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Comment by dessant | Hacker News Reader

We have the freedom to express ourselves by giving Apple $99/yr to share our open source apps, apps which ultimately further enrich their platform.

If you are poor and have been donated an iPhone, then express yourself somewhere else.

And if you have expressed yourself on macOS in the past, now pay up there too, or we are going to suggest that your art is dangerous to view on our devices, and we'll make it difficult [1] to run.

Nathalie Lawhead's article [2] is a heartbreaking exploration of how open source developers and artists experience Apple's chokehold.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24217116

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20200602003250/http://www.nathal...

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There is also the other (more important than opensource) kool-aid about how "green" Apple is. Meanwhile they're choking the repair industry which is reducing the e-waste on our planet. And they give themselves a gold star on their so called "report card" on the environmental impact of their products. The irony..

Come on..You get listing and visibility and distribution worldwide, Consumers don't have to worry about your credentials and bonafides because app store due diligence checks help keep out malicious and fraudulent apps.

People can download appstore apps without worry as opposed to some random guy publishing an open source app that most don't have time or expertise to vet.

Yes, there are costs associated with running the App Store, but I would be very surprised if those costs came anywhere near what Apple is charging devs.

I don’t feel that Apple shouldn’t charge at all, only that what they’re charging is unreasonably high.

Not on macOS, there you’re getting the advantage that macOS doesn’t mark you as malware.

You can't see how that's a double edged sword though?

I buy a device, I even buy a special computer so I can build programs for the device... and now I have to pay $99/year just to comfortably run my own program on my own device? Even worse, I can't even continue to digitally interface with my own customers, people who Apple never helped me land as clients, without passing through Apple's arbitrary store rules AND paying them 30%?

That's fucking dog shit and it's going to have to change, especially given that they have 50% of the market in the US.

> People can download appstore apps without worry

We should be given a choice to worry or not, and to do it independently from the App Store.

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