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Comment by pathartl | Hacker News Reader

> A few years back there was this issue of MacOS apps launching with a delay because the OS was checking with Appe if you are allowed to use the app. IIRC, this was just a bug.

If you're talking about Nov 2021 when Apple's Gatekeeper servers went down, apps weren't just delayed, they were unable to be opened _at all_ unless you blocked DNS requests to the server or completely disabled your internet connection.

I believe the only apps that were allowed to be opened were the built in macOS apps. Why this verification is done on every single load is completely beyond me. After this and the whole iPhone 7 radio debacle I won't be buying their products for a long time.

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> If you're talking about Nov 2021 when Apple's Gatekeeper servers went down, apps weren't just delayed, they were unable to be opened _at all_ unless you blocked DNS requests to the server or completely disabled your internet connection.

IIRC, Gatekeeper responses are cached for some amount of time for each app, so most people were still able to launch a given app. But yeah, you'd have to disable DNS or internet if you were unlucky and the cache had expired.

Apple's failure inspired me to research compressed CRLs. These don't have the same privacy problems as OCSP, and they work offline. As far as I can tell they would be a good replacement for OCSP here (and also in most cases on the web) but I don't know how one could convince them to roll them out.

It was November 2020, and at the time, OCSP responses were only cached for 5 minutes, so most people weren't actually able to launch apps. After the incident, Apple increased the cache period to half a day.

Ah yeah, I had the year off. At the time it knocked out my SO's entire company for a couple of hours.

What’s the iPhone 7 radio debacle?

The iPhone 7 had a flaw in its assembly where the radio IC was not epoxied to the PCB correctly. Overtime due to heat stress the chip would get fractures in its solder joints and the phone would lose the ability to get on cell networks.

I took my 7 to the Apple store in 2019 with this issue after giving it to my SO. I was told by the store rep that it was an issue with "the third party manufacturer" (Qualcomm) but Apple would do the repair for free. I learned from some independent repair communities that this was actually a really common issue and Apple was doing some silent recalls.

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