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Comment by moylan | Hacker News Reader

app development on symbian used to be a chaotic affair till nokia brought in signed apps. after that the apps started to dry up. it became a hurdle for lone developers that wasn't worth the effort.

i'm sure apple would organise it better but it is still another hoop to be jumped through to get an app developed.

as to openess i still have an iphone 3g. i had the cash saved up for a prepay iphone 3gs and was to go and pick one up the following weekend when apple banned google voice. it was an indicator of control so i spent the cash instead on android. the iphone 3g will be my last purchase from apple thank you very much.

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app development on symbian used to be a chaotic affair till nokia brought in signed apps. after that the apps started to dry up. it became a hurdle for lone developers that wasn't worth the effort. i'm sure apple would organise it better but it is still another hoop to be jumped through to get an app developed.

Symbian Signed is what you're talking about. And it didn't just dry-up app development - it killed free software on Symbian.

But that's a completely different situation than Apple's GateKeeper - with Symbian Signed, Nokia decided that they didn't want to take on the hassle of being a CA the way Apple is with GateKeeper, so the Nokia program required applications to be signed with a $800 SSL certificate. How is anyone making a Symbian app in their basement going to shell out for that? Some free software developers had to post convoluted instructions to their users on how to use the Nokia developer website to self-sign their programs. Others looked to commercial software developers to sponsor them to buy certificates. It was a disaster.

The hour spent organising the certificates is nothing compared to the months spent designing, developing and marketing the app.

And ALL developers would be happy to see less malware around.

i'd rather a platform were i have to be careful to avoid malware rather than a platform were there is a single 'gateway' to what apps can be installed. how can that gateway ever be considered impartial in a for profit system?

If that's what you prefer, it's your choice: don't use OS X Mountain Lion (or use it, with Gatekeeper turned off). You (and I) can understand FlashBlock.app is a malware and wouldn't install it, but ordinary computer users don't, and that's the market Apple is after.

i'm not saying your wrong. and i definitely agree this is aimed at average users. but it will put off a percentage of non average users. and those are often the users who recommend to average users what to use. i know i've stopped recommending apple hardware after a decade of doing so.

whether this affects apple negatively overall is the big question.

How careful?

I once got a virus on Windows that was attached to an Installshield installer for a legitimate program (WarFTP) that had been posted to download.com.

How could I have avoided that? Something like GateKeeper would have been nice - at least I would have known that the installer had been meddled with. Otherwise?

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