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Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

When an app is so expensive, and is targeted to niche/technical users anyway, I wonder why they (or other companies) don't also sell it outside of the app store (and avoid Apple's cut)?

Users would get a $99 developer license, download the binaries and a little installer script, and the script would install the app via XCode on the device. For one app alone it would not make sense for the user financially, but I could imagine that some power users or people wanting to use censored stuff already have the license. Any reason why this wouldn't work (I'm only superficially familiar with IOS development)?

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I believe that's a violation of Apple's developer license. There was a company using a similar trick to bypass the app store, and they got in hot water for it a while back. (I remember it being reported here but can't find the posting.)

Yup, it is. If you're remembering what I was remembering, there was a developer who created a adhoc profiles and would distribute their app 100 at a time, then remove the device and start over. This was before Apple's rolling hundred devices was implemented.

But if I understand it right, in that case the developer was distributing the app, signed with his own developer's account, abusing the 100 devices you have for testing.

What I meant was to let the users be the developers, and sign and deploy it themselves.

If you didn't care about selling it, you could just dump the source somewhere with a little installation script. I can imagine many IOS users who would like to use emulators or other banned apps would happily pay $99 and compile their own stuff.

There was the other example, and then The Omni Group distributed a "Key Gen" for their own software that would enable Pro or unlock their free apps for people who had already purchased the app outside the ecosystem. Apple shut that down too.

Because that would violate the Apple rules (and also be practically infeasible for technical reasons).

You can officially (as a matter of policy and enforced by iOS) distribute apps in 3 ways:

1. Through the App Store

2. As an enterprise developer distributing apps to employees of the same company through an enterprise App Store to an enterprise enrolled iOS device

3. As a developer to a test device where the test device is 1 out of 100 registered devices in your Apple developer account

The only other alternative I'm aware of is to jailbreak the device and distribute via Cydia.

Regarding your (2.) - just to clarify this for others: With an enterprise provisioning profile, you can deploy your app to an arbitrary number of devices. These devices do not need to be known before via UDID (as with normal OTA provisioning). You can just upload the app to a server and ask people to download. So the devices do not technically have to belong to the same organization (even if this is perhaps Apple's intent). E.g., a friend of mine uses an enterprise account which they aquired for their university to deploy an app for a study (for data gathering). The subjects who install the app and enter their data are not all part of the university. Apple was informed about this use case and they did not have anything against it.

But, AFAIK Apple centrally checks the validity of the profile with each download and thus they are certainly able to detect if you use your enterprise profile to circumvent the appstore.

OK, but in all those cases the primary developer compiles and signs the app with their developer's key, which is restricted by Apple.

What I was thinking about was (simplified):

- The primary developer distributes a non-runnable version of the app. Say they just dump the source somewhere and declare it public domain.

- A user registers as a developer with Apple, downloads Xcode and the app's source, and then builds and signs it themself and places it on their iOS device.

The user pretends to be debugging the app he just compiled. No compiled or signed code is distributed, nothing is placed in the app store, etc.

Is the rule still that if you allow in-app purchase or subscription then it must be sold through the App Store? You could circumvent this by distributing the software via the app store and then must authenticate before any of the functionality is usable. Amazon Instant Video and Netflix apps do this I think presumably so they don't have to pay 30% of their subscriber fees to Apple.

Because people want things to be easy as possible.

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