I usually don't get annoyed at fans wearing rose-tinted glasses (aka fanboyism), but I feel that people sticking up for Apple here is some variant of the Stockholm syndrome. We're heading for a world where advanced users might not be allowed to interact with their devices because They (et al.) Know Best. Protecting knowledgeable users from running arbitrary code is generally a pretty solved problem. There are layers of trust in the system, and human connections that keep the system alive. This delegation of critical thinking to Apple is an unfortunate path.
P.S. I say all of this as someone who has recently converted to iOS from Android after many years of loving Google Nexus devices, and wanted to see what the integrated design of the iPhone 6s Plus was like. I absolutely don't support ANY of the major technology companies as people who won't do the wrong thing so that they can make more money. They're all self-interested actors! We should never forget that. They can be just as evil as big oil or the textile industry.
EDIT: to fix phrasing and the omission of a couple words
This is literally the capstone of iOS. You have no power, or privlidge. You work in the languages the master wants, using the tools the master has you buy, using the APIs the master blesses you with.
You never come close to owning the device, and you don't own your software for it.
The greatest irony is how many walked into this with open arms, and how many continue to praise this. iOS only thrives on the developers who sacrifice their power to Apple's will. Apple stands atop a glass house built on lock in and memes about how good their products are. Its the users that pledge allegiance to that manipulation that hold it together.
I think years later people are going to look back and say we had it pretty good with Windows/Linux/*BSD and x86.
I can take a bunch of OSes and run them on standard x86 hardware and peripherals more or less, build my own OS if I want to and run my own apps with the compilers, linkers and frameworks of my choice. Skip forward a few years and there's a good chance that will all be gone.
x86 is also a less than ideal proposition with Intel the only game in town - sure they are Open Source friendly for now but still it would've been a better world where the likes of AMD and VIA were flourishing in x86 land.
You're right. Growing up with PCs I took for granted the fact I could download any OS and install it easily. It's so incredibly different to the closed off world of tablets and phones, where getting any non-OEM code to run is a huge undertaking. A few years ago this seemed OK, because the phones and tablets were low powered utilities. Today they're rapidly becoming our PCs and so we're quickly moving towards a world in which our primary PCs are completely closed devices.
It's remarkable that I could easily dust off my 2002 era desktop and boot a modern Linux distro, but that trying to get my 2013 era tablet to boot anything other than the Android 4.4 that it shipped with would be a huge struggle. It's such a shame things are going this way.
It wasn't just x86, it was the fact that IBM released the entire documentation for the PC architecture up to the AT, including the BIOS source code (which was copyrighted, so competitors could not just copy it, but they could certainly study its function and produce a different but compatible implementation.)
For the PC, things started taking a turn for the worse with EFI and SecureBoot, but before that it was quite open.
Yes of course x86 implies the BIOS and the historically very significant reverse engineering of it by Compaq.
However EFI and Secure boot have not changed anything at all. UEFI is a standard and most vendors use the reference implementation from Intel and its all at least as good as BIOS in terms of being documented.
"I think years later people are going to look back and say we had it pretty good with Windows/Linux/*BSD and x86."
I don't agree. I grew up with Microsoft ruling the world. The biggest problem wasn't the dictatorship, is was the poor quality of the experience in the face of the dictatorship.
Apple has major flaws in its experience, but they're nowhere near as bad as the dog days of Windows 98.
What people don't get about Microsoft is however bad they were, they practically enabled a hugely diverse and mostly open hardware and software ecosystem and they had to standardize and open up in order to keep it going. Sure they had their monopolistic ways but fortunately they were reigned in for the better.
It's disingenuous to claim user experience requires a closed and non standard system. And besides that Microsoft and Linux distros have made steady progress towards improving the quality and experience while still keeping the PC ecosystem open.
The only way to get apps on the original iPhone was to hack your iPhone. It was only through the incredible demand that users wanted to do this that Apple actually released a store for applications. I'm continually surprised at people that are surprised when Apple does stuff like this.
To engage in a little snark, I wonder how long it will be before Apple adds a feature to the next version of iOS that allows f.lux-like functionality, and then claim they invented it.
I doubt it. A few million downloads is still a drop in the bucket and such software has been available for OS X forever and they haven't cared to integrate it.
There's a tonne of stuff available for OS X forever that they haven't cared to integrate though. Not true of iOS, mobile is somehow different, and as above - it started off completely closed to third-parties!
Interesting perspective. I've always thought the lack of an appstore in 1.0 was just pragmatic. It definitely made it easier to launch the first version of iOS and cope with the very limited resources -- 128MB of ram!
At the time, Jobs was showing off how developers could create app-like experiences using HTML - with the ability for people to "install" your app using the add-to-home-screen feature. That was the intended solution for us plebs. Native apps were most likely going to be only for partner companies.
Ironically when people starting creating actual apps using HTML via PhoneGap and the like, Apple was resistant to that too!
Meh, Apple wants to control everything because they want a seamless, dead-simple device for non-techies. Because that's the majority of customers - not the power users who want to get down to the bare metal of their machine. They are tyrannical about protecting that experience and basically not allowing you to screw up your device no matter how hard you try.
Of course they're making a ton of money on the App Store as well, but I still think it's more about protecting the device. Otherwise they'd just approve every app and collect their commissions.
> The greatest irony is how many walked into this with open arms, and how many continue to praise this.
Show me an alternative that allows me the same level of Just Works as an iPhone. Because Android ain't it. I don't need a reason to spend hours every week having to tweak, poke at, marshal and police the various apps on my phone to make sure normal behavior isn't messing something up. I put up with that for 4 years and never felt like I had a digital partner in my pocket. It was always a consciously present "thing" I had to be wary of eating a battery, crashing a workflow, failing to connect to something or transfer something or save something.
I love the linux "always be tinkering" idea but I don't need that to be something I spend part of my decision points on each day.
So if Google tightens up implementations of Android to a point where I can trust a device to get out of my way like I can this most recent iPhone, I'm all for giving it another go. But my money's not on that at the moment.
Through several generations of Android I had problems with battery life. However I never had problems with apps like you describe. Since my Note 4 I cannot complain about battery life, and now that iPhone has taken on some Android features like multitasking, friends I know with older iPhones are having battery issues (including one with an iPhone 5 that just had the battery replaced). So it was a tradeoff of emerging features, where Android had included many more from the start (Apple is more careful/conservative) and they are at parity now.
Very true, and an interesting comment. It is interesting to see the other platforms attempting to model themselves after this (such as the Windows application store or whatever it is called), although you obviously have the power to install and run whatever you want there.
I truly hope that OSX does not become the crippled/locked-down OS that iOS is. I know the new rootless feature is a warning sign, as is only allowing signed applications to run.
The hard part for us as developers is that we have to eat and pay bills, so all fleeing to Linux to write desktop software there won't pay our bills. The wide adoption of these Internet appliances (eg. iPad) means we railroaded into writing for them, or find another occupation.
I think I need to preface this by saying that I sideloaded f.lux using the original technique the moment it came out without hesitation and will not remove it from my phone now that it's not kosher.
Almost none of this is actually true, just to clarify a few points:
- Apps (for the App Store or otherwise) do not have to be written in Objective-C or Swift (see: RubyMotion, Xamarin, PhoneGap/Cordova, React Native, J2ObjC, RoboVM, that thing Microsoft is working on, probably others I don't know about or have forgotten)
- You don't have to buy anything to put an app on your personal iOS device, you just download Xcode and work from there (more on this later)
I'll concede that you can't access the hardware directly from iOS, meaning yes, it does have to be accessed through APIs, however allowing direct hardware access is a massive legitimate security risk. However, you absolutely do own the device as it exists as hardware. You don't own the software on it, but that's the same for every proprietary software product in existence. What you own is a license to run the software for certain purposes. Whether or not this is a bad thing is for you to decide, but this is not a problem unique to iOS. Furthermore, if you write an app using your free copy of Xcode and put it on your iOS device, you absolutely own the copyright for that app.
Now, as for what is true in your comment, yes, you do have to pay $99 a year to distribute apps using the App Store. More than anything else, I believe this is why Apple could not allow this to continue. If this became a trend among iOS app developers, it stands to reason that they would lose a lot of money from developers distributing this way instead of using the App Store. Yes, f.lux is free, but they don't want a trend starting and even with free apps you can still sell advertisements. Again, I'm making no judgment on whether or not it's morally just for Apple to do this, I'm just explaining why it happened in more specific terms. Second, doing this completely subverts Apple's security features. The ability for users to load arbitrary apps onto their devices was to allow people without $99 to run apps that they made on their own devices.
This was a privilege originally only afforded to registered developers, and this was intended to lower the barrier to entry for iOS app development. When it's one person writing apps for fun and loading them on their phone to test and show their friends or whatever, the security risk is low. When it's groups of programmers telling people to download a precompiled binary that can't be inspected to ensure its safety and load it onto their devices, it becomes a massive security risk. (as a free software person, you should know that even for us that chose to load it, we don't know what the fuck it contains. f.lux is not open source. for all we know, we just loaded a ton of malware onto our iOS devices.)
It should be noted that there are shit tons of open source iOS apps, and so far Apple has not told them to stop providing the source for people to download, compile, and sideload.
There are so many reasons aside from locking down iOS that Apple could have locked this down for. You can't read the source, it's a proprietary app, it subverts their developer agreement, and it's actively encouraging people (176,000 by their count) to load a binary onto their phone the source of which they can't read and that by the developer's own admission is using undocumented APIs.
Now, if Apple said that you were no longer allowed to load apps onto your devices without a developer license period, as used to be the case, then that would be a different story and saddening to boot. However, as it stands, f.lux is the only app I know of that this has happened to and there is ample reason for it having happened.
IANAL, but my understanding is that you can not distribute a copyleft software using Apple's app store. Therefore, all copylefted applications that are in Apple's store must be dually licensed.
That's true, but I was more referring to the fact that you can download and compile open source apps for sideloading similar to what f.lux wants you to do, but the advantage there is that they are open source and don't use undocumented APIs.
It's also possible to have issues with the model but still participate. I've spent the last few years working on a .NET stack doing Android and iOS apps. I'd really prefer building on linux, but sometimes you make compromises because it's what the job requires.
it's also one the greatest digital publishing platforms ever invented... sooooo sorry that every once in awhile they enforce some rules to keep it so. The alternative is Android. Which, if you ever tried to program for, is literally worse than going to the dentist.
> The alternative is Android. Which, if you ever tried to program for, is literally worse than going to the dentist.
Parent comment is mostly rubbish, but I'll concede that he has a point about programming for Android.
Compared to most other systems I've touched, programming for Android feels incredibly heavy and tooling reliant.
Android Studio and an updated toolchain has made it less painful than it used to be with Eclipse, but it's still nowhere as nice as making a standard Web-app, or WinForms app or something like that.
I'd love to just blame Java, but really... The Android API could take some sweetening up too.
I wouldn't say you have no power or privilege. For their 30%, they are putting your device in a market that has the most affluent users of technology, in the world. There's a reason that they've been able to get away with what they're doing--they're giving consumers what they want. It's just that important things like this aren't decided by popularity, e.g. freedom. They're rights bestowed to us by our government. I'm not saying that what Apple is doing is right or wrong. I am saying that them doing it is a great loss of freedom for users and developers.
While I'm a rabid defender of rights, I don't agree they are not bestowed upon us, nor that they are unable to be taken away. Ask anyone in prison or a wartorn or repressive country if they still have all of their human rights. They don't. Rights CAN be taken away, and routinely are. The question is do we fight to retake and retain them.
You misunderstand -- I'm not saying they can't be taken away. What I'm saying is that they cannot be /given/, /granted/, or /bestowed/ because governments don't make or own rights.
Every human is innately free whether or not a governmental entity likes it or not. Whether or not those rights are oppressed or not is another story.
You're making rights out to be something they aren't. Humans, outside of government, humans "in the wild" have exactly the rights an animal has: they're free. Free to be food for something bigger, or to defend themselves if they can. But that's about it. Rights are a human-made concept, and can only be given from one person to others.
It's a guess. Can you back up the idea that rights are anything other than a human-made concept, at all? That they're somehow intrinsic to the universe?
Fair enough, so what's your answer to your question "So if rights are bestowed upon someone by another person, who bestowed those rights to the grantee? And who bestowed them to that person, and so on?" i.e., what's your core assertion about this subject?
I'm a Christian, so my belief is that God created us with a set of rights: the right to survive (food, clothing and shelter), the right to exist peacefully in creation and the right to live securely.
You only have rights as long as your government is willing to respect them. For this purpose, bestowing a right and not taking it away are exactly the same (and you acknowledge below that a government can "take away" rights).
Secondly, a "right" is a human concept, born of human logic. It is not natural, the Universe & Reality doesn't care one way or another what "rights" humans have.
Down voted to -4. Really? Are you guys just completely lacking in humor or are you just angry at anyone who laughs because you were brought up with no appreciation for laughter? What is it with super fragile egos? It's not about you! Don't be so vain. Jesus.
Do you really think everyone who finds a post entertaining is compelled to reply with "LOL"? This place would be full of substanceless posts like that, you'd have to wade through them all to find any actual discussion. It's considered rude to post when you have nothing to say.
Considered by whom? yourself? others like you? the whole of humanity? Obviously, to many of us, emotion is not void of information, but to you it and others it may be.
I on the other hand love it. I use Linux, Windows and OSX on a daily basis. I use an iPhone and an Android tablet. Each device has its purpose, and levels of trust, and a kowegeable buyer knows the strenghts and weaknesses of each platform going in. If you're getting upset that Apple is enforcing its rules for what it views as a security concern, is silly in my opinion.
If you don't want someone overzealously protecting you, then don't get an iPhone. If you don't want all your data sent to a server, then don't get an android or windows device. No one is ever forced to use an iPhone personally, and the flux devs knew they were breaking a set of rules which is why they were using the approach they were.
No rose coloured glasses here, I just don't get worked up over things I could have seen coming a mile away.
What if I don't want somebody "protecting" me but I also don't want Google or Microsoft taking all my data?
Apple enforcing its rules by forcing somebody to take down content hosted on a web page, content which does not infringe any copyrights or trademarks or other IP, is stepping out of bounds, in my opinion. There are a lot of things I dislike about Apple, but this crosses a line for me.
People bought Android instead of WebOS and killed the most open platform mobile has ever seen. Hell, you could boot a kernel over USB, and Palm gave you the tools and commands to do it. On their official website.
Google does the same with its Nexus devices[1] in that you can build a completely open-source version of Android except for certain hardware-specific binary blobs.
The hard driver parts are for things like LTE, GPS, GSM, wifi, camera, etc. which the device manufacturers haven't chosen to open-source. I don't see how it's relevant to Android itself, any other OS would have the same problems with that hardware.
The market has basically failed your particular niche. Until enough people (or lawmakers) step up on privacy Apple is your best bet, all things considered.
That's my conclusion as well. I use an iPhone but I'm not terribly happy with it. It may be the best choice, but that doesn't mean I can't complain about its many deficiencies, among which Apple's stupid "security" policies are some of the worst.
I'm pretty happy in Apple land, but the battle was lost years ago when it comes to the internet. Gmail tracks me. Facebook tracks me even though I'm not a member. YouTube tracks me because I use Gmail. Google tracks me because of Gmail. Everything tracks me.
And the only solution is to throw out every piece of electronics I own. That's not happening.
We need laws. Some day, perhaps. Too bad the TPP didn't include EU countries (I know), maybe there would have been ONE benefit.
> Too bad the TPP didn't include EU countries (I know), maybe there would have been ONE benefit.
You think the TPP including the EU would have led to better privacy protections? To it seems obvious that the point of addressing privacy in the TPP would have been watering down the EU's existing protections, not trying to increase the privacy protections available anywhere else.
I usually don't get annoyed at fans wearing rose-tinted glasses
You realize that darkly tinted rose colored glasses would actually work better than f.lux?
(I know because I have a narrowband 470nm filter and I've looked at screens under f.lux, and there is often significant blue light coming out of very red looking screens. It doesn't take much to suppress melatonin secretion, especially with prolonged exposure.)
There's an opportunity for Apple -- just include backlighting specially designed for nighttime with no blue light. Switch it at night. That would have been Jobs' approach to the problem.
Have you ever used OS X? I have never had a problem caused by running binaries I've downloaded from the internet. I understand how to read signals of trust and using my brain to vet sources. Why should my phone or tablet be any different? It's a risk, sure, but even Apple's approval isn't foolproof!
"I feel that people sticking up for Apple here is some variant of the Stockholm syndrome."
Brand loyalty is a reasonable thing.
Look, most software for most people since the dawn of the personal computer era has been about begging, cajoling, threatening, and screaming at your vendor to support your pet feature.
Apple has succeeded in part because it by and large does listen to its customers, it just usually takes far too long to do it the "Apple way" ... but not so long that one wants to switch platforms.
In this case, I filed feedback with Apple (which does get read), asking for f.lux support on iOS and/or documented APIs they can use. I'll also file this away in my "reasons Apple sucks" list. This list tends to grow and shrink over time, which means I have some faith in being patient. With Microsoft in the 90s it just grew unbounded until Windows 2000 was released.
The open source world of course allows me to tweak whatever I want, and I did own an Android Samsung GS3 once, but couldn't really stand it. The Linux desktop (ran one from 1994 - 2001) doesn't suck but it makes my eyes bleed: not my thing once I switched to OS X.
f.lux cannot ship an iOS App using the Documented APIs, because the APIs we use are not there. In the last 5 years, we have had numerous conversations with Apple about our product and what would be required to make it work with iOS.
Using undocumented APIs has ALWAYS resulted in getting kicked out. They violated the letter and spirit of the program.
I'm sorry Apple doesn't expose the APIs they need, but this is cut and dry.
> I feel that people sticking up for Apple here is some variant of the Stockholm syndrome
I think Apple offers a deal that has it's good and bad points and you are free to buy from many competitors. And yet, dozens of times per year on HN, we're told that Apple is essentially executing William Wallace and freedom itself for routine decisions that seem entirely consistent with it's longstanding policies on private API's, sideloading, end runs around enterprise deployment, etc.
> We're heading for a world where advanced users might not be allowed to interact with their devices because They (et al.) Know Best.
Presumably if this is vital and important to advanced users they can choose a device that allows them to do this.
> Protecting knowledgeable users from running arbitrary code is generally a pretty solved problem.
In strawmanville, every problem is 'generally pretty much solved'. 'Just let knowledgable users do it' is non-serious imho; anything 'knowledgable users' can do without a lot of effort/money you should assume anyone can and will do it. Jailbreaking has sometimes been associated with 'advanced users', unless you were in China and the guy who sold you the phone did it for you.
P.S. I say all of this as someone who has recently converted to iOS from Android after many years of loving Google Nexus devices, and wanted to see what the integrated design of the iPhone 6s Plus was like. I absolutely don't support ANY of the major technology companies as people who won't do the wrong thing so that they can make more money. They're all self-interested actors! We should never forget that. They can be just as evil as big oil or the textile industry.
EDIT: to fix phrasing and the omission of a couple words