This is such an honor. I was starting to suspect no actual humans other than the developers and the managers work at FFANG at all given how hard it is to contact them. Perhaps in this case it is not a human either but a neural network of a sort.
Anyway, I believe everything should be done this way, through communicating with humans. Humans should study every ad and every app before it gets published (but I support side-loading for users willing to opt-out), humans should review every video before it gets de-monetized or removed, humans should communicate on every appeal. I would vote for a law mandating this.
PS: The more news of this kind the more I feel like buying an iPhone perhaps. I don't like how they restrict the users but I bloody adore how they restrict the apps (with exception of some cases like iDOS, terminal apps, alternative-engine web browsers etc - I certainly don't like Apple banning them).
It doesn't seem like the author is complaining about having to contact someone at Apple to have these permissions in an app you are building to distribute. If this was for distribution, that could have made sense, but apparently this request for permission is way before that: you need to contact them simply to be able to use the feature on your own device, without distributing it anywhere.
This is like being asked to get permission from IETF in order to run an HTTP server on your computer, it just doesn't make sense.
> This is like being asked to get permission from IETF in order to run an HTTP server on your computer, it just doesn't make sense.
The iPhone was never intended to cater to developers writing personal-use, general computing software on their own devices, though. I know it’s an unpopular opinion on HN, but I don’t expect my iPhone to be an open development platform and I’m fine with that, even though I’m also a developer and software enthusiast.
Realistically, how many people would even be impacted by this restriction on multicast packet sending for personally-developed apps for personal use only? The number is vanishingly small relative to the total iPhone user base. It makes sense that Apple wouldn’t go out of their way to cater to that ultra-niche use case which can still get the access they need by requesting the permission.
I know people get angry that the iPhone doesn’t cater to every single niche personal use case, but honestly I’m fine with that. If I need to write a custom app for personal use that does something unique, I’m not going to reach for an iPhone anyway. However, I use an iPhone as my primary phone because Apple has focused on the things that matter for making it a good phone that does phone things well, which is exactly what most of us actually need.
This isn't really that niche. "Personal use" apps are just another word for prototype. It is incredibly damaging to innovation if you can't even build a little prototype without submitting a request to Apple.
> It makes sense that Apple wouldn’t go out of their way to cater to that ultra-niche use case which can still get the access they need by requesting the permission.
Well, its not about expecting Apple to put more effort to enable some feature. In many cases enabling that feature is less effort and Apple instead goes "out of their way" to disable such things. _That_ is the problem - and it is not specific to iPhone, things like this have happened in the past on MacBooks too (see https://github.com/onmomo/superdrive-enabler/blob/master/src...)
Your stance is going to have lots of unforeseen network effects which will in the end leave you with no general purpose computer at all. What you will be able to run will be dictated by large multi-national conglomerates which will double as some kind of quasi-states.
Exactly, it should use the same process as other “advanced” features like payments or push notifications: you toggle a flag in the app entitlements file, it works by default for local development, but you can’t distribute on the App Store without a review.
> Anyway, I believe everything should be done this way, through communicating with humans. Humans should study every ad and every app before it gets published
Why? This is actually one of the biggest complaints about the App Store review process, because it tends to produce a lot of inconsistent results if your app comes anywhere near the gray areas of the App Store guidelines.
Mandating human review for everything sounds like a good idea for those who imagine perfect, highly-skilled, consistent reviewers handling every step of every process, but that’s not how things work in the real world. You don’t actually want to legally mandate real humans handling every step of everything, unless you want to force everything back to the days of bureaucracy and endless back-and-forth communications to get everything done.
The vast majority of what you experience in society has gone through human review. All laws go through human review before they are enacted. When you go to the grocery store or a restaurant, all the food there has been selected by a human for you. For some fruits or vegetables, every single item was hand-selected for sale during harvest.
When you go into a Target or a Walmart or certainly any small retail shop, everything in there was selected for inventory by a human buyer. When you read a newspaper, every single article was reviewed by a human before it was published.
Product designs are reviewed by humans for utility and safety. Drugs are reviewed by humans for efficacy and safety. Cars and trains and airplanes were human-reviewed during design and assembly, and again at regular intervals. Every scientific article is reviewed by humans before publication.
Systems that try to run at scale without human review have problems with quality. Amazon tries to run a retail platform with minimal human review; it’s choked with fakes and scams. Social media companies try to run with minimal human review; they’re full of false information and scams.
Does this go much deeper than zoom? They're the only one's I've really heard of. IMO, apples walled off model has some pretty serious flaws, so I'm not surprised if there's exceptions
* Well, I'm somewhat surprised, because it's apple, and they tend to be overly idealistic... but there seems to be a bit less of that in the post-Jobs era
What you are describing sounds for me exactly like a bureaucratic nightmare.
> I don't like how they restrict the users but I bloody adore how they restrict the apps
Honestly, that brought me to go away from Apple. They reject apps randomly, allow terrible security holes that affect ALL applications over relying on safari mobile web views (Pegasus) and do nothing against scams (see discussions over family sharing):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28203361
Brazil is fiction. Judging how you relate to things in the real world by comparing them with things that were made up to be funny is not how you achieve insight.
Um... Yes, Brazil is fiction but the dystopia it portrays is rooted in extrapolations of the times in which it was made.
Its absolute nonsense to shoot someone down on the basis that they draw parallels to movies or other artforms. Especially if those works of fiction are intended as warnings / cautionary tales.
As it is i thought the parent comments comparison to Brazil was fairly apt in this situation...
When I watched Brazil the first time as I was a kid I couldn't imagine anything shown there being possible in real life. Especially the lack of the right to repair - we repaired everything from all the plumbing and electric wiring (and that was in apartment buildings, not just in private houses, private houses didn't even require any bureaucracy at all - people just built for themselves whatever way they wanted from whatever materials they had, often without any project whatsoever) to all the electronics, let alone cars ourselves during those days. I also couldn't imagine people being be SWATed in their homes for non-violent offenses (by mistake or not).
Now I see the movie has been implemented into life almost precisely and the AI with mass surveillance has been introduced to make it even worse.
To make it more fun and looking realistic today they even portrayed people kinda watching Netflix on their office computers when the boss doesn't look (AFAIK computers were not actually capable of streaming videos over the network during the days the movie was filmed).
My assumption was the homes in Brazil were owned by the state, so the restrictions aren't even really hyperbolic. If you've ever lived in government/military housing they can come and inspect how clean you're keeping the place at any time, for example.
This is a pretty obtuse perspective. Fiction can be written for the express purpose of achieving insight. Just because something is fictional or humorous doesn't limit that - it can emphasise it. See - A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift.
I'd hardly call one of the most acclaimed dystopian-bureaucracy films a 'random bit of satire'. If you've not watched and understood it (clearly the latter of that is especially true) I dont think you've any right to claim it's not relevant to anything.
I also understand that it is fiction, and it is exaggerated, and it is highly silly.
It is not a prophecy, it not a guide to reality, it is a silly film by a guy from Monty Python who was annoyed at bureaucracy, a very simple and shared part of human experience.
So why are you criticising someone highlighting annoyance of encroaching bureaucracy referencing a work of fiction that deals with this "shared part of human experience" in a "simple way"?
No one is saying its a 1:1 guide to reality, but as a nightmare vision of a dystopia gripped by unnecessary administrative apparatus, silly or not, it is a work of fiction that takes its root from reality and then makes a farce of it.
There are reasons works like kafkaesque, orwellian, ballardian become part of the lexicon despite all dealing with fictional universes of their own making...
It was just a person, on the internet making a 4 word reference to a famous movie... I don't know why you're intent on endlessly attacking the "lack of insight" from the poster.
I guess you think Monty Python films are just 'silly films' too, completely overlooking the intelligent satire present throughout the entire films, that will be studied and admired as top level satire for generations to come?
It's astonishing to me that you can't seem to grasp how effective fiction is at laying bare (albeit in an exaggerated fashion) the issues present in the real world.
Yeah, but it seems like you're trying to have it both ways. On the one hand you're arguing that the insights into society can be absolute garbage and on the other implying (or suggesting) that Brazil doesn't necessarily fall into this category.
So what is it then? Brazil does make interesting points about encroaching bureaucracy (and therefore the parents post is justified)? I think you took the point about Brazil a bit too literally, the poster was never suggesting that the world is suddenly exactly that way, more highlighting the parallels. I think you need to allow yourself to suspend disbelief a little more and realise the very deliberate allegorical nature of these movies...
I mean, judging by the greyed out appearance of all your posts on this topic I would say it seems you're in the minority with this kind of opinion.
I don't agree. Developers should be able to develop whatever app they want, and not the apps that Apple decides that can be developed.
Modern smartphone have a lot of potential that cannot be exploited only for policies. One example is network connections in general, it's so restricted that is barely usable. For example controlling the network interfaces is problematic. On iOS (and now also on Android) you can't tell the phone to connect to a particular Wi-Fi network, only to a network with a prefix and it's not even that reliable. Where that would be useful? Of course in an app that connects to some device that exposes a Wi-Fi AP.
I develop embedded devices and thanks to mobile phones network limitations everything has to pass trough a cloud. That is a big improvement for privacy if we ask Apple? I don't think so. But there are really no reliable ways to control something in your LAN. Well if you give Apple a ton of money to implement HomeKit by putting the Apple proprietary chip in your product of course, why do you think they impose this limitations?
If I bought an iPhone, I'd use it to call people. That's probably it.
Android phones are nice because they at least respect my pre-existing workflow. I can sync my Nextcloud server to keep my notes and photos distributed, I can install different shells to get work done on the go, Hell, I can even use it to send a firmware payload to my Nintendo Switch in RCM mode. It's my swiss-army knife for when it's impractical to carry a full Unix machine.
This is such an honor. I was starting to suspect no actual humans other than the developers and the managers work at FFANG at all given how hard it is to contact them. Perhaps in this case it is not a human either but a neural network of a sort.
Anyway, I believe everything should be done this way, through communicating with humans. Humans should study every ad and every app before it gets published (but I support side-loading for users willing to opt-out), humans should review every video before it gets de-monetized or removed, humans should communicate on every appeal. I would vote for a law mandating this.
PS: The more news of this kind the more I feel like buying an iPhone perhaps. I don't like how they restrict the users but I bloody adore how they restrict the apps (with exception of some cases like iDOS, terminal apps, alternative-engine web browsers etc - I certainly don't like Apple banning them).