I suppose most of this is eaten up by the need to pay apple $99 per year just to run your own app on your own phone for longer than a week.
When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price.
I'm a longtime Apple user but can't shake off this love-hate relationship with the company.
How much something costs is not what determines how much a company charges for something.
A company sets prices based on what will make it the most money. A company only lowers prices if they think doing so will generate higher total profits in the long run.
Apple seems to think charging $99 a year for developers will help its long term bottom line the most.
There are probably many reasons for that, some of them already mentioned in sibling comments - keeping low effort apps out, preventing spammers from constantly buying new accounts to bypass bans, reducing the workload for approvers, generating revenue from the fees, etc.
Prices aren't justified or not, you choose to pay them or not.
Apple should long ago make the $99 an App Store fee, not tied to any provisioning certificates or code signing.
Apple's $99 fee is annoying and feels like a waste of time and one more thing to manage.
The paid ADC program has kept me from sharing projects with other developers who would have otherwise been able to contribute (but they aren't paid devs because they'd rather have a year of Costco hotdogs than pay Apple to help me with my app for a week)
I applaud the authors of the few good extensions who went the extra 20.000 leagues. (But I still reluctantly switched to Ungoogled Chromium.)
Well that obviously didn't work. I got rid of my Iphone, but I remember the app store as being an absolute wasteland of garbage, and discoverability was awful. I don't know if it was a slogan, or an ad campaign once, but there was this thing with "there's an app for that". Yea I guess maybe there is, but good luck finding it, and finding one that isn't riddled with ads and scammy in-app purchases, and then further good luck that the developer of it keeps paying apple 99$ dollars every year so the app isn't delisted.
I'm not saying Google is any better. I've pretty much given up on apps and app stores at this point. If I find something new, it's something I'm made aware of via other channels (or unavoidable bullshit like mandatory app based car parking etc.).
--love Ted K.
The PlayStore for comparison is horrible.
Remember all apps have once been low effort apps: the first few weeks when you begin working on them. Polish comes later.
Please, if you are of the mindset $99 is not a life-changing amount for someone else, I implore you to widen your world and at least stay in touch with what the average human experience is like.
The person working McDonald's who has an app idea now needs an iOS device, a Mac, and $99 of available funds. Then, remember that person is richer than many people in other countries.
$99 is a huge amount, especially given that you get nothing except a privilege that has no inherent value.
Meaningless distinction. Most starting indie developers don't have more than one app anyway. It's like going to a fancy steakhouse and being offered a $99 all-you-can-eat where the only menu item is a 18oz porterhouse.
> $99 isn’t a huge amount
It isn't if this is your main job. It could be if this is merely a hobby.
Furthermore, there are so many things that can't realistically tested by the developer on the simulator.
Those reasons don't really make a lot of sense:
> keeping low effort apps out
"Low effort" apps are critical to establishing demand. Small developers can't justify spending a large amount of resources on something you're not sure anybody wants. If you post the MVP and get a lot of downloads, now you know it's worth your time to make it better. If you can't post the MVP then you don't post it at all and neither the MVP nor the polished version ever exists.
That's the recipe for having an app store full of loot box games and similar trash which is known to be profitable to the developers while losing thousands of apps people might actually want to the uncertainty of not knowing that ahead of time. Which is exactly what we see. How is that in their interest?
> keeping low effort apps out, preventing spammers from constantly buying new accounts to bypass bans, reducing the workload for approvers
These are things that would imply an account creation fee rather than an annual fee, and also have nothing to doing app development where you're only installing the app on your own device.
> generating revenue from the fees
This is the thing people are complaining about. They feel as though a troll has jumped out from under a bridge to demand money without providing anything of value in return. You've already paid for the phone, now it's your phone, what gives them the right to double dip?
> Prices aren't justified or not, you choose to pay them or not.
That's true in a competitive market. If you don't like Apple's prices then go use one of the other app distribution services for your iPhone. Unless there isn't one, right?
It actually does - in a free market. That's, like, one of the main arguments why capitalism is good for the population and not evil. But in a gate-kept oligopoly like phones, actors can abuse the system to squeeze more money out of consumers, leaving the corporations as sole beneficiaries. That's why this kind of stuff usually gets curbed in functioning democracies.
This is the biggest lie that we keep telling ourselves. Capitalism is destroying the only place in the universe we can survive, and with the absurdly unequal wealth distribution and centralisation it enables, has caused more collective misery than any other idea in human history, in my opinion.
Meaningless sentence.
It’s one of the great achievements of capitalism that it managed to convince people that trade == capitalism and that without capitalism you are reduced to the Soviet Union, because no other options are possible.
Never heard anyone say this before, although it may be pretty much the case[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_trade_of_the_Soviet_Un...
And that wkkipedia article is of course not proving that trade equals capitalism (or are you saying that America stops being capitalistic if Trumps dream of a self-sufficient nation somehow succeeds?). Trade is trade. There was trade in the past when capitalism did not yet exist and there will be trade in the future when capitalism no longer exists.
Indeed. I don't think anyone thinks otherwise. Fuedal lords traded. Totalitarian states traded. We know there was and is trade.
No company does this. Prices are set based upon demand. This does provide opportunities to make more money during some periods than others. If you have a monopoly then you can ignore this and just pick what makes you the most.
> Apple seems to think charging $99 a year for developers will help its long term bottom line the most.
It's absolutely a bespoke filter to prevent spam and automated misbehavior. Admittedly there does seem to be a resulting overall quality difference between iOS apps and other platforms.
> Prices aren't justified or not, you choose to pay them or not.
Business models are legal or not. You choose to play by the rules or you don't play.
> No company does this. Prices are set based upon demand.
I read an interview a long long time ago (with Jobs, Schiller or Cook - I don't remember) where they were saying explicitly that Apple charge the amount that get them the most money not marketshare. I remember the times when analysts where obsessed with market share and that apple had to lose because they were to expensive. I don't hear that opinion that often today.
They want to prevent spam and automated misbehavior because that will maximize their long term profit.
Business models can be illegal, but not your pricing.
In a market without competition (such as the mobile duopoly), that's how it works. The customer has no choice anyways so no price comparison can happen.
By "fairly rigorous", do you mean "fickle, random"?
Recently I had an app for a customer. Approved easily by Apple. Rejected by Google.
The reason given by Google was completely meaningless in the context of the app. When this happens, I usually make a bullshit change, increment the version, and submit again. That was also rejected in this case. I asked for more info and they provided a meaningless screenshot of the app - that was all. So I appealed. That was also useless! They provided no info to help.
Eventually I just created a new Google Play account and re-submitted a new version of the app, and it was accepted near immediately.
I've had some annoying experiences with Apples review process but it is gold compared to Google Play.
You can only sideload for free if you are willing to reinstall every X days.
They don't need to test an app if you're not asking them to distribute it through their store.
There are simpler and more usable options that are more defensible than what they do today.
That, in their opinion, makes it their job to prevent people from permanently installing software on other people’s phones. I’m sure they would remove the “permanently” if they could, but developers have to test builds so frequently that they can’t review them all.
Does this mean you lose data, or is data retained when reinstalling?
I should be able to self-sign an app for longer than a week on a free developer account.
whats the value add of rigourously validating an app that youre only running on your own phone?
No, they do not. That is how you are interpreting their actions. It’s obviously not the narrative they are pushing, that would be utterly absurd. The narrative Apple pushes over and over is that it’s your device, and that what you do with it is private and stays with it. Outright saying the device is theirs and they only let you do what they choose would be incredibly stupid, and their marketing is not incompetent.
Mind you, this doesn’t mean your interpretation (which is shared by many people) is wrong. On the contrary, it has merit. But it makes no sense to say Apple is pushing it as a narrative, that’s not what the expression means.
Apple made no attempt clarifying this.
I'd love to hear from individuals who worked at these companies whether it disgusts them as much as it does me, and ideas (from a business perspective as much as technical) on how a new platform might wrest control back into the hands of users/owners.
At least Apple has humans doing review and support.
Money is nice, they can charge it and people will pay them. Would be letting their shareholders down not to charge it really. I'm surprised they haven't tried bumping it up yet.
It started out originally that I just needed a UNIX/Linux like but I also needed at the time better support for some propietary stuff than linux had, which is how I entered the fold.
What has kept me a customer has been their quality of service over the 15 years I have been a customer, which has more than made up for the extra cost of their hardware.
I get an OS I find reasonable to use, in a hardware package I like (give or take quite a few years there) and generally at this point still know that if something goes wrong the apple of today (but maybe not tomorrow) will look after me as a customer. If this changes, i'll go elsewhere, shunt OSX off and just go back to linux on the desktop I suppose. I'm not wedded to them. If they had'nt released the silicon variants when they did I was already getting to jump ship over to Lenovo/Dell land (at the time.)
Phones are a bit different, i've still received brilliant service from them in that regard, but I tend to flip back and forwards between android and iOS depending on my mood at the time.
Welcome to the world of having a small business. Be happy it's only $100. Your fees for cost-of-doing business is many times higher for a hot dog stand or any other thing you can come up with.
That vulnerability was a huge win. It just recently stopped, with the final vulnerable device (7th gen iPad) not getting the iPad OS 26 update.
There are literally home appliances with more customizable app development and deployment stories than iPhones.
There's some tools to automate "refreshing" the app, but that requires you have some other computer that pushes a new app every week.
The "1 week" restriction is usually fine when you're developing (as you typically are continually rebuilding and updating when actively working on an app) but is clearly intended to avoid being a way to sideload apps without the developer account "nearby".
[1]: https://docs.sidestore.io/docs/faq/#why-is-my-account-gettin...
[0]: https://us.ecoflow.com/products/river-2-pro-portable-power-s...
Also that's about 500kWh of power annually which averages to 50W. There is just no way iPhone uses that much.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/277/
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/18/apple-transcription-api...
A CLI for on-device speech transcription using Speech.framework on macOS 26
For every HN blog post of "I accomplished ___ despite a hacker-hostile platform, and now you can use what I built, and be hopelessly tied to the platform"... Baby Jesus Linus sheds a tear.
In this case, it's a bit odd, since the writer has an entire section, "Why This Actually Matters", of unusually good hacker and social values.
*see what i did there
And some of the times that it does, it's because someone earlier didn't think about values before establishing network effects that stuffed a bad-values thing while starving a good-values thing.
I have an iPhone SE that I've tried keeping plugged in all the time and its battery has turned into a spicy pillow three times, first with Apple replacing the whole device (since they won't touch it with a swollen battery), then using third-party replacement kits.
This isn't going to work for long if the battery is usually at 100%.
My #1 wish for being able to repurpose old phones is to operate without touching the battery, and/or keeping the battery at 50%. Newer Apple phones have an 80% limit option which is an improvement, but I'm not sure how much. And unfortunately the option isn't there on any but the most recent phones, even on up-to-date iOS.
This will of course require a Homekit hub.
Unfortunately it wouldn't work for my particular usage, which was keeping it plugged into an old but expensive smart speaker as a music player via its lightning port. A smart plug would turn off the speaker along with the phone... But I appreciate the suggestion, as complicated as it is!
I've seen hacks that replace the battery with a supercapacitor though.
It really seems like, if it weren't for the battery part, these phones could run for decades... but right now you have to replace the battery every couple years because it swells when constantly kept at 100% which it is not designed for.
Interesting. I've had a spicy pillow on a 2017 MBP, they fixed the poor thing, and while at it: replaced the cursed keyboard, and left some kind of tape to reinforce the loosened USB-C ports.
Unfortunately, they didn't do the thermal paste - I had to do DIY, which is something I will never touch again. It did pay off though, it's cooler by some 10°C under load, and runs faster too. It's still loved and in everyday use.
We don’t give enough credit to Apple for keeping these old devices alive and kicking.
I have a similar story wherein I repurposed my ancient OG iPhone SE and gave it a new life.
I'm not sure I follow. It feels exceedingly hard to find new uses for old iPads without doing a lot of heavy lifting. Has that changed?
Otherwise, it still functions as an epub reader as long as iBooks continues functioning, but it's lame that I can't really use it for much else unless I made it a hobby.
Can you not install apps from the Purchased section in the App Store? I was able to download the new version of an app on my iOS 18 iPhone, then reload the App Store on iOS 9 and download from the "Purchased" section, assuming the app existed back in the iOS 9 days or had a version targeting this old OS.
I would imagine the best use of this device post eReader is a photo stand given the gorgeous screen... or something else that wouldn't need any interaction (it will be too slow to want to have touch interactions with).
I use an iPad 2 as a IPcam monitor. The battery doesn't last long, but I'm able to grab it off the charger and take it around the house if I'm watching something going on. It doesn't support my new AI smart cams, but it still functions.
My phone is an iPhone 13 (2021) and I’ll probably upgrade in the next 24 months to get a better camera.
I own a laptop from 2011 and it runs the latest fedora perfectly and is not limited at all performance wise as long as you don't try to run AAA games.
Apple would also gladly throttle your phone, see Batterygate.
When a battery is old and has low state of charge (under 25%), it is easy for a device to request more power than the battery can provide and BOOM, the screen is black.
Apple mitigated and avoided that experience for users by programming the phone to slow down when a user's old battery could not support the power needs of the device at full speed. It makes sense when you take the time to be informed about it.
I find incredible the idea of giving these devices another life. I wonder how hard is to host a sort-of vps on an abandoned android phone these days... I guess as long as you can put ethernet + docker you'd have a very capable device.
I'd never heard of a website hosted in any way on an iOS device... makes me wish it was an option.
I did also like the original iPhone SE mostly because of the size, but the haptics make the the iPhone 8, along with having a bezel, square screen, and home button.
Interesting. Apple throttles on cold too?
In my experience it would shut down on cold, but I don't think I noticed throttling. But then I don't run anything important enough to benchmark on a phone...
I initially intended to use it with a ReSpeaker speaker/mic system so that I could use it as a smart home assistant / Q&A bot since Google Home constantly frustrates me with its inability to answer questions that LLMs answer flawlessly but the mic/speaker on the phone is good enough. The only problem is the wake word functionality. I'm going to try Porcupine next and see.
I wonder if the new Android 16 terminal app would allow combining both.
However I did not love the writing style of this article. Lots of repetition. Asking questions to stress a funny point. Lots of repetition.
I don't mean to sound like a jerk, even though I've succeeded at it. The author is cool, what they did is just as cool.
- poses a lot of questions: "Me? I turned mine into a server that saves me money" / "Could I have just run this on my Mac like a normal person? Absolutely. But where’s the fun in that?" - it's not just X, it's Y: "it’s not just dumping power into devices; it’s managing charging curves properly" - creates scenarios and juxtapositions: "The workflow is beautifully simple: My image processing service sends images to the phone for OCR processing using Apple’s Vision framework. The phone processes the text, sends it back, and updates its dashboard with processing stats. All while I watch birds outside my window and feel smug about my setup."
I think this kind of writing borrows from twitter threads and youtube videos. I think we're going to be so sick of these patterns soon. And also, I don't think this is necessarily what the LLMs do natively, I think it might just come from bad RLHFs
Somehow you're also passionate about selling user data to hundreds of data brokers with no easy way to opt-out
It’s curious to me that OS X in VirtualBox is sluggish. Both VMWare Fusion and VirtualBox use virtualization…
It's silly and probably makes no sense at all based on how weak the model will probably be but it's a fun thing to think about.
"The emissions from production of computing devices far exceed the emissions from operating them" [...] "the European Environmental Bureau [7] makes the scale of the problem very clear. For laptops and similar computers, manufacturing, distribution and disposal account for 52% of their Global Warming Potential [...]. For mobile phones, this is 72%. The report calculates that the lifetime of these devices should be at least 25 years" https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-comp...
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Any sort of automation in Home app besides 2-3 line demo is quickly turning into nightmare, you are locked in bunch of annoying limitations and devices are always costing more than open source alternative.
Home Assistant (with all its dumb quirks) at least makes an attempt to integrate them. Some FOSS devices I've exposed to HomeKit for presence automation, but seeing Siri is going nowhere I don't think I'll continue.
1. if you are on device, then use on device OCR (e.g. use Apple Vision directly)
2. if you are on cloud, then self-deployed OCR models
3. if you are on browser, then WASM/local self-deployed OCR models