> You need a $100 developer subscription per developer
I believe it’s standard practice to have just one developer account for signing and submission to the store. Other developers can self-sign the app for local testing and tools like Xcode are free to use.
it's per publisher, company accounts can have multiple developers, a bit misleading there, and it's not even needed for mac apps, just for publishing and distributing notarized apps or through the app store
Apple has made opening non-notarized apps a huge pain.
First, it was a setting in system preferences to allow unsigned apps.
Then, that option was removed and it was the a are-you-sure-you-want-to-open-this dialog on every first run of a new or updated app.
Then the "Open" button on the dialog was removed and put in the Security preferences pane.
When System Preferences became System Settings a couple releases ago, that button got moved below the fold in the Privacy and Security prefpane. This is the current state today and is infuriating for some OSS apps, especially niche ones.
At one point, there was a command-line way to clear the xattr 'com.apple.quarantine' on the .app, but that also got nuked in a recent update.
But people still want to believe macOS will not become locked down like iOS. It is quite funny. The only reason it has not yet been done is because it is technically hard to do so on a platform that wasn't built that way from the get-go.
This model should be done more. Develop the product in the open, offer a fully functional open source version, and then offer a paid version on commercial app stores.
This can bring in some extra revenue for the project, plus covers the app store dev work.
I bet a bunch of users would buy it just to support the dev team. Plus I would argue an app store purchase (one click) can be done faster/easier than any donation flow I have seen for an open-source project.
Always loved the model in MacOS that developers charge a small one time fee, usually in the range of $5 - $20 to support them to build relatively good apps pushing the overall quality of the third party app ecosystem instead of either crappy free or corporate built big/slow/expensive mess on other platforms.
Anki has a similar ish model. Free on desktop and web, a community made Android app compatible with the free cloud saving, and a paid iOS app by the team. If you can’t afford the iOS app you can use the web version.
And when that's not enough to cover the yearly $100 fee, and Apple makes it purposely difficult to ship compiled binaries in any other way, you get no (niche) OSS software on the platform.
this makes me think -- is there room in the world for some sort of foundation/conservancy that takes reputable desktop app projects under its wing, provides funding, version control hosting, whatever... and then, crucially, offers to sign releases with its identity so windows and macos users don't get the popup of doom? and then maybe fast track publishing to app stores on top of that? is that kind of codesigning identity sharing a tos violation?
i overflow my hands counting the projects i can name that are solid, polished, etc, but in the era of gatekeeper and friends inevitably present pretty brutal friction to typical end-users because the dev can't justify shelling out for apple developer or whatever.
i mean yes broad financing of free software efforts would have a similar effect but yknow. projects like drawing apps and media players are pretty broad-use. hell, blender has a foundation with corporate donors. but what about the more obscure stuff that doesn't create its own entire ecosystem but nonetheless improves the lives of users within its niche? maybe we could make it fashionable for wealthier techies to adopt those projects as patrons in the old sense or something
Apache Software Foundation would be the biggest example - although I don't know if they use the same authenticode certificate or App store accounts for their subprojects.
This was supposed to be a product announcement, I guess, but 90% of it was spent bitching.
Instead of telling me what Krita is, why I should use it, and how exciting it’s now available on the Mac App Store, we get complaints and lectures. (You don't need to tell us that it costs more on the Mac App Store and complain about it; just set the price to what you need it to be, maybe have some tact and say something like "Each app store's pricing reflects their unique costs and revenue sharing model")
I realize this is an open-source project and not a commercial product, but if the goal is to spread the word and grow the user community, this style of bitterness won't do it.
That’s not the point. Obviously I know how to search and figured out what it is.
I’m just saying that when you write press releases and articles you should probably be mindful of the fact that it might be someone’s first impression of you.
I’d never heard of Krita before this post and my first impression is that their maintainers have rocks in their shoes.
The "Press" section on the other hand has this as its first sentence: "Krita is the full-featured free digital painting studio for artists who want to create professional work from start to end."
I believe it’s standard practice to have just one developer account for signing and submission to the store. Other developers can self-sign the app for local testing and tools like Xcode are free to use.