Apple Discontinues 'iOS Developer University Program' for Students

[benwiggy]

you can sign them locally without a developer account

For now. I did say "in a future version". And if I want to write an app for my mum, I'll have to give her instructions on how to do that?

 

[mxrider88]

They need to send their own engineers back to university I’m afraid

 

[MacPoulet]

Nuts. The previous system was more convenient. It can be a hassle to get University admin on board, even with it being free.

 

[Shirasaki]

Get rid of a fee?

This is Tim Cook Apple we are talking about here 😂

Tim Cook will charge more on each iPhone to make up for any fee they get rid of. And customers would happily pay for it.

 

[Mike Richardson]

Time was when you could get Apple's Macintosh Programmers Workshop tools free.

Apple has explicitly said that un-signed apps will be prevented from running by default in a future version of MacOS, meaning that anyone who wants to compile an app will have to pay Apple a sub. That's going to kill the Mac as a hobbyist platform.

Can you please cite your source for this?

 

[Mike Richardson]

The old program is described as allowing "university professors and other eligible instructors to create a development team with up to 200 students, who could create and test apps without needing to pay the usual $99 annual fee".

That is to say, the professor created the account, and then could have 200 students as subordinates.

The replacement being offered is the fee waiver program, which states: "To be eligible, you must: Be a legal entity with a status as a nonprofit organization, accredited educational institution, or government entity;"

Students are not legal entities, so they can't themselves sign up with fee waiver. It's not clear at all how a student would sign up anymore.

EDIT: https://atlc.apple.com/downloads/Ap...ardingKit.pdf?cid=pm-enus-nwl-3pp-edu-dis-adp

I guess you can still have subordinate accounts ("Developers") but it doesn't say how many.

 

[svish]

Good to know about this. But since they can request for a fee waiver, don't think it changes much.

 

[benwiggy]

Can you please cite your source for this?

In session 701 of WWDC 2019, Apple’s Garrett Jacobson warned: “the security of the platform has become increasingly reliant on the validity of code signatures. And this means that if an app has no signature, it’s impossible to detect tampering. And further, if a bundle signature has become broken at runtime, it’s very difficult to differentiate malicious tampering from mundane tampering when [an app] modifies itself at runtime. And in a future version of macOS, unsigned code will not run by default anymore.”

 

[AppliedMicro]

Apple has explicitly said that un-signed apps will be prevented from running by default in a future version of MacOS, meaning that anyone who wants to compile an app will have to pay Apple a sub. That's going to kill the Mac as a hobbyist platform

The future is now. They are prevented from running by default in today’s version of macOS.

Though you can, of course, selectively override that default and allow it to run.

 

[benwiggy]

Though you can, of course, selectively override that default and allow it to run.

My point is that eventually, if you want to create apps for MacOS, and e.g. put binaries up on github, you will be forced by necessity to pay Apple a continuous fee for the privilege. The time may come when even locally signing them will require payment.

Personally, I have a very big problem with the principle of that. It doesn't matter whether it's a small fee, or a large fee. I learnt programming at school in the 80s. If you told me then that I would have to pay a company to run my code, I'd consider that a dystopian, Orwellian future.

 

[AppliedMicro]

Running your own code for he purposes of learning is something different than publicly distributing binaries for use by others. Any way, there sadly seem to be quite a lot of users on this forum that not only justify but actively support such a dystopian, Orwellian future.