I think Apple has adopted a denylist instead of permitlist approach. They let all iPad and iPhone apps run unless the developer puts their app on the denylist.
If it's a whitelist or a blacklist is really just an implementation detail.
The key here is that the developer can choose to opt-in/out when uploading to the mac store (defaulting to opt-in), however older apps will be opt-out by default (as the developer didn't have this choice when they uploaded).
Well if you want to get technical on terms, it’s probably not implemented as either a whitelist or a blacklist and is probably just a database field which was defaulted to false during the migration.
And because it’s likely implemented like that, you can either generate a whitelist or blacklist if you want, but in reality it’s highly unlikely it’s implemented as either of these things.
But regardless it seems like this whole thread is just about semantics anyway.
Yes in 2014 they made the move. The first iPad is from 2010. So we have 4 years worth of old arm compiled apps. I don‘t understand the intel part though.
There are good reasons to not allow some mobile apps to run on a laptop or desktop. For example for some games you might have an competitive advantage playing them on a computer instead of a mobile devices.
Beside that there are also impacts on the developer / company with additional training, documentation and support which might simply not make any sense to them based on their app and business model.
We as a company made the decision not to include some apps right from the start. It has mainly to do with the support, maintenance and the looks of the product. My old CEO told me after I asked him why we don‘t put our games to more platforms. „Publishing them is easy. Then you need to actively support them.“ I know from testing that most of our games looks and works good on M1. But we don‘t add it to our QA cycle. But I understand your point as well.
I don‘t know about you but in the last 8 years or so my job was it to maintain multiple games in different stores (playstore, appstore, kindle, etc.) The amount of things that changed over the years that had to be actively maintained in order to be able to push new versions to these stores is huge. Sure if you have a free app that just uses a minimum API and in case of iOS is somewhat responsive you can do a fire and forget publish.
But the moment you have a tighter integration with the system with a custom login or maybe ads and some inApp products you are in for a fun ride if you want users to get the latest and greatest version. The moment you have ingame products that are paid with real money you will have the added joy of dealing with customers and issues with said payments. The. One the yearly API deprecations with soft force updates to the latest build tools and so forth.
Also OpenSourcing a game is not just a push of a button on GitHub. For bigger projects and companies it means lawyers have to get involved.
My understanding is that not denying your app to run on M1 Macs means it appears in the Mac App Store.
So a user who has never used the app on iOS can go in the store, pay money for the app, and try to use it on their Mac.
So yes, that does create an implication of support by the developer for that app running on that platform.
That is a different scenario than removing access to download an app on your phone that you purchased in the past. You can remove the app from the store and still allow downloads for existing users.
I excluded my company’s app from running on M1. It relies on iPhone hardware (specifically the microphone, and all our training data was recorded from iPhones), and we found the experience on M1 to be abysmal.
So perhaps, many developers who exclude their app from running on M1 may be doing it for technical reasons.
At least one app I've tried (Logic Wiz sudoku) failed to get past the loading screen. Any insight? Not sure if it's an api that isn't implemented or a data storage issue?
Doing it the way you describe requires an Apple ID, which requires a phone number and email address, and also transmits your unchangeable hardware serial number (a supercookie) to Apple when you launch the App Store.
I believe it also requires that system integrity protection not be disabled, so any other Apple spyware in macOS (eg serial-linked APNS phone-home) cannot be disabled.
You just download the iPad version from the App store and it runs automagically.
I even did a blog post about it: https://chrisbergeron.com/2021/06/16/Pushover-Desktop-Yes-on...