Sideloading on iOS now Possible

[adams161]

I dont know if you're a millennial or gen-z but i feel i get static with the younger generation on talkchess.

Yea it's possible to develop for ios without great difficulty beyond 99 a year. Though you can side load on your own device for free.

Android is no walk in the park. Any development is a sort of commitment.

Mike Adams

I'm certainly not a millennial. Would be nice to shave off 10-20 years though.

Ok, so you can test iOS apps now on your device without dev account. That's certainly nice. But if you want to go to AppStore/do AdHoc distribution, you'll still need the dev account if I'm not mistaken.
I personally don't care much about the price itself ($99), I simply feel that I don't get much in return.
Well - except the deprecation of OpenGL, which is a big problem for me because all my apps were portable, OpenGL-based.

I don't know which language you use for development, but I use C++, so the idea is to have portable C++ backend with Objective-C <=> C++ glue.

I never finished anything serious for Android except for compiling my engine to work with Chess for Android so I can't really compare.

May I ask how you deal with the portability of your applications and which language(s) you use?
Do you use Swift/ObjC for iOS and Java for Android, perhaps interfacing with C/C++ code to do common tasks?
I can imagine that maintaining multiple independent applications for each platform would be difficult.

I have not really enthusiastically responded to discussions of the pros and cons of developing for Android vs iOS. Main reason was I was hoping to have some discussion of the side loading concept. For example do people believe this would comply with GPL's requirement you be able to modify any GPL app the user uses. If that was the case would it matter if the install expires and need to be reloaded in 90s days if it's rated a test build which i'm not sure on the answer.

Can people see themselves doing this say if Chess - Analyze this or another popular app was Open Source could someone see themselves grabbing the project, making the modifications they want to make and compile it on XCode if they have a Mac and run their own modified version, something GPL apparently thinks is an important right.

Does it matter to people that users can only compile these open source iOS apps if they have a mac or access to one?

Now on pros and cons of Android vs iOS development, most of the bigger apps do both. it's even possible to use primarily one code base for both now if done with C++ mainly such as Cocos2d apps or in Unity ect or other tech to keep one code base. Apps that depend on heavy libraries can also write some UI in native code and keep libraries in c/c++.

But i'm more interested in this thread if people think what i've described as side loading on iOS is useful at all, say to those who already compile open source programs. And could this satisfy various license that require with open source software the users can modify their copy?

[Ras]

It's still not compliant with the GPL because the GPL doesn't just refer to the source text and building oneself, it refers also to the binaries. You have to be able to give the binary to anyone else on any (compatible of course) device. That is still not possible with the binary from the store. Besides, recompiling every engine every 90 days is sort of ridiculous.

The situation may change with the current anti-trust court proceedings that Apple is facing. They may be forced to open iOS for competing stores, in which case something like F-Droid could not only allow a proper chess GUI with separate engine executables, but also full GPL compliance.

And as for Android being no walk in the park - oh yes, it is. Provided that you already have a Linux version of a chess engine, you just take the NDK and compile an Android binary that you can copy over e.g. to the Droidfish/Uci folder, that's it. No additional DRM that would violate the GPL either. Also, the user doesn't have to get used to a different GUI each time he wants to use a different engine, which is a usability plus.

There's good reason why you have way more engines available for Android than for iOS. On the other hand, this is exactly how Apple actually wants it because they want to avoid having tons of very similar apps. So Apple has decided that for iOS users, a handful of engines have to be enough.

[adams161]

The situation may change with the current anti-trust court proceedings that Apple is facing. They may be forced to open iOS for competing stores, in which case something like F-Droid could not only allow a proper chess GUI with separate engine executables, but also full GPL compliance.

After hearing it laid out, yea from an open source perspective iOS is a poor source. I agree the current anti-trust law suits Apple faces could change something. The US Supreme Court ruled last week the cases can go forward.