Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by colejohnson66 2419 days ago
Yes, and no, in reality. It’s complicated, but you can set up your own enterprise certificate (for a cost) or just resign the app using your own developer license every 7 days. Cydia Impactor even allows you to do the latter on non-macOS devices.

So while it’s definitely not as “open” as, say, a PC or Android, it’s not as simple as, “no they don’t.”
1 comments
snazz 2419 days ago
You can also automate the resign-every-week process with iTunes Wi-Fi Sync and have it just work so long as you are on your home network at least once a week.
link
swiley 2419 days ago
I haven’t been able to run iTunes on Linux.
link
willstrafach 2416 days ago
https://www.libimobiledevice.org/
link
snazz 2419 days ago
Run Windows or macOS in a VM? Bare-metal Hackintosh? I agree that it’s somewhat restrictive (and it would be great if iTunes ran on Linux, not that it’s surprising that it doesn’t), but it’s not horribly difficult to run your own self-signed iOS apps. If you can’t handle Windows or macOS, then you’ll have to plug your iOS device in to your Linux machine to use Cydia Impactor.
link
vbezhenar 2419 days ago
3 apps per device only.
link
skinnymuch 2419 days ago
Isn’t it per Apple ID? Not limited to 3 per device.
link
vbezhenar 2418 days ago
So you're suggesting to create multiple fake apple accounts and use them to build apps for personal use? I think that Apple would find out and ban those accounts, because surely they made that restriction to restrict exactly this behaviour (abusing developer account to by-pass AppStore). Does someone use that approach?
link
skinnymuch 2417 days ago
Fake accounts makes it sound like some “thing”. Just using a couple of different accounts for most any public-ish big service is pretty par for the course.

Not sure what “does someone use that approach” mean. I can just say Apple for sure does not do any sort of banning of any kind if you use a handful of accounts with one device.

There’s probably people in the sideloading and jailbreak community who have a dozen accounts linked to one device. I’ve never thought of it as anything more than just doing some simple relatively innocent thing to get around the 3 limit. No problems to the at this point probably dozen accounts I have.

link