[apple-sauce]

Honestly, I don't get it.

Apple makes big money from their ecosystem. Wireguard developer provides high-quality solution for free, helping to grow proprietary ecosystem, essentially helping Apple to make more money indirectly and directly (by giving 30% from donations).

In return developer gets tons of hate from users and from Apple itself in the form of delayed reviews, rejects and constant threat of violating some rule and getting dev account banned.

In my opinion, the only solution for this is to stop providing services for free and put a price tag on the app.

I understand, that developer is a kind, not-yet-burnt-out person who wants to be the world a better place by providing the free way to exchange information securely, but doing so for free for corporate ecosystem is clearly not sustainable, neither financially nor emotionally.

[tasn]

Users demand it. You can't have a popular VPN app without Apple support (because at least one person in the org will have an iDevice), so you have to do it. I made another comment in this thread about my experience building EteSync.

That's one of the more annoying parts about Apple being the gatekeeper to 40% of the US population (and in effect, to 100% of businesses). As a developer, you are just stuck with no way out.

[fxtentacle]

Oh you absolutely can. You'll lose 40% of your users, but for a free project, that shouldn't matter much.

[tasn]

Many apps (e.g. EteSync and WireGuard) are almost useless if they don't work for everyone within a certain group. A more extreme example is a messaging app. Will not having iOS support for a messaging app lose you 40% of your users? No, it will lose you 100%.

In WireGuard's case it's maybe less obvious than messaging, but if WireGuard doesn't work on macOS, it's enough to have one Apple user in your whole organisation in order to make it a non-viable solution.

[literallycancer]

What organization is it, that can't order an employee to use a different OS on a work computer?

[bombcar]

When the employee is the CEO who wants to use his iPhone or an owner who wants to use her MacBook, the IT department bends.

And yes, the users are smart enough to see there’s an iOS client so you can’t just tell them “it’s not available”.

[fxtentacle]

We're talking about an open source project.

So if bigcorp wants OS X WireGuard support, they should be able to pay handsomely for it.

If they aren't willing to pay, then I believe the project should just avoid offering it, to avoid getting burnt out from unreasonable requests.

[tasn]

Video editors, designers, and sound mixer are a few example professions where users mostly use Apple products. Most companies have designers.

Additionally, companies don't choose their whole software stack based on their VPN solution. They would just change a VPN solution if it's incompatible with what's there.

[fxtentacle]

That was 5 years ago.

By now, video editors and sound mixers are heavy windows users, because there's no halfway endurable Apple machine that you can purchase that supports 128GB of RAM and 8+ CPU cores and NVIDIA CUDA. Because like it or not, almost all video editing plugins use CUDA for acceleration.

https://avid.secure.force.com/pkb/articles/download/Pro-Tool...

The industry standard for movie mixing supports: macOS Catalina (10.15.7), macOS Mojave (10.14.6), and High Sierra (10.13.6).

In other words, they didn't even bother with Big Sur yet.

[igetspam]

You'll lose more than that. If there wasn't a viable Apple solution, half my dev team wouldn't be able to use it, so 100% of my org wouldn't be able to use it because I can't maintain half a solution. You'd be left only with tinkerers. I'd say you'd have lost about 95%.

[literallycancer]

It's much less than 40% outside the US.

[themacguffinman]

Does the free and open source Wireguard need to be a popular VPN app? One benefit of being more popular is that they get more contributions, but given that they barely get enough contributions to fix macOS-specific bugs as it is, it's not clear that the benefit outweighs the costs.

Apple and Apple users respond to tangible consequences; appeasement doesn't seem to be working, and it doesn't seem to be benefiting the project either. Like OP said, it's magnanimous of the developer to do this but I don't think "users demand it" is a great justification, nor is it quite in the spirit of open source.

[tasn]

Why build it in the first place if you don't want people to use it? Also, a lot of VPN services are moving to WireGuard, they will hopefully contribute to WireGuard development in the future. You can't really do cost/benefit assessment based on current contribution values. If you did that, no startup will ever start, and no open source project will ever be created, as upon creation the usage is almost always zero.

[themacguffinman]

Windows & Linux users will still be able to use it. Most popular VPN services seem to develop their own custom desktop clients (they do this for OpenVPN); they will definitely contribute to Wireguard, but I'm not sure that they will contribute much to the desktop-specific parts of the "official" apps.

Edit: I should add that there is another cost/benefit assessment here: if Wireguard developers continue to appease Apple, Apple will continue to make life difficult for them as there will be no pressure for it to behave better.

[thw0rted]

You can't just look at the clients, you have to consider a VPN protocol holistically. Do you think that most VPN installations are going to run two different gateways side-by-side so that they can provide Protocol X for Platforms A and B, and Protocol Y for Platforms C and D? (Even worse: X for just Platform A, and Y for literally every other user.)

[codefined]

My understanding is that WireGuard do _not_ give 30% of their donations to MacOS, so Apple are only indirectly making money from WireGuard being on their platform.

See:

> We faced rejections in submitting the app, because they decided to change their policy on the app having a link in the "About WireGuard" tool window to www.wireguard.com/donations/ (which they previously had allowed explicitly; now they want 30% or something)

[yoz-y]

Selling an app brings even more burden and responsibility than a free app though.