[fifafu]

Apple once rejected an app of mine for being "useless". App review even called me to tell me my app is useless and will not be approved to the Mac App Store.

~12 years later thousands of people have used that little useless app (KeyboardCleanTool, a very small free app to block all keyboard / touch bar input). People have used that app in ways I'd never have imagined (e.g. letting toddlers hack on their keyboards or letting their cats sleep on the laptop).

What is useful or not is really subjective.

[jerrysievert]

When I desperately needed to clean my keyboard, I was searching for how best to clean a MacBook keyboard. Your app kept coming up and I kept laughing it off thinking, “yeah, how can an app clean the keyboard, will it fake shake it until it’s clean?”

It wasn’t until about 10 searches later I found a decent article about the best way to clean your keyboard, with a shout out to your app for being able to lock the keyboard.

Finally, it clicked and I downloaded it - quite useful for a “useless” app - thanks for making it and maintaining it!

[foundart]

I turn my laptop off to clean it and avoid the power button while doing the cleaning. Was this not an option for you?

[wavemode]

I mean, clicking an app is a lot more convenient than having to turn the whole laptop off.

[kryptogeist]

Jesus... how often do you clean your keyboard? :)

[imp0cat]

Probably after each meal? :D

[WJW]

I recently discovered that if I put a plate between my food and the keyboard, the keys don't get nearly as dirty as when I put the food directly on the keyboard. Life hack!

[nsvd]

I clean mine about once a week. It tends to get grimey.

[foundart]

Yikes! TIL that with Apple Silicon it is impossible to stop the computer from auto-booting on lid open or key press. There was an nvram hack that worked for Intel machines but it has no effect now. What a "feature."

I've added a user account "Clean" and will do cleaning after locking the screen while logged into that account. If I happen to disable its login via failed logins due to keypresses while cleaning, I can switch back to my normal account and reset it.

[jerrysievert]

there are a few apps that I don't want to quit any time (about once every 2 weeks) that I want to clean my laptop keyboard.

currently, I'm fighting slack to make sure it doesn't update again.

[jrmg]

Recent Apple laptops switch on if _any_ of the keys are pressed.

[alpaca128]

Or if you open the lid.

[alsetmusic]

I’m aware of your app. Seems pretty brilliant to me.

My mother accidentally turned on our computer (Mac IIsi) when cleaning while I was a kid. I successfully turned that into the justification for why we needed the After Dark screensaver. Flying toasters soon graced my screen. Ah, nostalgia…

[alin23]

Thanks for KeyboardCleanTool! I’ve used it for years, and it inspired me to add a similar function called Cleaning Mode in my Lunar app: https://lunar.fyi/shortcuts#cleaning-mode

I needed the MacBook screen and monitors to be completely black while cleaning so I can see the dust that would result in scratches if cleaned with a cloth. I also needed the trackpad to be disabled and an easy to press key combo to turn off cleaning mode (I arrived on spamming the Command key at least 8 times as a combo, hard to accidentally press, easy to remember)

I’m always annoyed by Apple’s practices in app review, why would they decide for users what is useful and what isn’t? Not to mention the scams that pass review and are left to live in the App Store for months.

[bGl2YW5j]

I've benefitted from your app! Thank you for the awesome anecdote.

[knlam]

I will save this comment whenever someone defend the apple wallgarden

[willi59549879]

i refuse to call apple a walled garden. To me it is plainly a prison, doesn't play well with anything outside

[orangecat]

I've wanted that for years, thank you! Apparently nobody at Apple has a cat.

[ok_dad]

Cat like typing detected

http://www.bitboost.com/pawsense/

[luigi23]

It wasnt useless, it was their way of telling ‘not suitable for average user because they can lock themselves in and were gonna take the heat’

[Isthatablackgsd]

I love your app! It is perfect for my MBA M1. I was annoyed there wasn't an option to temporarily disable the keyboard for cleaning. I found your app through brew.

[albertzeyer]

Oh interesting, I wrote something very similar: https://github.com/albertz/mac-suppress-mouse-keyboard

It also blocks mouse presses.

The only way to unblock is to type in a special sequence of letters on the keyboard. But an on-screen display will tell you what to type.

It was mostly for my toddler.

[coopierez]

Funny you should mention, I just needed to clean my keyboard yesterday and I was looking for a way to disable my keyboard without turning off my PC. Thanks for your app!

[john-tells-all]

Pfft I used your "useless" app! I wanted to clean the keyboard and the app lets me do that without shutting the computer down. Very happy! Thanks.

[Quiark]

TBH I just switch to the lock screen if I need that

[albertzeyer]

We did some video meetings (or online sport sessions) during corona, and our toddler always wanted to play around with the computer.

[jbaber]

In Linux, I switch to a vty (ctrl-alt-f4) and don't log into it when I want to disable the keyboard.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I would think in most cases some sort of lock would be fine - whether that's switching to a getty, calling xscreensaver/gnome-screensaver/whatever, or whatever your platform's equivalent is.

[imp0cat]

This. I just lock the machine and have a go at it.

[mysterydip]

how did you get it approved?

[forgotmypw17]

It is published outside of the apple app store.

[waprin]

Yet multiple times I’ve seen people on this site defend Apples approval process as a good thing since they get such a great curated experience as a consumer. But here’s the thing - you don’t know what you’re missing because you never see it. If this persons idea was for iPhone instead of macOS it would never benefit those thousands of users that it did.

And - I’m going to put this bluntly while trying not to be too rude - Apple does not assign the best of the best to their App Store approval process. The experience is rife with reviewers who seem to have never looked at your app and are incapable of communicating in English outside the scope of auto form responses. Imagine the worst call center experience you’ve ever had as a customer - now you get that experience after having put hundreds or thousands of hours into a project and in some cases , a business of yours. And your concerns are a speck of dust to this trillion dollar company.

And let’s be real - you can’t seriously make a mobile app and ignore iPhones. It’s not a pure monopoly but they effectively have the leverage of one.

It’s unimaginable to me that on a site called hacker news I would see support for such incredibly antagonistic behavior towards developers that Apple exhibits but unfortunately I have multiple times so I hope this persons brilliant keyboard app that has helped so many people serves as one of the many many examples as to how Apples broken App Store process hurts developers and hurts consumers and benefits absolutely nobody.

I haven’t even touched upon the fact that you have to pay $99/year and THIRTY percent of revenue for the privilege of this experience.

The simple solution is a legal mandate to allow third party app stores. It’s fine if Apple wants the official rails to be highly curated but there simply must be an off-ramp.

We are so lucky that European regulators have some sense here.

[jodrellblank]

> "you don’t know what you’re missing because you never see it."

I saw the Cydia store, I see the Google Play store, I see the Microsoft Windows store, I see the internet outside the stores and all the software offerings on the web and on GitHub and Sourceforge and all the rest. What makes you think there's some secret buried treasure of high quality apps and not an overwhelming noise of 99% crud? And no, one example of a good program doesn't refute this, this is not a claim that there are zero good programs outside the app store (or even that there are 100% good programs inside it), this is a claim that removing moderation would be like removing the walls of your house in winter - how dare you try to keep the heat in and the cold out when I know of some warm places outside; the majority of places outside are cold.

This is like wishing for unmoderated blog comments; I like this blog[1] but see how long the scrollbar is, scroll down until the original sensible comments turn into spam. Yes there may be a good comment lost in anti-spam moderation systems, but getting rid of them is worse.

[1] https://yosefk.com/blog/compensation-rationality-and-the-pro...

[komali2]

Your concern is addressed in the OP:

> The simple solution is a legal mandate to allow third party app stores. It’s fine if Apple wants the official rails to be highly curated but there simply must be an off-ramp.

Right now Apple has an effective monopoly on the software that can run on its machines, especially the iPhone which is extraordinarily difficult to install non-appstore software on. I don't understand why that's considered acceptable when we once pilloried microsoft for having internet explorer be uninstallable. In that case you could at least still install whatever other browser you wanted... (obviously software being uninstallable is also bad)

> What makes you think there's some secret buried treasure of high quality apps and not an overwhelming noise of 99% crud?

This could be because of the barrier to entry to getting software onto the platform. I don't really face this problem with other platforms, such as Android or Linux. Maybe because I have my own curation process though, which brings me to my final point:

If 3rd party app stores were mandated, not only does that allow users to install the software of their choice on the computers they purchased, it also allows competitive markets. Apple right now can (and might?) pull an Amazon and promote their own products/software over others' because they own the market and the algos that run the search on the market. They can prop up their partners, and they can charge whatever markup they please to be listed in their curated experience.

3rd party markets means new algos representing different needs without daddy Apple getting say-so. F-droid is a great example. The various marketplaces for linux software is another: Ubuntu's official repositories, Arch's, etc, with offramps in the form of AUR or just compiling software on your own that you find on your favorite search engine or forum if you're so inclined.

Apple's app store is monopolistic behavior, plain and simple. You can love it, you can have it, it's actually quite fine imo for there to be an official software repo, but there must be an offramp to enforce user freedom.

[mistercheph]

The Cydia store was good and had amazing, high quality apps and tweaks, and the other two examples you mention are walled gardens curated by companies who have historically amplified bad actors rather than stifle them.

There is a need for curation, but I don't think Apple is qualified to perform the kind of curation that is best for consumers, it is both so loose as to permit an app store mostly filled with useless garbage, a great deal of which they promote on the "curated" home page ( to-do lists, mrbeast unity game, financial management tools that simply exist to bait consumers into enabling bank api access) and so tight as to stifle the creativity of those who think outside the narrow box of the monotony that is popular on their app store.

Curation is necessary and valuable, but distribution and curation aren't the same, and as the examples you cited, and Appls's app store reveal, the motivations of curator and distributor are in a fundamental tension between maximizing sales and improving the experience of the customer.

And as for the principle of being able, even to your own harm, to freely install the software you choose on your device, infants and the sick may need walls to keep them safe from winter, but if we build walls so high that those who would hunt cannot pass outside, and so strong that when spring comes we cannot tear them down, we shall all perish.

[jodrellblank]

> "And as for the principle of being able, even to your own harm, to freely install the software you choose on your device, infants and the sick may need walls to keep them safe from winter, but if we build walls so high that those who would hunt cannot pass outside, and so strong that when spring comes we cannot tear them down, we shall all perish."

Oh pulleeease, you're a superior "hunter" to the "infants" who use vendor curated app stores? Can you hear yourself regurgitating this embarassing Alpha Male/Ayn Randian drivel? It's software not manliness gym-bro posturing world. The experience of picking quality software from the large volume of total software isn't "powerful hunter" it's panning for gold - sifting a ton of river silt for hopefully a few flecks of gold, or being a filtration feeding sea creature, swallowing litres of seawater for a few morsels of sustainance.

You have freedom with Android, Chromebook, PinePhone, Windows, Linux. You covet iPhone and macOS because they're so obviously better people will spend two, three, four times the money to avoid the alternatives but then you want to break them and make them as bad as the alternatives? What about the principle of being able to, even to your own harm, choose to buy and use a restricted, limited device? The freedom to avoid having to be a human spam-filter, the freedom to make and sell restricted devices that people can opt-in to buying?

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> What makes you think there's some secret buried treasure of high quality apps and not an overwhelming noise of 99d% crud?

Well, obviously it's both; there's a lot of rough, but I still want the diamonds that are buried in it.

[wruza]

The missing out is real, but it is still a tradeoff. I’d prefer the world where we could have both all the reasonable apps and no spyware/pii-ransomware nonsense in app stores. But we only have this one and have to share it. You don’t see it as a tradeoff, that’s okay. But voting to ruin the experience that people actually liked for decades… that’s hard to understand.

[specialist]

> THIRTY percent of revenue

What is a reasonable percentage?

> ...a legal mandate to allow third party app stores.

My proposal is a bit more, um, simple:

Apple's App Store must be spun off and operated as an entirely separate entity. Maybe even run as a nonprofit org.

I cannot abide by markets also competing with their own vendors. Apple cannot both run the App Store and sell its own apps on it. They must pick a lane and stick to it.

Ditto Amazon, Walmart, Google, etc. Amazon can be an e-commerce site or sell Amazon Basic (etc), but not both.

Said another way: No vertically integrated monopolies. Dominate one market, by default or by design, fine (sort of). But using that domination to enter and dominate other markets, adjacent or otherwise, is not allowed.

[komali2]

> My proposal is a bit more, um, simple:

I think your suggestion is kinda based, but it's definitely not more simple, as it would require targeting a single company and enforcing a monopoly action against it to force it to split up. I believe the last time that happened in the USA was 1982 when Bell System was broken up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

Meanwhile a legal mandate to allow third party app stores can be accomplished more simply (imo) similar to how the EU forced Apple to use USB-C: market directives.

[pyrale]

Let's be honest, there's probably a dozen antitrust actions that are overdue in the US tech sector, and since the US doj has ignored that issue for so long, it now probably needs to be done the Standard Oil way, with a hacksaw. Of course it's not going to be easy, but the current situation happens because for 4 decades the US has taken the easy way, or done nothing at all.

As for simplicity, it lies in the fact that lighter actions often don't produce enough effect, can be side-stepped or simply ignored without continuous oversight. On the other hand, when you force divestment and bust corporate control, it is much easier to guarantee that the desired effect happens.

[NL807]

Fortunately macOS apps don't have to be installed through the Appstore system. There are third party stores.

[brandall10]

I imagine the majority non-Apple App Store hosted apps are installed independently of any app store.

[BHSPitMonkey]

I wonder how long that will remain true.

[twelvechairs]

The EU seems keen to enforce this. The DMA set to come in will force Apple to allow third party app stores and side loaded apps to iOS, where it's not currently done

[extraduder_ire]

I think regular anti-trust laws would be the way this would be fought on the desktop.

macos as a whole doesn't have enough users in the EEA to fall under the purview of the gatekeeper section of the DMA, unless the "app store" counts as a single thing. Which it kind of does now that apple has unified it between iOS, iPad OS, and macOS.

Windows S versions that only allow software from the microsoft store haven't drawn any ire from EU countries, AFAIK.

[Forgeties79]

I mean off the top of my head, google chrome isn’t on the App Store for macOS. It also overwhelmingly dominates the browser market. There are just too many products like that that are not on the App Store that I don’t think Apple can afford to lock people off from.

I’d say 60% of my apps on my Mac are not from the App Store. Sure I am probably not representative of the average user, or maybe I am, I don’t know, but assuming I am not it’s such a large number that I can’t help but think most people have at least a couple of key things they don’t get through the App Store.

[devmor]

Forever, if Apple wishes to have a developer ecosystem.

[Alupis]

> Forever, if Apple wishes to have a developer ecosystem

Apple routinely goes out of their way to reinforce the sentiment that Apple hates developers. The only reason developers still support the Apple ecosystem is because there's a lot of money to be made within the US (where Apple devices carry non-trivial market share).

If Apple banned 3rd party App Stores, the money would just become more concentrated. Therefore, all the developers will go to the Apple App Store...

No loss from Apple's perspective - in fact, it would be a tremendous gain.

[nonameiguess]

This is a ridiculous assertion. Developers still support the Apple ecosystem because they have no choice. They want a still Unix experience but their companies require remote management software that isn't available for Linux for security compliance. So we're stuck with Mac. We're not talking about developers targeting Mac as a platform. Just regular software targeting servers. A customer needed me to figure out how to install and use rsql, Amazon's official client for Redshift, to see if it would be feasible for their researchers to use. Not to mention, you know, awscli itself. AWS packages nothing whatsoever through third-party repositories. They won't even put botocore in PyPi any more. Not only do you need to get the client from Amazon's website (also their VPN client), but it requires openssl 1 because Amazon is too lazy to keep stuff up to date. Does Apple even have library packages at all in its app stores? Libraries aren't an "app." They certainly aren't going to carry long-obsolete old libraries.

If Apple ever stopped letting you install arbitrary CLI tools, they'd lose every software company issuing their developers Macs. Yeah, they'd keep the solos actually targeting Mac itself as a platform, but that is not going to be anywhere near the plurality of people using it.

iOS is the way it is because, for better or worse, Apple sees it as an appliance, not a general purpose computer. That has never been true for their PCs. It isn't true for any PCs at all. Microsoft will never do this with Windows, either. It doesn't matter how little you think of them. You people on Hacker News are way too cynical about this stuff to be realistic. The business cases alone make no sense. Plenty of companies need to be able to install their own software that they write for internal use only. They're not going to put that in a public app store or through any kind of external review process. Those customers might even still want central control, but through their own app store, not Microsoft's or Apple's. That's why SCCM and JAMF exist. They not only allow third-party app stores, but you can get the third party app store from the official app store!

[alpaca128]

> If Apple banned 3rd party App Stores, the money would just become more concentrated. Therefore, all the developers will go to the Apple App Store...

No, they may leave the Apple ecosystem as main development platform and only use a company Macbook on the side to port their app to the appstore.

As long as Linux exists I don't really need Mac OS, I need a laptop & OS which lets me install & build arbitrary software.