I admit I feel a bit surprised reading Jason’s takedown of the AppStore model on his preferred computing platform. Maybe I shouldn’t be, but it seems far more direct than I expected.

A few highlights:

Today’s computing world is also more dangerous than the one in which macOS was originally devised, so Apple cleverly built a multi-tiered approach to running software on macOS. (Never let anyone tell you that there’s no way Apple could open up iOS to software beyond the App Store. The very smart people at Apple have already solved the problem, and they did it for the Mac.)

True, Apple doesn’t want to give up the sweet AppStore revenue from iPad and iPhone customers until governments make them.

A few years ago, at one of the last in-person WWDC events, an Apple representative stood on stage and said that Apple will never stop users from running code they want to run on their Macs, and we all need to hold them to that.

Unfortunately, running these apps is getting harder. While I understand that Apple sees them as a vector for malware, spyware, and other nefarious things, it’s also gone too far in making them hard to run. As of macOS Sequoia, launching one of these apps requires you to attempt to launch them and fail, then visit the Gatekeeper section of System Settings to lower your security level, click through a stern warning, and enter in an administrator password. There’s no setting for users to opt out of this dance–you have to do it for every non-notarized app you install.

Alongside the crazy hardware costs this is one of the reasons I stopped using my M1 MacStudio. I don’t trust that Apple will really keep the option to run whatever you want open. As ShopTalk said it only takesone crazy person at the top to kill developer relations. Yes this could happen with my Framework laptop and Fedora operating system, but in this world I have many other options to go to if that happens.

I suggest you read the whole article from Jason.