China to Require Apps to Register With Government

Josh Ye:

China will require all mobile app providers in the country to file business details with the government, its information ministry said, marking Beijing's latest effort to keep the industry on a tight leash.

[…]

You Yunting, a lawyer with Shanghai-based DeBund Law Offices，said the order is effectively requiring approvals from the ministry. The new rule is primarily aimed at combating online fraud but it will impact on all apps in China, he said.

[…]

Bishop said that in order to comply with the new rules, app developers now must either have a company in China or work with a local publisher.

Via Craig Hockenberry:

This will basically put an end to indie apps on the Chinese App Store.

We’re too small too work with a local publisher, much less open an office.

Hopefully Apple figures out a way to establish themselves as a publisher (not just a distributor).

If you are forced to remove a subscription for a product in China, you could be on the hook for pro-rated refunds (even though the country may not require them, it’s a general Apple policy).

Previously:

• Apple Removes Unlicensed Games From China App Store

Update (2023-08-22): Christopher Atlan:

Seems like Amazon is out as well.

App Store Business China iOS iOS 16

Objective-C Internals

Brian T. Kelley (via Dave Verwer):

Get ready to dive deep into the inner workings of the Objective-C language and runtime! Each post delves into a specific aspect of the language and explores the details of its implementation. I hope you’ll find this valuable to demystify the language, tackle tricky bugs, and optimize your code for performance.

Quinn:

Highly recommended! Even if you lived through all this evolution, and spend way too much time staring at hex dumps in the debugger, you’ll still learn something.

Update (2023-08-15): See also: Hacker News.

Update (2023-08-28): Scott Perry:

wrt immortal objects in Python, I can’t believe adding a conditional branch in the refcount code path didn’t cause measurable performance issues; we got a big win when we moved the tag bit to the top of object pointers so we could use p<=0 on the fast path to catch nil and tagged pointers in one shot.

Language Design Objective-C Objective-C Runtime Optimization Programming