Archive for November 10, 2025

Monday, November 10, 2025

Apple Removes Gay Dating Apps From Chinese App Store

Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis (Bluesky):

Apple has removed two of the most popular gay dating apps in China from the App Store after receiving an order from China’s main internet regulator and censorship authority, WIRED has learned. The move comes as reports of Blued and Finka disappearing from the iOS App Store and several Android app stores circulated on Chinese social media over the weekend. The apps appear to still be functional for users in the country who already have them downloaded.

“We follow the laws in the countries where we operate. Based on an order from the Cyberspace Administration of China, we have removed these two apps from the China storefront only,” an Apple spokesperson said in an email.

Previously:

FSF EU Notarization Complaint

Free Software Foundation Europe (via Hacker News):

The EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) aims for a structural reset of power in digital markets, a shift from corporate control toward device neutrality, where users decide what runs on their devices. For Free Software, this legislation can be a unique opportunity by finally opening closed ecosystems - like iOS - to Free Software alternatives. Apple has reacted aggressively against the DMA, litigating against regulators, and unfairly excluding Free Software from iOS and iPadOS by blocking the unfettered installation of software (sideloading), prohibiting alternative app stores, and hindering interoperability.

[…]

Apple’s complete review of apps – known as “notarisation” process - a mandatory step for distributing any software on its platforms, represents the very gatekeeping behaviour the DMA was written to prevent.

Notarisation forces all apps, even those distributed outside Apple’s App Store, to be submitted to Apple’s servers for scanning, approval, and cryptographic re-signing before installation. The result is that Apple retains full control over what software users can install and how developers can distribute it. This transforms Apple’s self-appointed “security review” into a choke-point of power, locking in developers and users into the company’s proprietary ecosystem.

[…]

The alternative to Apple’s notarisation already exists, and it works. Decentralised curation, as practised by repositories like F-Droid, shows that security and software freedom coexist inherently. Instead of concentrating trust in a single private authority, decentralised systems distribute it: through transparent verification pipelines, reproducible builds, and community audits. Users choose whom to trust, and curators are accountable to the public, not to corporate shareholders. This model embodies the DMA’s vision of interoperability and openness far better than Apple’s notarisation.

I continue to have problems with even the automated notarization for Mac apps. Seemingly every other build these days, I get an error like this:

[15:16:58.729Z] Warning [KEYCHAIN] Couldn't find keychain item matching ["r_Attributes": true, "acct": "com.apple.gke.notary.tool.saved-creds.AppleNotaryProfile", "sync": "syna", "labl": "com.apple.gke.notary.tool", "class": genp, "m_Limit": m_LimitOne, "r_Data": true]. An error occurred while accessing the keychain. The specified item could not be found in the keychain.
[15:16:58.729Z] Info [KEYCHAIN] No Keychain password item found for: AppleNotaryProfile
Error: No Keychain password item found for profile: AppleNotaryProfile

The first few times, I would run notarytool store-credentials to fix this, but I later found that the item really is still in the keychain, and if I keep retrying the notarization it will eventually work. So, aside from the broader policy question, the reality on the ground is that notarization was introduced more than 7 years ago (with macOS 10.14) and it still adds friction and unreliability to the development process.

Hammer:

We need to push a phrase like “freely installed apps”. Don’t use their terms. When Apple talks “sideloading” correct the record “I don’t want sideloading from the App Store either, I want freely installed apps from anywhere”.

[…]

At this rate I think we’re all going to end up using Steve Jobs’s original “sweet solution” to break free.

Previously:

Thanks for Under the Radar

Under the Radar:

In our final episode, we reflect on how indie app development has changed over the past decade.

Marco Arment:

We’re incredibly proud of our ten-year catalog of 30-minute discussions on development, marketing, monetization, work/life balance, and mental health for app developers.

I really liked the 30-minute format and the breadth of topics: everything from API details to broader design considerations, stats from their own businesses, and postmortems, plus all the stuff he mentioned.

Ricky Mondello:

I’ve listened to every episode of the Under the Radar, so I want to thank Marco and David for wearing their hearts on their sleeves while delivering a disciplined podcast that frequently jumped to the top of my queue.

I’ve never been an indie software developer, but I found the podcast extremely insightful. It’s influenced how I’ve thought about my non-indie software development career, not just as someone delivering bits that indies use, but also as a product person who writes software as a means to an end.

Some of my favorite topics touched on by the show have been taking risks, being willing to pivot when those risks don’t work out, keeping many different types of users in mind, and how to market one’s work and oneself (two different things that feed into each other!).

Previously:

NetNewsWire 6.2

Brent Simmons (release notes):

Long-time Mac users will understand when we say that this is a Snow Leopard release — it fixes a bunch of bugs, makes some things faster, and adds only a couple features.

[…]

Note also that it doesn’t adopt Liquid Glass. We’ll be doing that in NetNewsWire 7, which we’re working on now. (See The Liquid Glass Plan.)

All that said — there is one new feature of potential interest: we’ve added support for Markdown in RSS feeds. When the parser encounters a source:markdown element, we save it in the database, and the app renders the Markdown as HTML and displays it in the article view.

I still love this app and how fast it is. I’m using it to read Mastodon and Bluesky, in addition to all of my RSS feeds. It looks like they’ve figured out the bug that makes me have to restart the app daily to keep Feedbin syncing working, but the fix has been postponed until 7.1.

Previously:

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