Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels

分发 Mac 软件正在让我的皮质醇水平飙升

Apple is increasing my cortisol levels. Date: 2026-05-09. I’m creating a simple developer utility to make managing Claude Code profiles (e.g. running it with DeepSeek, or some OpenRouter models) a little bit easier. The utility itself is written in the Go language, and the tooling there makes it really easy to compile for various platforms - I get a static executable I can put anywhere I want. I intend to release it soon, but for now wanted to check how easily I can get it running everywhere. It works just fine for distributing Windows software (I get an .exe). It works just fine for distributing Linux software (same deal, after chmod +x). 苹果正在让我的皮质醇水平飙升。日期：2026年5月9日。我正在开发一个简单的开发者工具，旨在让管理 Claude Code 配置文件（例如使用 DeepSeek 或某些 OpenRouter 模型运行它）变得更容易一些。该工具本身是用 Go 语言编写的，其工具链使得为各种平台进行编译变得非常简单——我能得到一个可以随意放置的静态可执行文件。我打算很快发布它，但目前我想先测试一下它在各处运行的便捷性。在分发 Windows 软件时，它运行良好（我得到一个 .exe 文件）。在分发 Linux 软件时也一样（在 chmod +x 之后，效果相同）。

Distributing Mac software. It does not just work for macOS and my MacBook instead shows me this: What you see is their quarantine kicking in for downloaded software, even if I share it with myself over Nextcloud. Technically, you can ask your users to override it manually, in the terminal: Most developers might be willing to do that. It is not, however, good user experience and might raise some eyebrows. Doesn’t seem like such a big deal, right? I’ll just enroll in their Apple Developer Program, sign the executable and be on my way, right? 分发 Mac 软件。在 macOS 上情况并非如此，我的 MacBook 反而向我展示了这个：你所看到的是他们针对已下载软件启动的“隔离”机制，即使是通过 Nextcloud 与自己共享的文件也不例外。从技术上讲，你可以要求用户在终端中手动覆盖它：大多数开发者可能愿意这样做。然而，这并不是良好的用户体验，而且可能会引起质疑。这看起来没什么大不了的，对吧？我只需要加入他们的 Apple Developer Program，对可执行文件进行签名，然后就可以继续了，对吧？

Giving Apple money, and failing. Wait, they want how much money for the account? And it’s a yearly subscription? My brother in Christ, I intend to release a utility maybe a dozen or two dozen people are going to download, tops, for like 7 USD on Itch.io with a pay-what-you-want model, meaning that most of those people will probably choose the price of 0 USD instead (since I don’t intend to be like Apple, people have various circumstances). That means that even if it works out that much, there’s going to be VAT and Itch.io will also take a cut so out of those maybe 50 USD I’ll get about 25 USD, which funds me about 3 months of that Apple Developer Program price. 给苹果送钱，却遭遇失败。等等，他们要多少钱来注册账户？而且还是年度订阅制？天哪，我打算发布的这个工具，顶多也就十几二十个人下载，在 Itch.io 上定价 7 美元，还采用了“随心付”模式，这意味着大多数人可能会选择 0 美元（因为我不想像苹果那样，人们的情况各不相同）。这意味着即使真的赚到了钱，还要扣除增值税，Itch.io 也要抽成，所以在那 50 美元里，我大概只能拿到 25 美元，这只够支付 Apple Developer Program 大约 3 个月的费用。

I guess the reason for it being priced like that lies somewhere between greed and wanting to gatekeep hobbyists out and only support Serious Users™, but it seems a bit stupid. Oh well, I already had to get the overpriced MacBook for another freelance thing, because they also won’t let me compile macOS/iOS apps on Windows or Linux, so I guess this is just them spitting on me after slapping me in the face. 我想这种定价的原因介于贪婪和想要将业余爱好者拒之门外、只支持“严肃用户™”之间，但这看起来有点愚蠢。好吧，我已经因为另一项自由职业工作不得不购买了价格过高的 MacBook，因为他们不允许我在 Windows 或 Linux 上编译 macOS/iOS 应用，所以我想这就像是他们扇了我一巴掌后又往我脸上吐口水。

What I get from that is that articles like “An app can be a home-cooked meal” are cool, but don’t take the economics of wanting to release something publicly into account - unless you’re developing something that you’ll add a bunch of monetization to, you’ll be losing money. For desktop software there is Homebrew but that also means that you couldn’t charge a few bucks for it even if you wanted to (or that you’d need to add mac-homebrew-install-instructions.txt to the Itch.io downloads page when doing the pay-what-you-want approach, which would feel awkward). 我从中得到的结论是，像《一个应用可以是一顿家常便饭》这样的文章很棒，但它们没有考虑到公开发布软件的经济成本——除非你开发的是那种能带来大量变现的产品，否则你就是在亏钱。对于桌面软件，虽然有 Homebrew，但这同时也意味着即使你想收费也收不了（或者当你采用“随心付”模式时，你得在 Itch.io 下载页面添加一个 mac-homebrew-install-instructions.txt 文件，这会让人感到尴尬）。

I don’t like that the economics are pushing software and app development in a direction where releasing a package (that might be non-open-source or just source-available, but you want to release binaries) costs money, though I also acknowledge that there would be other issues, like insane amounts of spam, with not doing that. 我不喜欢这种经济模式将软件和应用开发推向了一个“发布软件包（可能是非开源或仅源码可见，但你想发布二进制文件）需要花钱”的方向，尽管我也承认，如果不这样做，会出现其他问题，比如海量的垃圾信息。

Then, we get to the actual verification process - it’s understandable that they’d want to verify my ID. The problem is that on the MacBook they also expect me to use its webcam to take a picture. I will admit that my M1 MacBook Air is getting dated at this point, but regardless of what lighting I tried, I could just not get a good picture of the document. It’s not like they were like “Oh hey, we’ve detected that your own iPhone is connected to the same local network as this MacBook, would you like to use it as a camera?”, so for about 10 attempts, this is what I saw: 接下来是实际的验证过程——他们想要验证我的身份是可以理解的。问题在于，在 MacBook 上，他们还要求我使用其内置摄像头拍照。我承认我的 M1 MacBook Air 现在已经有点过时了，但无论我尝试什么样的光线，都无法拍出一张清晰的证件照。他们并没有提供类似“嘿，我们检测到你的 iPhone 与这台 MacBook 连接在同一个局域网，你想用它作为摄像头吗？”的选项，所以在大约 10 次尝试中，我看到的都是这个：

Eventually, I moved over to trying to use my main webcam for that, since their built in one just doesn’t work: Why they can’t just let me upload a scan of the document eludes me. I mean, I guess I can imagine a few reasons why, but it’d probably be easier to forge my own ID so it’s not as glossy rather than having to turn my small kitchen table into this. Pictured for maximum frustration, a dongle that I needed: Even that wasn’t good enough, because understandably it doesn’t have autofocus for something that you hold close. Not only that, but every 2nd failure seemed to just give me a generic error and I’d have to start the whole enrollment process from the beginning again: 最终，我转而尝试使用我的主摄像头，因为他们内置的摄像头根本无法工作：我不明白为什么他们不能直接让我上传证件扫描件。我的意思是，我大概能想到几个原因，但伪造一张反光没那么严重的证件，可能比把我那张小餐桌变成这样要容易得多。为了展示极致的挫败感，图中是我需要的转接头：即便如此也不够好，因为可以理解的是，它对于近距离拍摄的物体没有自动对焦功能。不仅如此，每失败两次，系统似乎就会给我一个通用错误，我不得不从头开始整个注册流程：

Luckily I realized that I can install the app on my iPhone directly. There, it worked on the first try. I guess it must really suck if you don’t have an iPhone or a fancy webcam, better spend some more money so you can give them money! The payment went through okay, soon after I had an activated developer account. Except of course I didn’t, look, the app tells me to await an e-mail (which I seemingly already received?): And the desktop app doesn’t care at all either, it doesn’t even know that I’ve tried the enrollment, and offers me to start the whole thing over again, despite me being signed into the exact same account: 幸运的是，我意识到可以直接在 iPhone 上安装该应用。在那里，我一次就成功了。我想如果你没有 iPhone 或高级摄像头，那一定很糟糕，最好多花点钱，这样你才能给他们送钱！付款成功了，不久之后我拥有了一个已激活的开发者账户。当然，事实并非如此，看，应用告诉我等待一封电子邮件（但我似乎已经收到了？）：而且桌面应用也完全不在乎，它甚至不知道我已经尝试过注册，并建议我从头开始，尽管我已经登录了同一个账户：

It’s probably a case of eventual consistency and some background processes or whatever, but it’s also quite frustrating and, in a word, stupid. Apple is kind of frustrating. Apple, I think you make hardware with pretty good build quality and the M-series chips made for pretty much the perfect notebook for me - and I’m sure they’re great main dev machines for those that can afford the higher spec versions. I think that’s nice and I genuinely enjoy having the iPhone SE 2022, at least before learning that you killed off the budget series altogether (your new e-series are more expensive) and removed the nice silent mode toggle on the side and removed TouchID. That’s before we even start talking about the 3.5mm jack and frankly all of that makes me question whether my next phone shouldn’t just be an Android again. I can deal with needing software like AutoRaise and Rectangle and DiscreteScroll alongside others to customize your OS to my liking bec… 这可能只是“最终一致性”或某些后台进程的问题，但这确实令人沮丧，用一个词形容就是：愚蠢。苹果确实让人感到沮丧。苹果，我认为你们制造的硬件做工相当不错，M 系列芯片几乎为我打造了完美的笔记本电脑——我相信对于那些买得起高配版的人来说，它们是非常棒的主力开发机。我觉得这很好，我也确实很喜欢 iPhone SE 2022，至少在得知你们彻底砍掉了预算系列（你们新的 e 系列更贵了）、移除了侧面好用的静音拨片并取消了 TouchID 之前是这样。这还没开始谈论 3.5mm 耳机孔的问题，坦率地说，所有这些都让我怀疑我的下一部手机是否应该换回安卓。我可以接受为了按我的喜好定制你们的操作系统而安装 AutoRaise、Rectangle 和 DiscreteScroll 等软件，因为……