This Apple fee is one of the most absurd things they do. Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app?
When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price.
I'm a longtime Apple user but can't shake off this love-hate relationship with the company.
> Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app?
How much something costs is not what determines how much a company charges for something.
A company sets prices based on what will make it the most money. A company only lowers prices if they think doing so will generate higher total profits in the long run.
Apple seems to think charging $99 a year for developers will help its long term bottom line the most.
There are probably many reasons for that, some of them already mentioned in sibling comments - keeping low effort apps out, preventing spammers from constantly buying new accounts to bypass bans, reducing the workload for approvers, generating revenue from the fees, etc.
Prices aren't justified or not, you choose to pay them or not.
There can’t be that many iOS developers that the $99 really affects their bottom line. I always assumed it was a barrier to entry to help discourage low effort apps.
The fee could be less and have a similar deterrent on the type of activity you describe. The real question isn't what Apple is gaining from this fee, but what they are losing.
Apple's $99 fee is annoying and feels like a waste of time and one more thing to manage.
The paid ADC program has kept me from sharing projects with other developers who would have otherwise been able to contribute (but they aren't paid devs because they'd rather have a year of Costco hotdogs than pay Apple to help me with my app for a week)
Of course there are. Many browser extensions are available for all platforms except Apple's, because you need that $99/y (and a Mac) to wrap (and fix up) a bunch of JS you already wrote and tested everywhere else.
I applaud the authors of the few good extensions who went the extra 20.000 leagues. (But I still reluctantly switched to Ungoogled Chromium.)
Well that obviously didn't work. I got rid of my Iphone, but I remember the app store as being an absolute wasteland of garbage, and discoverability was awful. I don't know if it was a slogan, or an ad campaign once, but there was this thing with "there's an app for that". Yea I guess maybe there is, but good luck finding it, and finding one that isn't riddled with ads and scammy in-app purchases, and then further good luck that the developer of it keeps paying apple 99$ dollars every year so the app isn't delisted.
I'm not saying Google is any better. I've pretty much given up on apps and app stores at this point. If I find something new, it's something I'm made aware of via other channels (or unavoidable bullshit like mandatory app based car parking etc.).
I mean you're right and you've said it yourself already, but in comparison to try Play Store there apps from the App Store are like double the quality on average. Because most of the extremely low effort bs is kept out. I still hate the fee though, dont get me wrong.
But it's asinine for developers to have to pay $99 in order to test their app, such as on TestFlight. When you have an app idea, when you are far from deciding on monetization, you just want to test out the central features of the app among friends, it's wrong to require payment for that.
Remember all apps have once been low effort apps: the first few weeks when you begin working on them. Polish comes later.
$99 is a show-stopping barrier for more people than you can possibly imagine.
Please, if you are of the mindset $99 is not a life-changing amount for someone else, I implore you to widen your world and at least stay in touch with what the average human experience is like.
The person working McDonald's who has an app idea now needs an iOS device, a Mac, and $99 of available funds. Then, remember that person is richer than many people in other countries.
$99 is a huge amount, especially given that you get nothing except a privilege that has no inherent value.
Meaningless distinction. Most starting indie developers don't have more than one app anyway. It's like going to a fancy steakhouse and being offered a $99 all-you-can-eat where the only menu item is a 18oz porterhouse.
> $99 isn’t a huge amount
It isn't if this is your main job. It could be if this is merely a hobby.
I said test among friends, i.e. potential but real users. The gulf between the simulator and TestFlight is so large that they are better considered completely different stages of testing.
Furthermore, there are so many things that can't realistically tested by the developer on the simulator.
> There are probably many reasons for that, some of them already mentioned in sibling comments
Those reasons don't really make a lot of sense:
> keeping low effort apps out
"Low effort" apps are critical to establishing demand. Small developers can't justify spending a large amount of resources on something you're not sure anybody wants. If you post the MVP and get a lot of downloads, now you know it's worth your time to make it better. If you can't post the MVP then you don't post it at all and neither the MVP nor the polished version ever exists.
That's the recipe for having an app store full of loot box games and similar trash which is known to be profitable to the developers while losing thousands of apps people might actually want to the uncertainty of not knowing that ahead of time. Which is exactly what we see. How is that in their interest?
> keeping low effort apps out, preventing spammers from constantly buying new accounts to bypass bans, reducing the workload for approvers
These are things that would imply an account creation fee rather than an annual fee, and also have nothing to doing app development where you're only installing the app on your own device.
> generating revenue from the fees
This is the thing people are complaining about. They feel as though a troll has jumped out from under a bridge to demand money without providing anything of value in return. You've already paid for the phone, now it's your phone, what gives them the right to double dip?
> Prices aren't justified or not, you choose to pay them or not.
That's true in a competitive market. If you don't like Apple's prices then go use one of the other app distribution services for your iPhone. Unless there isn't one, right?
> A company sets prices based on what will make it the most money.
No company does this. Prices are set based upon demand. This does provide opportunities to make more money during some periods than others. If you have a monopoly then you can ignore this and just pick what makes you the most.
> Apple seems to think charging $99 a year for developers will help its long term bottom line the most.
It's absolutely a bespoke filter to prevent spam and automated misbehavior. Admittedly there does seem to be a resulting overall quality difference between iOS apps and other platforms.
> Prices aren't justified or not, you choose to pay them or not.
Business models are legal or not. You choose to play by the rules or you don't play.
>> A company sets prices based on what will make it the most money.
> No company does this. Prices are set based upon demand.
I read an interview a long long time ago (with Jobs, Schiller or Cook - I don't remember) where they were saying explicitly that Apple charge the amount that get them the most money not marketshare. I remember the times when analysts where obsessed with market share and that apple had to lose because they were to expensive. I don't hear that opinion that often today.
At the time, eroding marketshare was a legitimate concern. It takes money to develop products, and without continuous development they would not remain competitive. Whether they liked it or not, marketshare is a factor in making the most money since you need to spread out the cost of development. Many companies were failing at the time, including those who made high end workstations because of that. Many years ago, I read an article about how the development of Alpha processors could not keep up simply because Intel could invest far more into R&D.
Demand is a factor in determining what price will generate them the most money in the long term, but it is not the only factor. Competition is another factor, like you mentioned.
They want to prevent spam and automated misbehavior because that will maximize their long term profit.
Business models can be illegal, but not your pricing.
> No company does this. Prices are set based upon demand.
In a market without competition (such as the mobile duopoly), that's how it works. The customer has no choice anyways so no price comparison can happen.
>How much something costs is not what determines how much a company charges for something.
It actually does - in a free market. That's, like, one of the main arguments why capitalism is good for the population and not evil. But in a gate-kept oligopoly like phones, actors can abuse the system to squeeze more money out of consumers, leaving the corporations as sole beneficiaries. That's why this kind of stuff usually gets curbed in functioning democracies.
I'm pretty sure in a free market, how much someone is willing to pay for something is what determines how much a company charges for something, not how much it cost to provide. We wouldn't have inflation of most goods/services if it was based on how much it cost to produce/provide.
True - how much someone is willing to pay matters. However in a competitive market, companies can’t just charge whatever people will pay. Competitors will undercut them, so prices should eventually align with the cost of production plus a reasonable margin.
Nope. In free market theory (=perfect competition, no barriers to entry, unlimited buyers etc.) prices are set as the equilibrium where demand equals supply. Supply ends up being equal to marginal cost in the mathematical limit. So in this limit, companies no longer make profit because if they charge cost+epsilon, they will loose demand to other suppliers. That's literally what you learn in economics 101. Of course in the real world you won't reach that limit, but getting to it within first order is still very good for consumers. The further you go away from this free market state, the more companies can extract what consumers "are still willing to pay" (irrespective of their cost) as you say. The opposite limit is the monopoly, where consumer welfare doesn't matter at all and companies can set their prices to maximise their own profit, because they don't need to adhere to any supply curve. They can literally charge extra until people go broke for inelastic demand curves like those of basic utilities (which phones are becoming more and more).
You're right, but generally in a free market competition will force prices down until they are close enough to production costs that going lower risks loss. In practice this rarely happens because we don't really have "free" markets, but rather a weird hybrid plus legal landmines all over the place.
> capitalism is good for the population and not evil
This is the biggest lie that we keep telling ourselves. Capitalism is destroying the only place in the universe we can survive, and with the absurdly unequal wealth distribution and centralisation it enables, has caused more collective misery than any other idea in human history, in my opinion.
I agree and piling on. Capitalism is good for those with capital, the wealthy few. Then wonder where they got the capital, and mostly it's something environmentally bad, like the extraction industry such as coal and oil.
Even in a free market, not every product has perfect competition. Luxury brands always charge a lot more than it costs to make a product, because there are other factors that go into price.
Free markets have absolutely nothing to do with capitalism. You can have markets without capitalism. You can have free trade without capitalism, and you can have unfree trade with capitalism too.
It’s one of the great achievements of capitalism that it managed to convince people that trade == capitalism and that without capitalism you are reduced to the Soviet Union, because no other options are possible.
> It’s one of the great achievements of capitalism that it managed to convince people that trade == capitalism and that without capitalism you are reduced to the Soviet Union, because no other options are possible.
Never heard anyone say this before, although it may be pretty much the case[0].
If you criticise capitalism one of the most likely responses you're going to get is ''so you want to become communist like the SU"?
And that wkkipedia article is of course not proving that trade equals capitalism (or are you saying that America stops being capitalistic if Trumps dream of a self-sufficient nation somehow succeeds?). Trade is trade. There was trade in the past when capitalism did not yet exist and there will be trade in the future when capitalism no longer exists.
> Trade is trade. There was trade in the past when capitalism did not yet exist and there will be trade in the future when capitalism no longer exists.
Indeed. I don't think anyone thinks otherwise. Fuedal lords traded. Totalitarian states traded. We know there was and is trade.
I think it's fair to also cover the fairly rigorous testing that occurs for each app store submission. I'm not sure a hundred bucks is the right number, but it's not fair to say all they do is host the file.
Not even close compared to Google Play and their review and appeal process.
Recently I had an app for a customer. Approved easily by Apple. Rejected by Google.
The reason given by Google was completely meaningless in the context of the app. When this happens, I usually make a bullshit change, increment the version, and submit again. That was also rejected in this case. I asked for more info and they provided a meaningless screenshot of the app - that was all. So I appealed. That was also useless! They provided no info to help.
Eventually I just created a new Google Play account and re-submitted a new version of the app, and it was accepted near immediately.
I've had some annoying experiences with Apples review process but it is gold compared to Google Play.
I would guess they do it because they want to minimize the chance that someone will install an unapproved app to someone’s phone and cause harm. I know it’s already pretty hard but Apple seems to be very particular when it comes to this.
That’s an opinion. Apple’s take is that they sell ”everything that runs on your phone has gone through our reviews, so you can trust it isn’t malware”
That, in their opinion, makes it their job to prevent people from permanently installing software on other people’s phones. I’m sure they would remove the “permanently” if they could, but developers have to test builds so frequently that they can’t review them all.
"fair" would be letting me sideload if I didn't want to go through Apple's vetting. Their expensive review process is only required because they decide it's arbitrarily necessary and unavoidable.
apple could easily pay that with its money printer commision on app sales or on its money printer iphone sales, both of which are inpart because of the app developers.
whats the value add of rigourously validating an app that youre only running on your own phone?
> Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit".
No, they do not. That is how you are interpreting their actions. It’s obviously not the narrative they are pushing, that would be utterly absurd. The narrative Apple pushes over and over is that it’s your device, and that what you do with it is private and stays with it. Outright saying the device is theirs and they only let you do what they choose would be incredibly stupid, and their marketing is not incompetent.
Mind you, this doesn’t mean your interpretation (which is shared by many people) is wrong. On the contrary, it has merit. But it makes no sense to say Apple is pushing it as a narrative, that’s not what the expression means.
Apple pushes a narrative that their devices are secure (not private, but secure). And my less tech-savvy friends sincerely believe that it's due to it being a walled garden, with curated software only.
I believe they are talking about Apple's anti-trust legal defense narrative. Not the marketing narrative, which is in direct conflict, and maybe false advertising.
This is why I switched to Android 10 years ago. Unfortunately the grass isn't looking much greener over there these days.
I'd love to hear from individuals who worked at these companies whether it disgusts them as much as it does me, and ideas (from a business perspective as much as technical) on how a new platform might wrest control back into the hands of users/owners.
In this very narrow case, the grass on the Android side is much greener: You can install your own APKs on an Android device without paying anyone at all, without having to upload anything anywhere, and without requiring any particular device to build the APK in the first place. You don't even need to touch the bootloader or root it; you just toggle a setting to allow the installation and it works.
Money is nice, they can charge it and people will pay them. Would be letting their shareholders down not to charge it really. I'm surprised they haven't tried bumping it up yet.
It started out originally that I just needed a UNIX/Linux like but I also needed at the time better support for some propietary stuff than linux had, which is how I entered the fold.
What has kept me a customer has been their quality of service over the 15 years I have been a customer, which has more than made up for the extra cost of their hardware.
I get an OS I find reasonable to use, in a hardware package I like (give or take quite a few years there) and generally at this point still know that if something goes wrong the apple of today (but maybe not tomorrow) will look after me as a customer. If this changes, i'll go elsewhere, shunt OSX off and just go back to linux on the desktop I suppose. I'm not wedded to them. If they had'nt released the silicon variants when they did I was already getting to jump ship over to Lenovo/Dell land (at the time.)
Phones are a bit different, i've still received brilliant service from them in that regard, but I tend to flip back and forwards between android and iOS depending on my mood at the time.
What other serious business to business agreements can you enter into without spending at least $100? The fee is not to cover technical costs, but administration costs.
Welcome to the world of having a small business. Be happy it's only $100. Your fees for cost-of-doing business is many times higher for a hot dog stand or any other thing you can come up with.
The iPhone 8 has the unpatchable checkm8 bootrom vulnerability, so while it doesn't say this in the article, the author could have jailbroken the device to run whatever software they want without paying any Apple fees.
That vulnerability was a huge win. It just recently stopped, with the final vulnerable device (7th gen iPad) not getting the iPad OS 26 update.
It's the "for longer than a week" bit - Unless you have a paid developer account, you can only sign apps to sideload that last one week.
There's some tools to automate "refreshing" the app, but that requires you have some other computer that pushes a new app every week.
The "1 week" restriction is usually fine when you're developing (as you typically are continually rebuilding and updating when actively working on an app) but is clearly intended to avoid being a way to sideload apps without the developer account "nearby".
is there a reason to be wary of sidestore? first time i've heard of that but seems like a legit opensource project. doesn't seem like it would be a project that is all that lucrative for bad actors... people that don't want to pay $99/year to load apps on their personal iphones/ipads doesn't seem like a big score.
I’m not a 100% on this, but I believe you need to pay them to “sign” your app. For iOS, that means there is no way anyone else will be able to use your app unless they side-load it themselves (and we all know how cumbersome that is, Apple doesn’t want to make it easy).
I was just checking the combo he is using [0] (River 2 Pro + 220W solar generator) and it's currently at USD 619. In the post, the author sums it at USD 780. I assume price dropped because of newer models, etc.
surely on an iPhone that has the checkm8 hardware vulnerability available, one could jailbreak the device, install a codesigning bypass plugin on it, then develop and sideload their app without the whole "pay apple $99/yr to keep your sideloaded app on your phone" thing?
That was exactly my thought. Out of the whole universe of development platforms we have to choose from to do an off-label maker-think gadget hack, iOS is inarguably, and by a huge margin, the worst.
There are literally home appliances with more customizable app development and deployment stories than iPhones.
the code example of vision framework, and the links in "Software Resources" section are enough I guess, you can feed them to an LLM to get a full application if you are too lazy to figure out by yourself
Nice hacker effort and writeup, but I want to comment on a general HN pattern of what tech people promote implicitly with hacker network effects...
For every HN blog post of "I accomplished ___ despite a hacker-hostile platform, and now you can use what I built, and be hopelessly tied to the platform"... Baby Jesus Linus sheds a tear.
In this case, it's a bit odd, since the writer has an entire section, "Why This Actually Matters", of unusually good hacker and social values.
Repurposing an old device is good. If the closed platform bothers you, don’t buy and iPhone - but regardless of what you do there are millions of old iPhones that could be saved from the landfill by projects like this
THANK YOU. For example, I'm currently a user of an android app (installed thru Play Store) which I found through front page; cool. The headline: "I developed <insert FOSS app which meets regular value prop> and didn't use <insert commonly used framework>".
Tragically, I care less about framework than I do about functionality, and ever since installing, i've been left wondering how many of the hundreds of upvoters tried running what I describe as the single buggiest app on my phone. I've rage uninstalled multiple times in hopes of fixing issues which are sometimes only fixed by clean installing.
My point: Guiding philosophies are important, and evaluating them at scale is critical* work.
Yes, but usually it doesn't come down to something that works vs. doesn't work.
And some of the times that it does, it's because someone earlier didn't think about values before establishing network effects that stuffed a bad-values thing while starving a good-values thing.
My guess is that he wanted to use that Apple OCR framework and that iPhone was whatever he had handy. I went to his blog's homepage hoping to find some article as to what he's processing, but I didn't find anything. Is he scanning all of his novels?
I have an iPhone 8 still in service and compared to an equally old Android device, the Android (some kind of Motorola eX series low end phone) runs circles around the iPhone. Even playing background video or audio streamed from wifi and output over bluetooth with the screen off, the Android will burn 15% in an hour while the iPhone will burn over 60%. Both are the same age but the iPhone feels subjectively obselete while the low end Motorola feels like a mid-2010s computer. Even for it's age the Android will last two weeks in Airplane mode.
This just suggests that the battery in your iPhone 8 is more degraded than your low end Motorola. This could easily occur if you have used the iPhone more over its lifetime and isn't a good measure of relative performance.
> The phone’s battery health held up reasonably well. After over a year of constant operation, it’s at 76% capacity.
I have an iPhone SE that I've tried keeping plugged in all the time and its battery has turned into a spicy pillow three times, first with Apple replacing the whole device (since they won't touch it with a swollen battery), then using third-party replacement kits.
This isn't going to work for long if the battery is usually at 100%.
My #1 wish for being able to repurpose old phones is to operate without touching the battery, and/or keeping the battery at 50%. Newer Apple phones have an 80% limit option which is an improvement, but I'm not sure how much. And unfortunately the option isn't there on any but the most recent phones, even on up-to-date iOS.
Plug your charger to any Homekit-compatible "smart plug," and create a shortcut that turns the the plug on when the battery reaches 45%, and off when it reaches 55%.
That's an intriguing idea, I had no idea that was a possibility.
Unfortunately it wouldn't work for my particular usage, which was keeping it plugged into an old but expensive smart speaker as a music player via its lightning port. A smart plug would turn off the speaker along with the phone... But I appreciate the suggestion, as complicated as it is!
it would still work if you used some kind of lighting/audio splitter (yes, that's a thing) into your speaker, but yeah, that's definitely a fringe case
Most of these devices can't run "without touching the battery" because the external supply can't provide the required peak current, so during some CPU burst it would shut off.
I've seen hacks that replace the battery with a supercapacitor though.
Couldn't the power management simply throttle the CPU to never go above supplied power in a battery-free mode? Don't they already implement a power threshold for degraded batteries? It seems like that would just be part of the feature I'm asking for, and easy to implement.
It really seems like, if it weren't for the battery part, these phones could run for decades... but right now you have to replace the battery every couple years because it swells when constantly kept at 100% which it is not designed for.
> since they won't touch it with a swollen battery
Interesting. I've had a spicy pillow on a 2017 MBP, they fixed the poor thing, and while at it: replaced the cursed keyboard, and left some kind of tape to reinforce the loosened USB-C ports.
Unfortunately, they didn't do the thermal paste - I had to do DIY, which is something I will never touch again. It did pay off though, it's cooler by some 10°C under load, and runs faster too. It's still loved and in everyday use.
I don't believe a battery bypass mode is physically feasible, since the user could be charging the phone with a cheap 5V 1A charger, and yet the peak power consumption of an iPhone could very well exceed that.
My iPad 3 is only unusable because anything beyond iOS 9 isn't installable, most of the like 5 Apps I did have installed on it didn't survive a "backup", and obvs nobody's going out of their way to support ancient platforms.
Otherwise, it still functions as an epub reader as long as iBooks continues functioning, but it's lame that I can't really use it for much else unless I made it a hobby.
To be fair, your iPad 3 is an iPad 2 with a retina screen; I remember buying an iPad 3 and it was glacially slow even at launch on the original iOS.
I would imagine the best use of this device post eReader is a photo stand given the gorgeous screen... or something else that wouldn't need any interaction (it will be too slow to want to have touch interactions with).
I use an iPad 2 as a IPcam monitor. The battery doesn't last long, but I'm able to grab it off the charger and take it around the house if I'm watching something going on. It doesn't support my new AI smart cams, but it still functions.
That's a great counterexample, since built-in video playback capability is awful. It's one of the few I still have installed if memory serves. It think I also have "The Room" and a few Google apps. Hardware-wise I always thought it was pretty solid, the software and general utility not so much, but I look at newer versions hat have come out since 2013 and don't really see how they're fundamentally any more capable than mediocre content consumption devices, and while that does do something for me, I would have hard time rationalizing the purchase of another one in the future.
I was able to regain access to a lot of ipsw app backups from old Time Machine drives, in case you are wanting apps that are easy to use on your device. Any files from your backups will work, since they'll have your Apple ID in them.
Can you not install apps from the Purchased section in the App Store? I was able to download the new version of an app on my iOS 18 iPhone, then reload the App Store on iOS 9 and download from the "Purchased" section, assuming the app existed back in the iOS 9 days or had a version targeting this old OS.
For me, iPads (base model, non-Air/Pro) and iPhones seem to exist on opposite ends of the longevity spectrum. Never had an iPad last over 2-3 years without feeling sluggish and ready for an upgrade. Never had an iPhone since the 4 that felt sluggish when Apple stopped supporting it (5+ years).
I don't agree with this take at all. I had to give up my iPhone 7 because I couldn't update iOS and my banking app refused to work on the older version.
Apple would also gladly throttle your phone, see Batterygate.
Informed technical users should know that the alternative to Batterygate is that iPhones would randomly be turning OFF with no warning in user's hands.
When a battery is old and has low state of charge (under 25%), it is easy for a device to request more power than the battery can provide and BOOM, the screen is black.
Apple mitigated and avoided that experience for users by programming the phone to slow down when a user's old battery could not support the power needs of the device at full speed. It makes sense when you take the time to be informed about it.
This reminded me of the guy that built a meme database using iPhone's OCR as well [1].
I find incredible the idea of giving these devices another life. I wonder how hard is to host a sort-of vps on an abandoned android phone these days... I guess as long as you can put ethernet + docker you'd have a very capable device.
This is very cool! I have a similar EcoFlow battery hooked up to a Pixel 4. With Termux this is a very capable tool. I have it on Tailscale (using my own headscale server) and I use it for speech to text and text to speech using the native APIs (which are well supported with Termux's APIs and helper functions). It's a very capable computer. The one thing that I haven't quite figured out is how to run a high-quality wake-word tool.
I initially intended to use it with a ReSpeaker speaker/mic system so that I could use it as a smart home assistant / Q&A bot since Google Home constantly frustrates me with its inability to answer questions that LLMs answer flawlessly but the mic/speaker on the phone is good enough. The only problem is the wake word functionality. I'm going to try Porcupine next and see.
The iPhone 8 was peak iPhone. I’m on my second iPhone 8 and am posting from it now.
I did also like the original iPhone SE mostly because of the size, but the haptics make the the iPhone 8, along with having a bezel, square screen, and home button.
> One unexpected discovery: the phone performs OCR faster when slightly warm (but not hot). Cold Canadian mornings mean slower processing times - something I never would have noticed with wall power.
Interesting. Apple throttles on cold too?
In my experience it would shut down on cold, but I don't think I noticed throttling. But then I don't run anything important enough to benchmark on a phone...
I think this wouldn't work with any iPhone that's on a version of iOS new enough to have the 'feature' where it automatically restarts after a few days without being used?
the project isn't AI at all, but the writeup is definitely AI. It overuses clickbait / hijacking / hook patterns that makes it really jarring:
- poses a lot of questions: "Me? I turned mine into a server that saves me money" / "Could I have just run this on my Mac like a normal person? Absolutely. But where’s the fun in that?"
- it's not just X, it's Y: "it’s not just dumping power into devices; it’s managing charging curves properly"
- creates scenarios and juxtapositions: "The workflow is beautifully simple: My image processing service sends images to the phone for OCR processing using Apple’s Vision framework. The phone processes the text, sends it back, and updates its dashboard with processing stats. All while I watch birds outside my window and feel smug about my setup."
I think this kind of writing borrows from twitter threads and youtube videos. I think we're going to be so sick of these patterns soon. And also, I don't think this is necessarily what the LLMs do natively, I think it might just come from bad RLHFs
I wonder if someone will make a LLM farm from older (probably not too old) iPhones using Apple's new foundation models. I know they won't hold a candle to SOTA models, they are much smaller for one, but when they announced API access that's the first thing I thought of, a sort of "folding @ home" but routing queries to a phone and spitting back the results.
It's silly and probably makes no sense at all based on how weak the model will probably be but it's a fun thing to think about.
Manufacturing newer CPUs makes sense only if the device it's meant to replace is like 25 years old:
"The emissions from production of computing devices far exceed the emissions from operating them" [...] "the European Environmental Bureau [7] makes the scale of the problem very clear. For laptops and similar computers, manufacturing, distribution and disposal account for 52% of their Global Warming Potential [...]. For mobile phones, this is 72%. The report calculates that the lifetime of these devices should be at least 25 years" https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-comp...
HomePods perform real-time vision processing on multiple camera streams for HomeKit. However, the primary quality challenge lies in the video quality of HomeKit-enabled doorbell cameras that can consistently stream to Wi-Fi. For instance, my doorbell operates on 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, resulting in highly compressed video streams. This compression likely impacts the results.
The range of HomeKit-enabled doorbells and cameras is disappointing to begin with and even worse when removing options that require a proprietary adapter box and/or subscription. The best option at the moment seems to be a Ubiquiti setup that integrates into HomeKit by way of Homebridge or other similar solutions rather than anything that supports HomeKit specifically.
Any sort of automation in Home app besides 2-3 line demo is quickly turning into nightmare, you are locked in bunch of annoying limitations and devices are always costing more than open source alternative.
It’s the smart home ecosystem that the FOSS world has kind of coalesced around, though (see HomeBridge, HomeAssistant, etc). The others are all much more centered around someone else’s servers and subscriptions and offer little to no possibility of running things locally.
Yes I run Home Assistant too. Also got quite a bit of devices on Aqara's platform, and a device each on Ewelink, Tuya, Meross which all technically are a platforms. There's probably another 5 devices with their own apps. Tasmota + Home Assistant is the only one I'm happy about.
Home Assistant (with all its dumb quirks) at least makes an attempt to integrate them. Some FOSS devices I've exposed to HomeKit for presence automation, but seeing Siri is going nowhere I don't think I'll continue.
I have about 7 old android phones/tablets that I would love to put to use as some kinda makeshift server farm, I just can't think of a good workflow that could take advantage of them
I see your fruitPhone 8 and raise my Motorola MB525 'Defy', Motorola MB526 'Defy+' and Samsung J3 which are in use as Wifi-enabled trailer camera. The phones provide a Wifi hotspot through which the camera's images are accessed. Hook up the trailer, connect to the Wifi network and voila, you can see what's happening in the trailer behind you. The oldest device in this list is from 2010, all of them run either Cyanogenmod (MB525 and MB526) or its successor LineageOS (J3). I replaced the batteries in the Motorola's, the J3 runs on its original battery. Oh, all of them run without a screen since that is not visible anyway and was broken in 2 of the 3. Android runs just fine without a screen and using the things this way takes a little less power.
> Welcome to my corner of the internet! I’m Hemant, a Senior Software Engineer based in Canada . I’m passionate about cloud computing, DevOps, and building robust distributed systems.
Somehow you're also passionate about selling user data to hundreds of data brokers with no easy way to opt-out
I have an ancient ipad that is still functional but stuck on iOS 9. Xcode doesn't let you target that version anymore. Is it still possible to compile an ipa for devices out of support?
On Apple x86 hardware: Running Windows in VMWare Fusion works very, very well. I can’t see a reason why that wouldn't also be the case for old versions of OS X, though admittedly I haven’t tried.
It’s curious to me that OS X in VirtualBox is sluggish. Both VMWare Fusion and VirtualBox use virtualization…
I donated my iPhone 8 a few years ago and it’s still going strong, at least from what I heard last time earlier this year. Honestly impressive how long these older iPhones keep up, both in performance and battery life (still original battery)
The privacy obsession and the fact he never mentions what kind of images the service is processing or what they’re for just kinda gives me the creeps, especially for the amount of requests he gets. There is a non-zero chance this is for illicit purposes.
The idea of him looking outside a window at peaceful birds feeding, while his phone also sits in the foreground of the window crunching whatever horrifying OCR workloads may be hitting the device, is a juxtaposition worthy of cinema.
>I’m saving approximately $84-120 CAD annually.
I suppose most of this is eaten up by the need to pay apple $99 per year just to run your own app on your own phone for longer than a week.
This Apple fee is one of the most absurd things they do. Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app?
When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price.
I'm a longtime Apple user but can't shake off this love-hate relationship with the company.
> Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app?
How much something costs is not what determines how much a company charges for something.
A company sets prices based on what will make it the most money. A company only lowers prices if they think doing so will generate higher total profits in the long run.
Apple seems to think charging $99 a year for developers will help its long term bottom line the most.
There are probably many reasons for that, some of them already mentioned in sibling comments - keeping low effort apps out, preventing spammers from constantly buying new accounts to bypass bans, reducing the workload for approvers, generating revenue from the fees, etc.
Prices aren't justified or not, you choose to pay them or not.
There can’t be that many iOS developers that the $99 really affects their bottom line. I always assumed it was a barrier to entry to help discourage low effort apps.
Keeping low effort apps out of the store helps their bottom line. It's a second order effect.
Yes but the $99 fee doesn't just allow selling apps on the App Store. It is also required for testing the app such as on TestFlight.
Apple should long ago make the $99 an App Store fee, not tied to any provisioning certificates or code signing.
Without a fee, people would make new accounts and circumvent distribution restrictions.
The fee could be less and have a similar deterrent on the type of activity you describe. The real question isn't what Apple is gaining from this fee, but what they are losing.
Apple's $99 fee is annoying and feels like a waste of time and one more thing to manage.
The paid ADC program has kept me from sharing projects with other developers who would have otherwise been able to contribute (but they aren't paid devs because they'd rather have a year of Costco hotdogs than pay Apple to help me with my app for a week)
Of course there are. Many browser extensions are available for all platforms except Apple's, because you need that $99/y (and a Mac) to wrap (and fix up) a bunch of JS you already wrote and tested everywhere else.
I applaud the authors of the few good extensions who went the extra 20.000 leagues. (But I still reluctantly switched to Ungoogled Chromium.)
>discourage low effort apps
Well that obviously didn't work. I got rid of my Iphone, but I remember the app store as being an absolute wasteland of garbage, and discoverability was awful. I don't know if it was a slogan, or an ad campaign once, but there was this thing with "there's an app for that". Yea I guess maybe there is, but good luck finding it, and finding one that isn't riddled with ads and scammy in-app purchases, and then further good luck that the developer of it keeps paying apple 99$ dollars every year so the app isn't delisted.
I'm not saying Google is any better. I've pretty much given up on apps and app stores at this point. If I find something new, it's something I'm made aware of via other channels (or unavoidable bullshit like mandatory app based car parking etc.).
--love Ted K.
It certainly does discourage low effort apps.
The PlayStore for comparison is horrible.
I mean you're right and you've said it yourself already, but in comparison to try Play Store there apps from the App Store are like double the quality on average. Because most of the extremely low effort bs is kept out. I still hate the fee though, dont get me wrong.
But it's asinine for developers to have to pay $99 in order to test their app, such as on TestFlight. When you have an app idea, when you are far from deciding on monetization, you just want to test out the central features of the app among friends, it's wrong to require payment for that.
Remember all apps have once been low effort apps: the first few weeks when you begin working on them. Polish comes later.
You aren’t paying $99 per app, you have to pay that once per year and you can develop as many apps as you want. $99 isn’t a huge amount.
$99 is a show-stopping barrier for more people than you can possibly imagine.
Please, if you are of the mindset $99 is not a life-changing amount for someone else, I implore you to widen your world and at least stay in touch with what the average human experience is like.
The person working McDonald's who has an app idea now needs an iOS device, a Mac, and $99 of available funds. Then, remember that person is richer than many people in other countries.
$99 is a huge amount, especially given that you get nothing except a privilege that has no inherent value.
> $99 per app
Meaningless distinction. Most starting indie developers don't have more than one app anyway. It's like going to a fancy steakhouse and being offered a $99 all-you-can-eat where the only menu item is a 18oz porterhouse.
> $99 isn’t a huge amount
It isn't if this is your main job. It could be if this is merely a hobby.
They can test and iterate using simulator without spending $99
I said test among friends, i.e. potential but real users. The gulf between the simulator and TestFlight is so large that they are better considered completely different stages of testing.
Furthermore, there are so many things that can't realistically tested by the developer on the simulator.
> There are probably many reasons for that, some of them already mentioned in sibling comments
Those reasons don't really make a lot of sense:
> keeping low effort apps out
"Low effort" apps are critical to establishing demand. Small developers can't justify spending a large amount of resources on something you're not sure anybody wants. If you post the MVP and get a lot of downloads, now you know it's worth your time to make it better. If you can't post the MVP then you don't post it at all and neither the MVP nor the polished version ever exists.
That's the recipe for having an app store full of loot box games and similar trash which is known to be profitable to the developers while losing thousands of apps people might actually want to the uncertainty of not knowing that ahead of time. Which is exactly what we see. How is that in their interest?
> keeping low effort apps out, preventing spammers from constantly buying new accounts to bypass bans, reducing the workload for approvers
These are things that would imply an account creation fee rather than an annual fee, and also have nothing to doing app development where you're only installing the app on your own device.
> generating revenue from the fees
This is the thing people are complaining about. They feel as though a troll has jumped out from under a bridge to demand money without providing anything of value in return. You've already paid for the phone, now it's your phone, what gives them the right to double dip?
> Prices aren't justified or not, you choose to pay them or not.
That's true in a competitive market. If you don't like Apple's prices then go use one of the other app distribution services for your iPhone. Unless there isn't one, right?
Yeah companies charge as much as they can getaway with
> A company sets prices based on what will make it the most money.
No company does this. Prices are set based upon demand. This does provide opportunities to make more money during some periods than others. If you have a monopoly then you can ignore this and just pick what makes you the most.
> Apple seems to think charging $99 a year for developers will help its long term bottom line the most.
It's absolutely a bespoke filter to prevent spam and automated misbehavior. Admittedly there does seem to be a resulting overall quality difference between iOS apps and other platforms.
> Prices aren't justified or not, you choose to pay them or not.
Business models are legal or not. You choose to play by the rules or you don't play.
>> A company sets prices based on what will make it the most money.
> No company does this. Prices are set based upon demand.
I read an interview a long long time ago (with Jobs, Schiller or Cook - I don't remember) where they were saying explicitly that Apple charge the amount that get them the most money not marketshare. I remember the times when analysts where obsessed with market share and that apple had to lose because they were to expensive. I don't hear that opinion that often today.
At the time, eroding marketshare was a legitimate concern. It takes money to develop products, and without continuous development they would not remain competitive. Whether they liked it or not, marketshare is a factor in making the most money since you need to spread out the cost of development. Many companies were failing at the time, including those who made high end workstations because of that. Many years ago, I read an article about how the development of Alpha processors could not keep up simply because Intel could invest far more into R&D.
That's what they say. Anyways it would be a clever way of rephrasing "many of our products have very low demand and high lock in."
Demand is a factor in determining what price will generate them the most money in the long term, but it is not the only factor. Competition is another factor, like you mentioned.
They want to prevent spam and automated misbehavior because that will maximize their long term profit.
Business models can be illegal, but not your pricing.
> No company does this. Prices are set based upon demand.
In a market without competition (such as the mobile duopoly), that's how it works. The customer has no choice anyways so no price comparison can happen.
>How much something costs is not what determines how much a company charges for something.
It actually does - in a free market. That's, like, one of the main arguments why capitalism is good for the population and not evil. But in a gate-kept oligopoly like phones, actors can abuse the system to squeeze more money out of consumers, leaving the corporations as sole beneficiaries. That's why this kind of stuff usually gets curbed in functioning democracies.
I'm pretty sure in a free market, how much someone is willing to pay for something is what determines how much a company charges for something, not how much it cost to provide. We wouldn't have inflation of most goods/services if it was based on how much it cost to produce/provide.
True - how much someone is willing to pay matters. However in a competitive market, companies can’t just charge whatever people will pay. Competitors will undercut them, so prices should eventually align with the cost of production plus a reasonable margin.
Nope. In free market theory (=perfect competition, no barriers to entry, unlimited buyers etc.) prices are set as the equilibrium where demand equals supply. Supply ends up being equal to marginal cost in the mathematical limit. So in this limit, companies no longer make profit because if they charge cost+epsilon, they will loose demand to other suppliers. That's literally what you learn in economics 101. Of course in the real world you won't reach that limit, but getting to it within first order is still very good for consumers. The further you go away from this free market state, the more companies can extract what consumers "are still willing to pay" (irrespective of their cost) as you say. The opposite limit is the monopoly, where consumer welfare doesn't matter at all and companies can set their prices to maximise their own profit, because they don't need to adhere to any supply curve. They can literally charge extra until people go broke for inelastic demand curves like those of basic utilities (which phones are becoming more and more).
You're right, but generally in a free market competition will force prices down until they are close enough to production costs that going lower risks loss. In practice this rarely happens because we don't really have "free" markets, but rather a weird hybrid plus legal landmines all over the place.
> capitalism is good for the population and not evil
This is the biggest lie that we keep telling ourselves. Capitalism is destroying the only place in the universe we can survive, and with the absurdly unequal wealth distribution and centralisation it enables, has caused more collective misery than any other idea in human history, in my opinion.
I agree and piling on. Capitalism is good for those with capital, the wealthy few. Then wonder where they got the capital, and mostly it's something environmentally bad, like the extraction industry such as coal and oil.
if you are commenting on this website you almost definitely fit the definition of the “wealthy few”.
> It actually does - in a free market
Meaningless sentence.
Even in a free market, not every product has perfect competition. Luxury brands always charge a lot more than it costs to make a product, because there are other factors that go into price.
Only for commodities, and even then only sometimes.
Free markets have absolutely nothing to do with capitalism. You can have markets without capitalism. You can have free trade without capitalism, and you can have unfree trade with capitalism too.
It’s one of the great achievements of capitalism that it managed to convince people that trade == capitalism and that without capitalism you are reduced to the Soviet Union, because no other options are possible.
> It’s one of the great achievements of capitalism that it managed to convince people that trade == capitalism and that without capitalism you are reduced to the Soviet Union, because no other options are possible.
Never heard anyone say this before, although it may be pretty much the case[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_trade_of_the_Soviet_Un...
If you criticise capitalism one of the most likely responses you're going to get is ''so you want to become communist like the SU"?
And that wkkipedia article is of course not proving that trade equals capitalism (or are you saying that America stops being capitalistic if Trumps dream of a self-sufficient nation somehow succeeds?). Trade is trade. There was trade in the past when capitalism did not yet exist and there will be trade in the future when capitalism no longer exists.
> Trade is trade. There was trade in the past when capitalism did not yet exist and there will be trade in the future when capitalism no longer exists.
Indeed. I don't think anyone thinks otherwise. Fuedal lords traded. Totalitarian states traded. We know there was and is trade.
I think it's fair to also cover the fairly rigorous testing that occurs for each app store submission. I'm not sure a hundred bucks is the right number, but it's not fair to say all they do is host the file.
> I think it's fair to also cover the fairly rigorous testing that occurs for each app store submission.
By "fairly rigorous", do you mean "fickle, random"?
Not even close compared to Google Play and their review and appeal process.
Recently I had an app for a customer. Approved easily by Apple. Rejected by Google.
The reason given by Google was completely meaningless in the context of the app. When this happens, I usually make a bullshit change, increment the version, and submit again. That was also rejected in this case. I asked for more info and they provided a meaningless screenshot of the app - that was all. So I appealed. That was also useless! They provided no info to help.
Eventually I just created a new Google Play account and re-submitted a new version of the app, and it was accepted near immediately.
I've had some annoying experiences with Apples review process but it is gold compared to Google Play.
You have to pay $99/year even if you only want to use the app on your own device.
You can only sideload for free if you are willing to reinstall every X days.
They don't need to test an app if you're not asking them to distribute it through their store.
What’s worse is it used to be 90 days. Apple changed it to 7 days years ago.
90 days is still absurd. I have custom apps I install on my Android phones once per phone. I go years without bothering to rebuild them.
I would guess they do it because they want to minimize the chance that someone will install an unapproved app to someone’s phone and cause harm. I know it’s already pretty hard but Apple seems to be very particular when it comes to this.
Popup on app open that warns app is sideloaded?
There are simpler and more usable options that are more defensible than what they do today.
That is not their job.
That’s an opinion. Apple’s take is that they sell ”everything that runs on your phone has gone through our reviews, so you can trust it isn’t malware”
That, in their opinion, makes it their job to prevent people from permanently installing software on other people’s phones. I’m sure they would remove the “permanently” if they could, but developers have to test builds so frequently that they can’t review them all.
> You can only sideload for free if you are willing to reinstall every X days.
Does this mean you lose data, or is data retained when reinstalling?
OK, then don't charge me until I submit something to the App Store.
I should be able to self-sign an app for longer than a week on a free developer account.
"fair" would be letting me sideload if I didn't want to go through Apple's vetting. Their expensive review process is only required because they decide it's arbitrarily necessary and unavoidable.
apple could easily pay that with its money printer commision on app sales or on its money printer iphone sales, both of which are inpart because of the app developers.
whats the value add of rigourously validating an app that youre only running on your own phone?
i’d guess it’s more to keep extremely low effort submissions out of the app store.
Which is not unreasonable for something listed in the App Store. It is unreasonable that you can’t sideload though.
I'm pretty sure the $99 fee is explicitly there to prevent "normal" users from side-loading.
It could be playing 2 roles, acting as a limiting gate for the App Store spam and preventing a simple 2 step tutorial to enable side loading.
yeah, this also makes sense
Feels even sillier in an era where people are trying to find creative, sustainable uses for older hardware
> Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit".
No, they do not. That is how you are interpreting their actions. It’s obviously not the narrative they are pushing, that would be utterly absurd. The narrative Apple pushes over and over is that it’s your device, and that what you do with it is private and stays with it. Outright saying the device is theirs and they only let you do what they choose would be incredibly stupid, and their marketing is not incompetent.
Mind you, this doesn’t mean your interpretation (which is shared by many people) is wrong. On the contrary, it has merit. But it makes no sense to say Apple is pushing it as a narrative, that’s not what the expression means.
I recall seeing a lot of "in your hand", "on you device", "tailored for you" and such in their keynotes and press material.
Apple pushes a narrative that their devices are secure (not private, but secure). And my less tech-savvy friends sincerely believe that it's due to it being a walled garden, with curated software only.
Apple made no attempt clarifying this.
I believe they are talking about Apple's anti-trust legal defense narrative. Not the marketing narrative, which is in direct conflict, and maybe false advertising.
This is why I switched to Android 10 years ago. Unfortunately the grass isn't looking much greener over there these days.
I'd love to hear from individuals who worked at these companies whether it disgusts them as much as it does me, and ideas (from a business perspective as much as technical) on how a new platform might wrest control back into the hands of users/owners.
In this very narrow case, the grass on the Android side is much greener: You can install your own APKs on an Android device without paying anyone at all, without having to upload anything anywhere, and without requiring any particular device to build the APK in the first place. You don't even need to touch the bootloader or root it; you just toggle a setting to allow the installation and it works.
For now at least. There have been articles recently about how Google is looking to change that
The Android fee is only $25, but in my experience everything around the submission process is at least 4x worse, so it evens out.
At least Apple has humans doing review and support.
But you don'have to pay to sideload your app and have it stay forever on your device.
Whats seemingly more absurd is you already paid for the phone AND the Mac you have to develop for iOS devices for
> how is it even justified
Money is nice, they can charge it and people will pay them. Would be letting their shareholders down not to charge it really. I'm surprised they haven't tried bumping it up yet.
what is it that you "love" about Apple?
Not op but...
It started out originally that I just needed a UNIX/Linux like but I also needed at the time better support for some propietary stuff than linux had, which is how I entered the fold.
What has kept me a customer has been their quality of service over the 15 years I have been a customer, which has more than made up for the extra cost of their hardware.
I get an OS I find reasonable to use, in a hardware package I like (give or take quite a few years there) and generally at this point still know that if something goes wrong the apple of today (but maybe not tomorrow) will look after me as a customer. If this changes, i'll go elsewhere, shunt OSX off and just go back to linux on the desktop I suppose. I'm not wedded to them. If they had'nt released the silicon variants when they did I was already getting to jump ship over to Lenovo/Dell land (at the time.)
Phones are a bit different, i've still received brilliant service from them in that regard, but I tend to flip back and forwards between android and iOS depending on my mood at the time.
What other serious business to business agreements can you enter into without spending at least $100? The fee is not to cover technical costs, but administration costs.
Welcome to the world of having a small business. Be happy it's only $100. Your fees for cost-of-doing business is many times higher for a hot dog stand or any other thing you can come up with.
The iPhone 8 has the unpatchable checkm8 bootrom vulnerability, so while it doesn't say this in the article, the author could have jailbroken the device to run whatever software they want without paying any Apple fees.
That vulnerability was a huge win. It just recently stopped, with the final vulnerable device (7th gen iPad) not getting the iPad OS 26 update.
Isn't it an in-memory exploit, though? I believe it would stop working if the phone restarts for some reason.
Yes, that's correct, it's "tethered" meaning you have to basically redo it each time the phone restarts.
I believe you only have to pay to put your app on the App Store. I’ve made apps for my iPhone before and never had to pay.
It's the "for longer than a week" bit - Unless you have a paid developer account, you can only sign apps to sideload that last one week.
There's some tools to automate "refreshing" the app, but that requires you have some other computer that pushes a new app every week.
The "1 week" restriction is usually fine when you're developing (as you typically are continually rebuilding and updating when actively working on an app) but is clearly intended to avoid being a way to sideload apps without the developer account "nearby".
If you trust it, SideStore manages to do it on device by using a local VPN to make an on-device server appear to be an external device on the network.
is there a reason to be wary of sidestore? first time i've heard of that but seems like a legit opensource project. doesn't seem like it would be a project that is all that lucrative for bad actors... people that don't want to pay $99/year to load apps on their personal iphones/ipads doesn't seem like a big score.
I’m not a 100% on this, but I believe you need to pay them to “sign” your app. For iOS, that means there is no way anyone else will be able to use your app unless they side-load it themselves (and we all know how cumbersome that is, Apple doesn’t want to make it easy).
correct
There is also the roughly $1k in costs for the solar and battery hardware even if we consider the iPhone itself free since it is so old.
I was just checking the combo he is using [0] (River 2 Pro + 220W solar generator) and it's currently at USD 619. In the post, the author sums it at USD 780. I assume price dropped because of newer models, etc.
[0]: https://us.ecoflow.com/products/river-2-pro-portable-power-s...
There were also $280 of other vague miscellaneous costs listed among the initial investments that I was including as part of that "roughly $1k"
Also you can only run the compile-sign-deploy from a mac AFAIK.
surely on an iPhone that has the checkm8 hardware vulnerability available, one could jailbreak the device, install a codesigning bypass plugin on it, then develop and sideload their app without the whole "pay apple $99/yr to keep your sideloaded app on your phone" thing?
That was exactly my thought. Out of the whole universe of development platforms we have to choose from to do an off-label maker-think gadget hack, iOS is inarguably, and by a huge margin, the worst.
There are literally home appliances with more customizable app development and deployment stories than iPhones.
EcoFlow batteries are pretty expensive too.
Also that's about 500kWh of power annually which averages to 50W. There is just no way iPhone uses that much.
The author has a mini PC plugged into the EcoFlow as well. That uses the bulk of the power.
Interesting tech but there’s zero explanation of the actual application, so it’s all a little abstract.
the code example of vision framework, and the links in "Software Resources" section are enough I guess, you can feed them to an LLM to get a full application if you are too lazy to figure out by yourself
A little detail in the otherwise great write up! I'm curious too.
Agreed. Came to the comments thinking the same thing.
Soon you'll also be able to do speech to text locally, as Apple is adding a SpeechAnalyzer API [0] which is apparently faster than whisper [1].
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/277/
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/18/apple-transcription-api...
Tangentially, https://github.com/finnvoor/yap
The MacStories article made it seem about 2x as fast as Whisper, but there's no network or shared servers involved, so it's effectively faster.Faster, but... quality? I would take something 10× _slower_ than Whisper 3 if it meant a 5% increase in quality.
Nice hacker effort and writeup, but I want to comment on a general HN pattern of what tech people promote implicitly with hacker network effects...
For every HN blog post of "I accomplished ___ despite a hacker-hostile platform, and now you can use what I built, and be hopelessly tied to the platform"... Baby Jesus Linus sheds a tear.
In this case, it's a bit odd, since the writer has an entire section, "Why This Actually Matters", of unusually good hacker and social values.
Repurposing an old device is good. If the closed platform bothers you, don’t buy and iPhone - but regardless of what you do there are millions of old iPhones that could be saved from the landfill by projects like this
THANK YOU. For example, I'm currently a user of an android app (installed thru Play Store) which I found through front page; cool. The headline: "I developed <insert FOSS app which meets regular value prop> and didn't use <insert commonly used framework>". Tragically, I care less about framework than I do about functionality, and ever since installing, i've been left wondering how many of the hundreds of upvoters tried running what I describe as the single buggiest app on my phone. I've rage uninstalled multiple times in hopes of fixing issues which are sometimes only fixed by clean installing. My point: Guiding philosophies are important, and evaluating them at scale is critical* work.
*see what i did there
Yes, but usually it doesn't come down to something that works vs. doesn't work.
And some of the times that it does, it's because someone earlier didn't think about values before establishing network effects that stuffed a bad-values thing while starving a good-values thing.
I'm confused. What are you OCR'ing that requires a solution like this? What images are you processing?
My guess is that he wanted to use that Apple OCR framework and that iPhone was whatever he had handy. I went to his blog's homepage hoping to find some article as to what he's processing, but I didn't find anything. Is he scanning all of his novels?
I have an iPhone 8 still in service and compared to an equally old Android device, the Android (some kind of Motorola eX series low end phone) runs circles around the iPhone. Even playing background video or audio streamed from wifi and output over bluetooth with the screen off, the Android will burn 15% in an hour while the iPhone will burn over 60%. Both are the same age but the iPhone feels subjectively obselete while the low end Motorola feels like a mid-2010s computer. Even for it's age the Android will last two weeks in Airplane mode.
This just suggests that the battery in your iPhone 8 is more degraded than your low end Motorola. This could easily occur if you have used the iPhone more over its lifetime and isn't a good measure of relative performance.
> The phone’s battery health held up reasonably well. After over a year of constant operation, it’s at 76% capacity.
I have an iPhone SE that I've tried keeping plugged in all the time and its battery has turned into a spicy pillow three times, first with Apple replacing the whole device (since they won't touch it with a swollen battery), then using third-party replacement kits.
This isn't going to work for long if the battery is usually at 100%.
My #1 wish for being able to repurpose old phones is to operate without touching the battery, and/or keeping the battery at 50%. Newer Apple phones have an 80% limit option which is an improvement, but I'm not sure how much. And unfortunately the option isn't there on any but the most recent phones, even on up-to-date iOS.
Plug your charger to any Homekit-compatible "smart plug," and create a shortcut that turns the the plug on when the battery reaches 45%, and off when it reaches 55%.
This will of course require a Homekit hub.
That's an intriguing idea, I had no idea that was a possibility.
Unfortunately it wouldn't work for my particular usage, which was keeping it plugged into an old but expensive smart speaker as a music player via its lightning port. A smart plug would turn off the speaker along with the phone... But I appreciate the suggestion, as complicated as it is!
it would still work if you used some kind of lighting/audio splitter (yes, that's a thing) into your speaker, but yeah, that's definitely a fringe case
A timer is sufficient. No need to be precisely 45% or 55%.
I can't imagine that a timer wouldn't quickly drift and either drain it to zero or charge it fully
This
Most of these devices can't run "without touching the battery" because the external supply can't provide the required peak current, so during some CPU burst it would shut off.
I've seen hacks that replace the battery with a supercapacitor though.
Couldn't the power management simply throttle the CPU to never go above supplied power in a battery-free mode? Don't they already implement a power threshold for degraded batteries? It seems like that would just be part of the feature I'm asking for, and easy to implement.
It really seems like, if it weren't for the battery part, these phones could run for decades... but right now you have to replace the battery every couple years because it swells when constantly kept at 100% which it is not designed for.
> since they won't touch it with a swollen battery
Interesting. I've had a spicy pillow on a 2017 MBP, they fixed the poor thing, and while at it: replaced the cursed keyboard, and left some kind of tape to reinforce the loosened USB-C ports.
Unfortunately, they didn't do the thermal paste - I had to do DIY, which is something I will never touch again. It did pay off though, it's cooler by some 10°C under load, and runs faster too. It's still loved and in everyday use.
It's frustrating that Apple doesn't offer a proper "battery bypass" mode or even let you set charge limits
I don't believe a battery bypass mode is physically feasible, since the user could be charging the phone with a cheap 5V 1A charger, and yet the peak power consumption of an iPhone could very well exceed that.
Wonderful story!
We don’t give enough credit to Apple for keeping these old devices alive and kicking.
I have a similar story wherein I repurposed my ancient OG iPhone SE and gave it a new life.
https://samkhawase.com/blog/dumb-smartphone/
>We don’t give enough credit to Apple for keeping these old devices alive and kicking.
I'm not sure I follow. It feels exceedingly hard to find new uses for old iPads without doing a lot of heavy lifting. Has that changed?
My iPad 3 is only unusable because anything beyond iOS 9 isn't installable, most of the like 5 Apps I did have installed on it didn't survive a "backup", and obvs nobody's going out of their way to support ancient platforms.
Otherwise, it still functions as an epub reader as long as iBooks continues functioning, but it's lame that I can't really use it for much else unless I made it a hobby.
To be fair, your iPad 3 is an iPad 2 with a retina screen; I remember buying an iPad 3 and it was glacially slow even at launch on the original iOS.
I would imagine the best use of this device post eReader is a photo stand given the gorgeous screen... or something else that wouldn't need any interaction (it will be too slow to want to have touch interactions with).
I use an iPad 2 as a IPcam monitor. The battery doesn't last long, but I'm able to grab it off the charger and take it around the house if I'm watching something going on. It doesn't support my new AI smart cams, but it still functions.
As a counterexample, VLC surprisingly still supports iOS 9.0
That's a great counterexample, since built-in video playback capability is awful. It's one of the few I still have installed if memory serves. It think I also have "The Room" and a few Google apps. Hardware-wise I always thought it was pretty solid, the software and general utility not so much, but I look at newer versions hat have come out since 2013 and don't really see how they're fundamentally any more capable than mediocre content consumption devices, and while that does do something for me, I would have hard time rationalizing the purchase of another one in the future.
I was able to regain access to a lot of ipsw app backups from old Time Machine drives, in case you are wanting apps that are easy to use on your device. Any files from your backups will work, since they'll have your Apple ID in them.
Can you not install apps from the Purchased section in the App Store? I was able to download the new version of an app on my iOS 18 iPhone, then reload the App Store on iOS 9 and download from the "Purchased" section, assuming the app existed back in the iOS 9 days or had a version targeting this old OS.
For me, iPads (base model, non-Air/Pro) and iPhones seem to exist on opposite ends of the longevity spectrum. Never had an iPad last over 2-3 years without feeling sluggish and ready for an upgrade. Never had an iPhone since the 4 that felt sluggish when Apple stopped supporting it (5+ years).
My iPad is a 2018 iPad Pro and it still works great. It’s my most used computer by far. AFAIK, it’s still supported by Apple.
My phone is an iPhone 13 (2021) and I’ll probably upgrade in the next 24 months to get a better camera.
2018 is still fairly new.
I own a laptop from 2011 and it runs the latest fedora perfectly and is not limited at all performance wise as long as you don't try to run AAA games.
I don't agree with this take at all. I had to give up my iPhone 7 because I couldn't update iOS and my banking app refused to work on the older version.
Apple would also gladly throttle your phone, see Batterygate.
Informed technical users should know that the alternative to Batterygate is that iPhones would randomly be turning OFF with no warning in user's hands.
When a battery is old and has low state of charge (under 25%), it is easy for a device to request more power than the battery can provide and BOOM, the screen is black.
Apple mitigated and avoided that experience for users by programming the phone to slow down when a user's old battery could not support the power needs of the device at full speed. It makes sense when you take the time to be informed about it.
Maybe i'm missing something. Where are these thousands of users coming from? is this some service you offer?
Yes, the author offers a public-facing website that allows free OCR of uploads.
This reminded me of the guy that built a meme database using iPhone's OCR as well [1].
I find incredible the idea of giving these devices another life. I wonder how hard is to host a sort-of vps on an abandoned android phone these days... I guess as long as you can put ethernet + docker you'd have a very capable device.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34315782
This was a great read!
I'd never heard of a website hosted in any way on an iOS device... makes me wish it was an option.
This is very cool! I have a similar EcoFlow battery hooked up to a Pixel 4. With Termux this is a very capable tool. I have it on Tailscale (using my own headscale server) and I use it for speech to text and text to speech using the native APIs (which are well supported with Termux's APIs and helper functions). It's a very capable computer. The one thing that I haven't quite figured out is how to run a high-quality wake-word tool.
I initially intended to use it with a ReSpeaker speaker/mic system so that I could use it as a smart home assistant / Q&A bot since Google Home constantly frustrates me with its inability to answer questions that LLMs answer flawlessly but the mic/speaker on the phone is good enough. The only problem is the wake word functionality. I'm going to try Porcupine next and see.
The iPhone 8 was peak iPhone. I’m on my second iPhone 8 and am posting from it now.
I did also like the original iPhone SE mostly because of the size, but the haptics make the the iPhone 8, along with having a bezel, square screen, and home button.
Had the iPhone 8 and now on an SE3, which is the same but better, peak device forms and features indeed.
I loved the 'it turns out I'm an indoor cat with outdoor aspirations'. I often joke I'm an 'avid indoorsman'
You might like this song, The Outdoor Type by The Lemonheads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijlk0GTQbB4
> One unexpected discovery: the phone performs OCR faster when slightly warm (but not hot). Cold Canadian mornings mean slower processing times - something I never would have noticed with wall power.
Interesting. Apple throttles on cold too?
In my experience it would shut down on cold, but I don't think I noticed throttling. But then I don't run anything important enough to benchmark on a phone...
I think this wouldn't work with any iPhone that's on a version of iOS new enough to have the 'feature' where it automatically restarts after a few days without being used?
This still requires a mini PC to bridge the API call and the iOS app.
I wonder if the new Android 16 terminal app would allow combining both.
I love projects like this, doing things because you can. Especially low power, off-grid projects.
However I did not love the writing style of this article. Lots of repetition. Asking questions to stress a funny point. Lots of repetition.
I don't mean to sound like a jerk, even though I've succeeded at it. The author is cool, what they did is just as cool.
It's AI slop. In fact, most (if not all) of this blog's recent posts are AI slop.
That's not what slop means. This is anything but low-effort or low-quality.
the project isn't AI at all, but the writeup is definitely AI. It overuses clickbait / hijacking / hook patterns that makes it really jarring:
- poses a lot of questions: "Me? I turned mine into a server that saves me money" / "Could I have just run this on my Mac like a normal person? Absolutely. But where’s the fun in that?" - it's not just X, it's Y: "it’s not just dumping power into devices; it’s managing charging curves properly" - creates scenarios and juxtapositions: "The workflow is beautifully simple: My image processing service sends images to the phone for OCR processing using Apple’s Vision framework. The phone processes the text, sends it back, and updates its dashboard with processing stats. All while I watch birds outside my window and feel smug about my setup."
I think this kind of writing borrows from twitter threads and youtube videos. I think we're going to be so sick of these patterns soon. And also, I don't think this is necessarily what the LLMs do natively, I think it might just come from bad RLHFs
A classic related article, also using iPhones as OCR servers: https://findthatmeme.com/blog/2023/01/08/image-stacks-and-ip...
I wonder if someone will make a LLM farm from older (probably not too old) iPhones using Apple's new foundation models. I know they won't hold a candle to SOTA models, they are much smaller for one, but when they announced API access that's the first thing I thought of, a sort of "folding @ home" but routing queries to a phone and spitting back the results.
It's silly and probably makes no sense at all based on how weak the model will probably be but it's a fun thing to think about.
nop probably a very bad idea even if you had enough iPhones and you could parallelise them, it would be 10x less electricity efficient
Manufacturing newer CPUs makes sense only if the device it's meant to replace is like 25 years old:
"The emissions from production of computing devices far exceed the emissions from operating them" [...] "the European Environmental Bureau [7] makes the scale of the problem very clear. For laptops and similar computers, manufacturing, distribution and disposal account for 52% of their Global Warming Potential [...]. For mobile phones, this is 72%. The report calculates that the lifetime of these devices should be at least 25 years" https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-comp...
Used Mac Minis are probably cheaper and more energy efficient
In my browser the ads cover the actual content.
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
I found the page quite clean (with cloudflareinsights.com, googlesyndication.com, and googletagmanager.com blocked of course).
uMatrix?
HomePods perform real-time vision processing on multiple camera streams for HomeKit. However, the primary quality challenge lies in the video quality of HomeKit-enabled doorbell cameras that can consistently stream to Wi-Fi. For instance, my doorbell operates on 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, resulting in highly compressed video streams. This compression likely impacts the results.
The range of HomeKit-enabled doorbells and cameras is disappointing to begin with and even worse when removing options that require a proprietary adapter box and/or subscription. The best option at the moment seems to be a Ubiquiti setup that integrates into HomeKit by way of Homebridge or other similar solutions rather than anything that supports HomeKit specifically.
At this point I'd just avoid HomeKit entirely.
Any sort of automation in Home app besides 2-3 line demo is quickly turning into nightmare, you are locked in bunch of annoying limitations and devices are always costing more than open source alternative.
It’s the smart home ecosystem that the FOSS world has kind of coalesced around, though (see HomeBridge, HomeAssistant, etc). The others are all much more centered around someone else’s servers and subscriptions and offer little to no possibility of running things locally.
Yes I run Home Assistant too. Also got quite a bit of devices on Aqara's platform, and a device each on Ewelink, Tuya, Meross which all technically are a platforms. There's probably another 5 devices with their own apps. Tasmota + Home Assistant is the only one I'm happy about.
Home Assistant (with all its dumb quirks) at least makes an attempt to integrate them. Some FOSS devices I've exposed to HomeKit for presence automation, but seeing Siri is going nowhere I don't think I'll continue.
I have about 7 old android phones/tablets that I would love to put to use as some kinda makeshift server farm, I just can't think of a good workflow that could take advantage of them
Run webservers with Cloudflare Tunnels or ngrok. Free compute
Love the mix of "just because I can" engineering and actual practical benefits
interesting, who (why?) is using and even paying for this service?
1. if you are on device, then use on device OCR (e.g. use Apple Vision directly)
2. if you are on cloud, then self-deployed OCR models
3. if you are on browser, then WASM/local self-deployed OCR models
Mine bailed out on a Baseband error due to which i am not even able to boot it anymore :(
I see your fruitPhone 8 and raise my Motorola MB525 'Defy', Motorola MB526 'Defy+' and Samsung J3 which are in use as Wifi-enabled trailer camera. The phones provide a Wifi hotspot through which the camera's images are accessed. Hook up the trailer, connect to the Wifi network and voila, you can see what's happening in the trailer behind you. The oldest device in this list is from 2010, all of them run either Cyanogenmod (MB525 and MB526) or its successor LineageOS (J3). I replaced the batteries in the Motorola's, the J3 runs on its original battery. Oh, all of them run without a screen since that is not visible anyway and was broken in 2 of the 3. Android runs just fine without a screen and using the things this way takes a little less power.
That’s pretty impressive. I love when people give old devices a new life and save them from being eWaste. True to the hacker spirit.
Even in death, it still serves.
> Welcome to my corner of the internet! I’m Hemant, a Senior Software Engineer based in Canada . I’m passionate about cloud computing, DevOps, and building robust distributed systems.
Somehow you're also passionate about selling user data to hundreds of data brokers with no easy way to opt-out
I have an ancient ipad that is still functional but stuck on iOS 9. Xcode doesn't let you target that version anymore. Is it still possible to compile an ipa for devices out of support?
It's a painfully sluggish alternative, but you can run older versions of OS X (and thus Xcode) in VirtualBox.
On Apple x86 hardware: Running Windows in VMWare Fusion works very, very well. I can’t see a reason why that wouldn't also be the case for old versions of OS X, though admittedly I haven’t tried.
It’s curious to me that OS X in VirtualBox is sluggish. Both VMWare Fusion and VirtualBox use virtualization…
Software framebuffer. Remaining devices are also emulated.
this is so cool! Is it possible to boot linux on an old iphone?
It has definitely been done before, but probably not recently. Maybe if you use the checkra1n bootROM exploit you could do it with lots of dev work.
https://linuxoniphone.blogspot.com/ https://checkra.in/
I'm not sure if there's a FOSS OCR package of equivalent quality to Apple Vision. I'm happy to be corrected otherwise.
I donated my iPhone 8 a few years ago and it’s still going strong, at least from what I heard last time earlier this year. Honestly impressive how long these older iPhones keep up, both in performance and battery life (still original battery)
The privacy obsession and the fact he never mentions what kind of images the service is processing or what they’re for just kinda gives me the creeps, especially for the amount of requests he gets. There is a non-zero chance this is for illicit purposes.
It's not your business. This is just the old nothing to hide argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
The idea of him looking outside a window at peaceful birds feeding, while his phone also sits in the foreground of the window crunching whatever horrifying OCR workloads may be hitting the device, is a juxtaposition worthy of cinema.
More like a juxtaposition worthy of a thriller novel trilogy. Where's the OCR in cinema?
Maybe he's ashamed it's not done in Rust...