

Time for Apple To Let Go Of The 100 Testing Devices Limit - dirkdk
http://blog.mobtest.com/2012/11/time-for-apple-to-let-go-of-the-100-testing-devices-limit/

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saurik
Apple developer accounts cost $100/year; if you are in the position of having
more than 100 devices you need to routinely test your applications on at your
large organization, you can certainly get more developer accounts (even if it
is just reimbursing employees for bringing their own developer account with
them as they work their job).

~~~
dirkdk
yes, but what a pain to manage! Money is not the issue, it is the time spent
keeping track of builds, profiles and UDID's

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eliajf
From what I understand, Apple's concern is circumventing the App Store, making
it possible for developers to distribute apps that Apple hasn't seen yet. In
short, the concern is viruses, worms and other security issues. This, I
believe, is why they don't change the limits.

~~~
dirkdk
Yep, I know that is one of their worries. Parallel store, bypassing Apple's
payment system and creating a bad user experience. However, the number of
users that jailbreak their iPhone and use Cydia is small, and the new iPhone
users are more and more regular people and will not jailbreak their phone. In
essence, Apple has all the control it needs to prevent this and shouldn't
worry about it

~~~
saurik
(Note: I realize that this is somewhat off-topic for the thread as a whole,
but I post it as a direct response to the specific argument you are making in
your comment. With that in mind, I will also explicitly say I don't even
disagree with your conclusion: I just feel that there is a misconception about
jailbreaking that should be corrected that is causing the argument to not
really follow all the way through to the conclusion. In the end, I still agree
that Apple already has the control they need in this scenario, and the
suggested solutions in the article would not cause them any challenges in that
regard.)

The percentage of people jailbreaking their iPhone over time has not really
fallen, excepting of course times when we don't have a current jailbreak (like
now, but that rebounds quickly when we do as the demand is latent and
pounces); I wouldn't even call it small, as it hovers upwards of 10%: of the
hundreds of millions of active devices Apple has out there, tens of millions
of them are jailbroken (and yes: they are often current devices; the people
most likely to want the absolute newest device constantly are also the people
most likely to want even more out of it and thereby jailbreak).

That said, that isn't really relevant: jailbreaking has nothing at all to do
with the device testing limit on applications because jailbreaking isn't
really about applications: it is about all of the little modifications we make
to existing software using my Substrate library... the default repositories in
Cydia actually carry an insignificant number of "applications" (something that
could be installed with a developer certificate) in comparison to the number
of Substrate extensions. If you told me tomorrow that everyone in the world
could now get infinite developer certificate access, we in the jailbreak
community would say "so what? that doesn't help us" and continue with business
as usual.

------
aneil
I'd be ok with a limit if there weren't a 1 year period for reclaiming a
license. What's annoying is having a bunch of unused UDIDs - whether from
departed users or abandoned phones.

