
What Apple Gives You for $100 as a Safari Extension Developer - 8ig8
https://medium.com/@honestbleeps/what-apple-gives-you-for-100-as-a-safari-extension-developer-and-why-reddit-enhancement-suite-6e2d829c2e52#.h0oq54r6j
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shakna
So... This last year in Safari Extension world:

* $100 buy in. Yearly. (Firefox, Edge, Chrome, Opera... No license fees.)

* Long, bug-prone, and somewhat idiotic review process.

* No way to charge for an extension, to recoup that $100. So its ads or nothing.

* Installation page only. No reviews. No real information.

Caveat: You can develop for free, without getting listed, but then you can't
automatically update the extension.

What's coming in Safari Extension world:

* The $100 fee is staying.

* Xcode requirement. You'll need a Mac to publish.

* Swift/Objective-C requirement. No more HTML/JS/CSS only.

* Mac store listing, which means you can charge for extensions. But the Mac Store isn't known for a nice review process.

* Hugely lacking documentation. Hopefully this'll change... But Apple doesn't have a good track record here.

Result:

Reddit Enhancement Suite has to decide between not publishing for one of the
major browsers, or paying out for a longer, harder to maintain process, to
achieve the same thing as they already do for Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Opera.

Personal anecdote:

Apple seems to hate their own developers. This story, others, and my own
experiences tell me that Apple makes everything more difficult than need be to
put together a program, small or large, that actually runs on their platform.

Swift was a step in the right direction, a nice language, a decent Open Source
effort, and cross platform to boot.

But Safari... Safari lacks in so many areas that it's progress on JS doesn't
matter much. Isolating those who build for it is unhelpful.

It almost seems like Apple want Safari to die.

