I'd say it's because Proton does not employ actual cryptographers or security engineers. They do seem to have a lot of marketing folk, interns, and particle physicists, allegedly.
I love this but just looking at the comments - while admittedly cool, implementing your own OS isn't black magic or particularly arcane knowledge; sure it's a whole lot of work where you're often reimplementing the wheel, but not outside the realm of any reasonably skilled graduate I would think.
Writing an OS is not any harder than writing a database or a programming language. The complexity lies in how far do you want to go with it.
While not black-magic, dealing with hardware and its quirks is a different skillset than writing React logic. A bug might need a reboot, or in some rare cases with terrible hardware, turning it into a paperweight.
In fact, I believe that learning to write low-level code for simple hardware (say, an Arduino or a RP2040), is a smoother path for a complete newbie than learning the massively complex frontend world, and provides much better foundational knowledge.
The really challenging part when you're building an OS comes from not building an incrementally bigger and bigger mess until you're stuck and can't make any progress any more.
You're right, there's no magic here. It's just lots and lots of work. And there are important decisions to be made about how you design and abstract everything. None of them are hard, but making so many decisions is the very thing that's hard about most programming.
The answer of course is to have lots of programming experience. Which is why building an actual OS to the level of SerenityOS is not something a reasonably skilled graduate would be able to do.
> Marketplace developers must provide Apple a stand-by letter of credit from an A-rated (or equivalent by S&P, Fitch, or Moody’s) financial Institution of €1,000,000 prior to receiving the entitlement. It will need to be auto-renewed on a yearly basis.
Apps must not have unreasonably high prices. The price $10 is too high.
Yet a Nigerian scammer continues offering an app for $300, even after an employee reports it.
Well, there's the I Am Rich app[0], which essentially did nothing and cost US$999.99.
The crux was, however, that the developer was totally upfront about what you got for the price and apparently there still were douchebags around forking over the cash to buy "status".
Apple yanked the app due to the publicity. Which I thought was wrong. It didn't violate any App store rules and it was honest and up front in the description of the app.
I suspect they might actually have yanked it due to the high rate of refund requests and chargebacks. Not the developer's fault, but not something Apple want to have to deal with.
I usually go with stupid before malevolent, but is this a possible way to launder money? Just have a really hard time believing people are that stupid.
How would you launder money with this approach? The amount of downloads/purchases is verifiable as the whole flow of money from buyer to seller. If I sell it 10 times (10 downloads and 10 wire transactions that cover them) how do I put the unaccounted money into the system?
Prices just have to be consistent so as long as most scams stay in that price range? But would love to see that rejection: “This scam is underachieving and will be blocked until the price exceeds $300.”
Sure, but it doesn't seem like they are rejecting the app because of its functionality or quality, but the price point. Software that serves a niche isn't going to get the mass downloads required to fund the development a low price point per sale requires. There is a use case for apps costing more than $10. The Samsung store allows for in-app subscriptions, at 2 bucks a month the app is going to cost the user more than $10 over the span of a year, heck even over the course of 6 months.
But yeah, if Samsung doesn't like it, I say screw 'em and just put it on the Play Store instead.
