What Apple Gives You for $100 as a Safari Extension Developer
So... This last year in Safari Extension world:<p>* $100 buy in. Yearly. (Firefox, Edge, Chrome, Opera... No license fees.)<p>* Long, bug-prone, and somewhat idiotic review process.<p>* No way to charge for an extension, to recoup that $100. So its ads or nothing.<p>* Installation page only. No reviews. No real information.<p>Caveat: You can develop for free, without getting listed, but then you can't automatically update the extension.<p>What's coming in Safari Extension world:<p>* The $100 fee is staying.<p>* Xcode requirement. You'll need a Mac to publish.<p>* Swift/Objective-C requirement. No more HTML/JS/CSS only.<p>* Mac store listing, which means you can charge for extensions. But the Mac Store isn't known for a nice review process.<p>* Hugely lacking documentation. Hopefully this'll change... But Apple doesn't have a good track record here.<p>Result:<p>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.<p>Personal anecdote:<p>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.<p>Swift was a step in the right direction, a nice language, a decent Open Source effort, and cross platform to boot.<p>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.<p>It almost seems like Apple want Safari to die.