A sternly worded blog by Jeff Johnson.
The macOS command-line tool hdiutil is used to manipulate disk images. From the WHAT'S NEW section of man hdiutil on the latest macOS 27 Golden Gate beta: In macOS 27.0, hdiutil is deprecated. Use diskutil image instead for all disk image operations. diskutil image provides subcommands for attach, create, resize, info, and chpass. ASIF (Apple Sparse Image Format) images are only supported by…
In response to my article App Store allows developers to spam the submission and review process , MacStories published an article Raising the Gates Is Not the Way to Improve the App Store . I highly respect MacStories, and of course subscribe to their RSS feed , but I disagree with their article’s framing of my article. I did not raise the gates or erect the barriers, Apple did. Apple is the one…
Yesterday I published a spicy tale of an App Store fraud perpetrated by a developer deep into AI slop. My blog post was linked by Daring Fireball and 9to5Mac , which I appreciate! Coincidentally, on the same day well-known developer Marco Arment complained on social media that his new, unreleased Mac App Store app had been waiting 12 days for review by Apple. Reportedly, Apple app review is having…
Despite my history of uncovering App Store frauds , I rarely go looking for these things intentionally! They’re just so pervasive and obvious, they jump out at me. In this case, I was looking at the list of top paid Safari extensions in the Mac App Store , because two of my own extensions are currently on the list, when I noticed the TabControl Extension . TabControl Extension is the #13 top paid…
Ten years and one day ago, on August 9, 2016, I abruptly quit my job. I mark this occasion as the beginning of my indie software developer career. Happy anniversary to me and to my customers! I didn’t formulate a plan until after I quit. I decided that I could afford to indulge a dream, express myself, design and build my own app from scratch. I could be my own boss for once. My journey as an…
I use iCloud only for testing the iCloud sync feature of my App Store apps . As I mentioned in my recent blog post Apple account email address disclosure via Mail app , I don’t have an iCloud email account. As you can see in my screenshots below, iCloud is disabled in System Settings for all uses of Mail. Nonetheless, when I send an email in Mail app, from a non-iCloud account to an non-iCloud…
In 2023 I published a blog post The myth and reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard that included links to the release notes of some Mac OS X updates. Well, let's look at the release notes for the 10.6.1 update : […] It looks like the so-called "bug fix update" itself needed a number of bug fixes. How about the 10.6.2 update ? […] We're not done. Here's 10.6.3 : […] And 10.6.4 : Sadly, the links above…
I’ve written very little on my blog about so-called Artificial Intelligence, an old term applied to a relatively new technology, Large Language Models (LLM). I don’t think I have anything new to say about the subject, and my first-hand experience with LLMs is negligible, since I eschew them. Fortunately, my employer does not force me to use AI. (I’m self-employed!) The benefit of writing a blog…
I could have terminated the title of this blog post with “App Store” but wanted to talk about something specific that came up for me today: App Store user ratings and reviews. This subject is related to yesterday’s blog post No, you curate the App Store . Despite the fact that Apple employees privately review every version of every app before developers can publish to the App Store, supposedly…
A week ago I blogged about an app named Chrome Browser Default in the Mac App Store. This app is no longer available in the Mac App Store. I had deleted the app from the Applications folder on my Mac, and now I can’t download it again from the Purchased section of the App Store app. I have no idea why the Dutch name “Standaard Browser Wisselen” appears in the alert, because the App Store Purchased…
I use an M1 Mac mini for testing different major macOS versions. Currently the Mac has six boot volumes, macOS 12 Monterey through macOS 27 Golden Gate. While booted into macOS 26 Tahoe, I noticed a couple of strange things in the Privacy & Security section of System Settings. The Privacy & Security subsections Files & Folders and Full Disk Access are inextricably intertwined. Let’s look at Full…
Three years ago, I disclosed an unfixed vulnerability in the macOS App Management feature, which you can see in the Privacy & Security section of System Settings. App Management is supposed to protect the integrity of notarized apps installed on your Mac by requiring your permission to modify them. By default, only the developer of an app, as determined by its code signing certificate, is allowed…
This is a loosely-based sequel to my May 16 blog post Mac App Store: What’s in a name? inspired by an app named App for YouTube ℠ with a symbol at the end. This blog post is inspired by an app named Chrome Browser Default . Released less than a month ago by an unknown developer, Chrome Browser Default has somehow become a top download in the United States Mac App Store, alongside well-known…
This is a follow-up to my July 10 blog post, Apple Hide My Email bug, possibly related to disclosure vulnerability . Yesterday I happened upon a Mastodon post that inspired me to continue researching my Mac Mail app bug: curl can be used to send emails with smtp I have multiple email accounts, for example with my personal domain lapcatsoftware.com here and my business domain underpassapp.com , but…
If I think about what I like and dislike about the internet, contrasting what I find pleasant or productive with what I find unpleasant or unproductive, I can’t escape the conclusion that debating strangers stands out as the principal activity that makes me dislike, even hate the internet. A long internet debate with a stranger can drastically sour my mood, ruining a whole day. And I can’t recall…
Yesterday I published the blog post Apple again black-holed my App Store Connect bug report , which complained that Apple has twice given up on investigating my bug report without requesting additional information from me. This morning I spent some time investigating the bug myself. I believe that I’ve found the cause and a workaround. Funny, isn’t it, how a lone outside developer, in less than an…
I had filed a bug report with Apple Feedback Assistant: FB22952887 “App Store Connect page redirects to /login after already logged in.” This reproducible bug is still not fixed. My report previously received the resolution “Investigation complete - Unable to diagnose with current information” without requesting additional information from me. On the morning of June 15, I published the blog post…
For five years I’ve used the free random password generator app PSWD from the Mac App Store, and I’ve been happy with it. Since I first installed the app, the developer released a number of minor updates, the last in July 2023, three years ago. This was fine, because the app was essentially perfect for my purpose, so I didn’t need the app to change. A few days ago, however, the developer released…
When you press the volume keys on macOS Sequoia and earlier, a nice big user interface appears as feedback, registering the volume change and displaying the new system volume. You can’t miss it. On macOS Tahoe, however, you can easily miss it. The user interface is much smaller and appears only at the top of the screen, near the volume control in the menu bar. The volume interface has not changed…
As a software developer for Apple platforms, I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the years attempting to understand Apple financial statements, though I’m admittedly not an expert in corporate finances. This blog post is for other non-experts who are also interested in Apple finances. I originally became interested in Apple quarterly reports and financial statements because I wanted to see the…
Last week a disclosure vulnerability in Apple’s Hide My Email feature was publicly announced and verified by a news media outlet, though the technical details of the vulnerability were not publicized. The vulnerability is that it’s possible to unhide the real email address of a Hide My Email user. I don’t know whether I’ve accidentally stumbled upon that vulnerability, or perhaps in this case the…
Safari was inactive, in the background, with no windows open, when out of the blue I got a Little Snitch alert: Safari wanted to connect to the URL http://192.168.0.1/favicon.ico for some reason. The IP address 192.168.0.1 is private . I quickly realized that http://192.168.0.1/ was one of my bookmarks, for the web interface of my router. I had recently been looking at my bookmarks in order to…
This may sound far-fetched, but I already found that iCloud remotely triggers iMessage sign-in and sync (as well as FaceTime sign-in). I have circumstantial evidence that iCloud also remotely enabled Protect Mail Activity on my Mac, and I can’t think of any other explanation. Let me describe the circumstances in detail. Yesterday, inspired by social media , I was looking through the Mac Mail app…
WebKit, to quote its website , “is the web browser engine used by Safari, Mail, App Store, and many other apps on macOS, iOS, and Linux.” Obviously, Safari uses WebKit to display web pages, but did you know that Mail app uses WebKit to display email messages? This is true not just for HTML emails but also for plain text format emails. There are a couple of ways to reveal the presence of WebKit in…
Despite the fact that I never filed a report with Feedback Assistant, the bug that I discussed in my March 26 blog post App Store Connect analytics missing platform versions appears to be fixed now. The analytics are no longer missing iOS and macOS versions. Did my blog post spur the bug fix? I have no idea, since Apple is uncommunicative, but I’m going to try again with another bug. This time I…
For years, I’ve followed Reddit via RSS. I mentioned Reddit RSS feeds in a 2022 blog post . Among the various ways my customers can contact me, there’s a subreddit for my products . I follow a number of Apple-related subreddits such as r/apple , which is helpful to me in unearthing information relevant to my business and helpful to redditors, whose technical questions I sometimes answer. I also…
Safari has traditionally supported the latest three major macOS versions. For example, Safari 26 supports macOS 26 Tahoe, macOS 15 Sequoia, and macOS 14 Sonoma. Currently, the Safari 27 beta is available only for the macOS 27 Golden Gate developer beta, but the release notes indicate that the Safari 27 beta will also become available for Tahoe and Sequoia soon, perhaps along with the macOS 27…
Back in September, I blogged about a bug that I discovered: URL/NSURL double-encodes characters unnecessarily . Despite my well-known hatred of Feedback Assistant, I reluctantly used it in this case. I’ve filed a bug report in Apple Feedback Assistant : “URL/NSURL double-encodes characters unnecessarily” (FB20439045). It turns out that miracles do happen. See today’s macOS Golden Gate 27 Beta…
The web browser vendors continually add JavaScript API that prioritize the needs of web developers over web users. The interests of the two groups can conflict, for example because web developers often want to fingerprint and track web users, and I would note that Google Search advertising revenue provides a large part of the funding for all three of the major web browser engines: Chromium,…
The Mythical Man-Month is a book by Fred Brooks about software project management. The book has become famous in the industry, along with an observation from the book known as Brooks’s law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. I’d like to make an analogy between software development and Apple App Store review. A common, cursory reaction to the obvious failures of app review,…
Checking the Mac App Store charts for my own apps, I happened to notice an oddly-named app in the top ten list of Safari extensions in the United States: App for YouTube ℠ . Who names their app App? That’s absurdly generic, like naming your child Child. Or Jeff Johnson. Also curious is the service mark symbol in the app name. The App Store allows developers to use a third-party trademark in an app…
Update: Apple has now finally released Safari 26.5 for Sonoma and Sequoia . I’m going to take credit for that coincidence. ;-) Some people have objected to my use of the term 0-day. I’m not sure there is a good term for a situation where a software vendor knowingly fails to patch a vulnerability while simultaneously providing enough public information about the vulnerability for attackers to…
“Prevent cross-site tracking” is a Safari privacy setting, enabled by default. When “Prevent cross-site tracking” is enabled, Cloudflare challenges require an extra step, to manually click “Verify you are human.” This extra step is not required when “Prevent cross-site tracking” is disabled, nor is it required at all in Chrome or Firefox. Here is a Cloudflare challenge demo you can try:…
A year ago I wrote a blog post App Store Curation identifying a scam in the iOS App Store: the app Virus Protection for Phone. A few weeks later in the blog post Free with In-App Purchase is a sham I noted that the app had been removed from the App Store. Today I have two sad updates to the story. First, Virus Protection for Phone is back in the App Store ! The App Store URL is the same, and the…
Back in February, I installed the Chrome extension Open in Firefox Browser to investigate a compatibility issue reported by a customer of my own extension . After my investigation was complete, I disabled the extension in Chrome, but I didn’t remove the extension from Chrome, because I was still conversing with the customer. A few days ago I noticed that the disabled extension was still on the…
The 50th anniversary of Apple’s founding, on April 1 1976, is this week. The App Store, which opened on July 10 2008, almost 18 years ago, has existed for more than a third of Apple’s corporate lifespan. My view, as an App Store developer for 9 years, half of the App Store’s lifespan, is that Apple has neglected it, taken the App Store and developers for granted, because iPhone and iPad are locked…
I’m wondering whether other App Store developers can reproduce the issue that I’m seeing, which was occurring before the recent App Store Connect analytics design and continues to occur now. I’ve been back and forth with Apple Developer Support for more than a month (case 102827338878 if anyone from Apple is reading), getting nowhere slowly. Their latest unhelpful email response this morning left…
Why do I file bug reports with Apple Feedback Assistant ? I plead insanity. Or perhaps addiction. I seesaw between phases of abstinence and falling off the wagon. I’ve even tried organizing a public boycott of Feedback Assistant, with a list of demands to improve the experience for users, but the boycott never caught on with other developers. Regardless, an incentive still exists to file bug…
After gathering feedback from fellow App Store developers, I’m going to write a blog post (next week?) presenting a long list of small ways that Apple could improve the App Store for developers. To be clear, I’m certainly not opposed to improving the App Store in big ways! In fact, I feel strongly that Apple needs to fundamentally rethink the App Store. However, this is controversial. My aim here…
As I mentioned in my recent blog post Safari web browser bugs: A year in review , I frequently browse Reddit and think Apple employees should too. Today on Reddit I came across the question, Can I make the Safari PiP window smaller than the default minimum in Tahoe? The Redditor noticed, and I’ve verified, that the minimum size of a Picture-in-Picture window is much larger on macOS 26 Tahoe than…
I started blogging way back in 2006, when I was also starting my career in computer programming, before I even had a job. I was posting mostly about technical programming issues, basically to prove my skills. In 2008 I joined Twitter, as it was still called, for a programming conference, C4 , organized by Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch, who has unfortunately disappeared from my online community. At the…
68 of my WebKit Bugzilla reports were opened or changed in 2025, which you can see if you click the previous link, though you might see only 67 reports in the list, because one security bug is still not publicly accessible. 66 of those 68 reports were newly opened by me in 2025. Two reports that changed in 2025 were opened by me in 2024, one of which was fixed in 2025, and while a number of bugs I…
I was introduced to computers by my father, though not intentionally. Now retired, my father worked in sales and was assigned a local territory within which he traveled by car to meet with customers. It made more sense for him to keep an office in our home and travel from there instead of first commuting to an office building and then traveling. For his home office, my father purchased an Apple…
This is a follow-up to my recent blog post macOS Tahoe windows have different corner radiuses . I’ll start by noting that Apple goes into more detail about the new Tahoe design in the WWDC 2025 session video Build an AppKit app with the new design : The floating sidebar, along with the toolbar, demonstrate a key element of the new design system: concentricity. Each element is designed with a…
I don’t normally review products that I have not purchased and have never touched. However, I feel that MacBook Neo is worthy of comment, because it has the potential to be one of the most important Macs in history. I say this without intention to exaggerate. Although MacBook Neo is a subpar Mac technically, due to a number of design compromises, a Mac that I would never purchase for myself, its…
A week ago I filed a bug report about Safari with Apple’s Feedback Assistant: (FB22057274) Pinned tabs: slow-loading target="_blank" links appear in the wrong tab. Apple has marked the “Resolution” of this bug report as “Investigation complete - Unable to diagnose with current information.” I was not notified by Apple that the investigation was complete, nor did Apple ask me for more information.…
I’m sometimes late to notice new and terrible things about macOS 26 Tahoe, because I use it only for testing, on a secondary Mac. My main Mac remains on Sequoia, as enforced by Little Snitch . I was of course aware that app windows on Tahoe have exaggerated corner radiuses, but I was unaware until now that the window corner radius on Tahoe is not uniform: different windows can have different…
The next major version of macOS, presumably to be released in fall ’26 and numbered 27, thanks to Apple’s "crack naming team,” who are high on crack, is rumored to be “another Snow Leopard,” inspiring considerable hope and relief among Mac users. Perhaps the rumor is true, but I think the optimism is misplaced, because the historical reality of Snow Leopard was much different than the mythical…
In today’s macOS 26.3 update, Apple implemented a “fix” for an issue I blogged about a month ago, macOS Tahoe broke Finder columns view . (At the behest of John Gruber and the Apple Style Guide , I’m now using the term “column view” rather than “columns view.”) Specifically, the issue was with the system setting to always show scroll bars. First, here’s a screenshot from the previous version,…
Several months ago I blogged about switching from Google to DuckDuckGo for search. I mentioned some (but not all) of my reasons for switching: Google Search “dropped support for the n= URL parameter that allowed you to specify the number of results shown per page” and kept “incorrectly flagging me as a bot.” These Google Search problems are exacerbated by my preference for performing searches in…