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Comment by indrora

21 days ago

Apple requires you to get a developer account with them.

Nowhere does that require you to go and get a DUNS number, which is onerous for a single developer to do without the infrastructure of a company.

17 comments

indrora

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andyferris  21 days ago

Never heard of DUNS. It seems to be a US company *Dun & Bradstreet) that provides business intelligence.

It seems kind of odd to me to rely on some kind of external hidden "credit agency"-style company for this? And why would DUNS want to know about some kid in their basement in Bangledesh making (non-malicious) apps, and why would the kid want Dun & Bradstreet to know about them? It makes no sense at all.

  • aerostable_slug  21 days ago

    They're trying to control malware. Tying apps that may be malicious to an identity that takes some degree of cost and effort to establish seems sensible in that light.

    It's not that the identity prevents malware/abuse, but publishing any malware to the store burns the identity and establishing another is harder than simply coming up with a new email address. It's not necessarily the best scheme out of there, but it makes sense given their apparent goal.

  • Dragon0  21 days ago

    I've had a business get listed on DUNS; once you're on it, they resell your data forever.

  • cyanydeez  21 days ago

    Yeah, basically this is the rise of computer-credit agencies.

    Youc an see the zeitgeist forming around corporations wanting to lock out any small unlicensed company from working on phones.

    The key is mostly fascism in the guise of "security". Witness stuff like the ICE tracker app. Google would love a way to freeze out both it's appearance on the app store and any developer who'd program similar.

llm_nerd  21 days ago

While the linked article notes that organizations require a DUNS number seemingly as an aside, personal accounts do not.

Which is exactly the same policy as Apple.

  • didibus  21 days ago

    For me the difference is that Android is an open-source operating system. It sold itself and differentiated itself to users, developers and phone manufacturers as an open ecosystem built on open-source foundations.

    Over the years, it seems Google has been trying to have their cake and eat it too, by basically subsuming others to use Android through this appeal of a more free and open operating system ecosystem, but have tried to slowly close and close it down now that it has won the other half of the market on that promise.

    This feels more sly, because it's kind of a bait and switch. Apple never made such claim and was always upfront, so while I don't like it, I never bought into it in the first place for them to have the rug pulled under me after giving them my money as Google might be doing.

    • jonny_eh  21 days ago

      > For me the difference is that Android is an open-source operating system

      Google Play is not open source. You're still free to sideload on phone that use vanilla open-source android like the Fairphone.

tensor  20 days ago

FWIW I got a DUNS number through apple as a single developer for a corp. It was super easy. If you've already gone through the trouble of setting up a corp, getting the DUNS is trivial by comparison.

platevoltage  20 days ago

Yes. You gotta pay your 100 bucks, but I don't remember feeling like my privacy was being invaded when getting a developer account. I assume the best reason they have for this is that they can nuke the account, effectively killing the install base of an app is reported to be malicious. Unless someone tells me why I should, I don't have a huge issue with this.

  • iggldiggl  18 days ago

    > I assume the best reason they have for this is that they can nuke the account, effectively killing the install base of an app is reported to be malicious.

    They can already target malicious apps via Play Protect, including presumably all apps signed by the same signing key, so from that point of view no change would be needed. What this is presumably supposed to achieve is rather making it harder to rotate your signing key after it has been burnt…