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Nonatone is now open source!
Hey guys,
So it's been about a year since I last posted here about Nonatone, and the response was better than anything I could have expected, I've been so happy to see everyone enjoying my little app.
Since then, Nonatone has been happily ticking along on the App Store, however I recently got an email from Apple telling me it was time to pay up for another year of being there ($100, which right now isn't something I have to throw around), and with that in mind I thought it'd be better to just leave the App Store and instead open source it instead, so here you go:
https://github.com/tspring5000/Nonatone
As you'd probably expect, Apple doesn't quite like the idea of installing apps from anywhere but their App Store so unfortunately it's not an easy process, I put it out there more so people can learn from it and maybe get into the app dev world themselves. It's MIT licensed so you can do pretty much anything you want with it, but for those who do just want to install it like any other app I've documented the process as far as I could, though it'll likely involve a bit of Googling. Apologies about that, I'd like to make it an easy install process, it's just unfortunate that Apple charges for the privilege of that.
Just to quickly note, if you previously paid for it don't worry, you can still access it under your previously brought apps in your apple account, so you won't need to go through this install process. It should also still be on the App Store until I believe May 20th.
And that's about it. You guys have been fantastic to me, I hope you'll continue enjoying Nonatone, whatever form it may take in the future 
Cheers!
Comments
Having to pay $100 just to keep your apps up is ridiculous, I hope we can get out of this stupid system soon enough.
Thanks for sharing
It is, it even applies if you make your app free which seems unfair, though then again not entirely surprising given how Apple is with a lot of this kind of thing.
Still, if it hadn't been the case I might not have taken the effort to open source it, so every cloud and all that
If you just want to develop apps for yourself or for internal use at a company (and not distributed through the App Store) then you don't need to pay the developer's fee. The fee covers Apple's administrative and operational expenses, I believe. And there are already a huge number of "freemium"/free apps on the App Store (Grok estimates 95% of the more than 2 million App Store apps available are free to download).
I don't think this is correct.
When your developer account lapses, those apps will disappear some time (possibly soon) after. They may hang around for a little bit, but they'll disappear at some point.
IF people back up the app to a computer using iMazing (the free version is fine) BEFORE that happens, then they will be able to restore it to devices with the same Apple ID in the future.
Thank you for being so generous with your code. If I ever decide to try again to develop iOS music apps, I stand a much better chance now thanks to people like you.
Detailed iMazing app backup info here:
https://forum.loopypro.com/discussion/comment/1363294/#Comment_1363294
Isn’t the iMazing app archiving broken at the moment? I haven’t verified but a few people have reported recently that it wasn’t working.
What are the limitations? As far as I remember, you can't even install a self-developped app on your iPhone without a developer certificate, and a free one would expire after only 7 days, no?
At least it used to be like this and it for me, it kinda took the charm out of taking the time to get into iOS app development years ago.
It was my understanding that the App Store page would disappear, but it would still be available under your purchase history, though a quick google search shows that I may have misunderstood that. I'd really hate for people that paid to lose access, that doesn't seem fair at all.
That's right, it's pretty much how you'd go about installing this from source, but if you want to get it on the App Store thats where the fee comes in, free or paid.
The thing is, I understand Apple needs to cover their expenses, but on top of the fee they also take 30% off each sale too, the two together seems a bit excessive.
I read that too, but I'm backing up apps without issues as I write this. I did decline to update 3.0.something to 3.2.something just now. I'll give it a try with the update after I get through backing up what I need to.
[edit] Shoot. Only some apps work. Others fail.
Tx for the info.
edited - see above. 😕
15% unless a developer makes over $1,000,000 per year on app sales. To be honest, I think 15% is a bargain considering what is provided.
Which doesn't mean anything if one doesn't make more than $115 or so per year in app sales. I wouldn't pay it either if I wasn't, but I wouldn't hold that against Apple.
Oh yeh, looks like you're right, though my experience with Apples general developer experience hasn't been quite so positive to say that 15% + $100 a year is a bargain, the best parts of my experience were provided by other open source developers external to Apple. The whole idea of Audio Units is very nice, though as I've said in previous posts the documentation is really poor, and again was pretty much a case of relying on other open source devs to guide me through.
To be fair though, maybe I'm just too a bit too stressed at the moment to look at it objectively. I'm obviously worried about what will happen to those who brought my app before now, and the whole Xcode side of open source is quite new to me so I'm still worried I made some mistake opening up code I shouldn't have (I'm fairly sure its all clean, Xcode just has a lot more hidden auto-generated config files than I'm used to dealing with). Maybe when its all in the clear I won't see it so negatively anymore.
Indeed. On that score, Apple has been and still is utterly shameful. The only reason we're in better shape today is because of generous developers such as yourself who have donated their open source code, framework providers such as AudioKit.io, and 3rd party blogs.
I'm only speaking to the "free" development tools (Xcode), extensive libraries, and sophisticated international distribution mechanism that Apple does provide. The corporations I worked decades for would have jumped at a 15% premium for all that. 30% would have been a bit steep, but still justifiable.
But, as I say, that's irrelevant for us little guys that don't expect to cover those costs. Some may work essentially for free, but no-one should be expected to work at a net loss. Apple could subsidize that by waving the developer fee for developers that make less than $99 profit per year. One could argue that it would even benefit them by leveraging unpaid labor that brings interesting apps to entice people to the platform - but that would accomplish nothing. 😉
Yeh, that would be scary to me too, now that I think about it. I would think that Apple would prevent releasing anything that could be considered proprietary code in anything but a compiled form without licensing provisions clearly present in the code, but I can see why you'd be nervous anyway.
Then again, if Apple had much cognizance of the little guys like us in the first place, we wouldn't be hunting down scraps of open source code and obscure blog posts to learn this sh*t. I'd think would cost more in lawyer fees to draft a take-down letter than it's worth from their perspective.
With the benefit of just a bit of a break, you are right to be fair. I've had my problems with Apple, but undoubtedly Swift and SwiftUI were brilliant to work with, and yeh the whole deployment mechanism was pretty seamless, even so far as to having a workflow preconfigured from my GitHub repo, so anytime I made any changes it would just create a new build.
As for the open source worries, honestly my main concern is that I've left something in the repo that should be private, like a developer secret or an API key or something. I'm sure I managed to clean all that out, but obviously these anxieties are rarely based on logic so it's just something I'll get over as time goes on and (hopefully) nothing bad happens.
That and I just hope the people that previously supported me aren't too disappointed by it, I really hope there is some way they can keep access to it, if you pay for something you shouldn't just lose access to it, so I just hope the gains from open sourcing it make up for the losses of the App Store.
I should probably get some sleep lol
Since I remember how much retailers used to charge software companies for in-store placement and their cut of the sales (50%), I don't see 15% or even as much as 30% as excessive. Not by a long shot.
Also, the developer determines how much they want to charge for their apps in the App Store. If they have a unique and in-demand product for customers, they can obviously charge what they want.
You can't use what bricks and mortar stores charged as a fair benchmark. The costs involved in building and maintaining a shop, staffing it etc are vastly higher then the costs in being a digital shop front. 15% is fair. Anything near 50% would be silly money.
We don't know the extent of Apple's costs, so it's impossible to say what is "fair".
I've seen estimates that it may have cost Apple $300 million to $500 million to develop the App Store and it could cost them $1 billion a year to run it. Possibly more, possibly less. The only thing we do know for sure is what they charge developers annually to develop and sell on the App Store (and Apple's cut of the revenue) and we know that Android charges developers about the same amount.
I believe you can use Xcode without paying the $99 and still install apps on up to 3 devices for personal testing. Those installs will expire after 7 days and you would need to keep re-installing.
Yes that's what I know too so it's not really an option.
Yeh I'm not sure comparing to a physical store is a fair comparison, and also like I say it's not just the cut they take, it's the fact they also charge you for being there.
I can deal with a 15% or even 30% fee, that's alright, I could even deal with a one time fee on top of that for a dev license, but a yearly charge as well does seem a bit much.
As for Android, they take the same cut as Apple (15% up to $1 million, then 30%) but the fee is $25, one time.
Worth remembering too that this isn't some small business we're talking about, it was only up until this year that Apple wasn't the richest company in the world (much of which comes from the App Store). I don't see them struggling for money to be honest.
Don't forget that $99 per year includes code-signing / developer certificates and App Store distribution on macOS as well as iOS.
Have a look at the costs of doing all that if you want to release a plugin for Windows... You could be looking at $500-1000 a year and if you distribute through a 3rd party, they'll typically be wanting more than 15%.
On the upside, the required VST3 license is free from Steinberg.
I'm not all too aware of the VST side of software development, but typically unless you go through a distributor (like if you wanted to release a game on Steam of something) there are no costs involved, you don't need to pay to compile an exe or dmg or any executable. It only becomes a problem on platforms which require a distributor, like iOS or (kind of, you can just distribute an apk however you want but its not really the done thing) Android.
All this is by the by though, it is what it is and there's no point me complaining about it, hence why I just open sourced it
[edit for clarity: Outside of the Apple ecosystem...]
You need a code signing certificate and that costs, otherwise your app / you will get flagged as not trusted.
You also need to host the app download and process payments - again, that costs.
@tspring - my message was more at folks thinking $99 a year was somehow unreasonable. I happen to think the opposite.
And fair play for open sourcing your app. 
The VST3 developer license is needed also and you have to apply for one.
To be fair I was the one saying $99 a year is unreasonable, but despite that being the main conversation it's not actually something I was that bothered about originally. It was more that it was coming time to renew it, that right now for me isn't an amount of money I can easily spend and it just seemed like it'd be better for everyone if I open sourced it instead.
Good points. Apple seems to be offering value above and beyond the fees, in my opinion. And again, if someone is just developing apps on their own for fun or for distribution in their organization, there are no fees.
@tspring Im a customer of Nonatone and would like to help keep it alive on iOS. If you need help with the developer fee, I’m here to help.
That's very generous of you, but unfortunately it's easier said than done for a few reasons (one of which being a mistake on my end). From my perspective, I'd been quite happy to see its life on the App Store end here and continue as open source, but if people really want it to remain on the App Store, I'll find the money for another year and we'll deal with it in 2026.
I installed the latest 3.2.0 version and iMazing is working again for backing up apps from the App Store.
That just pushes the problem down the road a year while putting you out $99 bucks. It's unfortunate that Apple pushes the hardship down to users when they could just continue to host the app files, but that's their right I suppose. Still, you shouldn't have to compensate for that, IMO.