I suppose most of this is eaten up by the need to pay apple $99 per year just to run your own app on your own phone for longer than a week.
behnamoh · 3h ago
This Apple fee is one of the most absurd things they do. Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app?
When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price.
I'm a longtime Apple user but can't shake off this love-hate relationship with the company.
aerostable_slug · 3h ago
I think it's fair to also cover the fairly rigorous testing that occurs for each app store submission. I'm not sure a hundred bucks is the right number, but it's not fair to say all they do is host the file.
neilv · 2h ago
> I think it's fair to also cover the fairly rigorous testing that occurs for each app store submission.
By "fairly rigorous", do you mean "fickle, random"?
rahimnathwani · 3h ago
You have to pay $99/year even if you only want to use the app on your own device.
You can only sideload for free if you are willing to reinstall every X days.
They don't need to test an app if you're not asking them to distribute it through their store.
mitemte · 2h ago
What’s worse is it used to be 90 days. Apple changed it to 7 days years ago.
bigyabai · 1h ago
"fair" would be letting me sideload if I didn't want to go through Apple's vetting. Their expensive review process is only required because they decide it's arbitrarily necessary and unavoidable.
notnmeyer · 3h ago
i’d guess it’s more to keep extremely low effort submissions out of the app store.
Gigachad · 2h ago
Which is not unreasonable for something listed in the App Store. It is unreasonable that you can’t sideload though.
phire · 2h ago
I'm pretty sure the $99 fee is explicitly there to prevent "normal" users from side-loading.
eddythompson80 · 1h ago
It could be playing 2 roles, acting as a limiting gate for the App Store spam and preventing a simple 2 step tutorial to enable side loading.
rkagerer · 1h ago
This is why I switched to Android 10 years ago. Unfortunately the grass isn't looking much greener over there these days.
I'd love to hear from individuals who worked at these companies whether it disgusts them as much as it does me, and ideas (from a business perspective as much as technical) on how a new platform might wrest control back into the hands of users/owners.
asimovfan · 1h ago
what is it that you "love" about Apple?
procinct · 4h ago
I believe you only have to pay to put your app on the App Store. I’ve made apps for my iPhone before and never had to pay.
mcpherrinm · 3h ago
It's the "for longer than a week" bit - Unless you have a paid developer account, you can only sign apps to sideload that last one week.
There's some tools to automate "refreshing" the app, but that requires you have some other computer that pushes a new app every week.
The "1 week" restriction is usually fine when you're developing (as you typically are continually rebuilding and updating when actively working on an app) but is clearly intended to avoid being a way to sideload apps without the developer account "nearby".
tech234a · 3h ago
If you trust it, SideStore manages to do it on device by using a local VPN to make an on-device server appear to be an external device on the network.
sheepscreek · 3h ago
I’m not a 100% on this, but I believe you need to pay them to “sign” your app. For iOS, that means there is no way anyone else will be able to use your app unless they side-load it themselves (and we all know how cumbersome that is, Apple doesn’t want to make it easy).
notnmeyer · 3h ago
correct
slg · 2h ago
There is also the roughly $1k in costs for the solar and battery hardware even if we consider the iPhone itself free since it is so old.
HenryBemis · 2h ago
I was just checking the combo he is using [0] (River 2 Pro + 220W solar generator) and it's currently at USD 619. In the post, the author sums it at USD 780. I assume price dropped because of newer models, etc.
There were also $280 of other vague miscellaneous costs listed among the initial investments that I was including as part of that "roughly $1k"
nico_h · 2h ago
Also you can only run the compile-sign-deploy from a mac AFAIK.
ajross · 55m ago
That was exactly my thought. Out of the whole universe of development platforms we have to choose from to do an off-label maker-think gadget hack, iOS is inarguably, and by a huge margin, the worst.
There are literally home appliances with more customizable app development and deployment stories than iPhones.
dzhiurgis · 2h ago
EcoFlow batteries are pretty expensive too.
Also that's about 500kWh of power annually which averages to 50W. There is just no way iPhone uses that much.
winter_blue · 2h ago
The author has a mini PC plugged into the EcoFlow as well. That uses the bulk of the power.
neilv · 2h ago
Nice hacker effort and writeup, but I want to comment on a general HN pattern of what tech people promote implicitly with hacker network effects...
For every HN blog post of "I accomplished ___ despite a hacker-hostile platform, and now you can use what I built, and be hopelessly tied to the platform"... Baby Jesus Linus sheds a tear.
In this case, it's a bit odd, since the writer has an entire section, "Why This Actually Matters", of unusually good hacker and social values.
namuol · 4h ago
Interesting tech but there’s zero explanation of the actual application, so it’s all a little abstract.
jdon · 6h ago
Soon you'll also be able to do speech to text locally, as Apple is adding a SpeechAnalyzer API [0] which is apparently faster than whisper [1].
>We don’t give enough credit to Apple for keeping these old devices alive and kicking.
I'm not sure I follow. It feels exceedingly hard to find new uses for old iPads without doing a lot of heavy lifting. Has that changed?
brailsafe · 4h ago
My iPad 3 is only unusable because anything beyond iOS 9 isn't installable, most of the like 5 Apps I did have installed on it didn't survive a "backup", and obvs nobody's going out of their way to support ancient platforms.
Otherwise, it still functions as an epub reader as long as iBooks continues functioning, but it's lame that I can't really use it for much else unless I made it a hobby.
tech234a · 3h ago
As a counterexample, VLC surprisingly still supports iOS 9.0
brailsafe · 2h ago
That's a great counterexample, since built-in video playback capability is awful. It's one of the few I still have installed if memory serves. It think I also have "The Room" and a few Google apps. Hardware-wise I always thought it was pretty solid, the software and general utility not so much, but I look at newer versions hat have come out since 2013 and don't really see how they're fundamentally any more capable than mediocre content consumption devices, and while that does do something for me, I would have hard time rationalizing the purchase of another one in the future.
jerlam · 3h ago
For me, iPads (base model, non-Air/Pro) and iPhones seem to exist on opposite ends of the longevity spectrum. Never had an iPad last over 2-3 years without feeling sluggish and ready for an upgrade. Never had an iPhone since the 4 that felt sluggish when Apple stopped supporting it (5+ years).
criddell · 2h ago
My iPad is a 2018 iPad Pro and it still works great. It’s my most used computer by far. AFAIK, it’s still supported by Apple.
My phone is an iPhone 13 (2021) and I’ll probably upgrade in the next 24 months to get a better camera.
etra0 · 4h ago
This reminded me of the guy that built a meme database using iPhone's OCR as well [1].
I find incredible the idea of giving these devices another life. I wonder how hard is to host a sort-of vps on an abandoned android phone these days... I guess as long as you can put ethernet + docker you'd have a very capable device.
I think this wouldn't work with any iPhone that's on a version of iOS new enough to have the 'feature' where it automatically restarts after a few days without being used?
wing-_-nuts · 5h ago
I loved the 'it turns out I'm an indoor cat with outdoor aspirations'. I often joke I'm an 'avid indoorsman'
Maybe i'm missing something. Where are these thousands of users coming from? is this some service you offer?
yegle · 3h ago
This still requires a mini PC to bridge the API call and the iOS app.
I wonder if the new Android 16 terminal app would allow combining both.
joshstrange · 4h ago
I wonder if someone will make a LLM farm from older (probably not too old) iPhones using Apple's new foundation models. I know they won't hold a candle to SOTA models, they are much smaller for one, but when they announced API access that's the first thing I thought of, a sort of "folding @ home" but routing queries to a phone and spitting back the results.
It's silly and probably makes no sense at all based on how weak the model will probably be but it's a fun thing to think about.
piperswe · 16m ago
Used Mac Minis are probably cheaper and more energy efficient
romain_batlle · 4h ago
nop probably a very bad idea even if you had enough iPhones and you could parallelise them, it would be 10x less electricity efficient
xydac · 1h ago
Mine bailed out on a Baseband error due to which i am not even able to boot it anymore :(
laurensr · 4h ago
In my browser the ads cover the actual content.
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
nickburns · 4h ago
I found the page quite clean (with cloudflareinsights.com, googlesyndication.com, and googletagmanager.com blocked of course).
jiqiren · 4h ago
HomePods perform real-time vision processing on multiple camera streams for HomeKit. However, the primary quality challenge lies in the video quality of HomeKit-enabled doorbell cameras that can consistently stream to Wi-Fi. For instance, my doorbell operates on 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, resulting in highly compressed video streams. This compression likely impacts the results.
cosmic_cheese · 4h ago
The range of HomeKit-enabled doorbells and cameras is disappointing to begin with and even worse when removing options that require a proprietary adapter box and/or subscription. The best option at the moment seems to be a Ubiquiti setup that integrates into HomeKit by way of Homebridge or other similar solutions rather than anything that supports HomeKit specifically.
dzhiurgis · 2h ago
At this point I'd just avoid HomeKit entirely.
Any sort of automation in Home app besides 2-3 line demo is quickly turning into nightmare, you are locked in bunch of annoying limitations and devices are always costing more than open source alternative.
cosmic_cheese · 2h ago
It’s the smart home ecosystem that the FOSS world has kind of coalesced around, though (see HomeBridge, HomeAssistant, etc). The others are all much more centered around someone else’s servers and subscriptions and offer little to no possibility of running things locally.
dzhiurgis · 35m ago
Yes I run Home Assistant too. Also got quite a bit of devices on Aqara's platform, and a device each on Ewelink, Tuya, Meross which all technically are a platforms. There's probably another 5 devices with their own apps. Tasmota + Home Assistant is the only one I'm happy about.
Home Assistant (with all its dumb quirks) at least makes an attempt to integrate them. Some FOSS devices I've exposed to HomeKit for presence automation, but seeing Siri is going nowhere I don't think I'll continue.
redundantly · 5h ago
I love projects like this, doing things because you can. Especially low power, off-grid projects.
However I did not love the writing style of this article. Lots of repetition. Asking questions to stress a funny point. Lots of repetition.
I don't mean to sound like a jerk, even though I've succeeded at it. The author is cool, what they did is just as cool.
rbinv · 4h ago
It's AI slop. In fact, most (if not all) of this blog's recent posts are AI slop.
bpiroman · 1h ago
this is so cool!
Is it possible to boot linux on an old iphone?
hackyhacky · 1h ago
I'm not sure if there's a FOSS OCR package of equivalent quality to Apple Vision. I'm happy to be corrected otherwise.
troupo · 3h ago
> Welcome to my corner of the internet! I’m Hemant, a Senior Software Engineer based in Canada . I’m passionate about cloud computing, DevOps, and building robust distributed systems.
Somehow you're also passionate about selling user data to hundreds of data brokers with no easy way to opt-out
tootie · 4h ago
I have an ancient ipad that is still functional but stuck on iOS 9. Xcode doesn't let you target that version anymore. Is it still possible to compile an ipa for devices out of support?
daneel_w · 4h ago
It's a painfully sluggish alternative, but you can run older versions of OS X (and thus Xcode) in VirtualBox.
WalterGR · 3h ago
On Apple x86 hardware: Running Windows in VMWare Fusion works very, very well. I can’t see a reason why that wouldn't also be the case for old versions of OS X, though admittedly I haven’t tried.
It’s curious to me that OS X in VirtualBox is sluggish. Both VMWare Fusion and VirtualBox use virtualization…
daneel_w · 2h ago
Software framebuffer. Remaining devices are also emulated.
deadbabe · 2h ago
The privacy obsession and the fact he never mentions what kind of images the service is processing or what they’re for just kinda gives me the creeps, especially for the amount of requests he gets. There is a non-zero chance this is for illicit purposes.
hagbard_c · 5h ago
I see your fruitPhone 8 and raise my Motorola MB525 'Defy', Motorola MB526 'Defy+' and Samsung J3 which are in use as Wifi-enabled trailer camera. The phones provide a Wifi hotspot through which the camera's images are accessed. Hook up the trailer, connect to the Wifi network and voila, you can see what's happening in the trailer behind you. The oldest device in this list is from 2010, all of them run either Cyanogenmod (MB525 and MB526) or its successor LineageOS (J3). I replaced the batteries in the Motorola's, the J3 runs on its original battery. Oh, all of them run without a screen since that is not visible anyway and was broken in 2 of the 3. Android runs just fine without a screen and using the things this way takes a little less power.
FlyingSnake · 4h ago
That’s pretty impressive. I love when people give old devices a new life and save them from being eWaste. True to the hacker spirit.
I suppose most of this is eaten up by the need to pay apple $99 per year just to run your own app on your own phone for longer than a week.
When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price.
I'm a longtime Apple user but can't shake off this love-hate relationship with the company.
By "fairly rigorous", do you mean "fickle, random"?
You can only sideload for free if you are willing to reinstall every X days.
They don't need to test an app if you're not asking them to distribute it through their store.
I'd love to hear from individuals who worked at these companies whether it disgusts them as much as it does me, and ideas (from a business perspective as much as technical) on how a new platform might wrest control back into the hands of users/owners.
There's some tools to automate "refreshing" the app, but that requires you have some other computer that pushes a new app every week.
The "1 week" restriction is usually fine when you're developing (as you typically are continually rebuilding and updating when actively working on an app) but is clearly intended to avoid being a way to sideload apps without the developer account "nearby".
[0]: https://us.ecoflow.com/products/river-2-pro-portable-power-s...
There are literally home appliances with more customizable app development and deployment stories than iPhones.
Also that's about 500kWh of power annually which averages to 50W. There is just no way iPhone uses that much.
For every HN blog post of "I accomplished ___ despite a hacker-hostile platform, and now you can use what I built, and be hopelessly tied to the platform"... Baby Jesus Linus sheds a tear.
In this case, it's a bit odd, since the writer has an entire section, "Why This Actually Matters", of unusually good hacker and social values.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/277/
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/18/apple-transcription-api...
We don’t give enough credit to Apple for keeping these old devices alive and kicking.
I have a similar story wherein I repurposed my ancient OG iPhone SE and gave it a new life.
https://samkhawase.com/blog/dumb-smartphone/
I'm not sure I follow. It feels exceedingly hard to find new uses for old iPads without doing a lot of heavy lifting. Has that changed?
Otherwise, it still functions as an epub reader as long as iBooks continues functioning, but it's lame that I can't really use it for much else unless I made it a hobby.
My phone is an iPhone 13 (2021) and I’ll probably upgrade in the next 24 months to get a better camera.
I find incredible the idea of giving these devices another life. I wonder how hard is to host a sort-of vps on an abandoned android phone these days... I guess as long as you can put ethernet + docker you'd have a very capable device.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34315782
I wonder if the new Android 16 terminal app would allow combining both.
It's silly and probably makes no sense at all based on how weak the model will probably be but it's a fun thing to think about.
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Any sort of automation in Home app besides 2-3 line demo is quickly turning into nightmare, you are locked in bunch of annoying limitations and devices are always costing more than open source alternative.
Home Assistant (with all its dumb quirks) at least makes an attempt to integrate them. Some FOSS devices I've exposed to HomeKit for presence automation, but seeing Siri is going nowhere I don't think I'll continue.
However I did not love the writing style of this article. Lots of repetition. Asking questions to stress a funny point. Lots of repetition.
I don't mean to sound like a jerk, even though I've succeeded at it. The author is cool, what they did is just as cool.
Somehow you're also passionate about selling user data to hundreds of data brokers with no easy way to opt-out
It’s curious to me that OS X in VirtualBox is sluggish. Both VMWare Fusion and VirtualBox use virtualization…