They were trying to offer what they considered to be an important public service, in the only way they could figure out to possibly do it, under the constraints of the time.
The mechanism was a poor one, but they didn’t have any other choices (besides giving up and effectively conceding that people’s circadian rhythms would be disrupted by the target devices with no ability for a third party to offer any mitigation, at a time when it seemed like the phone vendor had no interest in the topic whatsoever).
This isn’t “suspicious” if you take a moment to understand what the developers view as their mission. Indeed, it is strong evidence that they are treating this project first and foremost as a cause to promote / public service, rather than a business to profit from.
If your personal top priority is phone security rather than health, and you are inherently suspicious of all software developers, then of course you will recommend people not side load applications which haven’t been carefully vetted by Apple. That is also a reasonable position to take. If you are Apple, there are obviously good reasons to shut down any developer’s ability to pursue such a workaround of platform policies.
But the argument that willingness to provide a free tool which can be sideloaded on a phone in contravention of platform policy indicates willingness to distort scientific evidence just doesn’t hold water. The two things are entirely unrelated.
I'm not sure if you're aware of the circumstances surrounding the fiasco, so I'm going to recap the timeline here:
WWDC 2015: Apple allows for sideloading apps through Xcode without a paid developer program account.
~November 10, 2015: f.lux releases their product for sideloading on iOS (it was previously only available for jailbroken devices) as an Xcode project that ran scripts to install a opaque binary.
~November 12, 2015: f.lux receives a notice from Apple to stop distributing f.lux in this manner.
~2016: Apple restricts the users not enrolled in the developer program to sideloading just three apps, and only for seven days, without requiring a resign.
So, as you can see, f.lux basically put in extra effort to make sure their code was not distributed with their binary release, and this made Apple get mad at them–so much so that they significantly curtailed the sideloading abilities of the free developer program. Note that there was no issue here of using private APIs–there are already a couple open source apps performing similar functionality with a large number of users that Apple had turned a blind eye to. The issue was that this was being used to load uninspectible code onto users' devices, which sooner or later may have led to a bunch of users installing malware.
> The issue was that this was being used to load uninspectible code onto users' devices, which sooner or later may have led to a bunch of users installing malware.
It is entirely reasonable to prioritize malware above circadian rhythms. (And e.g. Apple’s response is predictable.) This is just not the same as the priorities of the Flux developers.
I feel like you are deliberately missing my previous point. Do you understand what their motives and reasoning process were?
Can you see why I think their practice has nothing to do with their likelihood of distorting scientific research about vision or sleep science?
Relating the two seems to me like seeing a pedestrian crossing the street in the middle of the block and guessing that they probably don’t tip restaurant servers.
The mechanism was a poor one, but they didn’t have any other choices (besides giving up and effectively conceding that people’s circadian rhythms would be disrupted by the target devices with no ability for a third party to offer any mitigation, at a time when it seemed like the phone vendor had no interest in the topic whatsoever).
This isn’t “suspicious” if you take a moment to understand what the developers view as their mission. Indeed, it is strong evidence that they are treating this project first and foremost as a cause to promote / public service, rather than a business to profit from.
If your personal top priority is phone security rather than health, and you are inherently suspicious of all software developers, then of course you will recommend people not side load applications which haven’t been carefully vetted by Apple. That is also a reasonable position to take. If you are Apple, there are obviously good reasons to shut down any developer’s ability to pursue such a workaround of platform policies.
But the argument that willingness to provide a free tool which can be sideloaded on a phone in contravention of platform policy indicates willingness to distort scientific evidence just doesn’t hold water. The two things are entirely unrelated.