danudey

I'm not the Wirecutter guys but…

My experience and that of my friends: smart TVs are more confusing and harder to operate than regular TVs. Get a non-smart TV and an AppleTV and teach your mom how to change the input back if case she changes it and you're done.

I've never seen a smart TV feature set that made their interface worth using.

Source: I know people with smart TVs, they hate them. You can also build a Raspberry Pi to serve as a media centre, power it off the TV, and control it with the TV remote.

You're more than welcome!

Edit: You can also build a Raspberry Pi to serve as a media centre, power it off the TV, and control it with the TV remote.

If you're willing to build a nice setup for her out of that and a Linux file server you could even remote-control it and download shows for her from them internets.

In one of our products, we were using Lua and a Lua-ObjC bridge. We found that when we encountered a bug in our ObjC code, we could build a replacement method in Lua, ship that to the client, and swizzle the new Lua method in place of the old ObjC method, basically patching the game on the fly.

This was several years ago, and it's never been a problem for us. No one can be truly confident that Apple isn't going to change their minds, but it's not a new idea and it's not something that they've had any problem with in the past. Fundamentally their goal is not to prevent malicious apps (which they can do to some extent but they can't guarantee) but rather to prevent exploitation of vulnerable apps. In our case, all of our code updates were delivered over certificate-pinned HTTPS connections, and replacing a function would require pretty fundamental understanding of our app and pre-existing exploitation of clients or servers.

The same is likely true of React apps; sure, they could be exploited by the creators, but honestly you could put some code in that says 'if date after <two weeks from now> then harvest the user's data and spy on them all the time' and get through the review process that way.

Developers have a lot to lose; you have to create a new app, get it past the review process (i.e. it has to be a decent app with some kind of merit), and then get enough people to download it that it's worth burning that app and that dev account once you start collecting. It's hard enough to get your app out there and get noticed in the store that if you want to put the time and energy into actually getting people to download your app it's probably more sensible to put ads in your app rather than burn your entire dev account for whatever data you can harvest before Apple shuts you down.

I'm sure this, as well as the message I sent you on facebook, comes off as a bit pushy or maybe proselytizing

Once I got to this point I started wondering if this entire post was a parody of something.