That's great!
What about iOS?
This has apparently been possible for a long time on iOS but you have to use an MDM profile to change the setting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28573354
They say this, but then looking at a recent issue they say it's not done in iOS yet, only macOS: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/4299
Yep it doesn't work on iOS, hopefully the Tailscale team add a similar debug menu that they added on Android and make the login server URL configurable through there, or a working configuration through a .mobileconfig would also be fine!
I wonder why they don't open source the iOS client like they do Android. There is precedent for open source iOS apps still available on the App Store, so that's not a limitation. I would gladly dedicate some time to adding this as a PR (as I'm sure a million others would, too).
> I wonder why they don't open source the iOS client like they do Android.
Mostly because developing for iOS and macOS is terrible, especially when your app needs to have "entitlements". Tailscale uses a "Network Extension entitlement" which is linked to our corporate Apple account. Even onboarding new employees and getting them up to speed on xcode/macOS/iOS development is painful. It often requires a bunch of messing around with Keychain and random reboots (not just Xcode restarts!) because something in the macOS kernel gets confused. For some development we also need to disable System Integrity Protection. And make sure there aren't duplicate copies of certain files between /Applications and ~/Library/Developer/whatever.
And then once you get it all working, some cert or login or something in Xcode or Keychain expires in a few months and you have to re-learn the whole esoteric dance once again.
The whole process of developing Network Extensions is pretty terrible.
Even if we open sourced it, you couldn't just git clone it & hit play in Xcode. Even if you paid Apple $100/year, you still couldn't, because your Apple account isn't blessed enough with the right to use a Network Extension.
It's hard enough for us to support Apple platform development internally without helping the world learn Xcode/code signing/entitlements/Keychain.
I've been and remain a huge open source fanboy for about 25 years now. If I thought we or the community would benefit from it being open source, I'd argue for us open sourcing it. But it just doesn't seem worthwhile. Or maybe I'm just still angry at the platform.
It really does feel like Apple just doesn't care that their app policies are hostile to developers because they have such a strong monopoly on mobile app distribution.