If only life had been as simple as dropping an .apk on their phone...
I don't expect Facebook to get a whole lot of sympathy, but really, Apple's power on device owned by customers is ridiculous.
I don't expect Facebook to get a whole lot of sympathy, but really, Apple's power on device owned by customers is ridiculous.
Makes you wonder who really owns the phone?
FB can still side load apps all they want, they just can't do it on an enterprise scale like they currently do because they've abused their enterprise agreement.
This is not different than abusing (say) Microsofts MSSQL to host on a 10,000 core machine when you have a 2 core license.
"Who really owns the phone" is a misnomer, because you've licensed the OS. The physical hardware is of course yours but the OS remains property of Apple, your data remains the property of you. This is especially clear if you take the time to read the EULA. (Although EULA's have questionable legality in many parts of the world)
The enterprise cert program and associated software and infrastructure allows efficient internal side-loading under specific licensing conditions. If you break the license you don’t get to keeping using the product just because you bought the hardware that that licensed software happens to run on!
Facebook clearly abused the distribution system here.
It broke the agreement they made with Apple to get the key and as such Apple revoked the key. It seems very cut and dry to me.
Except the enterprise distribution which is what Facebook fucked up by breaking the rules. You have to try really hard to get that revoked, Facebook did and now they're in a tough spot. This is fine.
But yeah, it does still make you wonder...
It's a feature I appreciate. Malware is a serious problem and one I'd rather not deal with on my phone.
And I appreciate that they provide that service and happily pay premium for it.
But I'd still like a way to load apps that they don't approve.
And being a former iPhone dev, they really didn't vet much of anything, it was mostly what the employee was feeling that day that got your app accepted or not. This was back in 2013 or so, so things may have changed, but it really was a coin flip...
I don't understand why people keep bringing up this point.
Yes, it's your phone but it's not your app store. One can use an iPhone without ever opening the app store.
It's a feature.
Another option is TestFlight, but for devices that aren't registered (so-called "external beta") the app has to go through some App Store review.
I guess then they'll have to beg for forgiveness or just spin the native apps into web apps. I feel sorry for their Enterprise Engineering team!
Without going through Apple at all, the only option is jailbreaking, to bypass the signing check. No one's figured out (publicly) how to jailbreak the last two major versions, though, as far as I know (there were some jailbreaks that worked for iOS 11 betas).
Another option still involves getting a cert from Apple, but it's free. You just need to create an Apple ID. The limitation here is that you have to re-install the app (IIRC) every seven days.