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Comment by pentae | Hacker News Reader

Right. I love hating on FB as much as the next person but the stronghold Apple has over the hardware is absolutely unreal. Imagine buying $10M worth of iPhones every year for your workforce and then Apple pulling your critical software because there's no alternative way to side load apps for the market research department. Which, by the way, might be a bit scummy but as far as I can see theres no indication they have broken any laws there either.

Makes you wonder who really owns the phone?

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I don't agree.

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)

It’s a very good point that a less efficient way to side load apps onto an iPhone exists.

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!

What less efficient way to side load apps exist? Flying the person to FB HQ and plugging their phone into a developers machine by USB? Yeah, right.

No, collecting UDIDs and using (multiple) standard developer accounts.

With TestFlight you don't even need to collect UDIDs or even email accounts anymore. And that's 10,000 users per app.

TestFlight requires going through a partial app review processes.

True. I'm surprised the enterprise app doesn't involve the same review.

It shouldn't involve the same review. Apps internal to a company might break some rules set by Apple, but are agreed to by the employee in question via their contract or consent. The whole point of the enterprise distribution system is to easily distribute apps inside your organization.

Facebook clearly abused the distribution system here.

> Which, by the way, might be a bit scummy but as far as I can see theres no indication they have broken any laws there either.

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.

My point is Apple offers no alternative.

Why should they? Facebook went out of their way to abuse the rules, but should get an exception because they buy a lot of iPhones?

Apple should offer an alternative way to load apps onto the phones that Facebook paid for that can't be revoked.

I don't think anybody's suggesting that Facebook should be an exception - rather, it would be good if Apple allowed everybody to sideload iphone apps (other than enterprise and developer keys, which are both great for their niche but not general-purpose)

You don't understand what parent comment is saying ... it complains Apple's closed environment not allowing of any apps to be installed in anyone's phone unless app is downloaded from AppStore.

> Apple's closed environment not allowing of any apps to be installed in anyone's phone unless app is downloaded from AppStore

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.

The market has no alternative is the real story here

TINA (there is no alternative)

FB first broke their appstore agreement with Apple (resulting in the app getting kicked out of the appstore), then violated another agreement, which was subsequently cancelled by Apple.

Some people buy iphone precisely because Apple does things like this, and they want effective privacy settings enforced on their device.

But yeah, it does still make you wonder...

Why does Facebook need to use native apps for employee shuttle and information portal? They could use a web page or PWA saved to the phone's home screen.

People like native apps. This isn't just Facebook; other companies in the valley do the same thing.

iOS deliberately has no notification options available for PWAs and various other shortcomings to push people into the app store. I imagine internal enterprise apps need those.

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