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> if Ford says that installing a third party radio without their authorization voids your warranty or otherwise makes it impossible to do so, it’s generally accepted to be OK

This has been generally illegal in the US since 1975: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/2302 (section c)

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Interesting and I was wrong. While that might make for a good case why Apple should be compelled to allow the side loading of apps (especially since an App can be sandboxed and couldn’t possibly damage the device, a key criteria in the link). It still makes it hard to win an antitrust case against Apple. If you defined the market for Ford radios as to only include Ford-manufactured vehicles, then every single car company is a monopolist. Defense would push back that Ford competes against GM and Tesla, not against Bose and Sonos (in my prior analogy), so as long as consumers have choice of cars, then Ford shouldn’t be subject to antitrust actions and remedies in regards to radios.

There is nothing that would indicate side loading alone would be sufficient for applications wishing to forgo the App Store. Fortnite on Android is an example of an application which started out being side loaded but eventually conceded that there were too many platform restrictions for that to be viable.

Apple does allow side-loading apps today, but with restrictions that make it unsuitable for consumer applications - requirement for an enterprise provisioning profile, applications expire after a set period of time, applications are expected to be deployed via Xcode, etc.

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