Apple is blocking Apple Silicon Mac users from sideloading iPhone apps
theverge.com
theverge.com
> Apple moving to block the unauthorized app installs isn’t necessarily surprising
> Apple has given [iOS] developers power to block their apps from running on the Mac — a power that is undermined by sideloading
Presumably it's a response to a) piracy/unlicensed use of iOS apps, b) developers who don't want to support macOS, and c) developers who want to charge higher prices to macOS users.
I think the answer is a little from each column, but (c) has the strongest weight: some apps, say Cultured Code's Things and The Omni Group's OmniGraffle, are sold as separate Mac and iOS SKUs. Apple would damage their businesses if they allowed the iPad app run on the Mac without the developer approving it. I hope it becomes the norm soon, but we're in an early stage of the transition.
It wouldn't surprise me if someone figures out that they simply need to re-sign the binaries to run them, though.
What about the end user who paid good money to own a computer and run whatever he wants on it?
You paid good money to Apple. You didn't pay good money to the app developer.
iOS app prices are ridiculously low because of the crap store "race to the bottom", which fortunately didn't affect the Mac as much. This is one big reason why Things for iOS is so cheap: the market demands it, not because it's magically cheaper for a dev to make an iOS app. If you take away the Mac-level prices for Mac apps, developers like Cultured Code might go out of business, and then you won't get either version of the app.
If Mac app prices start to go as low as iOS app prices, you're going to see almost all developers completely abandon writing native Mac apps, and then Macs might as well just run iOS instead. To forestall that possibility, Mac devs might abandon their much cheaper (or even free) iOS versions to avoid getting undercut by their own products.
Paying money to Apple for a Mac doesn't automatically license you to use third-party apps. That's not how it works legally.
That's an elaboration of what I meant by (b) and I think it's on target.
Stop buying these systems no matter how much faster they are.
Others will copy Apple because they see the money. In the end they decide what you can do with your computer and there will be nothing you can do. It will be too late.
For everyone else who wants full control and ownership of their hardware there's always Linux.
I never owned Apple products and never will, but some (most?) consumers don't care about the openness of their system and just want to be in a reliable and cozy ecosystem or walled garden if you will, of well polished products, even if it costs a lot and is mostly used for watching netflix and browsing the web which, I guess, is the majority of Apple's customer base. For everyone else who wants full control and ownership of their hardware there's always Linux.
Because of the way Apple is, you'll never use their hardware, but you use Microsoft Windows, which is horrible for privacy. Seems there's a contradiction there.
If you replied "I only use Linux on hardware I make", then I'd have thought, "yeah, very consistent" but using Windows and being so anti-Apple blows my mind.
1. I'm allowed to use whatever I want and have opinions you might not agree with.
2. I don't know why you're attacking me, I was never anti Apple in my original post (Did you even read it? Because it sounds you're making stuff up), I just said their ecosystem is not for me but I understand why it's appealing to the masses.
>but you use Microsoft Windows, which is horrible for privacy
As opposed to Apple's telemetry and OCSP keeping tabs on whatever you run via non-unique hashes you can intercept on network traffic and find out what apps users are running? Plus their participation in NSA's PRISM bulk collection program?
Oh yeah, that sounds great for privacy, you should give them more of your data.
I dual-boot windows since Linux doesn't play well with Nvidia Optimus on my laptop, so for games I go to Windows where I can run my videogames on whatever hardware I want from whatever vendor I choose and run whatever software I want, no matter how old, as long as it's an X86 binary while on Mac I can only run what Apple allows me to run and only on their own hardware which is fine for some people but not for me.
Same with Android, it's not without issues, but I can choose to sideload whatever app I want, disable whatever service I don't like, all without needing Google's permission. Plus, I'm spoiled for choice in terms of hardware vs being locked in to a walled garden I have no control or say in. And last but not least, I can install a system wide ad-blocker, watch youtube ad-free and stay safe and ad-free on the minefield the current web has become.
Windows and Android are not perfect but they allow me more control over what HW and SW I can use vs Apple.
Peace out!
I genuinely am confused by your bashing and declarations about Apple, but you happily use Android and Windows. You disagree with me, very much so. That's all. Let's leave it at that.
Where?
Selling for $1 on the ios app store is only financially viable for me the developer if everything is standardized so that I never have to deal with any customer-specific manual work. That's why the ability to block ios app execution on Mac is crucially important to keep things profitable for developers.
I usually hate Apple for locking things down, but in this case I believe they had to do it, or else risk sacrificing many ios developers.
But here, it's not about that. It's about having paid for an iOS app and thinking that you now have the right to run it on a completely different type of device, and also presumably on many more devices (given how Apple allows installs for any device hooked to a given Apple ID).
Honestly, I'm shocked that so many people on HN are downvoting my comment that emphasizes the rights of software developers to not have their proprietary software used on device types that they were never meant to run on.
but developer has no power to command how legal owner of software runs it
and separately Apple for some reason thinks it's ok to control what binaries can be ran on a general purpose computer they sold
So if the given justification is weak, then what is the actual reason? It must be that they want to lock down the computers like phones are locked down. This way they can remove objectionable apps (trading favor for favor). And they can protect and extend their 30% cut into computer realm.
The reason is that many developers were already selling native Mac and native iOS versions of their apps, and who opted out of providing their iOS app in the Mac App Store — because they already had a Mac app in the Mac App Store! — and then Apple comes along and without permission undercuts the developer's own product.
Note that Apple allowing this to happen actually violates Apple's developer program agreement with third-party developers. Section 6.3 of the agreement covers iOS and iPadOS apps on Mac, while section 7.6 explicitly says No Other Distribution Authorized Under This Agreement. Apple was in breach of contract!
This is not further lockdown of the Mac, because from the beginning of iPhone in 2007, Macs never even had the ability to run iOS apps. 2007 to late 2020, no iOS apps on Mac, and nobody was crying lockdown about that. Intel Macs still can't do it. Apple wasn't violating your legal rights all those years.
There is a license agreement with the third-party developer, and unless the developer has opted in to providing the app on the Mac App Store, then distribution of the app to a non-licensed device is illegal. You are free to use licensed apps however you like, but only on licensed devices. For example, you can't copy the app you bought to an unlimited number of devices, to your friends devices, etc. It has never been true that you have unlimited use of licensed apps. You can only install a Mac App Store app on up 5 Macs, no more. That's not "OS lockdown".
We'd like to think that, but in reality the people doing the complicated stupid things are not always the same as the people using the product and complaining / demanding refunds from the developer. True story, back when the intel macs first came out, I was working for Apple retail. I had a customer come in angry as a hornet and demanding a refund because the computer they bought was crashing all the time, it still had viruses all over it and nothing worked any better than their old PC so why did they pay extra for a mac? Thing was, what they were describing seeing and doing on their computer didn't sound like they were using a mac at all. I asked the customer to show me what was going on, and when they pulled it out and turned it on, it booted right into windows.
Turns out after they bought their new computer, they gave it to their nephew to help set it up. Well apparently the nephew decided that what they really needed was to run windows on their new intel mac, and went through the process of installing boot camp, repartitioning the whole system to shrink the mac OS partition as small as boot camp would let them, and configure the computer to boot to windows automatically. My customer had effectively been using an expensive windows laptop for a few months, with all the problems that entailed, plus the additional problems of not getting proper system support. This was around the time that macbooks needed firmware updates to eliminate a crash, a firmware update that was only delivered via OS X software update, which the customer had no idea even existed on their computer.
So even though boot camp was a complicated procedure at the time, with lots of dialogs explaining exactly what you were doing, and what was and wasn't supported, the end user wasn't the one who went through the process. They were the one who was pissed off though. And I saw (and have seen elsewhere in tech) the same sort of thing play out over and over and over again, where someone's clever tech friend sets them up with some unsupported setup, and leaves them on their own to then try to get support from the manufacturer who rightfully doesn't support the issue.
Apple gives iOS developers a way to mark their apps as compatible or not with mac os, and they're implementing an actual check or block on that. I fail to see how that's any worse than Apple offering a "minimum OS version" check in their frameworks and enforcing not running an app that a developer specifies isn't compatible with an older version OS either.
Absolutely, it doesn’t make sense to allow it only if the user does some sort of complicated workaround. That’s also not exactly in Apple’s style - if you are allowed to do it it should be easy. If your not allowed to do it, you shouldn’t be allowed to full stop.
I think a developers expectation would probably be that if they upload an app to the iOS store, and explicitly say they don’t want users to be able to use it on their laptop, that users shouldn’t be able to use it on their laptop (either by installing it normally or via side loading).
Why should some workaround to this be allowed just because “it’s quite complicated so users won’t expect it to work”. Making things intentionally difficult and unreliable isn’t exactly what Apple is known for... It should either be allowed and simple to do, or not allowed at all.
You might think that with the "App Store" you were, you know, buying the App. You might think you could run it however you like, or even sell it to someone else if you wanted to (e.g. first sale doctrine.)
But of course the App Store isn't actually a "store" that sells "apps" at all rather but a "limited licensing service" enforced by Apple's DRM. You're getting a limited license to use the App, and if you use it on an Apple device then Apple's DRM will usually impose specific limits on how you can use it.
I like the App Store, but it's poorly named. I guess "App Limited License Store" wasn't catchy enough.
I believe sideloading in this context means extracting a DRMed app image (e.g. from a backup of your iOS device) and installing/running it on macOS.
It's almost like running an app in an emulator. From that perspective, I'm somewhat annoyed that Apple is preventing you from doing so, because it's an app that you paid for; even though it's only "licensed" we still call the "App Store" a "store" and not a "licensing service."