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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

With the App Store, Apple’s really brought this problem upon themselves whether they agree with what they are told to do or not. Any sort of centralized distribution mechanism is always going to be the first thing an authoritarian government targets when trying to take down content they don’t like. On iPhone it’s even worse because the App Store is not only a centralized distribution mechanism but the only distribution mechanism. If you want something gone, you can just force Apple and that’s that for iPhone.

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I sort-of agree. Apple must be bound by the laws of each nation it operates in, but those laws can be in conflict, and even a company cannot be the servant of two masters [0]; the only solutions I can even imagine boil down to properly separate versions of — call it “Apple Software and Services Inc.” — in each jurisdiction. Same for Google.

[0] It’s been annoying me for years that I, a British national living in Germany, have to tell the US federal government about all encryption I use in apps made solely for the German market. What happens if it starts annoying the EU, too, and they pass a law saying we can’t tell the US government anything about it?

"have to tell the US federal government about all encryption I use"

Can you elaborate on that?

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/complying...

This would also seem to be a vulnerability of Canonical's centralised snap store. Would they take down submissions containing content that the CCP objects to?

Snap provides commands to pull from other snap stores. There's nothing preventing people from setting up their own snap stores.

This is incorrect. It does not have commands to pull from other app stores and Canonical has stated they have no intention of adding external repositories of any kind. It does have commands to manually install a pre-downloaded snap package, but you have to put `--dangerous` on the CLI and you won't get auto-updates for that manually installed package either.

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