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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Yes there is. I don't want Facebook or Google to move all their apps to side loading or an alternate store with lax controls and opaque privacy disclosure. I need to use their apps, but I want them to have to satisfy Apple's app store policies. Side landing and alternate stores would cripple the effectiveness of those policies.

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So the reasoning is "if you allow my phone to be unlocked, so many people will want alternate stores that Facebook and Google will unlist their apps from the App Store and use the alternative stores only, and then they won't be as rigorously reviewed"?

Like how you can't get Facebook on the Play Store because it's only available on F-droid on Android, for example?

That's certainly... interesting.

Epic, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Spotify and a host of other companies are itching to get on to a rival 'Freedom' app store on iOS, with lax controls and weak privacy disclosure. Where they go, users would have to follow. It's not as though users are crying out for weaker privacy disclosure, but they'd go anyway.

Facebook is quite happy on the Play Store because it has weak privacy and disclosure policies, because Google has no interest in enforcing such things.

Nope, you're surreptitiously adding a righteous "the people will freely choose what suits them best" twist to the parent's post. That's a rich assumption, history proves that "the people" just want their shiny toy and will sheepishly accept whatever condition imposed by the manufacturer. Remember IE6?

Then people arguing this should stop being disingenuous that this is somehow about enabling user freedoms, and outright say "your phone should take away your choice because you can't be trusted with it" .

Hundreds of millions of people freely choose to delegate those details to Apple, and we don’t want people like you forcing loopholes in the system so other companies can do an end run around those controls. Arguing that this is all in our interests is what’s disingenuous.

Couldn’t have said it better. Thanks

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