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Comment by drenvuk | Hacker News Reader

This article glosses over the biggest deal in the bill.

Section 3 subsection d - INTEROPERABILITY

A Covered Company that controls the operating system or operating system configuration on which its App Store operates shall allow and provide the readily accessible means for users of that operating system to—

(1) choose third-party Apps or App Stores as defaults for categories appropriate to the App or App Store;

(2) install third-party Apps or App Stores through means other than its App Store; and

(3) hide or delete Apps or App Stores provided or preinstalled by the App Store owner or any of its business partners

Let's see how far this goes before it gets mangled all to hell.

View on HN

Obviously phones/game consoles would be game changing with this law, but i wonder what else would get hit...

Could this impact the infotainment on cars? Google Home devices? Smart TVs?

This could have major affects on user's ability to control their devices.

As always, they draw an arbitrary line in the sand since they know they just want to target specific things.

This hasn't been introduced yet, btw, so it doesn't have a real congress.gov entry - you'll have to settle for this https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/8.11.21%20-%...

> APP STORE.—The term ‘‘App Store’’ means a publicly available website, software application, or other electronic service that distributes Apps from third-party developers to users of a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device

General purpose computing device isn't even defined in this bill! Is the Xbox general purpose? Sure, most people use it to play games, but it has a full web browser with Microsoft Edge! the Switch and PS5 also have web browsers, just not with a URL bar. Do they qualify?

Laws need to hit the right amount of vague in order to be practical.

Courts and legal traditions will fill in the gaps (especially in a precedence heavy system like the US one).

It wouldn't surprise me if there isn't already a standard interpretation for "general computing device".

> general purpose computing device

There really isn't, at least in the US Code. If there was and this law was referring to it, it would refer to it "as defined by U.S.C <number>".

This discussion from a year ago illustrates my point; this bill is PR fluff and the one they actually discuss putting into law will have to be more specific https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24191018

A simple way to determine whether a device is primarily a "gaming handheld" is to follow the money.

According to statista.com, "gaming apps accounted for 85 percent of gross app revenues in the Google Play store in 2019."

That's a good question!!

Do you think Alexa 'apps' count? If so making that work seems like it have to completely open 'Alexa' up (hooks into voice recognition, programming logic) as basically an extensible AWS type platform.

It doesn't seem like it since it specifies on-device stores, but hopefully!

That's actually a fairly sensible bill. I'd imagine that both Google and Apple's respective teams are working their hardest to prevent the American people from hearing too much about this.

I believe it is a sensible bill. it limits its impact to companies that have access to 50,000,000 users or more so it should only curtail giants.

I'm sure PSN and xbox have more than 50M users, so does this bill apply to them?

I haven't yet formed an opinion on whether this bill should apply to Sony (PSN) or Microsoft (Xbox), but in general, Sony and Microsoft very definitely qualify as giants.

IANAL. It will probably argued that way at some point if this passes.

don't know but I hope it does

Google already complies with that except the default is one big switch AFAIK on android, it's not per-category.

The non Google Play stores are severely nerfed though - they for example can't auto-update apps installed from them, like Google Play can.

So if you install something say from Fdroid and want to have it up to date (say a Firefox rebuild), you have to periodically open the Fdroid app, check if there are any updates for the app and manually install them if there are some.

Also I don't think you can currently hide Google Play if its installed, again giving it an unfair advantage.

This is probably because I'm running a Samsung os, but I get auto updates from the Samsung store.

The vendor has custom modules for auto-updating. afaik F-Droid also auto-updates on freer distributions of Android but not on most manufacturer ones.

Exactly. This is because F-Droid requires root access to provide this functionality. I'm not sure if the module for this is still up to date, but it is a Magisk module that could be installed on any Android device rooted with Magisk.

Well I actually also have a Note 9 and it seems Samsung stuff generally does not get updated by itself & either stays outdated or nags for update I need to manually trigger.

Stores that are baked into vendor images are granted special privileges to act as app stores.

It's not quite that dire, as F-Droid will pop up a notification when there are apps that need updating. But yeah, you do have to tap through and confirm to get it to update, once for each app.

It is a feature, not a bug. Moreover, I want to be able to roll back the update or install an older version and pin it.

I think having two app stores being installed would (or should) satisfy this.

I think the intention is to prevent Apple saying "either you use our store exclusively, or you opt out of all our apps".

Google lets you install a browser from one store, a game from another, and everything else from the official Play Store.

Google could also easily implement category switching. The URL navigation structure of android could just append ?cat=gaming.

Not so much "preventing" anyone from hearing it as much as disparaging the bill in public discourse alongside buying off politicians. Mostly because word about bills like this tends to go around anyway thanks to all the orgs working for the public good. E.g the EFF, etc.

Why downvotes? Can we please have a discussion of ideas rather than blatant info-warfare on HN?

It's too easy to for Google&Apple to tip the scales. Choice will mostly be an illusion as almost everyone will choose Google or Apples store. You can see it on Android today.

I don't mind that personally. They can default to their own stores and advertise them, as long as I can sideload anything I want.

On Android I do use sideloading for niche applications and for FOSS applications available outside the Play Store (F-Droid).

If iOS allowed the same ability to sideload that Android does, that would be a huge step forward for "power"users, irrespective of whether the majority of the population stays with the Apple default.

For what it's worth, https://altstore.io/ is a relatively-new sideloading system that "just works" for iOS without jailbreaks - you can download .ipa packages however you want, and as long as you're on the same WiFi as a computer running the server, it will re-sign them with a personal key every 7 days. Outside of emulators, though, there's just not much of an ecosystem of high-quality apps for iOS that aren't built to be Apple-approved. But hey - you can bring back Flappy Bird!

I’m not sure who lobbied for this legislation, but I have a gut feeling a company like Facebook is behind some of the money. What a Trojan horse, a government legislated third party Facebook App Store on your IPhone/Android that incentivizes developers to build apps that plug into the FB ecosystem. Lower percentage cut taken by Facebook, with the ultimate caveat - no privacy, all your user data is ours, oh and ads, lots of them.

Cheers. Shit, FB didn’t even have to develop their own phone. What a win.

At this point the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Let's see if whoever is doing the arm twisting can force Apple onto a path where they don't get to do every single little thing that they want.

That's interesting because I have the opposite view - I prefer Apple maintains control so that Facebook doesn't get to do every single thing they want. Facebook is strictly worse and I bemoan a future where FB is given even more data to sell on hundreds of millions of Americans.

How about (gasp) the government maintains control so that non-democratic bodies don't get to do every single thing they want?

What government are you referring to?

I suspect that not all countries (even western) would love the idea that the US government had that type of control ;)

How about designing devices and services such that they are open and cross-compatible and the user is ultimately in control?

Yeah, I had heard of that.

Personally, I don't really like the idea of depending on re-signing every 7 days to prevent apps from breaking. In practice it would be fine nearly 100% of the time, it's just not something I like from a point of view of principles. It feels like an immense contortion to make just to install a binary on a device I own :-(

Last time I checked you also had install some their plugin for mail.app that is setup with Apple ID account - that was deal breaker for me.

It should really work the same way you select a default browser during setup. Even if you can sideload a different option, setting a default to their own property is a classic example of bundling, which is an anticompetitive act.

Right, it would have a huge impact on iOS devices and for their users.

Even if the only effect of a law like this was that you could run a better browser on iOS, that in itself would potentially be game-changing. It is hardly a radical suggestion at this point that Apple might have consistently and knowingly nerfed the only real browser users can run on iOS to reduce competition to native apps bought through its own store.

Let’s be honest here. If that happens , Chrome wins cause developers interest do not align with consumer interest but money interest. Understand I’m not saying that Developers go for the money, I’m saying the majority of companies that employ developers do and they will target chrome. Firefox by itself is not enough to fend off Chromes “standards” and the only thing ironically stopping Chrome dominance is stagnation not completion.

I am all for browser diversity but if there did end up being only one browser almost everyone used I would prefer it to be Chrome than iOS Safari. Everything from security updates to functionality in numerous areas is inferior with Safari and that hurts users and developers alike.

Yes forcing Apple to allow alternative Browser Engines and javascript/html/css runtimes such as Electron, would be the quickest and easiest way to help developers introduce some real competition to native apps.

But does that mean Google can release an iOS app store? I guess the reverse is much easier as Android is a much more open platform.

> You can see it on Android today.

Are there any good third-party Android stores? My (dated) experience is that it's only Amazon and hundreds of pirate sites.

There is F-Droid, which is a terrible client app but provides (non-Amazon, non-pirate) open source software such as NewPipe, Simple Notes or DavX.

Foxydroid is a really nice and imo much faster F-Droid frontend https://f-droid.org/en/packages/nya.kitsunyan.foxydroid/

(not affiliated just a big fan)

There's also Aurora Droid, an F-Droid client developed by the creator of Aurora Store.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.aurora.adroid/

It's currently being rewritten to match Aurora Store v4's interface.

I think that these demands should require the built-in app store to support an interoperable feed to other sources. I think that they do but not clearly enough.

I doubt Google would interpret it that way, but that would be the fair way to do it. Make it so that the information is interoperable rather than just not actively disallowing it. Then it can stop being a monopoly.

Fdroid is ok. Not the best, but it does function.

WeChat is pretty much an app store (among many other things).

Apkpure and fdroid.

I wonder how the Cydia lawsuit against Apple is going.

I'm not a lawyer so I don't know, if this law passes before the conclusion of the lawsuit, is Cydia out of luck?

Out of luck how? Isn’t the goal to be able to install and use Cydia without jailbreaks and without signing it yourself? And if the bill passes in the sort of form that is here, isn’t that exactly what’s going to be possible, so then the goal is achieved?

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18730843/saurikit-llc-v...

That's an awesome law! I doubt the copyright industry will allow it to pass...

Apple is like "over my dead body!!!"

It's already mangeld:

(1) choose third-party Apps or App Stores as defaults for categories appropriate to the App or App Store;

What does "appropriate" mean? From apples POV they will probably push that no "sensitive" default is ever appropriate for any App or AppStore and how is it handled? If I would be Apple acting like apple did in recent years I would require such apps to be white listed in a extremely cumbersome system which requires and Apple Dev account, allows later revocation by Apple and requires resigning every time you push a update which will always takes weeks and gets randomly denied because they supposedly detected malware or security flaws in you app. Making it "de-facto" impossible to set defaults to 3rd party apps.

(3) hide or delete Apps or App Stores provided or preinstalled by the App Store owner or any of its business partners

Hide doesn't mean disable, it just means "make it not visible" and makes this paragraph in the end pointless.

I suggest you read the full text or at least in part.

>choose third-party Apps or App Stores as 13 defaults for categories appropriate to the App or 14 App Store;

Categories appreciate to the app means you can set a non default browser to handle urls and a image viewer to handle images herein appropriate means that the application can handle that type of content it is not an opening for apple to decide what kinds of apps are appropriate in the normal English language definition of the word.

I don't think merely deleting the icon for an app but opening it in response to a link would meet the intent of the law but it ought to just say disable.

Pretty sure I could retire if I was a lobbyist and this is the only issue I worked on

Apple's about to turn some money faucets on

Facebook app store and Epic App Store are about to double turn their faucets on.

But you are right, the lobbyists involved here are playing for seriously high stakes. I guess someone finally found a way to make Apple spend all that cash on hand.

As a long-time Android user, if this passes I might actually consider buying an iPhone for the first time in my life, which feels rather ironic considering Appple is fighting it tooth and nail.

This would be so good for the smartphone environment and clean and trustworthy systems. It would a complete game changer. One can dream...

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