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Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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 :-(

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.

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

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.

Apkpure and fdroid.

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

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