Apple's Past Sideloading Plans | Hacker News Reader

Apple's Past Sideloading Plans

macrumors.com

94 pointsmortenjorck7 comments

The relevant quote about Steve Jobs signing off on an iOS sideloading-related prompt, from a 2008-era email:

> Just two months after declaring that “the App Store is going to be the exclusive way to distribute iPhone applications,” iOS chief Scott Forstall asked which of these two templates Jobs preferred: “The application ‘Monkey Ball’ from the developer ‘Sega’ did not come from the App Store. Do you want to open it?” or “Are you sure you want to open the application ‘Monkey Ball’ from the developer ‘Sega’?” Jobs picked the latter.

Interestingly, about 4 years later, a very similar string ended up being used in Mac OS Lion with the release of Gatekeeper.

Maybe link to the original article?

https://www.theverge.com/22611236/epic-v-apple-emails-projec...

I considered linking to that instead, but the Verge piece buries the lede that Jobs signed off on an iOS sideloading workflow in 2008.

It's an interesting bit of information. I remember back when Gatekeeper was introduced on the Mac, I fully expected it to make its way to iOS the following year in a form that only allowed signed apps to run -- it seemed like it would allow the benefits of sideloading to users while letting Apple keep a measure of control. (That may seem naive now, but when Gatekeeper was introduced in 2012, App Store revenue was a pretty small part of Apple's business -- it was still being listed as part of "Other Music-Related Products and Services" as of their Q4 2012 10Q statement.)

Even so:

> Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.

Sometimes this guideline gets mushy, but in this case it's pretty cut and dry.

> In October 2010, Jobs declared at a corporate strategy presentation that a key company aim would be to use the cloud to "tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem."

On promoting competitor apps:

> No promotion... we are not going to promote something that puts it's goal as replacing our music player unless it is significantly better than our player and this is not.

There is a lot of anti-competitive shit here, I'm pretty appalled.

I mean, that’s the guy that called Google’s CEO to threaten him not to hire any more people from Apple, unless he wants a war.

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