What will actually happen: "honey, something is wrong with my phone, whenever I unlock it, a popup jumps up that says 'Please update the Adobe™ Updater™ to get up to date Adobe™ Software Updates', could you take a look at it?"
honestly, Apple had their chance and while claiming to self-police, in fact they enacted an obvious walled garden that went way way way beyond security requirements.
It’s not about making products less secure. That’s what apple makes you wanna think.
It’s about giving customers choice. They can stay in Apple ecosystem (I will for example). Or they can not. Companies like Apple will have to work much harder now, to give both users and developers enough value to justify being locked in.
Nope, Adobe will make sure all its apps require Adobe App Store. Same for Facebook with Whatsapp. No more stupid Apple store restrictions, yay!!
People really don’t like extra friction. That’s why you see so much fight about getting stuff preinstalled.
Perfect example is iMessage - it’s years away other messengers, but it’s good snuff and it’s default so it dominates USA market.
I don't see how it's so different. App vendor is forcing me to use an alternative app store that I don't want to use, don't trust and don't want to share my data with - the same thing.
I think Apple should be forced to allow sideloading, but forcing them to allow alternative appstores to integrate into the OS seems like a road to security/privacy and UX hell to me. I always saw single App Store as the better thing - finally someone learned from the Linux Desktop lessons.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32172314
This whole scenario assumes that AdTech has unlimited power, that Apple has none, and that the courts are blind to their malfeasance.
Finally, Adobe isn't even an ad company. They literally sell software!
> MS/FB/Google stores are being planned right now during the celebration party thrown because of this regulation.
I hope they are getting their PR team ready too with mea culpas once a vengeful public backlashes against third party exclusivity.
Ultimately I have faith that both the public and public institutions will do the right thing, and that we shouldn't put all of our trust into one private corporation to check the power of other private corporations.
And yes, the Samsung apps are miles ahead. Fast, no ads, low resource consumption, small sizes, great UX and nice UI design. Nothing in Play store comes even close, and I tried practically everything. Play store is a catastrophe in terms of app quality, you can't find even a decent calculator there.
I don't believe it's possible, partly because already on Android you don't see Adobe or Microsoft starting their app stores. On iOS it would be even more difficult, because the sheer overwhelming amount of users already find the App Store to be good enough, and I simply don't see those other companies as competent enough from a product perspective to entice users over to their own third party app stores (as I discuss in detail elsewhere in my comments).
Facebook doesn't care about Play store on Android. They have deals with most operators on the planet to preinstall their app and Play store is a nice updater only. A user never installs Facebook, it's already there.
Makes me wonder too if Apple might end up enforcing indirect app review outside of the App Store. They could bundle the iOS equivalent to Microsoft Defender, basically Apple's built-in security tool. It could mark binaries found in the wild as unsafe if Apple discovered them to be misusing permissions or to be malware. If iOS apps can just be sideloaded, they should still be inspectable...
Not only that, but this act requires the ability to uninstall bloatware.
It’s all about value they can provide, both sides.
We’ll basically lose a whole stack of the guarantees about data, app operation that Apple was able to enforce on hostile, belligerent companies like fb because of their position.
I trust Apple to design their operating system to be secure, without having to lock me in.
And isn’t Facebook dead and not used by anyone?
Googles standards for the App Store are low and they’re more than happy to let apps exfiltrate basically whatever user data they want.
Do you remember the hissy fits developers-and more notably advertisers-threw when Apple went “no you can’t have fine grained GPS unless you have a valid reason” and “the app still has to work even if the user declines sharing data”.
I can tell you right now which one, Kristie, the 17 year old High Schooler is going to download. She'll then unknowingly be giving away all sorts or privacy away on the sideloaded version, under the guise of a marketed, more "in your face" privacy feature.
It seems like your defense of Apple is that other companies will be able to act like Apple.
I'd rather have multiple small masters which compete with each other than a single all powerful master.
> “[It is] encouraging to see this long-term, collaborative approach to privacy-protective personalized advertising from Google,” Graham Mudd, vice president of product marketing
Not the same thing, looks like. Facebook likes Google.
It's got the EXACT same incentive as FB to track you.
This is exactly the bad duopolistic behaviour this act is trying to break open.
Apps from 3rd party stores will be sandboxed just like apps from the App Store are today.
Some of it. But Apple has the real-world identity of developers/organizations, and will ban them from the App Store for malicious behavior.
And next to no privacy protections are from App Sandbox. You can turn off things like advertising identifiers, but there are a million other unique hardware identifiers as well as things like IP addresses which can be used to track someone.
The way Apple solves this is - you need to get user consent to track, which will also hand you the advertising identifier. But if the user does not consent, you can't work around it by correlating other data from the phone. Or we will kick you out of the store.
> There are lots of scam apps on the App Store, despite Apple's review.
Just imagine how bad it would be without review.
> Apps from 3rd party stores will be sandboxed just like apps from the App Store are today.
Will they? Without someone reviewing/approving entitlements for side-loaded apps, they can all effectively seek out as many entitlements from the menu as they want.
There's really no point in having Apple check those permissions. It would be much better if the user could check entitlements.
What Apple currently offers (the privacy information and the tracking consent) is all based on goodwill from the publisher -- if the publisher says they don't track you, but they still do, it's going to be very hard to prove.
The magical rockstar engineers of Apple will listen for their best in the world UX and handcraft artisanal UI that will respectfully explain users what causes the popup.
Not to mention the vast majority of users will not bother to deal with alternative app stores when the vast overwhelming majority of existing apps will remain on the official App Store.
Oh my sweet summer child! Lol
My own position, in comparison, actually is. Contrary to your insinuation, it is based on jadedness and cynicism. I’ll give you the Cliff’s Notes of this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32163704
1. Facebook and Google, to put it bluntly, are not exactly product powerhouses these days and any attempts to present yet another platform will be met with skepticism and they simply will not have enough new apps to lure over users.
2. Without customer interest, third party developers will keep their apps on the official App Store, just as they do on Android on the Play Store, because that’s where the users are. They want the most eyeballs.
2.5. Sure, Facebook and co. can try to cut exclusive deals with third party devs to get apps on their store, but that is tricky, just see Microsoft’s or BlackBerry’s failure to woo devs to their platforms.
3. Consumers are tired of all of the accounts and services they have to deal with at this point, and dealing with more app stores will be a source of friction. Users are tired of this shit.
4. Facebook or Google trying to spur artificial growth of third party iOS stores by making their apps exclusive will likely run into regulator pushback, especially if those stores permit greater user tracking.
Okay, now justify your insult.
I have yet to see a convincing argument that any of these corporations will be able to charm users into joining competing app stores. So instead they will try to force them. Leading to backlash, and within days you'd see them putting their apps back on the App Store and begging the public for forgiveness. These are not companies who are particularly good at delivering huge new products anymore, and the difficulty is compounded by the fact that they would be playing on Apple's own platform.
The argument doesnt make sense. The user is either tech savvy or not tech savvy.
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And even more: You people talk as if that doesnt happen today. Nobody will try to scam anyone by creating an entire freaking APP STORE while they can just phish them by sending them an email to get their credit card numbers and whatever data they can collect.
And further: Today anti-virus software is capable of detecting and preventing most of those scams already. We are not in mid 2000s. Anti virus software will not disappear with the appearance of 3rd party app stores. So the problem does not even make sense to be considered a problem.
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It just feels like some of you people (i mostly saw Americans) are SO mentally hostage to your corporations that you really defend the indefensible.