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!!
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 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.
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”.
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.
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.
Not only that, but this act requires the ability to uninstall bloatware.
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.
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...
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.