I still recall the outrage when Apple published their first app on Android and it turned out to be Move to IOS. It seems strange that it took so long for the opposite service to appear.
Apple wouldn't allow it on App Store. And accessing those information likely requires lot of approval at different levels. The only thing changed was the Anti-Trust issues going on where Apple continues to claim people could switch to Android. So now having Google's App on their Store is part of that. And I would not be surprised if Apple intent to use it as their PR later along with shit loads of submarine articles.
Do you have a source for this? Offhand, I can't find any source -- not "reputable" source, but any source, period -- that confirms there was ever a "Switch to Android" app that Apple blocked from the App Store. The Register's story on "Switch to Android" from April of this year says, "Google, which supports sideloaded apps on Android devices, also wants people to buy an Android phone and, after a year or so of planning, has finally deployed its own iOS app to help that happen." The Register is hardly the kind of publication to softpedal stories to keep Apple (or anyone else) happy, so if this "year or so of planning" was 2015 and they didn't get to actually put it in the store until 2022, it's real hard to believe that wouldn't have been mentioned.
Happened before with Kindle, for example (that originally had a store built in …which Apple blocked so that they could release in-app purchasing a few months later)
And that's kind of what I'm getting at. It's not that Apple doesn't do petty, vindictive, and greedy things. It's that if Apple had been blocking Google from submitting an app for five years, it's very hard to believe there wouldn't have been an "anonymous leak" from someone on Google's side over it -- this is the sort of story that tech reporters would eat up, and Google would have good reason to want it out there.
What is a submarine article?
It's a variant of popper's paradox I suppose.
We use that term at work right now on my team all the time, and it has nothing with app stores or gatekeeping or anything like that.
Making it the popular name for the same thing on mobile was the marketing.
> 1. install (software, especially an app) obtained from a third-party source rather than an official retailer.
> 2. copy or transfer (data) from one device to another directly, typically by means of a link such as a USB cable or wireless connection.
The Google Ngram for “sideloading” shows, like you mention, a measurable uptick in usage after the iPhone launch in 2007.
Looking closer, there is a steep increase in frequency after the year 2000, with the steepest slope from 2005 - 2009. [1]
[0]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sideloading&ye...
[1]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sideload_*&yea...
A word reduced to meaninglessness by surveillance capitalists and useful idiots who are furious at people being able to hire a large company to protect them from Facebook.
True, although lately they've been under more regulatory scrutiny so I highly doubt something like this would get disallowed, especially if the equivalent app is allowed on Android.
The likelihood of the ruling government to support the interests of its citizens is dependent on the power (negotiating leverage) that the individual citizens have over large government-controlled institutions (inc. coporations). Authoritarian systems produce generally compounding effects, so the idea that we should just sit around and do nothing while they compound is dangerous. When the time comes that protesting surveilance, censorship, etc. is dire then it already be too late because government will have the powers of surveilance, censorship, etc. on its side to squash dissent.
It is better to depend on systems (like FOSS) that are fail-safe for freedom. That is- they naturally err on the side of individual liberty. This is because authoritarian societies are non-recoverable and have to be rebooted by adjacent (free) societies.
(Here, so the paradox would go, the tolerant society Android, gets hijacked by the less tolerant Apple.)