Apple to allow outside app stores in overhaul spurred by EU laws
bloomberg.com
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If you want to run unsigned software or extensions you will have to boot into a recovery console and change the security model. The warning dialogs will be enough to discourage most use. Things like ApplePay and iCloud may be disabled depending how far you reduce security, but you'll be able to do whatever you want.
I think it be a great solution to have a more uniform solution across all devices and platforms. It would create a boom in the hacker community, while still keeping >99.99% of users running from sealed system snapshots.
You can say a lot of negative things about Apple, but their incentives lined up with the end users more often than companies like Meta and Google.
Why do people continue to tout this as some sort of gotcha? Android has multiple app stores yet this doesn't occur.
However, what I do like is that if I want to download some other client for Instagram from F-Droid for example, I can, unlike in the Apple App Store. Currently I use one that blocks apps, enhances image quality on upload and download, etc. Not really possible on iOS.
Maybe not yet specifically with Meta, but it absolutely does happen. Fortnite is the most obvious example.
Same as on a computer, I use Windows, but it'd be absurd for me to download software only through the Microsoft Store app.
Why would EU Lawmakers be satisfies with some crazy process that requires rebooting the device or going through 10+ steps to enable sideloading? These EU laws will likely require low-friction alternate app stores, which means actually installing Facebook via an alternate method might mean something as low-friction as meta.com/store -> "trust Meta store" -> open and install Facebook.
2. The current Settings menu in iOS is already a jumbled mess as it is, thanks to years of layers upon layers of options added into it. Even simply getting into developer mode would cause some friction.
3. Even on Android, it's somewhat out of the way:
https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-enable-developer-mode-on-and...
4. I'm talking about the existence of alternate app stores themselves adding friction. Meta forcing users to use their store would be adding an additional wrinkle as it is. Think about the current streaming space. Many many users are already forced to deal with multiple services and managing their accounts just to get into content. And now they're going to be doing it on their iPhones? It's quite likely that a substantial amount would just forego dealing with a Meta app store and just start using the the mobile website - or just abandon Facebook on their phones altogether, which is even worse than Meta.
5. A point I mention in the link but not above: EU lawmakers, who are already suspicious of Meta, will likely scrutinize any third party app stores launched by them or other big tech companies anyway. So it's not as if it would be unpoliced for privacy violations and the like.
If anything, such app stores would be a treasure trove for regulators to inspect.
It is not a downgrade, because for those who live in democracies, such regulations are decided by we, the people, and thus we should ultimately place our faith in the democratic system, not in any private corporation, no matter how benevolent-seeming.
> because if you PII gets siphoned to China you won't get any remediation whatsoever
Evidence that this isn't already happening anyway? Whither current iOS users in China?
> at least for as long as they remain the world's manufacturing capital
Don't worry, Apple is hard at work shifting their supply chain to India and Vietnam. Right? Right?
I'm taking about a situation where a government, say a fictional United States, implements privacy regulations. For any legitimate company, they must follow these to operate in the United States.
In this scenario, the Government has no way to protect vulnerable citizens who search "free clash of clans gems ios", download a third-party app store provided by some data company in China, and have their PII beamed to servers in China (bonus points if it uses a zero-day to do something like purchase a bunch of product from Amazon or otherwise use the person's phone as a zombie in a botnet or money-laundering scheme). This is currently impossible on iOS without the data firm having something like a hacked Apple Enterprise account it's using to distribute software outside of the App Store, where it's checked to ensure IDFA compliance and levels of static/dynamic behavior analysis & preventing JIT code compilation or most things that could run unaudited code.
I've also speculated elsewhere that perhaps Apple could open source binary analysis tools, or at least present some sort of public-facing service to scan binaries. They could manage the semi-opening of their platform themselves, if they wanted to.
The argument for this on Apple's side is that you're not paying just for the payment processing, but you pay it as a fee for benefiting from the user base that Apple attracts via their investment into their R&D from the hardware, to the UI design, to the APIs that enable your app itself to run.
0: https://www.notebookcheck.net/iPhone-14-Pro-Max-production-i...
If you want to back to take back that argument, great.
So, the whole idea of "Well you are paying for all this other stuff" is completely off the table, and you can't use it, because people pay 1400$ for the phone.
So lets all just completely ignore that idea, and lets stop pretending like Apple is "owed" anything for the phone that belongs to the user.
The phone belongs to the user, and they paid a fair price for it, so no Apple is not owed money for any of other stuff.
> at what point is it "you cannot make money off your software on the backend"?
Apple can keep doing that if they want. By competing in the free market.
They just can't force people onto that anymore. They will have to actually make a better product, and hope users go to that store, instead of alternatives.
I don't see how this answers my question. It's literally just "does making money on the hardware justify allowing other developers to benefit from your software updates and APIs without paying you?" Because if Apple turns their phone into a console by dropping the price (or even just adding $600 worth of carbon nanotubes to the package) it sounds like you'd still prefer if any developer could make their own app store to get around their 30% fee on purchases.
Well the phone belongs to the user. So yes the user should be able to do whatever they want with their own device, including installing other app stores.
So anything at all, that you were talking about, about Apple being "owed" anything, just doesnt matter. Lets just ignore Apple being owed anything, because they sold the device and it now belongs to the user.
> turns their phone into a console
We can worry about the console market once it is a 2 company duopoly, worth trillions of dollars.
It is perfectly fine to care more about the phone market, simply because it is larger, more pervasive, and more market centralized.
Also, thats whataboutism. Maybe there are problems with the console industry. But regardless of that, it should not stop us from taking action on the much larger phone industry.
We can prioritize our actions, to the markets that are the most important, even if you think that other, smaller markets have issues.
The 30% is simply a money making endeavor, it's not at all related to their R&D, hardware design etc.
Actually it's not even an isolated case, it's the dominant business model for gaming console.
Back in the day computer vendors didn’t let anyone else write software for their systems. If you wanted software you had to pay the vendor an arm and two legs to write it.
It'd be absurd for me to download software through the Microsoft Store
And? There are plenty of apps that are exclusive to F-Droid, as well, and the sky still hasn't fallen.
Meanwhile, two companies have kept a stranglehold on all mobile app sales and mobile app payments, ensuring that businesses can't exist that can't afford a 30% cut into their margins.
It's been over a decade of this insane profiteering on behalf of Apple, and in some respects Google, it's about time that the mobile app distribution market and mobile app payments market are allowed to compete and flourish.
It is very possible that this hasn't ocurred because google has not enforced the same level of privacy-related restrictions that apple has (which reportedly costed facebook ~10 billion dollars [1]).
I'm a strong supporter of device owners being able to do what they please with their devices, but the risks are there and are very real.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2021/11/06/appl...
They'll probably just be on both with some perk incentivising a switch.
Moving from one store that takes a 30% cut to a store you own makes a lot of sense if you can carry over at least 70% of your paying customers.
This didn't happen on Android, macOS, or Windows, despite all of them allowing alternative app stores.
Similarly, Google is converging on the same anticompetitive practices with the Play Store.
This duopoly quite literally prevents competition in the mobile app distribution and mobile app payments markets.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
Thankfully, there are more responsible parties and more capable security paradigms than the one Apple forces down users' throats via the App Store, and users should have the choice to use them on the devices they own.
Maybe if Apple actually faced competition when it came to the App Store, they would take the security of users, and not just their profit margins, more seriously and wouldn't let fraud and malware affect hundreds of millions of their own customers.
So again, how does this hurt choice? You can choose a dozen other phones. Your ability to participate in the smartphone revolution isn’t hindered in any meaningful way.
To be clear, I HATE the App Store review process as it stands. But that’s not because I don’t have a choice and somehow magically think other app stores will fix everything. It’s because it is objectively badly run as a business process. They don’t respond for weeks. The communication is entirely arbitrary. The application of rules is wholly inconsistent.
I’m not sure a second App Store will help with that.
I can still only see mostly downsides by creating confusion for consumers like others have said will happen.
It doesn't matter, the consumer still bought the device. It's their hardware, they own the iPhone. They deserve the last say over what runs on their computer. A system like the current M1 Macs (unlocked bootloader, OS with overrides) would completely shut everyone up over Apple's abuse here. This legislation is a step in the right direction.
> I’m not sure a second App Store will help with that.
If nothing else, it gives Apple an incentive to compete. Something I'd argue is sorely needed on iOS.
> I can still only see mostly downsides by creating confusion for consumers like others have said will happen.
Well, it didn't really cause any confusions when Android did it, or even when Microsoft added sideloading to Xbox. Very little evidence supports the claim that everything will fall to pandemonium when third-party stores hit iOS.
Consumers own the hardware NOT the software. Apple, Google, etc are expected maintain the software over a long period of time. The content on the device is owned and manage by developers, Apple, Google, etc. You only rent access to the software. It's not yours. You can buy a TV but you still have a cable bill. The TV is yours, the channels are not!
What do you mean? Google has been making things easier for third-party app stores over time, not converging to Apple's model. (Most recently in adding the auto-update permission in Android 12.)
Sometimes, we get a good outcome because titanic companies' competing interests are balanced... but that doesn't mean we should forget that if that balance were upset the winner would screw over users in a nanosecond.
I'm guessing you aren't a gamer. This absolutely happened on Android and PC. Fortnight is the most obvious example on Android and the various PC game stores are constantly battling over exclusives which has led to bizarre and annoying situations like this[1]
[1] - https://wccftech.com/goat-simulator-3-devs-tell-players-to-u...
But I don't think there's that much threat for the gaming + mobile market, in the sense that Fortnite aside, I'm pretty sure EA/UbiSoft/Activision Blizzard/etc. don't really have "killer apps" for iOS that would entice a lot of users to use their third party app stores. For all other types of mobile games, Apple Arcade is hard to beat.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30204012
Though perhaps there is a concern if Chinese gacha game makers start making their own stores.
How so? Steam is still alive and well, while publisher-exclusive stores are slowly disappearing. Sure, Epic Store still exists and has solid market share, but it's arguably more than just a publisher store.
What I just mean is a few years ago this trend started happening, Epic was but one of them trying to break into the prior Steam/GoG landscape.
EA has started putting games back on Steam [0] and so has Ubisoft [1]. I've heard rumors of battle.net going the same way, but nothing seems to be confirmed as of now. Since nearly all of those stores have been inferior to Steam feature-wise with the exception of exclusives, I think it's mostly save to say that publishers have mostly given up on trying to force their users onto their own controlled store.
Epic is a different topic, since they seem to actually try to compete with it in terms of features and catalog and opened up the store for third party games, which most publishers did not.
As for Microsoft, this might be my bubble, but it seems to me that store isn't really considered a major player, similarly to GOG, itch.io and the likes.
[0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/ea-puts-first-wave-of-games-ba...
[1] https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ubisoft-games-are-coming-ba...
At the end of the day, if you're this afraid of Facebook, you're free to not use it. There's no reason other users should be restricted because you think that the spectre of Facebook might lurk in the shadows.
I guess that is the end of our discussion as there is no way to counter this type of logic other than saying that if you didn't agree with Apple's walled garden policy, you were free to not use Apple devices.
iOS is.
[1] - https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/05/03/incredible-meta-pl...
[2] - https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/27/22253162/iphone-users-tot...
1. Regulators would make a beeline to inspect such a third party app store/the sideloadable binaries they present for irregularities, illicit tracking, data violations, etc.
2. Slap them with anti-competitive monopolistic behavior by engaging in the highly disruptive act of depriving the main App/Play Store users of their apps. Thus, they would be forced by regulator action to host their apps on both their stores and official stores.
Regulators aren't too keen on Meta these days, they're not too keen on Big Tech in general, this isn't a vendetta against Apple.
That's equally bad though. What happens to people that don't use either?
Having a smartphone has become as ubiquitous as having electricity or running water now that nobody questions living without one. It's pretty much a must have.
That's why the Apple/Google platform are starting to attract regulators, which is only a good thing.
The thing is, in the developing world, smartphones and the various apps have really improved people's lives, mostly by getting ahead in speed and innovation of what the governments, public services and local companies could offer the traditional way.
So it's not like everyone is forced to get a smartphone, but everyone got a smartphone because it now allowed everyone to communicate better, organize better, and sell their services/goods easier.
You are also right that mobile apps make it easier for people that do have them to do all of those things. However the problem appears when it's so convenient to have a phone that when making decisions about how to provide access to things they think of only two options: Android or iOS. I have none and I don't like being a third class citizen when I want to connect to my bank, to my COVID appointment or, god forbid, interact with the government machine.
Where did I do that? I wasn't saying that smartphones should be the norm for everything , I was jusy saying how society usually sees smartphone ownership as a necessity in certain countries because they reduce the friction for many communication and organization task that would otherwise be much more difficult. I wasn't saying that's how I want it to be or that this is a good thing, I'm saying how things are in the real world and in which direction they are going.
Like for example in my country, parent-teacher communication regarding school and child matters is done via WhatsApp/Telegram. Is that good? No, obviously not. Ideally we'd have an internal school chat/meesaging system with logins for parents and teachers like how proably things are in Scandinavian countries I imagine. But since my country is poor and schools could never afford to pay market rate devs and sys-admins to implement and maintain such communication systems, the likes of Telegram and WhatsApp took over this role because they're free, convenient, frictionless and since "everyone already has a smartphone" they already know how to use these apps.
So there you go, that's how the likes of WahtsApp have such a huge market share in the lives of all people and businesses, especially in developing countries.
>I don't like being a third class citizen when I want to connect to my bank, to my COVID appointment or, god forbid, interact with the government machine.
I'd be curious where this is the case. There are enough "old-school" banks where you don't need a smartphone, and stuff like government interactions are usually regulated so that they can be accessible for people without smartphones and also for people with disabilities. Even in developing countries. Digitization of government serivices has been implemented to make things more efficient and reduce the need for paperwork, commuting and waiting in lines, not to completely replace the old systems.
As someone who works with many business, I can tell you that this is false. There are many more ways to market services than via Facebook and other related Meta properties.
Are your businesses local, allowing you to just use physical flyers or something?
- Google Maps optimization, asking or discounting for ratings
- Rewards and affiliate programs
- Physical flyers sometimes, yes
- Free samples at various stores if food related
Startups:
- SEO
- Content marketing
- Affiliate programs
- Cold emailing, DMing on other platforms
- Sponsorships with creators like on YouTube
- Gamification
- And of course, word of mouth and simply having a good product
Unless you're big or have lots of VC, ads usually don't work. The companies I've worked with, we tried many different ad models which cost a lot of money but ultimately didn't bring in the traffic commensutate to the cost.
Just because someone has decided they like the Apple App Store now, doesn't mean opinions won't change over time, or that the product doesn't change. Therefore being able to easily change your options is good.
That someone could still use Apple's app store and just ignore the alternatives, just like the large majority of Android users.
Unless apps are exclusive to the alternatives like this whole Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp hypothetical.
Or maybe Meta are forced to release on Apple iPhone because consumers have power. Well that same power can get them to release on the Apple App Store if there were alternatives. That's how supply and demand in the free market works.
It's not something you can bait Grandma into very easily. It's a useless attack vector when Safari comes preinstalled on every iPhone.
And if you believe exploiting evergreen Safari from JS to arbitrary execution is the same as directly running malicious instructions that came in sideloaded app then I have nothing more to say.
I know such people who use alternative browsers. They are OK jumping through an extra hoop to use non-notarized enthusiast-made software. And don't underestimate how people like to reskin their OS GUI which on Apple hardware is not possible without full root and disabling various security measures.
So you are literally free to choose to use Facebook or not, but if you want to participate in society, use banks, get a job, etc, you are not free to escape the Apple and Google duopoly, because their illegal anticompetitive actions have artificially limited consumer choice.
However I still agree it's a dying boogeyman.
And we're not talking advanced memory safety exploit, breakout the ROPs "backdoor". They requested permission to install apps, then went on to silently install any apk that was put in a path with 0 verification.
It's the kind of lazy mistake that puts on full display the fact that at the end of the day, Epic doesn't care about anything as bold as freedom. They were so giddy to get around the Play Store cut that they couldn't put 5 seconds into thinking about anything besides "how quickly can we roll this thing out to people and get our cash cow back on track?"
If users had the option of using a browser with better security and features, an exploit in Safari wouldn't be as big of a threat.
Here's a fun figure: exploits for iOS are cheaper than exploits for Android because exploits for iOS are more common than those for Android.
Consumers should have the choice of running whatever software they want on the devices they own, in part because that gives them the option to use more secure apps than the ones Apple forces all iOS users to use.
If we remove the part where you try and brush of Epic's negligence because "oh yeah?! Apple makes mistakes too!!!" and try to imply that Chrome isn't a massively more lucrative target than Safari... this is just fearmongering about security.
Alternative app stores on Android are either F Droid, or crap. And the crap ones vastly outnumber F Droid, and mostly push malware laced versions of the play store, like Aptoide. The ones that don't are bloatware like Samsung's half-baked attempt at an app store, or the Amazon App Store serving up outdated packages so you can enjoy last year's vulnerabilities today.
> Here's a fun figure: exploits for iOS are cheaper than exploits for Android because exploits for iOS are more common than those for Android.
For 12 of the 15 years they've both existed iOS exploits were more expensive, and unlike now the margin was entire orders of magnitude.
I've lead shipped Android products from datasheets. Would not bring up Android in any conversation about security: you don't need fresh backdoors with the culture SoC manufacturers have driven. A quarter of the platform is on versions that stopped getting security updates years ago.
That's why I'm perfectly happy with Android being the OS for psuedo-Stallmanists who say things like "Consumers should have the choice of running whatever software they want on the devices they own".
It's disappointing that Apple is going to let something that's proven itself to overwhelmingly be used for garbage onto the platform because non-technical people are getting lobbied by companies with an agenda under the guise of "freedom". Let Android be the containment zone for that stuff.
No, you are not because facebook is Big. So for instance restaurants, announcements, some news etc will only be on facebook. So this reads like "just don't use any electricity"... technically 'possible' but a completely useless argument.
But all my local events are on it. So yes I can delete my account… but that amounts to becoming a social outcast.
Epic is offering free games and discounts to lure players in all the time. this is excellent for consumers.
The problem with goat simulator is 100% on the developer and not some dark pattern imposed by steam. If you have an xbox or ps controller it will work out of the box without steam (provided you have installed the drivers). Steam has a gamepad emulation layer and that's why the dev recommended using it as a launcher for the non-steam game, because any controller will work with it.
> I'm guessing you aren't a gamer. > Fortnight
Seriously? it's Fortnite
However, you can't rest easy with a monopoly, even with a BDFL. At some point, Gabe will step down, and Steam will either go sideways or get sold to Microsoft or Google, ending the love story.
That's why I buy some games on Epic, to keep Steam on their toes, even though they are still the best option out there. I tell everyone I know to do the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminat...
And in any case a little inconvenience is a small price to prevent monopolies.
Followed by calling the game "Fortnight" gave me a bit of a chuckle.
Most people I know just don't buy anything that isn't on Steam. People only use the Epic store cause they give out free games all the time in a sad attempt to get people to use it more, but most people don't care and would rather stay with Steam (while occasionally redeeming some free games on Epic). As for something like GoG, they give you DRM-free portable installers, so obviously some people like that and occasionally use it instead of Steam.
There are effectively only two smartphone platforms available to users, and destroying one of the only meaningful differences between the platforms in the name of “user choice” is nothing if not ironic.
If you want to stay in the playpen, that's fine, but there's no reason why users who want to use the full potential of their devices shouldn't be able to in order to keep you happy.
It's not a dichotomy. If you want to keep your options limited, stay in the playpen. Users who value freedom, competition, and efficiencies of markets can also enjoy those things, but they currently are prevented because Apple will pull no stops to protect their App Store moneyhose.
The counter is that these users do have a choice. They can buy an Android.
Allowing different stores might end up removing choice for the end user who like Apple's current approach as the large developers with power like Meta will likely force the different stores on us. This change is reducing Apple's power, but that power isn't all going to the end user. It is empowering Meta, Google, Amazon, and other big tech companies who are seemingly even less likely to act in the end user's best interest than Apple.
The majority of the mobile OS market in the US is iOS, the rest is Android. Apple is responsible for 2x mobile app revenue than Google, but Apple and Google both make up more than 99% of all mobile app sales.
When talking about monopolies, the working definition from the FTC are firms that have significant and durable market power such that they can set prices and exclude competitors[1]. That describes the Apple and Google duopoly accurately. Such firms and their anticompetitive tactics are outlawed by antitrust legislation in the US.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
But for whatever reason that I can’t quite explain (especially on android, on iOS I think iMessage locks people in. Maybe on Android it’s the Google suite?), others haven’t made a dent.
I can, to some degree, understand people's gripe with Apple for DRM behaviors on hardware you own. But I don't see why forcing Apple to host multiple app stores will provide more user-choice in the mobile OS space.
It might make Apple's platform more compelling for some users. But it will do the opposite for other users and still doesn't solve the duopoly problem you're citing.
I also don't see what the FTC's definition of a monopoly brings to the discussion other than to boogey-man the big bad corporations.
It sounds like your issue is with the lack of OS choice in the mobile market. Forcing Apple to allow other app stores does nothing to solve this problem.
Apple and Google are doing the same with their dominance in the mobile OS market to dominate the mobile app distribution and mobile app payments markets.
If you don't see the significance of literal illegal anticompetitive business practices, I don't know what to tell you.
https://www.justice.gov/atr/complaint-us-v-microsoft-corp
Has Apple compelled asked companies that are using Android to dump Android and switch to iOS (for some money)? (P.17)
How about having 3rd party iPhone manufacturers be restricted to using iOS as a condition for licensing and distributing iOS? (P.18 - note, if you're making Android and requiring all of the 3rd party manufactures that use it to also have Google Play... that's ok)
Has Apple entered into exclusive contracts with all the top ISPs to brand their web pages to work with Safari but not Chrome? (P.28 - note, if you are making Chrome and make a site not work with... say Firefox, that's ok)
So yes, Microsoft and the DOJ went to court. But the thing was about Microsoft forcing its terms on other companies that excluded it's competitors. Is Apple going to other companies and enforcing terms that are excluding Android?
There are arguments for side-loading on Apple, but that doesn't have anything to do with breaking up the iOS-Android mobile OS duopoly, which seems to be the thing you're really mad about.
Android allows side-loading. Making iOS more like Android doesn't strike me as "increasing consumer choice".
>illegal anticompetitive business practices
None of what Apple has done is apparently illegal. In fact, this is a _new_ law that Apple is complying with.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/atr/complaint-us-v-microsoft-corp
I don't think so- they'll try, they might build their own stores, but I doubt they can force the customers to switch.
1. Consumers are already sick and tired of having to do account management already and having to deal with Meta or Google forcing them to do more of that will lead to backlash.
2. I'm unconvinced that Meta and Google have the product capability wherewithal to force a great migration, judging by their attempts at new products in recent years, let alone what basically amounts to a new platform. The Facebook Home launcher went nowhere and I'm pretty sure Android Instant Apps didn't either. They don't really fare very well outside of their home turf, and iOS is definitely not theirs.
3. Regulators, particularly in the EU, would not sit idly by while Big Tech lures customers to shady third party app stores; if anything, these stores would present opportunities for greater scrutiny and more crackdowns.
4. I'm not even sure if Meta can get away with pulling a crucial app such as WhatsApp away from the main App Store. That seems like monopolistic behavior, and disruptive to the lives of tens of millions of people who use it for basic communications. The EU would probably mandate them host it on their third party app store AND on the official App Store.
5. I do have a carve out exception for games, because publishers regularly engage in extractive abusive behavior and gamers just take it or pirate:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30204012
I do think the possibility of a Bytedance app store/sideloaded .ipa is a wildcard, as TikTok seems to be the current killer app on mobile.
My main point is that it's not about actually creating an app store ecosystem to compete with Apple's. I agree that that would be difficult (although existing ecosystems like Steam would almost certainly go for it, as you seem to concede). My main point is that they would just immediately make you sideload to use Facebook, Fortnite, etc.
> My main point is that they would just immediately make you sideload to use Facebook
What about my points about the regulators? Meta does not exist within a vacuum. They are under as much scrutiny, probably more, than Apple. Sideloaded binaries will end up combed through by regulators, government watchdogs, security firms, Brian Krebs, etc., to check for Meta malfeasance. Plus, the point about forced migrations being potentially monopolistic behavior.
And again, they can try to make users sideload, but a not-insignificant minority would not comply. Forcing them to jump through new hoops while presenting no new benefits would not be a good user experience. Plenty would take to social media to complain. Many would read up about Meta's dastardly data policies. It would be a PR nightmare. The mea culpas and reversals would come quicker than you can say "Senate hearing."
This is also all overlooking the fact that Meta as a company is in a pivotal business situation right now- DAU was falling a few quarters ago, they just spent a ton of money on the metaverse with no results other than avatar legs to show for it, and so on. Trying to do something as disruptive as forcing their customers to get their apps from a new source could be highly detrimental to them.
Not to mention that it's not much use for most social media platforms, assuming this doesn't allow them to bypass privacy restrictions. The only apps eho would immediately benefit from such a move would be the ones handling payments.
This is just flat out not true with networked devices. I want my tech illiterate mother on a platform with no malware. That includes no malware on other devices that can contact hers and trick her into installing the same malware on her device. Apple’s iOS is the only computing platform that she has ever used on which she has avoided being tricked into malware installation. I’m skeptical that that will continue with third party app stores becoming a thing.
She doesn’t know what that is. She won’t remember what I said 5 minutes after I leave. She will blindly follow the instructions of any official-looking website or any scam caller that instructs her to disable these protections in order to “watch a video” (actually sideload an executable).
> Apple is the master of UX; surely they can figure out a way to keep things secure for users who need it to be?
She got around all of the modern permissions and signing protections on macOS and installed a malicious phony video player that nuked her device and stole her banking credentials. It doesn’t matter what you tell her: she WILL get tricked unless it’s impossible to be tricked.
You probably shouldn't let her use the internet unsupervised, if this is true.
If not more.
If we're just telling people to do things then why not just tell app developers to publish through the App Store.
Well you should probably get her off iOS then, don't want her getting Pegasus by accident.
> That man’s name is Kosta Eleftheriou, and over the past few months, he’s made a convincing case that Apple is either uninterested or incompetent at stopping multimillion-dollar scams in its own App Store. He’s repeatedly found scam apps that prey on ordinary iPhone and iPad owners by luring them into a “free trial” of an app with seemingly thousands of fake 5-star reviews, only to charge them outrageous sums of money for a recurring subscription that many don’t understand how to cancel. “It’s a situation that most communities are blind to because of how Apple is essentially brainwashing people into believing the App Store is a trusted place,” he tells The Verge.
Apple is also responsible for distributing 500 million copies of Xcodeghost to users via the App Store[2].
The App Store model is about profits, and security is an afterthought that makes for good PR.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/21/22385859/apple-app-store-...
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7bbmz/the-fortnite-trial-is...
You are advocating for your own preferences and dressing it up as a noble pursuit of some general user choice, when the users have already chosen. You simply want to subvert their choice.
Okay, but surely there has to be some reasonable bound on what we mean by "user choice," otherwise given any finite set of products we can say there is suppression of choice of every customer who wants any of the infinite set of products that does not exist. Of course there are endless combinations of features that I might want to exist in a product, but the fact that not every conceivable product exists is not (in my view) sufficient to show that customer choice is being suppressed.
Maybe I want a Playstation 5, but in the enclosure of an Xbox Series X because I prefer the look of the latter. Is Sony suppressing customer choice by only offering the Playstation 5 in one enclosure?
Maybe I want a folding phone, but I want it to by an iPhone. Is Apple suppressing customer choice by not offering any folding phones?
My answer to both of those examples is "No." If you want a gaming console that looks exactly like an Xbox Series X, it's reasonable to that have to buy an Xbox. I think if you want a folding phone it's totally reasonable that you have to go to manufacturers that offer them. It's not reasonable to desire some specific set of requirements and require that one particular manufacturer provide you with a product that fulfills them.
What we are actually discussing is Apple's anticompetitive restrictions against third-party app stores and sideloading. These restrictions harm user choice especially in light of iOS being part of a duopoly. Apple's anticompetitive restrictions are what the EU's Digital Markets Act is addressing to increase user choice.
EA and Epic have entered the chat. This has absolutely happened on Windows. Source: the PC attached to my TV where my kid plays games, just this week.
I would posit that there are two possibilities for why it hasn't happened on Android:
1. The UX for alternative app stores is so terrible that they may as well not be allowed.
2. Not enough people want to pay for software on Anrdoid for this to be worthwhile.
And as a side note, Amazon tried this on Android (requiring it for e.g. Prime Video), but gave up at some point.
PayPal sends me MFA-ish verification codes via WhatsApp.
At least, that's how I expect it would work.
I would say this is one, and by far the most important case, where Apple's incentives aggressively oppose those of the end users'.
Whether this is enough to tip the balance of which company is 'worse' is a value judgment, but I cannot fathom how people argue in good faith for this blatantly anti-consumer and anti-fundamental-freedom vertical monopoly that is enforced with strong crypto. Crypto should be working for the user, not against them to secure Apple's ability to rent seek on all economic activity that passes through the user's device. And no, the two are not fundamentally coupled, as Apple will have you believe.
Interesting. Hadn't thought about this before. Why?
Is it the app store that makes their influence possible?
If they were going to do that, why wouldn't they have done it already on Android?
> You can say a lot of negative things about Apple, but their incentives lined up with the end users more often than companies like Meta and Google
This sounds like even more of an argument that your fear is unfounded. If Google doesn't care about users as much as Apple but still has managed to make it unappealing enough to have a separate Facebook app store, why wouldn't Apple be able to do the same?
What am I missing here? What’s the problem?
I think this sort of relief valve will also breed interesting system utilities and user interface ideas for Apple's mobile OSes, provided that software using private APIs can still pass the signing process. Maybe they could have avoided some of the Stage Manager fiasco if they had years of third party experimentation to observe on their own platforms.
The ease of everything in iOS is 100% worth a 30% cut once you’re established (speaking to the small business program) - AND everyone forgets, Apple’s cut 15% after the first year of subscriptions, no matter how much you make.
The reason the Mac “side load” exists is because of AppKit - and the hoops one must jump through to get things to run halfway decent with gatekeeper is maddening to the nth degree. Fine, let people side load and deal with that on their own - but do not act like it’s “a weekend” worth of development time to get right.
Everyone is winging because they won’t (or know they can’t) make something damn good - take the time perfecting the craft and finding the targets no one can see rather than throwing stones.
But here’s the rub - those competitor apps must use the “universal” apis. They don’t get to use UIKit, CoreData, Foundation (the full one), CoreBluetooth, CoreMotion, ML, etc … they need the open source community (as AshiLinux has done) to build the APIs apple is not paid to make. Then have those reviewed and dealt with in a Gatekeeper like fashion - absolute pain awaits.
Writing Swift in Linux is both beautiful and humbling - there are horrible rough edges, you have to go lower more often than you’d like.
My issue is everyone has it pretty good - and a loud voice is going to make the experience less great overall, at the expense of us all being more equal.
I can only recount from my direct experience, and the style of software that is driving this campaign literally wants to make loot boxes more profitable. They cannot enjoy the natural consequences of making something truly valuable in a subscription form to get the fee down to 15%; and they’re upset. So maybe I’m spiteful, but it feels justified.
One can at least see the incentive structure towards things of value - i.e. you’re stuck in 30% land if all you want to do is coin transactions, get the benefits of Apple Pay if you’re e-commerce / delivery, or provide long term value in sub form and get the steep discounts.
And in some ways, we are arguing over a dead corpse. It's possible that VR/AR will hit an inflection point - not by glasses - but by people actually making the 'real malleable world' like DynamicLand and Humane. Those paradigms may very well leave Apple in the dust - because the way Apple has approached this argument to me feels hollow, they don't own their beliefs in the rhetoric, and even I have felt at times they've been coasting and rent seeking. Potentially I'm just misguided in thinking in the ideal.
I have bad news for you about how much software licensing costs. If your company was to license software comparable to Apple's SDKs on the open market you would be paying minimum hundreds a month for the lowest tier plans and if you get big all of them become contact us pricing.
I think all of this is implying that Apple can be the only company that iOS users trust to sign software. Its a false choice.
Making things look "scary" to discourage users from trusting others is simply FUD.
I don't think you need to do this unless the application requires you to disable SIP which is extremely rare and I would do cautiously anyway.
That's the primary reason I want side-loading.
You paid to own it, Apple puts in rules as if you're renting it. It doesn't matter that you can hack it. You shouldn't have to hack your own hardware.
It’s ridiculous to say expect that Apple is obligated in helping you use the device in ways not designed to work. Would you expect Apple also to make it possible to run PlayStation games?
No, of course not. We all know that the ability to run on unapproved roads isn't a "feature", but rather the inability to run on an unapproved road is an anti-feature that they built in the first place. For that matter, the inability to run playstation games outside a playstation is also an anti-feature which had to be engineered by Sony. For that matter, do you buy razors that only fit Gillette approved blade designs? So why restrictions on computing devices then?
I will give credit where its due in that Apple is upfront about the nature of the walled garden. Who knows, maybe there really is a market for cars that only go to approved places.
Everything intelligent comes with a set of software. You can replace that software (on almost everything?), but then it's up to you to maintain the setup how you like. That's not unique to iOS.
Most people that argue for your desired outcome can at least see that there are non-zero user-facing benefits to a walled garden. Do you really not have anyone in your life that isn’t an idealistic tech savvy power user? Apple obviously has financial incentive to maintain its 30% transaction cut, and it’s made some silly arguments to try to maintain that. However it’s also raised some very legitimate and well thought-out downsides.
At this point, the conversation has evolved so far beyond the “it’s a road!” analogy that continuing with that line of reasoning feels either ignorant or acting in bad faith, not because of any “won ground” by the pro walled garden lot, but because all that are interested in a legitimate debate know that these misleading comparisons help nobody.
It is kind of strange if you own something 100% and you can't sell it.
Without this becoming a rant, what fraction of that "security" is protecting you from nothing more than apps that didn't pay the Apple tax. You must admit, the narrative that only approved apps are "good"/"safe" is insanely self serving and conveniently hard to falsify.
You have a point but without Apple’s restrictions, someone can build tracking free Facebook client too, if that’s something people want.
If it requires diving in to Settings or connecting the phone to a computer -- Facebook would never abandon the App Store, friction to using side-loading would be too high.
If Facebook makes a change that kills the low-tracking front-ends and insists everyone be tracked more, and in response you grovel to them and put up with their new app, then no amount of EU law or App store law was ever going to protect you from yourself. Apple store polices are a red herring, the problem you're actually highlighting is the adversarial relation you have with fb.
Reminder that Epic tried this with Fortnite and eventually went back on the play store. And this was on the platform that had sideloading since day one.
Epic Games is going to put their own storefront on iOS, and it's going to have few if any of the polices for customer protection that the App Store does.
Then an app like F-Droid will come along and offer even more protections than the App Store. Confound it!
For my part, this is a step in the right direction. With a few more fixes, iOS might even become usable enough for me to buy a device that runs it.
If you wanted to use an abusive subscription system currently you would have to do it outside the app via a web browser
Then [company] lose marketshare to those who don't care about anything outside of the App Store, and when media outlets and social networks pick up on how [company] app on this third party store tracks so much more information than it used to, even more people will uninstall. It's what we've seen on Android for years, there is a huge reputation factor when it comes to third party app stores. That reputation factor is the reason why F-Droid is the major choice outside of the Play Store.
There is incentive here for app developers to continue to provide solid services. Just not Facebook, as their primary goal is tracking.
The fact that Facebook can do any spying on you at all (because it can still track you, on your current Apple device, right now) is because government regulators are dropping the ball. It's not Apple's responsibility, it's not something they're good at, and it's not something that they should be doing.
The government, so far, has been rather toothless in terms of ensuring the privacy of people and have issued paltry fines to the companies that amounted to no more than a slap on the wrist and extracting a promise that they'll do better next time (with their hands behind their back and fingers crossed).
The reason I purchase apple devices is because they are the only ones that are taking my privacy seriously.
Government regulators are letting the market decide how valuable customer data is and Apple is saying "it is valuable and our customers value not letting random people getting it." Thus, I am voting with my wallet because in this case, votes for elected officials isn't doing much.
Well... https://www.macrumors.com/2022/11/21/icloud-for-windows-corr...
You don't need the App Store for security, it isn't a dichotomy.
"Introducing: iLess - A $15/month optional subscription fee that removes sideloading from your phone."
Sure to be a smash hit, sounds like exactly what you're looking for!
I’m free to resolve my cancelled flight by either waiting a week for the free alternative or buying a combination of rail and ferry tickets to get me from Stansted to Berlin, but only because I have an understanding boss, enough money, and an app which can get me arbitrary hotels on route because that’s more than a day’s journey unless I plan to sleep in a train station.
I’m free to not remain in a country whose politics or laws I dislike. But only because I got lucky with a few things.
I’m free to not download any app which forces me to sideload. But only because they don’t exist yet on iOS (except for the ways that apparently never counted according to all the people demanding this) — there’s too many ways a theoretical “optional” can become an “actually mandatory”, from laws to employers to defacto monopolies, and those are just the ones I’ve seen examples of in other contexts.
The trouble is that the walled garden approach only works if the wall goes all the way around. If Facebook, Google, or the other big ad companies are allowed to access the iOS ecosystem without consumer protections, then they absolutely will and will force users to go along with it. This is about developer freedom, not user freedom.
Apple does. I buy a Macbook, and I can modify the bootloader to completely leave MacOS. It's a pain in the ass, and Apple certainly doesn't make it easy as it was on x86, but it's an option. Even if I use MacOS, I still have the option to disable system integrity, install unsigned apps and use third-party software managers.
That's a system that lets me escape the walled garden. They give me concessions inside their OS and an escape-hatch for third-party OSes if they really fuck things up. The iPhone has none of those things. If you buy an iPhone, your only way to leave the walled garden is to not use the iPhone. Buying an Android phone does not break your iPhone out of the walled garden.
I paid for an iPhone for my mom so that she could not load whatever she damn well pleases, because if she does I have to deal with the mess afterwards.
Some folks are okay with walled gardens for specific purposes. If that's not you, that's fine. Perhaps Apple iDevices are then not for you.
Even today it is not ok to be careless with what you put on your machine, but in a couple of decades, it could be a true disaster, specially if public services are fully tied to your digital identity. You would not want your digital self to be entertaining any random* program as guest.
* effectively random - see first point
But having a debilitating disease is a different story and beyond the persons control.
Given a choice, I and many others here will continue to learn and adapt.
The subset might include you, or a majority of HN people even. Just a smaller % of population than currently.
Regards your > Given a choice
If you have family with such issues, you know it wasn't a choice. Getting older means facing mental plasticity slowdown. You can work to be fit on that front sure, but it is an issue that we will all face and not everyone will choose as you do.
I am not sure I agree with GP's assertion that technology will be inherently harder to deal with though.
This issue can not be decided based on what is appropriate for a niche segment of society. We have a variety of options to serve the general society -- state/control, state/licensing, state/regulation, private/corporate, public/ngo, public/community, personal/ai, personal/expertise. These are not mutually exclusive options and we should discuss the possible configurations, optimal for general societal welfare, rather than denying that the problem exists.
One possibility that comes to mind is that we could possibly rely on trustworthy AI to help us understand the implications of using X in full. So if not walled gardens maybe private landscape architects or AI gardeners.
But one of the two will be required for digital life.
I don't want to buy a Nokia. Apple's hardware is really good and I want to buy their devices. I just don't want to become a serf in their digital fiefdom.
There is no reason to consider the OS and the App Store part of the device, other than marketing.
There are several, very easy to imagine mechanisms that both provide user freedom and security/idiot-resistance at the same time.
For instance, extending the "parental control" feature to have a toggle for sideloading - then, you just turn on parental control, toggle that off, and keep the PIN. Done.
The idea that the features of the product should completely unnecessarily be restricted for all users for the dubious benefit of a tiny subset of them is laughable. The only logically consistent motive to advocate for this is profit.
If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.
No one is forcing “everything to be homogenous”. If you don’t like homogeneity, then avoid it. It’s not hard to understand. My choices are none of your business just like I’m not going to criticize you for wanting more freedom to customize your device at the expense of security and stability.
Very, very bad and consumer-hostile sentiment that is inconsistent both with good ethics and with the way that the regulatory system works currently.
Regulations on goods sold exist for a purpose - to allow the user to generally buy things while having some guarantees about their lifetime/security/safety/consistency with marketing/etc.
"If you don't like it, don't buy it" implies that companies should be able to sell goods made with toxic substances, not honor their warranties, lie on their marketing, and steal and sell your personal medical information. This is bad.
If I buy a product, I expect to be able to do whatever I want with it, and to not have arbitrary limitations on how I use that product that exist purely for the sake of making the seller more rich, and this is consistent with the way that consumer protection regulations work in general.
> Uniformity and convention over configuration and customization is why people feel why iOS is more stable and secure than the Android ecosystem as a whole.
False. The vast majority of people have no opinions of whether Android or iOS is more secure. Slightly more, but very few, of them have any opinions on their relative stability, and you can attribute exactly all of that instability to a mix between (1) manufacturers making terrible drivers and support packages for their hardware and (2) Google being generally bad at designing software. It has nothing to do with "uniformity" or "convention over configuration" at all.
No one is forcing you to buy products you don’t like. You’re confusing government sanctioned duopolies (created from bad regulation) like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T for Apple. You are free to buy alternative products from other companies.
> It has nothing to do with "uniformity" or "convention over configuration" at all.
Actually it does. The hardware is uniform and consistent, and therefore so are the drivers. There is a price to choice. Google is also one of the best software companies in the world.
There are choices made for use - having a phone on which everyone around communicates, having an internet connection from the only provider in the area.
Uniformity is a choice if the alternative is a viable choice and this is a complex matter.
And look where it got us.
With regulations. That people generally accept and agree are necessary to some extent...
> No one is forcing you to buy products you don’t like.
...even for goods that you have the option of not purchasing. It literally doesn't matter how many baby bottle manufacturers there are in the US - it is illegal for all of them to put BPA in their baby bottle products, regardless of whether their competitors don't.
> You’re confusing government sanctioned duopolies
No, I'm not. The US has boatloads of laws making it illegal to sell various things in markets where there's absolutely no monopolies/duopolies/oligopolies and buyers have ample choices, such as the above.
> Actually it does. The hardware is uniform and consistent, and therefore so are the drivers.
You're intentionally changing the use of "uniformity" from being about high-level OS user-facing design ("the features of the product should completely unnecessarily be restricted for all users for the dubious benefit of a tiny subset of them" + "Uniformity and convention over configuration" = talking about OS design) to implementation, which is a completely separate issue that's unrelated to the current discussion about user freedom. This is an admittedly clever slight of hand, but makes your point no less invalid.
> There is a price to choice.
Sure - but you haven't shown what the price is to allowing users to use whatever app store they want, you've just brought in completely irrelevant examples like phone hardware choice.
> Google is also one of the best software companies in the world.
Regardless of the truth of this statement, it doesn't change the fact that they're generally bad (note that "bad" is absolute, "best" is relative) at designing software, per my lived experience with dozen of bugs in dozens of Google products across browsers and operating systems over years of use.
Apple's freedom is to make their devices as they see fit. User's freedom is to vote with her wallet. Feel free to buy whatever device you like if you want to have the ability to shoot yourself in the foot and get pwned, I like to have it in some circumstances but it's not what I would recommend to all of my non-tech contacts. I appreciate most EU privacy laws but not where it comes close to taking people's choice to voluntarily give up some freedoms for security, it's the opposite of empowering them.
> The vast majority of people have no opinions of whether Android or iOS is more secure.
This is just some random unsubstantiated claim. Apple buys entire billboards in city centers that basically promote privacy. You are saying you know better than their entire marketing department.
Even laypeople pay attention and notice that it's their Android owning friends' bank accounts get hijacked but not iPhone owning friends, etc.
> you can attribute exactly all of that instability to
Whatever you attribute this to, potato, potato, the end result is one has been more stable, more secure, supported for longer, more profitable for indie app developers etc than the other.
So much misinformation
Maybe purchase a different product that more closely aligns with your needs.
0: ie. someone watches you enter your apple id and passcode and later swipes your phone, only to sideload spyware that hides itself from the UI, then re-plants your phone without you knowing
Discussed previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11231631
Instead, the proposal is that people be able to install whatever software they want, that runs as a normal iOS app subject to the iOS security restrictions. Being able to install a non-Apple-approved app does not give you the ability to read and write arbitrary kernel memory, or do other actually dangerous things.
Yet, it's up to me to decide whether I want that security or whether I want to trade security for freedom/flexibility. Not you, or any other authoritarians seeking to exert control over others.
> Maybe purchase a different product that more closely aligns with your needs.
This is an incredibly toxic and user-hostile sentiment that also is completely inconsistent with the way that consumer protection laws work in general[1].
I absolutely can manifest that choice - but it doesn't matter, because I have the right to be able to make that choice for any particular manufacturer.
> To quote your linked comment, I wouldn't expect you nor any other sane consumer to purchase goods that are "made with toxic substances, not honor their warranties, lie on their marketing, and steal and sell your personal medical information".
It doesn't matter that you wouldn't expect one to - it's wrong for a seller to sell one of those things at all, and that's why we've enshrined into our legal system that "some bad things are illegal to sell, regardless of whether the consumer has the ability to avoid them or not".
> Apple does not do any of that
It's pretty blindingly obvious that I'm not claiming that Apple is doing any of those things, and just using that as an example of the point that "some things are illegal to sell".
> and I think that you're intentionally derailing the discussion by comparing their guidelines + practices to any of the above.
The one who is doing that is you, by intentionally misinterpreting my words and reading things that I didn't write. The comparison is entirely apt - "we have laws against selling/doing some bad things x, Apple is selling/doing bad things y, even though x != y it's reasonable to have laws against also selling/doing bad things y".
This is a strange red herring. Attacks of this form are protected from by the OS, not the App Store. You can't do attacks like this by sideloading apps onto your own phone in developer mode because iOS itself protects against this - and we're discussing specifically allowing users to choose what App Store they use, not relaxing any of the security restrictions of the OS. Someone familiar with the basics of OS design would be aware of this distinction.
Security researchers, for example, can disable it. And use this to find security vulnerabilities.
The point is, as users we should have the ability... Apple (or any company) should not be allowed to dictate what people are & are not allowed to do on the devices they own.
Sure, you could say that I should just use this "Developer Edition", but that requires me to have access to install it on every puter I walk up to (just to be prepared for somewhat common web attrocities like full-page elements that prevent me from interacting with the page in ways that I feel should never be forbidden).
I don't tend to see 'warning' messages in the dev console that seem to be attempts to dissuade me from using the dev tools. Maybe…twice in >20 years?
https://www.kandji.io/mdm/start/product/?nis=8
https://www.jamf.com/lp/apple-mobile-device-management-mdm-j...
https://www.hexnode.com/mobile-device-management/macos-devic...
Hope not, especially by everyone and their mum.
I agree with the GP and prefer the current iOS landscape.
For now. Remote attestation is already a thing and soon Android apps will refuse to work on phones that have been "tampered with".
Also, if you buy an Xbox, Tesla, Fitbit watch, fridge, etc. you can’t load whatever you please, either. Why would all smartphones be different?
If you look at it historically, the PC is about the only device allowing that kind of user control.
Because corporations maintaining such control over what should have been our computers is fundamentally unjust. It turns us into serfs of their digital fiefdoms where they make the laws and collect the taxes and tariffs.
Are you new here? All of these things are examples of locked down ecosystems that most of us in favor of this change also want unlocked.
The idea that you can own a device and can't do whatever you want with it is asinine. If you can't do what you want, you don't own it.
Why should we give a shit about historical norms? For most of history most children died at childbirth. Does that mean we should accept a >50% infant mortality rate?
Someone doing something bad doesn't excuse someone else for doing the same thing.
Historically, women couldn't vote, does that excuse countries that prevent women from voting from doing so, too?
Well you should be able to. If the customer is powerless to stop it we're going to see cars and fridges playing ads at full volume very soon.
Even with sideloading, neither Apple nor the government will give up that much control. Apple will almost certainly retain the ability to delete "malware" apps even if they're sideloaded and governments can then lean on that mechanism. Even Google can probably do a lot through Play Services.
The AppStore would have never been a problem had Apple not been so greedy and draconian about it.
It's already happening. We must oppose it.
The only person who should be in control of the device is the user who owns it. Absolutely no one else. Our computers are sacred ground that no one else may enter without permission.
Developers are about to get a surprise about what they're actually paying for. This is the problem with believing their own talking points about "paying 30% for payment processing."
So now they'll be paying for actual third-party payment processing, as well as lawyers and accountants to ensure they're complying with Apple's royalty agreements to license their technology.
Fighting monopolies is hard, but the penalties scale up the more games these companies play. They know it too, but all of the **holes running these companies are worried about is cashing out their bonuses and retiring before the regulations finally get things to where they should be.
We've had 15 years of hardware and browser optimization, Moore's law, and development when it comes to mobile hardware.
Web apps run just fine now. Hell, many native apps are just web apps via things React Native or webviews.
It's no surprise that Apple will comply as maliciously as they possibly can.
IMO a lot of developers are paying for Apple to have an unreasonable amount of control and the entire point of side loading or competing app stores is to get rid of that because we don't want to be paying Apple to act against our interests.
I don't want to pay for Apple to "verify" my app. I want them to use the OS to enforce user granted permissions and that's it.
Either you'll pay Apple directly, or the non-App Store will collect the 30% they have to send to Apple.
A large portion of users want the protection that the walled garden affords. If you value openness, then I suggest you use and develop apps for Android.
Like how Apple's interests can be at-odds with your own. If developers have control over your device, you're not empowered as a user.
> A large portion of users want the protection that the walled garden affords
So, give it to them. Our interests are not mutually exclusive, you can make a device with both a walled garden and a developer mode. It's not rocket science, at least when you have 200 billion dollars in R&D cash sitting in your coffers.
You're at least right about one thing. Large tech companies will always exploit opportunities to limit the user, which is a privilege Apple has abused for too long. It's time for computing to be democratized again, even if we need to drag Apple though the mud to get there.
I don't know if you realize this, but OP and you are saying the same thing, they are just saying it slightly different.
You: To stand up to large company bullying you need to regulate them through the government.
OP: To stand up to large company bullying you, you need another large company who has the pockets and sway to bring change through congress because our government is bought and paid for by corporations.
It's regulating your iPhone so you don't have to?
I really don't want idealists to mess up the iPhone's stability, performance and security so people can use the minecraft app store or whatever.
You can’t walk away from government regulation because there is ultimately a gun at your back. Governments do not give up power once they’ve received it. Governments change hands who may wield that power differently than when it was imagined to be when first received.
People in European countries have had to learn this the hard way many, many times over and yet still don’t get why other cultures might take a different view on it.
Just because smoldesu says “Letting software go unregulated didn't work, full-stop” doesn’t make it so. It doesn’t even make sense–you’re the one fighting for deregulation here.
The government is the one institution in most people's lives that they have a real say in, and probably the only one that affords them democracy. I doubt any of us sit on Apple's board.
The problem is that the Apple and Google duopoly is stifling choice and competition such that we can't realistically walk away from those companies. Market forces haven't solved this issue, and this is where antitrust legislation kicks in.
Discoverability and the ease of access that the playstore/appstore provides is enough to pretty much always want to have your app up there.
The main difference is that there are a lot of apps that are simply not allowed in the appstore or that you need to change substantially to comply with apple's rules. For example, Telegram has censored content if you download the app from the appstore given Apple's pornography laws. Other apps that might be used to infringe on copyright are outright not allowed (they're also not allowed on the playstore, but you can install them from the apk or a third party store).
Now, maybe you think these restrictions are appropriate and that's fine... for you. Other people might want the freedom of doing more with their devices that they paid hundreds and hundreds of dollars for without having to resort to extreme measures. The argument Apple uses is bullshit and the EU saw through it.
To state the obvious: if this were true, Apple wouldn't have to force the issue. Apple's app store would be a premium that they would charge users extra for. Getting your apps from 3rd-party stores would be the equivalent of the green bubble.
and the argument about "giving developers power" simply doesn't hold any water. android openly allows sideloading with the google play store having very similar rules to the app store, and yet i can count the number of major apps that force or even offer a sideloaded version on one hand. the only ones that come to mind are fortnite (removed from google play) and telegram (on play store, but sideloaded version has faster updates and less censorship).
I fully agree, imagine if MS had made Windows apps on W10 only come from their store. Anybody saying that the solution is "just buy a mac 4head"*, like they love to do with mobile phones, would be laughed out of existence.
*: It's great to have options, and linux should be in here too, but that would be like telling a normal user in this situation (mobile market) to go buy a Pine phone, which for very few would work the way they expect/need it to.
Why? Android is a legitimate alternative, one that the majority of the world population uses. You have many makes and models of handsets from which to choose. You want the polished apps with a completely open and free environment. Maybe you should ponder why such apps don't exist for the open and free ecosystems?
If most people actually choose iOS/iPhones primarily because of the App Store quality/protections/ecosystem then people will continue to choose the App Store regardless if sideloading is possible - after all we just said that's the whole reason most bought the phone in the first place. If on the other hand people are choosing iOS/iPhones for other reasons and you're worried nobody else will use the App Store anymore then I don't really buy "there aren't enough of us so it should be allowed to hold a captive market to support our use case" as a reasonable argument even though I see it quite often on HN.
It is simply the job of the sandbox and OS security to prevent security/privacy violations.
The issue is the monopolistic price gouging Apple charges for access to the walled garden.
If you took the "policing for developer's short circuiting the 30% cut" out of Apple's approval process, everything in their ecosystem works out fairly nicely.
The core issue is, simply, that Apple price gouges enormously.
Add a user, I do.
Developers, and the tech sphere in general, have proven themselves untrustworthy.
This is the bed of greed the tech industry built. Now lay in it.
For a user, Apple's app store will remain available. Your love for Coca-cola isn't ruined by the existence of Pepsi.
If I can use alternate stores then some popular apps - Fortnite is an obvious one - will go them exclusively, forcing people to set up and use a store which will probably do less auditing. Those apps will be able to steal more of my data, and some of them might (will) be malicious (“poison”).
Once a malicious app destroys my phone, “the system is down”; I can’t use any apps regardless of where I bought them.
Ransomware is a multi billion dollar business, and alternate stores will be motivated to cut corners. What could go wrong?
The app can do whatever it wants, but if I disable it’s access to the internet at a system level it’s not getting access to the internet.
Even desktop OSes work like this. Just because I install a piece of software on my laptop does not mean that it gets root access.
This seems a bit hyperbolic. I personally have not had this problem on my laptop (a Mac) despite being able to sideload apps, and it likely being a much juicier target.
You can yell about Zucks adtech empire all you like, but Apple launched their competitor at the same time they denied other apps.
Google is now moving the same direction as well.
Your phone OS vendor controlling which software distribution platform is mandatory is not meaningfully, "security".
I don’t believe this is true, can you cite a source? The recent buzz about ‘targeted ads’ was actually about adds on their own App Store, no third party data sharing or sale was involved, so I believe you are mistaken.
What they are just starting to do is no different from Amazon using your past purchases to place ads on their own site. I have no problem with that either.
If your going to criticise them and think what they are doing is wrong, fine. That’s fair, but could people at least get what they're complaining about factually correct.
Are they going to keep on giving their own apps entitlements they deny to everyone else? (Or even, allow to others, but very selectively.) Or is the EU going to crack down on that as well? I hope.
So this will wind up being a worst of all worlds.
Lmao, you must have missed the news about Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix and another few dozen Fortune 500 companies negotiating with Apple under the table. They already do bend the rules for sufficiently large companies, they just won't budge if you're someone that threatens them.
I'd actually consider iOS again if it were more open so I think this is a really good thing.
Otherwise they're building a web app, which they've always been able to do!
- When they pay $99/year for their developer license
- When they pay royalties on every payment that gets processed
- When they buy and promote Apple hardware and software
People simply want to remove the payment processing one. If Apple really needs more money to build their amazing intellectual property, they have plenty of ways to bill developers for services rendered. Their current system is undeniably exploitative, and the EU won't stop until that exploitation is alleviated. Apple will stop at nothing to defend their control, but will ultimately be forced to abide by Europe's terms. They're not defying small-fry court orders in the Netherlands anymore.
That universe doesn't quite exist on iOS, partly because Apple makes it so uncomfortable in ways to attempt. I am hopeful that this shakeup might, in some way, make that easier. I've always wanted to ship some basic apps that do things without any ads or purchases or whatnot.
I don't really subscribe to one camp. There's pros and cons to both.
Besides the developer program cost (which I assume will still exist in this EU world) what is stopping you from doing this now?
Dealing with the capricious app store approval processs?
Not being allowed to use GPL code (might still be a problem for 3rd party app stores, but maybe not for sideloading. Maybe.)?
Having to develop on a mac (which will still be a problem)?
Apple is a hardware company, an appliance company if you wish, and also a media company. The fact that they are forced to also produce general computing devices as a wayto run stuff like Ableton or Photoshop is, I suspect, seen as a pesky legacy of Apple II days.
Pedantic, but the license agreement line requiring that 'MacOS can only run on Apple hardware' is, itself, in service of the fact that they only license the software to you if you purchase their hardware.
A Hackintosh is a transgression.
That's like saying people shouldn't be allowed to make unofficial accesories for physical products without paying the company because the original designs for the product itself are patented.
Hitching your "I don't want to pay the 30% commission" wagon to "Allowing 3rd party app stores and payment processors" is doomed to fail.
This has literally already happened https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/02/apple-shocks-ios...
0: https://www.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/m5p7ae/comment/g...
Keyword being conditions. Having a third-party app store disable a bunch of functionality would be different conditions than a first-party app store.
A third party store could offer itself and turn off certain security features. I'm not sure that would be against the law. In fact, I'm certain it would not even be against the law for Apple to say, "Hey, your app store turned off security, so we will no longer give you our users' credit card numbers." (In fact, that's what policymakers hope for. The goal is nothing going through Apple. Least of all payments.)
If people are expecting the law to allow low security payments, then they are in for a rude awakening. For one, no one has taken leave of their senses here. Secondly, the credit card companies have in no way given Apple permission to allow access to their payment system under terms of reduced security. (In fact, they haven't given permission for Apple to offer access to their payment systems under any modified terms at all. Security or otherwise.)
Now what lawmakers are saying is that Apple should allow different app stores to participate on their platform. But yes, the vision, and hope, is that those app stores will have their own arrangements with the credit card companies. But some app stores will probably just keep Apple security protections in place and use Apple's services. There's nothing that precludes that either. (But that would be disappointing in the sense that everything would still be going through Apple.)
Now it's illegal for the device manufacturer to provide warnings?
I'm sure they'll at least require notarization with their $99/year developer program, in line with macOS, where it's an increasingly enormous pain to run unsigned apps.
That mistake isn't worth downvoting you, though.
I don't understand where people get the impression from that it's a huge pain to run unsigned apps on macOS. It's a matter of executing
sudo spctl --master-disable
Sony has a market cap of $100B and Microsoft is clearly above the €75 billion euro market cap discussed.
Perhaps incorrectly, I don't see that market needing this legislation. The consoles themselves are sold on razor thin margins and rely on game sales to generate profit. Game consoles are also more of an "entertainment" device vs a general use mobile computer.
It's similar to carrier locked phones. They'll give you the phone for a 1/10th it's list price if you sign up for 2yrs of service. Is that anti-consumer? Vs forcing the consumer to pay full price up front?
Avg 9.6 games sold per console [1] * $70 game * 30% take rate [2] =~ $200 additional.
Current pricing: $400 + $70/game Restructured pricing: $600 + $49/game
So it's more costs upfront, but not insanely more expensive. It would certainly change marketing and incentives though, if Sony made more money by selling consoles than continuing to extend the lifecycle of the current generation.
[1] https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2019/01/ps4_has_a_very_high_... [2] https://hypebeast.com/2022/8/sony-playstation-digital-games-...
I would say that carrier locked phones are undeniably anti-consumer though, and they are banned in many jurisdictions. Their sole purpose is to add friction and give the customer less choice, and due to 'collusion' between the few carriers that exist, impossible to avoid, even if you did choose to purchase the phone outright; it's practically the definition of anti-consumer. The phone purchase should be a separate contract, with a defined monthly payment against the retail price of the phone. Offering this is a profitable enterprise for BestBuy etc. on other electronics, so why not phones? The user should be free to switch carriers with little friction, to maintain as competitive a market as possible in a market that is a natural monopoly.
It reminds me a lot of the equipment monopoly in the Bell System until the early '80s.
It might with time open up software across multiple ecosystems.
PCs are only expensive if you go the “current best” route, but hardware advances are well in the diminishing returns category (maybe besides hardware-accelerated ray tracing), so you can very well play most games on mid-setting on a few years old PC which you can build from $500.
Nobody ever sat down and decided that what Nintendo did with 10NES was a good idea; it was just legally viable and nobody stopped it. It became normal without any concerted decision that it should be, just the lack of any strong enough force opposing it. I don't think that means that everything must continue this way forever. It is possible to realize that the implications are bad.
Even that said, hackers like to think in absolute and concrete terms and theory. In practice, phones are extremely important, telling people to vote for their wallet doesn't work, and there are basically no phones that offer a good set of trade-offs today because the market is not incentivized to produce it. Consumers pay $1000 for a phone and can't install a web browser. It is disturbing that people who are on a website with "Hacker" in the name can see this as a good thing. (Not that you are necessarily. But still, I see it too often.)
This leads to all sorts of perverse incentives. If I'm Nintendo, I could sell my game console for $299 with some profit on Day 1 (like now), but then I would be forced to have an open store. Or, I could sell it for $269, take a initial loss, and have a closed store. It would simply made "game consoles shall be sold at a loss" the law, not opened things up. I think that would be atrocious. So... either game consoles can remain locked, or we simply declare game consoles cannot be sold locked.
- let the free market create even more perverse incentives
- let regulators use even more restrictive means of limiting innovation
As someone who errs moderate on the economy, I'd prefer that we don't lean into either extreme. Neither one seems to work well.
>(a) it has a significant impact on the internal market;
>(b) it provides a core platform service which is an important gateway for business users to reach end users; and
>(c) it enjoys an entrenched and durable position, in its operations, or it is foreseeable that it will enjoy such a position in the near future.
>2. An undertaking shall be presumed to satisfy the respective requirements in paragraph 1:
>(a) as regards paragraph 1, point (a), where it achieves an annual Union turnover equal to or above EUR 7,5 billion in each of the last three financial years, or where its average market capitalisation or its equivalent fair market value amounted to at least EUR 75 billion in the last financial year, and it provides the same core platform service in at least three Member States;
>(b) as regards paragraph 1, point (b), where it provides a core platform service that in the last financial year has at least 45 million monthly active end users established or located in the Union and at least 10 000 yearly active business users established in the Union, identified and calculated in accordance with the methodology and indicators set out in the Annex;
>(c) as regards paragraph 1, point (c), where the thresholds in point (b) of this paragraph were met in each of the last three financial years.
I wonder what the monthly active users for Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo consoles are. Also, if there are at least 10,000 active developers in the EU for any of these consoles.
I find this to be a feature. Please protect me against "myself" (sometimes I'm tired, sometimes drunk - and dark patterns around the web can get to me too).
lol
> That’s a you problem.
Isn’t it actually a you problem?
I have a painpoint. The company I want to do business with is a company willing to solve my painpoint for me for some money. Im willing to pay them and the ecosystem to solve it for me.
You have a painpoint. The company you want to do business with doesn’t want to solve it for you, for any amount of money. You want to force the company to solve your painpoint at my expense.
Seems very much like you have problems, and you’re making your problem into a me problem?
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
AFAIK, no android 3rd party store has been successful by that definition.
I realize that Safari now offers extension support, but it is so convoluted to download and activate an extension that practically no one does it. If if it were as easy as the Chrome/Firefox stores, this would be much more common. I'm hopeful that this could finally happen!
I want to have full blown Firefox with proper resolution on YouTube and no ads.
(Not affiliated, just use it; though not as the default)
Worth mentioning that the big MV3 change in WebExtensions is also banning interpetted code. Dynamic behavior is illegal in 2023, static code only, by corporate mandate.
>Currently, third-party web browsers, including ones like Chrome from Alphabet Inc.’s Google, are required to use WebKit, Apple’s Safari browsing engine. Under the plan to meet the new law, Apple is considering removing that mandate.
This decision will make me strongly consider returning it and getting an iPad instead. iPads leave Android tablets in the dust in terms of performance, although I do like the microsd card slot on Android.
Of course, it could take years for Apple to reluctantly implement the change.
This is the solution that makes sense.
The problem was never the Apple app store restrictions, changes, review-process, etc. It was that no one had a choice about it... not devs and not users.
* Apple can try to impose their idea of "safe", "quality" apps (or whatever it is they are trying to accomplish) in their store. * other stores can have their own rules. * users can get apps from the store they want.
1. Nothing is going to change and I will continue to use my phone as it was before because the App Store is still the primary driver.
2. I will be forced to use third party stores because critical apps are no longer distributed through the App Store.
3. I will just be using my phone less and less.
The EU, Developers, and Many here continue to forget that the reason many of us use an iPhone is because of the walled garden. If I wanted an open platform I would switch to Android and mod the hell out of it.
I don't want that. I want the precautions that Apple has in place to make it so developers can't employ dark patterns to keep me as a paying subscriber. To mine the data on my phone for their profit.
With one or 2 clicks of a button I can cancel any subscription I want that I did through the App Store. I also get alerts when anything yearly is about to charge (from Apple) or when things are about to cost more than they used to. Instead of hoping that we just wouldn't see the alert like too many sites do.
People keep saying that this is about choice, which frankly... is bull. This is about choice for the developer not the consumer. Most consumers don't care, but developers will jump ship to another App Store if they can start doing all of the negative practices that they are not allowed to do on the App Store. Especially if they are big enough, Seriously think that Facebook won't try to have their own App Store? Considering what they have gotten up to very recently.
We already have enough developers purposefully trying to deceive users right before they get the prompt about allowing the app to track.
Anyone... please tell me how this actually benefits ME as a consumer and not developers?
Edit: Instead of replying to each one I am going to just post here.
Many of you are saying Android does not have this issue. But unless I am mistaken Epic Games did exactly this?
Also unless I am mistaken, many of the consumer protecting restrictions are not on android. Especially around subscriptions and billing issues. I know google is cracking down on it, but from what I understand it is not as universally in place.
So developers don't have the incentives to move to another App Store on Android like they do on iOS (again benefiting developers while hurting me as a consumer)
Edit: I am going to make one last point here. I spend a fair amount of money on App Store subscriptions. (or buying apps but that is sadly not as popular anymore). I do this because I don't worry about singing up to try something, knowing that I can very easily cancel it. I don't even have to talk to the company.
This leads me to signing up for apps that I would never have considered paying for if it was through a traditional website that would make me jump through who the hell knows what hoops to cancel.
They complain about the 30% cut, but from me. It is you get 70% or I give my money to someone else.
I cannot imagine I am the only one that does this.
[Context] it is extremely odd to (ab)use the leverage of a 0 marginal cost business to be sensitive to a +/-18% payment processing fee - when the world basically runs on ~4% IRL. The business case if true and still viable should be unique and outside of a pure software play - which gets you squarely out of IAP.
Long story: it would be extremely odd to (ab)use the leverage of a 0 marginal cost business to be sensitive to a +/-18% payment processing fee - when the world basically runs on ~4% IRL.
Then you also had to pay into a marketing fund for those big full color inserts in the Sunday paper if your software was sold at the big box retailers.
You also had to eat the cost of returns of unsold inventory after you issued a new version.
Or do they mostly just support PayPal, Square, Amazon Pay or direct credit card billing?
We didn’t magically jump from only buying things in stores to only buy things from an App Store. Companies could and still do sell through their own website and through other places.
And it fucking sucked. Finding apps was hit or miss, there was no guarantee an app would run on your device model, and payments were ridiculous. Apple's App Store is far from perfect but it is vastly better than the absolute clown shoes of buying mobile apps for pre-iPhone mobile platforms.
Further, since most things were shareware, you could just _test_ the software on your machine ahead of time.
iPhones nowadays are much closer to functionality and power to (or significantly eclipsing) normal PCs that people have.
And the distribution of software for normal PCs has none of the issue you describe.
A) The presence of licensing software is irrelevant to the existence of something between a big box store and the App Store. Talking about the ecosystem as if people did not sell software electronically before the App Store is simply disingenuous.
B) Times have changed, it's easier to handle that stuff yourself using free software or with software packages that take less than a 30% cut.
C) You know what didn't need that licensing software? Free and/or OSS software. That simply isn't an option on iOS. Further, even if you wanted to enforce that on your paid software you may have used a publishing company, but you weren't artificially limited to a single one.
If enough developers choose to move to those other stores consumers will have no choice but to use those stores to get the apps they are looking for.
I understand wanting apps that the app stores doesn't permit. There are apps that I would love as well. But I don't want to loose the protections in place to get them.
Why wouldn't it? It's the reality of Android, why would it work any different on iOS?
But unless I am mistaken, a developer on Android is free to handle their own subscription billing, purchases, whatever however they want right?
I have seen some reports that google is tracking to crack down on this, but last I saw it was still far more open for the developers.
If that is correct. Developers are less incentivized to circumvent the Android Store. That incentive exists on iOS if it allows them to use those dark patterns for unsubscribing from an app or anything else.
If I am wrong about android than fine, that incentive doesn't exist and that removes most of my argument (it is still a possibility but the incentive won't be there).
If an app asks you to pay for a subscription and you don't like the payment processor the app uses, then don't use the app. It's really that simple.
I’m now expecting to see Xbox Store on PlayStation (and vice versa), Samsung Store on my LG TV (because they have xCloud), no bad practices with a third party store, and everything positive.
Seeing that this solves all our problems, I’m looking forward to xCloud on my LG soon.
I've jailbroken my iOS devices since the first iPod touch. There are lots of tools and features that Apple doesn't allow developers access to which limits what features are ultimately available to the end-user.
Nearly every big feature release on iOS came first from the jailbreak community. App switching, call overlay, PIP video, Shortcuts, lockscreen widgets, home screen widgets... and an endless list of others.
Non of these features would exist without designers and developers having access to the core functionality of the iPhone.
I love iOS. I currently own an iPhone without a Jailbreak (doesn't exist for my iPhone). I'm also an engineer and there is a whole lot of potential that Apple limits strictly under the guise of security. You can have alternate stores without compromising those that choose not to install them.
I understand that Google may decide to create their own store and take all their apps with them... this I can see being a very negative thing which may be needs regulation in itself. IDK what that would look like, but I don't use Google anyways because I have no trust in them. I don't trust them in the App Store so I wouldn't trust them with their own store.
What do you mean by "create their own store"? I don't understand this part of your comment.
If you already don't trust them in the App Store, why would you trust them in their own store to begin with? Sounds to me like you shouldn't use Google apps to begin with.
Most of their apps are very replaceable and with the arbitrary restrictions forcibly peeled back, the sole service that you can only get from them (YouTube) can finally get an iOS equivalent of NewPipe that doesn't need a hacked phone to be installed.
Or like the messenger or streaming wars: everything is fragmented, one AppStore you use primarily, and here and there you need to use the other Stores for specific use cases.
Additionally, it’s a benefit that users can now install any apps that Apple refuses to allow.
Not all laws exist to benefit you personally. It's a benefit to society to avoid a world where Apple will collect a 30% rent on all economic activity, kill of competition at a whim, and in general decide which products and product categories live and die.
I understand that it might be a intentional hyperbole but Apple very clearly and universally charges the comission (which is 15% if rev under < $1M) on digital good purchases. They have not planned to charge for bank transfers as some commenters in the NFT case of Coinbase fearmongered or physical goods. It's only a fee on things that App Store and Apple clearly enabled you to deliver to people with their system - digital goods.
People that say this is about walled gardens and security, which frankly, is bull…
Yes the 30% issue will mostly benefit devs, but also consumers. What if i could register for netflix, the ny times etc on my phone?
What if prices became cheaper because the 30% wouldnt be there anymore?
Also, the app store as it is now is a failure, some competition would do it good. Try finding anything there, the discovery tools are a joke.
1) Developers already raise the prices for apps/subscriptions in iOS (vs, say, the web) to offset Apple's cut.
2) Developers will be able to offer refunds more easily (something that continues to be ridiculously hard with the App Store).
3) The App Store only allows free trials for subscriptions. They don't offer free trials before a one time payment to buy the app. A 3rd party store could allow that.
4) Certain kinds of apps that Apple doesn't allow on the App Store would presumably be allowed on other stores.
5) Apple will finally be forced to compete now that the App Store has competition. It might even mean that all the points I made above become moot.
I'm not saying there won't be any potential downsides, but that's the whole point of competition, it's a tradeoff you can make. As a user you can choose to only use the Apple App Store if you want. Since most users will only use the official store, it seems unlikely that many mainstream apps would consider dropping it entirely.
I would counter that its really easy compared to most other systems.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204084
I had an occasion where my phone was loaned to my (young at that time) nephew on a car trip and since it was my phone (and only my phone) I had rather permissive purchase checks on it. He bought a bunch of in app purchase stuff for Talking Tom (owned by a Chinese company). I filled out the form, and got a refund. I believe that it was much easier than trying to get a refund from the developer.
They sold their company and shut down their service for which they charged monthly/yearly subscriptions. They had a decent relationship with Apple, so they emailed their contact and notified them that they'd like to issue refunds to all their users. Apple said that users had to do it themselves. That wouldn't be so bad, but there's (as I understand it) some restrictions on Apple offering refunds for subscriptions, for example if you're 25 days into a 30 day subscription period, Apple won't allow users to request a refund.
This caused users to get angry at my friend and their company.
If they had been using any other payment service other than the App Store, they could have just automatically issued refunds to all their users.
Apple balances on the assumption of the stability of their developers offering subscriptions and an easier experience for a user requesting a refund.
The difficulty that the developer is having in this case is that Apple isn't exposing the payment information to the developer. If they can say "this user gets a refund" that is leaking some information about the users to developers.
(...)
Additionally, it appears that there were some new methods added to the in-app library for developers to be able to create a refund request on behalf of a user.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/transacti...
> Call this function from account settings or a help menu to enable customers to request a refund for an in-app purchase within your app. When you call this function, the system displays a refund sheet with the customer’s purchase details and list of reason codes for the customer to choose from.
Regardless, to address your (off-topic) addition: do you actually request refunds from Apple often enough to be willing to pay 10% more for the privilege? You'd have to be asking for refunds for 1 out of every 10 products you buy for that to make sense...
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/transacti...
That right there is my problem with this. We can't even definitively say that it isn't possible. Doesn't Epic do it on Android?
A big enough company (like Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon) could easily push their store as being the primary way to download their apps. Start out on both at first but gradually introduce incentives for the users to redownload somewhere else. Then suddenly that App Store is on their phone, other developers see the App Store being used a lot and more and more developers stop using the App Store because they can get around these protections that I get as a user.
If somehow developers were still required to be on the App Store, fine. I would have no issue with it. But I just don't see developers doing it. Too many already try to employ dark patterns on there website that given a chance there is no way they won't try to do them on mobile. Many already try (like with the prompts to permit app tracking) but are limited in what they can do.
Or any shitty IoT company. When people pay $400 for an instant pot or $800 for a robot vacuum or electric scooter they’ll download any spyware app to make it run. Plenty already required sideloading apk’s on Android.
I mean most likely would not happen until another big enough store got popular. But then its... do I just download this app or do I return it.
However, as someone who doesn't deal with these big companies to begin with, it wouldn't affect me at all if they move out. It would just fast-track me to recommending alternatives to everyone I know.
I already migrated my whole family into iCloud for photos and own Nextcloud server for Google Drive alternative. It's been great. Obviously not the average user, but I could see people sticking with Apple's services over Google's.
Might get a huge base of older adults off of Facebook for good if they decide to leave the App Store.
That sounds like paradise to me.
This dynamic is already at play on Android. The lack of Fortnite availability on the Play Store is probably to the detriment of users. However, the existence of fdroid has allowed quite a few apps that users want but that fundementally don't work within the Play Store rules.
So when you ask "What does this do for me as a user", the answer is: it creates the opportunity for you to have access to a more diverse set of apps that are currently prohibited (such as anything with adult content).
Edit: A hopeful secondary effect is that Apple will be incentivized to improve the App Store to compete with third party stores. Maybe Apple will add free trials for one-time purchase apps. Maybe Apple will create an adult content section. Maybe Apple will provide better transparency around rejections. Maybe a store will emerge that does a much more stringent security review that catches the bad actors that do get their apps through Apple's screening. Most likely, none of this will happen and 3rd party stores will see minimal use, predominantly by technical users who want apps that fundamentally violate the store rules, like has happened on Android.
I'll believe most developers offering cheaper prices on other stores when I see it. Nobody is going to lower their prices just because they have moved app stores.
And do they lower it again when the 'cut' is 1/2 in year two? I haven't seen that, I've only seen devs pocket the diff.
"Simply not buy Apple things" means "buy Google things." There's no way around that if you want a functional smart phone. You either pick red or blue.
If there were 5-10 full-featured phone OSes out there, your point would make more sense to me.
You can like the hardware and not care for the software. It really is A/B at the moment. It's difficult for the average user to choose C. You either allow Google to peer into your life, or trust that Apple's marketing isn't a gimmick and a lot of Apple is e2e encrypted.
From what I read, iCloud backups are finally getting e2e encryption. I see this as the biggest reason to stick with Apple. I trade off full-customizability for better security/experience.
If a jailbreak was available for my iPhone, I'd be on it though.
Yes, but only as secure as the passphrase you use to unlock your phone. Except actually less secure than that; your phone will rate limit attempts to guess your passphrase, but encrypted iCloud backups turned over to a government won't and can't rate limit attempts.
For the average user with a relatively short passphrase, iCloud backups will be trivial to crack. Still, it's an improvement.
This is why you can casually change your pin code in your phone's settings without it chewing through your battery and data plan reencrypting and reuploading gigabytes of cloud data.
No big corporate support, less commercial apps packaged by default, but that’s a feature in itself.
Bonus points for supporting contactless payments, banking apps, and airline apps.
The hardware should have decent battery life and get great cell reception, and the UI should be smooth.
You are prohibiting from crying or complaining about this by your own logic.
You are free to not install an alternative app stores, and cannot use any arguments at all about how your choice is restricted.
You answered yourself. Most people are not Linuxy in the sense that they buy an iPhone and don't want to know how everything works.
If this would push that other 20%, I might even consider switching from Android.
As it stands, Android has a lot of free trash on the play store, and Iphone has a lot of paid trash on the app store because apple charges them hundreds per year for the honor of developing on their platform.
On Android, when I need an app with basic functionality, I already check fdroid first for a simple OSS implementation. I don't need my voice recorder to do anything except record audio. I don't need my heart beat monitor to do anything but check my pulse.
I'm hoping this change brings the type of innovation early jailbreak app stores brought that basically test drove features that Apple would copy years later and call "innovative".
I.e the gatekeeping my government wants to prohibit is the reason I’ve been recommending these things. I guess I’ll have to switch to recommending AwareGo security training for everyone
In what respect does any phone currently on the market have "mandated side loading"?
This is very obviously bull. When there are essentially only two smartphone platforms, and someone is arguing that one of the only significant consumer differences between the two platforms should be removed, that person is not trying to increase consumer choice.
This seems very unlikely. It hasn't happened on Android. Amazon has their own Android appstore and nobody is forced to use it, and I think nearly nobody does. But because Android has this possibility, I can use F-Droid which is excellent.
What does a "critical app" even look like? I don't have any apps on my phone that I would call critical, only convenient. My banking apps from the playstore are nice to have, but not critical. I can do banking on their websites, at an ATM or over the phone. Uber is sometimes convenient, but I've gone years without using it before and many people don't have it at all. If Facebook makes their own Facebook store and uses it to ship malware, it won't effect me because I never used their app in the first place, none of their crap is critical. That's the power of not submitting to peer pressure.
Maybe a "critical app" is one your government legally requires you to install, e.g. some sort of pandemic tracing app. But thankfully my government (America) has not gone that far. I don't think there is presently such a thing as a "critical app" in America. Only apps which may feel critical because of peer pressure or convenience, but aren't actually critical.
From what I've heard the Apple App Store isn't much better in this regard, except there you just don't have the option to ignore it (and the jailbreaking community seems more open, except the same "pay for every tiny thing" culture that plagues iOS has made it way over to that platform).
The EU forcing Apple to open up iOS should ideally result in a more fair, better curated ecosystem of smaller app stores and the development of apps that people actually want to use rather than apps that exist to make exciting number go up at an ad agency. There'll be some initial blowback, but the long-term benefits will be that much better for mobile phones on the whole (which to be frank, is desperately needed).
It also gives a secondary avenue for apps against Apple's app store guidelines, which have been noted in the past to basically be completely arbitrary (the main examples of this are the fact that Apple plays censor for VPNs in some countries, Steve Jobs telling people that want to have NSFW apps on their iPhone to "go buy an android", the last policy still leading to numerous social media apps getting in trouble because an app reviewer found something NSFW (this is why Tumblr banned NSFW) and for a very specific example of a game that somehow kept violating the guidelines: the iOS port of the Binding of Isaac was rejected for over a year because Apple wanted to play moral guardian, there's also the completely unreasonable ban on allowing emulation and really I could continue on and on about how absurd this is).
Tumblr is just one example. Discord had to restrict all NSFW channels in their app for iOS users because their randomly assigned App Store reviewer managed to get their account into an NSFW channel and found the expected.
Reddit just never had to deal with this issue because they didn't even have an iPhone app for years (their current app is a highly modified version of an older app, Alien Blue, but AB was pulled from the App Store when Reddit bought it) or they deal with it quietly so you don't hear about it. Not all companies who get shafted on the NSFW rule speak up about it, but those that have... all have repeatedly commented on the fact that the process is basically completely opaque and you need to basically pray that Apple doesn't decide to pull your current version either.
Tumblr picked the easy way out (ban all NSFW in general) because they were about to be sold to Verizon and Yahoo didn't want to bother trying to find a way to appease to apple at the last minute.
In a way though, that means Safari should be banned too. And the camera app, I mean point it down in the right state of undress... ;)
There have been cases where authoritarian countries have forced people to sideload government-issued malware onto their Android phones.
The knife here in terms of risking government overreach slices both ways, but in the case of Apple, they are in a much more vulnerable state for this sort of thing, since the CCP requires them to have meat shields (they need to have an office there) to continue operating in China.
One is massively more beneficial on the whole for user freedom.
Just because the status quo is bad for some people, it doesn't means it should be made worse for everyone else.
Likely because doing for Android alone represents too much of a risk given the profit potential. With these stores being able to exist on both platforms, that equation changes a lot, especially with iOS users' eyeballs traditionally having been valued more highly.
i, for one, am looking forward to a kindle app that allows me to purchase books on iOS.
>I want the precautions that Apple has in place to make it so [only Apple can] employ dark patterns to... mine the data on my phone for their profit.
It is your singular opinion, not a fact. I'm pretty sure that it's at the very bottom of list of reasons why people use iphones.
You also need to look passed the FUD and see that you have Android and you can't find a good example that you are forced to install a third party store to get some must have application. Geeks would unlock their phones and some apps might offer a cheaper version on a third party store forcing Apple to compete.
If you could also replace Siri with a better assistant you might even get Apple putting some work in their apps and improve Siri. Either way custoemrs will gain a better voice assistant if there will be fair competition.
This is actually part of the law. Apple have to allow 3rd party voice assistants.
It benefits you because you can get apps that Apple has decided aren't safe for you for whatever reason.
Comments advocating FOR the prison that is the App Store are so unbelievable I can't believe they're anything but astroturfing.
What other store operators should know is that if there’s any compelling feature that sets their store apart, Apple can very rapidly copy it and probable do a better job so there’s really very little incentive to bother creating a store to compete against Apple.
The overwhelming majority of Android users use the Google Play Store.
This is all a colossal waste of time and energy for no practical change.
I suppose there are people just itching to install closed source mystery code from unaccountable entities. Unfortunately most of them are the friends and family for whom I am first line technical support. I'm not looking forward to the change.
I'm willing to wait for the details, but at this moment, I am not a fan of unaccountable stores.
You can load any app you want, but it disappears after 3 days. Then you have to load it again. To keep the app on your phone, you need to load it onto your phone again every 3 days using your computer.
It's obviously set up for developer testing, not for someone trying to actually get use out of an app on their phone.
Edit: Ok, "true depending". If you are a registered developer then your apps last a year. If you are unregistered then you get one week, which would be a total pain in the ass.
I don't understand what risk they are mitigating by keeping the unverified developers to 3 days instead of one year. It is clearly an intentional action.
I guess you could have a business where you install unapprovable apps for people with a 1 year subscription and they have to physically come back to your kiosk and get an update from you each year.
I've heard that there's somewhat of a black market for this already. One person buys a developer subscription, then signs apps for other people so that they can sideload them using something like AltStore. Then, Apple sees that many apps have been signed by one dev account and shutters the account for terms of service violations. Finally, someone else registers a new developer account and the process repeats.
Macs have a long shelf life, and ones capable of running current Xcode are thrown to the recycler, I assume you could nab one for minimal coin too. They'll be slower, like 1/3 the speed to build compared to new machines, but apps don't take long to build. Most of your time is "sitting and staring" followed by "typing". Neither of which is appreciably impacted by using an old machine.
I went from an 8 year old Mini to a new M1 when they came out. A world of difference! Buttery smooth window drags, gorgeous scrolling. But I don't really program apps any faster. Sure, I have a few seconds now and then on a build, but it doesn't add up to much. Then I switched up to a Studio with a brain the size of a planet… no real change for app programming.
Don't let lack of a computer be a problem. Grab an old mini and do your thing.
What is this hypothetical even. Your nontechnical friends and family are also eager to go out of the App Store (after having to enable developer mode, which might be as difficult and full of disclaimers and warnings as Apple chooses to slap into it), then root around shady third party app stores and mobile websites to download mystery code? So they're simultaneously tech illiterate and power users?
They will totally hand their phone over to "other guy" who will "do something, I don't remember what he did"… and they'll be subscribed to SketchyAppStore2023-HGTWRE.
At some point the chickens come home to roost.
This is a (baby) step in the right direction but the Apple/Google duopoly still has way too much power.
I’ve been coding since I was 5 or so (C64); my first desktop computer was a Performa 5200, where I had to spend pocket money on Metrowerks CodeWarrior Student Edition (68k only, no PPC, the pro version was way beyond my 15 year old self’s budget) and get the official Apple books out of the library in order to learn C.
ResEdit was magnificent, for the era, and given away on magazine cover CDs. Then Apple switched to OS X, and Xcode became cheap, then free. The 30% that everyone’s been moaning about for the last 5 years was, when it was first announced, a fantastic improvement. ObjC and Swift may have felt like Apple reinventing the wheel when they could’ve just used C++, but C++ is still an option for developers, and one I’ve used in an iOS project at a previous employer.
How exactly is Apple supposed to be developer-unfriendly?
- The code signing process for iOS used to be an absolute nightmare, it was improved and streamlined over the years but still a pain
- A large part of the tech stack is Apple specific (ObjC, Swift, Metal)
- They tend to progressively drop support of cross-platform tech like OpenGL and C++ (some new APIs are Switft only and they will continue to force adoption)
- The App Store support for devs is extremely opaque
- They push very hard to enforce "guidelines" that they don't hesitate to break
It is part of the Apple culture, Steve Jobs was a product guy and he was brilliant, but he never really enjoyed the idea of other companies/devs doing things with his toys.
The iOS SDK was launched only to stop people from jailbreaking their iPhone to get access. The initial goal was web apps only.
Jobs also had a profound disdain for games and this is what started the Apple culture.
> XCode is widely considered to be one of the most annoying and buggy IDE.
You seen VisualBasic? Or Xojo (used to be called REALbasic)? Eclipse? And the only things I see here about VisualStudio are complaints.
> The code signing process for iOS used to be an absolute nightmare, it was improved and streamlined over the years but still a pain
Used to be annoying, now it's trivial.
> A large part of the tech stack is Apple specific (ObjC, Swift, Metal)
So just like C#/DirectX for Windows, or like Kotlin on Android?
Also: while some stuff can be multiplattform, making everything multiplatform only sounds good — I remember when Java was supposed to go everywhere and it was equally bad on all platforms.
> They tend to progressively drop support of cross-platform tech like OpenGL and C++ (some new APIs are Switft only and they will continue to force adoption)
C++ is interoperable with Swift. This is trivial to discover.
Dropping OpenGL was annoying to me also, but it seems like hardly anyone cares about that layer any more as they're all on Unity and Unreal instead.
I've seen your profile so I can guess why you care so much about this, but the job market is focused on the big two even despite (perhaps because of) their bulk.
> The App Store support for devs is extremely opaque
But much, much better than when it was new. I remember reviews taking a week by default, and the word "Knopf" in German localisations triggering automatic alerts about naughty language.
[skipping unverifiable opinion]
> Jobs also had a profound disdain for games and this is what started the Apple culture.
Such distain that all of the macs I bought while he was in charge came with a pre-installed game. That stopped roughly when he stepped away, a bit before he died, but by then the Mac App Store existed an games were already a big thing on the iOS App Store.
> C++ is interoperable with Swift.
Via ObjC bridging, yes. They just formed a working group for true interoperability at the top of this year.
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3649131/swift-c-plus-plus-...
> Dropping OpenGL was annoying to me also, but it seems like hardly anyone cares about that layer any more as they're all on Unity and Unreal instead.
Shame about first party support for Vulkan, though.
but now i'm already imagining fb app will be from alt-store with all the tracking reactivated and yes i don't use fb/have the app but try to explain in to elders/no tech people
If Facebook truly does use this as the opportunity to ruin their UX, then maybe your parents switch to Signal or iMessage.
This is what's scary, because it means that Facebook has what's effectively a massive captive audience with its messengers.
But, they don't. Realistically there's no reason for them to exist anywhere besides the App/Play Store, as long as those platforms play fair. This is a real strawman argument though, considering it's fully possible in the status quo. The problem isn't Apple or the government, it's that Facebook already has a disproportionate amount of control over your life. Apple cannot save you from that with a software update.
What I hope is that competition makes apple up their game a bit on the AppStore.
1) I hope they fix search. AppStore search is a joke, just awful.
2) Their 20% cut is too high
If they’re competing with 3rd parties I can see both these getting fixed ASAP, whereas currently they have no motivation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30808926
Now, they might try to entice users with deals and such (sort of like Epic's gung ho free games discounts on their gaming platform against Steam), but I highly doubt they'd pull their apps from the official App Store. Too much risk of blowback.
EDIT: I see now that while it's more possible than it was before, it may still be a bit unlikely for this to grow if Apple still must sign the apps.
"You CANNOT serve the European market if you don't do x, y, and z globally."
It just says what you have to do for European users.
The EU wants to regulate its own internal market. Companies can choose to be active in that market.
I agree in principle. How could they balance that force, without arbitrarily ruling over foreign companies? I don’t know. Maybe clarify what is "arbitrarily”?
The EU is setting rules for enterprises operating within their borders. Those that wish to operate must comply, others not.
Well, that is exactly the effective force I'm talking about. Can you imagine Apple not operating in Europe?
However, this is "legal" authority. I'm trying to discuss the more subtle moral authority: Many even inside the continent, do not accept the moral authority of the EU. and they also use that "arbitrarily" word to justify their claims. So why not discuss that word in detail ?
I’m not for downvoting replies to death. I’m more for letting people define their words better. It sometimes works. Sometimes.
Sure, we do after all have the example of some (non-Apple) companies not operating in China, a similarly important market. If Apple really believe their own rhetoric about how the only way to protect their users is for Apple to control the experience, they'll pull out of Europe rather than compromise on their users' security.
I just talked about how this is about moral authority VS legal one. Here it is about commercial markets VS cultural centres.
Europe is not just a market. Europe is the (historical) centre of the western world. I don't think big tech can/want to leave it. If they say so, IMO they are just bluffing.
But that doesn't mean they should be allowed to do so solely on their own terms.
Countries can set the terms they want. That is the meaning of sovereignty. Some of them have rules that constrain their legislature somewhat (a constitution) and some of them try to set rules that at least to some degree conform to the will of the people living there (democracies).
These principles have not come about from nothing, so I wouldn't call them arbitrary.
I did not either. I was just using his exact expression, in an effort to let him explain himself.
I can understand how offending that word is for some. Just wonder at all that bloody european history and superhuman effort to rationally get over it...
True, so much so that many, just outside of the continent, decided to leave the EU.
Insofar as they were in the EU though, they were bound by its laws.
This is no different from any other set of laws. Many in any country, state or other political organisation disagree with some law. They may choose to leave. They may choose to enact activism against said laws. They may not, without being subject to penalties, break said law.
Is it moral? Is it not? That's for societies to decide. If you're in the EU and you find the EU as a whole is not favourable to your country, you can start a campaign to leave. If, on the other hand, you just find that a specific law or another are wrong, you can write to your representatives, campaign to vote them out, etc.
Those are the (imperfect) workings of most democracies we know.
> Can you imagine Apple not operating in Europe?
I can. I don't think they will though. Why? Because even with the very few regulations that might reduce their ability to profit, it is still less profitable to leave the EU market. If eventually they find that not to be the case, they can lobby, campaign or leave.
> And England kinda speaks for all of them for this kind of thing
Well yes, it's 4 nations, except that England doesn't believe in the other 3 ;) Though it's only just coming to terms with the self-existence of most of the old Empire for that matter. Writing as someone who was born in the least likeable of the UK nations (England), and has lived in all but Wales.
Comparing it to "colonial times" is pretty egregious.
And a lot of these dark pattern cookie banners are not GDPR compliant. It should default to not track even if you don't press anything. And clicking 40 different reject buttons isn't allowed either. This needs serious policing.
So you're basically saying the alternative is don't exist for the vast majority of sites, reducing revenue by 50% and surviving is just about impossible for every internet company.
And if they wanted to turn every site into subscription overnight, they could have made this an optional provided header to opt out. Every browser could implement that in days.
Also, 50% less doesn't have to mean not to exist.
I do wish they had mandated the existing do not track flag to be honored though without presenting any popups. This would have finally made that flag useful and would have made things much easier. I know some browsers have removed it but it's easy to bring back.
It's strange that EU catching corruption and acting on it made it look corrupt. It's like the seat belts making people think the cars are not safe.
Honestly, I think this is partly to do with the fact that very few of these "Big Tech" companies are founded and primarily operate in the EU.
If anything this kind of legislation is more damaging to EU companies.
Very hard to get things off the ground (at least relatively speaking) in Europe. The software salaries also reflect that.
I remember arguing with so many people here on HN about this. People were actually trying to pretend like Apple was going to get around the law, or have it overturned, or pull out from the EU, or some other nonsense.
But, if you weren't completely biased, you'd know that of course Apple was going to lose this fight. They will be forced to follow the law like everyone else.
Kinda makes me want to see the same thing applied to other forms of tech with app stores and limitations on what users can install too, like smart TVs, games consoles, smart watches, etc. If you own a device, you should be allowed to install what you want on it, original creators be damned.
>You want to use Waze, Translate, Maps or anything else owned by Google? Download the Play Store now! We've blocked Youtube from being used in Safari for your safety. Please download Chrome from the Play Store to continue.
>Would you like to use Whatsapp, Messenger, Facebook? Download the Metaverse now.
>Would you like to use Signal? Download the scamcoin app store now.
Maybe soon I can finally purchase an iPhone SE again. I love the form factor and the hardware, but I hate buying my own prison.
I do not want to ask apple for permission.
As a user and family tech support: this fucking sucks
But...what's the source here?
So far as I could see, the article didn't even credit anonymous sources. It just states all these things as bare facts. And I haven't seen any other reporting on this (yet) that doesn't simply link back to this Bloomberg article.
And just as a reminder, this is from Bloomberg—the outlet that publishes the "Big Hack" story that proved to be completely false [0], without issuing any form of retraction, correction, or apology.
Again, it's entirely possible that this will prove to be true. But I have absolutely no confidence in Bloomberg on stories of this kind, and don't intend to get worked up over the possibility of Apple allowing outside app stores until and unless it gets some kind of independent reporting.
[0] https://daringfireball.net/2018/10/bloomberg_the_big_hack
So ... can they do that? It's pretty safe that if it's allowed, they'll do it.
Apple's within their right to say, "OK, but that third-party owes us 30% of their revenue."
Wonder if they considered (or maybe are considering) how to on paper split up in such a way they no longer meet this threshold
Why didn’t the EU apply it to the top XXX companies by market capitalisation?
Or is the intent that the law should cover more companies over time due to monetary inflation?
Apple wont want to spend too much time supporting third party systems
Am I supposed to feel bad for the poor engineers, unfairly distracted from their typical work of,,,reducing my rights as a user?
edit: it's a jab against apple that they will introduce restrictions like that. lmao
Giving people more options is not a bad thing, you should trust everyone to make their decisions.
Honestly, I look at these plans as an Apple customer and think "Oh great, the EU is going to tie Apple up in stupid, unproductive exercises that's going to make my experience worse.". Not only am I pissed off that I'm going to be paying a premium for an Apple device so they can employ a bunch of engineers to build a bunch of EU mandated features I'll never use and will probably make my device less safe, I'm pissed off that the EU is wasting their time with this bullshit when there are real problems in the world to deal with - problems the EU isn't doing a great job of dealing with.
This change isn't only about choice for the end user. It gives developers choice too. Those developers have their own incentives that are generally less aligned with the end user than Apple. Odds are this shifts the iOS experience from just needing the Apple App Store to needing the Amazon Store, the Epic Games Store, the Google Store, etc. Some of those stores (probably all of them) are going to have a weaker approach to security and privacy than Apple had. Right now I have Apple fighting for my privacy on iOS against companies like Google and Facebook. Will that still happen when Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are only available from the Facebook store?
But if something was not there, you were out of luck. Now you have more of a chance, maybe at a greater expense.
Same applies to music.
Apple's App Store is rather notorious for its bans on particular kinds of apps. Not only anything adult-oriented, but also stuff more important for some of us, like a different browser engine, or a programming environment, to say nothing about different payment options without the 30% cut.
Choice is not always easiest to the user, and iOS's original value proposition is that it removes much of the choice and makes things easy, so that they just work™ and include all you may ever need™. Good thing if this apples to you; you just need not make any changes to the way you're already using your iOS device.
(This is unrelated to whether state bodies forcing commercial entities do certain things is a good or a bad thing; as any power tool, it can be used for either, and always remains inherently dangerous.)
But this now removes the choice for the end user who likes the it just works™ experience because the developers with power like Meta will likely force it on us. It is reducing Apple's power, but it is empowering Meta, Google, Amazon, and other big tech companies who are seemingly even less likely to act in the end user's best interest than Apple.
If you were one of the users who wanted the choice of adult content or a different browser, you always had the choice to use Android.
If you need FB or Google, and they go crazy and refuse to keep their apps in App Store, they have web versions, and will definitely maintain them. (As do Reddit and Twitter, despite their trying hard to persuade me to use their apps.)
If you think about Google Meet or FB Messanger, then why? iOS has perfectly good iMessage and FaceTime, and I call them perfectly good completely unironically here.
You can still keep your iOS device as locked-down as before, unless you need certain forbidden non-apple fruit. But that was the case a year ago, too.
Not to mention, I wonder if they might be hit with anti-monopoly violations if they pull crucial apps (e.g. WhatsApp) off of the main official App Store in order to force users to switch to their third party stores. Regulators would probably mandate they keep such apps available in as many places as possible.
Feels like a public safety issue for people who communicate mainly on WhatsApp, or an intrusive business issue for companies that use Google Meet. There's probably a legal case in it somewhere to be made.