Apple will reportedly allow side loading of apps in iOS 17 | Hacker News Reader

Apple will reportedly allow side loading of apps in iOS 17

techcrunch.com

There's a part of me that really wants to know just how many people actually care about this.

When I was a teenager I was really into the rooting/jailbreaking concept. It was cool at the time, when the iPhone didn't have copy/paste, but I'm past that phase now and don't see a need for it.

Does sideloading really benefit the end user? The article seems to think it favors only other corporations.

I can forsee a future where my iPhone will have the Apple app store, a Spotify app store, a Netflix app store, an Amazon app store... doesn't this sound a lot like what's happened to streaming services? As an end user, I don't want this.

Will apple enforce having an offering on their app store if Spotify wants to offer their own alternative to bypass the 30% cut? or will Spotify remove their listing from Apple's store, and make my life, the end-users's life, more difficult?

I doubt many end users care about this, but there are businesses out there that are simply not offering their services on IOS because they can't justify passing a 30% markup to their customers, and they run on thinner margins than that themselves, so they'd go broke eating it. An example is bandcamp, which takes a 10-15% cut. Saying "sorry, everything is 30% more expensive on iphones" is a nonstarter, and so is keeping the prices the same. So they simply don't sell you music if you're in the ios app. I believe apple will even reject your app if you dare to provide a web link where the purchase can be made in the browser.

This would not have been required if apple allowed all legal apps and kept their cut reasonable.

Some apps require asine amount of permissions on Android to work. Imagine a hypothetical texting app that recently added video call feature. Now it won't let you get past permission gate until you give it permission.

These same apps work just fine without those permissions on iOS.

If there's one good thing about apple's enforcements, it is this (and similar things like privacy protections).

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