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Comment by browningstreet | Hacker News Reader

One upside I haven't seen discussed a lot about this: sideloading your own apps.

I don't care, and don't really imagine, sideloading others' apps... but this could give rise to a hobbyist/customization wave again.

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This is my plan, I'm super excited about this change.

I plan to sideload exactly 0 non-play-store apps except maybe dolphin or similar big-name open source things.

I DO plan to sideload two apps of my own (currently web apps but they suffer for being so, as opposed to being native), and while I know apple has given some ways previously to let you have "private" apps etc, they still require paying a ton of money AND you still have to get them approved by Apple!!

I was sad when I left android solely for the reason of sideloading apps, but given I'd used android for ages and only sideloaded two apps: dolphin and one of my own custom apps that I had stopped developing, I figured it wouldn't be a big deal. But I'm looking forward to this a lot now.

Apple already lets you sign your own apps, but i will admit the 1 week expiration is very quick and a $99/year developer subscription for 1 year signing is way too expensive for most hobbyists.

It'll be great to see all the neat little apps that macos has come over to ios

I wonder if there will still be two classes. I imagine sideloadable apps will need notarization like they recently implemented for macOS apps delivered outside the mac app store. They can require a developer account for that, or make it behave differently for the separate classes.

That's exactly what I want to do and what I hope this will eventually enable: Run my own apps on my own frigging devices (no distribution involved) without having to bribe Apple for the privilege (if you don't buy a Developer subscription, you have to re-install your apps weekly to keep them functional).

This would eat the app store alive and I could not be happier. So many very basic and simple, frequently cloned, but sometimes necessary apps exist out there that do the whole trial and subscription song and dance to collect rent. This is only because there is no path for open source alternatives. If there were, it would be like the state of affairs with desktop based software, where you have some first party solution, then on github there are typically a couple open source free alternatives if there is any demand for that sort of software, or there are even whole ecosystems like apt, brew, or conda to maintain open source software on your device.

There's F-Droid on Android, which is exactly what you're describing. App Store for Open Source projects. I'm hoping this brings something similar to Apple Devices!

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