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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

Hasn't Apple always said the reason they don't allow sideloading was that it'd be impossible without compromising security? So are they claiming their European iDevices won't be secure anymore, or are they admitting they were lying before and that the real reason was nothing but greed?

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I suppose it's true in the same way that having knives in your kitchen makes it more likely that you might cut yourself. but a kitchen without knives kind of sucks so

I don't think kitchens should have knives. I want my parents to be able to eat, but with knives in the kitchen they occasionally cut their fingers and I don't want to have to deal with that. You could make it optional but before you know it they'll get knives anyway. Besides, most people eat processed food and don't want to make meals from scratch so this is only a problem for a handful of people.

(yes yes this is satire)

If Apple's social media team is hiring, you should apply - this is exactly the irritating kind of replies I get when I criticise some Apple product. :)

My parents want to cook dinner with knives. They have no interest in side loading custom applications though.

My parents want to install applications of their choosing on their devices, but have no interest in knife-cooked dinner.

I find this hard to believe. Don’t get me wrong, freedom to sideload apps is a thing I believe in, but saying ‘it’s because my parents want more freedom’ is certainly a stretch.

It's about as much of a stretch as "actually my parents want an idiot phone"

I’m not sure what your point is, I know plenty of people who would prefer dumb phones, probably more than who would be interested in sideloading?

They're presumably claiming that european devices will be less secure.

Or usability of this feature would be so frustrating, that no one will use. Constant security popups on every start, very limited available API for apps, etc...

That would just give them a huge fine.

There is law and there is the spirit of the law. The ECJ can be pretty fast when they feel someone is taking the piss.

The cookie popups can be very annoying and confusing and they didn't do anything about that.

They have actually fined several large tracking providers for their shady cookie popups because opting out was harder than opting in.

European DPAs aren't getting enough funding to take on this problem, but they haven't been sitting still either.

They're slowly working through the backlog. Even Google gave in and put a single, working "deny all tracking" button front and center.

Recently I've noticed more sites providing a visible "Deny All" button, rather than the dark pattern of going through and unchecking 5, 10, 50 tracking cookies individually, or having to dig out a button hidden somewhere.

I assume this was how it was intended to function, but the kind people that run internet websites intentionally made it more difficult.

Indeed, the bigger players were, I think, specifically contacted.

Lots of smaller players still do it, though, so maybe this is not the most effective enforcement style.

That's why Windows is beautiful, all APIs are open for developers to use for whatever they want.

They are required by European law to allow it, wether they see it as compromising security or not. This isn't Apple's decision.

How they will do it likely is they will charge to install the App store app and assign it a CA and require it to sign the apps downloaded from that app store.

The sideloading of apps will technically be an apple approved app but enforced by another app store. To put it another way you would not be able to randomly download an unsigned app.

They will probably put all the side loaded apps in the same sandbox. Yikes ...

The claim is nonsense. If it was true Android devices would be full of malware, that is clearly not the case.

> there’s a far greater chance that hackers can make it onto the [Android] platform to distribute malware through malicious apps [compared to iPhone].

https://nordvpn.com/blog/ios-vs-android-security/

It's one thing to provide security in the kindergarden. It's another thing to provide security in the jail. So far Apple's track record is kindergarden security. They do have tech in place, but how that tech would resist big bad world outside the wall remains to be seen. My guess would be that there will be apps breaking the jails in the first years and 10 years later things will settle on and it'll become relatively safe to sideload untrusted apps.

Of course if one's smart enough to only download apps from reputable websites, then the only worry will be privacy issues which are probably not important for most people

Is MacOS insecure then?

You could probably argue yes, since a 3rd party app isn’t validated in any way by apple

3rd party apps are validated via OCSP on macOS when the apps are launched.

A few years ago this was an issue, when millions of macOS users found that they couldn't launch any apps at all on their Macs, because Apple's OCSP servers were down[1].

[1] https://blog.cryptohack.org/macos-ocsp-disaster

I think most would accept that iOS is more secure than macOS. But to flip the logic the other way around and put as you did is a little disingenuous.

Why couldn't both be true?

How would app review work?

The whole point is that there would be no app review for independent apps.

It's not a technical change in who distributes the software, it's a radical change that results in developers being able to give apps to users without being in a contractual relationship with Apple period.

I'm not sure I follow the chain of comments here. It seems that not having a review would result in less security, which is the context to my comment.

AppStore pretty much only does a “grep -r porn” on every app, hardly meaningful “security”. If anything, it’s best at mysteriously flagging competitor apps.

You know what's the most secure device? The one that doesn't work.

iPhones been hacked for ages already.

Perhaps "has it ever been hacked" is not the best metric, unless you prefer to keep your devices under armed guard, encased in several meters of concrete, without an internet connection.

IMO, https://zerodium.com/program.html is a good indication of "what would it cost to hack me using a never-before-seen exploit".

You wrongly assumed that zero days are single-use. Pegasus used the same exploits in dozens or hundreds of targets.

I didn't assume that at all - that's why I specified a never-before-seen vulnerability.

"seen" could not be true until after thousands are hacked.

Still surprising to me that AWS has firecracker and iOS still runs things like Javascript along side every other app on the system.

Security isn't binary. European iDevices will likely have more malware installed on them on average than US iDevices.

I thought iPhone apps were sandboxed, making malware impossible?

That limits what they can do, but it doesn't mean they can't do anything malicious. Someone could make a YouTube app which removes ads, but steals your session so that they can viewbot or spam comment sections with legit accounts.

This is something which would also work using an app store app -- where's the app store benefit in your point?

Distribution is centralized and Apple can end distribution if the app gets reported and add the malware to their malware scanning.

While possible, it should be more rare. When working on massive platforms it is typically the goal to minimize metrics like malware installs as opposed to trying to make them 0. The relative probabilities are important.

Scanning apps for malware, preventing them from being installed or run, and warning about malicious apps, doesn't actually require centralized distribution or limiting sideloading. This malware problem with sideloading has already been solved, by Google with Play Protect on mobile, by every other system that allows 'sideloading' and has some kind of antivirus, and by Apple themselves in macOS.

Compared to an antivirus (macos, windows, android, all have protection built-in), that could detect a malicious app, or receive a report about a malicious app and then block it from being run, having an app store in the chain might not even be that much help or be at all different in that process.

If anything, giving potential malware apps a chance to be published on an app store, get that scale, visibility and access to an audience outright, and hang there even if for a little bit before getting taken down, could be kinda worse than if malware apps were distributed across smaller venues. Where, through what channel could a malware app get access to biggest amount of people? Through a centralized app store. (especially if it's the only one on the platform, and the only way to install apps*, forcing all users of the platform to be there.) An app store gives potential malware makers access to an existing audience, ready to be exploited, and a centralized app store ensures that it's the biggest audience possible.

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