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Comment by labcomputer | Hacker News Reader

You’re missing the forest for the trees.

Apple today can tell Facebook “don’t track our users unless they opt in”, and Facebook has to comply or else. Or else what? Or else they get dropped from the iPhone.

Apple with side loading has no power to compel Facebook. Facebook will say “ok. Hey everyone! You can download and sideload the New And Improved app today!”

If you look at the game theory of it, everyone who wants to track (which is almost everyone) will leave the App Store once two or three big apps do it. So Apple will be forced to loosen privacy rules of App Store apps if they want to keep anyone.

> The question is - will you personally download a privacy-violating app in that weird manner via a corporate account or something?

The answer is obviously yes, because there won’t be any apps left in the App Store.

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Considering Meta presumably wouldn't be able to advertise alternative sources for downloading their app inside the app store (which is also the case on the play store) I simply can't imagine them or any of the other big developers doing so. Removing their app from the app store would completely annihilate discoverability and would likely lead to either some third party app taking their spot.

Also I can already imagine Apple throwing a bunch of scary warning popups at the user, requiring them to enable this and that in the settings and likely also not allowing to update an app originally installed through the app store using an app file downloaded from another source to make it even more tedious - requiring a reinstall of the app in that case. Can't imagine many users would be willing to go through that chore.

I may be wrong but considering we haven't seen any similar behavior on a significant scale on the play store I just don't see that as an eventual issue - especially considering Android makes installing apps from other sources very easy, necessiting only clicking on a button in a popup and toggling a switch to allow sideloading from within a specific app and even allowing you to update an existing app installed through the play store that way given that the signatures of both match.

I think developers will still be heavily incentivized to either change the behavior of their app or worst case attempt to sue Apple to force them to allow that specific behavior on the app store before moving their app outside the app store will even cross their mind.

This is the crux of it. App Tracking and Transparency is advisory: when you decline tracking, it simply asks the app not to track. There's nothing to force them to comply other than Apple removing apps from the store. It's a similar story to when Apple banned using hardware UUIDs for tracking a few years ago. You still absolutely can do it, it's just that being caught doing so could get you banned from the store.

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