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Comment by ixwt | Hacker News Reader

To be clear: nobody else should have the option to not have to use the walled garden on devices they purchased because... you prefer the walled garden?

If there is side loading forced to be allowed on Apple devices, there is nobody making you leave the walled garden.

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No, there are already devices which are not wall gardened. Use those.

My argument is that I have bought a specific device (and everyone else also did) instead of the other device being open. So I have already made a choice. Now you (or someone else) comes in and says: Well all of you obviously want this freedom that you chose not to have in the first place…

Yeah I explicitly chose that and I know many people who made that choice. Because they want the piece of mind vs the sideloading. Again are there phones that allow it? Yes, and people have decided not to buy those. My point is - respect that choice and don’t tell ppl (general public) that they want something because it’s more profitable to the developers.

I do expect a future conversation to go like this:

Scammer: Madam, go into your settings and enable side loading. It will then connect to your bank account and I will…

Now click on the link I sent you to connect so I can help you

Malware installed…

What harm is there to you if sideloading is enabled?

Literally the new attack vector I described above. It’s one more thing to worry about.

I think your proposed attack vector would look more like this:

Scammer: Madam, go into your settings and enable side loading. It will then connect to your bank account and I will…

Madam: Okay uuuuh... A big popup came up... It says... That I should not enable this setting unless I really know what I'm doing... And if someone is telling me to enable it then I should hang up the phone!!

This is a totally unrealistic scenario. Victims of scam trust the person on the phone much more than their own ability to figure out what's going on. Scammers successfully convince people to manually disable every protection and dismiss every warning the computer throws at them regularly.

No amount of software red tape is going to prevent scammers from sideloading malware on a device of a victim who trusts them. The only realistic way to actually prevent it is to not have sideloading as an option in the first place.

In many ways this is the same choice of wanting to live and do business in countries with a strong rule of law. I don't want other people to be able to opt-out of the law when they think it suits them, I want good ground rules that make things better.

Apple's walled garden has created an Apps market in the same way that governments create markets in the economy: by creating basic rules of conduct and commerce that allow people to feel safe enough to transact.

If side-loading appears I expect a race to the bottom as apps attempt to move people out of the App store and into a progressive web of predatory dark patterns that eventually kills all trust in the platform.

> If side-loading appears I expect a race to the bottom as apps attempt to move people out of the App store and into a progressive web of predatory dark patterns that eventually kills all trust in the platform.

Surely Android is an absolute cesspit at this point then.

I think you over estimate how many people actually utilize side-loading. To your other points, an overwhelming majority will never turn on side-loading if it's added. They will continue to use Apple's walled garden app market. The barriers to even install a side-loaded app will cause most to give up in frustration.

> Surely Android is an absolute cesspit at this point then.

I mean... yes? Like, it's not the bad old days of Windows in the early 2000s, but people demonstrably don't want to spend money in the Play Store and what money they do spend is on big name brands.

Devil’s advocate here. Nobody else should have the option to prefer Apple devices as they are today because… you’d prefer them differently?

If Apple stays the same as it is today, there is nobody making you buy an Apple device.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to be able to sideload apps, and I think more competition in the App Store space would be beneficial for consumers. But a lot of the “freedom” type advocates act as if someone held a gun to their head and forced them to use an Apple device for the remainder of their life, and now they can’t sideload apps. If that’s an important feature to someone, there’s a platform that allows that.

You make a valid devil's advocate position!

Personally, its about pushing back on the ever increasing tide of not owning your own device, and using it as you see fit.

I just can't understand why so many are against a feature that they don't have to use.

Every feature, even the one you don't use, comes with a price. There's no such thing as free feature in software.

Adding sideloading reduces security of a device even if you personally never touch it. There'll be more attack vectors, scams etc that would only be possible with sideloading.

I don't get it either. People come to Hacker News to defend the antithesis of everything hacking stands for. Makes absolutely no sense to me.

Not really. I have been on HN for some time. I like the debates that happen here. This is probably one of the only topics I feel very strongly about.

Again nobody has managed to challenge my point that if you want side loading there is another platform you can use. Why does every platform needs to be so open? You wanna tell me there are NO benefits from a closed platform?

I can still side load using my Dev Account so I want a specific app - I’ll build it and have it. Anyone can side load with a dev account so the entire point as I keep coming back is because of the revenue to developers not freedoms.

> if you want side loading there is another platform you can use

I don't want another platform. I like Apple's hardware. I think it's really well made and would like to purchase it instead of Samsung phones.

That's all the justification necessary.

> You wanna tell me there are NO benefits from a closed platform?

I wanna tell you that none of these benefits matter if they come at the cost of computer freedom.

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