iOS 17 sideloading support is coming, and Apple can’t stop it
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If you want to push for openness and transparency, you need strong government intervention and without a culture that pushes for it, it'll only get worse (see also right-to-repair).
Android exists. Other phones exist. Use one of those. No one is twisting your arm.
[predictably the communist wing of HN is out on the downvote]
Until this problem is solved with iOS and Android, this isn't a valid argument.
Microsoft Office does this currently. The Mac version is extra…
In regards to games on Steam, you don't pay anything extra to play on Windows/Linux/Mac if the game has support for that platform -- haven't since it became a thing almost a decade ago.
Most of these decisions these days are made by parents buying their kids their first phone. They aren't made by adults for themselves. By the time they become an adult, they've probably heavily invested in whatever ecosystem they grew up in.
FWIW, I'm not an Apple Fan. I'm just stuck with it.
You can’t have fair competition without rules, without sane rules you could win the Marathon with an AK47 and a Jeep every time, without any innovation.
Also come on, this “vote with your wallet” is just dumb — what are you voting for between literally the two candidates? What if I want a privacy-respecting, but open to customization phone with great hardware - do I buy like 87% iphone and 13% android, or how does that work? Will it somehow magically register my “vote” at Google, and not make them introduce an ever worse privacy feature?
The phone OS market has such a hard entry for others that even goddamn Microsoft failed at it, and they did throw a litany of money there. This is as much choice as the US two-party system: you get go vote at the least bad, good for you..
You’re bitching that you want more privacy, when GrapheneOS, Fdroid, Librem, Pinephone, and other alternatives exist.
They’re not that well developed because most people just don’t care like you do. “The man” isn’t keeping you down, there’s just not that big of a market for it.
And who knows, maybe the Solana phone will take off and be what you’re looking for.
Then maybe the rules are wrong.
> You’re bitching that you want more privacy, when GrapheneOS, Fdroid, Librem, Pinephone, and other alternatives exist.
All of these "options" come with huge compromises. I'd love to use GrapheneOS, but I also want to continue to be able to pay for things with my phone. That's just one example among many.
The point is that I shouldn't have to choose between these options. I should be able to get all of these things, but the market leaders have destroyed the ability of anyone else to be competitive.
This is just entitled conspiracy theorist thinking.
We have these amazing devices that are improving all the time and you’ve got these boogeymen “destroying” fdroid, graphene, librem, and all others.
There's no competition between Android and iOS either, it's a duopoly.
The phone market itself still competes on features, on the software side, the competition is fully dead though.
That is a hugely disingenuous mischaracterization of what Android is. AOSP is nowhere near enough to put together modern phone platform that anyone actually wants. And every year it becomes less and less useful due to Google's actions.
You and I both wish for more privacy features, so we can run one of the forks, or the Solana phone. Or maybe we don’t care enough to do that.
And Android isn't really an open platform but a semi-open platform. There's not a single phone on earth running AOSP (not even their own Android emulator) and the Play Store contracts where Google dictates their terms are pretty much mandatory to ship a phone.
Then again, there's network effects in play as well.
Well no, turns out you can't. Any app you might need for basic usage (communication, banking, taxes) isn't on it.
Competition in economic terms means actual substitutes and this just ain't it. This is also reflected by their negligible marketshare close to 0%, because well, they just aren't competitors.
> You want the like to be mandatory, using the long arm of the law. I think that’s an obvious overreach.
I'm not even talking about the political solutions to this duopoly yet, just stating the facts that the competition is dead on the area, then the conclusion on how to solve this are up to debate.
The US has a strong history of antitrust laws and splitting up companys for free markets sake. The globalization as well the digital markets change this, and its perfectly rational for the US to do nothing. Breaking up big tech would be in the interest of the consumer due to increased competition, but its not in the interest of US citizens. In the digital world we live in, competition could come from within the EU or China and that's worse, also due to geopolitical interest of the US. It is just smarter to live with the few oligopolists, as long as all of them are American.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/01/judge-blocks-penguin-random-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_purchase_of_T-Mobi...
whether from boeing, howard hughes, lockheed, at&t, ford and general motors.
the pharma companies.
case in point united fruit company -- resulted in many coups in latin american countries due to banana wars
Imagine those US law makers still interested in organizing the country, they probably tried, or didn't even bother to. All the cosy deals made back stage rendered null and void();
Also funny is the much hated EU still having to prove it's usefulness. I'm sure 100 years from now they will be selling out with the best of them but today it ain't in the cards.
Even more hilarious was that the current phone was suppose to be my last iphone. I might even make some apps. Under the current TOS that's just never going to happen.
More generally, will this lead to a resurgence of "unofficial" third-party apps for popular platforms like Instagram and Snapchat? These companies rely on the App Store to be the gatekeeper that stops such apps from proliferating. But if Apple can no longer control that, then I expect we'll see more usage of them. Perhaps Meta already understands this and sees it on the horizon, which is why Threads is built for the Fediverse, where third-party clients are the expected and default mode of operation.
It will lead to piracy in general. But whom will it affect?
Big companies like Meta won’t be worried about unofficial clients much, since the core is at the server anyway. There are many means of ensuring client authenticity, including by constantly changing the APIs, rotating secrets and updating the client.
Even social media aside, almost no big company today releases “buy and own forever” apps that don’t tie to servers or use some sort of subscription model. (Affinity is the one exception that comes to mind.)
So what sucks is that sideloading is going to eliminate the small indie dev who could make an honest living through the simple model of 1) make software, 2) let the user buy it once and own. Note who lobbied for sideloading (spoiler alert: very big companies).
- Sideloading only works with an EU Apple Account, on a device purchased in the EU, while you are physically in the EU
- Enabling "sideloading mode" will disable a bunch of other features for [IMPORTANT_SOUNDING_REASON]
But then the rumours stopped. Which made me come to the same conclusion as you.
And looking at previous examples of BigTech defying the spirit of directives, like how Google blatantly ignored the consent rules for GDPR for 3 years[1], I guess we will get proper working sideloading around 2027.
The only hope is that even if it’s hard and complicated, it will make things like AltStore work well enough that I can sideload a few things to fix the biggest annoyances in iOS.
[1] https://iapp.org/news/a/cnils-eprivacy-fines-reveal-potentia...
> 3. The gatekeeper shall ensure that the obligations of Articles 5, 6 and 7 are fully and effectively complied with.
> 4. The gatekeeper shall not engage in any behaviour that undermines effective compliance with the obligations of Articles 5, 6 and 7 regardless of whether that behaviour is of a contractual, commercial or technical nature, or of any other nature, or consists in the use of behavioural techniques or interface design.
> 6. The gatekeeper shall not degrade the conditions or quality of any of the core platform services provided to business users or end users who avail themselves of the rights or choices laid down in Articles 5, 6 and 7, or make the exercise of those rights or choices unduly difficult, including by offering choices to the end-user in a non-neutral manner, or by subverting end users’ or business users' autonomy, decision-making, or free choice via the structure, design, function or manner of operation of a user interface or a part thereof.
> 7. Where the gatekeeper circumvents or attempts to circumvent any of the obligations in Article 5, 6, or 7 in a manner described in paragraphs 4, 5 and 6 of this Article, the Commission may open proceedings pursuant to Article 20 and adopt an implementing act referred to in Article 8(2) in order to specify the measures that the gatekeeper is to implement.
The gatekeepers are required to provide "fair" access, but that doesn't mean everything has to be free of charge.
As an example, I would fully expect that iOS devices will continue to require digital signatures to execute, regardless of installation method. And those digital signatures will only be available to those who pay for the $99/yr developer program and comply with those regulations.
I don’t think that there is any “merely” anything. I think it’s a complicated process with tons of patents that you get a license to use when you pay for a developer membership.
Patents cover specific implementations. A lightbulb is patented. A specific machine that is connected to one cannot infringe on the patent for the lughtbulb itself, since it doesn't implement its inner mechanisms.
This is the only part that really matters here, AFAIK. Practically, there's no good way to enforce this limitation.
The residency thing is seared into my mind from people using EU "citizen" instead of EU "resident" when talking about the GDPR.
Realistically, the only one of those terms they could realistically implement is requiring an account with an EU payment method (e.g. an EU account).
EU citizens are still protected outside their country and EU law doesn't care where your purchased your phone, if you're a citizen.
(As an example - the top HN article at this moment is about iPhone being hacked).
I really think that Apple could have/could still head this off by introducing a separately branded edgier "dev" phone for people who want to live on the cutting edge. Give it a different persona (gamer hardware form factor and use distinctive UX elements) to ensure that when the journalist tries to create masthead graphics for their clickbait article, its obvious it only applies to non-walled garden phones.
Then let the market decide - maybe in fact the majority of Apple smartphone users do in fact want live life on the edge.
They could then have done a more controlled experiment on a subset of willing participants and had a much smaller blast radius if things got really hacked.
Now that the regulations are here its too late.
I feel the same. However, Apple has been playing with fire with their 30% cut and people have been warning for years that this would be a likely outcome in non-US regions. Now the outcome is worse for both Apple and users who prefer the security of the iOS ecosystem.
I really think that Apple could have/could still head this off by introducing a separately branded edgier "dev" phone for people who want to live on the cutting edge.
That ship has sailed. The new EU regulations require that both phones have side loading.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program...
Also consider, though, that we have nothing to compare to. Since app developers can't sell outside the App Store, we have no way of knowing what they'd do if they weren't subject to that 30% cut.
But for that comparison: consider food delivery apps. Restaurants have to pay similar portions of their take to the food delivery services. And many restaurants do inflate their menu prices on the food delivery apps. So clearly there's some elasticity in "what the market will bear", since they charge different prices for in-person or to-go dining vs. food bought through a third-party delivery service. There's no reason why this should be any different for apps sold on the App Store.
Apple could just introduce an extra setting to unlock the phone for developer mode, the same way Sailfish does. Then there's an option to install a terminal with easy SSH access, and away we go!
No need to spend time on new non-Appley designs. This fits right into their existing environment, and probably already exists in some form.
It's so large that any tech article with "iPhone"+"hack"+images of "this iPhone is the ver same iPhone as the one in your pocket" is going straight to the top in terms of tech news click cycle.
The fact that the "iPhone hack" only applies to users who have enabled "dev mode" will be buried at the bottom in the fine print.
Presenting different graphics/hardware form factor and branding would ideally prevent the majority of honest tech sites from using the images of the standard iPhone and they would have to use headlines like "xPhone has been hacked" or leave it at "An Apple smartphone has been hacked" which would cue me that I could safely ignore it.
But I don't particularly care. If there are negative consequences to actually allowing people to own the things they buy, then that should just be the price of doing business.
Anyway, I still think that Apple can benefit from this. An alternate app store paves the way for app developers to build and enforce their own walled gardens which would result in poor user experiences, so if Apple made more of the apps that third-party developers would otherwise do and such apps work seamlessly with each other and the OS, then people will have an incentive to buy into Apple’s own services ecosystem instead of that of some other third-party developer that does not have total control of the OS.
The problem with this sort of reasoning is that the ability to sideload is only one dimension that someone might use to decide which phone to buy.
Maybe someone values something else the iPhone offers slightly higher. But they're still not happy they have to make that trade off. And there's no technical reason why this trade off needs to be made, and no reason we (as a society) need to allow a company (a construct that we as a society allow to exist) to restrict our choices.
On the other side of the argument, I use Android specifically because I have more control over what I run on the device. But I am constantly uncomfortable that my choice reduces my privacy and security. Why should I have to choose between these two things? Again, there's no reason beyond a company's profit motive. And I don't think we (as a society) should put company profit motives above our own needs.
Frankly it does not matter if you are correct that no one cares about this stuff outside of hobbyists.
I still love to have the battery and the "it just work" reliability from Apple though. Let see how this play out in the US. If Apple doesn't hobble it too much I might get an iPhone for my next phone.
Guaranteed it will have some catches though. I also wonder how much it would affect the security side since Apple devices have been pretty secure so far with its walled garden approach.
https://citizenlab.ca/2023/09/blastpass-nso-group-iphone-zer...
Modded clients are notorious for stealing people's accounts. While Revanced is safe if you patch the official apk yourself, normal people will fall for trojans that inject malware into it.
And also Firefox with uBlock origin.
Sideloading in iOS might finally convince me to move away from Android.
Or pay for a developer account
Glad my YouTube Premium subscription subsidizes your theft
But, since App Store can't stop new browsers with their own engines, also yes.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf...
A recent law requires phone vendors to register all Apps to the authority. Any "side-loading" is viewed as a risk to national security.
No, the government want the power to de-list unwanted apps.
If I could also have it on my iPhone too, then I’d be even happier.
> Second, the Commission opened a qualitative market investigation pursuant to article 3(8) DMA into iPadOS to determine whether iPadOS, despite not meeting the quantitative thresholds, constitutes a gateway for business users to reach end users.
It seems like their rebranding a few years ago might really pay off.
I definitely want a 3rd party app store on my switch, one with emulators and all that jazz.
The only thing left is that jail-breaking an iPhone seems to be harder than rooting an android phone.
You do understand how much work porting new features to old operating systems is?
One good reason is that Apple doesn’t support the latest iOS on perfectly good hardware. Other ones could be that the older version takes up less space or that the new version is less useful for some users.
Also, FTA (emphasis added): “Apple has six months to implement sideloading in iOS 17 and potentially older iOS versions”
It runs on the iPhone SE, which went on sale in March 2016.
Main thing that got me wondering about this was "app store" being listed seperately from iOS in the EU supplied image.
Not that this problem doesn't exist via Apple's own store, but I worry it will be worse. Time will tell.
Of course, people will make alternate scammmy app stores to prey on less savvy users, but someone could also make one with more moderation than Apple and force them to get better.
I think the biggest change will be for developers to use their own payment system and keep more of the money, but there'll also be more risk of bad implementations leading to stolen card data.
With great power, comes great responsibility...
I have no idea how my mom gets her computer spyware-infected throughout between my visits, impossible for me to prevent that. Best idea so far has been to get her an iPhone and an iPad.
You want to install this app? Ok, first we will send you a verification email to make sure it's you, but before we do that you will have to wait a cool down period to make sure you want this app.
Either a bunch of hackers in NK are pretending to be iPhones, or some small lab of iPhones was marked as NK in the geo-ip database. But since the numbers are probably tiny 99% probably isn't too hard to achieve.
I'm not saying they would, but I do wonder if EU citizens would pressure lawmakers to rollback these rules in that case.
The Brussels effect is very effective!
The stock price alone would plummet.