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Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

> I don't want to download apps from alternative app stores.

Then don't. Nobody is forcing you.

Except this is a disingenuous argument.

Because there will be many applications you may need to use e.g. banking which will be on an alternative App Store purely so they can skirt Apple's privacy restrictions. Finance is one sector where they would love to siphon all of your user data in order to better promote products and reduce risk.

And so I would be forced to use them.

You can switch banks? Trust me if these banks are only following the rules because of Apple, I can guarantee you their backend is definitely not following these privacy rules.

Also, OS level permissions don’t need to go away for third party apps.

Switching banks can often mean changing home and personal loan products which is non trivial to say the least.

And Apple can’t properly enforce OS level permissions due to Objective-C dynamic dispatch.

Why can't they? They control the objc runtime, and IIRC the way message passing works in that system requires throwing strings around with the involvement of the runtime.

This being entirely separate from using allowed APIs for unapproved reasons, after passing whatever review/scan is done.

Because you would need to check every message against a hash map of disallowed private APIs.

The performance degradation would be so significant it would render many apps and most of the OS unusable.

Or not allow all apps to send messages to the objects that host those private APIs. Again, unless I don't understand how the message passing system works in objc/swift. (most of my knowledge of the internals comes from reading blogposts on nshipster.com years ago)

I am much more worried about Apple siphoning my data than my Credit Union. Apple is building an ad mega-empire, in big part via abuse of power on their monopolistic platform.

> Except this is a disingenuous argument.

And yours is truly insane.

How many people would install a banking app from a third party app store on Android? Let's be real, zero. Why would it be different on iOS?

If the third party App Store is owned and operated by the bank then there would be no choice.

And given that the benefit of doing so is unlimited access to user data and the capabilities of the hardware then it would be hard for many companies to not consider it.

I want to download them from the App Store. I use Instagram, but I want it to play by Apple's rules. Surely you understand what I mean.

Yes, I get what you want. You want to coerce everybody that brought a phone like yours into your cause, due to its sanctity.

And also, for some reason you are afraid that most people that brought that phone will refuse to join if not coerced.

That first one is morally wrong. And the second one of factually wrong.

If I can only get WhatsApp from the Meta Store then, yes, I’m forced.

That does not happen on Android though.

big corps (including apple itself) are powerful enough to force you to do everything if they really want.

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