I, for one, do not look forward to having to sideload Facebook, Instagram, Google, Gmail, and every single other megacorps app just because they want to track my every click. I would rather give power to Apple than all the other companies.
Besides, sideloading enables installation of modded apps giving users more choice.
It’s impossible to prevent fingerprinting of users and devices via purely technical measures — taking away the advertising ID won’t help.
It’s truly not — the OS sandbox is nowhere near as restrictive as, say, a browser sandbox.
Moreover, if Apple is forced to open the platform to third-party app stores, identifying unique users in collusion with the third-party app store is incredibly easy.
They did manage to answer this question in their comment. It’s the entire last sentence. (It also seems fairly well implied that they mean “iOS fingerprinting is currently hard” given the topic of discussion.) I don’t see how I could reliably fingerprint if so many APIs require user permission. It might be possible but I don’t see easy.
From IOKit to getifaddrs() to file system APIs, there are straightforward ways to uniquely identify a device — and I’m sure someone who actually works in this space can think of quite a few more.
Hell, even if you make it a hard problem and sandbox every possible source of unique information about the device, I’m sure Google would be happy to throw ML engineers at identifying users via impossible-to-obscure user information (keyboard timings, accelerometer readings, etc).
Preventing misuse of PII requires a policy/legal solution, not a technical one.
Or, a much, much simpler solution: an application firewall built into the system. With downloadable easily shareable rulesets. No matter what an app collects, it's all worthless if it can't send that back to advertisers. We already do that for websites by using ad blockers.
You especially cannot achieve this while providing third parties access to what has traditionally been vendor-only API on mobile devices; e.g. to support third-party app stores.
This simply is not solvable through technical means. It must be solved through policy and law.
Using an application firewall to prevent the facebook app from sending tracking data backing to facebook?
It still ended up going away and they gave up. So allowing sideloading is hardly the threat you think it is.
And you're making it out like the Play Store is worth peanuts.
https://cybercrew.uk/software/app-store-vs-play-store/#h3
App Store led with an estimated revenue of $85.1 billion in 2021
Google Play Store generated revenues of nearly $47.9 billion in 2021.
Nobody's ever going to try something shady for "just" $47.9 billion :-)))
I don’t recall Facebook publicly throwing any tantrums over Play Store policy changes.
It’s also possible that being able to put a store on both platforms is the kind of thing that would get, say, Facebook to expand the Quest software store to mobile. They’ll want to do that for Apple’s headset at least, if these changes open that up to them—expanding that effort to include iOS and Android seems like something with decent odds of happening.
If you don't like them, just don't use them, right? I mean that's the argument we're seeing against these changes, how does it not apply equally the opposite way? If you don't want to use an app like Facebook because it's on its own separate appstore, then don't. Besides, I don't see a reality in which these companies forego the easy native solution with millions of users in favor of whatever the process sideloading would involve.
Apple, right now, have the ability to ensure the apps are transparent about what they track, have an explicit dialogue to confirm if you'd like the app to track you.
These big corps hate that apple have that control and want to keep their customers informed on what's going on, and as such, they will stop using the App Store and ask customers to side load so they can release much more invasive versions of their apps that track everything without any user ever being informed.
So yes, this IS objectively a bad thing and ripe for explotation.
> These big corps hate that apple have that control and want to keep their customers informed on what's going on...
Oh yeah, the noble small Apple - the richest and biggest corporation to have ever existed - only has their user's best wishes in mind... It's totally unrelated to their own ad network, which they're building on top of the data they exclusively have access to thanks to their walled garden! And no, I'm not saying others should have access to this data, this data shouldn't be able to be used at all, not by Apple nor anyone else.
> ... they will stop using the App Store and ask customers to side load so they can release much more invasive versions of their apps that track everything without any user ever being informed
If the only thing protecting users from this is the fact that you can't sideload and have to rely on the App Store review process, then that's some real shit security, and Apple should definitely improve things there.
> So yes, this IS objectively a bad thing and ripe for explotation.
Funny how saying something is objective doesn't make it so. It's objectively bad for Apple, sure, since they lose their iron-tight grip on their own users. They also lose out on that sweet 30% of every penny a dev makes. Won't find me shedding a tear for them though, the less money Apple and the other megacorps get to suck dry, the better.
And again, all they have to do is spend a few thousand of those trillions of dollars they have to put up an obnoxious and hard-to-get-rid of warning when sideloading. People who care about sideloading like myself will happily oblige and go through the warning screens even if they're tedious, while the hypothetical vulnerable grandmas get greeted with a screen they don't know how to work around.
I don’t care about gmail because I don’t use it
They have gone for Apple out of pride and short sighted electoral strategy. The answer is to deal with Facebook(Meta) and Google(Alphabet) et cetera first. Pumping money into Gecko development.
This is serving up regular people who use smart phones (which in the west are essentially mandatory) to big data on a silver platter.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36393809
> regular people who use smart phones
That’s the beauty of it. I’m not convinced that ‘regular people’ are going to have the patience to deal with Meta forcing them to get and manage yet another damn account to use Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp. Just a terrible hurdle that will cause FB to shed a non-zero number of users, at a time where their DAU has not been hot, never mind their long term growth potential.
Without a compelling reason for them to join (free Oculuses? Oculii?) you can’t expect users to be forced to sign up for yet another account- not to mention most people are aware at the invasiveness of Meta- and remain quiet. Users already have more streaming services than they can handle, they’re not going to have the patience to juggle multiple app store accounts, just to get the same apps they already have!
Forcing users to adopt a new walled garden right away is going to inspire mass consumer backlash right away. And that will cause regulators to weigh in immediately, data gathering operation or no data gathering op.
I just don’t see Meta having the product or marketing stones to pull this off. Their last thing with positive buzz is what, Threads? Something dependent on the failure of another’s platform? And that only lasted for like a week.
There is going to be a race to become the WeChat of the west.
Governments more generally need to deal with tech and the EU is the only one with the heft and the stones to do it. But this piecemeal approach of trying to hit each of these giants like this ends up paralysed by court processes and intervention from the American Government.
Network effects are powerful. And there is a huge incumbency advantage past a certain point.
Meta, Google, Microsoft, and X are the big winners out of this decision.
Competition on storefront take will be slow.
Google is plagued by product execution issues. Any attempt at such an app will just fill a larger plot in the Google Graveyard. Microsoft doesn't even do social- what do they have, LinkedIn? Yammer? The Xbox network? X faces an uncertain future. Funnily enough I think Uber would have been a contender back under Kalanick's reign, but they don't have the same juice they used to.
Would be nice if Apple required you to have a functional web app before installing app. I.E.FB Messenger - the only reason why it doesn’t work on mobile browser is so that FB can track you more via their App.
What if Instagram decides to require side loading to install their app — in order to increase ad revenue?