I’m pretty sure Apple will keep positioning their App Store as the official authorized way to get software for iDevices. I’m also pretty sure that there’s going to be huge inertia there and most of the apps are going to be on App Store still. So your ability to live in a walled garden won’t be affected much. Yes, some apps will move away from the App Store, and I suggest you to vote with your wallet and not use them.
I for one absolutely cherish the ability to install software I choose on the device that’s supposedly mine.
Would it be nice to be able to install third party apps? I’d like… a GNU store, maybe a Suckless store, Panic is decent. There are pros, it isn’t all cons.
There is a downside, though, snooping companies like Facebook and Google are going to use this to circumvent Apple’s privacy rules.
I disagree that this is a case of “vote with your wallet.” I already voted with my wallet by opting into a less open ecosystem for my phone. In general, individuals voting with their wallets have limited reach, this is why people do things like join unions or co-ops.
It was good to have at least one popular platform that enforced at least some bare minimum standards that we could opt in to, that most app authors wanted to support.
Correct. There are two problems here:
1. Apple won't let people install the software they want on their phones 2. Lots of companies want to get their software installed on your phone by whatever means to control it and turn it against your interests
Both of these are bad. The DMA fixes 1, but HN users consistently complain that in doing so it will prevent Apple from mitigating 2. But relying on a company like Apple to stop other companies from abusing users is not a reasonable state of things. People should, through collective action (probably a law) prevent this abuse. And the DMA does not preclude this.
Thankfully Google Files got popular later.
It's pretty easy to imagine how a bad application like ShareIt or TikTok may be required to be considered socially normal.
So what!? Who cares what other people think? "Oh, gosh, you're the weird one who won't jump off a bridge!" Damn right!
Thanks to Google Files / Android NearBy share, today ShareIt has practically disappeared.
Another thing to consider is that when people casually leave someone out. For example, they regularly share their experience on a platform, because most of their friends is on that platform. If someone is not on that platform, they get left out of that experience sharing, if someone doesn't proactively reaching out to them, which I'd say is rare. This leads to the non-majority getting more and more isolated from the rest of the society.
Another angle is when people in power, businesses, or other significant figures like teachers exclusively use such platform. If the kindergarten instructions are on Whatsapp, the young parent better install that, fast.
This is all related to the network effect, whereby the value of a good or service comes not from the intrinsic value of the thing itself, but rather of its users.
Of course, "side-loading" should still be possible if it has sufficient barriers for casual users.
There doesn't even need to be a person that could be held responsible, or they could be easily masked behind anonymity of the web or layers of white horses / phished identities.
An on-device store would be equivalent to Steam which first need to be installed on the device for example via the regular iOS App Store or sideloading or another already installed app store.
Sideloading would be downloading from a web page or secondary device or similar method.
Separate stores would be a decent middle-ground for my part when less tech-savvy people inevitably ask me "can I trust this app" I can reply with "are you about to install it from store X or Y or download elsewhere?". If the answer is "that store from Epic Games" I could sigh quietly and say "it's likely okay".
My problem is exactly with these "safe stores from well known companies". Apple helps me. EpicStore and MetaStore helps them sidestep the anti-tracking and anti-spam rules of App Store.
That's a bit of a stretch. Apple, much like every other business, cares about you insofar as you're a paying customer. That's why they don't let you use... well, stuff like third-party payment processors.
I'm glad we have passionate Apple enthusiasts helping us prove how harmless market regulation actually is.
The real issues here are with the payment processing captured by Apple & Google, and why their gatekeeping (net negative to competition) should be a profit center for them while at the same time being a net negative (arguable) to consumers.
Apple’s business model is mostly: give money, get services and devices. That they are able to sell this as a nice special plus is a huge indictment of the computer and OS market.
I definitely can see a “store is just an app, you must allow third party apps” as a sort of maximal approach. But treating app stores as a sort of special thing that requires extra permission and coordination doesn’t seem totally impossible.
It could be sort of nice if each store was isolated inside a different sandbox and had it’s own filesystem. (I wouldn’t be that surprised if something like that happened because it is both justifiable from a security point of view, and also mildly annoying for people who want to use third party stores, which I guess Apple would prefer).
If you agree but downvoted because you think it isn’t their plan, maybe you can show us why the person I responded to here was wrong? That would be reassuring!
Likewise, I like to think that opening up my phone could make it more useful
The app based model that phones use is kind of crap. I will happily pipe together a bunch of little scripts and programs in bash to make a workflow for my niche usecase. But, phone apps don’t seem to focus on inter-operability. As a result, in the phone ecosystem you just have to find an app, or the task is basically impossible. If I’m not going to use third party store, and there are fewer apps in the official App Store, I’ll probably use my phone less.
On the bright side, maybe making the phone ecosystem worse will open up room for more proper Linux phones with the full desktop suite of tools.
This is the reality on GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone.
I think for my next phone I’ll look into them again. I like Linux. I like tinkering with my computer. I don’t really enjoy the smartphone form-factor that much, so I’m worried that I won’t enjoy tinkering on my phone as much, so I’ve got somewhat tepid feelings there. But we’ll see how things evolve.
Hoping to get four or so more years out of my current iPhone, but I’ll definitely check them out when it finally dies.