Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway22056 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway22056

Yes, the EU. It forces Apple to allow sideloading - that means installing apps with no restrictions, from any sources such as any random website. A store is just an app, thus there will be no way for Apple to force alternative stores to anything.

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.

View on HN

Is that what they are planning to do?

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).

It's what they did, the law is approved and will come into effect soon. A store is just an app like any other apps - e.g. your browser. If you can download an app from the web, you can download a store, and the store can download other apps.

That’s unfortunate

I find it weird that this comment was downvoted while my comment up two was upvoted. If you agree that a store should be something other than just another app, then you ought to agree that it is unfortunate if this is their plan.

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!

But from my perspective sideloading is not necessarily a separate on-device store.

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".

Yes, and you if sideload a store app from a website (a random one, or Facebook, MS, etc), Apple is out of control in that case. They could ban the altstore from their own App Store, but not from the web.

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.

> Apple helps me.

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.

That’s not quite true, lots of other businesses don’t care about you insofar as you’re a paying customer, they care about insofar as you are eyeballs for their actual customers.

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.

Which is great, I much prefer Apple Pay and their overview of all subscriptions etc and them actually enforcing what changes I make there, as opposed to the situation on Android where I was charged by custom payment gateway implementations after cancelling the subscription many times and Google just told me to take it up with the app vendor who never responded.

Hey, more power to you. The good news is that after the DMA rolls out, Apple doesn't have to stop offering any of that. You can keep using it until Apple stops providing the function, same as you would have without the DMA.

I'm glad we have passionate Apple enthusiasts helping us prove how harmless market regulation actually is.

The problem is that app vendors will no longer be forced to use it. That seriously hurts my sense of security as a user of the platform - the very thing why I chose it.

But it doesn't affect Apple's 1P app store, app review process, or other security processes at all, so if you are content exclusively using Apple's App Store then there's no impact. If you look at the Android ecosystem, there have been all kinds of app stores for years. Some run by hardware OEMs, some open source (FDroid), and some that are run by app review sites that basically function as sideloading hubs for pre-GA versions of apps. Arguably, things generally work and overall I don't believe system security has been negatively affected.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com