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Comment by Y-bar | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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.

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.

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.

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