Apple blocks PC emulator in iOS App Store and third-party app stores
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
"Fair", "reasonable", and "non-discriminatory" all have clearly defined legal definitions, which are not necessarily aligned with commonly understood or dictionary-defined definitions.
The only thing that ultimately matters is the letter of the law. If the letter is contrary to the spirit, the law should be rewritten.
* I assume you mean the USA when you say America, as both the North American and South American continents have many countries.
America exists because we couldn't stand Europe, and we've had to go back there at least several times to fix the mess y'all keep dispensing before we just said "Fuck it." after witnessing WW2 and made our presence permanent for the forseeable future.
Now that I got the snark out of my system, I personally prefer a legal system everyone will agree on even if not everyone will like it.
The legal system here is mind-blowing compared to the US. My son got beat up by some thug-teenager for being from the US (the teen was Afghan, so makes sense why he would feel that way, but to take it out on a 6 year old is kinda fucked up). Anyway, watching that play out was very interesting.
Even just dealing with employee background checks is interesting in that only certain crimes (relevant to the work you are asking them to do) show up. So if an embezzler wants to go into childcare, nothing would show up (probably, I haven’t actually done that, so I have no idea for this specific example, it’s just an example).
It’s so fascinating… but if you are ever looking for a way out of the US: Dutch-American Friendship Treaty is a way.
So, guess which ideology generated that German/Austrian monster.
Thank Jim Crow for that.
reasonable. Not extreme. Not arbitrary, capricious, or confiscatory. Public Service Com, v Haverneyer, 296 US 506, 80 L Ed 357, 56 S Ct 360.
"What is reasonable depends upon a variety of considerations and circumstances. It is an elastic term which is of uncertain value in a definition." Sussex Land & Live Stock Co. v Midwest Refining Co. (CA8 Wyo) 294 F 597, 34 ALR 249, 257.
I dunno, I think there's an obvious thing Apple would be worried about by allowing PC emulators on iOS (iPadOS specifically): the only thing that stops an iPad Pro from being the only computer of, say, a software engineer these days, is that iPadOS doesn't function as an non-inter-app-sandboxed parallel-multitasking development platform in the way that a desktop OS does.
But a (performant) PC emulator on iPadOS would fix that. You could buy an iPad Pro with a keyboard case, boot up a Windows or Linux (or maybe even macOS) VM, and work inside that — running shells, editors/IDEs, compilers, Docker containers, etc. And then swipe back over to (less-heavyweight) iPad apps when you're just taking notes / watching videos.
Honestly, it's something I've personally wanted for a long time. Despite loving my laptop, I'd love to be able to pack only an iPad when travelling to e.g. conferences. Right now I can't, because what if prod goes down and I need to investigate + develop a critical bugfix + deploy it? If I could run a PC VM on my iPad, I could do all that and more.
Would they rather someone buy a Thinkpad and run Linux on it, than someone buy an iPad and run Linux on it?
What's there to be scared of someone buying their own hardware?
These customers, in my personal experience, mostly end up gravitating toward using the Mac more and the iPad less — despite often saying they enjoy using the iPad more. They try to use the iPad for more things, but when there's something they need to do on their laptop, they switch over to using it — and then forget to switch back. Eventually, they give up on the "iPad experiment", and the iPad sits there gathering dust.
But they still did buy it. And likely have had it for long enough that they can't just return it. And they might even (probably mistakenly) think they'll pick it up again someday, maybe when a new iPadOS update makes it more functional and solves their pain-points.
And that line of thinking makes Apple very, very happy. "Buying an iPad you don't end up using because you also bought a Mac" is a situation Apple emphatically does not want to help anyone avoid. In fact, they do everything they can in their advertising to subtly guide customers into bad expectations about iPadOS capabilities, so that they'll end up in that situation.
Also, there's no point in using Photoshop for drawing on a tablet. (It's not impossible to use it for that, but it's not what I'd call a good experience.) You really want domain-specific digital-illustration software that puts the artist in direct control of brushes, color-mixing, and layers (either by direct-manipulation gestures, or in floating palettes, ring menus, etc); and then gets everything else out of the way (or doesn't include it at all.) You use such software to draw the things you want, as separate layer-groups or images — and then, when you're done, you throw those drawings into an app like Photoshop to clean them up, put them together, and otherwise transform your "drawings" into "artwork."
If you're familiar with audio production: think of Photoshop as a DAW, and illustration as a performance. Even a solo musician doesn't touch their DAW while they're playing an instrument; the only thing they're touching is their instrument. Digital-illustration software is an instrument.
The point I'm trying to make is that this artificial product category distinction people want to illustrate doesn't exist. Both of these hardware platforms can do both tasks equally well; all Apple has to do is provide both and let their customers decide for themselves. As time goes on, it feels increasingly easy to reverse-engineer Apple's design philosophy:
- Identify a problem (I need to install apps; I need a heartrate monitor; I want to draw on my Mac)
- Design a best-path solution (What if there was an app for that? What if all your vitals were monitored? What if drawing was tactile?)
- Take that solution and engineer it into an expensive auxiliary product (App Store/Developer Program; Apple Watch; Apple Pencil/iPad)
- Deny competitors market access specifically so they can't fix self-imposed limitations (Still Apple refuses to sign benign apps; Apple Health is all-or-nothing without Apple Watch, competitors are scary and can't be trusted; touchscreen Macs are "impossible" and Apple Pencil can only be made by licensing our tech)
Maybe I'm being too creative and optimistic, but are there not thousands of people on this site that would readily give up their Mac for an iPad with decent Linux support? The only person stopping people from having their cake and eating it too is Apple. And you know it's not because the iPad is in some way different from the Macbook and shouldn't have an open bootloader. It's because that would stop people from buying Macs. For the love of God, I hate Steve Jobs like the devil but I would probably go get a used iPad Pro if Apple announced they were publishing Linux drivers for it.
There are plenty of professional illustrators using tools other than iPad Pros, in fact most serious ones are still using Wacoms and the likes as you mentioned. The Surfaces devices and the likes are just as competent as iPads (if not more) they just don't have the same halo effect and there are people like you spitting a lot of bullshit to keep the superiority complexe alive.
Apple would like people to see the iPad Pro as the only good illustration tool, but the truth is, considering the price and software support it's actually not a great one. Since a "real" computer is going to be needed for work before delivery, if you don't need the extreme mobility, it's pretty stupid to buy an iPad instead of a traditional drawing surface.
But it doesn't matter, since Apple doesn't sell their devices to rational people, it's all about emotional marketing so whatever...
But they've always been scared of emulators in the IOS app stores, and the reason for that seems to be a combination of things:
1. The user experience with emulators can be awful, which is a contrast to the "It Just Works" way of doing things with IOS. This doesn't jive with the image they sell, or that they wish to support.
2. By letting anyone run real software easily on an iPad, this cuts into their sales of MacBooks. This is obviously not in their interest, since they'd rather sell two machines instead of one machine.
This is especially true on the "Pro" version of the iPad, where the OS feels like a major constraint on what would otherwise be a very capable device.
You don't need to touch your Windows VM. The iPad Magic Keyboard cases have trackpads on them; and iPads also support Bluetooth mice.
(And a user of iPadOS VM software probably wouldn't even be trying to touch the screen to interact with the software anyway. After all, why boot up such software if not for productivity? And who would attempt productivity on an iPad without putting it into its "productivity orientation", with the iPad docked onto a keyboard case?)
3. It lets users get software on to the ipad without going through the App Store (thereby escaping apples ability to clip the ticket on the way through).
I honestly believe this to be way more important of a reason to Apple than anything else. The point of making you buy two computers is not to get twice as much money out of you, it's to get app developers to port their apps over to UIKit and make you re-buy all your apps twice.
I tried UTM SE a while back. Using it with the Magic Keyboard was almost the Real Deal Laptop Experience, but if I ever took my iPad out of its Magic Keyboard then I'd have to use some really annoying mouse and keyboard emulation to use the same software. Apple's the kind of company that will absolutely put guns to the heads of their users to force them to not have a bad computing experience.
2. Some people like the walled garden. I'm not really amongst them, but I do tolerate the walls. (For those who absolutely abhor walls, there's rootable Android devices out there that can satisfy an itch to tinker with something in compact portable electronics. That's a lot of fun, too, but it's heading in the opposite opposite direction of Just Works.)
*: They "just work" within their limitations, which can be severe. It frustrates me that I can't install real Firefox on the iPad so I can use uBlock Origin, and it frustrated me that the iPod Touch didn't even come with the ability to install apps or even copy-and-paste text out of the box**. But in both cases, the devices behaved very well with the functions they were permitted to utilize.
**: I jailbroke the iPod Touch and went pretty far off the reservation with it (adding a clipboard, installable apps, multitasking, and a useful userland) because that was fun for me at that time, but by no means did I have to do any of that -- it was a very fine touchscreen music player with 802.11 and a web browser all by itself without any of that kind of help, and that's pretty much what it was promised to be able to do. And that was a long time ago; during the gap, I'd forgotten more about IOS than I ever knew.
I don't think they are worried about a few geeks running bash or docker. They should worry about Valve Software, and millions of non-geeks discovering that Steam works on iPads. Even if only a small subset of the Steam library works, that could be a collection of thousands of games going back decades that don't pay the App Store tax.
Unfettered PC emulation threatens billions of dollars of Apple revenue.
The whole point of an adult owning an iPad as a separate second device (besides using it as a drawing tablet or as a touch-control surface for professional production apps) is that it's a lightweight and more "rugged" portable computer than a laptop is, focused on enabling consumption and light computing tasks in situations where you either would worry about bringing a laptop, or just wouldn't care to deal with bringing a laptop.
The comparative advantage of an iPad over a laptop is found by just throwing it in your bag when you're going "out" and not planning to do work, and then pulling it out: in a coffee shop; at a park; on a beach; on a bus/train/plane; etc. Into, in other words, exactly the sorts of situations where you don't have a "permanent low latency network connection."
Any environment where relying on a remote desktop would make sense, is also an environment where the iPad has no comparative advantage. If you're in such an environment constantly, you'd just buy a laptop and never even consider an iPad!
My guess is that the thing Apple is actually objecting to is graphical user output, specifically mouse software being utilized on a touchscreen. UTM (and iDOS) does that, iSH only gives you a terminal. Terminal software is touch-friendly, so it's allowed, even though iSH has to do the same threaded code dance UTM SE does.
(And of course there's also a-Shell which runs WASM/WASI binaries in Safari...)
This is why iSH calls itself a "Linux-like environment." There's no package manager! If Apple allowed it, iSH would almost certainly just be a wrapped-up Debian VM. But it's not. (And this is why iSH has always been considered a toy by people wanting to do real software development, rather than being something anyone would recommend you use as part of your workflow.)
> I haven't yet tried updating the /etc/apk/ files to make Alpine upgrade though.
I would highly suspect that this wouldn't work.
Maybe it would have in some prior version, back when there was the technical barrier of it being very hard to cross-compile Linux binaries for arm64.
But I would guess, upon the popularization of things like the Raspberry Pi, that Apple required the developer of iSH to modify the version of apk(1) that ships with the tool to only work with APKs that have been signed by Apple.
Also, iSH does have a package manager. It used to actually be modified to pull packages from the App Store but now they use a separate server. I don't remember if it's the Alpine Linux package repo or a custom thing for iSH.
[0] In fact, this was the excuse Apple used to ban it a few years ago
"Nothing stopping you" in the same sense that there's nothing stopping someone from using a sequence of specific gamepad button-presses to turn Super Mario World into Flappy Bird.
In vulnerability-exploitation terms, sure, the attack surface is there.
But in "would anyone actually spend time doing this" terms: no. The advantages don't outweigh the labor costs. (Especially if you're doing this for work, in anger, and you want to install an app to let you solve a problem right now by popping open a Linux terminal, and installing all the packages you need — including some arbitrary non-packaged SDKs that depend on dev-dependencies from specific known Linux flavors.)
Mind you, in theory, someone could make it easier for everyone else to do this, by writing a bootstrap script that wgets a bunch of stuff and effectively turns your iSH environment into e.g. Debian. But nobody has done this.
Why? I can't say for sure, but I suspect it's precisely because the iSH "sandbox" isn't actually a VM containing a Linux kernel, but rather an older technique — I think involving a userland of binaries compiled to use Darwin libraries; or maybe more likely, a userland linked to some Linux-on-XNU virtualization layer (custom libc, libresolv, etc.) And that's just not a "flavor" of Linux that you can find Debian packages for, or even third-party APKs for. Even if you built up your own apt base-packages repo to allow debootstrap to work, that wouldn't magically enable you to then find install deb packages from arbitrary apt repos that weren't compiled for the iSH "arch".
And I think that iSH continuing to exist on iPadOS, but persisting in doing this complex kind of virtualization rather than switching over to being "just VM software hard-coded to use a specific Linux VM", is perhaps on purpose. I'm guessing that Apple wouldn't allow "just a Linux VM" on the App Store any more than they allow UTM — again, precisely because it would unlock the capability to efficiently utilize arbitrary third-party packages, and thereby to actually use the iPad "in anger" for software-development business productivity. It would be "enough" of a development environment that some businesses might consider buying their employees iPads instead of Macs. And Apple really wants to avoid that.
> Also, iSH does have a package manager. It used to actually be modified to pull packages from the App Store but now they use a separate server. I don't remember if it's the Alpine Linux package repo or a custom thing for iSH.
It's a semi-custom thing for iSH, in that it's a custom "arch", with all the packages containing binaries compiled for the iSH virtualization layer. So you can't switch over/add on any third party repo; binaries from ordinary arm64 APKs wouldn't run. Third parties would need to create an iSH-arch release of their package specifically. And AFAIK there's no published infrastructure to enable third parties to do that.
In essence, though, the packages in this repo are still a "part of" the app. Despite being hosted on a third-party server, those packages still have to be signed — and I have a strong feeling that Apple, not the iSH dev, holds those signing keys. So Apple, not the iSH dev, gets final say over what APKs end up available in the iSH userland. (And that's why those APKs haven't been updated in a while — the iSH dev likely has to go back-and-forth with Apple when pushing out updates to their own repo — just as if they were publishing a new version of the app.)
You're correct that there is no Linux kernel emulation. They went with reimplementation for that. However, the userland is very much emulated x86 binaries. You can even compile your own C code inside iSH and run it. When you syscall, control passes from the threaded code[0] interpreter into the Linux reimplementation.
The reason why they aren't shipping Debian is that the threaded code technique being used as a JIT substitute in both iSH and UTM SE is far too slow to run a full Debian derivative. Believe me, I tried installing Ubuntu on UTM SE and it took literal hours and flattened my iPad battery in the process. iSH uses Alpine Linux because it's very lightweight[1].
As far as I'm aware there's no secret deal with Apple to lock iSH down. The only limitations I've ran into have to do with MySQL, which wants unaligned atomics, which you can't do on ARM64 without compromising the performance of the emulator. I actually had a discussion with the developer of iSH about this and put in a PR to make MySQL stop crashing iSH.
[0] return-oriented programming
[1] So lightweight it doesn't even ship anything GNU, making it one of the few genuine "Linux distros" with no slash or plus or "I would just like to interject"
The reason it's considered a toy is because of the sheer number of bugs in its Linux syscall simulation layer as well as in its implementation of Forth-style threaded code, not because of a package manager. After all its GitHub page says "This code is known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, and reproductive harm."
Doesn't make it any better, of course.
As a developer, I feel tired and exhausted from constantly having to battle with the platform giants just so that eventually we can find a way to co-exist on "their" platforms.
I don't have enough superlatives to express my disappointment when seeing all of that effort suppressed and restricted by Apple.
When the UTM authors say "it's not worth it" -- they may be onto something. Apple is slowly but surely beginning to be "not worth it" for me and for many other professional users. Happy WWDC everybody; enjoy getting fucked.
Instead, no real improvements are coming to iPad OS and if you're not gaming or video editing, all you get to do is marveling at how powerful your YouTube player is in benchmarks.
Please Apple, let the Pro device finally be a Pro device and let us use virtualization.
with more locks.
The whole iPad will eat MacBook business so let's cuck its capabilities is insanely wasteful. Like should be illegal levels of wasteful given the current climate of consumption and climate change problems facing us.
Apple and their whole culture of product rollout and consumption is a massive part of our wasteful problem as a global society. Terrible company really.
I'm curious what you mean by this. In my country, a large percentage of developers are often seen working on Macs, and these are not developers of iOS or macOS apps, they just like using linux tools but on a non-linux OS UI. Visit a Clojure conference, for example, and notice how many are using macs. Same is true in many other engineering communities.
MacOS is just a nightmare to run the basic infra these companies require. It often times doesn't even run the software that's required.
These industries don't want cloud apps. They want robust standalone systems than run for the better part of a decade with minimal inputs or maintenance. Apple and the cloud and working on vms or remote servers or using some web app is not that. Linux is also usually out of the question as setup and customisation is not something they want to pay for. They want apps they purchase and then install once, setup once and that's it.
You state that "Apple should allowed [sic] to block apps from third party app stores on devices they paid for". No mention of users or owners rights post purchase. Did you mean "should not be"?
But long thread about nothing, I was just trying to clear up the misunderstanding.
Although, I think it would be better to just not install any browser by default and not even ask; you can install it yourself later if you wish to do so, and can install any one you want (or more than one, if you wish) instead of having to pick one from the provided list.
*or company. Perhaps part of the answer is that sometimes we say yes for people but no for companies.
Of course, this is the domain of contract law. Often car companies restrict how soon a desirable model can be resold and for how much.
edit: And robust anti trust enforcement keeps contract terms reasonable. Contracts are limited by unconscionability and superseded by legislation but otherwise fair game.
I've been using Macs my whole life (since the early nineties) and I'm as loyal a user as anyone. I've given them probably enough money to put down a downpayment on a small house. Behavior like this will drive me away if it cannot be addressed, even if it means I have to go to china to find a better hardware vendor.
I was looking for an earlier thread (which also involved Nokia and Windows Mobile) which shows the sort of timelines/cascading effects you'd have where vendors generally either become overly generic or just outright fail (i.e. BlackBerry). When I'll find it I'll edit and add it here.
Edit: didn't find it yet, but there are variations on appliance vs. general purpose hardware where things like smart TVs and android phone bootloaders are used as similar examples. I wish I had a better timeline search for threads.
As a side note, I've always understood that just stock iOS is way more optimized than stock Android simply because of better engineering. However, this is anecdotal and I don't have any references as such.
But personally it comes down to it’s a phone not a computer to me and I don’t want to or care if I can run “anything” on it.
iOS frankly has a ton of scam apps that ask for weekly subscriptions to resize a picture or other crap like that.
What Apple loves to make us believe is that Vendor, AppStore and ContentFilter are not three entirely orthogonal concepts that can be totaly separated from each other.
You can have:
- Company A be the hardware Vendor
- Company B host the App Store
- Company C be the provider of the ContentFilter
To become another Android iOS would have to be licensed to other vendors and appear on cheaply made devices dragging its name through the mud.
This is the problem with the current duopoly. Both options are pretty terrible.
I think it's great what the EU is doing though they're leaving too many loopholes for Apple to weasel through. And I think they should be attacking Google much harder.
I'm sure the market wants more than two providers.
> (because if they did, Apple would have gone out of business already).
The market of "low hanging fruit."
> or just outright fail (i.e. BlackBerry).
AT&T made a deal with Apple which should have been stopped by regulators.
Whatever it is that I, and everyone, likes about iPhones/iPads, it has absolutely nothing to do with Apple deciding that I'm too stupid to get to override what software to install on it.
Today, iPhones are now more powerful than a lot of computers, yet those computers can run rings around iOS in terms of doing actual computer stuff.
Because to non-technical people, iPhones are a sparkling clean oasis in deceitful confusing crime ridden cryptic hell-hole.
You might think I am simping for Apple, but my stance is identical to yours. However I have the situation in my life of being surrounded primarily regular people. I don't live in a tech bubble or work in a tech job. My rants against apple are notorious, and I have largely stopped, because I can see how ignorant yet still apathetic people are about it.
Just a short story to encapsulate it:
On a recent trip with lots of friends we ended using my phone for most group shots and other nice pictures. The Pixel's camera really does shine.
However when it came time to share those pictures, I informed everyone it would be best to get google photos where we could all dump the hundreds of pictures into one communal album. This was quickly met with "What? I don't want to deal with that, why don't we just share them the regular way?" (imessage).
I don’t mean something from Apple—maybe they have one, but that’s not what I’m using.
Examples of content blockers (not just ad blocking):
- AdGuard: https://apps.apple.com/app/adguard-adblock-privacy/id1047223...
- Hush: https://apps.apple.com/app/hush-nag-blocker/id1544743900
- Wipr: https://apps.apple.com/app/wipr/id1030595027
- Vinegar: https://apps.apple.com/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303229
You need to change some settings first, but it worked when I put the firefox version of ublock origin on a phone.
But Brave expects that Google will actually pull the code out of Chromium next year -- when that happens, it is unlikely anyone else will have the time to maintain patches to put it back in.
I wanted to do the same to my boyfriend's iPhone after seeing him sit through probably a dozen ads in one sitting with all the free games he has downloaded, but I found out that Apple literally does not allow you to change your DNS for mobile networks, and you have to manually change it for each wifi network. Weird for a company that claims to prioritize "privacy".
My family, including myself, all have iPhones. We’ve done exactly this for our family trips to the Black Hills and Ozarks over the last couple years, but we just share them with Apple’s shared albums. It works exactly the same as Google’s shared albums but with the iMessage and other iOS/macOS integration niceties. That could be why your family didn’t want to download another app to do what’s “already built in” to the phone, so to speak.
Just speculating, you know your family better than I ever could obviously.
To them, the reason I can't send them pictures is because Android phones suck. Which they complain about with "Anytime an android sends me a picture it looks like shit".
I think this is what the EU is basically doing but Apple is trying to work around that by minimally implementing 3rd party app stores in a way that still gives them control to see if they can get away with that (they probably won't be able to).
If you think Apple is bad, wait until you see Sony's terms for publishing a crossplatform game on Playstation (Xbox is a bit better.) The agreement they force publishers to sign has all sorts of stipulations, including rules that require payments when PSN users spend more on the PC version of a game than they do the Playstation version, and a prohibition on moving purchased cosmetics to accounts on other platforms.
Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft - all of them would be dead set against third party stores. So would all the media conglomerates (that Sony doesn't own.)
Many software developers would also be against it. If you sell an app on the iOS store, you're virtually guaranteed it won't be pirated. That guarantee goes away the second iOS devices can use third party stores and run any app.
That TPM chip in every x86 system? That isn't there for you, friend (although now it can be used to store FDE keys.) TPM was for storing the keys to decrypt media files.
People seem to keep forgetting that many of the security systems in MacOS and Windows aren't designed for your security, but the security of licensed content.
sony is not yet a gatekeeper, might be in the future... apple does not have to sell in Europe, if it does, and big enough (no need to be monopoly) to be a gatekeeper, law and rules say they operate a critical infrastructure/platform in the EU economy and hence they cannot tax developers (a country has such powers)
the question is not whether Apple has to change but a question might be why? this is the field of monopolistic power and competition law... monopoly profit is not inherently bad, can help innovation but along the way we figured out it is probably best to curb this power in the long run
Apple had its time of their life and to be honest, I see little meaningful innovation in the last 5+ years, however, they suppress competition and innovation in the economy, controlling a gateway between innovative developers and users
another aspect is consumer prices... should consumers get lower prices or let apple take monopolistic tax from them? of course lower prices seems to be better nd it is one goal... however, we should and we do allow success and monopolistic profit by each and every big innovation, in the beginning and Apple has already had that
it is a bit like an economy supports patent law and competition law at the same time
most people are motivated by financial success and most company pay research and innovation for potential monopolistic profit and this works and it is protected! however, competition law or new forms of it like DMA kicks in later on
it is like you innovate, use patents, get big money but if you grow big you are not allowed to become like all companies become if not controlled: shifting from competitive innovative power to a country like taxing power
I think it is correct that we need competition law too, if we really think about our past, economics, history, and what motivates people
But when you don't have trust, trade doesn't happen.
It's ironic. When apple first introduced the ios app store (decades ago) I thought "wow, they will protect me from the nonsense". But over time I learned, they don't really protect, there is still nonsense, and further they remove the ability to protect myself from the nonsense (you can't firewall your phone or detect/prevent network access by apps)
[0] oddly enough called "anti-circumvention provisions", which is fucking hilarious
I mean, okay, but that's just another thing that seems odd. I don't know why anyone is calling it a "third party" app store in that case.
What do you mean their device?
If they gift it to me for free, ok it is their device.
If I buy it, it is MINE and only I must be able to control what runs on it.
A hardware manufacturer has no business telling me what I may or may not run on hardware I have purchased, period.
btw, i think the top comment on that article nails it:
> This is clearly Apple just blocking anything that could allow the iPad to be used as a real computerOn the other hand, the reason why UTM got banned is completely obvious: it lets users operate desktop software with a finger. That's the same reason why iDOS 2 got banned[0], and if iSH shipped with a graphical output they wouldn't have unbanned that either. The whole reason why the iPad exists at all as a separate product line with a separate UI toolkit from Macs is purely because Apple - specifically, Steve Jobs - said so.
Apple's entire foray into multitouch was borne out of Steve Jobs wanting to spite a 'friend'[1] at the pen computing division of Microsoft. It can be summed up with the phrase "who wants a stylus"?[2] That's why they continue to saddle the iPad with inferior, buggier phone software, because they think it's literally the only way a tablet can be made. So literally anything that might let someone turn an iPhone or an iPad into a Windows tablet is considered the worst kind of heresy in the Apple religion.
Anyway, I hope the EU smacks Apple down on this, because Apple very clearly promised that EU DMA compliant Notarization would only filter for technical compatibility, not taste.
[0] Yes, Apple said a bunch of stuff about how it "allows content without licensing", but we saw with Delta how easily that concern crumbles away.
[1] I do not believe Jobs could have friends in the way we understand the word.
[2] The Apple Pencil doesn't count. A "stylus" is a physical tool intended to work around software not being designed for touch.
This is the real "developer" issue we are talking about.
I thought it was the latter (that running a JIT on iOS would be possible but not accepted on the app store), but then I'm left wondering why they seem to have submitted a JIT-less version on a third party app store.
Maybe the intent was ease development by having only one version to support for the first-party and also third-party app stores.
1. continue getting income while a dispute is ongoing,
2. potential payout if it goes to court/settled.
Basically, the insurance company would probably very rarely go to court; they'd only do it if they knew they would win hands-down. Otherwise, they would probably just send threatening letters (which lawyers are good at) and take a token sum (if anything).
In reality, getting a false DCMA takedown is pretty rare (if the amount of YouTube content is anything to go by).
And lets not mention all the free publicity you'd get when a YouTuber does get one, because they all apparently, rant and rave about how they got their video taken down when it is taken down.