If Apple had any competitive ground to stand on, it would not bother banning other app stores.
Customers would love to pay the 30% Apple tax for security and the great selection of apps.
Customers would love to pay the 30% Apple tax for security and the great selection of apps.
If you count the number of devices. By app store sales, the figure is maybe 50%, probably higher.
Where did you get this idea? You are responsible for what your device does on the network. It's in your contract with your carrier. If you interfere with others' ability to use their phones on the same network, that has a good chance of the communications authority getting involved.
But we're talking about apps. The worst thing an app can do is DDoS something. That would just make you run out of data very quickly. Or auto-dial numbers (Android allows that, with a permission for which the app has to ask you), you'll just rack up an enormous bill and will learn to never make this mistake again. Or spam SMS, same thing.
But I really struggle to understand how any of this relates to the distribution of apps that run in sandboxes.
Certain categories of apps aren't deemed acceptable by Google (e.g. apps with adult content, apps that circumvent copyright, some "hacking" apps, etc). If you want any of those they are easy enough to find and sideload.
There is also a big community pirating legitimate Android apps. According to some for every one purchase ten people use a pirated version.
On iOS, they just can't "legally" have an app any more, period. Some made their apps PWAs, some say "just use the website", and some (Tinkoff/T-Bank in particular) keep trying to get into the app store with those double-bottom apps and also distribute them signed with enterprise certificates.
Most of the paid apps I've ever used on MacOS are well-known and cross-platform -- the kind of thing where you'd go to the developers website directly by name. So, of course the developer is going to guide those people down a path where they get all the revenue.
And the users of FOSS apps are overwhelmingly the people who will download a DMG from GitHub releases, and change their security settings to install it -- so why bother?
But for everyone else -- the $4.99 apps that aren't household names -- the App Store is probably where these are most often purchased. Although I doubt this market is very large on the desktop -- most people just use a browser and maybe some well known software that would have come in a box 20 years ago.
The app store isn't just about making more money, it's about enforcing privacy and security guidelines for apps through the review process and through checks for unauthorized api usage.
Apple's product is privacy; they view privacy as a premium feature worth paying for, and 3rd party app stores that are the wild west for privacy are antithetical to this.
When Apple Kerberos all their services they essentially made it possible to granularly manage service availability by user, device, and region.
The EU fining schedule is so out of proportion that it creates a real business risk to Apple that may be greater than the EU market size.
I don’t think the EU efforts are as detailed or grounded in reality as the EU considers them.
As a spectator I can’t wait to follow the ups and downs of this.
> Apple's product is privacy
that's a large component of their brand, not their product.
for contrast, signal's product is privacy. (note: i'm no fan of signal)
consider that the facebook app is allowed, on the first party app store. i'm failing to see how the app store gates privacy.