EU's AltStore Gets First Native iOS Pornography App
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
"While Apple does waive the CTF for the first million installs of an app, this does not apply to app marketplaces themselves. This means every download of AltStore costs us €0.50, period. This is clearly unsustainable for a free app supported entirely by donations — especially considering we already have millions of users — and we’ve seen a lot of discussion hypothesizing how we could possibly afford this.
To us though, the answer is obvious…we can’t! So instead, we’re going to charge €1.50/year for AltStore PAL and pass the CTF onto our users."
So Apple's rules either require a deep pocketed free to play peddler like Epic, or push small independent stores into subscriptions.
This is still malicious compliance.
Not to mention that I never wanted "alternative stores" but sideloading... why would I have any store control what I install?
Obviously, there's a web browser, but let's ignore that for now. More notably in this "we make you safe from porn inside apps" framing, there's incredibly prominent apps like Reddit or X, both of which are lousy with porn. If Apple thinks that porn is bad and worthy of being blocked from its store, they should take a look at that. This is just wildly hypocritical otherwise.
Mostly, they're in the App Store with age ratings of 17+, so parental controls will block them out. No idea how that system interacts with third party app stores, either -- but if it doesn't work there, that was very much Apple's implementation-choice.
Set up parental controls on your children's devices! Apple cannot protect them from the preinstalled Safari app (one of the most popular porn apps in the world) unless you take initiative. You can also block the installation of all apps outside of the App Store using parental controls.
> Apple charges apps a Core Technology Fee (CTF) for each install after their first one million installs, but the fees don't kick in right away for small developers.
Still ridiculous apple got away with this one. The entire point is to free users and developers from Apple's tyranny.
https://mastodon.sdf.org/@jack/113952225452466068
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261
True alternatives, GNU/Linux phones, are not as polished as iPhones are.
This is plain false, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duopoly#Characteristics_of_duo...
edit Since this seems to need clarification: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tyranny
Stop misusing words like that. It debases them.
Not liking how a company provides a service, when there are other companies providing the same service? That's not tyranny. That's not like a government threatening you with jail or violence.
If you think it is then the time has come, IMO, to log off for a while and get back in touch with the world outside of the internet and tech.
I'm sure enough that Apple won't get away with it, that I'm willing to bet money on it. The arms of regulation moves slowly, but they do move. Wouldn't be the first time someone got fined for not following the spirit of the regulation and trying to work around it.
Beyond the abuse and sex trafficking ties (or the right at the edge of the legal definition but certainly not entirely consensual), revenge porn, and such, the impacts of porn on humans have been exceedingly harmful. There's the whole "PIED" (porn induced erectile dysfunction) thing, where a boy or young man's brain has been so wired from porn that they can't function with an actual woman, you've got disturbing increases in physical damage to people (mostly young women) from boys trying what they've seen in porn, etc.
It's not harmless, on either end of the process, and as far as age gating, I'm not aware of any of the porn sites even trying to do anything until legally required. A 10 year old with a smartphone has no trouble finding things way over their head.
So, yeah. The experiment has been tried and found wanting. I'm perfectly fine with them trying to make it illegal, or at least "radically harder to access than it is currently," which is "zero roadblocks at all."
Society, and humans, were rather better off when you had to walk through the curtain into the back corner of the video store, or get something from the papered off magazine rack at a seedy gas station, than having it available, in total privacy, 24/7.
Any links? Alternative opinion: https://aeon.co/essays/when-it-comes-to-pornography-whats-th...
When people do change their minds on such topics it tends to be from lived wisdom rather than learned knowledge. Or starting to see such things through the perspective of your children, rather than yourself.
I question if having provided a few links would change anyone's opinion, yes. I started out planning to add a pile of them, but it's hard to find anything that comes across as "neutral" - either the sources are very pro-porn sources arguing that there's no problem, or they're very anti-porn sources - anti-trafficking organizations, web filter/accountability software, etc.
I'm not sure the endless stories of how porn has screwed up young men on Reddit will really change minds either. Perhaps if someone is on the fence, the stories and encouragement of getting over it will help, but that's not really the point being discussed.
So, no, I didn't think it was worth the effort to do a heavily researched set of links on this topic. Sorry.
Reddit links aren't research. Try to find scientific articles.
Your point is true. I'd vouch for it.
You should probably be more concerned about the gratuitous violence that America loves, considering the amount of school shootings you get over there.
It's my root of depression. Just because it didn't effect you doesn't mean it doesn't effect others. Show some compassion for a change.
I'm just relaying my experience to a very valid thing. Pornography can, does and will cause damage.
Porn should be more heavily moderated. Where three words in Google can display explicit imagery isn't right.
Can you not comprehend that?
Obscene graphical content is everywhere. What about discord? Slack, Telegram, Matrix? Even IRC.
So you can't comprehend. Thanks for validating.
I'd say I disagree with "The experiment of "all the porn for all the people with no limits" has been tried, and the results have been absolutely abysmal for humans" and I'm open to changing my opinion about it, granted the papers/links are from good sources, author has some sort of credentials, the methodology makes sense, they're transparent and the results are (somewhat) reproducible.
pornography industry is evil as hell and cannot be reformed/regulated into an acceptable state, and actively prevents ppl from developing a healthy sense of sexuality/eroticism
genuinely not sure if alligning w ppl who want to ban pornography for religious/conservative reasons is a good idea, but it’s better than doing nothing i suspect…
Unfortunately, for legislators to ban porn without breaking the constitution, they'd have to change the First Amendment.
And there is a process for that! IMHO the constitution is due for an overhaul anyway - perhaps while they're at it, the legislators could also sort out those pesky school shootings with some tweaks to the Second Amendment?
Though they've been somewhat lacking since the 1970s.
I'm not aware they're trying to make it actively illegal, though. Just at least marginally age gated to adults, which is far from the current situation of "If you have a browser and can type something that a search engine can correct into a porn search, you can access as much extreme content as you want, as long as you want, from wherever you want!"
The average age of boys being exposed to porn is about 13, and the bottom end of the bell curve is disturbing.
The bottom end of the bell curve is a distraction. I remember kids sneaking porno mags into their backpacks in middle school and charging kids dimes and nickles to take a look. I watched Indiana Jones, James Bond and other pulpy films that pile sex onto the narrative with no adult supervision. I read books with chapters dedicated to graphic sexual depictions and violent conflict before I turned 15.
The problem, as always, comes down to parenting. If you don't trust your child's own authority to select content that is healthy for them, then it's your responsibility to hire a babysitter or deliberately prevent them from using the internet. It's like complaining that your kid might cut off a finger because you gave them a jigsaw.
They're not the slightest bit the same in terms of impact on human brains.
There's just no situation where you give kids access to the internet while also removing porn from it. It just doesn't work like that. It's either that all internet binging is harmful, or none is. No law will ever succeed at depriving kids from using the internet to watch sex videos. We know this because you can't outlaw kids from watching sex scenes in movies or sex chapters in books, either.
and why focus on sex? if I give my kid unsupervised access to the internet she can be subjected to endless stream of beheading videos and much much worse than that… I would HOPE AND PRAY she watches porn vs. other shit that is out there is kids are allowed unsupervised access
Now you say "infinite stream of whatever sounds interesting at the moment".
Those are two quite different things.
To start with, just because a kid saw pornography doesn't mean it was wanted. From a 2007 paper, "Forty-two percent of youth Internet users had been exposed to online pornography in the past year. Of those, 66% reported only unwanted exposure." (From "Unwanted and Wanted Exposure to Online Pornography in a National Sample of Youth Internet Users")
In quite a few countries, the way to watch porn as a teen is to set your alarm for 1am and watch soft porn on regular broadcast TV.
while I do not disagree with you in general the current “war on porn” in the America is a political theatre. no one gives two shits what might be disturbing to 13-year boys, it is all just political theatre
Which is of course a good thing.
Get it, Apple?