The EU ruled that the app store has to allow side-loading in the EU, but y'all still won't get a good browser because both Chrome and Mozilla have said making a side-loadable browser for iOS is only worth it if it can target the American market too, and the side-loading is region-locked.
So sure, y'all can side-load apps in the EU now, but you still can't install uBlock origin on firefox on your iphone thanks to america. Fuck yeah.
I'm not American, but this stance seems extremely biased. We only have Chrome and Mozilla due to America. Nothing's stopping an EU-originated browser from appearing, and with the America-funded open source Chromium, they would have 99.999% of the work already done.
An EU company that released chrome for iOS would have to pay Apple 0.50€ per side-load in "core technology fees", so if they didn't charge a bit, they couldn't, and no one pays for browsers.
They'd also have to pay apple I think 15% "Non-apple Payment Service Providers" fee for anything the user purchased in the app on their device, so i.e. if the user used amazon.com in the browser, the author of the browser would owe apple a percentage of each purchase.
But also it would take I would guess about 5 developers a year to actually port chrome to iOS, so you'd need a roughly 1 million dollar initial investment too.
⁽²⁾ https://help.kagi.com/orion/privacy-and-security/respecting-...
I might not even have to rely on a VPN into my house with a DNS blackhole anymore...
If Orion had a linux version, maybe I'd consider it, but the firefox-skin on webkit lets me share history even if I can't install extensions, and my history is more important.
A browser that only works on iOS and macOS doesn't have a better privacy policy for me in practice, apple collects all sorts of information that my linux devices don't.
Well, America has never prohibited Apple from allowing iOS sideloading, either specifically in America or worldwide. I completely agree that it would be a beneficial economic regulation for the US to require the major gatekeepers to allow such access like the EU has (although ideally with fewer opportunities for bad-faith half-assed compliance attempts than the EU gave Apple), but the biggest blame here goes on Apple and not on any government.