I'd love to see Apple open things up a bit. My personal pet peeve is that it's nearly impossible to use LGPL libraries in iOS apps due to some of the terms.
> Security Features. You may not attempt to, nor assist, authorise or encourage others to circumvent, disable or defeat any of the security features or components, such as digital rights management software or encryption, that protect, obfuscate or otherwise restrict access to any Content or Google Play.
- https://play.google.com/intl/en_us/about/play-terms.html
> 3.3 You may not use the SDK for any purpose not expressly permitted by this License Agreement. Except to the extent required by applicable third party licenses, you may not: (a) copy (except for backup purposes), modify, adapt, redistribute, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or create derivative works of the SDK or any part of the SDK; ...
Another bullet point is about restrictions on jailbreaking; while this is certainly highly onerous and I don't think Google has an equivalent clause, it's worth noting that Google's ban on reverse engineering the Play Store and apps distributed by it (as opposed to the SDK itself) includes activities that, translated to Apple terms, are fairly important to jailbreaking. (In particular, many App Store apps refuse to run on jailbroken devices, and must be reverse engineered to identify how to bypass this check. I don't know what the situation is on Android, but I would be surprised if that clause wasn't rouinely ignored.)
`adb pull <app location>`
plug in new phone
`adb install <app file you just pulled.apk>`
If google really doesn't have this, then it's a shame, but it would explain why there's so much malware on android.
EFF's position across this article is supporting malware, and preventing malware is the clear cause and reasons for all the things the EFF opposes.
Most Android malware is distributed on the Play Store; the reasons it is prevalent include the lack of review process and the Android permission system, both of which are orthogonal to the ability to circumvent the store.
Yes. Malware is the boogey man which apple uses to justify this.
How about we put everyone in prison, because some percentage of them will become criminals anyway? I don't even...
"Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."
This is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for controlling malware, yet you speak as if it is both.
It does require signing, and Apple prevents unsigned apps from running on non-jailbroken phones.
EFF is making a well reasoned decision here that is consistent with their stated goals as an organization, and with the stances they take on other issues.
Obviously, there are massive differences between Apple's policies and Google's policies, when taken as a whole.
EFF might (speculation) see the Google Play store as a minor compromise of their values, while the apple app store is a MAJOR compromise.
> Also, I don't see why the EFF would have published their Android app if they thought the terms were unacceptable.
It seems that the dominant theory by the enraged applephiles is relates to some imaginary 'holy war' against their beloved, innocent apple.
The Amazon code is really invasive, I have been working on extricating a free app from it for some time and it is tedious work.
There is an open Firefox bug about this:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=713777
It also ensures that the app won't run on a device that doesn't have an active Amazon App Store account, even when you bought the app fair and square.
If you're an open-source developer I'd suggest you stay well clear of Amazon.