Honestly, Apple could simply do exactly what they do for macOS now. The two are close enough to a merge at the architectural level that it would not be difficult. macOS is one step away from removing the ability to install unsigned software by default.
If you want to run unsigned software or extensions you will have to boot into a recovery console and change the security model. The warning dialogs will be enough to discourage most use. Things like ApplePay and iCloud may be disabled depending how far you reduce security, but you'll be able to do whatever you want.
I think it be a great solution to have a more uniform solution across all devices and platforms. It would create a boom in the hacker community, while still keeping >99.99% of users running from sealed system snapshots.
What I'm worried about is if the next time we open WhatsApp we see a splash message that says "Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp are moving to the Meta Store! Please restart your phone and follow these easy steps to continue using these apps." App developers have a lot more influence on mobile devices than they do on desktop OSes. This change would shift even more power to those large developers.
You can say a lot of negative things about Apple, but their incentives lined up with the end users more often than companies like Meta and Google.
Yet another example of the Facebook boogeyman being trotted out in an effort to explain why lack of user freedom, lack of consumer choice and anticompetitive business practices are actually good for the customers that are being fleeced by them.
This didn't happen on Android, macOS, or Windows, despite all of them allowing alternative app stores.
>This didn't happen on Android, macOS, or Windows, despite all of them allowing alternative app stores.
I'm guessing you aren't a gamer. This absolutely happened on Android and PC. Fortnight is the most obvious example on Android and the various PC game stores are constantly battling over exclusives which has led to bizarre and annoying situations like this[1]
And yet Facebook hasn't done this, and Epic hasn't done any of the scary things you're spooking yourself over in your OP. The fact that an app is distributed outside of the app store isn't proof that the sky is falling like you're saying will happen.
At the end of the day, if you're this afraid of Facebook, you're free to not use it. There's no reason other users should be restricted because you think that the spectre of Facebook might lurk in the shadows.
>At the end of the day, if you're this afraid of Facebook, you're free to not use it.
I guess that is the end of our discussion as there is no way to counter this type of logic other than saying that if you didn't agree with Apple's walled garden policy, you were free to not use Apple devices.
Facebook is not a duopoly service that is a significant factor of everyone's lives, controlling the parts not just in their social life but in the professional, financial, and other parts of life.
Then it could be argued that if Meta forcibly takes away their apps away from the App Store (or from the Play Store for that matter) then either:
1. Regulators would make a beeline to inspect such a third party app store/the sideloadable binaries they present for irregularities, illicit tracking, data violations, etc.
2. Slap them with anti-competitive monopolistic behavior by engaging in the highly disruptive act of depriving the main App/Play Store users of their apps. Thus, they would be forced by regulator action to host their apps on both their stores and official stores.
Regulators aren't too keen on Meta these days, they're not too keen on Big Tech in general, this isn't a vendetta against Apple.
WhatsApp is 100% needed in countries like mine (Argentina). COVID-19 vaccine appointments came via WhatsApp in Buenos Aires, most people require it for professional reasons, school parent groups and similar happen in WhatsApp, social life requires WhatsApp. Now iOS or Android are interchangeable… nothing demands having one or the other.
It's safe to assume that, even in developing nations, everyone has a cheap beat-down Android or iPhone.
Having a smartphone has become as ubiquitous as having electricity or running water now that nobody questions living without one. It's pretty much a must have.
That's why the Apple/Google platform are starting to attract regulators, which is only a good thing.
The reality kind of contradicts you. Sure, there are people living without smartphones, the same way how there are people living without electricity or running water.
The thing is, in the developing world, smartphones and the various apps have really improved people's lives, mostly by getting ahead in speed and innovation of what the governments, public services and local companies could offer the traditional way.
So it's not like everyone is forced to get a smartphone, but everyone got a smartphone because it now allowed everyone to communicate better, organize better, and sell their services/goods easier.
What you are showing here is a very severe lack of empathy in my opinion. The fact (which you seem to recognize) is that there are people that do not have mobile phones.
You are also right that mobile apps make it easier for people that do have them to do all of those things. However the problem appears when it's so convenient to have a phone that when making decisions about how to provide access to things they think of only two options: Android or iOS. I have none and I don't like being a third class citizen when I want to connect to my bank, to my COVID appointment or, god forbid, interact with the government machine.
>What you are showing here is a very severe lack of empathy in my opinion
Where did I do that? I wasn't saying that smartphones should be the norm for everything , I was jusy saying how society usually sees smartphone ownership as a necessity in certain countries because they reduce the friction for many communication and organization task that would otherwise be much more difficult. I wasn't saying that's how I want it to be or that this is a good thing, I'm saying how things are in the real world and in which direction they are going.
Like for example in my country, parent-teacher communication regarding school and child matters is done via WhatsApp/Telegram. Is that good? No, obviously not. Ideally we'd have an internal school chat/meesaging system with logins for parents and teachers like how proably things are in Scandinavian countries I imagine. But since my country is poor and schools could never afford to pay market rate devs and sys-admins to implement and maintain such communication systems, the likes of Telegram and WhatsApp took over this role because they're free, convenient, frictionless and since "everyone already has a smartphone" they already know how to use these apps.
So there you go, that's how the likes of WahtsApp have such a huge market share in the lives of all people and businesses, especially in developing countries.
>I don't like being a third class citizen when I want to connect to my bank, to my COVID appointment or, god forbid, interact with the government machine.
I'd be curious where this is the case. There are enough "old-school" banks where you don't need a smartphone, and stuff like government interactions are usually regulated so that they can be accessible for people without smartphones and also for people with disabilities. Even in developing countries. Digitization of government serivices has been implemented to make things more efficient and reduce the need for paperwork, commuting and waiting in lines, not to completely replace the old systems.
Apple's not a monopoly of the cell phone market.
Facebook is a monopoly of the social media market.
If you you or your business boycot facebook you will probably fail.
> Facebook is a monopoly of the social media market. If you you or your business boycot facebook you will probably fail.
As someone who works with many business, I can tell you that this is false. There are many more ways to market services than via Facebook and other related Meta properties.
Given that you didn't go into details about this "list", there's not a lot of weight in your argument. Be it for privacy reasons or not, if your don't share at least some high level information about these alternative marketing strategies you are talking about, I can't really believe you.
Are your businesses local, allowing you to just use physical flyers or something?
- Google Maps optimization, asking or discounting for ratings
- Rewards and affiliate programs
- Physical flyers sometimes, yes
- Free samples at various stores if food related
Startups:
- SEO
- Content marketing
- Affiliate programs
- Cold emailing, DMing on other platforms
- Sponsorships with creators like on YouTube
- Gamification
- And of course, word of mouth and simply having a good product
Unless you're big or have lots of VC, ads usually don't work. The companies I've worked with, we tried many different ad models which cost a lot of money but ultimately didn't bring in the traffic commensutate to the cost.
There's a big difference between not using one out of fifty competing social media apps and not using the products from an illegal duopoly. The first is freedom of choice, the second is a lack of choice enabled by illegal business practices that prevent competition through violation of antitrust laws.
So you are literally free to choose to use Facebook or not, but if you want to participate in society, use banks, get a job, etc, you are not free to escape the Apple and Google duopoly, because their illegal anticompetitive actions have artificially limited consumer choice.
And now (soon) if you decide to, you'll be able to stop using Apple App Store without purchasing a new phone, and apps for the new phone. This encourages free movement between markets and encourages competition.
Just because someone has decided they like the Apple App Store now, doesn't mean opinions won't change over time, or that the product doesn't change. Therefore being able to easily change your options is good.
There seems to be a disconnect here as you missed the point of this comment. Previously people could choose between an open platform and a platform with a walled garden. In the future, the choice is likely between two open platforms. Someone who preferred the security, privacy, and simplicity of a walled garden is potentially losing that choice.
That's a false dichotomy. Apple can offer everything you have now while also giving users the option to sideload. Nowhere is it written that they have to be mutually exclusive.
Sideloading sounds great to me and you, but it also opens up a great attack vector on less techy people: just convince the user to run an arbitrary binary to pwn the device.
Not in practice no. People don't sideload "arbitrary binaries" also on android they install other app stores and these app stores have vetting. The vetting guide lines there might have less censorship than apple, but this "attack vector" is just completely made up in reality.
Right. On Android, that's not possible without enabling Developer Mode in settings through a cryptic combo, then enabling the installation of third party packages. After that you still have to go through the process of installing the software.
It's not something you can bait Grandma into very easily. It's a useless attack vector when Safari comes preinstalled on every iPhone.
Oh that's not a problem, there are so many ways to make it seem innocuous. Let's start with the fact that 80% of legit devs will just never notarize if they can instead tell users "go through this flow to use my app, not my fault apple bad". Like on macOS, it becomes routine after 3rd time.
And if you believe exploiting evergreen Safari from JS to arbitrary execution is the same as directly running malicious instructions that came in sideloaded app then I have nothing more to say.
How many casual users are going to be downloading mobile apps from random indie devs who do that? How many casual users are going to be sideloading at all?
Like on macOS, probably lots. It's not casual users who are at most risk but semi-techies savvy enough to follow a tutorial on disabling SIP to do something benign but not savvy enough to know of the implications. There are more people like that in digital native generations, perhaps even more than actually "casual users" in the old sense.
I know such people who use alternative browsers. They are OK jumping through an extra hoop to use non-notarized enthusiast-made software. And don't underestimate how people like to reskin their OS GUI which on Apple hardware is not possible without full root and disabling various security measures.
Then why haven't Meta already removed their apps from the Apple App Store and only released them on the Meta Android Store? Make their apps exclusives to an alternative of iOS altogether. Do you think users would be forced to buy a Meta Phone in that case? Or would they be able to ignore it?
Or maybe Meta are forced to release on Apple iPhone because consumers have power. Well that same power can get them to release on the Apple App Store if there were alternatives. That's how supply and demand in the free market works.
Which would turn the eye of Sauron that is the European Commission onto Meta for their monopolistic behavior, especially if it's transparently and flagrantly for the purpose of cheap data collection.
The first time Epic tried to push Fortnite on Android they accidentally introduced a backdoor to every single device that installed their homebrew updater.
And we're not talking advanced memory safety exploit, breakout the ROPs "backdoor". They requested permission to install apps, then went on to silently install any apk that was put in a path with 0 verification.
It's the kind of lazy mistake that puts on full display the fact that at the end of the day, Epic doesn't care about anything as bold as freedom. They were so giddy to get around the Play Store cut that they couldn't put 5 seconds into thinking about anything besides "how quickly can we roll this thing out to people and get our cash cow back on track?"
Apple regularly ships backdoors and RCEs in their software. Safari is routinely exploited, and exploits in Safari put every iOS user at risk, because Apple prevents other browser engines from running on iOS. Even Firefox and Chrome on iOS are just reskinned Safari.
If users had the option of using a browser with better security and features, an exploit in Safari wouldn't be as big of a threat.
Here's a fun figure: exploits for iOS are cheaper than exploits for Android because exploits for iOS are more common than those for Android.
Consumers should have the choice of running whatever software they want on the devices they own, in part because that gives them the option to use more secure apps than the ones Apple forces all iOS users to use.
The idea that whataboutism is the only hallmark of a poorly conceived argument you need to look for picks up another case.
If we remove the part where you try and brush of Epic's negligence because "oh yeah?! Apple makes mistakes too!!!" and try to imply that Chrome isn't a massively more lucrative target than Safari... this is just fearmongering about security.
Alternative app stores on Android are either F Droid, or crap. And the crap ones vastly outnumber F Droid, and mostly push malware laced versions of the play store, like Aptoide. The ones that don't are bloatware like Samsung's half-baked attempt at an app store, or the Amazon App Store serving up outdated packages so you can enjoy last year's vulnerabilities today.
> Here's a fun figure: exploits for iOS are cheaper than exploits for Android because exploits for iOS are more common than those for Android.
For 12 of the 15 years they've both existed iOS exploits were more expensive, and unlike now the margin was entire orders of magnitude.
I've lead shipped Android products from datasheets. Would not bring up Android in any conversation about security: you don't need fresh backdoors with the culture SoC manufacturers have driven. A quarter of the platform is on versions that stopped getting security updates years ago.
That's why I'm perfectly happy with Android being the OS for psuedo-Stallmanists who say things like "Consumers should have the choice of running whatever software they want on the devices they own".
It's disappointing that Apple is going to let something that's proven itself to overwhelmingly be used for garbage onto the platform because non-technical people are getting lobbied by companies with an agenda under the guise of "freedom". Let Android be the containment zone for that stuff.
No, you are not because facebook is Big. So for instance restaurants, announcements, some news etc will only be on facebook. So this reads like "just don't use any electricity"... technically 'possible' but a completely useless argument.
It is trying to derail the conversation comparing Facebook to electricity. You are trying to shoehorn everyone into your chosen way of life as many people don't use Facebook and many avoid all social media like the plague. I don't have Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, etc. and I have no use for it at all. If a restaurant only want customers from Facebook then just don't eat there. It is not like you'll starve if you don't. To me it is no bigger a decision to not use Facebook than what brand of toilet-paper to buy - which shows how biased you are.
They are big, but not that big... I haven't used any meta product for a couple years now and I'm only missing the seldom update from a couple of companies. Tbh, I don't miss it that much. However, I can understand some people are "hooked" on it and have stopped looking for alternatives.
What? With Epic you cannot just install the game on mac os. You need to install their Epic „store” that will try to
run itself each time you start a computer and
so
on. Exactly the thing that people don’t want on iPhone.
Which you cannot do on an iPhone. You don't boot it like a PC and apps don't launch when you do restart it. It is another what-if that cannot happen, derailing the discussion.
Epic is offering free games and discounts to lure players in all the time. this is excellent for consumers.
The problem with goat simulator is 100% on the developer and not some dark pattern imposed by steam. If you have an xbox or ps controller it will work out of the box without steam (provided you have installed the drivers). Steam has a gamepad emulation layer and that's why the dev recommended using it as a launcher for the non-steam game, because any controller will work with it.
Competition for competition’s sake isn’t always good. Netflix is by any standard I can think of a worse product than it used to be. It’s doubtful that the free games thing is sustainable long term; Epic is burning a ton of money to try and establish a toehold.
Steam is a special case because they set the bar incredibly high while having a monopoly on PC for almost two decades.
However, you can't rest easy with a monopoly, even with a BDFL. At some point, Gabe will step down, and Steam will either go sideways or get sold to Microsoft or Google, ending the love story.
That's why I buy some games on Epic, to keep Steam on their toes, even though they are still the best option out there. I tell everyone I know to do the same.
To be honest, streaming is fraught with content restrictions and copyrights. If it was similar to the PC gaming case, then we would be able to watch any show on any platform, minus a few exclusives. That would actually lead to innovation and is good for the end consumer. This is decidedly not the case any more after all the major content owners came out with their own streaming service, and locked others out.
To me this shows the flaws of a narrow-minded focus on competition. There is little video streaming services can do to distinguish themselves without exclusive access to content (sure, UI tweaks and the like, but most of the time the UI is not even visible by design), so the anticipated result of more competition is the content splinters across a greater number of services.
The solution is for Congress to require FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) licensing on all digital media. Exclusive distribution is anticompetitive. Producers should be required to set a price and terms and any marketplace can carry the item if they pay the price and meet the terms.
Followed by calling the game "Fortnight" gave me a bit of a chuckle.
Most people I know just don't buy anything that isn't on Steam. People only use the Epic store cause they give out free games all the time in a sad attempt to get people to use it more, but most people don't care and would rather stay with Steam (while occasionally redeeming some free games on Epic). As for something like GoG, they give you DRM-free portable installers, so obviously some people like that and occasionally use it instead of Steam.
You're not wrong, but games are probably a unique space where that's the sort of thing that already regularly happens on PCs as well, witness the proliferation in publisher stores over the last few years. AAA studios are simply used to forcing that sort of extractive behavior from users, and users are all too willing to comply.
But I don't think there's that much threat for the gaming + mobile market, in the sense that Fortnite aside, I'm pretty sure EA/UbiSoft/Activision Blizzard/etc. don't really have "killer apps" for iOS that would entice a lot of users to use their third party app stores. For all other types of mobile games, Apple Arcade is hard to beat.
> AAA studios are simply used to forcing that sort of extractive behavior from users, and users are all too willing to comply.
How so? Steam is still alive and well, while publisher-exclusive stores are slowly disappearing. Sure, Epic Store still exists and has solid market share, but it's arguably more than just a publisher store.
I might be out of date now but aren't there EA Origin, Ubisoft store, Battle.net, and the Microsoft Store, at least? Those publishers carry a good chunk of titles between them. Is the pendulum swinging back against proliferation of game publisher stores?
What I just mean is a few years ago this trend started happening, Epic was but one of them trying to break into the prior Steam/GoG landscape.
> I might be out of date now but aren't there EA Origin, Ubisoft store, Battle.net, and the Microsoft Store, at least?
EA has started putting games back on Steam [0] and so has Ubisoft [1]. I've heard rumors of battle.net going the same way, but nothing seems to be confirmed as of now. Since nearly all of those stores have been inferior to Steam feature-wise with the exception of exclusives, I think it's mostly save to say that publishers have mostly given up on trying to force their users onto their own controlled store.
Epic is a different topic, since they seem to actually try to compete with it in terms of features and catalog and opened up the store for third party games, which most publishers did not.
As for Microsoft, this might be my bubble, but it seems to me that store isn't really considered a major player, similarly to GOG, itch.io and the likes.
Yeah, but it’s their first party exclusives that might lock people in if they’re trying to play Warzone or the latest Assassin’s Creed or any of the ‘crafts. No one really wants to have to deal with another store in addition to Valve and on occasion GoG for older titles, but they’re forced to for those AAA franchises.
Well, that does it. Some people can't play Goat Simulator 3. That definitely proves the whole model of having independent stores in un-viable. I mean, who needs those fancy picture boxes is you can't even play a goat simulator on it without "using steam"? It's just not worth it anymore.
“User freedom” doesn’t work in this argument. Apple’s restrictive App Store is a big reason of why I use iPhones and why I recommend them to most people who ask.
There are effectively only two smartphone platforms available to users, and destroying one of the only meaningful differences between the platforms in the name of “user choice” is nothing if not ironic.
What you're saying is that you like Apple's playpen, so everyone else should be forced to stay in that playpen, too.
If you want to stay in the playpen, that's fine, but there's no reason why users who want to use the full potential of their devices shouldn't be able to in order to keep you happy.
It's not a dichotomy. If you want to keep your options limited, stay in the playpen. Users who value freedom, competition, and efficiencies of markets can also enjoy those things, but they currently are prevented because Apple will pull no stops to protect their App Store moneyhose.
>Users who value freedom, competition, and efficiencies of markets can also enjoy those things, but they currently are prevented because Apple will pull no stops to protect their App Store moneyhose.
The counter is that these users do have a choice. They can buy an Android.
Allowing different stores might end up removing choice for the end user who like Apple's current approach as the large developers with power like Meta will likely force the different stores on us. This change is reducing Apple's power, but that power isn't all going to the end user. It is empowering Meta, Google, Amazon, and other big tech companies who are seemingly even less likely to act in the end user's best interest than Apple.
Google is part of the same duopoly that leverages their dominance in the mobile OS and hardware markets in order to dominate the mobile app distribution and mobile app payments markets.
The majority of the mobile OS market in the US is iOS, the rest is Android. Apple is responsible for 2x mobile app revenue than Google, but Apple and Google both make up more than 99% of all mobile app sales.
When talking about monopolies, the working definition from the FTC are firms that have significant and durable market power such that they can set prices and exclude competitors[1]. That describes the Apple and Google duopoly accurately. Such firms and their anticompetitive tactics are outlawed by antitrust legislation in the US.
How is Apple's app store specifically anti-competitive with respect to other mobile OSs and devices?
I can, to some degree, understand people's gripe with Apple for DRM behaviors on hardware you own. But I don't see why forcing Apple to host multiple app stores will provide more user-choice in the mobile OS space.
It might make Apple's platform more compelling for some users. But it will do the opposite for other users and still doesn't solve the duopoly problem you're citing.
I also don't see what the FTC's definition of a monopoly brings to the discussion other than to boogey-man the big bad corporations.
It sounds like your issue is with the lack of OS choice in the mobile market. Forcing Apple to allow other app stores does nothing to solve this problem.
Microsoft went to court and lost to the FTC for less. Microsoft leveraged their dominance in the PC OS market to dominate the browser market, as well. The FTC successfully upheld antitrust legislation against Microsoft in that instance.
Apple and Google are doing the same with their dominance in the mobile OS market to dominate the mobile app distribution and mobile app payments markets.
If you don't see the significance of literal illegal anticompetitive business practices, I don't know what to tell you.
Has Apple compelled asked companies that are using Android to dump Android and switch to iOS (for some money)? (P.17)
How about having 3rd party iPhone manufacturers be restricted to using iOS as a condition for licensing and distributing iOS? (P.18 - note, if you're making Android and requiring all of the 3rd party manufactures that use it to also have Google Play... that's ok)
Has Apple entered into exclusive contracts with all the top ISPs to brand their web pages to work with Safari but not Chrome? (P.28 - note, if you are making Chrome and make a site not work with... say Firefox, that's ok)
So yes, Microsoft and the DOJ went to court. But the thing was about Microsoft forcing its terms on other companies that excluded it's competitors. Is Apple going to other companies and enforcing terms that are excluding Android?
Have you even read the Microsoft case? It's not even close to the same thing [0]. Apple hasn't forced it's terms on other companies in nearly the same way. Apple has instead built a hardware and software platform that has a lot of users and is gatekeeping their OS, hardware, and user-base.
There are arguments for side-loading on Apple, but that doesn't have anything to do with breaking up the iOS-Android mobile OS duopoly, which seems to be the thing you're really mad about.
Android allows side-loading. Making iOS more like Android doesn't strike me as "increasing consumer choice".
>illegal anticompetitive business practices
None of what Apple has done is apparently illegal. In fact, this is a _new_ law that Apple is complying with.
It’s not like many others haven’t tried. Microsoft, Palm, maybe they can try again.
But for whatever reason that I can’t quite explain (especially on android, on iOS I think iMessage locks people in. Maybe on Android it’s the Google suite?), others haven’t made a dent.
I'm certainly not as confident as you are. Why wouldn't essentially every large app with even a moderate amount of lock-in do this? I would be extremely surprised if any large social networks or online games wouldn't immediately do this.
Facebook has spent an immense amount of effort on being installed-by-default on most platforms. They also have massive user retention problems right now, with competiting platforms taking app a lot of market share from basically all of their owned platforms, not to mention their image issues. I'm willing to bet that going for a scarcity tactic with their own appstore would be major mistake.
Not to mention that it's not much use for most social media platforms, assuming this doesn't allow them to bypass privacy restrictions. The only apps eho would immediately benefit from such a move would be the ones handling payments.
They would try, but they would likely fail because, as I mentioned above- do you have any responses to the points I bring up? To enumerate some of them-
1. Consumers are already sick and tired of having to do account management already and having to deal with Meta or Google forcing them to do more of that will lead to backlash.
2. I'm unconvinced that Meta and Google have the product capability wherewithal to force a great migration, judging by their attempts at new products in recent years, let alone what basically amounts to a new platform. The Facebook Home launcher went nowhere and I'm pretty sure Android Instant Apps didn't either. They don't really fare very well outside of their home turf, and iOS is definitely not theirs.
3. Regulators, particularly in the EU, would not sit idly by while Big Tech lures customers to shady third party app stores; if anything, these stores would present opportunities for greater scrutiny and more crackdowns.
4. I'm not even sure if Meta can get away with pulling a crucial app such as WhatsApp away from the main App Store. That seems like monopolistic behavior, and disruptive to the lives of tens of millions of people who use it for basic communications. The EU would probably mandate them host it on their third party app store AND on the official App Store.
5. I do have a carve out exception for games, because publishers regularly engage in extractive abusive behavior and gamers just take it or pirate:
It would definitely depend on how difficult it was to sideload and whether there were negative side effects (like Apple disabling certain features if you enable sideloading). Your older comment seems to imply that it would be quite difficult, and other than that I don't see much of an argument for why it wouldn't happen overnight.
My main point is that it's not about actually creating an app store ecosystem to compete with Apple's. I agree that that would be difficult (although existing ecosystems like Steam would almost certainly go for it, as you seem to concede). My main point is that they would just immediately make you sideload to use Facebook, Fortnite, etc.
Steam might go for it, but I think Epic would be the big one, mostly because I don't believe Valve has any mobile games that would entice users to join their app store. Well, I guess being able to buy Steam games without going through the App Store cut would be a factor, but then it would just be a standalone storefront app for purchasing PC games, not really a shady app store with questionable binaries full of user tracking.
> My main point is that they would just immediately make you sideload to use Facebook
What about my points about the regulators? Meta does not exist within a vacuum. They are under as much scrutiny, probably more, than Apple. Sideloaded binaries will end up combed through by regulators, government watchdogs, security firms, Brian Krebs, etc., to check for Meta malfeasance. Plus, the point about forced migrations being potentially monopolistic behavior.
And again, they can try to make users sideload, but a not-insignificant minority would not comply. Forcing them to jump through new hoops while presenting no new benefits would not be a good user experience. Plenty would take to social media to complain. Many would read up about Meta's dastardly data policies. It would be a PR nightmare. The mea culpas and reversals would come quicker than you can say "Senate hearing."
This is also all overlooking the fact that Meta as a company is in a pivotal business situation right now- DAU was falling a few quarters ago, they just spent a ton of money on the metaverse with no results other than avatar legs to show for it, and so on. Trying to do something as disruptive as forcing their customers to get their apps from a new source could be highly detrimental to them.
>If you want to stay in the playpen, that's fine, but there's no reason why users who want to use the full potential of their devices shouldn't be able to in order to keep you happy.
This is just flat out not true with networked devices. I want my tech illiterate mother on a platform with no malware. That includes no malware on other devices that can contact hers and trick her into installing the same malware on her device. Apple’s iOS is the only computing platform that she has ever used on which she has avoided being tricked into malware installation. I’m skeptical that that will continue with third party app stores becoming a thing.
Multimillion dollar scams flourish on the App Store[1]:
> That man’s name is Kosta Eleftheriou, and over the past few months, he’s made a convincing case that Apple is either uninterested or incompetent at stopping multimillion-dollar scams in its own App Store. He’s repeatedly found scam apps that prey on ordinary iPhone and iPad owners by luring them into a “free trial” of an app with seemingly thousands of fake 5-star reviews, only to charge them outrageous sums of money for a recurring subscription that many don’t understand how to cancel. “It’s a situation that most communities are blind to because of how Apple is essentially brainwashing people into believing the App Store is a trusted place,” he tells The Verge.
Apple is also responsible for distributing 500 million copies of Xcodeghost to users via the App Store[2].
The App Store model is about profits, and security is an afterthought that makes for good PR.
Just tell her not to enable developer mode. This is FUD: Apple would clearly have the right to determine the side-loading process as they see fit, and they can put in all sorts of protections to prevent novice users from accessing it easily. Think parental mode type protections. Apple is the master of UX; surely they can figure out a way to keep things secure for users who need it to be?
She doesn’t know what that is. She won’t remember what I said 5 minutes after I leave. She will blindly follow the instructions of any official-looking website or any scam caller that instructs her to disable these protections in order to “watch a video” (actually sideload an executable).
> Apple is the master of UX; surely they can figure out a way to keep things secure for users who need it to be?
She got around all of the modern permissions and signing protections on macOS and installed a malicious phony video player that nuked her device and stole her banking credentials. It doesn’t matter what you tell her: she WILL get tricked unless it’s impossible to be tricked.
That's both unfortunate, and sort of amazing. So she's not technically literate to know if she's being scammed, yet obviously competent enough to follow directions to get hacked.
My guess is that the actual numbers are much lower, like orders of magnitude lower. The U.S. may be dominated by Apple devices, but the rest of the world runs on Windows and Android. 80% of the world population isn't being scammed out of their savings nor are their phones infested with keyloggers and other malware.
Most developers will continue to do that even after iOS allows third party app stores, just as most Android apps publish through the Play Store (even if better alternatives such as F-Droid exist).
No, I'm saying that Apple's restrictions on third-party developers are one of the most significant distinguishing characteristics of their smartphones versus their competitors, and that if you wanted an alternative you could easily and almost certainly already have decided to use a competitor's product instead.
They're also totally arbitrary. It should be the user's choice if they want to impose those restrictions, because the user bought the hardware. In any just world, the consumer deserves the final say over what software runs on the hardware they own.
The purchase of the hardware is the users choosing those restrictions.
You are advocating for your own preferences and dressing it up as a noble pursuit of some general user choice, when the users have already chosen. You simply want to subvert their choice.
There are people who prefer using iOS or Apple hardware but do not want Apple's anticompetitive App Store restrictions imposed on the Apple devices they own. Those are the people whose user choice is being suppressed, and those are the people you are sidelining because you wish to impress your own preferences onto them. People content with the status quo, including you, can continue to exclusively use the App Store on iOS on Apple devices.
> There are people who prefer using iOS or Apple hardware but do not want Apple's anticompetitive App Store restrictions imposed on the Apple devices they own.
Okay, but surely there has to be some reasonable bound on what we mean by "user choice," otherwise given any finite set of products we can say there is suppression of choice of every customer who wants any of the infinite set of products that does not exist. Of course there are endless combinations of features that I might want to exist in a product, but the fact that not every conceivable product exists is not (in my view) sufficient to show that customer choice is being suppressed.
Maybe I want a Playstation 5, but in the enclosure of an Xbox Series X because I prefer the look of the latter. Is Sony suppressing customer choice by only offering the Playstation 5 in one enclosure?
Maybe I want a folding phone, but I want it to by an iPhone. Is Apple suppressing customer choice by not offering any folding phones?
My answer to both of those examples is "No." If you want a gaming console that looks exactly like an Xbox Series X, it's reasonable to that have to buy an Xbox. I think if you want a folding phone it's totally reasonable that you have to go to manufacturers that offer them. It's not reasonable to desire some specific set of requirements and require that one particular manufacturer provide you with a product that fulfills them.
Your two examples are completely irrelevant because they do not concern anticompetitive behavior. The form factors of Apple's phones and the appearance of Sony's consoles have nothing to do with anticompetitive behavior and are not regulated by antitrust law.
What we are actually discussing is Apple's anticompetitive restrictions against third-party app stores and sideloading. These restrictions harm user choice especially in light of iOS being part of a duopoly. Apple's anticompetitive restrictions are what the EU's Digital Markets Act is addressing to increase user choice.
Android, macOS, and Windows aren't being blamed by Facebook public for a $10 million drop in ad revenue due to a change in iOS policies, so it's not quite the same fruit.
That didn't happen on Android because while Android allows alternative app stores, it doesn't go out of its way to encourage users to them. So Google still has a lot of power via Play store user count.
Sometimes, we get a good outcome because titanic companies' competing interests are balanced... but that doesn't mean we should forget that if that balance were upset the winner would screw over users in a nanosecond.
So if I make a competitor called the Avocado company, and my Avocado phone can only run third-party software I vet myself, and my entire marketing pitch is "this vetting process protects your security and privacy", would the same argument apply?
Is your company a firm that has significant and durable market power such that they can set prices and exclude competitors[1], like the Apple and Google duopoly can and does?
You can have security without the App Store, it isn't a dichotomy. Apple doesn't have the best track record with "security" on the App Store, either, considering multimillion dollar scams flourish on the platform, and the fact that Apple is responsible for distributing a half billion copies of just one type of malware to iOS users via the App Store.
Thankfully, there are more responsible parties and more capable security paradigms than the one Apple forces down users' throats via the App Store, and users should have the choice to use them on the devices they own.
Maybe if Apple actually faced competition when it came to the App Store, they would take the security of users, and not just their profit margins, more seriously and wouldn't let fraud and malware affect hundreds of millions of their own customers.
> Similarly, Google is converging on the same anticompetitive practices with the Play Store.
What do you mean? Google has been making things easier for third-party app stores over time, not converging to Apple's model. (Most recently in adding the auto-update permission in Android 12.)
You can't distribute apps on the Play Store without using Google's mobile payments platform, giving them the 15%-30% cut that Apple takes. They're preventing competition in the mobile app payments market by leveraging their dominance in the mobile OS and mobile app distribution markets, just like Apple does.
Small but meaningful correction: Apple decides what is allowed on _Apple_ devices consumers own.
So again, how does this hurt choice? You can choose a dozen other phones. Your ability to participate in the smartphone revolution isn’t hindered in any meaningful way.
To be clear, I HATE the App Store review process as it stands. But that’s not because I don’t have a choice and somehow magically think other app stores will fix everything. It’s because it is objectively badly run as a business process. They don’t respond for weeks. The communication is entirely arbitrary. The application of rules is wholly inconsistent.
I’m not sure a second App Store will help with that.
I can still only see mostly downsides by creating confusion for consumers like others have said will happen.
> Apple decides what is allowed on _Apple_ devices consumers own.
It doesn't matter, the consumer still bought the device. It's their hardware, they own the iPhone. They deserve the last say over what runs on their computer. A system like the current M1 Macs (unlocked bootloader, OS with overrides) would completely shut everyone up over Apple's abuse here. This legislation is a step in the right direction.
> I’m not sure a second App Store will help with that.
If nothing else, it gives Apple an incentive to compete. Something I'd argue is sorely needed on iOS.
> I can still only see mostly downsides by creating confusion for consumers like others have said will happen.
Well, it didn't really cause any confusions when Android did it, or even when Microsoft added sideloading to Xbox. Very little evidence supports the claim that everything will fall to pandemonium when third-party stores hit iOS.
> still bought the device. It's their hardware, they own the iPhone.
Consumers own the hardware NOT the software. Apple, Google, etc are expected maintain the software over a long period of time. The content on the device is owned and manage by developers, Apple, Google, etc. You only rent access to the software. It's not yours.
You can buy a TV but you still have a cable bill. The TV is yours, the channels are not!
> What I'm worried about is if the next time we open WhatsApp we see a splash message that says "Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp are moving to the Meta Store! Please restart your phone and follow these easy steps to continue using these apps."
Why do people continue to tout this as some sort of gotcha? Android has multiple app stores yet this doesn't occur.
However, what I do like is that if I want to download some other client for Instagram from F-Droid for example, I can, unlike in the Apple App Store. Currently I use one that blocks apps, enhances image quality on upload and download, etc. Not really possible on iOS.
> Why do people continue to tout this as some sort of gotcha? Android has multiple app stores yet this doesn't occur.
It is very possible that this hasn't ocurred because google has not enforced the same level of privacy-related restrictions that apple has (which reportedly costed facebook ~10 billion dollars [1]).
I'm a strong supporter of device owners being able to do what they please with their devices, but the risks are there and are very real.
Honestly, that's fine by me. Epic made the game, they process the payments, they're not using the Google Play Store's services and storefront at all (not to be confused with Google Play Services), so why would they pay 30% simply to be on a store they don't use?
Same as on a computer, I use Windows, but it'd be absurd for me to download software only through the Microsoft Store app.
Couldn't Meta follow the same path as Epic? Doesn't that have potential to create a situation that is worse off for consumers because their device theoretically would be less protected in terms of both security and privacy?
They could, but I argue that Meta requiring users to use a third party app store would likely be self-defeating for them. It could conceivably alienate a lot of users who don't want to deal with managing yet another account, let alone subject themselves to an environment run by Meta.
> let alone subject themselves to an environment run by Meta.
Why would EU Lawmakers be satisfies with some crazy process that requires rebooting the device or going through 10+ steps to enable sideloading? These EU laws will likely require low-friction alternate app stores, which means actually installing Facebook via an alternate method might mean something as low-friction as meta.com/store -> "trust Meta store" -> open and install Facebook.
1. I don't think EU lawmakers would be opposed to sensible user flows from Apple that properly disclose the risks and provide disclaimers about the potential dangers of side loading.
2. The current Settings menu in iOS is already a jumbled mess as it is, thanks to years of layers upon layers of options added into it. Even simply getting into developer mode would cause some friction.
4. I'm talking about the existence of alternate app stores themselves adding friction. Meta forcing users to use their store would be adding an additional wrinkle as it is. Think about the current streaming space. Many many users are already forced to deal with multiple services and managing their accounts just to get into content. And now they're going to be doing it on their iPhones? It's quite likely that a substantial amount would just forego dealing with a Meta app store and just start using the the mobile website - or just abandon Facebook on their phones altogether, which is even worse than Meta.
5. A point I mention in the link but not above: EU lawmakers, who are already suspicious of Meta, will likely scrutinize any third party app stores launched by them or other big tech companies anyway. So it's not as if it would be unpoliced for privacy violations and the like.
If anything, such app stores would be a treasure trove for regulators to inspect.
So we have a technological solution to cross-app tracking, and we'd downgrade to a regulatory process that hopefully fines companies enough to actually cause a difference. Oh, and you'd better hope those companies are actually located withing the EU or US, because if you PII gets siphoned to China you won't get any remediation whatsoever (at least for as long as they remain the world's manufacturing capital).
> we'd downgrade to a regulatory process that hopefully fines companies enough to actually cause a difference
It is not a downgrade, because for those who live in democracies, such regulations are decided by we, the people, and thus we should ultimately place our faith in the democratic system, not in any private corporation, no matter how benevolent-seeming.
> because if you PII gets siphoned to China you won't get any remediation whatsoever
Evidence that this isn't already happening anyway? Whither current iOS users in China?
> at least for as long as they remain the world's manufacturing capital
Don't worry, Apple is hard at work shifting their supply chain to India and Vietnam. Right? Right?
> Evidence that this isn't already happening anyway? Whither current iOS users in China?
I'm taking about a situation where a government, say a fictional United States, implements privacy regulations. For any legitimate company, they must follow these to operate in the United States.
In this scenario, the Government has no way to protect vulnerable citizens who search "free clash of clans gems ios", download a third-party app store provided by some data company in China, and have their PII beamed to servers in China (bonus points if it uses a zero-day to do something like purchase a bunch of product from Amazon or otherwise use the person's phone as a zombie in a botnet or money-laundering scheme). This is currently impossible on iOS without the data firm having something like a hacked Apple Enterprise account it's using to distribute software outside of the App Store, where it's checked to ensure IDFA compliance and levels of static/dynamic behavior analysis & preventing JIT code compilation or most things that could run unaudited code.
Then Apple will have to harden iOS's security model further. Do you doubt that they can? They've been able to, so far. For one thing, they'll likely be able to force notarization by default for all apps, regardless of origin.
Most of Apple's security model is inherit to the human auditing and binary analysis that happens during app store submission; the inherit nature of computer software is to have unintended behavior due to unforeseen input and state. As Craig said, "Today, we have a level of malware on the Mac that we don’t find acceptable and that is much worse than iOS" https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/19/apples-head-of-software-says...
Ah, well I stand corrected on that point. My other points also stand.
I've also speculated elsewhere that perhaps Apple could open source binary analysis tools, or at least present some sort of public-facing service to scan binaries. They could manage the semi-opening of their platform themselves, if they wanted to.
> so why would they pay 30% simply to be on a store they don't use?
The argument for this on Apple's side is that you're not paying just for the payment processing, but you pay it as a fee for benefiting from the user base that Apple attracts via their investment into their R&D from the hardware, to the UI design, to the APIs that enable your app itself to run.
> Imagine any other manufacturer or OS charging you for allowing you to write software for their systems.
Back in the day computer vendors didn’t let anyone else write software for their systems. If you wanted software you had to pay the vendor an arm and two legs to write it.
So, let's say Apple drops the cost of the 14 Pro Max down to $506[0]. Does it suddenly become legal? What if it's a more reasonable profit margin of $100 perhaps - at what point is it "you cannot make money off your software on the backend"? and, importantly, what makes consoles any different now that they also (A) sell either close-to-cost or at a loss, (B) tend to contain a web browser, and (C) charge a large percentage fee on third-party titles bought for the console?
You were the one who brought up the idea of "but you pay [it for] their R&D from the hardware, to the UI design, to the APIs".
If you want to back to take back that argument, great.
So, the whole idea of "Well you are paying for all this other stuff" is completely off the table, and you can't use it, because people pay 1400$ for the phone.
So lets all just completely ignore that idea, and lets stop pretending like Apple is "owed" anything for the phone that belongs to the user.
The phone belongs to the user, and they paid a fair price for it, so no Apple is not owed money for any of other stuff.
> at what point is it "you cannot make money off your software on the backend"?
Apple can keep doing that if they want. By competing in the free market.
They just can't force people onto that anymore. They will have to actually make a better product, and hope users go to that store, instead of alternatives.
I don't see how this answers my question. It's literally just "does making money on the hardware justify allowing other developers to benefit from your software updates and APIs without paying you?" Because if Apple turns their phone into a console by dropping the price (or even just adding $600 worth of carbon nanotubes to the package) it sounds like you'd still prefer if any developer could make their own app store to get around their 30% fee on purchases.
> "does making money on the hardware justify allowing other developers to benefit from your software updates and APIs without paying you?"
Well the phone belongs to the user. So yes the user should be able to do whatever they want with their own device, including installing other app stores.
So anything at all, that you were talking about, about Apple being "owed" anything, just doesnt matter. Lets just ignore Apple being owed anything, because they sold the device and it now belongs to the user.
> turns their phone into a console
We can worry about the console market once it is a 2 company duopoly, worth trillions of dollars.
It is perfectly fine to care more about the phone market, simply because it is larger, more pervasive, and more market centralized.
Also, thats whataboutism. Maybe there are problems with the console industry. But regardless of that, it should not stop us from taking action on the much larger phone industry.
We can prioritize our actions, to the markets that are the most important, even if you think that other, smaller markets have issues.
And? There are plenty of apps that are exclusive to F-Droid, as well, and the sky still hasn't fallen.
Meanwhile, two companies have kept a stranglehold on all mobile app sales and mobile app payments, ensuring that businesses can't exist that can't afford a 30% cut into their margins.
It's been over a decade of this insane profiteering on behalf of Apple, and in some respects Google, it's about time that the mobile app distribution market and mobile app payments market are allowed to compete and flourish.
This will absolutely occur on iOS there's too much money on the line for it to not happen. On Android it doesn't matter because Facebook can largely do what they want.
It will not because it's the sort of underhanded tactic that will just bring regulators to Meta's door. Right now it's open season on all of Big Tech, not just Apple.
Would this change though if they were out of reach of the apple App Store? The "ask app not to track" feature is a component of the OS. The only difference is then that Facebook would be allowed to violate the user's consent with impunity, which they can already practically do given the App Store's relative inability to stop malicious software
> You can say a lot of negative things about Apple, but their incentives lined up with the end users more often than companies like Meta and Google.
I would say this is one, and by far the most important case, where Apple's incentives aggressively oppose those of the end users'.
Whether this is enough to tip the balance of which company is 'worse' is a value judgment, but I cannot fathom how people argue in good faith for this blatantly anti-consumer and anti-fundamental-freedom vertical monopoly that is enforced with strong crypto. Crypto should be working for the user, not against them to secure Apple's ability to rent seek on all economic activity that passes through the user's device. And no, the two are not fundamentally coupled, as Apple will have you believe.
I think the disabling of "secure" features will be enough of an inconvenience that people won't do this, and so mainstream apps would never bother. Some might be willing to give up ApplePay. But they could disabled FaceID as well. Or even iMessage. Whether this is "justified" or not would be a separate issue, but I can definitely see them doing it. I can see them going a step further and letting developers decide if they want to allow their software to be run on systems based on security model. Banks, for example, could simply set a flag in their app such that it will not run if the system is set to a reduced or permissive security setting.
Nobody cares about iMessage in Europe, everybody uses WhatsApp or Signal.
A Apple-only messenger doesn't fly in a market where apple has <20% market share
If this is the case, why is the EU demanding Apple open up iOS? Apple doesn't need EU. The do well enough in China and Japan to cover any meager loss the EU could generate.
I am not sure, what is there to worry about? So, FB is going to independently distribute their own apps. You present it as it is an obvious evil, but tbh I fail to see what's evil about it? Yes, a little power would be shifted from all-powerful-now Apple to FB. Both probably not to be trusted, but at least it would be more federated now.
If there are other app stores, does that mean they'll be able to have different privacy rules? Or would that be blocked at the OS level? It seems like some stuff (giving the app access to your location, contacts, etc.) would be subject to OS-level control, but the recent change to opt-in personalized ads would be easily reversible by any new app store.
Expecting Apple to fight your fights isn't going to solve anything. Apple only cares about money, and they're going to obediently abide by local laws (as they do in China). We need to take the power away from Apple and put it in an entity that we en-masse have influence with - such as a democratically elected government.
I'm in the fortunate position of not needing any of those apps. I have never once in the US heard anyone mention WhatsApp as a potential form of communication, and I'm way better off without FB or Instagram on my phone.
And as a side note, Amazon tried this on Android (requiring it for e.g. Prime Video), but gave up at some point.
> What I'm worried about is if the next time we open WhatsApp we see a splash message that says "Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp are moving to the Meta Store! Please restart your phone and follow these easy steps to continue using these apps."
If they were going to do that, why wouldn't they have done it already on Android?
> You can say a lot of negative things about Apple, but their incentives lined up with the end users more often than companies like Meta and Google
This sounds like even more of an argument that your fear is unfounded. If Google doesn't care about users as much as Apple but still has managed to make it unappealing enough to have a separate Facebook app store, why wouldn't Apple be able to do the same?
Not at all. The monolithic App Store has been terrible for users. They even impose censorship on social media apps. Having alternative stores by Meta et al is excellent. More choice, more competition, less rentseeking, more innovation.
Someone who’s so tied to Meta products already has Meta apps installed on their phone. All Meta would have done through this step is added more friction to the process of installing their apps.
A perk? The app on its own store will cost 70, the app on the Apple store will cost 100. The app will be on both stores, people will decide where to buy from.
>If you want to run unsigned software or extensions you will have to boot into a recovery console and change the security model. The warning dialogs will be enough to discourage most use. Th
I think all of this is implying that Apple can be the only company that iOS users trust to sign software. Its a false choice.
Making things look "scary" to discourage users from trusting others is simply FUD.
Agreed. As it stands, macOS will treat un-Notarized apps as if they're radioactive, and the OS actively tricks the user into thinking such apps either don't work or are malicious. You have to pay the $100/year tax if you want your macOS app to compete on fair terms with other apps.
Yep. I'm fine with my parents never venturing beyond the bounds of the app store, but if I want to run some dev tools on the iPad that don't fit into the app store model I should be able to choose an option where I can install signed software.
I think this sort of relief valve will also breed interesting system utilities and user interface ideas for Apple's mobile OSes, provided that software using private APIs can still pass the signing process. Maybe they could have avoided some of the Stage Manager fiasco if they had years of third party experimentation to observe on their own platforms.
I think, for me, the best example is actually the ACE (Audio Capture Engine) plugin by Rogue Amoeba, which is used by a lot of 3rd party apps. It's quite popular, and it requires Reduced Security to install. I actually HATE that there is no (good) alternative to this software yet that can run within the bounds of the Full Security model. But I like that it's still possible to run this software. It feels like the warnings are adequate.
Here’s the deal, ship one of each: Mac, Mac AppStore, iOS AppStore, SMS chat bot, WebApp, Windows, cross platform with Electron, cp with Tauri, with varying degrees of dynamic libraries, concurrency, mono-server and containerized APIs - then say something productive about each. (On your own, no help but you and and your online friend Eskimo)
The ease of everything in iOS is 100% worth a 30% cut once you’re established (speaking to the small business program) - AND everyone forgets, Apple’s cut 15% after the first year of subscriptions, no matter how much you make.
The reason the Mac “side load” exists is because of AppKit - and the hoops one must jump through to get things to run halfway decent with gatekeeper is maddening to the nth degree. Fine, let people side load and deal with that on their own - but do not act like it’s “a weekend” worth of development time to get right.
Everyone is winging because they won’t (or know they can’t) make something damn good - take the time perfecting the craft and finding the targets no one can see rather than throwing stones.
If Apple's value add is as great as you're saying, then they should have absolutely no problem competing on fair terms with other companies instead of dictating what users are allowed to do, and what competitors are allowed to exist, on their own hardware.
But here’s the rub - those competitor apps must use the “universal” apis. They don’t get to use UIKit, CoreData, Foundation (the full one), CoreBluetooth, CoreMotion, ML, etc … they need the open source community (as AshiLinux has done) to build the APIs apple is not paid to make. Then have those reviewed and dealt with in a Gatekeeper like fashion - absolute pain awaits.
Writing Swift in Linux is both beautiful and humbling - there are horrible rough edges, you have to go lower more often than you’d like.
My issue is everyone has it pretty good - and a loud voice is going to make the experience less great overall, at the expense of us all being more equal.
Now that may be a completely fair, and potentially shared, view.
I can only recount from my direct experience, and the style of software that is driving this campaign literally wants to make loot boxes more profitable. They cannot enjoy the natural consequences of making something truly valuable in a subscription form to get the fee down to 15%; and they’re upset. So maybe I’m spiteful, but it feels justified.
Well, considering Apple's goal isn't to ban lootboxes outright (just profit from them) it's hard to argue that they're being any more altruistic by letting Genshin Impact be installed on iOS devices.
One can at least see the incentive structure towards things of value - i.e. you’re stuck in 30% land if all you want to do is coin transactions, get the benefits of Apple Pay if you’re e-commerce / delivery, or provide long term value in sub form and get the steep discounts.
Yes, I understand where they are coming from. This balance between the 'normal, everyday person end user' and people who stare down command lines and make their own frameworks used by millions will always be tough - but there is a primary person in both arenas Apple is making things for, and sometimes it isn't 'us - and that's ok!
And in some ways, we are arguing over a dead corpse. It's possible that VR/AR will hit an inflection point - not by glasses - but by people actually making the 'real malleable world' like DynamicLand and Humane. Those paradigms may very well leave Apple in the dust - because the way Apple has approached this argument to me feels hollow, they don't own their beliefs in the rhetoric, and even I have felt at times they've been coasting and rent seeking. Potentially I'm just misguided in thinking in the ideal.
I have bad news for you about how much software licensing costs. If your company was to license software comparable to Apple's SDKs on the open market you would be paying minimum hundreds a month for the lowest tier plans and if you get big all of them become contact us pricing.
Which is why Apple's plan is likely to move it to the MacOS model, ie. notarization and code signing is required. Honestly this is such a great middle ground despite the level of malware that exists and is targeted to small groups of users.
I don't think it's "one step". I do development on a mac, which means running unsigned software pretty much daily hundreds of times. Doesn't require any special steps. I probably don't need that capability on the phone though (that said, I don't use iOS either...)
I'm fan of the Apple's AppStore model, I like it and think it works great and Apple's commission is a nonissue for the most use cases(it's issue only in low margin trades), however I'm afraid that Apple's control over the device risks governments making Apple their police. Apple limiting AirDrop in China is a very bad sign of what might happen if the rest of the world follows China's totalitarian path. Even in the US, which was supposed to be the land of the free, there are talks about banning apps.
I for one believe in the principle that I paid to own the device and that entails loading whatever I damn well please on to it from whichever front, side, or backside I see fit!
> I for one believe in the principle that I paid to own the device […]
I paid for an iPhone for my mom so that she could not load whatever she damn well pleases, because if she does I have to deal with the mess afterwards.
Some folks are okay with walled gardens for specific purposes. If that's not you, that's fine. Perhaps Apple iDevices are then not for you.
There are several, very easy to imagine mechanisms that both provide user freedom and security/idiot-resistance at the same time.
For instance, extending the "parental control" feature to have a toggle for sideloading - then, you just turn on parental control, toggle that off, and keep the PIN. Done.
The idea that the features of the product should completely unnecessarily be restricted for all users for the dubious benefit of a tiny subset of them is laughable. The only logically consistent motive to advocate for this is profit.
Uniformity and convention over configuration and customization is why people feel why iOS is more stable and secure than the Android ecosystem as a whole.
Very, very bad and consumer-hostile sentiment that is inconsistent both with good ethics and with the way that the regulatory system works currently.
Regulations on goods sold exist for a purpose - to allow the user to generally buy things while having some guarantees about their lifetime/security/safety/consistency with marketing/etc.
"If you don't like it, don't buy it" implies that companies should be able to sell goods made with toxic substances, not honor their warranties, lie on their marketing, and steal and sell your personal medical information. This is bad.
If I buy a product, I expect to be able to do whatever I want with it, and to not have arbitrary limitations on how I use that product that exist purely for the sake of making the seller more rich, and this is consistent with the way that consumer protection regulations work in general.
> Uniformity and convention over configuration and customization is why people feel why iOS is more stable and secure than the Android ecosystem as a whole.
False. The vast majority of people have no opinions of whether Android or iOS is more secure. Slightly more, but very few, of them have any opinions on their relative stability, and you can attribute exactly all of that instability to a mix between (1) manufacturers making terrible drivers and support packages for their hardware and (2) Google being generally bad at designing software. It has nothing to do with "uniformity" or "convention over configuration" at all.
No one is forcing you to buy products you don’t like. You’re confusing government sanctioned duopolies (created from bad regulation) like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T for Apple. You are free to buy alternative products from other companies.
> It has nothing to do with "uniformity" or "convention over configuration" at all.
Actually it does. The hardware is uniform and consistent, and therefore so are the drivers. There is a price to choice. Google is also one of the best software companies in the world.
About that free market - it might be free but lobbying culture in the US starts early, at school where Apple pushes products to influence future choices of students. Not choosing something which is used by everyone around is probably more difficult psychologically than standing up to the status quo and choosing alternatives whatever they are.
There are choices made for use - having a phone on which everyone around communicates, having an internet connection from the only provider in the area.
Uniformity is a choice if the alternative is a viable choice and this is a complex matter.
With the price of smartphones these days I'm betting a lot more people use work-provided devices privately than before. You don't always have a choice between Android and iOS in those instances.
With regulations. That people generally accept and agree are necessary to some extent...
> No one is forcing you to buy products you don’t like.
...even for goods that you have the option of not purchasing. It literally doesn't matter how many baby bottle manufacturers there are in the US - it is illegal for all of them to put BPA in their baby bottle products, regardless of whether their competitors don't.
> You’re confusing government sanctioned duopolies
No, I'm not. The US has boatloads of laws making it illegal to sell various things in markets where there's absolutely no monopolies/duopolies/oligopolies and buyers have ample choices, such as the above.
> Actually it does. The hardware is uniform and consistent, and therefore so are the drivers.
You're intentionally changing the use of "uniformity" from being about high-level OS user-facing design ("the features of the product should completely unnecessarily be restricted for all users for the dubious benefit of a tiny subset of them" + "Uniformity and convention over configuration" = talking about OS design) to implementation, which is a completely separate issue that's unrelated to the current discussion about user freedom. This is an admittedly clever slight of hand, but makes your point no less invalid.
> There is a price to choice.
Sure - but you haven't shown what the price is to allowing users to use whatever app store they want, you've just brought in completely irrelevant examples like phone hardware choice.
> Google is also one of the best software companies in the world.
Regardless of the truth of this statement, it doesn't change the fact that they're generally bad (note that "bad" is absolute, "best" is relative) at designing software, per my lived experience with dozen of bugs in dozens of Google products across browsers and operating systems over years of use.
Goalposts are racing across your comments. You claim both "freedom is good even if it means exposing users to attacks" (because rest assured if there is an "allow unsafe" button then black hats will find a way to convince your grandma tap it) and "freedom is good but not when it is bad for the user", whatever is more convenient for you at the time.
Apple's freedom is to make their devices as they see fit. User's freedom is to vote with her wallet. Feel free to buy whatever device you like if you want to have the ability to shoot yourself in the foot and get pwned, I like to have it in some circumstances but it's not what I would recommend to all of my non-tech contacts. I appreciate most EU privacy laws but not where it comes close to taking people's choice to voluntarily give up some freedoms for security, it's the opposite of empowering them.
> The vast majority of people have no opinions of whether Android or iOS is more secure.
This is just some random unsubstantiated claim. Apple buys entire billboards in city centers that basically promote privacy. You are saying you know better than their entire marketing department.
Even laypeople pay attention and notice that it's their Android owning friends' bank accounts get hijacked but not iPhone owning friends, etc.
> you can attribute exactly all of that instability to
Whatever you attribute this to, potato, potato, the end result is one has been more stable, more secure, supported for longer, more profitable for indie app developers etc than the other.
You make your trade offs or you get another vendor to copy the features you like and not the ones you don’t. Forcing everything to be homogenous is something you’re meant to grow out of when you’re eight, once you see that ruining things for other people because you’re jealous is a bad personality trait.
> Forcing everything to be homogenous is something you’re meant to grow out of when you’re eight, once you see that ruining things for other people because you’re jealous is a bad personality trait.
No one is forcing “everything to be homogenous”. If you don’t like homogeneity, then avoid it. It’s not hard to understand. My choices are none of your business just like I’m not going to criticize you for wanting more freedom to customize your device at the expense of security and stability.
Ultimate Security in the form of preventing extremely sophisticated physical access/evil maid attacks[0] benefits people even if they don't think they need this security.
Maybe purchase a different product that more closely aligns with your needs.
0: ie. someone watches you enter your apple id and passcode and later swipes your phone, only to sideload spyware that hides itself from the UI, then re-plants your phone without you knowing
> Ultimate Security in the form of preventing extremely sophisticated physical access/evil maid attacks[0] benefits people even if they don't think they need this security.
This is a strange red herring. Attacks of this form are protected from by the OS, not the App Store. You can't do attacks like this by sideloading apps onto your own phone in developer mode because iOS itself protects against this - and we're discussing specifically allowing users to choose what App Store they use, not relaxing any of the security restrictions of the OS. Someone familiar with the basics of OS design would be aware of this distinction.
> Ultimate Security in the form of preventing extremely sophisticated physical access/evil maid attacks[0] benefits people even if they don't think they need this security.
Yet, it's up to me to decide whether I want that security or whether I want to trade security for freedom/flexibility. Not you, or any other authoritarians seeking to exert control over others.
> Maybe purchase a different product that more closely aligns with your needs.
This is an incredibly toxic and user-hostile sentiment that also is completely inconsistent with the way that consumer protection laws work in general[1].
I still don't understand how you can't manifest that choice by simply purchasing a device from a different manufacturer. It's pretty disingenuous to suggest that Apple is some kind of authoritarian power that you have no choice but to purchase from.
To quote your linked comment, I wouldn't expect you nor any other sane consumer to purchase goods that are "made with toxic substances, not honor their warranties, lie on their marketing, and steal and sell your personal medical information". Apple does not do any of that, and I think that you're intentionally derailing the discussion by comparing their guidelines + practices to any of the above.
> I still don't understand how you can't manifest that choice by simply purchasing a device from a different manufacturer.
I absolutely can manifest that choice - but it doesn't matter, because I have the right to be able to make that choice for any particular manufacturer.
> To quote your linked comment, I wouldn't expect you nor any other sane consumer to purchase goods that are "made with toxic substances, not honor their warranties, lie on their marketing, and steal and sell your personal medical information".
It doesn't matter that you wouldn't expect one to - it's wrong for a seller to sell one of those things at all, and that's why we've enshrined into our legal system that "some bad things are illegal to sell, regardless of whether the consumer has the ability to avoid them or not".
> Apple does not do any of that
It's pretty blindingly obvious that I'm not claiming that Apple is doing any of those things, and just using that as an example of the point that "some things are illegal to sell".
> and I think that you're intentionally derailing the discussion by comparing their guidelines + practices to any of the above.
The one who is doing that is you, by intentionally misinterpreting my words and reading things that I didn't write. The comparison is entirely apt - "we have laws against selling/doing some bad things x, Apple is selling/doing bad things y, even though x != y it's reasonable to have laws against also selling/doing bad things y".
To add, this is the difference from 'not honoring a warranty' and a product that explicitly comes without a warranty: you (can/should) learn about the product before you purchase it to see if it's actually for you.
I don't see how this is relevant. Nobody is advocating for the relaxations of the iOS security model itself, which is the actual thing that prevents rootkits and malware on your device.
Instead, the proposal is that people be able to install whatever software they want, that runs as a normal iOS app subject to the iOS security restrictions. Being able to install a non-Apple-approved app does not give you the ability to read and write arbitrary kernel memory, or do other actually dangerous things.
Yes, actually. Then every website wouldn't have to litter the console with warnings to users about pasting in code. I would much rather just have Chrome Developer Edition.
But… I "need" those tools to undo the harm that some websites try to inflict on me. I use them almost daily to delete things like taking 25% of my window for a scrolling and animated banner trying to sell me their irrelevant-to-me Excel add-in (annoyingly, this example bypasses all adblockers, comes with a widget that resizes it to a 'mere' 5% of my window, and forgets my choice every time I load or reload any of their pages). I also sometimes use them to repair malfunctioning pages so I can actually use them as intended.
Sure, you could say that I should just use this "Developer Edition", but that requires me to have access to install it on every puter I walk up to (just to be prepared for somewhat common web attrocities like full-page elements that prevent me from interacting with the page in ways that I feel should never be forbidden).
I don't tend to see 'warning' messages in the dev console that seem to be attempts to dissuade me from using the dev tools. Maybe…twice in >20 years?
If there were two separate versions of Chrome you can be sure there'd be people trying to block the dev version because they'd think using it is hacking or someone being tricked and everyone would be adding 'no-dev' scripts to their pages and we'd lose out by moving the web closer to PDFs.
Technology to have managed iOS devices is called MDM. Its mature technology that is already used for things like work-issued devices. What you want already exists. You're setting up a false choice.
You’re being sarcastic, but as lifespans continue to increase and with no known cures for mental degenerative diseases like dementia; this is more common than you realize.
At some point in the near future we are all going to be in the same shoe as GP's mother: confronted by tech we simply no longer understand. Even the latest generation is merely fluent in using these devices. The subset that will keep up will be even smaller than today, imo. Almost all others will choose the safe options, specially when our lives are even more critically intertwined with our devices.
Even today it is not ok to be careless with what you put on your machine, but in a couple of decades, it could be a true disaster, specially if public services are fully tied to your digital identity. You would not want your digital self to be entertaining any random* program as guest.
There is certainly that, but in fairness GP is correct that I am saying that at some point tech is going to outstrip even the best of us (maybe it's just the dumb me projecting).
One possibility that comes to mind is that we could possibly rely on trustworthy AI to help us understand the implications of using X in full. So if not walled gardens maybe private landscape architects or AI gardeners.
But one of the two will be required for digital life.
Eh. GP:> The subset that will keep up will be even smaller than today
The subset might include you, or a majority of HN people even. Just a smaller % of population than currently.
Regards your > Given a choice
If you have family with such issues, you know it wasn't a choice. Getting older means facing mental plasticity slowdown. You can work to be fit on that front sure, but it is an issue that we will all face and not everyone will choose as you do.
I am not sure I agree with GP's assertion that technology will be inherently harder to deal with though.
The subject at hand affects the entirety of society, not just hn members. Even today surely you must have very intelligent and capable friends or people you know that are preoccupied with their own domain and it is an unreasonable position to expect them to keep up with software and hardware and cellular/networking and be able to ascertain with high confidence that X is a safe and secure choice.
This issue can not be decided based on what is appropriate for a niche segment of society. We have a variety of options to serve the general society -- state/control, state/licensing, state/regulation, private/corporate, public/ngo, public/community, personal/ai, personal/expertise. These are not mutually exclusive options and we should discuss the possible configurations, optimal for general societal welfare, rather than denying that the problem exists.
macOS has SIP (System Integrity Protection) which can be disabled.
Your mom would not disable it. No non-technical person i've ever met, even knows what SIP is, let alone has disabled it.
Security researchers, for example, can disable it. And use this to find security vulnerabilities.
The point is, as users we should have the ability...
Apple (or any company) should not be allowed to dictate what people are & are not allowed to do on the devices they own.
But the device consists of the hardware, the os and the app store. The is no "hardware" in the Apple universe. And that is good. If you don't like it that way, buy a Nokia.
That makes no sense. Device refers to the physical machine. The software running on it is a completely separate matter. Just look at Apple's M1 laptops and Asahi Linux.
I don't want to buy a Nokia. Apple's hardware is really good and I want to buy their devices. I just don't want to become a serf in their digital fiefdom.
So, for this _specific_ purposes, keep the walled garden by default on, on one of the biggest ecosystems? How about opt-in for walled garden for those who need it.
Good news! There is a phone for you. Android allows that. Why not allow others who want their device partially controlled by the vendor to have that option?
I agree with the GP and prefer the current iOS landscape.
Yeah but you can still use software like Magisk to fake out whatever detection mechanisms they used. With hardware remote attestation, it will be impossible to do that.
Yeah duh no real jail involved. That misses my point. Its called jailbreaking for a reason. Out the box its metaphorically in jail. Its restricted and limited in a bunch of ways that you have to break it out of.
You paid to own it, Apple puts in rules as if you're renting it. It doesn't matter that you can hack it. You shouldn't have to hack your own hardware.
Apple made it work in a certain way and it’s clear about it, if you want it to work in a different way I don’t think Apple obligated in helping you. If you’re surprised that they don’t support software installation beyond the AppStore, you can modify your device and make it do that(jailbreak), you can return your device or sell it.
It’s ridiculous to say expect that Apple is obligated in helping you use the device in ways not designed to work. Would you expect Apple also to make it possible to run PlayStation games?
Would you buy a car that only goes on Ford^TM approved roads and only takes Ffuel from Ford approved stations? Sorry, you can't drive here. That's a GM road.
No, of course not. We all know that the ability to run on unapproved roads isn't a "feature", but rather the inability to run on an unapproved road is an anti-feature that they built in the first place. For that matter, the inability to run playstation games outside a playstation is also an anti-feature which had to be engineered by Sony. For that matter, do you buy razors that only fit Gillette approved blade designs? So why restrictions on computing devices then?
I will give credit where its due in that Apple is upfront about the nature of the walled garden. Who knows, maybe there really is a market for cars that only go to approved places.
This is such a terribly flawed analogy. Roads are a shared utility that are usually built with public money. They are not a matter of personal choice. In addition, roads are largely a commodity, with few points of differentiation beyond fodder for office small talk. Drawing the comparison, even without referring to these specific attributes, is manipulative and misleading.
Most people that argue for your desired outcome can at least see that there are non-zero user-facing benefits to a walled garden. Do you really not have anyone in your life that isn’t an idealistic tech savvy power user? Apple obviously has financial incentive to maintain its 30% transaction cut, and it’s made some silly arguments to try to maintain that. However it’s also raised some very legitimate and well thought-out downsides.
At this point, the conversation has evolved so far beyond the “it’s a road!” analogy that continuing with that line of reasoning feels either ignorant or acting in bad faith, not because of any “won ground” by the pro walled garden lot, but because all that are interested in a legitimate debate know that these misleading comparisons help nobody.
You can pontificate all you want, but the law is pretty clear that what Apple is doing violates antitrust law, and is thus illegal. See the precedent set in US v. Microsoft.
Your Ford comes with a particular operating system and performance parameters. If you want to run something else, you have to jump through a few hoops to change that. Those hoops might be more or less difficult to clear than jailbreaking iOS, but the option/requirement is there in both cases.
Everything intelligent comes with a set of software. You can replace that software (on almost everything?), but then it's up to you to maintain the setup how you like. That's not unique to iOS.
Well, lots of people seem to like using Apple products in the way Apple intended to - adhering to your example, driving on the vast Ford network that covers most of the world and gets ford drivers pretty much everywhere.
Because corporations maintaining such control over what should have been our computers is fundamentally unjust. It turns us into serfs of their digital fiefdoms where they make the laws and collect the taxes and tariffs.
Are you new here? Every discussion about closed ecosystems I see on this terrible website has people arguing for both sides. That’s why they’re…arguments…and not simply people patting each other on the back.
If you have seen multiple discussions about closed ecosystems, then you should know it's not about Apple specifically and is about the principle of device ownership already.
>If you look at it historically, the PC is about the only device allowing that kind of user control
Why should we give a shit about historical norms? For most of history most children died at childbirth. Does that mean we should accept a >50% infant mortality rate?
Are you allowed to buy into a walled garden where developers can’t force you to sideload apps to use their apps? That’s what I want to do, but it seems the EU is making that illegal. It seems that users who value freedom can buy Android, and users who value security can buy Apple, but the second option is going away.
A walled garden they willing walked into and willingly can leave at any time? It’s not as though there’s nowhere else to go. The trouble is people want all the benefits of the walled garden without the wall.
Nobody is stopping you from escaping the walled garden; you can absolutely go buy an Android device which is equivalent to an iPhone but without these sorts of restrictions.
The trouble is that the walled garden approach only works if the wall goes all the way around. If Facebook, Google, or the other big ad companies are allowed to access the iOS ecosystem without consumer protections, then they absolutely will and will force users to go along with it. This is about developer freedom, not user freedom.
> Nobody is stopping you from escaping the walled garden;
Apple does. I buy a Macbook, and I can modify the bootloader to completely leave MacOS. It's a pain in the ass, and Apple certainly doesn't make it easy as it was on x86, but it's an option. Even if I use MacOS, I still have the option to disable system integrity, install unsigned apps and use third-party software managers.
That's a system that lets me escape the walled garden. They give me concessions inside their OS and an escape-hatch for third-party OSes if they really fuck things up. The iPhone has none of those things. If you buy an iPhone, your only way to leave the walled garden is to not use the iPhone. Buying an Android phone does not break your iPhone out of the walled garden.
No one is forcing you to use any app, let alone developers.
Without this becoming a rant, what fraction of that "security" is protecting you from nothing more than apps that didn't pay the Apple tax. You must admit, the narrative that only approved apps are "good"/"safe" is insanely self serving and conveniently hard to falsify.
Let me provide a concrete example: right now I can download and use Facebook, with less tracking than Facebook likes, on the App Store. If Facebook is allowed to offer a sideloaded app with all the tracking included, what do you think the chances are they will keep the version on the App Store? If they remove it and only offer the new sideloaded version, I am worse off as a user than I am right now.
This is relying on Apple to act as a regulator of Facebook. That's not Apple's job, and they do a bad job of it. That's the job of the government, which is actually (ostensibly (unlike Apple)) representing the people.
The fact that Facebook can do any spying on you at all (because it can still track you, on your current Apple device, right now) is because government regulators are dropping the ball. It's not Apple's responsibility, it's not something they're good at, and it's not something that they should be doing.
I would contend that so far, Apple has done a better job of ensuring their customers' privacy in the face of other companies that employ dark patterns to try to extract personal information from the device that neither Apple nor Apple's customers allowed them to.
The government, so far, has been rather toothless in terms of ensuring the privacy of people and have issued paltry fines to the companies that amounted to no more than a slap on the wrist and extracting a promise that they'll do better next time (with their hands behind their back and fingers crossed).
The reason I purchase apple devices is because they are the only ones that are taking my privacy seriously.
Government regulators are letting the market decide how valuable customer data is and Apple is saying "it is valuable and our customers value not letting random people getting it." Thus, I am voting with my wallet because in this case, votes for elected officials isn't doing much.
App tracking permissions are handled by the OS, it's entirely possible to ship Facebook apps that can't track because they can use the same exact permission system that the existing Facebook iOS app is using.
You don't need the App Store for security, it isn't a dichotomy.
Ignoring Facebook as the example since nobody who cares remotely about tracking is using Facebook.
Then [company] lose marketshare to those who don't care about anything outside of the App Store, and when media outlets and social networks pick up on how [company] app on this third party store tracks so much more information than it used to, even more people will uninstall. It's what we've seen on Android for years, there is a huge reputation factor when it comes to third party app stores. That reputation factor is the reason why F-Droid is the major choice outside of the Play Store.
There is incentive here for app developers to continue to provide solid services. Just not Facebook, as their primary goal is tracking.
Epic Games is going to put their own storefront on iOS, and it's going to have few if any of the polices for customer protection that the App Store does.
Epic will be able to give you games for free to gain market share, just like the Amazon App Store tried on Android and just like Epic is currently trying on Windows. The horror!
Then an app like F-Droid will come along and offer even more protections than the App Store. Confound it!
For my part, this is a step in the right direction. With a few more fixes, iOS might even become usable enough for me to buy a device that runs it.
Epic currently can’t do that on iPhones in their apps because in-app subscriptions all use Apple’s subscriptions system and can be managed in one place
If you wanted to use an abusive subscription system currently you would have to do it outside the app via a web browser
The fb webpage still exists. No app. No permissions. No problems.
If Facebook makes a change that kills the low-tracking front-ends and insists everyone be tracked more, and in response you grovel to them and put up with their new app, then no amount of EU law or App store law was ever going to protect you from yourself. Apple store polices are a red herring, the problem you're actually highlighting is the adversarial relation you have with fb.
That depends entirely on how much friction there is involved in the process. I think you know and Facebook knows that technical hoops at the level of, say, enabling developer menus on Android is a bridge too far for the average tech illiterate user.
Reminder that Epic tried this with Fortnite and eventually went back on the play store. And this was on the platform that had sideloading since day one.
I think this depends on how much friction side-loading ends up being. If I can just click a link and hit "run" like I can on a computer, yeah it could be an issue.
If it requires diving in to Settings or connecting the phone to a computer -- Facebook would never abandon the App Store, friction to using side-loading would be too high.
I believe the implication is there will now be less incentive for app developers to ship for App Store when they can get 80% of the way there with 0% of the “hoops” to jump through (I.e. Apple guidelines)
I’m free to not work for a company whose ethics or contract I dislike. But only because I got a skill which made me a desirable employee elsewhere.
I’m free to resolve my cancelled flight by either waiting a week for the free alternative or buying a combination of rail and ferry tickets to get me from Stansted to Berlin, but only because I have an understanding boss, enough money, and an app which can get me arbitrary hotels on route because that’s more than a day’s journey unless I plan to sleep in a train station.
I’m free to not remain in a country whose politics or laws I dislike. But only because I got lucky with a few things.
I’m free to not download any app which forces me to sideload. But only because they don’t exist yet on iOS (except for the ways that apparently never counted according to all the people demanding this) — there’s too many ways a theoretical “optional” can become an “actually mandatory”, from laws to employers to defacto monopolies, and those are just the ones I’ve seen examples of in other contexts.
You don’t think a 30% tax on users for the privilege of using an AppStore app and Apple’s abuse of that are problems? But somehow the AppStore affects government abuse of iPhones?
The AppStore would have never been a problem had Apple not been so greedy and draconian about it.
It's weird how the app store started out from nothing with even worse terms, and they were enthusiastically accepted by developers and consumers alike. Under these greedy and draconian terms, the app store became broadly embraced by developers, to the point of being called a monopoly. However, with this success Apple's reaction wasn't to abuse its market power by increasing its fees, but instead it reduced fees for long-term subscriptions and for developers with under $1M in revenues.
Apple's control over the device risks governments making Apple their police
Even with sideloading, neither Apple nor the government will give up that much control. Apple will almost certainly retain the ability to delete "malware" apps even if they're sideloaded and governments can then lean on that mechanism. Even Google can probably do a lot through Play Services.
Play this scenario out to its logical conclusion. If we are in a situation where Apple and the government is targeting specific apps for removal, this becomes a game of whack a mole that the developer always wins.
> I'm afraid that Apple's control over the device risks governments making Apple their police
It's already happening. We must oppose it.
The only person who should be in control of the device is the user who owns it. Absolutely no one else. Our computers are sacred ground that no one else may enter without permission.
>To help protect against unsafe apps, Apple is discussing the idea of mandating certain security requirements even if software is distributed outside its store. Such apps also may need to be verified by Apple — a process that could carry a fee.
Developers are about to get a surprise about what they're actually paying for. This is the problem with believing their own talking points about "paying 30% for payment processing."
So now they'll be paying for actual third-party payment processing, as well as lawyers and accountants to ensure they're complying with Apple's royalty agreements to license their technology.
There's a universe of FOSS that hasn't needed third-party payment, lawyers, accountants, etc. because they do not perceive the purpose of apps as "making money."
That universe doesn't quite exist on iOS, partly because Apple makes it so uncomfortable in ways to attempt. I am hopeful that this shakeup might, in some way, make that easier. I've always wanted to ship some basic apps that do things without any ads or purchases or whatnot.
On top of $100/year developer license, you also need an Apple laptop (or desktop) to develop for iOS devices. You are legally (though not technically) forbidden to run a copy of macOS on non-Apple hardware, even if a legitimate copy were obtainable without purchasing some hardware.
Apple is a hardware company, an appliance company if you wish, and also a media company. The fact that they are forced to also produce general computing devices as a wayto run stuff like Ableton or Photoshop is, I suspect, seen as a pesky legacy of Apple II days.
> , even if a legitimate copy were obtainable without purchasing some hardware.
Pedantic, but the license agreement line requiring that 'MacOS can only run on Apple hardware' is, itself, in service of the fact that they only license the software to you if you purchase their hardware.
You can build them without a developer account, but then you will have to re-sign your own apps every 7 day and can only have 4 such app on your phone at a time.
Apple's review process and their rules about the kind of apps and code that are allowed to run? Heck, do they even allow GPLv2 and GPLv3 apps on the app store?
It doesn’t matter whether they do. The anti-tivoization clause in the GPLv3 license (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#Tivoization) forbids developers from selling iOS apps that contain GPLv3-licensed software (the situation w.r.t. GPLv2 is less clear)
If the FOSS universe wants to make web apps, that's great. But they didn't need this law to do that. If they want to make native iOS apps, well now they'll be using Apple's intellectual property, which won't be for free.
Why is "making an app that calls iOS APIs" an use of Apple's IP that they should be compensated for?
That's like saying people shouldn't be allowed to make unofficial accesories for physical products without paying the company because the original designs for the product itself are patented.
It should be Free. People are okay with literally stealing money from corporations in the name of “tax,” yet they balk at making SDKs Free? Platforms should capture some of the economic returns to have good incentives to improve, but the majority should go to users and third-party developers. It should also be possible to release GPL software on any platform. That’s the minimum bar for not screwing over users.
It is likely that the use of web-based experiences will eventually surpass the need for app stores. In many cases, the functionality of a website is similar to that of a mobile app. However, Apple's restrictions on the progress of progressive web apps (PWAs) on Safari may slow the transition from app stores to web-based options. In the meantime, it may be worthwhile to consider visiting a website before downloading an app for your next mobile experience.
That’s funny. Because when the iPhone launched Apple offered just that: their own native apps and the rest had to contend with web based apps and a api to access phone specific features and UI elements. Only much later they announced the App Store and I doubt they will let it go now. In favor of non native web interfaces.
> Developers are about to get a surprise about what they're actually paying for.
IMO a lot of developers are paying for Apple to have an unreasonable amount of control and the entire point of side loading or competing app stores is to get rid of that because we don't want to be paying Apple to act against our interests.
I don't want to pay for Apple to "verify" my app. I want them to use the OS to enforce user granted permissions and that's it.
As a developer, I understand this sentiment. As an iPhone user however, I don't want the power to shift to developers, because I know developers have financial or other interests that are sometimes at odds with mine.
A large portion of users want the protection that the walled garden affords. If you value openness, then I suggest you use and develop apps for Android.
> because I know developers have financial or other interests that are sometimes at odds with mine.
Like how Apple's interests can be at-odds with your own. If developers have control over your device, you're not empowered as a user.
> A large portion of users want the protection that the walled garden affords
So, give it to them. Our interests are not mutually exclusive, you can make a device with both a walled garden and a developer mode. It's not rocket science, at least when you have 200 billion dollars in R&D cash sitting in your coffers.
The trouble is that if large tech companies are given the opportunity, they will force users to use whatever is best for the company, not for the user. The only way to stand up to large tech companies is with another tech company like Apple.
That's bullshit. The only way to stand up to large tech companies is with regulation, which the United States is pathologically opposed to. Foreign countries have to write their own consumer protection laws because US juggernaut tech companies are so ruthless. Shareholders fear nothing as much as regulatory backlash.
You're at least right about one thing. Large tech companies will always exploit opportunities to limit the user, which is a privilege Apple has abused for too long. It's time for computing to be democratized again, even if we need to drag Apple though the mud to get there.
> That's bullshit. The only way to stand up to large tech companies is with regulation
I don't know if you realize this, but OP and you are saying the same thing, they are just saying it slightly different.
You: To stand up to large company bullying you need to regulate them through the government.
OP: To stand up to large company bullying you, you need another large company who has the pockets and sway to bring change through congress because our government is bought and paid for by corporations.
We're strongman-ing two sides of the same coin. They're arguing that the free market will solve this, whereas I'm arguing that proactive measures are required. Apple's business is designed so that it cannot be disrupted without forcing them to abide by a common set of rules. By leaving those rules undefined, we have clearly not encouraged innovation or disruption. Our only option is to define our consumer rights that we should have instated a long time ago.
Apple can still regulate your iPhone if they want. They just have to do so with the option to disable that regulation, which seems like a fair concession to me. Macs pull this off without a problem, even letting you install another OS if you're dissatisfied with MacOS. Apple just needs to bring that same philosophy to iPhone, and developers won't be mad at them.
A difference between governments and corporations are that you can walk away from a corporation for another one or none at all in the extreme case an alternative doesn’t exist.
You can’t walk away from government regulation because there is ultimately a gun at your back. Governments do not give up power once they’ve received it. Governments change hands who may wield that power differently than when it was imagined to be when first received.
People in European countries have had to learn this the hard way many, many times over and yet still don’t get why other cultures might take a different view on it.
I don't sit on Dow's board and have zero say in whether they decide poisoning the environment where I live is a good idea or not. We are not afforded democracy like owners and board members are.
The government is the one institution in most people's lives that they have a real say in, and probably the only one that affords them democracy. I doubt any of us sit on Apple's board.
The problem is that the Apple and Google duopoly is stifling choice and competition such that we can't realistically walk away from those companies. Market forces haven't solved this issue, and this is where antitrust legislation kicks in.
How incredibly myopic. And also wrong. It works just fine for users. Not so much for all the greedy, prima donna developers out there. They and governments don’t need this power, they want it.
Just because smoldesu says “Letting software go unregulated didn't work, full-stop” doesn’t make it so. It doesn’t even make sense–you’re the one fighting for deregulation here.
Sling all the mud you want, troll. Just because smoldesu doesn’t like the regulation that Apple enacts, doesn’t mean they are not regulating the apps people try to ship.
This doesn't happen on Android. Why would it happen in iOS?
Discoverability and the ease of access that the playstore/appstore provides is enough to pretty much always want to have your app up there.
The main difference is that there are a lot of apps that are simply not allowed in the appstore or that you need to change substantially to comply with apple's rules. For example, Telegram has censored content if you download the app from the appstore given Apple's pornography laws. Other apps that might be used to infringe on copyright are outright not allowed (they're also not allowed on the playstore, but you can install them from the apk or a third party store).
Now, maybe you think these restrictions are appropriate and that's fine... for you. Other people might want the freedom of doing more with their devices that they paid hundreds and hundreds of dollars for without having to resort to extreme measures. The argument Apple uses is bullshit and the EU saw through it.
You realise that's what Apple has been doing for the past 15 years? Force users to do what's best for them, and only them? Anti-competitive practices do not serve customers, they increase prices and prevent innovation.
the "use android" argument is getting really tiring. as someone who used to be an android user for years and still somewhat keeps up with the ecosystem, ios and most apps written for it (including major apps like twitter) are far more polished than whatever mess google is doing with android (and manufacturers make it even worse). i much prefer having the polished ios experience while being able to sideload and possibly even jailbreak my phone. and then there's imessage too, though we'll see what happens with that after the dma.
and the argument about "giving developers power" simply doesn't hold any water. android openly allows sideloading with the google play store having very similar rules to the app store, and yet i can count the number of major apps that force or even offer a sideloaded version on one hand. the only ones that come to mind are fortnite (removed from google play) and telegram (on play store, but sideloaded version has faster updates and less censorship).
> the "use android" argument is getting really tiring
I fully agree, imagine if MS had made Windows apps on W10 only come from their store. Anybody saying that the solution is "just buy a mac 4head"*, like they love to do with mobile phones, would be laughed out of existence.
*: It's great to have options, and linux should be in here too, but that would be like telling a normal user in this situation (mobile market) to go buy a Pine phone, which for very few would work the way they expect/need it to.
That iOS polish is largely a byproduct of the walled garden approach. Users are incentivised to spend within the ecosystem due to the safety, security and support provided by Apple.
This argument would only make sense if the vast majority of Android spend was outside the Play ecosystem, which it is not. The second part "The safety, security and support provided by Apple." sounds more like a general Apple press release than something related to app polish.
If most people actually choose iOS/iPhones primarily because of the App Store quality/protections/ecosystem then people will continue to choose the App Store regardless if sideloading is possible - after all we just said that's the whole reason most bought the phone in the first place. If on the other hand people are choosing iOS/iPhones for other reasons and you're worried nobody else will use the App Store anymore then I don't really buy "there aren't enough of us so it should be allowed to hold a captive market to support our use case" as a reasonable argument even though I see it quite often on HN.
> the "use android" argument is getting really tiring
Why? Android is a legitimate alternative, one that the majority of the world population uses. You have many makes and models of handsets from which to choose. You want the polished apps with a completely open and free environment. Maybe you should ponder why such apps don't exist for the open and free ecosystems?
> A large portion of users want the protection that the walled garden affords.
To state the obvious: if this were true, Apple wouldn't have to force the issue. Apple's app store would be a premium that they would charge users extra for. Getting your apps from 3rd-party stores would be the equivalent of the green bubble.
The issue is the monopolistic price gouging Apple charges for access to the walled garden.
If you took the "policing for developer's short circuiting the 30% cut" out of Apple's approval process, everything in their ecosystem works out fairly nicely.
The core issue is, simply, that Apple price gouges enormously.
Look, it’s not my analogy, but I think you’re all being quite disingenuous.
If I can use alternate stores then some popular apps - Fortnite is an obvious one - will go them exclusively, forcing people to set up and use a store which will probably do less auditing. Those apps will be able to steal more of my data, and some of them might (will) be malicious (“poison”).
Once a malicious app destroys my phone, “the system is down”; I can’t use any apps regardless of where I bought them.
Ransomware is a multi billion dollar business, and alternate stores will be motivated to cut corners. What could go wrong?
> Those apps will be able to steal more of my data, and some of them might (will) be malicious (“poison”).
This seems a bit hyperbolic. I personally have not had this problem on my laptop (a Mac) despite being able to sideload apps, and it likely being a much juicier target.
>Apple in fact uses and sells your data for the same purposes it is "protecting you" from when other developers do it.
I don’t believe this is true, can you cite a source? The recent buzz about ‘targeted ads’ was actually about adds on their own App Store, no third party data sharing or sale was involved, so I believe you are mistaken.
By that definition, Google doesn't share your data either. But they do, by monetizing it in the form of targeted ads. Both Apple and Google try to gussy it up with 'anonymous' labels, but the business of tracking and monetizing your habits is shared by both.
It’s still not the same as selling your data to third parties, with all the many very considerable additional privacy and accountability problems that entails. It’s also not using your data to provision ads on third party sites and apps. I’ve seen people claim Apple does both of those things here before, and the fact is they don’t.
What they are just starting to do is no different from Amazon using your past purchases to place ads on their own site. I have no problem with that either.
If your going to criticise them and think what they are doing is wrong, fine. That’s fair, but could people at least get what they're complaining about factually correct.
Apple has an ad network, which has special privileges on iOS. Are you saying they don't provision ads on their ad network based on all the special access they have? They'd be kind of crazy not to, they've secured themselves a very valuable information monopoly here, and it's pretty obvious why...
They don’t have an ad network in any meaningful sense, because there’s no distribution network for their ads. The ad targeting everyone is talking about is only for ads for apps on the App Store. Not in third party apps or web sites and such. That’s why I compared it to Amazon targeting ads in their own store.
> >To help protect against unsafe apps, Apple is discussing the idea of mandating certain security requirements even if software is distributed outside its store.
Are they going to keep on giving their own apps entitlements they deny to everyone else? (Or even, allow to others, but very selectively.) Or is the EU going to crack down on that as well? I hope.
Sounds like it'll be a bit like on Mac with that whole notarization rigmarole.. But on Mac you can bypass it by jumping through some hoops. I guess on iOS you won't be able to until the EU catches up and forbids that too.
I'd actually consider iOS again if it were more open so I think this is a really good thing.
The EU is mandating sideloading, it's not mandating Apple do it for free. Until now, developers have been licensing Apple's intellectual property in a bundle through the Developer Program License Agreement. For anyone that goes through the sideloading route, they can expect to enter into a different contractual agreement with Apple to license their technology.
Otherwise they're building a web app, which they've always been able to do!
What a sham, though. Developers already pay for Apple's IP
- When they pay $99/year for their developer license
- When they pay royalties on every payment that gets processed
- When they buy and promote Apple hardware and software
People simply want to remove the payment processing one. If Apple really needs more money to build their amazing intellectual property, they have plenty of ways to bill developers for services rendered. Their current system is undeniably exploitative, and the EU won't stop until that exploitation is alleviated. Apple will stop at nothing to defend their control, but will ultimately be forced to abide by Europe's terms. They're not defying small-fry court orders in the Netherlands anymore.
For me as a user it's not about the payment thing at all. It's about being able to do with my device what I want without the manufacturer having to approve it first.
You're exactly the person the top of thread person is talking about. When Apple was forced to allow 3rd party payment processors they still charged developers a 27% commission on the sale of digital goods.
What if, because of the new regulations, a new ecosystem of open-source iOS SDKs pops up? Developers who use those would not have to pay Apple at all, since they are not using any of Apple's IP.
It's very likely, they've tried playing the same games with other jurisdictions, "sure, you can use your own payment processor, and still pay us 27%", but it's very unlikely those tricks will hold up to further legal actions.
Fighting monopolies is hard, but the penalties scale up the more games these companies play. They know it too, but all of the **holes running these companies are worried about is cashing out their bonuses and retiring before the regulations finally get things to where they should be.
I certainly understand why developers would prefer that Apple have that business model, but that's not the one they chose for the iPhone. And these laws don't prohibit it.
Yes it was, they later changed their stance. In the announcement for iPhone, Jobs on stage explicitly stated that all you need to develop an app was html and modern javascript with API's into the phone hardware. And they would basically just be a PWA that would keep the app updated automatically as soon as the developer makes a change, all while keeping the iPhone "reliable and secure." In fact, he was bragging about not having a store "rather than having to go through this complex update process" as a dig at the Google play store.
That's incorrect. Enforcement has failed to handle it, but Apple's app store model is a violation of antitrust law, in the US, the EU, and elsewhere. Many of the actions you are seeing in the news about it are regulatory mandates, based on the fact that Apple's business model isn't legal.
The number 1 thing they are paying for by a mile is reach. Not any particular service offering. Your listing the app store can be nearly as important as your SEO ranking of moreso depending on your business. It's why Google can still charge pretty hefty fees despite not locking users in nor doing all that much for app quality. If you're not in the Play Store, users won't find you.
They won't, because anyone who starts an alternative app store will provide everything necessary for a small fee. The likes of Epic, Microsoft, Amazon, etc are more than capable.
Yes and you'll still have to pay Apple a 27% commission on digital goods sold even when it's distributed through the Epic store. This is what the parent is talking about not understanding what you're paying for.
Hitching your "I don't want to pay the 30% commission" wagon to "Allowing 3rd party app stores and payment processors" is doomed to fail.
I don't own an iPhone, but if this is the case then the end result is going to be hilarious. Apple will eventually get a court order to prevent software from a third party store being installed on their devices. Either it will enable copyright infringement or violate some other IP restriction.
What's the precedent for that? Windows, MacOS, Android and Linux have all allowed the user to indiscriminately install software, but I've never heard of legislation that tried to reverse that.
I definitely agree it's going to be the worst of all worlds. The current model was the most efficient one for Apple and developers. There will be additional costs for everyone involved (great for lawyers and accountants though). The current model was a virtuous cycle that benefited Apple, developers, and users. High trust from users made them amenable to spending money on software, grew the Apple developer ecosystem, and unleashed a wave of innovation which spawned industries since 2008. Importantly, all developers got standard terms which created a level playing field. I suspect we're moving into a world where large developers (Spotify/Netflix/Microsoft) will have much more negotiating leverage than a small developer. But that is the 'business as usual' world, which makes this a reversion to the mean.
> Importantly, all developers got standard terms which created a level playing field.
Lmao, you must have missed the news about Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix and another few dozen Fortune 500 companies negotiating with Apple under the table. They already do bend the rules for sufficiently large companies, they just won't budge if you're someone that threatens them.
What the Epic v. Apple antitrust trial showed was that no one actually got better terms than anyone else. If you have evidence of Microsoft, Amazon, or Netflix getting terms that aren't available to anyone else, please link them.
That was only true after Apple adjusted their rules to expand Netflix's deal (allowing external processors in certain situations) to the rest of the store. There was a time when it was an exclusive, under-the-table deal with Netflix. It's not hard to believe when you hear about the private entitlements notable developers like Uber and Google get.
Apple will 100% require notarization. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if installing anything from a third-party AppStore would disable a bunch of sensitive functionality, like ApplePay, FaceID, Find My, etc. with a nice alert that says: "Sorry, your device might be compromised due to unsafe apps. In order to use ApplePay / FaceID / etc. you need to restore your phone to factory settings first. Would you like to continue?".
The "unsafe app" thing may be against the new law. The text of the law is "The gatekeeper shall not prevent business users from offering the same products [...] at prices or conditions that are different from those offered through the online intermediation services of the gatekeeper"
Keyword being conditions. Having a third-party app store disable a bunch of functionality would be different conditions than a first-party app store.
A third party store could offer itself and turn off certain security features. I'm not sure that would be against the law. In fact, I'm certain it would not even be against the law for Apple to say, "Hey, your app store turned off security, so we will no longer give you our users' credit card numbers." (In fact, that's what policymakers hope for. The goal is nothing going through Apple. Least of all payments.)
If people are expecting the law to allow low security payments, then they are in for a rude awakening. For one, no one has taken leave of their senses here. Secondly, the credit card companies have in no way given Apple permission to allow access to their payment system under terms of reduced security. (In fact, they haven't given permission for Apple to offer access to their payment systems under any modified terms at all. Security or otherwise.)
Now what lawmakers are saying is that Apple should allow different app stores to participate on their platform. But yes, the vision, and hope, is that those app stores will have their own arrangements with the credit card companies. But some app stores will probably just keep Apple security protections in place and use Apple's services. There's nothing that precludes that either. (But that would be disappointing in the sense that everything would still be going through Apple.)
What security features are you talking about? Third party stores will only have the API features as Apple adds them, and the law only forces the same feature access as their own first party store. Does Apple's own App Store allow you to turn off security features?
The problem isn't that you can't use Apple Pay, but you can't release an app that works like Apple Pay because of features Apple do not allow others to use. Quick look at the docs, Apple only allows apps to read NFC tags, not host card emulation to use for contactless payments the same way your credit card or Apple Pay works
But even being jailbroken doesn't affect Apple Pay, their own Apple Card service, or FairPlay[0] (which is the most surprising to me). Maybe it's sent as a heuristic / weak fraud signal for Apple Pay, but no functionality is removed in the OS, so I don't see why a notarization-approved third party app would trigger any other broken functionality.
No, even regular apps have a multitude of tools they can use to detect a jailbroken state, given that there are paid jailbreak tweaks that hide the jailbroken status from apps. Even then, there are complaints about mobile apps like Pokémon Go, Pokémon Unite, and some bank apps[0] still detecting your jailbreak. Most likely Apple just doesn't see it as a threat/doesn't want to draw attention to the practice.
I don't think any legislature or courts would have problems with genuine warnings and if they did it'd likely require additional laws. Favoring the built in store so heavily by disabling more functionality than strictly required might be taken as going against the law already going into effect or be seen as overly anticompetitive in general though. The same might be said for overly aggressive/false warnings.
> To help protect against unsafe apps, Apple is discussing the idea of mandating certain security requirements even if software is distributed outside its store. Such apps also may need to be verified by Apple
I'm sure they'll at least require notarization with their $99/year developer program, in line with macOS, where it's an increasingly enormous pain to run unsigned apps.
I know it is contrary to HN guidelines to discuss comment votes, but this is weirdly my most downvoted comment of all time. In almost 13 years of commentating I have never had a comment receive -4 points before.
It's because app notarization doesn't involve review. It's an ahead of time virus scanning and they presumably archive the apps as well to be able to go back later and find equivalents when new malware is identified, but notarization itself is fully automated and takes only a minute or two.
Sony has a market cap of $100B and Microsoft is clearly above the €75 billion euro market cap discussed.
Perhaps incorrectly, I don't see that market needing this legislation. The consoles themselves are sold on razor thin margins and rely on game sales to generate profit. Game consoles are also more of an "entertainment" device vs a general use mobile computer.
Ignoring monopoly positions, censorship concerns, security research, industry innovation and many other important considerations that go into these kinds of ideas, I'd like to present another angle; I think even just the eWaste concern alone is enough to suggest that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo should also have to provide the end user the ability to load their own code with relatively few restrictions. I actually don't see why game consoles are special and I don't really care about current industry norms or razor thin margins. The industry we have now doesn't need to remain financially sustainable as-is; that is not a condition that is set in stone. In fact, I'd argue that often times making progress literally requires this kind of disruption sometimes.
Nobody ever sat down and decided that what Nintendo did with 10NES was a good idea; it was just legally viable and nobody stopped it. It became normal without any concerted decision that it should be, just the lack of any strong enough force opposing it. I don't think that means that everything must continue this way forever. It is possible to realize that the implications are bad.
Even that said, hackers like to think in absolute and concrete terms and theory. In practice, phones are extremely important, telling people to vote for their wallet doesn't work, and there are basically no phones that offer a good set of trade-offs today because the market is not incentivized to produce it. Consumers pay $1000 for a phone and can't install a web browser. It is disturbing that people who are on a website with "Hacker" in the name can see this as a good thing. (Not that you are necessarily. But still, I see it too often.)
Defining what business models are legal and illegal, based on profit margins, is not a road we should go down in my opinion. Plus, some game consoles (like the Nintendo Switch) are profitable even if nobody buys a game because Nintendo prioritized that, and other game consoles become profitable in-and-of-themselves later in their lifecycle.
This leads to all sorts of perverse incentives. If I'm Nintendo, I could sell my game console for $299 with some profit on Day 1 (like now), but then I would be forced to have an open store. Or, I could sell it for $269, take a initial loss, and have a closed store. It would simply made "game consoles shall be sold at a loss" the law, not opened things up. I think that would be atrocious. So... either game consoles can remain locked, or we simply declare game consoles cannot be sold locked.
Cutting up the space of all possible business models is exactly the job of these authorities, to solve these coordination problems that arise from raw market forces, that only wants to optimize for a local maxima. (And the companies that try to take certain externalities into consideration are disadvantaged, so they have a smaller market share than otherwise, which in many markets simply means zero ... see eg EVs, nuclear power plants, and other current big "revelations".)
FWIW, I agree. It'd be nice if we gradually walked back the idea of selling computers with these kinds of limitations. Some lock down is going to be desirable in some situations, but it should be the exception rather than the norm.
>1. An undertaking shall be designated as a gatekeeper if:
>(a) it has a significant impact on the internal market;
>(b) it provides a core platform service which is an important gateway for business users to reach end users; and
>(c) it enjoys an entrenched and durable position, in its operations, or it is foreseeable that it will enjoy such a position in the near future.
>2. An undertaking shall be presumed to satisfy the respective requirements in paragraph 1:
>(a) as regards paragraph 1, point (a), where it achieves an annual Union turnover equal to or above EUR 7,5 billion in each of the last three financial years, or where its average market capitalisation or its equivalent fair market value amounted to at least EUR 75 billion in the last financial year, and it provides the same core platform service in at least three Member States;
>(b) as regards paragraph 1, point (b), where it provides a core platform service that in the last financial year has at least 45 million monthly active end users established or located in the Union and at least 10 000 yearly active business users established in the Union, identified and calculated in accordance with the methodology and indicators set out in the Annex;
>(c) as regards paragraph 1, point (c), where the thresholds in point (b) of this paragraph were met in each of the last three financial years.
I wonder what the monthly active users for Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo consoles are. Also, if there are at least 10,000 active developers in the EU for any of these consoles.
Probably not enough to qualify. PlayStation 4's total sales in Europe to date is 55 million consoles... but how many are active users? How many have multiple consoles for the same "user"? How many are in storage, were broken, or simply don't get turned on for long periods of time? I think they are borderline or under the limit. As for total developers, there are currently 3,276 recognized games, and thus less than that amount of "developers" as per the legal definition - let alone how many of them are still active. I know we're on PlayStation 5 now, but if PS4 doesn't hit the limit, game consoles are fine. The Nintendo Switch has many more games (particularly indie) than PS4, yet they only hit 4,462.
I view consoles as the same way I do phones. A single store to purchase goods is anti consumer. I can see someone taking them to court since the only way to buy games locally on your Xbox, Playstation, or Switch is through the first party stores.
Is it though? What if the price to buy a playstation went to $1200 because that was the only way it's affordable for Sony if they can't subsidize it with a restricted store. So now the consumer can side load but they can't afford the device in the first place. I'm just pulling a price out of thin air but I don't think it's quite a simple as "single store = anti consumer"
It's similar to carrier locked phones. They'll give you the phone for a 1/10th it's list price if you sign up for 2yrs of service. Is that anti-consumer? Vs forcing the consumer to pay full price up front?
I was curious what the added price on a $400 console would be if Sony couldn't guarantee a cut of game revenue, so here's some napkin math.
Avg 9.6 games sold per console [1] * $70 game * 30% take rate [2] =~ $200 additional.
Current pricing: $400 + $70/game
Restructured pricing: $600 + $49/game
So it's more costs upfront, but not insanely more expensive. It would certainly change marketing and incentives though, if Sony made more money by selling consoles than continuing to extend the lifecycle of the current generation.
Nothing's stopping Sony (or more likely, retailers) from offering a payment plan for your hypothetical $1200 PlayStation, just like the phone carriers do for handsets. The difference is that they extract the money directly from the consumer, who can make an informed decision about it that has market impact, rather than on the back-end through strongarm deals with the publishing companies where the consumer has no direct influence.
I would say that carrier locked phones are undeniably anti-consumer though, and they are banned in many jurisdictions. Their sole purpose is to add friction and give the customer less choice, and due to 'collusion' between the few carriers that exist, impossible to avoid, even if you did choose to purchase the phone outright; it's practically the definition of anti-consumer. The phone purchase should be a separate contract, with a defined monthly payment against the retail price of the phone. Offering this is a profitable enterprise for BestBuy etc. on other electronics, so why not phones? The user should be free to switch carriers with little friction, to maintain as competitive a market as possible in a market that is a natural monopoly.
It reminds me a lot of the equipment monopoly in the Bell System until the early '80s.
There is always the second hand market if you don’t want to pay full price. Which currently for digital games doesn’t exists, because everything needs te be bought through first party stores and is DRMed.
I think it might enable game consoles to allow more developers to list their products on the store without the hassles of their particular processes. Perhaps an indie only section.
It might with time open up software across multiple ecosystems.
Well, would anything of value be lost? Like, why don’t just sell custom built PCs? Then developers can actually develop against a few common APIs, no more exclusives, etc..
PCs are much more expensive than consoles, with that gap only increasing with recent soaring prices for GPUs. I’m guessing this will just force more people into using their smartphones for this.
Are they more expensive for equivalent hardware? I didn’t look at the current gen ones, but it used to be the case that consoles get a few years old hardware, developers just optimize better for those targets. And even still, there have been plenty of memes how you get a low-poly mess for a character in some console games.
PCs are only expensive if you go the “current best” route, but hardware advances are well in the diminishing returns category (maybe besides hardware-accelerated ray tracing), so you can very well play most games on mid-setting on a few years old PC which you can build from $500.
> Apple pretending "to protect me against myself",
I find this to be a feature. Please protect me against "myself" (sometimes I'm tired, sometimes drunk - and dark patterns around the web can get to me too).
I have a painpoint. The company I want to do business with is a company willing to solve my painpoint for me for some money. Im willing to pay them and the ecosystem to solve it for me.
You have a painpoint. The company you want to do business with doesn’t want to solve it for you, for any amount of money. You want to force the company to solve your painpoint at my expense.
Seems very much like you have problems, and you’re making your problem into a me problem?
Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes everything worse, and we've had to ask you this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26881211.
I'm going to predict that all the stores will fail. The only one that might succeed would be a Steam store but I don't suspect Valve has any interest in being a store for free to $0.99 games. But hey, it would be nice if bought some game on Steam that meant I got access to Mac/Linux/Windows/Androidn/iOS versions
It's doubtful that an Open Source F-Droid style repository would fail. Apple is already setting things up to be as unprofitable as possible, but stores that don't concern themselves with turning a profit will probably work just fine.
Hard to say, the Play Store has been fairly lax WRT allowing third-party browser engines, Free Software and emulators. If the floodgates open on iOS, there might be considerable demand for apps that Apple has traditionally tried stopping.
What about browser extension stores? That is, could Kiwi or Firefox now run on mobile, with mobile extension support?
I realize that Safari now offers extension support, but it is so convoluted to download and activate an extension that practically no one does it. If if it were as easy as the Chrome/Firefox stores, this would be much more common. I'm hopeful that this could finally happen!
>Currently, third-party web browsers, including ones like Chrome from Alphabet Inc.’s Google, are required to use WebKit, Apple’s Safari browsing engine. Under the plan to meet the new law, Apple is considering removing that mandate.
I was momentarily excited for this possibility but not in a million years is Apple going to relax their "no interpretter code" restraints.
Worth mentioning that the big MV3 change in WebExtensions is also banning interpetted code. Dynamic behavior is illegal in 2023, static code only, by corporate mandate.
Despite being a long-time Apple user, I just purchased an Android tablet the other day, in a large part because iPads are so locked down and controlled by Apple.
This decision will make me strongly consider returning it and getting an iPad instead. iPads leave Android tablets in the dust in terms of performance, although I do like the microsd card slot on Android.
Of course, it could take years for Apple to reluctantly implement the change.
Truth. I hung onto Android for many years for that little shred of more choice, mostly the ability to install APKs. But Apple’s stability and user experience runs laps around Android and it’s extremely hard to justify not going with iPhone. Now I would have 0 reason.
Apple has said that they are implementing this change as a part of iOS 17 in 2023, before the EU 2024 deadline. If they miss the deadline they can be fined 20% of their global revenue, which is quite the incentive.
The problem was never the Apple app store restrictions, changes, review-process, etc. It was that no one had a choice about it... not devs and not users.
* Apple can try to impose their idea of "safe", "quality" apps (or whatever it is they are trying to accomplish) in their store.
* other stores can have their own rules.
* users can get apps from the store they want.
1. Nothing is going to change and I will continue to use my phone as it was before because the App Store is still the primary driver.
2. I will be forced to use third party stores because critical apps are no longer distributed through the App Store.
3. I will just be using my phone less and less.
The EU, Developers, and Many here continue to forget that the reason many of us use an iPhone is because of the walled garden. If I wanted an open platform I would switch to Android and mod the hell out of it.
I don't want that. I want the precautions that Apple has in place to make it so developers can't employ dark patterns to keep me as a paying subscriber. To mine the data on my phone for their profit.
With one or 2 clicks of a button I can cancel any subscription I want that I did through the App Store. I also get alerts when anything yearly is about to charge (from Apple) or when things are about to cost more than they used to. Instead of hoping that we just wouldn't see the alert like too many sites do.
People keep saying that this is about choice, which frankly... is bull. This is about choice for the developer not the consumer. Most consumers don't care, but developers will jump ship to another App Store if they can start doing all of the negative practices that they are not allowed to do on the App Store. Especially if they are big enough, Seriously think that Facebook won't try to have their own App Store? Considering what they have gotten up to very recently.
We already have enough developers purposefully trying to deceive users right before they get the prompt about allowing the app to track.
Anyone... please tell me how this actually benefits ME as a consumer and not developers?
Edit: Instead of replying to each one I am going to just post here.
Many of you are saying Android does not have this issue. But unless I am mistaken Epic Games did exactly this?
Also unless I am mistaken, many of the consumer protecting restrictions are not on android. Especially around subscriptions and billing issues. I know google is cracking down on it, but from what I understand it is not as universally in place.
So developers don't have the incentives to move to another App Store on Android like they do on iOS (again benefiting developers while hurting me as a consumer)
Edit: I am going to make one last point here. I spend a fair amount of money on App Store subscriptions. (or buying apps but that is sadly not as popular anymore). I do this because I don't worry about singing up to try something, knowing that I can very easily cancel it. I don't even have to talk to the company.
This leads me to signing up for apps that I would never have considered paying for if it was through a traditional website that would make me jump through who the hell knows what hoops to cancel.
They complain about the 30% cut, but from me. It is you get 70% or I give my money to someone else.
I cannot imagine I am the only one that does this.
> 2. I will be forced to use third party stores because critical apps are no longer distributed through the App Store.
This seems very unlikely. It hasn't happened on Android. Amazon has their own Android appstore and nobody is forced to use it, and I think nearly nobody does. But because Android has this possibility, I can use F-Droid which is excellent.
What does a "critical app" even look like? I don't have any apps on my phone that I would call critical, only convenient. My banking apps from the playstore are nice to have, but not critical. I can do banking on their websites, at an ATM or over the phone. Uber is sometimes convenient, but I've gone years without using it before and many people don't have it at all. If Facebook makes their own Facebook store and uses it to ship malware, it won't effect me because I never used their app in the first place, none of their crap is critical. That's the power of not submitting to peer pressure.
Maybe a "critical app" is one your government legally requires you to install, e.g. some sort of pandemic tracing app. But thankfully my government (America) has not gone that far. I don't think there is presently such a thing as a "critical app" in America. Only apps which may feel critical because of peer pressure or convenience, but aren't actually critical.
F-Droids official repo also does strong curation really well in my experience. Searching the Play Store usually surfaces some SEO-gamed garbage apps. Pretty much all Android apps I use from the Play Store were at friend recommendations. F-Droid has some issues (specifically, they have a very big requirement that all APKs must be build by their server, which has some issues and locks their official repo down to FOSS apps), but even just on the surface their curation is just so much better. And hey, if I don't like something, I can literally just plug in any arbitrary URL I want and as long as it points to a repository, it'll show up as valid.
From what I've heard the Apple App Store isn't much better in this regard, except there you just don't have the option to ignore it (and the jailbreaking community seems more open, except the same "pay for every tiny thing" culture that plagues iOS has made it way over to that platform).
The EU forcing Apple to open up iOS should ideally result in a more fair, better curated ecosystem of smaller app stores and the development of apps that people actually want to use rather than apps that exist to make exciting number go up at an ad agency. There'll be some initial blowback, but the long-term benefits will be that much better for mobile phones on the whole (which to be frank, is desperately needed).
It also gives a secondary avenue for apps against Apple's app store guidelines, which have been noted in the past to basically be completely arbitrary (the main examples of this are the fact that Apple plays censor for VPNs in some countries, Steve Jobs telling people that want to have NSFW apps on their iPhone to "go buy an android", the last policy still leading to numerous social media apps getting in trouble because an app reviewer found something NSFW (this is why Tumblr banned NSFW) and for a very specific example of a game that somehow kept violating the guidelines: the iOS port of the Binding of Isaac was rejected for over a year because Apple wanted to play moral guardian, there's also the completely unreasonable ban on allowing emulation and really I could continue on and on about how absurd this is).
To put it simply: pray to the whatever spiritual deity you believe in (or other such thing) on app review and hope that Apple doesn't try anything when reviewing your app. The best method is always to make sure that adult content can never end up before a reviewers eyes, so unless you have an unusually thorough reviewer who goes out of their way to look for it, they won't complain. Apples role as a moral guardian on NSFW content is one of the bigger driving factors as to why NSFW gets treated as second class, even though NSFW content has been estimated to be a very large amount of all internet traffic.
Tumblr is just one example. Discord had to restrict all NSFW channels in their app for iOS users because their randomly assigned App Store reviewer managed to get their account into an NSFW channel and found the expected.
Reddit just never had to deal with this issue because they didn't even have an iPhone app for years (their current app is a highly modified version of an older app, Alien Blue, but AB was pulled from the App Store when Reddit bought it) or they deal with it quietly so you don't hear about it. Not all companies who get shafted on the NSFW rule speak up about it, but those that have... all have repeatedly commented on the fact that the process is basically completely opaque and you need to basically pray that Apple doesn't decide to pull your current version either.
Tumblr picked the easy way out (ban all NSFW in general) because they were about to be sold to Verizon and Yahoo didn't want to bother trying to find a way to appease to apple at the last minute.
Ah that makes sense. Yes Reddit is pretty good at not showing you NSFW unless you actually go and look for it. But when you do it takes you all the way down the rabbit hole (figuratively!! - I hope), this is why I found it a bit surprising, it's not just some lingerie pics or anything.
In a way though, that means Safari should be banned too. And the camera app, I mean point it down in the right state of undress... ;)
At the same time, Apple has also been doing the opposite by playing government censor for the CCP by removing VPN apps from the App Store in China.
The knife here in terms of risking government overreach slices both ways, but in the case of Apple, they are in a much more vulnerable state for this sort of thing, since the CCP requires them to have meat shields (they need to have an office there) to continue operating in China.
One is massively more beneficial on the whole for user freedom.
This is true, on a global scale both options are bad. On the other hand, on a personal scale, the walled garden is much better option for me. It sucks that the Chinese are stuck between a rock and a hard place, but I am not, and I don't see how it's anyone's business to regulate my choice of technology.
Just because the status quo is bad for some people, it doesn't means it should be made worse for everyone else.
Likely because doing for Android alone represents too much of a risk given the profit potential. With these stores being able to exist on both platforms, that equation changes a lot, especially with iOS users' eyeballs traditionally having been valued more highly.
> Anyone... please tell me how this actually benefits ME as a consumer and not developers?
1) Developers already raise the prices for apps/subscriptions in iOS (vs, say, the web) to offset Apple's cut.
2) Developers will be able to offer refunds more easily (something that continues to be ridiculously hard with the App Store).
3) The App Store only allows free trials for subscriptions. They don't offer free trials before a one time payment to buy the app. A 3rd party store could allow that.
4) Certain kinds of apps that Apple doesn't allow on the App Store would presumably be allowed on other stores.
5) Apple will finally be forced to compete now that the App Store has competition. It might even mean that all the points I made above become moot.
I'm not saying there won't be any potential downsides, but that's the whole point of competition, it's a tradeoff you can make. As a user you can choose to only use the Apple App Store if you want. Since most users will only use the official store, it seems unlikely that many mainstream apps would consider dropping it entirely.
> As a user you can choose to only use the Apple App Store if you want. Since most users will only use the official store, it seems unlikely that many mainstream apps would consider dropping it entirely.
That right there is my problem with this. We can't even definitively say that it isn't possible. Doesn't Epic do it on Android?
A big enough company (like Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon) could easily push their store as being the primary way to download their apps. Start out on both at first but gradually introduce incentives for the users to redownload somewhere else. Then suddenly that App Store is on their phone, other developers see the App Store being used a lot and more and more developers stop using the App Store because they can get around these protections that I get as a user.
If somehow developers were still required to be on the App Store, fine. I would have no issue with it. But I just don't see developers doing it. Too many already try to employ dark patterns on there website that given a chance there is no way they won't try to do them on mobile. Many already try (like with the prompts to permit app tracking) but are limited in what they can do.
> A big enough company (like Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon) could easily push their store
Or any shitty IoT company. When people pay $400 for an instant pot or $800 for a robot vacuum or electric scooter they’ll download any spyware app to make it run. Plenty already required sideloading apk’s on Android.
However, as someone who doesn't deal with these big companies to begin with, it wouldn't affect me at all if they move out. It would just fast-track me to recommending alternatives to everyone I know.
I already migrated my whole family into iCloud for photos and own Nextcloud server for Google Drive alternative. It's been great. Obviously not the average user, but I could see people sticking with Apple's services over Google's.
Might get a huge base of older adults off of Facebook for good if they decide to leave the App Store.
There is a trade-off here. Yes, some apps might not be available in the main store. Not all of the rules that are applied to app submissions are in the best interests of every user. Even some of the rules that do protect some users, also eliminate whole classes of apps that other users would like to use.
This dynamic is already at play on Android. The lack of Fortnite availability on the Play Store is probably to the detriment of users. However, the existence of fdroid has allowed quite a few apps that users want but that fundementally don't work within the Play Store rules.
So when you ask "What does this do for me as a user", the answer is: it creates the opportunity for you to have access to a more diverse set of apps that are currently prohibited (such as anything with adult content).
Edit: A hopeful secondary effect is that Apple will be incentivized to improve the App Store to compete with third party stores. Maybe Apple will add free trials for one-time purchase apps. Maybe Apple will create an adult content section. Maybe Apple will provide better transparency around rejections. Maybe a store will emerge that does a much more stringent security review that catches the bad actors that do get their apps through Apple's screening. Most likely, none of this will happen and 3rd party stores will see minimal use, predominantly by technical users who want apps that fundamentally violate the store rules, like has happened on Android.
So the big tech companies will self silo into their own app stores (which I can ignore), I can add an open source app store, and companies can run their own app store for line of business apps?
I had an occasion where my phone was loaned to my (young at that time) nephew on a car trip and since it was my phone (and only my phone) I had rather permissive purchase checks on it. He bought a bunch of in app purchase stuff for Talking Tom (owned by a Chinese company). I filled out the form, and got a refund. I believe that it was much easier than trying to get a refund from the developer.
Here's an example a friend of mine ran into recently:
They sold their company and shut down their service for which they charged monthly/yearly subscriptions. They had a decent relationship with Apple, so they emailed their contact and notified them that they'd like to issue refunds to all their users. Apple said that users had to do it themselves. That wouldn't be so bad, but there's (as I understand it) some restrictions on Apple offering refunds for subscriptions, for example if you're 25 days into a 30 day subscription period, Apple won't allow users to request a refund.
This caused users to get angry at my friend and their company.
If they had been using any other payment service other than the App Store, they could have just automatically issued refunds to all their users.
The difference that we're seeing here is a "user can request a refund easily" vs "developer can refund something to a user."
Apple balances on the assumption of the stability of their developers offering subscriptions and an easier experience for a user requesting a refund.
The difficulty that the developer is having in this case is that Apple isn't exposing the payment information to the developer. If they can say "this user gets a refund" that is leaking some information about the users to developers.
(...)
Additionally, it appears that there were some new methods added to the in-app library for developers to be able to create a refund request on behalf of a user.
> Call this function from account settings or a help menu to enable customers to request a refund for an in-app purchase within your app. When you call this function, the system displays a refund sheet with the customer’s purchase details and list of reason codes for the customer to choose from.
Sure, but that obviously isn't what people were talking about with respect to developers giving refunds. I provided that feature to developers in Cydia and gave refunds directly to users and it was still appreciated by all to have that feature.
Regardless, to address your (off-topic) addition: do you actually request refunds from Apple often enough to be willing to pay 10% more for the privilege? You'd have to be asking for refunds for 1 out of every 10 products you buy for that to make sense...
Apple could still act as an indirect facilitator - send apple the money and they refund it on your behalf. I'm sure there are many reasons why this is complicated, but I don't see any fundamental reasons this couldn't be done if Apple want to enable it.
A developer can issue a refund request on behalf of a user - its just that they can't do the refund themselves because the developer doesn't hold tokens for processing the payment. Doing so gets into issues of PCI and user privacy.
Do you really think developers are going to lower the price of their app people are already willing to pay for? I agree the 30% Apple tax can inflate prices, but I'm more inclined to think developers will pocket the 30% instead of reducing their apps price, especially companies selling a product (e.g. Twitter).
> Developers already raise the prices for apps/subscriptions in iOS (vs, say, the web) to offset Apple's cut.
I'll believe most developers offering cheaper prices on other stores when I see it. Nobody is going to lower their prices just because they have moved app stores.
> Anyone... please tell me how this actually benefits ME as a consumer and not developers?
Not all laws exist to benefit you personally. It's a benefit to society to avoid a world where Apple will collect a 30% rent on all economic activity, kill of competition at a whim, and in general decide which products and product categories live and die.
> Apple will collect a 30% rent on all economic activity
I understand that it might be a intentional hyperbole but Apple very clearly and universally charges the comission (which is 15% if rev under < $1M) on digital good purchases. They have not planned to charge for bank transfers as some commenters in the NFT case of Coinbase fearmongered or physical goods. It's only a fee on things that App Store and Apple clearly enabled you to deliver to people with their system - digital goods.
I've jailbroken my iOS devices since the first iPod touch. There are lots of tools and features that Apple doesn't allow developers access to which limits what features are ultimately available to the end-user.
Nearly every big feature release on iOS came first from the jailbreak community. App switching, call overlay, PIP video, Shortcuts, lockscreen widgets, home screen widgets... and an endless list of others.
Non of these features would exist without designers and developers having access to the core functionality of the iPhone.
I love iOS. I currently own an iPhone without a Jailbreak (doesn't exist for my iPhone). I'm also an engineer and there is a whole lot of potential that Apple limits strictly under the guise of security. You can have alternate stores without compromising those that choose not to install them.
I understand that Google may decide to create their own store and take all their apps with them... this I can see being a very negative thing which may be needs regulation in itself. IDK what that would look like, but I don't use Google anyways because I have no trust in them. I don't trust them in the App Store so I wouldn't trust them with their own store.
> I understand that Google may decide to create their own store and take all their apps with them... this I can see being a very negative thing which may be needs regulation in itself. IDK what that would look like, but I don't use Google anyways because I have no trust in them. I don't trust them in the App Store so I wouldn't trust them with their own store.
If you already don't trust them in the App Store, why would you trust them in their own store to begin with? Sounds to me like you shouldn't use Google apps to begin with.
Most of their apps are very replaceable and with the arbitrary restrictions forcibly peeled back, the sole service that you can only get from them (YouTube) can finally get an iOS equivalent of NewPipe that doesn't need a hacked phone to be installed.
I think Apple lowkey actually wants Jailbreak to continue as it's a pool of free novel ideas that they can then implement in iOS. But what % of Apple's customers JB their iDevices? Probably not more than 5%, and that number is likely decreasing too. For instance, I used to JB my iPad and iPhone up until iOS 15 when the features introduced by the OS passed my needs *threshold*.
Oh trust me it's way way lower than 5%. More like 0.05% :) I was until recently a corporate admin of (among many other types) tens of thousands of BYOD iphones.
> I understand that Google may decide to create their own store and take all their apps with them... this I can see being a very negative thing which may be needs regulation in itself.
What do you mean by "create their own store"? I don't understand this part of your comment.
As a linux user, I don't like how Apple gets to decide every app that can be installed on iOS. I like the ability to install any program I choose. This alone is enough for me. Currently, I use a linux emulator, iSH, on my iPad, but I'm really worried that at any moment apple could make it unusable for me because it can run arbitrary programs, which they stated they are directly against.
As a Linux user, I love that there’s a kind of device I can recommend my non-technical friends and family without worrying too much about their safety or privacy. Is it perfect? No. But the risk that they’re fooled into installing a malicious app is still a lot lower than with mandated side loading and app stores with lax oversight.
I.e the gatekeeping my government wants to prohibit is the reason I’ve been recommending these things. I guess I’ll have to switch to recommending AwareGo security training for everyone
Then my question is: Why do you believe that relaxing app requirements on iOS would cause mandated side-loading, given that it's not a problem for anything else currently on the market?
My point was that the possibility to side load apps is becoming mandatory, and that that possibility comes with a risk. I don’t think people will be forced to side load things, sorry if I didn’t express myself properly
Yea I don't get the argument of "Just don't use Apple"
You can like the hardware and not care for the software. It really is A/B at the moment. It's difficult for the average user to choose C. You either allow Google to peer into your life, or trust that Apple's marketing isn't a gimmick and a lot of Apple is e2e encrypted.
From what I read, iCloud backups are finally getting e2e encryption. I see this as the biggest reason to stick with Apple. I trade off full-customizability for better security/experience.
If a jailbreak was available for my iPhone, I'd be on it though.
> From what I read, iCloud backups are finally getting e2e encryption.
Yes, but only as secure as the passphrase you use to unlock your phone. Except actually less secure than that; your phone will rate limit attempts to guess your passphrase, but encrypted iCloud backups turned over to a government won't and can't rate limit attempts.
For the average user with a relatively short passphrase, iCloud backups will be trivial to crack. Still, it's an improvement.
You seem to think that your phone's pin is used directly as some sort of encryption key for cloud backups, but that's not how these systems work. Your pin or face or fingerprint unlocks your phone's secure element, and the secure element contains a randomly generated high entropy encryption key for your data.
This is why you can casually change your pin code in your phone's settings without it chewing through your battery and data plan reencrypting and reuploading gigabytes of cloud data.
In addition to what DCKing said, you can effectively rate-limit password attempts on encrypted data by deriving the key using a cryptographic hashing function such as bcrypt with a high amount of iterations.
What does full-featured mean to you? There’s a bunch of non-google Android distros that seem full featured to me. Same with Sailfish, at least when I last used it some years ago.
No big corporate support, less commercial apps packaged by default, but that’s a feature in itself.
To me, full-featured means that I can install a ridesharing app, social media/chat apps, a podcast app, a maps app with live traffic updates and turn-by-turn directions, and popular streaming music and video apps.
Bonus points for supporting contactless payments, banking apps, and airline apps.
The hardware should have decent battery life and get great cell reception, and the UI should be smooth.
Switching phone ecosystems is a hell of a lot harder and more expensive than installing an app. (And the Android ecosystem is honestly not good either.)
I'm in a similar boat. I bought an ipad because its simply the best tablet and actually gets attention. I didn't want a chromeOS or Windows device. The ipad for me is about 80% there and the other 20% is just not what apple wants.
If this would push that other 20%, I might even consider switching from Android.
As it stands, Android has a lot of free trash on the play store, and Iphone has a lot of paid trash on the app store because apple charges them hundreds per year for the honor of developing on their platform.
On Android, when I need an app with basic functionality, I already check fdroid first for a simple OSS implementation. I don't need my voice recorder to do anything except record audio. I don't need my heart beat monitor to do anything but check my pulse.
I'm hoping this change brings the type of innovation early jailbreak app stores brought that basically test drove features that Apple would copy years later and call "innovative".
Because there are apps I would like to use on my iPhone which are prohibited by the current AppStore rules. For example something like Termux. So my szenario would be:
4. I mainly keep using the AppStore with the exception of selected apps from trusted sources which were impossible so far.
If enough developers choose to move to those other stores consumers will have no choice but to use those stores to get the apps they are looking for.
I understand wanting apps that the app stores doesn't permit. There are apps that I would love as well. But I don't want to loose the protections in place to get them.
When your response to criticism of iOS is, "just use Android!", I think it's fair to apply the same approach to desirable popular apps: just use the alternative apps & services.
I have not used Android in a long time so most of my news about it comes somewhere else.
But unless I am mistaken, a developer on Android is free to handle their own subscription billing, purchases, whatever however they want right?
I have seen some reports that google is tracking to crack down on this, but last I saw it was still far more open for the developers.
If that is correct. Developers are less incentivized to circumvent the Android Store. That incentive exists on iOS if it allows them to use those dark patterns for unsubscribing from an app or anything else.
If I am wrong about android than fine, that incentive doesn't exist and that removes most of my argument (it is still a possibility but the incentive won't be there).
If you're asking me for my personal experience with such dark patterns on android, I don't have any stories to tell you. None of the apps I use on android are paid for, have ads or subscriptions, much less un-subscription dark patterns. For things like Uber or banking, Google is not a middleman in my transactions with those companies and I've never seen or felt any reason to desire otherwise.
If an app asks you to pay for a subscription and you don't like the payment processor the app uses, then don't use the app. It's really that simple.
I want an open and private platform. Google may let me sideload apps, but the operating system is hostile to data privacy. For me, an iPhone that I can install other apps on is the best alternative apart from going to a GNU/Linux phone.
Additionally, it’s a benefit that users can now install any apps that Apple refuses to allow.
This is just an Apple PR talking point. You know what existed between the retail stores and the App Store? The internet
We didn’t magically jump from only buying things in stores to only buy things from an App Store. Companies could and still do sell through their own website and through other places.
I am not forgetting the existence of licensing concerns, but they are not exactly relevant.
A) The presence of licensing software is irrelevant to the existence of something between a big box store and the App Store. Talking about the ecosystem as if people did not sell software electronically before the App Store is simply disingenuous.
B) Times have changed, it's easier to handle that stuff yourself using free software or with software packages that take less than a 30% cut.
C) You know what didn't need that licensing software? Free and/or OSS software. That simply isn't an option on iOS. Further, even if you wanted to enforce that on your paid software you may have used a publishing company, but you weren't artificially limited to a single one.
> We didn’t magically jump from only buying things in stores to only buy things from an App Store.
And it fucking sucked. Finding apps was hit or miss, there was no guarantee an app would run on your device model, and payments were ridiculous. Apple's App Store is far from perfect but it is vastly better than the absolute clown shoes of buying mobile apps for pre-iPhone mobile platforms.
This is changing the goal posts. Whatever the state of “pre-iPhone mobile platforms” is irrelevant. We are discussing about general software distribution.
iPhones nowadays are much closer to functionality and power to (or significantly eclipsing) normal PCs that people have.
And the distribution of software for normal PCs has none of the issue you describe.
What world are you coming from? The story for buying windows apps on the internet has been pretty fine for a long, long while; and, compatibility hasn't been any problem at all, in my experience.
Further, since most things were shareware, you could just _test_ the software on your machine ahead of time.
That is more because payment processing in general has come a long way. Buying mac or Windows software from a developer's site using Stripe or even Apple Pay or similar doesn't fucking suck much more than using the App Store.
There was a publisher, a distributor, and the retail outlet all taking their cuts.
Then you also had to pay into a marketing fund for those big full color inserts in the Sunday paper if your software was sold at the big box retailers.
You also had to eat the cost of returns of unsold inventory after you issued a new version.
It's true, Minecraft absolutely had like 4 layers of red tape Mojang had to go through to sell is program. Same with WinZip, WinRar, XSplit and many other applications.
Or do they mostly just support PayPal, Square, Amazon Pay or direct credit card billing?
That’s false. If your business is fine with 12% processing fees (specifically in tech and more so in IAP style apps) and not with 30% - something is very wrong.
[Context] it is extremely odd to (ab)use the leverage of a 0 marginal cost business to be sensitive to a +/-18% payment processing fee - when the world basically runs on ~4% IRL. The business case if true and still viable should be unique and outside of a pure software play - which gets you squarely out of IAP.
Long story: it would be extremely odd to (ab)use the leverage of a 0 marginal cost business to be sensitive to a +/-18% payment processing fee - when the world basically runs on ~4% IRL.
Yeah exactly. I should be cheering for the option of paying less to Apple as a business, but realistically you will get sideloading, piracy and the “mobile users don’t spend money on apps” like it is “Android users don’t spend money on apps”
I think this one benefits some consumers, who are in to it, but overall it's more the principal of avoiding monopoly practices. The push to allow other rendering engines/browsers on iOS is a much more beneficial and clear cut positive imo.
I could not agree more. I won’t touch another app store with a bargepole. You want free software, get Linux / Android. You want a walled garden? Get Apple. I use both for different things.
Honestly, I disagree. I'm currently on a mac where I can live the walled garden lifestyle if I choose, but sometimes I want to install an app which is experimental, open source etc. Sure, I get it, macOS predates the iOS App Store, but so does iOS. The very first apps to run on an iPhone had to be side-loaded, there was no App store at launch for the iPhone.
I like App Store, but I don't like the restriction that stops me from installing older versions of apps. I have a couple iDevices that are perfectly fine, except that their iOS is too old for the newer apps. If I could install old versions of UC Browser, I could breath a fresh air into those devices.
I want the ability to sideload apps on my iPhone, but I really hope Apple makes it painful enough that companies like Facebook can't rely on it to get around Apples app store rules.
> People keep saying that this is about choice, which frankly... is bull.
This is very obviously bull. When there are essentially only two smartphone platforms, and someone is arguing that one of the only significant consumer differences between the two platforms should be removed, that person is not trying to increase consumer choice.
You can still stay in your "walled garden" by sticking to the App Store (this is very likely what I will do 99% of the time). That solves all of your grievances including your Facebook hypothetical. But yes, it does mean you will need to choose between installing Facebook and using the App Store.
You can also use Apple's favorite response to this: use the browser. Just open up Safari and type in facebook.com. Then you won't need the app and you don't have to leave the App Store!
Apple can sell "walled" phones in US. so FB/Google will have no choice but continue to do business with the Apple Store. So US citizens should have no reasons to plain that EU is forcing them to have choices.
You also need to look passed the FUD and see that you have Android and you can't find a good example that you are forced to install a third party store to get some must have application. Geeks would unlock their phones and some apps might offer a cheaper version on a third party store forcing Apple to compete.
If you could also replace Siri with a better assistant you might even get Apple putting some work in their apps and improve Siri. Either way custoemrs will gain a better voice assistant if there will be fair competition.
Great. now let\s see Apple fanboys explain to us that competition with Siri is bad, and if you want good voice assistant in your language you should buy something else.
My bet is that the vast majority of users are like you, so developers who stop distributing on the App Store or distribute on multiple stores will find it doesn’t pay and so the incentive for them will largely remain to distribute on the App Store. Yes there might be niche apps where this doesn’t apply but those are edge cases.
What other store operators should know is that if there’s
any compelling feature that sets their store apart, Apple can very rapidly copy it and probable do a better job so there’s really very little incentive to bother creating a store to compete against Apple.
The overwhelming majority of Android users use the Google Play Store.
This is all a colossal waste of time and energy for no practical change.
Or like the messenger or streaming wars: everything is fragmented, one AppStore you use primarily, and here and there you need to use the other Stores for specific use cases.
I’m now expecting to see Xbox Store on PlayStation (and vice versa), Samsung Store on my LG TV (because they have xCloud), no bad practices with a third party store, and everything positive.
Seeing that this solves all our problems, I’m looking forward to xCloud on my LG soon.
I think this is great and fully support the change, given that loading your own applications has worked pretty great as the baseline for basically every personal computer since the dawn of computing. As an aside, I'll always be amused by how much hype is generated whenever Apple adds something that has existed for decades to their systems. When they finally put an SD card slot on their devices thirty years from now I expect this site to go down due to high traffic and for hell to freeze over.
So the first 1.8 million apps plus the ability to use the free development environment to compile and load any program you want (necessarily open source) on your devices wasn't enough?
I suppose there are people just itching to install closed source mystery code from unaccountable entities. Unfortunately most of them are the friends and family for whom I am first line technical support. I'm not looking forward to the change.
I'm willing to wait for the details, but at this moment, I am not a fan of unaccountable stores.
> the ability to use the free development environment to compile and load any program you want
You can load any app you want, but it disappears after 3 days. Then you have to load it again. To keep the app on your phone, you need to load it onto your phone again every 3 days using your computer.
It's obviously set up for developer testing, not for someone trying to actually get use out of an app on their phone.
Not true [see edit below, retraction]. The apps I write and load onto my own devices outside the store stay on my devices until I get a new device. I think there might be a profile that has an expiration of one to three years, but in practice that never goes off for me. I either add a feature or get a new device before that goes off.
Edit: Ok, "true depending". If you are a registered developer then your apps last a year. If you are unregistered then you get one week, which would be a total pain in the ass.
Are you trying to say that a free development environment that you can install in order to compile and load any program you want for three days isn't enough?
It depends. It is enough to turn yourself into an experienced software developer, then you can get a job and afford the annual developer fee. But it sort of sucks if you are, say, retired and don't keep up your identity but would like to keep your apps.
I don't understand what risk they are mitigating by keeping the unverified developers to 3 days instead of one year. It is clearly an intentional action.
I guess you could have a business where you install unapprovable apps for people with a 1 year subscription and they have to physically come back to your kiosk and get an update from you each year.
> you could have a business where you install unapprovable apps for people
I've heard that there's somewhat of a black market for this already. One person buys a developer subscription, then signs apps for other people so that they can sideload them using something like AltStore. Then, Apple sees that many apps have been signed by one dev account and shutters the account for terms of service violations. Finally, someone else registers a new developer account and the process repeats.
> I suppose there are people just itching to install closed source mystery code from unaccountable entities. Unfortunately most of them are the friends and family for whom I am first line technical support. I'm not looking forward to the change.
What is this hypothetical even. Your nontechnical friends and family are also eager to go out of the App Store (after having to enable developer mode, which might be as difficult and full of disclaimers and warnings as Apple chooses to slap into it), then root around shady third party app stores and mobile websites to download mystery code? So they're simultaneously tech illiterate and power users?
Exactly! They run into "that other guy" who tells them "Oh, you should delete Safari and Mail and always use these other programs!" Then I get to help them with why "other browser's" keychain integration is rubbish and it displays blanks instead of web pages for some sites, and the content filters don't work right… and something weird is happening with the UI of "other mail".
They will totally hand their phone over to "other guy" who will "do something, I don't remember what he did"… and they'll be subscribed to SketchyAppStore2023-HGTWRE.
Who is that other guy? A TikTok influencer? A YouTuber? Why are your friends and family handing over their phones to such shadowy figures on the street? Just tell them not to do that and be done with it.
Well of course you need a computer to run the IDE. Xcode only runs on Macs. It is possible to develop and sign code without Xcode if you have access to a different sort of computer, but that is a level of masochism unrelated to productivity. (As opposed to Xcode which is a level of masochism related to productivity.)
Macs have a long shelf life, and ones capable of running current Xcode are thrown to the recycler, I assume you could nab one for minimal coin too. They'll be slower, like 1/3 the speed to build compared to new machines, but apps don't take long to build. Most of your time is "sitting and staring" followed by "typing". Neither of which is appreciably impacted by using an old machine.
I went from an 8 year old Mini to a new M1 when they came out. A world of difference! Buttery smooth window drags, gorgeous scrolling. But I don't really program apps any faster. Sure, I have a few seconds now and then on a build, but it doesn't add up to much. Then I switched up to a Studio with a brain the size of a planet… no real change for app programming.
Don't let lack of a computer be a problem. Grab an old mini and do your thing.
I’ve been coding since I was 5 or so (C64); my first desktop computer was a Performa 5200, where I had to spend pocket money on Metrowerks CodeWarrior Student Edition (68k only, no PPC, the pro version was way beyond my 15 year old self’s budget) and get the official Apple books out of the library in order to learn C.
ResEdit was magnificent, for the era, and given away on magazine cover CDs. Then Apple switched to OS X, and Xcode became cheap, then free. The 30% that everyone’s been moaning about for the last 5 years was, when it was first announced, a fantastic improvement. ObjC and Swift may have felt like Apple reinventing the wheel when they could’ve just used C++, but C++ is still an option for developers, and one I’ve used in an iOS project at a previous employer.
How exactly is Apple supposed to be developer-unfriendly?
- XCode is widely considered to be one of the most annoying and buggy IDE.
- The code signing process for iOS used to be an absolute nightmare, it was improved and streamlined over the years but still a pain
- A large part of the tech stack is Apple specific (ObjC, Swift, Metal)
- They tend to progressively drop support of cross-platform tech like OpenGL and C++ (some new APIs are Switft only and they will continue to force adoption)
- The App Store support for devs is extremely opaque
- They push very hard to enforce "guidelines" that they don't hesitate to break
It is part of the Apple culture, Steve Jobs was a product guy and he was brilliant, but he never really enjoyed the idea of other companies/devs doing things with his toys.
The iOS SDK was launched only to stop people from jailbreaking their iPhone to get access. The initial goal was web apps only.
Jobs also had a profound disdain for games and this is what started the Apple culture.
> XCode is widely considered to be one of the most annoying and buggy IDE.
You seen VisualBasic? Or Xojo (used to be called REALbasic)? Eclipse? And the only things I see here about VisualStudio are complaints.
> The code signing process for iOS used to be an absolute nightmare, it was improved and streamlined over the years but still a pain
Used to be annoying, now it's trivial.
> A large part of the tech stack is Apple specific (ObjC, Swift, Metal)
So just like C#/DirectX for Windows, or like Kotlin on Android?
Also: while some stuff can be multiplattform, making everything multiplatform only sounds good — I remember when Java was supposed to go everywhere and it was equally bad on all platforms.
> They tend to progressively drop support of cross-platform tech like OpenGL and C++ (some new APIs are Switft only and they will continue to force adoption)
C++ is interoperable with Swift. This is trivial to discover.
Dropping OpenGL was annoying to me also, but it seems like hardly anyone cares about that layer any more as they're all on Unity and Unreal instead.
I've seen your profile so I can guess why you care so much about this, but the job market is focused on the big two even despite (perhaps because of) their bulk.
> The App Store support for devs is extremely opaque
But much, much better than when it was new. I remember reviews taking a week by default, and the word "Knopf" in German localisations triggering automatic alerts about naughty language.
[skipping unverifiable opinion]
> Jobs also had a profound disdain for games and this is what started the Apple culture.
Such distain that all of the macs I bought while he was in charge came with a pre-installed game. That stopped roughly when he stepped away, a bit before he died, but by then the Mac App Store existed an games were already a big thing on the iOS App Store.
You've named a lot of the most annoying and buggy IDEs, and that does not contradict that post, as Xcode can still be in that number. Rare is there an iOS/macOS developer that does not complain about Xcode. Sites like this exist for a reason:
Well, let’s see how long it takes for FB, WhatsApp, Snapchat to migrate to alt-store. The nag screens and the the tug-of-war and victim playing over user data access. Apple must play its hand carefully, or it’ll be IE toolbars all over
I really doubt that Meta will slit their own throats and give more users an excuse to not download or update their apps, by introducing the friction of having to deal with yet another account to manage for another store:
I'm sure your parent won't want to install the facebook app so they can talk to family oversee
but now i'm already imagining fb app will be from alt-store with all the tracking reactivated and yes i don't use fb/have the app but try to explain in to elders/no tech people
If you're concerned about that, you shouldn't let them use Facebook in the first place. Hell, if tracking is your concern then they probably shouldn't be using a smartphone at all.
If Facebook truly does use this as the opportunity to ruin their UX, then maybe your parents switch to Signal or iMessage.
Getting people to switch from FB Messenger or especially WhatsApp (which is effectively the default messenger in many parts of the world) is a monumental task. One wouldn't need to just convince their family, but their family would also need to convince their circles and so on and so forth.
This is what's scary, because it means that Facebook has what's effectively a massive captive audience with its messengers.
That's kinda a bogus concern. As-is, Facebook can already declare that they're moving all WhatsApp clients to their New Web Version and remove all the versions off the App Store. Same goes for the rest of their apps, and it's fully possible on Android too.
But, they don't. Realistically there's no reason for them to exist anywhere besides the App/Play Store, as long as those platforms play fair. This is a real strawman argument though, considering it's fully possible in the status quo. The problem isn't Apple or the government, it's that Facebook already has a disproportionate amount of control over your life. Apple cannot save you from that with a software update.
There's tens of millions of Mac users and hundreds of millions of iOS users. There's literally an order of magnitude difference in the size of the user base. It will be a problem on iOS because the user base is large and lucrative.
I think you could do enough fingerprinting (via otherwise harmless functions) to identify users even without access to the advertising ID (that requires the tracking permission).
I'm a little confused, but maybe someone from the adtech space can answer this. If you're logged into Facebook, why would they need another identifier for you?
I don't want to fearmonger too much, but you may not have a choice in using 3rd party App Stores, assuming you use popular apps like Facebook or Instagram. The large tech companies may remove their apps from the original App Store and only use third parties that allow them to do the ad tracking they want to do.
Now, they might try to entice users with deals and such (sort of like Epic's gung ho free games discounts on their gaming platform against Steam), but I highly doubt they'd pull their apps from the official App Store. Too much risk of blowback.
Will be interesting to see if Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox can now create a true browser on iOS and not just a skin slapped on top of mobile safari.
You can say whatever you like about the EU (corruption anyone?), but at the very least, they are countering Big Tech. Just that idea of effective balance of force is a positive signal to me.
I remember a big stink about corruption in the Olympic Games when it went to Utah, and giving my mormon friend some crap about it. He pointed out that it's always been DEEPLY corrupt, and the only problem was that the Utah officials didn't go along with it, and that's what caused all the press. I don't know how much of that is actually true, but it seems analogous.
You'll find corrupted politicians in every government in every country in the world. And yes, the EU has the strongest consumer protection laws anywhere in the west.
All laws also apply to EU companies plus EU companies have to adhere to EU laws from the start while non-EU companies can focus on more lenient regulations until they are ready to move into the EU market.
If anything this kind of legislation is more damaging to EU companies.
Why do you think that? They've successfully intervened in anticompetitive markets even where all participants are fully EU based (e.g. railways, train manufacturers).
Show me a government that has 0 corruption. No system is perfect, but there's better ones and worse ones. IMO EU is one of the better ones, but not a perfect one, obviously :)
I am huge EU skeptic, but this one really does push back on my beliefs. I find it very disappointing it took such an action for Apple to do the right thing. Way to go EU!
Yeah. Though for us entirely outside the political sphere of influence for the decision making, it's a tad bittersweet having to take the bad with the good. Love my unified USB-C, don't love clicking GDPR cookie banners.
GDPR didn't enforce cookie banners. Sites can simply not track if they actually care about their users. If they don't track they don't need to ask for anything.
And a lot of these dark pattern cookie banners are not GDPR compliant. It should default to not track even if you don't press anything. And clicking 40 different reject buttons isn't allowed either. This needs serious policing.
So you're basically saying the alternative is don't exist for the vast majority of sites, reducing revenue by 50% and surviving is just about impossible for every internet company.
And if they wanted to turn every site into subscription overnight, they could have made this an optional provided header to opt out. Every browser could implement that in days.
No not really. When everyone does it, untargered ads will be the norm and will just be more valuable. Just like they were before adtech happened.
Also, 50% less doesn't have to mean not to exist.
I do wish they had mandated the existing do not track flag to be honored though without presenting any popups. This would have finally made that flag useful and would have made things much easier. I know some browsers have removed it but it's easy to bring back.
While I want monopoly companies to screw themselves. I don't like EU attitude to want to rule over foreign companies arbitrarily, it's a call to the colonial times when Europe wanted to make the world follow their rule and serve them.
The EU government is simply laying the ground rules as to how businesses should operate inside the EU single market. They're not forcing Apple to change its business practices anywhere else in the world, as far as I understand. And Apple is free to leave the European market, if they do not like those conditions. Personally, as a consumer, I welcome this. And I hope that they don't just end at Apple. Google and Microsoft oughta be next.
Isn’t this sort of like saying that Apple is just dictating how developers should operate when creating apps for their phones? If developers don’t want to use the App Store, they are free to leave the market of Apple consumers.
Ironic, considering US companies must provide their data to US gov even for non US persons or clients, and that's why Google and MS services are deemed illegal in many EU countries.
BTW, no foreign company is forced to operate in Europe.
Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland. But only because the UK is weird and insists it’s four nations. (And England kinda speaks for all of them for this kind of thing).
Well in the proper sense the EU isn't a nation in any case. I was being loose about the governmental level at which regulation of foreign entities take place, which I think is fine for a HN comment!
> And England kinda speaks for all of them for this kind of thing
Well yes, it's 4 nations, except that England doesn't believe in the other 3 ;) Though it's only just coming to terms with the self-existence of most of the old Empire for that matter. Writing as someone who was born in the least likeable of the UK nations (England), and has lived in all but Wales.
Any company that wants to do business in the EU has to comply with European rules, and their products have to comply with European guidelines. Electronics, cars, food, everything had to comply to rules. This includes antitrust policies.
> I don't like EU attitude to want to rule over foreign companies arbitrarily
I agree in principle. How could they balance that force, without arbitrarily ruling over foreign companies? I don’t know. Maybe clarify what is "arbitrarily”?
Well, that is exactly the effective force I'm talking about. Can you imagine Apple not operating in Europe?
However, this is "legal" authority. I'm trying to discuss the more subtle moral authority: Many even inside the continent, do not accept the moral authority of the EU. and they also use that "arbitrarily" word to justify their claims. So why not discuss that word in detail ?
I’m not for downvoting replies to death. I’m more for letting people define their words better. It sometimes works. Sometimes.
Sure, we do after all have the example of some (non-Apple) companies not operating in China, a similarly important market. If Apple really believe their own rhetoric about how the only way to protect their users is for Apple to control the experience, they'll pull out of Europe rather than compromise on their users' security.
I just talked about how this is about moral authority VS legal one. Here it is about commercial markets VS cultural centres.
Europe is not just a market. Europe is the (historical) centre of the western world. I don't think big tech can/want to leave it. If they say so, IMO they are just bluffing.
There are both monetary and strategic reasons for global corporations to operate in Europe of course, just as there are with other areas of the world.
But that doesn't mean they should be allowed to do so solely on their own terms.
Countries can set the terms they want. That is the meaning of sovereignty.
Some of them have rules that constrain their legislature somewhat (a constitution) and some of them try to set rules that at least to some degree conform to the will of the people living there (democracies).
These principles have not come about from nothing, so I wouldn't call them arbitrary.
> These principles have not come about from nothing, so I wouldn't call them arbitrary.
I did not either. I was just using his exact expression, in an effort to let him explain himself.
I can understand how offending that word is for some. Just wonder at all that bloody european history and superhuman effort to rationally get over it...
> Many even inside the continent, do not accept the moral authority of the EU.
True, so much so that many, just outside of the continent, decided to leave the EU.
Insofar as they were in the EU though, they were bound by its laws.
This is no different from any other set of laws. Many in any country, state or other political organisation disagree with some law. They may choose to leave. They may choose to enact activism against said laws. They may not, without being subject to penalties, break said law.
Is it moral? Is it not? That's for societies to decide. If you're in the EU and you find the EU as a whole is not favourable to your country, you can start a campaign to leave. If, on the other hand, you just find that a specific law or another are wrong, you can write to your representatives, campaign to vote them out, etc.
Those are the (imperfect) workings of most democracies we know.
> Can you imagine Apple not operating in Europe?
I can. I don't think they will though. Why? Because even with the very few regulations that might reduce their ability to profit, it is still less profitable to leave the EU market. If eventually they find that not to be the case, they can lobby, campaign or leave.
Oh hey, will to look at that. The law is actually suceeding in forcing Apple to change its behavior and allows alternative apps.
I remember arguing with so many people here on HN about this. People were actually trying to pretend like Apple was going to get around the law, or have it overturned, or pull out from the EU, or some other nonsense.
But, if you weren't completely biased, you'd know that of course Apple was going to lose this fight. They will be forced to follow the law like everyone else.
Good, if you own a device like an iPhone or iPad, you should be able to do whatever you like with it, not be restricted to whatever Apple thinks is appropriate to run there.
Kinda makes me want to see the same thing applied to other forms of tech with app stores and limitations on what users can install too, like smart TVs, games consoles, smart watches, etc. If you own a device, you should be allowed to install what you want on it, original creators be damned.
>You want to use Waze, Translate, Maps or anything else owned by Google? Download the Play Store now! We've blocked Youtube from being used in Safari for your safety. Please download Chrome from the Play Store to continue.
>Would you like to use Whatsapp, Messenger, Facebook? Download the Metaverse now.
>Would you like to use Signal? Download the scamcoin app store now.
I'm curious how Apple is going to limit this functionality to Europe. Will it just be iPhones sold in Europe? What about older iPhones then? Can I import a European iPhone to American shores? Will it be just detected region? If so, what happens if I fly from Europe to America for a week? Does it apply to all EU Citizens regardless of where they live, like GDPR? If so, how is that enforced for EU citizens living in the US, or dual-citizens? What about iPhone users without an Apple ID stating their location? Can Apple be sued if they inadvertently cut some European users off? In which case, if they are forced to play it safe, how will they prevent sideloading in America? If they discover they can't prevent sideloading in America effectively, then what?
To my knowledge you can either side-load na app from Xcode using the free developer account, but the signing certificate will expire in 7 days, or you can pay 100 USD to Apple and use a personal team to be able to side-load apps whose signing certificate is valid for a year. And you are limited to 5 apps only. Is this incorrect? The only reason I care about this legislation is because I want to side-load an app or multiple apps and don't have to worry about making an Apple Developer account or worry about signing certificates at all. In fact, I'd like to be able to build and compile an app on Linux, in CI, download a file and just drop it on my phone and run as an app. No accounts (like Apple Developer), no payments. Is this possible today?
We can take a look at the Samsung Store or Roblox, and take lessons from it. Samsung's store is incredibly bad in UX, and noise.
I hate the monopoly and monopoly fees that come with the Apple store. The take away is the amount of money and work Apple has put to provide a clean and homogeneous interface throughout their store. An alternative market would need that, else consumers' interests won't be served.
Samsung Store is actually an example for the regulation. Samsung Store is more like Apple Store on Samsung phones. Every Samsung user is happy that they can use Google's store as an alternative.
Now, I'm not going to say this is impossible; it sounds like it's just the kind of needle-threading that Apple would prefer in this sort of situation.
But...what's the source here?
So far as I could see, the article didn't even credit anonymous sources. It just states all these things as bare facts. And I haven't seen any other reporting on this (yet) that doesn't simply link back to this Bloomberg article.
And just as a reminder, this is from Bloomberg—the outlet that publishes the "Big Hack" story that proved to be completely false [0], without issuing any form of retraction, correction, or apology.
Again, it's entirely possible that this will prove to be true. But I have absolutely no confidence in Bloomberg on stories of this kind, and don't intend to get worked up over the possibility of Apple allowing outside app stores until and unless it gets some kind of independent reporting.
Thanks for the reminder about the article that turned Bloomberg into a joke. But do note that the author is Mark Gurman, a fairly prolific Apple analyst. I suppose he implies that he has anonymous sources.
> Apple is discussing the idea of mandating certain security requirements even if software is distributed outside its store. Such apps also may need to be verified by Apple — a process that could carry a fee.
So ... can they do that? It's pretty safe that if it's allowed, they'll do it.
>The laws apply to technology companies with market valuations of at least €75 billion ($80 billion) and a minimum of 45 million monthly users within the EU.
Wonder if they considered (or maybe are considering) how to on paper split up in such a way they no longer meet this threshold
If a matter goes to court, it is easier to prove that the defendant's capitalization is over €75 billion than to prove that it is in the top XXX companies because the latter involves determining the capitalization of all companies that might have a cap in the top XXX.
If this happens how will the 15-30% Apple tax work? It seems excessive to me but what is the likely outcome here, a reduction in costs maybe or some crippling of Apps in external stores?
I like the current Apple model very much. I do not need to think safety or security when I buy apps from Apple App store.
Also I like that all apps including Spotify, Netflix, and all other big apps are available from the same place. Apps are updated automatically, and many of my subscriptions are handled in the same place.
For us users these are good features, that are worth the small premium.
I could be wrong about this, but it seems like it would change for most users since Facebook/Google/Amazon/etc have a big incentive to push third party App Stores: ad tracking. Apple currently limits it, so I would not be surprised at all if suddenly all of grandmas and grandpas favorite apps are now “third party only”.
Most people dont like too many choices. And sideloading just might destroy the experience for the majority, because many big players could choose to have their own store.
Sideloading didn't destroy MacOS, Windows or Android. Unless you have evidence that iOS is somehow different, I'm going to assume that it won't destroy iOS either.
Phones are different from computers, it is a different market with different requirements. Apple app store is much more succesful than Android “app store”. That is the evidens for you.
If it hadn’t been for Brexit, the EU market would be an “which exchange rate do you prefer?” away from being the equal of the USA. And the UK’s economy is something like California in this analogy, and they basically follow the same rules anyway despite all the noise about wanting to be different.
Yeah. I wonder if we will see another vote for them to rejoin in the future. They are surely hypocrites though as Scotland was denied independence by the UK high court.
Truly tragic that the genius minds behind Dynamic Island are having their time wasted with all this work on 'user empowerment' and 'regulatory compliance'.
The status quo was Apple monopolizing that power, I'd much prefer for it to be distributed among other developers. If the process for installing Fortnite or Facebook becomes too painful, users will stop using it. As long as Apple's store is the best-in-the-business, they have nothing to worry about. Now they just need to compete.
Can't wait to not use my banking apps or MDM stuff anymore because my device could be compromised because I installed something from a third party store...
edit: it's a jab against apple that they will introduce restrictions like that. lmao
There's a pretty simple solution: Don't install applications from a third-party store. This change doesn't mean the Apple store is going away. It's reasonable to assume that you'll be able to continue using your device as you always have without worry.
I just think this level of fine-grained intervention into a single company's business model is absurd. The reason Apple is in this market dominant position is because they've done something great, and the intervention appears to be foreign governments intervening into executive decisions about Apple's business model.
Honestly, I look at these plans as an Apple customer and think "Oh great, the EU is going to tie Apple up in stupid, unproductive exercises that's going to make my experience worse.". Not only am I pissed off that I'm going to be paying a premium for an Apple device so they can employ a bunch of engineers to build a bunch of EU mandated features I'll never use and will probably make my device less safe, I'm pissed off that the EU is wasting their time with this bullshit when there are real problems in the world to deal with - problems the EU isn't doing a great job of dealing with.
Choice isn't always great for the end user. Remember when you wanted to stream a movie and could just go to Netflix? Now today you need to subscribe to Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, etc. if you want everything. I worry that this move can lead to that.
This change isn't only about choice for the end user. It gives developers choice too. Those developers have their own incentives that are generally less aligned with the end user than Apple. Odds are this shifts the iOS experience from just needing the Apple App Store to needing the Amazon Store, the Epic Games Store, the Google Store, etc. Some of those stores (probably all of them) are going to have a weaker approach to security and privacy than Apple had. Right now I have Apple fighting for my privacy on iOS against companies like Google and Facebook. Will that still happen when Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are only available from the Facebook store?
You don't miss choice when you don't need it. If everything you ever wanted to watch was on Netflix, great!
But if something was not there, you were out of luck. Now you have more of a chance, maybe at a greater expense.
Same applies to music.
Apple's App Store is rather notorious for its bans on particular kinds of apps. Not only anything adult-oriented, but also stuff more important for some of us, like a different browser engine, or a programming environment, to say nothing about different payment options without the 30% cut.
Choice is not always easiest to the user, and iOS's original value proposition is that it removes much of the choice and makes things easy, so that they just work™ and include all you may ever need™. Good thing if this apples to you; you just need not make any changes to the way you're already using your iOS device.
(This is unrelated to whether state bodies forcing commercial entities do certain things is a good or a bad thing; as any power tool, it can be used for either, and always remains inherently dangerous.)
>Choice is not always easiest to the user, and iOS's original value proposition is that it removes much of the choice and makes things easy, so that they just work™ and include all you may ever need™. Good thing if this apples to you; you just need not make any changes to the way you're already using your iOS device.
But this now removes the choice for the end user who likes the it just works™ experience because the developers with power like Meta will likely force it on us. It is reducing Apple's power, but it is empowering Meta, Google, Amazon, and other big tech companies who are seemingly even less likely to act in the end user's best interest than Apple.
If you were one of the users who wanted the choice of adult content or a different browser, you always had the choice to use Android.
While I understand your concern of who strongarms whom, I don't see it as a departure from the original promise of iOS.
If you need FB or Google, and they go crazy and refuse to keep their apps in App Store, they have web versions, and will definitely maintain them. (As do Reddit and Twitter, despite their trying hard to persuade me to use their apps.)
If you think about Google Meet or FB Messanger, then why? iOS has perfectly good iMessage and FaceTime, and I call them perfectly good completely unironically here.
You can still keep your iOS device as locked-down as before, unless you need certain forbidden non-apple fruit. But that was the case a year ago, too.
I'm also not convinced that the EU would just let Meta or Google and the like to create privacy-infringing, data-vacuuming third party app stores and then do nothing about it. Those app stores would become nice big targets of every regulator instantly.
Not to mention, I wonder if they might be hit with anti-monopoly violations if they pull crucial apps (e.g. WhatsApp) off of the main official App Store in order to force users to switch to their third party stores. Regulators would probably mandate they keep such apps available in as many places as possible.
Feels like a public safety issue for people who communicate mainly on WhatsApp, or an intrusive business issue for companies that use Google Meet. There's probably a legal case in it somewhere to be made.
It doesn't Just Work, though. Developers are tired of it, and making things Just Work relied on the unfair exploitation of developers and restrictions of user freedom. If your digital utopia is predicated on software genocide, then it's not poised to last long.
I think that Apple quite deliberately do not make the life of smaller developers any easier. They seem to not want all these small fish, they would prefer to interact with serious corporate developers like Adobe. I won't be surprised if they increased the developer license fee to, say, a minimum $499/year for a group of 5 developers, maybe with a special provision for students. They already have too many small titles in their App Store, they likely would prefer fewer high-profile titles, like game consoles have it.
