Don’t miss those days at all, you clearly never lived around the Palm treo, Sony Ericsson Symbian OS days, of side loading bootleg apps to all my old phones. It was hard discerning what was legit and what wasn’t, but Hey if you’re all for it, life’s a circle.
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AltStore Available in Japan One Day After Apple Enables Alternative App Marketplaces
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I’m legitimately unsure what you think difference is between installing apps from outside the store on a mac (which is super common and always has been) and doing so on a phone? The problem you’re describing comes from bootlegging apps, which has always been rife with abuse if you arent careful, not from installing from outside the store.
There is a major difference between using an alternate store, a developer’s website, or a public distribution point (say, an official github page for a project, etc) and torrenting a pirated app from a sketchy release group. No one in this thread is advocating for the latter. You seem to think there isn't a difference, I’m curious why? For that matter in general a lot of folks seem to think you can only do the latter if the former is easily doable, which is silly because jailbreaking iOS has been a thing since iOS has. If someone wants to install a sketchy pirated bootleg app right now they typically can as long as they stay a point release or so behind. Apple being forced to provide ways to install software from outside their store that doesnt require jailbreaking doesnt change that, the problem with bootleg apps potentially having something malicious tagging along isnt in that part of the chain.
Because no one ever takes their laptop to as many places as they take their phones?
Are there people who are more apt to lose their laptops than phones? It’s a big world, so, maybe? But, I’d still say that’s an edge case exception more than a rule. In general, the way people treat their Macs is pretty much what one would expect for someone aware they’re dealing with a less secure device/OS.
Do you not live near any coffee shops?Because no one ever takes their laptop to as many places as they take their phones?
But, I’d still say that’s an edge case exception more than a rule.
I would love to see a citation for that
That’s how the apps were distributed back in the day. Did you forget how slow the internet was back in those days? They were no fancy websites with developer information all over, when you wanted an app or a game, you searched it for and you usually got the links for “something”. They were no reviews that told you if an app was fake or not, you literally had to “guess” or make sure it wasn’t an old version of an app, because automatic updates were not a thing, you had to manually download it every chance they released it manually. Even then WE could upload apps to iPhones/ipads through iTunes up until like 2017 I think. I still have every single app that was on my iPhone, backed up somewhere on my disk drive, but up to a certain updated version.
I lived through every single method you described and I got tired of discerning what was legitimate or not. It wasn’t even about supporting piracy or bootlegging apps, Wikipedia wasn’t a thing to help with me either. Music was incredibly bad also, there was no unified service that could let you access so much music that was legit, apple at least tried to unified all of that with the App Store. I’ve been using since its inception and it’s easy, no need to see if it’s legit or not because they have to be verified. I never said i was against it, it’s just easier now than it was back then, even if the app is “illegal”, if you want to use the developer’s service 9/10 they are locked behind subscription and require internet connections.
I bought media from iTunes, Apple TV, Apple Music and apps since the App Store opened, and I can still download every single app I’ve purchased or media on my old/new apple devices, and the fact that my purchased media content gets updated for free over the past years, (I’ve had movies that started as SD, upgraded to HD and finally 4k FREE). It’s convenience more than anything for me now, one tap, it’s automatically downloaded, if you side load it, you have to manually update it every chance you get through their website.
Even then, there’s not that many apps that I use on iPhone, since i use mine for media/streaming/ games. Everything’s simplified now, we did had apps for everything we take for granted now, I personally dislike jumping through too many hoops, but you have to act like Apple didn’t let us do this, when they did back in the day, I mean there’s a reason why I still have all my old apps back up, because they used to let us download and back up and sideload apps through iTunes.
Uhhh, no…. Developer websites usually sold their software directly (reaching pretty far back remember developers like Ambrosia software and games like EV Overide/EV Nova?) as did most major projects, and there were relatively trusted locations for a lot of things (like sourceforge back in the day).
If you wanted to *pirate* the software you searched and got “something”, if you wanted to buy it or use something opensource or freeware there were plenty of less sketchy options.
Even pirating had some relatively safe options (in the beginning of the torrent era for ex the comments on TPB and closed tracker groups for example were invaluable)
The official sites for most dev shops were pretty easy to find…
Sounds like you had difficulty using the internet…
Depends on the software, and the platform.
Most of the time yes, but you went to the official site
Sort of, it was still through apple or through the dev loophole (that mostly still exists)
I lived through all of this too and somehow avoided this problem…
That would be the itunes music store, which substantially predates the app store. Before that most people ripped their CDs (or pirated music). It’s not like there was a shortage of brick and mortar music stores back then, I actually miss browsing CDs
And that’s great for you, other people want more options
Er, wut? Pretty much every major app I use on my macs either has its own autoupdate functionality or is installed through homebrew with package management and updates that way, you dont need the app store for that…
For you, sure, other folks have other app needs and wants, you understand that, yeah?
Again, the mechanism you’re describing still mostly exists, if you want to struggle with the limitations, and at the time, without jailbreaking, it still required being downloaded through Apple’s store and signed.
You massively underestimate the amount of work Apple puts in artificially locking down the APIs to prevent alternate browser engines and App stores on iOS to begin with. Apple doesn't really have to do anything unusual to support either of those things (MacOS which is the basis of iOS already supports these just fine). If Apple were to actually comply with the spirit of the EU's directives rather than try to find ways to work around them, they would likely free up far more development resources than they would spend.
Not sure what "back in the day" you are describing, but it sure wasn't the 80's, 90's, 00's or '10s. The 80's and early 90's were perhaps the closest thing to the "wild west" you are describing when it comes to shareware or freeware, but that was only really because people were frequently downloading software from home-based BBS's (even then, Compuserve, America Online, etc. existed and had curated software libraries). Sites like Tucows and oak.oakland.edu (among many, many others) sprung up in the early 1990s (in some cases, even before the Web was a thing).
Every major developer had a website with information on their software. Most minor developers did, too. Where it was feasible, all of the above distributed their software as downloads directly from their own hosted sites. Software that wasn't feasible to download was distributed on disk.
The problems you describe are not problems that were generally solved by App stores to begin with, outside of maybe convenience for users and visibility for very, very small developers who couldn't be assed with creating a web page and a download link.
“Can I continue to think of edge cases?”
But, maybe it’s NOT an edge case and the majority of Mac users in the world live near coffee shops and walk down the street typing on their less secure MacBooks instead of their phones. Sure.“Tell me you’re not well versed in software development practices without telling me you’re not well versed in software development practices.”
Man, I forgot about Tucows, back in the day was awesome.
Using a laptop in a coffee shop is an edge case? Wut?“Can I continue to think of edge cases?”
"I'll have you know..." - equally dead meme that basically shouts "I don't have an answer." Though to be fair, I only work in enterprise software. I leave the OS stuff to people who would rather argue about rounded corners, emojis, and badly designed icon gradients.
I'm not sure one has to know too much about "software development practices" to conclude that Apple has spent the last two decades going out of their way to lock down iOS in ways that would take far more work than leaving the standard APIs inherent in its base OS as-is. It also doesn't take a lot of in-depth knowledge to see that Apple's efforts in building multiple different feature sets that are tied to physical device location and curated to just barely comply with the rules of a given region is far more work than it would be if they just followed the relative spirit of those laws across the board.
You probably should be a little more honest with yourself if you're relying on dead memes to cope.