Ok. Sideloading advocate here:
I legit have a hard time understanding how anyone can align with Apple on this. I’m going to list my reasons why and I want some to refute each piece by piece.
Why does offering a choice to install apps sideloaded “destroy” security on iPhone for you given that:
- if you feel unsafe sideloading, you don’t have to use it.
- If you worry it will become the only option on some choice apps forcing you to use sideloading:
A - if said apps were so compelling to want to side-load then where is the malware coming from? Was it secretly injected when the developer wasn’t looking? Note this can happen but it’s pretty rare and there are ways to protect against it even with side-loading. The only seeming advantage Apple has in its favour is the ability to review the code directly as opposed to compiled instructions…. But really virus detection is a complex beast and software is often thousands upon thousands of lines of interwoven detailed code. Trying to comb through another developers code to find a virus is like looking for a needle in a haystack. If you think Apple Code Reviewers looks at code manually… scanning everything before approval… you would be extremely disappointed. In truth they run automated scans and if something is detected might review the code. This might seem more secure on the surface than scanning compiled code which is impossible to read at the human level…. But it’s actually quite sophisticated and in many ways looks at code in a more arbitrary sense than a human looking for the words “I am haxorz” written in the bylines.
B - that last argument went so off the rails I doubt you care about part b anymore.
C - sideloading will realistically always be relegated to a niche almost no-one uses except.
- if you worry about grandma sideloading and getting hacked…. I mean that’s probably the only legit argument I can think of since grandma is always getting hacked and frankly I’m tired of trying to teach her how to detect when someone is trying to steal her money. That said, grandma knows she doesn’t know how to use a computer and kind of hates them and calls me every time she thinks she has a virus (which is ironically usually just a dialog she saw telling her she had a virus she saw online that lied to her and tried to get her to install a virus as a result) and knows to run away from such things and never install stuff when stuff like that happens after years of being trained by the leet hackers of the world to not trust anyone.
- Android has a cool method where they bury sideloading in some weird subpage where you pray to the sun gods and enter the Konami code in order to enable sideloading that’s so out of sight/hidden grandma would need to be on the phone to get the hackers walking her through the process step by step to enable it. Or maybe that was for rooting. I don’t remember anymore. Do that Apple. I mean, sure those same people are just gonna accuse you of abusing your power by burying the sideloading feature you didn’t want into some blackhole of hell but frankly: they were going to do that anyway. And I should know cause I’m one of them.
Firstly, and someone has already beaten me to my reply but I’ll re-iterate. You should be very pleased that you are a technophile who knows exactly what they are doing and wants ultimate flexibility from the Apple platform to side load apps - but you don’t explain what apps they are - what you do with them and why you can’t get that app on the Android platform which is well served by Google and Samsung to name but two vendors.
I’d like to throw it back to you - why do you want a side loaded app on iPhone?
I ask as you look like a tech savvy hipster dude who knows his stuff - so why choose Apple and not Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel? At the top end they apparently have better cameras, more cores, more RAM, bigger screens, more flexibility, USB-C charging, fingerprint sensors AND face sensors, external storage slots, maybe even a replaceable battery - the list goes on…
I’d have thought the tech savvy who like to have control of their own hardware wouldn’t even waste time with the Apple walled garden and be sitting on their Android phone of choice rather than trying to tear down the ’walled garden’.
You point to Apple not going through code line by line for submissions to the App Store. For side loading there’s no checking at all. Apps could get written with all sorts of slackness and lack of adherence to style guides. This will surely introduce more bugs, perhaps adware as well, doesn’t the App Store have a kill switch in case something turns out to be really bad? There’s no such kill switch on side loaded apps. My main point against these is that some badly written programs that drain battery or eat up available RAM wouldn’t get caught either.
The point of the App Store is that Apple take responsibility for the apps on it and the average user is happy with that. Yes, bad stuff can get through - I recall the recent story about some apps built with a dodgy download of XCode - but what are you going to do about apps that run out of control and leave a frustrated iPhone Pro Max user with a 2 hour battery life and space heater in his pocket? Or the ones that eat all the RAM up and end up making other apps on the phone crash?
Imagine if there was the kind of free for all that you see on macOS and Windows where software can be installed with an administrator password to an iPhone, and if various software can get installed much easier - perhaps even without the realisation of the unsuspecting user? This software might be innocuous, but people of all kinds will be looking for the magic routine where software gets installed easier than going to the one App Store.
Imagine what sort of stuff could get installed by unsuspecting users who just ok their way through multitudes of dialogues, and how long will it be before weaponised malware gets through alongside the annoying or badly written programs?
Who gets the blame then? This is reputation control for Apple now because the developer isn’t going to get the blame - it’ll be Apple - just like how Android will get the blame for various software on that platform not playing nice and making the phone crash, slow down, battery last just an hour after just 3 months, I’m sure Apple don’t want any part of that.
This is especially the case because their hardware is specifically optimised for efficiency. When Android phones comparisons were all the rage and people would say some Samsung phone was better because it had more cores, more RAM, and bigger battery - why do you think Apple was able to claim better multitasking, faster performance, and longer WiFi browsing time? It’s the tightly integrated software which helps make this happen.
And then let’s not forget about the long suffering folks who don’t want to spend hours on technical support with ‘grandma’. You mention a grandma but we don’t know if that’s literal or figurative.
I’ll guess you might not be aware that people will be recommending or buying iPhones for family members specifically because they DON’T want to be technical support forever. And not everyone is going to have the benefit of a 20 something hipster tech dude who has the time and inclination to talk them through every single last problem.
And if they do get a call asking about some issue, the fact that the built-in apps are universal is a massive time saver when trying to talk ‘grandma’ through stuff Rather than trying to figure out of they are using Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, or Outlook, Mail, Signal, Telegram, What’s App etc.
If you remove that universality by default you’re potentially dragging Apple’s iOS platform down to the level of Android. Less trust = fewer people buying the iPhone and subsequently because it’s just as slow and buggy as that Android rubbish that no longer gets support after 1-2 years of ownership.
It’s all very well hiding some sort of safety switch deep in the settings, reminds me a bit of the Windows S mode - that’s a one way deal - you can remove it but never put it back on. But seriously, this is just going to add support costs all round.
Perhaps Apple need to evaluate how much it is costing to put annual iOS updates on a phone for 4-7 years rather than 18 months. The end user wont like Apple putting a price on that.
But then these could be the same users whining about not being able to add their own external storage because Apple do ‘rip off’ prices, only to then complain about Android phones being POS because the 10$ 256Gb fake SD card from eBay they slotted in their Android phone caused it to run slowly and crash all the time.
That’s an argument for another thread through - this is software.
