Ahhh -- I think I understand where you're coming from... you used to think Apple cared about its' users!
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Tim Cook: Users Who Want to Sideload Apps Can Use Android, While the iPhone Experience Maximizes 'Security and Privacy'
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I’d argue it’s not just about profit but about maintaining rigid control.
Steve Jobs famously didn’t want apps on the iPhone at all. That was more control over the iPhone experience than they wanted to cede. He only gave in under duress, and they moved very slowly in opening up more parts of the experience.
It was more than a decade before you could even choose your own default browser, as silly as that is given that all iOS browsers are just reskins of Safari anyway.
Apple has always had something of the control freak in its DNA. For a long time, serendipitously enough, the experience they wanted me to have aligned with the experience I sought, and all was well.
Now I’m feeling less at home in the walled garden but there’s nowhere else to go that isn’t worse.
First world problems, right? I have a 3-year-old phone I haven’t upgraded because I can’t find my Goldilocks device. How ridiculous.
Not in the “hey, we’re all pals here” sense, but in the “we don’t have very many customers, so we better pay attention to the ones we’ve got” sense.
We were never buddies, Apple and I, but my decision to buy or not to buy from Apple used to carry much more weight than it does now.
They used to have to care about their customers, and they still do, to be sure, but they’ve also spent the last 20 years building an ecosystem that’s damned hard to escape once you’re in.
It’s such a lovely prison you mostly don’t even notice the bars on the windows …
I agree with all of this --- I would add that their rigid control has provided a certain level of security that is not present on other systems, and they are now capitalizing on that from a PR perspective of "we do things in this way because of security", when in reality it's "we do things in this way (security) because of profits." Again, they're entwined, but it's a side benefit that many iOS users like.
I thought you didn't care about side loading? What's the experience you're missing out on?
I've never understood the ecosystem lock-in. I've seen arguments that people are locked in due to:
- iMessages --- what's the deal with this? e2ee? I use Signal with iOS and Android users with e2ee without issues
- iCloud --- there's also google/dropbox/opendrive ---- there are alternatives that would be simple enough to move over to
- Apple Music --- you don't have to stop using it if you move over to another ecosystem, or, you could use it in conjunction with other music services.
?♂️
Albertus Magnus (the andrioid guru) responded:
"In this way, if you continue all the time in the way we have described from the beginning, it will become as easy and clear for you to remain in contemplation in your inward and recollected state, as to live in the natural state."
He knew back in the 1200 AD this topic would surface today!
"In this way, if you continue all the time in the way we have described from the beginning, it will become as easy and clear for you to remain in contemplation in your inward and recollected state, as to live in the natural state."
He knew back in the 1200 AD this topic would surface today!
But if that scenario occurs and the vendors all sell/install from their own websites like the “good” old days, we will be stuck going to multiple sites/stores for our installations. Why should your desire to sideload make everyone else’s life more complicated? I bought my iPhone partly due to the simplicity of the single source store.
Opposite seems to be the trend, at least looking at what MS has done with the windows store in win 11. More apps moving into the store instead of the other way around (not that they had a ton to begin with) but even free browsers like Firefox see the advantage of being there. It'll be interesting to see how this trends going forward. There are even going to be 3rd party app stores on the official Windows 11 store, somehow, not sure on details for that one.
Yes… because most users have just as much sense of IT security as a 5 year old knows about driving a car.
You are apparently not a technically moron, so you can have fun on a more open platform. Just don’t insist that the rest of the users (5 year old kids) should have real cars in order to have real freedom and choice.
Google Play Store allows more trackers to be built in the app, so distributing on Google Play Store has small impact on advertising business model, and have the convenience of user familiarity and trust. Notice that Amazon app on Google Play still has less tracking capabilities than, let’s say, on Kindle Fire Tablets, because more frameworks were built in the Amazon’s Android.
On the iOS side, a totally different situation.
- IDFAs are the only allowed advertising identifier.
- SDK capabilities are more limited.
- Apple’s approach on privacy already had big damage to advertising business model.
- Advertising companies still want to reach iOS users, since iOS users are generally ”more valuable”.
So if the Apple App Store isn’t the only way to distribute apps, we can see the future when some companies “making a big shift” to lock some of their apps/games behind another App Store. Apple cannot review apps from 3rd party App Store, so a lot of privacy measures can be bypassed now.
Of course, users still can rely on built-in system privacy mechanism, but that is just like relying purely on UAC and management tools to protect Windows, which doesn’t work for like 99% of non tech savvy people. iOS also has no built-in monitoring tools, so no one has idea on what Facebook from another App Store is doing background. And we are not talking about software profiles, which give certain apps even more power to abuse.
There’s exactly NOTHING stopping you from installing Xcode for free and building then running one of 40,000 open source apps just like in the Linux world.
Apple is quite clear that if “you can read the code” then you can build and run the application.
What Apple is trying to stop is “Facebook” from providing a “Facebook plus” with some extra feature which in turn “bugs your phone”. All the “do not track” stuff can be circumvented…
Also little known fact using a MDM server you can actually sideload apps “in a kosher way”..
But again , this is all to make sure “people don’t get tricked into installing malware”.
Windows 11 is identical , but has to be “locked up” meanwhile Apple devices have to be “unlocked”
There will be efforts. Exclusive contents are a thing long before the App Store.
Ultimately it comes down to the business model. I don’t think Microsoft Office will only be on Microsoft’s store, because what they offer are services. But I can see content distributors lock certain contents behind their own store, if they think enough people want the content so bad that they can download another App Store. It worked at least in PC gaming market.
Uhhhhh. Read what you said. The fact you NEED a firewall to block something is a security issue. Why not just let it call home? And the fact that you can install anything on macOS is all the proof you need that it is more at risk.
But my GRANDMA CANT. So if she gets infected, my contact info is now in the attackers hands. Sorry but I already get too many scam calls/texts and emails.
People REALLY need to stop being so selfish. We get it, you are security experts. But my parents and grandparents aren’t. I had to deal with my other grandma’s Android issues.
Im sick and tired of getting scams every day and 2,000 spam/phishing emails. Do you know what helps with these large numbers? Zombie computers. Computers that are infected that participate in this kind of activity and also helps DDoS.
Windows still dominates, but you can’t sit here and tell me with a straight face that Windows doesn’t have a malware problem. Windows was even dominating in Windows XP days.
tl;dr
You are correct.
Many of the device APIs are accessible via JS.
The big one that gets "pushed" by native developers is the lack of access to native notifications. We can send text notifications, but not the native popups via JS... yet. Maybe the courts will push Apple to allow it. I do not use notifications; most likely, because I cannot, but I'd like to believe that I do not WANT to... text alerts are good enough.
There are many others, but most apps that I build anyway do not need them:
- native notifications
- access to gyroscope
- access to bluetooth for peer to peer connections
that is the worst car analogy I have heard and I have heard a lot
If you ever get a Tesla or even a used one, would you rather get a battery directly serviced, placed or replaced by Tesla or would you rather go on your own with a random third party battery pack?
For what is worth, I don’t think you can even put anything else than a Tesla pack… if that’s the case, let’s start the right to repair on all things Ford, Tesla, etc and lawsuit on all those media consoles that don’t have CarPlay, my car my rules, my connection modes.
Regarding high tier cars, for sure as heck I would be putting top of the line or recommended fuel for that Lamborghini, Ferrari, Porsche, etc… and the tire swap/balancing/brake-vectoring-check/etc? At the dealership every single time.
100% this, and even the non apple crowd when we don’t have something, like “RT cores” they would say “that’s your fault, go windows, there are all the NVidia cards over here”… nothing about lawsuits bringing tech parity between the platforms.
Here we even have people that don’t care at all about iOS, about iPhones and Apple in general yet forcing a hand to make things be how they would like it to be from afar.
what if someone manages to get into your phone’s system, zero click exploit or whatever might exist (I got no clue), and of all the things they could tamper with now they get access to a new shiny switch that gives them access to start dumping new software and hiding it without even knowing.
Before said hypothetical hacker didn’t even have that switch to activate but now it would.
I’m quite illiterate on this so I’m just extrapolating, but if this is impossible or doesn’t make sense at all, then fine, I guess we could have that unhackable hard lock protected sideloading enabler switch.