Everyone was an amateur once. How should they distribute their apps?
Why is it so difficult for people to imagine how insanely powerful and datapacked your phone is?
Allowing sideloading to average people means they will get hacked and ransomwared left and right. Your entire life is on the iPhone.
While I agree with you about sideloading apps for enthusiasts and hackers, but the world is far different than you and me. I really don't understand why these arguments are presented on HN time and again. Jailbreaking your iPhone is a terrible idea. Horrifying even.
I am glad Apple is gate keeping. Privacy > Hackability. You can't have both. The world is full of vultures that will shred your privacy in no time. Just look at what the ad-tech is doing within these sandboxes (browsers). Microsoft got into ad-tech game because they realized "Holyshit, we are actually in a unique position...develop operating system and sell data for millions of users?".
Apple is probably the only company looking after users and yet we've got completely deluded developers on HN complaining about sideloading apps. Sigh.
For amateurs, let them develop stuff on browsers. I don't want these amateurs widely distributing apps to billions of users with system level access with a quick approval popups for billions of idiots that don't care about their privacy and would give access to anything that asks for it.
And the fact that I can Jailbreak my phone has not caused your iPhone to to become safer or less private. All I want is for Apple to offer an escape hatch, completely optional. It would not affect your experience in the slightest.
Hot links, such as reddit.com launching App Store to download their app should not be allowed because some uninformed user might just download bogus apps from 3rd party stores.
Again, I support the idea of an escape hatch, but I feel like that applies to an imposssibly small slice of the total iPhone userbase. People like you and me. I feel like I should write it out: 0.00000001% people.
Do you think executives at Apple look at this feature request and spin the entire ship around so that you and I can hack a phone?
The world population is ~7.8 billion. 0.00000001% of that is 0.78. If you drop the percentage, it's still only 78 people. And that's assuming every person in the world is an iPhone user.
I think the slice is obviously bigger than that.
Yes, because of what happened with HKMap.live. This is incredibly important for free expression.
It’s only used by a tiny number of people until one day when it suddenly becomes essential.
Perhaps Apple could sell a developer edition of the phone that allows side loading.. come to think of it, they do. If you are an Apple developer you can side load apps. Any developer that wants to can post their code on github and let other developers install it on their phone.
Really, if you don’t like the rules, you have an alternative.
I think you massively overestimate how many people would use that functionality.
https://research.checkpoint.com/2019/agent-smith-a-new-speci...
https://blog.malwarebytes.com/android/2019/08/mobile-menace-...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/virul...
I have.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2019/07/24/warni...
I admit that I know very little about Fortnite and am not a regular Android user, but my understanding is that, right now, anyone who wants to play Fortnite on Android is sideloading it. That's a lot of people who are opening up a pretty brutal attack vector to be able to play a game that got kicked out of the official Play Store.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/13/21368079/fortnite-epic-an...
Sideloading Fortnite is not opening up an attack vector unless Fortnite itself is malicious, which it's not, because it's a huge game from a huge company. As long as the official download source is known to everybody, I think it's fine.
I know there are fake (malicious) copies of Fortnite out there, but those promise free V-Bucks or some such. You could just as easily run that scam without sideloading and target the user's credit card number of similar.
How were non-sophisticated users supposed to figure out that the Epic link was the correct link to click among the thousands of search results? How many of the people wanting to play Fortnite for the first time even knew what Epic was?
> As long as the official download source is known to everybody
It's not, and that's the problem.
[1] https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/2018/06/fake-fortni...
For example, does everyone know the official source of Facebook? If so, why, and if not, why is there not an epidemic of fake Facebook scams that steal login credentials? I know there are targeted phishing attacks, which is a separate issue, but I haven't heard of significant attacks from people who just didn't know the correct login page.
One way we do deal with this is with targeted blacklists of known-bad sites, particularly Google Safe-browsing. That's certainly a mechanism that could be employed for Android Malware—and I think it already is, actually.
Problems do happen—but I don't see anyone calling on Google to restrict Chrome to a whitelisted set of approved URLs. And I'd posit that gaining access to someone's Facebook account is no less invasive than gaining access to their phone.
> And I'd posit that gaining access to someone's Facebook account is no less invasive than gaining access to their phone.
I don't think so. Accessing someone's Facebook messages and photos is one thing, gaining access to their phone means gaining access to their email which means potential access to any account linked to that email. Given how many people use mobile banking these days, I'd say there's a lot more potential for damage if your phone is compromised.