Today you don't care. You might never do.

Some people do at the moment, but that's not completely the point.

This legislation should be about tail risk - protecting the people who increasingly only have an iPhone or iPad as their main computer from either forced obsolescence or restrictions on their behaviours.

Forcing people to use stores they don’t want to is the exact opposite of ‘protection’.

If you don't care about sideloading? Don't sideload, just use the Apple Store.

Users like you have zero skin in the game. Nothing in your workflow will change, other than you might get cheaper applications.

Nope. Hurts overall experience. Not only the App's won't be curated the same as the other ones, but now I would have to maybe reach to some webside to download a .ipa file or to download a secondary App store to get a apps that otherwise would be available on App Store.

Then keep using the curated store? It only hurts if Apple's store can't compete with alternative ones. There's no such problem on Android because developers and users are fine with the Play Store.

Epic even tried doing a sideloaded Fortnite for Android and people didn't download it, so they came back.

This keeps getting repeated but is false.

New stores will pay for exclusives rights to popular apps just as video streaming platforms do for video.

Users will have no choice but to use a jumble of different stores.

Then why hasn't it happened? Android has always had sideloading and this is not the case. Just asserting it to be false isn't convincing.

Why doesn’t Epic have an Android App Store?

If they want an independent store, there is no reason for them not to create one for Android.

If Android was a model for what Epic wants, they would have built a store there.

It’s pretty obvious that this is just about them going where the money is.

As I said, they tried and failed because nobody downloaded it. I'm not sure why you're suddenly bringing Epic's motives into a comment chain about the desirability of sideloading though? Epic is obviously looking to skirt store fees and doesn't actually prefer to run their own store, but that has nothing to do with anything above in the chain.

The post is about Epic.

Do you think anyone would install alternative stores on iOS?

If so, Android is obviously an irrelevant comparison.

Epic clearly believes iOS is different from Android.

I don't think most people would. I think most sideloading would be by users making things that fall outside of what Apple allows on their store, like on Android. I see no coherent reason at all why things would be any different on iOS, and nobody has presented one here beyond just asserting the premise that it would be different, and I don't think "Epic believes it is" is a convincing argument.

> I don't think most people would.

Why wouldn’t Facebook just integrate a store into their App?

Why wouldn’t Google advertise their store in the search engine just as they did with Chrome? Why wouldn’t their store ship with an Android runtime?

Epic doesn’t just believe it would be different. They are prepared to invest millions of dollars.

All there of these are obvious and coherent reasons why it would be different.

These are not coherent reasons why it would be different, they are assertions that you think it would be. None of them even speak to any difference between the platforms.

Just saying that it will be isn't a reason. None of this has happened. Every attempt at doing this has failed horribly. Most users are not technically capable enough to even go about installing an alternative store.

Why, given that this has not happened in the case of the leading mobile platform, and in fact all attempts to even mildly break with the play store have been resounding failures, would iOS be any different?

Obviously you must not be aware that Android is not the leading platform in terms of app sales.

You say:

> Most users are not technically capable enough to even go about installing an alternative store.

This is obviously false. We know for sure that average users can install apps.

A store is just an app. Why would installing an alternate store be harder than installing any other app?

Why wouldn’t Facebook just integrate their store into their app?

> Obviously you must not be aware that Android is not the leading platform in terms of app sales.

Both are still in the range of tens of billions of dollars. If one is worthwhile the other is too. Android is also by far the leader in number of actual users, which is what matters most to companies like Facebook.

The sideloading process is harder than just installing an app. Most users do not know how to do it and have no interest in doing it.

Google does not allow third party app stores to be distributed via their app store, and I assume Apple would do the same.

> Google does not allow third party app stores to be distributed via their app store, and I assume Apple would do the same.

This seems like an unreasonable assumption.

Apple wouldn’t allow alternative app stores at all.

We’re talking about them being forced to allow them. I.e. it’s not Apples choice.

Why would anyone forcing Apple to allow alternative stores permit them to make it too difficult for regular users to do?

Until you’re forced to download the FB App Store for Facebook apps, the Epic Games store for theirs, the Google App Store for Google applications...

It’s not true users who don’t want to side load have zero skin in the game. The entire ecosystem would suffer.

Why hasn't it on Android then?

Supposedly (if you buy into Epics recent lawsuit against Google) because Google have abused their power to prevent it...

Maybe the majority of users doesn’t care and uses the Play Store. They probably don’t know about F-droid and co.

How about don't tell me what device I can or can't use? I want to sideload on my iPhone.

Nobody is telling you what device you can use.

Why would you buy a device that doesn’t do what you want?

Why do people move to America when there is crime happening there? Maybe there are good things in America as well. You appreciate the good things and then try to fix the bad things.

This is a false analogy.

All countries have crime, and the switching cost is immense. However some countries are much worse than others which makes it worth it.

Phones are at parity in terms of features, and the switching cost is trivial.

You have a point when looking at Zimbabwe or something. However people move from Canada to USA too - or from Northern Ireland to Ireland.

Right but it’s still not comparable.

Moving even between counties is not comparable to just spending a few hundred dollars on a phone.