Senators introduce bipartisan antitrust bill to promote app store competition

Re:Senators introduce bipartisan antitrust bill to promote a... by btown on Thursday August 12, 2021 @12:31AM (#28151947)

For what it's worth, https://altstore.io/ is a relatively-new sideloading system that "just works" for iOS without jailbreaks - you can download .ipa packages however you want, and as long as you're on the same WiFi as a computer running the server, it will re-sign them with a personal key every 7 days. Outside of emulators, though, there's just not much of an ecosystem of high-quality apps for iOS that aren't built to be Apple-approved. But hey - you can bring back Flappy Bird!

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Re:Senators introduce bipartisan antitrust bill to promote a... by runawaybottle on Thursday August 12, 2021 @01:02AM (#28152170)

I’m not sure who lobbied for this legislation, but I have a gut feeling a company like Facebook is behind some of the money. What a Trojan horse, a government legislated third party Facebook App Store on your IPhone/Android that incentivizes developers to build apps that plug into the FB ecosystem. Lower percentage cut taken by Facebook, with the ultimate caveat - no privacy, all your user data is ours, oh and ads, lots of them.

Cheers. Shit, FB didn’t even have to develop their own phone. What a win.

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Re:Senators introduce bipartisan antitrust bill to promote a... by drenvuk on Thursday August 12, 2021 @01:08AM (#28152209)

At this point the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Let's see if whoever is doing the arm twisting can force Apple onto a path where they don't get to do every single little thing that they want.

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Re:Senators introduce bipartisan antitrust bill to promote a... by nemothekid on Thursday August 12, 2021 @01:46AM (#28152442)

That's interesting because I have the opposite view - I prefer Apple maintains control so that Facebook doesn't get to do every single thing they want. Facebook is strictly worse and I bemoan a future where FB is given even more data to sell on hundreds of millions of Americans.

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Re:Senators introduce bipartisan antitrust bill to promote a... by tremon on Thursday August 12, 2021 @08:21AM (#28155312)

How about (gasp) the government maintains control so that non-democratic bodies don't get to do every single thing they want?

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Re:Senators introduce bipartisan antitrust bill to promote a... by baridbelmedar on Thursday August 12, 2021 @01:20PM (#28158957)

What government are you referring to?

I suspect that not all countries (even western) would love the idea that the US government had that type of control ;)

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Re:Senators introduce bipartisan antitrust bill to promote a... by Valkhyr on Thursday August 12, 2021 @10:47PM (#28164811)

How about designing devices and services such that they are open and cross-compatible and the user is ultimately in control?

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Re:Senators introduce bipartisan antitrust bill to promote a... by Valkhyr on Thursday August 12, 2021 @10:47PM (#28164803)

Yeah, I had heard of that.

Personally, I don't really like the idea of depending on re-signing every 7 days to prevent apps from breaking. In practice it would be fine nearly 100% of the time, it's just not something I like from a point of view of principles. It feels like an immense contortion to make just to install a binary on a device I own :-(

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Re:Senators introduce bipartisan antitrust bill to promote a... by pzo on Thursday August 12, 2021 @02:07AM (#28152552)

Last time I checked you also had install some their plugin for mail.app that is setup with Apple ID account - that was deal breaker for me.

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