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A comment on Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin. Parent comment

Re:Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian e... by tolmasky on Friday September 17, 2021 @07:38AM (#28564214)
Allow side-loading so that you don’t leave yourself open to a situation where the only way your customers get access to a voting app is by having your employees jailed. The AppStore creates an easily exploitable bottleneck for governments to take advantage of. The hkmap.live situation during the protests in Hong Kong was similar.
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Re:Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian e... by tailspin2019 on Friday September 17, 2021 @08:40AM (#28564753)
As much as I like a lot of the benefits of the walled garden (from a consumer perspective, not necessarily as a developer), this is actually a very good argument for side-loading and one that I hadn't thought about before.
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Re:Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian e... by saurik on Friday September 17, 2021 @11:09AM (#28566353)
~4 years ago I gave a talk at Mozilla Privacy Lab (perfected from a talk I gave at 360|iDev) that focused on these moral reasons for not having centralized systems, looking at everything from government control to the tyranny of the majority, that I called "That's How you Get a Dystopia".

https://youtu.be/vsazo-Gs7ms

As far as I am concerned, you absolutely cannot have centralized control over something like "all software distribution" without being actively complicit with such regimes, and that people working for Apple have chosen to normalize this is unconscionably immoral :(.

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Re:Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian e... by tailspin2019 on Friday September 17, 2021 @11:28AM (#28566601)
> As far as I am concerned, you absolutely cannot have centralized control over something like "all software distribution" without being actively complicit with such regimes

Yeah that seems to distil the problem down to the fundamentals. Will watch your talk, thanks!

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Re:Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian e... by viktorcode on Friday September 17, 2021 @08:51AM (#28564844)
The app is still available in other countries, so in order to install it in Russia one just have to create another Apple account to install it from a foregn app store on the device.
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Re:Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian e... by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK on Friday September 17, 2021 @02:14PM (#28568957)
"Just" creating another Apple account means forfeiting all your data, apps, purchases etc. There are many simpler ways to access that same data, for example on navalny's website via a vpn. But all those ways are too complicated for most people.
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Re:Google, Apple remove Navalny app from stores as Russian e... by viktorcode on Monday September 20, 2021 @03:47AM (#28591233)
That's not how it works on iOS. iCloud and App Store accounts can be switched independently. After the installation you can switch back to your main account, and all your data will still be there. Newly installed app should auto-update as well.

I personally have apps from 2-3 different countries' store accounts on my Apple devices.

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