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A comment on Apple forced to allow sideloading and 3rd-party app stores under new EU law. Parent comment

Re:Apple forced to allow sideloading and 3rd-party app store... by olliej on Friday March 25, 2022 @08:38PM (#30808289)
The sandbox is enforced by App Store review. I don't mean the runtime enforcement, but rather the sandbox that apps opt into. It is the App Store that rejects apps when they have attempted to include sandbox entitlements that they have no business having.

Access to your photos, contacts, device identifiers, etc are all gated on sandbox entitlements, and if you remove the App Store review process then you remove the gate the prevents an app from saying "give me read/write access to the whole file system", "give me read/write access to the photos on the device", etc

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Re:Apple forced to allow sideloading and 3rd-party app store... by GekkePrutser on Saturday March 26, 2022 @08:11AM (#30811167)
Yes that's how it works now.

That can be changed of course. They can make it work just like on Android where the user has to give permission for things like filesystem access.

The point of the law is to bring more control away from Apple and to the user.

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Re:Apple forced to allow sideloading and 3rd-party app store... by Apocryphon on Friday March 25, 2022 @08:56PM (#30808384)
Perhaps Apple can just hardcode such restrictions into the operating system itself
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Re:Apple forced to allow sideloading and 3rd-party app store... by olliej on Friday March 25, 2022 @10:57PM (#30808891)
That’s what the sandbox is for. Without specific entitlements an app can’t access any data outside of its container.

The OS cannot decide when it should or should not trust the entitlements, because the whole point is that an app has some modicum of trust.

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Re:Apple forced to allow sideloading and 3rd-party app store... by Apocryphon on Friday March 25, 2022 @11:11PM (#30808941)
Apple could always enforce a more restrictive, hardened security model for non-official App Store distributed apps. Again, they control the platform- they could change it at will to accommodate new use cases.
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Re:Apple forced to allow sideloading and 3rd-party app store... by olliej on Saturday March 26, 2022 @12:05AM (#30809151)
The whole point of this is that it does not allow that.
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Re:Apple forced to allow sideloading and 3rd-party app store... by Apocryphon on Saturday March 26, 2022 @12:13AM (#30809183)
Allowing sideloading and independent app stores doesn't say anything about adding restrictions on third party app permissions.
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