Imagine if your appliance manufacturer could dictate that you kept your door open for them.
For example Bossware has been common since covid and it's not a stretch to imagine a future where health and other types of insurers use similar software to ensure that you're not partaking in risk. Consumers need more than every developer to act in good faith.
Example data collected by bossware surveillance applications include: keylogging, email monitoring, productivity tracking, screen recording, audio recording, camera recording, presence detectors, social media monitoring, time tracking, web browsing activity, location tracking, file search etc
Such apps would never receive approval from the app store, nor would they receive the necessary permissions to even ask for such invasive access.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/27/remote-wo...
If you do not have choice on the platform, you are in a prison. That is why it's called jailbreaking.
i have an xbox one x, it does what it was designed to do and it does it well. I have a desktop computer i built. it was designed to run anything that runs on x86 and designed to be open. so i run linux. i love it. i just figure i use the tools as they were meant to be used.
i am a bit inconsistent though ... i do support the asahi folks in their attempts at getting linux supported on m1 hardware. but they're not bemoaning apple's closed attitude to other operating systems on apple silicon they're taking more of the jailbreaker's approach of hacking their way in. more power to them. that's the rub i think. folks trying to use the courts or mobs to force the hand of a company to do a thing for hardware that was designed to be closed in the first place.
I don't understand this 'I want what they have but I want them to change it for meeee' mindset. Everyone complaining appears to be a power user/hacker. Do it yourself then.
If you want a fully customizable phone: build your own on Linux
It just seems something that would be really good for large companies like Spotify, and suck for small developers who will still need to rely on the App Store (and its commission) for visibility.
If the EU is so interested in which apps are available on iOS and eliminating any discriminatory practices, then the EU should legislate that the App Store approval process be made independent, heck the EU can run it themselves for the EU-states.
this is a feature for the companies pushing for it - this is literally the entire point, in fact! facebook wants to be able to use sideloading to push this stuff again:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-...
for the consumers pushing for it, I think there's a pretty good mixture of rationales: some of it is good-faith belief that everything should be open (although you can see from the defense around consoles that many people do not fall into this camp). some of it is just ignorance or not thinking it through. and some of it is brand-warriorism/fanboyism, the people who want to legislate a solution to the android/iphone wars, or simply are doing it because they know it's something apple users care about and that burning it down will make them upset.
the usual human mixture of reasons, basically. but for companies? yeah, they fucking know it's gonna undercut the permissioning system, that's the whole fucking point. because right now they have apple standing in the way doing app review. they can't overturn apple, they have to go around them, but apple is the gatekeeper on their platform. or, was.
companies know there's fanboyism they can exploit to their own goals, and is perfectly happy to use these, ahem, "temporary allies". Just like the google "pwease use RCS, it's so open!" page that gets passed around uncritically, completely omitting the fact that google isn't using RCS, it's using a proprietary fork of RCS and it's already blocking third-party interop from interested parties.
https://ianbetteridge.com/2022/08/19/please-wont-someone-sto...
(If that's open then macos is open because it's based on freeBSD, right?)
Even looking at Spotify, they never once passed on the 15% fee savings that apply after a one-year subscription. Yet they constantly decry these fees as a reason they can't lower prices – and now Spotify is 100% a reader app, and they still can't turn a profit.
Meanwhile at the same time, what have we seen:
1. Apple reduce fees. New developers and developers who receive less than $1M per year are at a 15% rate. Subscriptions that run over a year are also halved to the 15% rate.
2. Apple providing developers more opportunities to challenge rejections.
3. Apple providing developers even the opportunity to challenge the rules themselves.
4. Report after report (E.g. Nokia's annual Threat Intelligence Report) pointing the prevalence of Malware not on security holes, but on side-loading.(1)
More simply if we want to play Occam's razor with this and say it's all about the money: Then Apple's interests lay in protecting and enhancing their platforms because their lion's share of profit comes from device sales, they could reduce app store fees to 0% and while that wouldn't be fair (and likely anti-competitive) it wouldn't destroy Apple's business. While for the majority of the other players have profits come, almost solely, from ads/user data. To such an extent that limiting the flow of this data has had significant effects on their company revenue.
(1) https://www.nokia.com/networks/security-portfolio/threat-int... (see pages 13 and 15 for more detail.)
Whatever changes apple implements would have to be easily revertable so people can go back to their golden prison.