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iOS 17 will reportedly set the stage for sideloading apps on iPhone

techcrunch.com

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Re: iOS 17 will reportedly set the stage for sideloading apps on iPhone

#271

Post by josephcsible »

pwinnski wrote: post #195
josephcsible wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is everyone so worried that Facebook, etc. will pull out of the App Store and require sideloading on iOS just because it'll be possible, when they haven't pulled out of the Play Store or required sideloading on Android where that's already been possible all along?

Because Facebook announced publicly that Apple's privacy policy changes would cost them $10 billion[0], putting them on the record as having strong motive to avoid the App Store. 0. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/facebook-says-apple-ios-priv...

Isn't that about a technical feature of iOS that won't be bypassed just by installing an app from outside the App Store?

Re: iOS 17 will reportedly set the stage for sideloading apps on iPhone

#272

Post by ayewo »

onli wrote: post #142
josephcsible wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is everyone so worried that Facebook, etc. will pull out of the App Store and require sideloading on iOS just because it'll be possible, when they haven't pulled out of the Play Store or required sideloading on Android where that's already been possible all along?

It's a talking point. I'm sorry that it is negative and it might not fair to the parent commenter, but it's obvious bs. It is a propaganda point that was placed somehow into the discussion and gets repeated again and again. In no world does it make any sense that an app like FB would not try to be in every big store, but here we are, having that "concern" repeated under every Apple sideloading discussion. Propaganda…

I wouldn’t call it propaganda. Facebook’s reputation in this regard hasn’t exactly been stellar because they’ve been caught red-handed spying on users at scale [1] [2].

And Apple was swift to limit the damage of their spying by banning [1] their app from the app store which is why the point the gp is making is sound. The app store is two things: a (heavy-handed) review process and a marketplace. Without the Apple app store review process, you’d end up with what looks like the Google Play store.

So it’s not hard to imagine Facebook disappearing completely from the Apple app store (to avoid being bogged down by Apple’s policies) forcing users to sideload the app directly from their website to “get their fix”.

1: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/apple-bans-facebook-vpn/

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo

Re: iOS 17 will reportedly set the stage for sideloading apps on iPhone

#273

Post by Karunamon »

hwbehrens wrote: post #57
smoldesu wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but overtime I no longer have the choice to avoid these alternate stores or to side load Maybe Apple should update the terms of the App Store to be more competitive/attractive then.

Per the parent comment, the terms they would have to add to be competitive in this scenario would be "Developers can blatantly and horrendously mine all sensitive data from users." which, while they would be appreciated by many businesses that want to provide apps to iOS users, may not be as desirable to the users themselves. Essentially, what I believe that parent comment is calling out is that Apple is currently (v…

Let's stop pretending that not being allowed to engage in "mining sensitive data" is the only reason a company has to not want to be on the app store.

- Discrimination against entire fields of endeavor like emulators and streaming clients

- 30% tax

- Victorian era morality clause that has forced applications to make UX degrading changes for NSFW content

- Anti-competitive behavior for anything that competes with Apple's own offerings, including e-books (audible), music (bandcamp), web browsers (Firefox/Chrome), and probably more I'm not thinking about right now.

- No GPL on the app store

If this were just about "Facebook is mad because they can't data mine and stay on the app store" there would be a much stronger case, but in the world we live in, Apple has abused their so-called "user advocate" position to advance their own interests at the expense of their competitors, and users, in many other ways. They did not have to do this.

If you want to be upset at someone, be upset at Apple for inviting the typically heavy and imprecise hammer of the state when they could have just stayed in their lane and not behaved like greedy controlling puppet masters.

Re: iOS 17 will reportedly set the stage for sideloading apps on iPhone

#274

Post by jmull »

andruby wrote: post #186
jmull wrote: post #93

Having "side loading" -- also known as regular app installation on non-phone platforms -- hasn't caused chaos on desktop platforms or android. No reason to think it will on iOS either.

> hasn't caused chaos on desktop platforms I beg to differ. How many windows machines were infected in the early 2000's? Would bot-nets exist if Windows had a strict app store back then? Now: I will agree that freedom to install any software on desktops has been wonderful, and I hope it remains, but I wouldn't say it hasn't caused chaos.

Why are people bring up the early '00s?

This seems too obvious to have to mention, but I guess I do: the comp for iOS with side-loading isn't Windows 98, it's MacOS in 2023.

Re: iOS 17 will reportedly set the stage for sideloading apps on iPhone

#275

Post by moomoo11 »

Isn’t it a minority of people who want this?

I’d bet 99% of Apple users don’t care nor want this.

I know I don’t. I like Apple’s App Store standards. If I want to side load apps I’d use android. But I don’t.

If companies don’t like it just don’t support iOS. Others will and I’ll use those apps.

Re: iOS 17 will reportedly set the stage for sideloading apps on iPhone

#276

Post by rickdeckard »

legutierr wrote: post #53
Vespasian wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your concern and share some of them. However the solution to overreaching unaccountable private cooperations cannot be to hand all the power to another private unaccountable company. Apple is venturing into advertising and that'll tempt them to weaken privacy protections sooner or later. Additionally their app store rules went far beyond enforcing security and privacy. They gave themselves an advantage a…

> Apple is venturing into advertising and that'll tempt them to weaken privacy protections sooner or later. I hope they never become this short-sighted. I buy Apple primarily because I believe that they protect my privacy—or at least that they do a better job of it than everyone else.

The thing is, yes Meta/Google did make mistakes in the past and malicious players were able to gather individual information from them. But the current business of Meta/Google Ads is actually based on protecting your private information and curating it into anonymous Personas.

They protect your privacy for the very same reason as Apple: To be the sole gatekeeper for effectively reaching you with Ads.

There also won't be any "weakened privacy protections". The goal of Meta/Google/Apple is to reach maximum precision for those Personas they create from their users, and protect the underlying data for competitive advantage.

Personas are legally not personal data, they are abstractions. Advertising to you via a cluster with other people who recently purchased a new car is not a legal violation of privacy.

This is how Meta/Google advertising works and how Apple Ads works as well, their T&C already state this clearly ("your information will be used to show ads relevant to you").

Re: iOS 17 will reportedly set the stage for sideloading apps on iPhone

#278

Post by smoldesu »

mft_ wrote: post #106
sneak wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it's where the apps send the credentials or usage information off to. Most apps in the iOS App Store are chock full of spyware that reports on everything you do in the app. Many of the Apple system apps function the same way too (even with analytics disabled).

Again, totally genuine question: how do you know this? From a (my) relatively uninformed perspective, I'd have expected the opposite - that the iOS App store was more of a 'controlled' environment, and the Play store more like the wild west. But maybe this is just me believing Apple's marketing...

Well, any app can make web requests for starters. If Facebook/Meta/Whoever wants to exfiltrate data from their app, they probably can. So, the issue on most apps becomes limiting the amount of personally identifying data that can reach that runtime in the first place.

Both Android and iOS now do a fairly good job sandboxing the filesystem, but both cannot protect against advanced fingerprinting/data processing. Apple can outline acceptable data processing terms in the App Store, but that doesn't stop bad actors from taking data and processing it remotely. In Facebook and TikTok's case, this is almost certainly what's happening - and why the government is the only one capable of holding them in check.

The "alternative" is restricting the amount of entropy a user can generate to near-zero, which isn't really useful for app developers. Suffice to say it's an unsolved issue, even with a singular App Store.

Re: iOS 17 will reportedly set the stage for sideloading apps on iPhone

#279

Post by GeekyBear »

andsoitis wrote: post #241
GeekyBear wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only Facebook makes the Facebook app, and I find it extremely easy to imagine a Facebook app that can only be sideloaded, so that Facebook can bypass the restrictions put in place by the App Store. For instance, Apps are currently not allowed to degrade functionality if the user says no to a permissions request (e.g. location tracking).

Perhaps, but what I was emphasizing was that on iPhone such apps will likely not come pre-installed; neither by Apple (vs e.g. Samsung) nor by a carrier because I seriously doubt Apple would allow that. Instead, what Apple is doing is finding a new balance that appease those who are attacking the legitimacy of the App Store (and its toll booth) while in practice the vast majority of iPhone users will retain their pri…

> Perhaps, but what I was emphasizing was that on iPhone such apps will likely not come pre-installed; neither by Apple (vs e.g. Samsung) nor by a carrier because I seriously doubt Apple would allow that.

If Facebook is willing to pay to have their app preinstalled, unremovable, and granted root permissions on Android, why in the world wouldn't they be willing to force users to sideload their app on iOS?

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