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I wonder if they considered an "iPhone Europe Edition" - USB-C, side loading, physical SIM cards. Sounds like a good phone!
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I don't think that will happen, because I expect Apple will do something along the lines of "unless an iDevice is signed in with an account with a verified EU credit card, and/or has been in the EU for more than 50% of the time over the last year, disable the ability to sideload and wipe all existing sideloaded apps".
Apple already has a system to set the region of a device. Go to Settings > General > Language and Region > Region.
What if a security incident happens just in Europe but not elsewhere?
Then it becomes instantly clear that Apple’s argument against sideloading was not a strawman.
I wonder if they considered an "iPhone Europe Edition" - USB-C, side loading, physical SIM cards. Sounds like a good phone!
It will be quite undesirable to distribute apps through a means where economies of scale are not available for example if there is no US market
(Distributing software is not always easy, as game companies that have 100GB game downloads on launch day will tell you. But, for most apps, it will be easy enough.)
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That I can just take the SIM out and put it in a different phone? what's the migration process for eSIMs?
The migration process is, you ask your carrier for a new eSIM. They send you one via QR code. That's pretty much it.
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As a further separate but distinct response: You are justifying why a monopoly app store is bad by showing a hack that resulted from downloading an app (xcode) from a source other than the app store. Security firm Palo Alto Networks surmised that because network speeds were slower in China, developers in the country looked for local copies of the Apple Xcode development environment, and encountered altered versions t…
This just shows that the App Store model is insufficient for user security, as the the security model was supposed to prevent malware from being distributed to users in the first place, no matter what malicious developers upload to the App Store. If Apple treats Xcode as App Store blessed because it believes it came from blessed sources like the App Store, instead of using real security measures, exploits will contin…
But not for a lack of trying. Windows has tried to retrofit their App Store, just less successfully. One good example is the code signing racket, where it’s pay to play to avoid useless warnings that scare off people who don’t know better.
Look, you can somewhat reasonably prove the origin of a piece of software, but a domain name x509 cert would be better (only difference is validity needs to handle longer time ranges). The issue is all the “trusted” yadda yadda. Doesn’t matter if it’s an App Store, a holy enterprise certificate trafficker or the pope himself doing the blessing, it just doesn’t hold up. Maybe they could have a herd-protection like VSCode extensions: “50M+ users” so when I see an executable called “Facebook” with “35 users” I can stop and make my own judgment that it looks fishy. But that’s about UX for checking the vendor matches who you think it is, not blessing it.
> Similarly, if OSes don't implement real security that's independent of the App Store model, users will continue to be exploited in this way.
Spot on! Here’s the thing: sandboxing software on any of the big operating systems wasn’t there from the beginning, and that’s the billion dollar mistake. Sandboxing is the only real game changer in end-user security with iPhone/android over desktop, not the monopolistic app stores. Tbf, Apple at least has tried really hard to bring sandboxing to desktop but even they are not there yet. These mega corps should imo have seen it coming a decade earlier, when the web became vastly popular platform, much thanks to sandboxing.
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Apple already has a system to set the region of a device. Go to Settings > General > Language and Region > Region.
I don't think Apple will use that system for this, since doing so would let everyone sideload just by setting their region to somewhere in Europe even if they're not actually there.
I am looking forward! I tried side loading the YouTube with sponsorblock and adblock, which worked but renewing the apps weekly is too much effort.
As the developer of a subscription app, if unfettered side-loading is allowed I'd be worried about cracked versions of my app being distributed. We've done everything in the client for privacy and reliability, but the obvious countermeasure would be to move functionality over to a backend. This would be history echoing the transition from boxed software to SaaS.
There are great pirate movie websites where you can watch all the movies at about the same user experience or even better but Netflix etc are doing just fine.
Piracy isn’t what it used to be but I do enjoy these sites.
The real problem is the subscription fatigue and fragmentation. I won’t subscribe to all the services and Even if I have a subscription it’s easier for me to find the movies in one place.
However apps are different, you are expected to open different apps for different things anyway. In apps, the danger could be something like ChatGPT becoming the main UI and doing everything the user wants from there.