I find the FUD against third party app stores on iOS to be simultaneously crediting Apple with providing immense amounts of security in its App Store, and believing that it would be incredibly helpless without sole control through its App Store. That's very contradictory, both in ignoring the many, many vulnerabilities and scams that have proliferated on the App Store through the years (not to mention other negative…
> iOS is more secure than Android [Citation Needed]
App store bill sails out of Senate Judiciary Committee
321–330 of 437 posts
Re: App store bill sails out of Senate Judiciary Committee
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
> iOS is more secure than Android [Citation Needed]
https://www.ijert.org/research/security-comparison-between-a...
I see your 2017 study and raise you these 2019 articles.
https://www.wired.com/story/android-zero-day-more-than-ios-z...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/for-t...
Re: App store bill sails out of Senate Judiciary Committee
#323I would be more interested in having this for car entertainment systems, smart televisions, and like TBH. For my iPhone this probably causes me to install less apps and avoid subscriptions as I’m not interested in the ”install this crap so you can install that crap” pattern. If this is route, force Epic and digital platforms to open up their market places as well and let me design my own loot boxes to side-sell to let them taste the medicine of user choice and convenience of supporting alternative platform actors as well. I’m really not interested in giving more foothold for adtech and micropayment nickle-and-dimers on my most personal computing device. It’s enough I need to put up with Apple’s bright ideas of implanting my device with ”this scans everything on your phone” brainfarts, I definitely don’t need a zuccstore on my phone implanting every internal API for ”DRM purposes and best experience” as a ransom for the privilege of using WhatsApp so I can get more targeted ads for gimp suits and toilet brushes.
Re: App store bill sails out of Senate Judiciary Committee
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
Android offers sideloading and third-party app stores (with minor limitations), yet the vast majority of users do not sideload Android apps. I remember reading it's about 1 in 200 who does, which I found surprisingly small. Commercial apps that aren't in Google's store usually want to do something against Google's rules - sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not. I don't think you'll find many apps jumping ship enti…
I bet part of the reason for that is because of how it's presented. Google puts up several warnings that you have to click through and they're all along the lines of "this will ruin you phone!" IMO having sideloading isn't anything more than a well thought out, long term plan to deflect accusations of anti-competitive behavior. In reality they do everything they can to discourage users from sideloading. The biggest i…
> The biggest issue for me personally is that it's not clear how, or if, sideloaded apps are sandboxed and how they're granted permissions. The warnings seem intentionally designed to play on those fears. If they're sandboxed the same as other apps and have fine grained permission controls I'd do a lot more sideloading.
As someone who recently started dabbling in Android app development, I'm side loading my own app all day long. My app, whether side loaded or downloaded from the Google Play store, makes permission requests and the user must approve every one of them.
Re: App store bill sails out of Senate Judiciary Committee
#325The main question is: What about push notifications? WHAT ABOUT PUSH NOTIFICATIONS?!! Even if we sideload an app, with modern mobile OS architecture many classes of apps will be almost useless if sideloaded apps will not be able to use push notifications provided by an operating system.
Strong disagreement. Push notifications are so annoying and really should not exist except for calendar, todos and other time sensitive things.
The idea that apps just get to notify me whenever they want is insane. This is especially true in games.
Heck theses days a website gets to buck me about it just by me visiting it.
Re: App store bill sails out of Senate Judiciary Committee
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably "similar Apps or functions" would mean that third-party Apps could once again[0] deactivate the cellular radio, to prevent tracking by the mobile network at certain times (or locations/speeds). [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25674655/how-to-turn-on-...
Not so. Those functions are OS-exclusive. It's doubtful that legislators intend the Settings app to be one of those similar apps that third parties can duplicate, and Apple would easily win any case that argued otherwise.
> Apple would easily win any case that argued otherwise.
Why?
Re: App store bill sails out of Senate Judiciary Committee
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, too many apps wants to interrupt whatever I am doing to nag/inform me about non time critical stuff. I have disallowed notifications for almost all apps on my iPhone. I will check an app when I want to check it, not when the app developer wants me to.
This is an extremely limited way of thinking. Do you want WhatsApp to deliver a message to you from your mom or special one that they urgently need help? Or should they wait till you will want to check the app?
I can maybe see a prioty system for contacts.
Not sure how much it would help. My family is at least an hour away and I might not see the notification anyway.
That is a far cry from permitting it for all apps though.
Re: App store bill sails out of Senate Judiciary Committee
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it were 20%, people would complain it wasn’t 10%. And If it were 10%, they’d complain it should be 5%. And there are plenty of other malls to move to, is just that your customers aren’t there. I really don’t get the complaint about Apple’s monopoly on iOS. To me, it’s like VW’s monopoly on Jettas.
By your logic they should just charge 80 or 90%
We’ll, that’s where market forces push back on you. If you abuse your position then people (developers willing to work on your platform) walk. There’s a threshold, and I don’t know what it is, but Apples platform and it’s customers are currently worth the 15/30%.
I suspect that the number of developers at 80% would fall off a cliff. But that would be Apples decision to make. They set it at 30% and there are apparently plenty of developers who are willing to pay that rather than not develop for the platform.
Re: App store bill sails out of Senate Judiciary Committee
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
well what about them? an oversaturated channel that inevitably will become useless. Maybe users should be trained to seek the information they want instead of a device telling them what to think. It's heathier.
Ever heard of messaging apps? The kind you want to beep when somebody sends you a message? Currently you have 2 ways of providing this to your users: run the app in the background, maintaining a persistent connection to the server, or via push notifications, where an app is woken from disabled state and displays a message. And background processes are killed off on iOS in less than 15 seconds (the documentation state…
Messaging apps are a good example of when not to do notifications. Why should my day be interrupted because some random contact sends me some information? I don’t have email set to interrupt me, why should chat?
Re: App store bill sails out of Senate Judiciary Committee
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those aren't general-purpose devices. You can't even get official SDKs unless you're a game studio.
They are just as general purpose as my phone. It's quite easy to sideload applications onto an Xbox console for example.
Most modern consoles include a web browser. How many people do use it for real? How many people use consoles for anything that isn't gaming or media playback? For all intents and purposes, most people do consider them appliances.