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iDOS 2 will be gone soon

litchie.com

61–70 of 419 posts

Re: iDOS 2 will be gone soon

#61
post #7

Honest question - what do iOS users do in such situations? I'm using Android and we can always install things from outside the store, or even from alternative stores (eg. F-Droid). Is there any similar solution? If the app is open-source, can you at least build it yourself and sideload it as if you are the developer and you're testing your app? What solutions are there?

I don't do anything. It's a phone, not a PC. I got an iPhone because it does what it does well, and doesn't do other things at all. iPhones are slick, costly and secure, at the cost of not being malleable. It's a trade-off I made at purchase time and I know most users of both iPhone and Android never considered that tradeoff.

If apple allowed me to install a different store or easily side load you wouldn’t be negatively impacted

Re: iDOS 2 will be gone soon

#62
post #7

Honest question - what do iOS users do in such situations? I'm using Android and we can always install things from outside the store, or even from alternative stores (eg. F-Droid). Is there any similar solution? If the app is open-source, can you at least build it yourself and sideload it as if you are the developer and you're testing your app? What solutions are there?

iOS requires apps to be signed with a certificate that chains to an Apple root of trust. The only way around this is jailbreak.

IMO this shouldn't be legal.

Re: iDOS 2 will be gone soon

#64

When I was younger, my family couldn’t afford a laptop, but I have the distinct memory of wanting to learn to code on the iPads at my school, and being unable to find any app which would let me just write and execute programs. Looking around the App Store now, there do seem to be a couple of apps which would allow this, but it’s still really disappointing to see this kind of removal. The majority of kids these days w…

The next update to Swift Playgrounds is supposed to allow full iOS app development and submission to the App Store with no Mac involved.

Look also at Pythonista and a-shell for useful, if limited, programming environments. Both work by translating code into JS or wasm.

Re: iDOS 2 will be gone soon

#65
post #18
post #7

Honest question - what do iOS users do in such situations? I'm using Android and we can always install things from outside the store, or even from alternative stores (eg. F-Droid). Is there any similar solution? If the app is open-source, can you at least build it yourself and sideload it as if you are the developer and you're testing your app? What solutions are there?

You can sign 7 apps a week for your own device with the tethered non-dev Apple ID. The certificates expire a week after, so you need to resign those 7 apps every week or they will stop working. All of the "alternative" stores and distribution methods work with this mechanism, there is no better way and it is completely at Apple's whims. Really, most interested users probably gave up at this point, looking at the deca…

You can only have 3 apps + 3 extensions installed on one device simultaneously, however.

Re: iDOS 2 will be gone soon

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not allowed to submit a web browser to the app store with your own javascript interpreter.

There's no firefox on iOS?

Firefox (and every other 3rd party browser) internally uses the same web rendering engine as Safari. Rolling your own renderer + JS engine is not allowed.

Re: iDOS 2 will be gone soon

#68
post #49
post #7

Honest question - what do iOS users do in such situations? I'm using Android and we can always install things from outside the store, or even from alternative stores (eg. F-Droid). Is there any similar solution? If the app is open-source, can you at least build it yourself and sideload it as if you are the developer and you're testing your app? What solutions are there?

It is possible to sideload apps on iOS, it just requires jumping through hoops that you don’t have on Android. Apple allows sideloading of apps signed by the same Apple account that you’re signed into on your iDevice. Since this is really intended to make developing iOS apps more accessible, it requires resigning or rebuilding apps. Since iDOS is open source, that should be no problem here - you can compile and insta…

An additional limitation is that you can only have three such applications installed at a time. You also aren't going to be able to get access to functionality like push notifications (which might be obvious) or network extensions (which might not be: you have to have a paid developer account to develop/install a custom VPN for iOS; I find this limitation particularly frustrating, as it seems to mostly serve the purpose of helping authoritarian governments, and it isn't like Android has such a restriction so we know it isn't "par for the course": they are going above and beyond here).

Re: iDOS 2 will be gone soon

#70
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes that users understand the implications of the garden they're buying into. For many there may be a strong bandwagon effect, and they don't fully grasp what they are losing.

I think I largely understand the implications of the garden I chose, and I doubt there will be much anguish among my less technical family/friends about their loss when they fully grasp that they will never be able to run a DOS emulator on their iPhones.

The only reason we're talking about something as obscure as DOS is because it wasn't threatening. Now that people have raised awareness of the inconstency they're blocking it, like many other general purpose emulators.
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