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Apple announces ability to download apps directly from websites in EU

macrumors.com

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Re: Apple announces ability to download apps directly from websites in EU

#741

Post by [deleted] »

pndy wrote: post #605
bilekas wrote: post #269

> We’re providing more flexibility for developers who distribute apps in the European Union (EU), including introducing a new way to distribute apps directly from a developer’s website. They make it sounds like they're being super generous and they've gone out of their way to provide this 'cool new innovation' for us out of their own desire to give back to their customers. You have to really appreciate the spin and s…

The dichotomy of how real world looks and functions and how it does according to the big corpos is astonishing and terrifying. And this is the yet another example - there's no failure in this rose-tinted corporate world, just a minor difficulty which will be portrayed as a success. Honestly, I'm surprised Apple didn't come up with the overused standard reply #1: " We are excited to announce (...) ", or the standard r…

[deleted]

Re: Apple announces ability to download apps directly from websites in EU

#742

Post by ambichook »

nucleardog wrote: post #199
afavour wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so much of this is focused on the developers, and that is the problem here. How many users actually want this? How many users actually understand the issues at stake, though? I don't say that to be patronizing but it's a nuanced, thorny problem. I bet if you simply asked "do you think it should be allowed to download porn apps?" a good number of users (if asked anonymously!) would say yes. How many users understand…

> To my mind all of this comes back to the free market: you're free to ignore all this stuff and keep getting everything through the App Store. If you and many others do the same thing then the market will prove the idea to be a dud. This only really creates no impact to users if Apple were to force all apps to also be listed in their App Store. If, e.g., Facebook were to decide they don’t like existing App Store pol…

a question, is facebook on the google play store, which has the standard 30% cut? netflix? discord? just because the option is there doesnt mean every app is just going to up and leave, it just means they have a choice, and if apples curation is so great, the reputation of being on the app store will be a value add that may make it worth it to stay, even ignoring the fact that the app store is already just people's default way to find apps on their iphone.

Re: Apple announces ability to download apps directly from websites in EU

#743

Post by bilekas »

pndy wrote: post #605
bilekas wrote: post #269

> We’re providing more flexibility for developers who distribute apps in the European Union (EU), including introducing a new way to distribute apps directly from a developer’s website. They make it sounds like they're being super generous and they've gone out of their way to provide this 'cool new innovation' for us out of their own desire to give back to their customers. You have to really appreciate the spin and s…

The dichotomy of how real world looks and functions and how it does according to the big corpos is astonishing and terrifying. And this is the yet another example - there's no failure in this rose-tinted corporate world, just a minor difficulty which will be portrayed as a success. Honestly, I'm surprised Apple didn't come up with the overused standard reply #1: " We are excited to announce (...) ", or the standard r…

> he dichotomy of how real world looks and functions and how it does according to the big corpos is astonishing and terrifying.

I don't know you, but I feel the same with less words. We're not alone.

"You don't need to embrace to understand"

Re: Apple announces ability to download apps directly from websites in EU

#744

Post by asadotzler »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #442

Whats most annoying is that Apple pioneered the idea of PWAs going all the way back to Steve Jobs. I have said many times Tim Cook is a good COO but Apple needs a visionary who wants to innovate. It feels like Apples innovations are not where they could be. They are making some amazing things here and there, but I can only imagine they would be far more innovative with a different CEO.

There were mobile devices with large screens and web browsers doing "web apps" years before iPhone. I know because I worked on Gecko browsers for two different OSes on those form factors starting with Pocket PC in 2003-ish all the way through Windows Mobile 5 in 2007ish. We also got running on Maemo with big screen handheld devices in early 2004, collaborating directly with Nokia and that Linux-based OS team. A full Gecko browser worked on multiple big screen 3G mobile communicators doing ajax apps before Gmail invites were a thing, years before iPhone. Apple didn't pioneer here; they fast followed us and others. Heck, we were running Gecko on the iPaq 64MB devices in 2001 and third parties were distributing that in 2002. Not some WAP browser, not some brew joke, but Gecko, the same Gecko that was taking the web by storm with Firefox pre-release versions (and of course Mozilla 1.0 and Netscape 6-7) the same Gecko plus DomI that inspired web apps and ajax to take off in the mid-2000s.Web apps were a thing in 2005 and so were mobile web apps. Joe Hewitt, a co-conspirator of mine on Firefox, who gave us both DOM Inspector and Firebug, was a web app master having built the entire Firefox UI out of XUL, CSS and JavaScript and Mozilla's and Netsape's UIs and themes before that. He wrote iUI, the first ajax framework explicitly for iPhones in the period before Jobs suckered everyone into the App Store and sunk those who'd invested substantially in the promise of web apps that Apple fully abandoned. iPhone was no surprise to us, nor Apple running a powerful browser as an app framework, as we and others had done the same thing with Gecko (Ever see the Mozilla Amazon Browser, an entire Amazon client written on top of Gecko back in 2002-2003 not much different than what we see so many Electron apps today. Multiple books were written on all of this. It's not a secret and yet everyone seems to insist that Apple was the first smartphone with a capable web browser and browser-based apps. They got it right where everyone before had failed in some way, but they were not the pioneers, they were the swift following colonizers that came to pave the cow paths that we and others laid down, only to abandon the suckers who believed they'd keep investing in the web on iOS, something that has only just started to happen in the last couple of years.

Re: Apple announces ability to download apps directly from websites in EU

#745

Post by anon373839 »

Hamuko wrote: post #65
procgen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disregarding the letter of the law seems arbitrary and capricious.

The situation in the US seems to suggest that trying to finely analyze the exact sequence of words in a law or the consitution still leaves a whole lot of room for arbitrary decisions. Abortion was a constitutional right until it wasn't and the constitution was not changed between.

All language carries inherent ambiguity. However, developments in American constitutional law aren’t really about that. The Constitution is very general and it uses terms that lack an objective meaning (for example, “Due Process” - what counts as “process”? What process is “due”?) It can’t really be implemented without bringing in a pile of philosophy and policy making.

At the same time, SCOTUS has been guilty of stretching its terms to include ideas that are clearly out of scope. (For example, the dubious invention of “substantive” due process - which all of the abortion stuff hinges on.)

Re: Apple announces ability to download apps directly from websites in EU

#746

Post by Nevermark »

sircastor wrote: post #725
klaustopher wrote: post #13

I am really impressed how much time and effort Apples legal department spends to find every single loop hole in the wording of the DMA. The 50ct per install for alternate app stores, 50ct per install for non-App Store apps after the millionth install, 1 million dollar in securities for alternate app stores, etc all follow the words of the DMA, but not the spirit. I am really interested to see the European Commissian…

> I am really impressed how much time and effort Apples legal department spends to find every single loop hole in the wording of the DMA. Maybe this is an American trait, but I would be surprised at any company that wouldn't be doing this. A law has been made that affects our business: How do we comply with the law with as little impact as possible to us? Some of the comments here seem to expect Apple to simply give…

Perhaps it seems unusual, as Apple has so much technical control, an unusually extensive legal budget, and doing a very effective job of castrating any "threats" or as the EU might say "significant competition".

And Apple has the cash to play chicken with any potential fines if it comes to it, so its not hedging much if at all.

It is clear that the EU is going to have to get very tough, before Apple is going to proactively take into account any of the "spirit of the law" that the EU would like it to understand.

Re: Apple announces ability to download apps directly from websites in EU

#747

Post by asveikau »

stouset wrote: post #705
bogwog wrote: post #67

> Alternative app marketplaces. Marketplaces can choose to offer a catalog of apps solely from the developer of the marketplace. How does that count as a "marketplace"? > Web Distribution ... will let authorized developers distribute their iOS apps to EU users directly from a website owned by the developer All of this just makes it crystal clear what Apple's goal is: to prevent competition. It's not about security li…

> it's all about maintaining their app store monopoly. Does this only makes sense if you assume payments are tied to the App Store? They aren’t. If you remove payments from your list of motivations, what do you presume Apple’s motivation is to encourage apps to list themselves on the App Store and not a third-party marketplace?

Apple fans would always claim that this was a security measure to prevent malware. I have always found the claim dubious.

If you believe in that as a security measure, you could still have a signing requirement and apple could revoke trust on known-bad binaries. Which is probably what they will do.

Re: Apple announces ability to download apps directly from websites in EU

#748

Post by throwitaway1123 »

Crosseye_Jack wrote: post #34
Ballas wrote: post #6

I just want to be able to install my own apps on my own device without paying $99/year (and with a signature that lasts a reasonable amount of time). Sadly, this doesn't seem to allow for that.

Altserver+Altstore. Altserver will resign your apps, and altstore can background "refresh" your apps so they _shouldn't_ expire on your. It refreshes when your on the same wifi network as altserver, for me it works most of the time, but sometimes I need to kick altserver to get the phone to see it. Doesn't fix the issue, and its a limitation that annoys the hell out of me too, but at least helps mitigate it. (Though…

The only thing that bothers me about Altstore is that it require you to enter your Apple ID and password. I know the app is open source and only sends the credentials to Apple, but the risk of a supply chain vulnerability is terrifying.

Re: Apple announces ability to download apps directly from websites in EU

#749

Post by userbinator »

As someone who never got into the Apple ecosystem, the title is really amusing --- they're announcing it like it's a new feature and it actually comes with a lot of gotchas, when "download apps directly from websites" with absolute freedom has been the norm for just about every other computer in widespread use, for the past few decades.

Re: Apple announces ability to download apps directly from websites in EU

#750

Post by docmars »

Oh the horror, it must be so hard for Apple to cave to an open system for these people. What will they ever do without their unbelievable tax on app profits simply for existing on their nearly unlimited real estate, that is, the web?!

I have no sympathy for their concerns. I can download apps on my MacBook machines all day from many different sources, and it harms no one. While I understand the associated risks, computers have been this way long enough that the free and fair use of software on my devices is far more valuable than the brittle safety a marketplace offers.

Apple's greed knows no bounds, and while I'm no big fan of the EU, there are some regulations like these that ensure these big bears in the industry can't abuse their positions for profit, at such unreasonable expense to consumers (not always monetarily, but be it fair access, availability, and choice), and developers especially.

If commercial real estate charged XX% cuts of all sales from a business, every business would crumble with enough time, and only the big hitters would succeed with great resentment towards their gracious corporate overlords.

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