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by judge2020 1697 days ago
Even if this came to fruition, someone is still the gatekeeper. Many often forget that safe browsing gates access to every domain you type in and will throw up an error page if it's been flagged as malware. The same already happens for side-loading apps via Play Protect[0], iOS would surely have a similar system with Apple collecting samples of side-loaded apps and continuously scanning & expanding their blocklist of malicious apps.

0: https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/2812853?hl=en

2 comments

Even this system would be a huge leap forward, because we'd go from a whitelist model controlled by a monopoly to a blacklist model controlled by a monopoly. The sheer effort of keeping up to maintain the absolute user abuse by apple and google is infintitely higher than what we have now.
I get that - it’s not like traditional payment processors never shut anyone off. Reality is all in the squishy gray area, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a meaningful difference between what it’s like selling a service on a website vs. with an app.