[matheusmoreira]

> But people should also be able to get apps from whatever store they want.

This the answer. The app store monopoly doesn't really matter, the real tyranny is needing Apple's cryptographic blessing to run software on our own computers. This should be literally illegal. Restore our computer freedom and their app store rent seeking becomes irrelevant.

[bloomca]

It's not just about that. I am sure if the court would force them to allow sideloading, they'll make sure to never promote your app if you decide to offer both options to the users.

[para_parolu]

And that’s fair. Apple doesn’t have to provide services to businesses

[Nevermark]

Punishing developers for not exclusively using their App Store would be clearly uncompetitive.

If they have to allow other stores, then they are not going to be allowed to punish developers for using them.

(Assuming the lowest bar possible in anti-competitive resolution follow through.)

[earthnail]

Not until alternative stores become competitive. Realistically they have such a monopoly thar you end up in a chiclen and egg situation. Their monopoly is so large that noone wants to distribute via small alt stores, meaning alt stores never get large.

[anilgulecha]

A chicken and egg problem is highly unlikely. Here's a few probable situations:

1) A fdroid equivalent pops up, which them becomes a collection of fantastic open source apps, and soon develops a strong user base.

2) Google launches play store for iPhone, which will on day 1 get millions of users.

3) Meta launches metaStore, which so the only way to get Facebook, threads, Instagram and WhatsApp. This becomes the fastest growing store in a matter of a week.

One may personally not like this world - but imo it's a better world than the one we have - personally for (1) to exist.

[qwytw]

> 3) Meta launches metaStore, which so the only way to get Facebook, threads, Instagram and WhatsApp. This becomes the fastest growing store in a matter of a week.

Why? They don't do this on Android.

At then end of the day the number of active users would fall if they do this. That's unavoidable. So what incentives do they have to not distribute on the App Store? It's not like (unlike in Epic's case) Apple is requiring Facebook to hand over 30% of its revenue.

fdroid is of course great. Extremely niche and not that significant, though.

> Google launches play store for iPhone, which will on day 1 get millions of users.

Amazon tried that on Android. Of course I would expect Google to do much better but that doesn't mean a lot.

[jen20]

> Why? They don't do this on Android.

So they can fuck their users in ways not currently permitted.

[close04]

On #3, Meta could have done it for Android and I don't think they did. Actually if Android is a god estimation of how it looks like with 3rd party stores, it won't be super disruptive.

Unless the iOS market is so lucrative it will garner far more interest.

[spect88]

> Actually if Android is a god estimation of how it looks like with 3rd party stores, it won't be super disruptive.

Google Play has fewer restrictions though. Apple doesn't even allow alternative browser engines. Until last year they didn't allow any emulators.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Meta launches metaStore, which so the only way to get Facebook, threads, Instagram and WhatsApp

Would note the trade off: this store will be a bastion of tracking, possibly with Meta requiring its bugs be installed for inclusion.

[anilgulecha]

Highly probable.

This will rightly push Apple in the right direction - to bring the right OS controls at the operating system level / store API level, and not leave things up to apps. This is a better world, despite short term issues with metaStore.

[crossroadsguy]

As long as they clearly give the option, at the time of first setup - or an upgrade, to select which app store becomes default; and make it very easy to change default app store later, just like default browser, default search engine et cetera. But they must not be allowed to disallow for the reason that "you are on another app store, we don't like you, go away!".

Yup, it's then fair and they can keep the banner in their App Store that screams at font size 38 "This Journal App Is Da Best", "No Other Note App Has Been Made Greater Than This One".

[Cthulhu_]

It's a tradeoff. You may have the knowledge and risk awareness to install anything, circumvent protections like you still can on MacOS, but the vast majority does not and should not have that power; this led to huge botnets during the Windows XP era when many internet connections were first set up. They overcompensated with Vista, asking permissions for everything so people developed a kneejerk "just hit accept". The iPhone came out not long after, with a safety by default - which invariably meant restricting what a user can and cannot do and install on their system.

I think it's been a net positive overall. The percentage of people that want to do and install more with it is small.

[ndriscoll]

The problem with Windows XP was that at the time you plugged it into your modem directly (or the computer contained the modem if it was dialup) with no firewall, and it would get exploited in seconds without any user interaction through some default Microsoft background service. Wifi routers were probably a much larger impact than any operating system changes. Especially anything user facing. It's also why clickbait silliness aside, running windows XP isn't actually that likely to run into issues today.

[zb3]

> It's a tradeoff. You may have the knowledge and risk awareness [...] but the vast majority does not and should not have that power

But that power is not more dangerous than having guns, right? So.. while I can apply for a gun license, I can't apply for an unrestricted computing license, so something is wrong here, don't you think? Unless you believe guns are less dangerous.

[matheusmoreira]

> But that power is not more dangerous than having guns, right?

It actually is.

Free computers are intolerably subversive. They can literally wipe out entire sectors of the economy just by copying artificially scarce things. They can defeat police, judges, militaries, governments by democratizing access to strong cryprography.

They want to control our computers at all costs. We must resist. Computers are too important for us to allow them to be controlled and limited.

[kjkjadksj]

I can shoot an executive and it would tank the stock far more than anything I could do with a computer.

[echelon]

> > But people should also be able to get apps from whatever store they want.

The web. Without scare walls or hidden "enable downloads" menu settings.

And apps should no longer have to use first party payment rails, first party authentication/sign in rails, or be forced to jump through review or upgrade hoops.

[c0balt]

> The web. Without scare walls or hidden "enable downloads" menu settings.

I'm not too sure about that, for non-technical users the warnings before installing an APK on Android are very likely a good thing. There's a lot of malware out there and, similar to running a downloaded Exe on Windows, you should at least explicitly confirm it's execution.

[nchmy]

The warnings arent needed on the web, because it's vastly more secure, flexible, etc.. Steve Jobs even coined the PWA concept before going the fiefdom route

[labcomputer]

I don’t know whether to feel happy or sad for you.

Happy because you have nobody in your life in a vulnerable position to be taken advantage of the inevitable malware that will be installed on their device as a result of your wish.

Or sad because those people are most likely to be grandparents or elderly aunts and uncles. Perhaps you never even got to know them.

[tekkk]

What a stupid argument. Maybe grandpas and grandmas should get a different phone then, like a Doro, and stop bringing the rest of us down. And it doesn't even hold water as my mother has been scammed by legitimate App Store apps that have charged extra-fees just because they could.

[ben_w]

> Maybe grandpas and grandmas should get a different phone then, like a Doro

They did, they got an iPhone.

> my mother has been scammed by legitimate App Store apps that have charged extra-fees just because they could.

Did it empty her bank balance by abusing the private NFC payment APIs that Apple are being ordered to open up?

Did it cryptolock all her files?

Did it activate the camera and mic to spy on her for blackmail?

These are things that we need to worry about with random things we download on desktop these days. It's not 2007 any more, I have an entire spare computer for untrusted software.

[tekkk]

I don't want to get into politics but dont you think it's funny when you can purchase assault rifles, made for killing people, yet we are so afraid of having the poor individuals in control of their own phones. Or farming equipment - the list seems to keep growing.

It's just corporate propaganda that all hell would break loose, you could just offer installing baby mode at Apple physical store that can only be removed at said places. Yeah some people would still climb the fence and touch the power lines but look, can we save them all? Should we? In this world of merciless exploitation, wouldnt it be just fair we stopped pretending it never was about anything else but money?

[ben_w]

> I don't want to get into politics but dont you think it's funny when you can purchase assault rifles, made for killing people

I'm British by birth, living in Berlin. We definitely think Americans are a bit "funny", in the not-at-all-funny sense of the word, about guns.

> It's just corporate propaganda that all hell would break loose, you could just offer installing baby mode at Apple physical store that can only be removed at said places.

Thing is, with computers, we've had decades of watching malware infect, destroy, corrupt, ransom, and blackmail. It's still happening, even.

And we even have a way to get past "baby mode" restrictions: be a developer.

But guess what? Developers also face supply chain attacks, because malware is everywhere.

I do miss the olden days when I didn't need to care. A mac online in 2009 was worry-free.

[ohdeargodno]

>Did it empty her bank balance by abusing the private NFC payment APIs that Apple are being ordered to open up?

NFC payment APIs have been open on Android for decades and no such thing of the sort has ever happened. You cannot magically conjure up a payment from Apple Pay to <X> without user involvement and confirmation.

>Did it cryptolock all her files?

Apps do not have write access to all your files.

>Did it activate the camera and mic to spy on her for blackmail?

Every mobile device now has a giant notification saying that the device is using the microphone or recording video.

The disingenuous "having an open app store/not being locked in the walled garden is a security risk" is getting tiring, especially when it's basically all lies now. Unless your argument is that Apple is too incompetent to write APIs properly, in which case I wonder why you think that said APIs being private would prevent anything.

[ben_w]

> NFC payment APIs have been open on Android for decades and no such thing of the sort has ever happened.

Google is also getting legal action for monopoly abuse of their app store, so what's possible today on Android is not sufficient to say what's safe or not.

Despite this, they're also already facing legal action for sharing too much data from Google Wallet.

Fail on all directions at the same time.

> Apps do not have write access to all your files.

> Every mobile device now has a giant notification saying that the device is using the microphone or recording video.

And this can't be circumvented ever, even when private APIs are no longer vetted? And none of the voices describing downloads warnings as "scare screens" aren't making the same demand on this?

> The disingenuous "having an open app store/not being locked in the walled garden is a security risk" is getting tiring, especially when it's basically all lies now. Unless your argument is that Apple is too incompetent to write APIs properly, in which case I wonder why you think that said APIs being private would prevent anything.

The disingenuous "force platforms to be open, there's no security risk" position was tiring decades ago when the iPhone was brand new, especially when it was obviously lies even then. Apple obviously isn't magically competent enough to write APIs properly, they had "goto fail" and all the jailbreaks we've seen in so many versions of iOS were specifically some random doc that users could install that included a way to escalate privileges, and even without that evidence we've also got access to the black market prices for zero-day exploits that for a long time showed they're cheaper than Android, and the obvious reason why this prevents "anything" is that "anything" is a massive subset of "everything".

[labcomputer]

Or maybe the iPhone should be that phone and those who don’t like the closed ecosystem should get something else?

Why would buy a phone that doesn’t work the way you like when alternatives exist?

[matheusmoreira]

Because we want the iPhone on our terms.

[jen20]

So? I want it on my terms, which are mutually exclusive to yours. Who wins?

[tliltocatl]

Yet another "think of the children", except now it's think of the elderly. We CAN NOT make the world safe for everyone without also making it a total crapsack for everyone. It's simply not an option that exists.