[Wowfunhappy]

From: https://onefoottsunami.com/2025/10/03/iceblock-blocked/

> Gosh, it’s almost like Apple serving as the exclusive gatekeeper for what software can be installed on the iPhone (and iPad, and Apple TV, and Apple Watch, and Vision Pro) is a bad thing that creates a single point of failure which can be abused by increasingly authoritarian governments.

Apple should not be able to decide which apps their customers are allowed to use. It's one thing to make decisions about which products are allowed in your store, and quite another to unilaterally ban software from what is many people's primary computer.

There should have always been a side-loading switch. It doesn't have to be easy to find, it just needs to be available in the event of an emergency. Any possible security arguments to the contrary pale in comparison to the importance of maintaining a free society.

We live in a digital age, and software is a form of free expression. We would not (I hope) find this situation acceptable for eBooks, and we should not find it acceptable for software.

I am horrified that Google has decided to move in the same direction on Android, and I urge them to reconsider before it's too late. Right now, these apps can still be sideloaded on Android phones, so to be honest I don't care that much what Google does with the Play Store. But what happens next year?

[GoblinSlayer]

If phoneposters cared about that, they would buy a general computer. And yes, situation with ebooks is the same.

[Wowfunhappy]

Please direct me to the general computer in a phone form factor that isn't some fiddly Linux gadget.

What e-reader doesn't allow side-loading books?

[Y_Y]

> sideloading books

This madness is straight out of Right to Read [0].

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

[Wowfunhappy]

I understand why some people have a negative reaction to the word "sideloading", but to me it just means acquiring media from a place other than the manufacturer's official channels.

On Debian, compiling software from source or installing a deb you downloaded via a web browser would be "sideloading".

[savolai]

”The 15.18.5 update is also having an adverse reaction to sideloaded books. If you deliver a book using Send by Email or copy it to your computer via USB, a critical issue may arise, where a pop-up appears with an ‘Invalid ASIN‘ number. The new DRM system is attempting to locate the book in the Amazon store to decrypt it, but since it can’t find it, it reports that the book is invalid. Amazon claims they are working on the issue, ... ”https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45393505

[craftkiller]

Ah the old "I want freedom but I refuse to accept any inconvenience to get it"

[Wowfunhappy]

I don't know how I would live my life without access to mainstream mobile apps. I have to use an app to pay for the laundry machine in my apartment building. At school—I'm a teacher nowadays—we use an app to mark student attendance during fire drills.

Freedom of speech should not require living in the woods secluded from society. It is the responsibility of all of us—especially major institutions—to work to preserve that. I can't do it on my own.

[craftkiller]

> laundry

Keep an old android phone in a drawer somewhere. Take it out when you do laundry.

> mark student attendance

If your workplace requires you to use an app then your workplace can issue you a phone that you keep at work. I don't use my personal devices for anything work-related and you shouldn't either.

[atmavatar]

Reminder: the moment you start using your phone for work-related material, your workplace has the right to access and remove data from your phone.

Never, ever use your personal phone for work stuff.

[Wowfunhappy]

I can't practically carry around two different phones all day at work, especially given how big they are now. (It's not like I work at a desk, I'm constantly running between different classrooms and other spaces.) The "work" phone would end up being the one I had on my person most of the time.

...but frankly, I am such a geek that it doesn't really matter for me. I have a tiny 11-inch laptop that I usually keep somewhere nearby, or I can VNC into my home desktop computer from my phone.

The thing is that normal people shouldn't have to do this! I say this as someone who does believe that everyone should become more tech-literate and capable with computers. One of the subjects I teach is 5th grade computer science. I don't expect all or even most of my kids to become professional software engineers, but I want them to know enough that they'll be able to make computers work for them instead of the other way around. This is one of the reasons I became a teacher.

I don't expect all of my students to buy and carry around multiple phones in order to protect democracy.

[Spivak]

If you expect people to take real-life inconvenience over an abstract perceived freedom you will be disappointed until the day you die. People buy computing devices to do things. If the device has freedom but can't do the things they want it's a really cool paperweight.

Streaming services which lock you into DRM won over the slightly inconvenient but free thing.

Your time will always better be spent getting government to make the convenient thing more free than trying to move a river by gathering people with buckets.

[craftkiller]

Oh, I don't expect people like them to take real-life inconvenience over freedom. I am just tired of them pretending they care about freedom, when all it takes for them to give up is having to use a "fiddly" operating system.

[Zak]

I've been running Linux on the desktop for 20 years. I'm happily running Linux on a tablet (a Microsoft tablet at that). I run a third-party Android build with root on my primary phone. I am the ideal user for a fiddly operating system.

I put PostmarketOS on a spare phone and spent a good bit of time playing with it. It would be painful to try to daily it at this time, and completely unusable for many of the common smartphone use cases.

[subscribed]

No, not inconvenience, safety and security.

There are limited choices if you want to keep it in mind.

[y0eswddl]

Ahh the old "I'm going to pretend my utterly ridiculous suggestion is a reasonable and rational and expectation of the average human"

[fallinghawks]

Google has been clamping down over the past year or two on sideloading too. I used to be able to install games restricted to Japan if they were uploaded to apkpure, but every one lately gets stopped either by Play Services or the Play Store under the claim of "safety" and can't be worked around.

[bootsmann]

Once again we are back to deriving the DSA/DMA from first principles.

[Wowfunhappy]

I love the DMA in theory, but as currently implemented it doesn't fix this problem, because they're letting Apple enforce their stupid notarization scheme for alternate app stores. Apple can just pull notarization from a politically inconvenient app.

I also haven't heard anything about Europe being excluded from the upcoming Android crackdown, so apparently Google has decided it's DMA compliant. Which makes sense given what Apple is doing.