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No apology necessary, just a typical online missing-a-few-blanks-and-filling-them-in-ourselves event. :) It's true that Android has the ability to 'side load' and it is off by default, but phones and PCs are different animals. So, it's better to compare it to Windows which permits running even unsigned apps by default, though it does black the screen and show a warning box with a big red exclamation point. Realistically, I think the Mac laptops and desktops will continue along the 'consumer' line of thinking in terms of features and functionality. Apple will likely set Gatekeeper to Mac App Store only by default within the next release or two of Mac OS X. Users will be able to change it, of course, but it will still have the desired effect of making publishers feel like they have to sell through the App Store and give up 30% of their revenue to Apple (and also abandon many of their pricing models since the App Store doesn't support variable upgrade pricing, unfortunately). Most Apple users won't even know they can get apps outside of the App Store at that point, similar to how most Android users don't know. Similarly to Android, of course, there will be some power users that know and make use of that feature. Most Mac OS X users will be completely unaware of the fact that any of this happened or that their options have been limited, though, the same way most iOS users are unaware Apple prohibits third party browsers (unless they're just a skin on hobbled Mobile Safari), SMS clients, etc. Personally, I disagree with the path Apple has forged the last few years. They make pretty good hardware and were the first company that really 'got' mobile music (and the fact that it needed good hardware and software - both on the device and the connecting PC). I have an original iPod Mini I got and later hacked a 16GB CF card into and ran Busybox on. I even have an old Mac Classic sitting in the closet that I'll pull out and put shufflepuck on at some point. But I likely won't buy anything from Apple ever again at this point. And I won't develop anything for a platform whose owner operates the way and has the level of control that Apple does. Both of which make me a bit sad. Glad you like PortableApps.com and it's helped you out. We're still chugging along. If you're so inclined, give it an install to your cloud drive (Dropbox, SkyDrive, Google Drive, etc) and you can run your apps from there and sync them among your Windows machines. You can even run them under Wine on *nix or one of the Wine equivalents on Mac (CrossOver, Wineskin, WineBottler, PlayOnMac). |