Monopoly? How about digital feudalism. "We've put ourselves in charge of protecting you, so we're going to help ourselves to a portion of everyone's gold, and make sure none of the serfs are up to anything we don't approve of."
The way they aggressively police things on their app store, including "inappropriate" subversive content like Project Gutenberg, while taking 30% of everyone's revenue definitely sells the feudalism angle.
This is incorrect. Apple doesn’t force you to buy iphone, and there is plenty of alternatives.
Personally, I’d like to take full control over my iphone. And create apps for myself the way I see fit. But I’m afraid that with sideloading allowed, most software vendors will go sideloading-only. That means, nobody will have any control over their app’s privilege requests, behavior and other security related things.
Basically my concern is that when I need a “ruler app”, I just install it and am sure it couldn’t even be published with sms access request. Now with wild-west sideloading this restriction is over, so everyone and their dog will nag you to allow access to AB, calls, mic, etc. All dark patterns will break loose.
> But I’m afraid that with sideloading allowed, most software vendors will go sideloading-only. That means, nobody will have any control over their app’s privilege requests, behavior and other security related things.
There is no reason why side-loading means "not sandboxed". Apps still need to use Apple SDKs to interface with the OS, so there is still an opportunity to request permissions and for the user to deny permissions and for the OS to honor the denied permissions.
…and for an app to refuse to work without this irrelevant permission. This is my exact experience with an android phone and a quest of searching a ruler app. Ended up on lifehacker and a direct link to the app. Play store only suggested the most dark patterned apps in existence.
Random website downloads on Android are as reliable as random website downloads on desktop platforms. Most of them aren't malware, but Google's search is quickly turning into a malware distribution network rather than a search engine.
There are alternative app stores exactly for this reason. Nobody wants a future where you need to download random IPA files from the internet all the time, just having the ability to run F-Droid/Amazon App Store/Epic Games Mobile on your device is enough.
Honestly, I don't even get why Epic hasn't made an app store for Android yet. Mobile appsstores aren't exactly rocket science.
The problem is I didn’t know about f-droid and I believe that my experience in this regard is equivalent to the one of an average user. We simply don’t know which store is good, if not the default.
And the whole “free iphone” movement tries to go this route. We are basically living in a pocket between Apple pursuing their own goals (but thanks for explaining that again, someone bright here), status/rich iphone users, and app vendors who have to obey the rules. Why everyone here wants to destroy this pocket and get android-like situation on iphones when there already is an unlocked hacker-friendly f-droid or whatever is beyond me. I’m fucking sure that after Apple allows sideloading, most of these guys will say “nice, but now that it’s the same, meh” and will not buy an iphone anyway. While everyone who actually cared will suffer the consequences.
That's a fair assessment, but if you can't find the store you need, you'll probably be fine just sticking to Google Play, just like you would be on the app store.
Android and iOS are not the same, and they never will be. For one thing, people bully others for having the wrong colour chat bubbles; there's a whole social problem surrounding the brand and that provides one reason why someone who wants to install an emulator doesn't buy an Android phone.
There's no reason why you can't stick with Apple's app store if others decide they don't want to. In fact, the threat of competition will only drive Apple to make their own platform better. Just look at the way Safari has been improving ever since the threat of Blink coming to iOS became a reality.
What you describe isn't an "Android-like situation". Most Android users don't even know they can install apps from the internet, just like most iOS users don't know that you can just sideload apps over the network already, albeit with some arbitrary restrictions.
Yes this framing makes more sense, especially since many get stuck up on the definition of a monopoly when that doesn't quite keep up with new tactics being utilized (ie keeping competition going but only superficially).
