I have no idea why so many of those commenters are anti consumer rights. Android proves that it’s not a security issue. Why are they so brain broken that they are actively against opening up their walled garden, like it compromise their apple product purchases in some way.
I’m an anti-Apple advocate and an Android user. And I’m against this law. What good does it bring? These are Apple’s devices; let them do whatever they want with them. Don’t like how Apple does business? Buy another brand. Advocate against Apple. Suggest alternatives. But do not force them to do things how you like. It’s just toxic. I believe that the most anti-consumer thing is when governments try to decide what customers want or need. I hate it when they take me for an idiot (I might often be, but let me make my mistakes and learn from them).
These are Apple’s devices
But that’s the thing - they aren’t. Not once they’re bought. At that point, they’re my device, or your device.
Surely you can see how having a single supplier can be a bad thing, right? That supplier has no incentive to deliver quality. Why would they?
If you want to start baking cookies and sell them, you need to beat several bakers in your town and several companies in the rest of the country if you ever want to be successful and profitable. This is because there are already several well-established suppliers who have proven they make great cookies - why would anyone buy from you?
On the other hand if you’re the only one selling - you can reduce cocoa content in half to save costs, you can replace quality ingredients with cheaper versions for the same reason, you can increase prices as much as you want - the cookie-seeking customer will still buy, because there are no other options.
Sure, you can also be the best baker in the world. You can put love and care into every cookie that leaves your shop. You can care about customers and make sure they get the best stuff, because you have a monopoly and you can enforce that view.
But in reality, what actually happens is that those decisions don’t belong to you. They belong to the soulless company that only has one purpose: maximize profits. And you can be the best person ever, but if you’re working for a publicly traded company you’re at the mercy of shareholders.
Why would you want this? Forget about apple, why would you want this in any field?
except it is a security issue for those not tech savvy I had to enable parental controls on some family members phones cause they enabled side loading somehow and managed to royally fuck up their phone
While not impossible, you have to try fairly hard to fuck up your phone like this. I’d be actively impressed if your story is true (particularly as you used the plural), and if so I’d like to know what they were specifically trying to install that fucked up their phones.
It’s just statistically more likely they downloaded a malicious app from the Play Store than had any chaos side loading.
The plural is I just do it now cause i don’t wanna have to deal with it again and I don’t trust them but it was a obvious scam they clicked on and guy over a phone talked her through it
Reading the comments from that article is a prime example of how a cult functions.
In reality this will have a 0,002% impact. Most phone users are tech-illiterate and have no idea how to use their devices. You expect these people to go to a different store? On Android you can have other app stores, why don’t you have? Because Play Store is default and all app developers want to be where most users are, not on a 3-4% user share store.
It will most likely be background noise in the first months and everyone will go back to the App Store. The only people that will use an alternate store will most likely be the same ones that use F-droid, so 0,002% of the users.
But hey, it’s better to scream how this whole thing is making their devices less secure, because Apple told them so.
It’s always about the minority. Just because something fits 99% should not mean this is the only thing in existence, when other ways do not disturb. And one not fulfilled minority there, one not fulfilled there and soon we realise that almost everyone fit in some unfulfilled minority that is not dealed with.
I think that’s exactly the problem. The real user benefit will be very small, but in order to enable those changes, functionality will be implemented on everyone’s phones to support sideloading. In my eyes, this increseas the attack surface against iPhones. Time and time again alt stores have been used to distribute fake apps and malware on Android, and the victims are often those users who haven’t asked for sideloading and are unlikely to use it intentionally.
Yes, maybe this will enable an F-droid equivalent on iPhone and it will be great to have direct access to open-source apps. But is this niche addition worth potentially reducing the security of all iPhones? I’m not convinced.
But here’s the thing - side loading, even on android, is an opt-in feature. The user has to actively go out of their way to sideload an app. Even if an app tries to do it behind your back, you must first enable its ability to do so.
Yes, this doesn’t exist when ADB is involved, but in that case you have to go out of your way to enable USB debugging (and be stupid enough to plug your phone into someone else’s computer). The vast majority of iPhones will never have sideloading enabled by their users. The EU isn’t grabbing their balls and saying that all users must have it enabled by default, otherwise they’d be going after Android too.
Sure, I get that. The issue is that as soon as you introduce the ability to install apps from outside the App Store, it becomes possible to trick unsuspecting users into clicking buttons they don’t understand. By designing a web page to look like an actual Apple page, a malicious party could convince users to “opt in” to outside sources, in a similar way in which phishing websites harvest users’ online banking credentials. Currently, this kind of attack is entirely impossible on iPhone.
Doesn’t this argument essentially boil down to “people are stupid and we should take away their freedoms to protect them from themselves”? I’m not going to say that most people would make use of being able to install 3rd party apps, or even that it won’t give malware more chances to get people. But people can get themselves hurt or compromise their electronic security in any number of ways taking away people’s choices until they can’t make bad decisions anymore just doesn’t seem worth it to me
I would rather have a “all users must have root access to their devices” or all software must be user replaceable integrated into the law. We let Apple do their own thing, but adventurous users could try installing android and such on the iPhone (similar to how the asahi project is making Linux on M series macs a reality)
Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. 😂
Why are you simping so hard for corps 💀