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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

Can someone give me compelling reasons for disallowing side-loading of applications on iOS?

Hypothetically, if side-loading were to be allowed it could be buried under a configuration+confirmation flag for security reasons just like with Android or Windows 10.

Thinking more abstractly about this, I already do "sideload" iOS applications when I sign them with enterprise/developer certs and perform OTA installs from systems I control. Presumably, there is still some communication with the mothership going on (certificate revocation checks), but the principles are very similar...

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A single human is smart, people are stupid.

They’ll install ANYTHING, no matter how hard it is and how shady the site is. They can’t help themselves.

Then their phone is rooted by a bad actor and spreading malware. Who do they blame? Themselves? The shady site? The creator of the trojan?

Nope. Apple. They’ll shout from the rooftops how Apple ruined their life and business and remand restitution.

The easiest and most reliable way to prevent this is to lock people in a walled garden and make sure they don’t poke themselves with anything sharp. Yes, it sucks for the smart ones who know that shart things hurt, but that’s the way it’s gotta be.

That's hyperbole. People can sideload Android apps for a decade now and I have yet to see someone complain that sideloading did something bad let alone blame the OS for it.

That is such a rare case that I have a hard time trying to justify the loss of freedom.

There are dozens of Android manufacturers. If an Android phone breaks, people complain about the manufacturer or maybe the telco they bought the phone from.

Apple is a singular target, unlike anything in the Android ecosystem.

That sounds plausible but I've never seen it happen. Maybe you could provide some examples to back up your claim?

Yeah that's my point. Never seen it happen. Surely can't be enough to justify the loss of freedom.

So what I am hearing is that if I were to put a warning label and process around something that is potentially dangerous, it is no longer enough of a disclaimer for some arbitrary reason.

How is the process for enabling side-loading on Android unsuitable for consumers of Apple products? It is off by default. I don't think anyone is advocating for allowing iOS users the ability to run arbitrary executable images found in Safari without going through some process first.

People can “sideload” on mac os x and nobody is making a scene about their mistakes of mac os x being insecure.

Different market, different historical reasons, and typically a much smaller user base for MacOS than the iPhone.

Also, “sideloaded” apps on MacOS are most certainly suspect in Apple’s eyes, so much so they put opt-in requirements around them. While I do see that as an argument for allowing iPhone sideloading with similar opt-in requirements, you can at least understand the market is considerably different for iPhone users than for Mac users, even if there is an overlap between the two.

iPhones also, from a support perspective, are an order of magnitude (or close to it) greater than that of MacOS. Seems reasonable to me for them to keep their appliance locked down in this way.

A walled garden doesn't stop the fact that iOS exploits are cheaper than Android exploits because there are an abundance of iOS exploits, and many of them use Safari to gain root by visiting a website.

If I see an app in the App Store that I might be interested in trying then I can download it and be pretty sure it's not malware, it does roughly what it's advertised as doing, and I can see from its price and the IAPs listed in the store whether it's reasonable value.

By contrast every time my mum clicks a Facebook advert and downloads an app on her Android phone it makes her phone noticeably worse to use. Apple is seemingly the only company able to maintain a reasonable certainty that an app they're hosting/advertising isn't deliberately malicious.

If Apple allow sideloading then I genuinely expect millions of people will have malware on their phones within days of Facebook being able to replicate their malicious Android app advertising business on iOS.

If it is such a valuable service maybe Apple could let you pay $50 to lock your mom's phone after purchase, or whatever dollar value people value the lockdown at.

I am still not seeing the argument relative to mine.

If the ability to side load an app is not enabled by default, how would novice users accidentally install apps they may not have intended to?

Step 1: User clicks ad that says they can download this app super easily and improve their phone's battery performance.

Step 2: User clicks and navigates to a side-load page/alternate store.

Step 2a: Pop-up appears - please adjust your settings to enable access to this app

Step 3: User does so and now downloads malware.

Step 4: Gets upset and blames Apple or calls up their more tech informed Hacker-News-using family member and asks how to fix it.

(this genuinely happens with my mother and chrome extensions - she somehow CANNOT avoid those "search engine takeover" extensions no matter how much I try to educate her on how to avoid it)

What if the permission enablement was made more difficult? Perhaps like how you get to access Android developer tools only after tapping the build number a bunch of times. Or even, making it something you have to run from a CLI while connected to a computer.

My point is, there are many options that preserve safety for the vast majority of users without making it a total non-starter to use alternative app stores.

Few years ago before Apple implemeted Night Shift, F.lux used to use an ability for non-paid developer accounts to compile and run an app on their phone to distribute. They provided a source code for a small program that serve as a shim to F.lux. User need to compile this code with Xcode and put it on their phone.

People followed tutorial videos downloading Xcode, making a developer account, figure out how to get signing profile works, etc. just to get F.lux installed on their phone. Searching for "Flux iOS 9" on YouTube yields some video with over 100k views. In some community there are people who are willing to do it for you (by VNC into user's machine) at $10 per installation.

It’s very simple: support. Apple does not want to take any more needless support calls than they have to. When you run a trillion dollar company that handles, I would speculate, tens or hundreds of thousands of active support tickets, and consider adding in a virtually unsupportable mode in your appliance (keeping in mind that iPhones are considered an appliance to Apple), I would hope you would choose the sane option.

Also, Apple prides itself on quality. Side loading, whether you agree with allowing it or not, degrades quality because Apple loses its end to end control. See Android phones as an example of this.

All that being said, sure I would love to have the option of side loading, but if I really care that much, I’ll jailbreak.

I can "side load" my Mac too. And users know that if a 3rd party application fails or causes problems you don't call Apple. To me this line of thought doesn't hold up.

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