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Comment by chooseaname | Hacker News Reader

That mail bug is annoying. I don't get why Apple can't push their apps out to their app store and update them separately so it doesn't take an iOS update. The only reason I can think of is to force people to always stay on the latest iOS version, but that's anti-user, so surely that's not the reason. ;)

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They technically are on the App Store, just not updated through that channel.

Seems odd they're not taking advantage of their own app store to update these apps without requiring an OS update. Even Google does it on Android.

With Android, it's not so much that Google does it out of choice but because they have no control of most of the phones and there were (still are?) huge numbers of phones which don't even have access to OS updates or get them very late. Google was forced to pull a lot of functionality out of the OS level to be able to keep people up to date.

Most of the code is in system frameworks, not the app that you download.

Google does that because they aren't able to make sure that every android device gets an update. Since Apple can make sure of this there is no reason to have a second way to update their apps. App store updates won't magically make the mail app devs work faster or produce more.

> Google does that because they aren't able to make sure that every android device gets an update.

Hopefully they'll be able to remediate that in the future and separate the core OS deployment from the vendor-specific files. Let Google pushes the OS, and the vendor could update their own stuff separately / through the Play Store. At least there is "Project Mainline" that helps keeping those devices secure.

> App store updates won't magically make the mail app devs work faster or produce more.

Definitely, but it would make it easier to deploy a patch without having to wait for the next iOS update.

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