Comment by kart23 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kart23 | Hacker News Reader

I think the headline is wrong. Sideloading or alternate app stores wouldn't be required, thats not the purpose of the bill. Sideloading and alternate app stores is a legitimate privacy/security problem that will be exempted under the bill.

>"unless necessary for the security or functioning of the covered platform," from https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/299...

I think it would actually be very good for the app store, outlawing a lot of the restriction that Apple places on things like payments.

I really don't know what to think about the bill overall. It would definitely have the largest impact on Amazon, their basics line would pretty much be killed by the law. Google rankings would also be overhauled, no more flights at the top of the page.

The testimony in support of the bill by Sonos [0] and Tile [1] is also a good read.

[0] https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Eddie%20Lazar...

[1] https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/04.21.21%20Ki...

Using terms like sideloading is precisely why the vast majority of the public doesn't give a damn about this issue.Free 'social experiment' idea: ask everyone who was a smartphone what is sideloading, what is installing, what's the difference and what's common.

Altering our language to appease companies and somehow pretend like sideloading means something different than installing is why we're losing, precisely because it's a tactic to erase correlation of the word and the meaning.

As part of the general public I feel the same way about these made-up terms. However, I believe if there is an increase in litigation, as a result of new "anti-tech" laws, that is allowed to proceed through to discovery, then lawyers will cut through the BS. The made-up terms will be translated to "plain English" that the general population, including judges, can understand. It is part of the job.

There is an old theory that settlement may actually be averse to justice. In the case of "tech" companies and their nefarious practices, questions have been allowed to remain unanswered and issues to remain unresolved for the general public. This has been going on for a very long time. Uncertainty has been allowed to persist for decades. Who benefits from that uncertainty.

The headline was originally "U.S. Senate panel approves antitrust bill that would allow sideloading" (before we changed the URL from https://www.macrumors.com/2022/01/20/senate-panel-sideloadin....

The majority of experts will agree, that restricting sideloading is not 'necessary for the security'.

Depends how tight you want your security to be, risk tolerance varies.

If you don't want apps from outside the store on your phone then don't install any.

External apps should obviously require the device owner to authenticate in order to install. If this can happen without the device owner authenticating, that is a security problem, but so are a thousand other things, like copying your data off the device, that are no problem at all unless they can happen without authenticating.

That's an oversimplification. Lots of people in this thread have mentioned consequences of giving companies like Facebook the option of moving to sideload-only, and how that normalizes not having a quality/policy gatekeeper for installed apps. You can't enforce good app behavior purely from API design.

Facebook is a special case with its own solution:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30017171

Then you have a truth. The extent to which people want Apple to curate which apps they can install will control the amount of leverage Apple has to do it with. If people really want it, they'll put up a strong resistance to installing apps from other sources, even if Apple isn't forcing them to. Then Apple will have leverage to enforce good behavior. Or people will only switch to other high quality stores that also reject bad apps.

If it turns out hardly anybody cares, they won't. But then the argument that most people are buying Apple products specifically because they want a curated experience would disintegrate against empirical evidence.

No. One of the biggest lie I have always seen is that market moves accordingly to the users wants which, as developers, we must understand is absolute bull crap. Users aren’t binary vessels that act accordingly to if statements. They make compromises and comply with the default until the default inconveniences them extremely. One of the things businesses and we as developers have gotten really good at is hiding this until it’s too late until the Consumer is trapped and locked in.

People will do whatever it takes to use these big apps so long as the friction is perceived to not be to great and by the time the cons are experienced we will all be too entrenched. And no the law will not move to protect consumers, not until it’s far too late, just as this bill is.

You are now arguing that this is the case:

> If it turns out hardly anybody cares, they won't. But then the argument that most people are buying Apple products specifically because they want a curated experience would disintegrate against empirical evidence.

And then it goes both ways. If people go out and buy an iPhone because it's shiny and they're uninformed, without realizing it gives a huge corporation the ability to control what they can do with it while collecting rents on everything they buy and hiding all of that from them, that's at least as much of a problem as some app wants to show you ads for shoes because you did a search for shoes.

The solution for both is to do something about the information problem while still giving people choices, not declaring Apple to be Father and all living under corporate patriarchy.

If nobody cares then convince them to care or lose. Locking them in a gilded cage "for their own good" is not a valid solution.

Eh, even if so, how many years and millions of dollars before that is established in the highest applicable court and actually enforced? Until then Apple can do whatever, really.

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