They could also just offer direct app downloads from facebook.com, instagram.com, etc.
So what? This feels like a nothingburger to me. Given how sideloading is a much less pleasant experience on even Android (and we can expect Apple to do worse), Facebook wouldn't leave the main App Store without an earth-shattering reason.
And no, entitlements mean nothing without enforcement.
I expect that to be a operating system feature that works regardless of how the application was developed or installed.
You pay 40% extra for that. The creator gets $100, Apple gets 40, you see $140 sticker price. It is a nice feature, but how many would pay 40% extra for that? And if many wanted to pay 40% extra for subscriptions to have them cancellable, I'm sure there would already be companies doing that.
[0]: https://hothardware.com/news/facebook-claims-10b-revenue-hit...
There's an inherent trade off here where adding safeguards to protect users will make the life of developers more difficult. Balancing these two concerns is hard.
I find that Apple mostly strikes the balance right, and so I choose to be their customer. People who disagree have other options available on the market today.
The argument that Apple provides more safeguards is a bit flimsy in my opinion. I honestly don't know what people think Apple is protecting them from, especially when Apple's own features have led to people being stalked (air tags).
Also, most iPhone users that I know tend to have bought their iPhone for cosmetic/style related reasons, or the camera. They don't seem to be all that privacy conscious, especially when their phone is loaded up with every social media app on the planet, including Tiktok!
We've not seen iOS ransomware yet.
https://www.wired.com/story/android-ransomware-worrying-evol...
Although we have seen things that impersonate iOS ransomware.
https://medium.com/macoclock/ransomware-on-ios-a-clever-tric...
Note that this is another area where you have this user vs. developer trade off.
- GPL or other copyleft licenses will put the user's rights above the developer's.
- MIT or BSD-style licenses will favor the developer rights above the end user's.
"open and unrestrictive as possible" is all relative depending on whether you are a user or a developer.
> The argument that Apple provides more safeguards is a bit flimsy in my opinion.
My point is that this is a market where people value different things. I value the safeguards Apple is putting in. I find they do a better job at it than their competition. But I fully understand that other people do not think so, or that they value other things more.
What I don't particularly like is some of these people turning to the State to force Apple to do things differently.
https://www.fsf.org/news/2010-05-app-store-compliance
Maybe? Might have changed since then.
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9500/is-apple...
One could imagine that if the platform was opened to side-loading, the first third party app store to gain popularity would not be one from Meta or Google, but an F-Droid analogue for FOSS hobbyists and purists.
iOS has a lower-cost of support, with lower fragmentation and higher churn.
With enough profit on the line, more companies would be willing to suffer the lower user acquisition rate that would come from side-loading.
Put it behind 10 hidden menus inside settings and facebook will not be able to explain to your average user that they have to enable this shady looking setting to download facebook. They can of course choose to ignore half of the US market, but that’s hardly a sane decision.
Wouldn’t Twitter, Facebook etc in turn demand that those third-party apps be taken down from the App Store?
And even if they didn’t, how is any third party going to keep up with Twitter/Facebook/etc API changes.
And what about push notifications? Those would not work with a third-party app installed via the App Store unless Twitter/Facebook/etc explicitly made it so that they supported that on their end.
For example, here’s a blog post from 2016 about how the Riot app for iOS is able to get push notifications when you self-host a Matrix server. https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2016/12/11/riots-magical-push-n...
No? Why would they? Third-party clients are alive and well on the App Store today, and have been for years.
> And even if they didn’t, how is any third party going to keep up with Twitter/Facebook/etc API changes.
They've done a fine job of it so far.
> And what about push notifications? Those would not work with a third-party app installed via the App Store unless Twitter/Facebook/etc explicitly made it so that they supported that on their end.
It does? Check out Tweetbot or Apollo for Reddit. Both have push notifications that work fine.
Twitter has been gradually killing their APIs.[0] Reddit doesn't offer APIs for the newer features, like polls.
[0] - https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2018/...
This is a key feature stopping 3rd party apps being competitive.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/allowing-app...
Apple has no incentive to let other companies get away with bad behavior. And so far, their own bad behavior has been much better than other companies.
Here's a question though: isn't that also a reason for Apple to hobble web browsers? Everything you're saying about app security and developers refusing to follow Apples rules also applies to progressive web apps unless Apple commits to making its browser meaningfully less powerful than native apps, and (importantly) meaningfully less powerful in ways that Microsoft/Amazon/Facebook actually care about.
That means you've kind of got to commit to the idea that web apps on iOS never get notification support, they never get intent support with other apps or the ability to handle opening resources, they never get support for good background audio or timers/alarms, they never get reliable clientside storage for offline usage without accounts. It's not just that you can't do low-level complicated sensor/GPU stuff, Apple has to hobble browser capabilities that make it good for reading news or setting timers.
Is that a world you're comfortable with? I know a reasonable number of people on HN are comfortable with that idea, just because they don't want the web to have application capabilities in the first place. But a lot of other people bring up the web as an alternative to the app store (Apple itself is fond of making that argument), and it makes me think -- if the web ever is a viable alternative for good apps on iOS, then the situation you're worried about already exists, doesn't it? Instead of the NYT distributing a native app that you subscribe to with Apple's system that gives you easy cancellation, instead you would get a PWA reader app that you pin to your homescreen and you subscribe through their web interface. The only way that doesn't work is if the experience of reading the NYT and getting notifications about new articles and saving your account details is a worse experience inside of a browser.
If what you're describing about companies removing user choice or forcing users to accept worse alternatives -- if what you're describing is an inevitable result of any serious, alternative user-facing app platform on iOS, then the only way Apple avoids that situation with the web is if it consciously commits to Safari being perpetually behind on standards and perpetually systemically and deliberately made worse as an app platform. That could either be through making sure the browser always lacks features or it could be achieved through other UX designs like blocking PWAs from showing up in app lists, making them unreliable to install, blocking their installation entirely in some cases, etc...
Is that an outcome that Apple users are comfortable with?
I have push notifications disabled on my phone for (almost) literally every single app except my email client and Element/Signal.
I don't get why the web is special, push notifications in native apps are just as abused as they are on the web. Even built-in apps abuse them. We could just as easily make an argument that native apps should have them disabled as well.
But regardless, this kind of goes back to my point. Okay, let's say that every web app abuses push notifications. What we're saying is that we're not going to have progressive web apps. Any app that needs push notifications is going to be a native app, even if it's something as simple as a messaging client or a reader app.
There was a really strong movement around phone platforms a while back where people were asking, "why is this an app in the first place, why isn't this a website?" Well, you can't have that if you don't trust alternative app stores to some degree, because the answer is that any version of the web that is powerful enough to provide meaningful substitutes for native apps is an alternative app store that's outside of Apple's control/moderation.