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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

I think that's unlikely to happen, for a host of consumer experience and market viability reasons:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30280457

One should note that Meta could create their own Android third party store right now, like Amazon has (pretty much only to support their Kindle Fire devices), yet they haven't had any interest in doing so. One could claim that's because Android users don't pay as much for apps as iOS users do, but that's still a lot of users worldwide, and a lot of data that could be tracked. Yet they don't bother to.

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On the other hand the Play store is not being policed for days tracking and many apps are stuffed to the brim with tracking libraries.

So they really don't have a need to do this.

Apple can still make it difficult for them though. They can just remove the forbidden APIs and sandbox apps better. If they do this they don't even have to bother to review as thoroughly anymore.

The big benefit is that Apple no longer gets to decide what type of apps are allowed and what aren't.

The sandbox is enforced by App Store review. I don't mean the runtime enforcement, but rather the sandbox that apps opt into. It is the App Store that rejects apps when they have attempted to include sandbox entitlements that they have no business having.

Access to your photos, contacts, device identifiers, etc are all gated on sandbox entitlements, and if you remove the App Store review process then you remove the gate the prevents an app from saying "give me read/write access to the whole file system", "give me read/write access to the photos on the device", etc

Perhaps Apple can just hardcode such restrictions into the operating system itself

That’s what the sandbox is for. Without specific entitlements an app can’t access any data outside of its container.

The OS cannot decide when it should or should not trust the entitlements, because the whole point is that an app has some modicum of trust.

Apple could always enforce a more restrictive, hardened security model for non-official App Store distributed apps. Again, they control the platform- they could change it at will to accommodate new use cases.

The whole point of this is that it does not allow that.

Allowing sideloading and independent app stores doesn't say anything about adding restrictions on third party app permissions.

Yes that's how it works now.

That can be changed of course. They can make it work just like on Android where the user has to give permission for things like filesystem access.

The point of the law is to bring more control away from Apple and to the user.

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