I'm wondering what the people who say that no sideloading is a feature have to say now.
Tomorrow I can guarantee they will immediately cut costs and ship out piles of sideloaded garbage
Sure, it’s up to the consumer to choose, but they’re not going to write that on the package
Yeah except that's absolute nonsense because you could already do that on Android and yet I recall only one instance where a developer explicitly asked me to sideload an app(for Fortnite, no less). It's going to remain an incredible niche that will affect 0.00001% users at most.
Clearly they believe that number is much higher.
(in hindsight I shouldn't have said it will affect 0.0001% users - maybe I should have said that I guess only that many users will choose to sideload software instead)
iOS’ advantage is it’s walled garden. It’s a place where a lot of trust is curated for the nontechnical. This evaporates that.
What appears good for the highly technical is not always good for the user.
We can’t be expecting grandmothers to check signatures, ensure an app has certificates pinned, trust that a company won’t let its update domains lapse, and understand public key crypto to set up their GPG keys for a messaging alternative much less handle them properly. Hell I’ve had senior engineers send me their private GPG key when requesting their public key.
Your argument was that the moment there is no longer a need to be constrained by Apple's App Store rules, your Samsung dishwasher will make you install its app through Shady Store Incorporated, because it's easier, and it'll make your grandma install it.
Except that doesn't happen. Noone has done that. The highest profile case is Fortnite, and it makes you install it either through Epic Games, or the Samsung Galaxy Store, and the only reason for that is that Google feels entitled to taking 30% of transactions too.
As a technical user, it doesn't bother me. When I consider many of my friends, it does bother me—most of them I know with non-iOS devices have complained about their devices moving slowly due to the junkware and the third-party app stores they've acquired (never F-Droid, always something sketchy). When I think about family members, I think about how web push notifications have rendered two of their phones borderline unusable.
Most "consumer-friendly" choices the EU makes are actually about developer & manufacturer profit. This isn't consumer-aligned. It eliminates the profit motive that's left iOS devices as more or less the only LTS phones on the market.
I don't like Apple products that much—I use Linux on my cell phone, but at the same time I refuse to adopt cheap rhetorical tactics to make app developers wealthier.
If they really wanted things to be consumer-friendly, they'd ban proprietary software. Instead, they make it easier for proprietary software developers to make profit off of users.