Apple's malicious compliance: sideloading will remain impossible on your iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Apple's malicious compliance: sideloading will remain impossible on your iPhone

tuta.com

44 pointsmrzool19 comments

The mandatory .5 Euro charge per app means that an app store for free/OSS apps can't exist. :(

If our (sqlitebrowser.org) desktop application was instead an iPhone application, then our ~180k downloads a month would have us hitting the 1 million downloads limit in ~6 months.

This new Apple policy seems super anti-competitive.

That’s if you wanted to use a separate App Store than apple’s.

My question for you is, if you’re a free app, what’s your incentive to move AppStore?

Ps. Love the desktop app. One of my first installs on any new computer or fresh format.

The incentive that springs to mind for me is OSS apps using a license Apple doesn't allow with their store. eg licenses of the GPL variety

With the new separate app store concept, it should be possible to have one(s) allowing GPL apps.

Except this mandatory fee per app kills the whole thing outright. :(

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And thanks. :)

Many incentives:

- no limit on the kind of apps possible (browsers, emulators etc)

- no $100 per year fee just to be able to publish the app you offer for free

- not having to deal with random Apple rejections of updates

And indeed the licence thing mentioned too. Also reproducible builds a la F-Droid.

There is nothing stopping you from compiling and packaging an open source app and charging $0.50 for it. If you can’t convince people to pay $0.50 for the convenience, maybe it’s not valuable?

Admittedly, the $0.50 per year sucks and causes you to have a subscription for a free app.

> If you can’t convince people to pay $0.50 for the convenience, maybe it’s not valuable?

Then your app store needs to have payment facilities, and the ability to deal with the various things that entails (more lucrative target for hackers, charge backs, etc).

As you say, it's not impossible. It just adds a lot of complication and friction to something that would otherwise be reasonably simple and friction free.

Lots of people try out multiple (free) OSS packages on the desktop because there's no $ cost, just their time. Charging money means less people trying stuff out. :/

99% of the time, you shouldn’t be doing your own payments and outsourcing that to another SaaS.

The entire problem with the current App Store ecosystem and the internet in general is that there is not enough focus on the simple concept of you should charge for services and people should pay for value.

You're not a fan of OSS projects?

I’m not a fan of restrictive open source licenses. There are plenty of open source licenses that are compatible with the App Store.

Its only certain licenses that don’t allow yoh to submit them to the App Store.

I have a bunch of open source projects on my GitHub profile that are all MIT licensed. You can do anything you want with them.

Honestly though, the only reason I have any open source work is because when I worked in the Professional Services department at AWS, there was an easy to use process to open source all of my client work after removing the client specific code.

https://github.com/aws-samples

I then forked it to my own repo when I left

the article repeatedly gets this wrong.

> With new EU rules and regulations, Apple is now required to allow the sideloading of apps to iOS devices

The DMA requires side loading or alternative app stores. Apple chose the latter.

Article doesn’t say anything new.

I would say the title is using a strong word like "impossible" and it is not true. Even now, you can sideload apps if you have a developer account (or certificate, which you can generate a dozen using one account). This will stay happening. There is even a market for these certificates. Yes, this is ridiculous and annoying, and you pay apple more for freedom to use your device. But it is not impossible.

Technically you don't even have to pay them, it's just your free developer account certificates are only valid for a week, so you constantly need to re-add the app to your phone via a cable/Xcode.

You can install an application called ReProvision that can automate this on the device itself. It will need to be installed the same way as the app you want to re-sign though.

And then you can only install 2 apps in total since the reprovisioning app takes one of the three slots.

Apple carefully designed this process to be as annoying as possible.

That's pretty neat, I had no idea about ReProvision! I know there's an "App Store" that runs on macOS that does something similar (but of course requires the periodic reconnection). I have a paid developer account, but I'm always wary of trying out these "alternative methods" of app distribution in fear of somehow affecting my paid account (which is how I make my living).

Yeah, I don't know why so many places say it's impossible.

Guess I've been doing the impossible for about a decade now...

And we have tools today that make it not very painful at all at least IMO.

Is it still freedom at that point though?

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