Forcing Apple to allow third-party app stores isn't enough By March 6, 2024 Apple is expected to allow third-party app stores to distribute iOS apps, in Europe at least, because the company has been designated a "gatekeeper" under the European Digital Markets Act. "We are working with the EU on what safe compliance could look like," said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president …
It's that you have no choice. If Apple says "no, you don't get Untitled Goose Game" there's no recourse.
> Would you prefer Amazon, Google, Meta, or Microsoft curating your app options?
Actually, yes, I would. One of the reasons I don't use iDevices is Apple's walled garden. So I went to Google. I would consider Microsoft if they still made phones. And don't forget, Amazon made Android devices for a while with their own app store on it.
And yes, Google rejects stuff for the hell of it, just like Apple.
I use Google Play for 95% of my apps, but still Google says "YOU HAVE TO USE THE LATEST SDK!" and other stupid rules, and a lot of devs don't have the time to chase all the bugs in the bleeding edge. Then there's stuff Google won't allow, like the ad-blocking proxy AdAway, specifically because it threatens their ad revenue.
So all that is on F-Droid. I have the choice to go "OK, F-Droid is fine, and I don't feel they serve up too much malware or advertising"
"You also don't have free medical care, there is no such thing."
Ah you're one of the 'there's a cost to someone' brigade. Well yes it does not take a genius to know there is a cost to someone. In the UK with our NHS that's the great British Taxpayer. We have people here whose entire lives are funded by the taxpayer, so it is indeed free for them. Then we've got our lovely healthcare tourists. In any case it's free at the point of entry and we aren't badgered for our insurance details or have invoices for the ride in the ambulance if we need one.
"We have people here whose entire lives are funded by the taxpayer, so it is indeed free for them. Then we've got our lovely healthcare tourists."
Absolutely irrelevant to the article I just read, and nothing but an excuse for you to have a go at disadvantaged people.
People *exist* on benefits for a variety of reasons, and not all of those reasons are due to laziness or malice. Save it for the Daily Mail comments section.
"You also don't have free medical care, there is no such thing."
Well actually - it's free at point of use. There is no correlation between what someone pays and the care they receive.
This means that, to all intents and purposes healthcare is absolutely free to the 40% of adults who don't pay tax, and to all those children who don't either.
Yes - it means that those who do pay tax are funding a civilised service for a civilised country.
The danger is that it is being controlled politically by people who think they can profit from selling it off, as they did other national infrastructure.
Whilst technically true, it probably depends on how you count benefits.
The ONS publication "Effects of taxes and benefits on UK household income: financial year ending 2022" splits out direct and indirect (VAT and other duties) taxation.
"The proportion of people living in households receiving more in benefits than they paid in taxes decreased from 55.0% to 53.8% in FYE 2022."
If I look closely at figure 5 (which compares not deciles, but dodeciles (is that even a word?)) then it looks like the bottom two fifths of the population get more in *cash* benefits than they pay in indirect and direct taxation combined.
I can't find the raw data, but it looks like the third "fifth" get more in cash and indirect benefits than they pay in tax, it's not until the fourth and top "fifths" that the taxation significantly exceeds the cash & indirect benefits.
So I'm reasonably comfortable that the 40% is close enough for a discussion - not saying it's 40 rather than 39, but it's overwhelmingly likely more than 30...
Ah that old chestnut... It's free at the point of delivery. Every single working age person pays towards it's funding... a tiny fraction of their income. A few % a year.
Or
Pay thousands for coverage for you and your family each month and if you dare to get sick, you'll have to pay thousands more and we might just decide not to pay for your treatment anyway because we just this second decided it's not covered... so here's your 60000 bill for a tetanus shot, aspirin and a plaster of which you are now liable for 98% of it. Have the aspirin on us... what's that you've got a headache now... oh, you'll be needing some aspirin then... That's be another 12000 please.
But you'd rather have the second one than the first... because SOCIALISM BAD
Not all of the UK tax take comes from individuals. There's Corporation Tax, various import tariffs, some VAT (there's a bunch of companies who cannot register for VAT, and therefore cannot claim it back), duties on optional purchases, and so on.
Also, I think you might be underestimating the cost of health insurance in the US, but it's not something I have much experience of. Do you have figures available?
GJC
You can't.
For about $6k/year, you can get a basic health plan. That's going to include 1 free wellness visit a year, some discounts on doctor visits, some discounts on prescriptions, and an out of pocket max somewhere between $6k and $14k (that you have to pay in addition to your insurance if you happen to actually need it).
So your all in is going to be somewhere between $6k if you don't get sick and $20k if you do.
Oh, wait, you said FAMILY. Oops, that's more. Let's assume 2 parents, 2 teenage kids, both parents about 40, make enough money to not get help paying.
That's gonna start at around $18k for the cheapest premiums. Then if anybody gets sick it can go up to about $35.5k that you're out for the year.
So, maybe a bit more than 6k pounds.
And don't get me started on wait times for specialists. They're frequently longer here.
OK, so Google blocks apps that directly threaten advertising - which is over 100% of their total revenue so its obvious why they do so.
What class of apps is Apple blocking that threatens them? I can't think of anything. Sure, they block certain classes like emulators and browsers that don't use Webkit, but not because they threaten Apple's business model. You might disagree with why they block them, but allowing them wouldn't kill Apple's golden egg the way allowing ad blocking software on Android would kill Google's golden egg.
Occasionally when browsing Facebook if I touch the wrong thing I'll be taken to the App Store - its an ad for some game, inevitably. Hasn't happened for a while, because I guess they don't want ads that will take people out of the Facebook app for obvious reasons. With this change I imagine you'd be browsing and if you hit the wrong place you'll be treated to an iOS dialog box saying that third party app stores haven't been enabled and tell you how to do it. Or if you have already allowed Facebook's app store, no doubt it will automatically install that app and start it up - because Facebook will make sure they get a huge commission from advertisers for every install/use of that app. I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook doesn't end up getting more than Apple's 30% all told, between the advertising costs and installation commissions even if they don't collect anything post-install!
In a way I'm glad the EU is doing this. It won't affect me at all in the US, they will be the guinea pigs that will see any upsides and downsides of an Apple supported way for third party apps to be installed. They will be the ones suffering the consequences, and I'll get to read the articles at the Reg detailing the problems that result, and the angry comebacks from people claiming "smart people would have known not to install that app" and saying Apple should allow third party apps worldwide. Inevitably they will all be Android users saying that, I never see Apple customers screaming from the rooftops for third party app stores, it is always Android users.
In fact, some of their blocks are to help their revenue, including one of your own examples. They have, repeatedly, refused to allow in apps or even retroactively removed them when they competed with functionality they added to iOS. This isn't a one-time thing. Back when they first released Siri, they removed a few other voice assistants, even though the limitations of iOS meant that nobody was really going to use those anyway. They did the same thing eight years later when they released a tool to report on how often you or your children used the device and decided that others who had written apps to do that when Apple couldn't do it for you would now be banned. Now you may ask how that really did anything for Apple's revenue. The screen time example, although it's not a simple substitution, they were still indicating to developers not to compete with services Apple chose to make, which could prevent developers from trying things that compete with the services from which Apple really does collect revenue. The Siri example is much more straightforward: without the latest iPhone, you couldn't use Siri. By banning other voice assistants, they managed to tell everyone who wanted one that they'd have to buy new hardware.
The example of non-WebKit browsers is much more straightforward, even though you've mentioned it to the contrary. This is true for two reasons. If someone released a more powerful browser that could run web applications that are more complex than the ones Apple allows WebKit to run, that could allow a company to release their app to run in that, bypassing Apple's revenue collection. I'm sure many games would be happy to do so. That's a lot of money that Apple wouldn't get, but restricting the engine to WebKit will prevent a lot of those from running. The other side is that it makes competing web browsers less useful to the average user, meaning more of them will stick with Safari. Apple gets a large payment from Google every year to have Google as the default search engine in Safari. If people were using a different browser, that would be less valuable to Google and Apple would receive less money next year. They evidently decided that banning browsers completely wouldn't work, but they took steps to restrict their usage, such as restricting what they can do and filing any app with unrestricted browsing capability as an adult app that a child's account* could not install. I know at least one app that removed the in-app browser, essentially just calling WebKit, so that it could still be purchased for use in education.
* That is assuming that the child put in their real birth date when asked. When I was a child, I learned to put in a fake date to prevent tracking and that, if I was doing that, I might as well be an adult.
"What class of apps is Apple blocking that threatens them? I can't think of anything."
According to app store rules, anything that does something that an Apple device does already cannot be an app. Most famously, this means that web browsers cannot be installed via the app store, as they -gasp- might actually prove a superior experience to Safari, which comes installed with the device.
Yes, Chrome and Firefox have apps in the app store, but those aren't browsers - they're thin wrappers around Safari. There is no choice of browser on iOS - it's Safari or nothing. That's why Safari being underpowered is such a problem - another browser cannot just outcompete it, because it can't compete with it period. They've banned browser competition on iOS.
Because for an IT site, "wrappers around Safari' is so spectacularly incorrect, it's funny. Mozilla, Google and Microsoft, or whomever else wants to write [i]a browser[/i] can add, within reason, any functionality they want, provided that they use (in simple terms that some that this 'just a wrapper for Safari) WebKit. So downvoted for lazy, incorrect comment and you for being a coward and the MAGA comment.
You have a limited idea of what “functionality” means. The only changes that are allowed are in the navigation interface - anything inside the page content is beyond your control. Rendering, Javascript, network resource access, is all the same code as Safari; you have no choice. You get to put your pretty UI on top of it, but you cannot fix its errors, or its poor performance, or its lack of standard behaviours.
Whatever it says on the icon, all iOS web-browsers are functionally clones of Safari, because you can only build them from the same components as Safari uses. “Wrappers around Safari” is not an incorrect summary of this, even if it uses “Safari” as a shorthand for “WebKit and the various iOS libraries that were used to write Safari”.
Not really the same thing... The Chromium libraries got to their position of dominance by being pretty good, and by being easy to adapt. Nobody forced Chromium onto browser-devs - they used it by choice. If Mozilla gets better again, people can ship browsers based on that instead, and none of the desktop OS vendors will bitch about it. (And most browsers are forks of Chromium, so can change anything they want to)
The situation Apple gives you on iOS is different. There, Apple’s stack is dominant not because it’s better overall, but because you are simply not allowed to use anything else.
> What class of apps is Apple blocking that threatens them? I can't think of anything. Sure, they block certain classes like emulators and browsers that don't use Webkit, but not because they threaten Apple's business model.
Emulators certainly do threaten Apple's business model.
Release a free open-source game emulator that can play freely available (albeit legally dubious) game ROMs and Apple gets nothing from you to play Pac-Man. They only get the $99 developer fee.
The only option is for Namco to fund development of an official Pac-Man iOS port as a 'native' app that can then charge players upfront or via In-App Purchases and Apple gets 15/30% of the revenue.
There is already an Apple-supported way for third-party apps to be installed. On MacOS.
The setting to enable it is burried several layers deep in the settings app, much like it is in Android.
If that is how they implement it, I am OK with that.
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They have definitely let Safari lag way behind other browsers, that much is not in question. Whether that was because, in a somewhat ironic reversal, they wanted to prevent people from using web apps directly instead of apps that are wrappers around WebKit and/or encourage app developers to make fully featured native apps... that we don't really know, and unless someone breaks their NDA to come forward and say, "I was there, here's what the reason was," or maybe it comes out as part of a lawsuit, we'll never likely know for sure. I mean, you have other possibilities like, they own a pretty significant chunk of the worldwide mobile device market, so no matter how much Safari sucks, most web developers are forced to design around it, so why waste a lot of resources on it? Basically the IE6 modus operandi. That's a very plausible explanation that doesn't involve some shadowy cabal secretly deciding to screw over users. I don't know which, if any, are correct, but personally I'm inclined to go with a "fuck it, we're lazy" explanation over a conspiracy theory most days.
When asked people always hand wave and say how it was behind in the standards, but what standards, specifically, are being used in Chrome that Safari doesn't support?
Because I see stupid shit Google is pushing in web standards like allowing browsers access to USB or webcams and that is definitely 100% something I NEVER want my browser to even have support coded in for! If it CAN do that, then you have to worry about bugs accidentally allowing it - or Google post "do not evil" making it something you cannot disable or cannot rely on the "disable" switch to fully disable without exceptions for their own websites.
How about the HTML and CSS standards as set by the W3C?
And, just to use your "scary" example, pretty much every browser already supports accessing webcams. That's how you can have Electron apps like Teams actually do what they do. They've been able to do this for literally years. You can just buy a webcam with a physical shutter, or I've seen people selling a shutter that you can affix over a built-in webcam lens. Doesn't stop them from potentially using the microphone, but if you're dancing around in your underwear during business hours, you don't necessarily need to worry about your coworkers being able to see it. If you're really paranoid, there's the low tech solution of a little electrical tape.
How about the HTML and CSS standards as set by the W3C?
More handwaving, as expected.
WHICH HTML/CSS standards in particular - i.e. what are these particular bits of CSS and HTML allowing the browser to do that websites are doing with Chrome that they cannot do with Safari? Because saying Safari doesn't support HTML and CSS is not only a lie, it is cluelessness akin to saying that "iPhone 15 doesn't support Wifi" because it doesn't support Wifi 7, or maybe supports Wifi 6E incompletely, leaving some parts of that standard unimplemented.
HTML and CSS are constantly updated with more crap they can do, but websites look pretty much the same today as they did 5 or 10 years ago. I fail to see how any of it is necessary, versus make work to justify the existence of the standards committees coming up with it. Convince me otherwise, show specific things added to those standards in the past few years, and what they allow that makes for a better web experience for us end users. If you can't do that, you have no room to complain about Safari not supporting the latest additions to those standards - you are just parroting what others have said without any justification for those claims.
More handwaving, as expected.
Which you follow up with hyperbole, strawman arguments, and a whole lot of goalpost shifting.
Just admit it: you're a neo-luddite. No judgment, except for the fact that you seem to make being ignorant of things that have changed over the last decade or so as a badge of honor. You seem completely ignorant to things like web browsers have had access to webcams for literally years because you keep bringing that example up time after time. I'll go out on a limb and assume when that was being proposed is when you stopped keeping abreast of changes, so that would be, what, like a decade or so since you checked out of things? Sure it can be abused, but it can also be really handy. No need to download Obscure Videochat App X if interviewing for a job, just as one example.
If you want to say that you've hit that magic age when you realize that the world has passed you by, and you don't understand pop culture anymore... I'm right there with ya, buddy. It happens to all of us, and there's nothing wrong with admitting it. I blame all these ignorant people in the world who don't just give me things because I'm so adorable. It means I have to work for a living and don't have as much free time or energy to keep up with trends. Pretending like you're still up on current trends, when you're clearly not, however, is just embarrassing and painful to watch. You want to say, "I miss the days when web pages were actually web pages, not these giant monstrosities of JavaScript and CSS," that's a perfectly valid opinion to have. I may not agree with it, but I can respect it as an expression of your personal preference. However, trying to claim that there haven't been any useful improvements in HTML and CSS specs, or that Apple's WebKit engine is lagging quite a ways behind Firefox and Chrome when it comes to supporting those standards, is a factually incorrect statement. Maybe they're not useful to you, but to claim that because something has no value because you have no use for it is more than a little over the top don't you think?
The only thing out of this I will actually judge you on, is how you seem actively proud of your ignorance on topics. I cannot respect anyone who thinks ignorance is a good thing.
As I thought you can't provide any actual information, you are just knee jerking on what you read elsewhere from whiny webadmins who read about some shiny new standard and were bummed they couldn't use it. So you result to insults and name calling when you are called out for evidence you can't provide.
Another useless loser without any ability to back up his arguments.
Is that Apple bans things like Kodi and emulators because they can read and execute other files. Granted Kodi could probably offer to distribute a version of their app without the Python add-ons support, which is basically the approach MrMC took, but still, it seems like there are cases where some exceptions should be granted.
Other than that, I'm rather ambivalent, but app developers might prefer having their apps available on other stores where they may only take a 25% cut or something. For some big name apps, that can potentially add up to a decent chunk of change. I can think of one company, currently engaged in a bitter lawsuit with Apple, that would probably be one of the first to release a competing app store the second Apple is legally required to offer it.
I am curious to see if Apple will just do like they did with USB-C and make it universal across all regions, or if, since it's software, they'll try and limit it to only devices in the EU.
I can think of one company, currently engaged in a bitter lawsuit with Apple, that would probably be one of the first to release a competing app store the second Apple is legally required to offer it
The problem is that a fair number (probably the majority) of iPhone users will be unwilling to enable the "allow third party app stores" switch for anyone, and click past the warnings Apple will no doubt have before enabling a third party app store. It only takes 30% fewer customers, even if you keep 100% of their revenue, and Epic comes out behind. They will never be satisfied until Apple is required to pre-install and pre-enable leading third party app stores by default, including theirs, so that people can just click on a link to download an Epic title with no settings changes or interaction beyond clicking "install".
No problem. I understand your concern, and you can deal with it. Simply don't install third-party applications. I have Android devices, and the only third-party app I'll install on them is FDroid (I consider the apps I get through FDroid to be included). There are many others, but since I don't trust that they're reliable, I don't install them. You can make that choice, and I advise you to do so if you're not sure what you're installing. It doesn't mean that I shouldn't be able to install something, though.
The problem wouldn't be companies like Epic. If you want to install Epic's app store to get their games that's your choice. There are plenty of other games out there for those who want to stick with Apple's app store (I'm assuming Epic removes their games from Apple's app store)
But what if Facebook creates their own app store, and drop their app from Apple's app store? Not to get around the 30% fee which doesn't affect them, but to get around rules like the tracking protection Apple instituted that upset Zuck so much. We could have a world where every major app like Facebook, Twitter, and so on have their own app store so they don't have to obey any of Apple's rules that try to protect people's privacy or whatever. At some point you are effectively forced to enable third party app stores if you want to run more than a handful of niche apps, and then you have Zuck and Musk bribing developers of other apps to come to their app store because we take only a 10% cut (in exchange for getting a bunch of tracking data from your customers to help us sling ads!)
People will become used to downloading apps from those stores and of course since they are run by asshole billionaires who just want more money they will allow any app without vetting so it eventually becomes a scam and malware free for all. If this happens we will still have idiots telling us that's better than the days when Apple had a walled garden.
You just need to look at China's Android app store situation to see the future that could await if the floodgates are opened.
...really is truly a free-for-all online. Little to no regulation and no genuine desire to fix it. Does anyone seriously suggest that Facebook is trying to eliminate harmful ads when they make them money? This could be solved by having real moderators moderate the ads, not the low-end AI they seemingly employ. I see ads all the time that are obviously illegal in the UK, or at least bordering on the very dodgy. But there is no will to get rid of them. However, by employing more moderators, they'll just make slightly fewer billions of dollars profit a year.
And that's just Facebook. Even Apple don't protect you. An example: we often tell our customers to download Microsoft Authenticator, but the first item to appear in the App Store search when searching for Microsoft Authenticator is an app called "Authenticator app" that has a very similar icon to Microsoft's one. Except this app wants to charge you £4.49 a week. Why does Apple allow this? Google's Play Store is much the same.
Something has to be done like with all other forms of media, and basically it boils down to heavy regulation. We can't trust the 'gatekeeps' to moderate stuff when doing so would not be in their favour, so we need to enforce it. Globally.
My view is that if they did eliminate harmful ads, people might actually trust the ads a bit more, and Facebook could actually make more money from them.
At the moment, you have some big brands saying "we don't advertise on Facebook, if you see an ad for our product on there, it is a fake". I, probably like most people, can't actually remember which brands have and have not said that, so I work on the assumption that everything is a fake.
Possibly, but there are a lot of people who haven't heard those warnings and don't have an ingrained skepticism about ads as you and I appear to. Would 99% of users trusting the ads, but no payments from scammers be more or less than 97% of users trusting the ads, and you get to charge the scammers too? Also, since it won't be possible to entirely eliminate scams from ads, they probably wonder how many people still won't trust their ads even if they try to moderate them. They know that, no matter how much they spend, there will be some scam ads and therefore warnings about them, and they've chosen to forget about all these possibilities and simply take the money whose source is obvious. I wouldn't expect them to change course any time soon.
Yeah the search in Apple's app store really could stand some improvement. When I hear about an app I always have to double and triple check that I'm downloading the app I want, because anything popular there will always be scammers putting out similar sounding apps to fool people into downloading the wrong one.
I'm not sure how to solve that problem, anything Apple did to try to fix it is probably going to be viewed as sticking their oars in even more and encourage regulators to go after them. Due to complaints by both legit apps that get misjudged and unfairly penalized and scam apps that will claim they are the "little guy trying to compete and Apple is holding us down!" - and bureaucrats won't know the difference.
Actually it’s a complete coincidence. iTunes and XBox vouchers and supermarket gift-cards are used to launder the proceeds of all sorts of online and in-person crime. For example, these are also used to convert stolen credit/debit cards into an easily resaleable commodity (steal a debit card, use it to buy a couple of these gift-cards in the local Tesco using contactless-pay before the owner realises their card is gone, throw away the debit-card and sell on the vouchers)
And Microsoft doesn’t make TeamViewer.
And the scammers don’t use TeamViewer.
(The scammers need something the victim is unlikely to have installed, because they need to be present during the setup so they can get the access password - if TeamViewer is already installed, chances are the victim doesn’t have that password to hand, most likely because the original TeamViewer install was done by whichever tech-support friend/relative who remotes in and fixes things for them).
Perhaps your're thinking of Microsoft Teams, which is a business messaging app similar to Salesforce's Slack.
TeamViewer is a remote access/administration tool or RAT by TeamViewer AG, very similar in function to various VNC software packages (e.g RealVNC or TightVNC). It uses it's servers to connect people so you don't have to expose the necessary ports to make it work. Ease of use being ideal for targeting the technologically unsophisticated.
From a person that drop Android because of the mess that the Google store for apps became through the years, I would prefer Apple to handle everything. They do what they do beautifully. They should do as they want, already! I didn't like Apple because of the walled garden. I used Android for 5 years until I had enough. I gave Apple a chance and what a difference!! I want someone to keep an eye on the idiots. Google is not good at that cause they don't give a damn! I don't want the Apple store to become another Google! Android is a mess! The android phones are a mess! People maybe willing to spend their time fighting with that mess. I got tired of it! People are not willing to talk about that! I have an Iphone 13 and it has been a joy to have. I don't want to spend my life trying to fix Android Apps and the jerks that sell the phones that think that after one year of owning one of their phone I should waste my money to buy another because they will not update them any longer. What is with people trying to destroy apple? Why do people want to make Apple another looser like Google that don't give a damn about anything besides making money with advertising? Please spare me with the ...omg...we need to break apple to take the mess of other payments and to break their security and to destroy it because they don't have the game that I want in the store. It is easy, go to android and everything Google. I have been there and done that. What a bloody mess! I don't want to spend my life fixing a phone like I did with Android! Why should I? No one should! Yes, I know Apple is not perfect, but it comes close to it after using Android phone for 5 years and the companies that sell them! bleh to all of them. This is just my experience, very bad experience I had for the last few years! I was reluctant to try an Iphone but then I broke down and did! My phone works perfectly. The App store has what i need and it works beautifully. I should have tried it earlier! Open system are a mess with all the companies pointing finger at each other. Thank you very much, but I will stick with Apple. They make the OS and the Hardware and if there is a finger to point it will go to them and they can't hide! My two cents!
I guess if I had bunch of recurring disposable income the maintained independent of my labor, I wouldn't mind renting solutions from Apple. It's not like I would have to pay for it I could just let others pay for while I enjoy the passive income of their efforts.
Unfortunately my income is not subsidized by scraping off of others I have to work for all my money.
I find it's a wash because my Apple phones last longer than my Android phones did. Partly this is the result of repair services being available for Apple phones that aren't really for most Android phones. The fact that Apple actually bothers to put out OS updates for their phones helps too.
It's not about the app.
It's about the hardware which only realizes it's full potential outside of Apple administrated soft-limitations.
Currently purchasing an apple product is like buying a house in which you must further negotiate by the square inch for use of that purchased house, pay a premium for sitting versus standing and never being allowed in to the kitchen while still having purchased that kitchen.
It's bullying on the commercial scale.
If apple is to retain control in an appropriate manner they must cease to use the purchase model and operate their business as a leasing service, with all the tax implications for Apple that comes along with it.
Unfortunately apple as a company has grown arrogant and are not likely to correct themselves so must be corrected from external forces if it is ever to remove the direct conflict between reported relationship and and reality of relationship.
Who is this “we” to whom you’re referring? The more-or-less It-savvy typical Reg reader, or the billion or so yutzes with smartphones around the world?
I realize that Apple is far from perfect in many ways, but they do a better job (that is, any job at all) at protecting their users from crapware. Far from perfect, but they at least try. Imagine those billion in-duh-visuals loading their phones with all the crapware that’s out there, and will have a boom when the EU regs go into effect.
The same argument existed 120 years ago about the unwashed masses and the horseless carriage.
And although cars crash into each other far more often than horses ever did, somehow civilization not only survived but actually moved forward.
Your elitism is shining a little too bright if the sun total of your argument is “Freedom is too dangerous for the masses”.
Perceived necessity is the mother of invention.
To become more capable you have to stop carrying them so that they're forced to learn to walk.
It's not the most individuals lack the potential to be the responsible and self-capable.
It's that given the perception that somebody else has it covered , they'll never be bothered to mature their personal capabilities because they don't think they need to.
On at angential note, the danger of sideloaded apps and updates is very well demonstrated by Sonos and its POS software.
Lovely hardware, completely cr*p software which locks you out of your own system until its done an update - updates which are notoriously buggy, lock up frequently leaving an unusable sound system (three weeks currently) and no way to get around the garbage update until they fix it.
At least if the update is garbage, Apple can tell them to fix it or shut it down, but sideloaded updates which fail arent identifiable until after the system is bricked.
God I hate Sonos and wish I had another system which was more reliable.
Quote:
People who use software deserve part of the blame, except perhaps for those who use only free and open source software and never stray.
Unquote.
Wrong!
The reason we have so much 'ad supported' software is that FOSS destroyed the traditional business model for software developers. (ie: Make something and sell it.) Users expect software for free now.
Go ahead, write a new App for the Apple or Google App Store. Good luck selling that App, because all of the alternatives are 'free' (meaning 'ad supported'). So the only path to revenue is, usually, to join in and sell ads too.
Then we complain about data harvesting and ads. And we don't like subscriptions either. But we expect 'free' Apps.
It's gonna get worse before it continues to get worse again.
It’s not FOSS, although FOSS has done a lot to encourage “free as in beer” software. The rise of adware on mobile is down to decisions Apple made about pricing, and Google’ day-job as an advertising broker.
What it is the the App Store pricing model. The first, obvious push-factor is the high commission. If I published an app and sell it for $10 a pop, Apple took $3. So, whatever price I set to meet my own cost of living, I had to raise it to account for Apple’s markup, and the higher pricing means fewer customers and possibly less revenue overall. On the other hand, if I gave the app for free and used in-app advertising, then I save that 30% commission, get a much larger pool of users, and chances are I’ll earn more.. and it’s recurring revenue.
The second push factor is less obvious unless you were actually an iOS app developer, and that is that for most of the App Store’s history, version upgrades were free and automatic, regardless of scale. You write an app in 2008, a lot of people download it, you get money, great. Then it needs to be updated for the next iOS SDK (remember, you can‘t submit apps on very old SDKs - Apple pushes the burden of app compatibility onto developers), so you do that: time spent, but happy users, and you pick up a couple of new sales, so great. Your app starts falling down the sales charts? The best way to gain visibility again was to submit an updated version, so you add features and post again, and get a few more sales. The future looks golden...
But fast forward a few years, and your app, that has become your full-time job, and is unrecognisably improved since its first version, is just not paying anymore. The app market is now stagnant - anyone who wanted your app has bought it, and you realise you’ve been trapped into doing free maintenance programming in exchange for a handful of new sales each year. Meanwhile, your electrical supplier doesn’t take “#1 iPhone Banjo App” as payment for bills. So... there’s now a “Free” version of the app. With ads. Ads pay you every month.
(To revive a bit of suppressed history: Apple also tried to get onto the in-app ads bandwagon with its “iAds” product. You never hear about iAds anymore, and Apple now pretends that it was far too moral to ever use user information to target advertising, but if iAds had got any traction at all when launched—it did not—Apple would be all for “responsible advertising”)
On Android, ad-supported was pushed as an equal business model to paid from day one, because Google doesn’t care if it takes its cut from a purchase fee, or via an ad-placement fee.
This is a remarkably cogent article. It does a particularly good job of explaining in ways the non-technical SHOULD be able to comprehend how this new area of human reality has been weaponized in ways that would never be tolerated for centuries old infrastructure.
For once I have very litttle to add other than my opinion that the technocratic totalitarians running the 1st world countries are unlikely to give up this infinitely effective bludgeon for controlling the voting public. They got you a USB-C port; that is probably the extent of what they are willing to throw the serfs this decade.
I give people wanting the freedom to use their device the same answer I gave those saying "Shouldn't vendors all be forced to use a standard connector?" I point out "Apple is the only one not doing this, just don't use their products."
Really, for what you pay for that Apple device, you could buy in some cases 2-3 android devices with similar specs, or buy 1 android device with even higher specs; put whatever software you want on it (or don't, Google has an app store if going freeform is too overwhelming), and freely interchange your USB-C cables between them (unless you get one that's pretty old, then it'll be microUSB.)
int main(enter the void)... The Register 
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