Who would’ve thought? This isn’t going to fly with the EU.
Article 5.3 of the Digital Markets Act (DMA): “The gatekeeper shall not prevent business users from offering the same products or services to end users through third-party online intermediation services or through their own direct online sales channel at prices or conditions that are different from those offered through the online intermediation services of the gatekeeper.”
Friendly reminder that you can sideload apps without jailbreaking or paying for a dev account using TrollStore, which utilises core trust bugs to bypass/spoof some app validation keys, on a iPhone XR or newer on iOS 14.0 up to 16.6.1. (ANY version for iPhone X and older)
Install guide: Trollstore
IOS is the worst operating system i have ever used
Why do people buy it?
I wanted a fast laptop without a fan and with a big haptic feedback touchpad. Happy to hear about non-Apple options for this.
These are fascinating requirements. Mind explaining?
Fast, quiet, big touch pad. What’d fascinating or out of the world here? These are just kind of things most people want, not everyone wants to manually update their kernel or whatever.
I’ve got an Asus ZenBook (specifically this one that came out last year). It does have a fan, but it’s pretty quiet. I barely notice it most of the time. It’s pretty fast, too. Don’t know how large of a touchpad you want, though.
Doesn’t look bad, but I’m guessing it doesn’t have a haptic touchpad? (Clicking is equally easy anywhere on the touchpad, because there isn’t actually a click, the click is simulated by a vibrator.)
No, there’s no haptic touchpad. TBH, I didn’t even know that was a thing.
Think you might have confused iOS and MacOS
MacOS is even worse than iOS. Have to use it for work. And while the hardware is the best I’ve ever used, the software is complete garbage.
Oh yeah, I completely concur. I don’t get the ux argument either, I always find it to be incredibly slow and frustrating to use whenever I have to
Privacy and security mostly I would imagine
Closed source software can’t be audited, so it can’t be secure. If software isn’t secure, the exploits rid it of any privacy.
See: The bimonthly remote takeover bugs that keep getting found. Like this one: https://citizenlab.ca/2023/09/blastpass-nso-group-iphone-zero-click-zero-day-exploit-captured-in-the-wild/
Closed source software can’t be audited, so it can’t be secure
That’s the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard.
Closed source software is audited all the time.
Ok let me rephrase - nobody without a conflict of interest can audit a closed source application. If Microsoft paid for an audit of Windows, that doesn’t tell you anything about whether or not Windows is backdoored.
The audit is not for you. Closed source software is audited all the time, but the results of those audits are generally confidential. This is about finding security bugs, not deliberate backdoors.
The key with this is who do you trust. Sure, open source can be audited by everyone, but is it? You can’t audit all the code you use yourself, even if you have the skills, it’s simply too much. So you still need to trust another person or company, it really doesn’t change the equation that much.
In practice, most common open source software is used and contributed to by hundreds of people. So it naturally does get audited by that process. Closed source software can’t be confirmed to not be malicious, so it can’t be confirmed to be secure, so back to my original point, it can’t be private.
I didn’t go into that much detail in my original comment, but it was what I meant when I first wrote it. As far as “does everyone audit the software they use”, the answer is obviously no. But, the software I use is mostly FOSS and contributed to by dozens of users, sometimes including myself. So when alarms are rung over the smallest things, you have a better idea of the attack vectors and privacy implications.
In practice, most common open source software is used and contributed to by hundreds of people. So it naturally does get audited by that process.
Just working on software is not the same as actively looking for exploits. Software security auditing requires a specialised set of skills. Open source also makes it easier for black-hat hackers to find exploits.
Hundreds of people working on something is a double-edged sword. It also makes it easy for someone to sneak in an exploit. A single-character mistake in code could cause an exploitable bug, and if you are intent on deliberately introducing such an issue it can be very hard to spot and even if caught can be explained away as an honest to god mistake.
By contrast, lots of software companies screen their employees, especially if they are working on critical code.
Because it’s familiar, easy, pretty and does a lot of thinking for you.
Familiar only if you worked with it before.
Easy… fair enough.
Pretty… debatable.
Apple established itself as a luxury brand. So it gives customers this “prestige feeling”. That’s at least my take.
Think different, but stay the same, In Apple’s world, that’s the game. A touch of irony, don’t you think? In a sea of similar, we all sink.
Have you actually sat down and used iOS as your full time phone OS for a week? If you’re used to android then yes there’s quirks you have to learn. But after being a diehard android user for years I could never go back. And that’s that I still use both every day since my work phone is Android and my person phone is an iPhone.
I just can’t not have a back button that’s always in the same place!
lol back button - how freaking 2000s. buddy we just move our finger left on the screen and we go back. like are you a caveman? this is Android fans these days, crowing about obsolete pieces of their technology like it was good. it wasn’t then it really isn’t now.
Top comment by Chris (@[email protected]) Liked by 7 people
I think all these changes that the EU is doing really only benefit large development firms like Spotify and Epic at the expense of the smaller developers. EU is adding additional regulations and requirements from Apple which smaller developers and indie developers will now have to comply with which will act as barriers to entry for some. That’s bad for competition…which I think was ultimately the goal for Epic and Spotify.
I love this braindead take regurgitated again and again and again. The DMA specifically does not apply to anyone smaller than a big monopolistic company. Apple barely made the cut themselves. The whole regulation is about forcing six companies - the Act only applies to them at all - to open up their walled gardens because they are strangling their respective markets and killing innovation, consumer choice and competition.
I had a user on here tell me the DMA is proof that Valve can’t be considered to be in a position of monopoly with Steam because they don’t show up on the list of companies concerned… People don’t understand what the DMA is at all.
To be exact, DMA applies to platforms with >45M users in EU
Not even just that, you have to have at least 7.5B EUR turnover or 75B EUR market cap, AND 45M end users AND 10k business users AND keep this up for 3 years.
And even then it’s not automatic, you get nominated and get arguments, and only then you have to follow it.
I mentioned the six companies because they are the only ones that this currently applies to, and that will be the case for the foreseeable future as well. And even from them, it’s specific products. MacOS is not in scope for example, despite iOS being scoped in.
That is hilarious that they expect iOS users to pay a fee to sideload apps. Like comically evil.
It’s not the users they’re charging, it’s the developers. Instead of having to pay 30%, they’re asking for 27% if they’re selling their app side loaded.
Defeating the whole purpose.
Those numbers are from using outside payment methods and not side loading.
This was how it worked for years for developers. First step of testing your app on an iOS device you have is to pay Apple a developer fee. This has been a thing even back in iOS 3 times.
Is it just a one time fee? And what were you paying for, testing to see if it qualified for the app store?
Seems like sideloading would be a different path and goal unless Apple is trying to retain control of that too. To me a lot of the point of users sideloading is to load whatever they want, not what the corporation that made the OS will allow.
Its $100/year for sideloading an infinite amount of alls that don’t disappear. If you don’t pay, you can only sideload up to 3 at a time and they will disappear after a week
I don’t pay anything to side load apps on my phone.
Probably bc I switched to Android.:-)
And I am never ever going back!
You sound like one of those people who said they’d move to Canada when Trump got elected the first time, and didn’t.
… more like someone who already moved away from the US after prior episodes of shitty politics, and was vindicated when Trump was elected
Least neoliberal new urbanist
I fucking hate Apple with a passion.
Why? What have they done to you? If you don’t like their products, simply don’t buy them.
It’s not that simple.
Blue chat boxes affect everyone. RCS is a stepping stone but my daughter wouldn’t be caught dead with a green chat box. Tell me how that isn’t Apple using their dominance to prevent other players?
FaceTime (which they PROMISED to open up but never did) affects everyone.
sounds like your daughter is a typical sheep - perhaps THAT’S the issue you ought to try having an issue with rather than a company doing normal business.
LOL. What a charmer you are.
Blue chat boxes affect everyone
How do they affect you if you don’t even have an iPhone? You’ll never see those blue bubbles.
Besides, the defacto standard for chat apps is WhatsApp, hardly anyone uses iMessage anyway.
FaceTime (which they PROMISED to open up but never did) affects everyone.
This was due to a patent lawsuit. Blame VirnetX, not Apple.
If you are in a peer group of teens where 70% have iPhones the lack of decent interoperability with Android affects the 30% that can’t be part of the conversations.
It is not true that WhatsApp is the defacto standard everywhere. Might be true for you but large pockets where that ain’t true.
I am blaming VirnetX but we both know it could be solved if Apple wanted to solve it.
The FaceTime software, would have done plentiful towards the industry & others, if it became open sourced.
But nope, they decided to make it exclusive for only within the Apple product bubble. Now we are supporting with so many video apl software/ tools. It’s just fragmented. It’s okey with competition but this is far too much. Also the quality, safety have lessoned.
Apple has made a lot of anti-consumer decisions. And since Apple is a big market force, other companies follow suite when they pull off shit like that. There is a legitimate reason to not like Apple.
What makes you think I buy their garbage? Literal garbage.
Then what are you bitching about?
Your mom
Show me on the doll where Apple touched you.
Sent from an iPhone
Why? Just get Android. Plenty of choices.
I‘d be really surprised if Apple tried that.
They have to know that it violates the DMA. And the penalty for violating it can be up to 10% of their yearly worldwide revenue (not earnings!) for the first violation and up to 20% for repeated violations. I don‘t think they‘d risk that, especially as the EU really isn’t known for its leniency when someone intentionally breaks their rules.
On the positive side, those fines could fix the finances of a few smaller EU countries in a single sweep.
I’m not too sure that these actions violate the letter of the law here, even though I agree that they’re 100% in violation of the spirit of the law.
It’s been some years since I’ve put the mobile development world behind me, in no small part because of Apple’s shenanigans, but the way I understand how this might work - Apple may be required to allow “iOS software” to be installed from third party stores, but software that runs on iOS must either be signed using a certificate that only allows installation in a developer or enterprise context (which require explicit and obvious user consent to that specific use case, and come with other restrictions such as the installation only lasting for a limited period of time), or through an “appstore” certificate that allows installation on any device, but the actual application package will need to go through Apple’s pipeline (where I believe it gets re-signed before final distribution on the App Store). All certificates, not just the appstore ones, are centrally managed by Apple and they do have the power to revoke, or refuse to renew, any of those certificates at-will.
If my understanding is correct (I’d appreciate if any up-to-date iOS devs could fact-check me), then Apple could introduce or maintain any restrictions they please on handling this final signing step, even if at the end of the day the resulting software is being handed back to developers to self-distribute, they can just refuse to sign the package at all, preventing installation on most consumer iOS devices, and to refuse to re-issue certificates to specific Apple developer accounts they deem in violation of their expected behavior. I haven’t read the implementation of the DMA in detail, nor am I a lawyer, so I’m not sure if there are provisions in place that would block either of these actions from Apple, but I do expect that there will be a long game of cat and mouse here as Apple and the EU continue to try and one-up the other’s actions.
But the article of the DMA says that the gatekeeper shall not prevent the business user to serve their product using other conditions than those of the gatekeeper’s platform. I think that would include Apple’s publishing guidelines.
I think that’s the rub, in my theoretical scenario, Apple is not blocking the distribution or sale of iOS applications through third-party means, they’d enforce their existing restrictions on and power over building iOS applications in the first place. Developers would absolutely still be able to distribute unsigned applications - end user iOS devices would just be unable to install them.
It sounds ridiculous to me, and as I wrote earlier, it would be a clear violation of the spirit of the DMA, but I don’t see any reason why this scenario would not be technically possible for Apple to pull off.
They already make it hard to make an app without xcode
I’d love to see an apple cuck try and explain this
Apple is protecting the end user. Through charging a fee apple ensures the end user is really sure they want to sideload the app. This both creates more free storage space and helps the user sideload only the best applications… I’m still working on my corporate speech but that’s what I’d imagine them saying
Did Tim Cook have a bad trip or something? Apple normally isn’t this blatantly shitty.
Apple normally isn’t this blatantly shitty.
(¬_¬ ) Dude, you been living under a rock?
No
Joke aside, Apple has always been anti-consumer and shitty. Unfortunately.
I can’t wait to use AI to scam the elderly into side loading bitcoin miners.
For the hate-cult members circle-jerking over imaginary arguments with “fan boys” here. Actual Apple users either completely agree with the criticism, or simply don’t even care.
Feel free to hate on Apple the company, but stop trying so hard to make this place a home for baseless toxicity.
Edit: And just to drive home how pathetic this is, here’s a link to an article posted elsewhere in the fediverse about Google being shady af. Go look through those comments for a single soul saying anything about “Google fanboys”.
If they actually hated it, I doubt they’d be on a platform that restricted side loading in the first place. This feels strongly of “no true scotsman” fallacy.
Go look through those comments for a single soul saying anything about “Google fanboys”.
I mean, I agree with your sentiment, but I don’t think there have been actual “Google Fanboys” in like 10 years or so, whereas there are some real fans of Apple products and often they have good reasons to be a fan.
Apple has some shitty business practices sure, but they also produce the last consumer-level Certified UNIX machines you can easily get.
So I guess my point is Apple “fanboys” still exist because there’s some valid things to be fans for in regards to Apple.
I can’t think of a single thing that Google has done in ten years that has generated tech community enthusiasm or was interesting enough for anyone to fanboy over. No, they’ve mostly just killed all the products people liked during that time.
I mean fuck Google+ came out in 2011 and that was the beginning of the end of people giving a shit about Google.
The point I’m going for is that I never see such levels of spite and toxicity directed at users of other platforms, be it Android, windows, Linux or whatever.
(Which is good, because that would be just as absurd as it is when directed at Apple users.)
Yeah, I’m not really sure where that vitriol comes from. I think it might be leftover nerd elitism from a time when Apple products were mostly used for art and media production (we used them heavily for Final Cut Pro when I worked in local television), and so a lot of tech nerds got their panties in a twist because art nerds were invading their space, but that’s just a guess.
What is this gaslighting you’re trying to pull here? You’re really going to pretend that Apple fanboys don’t exist and instead start criticising sort of perceived toxicity from a “hate cult” against Apple? That’s before you get into some bizarre Google strawman. The reality is that these Apple fanboys with values antithetical to software freedom exist, and want walled gardens everywhere.
What purpose would there be in gaslighting something like this out of nowhere? Genuine question.
If you want to see examples of baseless vitriol directed at apple users, just keep reading the rest of the replies to OP’s post.The reality is that these Apple fanboys with values antithetical to software freedom exist,
Sure, just like anywhere else. You can’t point your finger exclusively at the apple camp for that.
and want walled gardens everywhere.
Speaking of staw men…
Some apple users prefer apple’s walled garden, sure, but they’re not going around saying Google, Windows or Linux must be walled as well.What purpose would there be in gaslighting something like this out of nowhere? Genuine question.
Most people, including myself, prefer their own version of reality. You are promoting a version of reality that I do not find tasteful at all. With conflicting realities, meaningful disagreement is impossible and the only thing I can do is question the narratives that oppose my own.
More generally, ego also plays a huge part in why people do this. Apple has a significant following that will defend its every decision. It’s brand has become personal identity for a lot of people. To the extent where I’ve been seeing news articles over the past two years about teenagers being bullied for using Android. This also happens to be the reason why people point their finger at Apple; because Apple users are the main group with such a distinct identity.
Yeah, I mean or you could just stop buying Apple products.
My rationale is this: apple users love spending money, so they can go ahead and spend it.
Fuck’em.
People like being fucked
True that. If people actually cared we would see better things in the world for example - Firefox dominating the market. Now I don’t care if people use Brave/Samsung/Chrome/Vivaldi/Edge but the fact that they may all lead to Google dictating the Open Web sucks.
I love that you bring up web browsers as an example while saying that Apple users don’t care enough about the technological landscape. Safari is the leading competitor to chrome! Without those Apple users sticking to the browser they know on the system you ridicule, the problem you’ve identified would be worse.
Good, charge those gossip wannabies… in the meanwhile I will use Android and I will not pay a flying fuck… LMAO…
And Apples file system sucks
Its restricted af, some people in my class don’t even know what a folder is because of their iPhones (gen z for context)
of course Apple plans to charge fees for sideloading, a bunch of scumbags, but fear not, Apple fan boys cult members will regurgitate Apple’s propaganda as gospel
Already happening, just look at some comments
The fanboys make me angrier than Apple. It’s so frustrating to discuss something with someone who is so brainwashed.
think about this: to me, all you really toxic people (including the OP, for shame) against Apple are the ones looking quite brainwashed, culty, back-bitey and very small minded. probably because you are. think about that for a second before you snap reply - there ARE more than just your side to this buddy.
Yes, well, the whole point is that them following the law means that their assistance warranting fees (like running a store) isn’t required. So I hope they get nailed.
Who would’ve thought? This isn’t going to fly with the EU.
Article 5.3 of the Digital Markets Act (DMA): “The gatekeeper shall not prevent business users from offering the same products or services to end users through third-party online intermediation services or through their own direct online sales channel at prices or conditions that are different from those offered through the online intermediation services of the gatekeeper.”
Apple has an annual legal budget of approximately infinity dollars. I assure you they are aware of this and they believe they are in compliance, even if just barely.
If challenged, they will have no problem fighting it — they have nearly as much cash on hand as the entire EU budget.
I hope the EU challenges this, and I hope the EU wins, but Apple isn’t going to be surprised by whatever happens.
The fine would be approximately 10% of Apple’s total revenue and the fine increases by 10% every violoation so I doubt that Apple can not accept the regulations.
Unfortunately, Apple has the resources, both legal and financial, to tie that up in the EU courts for decades.
What if I told you one of those two can make new laws?
In one afternoon the Commission+Parliament can change the basis of whatever case Apple wants to fight. And they are up against Vestager - she makes multinational software companies bend the knee twice before lunch.
We’ll see what happens
You’re underestimating what EU can get gone when they’re motivated to get it done.
They will get free publicity and show the users how they stand up to the overreaching government. Their users will eat it up.
I refuse to ever use a single Apple product.