Most phone users aren’t interested in developing software on their phone. They aren’t interested in developing a better systemd. They have no idea what malware actually is.
All that is going to happen if Epic gets their own store is Epic will be collecting the 30% rather than Apple, and the user will get apps that are poorly designed, chew battery, and don’t conform to the UX standards that Apple has set (eg: accessibility) and exploit undocumented APIs which change from iOS version to version.
Epic will blame Apple for all these problems, Apple will blame Epic for not doing sufficient QC, and we’ll be back in court with various store managers demanding that Apple stop changing things.
If you want third party stores, there’s the Android ecosystem. Keep your grubby mitts off the Apple ecosystem.
The new iPads literally have the same SOC as what are some of, if not the best consumer laptops on the planet currently. But what can you do with them? Not a heck of a lot, thanks to the walled garden that is iPad OS. If you ask me, that's a crying shame.
I don't see how it hurts anyone to allow side-loading of apps on iOS devices. Even if you make it as hard as having a toggle behind a scary warning 2 layers deep in the menu, 95% of users will never use it, and it will open up a world of opportunities for people who actually want to create with their devices.
I disagree. There are many classes of applications on the Play Store and F-droid not on the App Store, including multiple browsing engines and emulators.
I would wager that within weeks or months there would be a full windows VM available for the iPad if it was allowed.
>Apple allows you to sideload those kinds of apps using the developer certificate.
A TEMPORARY developer certificate that expires and requires a MacOS system to install.
Meanwhile I can click to download an apk through the browser on my phone, click accept and install. No expiration, no self signed certificates, no other system needed.
A while back I paid Apple $99 for the privilege of compiling an open source emulator and side loading it to my iPad and then having to re-load is after some period of time. It was not worth the effort.
For the average user, it is not even within the ballpark of their abilities.
I would argue that the reason is less form factor and more computational power. The M1 brings best-of-class laptop performance to a tablet, combined with a keyboard and a Linux distro and I would have a much more powerful platform than my current laptop.
It's very much not something you could depend on as a component of a serious workflow. You have to stay on top of certificates, and Apple can change those rules at any time.
The iPad is already one of the best creation tools out there for artists, musicians, photographers etc.
I’d suggest the iPad is hampered more by the limits of iPadOS’ multitasking UI and it’s roots as a scaled-up phone OS - and the scarcity of truly pro-level software - rather than the App Store and not being able to sideload.
In fact the only real reasons to sideload or jailbreak at the moment are to get around the limitations on running dynamic code - or to use cracked/dodgy versions of paid apps.
Wouldn’t be surprised if we see some big improvements in the dev experience over the next few system releases, but to say this will enable a burst of creativity is ignoring all the highly creative ways it’s already being used.
iPad has some good tools for content creation. Procreate for example is probably one of the best drawing tools available at the moment.
But these apps are still largely islands. Powerful pro workflows require multiple applications to be used together in interesting ways. With iPad that's impossible. You have an anemic file system, and strict limitations on what an app can do.
What I want is a proper *Nix layer, like I have on macOS. For instance, if I want to synchronize my files across multiple systems, I need my iPad app to have a built-in solution for that. I want to be able to run a daemon in the background to synchronize my creative work with an S3 bucket using a custom protocol of my choosing. That kind of customizability is just not possible on iPad, and it's a huge limitation.
Even a lot of amateur workflows are difficult to impossible on the iPad. I'm an amateur photographer and after using the iPad Pro as my primary editing computer for months I gave up and went back to Windows. I wanted to make it work. I really did. The file system makes the workflow incredibly painful, my preferred RAW converter isn't available, and the Adobe apps that are available are sorely lacking compared to the desktop versions. I have a couple hundred dollars worth of Photoshop plug-ins and none of them work on the iPad. There isn't even a way to load plug-ins on iPad. I can't print at all (yes, some of us still like to print). Backups can't be automated. Internal storage is very limited and external drives are painful to use. There's simply no way to tell when the iPad is accessing the external drive or not. I have had to perform multiple filesystem repairs because of that.
The iPad has some definite advantages. Battery life is great, performance is great, the screen is amazing, but it's all severely crippled by the software. Until Apple makes the OS as powerful as MacOS there is no point at all in having so much power that you simply can't use.
No one really jailbreaks for cracked apps. There are many small reasons to jailbreak. Most apps are paid via in app purchases that can’t be cracked. Very few apps are paid and popular enough to be cracked and not crash upon attempting to use. It is something that may have been true a decade ago. The cliche needs to stop ever since in app purchases took over most spending.
Especially because how big was piracy ever on iOS? It would be a fraction of jailbreakers. Who were always a significant minority of iOS users. So we’re talking under 10% of users who use at least one cracked app at the peak. Most likely. Likely less and def less for people using multiple pirated apps regularly. 5% piracy rate is still not helpful or good to some developers, but that’s not going to do much at all to the bottom line.
So yeah unfortunate. Both the high price of yearly or monthly subscriptions and the specific in app purchases for things like brushes.
The point is that a developer could have a lot of fun experimenting with the tablet form factor and inputs, with the full power of a desktop system (including hardware x86 emulation which is currently unusable!) but we can't because Apple says we can only use the hardware we bought in the way which they intend it.
Imagine how you would react with any other product you paid for, and brought into your home, if the company which produced it had the right to dictate how you could and could not use it.
I know it is completely anathema to suggest something like this on HN these days as the socialist wave completely took it over and the mere suggestion that people have the freedom to not buy something if they don't think it fits within their world view instead of trying to force everyone using the state and the courts to cater specifically to them is now considered a sin, but...
You said it yourself, you have a laptop with the exact same chip that lets you do all the things you want, and then you have the iPad that doesn't...why don't you buy the laptop instead? Surely if enough people feel the way you do Apple would get the message.
You don’t think Apple has a team of people trying to figure out what you can do with them? iPadOS isn’t designed to cripple the HW, its designed to extract the most from it. Its missing some traditional use cases
>backup and restore the entire device including apps
Ironically these areas are where iOS shines. Despite being a heavily walled garden, it grants you full backups and full user filesystem access (including things like keychain) via extracting those backups.
A comparable and unrooted Android tablet cannot be fully backed up, and you cannot inspect app/user settings areas of its filesystem.
You get way more access on unjailbroken iOS than on unrooted Android. The equivalent of the entire /data partition is available to both read and write via iTunes backups with very few exceptions.
On Android, you used to be able to backup maybe half of app/user data in this way (many devs opted out), now closer to zero (adb backup deprecated)
Yeah exactly, the main thing which is missing is being able to have direct access to the file system in a programmatic way, an to run arbitrary processes (including background processes) which operate on the file system. Until then the way software can be combined to do interesting things will be severely limited.
The problem with those permission prompts is that many users blindly accept them. If a “sniff all network traffic” permission were allowed, it would take all of one day before Facebook et al release an update with it and start siphoning millions of users network traffic.
Apple would probably also prefer it if I had to use an in-app purchase to pay my rent, but luckily we live in a nation of laws, and Apple doesn't get to decide everything based on unilateral self-interest.
All of this is available if you use the same exploits that malware often use to compromise systems.
"Jailbreaking" is not a feature inherent to iOS so stop trying to say it's an option. It really isn't.
An option is something that continues to be available to the user regardless of system updates and without restriction. As such, sideloading apps is an option on Android.
Jailbreak is not a feature. It is the result of the LACK of features.
I didn’t make my post clear enough. I was stating most people don’t care for these features that are available when jailbroken. My post was not about this being an “option” but that the list of features aren’t important to even the more geeky jailbreaking users.
Regardless of me not being specific in my post, your reply has a ton of assumptions and unnecessary attitude in my opinion.
Jailbraking is fine as a hobby, but it's not viable to build serious workflows on top of what's essentially a cat-and-mouse game between Apple and the jailbreak community
iPadOS is designed to extract the most revenue from the hardware, and the users. An more-open platform would allow for many things that would likely be really awesome for users, but is disallowed because that would threaten Apple's revenue streams.
> All that is going to happen if Epic gets their own store is Epic will be collecting the 30% rather than Apple
"All" that is going to happen if Epic gets their own store is there's going to be competition in what is now a monopoly. To say that the only difference will be lower quality is, at best, naive.
Epic winning wouldn’t only let Epic do things. It would let any one. Though why not be interested in what the company doing the fighting is doing? Versus Steam that only has a good rep because other app stores in comparison seem worse. Even though Steam’s fee is crazy too and they only did one recent change because of competition.
Great I can't wait to sideload the Epic Game store on my PS5 and Xbox series X. I also look forward to the outlawing of buying exclusive rights and laws that force developers to release their games on every platform in existence. Anything less is AnTi CoNsUmEr..
Some of us prefer to sit down and use a device without having to worry about installing an app or game store just to use/play one app...
The point is opening it up so users have a choice. Third party stores will emerge, and it is up to the consumer, not Apple, to decide whether the extra features are worth the new apps being a little rough around the edges like they are on Android. If it's as bad as you say, the new stores will not be successful anyway.
> The point is opening it up so users have a choice.
Users have a choice: Don't use iOS.
Their actions have pretty overwhelmingly spoken and they don't care. The only people that care are techies. And most obviously not that much because most meetings I show up to are still full of iPhones.
Sorry, but I don't believe that should be Apple's prerogative.
You say that users don't care, but users _don't know either_.
And whenever people lobby for right to repair laws and for consumers to _own_ hardware, guess who's always standing on the other saying that it ain't so.
I’m a techie and I don’t want to worry about malware, spyware, extensive software configuration, etc. on my microwave, my car, or my phone. I’ve got plenty of computing devices for that!
You will also have a choice: don’t use alternative stores
And if Apple is so concerned about user security & privacy when it comes to alternative app stores, they should adjust their policies so that the apps most users want will see no reason not to be on the App Store.
I switched from Android to iPhone because the hardware is excellent and lasts forever. They won the hardware battle
Should they then be able to leverage that position to instantly win and extort the marketplace built on the next layer up? It pretty much goes to the heart of antitrust
5-10%... sure maybe, 30% of saas fees... ridiculous
>Should they then be able to leverage that position to instantly win and extort the marketplace built on the next layer up? It pretty much goes to the heart of antitrust
Exactly. And yet this idea seems so hard to grasp for many, just look at the discussions around the web and on HN. Everyone over simplifies it to it is Apple's phone or Apple's App Store they do what ever they want. Or the user chose iPhone if you dont like it go and get an Android.
The judge actually pointed out ( Finally ! ) vast majority of revenue are coming from Games. Which means Gaming is in a way subsidising all other Apps in App Store.
I wish Apple separate the Game into Game Store and keep those 30%. While Apps and Services are 10%, with little curation of Apps with App Store. i.e You no longer block Apps for their political view or speeches. As long as they are legal you should allow them in within the quality guidelines and security clearance. Apple could still down rank all these lower quality apps should they choose to. They dont have to block it from accessing iPhone.
EU is watching the case very carefully. While Americans might think Apple can do whatever they want with their devices. The same could not be said with the EU. And I am willing to bet the court battle wont flavour Apple because it seems the old world has a much different view to Anti Trust and Anti Competition than US.
And Apple will have a choice, comply or paid a heavy price.
> Every app with any popularity will then be considering their own app store. The WeChat Store. The Facebook Store. The Snap Store.
Why would you assume this would happen on iOS when it hasn't happened on Android, when the suggestion is to do what Android already allows, and yet we don't see this on Android?
> Android doesn’t allow first class alternative stores
The only thing that Android doesn't allow is for the third-party stores to auto-update apps installed through those stores.
I'm not going to say that's not a big deal, because it's definitely annoying, but I have F-Droid on my phone and get plenty of value out of it, despite having to go through a confirmation dialog to update the apps I've installed through it.
> ... and is also not the market leader
Which is entirely irrelevant. (And if you consider the world market, not just the US, Android definitely is the market leader.)
> Android doesn’t allow first class alternative stores
Don't change the goal posts. Apple doesn't provide anything. Having to pass through a dialogue after download t confirm install isn't ideal, but possible is better than not.
> and is also not the market leader.
Android is at 45% and apple is at 55%.[1] Is your contention that a least of that amount is sufficient such that it actually changes this in some way? If so, how do you square that with Android's worldwide market share being reported as 72% in 2020?[2]
> Don't change the goal posts. Apple doesn't provide anything. Having to pass through a dialogue after download t confirm install isn't ideal, but possible is better than not.
It’s not just a dialog box. Alternate stores can’t provide automatic updates, which is a critical feature.
You are the one changing the goalposts here. Android alternative stores are not representative of what would happen because they are not the same, either technically, or in terms of market value.
> Then we'll have to trust that all of these companies have the same level of competence to prevent malware that Apple does (narrator: "they won't").
This is a losing argument. We've already seen that the Apple store doesn't/can't prevent clones and fakes with information collecting inserts from overwhelming the originals.
If anything, empirically we've seen that Apple runs a much tighter ship wrt scams and malware than Android and 3rd party friendly platforms. Especially from the perspective of non-tech mass consumer, who are incredibly well served by Apple's model.
Legislating / ruling Apple's closed model to be illegal is the true harm to consumer choice and freedom.
When you only have two choices of operating system for phones, there is not choice. It's a duopoly; there's nothing competitive or pro-consumer in having to lump the entirety of your mobile OS feature sets in two camps and damn anything else that doesn't remotely resemble that.
Sorry but Toyota doesn't have its business model harmed by being able to go to my mechanic to tune a car. If Apple wants to put three layers of dialogues to open up customization, so be it.
I have no sympathy for a trillion-dollar company and their "choice".
Why do users care about this choice? What are some top experiences available to Android which aren't available to iOS customers? In fact, isn't it often the other way around? iOS gets things and Android doesn't?
Or are users seeing awful prices for the app store?
> What are some top experiences available to Android which aren't available to iOS customers?
The Humble Bundle app allows you to install Android games you bought through humble bundles onto your Android phone. This allows you to buy bundles of games from developers at your own desired purchase price and give an amount of that purchase you choose to some charities of your choice.
It is, quite literally, used as another store and has the ability to install applications.
Many of the games I've gotten through that are also available on iOS, but you're unable to get iOS versions from this because there's no way to install that app nor a way for it to install other applications if you did, currently.
At least some of those developers would be happy to offer iOS versions as a bundle, or even give you access to choose iOS or Android in the same bundle, but there's no way to legitimately deliver these games to those customers.
Well I can imagine if 3rd party stores were allowed, I could have a Steam client on an iPad for example, and share my library of games without paying for it a second time for iOS.
>What are some top experiences available to Android which aren't available to iOS customers?
Recently, cloud gaming apps and paying for subscriptions. Google Stadia and Xbox Streaming are not allowed through the iOS Store. Netflix and Spotify(not sure about this one) do not allow you to pay for the subscription on their app because Apple asks for 30%.
Apple does not allow other browser rendering engines. So now every iOS browser is just a Safari wrapper and you're unable to do any sort of plug-in, like adblockers.
These features being blocked does not help customers. They only help Apple.
> the user will get apps that are poorly designed, chew battery, and don’t conform to the UX standards that Apple has set (eg: accessibility) and exploit undocumented APIs which change from iOS version to version
Your parents and non-techie friends and family won’t have to use alternative stores, no one will be forcing them to.
And if Apple is so concerned about user security & privacy when it comes to alternative app stores, they should adjust their policies so that the apps most users want will see no reason not to be on the App Store.
Decades of experience helping protect my parents PCs tells me this isn’t true. As soon as the option is available, it will be exploited by bad actors. I guarantee that “app stores” will prey on my parents fears or confusion to get them to install that store as opposed to Apple’s, and I really don’t want that.
All that is going to happen if Epic gets their own store is Epic will be collecting the 30% rather than Apple
Epic already has a store of its own, and it charges developers 12%.
Moreover, Apple already has thousands of apps that are poorly designed, chew battery, and don't conform to Apple UX standards. Part of the reason for the pushback against the Apple tax is that Apple is objectively failing to perform many of the tasks it claims as justifications for the tax.
Your argument only works if people are forced to use iPhones or if you can show that reasonable people expect to have functionality on their iPhones that doesn’t exist. But on the contrary, I suspect a lot of people choose iPhones specifically because of the perceived curation of the App Store and lack of malware, spyware, etc.
In my experience people choose iPhones because they are a status symbol, and because Apple has become synonymous with good design and good taste. Due to marketing efforts, Android devices are still seen as the "cheap option" or for people who don't care about their image. Many people are also already locked into the Apple ecosystem through desktop/laptop Macs, iCloud, etc., so getting a non-Apple phone would introduce a lot of friction into their experience.
Part of it is also that iOS used to be quite far ahead of Android when it came to usability and polish. Android has since mostly caught up, but there is an advantage to being a first mover, and the people who didn't like Android back when it was much worse have since gotten locked into Apple's ecosystem, even if they never used Apple products before that.
I don't think most people seriously think about App Store curation as any of top reasons why they have an iPhone.
But iPhones and Android devices do have functionality that users can’t obtain anywhere else. What alternative smartphone ecosystem could the average user choose as a substitute? To say nothing of the fact a smartphone is essentially required in and of itself.
Once a user has chosen a smartphone ecosystem large switching costs come into play.
If a significant amount of your customers choose your phone because it is stylish that could just as well demonstrate there is no price competition to speak of.
Will it, though? My expectation is that most apps will still want to be on the main App Store if they can, since installing a third-party app store still represents friction to the install experience.
Perhaps in a more mature market where having several app stores on your phone is commonplace (assuming that even happens), we'll have an annoying situation of exclusives, but I don't expect that "instantly" or even remotely so.
How else should Epic compete? They can't reduce the price in line with their 12% cut vs steam's 30%, because steam doesn't allow games to have cheaper prices elsewhere.
Which now that I think of it seems anticompetitive from Valve.
Exactly this - exclusives are a standard move which we can be guaranteed will be used if multiple apps stores are allowed on iOS.
It won’t help consumers or developers, but it will allow epic and other well funded companies to insert themselves into a revenue stream without creating value.
Well funded app stores will just pay up front for exclusives. It’s completely standard practice in any comparable industry. Music, TV, Movies, books, podcasts, etc.
Developers might abstractly prefer to be on the main store, but some will be happy to take million dollar payouts from the marketing budgets of the new stores.
It’s hard enough for independents to be successful now, but once you have competing publishers like Epic in the game, the era of independent commercial app development will be over.
If Apple is so concerned about user security & privacy when it comes to alternative app stores, they should adjust their policies so that the apps most users want will see no reason not to be on the App Store.
> All that is going to happen if Epic gets their own store is Epic will be collecting the 30% rather than Apple
News flash, Epic already runs a store, and competes with another store (Steam) which takes a 30% cut. How much of a cut does Epic take there? 12%.
There is a well known example of Epic in a similar situation specifically not doing what you say they will, so why assume they will do that? Or are you arguing without knowing this fairly common knowledge of this case?
> the user will get apps that are poorly designed, chew battery, and don’t conform to the UX standards that Apple has set
These are games. They already don't conform to the UI standards. They already chew battery by the nature of what they do, not because they are inefficient. That said, being the authors of the Unreal Engine, Epic is in a key position to make changes so the engine works better with iPhone norms, performs better, and uses less battery and many games would benefit from that. If only Epic had more financial incentive to focus work on the iOS platform...
> and exploit undocumented APIs which change from iOS version to version.
Doubtful. They need to make sure their product is stable across a wide swatch of iOS devices, as individual game makers that license their product will have different support policies and targets. You don't make a widely portable and stable engine across multiple architectures and operating systems by using hidden and unstable APIs unless you have some assurance they aren't going away.
> Epic will blame Apple for all these problems, Apple will blame Epic for not doing sufficient QC, and we’ll be back in court with various store managers demanding that Apple stop changing things.
The blaming I see going on is people that don't really understand the market, the problems, or the incentives making wild conjectures that not only aren't backed up by anything, whether that be logic or evidence, but seem to run counter to that.
> If you want third party stores, there’s the Android ecosystem.
They're being sued too. They take the same cut. You can put an alternate store on Android, but you can't have it function with the same permissions (you need to manually approve each install, and it can't auto-update). This is what keeps third party stores from actually being a reality there. I don't consider secondary stores that ship with the phone on purchase and are part of the customer OS shipped "third party", and that's what has to be done to really compete on the same level as the Play store, and even then, it's not like they're used much. This is all about control and Apple not wanting to give up that very lucrative 30% cut of in app purchases, and subscriptions.
All Apple has to do is change the APIs from version to version and poorly document the changes. Would Apple do such a thing? Of course not. Apple is too noble and good for that -- exactly like how they work with WebRTC right now.
Indeed. The customer is, of course, the people buying the phones and buying the software, and not the developers. The judge seems a little vague on this fact. One has to either accept that the customers buy Apple because they prefer it this way, or else assert that the customers are too dumb to know what’s good for them. That may be literally true but isn’t really a classically good argument you would use to pin somebody down on anticompetitive behavior.
Also, as a parent, I consider it a useful feature that Apple makes it very hard for kids to buy things on the phone through any method other than the one that I am aware of.
All that is going to happen if Epic gets their own store is Epic will be collecting the 30% rather than Apple, and the user will get apps that are poorly designed, chew battery, and don’t conform to the UX standards that Apple has set (eg: accessibility) and exploit undocumented APIs which change from iOS version to version.
Epic will blame Apple for all these problems, Apple will blame Epic for not doing sufficient QC, and we’ll be back in court with various store managers demanding that Apple stop changing things.
If you want third party stores, there’s the Android ecosystem. Keep your grubby mitts off the Apple ecosystem.