Japan prepares regulation requiring Apple to allow sideloading::As the Digital Markets Act antitrust law passed in the European Union, Apple has until March 2024 to let users…
Having app developers be able to avoid Apples forced 30% fee is great. The fee is pure rent seeking masquerading as curation.
30% might be a bit much, but Apple and Google are offering ongoing services for the price you pay as a developer. From hosting, to payment processing and APIs you can use in your apps, I think what they’re offering has some monetary value that would be acceptable if it wasn’t so damn much. I don’t think it’s toxic rent-seeking in and of itself. What’s pretty toxic is that there’s no way around those fees on Apple phones and tablets.
The #1 thing they provide is exposure.
The vast majority of users simply won’t download and install something they find on a website on their phones.
I suspect you’re just repeating arguments you’ve heard, so don’t take this internet rage personally, but that is complete bullshit.
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Hosting costs nothing. Devs will gladly foot the bill for that if given the option. Even if you distribute your apps on AWS (which is notorious for severely overcharging on egress), your expenses will be no where near 15%-30% of your revenue.
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Payment processing is a competitive field outside the appstores. Even 15%-30% is ludicrous when “overpriced” processors like stripe charge 2%-3%
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APIs are not something sold to developers. They build them as part of the operating system because they have to. That’s how it works. They could try selling licenses, but it would result in devs not building on their fancy new features.
(you didn’t mention the ones below, but people with your argument usually do, so I’m adding them for completeness)
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Security is also bullshit. The Appstore and Play store are FILLED with malware. It is not physically possible to manually review the sheer volume of apps published to those stores. They also are not incentivized to improve the process much, because each time your kid or grandma accidentally activates a $40/week subscription, Apple/Google take a 15%-30% cut.
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Curation/promotion is bullshit. Discoverability on these stores has always been bad, but has been particularly awful since both Apple/Google have started selling search ads in the store. The other day I almost accidentally downloaded a fake ChatGPT app because it was the first result when I searched, it had a very similar icon, “ChatGPT” in the name, 5 stars, and millions of downloads.
These stores also heavily incentivize devs to push subscriptions. I suspect (but haven’t confirmed) that the Appstore and Google Play both rank subscription based apps higher than others, and subs tend to pay a lower revshare fee than other monetization types.
I could go on all day about the rotten dumpster fires that are these disgusting stores. The only people who defend them are fanboys and people who have never actually had to deal with them professionally.
legislation is expected to be sent to parliament next year and focuses on four areas: app stores and payments, search, browsers, and operating systems.
We also get Linux on iPhones??
And the talk is just about sideloading… :-)
Wouldn’t putting Android on an iPhone be redundant? It would have less features and capability for a higher cost.
Are you saying Android has less features and capabilities? Or am I reading it wrong?
By and large, probably… But I don’t think it’s true for everyone.
As an iPad owner myself, I would love to ditch the OS! And I suppose alternative OSes would be pretty popular with the people jailbreaking their phones.
I don’t want to impose alternative OSes on others. I would just like the option for me!
Yeah it’s literally a status symbol amongst kids.
My kid is desperate for one but can’t give me a single compelling reason apart from they’re seen as cool.
lol right
Good luck getting any of the hardware to work properly without Apple’s help.
Based Japan once again. I would love to see other countries requiring this too, but I’m not going to hold my breath unfortunately.
I mean, the EU has already done this and now Japan is doing the same. So i guess it’s very well possible that other countries besides Japan will also follow suit.
I tried to install an old version of San Andreas recently on my phone cause the last update broke controller support (which I actually bought with money).
Apparently we don’t own our Android OBB directories anymore because of “safety”.
So far the “we Android users already have this”…
Yep, it’s unfortunate that manufacturers are taking more and more control away from users. That’s why open-source software like Linux is so important, you can do anything you want to with it.
Back in the old days, Android OS used to be Open Source. You can still get firmware built up from the last release, such as CalyxOS, but in order to install it you have to buy directly from Google with the Bootloader Unlocked as a feature.
God I miss the old days of android…the OG droid, everything was unlockable, no fuckery. Google hadn’t yet slowly started adding data collection by ways of slowing moving functionality away from the core AOSP.
It still is open source, btw. But they’re just intentionally choking it to death. They’ve recently announced they’re not going to maintain the open source PHONE APP…FOR THEIR PHONES…for christ sake. They’ve even had a new replacement OS in the works for a couple years.
Yeah Android is Linux. But Manufactures are limiting it so hard that it is sometimes nearly impossible to get a custom ROM on the phone.
Yes. The openess of the operating system is meaningless if the phone’s firmware isn’t open.
sideloading would be nice; i have no idea how people can get proper work done on an ipad as of now (especially with apple at one point acting like it was only a matter of time for them to replace laptops). everything is so overly glossy and surface level and designed for children or the elderly; you can’t actually DO anything!
Even with side loading, you will still be pretty limited as the iPad is decently locked down. First of all it needs a decent window manager. That alone would go a long way.
But honestly, these things should be running full blown macOS when they are docked to a mouse and keyboard.
They had an 11” air at one point, so screen size can’t be the issue.
This could be the real “pro” iPhone. Running m3, acting as a phone by itself and throwing a full macOS with Office and Adobe Cloud apps when docked.
Yuh-huh! Just get a terminal emulator from the App Store. I will be just a few dollars a month. Then you can ssh into a Linux server you have somewhere.
See it’s an entire computer!
No you do not get it.
At Apple we make magical devices that are unlike anything done before. We have truly revolutionized computing with over priced hardware.
If you don’t have a Mac then you are not cool and not good at your job.
That’s the point. They want people to use devices where information is given to them, but they can’t interact with it or give something back.
They literally want us scrolling tiktok all day before it’s time to get ready for work.
That’s also where the Web is now.
People are saying that Flash was bad and HTML5 with heavy JS and all the functionality of modern browsers is good.
Such people are either fine with it, or don’t understand that downsides of Flash (or Java applets, or whatever else) were defined by its advantages, which were much more important.
A lot of kids or young people with no particular interest in IT\CS\engineering would use Flash for animations or little cute things which made their simple, possible back then websites more alive. (I’ve just looked at such one site, abandoned with some trace of a resurrection attempt in 2019, and it’s gorgeous.)
You had to know less to make your own stuff in that old Web than you have to know now.
The Web is by its purpose a networked global hypertext system, a living library with common participation.
That some people want to repurpose it, think they’ve been successful at it, and think others will go along with their wishes, - is sad, but should have no weight.
I don’t take a laptop with me when I travel, because the iPad is more than enough for my work needs for a few days. Working with large spreadsheets is the only thing I absolutely need a computer for.
I have friends who are programmers and regularly work on just an iPad. As I understand it, they only need a computer for some more horsepower-hungry parts of their workflow.
The real problem with iPads is iPadOS. It’s intentionally gimped so you need a computer for some tasks. The iPad Pro has more than enough processing power and memory for full workloads (as well it should, given the price point), the OS is the restricting factor.
What real work can even be done on any tablet that is not running desktop OS? I guess you could write stuff or edit spreadsheets, but that’s it.
