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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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People are so stupid in this country. Do what the EU did and make it law that they have to offer sideloading and other app stores and payment methods.
It should be the law to begin with. This walled garden shit is really just another word for controlling what the user does with the device they purchased and not allowing them to do business with anybody else exclusively to add software without apple's approval and protection racket fee.
Everything is about control. The internet was left open by accident for a while and they are working hard to "fix" it. They are just trying to be slightly less obvious about it than China was. All of the forced AI tools, required apps and stuff like that are just ways to move users away from the open web.
Once most users restrict their Internet usage to ONLY content provided by the large companies (for example, once people no longer click on any Google result), then Internet providers will start granting access to the content from large companies for free and charge a lot more for access to anything else.
In 10, maybe 20 years, we will be needing to tell our internet providers when we change jobs so that they may change which "custom" internet services we get to have access to specifically for work.
It wouldn’t help.
In this case, even if the app was side-loadable and had a web app, that’s enough of a technical hurdle to kill its critical mass.
In other words, it doesn’t have to be banned; suppressing ICEBlock is basically enough to kill it.
Arguably, if it was normal to sideload apps it wouldn't be as much of a barrier to users, but they've been conditionned to think they need an app and the only place you can ever get them is the store.
It's a technical hurdle only because Apple decided they want to control everything, and same on Android because of Google's ever increasing war on sideloading. You used to download an APK from the browser and it would go like "This is an app! Install?", but now you have to go enable third party installation and all that, and now the whole Play Protect forcing developer validation coming up.
You are overestimating how technical most folks are. I know kids and older adults, on either side of my age, that have no concept of a filesystem, a URL, an APK to download, things like that, because they've never needed any of that.
Attention is finite.
Hence, web app's aren't really blocked by iOS/Android, but that's still a basically insurmountable hurdle simply because it's not the usual procedure for operating a phone. Defaults and accessibility are king (and Apple/Google know it).
EU didn't do anything except lower the tax on developers from 30% to 27%. And they still require Apple's rubber stamp to install.
They should have been concerned about OS lock-in, instead of app store lock-in. Imagine being able to install the OS of your choice on your phone.
Why not both?
Yeah, you still can't install arbitrary IPA files on iOS.