Apple must open iPadOS to sideloading within 6 months, EU says

Do I think side-loading and alt app stores would make iPads and iPhones more versatile devices? Yes.

Do I believe indie devs will be worse off? Unfortunately, also yes.

If you are a solo app developer, you will now have to keep presence on all app stores out there, since if you don’t publish on one then a copycat will. Every store would have its own review processes, fee structures, billing and tax procedures. Since you would need to follow a dozen of those, as an indie operation realistically you will either go under or pay middleman companies a chunk for this—so, in the end, you’ll lose the same cut or more and we’re back to the starting point.

Furthermore, I believe you will have much less protection against plain piracy, which was a big thing in the days of yore until it was spectacularly dealt with by Apple within its mobile ecosystem.

This is why I suspect the primary interests side-loading and alt app stores on Apple devices would satisfy is large enterprises and a few opportunistic middlemen. Entities like Epic, Netflix, who will be able to generate more profit; governments, perhaps; a few publishing companies (think CDBaby for apps) will win small time; some users who don’t want to pay and want to get things for free might be able to get their way; indie devs will be worse off.

> I believe

Maybe give it some time to see how things shake out, before tying yourself to strong "beliefs" up front?

> This is why I suspect the primary interests side-loading and alt app stores on Apple devices would satisfy is large enterprises and a few opportunistic middlemen.

Sideload as Apple implemented, yes. Sideload as what sideload always meant, no.

Apple is trying to distract and mislead the public by redefining what "sideload" means. If I can't install whatever open source shit I build myself on NON-APPLE HARDWARE to an iPhone then it's not sideload. I hope EU figure this out soon and retroactively fine Apple for this dishonest move.

I've not done much app development as a solo dev, but hasn't it been the case for many years now that Android has supported multiple app stores? Is this a problem for developers of Android apps?

It's fair: beliefs are like that, you have them before seeing how things shake out.

I disagree. First of all I expect competing stores to ask a smaller cut than what currently Apple asks (and Apple itself may lower it), so it may very well be the case even with a middleman the amount "lost" by the developer will be lower. Not a given though, I guess we will see.

Secondly, the Android ecosystem seems to be doing well even with the situation you describe. There are not that many competing stores (mostly from sellers of devices, like huawei, samsung, amazon, which is something will not happen with Apple devices), and piracy, while present is not as commons as with desktops.

Do you think sideloading hurts indie developers on Android? I believe that over time the situation on iOS will become identical to the one on Android - Google Play/the App Store will be the primary way to install apps for 99% of users since it's the default and has the biggest catalogue; some companies that are unhappy with Google Play/App Store fees will have an alternative store just for their apps (see Epic games), and advanced users will have an "advanced user" appstore with apps that either Apple/Google don't want to support or developed by people who don't want to pay a Google/Apple developer fees (i.e. mostly open-source hobbyist apps), along the lines of F-Droid. It appears the iOS equivalent of that will be AltStore.

If that's what happens then I see no way for this to be bad for indie devs - the ones who want to write a paid app and can afford the upfront capital to publish can still do so on the store with 99% of users, while those who don't have the capital or don't want to publish paid apps now have the option of going with AltStore.

This is what I hope happens at least, as I am a big fan of Apple hardware but absolutely despise how its software treats me like a baby. If Android can allow for more freedom without compromising security by hiding advanced features behind several scary menus and parental controls then I don't see why Apple can't have the same.

This is already mitigated with copyright laws.

If a copycat is using your brand, you’ll have zero issue removing them from any App Store. If a copycat is just copying your app, well, that’s called a competitor.

You forgot an immense portion of companies who will benefit from this : B2B companies which have lower client pools but want to have a direct contractual relationship with their clients.

Indie devs typically won’t have the resources to monitor and react to a constant flow of copycats.

> Do I believe indie devs will be worse off? Unfortunately, also yes.

Worse off than having 15% to 30% of their entire revenue stream taken? Doubt it.

Sounds like they need a meta-bundler that will build bundles for all of the app stores then.

No one copies small indie apps. Copying makes sense only with popular apps.

Also, web is very open ecosystem and phishing is a problem but for users and corporate, not for small devs

If it's a common issue, services for automatic multi-store deployment and checks like that will appear very soon.

You raise some valid points, but I believe your comparison isn't quite complete/holistic.

> If you are a solo app developer, you will now have to keep presence on all app stores out there, since if you don’t publish on one then a copycat will.

This doesn't make much sense. The App Store will still be where 90%+ apps are installed from, and I'm willing to bet money on that. Where are all the Google Play devs pushing their apps on the Amazon store or on 3rd party app stores?

> Furthermore, I believe you will have much less protection against plain piracy, which was a big thing in the days of yore until it was spectacularly dealt with by Apple within its mobile ecosystem.

Depending on your familiarity you already had lots of such websites (I'm not going to mention any names but it's easily googleable if anyone wants to verify). Yes keeping the app for >7 days was a pain as they expire but a 3rd party altserver helps with that.

> This is why I suspect the primary interests side-loading and alt app stores on Apple devices would satisfy is large enterprises and a few opportunistic middlemen.

Have you taken a look at any of the privacy forums/subreddits? Places where they use say GrapheneOS? Do you know what's their favorite app store? It's this thing called F-droid. And it only contains open source apps. Such a move would be amazing for open source devs. Hell, it would be great for beginner/hobbyist devs too. I (ages ago) had tried my hand at android dev. And unlike iOS, you don't need to pay $99 to appease the Apple gods for that. Free publishing is great for indie and small devs who may never hit $99/yr revenue.

Btw, afaik you already needed to pay a higher price for youtube premium if subscribing through the app. And apple's draconian/benevolent-and-super-nice policies (/s) meant that you couldn't even tell your users to get it for cheaper from elsewhere. Would you like paying 30% of your income regardless of choice?

I agree with you on most counts save for the piracy. It's highly dependent on market segment, with less affluent sectors especially with youth you'll find very high privacy rates.

I look forward to the day an fdroid like platform is available on Apple phones and tablets.

I hardly see any critic of the DMA talk about things like F-Droid. I suppose the generous explanation is that they don't know.

1) Users win. The first alt app store didn't even launch and it pressured Apple to change it's review policies TWICE. Once to allow game streaming services, and then to allow game emulators. Hell, even developers won here.

2) How did this play out on every other platform. Sure - piracy exists, but most don't and it's pretty non-impactful AFAICT.

Are you making much money from less affluent sectors anyway? Existance of piracy doesn't mean loss of sales. I would guess that most pirated software was never going to be purchased anyway.

> beliefs are like that

Not really a common approach with the people I know.

People can make educated guesses ahead of facts. That's pretty standard.

But having strong "beliefs" without evidence just means there's no real basis for the "belief". And that makes it just an irrational feeling or wish-for-it-to-be-true for whatever reason.

Indie game devs gave up on mobile almost a decade ago, when the F2P wrecking ball swung its way through mobile gaming.

(Have the top games even changed since then? some variant of Clash of Credit Cards dominating?)

Piracy is not-impactful is not true. The disappearance of indie software that do not depend on a remote server (or that's not software on a remote server) is basically due to the inability to monetize with sales native, stand-alone, software. And that's for the piracy.

In some way, the success of the App Store towards indie/solo developers is because there was a way to sell things without the piracy easily steal your sales.

Yes, I know that "it's not stealing", "it's not theft", etc. Beside the ethical/moral conundrum of piracy, the fact is that it destroys the market for small developers.

> Do I believe indie devs will be worse off? Unfortunately, also yes.

There's a high number of indie devs which just gave up with the cumbersome appstore process. The ones you see on the appstore are the ones who made past this filter already.

I personally advise single devs against making an app unless you are really sure to have the motivation to go through all all of this.

The mobile stores are particularly bad and unsuited for hobbyists or single devs at the moment.

Just compare that to a website where you deploy and you are done.

Piracy literally cannot affect the economic wellbeing of content or software producers. It is logically impossible!

If it weren't, you wouldn't be experiencing this cascade of downvotes, so get with the program.

> If you are a solo app developer, you will now have to keep presence on all app stores out there, since if you don’t publish on one then a copycat will

I really wouldn't worry about it. Those of us who care about this kind of thing are the small minority. I'm incredibly happy to have this in the EU, but am under no illusions that it means the average Joe is going to care enough to jump through the hoops necessary to install (yes, install!) an alternative app store.

This would be true if the only alternative to piracy is not using said content or software. If paying is a valid alternative to a nonzero fraction of pirate users if piracy was not an option, then the piracy does affect the creators economically.

> If it weren't, you wouldn't be experiencing this cascade of downvotes, so get with the program.

Disregarding this statement's general silliness, it is also downvoted. Now we're in a paradox. Downvotes mean you're wrong, so the statement that downvotes mean you're wrong..is wrong?

There have been various efforts to estimate the effect piracy has on revenue like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15319476 or http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Another-view-of-game-piracy

So depending on product category it might be a large drop (EU study finds -38% displacement rate for books) but it might also be a boost (EU study finds +24% for video games), and it is hard to say in general, since even a 90% piracy rate might only mean a maximum of 5%-10% lost sales (from the wolfire blog post). Either way it isn't at the level of "impossible to succeed".

If we are talking about app stores specifically, I bet a much bigger factor in (lack of) success is discoverability, both because your app is literally hard to find and because app store owners allow a flow of cheap clones to compete with your genuine app.

Well, the point I was trying to make, said in another way is that the initial success of App Store (iOS, in particular) was driven that the fact that , suddenly, users thought that was OK to pay for the software. I think that the (relative) lack of piracy and difficulty for ordinary users to install pirated software has been a key factor in the success of it: "there's an app for that, and I can't easily find it for free".

The other point I was trying to make is that the disappearance of "stand-alone" apps, not tied to a web service, is primarily driven by the fact that, this way, you can avoid piracy. You can offer a free-tier (that would be eaten by the piracy anyway) and sell (say) a synchronize, or additional features tied to a web service (so not printable).

May be it's not the only thing, but that's what (anecdotically) I hear from solo-indie-very small developers.

I fully agree with you on both the current discoverability problem and also with games piracy having a different, may be even not negative effect.

> Secondly, the Android ecosystem seems to be doing well

Android apps are notoriously pirated through and through. For a smaller company in developed market anything Android is a second thought because monetization is much harder

> suddenly, users thought that was OK to pay for the software

I would argue almost the opposite way. Users are now conditioned to expect the software to be free with ads of 99 cents. Both greatly lowering the cap on what people can charge for software due to expectations. Instead we've seen the rise of subscription services apps that have no business needing one.

I'd contend that profiteering off of youth is more questionably moral than piracy among youth.

I pirated virtually everything I consumed as a kid/teen and now that I have money I pay for it. The companies I pirated off of lost nothing because I had no means to purchase it anyways.

I ported my lucrative iPhone games to Android back in the early days, 2010-11. They were immediately copied and re-uploaded to Google Play (I think it was still called Android Store back then). I mean literally duplicated, not a single thing changed. Just using my binary under someone else’s name. And then it was freely downloadable all over the web. Just wide open theft and piracy with no help or enforcement from Google.

Took all summer to port those games and I made maybe five bucks for the effort. Never again.

> you will now have to keep presence on all app stores out there, since if you don’t publish on one then a copycat will

Nobody has to do anything. If you don't want the trouble of publishing on an alt-store to serve your customers, what's the problem of letting others do so?

This is such a lazyness argument, to be honest...

i can't speak for app stores, but my band, based out of Anchorage, Alaska, makes good money from streams. we are completely independent. we don't use cdbaby, but distrokid who charges a flat fee to upload, and publishes to all available platforms. that flat fee also covers publishing to new platforms as they become available to distrokid.

i underdstand your worries but at least in my main line of work, i've seen a lot of innovation over the 20 years i've been doing this. fret not. i guess that's a guitar pun.

And if the store is hosted outside of Europe? Just like how nobody can access the pirate bay?

The only evidence is that developers think they need to do these things because of piracy, which is not the same as actually needing to. A moral panic about a thing does not prove the thing is actually a problem, and the effects of the panic itself shouldn't be blamed on the thing, either.

Come on, the pc has allowed "sideloading" since its inception maybe 40 years ago.

On the pc, you could create applications entirely out of the control of microsoft (formerly ibm) and the world was better for it.

When ios came out with the app store, apple immediately prevented large swaths of useful applications from seeing the light of day. The debacle with privacy would be of less consequence if Little Snitch had been ported from macos to ios.

Not sure in which world you’re living. Remember shareware and cracked versions of it? Remember having to jump through hoops to get paid for software (or indeed to pay, if you were a user)? Especially if user and developer lived in different countries.

Apple created a new reality where you pay 99 cents and buy to own. It made so very compelling, through general ease of payment flow that just works worldwide and through a large ecosystem of compelling hardware.

Then, subscription behemoths like Epic started crying how it’s all unfair. Of course, it is to them, but there is no way kowtowing to them is beneficial to small app developers.

Remember that we are talking about small developers.

Yes, Adobe, Microsoft or makers of viral AAA games absolutely benefit from piracy (that’s why they have actually tolerated it for decades): it helps their software penetrate the market and get more users hooked up on their ecosystem. However, to John Doe’s lifestyle business of a couple small niche or utility apps each lost sale is bread off the table.

In addition, piracy on iOS is great for major providers who do subscription services (a device where you can pirate means a device with more users, and more users means more monthly revenue).

Again, the people hit the most are the above-mentioned small time John Does.