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

(arstechnica.com)
380 points rezonant | 1 comments | 30 Apr 24 04:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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kevingadd ◴[30 Apr 24 05:35 UTC] No.40207559[source]▶
I'm genuinely surprised by this. I figured the differences between tablets and phones, combined with Apple's efforts to distinguish between 'iPadOS' and 'iOS', would be enough to get them a win on this point. If the shared app store is part of the problem I wonder if that makes it a liability for any new apple ecosystem to tie into the App Store, like Vision OS for example.
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kvdveer ◴[30 Apr 24 05:49 UTC] No.40207618[source]▶
Why would IpadOS not be held to the same DSA rules as IOS? Apple has applied the same model of gatekeeping (walled garden) to both the iPhone and the iPad. DSA attaches requirements to the gatekeepers if they are big enough.

Software similarity and market positioning don't really come into consideration once the role of gatekeeper has been established.

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threeseed[dead post] ◴[30 Apr 24 05:53 UTC] No.40207638[source]▶
[flagged]
beretguy ◴[30 Apr 24 06:14 UTC] No.40207743[source]▶
Why are you defending having less ownership over devices that you own? It’s like your employer wants to give you a salary increase but you complain and say you don’t want more money.
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massysett ◴[30 Apr 24 09:02 UTC] No.40208739[source]▶
Because I should have that choice. Government should not make this decision for me. If it’s important to me that I have devices I fully own, I should seek that out. If I like the products and prices that result from walled-garden business models, I should be able to choose them.
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lupusreal ◴[30 Apr 24 09:14 UTC] No.40208819[source]▶
You will have the choice of installing or not installing the software you wish. The "choice" as you're describing it is a symptom of Stockholm Syndrome.
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massysett ◴[30 Apr 24 09:29 UTC] No.40208918[source]▶
I might not want that choice. That requires that I use my brain as I use the device and not do the harmful thing. Or maybe I want to hand the device to my child and be assured that she cannot install software, or use it as a publicly-accessible kiosk and be assured members of the public can’t break it. People who have handed Windows PCs to software illiterates and have to constantly return to eradicate crapware understand this problem.

Also, it costs the vendor to implement support for installing other software - resources the vendor could have spent on features I value, rather than features I don’t want. If only a government didn’t dictate to the vendor what it should do, stripping the vendor and the user of the power to decide for themselves.

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1. 76SlashDolphin ◴[30 Apr 24 10:35 UTC] No.40209399{3}[source]▶
If you don't want that choice you don't have to enable the feature. Installation from Unknown Sources in Android is off by default and requires a user to explicitly go into the settings and find the obscure toggle, which in recent times has proven to be a big enough deterrent that there don't appear to be any recent mass-scale attacks using this vector. On top of that Android and Windows both have fairly comprehensive parental controls, which can disable the entire option of installing non-approved software, so that point is moot.

And the resources needed to make an app installer are not nearly as high as you make it out to be because iOS already has the mechanism to install signed .ipas. All that's needed in theory is a check to disable signing (which they already have implemented in MacOS) and to add a few pages to the Settings app, which surely shouldn't be an issue for a tech company of Apple's size. And if you argue that it might break some spaghetti code then maybe that should be fixed anyways and it's doing them a favour.