this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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Reading the comments from that article is a prime example of how a cult functions.
In reality this will have a 0,002% impact. Most phone users are tech-illiterate and have no idea how to use their devices. You expect these people to go to a different store? On Android you can have other app stores, why don't you have? Because Play Store is default and all app developers want to be where most users are, not on a 3-4% user share store.
It will most likely be background noise in the first months and everyone will go back to the App Store. The only people that will use an alternate store will most likely be the same ones that use F-droid, so 0,002% of the users.
But hey, it's better to scream how this whole thing is making their devices less secure, because Apple told them so.
I think that's exactly the problem. The real user benefit will be very small, but in order to enable those changes, functionality will be implemented on everyone's phones to support sideloading. In my eyes, this increseas the attack surface against iPhones. Time and time again alt stores have been used to distribute fake apps and malware on Android, and the victims are often those users who haven't asked for sideloading and are unlikely to use it intentionally.
Yes, maybe this will enable an F-droid equivalent on iPhone and it will be great to have direct access to open-source apps. But is this niche addition worth potentially reducing the security of all iPhones? I'm not convinced.
But here's the thing - side loading, even on android, is an opt-in feature. The user has to actively go out of their way to sideload an app. Even if an app tries to do it behind your back, you must first enable its ability to do so.
Yes, this doesn't exist when ADB is involved, but in that case you have to go out of your way to enable USB debugging (and be stupid enough to plug your phone into someone else's computer). The vast majority of iPhones will never have sideloading enabled by their users. The EU isn't grabbing their balls and saying that all users must have it enabled by default, otherwise they'd be going after Android too.
Sure, I get that. The issue is that as soon as you introduce the ability to install apps from outside the App Store, it becomes possible to trick unsuspecting users into clicking buttons they don't understand. By designing a web page to look like an actual Apple page, a malicious party could convince users to "opt in" to outside sources, in a similar way in which phishing websites harvest users' online banking credentials. Currently, this kind of attack is entirely impossible on iPhone.
Doesn't this argument essentially boil down to "people are stupid and we should take away their freedoms to protect them from themselves"? I'm not going to say that most people would make use of being able to install 3rd party apps, or even that it won't give malware more chances to get people. But people can get themselves hurt or compromise their electronic security in any number of ways taking away people's choices until they can't make bad decisions anymore just doesn't seem worth it to me