![]() Macs aren’t the wild west despite the fact that anyone can install apps from any source. No different from any other computer platform. Opening a hole in iOS that allows third-party stores, third-party billing, and/or side-loading would open up a raft of security issues whereby innocent people would be duped into clicking links… Gatekeeper on macOS does this and it seems to work just fine. And those that don’t want to trust third-party app stores can use the existing permission mechanism to block apps from installing additional apps.Īnd, of course, there is no reason why iOS can’t still require apps to be signed and notarized even if they are distributed by a third-party store. It didn’t destroy the Windows platform (where malware is a far bigger problem), it didn’t destroy the Mac platform and it won’t destroy iOS. Yes, a user might be tricked into installing a malicious app store, but there’s no way to avoid that. With such a feature, legitimate app stores (like Amazon or Samsung or your wireless carrier) can install your purchases without permitting everything in the world access. You can instead make “install software” another permission that an app needs if it is going to be allowed to install additional apps. Apple (or Google, for that matter) doesn’t need to remove all access controls in order to permit third-party app stores. Personally, I think there’s a happy medium here. You do have to configure Android to allow installation from “unknown sources” in order to use it, but you can also revert the setting (to block unknown sources) when you’re not actually installing an app, if you are worried about malware auto-installing something. But the worst case scenario seems unlikely given the state of app distribution on Android.Īmazon has had an Android store for a long time. Apple could allow sideloading but make it so onerous to enable that it’s not a viable route for any mass market app. The specific implementation would make all the difference. And of course, once you allow sideloading, it would be near impossible to take it away if things did go badly. The counter argument is that Android is already a lot more permissive than iOS, so a company like Facebook has a lot less incentive to go to the effort of an alternative distribution method. I have to say, I’m still on the fence as to whether sideloading would be a problem if it were allowed on iOS. Or, to take another example, why hasn’t Facebook taken their app off the Google store? Surely that would give them a lot more freedom in what they can do with the app? If a big company selling a game as addictive as Fortnite can’t make a profit selling outside the official platform app store, it’s hard to see anyone else doing it. I think it came out in the recent Epic trial that they had tried distributing Fortnite for Android outside the Google store so they could avoid paying Google a cut, but they had to abandon that and put it on the Google store because they couldn’t get enough people to download it outside the official store. How likely is this to happen, though? Given that sideloading is possible on Android and Google is generally less restrictive, why haven’t the big players set up their own alternative stores there. Songs from the Apple Music catalog cannot be burned to a CD.I don’t want to have to remember that the Nest app came from Google’s store, and the Alexa app came from Amazon’s store, and Netflix required users to download the app to install directly, and Fantastical and CardHop only from the Flexibits store. ![]()
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