Apple has zero moral justification for them. They are quadruple-dipping:
1. Consumers pay premium prices for Apple devices.
2. Developers have to pay $100 a year to be able to publish an app.
3. Developers need to buy expensive Apple hardware to develop for iOS. XCode doesn't work on Linux or Windows.
4. And on top of it, Apple also wants 30% of all the gross app sales.
All while their tools that developers _have_ to use are buggy and often nigh unsusable (Apple Connect....).
But wait, there's more! To keep the stronghold on developers, Apple is not allowing third-party apps to use JITs, resulting in a huge amount of time wasted to work around that.
> All while their tools that developers _have_ to use are buggy and often nigh unsusable (Apple Connect....).
I'm moving to a job where I don't have to be the build/devops engineer for a product with an iOS app. To say I'm relieved wouldn't even be the half of it. What made it particularly worse was that our release cycle was every two months which is just enough time for Apple to completely wreck the build.
The broader consumer base will install anything a bad actor wants them to and then blame the manufacturer for not stopping them with some draconian rule.
This expectation exists because Apple/Google/monopolists sell it. But it's not realistic, the app stores are cesspools. We need a culture shift to being more selective about installing software. Clearer permissions, better architecture, and trusted repositories with reputations to maintain. Installing software without any validation of safety should be possible but scary (show a terminal log reporting useful technical information or something).
Permissioning is a mess – among other things of course. I feel that permissions to access any resource(image, location, files etc) could be given without necessarily giving access to the PII value that resource holds, e.g. running a no side effects function on it on-device or on a trusted service that is readonly to me and write-only to 3rd parties.
Please, side-loading is usually an annoying involved process targeted at developers which the average consumer cannot accidentally do.
A bad actor would have better luck telling a victim "just ship me your phone and login password for some emergency maintenance" than instructing a user through sideloading an app onto their smart fridge.
I, personally, would be happy if iOS had android-style side-loading where you have to enable developer mode, promise you're not an idiot, and go from there.
Our priorities just aren't aligned, I am not being measurably hurt by any of the AppStore rules cyberax laid out.
I don't want to be forced or even prompted to fill out my personal information on every apps website. To me that sounds like an increased burden of my time, and it puts my personal information at higher risk to be gathered and sold or leaked. I prefer the transaction to happen within the app on iOS conforming to the UI/UX standards that Apple has established.
I know exactly what happens when we just let the free market "manage" anything. Utter chaos. We get an internet that is completely and utterly infected with ads, spam, and scams.
Not bad faith. In 2006, the AppStore didn’t exist. In 2008, it did. Many people decided that they could sell an app and make a profit.
A decade and a half later, the overhead is the same but somehow people think they’re being treated unfairly.
You can make the app, you can charge what you want, you can make the app for any and every platform. Where is the harm? Where is the anti-competitiveness?
> I know exactly what happens when we just let the free market "manage" anything.
This is literally how we got here right now. The "free market" allowed Apple to be anti-competitive. The way you say it makes it sound like we're not in a free market, lol.
Monopolies (or its variants) are literally the end game of free markets. You can't have free markets without eventually reaching this shitty endgame of a few players manipulating the market as they see fit.
Apple has zero moral justification for them. They are quadruple-dipping:
1. Consumers pay premium prices for Apple devices.
2. Developers have to pay $100 a year to be able to publish an app.
3. Developers need to buy expensive Apple hardware to develop for iOS. XCode doesn't work on Linux or Windows.
4. And on top of it, Apple also wants 30% of all the gross app sales.
All while their tools that developers _have_ to use are buggy and often nigh unsusable (Apple Connect....).
But wait, there's more! To keep the stronghold on developers, Apple is not allowing third-party apps to use JITs, resulting in a huge amount of time wasted to work around that.