The whole point of side loading apps is to not need the app store. One of the most important features of an app store is to distribute and update apps. Storage and bandwidth isn’t free, but it is quite cheap.
I’m sorry if it hurts apples feelings when we tell them they’re not allowed to charge for every aspect of their hardware. But if they didn’t want us to own our iPhones then they shouldn’t have sold them.
Apple: builds their entire software ecosystem on free, open-source foundations.
Also Apple: better have a million euros if you want to even start distributing software.
The best use case for an external app store is free open-source software, like we have on the Android side with F-Droid. Apple stopped that before it even started. Jeez.
Note that third party app stores like F-Droid still aren’t first-class citizens like Google Play, since every installation still needs to be confirmed by an os popup, they can’t automatically install updates on most phones.
TBF if it wasn’t without a popup it would be insanely easy to install malware without the user knowing
You even get that popup on windows when installing something.
The only thing I see a problem with is that something like fdroid can’t be installed from the play store
The thing is, Google Play doesn’t have that for each app it updates. If I can choose to trust Google Play, I should be able to choose to trust F-Droid in that regard.
This is why copyleft licenses like gpl, agpl,
mit, creative commons exist. If they use those projects then the derivatives would also need to be open source.Edit: mit is not copyleft
MIT is free for commercial use and just requires attribution, you aren’t required to open source software derived from MIT licensed code.
GPL is also free for commercial use… all open source licenses are. The rendering engines used by Safari (and Chrome/Edge) are GPL.
GPL can be used for commercial purposes, but it requires all software derived from it to also be open source and GPL compatible. So no one whose commercial business relies on selling software will use GPL because their customers can copy and distribute the code.
Neither Safari nor Chrome’s rendering engine is GPL. Safari’s engine is LGPL, which means the binary library can be linked into a closed source program, but modifications to the library’s code must remain open.
Chromium is BSD, which doesn’t even require modifications to remain open. So I can take chromium’s source, change it however I want for my own browser, and never distribute that code.
If Safari’s and Chrome’s engines were GPL, Safari and Chrome would be forced to be open source, and they very much are not.
The thing is that source code is just a small part of an application. For example, Quake games are open sourced, but their assets like textures, models and music are not. Thus you can’t just compile the game and call it a day. Another example is all kinds of certificates, they are never part of the source. You can compile the app, but it won’t work.
Source code, GPL or otherwise, doesn’t matter.
I don’t expect the EU to fine Apple enough that it might actually hurt them, but if we suppose the regulators wanted to, is there anything to stop them?
The highest GDPR fine was 1.2 billion. As far as I know nothing is stopping the EU from imposing higher and higher fines with continued breach of guidelines there, and I would expect these fair market regulations to work similarly.
Also for reference, that fine was against meta, who had 34 billion in revenue in 2023. So that fine cost them around 3% of their global revenue, which I’m sure is tolerable, but definitely approaching the point of hurting.
The highest GDPR fine was 1.2 billion.
This isn’t the GDPR but the DMA. That said, fines there are even steeper, 10% of global revenue for the first offence, 20% for repeated offences.
This is what I hoped to see. Apple’s at actual risk of harm (or pissing off its shareholders) by messing with the EU.
Here in the States, our regulatory departments are entirely captured so there’s little to stop corporate anti-competitive shenanigans.
I am by no means an expert but this seems like a ludicrous response from Apple.
They can’t take this fight as, like you say, pissing off the shareholders will force them to change direction; if the EU do start talking about repercussions.
