Comment by magguzu
3 months ago
Which is totally fine IMO, it was weird to me that they weren't going with this approach when they first announced it.
Macs blocked launching apps from unverified devs, but you can override in settings. I thought they could just do something along those lines.
That's not fine at all. A developer who doesn't want to (or can't) distribute through the Play Store will now need to teach their users how to enable developer mode and toggle a hidden setting. This raises the barrier a bit more than the current method of installing outside the Play Store.
It's not fine. Some apps particularly banking apps have developer mode detection and refuse to work if developer mode is enabled.
I've switched banks for less.
Until there are no banks left to switch to
Maybe this sounds dark but see also how the net is tightening around phones that allow you to run open firmware after you've bought the hardware for the full and fair price. We're slowly being relegated to crappy hobbyist projects once the last major vendors decide on this as well, and I don't even understand what crime it is I'm being locked out for
We're too small a group for commercial vendors to care. Switching away isn't enough, especially when there's no solidarity, not even among hackers. Anyone who uses Apple phones votes with their wallet for locking down the ability to run software of your choice on hardware of your choice. It's as anti-hacker as you can get but it's fairly popular among the HN audience for some reason
If not even we can agree on this internally, what's a bank going to care about the fifty people in the country that can't use a banking app because they're obstinately using dev tools? What are they gonna do, try to live bankless?
Of course, so long as we can switch away: by all means. But it's not a long-term solution
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