Comment by isodev
2 hours ago
That’s good news for people who enjoy the freedom of using the device they own in the way they want.
Having (alt store) presence in Australia, Brazil, EU and Japan is in fact more than enough for many indies - one can even begin to imagine ignoring the US as a region.
It’s also great news for app developers.
First, Apple does not follow the same rules they set for developers.
Second, Apple does not treat all developers equally. We have functionality we’re unable to offer to iOS users.
The same feature, including technical implementation mechanism, is available in Claude and Gemini. It’s unfair.
I’ve been thinking about open source replacements of proprietary companion apps. It’s easy enough to reverse engineer Bluetooth protocols now, but you can’t run these in websites. Putting stuff on the App Store is too expensive but sideloading could be viable.
Side*note: I really hope we can move away from the term "sideloading" which makes it sound like we're doing something on the down low.
Installing something is a perfectly normal operation - it's the App Store that's the special case :).
Yes, how about just "loading"?
Direct Install, or better yet, Owner Controlled Install.
Lets call it what it is.
You actually can use most bluetooth apis in websites on most browsers outside of iOS [0]. I used recently this tool [1] to program my baofeng radio and the bluetooth aspect of it worked great, but I did end up having to reverse engineer aspects of the payload to get it encode and decode all the channel configuration correctly.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Bluetoo...
[1] https://dz0ny.github.io/5r-mini-ble-tool/
> one can even begin to imagine ignoring the US as a region
As someone from that region, this is probably a good idea for all parties, right now. I'm not fond of our current trajectory, and the outside pressure to change isn't sounding unreasonable.
But that is the region where most developers would want to target to get more revenue
It's terrible news for anyone who has some responsibility for the security of environments in which these devices are used.
Right now we have a relatively high confidence that as long as the devices are not jailbroken and are kept up to date they are relatively secure.
What this change means for people like me is that either there is some capability to detect whether third-party app stores are in use on a device and we will set a policy that disallows anyone using such things from accessing company data/services, or we have to lock out the devices altogether.
Surely it's possible to treat phones the same way as computers in corporate settings? Normal users aren't usually allowed to install whatever they want on their work PC, so why their work phone?
I think they were talking about bring your own device.
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Or your company buys phones for its employees and allows only those work phones on its networks. I understand that this is an extra cost and phones are maybe more expensive than some laptops good enough for working with Office.
The ruling doesn't ask Apple to get rid of app sandboxing. The ruling explicitly notes this:
> Moreover, because iOS apps are sandboxed, as implemented in other jurisdictions, apps available through alternative distribution will be sandboxed, which further strengthens security and reduces the likelihood that any app will compromise other apps [...]
"Billions of consumer phones must be locked down because our IT department is completely incompetent and incapable of providing locked down work devices"
Uhm, disallowing third-party stores, sure, but you draw a line that allows a non-jailbroken and updated device to be able to access company data? How is the lack of third-party app stores gonna prevent someone from sending sensitive data through the Mail app or to iCloud? Shouldn't company devices be managed with MDM to begin with?
> It's terrible news for anyone who has some responsibility for the security of environments in which these devices are used.
On the contrary, it allows app and payment security to be better than what Apple offers.