By this point it seems pretty clear that they will, at least while Tim Cook is in charge. Other higher ups, specifically Phil Schiller, knew this was a bad idea but were overruled.

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/02/25/apples-phil-schiller-co...

You can set a different email client globally, but a different default Messages or Maps app? That only works in some regions. In-App payments? You can now basically do whatever you want in the US, in the EU you can opt-in into a different regime, in other regions it's staying the same but who knows for how long.

By fighting this everywhere they're basically losing control over the outcomes and will end up with lot's of different regulations everywhere. Instead of doing the sensible thing and opening up their platform before they're being forced to do so.

Here in EU they did allow third party stores and all we got were shovelware sites with subscriptions. It added even more friction an shadiness to acquiring apps.

We need to sop pretending iOS third party stores are anything like what we envisioned them to be. They are not f-droid or anything even half as good. Apple complies with this impotent law because the law changes absolutely nothing for end user.

Is Apple going to kill the golden goose unless it is literally forced to? Of course not.

Apple, together with Google, get a cut of 15% to 30% of all mobile app revenue. They have the entire market captured. They will only give that up when they're forced to.

And they’re just the most visible

Everything banned in the US is still offered as soon as you step across a border, every gross visual warning mandated in those countries is not implemented in the US

Your life is absolutely untouched by having other store options. And privacy is maintained by the granularity of the permissions, the manual review process is generally a joke and it changes like the weather.

Personally, every time I hear Apple fans talk about Android users "trying to turn their iPhone into Android because they bought the wrong device", I groan. Because over the last ten years, while Apple has more or less hasn't budged on their shitty security policy[0], Google has been stumbling head over heels trying to turn every Android into a shittier iPhone.

As for the "race to the bottom malware ecosystem", you don't need to sideload at all to get pwned on Android. That's enabled by Google themselves, because Google Play - what is supposed to be the vetted and secure place to obtain software - is absolutely chock full of scamware. If the app store is the "default", or only option, its business model doesn't actually punish the store for failing its users' trust.

In fact, while Google is demonstrably worse at every aspect running an app store, Apple's own store isn't much better. Sure, Apple can stringently review and deny app submissions from a new developer, but large established megacorporations get all sorts of special treatment on Apple devices. Think about how they made an example out of Tumblr, compared to how they manage Reddit, Twitter, or any Facebook-owned[1] app. Or how Apple blatantly violates their own ATT guidelines by not letting us turn off their own first-party tracking[2]. Or worse, how Roblox's core business model violates basically all the App Store rules and nobody at Apple seems to care, even though that app is basically a child predator's best friend. The iOS App Store is also a race-to-the-bottom malware ecosystem.

[0] To paraphrase, "Users can't be trusted not to fall for scams, and also they will rape developers, so we should have total control over their phones".

For the record, "rape developers" means "modify software in a way those developers don't like", which is "rape" in the same sense that your VCR is a home-invading rapist.

[1] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.

[2] In fact, this is so blatantly anti-competitive, the EU is mulling over - I shit ye not - forcing Apple to get rid of opt-in consent to level the playing field. Which itself sounds like a GDPR violation.

That doesn't make much sense, XNU and the layers above it are very portable, they went PowerPC -> x86 -> x86_64 -> ARM64 after all. They also supported multiple different GPUs in the Intel era.

If the entire OS stack was open sourced today, we would have forks running on standard Intel/AMD CPUs in a week. They wouldn't have the same optimized power management, etc. But I think it would have a good chance of wiping out desktop Linux within a brief period.

macOS/iOS are part of the moat.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45764986

This goes against the spirit of the DMA, which was supposed to 'open up' 3rd party stores.

The European Commission does not seem to care atm that Apple is still the gatekeeper.

> Apple’s App Store for security

The App Store doesn’t do anything to protect you in that sense. It’s easy to circumvent and these days it’s cheaper to just buy an iOS exploit than go through the trouble of making a shady app.

Can’t even scroll right in the text editor. Trillion-dollar company.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/support/web-distribution-eu/