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Yeah it's hell on android having to install all of these separate app stores.... Oh, except it isn't, 99.9% of these apps just exist on the Play Store.

If you don't like them, just don't use them, right? I mean that's the argument we're seeing against these changes, how does it not apply equally the opposite way? If you don't want to use an app like Facebook because it's on its own separate appstore, then don't. Besides, I don't see a reality in which these companies forego the easy native solution with millions of users in favor of whatever the process sideloading would involve.

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Apple have much stricter requirements, which is the point the person is making and you are willingly ignoring.

Apple, right now, have the ability to ensure the apps are transparent about what they track, have an explicit dialogue to confirm if you'd like the app to track you.

These big corps hate that apple have that control and want to keep their customers informed on what's going on, and as such, they will stop using the App Store and ask customers to side load so they can release much more invasive versions of their apps that track everything without any user ever being informed.

So yes, this IS objectively a bad thing and ripe for explotation.

Sounds like Apple, with their trillions of dollars and apparent focus on quality, should invest into figuring out an OS-level permissions system then, which I presume they already do have. The OS should be handling such issues, not the App Store from which apps come from. Even if the user installs some botnet willingly, it shouldn't be able to break out of the OS sandbox and do things the user doesn't want simply because it was sideloaded (assuming a non-jailbroken/rooted phone which no non-technical user will ever accidentally find themselves with).

> These big corps hate that apple have that control and want to keep their customers informed on what's going on...

Oh yeah, the noble small Apple - the richest and biggest corporation to have ever existed - only has their user's best wishes in mind... It's totally unrelated to their own ad network, which they're building on top of the data they exclusively have access to thanks to their walled garden! And no, I'm not saying others should have access to this data, this data shouldn't be able to be used at all, not by Apple nor anyone else.

> ... they will stop using the App Store and ask customers to side load so they can release much more invasive versions of their apps that track everything without any user ever being informed

If the only thing protecting users from this is the fact that you can't sideload and have to rely on the App Store review process, then that's some real shit security, and Apple should definitely improve things there.

> So yes, this IS objectively a bad thing and ripe for explotation.

Funny how saying something is objective doesn't make it so. It's objectively bad for Apple, sure, since they lose their iron-tight grip on their own users. They also lose out on that sweet 30% of every penny a dev makes. Won't find me shedding a tear for them though, the less money Apple and the other megacorps get to suck dry, the better.

And again, all they have to do is spend a few thousand of those trillions of dollars they have to put up an obnoxious and hard-to-get-rid of warning when sideloading. People who care about sideloading like myself will happily oblige and go through the warning screens even if they're tedious, while the hypothetical vulnerable grandmas get greeted with a screen they don't know how to work around.