> A big part of the reason I use Apple products is that they protect not only me, but my family who don't know what the implications of sideloading are. I know that the apps my phone runs have been given the green light by Apple.
Which is fine, you're not required to install sideloaded apps. You could even, for example, configure your phone to disable them in a way that can't be modified again without a factory reset.
But why shouldn't someone else who wants something else be able to do something else?
Notice that their ability to do it benefits you. Someone writes a crappy little open source app, without sideloading they don't even bother because the approval process is too much of a barrier. With it, they throw it up on github and then a dozen other nerds use it for a while and make contributions, until it starts getting popular and good. Then they have enough donations to pay somebody to push it through the approval process and you get to install it from the app store. But without that, it doesn't exist.
> Is the 30% fee egregious? Maybe, but why shouldn't they be able to charge the fees they want? It's their platform.
Corporations don't own you just because they sold you something.
> And for those who don't agree with it, like Epic Games, maybe they can go and develop their own phone?
Phone platforms have a strong network effect. Microsoft is a trillion dollar corporation that made a serious attempt to do this and failed, what hope does anyone smaller have? Two platforms that already existed when app stores became a thing (iOS an Android) still have a combined ~100% market share almost two decades later. "Just make your own phone" is like "just start your own phone network" in terms of viability for ordinary people.
> Mandating Apple to allow sideloading is essentially saying "we have no hope of ever developing a competing open platform so we have to use law to force this American company to make us one."
Okay, let's say you want to do that. The typical way to start a new platform is to create an abstraction over it that allows people to create apps that run on both your new platform and any incumbent platforms. Developers like this because they can use the new framework instead of having to create separate apps for each of the incumbent platforms, so they do, and then those apps also support your new platform and allow you to start building a network effect. Think Java, Qt, Gtk, HTML/JavaScript, etc.
Then all you need is the ability for users to side load the new apps independent of the platform corporation who is going to discourage that sort of thing (as, for example, Apple does by making features available to native apps that aren't available to web apps). Which is the thing being requested.
Which is fine, you're not required to install sideloaded apps. You could even, for example, configure your phone to disable them in a way that can't be modified again without a factory reset.
But why shouldn't someone else who wants something else be able to do something else?
Notice that their ability to do it benefits you. Someone writes a crappy little open source app, without sideloading they don't even bother because the approval process is too much of a barrier. With it, they throw it up on github and then a dozen other nerds use it for a while and make contributions, until it starts getting popular and good. Then they have enough donations to pay somebody to push it through the approval process and you get to install it from the app store. But without that, it doesn't exist.
> Is the 30% fee egregious? Maybe, but why shouldn't they be able to charge the fees they want? It's their platform.
Corporations don't own you just because they sold you something.
> And for those who don't agree with it, like Epic Games, maybe they can go and develop their own phone?
Phone platforms have a strong network effect. Microsoft is a trillion dollar corporation that made a serious attempt to do this and failed, what hope does anyone smaller have? Two platforms that already existed when app stores became a thing (iOS an Android) still have a combined ~100% market share almost two decades later. "Just make your own phone" is like "just start your own phone network" in terms of viability for ordinary people.
> Mandating Apple to allow sideloading is essentially saying "we have no hope of ever developing a competing open platform so we have to use law to force this American company to make us one."
Okay, let's say you want to do that. The typical way to start a new platform is to create an abstraction over it that allows people to create apps that run on both your new platform and any incumbent platforms. Developers like this because they can use the new framework instead of having to create separate apps for each of the incumbent platforms, so they do, and then those apps also support your new platform and allow you to start building a network effect. Think Java, Qt, Gtk, HTML/JavaScript, etc.
Then all you need is the ability for users to side load the new apps independent of the platform corporation who is going to discourage that sort of thing (as, for example, Apple does by making features available to native apps that aren't available to web apps). Which is the thing being requested.