Oh, and I’ve had an Apple phone for like 2? years, and not been bothered by prices, as I haven’t had to buy any apps or anything, so I guess I might be an outlier. Also the phone only cost like £500, so that was not Too painful either.
Google pulled the app too, so why are they only mad at apple? Cause you can sideload?
Inb4 epic app store on Android.
Wouldn’t suprise me
You don’t even need to sideload on Android. You just uncheck a box and boom you can install any APK you download to your heart’s content.
Sweeney is looking for every way to suck kids parent’s credit card dry.
I think you just made the case for not allowing it.
Probably the main difference between the platforms is how the manage and approve apps. Apple has a human component, google relies on technology.
Its not clear that Epic would be happy with their apps being stopped from being side loaded by apple identifying potentially harmful apps, they seem to want to run their won store with no conditions. And why should Apple pay for that?
As for side loading and harmful apps. Google suggests that 2018 0.92% of all side loaded apps were harmful. Google suggest they were only able to stop 73% of harmful apps.
But to give you an idea of what that number is. Google prevented 1.6 billion harmful apps from being installed outside the play store. That 1.6 billion is the 73% of the 100% of harmful apps outside the play store. Thats what… somewhere around 500 million harmful apps installed on peoples phones.
As a quick comparison of how bad it is outside the play store
0.92% might not sound like much, but it is when its billions of devices and hundreds of times higher than the play store.
Its getting better as well, but its getting better because Google are placing more and more restrictions on the platform, the opposite of what Epic wants.
source: https://source.android.com/security/reports/Google_Android_Security_2018_Report_Final.pdf
Just to give you an idea of the extend of the issues Android and Google have to deal with
Chamois
Chamois was one of the most impactful PHA families in Android in 2018 with more than 199 million installs. It originally emerged in late 2016 and again in early 2017; Google detected and disrupted the first two variants. After an eight month hiatus, Chamois re-emerged in November 2017 outside of Google Play. Chamois uses a variety of distribution mechanisms including being pre-installed, added as an advertising SDK, and injected into popular sideloaded applications. The Android security team implemented detection and remediation techniques across these channels, leading to a sharp decline in installs in 2018.Chamois is a well-engineered, sophisticated piece of malware. As of November 2018, there were five known variants of the Chamois botnet family, three of which emerged after November 2017. These variants are comprised of four or five stages with anti-analysis features and a command-and-control infrastructure for deploying their payload. Google Play Protect classifies Chamois as a backdoor due to the remote command-andcontrol capabilities it has. The payloads for Chamois range from a variety of ad fraud payloads to SMS fraud to dynamic code loading.
These kind of issues I believe will only serve to strengthen Apples case
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As someone who runs custom roms and the like I take issue with this notion.
It’s as dangerous as you make it yourself. I don’t believe Google’s numbers for a minute. I’d trust content on F-Droid as much as I would on the play store.
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With all due respect. You’re not normal (neither am I). You have to remember we live in a tech bubble that isn’t the real word. None of us are your average person.
The fact that you run a custom rom probably means you aren’t even counted on these stats in the first place.
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Sure, but people installing apps outside of the play store or other ecosystems (think Amazon) aren’t normal either.
Not necessarily, but people get scammed all the time. The vast majority of people just aren’t tech people, if I told someone to install this apk to get this cool thing they wanted, they’d probably believe me and follow my instructions.
People are idiots, and it’s not really a good or bad thing, they just don’t know. They have other things going on in their life.
People download absolute garbage on their PC all the time. Side loading isn’t that much different.
FWIW I am counted because I choose to be. The functionality of the scan is built into Google app services which I chose to install.
I think that’s why I like what tim is doing here, because I like choice.
That’s one of the reasons I don’t use apple anymore. I used to jailbreak so I could have access to alternative repos. They made this impractical.
Agreed but out of the box you can’t install third party apps on most Android phones.
For the record, side loading is a developer tool. No one besides people like me and actual devs are sideloading. I think there’s some misconceptions at play here just due to lack of information.
Side loading requires custom recovery firmware or a PC. You boot the device into a diagnostic mode to manually install applications without Android running.
The vast majority of people don’t know how to even install third party applications. Side loading is a niche tool.
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Yes it does. You agree to sell your products on that storefront by following their terms. If not - well you don’t sell on their store anymore.
It’s fine when Steam removes games for violating terms of service, but not apple?
It’s fine when Target doesn’t sell GTA5 but Fortnight on IOS is a big deal?
No…
But this is what epic wants. They effectively asked for a 3th party store - epic store, this way not paying rent to Apple.
I don’t love apple. I don’t love epic either.
All I am saying is, looking at this situation I am kinda on the side of apple.
Just like I was on the side of Sony when Disney strongarmed them for more money by breaking their contract.
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As far as I remember you just need to check ‘unknown sources’ from the security menu and then just tap the apk to install it.
I’m not talking about sideoading apps without the knowledge of the OS, just side loading in the context of installing apps outside of the confines of the App Store.
That’s not what sideloading means from a technical standpoint but you can do that. The rub is you have to check the box, install a file explorer, and download the APK to run. This isn’t something most idiots users are doing either.
There’s also the matter of false positives which I’m sure you’re no stranger to.
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You’re arguing against a point I never made.
Well no matter how you put it, users have done it with harmful apps at least 1.6 billion times in a year. And yea most users aren’t. Only about 1% of them. The problem is that’s a huge number. These tiny percentages result in large issues.
So I can see from apples perspective that allowing that kind of issue, and reducing the security of the platform isn’t acceptable to them.
I agree with you on the side loading, the wrong terminology perhaps but hopefully not confusing to my post.
Absolutely, I don’t mean to show the numbers as absolute, but as a general indication of some of the issues being considered
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I totally understand and agree apple is fully in the right doing what they did. I also agree it’s their ecosystem and their right to do as they please with it.
I also remember what it was like having non app store software available and think I’d prefer to have more choice. I’d probably get an iPhone SE if they didn’t make it so impractical to run what I want to run.
Oh I completely get this. There is an element of compromise for the choice of platform. A completely open iOS… it’s a really interesting idea.
I’ve actually considered getting myself a second phone (the pine phone) as a little hacking phone to do things I can’t on iOS, while having my iPhone as my more secure and ‘trusted’ platform.
Something like the iOS equivalent of Darwin would be cool. Something you could flash yourself and add in your repos like exists for Android. It wouldn’t solve Sweeney’s problem but it would be nice to me.