I hope Apple will be punished for their behaviour. I could ideally understand them reserving the power to decide what gets uploaded and what doesn't on their stores, but then they must allow sideloading. People paid good money for their phones, and so they must be free to use them as they see fit. To me this sounds like buying a car that's restricted from entering Germany or buying a fruit processor that forbids you to blend fruit, which would universally be considered as an abuse of power from the manufacturer.
Apple can't just impose to user what basically boils down to a fee to use your own hardware as you want, while at the same time preventing their competitors from competing at par with their services. Their draconian policies have been getting harsher and more drastic over time, it almost feels like they are really trying to get the EU Commission to punish them somehow.
I very much want Apple to allow proper sideloading on iOS and iPadOS without any sort of developer account requirements that they currently impose and without any sort of weird workarounds to refresh certificates like altstore [1]. I think Apple absolutely should change their policy here because it is something I find unattractive about their devices and their devices are worse than they should be because of it.
With that being said, your analogies don't actually hold up at all.
> People paid good money for their phones, and so they must be free to use them as they see fit.
Apple doesn't hide its policies from its customers and while some people may be ignorant to them, it doesn't change the fact that it's not hidden away. You're not tricked into buying an iPhone thinking you'll be able to install any software you want on it. Anyone that cares enough to want to do so is also fully capable of looking this information up and understanding that they can't (even if they really want to).
> To me this sounds like buying a car that's restricted from entering Germany
It's more like you buy a car knowing fully well that it doesn't run Spotify on its computer then buying it anyway, then being upset that it doesn't run spotify. I get that your point is more that a car's purpose to drive places and an iPhone is a computer so its purpose is to compute things, but even a car imposes restrictions on its use with things like a governor to prevent you going over a certain speed. If you want a car without that restriction you buy one without it.
> or buying a fruit processor that forbids you to blend fruit
If anyone bought a fruit processor that doesn't blend fruit, that's kind of on them. But given that this were hypothetically possible, the person wouldn't have to buy that fruit processor because they should know before hand that that particular one doesn't blend fruit.
I very much hope not. If you don't like the way Apple does business, feel free to buy from someone else. They are a minority player in the marketplace by a significant margin; getting all upset about how they manage their platform is a weird, weird look.
That's the very reason I've been buying from "someone else" for almost a decade. Still, in certain markets they are not a "minor" player, and even then that still doesn't give them an excuse to abuse the position. Yes, they are a minor player compared to the WHOLE market, but if you compare only the segments they actually put the effor to compete in, they have quite a large slice and they rake in more profit than anyone else from it. You can't reasonably use under-$200 phones to justify the fact Apple doesn't have a monopoly when they refuse to enter that segment. You may even argue that if that's a valid argument they would never want to sell cheap phones in the first place, and that market share isn't a good metric for anything.
I don't see why the option to sideload stuff onto the iPhone you've bought would make the platform less secure, especially if it is disabled by default and requires explicit user consent to be turned on.
Also, their focus on "security" has always felt very phony to me, as much as their focus on "standards" always basically meant they only evangelized for interoperability when it suited their interests. What they have been doing with iMessage in the USA is the epitome of abusing your market position, but I guess the FTC doesn't really care about that.
> I don't see why the option to sideload stuff onto the iPhone you've bought would make the platform less secure, especially if it is disabled by default and requires explicit user consent to be turned on.
You don't see how running any code you want on a device is less secure than restricting the kind of code that you can run? I think the risk is heavily overstated by Apple, but it's a bit inane to claim that it doesn't make the platform less secure.
I agree with you that the process you describe is probably sufficient and I don't think the security aspect is a reasonable argument against allowing sideloading.
> You don't see how running any code you want on a device is less secure than restricting the kind of code that you can run?
Who's Apple to decide what I consider to be secure or not in my own free will, on my device? It's like saying that guys from Ford have the right to chime in whenever they want and tell me I can't drive my Ford-branded car to a given supermarket chain.
> Who's Apple to decide what I consider to be secure or not in my own free will, on my device?
They're deciding what is secure on their platform that they can be held liable for. Once you buy an iPhone, you can do whatever you want to it. You can hack it, you can smash it with a hammer, you can submerge it deep underwater. There's absolutely no one restricting your free will in any way here. What you are doing is, of your own volition, purchasing a device that you know has software that has built in restrictions, that you may or may not be able to bypass, but it wasn't designed to be, and getting upset that it doesn't behave as it wasn't promised.
The car analogy doesn't hold up. It'd be more akin to buying a car with android auto and being really upset that it doesn't run apple carplay.
Apple can't just impose to user what basically boils down to a fee to use your own hardware as you want, while at the same time preventing their competitors from competing at par with their services. Their draconian policies have been getting harsher and more drastic over time, it almost feels like they are really trying to get the EU Commission to punish them somehow.