I hope this happens in the US as well, Google has become a terrible partner for Android developers.
This past week Google announced (1) that in order to release an app on Play:
"developers with newly created personal Play Console accounts will soon be required to test their apps with at least 20 people for a minimum of two weeks before applying for access to production."
This will be gamed (test farms), and the policy will not achieve any goal but making life difficult for small / indie developers.
I for one look forward the most to seeing the equivalent of the F-Droid store coming to iOS. Either from the people behind the original F-Droid, or from some group of people with similar ideals like them.
However, I wonder if that will enable apps that corporations don’t want to exist, to exist on iOS. I.e. BitTorrent clients, alternate YouTube frontends that use yt-dlp to play YouTube videos without ads, etc.
The apps still need to be signed with a developer account right? And so Apple will still be able to deny signing certain apps / blacklist those apps when they receive complaints, right?
I'm pretty sure one of the first app stores we'll see is Meta App Store.
The deliberate delay in releasing the Threads app in the EU, without any clear reason, makes me believe that they intend to make it an exclusive offering of the Meta store.
Threads is not available in the EU because it would likely surpass the 45M users and hence be subjected to all the various rules under the new DSA and it’s my understanding that the threads team is currently small and meta probably doesn’t want to allocate a ton of resources to it yet.
Or, instead of conspiracy theories, why don't we go for most plausible cause? That the app is a privacy nightmare that in now way could pass the GDPR filter? As if Facebook had anything more to offer in his "store" other than Facebook, whatsapp and Instagram.
I agree that Threads may be a “privacy nightmare” and so that may limit its deployment to Europe, but is it really a conspiracy theory to suggest that Meta will release their latest products (and maybe move current ones) to their own Meta App Store once Apple is forced to allow 3rd-party app stores? That seems less of a conspiracy to me and more of a natural consequence, and Meta won’t be alone here either.
Many have said “that’s not what happened on Android” and that’s true, however I think that’s true only because everyone is waiting for the iPhone to be forced to change and then you release your own store across both platforms. It seems likely to me it’s not worth it to do it on Android alone - kind of like releasing an Android-only app. You’d want both an Android and iOS version of your app. The costs and duplication of infrastructure probably doesn’t make sense for one operating system but does for two.
Even if alternative stores will be allowed in the EU, Meta will still need to be present on the App Store because the majority of Apple users will probably not bother install others stores.
Plus, if it’s an EU only store they’ll still need to be present on the official store for all the other people that are not in the EU.
And no matter the store, they’d still be subjected to the new EU regulations which is the real reason why Threads is not available in the EU at the moment.
I’ve heard this discussion point often “most users won’t switch to the new store” but the problem with that point is it makes all of the 3rd-party App Store development and related activities pointless. I don’t buy that they will need to maintain a presence. iOS is what moves the needle and drives revenue.
US regulation will almost certainly follow EU regulation to allow 3rd-party app stores or it’ll just be a tax we all pay in the US on prices (probably small, admittedly) for devices and software cost as Apple has to maintain increasingly divergent os profiles for different locales.
Also I think you are correct that Meta may follow 3rd-party App Store rules and regulations, but if they’re all subject to to the same rules and relegations allowing the 3rd-party stores is either pointless and annoying (download the Meta store to download the Meta apps) or it’ll just be used for scummy and scammy software.
But also a lot of let’s say user data tracking for example could theoretically be banned by the EU but Meta can just get around that and maybe pay the cost later. It’s not like there are any watchdogs here. They don’t need Apple or their requirement to allow Sign in with Apple or to follow any sort of checks and balances (they are dogfooding) from another institution.
All that to say, I see no benefit to these 3rd party app stores and lots of potential negatives. But I guess it’s “more open” or something?
Facebook is probably salivating at the thought of their own App Store. Don’t forget that Apple already once had to block Facebook’s enterprise apps because they were literally paying kids to enroll their devices and install a data harvesting VPN.
One app I use heavily is Blokada. It's a loopback "VPN" that runs completely locally, so all your traffic can be routed through the adblocking application running inside the VPN.
There's two versions of this app. From their website, it offers all the above features, but when installed from the Play Store there's no local VPN, it's only for connecting to a premium cost remote VPN.
Back in 2019, I was using blokada but from outside the phone source network analysis, I found blokada is doing network requests but not showing them in ui.
Nuked the app.
I was at around 1 million blocked requests so its not like I did not use it or like it.
Is allowing direct install from internet (like how most desktop applications work) also required by the DMA? Or are all developers of independent apps going to be required to publish their app to some app store?
This past week Google announced (1) that in order to release an app on Play:
"developers with newly created personal Play Console accounts will soon be required to test their apps with at least 20 people for a minimum of two weeks before applying for access to production."
This will be gamed (test farms), and the policy will not achieve any goal but making life difficult for small / indie developers.
(1) https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2023/11/ensuring-h...