I feel 100x safer in a Waymo than an Uber in SF. That said I did have a Waymo lose its mind and take me to a random alley in Chinatown at 3am…that was fun.
FTA:
"Apple's fine, however, is about a quarter of the 8.25 billion euro fines the EU regulator meted out to Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google in three cases in the previous decade."
We always used these in red teams…scatter them around the client’s office. Haven’t seen malicious thumb drives fail once bc there’s always someone thirsty enough to plug one in.
It looks like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32934936 is a recent submission of a more neutral source, which is based on the Netblocks report, so I think we'll move the comments thither and re-up that one.
After the first year of the pandemic I deleted all work apps off my phone — just remove the ability for Slack/Teams, GCal, Lattice, Figma, etc. to constantly badger you.
People will call if it’s actually urgent. But gotta protect/prioritize yourself in this new faux-remote reality.
I've waffled on this a bit. I joined a new company about a year ago, and swore to myself I'd keep work email, slack, etc. off my phone. I eventually caved because my boss expected a certain amount of "presence", and being able to check in and respond from my phone meant I could enjoy my coffee in the morning, run errands, take a walk, or do whatever else without being chained to my laptop.
A better middle-ground might be to have a separate phone, so it's only with me if it has to be. Starting a new job with this setup soon, we'll see how it goes.
I think it's a matter of trust and boundaries with work. I love having work email and IM on my phone; but everyone I work with respects work/life boundaries.
It's especially useful at the moment, because I'm in a small company and we do devops.
If I start getting a barrage of work-related IMs after-hours, first I'll point out to the offender that I expect them to respect boundaries. Then I'll try to configure quiet hours. Finally I'll remove the apps.
Some middlemen are completely useless, others play a critical and necessary role in providing access to a product, and there is a whole spectrum in between.
There is some reasonable cost involved in sourcing food from different countries reliably, regularly, in quantity into your local supermarket. Sure they take a profit, but they invested in infrastructure and employ people to put it all together, without which you wouldn't have a good selection of affordable food... They add a tangible value, and in fact effectively reduce the cost of the end product through scale (it's more cost efficient to deliver a million oranges over a long distance than single oranges in a disorganised manner).
Apple are not part of this equation, without Apple it would still exist, it might only be slighly less convenient to pay and select via a native app.
In short, Apple is an artificial middleman... they are at the extreme end of the useless scale, the rent seekers with an outrageous markup. They are not part of the chain of people involved in delivering food or picking up passengers, they are at most a transaction fee handler, and even then they are forcibly a transaction handler. Everything about it is artificial.
Thank you for your thoughtful response! I think we’re in full agreement — which is weird on the Internet.
> There is some reasonable cost involved […]
Apple is just taking a profit like your corner store, COOP, Migros, etc. Is it reasonable? Don’t know! Are profit margins how most business operate? That is for sure.
iOS has allowed side loading for half a decade now. Companies that find $100 prohibitive have a free path that’s nearly identical to Android side loading.
iOS most certainly does not have real sideloading. You can if you recompile the app with your own key every 7 days. Or you can use testflight with some very serious restrictions like not being able to monetize at all.
Sideloading on iOS is nothing like sideloading on Android, you have to compile the app from source with your personal key and even then it's only valid on the device for 7 days.
There is tooling to manage self-signed certs beyond the seven day window. Unrelated but I find it weird that “you have to compile the app” is a bad thing now.
There are ways to go past 7 days but all come with even more downsides to both the end user and company trying to get users to sideload. "You have to compile the app" is extremely related if you're a company wanting users to install your app, especially since that requires more than just knowledge to be able to do.
To ask you the inverse question, in what way is any of this "nearly identical" to Android sideloading which allows indefinite sideloading via any delivery method, including installation of 3rd party stores, with no more than a click on an approval prompt from the user?
Optimizing for people who want to side load ~and~ cannot click the build button in Xcode seems wild to me. (No disrespect!)
It’s identical though in that <when one side loads> one is <completely disconnect from the ecosystem of the device manufacturer>.
Re: side loading binaries/APKs on my actual phone that’s logged into my actual bank account? Hard pass. There’s a time and place for lax security. This is what air gapping is for.
> Optimizing for people who want to side load ~and~ cannot click the build button in Xcode seems wild to me. (No disrespec
When you personally limit sideloading to be "I compile the app and manage a personal security chain to keep it active" it may seem wild, that's not what the vast majority of Android sideloading/3rd party stores is though. Xcode, beyond requiring installation, requires a macOS install to run it on. There are other ways to compile iOS apps, each even less accessible to users or distribution by companies. And again: the obvious statement that the vast majority of revenue generating apps on the App Store are not open source.
Even amongst the Android tech nerds 3rd party stores like F-Droid are popular because users don't want to compile their open source apps constantly... and there are even less requirements around compiling Android apps than iOS apps!
> It’s identical though in that <when one side loads> one is <completely disconnect from the ecosystem of the device manufacturer>.
Not true, sideloading apps on Android means loading them from a different source not disconnecting them from Google services or the Android ecosystem as a whole. It of course allows for that if it's what you're after but it's not limited in such a scope.
> Re: side loading binaries/APKs on my actual phone that’s logged into my actual bank account? Hard pass. There’s a time and place for lax security. This is what air gapping is for.
On Android sideloading is being able to pick which app sources you trust, even if that means "not Google". That could mean "I compiled it myself on an air gapped computer" to you, "I loaded it from a 3rd party store" to another, and "I downloaded it from the developers site" to a third. Which you personally choose is irrelevant as each user gets to pick their allowed sources so it can fit any user's need.
There are several methods for doing it but they are all crippled in ways that make it impossible to actually use the system for anything but QA testing and development.
You can install any app you compiled with your own key and it lasts for 7 days before requiring it to be recompiled.
AltServer can do it but in my experience the Windows version of AltServer is extremely unreliable. AltStore never really auto-renewed properly for me until I put AltServer on an old MacBook Air. Furthermore, the fact that this process needs a second device to bootstrap provisioning at all[0] might be a non-starter for some. Take a week-long vacation? Well, now all your sideloaded apps stop working.
A far bigger limitation for me is the three-app provisioning limit. There isn't any way to work around it[1], and if you do want to do serious sideloading you almost certainly will need to upgrade to a paid developer account.
[0] Specifically iOS only allows app provisioning over USB or Wi-Fi, not locally. Locally installed software cannot actually communicate with the remote debugging daemon. You can work around this with network extensions, but you don't get to use them in dev-signed apps unless you have a paid dev account that's been approved by Apple to use them.
For the record, that isn't to make sideloading harder; that's because Facebook went and shipped a spyware VPN with their enterprise cert.
[1] Personal experience time: Even when jailbroken, and with AltDaemon and Immortal installed, AltStore still bumps up against the three-app limit.
Great example! In retail it’s bad if there isn’t a 300%+ markup.
The fascination with making Apple a boogey man on this is bizarre. Your local corner store — which you should very much support! — has a markup that makes Apple look lazy.
Retail provides a necessary service of managing a large inventory of vetted goods readily available under reasonable terms 5-10 minutes from most everywhere america.
There is no way I'm flying to South America for a banana or to Taiwan for a toaster. Their profit is payment for this service.
Your oem provided you a device which is perfectly capable via your ISP and your vendors infrastructure of arranging products and services. Your oem is only an essential part because they insist on it.
FedEx and ford could have in theory done the same or Dell and Verizon.
Sideloading is not allowed per Apple rules and requires jailbreaking which comes with a list of caveats. So technically yes as a user I can side load but as a company providing apps it's not a realistic method of app delivery for the vast majority of use cases.
This is the second time you've made this claim on the thread. Nobody knows what you're talking about. What side loading are you referring to? You mean taking advantage of the dev loophole by asking users to build and sign your code every 7 days?
