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Yet somehow all of those things preexisted consumer devices that prevent sideloading.

In fact it still works on Android, Windows, Linux desktop, etc.



Well then there's your answer: devs who believe iOS App distribution doesn't work as well as Android, Window or Linux should build their apps there.

Why does the existence of a competing alternative need to force the company in question to adopt the alternative strategy?


I'm not sure I understand the segue you've made here. But, it would be absurd to suggest that Google is entitled to charge a fee for every app installed installed from F-Droid.

Your original claim was that a device owner downloading an application from elsewhere somehow means that Apple could not afford to provide basic development tools. This is demonstrably false.

In any case, most of these outside apps have tended to be free, so if anything sideloading should reduce burden on their servers, which seemed to have been part of your concern.


There is technology that goes into ensuring an app runs on a device — the dynamic linked libraries being present, the compilers adapted to the specific instruction set shipped on that device’s chip, the algorithms, ci/cd pipelines, that go into ensuring all that language design, debugger tools, profiling and performance tools, and then the online infrastructure to support things like backups, iCloud, cross-device sync, device to device transfers on upgrades/new phone purchases. Yeesh the details!

“Afford to provide basic development tools” is a conniving way to put it. Forcing a company via legislation to fund, and develop tools is more like what’s happening.

What’s happening here is a couple of greedy app developers want to skimp out on paying for the nitty gritty details of making a customer experience actually work.

So, yeah, pardon me for inaccurately categorizing them all as “server costs” — I definitely misused that word — but there’s no way in hell you can expect all of the other tech to come for free or even at a price that the _developers demand the tool maker to set_

All this litigation, back-and-forth is going to tarnish the user experience.


DLLs preexist the iPhone by a long time. The implication of your argument is that Google is bankrupt because of F-Droid. Again, all of the big companies (Apple included) were shipping those things before the iPhone came along and blocked sideloading. In fact, those other companies still are provided those things (Apple included if you consider the mac). Some examples (non-exhaustive), since you are ignoring it:

Microsoft: Onedrive, VS, VScode, C#, Visual Basic, .NET (upto and including core), windbg, MSVC, Windows, Windows app stores, etc

Google: Dart, Go, Android Studio, Android, Google Drive, Google Play store & services, etc

Apple: xcode, objective-c, cocoa, llvm, lldb etc all preexist the iphone as well

The facts are: 1. Device owners should be able to install programs onto their phone without any interference from Apple. 2. Apple allowing this will not significantly affect their ability to remain profitable. 3. Most smartphone devices (Android) already do allow this.




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