the USA Goverment probably forced them to remove it
no shit
This is why the web is way better than any app store, yes even with the problems of DNS (DIDs becoming more prevalent cant come fast enough though). Any future phones should have a first class web experience imo.
Does anyone remember how the Devs from there didnt want to release for Android because ApPlE iS sOoOo mUcH mOoOrE sEcUrE
Get rekt.
In terms of security alone, iPhones easily beat most Android phones. Which may be a fair argument in favor of iPhones. However, to ignore Apple’s policies and long history of delisting similar apps is delusional.
In regards to security, Apple does have three upsides, and only those:
- No sideloading and no unlocked bootloader means you can’t sideload malware or install malware-preloaded ROMs. No root also means you can’t just install malware that uses root access.
- Long OS support means fewer people run around with iPhones that are 5 OS versions behind.
- There’s no tiny boutique iPhone manufacturers who sell phones that come pre-loaded with malware.
The solution for the first one is “don’t sideload untrusted stuff” and the solution to the second and third one is “buy an Android phone from a trusted manufacturer that has long term OS support”.
Long os support meant to intentionally brick your iphone so you buy new. That is 100% true as I had many apple products started degrading after upgrade and still have old models that are not upgraded and work perfectly
I’m not defending apple here. Short OS support (or none at all) is not a good thing, and it’s something that’s sadly still quite common if you buy the wrong Android brand.
Samsung is doing pretty well in that regard right now.
You say that based on what?
Based on most smartphones being very insecure. Of course, iPhones aren’t extremely secure, but the competition is practically nonexistent. Pretty much the only secure Android phones are Pixels. Samsung is considered one of the more secure manufacturers too, but according to GrapheneOS devs it’s still way behind Google.
Note that even police and government agencies sometimes have trouble getting into iPhones. They never have such troubles getting into Android smartphones, except Pixels.
This is by no means meant to advertise iPhones. It’s just a simple observation that security in smartphones is heavily lacking.
So based on marketing.
Dude give one example so we can google and have our own opinion. You are just saying “because they said so/because someone considered it so”.
Schizophrenia
This shouldn’t be on the app store. It gives the US government too much access to pull data from it, or order it pulled down. This should be a web app hosted outside the US that can be accessed by any device and can be obscured by VPN access so the regime can’t persecute participants. Apps pull way too much data from phones that ICE can subpoena.
ICE is objectionable… did they got “confused”?
Fuck Apple but honestly this app is like trying to stay warm with matches in Antarctica.
Fuck Apple and I’d prefer matches in Antarctica to no matches in Antarctica.
You might want to read Den Lille Pige med Svovlstikkerne (spoiler alert : it doesn’t work).
1.) I can’t even read the title, 2.) I still want the matches. I’m not saying I’ll use the matches themselves, but who knows, maybe I find wood or whale blubber to burn or something. Just give me the matches, please.
Surprise you can’t search without speaking the language but OK, easier https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32571/32571-h/32571-h.htm#Page_117 about 2 pages. Also I’m not crying. /s
It’s about as useful as a canary in a coal mine.
A famously useful tool for saving miners from suffocation?
So if this
appcanary has just died, what does that imply…?it implies that it’s time to gtfo
So… Really useful?
Not for the canary cry emoji
😩
I’m gonna play devils advocate here (and probably be monstrously downvoted);
ICEBlock stored the location data of all its users on Apples iCloud Servers. This the perfect target for ICE; a complete database of locations of every person who doesn’t want ICE to know where they are.
One assumption is that that Apple realised how tempting this data is to the current demonstrative administration and purged it before ICE could get their civil-liberty-abusing mitts on it.
You’re giving apple too much credit. Tim Apple literally gifted trump a golden statue. The press are reporting that this is directly in response to a request from the DOJ. This isn’t apple having a moral epiphany and thinking they’re doing ice targets a favour. Corporations don’t do that sort of thing unless it will make them $$$
Alternate take: Tim is a businessman doing what’s best for Apple and he personally might not support Trump, but we will likely never know.
Tim Apple is a billionaire, doing billionaire things. Supporting the people who give him the most power and not giving a fuck about anyone else.
Same take my friend. I agree - Tim’s personal politics are kinda irrelevant in this context. Best for apple=compliance with whoever is in charge so they get to keep their money printer. Corpos gonna corpo
Oh, so you’re trying to say that Tim is so greedy that he doesn’t have values at all, other than his greed? That’s an interesting position, but I think it makes him sound even worse than the previous one.
It’s an inherent byproduct of capitalism.
If you rise to Tim Cook’s level you must be someone that is either willing to put your personal values aside or you do not have them to begin with. The growth of the company matters more and if you prioritize your values you will be filtered the moment you misalign with whatever prevents maximal growth.
Capitalism does not care about values, ethics, morals, social wellness, or anything besides growth. It is cancerous and leads to a toxic society that poisons itself and falls apart, which is literally happening
You don’t succesfully run big corporations by having high moral standarts, this was never an argument. Argument was about what makes businessman a good business man, and one major thing is seizing opportunities and “playing” important people like Trump. I don’t think he’s anywhere as (morally) bad as Steve Jobs was, but he’s doing his job as expected.
It’s certainly not altruism, but devil’s advocate: avoidance has been their go-to tactic in working around court-ordered law enforcement cooperation. If they can make it so they don’t have access to the requested data, then they can throw their hands up when subpoenas come and avoid taking sides.
Again, I don’t think it’s altruism. The legal and technical infrastructure required for law enforcement cooperation is an expensive, high-liability mess, and now they have the added risk of a fledgling privacy brand.
It’s not implausible they would delete an app hosting sensitive user data as soon as they suspect they may be forced to hand it over. In fact, what’s more weird to me is that they let it stay up until an official DoJ request.
Edit: nice
Something worth noting, if you are using iCloud, advanced data protection is your friend. Apple doesn’t have the encryption keys, you do.
This is not on by default.
Advanced Data Protection does require all iCloud Ecosystem devices to be current.
Not every person can afford the latest and greatest.
Or they removed it to keep up the appearance that it wasn’t actually a honeypot to begin with.
Money is always the answer with these “people”.
To assume otherwise is to feed the beast
This is why Android is far far better than Apple, despite its faults.
Ice block couldve been a web app
Not for long :'(
Yeah, fuck Google.
You mean less worse, but worry not, google’s catching up.
“Good thing I got revenge though on Google’s sideloading ban by buying a phone that never allowed it to begin with”
We should make webapps for everything. When done properly they are as fast as native apps, can work on any device and do not require a dev license or account.
They’re now supported on Firefox on Android, so good news!
Webapps are now supported on Firefox? Holy smokes!
Funny thing: before the App Store, the original plan for the iPhone was that all third-party apps should be webapps.
Completely agreed. Nowadays we even have WASM that can run more advanced things, and may even give webapps sandboxed capabilities, and can be run natively on any device with a WASM runtime.
Sweet solution
Who could have seen this coming from the company whose CEO gifted Trump a literal gold plaque in celebration of his reelection?
Hey, you know nothing about the absurd pressure billionaire CEO’s are unde/sr
You see why Google attempting to lock down installing whatever apps you want is a bad idea? This is an example of what will happen.
And this is why having 3rd party app stores is important. It’s why it matters that Google is killing side loading, if two fucking companies get to decide what you can do on your phone, we’re in a bad spot technology wise
We’re in a bad spot technology wise
We rapidly need to switch to Linux Mobile. PostmarketOS and Mobian are the two most promising projects, and I would highly recommend anyone reading this to donate to them if you have the means.
Both projects directly use your donations to hire developers to build and polish the critical essentials to get this alternative viable as a daily driver.
While I full heartily agree with you, I’m pessimistic you will ever reach enough people with these alternatives. Even on privacy forums you hear people fervently defending how banking apps are mandatory. Those will never run on anything that isn’t locked down. The eID proposal for the EU is also dependent on Android and iOS.
how banking apps are mandatory.
This i don’t get, i’d rather use home-banking from my home PC.
Yes but you can’t motherfucker, don’t you understand that? In most of the world you have to use the app, you CANNOT use online banking without the bank’s app on your phone, you have no sign-in details apart from the email and the bank app, it is the only way to sign in and you sign in via 2FA inside their app and authorize transactions exclusively via that, and no you can’t use Google authenticator or whatever, it’s a “tap to allow sign on” type 2FA and the only kind supported.
There is no “home banking”, and you are not even allowed to enter a physical bank location on the high street without being intercepted by a ghoul telling you to use the app or fuck off, you cannot call the bank because they have no public number, you do everything via the app or you cannot do anything at all.
That’s why even people without access to drinking water have the latest fucking smartphones, they’re a prerequisite and there are no alternatives.
Most of the time you don’t even have a bank card, just the bank card details in the bank app on your phone that are automatically added to Google Pay, and you use that because near everything is cashless and NFC.
Soon across EU and UK your very ID will be stored on your phone.
I’m glad i don’t live in those parts of the world and the only mom i fuck is yours, she says hi.
It doesn’t necessarily need to achieve mass adoption, it just needs to get to a ‘good enough’ point to make it viable for those who are willing or desperate to get away from big tech.
Linux still has plenty of people giving reasons why they won’t switch, but it’s now finally viable for many, including myself. I just want mobile Linux to get to that point too, even if there’s still rough edges.
And the open source movement is such a blind spot to the ‘left’ as well, even though technology freedom is critical if you want to be able to organise any type of resistance in the digital space.
Lemmy users largely get it, obviously, but centre left people will happily let themselves get locked into the Apple/Google walled gardens even though you’re just giving that company a ridiculous amount of power over you.
Right? The collective dismissal of Mastodon from leftist influencers when the Muskening happened was eye opening.
Like, there’s a collaborative, volunteer-based platform right over there. You want mutual aid? Open-source is as mutual-aid as it gets.
But it’s nerd shit.
Yeah it’s unhinged, FOSS is as communism in practice as it gets right now and the left just ignores it, dismissing it as “tech bad” because they can only think in AnPrim brainrot terms most of the time and judge only by aesthetics and make sweeping generalisations about social media that lack any and all imagination.
Because they are controlled opposition.
The only time something not controlled got popular was TikTok and you saw how quickly both parties went to ban it in 2024 after normal people started talking about Gaza genocide in every day conversation. The American Congress worked together to ban it even though they couldn’t agree on anything else.
It went from an Asian platform where Asian people in the West connected with each other outside the mainstream blue pill/red pill false choice and shared culture as well as history that isn’t taught, to “here’s the truth about Jesus” and “the world is flat debate me” after that vote. Now it’s full on MAGA.
Mastodon is harder to control because servers can pop up organically, but I guess Threads was a hedge against that threat.
Also, on xitter are all these assholes I don’t care about. I can’t leave that platform. Pathetic!
I originally got introduced to sociallist idiology through Richard Stallman’s speaches. I know he had some, uhh… “interesting” things to say about Epstein’s victims (which I believe he has since redacted), but his speaches are absolutely still worth listening to just for the content alone.
Yeah, very disappointed by RMS’ creepiness (the Epstein stuff isn’t the only thing), but he was 100% right about software freedom.
Redacted or recanted? One of these is definitely preferable to the other in this context.
Recanted is the word I was thinking of.
Those same people are also still using Twitter or Instagram or TikTok.
People will never understand intricacies like that. On the other hand, the big tech corps do. We are doomed
Yeah. And to think, it’s a fairly small amount of nuance - it’s very basic and intuitive and information about it is literally everywhere. We are hopeless when it comes to far more complex and nuanced social issues we face like rehabilitation or ethnocentrism or trans athletes or the what have you.
People seem to think socialism and any progress is like “be nice to each other” or some stupid aestheticism about “empathy”.
There’s basically no way to have a conversation with them most of the time, they are so far gone and their fully formed thoughts seem more like inaccurate shorthands, it’s like trying to explain astrodynamics to a dog when it’s actively trying not to understand them.
Normies are the death of us all.
Most people dont have values because they have values. They hold a perspective just to talk down on others.
No doubt. I’ve gotten to the point where I have like 6 apps on my phone and it’s in lockdown mode on iOS. And I’d be on grapheneOS if I wasn’t required to use iOS for work.
Can you have your job pay for an iPhone while you have a different personal phone? I’m a big fan of keeping a work device that’s separate from a personal device.
I do this. Highly recommended.
I probably could, but I’m also a recovering drug addict and my partner is pretty hesitant about a second device as it’s another way to hide things. However I’m the head of the MDM team so I’m not really nervous about what the company can see
I thought you were head of the MDMA team for a second and thought that could be rough as a recovering drug addict
Definitely got the experience required for the job
Oddly I’ve only tried MDMA a few times and it never really worked. There’s some anecdotal evidence that it doesn’t work for those with bipolar which I do have, that might be the one drug I could be in charge of with no temptation actually
Yeah, people should have listened to the people warning of privacy concerns with online services. Now that your data is valuable, companies will do anything to extract it from you.
Stop using those products, de-Google, install Linux, use self-hosted solutions.
It will take some effort to switch. You get to decide how much effort you’re willing to expend in order to not sacrifice all of your privacy and control of your digital lives.
Just technology wise? I think it’s a little deeper than just technology unfortunately
Oh yeah, of course, but it feels like it’s never part of the conversation, even among people whose opinions I respect and are, for example, super critical of AI and talking about enshittification and other issues in the online sphere, they never seem to take the step to check out Linux, or get off Twitter or whatever.
“Sideloading” is their term, invented to make it sound like something it is not. We should not use this word. The correct word is “installing”.
You don’t “sideload” on Windows when you install software outside of the Microsoft Store™️. There is no real difference or distinction with software on phones, so there is no need for a special word.
I can see Microsoft moving to the same sort of thinking as well. Apple already made Mac OS users jump through hoops when you want to install something from the internet or even through a third party package manager like homebrew.
Microsoft has been trying this for years already. That eventually led to Valve incresing their efforts in the Linux gaming front and releasing the Steam Deck.
See this
I wonder if Valve would ever get into the Linux Phone market.
But for the platform itself to be open, I wonder how much would have to be recreated.
Not to defend it, but the first time I encountered the term was when BlackBerry released their Playbook tablet. It ran their bbos10 and they created an android emulator so you could run some android apps. The process of installing the apk into the emulator was called sideloading.
I miss BlackBerry is all I really wanted to say.
Not yet.
“Install” includes installing from an app store no matter how closed down and exlusive. The correct term would be “install from other sources than an app store” which is just clunky. Calling it “sideloading” won’t change that nor will calling it “your mom”. Considering how many corporate-speak terms are in use and how many braindead abbreviations and terms shortened to a word’s last syllable -completely distorting the original meaning- generally are in use, the term “sideloading” is pretty irrelevant. Either lose your mind listening to the bullshit people permanently are emitting or just live with it…
the term “sideloading” is pretty irrelevant.
No, it’s not.
“Installing” is innocuous and easily understandable (by those tech-illiterate dumbfucks that get spoonfed FUD by lobbyists); whereas sideloading is eerily similar to sidestepping and is prone to being interpreted as “working around a safeguard”.Words are not irrelevant.
Your phone is fucking you no matter what you do.
“Hurd OS? Isn’t that obsolete?” “Not obsolete. Just… illegal.” ~Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
If people were more aware of how to make and install mobile web apps it would be less of a problem.
At least on the iPhone you can still add a site to your screen that can behave a lot like an app, including camera access, location services, and even gyro. And it’s just a website like most “apps” are.
Mm
Mm
Most people don’t care about any of that. Firefox with AdBlock to surfe YouTube without ads? Nah, they want the app, which is basically the same, but at least they can’t block ads. I stopped trying to understand
Yeah, me too.
Honestly, this thing should just been a PWA. Making this naive app was dumb.
Google is not killing sideloading. If the dev is willing to submit to Apple for verification, they’d probably not object to submitting it to Google.
Google is not killing sideloading. If the dev is willing to submit
I see…
Yes, and then they ban that developer and their apps. It doesn’t matter you can install apps outside of the Play Store, if Google still controls which apps you are allowed to install.
I don’t understand why society accepted that the hardware maker gets to decide what software you run.
That’d be like your car deciding which roads you can take, or your blender deciding you’re not allowed to use strawberries in your smoothie.
Are you nuts? Why the fuck would your phone decide which apps you can run?
That’d be like your car deciding which roads you can take,
It’s a feature for the next release, don’t worry.
Maybe our phones are their f’in phones too
Apple welding their phones to their own store, exclusively, is just like paying workers with scrip instead of dollars. This used to be a common practice for capitalists. The scrip is spendable only in the company store.
We have to stop all such anticompetitive practices.
Just a reminder, to stop the practice of getting paid in scrip the American workers had to take up arms and shoot some people. Look up Battle of Blair Mountain. It’s not like the capitalists stopped the practice just because it was unpopular, lol. Nor did the anticompetitive practice of paying wages in scrip stop because people called their senators and wrote angry letters.
Agreed, too many people defend the App Store monopoly.
Is it that non tech people have a hard time understanding this? Or is it just all the corporate lobbying bribes?
There was a person on a Lemmy.zip community that was arguing in favour of a lockdown approach.
I’ll catch the flames and say “religious reasons”.
And for what reason do you not think we’re headed in that direction?
Keep on buying, y’all. Show 'em we mean business when we’re appalled at their actions. Giving them more money will surely let them know how much we want change!
Oh we are way passed the point where “voting with your dollar” means literally anything. These billionaires are making more money than they ever have in human history. They have literally turned all of society across large swaths of the world into a gigantic personal capital generator. It makes literally not a single difference if all of us here boycotted them or not. It’s meaningless.
It makes literally not a single difference if all of us here boycotted them or not. It’s meaningless.
Just lemmy users? Sure, but you don’t stop with just lemmy users.
These billionaires are making more money than they ever have in human history
Honest to god do you think that money magically appears in their pocket. We can still claw it back. Unionize, boycott, collective action is our strongest pressure against them and IT DOES WORK.
collective action is our strongest pressure against them
Which is why governments fight so much to make it hard.
In my neck of the woods it’s not cool to unionize and there’s no home owners’ association, people only rally for their favorite sports team but don’t bother voting.I guess we get what we deserve.
…and it happened in a vacuum, just all by itself.
Tell that to Disney.
A big problem is that people need smartphones for so much of modern life. You can stop watching Disney and your life won’t meaningfully change but it’s really hard to avoid evil smartphone companies. Part of me wants to switch from Apple but what would I go to? Samsung who’s just as bad about right to repair? Google who’s Google? I’m not saying it’s impossible but I’m not going to say that the choice is as easy as cancelling a streaming service.
A big problem is that people need smartphones for so much of modern life.
Do you though? They’re convenient, for sure, but you can also use a dumbphone and a laptop.
How the fuck would I access my bank then? All banks literally require their apps to access the account or sometimes even open the account, nevermind actually pay for anything or get a debit or credit card.
>Inb4 some American downvotes because they forget the rest of the world exists
We get it, Americans use cash in America, and they use magnetic stripe cards and cheques and all these other technologies that were phased out in rest of the world before I was even born, but that’s not really an argument to make on a global platform.
All banks literally require
In your part of the world…
In most of the world that isn’t 1 country that starts with ‘United States’ and ends with ‘of America’
Fairphone. Right to repair, plus good custom ROM and linux on mobile support.
Useless without passing Google’s Integrity checks.
Yeah this is generally the take I hear the most. The smartphone is presented as a necessity and for a lot of people that may be true, but what it really is is a tool for capitalism. It spies on you, gives you fomo, serves you ads, gives access to all kinds of addictive content… oh and work apps!
It’s like AI, shoved down our throats until people think it’s needed. It’s not.
Yeah except I do actually need one for work, paying rent, paying bills etc. It’s a helluva position of privilege to be able to say no to something like that, and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t have a car, which is far less necessary.
Your smartphone serves you ads?
I would say you’re missing some nuance in these arguments, though.
With a phone people no longer need laptops or full-sized computers and they also get a phone and camera to go along with it. They get a lot of power even just using fairly mundane apps like email, file storage, and a calendar. And then you have access to the internet and all the power that comes with that. I also don’t know why you think phones show ads.
AI, on the other hand, is hot fucking garbage at everything it does. Why anyone uses it I can’t say, it’s so bad and it’s known that it’s actively making people dumber. I don’t touch the stuff and my life has been going just fine.
they would have been perfectly fine it was simply that the optics were bad enough to warrant a response
Why do they care about the optics? $$$
Do you really think this situation is comparable in any way to Jimmy Kimmel? I really don’t. Even if it were, nowhere near that many Apple customers care whether or not the app that targets fascist militias is on the app store or not.
I do think it’s comparable. All of this is about money. Americans are funding all of this crap with the, albeit controlled, choices we make with our money. Our taxes are funding genocides and coups and war and destruction; our purchasing habits are funding the decline of our planet and our social structures and our sanity.
You’re right though, consumers will likely never change in large enough quantities to make a real difference. People are already resubbing to Hulu so…
Americans are funding all of this crap with the, albeit controlled, choices we make with our money.
To an extent, yes, but the dollar has been decoupled from gold a long time ago, they can literally just print money in the billions and they do (although there days it’s probably
money++on a mainframe), completely sidestepping tax money…Jimmy Kimmel made Disney a lot of money. They had to choose between pressure from the US government, and losing a popular source of revenue along with the vast amount of liberals who swore them off. Jimmy Kimmel was not a real institutional threat to the US government. So the US government did not have a very strong incentive to continuously push for him being taken down, and Disney had a lot of incentive to keep him around.
An app that targets fascists makes Apple no money. The US government faces the loss (or rendering ineffective) of their fascist police force. Both sides therefore face a huge amount of pressure to have the app taken down. It would have to be a gigantic part of their profit margin to warrant any pushback from Apple. I’d be very, very surprised to hear that this change is ever overturned through a boycott.
Every revolution famously begins with everyone giving up completely.
Can you show me where I said to do nothing? Or is boycotting the only form of collective action you’re aware of?
No, but great idea gatekeeping collective action. We surely need less of it.
I wasnt gatekeeping it. Just pointing out how ultimately ineffective it is in creating meaningful change.
Defeatist subservient take
Every time I hear people talk like that I begin to think they dont understand basic microeconomics.
Yes, as opposed to spending money at another capitalist institution that will inevitably do the same thing, which is somehow not a subservient take.
There are a lot of other ways to apply pressure besides boycotts. I dont think a boycott would ever work against Apple over this.
ah good ol Cynicism. Might as well find yourself a giant pot to live in while they’re still available!
I dont understand why recommending other forms of collective action makes me cynical.
Where was that again?
There are a lot of other ways to apply pressure besides boycotts.
?
Im sure thats why disney quickly reversed gear with cancelling kimmel after loosing 3.8B overnight
Something sensitive like this really should be a PWA (and web app for iOS users)
Between Apple walled garden and the new dev signature thing from Google, those big players sure do like control over what we can do as users.
I agree with you, PWA is the way but Apple has been slow walking integration for years now (see https://brainhub.eu/library/pwa-on-ios)
Except PWAs are heavily limited on apple devices so Apple could get that 30% cut.
Got a source for that?
I’m a dev and have a bunch of PWAs on my iPhone. You can install them right from the browser using that same old “add to Home Screen” behavior that has been in iOS for an eternity.
I’m posting this through voyager for Lemmy, installed from my browser, not the App Store.
You’re a dev and use PWAs on ios and don’t know that you can’t even get push notifications? There’s no web bluetooth, no web nfc, no background sync, 50-100mb storage limit, no background processes, no service workers. These are all standard features that apple refuses to implement for some reason. Wonder why.
