The fact that letting users choose what software they’d like to install wasn’t seen as an fundamental part of a computer really highlights Apple’s backwards philosophy towards user experience.
And the cult followers will foam from their mouths and defend that it’s better if you have less choice for some myth of security.
I’d say the cult Apple haters are generally more toxic in their language and aggressive in gate-keeping.
Sure because the things Apple has done has totally screwed over non Apple users too…
Also, Apple’s success basically depended on deceiving the public. The perfect example was the Mac vs PC ads which were designed to mislead people into believing Mac’s can’t crash and can’t get viruses
Another more recent example is iMessage which is designed to lock Apple users into their OS.
The only reason they dropped lightning for USBC even was because of laws
They’re boasting about privacy, when literally earning billions from Google for making them the default search (so they’re selling your details to Google basically)
Even now, developers are forced to buy Mac’s to develop for iOS. So of course many of them will be annoyed.
I even had a apple sales manager scold me publicly when I sold macs (a week before bootcamp was released) that nobody would want to run windows on a mac, and basically implied I was an idiot for doing it. Two weeks later he returned and boasted about how macs could now run Windows. No apology.
Apple is a toxic company (even Steve Jobs was a TERRIBLE person who apparently used to park in the disabled parking every day). There’s plenty of reasons not to like them. And thats only a tiny list…
The technical team there I met were awesome… But the sales side stinks from the top down…
Gate keeping by calling out BS and anti customer business practices? Interestingly definition of gate keeping you have.
Their argument for “safety” always bothered me, their app store is full of garbage and malware. They just want their 30% cut.
And even if the App Store was perfectly safe, keeping users safe via restricting basic functionality instead of increasing tech literacy is a backwards approach
Google requires a full reformat to 3rd party apk installs on Chromebooks. That’s heavy-handed, cumbersome, and idiotic. But it’s still
better than Apple.
It should be as easy as sudo apt-add repository, sudo apt-get update, sudo apt-get install everywhere.
That’s very cool, or maybe not it seems it could only allow other stores to install software and not ‘whatever you want’, but are they going to apply this rule to Nintendo or Sony, whose consoles aren’t a very different case to apple iOS devices, as well? No mention in the article
How did sideloading get its name?
That’s always my trigger, fucking ‘sideloading’. Jesus christ it’s installing shit. Installing. There was never a need for such a pissy horrible concept in the firstplace, a bootlicking special if there ever was one
It’s like “jaywalking”. It purely exists to bully and discriminate against pedestrians and declare the streets belong to the cars. That’s what you get when you have big ass corporations do the lobbying.
Sideloading isn’t a ticket-able offense. It’s just a name for a thing we are all within our rights to do. That’s not really comparable.
Now “jailbreaking” is a term I definitely take issue with as the language straight up makes people question the legality.
Probably because “installing unsigned code from an unknown source” is a mouthful. Installing implicitly means “from within the walled garden” on these devices.
Dude you don’t get to decide what I’m angry about. The term is extremely inaccurate, you don’t sideload shit on your computer, right? It’s yours. I don’t sideload shelves, I put them on my wall. So I’d say the offensive part is that somebody who gets my money gets to decide if I own something.
So this is actually an interesting term. Looking it up from Wikipedia…
The term “sideload” was coined in the late 1990s by online storage service i-drive as an alternative means of transferring and storing computer files virtually instead of physically. In 2000, i-drive applied for a trademark on the term. Rather than initiating a traditional file “download” from a website or FTP site to their computer, a user could perform a “sideload” and have the file transferred directly into their personal storage area on the service.
The advent of portable MP3 players in the late 1990s brought sideloading to the masses, even if the term was not widely adopted. Users would download content to their PCs and sideload it to their players.
So as applied to phones it originally meant a particular type of download and install - rather than installing directly to your phone from an app store, you have somehow obtained the file on your PC, transferred the file to your phone, and then installed it. In that context, downloading an APK directly to your phone and installing it would not be sideloading.
However, semantics have shifted somewhat and now it’s used generally to refer to any install that isn’t directly from an app store of some kind, and requires downloading an actual package file and then installing it.
So it does kind of fit in with the other definitions: download is from the wider internet down to your local device, upload is from your local device up to the wider internet, so sideload is just moving something from somewhere local to somewhere else local. I imagine sideload wasn’t generally used before because we’d just say “copy/install a file” or similar, and its usage now comes from it being a shorthand for the slightly convoluted process required on mobile devices.
It’s from the earlier days of computing/portable devices where almost nothing had the sort of inter-connectivity we take for granted.
You’d download apps or music onto your PC and then ‘sideload’ them onto your PDA or MP3 players.
Sometimes this required both proprietary cables and software. (This is why some of us still get excited by simple USB ports)
Or to stop doing business in Japan entirely
Considering they’re a huge market for Apple (~70%), I doubt they’ll pull out. And if they do, then too bad.
They won’t. Even back in the Steve days, they paid special attention to the Japanese market. The OG Macs were some of the first computers to have well-rendered fonts for CJK. Knowing Japanese culture, they will either do nothing with this new sideloading capability or they will run with it and an ecosystem will explode of alt app markets. I’m leaning toward the former.
What does that ~70% refer to? Japan is about 5% of Apple’s global revenue and iOS is installed on around 50% of Japanese phones.
