Friday, March 11, 2022

Apple Responds to UK CMA Interim Report

Hartley Charlton (tweet):

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) today published Apple’s response to its Interim Report on mobile ecosystems, as well responses from dozens of other companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Epic Games.

[…]

Apple expressed intense concerns about potentially having to “redesign the iPhone” to benefit this small, powerful group [that wants sideloading]

[…]

Apple addressed specific issues raised by the Interim Report, such as the company’s WebKit restriction on iOS and iPadOS, which bans any rival browser engines on the platform. It claimed that WebKit is innovative and responds to demand for features, such as adding “new functionality to enable greater features and functionality for web apps.”

John Poole:

How many developers have had to redesign their apps to stay on the App Store? We had to pull our battery test from Geekbench.

Michael Love:

There are literally emails where Steve Jobs approved the text to display before sideloading, not to mention the fact that developers + enterprises already have the ability to sideload right now. You don’t have to “redesign” anything to support sideloading.

Previously:

Update (2022-03-16): Dave Wood:

It’s a bad precedent when Apple lies about this. It means they can’t be trusted when they’re telling the truth about encryption backdoors. If they say side loading will compromise the system & they’re proven wrong, governments may then assume they’re lying about backdoors too.

Kyle Howells:

I don’t think a lot of people realise but iOS supports side loading via Safari right now, and has for years.

Devs can sign adhoc builds and put them on their servers, install via clicking a link.

It’s limited only by those, 100 device, adhoc provisioning profiles.

2 Comments RSS · Twitter

Old Unix Geek

What a load of rubbish. They'll have to redesign everything, I tell you! The file system, memory system, drivers, and even the phone functionality will have to be recreated from scratch! And it's all because of multi-million dollar companies, no less.

The comments on this article are equally bad. Oh, noes, without Apple's incredibly thorough software review, iPhones will be full of trash... and will be stealing money left right and centre.

It's frightening how effective lies and security theatre are.

For those who don't get sarcasm, removing the code that prevents sideloading is a lot easier than adding it...

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