A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
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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
They absolutely should. Closed ecosystems should be illegal. They are literally an intentional form of unethical, predatory trust.
In Japan, companies > people. Because the ruling LDP has won the election for 80 years almost 100% and people believe economy = stock market.
My first thought was Sony locking the PS3 (?) from being able to use linux. Curious if this would apply to them too.
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.
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.
https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/japan
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.
Sweet!
I still wouldn’t switch. I know many here will, but I like my GrapheneOS phone too much
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.
Their argument for “safety” always bothered me, their app store is full of garbage and malware. They just want their 30% cut.
I mean if they want their safety they can feel free to keep it. No need to limit others to the App Store.
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.
Chromebooks are even worse: “Instead of hampering user’s computers for safety, we’ll make a ‘computer’ that just launches our proprietary web apps!”
“What’s a Computer?”
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.
Gate keeping by calling out BS and anti customer business practices? Interestingly definition of gate keeping you have.
Absolutley! Even more “interesting-ly” than that straw-man of yours, friend! ;)
FYI, calling out Apple’s anti-competitive bs is not at all a problem. In fact, many Apple users are plenty happy to do that themselves. The problem is with how haters behave toward the users of Apple products, rather than the company itself.
“Cult Apple haters” is a goofy phrase and doesn’t exist. Maybe people who swear off / boycott Apple, but a cult? Goofy.
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…
My reply was meant to bring attention to the behavior of some community members, not Apple the company. Sorry if there was a misunderstanding.
Feel free to not buy Apple products if you don’t like them. It’s your choice and I really don’t care.
Be nice too if Japan passed a law allowing users to sideload batteries. Apple’s greatest sin in my book was sealing up batteries in the ipod and should of been outlawed at the very beginning. What a waste. I still keep my LG V20 because of replaceable batteries and a nice dac. The thing is it’s not in a landfill.
How did sideloading get its name?
So this is actually an interesting term. Looking it up from Wikipedia…
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.
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
Probably because “installing unsigned code from an unknown source” is a mouthful. Installing implicitly means “from within the walled garden” on these devices.
Ah yes, let me sideload a 3rd party web browser onto my PC.
Gonna sideload a browser while I mainload my game
Gonna sideload cocaine while I mainline heroin.
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Sideloading doesn’t mean it’s unsigned. F-droid apps are signed for example. Sideloading just means “it doesn’t pay neo-feudal taxes to either of the two duopolist lords”.
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.
Originally jaywalking also wasn’t a ticketable offense. Do you know the origin of this term? That’s the parent poster’s point.
Does sideloading incur a fine?
Can you be arrested for it?
If the answers are “no” and “no” then there’s no parallel with jaywalking and there’s nothing to debate.
The answer is “currently no”, and that might change. Just like with jaywalking.
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That applies to literally everything. Anything can be made illegal. It is not illegal to sideload. This is such a stretch, you can’t possibly believe this argument.
You cannot compare sideloading to ticket-able offenses or actual crime. It is 100% legal. Nothing can stop you.
Wfegnwfnwfnwf
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.
Noted
You seem… hinged…
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)
Another thing Japan can do is as long as there is a minimum user base(to be determined, maybe 25-50%?) still using a device then security updates at a minimum has to be available. It should be up to the buyer’s if they want to buy a new phone, not the manufacturers. This would save a lot of resources and toxins entering the environment. To I expect this kind of thing? No. My kind of work before retirement was resource extraction, so I seen the damage it does first hand. I realize that these resources are necessary in a modern society, but dam throwing away good stuff so a company can pad there shareholders portfolios is really a bad thing to do.