The EU seems keen to enforce this. The DMA set to come in will force Apple to allow third party app stores and side loaded apps to iOS, where it's not currently done
I think regular anti-trust laws would be the way this would be fought on the desktop.
macos as a whole doesn't have enough users in the EEA to fall under the purview of the gatekeeper section of the DMA, unless the "app store" counts as a single thing. Which it kind of does now that apple has unified it between iOS, iPad OS, and macOS.
Windows S versions that only allow software from the microsoft store haven't drawn any ire from EU countries, AFAIK.
I mean off the top of my head, google chrome isn’t on the App Store for macOS. It also overwhelmingly dominates the browser market. There are just too many products like that that are not on the App Store that I don’t think Apple can afford to lock people off from.
I’d say 60% of my apps on my Mac are not from the App Store. Sure I am probably not representative of the average user, or maybe I am, I don’t know, but assuming I am not it’s such a large number that I can’t help but think most people have at least a couple of key things they don’t get through the App Store.
> Forever, if Apple wishes to have a developer ecosystem
Apple routinely goes out of their way to reinforce the sentiment that Apple hates developers. The only reason developers still support the Apple ecosystem is because there's a lot of money to be made within the US (where Apple devices carry non-trivial market share).
If Apple banned 3rd party App Stores, the money would just become more concentrated. Therefore, all the developers will go to the Apple App Store...
No loss from Apple's perspective - in fact, it would be a tremendous gain.
This is a ridiculous assertion. Developers still support the Apple ecosystem because they have no choice. They want a still Unix experience but their companies require remote management software that isn't available for Linux for security compliance. So we're stuck with Mac. We're not talking about developers targeting Mac as a platform. Just regular software targeting servers. A customer needed me to figure out how to install and use rsql, Amazon's official client for Redshift, to see if it would be feasible for their researchers to use. Not to mention, you know, awscli itself. AWS packages nothing whatsoever through third-party repositories. They won't even put botocore in PyPi any more. Not only do you need to get the client from Amazon's website (also their VPN client), but it requires openssl 1 because Amazon is too lazy to keep stuff up to date. Does Apple even have library packages at all in its app stores? Libraries aren't an "app." They certainly aren't going to carry long-obsolete old libraries.
If Apple ever stopped letting you install arbitrary CLI tools, they'd lose every software company issuing their developers Macs. Yeah, they'd keep the solos actually targeting Mac itself as a platform, but that is not going to be anywhere near the plurality of people using it.
iOS is the way it is because, for better or worse, Apple sees it as an appliance, not a general purpose computer. That has never been true for their PCs. It isn't true for any PCs at all. Microsoft will never do this with Windows, either. It doesn't matter how little you think of them. You people on Hacker News are way too cynical about this stuff to be realistic. The business cases alone make no sense. Plenty of companies need to be able to install their own software that they write for internal use only. They're not going to put that in a public app store or through any kind of external review process. Those customers might even still want central control, but through their own app store, not Microsoft's or Apple's. That's why SCCM and JAMF exist. They not only allow third-party app stores, but you can get the third party app store from the official app store!
> Developers still support the Apple ecosystem because they have no choice. They want a still Unix experience but their companies require remote management software that isn't available for Linux for security compliance.
If that's what it actually was, they would be using WSL. Or their companies would have them using WSL (because supporting Mac endpoints is a pain in a Windows-first shop, which is to say most shops). The fact that so many developers still use Macs even years after WSL came out indicates it has to be something other than the unix experience.
You're being obtuse. First, macOS market share is closer to 20% in the desktop segment. Second, part of that market share consist of essential developers making products for the entire Apple ecosystem. I mean, what else are they gonna use for developing Apple software? An iPad? Don't be silly.
