> To qualify for the [MarketplaceKit] entitlement, you must:
> [...]
> Provide Apple a stand-by letter of credit from an A-rated (or equivalent by S&P, Fitch, or Moody’s) financial Institution of €1,000,000 to establish adequate financial means in order to guarantee support for your developers and users.
> The gatekeeper shall allow and technically enable the installation and effective use of third-party software applications or software application stores using, or interoperating with, its operating system and allow those software applications or software application stores to be accessed by means other than the relevant core platform services of that gatekeeper.
> The gatekeeper shall, where applicable, not prevent the downloaded third-party software applications or software application stores from prompting end users to decide whether they want to set that downloaded software application or software application store as their default. The gatekeeper shall technically enable end users who decide to set that downloaded software application or software application store as their default to carry out that change easily.
> The gatekeeper shall allow providers of services and providers of hardware, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same hardware and software features accessed or controlled via the operating system or virtual assistant listed in the designation decision pursuant to Article 3(9) as are available to services or hardware provided by the gatekeeper. Furthermore, the gatekeeper shall allow business users and alternative providers of services provided together with, or in support of, core platform services, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same operating system, hardware or software features, regardless of whether those features are part of the operating system, as are available to, or used by, that gatekeeper when providing such services
How is requiring them to have access to $1M acceptable, or compliant with the legislation?
> The gatekeeper shall not be prevented from taking strictly necessary and proportionate measures to ensure that interoperability does not compromise the integrity of the operating system, virtual assistant, hardware or software features provided by the gatekeeper
Apple state the $1M requirement is to allow for providing support to customers. There is no allowance for doing that in the regulation, and no reasonable argument can be made that lack of customer support has an impact on the integrity of the operating system or hardware. I can understand scanning software or asking for it to be uploaded and signed, that could be justified. Not this.
As a government regulation, yes, you might need some liability insurance if you want to sell food for example. Apple is acting like it's a government here.
> The gatekeeper shall not be prevented from taking, to the extent that they are strictly necessary and proportionate, measures to ensure that third-party software applications or software application stores do not endanger the integrity of the hardware or operating system provided by the gatekeeper, provided that such measures are duly justified by the gatekeeper.
Looks like Apple tries to make a case to exploit this statement, which sounds exactly like a malicious compliance.
All I want is a F-Droid-esque store with sane apps. You know, open source apps, centrally built. No in-app-purchases and Chinese geotracking framework for something that is 25 lines of code to talk to some bluetooth gadget.
Ok, so I get that you want to be able to install random binaries on your phone, but I want to understand how you think that could happen without undermining the platform security model?
The inability of binaries to do malicious things on iOS is the result of the sandboxing and entitlement mechanisms of the platform. The store review and approval process is what stops applications from including entitlements that undermine the platform security. If you remove that step from the process there is nothing stopping an application shipping with the system entitlements that allow the application to read or write to other app data, or the entitlements to talk to system services without prompting permission dialogs, etc.
If you want to remove the review and approval systems that the App Store has (and it sounds like are going to be required for 3rd party stores?) you have to have an answer for that. Otherwise you just end up with the android malware problem.
You tell the user what entitlements or permissions are being requested at the point of the app trying to use them, stop treating the users like stupid children and let them make an educated decision about how to use the hardware that they own.
There are limits on Android anyway, what your side-loaded apps can do without you using a custom ROM or rooting the device is restricted somewhat.
Have you ever seen a random windows user? Do you think Grandma understands that?
I’m all for allowing power-users to side loads apps, but average user definitely needs to be thought as a child that will use 1234 as their password, and click ‘ok’ on every pop-up without even reading it.
Require the super scary "break app sandbox" entitlements to be activated behind an adb-command-mutated flag (or whatever the iOS equivalent of adb is) after jumping through the USB debugging hoops?
Which Android malware problem? Android has a permission system, every permission an app has needs to be approved by the user, and some permissions only system-apps can request.
There is no need for an app store review process to stop apps from requesting the "write to other application's data" entitlement; this can be enforced by the phone itself.
This is complete nonsense, the permissions are enforced by the OS, not by the store approval process, same for accessing the various parts of the file system.
To enforce permissions the OS needs to know what those permissions are.
That's what entitlements are, and the App Store review is what ensures you don't have bogus entitlements.
There are entitlements that, for example, control whether or not you can read the user's message database, the entitlement has to exist so that messages app and daemons can access that database. The App Store review process automatically rejects submissions with those, and other similar, entitlements. There are entitlements that allow reading and writing arbitrary data from arbitrary applications, because (for example) there are OS daemons and services that need to read/write all of that data (the settings app can report disk usage, there's the daemons that install and uninstall apps, etc), and again those entitlements are gated by store review.
The entire trust/security model for iOS starts at the store review disallowing system entitlements, and gating even allowed entitlements on appropriate notice in the app description.
Hopefully you can look at that list and get an idea of how removing the gate on applications being able to specify whatever entitlement undermines a huge component of the platform security model.
On Android system apps have permissions that user applications cannot have, this is easy to enforce by the OS, same thing for iOS, if Apple does not allow user apps to have a certain permission it would be just disable from the sandbox environment, it's not the store approval process that disallow user apps to became system apps or that would be hilarious honestly, at that point why even jailbreak the device.
Also I don't know what you mean by bogus entitlements, if it's not meant to be used by user apps than it wouldn't be available to user apps, if the app needs to have access to a certain feature that required a permission, it would need to ask gently the OS and the OS would need to approve it (maybe even after asking the user), or the app would not simply to be able to access it, so it's in the app's interest to have the permissions laid out correctly so that the OS knows. From the previous message you seem to believe that the app could just simply bypass the dialog asking the user for permission.
> [...]
> Provide Apple a stand-by letter of credit from an A-rated (or equivalent by S&P, Fitch, or Moody’s) financial Institution of €1,000,000 to establish adequate financial means in order to guarantee support for your developers and users.
Just let us sideload IPAs, please.