Classic American take.

dictating what tech companies can and must do worldwide

EU isn’t dictating what Apple does outside EU. Blame Apple for being lazy enough to not make two models of iPhones with Lightning and USB-C for different regions.

Leaks also say that sideloading is only region locked to EU, why are you complaining that Apple does something in a region you aren’t even in?

small fraction

iOS Appstore alone has over 100 million EU users. iPadOS over 23 million. Tiny.

It should be left to the free market to decide.

aka, it should be left to apple fanboys to decide.

Apple has good reasons not to allow this

they sure do — they like to keep their users with no choice whatsoever, locked in their little and wonderful cage.

Also, you’re wrong — EU doesn’t ask for sideloading worldwide, and Apple will not make it available worldwide either. The changes are exclusively for EU and EU only. And god I love to live in EU, right about now.

I mean you could say this about any regulation passed by an economically powerful nation.

Do the people of the EU favor these regulations? If so, the EU is within its moral rights to regulate the products sold in its borders. Apple is free to not abide by those rules outside the EU. If they decide that it’s not worth the cost, that’s Apple’s problem.

I was downvoted on technology sub for saying that I am terrified of this.

The number of people I have seen who just click Accept or whatever the button says without reading a thing is fairly high. And the number of people who end up installing shit and later say “it just came by itself” is high as well. I am so happy me and the family I care about are on iPhones and I read that all the scams this year in my city were on Android devices. I feel a bit safer knowing that it is harder to pull off this shit on iPhones, thanks to what Apple is doing.

I like EU push for USB-C and RCS. Not so sure about sideloading.

Good lord I hesitate to think of the average iPhone user who hears about this, tries it, and winds up with literal vermin and spiders cascading out of it like the masks in Halloween 3.

How the fuck would one literally have vermin and spiders “cascading” out of their iPhone if they installed an application outside the App Store? Like how would that even work? Some dude drives out to your house and objects spider eggs into the phone? The physics alone don’t make any sense.

I don’t follow Android, does this happen with a more open OS? Like tons of malware and shit? I mean with normal people, not Redditors

In excess of 90% of all mobile malware is for Android.

Just think of the average Android User, they’re the same outside the tech bubble.

On most Android devices, sideloading is turned off by default such that the device will block any APK not downloaded through only Google Play (or the Galaxy Store, if you’re using a Galaxy). You have to go into Settings > Apps > Special App Access, check a box usually labeled “Install apps from unknown sources”, and acknowledge a warning before you can turn on sideloading; on my Pixel you can even restrict it to certain sources (I have it turned on for Chrome, Fdroid, Firefox, Files by Google and Google Drive, but not for other apps such as WhatsApp, TOR or Gmail). And most Android users who sideload apps do so through a third-party app store like Fdroid or the Amazon App Store, or through a developer they already know and trust. Honestly, I feel like I’d have to be actively looking through the dark web to get close to downloading malware.

I also want to point out that if you have a Mac or MacBook, it enables sideloading by default (hence why you can download apps like Word or Firefox or Spotify). If you want to disable sideloading so the user can’t download apps outside the macOS App Store, you have to go into Settings > Privacy & Security > Security, then under “Allow apps downloaded from” change it from “App Store and identified developers” to “App Store”. The only major desktop OS that has sideloading turned off by default is, ironically enough, Chrome OS.