4 ms·

Are there any legal ways (as in not breaking any ToS) to get iOS apps onto your phone which aren't in the app store? The walled garden doesn't stop at apps and

Are there any legal ways (as in not breaking any ToS) to get iOS apps onto your phone which aren't in the app store? The walled garden doesn't stop at apps and the app store, but it includes how easy it is to integrate non-Apple products into your Apple device or how easy it is to integrate Apple devices into non-Apple products. Which is often near or completely impossible and Apple doesn't provide any support for it. If it's non-Apple there's no reason to support it. Just take a look what they did to OpenGL. Open standards implemented by pretty much everyone gets deprecated for their proprietary Metal implementation. The walled garden isn't only about apps, but it's any interaction with the non-Apple world or from the non-Apple to the Apple world that is being made very complicated if not impossible at times.

ubermonkey 8y ago
>Are there any legal ways (as in not breaking any ToS) to get iOS apps onto your phone which aren't in the app store? Yes, there are. You can compile your own and sideload, or you can download precompiled apps and allow them to execute explicitly in the security settings. It's just that most people don't care to bother. I get that "the walled garden isn't only about apps," but I really don't see examples of it being a problem. You broadened the question to "Apple" from "iOS;" are you aware there's absolutely no walled garden AT ALL for apps on the Mac? You can download software from ANYWHERE YOU WANT; my emacs build came from gnu.org. As a Mac user in a Windows world I've always been able to interoperate pretty well, at least at the user/app level. For example, both OS X and iOS have native Exchange support, which is huge. (And the native tools are more capable than Outlook in lots of interesting ways that aren't germane here.) This is something that Apple explicitly supports. Macs talk to Windows file shares without issue. So I guess I don't really know what you mean here at all. I can't speak to OpenGL, but given that Apple development has always kind of gone its own way I'm not sure that's a great example of a walled garden where actual user experience is concerned. Can you say more about why that applies?

ubermonkey 8y ago

>Are there any legal ways (as in not breaking any ToS) to get iOS apps onto your phone which aren't in the app store? Yes, there are. You can compile your own and sideload, or you can download precompiled apps and allow them to execute explicitly in the security settings. It's just that most people don't care to bother. I get that "the walled garden isn't only about apps," but I really don't see examples of it being a problem. You broadened the question to "Apple" from "iOS;" are you aware there's absolutely no walled garden AT ALL for apps on the Mac? You can download software from ANYWHERE YOU WANT; my emacs build came from gnu.org. As a Mac user in a Windows world I've always been able to interoperate pretty well, at least at the user/app level. For example, both OS X and iOS have native Exchange support, which is huge. (And the native tools are more capable than Outlook in lots of interesting ways that aren't germane here.) This is something that Apple explicitly supports. Macs talk to Windows file shares without issue. So I guess I don't really know what you mean here at all. I can't speak to OpenGL, but given that Apple development has always kind of gone its own way I'm not sure that's a great example of a walled garden where actual user experience is concerned. Can you say more about why that applies?