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The EU's Digital Markets Act will soon either make this a first-class citizen or totally useless.

gregoriol 4y ago
High hopes this will happen! Not being able to install some apps just because some Apple person decided is hurting the community: Cydia at it's peak was a huge catalyst for innovation
- wruza 4y ago
  How did Cydia protect its users from SEOing apps that require unnecessary permissions? If by the fact that it’s a niche store used by only hundreds of people, there’s bad news.
  - gregoriol 4y ago
    I'm not saying it was for everyone. As soon as you used jailbreaks, you opened a big door anyway. But it also allowed many new things to be built that were not allowed on the regular store, and in the end a lot was copied by Apple in later iOS versions as their own. An alternative store with open-source apps, without the opening of the jailbreak and that could be verified by users, would be a good amazing start.
    - alexvoda 4y ago
      In other words, F-Droid but for iOS.
      - witheld 4y ago
        F-Droid is lawful good, Cydia was chaotic good
  - wingerlang 4y ago
    Maybe I am misunderstanding you here. But, Cydia had millions upon millions of users, and generated millions in revenue. It didn't protect you at all, it was more of a package manager GUI than a proper store, it just had some repositories where you could upload paid packages. And generally, you wouldn't really install apps from it (with both notable and non-notable exceptions, of course). You would install 'tweaks' which normally were iOS plugins/modifications of various sizes and functionality. They all had root privileges an a lot of it was trust based. I don't think there have been a whole lot of malware distributed in this way.
    - wruza 4y ago
      I apologize, I initially mistook it for an alternative android store and didn’t know it has so many users.
    - sureglymop 4y ago
      That's correct. Iirc, dpkg and apt were ported/compiled for iOS and then cydia was created by saurik which is basically just a frontend for apt. Unlike on e.g. Debian, paid repositories became a thing and some of those became first class citizens of cydia, or in other words, they were pre configured in cydia. A lot of the business in jailbreaking always had to do with pirating and cracking apps and there were alternative app-stores offering paid apps for free. This practice was apparently more common in asian countries like china which led to some jailbreaks being supplied by chinese groups funded by alternative app store companies. However do note that this was never embraced by cydia, third party repositories and stores were used for that. Cydia and jailbreaking is how I got into computer science and learned how to host my own debian repository as a kid before I got into actual debian and linux. I don't know how the jailbreak community is doing now and I have moved to android a long time ago, but I am eagerly awaiting the time when apple has to allow side loading, then I might become interested in iOS again.
ho_schi 4y ago
Let us hope the best. This must have happened already ten years ago. The EU seem to stopped fighting against misuse of power in IT. Only when a competitor has money fight? On the other end we have this awful Cookie-Directive. A disaster and misuse is now on even worse.
- LadyCailin 4y ago
  The cookie directive is great. The fact that companies decided to maliciously comply is on them, not the law.
- noirscape 4y ago
  The Cookie directive being awful for end-users has nothing to do with the EUs actual legislation, it's a case of scummy companies maliciously trying to not comply with it. The legislation is really good actually; it orders sites that want to place tracking cookies (Google Analytics for example relies on this) to request consent from the user before they're allowed to do so. That's all it requests. This could easily have been implemented in any number of user-friendly ways - ie. Store one cookie for Google Analytics as a whole that is just "I don't consent", that would have been enough to comply. Just check "did user consent or not". If they didn't, then don't show the popup on any site using Analytics. Problem solved, consent obtained and/or rejected. The reason it's so obnoxious is because these businesses know that if they start being honest with what's being tracked, they'll lose a shitton of income (Facebook reportedly lost 12 billion just because Apple allowed users to randomize their advertisement ID). They don't want that, so now CJEU has to slowly but surely beat actual compliance into them. Nowadays you have to have an opt-out option that should be as easy as not opting in (so no more "50 million tracking slider" nonsense), the opt-out option can't be obnoxious to find and click, the opt-in button may not receive extra promotion compared to the opt-out button and so on. The only step that's not yet complied with is that if the user indicates that they just don't want tracking period, then they shouldn't track at all (basically enforcing the good old DNT header).
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    Even the EUs own government websites don't implement the cookie directive nicely.
Nextgrid 4y ago
Define "soon". The GDPR was supposed to outlaw spyware. 5 years later, Google and Facebook are still in business. If the enforcement of the DMA is like the GDPR's, you're gonna be waiting for a long time.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  The DMA went into effect on 1 November 2022. It includes a grace period for companies to adjust to the law and provisions for member states to implement the law, making it effectively come into effect May this year with the law effectively coming into effect March next year (at the latest). However, because the law will actually go into effect in two months, I expect the EU's inevitable case against the various gatekeeper companies to take into account decisions and practices from this May and onward. Looking at the way the GDPR introduction went down, I expect large websites to start posting panic posts around January 2024, telling us how the DMA is going to kill our kids and poison our wells.

High hopes this will happen! Not being able to install some apps just because some Apple person decided is hurting the community: Cydia at it's peak was a huge catalyst for innovation

wruza 4y ago
How did Cydia protect its users from SEOing apps that require unnecessary permissions? If by the fact that it’s a niche store used by only hundreds of people, there’s bad news.
- gregoriol 4y ago
  I'm not saying it was for everyone. As soon as you used jailbreaks, you opened a big door anyway. But it also allowed many new things to be built that were not allowed on the regular store, and in the end a lot was copied by Apple in later iOS versions as their own. An alternative store with open-source apps, without the opening of the jailbreak and that could be verified by users, would be a good amazing start.
  - alexvoda 4y ago
    In other words, F-Droid but for iOS.
    - witheld 4y ago
      F-Droid is lawful good, Cydia was chaotic good
- wingerlang 4y ago
  Maybe I am misunderstanding you here. But, Cydia had millions upon millions of users, and generated millions in revenue. It didn't protect you at all, it was more of a package manager GUI than a proper store, it just had some repositories where you could upload paid packages. And generally, you wouldn't really install apps from it (with both notable and non-notable exceptions, of course). You would install 'tweaks' which normally were iOS plugins/modifications of various sizes and functionality. They all had root privileges an a lot of it was trust based. I don't think there have been a whole lot of malware distributed in this way.
  - wruza 4y ago
    I apologize, I initially mistook it for an alternative android store and didn’t know it has so many users.
  - sureglymop 4y ago
    That's correct. Iirc, dpkg and apt were ported/compiled for iOS and then cydia was created by saurik which is basically just a frontend for apt. Unlike on e.g. Debian, paid repositories became a thing and some of those became first class citizens of cydia, or in other words, they were pre configured in cydia. A lot of the business in jailbreaking always had to do with pirating and cracking apps and there were alternative app-stores offering paid apps for free. This practice was apparently more common in asian countries like china which led to some jailbreaks being supplied by chinese groups funded by alternative app store companies. However do note that this was never embraced by cydia, third party repositories and stores were used for that. Cydia and jailbreaking is how I got into computer science and learned how to host my own debian repository as a kid before I got into actual debian and linux. I don't know how the jailbreak community is doing now and I have moved to android a long time ago, but I am eagerly awaiting the time when apple has to allow side loading, then I might become interested in iOS again.

ho_schi 4y ago

Let us hope the best. This must have happened already ten years ago. The EU seem to stopped fighting against misuse of power in IT. Only when a competitor has money fight? On the other end we have this awful Cookie-Directive. A disaster and misuse is now on even worse.

LadyCailin 4y ago
The cookie directive is great. The fact that companies decided to maliciously comply is on them, not the law.
noirscape 4y ago
The Cookie directive being awful for end-users has nothing to do with the EUs actual legislation, it's a case of scummy companies maliciously trying to not comply with it. The legislation is really good actually; it orders sites that want to place tracking cookies (Google Analytics for example relies on this) to request consent from the user before they're allowed to do so. That's all it requests. This could easily have been implemented in any number of user-friendly ways - ie. Store one cookie for Google Analytics as a whole that is just "I don't consent", that would have been enough to comply. Just check "did user consent or not". If they didn't, then don't show the popup on any site using Analytics. Problem solved, consent obtained and/or rejected. The reason it's so obnoxious is because these businesses know that if they start being honest with what's being tracked, they'll lose a shitton of income (Facebook reportedly lost 12 billion just because Apple allowed users to randomize their advertisement ID). They don't want that, so now CJEU has to slowly but surely beat actual compliance into them. Nowadays you have to have an opt-out option that should be as easy as not opting in (so no more "50 million tracking slider" nonsense), the opt-out option can't be obnoxious to find and click, the opt-in button may not receive extra promotion compared to the opt-out button and so on. The only step that's not yet complied with is that if the user indicates that they just don't want tracking period, then they shouldn't track at all (basically enforcing the good old DNT header).
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  Even the EUs own government websites don't implement the cookie directive nicely.

Nextgrid 4y ago

Define "soon". The GDPR was supposed to outlaw spyware. 5 years later, Google and Facebook are still in business. If the enforcement of the DMA is like the GDPR's, you're gonna be waiting for a long time.

jeroenhd 4y ago
The DMA went into effect on 1 November 2022. It includes a grace period for companies to adjust to the law and provisions for member states to implement the law, making it effectively come into effect May this year with the law effectively coming into effect March next year (at the latest). However, because the law will actually go into effect in two months, I expect the EU's inevitable case against the various gatekeeper companies to take into account decisions and practices from this May and onward. Looking at the way the GDPR introduction went down, I expect large websites to start posting panic posts around January 2024, telling us how the DMA is going to kill our kids and poison our wells.