epic vs apple Tim Cook testifies against epic games - epic v apple update

[RejZoR]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

Why wouldn't it, Xbox running Windows NT kernel OS and uses DirectX. Darn sight easier than making x86 apps run on ARM.

It has a 16GB pool of memory that's otherwise split between RAM and VRAM for "traditional" non-console games. I mean, it would run games, just probably not at max settings like on PC. Assuming games would be able to properly work within a single pool of memory at all given how they sperg out sometimes.

[Master Disaster]

7 hours ago, Kisai said:

snip

So you basically think its OK for Apple to have their cake and eat it too?

 

Remember this is the company fighting back the hardest against right to repair and the company that has no issues telling a customer with a brand new device that it cannot be fixed despite the fact there are people out there who could fix it easily and for cheaper than Apples replacement service.

 

Also why would you think they want to reduce support & service costs? Support & servicing is probably a huge revenue stream for them and its pretty much free money since most people will buy Apple care then never have to use it at all because they're not allowed to do anything that could potentially damage their device.

[leadeater]

Just now, RejZoR said:

It has a 16GB pool of memory that's otherwise split between RAM and VRAM for "traditional" non-console games. I mean, it would run games, just probably not at max settings like on PC. Assuming games would be able to properly work within a single pool of memory at all given how they sperg out sometimes.

I wouldn't want or expect it to run at max settings, would just be very convenient and maybe the first and only reason ever that I would consider buying an Xbox over PlayStation. Won't happen though, Microsoft is pushing universal purchases through their store so if you buy a game you can play it on PC or Xbox and on the developer side the optimization between platforms now is very little compared to past IBM based hardware. Plus I've done some very light game programing way back long ago when Microsoft first released XNA Game Studio which was fundamentally just C#, with that it was just a mere drop down box to select target platform and then compile. That was roughly 10 years ago with Xbox 360, I expect tools have gotten way better now. Don't get me wrong though, nothing I did was even remotely complex, graphically or otherwise lol.

 

Microsoft it heading down the right path anyway, it just kind of suck for all us existing people with large Steam game libraries etc. Newcomers it's great, stick with Microsoft store and you've got a cross platform single purchase experience. Though like this story and with IE it won't be long until someone complains and ruins it for everyone.

[LAwLz]

25 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Though like this story and with IE it won't be long until someone complains and ruins it for everyone.

Excuse me for going of topic but are you seriously suggesting IE was good before someone complained and then it got bad? 

IE was cancer and it was good that Microsoft got slammed for their illegal business practices they employed in order to try and dominate the web. 

Microsoft tried to take control over the entire web and employ proprietary standards that only they could support. It's good that people complained because otherwise we wouldn't have as open of a web as we do today. It would be Microsoft-land, and probably not the current "we like open standards" Microsoft we got today. It would have been the blood thirst Microsoft that were pure evil. 

[leadeater]

3 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Excuse me for going of topic but are you seriously suggesting IE was good before someone complained and then it got bad? 

No it's the tale of something being included and then others complaining. Though at least with IE it only affected the EU 

[Mark Kaine]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

Steam is the only one that does things in a way that isn't annoying and time wasting

When it takes 2 hours to install a 110MB "patch" I beg to differ…

 

 

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

PS3

PS3 was fully hacked since 2009 or so, there was no going back, they released revisions that were just as easily hacked though.

 

 

[leadeater]

22 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

When it takes 2 hours to install a 110MB "patch" I beg to differ…

huh? You talking about Steam here?

[Mark Kaine]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

huh? You talking about Steam here?

Yup, and its happened often enough now (5 times or so this year) that I kinda dont want to buy any more games on the platform - basically its what happened a lot on PS4, "copying..." , which made me stop using consoles in the first place, and now Steam does it too!

 

 

[Vishera]

49 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

PS3 was fully hacked since 2009 or so, there was no going back, they released revisions that were just as easily hacked though.

Even iOS was hacked back then,Both Sony and Apple patched those holes with their newer products.

The PS4 was hacked,but not fully hacked,there are a lot of stuff that you don't have access to,

I am very active at the Playstation hacking community so i can tell you the cool stuff you can do with a PS3 that you can't do with a PS4:

Access to the PS3 BIOS chip - You can use a hardware BIOS flasher and flash a BIOS on the system,

I have done it with a Teensy++ 2.0 development board.

Access to the boot codes within the syscon.

You can install custom firmware - Installing a modified version of GameOS and can even use that to "dual boot" Linux with GameOS.

I have Rebug 4.81 installed - It gives retail units the full capabilities of debug units,I can use any savegame i want without resigning it,and a lot of other cool stuff.

I can control the fan speed and have an OSD with temperatures,fan speed and everything!

I actually installed a web + FTP servers on the native OS of the PS3

Transfering files over the network between my PC and PS3.

I can install mods for games and play them!,Skyrim mods,GTA 5 mods - My PS3 can play them!

 

All of those wonderful things are functionality and capabilities that are locked away by the manufacturer,just for the sake of their monopoly.

[Vishera]

48 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

When it takes 2 hours to install a 110MB "patch" I beg to differ…

 

Depends on the server steams tries to download from.

[Master Disaster]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

It would be Microsoft-land, and probably not the current "we like open standards" Microsoft we got today. It would have been the blood thirst Microsoft Bill Gates that were pure evil. 

FTFY. Gates was always the problem at MS, his entire business model was to incorporate someone else's tech into his products then turn it proprietary and force his rivals out of the market. Given that we now know he was forced out of MS for having an affair with an employee its hard to say where MS would be now had he gotten his way with the internet.

19 minutes ago, leadeater said:

huh? You talking about Steam here?

Yup, its become a PITA for a lot of people. Steam will download a 25GB patch in compressed form then install it in the blink of an eye one time then the next time it'll take almost an hour to download and install a patch that's only a few hundred MB.

45 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

When it takes 2 hours to install a 110MB "patch" I beg to differ…

My understanding is its not actually Steams fault. Its possible I'm misremembering but a few years back I started looking at this issue and I remember reading a post somewhere that theorised the issue is down to how the developers/publishers pack their games for upload to Valves CDN. If they don't use the proper packing method for Steam Pipe then it takes much longer to unpack at the receiving end which is why you'll notice download speed stopping for huge periods while the HDD usage churns away.

 

As I said, it was only a theory but it seems plausible to me.

[Mark Kaine]

17 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Depends on the server steams tries to download from.

Nope, its something else... its downloaded within seconds, then proceeds to install or "copy" forever (literally hours)

 

 

17 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

My understanding is its not actually Steams fault. Its possible I'm misremembering but a few years back I started looking at this issue and I remember reading a post somewhere that theorised the issue is down to how the developers/publishers pack their games for upload to Valves CDN. If they don't use the proper packing method

That is a possible explanation, but it does happen a lot more recently, and its very annoying and time wasting.

And I dont even know what its actually doing…

 

And how is that *not* Steams fault lol, its their servers, they should have control over what kind of messed up code devs upload to their servers and ultimately customers.

 

That explanation makes it actually worse…  

[leadeater]

34 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Yup, its become a PITA for a lot of people. Steam will download a 25GB patch in compressed form then install it in the blink of an eye one time then the next time it'll take almost an hour to download and install a patch that's only a few hundred MB.

Sounds more like the publisher/dev at fault there. Steam doesn't really enforce packaging methods or anything like that. I've only seen this type of behavior a few times but it's generally isolated to the actual file being updated, so if the file is 2GB it'll read it but not the whole 25GB game.

 

My game library is a little older now so I'd guess it's due to a change in the way publishers/devs package and deliver games now, I doubt Steam has any control over that at all. All it knows is to send files as required then execute defined programs and scripts, defined by the game publisher/dev.

[leadeater]

15 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

And how is that *not* Steams fault lol, its their servers, they should have control over what kind of messed up code devs upload to their servers and ultimately customers.

 

That explanation makes it actually worse…  

You'd have a better bet at blaming Unreal Engine than Steam. Steam doesn't have the power to change development pipelines, Epic on the other hand does.

[Mark Kaine]

14 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Sounds more like the publisher/dev at fault there. Steam doesn't really enforce packaging methods or anything like that. I've only seen this type of behavior a few times but it's generally isolated to the actual file being updated, so if the file is 2GB it'll read it but not the whole 25GB game.

I think we're actually discussing 2 different issues here now, which complicates  things of course .

 

1)

Theres a 50MB patch (a tiny bug fix or whatever) but because of how the game is packaged (in so called "chunks") it wont just download the 50MB patch, no, it will download and install the whole "chunk" which may actually be like 25GB… for a tiny 50MB patch…!  But, it will actually tell you that in the download section of Steam, and will take approximately as long as you'd expect such a download to take.

So, yeah, that is bad, and regardless of explanation disregarding the customers time.

 

2) different problem, as far I can tell a *new* one

Theres a 50MB patch, Steam will download it and proceed to install - but now this (the install) is taking forever, 30 minutes, an hour, 2 hours, no way to tell because at this point any estimates or "progress bars" are out of the window…

So that is an even more annoying and baffling issue, because its not actually downloading a chunk file or anything, its completely unclear what its actually doing and why its taking so long (to me at least) 

 

Its frankly completely baffling and i can only hope its a bug or something, but this started happening in january and hasnt been fixed yet, if it is a bug…

 

 

^Just for clarification that there are indeed 2 different issues in my opinion, and its sad, because Steam used to be really fast, but not anymore. 

[Vishera]

36 minutes ago, leadeater said:

You'd have a better bet at blaming Unreal Engine than Steam. Steam doesn't have the power to change development pipelines, Epic on the other hand does.

I think that @Mark Kaine is talking about the compression algorithm that some some developers use to upload the game to steam,not the the one of the game engine.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Vishera said:

I think that @Mark Kaine is talking about the compression algorithm that some some developers use to upload the game to steam,not the the one of the game engine.

Algorithm isn't the issue, which one you pick wouldn't really change anything. It's how the actual files are packaged and delivered. If you jam every game asset in to a huge file and have no why of doing differential bit/byte replacement of parts of the file then you have to read the whole thing in to memory, make the change then write it all out again.

 

Also in this case the patch would have to deliver the entire file again anyway so it wouldn't be just a 50MB patch, it would be at least as big as the game files being updated.

 

Edit:

Also the entire purpose of SteamPipe is so these differential replacements can be done, if for whatever reason it's not working then it's 100% the game dev or publisher doing something dumb.

 

Quote

SteamPipe has an efficient patching algorithm based on binary deltas, only changing the modified portions of existing content files. When this content is updated, only these deltas need be sent. This means both developer and user transfers are smaller and faster. Most partners will find that using a SteamPipe Local Content Server not necessary since they can efficiently patch builds on private branches.

/Edit

 

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

Theres a 50MB patch (a tiny bug fix or whatever) but because of how the game is packaged (in so called "chunks") it wont just download the 50MB patch, no, it will download and install the whole "chunk" which may actually be like 25GB… for a tiny 50MB patch…!  But, it will actually tell you that in the download section of Steam, and will take approximately as long as you'd expect such a download to take.

Whenever I see that happen I don't see it download that actual amount, I see it read that much off disk but that actual downloaded is the size of the patch. Steam doesn't report this very well. Sure it still takes ages but you should only see this as Disk Usage in the Steam download page.

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, Vishera said:

I think that @Mark Kaine is talking about the compression algorithm that some some developers use to upload the game to steam,not the the one of the game engine.

Maybe, but i just want to clarify that this started happening this year and is a separate, additional issue to when Steam downloads huge files or whole games just for a tiny MB sized patch… (which has been happening for a while and is a known issue with how "packages" are installed for some games)

 

What Ive also noticed is Steam doesnt  seem to install while downloading anymore, it just downloads and then installs , which of course is less efficient, basically its what PS3 used to do and what people always praised Steam (and Xbox, afaik) to do better…

Regress at its finest, and no word from Steam about it whatsoever - seriously a bit of communication would go a long way sometimes, but its not something Steam is known for traditionally with their proposed "hands off" approach to how to handle these things. 

 

29 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Whenever I see that happen I don't see it download that actual amount, I see it read that much off disk but that actual downloaded is the size of the patch. Steam doesn't report this very well. Sure it still takes ages but you should only see this as Disk Usage in the Steam download page.

I did, whole games even, so ~50+GB for a ~2GB patch - but as I said at least you can see that it actually downloaded that much then, and while its not "cool" you at least have an explanation, like "ah, I see what its doing…ok"

But now, sometimes even the same games (Tekken 7 for example, but this is in no way isolated to unreal engine games iirc) take a different approach, as i explained ,it'll download a small patch and then proceed to install said patch "forever" and even when there is a progress bar, it'll just keep growing with no way of telling how long it'll actually take. Its seriously baffling, and I want to say that takes actually longer than if it just downloaded the whole game instead lol. >.<

 

 

So, yeah, i believe it depends on the game as not all patches are like that, some are actually fast, its still regress and doesnt *really* make sense, i mean all it does is piss off the customer in the end.

[leadeater]

9 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Maybe, but i just want to clarify that this started happening this year and is a separate, additional issue to when Steam downloads huge files or whole games just for a tiny MB sized patch… (which has been happening for a while and is a known issue with how "packages" are installed for some games)

But how do you know it's only a few MB?

 

As my edit I just did, SteamPipe explicitly does binary deltas so only transmits actual change portions of files not the entire file. So if it's doing anything other than this then it's the game dev doing something dumb in the manifest file specifying a new file which then has to be delivered in full to you/everyone.

 

I suggest if that actually is the case, and not reporting error on the download page or some other misinterpretation, then go to the publisher/dev/game forum and yell at them and ask why.

 

[Mark Kaine]

25 minutes ago, leadeater said:

But how do you know it's only a few MB?

I see it in the "downlod section" of Steam, which in my experience is very accurate, usually.

 

This is one example of it taking way longer than it should (not longer than 10 minutes, but in reality it took over one hour)

 

Also the exact same thing happened a day before (which is what triggered me to take screenshots this time), except it was ~100MB and took *2hours* to install! Note how it actually says it downloaded more than what it actually installed in this picture?

PS: the bottom picture with "9%" is literally a minute or so before  it actually finished installing, the "download" was long done at this point. 

 

25 minutes ago, leadeater said:

then go to the publisher/dev/game forum and yell at them and ask why.

Im afraid he literally gives no shit… 

 

 

[Mark Kaine]

8 hours ago, RejZoR said:

This is why I never understand the argument of people that Apple is obligated to do anything. It's literally THEIR everything from ground up.

Just because you own something doesnt mean what you're doing with it cant be illegal, which is somewhat the point of this lawsuit, and no, its not just Apple, its also Google, Microsoft, facebook, etc.

 

 The crux of this lawsuit specifically is indeed should Epic win it sets a precedence of "epic proportions"  which is why I think its not happening, even though Epic is in the right in principle here. 

 

I.e. no more "walled gardens"  I just dont see a judge pulling this off just like that lol…

 

[WolframaticAlpha]

17 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

> Third parties would be able to vacuum up everything

 

Is their sandboxing that bad?

 

I remember this exchange b/w carmack and jobs.

This happened right after it was revealed that the OG iPhone not having native apps.

Quote

After the public cleared out and the rest of us were gathered in front of the stage, I started urgently going on about how web apps are terrible, and wouldn’t show the true potential of the device. We could do so much more with real native access!

Steve responded with a line he had used before: “Bad apps could bring down cell phone towers.” I hated that line. He could have just said “We aren’t ready”, and that would have been fine.

I was making some guesses, but I argued that the iPhone hardware and OS provided sufficient protection for native apps. I pointed at a nearby engineer and said “Don’t you have an MMU and process isolation on the iPhone now?” He had a wide eyed look of don’t-bring-me-into-this, but I eventually got a “yes” out of him.

I said that OS-X was surely being used for things that were more security critical than a phone, and if Apple couldn’t provide enough security there, they had bigger problems. He came back with a snide “You’re a smart guy John, why don’t you write a new OS?” At the time, my thought was, “Fuck you, Steve.”.

 

 

Jobs used the same thing. His "It could bring down cell towers" was another time, when Apple tried to defend itself by nearly calling it's sandboxing bad.

[WolframaticAlpha]

8 hours ago, RejZoR said:

This is why I never understand the argument of people that Apple is obligated to do anything. It's literally THEIR everything from ground up. They designed devices, the app store, the whole ecosystem. It wasn't a collective of 150 phone makers around an OS someone else made (Google's Android) and they all eat from the same bowl. It's just Apple, on their own. If they decide to have total control over stuff they made in its entirety, then that's entirely their own choice.

 

It's also weird when people say "uh but then you have no choice". How again you don't? If you don't like iOS then you go with Android where you have all the freedom you want. But some then argue iPhones are still a huge market where it's worth investing. Well, that's funny too and it's exactly the same as the issue Apple itself is facing with the China situation. They don't like the fact they have to run servers for China for Chinese users and expose all data to Chinese gov as a result. But China is a big market and they feel it's still worth investing in it. If they really wouldn't want it, they could say "Fuck you China" and left their market. Just like users can say "Fuck you Apple" and go to Android. But for some reason they decide it's worthy to stick around Apple's ecosystem, but they endlessly bitch everyone should cater to them. Notice how weird that looks like?

 

Your example with consoles is very similar and very much valid. Imagine Microsoft gets forced to allow 3rd party stores on their Xbox console. You know, the console they designed, with ecosystem and services on it they designed, usually with huge loses because consoles have historically gave back profit through sales of games, not hardware itself. Imagine you spend billions designing console, OS for it and then all the big revenue goes to Epic because they forced in their game store on Xbox. Yeah, Apple's hardware is more like consoles in a lot of aspects. And their profit is heavily based on that. It's why Google doesn't give a lot of shit about it cos they are in entirely different business. They make Android the same way they make all other services. To hook users into their ecosystem of "everything is free shit" and then hoard on their data and make billions by selling ads to everyone.

It's much more of a bitching - fest for elitists. But still, wouldn't you like it, if 3rd party app stores were allowed on an iPhone. Sure some of the racecar johnnies would be harmed, but the techsavvy will be benefitted.

[Kisai]

7 hours ago, leadeater said:

 

 

Microsoft it heading down the right path anyway, it just kind of suck for all us existing people with large Steam game libraries etc. Newcomers it's great, stick with Microsoft store and you've got a cross platform single purchase experience. Though like this story and with IE it won't be long until someone complains and ruins it for everyone.

Steam already offered cross-platform MacOS and Linux support, and pretty much no uptake on that. 

 

People need to stop and realize that the MacOS X Desktop platform is tiny, and the Linux Desktop platform even smaller. OS X can afford to have side-loading remain available because it's also a development platform, and hence, they can't take that away without taking away the ability to develop software on it. Sure, they could come up with some sandboxing for it, but then we're right back at the problem not being addressed.

 

The problem with IE is exactly the reason why you don't want just one choice for many things. Microsoft tried to wrestle control over the WWW back when there was uneven standards in the HTML 3.2 era (that was before tables and frames), and Microsoft great contribution to the HTML standard was in fact the iframe. A thing that is now extensively abused by advertisements, but also the web's only sandbox. The only reason MSIE is still around is because of ActiveX Flash and Java plugins. Of which the former was killed this January regardless if you liked it or not. Seeing as Java has ways of being run without a web browser, now's a good time to put a stake in the vampire that is MSIE.

 

Microsoft's mistake with MSIE was the illegal tying. Which on the surface, Microsoft including any of it's own software other than the operating system (such as the media player, or dvd player, or even MS Office) would have triggered this, and in the current software ecosystem, Microsoft has mostly prevented a recurrence of this by always selling a version of Office for the Mac, and making many features optional that a competitor has product for. Like you don't see very many people selling calculator or notepad apps (most alternatives are free, open source and better.) Now had that not happened (ultimately Microsoft wound up doing nothing.) Microsoft might have done the same thing Apple did with the webview, and google chrome would have not established itself at all on Windows. The MSIE webview is what 100% of stand-alone game launchers use to patch their games, even if they are launched by Steam. In know for fact a game that is still operating, released in 2004, uses that webview (or integrated MSIE) for various help information inside their game, let alone their launcher.  Surely they switched to CEF now, but I've not played it in such a long time. I just know it still exists.

 

The big reason people switched to Chrome, was because it was a maintained version of Webkit that was available on OSX (as Safari) and Linux (as KHTML/Konquerer) where as MSIE was just stagnating. The alternative was Firefox, and without Firefox there would be a highly fragmented, standardsless web. Heck, if things progressed exactly as they were heading, there would be no web, only Java (not Javascript) apps, because Javascript was very very much a broken thing, with most Javascript being written as sloppily as possible using document write's rather DOM manipulation. (and much of the web is still sloppy using InnerHTML which is just as bad, and used by jquery and such.)

 

So just because there are alternatives, doesn't mean people will gravitate to those alternatives. What does Firefox offer that chrome doesn't currently? Nothing. What about Edge or Opera? Those use the same layout engine as Chrome, only the Javascript engine is different and one or two UI buttons. We don't have 4 web browser choices we have 2, Firefox, or "something based on webkit", heck all of them use the same underlying renderer (ANGLE)

 

 

I sure hope those companies I previously worked for who had ActiveX based Siebel CRM systems threw that mess away, but with their luck, it probably got turned into a WASM app.

 

Back on topic.

 

I'm actually glad that the "30%" share is being attacked, though I wish it was Sony and Nintendo on the receiving end. Apple has a device that is basically phone+media player+game console, yet is the only one that seems to be on the ball about building hardware and software without a planned obsolescence goal. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all hopped onto the Console war bandwagon and aren't even competitive with each other, each console basically gets it's exclusive games, and the rest of the games either don't get ported to the weakest console (the Nintendo one), or get ported to everything, and the price ends up being the same, regardless of the "cut" the store takes. It's actually kinda strange in that regard because you see steam sales all the time, but ONLY on steam. You never see sales on the App stores of Apple, Sony or Microsoft. 

 

Which is why trying to claim there is some kind of anti-trust thing going on here is absurd.

 

Let's take a look at some anti-trust stuff:

a) Price fixing - Wow, did you know that he average PC game is $80 now? With the average DLC bundle being around $250?

 

EGS: Nope

Microsoft Store: Nope

Origin:

  

 

PS4:

 

Xbox Series X/S (not Windows)

 

So... all the stores it's released on, somehow decided to sell it for the same price. Huh, Maybe it's because these are considered 4 different licensees, and therefor are legally not the same product, despite being the same product.

 

And I should also mention that there are pretty much no games ported to the Mac in the first place, rather there are games developed for iOS using Unity that simply never get ports to the PC because they are designed to use a touch UI and games that are just straight ported from mobile to PC are BAD and vice versa. At least a console game can be played with the exact same controller on PC or PS4/PS5/Xbox360/XboxOne/etc, which is all the more reason to consider these games the same thing.

 

What about Market Sharing?

This is something that ISP's are more guilty of, where ISP's one one side of the country stay out of the the other side of the country, thus competition is reduced or eliminated so they can get higher ARPU's.

 

But, in the games market, this is seen by Region locking games, and preventing games from being played on competitors platforms. This is why there is all this differential pricing crap with Steam and other stores. Notice how those price tags are all CAD, but right before I clicked "take me to Canada" on the Xbox store it showed the US price. Stores not manipulate the prices, but try to hide what the actual price is.

 

 

 

So that 79.99 price is actually more expensive, and does not even include taxes like it would in Australia.

 

Incidentally:

AU price: 99.95

NZ price: 109.95

 

So one might ask, seems awfully convenient, that these prices all end in 9.95 or 9.99, that New Zealand price is nearly 30% more expensive.

 

 

You get a choice of CAD79.99, CAD79.99 CAD79.99 or CAD79.99 yet, the sticker price is completely arbitrary, and disconnected from the marketed price of USD 59.99

 

A lot of good additional store choices are on the PC when the price is exactly the same on all of them. That's all the proof you need that additional stores will not lower prices. They don't lower prices on the PC platform to begin with, why would they lower prices on iOS's store. The developer just takes a bigger cut for themselves.

 

The only place I see potentially Apple getting slapped here is the bundling of various software with iOS that there were previously "product duplication" of more popular products, which would go back to the illegal typing argument rather than anything else. But no, I don't see Apple being forced to allow EGS on iOS, nor any kind of side-loading-controlled-by-user.

[RejZoR]

2 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

It's much more of a bitching - fest for elitists. But still, wouldn't you like it, if 3rd party app stores were allowed on an iPhone. Sure some of the racecar johnnies would be harmed, but the techsavvy will be benefitted.

I wouldn't complain over it if it was an option, but quite frankly, I'm not going to bitch about wanting it relentlessly. Given I can switch between Android and iOS and not have my usage interrupted, I frankly don't even care.