iOS 17 update could open your iPhone to third-party app stores

[DrMacintosh]

On 4/17/2023 at 5:00 PM, TheawesomeMCB said:

If you are scared of viruses then that doesn't stop you from getting an anti virus like android has.

It is in everyone’s best interest that iOS does not become Windows in this revised. The user should not have to pay to patch vulnerabilities in the OS. The correct response to that is to say don’t side load. 

[DrMacintosh]

On macOS there is a toggle to allow applications to install from the App Store and trusted developers only or install from anywhere. 
 

The default setting must be only the App Store for iOS. Changing this setting should be under security & privacy settings and require user authentication warning them you’re opening the door to unverified software that is potentially malicious. 
 

My biggest fear is that someone could have a 3rd party app installed from an alternate store which compromises the system as a whole or an app can be used by a government entity to compromise a large portion of people. 

[Donut417]

24 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

app can be used by a government entity to compromise a large portion of people. 

Those apps exist already. It’s called social media, where everyone shares everything. 

[Commodus]

To riff on what DrM said, I could see Apple replicating what it did on the Mac, where non-App Store apps aren't allowed by default but can easily be enabled in settings. I could even see Apple requiring a Developer ID signature that lets the company remotely disable an app if it's malware or otherwise illegal. That could bring concerns of its own, but might also help avoid Android's problem (where malware usually comes from third-party stores and sites).

 

However Apple tackles it, I'd say this is a net positive move. It'll hurt Apple's rep for security, but it'll also remove one of the obstacles enthusiasts often cite for rejecting iPhones. These are pocketable computers, and benefit from being treated as such. Not that Android diehards won't find some other justification...

[Kisai]

9 hours ago, Vishera said:

That's pretty much the case with macOS.

False,

 

Ahem... 

5 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

 

I’m personally pretty eager for getting Retroarch on my iPhone. The CPU is bloody fast, and should make mincemeat of the more accurate SW-based emulation cores. 

 

Given enough rope, people will hang themselves with it. I'm not insinuating everyone wants to download emulators and/or play pirated games, but that is incentive enough to jailbreak a device.

 

Assuming people will just be honest when they've admitted they won't, just proves Apple was always right to have it locked down. I quite frankly, don't care what you do with your own device or software, but the amount of times a single "hacked console" has utterly destroyed multiplayer games is every-single-person on that console who has the game is FAR higher. You pretty much have to assume that people on the top of leaderboards have cheated to get there. Maybe that's the game dev's fault for not tracking more data points to verify a score is legitimate, but they also shouldn't have to assume someone will do so.

 

What I would like to see is these sideloading arguments turn into reasons to destroy the IAP's. Because a lot of IAP's are extremely arbitrary. How some companies (eg EA) manage to keep getting people to pay IAP's has a lot to do with how their own games have been integrated into their own stores, and they hold the "save game" hostage. Same with Nintendo. But if you're not EA (or Ubisoft or SquareEnix) or Nintendo, your IAP purchases are already subject to the app store rules and handing over money to the app store owner. So if someone JB's their device and the difference between you having 0 smurfberries and 1,000,000,000 smurfberries is a text file with "smurfberries=1000000000" in a game. Well that's when you start seeing all these "how to get free smurfberries" ads, videos, and other crap that will be malware. Suuuure it might do what it said, but might also install a RAT your device. 

 

The difference between "I chose to do something illegal or against the EULA" and "letting someone else do it, and I'm the beneficiary", is that the more people involved, the more likely you are going to be on the receiving end of financial consequences, from either having your information stolen, or from having your device destroyed. 

 

People are lazy.  There is technically a correct way to do things, but most people will not do it the correct way because it's extremely involved, miss a step, brick the device, or destroy data on it that can't be recovered. Sometimes companies like Nintendo, mislead the customer into believing that you are paying for your saves to be backed-up, when you had to do something first to enable that. 

 

So you get this not fun scenario when you have a device that IS backed up by a cloud service, you brick/hack your device, and it propagates the hacks to the cloud service, so now you potentially also brick all future devices as well. That's the nightmare scenario I imagine that Apple is trying to avoid.

 

[Vishera]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

10 hours ago, Vishera said:

That's pretty much the case with macOS.

False,

 

Ahem... 

7 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

 

I’m personally pretty eager for getting Retroarch on my iPhone. The CPU is bloody fast, and should make mincemeat of the more accurate SW-based emulation cores. 

 

Given enough rope, people will hang themselves with it.

And you quoted me, please explain.

 

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

download emulators and/or play pirated games

Why do you try to portray as if emulating a game is similar to piracy?

What's wrong with buying a game disc, dumping it into an ISO and then playing it on an emulator?

[Vishera]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

Assuming people will just be honest when they've admitted they won't, just proves Apple was always right to have it locked down.

So take our freedom to do whatever we want with our property just because some people will use it for nefarious purposes?!

This is pretty much the "Oh, but the children!" argument all over again.

[Kisai]

18 minutes ago, Vishera said:

And you quoted me, please explain.

 

Why do you try to portray as if emulating a game is similar to piracy?

What's wrong with buying a game disc, dumping it into an ISO and then playing it on an emulator?

Do, pray tell, explain to me how you personally dumped a game, illegally decrypted it, and then played it on said emulator. Go on... I'm sure the lawyers in the room are making gestures.

 

14 minutes ago, Vishera said:

So take our freedom to do whatever we want with our property just because some people will use it for nefarious purposes?!

This is pretty much the "Oh, but the children!" argument all over again.

It's not "think of the children" but "lawsuit happy armchair lawyers" 

 

It was not that long ago that companies started adding 500 page TOS/EULA's to everything exactly because of clowns who file frivolous lawsuits looking for a payday.

 

"Think of the children" is a defense often thumped to Censor things, because it comes from people who think children should be kept in a rubber room, that they are somehow too stupid to live, until they are 25.

 

When the reality is, literately, when you tell a child no, and are deceptive of why you've told them no, they are going to do the opposite. You do a child no favors trying to hide "bad things" from them, because that just makes them more curious to find it out on their own and NOT tell you about it.

 

Like good grief, Apple's lockdown against having porn on the app store is explicitly because PARENTS don't use the parental controls that already exist, and adult app/site operators don't verify ages, because they can't legally ask a child to prove they are over 18. If you're between the age of 13 and 18, the best any game/app/website developer can do is go "Are you over 18?" and if you say no, send you to disney.com without storing anything. If you're under 13, you can't even ask the child that, because that invokes all other other child protection nonsense. So the responsibility is unfairly dropped on the service providers to self-label content that YOU might find offensive, so it can be hidden by filters rather than YOU going "hell yeah, I just turned 18 let me see the tiddys"

 

If things were perfect, there wouldn't be single game with a gun in it, on not just the app store, but all games on all platforms. Because if you are not old enough to buy a firearm, you should not be able to play a game involving a firearm. That's the same logic we use for nudity, sexualized or not. But no, for some reason you can be 13 and play a shooty-shooty-bang-bang game, but a women in a sports bra is too much in a video game.

 

So just throw that argument in the trash. People who use "think of the children" as a defense, just plain hate certain kind of content and would gladly throw children into the meat grinder if it furthers their objectives.

[Vishera]

47 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Do, pray tell, explain to me how you personally dumped a game

Put the disk into the console, dump it into an ISO with homebrew.

47 minutes ago, Kisai said:

illegally decrypted it

????????????

Why crack the game when you can generate a RAP file from your console (or the equivalent of that in other consoles)?

 

Have you ever even emulated a legit copy of a game before?!

 

47 minutes ago, Kisai said:

It's not "think of the children" but "lawsuit happy armchair lawyers" 

Nope, It's pretty much "think of the children" all over again.

I even have a name for it now "tHiNk Of ThE PiRaCy"

[Kisai]

37 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Put the disk into the console, dump it into an ISO with homebrew.

????????????

Why crack the game when you can generate a RAP file from your console (or the equivalent of that in other consoles)?

 

Have you ever even emulated a legit copy of a game before?!

Clearly you haven't. § 1201(a) of the DMCA says you can't. Section B is even more specific

Quote

(2)No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—

(A)

is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

(B)

has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or

(C)

is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

 

Tell people to JB a device, and you are effectively saying "here's how to pirate things", Next-to-nobody has the tech proficiency to dump their own games for a console that has encrypted the game, and I doubt you do either. Even if you didn't, you would not be allowed to describe it for exactly above reason.

 

37 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Nope, It's pretty much "think of the children" all over again.

I even have a name for it now "tHiNk Of ThE PiRaCy"

 

Nah bruh, it's "think of the idiots"

 

 

[Vishera]

39 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Clearly you haven't. § 1201(a) of the DMCA says you can't. Section B is even more specific

It doesn't circumvent copy protection.

The RAP files from your console are pretty much like a CD key

You can only generate them with legitimate copies of the game on a real console anyway.

 

Pirates would just download cracked ISOs...

[Kisai]

50 minutes ago, Vishera said:

It doesn't circumvent copy protection.

The RAP files from your console are pretty much like a CD key

You can only generate them with legitimate copies of the game on a real console anyway.

 

Pirates would just download cracked ISOs...

 

I'm not trying to change your mind, just you're not getting the hint to stop talking about it. Let's stop talking about this before a moderator has to clean up the thread. Thanks.

 

People are going to sideload whatever they want onto a device if it's made easy enough, and you want it to be "hard enough" that someone isn't going to file a lawsuit saying they were insufficiently warned, and you don't want it easy enough that a 12 your old child can download a text editor and turn off the parental controls by editing a configuration file.

 

The happy middle is you go to the app store, toggle "install software via sideloading" it asks for your password to check for parental permission/enterprise permission to do so, it unlocks the sideloading for 5 minutes, long enough to scan the sideloaded program for white/grey/black listing via the Apple's "known software" lists.

If it's on the whitelist, it's signed by the developer, and you get no further warnings, just the standard "this software wishes to access (hardware)" permissions. 

If it's on the blacklist, you get a "this software will damage your device and has been blocked", the developer has to clear it up with Apple. You can also override it with a "I know what I'm doing and will not hold Apple responsible" affirmation.

If it's on the greylist (software you have manually approved regardless of whitelisting or blacklisting) you have to sign the binary yourself. (Meaning you compiled it yourself, not not merely downloaded someone elses binary that you can't trust.)

Software not on the whitelist will not be backed up by iCloud to avoid propagation of compromised binaries.

 

[Zodiark1593]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

Do, pray tell, explain to me how you personally dumped a game, illegally decrypted it, and then played it on said emulator. Go on... I'm sure the lawyers in the room are making gestures.

 

 

I literally just took my PS1 discs (which I have unironically stored in a CD case featuring a Pikachu), used IMGBurn to make an ISO (back when laptops actually had Disc Drives), and archived them for, I suppose, nearly 15 years at this point. At one point, I also made copies of the ISOs to put in an encrypted container, for cloud storage. PS1 games are unencrypted, so there wasn’t really much in the way of DRM to break. 

[maartendc]

19 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

I'm aware of that, still their reason whatever it is means nothing to end user if they are not allowed to do some simple things. Being blocked by OS on so many levels is a joke. 

Obviously it's good people stand out for this regardless if it seems useful for minority. In the end it brings back functionality that more can start to use that didn't even knew the benefits.

Or like not being able to do general mass storage transfer in simple way without itunes which is restricting too or some other app or always some of their only way crap. So things I could do on a feature phone without a fuss. 

Buying a €1500 device and not being able to do the simplest of things and customization or even have options, is beyond a meme at this point.

True.

 

And indeed the convoluted ways of file transfer to and from iOS devices is really annoying. I really don't understand even why they do this. To force people to get an iCloud subscription?

 

Just last week a colleague was asking how to get photos off their iPhone onto a Windows computer, it is just not intuitive and not a good user experience.

 

And iTunes is not even their main media app anymore, because they have Apple music and Apple TV etc. iTunes is like this weird legacy software that they still force people to use for certain functionality. Everything is done through iCloud now, including phone backups etc., but as soon as you connect with a cable, you need iTunes for a lot of things. Weird.

[HenrySalayne]

18 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

My biggest fear is that someone could have a 3rd party app installed from an alternate store which compromises the system as a whole or an app can be used by a government entity to compromise a large portion of people. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)

 

 

[Kisai]

9 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

I literally just took my PS1 discs (which I have unironically stored in a CD case featuring a Pikachu), used IMGBurn to make an ISO (back when laptops actually had Disc Drives), and archived them for, I suppose, nearly 15 years at this point. At one point, I also made copies of the ISOs to put in an encrypted container, for cloud storage. PS1 games are unencrypted, so there wasn’t really much in the way of DRM to break. 

The DRM of the the PS1 is the PS1 BIOS, which you are unlikely to have the capability of dumping yourself. There is one PS1 emulator out there that can operate without a BIOS, but the rest do.

 

If people want to say "I dumped the rom myself" I will call them out on lying. Because that is beyond the technical capability of everyone who doesn't own a devkit, or installed a mod chip for playing pirate/import games in the first place. There is simply no connection between "I bought the game legally" and "I can play it on my iphone/android phone/mac/pc/xbox" without doing or acquiring something illegal in the process.

 

And, no, I do not care if you've done this, I do not believe anyone on THIS forum owns all the necessary hardware to dump anything legally and my saying "prove it" is calling your bluff, because the forum does not allow talking about piracy to this degree. Suffice it to say, if you can dump the ps1 firmware, you own something illegal. 

 

Newer digital-only purchases create this fun problem of there being no possible way to legally backup the software, even to a successor device. The Wii to WiiU, physically deletes the data off the original Wii. Sucks to be you if anything goes wrong. You can't actually transfer those games from the Wii/WiiU to a PC emulating the Wii/WiiU. Same with the DSi/3DS. You're better off getting a list of your purchases from Nintendo and then finding a pirate copy on the internet that someone else already dumped if your devices is hosed, because you're never going to be able to download it from Nintendo again.

 

[Avocado Diaboli]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

If people want to say "I dumped the rom myself" I will call them out on lying. Because that is beyond the technical capability of everyone who doesn't own a devkit, or installed a mod chip for playing pirate/import games in the first place. There is simply no connection between "I bought the game legally" and "I can play it on my iphone/android phone/mac/pc/xbox" without doing or acquiring something illegal in the process.

 

And, no, I do not care if you've done this, I do not believe anyone on THIS forum owns all the necessary hardware to dump anything legally and my saying "prove it" is calling your bluff, because the forum does not allow talking about piracy to this degree. Suffice it to say, if you can dump the ps1 firmware, you own something illegal. 

That... really makes no sense. You can't use the fact that something is illegal or discussion thereof being prohibited on this forum as evidence that they are incapable or not knowledgeable enough to dump their own games and firmware. Are you correct with your assumption that most people here haven't dumped their own games and firmware? Probably, Occam's razor leads me to believe that most people who play emulated games download the files, regardless of if they own a physical copy or not, because it's just easier. But to assume that the legality of the situation is evidence enough to dismiss someone's claims of having dumped it themselves? I don't think so.

 

And no, I'm not trying to insinuate that I've dumped my own software to play on emulators. But the legality aspect just seem so far-fetched, especially in a forum that you know is frequented by quite a few nationalities. For most people here, film and music piracy is illegal. For me it isn't. So something that breaks US copyright law might not be illegal to that extent in every jurisdiction. But that doesn't magically make anyone playing emulated games in those territories into technical experts. The legality of the situation has literally no bearing on the ability.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

That... really makes no sense. You can't use the fact that something is illegal or discussion thereof being prohibited on this forum as evidence that they are incapable or not knowledgeable enough to dump their own games and firmware.

People like to whip out the e-brag that they've done something illegal, and that is what I'm pointing out.

 

1 hour ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

 

Are you correct with your assumption that most people here haven't dumped their own games and firmware? Probably, Occam's razor leads me to believe that most people who play emulated games download the files, regardless of if they own a physical copy or not, because it's just easier. But to assume that the legality of the situation is evidence enough to dismiss someone's claims of having dumped it themselves? I don't think so.

No, you're right, Occam's razor. Everyone who admits to wanting to sideload or jailbreak a device, merely wants to play pirated games on it. Therefor there is likely zero people on the forum who own the necessary hardware to do it.

 

 

1 hour ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

And no, I'm not trying to insinuate that I've dumped my own software to play on emulators. But the legality aspect just seem so far-fetched, especially in a forum that you know is frequented by quite a few nationalities. For most people here, film and music piracy is illegal. For me it isn't. So something that breaks US copyright law might not be illegal to that extent in every jurisdiction. But that doesn't magically make anyone playing emulated games in those territories into technical experts. The legality of the situation has literally no bearing on the ability.

Yes, but the forum is based in Canada, but behind Cloudflare. So discussing anything that is illegal in Canada would be a BAD idea, and by extension anything that is illegal in the US, or other English-speaking countries.

 

You can side-step some of the liability by never linking to, or being vague about the process (eg "I dumped the game disc myself, using a CD-RW drive from 1997") without name dropping the software or hardware name. As soon as you do, you've incriminated yourself. We may generally look the other way when someone goes "I played (game) on an emulator" but every admission of playing a game on an emulator is an admission of violating a copyright law at some point. I don't personally care if you played something on an emulator as long as you either:

a) Bought the game at any point, on any platform

and/or

b) The developer of the game has made the game available for free/unencrypted state.

 

An example of B is several SEGA and Square-Enix games that the PC version simply wraps the original ROM in an emulator or uses the ROM file itself for assets. So if I have 5 different versions of FF6, and Square Enix releases FF6 again for another platform, I am not compelled to buy it again if I can emulate one of the 5 versions I already own on that platform. I may just buy it again to save the time, but I do not feel compelled, legally or ethically to have to buy it for every platform I may want to play it on, having already bought it a few times over.

 

For all that matters, Nintendo is alone in not releasing their games for competitors platforms, so emulating a Nintendo-owned game (eg Mario, Pokemon, Kirby) is pretty much guaranteed a pirate copy, other than the platform-specific games released on iOS/Android (Eg Mario Run, Pokemon Go.) But I can also just stick the gamecube disc in the blueray drive and go "look ma, I'm playing mario sunshine on the pc" even though it's not actually reading the disc. It's enough to demonstrate you have the physical copy, regardless if that's actually how it's doing it. 

 

At any rate the point comes back to to the true motives for wanting to jailbreak the iPhone. I imagine that Epic Games wants to sidestep the Apple store so they can put their own store on the device, but even then, I don't see that being a thing. I could also see Steam doing this. So you could buy a game on steam that has a matching "iOS" version, and that can be downloaded to the phone, but I don't think you're going to be making purchases from EGS or Steam on the phone. Just using it to download iOS versions of software that already exist and can be vetted by Apple to not be malware.

 

I don't see people sideloading porn games onto their phones. I know this is a thing in Japan with Android phones (hell there are MMO adult games that only run on Android phones), but you still have to actually acquire the game through a convoluted process to do that.

[Commodus]

10 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)

 

 

A better example is what happens in China's Xinjiang province (where the government is oppressing the Uyghur). If an iPhone owner comes into the region, border officials can't do more than inspect the phone there and then due to Apple's policies. With Android, agents can make you install a surveillance app that tracks your activity in the area.

 

I'm not opposed to sideloading, to be clear, but this is an example of how theoretical freedom doesn't necessary translate to real-world freedom; in Xinjiang, the more open platform just makes it easier for authorities to crack down. While it may be beneficial in the long run, don't be surprised if we hear about security problems that simply weren't an issue before.

[AnonymousGuy]

14 hours ago, maartendc said:

And indeed the convoluted ways of file transfer to and from iOS devices is really annoying. I really don't understand even why they do this. To force people to get an iCloud subscription?

 

Just last week a colleague was asking how to get photos off their iPhone onto a Windows computer, it is just not intuitive and not a good user experience.

You can mount an iphone as a removable drive and copy photos off:

 

 Or there's apps that can sync photos to network drives or various cloud services.

 

Or if you only need a few photos you can sign into icloud on your browser and get them from there.

 

 

Hence my reaction: the fuck you on about it being hard?  This triggers my rant about people like you probably being the ones advocating for USB C instead of Lightning or 3rd party app stores when it's like: you don't even own the product, sit down.

[Ultraforce]

On 4/18/2023 at 5:19 AM, maartendc said:

It is probably good that it is an option but, honestly, I am not really going to use this.

 

As an iPhone and former Android user, as someone who has jailbroken their iPhone in the past... these days I just need it to do what it does out of the box. I think a lot of Apple users see their "walled garden" approach as a feature, not a bug. Users prone to tinkering with their devices probably buy something else and put a custom ROM on it.

I mostly have a similar perspective though if the allowance of sideloading is combined with either apps in the official App Store or maybe even just in general getting greater access I would probably install whatever the most powerful version of KDEConnect is since the app seems to have a lot of features only on Android.

Though of course my previous negative experience with Android and just the simplicity of just upgrading an iPhone every 6 or so years so I won't be grabbing an android phone.

[Kisai]

7 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

You can mount an iphone as a removable drive and copy photos off:

 

 Or there's apps that can sync photos to network drives or various cloud services.

 

Or if you only need a few photos you can sign into icloud on your browser and get them from there.

 

 

Hence my reaction: the fuck you on about it being hard?  This triggers my rant about people like you probably being the ones advocating for USB C instead of Lightning or 3rd party app stores when it's like: you don't even own the product, sit down.

 

To be fair, iOS has gotten WORSE, because lighting is extremely slow, and you need to authorize the phone twice to get this far. The first time you plug in the phone, you'll just see "internal storage" but it'll be blank until you unlock the phone. Then it will "unplug" and "replug" and now DCIM is there. It shouldn't be this annoying, but it is. But it confuses even smart people because it does something different from all other devices.

 

My N95 that I held onto until I bought an iPhone 6S, I could just plug it into the PC and select either "media device" or "storage device" and it would either present the entire phone (storage) or just the photos and music (media device) to the computer. Not really any worse.

 

But what people really want is for the iPhone to just pop up on their computer, even when it's wireless when they have it near the computer. Something that doesn't happen because most desktops don't come with Bluetooth, they're too cheap to. Only Apple computers and some laptops (Eg Dell) come with Bluetooth standard because it's part of the Intel Wifi radio. PC desktop motherboards almost never come with that M2 card, and it's only been really really recent motherboards that come with WiFi6E, and even then, there is almost nothing mentioned in the manual about it. "Has bluetooth, check radio manufacturer for feature support" ... wow helpful, not.

 

You shouldn't "need" the charging cable plugged into the pc to transfer data to or from on it, you should be able to just pair it via BT once, and it automatically figure out what IP address the devices have to transfer to each other via WiFi. If they're not on the same WiFi, then it'll resort to BT only. That's what we expect, but not what we get.

 

 

[HenrySalayne]

11 hours ago, Commodus said:

A better example is what happens in China's Xinjiang province (where the government is oppressing the Uyghur). If an iPhone owner comes into the region, border officials can't do more than inspect the phone there and then due to Apple's policies. With Android, agents can make you install a surveillance app that tracks your activity in the area.

I'm not opposed to sideloading, to be clear, but this is an example of how theoretical freedom doesn't necessary translate to real-world freedom; in Xinjiang, the more open platform just makes it easier for authorities to crack down. While it may be beneficial in the long run, don't be surprised if we hear about security problems that simply weren't an issue before.

You mean the country where all telemetry and private data from iPhones is siphoned into government controlled data centres and where the iOS app store is also government controlled?

 

And this is still along the lines of the "we need to keep people in cages so they'll be safe and won't walk into the wrong bar and get into a fight" argument. Or the "knifes are bad, they could be used to stab somebody" argument. It's basically fearmongering to present alternative ways to install software as the the enabler for bad actors. Who - which has been shown countless times - are already acting in bad faith with or without this.

 

[maartendc]

10 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

You can mount an iphone as a removable drive and copy photos off:

 

 Or there's apps that can sync photos to network drives or various cloud services.

 

Or if you only need a few photos you can sign into icloud on your browser and get them from there.

 

 

Hence my reaction: the fuck you on about it being hard?  This triggers my rant about people like you probably being the ones advocating for USB C instead of Lightning or 3rd party app stores when it's like: you don't even own the product, sit down.

Honestly it has been a while since I have connected my iPhone to a Windows machine, I use a Mac on the daily. It used to be impossible to get an iOS device to show up as a removable storage on Windows without iTunes. Maybe they changed that somewhere down the line.

 

On MacOS it still doesn't work like a normal removable storage device. You have to go through the Photos app, which I don't like to use. You can't just manually get the photos off and place them in a folder.

 

And cloud storage: sure, you can use that, and I do. You get 5GB of free iCloud storage. Which fills up in like 2 weeks. After which they will happily charge you the subscription fee. I just feel they push everyone to iCloud to just sell those subscriptions, and make every other solution harder than it needs to be on purpose.

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

 

But what people really want is for the iPhone to just pop up on their computer, even when it's wireless when they have it near the computer. Something that doesn't happen because most desktops don't come with Bluetooth, they're too cheap to. Only Apple computers and some laptops (Eg Dell) come with Bluetooth standard because it's part of the Intel Wifi radio. PC desktop motherboards almost never come with that M2 card, and it's only been really really recent motherboards that come with WiFi6E, and even then, there is almost nothing mentioned in the manual about it. "Has bluetooth, check radio manufacturer for feature support" ... wow helpful, not.

 

You shouldn't "need" the charging cable plugged into the pc to transfer data to or from on it, you should be able to just pair it via BT once, and it automatically figure out what IP address the devices have to transfer to each other via WiFi. If they're not on the same WiFi, then it'll resort to BT only. That's what we expect, but not what we get.

 

 

Well there is Airdrop, which only works between MacOS and iOS. But it does what you are describing. Kind of. You can drag and drop files between devices wirelessly as long as they are on the same Wifi network and bluetooth is enabled. But it is not like you can see the whole storage of the device and browse the files. Also, it is painfully slow. I don't know whether it actually transfers through Wifi or Bluetooth, but it takes forever to transfer larger files.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, HenrySalayne said:

 

And this is still along the lines of the "we need to keep people in cages so they'll be safe and won't walk into the wrong bar and get into a fight" argument. Or the "knifes are bad, they could be used to stab somebody" argument. It's basically fearmongering to present alternative ways to install software as the the enabler for bad actors. Who - which has been shown countless times - are already acting in bad faith with or without this.

 

You don't let your kids play with the steak knives, for the same reason you don't give your kid a phone without parental controls.

 

What you want is there to be enough annoyance so that something side-loaded can't bring it's friends, but not "annoying enough" that the user disregards the warnings. Which is what people were doing in Windows Vista.

 

There's far too many people out there who want Apple to do something, just so they can then cheat Apple of the benefit that comes by doing so. Epic wants to screw Apple by operating it's own store, and so do other companies like Electronic Arts. All the money for the store owner, none for Apple. 

 

Saying "the bad actors will do this anyways" is ignoring the elephant in the room that the bad actors can't do anything unless Apple lets them, which is why Android is full of malware, and Apple iOS isn't. That's not an accident. But it's not perfect.

 

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-android-malware-apps-installed-10-million-times-from-google-play/

Quote

A new batch of malicious Android apps filled with adware and malware was found on the Google Play Store that have been installed close to 10 million times on mobile devices.

The apps pose as image-editing tools, virtual keyboards, system optimizers, wallpaper changers, and more. However, their underlying functionality is to push intrusive ads, subscribe users to premium services, and steal victims' social media accounts.

https://www.pandasecurity.com/en/mediacenter/mobile-security/android-more-infected-than-ios/

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Android-powered connected devices are fifty times more likely to be infected with malware when compared to iOS.

Android devices are nearly fifty times more likely to be infected by malware than Apple devices, revealed Nokia’s latest threat intelligence report. According to the whitepaper, Android devices were responsible for 47.15% of the observed malware infections, Windows/ PCs for 35.82%, IoT for 16.17% and iPhones for less than 1%. We’ve compiled a list top three reasons that explain why almost half of all malware-infected devices are running the Google-created platform.

You see that, there is more malware on Android phones than Windows PC's. And PC's are "more open"

 

It's not an accident that there's less malware on iOS, but that's chalked up to how easy it is to install garbage on Windows and Android, because people don't read security messages, and many software programs (such as ad-supported programs) won't even launch unless they have permission to access everything.