You can read it here[0] and for the entire content here[1] (this I didn't read yet).
Gatekeepers are allowed to exist, but they need to loosen up a bit. It's not an option that you are the only one able to distribute apps on a phone.
Right now on Mac OSX you can still install apps from outside the App Store - if the developer didn't notarise the app, your OSX will shout at you before letting you install it, but you can still do that.
On iOS you just can't (unless you root it, I think). That's where the law came in. And, arguably, I am not sure if the same can be done on Android (getting stuff from F-droid doesn't seem something that average Joe knows how to do).
On the other hand, the way I imagine Apple wants to do it:
- The user clicks on a link (from whatever App Store out there)
- Downloads the app
- Gatekeeper on iOS (behind the scenes) checks if the app was notarized
The user flow seems similar to what we currently have on OSX as well, but with a mix with Apple Store: you can only install an app if it was notarised by Apple to prevent malware and tampering. This is not an app review, so you can still have private API calls (as far as I know).
This is also why the responsibility falls on the external store: it's with the certificate from the external store that the notarisation will be done (on the app), as individual developers might not want anything to do with Apple Store at all. But someone has to - and this someone is the new marketplace.
To be honest: I am not worried at all about the notarisation, it typically takes not too long, and it's a very basic step to prevent malware - can you still do ugly things? Probably yes, but this is really to set a minimum standard of what's allowed to have on the phone. If you question this step "why shouldn't I be allowed to have anything that I want on the phone", I even agree with you, maybe EU will tell apple to disable entirely the OS gatekeeping process (?).
[0]: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/about-dma_en [1]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?toc=OJ%3AL%3...
I don't think this is true, I recently tried to port one of my programs to macOS. After one of my test users downloaded the program and tried to run it, macOS claimed that the program was corrupted and that they needed to contact the developer for assistance (paraphrased). There was no way to bypass this error from the GUI.
This was odd because the program ran perfectly fine on my machine (virtualized macOS). The error went away after the test user ran some terminal commands to clear "downloaded from the internet" flags from the file.
