> Gosh, it’s almost like Apple serving as the exclusive gatekeeper for what software can be installed on the iPhone (and iPad, and Apple TV, and Apple Watch, and Vision Pro) is a bad thing that creates a single point of failure which can be abused by increasingly authoritarian governments.
Apple should not be able to decide which apps their customers are allowed to use. It's one thing to make decisions about which products are allowed in your store, and quite another to unilaterally ban software from what is many people's primary computer.
There should have always been a side-loading switch. It doesn't have to be easy to find, it just needs to be available in the event of an emergency. Any possible security arguments to the contrary pale in comparison to the importance of maintaining a free society.
We live in a digital age, and software is a form of free expression. We would not (I hope) find this situation acceptable for eBooks, and we should not find it acceptable for software.
I am horrified that Google has decided to move in the same direction on Android, and I urge them to reconsider before it's too late. Right now, these apps can still be sideloaded on Android phones, so to be honest I don't care that much what Google does with the Play Store. But what happens next year?
What e-reader doesn't allow side-loading books?
I also haven't heard anything about Europe being excluded from the upcoming Android crackdown, so apparently Google has decided it's DMA compliant. Which makes sense given what Apple is doing.
Apparently armed, masked thugs covered in body armor dragging people off the street for the federal government count as a "vulnerable group" now?
So many powerful people are the former.
They have choices and they are consciously choosing this.
Don't let them pretend that they are innocent in all of this. They're all polishing their jackboots right now.
Google, name your non-vulnerable groups. Could those being taken away be considered a "vulnerable group" or a non-vulnerable group?
This is pure hypocrisy in the wild.
In 2025 in USA?
TikTok's initial rise predates the protests by about a year. But it explodes and overtakes other social media apps starting in 2019 and into 202.
Am working on a mobile app that requires in person keygen/sharing via Bluetooth, syncs selected data between devices once keys exchanged and new local IP is shared (over something like Signal; discovery is hard/expensive so I am going with a low tech manual option to notify peers how to reconnect)
Flood the field with alternatives to keep The Man on his toes and distracted.
The main problem with hyper normalized and streamlined society is it just makes it easier for The Man to spot and squash dissent. What is dissent when the people are peacefully not following orders by making passive surveillance difficult.
I've long thought people should just fork DNS. This already sort of happens with ad blocking commercial services, but I'm thinking it might be time for something that runs over a mix network, where devices have multiple trust roots for DNS services, and run a quorum computation when there's disagreement.
Ideally, disagreements between the roots could be escalated to a web browser UI.
As an unbannable alternative, Make the web app trivially hostable, and use IPFS as a data backend maybe?
The CEOs were all there at the inauguration. Is anyone really surprised that they're taking orders from this administration?
But absolutely start a project under a permissive license. That's a great idea.
There's precious little reason to distribute as an app, except for exploiting the user. If all you wanted to do was show things on a map then the web is already well set up for that. In fact the apps are probably just embedding a web browser anyway (haven't checked).
I'm no fan of ICE, but I wouldn't trust these developers either.
This is a very Hacker News centric perspective; most of us probably use the browser on our phone for hours every day. But a lot of normal people simply don't - if it isn't an app, they won't really use it. I find it strange, but I've seen this over and over again.
ICEBlock handled my vulnerability report in the worst possible way | https://micahflee.com/iceblock-handled-my-vulnerability-repo...
Maybe a PITA to use compared to a app, but at least it could not be banned.
Doxxing of federal employees' personal information in certain circumstances is technically illegal (but many people think it isn't): https://www.robertreeveslaw.com/blog/doxing-arrested/
But publishing location information of where authorities happen to be in public at a certain time... I don't think is actually illegal. The Apple app author also believes he is 100% legal and is seeking to go to court over this.
https://www.kpbs.org/news/science-technology/2025/10/03/lega...
It could possibly be found that the government illegally pressured or "coerced" a company like Apple/Google to remove "speech" (an app) they didn't want.
https://robertslaw.org/1st-amendment-protection-against-usin...
These restictions will give governments total control over what apps you can run on your phone.
Is a quote often wrongly attributed to Mr. Fascism Benito Mussolini himself, but whoever said it had made a damn good point. Be aware that what you are seeing now fits the exact and precise definition of fascism.
It's amusing seeing the US descend so quickly in pure unadulterated fascism and the amount of denial and attempts to sugar coat it or window dress in places like HN. Then forums like this will go dark, and next thing you know, the brownshirts from the modern Gestapo/Stasi/ICE would be knocking on your door.
Make no mistake about Google and Apple: moderating anti fascist apps or content is abetting fascism (that applies to HN mods as well).
Seems to be something else in this case.
No, the "first amendment only applies to government" is cope of the highest degree, it was always a cope.
You accepted that an oligopoly could dictate what you could do with devices you owned because it suited your preferences and now that you are on the other side of the sword you squirm.
The correct answer was neither all along.
IMO, we need to stop thinking in this broken paradigm of "-opolies" (with its loaded requirement to define what constitutes a given "market") and look at the actual coercive power they wield through market stickiness. Apple and Google both wield much coercive power with regards to software running on mobile devices.
Entertainers are a kind of contemporary secular faith healer and tribal shaman, imo.
To mix metaphors, stopped clocks who can be right and worth listening to only in very specific situations.
