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Title: What Every Argument About Sideloading Gets Wrong

Link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/09/02/143420...

Developer Hugo Tunius, writing in a blog post: Sideloading has been a hot
topic for the last decade. Most recently, Google has announced further
restrictions on the practice in Android. Many hundreds of comment threads
have discussed these changes over the years. One point in particular is
always made: "I should be able to run whatever code I want on hardware I
own." I agree entirely with this point, but within the context of this
discussion it's moot. When Google restricts your ability to install certain
applications they aren't constraining what you can do with the hardware you
own, they are constraining what you can do using the software they provide
with said hardware. It's through this control of the operating system that
Google is exerting control, not at the hardware layer. You often don't have
full access to the hardware either and building new operating systems to run
on mobile hardware is impossible, or at least much harder than it should be.
This is a separate, and I think more fruitful, point to make. Apple is a
better case study than Google here. Apple's success with iOS partially
derives from the tight integration of hardware and software. An iPhone
without iOS is a very different product to what we understand an iPhone to
be. Forcing Apple to change core tenets of iOS by legislative means would
undermine what made the iPhone successful.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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