Fuck Apple but honestly this app is like trying to stay warm with matches in Antarctica.
I’m gonna play devils advocate here (and probably be monstrously downvoted);
ICEBlock stored the location data of all its users on Apples iCloud Servers. This the perfect target for ICE; a complete database of locations of every person who doesn’t want ICE to know where they are.
One assumption is that that Apple realised how tempting this data is to the current demonstrative administration and purged it before ICE could get their civil-liberty-abusing mitts on it.
You’re giving apple too much credit. Tim Apple literally gifted trump a golden statue. The press are reporting that this is directly in response to a request from the DOJ. This isn’t apple having a moral epiphany and thinking they’re doing ice targets a favour. Corporation’s don’t do that sort of thing unless it will make them $$$
Something worth noting, if you are using iCloud, advanced data protection is your friend. Apple doesn’t have the encryption keys, you do.
This is not on by default.
Advanced Data Protection does require all iCloud Ecosystem devices to be current.
Not every person can afford the latest and greatest.
Or they removed it to keep up the appearance that it wasn’t actually a honeypot to begin with.
Money is always the answer with these “people”.
To assume otherwise is to feed the beast
“Good thing I got revenge though on Google’s sideloading ban by buying a phone that never allowed it to begin with”
We should make webapps for everything. When done properly they are as fast as native apps, can work on any device and do not require a dev license or account.
Completely agreed. Nowadays we even have WASM that can run more advanced things, and may even give webapps sandboxed capabilities, and can be run natively on any device with a WASM runtime.
Who could have seen this coming from the company whose CEO gifted Trump a literal gold plaque in celebration of his reelection?
Hey, you know nothing about the absurd pressure billionaire CEO’s are unde/sr
You see why Google attempting to lock down installing whatever apps you want is a bad idea? This is an example of what will happen.
I object to fuck-faced people who object to basic acts of decency, safety & freedom.
Keep on buying, y’all. Show 'em we mean business when we’re appalled at their actions. Giving them more money will surely let them know how much we want change!
Oh we are way passed the point where “voting with your dollar” means literally anything. These billionaires are making more money than they ever have in human history. They have literally turned all of society across large swaths of the world into a gigantic personal capital generator. It makes literally not a single difference if all of us here boycotted them or not. It’s meaningless.
It makes literally not a single difference if all of us here boycotted them or not. It’s meaningless.
Just lemmy users? Sure, but you don’t stop with just lemmy users.
These billionaires are making more money than they ever have in human history
Honest to god do you think that money magically appears in their pocket. We can still claw it back. Unionize, boycott, collective action is our strongest pressure against them and IT DOES WORK.
…and it happened in a vacuum, just all by itself.
Tell that to Disney.
A big problem is that people need smartphones for so much of modern life. You can stop watching Disney and your life won’t meaningfully change but it’s really hard to avoid evil smartphone companies. Part of me wants to switch from Apple but what would I go to? Samsung who’s just as bad about right to repair? Google who’s Google? I’m not saying it’s impossible but I’m not going to say that the choice is as easy as cancelling a streaming service.
Fairphone. Right to repair, plus good custom ROM and linux on mobile support.
Yeah this is generally the take I hear the most. The smartphone is presented as a necessity and for a lot of people that may be true, but what it really is is a tool for capitalism. It spies on you, gives you fomo, serves you ads, gives access to all kinds of addictive content… oh and work apps!
It’s like AI, shoved down our throats until people think it’s needed. It’s not.
Your smartphone serves you ads?
I would say you’re missing some nuance in these arguments, though.
With a phone people no longer need laptops or full-sized computers and they also get a phone and camera to go along with it. They get a lot of power even just using fairly mundane apps like email, file storage, and a calendar. And then you have access to the internet and all the power that comes with that. I also don’t know why you think phones show ads.
AI, on the other hand, is hot fucking garbage at everything it does. Why anyone uses it I can’t say, it’s so bad and it’s known that it’s actively making people dumber. I don’t touch the stuff and my life has been going just fine.
they would have been perfectly fine it was simply that the optics were bad enough to warrant a response
Why do they care about the optics? $$$
Do you really think this situation is comparable in any way to Jimmy Kimmel? I really don’t. Even if it were, nowhere near that many Apple customers care whether or not the app that targets fascist militias is on the app store or not.
I do think it’s comparable. All of this is about money. Americans are funding all of this crap with the, albeit controlled, choices we make with our money. Our taxes are funding genocides and coups and war and destruction; our purchasing habits are funding the decline of our planet and our social structures and our sanity.
You’re right though, consumers will likely never change in large enough quantities to make a real difference. People are already resubbing to Hulu so…
Jimmy Kimmel made Disney a lot of money. They had to choose between pressure from the US government, and losing a popular source of revenue along with the vast amount of liberals who swore them off. Jimmy Kimmel was not a real institutional threat to the US government. So the US government did not have a very strong incentive to continuously push for him being taken down, and Disney had a lot of incentive to keep him around.
An app that targets fascists makes Apple no money. The US government faces the loss (or rendering ineffective) of their fascist police force. Both sides therefore face a huge amount of pressure to have the app taken down. It would have to be a gigantic part of their profit margin to warrant any pushback from Apple. I’d be very, very surprised to hear that this change is ever overturned through a boycott.
Every revolution famously begins with everyone giving up completely.
Can you show me where I said to do nothing? Or is boycotting the only form of collective action you’re aware of?
No, but great idea gatekeeping collective action. We surely need less of it.
Im sure thats why disney quickly reversed gear with cancelling kimmel after loosing 3.8B overnight
Defeatist subservient take
Every time I hear people talk like that I begin to think they dont understand basic microeconomics.
Yes, as opposed to spending money at another capitalist institution that will inevitably do the same thing, which is somehow not a subservient take.
There are a lot of other ways to apply pressure besides boycotts. I dont think a boycott would ever work against Apple over this.
ah good ol Cynicism. Might as well find yourself a giant pot to live in while they’re still available!
I don’t understand why society accepted that the hardware maker gets to decide what software you run.
That’d be like your car deciding which roads you can take, or your blender deciding you’re not allowed to use strawberries in your smoothie.
Are you nuts? Why the fuck would your phone decide which apps you can run?
Maybe our phones are their f’in phones too
Apple welding their phones to their own store, exclusively, is just like paying workers with scrip instead of dollars. This used to be a common practice for capitalists. The scrip is spendable only in the company store.
We have to stop all such anticompetitive practices.
Just a reminder, to stop the practice of getting paid in scrip the American workers had to take up arms and shoot some people. Look up Battle of Blair Mountain. It’s not like the capitalists stopped the practice just because it was unpopular, lol. Nor did the anticompetitive practice of paying wages in scrip stop because people called their senators and wrote angry letters.
Agreed, too many people defend the App Store monopoly.
Is it that non tech people have a hard time understanding this? Or is it just all the corporate lobbying bribes?
There was a person on a Lemmy.zip community that was arguing in favour of a lockdown approach.
I’ll catch the flames and say “religious reasons”.
And for what reason do you not think we’re headed in that direction?
Something sensitive like this really should be a PWA (and web app for iOS users)
Between Apple walled garden and the new dev signature thing from Google, those big players sure do like control over what we can do as users.
I agree with you, PWA is the way but Apple has been slow walking integration for years now (see https://brainhub.eu/library/pwa-on-ios)
Except PWAs are heavily limited on apple devices so Apple could get that 30% cut.
Got a source for that?
I’m a dev and have a bunch of PWAs on my iPhone. You can install them right from the browser using that same old “add to Home Screen” behavior that has been in iOS for an eternity.
I’m posting this through voyager for Lemmy, installed from my browser, not the App Store.
You’re a dev and use PWAs on ios and don’t know that you can’t even get push notifications? There’s no web bluetooth, no web nfc, no background sync, 50-100mb storage limit, no background processes, no service workers. These are all standard features that apple refuses to implement for some reason. Wonder why.
And this is why having 3rd party app stores is important. It’s why it matters that Google is killing side loading, if two fucking companies get to decide what you can do on your phone, we’re in a bad spot technology wise
We’re in a bad spot technology wise
We rapidly need to switch to Linux Mobile. PostmarketOS and Mobian are the two most promising projects, and I would highly recommend anyone reading this to donate to them if you have the means.
Both projects directly use your donations to hire developers to build and polish the critical essentials to get this alternative viable as a daily driver.
While I full heartily agree with you, I’m pessimistic you will ever reach enough people with these alternatives. Even on privacy forums you hear people fervently defending how banking apps are mandatory. Those will never run on anything that isn’t locked down. The eID proposal for the EU is also dependent on Android and iOS.
It doesn’t necessarily need to achieve mass adoption, it just needs to get to a ‘good enough’ point to make it viable for those who are willing or desperate to get away from big tech.
Linux still has plenty of people giving reasons why they won’t switch, but it’s now finally viable for many, including myself. I just want mobile Linux to get to that point too, even if there’s still rough edges.
And the open source movement is such a blind spot to the ‘left’ as well, even though technology freedom is critical if you want to be able to organise any type of resistance in the digital space.
Lemmy users largely get it, obviously, but centre left people will happily let themselves get locked into the Apple/Google walled gardens even though you’re just giving that company a ridiculous amount of power over you.
I originally got introduced to sociallist idiology through Richard Stallman’s speaches. I know he had some, uhh… “interesting” things to say about Epstein’s victims (which I believe he has since redacted), but his speaches are absolutely still worth listening to just for the content alone.
Yeah, very disappointed by RMS’ creepiness (the Epstein stuff isn’t the only thing), but he was 100% right about software freedom.
Redacted or recanted? One of these is definitely preferable to the other in this context.
Recanted is the word I was thinking of.
Right? The collective dismissal of Mastodon from leftist influencers when the Muskening happened was eye opening.
Like, there’s a collaborative, volunteer-based platform right over there. You want mutual aid? Open-source is as mutual-aid as it gets.
But it’s nerd shit.
Because they are controlled opposition.
The only time something not controlled got popular was TikTok and you saw how quickly both parties went to ban it in 2024 after normal people started talking about Gaza genocide in every day conversation. The American Congress worked together to ban it even though they couldn’t agree on anything else.
It went from an Asian platform where Asian people in the West connected with each other outside the mainstream blue pill/red pill false choice and shared culture as well as history that isn’t taught, to “here’s the truth about Jesus” and “the world is flat debate me” after that vote. Now it’s full on MAGA.
Mastodon is harder to control because servers can pop up organically, but I guess Threads was a hedge against that threat.
Also, on xitter are all these assholes I don’t care about. I can’t leave that platform. Pathetic!
Those same people are also still using Twitter or Instagram or TikTok.
People will never understand intricacies like that. On the other hand, the big tech corps do. We are doomed
Most people dont have values because they have values. They hold a perspective just to talk down on others.
No doubt. I’ve gotten to the point where I have like 6 apps on my phone and it’s in lockdown mode on iOS. And I’d be on grapheneOS if I wasn’t required to use iOS for work.
Can you have your job pay for an iPhone while you have a different personal phone? I’m a big fan of keeping a work device that’s separate from a personal device.
I probably could, but I’m also a recovering drug addict and my partner is pretty hesitant about a second device as it’s another way to hide things. However I’m the head of the MDM team so I’m not really nervous about what the company can see
I thought you were head of the MDMA team for a second and thought that could be rough as a recovering drug addict
Definitely got the experience required for the job
Oddly I’ve only tried MDMA a few times and it never really worked. There’s some anecdotal evidence that it doesn’t work for those with bipolar which I do have, that might be the one drug I could be in charge of with no temptation actually
Yeah, people should have listened to the people warning of privacy concerns with online services. Now that your data is valuable, companies will do anything to extract it from you.
Stop using those products, de-Google, install Linux, use self-hosted solutions.
It will take some effort to switch. You get to decide how much effort you’re willing to expend in order to not sacrifice all of your privacy and control of your digital lives.
Just technology wise? I think it’s a little deeper than just technology unfortunately
Oh yeah, of course, but it feels like it’s never part of the conversation, even among people whose opinions I respect and are, for example, super critical of AI and talking about enshittification and other issues in the online sphere, they never seem to take the step to check out Linux, or get off Twitter or whatever.
“Sideloading” is their term, invented to make it sound like something it is not. We should not use this word. The correct word is “installing”.
You don’t “sideload” on Windows when you install software outside of the Microsoft Store™️. There is no real difference or distinction with software on phones, so there is no need for a special word.
I can see Microsoft moving to the same sort of thinking as well. Apple already made Mac OS users jump through hoops when you want to install something from the internet or even through a third party package manager like homebrew.
Microsoft has been trying this for years already. That eventually led to Valve incresing their efforts in the Linux gaming front and releasing the Steam Deck.
See this
I wonder if Valve would ever get into the Linux Phone market.
But for the platform itself to be open, I wonder how much would have to be recreated.
Not to defend it, but the first time I encountered the term was when BlackBerry released their Playbook tablet. It ran their bbos10 and they created an android emulator so you could run some android apps. The process of installing the apk into the emulator was called sideloading.
I miss BlackBerry is all I really wanted to say.
“Install” includes installing from an app store no matter how closed down and exlusive. The correct term would be “install from other sources than an app store” which is just clunky. Calling it “sideloading” won’t change that nor will calling it “your mom”. Considering how many corporate-speak terms are in use and how many braindead abbreviations and terms shortened to a word’s last syllable -completely distorting the original meaning- generally are in use, the term “sideloading” is pretty irrelevant. Either lose your mind listening to the bullshit people permanently are emitting or just live with it…
Not yet.
Your phone is fucking you no matter what you do.
“Hurd OS? Isn’t that obsolete?” “Not obsolete. Just… illegal.” ~Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
If people were more aware of how to make and install mobile web apps it would be less of a problem.
At least on the iPhone you can still add a site to your screen that can behave a lot like an app, including camera access, location services, and even gyro. And it’s just a website like most “apps” are.
Most people don’t care about any of that. Firefox with AdBlock to surfe YouTube without ads? Nah, they want the app, which is basically the same, but at least they can’t block ads. I stopped trying to understand
Yeah, me too.
Honestly, this thing should just been a PWA. Making this naive app was dumb.
Google is not killing sideloading. If the dev is willing to submit to Apple for verification, they’d probably not object to submitting it to Google.
Yes, and then they ban that developer and their apps. It doesn’t matter you can install apps outside of the Play Store, if Google still controls which apps you are allowed to install.
Oh no, our precise Apple is really a shit company. Tim Cook, just like every other Tech CEO, is a Liberal POS (or just straight republican).
They don’t care about LGBQT+ or the enviornment. They care about money and how much tey can make from stupid people.
This sucks, and they shouldn’t have to do this, but could they make it a webapp?
Did you mean “web site”? Because, according to Cory Doktorov an app is just a website wrapped into enough IP to make it a felony blocking ads in it.
I’m surprised it stayed up as long as it did. I thought Apple would have taken it down within days.
Anyways I’ve seen this as a non app alternative: https://www.stopice.net/
I mean yeah honestly probably the best, but I’ll take any chance to rant against the idea of walled garden tech
Would I be paranoid to use a VPN while visiting this site? (And others like it) god only knows if IP’s visiting the site could be uncovered…
Yeah, I’m probably being paranoid…
Not a bad idea. Just make sure your VPN doesn’t cooperate with law enforcement or sell your data otherwise.
Additional note: check if the VPN does DNS or not. If not then use something like NextDNS, or get a VPN (Proton, Mullvad) that does do DNS servers. Plus they usually include better ad-blocking.
Back to the WWW just like the good ol days
It’s really sickening that every corporation has thrown in with the new fascist regime.
At least these assholes used to pretend to be “not absolutely awful”. Now they’re just mask-off oppressors.
It’s no accident that capital is aligned with fascist. Line must go up.
Line must go up.
It’s such a stupid axiom but it explains everything perfectly
It’s not that it’s not profitable for them.
The corporate sector will always back a fascist government.
For instance: Volkswagen and Coco Chanel’s ties to Nazi Germany
Ford too
Now listen here buddy, Ford was supporting fascists long before the Nazis alright
Long? Fascism came about through Mussolini, who was Hitler’s ally, who coined the term and rose to power in '22. Hitler came about in '33. So was 11 years a long time?
Not really. Obama left office in '17. Counting the nomination, we’ve had to listen to tRump for about as long.
If that’s a short time then I’m sure the next 11 years of Trump will flash by.
(That’s when he dies)
Call me a conspiracy nut job , but I honestly think we live in a new age where it’s the other way around. Megacorps are creating a situation where governments are set up to fail and then swoop in to save the day “alien earth” style, so everyone can be forced into lifetime indentured service.
