I think grandma-mode should still be the default, but with some arcane startup ritual to enable sideloading that you only have to do once, with said process being replete with "HERE BE DRAGONS" warnings. Basically make it more like a mac or a typical chromebook. Pixel phones still let you root them, don't they?

Not only does Google let you root Pixels, but they don't appear to be interested in interfering with GrapheneOS, which is specifically for Pixels and lets you run all of the google stuff in userspace so that it has to ask your permission before doing things.

Google is plenty evil in their own ways, but they're at least not anti-tinkering.

Probably because they know FOSS is not at all a threat to their business. I love the idea that if I wanted to I could put some other OS... But Android is very reliable and Graphene OS might not support some feature or other, which I might not notice till I actually need it, so I'm not gonna risk the most expensive thing I own with tinkerer tech.

Companies really overestimate end users tolerance for tinkering.

> I'm not gonna risk the most expensive thing I own with tinkerer tech

Different strokes I guess. Until I've put the vendor in a box, I don't consider it "my" phone, and I'm not gonna pay more than $300 for a phone that serves some other master. Yesteryear's refurb pixels are doing just fine.

Yes, I don’t know exactly what it’d entail but enabling sideloading really does need to be something that’s sufficiently scary to the non-technical to help curb social engineering by fake “Microsoft support” and such.

It’s somewhat painful and inconvenient but the old desktop OS model where arbitrary code can not only be run at a whim, but also gets free reign to do whatever it pleases simply doesn’t scale to the masses. It was a problem even prior to smartphones but has only gotten worse as larger swathes of the population have come aboard.

You should check out the arguments in Epic vs Google, where an arcane process to sideload apps was used as a data point against Google. By disallowing any exceptions, Apple can make the case that this is simply not a supported feature of their product.

The EU DMA and the resulting competition may cause Apple to release a lower priced tier for apps with a smaller distribution, and I look forward to that.

> By disallowing any exceptions, Apple can make the case that this is simply not a supported feature of their product.

I know that's what the ruling essentially implies, but that doesn't sound like a reality we should be encouraging or even entertaining, IMO. It's a failure of the US legal and antitrust enforcement system if this line of reasoning is accepted, blatantly so in this case.

I, for one, hope that Apple is eventually forced to open up their platforms to sideloading worldwide.

The only reason they lock it down is the 30% take from the app store. Grandma is more likely to lose her savings over the landline with good old fashioned social engineering over anything with that phone. If they actually cared about security and spam beyond profiting from app store or the repair situation, they’d have at least lifted a finger with imessage spam by now.

I think that's where the TestFlight "external beta" is genius. If there was a route for me to be treated like an enterprise for my friends and family, I would have years ago, but with TestFlight being so easy and the audience size so large, there's no barrier for me anymore. I just wish that was a route I'd have realized a while ago. And even though there's a cost barrier, I don't think it's that high given the tax to have a Mac in the first place.

You're right about the notion that computers are magic, but distribution isn't the cause of that. I think it's a shame people don't seem to want to do more with their computers. I remember my parents using pretty barebones database apps and stuff on a 386 back in the day, and somewhere since then the machines have become bigger and scarier, and they're less inquisitive. Maybe age, but maybe we've made the machines less friendly to new code.

Oddly I think sideloading should be allowed to prevent grandma from getting scammed. It's just a matter of who's doing the scamming. The criminals might make a big score, but the phone vendors act on a much wider front and are much more costly.