With the US v Apple antitrust lawsuit news (and it’s about time), I figured looking back to the last landmark antitrust case, US v Microsoft, would be useful to understand what might happen in the future.

The problem:

Microsoft owns Windows, and Windows is the only reasonable operating system any OEM (partners like HP, Dell, etc) can ship on a consumer PC. In other words, it’s a monopoly.

Microsoft also owns Internet Explorer, and they saw the coming of the internet as a huge threat to Windows, unless they acted to keep control. They missed the deadline to release IE for Windows 95, so they bundled it for free with everything they could, including Office and Microsoft Plus! (often came bundled with home PCs). Worth noting Netscape was a paid product until this point.

Windows 95 was revised twice with more extensive IE integration, the final 95 “C” and its bundled IE 4 changing it from a standalone program to a deeply-integrated core feature. It changed how Explorer windows worked entirely - they were now literally IE windows. It changed the desktop so you could add webpages to it (Active Desktop). One of those, enabled by default, was the Channels Bar, which linked to news orgs that paid to be listed.

It also added hundreds of new APIs, not all of which had anything to do with IE. Now Microsoft was strongarming developers into distributing IE 4 for them, requiring their customers to have it installed for their app to work. On top of that, Microsoft’s OEM program changed its rules such that only the latest revision of Windows 95 could be preinstalled, the latest IE must also be preinstalled, and direct competitors to Microsoft flagship products (Netscape, WordPerfect, Lotus, etc) are not allowed. They also told OEMs to stop bundling their own simplified replacements of the Windows 95 desktop, and instead created Microsoft Bob, and we know how well that one went.

At least with Windows 95, you had the option to use the retail “A” release and avoid IE. With Windows 98, IE 4 was preinstalled with all features enabled. Microsoft toned it down a notch with IE 5 in Windows 98 Second Edition, but the damage was already done.

Does this sound familiar at all?

Apple checks a lot of boxes similar to Microsoft here. You can see how a compelling case could be made that Apple doesn’t allow competitors to key features such as Safari and the App Store on iOS, doesn’t allow developers to use a payment service other than Apple’s own, doesn’t want developers to raise prices by 30% or disclose to users that 30% goes to Apple, restricts access to certain features only to developers that are favorable to them, and are known to retaliate against those they don’t like (see Spotify). It’s harder to argue because there’s millions of developers and customers being directly individually affected, rather than only a few dozen OEM partners, but it could be done. In other words, Apple restricts the user, because there is no middleman (the OEM) to apply restrictive contract terms to.

The outcome:

So what happened with Microsoft, and what could possibly happen with Apple? After being found guilty of monopolisation and illegal tying/exclusivity tactics, some of the usual legal back and forth of appealing and whatever, the DOJ and Microsoft agreed to settle, with the terms being:

1. Microsoft must allow OEMs to preinstall any software they want.

2. Microsoft can build “middleware” features into Windows, but OEMs must be able to uninstall them in favor of competitors’ offerings.

3. Microsoft must publicly release documentation for certain private Windows APIs introduced by IE.

4. Microsoft must not retaliate against OEMs that do things they don’t like (when it’s fully within their contract rights).

5. Microsoft was banned from making exclusivity deals with OEMs and developers.

6. Microsoft’s actions would be overseen by a committee for 10 years.

I sure hope to see an outcome like this for Apple. It’s time to see them change, and their recent actions have only reinforced that they can only be made to change by force of the law, and constant oversight to keep them in line.

👉 “Sideloading, a feature unfamiliar to Apple users, could generate perplexity and lead to misplaced criticism of Apple.”

This is the only argument I think holds weight, but it really depends how things pan out in the community with developer and user tools for sideloading, and how much Apple feels like building out the feature. Apple has responsibility here to ensure the user experience works as expected, isn’t confusing, and explains the risks and benefits to users in a balanced, unbiased way. I would point out that if they don’t do these things well, it may be intentional sabotage so they can say “see? We told you sideloading is a user experience and security nightmare!”

👉 “Sideloaded apps may lead to increased battery drain.”

The operating system is responsible for enforcing policies such as battery life management, not App Review. If an app can drain battery, that’s an iOS bug that needs to be fixed. This also applies to other common concerns, such as whether apps can bypass permission prompts - they can’t, because this is enforced by code, not humans.

Conclusion: There most definitely can be arguments against sideloading, but these aren’t it. My personal opinion is that the only argument will be whether the feature is built effectively enough to keep users informed of risks and to protect them from malware if it does arise, and how much of a gap there is in cloud functionality such as iCloud in sideloaded apps. iCloud and push notifications are supported in non-App Store macOS apps, so I’d expect they should be supported in non-App Store iOS apps too.

Most of the risk is up to whether Apple feels like building the feature well, or if they’re just doing the bare minimum to meet the letter of the law and prove a point. It really entirely remains to be seen what ends up holding true, and we can only speculate on these details right now.

I won’t link to the original person who wrote this, because it’s clearly engagement bait. But let’s break down falsehoods about the world outside of the App Store, because you’ll be seeing a lot more FUD about sideloading as the deadline nears for Apple to comply with the EU DMA:

(TL;DR at the bottom)

👉 “When developers sideload their apps, they don’t have access to Apple’s tools and resources to optimize their apps for iOS. This can lead to apps that are slower, less responsive, and have less polished animations.”

I develop the https://newterm.app command line terminal and @zebra app store for jailbroken iPhones. Both are developed using Xcode and Apple’s current frameworks. NewTerm extensively uses SwiftUI. Neither app has performance issues.

👉 “Apple releases new APIs with each new version of iOS. Sideloaded apps may not be updated to support the latest APIs, which means that they may not be able to take advantage of new features and functionality.”

The latest SDK always works fine. The limiting factor is often rather that the app’s codebase isn’t ready for a newer SDK, due to new breaking behavior Apple introduced. This is an issue as old as time itself, and affects any platform including iOS, macOS, Android, Windows, and Linux, whether App Store or not. It’s just necessary for platforms to break compatibility sometimes. That said, even if you use an old SDK, you can still define and use functions from newer SDKs.

👉 “Sideloaded apps may not have the same level of quality control as App Store apps. App Store apps are reviewed by Apple before they are made available to users.”

This is a very common misconception. Apple doesn’t review apps for quality, they review them for violations of their rules. Even then, they miss many clear scams. There are replies in the original thread from app devs who had experience releasing a broken build that App Review completely missed.

https://theverge.com/2021/4/21/22385859/apple-app-store-scams-fraud-review-enforcement-top-grossing-kosta-eleftheriou

👉 “Sideloaded apps are not subject to this same level of review, which means that they may be more likely to contain bugs, security vulnerabilities, or other problems.”

As with the last one, App Review isn’t a security audit. If you’ve had an app rejected before, you’ll know the reviewers aren’t technical people. The security of your code is your responsibility, and companies who can afford it do regularly get their code professionally tested for security issues. I would also point out that full jailbreak apps were approved on the App Store multiple times in the past. The apps were pulled only after they got media attention.

https://9to5mac.com/2016/08/29/reddit-jailbreak-dribbble-client-app-store/

👉 “A sideloaded app may not be able to take advantage of the new Metal 3 graphics API in iOS 17, resulting in less impressive graphics and performance.”

You would be surprised to peek under the hood and find that plenty of apps you use every day, ones that feel current and do everything in ways you expect, in fact use old APIs in some cases. Being approved on the App Store has nothing to do with how “current” your codebase is. Apps are even still allowed to use OpenGL, which was deprecated by Apple in 2018, and was clearly on its way out since 2014.

👉 “A sideloaded app may not be as well-designed as an App Store app, making it more difficult to use and navigate.”

There are absolutely terrible apps on the App Store, including from companies that have plenty of money to hire a UI/UX design firm. You’ve definitely used at least a few apps like this and know what I’m talking about. Conversely, there are some incredibly polished apps/tweaks released in the jailbreak community, or even just outside of the App Store on macOS. Would you consider Chrome, Discord, Visual Studio Code, VLC, etc etc. poorly designed and hard to use because they’re not in the App Store? How you install an app has no bearing on its quality.

👉 “A sideloaded app may contain more bugs than an App Store app, leading to crashes and other unexpected behavior.”

Like I said earlier, App Review aren’t QA testers for every app to ever exist. It’s always been the developer’s responsibility to write high quality code and catch any bugs in it. You also really don’t want to waste time waiting hours or days for Apple to reject your app, when you can pass a build over to your QA testers (or perhaps friends, family, and TestFlight for indie devs) and get far higher quality feedback from people who actually use your app and know what to expect.

The Chariz team is saddened to learn that Lachlan Abbott, better known as LaughingQuoll, has passed away at 22.

His relationship to our team was instrumental to our success. Chariz, as it stands today, would not exist without his encouraging words, and his commitment to help the platform when it was in a difficult position by launching his tweaks Noctis Neo, Siliqua Pro, and Watermelon with us. He was a wonderful, creative member of the jailbreak community, and an incredible friend of ours. He will be sorely missed.

If you would like to make a donation in his memory, his family has suggested the Friends of the Earths Strzelecki Koala Action Team.

We know you’ve been waiting for it, and we’re glad to announce Cephei 2 has been released! This will allow many of your favorite tweaks to be updated for rootless jailbreaks.

Cephei 2.0 is a major refactor, exclusively supporting rootless jailbreaks. It removes numerous code paths that stayed around for compatibility with old tweaks or iOS releases, and is built to run on the new ElleKit hooking platform. Cephei 1.x will continue to be supported for rootful jailbreaks on iOS 15.

Most, but not all, tweaks should already work with Cephei 2. Please don’t expect tweaks converted from rootful to rootless to work. The developers of these tweaks will most likely need to release a rootless update if there are any crashes.

Full changelog here: https://chariz.com/get/cephei/changelog

Dopamine 1.0 (formerly Fugu15 Max) has been released! This is a jailbreak for iOS 15.0 - 15.4.1 on iPhone XS and newer (A12 - A15 and M1 devices), based on some truly incredible work by @opa334, @evelyne, Linus Henze, and others.

Going forward, we’re going to suggest users of XinaA15 upgrade to Dopamine, because it has far fewer compatibility issues and should be substantially more stable. We know it’s annoying not all tweaks work yet, but we also hope this release will prod more of your favorite tweak developers to release updates for rootless jailbreaks, which is how all jailbreaks will be going forward.

https://ellekit.space/dopamine/

🔔 Chariz now supports both traditional and rootless packages for developers to upload on their submissions. This means that users can expect to see rootless versions of their favorite packages as more developers start releasing them.

Stay tuned for updates!

Developers: When submitting packages to us, you’ll be able to upload a rootless and rootful variant of your package. We’ve sent an internal announcement providing more in-depth details about rootless support and other changes.

🧑‍💻 New library for tweak developers on Chariz: Comet by Ginsu.

Comet allows tweak settings screens to be written using SwiftUI. I personally haven’t used this yet, but it looks extremely promising! SwiftUI is definitely the future of tweak settings. No more of those ugly, clunky specifier plists 😉 Really hoping to see some delightfully designed tweak settings experiences from this.

https://chariz.com/get/comet

More info on GitHub: https://github.com/ginsudev/Comet

A christmas gift from us to our favorite community: NewTerm 3! We rewrote almost all of the app, it’s faster, has better rendering, and integrates better with your terminal programs. It supports iOS 14 – 16 including XinaA15.

Check out the beta here: https://chariz.com/get/newterm-beta

By the way, we still have more tweaks to give away! 🎉 Head to our Discord server to enter, and hang around for more throughout the next few days!

Merry Christmas Everyone! We’re running giveaways over the festive period on our Discord server so make sure to take a look and enter for a chance to win amazing prizes!

Some time passed since I wrote this post, and this week went a bit crazy with my attention being diverted in so many different places, so just updating (especially now that I can write 5000 characters in markdown):

• 👉 Zebra 1.1.30 – fixing a few things I broke in 1.1.29.

  Running behind when I really wanted this to release, but it’s still coming! This release also now supports searching for a single character in non-English languages – this is pretty important for languages such as Chinese – along with some various bug fixes.

• ⚪️ Cephei 1.18 – rootless support.

  It pretty much all works, with the exception of features that try to grab info from the dpkg status file, such as the package header cell, on Xina15. I’ll also be adding a built-in cell for linking to Mastodon profiles, because, well… it’s not exactly like I have much confidence in the direction the bird app is going right now.

• ⚪️ Alderis 1.2.2 – rootless support.

  Effectively I’ll just be creating a build for iphoneos-arm64 (proper rootless jailbreaks), since 1.2.2 works perfectly on iOS 15 and 16 under non-rootless/Xina15.

• ⚪️ NewTerm 3 beta 1 – near-total rewrite.

  Super excited for this! No doubt the most popular request I’ve been hearing over and over 😁 NewTerm 3 uses a more up-to-date terminal emulator framework supporting modern features. Just need to finish up a few things I left unfinished so I can start releasing official betas.

• ⚪️ Zebra 1.1.31 – Xina15 support.

  The way Xina15 has set up APT (or rather, not set it up) is very awkward, so all package managers needed to be updated to support it. I put this off for a bit so some of the awkward problems with it could be figured out first, and things start settling down to something stable I can work against. I feel we’re in a good position with it now, so I’m going to go ahead and implement this support soon.

• ⚪️ Zebra 2

  This is a longer-term thing, because it’s a very different beast (different horse?) from Zebra 1. I really hope we can start launching betas of Zebra 2 soon! If you haven’t seen it, check out our unveiling of the UI from a few months ago.

👋 Hello to everyone who’s new to Mastodon and the fediverse! Just wanted to post to get the word out that we’re on here.

Chariz helps you find apps and utilities to improve your life, and helps you support the developers that build your favorite apps.

We’re one of the top sources for jailbreak tweaks — special kinds of programs that add handy enhancements to iOS that aren’t possible within the App Store. You can customise your device exactly how you want it, and even access the underlying Unix operating system to use your device to its full potential. We’re glad to support an incredibly innovative community that loves Apple’s devices, and has proven the value of open operating systems ever since the first iPhone.

Seems interesting? Give us a follow!

👋 Hi again friends! If you’re on iOS 15 with the XinaA15 jailbreak, there’s now an update to Sileo with support for this jailbreak. You can find instructions here. (We also have a link to this on our package detail pages in Sileo for your convenience.)

Installing XinaA15 - Updating Sileo

Hi everyone! Just a quick update from us on the iOS 15 jailbreaks.

We’re starting to accept updates from developers for iOS 15, but with the caveat that the jailbreaks that are currently released for it, palera1n and XinaA15, are quite incomplete. This is unlike our usual policy where we wait until a final working jailbreak has been released to start accepting updates, but this year has obviously been a different one, and we want to help push things along as soon as possible.

Please be patient with things at the moment, not everything works properly just yet. Particularly, you won’t be able to download paid packages yet, as there is some issue with Zebra and Sileo’s ability to store logins in the keychain (iOS’s encrypted password storage) that both projects are currently looking into.

There is some more info about the state of things from this post on /r/jailbreak.

You can catch us on Discord or post on /r/jailbreak if you have any questions. Although, if the question is “should I jailbreak yet?”, the answer is most likely not yet, unless you’re willing to try some things that aren’t quite ready yet.