sudotstar

I think that’s the rub, in my theoretical scenario, Apple is not blocking the distribution or sale of iOS applications through third-party means, they’d enforce their existing restrictions on and power over building iOS applications in the first place. Developers would absolutely still be able to distribute unsigned applications - end user iOS devices would just be unable to install them.

It sounds ridiculous to me, and as I wrote earlier, it would be a clear violation of the spirit of the DMA, but I don’t see any reason why this scenario would not be technically possible for Apple to pull off.

I’m not too sure that these actions violate the letter of the law here, even though I agree that they’re 100% in violation of the spirit of the law.

It’s been some years since I’ve put the mobile development world behind me, in no small part because of Apple’s shenanigans, but the way I understand how this might work - Apple may be required to allow “iOS software” to be installed from third party stores, but software that runs on iOS must either be signed using a certificate that only allows installation in a developer or enterprise context (which require explicit and obvious user consent to that specific use case, and come with other restrictions such as the installation only lasting for a limited period of time), or through an “appstore” certificate that allows installation on any device, but the actual application package will need to go through Apple’s pipeline (where I believe it gets re-signed before final distribution on the App Store). All certificates, not just the appstore ones, are centrally managed by Apple and they do have the power to revoke, or refuse to renew, any of those certificates at-will.

If my understanding is correct (I’d appreciate if any up-to-date iOS devs could fact-check me), then Apple could introduce or maintain any restrictions they please on handling this final signing step, even if at the end of the day the resulting software is being handed back to developers to self-distribute, they can just refuse to sign the package at all, preventing installation on most consumer iOS devices, and to refuse to re-issue certificates to specific Apple developer accounts they deem in violation of their expected behavior. I haven’t read the implementation of the DMA in detail, nor am I a lawyer, so I’m not sure if there are provisions in place that would block either of these actions from Apple, but I do expect that there will be a long game of cat and mouse here as Apple and the EU continue to try and one-up the other’s actions.

I’m curious to hear about yours and others’ experiences with containerizing Java applications in such environments. I used to work in a place that traditionally had such restrictions on JDK versions, but after the internal IT environment moved towards running applications within containers, either on Kubernetes or on public cloud platforms’ container runtimes, that restriction became unnecessary since the application would be shipped to production alongside its compatible JDK.

While there were still restrictions on exactly what JDK you could run for other reasons, such as security/stability, common developer experience, etc, it at least allowed teams to immediately adopt the newest LTS release (17 at the time I left) with little restriction.

I’d probably pick something esoteric and then just stop programming, tbh. I enjoy being a polyglot programmer, and learning many languages and learning from many ecosystems is incredibly interesting to me, far more than hyper-specializing in a single language would be.

IMO this isn’t a real “solution” to the problem here, but this article states Android 14 also allows Google to manage device CAs remotely and push updates via Google Play, and goes into detail about how that mechanism is poorly documented publicly and is basically only an option for Google themselves, not any third party device administrators.

Google can easily claim that all security concerns are handled by their own management while continuing to deny access to all third parties to actually handle that responsibility themselves if desired.