Apple has REMOVED the ICEBlock app from the App Store due to “objectionable content.”
https://bsky.app/profile/muellershewrote.com/post/3m2am5hhvxk2wOpen linkView original on lemmy.ca1627
Comments333https://bsky.app/profile/muellershewrote.com/post/3m2am5hhvxk2wOpen linkView original on lemmy.ca
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
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
I do this. Highly recommended.
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.
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.
I'm not sure what you mean by controlled, but how I got to know it was as the malware that's recommended to everyone on the front page of the google play store, and then even factory preinstalled on a lot of them.
It wasn't doing anything that Facebook wasn't already doing, but it got banned. The CEO was brought in front of Congress and racially profiled, gave strong answers, and then got banned anyway.
Wonder why?
TikTok hate was a bot farm. The algorithm was always a reflection of the user.
Also, on xitter are all these assholes I don't care about. I can't leave that platform. Pathetic!
Yeah it's unhinged, FOSS is as communism in practice as it gets right now and the left just ignores it, dismissing it as "tech bad" because they can only think in AnPrim brainrot terms most of the time and judge only by aesthetics and make sweeping generalisations about social media that lack any and all imagination.
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.
https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September_2019_(Sex_between_an_adult_and_a_child_is_wrong)
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
Yeah. And to think, it's a fairly small amount of nuance - it's very basic and intuitive and information about it is literally everywhere. We are hopeless when it comes to far more complex and nuanced social issues we face like rehabilitation or ethnocentrism or trans athletes or the what have you.
People seem to think socialism and any progress is like "be nice to each other" or some stupid aestheticism about "empathy".
There's basically no way to have a conversation with them most of the time, they are so far gone and their fully formed thoughts seem more like inaccurate shorthands, it's like trying to explain astrodynamics to a dog when it's actively trying not to understand them.
Normies are the death of us all.
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.
This i don't get, i'd rather use home-banking from my home PC.
A lot of banks require their personal apps as 2FA to access your account. I would never agree to that.
I don't need to use an app to manage my bank account.
Sounds like you people have shitty banks. Maybe it's time to switch?
I am not American you weird internet man. In the rest of the world and specifically my part of it - Europe, all banks require their app, there is no way around it, and there is no way to use foreign bank accounts or not have a bank account at all etc etc.
I wrote about all this before, including ITT.
Why the fuck do I have to explain this over and over like you was born yesterday?
Stop assuming your country's experience is at all representative of the rest of the world, because evidently - it is not.
Genuinely shocking. Idgaf about any of this but the America-centrism is crazy.
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.
Does anybody actually enjoy gaming on the phone or just do it because there nothing better to do?
I would perhaps buy a valve phone but I wouldn't want to game on it which sounds weird.
Unless it was like a switch and had detachable joycons.
Oh same here. I'm hopeful that valve brings us a linux phone, not a gaming phone. I've never really gotten into gaming on mobile either.
However, if they DO make a linux phone, I'm sure it will be Steam branded and have all kinds of gaming-specific tweaks.
But again, to me that just sounds like it will have good hardware specs. So not a problem!
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-and-windows-11-in-s-mode-faq-851057d6-1ee9-b9e5-c30b-93baebeebc85
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.
Not yet.
Windows laready has something like this it's called S mode i think. IT makes it so you can only instlal stuff frmo the windows store, but you can disable it pretty easily.
"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...
No, it's not.
"Installing" is innocuous and easily understandable (by those tech-illiterate dumbfucks that get spoonfed FUD by lobbyists); whereas sideloading is eerily similar to sidestepping and is prone to being interpreted as "working around a safeguard".
Words are not irrelevant.
Right? Anyone who has been paying attention to the healthcare thing in america should know that what you call something influences immensely what people think about something. Just look at the difference in support in polling when they call it the affordable healthcare act OR obamacare.
Right, we should just completely ignore any power words have over people, because we personally don't like it. Let's also ignore all sorts of other manipulation tactics cause it's more convinet to pretend they don't exist. 🙄
Your phone is fucking you no matter what you do.
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.
There is a great app called 'hermit' on android that gives you a better wepapp experience. Basically a browser tuned to make webapps act native.
Honestly, this thing should just been a PWA. Making this naive app was dumb.
“Hurd OS? Isn’t that obsolete?” “Not obsolete. Just… illegal.” ~Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
Webapps for the rescue!
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.
E: downvotes for facts, I guess? 🤷
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.
I see...
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.
Or tor.
Back to the WWW just like the good ol days
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".
It's a feature for the next release, don't worry.
"To use this road, please download our optional expansion pack for $4.99"
And for what reason do you not think we're headed in that direction?
The scumbags got a headstart on setting the standard for phone users so the freedom that was given to PC users never happens again.
It worked and everyone with an iphone is an actual moron.
That’s the key difference between mobile devices and actual computers. You are merely a user, not the administrator who can do anything with the hardware.
What's objectionable about it Apple? Hmm?
They can only buy a politician so many gold statues.
Does anyone remember how the Devs from there didnt want to release for Android because ApPlE iS sOoOo mUcH mOoOrE sEcUrE
Get rekt.
https://fire-app.net/
There's a similar app for Android.
Same problems
Not open source for once
Needs to be a website, would be best on i2p, but i fear no one would be able to figure out how to get to it.
You can use a I2P proxy for access via the clearnet. Additionally, many people can set up I2P proxies that can only being used to access that site. Take one down, there's a bajillion others to choose.
With the current political weather, you're going to want the client anonymity protection. All they need to do is run a handfull of proxies, and they'll narrow down your house/phone as ICE targets.
We're beyond the nahh nahh can't get me because i'm not sharing illegal files, you'll get trucked off like the immigrants.
If they can log you reporting ICE to a website, you're toast.
That's fair. We need a solution to that.
Riseup and similar VPN services need to get spun up more. Or push people to solutions like briar
It's not accessible enough to someone working 60-70hr weeks trying to make enough to survive as an illegal migrant in the US. Maybe if people were actually out there protecting their neighbours and being the ones checking these sorts of apps. But they're all living paycheck to paycheck too and just aren't. Trump's current policies are literal decades in the making.
I think you mistook what Im saying. Im saying, as a project, those who can, should set up these in proxies to aid those who cant and need it.
I understood that, I'm talking about even setting up the proxies on a device so you can access services. It's my understanding that I2P is similar enough to Tor. A user setting themselves up to access a Tor service is still difficult for the average user, especially if they are time poor.
In terms of security alone, iPhones easily beat most Android phones. Which may be a fair argument in favor of iPhones. However, to ignore Apple's policies and long history of delisting similar apps is delusional.
In regards to security, Apple does have three upsides, and only those:
The solution for the first one is "don't sideload untrusted stuff" and the solution to the second and third one is "buy an Android phone from a trusted manufacturer that has long term OS support".
It's a simple configuration change to disable it and can be done with any corporate MDM system, making this a moot point. Not to mention too many people don't understand security, so Android is taking away sideloading anyway, FoR sEcUriTY
The vast majority of Android phones do not come with root access. For both, you generally have to elevate access yourself
If you're running an out-of-date OS, clearly security is not a priority
Supply chain attacks absolutely can happen to iPhones as well. There are plenty of re-sellers
You missed the actual security benefit over iOS that Android cannot compete with: Apple controls the entire software chain from security patch to OTA update. This allows them to patch and release a fix for critical vulnerabilities far faster than any Android device possibly could. Apple does not need to get the approval of an OEM (such as Samsung), and, due to special deals, they do not need to get the approval of a carrier (like Verizon). Android devices typically need to get approvals from both before releasing updates (although Google flagship phones can bypass one, and can fast track the other)
The downside there is there are no checks on Apple. They could release a horribly vulnerable patch with no additional checks in-between
You don't seem to get my point and seem to think that I'm some apple fanboy that you need to convince or win against.
I use android, I've never used iOS. I enjoy the freedom of sideloading. Still it is a fact that the overwhelming majority of malware infections on Android happen due to side loading. The percentage of devices running corporate MDM is tiny, making this a moot point.
And yet quite a few devices in the wild run rooted or custom ROMs.
You seem to forget what this thread is about. It's not about personal security and whether one can run a safe android device, but about an app developer not providing an Android version, because the platform as a whole (meaning the average user) is less secure.
Personal preferences like paying for a new, non-outdated phone don't really matter for that big picture view.
That's a strange argument. Getting malware that survives a factory reset onto an iPhone without apple's approval is close to impossible. Making an Android phone from scratch that contains malware right in the system image has been done over and over again. You are argueing a hypothetical versus something that happens every day.
Long os support meant to intentionally brick your iphone so you buy new. That is 100% true as I had many apple products started degrading after upgrade and still have old models that are not upgraded and work perfectly
I'm not defending apple here. Short OS support (or none at all) is not a good thing, and it's something that's sadly still quite common if you buy the wrong Android brand.
Samsung is doing pretty well in that regard right now.
Sorry, didn't think I had to clarify it. Long support is good IF has good intentions behind it. Most long supported os has bad intentions behind it as making old models inferior and unusable as in case with ios on iphone 5. For example in my opinion windows xp was THE best windows, maybe on par with seven. So if you give me two options, first is updating my phone so it becomes laggy and unusable or keep current version, I will choose to stay on old OS.
Your evidence is an iPhone that came out 13 years ago last month? Back in those days, the year over year improvements in the hardware were immense, and the software tried to take advantage of it. But people would complain, A Lot, if those features didn't come to their older device. Do you remember how much folks lost their mind when the iPhone 4 came out and iOS 4 allowed it and the 3GS to have a home screen wallpaper, but not the iPhone 3G? People were pissed and called it "planned obsolescence" that it didn't get the feature. So, when the iPhone 4 hit iOS 7, they included all the animations. And then people called it planned obsolescence that it stuttered.
It really depends on what your goal is. Usability, keeping a familiar interface, performance, all of that are things that make it reasonable to stay on an outdated OS, and none of these reasons are bad.
Security (which is the only thing we are really talking about here) does require updates.
If security is your most important concern, you need to update. If security is not your biggest concern and other topics are more important for you, it might be reasonable to stay on older versions.
But in the context of this post, which was purely about security, having long term security updates is important.
In other words do not confuse long support with good support as these are totally different things
Always funny watching apple users think they know something.
pinches cheek
You say that based on what?
Based on most smartphones being very insecure. Of course, iPhones aren't extremely secure, but the competition is practically nonexistent. Pretty much the only secure Android phones are Pixels. Samsung is considered one of the more secure manufacturers too, but according to GrapheneOS devs it's still way behind Google.
Note that even police and government agencies sometimes have trouble getting into iPhones. They never have such troubles getting into Android smartphones, except Pixels.
This is by no means meant to advertise iPhones. It's just a simple observation that security in smartphones is heavily lacking.
So based on marketing.
Both iPhones and Android phones can be configured to your desired security level. Both are used by various government agencies around the world for their most important secrets. Neither are secure out of the box. You have to harden them to your desired level of security
Arguing whether Android or iOS is more secure is a bit like arguing whether an SUV or pickup is safer. It doesn't matter which you pick when basic security steps are magnitudes more important: Wearing a safety belt, having a functioning air bag, driving a safe speed, not driving drunk, etc.
Dude give one example so we can google and have our own opinion. You are just saying "because they said so/because someone considered it so".
Look up grapheneos's reasoning
You fell for the propaganda marketed as truth.
That's not how security works in the modern tech landscape. No major OS is going to meet a high security standard out of the box. All of them have to be configured to the desired security level, then be added to ongoing security efforts. Every major OS can be secured to the highest security standards
The primary difference is how much effort each takes, but even then there isn't much of a difference. You'll find tooling and in-house expertise makes a much larger difference than the OS
The myth that some OS are inherently secure really needs to die off
Has Android added E2EE to their cloud backups yet like Apple has?
Apple is no friend to any of us, but Google openly and shamelessly scrapes every piece of data you put on their phones. Apple is absolutely the lesser of these two evils with out of the box functionality. I say this as a lifelong Android fan and Apple hater that entered the cybersecurity space and am only interested in the most private option I can get out of the box.
Like an Android can be more secure and private than an IPhone, but afaik that involves owning a Pixel specifically and installing an entirely different OS on it, one that Google a Is also out to get.
You do know that Apple privately scrapes every piece of data you put on their phones right? Go read the privacy and ad policies. Apple also gives access to a lot of their users private information (China has full access to its users iCloud), will remove apps like this (while Google still allows apps that block ad trackers like DuckDuckGo that block Google own trackers). And Google supports CSE.
We get it from your post, your a huge and blind Apple fan that wants to do anything you can to confuse others into believing falsely like you that Apple is somehow a great company and product. But the truth is, Apple doesn't care about your privacy, lies to your face about it, and makes you less secure and your information less private as these situations show. And if you were in cybersecurity, you'd know this.
I’m not much of an Apple fan, I just like to get my privacy where I can. And with over a decade of experience in cybersecurity I can confidently say that as much as you shouldn’t blindly trust Apple, they at least give you a number of tools to increase your privacy out of the box.
Android on the other hand is a nightmarish hellscape of data mining and user profiling. There is GrapheneOS which is as of today a great option to circumvent Google’s data mining, but now that its future is at stake I worry for the future of privacy on Android devices.
But we get it from your post, you’re a pro-Google shill bot that didn’t actually read my comment and is just regurgitating nonsense to muddy the waters.
I'll just back up what I said with real links and not "trust me bro".
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertising/ Apple collects in real time info about you like "Your name, address, age, gender... your approximate location (when turned on, kinda needed for many functions so pretty much everyone does)" I could go on.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/111754 Apple explaining that yeah, they give the Chinese government full access to Chinese iCloud users. You know who actually cared about their users privacy and didn't do that, preventing them from selling in China? Google.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.duckduckgo.mobile.android&pli=1 Book ad tracking on Android from all apps. Notice that it's on the Play Store? Where is the equal to it on Apple's App Store?
https://support.google.com/a/answer/14328489?hl=en Gooe built in CSE.
Just because I was able to call you out and prove you wrong, doesn't mean I'm a shill. The fact you just doubled down on your mis-information does out you as the shill though.
Are you making the argument that Stock Android is more private and more secure?
"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.
They're now supported on Firefox on Android, so good news!
Webapps are now supported on Firefox? Holy smokes!
Yup!
I don't know what that button does but I'm fairly sure it's not about support for web-apps. Firefox has always supported web-apps, because web-apps are just interactive websites.
It's the button to pin a PWA to the taskbar by reading the manifest.json
https://www.maketecheasier.com/enable-progressive-web-apps-firefox/
That's from August, when support was added back after the feature being dropped in 2020.
This is for the September 16 update.
https://www.ghacks.net/2025/09/16/mozilla-firefox-143-0-adds-support-for-progressive-web-apps-copilot-on-sidebar-important-dates-in-the-address-bar/
Progressive Web-apps are a particular kind of web-app. The person you replied to just referred to "webapps", not this special kind of web-app. Firefox has always supported web-apps.
The nature of progressive web-apps means that you can use them even if the browser doesn't explicitly support them. All that explicit support does is wrap the web-app in an icon and reduced browser window.
About time!
Thanks for the great news!
Sweet solution
there are technically alternative marketplaces on iOS in the EU, but they do the exact thing google is now copying off apple: apple still has to give the green light. apple "notarizes" every app, even if it goes through a third party app store. this changes the app irreversibly, and ios/ipados devices can only install notarized apps.
remember when Tim Apple gifted tRump a golden statue? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
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. Corporations don't do that sort of thing unless it will make them $$$
Alternate take: Tim is a businessman doing what's best for Apple and he personally might not support Trump, but we will likely never know.
Tim Apple is a billionaire, doing billionaire things. Supporting the people who give him the most power and not giving a fuck about anyone else.
I love that his has just stuck, and I don't even blink an eye at it anymore lol.
Same take my friend. I agree - Tim's personal politics are kinda irrelevant in this context. Best for apple=compliance with whoever is in charge so they get to keep their money printer. Corpos gonna corpo
Oh, so you're trying to say that Tim is so greedy that he doesn't have values at all, other than his greed? That's an interesting position, but I think it makes him sound even worse than the previous one.
It’s an inherent byproduct of capitalism.
If you rise to Tim Cook’s level you must be someone that is either willing to put your personal values aside or you do not have them to begin with. The growth of the company matters more and if you prioritize your values you will be filtered the moment you misalign with whatever prevents maximal growth.
Capitalism does not care about values, ethics, morals, social wellness, or anything besides growth. It is cancerous and leads to a toxic society that poisons itself and falls apart, which is literally happening
You don't succesfully run big corporations by having high moral standarts, this was never an argument. Argument was about what makes businessman a good business man, and one major thing is seizing opportunities and "playing" important people like Trump. I don't think he's anywhere as (morally) bad as Steve Jobs was, but he's doing his job as expected.
If he does he doesn't have morals to care about acting on his values as such they are more or less irrelevant.
You’re absolutely right. Economic motivations decide the trajectory a company may take. Ethics, green washing, queer rights and other factors take a back seat. If they come with financial benefits, the company will follow that path, but that’s always because of money—no matter what the marketing material actually says.
Remember when companies were supporting sexual and gender minorities? That was because financial incentives aligned with that at the time. Remember when those turncoats suddenly scrapped the DEI programs and removed all rainbow themes? Same motivation again. Facade changed, but the foundation is still the same.
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.
It requires iOS 16 and MacOS 13.
The devices that max out at those operating systems are 9 and 10 year old.
Current or on a current OS?
Edit: I just enabled it and I have a iPhone 11 on my iCloud account.
So, just latest OS.
Which Apple gives you basically forever instead of maybe a year of old updates with android.
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
Disclaimer: The app is closed source, so all we can go off is the developer's word, although the fact the government removed it is a strong indicator they don't have access to data from the app
The developer stated they do not even retain any identifying data, so the only data the government could get is public anyway. Through Apple they'd be able to see who downloaded it, and likely when it was used. Your defense would be easy enough though: "I just wanted to make sure the libs weren't harassing our
fascistpatriotic ICE agents near me"It is impossible to send a (edit: true) push notification to a device without knowing which device it is going to. The developer may not know/have access to that information, but Apple/Google know which devices they are sending those pushes to. If it wasn't a true push notification, then they would not arrive in a timely manner and potentially only when the app was opened the next time.
He was using true push notifications, so the government could just subpoena that information.
He could maybe obfuscate who initiated the initial message, but its impossible to do that for the receivers.
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.
It's such a stupid axiom but it explains everything perfectly
It's not that it's not profitable for them.
When I had an iPhone 3GS I got in a hot tub with it in my pocket and it died. I let it dry out. Then I very carefully took it apart and found all the little white stickers inside that turn from white to pink when in contact with water. I used a razor blade to remove those stickers without damaging them. I then placed a drop of bleach on each which turned them back to white and let them dry out. I used very tiny amounts of super glue to re-apply them to the exact same positions within the phone and then very carefully reassembled the phone.
Took the phone into an Apple store. Guy disappeared into the back for about 10 minutes with it. Came back out and said it must have just up and died but he doesn't know how and gave me a new iPhone.
Only Apple product I've ever owned.
Fuck you Apple.
This is why the web is way better than any app store, yes even with the problems of DNS (DIDs becoming more prevalent cant come fast enough though). Any future phones should have a first class web experience imo.
Edit: I wanna add that browser monopolies are a real threat too. Ladybird is legit on Charlie Kirk's side aka nonpolitical so not a fan of the outlook there. Would love to see KDE fork chromium/blink with valve money and recreate Konquerer and bring back KHTML (I like irony). Valve even has a fork of CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework, electron uses this as well) because of Steam and its ui being a big web app. KDE then has web apps and add them to Discovery, or you can build qt apps. Make it happen valve! And hire me to help lol
Google's sideloading restrictions seems almost like its perfectly timed... 👀
Anyways, Google can gargle my:
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's, Hitler's ally, coining the term and rising 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)
And IBM
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.
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
This is cowardice from Apple, but ICEBlock was not a good app:
This kind of thing is coming for Android as well once Google has converted it to it's own walled garden bullshit.
the USA Goverment probably forced them to remove it
not probably; the doj forced apple to remove it and apple caved: https://www.404media.co/iceblock-owner-after-apple-removes-app-we-are-determined-to-fight-this/
ofc
I keep seeing things about how x, y or z company "caved" to government pressure, as if companies have ever made value judgements in the modern era. What this decision would have come down to, the only thing it could legally come down to, is shareholder value. Considering Apple secured a reprieve on tariffs, it's absolutely within reason that Trump and/or his administration threatened them with cancelling said reprieve. At that point, the decision would be based off the loss of sales for taking it down, against the loss of sales of devices due to tariff price increases.
Apple has a fiduciary duty to their shareholders first and foremost. There is nothing stopping this batshit insane administration from enacting tariffs, and then using the SEC and DOJ to investigate and bring charges that they aren't upholding their responsibilities to their investors.
apple could easily move all manufacturing and operations to canada and demolish the us economy...
Ahahahahahahahahahahahaaa,,,, oh wait,,, you're serious? 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Edit: I know I'm being a fair bit of a jerk in the rest of my comment, but this is pawssibly the most ridiculous assertion that I've seen on Lemmy, and I have no idea how to pawperly refute it.
oh yeah,makes sense tho
not even a solid gold base, a cheap gold base, with a "glass sculpture"
No, they don't have to. The corporations are the ones who want to control everyone. The U.S government is just a tool for them. The politicians are basically just actors at this point.
It's a bit more complicated than that and trump also isn't as easy to control cause he is a member of the billionare class. It's why there was that movement to try and replace trump with DeSantis. There's also multiple factions. of billionaires as well. Some of them are idealogical fascists. Some only care about money. Some are technofeudalists. Corporations or more accuratlely Capitalists control the government yes. But the billionare class isn't a monolith. There's also a cost benefit analysis. Morals aside there is little benefit for apple to oppose trump unless they think opposing trump will significantly impact their sales. Which reasonably don't think will be the case. especially if the competitor is also playing ball.
They also caved into PRC government and they removed the apps that reported on HK police activity and added restrictions for airdrop to make information sharing harder.
no shit
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.
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.
Do you though? They're convenient, for sure, but you can also use a dumbphone and a laptop.
Yea, just gunna carry my laptop around with me everywhere. And that’s not even talking about all the nonsense on laptops that most people can’t deal with.
Keyword: convenient
How the fuck would I access my bank then? All banks literally require their apps to access the account or sometimes even open the account, nevermind actually pay for anything or get a debit or credit card.
>Inb4 some American downvotes because they forget the rest of the world exists
We get it, Americans use cash in America, and they use magnetic stripe cards and cheques and all these other technologies that were phased out in rest of the world before I was even born, but that's not really an argument to make on a global platform.
In your part of the world...
In most of the world that isn't 1 country that starts with 'United States' and ends with 'of America'
Fairphone. Right to repair, plus good custom ROM and linux on mobile support.
Useless without passing Google's Integrity checks.
Two phones.
One for everyday life.
The other for documentation of events, activism, direct action, this app mentioned in the post, and maybe even rebellions.
(actually if you are doing a rebellion, you better use meshtastic or some sort of radios, and remember: do not transmit from home)
Your smartphone serves you ads?
Yeah except I do actually need one for work, paying rent, paying bills etc. It's a helluva position of privilege to be able to say no to something like that, and that's coming from someone who doesn't have a car, which is far less necessary.
No, we cannot do those things any other way.
Yes, it's a privilege to be able to simply say no to having a bank account, for one you'd need to not be in paid employment and not on any financial assistance, so basically a NEET and/or like a foreign-born investor, for which you need to be pretty rich.
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.
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.
To an extent, yes, but the dollar has been decoupled from gold a long time ago, they can literally just print money in the billions and they do (although there days it's probably
money++on a mainframe), completely sidestepping tax money..Can you show me where I said to do nothing? Or is boycotting the only form of collective action you're aware of?
I wasnt gatekeeping it. Just pointing out how ultimately ineffective it is in creating meaningful change.
...and it happened in a vacuum, just all by itself.
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 dont understand why recommending other forms of collective action makes me cynical.
Where was that again?
?
Just lemmy users? Sure, but you don't stop with just lemmy users.
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.
Which is why governments fight so much to make it hard.
In my neck of the woods it's not cool to unionize and there's no home owners' association, people only rally for their favorite sports team but don't bother voting.
I guess we get what we deserve.
I agree that collective action is our strongest pressure against them and it does work.
I do not think a boycott itself is likely to reverse Apple's removal of the app. I also think it makes more sense for the app to become available from a web browser, or some other avenue that circumvents the need for Apple's approval in the first place.
I also believe that collective action in this circumstance is better spent on ICE itself, which would be more effective (its the reason the US government wants Apple to remove the app in the first place) and more direct to fascist power.
Im sure thats why disney quickly reversed gear with cancelling kimmel after loosing 3.8B overnight
Tech companies have never been our friends.
Fuck Apple but honestly this app is like trying to stay warm with matches in Antarctica.
Fuck Apple and I'd prefer matches in Antarctica to no matches in Antarctica.
You might want to read Den Lille Pige med Svovlstikkerne (spoiler alert : it doesn't work).
1.) I can't even read the title, 2.) I still want the matches. I'm not saying I'll use the matches themselves, but who knows, maybe I find wood or whale blubber to burn or something. Just give me the matches, please.
Surprise you can't search without speaking the language but OK, easier https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32571/32571-h/32571-h.htm#Page_117 about 2 pages. Also I'm not crying. /s
Disappointed by not surprised by the downvotes. English is the lingua franca but it doesn't mean it's the only language. Grow up.
I admit it wasn't at all what I expected. I thought it was going to be some account of an Arctic explorer dying or similar. It makes my point, though. If the little girl had perhaps thought to go find some dry kindling or a whale carcass, it might have been a very different story. That's all I'm trying to say.
I don't want to read it either. Are you implying that ICEblock isn't worth downloading? In your own words, why or why not?
If you don't want to bother read a centuries year old classic of literature on human condition I don't think I want to bother clarifying.
Forgot my silly opinion, read the 2 pages story.
It's about as useful as a canary in a coal mine.
A famously useful tool for saving miners from suffocation?
So if this
appcanary has just died, what does that imply...?it implies that it's time to gtfo
So... Really useful?
Exactly. It doesn't matter too much what the app doesn't. The fact it's removed is the useful part.
Not for the canary cry emoji
😩
Why not just make it a website? We're not doing censoring yet, right?
'cause most people are tech illiterates stuck in the walled garden.
The creator used Apple (iOS) exclusive privacy features to run the service. They commented on it publicly a few times. Also why there was never an android version.
Sheer fucking cowardice
From the heroes who bravely took away the headphone jack
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.
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.
Ahh. I thought you were talking about Apple charging for PWAs or something.
That said, I believe push works now.
It's only objectionable to fascists who are getting their sensitive little fee fees hurt
Walled garden = poop town
A necessary step for chat control i guess
apple and the us government and ice can all suck a dick
Apple CEO Tim Cook recently gave Trump a 24 carat gold bribe.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/07/tim-cook-trump-gift/85555805007/
I wish we could use a “regular” app like Waze and start reporting “icy weather” as code for ICE. I mean we can, but idk how to make it a thing. Kinda how they were using “winter boots” as code on TikTok for ICE to get around the censors.
Was this ever even available to non-US accounts? Was there ever an explanation for why it was georestricted?
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.
FAANG is today as VW Adidas and Hugo Boss was in the third Reich.
Everything is objectionable.
Are we ready to admit that giving 3 companies the ability to decide what everyone can and can't execute on their devices is a massive international problem? This is probably the greatest threat to every country in the world, and the people of the US.
Fuckers.
I object to fuck-faced people who object to basic acts of decency, safety & freedom.
Oh no
Was likely a honeypot the whole time..
I miss my Blackberry Curve. ☹️
Oh no, our precious Apple is really a shit company. Tim Cook, is just like every other Tech CEO, a Liberal POS (or just straight republican).
They don't care about LGBQT+ or the enviornment. They care about money and how much they can make from stupid people.
I get the outrage, I really do, but the app broke many privacy rights for users and also the app did technically break ToS by definition being a “doxxing” app.
Regardless, there are websites out there that do it far better than the app, and have universal access Apple and Android devices, which makes sense, because the developer of ICEBlock made it exclusive to Apple, and hispanic communities are overwhelmingly Android users.
ICE is objectionable... did they got "confused"?
Switch soon or you will be beholden to fascists.
![email protected]
Tim Apple gifting Drumpf a 24 carat Apple logo.gif
I made a tool to help with this. It sends encrypted Signal alerts when ICE shows up in your area based on community reports. Honestly been struggling to get the word out because everyone thinks it's spam, but it's legit and people are using it. iceheadsup.com Please check it out or share with someone it could help.
Apps are just browsers that can only visit one website. Who cares about them?
And websites are just little programs you can download at will, so who cares about them?
A lot of websites have server side programs taht are never downloaded by the client. So there is a pretty big difference there. Basically if you want a subversive anti-government "app" you really want a website, not an app.
Wait, where are you seeing a difference between that and how an app functions? Right now it feels like you're abstracting a bit too far in order to make a point, but I'm (genuinely) deeply curious what you mean.
Most apps are a packaged browser that makes proprietary API calls over https. However there is nothing proprietary or valuable in the app itself, except possibly some key material for authentication of the app with the back-end.
Then depending on the user making various requests a middle-ware program will interact with the backend database and retrieve the results back to the user. The database is the valuable part and other then the specific query the user is making, nothing else is can be retrieved by the user. Normally the middle ware isn't even downloadable either.
That's how everything (edit: that doesn't benefit from locally hosted resources, which have exceptions for things like gaming where rapid data access is more important than structural niceties) works, its a design paradigm called MVVM. Host the database, shift processing to the user's hardware (excepting hardware dependent tasks like LLMs or other compute heavy tasks). Websites, apps, even firmware -- essentially anything that makes an API call in some way uses this basic structure. Even entirely local applications do it this way (albeit internally).
Yes. Hence my initial claim that apps are worthless, and shouldn't be used if you can use a website instead. So the whole idea of Apple or Android being able to remove the "iceblock" app, shows that the app was ill-conceived to begin with. Or possibly it was even a honey-pot since apps do have much greater access to the parent device then a website.
I'm not disagreeing at all that this should have had a website as a backup, but you yourself are making some really good points about how apps aren't the same thing as websites and the benefits to using an app in this situation. Leveraging user hardware without the intermediate layer of a brower's sandbox is good for performance and makes a site much more robust in the face of things like DDOS, and having locally-hosted resources with which the user can interact without requiring an active TCP connection (because for example: ICE has geoblocked connectivity at one of their "enforcement actions" - but you can still document what's happening and the app will automatically-and-without-user-interaction upload what you've given it once connectivity is restored) is an incredibly important feature.
Offline websites, while potentially able to exhibit similar behavior, rely on extremely hacky workarounds and cached data to be able to do it - and an app is a much less volatile way to store that data than relying on your browser's cache reintegration (which will often be dumped if you're hit with bad a DHCP config).
I think your spirit is in the right place, but you're missing enough of the technical nuance that it's really undermining your ability to convincingly make your point. And again, I 100% agree that not having alternative access to this service is a critical loss.
This is why Android is far far better than Apple, despite its faults.
Not for long :'(
Yeah, fuck Google.
Ice block couldve been a web app
You mean less worse, but worry not, google's catching up.
Somebody missed the recent announcement 👀