I think I need to preface this by saying that I sideloaded f.lux using the original technique the moment it came out without hesitation and will not remove it from my phone now that it's not kosher.
Almost none of this is actually true, just to clarify a few points:
- Apps (for the App Store or otherwise) do not have to be written in Objective-C or Swift (see: RubyMotion, Xamarin, PhoneGap/Cordova, React Native, J2ObjC, RoboVM, that thing Microsoft is working on, probably others I don't know about or have forgotten)
- You don't have to buy anything to put an app on your personal iOS device, you just download Xcode and work from there (more on this later)
I'll concede that you can't access the hardware directly from iOS, meaning yes, it does have to be accessed through APIs, however allowing direct hardware access is a massive legitimate security risk. However, you absolutely do own the device as it exists as hardware. You don't own the software on it, but that's the same for every proprietary software product in existence. What you own is a license to run the software for certain purposes. Whether or not this is a bad thing is for you to decide, but this is not a problem unique to iOS. Furthermore, if you write an app using your free copy of Xcode and put it on your iOS device, you absolutely own the copyright for that app.
Now, as for what is true in your comment, yes, you do have to pay $99 a year to distribute apps using the App Store. More than anything else, I believe this is why Apple could not allow this to continue. If this became a trend among iOS app developers, it stands to reason that they would lose a lot of money from developers distributing this way instead of using the App Store. Yes, f.lux is free, but they don't want a trend starting and even with free apps you can still sell advertisements. Again, I'm making no judgment on whether or not it's morally just for Apple to do this, I'm just explaining why it happened in more specific terms. Second, doing this completely subverts Apple's security features. The ability for users to load arbitrary apps onto their devices was to allow people without $99 to run apps that they made on their own devices.
This was a privilege originally only afforded to registered developers, and this was intended to lower the barrier to entry for iOS app development. When it's one person writing apps for fun and loading them on their phone to test and show their friends or whatever, the security risk is low. When it's groups of programmers telling people to download a precompiled binary that can't be inspected to ensure its safety and load it onto their devices, it becomes a massive security risk. (as a free software person, you should know that even for us that chose to load it, we don't know what the fuck it contains. f.lux is not open source. for all we know, we just loaded a ton of malware onto our iOS devices.)
It should be noted that there are shit tons of open source iOS apps, and so far Apple has not told them to stop providing the source for people to download, compile, and sideload.
There are so many reasons aside from locking down iOS that Apple could have locked this down for. You can't read the source, it's a proprietary app, it subverts their developer agreement, and it's actively encouraging people (176,000 by their count) to load a binary onto their phone the source of which they can't read and that by the developer's own admission is using undocumented APIs.
Now, if Apple said that you were no longer allowed to load apps onto your devices without a developer license period, as used to be the case, then that would be a different story and saddening to boot. However, as it stands, f.lux is the only app I know of that this has happened to and there is ample reason for it having happened.
IANAL, but my understanding is that you can not distribute a copyleft software using Apple's app store. Therefore, all copylefted applications that are in Apple's store must be dually licensed.
That's true, but I was more referring to the fact that you can download and compile open source apps for sideloading similar to what f.lux wants you to do, but the advantage there is that they are open source and don't use undocumented APIs.
Almost none of this is actually true, just to clarify a few points:
- Apps (for the App Store or otherwise) do not have to be written in Objective-C or Swift (see: RubyMotion, Xamarin, PhoneGap/Cordova, React Native, J2ObjC, RoboVM, that thing Microsoft is working on, probably others I don't know about or have forgotten)
- You don't have to buy anything to put an app on your personal iOS device, you just download Xcode and work from there (more on this later)
I'll concede that you can't access the hardware directly from iOS, meaning yes, it does have to be accessed through APIs, however allowing direct hardware access is a massive legitimate security risk. However, you absolutely do own the device as it exists as hardware. You don't own the software on it, but that's the same for every proprietary software product in existence. What you own is a license to run the software for certain purposes. Whether or not this is a bad thing is for you to decide, but this is not a problem unique to iOS. Furthermore, if you write an app using your free copy of Xcode and put it on your iOS device, you absolutely own the copyright for that app.
Now, as for what is true in your comment, yes, you do have to pay $99 a year to distribute apps using the App Store. More than anything else, I believe this is why Apple could not allow this to continue. If this became a trend among iOS app developers, it stands to reason that they would lose a lot of money from developers distributing this way instead of using the App Store. Yes, f.lux is free, but they don't want a trend starting and even with free apps you can still sell advertisements. Again, I'm making no judgment on whether or not it's morally just for Apple to do this, I'm just explaining why it happened in more specific terms. Second, doing this completely subverts Apple's security features. The ability for users to load arbitrary apps onto their devices was to allow people without $99 to run apps that they made on their own devices.
This was a privilege originally only afforded to registered developers, and this was intended to lower the barrier to entry for iOS app development. When it's one person writing apps for fun and loading them on their phone to test and show their friends or whatever, the security risk is low. When it's groups of programmers telling people to download a precompiled binary that can't be inspected to ensure its safety and load it onto their devices, it becomes a massive security risk. (as a free software person, you should know that even for us that chose to load it, we don't know what the fuck it contains. f.lux is not open source. for all we know, we just loaded a ton of malware onto our iOS devices.)
It should be noted that there are shit tons of open source iOS apps, and so far Apple has not told them to stop providing the source for people to download, compile, and sideload.
https://github.com/dkhamsing/open-source-ios-apps
There are so many reasons aside from locking down iOS that Apple could have locked this down for. You can't read the source, it's a proprietary app, it subverts their developer agreement, and it's actively encouraging people (176,000 by their count) to load a binary onto their phone the source of which they can't read and that by the developer's own admission is using undocumented APIs.
Now, if Apple said that you were no longer allowed to load apps onto your devices without a developer license period, as used to be the case, then that would be a different story and saddening to boot. However, as it stands, f.lux is the only app I know of that this has happened to and there is ample reason for it having happened.