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Iphone The Courts

Original Jailbreak App Store Cydia Sues Apple for its Monopoly (vice.com) 102

The iPhone's original -- and unofficial -- app store has sued Apple, accusing the company of having a monopoly on the distribution of apps. Cydia, an app store created and launched in 2007 by Jay "Saurik" Freeman, one of the original jailbreakers filed the lawsuit against Apple on Thursday. From a report: "Were it not for Apple's anti competitive acquisition and maintenance of an illegal monopoly over iOS app distribution, users today would actually be able to choose how and where to locate and obtain iOS apps, and developers would be able to use the iOS app distributor of their choice," the lawsuit reads. Before Apple created the App Store, Freeman and a group of iPhone hackers created an unofficial app store where users that were willing to jailbreak -- a technique to exploit one or more bug to disable the iPhone security mechanism called code-signing enforcement that allows for only Apple-approved code to run on the phone -- could download and install apps. In 2010, according to Freeman, Cydia had around 4.5 million users.
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Original Jailbreak App Store Cydia Sues Apple for its Monopoly

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  • Sueing in the EU may work been then the USA on this.

    • Thats a good point and very true. Suing in the US will set a precedent for losing which in turn will may it harder in the EU. Cydia blundered.

      • by Sebby ( 238625 )

        Thats a good point and very true. Suing in the US will set a precedent for losing which in turn will may it harder in the EU. Cydia blundered.

        Harder how? The laws are different, and the laws of one jurisdiction don't override those of another jurisdiction. So a decision in the US doesn't automatically define a decision in the EU.

        If they lose in the US, it might affect public opinion, but that's not admissible evidence in a court of law (as Trump's legal team seems to be largely unaware).

        • The EU does not have law by "precedent" anyway.
          And most certainly not from a different country.

          You Americans should finally grasp: there are countries with a sound judicial system, and there are some without. US of awesomeness is one: without.

      • I think their calculation is the same as Epic's, that when the government intervenes with Apple, they'll get to ride along for free. There are something around 7-8 active anti-trust investigations into Apple around the world, and if those start to bear fruit, a lot of people who have been biting their tongue are suddenly going to want a piece of the pie.
    • They have standing, so they are likely well positioned even in the US. It will be interesting to see what happens.
  • Business Model (Score:2, Insightful)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 )

    1. Crack a locked-down phone operating system
    2. Develop an alternative app store that can only be installed on a cracked operating system
    3. Developer of said operating system closes security loophole you were exploiting
    4. Sue developer of operating system
    5. Profit!

    I mean, you could develop your alternative app store for Android, which allows for such things. But I guess there is too much competition there?

    Anyways, let's see them repeat this business model for the Playstation, Xbox, and Switch stores. Oh, an

    • Cydia was created before the app store. There was no need for a jailbreak back then, iOS wasn't locked yet.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      Now here's a harsh reality check: Cydia came out before Apple even created an app store. And there's every reason to believe that Apple would not have opened up the platform to third-party developers at all, or at best would have done so to a very small number of select game developers, much as they did with the iPod, had they not seen the vibrant developer community that sprang up as a result of jailbreaking. At best, Apple would have done so years later, after Android cleaned their clocks.

      Apple largely

      • I would wager that the App Store was already an idea before Cydia came out, but the way the iPhone was rushed to market made it something that Apple just didn't want to screw with at the time. Cydia has absolutely been a proving ground for new concepts that Apple has integrated into their OS in future software updates, some of them common sense stuff, some of them you wonder if they used code from the jailbreak tweak and changed it just enough that they couldn't be accused of stealing it.

        Cydia was fun in th

        • by Sebby ( 238625 )

          I would wager that the App Store was already an idea before Cydia came out

          I don't know the history of when Cydia came out, but I do remember Steve Jobs "just do web apps" lame excuse for not having proper third-party app support in the first round.

      • I think you're confusing Cydia with Installer.app, which was there before the App Store. However, Cydia came about around the same time that the App Store made it's appearance, which was with iPhone OS 2.0 I believe.
        • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          Heh. Yes, you're right. I was thinking of Installer.app; the iPhoneOS SDK was announced five months before Cydia came out (so presumably the app store was also planned by then). Either way, the main point remains that the jailbreak community was what got Apple's attention, and were it not for folks outside of Apple seeing how much more potential the hardware had, there's a good chance TPTB wouldn't have changed their tune.

    • Apple should not be allowed to sell a locked down phone. The user should be allowed to repair it and modify it, that's a fundamental right that you get by buying something.

  • "Were it not for Apple's anti competitive acquisition and maintenance of an illegal monopoly over iOS app distribution, users today would actually be able to choose how and where to locate and obtain iOS apps, and developers would be able to use the iOS app distributor of their choice,"

    ... and the iOS ecosystem would also be crawling with malware, much as the Android ecosystem is already.

    No thanks. I chose the walled garden for a reason. My time is too valuable to waste trying to update iPhone anti-virus

    • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      "Were it not for Apple's anti competitive acquisition and maintenance of an illegal monopoly over iOS app distribution, users today would actually be able to choose how and where to locate and obtain iOS apps, and developers would be able to use the iOS app distributor of their choice,"

      ... and the iOS ecosystem would also be crawling with malware, much as the Android ecosystem is already.

      No thanks. I chose the walled garden for a reason. My time is too valuable to waste trying to update iPhone anti-virus software every week.

      That's the thing about having more than one app store available: you don't have to install any other app store if you don't want to. You can keep limiting yourself to the walled garden, and the vast majority of users will.

      iOS will never be like the Android ecosystem, because nobody but Apple will ever sell iOS devices, so there will never be iOS devices sold that lack access to Apple's iOS App Store, and there will never be iOS devices sold with custom replacements for Apple's apps, and even if that happen

      • So for people like you, if Cydia wins, nothing will change.

        Oh, but something will change. What will change is that I'll start getting frantic calls from friends and family members who were contacted by "Apple Support" who walked them through the jailbreaking process, and then directed them to visit an app store hosted out of Russia because "your iPhone is infected with a virus". And they'll believe it, because various iPhone exploits will be getting non-stop press. And guess who will be asked to clean up

        • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          So for people like you, if Cydia wins, nothing will change.

          Oh, but something will change. What will change is that I'll start getting frantic calls from friends and family members who were contacted by "Apple Support" who walked them through the jailbreaking process, and then directed them to visit an app store hosted out of Russia because "your iPhone is infected with a virus". And they'll believe it, because various iPhone exploits will be getting non-stop press. And guess who will be asked to clean up that mess?

          That's what the

          WARNING: You are about to install software that is NOT APPROVED by Apple. Unless you are SURE that you want to do this, press cancel now.

          [I Understand the Risks] [[Cancel]]

          dialog is for. If people are dumb enough to click through a warning message like that without knowing what they're doing, then I won't feel sorry for them when they have to wipe their devices and restore from a backup.

          Speaking of which, Apple really needs to make it possible to restore from more than the most recent

          • That's what the

            WARNING: You are about to install software that is NOT APPROVED by Apple. Unless you are SURE that you want to do this, press cancel now.

            [I Understand the Risks] [[Cancel]]

            dialog is for.

            And when your elderly mother tells you, "Oh, but the nice person from Apple assured me that I could ignore that warning, and that I needed to press it, so I did."

            It will happen. My God, there is an entire ecosystem of criminals who are able to convince people to go to the store, buy gift cards, and read the

            • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

              That's what the

              WARNING: You are about to install software that is NOT APPROVED by Apple. Unless you are SURE that you want to do this, press cancel now.

              [I Understand the Risks] [[Cancel]]

              dialog is for.

              And when your elderly mother tells you, "Oh, but the nice person from Apple assured me that I could ignore that warning, and that I needed to press it, so I did."

              It will happen. My God, there is an entire ecosystem of criminals who are able to convince people to go to the store, buy gift cards, and read the codes to them over the phone so the police won't show up to arrest them, or the power company won't shut off their electricity. They scam people all over the country every week. And you don't think that those same criminals won't be able to convince people to turn over control of their iPhone to them?

              What I think is that those same people do that already, using VNC Server apps that are already available on the App Store. Bad people being able to abuse a useful feature to do something nefarious is a really bad reason to not develop the feature. It's a good reason to design it carefully in ways that make abuse hard.

              Taking your attitude to its logical conclusion, we should all use web apps and like it.

          • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

            That's what the

            WARNING: You are about to install software that is NOT APPROVED by Apple. Unless you are SURE that you want to do this, press cancel now.

            [I Understand the Risks] [[Cancel]]

            dialog is for. If people are dumb enough to click through a warning message like that without knowing what they're doing, then I won't feel sorry for them when they have to wipe their devices and restore from a backup.

            First, read up on Dancing Pigs [wikipedia.org].

            Then realize that it was possible to design a worm that exploited the fact a

            • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

              Then realize that it was possible to design a worm that exploited the fact a lot of iPhones were jailbroken. Even though in the early days, you had to do about 30 steps, 2 of which involved downloading and installing SSH. On Windows (PuTTY was popular). And typing a half-dozen commands at the shell prompt.

              Many of those steps people followed didn't even tell people to change the default root password.

              Which allowed for a simple worm to scan an IP range, log in via SSH using the default root password and infect iPhones.

              Now let's take that apart for a moment. Running an SSH daemon on your iPhone was never something that was designed for the general public to be doing. Apple didn't provide one. The folks that did so were doing so under the assumption that people who tried to install one would be power users who would know how to configure SSH.

              They were wrong, of course, but that didn't make it a completely insane assumption.

              But the important thing to understand was that the people creating the instructions to make it pos

        • Nothing would prevent Apple from regulating other stores and requiring them to sign apps and audit system calls to follow Apple security policies. They would just need to have a program for it and proper enforcement mechanisms.
          • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

            Nothing would prevent the kernel from auditing system calls, either. Just put all the apps from each app store in their own app-store-specific sandbox with no sharing across sandboxes other than through sockets for things like OS-gated access to your photos and stuff, and don't worry about it.

    • by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

      This lawsuit isn't about what's best for developers and users.

      Some say that it is. Nobody delegated that determination to you.

    • by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

      No thanks. I chose the walled garden for a reason.

      No you didn't:

      If there were 5 app stores for iOS devices, and you chose to only use the Apple one, then you would be choosing to use the walled garden. The only choice you had was which device you wanted. After that, you used the only app store available to you. What the Cydia developers want is to be able to legally open their own app stores, and they are fine with people choosing not to use it. It's the lack of choice that is the issue here.

      This lawsuit is important because we are on a collision cours

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by timholman ( 71886 )

        No you didn't:

        Don't be ridiculous. Of course I did. Don't presume to think that I didn't make that choice after weighing the pros and cons.

        I had a very clear choice between an iPhone with the iOS walled garden, or any one of dozens of Android phones with my choice of app stores. I also had a clear choice of which of those worlds to recommend to my computer-illiterate family and friends. I made that choice, and I've never regretted it. If I ever did regret it, a different world is as close as the neares

        • by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

          Okay, fine. So ultimately, you chose a world where the vendor tells you what you can and cannot install. But many people are not okay with that, and nothing in this suit will stop you from choosing your walled garden. But don't decry those people who do want choice. If this suit wins, you lose nothing. But if the suit loses, we are one step closer toward all platforms becoming walled gardens. Prior court decisions are the only thing stopping that from happening.

      • the only place for free software to exist will be Linux. Let us try to avoid that.
        That is an silly and wrong argument.
        Free software has nothing to do with the way you acquire/install it, via app store or self compiled.

        All my "free software" on my macs comes via "brew install APP". And on windows/linux it is git clone REPOSITORY.

        Simple, has nothing to do with app stores.

        • by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

          All my "free software" on my macs comes via "brew install APP". And on windows/linux it is git clone REPOSITORY.

          You can't "brew install APP" on iOS. And if the US -vs- Microsoft suit had not happened, you wouldn't be able to do it on Windows or OSX either. If and when the day comes that the only way to install free software is git clone + build it yourself, free software will be almost dead. Lets fight for a world where vendors can't tell us what we can and cannot install. Why is that a controversial point?

          • Why is that a controversial point?
            Because your point is wrong?

            I can install what ever I want on my Mac or Windows PC.

            And to get it on my iOS device I only need to download it on my Mac and move it on my iPhone.

            Sorry, you are simply wrong ... good bye.

    • by Sebby ( 238625 )

      This lawsuit isn't about what's best for developers and users, it's about what's best for Cydia's bottom line.

      ... meaning competition.

      • App Stores do not compete.
        The software sold via them does.

        And you can be assured my software on iOS costs the same as my software on Android, regardless how many stores any of the platforms provides.

        • by Sebby ( 238625 )

          App Stores do not compete.

          Exactly - Apple makes money from what is sold on the app stores (remember, that 30% cut?), so it made sure it had no competition.

          • They do not make a 30% cut, remember?
            The take a 30% fee.

            And the earning on that is probably 7% - 10% - a no brainer. All other app storers, music stores book stores basically also take a 30% fee. For a reason. Taking less would make them cost money.

            • by Sebby ( 238625 )

              They do not make a 30% cut, remember?
              The take a 30% fee.

              LOLs that's your counter argument, argue semantics?

              Regardless if you call it a "fee", a "cut" or a "developer tax", the end result is the same: from the total price of every purchase of any app on the app store, or from within those apps, Apple keeps a percentage of that total, and the rest goes to the developer (historically 30%, but now it's 15%-30% depending on various things).

              Every. Purchase.

              And Apple wants its "cut" all to itself - no sharing with anyone else.

              But evidently you've just crawled out from

              • Semantics is:
                30% cut.
                15% credit card processing fee
                10% administration for checking the software before it goes into the store - doing refunds etc.
                5% running the store "in the could"

                I doubt Apple earns anything in an App Store. They earn money in the music store, and thats it.

                Sorry ...

                And Apple wants its "cut" all to itself - no sharing with anyone else.
                And what actually would they share from a store that basically runs at cost or only makes profit because of "big numbers"?

    • No thanks. I chose the walled garden for a reason. My time is too valuable to waste trying to update iPhone anti-virus software every week.

      There's no technical reason that alternate App Stores would force you to run your phone in an unsecure way. But for the sake of argument, would you be against Apple selling phones that let you chose at setup to install an unlocked OS vs. a locked down OS? It seems like two sets of users with different priorities would win there, no?

    • by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      OK, but what's wrong with giving the user the choice on their own devices? No one is saying they should be forced to ship the device in an insecure state or to distribute other app stores with the device out of the box. Put a toggle in the security settings to enable 3rd party side load with a big warning popup about the risks. Put it on the user to be responsible for their experience. Yea, users are dumb but that's on them if they break their phones loading up crap from a 3rd party store. Apple can wash th
    • No thanks. I chose the walled garden for a reason

      That's fine, but you're selfish if you deny other people the ability to leave (and foolish if you deny yourself the ability to leave. Stay when it's convenient, but it won't always be).

    • You choose walled garden that's great, but why stop others choosing? I run android and most of the time I choose walled garden but when I couldn't install ScratchJr because I didn't have a 7inch screen I chose to install it anyway because I actually had choice.
  • Apple's iOS business model is protecting grown-up users from themselves, even if those users are competent to make their own decisions.

    Why else do they have to track every app you open on MacOS, every time you open one? They take care of you like a big brother would.

    • Apple's iOS business model is protecting grown-up users from themselves, even if those users are competent to make their own decisions

      This is the model Firefox is following. Hiding everything from users, not allowing changes to certain things, warning galore, forbidding people from going to certain sites if they deem it untrustworthy.

      It's why I stopped updating long ago. The older version doesn't harass me when I try to visit a site, and, for the most part, has enough configuration items left th
  • by Pibroch(CiH) ( 7414754 ) on Thursday December 10, 2020 @01:29PM (#60816386)

    Speaking as an avid jailbreaker myself up until about 4 years ago, this is kind of surprising. I've used the iPhone since 2007, but a year or so ago I switched to Android (specifically the Note 8) just so I could have more of a hands-on experience with the Android world. I have owned many Android tablets and am not at all a neophyte when it comes to tech, but I was struck at how shitty and useless so many Android apps in the Play Store tended to be. Search up anything you wish to download and you'll be greeted with a dozen garbage apps that have 4.5 stars with 75% of the positive reviews being fake. Download any one of them and you'll be greeted with anything from full-page ads *when the app is not actively being used* or battery drain.

    Not that every single app is like this, but I've had a much more consistent and satisfying experience using the App Store on iPhone, and it's unfortunately because Apple has a chokehold on what is allowed to be in it. They do a decent job of vetting the apps to make sure they do roundabouts what they say they're going to, and any asshole can make an app and put it up, as long as they play by the rules and pay Apple their pound of flesh.

    Cydia has always been a great concept but in execution, even as a "power user" that has some coding skills and is fairly well-versed in how Apple's software interfaces with the hardware, it is a frustrating experience in practice. It's not like jailbreaking is some advanced science that only the most savvy of users can do... it's not terribly hard to follow simple instructions and have Cydia running on your iPhone in a half-hour. And once you do, it's easy to find software that you think you want to use and then be unable to use it because it's 7 years old and hasn't been updated to run on anything past the iPhone 4. Lots of tweaks made to run on iOS versions that worked three point releases ago. It's not hard to install something that will bootloop your phone and either cause you to have to restore the software or at the very least screw around with a failsafe that will respring it without any tweaks.

    Not to mention the dumpster fire that is the paid tweak ecosystem. I've seen myriad reports of people buying tweaks and then not being able to use them for whatever reason, and the creator basically telling them to piss up a rope. That's absolutely not 100% of the experience, and there is some really cool stuff that's come out of the jailbreak marketplace, some of which I've paid for myself, but it really kind of cements for me that the Apple way of doing things, while unpopular and occasionally controversial, is probably the best way of doing it.

    And this is after years of having this platform open and usable by anyone, really. Apple doesn't like you jailbreaking their phones, but they don't screw you over if you do by locking you out of anything or voiding your warranty. I'm interested to see what comes of this, but I'm betting not much.

    • I'm mainly an Android and I don't really have an issue with the Walled Garden approach to their official store. More power to them.

      The issue comes when they make it really difficult to go outside their walled garden. Maybe you are an iphone user who wants to install an application outside their walled garden.

      In my case, I do security testing, which often involves IPhone applications. The steps we go through are annoying at best. Just side loading an application is an annoying process, but we do it. Not to m

  • Not a Monopoly (Score:2, Informative)

    by Macdude ( 23507 )

    From https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]

    "Apple iPhones claimed a 13.5 share of the market in the second quarter of 2020, a slight increase on the previous quarter."

    13.5% does make make for a Monopoly.

  • by Jodka ( 520060 ) on Thursday December 10, 2020 @01:44PM (#60816472)

    Apple has a legitimate reason to lock out other app sources, which is to protect its customers from harmful software. However, we know Apple's true motive is to protect their own pricing. We know that because Apple could give is an option to opt-out of App Store on the condition that the customer assumes the risk. Give us a great-big switch which lets us install apps from other sources which says "If you throw this, then Apple can no longer protect your device from harmful software. It's on you if something shitty happens as a result. Don't bother us with it, we will ignore you. You agree to this by throwing the switch. There is no going back."

    Should make everyone happy, right? Both the people who want Apple's protection and the ones who want to install non-Apple approved apps would be satisfied. Except the one unsatisfied party would be Apple, because it would have to lower the App Store fee under competition from other, reputably secure, app stores.

    Like I said, Apple's true motive is income from monopoly pricing, not protecting consumers. Breaking that monopoly should be the job of the FTC, but that is never going to happen because government agencies act in the interests of the corporations which control government, not against.

    • part way idea have an open content part of IOS store with NO content censorship (other then non legal stuff like Child pron)
      and lower the cut to 10%-15% of some in app sales and you can't tell Facebook that they can't say 30% of your donation is eaten by apples fees, Can't tell WordPress you can't sell websites that apple have 0 to do with in there app with no apple fees.

    • We know that because Apple could give is an option to opt-out of App Store on the condition that the customer assumes the risk. Give us a great-big switch which lets us install apps from other sources which says "If you throw this, then Apple can no longer protect your device from harmful software. It's on you if something shitty happens as a result. Don't bother us with it, we will ignore you. You agree to this by throwing the switch. There is no going back."

      And when your elderly mother, or your computer-i

    • Give us a great-big switch which lets us install apps from other sources which says "If you throw this, then Apple can no longer protect your device from harmful software. It's on you if something shitty happens as a result..

      But it would not be just "on you if something shitty happens". That fact that shitty stuff could happen, and did happen, would ultimately harm Apple's reputation.

    • Bad idea. By allowing risky apps you are opening up the door for malware to compromise other apps on the device that went through the correct process. Your idea completely removes the benefit of the app review process.

    • Apple has a legitimate reason to lock out other app sources

      Even if they didn't, no one owes you access to a platform. They only owe you an equal playing field for all your competitors.

    • Which would be fine if that app store also didn't deny apps for competing with it's own (sometimes not yet delivered) applications or run applications of its own (aka any emulator). Since Apple does both of those things it would be nice to have another option.
      • Apple does none of those thing. There are plenty of emulators on the App Store and plenty of Mail and Browser apps or whatever.

        This is a silly /. myth. If you ever had looked at the App Store you knew that, but you did not. So how do you come to your retarded idea?

    • because it would have to lower the App Store fee under competition from other, reputably secure, app stores.
      And why would that be the case?
      Sorry, you americans always see competition where no competition is, like claiming Google and Facebook are competing somehow ... about what actually?

  • Most of us are restricted to a 24 hour day (contact me if you've found an exception). From that we must subtract many hours for sleep, for work, for family and for recreation. Fiddling with a phone, should you choose that lifestyle, must also fit within that 24 hours. How much time is that worth for you? This is a question about the 'opportunity cost' of phone activity, it asks what you are willing to give up for an extra hour trying out a new app or trying to fix a malware problem.

    I've had iPhones and Andr

  • It boils down to this: Cydia isn't going to pay for the tech support costs when some app crashes the phone, steals the phone owner's data, or worse. So, yeah, Apple should have the right to decide what can and can't be on their phones because they're the ones who are going to have to deal with pissed off users.

  • Jailbreaking is quite often used for piracy, so that is dangerous. It definitely breaks the security of a phone, and I'd be curious if Cydia advertises that sufficiently well. Finally, it may be that Apple's software running on a phone is only licensed, and Cydia apps use it without a license, which would be copyright infringement. I'm sure Apple has lawyers that can come up with more problems for Cydia.

    Apple is big enough that you don't want to piss them off, and that is exactly what Cydia is doing.
  • Cydia didn't come until iPhoneOS 2.0 jailbreak

    The original jailbreak app store was Installer.app which was originally made for iPhoneOS 1.02 jailbreak.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

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