I'm surprised we haven't seen this emergent behavior for iOS yet. As more and more people have Xcode and a dev license, we could have a sufficiently large amount of people to skip the app store for apps that will never be allowed. I wonder how Apple will like that.
Seems like there's a reasonably good chance that we'll see a tool to automate this process—an "installer for apps".
I guess Apple would likely respond by one or both of (a) putting up more roadblocks to getting developer accounts or (b) further restricting what apps can do at a technical level through more sophisticated sandboxes, making the delta in allowed functionality between an app in the App Store and a sideloaded app smaller and smaller.
They must have expected this when they changed the latest xcode to allow free personal provisioning.
There's already some significant annoying limitations, in particular short provisioning expiration limits (must reinstall the app every 90 days), and no access to services like push notifications.
Yes, once a provisioning profile expires, apps built against it fail to launch.
You have to rebuild and reinstall the app (with an updated provisioning profile, but Xcode takes care of all that behind the scenes now) to get an expired app working again.
In addition, people underestimate what you can do from the sandbox (and will be able to do for a long time, unless Apple speeds up its development cycle): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10415288
The only issue with it is that the decision to give everyone a developer certificate for free was to increase Swift adoption. The security implications were not investigated. Apple wasn't aware that they put the final piece of the puzzle in place for something like this to exist.
> I'm surprised we haven't seen this emergent behavior for iOS yet. As more and more people have Xcode and a dev license, we could have a sufficiently large amount of people to skip the app store for apps that will never be allowed.
If this ever happened and got popular, you can be certain that Apple would shoot it down in an upcoming iOS release.
Because that's how Apple works: No freedom permitted on "their" devices.
Version 7 and we're just now getting the ability to sideload without a developer license? I think that actually demonstrates the PP's point. This isn't a new liberty, this is a tool to help Apple to drive adoption of their new language.
Their point was that the ability is going to be removed if it gets used at all. That just doesn't make any sense given the fact I outlined in my response.
I can see it now: the "Sideload App Store"