So are we gonna get an alternative OS for iPhones? I wonder how that would even work, with the hardware-level security that I assume requires a signature that Apple won’t wanna make publicly available.
And what about the SDKs? Would you be able to reuse the Apple-maintained ones, or would we need FOSS reimplementations – or would that even be possible without violating IP?
Cuz some of the ways that Apple achieves privacy while enabling functionality (I’m thinking things like ARKit shared sessions) could be considered trade secrets, and I wouldn’t be comfortable using an alternative that doesn’t provide the same level of privacy…
In a statement, Apple told Bloomberg “We remain very concerned about the privacy and data security risks the DMA poses for our users.”
Usually, the “We’re gonna fight this!” response the corpos publish when we do antitrust action is like “Yeah sure buddy, whatever you gotta tell yourself”. But this one does actually ring kinda true for me.
Most likely, it would look like Asahi Linux, which has managed to reverse engineer and re-implement many parts of the Mac environment relatively quickly in Linux. If it works like the Mac does, we may see a project to make a custom ROM for iPhone (probably a fork of either a Linux phone project or of AOSP) soon after the responsive update, and within about a year of that, we might see it be fairly usable.
It is apparent however that the platform security model was engineered to allow third party operating systems to coexist with macOS in a way that does not compromise any of Apple’s security guarantees for macOS itself. Rumours circulating that Apple are actively hostile towards efforts such as Asahi, or that their security must be bypassed or jailbroken to run untrusted code are unfounded and false. In fact, Apple have expended effort and time on improving their security tooling in ways that only improve the execution of non-macOS binaries.
So if Apple complies with this new ruling in a similar way, we could expect to (eventually) have the same level of security on a third-party OS!
So are we gonna get an alternative OS for iPhones? I wonder how that would even work, with the hardware-level security that I assume requires a signature that Apple won’t wanna make publicly available.
And what about the SDKs? Would you be able to reuse the Apple-maintained ones, or would we need FOSS reimplementations – or would that even be possible without violating IP?
Cuz some of the ways that Apple achieves privacy while enabling functionality (I’m thinking things like ARKit shared sessions) could be considered trade secrets, and I wouldn’t be comfortable using an alternative that doesn’t provide the same level of privacy…
Usually, the “We’re gonna fight this!” response the corpos publish when we do antitrust action is like “Yeah sure buddy, whatever you gotta tell yourself”. But this one does actually ring kinda true for me.
Most likely, it would look like Asahi Linux, which has managed to reverse engineer and re-implement many parts of the Mac environment relatively quickly in Linux. If it works like the Mac does, we may see a project to make a custom ROM for iPhone (probably a fork of either a Linux phone project or of AOSP) soon after the responsive update, and within about a year of that, we might see it be fairly usable.
Oh neat: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Apple-Platform-Security-Crash-Course#apples-unspoken-agreement
So if Apple complies with this new ruling in a similar way, we could expect to (eventually) have the same level of security on a third-party OS!
Is being able to run an alternative OS on your device covered in the law?
I would love to be able to put another OS on iPhone hardware, as now they become waste quickly after Apple drops them from the latest iOS version.