The Justice Department has announced a sweeping antitrust lawsuit against Apple, accusing the tech giant of engineering an illegal monopoly in smartphones that boxes out competitors and stifles innovation
You need an Apple ID for the Mac’s App Store, but the Mac’s App Store is very much the second banana on MacOS. You can open up Chrome or Firefox and download an installer for any ‘ol app, or another app marketplace entirely.
That said, if a developer hasn’t registered as a “Trusted developer” with Apple, installing an app will ask the user if they’re sure that they want to install the program. All of the settings around trusting known developers are at the OS account level. They require a local admin login, not an Apple ID. Its somewhat similar to what Google does with Android.
Yeah, I was mostly referring to the “install apps” part of your comment. You can just download installers from websites. Very few Mac developers rely on the AppStore as their only means to distribute apps.
As for the OS updates, the stuff around major point releases keeps changing. They were forcing people to download installers for major point releases in the AppStore for certain versions of MacOS. I don’t know if that’s still the case with Sonoma. The update experience got refactored about a year and a half ago.
Was thinking that too, although there are some caveats, you need to at least log into the store to download apps as it stands right now. I think you can log out after installing them, but still. Also using FaceTime or iMessage require accounts, when Apple otherwise could have it set up to just register with the phone number only, have no account, and just be ephemeral to that specific device. (But then at that point, they might as well just follow the IMS video call standard that is cross-platform and do away with FaceTime altogether, and the mobile industry should figure out the SMS replacement to then eliminate iMessage.)
Can’t you already do #5?
I have Macs and iOS devices that aren’t logged into an iCloud account.
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Installing apps on iOS is good point. You need an account. MacOS doesn’t have that constraint.
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You need an Apple ID for the Mac’s App Store, but the Mac’s App Store is very much the second banana on MacOS. You can open up Chrome or Firefox and download an installer for any ‘ol app, or another app marketplace entirely.
That said, if a developer hasn’t registered as a “Trusted developer” with Apple, installing an app will ask the user if they’re sure that they want to install the program. All of the settings around trusting known developers are at the OS account level. They require a local admin login, not an Apple ID. Its somewhat similar to what Google does with Android.
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Yeah, I was mostly referring to the “install apps” part of your comment. You can just download installers from websites. Very few Mac developers rely on the AppStore as their only means to distribute apps.
As for the OS updates, the stuff around major point releases keeps changing. They were forcing people to download installers for major point releases in the AppStore for certain versions of MacOS. I don’t know if that’s still the case with Sonoma. The update experience got refactored about a year and a half ago.
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Was thinking that too, although there are some caveats, you need to at least log into the store to download apps as it stands right now. I think you can log out after installing them, but still. Also using FaceTime or iMessage require accounts, when Apple otherwise could have it set up to just register with the phone number only, have no account, and just be ephemeral to that specific device. (But then at that point, they might as well just follow the IMS video call standard that is cross-platform and do away with FaceTime altogether, and the mobile industry should figure out the SMS replacement to then eliminate iMessage.)