EU's AltStore Gets First Native iOS Pornography App
58 comments
·February 11, 2025kemayo
Apple's stance that this is a shocking development, and previously the iPhone was some sort of porn-free zone is... strange.
Obviously, there's a web browser, but let's ignore that for now. More notably in this "we make you safe from porn inside apps" framing, there's incredibly prominent apps like Reddit or X, both of which are lousy with porn. If Apple thinks that porn is bad and worthy of being blocked from its store, they should take a look at that. This is just wildly hypocritical otherwise.
Syonyk
Are they doing anything with the on-device "Hey, this image someone texted you may contain nudity, are you sure you want to see it?" sort of filters with what's displayed in apps, or is this a parental control option?
kemayo
I believe apps can choose to hook into "sensitive content warnings" (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sensitivecontentan...) but I don't know whether any of the major social-networks-with-a-lot-of-porn apps actually do so.
Mostly, they're in the App Store with age ratings of 17+, so parental controls will block them out. No idea how that system interacts with third party app stores, either -- but if it doesn't work there, that was very much Apple's implementation-choice.
latentcall
Sounds like EU is the land of the free.
lawn
Meanwhile the republicans are doing their best to make porn illegal.
Spivak
Not sure I get the downvotes, this is a core tenant of evangelical conservatism which is now the dominant force of the GOP. Republicans might have a big tent but everyone else is getting squeezed out. The evolution of the US right has been happening since the tea party. It's been sad to see political Republicanism die out, they were a good counterbalance to center-left Democrats.
Syonyk
I assume if you mention US political party names on HN, you get a pile of downvotes immediately, valid point or not.
I'm not aware they're trying to make it actively illegal, though. Just at least marginally age gated to adults, which is far from the current situation of "If you have a browser and can type something that a search engine can correct into a porn search, you can access as much extreme content as you want, as long as you want, from wherever you want!"
The average age of boys being exposed to porn is about 13, and the bottom end of the bell curve is disturbing.
fsflover
Probably because you didn't bring anything to discussion that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity, https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Syonyk
The experiment of "all the porn for all the people with no limits" has been tried, and the results have been absolutely abysmal for humans.
Beyond the abuse and sex trafficking ties (or the right at the edge of the legal definition but certainly not entirely consensual), revenge porn, and such, the impacts of porn on humans have been exceedingly harmful. There's the whole "PIED" (porn induced erectile dysfunction) thing, where a boy or young man's brain has been so wired from porn that they can't function with an actual woman, you've got disturbing increases in physical damage to people (mostly young women) from boys trying what they've seen in porn, etc.
It's not harmless, on either end of the process, and as far as age gating, I'm not aware of any of the porn sites even trying to do anything until legally required. A 10 year old with a smartphone has no trouble finding things way over their head.
So, yeah. The experiment has been tried and found wanting. I'm perfectly fine with them trying to make it illegal, or at least "radically harder to access than it is currently," which is "zero roadblocks at all."
Society, and humans, were rather better off when you had to walk through the curtain into the back corner of the video store, or get something from the papered off magazine rack at a seedy gas station, than having it available, in total privacy, 24/7.
michaelt
Yes, dreadful stuff.
Unfortunately, for legislators to ban porn without breaking the constitution, they'd have to change the First Amendment.
And there is a process for that! IMHO the constitution is due for an overhaul anyway - perhaps while they're at it, the legislators could also sort out those pesky school shootings with some tweaks to the Second Amendment?
fsflover
> The experiment of "all the porn for all the people with no limits" has been tried, and the results have been absolutely abysmal for humans.
Any links? Alternative opinion: https://aeon.co/essays/when-it-comes-to-pornography-whats-th...
NotPractical
One important thing to note that isn't mentioned in the article: you have to manually add the porn app's source URL to the AltStore before it'll show up there. Because you have to browse to the (adult) porn app website in Safari beforehand to get the link, it isn't any easier to access porn this way than it is by typing "porn" into the search box.
Set up parental controls on your children's devices! Apple cannot protect them from the preinstalled Safari app (one of the most popular porn apps in the world) unless you take initiative. You can also block the installation of all apps outside of the App Store using parental controls.
dangrie158
I love the name Altstore PAL for the app only usable in Europe.
diggan
Poor innovation-less EU resident here, with PAL AltStore installed. Is it actually available? I don't find it while searching, or scrolling through the list of all the apps available in AltStore (a whole 5 of them). If it's in a external source, could you even say it's "In AltStore"?
jillyboel
> Alternative app marketplaces are required to pay a Core Technology Fee for each install
> Apple charges apps a Core Technology Fee (CTF) for each install after their first one million installs, but the fees don't kick in right away for small developers.
Still ridiculous apple got away with this one. The entire point is to free users and developers from Apple's tyranny.
martijnarts
It's still being investigated by the EU.
diggan
> Still ridiculous apple got away with this one
I'm sure enough that Apple won't get away with it, that I'm willing to bet money on it. The arms of regulation moves slowly, but they do move. Wouldn't be the first time someone got fined for not following the spirit of the regulation and trying to work around it.
EA-3167
Calling that tyranny really devalues the word, especially when you had to buy an Apple device to be "subjected" to it, and there are alternatives.
amelius
Why would alternatives be any better? It is clearly in the vendor's interest to lock down their platforms. Or are you talking about an open source alternative?
EA-3167
I was thinking about Android, or Librem, or jailbreaking.
null
fsflover
Calling this "alternatives" misleads into thinking they are reasonable and there's no duopoly:
https://mastodon.sdf.org/@jack/113952225452466068
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261
True alternatives, GNU/Linux phones, are not as polished as iPhones are.
EA-3167
Not having the alternatives you want isn't the same as not having alternatives, nor is it tyranny.
amelius
Content-filter != App-store, they are orthogonal concepts.
Get it, Apple?
diggan
I mean, they obviously don't, otherwise they would have done something about people being able to view porn in Safari.
wruza
Any screenshots?
bouke
The app screenshots shown in AlStore are quite sfw: https://cdn.fastpixel.io/fp/ret_img+v_8beb+w_2000+h_1125+q_l...
vednig
They've utilized EU regulations to prevent app from being rejected by Apple, and after recent request by EU to force backdoor for End to End Encryption for Apple Services, I think I've seen enough.
kmeisthax
The EU regulation is to prevent Apple from having a monopoly over mobile software distribution.
The UK (not the EU) wants to just force Apple to backdoor iCloud. Insamuch as this backdoor involves any on-device code, it's the standard iCloud daemon (ubiquityd, AFAIK) that runs so long as you have an Apple Account sign-in. (can you even use an Apple device without one?) There isn't going to be a mandatory "UK Surveillance" app that everyone has to install, it's all going to be done server-side without your knowledge.
If your goal is to spy on people's phones, shipping an app is not a great way to do that. You have to trick the user into granting specific permissions, use fingerprinting to correlate different data streams, and hope Apple doesn't catch and ban you. Furthermore, third-party app distribution means you have to convince your user to install random shit from the web, which lots of people are afraid of. And finally, Apple still reviews third-party distributed apps and still has the right to reject malware. The only control they ceded is that now apps they don't want on the App Store for non-technical reasons (e.g. they're a brand risk or the developers refuse to pay their tithes[0]) can live on AltStore PAL. But there's no additional spying being enabled that wouldn't have been available had Apple not been forced to respect third-party app stores.
[0] Note that if you do use third-party distribution you still have to pay a "core technology fee" per install, so you still have to pay a tithe, but it's a different and potentially smaller one.
pretext-1
That request came from the United Kingdom, which is famously NOT in the EU.
t-writescode
Wasn't that request by the UK, not the EU?
null
gostsamo
Never let facts stand at the way of an already formed opinion.
talldayo
Most globally informed Apple customer:
pjc50
.. what do these things have to do with each other?
vednig
The government regulations are coming in between the proper functioning and quality required for what's best for users.
troupo
"They've utilized EU regulations to prevent Apple from abusing its power that's why I'm going to bring in a completely unrelated bit of news from a country famously not in the EU"
Interesting:
"While Apple does waive the CTF for the first million installs of an app, this does not apply to app marketplaces themselves. This means every download of AltStore costs us €0.50, period. This is clearly unsustainable for a free app supported entirely by donations — especially considering we already have millions of users — and we’ve seen a lot of discussion hypothesizing how we could possibly afford this.
To us though, the answer is obvious…we can’t! So instead, we’re going to charge €1.50/year for AltStore PAL and pass the CTF onto our users."
So Apple's rules either require a deep pocketed free to play peddler like Epic, or push small independent stores into subscriptions.
This is still malicious compliance.
Not to mention that I never wanted "alternative stores" but sideloading... why would I have any store control what I install?