Apple is reportedly preparing to allow customers to sideload iPhone apps from alternative app stores beginning in the first half of 2024.
The App Store will soon no longer be the official place to get apps. But it’s not a change Apple is making out of its convictions. Instead, EU regulators are forcing Apple’s hand to comply with the bloc’s Digital Markets Act by March 2024.
The stakes are high. Should the company fail to meet the deadline (it won’t), the EU could slap it with fines as much as 20 percent of its global revenue. Apple will also see a revenue drop after this change, considering App Store commerce generated $1.1 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2022 alone.
iPhone sideloading  could be a “highly controlled system.”
Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman says Apple could try to outsmart EU regulators with a “highly controlled system” for installing apps hosted outside the App Store.
He provided no further details, so let’s hope that “highly controlled” doesn’t mean Apple will intentionally make sideloading so clunky and convoluted to discourage it.
The EU has been debating whether the iMessage service counts as a core platform service. To that end, Gurman says Apple will change how the preinstalled Messages app and third-party payment apps work as part of the upcoming changes.
Will sideloading come in iOS 17.3 or iOS 17.4?
Gurman claims that the changes could arrive with iOS 17.2, but that doesn’t sound right to us because iOS 17.2 is currently tested and will drop by December.
We think Apple will release iOS 17.2 in a few weeks and then restart the beta cycle with the iOS 17.3 beta sometime in January. Doing so would give the company plenty of time to test the iOS 17.2 update before launching it publicly by March 2024. It’s also possible that sideloading will come with 17.4.
Will iPhone sideloading be permitted outside the EU?
Most certainly, Apple will keep sideloading restricted to the European Union until regulators in other countries force these changes. Lawmakers in the United States are already debating legislation that would force Apple to permit sideloading.
What is app sideloading?
Apple has argued that sideloading will decrease convenience and security by requiring users to add payment data to a store ran by a third-party company.
Part of Apple’s pitch to developers is that the 15-30 percent take on App Store sales funds costs associated with running the store, hosting apps, creating and maintaining developer APIs, providing bandwidth and marketing, etc.
This used to be true in the early days of the App Store, which debuted back in 2008, but many, if not all those points are no longer valid in 2023.
Apple’s way or the highway
There’s no reason why a third-party store like Epic Games Store couldn’t be as convenient and malware-free as the App Store. Change is always good, but for far too long customers were forced to take Apple’s way or the highway.
Well, sideloading could end up giving the App Store a run for its money. We’ll be curiously watching to see if the looming competition between Apple and alternative app stores has enough oomph to lower prices for the user.
But if Apple intentionally makes sideloading too clunky, the whole thing could end up like third-party keyboards: People have been asking for them for a long time and when Apple finally permitted third-party keyboards, it restricted their functionality so much that ordinary users don’t even bother installing them anymore.