🚀 Apple is bringing sideloading and alternate app stores to the iPhone - The Verge

The big news is that third-party app stores will be allowed on iOS for the first time, breaking the Apple App Store’s position as the sole distributor of iPhone apps. The changes will arrive with iOS 17.4 in March.

Here’s how the new “alternative app marketplaces,” as Apple called them, will work. Users in the EU and on iOS 17.4 will be able to download a marketplace from that marketplace’s website. In order to be used on an iPhone, those marketplaces have to go through Apple’s approval process, and once you download one, you have to explicitly give it permission to download apps to your device. But once the marketplace is approved and on your device, you can download anything you want — including apps that violate App Store guidelines. You can even set a non-App Store marketplace as the default on your device.

More places to choose from is always good. Thanks, EU.

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🚀 I’ll never stop blogging: it’s an itch I have to scratch – and I don’t care if it’s an outdated format | Simon Reynolds | The Guardian

I miss the inter-blog chatter of the 2000s, but in truth, connectivity was only ever part of the appeal. I’d do this even if no one read it. Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed 3,000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy. No rules about structure or consistency of tone. A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved: I feel _zero _responsibility to “do my research” before pontificating. Purely for my own pleasure, I do often go deep. But it’s nearer the truth to say that some posts are outcomes of rambles across the archives of the internet, byproducts of the odd information trawled up and the lateral connections created.

“Ramble” is the right word. When blogging, I can meander, take short cuts and trespass in fields where I don’t belong. Because I’m not pitching an idea to a publication or presenting my credentials as an authority, I am able to tackle subjects outside my expertise. It’s highly unlikely I could persuade a magazine to let me write an essay comparing Bob Fosse and Lenny Bruce, or find a thread connecting Fellini’s Amarcord, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch and Jacques Tati’s Playtime. (…)

Freedom and doing it for free go together. I’ve resisted the idea of going the Substack or newsletter route. If I were to become conscious of having a subscriber base, I’d start trying to please them. And blogging should be the opposite of work. But if it’s not compelled, blogging is compulsive: an itch I have to scratch. And for every post published, there are five that never get beyond notepad scrawls or fumes in the back of my mind

I think I have read, even shared, this piece before, but I just revisited it thanks to David Enzel and it resonated again with me, so here it goes.

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