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That's fcking my mobile. I paid for it. I own it. If I want to install something on my owned device, who the f is Apple to stop it?

Think about it this way: A chair supplier telling Apple to only allow it's employees to sit a certain way. Or architects telling it to only build their HQ's a certain way. Not as an advice, but, enforced.

How ridiculous is that!

7 comments

> How ridiculous is that!

Not as ridiculous as being well aware of the limitations of iPhones wrt to installing applications outside of App Store and still buying one. People should vote with their wallets. Me personally I do not mind the limitations, but if you do - don't buy it.

> People should vote with their wallets.

That only works in efficient markets, which, obviously phones are not. An oligopoly where the barrier of entry requires like a billion dollars to spin up new phone hardware, a new OS, and an app ecosystem is not a place where effective competition is going to occur.

If we require sideloading via untrusted sources, then that's just flipping the situation on its head to where, now, people who do want a phone with a single authority screening the entire software stack (from the bootrom to third party app code) don't have a phone to pick from that will suit their needs. With such a law, it becomes impossible to enter into the market at all with a product for these customers.

The phrase "vote with your wallets" should just be eliminated because it's completely meaningless. You're asking to "just" coordinate millions of people to do some collective action or to change their behavior.

Do you know what the tool for doing that is called? Government. Vote with your actual votes.

Ironically, there's a big overlap between the "my vote doesn't matter" groups and the "vote with your wallet" groups.

Vote with your wallet works in that, if someone made an undesirable product when right next to it at the Best Buy is a superior product, the inferior product sells zero units and thus the company loses millions or billions of dollars in sales. If both of those products suck, then why would consumers buy them and Best Buy stock them? Or is it that both of those products are invaluable and some people are just mad that the products have certain features (security restrictions) which they don't want.

Can you make an iPhone, just without Apple?

Nope

Their designs are protected at the point of a gun through patents and copyrights. Breaking those literally means the police will use force to stop you and to ruin and imprison you.

Take away these restrictions and you’d see an identical iPhone, but without Apple’s restrictions. I bet that phone would sell millions. That would actually allow voting with your wallet to be real.

Since the government enables these behaviors, it is also the only one who can actually reign them in. Unless these nearly perpetual lock-ins stop, voting with your wallet is impossible.

So you want the result of Apple's tens of billions of dollars of hardware R&D, but without paying them for it.

There’s no fundamental human right to a monopoly of an idea. This is actively acknowledged in the language of the US Constitution.

If Apple actually delivered what was best for consumers, knock-offs wouldn’t matter too much.

My actual argument is that either we must regulate the idea monopoly we created or eliminate it by stopping the government protectionism.

It is the Apple way, since the Apple Classic was introduced to the world, don't like it?

Give other company your money.

I don't think they should remove it, but I also don't think it's that ridiculous. Apple has always been against tools that allow execution of arbitrary code. Which is fair; it gives applications on the App Store the ability to bypass review. At some point it's on you as the consumer to understand the limitations you're signing up for when you get an iPhone.

> A chair supplier telling Apple to only allow it's employees to sit a certain way.

Chair suppliers don't have a history of decreeing sitting posture. The iPhone OTOH has been locked down from day 1.

I would bet my paycheque you'll buy another Apple device.

Or states demanding yearly inspections if your car is up to safety standard and your modification didn't make it more dangerous / unlhealthy for the public. Absolutely ridiculous.

I don’t see how these two things are in any way related. If your car is unsafe, you could kill someone. If you sideload an app on your phone, that only affects you. There’s a line we must all draw between personal freedom and the right of others to also be free when you decide to live in a society with other people.

> If your car is unsafe, you could kill someone. If you sideload an app on your phone, that only affects you.

If there is no authority / safety-check over the apps, potentially thousands could lost millions from new wave of scams. Some sort of oversight has to be in place for devices with that much personal data. In the worst case scenario, Apple could get sued for that.

If this happens, maybe the device should become unsellable since you could sideload unremovable adware and then sell it to an unknowing buyer.

An malicious app that turns your device into another botnet zombie definitely does affect others.

Apple has always been like this. Better hope they dont decide to throttle down your current hardware when they release a thinner one next year and deem yours obsolete.

This only started with the iPhone. Apple has been around much longer and was a regular computer company before which treated their users like adults.

Imagine for a moment you're an Apple exec who gets to see real usage numbers and revenue numbers per platform and is on board with the current company belief system.

You see MacOS devices completely dwarfed in both users and profit per user by iOS devices.

As that executive, who keep in mind probably doesn't share your opinions on open technology or they would never have got into that position. What decisions would you be making on the direction of their platforms.

I can't help but think we're only going one way and it's not towards something more open.

Exactly. Apple executives threw macOS under the bus in the Epic trial, saying that its capability to run arbitrary software makes it unacceptably insecure (e.g. https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/19/22444353/mac-malware-not-...). It shouldn't surprise anyone if a future macOS version requires a paid developer certificate to run unapproved apps or access the Unix layer.

MacOS is indeed unacceptably insecure. Imagine someone downloads FortniteForMac.app (as in, a fake Fortnite for MacOS download since it's not available except on Windows right now) - that can lead to a keylogger and clipboard watcher beaming your data to some foreign data lake, where it'll soon be used to sign into your Bank (proxying requests to your computer to appear less suspicious, of course).

This is exactly how it works since forever on Windows, yet the sky hasn't fallen yet.

The Apple II enabled expansion and the creation of (for the time, amazing) software like VisiCalc. Starting with the original Macintosh, Apple has had a continuous tug-of-war over whether "creative freedom" is better than a "curated experience". iPhone give the "curated experience" side an unprecedented amount of ammunition for their side. Malware apps like Facebook continue to feed that side.

You can see it in the back and forth dance on the Mac. Will Apple ruin it by closing down too much? Time will tell.

Apple has been trying to take control of users ever since the original Macintosh with its attitude of hiding things from them.

DOS came with a debugger that let you modify and create your own software. The Mac didn't.

Planned obsolescence was also not something new --- the infamous Lisa was designed with clock hardware and software that couldn't make it past 1995, for a machine released in 1983. (The PC AT, from 1984, has an RTC that went to at least 2000, and is still a design in use today.)

They have no history of throttling phone hardware to drive sales of new devices. What makes you think they would start doing it now?

There’s a lot of criticize Apple for, but they are among the best in the industry for supporting old mobile phones.

Apple giveth: firmware updates for 5 year old phones

Apple taketh away:

"Apple on Wednesday agreed to pay $113 million to settle consumer fraud lawsuits brought by more than 30 states over allegations that it secretly slowed down old iPhones, a controversy that became known as "batterygate. Apple first denied that it purposely slowed down iPhone batteries, then said it did so to preserve battery life amid widespread reports of iPhones unexpectedly turning off. "

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay...

Extending the lives of phones with degraded batteries is a good thing. In fact, the feature still exists today.

The thing they did wrong was not telling people. Now they do.

As stated in the other comment, old batteries often physically couldn't handle the voltages required to run at peak performance, so if iPhone detected these conditions, it would temper those peaks so that the phones would stop randomly turning off for people. The issue was that they didn't tell affected device owners that this was happening, and now they do in Settings.

I had a Mac before the iPhone came out. Apple used to be pretty great.