The people comparing Apple's approval process to 1984 are clearly drawing parallels with the torture scenes where the protagonist is ultimately convinced that he shouldn't have done what he did and Big Brother is ultimately right - which sounds exactly like Apple. If you don't like it, it was a good choice and you're just looking at it from the wrong angle.

You're speaking in black and white where shades of gray are clearly the order of the day. Google exhibits certain traits of the 1984 state, Apple others.

Then they are Winston Smith, not Big Brother.

No, in the perfectly valid analogy, we are Winston Smith, Apple is Big Brother. Though it also might be argued that in this analogy you are O'Brien.

Apple is not Big Brother: they don't use their technology to spy on and track users. They don't opt users into new privacy-violating features, like Buzz. The surveillance is the KEY reason why Orwell set it in the future--it's a technology that he can take advantage of to make the society seem that much more terrifying. If you're trying to find a random dictator whose rules oppress us, you have a feast of other dictators to choose from. If you're going to use Big Brother, if you don't have an analogy to draw with his omniscience and omnipresence, then you aren't making a good analogy. Unless you're in 10th grade and Big Brother is just a proxy for dictatorship.

You know, while we're on the topic, Google aren't exactly rushing full speed ahead to make the best app experience on a phone. It's not their incentive to work towards the best native app user experience, because that takes away from the web traffic that makes them the real money. And they can't track us in apps. But who cares, right? It's free. Another social contract of sorts.

Why is it so important to you that Google is evil and Apple is good? That's why Apple is like Big Brother. Fanatical, unreasoning devotion is a key component of Orwell's dystopia. Google doesn't have that.

All I'm saying is that Big Brother is a stupid analogy and that it can just as swiftly be applied to Google for its obsession with collecting personal data with their free services. This ultimately damages customer value because it commits them to pushing inferior web app experiences that must be downloaded from scratch each time a user attempts to access a particular service.

I am not for strong accusations and name calling (and I deliberately didn't mention Google by name in my original post), but evidently you have no problem making this personal. If you look over this discussion, you're the one affixing labels on everything (including me). I have no commitment to maintaining intellectually impoverished rhetorical positions. In my opinion, such positions are ruining the discourse. I still don't understand why free and open-source advocates try to brush development, security, privacy, usability, compatibility, and monetization issues under a rug. Can we not fix a price to those elements? Are we so extreme that we can't accept that there are tradeoffs inherent to the system, and that approval doesn't have to necessarily equal malevolent control?

In tech, if we don't appreciate--and point out--the nuances of different kinds of relationships and different stances regarding privacy, cost, and experience, then ultimately we lose as entrepreneurs and developers because we don't see the next big thing coming, or we overvalue something that consumers are not necessarily interested in. Equating app store approval with Big Brother doesn't help anybody, and it deliberately slants the discussion.

> Have these guys read 1984? "Big Brother" is supposed to represent the panopticon surveillance state, you know, one where your footsteps are tracked and recorded constantly. Sounds more like someone else to me.

Android is open source, if you believe it's spying on you, feel free to remove the bits of code you don't like, there are many ROMs available already. Now try to do the same with the iPhone, plus last time I checked it requires you to give your credit card before even using it...

But on the other hand, any carrier and manufacture can inject the needed tracking code without asking anyone.