You do not understand because lots of apple users clearly have different usage requirements for their phones.
I tinker with stuff 8+ hours per day for a paycheck; when I'm using my phone, I don't want to tinker with it, I want it to just work, and my iPhone does exactly that. Someone has made a bunch of intelligent design decisions about the way things work— much better than with android phones— and I agree with them often enough that I don't care that I can't change them. My brain is busy; the fact that I don't have to think about changing them is great. It's an appliance to me. I don't try to reprogram any of my electronic kitchen appliances either, and I'm a software developer that used to be a chef. I'd much rather spend my time concentrating on the output than the tools. I get that it's not everybody's workflow— you do you.
I also really don't care if I can't install apps that aren't available through the app store. I use a teeny, tiny fraction of what is available through the app store... the chance of app store availability being a limiting factor in my phone usage is pretty much non-existent. I use a computer for everything I can't use my phone for, and it's usually better for those tasks, anyway.
So you consider an iPhone works so much better and its design is so much better than Android phones that you allow Apple to choose what you can install? I hope you never end in a situation like in Hong Kong where freedom matters more than design.
Yeah. Lots of people do. Giving up control means a lot, I get it. However I give up control with loads of devices, appliances and services every day. In exchange I expect my iPhone, my gmail account and my Samsung TV to make my life easier. They (hopefully) can’t read my mind, so my choices will always lie on a spectrum between: Taking all control, but having to do all the work myself vs. giving up control (and risk being betrayed) but not having to do the work.
> I hope you never end in a situation like in Hong Kong where freedom matters more than design.
Absolutely, but I wouldn’t trust most alternatives out there either. I honestly don’t know what I’d do in that case.
You're right, $8.79 is a RIDICULOUS price to expect apple users to pay for the former ability to use wired headphones!
Unlike literally 100% of iPhone owners, who can upgrade the second a new OS is available (if they’ve had a phone made in the last 5 years or so)
This is especially ridiculous considering the adverse security environment we currently inhabit.
This is of course scoped to here in the US, where most of the time Android phones have their OS entirely locked down apart from sideloading apps, ie no running different ROMs, upgrading out of what you're allowed by the network, rooting, running super user apps, etc
About Android - don't be crazy to buy Huawei/Xiaomi/etc.
mobile computing market size >> desktop computing market size
Certainly there are many apples to oranges differences, but I don't think it's fair to discount the "managed" nature of mobile devices as a component of their success.
The uptake in Chromebooks would be semi-supporting as well.
Also, laptops with wwan cards are a thing, but they also coat more, aren't a default, and can't just be bought at a conveniently located store. It also doesn't fit in my pocket or last nearly all day on a charge.
free of malicious software, without virus/malware/Trojan/bot/worm/etc., free of endless searching for the right app to do the job, free of complicated procedures and user interfaces, etc.
And if these mean that the company (Apple in this case) must impose certain limitations on their software (and hardware), then so be it. People are always free to choose which product they want to purchase and for the majority of Apple's users, it seems Apple's definition of freedom has been more appealing than that of the others. It's not like people are not aware that buying an iPhone brings with it some "quirks" (remember you couldn't send/receive files by Bluetooth on iPhone, or in the beginning, third-party apps were not even allowed on iOS, ...).
Disclaimer: I'm not defending Apple here. Just saying that I understand their reasons.
Let me ask a similar question: is preventing con artists from contacting the elderly with varying degrees of cognitive decline (i.e. people who would easily be tricked by them), totalitarianism? Maybe when it’s the government doing it, but how about when it’s a feature of some, but not all, phones?
Apple isn’t a monopoly†. You buy into their curated walled garden, by choice. Just like you see a movie by choice, or enter an art gallery by choice. At that point, you are intentionally handing control over your experience to the person or organization who curates the experience. But you can always revoke that control: just leave the ecosystem.
Analogy: City parks exist. National parks exist. National wildlife preserves exist. The former does not preclude the latter. If you visit the former and don’t like the curated nature of it, you can always leave, and go visit the latter, where things are less curated. But there is value and functionality in the curation of a city park. For one, you can take small children and pets to city parks and not have to watch them very hard.
(† If something is a monopoly, such that it’s hard to avoid using it, then this argument doesn’t apply. Facebook, for example.)
Case and point. I did not burst from the womb computer-savvy. I had to learn. Part of that was supported by the fact there were not highly technical barriers to entry in regards to expanding my computational toolset.
Getting something working on Android and iOS on the other hand, is over and again more complicated.
I can at least side-load to Android, but I must understand Sal and encryption enough to grok code-signing. That is not a trivial barrier to entry. For iOS, I essentially have to sign up as a member of a registry in order to even get something on the phone/tablet for development purposes.
My love of computing and figuring out how things work carried me to where I am today; but the high degree of friction that is increasingly implemented for no other reason than being good for business presents a form of computing that I'm still amazed anyone partake in as a pastime at all.
Hell, Android is specifically set up to prevent you as a User from doing anything you would conventionally do as a User of a computing system. It is very much a computing platform for the developer's and not the user's benefit.
It's a precarious balance to maintain admittedly, but what Apple has illustrated through their actions is that their Phones and AppStore are meant as an extension of themselves to do business first, and to be useful for what you deem fit second. Even if Hong Kongers ended up getting developer accounts to run the safety app, Beijing is well within their authority to use that list of "developers" as a basis for a crackdown by demanding Apple hand it over as a condition of doing business.
I can understand the luxury in just being able to get your Gram a mobile phone and not have to worry so much. I worry even more at the consequences in store a few generations down the line where the bunch of we Free Software nutters who remember what flying by the seat of our pants as root, damn the torpedoes, are not guaranteed to be around for to protest when increasingly large and entrenched models of proprietary software distribution networks and OS architectures lock users out of even being able to leverage honest-to-God General Purpose Computation.
The more decisions are left to the industry and supply chain, the more rights will be lost by the wayside in the name of doing business.
If you have some burning desire to hack the hardware, get a dev account and you can lode arbitrary code. Or just buy a different phone.
Who ever owns the phone owns the person and their speech, this is why the complaint over who actually owns the phone and what that means is so important.
> Or just buy a different phone.
The complaint goes beyond Apple and iPhone, Android does a better job of pretending you own the phone but all that really means is Google owns you instead of Apple. The problem is political not technological, all the common person can do is bitch and moan about it.
Mobile phones are like 3D printers: the technology isn't new, but within the last decade the price of 3D printer components dropped, and the availability of open source software to drive them rose, and an equilibrium was found where they entered the domain of non-professional tinker types, at which point we saw an explosion of creativity in that space. The only difference is that that equilibrium hasn't happened for mobile phones yet.
But people are working on it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2103809433/wiphone-a-ph...
It's gonna take a while, but once the DIY approach is a viable alternative, even for just the tech savviest 1% of the population, Apple and Google will have something else to be compared against, and that will effect their choices in a nice way. Or at least I hope so.
Isn't the answer to that just buy an easily rootable phone and flash an OS without spyware? There's a few manufacturers out there with official unlock tools and presumably supporting that practice would only lead to more adoption. (although, admittedly, this does require the hardware to not have spyware or backdoors built into it)
Also, you haven't made clear how giving users the freedom to install apps of their choice contributes to a negative user experience.
As to a negative user experience, console gaming won largely due to the lack of software issues. There are several reason for this, but inability to install random software really is one of them.
See https://pcsx4.com/compatibility/
The fact that consoles don't allow side-loading apps is a relatively common criticism of consoles, and one that hackers regularly try to fix. I'm grateful for that. I rather like being able to run emulators on my 3DS, or being able to back up save files from the Switch.
Of course, people don't get as upset about locked down consoles, because consoles are a superfluous entertainment device -- consoles don't really matter for anything. Phones are a lot closer to a laptop in functionality than they are to a console, and the effects of restricting software on a phone are more directly equivalent to restricting software on a computer than on a pure entertainment device.
That being said, substitute out this program for something like Dolphin with the Wii, and I think the point still stands.
There are people working on circumventing cross-platform restrictions for just about every console out there, even in cases where the restrictions are technological and not just policy.
It's not obvious to me, please elaborate with reasoning.
> Still, if you’re talking about running arbitrary software then try loading “Uncharted: The Lost Legacy” on your PC or laptop. It’s not going to work, because you’re always limited to a subset of software on any platform PC or otherwise.
This is due to Sony trying to push sales for PS4 by developing games exclusive to PS4. It's not the same thing at all. If Sony wanted to support Windows as a platform, they are free to do so.
> There are several reason for this, but inability to install random software really is one of them.
What are you basing this claim on?
Mass market internet capable consumer devices, with significant compute hardware used to run a wide range of software. That’s a rather narrow list of device categories.
> What are you basing this on?
Malware for one thing. But, also things like driver compatibility, it’s simpler to develop software for well defined ecosystems which consoles provide. Many non exclusive ports don’t happen because it’s surprisingly expensive to port triple A games the PC.
> It's not the same thing at all.
If you want to nitpick that then fine, Red Dead Redemption is on PS4 and XBox box, but never made the PC jump. Porting AAA games to PC is surprisingly expensive, even if getting it to almost work is cheap.
But, it’s vastly more widespread than that. Just try to load some of that realtime software running inside your car on a desktop it’s simply not designed for it.
I am not sure what you're trying to say. I asked you to elaborate on your claim:
> Consoles are a fairly direct comparison so the link is obvious.
Also
> But, also things like driver compatibility, it’s simpler to develop software for well defined ecosystems which consoles provide. Many non exclusive ports don’t happen because it’s surprisingly expensive to port triple A games the PC. If you want to nitpick that then fine, Red Dead Redemption is on PS4 and XBox box, but never made the PC jump. Porting AAA games to PC is surprisingly expensive, even if getting it to almost work is cheap. But, it’s vastly more widespread than that. Just try to load some of that realtime software running inside your car on a desktop it’s simply not designed for it.
Yes I agree that it can be expensive to port games to different platforms. Not sure how that goes to support your assertion that closed ecosystems are better. Platform makers want people to write stuff for their platform. It's the prerogative of the game/app makers to support the platforms based on their target demographic.
All I am saying is that:
> Limit what software can run and you vastly improve most people’s experience. Freedom is not just about letting people do anything, it’s also a question of what contracts they can enter.
This doesn't make sense, and nothing you have thus far stated helps to further your argument. Apple has incentives outside the user experience to have a tight hold on the iPhone ecosystem. Were they to do the same thing to the Mac, they'd face a strong backlash. No platform maker wants to deny people access to their platform willy nilly.
> I am not sure what you're trying to say.
Try listing out what fits that description. (Consoles, tablets, pc’s, and...). Then add a checkbox near the so called open platforms. My point is it’s a short list including PC’s, tablets/cellphones, consoles, and not much else. Smart TV’s are another possibility, though these tend to be even less open.
Anyway, it’s not that it costs money, it’s that it costs more money to make the port. Consoles take a significant cut of every sale and it’s often not worth it to port to windows due to the bugs associated with arbitrary code running on a users machine.
TLDR: Windows open nature results in more bugs and thus a worse user experience. It’s an inherent issue with open platforms relating to increased surface area for bugs to occur.
I think you are making an unsupported, and likely wrong, logical leap that windows' open nature results in a poorer user experience. I think by far the most likely reason an app/game maker wouldn't decide to support windows is the associated cost of supporting another platform. But many triple A titles do support windows and absorb the cost because in the long run it opens up the use of their product to a wider range of people. And Sony for instance is incentivized to not support windows in the games they produce because they have a competing platform, the play station. By making games exclusive to ps4, they incentivize users to buy their platform. But most games and apps are supported in windows because not supporting windows would result in missing out on a huge chunk of people.
Also BTW Mac OS is also open, you can install stuff outside the app store. Why don't you mention that? Is osx also buggy and provides a bad user experience due to its open nature? I ultimately don't understand the argument at all because no one is forcing the user to install anything, they can pick and choose between apps that they want. There are bad actor apps out there, sure. But if the user only installs well known and reviewed apps the chances of malware are low. Also Windows defender also goes a long way in protecting the system from bad actor apps. Finally, the only reason why you might be more likely to encounter more bad actors in the windows ecosystem than osx for example is due to how popular and ubiquitous windows is. And so I just don't buy the argument that open ecosystems result in a poorer user experience. Even if you write off windows as buggy and terrible, osx is a great counterexample to this argument, imo.
And finally, I'd pick the possibility of accidentally installing a shitty app on my computer over only being able to install apple/Microsoft approved apps any day of the year. This is primarily the reason I use android. Locking down the platform simply drives off a lot of users.
This is a bogus argument for the case of the safety app. There is people who wrote a functioning program designed specifically for the iphone, that other people were already using on their phones. Then apple, a third party, removed the right of people to continue sharing a correctly functioning program on their own devices. The iphone is clearly designed to run arbitrary software and it already did in this case, before apple's callous interference.
As to the safety app, that’s the kind of thing I would like to play with. You may or may not actually be able to emulate that stuff on PC hardware, but not all of it, more critically however your not getting the license for it.
PS: The removal of software is an argument about execution not the idea of a restrictive platform. The gatekeeper will prevent some software running on the platform that’s the basic idea, removing previously approved software is a separate question.
Now, modern smart phones are considered as general-purpose computing devices. And because they are placed in this category (and rightly so for their capability in both hardware and OS), a lot of people are going to expect freeform app distribution.
> If you have some burning desire to hack the hardware, get a dev account and you can lode arbitrary code. Or just buy a different phone.
You see, sometimes it's not just about the end-users. Developers cannot distribute apps to the general public on iOS without going through the App Store. Yes App Store adds friction to the app distribution process and that can prevent some malicious apps, but that's about it. Does it really lead to higher quality apps? Well no, just look at all the garbage apps on there. Quality of the store is always a balancing act; it has nothing to do with being a monolithic walled garden.
And all this comes with severe limitations. Localized developers are forced to conform to a suite of rules and guidelines placed by Apple for a global audience. Developers are forced to use monetization models (and has no say in the revenue split) provided by Apple. If devs can distribute apps freely or choose another app store just like they can on Android devices, I can't say for sure whether the end-user experience or security will be higher or lower, but developers will certainly have more freedom and enjoy it more.
Banning a "safety app" has entirely different consequences than not being able to play Halo. I don't understand why you think these are the same.
Well, for starters, I hear it's preventing Hong Kong residents from avoiding dangerous protest hotspots...
That's why there are options (mind you, very few in this case, but that's kinda beside the point).
Yet allowing anything to be installed is the cesspit of Windows virus laden software.
That said, I buy Android because I can side-load if I choose to.
Okay, I have seen this false choice enough times over several years and at this point it annoys me so much that I must speak up. No, Windows is (was? I have not used it for more than a decade) not the mess it is because it allows you to install anything. It is the mess it is because it there was no sensible source of approved software. The choice is not between anything goes and a walled garden, there is the middle ground of providing a solid source of approved software (frankly, I think Google has largely failed with this given the state of their Play store) and still allow side loading for cases such as the one mentioned in this very article. Heck, this was one of the amazing things I experienced when moving to Linux in 2005. You had 98% of your software approved and receiving updates through your OS, and then a game or two, oddball VPN, etc. installed in your home directory – it was endlessly refreshing.
With proper permission control and isolated storage for apps, installing anything does not equal cesspit of virus-laden software.
I completely disagree.
In particular, if there is a paid version in a store, then users will seek a free version outside of the store, and then receive a free bouquet of viruses. Or they seek a free movie or VPN, and Google suggests an application that isn't in the store: more free flowers installed.
Android has an approved store, and yet I have read articles lambasting the security of Apps, where the underlying reason was that users had gone side-loading. Fear damaging the brand.
or perhaps just make a massive group text in an existing tool like discord or whatsapp?
This is a massive advantage which arguably outweighs the disadvantage.
The argument I typically see goes something like:
"I don't want to have to worry about whether I should trust an app or not, so I prefer everything be vetted by Apple. If we allow users to install their own software, then bypassing the app store will become commonplace."
I personally disagree with this notion. In fact, I wouldn't mind a law that says "if a device has an app store, then it must be able to load applications outside of the store".
I think the fears of everybody sideloading malware apps are a little overblown. Many Android phones can have apps sideloaded (and are even rootable), but how many people actually do it?
How did we go from Microsoft getting sued over internet explorer to the situation we're currently in?
this is a great example of a superfluous law we don't need. if you want sideloading, get an Android phone. having no option to get a feature you care about is a problem. not being able to have your dream set of features on a particular phone is not.
The issue I have is that phones and tablets are slowly replacing general purpose computers for the majority of people (at least for day to day use), and there's a fundamental difference in how they operate when it comes to software freedom.
Apple can't be considered a monopoly because there's still a choice of Android, but what happens in the future if the ability to sideload applications on Android phones is removed?
We end up in a scenario where every application must be funneled through an app store where the hardware manufacturer can take a cut of the sales, and I'm not okay with that.
I used to have this exact argument with my dad all the time in the early 2010s; he liked apple and I liked android. I couldn't understand it at the time, but my dad liked how locked-down all his devices were. it removed a major source of anxiety he had using technology. years later, I realized it was pretty cool that we could both have phone OSes the way we wanted them.
Also, government mills mill slowly. In the anti-trust case against Microsoft (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...), where laws and jurisprudence existed, it already took 6 years from (first FTC investigation started in 1992, anti-trust lawsuit started in 1998)
I don’t think it is a matter of oversight getting weak; it just takes time. Certainly, the EU is willing to take action.
In the drive to close up security holes, Apple created a new one that can't be conceivably fixed by the user.
The user is ostensibly prevented from installing apps outside of the Apple Store to protect the data from malicious access, theft or destruction. The thorough app vetting process gives high assurances of that.
However there's a 4th aspect of security: security against service denial. Apple, by being the sole guardian and steward of the iPhone app ecosystem, made all their users vulnerable to service denial (in form of app removal). If there were alternative mechanisms available - ex competing iPhone app stores - the vulnerability would be negligible.
However presently the vulnerability is glaring: all it takes is single legal action - or even just enough of pressure from government on a key market - and the users are denied use of certain apps.