Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI complained

Re:Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI compl... by StillBored on Tuesday January 21, 2020 @01:59PM (#22110149)

   They botched subsequent pushes on it because the bootstrapping problem around apps had grown too deep.

I don't really think that is necessarily accurate. Lots of smaller developers would be more than happy to have a green field for app development if another player were willing to put the effort into assuring the device isn't a POS, and is priced reasonably. Some of the larger apps (netflix for example) already have a dozen diffrent versions because they support not only ios/android but a pile of similar devices (TV's/etc) and likely don't have a problem with another platform if it has a future and has the prereqs (widevine or similar DRM for example).

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Re:Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI compl... by _bxg1 on Tuesday January 21, 2020 @02:03PM (#22110196)

Microsoft literally paid developers to port their apps to Windows Phone: https://www.theverge.com/2013/6/15/4433082/microsoft-paying-...

It's that chicken-and-egg problem where people don't want to use it because it doesn't have the apps they need, and developers don't want to make apps for it because it doesn't have enough users. Microsoft tried to throw money at the problem to middling success. But I think it was too little too late.

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Re:Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI compl... by StillBored on Tuesday January 21, 2020 @02:41PM (#22110690)

I'm not sure why paying developers is a problem to bootstrap the ecosystem. Although, if they were paying for temple run (as the image might suggest) that seems odd. Mostly because presumably they should be targeting the apps everyone uses that don't have good replacements (aka netflix/prime streaming/etc).

I would guess that they aren't the only ones. Do you think LG/Sony/Samsung/roku/apple tv/firestic/etc all got the netflix app ported for free? Maybe. Plex probably isn't getting paid, and they do it too..

But MS was a special case, it seems to me that every time I looked at CE/Mobile/etc they were tossing existing app compatibility aside for the latest and greatest toolkit that went with some not particularly good set of phones.

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Re:Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI compl... by Marsymars on Tuesday January 21, 2020 @05:45PM (#22112568)

> But MS was a special case, it seems to me that every time I looked at CE/Mobile/etc they were tossing existing app compatibility aside for the latest and greatest toolkit that went with some not particularly good set of phones.

Their (forward) app compatibility was actually very good. I wrote a WP7 Silverlight app in 2011 that still works on the last release of Windows Mobile 10.

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Re:Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI compl... by StillBored on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @01:32PM (#22120478)

But that was basically quite late in the game, microsoft had been making a phone OS's for ~ a decade at that point. In 2011 it seemed like MS was already putting it on life support.

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Re:Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI compl... by glogla on Tuesday January 21, 2020 @03:54PM (#22111441)

It was not just any anonymous developers, it was Google specifically making Gmail and Youtube not working on the Windows Phone. They refused to port their apps, and when Microsoft created clones (i.e. Microsoft built Youtube apps) Google made them not work on the back-end and threatened to sue MS.

It was just monopoly abusing its walled garden and being anticompetitive, nothing else. Not that Microsoft would behave any differently, if the positions were switched.

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