Apple as an ecosystem that emphasizes trust. They believe they can charge a premium for this. Whether you think this should be "dispelled forever" is up to you - feel free to market your carriers phone however you want.

The app store, as the method that pricing, refunds, subscriptions etc are handled, is part of this story of trust or lack of trust.

And yes - apple does review use of permission by developers upon submission. Want to use a touch bar api, they may ask you to show how that feature is used in app (third party libs would use these features to help fingerprint machines etc). The irony - we've had people here complaining about how unfair it was their app was rejected (often because they link without knowing to some scam monetization library that abuses or tries to abuse apis).

What is incredible is that developers on HN seem to have no clue why people actually like what apple does. For example, when they notified you that you had a non-genuine battery - that was met with HN outrage. When they did things that made replacing certain key security sensitive parts harder (finger print sensor for unlock etc) - again outrage, and apparently they figured out a way to make it easier without losing security.

The name of the game these days is trust. Do you trust you telecom to ship a bloat free phone? Apple? The folks who have that trust are going to be able to charge a premium and gain more control.

The desire to have consumers installing any app from anywhere on the web that you can browse to using the web browser is FAR FAR more terrifying - but is what HN comments push over and over. Reality - when it comes time to buy their kids a phone, these same outraged HN folks - buy their kids an iphone :)

And yet, all top 10 apps currently on the App Store are considered the worst repeated violators of data privacy.

There's no need to pretend to be naive, PII does in fact go beyond telemetric touchbar behavior or your fingerprint sensor. The rest of what you said continues to have nothing to do with App Store review processes.

>What is incredible is that developers on HN seem to have no clue why people actually like what apple does.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair.

So true. They are so busy optimizing their dark patterns they don't understand why - in the big picture - clear pricing on subscriptions, easy cancellations etc - helps the entire ecosystem and brand. It's the tragedy of the commons I think.