>Superior for developers because their margins improve.

First, this is debatable itself, walled gardens bring their own advantages for developers too. But second, why exactly should developers be the primary concern? There are three parties involved after all: the platform creator/maintainer, the developers, and the users. Why should users not have the choice to essentially collaborate with the platform creator to promote their interests, even at the expense of the developers?

I mean, I know this is HN, and a lot of us wear developer hats. But we tend to wear user hats too, and even in many cases family (or business) support hats. Switching to one of those, developers on open platforms are often jackasses and can develop their own power imbalance vs users. Sometimes (often even!) a single particular piece software can become so vital and represent so much investment that it's much harder to substitute than even the platform itself. At that point any single user faces big hurdles vs the developer. The likes of Adobe and others have repeatedly been able to force very user hostile choices on their customer base because their customers couldn't really coordinate collective action.

One thing Apple offers is a way to buy into a collective action system against developers. For many people that's not a bug, that's a feature, so complaining about how developers are "hurt" or "make less money" isn't going to sway them one bit, quite the contrary. They're generally glad when Apple tells devs their way or the highway[Android/Linux/Mac/Windows]. Of course, this concentration of power also has negative implications too in terms of censorship, inability to do some very useful creative development and utilities, potential for major harm if/when Apple goes bad, etc.

But too many on HN have refused to recognize the strengths and the reasons why it's been popular and to try to find ways to incorporate some or all of those while still allowing power users/misfits/hackers to push the envelope. I think our collective disdain for many regular non-tech users is part of why we've ended up in this mess in the first place.

This comment is 100% true.

But for a user, especially a non technical one, a walled garden is a superior ux. Updates automatically, single stop to find anything and easy discovery, no worry of viruses/malware except in extreme circumstances, cheap apps (never seen a .99 app in the wild) etc.

Automatic updates, single stop and little worry for malware are all perfectly achievable without a walled garden. It's been a thing on Linux for ages. It even gives you the choice of how high you want your walls, whether you only trust the debian developers or a user-made aur package or anything in-between.

Perfectly achievable, at the expense of being an end user nightmare.

The reason I'm buying an iPhone is I don't have the time to care about how high the walls should be and to ensure every app I use isn't abusing the SDK to suck up data. The reason I'm paying a premium for Apple is I'm choosing to trust them rather than trust every developer.

The day apple, microsoft or google would manage updates of a whole system as well as some linux distribution would actually be the end of many user nightmares.

Unless you don't install any app, you still trust all the developers of the apps you install. Walled garden is just a nice way to name Authoritarianism applied to a platform.

It might make you feel safe to have apple deciding every bits of what you can do with your phone but it does mean that: - it's secure - the apps you are using are - you still have very low control over your data.

You just pay to close your eyes and feel safe.

That’s true of all closed source software, not just walled gardens. Any time you don’t have the source, you’re trusting that the developer isn’t screwing you over.

I’d rather trust Apple than the cumulative two dozen developers that have their software running on my phone.

Or to put it another way, Apple provides systems administrator services with every phone. Most medium and large businesses pay a LOT of money for systems administration to ensure that their desktops and laptops work reliably.

And yet the only way it was successful on the mainstream was via ChromeOS and Android, which hide from userspace that they are even using the Linux kernel.

You are confusing "because of" with "in spite of"

Where is the evidence that any of that was required?

Apparently yes, given the amount of "Linux" developers that rather pay Apple for a UNIX desktop experience instead of making "Year of Desktop Linux" actually turn into a reality beyond the usual 2% from Steam surveys.

Your example seems particularly weird to me since Spotify's business is having extremely broad hardware support. They set up shop on everyone's platform. I'm sure desktop/laptop listening is a sizable chunk of their use but it's probably dwarfed by all the cars, phones, smart speakers, TVs.

In the Spotify analogy, maybe the music artists would play the role of developers here—-get squeezed for the benefit of end users and the platform owner.