Heck, I’ll just speak for myself. I’m a software engineer. I pride myself on being able pull things apart, understand how they work, and put their pieces together in unintended ways. There are aspects of Apple’s control over their devices that I’ve accepted grudgingly... because even being familiar with the tradeoffs they’ve largely benefited me, and all that I’ve given up has been either moot (UI hacks that are better served with other apps or just not available anywhere anymore) or not a hindrance for my actual usage (it turns out blocking system modification has made clever things I use be more respectful of the integrity of my system!). The biggest thing I’ve lost as an Apple customer has been due to third party developers turning my whole computer into a web browser. Glad it isn’t full of security holes!
Forget iPad replacing macOS, at this point I’m fascinated by the idea that an iPhone Pro might actually run macOS-like in the future for developers. It’s been a decade since the first jailbreaks were commonly available and we could run shells and other background apps—at the expense of battery life. Apple has built everything they need to keep things safe even if they open the sandbox... they could treat it like location permissions and continuously prompt, allow only some apps, spy or sandbox what function calls apps can make by default, etc. Yes, it could be abused, but they could cloud-scan files before running, or even require signing and submission. I know folks will keep pushing for fewer restrictions, and I know the business reasons that keep Apple from doing this. But this use case won’t ever actually go away...
OP is just saying that deciding to do that has a usability and security cost that some users will perceive as a net negative.
I know it’s a toggle, but as soon as that toggle exists app developers will use it to provide unsigned copies of fortnite to the kids, it won’t just be for pro users.
This is the point of contention here, imo. Jailbreaking, sideloading, and turning on developer modes are not always informed decisions. I've personally serviced hundreds of iPhones that have had all these things done because someone followed a set of instructions without knowing what they were doing or had someone else turn the option on without informing them and then they were exposed.
When I was younger, I preferred a Windows to a Mac as I liked to customize everything and make it look fun and cool and unique, and to be able to use many niche programs that only existed for Windows. I preferred Android to iOS for the same reason.
Now that I'm working most of the time, however, I just want something that works. I don't care about customizing all that much; I'll leave it to the (mostly) great designers Apple pays. I really value being less concerned about the legitimacy of things I download or view, knowing that Apple's choices to make a walled garden have protected me further.
Beyond myself, though, I'm immensely happy that my older, less tech-savvy parents have iPhones, and I bought my mother a MacBook which she has loved compared to her old desktop. All she wants to do are common tasks on it, and to accomplish them simply and quickly and without worrying about viruses.
I empathize with the jailbreaking community and honestly love how responsive you all are, and how you really make an effort to build things that bring people joy. I think there's millions of people in the world that prefer to have jailbroken phones and more customization and freedom, but there's also millions who prioritize as I do. There's a pro and con to every choice.
There are security implications of such freedoms which should be avoided of course for the regular users. The phones should be locked down as much as possible. But that doesn't have to be the only option.
This is way GrapheneOS [1] exploits Android flexibility and customization to try to improve fundamental OS security to the most modern standards and attempts to break the closesed walls of Google WHILE still shipping a fully locked down phone at the bootloader and OS levels [2].
The ideal world is Apple and Android does their normal security lockdowns for standard endusers for security's sake. Then they offer a separate hackable version where research and those crazy UI/UX hobbyists can do their thing.
In all technical senses this is entirely possible for a vendor to do. So it becomes a product question. And I'm convinced they will get ancillary benefits from the hackers doing expimentation in both security and UIs and whatever,\ from which to draw inspiration for their IRL produdcts. And possibly just as important - talent (developers, developers, ...) there are people who care about this stuff who just want to hack on their devices. These can be talented individuals and who knows some future leader within Google et al, the way the Napster guys are SV celebrities now.
I'm convinced there's enough ROI (yes commercially) for every OS platform to support this niche. They shouldn't be relegated to the ruffians and pirates on the fringes using risky circumvention techniques to achieve their goals.
I'm not sure that this works, because you can't draw the line so easily.
If there was an easily obtained unlocked device, more people would choose it than currently jailbreak. More people would make improvements and share them. The ecosystem would improve. There would be more things you can only do with an unlocked device. Which would attract more people, and polynomially more developers to the growing market. You get a feedback loop that ends with everybody buying the open devices.
The only way you get a walled garden is by successfully suppressing open alternatives, because otherwise the benefits of openness outweigh the costs and people start to move. AOL loses to the web. Proprietary Unix loses to GNU/Linux. Windows RT loses to actual Windows.
You can't get everybody to choose something where the only difference is that it prevents them from doing something they want to do. They only choose that if the choice is bound up in several other things they want and they're really choosing the other things.
But the underlying question here is not actually whether to have curation or not. Linux package managers are curated. If you create an environment in which all the good things are in the store and none of the bad things are, ordinary people have no reason to install anything from outside the store, and can then be trained to look with suspicion at anything that isn't, even if it's still technically possible.
The problem we have right now is that the assumption is false. The platform stores reject things the user actually wants, or would drive them out with high fees if there was some viable alternative installation method available. Which then drives users to uncurated installation methods, if they exist, which the platforms consequently then try to stamp out.
The better solution is to have first class competing stores. The competition solves the problem. Stores that charge excessive fees lose developers to ones that don't. Stores that reject good apps or allow bad apps lose users to ones that don't. You end up with a couple of stores that have low fees and high quality apps, giving people no incentive to leave the garden even if there is no lock on the gate.
But you have to leave the gate unlocked or the user's ability to leave doesn't cause the garden to improve to the point that the user has no desire to exercise that ability.
I don't believe that typical end users are knowledgable enough about computers to know that they can or should ask for this in the first place.
Anecdotal example: My computer illiterate mother wants to download some random unscrupulous DMG onto her Mac, claiming to be a file conversion app. I catch her in the act, and tell her no, don't do download that.
Now did my mother ever ask to be prevented from doing this? No. Does she even understand why me preventing her from doing this was a good thing? No. But was it in her best interests overall? Yes. I view the gatekeeping functionality of iOS as largely replicating my role in this scenario.
100x this - and Hacker News is really guilty of doing this.
How about we focus on making understanding the risks more accessible to users if we think there's a legitimate problem with users "not knowing what's good for them"?
Is requiring certified electrical wiring that much different from a “walled garden”? Some people tinker at the edges of their home setup, but you’d probably be pretty worried if you found out your average neighbor had rewired their whole house on their own following some lifehack they found online. Computers are connected in a different way than neighboring houses, but it doesn’t mean you aren’t affected by the decisions of your digitally-close acquaintances (from worms and botnets down to simple email/contact harvesting).
That’s not to say the world hasn’t benefitted greatly from software choosing velocity over robustness; other technologies have followed similar early arcs, causing damage before they matured. Maybe we’re at the point where limiting choice is simply one of our least-bad strategies for most people? For what it’s worth, I am pretty confident that the vast majority of people want computing appliances and not tools (why would computers be any different from any other consumer good?), so I find it highly unlikely that the pro-tinkering arguments apply outside of a tiny proportion of users. I definitely don’t mean to imply that this is the only way, but it seems like there’s already a spectrum of choices for consumers and sometimes it feels like we’re arguing to narrow the less “open” end of that spectrum because we’re projecting ourselves onto the whole population.
Yes it is very different, because those certifications are limited to basic safety whereas Apple's restrictions are a wild mix of security protections, paternalism (e.g the porn ban), protecting their business model, and staying in the good graces of authoritarian regimes.
If Apple really cares about security they should not blur the lines between security and unrelated issues.
>I am not sure if I've ever heard an "end user" ask to be prevented from doing something they actually wanted to do
...until what they wanted to do exposed them to malware or an app that they didn't know how to use or put them in a situation where their phone was randomly restarting the springboard over and over.
Of course no one would ever ask to be prevented from doing what they want to do but most people using these devices don't know exactly what "what they want to do" entails and the consequences of that. It's the same thing as Internet Explorer and all those toolbars that it's now known for in meme history. Of course people would want a toolbar that lets them automatically search for coupons or whatever it is they want to be notified of. Do they know that the same toolbar is also injecting ads or collecting data and keystrokes? Probably not.
I agree with your sentiment 100% (and my issues may be addressed in your TED talk which I'm going to watch right now) but there needs to be some way to acknowledge what the consequences of those actions are and, for me, I think a technical barrier or entry is the only realistic way to do that. Anything simpler will be taken advantage of.
- casual users do care about this stuff - just the other day for example my wife wanted to play some GBA game from her childhood - you can get that on play store easily, and even if you couldn't it's on other stores and in OSS. That's just not an option on iOS unless you're a technical user. Or more broadly recent Epic and Fortnite situation. Plenty of scenarios where Apple will decide what you can or cannot get and it won't work for everyone - you don't need to be a power user to be excluded
Apple has best products, HW and software wise, and they are milking that advantage as much as they can - not necessarily judging them but this arguing that it's in user interest is ridiculous, they are optimising for number of users affected vs profit they can extract - for example they had to buckle with big players like Amazon and Netflix because that would alienate too many users, but they will enforce their grip on the ecosystem if that means limiting a small number of users - and that has nothing to do with security.
A good compromise here would be an ability to enable developer mode, perhaps with some quiz or test that checks if you have the right skills to handle such a responsibility.
If you "sell" the idea of an alternative store as being able to pay less - then everyone* will jump on board.
*nearly everyone, there are contrarians and those who want to pay more just to show they can
Then, on the other hand, when the majority of people see their favorite app, album, book, movie, show disappear from their because the 'big company' decided they can't have it anymore, they do get upset, they just don't know what happened or why or what they can do to help it.
Android is a weird middleground; it's both too walled off and too open; you can get yourself pwned (without rooting) while you still don't have enough freedom to do whatever you want (without rooting). I like it's more open but then I prefer a laptop with full blown Linux (which is what I use most).
We cannot make an assumption that users don't care about X when they are not allowed to do X in the first place.
I like Apple's walled garden. I'm a developer for 20 years professionally and 10 more as a hobby. Writing this on a MacBook Pro, with an Apple Watch on my wrist and my iPhone next to me (I left the iPad at home).
I care that Apple's has this control over their ecosystem that I feel 100% confident on leaving my iPhone or iPad with my kid and know he won't follow some weird website instructions and brick/compromise it for example.
Right up until they’re locked out. It’s like not caring about privacy.
(I don’t mean to imply that one choice is necessarily more valuable than the other, just that they both exist.)
I know that this sentiment is going to resonate here, but I'm not sure it's representative of the overwhelming majority of the people actually paying for said hardware. The reality is that what tech people complain about in terms of lack of control over their devices has been a huge boon in device security for people who neither care about nor want such control.