in a few seconds I can think of many many ways an ipad is crippled.

- look at your data directly and back it up

- backup and restore the entire device including apps

- use ethernet through the lightning port instead of wifi

- use general usb devices through the lightning port

- wifi scanner (apple disallowed it in ios early-on)

- tcpdump network traffic

- change the wifi-off shortcut to actually turn it off (matching settings)

- firewall

I'm sure people can think of other examples...

>look at your data directly and back it up

>backup and restore the entire device including apps

Ironically these areas are where iOS shines. Despite being a heavily walled garden, it grants you full backups and full user filesystem access (including things like keychain) via extracting those backups.

A comparable and unrooted Android tablet cannot be fully backed up, and you cannot inspect app/user settings areas of its filesystem.

> Ironically these areas are where iOS shines.

You as a device owner do not have access to the full ios filesystem. full stop.

You get way more access on unjailbroken iOS than on unrooted Android. The equivalent of the entire /data partition is available to both read and write via iTunes backups with very few exceptions.

On Android, you used to be able to backup maybe half of app/user data in this way (many devs opted out), now closer to zero (adb backup deprecated)

Yeah exactly, the main thing which is missing is being able to have direct access to the file system in a programmatic way, an to run arbitrary processes (including background processes) which operate on the file system. Until then the way software can be combined to do interesting things will be severely limited.

iPad Pro supports ethernet and general USB devices.

And allowing apps to sniff network traffic defeats the entire security model of the device which many of us like.

I want more privacy and security in my devices not less.

How does it defeat your security if other people want to look at network traffic on the device they purchased?

Because I don't want apps to be actually sniffing traffic whilst pretending to be something else.

You could solve this with OS-level permissions for this kind of thing, the same way Apple now handles cross-app tracking

Sniffing network traffic would not defeat anything, provided you are prompted about the necessary permissions.

The problem with those permission prompts is that many users blindly accept them. If a “sniff all network traffic” permission were allowed, it would take all of one day before Facebook et al release an update with it and start siphoning millions of users network traffic.

Apple does not want this.

Apple would probably also prefer it if I had to use an in-app purchase to pay my rent, but luckily we live in a nation of laws, and Apple doesn't get to decide everything based on unilateral self-interest.

All of this is available if jailbroken. There aren’t many people caring too much about most of these.

I personally enjoy parts of the first two. They aren’t deal breakers if I can’t jailbreak/root though.

>All of this is available if jailbroken.

should read:

All of this is available if you use the same exploits that malware often use to compromise systems.

"Jailbreaking" is not a feature inherent to iOS so stop trying to say it's an option. It really isn't.

An option is something that continues to be available to the user regardless of system updates and without restriction. As such, sideloading apps is an option on Android.

Jailbreak is not a feature. It is the result of the LACK of features.

I didn’t make my post clear enough. I was stating most people don’t care for these features that are available when jailbroken. My post was not about this being an “option” but that the list of features aren’t important to even the more geeky jailbreaking users.

Regardless of me not being specific in my post, your reply has a ton of assumptions and unnecessary attitude in my opinion.

Jailbraking is fine as a hobby, but it's not viable to build serious workflows on top of what's essentially a cat-and-mouse game between Apple and the jailbreak community

iPadOS is designed to extract the most revenue from the hardware, and the users. An more-open platform would allow for many things that would likely be really awesome for users, but is disallowed because that would threaten Apple's revenue streams.

Which is exactly what anti-trust regulation is supposed to protect us from, it's a shame it's quite impotent at the moment