The big difference between "Apple's app review process" and "seatbelts and airbags" is that car companies acknowledge the latter are fallible.

It's not about adding layers of protection or not; it's about being transparent with your customers about how effective those layers actually are.

I don’t think any one of my less technical friends has any belief that the App Store is infallible or even mostly secure. Apple doesn’t advertise it much, and if they did I’d be happy to call that a mistake.

Just read their copy for the App Store: https://www.apple.com/app-store/

> Because we offer nearly two million apps — and we want you to feel good about using every single one of them.

> Apps must adhere to our guidelines.

> You should never have to worry about inappropriate content.

> Every day, moderators review worldwide App Store charts for quality and accuracy.

All of these are far stronger claims than I would be comfortable making about the current state of the store.

Disagree, they seem very reasonable. But also no one is reading those terms really, they aren’t being pushed in ads or shown at the store.

Do you have any ties to Apple?

That is the most ridiculous implication.

'We did not expect anyone to read the terms of the product, so we shouldn't have to deliver on what we promised.'

That is not resonable.

Apple is using weezle-words like "should" which gives them wiggle room, but I guess it will be up to a court to decide.

I have no ties, other than owning a few of their devices. I think you should up your prior that there exist people who generally think this is ok.

I think about 0 out of the first 100 people I know that I think of have heard any version of those claims (maybe 5 now since a few read HN). It’s probably not even a top 10,000 trafficked page on their site.

Do you have any ties against apple or for a competitor?

Car manufacturers are going to face the liability issues when they try to sell "self driving" cars. Volvo has for example ack'ed this in public years ago.

https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/7/9470551/volvo-self-drivin...

Weird, I can flash whatever code I want to on my car's ECU. There's even an entire subculture dedicated to modding ECU firmware.

You absolutely cannot, unless you have an open ECU to begin with. Typically this is only sporty type cheap cars (evo, wrx). But even if you were to take on such and endeavor the difficulty of such a task and the knowledge requirement will scare off the unexperienced

Flashing your car's ECU is illegal. Or more specifically, federal and state laws make it illegal to operate an automobile on the open road or highway after you've altered a vehicle's emission control devices (which includes the ECU).

In contrast, it's legal to jailbreak an iPhone.

The Apple review process is not in any way equivalent or even similar to seat belts and airbags. Not even the government can be fully blamed for bad drivers since people don't actually need a driver's license in order to drive.

Punishing companies for adding protections to their products is an insanely backwards incentive. May as well turn off sandboxing, and lock screens. If they ever break, it’d be a liability!

Nah. If you're gonna set yourself up as the ultimate arbiter of what I can run on my device, you are absolutely to blame for any harm that comes as a result.

Protections? Encryption is protection. Address space randomization is protection. This Apple review process? This is just humans failing to do what's expected of them. Also known as negligence.

there’s a lot of faulting apple here, when you point out it’s a “humans failing”. Does this mean you understand the process completely and you can do better?

Probably not,

which is why he hasn't placed himself in the position of "arbiter of what's right and wrong on phones", the way Apple has with their App Store.

so then what’s the argument here, if not perfect, remove?