The state of federal law is that you own your iPhone and can run whatever software you want on it. Jailbreaking is legal, largely because you own your iPhone. The law just doesn’t force Apple to make it easy for you.
On a practical note, I’m interested in thoughts on why Apple might try to lock down multicast, specifically, but I have to scroll through dozens of comments arguing about a software system (iOS + App Store) that is now over 13 years old. Is there anyone on HN today who does not understand how iPhone software works? Why do we have to rehash a decade-old conversation on every single iPhone/iOS Apple story?
EDIT - Since I’m still in the edit window, I might as well link to a comment that seems actually useful and relevant to this blog post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28287064
There are other interesting and useful comments if you scroll down…
Because people are mad - still, and baffled - still, that Apple is successful and prosperous despite not catering to the niche needs of your average HN commenter.
I discuss lots of things that I do not loose my sleep over. This whole HN is just an entertainment for me. Distraction from work so that my brain does not melt.
>"Maybe just use whatever you want instead?"
I do use whatever I want. And what I rant about is not for you to decide.
Because there's new people in the world every day and they need to hear this important conversation, which is new for them. If you are already aware, it does no harm to you to just ignore the conversation.
If there is such software is inside your civic then no, you don't own it. Honda does. The word "ownership" is in part defined by the ability to exert control. If Honda controls who drives the car, where, how and when, the owner is indisputable Honda.
It's entirely within the rights of a company to lock down their hardware if that's how they sell it to you, but it should be equally within the rights of the hardware owner to bypass those "protections". If Honda decides to lock ignition behind an arbitrary clearance check (pulling a John Deere), they shouldn't be able to retaliate if that lock gets bypassed -- as long as that distinction exists, we will always be proper owners of the things that we buy.
If we were to upgrade the saying "possession is 99% of ownership" to the digital ream, it would be something like "control is 99% of ownership." The distinction between possession and control is only relevant for smart devices.
They may be mandated to do so:
> U.S. Senate bill seeks to require anti-drunk driving vehicle tech
* https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-bill-seeks-requir...
See also BMW and microtransactions:
* https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/2/21311332/bmw-in-car-purcha...
Cars and their infotaiment systems aren't marketed as general-purpose computing devices in the first place. iOS devices very much are.
The specific question here is why Apple is putting new restrictions on multicast. Unfortunately all the informative comments are far below this rehash sub thread.
I bet they don't. And Apple would've lost some part of their user base if they were honest about this with their users, not just developers.
Though around me in particular, many people became acutely aware of that in 2016 when Pokemon Go became huge and those with iPhones found out they can't just download the game from somewhere else and install it to bypass the geographical restrictions in the app store. Some made separate Apple IDs for a country where it was available. Many were envious to those who use Android, because you'd just download an apk and be done with it.
If “regular users” aren’t taking the same stance as you, maybe it’s not because they aren’t aware, maybe it’s because they have different use cases and priorities.
Apple is very good at disguising these limitations such that you don't notice them unless you start actively thinking about iOS development one way or another. In other words, you only become aware of the walls around the walled garden if you try to escape it.
Anyways I digress, though you really think that Apple not wanting you to install an unsanctioned iPhone app is going to cause outrage? Sideloading has been a thing for a long long time
I can install any aftermarket parts I want to install in my Civic, because I own it.
I use the “flashlight” on my iPhone all the time but I remember when the only way to use it was to open the camera app, switch to video mode, and turn on the flash. And Shortcuts is one of the most useful app available for an iPhone and it was an idea patched together using APIs in a way Apple never intended. In fact, Shortcuts could be way better if Apple didn’t have so many seemingly random and arbitrary limitations.
Because this is the possibility of people to cash in on their "I told you so". Also, it is not too late to either change direction or jump ship; if we take this without complaining, the situation will only get worse.
You are bound by 17 U.S.C. § 1201 to not attempt to alter the car in ways Honda does not approve.
Not that simple. Since the DMCA/EUCD, it's complicated.
If something goes haywire in my phone, it can't possibly turn into a 2 ton death machine, which is something that can happen with a car. Cars have stringent safety regulations that cell phones do not. So... bad example.
It is not clear to me why it would it would be different from the “Local Network” permission.
When you buy a phone, you definitely own all the atoms in it. You can take it apart and use the bits to make jewelry. You can take all the phones you have and assemble them into a piece of wall art. Apple has no say in what you do with the object.
But your belief that physical ownership of the object should mean you can make it do anything you want is… bounded by your actual capability to do so.
You can probably extract some of the parts of your phone and reuse them - maybe with care and patience you could figure out how to use the screen, or the battery, or the camera as part of another device. Again, not something Apple can stop you doing.
But expecting to be able to use a device to do something you want to merely because you know the potential to do so is inside is an unrealistic expectation. A cotton t-shirt might contain enough thread to be able to be woven into a pair of shorts, but you can’t complain to the manufacturer that the way they made the t-shirt makes it hard for you to turn it into shorts. They sold it to you in a useful, valuable configuration. They’re not obligated to make it easy for you to reconfigure it to your will.
Apple actively design their products to not allow you to reconfigure them even if you have the tooling. The shirt manufacturers do not prevent me from taking a old shirt and making oil rags from the fabric.
That doesn’t seem quite so evil, does it?
Yes, a device manufacturer putting locks on my device that I can only open by "apply[ing] through a form on their website" does seem pretty evil to me.
"I sold him the car, officer! I just refuse to give him the keys to actually start it."
I understand the risks of allowing local network access, I'd like to unlock the lock.
Why does apple still have control to say no?
> Note: You can test your app using the iOS and iPadOS simulators without an active entitlement, but using multicast and broadcast networking on physical hardware requires the entitlement.
You’re free to access that functionality of your device, using software that uses it responsibly.
So using it solely in ways Apple approves of - Since they're the arbiter of "responsible" here.
So how do I own this device again?
Who the fuck is Apple to tell me what responsible use looks like on a device that I own, on a network that I own, in my own damn home.
Similarly, I own a car. Can I take off the seat belts? Physically, yes. But legally, a vehicle without a seat belts is no longer a car and I lose the right to enjoy driving it on public roads.
Ownership was never about physical possession. It's about gaining some rights.
Back to phones, the challenge is to demarcate what rights does an owner get when they buy a phone. To side with Epic Games, the discussion is even more complicated by Apple's (purposeful) confusion of owning a phone with having access to an ecosystem of apps for that phone. I can do whatever I am capable of with my iPhone, but I may lose access to the ecosystem of apps.
You not being allowed to drive a car without seat belts has nothing to do with the car, and everything to do with the road.
You own the car. You share the road.
You can drive that car anywhere you want with permission from the owners, you just can't share the road we all paid for together unless you put on a god-damned seat belt so that John the EMT doesn't have to see the 4th smeared human body on the shared road this week when you crash it.
(You might own some networks. But you also might own some roads. We'd stretch the analogy to your home WiFi being akin to your driveway, I guess.)
The fact that that is an extremely complicated thing to do is not apple’s problem.
My issue is that Apple (and many other manufacturers, this isn't really Apple specific) add complexity solely to act as digital locks on what is otherwise a fairly obvious and achievable task.
Take your ROM example - Why should I even need to rip it off and replace it? I know damn well how to flash ROM. I have the software tools available. I have the image file with all the drivers I need/want. The only thing stopping me is digital locks in the device.
Are the locks themselves evil? No, clearly not - I lock my house when I leave, and I'll probably leave my phone locked most times too.
Are the locks evil if I don't own a key? Pretty clearly yes.
Can I rip the whole device apart, interface directly with the ROM, and flash it? Probably - assuming I buy some much more expensive hardware. But that sorta defeats the point of having the device, yes?
Just like it's not reasonable to sell me a car without a key.
---
- Congratulations - you own this brand new car you just bought!
- Great! Thank you so much, can I have the keys to drive it now?
- No, no... of course not. When you want to drive it, you phone us up, and we come unlock and start it for you
- Wait... what? That's bullshit - I just bought this car!
- Well, you're welcome to break a window and hotwire it to drive it. But do be aware we'll report this as theft to the police, and depending on what you tinker with we might also throw the DMCA at you
- I just want to be able to drive MY car as fast as I like!
- okay, but the trouble is the way this car works, if we give you the ability to disable the speed limiter, there's literally no way we can do that that doesn't also open up the possibility that when you turn on the radio, the radio station might broadcast an ad that causes an uncontrolled acceleration.
- that's a stupid way to design a car
- well yes, but this is an analogy car, not a real car. The real system in question is a turing-complete networked device designed to run arbitrary third-party software, so... the analogy is going to be slightly flawed.
And no, Apple isn't going to report a theft if you physically damage your phone, nor are they going to have a DMCA complaint if you hack your own phone in ways that let you change the way the software on it behaves (you might run into DMCS issues if you try to distribute tools to help other people do that, which is... definitely dubious, but that's what the law says; it doesn't have a great deal to do with this case of the Apple restrictions on which software the OS trusts to use its multicast API, though.)
---
This - this piece here is the fallacy in your argument. There absolutely are ways to do this. Matter of fact, Apple themselves have a nice little set of digital keys that lets them turn all these locks off as they please.
So the argument is not "We have no way to do this safely" it's "We don't believe you (the owner of the damn device) can be trusted to do this safely."
Which brings me right back to - you don't own the damn thing.
Apple adds these arbitrary digital locks since they protect against the threat model of physical access, whether that be an attack thanks to leaving the phone unlocked or giving your passcode to your friend to use for a while. This is all in disregardless of whether or not the customer actually has this as part of their personal threat model.
Which they still own and have.
Adding an optional "You phone us and we can unlock your car with a copy of your key" is fine by me. As long as I still have the fucking key.
----
For the second part - The security boogey man is not a compelling argument to give up ownership rights and enter digital serfdom where you only own a device if you use it in the way the manufacturer intends and approves of.
I'm not asking them to stop selling devices with locks. Hell, I'm even fine with them keeping a copy of the keys (which they have right now). I'm just saying: As the owner of a computer, I deserve to have a copy of the fucking keys that make it work.
Zero of which will be bought by me.
>Apple adds these arbitrary digital locks since they protect against the threat model of physical access
Apple can add as many arbitrary digital locks as they want. The problem is that they keep the key instead of giving it to the user.
Under the DMCA, if you rearrange the atoms or attempt to describe how to rearrange the atoms in a way not approved by the phone manufacturer, you are a criminal.
Copyright, and in particular the DMCA, has superseded your ownership of the atoms. You must do with them as the true owner of the atoms (Apple for example) permits.
No object should ever actively, uncompromisingly preclude me from using it to do something of which it is capable. Objects can suggest I take a certain course of action, but ultimately they must follow my instructions without trying to impede me. Any other way and I don’t truly own the object.
It is up to you to figure out how to get the electrons in the antenna to wiggle in the appropriate manner to make that happen, but there are absolutely no constraints preventing you, as the owner of said iPhone, from doing so.
Yes it will. The premise of your claim is wrong. It impedes me from doing lots of things, like running apps that aren’t approved by Apple.
Good luck with that, but don’t blame the device - the object you bought and own - for your failure to be able to.
In the UK you can buy a freehold house for £250k and that's it. Or you can rent one for £800 a month, although that confers certain rights. But between those two, you can buy a leasehold house, which has obligations to pay a ground rent. You can buy a freehold house where you are obligated to pay a management company to maintain common areas.
"Buy" and "Rent" are certainly not clear cut.
With a car, I can rent a car from Hertz, or I can buy one for cash, or I can lease one, or I can buy one with a loan payment secured against the car, again there's no clear line between "buy" and "rent"
Because the government didn't step in early and say "Oh, that's just an obsolete feature, you can't do that with it, we'll remove it" and pass legislation in say 2005 to set the maximum ground rent at a notional £1, the "investors" got bolder. They added escalator clauses, after all £1000 per year is a nice earner today, but it won't be much in a hundred years, so let's say it doubles every 25 years to account for likely inflation plus some profit.
Actually wait, the idiots are still buying them, let's say it doubles every 10 years.
And next thing you know, some of the people who "own" a house are paying almost as much rent as people who don't "own" a house, oops.
Funny that the property owning, rich investor classes in the Tory party don't seem to be in a big hurry to actually fix this, although they do say it's a "Priority" (like everything else) when confronted. I wonder how much money Rishi earns every day from this "mistake" that he never got around to doing anything about as chancellor for example...
https://www.nytimes.com/1976/07/10/archives/queen-warmly-rec...
With an Apple device it certainly is muddy waters because you purchase hardware while simultaneously in some weird lease agreement for the software.
I guess it’s like buying a house in a gated community with very strict home owners association. You can purchase the house but if you want to put a new door on it you gotta go through the motions to ultimately get denied the color you want, etc.
And if Apple was the association they’d have a neighborhood watch ensuring 8PM curfews.
In this case, the party setting the rules is more like the rich person who originally built and "sold" the houses (but still enforces curfew, and changes the rules whenever they feel like it).
As they said, with leasehold or some things with freehold it's not quite so simple.
I used to have a leasehold house, which I "bought" but also sort of rented, or at least rented-ish the land while owning-ish what was within the bricks.
I have a freehold house now, but there are restrictive covenants which technically govern what I am allowed to do to my own property (these are not council/etc permissions but private ones).
The term "buy", at least in the UK when it comes to housing, is a sliding scale.
When buying a flat or a non-detached house, you usually fall into an ownership law called "bostadsrätt". In essence, you don't buy a house. You buy stocks in a housing association, which grant you the right to use the chosen flat/house. The housing association is pretty much run like a company, with a yearly board meeting, a CEO, a CFO, etc. Your ownership is proportional to the surface area you bought.
So it is buying then.
I'm on board with the idea that there's a lot of arrangements in between full ownership and pure rental, as long as we have terms to describe the meaningful differences.
But in all these cases we use the word "buy" to buy the car or house, just like we use the word "buy" to take in posession of a slab of electronics
The problem is not that there are gradations of "ownership". The problem is that Apple (and many others) conflate the terms and deliberately obfuscate exactly what your rights are when you "buy".
And completely missed the main point - buying/owning a house can be complicated, so we frequently involve lawyers to represent our interests.
Buying a phone shouldn't be so complicated. But, not only are EULAs overly long, they're often written in legalese which is beyond the comprehension of the average person.
If they refuse to provide it for purely commercial reasons despite having full technical ability to do so, you might have a case that you were misled into purchasing a subscription service. Ideally, you would find some advertised capability that is only enabled for apps sold though the App Store, a hidden subscription fee especially considering its onerous value.
As much as I want the court to decide that “buy” cannot mean anything less than “indefinite and irrevocable license” I’m expecting the judge to decide the case in Apple’s favour on the basis that consumer expectations have changed over the past 15 and that no “reasonable person” would expect a $15 impulse-buy of an intangible product to _last_. After all, you may have your VHS tapes from K-Mart you bought 30 years ago, but can you actually watch them? And you are “buying” a license to DRM’d content after-all and “buy” isn’t legally defined that way (Yes, I recognise it’s a terrible argument, just playing Devils’ advocate)
…or Apple will just change “Buy” to “Get” and it won’t make a difference to their bottom-line at all. I’ll bet that Apple’s profits - or even revenues - from purchases on iTMS for movies and TV shows are a rounding error compared to AppleTV+ subscriptions - and iPhone hardware sales, of course.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or just a bad example. Yes, you can still watch VHS tapes, since they're physical media that can be decoded by a VHS playback device. You might have trouble finding the hardware, but if you have the hardware, it will still run – it's not going to require a software update.
A bad example given HN's audience - but I imagine of most normal-people, the majority of those with a VCR will have left it in the attic or basement and never bothered to connect it to their modern LCD TV. If it was a home-video camcorder vid then it's likely already converted to DVD if it's worth preserving.
In that sense, you do own an Apple product. But if you want to stay in their nice little walled garden, that ownership is more like buying a house that comes with a benevolent dictatorship HSA.
It has a Market Cap of $320b, way bigger than Sony, Time Warner, Viacom and MGM put together.
Apple on the other hand is worth about 7 times as much as Disney.
A locked down phone without software updates will soon become not practical to keep using.
We have an old elevator in my building. It gets inspected year to year. If replaced it has to be up to code. A new up to code elevator, won't physically fit in the space the old one is). We're also in a "historic" district which is another entity of denial.
You are right that upgrades can become a nightmare of codes/regulations. At least in the US these entities are controlled by a government we in theory elect so its at least partially our fault. Also at least in the US, when the government "takes" or changes a rule that destroys value, there is always the threat of a lawsuit for the value destroyed.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/nov/02/after-grenfell...
If my purchase of a home meant I had no participatory rights in the HoA, and they can still change the rules at any time on me, and didn't have to disclose in plain language the existing ones upfront, then yes.
It seems to me that if Apple had no more than 10% of the mobile market anywhere this just wouldn't be an issue. If that's what some people wanted, fine, they could get it. The reason it's a problem is, as it turns out, this model works really well for a lot of people and is fantastically popular.
So I am open to arguments for regulating mobile phone platforms, if that proves to be necessary. I just don't think it is, none of the arguments Ive seen so far are compelling. They mostly seem to be sour grapes. "I want to buy X product with P, Q, R features and nobody is making one, we should force them to by law". No, that's not how that works.
ADDED: And if it's not obvious from the context, by "network" I mean a network that can communicate with the broader world, not just a LAN.
0: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/07/apple-to-acquire-the-...
For the primary networks at issue here, cellular networks: The FCC, and regulations restricting what devices can access which EM frequencies legally.
* https://www.sierrawireless.com/iot-blog/what-are-private-lte...
Not sure about connectivity to the larger / global SS7 network.
I think it’s closer to: I bought a 10% black box (90% open) widget in the 1990s, and now in 2020 that same widget (with a few more functions) is 80% closed. And: why can I no longer use a generic computer for what I want to use it for? We’ve forgotten that an open distributed learning web is possible, and how instead computer literacy (programming) is very low because most of us can no longer follow our curiosity and look inside technological systems; only ‘experts' are allowed to do that (someone wrote about that recently, that whenever he talked to older/earlier computer hobbyists, how most of them mention that they are pretty disappointed by today‘s black box world/web).
And no they’re not ‘sour grapes‘, they’re just sensing the painful ways in which the commons has been plundered, and feeling frustrated by the way people such as yourself pretend that there are still many benefits to be found in locked down/black box platforms and devices, which there aren't.
The completely ludicrous part is how normalized all this is today. How much our tools are now over-engineered, non-modular and non-repairable; how much black box shit we produce. Literal shit. Single use shit. Biological systems have no waste, yet our current production systems produce the most toxic, anti-life sludge the world has seen (see Baotou -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_UdqZdFr-w). Today we produce coffee machines that have iPads sitting in a dock with virtual buttons to choose options. An iPad. What the fuck. What is that? Infinitely less complex technology was used to send people to the moon. What a complete and total waste of valuable resources and laborers' time!
I'm talking about how we could have so many more open standards and decide to produce only high quality stuff. But no, our culture teaches us to discredit those who came before and to commoditize tiny incremental updates, slapping our own names on them (‘branding’) to please our neglected and alienated souls. I’m so tired of this false story of the need for competition. Humans are copying machine. It’s ok to copy! It’s how we learn and grow.
Anyways, to get closer to a 'universal basic inheritance' - a commons that respects actual scarcity, and thus also the abundance of digital resources (scientific knowledge and technological blueprints), we need a new system for accounting. I believe http://valueflo.ws can offer us a very possible way forward https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vymAHXGSM14: they are radically distributed supply chain systems using the Resource-Event-Agent ontology, built on fully distributed tech, e.g. holochain and activitypub.
To see an exciting future that has been buried yet not forgotten (it's a new Cybersyn documentary): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJLA2_Ho7X0
>...pretend there are still many benefits to be found in locked down platforms and devices, which there isn't.
Now you're in lala land. People derive enormous benefits from ubiquitous access to easy to use computer technology all the time. They're just not the benefits you personally seem to value or understand.
And roughly zero of them can make a phonecall, or a contactless payment, or to find directions on the go because they are not portable and internet connected.
Telephony has always been very closed--fringe phone phreaking notwithstanding. Heck, some of us have been around long enough to remember when you had to rent a phone from a regulated monopoly.
And in the 90s, Windows was mostly your choice in a computer. You could build your own PCs but you mostly had to run Windows. (Linux was still quite early days at that time.)
Access to computing under the hood is much more democratized than it used to be even if the vast majority of people choose to use effectively appliances for certain tasks.
My mobile phone in the 90s was certainly not 90% open, it was far less open than my current iphone. I guess it was easier to change the battery, if that's what you mean? Swapping a proprietary battery doesn't count as open in my book.
My desktop computer in the 90s on the other hand was far more closed than my current one.
This line of argument is frankly incoherent. That many, not all, available mobile devices remain firmly under the control of their makers after purchase is not because some free marketeer (or cabal thereof) foisted these devices onto unwilling recipients. This situation came about because the majority of mobile device users saw the deal on offer and decided they were better off taking it that walking. The real source of the status quo is the average consumer... no matter their ideology. That buyers weigh promises of "Just Works", the status of owning the cool new device that's in fashion, and some guardian supposedly lurking in the background keeping them safe over your own (seemingly apparent) priorities is a matter of each individual choice.
Private property rights haven't been cancelled at all or by anyone. There simply aren't enough people interested in owning devices that they fully control. Insofar as there are few alternatives to the status quo... blame the privacy activists and those clamoring for "full control" for not better convincing the masses that what they're giving up for iOS & Android is more than they're getting by buying these devices. As a free market extremist myself, I guarantee you: if people stop buying these devices because the deal is perceived as bad the situation will change.
Finally, if I try to infer what you might be for (rather than what you're against), which I do because it's the only reason to call out "free market extremists", is that you want a small group of "our betters" to decide what exactly a mobile device should be, over and above all those that find the current deal sufficiently satisfactory. You would have your priorities made the only choice over the interests of the majority of consumers. Ironically, perhaps, you'd eliminate the broader spectrum of choices by forcing what choices were allowed... wanted and valued or not. Naturally, I'm reading a lot into your short comment... but what solution do you really see that isn't a free market extremist position that doesn't come close to what I think you're saying?
"saw the deal on offer and decided they were better off taking it that walking"
The same reasoning applies to loan sharks, drug dealers and mafia. 'Unlimited' free market always degrades into oligopoly or Mafia rule.
"you want a small group of "our betters" to decide what exactly a mobile device should be"
You want that, and you have that- a small group of powerfull men decide to do with your device. Tomorrow your device uodates and startps reporting you to police for speeding, and there is fuck all you can do.
I am not asking for a communist mobile pgone comitee, I am asking for the word ownership to mean something. It's not a difficult concept.
-- 1) Open Chrome.
-- 2) Find and Download APK. https://i.imgur.com/ZFZb1uE.png
-- 3) Accept warning and Open APK.
-- 4) Go to settings. (This only has to be done once) https://i.imgur.com/R8FzTzP.png
-- 5) Toggle Install Unknown Apps for Chrome. (This only has to be done once) https://i.imgur.com/K0ADO2q.png
-- 6) Click back (This only has to be done once)
-- 7) Click install. https://i.imgur.com/xVSndex.png
-- Done. https://i.imgur.com/fyasTK9.png
Once you do this for the first time, the process reduces down to 4 steps each time after: Open Chrome, Download APK, Open APK, Click Install. Done.
As someone who has worked retail in the past, and who currently works in IT: starting with this assumption generally minimizes headaches down the road.
There are only so many hours in the day: people learn what they need to get their job done, and tend to move on. Some people are quite dim, but others don't have the time/energy/motivation/need to learn the details.
About Aunt Susan , you could have the device locked by default and have a more complex process to root the device, like some code/password that is in the box of the device, in that envelope Apple PR team could inform Aunt Susan that she should not do this unless she is tech competent or a communist.
Turns out a lot of people don't want to deal with the responsibilities of completely owning a device (updates, anti-malware, app origin), and are willing to give up some control/ownership in exchange for convenience and being able to get on with life. (Certainly not everyone of course.)
Whether this view of convenience is short-sighted and will be regretted long-term remains to be seen.
When I have conversations with non techy friends and introduce them to my take on the privacy and consumer rights issues, and they take the time to look into the problems and think about it, they've almost always come back and said the costs in loss of rights, market diversity, ecological impacts, or simply in dollars, are not worth the value provided by huge companies like Apple and Google.
They both ruthlessly squash competition and innovation that threaten their bottom lines, but somehow project wholesome images as innovation engines and friends of consumers. They both ruthlessly exploit employees and partners, while somehow appearing to be wholesome and desirous places of employment.
They're both soulless megacorps with institutional algorithms that prevent any threat to the control over a domain of profit. When such institutions arise, outside the control of any human or group of humans in the loop, they should be forcibly broken up. That level of power and influence belongs in the hands of people, not inhuman constructs.
I've been an iOS and Android developer—as in, paid to do it. Was an Android phone user before doing any mobile dev. Finally got my hands on IIRC a 3rd-generation Surface at work a few years back, as a test device.
Having extensive experience with the competition, I now choose Apple phones and tablets for a few reasons, functionality very much among them.
I doubt most "technologists" care about writing code for their phone to begin with, and I don't know what you mean by "non-buggy web access". That doesn't mean I think most "technologists" would pick Apple (I really don't know) but I don't think I'm the outlier here, preferences-wise, even if I am on which platform I choose.
> Having better photo sharing and phone call capabilities, less device restarts
Photo sharing's never been a problem—what am I missing? I don't talk on the phone much so maybe that's actually terrible (it seems entirely fine?) and I just don't know it. Device restarts? How often do you think I restart my iOS devices?
> the ability to caption audio for times when having the speaker on is inconvenient or not loud enough
That is cool. Not something I'd use personally, but it's cool.
> supporting restricted guest accounts are also features that
Account management is my biggest complaint about I-devices. Mostly the iPad—I don't really care if iPhones continue to have only two modes (full, and PIN-restricted "screen time" mode—which I don't use anyway, so I wouldn't mind if that disappeared, really) but true multi-account would be great on the iPad.
> most people who don't worry as much about fashion would not want to give up.
Hahahaha.
I program my computing devices constantly, and with my phone being a computing device I have near me almost all the time, I naturally program that as well.
> I don't know what you mean by "non-buggy web access".
Webkit is extremely buggy and the only supported way to access the web on iOS. On other platforms, if one engine is buggy, I can use another.
> Photo sharing's never been a problem—what am I missing?
Uploading photos to your server in the background.
> I don't talk on the phone much so maybe that's actually terrible
You can't route calls through other services, you can't record calls (which the first makes trivially possible), you can't have your phone answer the call for you and show you a realtime transcription or save the transcription for later viewing, you can't have the phone wait on hold for you, etc. The iPhone is extremely limited as a phone.
> Device restarts? How often do you think I restart my iOS devices?
Every single time you need to update a system app.
I suppose that's the difference: the price they pay in user control and freedom is swapped for experiences and abilities to which they would never otherwise be exposed.
I prefer not to frame those people as ignorant in a negative way. It is we who set them up with those devices and taught them how to use them, we were just as ignorant.
Many Android phones come with unlockable bootloaders. Again, how many of those who bought such a phone know about this capability?
What I'm trying to say that it's fine to sell a device in a locked down state. What's not fine, however, is not providing an unlocking mechanism, possibly deliberately well-hidden like it is in case of Android bootloaders, for those who know what they're doing.
Apple’s policies are guided in part by profit motive but also by security nihilism.
"Voting with your wallet" doesn't work on most technology markets, where products and services are not commodities, and where the barriers to entry are insanely high. Yes - insanely high. Sure, you can get a $100 computer and a $10/month Internet connection and start writing software for millions, except it won't do you much good - software is the easy part. To compete with Facebook, you need to bootstrap a whole social network. To compete with Apple and Google on the phone market, you'll need to bootstrap your own hardware manufacturing, because all the smartphone vendors are into the same user-hostile crap these days.
Projects like PinePhone are probably as far as you can reasonably get on the "smartphone, except not user hostile" front. It's worth looking into why they don't succeed. It's not as simple as "people must not truly want it because they aren't paying the premium to get it".
Not according to many on HN who argue that it is precisely why they purchased an iOS device instead of an Android one.
I think we have to be really careful about trying to push our ideals on others via regulation.
raises hand
It's not the only reason, but it is a reason. With government asleep at the wheel on regulating things like subscriptions, scams, spyware (which is, like, most software these days), et c., I'm living the anarcho-libertarian dream of paying a corporation to be my regulator. As it naturally would in the real world, this requires them to be big enough to distort and control markets, for it to be worth paying for. Does that mean they're behaving as a monopoly? Yeah, probably.
This sucks, of course, but it's what we've got.
On one hand, the locked down iOS clearly hurts a lot of businesses and broader market competition.
On the other hand, Apple has been open and honest (and rather boastful) of the locked down nature of iOS since Day 1. Consumers have very clearly voted with their wallet time and time again that this system (and it’s tradeoffs) is the one they prefer.
To force iOS open is to undo the choices that consumers have made. But to leave iOS restricted is to harm broader business competitiveness.
You’re right that if Apple had marginal market share, this behaviour would not be problematic.
Broadly speaking, I’m not all that sympathetic to the plight of the big-name developers like Facebook and Match Group. They’ve collectively made users so cynical about privacy, security and the general trustworthiness of software that it’s prompted users to take refuge behind these hardened walled gardens. I just hate to see good independent developers have to be harmed as a consequence of that as well.
I chose iphone because a string of bugs left a sour taste in my mouth with android, and inertia locked me in. I definitely don’t want this level of locking it down, and I doubt a majority of iphone buyers want this.
I am also fully aware that if I want a mobile hackable device I will have to find another option and I am fine with it.
And by any measure, this already put me in the minority of minorities. I doubt most users would want a more open iphone if they are made aware of the trade ofs. Why should a businessman want to know more technical stuff in order to use his phone? just so we geeks would be able to sideload stuff? Well, he don't want it, he actively don't want the device to give him this freedom, because them he would have to be aware of boundaries that he didn't have to before, more cognitive workload for him for no value added.
And regardless, Apple has never hidden the nature of iOS. These consumers have clearly decided that the tradeoffs of the walled garden were acceptable, despite there being plenty of more open alternatives on the market in the early days of the iPhone.
Security, privacy, reliability and “it just works” was always a major selling point of the Macbook too.
The dichotomy between secure and locked and open but unsecure is a complete strawman. It is possible to be both open and secure. People would still be able to only install applications from the App Store even if the iPhone was less locked.
Apps on Mac OS X can absolutely screw up your machine. Adware in particular is a big problem for novice OS X users (speaking first hand here, having had to support these users). That’s an exceptionally rare occurrence on iOS.
I’m comfortable with the security model on macOS, but would be very concerned if that same model were applied to iPhoneOS, where users (myself included) carry significantly more private information.
On my phone, I want applications to have access to as little private information as possible, even if it’s detrimental to functionality. Call me a security nihilist, but security and privacy is by far my #1 overriding concern on mobile platforms, given the wealth of personally identifying information these devices gather.
More succinctly: the threat model on mobile devices is not the same as the threat model on personal computers. It’s inappropriate to apply the same security to both platforms.
1. Third party developers
2. A subset of power users
The broader end user appears to be quite satisfied with the status quo.
It’s a weird situation where anti-trust law (which ostensibly exists to protect the consumer) is likely in opposition to broader consumer sentiment.
It’s a very different situation than Microsoft’s antitrust in the 90s, where consumers strongly supported the antitrust actions.
Customers mostly didn't care about Microsoft antitrust trial in the 90s either. It was mostly affecting third party developpers and companies selling computers. The situation is not particularly dissimilar except Microsoft had a clear monopoly while Apple and Google are a duopoly and Apple is seen as a lifestyle brand to defend by a rabid minority of its customers while Microsoft was strictly seen as a tech company then.
It is also important to note that Internet Explorer was a VASTLY SUPERIOR PRODUCT to Netscape. So Microsoft competed, fair and square. The antitrust trial was just Netscape getting assmad that they were beaten at their own game.
No, we've heard plenty of people here on HN specifically say that's why they prefer it.
If you buy a car, is it your car? You very possibly cannot do things with it independently, on your own, without manufacturer involvement or without voiding any warranties you have. The same idea extends to many things. I'm defending Apple here, but this idea that it's not your own device is silly IMO.
(prediction: I'll probably get downvoted)
My argument is not about cars, really, it's just a point I'm trying to make.
Some people might want to have full access to the OS, but allowing custom software in the userspace would still be a huge step and enough for most people.
p.s. It's hard to compare a computing device to a car because what's an equivalent of usespace in car? Changing oil? Changing tires? You can do it yourself, you can even change spark plugs, without voiding your warranty.
By all means throw shade at Apple for tripping on a power complex that puts Battersea to shame, but insulting this writer’s awareness doesn’t fly. They are not such a fool as suggested.
You're not telling the truth.
Apple will recycle any device for you for free. They may even pay you for it if it's in reasonable condition and reasonably recent.
This is one of thoses cases where I agree with the free market people that competition is good. If there were more companies that made Apple devices, then you would be able to buy a non-defective Apple device, too.
And: In a rational society, I could just download the source code and make the change myself. Actually, in a rational society the people that make the computers would not be incentivized to artifically restrict them!
But if you make something for the world at large, you should stick to the rules. They're not unreasonable, and they are one reason why iOS devices are some of the most secure devices out there.
I grokked everything up to this comment. Apple has extensive trade-in and recycle programs [1],[2]. Or did you mean something else?
You own the hardware. You license but do not own the software (as is the case with almost all software nowadays, including FOSS software). If the software from Apple is not to your liking, jailbreak the hardware and install software that is more to your liking.
This might take some effort as newer releases of Apple software are harder to jailbreak so you might have to stop installing new Apple OS releases to give the jailbreaks a chance to catch up to what is on your phone.
In particular, the author complains about "prostrating" themselves, when they actually want to write apps that would run on ANY users device that could have relatively serious privacy implications because instead of providing a specific service they want to do a wildcard discovery.
Also the button on apple.com says "Buy now" not "Rent now".
> they sell a computing service
Nothing has changed, Apple maintained full control all the time. You have absolutely no power in this matter and no rights, you are simply a revenue source, the only thing you can do is cease supplying money to Apple.
I fully support Apple remote bricking all hardware past a certain age to drive the sales of newer models. It's just a matter of time until you will start to see phones with "3 years limited software support". Once the 3 years are done, a splashscreen appears warning you that the device is no longer supported and insecure, thus unusable.
It sounds remarkably like a video game console or a stereo receiver.
That makes sense really since the main purpose of a consumer computer at this point is to, well, 'consume'.
It's funny to think back on an era when the average privately-owned computer was bought to actually do something useful.
Whereas on Android you can simply download the APK from within the device. No host PC needed. No developer cert. No expiry.
That's funny, he believes he owns an Apple device. Sorry, no. Apple locks down the device with strong crypto and rents you limited permissions, they sell a computing service, not a device. Apple are the only ones who get to say what code ultimately runs on their hardware.
The confusion is common due to the specific way the lease agreement is structured: you pay a lump sum for the device custody and future rent, you lose that sum if you damage the device, and you are responsible for recycling the outdated hardware instead of returning it to the owner.