> Add a user, I do.

For a user, Apple's app store will remain available. Your love for Coca-cola isn't ruined by the existence of Pepsi.

It is, if the Pepsi is poisoned.

Pepsi being poisoned will not affect your Coke.

How are you going to enjoy that Coke while your system is down?

Why is my system down?

Look, it’s not my analogy, but I think you’re all being quite disingenuous.

If I can use alternate stores then some popular apps - Fortnite is an obvious one - will go them exclusively, forcing people to set up and use a store which will probably do less auditing. Those apps will be able to steal more of my data, and some of them might (will) be malicious (“poison”).

Once a malicious app destroys my phone, “the system is down”; I can’t use any apps regardless of where I bought them.

Ransomware is a multi billion dollar business, and alternate stores will be motivated to cut corners. What could go wrong?

> Those apps will be able to steal more of my data, and some of them might (will) be malicious (“poison”).

This seems a bit hyperbolic. I personally have not had this problem on my laptop (a Mac) despite being able to sideload apps, and it likely being a much juicier target.

The elephant in the room in this discussion is OS level permissions to access files and information on the phone from outside the app.

The app can do whatever it wants, but if I disable it’s access to the internet at a system level it’s not getting access to the internet.

Even desktop OSes work like this. Just because I install a piece of software on my laptop does not mean that it gets root access.

Apple in fact uses and sells your data for the same purposes it is "protecting you" from when other developers do it.

You can yell about Zucks adtech empire all you like, but Apple launched their competitor at the same time they denied other apps.

Google is now moving the same direction as well.

Your phone OS vendor controlling which software distribution platform is mandatory is not meaningfully, "security".

>Apple in fact uses and sells your data for the same purposes it is "protecting you" from when other developers do it.

I don’t believe this is true, can you cite a source? The recent buzz about ‘targeted ads’ was actually about adds on their own App Store, no third party data sharing or sale was involved, so I believe you are mistaken.

By that definition, Google doesn't share your data either. But they do, by monetizing it in the form of targeted ads. Both Apple and Google try to gussy it up with 'anonymous' labels, but the business of tracking and monetizing your habits is shared by both.

It’s still not the same as selling your data to third parties, with all the many very considerable additional privacy and accountability problems that entails. It’s also not using your data to provision ads on third party sites and apps. I’ve seen people claim Apple does both of those things here before, and the fact is they don’t.

What they are just starting to do is no different from Amazon using your past purchases to place ads on their own site. I have no problem with that either.

If your going to criticise them and think what they are doing is wrong, fine. That’s fair, but could people at least get what they're complaining about factually correct.

Apple has an ad network, which has special privileges on iOS. Are you saying they don't provision ads on their ad network based on all the special access they have? They'd be kind of crazy not to, they've secured themselves a very valuable information monopoly here, and it's pretty obvious why...

They don’t have an ad network in any meaningful sense, because there’s no distribution network for their ads. The ad targeting everyone is talking about is only for ads for apps on the App Store. Not in third party apps or web sites and such. That’s why I compared it to Amazon targeting ads in their own store.