Everyone likes to say “but would Apple would lose the $100/yr from all those hobbyists.” How many hobbyists do you think are out there right now paying $100/year just to load some apps on their phone? Can’t be more than 1000. Even if it were 10,000 that would represent $1 million/yr in lost revenue for Apple. That’s less than a rounding error on just one quarterly report. They really don’t care about that!
Apple wants to fully control the devices they're letting people use. Allowing side loading can only be considered a reduction in control of their devices, thus it's against their main mission.
Nah, they're worried someone might sideload a software with payment method that doesn't give them cut
Get real, Apple's target demo is upper-middle class people who want a frictionless computing experience - the kind of people whose response to a massive avoidable security fail would be litigation and political/regulatory action.
Apple treats their users like a nursing home treats senile people.
They made a thing, and you bought it.
Why would anyone with a bent on free computing walk into what they know to be a closed ecosystem. Just buy an Android phone. It’s like flying to a foreign country and expecting everyone to English to you imo…
This excuse is exhausting, lacks any principles whatsoever; these are general purpose devices, browsing the web & allowing arbitrary apps to be developed & squeezed into the world, if they pass through the tyrant's gauntlet. That one company offers some modicum of un-tyranny is a poor defense for locking down & excluding general purpose computing, for withdrawing the systems we have in our pockets from our own ownership & ability to control.
Citizens should have some options. The implications that althe market is free to do whatever & citizens are free to pick from what's available seems presently somewhat tennable, but if we step back just a little bit here & look at the picture, it's horrifying. The inability to root most Android phones shows that actual freedom, real general purpose computing, is an extremely fine & narrowing little sliver, of the most important & most used general computing world.
Good luck.
It should be an absolute no brainer to protect the species, to not close the book on possibility forever, to not let the species be limited & cajoled by impersonal & vast techno-captial-ocratic enterprises, that will hedge us in. But the short term wins arent super clear. "What is the use case?" "We dont know yet." We might have to enable possibility, act on principle, to find out.
The threat of living in a post science world, where the universe around us is illegibile because we made it that way, where we cannot learn or see or work some of the most important & connective matter around us, seems like it's worth all the cards, is a no brainer to go all-in to defend against. The war against general purpose computing is a slow & creeping infernal damnation.
Android went dark long ago too. All of the open source apps are abandoned and unmaintained replaced by closed source versions. The Play Store takes a 30% cut of things like Apple. Google decides what kind of apps are available on the app store and it closely matches Apple.
Not arguing but rather expanding: You may be thinking "He just ignored sideloading get real" but tell me, are there any porn apps? No there aren't. They have no distribution channel and are banned on 100% of the computing devices people run their lives with which is their phone. "But porn works just fine in the browser" well so does pretty much anything else even on an iPhone so why are we even chatting in this thread? To end users Android sideloading does not exist.
Apple and Google control what types of software humanity gets to use and there are no viable alternatives. Apple has fully embraced 1984 as these recurring threads keep pointing out but Google follows Apple in lock step on nearly every decision. There is no third choice except the increasingly crippled web.
In terms of mainstream stuff, I think that's less of a "Apple & Google don't want you to have them" and more "society doesn't want you to have them, won't somebody please think of the childreeeeen".
Parents ignoring the fact, of course, that the 3 year old they gave a fucking tablet to with unlimited access can still end up on any of those sites via the browser.
If you want an adversarial narrative between Apple and the people, you'll find no greater supporter than me. Europe seems to disagree with Apple's philosophy though, so maybe it's time they reassess their opinions.
My phone is an appliance. I need it to provide 2 way communications and access to the information on the internet. Apple will provide security updates for the foreseeable future. That's all I want as I enter curmudgeonly old man age.
But yeah, I know I bought a locked down device and I'm ok with that. BMW is charging a subscription for heated seats. I'm not ok with that, so won't be buying one. Obviously, they expect some people still will. I agree with them.
That's the key point: I bought it. It's mine now and I have the moral the moral right to do anything I please with it that isn't immoral. Granted, there can be laws that trample that moral right or artificial technical barriers that attempt to restrict it, but both are unjust. Attempted word magic spells such as "by using this product that you just bought you agree that you didn't actually buy this product" are ridiculous, dishonest, incoherent, and not morally binding.
And ... you do? Is there some reason you can't do whatever you want with the device? This is like complaining that you can't use your xbox or television as a general purpose computing device.
You can legally hack your own iphone. Go for it. You own the device.
This is true, but only due to DMCA exemptions that Apple strongly opposed: https://www.wired.com/2010/07/feds-ok-iphone-jailbreaking/
Give it a year of lower than usual profits and some twitter complaints and they will backpedal at mach 10
Oh, wait...
For example, say I run a sketchy reseller operation that buys old or refurbished Apple equipment and load an iOS-ish/macOS-ish custom unix (and then falsely market it as an "Apple product"). For all intents and purposes, it may look exactly like an official Apple OS, but it isn't.
The untrained eye is oblivious to the differences and now, assuming the "sell" was that that person got an Apple device for cheap from some random seller, Apple now has the potential burden of supporting that. Considering their potential market is in the millions who might be duped by this, by allowing this one little change, they just introduced a support burden that nukes their profit.
I would personally just not buy an iOS device for this reason, though now they're putting M* chips in them I suspect they'll eventually be jailbroken and able to run an open source operating sysem.
That being said, the discussion goes beyond the feelings of people for and against Apple. This is directly about addressing their business practices relative to the rest of the market, and these side-effects suck. If these changes don't directly remove a feature you care about, then there is no reason to throw yourself in the line of fire. Apple, much like every other FAANG company on the ladder, is ruthless. They're a min-maxed value extraction machine with the greatest marketing team ever assembled. It's hurting the rest of the industry, to the point that regulators have to step in and tell them they're wrong. And when they do (like the Dutch antitrust ruling), they refuse to acknowledge the results as fair and ignore the fines.
That's asshole behavior. Petty arguing on the internet hurts nothing but your feelings. Apple's lack of accountability has enabled government surveillance, legitimized China's ethnic cleansing, and snuffed out anyone who would try to compete with them on their own platform. When you personally defend their mess, you look messy by association.
Nothing stops Apple to keep doing this while allowing for more freedom on the user side.