> what Apple is doing is perfectly legal
Not in the EU starting this summer!
Although I agree with the second point: game consoles being general purpose computers should be treated the same.
That's a great argument. I have even a better one:
Don't dictate what and how people use their devices that they paid for with their hard-earned money.
Apple doesn't dictate what software runs on your iPhone, any more than a toaster manufacturer dictates whether you can use it as a space heater, or Toyota dictating whether your car can function as a boat, or Epic Games dictating whether Fortnite can be used to prepare your taxes.
No, Apple isn't going make the process of running your own software easy, but you are legally entitled to break whatever barriers you like and replace the OS with a Linux distro. No, you shouldn't be legally entitled to force Apple to make their operating system do whatever random thing you want it to.
Then don't enable side loading.
And what Apple is doing is actually not perfectly legal. That's the entire reason they're changing their policies. It's not like they enjoy having to compete with app stores that offer other payment providers or allow things like emulators.
Sure, maybe Epic can be trusted. But perhaps Meta decides that the latest/most desirable versions of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have to be side-loaded. Now it's commonplace. Now everyone's phone has sideloaded apps installed.
Sure, maybe Meta can be trusted. But perhaps some new future TikTok-esque craze besets the mainstream, and it's in the form of a sideloaded app, made easy because sideloaded apps aren't unusual, and the company who makes this viral app is dodgy as f***.
But sure, it's always the user's choice.
It's us asking our democratically elected government to stop a giant corporation from telling us what to do with our own devices.
Yes it's your device, but it's not your software. You don't own the software. And it's the software which is stopping you from doing what you want.
Really though I'm just saying that I resent arguments that fail to provide anything resembling a modicum of consistency around this. As far as I'm concerned, as long as Sony is allowed to keep the PlayStation locked down, Apple should have equal right to keep the iPhone locked down. And if you, the consumer, doesn't like it, don't buy a PlayStation. I realise this comes across as a trite, throwaway thing to say, but I absolutely mean it. It is, in my opinion, a slam dunk argument.
What you're proposing is not really ownership of the device in any meaningful way, but just a license to use it on somebody else's terms.
I don't want a world in which I don't own the device I pay for, so neither Sony nor Apple should be able to dictate what I do with them.
It's like selling you a screwdriver and then saying you can only use it with one specific brand of screw.
Ownership of software is clear-cut under the law: unless you hold the copyright, it's not yours. You have been granted permission to use the software under the restricted terms of a license. In practice though, the legal perspective isn't a useful one. It's another bad analogy, useful only because it's the one backed by law. What actually matters is what you can do.
It doesn't matter who "owns" it, you don't have the code needed to recompile the OS from source. Much less than sideloading apps, there are thousands of nominally trivial aspects of the OS which you cannot change without source code and a working build environment. Without this you don't have any ownership over the software in any useful sense.
You do own your piece of physical iPhone hardware, and it's yours to muck about with as much as you wish. But don't expect schematics or the ability to manufacture your own parts, or the ability to sideload more processing cores into the A14 chip, or replace the camera with a different module.
I'm sure that now that the EU has finally woken up, gaming platforms will be under scrunity too. Mobile phones are a much more critical part of people's lives than game consoles, so it made sense to target them first.
Well, not in EU now
So you think it's better asking companies to save us from our own choices? And that doesn't strike you as even more ridiculous?
Most of the noise in the community is from people who just enjoy seeing Apple squirm and probably aren't even an Apple customer anyway. Meanwhile the entities spending real money to lobby governments on this issue actually only care about getting around Apple's increasingly consumer-protecting app review process — they tolerated the 30% fee right up until the very same month that Apple started forcing developers to inform users if they were tracking users between apps.
They want side-loading so they can track you, not so they can extract more money from you. Because they know they won't. Yes, entities like Epic might be able to sell apps with a lower marginal cost (not a lot lower, as they'll be handling stuff like fraud and refunds themselves, and Apple is still entitled to a software license fee) but the simple act of requiring consumers to enter their credit card number into an app is going to reduce transaction completion rates. I'd be willing to bet by at least 30%.
As much as you and I don’t like it, what Apple is doing is perfectly legal. And as much as you or I might support a change in the law, you’re not going to get my support if the legislation is truly universal and not just a narrow-band targeting of a single company for developing an ecosystem which resonated with a large number of people. Write some legislation which applies to ALL platforms which run software and maybe I’ll take it seriously.