Some people believe they should be allowed to do as they please in Walmart. Walmart disagrees.

iOS app approval isn't some new policy Apple is springing on people out of the blue.

Let's not pretend that the people who want free as in Stallman apps signed up with Apple and are now shocked at this new development.

Let's also not pretend that Apple security will show up at your house if you jailbreak your phone.

Let's also not pretend that Apple is the only company that has a policy against certain types of apps in their store.

> Some people believe they should be allowed to do as they please in Walmart.

These people don't own their local Walmart. They do on the other hand own their smartphones.

But they don't own the iOS App Store. People want to move goalposts and say we're arguing about what you can do with your phone but we're really arguing about a store policy.

And if these people wanted to buy a phone that had lots of app stores available I think we're all in agreement that they fucked up if they bought the iphone.

Actually you just moved the goalposts from "do as they please with their own device" to "do as they please in some non-public space that they do not own".

Because we're really explicitly NOT arguing about a store policy. If it was just a store policy there would not be this argument.

For instance, say Virgin does not want to sell some CD with deeply offensive lyrics. They probably make those decisions every day. Nobody complains.

However, it would stop being just a store policy, if a large part of the public would only have a CD Player that can exclusively play CDs that Virgin approves of. Get the difference? And that part of the argument doesn't even involve general purpose computing.

When the store is the only way for ordinary users to load software, the store policy and what you can realistically do with your phone is the same thing.