It's hilarious the number of people getting up from their Xbox or Playstation to rip on Apple for being a closed garden, and why, oh why, would anyone, anywhere be so stupid to develop for, or buy into, a walled garden.

The cognitive dissonance is intense, which explains, I think the barely contained rage seeping out of each comment.

And that's not crazy. The variety of things you do with your phone is far wider than the variety of things you do on your console. With a console you pretty much just want to play games and maybe use it as a video streaming machine so you don't have to get another device for such a simple function. Compare that to your phone, whose usefulness as a device for making calls has been marginalized, and usefulness for just about everything else has exploded.

Developers hated it, of course, so now we have the App Store. But it's not like Apple has all of a sudden stopped people from bookmarking a website and using it like a built-in app.

And if it doesn't, then why is the app "second class" when run on an iOS device? Phones running Firefox OS do have native apps running (e.g. the browser). Is Firefox OS doing the wrong thing by preventing users from installing native apps?

If it's A-okay when Mozilla does it, the same should be true when Apple does it.

If I want to install software on a device that I bought, I should not need to jailbreak it. If I want to install software on a device that I bought, I should not need to buy a developer's license.

But if the platform was built by someone else, he gets to set the rules.

And if the rules are lax enough, like the App Store is, and people using the platform dont mind much, then we don't have much of a case.

If the app meets reliability and design standards, why not let the market decide? Its arrogance.

Apple should by no means ever restrict the ability to place code on a device that they sell. Restrict things from the App Store? Sure. Restrict devices to only use the App Store? Absolutely not.