I just want to be able to run and distribute my own apps. It’s ridiculous and just plain criminal that this is not possible. Apple does not own my device and does not get to dictate what I do with it. Phones are so locked down that they are a real threat to personal computing and software engineering. The day where apple stops indies from publishing apps is near.
This is where antitrust attention needs to be laser focused.
Our freedoms are at stake, and this should be our rallying point.
The iPhone is a general purpose computer (email, photos, dating, payments, reminders, docs, web, games, etc.) and computer manufacturers should not be allowed to control the only means to run software on computers they sell.
This is less drastic than breaking the company up into constituent parts. But honestly we ought to also be asking ourselves why a computer manufacturer gets to be a film studio and distribution chain.
Currently the iPhone is a great device for almost everyone on the planet and the trust their users have in the 3rd party apps is a big part of that.
If Apple made it easy to put custom apps on the device it would mean you could more easily be tricked into installing malware and so reduce the trust in the security.
The iPhone is as popular as it is today due in no small part to how they have policed the App Store.
According to [1], Android makes up 60% of the US smartphone market share; but you're comparing many different brands of phones, all of which use Android, to the iPhone which isn't exactly fair.
You can see that the iPhone is still has the largest smartphone market share in the US.
Also, bear in mind that Android phones thrive in less rich countries like Mexico [2] or the Philippines [3]. The price of the iPhone is perhaps the largest burden for these people, but I'm willing to speculate that if given the choice, most would favor iOS over Android.
A big reason for me to switch to Android was this. I'm reasonably tech savvy, but still it was becoming painful to manage all sorts of app permissions on Android. Not to talk about all kinds of tracking that Google does by default some of which may even be impossible to turn off.
Between me and Apple I'm reasonably clear about the business transaction. I pay to buy a high margin device. In turn Apple assures me that they have a vested interest to do what's best for me (i.e., my privacy, no trackers allowed etc.,).
With Android we have bewildering choice of hardware/forked-Android and what not which come with pre-burned apps and app stores that one can't get rid of.
Google Pixel comes closest to iPhone but at that price point I might as well buy iPhone as Apple has better track record of respecting user's privacy.
Because it is essentially a duopoly, and switching platforms is not as easy as just not buying an iPhone.
For example, I recently broke the screen on my iPhone 7 and for this exact reason (not being able to run some Apple unapproved applications on my device) wanted to switch to an Android, but when I tried one out for a couple days
* My BMW would not show music cover art because only Apple had a deal with them in early 2010s
* iMessage no longer worked and I had to maintain an iPad for communicating to friends who only use iMessage and Facetime
* Macbook was suddenly a lot less interoperable with the phone - the easiest way to transfer photos was to push them to Google photos and download them on the mac
* Homepod speaker would no longer be controllable from my phone
* Apple obviously won't publish AppleTV(Remote) or HomeKit apps for android
In other words, you love and love paying for literally everything about Apple's platform, but you still haven't figured out what you are paying for, and you think you should get all the benefits of that platform (including the benefits accrued by it being a walled interoperable garden that doesn't suck), magically, even if you want to use other hardware and other platforms.
That's exactly my point, I don't love and love everything about Apple's platform and I want to move away but they won't let my Android device interop with Homepod or Homekit or Apple TV.
I just realized too late, what exactly I paid them for - it wasn't the device - it was the "experience" and I regret spending every penny on this experience because it is essentially a sunk cost now.
Nor am I saying it is, I'm telling you why switching is not an option for me which is what the parent comment asked.
I'm slowly reducing my reliance on Apple and have already abstained from getting the new watch or adding homepod minis to my current apple tv and homepod setup. And hopefully, as these devices weather out I will definitely make it a priority to not buy into a closed system like this again.
Yes, but that choice is getting harder with time. What happens when home automation and car automation is also controlled by these tech giants?
What if some day your account was banned because you said something against the "community guidelines" of Apple? Will your car, phone, TV still work? Will Apple buy them back?
That's already happening with facebook (oculus) and google as well (what happens to your android device? what about the photos you had stored on the cloud? what about all the sign-in with google?)
Oculus is an extremely niche product, barely out of the experimental stage.
Can you point to cases where people have been locked out of their Android phones?
If so, I’m surprised lawyers aren’t involved.
It’s not clear though, what this has to do with app stores.
If we think companies shouldn’t be able to lock us out of their products for speech violations, that seems like an important consumer protection that should apply to all companies.
- iMessage is built into the sms/MMS GUI and opportunistically "upgrades" sms chats to iMessage chats. This alone is a huge deal and makes me wonder why you would even ask this question.
- Everyone with an iPhone will have an account (the phone is practically unusable without one.)
- The app is built into the OS, when combined with the previous 2 integrations that makes it the only thing most iphone users are willing to use unless they have a very very good reason not to.
- I think the sharing UI has some special imessage-only shortcuts
How is this so hard for you to understand, iMessage gets shoved in people's faces and is activated automatically. It's extremely anticompetitive and isolates people not on apples platform. It's far worse than anything microsoft did in the 90s.
How exactly is anyone ‘isolated’? There just doesn’t seem to be any basis for saying that that.
All it does is improve the use experience for people who do use Apple’s platform. They are just as able to communicate with people who have SMS as they were before and vice versa. You are going to need to explain this ‘isolation’.
Literally billions of people use competing messaging apps such as WhatsApp or Facebook messenger.
It's not just preinstalled, it forces you to make an account to use the phone and inserts itself into what was previously the most popular messaging system in the US. If apple did something like this with the mail app everyone would probably completely flip out, the only reason they don't is because SMS was already terrible.
Flawed argument similar to the one used around privacy: People who don’t have anything to hide should not worry about big brother.
Well, turns out that you are telling me that companies with ungodly amounts of power and influence should be allowed to dictate our rights. This is why we desperately need regulation that puts consumers first.
Is that really the same type of argument? While I don't think, "Don't buy apple products then" is really a great argument it's not the same as the privacy argument. You do have other options. I don't have other options than to be spied on by the US government.
This is just as true for Facebook or Google or any messaging system. There is nothing special about Apple in this regard. It’s just a feature of current messaging technologies.
I stopped using Facebook earlier this year, and I am missing out on a bunch of social groups the contain people I know in real life.
What we need to do is build technology that doesn’t these downsides.
While we're at it, we can also just stop paying credit card swipe fees too by paying cash as well and avoid artificial preservatives by growing our own food, and while we're at it we can bicycle everywhere in order not to exhaust Carbon into the air.
Or as a democratic country, we can debate the laws and rules in which we would like businesses to follow for the privilege of selling products in the market and so they do not unhealthily, dominate the market.
You can still use a flip phone and a desktop PC running arch Linux.
Most users , even some of us can accidentally break a Linux install. Saving me from myself is what IOS effectively does. Look at the Android fortnite fiasco with users installing the wrong app and getting malware on their phones.
Even open source smart phones exist. Your more than free to custom write your own software on them.
I do believe that once I buy a device it's mine. I have jailbroken iPhones and an iPod Touch before, they were my devices and I did as I saw fit.
On the other hand I don't feel I have the right to dictate to anyone else what sort of products they may or may not sell, or how they work, beyond health and safety, accessibility, etc. I don't see that I have a right to tell Nintendo that they must write software to support side loading games for my Switch for example, or demand via government regulation that Sony can't charge a fee for developers to create games for the Playstation. As long as I know up front what the features and services are that come with my purchase, I have a free choice whether to accept them or not.
In particular, I certainly don't think I have the right to tell other members of the public that they should not have the option to buy those products on those terms if they wish. What right do I have to interfere in the product design of popular products, used by millions of people that are perfectly happy with them? Especially if that will force the company involved to change it's business practices and charging structure in ways those customers would not be happy with.
[edit: I missed that the parent comment was scoped to iPhone, rather than the OP story about Macs.]
You can distribute [macOS] apps directly to customers.
From Apple's site:
"While the Mac App Store is the safest place for users to get software for their Mac, you may choose to distribute your Mac apps in other ways. Gatekeeper on macOS helps protect users from downloading and installing malicious software by checking for a Developer ID certificate. Make sure to test your apps with the latest version of macOS and sign your apps, plug-ins, or installer packages to let Gatekeeper know they’re safe to install.
You can also give users even more confidence in your apps by submitting them to Apple to be notarized."
Yeah sure, let's just blast that silicon with some focused ion beam to overwrite the public key that the bootloader is signed with. It's that simple, right? Everyone could do it.
Where do you get a mobile device that's not a walled garden? It's just that Google's is designed with a gate slightly ajar. Continuing with your pet analogy, it's as if you could only get a dog or a cat, and it only eats food made by one specific manufacturer. You can convince the cat to eat almost whatever you have, but the dog won't budge. Want a parrot or a hamster? Tough luck.
I wholeheartedly agree with the OP article. You made a device, then you sold it. You shouldn't get to control it after sale because you no longer own it. Plain and simple.
I don't care about manufacturer "supporting" something. I bought it, it's mine now, I'm on my own, and please don't get in my way of modifying the thing I bought because I have the right to do so.
You're positing an example but not refuting mine - again, tell me, how is a cat supposed to be a dog?
> I wholeheartedly agree with the OP article. You made a device, then you sold it. You shouldn't get to control it after sale because you no longer own it. Plain and simple.
Apple didn't just "make a device" though. They don't make just hardware - they make software w/ hardware. The product is the whole experience. Expecting them to change how they design their product for the masses (that LOVE THEM), because you can't do exactly what you want, is wrong.
> I bought it, it's mine now, I'm on my own, and please don't get in my way of modifying the thing I bought because I have the right to do so.
YOU CAN do what you want with it. If you were perhaps smarter, you could hack into it and make it do whatever you want. You can throw it right off a bridge if you want! Congratulations. But Apple IN NO WAY is required to make it EASIER for you to throw it off a bridge. Sorry.
My point is, Apple purposefully engineered the product to give them more access to it than you'll ever get. It took them extra effort to do this, it's easier to make a device/OS without DRM than with it. You can't exactly hack it because that would require millions of dollars worth of equipment and some very specific knowledge.
I'm not renting it. I'm not licensing it. I'm buying it.
> Expecting them to change how they design their product for the masses (that LOVE THEM), because you can't do exactly what you want, is wrong.
That would empower their users. Developers would be actually making MORE apps for the platform because they would have the confidence that they'll be able to get that app into the hands of users one way or another. I've seen some stories of someone doing a lot of work making an app only to have it rejected because its very idea didn't resonate with the review team. There's nothing they can do to bring it into compliance — countless hours of work were wasted.
In other words - the engineered a product that is much harder to break, is more private, and is harder to hack. All things most customers want.
> I'm not renting it. I'm not licensing it. I'm buying it.
I buy a cat. I can't complain about it not being a dog. I bought it. I didn't "license" the cat, I didn't "rent" the cat. But I still can't make it into a dog, despite the fact that I own it.
Go ahead, hack it, if you can. All the power to you. That's your right. You can't impose your absurd dev geek worldview on everyone else. That's just wrong. If you want, make a competing device. But you won't.
The App store doesn't need more apps. No one complains about lack of apps on the app store. Androids are flooded with crap apps - I'd rather keep it the way it is.
How, exactly, limiting what YOU can do with YOUR OWN device translates into more security? I want to see people ask "oh, if only I had no ability to install apps unless the manufacturer of my computer approves them". Haven't seen any yet. As they say, if someone hits you on the head every day since childhood, you would come up with all sorts of reasons why it's a good thing, and then miss it if they stop.
"But people might get scammed by bad actors." They can as well get scammed on the web which Apple devices are capable of accessing. Or over text messages. Or over phone calls. Or in real life.
Your analogy about cats and dogs is wrong, by the way. Being either kind of animal is an intrinsic property of it that can't be changed. You choose one or the other. It's not like someone took an "universal" animal that is initially capable of morphing into a cat or a dog, purposefully locked it into being a cat forever, and then called it an iCat sold it to you for $999.99. On the other hand, an iPhone is inherently a general-purpose computing device, that was purposefully and artificially locked into only running software that was pre-approved by Apple, thus limiting what its user can do with it (without owning an electron microscope, anyway).
That's what I refer to when I say about "gate slightly ajar". The thing is, you only unlock the bootloader that boots the main OS kernel, on EL1. There are more higher-privileged exception levels in an ARM CPU, and Google makes use of those to implement anti-consumer features like the dreaded SafetyNet or DRM. Your main OS is considered "untrusted", and you never get to run any custom code with highest possible privileges, a.k.a TrustZone — only Google and phone manufacturer do. Magisk is a dirty hack which will stop working whenever Google feels like flipping the switch to make use of their TrustZone firmware.
This is the right answer. Apple’s not going to arrest you for jailbreaking your phone and running your own software. But they’re not obligated to go out of their way to support it either.
It’s not that they don’t go out of their way to support it. They actively try to stop it. All jailbreaking is, is gaining root privileges on the device. They could just add a little toggle button saying use at your own risk, we don’t support it.
By making it so hard to jailbreak and so hard to install apps not from the App Store, they make jailbreaking not the answer.
Their goal/feature/product, whatever you want to call it, is to create something secure enough that grandpa can’t get tricked into getting owned. Anything at all that allows people to disable security becomes an immediate threat for that type of user. If the side effect is that they prevent people from jailbreaking then so be it because they have no desire or obligation to support those users.
> I just want to be able to run and distribute my own apps
A niggle and not contradicting your main point.
You can run and distribute you own app. You can even share it with a few hundred people (maybe a couple thousand?).
What you can't do is distribute it in the App Store or effectively sell it outside the App Store.
Again, more a niggle and not disputing your point.
> The day where apple stops indies from publishing apps is near.
This point I will dispute. Apple isn't going to stop Indies from publishing apps. Apple loves developers (though sometimes they show it poorly) and knows they are the life-blood of the platform.
Subtle, different, but irrelevant in this context. Apple needs developers as much as developers need Apple. There will never be a day where Apple boots all Indies from the App Store. They would just as soon change the policies on locking the doors on their retail stores at night.
Users don’t care about indie crap as long as they get their Facegram and Instabook.
The harsh truth is that indie devs need access to Apple’s users, not the other way around.
And so you have to play by the policies that attracted those users to Apple in the first place, which includes the App Store with all its glorious kinks.
> The harsh truth is that indie devs need access to Apple’s users, not the other way around.
This is simply not true.
Instagram was the project of indie developers. Likewise many of the big apps which exist on iOS. The vast majority of software on iOS is small niche tools which are either fun to use or useful tools.
Apple knows this and they know they need indie developers supporting their platform.
I realize there are a fair number of situations where it doesn't seem that way. But there are a lot of times such as this where it's more than clear they do.
