Comment by bko
8 months ago
> Competition is how you get to the best product. Lack of competition leads to malaise of product improvements as the market dominators are owning the space and happily exert their power over people.
I think the malaise is when you require every company to take the exact same approach.
Let two companies take different approach. One is walled garden and the other is bazaar. I wish we had more walled gardens personally. I'm tired of wading through hundreds of results in Amazon through shady third party sellers. At this point I go to Best Buy, knowing that they won't sell me absolute garbage. Curation is very useful.
This seems like a distinction without a difference. Curation is totally allowed, in Apple's own app store. They just can't prevent people from using their devices how they see fit to maintain that curation.
> I think the malaise is when you require every company to take the exact same approach.
I think you're arguing against yourself here. The way to allow companies to take different approaches is to require any app store/approach be allowed. Then Apple can curate, FOSS app stores like FDroid can use their approach, etc.
Fundamentally I think this issue is about ownership. Modern companies/products like to pretend that you don't own the things you buy, because it makes them money. Apple loves their 30% cut of apps, and hides behind "protecting the users" to maintain it, but they really want to control the your device. People would never ever tolerate not being in full control and maintaining true ownership of most things in their lives, but for some reason we let it slide with phones, which, like it or not, are one of the most important objects people own. They should be treated that way, and provided full ownership of them.
Sorry but allowing you to side load apps for a product like Apple makes it shittier. If helps companies that don't want to pay the Apple tax, but that's a bit funny considering that Apple essentially made this ecosystem and now they want to pretend it was just inevitable or always there.
I don't want to worry about giving my dad an iPhone and making sure he doesn't sideload some scammy app because that's essentially what you'll get. The same was the "third party sellers" on places like Amazon are pretty terrible.
I'm on an Android because I like the freedom. But again, Apple would not exist if you had this rule in place because it would immediately be en-shittified and no one would voluntarily pay the Apple tax that allows them to invest and invent this new ecosystem if they feel they can't control it.
If you don't want walled garden, don't use Apple. Plenty of people don't use Apple products. iOS is about 25% of European market, so what are we even talking about here?
Preventing every other iPhone owner on the planet from having full access to their own property because you don't want to do tech support for your dad is not an acceptable argument.
Preventing bad things at the cost of certain fundamental freedoms is not a desirable goal. Law enforcement is intentionally made harder by the 4th Amendment. It's literally there to obstruct the police, because it's more important for people to have privacy.
The same applies to your phone. A device you buy should be yours to use however you want, especially a device as important as a smartphone in the 21st century. No one expects to be able to run Linux on their toaster if it didn't already come with it, but preventing certain major functionality because ToasterCorp wants a walled garden is not acceptable. I see no difference with a phone.
Going forward, you could emphasize to Pops: "Never install anything not from the Apple App Store. Only use the Apple App Store." Problem solved. The rest of keep our freedom, Pop is safe.
I'd also like to see more walled gardens. Imagine an app store on iOS that only contained truly hand curated, exhaustively audited and continually monitored apps. I'd have no problem paying for access to this store or paying more for apps purchased via this store because it's adding something valuable to me.
Unfortunately we have the platform owners controlling (or essentially controlling) which stores are allowed to operate on those platforms right now. This needs to change.
> I'd also like to see more [curated] gardens.
Fixed that, and agree. ("Walled garden" means a platform that doesn't allow other choices, curated or not.)
I don't know why this needs repeating every time this comes up, but no one - absolutely no one - is asking you to leave the App Store walled garden.