Software freedom, at least for end users, is a smokescreen, too. I can revert your argument: "you want more ransomware because of a few OSS enthousiasts?" What we need is a way to curb the excesses, such as high entrance barriers to the store.
A phone/tablet is a tool, with very intense usage, and huge privacy value, not an engineer's toy.
The real smokescreen is this freedom vs security false dichotomy. If you give up freedom for the promise of security, you get neither. Look at the App Store. It's full of harmful garbage designed to extract value and waste your time by any trick necessary. It's one step short of ransomware. Oh, unless you use an app for your important documents, then it comes under new management and demands you start paying monthly or lose your stuff. Suddenly that lack of freedom to continue using an old version of the app or to dig around its internals and pull out your data becomes a loss of security. It's fine though, because this type of ransomware is totally legal and inline with your benevolent platform dictator's policies.
Your argument falls apart when you consider iPhones' 60% market share. People have spoken out about whether they want dangerous, uncontrolled third-party apps on their phones.
This is called the tyranny of the majority, where you're arguing that because most people don't care about freedom, therefore freedom doesn't have value. It's not a sound argument, much like saying freedom of speech doesn't matter because most people have nothing to say.
Editing to add: it seems particularly ironic that you think iPhone users make great purchasing decisions when they buy the phone, but are incapable of making good decisions when selecting software. What accounts for the discrepancy?
I don't care about what the riff-raff think, it is morally wrong and defies human freedom and dignity to require everyone walk around with a locked-down surveilance device in their pocket in order to function in the economy.
60% of society could be raptured tomorrow and the world would be better off.
Just in case you unironically don't understand this and aren't just playing it up:
Allowing third party installations does not mean uncontrolled third party apps. It merely means users have to option to install software on their phones - which continues to limit the softwares capabilities until the user was prompted to allow each.
You could argue "but a braindead person can randomly go on a phishing website, randomly download some .app file and suddenly - through magic go through a theoretical installation dialog to finally explicitly grant this malware problematic permissions... And I'm sure there are going to be people that will do exactly that... But without it, they'll still manage to do the same to the same effect, just without the app installation by inputting their bank credentials in a phishing site or similar
The thing your citing as a problem solved by disallowing app installs isn't actually solved - and it would not become more problematic either.
Finally, the fact of the matter remains that almost nobody would actually use the capability to install from third party stores, as you've correctly insinuated. But if anything, that should be another proof that allowing third party installs doesn't reduce security.
People just like to have everything provided to them from a single source, and will usually pay a premium for that.
Most people are stupid and short-sighted. Pointing to the stupid in support of your argument doesn't help it.
And, the app store does absolutely nothing to prevent "dangerous" apps. Apple doesn't review the code. In fact, if your code is reviewable, it's even harder to get it on the app store.
At the end of the day, the App Store and Play Store are filled with adware, spyware, and other malware - because Apple and Google like it that way. That's what they want. They don't give a single flying fuck about your security. They care about extracting 30% while simultaneously doing as little as possible. That's completely at odds with security, yes, and they know that. They just don't care.
What point are you even trying to make? That's not a counter-argument unless you assume that people in aggregate always make great purchasing decisions. Wait until you hear about cigarettes, heroine, slot machines, snake oil, tulips, and the rest of the effectively infinite list of fun and unique ways people make terrible choices or are bamboozled into acting against their own and others' interests. This is a comment thread about protecting people from scams. The premise acknowledges that people make widespread poor decisions. Is it so unthinkable that buying an iPhone is one of them?
They are using it as a proxy for "people with low technical skills" (which is a specious argument since it was a friend of my parents who got me into programming and he remains one of the best I've ever known) and making the usual argument that we should limit control of our devices to make it safe for them.
I actually don't have (much) of an issue with walled garden approaches as long as the wall has a gate that is easily opened, give me an OS level toggle with a warning of "Here be dragons" and I can live with it - it's not ideal but it's not a terrible trade off.
It's something Android has had previously (but they seem to be trying to lock that gate) and iOS less so.
How about instead of a single os level toggle you get a trillion dollar company, renowned for their high quality design, invested in providing the best possible UX while respecting the user as the owner of the device?
The idea being that if we put apple in a regulatory environment where rent-seeking is no longer the winning strategy they could be forced to redirect their resources towards competing on customer value instead.
Which is something I find very annoying, because I know a lot of people who are parents (or adults) or grandparents which have greater technical skills than their children.
> I still don’t see why you would want your parents to run untrusted software on their devices, but you do you I guess.
I don't trust Apple's App Store review. They've approved countless scams that have tricked Apple users out of a lot of money, perhaps $billions in total.
Sadly about 98% of real world users are going to fall into scams, ransomwares and stuff. They are not mentally challenged, there are just so many traps/fakes/tempting stuff that we as IT people are more aware of (but even we still fall into some).
We also can't count on every person being able to check every single thing they do: how do you check if some food or drug you get is good or not? you can't really, you have to trust someone who knows.
It’s a bit like the Elizabeth Warren toaster analogy. If you bought a toaster with shoddy wiring and it caught fire and burned down your house, everyone would blame the manufacturer and not sneer at you online for not learning electrical engineering and not checking the wiring yourself before using it.
It's more like if I buy a reliable toaster, but I buy bread that's secretly poisoned by the manufacturer and hurt myself. I'm not gonna demand the toaster maker add a poison sensor to the toaster and say "how dare they didn't protect me!"
I don't buy this in the first place. It is reasonable to expect consumers to do some background research into the products they buy. In fact, it is the only way capitalism can function as a meritocracy.
Society should be more dangerous as a means to force people to learn more about technology they rely on.
I'm not sure what you think is so harmonious about it. I think there are gobs of iPhone users that wanted a free store, created Cydia, had it shut down, and have been fighting ever since with tools like AltStore to try to restore their own ability to install software of their choosing on their phones. Simply searching any search engine for "build and install iOS apps locally" results in gobs of discussions where people are trying to figure out how to actually get control back of their device and work around all of Apple's restrictions.
Further, the state of affairs has steadily gotten worse over the years as Apple tightens their restrictions, adds more barriers to running apps of your choosing, and having agency over what programs you can actually run.
This is a war on general purpose computing. And sure, there are gobs of people who don't care, but there are many who do, and they're fighting for the rights of all of us. My own mother-in-law who spent thousands of dollars on Kindle books didn't understand that she couldn't ever read any of those books using anything other than Kindle, and that she could never give them to somebody else to read (like my son who doesn't have an Amazon account). These people making these decisions are not well-informed. They assume they're not being screwed over, but they're in for a rude awakening.
We are rapidly moving to a world where there are no options for people to run software of their choosing on mobile devices. And we already know that the mobile manufacturers operate at the behest of the US government. This is not a pattern that I think is going to serve us well in the coming decades.
At some point, you have to figure out who your mobile devices are working for.
Right, if we could educate users on the tools they use, and if the trillion dollar companies could provide tools to help community members protect each other, we wouldn't be here. Apple doesn't have to be a dictator if they would help the community support each other. Instead they took the easy way out of stripping freedoms from everyone so they can control every device out there. It's a minor inconvenience to be involved in protecting vulnerable people in our community, it's tragic that people just said Apple should take that role.
They don’t. You can still run any software you’d like. You just get warnings, so people like parents don’t just randomly open malicious programs from the internet.
App developers do know. I can't say that I've ever worked on an app where this request has been made. Neither the App Store Connect Agreement[0] nor the Apple Developer Agreement[1] stipulates that the developer can be compelled to surrender their source code.
All the relevant agreements can be found here, so if there's something that specifies this kind of overreach, I'd both be very surprised and interested.
“If you are required by law, regulation, or court order to disclose any Apple Confidential Information (which can include requests related to legal investigations or audits), you agree to give Apple prompt notice and to cooperate in seeking a protective order or confidential treatment of such information”
They haven't read the document properly. Here's the definition:
> any information disclosed by Apple to you in connection with Apple Events will be considered and referred to as “Apple Confidential Information” and are subject to the confidentiality obligations of this Agreement
The definition of Apple Events:
> As an Apple Developer, you may have the opportunity to attend certain Apple developer conferences, technical talks, and other events (including online or electronic broadcasts of such events) (“Apple Events”).
