[saagarjha]

How much work do you really think that it would take them to remove the entitlement on the daemon that installs apps? I have heard that entire App Store frontend was maintained by like a single engineer until like iOS 8. The change would be fairly simple; the amount of time they spend on fighting these things both in court and with technological measure in the OS is many orders of magnitude more than this.

[chrisseaton]

They think it’ll be worse. Many of their customers agree. If you don’t can’t you go elsewhere? Why impose on people happy minding their own business?

[gambiting]

>>If you don’t can’t you go elsewhere? Why impose on people happy minding their own business?

That's the same argument, word for word, that people used to defend businesses not serving coloured folk - after all, can't they just go elsewhere? And we as society decided no, they shouldn't have to go anywhere - if you run a business, you have to serve everyone, end of story. I think it's time to do the same for Apple - if you want to run an app platform, you have to allow choice. And if your choice is to stay with App Store and only install apps curated by apple - that's perfectly valid. No one is taking that away from you.

Again, how exactly does that inconvenience you, personally? No one is forcing you to use these other stores, no one is imposing anything on you. They will just exist somewhere for people who want them. Again, I'm on Android but I don't feel like I'm losing anything by the mere existence of the Amazon App store - it's there if you want it, if you don't then that's cool.

And yes, I absolutely think you are overexaggerating the technical difficulty behind allowing people to do this - all Apple needs to do it allow apps to install other apps from packages. It's hardly a groundbreaking architectural change, come on.

[chrisseaton]

I don't think it's a reasonable argument to put people oppressed due to their race with people who want their smartphone to work a bit differently at the same level.

> if you run a business, you have to serve everyone, end of story

This isn't even true! You can deny service to anyone for any reason as long as it's not a protected characteristic! Apple already cannot deny your app based on your race.

If a restaurant doesn't like your attitude they can ask you to leave. Can't Apple do the same?

> Again, how exactly does that inconvenience you, personally?

Because the smartphone gets worse. Less locked-down, less simple, more complex, more avenues of attack. More expensive to make and maintain.

But why does anyone have to justify why they don't like it? I think 'I don't want to do this' should be reason enough for Apple to not do it. As long as they aren't impacting people who aren't their customers it's their business not yours.

> no one is imposing anything on you

Yes you are you want to impose that Apple change their software to suit you - it's selfish.

You want it your way, I want it my way. Hope can we resolve this? How about we let Apple choose who to market to?

We can't make it a legally protected right to have products designed for people's random whims.

[gambiting]

>>I don't think it's a reasonable argument to put people oppressed due to their race with people who want their smartphone to work a bit differently at the same level.

Well, perhaps, my broader point is that the ability of businesses to govern themselves and set their own rules does end somewhere, and that line is decided by societies and can change with time. Things that were acceptable few years ago maybe aren't acceptable now, and vice versa.

>>Because the smartphone gets worse. Less locked-down, less simple, more complex, more avenues of attack

I just don't see that at all, sorry. The experience for 99.99% users won't change at all. Apple could have enabled this last week and you wouldn't have seen any difference at all.

>>We can't make it a legally protected right to have products designed for people's random whims.

Well, but it's not just a random whim, that's the crux of the issue. Once the size of a company and the market it controls gets big enough, it's only natural that they are forced to open to others. It happened to every industry before, why should apple be immune to this? It's the whole epic vs apple discussion again - if two sides want to engage in lawful business contract(sell each other software in this case) why should apple be the arbiter of these transactions? Or rather - why should you, the owner of your smartphone, be forced to use apple as the arbiter.

>>How about we let Apple choose who to market to?

They still can, literally nothing changes on that front. They still market to the same people, they still curate the apps like they used to, they still have 100% control of their app store and the device. The only thing that I would like to change is that ability to say "this is my device apple, I paid for it, let me install software that didn't go through your filter". Again, entirely optional. But we looped back to the first point that we are going to disagree on again - you think that will make the experience worse, I don't think it will.

I think we should agree to part ways on that - the discussion is as always enjoyable, but we might have exhausted the potential here :-)

[spacedcowboy]

For what it’s worth, I’m with him, for pretty much the exact same reasons.

You knew what you were getting into when you bought the iPhone. Trying to change it after the fact just seems like trying to profit off other people’s hard work and investments. Screw that.

[gambiting]

So....if you buy something, you automatically lose the right to complain about the way it works? Do you apply that rule to the other areas of your life?

Maybe a different example - until very recently, if you bought a BMW, you could only get Apple CarPlay as a subscription, you couldn't just pay upfront to have it. Which is not how this works literally anywhere else, every other brand has it as a one-time unlock and then you have it for life.

Surely, every person buying a brand new BMW knew this, it's clearly advertised. So....should they not have complained about this? After all, they knew what they were buying. But, people have been complaining, and BMW has finally changed it recently. Good riddance I say.

But back to the iphone dillema. The problem with your argument is that this is traditionally not how markets work. If company X wants to sell something to John Smith(let's say an app for their iphone), but cannot without going through some kind of licence holder(Apple in this case) - it's totally a valid question to ask if Apple is stifling competition here or not. In my opinion - they are. Maybe the company X is making a completely legitimate web browser, that John Smith wants to buy and pay money for - but Apple will say nope, you can't buy that, because that would compete with our own product. That's anticompetitive behaviour, and traditionally it does eventually get stopped in court. Like I said in my example several posts ago - volkswagen cannot do anything to stop the company X from selling brake pads to John Smith, yes they fit a car that Volkswagen made but Volkswagen doesn't get to say whether John Smith is allowed to purchase and fit those parts or not. Courts all over the world have decided, many times, that corporations shouldn't have that power. Why do smartphone manufacturers get to keep that power now then? That will change in my opinion, and they will be forced to open up.