The App Store policies were always for the benefit of customers (and Apple). These policies will keep happening because the basic incentive of Apple's business model has been unchanged since 2008.
Indeed many people do not remember that Android ecosystem at the beginning deliberately was on the side of the developer (and Google) as opposed to the user with its lax permissions and liberal access to the system and took its leisurely time to add more useful permission controls for years (location access was install time and you could not opt out of that specific permission unless you chose not to install the app at all).
Priorities matter.
P.S. I do see Apple business model changing to services bringing in some bad behavior associated with that: for instance, push notifications now are used as a spam/marketing mechanism for Apple services similar to Android; iCloud Storage nag is another example.
100% this, folks do not remember that it was really apple leading on a TON of this stuff.
The storage and other nags I hate, it's a real ethos breaker for me. Get that crap off my iphone. That's why I pay extra - for less crap (I like that they somehow can also block the carriers from installing unremovable apps, for some reason android phones sometimes come with weird apps from your carrier when you get them).
> leisurely time to add more useful permission controls for years
I remember when I discovered my Android phone wasn’t encrypted, and it had lasted for years. I suddenly stopped using it, changed my passwords/tokens and bought an iPhone. Never came back.
Yeah, like the inability for the user to install an app after an authoritarian government decided that their subjects should not be using it, and Apple subserviently obeyed and removed said app from the Appstore.
An extremely beneficial policy for the customers, right.
You’re talking about something else. Do we expect money-making companies to be the ones to war against authoritarian regimes? Do we not also expect companies to obey the laws of the lands in which they conduct business? You can’t just say screw it to GDPR and expect to continue to be able to conduct business in the EU.
I do expect the company that sells hardware to their users to allow users to decide which apps to run on sold devices. Currently, Apple is behaving as if still owns those devices and decides which apps to run. Precisely this lock-in created by apple is actively exploited by authoritarian regimes.
If Apple will allow third-party app stores or direct installation of applications on devices, dictatorships will lose this capability to harm Apple's customers.
But of course we all know that this policy was never intended to protect users, it was to protect Apple and their appstore monopoly, which also allows Apple to extort developers of 30% of all of their revenues by forcing them into Apple's payment services. Finally, the world has had enough of this and starts to fight back against it.
> If Apple will allow third-party app stores or direct installation of applications on devices, dictatorships will lose this capability to harm Apple's customers.
As someone who switched from the Samsung note line to iPhone, the only freedom I felt from the ability to install other apps was the freedom to deal with all the unrecoverable crap ware.
There’s other phones out there with greater freedom than the iPhone, people are aware of them, and are still choosing the iPhone.
The curation is a benefit in that I have a corporation with thousands of employees working to prevent the other corporations from making my user experience worse. If the curation goes away I’d probably switch to a cheaper phone next upgrade and I’m sure apples aware of that
You are not living in an authoritarian country. That's why you think that the shiny chains that you wear are just a nice decoration, because they were never used to strangle you.
Apple didn't have to lock users out of installing "unapproved" apps on their own. That isn't for the user's benefit and isn't necessary for apple to have a curated app store.
What would the alternative be - the method of installation is the App Store, and Apple's compliance was removing the public and private presence from the App Store within that country.
Just allow sideloading. It's not hard to not block that. But apple is hell-bent on collecting every cent they can, so of course all app installations must go through their walled garden where they can take their 30%. Anti-consumer behavior at its finest.
How does the app store searching and filtering work now? I had last contact with Apple devices around iPhone 4S. What I remember from that time (maybe wrongly) is that the experience was practically limited to a name search (as on Android). You can't filter for example for open source apps. I know that the example is not useful at its face value even if power users could show their less technical peers "this one simple trick". But it is just an example. From what I remember searching things in app stores is a lesson in frustration, because it is mainly there to input a well known brand or app name and quickly install it instead of helping with app discovery.
Nowadays on Android I try to search for apps on F-Droid first or search on Github as a shortcut to find open source apps. Why open source? They are often a barebones version, that will probably not sell me out and will not use dark patterns (I know it can still happen). I have nothing against paying for apps, I do have a couple I bought, but sometimes I have simple itch, that I know for sure someone else already scratched for everyone else and I do donate sometimes. This lousy state of app stores leads me often to search for some simple web apps on github.io. At the same time I sold whole open source category to Microsoft. In the end it seems that all I want is a smartphone shell scripting equivalent, but that is a totally different point.
> You can't filter for example for open source apps.
There isn't metadata for this, as it is not part of Apple's relationship.
They are a seller of software, and the creator of the software is responsible for making sure the software can be compatible with the licensing and copyright terms of both Apple and any dependencies.
A semantic link to grab the source code for an app would be neat, but a pretty niche feature. That Apple can't verify that it is the same code (or that the separately hosted build process doesn't have malicious logic within it) probably quickly pushed them over the edge in terms of not supporting such a feature.
Priorities matter.
P.S. I do see Apple business model changing to services bringing in some bad behavior associated with that: for instance, push notifications now are used as a spam/marketing mechanism for Apple services similar to Android; iCloud Storage nag is another example.