[tomlin]

Very few people will probably agree with you, probably even try and bury your comment, even though you're absolutely right.

No one wants to admit that their fav. ecosystem is basically mob-mentality dressed in a sleek, comfortable, suit - but it is.

I love Xcode, the Apple ecosystem - but I'm finding it hard not to look down the road and see the inevitable. Are people willfully blind?

It's a mixture of shortsightedness and comfort. We have this Apple/Google fanboy thing going on, where one is trying to be better than the other. While that happens, the open web, something both sides seem to agree is important, becomes an "old media" way of doing things.

[drieddust]

I totally agree. Even Microsoft is going to follow suit[1].

[1]http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/windows-8-app-store-will-...

I dread a world in which every app have to be approved by Microsoft/Apple. In the end customer is going to lose.

[T-hawk]

No, most customers will win. Their experience is improved by the layer of curating to weed out broken and scammy stuff. Most customers don't have needs that can't be satisfied within the set of apps that Microsoft and Apple approve, plus the entire public browser-accessible web.

It's not black-and-white that "OPEN == GOOD" and "CLOSED == BAD". There are tradeoffs both ways.

[drieddust]

I am open source agnostic but I will not allow someone else to control what apps I can install.

Scammy stuff will still exists and only difference will be that customer will never know about it[1] and is going to live under false security.Companies will try to ban every person trying to expose vulnerabilities.

[1]http://www.darknet.org.uk/2011/11/apple-bans-security-resear...

Do you thing a small set of employees sitting in a company's approval department are experts of every single thing that can be ever conceived by a developer?

I am not against the idea of sand-boxing if it is built in the OS API. How approving a sand-boxed application is going to improve the security?

[tomlin]

This. Attackers just point their attention to the greatest targets. When one target disappears, the attackers don't disappear - they just find a different approach. The recent iOS security breach proved this, in my opinion, pretty concretely.

[tomlin]

I agree that both open and closed can co-exist, but if media drives media (ie, advertising agencies chasing the app-for-no-reason bandwagon) how can we be sure that we don't have a monoculture in software development in the future? I don't think there is any argument that that would be an entirely bad thing.

At my job, I am embroiled in signs that point in this very loathsome direction.