| Apple wants the iPad OS developer experience to be bad Their #1 focus is lock-in, preventing being commodified, and extracting value No apps that run operating systems, no apps with windowed environments, no app-store-like apps / third party app stores, no browser engines, no Flash, terrible mobile safari experience, no OS mods / jailbreaks, no desktop-style cursors, physical iPad keyboards lacking escape keys. Wanting 30% of all payments for digital goods that occur on an iPhone. Being able to eg "run Docker on your iPad" would go against all that. I think it's also a big part of why they charge $99/yr for being a developer - otherwise people would be able to sideload apps much more easily Nice article related to this: https://subconscious.substack.com/p/aggregators-arent-open-e... Hard to imagine just how different things might be right now if things were more open. iPhones are always on and connected to the internet - you could run servers from them! maybe mesh networking could actually be a thing? The mother of all demos would not be allowed on the app store. Squeak/smalltalk would not be allowed. Feels disrespectful to humanity that the most popular platform in the US is so locked down. Idk how things would change here without government intervention -- this all seems to be in shareholders' interests. Seems like a good time to be running a competitor. iOS being so locked down means they'll have lackluster support for the long tail of desired AI use cases. And cross platform development via react native is really good now, imo. |