[Wowfunhappy]

I mostly love this post but I want to quibble about one thing:

> And of course that's the case because there's no other way to square the idea that people willingly buy into the Apple ecosystem and also that those same people wouldn't avoid sideloaded apps if given the choice.

I think there is a universe in which:

1. Apple allows sideloading on iOS.

2. 95%+ of users don't ever sideload apps, preferring the safety and security of the official App Store.

Note that #2 does not mean consumers need to understand the precise risks of untrusted software, provided they generally understand that malicious apps exist and can harm their phone, whereas Apple promises everything in the app store is safe.

To make this happen, Apple would need to do some work, aka actually compete in the market! They would need to run an advertising campaign about the value of app store curation. They would need to improve search and discoverability, such as by not auctioning off the top search result spot. They might need to take a lower percentage of app revenue.

And Apple should have to do these things because it would be good for consumers!

[danShumway]

I don't necessarily disagree, just that what you're describing is an education effort.

I do think that general users can understand what the security/freedom tradeoff of sideloading is; this is not something that's beyond the ability of normal people to reason about. I just think that in the current market they don't. I don't believe that the current behaviors we see where lots of people simultaneously buy into iOS as a closed platform and are also pretty bad about staying in walled gardens without being forced to can be explained by saying that one of those things is an educated decision and the other one isn't.

But you're right, that's not to say that in theory consumers couldn't be educated about the tradeoffs or that it wouldn't be good to have a general education effort in that direction. But I think it would need to be a shift and we would need to start doing that education. I'm only trying to push back on the idea that absent consumer education we can still make inferences about their preferences through just surface-level choices that they might be making for arbitrary reasons.

[seanmcdirmid]

> To make this happen, Apple would need to do some work, aka actually compete in the market! They would need to run an advertising campaign about the value of app store curation. They would need to improve search and discoverability, such as by not auctioning off the top search result spot. They might need to take a lower percentage of app revenue.

Apple already does that marketing. It’s why I bought an iPhone rather than an android phone. Apple doesn’t have a lockdown on the smart phone market. They don’t even have a majority of it, I choose an iPhone because I don’t want to deal with my phone like a Linux box.

Yes, Apple has a monopoly on iPhones. But making the iPhone suck as much as other phones doesn’t seem like it will correct that monopoly.

[danShumway]

> Apple already does that marketing. It’s why I bought an iPhone rather than an android phone.

Do you believe that if sideloading is offered on the iPhone that the majority of Apple users will be able to make an informed decision about whether or not it's safe to use 3rd-party stores?

This is exactly what I'm getting at: it cannot simultaneously be true that iOS customers already know the security/choice tradoeffs and are opting into the market fully informed about their decisions specifically because they want a walled garden, and also be true that those same people's brains are going to suddenly, magically turn off and they'll be incapable of making security decisions if they ever have an option in the iOS settings to enable sideloading.

Given that we know that lots of people buy Apple phones, and given that we know that many of those same users would choose to sideload possibly malicious apps without hesitation even though doing so would open them up to security risks -- the only explanation that reconciles those two contradictory facts is that the majority of iOS users are not thinking about security or user choice at all. And that's an explanation that's supported by what we seen in the real world as well: when talking to non-technical iOS users they don't tend to have strong opinions about this (if they even know what the debate is in the first place). If you go to a random person on the street and ask them why they bought an iPhone, "app store policy" will not be their response.

You may not be in that category; maybe you did buy an iPhone specifically because you wanted a closed ecosystem. But if so, you are not representative of the majority of iPhone users. The majority of iPhone users don't know what an "alternate browsing engine" is. The majority of iPhone users have probably never thought about how the app store works or whether they agree with it. They don't have preferences in any direction; the majority of iPhone users currently think we're all giant nerds for having this conversation at all.

And being informed about that conversation is what we're talking about when we talk about education. None of this is to say that people couldn't be educated enough to make informed decisions about sideloading or that they're incapable of thinking about security, but you're fooling yourself if you think an average smartphone user is currently thinking about app store policies at all when they buy a smartphone.