[kcplate]

> Apple is well on its way to ensure you can only run things they allow via app store

I am totally ok with this. I have personally seen apple reject an app update and delist the app because a tiny library used within it had a recent security concerns. Forced the company to fix it.

[eviks]

No one is stopping you from using only the app store if you value its protection, so you need a more relevant justification to ok forcing everyone else to do so

[kcplate]

If I had 1.4B active users I would want to mitigate the ability of almost all of them to accidentally fuck up their devices instead of worrying about irritating a few tech folk because they can’t load broken apps on it.

[eviks]

Your stat is an order of magnitude type of fantasy, the apps aren't broken, and the inability to install also affects everyone, not a few folks, so again you're left with nothing but your personal desire for controlling other people

[kcplate]

> Your personal desire for controlling other people.

Well that’s just childish, pouty, and not a very well thought out train of thought on the subject.

The control isn’t over people, it’s about finding a solution to creating and preserving market share via device reliability on the platform. There are 1.4B iPhone users (and that’s a real number, not a fantasy), and not every one of those people is savvy enough to vet their applications before installation. If installation of any app was wide open you would have a large portion of those 1.4B accidentally installing crap. They may have 100 apps on their phone but if 1 is a piece of shit and broken (and yes conservatively at least 1% of apps out there probably have a bug bad enough to wreck some havoc) and it renders the reliability of the phone to shit that’s bad. If the market perceives that the reliability of the device is shit, Apple loses either in increasing or preserving market share for the device. Apple needs those devices need to work reliably and it feels that one way to do that is vetting the apps that will be running on it. The hardware is great, the OS does its job making the hardware platform operational, but the one place where there is the opportunity to introduce instability is in the apps. So you do your best to control that area of instability opportunity on your platform.

Here is the beautiful thing for you…there plenty of other phones out there that will allow you to install whatever the hell you want. Apple only has 16% of the worldwide smartphone market share.

https://backlinko.com/iphone-users#iphone-key-stats

[eviks]

Man, talking about crashing trains of thought: you fail to grasp the fact that the conversation is about MacOS, not iOS, that there is no contradiction between "blah platform" and control over people, and even that the fact that other phones exist doesn't negate the deficiencies of this specific phone

> conservatively at least 1% of apps

That's another made up number of yours, with a similarly made up qualifier

> the market perceives that the reliability of the device is shit

Since the vast majority of devices aren't so locked down, isn't "the market" yelling at yout that you're wrong?

[kcplate]

I was talking about iOS so yes, I missed that the conversation was about Mac. Shame on me. In a sense the use case for a Mac is less ubiquitous than a smartphone, so the need for vetting may not be as great because users of the device don’t perceive the apps running on it as the device itself.

However, I stand firm in my argument about why the iPhone is locked down and why it’s a good thing. Even if you spread into other smartphone manufacturers like Samsung, you still find similar attempts to control the lay users ability to install unvetted apps on the devices. It may even be more important for them to do that too since they don’t fully control the OS on their devices.

> That's another made up number of yours, with a similarly made up qualifier

Obvious it was made up and obviously it was set as an intentionally low bar for software quality because who would argue (especially on HN) that 100% of available software out there is bug free, but if you want to believe that all available software is 100% safe to use, I encourage you to download and install everything you come across no matter whether the device is a smartphone, a Mac, or any other device you use and rely upon. I am sure you will be fine.

[1596025359]

What about all those libs and executables you likely install via brew, npm, cargo etc? Those are all applications

[sealeck]

Sure – Apple are trying to stop people who don't know what they're doing from getting hurt. Hence the strong scrutiny on what is allowed on the App Store (whether it's reasonable to charge 30% of revenue is an entirely different question).

People who are installing things using a terminal are probably (a) slightly computer savvy and (b) therefore aware that this might not be a totally safe operation.

[spacedcowboy]

And, despite being an avid homebrew user, I've never had a problem there.

[ddingus]

All of us having this discussion are outliers.

The things we talk about here which annoy us are for the much larger set of people who need them!

Put another way, it is all about the set of us who cannot really participate in this discussion.