[kulahan]

Walled gardens are not inherently bad. I DO thank Apple for the App Store. It’s half the reason I have an iPhone. I WANT to be able to download any stupid thing in there without a care in the world re: viruses or other damaging experiences.

This is not to say every aspect of their walled garden is good, but I’m more than happy to accept those problems in light of the benefits I personally value.

This is all to say: it’s not much of an argument to point out that one of their selling points is an aspect of their ecosystem! I don’t think you’ll get through to anyone who doesn’t already agree with you.

[socksy]

I never understand this viewpoint — I understand what you're saying but there's no advantage to this over the Play Store model on Android.

You can have the walled garden, and also not restrict people's freedom — on Android I'm sure the number of people that use any other store than the play store or even side load apps are vanishingly small.

To even be able to do it you have to enable it deep in the settings. And even then, if a new app tries to install an apk you have to manually approve that app's ability to do that before reinitiating the entire process.

That's to say, the default experience is very wall gardened, and I do feel somewhat more protected when downloading something from the play store than not, and the vast majority of people will never leave the Google walled garden. But there exists a way to go around that walled garden when you need to, and that doesn't subtract from that walled garden mode in any way IMO.

[baseballdork]

For myself, the point is that I don't have to download another app store ever. If fortnite wants to get me (and roughly 50% of US mobile users) to play their game, they _have_ to follow the rules of the app store we have decided suits us best. If, however, other app stores are allowed, then there are no rules. No gatekeeper.

I prefer the gatekeeper, in this case.

[sneak]

> I WANT to be able to download any stupid thing in there without a care in the world re: viruses or other damaging experiences.

The Apple ios app store is positively chock full of spyware. You can’t download apps without a care in the world. This is why Apple put a privacy label on the apps (which is still woefully inadequate; it is self-reported).

[crummy]

surely any "spyware" on the app store is going to include a ton of permissions alerts when it does anything? do you have any egregious examples?

[klabb3]

The permissions alerts don’t come from the App Store, they come from sandboxing and the permission model. This is a property of the OS, and everyone agrees that this is better than the anarchy of desktop OSs. But they were created decades earlier, sandboxing was obvious in hindsight only.

> surely any "spyware" on the app store is going to include a ton of permissions alerts when it does anything?

Not really. Push notifications is enough. I can send you a push notification and get loads of details from your phone, including cross-app fingerprinting. Iirc Apple allows ~3 silent push notifications per hour so they can be completely hidden.

https://gizmodo.com/iphone-apps-can-harvest-data-from-notifi...

But really, your search is as good as mine. The entire digital economy is based on personal data collected from your devices, and yes, that includes the iPhone. How is this news? What’s your definition of spyware?

[realusername]

> I WANT to be able to download any stupid thing in there without a care in the world re: viruses or other damaging experiences

That's rich knowing that most of the money Apple gets from the Appstore is made from predatory casino-like games