[joemi]

If they did that, every influencer would make youtube videos and tik toks telling people how they should enable that setting to make their phone better or more powerful "for free", and everyone would just do it, especially the people who really shouldn't because they don't know any better.

[Zak]

No they wouldn't. We don't have to speculate about that; Android already has a toggle to allow direct installation of apps, and most people don't turn it on.

Many Android devices allow unlocking the bootloader and gaining root or installing an alternate OS without exploits, and there are quite a few third-party Android builds for supported devices. The process is not beyond what a person of average intelligence and modest computer skills could pull off with some patience and a video guide. Only a handful of tech nerds actually do it.

[joemi]

Perhaps we're making different assumptions, but a process that "is not beyond what a person of average intelligence and modest computer skills could pull off with some patience and a video guide" sounds quite a bit more complex than a mere Unlock option in iPhone settings. Also, the results are different too. The process you've described results in an Android desktop, whereas the proposed iphone unlock process would result in a full macOS desktop, which sounds (to me at least) much more desirable to have.

I stand by my speculation that if it were possible to do that on an iphone, it'd definitely be something loads of people would do, including a large amount of people who shouldn't open their device that way but do just because they watched someone on social media telling them to.

[AstroBen]

> everyone would just do it

Wouldn't it be better to solve that with education? Also MacOS gives you a warning when you're opening something not vetted by them.

The idea that it's some higher authorities responsibility to keep us safe quickly slides into losing freedoms we care about.

Would you also like all websites to be ISP-approved?

We could also have all social media filtered through LLM guards to keep us safe?

Maybe link our IDs to our online identity to protect our kids.

[joemi]

MacOS does more than just give you a warning when you're opening a program not vetted by them -- it prevents you from opening it, so that's not really a good example of education, and is in fact an example of lockdown.

I'm not arguing that anything get any more locked down than it already is, so your points (while possibly valid in a bigger discussion) don't make a lot of sense here in this discussion about a hypothetical "unlock phone" setting.

[MBCook]

Yep. Scammers have managed to get people to install profiles on their devices so they can run non-appstore approved scam apps.