Would giving people the ability to opt out of Apple's ultra-managed experience and take more control over their device harm your ability to continue to enjoy those benefits?
I heard an argument like this a lot at the start of discussions about whether we should be able to choose to WFH in the longer term. "I don't want to WFH because..." Ok, sure, but nobody is trying to force you to.
It might just be me, and I'll definitely fret about whether I'm being unreasonable for at least the next couple of hours, but this kinda frustrates me.
I'm supportive of your choice, but you already get to do the thing you want, and nobody is trying to take that away.
Expressing that you wouldn't behave any differently given more options is a distraction in a discussion about whether other people should be allowed to make a different choice.
> Would giving people the ability to opt out of Apple's ultra-managed experience and take more control over their device harm your ability to continue to enjoy those benefits?
Next thing that would happen is that every major "can't miss out" app will walk its users through the process to disable safe management features, all to fulfill the promise of showing cute cat gifs. You know that's how it is.
We don't have to guess. Android app store is clear example that gives power users choice, while at the same time being able to hold onto most of the users.
>When Fortnite launched on mobile in 2018, Epic Games very notably sidestepped the Google Play Store and pushed users to download the title directly from their website, an effort made to avoid the substantial revenue cuts that Google takes from in-app purchases of Play Store downloads. At the time, the move was understandable for Epic, which was sitting on the hottest free-to-play game of the year that was pulling in substantial revenues from in-app purchases.
Google proceeded to try to scare users away from sideloading Epic's app, and Epic sued.
>“Google puts software downloadable outside of Google Play at a disadvantage, through technical and business measures such as scary, repetitive security pop-ups for downloaded and updated software, restrictive manufacturer and carrier agreements and dealings, Google public relations characterizing third party software sources as malware, and new efforts such as Google Play Protect to outright block software obtained outside the Google Play store,” an Epic Games spokesperson said in a statement. “Because of this, we’ve launched Fortnite for Android on the Google Play Store.”
>> A sibling argument is saying that if side-loading were opt in, major apps would move to require it from users.
>> This has never happened on Android.
> When Fortnite launched on mobile in 2018, Epic Games very notably sidestepped the Google Play Store and pushed users to download the title directly from their website...
Though that's the exception that proves the rule. Besides Fortnite, who else has pushed users into side-loading? It's not at all common, which weighs strongly against the scare-mongering that it would somehow cause their platform security to collapse if Apple allowed it.
It also seems like it would be the case if your app is big enough to get people to side-load it, it's probably also big enough to get some security/privacy of its own to keep its practices in check.
WeChat won’t start on Android if you didn’t give access to your contact list, this is not the case on iPhone as Apple wouldn’t allow that crippled user experience. Android already allows shenanigans so the incentives for more stores aren’t that big. I had Samsung store on my last Android phone also.
We know from discovery in the various Google antitrust cases that Google has a pattern of behavior where they place barriers against others who attempted to offer their own app store. They talk a good game about allowing it, but their conduct is a different story.
>The lawsuit is effectively claiming that this openness is a facade, because while customers technically have the choice of where to get their apps from, Google’s business practices have prevented a viable app store competitor from emerging.
>Google has struck at least 24 deals with big app developers to stop them from competing with its Play Store, including an agreement to pay Activision Blizzard Inc about $360 million over three years
>Epic reached an agreement with OnePlus to preload Epic Games on the company’s smartphones. As part of the agreement, Epic says it developed a version of Fortnite specifically for OnePlus devices to take advantage of the OnePlus phones’ high-refresh-rate screens...
Google demanded OnePlus not implement the agreement outside of India, where the company allowed OnePlus to move forward with the deal.
OnePlus reportedly informed Epic that Google was “concerned that the Epic Games app would have the ability to potentially install and update multiple games with a silent install bypassing the Google Play Store.”
For me, it's not about companies right but individuals rights. If I paid money for a device and if I am willing to let go of warranty and updates, I should be free to do whatever I wish with it. I don't think this statement should be as controversial as people make it to be.
Epic's enormously popular game Fortnite was removed from the Google Play store in 2020 for violating their in-app purchase policies, so they publish it in their own sideloaded app store.[0]
Facebook claims to have lost $10 billion due to a single iOS prompt giving users the option of blocking tracking. If side-loading were allowed on iOS, Facebook would have 10 billion reasons to push users to side-load their app, a pressure that doesn't exist at all on Android, which is tracking-happy.
Since Google lets most apps do what they want in most ways, there's not much motivation for bypassing the App Store--unless you're greedy like Epic. Since Apple restricts apps more with each passing year, the motivation is much higher, in addition to the identical 30% fees.
Then make it a contact that can be opened by removing a screw behind a "non reversible loss of warranty" sticker so that only users who know what they're doing would be motivated to proceed.
I'm not familiar with those laws, do you mean the protection screw or the loss of warranty? I think many devices implement the latter in their EULAs, in case of tampering, use of non original parts etc, and the former as a protection is commonly used for example in some Chromebox PCs models to prevent flashing other operating systems. I think many tinkerers, including myself, would be more than happy to surrender any warranty, support, etc, if that was the only price to pay to be able to install what we want on our devices.
Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act ban such stickers as the manufacture has to prove a modification directly led to the failure before denying a warrany claim. the FTC sent out in 2018[1][2] a letter to several manufacturers, including Apple I believe, that deployed such stickers on their products
The common example I give is that if you replace the radio in your car, and then the water pump fails the manufacturer of the car can not refuse the warranty because you change the radio
Similarly, if in this instance you remove the sticker to turn on Dev Mode and then the Screen fails it would be incumbent on Apple to prove some software or something you did directly cause the screen failure before voiding the warranty claim, they can not simply relay on a sticker
Why is here consistently in any Apple discussion exactly this reaction? Locked down is good for you, you don't want freedom, we know better. On hacker forum.
Seriously, basically any other topic we can discuss like adults here but when it comes to Apple and their restrictions/bad behavior it feels like the most upvoted posts are paid ones (not stating they are, but it certainly would look like that on more generic forums)
> Why is here consistently in any Apple discussion exactly this reaction?
Because the only mobile OS provider which allows blinding tracking frameworks with a single click is Apple currently, and every software vendor will want its telemetry and ads for their "monies".
The application model evolved from "pay this to get that" to "train this AI implicitly which we gonna use against you, and ah, we also sell your every aspect of you" to see cute cat GIFs.
Some of us are seriously against this and Android doesn't provide that. Maybe it's because Google is an advertisement company which provides nice looking (free-ish) utilities which also acts as nice data funnels (incl. Android).
If you mean browsing web, the freedom I talk about allows you on Android to install Firefox and ublock origin (and other plugins), which is more privacy friendly solution in-the-box than Apple will ever allow to be installed on any Apple device. If you mean apps installed its your choice what you put on your device.
Lets not forget the stuff you (and most of us) so loathe is direction Apple is actively heading for few years via their own ad-space. Truly surreal discussion.
True, but Google's own implementation of Android in the Pixel does allow you to re sign the bootloader so you can install your own OS and securely boot to it. And "Android" isn't all the same. It's a broad and shared ecosystem.
However, doing this and using a custom ROM will flat out disable SIM services menu and related functionality, which I need for my embedded e-Signature in my SIM card.
Also, we have a gatekeeper called Google Play Services. In other words, even if you have a custom ROM, you need that all-encompassing framework to have nice things.
Clients may differ, but the cloud platform and the connector which enables all these "Android" things is closed source, and controlled by Google.
Or you could have the open source microG and miss out only on Google Pay (and some bank apps that wanna validate SafetyNet for some reason). If you disable FCM / push notification support, your phone won't even need to interact with Google servers at all.
For low budget folks, a lot of Xiaomi phones are supported. You'll have to sign up for their account and wait for a few days, but otherwise the process is pretty straightforward. E. g. this is for my current phone: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/ginkgo/install
> Would giving people the ability to opt out of Apple's ultra-managed experience and take more control over their device harm your ability to continue to enjoy those benefits?
Not OP but yeah, I think it would. Im currently an android user because I thought it wouldn't, but in practice it does.
The most explicit example is that despite owning a flagship phone from a flagship manufacturer, the Google suite of apps don't integrate properly with the hardware. I have a Z flip 3, and I need to use Samsung Pay (over google wallet) with the phone to use it while folded. Because Samsung Pay doesn't integrate with my Google account, I'm forced to use both services in praxtice.
These sorts of niggley incompatibilities are _everywhere_ on android.
The other point is what epic has done is going to spread (side note: I used to work for Epic, this is my take on their move, not speaking on their behalf). If I want to play the Fortnite right now, I am forced to download an extra launcher on my device that interacts differently to the play store and Samsung store, doesn't support the integrations with the rest of my apps. I can only guarantee that as other apps grow we'll end up with storefronts for X, Y and Z (see uplay, battle.net, origin, epic launcher, ms store) so that those apps can either take a bigger cut or skirt around the requirements the platform holder has - on iOS it will make it so that sign in with apple isn't a requirement on third party stores.
The fact is that people who do want to sideload have the option to right now - use android. The people who want to live in a walled garden also have an option. By forcing apple to be more open you remove that option from the people who want it.
As with it OP, I'm not saying everyone should feel this way.
> The most explicit example is that despite owning a flagship phone from a flagship manufacturer, the Google suite of apps don't integrate properly with the hardware.
I personally have never used a Samsung device, but from I've read, I feel like Samsung phones are trying to be their own OS and do as much as they can to hide the fact that they're running Google's Android OS.
It's similar to the same way MacOS tries to hide the fact that it's Unix under the hood and hides all the Unix directories (/usr, /bin, etc.) in the Finder by default.
I'm sure I have a couple of vice grips around here somewhere. I wonder how far an iPhone will fold before Apple Pay stops working. Surely some YouTuber has tested this already...
Absolutely no idea, sorry. I don't have other devices to verify on. But, if I set my default payment app to Google Wallet, when I try to activate a payment the phone says "open your phone and set the default payment app to Samsung Wallet"
> Would giving people the ability to opt out of Apple's ultra-managed experience and take more control over their device harm your ability to continue to enjoy those benefits?
No.
> It might just be me, and I'll definitely fret about whether I'm being unreasonable for at least the next couple of hours, but this kinda frustrates me.
The thing is, I'm stating my position and not telling that just because I choose something, everybody should be happy with that. I have only stated that Apple's proposition is better suited to my mindset and current preferences, given the choices are Android and iOS.
> I'm supportive of your choice, but you already get to do the thing you want, and nobody is trying to take that away.
I expressed no such fear or concern as far as I'm aware?
> Expressing that you wouldn't behave any differently given more options is a distraction in a discussion about whether other people should be allowed to make a different choice.
I don't think so. I skimmed the discussion and didn't see the position I have expressed here, and the parent asked for a counter-opinion, and I presented mine in a concise and polite manner. I guess we're discussing by expressing our opinions here, what am I missing?
I think the point is that the benefits you list can continue if Apple adopts a Google model of allowing power users to add additional stores. You seemed to be presenting them as reasons why that shouldn't happen.
To be clear: I'm mostly complaining about the general concept of people giving "I like A" answers to "should we allow people to choose B over A" questions.
Your comment was an example of that, if not a particularly egregious one. We're not about to sway Apple in a HN comment thread. Specific reference to your comment was intended only to use it as an example to illustrate the point.
> I expressed no such fear or concern as far as I'm aware?
Nor did I claim that you did. While it is not your position that allowing others a choice would harm you, explicitly mentioning that you don't stand to lose anything by allowing that choice is supportive of the main point in the next sentence.
> Would giving people the ability to opt out of Apple's ultra-managed experience and take more control over their device harm your ability to continue to enjoy those benefits?
You can always Jailbreak your device?
I think Apples response to your argument would be that it isn't the technically aware user that is trying to get control over their device that is the problem, its apps being used by those with no technical ability. Once an App is allowed to break out of the sandbox or be installed away from the AppStore the likelyhood of an average users phone getting into a broken mess at best and becoming infected with a virus at worse goes up my an order of magnitude.
No, you can't and this isn't a serious alternative, especially since Apple goes out of their way to prevent and break jailbreaks.
> Once an App is allowed to break out of the sandbox or be installed away from the AppStore the likelyhood of an average users phone getting into a broken mess at best and becoming infected with a virus at worse goes up my an order of magnitude.
And yet multimillion dollar scams flourish on the App Store[1]:
> That man’s name is Kosta Eleftheriou, and over the past few months, he’s made a convincing case that Apple is either uninterested or incompetent at stopping multimillion-dollar scams in its own App Store. He’s repeatedly found scam apps that prey on ordinary iPhone and iPad owners by luring them into a “free trial” of an app with seemingly thousands of fake 5-star reviews, only to charge them outrageous sums of money for a recurring subscription that many don’t understand how to cancel. “It’s a situation that most communities are blind to because of how Apple is essentially brainwashing people into believing the App Store is a trusted place,” he tells The Verge.
Apple is also responsible for distributing 500 million copies of Xcodeghost to users via the App Store[2].
The App Store model is about profits, and security is an afterthought that makes for good PR.
I'm not sure what your point is - both of those articles are making the case that Apple should be doing more rather than less. If users don't understand how to cancel an App subscription from their phone how much fun will they have when the same apps and more have tied their credit cards into recurring payments.
Apple is clearly incapable of securing their own App Store and consumers should have the option of using app distribution methods run by more competent engineers with better track records.
No, you can’t. Apple has tight control over what gets installed on the iPhone, all the way throughout the boot chain.
Jailbreaking is about finding vulnerabilities to somehow acquire root, and many times exploits are not persistent after a reboot. The keyword here is “vulnerability”, something that Apple is eager to patch using security as an excuse, which is hard to argue against. But Apple could provide its users the ability to flash their devices with a warning that if they do, they’re on their own, but Apple wont do that for the aforementioned reasons by countless people in this thread! They are locking down the platform on purpose, and neither privacy nor security are adequate excuses.
Jailbreaking shouldn’t be a thing, because users shouldn’t be living in jails, they should live in fortresses.
Jailbreaking is incredibly bad UX. You are forced to use closed source software to “jailbreak” your phone, a jailbreak which may or may not be persistent after reboot. And only if you have the right iOS versions. So users are forced to stay on vulnerable iOS versions and not upgrade and pray to God that a new exploit is made for their version. Because if they upgrade, Apple wont let them downgrade again, which makes the users miss the opportunity of using a newly created exploit. It’s a cat and mouse game, and it makes users more vulnerable to malware.
So make it difficult to do. Add a bunch of warnings.
This option lets hackers into yr phone to steal yr nudes click OK to continue.
Are you SURE?
Check this box if you're sure.
Check this box if you're just clicking every box to get through this to cancel, or wait thirty minutes to continue.
Type "I GET IT MR APPLE BRING ON THE VIRII" and tap continue to continue.
Get any Gold badge on HackerRank to continue.
Put your phone in the microwave on HIGH for 30 minutes to continue.
...
...
Good. If you are reading this, it means you did not microwave your phone. You have passed the test. A fully clothed Apple representative is waiting for you in your car. Do not look directly into his eyes. Follow his directions to travel to our Appcave. After performing a gravity search for security reasons, he will grant you control over your device.
Something like that.
Johnny Tech-No might be able to navigate the checkboxes, he might even get through the trick one where you have to wait 30 minutes. There's no way he's getting Gold on HackerRank without having the know how to safely use a rooted phone. Surely.
You can’t jailbreak the last two iOSes. It’s possible full jailbreaking is a thing of the past. This is the longest time it has taken to get a jailbreak for new iOS versions (for the one from last year)
World of Warcraft has a day/night cycle, but it runs in a full 24-hour cycle just like the real world. This meant that if you were like me and mostly played at night, you mostly only ever saw the game world at night, and rarely saw the beautiful daytime colors.
I found forum threads of people asking for the option to either disable the day/night cycle entirely (it was 100% cosmetic and had no effect on anything in the game), or perhaps change it to something shorter like a 6-hour cycle.
And in every one of them, there were people arguing against having it as an option because they wouldn't use it. It seems people struggle to understand what "optional" means.
It's a mindset that I just absolutely don't understand. I could maybe see someone coming at it from the standpoint of "I don't think devs should spend the time on implementing an option I won't use when there are so many other things to work on", but in the specific case of WoW's day/night cycle, I can't imagine it would be much of an effort.
> Would giving people the ability to opt out of Apple's ultra-managed experience and take more control over their device harm your ability to continue to enjoy those benefits?
Yes, it would, because <insert your giant corporation here> will require you to opt-out of Apple's ultra-managed experience to use their app.
Fortnite was removed from the Google Play store in 2020 for violating the in-app purchase policies, so Epic publishes it in their own sideloaded app store.[0]
Is this really such a bad thing? Following technical walk throughs are the sort of thing that get people interested in the kind of education that is more likely to protect them and even make them someone who “knows what they’re doing.” Most of the people I know who got interested in tech didn’t do so from some Apple approved stem app, it was from this sort of independent exploration to get something they want. These arguments start to feel like prohibition over education, and in a lot of ways just plain technocratic.
Then don't install it or only install it if its worth the trade off. The only real reason for 99.9% of apps to want to do that is to prevent Apple from taking a huge portion of the revenue. Decrease the tax and this problem virtually goes away.
Not OP, but the thing which bothers me about this is that it’s not a real choice from an end user perspective. So many employers quasi-require people to use their phones as part of their work. I can just see something like Microsoft teams becoming a wedge that pushes people to disable lockdowns from apple that, in their personal lives, they’d rather keep.
I do think that could be solvable. Something like different personas on the phone could be the next step for the new “focus” features on the iPhone— maybe if you could disable App Store lockdowns but only for isolated profiles on your phone?
> I can just see something like Microsoft teams becoming a wedge that pushes people to disable lockdowns from apple that, in their personal lives, they’d rather keep.
Exactly. Not just employers, but also Facebook, TikTok, and whatever new and worse invasive tech that is enabled by the lack of Apple's restrictions.
> I do think that could be solvable.
I agree. And it should be solved. But, those who are asking for less restrictions won't be happy, because what they are looking for is better tracking tools.
> Decrease the tax and this problem virtually goes away.
Why are these companies not happy with the current commissions structure? What guarantee is there that they'll be happy with a new one? Corporations are greedy. They will ask more of whatever their bottom line needs, including users' attention, privacy, etc.
> Then don't install it or only install it if its worth the trade off.
And get excluded from online circles that everyone in the world uses? Or, find a different job, because my employer wants to install their surveillance app outside Apple's sandbox? I prefer not having to do the trade off at all.
> Would giving people the ability to opt out of Apple's ultra-managed experience and take more control over their device harm your ability to continue to enjoy those benefits?
I remember back to when Apple allowed apps to set location privacy options. They could make it so ‘only while using the app’ wasn’t an option. So uber only let you have it always on or always off. It took Apple unilaterally enforcing an opinionated stance on what apps are allowed to do before companies stopped being anti-user in that particular way. When Apple allowed more flexibility, app makers didn’t.
>Would giving people the ability to opt out of Apple's ultra-managed experience and take more control over their device harm your ability to continue to enjoy those benefits?
I don’t want Apple to allow app-makers the freedom to provide apps that are anti-user. In practice, it seems to bethe lesser evil.
I remember when Apple allowed Uber to give users the location preferences of “always” and “never,” before they required apps to offer “only when using the app.” I guess I just tend to like what apple’s tight restrictions do to the entire ecosystem.
I'm not suggesting giving app developers greater control, but users. I agree that letting app developers demand whatever permissions they want will lead to stopwatch apps which always require precise location.
If I want the option to shut off Apple's controls and sideload a bunch of malware, that doesn't have to affect users who don't want to do that (assuming this option is gated behind some sufficiently stern warnings about the consequences). That Apple doesn't allow that has far less to do with protecting users than it does protecting their bottom line.
Having said that, Apple making these kinds of decisions for business reasons is (IMHO) a perfectly valid and logical way to operate. I'd just prefer we didn't pretend they're making this decision because allowing users to take more control over their devices is necessarily dangerous. That excuse has more holes than a slice of this fine Gorgombert.
> * "I don't want to WFH because..." Ok, sure, but nobody is trying to force you to.*
When I was last looking for a job, I clearly stated that I did not want to work from home and that I was only interested in onsite. Out of dozens of recruiters contacting me, only 1 respected that desire.
I share a house with my sister and she has terrible boundary issues (the places she socialized with others closed and went out of business from the Covid shutdowns). Her refusal to stop "visiting" during working hours cost me 2 jobs.
> "I don't want to WFH because..." Ok, sure, but nobody is trying to force you to.
The correct phrasing is probably "I would rather not work with a mix of remote co-workers". Which is very different, though I'd argue still a perfectly reasonable preference!
Sure, and I suspect in the case of WFH that is what some of those people really meant.
I'm not sure I'd agree on the reasonableness point.
It's definitely a reasonable preference to have (although this is true of all preferences). To me, the reasonableness ends at trying to make anyone else satisfy that preference.
I heard an argument like this a lot at the start of discussions about whether we should be able to choose to WFH in the longer term. "I don't want to WFH because..." Ok, sure, but nobody is trying to force you to.
It might just be me, and I'll definitely fret about whether I'm being unreasonable for at least the next couple of hours, but this kinda frustrates me.
I'm supportive of your choice, but you already get to do the thing you want, and nobody is trying to take that away.
Expressing that you wouldn't behave any differently given more options is a distraction in a discussion about whether other people should be allowed to make a different choice.