I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to say.

>>As soon as other shops can install 3rd-party parts

But....they can. Of course they can. What's more, both EU and US law protects the ability of 3rd parties to make replacement parts, and your ability as the consumer to fit those parts. The law goes so far as forbidding manufactuers from voiding your warranty due to fitting of non-OEM parts unless they can specifically prove that the part that you fitted caused problems.

>>you wind up with cars that, for example, get better performance by violating emissions standards except when they're actively being tested.

Again, that's already a thing and has been a thing since forever. Modding is extremely popular in some circles. Just like flashing your phone with custom FW is popular in certain circles too, but that doesn't mean that once it's allowed everyone and their grandma will suddenly run some HAXXOR build of iOS.

It was, in hindsight, a lame attempt at a joke, based on Volkswagen's history with skirting emissions controls.

More seriously, it's hard to know what all's installed on your phone, and what all it's doing; car parts are intrinsically sandboxed.

It'll be interesting to see what happens when always-connected self-driving cars have enough compute power to run self-driving systems and people are free to install random apps without great security (because car manufacturers seem to be awful at that). I'm predicting cutesy weather apps that quietly mine crypto all night long...

A malicious app on iOS can pose as something it’s not, and ask for your mom’s credit card number.

So can a website, these sort of hypotheticals just seem like pure scaremongering.

Yes, definitely so can a website.

The whole point of Apps is that they are reviewed and therefore are safer than random stuff on the web.

It’s would be scaremongering if these kinds of threat were hypothetical, but of they are pretty widely known.

It’s true that EU and US law protect the ability of 3rd parties to make replacement car parts.

But.. the law also holds those 3rd parties responsible for damage caused by failures of their parts.

No such protection exists for software.

Let’s start with some working legal privacy and fraud protections for software.

Then we can compare software to cars.

Until then, let people buy into a walled garden if they want to.

> In your example: Volkswagen imposes quality controls on those parts, making sure they're not going to blow up or subvert the car.

And they are free to do it. Have your own set of trusted dealers and vendors. Void warranty for off-branded parts. However, once I buy the car I am also free to go to any shitty unsafe vendor I want. VW can't tell me not to do that, because it's my car not theirs.

Do you think it would be okay if Volkswagen remotely shut down your car because they didn't like the brand of gas you put in it (for your own safety of course)?

> In your example: Volkswagen imposes quality controls on those parts, making sure they're not going to blow up or subvert the car.

So, like almost everything you buy? This is why branding and reputation are important. You can be cheap, but you get what you pay for.

But we don't want to have to check brands and research - we want a trusted party ensuring quality because their reputation is on the line.

That does not go away, there's nothing stopping you from buying genuine parts from the manufacturer if you trust them more than the competition.

But having a system that accepts non-genuine parts leads to a more complicated system. Apple's system is simple. Android's system is more complicated because it has multiple app stores. I don't want that complexity.

That's an interesting way of thinking which I've not really encountered outside of Soviet-style centrally controlled economy advocates and the like.

Do you feel the same way about all other things in life where you are presented with a choice? Would you prefer there to only be a single grocery store you get your groceries from, for example?

No I’m in favour of competition, but competition between simple clean focused products, not the Homer cars other people seem to want.

If you want a different App Store then market a different phone don’t drag down the iPhone.

I just don't understand. I really try hard to understand, but I physically can't I think.

Let's say that hypothetically, there was another store present on iOS. Does that stop you(or anyone) from only ever using the Apple App Store?? On Android, there are several other stores available, yet I have never felt the need to use any of them - they exist, they have their own customers.....but....that's it.

It's like if you already have one shop in your village, so you prevent others from opening even though literally nothing would force you to go to these other shops and you can still enjoy the original shop as much as you did before. Literally nothing changes in your life, but you want to prevent others from having a choice, even if you yourself don't appreciate the choice. That's mindboggling to me.

Reading through the replies you got for this post is really quite interesting. I feel like what it boils down to is that there are a decent amount of people that prefer life under an authoritarian regime (whether governmental or corporate). A regime where someone they trust decides for them how they should enjoy their life and protects them from bad choices. Merely allowing a different party from offering a competing choice would undermine the whole premise.

It's a bit like the cruise ship industry where you forgo choice (compared to traveling outside of a tour) but gain safety and the benefit of not having to research or make decisions. If anyone could open up a restaurant or organise an outing on a cruise ship, then that perceived safety disappears and the need to make conscious decisions arises.

As this seems to be a reasonably common theme in these posts I wonder if there's a market for more products that follow a similar purchase incentive, like a fridge that only allows you to insert groceries you've bought from the trusted supermarket.

I pay the Apple tax so to say - so that my mobile experience is as hassle free as can be. And yes, it's worth it. It just works, and i never have to worry about shady apps or wonder too much about the quality of the apps that i download - theres always some lesser than others, but on the whole its all good.

Arguing for other app stores / unsigned apps on the iOS platform is counter intuitive to what made the ecosystem great in the first place.

I had android phones and did all the custom stuff & rooting from the G1 and forwards for many years, in the end i only regret not changing over sooner.

There is nothing great about the "freedom of choice" on the android platform, it all makes for a lesser experience unless you're really into it for other reasons - political/principle.

But....but .....literally no one is forcing you to install and use these other stores. NOTHING about your experience changes at all. Again, I can install the Amazon store in my phone, but.....I just don't. Why is this such a revolutionary idea?

Apple would have to do the work to modify their software to support multiple stores, and they’d have to support the code for that going forward.

They’d be doing that instead of something else productive that I could use.

So it’s a loss to me and other Apple users who appreciate the curated system at the moment.

Your analogy is ‘prevent’ but really it’s ‘not want to do the work to enable’. See how that’s not the same thing? Instead of 'not preventing someone opening a new shop in the village' you're asking them to cut a hole in the side of their store so someone in a greasy food cart can connect up to it and sell smelly burgers with poor food hygiene standards in the middle of their boutique, and then maintain that hole going forward.

They don't want to do that! Many of their customers don't want that! Those customers that do want it can go somewhere else, like Android!

How much work do you really think that it would take them to remove the entitlement on the daemon that installs apps? I have heard that entire App Store frontend was maintained by like a single engineer until like iOS 8. The change would be fairly simple; the amount of time they spend on fighting these things both in court and with technological measure in the OS is many orders of magnitude more than this.

They think it’ll be worse. Many of their customers agree. If you don’t can’t you go elsewhere? Why impose on people happy minding their own business?

>>If you don’t can’t you go elsewhere? Why impose on people happy minding their own business?

That's the same argument, word for word, that people used to defend businesses not serving coloured folk - after all, can't they just go elsewhere? And we as society decided no, they shouldn't have to go anywhere - if you run a business, you have to serve everyone, end of story. I think it's time to do the same for Apple - if you want to run an app platform, you have to allow choice. And if your choice is to stay with App Store and only install apps curated by apple - that's perfectly valid. No one is taking that away from you.

Again, how exactly does that inconvenience you, personally? No one is forcing you to use these other stores, no one is imposing anything on you. They will just exist somewhere for people who want them. Again, I'm on Android but I don't feel like I'm losing anything by the mere existence of the Amazon App store - it's there if you want it, if you don't then that's cool.

And yes, I absolutely think you are overexaggerating the technical difficulty behind allowing people to do this - all Apple needs to do it allow apps to install other apps from packages. It's hardly a groundbreaking architectural change, come on.

I don't think it's a reasonable argument to put people oppressed due to their race with people who want their smartphone to work a bit differently at the same level.

> if you run a business, you have to serve everyone, end of story

This isn't even true! You can deny service to anyone for any reason as long as it's not a protected characteristic! Apple already cannot deny your app based on your race.

If a restaurant doesn't like your attitude they can ask you to leave. Can't Apple do the same?

> Again, how exactly does that inconvenience you, personally?

Because the smartphone gets worse. Less locked-down, less simple, more complex, more avenues of attack. More expensive to make and maintain.

But why does anyone have to justify why they don't like it? I think 'I don't want to do this' should be reason enough for Apple to not do it. As long as they aren't impacting people who aren't their customers it's their business not yours.

> no one is imposing anything on you

Yes you are you want to impose that Apple change their software to suit you - it's selfish.

You want it your way, I want it my way. Hope can we resolve this? How about we let Apple choose who to market to?

We can't make it a legally protected right to have products designed for people's random whims.

>>I don't think it's a reasonable argument to put people oppressed due to their race with people who want their smartphone to work a bit differently at the same level.

Well, perhaps, my broader point is that the ability of businesses to govern themselves and set their own rules does end somewhere, and that line is decided by societies and can change with time. Things that were acceptable few years ago maybe aren't acceptable now, and vice versa.

>>Because the smartphone gets worse. Less locked-down, less simple, more complex, more avenues of attack

I just don't see that at all, sorry. The experience for 99.99% users won't change at all. Apple could have enabled this last week and you wouldn't have seen any difference at all.

>>We can't make it a legally protected right to have products designed for people's random whims.

Well, but it's not just a random whim, that's the crux of the issue. Once the size of a company and the market it controls gets big enough, it's only natural that they are forced to open to others. It happened to every industry before, why should apple be immune to this? It's the whole epic vs apple discussion again - if two sides want to engage in lawful business contract(sell each other software in this case) why should apple be the arbiter of these transactions? Or rather - why should you, the owner of your smartphone, be forced to use apple as the arbiter.

>>How about we let Apple choose who to market to?

They still can, literally nothing changes on that front. They still market to the same people, they still curate the apps like they used to, they still have 100% control of their app store and the device. The only thing that I would like to change is that ability to say "this is my device apple, I paid for it, let me install software that didn't go through your filter". Again, entirely optional. But we looped back to the first point that we are going to disagree on again - you think that will make the experience worse, I don't think it will.

I think we should agree to part ways on that - the discussion is as always enjoyable, but we might have exhausted the potential here :-)

For what it’s worth, I’m with him, for pretty much the exact same reasons.

You knew what you were getting into when you bought the iPhone. Trying to change it after the fact just seems like trying to profit off other people’s hard work and investments. Screw that.

So....if you buy something, you automatically lose the right to complain about the way it works? Do you apply that rule to the other areas of your life?

Maybe a different example - until very recently, if you bought a BMW, you could only get Apple CarPlay as a subscription, you couldn't just pay upfront to have it. Which is not how this works literally anywhere else, every other brand has it as a one-time unlock and then you have it for life.

Surely, every person buying a brand new BMW knew this, it's clearly advertised. So....should they not have complained about this? After all, they knew what they were buying. But, people have been complaining, and BMW has finally changed it recently. Good riddance I say.

But back to the iphone dillema. The problem with your argument is that this is traditionally not how markets work. If company X wants to sell something to John Smith(let's say an app for their iphone), but cannot without going through some kind of licence holder(Apple in this case) - it's totally a valid question to ask if Apple is stifling competition here or not. In my opinion - they are. Maybe the company X is making a completely legitimate web browser, that John Smith wants to buy and pay money for - but Apple will say nope, you can't buy that, because that would compete with our own product. That's anticompetitive behaviour, and traditionally it does eventually get stopped in court. Like I said in my example several posts ago - volkswagen cannot do anything to stop the company X from selling brake pads to John Smith, yes they fit a car that Volkswagen made but Volkswagen doesn't get to say whether John Smith is allowed to purchase and fit those parts or not. Courts all over the world have decided, many times, that corporations shouldn't have that power. Why do smartphone manufacturers get to keep that power now then? That will change in my opinion, and they will be forced to open up.

Here's the thing: I don't care about BMW. I have a nice situation with Apple holding the keys to the castle, without the horrendous problems that friends of mine have had with Android malware, and you're threatening it. I don't want that.

End of story.

I don't care who makes money and how they do it. I don't care about any wider point. I care that my experience on the phone that I bought for that experience doesn't get worse. I believe that experience would get worse, if there was open-season on the apps that could be installed. Capitalists are going to capitalize. The walled garden comes with restrictions that I signed up for, and I'm happy about that. That was why I signed up in the first place.

So....why are you here at all? Why bother replying to any of these comments, if you're not actually interested in the discussion in the slightest? Like, I get it - you don't care. And? Not caring isn't some new radical stance you know.

We’re not ‘not interested’ we actively don’t want what you’re proposing because we think it’s unjust and harmful and so we’re arguing against it.

But I think I had a very interesting discussion with yourself, you laid out some arguments, I did the same, at the end we disagreed but that's fine, I'm not on some sort of crusade here, it's just a discussion. But then spacedcowboy comes in to basically say "I don't care about any of this or any of your arguments". Ok then, of course they are free to do so, but then why bother commenting? I only continued replying because I hoped we can have explore the topic a bit more but no, spacedcowboy just straight up says he doesn't care about any of it, so I guess that's really, as they put it, "end of story".

I don't care about your arguments because I don't want their expected effects on my life.

I very do much care about the results of your proposals becoming popular, and I don't want what you're proposing to come about. I want it to be known that there are people who oppose your point of view, in case it becomes de-facto the "popular opinion".

Well, then this approach stands against everything I thought HN represented. I have discussed things I very much don't want to happen before here and the "I don't even want to see your side, I just don't want this thing to happen" has never seemed to me like a good tactic - it just doesn't get anyone anywhere. I've been convinced many times to change my mind on HN(and I hope I have changed some minds too) but that's just not possible if the other side isn't engaging in the debate. And if not for the debate, what are we even here for?

It would be a negative for me, because I would need to train my parents to never use this other store. Then their friends will get them to use it, because a sketchy app will be in that store that offers free money, or some other scam. My parents will then breach the secure containment of their phone, without really understanding what they're doing.

It would harm Apple, because when users try the third party app store and have problems, they will expect Apple to support it. If Apple doesn't do the support, it tarnishes their brand to that user.

Well but that's like saying that cars shouldn't allow mods, because someone will convince your parents to install aftermarket mods and they will mod their cars and crash and die.

Like, sure, it can happen. But if your parents can be convinced by someone to install a 3rd party store and download something from it, they can be equally easily convinced to go to a dodgy website that will scam them from something else and their magical iPhone won't save them from it. Besides, the whole idea that adult people should be prevented from having choice for their own good is almost offensive to me, like ....don't we believe in personal freedom and choice? Your parents should be able to choose to lock down your their phones(or you can do it for them) but equally, if they want to unlock it - they should be able to.