I have changes I want to make to my iPhone. Some of them would be as easy as adding a trigger to an SQLite datbase that a stock "app" uses. I'm not "allowed" to.

I don't think companies should be legally permitted to take away the rights of an owner to do what they please with their own property. Locked bootloaders, e-fuses, crypto keys buried inside hardware, etc, should all be able to be overridden by a physical interlock. (Like Google did with Chromebooks, for example.)

Flip that switch and you lose the "walled garden". Okay. So be it. No running software that "trusts" my device (which is, arguably, misplaced trust anyway). No "app store" for me. I can live with that. It's my device and my choice to make. I get to make the call to give up "security" for freedom.

It's morally wrong to take away the ability of the owner to do what they wish with their devices. It should be illegal too.

There's a reason I don't have any Apple device: they don't make anything that I want. It seems pretty pointless to mandate that all companies must sell products that I like.

The law should make it "their business". I don't believe it should be possible to waive your right to legally do what you want with your property.

(I have similar feelings about restrictive covenants in the conveyance of real property, for example.)

Since we're editing here:

It seems pretty pointless to mandate that all companies must sell products that I like.

We mandate lots of consumer protections. This seems no different to me.

Companies make and sell products for specific use-cases all the time. Saying the can't sell something unless they also make the product able to break away form that specific use case, regardless of time and cost to the company and consumers for parallel built in systems or whatever the lift may be doesn't sound feasible to me.

I don't know, I'm on your side that I should be able to dismantle my iPhone and use the parts to my hearts content if I want to. But I'm not sure that it's something Apple has to build into the system just in case someone feels like doing it, especially since I could buy any number of other computing devices that might work just as well.

I am being dogmatic. I can't think objectively about this because I have yet to see how it benefits society to absolutely remove the rights of owners to legally do what they please with their property (at least in terms of chattels).

Most people are interested in solving a task, and their device helps them with this. They are uninterested in general-purpose computers. And there's no shortage of them for the rest of us! Android devices are the obvious choice here, with their user-exposed flashable ROMs. (Not just the OS, but every ROM is exposed through fastboot) Or PinePhone. Or whatever Firefox is doing. You've got choices for tinkerers and general-purpose computation, it just doesn't live in a device with an apple logo.

This is disingenuous. Apple is not being called out for failing to create desirable functionality for iPhones. Rather Apple (et al) are being criticized for deliberately acting to purposefully constrain functionality. The first criticism would be asking manufacturers to do work to improve their products. The second criticism is telling them to stop crippling devices they sell.

You're reversing the burden. Apple is spending a lot of money to NOT make it possible to tinker with it.

No, because their failure to do this has no structural consequences for the market in ovens or space heaters. Apple’s control over the market for software that can run on 2 billion iOS devices, on the other hand, is a big deal. Some think it’s Apple’s just deserts for creating a platform that users like; others think the government should end that control using the antitrust laws passed to limit corporate power at this scale.

Now there are some real scummy practices that Apple uses, and those should be regulated. Software that detects tampering and shuts down the device? Sure, get rid of it. Some vital service they can (and do) shut down at any time, bricking the device? Regulate it to nothing. But ultimately 'do what you want with your property' is completely different from 'sell whatever I personally want in a device regardless of how others feel'. Apple sells a walled garden by design, and buying one of their devices pretty much entails realizing that.

I am not mature, informed, or articulate enough to argue about this objectively. I cannot conceive of how society benefits from taking away the rights of owners.

Both of those are fairly valid complaints though. Intentionally making a device hard to access or repair is almost as bad as not allowing it at all. That shows an actual concerted effort to stop or make it as difficult for consumers as possible.

That's basically the definition of anti-consumer practices.

It in no way benefits me to not be able to use a standard screw driver to open something and have to either purchase an expensive proprietary tool or at worst take it to an 'authorized' repair shop that has the license to use the proprietary tool.

Occasionally I find myself thinking I'd like to own an Apple product, eg when I run across a cool iPad app or something, but this rarely persists longer than the few minutes it takes me to remember that I don't want to reorient around the Apple ecosystem.

If you were not motivated enough to research the options available to you, you cannot in good faith argue that Apple did anything wrong here.

In every "jailbreak" case, the manufacturer's intention was to make practically impossible owner control of devices. Jailbreaks are about exploiting bugs. The manufacturer's intention remains the same-- to remove owner control. Just because Apple made mistakes in their implementation of their architecture of control doesn't change their intention.

re: impractical for individuals - Try un-blowing an e-fuse in a Nintendo Switch. That's practically impossible. That's the kind of protections I'm talking about.

The problem with this argument is the same as any essential utility. At some point, it becomes impossible to live a normal life without access to a certain facility. If access is only available through a monopoly provider or a small enough number of providers that they tend to move the market in unison even if not actively collaborating, that can become a serious problem.

This is why we have government regulation of essential markets. Regulators might impose pricing limits in violation of the "free market", to prevent exploitation of vulnerable customers (and in this context, remember that most or all customers might be in that category) where competition fails to do so effectively on its own. But laws and regulations can also impose other safeguards, such as requiring honest advertising, adequate privacy and security protections, or interoperability.

I think it is no longer credible, at least in my country (the UK) and others like it, to argue that a modern smartphone is a luxury. People use their phones to access government services, shops and home delivery services, banks and financial services. They are by far the dominant communication device of our age, not just for calls but also texts, emails, numerous Internet-based communications channels. Some people no longer have any other reasonably convenient means to access those services and communications. Some of those services and channels are provided exclusively via mobile apps and simply aren't available to those who don't have a phone (which is in itself a problem, because obviously not everyone does, and this is making things very difficult for some demographics during the strange times we are living in).

This being the case, it is reasonable to argue that people should not have to choose between two dominant ecosystems for their phone when both have serious problems in areas like privacy, security, reliability and data lock-in, some of which are a direct result of the interests of the providers of those two dominant platforms, without any realistic ability for most people to protect themselves from those risks or with any such ability relying essentially on luck (for example, the availability of jailbreaks and the continued operation of essential apps despite any jailbreak that has been applied).

Even more, it doesn't seem to me that cell phone manufacturers are currently moving the market in particular unison. There are still more and less open devices, just as there are more or less expensive ones. Perhaps we're moving slowly towards that, but we're certainly a long way away as of now.

My primary issue is the difference between ensuring that no one has to get screwed and ensuring that no one can get a product they want. So long as there are more open devices, no one is compelled to use an IPhone. Anyone who wants to be protected from big bad apple may simply refrain from paying them. A utility is generally regulated not because of its vitality, but because of inherent restrictions on consumer choice. Unless it becomes impossible to just not buy Apple's shitty locked down hardware, it doesn't make sense to constrict.

No idea about Google Pay, it's never even occurred to me to try it.

We are in a similar place in the mobile world, where life is getting increasingly reliant on electronic luxuries. If you want to take advantage of the convenient electric scooter or rideshare, you need an app. If you want to cash a check without going to a bank or paying a fee with a third party like a grocery store, you need an app. If you want to get early warnings from the city and/or state about earthquakes of all things, you need an app (MyShake). And for all those apps, you can't build from source on your own hardware. There is rarely a mobile website alternative. You need to get them from one of two centralized and moderated marketplaces, where only sanctioned and licensed devices may participate. You could make a stand here with a dumb phone and yell at the clouds that the world is this way, and it really is bad that it is this way, but you'd realistically be living a decade in the past and miss out on all this useful functionality.

Following your weird examples the parent's comment is like saying you don't have to buy a *Ford* car, or a *Carrier* AC. There are many more car and AC options if you don't like Ford or Carrier.

Same goes for Apple; I would never use an Apple device, because I like to have control over my technology. Somehow, despite my amazingly brave stand against tyranny and capitalism, I still have a phone, running a LineageOS install that took me 20 minutes and an online guide to get running years ago. On the other hand, if I wanted to give my grandma a device I was confident she couldn't somehow force into a bad state, I would like it to be legal to sell me one.

Most people I know who are any good at programming had started learning about it by modifying something either on their own computers (pre-2000) or on the web (post 2000). They took things they found interesting or useful and somehow introspected and changed them. Good chunks of skills gained by that were transferable to professional environment.

Today, this is not how people get into tech. There is an ever increasing gap between technologies used for professional computing and things that are observable and modifiable by a normal person out there.

Curiosity and experimentation have been replaced by (appropriately named) coding bootcamps.

However, I'm not convinced that the absolute number has decreased. It's completely possible that larger numbers than ever of people are getting into tech as an extension of their own curiosity, and are simply less visible due to being outnumbered by the masses from bootcamps.

As a kid I got into programming in basic on my Acorn Archimedes because I had a book on basic. However I never got further than that because I didn’t have access to any more advanced programming books.

Now, all the information about it everything is available within a few minutes of searching.

Imagine being able to quickly and easily add your own custom programs to your iPhone without asking anyone's permission though? Also, what if - as the owner of that device - you had full control over it's capabilities like you do with a desktop computer? Adding these abilities certainly would not be the downfall of phone ecosystems as we know them. People that want convenience wouldn't leave their app store.

The fact that they are our interface to the world is exactly the reason why we need to take control of them away from the Apple/Google oligarchy. People need to stop comparing these devices to gaming consoles, which don't impact the world even a fraction as much as smartphones, when we're talking about making new rules for running smartphone platforms.

Cool? I'm a software engineer and I have no desire to do this. The number of people who care about this feature is vanishingly low. I think it is reasonable to lament losing a particular feature for tinkerers, but it becomes unreasonable to demand that businesses cater to this very small niche.

> Adding these abilities certainly would not be the downfall of phone ecosystems as we know them. People that want convenience wouldn't leave their app store.

Downfall? No. But locked down systems are a somewhat effective way of keeping badware off of devices for the masses.

If you're not advocating self reliance and self governance for people, you're not thinking long term. It's historically proven bad advice to willingly give all control to central powers.

> ...locked down systems are a somewhat effective way of keeping badware off of devices for the masses.

Developers are not the masses. The masses aren't installing the necessary tools and compiling their own programs and they never will. I'd settle for signing a written agreement with Apple and waiting a week for approval when I buy my phone so that I can actually control my own device.

I'm not arguing for letting me put my apps on everyones iPhones, just mine.

I don't advocate removing all safety checks from phones, but making somebody jump through 15 hoops to install a non-corporate-approved app is stupid.

Secondly, these companies stop a lot of badware, but they also act as gatekeepers to stop anti-establishmentware that may be for the public benefit at the detriment of the gatekeepers' stranglehold on power.

In other words, these devices are systems of perpetuating the status-quo and safeguarding the profits of the ones making them. This in itself I'm not upset about: of course capital seeks to cement its own power. The real issue I have is how much potential is destroyed as collateral damage.

General purpose computers are great for people who know what they’re doing (although there are some _really_ good phishing scams out there that can even fool trained people), but they’re an absolute disaster for the vast majority of people who _don’t_ become specialists in computer security.

I _just_ had a support ticket opened by someone who goes between different stores for a client…and this man sent his password in the clear in the support ticket. This man isn’t an idiot, it’s literally _not_ in his job description to be a computer security expert (his job has to do with hardware sales or lumber or something like that).

This man would be better served with two things we’re building later this year (AD integration and an Android version of the employee app), because then he can just log in with the same (probably simple and insecure) password that he uses for his Windows log-in at work. He is the type of person that, when told to do something, would simply install program X because someone told him to do so (never mind that program X is actually malware).

So no, while I think that Apple’s signing restrictions are a little on the draconian side, I don’t think that that Windows 95-like “permissions” are what most people want or need.

I don't buy it.

> I don’t think that that Windows 95-like “permissions” are what most people want or need.

That's an extremely bad faith take on my argument because there's a very wide spectrum of possibilities between the Windows 95 free-for-all and what we have with iOS. You're presenting a false dichotomy.

For one thing, iOS could easily put up tons of scary warnings before letting you sideload things. That would be enough to dissuade most people from doing it. However, I'd be willing to go to extremes to get control over the devices which I supposedly own. Make me come into the Apple store and sign away any rights to a warranty from Apple. Make me pay extra. Whatever you want - just don't put every single user in prison because a likely majority of people can't handle making good decisions on what software to install.

The idea that we must remove any and all control from users to protect the innocent is just as bad as the idea to have a War on Drugs - and I highly suspect that these preventions are actually in place for the same reason: to actually control people and rake in profits, not to protect them.

You say that Apple can make you pay extra. OK. Here’s a $99/year developer contract with which you can develop and install software that you want as you want (I believe that these builds are good for ~90 days, so you recompile/reinstall every 90 days; unlike the 7 previously mentioned). But people don’t _like_ that and have said that’s unfair.

I am completely saying that there’s no _meaningful_ way we can put up a fence to keep people who _shouldn’t_ be running random apps from doing so. We can’t keep users from clicking on _links_ that they shouldn’t be clicking on. Just this morning, I had a neighbour ask me about one of those full-screen “WARNING FROM MICROSOFT YOUR COMPUTER IS INFECTED” pop-ups; even though she was smart enough not to click on anything, she _still_ copied down the phone number to maybe call the scammer. My father, a couple of weeks ago, didn’t know about Ctrl-W / Command-W on a similar full-screen hijack that had affected both his Chromebook (locked down) and my mom’s MacBook (mostly not locked down).

I remember a few years ago there were a number of minor malware issues that were caused by people following instructions randomly on the internet to open the javascript console and “paste this in to see something neat”. So no, I don’t believe we can put a fence that protects the ignorant / unready / unwise but enables the people who think that they know better (and actually sometimes might).

If you can crack that, then there’s going to be a lot of people who will be at your door to reward you…and then many more looking for the backdoors you left so that they can continue to infiltrate systems for their own rewards (whether state actors or criminal actors).

Unless you were talking about jailbreaking.

Freedom to modify is not the same as zero cost. You paid for the iPhone hardware, after all. Just pretend it cost $99 more and came with the right to load your own apps.

The root cause is the complete lack of facilities to quickly and simply delegate capabilities to applications. There is no way to tell the OS, give this file to this application. Instead of trusting nothing, and providing the PowerBox facility to allow the user to do this, all the popular OSs just trust the applications with everything that the user has permissions to access, by default.

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If you want to pay for a purchase at a store with cash, you carry a number of units of currency... and you only give the clerk the appropriate amount, and you can count the change to verify the transaction is correct.

Giving you a person, access to your cash is a solved problem. 8)

There is no equivalent way to work with an application on mainstream OSs. This is collective insanity, which I've been calling out for more than a decade.

I would argue that at least some of those holes were indeed imagined, that’s why iOS works the way it does and not the way parent would like.

Or even better, imagine being able to quickly and easily add your own custom programs to someone else’s iPhone, without asking anyone’s permission though?

That’s kind of the problem, isn’t it?

But those aren't the same thing. Me being able to install what I want on my phone doesn't give me the ability to install it on other people's phones.

I currently have the ability to install apps on my phone from the app store, but I can't make that decision for someone else's phone. So why would it be different for software that doesn't come from the app store?

Obviously this is a bit self-serving on Apple’s part - restricting software installs begins to feel like a protection racket. But it still serves as a security perimeter.

Yes, there's a security risk, but what's really being said here is "we're going to decide what you're allowed to do so you won't hurt yourself".

And I guess I just don't think that should be their decision to make.

Or to put it another way: Apple can keep the app store, and even make it the default, but there should be a setting to allow installing things from outside the app store. It can even be behind a few scary popups warning the user of the danger.

They certainly didn't make a decision to install my malware in that apk!

Yes, there's a security risk, but what's really being said here is "we're going to decide what you're allowed to do so you won't hurt yourself".

I'm sure you won't hurt yourself - most iphone users will though.

Or to put it another way: Apple can keep the app store, and even make it the default, but there should be a setting to allow installing things from outside the app store. It can even be behind a few scary popups warning the user of the danger.

Yeah, I agree with you - as long as it's not something as simple as a click-through and ignoring a few worthless scary warnings that everyone ignores anyways and exposes non-technical users to bogus certificates and downloaded malware on Windows and Android. If it was something like MacOS's system integrity protection deactivation where you have to restart the whole system and execute a command through some obscure interface, it could work.

I disagree to an extent. While the hardware is much, MUCH faster, efficient, reliable.. it isn't something we can tinker with anymore.

Would you feel safe picking up a random USB drive and running the programs on it? A huge chunk of the fun of early PCs is gone. You can't just find new stuff and try it out to see how well it works.

If its open source, you get dependency hell, if it works at all. Plus there could be any number of backdoors or bugs in it waiting to subvert your system. Plus the ever present threat of having all of your passwords and/or data exfiltrated to who-knows-where.

In the days of 2 floppy disk machines, none of this was a worry.

Sure, why not? Just don't run it on the same computer that you access your sensitive data on. Given that you can buy a fully functional and tinker-friendly computer for like 20 bucks, this seems like a pretty straightforward solution.

It really isn't the same. You always have to worry these days.

It's similar to the fact that going into a crowd was no big deal in the past, but now it is.

Not to mention, sticking random floppies in your main computer was never exactly safe to begin with. The heydey of the Michaelangelo virus was 1991, if memory serves.

Because the hardware could have something planted in it... and if what you're tinkering with turns out to be useful, then what? Then you have to spend $20 for another computer that you can trust with that one little thing.

Yes, in the days of MS-DOS, there were virii spread by floppy disk, but those could be guarded against fairly easily. You could always start fresh with a clean copy of your OS and use it to clean up the mess.

A better way is to have an OS that protects the hardware, and itself. Then you can have a single computer for everything, without having to trust any piece of application code, ever.