> You want to take that away from me while pretending to do it for the greater good, when in reality it’s just a selfish desire to impose your will on others.
Let's call a spade, a spade. Your position appears to be "I don't want to choose, and I don't want anyone else to be able to choose either".
That is certainly not the paragon of virtue. Letting people choose -- which doesn't affect you at all - is.
People already can and do choose Apple knowing that they are entering a walled garden.
Apple has made a strategic decision to maintain this walled garden. This decision is one of the company’s key differentiators.
Your position appears to be “I want to force Apple to abandon a key market differentiator in service of a marginal gain in personal freedom for a marginal segment of customers who would actually care about such change.”
Apple customers are lacking choice in software just as much as Trader Joe’s customers are lacking choice in food brands.
Is the walled garden a key differentiator? When most people buy a phone, I think they're usually thinking about the camera and screen, or the security and privacy features. (And note the sandboxing features are part of the phone, not part of the app store.) I'd love to see data on this if you can find any.
I certainly didn't buy an iphone because I want to pay an extra tax whenever I buy apps.
The entire point is that it does. Opening up the walled garden isn’t “a feature”, it’s something that will completely, and irreversibly change the incentives on the platform.
Why the hell should Facebook comply with Apple’s every whim and wish, if they could just publish on a different store with less stringent privacy rules, and force you to download it that way? “You want Facebook? Go to Settings -> Privacy, then uncheck the bla bla bla box, and install Fb Store. Then...”. Yeah, no, that’s my worst nightmare.
Privacy should be built into the OS, not rely on fallible human review. Not to mention a 3rd party app store could be even MORE privacy focused than Apple's App Store, if the market was there for it.
There's no reason Apple can't enforce the same privacy options OS wide, even for sideloaded apps.
Of course they don't want to, they would lose their 30% cut. But if they are forced to allow 3rd party app stores they would have to, if they wanted to continue their privacy focused marketing.
And what do you do when your webhost becomes your moderator and deplatforms your site, on the exact same day?
We can take this all the way to fabricating wires to build computers to make our own servers; at some point we have to discuss the actual issue: where to private and public rights intersect and what is the role of government in resolving the conflict.
> But the thought of a government body deciding when a company may and may not enforce its rules is chilling.
In general I agree with you; I only consider this kind of thinking valid at Twitter/FB/Google/AWS scale - where one decision affects populations the size of entire nations (or larger). It's a problem less than a dozen companies would ever face and any reasonable law would need to make that abundantly clear. I wouldn't favor opening that door for smaller companies.
In the short term, sure it would. If you tear up one field in the middle of planting and plant another, it'll hurt short term; 10 years later it'll be a funny story.
Markets love a vacuum and it would be an opportunity for local players to dive in.
> The slippery slope argument is generally regarded as a logical fallacy because the argument can be applied to anything.
Can you expand on this? I've seen the claim several times, but given the fact that (in general, not referring to covid) it is possible to point to historical examples of how things progress from A->B->C, and then you can identify a sequence of A->B currently, it becomes almost silly not to conclude the goal is C. So why is demonstrating history repeating itself a fallacy?
Granted I've placed a number of conditions there. Maybe that's what you mean. I'm just curious what the general argument is.
> What interest would the U.S. have in requiring Flu or HIV tests for travel?
Humans unfortunately have a bias for "doing something" rather than nothing, even if the two actions are equivalent in consequence (which favors doing nothing - less energy).
Scream loud enough and we'll create problems where there weren't any. I mean that's basically what network news does all day every day. Then we'll respond to those problems, and create more problems. Etc. "It worked for covid, why aren't we doing it for the flu?" Even if the argument isn't valid, it sounds good, and politicians like things that sound good even if they don't do anything, creating problems and great expense for people for little to no actual gain.
I literally started asking around on the web for exactly this today.
Seriously taking a look, this looks promising. We built an app on AppSync and Cognito and I want to get off AWS so I'm looking for alternatives, and this... fits the bill.
