You're not wrong, you're just in the wrong place. Apple is the sysadmin and the phone holders are the users. They WANT apple looking out for them. Anyone who says otherwise stupidly wasted $1000 when they could have bought any number of unlockable devices for that money.
I say this with an unlocked and de-googled android phone next to me, and several hacked arm devices at home. I OWN THEM, with no doubt, so I agree with you in a different world.
I mostly agree - except people want Apple products for other reasons too.
There are quite a few Apple users who like the hardware, the operating system, apps which are iOS-only, and the integration with other Apple devices - some of whom also want to run their own choice of software as well.
There's no alternative which has equivalent benefits, if that's what you're looking for.
No one is entitled to Apple’s operating system. If you want freedom, the price is Android or whatever. In fact, the restrictions that Apple imposes on iOS and MacOS are arguably what makes them desirable in terms of consistent user experience, robust default security, and lack of crapware. For some people, that’s a good trade off. For others, the allure of Apple’s walled garden is too tempting.
Is this true of people who voluntarily signed up to be paid for data collection? It's like saying that Nielsen panelists need to be protected from Nielsen by Vizio. (Insert standard caveat about the degree to which kids' autonomy is in the hands of their parents).
An important difference that Nielsen doesn't have an agreement with Vizio that they broke and the "protection" being Vizio terminating their end of that agreement as a response.
As much as I dislike Apple, its amorality, its attitude towards it users, its effect on the markets it's in, etc, I don't have any disagreements with Apple's actions here: Facebook/Google violated their license, so Apple revoked them.
But the terms of this license are by no means "protecting" users who voluntarily chose to install these apps for payment. A license can have multiple legitimate purposes, including protecting the business interests of the licenser. There's no need to pretend that Apple is protecting users in order to defend their actions here.
Indeed. The violation here really has nothing to do with protecting users, as you say, it's more of a positive side-effect. On the other hand, if it weren't for that aspect, the press-coverage that sparked Apple's revokal would most likely not have happened.
Apple found themselves in a position were doing "the good thing" aligned with business.
If you asked IOS users about all the restrictions Apple places on apps, I bet less than 10% could tell you any of them. I also bet the majority of them would disagree with Apple's policy on forbidding real alternatives to Safari instead skinned Webviews.
It's the golden cage that allowed them to do of course good things this time. This argument is the old one against a walled garden and it still stands.
The point may be valid, but it's not what this discussion is about. Apple didn't cut off a user for running unauthorized software on their iPhone. They cut off Google for using a paid enterprise service to distribute their software in violation of its TOS.
> paid enterprise service to distribute their software
that's the problem - why should this service exist in the first place? It's extortion to have to pay to distribute apps to people who want them, on devices they own themselves.
Yes, and more to the point, they cut off Facebook and Google for distributing unreviewed apps to the general public. So the violation was using the enterprise key to evade app review by Apple. Which Apple does to protect its customers. And so Apple is just protecting its customers.
I believe Apple will do everything they can to keep them from abusing the ToS, but I also believe Facebook will try to work around any and every restriction applied to them.
Yeah, well, but Apple can always reject apps that violate their ToS, or revoke keys used to work around that. So ultimately Facebook can't win.
Except if they force Apple to nuke all of their apps, which would put Apple in a difficult position. But perhaps Apple could sandbox apps, and prevent them from doing stuff that violates ToS.
No, they still needed to revoke the cert because the app was still hanging out on users' devices. The only way to ensure that those apps are dead, from Apple's perspective, is to revoke the cert
I 100% agree with you. I should be able to run any code on my device (after I flip a bit and it gets wiped). The first thing I've done with every Nexus or Pixel purpose is to wipe and root it.
But that's not what this is about. Apple has been enforcing these rules for years. F.lux tried to get around the App Store by reaching users how to sideload via Xcode. Apple killed it.
The big players should be subject to the same rules. If they want to run their own code, they can't just flagrantly ignore Apple's TOS.
I'm also onboard with the Nielsen metaphor but not for kids. And both were scummy in targeting kids (though FB was definitely worse judging from marketing materials).
> F.lux tried to get around the App Store by reaching users how to sideload via Xcode. Apple killed it.
Specifically, Apple killed it because f.lux decided to distribute their app in a really sketchy manner where they essentially pushed an opaque binary blob to the phone rather than compiling the app from source and installing the build product from that.
I don't understand: Do you expect to be able to run any programs you want on the micro-controller on your washing machine?
That's what Apple is doing here. Pushing iPhone as a commodity, not a replacement for your macbook. This way they get the benefits of controlling the experience as much as they want. (I am not saying it is right or wrong, just that many people are fine with commodity phones and don't care for the loss of configurability).
I'm not sure where you're getting the "legal responsibility" part from - I'm not advocating legislation, simply stating my personal preferences as a consumer. I do what I can to try and bring others to my point of view, but I am in no part trying to push this as a legal burden on manufacturers. Please don't bring strawman arguments into this, this topic is complex and nuanced enough as-is.
Regarding security, that very much depends on your threat model and definition of "secure". Indeed, I see this general trend of decreasing user control over increasingly complex and connected hardware as a massive security threat where I am forced to trust multiple 3rd parties who may arbitrarily disrupt my life anytime new "features" or "policies" get pushed out.
It is perfectly possible to securely implement a tamper-evident "I know what I'm doing" switch/fuse that enables advanced control by device owners. However, I'm well aware that I'm in the minority on this topic, so I'm not holding my breath for such features to be implemented.
I don't use a washing machine controller as a general purpose computing device. I don't install apps on a washing machine and would never buy one that had that feature. It's not a reasonable comparison.
That said, I doubt washing machine microcontrollers use signed code. It's easier to modify them than your phone which is completely backwards.
> Do you expect to be able to run any programs you want on the micro-controller on your washing machine?
Yes. It is within my full legal right to install whatever programs I want on my washing machine.
Apple lost a bunch of lawsuits, when it tried to sue people for doing this. The courts proved that yes, you do have a legal right to do whatever you want with hardware that you own.
Sure. And Apple aren’t going to sue you if manage to. It sounds like you’re confused between “I should be able to” and “Apple should make it easy for me to”.
However you could get a developer license and load anything you want on your phone. Granted it's not for everybody, but if you're so incline to sideload apps on your phone you can pretend to be a developer (Meaning you just need to know enough to use the tools available, not in a demeaning way).
The thing is: my mother bought an Apple device not to think about data, security, backups and all these "InternetS" things. She doesn't even know what hardware is. If she did, she might have bought an Android phone or something else :)
If the IPA is already built you just need the cross-platform Cydia Impactor. Jailbreak not required, but standard Developer Account for full features applies.
Does sideload still work? I recall they enabled the ability for anybody to load apps via Xcode around iOS 7, but haven't kept up to date with latest versions. Did this stop working on newer iOS versions?
Using Xcode 6? You can go back a little bit because Xcode 7 supported the current version of iOS along with iOS 9 beta, but I don't think this goes all the way to iOS 7.
So jailbreak it. Meanwhile, Apple should be able to ship whatever operating system it thinks its users want, and those users should be able to keep it if they want.
Well in this case, wouldn't most people be using Google owned phones? Or if they bring their own device, have explicitly allowed Google/FB to manage their device through an enterprise system. That enterprise system for some reason shared a cert with an application _not_ used for enterprise, so the cert is banned.
That's a misstatement of the principle here. I bought a thing. It's my thing, not someone else's thing. Things don't have "terms". I signed no contract. Let me use my thing.
I mean, yes, we shouldn't buy iOS devices. But we should accept that things have ad hoc vendor-controlled "rules" just because someone baked them into the things, either.
> what Apple allows you to run on your own device is actually a different story, not related to this news
How so? It's not like Facebook and Google were hacking their way in here. They asked users "please run this software" and users had the option to do so. Seriously how is that any different than "please run my great jailbreak environment" or "here's a new OS for your iPhone"?
It was the behavior and marketing of these spyware things that we shouldn't like, not their mechanism.
> Facebook and Google did sign it and distributed their software based on it.
I think we're talking past each other here. I'm not talking about how Facebook and Google's spy kits were licensed to the end users or about their compliance with Apple's own vendor license.
I was pointing out that the principle here is that I (and Facebook and Google) should have the ability to write and distribute software for you (and me, and Facebook and Google and even Apple) to use on your iPhone. And that the fact we don't have that ability is bad.
And more to the point the fact that Apple's control over their platform was used to benefit the public by disallowing spy kits still does not make that control a good thing.
Free speech doesn’t allow libel and slander. Free assembly doesn’t allow riots. Without a framework for meaningful justice, the high minded principle is just a race to the bottom.
I should be able to have the freedom to choose a platform where I have some protection against the various bad actors out there. Without Apple, the only options we have is non-participation, believing the lies, and arbritration.
> you entered in a contract with the app developer
... wat? No, I didn't. It's easy to imagine I "must have", but in fact there's no signature, no negotiation nor in many cases any consideration.
Ah, but you say: I must have signed a contract to use the app store that I downloaded the app from, and that must constrain me to honor the terms of the app that I downloaded, which is constrained by Apple's contract with the developer.
Except, no, I didn't do that either. The whole thing is a house of cards. There is absolutely no principle behind this regime, it's just something we've all come to accept because it's technically possible and because "usually" the power granted to hardware vendors hasn't been abused.
But it has bad side effects too, and it's really important that we as a community not lose sight of the fact that locked down devices are really, really bad.
>Ah, but you say: I must have signed a contract to use the app store... Except, no, I didn't do that either.
Do you have an Apple ID? You need an Apple ID to download apps from the App Store, and when you create the Apple ID, you accept their ToS. So, yeah, I think you did.
Though that ToS has absolutely nothing to do with anything we're discussing -- the ToS that matters here is the one between Apple and Google/Facebook.
> ...and that must constrain me to honor the terms of the app that I downloaded...
I don't think Apple's ToS with you constrains you to honors the terms of the app you downloaded. That seems strangely indirect. I think the app may or may not have their own ToS that they make you agree to at some point before permitting you to use their services.
Technically correct. But software running on "things" has terms. It's called a license. When you buy a movie, you don't own the film. You own the right to use that film in accordance with the license.
You're conflating things. Your example is about copyright, not licenses. Copyright doesn't constrain use, it constrains distribution (though there's a parallel argument there about DRM and things like DVD region codes, etc...).
The question you're sidestepping is whether a license can say "you can't run your own software on your own thing". Obviously it can be implemented to do so given the way computers work, but it's not at all clear why that should be so.
IBM has had contracts for decades that govern use of your software on the hardware you bought from them. You buy CPU hours or the right to use a certain amount of the computer for a specific timeframe. One place I worked at had a mainframe that they could not use for production workloads unless a disaster declaration was made.
Copyright can constrain use (although the actual extent varies a lot between jurisdictions). Most licenses (which are basically a way to manage copyrights) don't make use that, but some do (like a license that Apple uses for their SDKs, which disallows running it on non-Apple hardware).
BTW. I ignore that and even many large, respectable companies ignore that, but it's there ;)
Sure they do. You want a gun? That comes with certain restrictions on what you can do with it. You want a car? There are certain restrictions on what you can do with it. Jet? Restrictions. Schedule 1 drugs? Restrictions. Knives? Restrictions. Fireworks? Restrictions. Cameras? Restrictions. Hell, even when it comes to a 2x4, there are rules about what you can and can't do with it -- you can't hit someone with it, or you'll suffer consequences.
According to the story, Apple have stopped Google employees running Google's "Gbus app for transportation". So yes, it's about what Apple allows people to run on their own devices.
They can still run that app by signing it themselves with a developer account, although that's not a very convenient option. And no, this is still about what Google allows its employers to run on their corporate devices (and Apple now taking this right away from them), as users wouldn't be able to sign that app with enterprise certificate by themselves.
XX% of Google employees don't use Mac as their laptop platform
XX% of Google employees have a locked-down Mac that isn't allowed to run XCode or locally-compiled binaries because their job role isn't in Engineering
You can only sideload up to a certain number of apps (3 IIRC), only for seven days at a time, and only using certain APIs (cannot for example use notifications), all of which would pose serious limitations.
It's as central an example of mansplaining as I've ever seen; Mansplaining just means "I'm too stupid to understand your point, so I'm going to throw in a non sequitur gendered insult".
At least as I understand it, it more means explaining things to the person you're talking to as if they don't know anything about the conversation topic, even though you have no particular reason to do so.
It doesn't necessarily have to be done by a man or directed at a woman. That's just how it tends to go. And obvs is a bit more fraught when it is going that way.
Leaving aside whether that's something to reasonably get upset about (how are people supposed to know exactly which facts are known to every single reader of their comment?), the way you're describing it seems pretty identical to the now-mostly-anachronistic expression of being "jewed" out of some money. The fact that the target of the slur doesn't have to be Jewish doesn't make it better; in fact, it kind of makes it worse. Hell, at least my example has its roots in a time when casual racism/sexism were accepted _pro forma_, and the term is slowly dying out. It seems to me your example is even less excusable.
Meh, those aren't as well-defined as you think they are. Variously, market-dominant minorities have been labelled as "oppressors" throughout history, and "we can be as immoral as we want as long as the victims deserve it" has been cover for all sorts of horrible shit. You can do whatever you want under the aegis of "fighting the power" if you just define "the power" as the people you wanted to be vicious to anyway. It takes a pretty simple-minded view of the world to think that a one-dimensional oppressors/oppressed view of the world is anywhere close to reality, instead of just being convenient cover that can be targeted at pretty much anyone, so shitty people can be regressive and sexist and racist while sitting on their high horse.
With focus on privacy Apple successfully reducing users wanting freedom. The marketing now seems to indicate that if you want freedom then you loose privacy.
Yes. Because it is technically almost impossible, if not completely impossible, to build a system that gives your code absolute freedom while not giving other code running on the system absolute freedom as well.
There will always be the possibility that some company will ask users to their absolute freedom ability to give them absolute freedom. Which is basically exactly what happened in this case. The only difference is, in this case, Apple built in a mechanism where they can stop individual actors.
