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Comment by honkycat | Hacker News Reader

Of course Apple bitched out, what else have they ever done?

Acting like a revolutionary, counter culture company is one thing. Actually sticking it's neck out and doing something important is something completely different.

Part of the reason I can't stand apple. At least Microsoft acts like a lame computer company without sloughing on layers of pretentious BS.

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I mean they did stick the figurative middle finger up to the FBI when asked to provide a backdoor into a terrorist's iPhone. Which I would say is one of the main stories that sticks out to my somewhat bias perspective of tech giants standing up for their opinions.

This may be more a reflection on the what flex the residing government provides for a company in a given country rather than the companies appetite to stand up for their opinion though.

One has to wonder though. Apple refused to provide the FBI a backdoor, which people speculated would be due to setting a precedent for Apple to make these backdoors standard

How likely is it that everything Apple sells in China is backdoored as mandated by the CCP?

It's clearly 100%.

What about the infamous browser attack publicized by Google’s project zero that seemed to be perpetrated by the Chinese government in order to target the Uighur Muslims? If true that would seem to imply the CCP did not in fact have backdoors already right?

It was targeting the Diaspora, which was using non-China models.

Ah, interesting, "Diaspora" meaning Uighurs outside of China? In that case though, what evidence is there that it was geographically targeted? My understanding was that the attack apparently focused on websites likely to be visited by Uighurs, so how would we know what the geographical target was?

The targeted websites are blocked in China. They are only accessible outside of China.

Thanks for clarifying, I didn’t realize that!

Very likely:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351

They allow a Chinese company to manage iCloud data.

The FBI doesn't have the ability to prevent Apple from selling phones in the USA. There is no law I know of that would allow the FBI to do that. China does have the ability to prevent Apple from selling phones in China.

The FBI doesn't have the direct ability, but they do have the ear of multiple powerful people who can move policy & trade law around to apple's disadvantage. They did just lose multiple requested tariff exemptions in the trade war.

Are you suggesting a Federal law enforcement organization, that maintains files on certain private individuals, would collectively come together to approach politicians to do blacklist a company?

Because that would be illegal on about 97 levels. Right out of the gate it would be seen as potential blackmail.

Apple needs to bow out of politics. Let anyone post an app as long as it's secure and not threatening to the OS or device itself. It's the politics (like with other companies) that will destroy it. If some terrorist wants to make an app, let it happen. It would be much easier to flag and track people that download said app, than to ban such apps completely from the walled garden, and force them underground.

I'm sure that's what Apple wants to do, and that almost works with American laws, but that will get you banned from China.

"Because it's the right thing to do."

- Tim Cooke

so what would you have expected them to do, break the law? when they said no to the FBI they did it while respecting the law. should they just have quit the entire chinese market?

Yes.

I would expect them to allow users to sideload applications easily so they can continue their protests in a form of mild malicious compliance. That's the least they owe their users.

The best test of any company's espoused "principles" is when it is forced to make inconvenient choices.

Correct! Apple isn't surprised by the actions China took to get to this point. They've had their chances to stop, complain, and fight.

In that case, apple shouldn't say that they care about user privacy. They should say they care about user privacy as much as the government where they happen to be operating does.

I should be able to install any app I want from a download link, that's what I expect. Apple has no business to make a decision about user choices.

no smartphone works like this tho, literally none. that's what activist à la Stallman always pointed out. and they were right , ofc.

Oh yeah, Android is also completely broken by design, I'm not advocating for the way it works there either.

No, it's not. It's not perfect, nor is it trivially easy, but it is possible to side-load apps on an Android phone.

It should be something the common user can do, right now you need to go to enable some obscure and scary sounding settings to enable that, that's unreasonable.

It doesn't matter if it's "unreasonable". The key is that it's possible. It's not possible at all on Apple devices, so Android is superior in this regard.

Every android phone I've owned can install apks just by opening them in the file manager. Not all Android phones allow this, but many do.

On top of that many brands (asus, oneplus, even some Chinese brands) let you unlock the bootloader with official tools. Using this you can take full control.

So it's far from 'none'. I recently bought a zenfone 6 because it satisfies this criterion. Asus is even sending devices to alternative os developers to help them out. So we can choose to not support walled gardens, and it's not even hard. It's a question of getting people to value software freedom higher.

Apple is a publically listed business operating a service (the app store). Their board and directors have a legal responsibility to comply with requests like this.

Then maybe they should not operate the app store at all if it's incompatible with user choices. Or at least, leave the user a choice to just download an app elsewhere if they want to.

Clicking on a link and installing an app like you would do on windows seems the right thing to do.

How is that even relevant? The parent was specifically saying that you should be able to sideload apps so that even if an app was removed from the official store, you could still install it.

That's never been the case with iPhone apps. It's the app store or the highway. That's practically advertised by Apple as a feature of their ecosystem.

You missed the "I should be able to" part of the sentence.

Which law, exactly?

Yeah, breaking the Law can be totally justified. Unless you want to behave like a slave company.

That's stupid. Braking the law is never justified. Companies have to take care of the money that the stockholders invested into them.

> should they just have quit the entire chinese market?

yes?

It's not just consumer sales. The manufacturing pipeline is dependent on China. It would end Apple.

You may as well ask, if Apple got an NSL, should they quit the entire US market? Or should they comply.

Nobody wants to loose china market. Especially apple so they obey china what to delete.

This is what you can expect when a cooperation declares privacy their main concern.

Apple's walled garden system matches nicely with Chinese Communism.

Under strict government regime, I too would've done the same thing.

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