> There are plenty of Remote Desktop apps for the iPhone.
Not screen sharing, something equivalent to Windows Remote Desktop Services or X11 forwarding, where your device acts as a thin client for an application running on a remote server. It's expressly prohibited by the Apple guidelines, presumably because any such client would allow someone to compete with the app store by using remote apps. But it's also useful for other things, like keeping all your data on your company's trusted servers instead of on a device that could be lost or stolen.
> What policies are in place that don’t allow Signal to do backups using its own service - something that other apps do?
It doesn't use a service because the entire point is to not have all your data in the hands of a third party service. On Android it stores the backup in the filesystem which you copy off the device via USB.
> And you’re worried about “security” but you want a File Browser to have unfettered access to your data? It’s a feature that third party apps can only access files outside of their own sandbox that you explicitly give them permission to.
"It's not a bug, it's a feature!"
There should obviously be a permission required to do that, but if the user wants to use the app to view their files, they should be able to use the app to view their files.
This is the problem with Apple deciding everything for everybody. Some people have really stringent security requirements and don't want their data getting uploaded to a service, someone else wants a copy of all the data from every app to be backed up to some third party cloud service. But Apple restricts things to such an extent that you can't choose to do either one. One size fits none.
> No company wants to deal with the hassle and legality of bit torrent. Most people aren’t using to “download Linux ISOs”. I’m definitely not.
BitTorrent is not illegal, that isn't Apple's problem any more than it is with anything else anyway (what if someone pirates movies with Safari?), and "no company wants to deal with that hassle" is exactly the problem with putting the decision of what you can use your device for in the hands of a third party that isn't responsive to your needs.
> But before as far as bit torrent, my use case is starting and downloading things on my computer from my phone and adding them to my Plex library. I can do that by pairing my mobile browser to Vuze and going to remote.vuze.com.
Which is a fully generic counterargument, because you can make any app a web page and then do whatever you want on the web page. That's a total cheat when you're asking for things there are no iOS apps for.
> There are plenty of Windows only consumer apps - especially games.
There are plenty of Android only games, like Doom 3.
Not to mention all of the games that can be played in emulators on Android but not iOS because Apple doesn't allow emulators.
> Even from Microsoft, Access and Publisher are Windows only and are included with Office 365.
You must realize the equivalent to this would be Google apps for Android that don't exist on iOS, which there are several of.