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Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

Nobody is forcing you to use an iPhone either. There are plenty of options with different trade offs.

Allowing 3rd-party app stores has predictable negative externalities (privacy, security, etc.). Which is why I and others are not interested in that development. Apple is able to make developers engage in less shitty business practices precisely because they can control the distribution of software through the App Store . It’s no surprise that as Apple has increasingly focused on privacy and removing tracking capabilities and other dark patterns that developers are trying to find a way around Apple’s restrictions. It’s not like they all of a sudden implemented a new fee. It’s been there for years.

> 99.9%....

I guess this is the .1%? You don’t buy something expecting it to do something completely different. You don’t buy an iPhone expecting to install whatever you want. You don’t buy a Corolla expecting to off-road with it.

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> I guess this is the .1%?

No.

> You don’t buy something expecting it to do something completely different. You don’t buy an iPhone expecting to install whatever you want. You don’t buy a Corolla expecting to off-road with it.

Apple's current behavior isn't written in stone and dictated by God, it can change.

It is sad they don't have rooted developer phones available. I'd switch platforms in a second if they started allowing me root on my own device.

Root access used to be a concern for me, but it became much less useful when Xposed had to enter the cat-and-mouse game against SafetyNet. And now that unlocked bootloaders can't be hidden from SafetyNet, I don't even bother with root. And because of that I've been considering just switching to the next iPhone and going all in on Apple's ecosystem.

That's true, but it's nice to know it's there so you can have a use for old hardware, or to debug something obscure. More importantly, it's about the type of users it will attract.

Being able to have multiple app stores on android is also pretty good. I have an iPhone for work, and it's fine, but I don't know how people live with one. Everything wants to have ads or wants me to pay for it.

> You don’t buy an iPhone expecting to install whatever you want.

I specifically bought an iPhone to facetime my family from another country. I'd love to be able to have my apps from my old android. Or, use facetime from an android...

But yeah, I'd love to install whatever I want and that's what I'd expect instead of having to buy everything twice when I switched OSes.

There are plenty of competitors to Facetime, available across multiple different platforms. Google and Facebook for example enjoy pushing their messaging and video messaging ecosystems across multiple devices.

There's nothing unique about Facetime, except it's Apple exclusive.

Yeah, the issue is that we're talking about my parents here. I'm happy to use a different service (in fact, I prefer it) but my parents are old and stubborn and refuse to use a different service.

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