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Comment by friendlybus | Hacker News Reader

This kind of walled garden in the 80s led to apple losing ground to microsoft and a chant for developers, developers, developers.

Microsoft was forced to provide options for multibrowsers and limit it's paint application from competing with photo editing software.

All of your problems are solved with opt-in to secondary app sources. If you want the apple approved walled garden, don't install the alternative and retain all the benefits of percieved security.

What's wrong with letting people install a different app store, and apps? Was firefox worse than internet explorer?

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The entire reason there is a walled garden at all is the pre-iPhone landscape.

Pre-iPhone, the phone software landscape that most consumers interacted with was absolutely awful. Carriers loaded phones with all sorts of pre-installed, uninstallable junk. Most third-party software was also not very good. iPhone uptake was so large in 2007 because Apple put its foot down on all the carrier cruft.

> What's wrong with letting people install a different app store, and apps?

You would end up with something similar to downloading games on Windows: Every big company will force you to use their own app store to download their software which has absolutely no benefit to the end user. I want to install and use an application, not an app store.

Have not seen this happening on Android. Also: some people use only F-Droid to get their apps. IPhones lack such an option.

This shows so much of a misunderstanding of history it’s hard to know where to start.

The Macintosh was in no way closed in the 80s. How could it be? There was no memory protection, and you could hack at the system and make it do all sorts of things via extensions.

There were plenty of third party compilers. In the early 90s, developers didn’t even use Apple’s toolchain. For the most part they used MetroWorks.

Under Gassee (founder of Be) they went after margins instead of going after market share. Jobs said that himself when he came back.

Microsoft was also never forced to provide options in the US.

Great point. Now consider what browser came after Firefox. This is what Apple wants to prevent.

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