If you listen to the interview, the actual message from Cook is "privacy and security go hand-in-hand", which is plainly obvious and supported by history and data.
Maybe I'm missing something from a different source. Where has Apple said, "privacy can be obtained by giving up privacy"?
Offering services to fully anonymous counterparties is fraught with challenges.
Android is extremely vulnerable to third party attackers via apps.
> I can't only build apps and platforms that only work for half the potential users.
Are you sure even close to half of your potential users use (exclusively) iOS? I severely doubt that.
Exactly for the reasons you mention, people who want self-managed security don't use iOS.
And what apple is doing is not giving their customers and users a choice other than an extremely radical one of abandoning the platform completely.
FWIW, though: 1) even if you expected the vast majority of people to be using one system instead of the other, you can't build a communications platform or payment system or ecosystem generally at all that simply cuts them out as it causes problems for the people and companies trying to adopt it... if you build a platform for decentralized apps that doesn't support iOS or a chat system that doesn't support iOS or a payment system that doesn't support iOS, well, you now have to convince everyone else in the world not to support iOS: your hands are frankly tied here.
I call complete bullshit on this. I want the same thing, and so so many other people. The only reason we don’t have it is that it’s a lot of work and nobody has done it yet.
Blaming Apple for their business standing in the way of network effects is just an excuse.
If the software was built, we’d find a way to run it.
Nobody has built anything like the whole stack needed for a secure distributed App Store with private payments.
It’s obvious you can’t build such a thing on top of Apple’s store, it’s just not credible to claim to be trying and being stopped by Apple.
You could build one for Linux or Android. If you actually made it work, then it would be existence proof that a centralized model is not needed for a private and secure store.
That hasn’t been proven and the way to prove it is clearly to build it where it can be built, not to make arguments about Apple’s bad faith.
iCloud supports storage if encrypted data and disabling unencrypted backups.
It's fine that you reject the legitimacy of government, but unreasonable to expect huge organizations to do the same while serving hundreds of millions of users.
This doesn't seem to be true. Privacy here means "user privacy" whereas security means the security of the systems holding the user data.
Almost any system that hold large amounts of user data is a counter example. Such systems are typically highly secured but are antagonistic to user privacy.
Think about this in the extreme: imagine your computation platform is a virtual machine on a hypervisor controlled by your adversary. There would be no way to use this platform to safely interact with your private data.
A good example, since we are talking about Apple is "the fappening". A massive leak of celebrity photos, including nudes, coming from compromised personal iCloud accounts. It is an obvious attack on privacy, made possible by poor security.
Now, you can tell me that the best way to respect privacy is not to store user data, and it certainly helps, but if your software is insecure, it may be used to harvest passwords or do all sorts of nasty stuff. In other words, maybe you don't store anything but hackers will.
You can't guarantee privacy without security. And even for companies with poor privacy practices, with security, only authorized people can spy on you, without it, anyone can do it.
They sell the idea that Apple is the only "trustworthy" entity capable of handling and protecting your data, so you can trust them with your data and you should ignore how they are datamining it (because they are "trustworthy").
[1] https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/03/13/apple-maps-navigati...