the reality is that billions of people need to trust their phones with their most personal information, fininaces and lives and apple's policies while sometimes annoying do a lot to build that trust
they aren't a big secret and if you don't like it you're free to not buy their products
That wouldn't affect your kids and telling Grandma how to do that over the phone is very difficult. And at that point she could be handing over her credit card anyway.
It’s not just little Billy and Grandma who shouldn’t be turning that mode on, it’s most people.
The media would have a field day at Facebooks expense. Why would Apple even let them on the app store if they did something so stupid?
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/30/18203551/apple-facebook-b...
This isn’t even a hypothetical, it really happened. And yet people still have a hard time believing Facebook (and other companies) would abuse iPhone side loading if given a chance. Of course they would!
Apple doesn't want to deal with a million hackers screwing with their devices and clogging up their support system, and also then having to deal with endless reports of terrible customer service because someone paid 1000$ for an iPhone and then Apple won't help them out when they brick it with the latest flashware they downloaded from usenet. Followed by the inevitable complaints that "Apple Customer Care is terrible". Easier just to control the entire ecosystem, and tell folks who don't like it, "cool, cya".
It would be very helpful to developers and debugging too.
Surely a developer or ten has suggested the same thing by now?
My guess is focus: they are 100% focused on being the best closed platform that is easy to use and everything is handled for the user. A lively sideloading and 3rd party homebrew scene would be a massive distraction for the Dev team and most importantly the support side with little direct business ROI (indirect could be big but a harder sell).
Possibly harming brand reputation showing people what they could have absent the paid wall. When the alternative exposes people to risk, and they'd rather not have to explain themselves?
lol i can think of a few billion other reasons why they don't want it to happen.
Well obviously that's the most basic reason why but that doesn't help us solve the problem.
How exactly does it cause a loss in revenue? It's very possible the benefits that come from being more open improve the platform for everyone and increase sales. So it's valuable to be very specific on where the costs are.
Also, people already gripe about the fact that to "fully unlock" your mac these days, you need to disable SIP, and how that disables some things (but at least not your warranty). Do you really think the same people would be happy with "developer mode but no more warranty" on iPhones? Especially if someone like Epic or Facebook or Google insist that their apps need this unlocked mode and so the only way to use them is to void your warranty?
Honestly, the best protection would be the ability to control your own device, and make apple just one of many ways to help you secure it.
I would love to be able to firewall my device. To see what apps are doing and to prevent them from doing things you don't like. Then you can trust but verify.
By the way, apple does TONS of stuff behind your back - rapant telemetry, allowing and even helping with tracking, and doing its own advertising. Look at deep linking, iBeacon, and lots of other silly things.
While I agree that a single company shouldn't be unilaterally in charge of controlling access on behalf of users, I would say the industry doesn't do a good job of coming together to produce an option that works. Look at the software supply chain as an example of what tends to happen. The Linux distros do a pretty good job, but they maintain far fewer packages and getting your application into a distros repos isn't trivial.
Hey yeah, let’s all return to the golden era where everyone installed Symantec Norton Utilities and AVG antivirus on their computers and hoped for the best.
I’m aware about all of the known telemetry on iPhone and literally none of it is an issue for me. Collecting data is not an issue, especially when such collection can help make a product or service better. How data is used is the issue, and in this respect I’m unaware of any major tech companies whose hands are cleaner than Apple’s.
Erm. They make the hardware, so any bugs they put in there are what they are.
I don't see any reason to let more people put bugs in there.
iBeacon is 1-way read-only. Deep Linking is an app url scheme. Not much to look at.
afaict ibeacon allows apps to locate bluetooth beacons. think department store beacons and department store app. deep linking allows apps to (silently) intercept email/browsing/messages with specific urls. all of them and other schemes let apps wake up in the background.
Does this apply to Macs as well? Why can't iPhones be at least as open as a Mac?
I want the option to unlock my device and use it as I see fit.
Having the option would mean that many apps that are currently available through the App Store, and therefore broadly trustworthy, would suddenly become side-load-only and follow basically no rules at all.
If you're truly a developer, you can add whatever apps you want to your phone from source via xcode, free now, so what's the issue?