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Comment by throw10920 | Hacker News Reader

This is a very bad argument.

There are several, very easy to imagine mechanisms that both provide user freedom and security/idiot-resistance at the same time.

For instance, extending the "parental control" feature to have a toggle for sideloading - then, you just turn on parental control, toggle that off, and keep the PIN. Done.

The idea that the features of the product should completely unnecessarily be restricted for all users for the dubious benefit of a tiny subset of them is laughable. The only logically consistent motive to advocate for this is profit.

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Uniformity and convention over configuration and customization is why people feel why iOS is more stable and secure than the Android ecosystem as a whole.

If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.

You make your trade offs or you get another vendor to copy the features you like and not the ones you don’t. Forcing everything to be homogenous is something you’re meant to grow out of when you’re eight, once you see that ruining things for other people because you’re jealous is a bad personality trait.

> Forcing everything to be homogenous is something you’re meant to grow out of when you’re eight, once you see that ruining things for other people because you’re jealous is a bad personality trait.

No one is forcing “everything to be homogenous”. If you don’t like homogeneity, then avoid it. It’s not hard to understand. My choices are none of your business just like I’m not going to criticize you for wanting more freedom to customize your device at the expense of security and stability.

> If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.

Very, very bad and consumer-hostile sentiment that is inconsistent both with good ethics and with the way that the regulatory system works currently.

Regulations on goods sold exist for a purpose - to allow the user to generally buy things while having some guarantees about their lifetime/security/safety/consistency with marketing/etc.

"If you don't like it, don't buy it" implies that companies should be able to sell goods made with toxic substances, not honor their warranties, lie on their marketing, and steal and sell your personal medical information. This is bad.

If I buy a product, I expect to be able to do whatever I want with it, and to not have arbitrary limitations on how I use that product that exist purely for the sake of making the seller more rich, and this is consistent with the way that consumer protection regulations work in general.

> Uniformity and convention over configuration and customization is why people feel why iOS is more stable and secure than the Android ecosystem as a whole.

False. The vast majority of people have no opinions of whether Android or iOS is more secure. Slightly more, but very few, of them have any opinions on their relative stability, and you can attribute exactly all of that instability to a mix between (1) manufacturers making terrible drivers and support packages for their hardware and (2) Google being generally bad at designing software. It has nothing to do with "uniformity" or "convention over configuration" at all.

We have a free market.

No one is forcing you to buy products you don’t like. You’re confusing government sanctioned duopolies (created from bad regulation) like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T for Apple. You are free to buy alternative products from other companies.

> It has nothing to do with "uniformity" or "convention over configuration" at all.

Actually it does. The hardware is uniform and consistent, and therefore so are the drivers. There is a price to choice. Google is also one of the best software companies in the world.

About that free market - it might be free but lobbying culture in the US starts early, at school where Apple pushes products to influence future choices of students. Not choosing something which is used by everyone around is probably more difficult psychologically than standing up to the status quo and choosing alternatives whatever they are.

There are choices made for use - having a phone on which everyone around communicates, having an internet connection from the only provider in the area.

Uniformity is a choice if the alternative is a viable choice and this is a complex matter.

With the price of smartphones these days I'm betting a lot more people use work-provided devices privately than before. You don't always have a choice between Android and iOS in those instances.

> We have a free market.

And look where it got us.

> We have a free market.

With regulations. That people generally accept and agree are necessary to some extent...

> No one is forcing you to buy products you don’t like.

...even for goods that you have the option of not purchasing. It literally doesn't matter how many baby bottle manufacturers there are in the US - it is illegal for all of them to put BPA in their baby bottle products, regardless of whether their competitors don't.

> You’re confusing government sanctioned duopolies

No, I'm not. The US has boatloads of laws making it illegal to sell various things in markets where there's absolutely no monopolies/duopolies/oligopolies and buyers have ample choices, such as the above.

> Actually it does. The hardware is uniform and consistent, and therefore so are the drivers.

You're intentionally changing the use of "uniformity" from being about high-level OS user-facing design ("the features of the product should completely unnecessarily be restricted for all users for the dubious benefit of a tiny subset of them" + "Uniformity and convention over configuration" = talking about OS design) to implementation, which is a completely separate issue that's unrelated to the current discussion about user freedom. This is an admittedly clever slight of hand, but makes your point no less invalid.

> There is a price to choice.

Sure - but you haven't shown what the price is to allowing users to use whatever app store they want, you've just brought in completely irrelevant examples like phone hardware choice.

> Google is also one of the best software companies in the world.

Regardless of the truth of this statement, it doesn't change the fact that they're generally bad (note that "bad" is absolute, "best" is relative) at designing software, per my lived experience with dozen of bugs in dozens of Google products across browsers and operating systems over years of use.

Goalposts are racing across your comments. You claim both "freedom is good even if it means exposing users to attacks" (because rest assured if there is an "allow unsafe" button then black hats will find a way to convince your grandma tap it) and "freedom is good but not when it is bad for the user", whatever is more convenient for you at the time.

Apple's freedom is to make their devices as they see fit. User's freedom is to vote with her wallet. Feel free to buy whatever device you like if you want to have the ability to shoot yourself in the foot and get pwned, I like to have it in some circumstances but it's not what I would recommend to all of my non-tech contacts. I appreciate most EU privacy laws but not where it comes close to taking people's choice to voluntarily give up some freedoms for security, it's the opposite of empowering them.

> The vast majority of people have no opinions of whether Android or iOS is more secure.

This is just some random unsubstantiated claim. Apple buys entire billboards in city centers that basically promote privacy. You are saying you know better than their entire marketing department.

Even laypeople pay attention and notice that it's their Android owning friends' bank accounts get hijacked but not iPhone owning friends, etc.

> you can attribute exactly all of that instability to

Whatever you attribute this to, potato, potato, the end result is one has been more stable, more secure, supported for longer, more profitable for indie app developers etc than the other.

So much misinformation

Ultimate Security in the form of preventing extremely sophisticated physical access/evil maid attacks[0] benefits people even if they don't think they need this security.

Maybe purchase a different product that more closely aligns with your needs.

0: ie. someone watches you enter your apple id and passcode and later swipes your phone, only to sideload spyware that hides itself from the UI, then re-plants your phone without you knowing

That’s not a treat model 99% of users have to think about.

My I introduce you to Mr. Fart and his favorite colors? https://medium.com/@blakeross/mr-fart-s-favorite-colors-3177...

Discussed previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11231631

I don't see how this is relevant. Nobody is advocating for the relaxations of the iOS security model itself, which is the actual thing that prevents rootkits and malware on your device.

Instead, the proposal is that people be able to install whatever software they want, that runs as a normal iOS app subject to the iOS security restrictions. Being able to install a non-Apple-approved app does not give you the ability to read and write arbitrary kernel memory, or do other actually dangerous things.

> Ultimate Security in the form of preventing extremely sophisticated physical access/evil maid attacks[0] benefits people even if they don't think they need this security.

Yet, it's up to me to decide whether I want that security or whether I want to trade security for freedom/flexibility. Not you, or any other authoritarians seeking to exert control over others.

> Maybe purchase a different product that more closely aligns with your needs.

This is an incredibly toxic and user-hostile sentiment that also is completely inconsistent with the way that consumer protection laws work in general[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33978141

I still don't understand how you can't manifest that choice by simply purchasing a device from a different manufacturer. It's pretty disingenuous to suggest that Apple is some kind of authoritarian power that you have no choice but to purchase from. To quote your linked comment, I wouldn't expect you nor any other sane consumer to purchase goods that are "made with toxic substances, not honor their warranties, lie on their marketing, and steal and sell your personal medical information". Apple does not do any of that, and I think that you're intentionally derailing the discussion by comparing their guidelines + practices to any of the above.

To add, this is the difference from 'not honoring a warranty' and a product that explicitly comes without a warranty: you (can/should) learn about the product before you purchase it to see if it's actually for you.

> I still don't understand how you can't manifest that choice by simply purchasing a device from a different manufacturer.

I absolutely can manifest that choice - but it doesn't matter, because I have the right to be able to make that choice for any particular manufacturer.

> To quote your linked comment, I wouldn't expect you nor any other sane consumer to purchase goods that are "made with toxic substances, not honor their warranties, lie on their marketing, and steal and sell your personal medical information".

It doesn't matter that you wouldn't expect one to - it's wrong for a seller to sell one of those things at all, and that's why we've enshrined into our legal system that "some bad things are illegal to sell, regardless of whether the consumer has the ability to avoid them or not".

> Apple does not do any of that

It's pretty blindingly obvious that I'm not claiming that Apple is doing any of those things, and just using that as an example of the point that "some things are illegal to sell".

> and I think that you're intentionally derailing the discussion by comparing their guidelines + practices to any of the above.

The one who is doing that is you, by intentionally misinterpreting my words and reading things that I didn't write. The comparison is entirely apt - "we have laws against selling/doing some bad things x, Apple is selling/doing bad things y, even though x != y it's reasonable to have laws against also selling/doing bad things y".

> Ultimate Security in the form of preventing extremely sophisticated physical access/evil maid attacks[0] benefits people even if they don't think they need this security.

This is a strange red herring. Attacks of this form are protected from by the OS, not the App Store. You can't do attacks like this by sideloading apps onto your own phone in developer mode because iOS itself protects against this - and we're discussing specifically allowing users to choose what App Store they use, not relaxing any of the security restrictions of the OS. Someone familiar with the basics of OS design would be aware of this distinction.

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