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Comment by xmprt | Hacker News Reader

Just curious. What benefits do you see yourself getting by having a walled garden?

Higher quality applications. Fewer privacy violations. Lower chance of identity theft. Better overall security. Longer life cycles for new features. Even longer cycles for critical/security updates. Reduced effort to maintain and keep secure.

On top of that, but not because of the walled garden aspect: Better parental controls. Consistent user experience (although for this one it helps to have the walled garden). Better device interoperability across the ecosystem.

All of this has nothing to do with the walled garden.

The walled garden is the fact that you can't sideload apps or alternative stores at all. Everything you've mentioned is simply app store requirements.

I'm aware what walled garden means.

All of the benefits I listed are a result of, or helped by, the walled garden. The app store requirements are part of that walled garden.

All of that is still irrelevant. You can not have a walled garden and the exact same requirements for the Appstore.

Android is a walled garden too, up until you flip a switch and allow non-appstore apps, which most people do not do. If there were any benefits to the walled garden, they would be present on Android as well.

> Lower chance of identity theft

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUYODQB_2wQ

> Fewer privacy violations

The only reason Apple booted Facebook tracking is to become the next Facebook in tracking with its ads. (1) (2)

(1) https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/26/23425637/apple-pauses-ga...

(2) https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/08/21/apple-maps-could-...

Tell me you don't understand the words lower and fewer without telling me.

I don't want to manage the OS on my phone. I want it to work. Get up in the morning, make a call, read some websites, check weather, mail, maps, have music in the car. That's it. I don't want to manage sd cards, memory, processes, I don't need a text editor, shell, ssh, openssh, ..., on the phone. I rarely buy apps and games. I want a solid OS working for years.

Frankly, everybody keeps saying that iPhones are e-waste. Well, without starting a flamewar. I have managed more Android e-waste for the family than Apple. Just my mother had 5 different Android phones in the last decade. 4 of them laying dead in the drawer next to me.

Not having to worry about shit. There are dozens, if not hundreds of mobile devices I can buy where I can root and have full access to them. I just don’t trust myself to be able to secure them properly. I am happy, no, thrilled, for the opportunity to offload that risk to Apple.

I see this as a weakness of the Unix security model, not a benefit of the walled garden. Personally I’d love a future where apps on my laptop are sandboxed just as thoroughly as iOS apps. I want to be able to install and run desktop software from the internet without worrying about it exfiltrating or cryptolockering my data. Running an application should be just as secure as visiting a website.

And that capability seems orthogonal to the App Store. I don’t see any reason we need a monopolistic app store on our phones to get good security. You don’t need anyone’s permission to make a website. Why can’t applications work the same way?

You are aware that iphone is a phone, that could be rooted just by visiting a website and clicking on a button?

How can clicking an HTML element root my iPhone?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JailbreakMe

https://www.pcworld.com/article/486995/jailbreakme_30_how_do...

When someone talks about unspecified iPhones in the year 2023, they are probably not talking about iPhone 4 or older.

If those links are accurate, JailBreakMe hasn't been an issue for over a decade.

For me, “it just works.” The amount of time configuring a OSX vs Windows work computer was huge.

For personal use cases it’s the same. Smartphones are so advanced that there’s not that much functionality I’d get. The benefit from customizability of an Android is less than the stability and ease of access of an iPhone. Maybe ad blocking is the only issue, YT on the phone is unusable, but I have a pi-hole for my home network so I don’t mind.

I still have a rooted Android and a jail broken iPad to mess around with. But beyond some nerdy stuff or hacking a mobile game, it’s mostly a gimmick.

"It just works" is great until it just doesn't. Both our iPhones refuse to connect to iTunes via lightning cable. Nothing wrong with the file system, can view everything on the phone fine. I assume this is a software bug but the only option given is to factory reset the phones, which seems a little extreme.

But we can't use a third party app on the PC (you can find plenty to install, but they all use the same underlying iTunes software), or on the phone (some WiFi media transfer apps exist but don't work well for years of bulk data), or even just browse the file system like Android. So our only option is apparently paying for iCloud to get our media off the phone now, resetting, and hopefully putting it back on - which I don't have high hopes for since we had an issue in the past where iTunes bricked a phone when restoring from backup [IIRC iTunes didn't do the right system call to stop the Windows PC from sleeping, so it slept mid-restore, and next time we plugged it in, it automatically backed up the broken partial restore wiping the good backup].

The amount of time configuring a OSX vs Windows work computer was huge.

Both of which can run any software of your choice, which demonstrates that walled gardens aren't necessary for usability.

I spent many hours configuring my Macbook for work (including installing 3rd party apps that let you do things the default options don't) and there are many aspects of it I wish I could change but can't (at least without a lot of effort), but I could happily use Windows with very few tweaks. It's mostly personal preference as to what "just works" in both of these systems, but it's certainly nicer to have the option to change things you don't like.

It’s besides the point, but Windows has come a long long way to improve Windows client configuration (Intune, Winget, winget config files are in preview). MacOS is still reliant on third party tools like Brew or consumer oriented stuff like the App Store.

The existence of a company-sanctioned jailbreak process doesn't prevent your own non-jailbroken phone from "just working".

Something very specific to a walled garden is that app developers are forced to play by the garden’s rules. Facebook/Google/etc are forced by Apple to reduce their tracking, spam apps are less common, and generally apps are forced to support the latest APIs. I’m not saying Apple is some benevolent dictator, but it at least has helped curb certain abuses by other megacorps.

Giving side eye whenever someone mentions installing an antivirus on their android

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