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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

> The reason why I'm personally sticking with the iPhone is exactly the walled garden.

Exactly. I can and do buy plenty of general-purpose computing devices that I can install anything I want on.

If I wanted to buy phones that I'd also needed to sysadmin, I could do that. But I don't want that, and I find it a bit silly that the author thinks governments should eliminate appliance-style devices as a choice.

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It's a false dichotomy to assume that execution of your own code on a device necessarily implies a necessity to be a sysadmin of your own device. It doesn't have to be this way. iOS and it's devices are great for many reasons, but it still can't do all the things I'd want my phone to be able to do because Apple believes it knows better than I do about what I should be able to do with the hardware I own. It's OK to like Apple products, there are many people who are well served by them, and I realize I'm in the minority when it comes to my gripes with their devices. They're also a billion dollar company, their revenue rivals the GDP of most countries - they're allowed to receive criticism without unpaid support on an online forum.

I personally would just like to be able to run my own code without having to publish it on the app store or having to deal with recomipiling and reinstalling apps every two weeks. I'd also love to be able to use my GPG keys via NFC, something an iPhone definitely has the hardware to do, but Apple has decided to not allow it.

I understand that sentiment. So a question in response: if you continue buying more of those devices regardless of those limitations, why? Why not an alternative that would give you those possibilities?

It comes from a general ideological belief that the owner of a physical device that happens to be able to run code should get full control over such execution, even if it goes against the wishes of the manufacturer of that device.

I fully understand your argument. It’s the same argument I originally replied to at the top of this discussion. I simply shared my opinion about my conscious choice to stay within the walled garden.

As for your argument, we solve the "government regulation leading to Facebook sucking up your data" problem (if we hypothesize about a future where the user's right to control is enforced through law) with more government regulation (good privacy laws and strict enforcement), not by relying on another private company whose's objectives may change at any time.

Why did it not happen so far?

At least in the US, because of lobbying and potential constitutional issues (Privacy laws that exist in Europe may collide negatively with the First Amendment if passed in America)

I carry around an android phone and an iOS phone. If I didn't have to develop for iOS, I would solely carry around the Pixel 5 with GrapheneOS.

To your point here: > I'd also love to be able to use my GPG keys via NFC, something an iPhone definitely has the hardware to do, but Apple has decided to not allow it.

This is possible since iOS13 I think. I use my GPG keys in a YubiKey to unlock my Pass for iOS app.

Via NFC?

Yes

> It's a false dichotomy

You keep saying this. Do you have any actual evidence?

I mean, any modern device such as a Mac or a Windows laptop or an Android phone allows running your own code and it doesn’t require you to be a sysadmin to do that. What evidence do you need?

Care to put forward a counterargument instead of using rethoric?

Years of actual experience with devices, some even with unlockable boot loaders. Non sysadmins don't go around unlocking their own devices if they don't already have a strong desire to do so.

So what happens if the Vision Pro becomes the best interface to general-purpose computing, Apple still insists on "owning the experience", and their patents prevent full competition from devices whose experience you can own?

I lean towards your philosophy but I worry that a near-duopoly on advanced devices plus IP restrictions and the like will keep us who value control over our own Turing machines stuck with laptops and desktops.

> So what happens if the Vision Pro becomes the best interface to general-purpose computing

this is exactly my fear

The people who present Android vs iOS as a matter of personal choice are being slightly disingenuous. They are pretending that this choice is a natural inevitable result and will always exist. Their whole reasoning that iOS is "ok" is based on the fact that Android - another totally independent ecosystem, exists. And let's not forget, it's one which Steve Jobs vowed to sue out of existence.

The "android" of that ecosystem is the Meta Quest devices. At the moment, yes, you can sideload there and Zuckerberg is on the record saying he will maintain an open ecosystem. Yet it's still very tenuous. The sideloading experience is very poor, worse than Android (something you sideload can't appear as a first class citizen on the device - there's no way to have it show up in the main app menu, random permissions don't work sometimes etc). And the Quest OS layer is not open source - only the underlying Android OS.

The technical hurdles required for VR/AR are much bigger than general computing. It's not at all clear to me that an open alternative will emerge. So we are potentially headed into an era where effectively there's no option for general computing that isn't locked down and owned by a Mega corporation. And all these iOS users who are preaching tolerance of Apple's approach will have been the key enablers of this dystopia.

> The people who present Android vs iOS as a matter of personal choice are being slightly disingenuous.

TBH, there is already tremendous social pressure to choose iOS.

In that instance, I would say the problem is that the laws around patents are preventing competition, not that one competitor chooses to lock down their system. We have seen that more open systems like Android can exist, so I would expect those systems to stick around for the people that want them. Having both types of systems actually increases user choice.

> If I wanted to buy phones that I'd also needed to sysadmin, I could do that.

Is "sysadmin-ing" a phone really that big of a barrier? Ideally, you'd just install Mobian (i.e. Debian Mobile) on a device, security patches would install automatically via unattended-updates, and every two years you would be prompted to initiate a version upgrade. Proprietary apps would be available from Flatpak repos with strong sandboxing applied. That's essentially the same level of 'sysadmin-ing' any iOS/Android user has to do.

Don't you see a problem with that? Sure, if I really wanted to have debian on the phone, I'd get a capable Android device and sideload something. Would my wife do it? Would your average John Doe do it? Why would an average user ever want to do it? One of the selling points of the original iPhone was exactly that: shit is taken care of. The phone will just work.

Plenty of 'John Doe' types are using feature phones these days, because they're uncomfortable with the proprietary 'app' ecosystem that Apple and Android devices come with. A fully supported Debian Mobile device would essentially be a highly reliable feature phone, with selected smartphone features added to it that actually work for the user and not against them.

They're using feature phones which are 100% proprietary and actively fight anyone from sideloading any app at all because they're uncomfortable with Android's ecosystem, which by comparison lets you install pretty much whatever you want if you just enable developer mode on the device?

No. People who choose feature phones do so because they don't want to deal with apps at all on their mobile device. Not iOS apps, not Android apps, not Debian apps, not Ubuntu apps, not Symbian apps, nothing. They're wanting a phone that's just a phone, even more of an appliance than an iPhone. They probably wouldn't care about the phone running Debian at all, and they absolutely won't care about running GCC to compile their own apps on their phones.

Great for them. Leave my walled garden alone. Considering the volume at which iPhones sell I'm pretty confident that's the sentiment from millions of users.

Edit: When I'm somewhere hundreds of kilometers away from home, sitting in the car parked on the side of the road in the forest and trying to connect with people to figure out where I need to go to exactly, I want maps, email, browser, and phone. In that situation I really don't care about debian, flatpak and stuff. I just want the device to do what it was designed for.

Millions of users do not care about walled gardens. This does not factor into their purchasing decisions. Windows XP was never a walled garden, millions of people still used it. iOS could allow for more software freedoms without impeding on one's ability to use good first party map software.

There’s nothing preventing me from using third-party mapping software on the iPhone. That’s not my point.

That's not my point either - all I'm saying is we can ask for the cake and eat it too, whereas you're content with just being able to have the cake and believe that somehow having the ability to eat it would be worse?

> Plenty of 'John Doe' types are using feature phones these days, because they're uncomfortable with the proprietary 'app' ecosystem that Apple and Android devices come with.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but that's super weird to me. Using a smart phone without installing any apps works great. The integrated maps app is such a great feature, I'd get a smart phone just for that alone.

> Would my wife do it?

I tried to switch my wife to Android once and there was a revolt in the house. And that's a system that should be equivalent to iOS.

“Ideally” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment. Of course, I find even vanilla android a terrible UX.

That was meant to reflect the fact that current systems like Mobian are quite far from being daily-driver usable. (Mostly because of limited hardware support, which is a very difficult problem to address.) But the same is true of OP's Hp Jornada: it was sold with a different OS out of the box, and it's way too underpowered to actually run an up-to-date free OS, or for that matter, to develop anything on-device besides proof-of-concept "hello, world" examples.

Poe's Law.

Agreed. It's not like there's a shortage of general computing devices. To me the insistence on allowing side loading is akin to walking onto a farm and asking to put a saddle on a pig.

(Farmer) "Uh, sorry we don't do that."

(Person) "Well why not? I want a saddle on a pig."

(Farmer) "Because that's not how we do things around here. You're welcome to buy your own pig and put a saddle on it, but you can't do that here."

There's definitely a shortage of general computing devices that I can carry in my pocket.

Your (very strange) analogy reminds me of when I was in 3rd grade, and we were having lunch. There was a substitute teacher that day. I had peanut butter and jelly (packed by my mom), and started putting some potato chips inside it. The teacher came over, asked what I was doing, and said "stop; we don't do that here".

It was a dumb thing for her to say then, and it's dumb to tell us what we can and can't do with our devices now.

Ferrari has a list of rules you must follow in order to purchase their cars. If you violate the rules they will try to take back your car and anyway you will be banned for life from purchasing another of their cars.

For example they only allow a certain selection of colours for their cars.

So no, you are not allowed to do whatever you want with your device. That was never something completely true.

If I was working at Apple I would propose this feature: if you see the user changing the OS or modifying it in ways that are not acceptable to Apple then the user will be blacklisted from support and ideally from buying another Apple product. I would probably make some big bucks from bonuses.

Like that time at the Ferrari dealership when some dumb lady wanted a Ferrari in pink and the dealer told her "No" and pointed to the door: "Don't let the door hit you on your way out".

See? The companies are also allowed to tell you "No!". Freedom and all...

There is a shortage of primary driver-ready mobile computing devices which respect the user's privacy. The choices here are Android devices with custom ROMs + microG and daily prayers that Google doesn't go out of their way to break it (which they can very well do since it breaks ToS) or go nuts with SafetyNet or hardware attestation features and lock you out of a lot of (crucial) apps - or worst case just nuke your account if they detect you use such programs. Or alternatively iPhones.

I'm unsure why side loading would break the dynamics of their walled garden either. All that does is give both customers and developers the choice of forfeiting the benefits like discoverability, comfort and likely a bunch of App Store-exclusive APIs like IAPs and in return allow access in cases where Apple doesn't approve. I can already guarantee that most developers won't budge an inch from the App Store as the lack of discoverability and the annoyance of downloading an app file and clicking through Apple's warning popups just to install it would effectively kill their app.

That's the point though. You do buy the pig but they still won't let you saddle it.

Don't buy their pig then.

I mean, how simple is it? You know the deal, everyone knows the deal, and yet you still buy the damned pig and then complain about it afterwards!?

I mean, sure .. advocating for better behavior from major corporations is a fine thing to do, but it's hard not to view that as hypocritical if you still buy their products. If you care, shop elsewhere. That's the only complaining that really works.

Or you could consider the possibility that all available options on the market have downsides worthy of critique, and you're not helping anything (except maybe corporate interests) by painting people in a bad light for choosing one of them and still voicing that criticism. It's the same logic that says "why don't you leave the country and move somewhere else" if someone criticizes a government, or goes "curious, but you still buy food" when people criticize food companies.

Except the criticism here is of Apple, for preventing "side-loading" (and, presumably, for requiring Apple's certification of the installed binary).

For that, there is a clear alternative.

There’s no alternative if you want to keep the ecosystem.

... a "clear alternative" that has downsides too, that someone might very well consider to be equally bad or worse. Which they somehow only could point out as long as they didn't choose it?

I think the thing that irks me about this discussion is mostly the tone. The whiny, entitled, "I demand that Apple makes a device that suits me exactly, and if they don't, they're a bunch of fascist assholes" vibe really annoys me.

There are two things that are genuinely productive: supporting alternative phones (PinePhone, Librem 5, Jolla, OpenMoko, etc) and their software, and lobbying governments to impose regulatory constraints. I'd love to see more people doing them.

> Don't buy their pig then.

There's thread on HN, where father tells a story of child bullied for not having an iPhone and gets bullied himself by HN for being bad father, that doesn't want to buy his son an iPhone.

I don't agree that shopping elsewhere is the only complaining that works. When you publicly complain about a corporate policy, you can raise awareness in others and build a consensus. If enough people agree with you, the company may feel compelled to change course, or sometimes even legislation is enacted. Or a competitor will notice the swell of unmet demand and step in with a better product.

But if all you do is keep to yourself and stop buying, then your protest begins and ends with you. So, certainly not always, but at least sometimes griping and grousing works.

“If you don’t like the country’s politics just move elsewhere”. Switching to another ecosystem is not easy for many very obvious reasons. And honestly this “shop elsewhere” argument reminds me of the early iphone days, when iphones didn’t have i.e. multitasking. There were a lot of the similar “go buy a windows phone then” arguments. iPhones got multitasking at the end of the day, and both groups benefited from it.

How hard is it really to switch from an iPhone to and Android?

I have a couple of iphones, an apple watch, an ipad, 3 macbooks; my wife has a similar set of devices. Quite hard I’d say? Why are you asking?

Did you not know when you bought all of those devices that the Apple ecosystem wasn’t “open”?

I don’t care about openness too much. Though, the ability to side load is nice to have, that’s that. I am not going to swap between ecosystems, I want the ecosystem that I am using to change.

The thing I don’t quite understand - why do you bother? Having the ability to side load doesn’t affect you in any possible way.

As often as I’ve had to clean up my parents Windows computers is why I care.

But the question still is, why buy a device that doesn’t meet your priorities?

Do entertain us with your view of the world of operating systems, please. Windows is not the only OS around, this point is completely irrelevant. Anybody can install anything on Linux/Macos/Android system and the heavens did not fall yet.

> why buy

It does meet my requirements, that’s why. I’ve never said it doesn’t.

Yes, I’m sure my parents would love to use Linux. Did I miss the “year of the Linux desktop”?

You’re not making sense. Have a nice day, I guess.

How hard is it to bring whole Apple ecosystem to Android while keeping the same quality of mobile product?

If you judge “quality” by “the ability to sideload”, an iPhone is not “quality”. I’m sure you also want user replaceable parts. In that case, why spend thousands on products that don’t meet your needs?

Because, obviously, people want to have the best of two worlds in one.

iPhone is a not a pig and doing what you want with your device is not putting a saddle on a pig.

> Allowing people to control what they can install on their device = sys administrating device

Funny straw man.

Yeah, tbh, even iOS isn't a walled garden in a sense. You can pay them to allow sideloading.

We just want that for free. It doesn't have to be trivial to enable and certainly shouldn't be something that can happen by accident.

What? You don't need to sysadmin an Android phone anymore than an iphone while still being able to install anything you want to.

My past experience with 6 different Android devices doesn’t support your argument. All of them were Samsung devices with various Android versions. Maybe it’s different with official Google devices. However, if that’s the case then we need to stop making comparisons between iPhone and Android.

I don't understand why your particular experience matters in this argument.

There are billions of people using Android phones, from little kids to grandmas. Essentially none of these people know what the word sysadmin even means.

Why do some people on HN portray Android phones as some nerdy devices when that impression doesn't reflect reality even a little bit? So weird.

Yeah, I don't get it either. The US is very iPhone-heavy, but Android has a majority market share in most of the rest of the world. That'd be pretty impossible if using Android was like maintaining a Linux server.

Because that's how it is in the Silicon Valley, respectable product managers buy iPhones and nerdy developers buy Android.

> I don't understand why your particular experience matters in this argument.

It doesn’t matter. We are having a very enlightening discussion based on my opinion. I’m simply sharing my experiences and an opinion based on those experiences. Nothing more, nothing less.

> I’m simply sharing my experiences and an opinion based on those experiences. Nothing more, nothing less.

Repeating that doesn’t make you immune from criticism.

Perhaps it is; I've used Pixel devices for the past five years and haven't had to do anything even remotely like sysadmin'ing. I had a Sony Xperia phone before that, and I did have to fight with the SD card sometimes. Nexus phones before that, and, again, no sysadmin'ing required.

I've owned a mix of Android devices. Some Samsung, some HTC, some Pixel, and a few Motorolas.

I've sysadmined a couple of them (root, bootloader unlocks, etc) for fun, but that was years ago. I've also in stalled termux for fun.

But I've also done none of those things on some of them. It just isn't necessary.

And my past experience with Samsung devices doesn't support your argument either. I had to use an iPhone for a few weeks once when my phone broke and the experience was abysmal. It's much easier for me to remain on Android.

So Android is not an alternative to iOS, why do you keep suggesting that it is?

The alternative to the walled garden of the iPhone isn't a device you have to sysadmin. It's just Android. Which has its downsides! I would love a device that ran Android (and let me have root and sideload if/when I want) but protected my privacy as well as the iPhone does.

What does not wanting to be a sysadmin have to do with anything?

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