Apple's Crystal Prison and the Future of Open Platforms | Hacker News Reader

Apple's Crystal Prison and the Future of Open Platforms

eff.org

158 pointsGarbage112 comments

Doesn't Gatekeeper allow you to sign apps that aren't distributed through the Mac app store and avoid the warning mentioned in the article? That makes it a feature that's explicitly intended to improve the security of the Mac _without_ requiring that all apps be bought through the Mac app store (i.e. the opposite of the EFF's argument).

Also, there's more to the iOS story than the small amount of money that Apple makes from the app store. Apple has over $20 _billion_ in revenue per quarter from the iPhone [1], making Cydia's $10 million / year about a hundredth of a percent of Apple's revenue. Tim Bray has an interesting estimate [2] of how a small a fraction of iPhone revenue goes to software developers - $12 vs. $350 for the hardware - making Apple's cut an even smaller ~$5. I would argue that user experience and control are a much larger part of the motivation for locking down iOS than the additional revenue.

There's a good argument to made about the problems with closed platforms but, by being misleading about Apple's technology and motivation, the EFF does a poor job of making it here.

[1] http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q2fy12datasum.pdf [2] http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/03/04/Mobile-Mon...

Yes that is exactly how it works.

Apple is pushing people to the App Store to create a better user experience, but they also have made decisions that protect their 30% cut at the expense of that same experience (for recent examples, see the Dropbox API rejection and the inability to buy a book through the Kindle app). If the money wasn't at all important to them, they'd drop their cut down to a level closer to a payment processor.

You think they are just a payment processor? How about all the services that you have access to when you put your app on the store? Distribution, in-app purchases, notifications, game center, iCloud sync and storage.

they are happy to provide this without your app supporting in app purchases, and they get no extra money at all.

Yes it is a very socialist setup. The free apps are subsidized with the non-free ones. Pretty awesome, no?

If the argument is that they need the 30% to recoup costs, then fine, I can agree with that. But that means the 30% isn't just about protecting the user experience, which is my point.

For Apple, UX includes standardizing things such as payment processing, distribution, and icloud as well as the standard UI bits. It's about the whole package. I agree with everyone else here. This is about Apple keeping control of the ecosystem to provide a well polished and consistent user experience so that their products stand out in comparison.

Apple has always considered itself an appliance company. They push physical products. That is where they want to generate revenue. Everything else is a means to that end. Debating over how much they make off the app store or iTunes is kinda missing the point.

It seems like Apple doesn't trust its ecosystem to let it stand freely.

Otherwise "auto updates, in-app purchases, and iCloud" (etc.) should be a compelling package to keep developers in line. Not to mention visibility in the store (if they'd bother to provide a useful UI and search, that is).

Apple's antics are well-known, otherwise the situation could be interpreted as some lack of confidence in their own services.

Just like how your microwave maker doesn't support running different software on it. Apple is an appliance company hell bent on putting the user experience above all else. If this means 100% complete and total control over every instruction ran on the device, so be it.

That said, the motivation isn't malevolence, it's obsession.

A more apt microwave analogy would be if microwave manufacturer didn't want you to heat water in your microwave oven, because you could use that water to boil eggs outside the oven.

How many times do we have to make the argument that Apple doesn't run the app store to make a profit?

Please look at any Apple quarterly statement. There you'll see that the margins of the app store are in the low single digit percent range, whereas hardware has over 30% or even 40% margins.

That's what Apple is doing both with iTunes and the app store. Which doesn't mean this will always be the model - the rumored Apple TV could be different, there Apple could make most of its money selling services, while selling the hardware at cost. Maybe. Who knows. But the app store, and iTunes are merely feeder operations supporting hardware sales.

I doubt it. Apple's stance is that _all_ developers must stay in line, not most. What they think would happen is that _some_ developers will supply their own store, cloud implementation and slightly different UI, separate update method, because they think they can improve upon Apple's offering (maybe rightly so), it is cheaper for them, easier to integrate, more inline with their ideals, or whatever. End result would be that users will go from "I know how to update my stuff/control who see my data/manage hi-score/etc" to "you have to be a nerd to do that" mode.

I think they are right; some developers wouuse noose to be different. For example, Adobe would try and use something AIR-based and there would probalby be more than one Linux package-manager-like thing that allows you to get a 'special-for-you compiled executable with exactly the features you want')

>If the argument is that they need the 30% to recoup costs, then fine, I can agree with that. But that means the 30% isn't just about protecting the user experience, which is my point.

All of those costs are related to the user experience. It's not like their store is some webpage with a Paypal link.

No: these examples are much better explained by control over their competition (or even "user experience", which is arguable in both fact and morality), something which is much more easily evident when you stop using the irritatingly misleading term "their 30% cut".

Remember: Apple has costs in terms of payment processing, handles all of your complex accounting burden, takes care of district-specific sales taxes, manages currency normalization for worldwide distribution, and deals with any and all payment-related support requests (in numerous languages): they are left with a fraction of "their 30% cut", which is quite clear from their public financial reports.

So, to Apple, the amount of money they can make off of companies like Dropbox is effectively zero. Even their entire App Store ecosystem (representing tens of billions of dollars in revenue) nets them a profit but a few percent what they make off their hardware sales.

(Also, btw, as much as I disagree with Apple's decisions with respect to their platform, you are wrong about the experience issue: normal users would much rather have a single billing and support channel for all of their payments, and they get horribly confused when some of their purchases are direct to a developer and some aren't. It does not harm the experience of using an iPhone to have Dropbox bill through their App Store; it may harm Dropbox's experience, but that is irrelevant to Apple, as to them Dropbox's insistence to support multiple platforms is itself a mistake that will lead to poor customer experience of Dropbox.)

Does Apple deal with substantially more than other payment processors do, who charge far, far less than 30% for their services?

I will copy/paste the paragraph from my comment that you seem to have ignored :( where I already explicitly listed the things that Apple does which, for example, PayPal does not:

"handles all of your complex accounting burden, takes care of district-specific sales taxes, manages currency normalization for worldwide distribution, and deals with any and all payment-related support requests (in numerous languages)"

The App Store is a retail store: you hand them product and give them a general price point, and they handle the rest. All you need to do is develop your product and (hopefully) handle support directly related to the product itself. Otherwise, your abstraction is you are just sent a check every month.

If you choose to sell a product yourself, I hope you have a good grounding in sales tax law. For an example, did you realize that you cannot legally sell digital products to the EU, no matter what country you are a resident of, without registering for and collecting VAT?

You also will be dealing with a drastically different kind of support request, as there will be people claiming that you stole money from their credit card, that they didn't intend to make purchases, that they thought the price was different, that they made a payment to you with one credit card but now wish they had used a different one... some of these people are lying, some of them had their credit card number stolen, some of them don't realize that a member of their family uses their PayPal account to make purchases online, and all of them are much angrier than your normal support request. You can build systems that make these issues come up less often, but honestly then you end up spending much more of your time on payment processing than your application, so you should just pay someone else to take care of it for you.

Awesome explanation. Can we stop with the outrage over the "30% cut" now?

Know any payment processors that will also make your app available (and in some cases promote) to 300+ million people ?

I didn't say they were just a payment processor. I understand the value they provide.

All of the developer certificates are ultimately signed by Apple. Outside of the Mac App Store they don't restrict your non-App Store API usage and they don't inspect each release of your application. Nevertheless, if Apple decides Mozilla doesn't get a certificate, that's that - installing Firefox with a warning becomes the best-case scenario (more or less).

The same goes for if an SSL provider stops providing mozilla.com with a cert.

There are two key differences there: 1) There are many CAs you go to. 2) The CA has no financial interest in rejecting you. Neither goes for Apple.

3) (mostly Mozilla-specific) CAs need Mozilla far more than Mozilla needs CAs. Mozilla can always ensure that at least one major browser trusts their certificate, after all.

The real point is that in any security architecture, at some point you end up trusting someone.

No one is complaining about signed/certified binaries from a security perspective. It's the process behind the signatures and certification that is at issue.

Does Apple really have a financial interest in rejecting Firefox?

I bought several iOS devices understanding that the app market is an exclusive, curated, walled garden, with all of the advantages and shortcomings that that implies.

I'm a long time Mac user too, and an exclusive, curated, walled garden is most certainly not in line with my expectations on that platform. I'm happy to have the option of a curated marketplace, but if it's exclusive, I can tell you that I'm going to stop buying Macs - probably in favour of linux laptops. And I'm sure that I'm not alone.

That hardly seems to be in Apple's interest.

I know.

But Apple already rejected alternate browsers from iOS, they already demonstrated their willingness to abuse their power over iOS market, with dropbox, amazon, the ibooks debacle, and already set up barriers for developers on Mac OS, as if I remember correctly, the Gatekeeper license is supposed to cost serious money.

So I'm not exactly holding my breath, even though I'm writing this from a MacBook.

But Apple already rejected alternate browsers from iOS

Have they actually rejected alternative browsers? I know you can't execute mmap() on iOS to do javascript jitting, but have they actually rejected them for some other reason? Opera Mini is available, after all.

they already demonstrated their willingness to abuse their power over iOS market, with dropbox, amazon, the ibooks debacle

Well, I disagree with abuse. Remember that 99% of the programming guidelines that get apps rejected are to prevent egregious abuse of the end-user, like uploading the users whole address book to a server, logging IMEIs, or using trickery, obfuscation, and confusion to upsell iPhone users into cloud storage data plans.

If you're a 'rockstar programmer', and the only thing that matters is you and your fans, then iOS might not be the platform for you.

and already set up barriers for developers on Mac OS, as if I remember correctly, the Gatekeeper license is supposed to cost serious money.

It's $100 for the OSX developer program license, unless this has changed from when I last heard. And you don't need it anyways - just install with a warning. Why shouldn't the user get a warning when they're asking to install a program from an unknown and untrusted source?

So I'm not exactly holding my breath, even though I'm writing this from a MacBook.

I've been using Linux Mint 12 for some work tasks lately, and it's awesome. It's not OSX, but I know now that there's a viable alternative to OSX if Apple really messes things up.

You misunderstood the JavaScript issue: if you built a JavaScript interpreter (which people of course have, and which most of these JITs have as a fallback already) and used that to make a browser, you still would not be allowed in the App Store because you are downloading new code and functionality for execution to execute in a scripting engine that did not come with the iPhone.

In my experience those rules can be bent a little bit, i.e. for an app that displays 3D graphics like an augmented reality application, it's generally fine to use Lua or JS to script those, even if the code is downloaded from the web. Of course you still can't jit this, but luckily I've found that JavaScriptCore and LuaJIT with the jit turned off are very fast on iDevices anyway.

The function of the rule is to prevent people from creating an alternative app platform. For example, one based on the Flash runtime where you could download new applications from within this app, thereby bypassing the app store.

> The function of the rule is to prevent people from creating an alternative app platform. For example, one based on the Flash runtime where you could download new applications from within this app, thereby bypassing the app store.

A full-fledged third-party browser would inevitably be an alternative app platform. In some ways, that's the point.

As the guy who runs Cydia, your analysis of the money involved (or really, money not involved ;P) is spot on, but can be made even stronger: it isn't as if these things distributed by Cydia are things Apple would distribute in the first place, so even if that "lost" revenue were a meaningful amount, Apple has no mechanism to get it anyway.

(Honestly, if you could distribute something in the App Store, and are coming to Cydia instead, you are going to get some funny looks on my end. Cydia is not about accepting the App Store's rejects, nor is it about competing with the App Store. It is a way to distribute things fundamentally unlike the things in the App Store: extensions, not apps.)

Frankly, every time anyone--the EFF included--makes the argument that this somehow comes down to sales numbers and revenue competition, it just undermines the cause. :( That really sucks, as I think this is a serious issue and there really are good arguments to be made, but instead everyone just latches on to this simple-but-wrong direct revenue idea.

(For those who then ask "ok, what are some of those arguments?", I will direct you to the comments I sent to the copyright office for this year's round of exemption requests. I focus on things like cross-market control and the stifling of non-app innovation. You can also, however, make arguments about consumer control, purchase longevity, and security.)

http://www.copyright.gov/1201/2012/comments/Jay_Freeman.pdf

Hi saurik, I just would like to thank you for the wonderful job you did (and do) with Cydia. Jailbreaking and Cydia access is my first priority on any iOS device I buy, and I could never imagine myself buying another iPad/iPhone if Cydia stopped existing. IMHO you are not competing with Apple, but rather augmenting their ecosystem and keeping users like myself from drifting towards Android.

Hey Jay! Thanks for everything man, just wanted to take this chance to say that. I've had so much fun thanks to Cydia and it's been really useful.

Just joining the chorus: great work on Cydia. I have had hours of fun and I am yet to use an iOS device unjailbroken by choice for more than an hour or two.

Thanks I was going to say the same thing. I am an active EFF supporter and while most of the crystal prison article is more balanced than the title would imply, the money motivation is simply idiotic.

The Apple App store never was about making money - every quarterly report shows it performs just a little better than breaking even. They take a 30% cut but you have to consider than they're serving probably 100 times more free apps than paid for apps- somebody has to pay for that.

I'm glad the EFF is working on this -- their bill of rights at the end is a great proposal. It is so deeply frustrating for Apple to promote a vision of the next generation of computers (i.e., iPhones) where the hardware maker gets to decide what kind of software you're allowed to run.

The other day Gruber posted two consecutive stories that really brought this into focus:

(1) Apple has stayed true to Woz's vision from 1977 for personal computers. [1] (2) It's not surprising that Apple decided to unpublish software that used a "non-public streaming audio format," because it violated the spirit of section X.Y.Z of their rules of what kind of software you're allowed to run on your iPhone. [2]

Thinking about Woz's actual vision for personal computers, the second story is really a punch in the gut. No one should have that kind of arbitrary control over our computers.

[1] http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/05/24/woz-apple-ii [2] http://daringfireball.net/2012/05/more_on_airfoil_speakers_t...

The post claims that Mountain Lion will by default only allow apps from the Mac App Store, where Apple takes a 30% cut. That is not true — Mountain Lion also allows signed apps by default, and getting a certificate for signing is free.

And the setting is user configurable. You can even turn it off and install non-signed apps.

fwiw, you don't need to turn it off to install unsigned apps, it can be overridden on a case-by-case basis by right clicking the app and opening it there. you are never prompted again for that app.

i can see the argument for "burying" this ability, as users will tend to just get used to clicking "OK" blindly if you give them the ability to dismiss a prompt like this, much like i find myself doing with UAC on Windows.

app development on symbian used to be a chaotic affair till nokia brought in signed apps. after that the apps started to dry up. it became a hurdle for lone developers that wasn't worth the effort.

i'm sure apple would organise it better but it is still another hoop to be jumped through to get an app developed.

as to openess i still have an iphone 3g. i had the cash saved up for a prepay iphone 3gs and was to go and pick one up the following weekend when apple banned google voice. it was an indicator of control so i spent the cash instead on android. the iphone 3g will be my last purchase from apple thank you very much.

The hour spent organising the certificates is nothing compared to the months spent designing, developing and marketing the app.

And ALL developers would be happy to see less malware around.

i'd rather a platform were i have to be careful to avoid malware rather than a platform were there is a single 'gateway' to what apps can be installed. how can that gateway ever be considered impartial in a for profit system?

If that's what you prefer, it's your choice: don't use OS X Mountain Lion (or use it, with Gatekeeper turned off). You (and I) can understand FlashBlock.app is a malware and wouldn't install it, but ordinary computer users don't, and that's the market Apple is after.

i'm not saying your wrong. and i definitely agree this is aimed at average users. but it will put off a percentage of non average users. and those are often the users who recommend to average users what to use. i know i've stopped recommending apple hardware after a decade of doing so.

whether this affects apple negatively overall is the big question.

How careful?

I once got a virus on Windows that was attached to an Installshield installer for a legitimate program (WarFTP) that had been posted to download.com.

How could I have avoided that? Something like GateKeeper would have been nice - at least I would have known that the installer had been meddled with. Otherwise?

app development on symbian used to be a chaotic affair till nokia brought in signed apps. after that the apps started to dry up. it became a hurdle for lone developers that wasn't worth the effort. i'm sure apple would organise it better but it is still another hoop to be jumped through to get an app developed.

Symbian Signed is what you're talking about. And it didn't just dry-up app development - it killed free software on Symbian.

But that's a completely different situation than Apple's GateKeeper - with Symbian Signed, Nokia decided that they didn't want to take on the hassle of being a CA the way Apple is with GateKeeper, so the Nokia program required applications to be signed with a $800 SSL certificate. How is anyone making a Symbian app in their basement going to shell out for that? Some free software developers had to post convoluted instructions to their users on how to use the Nokia developer website to self-sign their programs. Others looked to commercial software developers to sponsor them to buy certificates. It was a disaster.

It does not say that at all, in fact it says:

"The upcoming version of Mac OS X, Mountain Lion, will reportedly include warning messages that strongly discourage users from installing apps from sources other than the Mac App Store. Fortunately, it will be possible to turn this off in Mountain Lion and install apps from anywhere you want, but Apple is continuing down the dangerous road of making their products less open."

"Strongly Discourage" != "Disallow"

Yes, but the statement is still wrong. By default, apps signed with the free-certificates aren't discouraged, they're as first-class as AppStore apps (however, there's a setting to disallow them). Not that Apple is making any effort to clear those misconceptions...

Yes, but the warning message appears only for unsigned apps, not for signed apps outside of the Mac App Store. The article is misleading.

I categorically agree that this idea of restricting what software should be run based upon someone else's whim is wrong, as a moral wrong.

It ought not to be that Apple can tell you what you can do with your iP\, or MS with your W8 phone. Or, for that matter, present chilling effects on actually using your computer to its fullest extent. E.g., "Don't use this open source app, it didn't Get Trusted". That's a racket!

An iP\ is a computer, and it ought to be considered to have all the freedoms that PCs have had for thirty years.

Great post -- I hope this will eventually trigger some serious discussion about hardware openness. People should realize it is (at least!) a serious freedom of competition issue, not only an odd fetish of weird bearded men.

While I share your hope that posts like these will one day trigger serious discussions about hardware and software openness, my rational side is far less optimistic about the future. So far the normal everyday user doesn't seem to care for openness, in fact I believe a huge portion of that demographic would assert that computers are too powerful right now ("confusing", "difficult", "full of nerd jargon", "I don't want to learn how to do these things") and they'd welcome any development that made their MacBooks work exactly like a smartphone - including heavy-handed censorship and everything. I am convinced that the computers of the future will be severely limited devices and people will love it.

There's no reason both ways cannot coexist. Just put a gateway out of the walled garden so people can come and go as they please.

If only it was that simple.

Those "people" who come and go as they please include those "people" who are trying to run bots, steal information, spam etc.

Doesn't the ongoing creation of jailbreaks make this difference mostly hypothetical?

What about a law-enforced, sealed jumper under the battery? You break it with a screwdriver and a gadget permanently enters "open" mode in which original, proprietary OS performs suicide and decodes the bootloader. Hostile jailbreak is hard and won't get unnoticed, producer software is safe and advanced users can't be ignored.

The problem with that is there is no way to compare it to what could have been.

Let's assume that one or two manufacturers get a monopoly on computing and control everything that can be done with bits and bytes, of course people will be happy whenever there is a major improvement to these platforms.

If people want to buy a managed platform that is their choice. No organization with the word 'freedom' in their name should be actively trying to take choices away from consumers. That's just bizarre. It's like arguing StarBucks shouldn't sell me a coffee because it takes away my freedom to make my own coffee at home. Of course it does not. Just because you like to make coffee at home doesn't mean you should be able to force me to do it.

If people want to buy an unmanaged platform, that should also be their choice, but sadly there are almost no options for that, and they all put the user at a severe disadvantage for having made that decision (of course, and to be clear, along axes that have nothing to do with it being unmanaged).

The reason government exists is that sometimes the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (or the one). Laws take away people's choices because we consider some choices to be dangerous, whether in the short term (direct damage to others) or in the long term (the relevancy in this context would be our laws against monopolies and trusts).

there are certain things that ought to be user rights, but which there is no financial incentive for any manufacturer to provide (in large part due to the apathy of insufficiently-informed users). for a good parallel, think about things like wheelchair accessibility - it would be very easy for a business to simply write off that minute percentage of its users who are wheelchair bound, but the law has decreed that being accessible to disabled people is a right they want to enforce as a basic cost of doing business.

> No organization with the word 'freedom' in their name should be actively trying to take choices away from consumers.

What organization are you talking about? The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote this article.

On the off chance you're referring to the FSF, the Free Software Foundation wasn't even mentioned in the original article, only in an update about a tangential issue.

Begging is not going to make things better. The best weapon is to actually leave the platform (not threatening to). I believe eventually someone can build an equally good device. At the same time, developers should publish their apps on other platforms as soon as iOS versions come out. Otherwise Apple will always have your balls -- the customers -- in their hands.

I think it's easier said than done. Sure, with more users on Android and the potential of making money getting higher by the day, there's hope. But as we've seen, Android's really fragmented and as a developer, providing support to all your users on so many different devices is absolutely brutal.

Have we actually seen that? I've seen a lot of meta-argumentation here about "fragmentation", but almost no use cases of "providing support on android is absolutely brutal".

I've experienced it first hand at my previous company.

It's not unmanageable, but it's certainly a lot harder than supporting iOS.

We can talk again once that equally good device exists.

I understand the positive arguments for keeping so many things about iOS closed. Examples: It provides a more consistant user experience. It lets Apple control more of the over all quality. Etc.. I also understand some of the negative arguments for keeping it closed. Apple makes money on the app store and media sales so why would they let a different bookstore, music store or app store in.

But I think there's a bigger picture argument. It goes something like this

Imagine it's say 1982. Imagine all the popular computers at that time were as ridged and closed as iOS is now. Imagine it stayed closed for 30 years. You're allowed to make apps but nothing that Apple says no to. How many innovations would we be living without?

Would mp3s and music services even exist? If I remember correctly the first mp3 player I ever used was Winamp in 1996-97. It came out long long before iTunes. If the lead computer companies never allowed anything other than the music apps that existed in 1982 would we have downloadable music now?

How about web browsers and the internet? Back in 1982 there were things like Compuserve. If the lead computer companies didn't allow any generic net browsing would the internet have ever even happened? Would we still be using terminal emulators as the only way to access the internet?

Would we even have internet at all? iOS doesn't allow external gadgets to connect directly to it that are usable by any apps. In 1982 personal computers didn't have networking. Networking was added over the course of the next 10-15 years mostly by 3rd party hardware. If computers has been as closed as iOS would networking on computers ever have happened?

How about browsers? Browsers didn't exist in 1982. Let's assume Apple decided to implement a single browser. Would it be anywhere near as powerful as today's browsers? Looking at the history of browsers it was the competition of IE, Netscape and then Firefox, Safari and Chrome that have brought us modern browsers. But arguably that would never have happened if, like iOS, all those computers banned making a browser.

How about all these languages. Perl, Python, C++, Java, Lua, Ruby. None of those languages existed in 1982. Yes, iOS allows you to use any language you want to make an app BUT....iOS does not allow you to make a programming environment. Imagine the computers for the last 30 years didn't allow you to make a programming environment. How would any of these languages even have come into being if they were outright banned as iOS bans them?

That's the problem with iOS's closed eco-system. It stifles innovation and prevents competition. We've seen how well that's worked in the past. Hint, it hasn't worked well.

Now, I certainly don't want an OS that's buggy with a crappy user interface and a poor experience. But I don't think that's a trade off Apple needs to make. I believe they can be open AND have the best user experience.

Let's hope they step up and embrace creativity. Even their co-founder thinks Apple needs to do this.

It came out long long before iTunes

iTunes probably wouldn't have existed if there hadn't been a large collection of illicitly obtained and ripped MP3s. If everything was still CDs, then there would have been hardly any need for either an online music shop, or a digital music library

Allow me to be a little bit absurd, but this strikes me as similar to right-wingers who ask me to imagine what would happen if everyone were gay. Yes, society would cease to exist, but I don't think this scenario has much bearing to the matter at hand.

More to the point, as long as there are real viable alternatives in the market, open and closed ecosystems can be fantastic complements, actually producing a deeper diversity. Flash, though controlled far too much by one company, was an excellent bridge that showed people the possibilities of a future internet. iOS has always had some shocking limitations, but it's set standards of stability and interface quality that everyone benefited from. The videogame industry has thrived in every respect by being on both tightly controlled platforms (think Wii's tight hardware/software pairing) and wide-open platforms (think Minecraft). Vigilance is good, but this kind of mix looks optimal to me.

I agree with you there are alternatives in the market. I don't agree that therefore I shouldn't speak up if one player is doing something I don't agree with and that I'd like them to consider that if everyone acted like them the world would be a worse place.

You bring up another excellent example in Flash. We can add that to the list of things (a rich multi-media internet) that likely would not have happened if every computer since 1982 was as locked down as iOS.

I don't believe we have to chose between stability/interface quality and an open platform. I believe we can have both.

If one player is doing something you don't like, you don't purchase their device, it's as simple as that.

Also, the iPad/iPhone was never setup as a generic computer but as a single coherent experience. Comparing it with PC history is a little absurd. The iPad has more in common with a DVD/Blu-Ray player then a PC.

It stifles innovation and prevents competition

I disagree. iOS is not the only mobile platform. It's not even the most popular one. Apple keeps an eye on other platforms and when something works they implement a similar feature. Their customers get to skip the whole ugly process of trial & error that often fosters that innovation. That's exactly what Apple is good at. Some of us pay Apple to curate and manage the platform for us.

I agree.

Windows (and MAC OS) has been a closed platform for more than 20 years, iOS for 5 years and so far we are all still alive, no doomsday apocalypse scenario with zombies and aliens!

Windows is a closed platform? It's obviously less open than Linux but it's hardly closed compared to iOS.

I can install anything I want on my Windows computer without approval from Microsoft. I can stop updates, limit updates, change the way my computer boots, and use (almost) any OS resources for anything I feel like. I can wipe my computer and install another OS if I feel like it. When I buy software, the company that makes it can keep updating it however they feel without any chance of the software being 'pulled' by Windows. I don't have to worry about a program I'm buying breaking Windows 'rules'. Windows doesn't control any purchases I make in any app and doesn't limit sexual content of my installs.

What iOS is doing is something entirely different from what Windows has ever done, and meaning of 'closed' is entirely different when discussing these platforms.

Not that I disagree with you about current Windows versions, but from what I heard about Windows 8, Microsoft is trying to be more like Apple with iOS here, with the locked UEFIs, not allowing rival browsers or making them unusable on purpose (exactly like Apple did on iOS), and the "oh and noone want's to use our new GUI so we make devtools that can be used with anything else cost extra" thing.

Looks like both MS and Apple have chosen different side in war on general purpose computing than (I would imagine and hope) any "hacker" would.

iOS is arguably a big enough market share (especially in terms of apps sales) to influence developer thoughts about how mobile apps should work.

I would imagine most major app developments aim to target at least both iOS and android. Therefor if you want to implement a feature that is allowed on android devices but not on iOS devices you won't be able to do that in a cross platform manor and are therefor likely to bin the idea altogether.

:( In a world where people believe Android (the only reasonable competitor I can imagine you are discussing) to be "open", we have arguably already lost. Apple has built an ecosystem that is so closed and so powerful that if a competitor even throws a simple bone like "can install applications that come from a non-market source" suddenly they are touted as "open", when you still can't make any of the interesting modifications to the system that you can make to a desktop computer, as you are limited behind the app boundary... you can't even build a reasonable alternative to Market (which requires special Google-only permissions to implement things like the "agree to permissions before download" interface).

Now, you can always make the argument that Android is open source and anyone can build a platform with it, but that means it is open for people who make phones: the actual consumers are still purchasing closed devices. The simple thing to remember: this is about hardware, not about software; it is a mistake to be thinking about this as operating systems battling one-another, when the security mechanisms are actually something controlled by the person making the increasingly tamper-proof hardware, not the person writing the software that runs on those devices (a line that is messy and confusing for many people, as the commonly-cited example of Apple has one company playing both roles).

A lot of Apple's power here comes from the fact that they have a near-monopoly: not on any protocol, technology, or format, but on good industrial and UI design.

The situation with good design and usability today is similar to the situation with formats and OSes with Microsoft in the 90s.

When did a small quote from an interview...

"I think that Apple could be just as strong and good and be open, but how can you challenge it when a company is making that much money?" he [Wozniak] said.

turn into "made a public call" for Apple to open up it's platforms?

Other people have picked up on factual inaccuracies so I'll pick on the commodore 64 one. It was blocked for the BASIC interpreter, then Apple review it's rules and guidance again, and allow people to include interpreters.

So yeah, Apple blocked it, carefully reviewed it's policies, admitted they made a mistake and rectified it.

I'm not saying I disagree with the crux of the argument, if people want it to be open then I think Apple should at least allow some mechanism, but lets look at it objectively. Can I currently install non-App Store apps on my phone/access at a root level? Yeah, sure, I jailbreak it and open it up. Can I install a non-iOS release on there? Sure, if I have an iPhone 3G I can. Should Apple honour a warranty for hardware failure if my phone is jailbroken? They should, but I wouldn't expect they would if they can't guarantee it wasn't something in the software. That's unlikely, but if Apple can save the repair costs well, they're a business and that doesn't stun me.

It's open to the people who want it open, by exploring the boundaries and pushing people forward. Imagine if Apple opened the platform up, they'd give the Dev Team nothing to do. They'd be sad, all the joy of exploring the edges and adding another point on the score board gone.

This argument makes about as much sense as claiming that in practice a minority of slaves already have reasonable lives if (a big if) they are tending to a benevolent family (remember that most people simply don't have an iPhone 3G: the iPhone 4S is a vastly different story with respect to the exploits we have; even most of the 3GS's in the wild don't have permanent untethers), those that don't can always escape (as if it were a simple process to do so, or there aren't other tradeoffs and risks), and that giving people general civil liberties would be a sad day as it would deny freedom fighters something to do while playing what is trivialized to a board game (ignoring that there are either other front-lines they could then moving the battle to, and forgetting that there are things more valuable to do in life than spend all of your time and energy fighting for something that should already be true).

(I'll preface, I'm a big fan of your work and think you're a super clever guy).

Equating it to slavery is pushing us towards a Godwin-esque territory. You, as a person, as an individual, as a consumer have the right to pick and choose what device you want. If you want an open platform it is your right to pick it, it's not your right to expect it, yet anyway. You, as a slave, as private property, as owned goods would not have a choice. You're defined by a lack of choice.

I'm all for giving people civil liberties, and I think it'd be nice for Apple to open their platform. But they don't need to, or have to, and as far as we can tell don't want to. This isn't a strict case of it being a civil liberty as Apple hasn't taken away your right to choose, they've simplified it. You want low-level access, the ability to go outside our App Store, you can have it by fighting against us or going elsewhere.

Like I say, I'm a big fan of the work both you and the Dev Team do, and I think everyone would be sad if you all went 'we've had enough' and moved on and the platform was shut down to it's initial state, but unless Apple has a massive change of heart they'll always say 'we're not actively pursuing jailbreaking as a crime, but we're not going to make it easy' and then we're always going to have a situation where a dedicated group want access, and will do anything to have it.

Your response ignored my arguments and went in a different direction. Your original argument was that this set of devices, in specific, were already effectively open: I demonstrated (I maintain clearly by my point-by-point analogy) that that was a twisted way of looking at what it meant to be open.

This response seems to have dropped that line of thought and is now claiming that the ecosystem as a whole is open because I can always choose another device and that Apple has a right to decide to make a closed system. This is an entirely unrelated argument, and one I will not respond to as harshly as the other.

Responding to this different argument, I will point out that I don't really have the ability to pick a different device, as of devices that are available almost every single one of them is equally closed. The exceptions are the irritatingly small handful of Android devices that support "fastboot oem unlock" in their bootloader.

Your second point, that this currently is not my right to demand, is obvious: that's why the EFF is lobbying for changes in laws. Claiming that the changes in law we want to see are not currently laws and thereby we should not be demanding them as we are not entitled to them is a non-sensical argument structure.

(For more information on argument paths related to the overall lack of choice, how it has come to happen, and what it means for related markets, I will direct you to read the comments I provided the copyright office for this years' round of DMCA exemptions.)

I'm not going to delve too deeply into this as I think I've said my piece.

So slightly jumbled as it comes to me: - It may have been a twisted way to compare my original point but it was a ridiculous comparison to make to start with. This stuff is important, but not as important as slavery. Maybe you wanted to make it as ridiculous as possible to try show me up for being ridiculous, I don't know. - I certainly did not claim the ecosystem was open. No where. I said that Apple had simplified the choice of if you want an open platform, this isn't it. - Actually you do have the ability to pick another device, as there's other devices available thats not the iPhone. I'm not having you have a large, all encompassing choice, but you have a choice. - I also never said demand. You're well within your rights to demand. Demand away. Scream at the top of your lungs for Apple to do it, and I'll cheer you on. I said you had no right to expect Apple to do something that they don't need to do. They exist to make products, they don't exist to make your product. - We haven't had choice in what we can do with phones for nearly a decade. I didn't hear of people furiously blogging about how Nokia wouldn't open the 3210. The companies are making devices for the masses, who genuinely don't care about low-level access.

Like I said, I'd love Apple to open it up a bit more, even if it was similar to the WinMo 'official' jailbreak and it was enshrined, but I don't expect anything from a company that exists to make products. If I don't like what they're doing, I'll go elsewhere. If many people don't like what they're doing and go elsewhere, someone will eventually cater for their needs.

And I have read your comments, most of it's fairly sensible, but Mobile Flash didn't die because of iPhone, it died because it was crap on most devices. Don't blame Apple for an Adobe business decision.

this emulator has been crippled to only run a handful of bundled roms, because apple don't want their users to run custom executables, despite that they are interpreted.

That is the trouble with allowing multitude of choices that they in the end break the "experience" one would come to expect from the device. Apple is an experience company and that is what they are selling. And people do like and vote with their money.

Just because some a subset of mindful users think that they should do otherwise, they should start a company and sell their own product - if they think that what people would want in the end. Most people's lives are complicated already and adding some geewhiz feature into their phone that would make them pause and think for a second - would not win any favours.

Liberty is great but when I am tired and going back home last thing I want to do I trying to figure out a best way to look up directions to a restaurant, make call or check messages. I've had android and iOS devices previous one android now an iPad. It is just that much easier to work with these devices when on the road. Perhaps if google will get their act together and tighten the leash on OEMs and make them use a uniform and usable interface across the board - that would be a step in the right direction. There's just too much dissonance in Android community it seems to me.

When ~10% of the people who buy an iPhone are willing to go to extreme lengths, following complex instructions from sketchy people (like me) on the Internet, voiding their warranty in the process, to get it open, you simply must assume that the real number of people who want to do it (even if they cannot verbalize that, as they are currently stuck on other scary steps that they feel are intrinsic to the experience) would in a world where it was even slightly more supported and not actively trodden on.

How many of them want to do it for the freedom of installing apps that aren't available in the App Store, versus how many want to just install App Store apps without paying for them?

Of all the people I know who've jailbroken their iPhones, I know exactly one who wanted to extend the system capabilities of his iPhone (he has some cool mods that let him make wifi and bluetooth adjustments from the home screen).

The rest of them just wanted to get software without paying the developers for a license.

The problem with anecdotes is that other people can use them too: I only have ever met a single person who "just wanted to get software without paying the developers for a license". Most of the people I've met are addicted to the ability to change the icons and sounds with custom themes.

The only thing the EFF should demand is that Apple provide an official way to jailbreak.

That's it. The rest of the policies are fine. They can show 100 warning messages, remove any warranty, et cetera - it's their stuff, why would they support it if you hack it?

Of course Apple will never do that. They will not officially provide a way to get the device into unsupported territory. Not because they're evil, or want the money, but because that's against Apple's entire philosophy.

By and large I think the locked down app store is a really good idea - I like it as a user, even. While I can't get some things I'd like to have, it also protects me from the kind of crap that happens on the Android app store.

The locked down app store is the reason I don't need to install "Anti Virus" software from dubious peddlers of scareware. That's something I appreciate to no end.

I'm glad the issue is getting an increasing amount of attention. One has to keep in mind that at the end of the day, all the corporations care about is increasing their profits.

"Two weeks ago, Steve Wozniack made a public call..."

I stopped reading after they spelled the name of one of the most important people in the PC revolution wrong.

In the end, while the author makes interesting or even compelling points for those who jailbreak phones, most consumers do not give a flying duck about all that and that makes it unlikely to change.

It bothers me when these articles pretend you cannot let users install fully open source apps on their iPhones:

http://sixrevisions.com/web-development/html5-iphone-app/

Your users can't install closed binaries except through the app store, but you're all about open source, right?

So make your app using HTML5 like LinkedIn or Facebook, and simply bypass the app store.

The problem isn't really solved. There are things you can do with apps that you can't do in the web sandbox. Not everyone is re-implementing LinkedIn or Facebook.

You can't install open source apps on iOS.

You can't get GPL apps. There are other licenses.

Apple don't display any license information when purchasing an app so I think all OSI approved licenses are off limits since they all have a clause that requires the license text to be included by the distributor of the work.

Apple lists all the BSD-licensed parts of iOS under Settings/General/About/Legal. Third-party apps usually hide this information deep down in the About screen. I have also seen apps that come with a Settings bundle just to show the licensing information there.

I think it really is only an issue with the (L)GPL.

So?

That's a limitation of the license, not of the app store. Why should the app store have to accommodate all sorts of licenses?

Nobody reads license info anyway - I, and probably everyone else except Richard Stallman himself just click on OK and hope for applicable laws to protect me in case the license should contain unacceptable terms.

iOS got this right, and the GPL got it wrong.

Are there some restrictions in the Apple Developer Agreement that prevent one from distributing the source for your app on a 3rd party website? I have always heard the argument that you can't distribute GPL'd apps because the source cannot be bundled, however, the GPLv3 (and v2) do not explicitly require this as the only approved means of source distribution. In fact, section 6 outlines several methods - through which one could reasonably see that the source code could be made available elsewhere, as long as there were notice within the app on where to retrieve it.

Agreed, however, that there are other licenses which are less restrictive on those that distribute object code.

As an app developer I find lots of useful code online - most of it is licensed under the MIT license, meaning do with it whatever you want (by and large)

If you want to make it so other people may use your stuff, just put it under such a license. That's what I do - please, share and use, here you go. There are no strings attached.

If I see the words GPL, or even LGPL, I stay far away from it. I don't want some nutcase to sue me years down the road when my software has become popular, just because I wanted to save an hour of coding time for the 1.0 release.

As someone who releases software under GPL and LGPL, and hardware designs under CC licenses, I don't see how anyone would sue you over a GPL license. Unless, of course, you took something from a GPL licensed software and then did not provide your users the same liberty you had with the source.

Whether or not one individual prefers copyleft (viral) or non-copyleft licensing is largely due to their intent - not to garner the maximum number of users, but to ensure that anyone else who might profit from their works affords their users the same right. And, if you really wanted to people to do whatever they pleased with your work without regards to your desire, you would've made it public domain, not MIT-licensed. You chose a license because you had a desire that the license enforced.

You can add an app to the Home Screen and use HTML5 offline storage. All the other limitations of HTML5 still apply, though.

HTML/JS aren't first class citizens on iOS when it comes to API access. You can't take pictures, get reliable sound playback, create notifications, etc.

Can you do those things on Android via HTML/JS? (Not bait I honestly don't know).

According to this Quora thread, the answer is Not Yet. http://www.quora.com/How-can-a-HTML5-web-app-access-Camera-i...

I'm not sure and I suspect not, however you can do these things on Android with your own app and not requiring app approval from Google.

Of course, there are other things you cannot do on Android even if you are an app. We will actually have lost this battle if all we get is the right to install any app we want (and then everyone loses interest and goes home, which is likely to be what happens at that point): what we need is the right to install any software we want.

Yuck, web apps.

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