Realistically, no hardware manufacturer of a significant size (let's say 100k total devices) should be allowed to dictate what software can be distributed to users. It opens up all kinds of unfair business practices.
The hardware manufacturer needs to ensure that software doesn't break the device.
Apple and Google are going well beyond any reasonable grey area, though. Demanding a cut if I buy a book through the Kindle app is absurd and has nothing to do with ensuring that Kindle doesn't break my smartphone.
Preventing software from breaking a device is a solved problem. All you need is a CPU that supports memory protection, and an appropriately designed OS.
If you want to only run software that's been OK'ed by a third party, that's certainly a choice you can make for yourself or your organization.
I don't like that this choice is imposed on almost-all cellphone users by monopoly.
Without doing a bunch of research, it looks like things were more split on the Mac side; some Mac models had fancy MMUs while others didn't until the switch to PowerPC. Classic Mac OS didn't support memory protection, and Apple's quest for a replacement operating system cumulating in the acquisition of NeXT is well known.
Conversely, Windows 9x could have made more aggressive use of the processor's protected mode, but it would have broken a lot of programs that worked fine on Windows 3.x. Windows 9x was still capable of running most 16-bit real mode software and generally allowed it to access BIOS and hardware, which NT couldn't allow without breaking the security model. Many "enterprise" customers even stayed on 9x instead of NT simply because it ran the software they used.
It took another few years before the hardware got fast enough and the software base moved to mostly 32-bit protected-mode code to merge the two product lines. However, there were still problems when it finally happened with XP.
The best example that comes to mind for me is Windows 95 having a special case in its memory management to work around a bug in SimCity. From a technical perspective, that's nuts, but from a business perspective I imagine not doing that would have hurt both immediate sales and consumer trust in the brand.
A lot of the problems arose from shoddy installers that wouldn't clean themselves up correctly on uninstall; requiring periodic reinstalls.
The problem isn't in that transaction, the problem is conflicts of interest. Platform vendors engaged in both gatekeeping and building their own apps have an inherent conflict of interest. I think that Apple in particular (but not Apple alone) abuses it quite brazenly.
The issue isn't that the police exist (a tradeoff of freedom for temporary security, we'd all be freer if they didn't), the issue is when they start shaking me down, or otherwise brutalizing me.
But I think it's also true that people are more than capable of adapting to such landscapes because we already do that with our desktop/laptop computers. Yes, malware exists and people do get their computers infected. But I believe the reliance of a sort of "watchful eye" also makes us lazy.
I mean, the ideal situation is not one where Apple doesn't have an app store. But imo more like what Google does with android where you can install anything if you really want.
I think the cuts these companies take from having a curated store is too high though. And in the case of apple there's simply no alternative (well, there's the nascent stage of an alternative forming in Europe I guess).
This is a common point, but similar to how there was widespread fear that seatbelts would encourage people to drive dangerously.
Security should be baked into the platform and not a task for an 89 year old grandfather to have to deal with.
"Ensuring that Kindle doesn't break my smartphone" requires time and effort. That's funded by the cut they take.
Apple / Google do not need to take a 30% cut of every e-book ever sold to fund their review. That's absurd and illogical.
One estimate is that Amazon sells 487,000,000 ebooks a year. If we assume they cost $10 each, that's almost a $1.5 billion cut for Apple and Google.
It does not cost $1.5 billion for Apple and Google to review Kindle to make sure it doesn't damage devices.
What if this is a service I don't? Why am I paying for it? The vendors selling in app items are certainly passing on some of the cost of this.
Free apps, apps that make money off ads, apps that cost $1, apps that charge a monthly fee, apps that resell products where a 30% cut exceeds their margin.
Perhaps the stores should change to a model of choose your own adventure: pay per release or % cut. What would you say is a fair amount to charge per release - keeping in mind apple/google will want to maintain their insanely high profits from the app stores?
What about those of us who want to break our devices? (At least, according to the manufacturer's idea of what "broken" is.)
I use Windows since the 90's and would only agree with you in the context of buggy drivers or malware.
Even today I don't use the Windows Store (except for one time I when I installed a Bluetooth audio "bridge") and all the "apps" I install work just fine.
> The hardware manufacturer needs to ensure that software doesn't break the device.
The software manufacturer must make sure the software doesn't break the device, whatever "breaking the device" means (sounds almost like "don't brick the wifi chip").
I mean, it's also the responsibility of the user to not install shady software.
More specifically, the radio in an iPhone can almost certainly be made to operate outside of licensed/compliant limits by tweaking the software. Should they be forced to allow that but still held accountable when their device is noncompliant?
Yes, absolutely. The responsible party is the operator of said equipment, and if they tinker with it, it's up to them to be compliant with FAA/FDA/HHS/etc. regulations or face proper legal reprecussions.
> More specifically, the radio in an iPhone can almost certainly be made to operate outside of licensed/compliant limits by tweaking the software.
See above. We can already do that today with WiFi chipsets that can be made to use frequencies that are illegal in a certain country. It's on the operator to ensure compliance. Alternatively, device manufacturers are free to use components that only work in a certain frequency spectrum - but that wouldn't prevent an operator from using them in another country.
We already solved those problems long ago.
no, because there's this weird concept that seems to be foreign to the modern software folk - Ownership.
Owner is held liable for that, not device manufacturer.
Not in places with regular inspection and mandated insurance. I.e. most civilised world.
I can see an argument for this. Nothing forced Apple to design their hardware this way: they could have built licensing/compliance limits into the hardware itself. But they didn't want to do that because they wanted to use the same HW for all markets, and different governments have different rules about which frequency bands are allowed. Of course, this then brings up the question: if they did make slightly different HW per-market (perhaps with 1-time fuses), what happens when someone brings their iPhone from one country to another and they've modified it to ignore any new region restrictions (Apple could still use SW to force new restrictions, though they can't allow anything new because of the HW restrictions) and it's broadcasting on an unallowed band?
Anyone who claims it’s an intractable is using it for a different purpose -/ either trying to keep their sweet monopoly - or wishing they could sue apple.
I mean, routers have worked like this for ages. OpenWRT has an entire page about tweaking your radio settings, and what could happen to you if you do. Why would Apple be held liable for something you did to your device?
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/transmit.po...
Because Apple is worth trillions of dollars
Even if someone wants to ignore this concept, where is the line drawn? Should a hardware manufacturer, or OS vendor, be allowed to make a product that blocks malware on their systems (like Windows Defender)? Windows was seen as a poor product because of all the adware that infected it in the early 2000s. That issue has largely been resolved, thanks to efforts from Microsoft. Should they not be allowed to solve the biggest issue that plagued the public perception of their product?
I realize I'm move the goalpost slightly, from hardware to OS vendor, but ultimately, it isn't Apple's hardware that's creating these controls, it's iOS, the operating system. And in the case of Google, it's clearly an OS vendor issue, as Android is installed on a wide variety of hardware from many different OEMs.
Defender doesn't do this: it's an optional security application by MS that's included with Windows. Users are free to disable it if they wish. Nothing is preventing Windows users from running whatever software on top of Windows that they like. Defender will prevent some malware from running, and many users like this for obvious reasons, and the fact that it's included for free unlike competing anti-malware software, but it's not so baked into Windows that you can't turn it off. An antitrust argument could possibly be made, along the lines of Windows including IE and putting competing software out of business, but that's a different issue than what we're discussing.
So you're right about this being really an OS vendor issue, but Microsoft doesn't force anyone to use Defender, and doesn't prevent anyone from using competing products. Google also allows using competing app stores (or even side-loading .apk files), though only a tiny fraction of users take advantage of this. Apple is really the problem here because it doesn't allow these things at all.