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Comment by cnst | Hacker News Reader

You're wrong. We are blaming Apple, because they prohibit us from installing the apps we want on devices we own.

That would be a valid argument if Apple mislead you into buying iPhone under the false premise of „you can install everything you want“. Instead, you either chose to blame Apple for making your phone work exactly as it was intended, or, as customary on the internet, you are blaming Apple for designing device you don’t even own against your expectations of how they should do it.

It can still be a valid argument - you're not allowed to just sell whatever if you tell people before hand. Disclaimers aren't legal silver bullets.

Do you really own your device if Apple has control over what you can use it for?

To be precise, it's not the hardware but rather Apple's operating system software which is restricting what software applications can run on your device. Do you really own the iOS operating system? No.

I don't know precisely where the line is between owning the literal physical atoms and not owning the literal binary blobs of software, but agree or not, it's well understood that buying the right to use software is not synonymous with owning the software. I feel like the hardware–software distinction is a difficult one to square in the context of "owning an iPhone."

Does owning the atoms of your phone entitle you to a mechanism for side-loading your own operating system binaries? I think so. If you buy hardware, there should be a reasonable mechanism for wholesale replacing the supplied operating system software with any alternative you like. Should Apple be required to document how any of hardware works? On that I'm ambivalent but I lean towards yes. But as for how iOS works, I personally think that's regrettably out of scope, because owning the hardware isn't the same as owning the software.

> it's not the hardware but rather Apple's operating system software which is restricting what software applications can run on your device

I disagree - the restrictions also apply at the hardware level. The entire boot process is locked down to prevent people from running their own OS on the hardware. It's nothing like Macs where Asahi Linux exists as an option. If anyone ever discovered how to bypass the restrictions you can count on Apple to fix it.

With respect to allowing people to run their own OS, if you read my post in full, you’d see that we are in complete agreement.

But it’s pretty unambiguous that any restrictions are software, not hardware. It’s just lower level software that runs earlier in the boot/system bring-up process.

Isn't that the point? People would like to own an Apple product instead of paying for it and then never getting the keys.

The problem with that expectation is Apple never gave anyone the keys before. That decision is not hurting them so why would they change?

Because we can make them change, lol. Why do companies do anything? Because of laws.

We're not powerless serfs, we can change the rules and we do it all the time.

DMA has shown us that Apple will do the absolute minimum to comply with changes like this. The fact that Apple is asserting it's power over an app distributed on a third-party store is a whole new example of legal changes not actually giving us what we want.

There's also the location issue. DMA forced Apple to make some changes but only in the EU. Apple is willing to do the work to only comply in regions where they have to. What happens if your country decides that Apple isn't doing anything wrong?

If this is something you care about then you should not buy an iPhone. First change the rules and then buy one when they comply.

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