I know it’s an analogy. I just think it was a bad one. The desire for nerds to run unusual software on their phone is not really a life or death situation. I think it’s important to remember that in context, the number of us who care about this issue rounds to about zero. Most people using a phone don’t care.

I also want to run the software of my choosing. But there’s not a single phone you can completely do that with. Some of this is due to design decisions, some of it is due to corporate lock-in, and some of it is due to regulatory requirements.

I wouldn’t be against a law requiring side loading and unlocking, I would be in favor of it. This only addresses part of the software on a phone, though. There’s a lot of software on a phone beyond user space applications.

But I do think it would be reasonable to put some hurdles to make it difficult to do. There are completely valid reasons to protect the average user from being scammed by malicious software.