How Apple's walled garden protects ICE | Hacker News Reader

How Apple's walled garden protects ICE

theverge.com

80 pointsFricken20 comments

It wouldn't surprise me if Google's plans to force developer verification on Android is, in part, a response to applications like the one that kept track of ICE. The government would like to go after people who are creating tools that make their lives harder, and to do that, they need names.

Not that these types of apps are good but Apple should allow people to void their warranties and sideload open source apps like you can easily do on Android phones.

why would installing apps void their warranties? installing apps on your mac doesn't void your mac's warranty either...

I think apple is paranoid about their battery life claims. By not allowing sideloading non-approved apps they have more control over this. Especially with their claims of "x hours of web browsing" and "x hours of video playback"

Apple isn't "paranoid about their battery life claims", they are paranoid about losing their taxation funnel. Everything else is contrived apologia in defense of their app distribution monopoly.

They wouldn't want even the appearance of it being an Apple product running crap on it. If there was some way to completely distance themselves from it, maybe, but pretty much a non-starter.

they do it on macs, they can do it on iphones. the only reason why they refuse to do so is profit maximization.

Google is moving toward Apple's model: https://www.androidauthority.com/android-developer-verificat...

Turns out authoritarianism is bad for freedom. Who knew?

Appreciate the article, but there are a few things in there that I think aren't quite accurate. Not wrong per se, but a bit misleading. For example:

> Of all the strange, unintended consequences stemming from major lawsuits, I never thought that the Trump administration’s power to force Apple to remove ICE-tracking mobile apps from its stores could have been connected to a legal battle over Fortnite V-Bucks.

It didn't stem from the lawsuit, it stemmed from Apple's intentional policy of tight control over the app store, which the lawsuit challenged. The lawsuit could have forced a change, but it did not make any changes, so I don't see how the lawsuit is at all relevant.

I also find myself a bit frustrated at expressions like this, because people like me have been shouting this danger from the rooftops since early on in iPhone history!

https://archive.ph/qsmhk

I'm always surprised by articles like this.

Apple or Google blocks your app, that could have been a web app anyway...

Apple blocked Microsoft from putting Cloud Gaming, as an app, Microsoft released a web page you can add to your home screen.

There are ways around this. The web app might have been the cheaper option too.

This got buried quick.

It’s about the intersection of law and technology, nothing for HN. Go back to LLM news, comrade.

Censorship by any other name...

> Whereas if it could be installed from a website or from another store, there’s just no possible way that they could go around to every single host in existence and try to shut it down.

That doesn't make sense to me, couldn't the Trump administration just as easily make ISP's block the required pages. Similar to how the Pirate Bay is blocked in many countries?

They could not easily do this, as there’s no mechanism for it. The “Block BEARD” bill currently in Congress is a first attempt to enact some kind of domestic site blocking in the US, but it’s focused on piracy and would need modifications.

The closest thing we have is seizing domain names which has been done for various reasons, but this doesn’t work for foreign domains.

They could just order it blocked extralegally, then attempt to exert extralegal pressure to force ISPs to implement the order, but this would likely face widespread pushback, a successful court challenge, and public embarrassment. So it’s not a serious risk until there is a law in place that could be twisted to enable this sort of blocking.

Where we are going, we don't need laws. Executive Orders will be just fine.

See my edit—this is certainly possible but I don’t see this approach being successful (yet).

They could also just drone strike the devs, and yet they do not. There is a reason for that, it’s not just that they haven’t thought of it as an option. It’s not a realistic option in the current political environment.

It’s called boiling the frog.

Even Putin took more than a decade before really clamping down on dissent.

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