Those apps have always been illegal in China. Of course, one could say Apple should not operate in China (and this is perhaps true), but they cannot both operate there and break the law.
You're never going to outsmart the Chinese government with clever little tricks. They don't play like that.
The comment I was replying to is not wrong exactly but the better way to phrase that is that any unrelated but centralized system can and probably will be co-opted by a totalitarian regime and in the long run only helps the oppressor and not the oppressed.
I think the argument is that Apple or even any company that makes Android phones could choose to have an open bootloader (and maybe some driver stuff) and normally that wouldn’t really offend any government, while also giving the users more freedoms.
Otherwise, what’s next, PCs that only run Windows and only allow Edge as the browser and force the telemetry on?
They're not killing their own people by the millions like in Mao's days, but it's still a brutal dictatorship when it wants to be.
The US is a brutal dictatorship all the time.
China thankfully has a govt that is on the same page as the people.
Country with social credit, LLMs that have a seizure at "Tiananment square", Winnie the Pooh and Taiwan, Great firewall, cultural genocide of Uyghurs is a country where "lives are getting better" while US is a brutal dictatorship, my fucking sides.
Ask other dictatorships while you're at it. Systems so great one wonders why stupid democracies haven't adopted the model still.
> Ask other dictatorships while you're at it.
In fact, I have observed immigrants from certain failed states that you refer to as "dictatorships." In many cases they say they hate their government yet they vote for mostly the same policies when they are given the chance to do so in the West, so again, even surveying them directly with a lazy question "do you like the government in country X" won't get you to the spirit of the answer.
To wit, you also just fell for the common fallacy of assuming dictatorship is the opposite of democracy. They are much more alike than you'd think. Democracy isn't liberty.
Would they? Unlikely, given iPhone creates a lot of jobs there. But if iPhone becomes the de facto devices for Chinese citizens to access illegal content then the chance is none-zero.
(And of course they can make Linux illegal too. It's just harder to enforce than making iPhone illegal.)
I am genuinely curious how someone can decide linux to be illegal. How would the ban even work out?
It's your desire to have open OS just say so. Doesn't really tie into avoiding oppression by communism. The Chinese need to solve that problem at its root.
At least try to pretend like you guys are thinking about situations in the real world.
Clearly they were doing exactly that until yesterday?