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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

I used to feel that way, and I used Android for years for that reason. But since switching to an iPhone, I've found that what I really want from my phone is not a totally open platform, but a tool that's simple, secure, and effective. Something I don't have to mess with, something I can trust to do its job and respect my privacy and be pleasant to interact with. They tried going that direction a bit with macOS when they launched its App Store, and there's a reason that pretty much failed. Workstations need to be totally user-controlled, but phones don't.

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I'm not sure I quite understand your complaint about the Mac's App Store. I want to have free reign on my workstation, but part of that is I want to be able to limit the amount of access that programs have. The big difference with the App Store, from my perspective, is that I know that the applications are sandboxed, signed, and someone out there can revoke the code signing certificate.

This is basically what I want, most of the time, and it's hard to achieve it outside the App Store.

Things that run on your mac are not required to go through the App Store. I think what the OP means is that the adoption rate has been lower than what they wanted/expected.

Fun fact: not all apps on the App Store are sandboxed. Some older apps, that were released before sandboxing was a requirement, were "grandfathered" in.

Any examples?

It briefly looked like they would move towards requiring software to come from the App Store. They did add the warning you see the first time you open any application that you downloaded from the internet, which is still there. That alone isn't problematic, but if they'd truly locked down macOS they would have alienated all of the programmers who use Macs. Thankfully, they seem to have dropped that idea.

Honestly that's my feeling as well, but even for workstations, it has begun to dawn on me that spending time configuring the minutiae of various settings and flags and plists etc just isn't worth my time. I just want a workstation that's simple, secure, and effective in getting things done.

That pretty much sums up my journey. I used to run Windows 2000 at home and decided to switch to Linux (Slackware) when it was rumoured that XP would have "phone home telemetry". Then after a few years of spending way too many hours on various different distros, decided I wanted a *nix machine that just worked and switched to Apple.

To a point. I use a Mac for work because it has many of the desirable qualities of Linux, without the hassle. But at the same time I know that if I ever need to just get in there and change something, which does happen occasionally, I can still do that.

Those are fine defaults, but why is it bad to allow people to explicitly opt out of this and do what they want? Other people being allowed to hack on their machine doesn't stop yours from being locked down.

Android isn't a "totally open platform". By default you can only install apps from the Play Store and Google exercices a fair amount of editorial control over apps.

You can run stock Android without any Play Store and no/minimal/neutered Google services by installing custom ROMs. Apple doesn't allow this with its hardware. More importantly, you can bypass any centralized app store and install your own APKs, such as from repositories like F-Droid. IOS doesn't allow you any such freedom.

On the latest android its a huge pain to install fdroid. The only way I could find was installing the system fdroid package through the recovery thing because android doesn't just allow you to install 3rd party apps, you have to get an existing app to request permission to install 3rd party apps and none of the default ones do so unless you already have fdroid you can't install it. Really unethical.

On my Pixel 3: Settings / Apps & Notifications / Advanced / Special app access. From there you can whitelist, e.g., Chrome to allow the installation of 3rd party apps.

IIRC Chrome even asks you if you want to enable that setting once you download an APK file.

I didn't have chrome on my phone and the default android browser doesn't request permissions. I used to install it from the downloads app thing but that doesn't seem to work anymore because of these new changes.

There was a point around the iphone 5/galaxy s4 era I really wondered what the hell Apple was doing releasing only a 4" phone, with an os roughly equivalent to androids, with less flexibility in what you could do with the device, at marked up prices. Nowadays I appreciate the things like the relative privacy, far superior OS support, and the more locked down security. I still buy Android but that's largely for value reasons. If cost was no object I would buy iPhone.

>Workstations need to be totally user-controlled,

I believe chromeOS is a good example of a stripped down less tunable OS that works great and is perfect for inexpensive Atom based machines that still have good build quality, battery life, and displays while being simple to use.

I believe trying to push the "store" model to desktops smacks of a solution that generates a lot of $$$ for M$ and Apple in search of a problem.

> I used to feel that way, and I used Android for years for that reason. But since switching to an iPhone, I've found that what I really want from my phone is not a totally open platform, but a tool that's simple, secure, and effective

The problem with that is that the nature of the issue is that it doesn't matter to you ... until it does. Like freedom of speech - you will never notice that your government is censoring you until you have a controversial viewpoint. And then it will matter. But all the people without those viewpoints will still wander around saying they can't see what all the fuss is about freedom of speech. This is intrinsically a problem you have to care about in advance of when you need it.

> Workstations need to be totally user-controlled, but phones don't.

Phones are more then likely the workstations of the future (when we figure out how to use them more effectively then the workstations).

That's just iPhones having good security and sandboxing. None of that goes away if Apple allows people to use enterprise certs to distribute software.

> Workstations need to be totally user-controlled, but phones don't

And why this extreme generalization, exactly? Don't you suppose you could have privacy, security, and perhaps even simplicity and ease-of-use with a totally free and open phone that grants control to the user? You really don't explain how "a totally open platform" is mutually exclusive, nor how your own personal needs require the inverse of freedom. Further, the distinction between computer and mobile device are irrelevant given so many people depend on the later as their main computing device. They should be offered the same degree of control as someone with a computer has.

Ultimately, you cannot have privacy and security in a closed-source restricted platform, even if it's backed by good intentions. You're at the mercy of a few companies and as soon as they abandon the device, or make a mistake, you're exposed. And as a consumer, you're forced to buy into their ecosystem instead of having the choice to provide your own solutions. This is already true for the hardware, such as the black-box baseband required to connect to cellular networks.

The two forces are, generally, at odds. Apple screens apps for me to see if they're malicious or snoop my data. They ensure the things on the App Store are of a certain quality and safety. If they discover one that got through, I'm glad they can remove it from my device without waiting on my action. I've effectively outsourced my configuration and security to a company that has strong financial incentives to do a good job at those tasks - certainly a better job than I would do if I had to keep tabs on it all myself. They also do far less "abandoning of devices" than most of their competitors, for what it's worth.

While this kind of support doesn't technically preclude open-source code, it's hard to find both in one. Red Hat is one rare exception to this - providing a comprehensive, supported solution that also happens to be open-source. But the economics tend to push it to be one or the other. In this case, I'm perfectly fine making that trade.

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