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Comment by fharper1961 | Hacker News Reader

fharper1961

I saw the writing on the wall in 2008-2009. A developer created a podcast app that downloaded directly to the phone without syncing through a PC running iTunes. I was running Linux, and I really wanted to buy that app.

But Apple rejected it, so the developer lost out, and I lost out. I could not accept that Apple was preventing me from running an app on hardware I "owned"! I never bought another iPhone after that.

I've been an Android developer since 2010. But now I've realized that Android has similar flaws because it is controlled by one corporation:

=> 30% Play Store transaction fees!

=> Apps delisted without any explanation

The freedom on open platforms is vital; so I will invest more time in them than in closed ones.

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As a user, I agree and cannot wait to exit the ecosystem.

With all apple's talk of privacy, I would love to be able to firewall the phone, see what apps are doing and prevent some of them from doing it. This includes apple apps.

But apple doesn't allow these sorts of things.

I installed adblock ios which allowed this (vpn though 127.0.0.1 which blocked things), but then apple changed their conditions so the developer had to cripple their app further.

Further back, I had an app that could show wifi signal strength which was incredibly useful -- but then apple banned it.

Things have changed a lot in 10 years.

Even as someone with heavy "tech nerd" needs (e.g. a mosh session that is always open to my server), there is very little I want to do on an iOS device that I can't do with tools provided by developers via the App Store.

This isn't a functional problem. Its a moral problem.

Except use a different browser engine...

The OP said "want to do," though, which is pretty subjective, right? I don't actually care about not being able to use a different browser engine, but I do care about not being able to set a third-party mail client as my default. There are things that I want to do on my iPad that I can't, but not all of them have to do with Apple platform policy -- UIKit's lackluster text editing components are undeniably contributing to the relative suck of Scrivener and Slugline on iOS compared to their Mac counterparts, for instance. (Although one might argue developers might be motivated to work more on homegrown components if the App Store was structured differently; personally, I think Apple's 30% cut is not the worst problem.)

>> I don't actually care about not being able to use a different browser engine, but I do care about not being able to set a third-party mail client as my default.

Has anyone actually noticed that if you use Gmail on iPhone and you’ve got Chrome installed it will use Chrome by default?

PS: I’ve generally use Firefox though

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