Hacker News Reader

Comment by highwaylights | Hacker News Reader

This, but I think it goes beyond this too.

If Apple allows exceptions to the iOS sandbox for developers, it will very rapidly be abused by users who don’t understand the implications of what they’re doing.

You can see this in the many just-jailbreak-your-iphone-to-get-this-cool-feature videos all over youtube. Almost no-one outside of developers understands what it really means to disable these guardrails and the headache for Apple when it starts going wrong would be enormous.

Grandma: “I let my grandson borrow my phone but now it has this screen that says I need to pay money to decrypt my files how do I fix it?”

Apple store staff: “That appears to be malware, madam”

blank stare

Apple store staff: “I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do”

Grandma: “But the ad said it was secure.”

etc.

View on HN

I really despise the idea that we should let the manufacturer decide what's best for us with no out based on the premise of protecting people who don't know any better. As technology becomes an increasingly integral part of our lives, people need to be able to think for themselves and understand the consequences of how they interact with software.

Also as someone who's grandmother started her own software company and was a programmer since the days of punchcards, I find these "what about grandma" appeals very repetitive and kind of insulting.

On the other hand, my grandma could barely use a DVD player, and definitely didn't want to learn to set one up. But when the industry bullied her into getting DVDs by making VHS too flimsy to last more than 10 years and then ditching it... she got us in to fix her problem.

"Grandma" doesn't mean "grandma" in these discussions, it's a placeholder for "people not driven to learn the details of all of their tools". Which is most people. Some people do "people" or "animals" or "geology" and not "technology". Your grandma sounds ace, btw.

> Also as someone who's grandmother started her own software company and was a programmer since the days of punchcards, I find these "what about grandma" appeals very repetitive and kind of insulting.

Your grandmother sounds like a genuinely very impressive person, given that it would have been a much more difficult career to forge as a woman in the timeframe from punchcards forward, even up to the present day.

Respectfully, I don't believe you are insulted. I think you know what was meant by the above, and chose to be insulted.

Your overall argument is also not wrong, but kind of irrelevant. This is HN - everyone here is a tech enthusiast. We are not Apple's target market. Removing the guardrails would cost them revenue and headaches.

Whether or not companies should be made to allow arbitrary software to run on devices is a different question entirely, has no clear and simple answer, and I'm not sure who would have the authority to make that happen.

Not all grandmas are like your grandma and at the same time not all needs are like yours.

Apple doesn't allow it because App Store fees are key component of their business model. That's it.

The argument that people are too stupid to know how to properly use a computer is just a handy argument their marketing team uses because protecting little old ladies from evil hackers sounds better than the truth.

Says someone who has never had to clean up someone else’s computer.

This "what about grandma and the ads" argument is tiresome. Try getting viruses on your Apple or Windows laptop which was advertised as secure and going to their support and see what happens. They'll just point you to their fine print, the same as Apple does with hundreds of people every day who come in with broken iPhones and iPads.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com