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I said as much. I mentioned twice that I wasn't trying to defend Apple.
The article is nominally about web standards, but the WHATWG—whose steering committee includes Google and Microsoft—hijacked web standards. The article is painting a picture where Apple is largely acting alone, but that's not even remotely true.
> Android is caving to the pressure to follow suit more and more every day.
Pressure? What pressure? Are you claiming that Apple is somehow pressuring Google into locking down Android?
Yes, both stepped over the line trying to anti-competitively make their browser dominant. Everyone had an ostensible choice to not use Chrome but if you spend enough money to be pre-installed, bundled, advertised, etc everywhere, you can take over. Good old fashioned monopoly tactics, right?
Apple took the novel, and IMO far more disturbing and reprehensible, approach by simply not giving anyone any choice. Since then, we've seen a huge expansion of DRM, integrity checks, eFuse, etc to strip everyone of their freedom. Companies got a taste of that sweet total control with iOS and wanted more.
Users who disagree with the concept of walled gardens have the choice of buying into an open platform.
As long as the platform creator is honest and doesn't try to yank away the supposed freedom to run any software you like that they fraudulently promised when they announced and marketed the platform.
No, I was trying to re-focus the discussion on all of the monopolists: Apple and Google on mobile, Apple and Microsoft on desktop. To talk only of Apple is to ignore the crucial roles of Google and Microsoft as monopolists.
Microsoft's Xbox walled garden predates the iPhone by over half a decade.
Apple didn't invent walled gardens, and consumers are not forced to buy into walled gardens.
Microsoft attempted to create Windows Phone and Windows RT on the original Surface tablet as walled garden platforms and consumers rejected both.
Ask yourself who was the adversary for this DRM model? Game console lockdowns were built to target publishers. Mobile lockdowns are squarely targeted at users. Both are bad but the implications, magnitude, and overall consequences are very different, IMO.
So why did Windows Phone fail as a walled garden?
I'd say that it was because of Google's fraudulent promise that Android would be the platform that allowed users to run anything they liked. Google traded false promises of "openness" for market share.
(As well as Google using it's internet video monopoly as an anticompetitive weapon to prevent Windows Phone from having a YouTube client)
Why did Windows RT fail in the tablet market if walled gardens were so acceptable?
It turns out that users were perfectly capable of rejecting walled garden platforms even after the iPhone.
Same with Photoshop. Neither Windows Phone or RT had any software support. It’s like buying a game console with no games — what’s the point?
No regular person even knows what a walled garden is. It’s not a decision factor.
Snapchat, Facebook, Uber, Lyft, etc are.
The Xbox is a locked down walled garden device with no complex administrative decisions and no malware problem.
It's a game playing appliance, and some people prefer that.
The Windows PC has the freedom to run anything you like, and with that freedom comes the freedom to shoot yourself in the foot.
Some people prefer that.
Consumers have the freedom to choose what they value.
Citation? My impression is people find Apple hardware better, and suffer through the OS.
I’m not arguing that you shouldn’t use more open portable devices. I contend that there are practical reasons why I greatly prefer them.
(But lock down my laptop to a degree that I can’t install and run software from wherever, and I’d fling it out the nearest window. The above applies to tablets and phones and that’s it.)
FWIW my intro to computers was DOS and later Windows, and Linux was my daily driver for a little over a decade before I finally gave Macs a fair shot. My first three or so smartphones were Android, before I ever tried an iPhone.
When someone's saying "X is destroying Y!" and you point out that A and B have at least as much culpability for whatever is happening to Y as X does, that's not whataboutism. It's accurate assignment of blame.