The “walled garden” is both what the average Apple customer wants, and what technophiles despise. Most iPhone users want the full assurance that they can download any app without performing research, knowing it won’t crash their indispensable device or track their every move. Say what you want about the limits of customization, it’s probably true, but Apple’s tight leash on software is precisely why iPhone is so reliable and private.
private, bro? are u kidding me?
Yes. Apple has the best privacy policy in the industry.
Yeah, they won't let anyone else profit off of their user's information. They'll do it, but nobody else can.
Say what you will about Apple, they are masters of spinning their shortcomings as groundbreaking achievements. When they refused to unlock the iPhone of the san bernardino terrorist attack, it was framed as an act of preserving user privacy, but brushed over how willing they were to hand over the iCloud backups if the police would have brought the iPhone to a known WiFi network for the backup to be uploaded.
exactly!
They don’t profit off of user information. It’s against their privacy policy. Ask for your GDPR compliant file from Apple. It’ll contain your name, billing address, and phone number (if you have an iPhone). Apple and third-party developers can display a prompt to request data collection for app improvement. It is completely voluntary.
Privacy policies are toilet paper without independent audits and the axillary ability to access source code.
💯
do you really trust them?
I don’t need to. It’s visible in their software. It runs on a UNIX kernel, so the application and operating system layers are independent. They restrict all APIs, both first and third-party, until a request for access has been approved by the user. The encryption they use for iCloud, iMessage, and FaceTime transmission is end-to-end, and local device encryption is hardware encoded, requiring local passcode entry to decrypt.
no it is not visible because their source code is closed
Tell that to jailbreakers. Lol
Security is not synonim with privacy.
I'm pretty sure anybody who develops anything in the jailbreaking scene can tell you that Apple's source code is not open to the public.
What industry? Does this industry you mentioned happens only contains data hungry ad oligopolies like google, facebook and bytedance; but happens to exclude all the reasonable alternatives like Mozilla, duckduckgo, grapheneos, calyxos, desktop linux, mastodon, and lemmy?
The consumer personal computer industry.
I got a feeling that many consumers do use desktop linux, given the recently revealed 4% desktop market share across the world. macOS has 15% market share (around 3 times desktop linux), and Windows at the dominant 72% (around 3 times macOS). See https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
I believe macOS probably is more private than Windows, but it is definitely not as private as the rest of the industry.
Sure, open source will always have the potential for the most privacy, assuming the user is savvy enough to maintain updated security. The article was primarily focused on Apple’s hold of the smartphone market. In the US, the only real competition is Android. Google is transparent about their consumer data use, and they also don’t offer much in the form of personal information privacy outside of encrypted RCS. For example, third-party apps can access user data and enable hardware APIs without first requiring user permission.
Okay, I mentioned desktop because you mentioned "personal computer industry" which I assumed means desktop/laptops.
I think there are indeed more private (some can even be more secure) alternative to iOS, like calyx and/or graphene.
But like you said, they do require a reasonable amount of computing literacy to install: first they need to know these projects exists, then they will need to connect their phone to their computer and click a single button.
Thus, I think there is indeed no private and "popular" alternative to iOS, that a completely tech illiterate person can easily obtain.
It’s interesting, because for my iPhone that is true. I was a bit concerned with the walled garden, but made the switch from Android because of privacy (not that Apple is perfect, just much better than Google). I can’t recall a single time when i wanted or needed more than what the iPhone offered.
But with my iPad there are multiple times when i wished i could run a local web dev environment, or run MacOS apps (it is using the save M1 as my computer after all)
Agreed. I’m hoping the move to M chips for iPad Pro will come with some macOS software compatibility in the future.
What about discovering and installing private app that don't use proprietary big tech service, including sending push notifications?
On android this is very easy, you can just search and install apps from fdroid, where all apps has been manually audited to make sure there is no telemetry and proprietary dependencies, including network service dependency.
Fdroid also build all the apps in their app store to prevent developers from secretly inject backdoors (think xz backdoor, and xcode ghost).
I don't believe the fdroid model works in Apple's walled garden.
i used fdroid when i used Android, but now i feel like it is a false sense of security. like, yeah, the apps themselves might not have telemetry, but the whole OS itself is a giant spyware made by the largest ad company in the world, so unless you are using a rooted, custom rom that has taken all the google apis out of the way, i still feel that my data is safer in ios than android with fdroid. the only real way to have data fully safe is too minimize the use of apps completely thou
i would use apps from an ios version of fdriod, if i had the chance, thou, so i think your point is valid
I think it is useful to use fdroid in conjunction with private OS like graphene, divest and calyx all with excellent android compatibilities. Unfortunately, grapheneos, IMO the best of the three, is only avaliable on a small set of devices (so is ios).
But I do agree with your point, if you use the stock android, even with privacy hardening, it is probably still not so private. But I don't know if a hardened stock android is "worse" than an average user's iPhone.
I don't totally agree but you're definitely onto something there. I will absolutely never be simpathetic to that vision, but you're right that Apple knows their audience.
If you throw a linux OS to an average user, they would want to download app from the web instead of installing from app store. Average user don't "want" to download app from the app store, they do that because they are "told" to do so.
I don't believe most average user "love" anything, they only want their device to "work", no matter what the privacy, security, and environmental concerns are. Plus apple's repeated propaganda, which makes many people believe that Apple is reasonably private and eco-conscious.
I think one of the best decision apple has ever made is to start shitty and thus never enshittify. After a while, people accepted the shittiness of apple; yet Windows continuing to enshittify by putting ads everywhere, thus people feel like their old and good experiences have been taken away from them.
I an obviously not saying Windows is better than macOS, they are both shitty in different ways. But I feel like Window's recent enshittification in some way contributed to the recent decline of Windows and rise of macOS.
Apple's history of being walled garden is interesting.
So in the 80s and 90s, Apple tried the wall garden approach. And it absolutely failed. The IBM clones won out, with software and all that that worked across vendors and platforms. The hardware and software could be separated, so Apple's approach of both and closed didn't work.
Then Apple languished for decades.
Then with smartphones you had this product where the hardware and software needed to be tightly integrated. And tight integration was necessary to give a high functioning, small, compact device, where you needed the software to be highly optimized for the specific hardware.
I find it fascinating that Apple has stuck with the same formula for decades of wall garden and control of both hardware and software. That business model failed spectacularly, then treaded water, and then succeeded spectacularly. I think none of which was from an insightful or brilliant business analysis, it was just how the stubbornness played out.
So as for where it will go from here, I think who knows. Phone hardware is now powerful enough that you don't need the same hardware and software vendor where it needs to be so tightly controlled. But Apple has built itself a nice market which is kind of self sustaining. Will people care about prices again?
So in the 80s and 90s, Apple tried the wall garden approach.
So after they lost and were scrambling. I expect at steep control, licensing fees, and hardship coming from Apple. A measly 3 years, I can't see how they committed to the concept - I expect most people made the same judgment call (and were right). (Different read was Jobs was fired from Apple from 1985-1997, so maybe he killed it after returning). I also never heard of it (not that I'm an expert) so I expect it was a very big 'too little, too late' situation.
Or everyone is starting to figure out that the garden looks just as good outside the fence as it does inside the fence. Technology has been converging for many years now to the point where most devices especially smart phones have reached a bottleneck and no one can make things go any faster and there is really no big need for even more massive storage space for the average person. So phones have hit a ceiling and the place that Apple once had where they were one of the few manufacturers that made good phones is now overshadowed by lots of other companies that are comparable or near comparable. Does the average person really care if they have a high definition 20MP camera or a 22 MP camera. All they care about is being able to scroll through Tik Tok, FB or Instagram and no one really seems to care what device they use to do that any more.
Apple still has a pretty solid ecosystem that makes it hard to break out of. For example:
airdrop and sharing in general - experience sucks pretty much anywhere else
watch, phone, and laptop all working together - iMessage, notifications, etc
iCloud - the experience is essentially seamless if you use all Apple products
I don't think people will be leaving Apple anytime soon, and those who don't use it probably don't know what they're missing.
I'm personally on Linux and it works well for me, but I recognize that people tend to stay where they're at, and I think Apple is probably more attractive to people who decide to leave Windows than Linux is (unless they need games, and Linux still seems to have better compatibility).
From a technical point of view I agree .. I have a few friends who work in music and visual arts and they swear by Apple products and software
But to average users and people who just want to go online with social media, snap a picture, share it, forget it and do it over and over and over again ... they really don't care if it's an apple product or not. The family and friends I know that are not technically minded only understand one key technological specification when it comes to devices ..... PRICE and COST.
If they can't afford a $1,000 apple phone .... they'll buy a $500 android phone ... or just stick to their five year apple phone and won't upgrade until they can buy a used $500 apple phone.
That's not what I see. In my area, people buy Apple because it's trendy. If they can't afford the $1000 Apple phone, they'll lease it and make payments. If they're too young, they'll convince their parents that they need it.
The ones with Android phones generally have a reason for it beyond cost. Once that reason is gone (e.g. Apple supports whatever the use case is), they may be swayed to get an iPhone. But once someone has an Apple device, they generally stick to it.
The Apple experience isn't necessarily better, but it is sticky.
Next tech is probably going to be dedicated GPUs or similar to run personalized AI
It's already here. I run AI models via my GPU with training data from various sources for both searching/GPT-like chat and images. You can basically point-and-click and do this with GPT4All which integrates a chat client and let's you just select some popular AI models without knowing how to really do anything or use the CLI. It basically gives you a ChatGPT experience offline using your GPU if it has enough VRAM or CPU if it doesn't for whatever particular model you're using. It doesn't do images I don't think but there are other projects out there that simplify doing it using your own stuff.
The m series Mac s with unified memory and ML cores are insanely powerful and much more flexible because your 32gb of system memory is now GPU vram etc
I was meaning for mobile tech, running your own personal AI on your phone.
Right now the closest we have to that is running ampere clusters. I'm saying that because it is going to be some years before any phone GPU/CPU is going to be able to effectively run a decent AI model. I don't doubt there will be some sort of marketing for 'boosting' AI via your phone CPU/GPU but it isn't going to do much more than be a marketing ploy.
It is far more likely that it will still continue to be offloaded to the cloud. There is going to be much more market motivation to continue to put your data on the cloud instead of off of it.
Does it matter even if they do? The company has lost consumer trust and respect going into the future.
I'm glad we are finally treating phones like the mini computers they are, they should be free as in freedom just like'em.
it's still a fetish for a lot of you alarming maniacs.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
So it’s been doing the logical thing for years, which is finding other ways to make money, and it’s been largely successful, particularly as it added the App Store and services like Apple Music.
And smaller developers struggled to find a business model that worked between Apple’s commission fees and strict guidelines over how and when it could charge customers for their product.
Microsoft recognized that Java could make porting software from Windows to other systems easier, so it sabotaged Sun’s efforts and instructed its allies not to aid the company.
Apple responded to the pressure by promising to support RCS on the iPhone — a standard that updates the relatively ancient SMS/MMS protocol and includes more iMessage-like features.
The other shoe fell last month when the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple for operating an illegal monopoly in the smartphone market.
But that’s unlikely to be the end of it — app developers aren’t happy with the company’s “malicious compliance” to new rules under the DMA, and European regulators are investigating Apple’s response.
The original article contains 2,020 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 91%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Honestly I'd be truly thrilled if they were merely forced to open up iMessage. I'd be a huge quality of life improvent for people who don't want to daily drive an iPhone but have to keep in contact with Americans.
And for those living in the US with Androids.
Good.
They will just figure ways to make new walls, or be as malicious in compliance as possible. Reminder: walled gardens are always anti-consumer, no exceptions.
Switched over to Pop!_OS from MacOS a few years ago. While there aren't a ton of open source mobile options, I decided to go with GrapheneOS over iOS. Fuck walled gardens.
The “walled garden” is both what the average Apple customer wants, and what technophiles despise. Most iPhone users want the full assurance that they can download any app without performing research, knowing it won’t crash their indispensable device or track their every move. Say what you want about the limits of customization, it’s probably true, but Apple’s tight leash on software is precisely why iPhone is so reliable and private.
private, bro? are u kidding me?
Yes. Apple has the best privacy policy in the industry.
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/
Yeah, they won't let anyone else profit off of their user's information. They'll do it, but nobody else can.
Say what you will about Apple, they are masters of spinning their shortcomings as groundbreaking achievements. When they refused to unlock the iPhone of the san bernardino terrorist attack, it was framed as an act of preserving user privacy, but brushed over how willing they were to hand over the iCloud backups if the police would have brought the iPhone to a known WiFi network for the backup to be uploaded.
exactly!
They don’t profit off of user information. It’s against their privacy policy. Ask for your GDPR compliant file from Apple. It’ll contain your name, billing address, and phone number (if you have an iPhone). Apple and third-party developers can display a prompt to request data collection for app improvement. It is completely voluntary.
Privacy policies are toilet paper without independent audits and the axillary ability to access source code.
💯
do you really trust them?
I don’t need to. It’s visible in their software. It runs on a UNIX kernel, so the application and operating system layers are independent. They restrict all APIs, both first and third-party, until a request for access has been approved by the user. The encryption they use for iCloud, iMessage, and FaceTime transmission is end-to-end, and local device encryption is hardware encoded, requiring local passcode entry to decrypt.
no it is not visible because their source code is closed
Tell that to jailbreakers. Lol
Security is not synonim with privacy.
I'm pretty sure anybody who develops anything in the jailbreaking scene can tell you that Apple's source code is not open to the public.
What industry? Does this industry you mentioned happens only contains data hungry ad oligopolies like google, facebook and bytedance; but happens to exclude all the reasonable alternatives like Mozilla, duckduckgo, grapheneos, calyxos, desktop linux, mastodon, and lemmy?
The consumer personal computer industry.
I got a feeling that many consumers do use desktop linux, given the recently revealed 4% desktop market share across the world. macOS has 15% market share (around 3 times desktop linux), and Windows at the dominant 72% (around 3 times macOS). See https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
I believe macOS probably is more private than Windows, but it is definitely not as private as the rest of the industry.
Sure, open source will always have the potential for the most privacy, assuming the user is savvy enough to maintain updated security. The article was primarily focused on Apple’s hold of the smartphone market. In the US, the only real competition is Android. Google is transparent about their consumer data use, and they also don’t offer much in the form of personal information privacy outside of encrypted RCS. For example, third-party apps can access user data and enable hardware APIs without first requiring user permission.
Okay, I mentioned desktop because you mentioned "personal computer industry" which I assumed means desktop/laptops.
I think there are indeed more private (some can even be more secure) alternative to iOS, like calyx and/or graphene.
But like you said, they do require a reasonable amount of computing literacy to install: first they need to know these projects exists, then they will need to connect their phone to their computer and click a single button.
Thus, I think there is indeed no private and "popular" alternative to iOS, that a completely tech illiterate person can easily obtain.
It’s interesting, because for my iPhone that is true. I was a bit concerned with the walled garden, but made the switch from Android because of privacy (not that Apple is perfect, just much better than Google). I can’t recall a single time when i wanted or needed more than what the iPhone offered.
But with my iPad there are multiple times when i wished i could run a local web dev environment, or run MacOS apps (it is using the save M1 as my computer after all)
Agreed. I’m hoping the move to M chips for iPad Pro will come with some macOS software compatibility in the future.
What about discovering and installing private app that don't use proprietary big tech service, including sending push notifications?
On android this is very easy, you can just search and install apps from fdroid, where all apps has been manually audited to make sure there is no telemetry and proprietary dependencies, including network service dependency.
Fdroid also build all the apps in their app store to prevent developers from secretly inject backdoors (think xz backdoor, and xcode ghost).
I don't believe the fdroid model works in Apple's walled garden.
i used fdroid when i used Android, but now i feel like it is a false sense of security. like, yeah, the apps themselves might not have telemetry, but the whole OS itself is a giant spyware made by the largest ad company in the world, so unless you are using a rooted, custom rom that has taken all the google apis out of the way, i still feel that my data is safer in ios than android with fdroid. the only real way to have data fully safe is too minimize the use of apps completely thou
i would use apps from an ios version of fdriod, if i had the chance, thou, so i think your point is valid
I think it is useful to use fdroid in conjunction with private OS like graphene, divest and calyx all with excellent android compatibilities. Unfortunately, grapheneos, IMO the best of the three, is only avaliable on a small set of devices (so is ios).
But I do agree with your point, if you use the stock android, even with privacy hardening, it is probably still not so private. But I don't know if a hardened stock android is "worse" than an average user's iPhone.
I don't totally agree but you're definitely onto something there. I will absolutely never be simpathetic to that vision, but you're right that Apple knows their audience.
If you throw a linux OS to an average user, they would want to download app from the web instead of installing from app store. Average user don't "want" to download app from the app store, they do that because they are "told" to do so.
I don't believe most average user "love" anything, they only want their device to "work", no matter what the privacy, security, and environmental concerns are. Plus apple's repeated propaganda, which makes many people believe that Apple is reasonably private and eco-conscious.
I think one of the best decision apple has ever made is to start shitty and thus never enshittify. After a while, people accepted the shittiness of apple; yet Windows continuing to enshittify by putting ads everywhere, thus people feel like their old and good experiences have been taken away from them.
I an obviously not saying Windows is better than macOS, they are both shitty in different ways. But I feel like Window's recent enshittification in some way contributed to the recent decline of Windows and rise of macOS.
Apple's history of being walled garden is interesting.
So in the 80s and 90s, Apple tried the wall garden approach. And it absolutely failed. The IBM clones won out, with software and all that that worked across vendors and platforms. The hardware and software could be separated, so Apple's approach of both and closed didn't work.
Then Apple languished for decades.
Then with smartphones you had this product where the hardware and software needed to be tightly integrated. And tight integration was necessary to give a high functioning, small, compact device, where you needed the software to be highly optimized for the specific hardware.
I find it fascinating that Apple has stuck with the same formula for decades of wall garden and control of both hardware and software. That business model failed spectacularly, then treaded water, and then succeeded spectacularly. I think none of which was from an insightful or brilliant business analysis, it was just how the stubbornness played out.
So as for where it will go from here, I think who knows. Phone hardware is now powerful enough that you don't need the same hardware and software vendor where it needs to be so tightly controlled. But Apple has built itself a nice market which is kind of self sustaining. Will people care about prices again?
Wat. In the 90s Apple literally had officially sanctioned "clones". https://everymac.com/systems/mac-clones/index-mac-clones.html
So after they lost and were scrambling. I expect at steep control, licensing fees, and hardship coming from Apple. A measly 3 years, I can't see how they committed to the concept - I expect most people made the same judgment call (and were right). (Different read was Jobs was fired from Apple from 1985-1997, so maybe he killed it after returning). I also never heard of it (not that I'm an expert) so I expect it was a very big 'too little, too late' situation.
Or everyone is starting to figure out that the garden looks just as good outside the fence as it does inside the fence. Technology has been converging for many years now to the point where most devices especially smart phones have reached a bottleneck and no one can make things go any faster and there is really no big need for even more massive storage space for the average person. So phones have hit a ceiling and the place that Apple once had where they were one of the few manufacturers that made good phones is now overshadowed by lots of other companies that are comparable or near comparable. Does the average person really care if they have a high definition 20MP camera or a 22 MP camera. All they care about is being able to scroll through Tik Tok, FB or Instagram and no one really seems to care what device they use to do that any more.
Apple still has a pretty solid ecosystem that makes it hard to break out of. For example:
I don't think people will be leaving Apple anytime soon, and those who don't use it probably don't know what they're missing.
I'm personally on Linux and it works well for me, but I recognize that people tend to stay where they're at, and I think Apple is probably more attractive to people who decide to leave Windows than Linux is (unless they need games, and Linux still seems to have better compatibility).
From a technical point of view I agree .. I have a few friends who work in music and visual arts and they swear by Apple products and software
But to average users and people who just want to go online with social media, snap a picture, share it, forget it and do it over and over and over again ... they really don't care if it's an apple product or not. The family and friends I know that are not technically minded only understand one key technological specification when it comes to devices ..... PRICE and COST.
If they can't afford a $1,000 apple phone .... they'll buy a $500 android phone ... or just stick to their five year apple phone and won't upgrade until they can buy a used $500 apple phone.
That's not what I see. In my area, people buy Apple because it's trendy. If they can't afford the $1000 Apple phone, they'll lease it and make payments. If they're too young, they'll convince their parents that they need it.
The ones with Android phones generally have a reason for it beyond cost. Once that reason is gone (e.g. Apple supports whatever the use case is), they may be swayed to get an iPhone. But once someone has an Apple device, they generally stick to it.
The Apple experience isn't necessarily better, but it is sticky.
Next tech is probably going to be dedicated GPUs or similar to run personalized AI
It's already here. I run AI models via my GPU with training data from various sources for both searching/GPT-like chat and images. You can basically point-and-click and do this with GPT4All which integrates a chat client and let's you just select some popular AI models without knowing how to really do anything or use the CLI. It basically gives you a ChatGPT experience offline using your GPU if it has enough VRAM or CPU if it doesn't for whatever particular model you're using. It doesn't do images I don't think but there are other projects out there that simplify doing it using your own stuff.
The m series Mac s with unified memory and ML cores are insanely powerful and much more flexible because your 32gb of system memory is now GPU vram etc
I was meaning for mobile tech, running your own personal AI on your phone.
Right now the closest we have to that is running ampere clusters. I'm saying that because it is going to be some years before any phone GPU/CPU is going to be able to effectively run a decent AI model. I don't doubt there will be some sort of marketing for 'boosting' AI via your phone CPU/GPU but it isn't going to do much more than be a marketing ploy.
It is far more likely that it will still continue to be offloaded to the cloud. There is going to be much more market motivation to continue to put your data on the cloud instead of off of it.
Does it matter even if they do? The company has lost consumer trust and respect going into the future.
I'm glad we are finally treating phones like the mini computers they are, they should be free as in freedom just like'em.
it's still a fetish for a lot of you alarming maniacs.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
So it’s been doing the logical thing for years, which is finding other ways to make money, and it’s been largely successful, particularly as it added the App Store and services like Apple Music.
And smaller developers struggled to find a business model that worked between Apple’s commission fees and strict guidelines over how and when it could charge customers for their product.
Microsoft recognized that Java could make porting software from Windows to other systems easier, so it sabotaged Sun’s efforts and instructed its allies not to aid the company.
Apple responded to the pressure by promising to support RCS on the iPhone — a standard that updates the relatively ancient SMS/MMS protocol and includes more iMessage-like features.
The other shoe fell last month when the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple for operating an illegal monopoly in the smartphone market.
But that’s unlikely to be the end of it — app developers aren’t happy with the company’s “malicious compliance” to new rules under the DMA, and European regulators are investigating Apple’s response.
The original article contains 2,020 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 91%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Honestly I'd be truly thrilled if they were merely forced to open up iMessage. I'd be a huge quality of life improvent for people who don't want to daily drive an iPhone but have to keep in contact with Americans.
And for those living in the US with Androids.
Good.
They will just figure ways to make new walls, or be as malicious in compliance as possible. Reminder: walled gardens are always anti-consumer, no exceptions.
Switched over to Pop!_OS from MacOS a few years ago. While there aren't a ton of open source mobile options, I decided to go with GrapheneOS over iOS. Fuck walled gardens.
Cool story bro