The ethics of Apple’s closed ecosystem app store
Apple is being sued for anti competitive behaviour in the US, but where did the company’s history of closed ecosystems come from in the first place? Michael Cowling and James Birt answer the question in this crossposting from The Conversation.
This July marks the tenth birthday of the iOS App Store.
The App Store originally launched alongside the release of the 3G model – 12 months after the original iPhone. The store gave developers the opportunity to write third party native apps for the iPhone, as long as they paid the 30% commission to Apple.
Unlike competing android devices, however, you can’t load apps onto an iPhone unless you get them from the official App Store. Installing apps from unofficial sources is known as “sideloading”.
I don’t use crApple products because they are very very expensive, seem to become obsolete very fast (to make you buy more) and are less flexible than many others; such as a standard PC which can run many OSs. Having said that, crApple products are more secure because of the expensive limitations. I make informed purchase decisions to buy non-crApple products for cost and functionality. It should be up to the consumer to make their informed purchasing decision if they wish to be locked into an expensive walled garden (albeit a safer one). I have no sympathy for the crybaby who bought into the walled garden concept (because it is “hipster cool”) and now suddenly decides he doesn’t want the limitations that HE bought into! He should just sell his product and make another purchasing decision based on his now changed opinion. He can’t have the significant safety aspect of the walled garden and yet allow unfettered app installation. As we have seen with Android, it requires superior technical ability to mitigate the problems with rogue apps. And now that certain chinese phone manufacturers are pre-installing spying malware which phones home, and which can’t be uninstalled, it is well past time that people understand that ANY mobile phone (including crApple) is a spying device (they paid for) which knows everything about them and which they DON’T control. This is why many security experts now only use dumb phones with no internet, bluetooth, WiFi, GPS or other radio options. As we are continuously reminded in the news, everything WILL be hacked at some stage. As they currently stand crApple phones (security by obscurity) are a halfway house between safety (a completely dumb phone) and some “Nigerian prince” emptying your bank account due to rogue apps installed on your “smart phone.”
I no sooner finish deploring “for free” than I am faced with “quite unique”. This from the combined efforts of a senior lecturer and an associate professor, no less! Gentlemen, as every schoolboy knows, there are no degrees of uniqueness. A thing is either unique, the only one of its kind, or it is not unique, being one among others.
At this rate I fear an encounter with our old friend “almost inevitable” cannot be long off.