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You keep comparing appliances to general-purpose devices. You also act like the "accept to continue" legalese actually matters to anyone but the legal department that wrote it. Please stop.

When someone buys a car, they usually don't expect to run third-party software on it. They use it to get to places. They expect to use the built-in entertainment system to listen to music and maybe use CarPlay or Android Auto, and that's it.

When someone buys a smartphone, they expect to be able to install apps on it. That's the smartphone thing, that's what sets it apart from dumbphones. Third-party apps are what sells smartphones.

> Apple devices are successful because they provide a great value.

Uh sorry??? It may have been true 10 years ago, but an iPhone costs around $1000 now. That's outrageously expensive for what it is. You can say that about midrange Android phones, but definitely not about iPhones. You pay this much and still don't get to actually own the damn thing.

> for example they didn't allow apps to run continuously in the background so that users can have all day battery life

How is that related to the app store? Android does that as well. An app only gets to run in the background if it starts a "foreground service" which shows a persistent notification.

Sandboxing apps and enforcing their behavior does not require limiting what the user can do with their own device.

> This requires continuous work to keep it running

It absolutely does not. If iOS stopped getting updated 5 years ago, no one would've noticed. It's been a finished, feature-complete product for a long time.



If you’re not happy with the Apple products or the value you’re getting from them, then simply stop buying them or making apps for them.

You don’t have to use an iPhone. You’re welcome to use any Android based phone you’d like and install anything Google allows on it.

Or use any European based phone operating system. Oh wait, there’s none, because any phone company that became successful in Europe had to run away.


> If you’re not happy with the Apple products or the value you’re getting from them, then simply stop buying them or making apps for them. You don’t have to use an iPhone. You’re welcome to use any Android based phone you’d like and install anything Google allows on it.

Leaving aside all the idealist "I own it" stuff that's been repeated here many times, there's another angle to this.

If you're a mobile app developer, you're effectively forced to develop for Android and iOS, it's a duopoly.

Would you accept a status quo where there were only two store brands for the entire US, and any seller of any product at all had to use one, the other or both? And all citizens had to shop in one or the other, and couldn't even switch because it carried many additional costs?


There is another alterative. People can use the EUs laws, and Apple can either follow the law, or be fined 10s of billions of dollars, or leave the EU.

Apple is the one who will have to get with the program and will no longer be able to force users to not have control of their own devices.




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