Stop Trying to Turn iOS Into Android

Apple has released its proposals to the EU for changes to its iOS policies in order to be compliant with the DMA. This comes after years of various commenters rubbing their hands in anticipation of Apple “finally getting what it deserves” in response to all sorts of real and/or imagined gripes regarding the way in which the company conducts itself. John Gruber has so far what appears the be the most thoughtful analysis of Apple’s DMA-induced changes, so there’s no need to go over everything he discusses here. However, I want to cover the major accusations and complaints the techie contigent most commonly levy against Apple, because frankly I’m sick to death of hearing ignoramuses incapable of grasping nuance prattle on about all this.

The long and the short of it is that Apple is fundamentally a different (pun un-intended) type of company, and a lot of people seemingly haven’t understood that or choose to ignore it. Cards on the table, I’m the sort of leftist your parents warned you about. I’m a Ph.D.-holding anthropologist whose politics could best be described as anarcho-syndicalist. I want to smash capitalism and see a truly just, equitable, global society arise from its destruction. I don’t like corporations, any corporations, ok? However, I’m also very pragmatic about my political views and realize that such a utopian dream will not come to pass in my lifetime, or perhaps ever, primarily because people suck. Given that, I make the best of a bad situation and get on with things.

Two incidents have always stuck in my mind regarding Apple. It is those two things in combination with my disgust with Windows and Android, and frustration with Linux, that has kept me a fairly consistant customer since I retired my Amiga 1200 in 1998. The first is that Apple’s primary interest is in making quality products, with the understanding that “if you build it, they will come.” Apple intuits that creating well-designed devices will generate enough sales to keep it in the black, along with the satisfaction of making good stuff in the first place. Tellingly, Tim Cook said as much at a 2014 shareholder’s meeting – let me just emphasize that if you just glossed over it, a SHAREHOLDER’S MEETING – that Apple does many things without concern for how it contributes to the return on investment for stock holders, and that the return on investment was generally a secondary priority. This is a big deal from a business standpoint, and something you would never hear from any other publicly-traded tech company, or non-tech company for that matter. The fact that a CEO was saying this to the faces of his largest shareholders is massive, and marks this company as distinctive.

The second thing about Apple that has stuck with me is how they conducted themselves during the FBI investigation of a terrorist shooting in San Bernadino, California in 2015, The FBI used the courts in an attempt to force Apple to backdoor iOS in order to not only gain access to one of the perpetrators’ iPhones, but to weaken security more generally to facilitate any future investigations. Note that no other hardware developer explicitly came to Apple’s defense, and they faced enormous public pressure to cave in and knee-cap iOS’ encryption features. Apple stood their ground even in the face of court orders, and the FBI finally backed off after buying phone-hacking hardware from an Australian firm. In the meantime, Apple has not only stuck to its guns regarding security and privacy, but continues to improve customer protections, causing recurring friction with state agencies here and abroad.

I’m by turns fascinated, amused, and appalled by the way discourse about Apple as a company has shifted from “beleaguered Apple Computer” to “Apple voted for Hubert Humphrey and killed Jesus.” Just look at this exchange from a recent Hacker News thread. In particular, note the comment from “dkjaudyeqooe,” which is emblematic of the hysterical rhetorical tone surrounding Apple at this time:

I don’t know how anyone can watch a huge corporation repeatedly thumb their nose at their laws and government and not have their blood boil. You think a huge corporation trying to assert it’s above the law is kosher? Just let Apple do whatever it likes? One day you will wake up and you no longer have freedoms you previously enjoyed because they were taken by a massive corporation that asserted its power over democratic institutions.

I’m not entirely sure what the through-line from charging an industry-standard 30% fee on in-app purchases leading to a Blade Runner-esque Hellscape is. Apparently, I’m just a hopelessly naive fanboy since this argument is lost on me. Apple-bashers in general are slightly more coherent, however, and what follows is a Greatest Hits of their rhetorical attacks – my responses to each follow.

“Walled-gardens are bad.” – The simple response to this is repurposing that old Hunter S. Thompson chestnut: “buy the ticket, take the ride.” If you as a customer or developer don’t like depending on the App Store for software distribution, there’s Android over there. Look, Apple priotizes the user experience above almost anything else. If users are suddenly able to sideload apps or run arbitrary code on an iPhone, they would immediately open devices up to a storm of security and functionality issues. Sure, Apple could always stipulate a “swim at your own risk” policy, but that tarnishes the user experience and (and good PR) with users. Once people start installing random apps from Some Guy on the internet willy-nilly, and end up getting rooted by FancyBear or their phone perfomance takes a nose-dive due to bad programming practices, it gives the impression of slipshod products to the average, non-techie user. If you desperately need a command line on your phone to compile C++ code in Emacs (sure, sure – or Vim, too), get an Android device instead.

“People should be ‘free’ to sideload.” – See above. If Apple officially allows this, it makes iOS as sucky as Android. All the big names (Epic, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.) will have separate stores, just like video streaming. In spite of what the EU claims as the point of the DMA, this still isn’t going to level the playing field for upstart new companies, and users will have a terrible experience, to boot. In addition, as I said before, we end up with a security nightmare as clueless parents and grandparents download Faysbuk in droves from Chinese malware factories and dutifully enter their bank account and routing numbers during the sign-up process. Hilarity ensues.

“Apple’s just engaging in rent-seeking!” – This assumes that Apple brings absolutely nothing of value to developers and customers with their sandboxed approach. Security, infrastructure, payment systems, maintenance, updates – these are all things provided by Apple, and thus is not rent-seeking. That term often gets thrown around uncritically by people who have no idea what it actually means. There’s a big difference between an absentee landlord and Apple’s maintenance and administration of the App Store and related services.

“30% fees for App Store purchases is way too much.” – As much as this complaint gets thrown around, 30% fees is the industry standard when you look at other digital storefronts on game consoles and Steam. This isn’t an aberrent, previously unwitnessed percentage rate – it’s been established for quite some time. It’s only suddenly become a legitimized topic of discussion because a couple of heavy-hitters – Epic and Spotify – started making money hand over fist on iOS and decided that they’re now to big to have to pay for Apple’s provided services.

“Apple is a monopoly!” – Apple’s market share in the US is roughly 50%, and worldwide it pales in comparison to Android. So try again. It’s pretty ironic that no one was concerned about the App Store in the past. Apparently, this has only become a problem now because Apple’s finally successful and not beleaguered. The data speak for themselves: there’s no iPhone monopoly. You don’t like Apple? No problem, buy Android. Don’t like Android or iOS? That’s cool, too. Just buy an Android phone and flash it with GrapheneOS, LineageOS, etc. Go nuts. Again, buy the ticket, take the ride. The courts already ruled that the App Store isn’t a monopoly, so this line of argument is demonstrably false.

“I’m sad about green buttons!”: It’s interesting that iMessage must be expanded to Android, but no one has an issue with Nintendo restricting Zelda games to their own platforms. Killer apps like iMessage aren’t by nature anticompetitive, and most hardware manufacturers have platform exclusives. Apple is getting put under the microscope… Why? Are people so upset about text colors they want to get federal regulators involved? What happened to letting The Market decide? Providing a better product on your platform isn’t anticompetive, and doesn’t apply to iOS when you can add any other comparable cross-platform text messaging apps you want (I use Signal, btw). It’s not Apple’s fault that Android sucks. As John Gruber pointed out, iMessage is a service, not just a communication protocol. Arguments for opening up iMessage blissfully ignore this fact and its implications.

Most of the voices in tech advocating opening up iMessage, app stores, and even cable connectors (Lightning vs. USB-C, anyone?) also argue that da guvment should force Apple to do so. This is the usual childish conflating of free-as-in-beer with free-as-in-speech that typifies liberal techie ideology. Capitalistic choice of consumption is frequently equated by these folks with actual political and social freedom. This libertarian view is dangerously shortsighted and entrenched in the tech industry. It’s hypocritical on the one hand to say that market forces should decide things, but on the other cry that federal regulations are necessary for competition in this situation. The free market has spoken, and customers just seem to be really happy overall with Apple’s way of doing things. Apple is being punished for the sin of being successful developing high quality devices that people actually want to buy.

Two things stick out reading Mastodon whining, Hacker News, and other tech blogs slamming Apple: techies have design priorities that are not the same as Apple’s, and they as a result default to “different=bad.” Second, there is a suprising amount of ignorance about Apple products in general (software engineers who don’t know about settings that address their concerns, a lack of basic knowledge regarding Apple security and privacy for user data, etc.), which just furthers the misinformation on these issues. This ties in nicely with a general lack of comprehension that Apple is just fundementally a different type of corporation in comparison to the rest of the industry (see Tim Cook’s rant against ROI above). The impression given by techies seems like, “I’m so use to other platforms sucking, I can’t believe that Apple is any different, therefore something must be rotten for them to be this successful and popular. Something-something marketing something-something sheeple!”

Perhaps the reason Washington is so eager to get involved in these arguments is because by making iOS fully open and interoperable with Android, it would require kneecapping much of what makes iOS such a secure, privacy-protecting platform (relatively speaking). Apple didn’t make any friends in DC by refusing to backdoor iOS when the FBI demanded it of them, and they’ve increased their security technology significantly since that incident.

The EU and UK also hate the idea of secure, private communication channels for people, but I suspect a lot of their scrutiny of Apple has to do more with economic protectionism – at least in the case of the EU with the DMA. Remember that the EU was constructed to promote its member’s economies (specifically their banks), and in this light taking a company like Apple down a peg or two gives EU-based companies opportunities to take advantage of the vacuum left behind. If those member-state businesses are relatively lax on privacy and security compared to Apple, well, so much the better…

Incidentally, Steven Sinofsky (ironic, given he’s an ex-Microsoftie) wrote a breathtaking critique of the EU’s handling of Apple’s DMA compliance in a recent essay. He does a better job than I of pointing out how the DMA strips the iPhone of it’s inherent iPhone-ness, and putting Apple in the impossible situation of wanting it to retain the elements that made its product desirable in the first place (security, stability, ease of use, etc.) in the face of regulations that force them into turning iOS into the same type of problematic open platform that Android has been from the outset. This entire exercise comes across like the EU is using Apple as an example to hold up to other non-EU firms – “follow our dictates, or you too shall suffer the same fate.” One of the important points Steven makes here is that the DMA isn’t about creating a competitive technology environment, it’s about diminishing the presence of a successful non-EU company. This is market favoritism, rather than increasing innovation.

Apple’s plan for following DMA guidelines has caused large swathes of techies to collapse in conniptions over alleged “malicious compliance.” The truth of the matter is that form of compliance is the only real option left to Apple if they are to remain faithful to what Sinofsky terms Apple’s “brand promise.” Apple’s priorities have primarily been first to itself as a for-profit corporation followed closely by its customers. Developers have always been a distant third, because for Apple the goal is about making the best user experience possible, and to Hell with anything else (c.f. WebKit, Metal, jettisoning 32-bit code). If the EU demands that iOS allow third-party versions of… Well, basically all of the services and APIs that make the iPhone desirable in the first place, the end result is going to be the mess that Apple has described in its response to the DMA. It’s akin to the idea that Washington can decree that end-to-end encryption can be back-doored by law enforcement without increasing a platform’s attack surface to the size of Nebraska. Yep, just “nerd harder,” folks – we’re sure you can program in the objectively impossible. Likewise, you can’t order Apple to allow third-party everything and still expect the company to keep iOS safe, secure, and private to the same degree it has up until now.

Bottom line, I chose to buy an iPhone because I strongly prefer their “walled garden” approach compared to other options. It gaurantees a significantly more secure, private, and well-integrated user experience in comparison to Android. If this is all about choice, than for pity’s sake respect my choice not to use second-rate platforms and leave my chosen one alone.