App stores, trust and anti-trust

App stores, trust and anti-trust
ben-evans.com

> Unfortunately, you can’t have your cake and eat it. A secure system with a switch to turn off the security might work for Linux and a highly technical user, but when you’ve given smartphones to a few billion people, a secure system with a switch to turn off the security is just a target for malware.

One of the things I found very frustrating about this article is that it fails to remember the actual history: when the iPhone first came out, jailbreaks were plentiful and powerful... the iPhone tried to be a closed and locked down platform, but failed due to the almost continual existence of serious security flaws that allowed for 0-day drops of exploits with almost every new device release (which coincided with every new major iOS release).

This means that we can actually look back at the history of the iPhone and answer the question "could the iPhone have been as successful as it was if there had been a switch that allowed users to opt out of Apple's complete control of not only whose apps could be installed, but further what kind of software could be installed (to let you install things like daemons or extensions to existing apps)" and the answer is "apparently, it could, because it did".

In fact, it is the opposite question that we can't easily answer: "would the iPhone have been as successful as it was without the ability to opt out of Apple's closed ecosystem?"... and this is a question where the answer is not at all obvious: for many many years the iPhone very poorly satisfied the needs of users in many countries, and jailbreaking filled the gap. Apple didn't get around to having a good Chinese keyboard until iOS 5 or 6 or so, and so Baidu maintained one and seriously encouraged users of their search engine to jailbreak from their landing page. Meanwhile, the feature set was in some real sense anemic, and jailbreaking also filled that gap: as a trivial example, Steve Jobs seemed very anti-wallpaper, a feature which didn't appear until iOS 4... the number of people who jailbroke just to install wallpaper was incredible ;P.

And honestly, I think Apple sort of knew that: I had always gotten the distinct impression that they considered the bugs used by people who jailbroke to be pretty low priority, and they would sometimes remain unfixed for months on end. At some point, the iPhone started to get "good enough" by default, and it was only then that Apple really started to turn down the screws, deciding to fix bugs quickly and even hire jailbreakers who never believed in the cause--those who were willing to play the game as a mercenary for hire--to defend the platform instead of being on the offensive. Today, jailbreaking thereby feels like a niche ecosystem, but it mattered for at least half the history of the iPhone, with something like 12% of users being jailbroken (it would quickly fall a bit on new firmware releases and then rise back up).

The reality is that innovation happens on platforms because of the ability for people to make modifications and enhancements without having to wait for the platform vendor: if iOS had succeeded in truly being a closed ecosystem, Baidu would not have been able to build custom keyboards to support Chinese users as Apple didn't get around to supporting third-party custom keyboards until iOS 8. Open platforms thereby get new features faster and can support the needs of many more users from any number of market subsets. Yes: it is the case that a closed system can sort of try to satisfy the needs of at least most people, but you don't get there overnight, and even coming up with sane extensibility hooks takes time. The real experiment has thus only recently begun: can a platform where only a single company can decide how to deploy new features continue to maintain its relevance going forward?

First off, the article's biggest point, the security sandbox, is not the issue at all with the App Store. The entire internet runs inside of a sandbox.

Developers understand they must play fair on a device that is shared with other developers. I don't think I've seen anyone complain of this anywhere.

However, what Apple has employed its engineering team to do is create and enforce only one path to getting usable apps on the device and that's through installing via the App Store.