I really don't care to defend Apple in particular, I think the only Apple product I've ever owned was an old school hard-drive ipod over a decade ago.

It's just that Apple has always been pretty clear that it's going to push whatever arbitrary rules it sees fit to ensure a certain level of quality on its platform and that's par for the course.

I agree that de-facto having to choose between Android on one hand and iphones on the other is not ideal and I'd like more competition in this space, but at least there is an alternative and there are plenty of Android smartphones that can be rooted to give you full access if you so desire. It's not ideal, but I really find it hard to find a flaw in Apple's approach to these things if their objective is to create a somewhat "premium" curated platform.

The problem with that logic is that it doesn’t address how this situation came to be. Apple has been consistent about their product vision since basically day one, and on day one they were the underdog... a drop in the pond. The thing is that over YEARS the market (people) consistently voted with their wallets to validate this vision. That’s why they are what they are now. This has two implications: 1) The reason it’s happening is due to long term choice in the market, i.e. this ecosystem is filling a need that whiners are ignoring, and 2) It ignores the fact that if your stated hopes actually came to pass, someone else would just execute on good hardware with a walled garden (with the resulting more consistent and reliable experience) and become popular AGAIN... after all, that’s what just happened this time.

People will answer this post saying “that’s not true, you can totally have the iOS experience with side-loading/whatever”. Those people also likely believe that the “right communism” just hasn’t been tried yet. If one could actually do this then likely someone would have tried it and succeeded already. Another way to realize that is to understand you are just describing Android, and a perfectly valid existing choice (actually, several choices in a family). Additionally, those people are ignoring the fact that the security/convenience/consistency trade-offs made in any ecosystem do have consequences (positive and negative from varying perspectives).

Which leads us back to the parent: If one wants a different trade-off (which is totally valid and I have happily owned and developed for both systems in the past) then pick a different ecosystem and buy into it. MY personal pie in the sky wish is that people would quit pissing on other people who don’t want to be forced to make THEIR choice. Please take your choices and stop advocating to take MINE away.

> Those people also likely believe that the “right communism” just hasn’t been tried yet.

It’s crazy anyone could believe that, if anything besides Marxist-Leninist or Marxist-Stalinist communism could be possible then of course it would already happened and thus cannot possibly exist. History is over.