Yes, and I think that the benefits gained by the walled garden are a big part of the iPhone's popularity. It's simple, it works, the scams are kept to a minimum, and it's a consistent, well-integrated experience. Those are all true of iPhones because of the walled garden; Android can't boast any of that.
99% of Android users never install an app from outside the app store either, Apple just does a better job filtering scams etc. out of their app store. If Google did a better job of curation it would be a comparable experience for the overwhelming majority of users.
The ability to install 3rd party apps has effectively zero effect on how well Apple curates their official app store.
All you're actually describing is that there's way less pressure for apps on the Google side to be as high quality as the Apple stuff. (Given the existence of the store alternatives, even if Google did enforce higher quality, those apps have plenty of other options to get on user's phones.) And that's kinda par for the course for the level of marketing-savvy that Google exhibits.
> The ability to install 3rd party apps has effectively zero effect on how well Apple curates their official app store.
You're missing the forest for the trees. Apple offers a curated environment largely through the curation of the app store. That curated environment is massively valuable to the average user. That's the asset Apple is trying to protect.
> You're missing the forest for the trees. Apple offers a curated environment largely through the curation of the app store. That curated environment is massively valuable to the average user. That's the asset Apple is trying to protect.
I am a big proponent of curation and one of the reason I'm an apple user is the high number of quality apps on the platform. But after encountering the apple publication process, it definitely feels like censorship and the lack of other options, even for applications I wrote, is stifling. I think it's better to encourage computer literacy than pretend that the outside world just does not exist (especially when there are so many scamming schemes on the app store).
Yeah, but Apple isn't hurting for devs or apps. It sucks for us trying to make apps, but that's our problem and it's not the actual principle being argued here. I do think it's telling though, that our motivation for opening up the app store is orthoganal to the justification being supplied.
The consistent well integrated experience is mainly from apple controlling the entire technology stack, rather than the App Store being closed. People buy macs for the same reason but they aren’t walled gardens.
You are free to think what you like but absent evidence, it's just more claim chowder.
My claim chowder: I have never once in my life heard an iPhone user say to me "I'm sure glad I can't turn on a buried setting and install apps from the web like Android users" or anything remotely like that, young or old.
I have heard a bunch of kids on this forum with trumped up claims about poor senior citizens uncle or granny who can't be trusted with this because they'll be socially engineered into digging into their iOS settings, flipping switches with scary warnings, then visiting a random scary website and downloading a package, and then agreeing through install dialogs all to get an app on their phone so the crook can steal their bank info.
The truth is, to anyone whose thought about it for more than a minute, that same scammer will literally just call up such an exceedingly naive person on the phone part of that smartphone and ask tech illiterate grandpa directly for his bank credentials and a claim that the crook's from the bank will work far more often than getting the old man to operate his smartphone in such a sophisticated and confusing way to get that malware installed. And he's not gonna find that setting and accidentally stumble through all the warnings unless he's being socially engineered so the whole idea is a silly edge case.
More anecdata: I've played with my parents' Android phones every couple years when visiting them over the last 12 or 13 years, they were born in 1945, and their phones are always in better shape than mine, with fewer apps installed, and a more organized set of app launchers than I have. And neither has enable a third party app store despite my making them fully aware of the possibility on several occasions. This infantalizing of old people is a tired trope that gets dragged out far too often on HN. The people born before every office worker in the country had a computer, they're all dead. The Boomers hitting 80 years old today, they were working on Windows 7 before retiring. Blaming them for your resistance to change is silly and sad. That Boomer's parents, if they're still alive at about 100 (my grandma made it that long) those people had Windows too, it was Windows 3.1 but they know what "installing" something means because guess what, you could install programs on Windows 3.1 and you had to do it without the safety of an app store or even basic sandboxing. Enough with the "think of the seniors" trope, it's far worse than "think of the children" who haven't lived through computers for many many decades yet.
Here's the thing - someone who is familiar with the process of figuring out what about a 'thing' represents the actual 'value to the user' (i.e. marketing) would find all this kinda self-evident.
> My claim chowder: I have never once in my life heard an iPhone user say to me "I'm sure glad I can't turn on a buried setting and install apps from the web like Android users" or anything remotely like that, young or old.
Of course they wouldn't say that - most people don't care enough.
