China forced Apple to remove any app where the developer isn’t registered in China. Meaning they asked Apple to remove 95% of the apps and games available in the App Store.
Poor iPhone users, basically they will get a “wechat handheld” and that’s it…
I look forward to a day where third party app stores are allowed to exist on iOS, should it ever come.
Corporate monopoly over a device (walled garden) means that a government authority has only one entity they need to “convince” to have full control over it.
We are in an Information War and I don’t see enough peer to peer friendships being made between The People of China and everyday people in USA, South America, Africa, North America, Europe, Australia, etc.
I don’t see China people on GitHub and YouTube like I did 5 years ago. Maybe the real war is power over technology and all of humanity isn’t winning. Isn’t that another way to interpret Climate Change, an education mistake on a global scale? Advertising and marketing defeating science teachers? The love for the singe-passenger automobile 9 to 5 commute job - exceeding the reality of global climate physics?
Like they say in The Orville - Dolly Parton was a hero! she basically turned out to be a great teacher, like Mr. Rogers on the true problems of childhood. 9 to 5 was kind of like showing children what your divorced single mother was having to go through. Not to say that fit the relationships in the film itself, but the office environment of white collar world. The technology of the Office Workplace and the era of typewriters as business machines. EDIT: It’s a real War: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6Do6VWUxyg
A problem I have with Dolly Parton is that her partner company, Herschend Enterprises, bought the Vancouver Aquarium during the pandemic, and tried to strangle the marine rescue component of the aquarium to death.
She might be wholesome but the businesses she runs with aren’t.
Apple is to blame too. They created a device that gives them so much power to make such lockdowns possible in the first place. The only proper response from Apple should be “we would really like to do it, but we can’t be sure users won’t install those apps outside of our store”.
Something like that should not be possible with universal computing devices. This is why freedom to install any OS you want on mobile devices is more important than ever.
This is why I never had anything more than an original ipod classic. Android let’s you do whatever the fuck you want with your own device. Don’t like having Google all over your phone? You can install roms with no Google services and use other app stores.
Eh, not all android devices, unfortunately. Mine does not have the ability to unlock the bootloader. ;c
But, that wasn’t your only choice for a device. Android runs on basically anything and you have plenty of options for devices that let you do what you want with it.
Basically, the bootloader being locked is a manufacturer problem and not an android problem. Buy a different phone, smartphones have fully matured at this point. Grab a pixel 7 or 7 pro for a couple of hundred bucks and make that device your biotch.
Web is the universal open platform, and China just blocks it with a firewall 🤷♂️.
If you have universal devices Web cannot be blocked at all, you can install different browser or share websites via physical media, you can fit whole Wikipedia on SD Card. Same with overall computer networks, you can run a cable to your neighbor, unless you want to do it on a mass scale.
But I think you mean the Internet (please, don’t confuse Web and Internet), which is in fact very limited on ISPs side.
This is the difference. While with computers you can only censor what is done by them on public network (cables on the street, radio, etc.), with jail like iPhone you can also censor what is happening on the device itself. Those devices are dangerous and Apple made a big mistreatment for the world by creating iPhone like that.
You need to look at this from a practical standpoint.
The vast majority of phone apps are not local-only. They are merely the frontend to services provided by some company - e.g. a Reddit app is really about Reddit the service, a food delivery app is about the service, not the locally running code, etc.
Apple controls what users can and cannot install on devices made by them, but the web and things like PWA are an alternative that would be viable for some portion of these.
You can make a web app that can be added as an icon on the homescreen, can access the camera, location, notifications, storage, authentication (e.g. require fingerprint), etc. It still can’t do everything native apps can do, but it would be good enough for a good portion of popular apps.
But in China, that is not really possible without the government’s approval either, because China requires the same kind of registration and an ICP license for websites, otherwise things will get blocked. Which, even if you could install anything you want on a device, would effectively limit you to purely local-only apps anyway.
What’s stopping China from saying - “if you want to sell iPhones in China, disable sideloading”?
The only thing stopping them is their own incompetency. Truly a thin wall, but as their older generations start dying off we’ll see that wall broken down.
Nothing. The point is first, they shouldn’t be able to do it for devices already sold.
Second, Apple is the one developing technologies to make phones jails even without goverment looking. If Apple hadn’t done it for past years and China would force them now, then still next couple of generations of devices would be trivial to jailbrake, beacuse those locks won’t be as mature.
VPN?
Sadly doesn’t seem like it’ll help
Last month, China announced it would require an ICP license in order for apps to be listed in all mobile app stores. Now, as Apple honors the regulation, it closes a loophole that had let iPhone users in China download and, with a VPN, use apps that the government there has blocked for most or all of the country, like WhatsApp, Facebook, and YouTube.
