Notices by Dominic 🇪🇺 🏳️‍🌈 🇺🇦 (riotnrrd@mastodon.social)

@nixCraft Back in the day the saying was “UNIX *is* user-friendly; it’s just really picky about who its friends are”

@Gargron There is also a free developer account. I want just enough of a hurdle that my parents or kids can’t be tricked into installing something nefarious.

And on the latter point, I disagree: especially past the one million user threshold, I think it’s reasonable for Apple to require payment. It may not be how you would like them to monetise their platform, but it’s how they have built their business. As a user, I like how this discourages abusive “freemium” business models.

@Gargron Yeah, as I said down-thread, a developer mode that allowed sideloading would work for me. The concern would be that if Apple made it too easy, the mechanism would be abused by Meta/Google/Epic/etc to inject their abusive apps. I’d rather err on the side of that protection, even if philosophically I agree with you.

I see this sort of argument from developers a lot, but they need to understand users’ perspective. One of the things we like about iOS is the increased trust we have that apps won’t do bad things. This trust is also good for developers because users are willing to try out apps much more freely. The alternative is to go back to the bad old days of Windows, where it was best practice just to blow the OS away every 6 months to get rid of accumulated cruft.

From: @Gargron
https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/111824854511299605

@nixCraft Just no. I don’t want to come off all techno-libertarian, but I can’t even count the problems with this proposal — and nobody who has paid attention to the evolution of real-name policies on social media should need to think very long before running away screaming from any such suggestion. Fortunately, plenty of nations already have digital ID systems that work, so there will be balkanised facts on the ground long before a unified worldwide system can get going.