When you buy an iPhone, you do so knowing that's what the deal is. iPhones live in a walled garden environment. Sure, that's limiting in some ways, but some of those ways are precisely why your iPhone isn't a virus-ridden, system-crashing wreck.
Neither are my Android devices, nor were my Windows Mobile devices before that.
Also, Apple makes its money by selling generally reliable devices, not your personal data.
Not for lack of trying. Apple really tried to get advertisers to jump on with iAds, which sold targeted slots using our personal data exactly the same way as Google does.
Plus don't get me started on Apple selling banks access to their own customers via the Apple Pay ransom. That's Apple profiting from using their customers as products, along with Apple getting back previously proprietary aggregate purchase info from the banks.
And then there's the way that Apple makes a billion plus each year selling Google direct access to its user's information by way of kickbacks from letting Google be the default search engine.
Apple might not be a prostitute themselves, but they're a heckuva pimp.
Finally, eleven years ago, the Apple App Store didn't exist, and 99-cent apps pre-screened for system compatibility and quality assurance were unheard of.
Actually, many of us were users of big stores like Handango, with vetted apps, many of them free.
This is one of those Steve Jobs ideas that created a whole new industry for software developers. No one could have imagined being able to make a living by writing software where the developer only gets 70 cents per copy sold, but where that software is instantly available for sale on hundreds of millions of devices.
Nor could anyone have imagined that writing a neat mobile app would mean that immediately two dozen copycat apps would show up and blow your chances at making any money. Over half the App Store revenue goes to a handful of huge app producers.
No one could have imagined a platform with a UI so consistent, stable, and user-friendly that consumers would be willing to purchase applications that don't come with instruction books and other documentation.
Actually, we were about to evolve into a platform agnostic Flash or Java ME Polish world. Jobs was rightfully terrified of what would happen once the newly purchased Flash platform was running well, and able to deliver highly interactive apps that ran on
any device. No wonder he bent over backwards to diss it.
Besides, if you really want out of the walled garden, there are other device manufacturers and software developers who more closely follow the old Microsoft model. You can get your apps from wherever, and your device is your device.. but your data will belong to Google.
Since Google does not sell my data, and I can monitor / turn it off, and I get services in return, not a problem.
