How Apple can fight the tyranny of ‘choice’

Apple’s iPhone and App Store turned the mobile phone industry upside down, created the smartphone generation, and set the scene for developer success that did not exist before, all while working to protect privacy and security.

No wonder Apple’s enemies want to break all that the company has achieved. No wonder they hope to feast on the crumbs left behind. The regulators seem to want to let them do just that, but what choice will consumers be given as they endure the tyranny of choice? 

We know the direction things are heading in. 

Where we are going

Apple will be forced to open up its App Store, to accept sideloading from outside of its curated experience, and to open up some of its APIs and device features in the name of competition.

But, as the company has argued, some of these moves can, may, or will erode platform security, which is something many of its customers expect from its products. Surely those customers deserve to keep to that choice, too? 

However, the regulators don’t seem to see it that way, insisting on changes to Apple’s iPhone platform that, quite frankly, threaten to turn it into the kind of flimsy, compromised beast we might have had if Windows had won the mobile war.

Luckily, Windows failed to win that war.

That’s not to say that all the arguments to force Apple to open up are flimsy. Apple does have huge market power, it can enter new markets fairly easily, and it seems appropriate to find ways to create new opportunities across its platforms.

But should those opportunities replace the existing privacy and security Apple’s customers luxuriate in today? Surely that privacy and security is also a choice.

Privacy and security should be an option

Perhaps there is a way Apple can provide both things: the essential curated experience hundreds of millions of us already love, and the more open platform its competitors seek to draw profits from. Perhaps it’s time to fork the platform. 

Think about it this way — it seems the introduction of support for third-party app stores and so on is being forced on Apple as a universal constraint. But should it be? Shouldn’t Apple’s customers have the right to choose which way to go? 

Many may decide to work with third-party app stores so they can use alternative billing systems and make that bloke from Epic Games even richer, but many others may never, ever want to play those games and may instead want to remain entirely in Apple’s so-called “walled garden.” Why shouldn’t they be able to?

What about giving people choice?

An interesting addition over the last 12 months on iOS has been a new and simpler way to run iOS beta software on your device. You can now do so with the flick of a switch.

What if Apple used that same system to deliver two breeds of its standard operating system? The first would be the iOS we all love and use today, though likely with the addition of new APIs to make some functions (such as mobile payments) more competitive; the second might be a more open version of iOS, equipped with support for external stores, payment systems, and all the other things people with lots of money seem to get angry about when it comes to Apple’s systems. 

That’s a compromise, perhaps, but it means Apple’s customers could vote with their own fingers. They could choose to join life outside the garden or stay within it. That is, after all, a choice they should be able to make. For many users, it is the choice they already took when they selected Apple’s platforms.

Some people need security more than they need Fortnite

It’s also a choice many enterprise users of Apple products want to make. 

Particularly in regulated industries, they need to ensure the privacy and security of sometimes highly sensitive data. To do so they need — they are actually legally required — to ensure every possible protection is in place.

Choosing Apple’s hard-as-nails walled garden iOS would be the option they took with their managed devices. People regularly accessing your medical data on a device shouldn’t be installing software that may or may not be completely safe from third-party stores that may or may not be what they seem. Many companies forbid the use of all kinds of device features using MDM controls, and taking the choice to remain all-in on Apple’s model is a choice they probably want to keep.

Maybe there’s another way

Perhaps Apple is thinking in the same way, particularly following the shock resignation of Matt Fischer, Apple’s Worldwide head of the App Store and the decision to split those operations into two segments: one to handle the App Store as is, the other to handle incoming alternative distribution systems. I don’t know if Apple is thinking in this direction; I’m merely speculating that it could be.

If it were, then it would provide a choice that lets people currently using iPhones retain the right to keep things as they are, rather than being forced to open up because a smattering of well-connected millionaires want to make money out of their insecurity. A lot of people — customers, developers and not just Apple — have already made a great deal of money while also protecting their security, after all. 

If Apple moves in that direction, the usual chorus of voices, amplified by a click-bait-hungry media, will castigate the company for the new buzz word of “malicious compliance.” But the question, at least when it comes to customers happy with the status quo, is why should they be forced to accept an openness they neither want nor need?

At least make it an opt-out option.

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