Apple must open iPadOS to sideloading within 6 months, EU says

Why are you defending having less ownership over devices that you own? It’s like your employer wants to give you a salary increase but you complain and say you don’t want more money.

Because I should have that choice. Government should not make this decision for me. If it’s important to me that I have devices I fully own, I should seek that out. If I like the products and prices that result from walled-garden business models, I should be able to choose them.

You will have the choice of installing or not installing the software you wish. The "choice" as you're describing it is a symptom of Stockholm Syndrome.

Why are you presenting something that happened as entirely one sided? This move means the end of an enforced, curated walled garden for iOS. This will mean a race to the bottom for iPad apps. Which, of course, means even more ads (since everything must be paid for one way or another). It likely means iPad prices go up even more because now they're forced to support configurations they've never tested.

For me personally, all of the above is the cost and what I get is something I wasn't using and didn't miss (if I want to install things outside the walled garden, I use a my Mac not a mobile device).

I might not want that choice. That requires that I use my brain as I use the device and not do the harmful thing. Or maybe I want to hand the device to my child and be assured that she cannot install software, or use it as a publicly-accessible kiosk and be assured members of the public can’t break it. People who have handed Windows PCs to software illiterates and have to constantly return to eradicate crapware understand this problem.

Also, it costs the vendor to implement support for installing other software - resources the vendor could have spent on features I value, rather than features I don’t want. If only a government didn’t dictate to the vendor what it should do, stripping the vendor and the user of the power to decide for themselves.

Having a choice will not harm you. The "brainpower" required to stick to one appstores is virtually nil, evidenced by the vast majority of android users sticking with only the play store. You don't want other people to have that choice because you're a sycophant for a corporation.

So if Android already offers the choice you seek, why does government need to make Apple offer that choice?

If you don't want that choice you don't have to enable the feature. Installation from Unknown Sources in Android is off by default and requires a user to explicitly go into the settings and find the obscure toggle, which in recent times has proven to be a big enough deterrent that there don't appear to be any recent mass-scale attacks using this vector. On top of that Android and Windows both have fairly comprehensive parental controls, which can disable the entire option of installing non-approved software, so that point is moot.

And the resources needed to make an app installer are not nearly as high as you make it out to be because iOS already has the mechanism to install signed .ipas. All that's needed in theory is a check to disable signing (which they already have implemented in MacOS) and to add a few pages to the Settings app, which surely shouldn't be an issue for a tech company of Apple's size. And if you argue that it might break some spaghetti code then maybe that should be fixed anyways and it's doing them a favour.

Because there are already users with Apple devices and those users might have been locked into using Apple's ecosystem for other reasons (already purchased apps, already owning Apple accessories that don't work with other devices, etc).

As an anecdote myself, the main reason I haven't switched to a Galaxy S24 is because my Airpods work amazingly with my iPhone and Macbook, and my Apple Watch only works with iPhones. But very often I sorely miss having Termux, NewPipe, Tachiyomi, a non-gimped version of GBoard, Syncthing, a sensible launcher, and probably other things that I can't remember off the top of my head. I've decided that I value the Apple system more than the value I get from those apps but this regulation means I get to have my cake and eat it too.

Because Apple is not necessarily entitled to an anticompetitive market just to provide product differentiation.

> That requires that I use my brain

There, you fell into a trap of your own making.

> This move means the end of an enforced, curated walled garden for iOS.

Great! (Imagine having wallgardened Windows computer where you could not install whatever you want).

> This will mean a race to the bottom for iPad apps. Which, of course, means even more ads

iOS store is already at the bottom. Everything is with ads or subscription based. More ads won’t scare me because I won’t use app with any ads. If app offers one time purchase - I’ll buy it if I like it. Examples of apps I bought: Structured, Bobby, ArtStudio, MusicStudio.

> if I want to install things outside the walled garden, I use a my Mac not a mobile device

What if Apple decided you cannot install apps outdide off their App Store on a Mac neither? What would your “Apple-defending” argument be then? It’s NOT a far fetched idea. Microsoft tries it with Windows S Mode and they currently constantly threaten people when they download software from internet about how dangerous it may be, trying to scare people into using their store.

>Great! (Imagine having wallgardened Windows computer where you could not install whatever you want).

Again, you are presenting this as if it has only one side to it. I need a computer that has no walled garden for certain kinds of work. For other kinds of work I'm happy to know I can't break it. Even more important, I'm happy when my parents can't break the one I buy them.

>More ads won’t scare me because I won’t use app with any ads. If app offers one time purchase - I’ll buy it if I like it.

As long as such an option exists. But in a true race to the bottom situation, there may not be anyone willing to invest in developing an app and then selling for a one time purchase. One time purchase is a model that's nearly dead anyway.

>What if Apple decided you cannot install apps outdide off their App Store on a Mac neither?

This I wouldn't accept because I can't. It's a development machine for me. But an iPad is a consumption device, I need the thing to just always work.