Epic celebrates "the end of the Apple Tax" after court win in iOS payments case

In my opinion, every manufacturer of a programmable device should not be allowed to prevent the buyer from reprogramming it.

Well, your opinion is literally illegal.

You're legally (and technically) prohibited from re-programming GPS modules, GSM modules, and probably many stuff in cars as well.

(Actually, maybe contractually when it comes to GPS modules.)

He is saying that it should not be illegal to do so.

And they are saying that it already is, naming a few examples of things that really need to be illegal to reprogram.

GPS et al would be non-functional if everybody could make a jammer.

(That’s not to say that app stores fall even remotely in that category.)

I don't really understand your point in restating this. Someone who says "X should be true" isn't going to be convinced that X should be false by reminding them that X is in fact false.

>GPS et al would be non-functional if everybody could make a jammer.

Then it should be illegal to make a GPS jammer. Making it illegal to reprogram a GPS receiver in any way is unnecessarily broad.

GPS is a bad example, but there are things that pose a physical threat to others that we maybe shouldn't tinker with. Like I think some modern cars are fly-by-wire, so you could stick the accelerator open and disable the breaks and steering. If it's also push-to-start, that's probably not physically connected to the ignition either.

It would be difficult to catch in an inspection if you could reprogram the OEM parts.

I don't care about closed-course cars, though. Do whatever you want to your track/drag car, but cars on the highway should probably have stock software for functional parts.