Apple's side-loading ban creates ideal conditions for authorities to compromise citizen's privacy via censorship, VPN bans, etc.
Ultimately, having one all powerful gatekeeper is not secure, because that gatekeeper can get compromised or impose arbitrary restrictions for commercial/ideological reasons (such as Apples anti-sex policies)
>Apple's side-loading ban creates ideal conditions for authorities to compromise citizen's privacy via censorship, VPN bans, etc.
I can't really parse that. iOS being locked down and having strong system security prevents censorship because it prevents authorities getting access to your data. How on earth can opening that up and providing backdoors to the system prevent censorship?
The whole reason for the VPN ban is precisely because Apple's system security is so tight that eavesdropping on the wire is the only way the authorities can get at user communications. This criticism makes no sense.
Ultimately, your expectations of how gate keeping should pan out fail to match actual reality. iOS is vastly more secure that it's open competitors, so much so that it isn't even remotely close. I don't know how you can post that with a straight face, but I suppose ideology is a powerful force.
>iOS being locked down and having strong system security prevents censorship because it prevents authorities getting access to your data.
This is completely false. Owning a secure device does not help you get around censorship at all unless you can also install a good VPN (or similar).
>I don't know how you can post that with a straight face, but I suppose ideology is a powerful force.
What ideology would that be? I am an iOS user myself and superior security and privacy is one of the reasons for it. But that doesn't make me blind to the negative side-effects of Apple's approach.
Being easily co-opted by governments for censorship purposes is undeniably one of those negative side-effects.
You don’t really need a good vpn though. Any communications app with end to end encryption such as Signal also works fine. Except if you can’t trust the platform, because then your data can be accessed anyway. You have to be able to trust both the system and the application, either one on its own isn’t good enough.
As for VPNs, those are banned in China for all phones, not just iOS. If a government bans this or requires that, it’s really game over for device or application vendors. They really don’t have any choice but to obey the law, or walk away. Having a closed or open architecture doesn’t make much difference to that. However it still makes a difference in other aspects of security so it’s still a differentiator.
Ok maybe I’m wrong about ideology. But you seem to be arguing that closed systems like iOS lead to worse security, but then say you prefer iOS because of it’s superior security? I’m sorry, I really must be missing something.
You do need a VPN for access to a lot of things in countries like China, but that's beside the point because governments can order Apple to take down any app, including end-to-end encrypted messaging apps.
>As for VPNs, those are banned in China for all phones, not just iOS
But what makes the ban effective on iOS as opposed to Android is Apple's side-loading ban. That's my point.
>But you seem to be arguing that closed systems like iOS lead to worse security, but then say you prefer iOS because of it’s superior security? I’m sorry, I really must be missing something
What you may be missing is that I don't live in a country that blocks wikipedia or porn sites and tells Apple to take down VPNs and end-to-end encrypted messaging apps (yet). That could change though.
Ultimately, having one all powerful gatekeeper is not secure, because that gatekeeper can get compromised or impose arbitrary restrictions for commercial/ideological reasons (such as Apples anti-sex policies)