> Phones weren't "general-purpose computing platforms" for the most part of those 30 years (Gordon Gecko's phone didn't have apps). Nor where they considered as

> Phones weren't "general-purpose computing platforms" for the most part of those 30 years (Gordon Gecko's phone didn't have apps). Nor where they considered as such. We're all well aware of that, but so what? There's nothing inherent to smartphones that requires vendor-locked stores, and indeed some other smartphone platforms allow various levels of so-called "sideloading". > And there were tons of capable of "general purpose computing" popular devices in those 30 years with closed markets or even restricted acccess to the SDKs themselves, almost all game consoles for example. I used the term "general-purpose computing platforms" specifically to contrast with platforms such as game consoles, which are by their very name single-purpose. By the way, I don't accept that vendor lockdown of game consoles is ok either, especially at present. My understanding is that the original motivation was that game consoles were sold at a loss to encourage adoption (which I don't think is true anymore), and thus a cut of the game revenue was required to make the consoles viable. So the console developers and the game developers had a kind of mutual interest in that. In contrast, iPhone was never sold at a loss, always at a massive profit for Apple. 3rd party app developers never needed to sacrifice their revenue to encourage iPhone adoption. It should also be said that Apple itself considered "sideloading" on iPhone before the App Store was introduced, as shown by the emails from the Epic Games trial. Scott Forstall even said that they implemented sideloading in an internal iOS build, which he discussed in an email to Steve Jobs. AFAIK it hasn't been revealed why Apple decided against it ultimately. https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/21043913-2008-may-steve-jobs-scott-forstall-sideloading-was-a-thing/#document/p1 https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/21043913-2008-may-...