> Only if the technology stagnates (or other conditions where a capital advantage proves useless). That's assuming both that defending requires the same level

> Only if the technology stagnates (or other conditions where a capital advantage proves useless). That's assuming both that defending requires the same level of resources as attacking and that the company trying to keep the changes a secret has a capital advantage. The current attempts to do these things are performed by multibillion dollar corporations and then cracked by individual teenagers, and now you're adding the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Samsung, etc. to the list of attackers. Apple is currently slightly bigger than any one of them but certainly not all of them put together and all of the teenagers and foreign governments in the world. > Some people might. Most wouldn’t. Certainly not the vast majority of the people willing to pay for apps and hence the market for devs. Samsung is a large conglomerate with in-house experience making modern electronics down to having their own fabs and making their own CPUs and flash. They would hand an iPhone to their techs, tell them to extract the code and then offer it as a checkbox to install iOS when you buy one of their phones. Nobody would choose that over the same phone with Android? For that matter Apple would be attempting to use the same system to stop people from copying apps, but then competitors would do the same thing there, and then who is buying an iPhone that tries to charge you for apps that everyone else has extracted and made available for free?