Imagine an alternate reality where Steve Jobs never budged on allowing apps on the iPhone, but allowed people to jailbreak their phones as long as they took responsibility for it (like how some Chromebooks have a dev mode).
You'd have tons of fun little apps, and almost no #enshittification of the app store. You'd also have a lot of great PWAs for those who never wanted to jailbreak their phones.
I don't miss the iPhone, but I absolutely miss the golden era (2008-2013ish) of the #iPhone.
The #enshittification absolutely would still have happened without the App Store, and probably way worse. Do you remember Download(dot)com? Do you remember how literally every software product you wanted to install (whether downloaded or on physical media, purchased or not) tried to shove any number of dozens of adware/crapware software into you background apps?
@ianthetechie@1dalm@RL_Dane the overall stability of the operating system would also be worse. Do you remember when people were jailbreaking iPhones? They were notoriously unstable.
My thinking is that most people would just use PWAs and not jailbreak. And those that jailbroke would probably be using FOSS apps like f-droid, not crazy crap.
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