Lessons From San Bernardino and ICEBlock

There's a lot of fear-mongering about the risks, however academic and unproven, to side-loading. So far we have yet to see anything substantial Materialize. Don't like it, go to Android is the most common refrain. There's also a compelling if uninformed belief Apple somehow has cultivated some mythic and unique lion's share of safety with a walled-garden approach. That term alone is used by Apple-faithful not in any pejorative meaning of the word, but in a locked-eyes, dead-serious stare-you-in-the-face fervor. Meanwhile that faith is misplaced as can plainly be seen by the myriad scam apps that are slowly (if ever) removed because they net the company serious cash. The chickens have come home to roost but the cognitive dissonance is too much to bear for many fans. I'm sure the silence will be largely deafening in those circles. For everyone else that sees the long game play out, you have to wonder what if any tipping-point would ever compel people towards a mea-culpa. Or is it just that the Internet has thoroughly insulated people to constructive criticism and opposing points of view that most people occupy an echo chamber that serves as an unintentional, propagandistic indoctrination arm.

Ironically, the DMA, with the mandated availability of third-party app stores, didn't address the kill switch issue.
Because of notarization, Apple can still wipe any app, even those outside of the official app store.
To my knowledge, the only way for a developer to be immune to that kill switch is by offering a web app.
Funnily enough, Steve Jobs initially thought it would be the main way third-party "apps" would be distributed on the first iPhone.

The real tragedy and the reason the status quo is so hard to break is that both sides of the debate are right to some extent: while having a master kill switch is wholly undesirable for all the excellent reasons that MJTsai and others have pointed out, countless users will install anything on their devices.

The (very) relative security of smartphones has allowed them to become indispensable devices. An entire economy relies on the fact that is is not utterly suicidal for the average, non-technical user to put random games, dating apps, ID cards, and banking apps onto the same device. The worlds of commerce and finance expect every person on this planet to possess a device that is both full of junk and reasonably secure, even if it is never consciously secured or updated.

Can this be achieved with extreme sandboxing? Sure! But then comes the EU with demands for extreme interoperability — which, again, are not ideologically wrong at all, but ignore all of the above. Plus, extreme sandboxing is extremely limiting, as early versions of iOS and iPadOS showed: there is only so much one can do (or sell) on a device with no accessible filesystem, no inter-app communication, etc.

Since we cannot have watertight sandboxing, both for legal and technical reasons, and since we cannot under-estimate the crazy things that will happen across billions and billions of smartphones, I understand why Apple and Google are reluctant to let their grip go. A kill switch is a last resort, but last resorts are good to have at this scale. (Remember when Apple remotely un-installed parts of the Zoom client from every Mac? That was both a terrifying capability and a very welcome development.)

Remember, we on the Internet write about replacing our phones every year, even if we do not necessarily do so. A large number of commentators run iOS betas as a matter of course. In the “real world,” people go into stores every day to buy fresh, unopened devices that run already obsolete versions of their operating systems and will never be updated. This is why companies like Meta support positively ancient versions of Android and iOS: “real people” do use them for years after the tech world has moved on. And don’t let’s get started on “environmentally responsible” second- or third-hand devices that have been “refreshed” in shady shops. Good for mother earth they certainly are, but secure? Hell no.

Yes, things more or less work on computers and user education would allow a great deal more flexibility, but the whole point of the smartphone is that it started life as an “appliance” the Disneys, Banks of America, and DMVs of this world could trust by default to faithfully spy on you and protect their Intellectual Properties. Turning smartphones into general-purpose computing devices would require a fundamental shift in how users and corporations alike think about them.

My hope is that Apple and Google will, at some future point, realise they have backed themselves into a legal corner. With the US, the EU, China, Russia, India, and other large markets each demanding conflicting and contradictory capabilities, it will, at some point, become easier and cheaper for them to just wash their hands of the whole problem, like they do with computers. Maintaining a kill switch may well, with a bit of luck, become economically and politically unfeasible, but this won’t happen overnight. It will take a lot — a lot! — of wasted development time and a lot — a lot! — of random, politically motivated fines for the App Store or the Play Store to stop making economic sense.

A lot of the talk about installing apps being too dangerous makes it sound like we are all running Windows XP unpatched.

Apple are the East India Company of our time.