Your Move, iPad
&gt; Introduce Gatekeeper and app notarization for iOS. The process of side-loading apps should not be as simple as downloading them from the App Store. Bury it in Settings, make it slightly convoluted, whatever: just have an officially-sanctioned way of doing it.<p>&gt; Ruthlessly purge the App Store Guidelines of anything that prevents the iPad from serving as a development machine. Every kind of development from web to games should be possible on an iPad. And speaking of games—emulators should be allowed, too.<p>No.<p>I am uncertain and unclear why a single company should have a monopoly on what we can and can&#x27;t install on a general-purpose computational device. When the iPhone was first launched, it was launched into a world where carriers controlled what could be installed on phones due to a combination of contracts and the difficulty of developing for the environment. The &quot;computers&quot; in the early smartphones were, essentially, embedded systems with a rudimentary operating system on top. You couldn&#x27;t do much of anything with them, so most people didn&#x27;t try.<p>Until Apple came along and brought OS X to the iPhone, that was the original promise. iOS was OS X on a phone, with all the great &quot;APIs&quot; and features that it indicated. However, Jobs wanted to keep it locked down with web apps being the only way out. AT&amp;T were pleased with that arrangement and gave them a good deal.<p>iPhone was a hit, and Apple had a crisis. They wanted to open up the phone to devs. Jobs said no. Jobs kept saying no until the App Store was created as a sort of compromise. In hindsight, this compromise ended up being a spigot of &quot;free&quot; cash, giving Apple the ability to control 30% of all revenue flowing through 1 Billion installed devices. If the average owner spends only $10&#x2F;yr, Apple makes $3Bn per year, essentially for &quot;free&quot; on top of the generous profit margins of their devices and services.<p>Smartphones have grown up since then. Moore&#x27;s law has turned embedded machines into full-fledged computers, with the ability to rival desktops. And yet we&#x27;re still stuck in this paradigm. Why?<p>Why should we accept this as the way it should be?<p>It hurts people like Becky and me. For smaller, indie businesses, 15% to 30% of your revenue going to a cut on a platform with little-to-no-oversight and extensive content restrictions means that several things are already off the table, and small businesses have to sell a third more to make the same amount.<p>It hurts the users. An adult can&#x27;t download and enjoy age-appropriate games on their phone because Apple says so.<p>If they live in an oppressive regime, they can&#x27;t use their phone for dissent because Apple lets their oppressors say so.<p>Programmers and artists can&#x27;t use their tools the way they want on computers they have bought and owned because Apple says so.<p>Consumers with an artistic streak can&#x27;t customize their phones because Apple says so.<p>iOS users get a degraded experience for common apps because Apple says so.<p>Apple jealously gatekeeps features, making several iOS apps either one or two updates behind their Android counterparts, or lacking in feature parity.<p>Why should we - the users, creators, developers, and artists - pay a tax to a company that is acting against our interest and is locking up a computer we&#x27;ve bought with our hard-earned money? Why should we live in a world where Becky has to give 30% of her income to Apple as tithe? And I have to live with what little Apple allows into the store?<p>Why should my creativity be limited by some corporate jockey sitting in Cupertino?<p>So, No.<p>We need to dream bigger. We need to set these computers free.