&gt; I think his fears have come true to some extent in iOS, but knowing what we know now about government surveillance of everybody, it may no longer seem like too great a price to pay.<p>We&#x27;re already paying that price, essentially. An iPhone won&#x27;t run arbitrary code, a replacement OS, or accept code from arbitrary sources. It&#x27;s already an exclusively vendor-curated platform. If you&#x27;re already going to buy into that model, I don&#x27;t see the point in not going for the greatest amount of protection that you can get. (OK, yes, a dev can compile their own code and push it to their own device. I&#x27;m actually not sure why I don&#x27;t hear about this happening more often as a way to run &quot;unacceptable&quot; programs on iOS devices).