Snippet: The EU vs US iPhone debate ☇

Manuel Moreale:

Two people in my RSS feed have recently written posts where they mention good ol John Gruber with his takes on Apple doing Apple things. I’m not going to comment on the two posts—they’re fairly short, you can go read them if you’re interested—but I’m interested in commenting on something at a more macro level related to this stupid EU vs US iPhone phase we’re going through…

I’ve started to feel a bit worn down on this myself. There’s way too much smugness and condescension in the discourse from both sides and it’s appearing that it won’t end. Every time something is perceived as a slight (true or untrue), this argument cycle starts up again. The tone has also gotten way too cynical about new features and products.

I’m all for choices and loosening Apple’s grasp on some things. I do believe that they should be allowed to make tightly-integrated products within an ecosystem if one chooses to take advantage of that. I also believe that powerful pocket computers can do a lot more than Apple chooses to allow and there should be some “advanced mode”-style options. Furthermore, I believe that Spotify as a company is using its home in the EU and its popularity to lodge any and all complaints it can to stay in the news cycle—if you like Spotify and want to use it, by all means do so, but recognize that they’re not entirely blameless.

I know I’m shouting into a bit of a void like Moreale, but it would be nice to come to an understanding. There are way too many Americans who think any kind of regulation is a bad thing because freedom™, while there are a lot of people weighing in from the EU that feel like users in Apple’s ecosystem that enjoy it need “rescuing,” because they don’t realize that Apple is exerting control and power. Neither of these are entirely wrong, it’s just that we often get caught up in painting with broad strokes and fighting. Apple’s ecosystem is quite nice if you’re into that. On the other hand, you should be able to have actual choices other than Apple.

Case in point, I like Safari, but if someone really likes Chrome, they should be able to use real Chrome on their iPhone. If it ends up being a resource hog, Apple can build tattle-tale resources in the operating system to educate the user. Likewise, I also would really prefer the ability to use my own storage for cloud-based device backups and photo storage—I could cut back on iCloud just for sync and the suite of non-storage features.