I just think back to before the iPhone. If you wanted something on your phone, it was still a walled garden, just one that the carriers put up. A new ringtone would cost you, and you’d be charged monthly for access to using gps through your phone.
By strong arming carriers Apple took this revenue to themselves which had the paradoxical effect of opening things up from where they were before. Without this, there’s no doubt you’d be using a Verizon App Store and I’d have AT&T and governments would see no need to take action because there was carrier competition.
Is being able to install whatever you want on your phone, a good thing? Undoubtedly, but we wouldn’t have tasted this opportunity without Apple’s move to take App Sales in house. We also have to be mindful of the devil we don’t know. if you’re OSS you see sideloading as blissfully unchaining your device, but if you’re an Apple competitor you see it as a chance to do everything you were forbidden to.
Depends on the phone. On a Symbian, you just downloaded a SIS file; later versions required code signing. Afaik, WinCE and Palm phones were similar. I had some java capable feature phones that were similar, put together a jad file and hope that write once, run everywhere works (I remember my first phone had some features that used a J2ME standard interface exactly backwards; turn on backlight would turn it off, and vice versa). I didn't even select those two phones for their openness, I just had them and tried to write/run code and it was available.
Certainly, the carriers had stores, but it's not like they had software I wanted to run.
By strong arming carriers Apple took this revenue to themselves which had the paradoxical effect of opening things up from where they were before. Without this, there’s no doubt you’d be using a Verizon App Store and I’d have AT&T and governments would see no need to take action because there was carrier competition.
Is being able to install whatever you want on your phone, a good thing? Undoubtedly, but we wouldn’t have tasted this opportunity without Apple’s move to take App Sales in house. We also have to be mindful of the devil we don’t know. if you’re OSS you see sideloading as blissfully unchaining your device, but if you’re an Apple competitor you see it as a chance to do everything you were forbidden to.