Back in the 90s and early 2000s people really took privacy seriously. The whole PC culture considered spyware anathema. Anyone around back then can remember the outrage when any piece of software was caught sending any private data anywhere without explicit user authorization.
Then the mobile revolution happened, and mobile basically re-educated and re-conditioned the market to accept surveillance capitalism as the de-facto business model. That was then "back-ported" onto the PC and the web.
Why was mobile built this way? Because the web learned that surveillance and ads is the only working business model. Mobile was built as a surveillance/ad platform first and an app platform second because the web showed that this was economically the way forward.
If users were accustomed to paying for things mobile might have been built like a mini-PC for your pocket with a touch UI but carrying forward the old-school PC culture of "I own my stuff" and "don't spy on me."
If I were given a billion bucks to build an iOS/iPhone competitor that respected user privacy and such, the first thing I'd do would be to actually prohibit free apps in the default App Store. All apps must be paid. I would pair this with really advanced privacy and security controls and a good UI for those and a lot of dark patterns applied in reverse to discourage apps from asking for elevated permissions. Push the market back to "you are the customer" from "you are the product."
The environment of the actual old 'closed-garden' internet-like services (something like CompuServe, AOL or Minitel?) would be informative, but don't have any personal experience with them. If some older people can chime in then that would be interesting.
Back in the 90s and early 2000s people really took privacy seriously. The whole PC culture considered spyware anathema. Anyone around back then can remember the outrage when any piece of software was caught sending any private data anywhere without explicit user authorization.
Then the mobile revolution happened, and mobile basically re-educated and re-conditioned the market to accept surveillance capitalism as the de-facto business model. That was then "back-ported" onto the PC and the web.
Why was mobile built this way? Because the web learned that surveillance and ads is the only working business model. Mobile was built as a surveillance/ad platform first and an app platform second because the web showed that this was economically the way forward.
If users were accustomed to paying for things mobile might have been built like a mini-PC for your pocket with a touch UI but carrying forward the old-school PC culture of "I own my stuff" and "don't spy on me."
If I were given a billion bucks to build an iOS/iPhone competitor that respected user privacy and such, the first thing I'd do would be to actually prohibit free apps in the default App Store. All apps must be paid. I would pair this with really advanced privacy and security controls and a good UI for those and a lot of dark patterns applied in reverse to discourage apps from asking for elevated permissions. Push the market back to "you are the customer" from "you are the product."