You can run pretty much any code on your iPad and iPhone that you want. You do need to pay your 99 bucks or so for a dev account, but you can run anything you can build for your iOS devices that way.
There is no "locked down attitude" with macOS, macOS is as open as ever. You can easily turn off all the malware protection if you want to do that. Many devs do.
The argument here isn't about you running any code you want. The argument is about access to the App Store and forcing Apple to allow anyone to distribute anything. That's something I don't want. I want Apple to distribute high quality apps that I can generally trust not to be riddled with malware, unlike their competitors. Apple has built a high value App Store, and devs want to change that to suit their wishes, and in so doing would turn it into the thing it has managed to keep away from since its beginning.
I think your argument is invalid, because i.e. Epic wouldn't want to share a buildable XCode project of Fortnite with you. The 99$ fee is also unreasonable IMHO.
Also, building complex applications is far from non-trivial; it's typical for me to spend a few hours fiddling with dependencies to get some complicated code running.
As for MacOS, yes on the software side things are still open, but on the hardware side things are closing up (for example, mandatory unbreakable encryption which can make data recovery impossible; I don't have a big problem with that however). Plus I've got no idea how long that will lasts since Apple does whatever it wants.
> I think your argument is invalid, because i.e. Epic wouldn't want to share a buildable XCode project of Fortnite with you.
They could share an installer that downloads and copies their binaries. Not too different from what many game publishers do on PC.
I'm not sure whether the main barrier to people doing this is the $99/year fee, or the friction associated with setting up a developer account, or the perceived (and real) risk of getting malware if customers made a habit of doing this.
But an iPhone in the US already costs $1000 over say 5 years, plus several hundred per year in carrier costs. I could entertain an argument that an extra $99/year to have an effectively unlocked device is not exorbitant or anticompetitive. If you think it is...would you still think so at $49? Or $9? The revenue Apple get from that must be insignificant compared to the app store.
Building a good Xcode project is as simple as pushing the “open in Xcode” button on github and pushing build. Obviously not all projects are that nice.
There is no "locked down attitude" with macOS, macOS is as open as ever. You can easily turn off all the malware protection if you want to do that. Many devs do.
The argument here isn't about you running any code you want. The argument is about access to the App Store and forcing Apple to allow anyone to distribute anything. That's something I don't want. I want Apple to distribute high quality apps that I can generally trust not to be riddled with malware, unlike their competitors. Apple has built a high value App Store, and devs want to change that to suit their wishes, and in so doing would turn it into the thing it has managed to keep away from since its beginning.