I think it's not properly appreciated that Apple fully endorses all of this. For two reasons: (1) the provision of the output of billions of dollars of developer time to their users for no up front cost (made back via ads) is super valuable to their platform; and (2) they uniquely could stop this (at the price of devastating their app store), but choose not to.
In light of that, perhaps reevaluate their ATT efforts as far less about meaningful privacy and far more about stealing $10B a year or so from Facebook.
>I think it's not properly appreciated that Apple fully endorses all of this. [...] they uniquely could stop this (at the price of devastating their app store), but choose not to.
A perfectly privacy respecting app store isn't going to do any good if it doesn't have any apps. Just look at f-droid. Most (all?) of the apps there might be privacy respecting, but good luck getting any of the popular apps (eg. facebook, tiktok, google maps) on there.
>In light of that, perhaps reevaluate their ATT efforts as far less about meaningful privacy and far more about stealing $10B a year or so from Facebook.
What would make you think Apple's pro-privacy changes aren't "about stealing $10B a year or so from Facebook"? At least some people are willing to pay for more privacy, and pro-changes hurts advertisers, so basically any pro-privacy change can be construed as "less about meaningful privacy and far more about stealing".
F-Droid will never have popular apps because it requires them to be open source. In fact F-Droid does the build for you, generating reproducible builds and avoiding the risk of adding trackers to the binary that aren't actually in the source code. With F-Droid the code you see is what you get.
> A perfectly privacy respecting app store isn't going to do any good if it doesn't have any apps.
40 years ago apps were sold on floppy disks. 30 years ago they were sold on CD-ROMs. 20 years ago, DVDs.
Online-only apps are a recent thing. A privacy respecting app store certainly can be a thing. Apps being blocked or banned from stores for choosing to not respect your privacy is a good thing.
>Online-only apps are a recent thing. A privacy respecting app store certainly can be a thing.
I'm not sure you're trying say. I specifically acknowledged the existence of f-droid as a "privacy respecting app store" in the quoted comment.
>Apps choosing to not respect your privacy, and being blocked or banned from stores, is a good thing.
"a good thing" doesn't mean much when most people haven't even heard of your app store, and are missing out on all the popular apps that people want. Idealism doesn't mean much when nobody is using it. Apple might not be the paragon of privacy, but they had a greater impact on user privacy than f-droid ever will. To reiterate OP's point: what's the point of having a perfectly private OS and app store, when there's no apps for it, and your normie friends/relatives are going to sell you out anyways by uploading their entire contact list and photos (both with you in it) to google and meta?
In light of that, perhaps reevaluate their ATT efforts as far less about meaningful privacy and far more about stealing $10B a year or so from Facebook.