I think the Appstore was planned all along, just did not fit in the first release, so they adapted the launching narrative to: "the browser is enough for all 3rd party software".
Vocally public yes… but they wanted to see what the diy scene created, how the power users were using the device and letting them develop the ideas and implement… they would open up and co-opt… boss tools is your drag down for all your settings case in point.
This has been openly admitted to in interviews after the fact.
They 100% did not let the power users and DIY scene exist. It only existed by exploiting OS security vulnerabilities. Every new iOS release required finding a new way to crack it. That's why a lot of people chose Android.
For the first year, Scott Forstall, the Senior Vice President in charge of the iPhone's software, very directly encouraged companies like Pandora[0] to jailbreak iPhones in order to get a head start on app development, protected that community from Steve Jobs' ire, and then used the existence and popularity of jailbreaking to convince Steve that a sandboxed app store would be a better idea than Apple writing every single app for the iPhone[1].
Once native APIs were available, that was true, but before it was even clear that the iPhone would have an app store, they very much did let it flourish.
That is true, but it also means that multiple parties does not solve the problem of the parent to my first comment in this thread which as "You can pick which of the two possibilities, neither of which is even close to your political views, will oppress you for the next 4 years.".
Yes, you get to say what you want, but that doesn’t mean you get what you want. With millions of people all saying something different, nobody gets exactly what they want.
If you install LSP. AFAIR their first versions used some kind of treee/structure for easy search, but they found out that grep was better/similar but with less complications (they now ship some kind of grep).
I think Amazon is doing ok as the cloud where most customers run their LLM. I think a lot of companies are using e.g., Anthropic models on Bedrock so it lives inside their AWS cloud.
It’s better, it’s useful even for those who don’t have a deep knowledge of computers. I’d expect more AI users than programmers, than ms-word users, than excel users.
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