Why so many people fail to infer the obvious answer here -- that Cook is a Trump-supporting Republican -- boggles my mind.
And not that it really matters, but I say this as a longtime Apple user and employee.
Tim Cook and the rest of the billionaire class do exactly what they want to do politically.
that's why they are not challenging this
In the case of this application, the circle of users may shift more towards technically savvy.
If we assume this to be true, I could see how it may make sense to provide the application as a sideloadable APK or as open source so that it can be compiled and installed using TestFlight. Its unfortunate that we've reached the point that users can't even run software on their own computing devices.
I wonder if things continue to get bad will we start to see a greater number of people refraining from installing updates to their devices just because prior versions allow more things like jailbreaks. Apple is burning their reputation with these moves so it may happen.
I highly doubt there will be any noticeable backlash against Apple for removing ICEBlock, sans negative online commentary (which to be fair isn't exactly zero, but doesn't have enough noticeable effect by itself).
No not just IceBlock but overall increasing the blocking of users from running the software that they want to run.
In the past we've just had niche applications blocked (emulators, some porn applications and apps maybe hackers would use).
Everything else was fair game to be in the app store. Now that semi-mainstream applications are getting banned, it encourages more people to find ways to get the software they want to run.
Apple defined ICE as a "protected class" in blocking anti-ICE apps
garyfirestorm•3h ago
ratelimitsteve•2h ago