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.
"It was the darkest time in history but I did the right thing by maximizing shareholder value."
We don't know what goes on in his little secret heart between him and Jesus but in the consensus reality that we all share he's a Trump supporter because when Trump wants to do something Tim Apple helps. That's what it means to support something. I think somehow we got that definition confused with whether Trump supporters feel good about the fact that they're Trump supporters as though saying "Yeah I did that but I didn't like doing it because it's not who I feel like I am" matters at all to the victims.
that's why they are not challenging this
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/24/dallas-ice-s...
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/defendants-in-prairieland-...
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
Downloading from YouTube is hard, Google keeps trying to kill yt-dlp. You can download manually from your own site using a web browser, but the app wrapper would make it easier to search by metadata ("Find ICE videos from my town") and to make sure you don't accidentally download the same thing twice.
Plus YouTube might take those down for ToS violations sooner or later.
Anyway it doesn't matter - We should have the right to have apps like this and make them available to the general public. If you can't get it from the App Store, and you can't install an apk on Android, and you can't install an alternate store trivially, then it's as good as dead.
That said, any app who's end goal is to doxx federal agents for doing their job is probably not going to last long on the app store.
So what you are saying is that federal police should be anonymous? Like some sort of, secret type of police?
garyfirestorm•4mo ago
ratelimitsteve•4mo ago
01HNNWZ0MV43FF•4mo ago