I disagree. It’s a pretty equal symbiotic relationship IMO. I keep reading people saying “NO other developer would ever get away with this!” Yes they would- if they had 2.2 billion active users on their platform. This may shock a lot in the tech community, but for some companies the rules don’t apply. Ask Procter and Gamble why Wal-Mart gets better prices than a local grocery. I truly believe Apple needs Facebook at least as much as Facebook needs Apple.

I think you might be underestimating to what degree this behaviour actually violates the sort of standards that Apple sets out for its products. Gaining control over all information on your device, including the content of private messages of teenage users shouldn't fly. Preventing this sort of stuff is one of the reasons people pay a premium for apple products, and Cook has stressed this over the last few years.

On top of this you can add the fact that they basically shipped renamed onavo code, which was already banned from the app store, so this is de facto a violation of Apple's rules.

It's in the long term interest of Apple to not be soft on this stuff, it's not symbiotic.

> Preventing this sort of stuff is one of the reasons people pay a premium for apple products, and Cook has stressed this over the last few years.

The device belongs to the user. It is fully within the user's legal right to install apps on their phone, even if Apple disgrees with those apps.

If you pay Apple $99 a year you can install whatever you want on your own phone only. There are no restrictions on directly installing IPAs with Cydia Impactor or Xcode. You can actually do it for free, but only a few apps at a time and must renew every 7 days.

If you buy an iPhone, without paying Apple 99$ a year, you are also legally allowed to install whatever you want.

If someone ones the phone, it is within their full legal right to do whatever they want with it. No extra fee necessary.

That is your opinion (and I would also appreciate being able to do anything I want with my iPhone), but it's clearly not how Apple sees it.

No, it is not "my opinion".

It is instead how the law works.

Apple tried, and failed, to sue people for doing things with the phones that were legally purchased by the individual.

If you install something Apple doesn't like, it is your full legal right to do so. The courts proved this.

I could argue that Apple is just as responsible for this as Facebook. How can they claim to take privacy seriously if it’s clearly possible for bad actors to get around the rules multiple times! How is Apple any less implicated in this than Facebook was in the CA scandal when a bad actor violated its policies and posed as an academic research project to gain access to user data it then sold to third parties? If you are going to hold Facebook accountable for CA, why does Apple get a pass when it enables third parties access to my data?

> I could argue that Apple is just as responsible for this as Facebook.

And you'd be wrong.

> How can they claim to take privacy seriously if it’s clearly possible for bad actors to get around the rules multiple times!

That's BS. You might as well say: "how can they claim to take security seriously, if it's clearly possible for bad actors to find exploitable bugs in their products multiple times!"

Apple has a tough job, and it won't do it perfectly because no one can. It's bizarre to claim that it's excellent but not perfect performance somehow makes it guilty of the things it's trying to stop.