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Comment on Apple's called Android a "massive tracking device" in an internal presentationparent

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The device is a rip off of iPhone/iOS, obviously, but the intent behind them is different.

As a developer I care a lot about intent, too: if we confuse what a program does with what it's supposed to be doing it gets hard to see what bug to fix.

And I also agree that in all those cases Google was motivated by the fear of being locked out. Locked out by open standards, ousted by Apple as they did with facebook, kept in the dark by Mozilla for refusing third party cookies or choosing a competing default search engine.

...Except that those fears in case of Apple were unwarranted. Apple sells "secure hardware" to customers, but is equally happy to sell those customers to Google, or anyone that pays a little to be in their app store. There are limits, but there are also limits to what Android allows.

So in practice, even though their intent might be different, the outcome barely is. I recently discovered about Stafford Beers' POSIWID [1] and I suppose that from that angle, Apple's attribution of Android is basically describing their iPhone just as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

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