So basically you'll just be moving the goalposts until you prove Apple is the only innovative company around? Right.

The software that is Windows-only isn't the most successful stuff that everybody has heard of (e.g. Office, Adobe, Chrome), that's the stuff available for both because it has enough demand to justify development even for smaller platforms.

The Windows-only applications are the ones with a niche. It's the control application for some piece of industrial equipment, or some line-of-business application, and then you need Windows because you have that equipment or you're in that line of business. And it's the same thing for Android. They can only justify development for one platform so they choose the most popular one. They're just not apps you'll have heard of if you aren't in that niche.

It's even moreso for Android because many types of applications are prohibited by Apple. Like what's the best BitTorrent app for iPhone? File manager? Remote desktop? Screen recording?

Even the popular apps that exist on both platforms aren't as good on iOS. Firefox has to use Safari under the hood. Maybe that doesn't matter to you. Until the "Firefox" you want to run is Tor Browser, which is designed to resist client fingerprinting in ways that Safari isn't, and then the inability to use that on iOS compromises your security. Similarly, the way Signal does backups on Android (i.e. with its characteristically diligent security properties) isn't allowed on iOS, so it doesn't support backups on iOS at all. So even for apps that exist on both, on iOS they're not as good.

There are plenty of Remote Desktop apps for the iPhone. There are also screen recording apps for the iPhone - there is an API for it. It’s used by Zoom.

What policies are in place that don’t allow Signal to do backups using its own service - something that other apps do?

And seeing how Signal does “backups”. It’s not exactly user friendly (https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...)

And you’re worried about “security” but you want a File Browser to have unfettered access to your data? It’s a feature that third party apps can only access files outside of their own sandbox that you explicitly give them permission to.

No company wants to deal with the hassle and legality of bit torrent. Most people aren’t using to “download Linux ISOs”. I’m definitely not.

But before as far as bit torrent, my use case is starting and downloading things on my computer from my phone and adding them to my Plex library. I can do that by pairing my mobile browser to Vuze and going to remote.vuze.com.

There are plenty of Windows only consumer apps - especially games. Even from Microsoft, Access and Publisher are Windows only and are included with Office 365.

counterpoint: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.delphicode...

Not screen sharing, something equivalent to Windows Remote Desktop Services or X11 forwarding, where your device acts as a thin client for an application running on a remote server. It's expressly prohibited by the Apple guidelines, presumably because any such client would allow someone to compete with the app store by using remote apps. But it's also useful for other things, like keeping all your data on your company's trusted servers instead of on a device that could be lost or stolen.

> What policies are in place that don’t allow Signal to do backups using its own service - something that other apps do?

It doesn't use a service because the entire point is to not have all your data in the hands of a third party service. On Android it stores the backup in the filesystem which you copy off the device via USB.

> And you’re worried about “security” but you want a File Browser to have unfettered access to your data? It’s a feature that third party apps can only access files outside of their own sandbox that you explicitly give them permission to.

"It's not a bug, it's a feature!"

There should obviously be a permission required to do that, but if the user wants to use the app to view their files, they should be able to use the app to view their files.

This is the problem with Apple deciding everything for everybody. Some people have really stringent security requirements and don't want their data getting uploaded to a service, someone else wants a copy of all the data from every app to be backed up to some third party cloud service. But Apple restricts things to such an extent that you can't choose to do either one. One size fits none.

> No company wants to deal with the hassle and legality of bit torrent. Most people aren’t using to “download Linux ISOs”. I’m definitely not.

BitTorrent is not illegal, that isn't Apple's problem any more than it is with anything else anyway (what if someone pirates movies with Safari?), and "no company wants to deal with that hassle" is exactly the problem with putting the decision of what you can use your device for in the hands of a third party that isn't responsive to your needs.

> But before as far as bit torrent, my use case is starting and downloading things on my computer from my phone and adding them to my Plex library. I can do that by pairing my mobile browser to Vuze and going to remote.vuze.com.

Which is a fully generic counterargument, because you can make any app a web page and then do whatever you want on the web page. That's a total cheat when you're asking for things there are no iOS apps for.

> There are plenty of Windows only consumer apps - especially games.

There are plenty of Android only games, like Doom 3.

Not to mention all of the games that can be played in emulators on Android but not iOS because Apple doesn't allow emulators.

> Even from Microsoft, Access and Publisher are Windows only and are included with Office 365.

You must realize the equivalent to this would be Google apps for Android that don't exist on iOS, which there are several of.

You have listed a bunch of screen sharing apps again. They're designed to let you view the screen of your PC or game console from your phone, not to let you run apps designed for phones remotely instead of running them on your phone (so that your data is never stored on your phone).

In theory you could probably use those apps to do that anyway since they use sufficiently generic protocols, but it would be quite risky to rely on the availability of expressly prohibited behavior for a workflow you require to actually continue to work.

In fact, that is a major risk of using an iPhone in general, because they can change the rules at any time and boot any app out of the store even if it's critically important for your workflow.

> They can. It’s called the “Files” app. It’s built into iOS.

No they can't, they have to use the "Files" app instead of the app they actually want to use. If it would do something the "Files" app can't do, now they can't do that.

> You know Apple supports standard USB storage devices now right?

How is that supposed to help if the app still can't write to the filesystem?

> I thought the favorite Anti- Apple talking point was that Apple forced everyone to create apps instead of using the “open web”?

I don't want to call this a straw man because I'm sure somebody has said it at some point, but that's a weak argument.

The web is like the lowest common denominator. It's universally available and in principle you can make it do anything (browsers are certainly Turing-complete), but then it's slower and uses ugly languages like javascript and is inherently client-server which is centralizing and terrible for privacy and offline availability etc. etc.

As far as I'm concerned the problem with what Apple is doing is that it makes it harder to have native apps that do what you want them to do which pushes more things to be crummy websites full of ad spam when they ought to be local apps that never contact an external server.

> There is no official port for Android either. There is an unofficial port for iOS and Android....

It's open source. "Official" isn't particularly relevant. What's relevant is that you don't need to be in a developer program to install it on your Android phone.

> How is the equivalent of anything? Microsoft has been writing software for Apple platforms since the original AppleSoft Basic in 1980.

You're asking for apps that are available on Android but not iOS. There are several of them from Google, but that hardly proves anything because Google makes Android. They have an obvious incentive to favor their own platform. Apps made by Microsoft that only run on Windows prove just as little for the same reason.

Or do you think that when someone uses Firefox on iOS that doesn’t count as far as monetization?

I’ve also been “told” that Apple doesn’t allow subscriptions outside of the App Store. That clearly isn’t the case.