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Apple knows best (or so it would have you believe)

Posted January 19, 2018 | Mac


If there’s one philosophy that seems to exemplify the vast majority of decisions that Apple has made about their products, it’s this: “We know best.”

Now, I get it. That’s kind of the upside of having a benevolent dictator: decisions get made for you, and you don’t have to worry yourself about making the right ones. Of course, the downside to a benevolent dictator is that they’re still, fundamentally, a dictator.

Apple’s taken its fair share of backlash over these kind of high-level decisions throughout the years, and the latest firestorm is about the company’s decision to make the tradeoff of battery life versus performance in older iPhones. Whether or not the company is right to have chosen for us, it’s now walking that decision back, with Tim Cook saying this week that a future version of iOS will allow users to decide for themselves.

Which, of course, got me thinking about other places that Apple could stand to give users a little more agency instead of making the “best” decisions for us.

No party like a third-party

Apple

Since the very first days of the iPhone, Apple has mandated its apps be the default option for the likes of email, web browsing, and so on. In that first year or so, when there were no third-party apps, this made perfect sense: click on a mail link in Safari and of course a new message opens in Mail. It’s simple, it’s easy, and when people were first coming to grips with the iPhone’s capabilities, it meant that you didn’t have to worry about what app you were going to see when you took a specific action.

But a decade later Apple’s vibrant ecosystem has spawned plenty of third-party apps that compete with its own built-in ones—yet the rules of default apps haven’t changed. Some third-party developers have found ways to make an end-run around Apple’s decision here: Google, for example, basically has its own micro-ecosystem inside iOS. You could run Chrome and the Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Calendar apps, just to name a few, and live mostly inside that realm…but you’ll still find yourself occasionally sucked back into Apple’s default apps from time to time.

On the Mac side, Apple has long allowed users to define their own default apps for mail and browsing, mostly because it dates back to an era when Apple didn’t make its own version of either of those. (Mail’s, though, is pretty silly, since you have to select it from inside Mail.)

Starting in iOS 10, you can actually get rid of some of Apple’s default apps on the iPhone and iPad—though not Safari, which is deemed too critical—but that doesn’t magically open up a way to define other apps as the new defaults. It’s about time Apple follows through and lets users make their own decision about the apps they want to use for the tasks they do every day.



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