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I assume you mean on an open hardware platform, because underneath Apple's SDKs are just more Apple APIs until you get to Apple's IPC interfaces to talk to Apple-designed hardware register interfaces.

Unfortunately when it comes to technology licensing, it is rarely successful to say you should pay less because you purposely made your job harder.

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> Nowadays with LLMs people could probably patch up some FOSS SDK that perfectly replicates the original's functionality without infringing Apple's copyrights.

I don't intend to insult you, but as an iOS developer myself I have serious doubts about whether you have any expertise in the subject you're talking about here.

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If you don't intend it as an insult, you might try providing literally any substance to your argument rather than just lobbing ad hominems.
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I didn't mean to imply that this would be a vibe-coded slop project. I'm no LLM evangelizer and hate the hype train as much as any competent dev. The truth is though that LLMs are uniquely suited for work of this kind, and a team that knows what they're doing could make short work of the whole thing much faster.
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> I didn't mean to imply that this would be a vibe-coded slop project.

That's not really the issue. LLM participation is a red herring. The issue is "replicates the original's functionality".

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What would be so outlandish about that?
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I'm not going to argue with you, because I continue to suspect that you have no iOS development experience and are just making hand-wavy claims with no empirical basis.
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?

It's you who has started to argue by replying to my comment in the first place.

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I asked a question: "How do you not use their SDK?"

Your answer seemed nonsensical to me.

What I meant, though, is that I'm not going to argue about a specific point, the viability of "some FOSS SDK that perfectly replicates the original's functionality." If you don't even have any experience with iOS development, then you have no basis for making any claims about that subject, and thus I'm not going to bother explaining "What would be so outlandish about that?"

In any case, most iOS devs don't want to opt out of using the SDK. That would not be a particularly attractive route for making iOS apps. What I want as an iOS dev is the same freedom of software distribution that we have on macOS.

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> If you don't even have any experience with iOS development, then you have no basis for making any claims about that subject, and thus I'm not going to bother explaining "What would be so outlandish about that?"

The basis for my claims about the subject is my knowledge of computing and development in general. I dipped my toes into iOS dev a few times and there's nothing that seemed to set it apart from any other SDK situation beyond Apple's restrictions, at least nothing that would make my claim outlandish.

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That is never going to happen. We will never get the same freedom we enjoy on pc's again for the simple fact it benefits both the platform owners and governments to have a simple centralize company in this case (Apple & Google) to go to get what they want. The freedom we have on pc's is too much of a wild west and not enough control that both governments and platform owners like. As much as we may want to it will never happen for those reasons.
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I think if you adjusted his statement to be - not use apple’s “everything” software ecosystem - it would be possible.

Core device apis yes, everything else, maybe not?

I think we could roll our own UI - I think we can roll our own payment systems - I think we could roll our own media display.

For the primary iOS app I work on I need vulkan, gps, touches camera, sound, and phone rotation. (And standard os services)

I don’t need anything else.

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