> I feel like the only explanation here is that the smartphone duopoly has worked hard to condition customers into accepting this.
replyThis is older than the current smartphone duopoly; IIRC, with a few exceptions like the N900 and the Palm Treo, cell phones were always very locked down. It probably came initially from the phone companies being control freaks, and wanting to restrict which devices (even mechanical ones with no electrical or radio interface) could be attached to their phone system.
Cell phones weren’t always effectively the primary computing devices for most of the human population.
reply> N900 and the Palm Treo
Performance-wise, a modern iPhone is more closely comparable to room-sized (building-sized?) supercomputer of that era.
You technically don’t need to pay if you just want to run your app on your phone. If you want to distribute your app with Testflight or the App Store you need to pay.
replyAs long as you're willing to re-sign and reinstall it every 7 days, that is. The free certificates Apple hands out have expiry set to a week, and AFAIK you can't configure your own iPhone to trust your own certificate.
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