I know hating on the apple is all the rage these days, but that is like walking into the Coke company store and bitching because they won't let you sell Pepsi tee shirts there.
That metaphor would make sense only if the only place you could by Coke was at the Coke company store. I'm fairly sure there are lots of places that sell both Pepsi tee shirts as well as Coke products.
Let us side load apps, and we'll stop bitching about Apple store practices.
There are lots of places that only sell one, too. Restaurants frequently sell only one or the other, in large part due to anticompetitive agreements when making the sales contracts.
I think the point is something Apple-sanctioned. Most people want to be able to put apps on their phone without violating terms of service agreements..
I think it would actually be fine if they didn't sanction it, and had it violate the warranty (at least), but allowed it (and hid the setting somewhere).
I think Google censoring search results because they linked to competitors such as Bing and DuckDuckGo would be a closer analogy. The dictation of applications based on the information they contain is the underlying issue here.
Except in this analogy, the Pepsi store would gladly sell Coke products. Let's drop the analogies and call it like it is. This is a company being overly protective of their store. It may be within their rights, but I don't think we should be defending a company for not allowing software on its product cause the app dares to focus on a competitor.
