Ok, to distill my point: I think the author is going beyond a complaint that the system is proprietary and claiming that Apple has purposefully made the code difficult to reverse engineer, which I something I dispute based on the level that the author was working with, which were fairly standard (might I say comparatively well-packaged) private APIs. I say this because I know there is actual Apple-proprietary code that the company has actually put effort into obfuscating; things like FairPlay (and closer to iMessage, IDS, though I have only heard rumors of the latter not having looked at it personally). Thus, at the moment I think Apple is preventing third-party clients of the type described just by virtue of the literal barrier of “this is a compiled blob that I need to interact with and I don’t have source to” rather than “Apple added obfuscation/prevents you from attaching a debugger/encrypts the code at rest with a Blowfish key that is undone when the kernel maps the process into memory” (all of which are things that Apple does actually do in cases where they half-care). Basically, I’m removing the attribution of malice I felt from the article. Does that make some sort of sense?
