> The "walled garden app ecosystem" is exceptionally bad for this, and the UNIX shell is exceptionally good, but both are extremes.
Very true.
> It's hard to imagine how a UNIX-like flexibility can be achieved inside an ecosystem that's optimized for passive media consumption and online shopping though.
Unix-like flexibility is also extremely insecure and easy to screw up.
It’s fairly obvious that the App Store ecosystem can and is becoming increasingly flexible. Things like shortcuts and safari extensions are obvious examples.
Unix-like flexibility will likely never come to iOS, nor should it, but it’s easy to imagine a steady drumbeat of easy to use managed points of flexibility that ultimately provide 80% of what people use Unix-flexibility for but without the insecurity or brittleness.
It’s not so easy to imagine how ease of use, security and robustness can be retrofitted to unix any other way.
Remember iOS is Unix. It’s just a matter of what they build for end users.
Very true.
> It's hard to imagine how a UNIX-like flexibility can be achieved inside an ecosystem that's optimized for passive media consumption and online shopping though.
Unix-like flexibility is also extremely insecure and easy to screw up.
It’s fairly obvious that the App Store ecosystem can and is becoming increasingly flexible. Things like shortcuts and safari extensions are obvious examples.
Unix-like flexibility will likely never come to iOS, nor should it, but it’s easy to imagine a steady drumbeat of easy to use managed points of flexibility that ultimately provide 80% of what people use Unix-flexibility for but without the insecurity or brittleness.
It’s not so easy to imagine how ease of use, security and robustness can be retrofitted to unix any other way.
Remember iOS is Unix. It’s just a matter of what they build for end users.