Since you’re a commenter on HN I’m going to assume you’re a tech person. I’m not talking about tech people, who through their discussions try to find the correct person/company to blame for issues.
I’m talking about the general public. If a story about a data breach in a 3rd party app — affecting iOS users — hits the news cycle, Apple will take the blame and their brand reputation and sales will be impacted. It doesn’t matter whose fault it really is, Apple is the face of the iPhone and through their walled garden they have accepted final responsibility for everything that occurs on iOS.
I don't see how this matters to the GP's argument. Windows was a virus hotbed for decades and that does not appear to have affected its reputation in a meaningful way.
That’s because Windows’ reputation was already mud. Microsoft made their business on corporate users anyway. Apple is a consumer brand. A data breach on iOS is like nudity in a Disney movie: utterly brand-destroying.
Right, but Apple built their brand on being the alternative to Windows for people who didn’t want to deal with security issues, viruses, crashes, bundled junkware, etc.
You can draw a direct line between Apple’s original marketing pitch (easy to use, simple, secure, appliance-style computing) and the iOS walled garden. Just as you can with Disney and their family-oriented brand. It’s not a compelling argument to say that other film studios have nudity in their films when Disney is the brand at issue.
That was because Microsoft abused their monopoly in operating systems at the time to force OEMs to use their OS on all their computers in order to maintain the industry discounts on OEM licensing.
Back in the day MSFT bolted IE into the operating system to a greater degree than Apple has done with Safari - a ton of the DLL's relied on IE for a lot of UI components and IE had ActiveX that literally hosted executable content in a browser window. It's almost like they hung out a sign on every PC and Windows server that said "please p0wn this machine" and lots of the bad actors in the world came knocking.
They didn't take security seriously when they were laying down the architecture for Windows because they didn't think they had to. Apple is taking the exact opposite approach. They're fairly obsessed with security and privacy because that's one of the big selling points for the whole iOS ecosystem. They miss things because they (like us) live in the real world but they do pay a lot of attention to it and the number of updates for things like 0day defects that arrive within days of the defects being reported tells me that this continues to this day.
* Mobile ad spend in 2022 reached $362 billion, a 7.7% increase on the previous year
* Android and iOS app consumer spending increased to $135 billion in 2023
* iOS was responsible for 66% of app consumer spending in 2023
* Games accounted for 60% of consumer app spending in 2023. Google Play contributed 41% of the total amount
* Subscription revenues increased to $45.6 billion in 2023, iOS was responsible for 76% of that revenue"
The real reason for all this foolishness can be found in these bullet points. 66% of $135 billion is $89.1 billion, and lots of people would love to get a piece of that pie without dealing with Apple (who built and owns the stack). It isn't a monopoly, though, and all of that monopoly talk is misdirection.
Windows doesn’t have a reputation. It’s the default. Nobody actually likes using windows you just have to. Do you really think there are people out there asking for advertisements in their start menu?
I’m talking about the general public. If a story about a data breach in a 3rd party app — affecting iOS users — hits the news cycle, Apple will take the blame and their brand reputation and sales will be impacted. It doesn’t matter whose fault it really is, Apple is the face of the iPhone and through their walled garden they have accepted final responsibility for everything that occurs on iOS.