Nice idea.

I know car metaphors are de-rigour here, but that's really not a good metaphor. This is approvals of add-ons and consumables, not repairs. And there are a few other examples. Games consoles, printers, razors.

The bizarre thing is it's framed as if it's imposed on consumers. But of course it isn't. It's entirely opt-in. There's a large number of people that are willing to pay a bit extra for the safety and quality that the iPhone platform gives. And one of the important mechanisms by which that safety and quality is delivered is by controlling what can be installed.

People aren't being MADE to be safer. They CHOOSE to pay extra for the service of being made safer.

If a phone ever needs the kind of maintenance a PC or Mac needs it's a failed phone. Consumers these days have got something that for most of their casual uses is better than a PC. That's progress.

Sure, there's a need for an industrial grade computing device too, for a start to develop the apps on the more casual devices.

But to make modern consumer computing devices with as troublesome a set of ideas as a PC would be silly. Consumers need reliable appliances, not unreliable boxes of bits that continually degrade and require maintenance.

Take a look around sometime.

And certainly they do need protection. (Where clueless kids using smartphones is a wide category from about 5 to about 35.) Insightful knowledge of the dangers of the internet does not come along at the same time as the ability to switch on other app-stores.

The clueless old folks might not. The clueless kids certainly will.

Right. Apple now has censorship rights over the entire internet. The conspiracy theory just gets bigger.

But it's not "same shit different name". Desktop metaphor is desktop with multiple opened documents side by side, and a filing cabinet and folder metaphor for data storage. Generally with pull down/ drop down menus. WinCE and the old GEOS Nokia Communicators used it. Modern phones don't.

A phone which has random files placed around it's file system by the user is a phone with a broken OS.

Clearly I don't. I mean for example the people who want to spend time organising MP3 files when they have apps available that sync up songs between multiple devices, organise them in albums or artists or whatever order, and display metadata at it's best.

Why can't you program using dip switches and blinken-lights any more? Because higher abstractions are more powerful.

Files have become too low an abstraction even on the desktop. Take Office documents, these days they are stored in multiple files, but file systems are in general too dumb to coordinate multiple files as a single thing, so they are zipped up to make them into a single file. Not only does that add to loading and saving time, it means that VCSs can't generally deal properly with their XML and end up storing them as undiffable binaries.

Or take applications. On Linux you need a package manager to deal with the multiple files. Or deal with tar and gzip. Windows requires installer apps to unpackage and then distribute the files around a filing system. MacOS has a bundle system that's not supported by foreign file systems. And all of them have the problem of leaving detritus when deleting the app.

But mobile OSs have this issue sorted. To a user an app is always single thing. You download it from an app store, or you delete it as a single thing. The abstraction of the multiple files required is complete.

Indeed it has changed. Nitro used to be limited to Safari, for security reasons, but from iOS 8 the Webkit available to apps uses exactly the same Nitro engine that Safari does.

And here's the thing - Javascript works the same on in all apps and all browsers in iOS. In Android, that's far from the case. At work we have an app in development that opens a 3rd party web page with a video embedded. On iOS the video zooms to full screen, and plays. Always. On Android, the behaviour is different on different phones. Some zoom to full screen, some don't, and some don't play the video at all.

I should note that for reasons such as this, the development team for iOS is 2. For Android it's 5. With iOS development still always outpacing Android.

As to data-mining, that's also an advantage on the iOS side. CyanogenMod might pull some Google spying out of the OS, but Android apps are far freer to spy on users than iOS apps. Such is the benefit of the "walled-garden".

App(lication)s need to be appropriate to the platform. When people are using phone apps, they are usually looking for one of 3 things:
1) Communication.
2) Quick retrieval of information.
3) Fill in some time with some entertainment. (Casual games, Youtube, Social apps. etc)

Tablets, nearly the same.

If someone's going to do spreadsheet work for example, they'll likely be at a desk, or they'll take their laptop with them.

Ideas are like assholes. Everyone's got one. They're worthless.

The ability, time and effort required to turn an idea, whether new or old, into a polished user-friendly app, and do all the other non-development tasks such as creating content and marketing. Those are the things that are worth money.

You're mistaken. There's plenty of iOS apps doing exactly that. e.g.
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/pi...

The problem is in your own head. It's the idea that all computers should have a desktop interface. It's both nonsense, and has never been true. A desktop interface on a device with a phone touch sized screen is stupid.

As to "managing files", that's busy-work. We tend to work at a higher abstraction these days. Heck even when developing on a desktop computer: a SCM such as git does more of the managing of files than we do.

No you're not the only one. Those are the reasons lots of people choose iPhone rather than Android. It's not perfect but it's far better than the anarchy of Android.

There's more than a million apps, on either iOS or Android. Lack of choice is not a problem.

Searching for every item you want on the web, or in an app is a pain. But I imagine it gets better as time goes on as products you've bought before are easy to reorder. I didn't persist long enough to find out.

There isn't a better mobile web renderer than WebKit. Even Chrome is just a fairly recent fork of it.

[Citation needed]

That doesn't appear to be true.

There's far more reasons than not getting lost to use a GPS. I use it more so because fuel is expensive and polluting, and so following the most efficient route saves money and the damage to the environment. Of course it's only an estimate of the best route even with a GPS. But it's a better estimate than people make for unfamiliar journeys.

You say that getting lost has the advantage of discovering new places. But so does GPS - it will take you down routes you've never taken before, when otherwise you might stick to the familiar routes. (And either method might take you down an unsuitable route.)