Apple knows their customers better than researchers can ever, esp some small sample of Korean users, and they spend a huge amount of effort promoting security and safety.

I guess that works if your values system includes the axiom “whatever Apple spend a lot of money on can’t be wrong.”

Even better if you allow yourself to make giant leaps of assumption about the underlying motives. Then it can justify almost any apology for bad behaviour.

Look, you have no counter evidence to the contrary, your tiny study of Korean consumers may or may not say something statistically significant about one small market, but nowhere else.

Apple competes with a horde of phone makers who sell cheaper phones at vastly lower profit margins. And who don’t have to spend a dime on OS development.

To compete Apple spends enormous effort in keeping iPhone secure and safe. And it makes safety and security a top iPhone marketing message. And it’s upper management repeats this mantra in interviews.

Apple knows how they came to dominate the high end of the smartphone market, they have pursued the same consistent strategy all the way back before the App Store existed. The first iPhones were locked down not allowing any third part apps. When they opened the App Store the security was already baked in, App Review, ode signing, sandboxing, the works.

It’s easy to be that dude on the internet who doesn’t believe Apple, but they aren’t running a $200B business by the seat of their pants. They have thousands of marketing people talking to customers, and if they could sell more phones by allowing sideloading and alternate app stores they would.

Excuse me - but you made a wild claim, and have offered no evidence to back it up. A shirty attitude when someone calls this out won't improve the strength of that claim. Belittling the origin of solid research to the contrary doesn't do any favours, either.

Marketing materials are not evidence of consumer preference. If anything, they're potentially the opposite; if people cared so much, why is constant repetition of the message necessary?

Investment levels are not evidence of consumer preference. There are countless strategic reasons why companies spend money in a certain direction.

If you're going to claim that consumers are suddenly factoring device security and relative levels of curation-dependent application safety into their platform selections, in the face of decades of history being incapable of doing so, you'd better be prepared with more statistical power than "they spend a lot of time & money convincing me how insanely great they are".

The final nail in this sorry coffin of corporate malfeasance is that even if consumers did value safety to the extent of choosing one platform over another on that basis, this can never justify actively misleading the consumer and requiring that other parties participate in the same deception.

I thought was arguing with someone rational, but equating marketing with “corporate malfeasance” makes it clear I am not.

Ok, you win. Apple doesn’t know it’s users, they put so much time, effort and marketing behind safety and security, while not understanding that customers don’t care about them.

It’s just random luck that despite being outsold 6-1 that they make more profits off smartphones than all other smartphone companies combined, and pay developers 50% more than any other company in earth. It can’t come from any deep understanding of what their customers want, since you don’t have a statistically viable sample confirming it.

It could, but it can also come from rent-seeking protectionism, or it can be due to excellent software design, a rich set of APIs, good tooling, effective marketing of the many other facets of the iPhone and iOS, incompetence and fragmentation and dismal support by competitors, and so on.

The corporate malfeasance is using your market power to force third parties to mislead consumers. That's straight-up illegal in my country. I hope it is illegal in yours too.

Attributing Apple's 66% share of the global app store market to "consumers actually want a walled garden that lies to them" is wildly unfounded.

I don't have to prove anything, since I'm just calling out a unfounded claim being used to justify bad behaviour. If you want a forum where those will go unchallenged, and more apologists for the same, try an Apple website. Maybe there you can even get away with name-calling, and belittling major overseas markets as "small" (fun fact: wherever you are in the world, Korea has better broadband than you).