This is insane. I have never heard of these and after checking I also have them on my iDevice. Tmobile should explain what wingman is and why it's on IOS devices.
I don't understand why Apple allows carriers to do this. Apple id a well-respected brand by most of their customers while carriers are seen as an evil you cannot do without.
I suppose "brand perception" loses to "we bought all the RF spectrum". If T-mobile, AT&T, and Verizon say "no iPhone", guess who is out of business? Not the spectrum owners.
> If T-mobile, AT&T, and Verizon say "no iPhone", guess who is out of business?
If Apple said, "no, you can't force users onto Wi-Fi networks without their consent," T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon would just say, "ok, it was worth a try," and carry on as if nothing happened. People will still want Apple products in sufficient numbers, and carriers will still want money from those people. But Apple isn't interested in what people want, Apple is interested in what they can convince people they want.
If my cellular provider stopped supporting iPhones as a first class device I would switch providers by the end of the billing period, no question.
AT&T got my business by supporting the iPhone first. I assume if one major carrier drops the iPhone the other would recognize the opportunity and court users asap.
I mean I’m certainly not switching back to a dumb phone or android. And since iOS maintains 56% market share in the US Apple can easily force some hands.
I count that as a plus. If the scanning is done on my device, they have zero reasons to scan the content in the cloud and thus can encrypt it at rest so nobody can access it even with a warrant.
But I've had this same argument a thousand times and it's like shouting at the tide and trying to stop it...
The reason you are likely wrong here is because it's an ownership boundary - the cloud service is understood to be renting, but you purchased the phone and own it.
What you are suggesting doesn't necessarily make zero sense to desire, but practically speaking I don't think it makes sense based on the transactions that have occurred in this scenario. They may have a right to do that stuff on the cloud, but they don't have a right to do it on your device. It has nothing to do with which is better.
...but they didn't scan anything unless you were uploading images to the cloud anyway.
Disable cloud upload -> no local scanning.
People were stumbling over each other in one of the biggest competitive misunderstanding contests of the 2020's and Apple backed down to shut people up just because nobody bothered to RTFM and just got angry based on random internet hot-takes that were based on incorrect assumptions.
Their plan was to scan stuff that would be sent to their hardware on your hardware so that they could encrypt it on their hardware without having the key themselves. And law enforcement wouldn't have had the "what about child pornography" -angle to force access to data, since everything would've been pre-scanned.
If no data would've been sent to their hardware, no scanning would've happened.
It wasn't a complex idea, but The Internet decided collectively to misunderstand it.
Not respecting or trusting Apple is a valid position to have. Not sure why people would down vote this.
It's clear that Apple uses the feelings of trust and respect in their marketing campaigns, but this is just a calculated strategy that works for them. As a company, they are like most companies - they desire to create and maximize revenue streams. To the extent that they value trust and respect they actually value customer perceived trust and respect as it relates to their marketing strategies.
Tl;Dr if they think they can get away with things that are customer hostile without tarnishing their marketing image they'll do it. They will take calculated risks here as well.
Apple forces a 30% fees on subscriptions, negotiates with Uber (and presumably others) to pass this cost directly onto the user in cases where the margin is so low the 3rd party cannot economically eat the fee: https://www.techemails.com/p/lets-take-a-cut-of-membership-p...
iMessage is exclusive to iPhone because they fear that parents may buy Android for their children over iPhones if the app was available on both - which obviously indicates that the dark UX treatment of non iMessage sms (green bubbles) is an intentional segmentation of the messaging ecosystem designed to bring users to the iphone thru social effects. Any platitudes to security are purely marketing. https://www.techemails.com/p/imessage-for-android
Apple is a company, their users are revenue streams, trust and respect matter in terms perspective not in terms of meaningful action. They will do things that put their trust/respect at calculated risks to maximize revenue.
Folks thinking otherwise are pleasantly naive - it is totally reasonable to question Apple's actions and motivations.
Apple
End Users
Distribution partners
Other companies
Once you realize that then their decisions make sense. And for me these priorities aren't the worst thing ever. Yes, Apple putting Apple first means I pay a premium.
(And BTW, to clarify: Apple has a book store monopoly on iOS, not "a monopoly on iOS for books". I can read my Kindle books perfectly fine)
You can read books from Amazon/Kindle on iOS because Apple lost an antitrust price fixing case in US federal court and paid nearly half a billion in damages.
Apple conspired with publishing houses to shut Amazon out of the market through leveraging it's huge device platform. Steve Jobs literally said: "The price will be the same... Publishers are actually withholding their books from Amazon because they are not happy."
If Apple had won their case it is a serious question if you would have Kindle books to read.
Maybe Apple doesn't know carriers are doing this and the capability is an oversight? Verizon and AT&T seem to be respecting the user auto-join preference flag.
I'm thinking Apple didn't expect the carrier to do this.
