alt Hacker NewsI want my less tech savvy family members to be able to buy locked-to-the-company-store hardware, that they can’t run other things on, as it protects them from one avenue of scams and hacks. This protection can and will be worked around if it can be easily disabled.
Fully open phone systems consistently fail to sell enough to make a difference, which is a bit of a shame, but honestly at this point the market has spoken.
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Nothing prevents that the device is locked by you instead of the "store" or even that the device has a "safe" mode that has to be explicitly disabled by the user in a non obvious way like connecting the device to a computer and running a command or so.
The only important thing is for the bank, Netflix and co to not be able to discriminate. But again nothing would provide the bank to offer a setting for the user to restrict where it can use it's banking app if it was not discriminatory. But we know well where this goes, in the end if you don't enable it
That is understandable, most people are not technical but the few who has a need for it should have an option for it.
As a developer I write apps for myself and I side-load them. Why take away my right to do so, just because other people can't then nobody should?
You provided an alterative solution yourself. Make protection harder to disable, so non-tech savvy users can't disable it easily, always inform them of the consequences of disabling it and make it that it's only needed in exceptional cases (there a lot of room for improvement here).
If they want to climb over the protection fence, they should be able to do it as they clearly WANT to do it. Why should you have control what they can or cannot do? (Unless they are your kids.) Should experts in other fields also be able to control over what their layman family members are allowed to do?