I disagree. iOS is not the only mobile platform. It's not even the most popular one. Apple keeps an eye on other platforms and when something works they implement a similar feature. Their customers get to skip the whole ugly process of trial & error that often fosters that innovation. That's exactly what Apple is good at. Some of us pay Apple to curate and manage the platform for us.
:( In a world where people believe Android (the only reasonable competitor I can imagine you are discussing) to be "open", we have arguably already lost. Apple has built an ecosystem that is so closed and so powerful that if a competitor even throws a simple bone like "can install applications that come from a non-market source" suddenly they are touted as "open", when you still can't make any of the interesting modifications to the system that you can make to a desktop computer, as you are limited behind the app boundary... you can't even build a reasonable alternative to Market (which requires special Google-only permissions to implement things like the "agree to permissions before download" interface).
Now, you can always make the argument that Android is open source and anyone can build a platform with it, but that means it is open for people who make phones: the actual consumers are still purchasing closed devices. The simple thing to remember: this is about hardware, not about software; it is a mistake to be thinking about this as operating systems battling one-another, when the security mechanisms are actually something controlled by the person making the increasingly tamper-proof hardware, not the person writing the software that runs on those devices (a line that is messy and confusing for many people, as the commonly-cited example of Apple has one company playing both roles).
iOS is arguably a big enough market share (especially in terms of apps sales) to influence developer thoughts about how mobile apps should work.
I would imagine most major app developments aim to target at least both iOS and android.
Therefor if you want to implement a feature that is allowed on android devices but not on iOS devices you won't be able to do that in a cross platform manor and are therefor likely to bin the idea altogether.
Windows (and MAC OS) has been a closed platform for more than 20 years, iOS for 5 years and so far we are all still alive, no doomsday apocalypse scenario with zombies and aliens!
Windows is a closed platform? It's obviously less open than Linux but it's hardly closed compared to iOS.
I can install anything I want on my Windows computer without approval from Microsoft. I can stop updates, limit updates, change the way my computer boots, and use (almost) any OS resources for anything I feel like. I can wipe my computer and install another OS if I feel like it. When I buy software, the company that makes it can keep updating it however they feel without any chance of the software being 'pulled' by Windows. I don't have to worry about a program I'm buying breaking Windows 'rules'. Windows doesn't control any purchases I make in any app and doesn't limit sexual content of my installs.
What iOS is doing is something entirely different from what Windows has ever done, and meaning of 'closed' is entirely different when discussing these platforms.
Not that I disagree with you about current Windows versions, but from what I heard about Windows 8, Microsoft is trying to be more like Apple with iOS here, with the locked UEFIs, not allowing rival browsers or making them unusable on purpose (exactly like Apple did on iOS), and the "oh and noone want's to use our new GUI so we make devtools that can be used with anything else cost extra" thing.
Looks like both MS and Apple have chosen different side in war on general purpose computing than (I would imagine and hope) any "hacker" would.
I disagree. iOS is not the only mobile platform. It's not even the most popular one. Apple keeps an eye on other platforms and when something works they implement a similar feature. Their customers get to skip the whole ugly process of trial & error that often fosters that innovation. That's exactly what Apple is good at. Some of us pay Apple to curate and manage the platform for us.