Apple's Operating Systems are Malware

Malware means software designed to function in ways that mistreat or harm the user. (This does not include accidental errors.) This page explains how the software in Apple's computer products are malware.

Malware and nonfree software are two different issues. The difference between free software and nonfree software is in whether the users have control of the program or vice versa. It's not directly a question of what the program does when it runs. However, in practice nonfree software is often malware, because the developer's awareness that the users would be powerless to fix any malicious functionalities tempts the developer to impose some.

If you know of an example that ought to be in this page but isn't here, please write to <[email protected]> to inform us. Please include the URL of a trustworthy reference or two to serve as specific substantiation.

Type of malware

Back doors
Censorship
Deception
Digital restrictions management or “DRM”—functionalities designed to restrict what users can do with the data in their computers.
Incompatibility
Insecurity
Jails—systems that impose censorship on application programs.
Pressuring
Sabotage
Surveillance
Tyrants—systems that reject any operating system not “authorized” by the manufacturer.

Apple Back Doors

The Dropbox app for Macintosh takes control of user interface items after luring the user into entering an admin password.
Mac OS X had an intentional local back door for 4 years, which could be exploited by attackers to gain root privileges.
The iPhone has a back door for remote wipe. It's not always enabled, but users are led into enabling it without understanding.
The iPhone has a back door that allows Apple to remotely delete apps which Apple considers “inappropriate”. Jobs said it's OK for Apple to have this power because of course we can trust Apple.

Apple Censorship

Apple mainly uses iOS, which is a typical jail, to impose censorship through the Apple Store. Please refer to the Apple Jails section for more information.

Apple Deception

“Dark patterns” are user interfaces designed to mislead users, or make option settings hard to find.

This allows a company such as Apple to say, “We allow users to turn this off” while ensuring that few will understand how to actually turn it off.

Apple DRM

DRM makes the iPhone 7 nearly unrepairable by anyone else but Apple.
Apple uses DRM software to prevent people from charging an iThing with a generic USB cable.
DRM (digital restrictions mechanisms) in MacOS. This article focuses on the fact that a new model of Macbook introduced a requirement for monitors to have malicious hardware, but DRM software in MacOS is involved in activating the hardware. The software for accessing iTunes is also responsible.
DRM that caters to Bluray disks. (The article focused on Windows and said that MacOS would do the same thing subsequently.)
iTunes videos have DRM, which allows Apple to dictate where its customers can watch the videos they purchased.

Apple Incompatibility

In this section, we list characteristics of Apple programs that block or hinder users from switching to any alternative program—and, in particular, from switching to free software which can liberate the device the software runs on.

In MacOS and iOS, the procedure for converting images from the Photos format to a free format is so tedious and time-consuming that users just give up if they have a lot of them.
Apple devices lock users in solely to Apple services by being designed to be incompatible with all other options, ethical or unethical.
iWork (office software that runs on MacOS, iOS and iCloud) uses secret formats and provides no means of converting them to or from Open Document Formats. iWork formats have changed several times since they were first introduced. This may have had the effect of thwarting reverse engineering efforts, thus preventing free software from fully supporting them.

iWork formats are considered unfit for document preservation.

Apple Insecurity

These bugs are/were not intentional, so unlike the rest of the file they do not count as malware. We mention them to refute the supposition that prestigious proprietary software doesn't have grave bugs.

A vulnerability in Apple's Image I/O API allowed an attacker to execute malicious code from any application which uses this API to render a certain kind of image file.
A bug in the iThings Messages app allowed a malicious web site to extract all the user's messaging history.
The NSA can tap data in smart phones, including iPhones, Android, and BlackBerry. While there is not much detail here, it seems that this does not operate via the universal back door that we know nearly all portable phones have. It may involve exploiting various bugs. There are lots of bugs in the phones' radio software.

Apple Jails

iOS, the operating system of the Apple iThings, is the prototype of a jail. It was Apple that introduced the practice of designing general purpose computers with censorship of application programs.

Here is an article about the code signing that the iThings use to lock up the user.

Curiously, Apple is beginning to allow limited passage through the walls of the iThing jail: users can now install apps built from source code, provided the source code is written in Swift. Users cannot do this freely because they are required to identify themselves. Here are details. While this is a crack in the prison walls, it is not big enough to mean that the iThings are no longer jails.

Examples of censorship by Apple jails

Apple is censoring apps for the US government too. Specifically, it is deleting apps developed by Iranians.

The root of these wrongs are in Apple. If Apple had not designed the iMonsters to let Apple censor applications, Apple would not have had the power to stop users from installing whatever kind of apps.
Apple deleted several VPNs from its app store for China, thus using its own censorship power to strengthen that of the Chinese government.
Apple used its censorship system to enforce Russian surveillance by blocking distribution of the LinkedIn app in Russia.

This is ironic because LinkedIn is a surveillance system itself. While subjecting its users to its own surveillance, it tries to protect its users from Russian surveillance, and is therefore subject to Russian censorship.

However, the point here is the wrong of Apple's censorship of apps.
Apple used its censorship system to enforce China's censorship by blocking distribution of the New York Times app.
Apple censors games, banning some games from the cr…app store because of which political points they suggest. Some political points are apparently considered acceptable.
Apple banned a program from the App Store because its developers committed the enormity of disassembling some iThings.
As of 2015, Apple systematically bans apps that endorse abortion rights or would help women find abortions.

This particular political slant affects other Apple services.
Apple has banned iThing applications that show the confederate flag. Not only those that use it as a symbol of racism, but even strategic games that use it to represent confederate army units fighting in the Civil War.

This ludicrous rigidity illustrates the point that Apple should not be allowed to censor apps. Even if Apple carried out this act of censorship with some care, it would still be wrong. Whether racism is bad, whether educating people about drone attacks is bad, are not the real issue. Apple should not have the power to impose its views about either of these questions, or any other.
More examples of Apple's arbitrary and inconsistent censorship.
Apple used this censorship power in 2014 to ban all bitcoin apps for the iThings for a time. It also banned a game about growing marijuana, while permitting games about other crimes such as killing people. Perhaps Apple considers killing more acceptable than marijuana.
Apple rejected an app that displayed the locations of US drone assassinations, giving various excuses. Each time the developers fixed one “problem”, Apple complained about another. After the fifth rejection, Apple admitted it was censoring the app based on the subject matter.

Apple Pressuring

Proprietary companies can take advantage of their customers by imposing arbitrary limits to their use of the software. This section reports examples of hard sell and other unjust commercial tactics by Apple.

Apple Siri refuses to give you information about music charts if you're not an Apple Music subscriber.

Apple Sabotage

These are situations in which Apple employs its power over users to directly intervene in ways that harm them or block their work.

Apple and Samsung deliberately degrade the performance of older phones to force users to buy their newer phones.
Apple has blocked Telegram from upgrading its app for a month.

This evidently has to do with Russia's command to Apple to block Telegram in Russia.

The Telegram client is free software on other platforms, but not on iThings. Since they are jails, they don't permit any app to be free software.
MacOS High Sierra forcibly reformats SSD boot drives, and changes the file system from HFS+ to APFS, which cannot be accessed from GNU/Linux, Windows or even older versions of MacOS.
Apple will stop fixing bugs for older model iThings.

Meanwhile, Apple stops people from fixing problems themselves; that's the nature of proprietary software.
The iPhone 7 contains DRM specifically designed to brick it if an “unauthorized” repair shop fixes it. “Unauthorized” essentially means anyone besides Apple.

The article uses the term “lock” to describe the DRM, but we prefer to use the term digital handcuffs.
Apple stops users from fixing the security bugs in Quicktime for Windows, while refusing to fix them itself.
The Apple Music client program scans the user's file system for music files, copies them to an Apple server, and deletes them.
iOS version 9 for iThings sabotages them irreparably if they were repaired by someone other than Apple. Apple eventually backed off from this policy under criticism from the users. However, it has not acknowledged that this was wrong.
Apple forced millions of iThings to download a system upgrade without asking the users. Apple did not forcibly install the upgrade but the downloading alone caused lots of trouble.
Apple deleted from iPods the music that users had got from internet music stores that competed with iTunes.
An Apple firmware “upgrade” bricked iPhones that had been unlocked. The “upgrade” also deactivated applications not approved by Apple censorship. All this was apparently intentional.

Apple Surveillance

Adware Doctor, an ad blocker for MacOS, reports the user's browsing history.
The DMCA and the EU Copyright Directive make it illegal to study how iOS cr…apps spy on users, because this would require circumventing the iOS DRM.
In the latest iThings system, “turning off” WiFi and Bluetooth the obvious way doesn't really turn them off. A more advanced way really does turn them off—only until 5am. That's Apple for you—“We know you want to be spied on”.
Apple proposes a fingerprint-scanning touch screen—which would mean no way to use it without having your fingerprints taken. Users would have no way to tell whether the phone is snooping on them.
iPhones send lots of personal data to Apple's servers. Big Brother can get them from there.
The iMessage app on iThings tells a server every phone number that the user types into it; the server records these numbers for at least 30 days.
iThings automatically upload to Apple's servers all the photos and videos they make.

iCloud Photo Library stores every photo and video you take, and keeps them up to date on all your devices. Any edits you make are automatically updated everywhere. […]

(From Apple's iCloud information as accessed on 24 Sep 2015.) The iCloud feature is activated by the startup of iOS. The term “cloud” means “please don't ask where.”

There is a way to deactivate iCloud, but it's active by default so it still counts as a surveillance functionality.

Unknown people apparently took advantage of this to get nude photos of many celebrities. They needed to break Apple's security to get at them, but NSA can access any of them through PRISM.
Apple has made various MacOS programs send files to Apple servers without asking permission. This exposes the files to Big Brother and perhaps to other snoops.

It also demonstrates how you can't trust proprietary software, because even if today's version doesn't have a malicious functionality, tomorrow's version might add it. The developer won't remove the malfeature unless many users push back hard, and the users can't remove it themselves.
MacOS automatically sends to Apple servers unsaved documents being edited. The things you have not decided to save are even more sensitive than the things you have stored in files.
Apple admits the spying in a search facility, but there's a lot more snooping that Apple has not talked about.
Various operations in the latest MacOS send reports to Apple servers.
Apple can, and regularly does, remotely extract some data from iPhones for the state.

This may have improved with iOS 8 security improvements; but not as much as Apple claims.
Several “features” of iOS seem to exist for no possible purpose other than surveillance. Here is the Technical presentation.
Spotlight search sends users' search terms to Apple.
The iBeacon lets stores determine exactly where the iThing is, and get other info too.
Either Apple helps the NSA snoop on all the data in an iThing, or it is totally incompetent.
The iThing also tells Apple its geolocation by default, though that can be turned off.
There is also a feature for web sites to track users, which is enabled by default. (That article talks about iOS 6, but it is still true in iOS 7.)
Users cannot make an Apple ID (necessary to install even gratis apps) without giving a valid email address and receiving the verification code Apple sends to it.

Apple Tyrants

Apple arbitrarily blocks users from installing old versions of iOS.
The Apple iThings are tyrant devices. There is a port of Android to the iThings, but installing it requires finding a bug or “exploit” to make it possible to install a different system.