I am too. But what makes me laugh, and respond to your comment is the idea that perhaps half of the opposition to Apple's walled garden among the HN crowd would go away if they just allowed ublock origin.
Chrome is available (and dominant) on desktop yet Firefox and a dozen other alternatives are doing just fine. There's no reason why it shouldn't be the same on iOS.
According to StatCounter Firefox's market share of all browsers is 2.93% followed closely by Samsung Internet(?) 2.59% and Opera 2.26%
I wouldn't call that "just fine".
If not for Safari (18.84% market share) Google could just dictate what happens on the Internet, because Chrome-based browsers would be the de facto standard.
The only reason sites still bother to support non-Chrome browsers is the fact that people on iOS monetise REALLY well compared to other segments.
While I agree that Firefox probably is nowhere close to Chrome in terms of market share, StatCounter isn't a great source of information here. StatCounter works through trackers, which are blocked by default on common Firefox installs.
Sites work well in practically every browser because we're not living in 2005 anymore. Some missing APIs are broken, but how often do you really need WebSerial on your phone.
> people on iOS monetise REALLY well compared to other segments
And therein lies the motivation to "open up" Apple's ecosystem, people just can't stand looking at all those dollar signs without being able to get their hands on them any way possible.
"So Apple just gets exclusive access to their users' money?!?" Well, they are the ones that built and maintain the ecosystem. Everyone else just wants to get in there and extract wealth like slash-and-burn rainforest developers or strip-miners.
The "problem" is that Apple gets most of their money from hardware sales, they don't need to be able to uniquely identify their users to make huge bank.
Thus they go privacy first in things just because they can. Like randomising IDs used to identify players across apps and services. You should've seen the tears marketing shed when that change happened.
They are complementary of course, one could not exist without the other.
But the competition (Google) is by all measurements an ad company that does software and hardware on the side, they cannot go the privacy route. Ads require tracking and tracking implies privacy issues.
I believe Safari will improve though. Currently Apple has little incentive to put more money into Safari because there’s no competition. Once they have to open up iOS to competition, they’ll spent more money on Safari to stay competitive. The web is still an important platform they cannot just ignore. And they have the resources and the know how, so they have a good chance of succeeding. And they will still be the native and default choice (even with browser choice), so they will also have that advantage still.
The reason you don't think so is because you are likely equating developer features with investment. But actually Apple just has different priorities which are security, privacy and battery life. They aren't trying to push more pro-advertising features like Google is or turn the browser into an operating system.
It is delusional to think that if Chrome becomes more popular that they are suddenly going to abandon their values.
Priority should be to make the browser usable. It's not. For example it’s extremely unstable for video conferencing. Last time, I don’t know what exactly happened, but I had to reboot my MacBook because the system wouldn’t recognize the camera anymore after trying to join a video conference in Safari, not even in other browsers. Never experienced something like this in any other browser. Many work tools such as Confluence, MS Teams and Google Docs just work better in Chrome. I wish I could switch, and I retry after each major release, but it’s just not good enough yet. I always end up switching back to Chrome after 1-2 days. If Microsoft and Mozilla can do better why can’t Apple?
What is the user base of Firefox now? Single digits, last I hear. Chrome just keeps growing. Once iOS no longer uses WebKit as it’s base, the Chrome Blink will dominate.
Hahaha. It'd be pretty ironic if Firefox eventually dies solely because no one bothers to support it because single digits on StatCounter which Firefox itself blocks.
Someone should fix this. Don't block whatever trackers StatCounter use.
I think I maybe get the broader argument you are trying to make, but in the context of gp’s comment, forcing web devs to test in and fix bugs in mobile safari because of its forced 100% iOS market share isn’t making people test in Firefox. And it currently not possible to run actual Firefox on your iphone, just a branded WebKit wrapper.
Opening up mobile browsers _would_ be good if not for the fact the consequence will be bugs that won't be fixed by devs for everyone not using Chrome.
Just use Chrome is advice that will be given by the corps when these bugs arise.
Our legislators are about to sleep walk into Google determining web standards fairly much unilaterally. Manifest V3 is what they do when they don't quite have that power. And that is a problem for Firefox users.
Sounds like more people should stop using Chrome. Market power isn’t going to shift by tossing your hands in the air when viable alternatives not only exist but are free.
Market power is definitely going to shift if web devs only test on Chrome.
The viability of Firefox as a browser is definitely going to decrease if devs only test for chrome.
People need services like banking, paying bills, secure web based portals. If the only browser these institutions are testing for is Chrome we will be in trouble.
I could write a web app for a bank. I could write a payments platform for the bank. I cannot code a bank. I could write a platform for the wholesale energy market and a front end for payments. I cannot code an energy company.
All I can see any of this doing in the medium term is increasing Google's market power and making the web less free.
All in the name of getting Chrome on a device that is inherently unfree.
As a seasoned web developer who has worked on multiple FAANG “.com” domains, I think you’re overstating the impact. Every big web shop already codes for market share, which means chrome, then hopefully has an iPhone they don’t allow to update to test in older versions of safari (sourcing them from eBay if necessary) to then litter their code with if safariBadVersionWhatevers. Smaller ones test it on their latest updated phone and then throw it over the wall, and call anything non-chrome best effort. To the extent that I’ve seen Firefox, supported it’s because the developers of the site personally use it.
Nothing about the safari monoculture on iphones makes people support Firefox because support is 100% a function of market share, and the monoculture actually prevents the Firefox engine from getting a sliver of market share on iOS.
The state right now isn’t “people code to web standards because safari forces them to” - its that they spend time % proportional to market %. That means code to chrome and then fix bugs in mobile safari. And even if chrome was wildly successful in getting iPhone users to switch and destroying safari marketshars there, reducing testing on safari, it doesn’t hurt Firefox. Testing on safari doesn’t help catch Firefox bugs because it’s a totally different engine.
Ironically, I believe all this scrutiny on Apple really started with degraded developer relations and their 30% take on in app sales.
If they had invested in better dev relations and dropped their 30% take (instead of coming up with all the weird ways you have to qualify for lower rates, which don't cover all scenarios), I don't think there would have been enough noise from below on this.
I’m happy with my 15% but the 30% never bothered me either.
I still remember the cheers when the 30% was announced because it was vastly better than what the splits were before the launch of the App Store and even now it’s an industry standard.
> (instead of coming up with all the weird ways you have to qualify for lower rates, which don't cover all scenarios)
Not sure what you’re alluding to here.
You essentially automatically qualify if you have less than $1MM in revenue, you tick a few boxes and answer a few questions and within 3 minutes you’re done.
There are some very niche edge cases that might disqualify you to prevent gaming the system, but those are extremely rare.
More than 90% of the developers fall under the lower 15%, but I’m sure some of the big juggernauts are still unhappy that they’re on the 30% tier.
In a fit of irony, lowering the commission to 15% will prove to be a big defensive argument in future antitrust cases, as all developers, including myself, simply pocketed the difference, killing one of the main arguments in cases like that: that these commissions cause higher prices for end users.
The way the experts gave testimony in the cases that so far have occurred, a percentage point or two difference in commission rate would cause huge price swings, moreover, their impromptu studies to support their testimonies claimed that a price difference of a few cents would have huge implications for consumer’s willingness to make the purchase.
It sounded counterintuitive to me then, and now I’ve seen that it truly was nonsense.
Apple in the meantime has been able to collect a treasure trove of data that shows that even a cut of 15% (roughly 3x more than the most ambitious hypothetical in testimonies) couldn’t sway the prices downwards for the end user.
It's not just the price that's outrageous, but also anti-competitive terms that come with it.
You're not allowed to have a better price outside of the App Store. iOS users aren't paying for their preferred payment system, it's everyone else subsidizing Apple's cut.
You're not allowed to give customers a choice of payment methods (people like Apple's subscription, but some may prefer PayPal, especially for multi-platform products). You're not allowed to say they exist outside of the App Store. You're not allowed to even say the word "Android" in the App Store description.
Apple intentionally bundles and mixes together security, convenience, and anti-competitive terms. This confuses the discussion, because if you protest the inflated price, or the unfair terms, they say "oh, so you want users to get malware, huh!?".
The price is high for what you get — an inflexible payment system without ability to offer direct customer support for the payments, and a lottery ticket to maybe appear somewhere else in the store than search results for your app's name, with your competitor's ad first.
Low-margin businesses can't exist with Apple's pricing. Even higher-margin business sucks with Apple - 40% margin is good, but when 30% goes to Apple, Apple earns 3x more than you do.
If I develop and app, and market it myself, and already have a relationship with my customers, Apple just inserts themselves with a "product" I don't want, my users may not want, but we're forced to buy it.
Add to the list the fact that the rules are not applied equally. Big companies can get special deals when Apple feels like it. Small devs can get randomly screwed when their reviewer misunderstands a rule.
Reading your comment makes me wonder if you have personal experience with the App Store because it’s the kind of criticism I read in tech articles but doesn’t entirely line up with the reality on the ground (if not outright false).
> You're not allowed to have a better price outside of the App Store. iOS users aren't paying for their preferred payment system, it's everyone else subsidizing Apple's cut.
This is simply not true. You’re not required to have price parity with IAPs if you also sell access to the service by other means.
> You're not allowed to give customers a choice of payment methods (people like Apple's subscription, but some may prefer PayPal, especially for multi-platform products). You're not allowed to say they exist outside of the App Store.
This one is half true (if we’re not talking about an app that facilitates purchase of physical goods).
You can’t add a PayPal payment option within the app, but you can direct users to your website to sign up, at which point you can give them any payment option (sans IAP).
There are entire app categories called “reader apps” that specifically utilize this.
> Apple intentionally bundles and mixes together security, convenience, and anti-competitive terms. This confuses the discussion, because if you protest the inflated price, or the unfair terms, they say "oh, so you want users to get malware, huh!?".
To a certain extent the security argument is valid, but more so in terms of app distribution and less so in terms of payments.
> The price is high for what you get
Depends on which price we’re talking about. The 15% or the 30%.
> — an inflexible payment system without ability to offer direct customer support for the payments, and a lottery ticket to maybe appear somewhere else in the store than search results for your app's name, with your competitor's ad first.
Direct support for payments has been made available a while ago. Both in terms of giving the customer a refund as well as in making sure the customer doesn’t receive a refund when they’ve used up consumable purchases.
Caveat is however that it requires a significant backend to utilize these options and most smaller devs prefer that Apple handles this for them.
> Low-margin businesses can't exist with Apple's pricing. Even higher-margin business sucks with Apple - 40% margin is good, but when 30% goes to Apple, Apple earns 3x more than you do.
Again, you’re assuming a 30% cut where most are subject to a 15% cut. Other than that this is a theoretical argument, software generally isn’t a low margin business and has enormous elasticity in terms of margins compared to the production of physical goods.
> If I develop and app, and market it myself, and already have a relationship with my customers, Apple just inserts themselves with a "product" I don't want, my users may not want, but we're forced to buy it.
Again, mainly a theoretical argument. Case in point being the many Mac apps that choose to publish on the MAS in addition to their own distribution methods.
It also completely ignores the value add provided by Apple in terms of developing and maintaining the SDKs and APIs your app depends on, not to mention the toolchain used to create said apps.
The commission is just a way of charging for those services (and defined as such in the developer agreement), other companies might instead charge per seat or, if they’re really stupid, per install.
In the gaming world they charge a hefty price per published build.
While these options might be attractive for bigger developers, it would be prohibitively costly for small indie developers, creating a significant hurdle to entry.
The problem of Apple’s revenue share structure is of course that people start forgetting what they’re actually paying for and quickly start to think they’re just paying for a glorified payment processor.
In practice the points you brought up are non-issues for most small developers, which make up the vast majority of developers on these platforms.
They do however become an issue for big developers, who now, that they’ve picked up steam, would very much like a side letter and try to rile up the smaller indie developers to fight for their cause.
It's their hubris that lead to this. For some reasons companies always seem to believe that they have an upper hand over even the most powerful governmental structure.
The very powerful people at the helm of Apple, Google and friends seem to forget that on the other side of the table there are powerful people as well and that those are quite similar to themselves.
I believe a large contributing factors were the public appearances (or lack thereof) of Tech Execs in front of government bodies (think Zuckerberg in the Senate) where it became clear that they think themselves above the rules of mere mortal man.
They committed the capital offence publicly "ridiculing" powerful politicians (and by proxy the people who elected them) all over the world and that is something that won't fly in the long term.
Come on Mark, suck in your ego, grovel a bit and agree to some semi-token compromises to keep the money train going.
And for the love of god spend some real money in Europe and pay your taxes if you want political leverage.
Apparently that was too much of an ask and now that the eyes of the public and regulators are on Big Tech they will be taken down a notch to "just" being profitable companies.
Do you realize how it sounds to compare the power of a private corporation that sells phones and computers to government agencies that wield the power of literal violence?
Do you honestly think that the incentives are that simple? Personally, I find that private companies provide me with way better, faster and more efficient services and benefits than any government agency ever has. But maybe that’s just the experience in the US.
How many of these governmental bodies look after the best interests of their citizens?
For example:
This year when I was traveling in Quito, the capital city of Ecuador, most everyone I talked to (surprisingly) wanted big governmental changes there and would welcome a governmental collapse. The two main concerns were high theft rate of valuables and phones as well as politicians campaigning with big promises and then doing nothing but playing on their phones and getting paid for it. There was no accountability in government.
From my own perspective, Ecuador needs foreign intervention and foreign security to help to at least keep mayors and presidential candidates from getting regularly assassinated because the way it’s going there, it looks like a collapse is probable. Ecuador’s government was one case of a government body not performing in the best interests of its citizens.
Ecaudor's current government is fully supported by the current U.S. administration as they are leftists that lick Washington's boots while making all the right noises to secure support.
“Ecuador has emerged as a model in Latin America and the Caribbean for its ongoing efforts to strengthen democratic governance and human rights,” Senator Bob Menendez,
"We admire the strong voice for democracy that you have shared with the Ecuadorian people, but also for people throughout our hemisphere”, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during his visit to Ecuador in October last year.
“You and I are united not only in our values but in our vision of the future, one that’s both free and democratic”, President Joe Biden said after meeting the Ecuadorian president in December.
'Foreign' aka U.S. intervention will only happen if Lasso pisses off Washington - like Libya's Gadaffi did. But he knows whose feet to keep massaging to stay in power. Doesn't matter how many mayors or candidates get assassinated as long as he hops to Washington D.C.
I think this apply to most leftist governments in Latin America and I believe this is a deliberate posture from Washington.
Using Brazil as a example: Lula government is doing an economic collapse and authoritarian slide speed-run while supporting Russia, China, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela. By all means Lula government don't align with US values and its actions goes against US interests. But at the end of the day it doesn't support Trump and share a similar "democratic/progressive" narrative.
I mean, the original intention was that developers would just write web apps for the phone. It seems like they really scrambled at the beginning to right the ship. That being said, it’s been 14 years.
I was at [IAPP Global Privacy Summit](https://iapp.org/conference/global-privacy-summit/) 2022, where Tim Cook gave a keynote. He started with highlighting all of the ways Apple protects its users privacy (many of which are great, and the reason I use Apple products!), but then he pivoted to make the case that Apple being forced to allow rival app stores would compromise their ability to protect users' privacy. This fell flat to many in the audience: why can't Apple continue to offer a privacy-by-default experience while allowing more competition?
The app store rules and review process are essentially the only thing that prevents Facebook from tracking you across all applications that use the Facebook SDK. It probably isn't possible to prevent tracking in a purely technical way. Even if two applications can't share data directly, they can each share fingerprinting information with a server, that allows Facebook to track you.
This sort of tracking can work even if you don't have a Facebook account, because so many different applications will include the Facebook SDK for ad tracking purposes.
Nothing specific to Facebook here, of course, it works the same way for any company with a large ad network.
Wrong: Dont install any App which uses the Facebook SDK (1), which you have no (sensible) way of finding out, otherwise FB will track, combine, condense and analyze your data across multiple Apps without ever asking you.
The fact that the data exists somewhere is small comfort if users cannot read the privacy implications in the app store itself when they're deciding whether to download an app.
It's just BS. Privacy and security are OS functions, not part of an app store. iOS has a good base here already - certainly much better than windows where every app can just arbitrarily read every file on the computer...
Naive take. Network sockets, remote servers, and data brokers don't care about local file permissions and an OS won't be able to tell me if corp-surveillance.justbuyme.com might be a domain hosting a privacy-disrespecting service without some sort of human-mediated reputation service.
Then we can look forward to an exciting front in the arms race that is computer security. Surely Apple, for all of their engineering and design brilliance, are up to the challenge?
It took me a long time to realize that Apple is doing the right thing here.
Outside of our little bubble, smartphones are a means to an end. No one bothers to learn technology more than what they can get by in their everyday life. Technology needs to be as simple and intuitive as possible.
Now, if Apple were to let a person enter developer mode by solving some Leetcode puzzles or CS quizzes, I'd be all in for it. Though I can still see scammers scamming people even with this.
You can in theory keep it cornered in its own room (sandbox), but there's no way to be 100% sure it'll stay there. You can be absolutely sure that it will never stop trying to get out.
App Store apps can be trusted to stick to a sandbox because they are vetted to a standard before being allowed there.
There's no reason for Epic-F-Droid-Store have their applications adhere to any kind of standards enforced by Apple. They can do whatever shitty manipulative tricks they want to try to escape any OS level sandboxing Apple tries to build.
Doubly so for 3rd party browsers. A browser has a huge attack surface and can also run code (javascript and WASM at the least). Keeping it secure and sandboxed is not a trivial thing.
Ok, so what, apple can still claim you have the same protection if you use just our app store. And I have the ability to use the alternative store where I can download a game without paying apple 30%. It's great.
It won't be an alternative store, the game will get pulled from the app store.
Now, despite the fact that I bought an iOS device to avoid having to deal with shitty third parties, I'm forced to use the epic store and whatever else.
This sort of comment is incredibly low value and doesn't contribute to the discussion.
I'm not being forced to install Facebook, but I choose to install it on my device. When this changes happens, the choice isn't going to be "install Facebook from the App Store or the Meta Store", it's going to be "install Facebook from the Meta Store". That's not a choice to the user, it's a choice for meta.
A choice for the user is choosing to buy an iPhone with the knowledge that this is a limitation, and if I don't want that limitation, I can buy an android device.
yep, user can choose to do what they want, including installing apps from third party or viceversa - not installing an app that doesn't respect their privacy/values
You're deliberately avoiding my point and my preferences. I want to use Meta's services, play Genshin Impact, and use microsoft apps on windows. I want to manage my subscriptions via the app store. I bought an iOS device _knowing_ that was the setup.
We've seen this change with uPlay, battle.net, epic launcher on PC. Users don't get "more choice", we live with the rules the developer sets out for us. I _want_ to be on a platform where the developer sets standards for payment handling, authentication options. I don't want to have to provide my payment deatils to Genshin's app store, but I do want to pay them.
Stop telling me that I will have a choice when I have already made a choice, and _you_ want something different.
and now you're gonna have to live by the rules the law say. same as in any other circumstance.
Someone else can come and say "but i want to sideload meta and Y and Z, but still use an iphone!".
Sure, both are choices, and MAYBE mutually exclusive. I will then side with the one that is most free. In this case thankfully regulation seems to aswell
> This sort of comment is incredibly low value and doesn't contribute to the discussion.
We're 4 comments deep on a thread of people worried about Facebook being removed from the App Store. Reminding everyone that Meta is optional might be the most rational thing typed in response to this godforsaken article.
Don't know about elsewhere but in Sweden companies, and what's worse government funded organisations, outsource and demand the use of services by Google, Facebook etc. Otherwise you'll be treated like a second class citizen.
Epic will pull Fortnite off App Store at lightning speed.
It'll only be available on their own store where they get 100% of profits and can use any kind of predatory crap to get kids to pay for the next fancy skin.
> but do not force others to go into the garden to play
I choose to live in the walled garden, and there is another option (android) for those who don't. You telling me the walls have to come down is you bringing your rules to the garden _I_ choose to be in.
clearly a great many iphone users would rather the non-walled garden, or they would just only install things that comes via it, and you have the best of both worlds?
perhaps your wish (of convenient limitations) just isnt the most popular?
I happen to largely agree that some of the walls apple puts up is for the best, but I would never presume to think I have the right to force that on others. Sure, keep their walled garden, if meta/epic/whatever does not want to play with that walled garden, well.. thats on them, and on their patrons to decide if they wish to patron
The walled garden isn't just what comes with the device, it's that plus the app store - knowing for example that any game I download will allow me to pay via apple pay, login with apple, manage my subscriptionz and cancel them in a sane way.
> thats on them, and on their patrons to decide if they wish to patron
This isn't giving the patrons a choice though, it's giving epic or meta a choice. The user has to accept whatever they do, and personally I trust apple to do that more than I do a random developer.
The issue is that "imposing the sandbox" isn't simple.
Apple themselves have "imposed a sandbox" for Safari since the first version appeared on iOS. Still we had multiple exploits, even though they owned both sides of the code.
Now imagine a situation where you're building a sandbox and the sandboxed application is using every trick possible to try to get out.
I would equate it to a rabid badger that is behind a door behind another door with both having signs saying ‘beware of rabid badger’. If you want to play with the badger, go for it or just leave the doors shut and you never have to worry about it.
Yes, but in a world where people have been trained to ignore signs if they want to have nice things. No kid and most adults would think twice before clicking I agree even if the screen was flashing red and the phone was making klaxon sounds.
If there's any company in the world that can use UX to their advantage, it's Apple. If they can create text message social division simply through blue vs. green bubble, they can find a way to subtly make non-App Store apps unpalatable except to technical users who know what they're doing.
The real problems of the Apple Tax — it ruins value-chain.
For every value created a customer receives there is value captured by a company paid by this customer. Let say a company creates a service valued as 1X by customer and customer pays 1X for that. This balance guarantees accessibility and interest among many customers.
Apple tax demands for a customer to pay 1.43X for the same value of 1X (0.43 = 30% of 1.43). It means that the balance is ruined, and customers do not get enough value for what they pay. In value they still get 1X despite paying for 1.43X. Hence, a company gets significantly less customers and at the same time it’s unable to benefit from additional 0.43X customers paid. Drop in the revenue is significant. That makes business unsustainable.
So, what a company could do? It could provide more value by letting go own margin in favor of only Apple benefitting from the service or it could increase marketing expenses to attract more users. But then again that additional marketing budget eats into a company’s margin. And again, makes it uneconomical.
Maybe it used to be acceptable to pay the Apple Tax in 2008 when it was enough to just create a simple non-cloud app like calculator, submit to AppStore, and forget about it. In those days there were no expenses to actually run the service. Now the core of mobile services happen outside Apple ecosystem and an iPhone is a mere access point and interface to them. Nothing more. It’s a mere mobile browser for 3rd party services.
Wonder how many great businesses weren’t realized due to Apple making them uneconomical.
It’s much simpler than that. Home screen shortcuts open in the default browser on iOS regardless of where you created the shortcuts from. So they just didn’t have Edge set as default
The inexplicable need to make the browser a second OS with worse everything boggles my mind. Especially on mobile devices which prize battery life.
It won't give users choice because we as an industry have again and again just chosen what's easiest for us instead of best for the customer.
We'd 100% still be using Flash if Apple hadn't refused to support it because of the battery and performance issues.
This forum spends a lot of time talking about the E**ification of everything and how user hostile many companies business practices are and then cheers tearing down the one walled garden a non-nerd can, by default, have a reasonable experience in.
> We'd 100% still be using Flash if Apple hadn't refused to support it because of the battery and performance issues.
Eh, it was very much on the way out already, and mostly used for things which didn't have brilliant alternatives at the time (e.g. videos) and sites like YouTube had been experimenting with "HTML5 video". Few people really liked Flash (outside of usage for games, which was and remains a valid use case IMO), but it was just used because browsers just didn't support a lot of things, and once HTML5 took off Flash usage dropped. HTML5 killed off Flash.
This is why Apple could get away with just not supporting Flash, which certainly sped up this pre-existing trend, but the idea that "Apple killed off Flash" is a serious misreading of history.
Oh no? I remember that whole thing, and being thoroughly confused. I was able to watch videos on websites on my Android phone that iPhone users couldn't, and it had no noticeable effect on my battery life.
I'm not saying we should all go to defend Flash, but I strongly suspect Apple killing Flash had a lot more to do with the fact that using Flash got around App Store policies (you could do _a lot_ using Flash), than battery life.
It maybe also had to do with Flash being one of the most insecure pieces of software ever devised?
It also had to do with Macromedia, at the time the iPhone was released, not giving every platform equal support? So Apple might have been in the position of negotiating with Adobe to get them to support iPhone? I can hardly blame them for pushing open standards like HTML5 and their own app store instead.
I honestly would give them more shit for moves like not supporting WebP seemingly to spite Google.
And by "battery and performance issues" you mean "people being able to play an insane number of games in the browser and Apple not getting a cut of the ad money".
Flash was running just fine on Android with much humbler specs than then-current iPhone.
There is a need for instant-install software and instant-access data. That is web. The web will be a second OS, because it needs to be, and well, it already is. Worse-everything won't be anymore as the web fully matures.
> We'd 100% still be using Flash if Apple hadn't refused to support it
I mean, that's hyperbole. Even in a flash-dominated web, there was still tons of non-flash technology being developed and distributed. In 2023 it would definitely be obsoleted, if for no reason other than Adobe having no incentive to keep it around. Apple's decision feels tangential relative to the progress of internet bandwidth, delivery technologies and even just the plain advent of YouTube obceleting 90% of the places Flash was used.
Flash would be dead today even if Apple did adopt it, because nobody in the industry wants to pay arbitrary taxes or kiss the proprietary ring. Their freedom on the web let them evolve and pick competitive replacements; Flash's death is hardly a defense of iron-fist ecosystem enforcement.
I take your point that it's been a long time - in the intervening 17 years that particular technology would probably have died out on its own, but the primary complaints about the modern web stack on desktop aren't dissimilar from those that pertained to Flash in the day: memory hungry, power inefficient etc.
We're _still_ pumping out solutions that are easier for us and worse for customers on desktop and that's without the problem of software-driven user tracking, which was still just larval when the App Store opened up. In fact the only reason things aren't even _worse_ on desktop is that non-mobile devices are a much smaller % of where people spend their time, and therefore a smaller target with a more technically proficient user base.
There's an open ecosystem available to people where you can load any old crap onto your device. It's even cheaper than iOS. Please just let most of (not all, some crap still gets past App Review) the junk alight there and give people a choice to buy entry into the walled garden.
> and give people a choice to buy entry into the walled garden.
No, that's Apple's decision. The garden plays by Europe's rules, or people don't get a choice at all.
De-facto monopolies are not inherently justified. Feel any way you will about it as a consumer; Apple uses their power to exercise anti-competitive control over their ecosystems. Governments will now step in to regulate the market Apple has failed to make competitive.
It would most definitely still be alive. Source: I worked for a company whose web UI was 100% Flash/Shockwave.
If Steve Jobs hadn't publicly come against Flash and by extension forced the hand of everyone else, I'm pretty sure they'd still be using Flash just because change is hard.
The company went so far as to ship a specific browser to customers that could still run Flash instead of spending resources to rewrite the crappy UI =)
> If Steve Jobs hadn't [...] forced the hand of everyone else
Steve Jobs called where puck was going. Everyone knew the problem; clients were falling behind in capability, and web content was getting more advanced and bigger. 99% of the things we use the modern web for have solved this problem with HTML5 and Javascript. The other 1% got locked behind a novel invention called "The App Store", a new way to pay 30% of your digital revenue to support APIs you ought to have access to in the first place. That sad fact is the reason why every Mac is loaded with Electron apps and WebViews for basic messaging and music players. Apple might even try to fix it if they didn't make so much money selling memory upgrades.
If Apple's goal was to build on the web instead of gimping it for their own exploitation, they would have a leg to stand on.
Agree, most web developers now are just in the opposite campaign of web "users" and trying every possible way to make their jobs (squeezing every penny out of their "users") simpler without any other considerations
He's saying that Apple should abide by the Digital Markets Act, which goes into effect in November. A summary of the changes the DMA will require would be nice.
I see a lot of people downplaying the claimed downsides of “Meta/Google will just build their own app store and force you to use that” or that malware will proliferate via 3rd party app stores by saying “well nobody is going to make their own app store, it doesn’t really happen on android either”.
So if no 3rd parties are going to make their own app stores, why force Apple to provide the ability at all? It’s a huge engineering cost to do so.
Theoretically it is hard to argue against letting apple configure and manage the devices they sell as they see fit. After all of users don't like iphone they can buy a galaxy. It's not like apple is a monopoly in smartphones.
However, the current market situation is definitely limiting customer choice and freedom in a way very similar to a monopoly. There are only 2 options in the market. Iphone or android. So even if I do care about having a device with full control, I literally cannot buy one, without sacrificing the last half decade of tech improvements.
If the next version of android totally disallowed side loading, what recourse would people have? Literally nothing. You would be forced to take it.
This thing has happened multiple times before with removable batteries, headphone jacks, memory cards, etc. I care about having a headphone jack a little bit, but there is literally no new phone coming out with that feature now. You can still get some, but not without major degradation in areas like CPU/GPU, battery, screen, cameras, etc.
So effectively, I do think that iphone and android should be related in some ways like a monopoly. Simply because that's how they are affecting customers.
> This thing has happened multiple times before with removable batteries, headphone jacks, memory cards, etc. I care about having a headphone jack a little bit, but there is literally no new phone coming out with that feature now. You can still get some, but not without major degradation in areas like CPU/GPU, battery, screen, cameras, etc.
It is understandable why Apple wants to keep its current grip on iOS indefinitely. What I don't understand is why some people defend it, on this very forum!
One commenter simultaneously defended gay marriages - "if you don't like gay marriages, don't get married to gays" - and defended the Apple's monopoly - "I like that there is only one Appstore and developers won't force me to sideload".
It comes down to this: I support companies being free to sell the product they want and users being free to buy what they want. If Apple sells a phone that's locked down, a piece of junk, wonderful, or anything in between that's between them and their customers. It's not the government's role to step in and prevent those voluntary transactions IMO. I would allow exceptions for grievous bodily injury and so on in my outlook, but I don't think that applies here.
Third party app developers don't have a right to use Apple's app store in whatever way they want. They have a right to sell things to customers on whatever terms the customers agree to and with whatever agreements they are able to make with other businesses like Apple.
Of all the major and minor players in this space, Apple has by far taken the most user-centric, privacy-first, security-centric stance. And they have done so over and over and over again.
Have they been perfect? Of course not. But every instance where they've lapsed, they've made geniune efforts to improve the situation. Are there ways they can still improve? Of course. But the direction has been clear and unambiguous. And as a result, they've earned my trust. This, in an environment where quite literally everyone else has repeatedly proven themselves untrustworthy.
> It's not the government's role to step in and prevent those voluntary transactions IMO
I'm a EU citizen and I'm more than happy that they're taking on Apple for this. After all, they're doing business with EU citizens, why shouldn't the EU tell them to behave?
If they don't like it, they can just stop selling in the EU, no one's gonna stop them there, but seeing as it's a money hungry megacorp hellbent on hoovering up every single penny that exists on this planet, that obviously isn't gonna happen, so they'll have to play by the EU's rules in that case.
Not sure whether you're fishing for a response or that naive...
Any number of security warnings for Android have come out specifically mentioning sideloading being a vector for malicious or invasive spyware. Much more than any curated store, and even then the historical track record isn't stellar.
Lesser of two evils principle maybe? I defend apple in this one appstore topic not because I think apple is good, but just better than google and facebook.
Of course the longterm solution is to get better legalization on privacy protection etc. But before that, I really prefer apple as a proxy between me and google/facebook/etc.
When this goes through, you can be 100% sure there will be a Meta-only iOS store along with a Google iOS store and all their apps will move there.
After that if you want to use apps to access any Google or Meta service, you'll need to get it from their store - that doesn't have any pesky limitations on user profiling or stupid guidelines for privacy.
With the Play Store, the only times I ever see people not use the play store is when:
- They're using an Amazon device
- They're installing fortnite
I'm not so convinced that opening up the app store to competition would result in a deluge of developers forcing people to install their own store apps and sideload everything. The only reason I could imagine that happening is Apple continuing to charge extremely high rents for the privilege of using the app store, in which case the competition isn't a bad thing?
I believe the much more real threat is non-technical users getting duped into installing malware through some shady third party store or sideloading scheme, but how often does this even happen on Android? I don't hear much about such schemes.
I am just generally unconvinced the App Store needs to be protected from competition to be used >90% of the time on iOS.
Facebook was extremely miffed at the required Privacy Disclosures that became required on the App Store a year or two ago, the one that lists, like a nutritional label, what data the app gathers. Facebook's looks like the ingredients list of a cheap-o, pre-wrapped donut from a gas station.
Meta has already been caught abusing enterprise provisioning profiles to get around App Store rules.
Many App Store rules are not technical, that you can get around by simply crafting the API to behave a certain way. Many of them take the form of a "gentlemen's agreement" type of rule. You have to convince either the code-inspection algos or the human app reviewers you are following them before your app gets listed. Many of these rules do not exist on the Play Store. So of course Facebook is just on the Play Store, they have no motivation to leave! They've *already* attempted to break out of the guardrails on the App Store.
I don't think they have the product gumption, nor do users have the patience, to deal with multiple app stores. They'll just end up abandoning those apps, at least on iOS. Also regulators will not be amused by other companies forcing users to use their own walled gardens if those gardens are going to be full on data-mining operations.
> I think the threat of rival app stores is highly overrated
Agreed. I also don't think Google or Facebook will make iOS stores. My real worry is that a malicious actor will create a side loadable store called "iGoogle Store" that is then pushed to non-technical people. I could easily see both young and old people falling for this. This "iGoogle Store" would then request Google login credentials and millions of accounts are compromised.
I don't see why wanting a closed ecosystem is a choice people are so against. There is a great open option, I'd prefer the current closed option to remain completely closed.
That's a fair consideration, and I don't have an immediate answer to that. Except to say that Apple could have gotten behind the opening up of iOS themselves, retaining some measure of control and protecting their users:
> Really, Apple could have headed off regulators at the pass if they had embraced the (semi-)opening of their platform themselves. Allow third party app stores but on their own terms, providing SDKs and APIs for creating your own iOS App Store with security checks baked in and mandating privacy protections built in. Sort of like a software services equivalent to Apple Authorized Service Providers and Apple Authorized Resellers.
They would have then controlled this debate, and there would have been less room for the Epics of the world to complain about the platform being locked down. Not to mention users would benefit from greater choice. Imagine boutique third party app stores springing up devoted to specific interests and niches such as F-Droid, or promising better curation or quality.
Companies who refuse to use the AppStoreKit that Apple so beneficently provided would then be seen as malefactors seeking to subject their users to lack of privacy and security, rather than Apple trying to uphold their 30% cut and restrictive behavior.
Instead, Apple tried to control everything and not only did they expose themselves to regulation like this, they deal with customers annoyed at scammy apps on their own App Store, and third party devs crying foul at inconsistent policing.
I mean, I think there's still time for them to try something like this. Embrace alternative app stores and building the infrastructure to enable them, rather than just throwing open the doors and letting the wolves swarm "because the EU made us do it." In fact I can see this scenario happening because the motivation would be to prove openness is inherently dangerous.
I actually don’t have a problem so much with this solution. It ensures that apps are still adhering to the same standards on privacy and security and that’s what I care about.
One thing that is missing is the requirement for each app to use in app purchases and how easy it is to cancel subscriptions. If you give a suggestion on this one (give that the above I’m very okay with) in the spirit of the above one - I’d most likely switch camps
I should imagine large kickbacks to apps using Google and Facebook SDKs even if they do not launch stores directly. They don’t need a store if they can get every other store compromised.
I also think shareholders in those companies that lust after data would revolt if they did not try to directly take all app sale profit and install data. I would be shocked if both did not already have apps in development stage.
I think the changes Apple should make is add a little indicator to every app showing the store it was purchased from encircling the icon with the default store color to remind of non-default privacy in that app. Just green badge them all and call it a day to let people know the app will be slower going through app specific memory encryption and API filtering with new anti-piracy frameworks to combat modified or fraudulent purchases.
Perhaps some new app storefront licensing board if the EU is serious about protecting consumers. Their current policy seems half baked along the line of shutting down government is a good thing. Make single click subscription cancellation a requirement for opening a storefront with and require bond to prevent stores from just cutting and running after a few fraudulent sales.
I think it is a shame how much silicon and engineering effort this will burn to maintain device security. It may go as far as apps run through a virtual machine sandbox with limited permissions in the short term. Personally being limited on my device made me sad, but as I lack self control the restrictions helped me focus.
Perhaps the future is that Apple, along with government watchdogs, data consumer protection groups, etc. provide free public scans of apps to detect permissions misuse and data tracking.
> I think the changes Apple should make is add a little indicator to every app showing the store it was purchased from encircling the icon with the default store color to remind of non-default privacy in that app. Just green badge them all and call it a day to let people know the app will be slower going through app specific memory encryption and API filtering with new anti-piracy frameworks to combat modified or fraudulent purchases.
I think these discussions often assign a lot of agency to the data malefactors and little to Apple. I've often made the point that Apple, being the masters of UX and subtle social engineering, can exploit their design to nudge less technical users away from dubious apps, very similarly to how they've created the infamous dichotomy between blue and green text bubbles:
So I definitely agree that badging non-App Store apps can be a way to protect users by deterring those who don't know what they're doing from mucking about with questionable apps.
I like the licensing board idea too. Make it so there are more protection groups out there besides Apple itself. Apply it to Android as well so users on that platform aren't shafted.
All Apple has to do is lower their rake and announce some kind of privacy program that allows intelligent ad placement, and Facebook will stay on the main app store.
Alternative app stores are mostly dead in the water if Apple will act like they are competitive.
This is a pretty defeatist take. Those big bad mega corporations will siphon all our privacy and our only solution is to allow Apple its monopoly.
Apple’s approach to hindering facebook’s spying is a technical one. But it’s not the only one. Just as we can take a political approach to dealing with Apple, so too with Facebook.
Workplace safety regulations didn’t exist until they did. Same with pollution. So too with meaningful privacy laws; and not cost of doing business fines, but the kind of fines that define business practices.
You really think you can stop your $relative from using Facebook or Instagram just because they moved the app to a store that has zero limits for privacy intrusions?
I mean yes - if I explain them this app is bad and provide an alternative, they'll switch. People should be able to make a choice and let's be honest, if apple will add sideload but with a longer process, like multiple warnings THIS MAY BE DANGEROUS, etc..., avg relatives will not even reach to that point
I'm rather indifferent on the matter, but this doesn't quite hold true. It's possible (likely?) that a someone big - one who ordinary folk would go through the jumps for - would only publish their app via side loading (or alt app store) and use this to bypass some of the policy restrictions wrt privacy on the App Store. This then becomes a slippery slope and would act as a platform to allow other apps through.
The tough part of "just don't side load" is when we have a somewhat contemptious relationship with some of the services you use, and they only offer their apps via alt methods.
Worth noting that Epic Games couldn't get this to work for Fortnite (for a period they only offered Fortnite via a sideloaded apk), and I don't believe Facebook as tried this.
There's also the finer details - if alt browse engines are allowed, will non-web browser apps start bundling and shipping their own browser engines (similar to the electron situation on desktop)?
The only thing about this argument I don’t quite agree with is that can’t apple just continue to sandbox apps to heck and back even if they are sideloaded? Like, currently apps can’t get a unique identifier for a user without the user allowing tracking, I don’t see why that has to change because sideloading is a thing. Unless there’s an implicit “and also the apps need to be able to get root/super entitlements without user consent” in the law.
The App Store was only ever a first line of defense against icky behavior.
Yes, security should always be implemented by technical means by the platform. Those hoping that alt-app stores means a complete free for all will be disappointed. But many things just cannot be restricted just by technical means, and instead relies on policy, and the threat of Apple kicking you off the platform, to enforce restrictions.
A trivial example is the review prompts. It's policy that you must use the standard iOS APIs to trigger (which limits the frequency it's shown to the user). An app technically could implement their own UI (and im sure some still slip through), and there's no real way to prevent this, but being against the rules carries risks.
That’s stupid. Apps will just not be in the App Store and you’ll have to side load to be able to have them. Which we (at least I) explicitly don’t want to do. And explicitly and even more don’t want my computer illiterate entourage to do!
Currently, Apple apologists say, "just do your research and don't buy Apple's products if you don't like the rules". Likewise, you are free to not use the apps that aren't available on Appstore.
I don’t want something shittier that I will invariably have to learn about to remove from my families phones. It suits me fine if it doesn’t exist at all.
Just because optional sideloading might create a mild inconvenience for you, you support the abusive policy that creates a huge problem for millions of users.
What’s a killer sideloaded app on Android that iPhone users suffer from not having? Fortnite? I’m looking for problems on the scale of millions of users.
You are moving the goalposts. You asked what are killer sideloaded apps that users suffer from not having, I gave you examples, you started deflecting.
Oppressive governments are not interested in sideloading, quite the opposite - they very happy with Apple's policies so far, as Apple readily removes any app that the governments asks them to remove.
It's not moving the goalposts because "apps banned by the government" are not apps that will be available through side loading. If Apple complies with the DMA, it will certainly comply with any government requirement that side loading not allow for certain apps to be installed.
This is nonsense. If the OS allows sideloading, users typically can install ANY app via sideloading. Like you can install telegram on your macOS in that very same China that bans it for iOS devices. Why? Because sideloading means no one has control what should work on device but the user. And this is essential if you live under the oppressive government.
Again, I don’t know how I can make this clearer: macOS with a sealed system volume is plenty capable of keeping an app from running, ever. That Apple doesn’t enforce it is a concession to the history of the platform. It’s very unlikely they allow exemptions to notarizing on iOS, and the DMA doesn’t require it. DMA only requires that Apple allow apps to be distributed outside their App Store.
If Apple even attempted to do whatever nonsense you're suggesting, their market share would plummet to zero very quickly. Users just won't accept not being able to use their devices as they see fit. All serious developers would leave and then all that left would be just an iPad with keyboard. And no platform ever survived without developers.
This is obviously untrue, because what I described is already the case, and Apple is the most successful consumer electronics maker. They don't care about market share, they care about owning the most profitable customers in the market, which they do.
The issue I have is that apps I want to use currently are forced to adopt user positive features like how Apple handles subscriptions for apps (cancel any time, keep access until the existing subscription ends, cancel with a button click, etc…). If those apps all migrate away from the App Store so they can be more profit focused rather than user focused that could negatively effect me.
When it's a company you like and don't feel like you've been hurt by, it's very easy to not even realize the bizarre rationalizations you're applying. Only in hindsight does it become obvious.
There is no inconsistency in your examples when you reframe the second point as: if you don’t like the terms at which Apple sells you devices, don’t buy Apple devices.
Apple should open up the boot loader and let you install an alternate OS.
Can’t get any more open than that.
But I think we will find people actually want access to Apple’s audience and dev tools for free. I’m loathe to stump for megacorp like Apple, but in the same vein as iMessage, I don’t think we should drag iOS down to Android’s level just because Googles messaging strategy has been a turd for a decade.
> I don’t think we should drag iOS down to Android’s level just because Googles messaging strategy has been a turd for a decade.
Wdym? Google Messages supports RCS, which has been a thing for a while, it's also an open standard. Apple still doesn't support it, they're stuck with SMS.
I support forcing open standards on tech giants. But I don’t support singling out a specific tech giant (in this case Apple), since it means Apple’s also-tech-giant competitors get an upper hand.
For example, why not force Google to open up Chrome, to increase interoperability? I want to be able to export saved passwords from Chrome and import them into the macOS keychain, and vice versa.
If the EU focuses on Apple and forgets, say, Chrome, it might gain an even greater market share because Apple has to open up features while Google doesn’t have to open up Chrome.
The DMA applies to anyone with a "gatekeeper" role. Part of the criteria for the role are: having more than 45 million monthly active users and more than 10,000 yearly active business users established in the EU, for the past three years.
Six companies (and in particular, 22 services offered by those companies) are currently listed as gatekeepers. [1]
He did say "Apple and other Big Tech" so I don't think he's singling them out especially. It's just that they're the most obvious example of a closed ecosystem right now.
Is this just one big protectionist move? Opening the doors for more EU app companies to rake more money? I'm not even sure which EU companies are spending the big lobbying dollars for this one? Anyone?
Conceptually I'm on board in practice I'm not. Once we actually look at what the other side looks like it's going to be super disappointing. And like everyone else said -- if you don't like the platform go shop for another one theres others out there. No one forced you into the Apple ecosystem.
They're not known for it because they don't have the ability, not because they don't have the willingness. It's not a matter of culture or policy as evidenced by the profiteering of European luxury goods monopolies. Europe can't compete in tech so it has its lunch eaten by American companies.
The rules to publish on the App Store aren't changing. Apple only has to allow alternative app stores. If you like the App Store, then continue to use it.
This is the actual quote from Breton, EU Commissioner for Internal Market:
> The next job for Apple and other Big Tech, under the DMA (Digital Markets Act) is to open up its gates to competitors, be it the electronic wallet, browsers or app stores, consumers using an Apple iPhone should be able to benefit from competitive services by a range of providers
Next feat after blessing us with the cookie banner and an inferior plug: making iOS so unsafe that everyone has to use physical branches for banking again
If the plug was superior, why wouldn't Apple use it on all their devices? Apple could have also opened the plug up for everybody if they really felt it was superior. Wasn't it Volkswagen that allowed all manufacturers to use the 3 point seat belt because of how safe it was? Volkswagen did something for the common good of humanity. Why couldn't Apple do the same if the plug was so insanely good as you say?
> making iOS so unsafe that everyone has to use physical branches for banking again
Yep, me the Android user has to go to physically go to the bank instead of installing my bank's app off the Play Store.
Will this include the ability to compile apps for iOS without requiring Apple made hardware/software (that specifically must run on MacOS)? Have never understood why developers haven't kicked up more of a fuss over that restriction, but it's why I would never write iOS apps as a hobby.
I assume many people are hard at work to get a free version of something like the xcode build system stood up. It's mostly there already, but I haven't seen anyone put the parts all together in a way you can self-host.
I think iOS hobbyists these days usually use a SASS build system with a free or cheap lower tier.
From my reading of the DMA, I would suspect that gatekeeping software development only to users who pay for Apple's hardware and software licenses would not be allowed. I imagine they can still keep things locked down, but they will have to include a way to turn off their restrictions so that people can run software without their gatekeeping.
I think it's perfectly reasonable for Apple to continue prioritizing security and keeping things locked down, but the end user deserves to have a key that can unlock things if they want them unlocked.
That information is already available, and much of the implementation (if not all) is open source.
You’re free to produce your own toolchain, developer tools, IDE, etc.
This generally isn’t done because it’s a significant amount of work, and you’ll always be playing catch-up to Apple’s comprehensive integrated development stack.
The fact that you need a MacOS machine even to build Xamarin or React native apps always struck me as bizarre though - I assumed there was some proprietary component that Apple wouldn't publish the details for.
Not if it requires me to go out and buy a machine with an OS I'm unfamiliar with. Though I gather I don't really need to interact with it directly to build Xamarin/React-native type apps (not sure about Flutter etc.)
I do wonder if Tim Apple would be so bold as to stop selling in the EU for all the rules and regulations that they have been required to follow. It would be amazing to see that play out imo. Like a reverse boycott could happen?
The secondary strategy Timmy could pull is a dumbed down ecosystem in the EU which I’m sure is even worse for everyone. But hey, you’d be able to buy audible books straight in the app. Is it worth it?
Sure, there are companies that choose not to be in a particular jurisdiction, like Meta has long chosen not to be in China.
But it’s a lot easier to make that choice early when you don’t need to give up on revenue. In Apple’s case, leaving EU would mean losing around $90 billion in annual revenue and ceding a large chunk of their global market share to Android. It’s really hard to justify that kind of thing to shareholders by “we didn’t want to open some APIs in our operating system.”
It might be easier to justify than that, though - the EU has shown an increasing willingness to dictate; Apple may project that out to causing more than $90B/yr in harm or slowed growth in the global business.
It's complete bs that Microsoft gets anti monopoly lawsuit just for having IE as default browser, but Apple can just force everyone to only be able to install software thru their own app store.
Windows had a vast majority of consumer installs. Microsoft was slapped around for using that monopoly position to push out other competitors.
Without even approaching whether it's a good case or not, Apple's situation is different: The monopoly claims against Apple are that they have complete dominance on their platform, not on all consumer platforms.
I also want to be able to reprogram my oven and washing machine. And also my car. I should be able to run any app on my infotainment system, not just those from the manufacturer.
Less tongue in cheek: let me install any game I want from any game store on Xbox and Playstation and Switch. I do not understand why this only focuses on Apple. Is that just the media for clicks?
Im reading this whole discussion and Im totally buffled by ppl trying to FORCE their way of thinking on others.
Nobody forces ppl to use Apple products, nobody forces ppl to use Google products. Ppl do so because they have no options to choose from.
So - Instead of fixing the issue of "there is no options to choose from" we try to force OUR rules on companies that operate totally within the rules of open market.
The issue we have should be solved by GOVERMENTs to make it easier for others to build and grow as competitors to Apple and Google.
But that requires donations, easier access to market, good conditions on the market. THIS is not something that can be easly done. So GOVERMENTs try to convince ppl the "big bad IT" is at fault for how the world works.
Tho they play only following the rules created by GOVERMENT in the first place..
So instead of being mad at GOVERMENT, ppl are mad at random companies. What a joke.
> Nobody forces ppl to use Apple products, nobody forces ppl to use Google products. Ppl do so because they have no options to choose from.
If I use neither Google nor Apple, I loose access to banking apps and other third-party apps. I have a choice not to use them, but that means I loose access to products that were developed by neither of those. Hell, even if I use Google's hardware (Pixels) but not Google software (Play Services), I loose these apps. Same goes for Instant Messaging, you can choose to use a competitor, but then you won't be able to discuss with other persons unless you convince them to use the same software as you do.
> The issue we have should be solved by GOVERMENTs to make it easier for others to build and grow as competitors to Apple and Google.
> Tho they play only following the rules created by GOVERMENT in the first place..
You say that the government should change the rules to ensure competitions is possible. But isn't that what DMA creates? It (in part) allows new competitors by reducing network effect and enforcing interoperability.
> If I use neither Google nor Apple, I loose access to banking apps and other third-party apps
So your real issue is lack of competition.
Something that could be regulated but is not due to corrupted goverment.
So instead of fixing the system to force Google and Apple to compete on a market, we prefer to choose an easy bandaid while keeping everything the same.
Yes my solution is harder but there are no easy solutions to hard problems.
> Isn't this going to try and turn iPhones into general purpose computing devices? Currently they're much more locked down than that.
They already are general purpose computing devices, the restrictions on how the general purpose software (apps) interact with the hardware in no-way negates that fact same with the restrictions on how you get the general purpose software (app-store). At the end of the day an iPhone is nothing more than a portable a computer, it's as simple as that.
the same is also true of a console, and there's no reason that app stores can't prove (eg) productivity apps like word processing on console platforms. Just plug in a keyboard, or use wireless.
People already use their phones for everything in our modern society, so they have simply declared them to be that, regardless of what Apple thinks about it.
Even if I'd personally like it, I don't think the same argument makes much sense for a PS5 - when have you last used it to order groceries or new furniture? Apple would love to get a cut of those purchases, by the way.
Starting by dealing with the devices that have the highest impact on the largest number of people, due to a runaway capitalistic empire trying to add an additional tax to everything that vaguely gets near it, has a higher chance of actually succeeding.
> Starting by dealing with the devices that have the highest impact on the largest number of people, due to a runaway capitalistic empire trying to add an additional tax to everything that vaguely gets near it, has a higher chance of actually succeeding.
This is the worst approach, I think. Lawmaking shouldn't work where a juicy fineable target is spotted, singled out, and milked for all it's worth. Laws should set out rules that everyone has to follow.
Also, it might be hard to order groceries on a PS5, but it's much simpler to make a PS5 able to browse the Web than it is to open up an iPhone to any HTML-rendering code, or background tasks, without compromising the seamless experience reasons many people bought one for in the first place.
> due to a runaway capitalistic empire trying to add an additional tax to everything that vaguely gets near it
It's not due to a runaway capitalistic empire. It's because it made stuff people really want, so they'll pay for it. You're thinking of political structures, where people are forced to pay taxes regardless of the outcomes. Apple are rich because they make things people want. That's not a runaway empire. That's just being really, really useful. This gross mischaracterisation of useful structures as empires is astonishing and unhelpful to any clarity of thought.
The point of the law isn't to fine Apple. The point is to ban their tax collection entirely, relieving society of this pointless money drain. Most people currently don't have a choice to not pay an extra fee to Apple - we'll see how many will once it's optional?
Once the device has been sold to you (for a profit, even!), Apple has no business interfering in relationships between you and a separate business trying to sell you additional software for it, much less to collect a tax on entirely unrelated things like streaming video subscriptions.
If you really believe that "once a device has been sold to you, the manufacturer has no business interfering in relationships between you and a separate business trying to sell you additional software for it", then you'd want to apply that principle to gaming consoles, to car infotainment systems, etc.
But no, the EU legislation basically restricts their coverage to only the largest companies (which are incidentally not EU companies). It's not based on principles, but on opportunistically targeting the companies that can afford to pay and can't afford to lose the EU market.
And we should feel bad for the largest corporations on earth... Why, exactly? These companies would sell you oxygen if the market was there for it, why on earth shouldn't we target these megalithic parasites?
If they want access to EU citizens, then they have to play by the EU's rules, otherwise they can get bent and say goodbye to that whole market.
>when have you last used it to order groceries or new furniture? Apple would love to get a cut of those purchases, by the way.
You can, though. There's no particularly convenient way to do most of those things, but that's largely because of manufacturer limitations. Nothing stopping you from using the browser on your Switch to go do instacart.com, tho.
>Starting by dealing with the devices that have the highest impact on the largest number of people
Why would this need to be addressed so singularly? Is that how the EU approaches most problems? It seems pretty sensible that they'd just regulate computing devices to allow for this sort of thing and then be able to pretty easily bring into compliance any who don't. Isn't that more or less what they did with the GDPR? It seems like regulating this would be even easier as non-compliance would be entirely visible to the consumer.
> Why would this need to be addressed so singularly?
I don't know, I didn't write the law. They must have thought this is the better approach to start with. Perhaps they consider fighting one gigacorp at a time to be easier. After all, Apple has been left to grow unchecked until became larger than many countries.
Sure wish the US would just handle Apple the same way China has handled Alibaba growing too large. One can dream, right?
For context, they basically just said "you had your fun, it's over" and forcibly split the company in many smaller ones under new leadership.
> Nothing stopping you from using the browser on your Switch to go do instacart.com, tho.
You can't just open up a browser on the switch (or a ps5 for that matter). You have to use a workaround to access the browser that's only intended for viewing help/regulatory pages and interacting with wifi captive-portals. I guess they're really mad about the browser exploits that hit them in previous gens. (although, doesn't matter if you still have any browser access)
It's on about the same level as escaping the UI on a touchscreen kiosk to access the web.
Logically, probably. They may choose to change their operations based on this ruling because they could expect a similar ruling against them in the future. I would personally expect them to continue operating as they do until/unless there is a such a ruling.
If they get declared a gatekeeper, yes. Until then it doesn't apply.
I'm not sure they meet the requirements of being a gatekeeper. One of the requirements for example is 45 million monthly active users in the EU. According to Microsoft, Xbox is only at 4 million:
A lot of this feels like it overlaps with the right to repair. Repairing a physical device is really about changing it and being able to change it — in particular, not being obstructed from doing so.
That feels very close, in spirit, to being able to run one’s own software on the device. Another natural extension is if one can run one’s own apps then that right ought also to extend to the entire device — the OS and the firmware.
The app / OS boundary is of interest to the computer scientists, but functionally there isn’t any distinction to the end user between the code that renders the heart under the cat video, the code that notices me touch the screen, the code which sends the JSON “{like:10295892983}” over the network, and the code which turns that message into radio waves.
Bureaucrats and their good intentions. Apple is not even close to being a monopoly on the market of smartphones. And the reason their products work so well (despite some lapses in last 6-7 years) is integration. Creating the whole banana as Jobs used to say. This makes me feel sick, as sick as I was having to jump through hoops installing European Windows which had its browser and media player removed because of European Union's bureaucrats and their good intentions. I don't even like Microsoft. But what I like even less is people with zero technical skill and understanding of managing ecosystems forcefully ruining the efforts of those who succeeded with theirs through incompetent regulation.
I think this is a warning shot. It'll be a while until EU actually files a case, and more time until it's adjudicated. And then Apple will fight it tooth and nail. Do not hold your breath.
There will be side-effects of well-intentioned, feel-good policies of supporting multiple app stores:
- Malware including ransomware, password theft, and identity theft
- Lookalike, counterfeit apps
- Software piracy
- Lowering of curation standards by Apple
Certain other software bits cannot be open sourced, including specific cryptographic keys. There is a great deal of Darwin/XNU that is already FOSS.
What would be helpful for r2r would be the availability of schematics and Apple-proprietary custom variants of third-party chips. Certainly, T prefix chips can't be too freely shared without weakening the integrity of the security baked into Apple products (no pie puns intended).
That has already been happening on the official App Store! Kosta Eleftheriou has done a ton of scholarship into the proliferation of bad apps. (Not to mention, poor UX such as archaic search.)
People imagine multiple app stores on iOS would be shady data-hungry operations from the likes of Meta or Google. But opening things up would just as likely, and perhaps more so, foster curated, transparent app stores such as an iOS equivalent to F-Droid.
as long as the first party iOS experience is still solid, I don't care. If apple has to prevent updates / services to 1p services because 3p cannot keep up, then I'd be pretty incensed. There is a reason i left android last year!
I doubt it can be if more apps are allowed. E.g. allowing one browser means they can control very tightly the performance characteristics of it and any other apps that use its renderer. If third party browsers are allowed then it's much harder to do that.
I know Android does it, but Android's got many years of experience doing it, and it's generally not as smooth as iOS.
Oh yeah, I think 90% of EU tech regulations are overall hurtful to EU citizens in the long run. But Apple acts very high and mighty in the tech industry and throws a lot of stones, so its nice to see Apple hit in their glass house.
I think it is nice to have a choice of a walled off platform. If I wanted a "more open" platform, I would get an Android phone. There are plenty of amazing Android phones.
I choose the tradeoff of Apple's curation.
Yes, I cannot run arbitrary software and sometimes it is a disadvantage. Yes, I don't agree with all of the App Store rules all of the time. Yes, I don't think the App Store revenue split is entirely fair.
However, I absolutely love that all the developers including the likes of Meta or Uber have to bow down to Apple's rules, which are mostly beneficial to me. I don't want to download apps from alternative app stores. I want them to be available in App Store and to be submitting to all of the curation rules.
Perhaps it might seem ridiculous to you, but I want to have the freedom to choose a closed ecosystem as long as there is a good alternative.
----
On the other hand, I think jailbreaking shouldn't void warranty. Also, I might be fine with a regulation that forces Apple to release an "official jailbreak". But that policy should then also apply to PlayStation, X-box, Tesla infotainment, etc.
Having a curated store \neq Having only one store.
Also, that misses all the other areas pointed out: "Be it the electronic wallet, browsers or app stores, consumers using an Apple iPhone should be able to benefit from competitive services by a range of providers."
> But that policy should then also apply to PlayStation, X-box, Tesla infotainment, etc.
Why? That only applies to "gatekeepers". So you would have to argue that apple is very unsuccessful and hence these are at the same level as apple... seems like quite a stretch.
No it's not. Currently all the apps that want to be available on Apple's platform have to submit to Apple's rules. If alternative app stores are allowed, they won't have to do that. As a consumer I like the current state of matters more.
>Also, that misses all the other areas
I'm reacting only to the App Store part. I'm all for opening electronic wallet or allowing browser engines into App Store. Those are off topic in this subthread.
>Why? That only applies to "gatekeepers".
I don't see how PS/Xbox/Tesla are any less of a gatekeeper than Apple.
The point is choice. As a consumer, you can choose to only get your apps via the official Apple store, which comes with all the "Apple rules" you want. As another consumer, I prefer freedom and hate monopolists so would choose another store. Everyone is happy!
> However, I absolutely love that all the developers including the likes of Meta or Uber have to bow down to Apple's rules, which are mostly beneficial to me. I don't want to download apps from alternative app stores. I want them to be available in App Store and to be submitting to all of the curation rules.
On Android, you have to abide by Google's rules if you want to be in the Play Store; Amazon's if you want to be in theirs; F-Droid's to be there.
Consumers have choice over whose rules they care about. In a hypothetical iOS with app store competition, what you write would presumably still be true for the Apple App Store, there just might be an 'F-iOS' or whatever that insists the app is open source too, for example.
having multiple stores in itself is fine, but it's even worse worse. if you want to release your app on multiple app stores, you have to release on all of them at the same time. if you skip one they will not allow you to launch there later because you dared to treat them as second choice. imagine apple banning you because you dared to release on android first.
Because there's no point as they need their apps to be cross platform and so Apple is setting a baseline for what behaviour is allowed.
But once Meta, Epic etc can run their own stores on both iOS and Android they will absolutely move their apps to them. Epic has already said how important this is to be able to implement their metaverse strategy.
Epic already did this at the height of fortnite's popularity, by using a "fortnight installer" app that you had to get from outside the play store. Can't remember why they backtracked, or why they didn't offer store/sideload versions at the same time.
Google even took steps to prevent people from installing malware pretending to be fortnite, and steered them to the official installer. Not out of the goodness of their heart, TBF.
I really, really don't think it'll be as easy you as say. Neither the audience nor the regulators will let them off easy, and these creaking giants aren't exactly great at launching popular new platforms, these days:
it is happening for android - there is more malware in the third-party stores, even with the extremely minimal scrutiny google apples to the official store.
anyway, here is a real-world example of the type of spyware that facebook and others will deploy once they have the leverage. again, remember that this already happened and most likely still exists and is something they have ready to deploy again if the opportunity presents.
One approach that might be reasonable is for device makers to provide a hypervisor to control actual hardware access, and then implement their environments in virtual machines running under that hypervisor.
iOS then becomes just one environment that the phone's owner can choose to run under that hypervisor. Within any given environment the maker of that environment should be free make it as open or closed as they want.
The device maker should have to make it easy to run different environments.
I like the walled garden of Apple as well, especially as a “family IT guy” who had no need to reset/reconfigure the systems or remove malware from any phones since talking the family members to switch to iPhones a few years back.
Some of the properties of the walled garden have nothing to do with security, though. They are simply uncompetitive practices on Apple part. I’m happy someone said “enough”.
It doesn't seem ridiculous to me, I get where you're coming from. Only I'd say you've been misled.
As others have pointed out, you can have both a walled garden store and an Apple curated store — and this is how Android operates. More menacing though, are Apples reasons for not wanting competition.
Put simply; if Safari wasn't the only allowed browser on iDevices (other browsers are just skins over what is essentially Safari), they would lose a significant amount of power. They can throw their weight around now, partially because they have a strong web browser market share — but it's artificially imposed.
If you don't think it's forced, have a quick quiz at work amongst Apple fanboys, and find out how many of them use Safari as their default web browser — on their Macs.
If there were other app stores besides Apple's for iDevices, Google would require you to download the Play Store to access Gmail, YouTube and Google Maps. Once there's an alternative major app store where Apple's strict privacy rules don't apply, why should companies with a more relaxed privacy stance stay on Apple's store? Your Bank, Facebook, Adobe, and Amazon will likely move to the store with the lowest standards.
Being on the default store is 1000% buff. Literally your Bank, Facebook, and Amazon aren't going to just disappear off the shelves of the biggest store. On Android, Amazon actually run their own app store and they still have all their apps on the play store.
Besides all of the trouble it takes to build and run one's own store, pulling one's apps off the official App Store would be hell for discoverability and UX. And the Amazon store really only exists for the sake of Fire tablets.
Ushering the FB app to a Meta store would still require a migration process that would be annoying at best and arduous at worst depending on the user. See what happened to the HBO Max to Max app rebrand this year, except with the additional headache of going to a new app store entirely.
That migration process is the discoverability issue, because now users would be forced to contend with yet another website, marketplace, account, etc.
When someone searches for the fictional new Facebook clone "Visagebook" in the Apple store you can bet they'll want to pay money for "Facebook" to show up somewhere in those results.
>I don't want to download apps from alternative app stores. I want them to be available in App Store and to be submitting to all of the curation rules.
Even if alternative app stores were allowed you'd more than likely never be forced to use them. Alternative stores are available on Android and yet the overwhelming majority of apps are still on the play store. The idea that Facebook, Amazon, Google or whoever would pull their apps and force you to use their store is complete FUD that ignores that the overwhelming majority of users wouldn't tolerate an app not being on Apples store.
> The idea that Facebook, Amazon, Google or whoever would pull their apps and force you to use their store is complete FUD that ignores that the overwhelming majority of users wouldn't tolerate an app not being on Apples store.
I think you're right, but won't that defeat the purpose of opening the stores up? For instance: right now, you can't buy Kindle eBooks through the Amazon app. You need to do it through the web browser, so Amazon doesn't need to pay Apple 30%. But if Amazon continues to list their Apple in Apple's App Store, how will that change? Would they have 2 versions of their App—one in Apple's store that disallows eBook purchases, and one in Amazon's App Store that allows eBook purchases? Or will they still just disallow eBook purchases?
Perhaps in this case they would be able to go to Apple and negotiate a more reasonable 5 or 6% cut and stay in Apple's store.
Amazon gets discoverability in the safe, Apple app store and Apple gets a cut of the revenue, win win.
Because there will be many applications you may need to use e.g. banking which will be on an alternative App Store purely so they can skirt Apple's privacy restrictions. Finance is one sector where they would love to siphon all of your user data in order to better promote products and reduce risk.
If the third party App Store is owned and operated by the bank then there would be no choice.
And given that the benefit of doing so is unlimited access to user data and the capabilities of the hardware then it would be hard for many companies to not consider it.
You can switch banks? Trust me if these banks are only following the rules because of Apple, I can guarantee you their backend is definitely not following these privacy rules.
Also, OS level permissions don’t need to go away for third party apps.
Why can't they? They control the objc runtime, and IIRC the way message passing works in that system requires throwing strings around with the involvement of the runtime.
This being entirely separate from using allowed APIs for unapproved reasons, after passing whatever review/scan is done.
Or not allow all apps to send messages to the objects that host those private APIs. Again, unless I don't understand how the message passing system works in objc/swift. (most of my knowledge of the internals comes from reading blogposts on nshipster.com years ago)
I am much more worried about Apple siphoning my data than my Credit Union. Apple is building an ad mega-empire, in big part via abuse of power on their monopolistic platform.
I totally agree and am bewildered that not more people do. The downsides and abuses to come are so obvious everybody should be revolting at the very idea. Instead we get a law to force it…
I don't care one bit about what Apple users can and can't use on their devices. Those consumers don't want general purpose computers, that want iDevices and Apple is quite right to exploit that market.
If I ever thought this was a threat to general purpose computing I would fight it tooth and nail. But Microsoft is and always has been the biggest threat there.
What I do care about is stupid shit like Apple messages, Air Drop, Air Play etc being locked up Apple stuff. What's really stupid is I can run an Air Play server on a raspberry pi and it works well with Apple devices but not at all with Android. It's utterly ridiculous that these things are locked up. Just let things be better for everyone you absolute fucking cunts. Of course Apple are by far not the only cunts in the world. People will be cunts unless we don't let them. Thank fuck for the EU (writing this as an embarresed UK citizen who no longer contributes).
Cook is doing a largely undocumented European tour.
He was also in the Netherlands to talk about/with ASML and NXP. There's a few dozen critical European suppliers that Apple depends on.
He's also not hostile to legislation at all, he openly committed and confirmed to want to apply with legislation in any major market.
Contrary to popular belief, legislation is not always perceived as negative by businesses. Without legislation, you're somewhat forced to get as unethical as the law allows, because if you don't, somebody else will.
In more cynical cases, companies may even embrace legislation as a competitive advantage. An example would be pro-active copyright detection, the detection of misinformation on platforms like Youtube and Facebook. Very hard and expensive to implement, thus small companies don't stand a chance to compete.
I think it makes sense to diversify, and if that means open-up so be it (for Apple or similar).
what worked well in last ~20 years isn't guaranteed to continue in that trajectory in the next 5 or 10 years even, since polarized Geo-political shifts make it more dangerous for a tightly-coupled enterprise [1] (enterprise-to-product coupling).
short-term makes sense to couple-tightly with a product, but not mid-term or long-term, for that it's better to focus on the market - think of the effects that sanctions (political or economical) or shortages (human or materials [chips, metals, oil etc]) could have on the enterprise's trajectory.
if you've got a monopoly, it's a good time to diversify [2], and sooner rather than later [1]
[1] enterprise could be a company or even a government
Does the DMA allow for a distinction between system applications and those that are sideloaded - or do they expect that any sideloaded app should have access to all entitlements, including those that are private today?
I've read summaries of the DMA but it's not obvious.
What's considered a system application? Messages and Siri that come with the system? Well they include those too.
They basically define it as "the same entitlements that a competing Apple app gets"
> the gatekeeper shall allow business users and alternative providers of services provided together with, or in support of, core platform services, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same operating system, hardware or software features, regardless of whether those features are part of the operating system, as are available to, or used by, that gatekeeper when providing such services.
So features like the iMessage app being able to send SMS may be the biggest system entitlement? I don't think a settings app may be considered a service.
Currently any recognized address is an advertisement for Apple Maps in the App Store (which I can’t use due to how dangerously inaccurate it is in rural areas)
This makes the copy paste activity opening google maps, etc. much more likely to go away.
Just use android if you care about things being open. Apple products are good because of the walled garden. Most people just want things to work out of the box, not to tinker with options.
"Just use X if you don't like Y" works up until the point where the choice carries significant cost to the user. For example, "choosing" not to use iPhone means you can't Facetime or iMessage with your friends. It's no longer "just choose not iPhone", it's "just choose not to communicate with friends and family".
Essentially, Apple gave up the right to assert this argument when they decided to abuse their control with iMessage as an explicit way of locking users into their system (which is just one example).
Your friends and family can be asked to use any of the cross-platform messaging apps that are available, or use any of the still working and universal contact methods like SMS and phone calls. I have an iPhone and manage just fine to message my friends who have Android phones (even sending pictures and videos!), and use Discord, Signal, WhatsApp, Slack, Teams, Twitter, etc etc etc to talk to lots of different groups of people who are using "I don't care" device.
If I got sick of Windows, I could easily get rid of all of my Windows installations. But some of my games, even ones I bought and paid for, are not available on Linux. That is part and parcel a consideration I have to make regarding my choices. There are positives and negatives in every choice, and sometimes the negatives outweigh the positives. It's frustrating, and sometimes to make a choice you have to give up things you like, but that's life. Not getting to use FaceTime is not a significant cost, it's an emergent property of "I choose not to use iOS devices".
I do concede however that the "default messaging app" be just another "slot" in the OS that I can configure any way I want, no dark patterns a la Edge on Windows 10/11. But then again, I don't think iMessage has a URL handler anyways, so really it'd just be a few additions to the contacts card so I can share some link/picture/whatever to a contact's WhatsApp handle instead of their iMessage handle. Thankfully, the law in question from the OP does seem to shift us towards that future. Apple's walled-garden is fine, but if you play by the rules in that walled-garden, there shouldn't be favoritism for the gardener's services, and the gardener shouldn't be able to abuse their position to push their services either.
I'd personally prefer to just break up the gardener's company so their TV and Music streaming arm is a separate company.
This cuts both ways too - "if facebook deploys their spyware build and requires you to sideload it, then just don't use facebook". But then you lose contact with friends/families/etc.
Also Google themselves currently don't actually use RCS either, but rather a proprietary fork of RCS which prevents interop, and already refuses access to third parties who ask to interoperate. And app-store warfare does not address this at all.
There is probably a substantial number of users who are content to use Facebook occasionally on desktop, and not even need it as a mobile app. The era of check-ins is far gone.
I would concede that Instagram is a different story, but even that platform isn't growing as rapidly as it used to.
And yet most people use Android. Let's be honest, apple is not making products for the most people. It's very much a status thing of "those who have Apple and those who don't"
One thing that Nintendo learned in the 80s is if you want to sell a platform with a sustainable perception of quality, you take responsibility for ensuring that garbage doesn't run on that platform. That means restrictions. Opening everything up on iOS/iPadOS will severely compromise Apple's ability to maintain its value-add in the marketplace as the best quality, most end-user-friendly mobile platform, as well as their security posture.
Well, we'll see how it goes. There's good reasons for, and against.
The one thing that I know, for sure, is that Apple users are valued a hell of a lot more, by crooks, than Android and Windows users. Those folks are probably rubbing their hands in glee (I would not be surprised if quite a few of them, are on this very forum).
Is my browser blocking parts of the article or is the article low on details? like what does it mean if the law becomes effective in November, how much time will Apple have to open up, will side loading be allowed immediately, how? etc
I for one look forward to there being a franken iphone in EU covered with ads and malware. Apple should give them exactly what they want. Every major software company will have their own app store for their apps. It will be glorius!
If you search for something in the app store, the first result literally says "Ad" by the first result, so it seems Apple shares my definition. I don't know what your definition you're using, but it must be in the minority.
The App Store ads are trivial and not the concern. I’m more concerned about the tracking that apps will be able to do when Apple cannot block them from installing. Hello FaceBook++
I agree that having a choice is absolutely important. I want to have a choice of a closed ecosystem, like Apple. Can we not have the option between open (Android) and closed (Apple)?
In the first quarter of 2023, Apple obtained 26 percent of the European smartphone market based on shipments. Historically have Apple's sales been very cyclical, peaking in the fourth quarter each year.
I read this as a statement of fact. The Digital Market Act has come into force. The act gives the platforms (Apple included) few months of preparations to comply. Breton just reminds that the clock is ticking.
This is an important detail that makes iPhone a viable option for me. I thought the problem would be the elapsed time until E.U. actually passes/forces that, but I had forgotten about the full glass backs.
It’s a difficult balance, what would stop someone like Facebook requiring you to install their AppStore with all the tracking that could entail to access some key software like WhatsApp…
I wonder if they'll force Apple to allow 3rd party SMS. Being forced to use iMessage is probably my biggest reason for not switching to nearly the only small phone on the market, iPhone SE.
In these discussions I often see a dichotomy between freedom and security. At the limit it's true that if you have complete control over a device, you can screw it up.
But you can have a lot more freedom without sacrificing security. For a start, you can have a web browser that supports the latest web APIs. For me, that would be enough, but you could also add a Linux VM. (Then you would have ChromeOS, basically.)
I dont agree with it at all, but you are right, people buy apple because need to trust somebody and they trust apple to keep making the right product for them. I don't even consider them superior but certainly trustworthy.
Whatever changes apple implements would have to be easily revertable so people can go back to their golden prison.
Monitoring surveillance-style software is already commonplace, just not on iOS.
For example Bossware has been common since covid and it's not a stretch to imagine a future where health and other types of insurers use similar software to ensure that you're not partaking in risk. Consumers need more than every developer to act in good faith.
Example data collected by bossware surveillance applications include: keylogging, email monitoring, productivity tracking, screen recording, audio recording, camera recording, presence detectors, social media monitoring, time tracking, web browsing activity, location tracking, file search etc
Such apps would never receive approval from the app store, nor would they receive the necessary permissions to even ask for such invasive access.
This is what laws, citizens rights and unions are for. You should not need to submit to a feudal lord such as apple in order to enjoy protection from such inhuman practices.
be it a good or bad thing aside it's not being clamored for yet Apple is being forced to because they're the largest company in the world. it's a double standard in thinking really and i just think folks should be consistent.
i have an xbox one x, it does what it was designed to do and it does it well. I have a desktop computer i built. it was designed to run anything that runs on x86 and designed to be open. so i run linux. i love it. i just figure i use the tools as they were meant to be used.
i am a bit inconsistent though ... i do support the asahi folks in their attempts at getting linux supported on m1 hardware. but they're not bemoaning apple's closed attitude to other operating systems on apple silicon they're taking more of the jailbreaker's approach of hacking their way in. more power to them. that's the rub i think. folks trying to use the courts or mobs to force the hand of a company to do a thing for hardware that was designed to be closed in the first place.
I don't understand this 'I want what they have but I want them to change it for meeee' mindset. Everyone complaining appears to be a power user/hacker. Do it yourself then.
Then buy the phone and accept the fact that life is full of hard choices. In a world filled with actual, important problems that need solving, I utterly fail to see why we should go whining to the government to intervene. The level of infantilism that surfaces whenever this topic comes up on HN astounds me.
I just don't really understand how allowing side loading on the platform will "fix" anything for consumers. The thinking seems entirely shallow, there isn't even any consideration for how these 3rd party stores will handle permission bits to protect the user's data.
It just seems something that would be really good for large companies like Spotify, and suck for small developers who will still need to rely on the App Store (and its commission) for visibility.
If the EU is so interested in which apps are available on iOS and eliminating any discriminatory practices, then the EU should legislate that the App Store approval process be made independent, heck the EU can run it themselves for the EU-states.
> The thinking seems entirely shallow, there isn't even any consideration for how these 3rd party stores will handle permission bits to protect the user's data.
this is a feature for the companies pushing for it - this is literally the entire point, in fact! facebook wants to be able to use sideloading to push this stuff again:
for the consumers pushing for it, I think there's a pretty good mixture of rationales: some of it is good-faith belief that everything should be open (although you can see from the defense around consoles that many people do not fall into this camp). some of it is just ignorance or not thinking it through. and some of it is brand-warriorism/fanboyism, the people who want to legislate a solution to the android/iphone wars, or simply are doing it because they know it's something apple users care about and that burning it down will make them upset.
the usual human mixture of reasons, basically. but for companies? yeah, they fucking know it's gonna undercut the permissioning system, that's the whole fucking point. because right now they have apple standing in the way doing app review. they can't overturn apple, they have to go around them, but apple is the gatekeeper on their platform. or, was.
companies know there's fanboyism they can exploit to their own goals, and is perfectly happy to use these, ahem, "temporary allies". Just like the google "pwease use RCS, it's so open!" page that gets passed around uncritically, completely omitting the fact that google isn't using RCS, it's using a proprietary fork of RCS and it's already blocking third-party interop from interested parties.
We keep seeing more and more evidence that even large "trusted" developers and publishers are trying to exploit this market. We saw it with both Meta and Google in the certificates fiasco you linked, but also even in small ways like how news and games publishers aim to improperly charge customers: New York Times and Epic.
Even looking at Spotify, they never once passed on the 15% fee savings that apply after a one-year subscription. Yet they constantly decry these fees as a reason they can't lower prices – and now Spotify is 100% a reader app, and they still can't turn a profit.
Meanwhile at the same time, what have we seen:
1. Apple reduce fees. New developers and developers who receive less than $1M per year are at a 15% rate. Subscriptions that run over a year are also halved to the 15% rate.
2. Apple providing developers more opportunities to challenge rejections.
3. Apple providing developers even the opportunity to challenge the rules themselves.
4. Report after report (E.g. Nokia's annual Threat Intelligence Report) pointing the prevalence of Malware not on security holes, but on side-loading.(1)
More simply if we want to play Occam's razor with this and say it's all about the money: Then Apple's interests lay in protecting and enhancing their platforms because their lion's share of profit comes from device sales, they could reduce app store fees to 0% and while that wouldn't be fair (and likely anti-competitive) it wouldn't destroy Apple's business. While for the majority of the other players have profits come, almost solely, from ads/user data. To such an extent that limiting the flow of this data has had significant effects on their company revenue.
So you say iphone can offer alternate stores/sideload and still keep old behavior for users that want to stay in apple's ecosystem? So why lock down iphone then? Consumers that want it locked down, will keep their old routines...
No, as alternate stores will change the experience for everybody.
I download 0 new apps per year, but I use WhatsApp, Outlook, and Google Maps. Today, I get them all from one store - one password to remember, one credit card to have, one stupid set of "security questions" to forget the answers.
Tomorrow, Facebook AppStore will be the only place to get WhatsApp, Microsoft AppStore will be the only place to get Outlook, and Google AppStore will be the only place to get Google Maps, so I will need to download n app stores to get to where I am today. Create n accounts... accept n privacy policies... activate two-factor n times...
Yeah, no, thank you but no. I'm pretty happy with the AppStore as it is, thank you very much.
Play store allows basically anything (including obviously fake/scam/adware/spyware apps), there's nothing to be gained by doing this on Android, you'd lose an easy distribution mechanism that doesn't limit you, helps you gain victims and provides credibility - it's on top of Google then it must be good, right?
Also consider the market share of iOS and Android. Why bother for such small amount of price sensitive users?
iOS is another story entirely. The App Store has a lot of demands on the app developers wrt. UX, compatibility, etc; there's a lot of money to be saved (and faster time to market gained) by not publishing apps there. And then you can also bypass the security/privacy screening.
Given that this scenario has happened on the PC side of things, where I now need to have a Steam store, Epic store, EA Store, Ubi store, and GOG store (it's optional — thanks GOG!), I'd say it's not as baseless.
> people outright reject software that is exclusive to a store that they do not favor
That's a funny thing to tell to your kid that he's now an outcast in his school because everyone plays that Battlefield game — but his dad "does not favor" EA.
Drop the “app” from store for a second and make your argument again, except imagine a scenario where there is just one physical store for all the consumer goods you need, and you’d be upset about that being broken up because now you’ll be inconvenienced.
But what you won’t be is under the thumb of a single company that has way too much power over you.
Imagine a scenario where there is a store that requires strict controls on ingredients and supply chain, where if you want your crackers or frozen pizzas or fruit sold there, you have to ensure they are USDA organic, free of GMOs, pesticides, and so on.
But I like Cheez-its, and Cheez-its are NOT USDA organic and the supply chain is full of modern monoculture farmed grain and its full of artificial ingredients. The store refuses to carry it. It's not nice! I like those, why can't I buy them there?
Even if it was the only store in town, and if I live in Anytown I have to shop at the fancy-pants health store, I chose to live in Anytown. I can leave anytime I want. But wait! There are parts of Anytown I really like! It's walkable, and quiet, and safe. I just can't have Cheez-its. It's not nice to make me choose between all of the things I like, and the things I don't! I want to have my cake and eat it to, or, rather, in this case, my Cheez-its.
If Anytown was some small town whose economy can only support one store, sure. But I think in this scenario Anytown is more like NYC. One store is not enough, and saying “if you don’t like it, move” is not really appealing. I’m not going to move, I’m going to get my fellow citizens together and break the damn store up.
I like the experience more than the alternatives, so I'm not ready to switch it for what is for me a worse experience. You probably won't be able to convince me otherwise.
I severely doubt that big corps will force side loading their app in iPhone when the easier experience is the iOS AppStore. Same reason why all those apps you mentioned are in the android store and not just apk downloads from their site.
We don't know how this will play out, and probably instead of sideloading the new stores will be downloaded from the app store.
So say you want WhatsApp on your phone.
Today: AppStore - get WhatsApp.
Tomorrow: AppStore - get Facebook store - start Facebook store - get WhatsApp.
The power Facebook (also, Microsoft and Google) have over the users of their apps may be so great that they could pull it.
Small companies? No chance in hell.
So actually, this move might put Apple (and Apple users) into a weaker situation while empowering FB/MS/GOOG and having no effect whatsoever on small app developers.
But apple can ban other stores in it's store. They can say 'we made platform open to sideloading, you can even sideload other stores' in combo with several warnings that sideloading is dangerous when a user attempts to do it. This can guarantee that apps will stay inside appstore bc it will be too hard for users otherwise
Because it opens the possibility for folks to get duped into installing something from a different app store that could lead to all sorts of problems. I am thinking about less sophisticated users like my boomer mom and aunts and uncles who if you're a nerd like me you're often the relied upon first line of tech support.
for them you can implement parental control if that's so important, or aple could just put a ton of warnings and dangers with big red cancel button and gray 'I want to continue button' with some additional warnings. In my experience, the second they see this messages, they'll exit the process
i'm not forcing you to sideload. It's immoral to not own your device fully, not being able to install what you want, even if it can hurt you if you don't have the skills is also immoral
@a-user-you-like yes, it's immoral, you guessed it right, just like many other things in this world but are still happening
and I hold the same opinion with other systems, be that smartwatches, infotainmens car systems or any other stuff. I don't expect sideload/firmware replace to be safe/easy, but I expect to be able to do this on things I own
Ppl like good hardware and sw support but want more freedom, why not allow this? I hope for a similar law for other systems like smartwatches, infotainment systems, etc
I think this is a great thing for Apple customers and customers of all platforms as it will increase the experiences available to iPhone customers and give non-iPhone customers a new reason to move to the iPhone (I know I would certainly consider buying an iPhone if I could do more with it).
This doesn't prevent high quality apps from being distributed on iOS - this just means that Apple needs to compete with other developers on its own platform, something it doesn't need to do currently.
It's unlikely consumers would install an alternative app store or side-load apps without a compelling reason to do so.
If we see that enough customers are motivated to learn and undergo the process of sideloading an app or installing an alternate app store, then we can view that as an indicator that Apple's existing ecosystem is lacking and restricting experiences customers desire - or that developers cannot publish using Apple's existing channels.
In other words, it indicates that Apple customers want more than Apple can provide meaning that Apple either needs to compete with the alternatives or lose software customers - fostering competition and engaging Apple on a level they haven't felt in a long time.
Apple can still justify its app store as the place to go to find the best quality "Apple certified" apps. Go there if you want to find an app free of tracking, and approved by Apple for quality - justifying their app store developer pricing through the marketing apps receive.
Would love to see how the legislation develops in the long term.
Will this eventuate in MacOS/iOS apps being cross-compilable (from Linux) through disarming license terms restricting libraries from being used on all platforms?
What about preventing the installation of iOS/MacOS on non Apple hardware?
What about banning locked bootloaders - allowing people to port Android to iPhones (which I assume is feasible given the cross over from the Asahi project) - or allowing root access as an opt-in feature for customers.
Or something like rules requiring vendors to provide minimal public software or hardware schematics to aid in repairability, or reuse through efforts to maintain software beyond the vendors support schedule (or support porting efforts like Asahi).
Considering how much effort dedicated people put into these endeavours today out of passion - overcoming the most immense artificial roadblocks - imagine how many crazy projects would emerge by breaking down these barriers... otherwise known as innovation ;)
I would buy my MacBook Pro again right now if I could run Linux on it with full hardware acceleration, hardware support and battery life. The desire to innovate is there.
People that scoff at the security argument as well as the argument against the proliferation of shitty third party stores clearly haven’t read Nokia’s annual threat intelligence reports of the past couple years.
Pretty much every year they show Android to have a sizable market share in malware and it’s almost always accompanied with the context that people got these from third party stores filled with Trojans posing as legitimate apps.
Yeah sure, you could try to cut this off at the pass with system level mitigations but it’s not like Google hasn’t made headway in improving this on Android.
People are also quick to forget that system level mitigations are but one layer of a Swiss cheese model with App Review, while not infallible, being a very important part of that model.
ETA: Below some information from said reports that I copy pasted from a different comment of mine
Where 2020[0] “only” saw Android come in at 26.64% with iOS coming in at 1.72%, in 2021[1] Android accounted for a whopping 50.31% of the infections while iOS didn’t even register on the charts.
Let me repeat that again: over half of all infections in 2021 were on Android devices.
Were these super sophisticated attacks?
Let’s see, because Nokia, understandably so, dedicated significant sections of their reports to Android.
In 2020 they stated (emphasis mine):
> In the smartphone sector, the main venue for distributing malware is represented by Trojanized applications. The user is tricked by phishing, advertising or other social engineering into downloading and installing the application. The security of official app stores, such as Google Play Store, has increased continuously. However, the fact that Android applications can be downloaded from just about anywhere still represents a huge problem, as users are free to download apps from third-party app stores, where many of the applications, while functional, are Trojanized. iPhones applications, on the other hand, are for the most part limited to one source, the Apple Store.
In 2021 they stated (emphasis again mine):
> Among smartphones, Android devices remain the most targeted by malware due to the open environment and availability of third-party app stores.
> […]
> The number of Trojans targeting banking information through Android mobile devices has skyrocketed, putting millions of users around the world at financial risk.
> […]
> Banking Trojans can arrive on smartphones in a variety of ways, often disguised as common and useful apps. When run, they request a variety of permissions needed to perform their desired behavior, then often remove their icon from the application pane, effectively disappearing from the device. In many cases, the apps never provide the promised functionality that enticed the phone's owner to install them and are forgotten quickly after disappearing. However, they remain installed and continue to run as background tasks, using a variety of tricks to collect user information. These may include capturing keystrokes, superimposing their own transparent overlays onto bank login screens, taking screenshots and even accessing Google Authenticator codes.
So it looks like in most cases users are being tricked to install malware and grant permissions.
This all also explains why the whole “muh sandbox” argument carries little weight.
Not only is the sandbox but a single layer of a bigger Swiss cheese model, the sandbox isn’t gonna help your mom if she’s tricked into granting permissions.
On top of that you can bet your ass that iOS users will be prime targets, certainly more desirable targets than random Android and Windows users, because of potential ill gotten gains.
Yes, but we need more anti-trust for all of them. Edge has been repeating the old Explorer tricks and Google pay-for-play is even worse (if Apple didn't get a cut, would they be as willing to push the increasingly ad-infested google search?)
Consumers do what they are told to do. If a website says install this app in order to use it they will. If an app says approve this permission to use this app they will.
And so you will inevitably end up with websites that only support Chrome which will increase its market share up until the point it is an IE style monopoly. And aspects like the cost of testing apps/sites on multiple diverging browsers will further entrench this monopoly.
People go on about how this is great for competition as they can finally install Firefox etc. No. This is going to cement Google's control over the browser market and wipe out third party browsers like Firefox for good.
And then we will end up with pro-advertising features that are built into the browser that you can't block.
Google and Microsoft got into trouble because they used their dominance in services and OS to strong arm manufacturers to only use their stuff. They used their clout to hurt competition.
Apple does very little of this IMO. No one is forced to use Apple equipment and no one is forced to work with them. It is trivially easy to avoid Apple either as a consumer or developer. If you don’t think you can make enough money publishing to the App Store then you can code for some other purpose. If you want a phone that allows apps that Apple doesn’t allow you can get an Android.
I do not understand the argument that Apple has to sell devices that work the way you want them to. There is no false advertising, nobody is getting fooled, and nobody is being forced to work with Apple or pursue their customers. Apple has made a very popular system, why do so many people feel entitled to change what they do?
Microsoft controlled >90% of the entire desktop computing market when they ran into anti-trust issues with the EU. I suppose I'm not old enough to remember, but I don't recall the argument at the time being "They control 100% of the Windows market". Perhaps it was?
Comparatively, it looks like Apple has marketshare in the EU is somewhere between 25 and 40% of the mobile phone market, depending on your source.
> "They control 100% of the Windows market". Perhaps it was?
Kind of. The argument was that since they controlled 100% of Windows, and "coerced" people into using IE (and "coerced" is a kind way of putting it), and Windows was 90% of the desktop market, that shit was bad for everyone.
40% of the mobile market is significant, when you consider that the other 60% isn't held by a single company.
Apple is 100% a monopoly. They have a monopoly over software which can run on iOS. You either pay 30% of all revenue, or you lose out on half the North American market. Please explain how that is not a monopoly.
Yes. But this is trivializing the definition of monopoly I just warned against.
What can't be construed with this logic?
Verizon holds a monopoly on the devices they allow on the Verizon network. Wal-Mart holds a monopoly on the products they allow on their retail floor space. Xbox holds a monopoly on their game compatibility. McDonalds holds a monopoly on selling burgers inside McDonalds. You can define these trivial "micromonopolies" on literally everything you want. Which is why courts have never punished any company for this nonsense line of reasoning, especially when it's on a company that holds no actual "macromonopoly", and monopolies by virtue of existing aren't illegal anyways.
Phones are the way of interacting with much of the world, unlike xbox or McDonalds. People consume their news using them, pay their bills, make photos of their kids, communicate with their family. It's a completely different realm.
There are two oligopolies on the market - Google (via google play) and Apple (via apple store), both are affected by the law.
Sure, and by existing laws and court rulings they haven't done anything wrong except be a preferred choice by many consumers. This is not comparable in any way to antitrust transgressions that got Microsoft in trouble, nor do they have the market share to manipulate that's comparable to what Windows or Google have had.
FWIW, I also want a more open iOS platform, but I don't think you can demonstrate that they run afoul of any existing antitrust laws or prior precedents either and trying to redefine what a monopoly means, exclusively to to the iPhone, is never going to work.
But after I bought a Honda or Ford I can do with it what I want and install whatever aftermarket stuff I want. Ford makes no pretence to have an exhaustive whitelist what I can do with my car, whereas Apple does.
(In recent years some of the electronics might be locked down, or I wouldn't be surprised if they are, but this is also criticized and the reason things like right-to-repair laws have been proposed and in some cases enacted.)
I mean didn't we already rule that as true? That's why there are so many laws forcing the manufacturers to produce and sell parts for N year, allow third party repairs shops, etc.
Like of all things to pick cars are literally a place this has played out where Apple would be in the wrong.
the monopoly car companies have on their cars is one of the ways they fleece consumers. It's why they have pricing power on repairs, can charge whatever they want for their self driving solutions etc. There's a reason why almost all of them are trying to turn their cars from mechanical vehicles into glorified software/service platforms, it's a way to lock people in.
In a world where hardware and software is open and interoperable and you can say, buy a self driving solution from any vendor (which is essentially what comma does in a hacky way), consumers benefit. Same is true for phones or laptops.
Fine then apply rules equally, I want to be able to use Nissan parts in my BMW and play Xbox and Steam games on my PlayStation…
There are advantages to having a walled garden and I would want to have some assurance that I would be able to block side loading and that it would never be applied without it being clearly and constantly visible to the user. I also want to be sure that no 3rd party can compel me to install their own App Store to get their app which is a quite possible and likely scenario due to the DMA.
Hey EU, can you please ask BMW to open everything up to its rivals so that I can use Toyota's infotainment system instead of BMW's iDrive. I also want to be able to run PS games on XBox & vice versa without having to buy separate copies.
And lastly, how about you open up your very own market to everyone by lifting protectionist taxes
That's exactly my sentiment. The main issue with this, it's like telling Apple how to do their job. Like , "you guys don't know how to build hardware and software that works really well together"
It's well meaning but ultimately flawed. So long as humanity works "competitively" instead of sharing technology for the greater good - companies like Apple are the good guys, not the bad guys. They are trying to make the best products they can THEIR way because that's how this competitive market works.
So now EU is like "no no no you don't understand how to make good products, in fact you have no identity - you just build hardware and let people do whatever the F they want with it¨
They bought it while fully aware of those shortcomings. It’s like people buying cheap land next to an airport, building a house, complaining about the aircraft noise.
I live in one of the myriad of countries in the eu, so I'm confused about what you mean when you say protectionist taxes and which country you are referring to or just something else?
You either have a set of values, or you do not. The EU claims outwardly to have the values of being pro-privacy and pro-competition for healthy consumer markets.
However, these 2 supposed "values" only seem to come into play when it comes to regulating foreign tech companies that it cannot produce domestic competitors for.
The EU has loads of anti-competitive protectionist legislation, and re: privacy, the EU is in fact strongly considering legislation to ban encryption domestically as we speak. You can bet GDPR would not exist if Silicon Valley was located in the Rhine Valley.
Clearly these are not values. They are simply the amoral moves of opportunistic market participants (politicians), just like the companies being regulated.
This is not bad, this is just reality. But any claims of moral high-ground should be rightly shot down for what they are (BS).
The EU claims to be pro-privacy and pro-competition internally :-)
I don't even know where you got that angle wrong, the EU CAP is renowned as a protectionist measure, and it's a core EU component. It's just an example.
> You can bet GDPR would not exist if Silicon Valley was located in the Rhine Valley.
That would be really nice, allow ps store on xbox(if they want) and viceversa
And for car infotainment that would be a godsend. Classic car companies do a terrible job with their infotainment systems
I'm hoping for smartwatch revision too: almost all smartwatches don't allow sideload/alternate stores(well technically you can, but cumberstone) or even firmware replacement
The "protectionist taxes" are the way the U.E. give a chance to local corps against exported of slave-labor, which two of the world's biggest exporters are quite fond of.
It doesn't matter that they don't call it slave labor locally, label don't change the facts.
I hope you're not referring to the US and H1B workers, because if so, wait until you learn how hard it is to immigrate to the EU and how bad the situation of immigrant workers is here. These people would love to have something like H1B available here in EU. As an EU citizen, I feel very bad about the stuff we do to immigrants, and I hate how there's a class of unequal not-citizens among us, doing the dirtiest jobs the high EU society doesn't like to do.
It starts with access to healthcare insurance, for example. Try to get it as a non-permanent resident (who's not attending a school)! You have to have a job, there's no option to pay for yourself - unlike the US, where it's expensive but possible.
I'm talking about 1% of the adult population being in prison, I'm talking about the 13th amendment and slavery, and I'm talking about 'for profit' prisons.
Any country that has incentives (here they are economics and race related) toward increasing prison population is one a citizen should be very wary of.
Depriving someone of their liberties should ALWAYS be a significant cost for the government doing it.
Right? I'd also like to have an alternative to the EU parliament. And an alternative to my local tax office. Let's stop the monopoly on the government services. Open it all up.
I, for one, do not look forward to having to sideload Facebook, Instagram, Google, Gmail, and every single other megacorps app just because they want to track my every click. I would rather give power to Apple than all the other companies.
A good solution to apps wanting to track your every click is not organizational but technical. Just don't give them APIs for reliable cross-app tracking. That advertising ID? It simply does not need to exist at all. Same for all the attribution bullshit.
Besides, sideloading enables installation of modded apps giving users more choice.
Making it a really technically hard problem is great news for Facebook and Google. They will happily hire software engineers that do the best possible job of detecting who a user is, using machine learning and all sorts of other tricks. And then sell this functionality (either explicitly or implicitly) to developers that use their ad platforms.
Same with not allowing fine-grain control of what apps are allowed to use your WiFi/connect to the internet. I don't give a shit that an app feels entitled to it, its my internet bill and its already implemented perfectly for your cellular data stuff. There's no reason or excuse its not a privacy setting that you can tightly-control and revoke.
This would be excellent, because most apps and even iOS shits the bed when it is on a WiFi network that can't reach out to the Internet. They expect it to be there and open all the time, and show me all sorts of Fisher-Price "Uhoh! Your WiFi isn't working!" errors when in fact it is working fine, and I'm completely aware it can't connect to the Internet because I'm the one who configured the firewall.
Fingerprinting is hard. Especially when apps are as sandboxed as they are on iOS, and especially when there are so few iOS device models. Any APIs that can be used to share data between apps should be subject to permissions (e.g. file system access) or explicit user action (e.g. sharing content or links from one app to another).
It’s truly not — the OS sandbox is nowhere near as restrictive as, say, a browser sandbox.
Moreover, if Apple is forced to open the platform to third-party app stores, identifying unique users in collusion with the third-party app store is incredibly easy.
They did manage to answer this question in their comment. It’s the entire last sentence. (It also seems fairly well implied that they mean “iOS fingerprinting is currently hard” given the topic of discussion.) I don’t see how I could reliably fingerprint if so many APIs require user permission. It might be possible but I don’t see easy.
From IOKit to getifaddrs() to file system APIs, there are straightforward ways to uniquely identify a device — and I’m sure someone who actually works in this space can think of quite a few more.
Hell, even if you make it a hard problem and sandbox every possible source of unique information about the device, I’m sure Google would be happy to throw ML engineers at identifying users via impossible-to-obscure user information (keyboard timings, accelerometer readings, etc).
Preventing misuse of PII requires a policy/legal solution, not a technical one.
That's the thing, all these holes need to be identified and plugged up. Google, despite being a data-hungry targeted advertising company, did a fairly good job at this in recent Android versions.
Or, a much, much simpler solution: an application firewall built into the system. With downloadable easily shareable rulesets. No matter what an app collects, it's all worthless if it can't send that back to advertisers. We already do that for websites by using ad blockers.
Facebook app can, of course, send its tracking data back to Facebook, but it will only be able to track what you do within Facebook itself. That's fair and that can't be prevented. I'm talking specifically about cross-app and cross-site tracking.
You really, truly, cannot close all the holes necessary to prevent fingerprinting while still providing a useful general purpose OS.
You especially cannot achieve this while providing third parties access to what has traditionally been vendor-only API on mobile devices; e.g. to support third-party app stores.
This simply is not solvable through technical means. It must be solved through policy and law.
Amazon used to encourage you to sideload their app store on android. You got a free copy of Angry Birds 2 if you did, and I think at one point you may have needed to do it if you wanted to install prime video at all.
It still ended up going away and they gave up. So allowing sideloading is hardly the threat you think it is.
Maybe. Incentives are different on iOS. Apps are more-restricted and the platform’s more valuable. Could play out like it did on Android, but might not.
… and the platform’s more restrictive. There were two factors I mentioned. And that’s just store revenue—it’ll skew harder toward Apple if you include other ways of making money on mobile.
I don’t recall Facebook publicly throwing any tantrums over Play Store policy changes.
It’s also possible that being able to put a store on both platforms is the kind of thing that would get, say, Facebook to expand the Quest software store to mobile. They’ll want to do that for Apple’s headset at least, if these changes open that up to them—expanding that effort to include iOS and Android seems like something with decent odds of happening.
Knowing the EU, further privacy policies are probably going to be announced at some point, greatly crippling the current form of targeted advertising, including on Android.
That’d be nice. Not having “doesn’t let companies do shit to you that ought to be illegal… as much” be a platform differentiator would be great. That should just be a given.
Yeah it's hell on android having to install all of these separate app stores.... Oh, except it isn't, 99.9% of these apps just exist on the Play Store.
If you don't like them, just don't use them, right? I mean that's the argument we're seeing against these changes, how does it not apply equally the opposite way? If you don't want to use an app like Facebook because it's on its own separate appstore, then don't. Besides, I don't see a reality in which these companies forego the easy native solution with millions of users in favor of whatever the process sideloading would involve.
Apple have much stricter requirements, which is the point the person is making and you are willingly ignoring.
Apple, right now, have the ability to ensure the apps are transparent about what they track, have an explicit dialogue to confirm if you'd like the app to track you.
These big corps hate that apple have that control and want to keep their customers informed on what's going on, and as such, they will stop using the App Store and ask customers to side load so they can release much more invasive versions of their apps that track everything without any user ever being informed.
So yes, this IS objectively a bad thing and ripe for explotation.
Sounds like Apple, with their trillions of dollars and apparent focus on quality, should invest into figuring out an OS-level permissions system then, which I presume they already do have. The OS should be handling such issues, not the App Store from which apps come from. Even if the user installs some botnet willingly, it shouldn't be able to break out of the OS sandbox and do things the user doesn't want simply because it was sideloaded (assuming a non-jailbroken/rooted phone which no non-technical user will ever accidentally find themselves with).
> These big corps hate that apple have that control and want to keep their customers informed on what's going on...
Oh yeah, the noble small Apple - the richest and biggest corporation to have ever existed - only has their user's best wishes in mind... It's totally unrelated to their own ad network, which they're building on top of the data they exclusively have access to thanks to their walled garden! And no, I'm not saying others should have access to this data, this data shouldn't be able to be used at all, not by Apple nor anyone else.
> ... they will stop using the App Store and ask customers to side load so they can release much more invasive versions of their apps that track everything without any user ever being informed
If the only thing protecting users from this is the fact that you can't sideload and have to rely on the App Store review process, then that's some real shit security, and Apple should definitely improve things there.
> So yes, this IS objectively a bad thing and ripe for explotation.
Funny how saying something is objective doesn't make it so. It's objectively bad for Apple, sure, since they lose their iron-tight grip on their own users. They also lose out on that sweet 30% of every penny a dev makes. Won't find me shedding a tear for them though, the less money Apple and the other megacorps get to suck dry, the better.
And again, all they have to do is spend a few thousand of those trillions of dollars they have to put up an obnoxious and hard-to-get-rid of warning when sideloading. People who care about sideloading like myself will happily oblige and go through the warning screens even if they're tedious, while the hypothetical vulnerable grandmas get greeted with a screen they don't know how to work around.
We can sideload on Android, but those apps are all on the Play Store, which actually gives them more tracking capabilities, because it's hard to block stuff using Play API's
Same here. Side loading will open the door to a whole new category of malware/adware/crapware.
Yes of course the App Store is not perfect but at least Apple has control over it and can stop things when they are degenerating. I’m not looking forward to a new Facebook VPN that will “enhance my phone,” available through side loading only, that I will of course never install but which my grandma or another unsuspecting entity would…
So don't sideload apps? For you, the experience will stay the same. Let apple put a warning like android with DANGER, ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT SIDELOAD and problem solved. Ppl that want to stay in apple store will do so, ppl that want sideload will sideload
Meta is already in the regulators' sights. Data harvesting is not something the EU is blind to. Presumably there would be injunctions made against them from so easily pied pipering users into doing that. Not to mention, most users do not want to have to jump through more hoops just to have the same old FB/IG/WhatsApp experience. They'd balk.
Ah yes... so give Meta a couple of years of all gas no brakes with regards to user data while the legislators play catch up.
They have gone for Apple out of pride and short sighted electoral strategy. The answer is to deal with Facebook(Meta) and Google(Alphabet) et cetera first. Pumping money into Gecko development.
This is serving up regular people who use smart phones (which in the west are essentially mandatory) to big data on a silver platter.
What’s your explanation for Japan doing the same to Apple? It’s hardly only the EU who has them (and Google, and the rest of Big Tech) in their crosshairs.
That’s the beauty of it. I’m not convinced that ‘regular people’ are going to have the patience to deal with Meta forcing them to get and manage yet another damn account to use Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp. Just a terrible hurdle that will cause FB to shed a non-zero number of users, at a time where their DAU has not been hot, never mind their long term growth potential.
Without a compelling reason for them to join (free Oculuses? Oculii?) you can’t expect users to be forced to sign up for yet another account- not to mention most people are aware at the invasiveness of Meta- and remain quiet. Users already have more streaming services than they can handle, they’re not going to have the patience to juggle multiple app store accounts, just to get the same apps they already have!
Forcing users to adopt a new walled garden right away is going to inspire mass consumer backlash right away. And that will cause regulators to weigh in immediately, data gathering operation or no data gathering op.
I just don’t see Meta having the product or marketing stones to pull this off. Their last thing with positive buzz is what, Threads? Something dependent on the failure of another’s platform? And that only lasted for like a week.
There is going to be a race to become the WeChat of the west.
Governments more generally need to deal with tech and the EU is the only one with the heft and the stones to do it. But this piecemeal approach of trying to hit each of these giants like this ends up paralysed by court processes and intervention from the American Government.
Network effects are powerful. And there is a huge incumbency advantage past a certain point.
Meta, Google, Microsoft, and X are the big winners out of this decision.
Musk's questionable decisions aside, I don't see how X can succeed being an everything app a la WeChat. (Aren't they also planning to pivot to becoming a video app? What is the vision combining both?) You know what social media app that also supports sending payments, video submissions, had/has its own content channel of shows, even a knock-off of HQ Trivia? Facebook. And who ever used FB in its portal-like form? Besides the Feed, Events, Groups, and Marketplace, who bothers with the everything features? I question that the WeChat model is really applicable for U.S. markets anyway, as it really depends if food delivery, ridesharing, etc. other companies are willing to team up with an everything app platform-maker.
Google is plagued by product execution issues. Any attempt at such an app will just fill a larger plot in the Google Graveyard. Microsoft doesn't even do social- what do they have, LinkedIn? Yammer? The Xbox network? X faces an uncertain future. Funnily enough I think Uber would have been a contender back under Kalanick's reign, but they don't have the same juice they used to.
If you were that concerned you’d use web version of all of the above.
Would be nice if Apple required you to have a functional web app before installing app. I.E.FB Messenger - the only reason why it doesn’t work on mobile browser is so that FB can track you more via their App.
Has it occurred to you that Apple might not be that different from other companies you listed. It's just good marketing strategy like Google had "don't be evil" years ago. Essentially apple is like only I can access all user data for profit, improving products, ads, while others can't.
Apple a) has a mutual interest in them remaining privacy centric as we do. B) most of your data is locked onto the device and cannot be accessed by anyone including apple themselves.
The first thing that will happen is Facebook putting up a "light" version in the AppStore with half of functionality removed and pestering people to sideload the "full" version, that will, naturally, come with tracking, snooping and all other unethical bs that they love so much.
As I mentioned in another comment: yep, that's just like they did on android, except no, they didn't, everything is on the app store. I'm not sure where people are getting these fantasies from.
So you, as a person concerned with privacy, will not install non appstore version, easy peasy sr even better- not install fb at all. You keep your security, and ppl that want sideload will have what they want, everyone happy. And it's quite ironic that on Android the app works as usual, no crippled version
Don't use instagram, simple choice)))
Or, hear me out, you would be able to use insta in the browser with iblock installed so that you don't have ads and part of tracking!
And what about the users who wish to use Insta for sharing photos on socials, but don’t want to allow fb wholesale access to their data? Why are their concerns so glibly ignored?
It's bullshit that you can only run Safari on iOS or that the App Store is the only store you can use.
Yes, I understand the security implications of a third-party browser having deeper integrations into the OS and potential battery life concerns.
I also don't care.
I want to run Firefox on my phone. The actual thing. With containers and extensions. Let Safari compete on the merits.
I want the choice of being able to pay for a great app or use its "good enough" open source equivalent outside of the App Store.
iOS is a fantastic operating system. iPhone and iPad are stellar hardware with brilliant physical UX. Apple Watch is leagues beyond anything else in its class. I will keep buying Apple stuff until I can't anymore.
But a monopoly on core system functions isn't necessary to keep that high bar high.
Apple mandating WebKit is the only thing holding v8 back from a total monopoly, while WebKit itself has no chance of being a monopoly in the forseeable future, so I doubt there's a good anti-competitive case to be made for forcing Apple to stop doing this. It would only accelerate the monopolisation of the browser market if this happened. It would be good for consumers in the short term to allow v8 on iOS but I deeply distrust Google.
Breaking the App Store monopoly there is a much stronger case for. There is a security argument for the app store, which I would accept were it not for Apple adding 43% to the purchase price of most paid applications, which is much worse for the end user than the average piece of malware. Not to mention the expenses it imposes on developers, like requiring them to maintain a subscription and buy Apple hardware.
If Blink becomes a monopoly, and with it chromium, then Google can finally be "properly" hit with an antitrust case over Chrome. Especially when combined with the fact the big G can't keep directly funding Firefox to create a fake competition anymore under the new rules from the digital markets act.
Google should've been hit with an antitrust case on Chrome years ago and their recent shenanigans with the topics api only make that more relevant, where now Google is playing gatekeeper to an already technically dubious system meant to put the spying on users directly into the browser (all because they couldn't solve the fact that the topics api still makes fingerprinting rather easy). Eliminating the "competition" that Google has artificially made needs to be done though because otherwise it's just not obviously visible.
> If V8 becomes a monopoly, and with it chromium, then Google can finally be "properly" hit with an antitrust case over Chrome
V8 isn't a monopoly in the antitrust sense, at all. Google gives away the source code to most of Chrome that allows other people to make browsers with it, and they do. Something being popular doesn't indicate a monopoly. Microsoft could choose to make a browser engine, but they don't, and it's not because V8 is a monopoly.
> Something being popular doesn't indicate a monopoly
Being on the standards board for "what browsers need to do", having the standards board under your thumb, and continually adding in requirements that only the highest spenders can afford to implement securely, that does indicate a monopoly.
Apple can afford to implement anything they want. But they clearly have a very strong business interest in not letting web apps gain all the features that native apps may have.
Also, there is no legal requirement to implement every single API that the standards body specifies. The point of having standards is to make sure that _if_ a browser maker decides to provide some functionality, then they can implement the standardised API rather than inventing their own.
This is a good thing in spite of the fact that it doesn't solve other problems related to market dominance.
I think this isn't the case. There were alternatives to Internet Explorer, yet Microsoft was hit with antitrust measures for defaulting to IE.
I believe that something being sufficiently popular does make it a monopoly in the antitrust sense - there's language around "market dominance" in there [0].
Having a monopoly isn't illegal. Using a monopoly as power in another market is. Microsoft got hit because they used their monopoly in desktop operating systems to freeze out competition in the browser market and jam IE down people's throats. The browser market being a different market than the desktop operating system market.
Correct. Antitrust is about monopolization. You can have a monopoly without monopolization, and you can do monopolization without having a monopoly.
For example, suppose there was a small maker of farm implements, Dirty Hoes, and that one of the stores that sold Dirty Hoes hoes was Sneed's Seed and Feed (formerly Chuck's).
Sneed's also sells hoes made by another small company in a small town in Suffolk County New York, Hoes of Babylon.
Dirty Hoes tells Sneed's that unless Sneed's stops selling Hoes of Babylon hoes Dirty Hoes will stop selling to Sneed's.
That could be an antitrust problem of Dirty Hoes, even though they aren't anywhere near having a monopoly, because it could be seen as attempted monopolization.
> Having a monopoly isn't illegal. Using a monopoly as power in another market is.
Mm.
With the caveat that I'm not a lawyer, that seems like "we gave away the source code to this engine" might still count as abusing market dominance in one domain (browser) to support another (ads)?
At least in principle. I couldn't describe the specifics of such laws even if a lawyer helped me out.
> With the caveat that I'm not a lawyer, that seems like "we gave away the source code to this engine" might still count as abusing market dominance in one domain (browser) to support another (ads)?
There has to be a link. How does one influence the other?
I don't think "making sure that non-crappy web browsers exist" is enough.
There doesn’t have to be a link… there has to be a competitive market. Giving away something that someone else sells can be anti-competitive, in certain situations. For example, if the goal of Google with V8 is to create a JS engine monopoly so that they could then start charging for it — that would be anti-competitive.
If there were calls for V8 to be considered a monopoly, you’d first have to prove that there are viable competitors available and they were being harmed. And particularly — was that harm impacting consumers. Anti trust only gets involved when consumers are being harmed (usually though higher prices or lack of choice).
SpiderMonkey exists and is pretty viable for many use-cases. But, the open source nature of V8 makes it hard to argue that it was really a monopoly. If Google did anything anti-competitive in V8, other developers are free to fork it, revert the change, and distribute that version.
For that I would ask — rhetorically because I don't know the answer — what convinced Google to develop and advertise Chrome in the first place given that by Firefox already existed.
And why they went further and made the core open source: every time I've been around the "we should open source $foo" conversation, the managers have asked, essentially "what's in it for us?"
> And why they went further and made the core open source
Worth noting that Blink is a fork of Webkit, which is a fork of KHTML, which is LGPL-licensed. The engine was always open-source, there was no Google business decision to make the engine open source.
> what convinced Google to develop and advertise Chrome in the first place given that by Firefox already existed
Firefox wasn't so great back then. Google survives by the Web being great. A free, premiere browser experience means people use the Web.
> every time I've been around the "we should open source $foo" conversation, the managers have asked, essentially "what's in it for us?"
Google overflows with money, so P&L enforcement likely isn't so evident, and they might've just had some engineers saying they wanted to do it that way, and the person with approval power was probably also an engineer.
> Google survives by selling advertisements, essentially making the web worse.
This seems entirely subjective. I prefer using Lichess to Chess.com, but I would in no way think that Chess.com, with its sponsoring of full-time players, makes the game worse. Advertising-related money goes somewhere and pays for things.
Yeah I reworded it - I meant Blink. And no, I'd argue that just because it's open source doesn't change that it's an antitrust-worthy browser. The obvious problem being the conflict of interest in developing a browser (which is meant to serve users) and an advertising platform (which is meant to serve business customers). That alone should have prevented Google from entering that field, but here we are.
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In a technical sense, Chrome is a monopoly though. The development of Chrome moves at such a rapid pace that only Firefox can keep up (kind of, Firefox had to give up on anything involving PWAs to do it and they take a large sum of money from the big G for putting their search engine as the default).
Similarly, just look at how many web RFCs amount to "this was implemented by Chrome and technically a Chrome fork is a second implementation, so it can be OK stamped", which has squeezed the market for third parties to be able to develop their own browser just by making the amount of "required" features so large nobody could meaningfully implement them.[0]
And then there's the utterly dismal state of the Android platform, where Google just uses their control over OEMs and the ROM to outright prevent anyone from easily replacing the System WebView (the browser Android uses to render stuff "in-apps", basically if you've ever used an app that seemingly opens external links without launching chrome, that's the System WebView) with a non-chrome engine (basically, Google lets OEMs specify a hash on what the System WebView should be - almost all mainstream OEMs lock it to the Google implementation -or Chrome Canary which is just the same fucking browser-, leaving the only option to circumvent it to be rooting, which has its own issues and limitations).
There's no meaningful maintained alternatives to it either (Mozilla's work on GeckoView only targets individual apps, not the system version; Vanadium and Mulch are both just Chrome forks that implement it as part of a larger custom ROM but in the end are only competition in the same way GNU IceCat is technically a competing browser - they're openly tied to the Chromium upstream because they lack the manpower to do it on their own. The Vanadium dev also stopped anyone from using his work in the future by setting his System WebView implementation to GPLv2-only to prevent folks from forking it), since nobody wants to bother.
Just being open source doesn't prevent a company from using their leading position and size to muscle away all the competition.
> The obvious problem being the conflict of interest in developing a browser (which is meant to serve users) and an advertising platform (which is meant to serve business customers). That alone should have prevented Google from entering that field, but here we are.
Considering that probably 90+% of the content that the average person uses their browser to browse to is paid for by ads, and there is no other existing business model that would currently [1] be workable to pay for creating and distributing 90% of that content, I think you'd have a very hard time making a winning legal argument that Google's advertising platform does not serve users.
[1] There are things that are workable technically, but they either require cooperation from many governments to change how they handle sales taxes or VAT because otherwise accepting micropayments from customers is a tax collecting and reporting nightmare or they require websites to sell the content through third party marketplaces that will act as the legal seller and handle the taxing so that the websites are only dealing with one potentially international relationship (if the marketplace company is not in their country). But consumers don't want to have to have accounts with a bunch of different content marketplaces, so for this to not end up like video streaming has (Netflix, Disney+, HBO, Peacock, Paramount, Hulu, Apple, Amazon, ...) which would be a million times worse for websites we probably need to end up with at most two marketplaces which together cover pretty much everything.
> In a technical sense, Chrome is a monopoly though. The development of Chrome moves at such a rapid pace that only Firefox can keep up
No - MS could too. They choose not to. Others could too, but it's not worth it. Either way, this is not a monopoly in the sense relevant to this discussion, as anyone can start a browser business and write from scratch, or use Chromium or Firefox as an enormous existing base on which to write a browser.
> There's no meaningful maintained alternatives to it either (Mozilla's work on GeckoView only targets individual apps, not the system version; Vanadium and Mulch are both just Chrome forks that implement it as part of a larger custom ROM but in the end are only competition in the same way GNU IceCat is technically a competing browser - they're openly tied to the Chromium upstream because they lack the manpower to do it on their own
If they lack the manpower to do something, but Chrome gives them with zero strings attached the core of itself, that's a good thing, not a bad one. Chromium enables browsers to be built that couldn't otherwise be.
> Just being open source doesn't prevent a company from using their leading position and size to muscle away all the competition.
Still though - competition over what? JS implementations? HTML rendering implementations? You're stating facts - in the most negative way possible - but without saying what you'd like to happen. If Chromium were never open sourced, would that be better?
> Google can finally be "properly" hit with an antitrust case over Chrome.
What do you think google should do to avoid getting punished? What kind of action would you like to see from Google regarding the near monopoly of Chrome and Blink?
Break off Chrome into its own company that can serve it's own interests in making a good browser that serves the user (remember it's called the user agent because the browser must ultimately serve the user above all else) rather than serving Googles ad interests would be the right kind of action.
Right now, Chrome is compromised in terms of meaningful user privacy and user security because Googles bottom line largely relies on them not making those features as good as they can, while pretending they do. They can't just block 3rd party cookies to reduce tracking, it has to come with their Topics API so that Google can keep its ad monopoly (and that API consolidates Googles powers even more, especially considering the current implementation has Google playing literal gatekeeper over who can and can't use it instead of solving the privacy issue that the Topics API has).
For another example; WebManifest v3 was intended as a security update to the mess of v2... but it also conveniently takes a wrecking ball to adblockers (a major issue for Google the ad company) and guess what Google (the browser developer) is basically completely non-responsive about. They could respond to this and work out an actual solution, but the only thing they do is keep pushing back the permanent end date for V2 to avoid the bad PR.
Finally, as for avoiding punishment; Google could do all of the above and make an agreement (with legal consequences upon violation) that the Chrome team/subsidiary is wholly independent from the rest of Google when it comes to making executive decisions on where to take a browser. That way, they wouldn't have to break it off and can still take in the profits/fund the development of Chrome without it being compromised into serving Google.
> Break off Chrome into its own company that can serve it's own interests in making a good browser that serves the user
That’s nice in theory, but historically, browser only companies haven’t been very successful in the market. No one wants to pay for a browser and monetizing one is a full of a big pool of dark patterns.
The most successful browser engines have always been those that we tied to another source of income, namely, the OS or search. Doesn’t Firefox still get the bulk of its funding from Google?
Even as a separate company, Chrome would be beholden to some external entity (likely Google search) for money, and that still carries with it the same risks as now, just formalized with contracts.
In a world where everybody uses Chromium, which is paid by surveillance capitalism.
I really don't know, but I could imagine a world where some people would pay for their browser (many would use the "community edition", probably), and where search engines would pay to be the default.
Google would probably still contribute to Chromium, they would just not directly have control over its governance. Maybe overall the web tech would move slower, but I don't think that would necessarily be bad.
In my world, people use whatever spying piece of crap browser a random app installed as a default for them. I really don't think anybody except a few enthusiasts would pay for a browser.
How would Chrome company make money? Nobody is going to buy the browser. They'd be selling content relevant ad space on the app or just implementing whatever google pays them to implement.
That probably not for us to decide. One way could probably be splitting the company so it's not at the same time a major content publisher, the main ad platform and a monopolistic browser vendor.
You're advocating against v8 monopoly, where no one is forcing it down on anyone, by holding a candle to the actual enforced monopoly of WebKit? Where's consumer choice in this and how about having an actual choice dictate what is used and what isn't?
Let me quote from a familiar case: "Antitrust laws ensure one company doesn't control the market, deplete consumer choice, and inflate prices. Microsoft was accused of trying to create a monopoly that led to the collapse of rival Netscape by giving its browser software for free."
Consumers chooses iPhones (and indirectly Safari), yes the bundling has some bad effects.
But in the bigger picture it's currently really the only thing keeping developers somewhat true to making cross-browser sites working for Firefox users, since the Firefox devs has a larger chance of keeping up with what works on ChromeEdge+Safari rather than keeping up with the ChromeEdge pace alone, do you really trust Google (and MS) not to abuse things if FF and Safari became irrelevant?
In the early days of Safari after OS X became popular, there was a second wave of "Works best on IE" from OS X web developers who generally only tested on Safari.
Let's not pretend that Safari's raison d'être is to protect consumers from Google's browser.
Just like Apple mandating WebKit is the only thing holding v8/Chromium from a total monopoly, the App Store monopoly is the only thing holding back "use Meta omni-permission store or get cut off from FB/IG/WhatsApp". And then Meta getting most companies to use their store because they'll take 10% and just the data.
I've never installed the Meta omni-permission store on my Android, but I've certainly installed Facebook's applications via the Play Store.
I'm not sure why the situation would be any different with iOS. It seems to me that the app store would still utterly dominate even if it were exposed to competition.
The incentive for Meta, etc to start their own “anything goes” app stores was low when it was a possibility only on Android. It being possible on iOS changes the equation significantly with how iOS users are typically higher value targets due to how on average, they buy/spend more.
It also gives them the opportunity to normalize per-megacorp app stores across the board instead of them always being a weird Android thing like they would be if Meta opened an App Store on Android now.
I'm sure it'll be a weird iOS thing too if it happens. Apple is going to make it as difficult as they possibly can, the same way sideloading is not trivial on Android for normal users.
Also running a third party store does not have to mean being able to break privacy protections. If the ecosystem relies on app inspections that much it simply needs to be secured better.
> If the ecosystem relies on app inspections that much it simply needs to be secured better.
How do you secure something without inspection? We have health code inspections for restaurants, car safety and emissions inspections, IAEA inspectors visiting nuclear facilities… Should we throw all those out too? What replaces them, the goodwill and word of people?
What I mean is, the OS should not allow apps to do these things. Rather than inspecting the code and strictly banning any dynamic code (one of the reasons emulators are not allowed), the apps should just not be allowed to do things like call hidden APIs at OS level.
In this analogy, getting to design the system on which the apps run is something like being able to alter the local laws of physics so that car exhaust simply can't contain pollution.
It's not always that simple. What if I make an app that asks for some data from you "for it to function", and then posts that data to somewhere it shouldn't, there's not a lot to be done about that from an OS enforcement perspective.
Google's Play Store allows Meta apps more permissions than Apple's App Store currently does.
Meta lost tens of billions in market value (and an estimated $10 billion a year in revenue) when the new Apple App Store privacy rules went into effect. That's a powerful incentive.
I'm sure they'd love to - someone else pays for the ecosystem, and they just sell software in it with no markup (or they keep the markup, rather than the ecosystem creator).
I would argue that apple doesn't do this for the good of the users, apples own apps are not restricted in the same way others are. The whole point is giving their own apps an edge over everyone else. This is what gives apple the power to demand deals like the recently covered deal with Google that gave them billions in search revenue.
Why should we have to let things get worse. Break up Meta and Google and MS and then talk to me about how we don't need Apple's store anymore. Don't remove the solution and then tell me you'll fix the problem later.
I mean… literally every complex judgement call in human history comes down to this answer; real life is mostly made of imperfect options with various tradeoffs.
"This is a complex judgment call, and I think forcing side loading is a reasonable conclusion in light of varied impacts" is a very different point of view than "I don't see any downsides."
The commenter started by saying they didn't see any downsides. Someone replied referring to specific downsides which impacted them (""use Meta omni-permission store or get cut off from FB/IG/WhatsApp"). Then the commenter said downsides don't matter because they can be used to argue against any change. That's a different argument than where they started.
That's not the comment I replied to. I replied to the comment where they offered no argument for why someone else's downside was invalid, instead opting to say that it's better to not let downsides prevent action. The lack of argument implied they didn't have a response, which I sought to confirm.
In general; let's take that whole monopoly thing serious again, together with regulatory capture.
I'm no free market liberal, quite the contrary. But competition is *good* and we should have more competition between these huge companies that basically make a living from extracting rent.
With markets I see it similarly as with democracy; it's the best of all the bad options we have. Given the challenges ahead (demographic crisis, climate crisis, environmental crisis) we must have a dynamic and flexible system to accommodate the to be expected strains, if we want to continue existing as a global civilization.
But markets also have flaws, such as externalization of costs and oligopolies that skew the market through their influence.
We've seen this with Google, that has started as a brilliant search engine, providing a valuable service. Nowadays it attempts to make more and more money through rent taking instead. Instead of creating value, these oligopolies capture value, sometimes even through illegal means (see; no-poaching agreements).
Apple has never been as big in lobbying as those are. Or as cooperative with various governments and state agencies.
Plus, they have those angles covered by token "open" BS like Android allowing sideloading, despite having total dominance on far more crucial for consumers and the economy in general areas that their OS, leaving Apple to be targeted.
Maybe people are going to bat for their own interests and recognize they align with the interests of a company they happily buy products from. Who are you to deny their preferences?
Almost every item you buy online has some Google 'tax' baked in. That alone isn't a problem, but since Google controls almost the entire ad market, there isn't any competition pushing that tax down. Notice the similarity to the App Store arguments?
If Google and YouTube were split up, I could see a future where both start competing for text and video search against each other. This competition would drive down ad rates across both platforms. It would also allow space for other competitors to come in.
Permissions can be baked into OS. No matter how the app is installed you'll get same popups confirming them. Though it should be also applicable to Apple apps.
It not “can be”, it is baked into ios, almost everything runs in a proper sandbox, including apple’s own apps. (iMessage doesn’t have complete isolation though, due to it being special regarding SMS - that’s why many attacks target it specifically).
That would be amazing, because people will finally leave these apps for good. See videogame case about corpos leaving Steam for their own inferior walled gardens and failing spectacularly.
> Apple mandating WebKit is the only thing holding v8 back from a total monopoly,
You say that as if Apple was a powerless victim with no money and no lawyers.
I'd argue Apple having to straight face Google's domination and doing something about it on the open (basically forcing regulation) would be a better outcome than letting them take iOS users in hostage forever.
At some point they had a new browser that they provided to windows as well and could have expanded way further. They could have made Safari a true alternative to IE, Chrome, Firefox. They didn't, it didn't make sense for them.
So yes, Apple isn't big on the web, but it's in part of their own doing. Safari not being a viable browser outside of the mac and iOS is nobody's fault except Apple.
On wether Apple can face Google...let's put it in perspective:
- can Apple face Facebook: sure, at one point they killed their stock value overnight through a single policy change on iOS
- can Apple face Microsoft: a long time ago no. Today they're showing Microsoft the middle finger when they're trying to let users stream games on Apple's platform.
- can Apple face the US government: welp, they sure do. We've seen nothing coming out from any trial or policy happening in the US.
So, can Apple face Google ? I kinda think they can, yes. They have the money, the lawyers, the lobbies and politicians in their pocket. If they really wanted to, they could probably force Google to change on any front they're competing on.
Does it matter if Apple isn't competing on every single area Google has a hand into ?
Should we also ask if Google is competing in TV production business, luxury watch bands, or computer wheels ?
To get back to the original point, Apple has a browser, and the means to raise a case against Google being too dominant in the browser space. They'd have plenty evidence of Google interfering with the market if they'd go all in and were faced with unfair practices. They never did and probably don't intend to, because they kinda don't care as long as Google isn't threatening their walled garden.
That's where the "Apple is the only defense against V8" falls flat to me.
That may be true today, but I don't think it was true during the early days of the iPhone, where Steve Jobs wanted no third-party native code running on the iPhone, only web apps that connect to third-party services.[1][2] It wasn't until lots of developer backlash and subsequent success of the App Store that they decided to de-prioritize the web.
> That may be true today, but I don't think it was true during the early days of the iPhone, where Steve Jobs wanted no third-party native code running on the iPhone, only web apps
That was 2007. Can you show me how exactly Apple was big on the web in 2007?
> It wasn't until lots of developer backlash and subsequent success of the App Store that they decided to de-prioritize the web
They never de-prioritised the web. Implementing Chrome-only non-standards isn't what being big on the web means.
Open a list of most-visited websites and show me Apple properties on it.
> Apple mandating WebKit is the only thing holding v8 back from a total monopoly
No, V8 has almost total monopoly because countries are ignoring anti-competitive practices. The EU is doing something about Apple in this case, and it should look at Google too.
I'm surprised nobody else mentioned this, but V8 is just a JavaScript engine, not a Web Browser or web rendering engine. Blink is the name for the broader web rendering engine behind Chromium and a number of other browsers.
So WebKit, Blink/Chromium, and Gecko are the main ones to my knowledge.
> There is a security argument for the app store, which I would accept were it not for Apple adding 43% to the purchase price of most paid applications, which is much worse for the end user than the average piece of malware.
IIRC most of the revenue is games, and most of game revenue is microtransactions. In this context, 43% (or whatever the lower number is that they announced a while back to reduce the heat) is just sending the same money to a greater evil.
As for "worse"… we already have cryptocurrency miners (leading to app store rules saying no to this because of the battery drain), and encryption-ransomware locking away all your data; financial fraud is only protected to the extent that it can be unwound, which means fraudsters in that domain look for things that can't be reversed.
If we do end up with a laissez-faire free-for-all — which is a possible scenario, but not a necessary one, it depends on the details of how alt-stores are done in practice — then you have to worry not just about your own device being malwared but also those of anyone nearby, because a hot mic in someone else's pocket can clone your voice, and there's already more than one demonstration of how wifi can be repurposed to function as a wall-penetrating radar.
> were it not for Apple adding 43% to the purchase price of most paid applications, which is much worse for the end user than the average piece of malware
Paid applications on iOS are dirt cheap, so I think the argument that that isn’t paid for by end users but by developers has at least some merit.
I also think it’s more like 18% for the majority of paid applications nowadays (Apple’s cut is 15% for less well selling apps nowadays, and I think there are many, many of those), but that’s a bit of nitpicking.
Bun is using JavaScriptCore voluntarily because it’s better than V8 for their needs.
I think both WebKit and JSC have merits of their own and are installed by default, so I don’t think they are in existencial danger.
That said, since iOS is not a monopoly, I think Apple has the right to do whatever it wants with its platform and the security, privacy and battery life concerns are valid.
Firefox can't compete against v8 on any other platform (it's what, 2% of browsers now?), so there's no real indication that it being allowed on iOS would do much.
> I would accept were it not for Apple adding 43% to the purchase price of most paid applications, which is much worse for the end user than the average piece of malware.
I think malware on your phone could easily cost you much more than 43% of all your mobile app purchases.
I think it comes down to what we expect the second order effects to be.
Those who argue that forcing Apple to open up their ecosystem is a good thing appear to believe that increased user freedom will lead to more option for all and increase freedom further. Those of us who argue that being forced to open their ecosystem is a bad thing believe (speaking personally) that any user freedom added would quickly be lost and set further back than we started as larger organizations would end up strong-arming or tricking users into giving away their freedom or fear missing out.
Personally I think we all want to see long-term user freedom, and I think whether we expect it to move forward or backward is what differs between us seeing this as good or bad.
> I think it comes down to what we expect the second order effects to be.
Apple is the wealthiest single organization in the history of the world, and they just make consumer electronics. This isn't some deep ecological problem. Very little good has come out of letting these big corporations go completely unchecked.
“Consumer grade” is literally the best though. The iPhone isn’t some watered down version of the good thing that governments and rich people use. It’s as good as money can buy.
They aren't 'literally' the best, not in software or hardware. They might be high tier consumer items, but that makes them luxury items and does not magically elevate them to best business grade software or hardware (broadly speaking).
> They might be high tier consumer items, but that makes them luxury items and does not magically elevate them to best business grade software or hardware (broadly speaking).
You mean 'lower', now 'elevate'. Business-grade software is usually a tier below consumer-grade. After all, you only have to convince management on the business-advantages of your software, not the actual users who have to use it on a day-to-day basis. They don't get a vote. That's why business software gets away with terrible performance and UX.
Why are you suddenly bringing in billionaires in this picture? This is about Apple software and hardware not being the best in class, an example no-one can refute being the hardware/software needs for businesses. Hell, depending on what you're looking for you can buy better consumer level items (and often cheaper).
Apple makes luxury consumer items, this shouldn't even be questioned.
I think it comes down to what we expect the second order effects to be.
Yes, and when the first order effect is that a giant corporation gets total control over how you use "your" property, you need to be very confident in your predictions to outweigh that.
Personally I think we all want to see long-term user freedom
(just about app stores)
I'd love a middle ground, but if I'm forced to choose, I'd prefer that there weren't other "app stores" on the iPhone, for many of the reasons stated above.
But the funny thing is, both of us have the same argument of "I want the cake and eat it too".
> "Why does it harm you to have another app store? If you don't like it don't use it!"
> But I want to use Whatsapp / etc! I just want to have the Apple policies protect me from what those apps can do on my phone![]
> "Why does it bother you that Apple sells phones under the condition of 'my app store or nothing'? If you don't like it, buy another brand!
> But I want to use the quality of iPhones and iOS!
[] This is what I mean by "middle ground". Today, I """trust""" Apple to protect me (somewhat) against random developers.
If there are alternative appstores, but either they must follow the same protection policies from the one from Apple[*] or their apps must also be listed in the Apple store, I'd be happy with multiple app stores. But that would defeat the purpose of other stores.
[*] (eg I must be able to use Apple Pay, the code still goes through Apple review, etc)
> that any user freedom added would quickly be lost and set further back than we started as larger organizations would end up strong-arming or tricking users into giving away their freedom or fear missing out
Regulate away their ability to do that. Even if it kills them.
Just literally write it into law. Make computer device users a protected class of consumer. Owners of computing devices shall have complete access to the devices they buy and shall not be discriminated against based on the software they choose to run, including but not limited to refusal to interoperate.
Yes, you're poorly explaining the difference between freedom-as-in-liberty and freedom-as-in-anarchy and then calling it idiotic.
You are literally more free if there were no laws about murder but your actual real life freedom would be reduced because you of all the precautions you now have to take.
Apple right now is operating as a de facto governing body forcing developers on the platform to follow its rules that whether or not you like it do sometimes benefit the user against some of the very worst actors. Taking away their ability to have those rules does also take away the benefits users get. And lord knows actual governments, even the EU, aren't going to enforce consumer protections. Whether or not that's worth it to you is fine, both stances are valid but it does logically follow.
> And lord knows actual governments, even the EU, aren't going to enforce consumer protections.
Ah yes, we don't trust an actual elected government to enforce consumer protections, so we'll trust a private monopoly instead. In a thread about said government enforcing said consumer protections, no less.
Just because you call it consumer protections doesn't mean that they actually improve consumers' lives, which is the point the other commenter is trying to make but you insist on flattening into a straw man.
You are making a strwman here, not GP. GP litterally responded to, and quoted, this sentence: "And lord knows actual governments, even the EU, aren't going to enforce consumer protections.". How do you get that sentence to mean that "consumer protections doesn't mean that they actually improve consumers' lives"? How?
Apple is a monopoly on the market of Apple apps. You can’t just hand-wave away self-created platforms, and given how absolutely important and essential mobile phones are, it’s only fair that the government gets a say there.
This but also because of the size of Apple's market. If they sold 1000 phones per year nobody would give a f... about their commercial practices. In the USA apparently Apple is bigger than Android, so about phones Apple is a larger monopolist than Google. In the EU, not as much but still a relevant one.
Android has a 66% market share in the EU, and ~55% in the US - which it gained only recently (~2021/22). Otherwise Android has had the largest share globally.
By definition, A monopoly force does not have a 33% or 50% market share. It has full control.
If you want, you can switch. If you want, you can use products that are NOT locked to a vendor. You have Dropbox, you have obsidian, email - any number of tools that are not vendor locked.
If you want a phone, you can take many of the comparable or superior phones in the Android ecosystem.
This is being phrased as a goal for "User Freedom". If a user wants the freedom to have a locked ecosystem, where they are the actual paying customer, so what?
Any absolutist user freedom argument has to also deal with users who dont want that freedom.
If this is about meaningful freedoms, then the threat is revenue models. There is no reason the Apple ecosystem should outperform Android - yet it does.
While I agree with the distinction between freedom-as-in-{anarchy, liberty), I don’t think this argument stands in case of Apple. Their OS is very secure and has a top notch sandbox - that’s the actual defense boundary on their devices. They do barely any AppStore checks.
I think the optimum would be a well-hidden (like android dev mode, click 6 times on whatever option), but possible sideloading without hacks like AltStore/7-day resigns, etc. Maybe they shouldn’t even allow other stores, just apps - as installing is a very specific permission.
Yeah, I don't understand it at all. It's shocking to me to see people on Hacker News defend the trillion dollar corporation's right to literally own their computers and their entire digital lives. We shouldn't even have to justify these viewpoints here.
And I am perpetually baffled by people crying "Steve Jobs phone open when???!!1" in every such thread, so let me explain in clear terms that even most obtuse people could understand: I spent enough time removing crap like MacKeeper from my GFs/mothers MacBooks and really _not_ looking forward to having to do the same on their iPhones. No, they don't need "freedom" to be tricked into installing crapware on their devices same way as I don't need "freedom" to cut my face with an open razor. _Real_ cool haxxors like you (as opossed to "so-called hackers") can buy an Android device and install whatever software they want like I did.
> buy an Android device and install whatever software they want like I did
Good luck with that. Hardware remote attestation will fail, outing you to the corporations as someone who "tampered" with the device. You'll be refused service based on that alone, from frivolous content consumption to vital banking services.
What does it have to do with forcing Apple to allow installing iOS software outside of their approved appstore? Manually installed FF from hypothetical non-Apple store will somehow magically pass remote attestation on iOS or what?
It has everything to do with it. Computing freedom is paramount. We should be able to install whatever software we like on our machines. Therefore it follows that corporations shouldn't be able to discriminate against us for doing so.
Your comment was essentially "but you can exercise your freedom if you want to". I said they will discriminate against you for exercising your freedom, robbing you of choice. "Whatever software you want", provided they belong in the set of software approved by Google or Apple.
If you still don't see how it's related, I don't know what else to say.
Then for your sake I hope they don't find out about those apps. It is their device, after all. They don't like it when you do things they didn't approve of. Their methods grow ever more sophisticated. Hardware cryptography is only the latest innovation.
> No, they don't need "freedom" to be tricked into installing crapware on their devices same way as I don't need "freedom" to cut my face with an open razor
But guess what, in the real world you do have the freedom to cut your face with an open razor. Still, you don't see everyone using one (unless they know what they're doing), they rather use a safe razor - they have the sensibility.
I find it demeaning that we "hackers" assume that a certain set of people will never learn about safety when it comes to computing. They can (they did with the razor), but they certainly won't when we give up on them.
You conveniently skipped part of my comment where I suggested that people who want to install software from outside of corporate app stores are free to vote with their money and buy a phone that allows that? I just want to be free to continue buying safe razors and locked devices for use-cases I deem beneficial.
Um, you're making the wrong comparison. Apple can just offer a "locked" version of iPhone if you want that. You could buy a unlocked one for you, and a locked one for $whoever. iOS vs Android should not a safe vs unsafe argument, it should be a Gillette razor vs Philips razor argument.
Also, I don't think the only merit that iPhone brings is this so-called safety, it is also a very well engineered device. I'd like to buy one but the only thing that has held me back is how closed the ecosystem is. If the EU is able to force Apple to fix that, I might finally buy an iPhone for the first time :)
> Um, you're making the wrong comparison. Apple can just offer a "locked" version of iPhone if you want that. You could buy a unlocked one for you, and a locked one for $whoever. iOS vs Android should not a safe vs unsafe argument, it should be a Gillette razor vs Philips razor argument.
Yes, that would be great, but I don't see how it could happen with current EU laws.
Yeah, just buy a phone that doesn't allow you to run the messaging services you need to communicate with your family and business contacts. Just buy a phone you can't run your banking app on because they only support locked down platforms. The freedom of choice is astounding.
I'm pretty sure my Android phone allows me to communicate with my family and local business contacts. Banking apps also work fine on it. And I even installed bunch of coolhaxxor software like WiFi scanner or a browser with real ad blocker from third-party app store!
Huh? Give it some time then. My banking app refuses to run if I so much as enable developer mode. WhatsApp will permanently ban your number if you use an alternative client. I have access to neither if I choose to run postmarketOS.
It's a necessary step. We cannot solve those issues and allow Apple to own the machine. First we must acquire the keys. Then we fight them when they discriminate against us for using them.
> No, they don't need "freedom" to be tricked into installing crapware on their devices same way as I don't need "freedom" to cut my face with an open razor.
Are you suggesting we ban razors for public safety then ?
To me, actual freedom, understood as being free from unjust coercion, is more important than "user freedom", understood as having a wide range of services and goods to choose from.
In this case, the former is being attacked in order to achieve the latter.
I literally cannot use public parking in my city without an app. A ton of services are requiring app based 2FA for their use. Anyone without a smartphone that uses either Android or iOS is literally being left out of a huge chunk of the modern world.
“Own this or you’ll be relegated to the fringes of society” very much sounds like coercion to me.
Ah, yes, of course. Doing the slightest thing to reign in the worst abuses of trillion dollar companies is equivalent to completely abolishing private property. Thanks for the insight.
User has the freedom to buy or not. Any other expectations the user has can't be regulated into existence and be called "freedom". So-called hackers constantly begging for regulation without thinking one step ahead of the consequences of increased tech regulation is more baffling.
User also has the freedom to use whatever he bought in any way he sees fit (as long as it isn't illegal). Or do you consider that something a user shouldn't be able to do?
And a business has freedom to restrict their products to prevent what they believe isn’t the use case they want. And users have the freedom to put their money where their mouth is by purchasing alternatives on the market.
So you go to purchase a device from a company who has been doing this since their very existence, is known for doing this, and has never pretended or tricked consumers into thinking they don’t do this. A closed ecosystem is Apple’s M.O. - and I can’t think of any sane person who cares about repairability who goes to them. They all own open phones such as the Fairphone. I love mine.
I find it confusing. I've never walked into a bakery that only sells chocolate cake, bought the cake and moaned about it not being vanilla. That would be insane.
No educated tech people are buying into Apples ecosystem without awareness of the limitations. If this is an issue, why be in this ecosystem at all?
Apple has done more for user freedom than the open source movement ever could, by creating products that uncompromisingly put the user first, enabling ordinary people to do things they could never do before. Tech nerds are a tiny sliver of a tiny sliver of the market; compared to the empowered users who appreciate Apple's commitment to keep its platforms secure and high quality, the number of people who really want to be able to run arbitrary (perhaps malicious) code on their device is negligible.
Even then, Steve Jobs could, with a wave of his hand, instantly achieve things tech nerds had been struggling to do for years before: things like make Flash go away or make DRM on digital music no longer be a thing.
I can already self-sign and run software on my iPhone. Would be cool if Apple removed whatever locks prevent running alternative OSs. But iOS is already a complete, cohesive, & secure offering. I don’t really see the hacker ethos in compelling Apple to switch out bits and pieces of their operating system so Google can make more cash. Would much rather be able to install Android or similar.
> It's bullshit that you can only run Safari on iOS or that the App Store is the only store you can use.
What I really want is an up-to-date browser even if iOS stops being supported on an old phone of mine. (And they seem to be dropping support faster, what with iOS 17 not supporting the iPhone X — introduced in 2017 — without any legitimate hardware reason.)
It's ridiculous that Safari and the underlying WebKit engine only get updated with every accompanying iOS release.
> The iOS and iPadOS 16.7 update covers all devices that could run version 16, including older stuff like the iPhone 8, iPhone X, and first-gen iPad Pro that can't be upgraded to version 17. In a couple of months, if precedent holds, newer devices will have to upgrade to keep getting security fixes, while iOS 16 updates will continue to support older devices for at least another year.
Could you update to iOS 16.7 and check which Safari version it uses? Would be interesting to know. On macOS you can already install the newest Safari version even when running 3 year old macOS.
Like with all “built-in” iOS apps, mobile Safari versions have always been tied to the iOS version. It would be big news if Apple was going to change that (quite unlikely). MacOS is a very different story.
That's the biggest problem with Chromebooks (or at least was the last time I used one).
The thing becomes useless as soon as it stops getting updates, because your browser doesn't get new features and gets locked out of various parts of the internet as time matches on without you. On any other computer, you can keep the browser up to date long after the OS stops receiving patches.
Not sure why I'm getting downvoted. The Chromebook Pixel was an awesome home computer until it stopped getting OS updates, which also pinned it on a version of Chrome that got obsoleted from the web. (Unlike IE, nobody cares if something works in old Chrome, and some sites actively reject old versions for security reasons.)
> I want to run Firefox on my phone. The actual thing. With containers and extensions. Let Safari compete on the merits.
I want to run AnkiDroid. So I bought a phone that runs it. I don't have an opinion on this EU decision - but what precludes you from purchasing a phone that supports Firefox if that's what you want. Isn't the classical argument that the market would push users like you away from an Apple device, and that market pressure would be the tipping factor in Apple deciding whether or not to allow Firefox?
Just don't "hack" YOUR iPhone then. I'm even ok with Apple warning on pre-install: "You're about to install software that could disrupt your stellar performance on your iPhone. Proceed? Yes, I understand the risks / No, take me back to the safety of the Apple ecosystem"
It turns out in practice I don't make much use of the extra freedoms that Android allows, certainly not to the point that it justifies buying worse hardware
If Apple was so good that men voluntarily gave them 90% market share you’d call them a monopoly, though it was freely given. Now if they acted immorally, they ought to be reprimanded, but you demanding freedom by coercion is immoral.
They are acting immorally by restricting what users can do with devices they own. They are using their market power to coerce users into using their services.
The rules were made by representatives voluntarily elected by the people and are an expression of their free will.
So I should be settled with inferior hardware, and huge privacy violations? Because the only way out from the latter is GrapheneOS on the Pixel, which is definitely not as great hardware-wise as the last few iphones, and then we didn’t even get to other properties like proper second-hand market and support.
>So I should be settled with inferior hardware, and huge privacy violations?
Of course not! You can bring the "huge privacy violations" to iOS, so all of us can enjoy them if we want to use Facebook, Instagram, some Google app, etc.!
And they don't even properly honour default browser settings for the other WebKit browsers they allow. There are many instances of this; E.g. make Brave your default browser. Then select a word or phrase in a page in this browser, then hit "Search Web" and ... it opens in Safari. Bastards!
I mean, it is a very neat and easy-to-use platform at this point with relatively good privacy. I hope that doesn't entirely go away and I hope Apple will move some of the restrictions they make in the App Store into the OS. I really like that apps have to disclose what personal data they process and that apps can't just use private APIs for unlimited spying (two things I'm sure Instagram and my bank would love to get around, and I can't realistically do without either). Also hope I won't have to manage 12 different app stores because every large brand will try to force their own. I'd be happy enough with just side-loading apps I write myself, as Apple will doubtless add some scary messaging, so Meta et al won't be able to use it for their apps.
> I'd be happy enough with just side-loading apps I write myself
I say this every time this topic comes up.
You can side load on your iPhone. Like right now. And it’s easiest if you compile from source. About a quarter of the apps on my phone are side loaded. It’s git-clone-click easy. No jail break required. No App Store restrictions.
We can complain about other things, like that you need a Mac (usually), there’s restrictions without a small fee, and you can’t debug other processes. But that’s a separate set of issues.
Couldn't one just argue the same about Apple? I mean, if you don't like their lock-in, then just don't use it.
I don't want to use WhatsApp, but it's a quasi monopoly in messaging in many countries and thei're not opening up their APIs for others. We should force them too, shouldn't we?
I've used messenger in the past, after that i've just convinced family/friends to install telegram and chat there. Now I'm thinking abt moving to Signal, so imo, it's not that a big deal, users can migrate/install alternatives. If ppl care, they'll install an app to communicate with you, if they don't, well...
Were you also able to convince your employer, repairmen, local communities to leave WhatsApp? I am among the least connected people among various circles I am in, yet I'm not able to leave WhatsApp.
If you live in Costa Rica, then you have no choice but to use WhatsApp. I suppose technically could you could choose to be entirely unable to communicate and to be left out of the economy, but that's not much of a choice.
That is still a choice, though, even if it's a sucky one. Sounds like people are forced to choose WA in lieu of starving because they have no/less income.
Boycotting requires a sacrifice and of course I understand that for some the sacrifice is too great; I wouldn't blame them at all.
But my point was more, in the West people make so much noise about stuff and yet do nothing. And we are all generally quite privileged compared to some other parts of the world.
I'd like to do (good) things apple doesn't allow, such as owning my phone.
I'd like to put in a firewall, I'd like to prevent apps from doing things I don't want them to do, and I'd like to run my own apps (without asking permission).
> But a monopoly on core system functions isn't necessary to keep that high bar high.
That's an extraordinary statement to make, got any matching evidence? Lots of competitors have been trying for over a decade but nothing has emerged thus far.
While I don't believe Apple's current methods and models are the only way that could possibly work, I haven't seen any other successful way either.
It's a bit like PKI and E2EE in that way, lots of noise around it (be it Secure Boot, Signal or Boot Guard or something else) but no true alternative. All we get so far is regurgitated ideas with Clipper chip concepts.
To me the closed ecosystem is just a nice user experience. Explaining to my mom how to download Whatsapp is simple with just one way to do it. All apps are downloaded the same way. There’s one login. One payment method. Everything kinda “just works” and Apple does its best to keep apps sandboxed and secure. To the typical end user, a more open environment is just more choice and more headache.
Having more choice means that in case you need them you can use these other choices, it doesn't mean you will have to explain to someone about all these different choices and how they work, your current explanation of how to download apps will still be valid. Also, these new choices will not impact the sandbox implementation of core iOS.
> Having more choice means that in case you need them you can use these other choices, it doesn't mean you will have to explain to someone about all these different choices and how they work,
So you want to hide them from the user? Are they really choices then anymore? Or how would the user know that these are choices they can, if they want, ignore?
"Hey mom, yeah, don't worry, just scroll past most of the 27 choices and pick the 16th one. That one turned out to be the one everyone uses, it's easiest to explain. Yes, the one between choice X and choice Y. Oh, wait that's Z for you? Hm, you must be on version C still. In version F it's the 16th one. Just tell me the last dozen ones. Hm, no. Oh, yeah, I guess that choice has not been added yet. I think it was part of update D that brought the other 3 choices. Yeah, sorry, guess you can't do it like everyone else then."
Edit: I tried to over-dramatize this but it feels like a conversation about Android I had the other day now that I read it myself ...
Or does Windows show a choice screen for you to choose your Web browser of choice? Surely not, they want you to use Edge. Still, one can use another browser easily.
> Or does Windows show a choice screen for you to choose your Web browser of choice?
It's funny you bring this as an argument as I constantly get asked about "the weird dialogue" when you install a third party browser. "What do I do? I don't understand." ... A great counter example to good choice actually.
Google Play charges the same 30% and Android is already an open platform, yet this scenario hasn't happened. What makes you think this would be any different?
Maybe it has to do with the relative willingness of users to spend money on apps. Despite being a much smaller market, iPhone users as a group spend a lot more money than Android users. It just isn’t worth going to all that trouble to avoid the Play store.
Coercion is the way the world works. Right now we're being coerced by Apple, a megacorp with vastly more power than any of us individuals. The only way to fight it is by banding together and counter-coercing through our elected representatives.
Men work there, they have families and lives. You want to force them to offer “my sideloading”. That’s absolutely entitled thinking. Let free men make free choices and stop this authoritarian crusade.
The men working there are already under the authoritarian command of their CEO and board. They might be forced by them not to offer side loading, in fact.
You keep talking about coercion, but completely ignore the coercive nature of capitalism. It makes your points ring hollow and insencere.
So does Steam but Apple is the only one getting any flak for it. Turns out that running a global distribution network shipping billions of apps/updates daily, testing them, providing payment processing etc costs quite a bit of money.
People that have bought into the "iPhones let you join a super special secret club with superior products" rhetoric.
Only good things can come from this, if people want a vanilla Apple experience then just don't install alternatives to Apple's stuff, pretty simple. All they're worried about is their special locked down "what's a computer?" being "ruined".
Or... They recommended a device to their family, friends - those who need support from them - that is closed intentionally?
For many people this will be a support nightmare, and opens new avenues to problems (little cousin installing spyware on mums phone because he wanted free gbux, vulnerable older family member told by scammer to install alt store rootkit, etc).
Your comment is pretty closed minded and fairly rudely toned. You should probably read things back before you post them.
To a large degree I think this is more true than not.
Putting style aside, it's ridiculous that we don't have basic common designs that "just work". I want a kettle and toaster that are expected to work for decades and can be easily repaired if something goes wrong. There are some reasons to differentiate (e.g. I want shoes that work well and last but people have different foot support needs) but in my ideal world we have shared product functionality and slap stylistic preferences on top of that.
The problem is once you do that that particular design will stop improving fast. e.g what if phones were legislated to all be open to everything and everyone and standardized at Symbian S40.
It's simple, don't buy an iPhone. If you say "But I want an iPhone because is better than any Android", than you have to think that maybe iPhone is better because of the more restrictive rules.
Why do you say that. I use Firefox on my Android, specifically because I can install plugins, which I can't do in Chrome. What functionality do you think is "crippled"?
The Pixel 5's security update end of life is in two weeks[0]. This is a phone that launched October 2020.
My iPhone XS which I bought in 2018 just got the iOS 17 update and it's working pretty well.
I want to be able to load whatever I want on my phone, but I also don't want to have to buy a new phone every couple years (or sooner! Looks like the 5a is still in production with security updates ending in 11 months) to get Android updates, or even security updates.
The rumors are that the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro will launch with a promise of 7 years of updates, including not only security fixes and bug fixes but also feature drops. We’ll see what’s announces next month, but Google might be about to jump ahead of even the iPhone on this point.
Disclosure: although I have worked for Google in the past, I haven’t worked for them in more than 8 years, never worked on Android or Pixel beyond internally testing pre-release Android OS versions, have never had anything to do with setting their lifecycle policies, have no inside information on these rumors, and am not speaking for Google here.
I'm having trouble thinking of Google breaking any explicit promises like "Pixel 6 and later phones, including Fold, will get updates for at least 5 years from when the device first became available on the Google Store in the US"? What are you thinking about?
Another example: when free high quality (slightly downscaled) photo storage turned into paid after I had used it as backup of almost sll my photos during my android days?
(To be fair, both Dropbox and OneDrive has done the same: offered free storage without specifying a time limit for jumping through some hoops, then IIRC:
- in the Dropbox case: suddenly just introduce a time limit
- in the OneDrive case just tell me one day that they didn't want to do this more and I need to take my data out quickly or pay to avoid losing it
)
hard doubt it's bc of old data. It could be a bug in the system, but most probably It's either bc you uploaded from another device/browser or bc of gmail or after the free period ended
nope, it was unlimited compressed for a specified timeframe*(for other phones) and free unlimited compressed forever for pixel 2 to pixel 5(and unlimited uncompressed for og pixel). Google didn't break their promises
* Actually it wasn't about timeframe, google afaik didn't say that other smartphones will get unlimited compressed forever, just that it's free for that time
Yeah, my wife’s Pixel 3 came with unlimited photo storage too. It was a selling point… of course, that went away when it became inconvenient for Google.
I cannot remember them telling that unlimited photo storage wasn't unlimited?
I was also burned, in my case by the "free forever" or something "high quality photo storage" (as opposed to full quality).
I understand nothing is truly free, but I expect when a large scale company offers something for free they have thought it true and aren't planning from the start to weasel out once you have uploaded a few thousand images using their solution?
Well, I have learned my lessons:
I don't trust Google anymore.
As some said it took a while to stop trusting Google because they had to burn through a mountain of goodwill, but here we are.
On the first Pixel generation it was unlimited for the lifetime of the device, from Pixel 2 onwards it was unlimited storage for 3 years, in case of Pixel 3 which launched in Oct.2018 it was unlimited until 31st January 2022.
I understand your frustration, but this was communicated by Google already at launch.
Google specifically said what benefits you get with each pixel: unlimited original with first p, from 2 to 3 or 4, unlimited original for 3 years and unlimited compressed after, for p5 just unlimited compressed. Google didn't broke any of these claims
I think a challenge of pixels and android in general is they don't seem to care about how well older hardware works with new os releases (or even some updates). I have an iphone se and it seems to work just fine after installing multiple os releases. Pixel type phones seem to struggle after a few os releases, as well as android in general. I should say I usually end up buying one generation behind cur on pixel.
So on top of google's short timeframe to allow 'next os release' support, apple does a better job on keeping older gen phones working well across multiple os releases.
This is one of the first generations of Pixel phones, maybe the first, where Google has had sufficient top-to-bottom vertical control over everything from the CPU on up to plausibly make this kind of promise. Apple got there before Google did, but Google may have finally arrived there.
Again, I have no inside info on this despite having worked for Google many years ago. We'll see what the announcement is on October 4.
Yeah, and also google did a poor job with lens coating on P7 so that lens flare is ruining any photo with too many light sources
And the phone overheats with camera/video turned on for more than 15 mins, even 30fps 1080
Just spitballing here but it's possible that Android's openness is exactly why Google Pixel doesn't have better resources to have long term support. Some bean counters probably determined that Google doesn't make enough money to have teams supporting older Pixels. Samsung is taking a ton of profits from Pixel and the end result is piss poor Android support on Pixels.
Guess what? Samsung doesn't care about long term Android support. They're in it to sell phones. It's better for Samsung if Android's ecosystem continues to drop older phones.
At some point, Apple realized that long term support is a competitive advantage they can leverage. Due to their enormous profits, they can increase their support costs. With their closed ecosystem, Samsung can't come in and pull their shenanigans to undercut Apple.
IMO, Android’s openness is exactly why the Android experience on older phones suck.
I'm not sure openness is the sole factor reducing support duration.
Windows 8 was released in 2012 and was supported untim 2023 and Microsoft for sure hat _a lot_ more platforms to support than Google / the Android Team.
I would argue that a closed system is a lot easier to support for a longer time (because one can mandate changes/depreciations). But for a open system, there must be another factor coming into play, may it be money or a simple "don't care".
Pretty sure Samsung has sold more SKUs than fair phone has sold actual phones. It’s a pretty ridiculous comparison. Have they even been shipping phones for 8y?
Saying "why can't BigCo support BillionsOfPhones, when fair phone can support AFewPhones" doesn't make sense.
1. We don't know FairPhone can follow through, they're small/young and may not exist in 8y, or may not have money to pay for support.
2. Even if FP succeeds, they accomplished a much easier task than BigCo is expected to.
Nr of phones doesn't matter, nr of models matters. How many models have google launched? 8? Fairphone did 5, not that big difference. And apple how many? >15 generations with huge support. So here we have both a small company with big support, a big company with big support (and even samsung now provides more years of os updates lol) and here we have google, a big corp that "can't" do this bc they are big... suuuuuure
To be fair, Google is also developing most of Android, so they already have a lot higher costs. Tough S*t, I know, but if Google drops android, I'd like to see how much support/progress someone like FairPhone can really provide. Only apple really has a fair comparison. I agree Google just hasn't supported long cycles because they didn't care, not because they can't. But you have to recognize they have a much bigger task. I would also assume that Google + Samsung's support is a lot more comprehensive than FairPhone's
Google obviously has the resources. The bean counters decided that they want profits instead of building up a loyal customer base.
My main point is that if Pixels sold as many phones as Samsung, it is very likely that Pixel would put in the resources to support older phones. Competition within the Android space does not equate to better long term service.
Ultimately it was the need to buy a new phone every couple of years even when I otherwise wouldn't need to that pushed me to Apple devices. I only this year had to replace my daughter's iPhone 7, but not because it wasn't supported as a 4 year old device. Granted it won't get iOS 16 or 17 but 15 is still supported.
The parent just said the iPhone is what they wanted. Is it hard to believe that someone could both like Apple and look forward to a world with more control over their phone?
It’s not hard to believe someone would like to have their cake and eat it too. That doesn’t make it a reasonable demand though.
The parents say the iPhone is what they want and that is because the iPhone is the phone you can’t accidentally break by installing alternative stores or apps or making the wrong settings. If Apple is forced to allow alternative stores, apps and settings that can break the system, the iPhone is no longer the phone they wanted.
> If Apple is forced to allow alternative stores [...] the iPhone is no longer the phone they wanted.
I just re-read it and couldn't find the part where they said that. Do you have a direct citation from the parent, or are you just floating a guess to support your opinion?
Yeah, I need a phone that can run Apple's GarageBand, (easily my most-used app; hundreds and hundreds of hours, and as I use Logic to create music at home and have for 15+ years, I can open up these iPhone-created files at home, establishing a workflow Ableton, for instance, has completely failed to replicate) - ideally uses iMessage so I can more easily communicate with my romantic partners who both use it; and can run a browser of my choice. I'd also like it to work with my Apple Watch. Any non-iPhone recommendations?
The mindset here is so alien to me. Do people think that the EU is willing to take action against Apple, and yet somehow unwilling to take action against Google?
It's currently happening. Try using YouTube or Google Search on the desktop with, for example, MS Edge. Google will tell you you should download Chrome to work better.
The only reason that's not the case on iOS devices is that they don't have that option.
MS Edge uses Blink under the hood, which is a Chrome fork. The monoculture is all but here, save for dwindling Firefox and Webkit. Everything else that's popular is effectively a Chrome skin, or if you like, Linux distributions packaging up stuff around the kernel (the rendering engine).
I didn't say Chrome would actually make it work better. The fact that MS decided not to maintain their version of Edge is a little frustrating, because more competition would be better. Indeed, that's why I want Safari to remain.
But even reskinned Chrome isn't safe from nag messages to switch to Chrome.
I do think it’s unlikely, or at least unlikely to happen before the damage is done and we’re stuck with a permanent browser engine monoculture.
If they were rolling out policy to quash anticompetitive behavior in the browser space along with requiring Apple to open iOS up I’d be much more comfortable. The two should go hand in hand. I don’t want Google to have any opportunity to entrench Chrome/Blink on iOS.
It’s pretty reasonable to believe whatever action it takes will be a long ways away, a period during which the user experience will suffer. You don’t have to believe they’ll never act; you just have to believe they’ll act slowly and poorly. For example, the proposal to force iMessage interoperability which makes little sense and introduces security risks.
Google Search, YouTube and many other Google properties are also subject to the same Digital Market Act regulations. Google is a designated gatekeeper, same as Apple.
The DMA largely regulates essential platform services, so it has little to say about YouTube steering users to Chrome, neither of which are platform services on iOS.
It's not about personal choices, it's about enabling fair competition. If you sell a general-purpose computing device and market it as one, you should relinquish any control of it once it's sold.
The very same site where a significant number of users argue, completely seriously, that game consoles are not general purpose computing devices and, as such, should not be subject to the same rules.
I'd define the "general purposeness" by the public availability of an official SDK. Video game consoles are strange because there's no agreement whether they are appliances or not. Most of them also have unofficial public SDKs. Heck, some people would even say that routers are general purpose computing devices and install a custom OS on theirs.
Apple's SDKs are "public" in the sense that you can go read them, but if you want to ship anything with them on iOS, you need a paid developer account, right? I wouldn't call that public.
Given the context, I’m guessing what you want is to run arbitrary code on an OS that manages the battery, the network, the display, audio in and out, provide a security apparatus... You want all of the benefits of the well-managed, walled garden.
> I’m guessing what you want is to run arbitrary code on an OS that manages the battery, the network, the display, audio in and out, provide a security apparatus... You want all of the benefits of the well-managed, walled garden.
...or a sufficently advanced browser :p (and people wonder why MacOS is loaded with lazy Electron ports...)
Distributing software should be free, ignoring the cost of transmitting the information and storing it on the client. Apple's pricing is arbitrary, and their defense of it is unsubstantiated. Forcing the App Store to compete is the only natural step forward for Apple, whether they (or their shareholders) want to admit it or not.
If you're going to make an appeal to identity: what kind of lame hackers need to appeal to a bunch of stuffy suits in Brussels to get homebrew running on a general purpose computer?
Social engineering is a form of hacking, and there are grey, white, and black hat forms of hacking. Hacks also vary in terms of skill, and elegance. What you describe sounds very script kiddie.
Agreed. It’s still hacking- it just might not be good hacking, in more than one sense of the word. So perhaps it depends on the nature of the hacker itself!
The EU did, by qualifying Apple as a services gatekeeper on iPhone:
1. An undertaking shall be designated as a gatekeeper if:
(a) it has a significant impact on the internal market;
(b) it provides a core platform service which is an important gateway for business users to reach end users; and
(c) it enjoys an entrenched and durable position, in its operations, or it is foreseeable that it will enjoy such a position in the near future.
I have a different take on the ad. The ad is saying that computer is the obsolete experience, not that the iPad can do everything a computer can do. If Apple truely believed that, they would not have a mac line up.
For a certain demographic of people, I would agree. I continue to push the iPad for my aging parents because it can do what they need to do without my tech support. They don't need all the flexibility of a computer as a general purpose computing device. They just need to browse the web, write emails and watch videos, and the iPad is perfect for them.
Any questions, or do you still want to whinge over how "turing completeness isn't computation!"? You're welcome to it, but quite obviously the Digital Markets Act has nothing to do with it. Apple would be a designated gatekeeper if they sold Cuisinart blenders, now they have to cope or leave the relevant markets.
It's truly shocking to me how some people are willing to write multiple pages of comments in response to this. Half the people in this thread are replying to every positive comment they can find crying "Atlas Shrugged!" like bloody murder.
There are microprocessors with storage in any object you can buy, so obviously your evidence that iPad is a computer is pretty casual.
I don’t think the DMA will change much but do find it funny how many people think they are defending human freedom by getting a convoluted process to run emulators, uBlock, and piracy apps on their phone.
European regulators are idiots who have spent nearly half a decade trying to undermine end to end encryption. If I were them, I’d say their best chance at defending human freedom would be to make nuclear reactors easy to build, not engaging in some boondoggle about how easy it is to install some apps on a phone. This will end up being as useful as GDPR privacy notices and cookie consents on websites.
Because Apple sells the highest security mass market consumer device ever made? Because Apple brought easy to use, end to end encryption to the masses with iMessage?
No clue what your point here is besides regurgitating some non-specific conspiracy theory about the extent of Apple’s cooperation with the government.
> That's the Free Market's job.
Regulation is not the free market’s job, as you evidently believe since you are so excited about digital markets regulation.
Maybe they could start by not categorizing wood pellets shipped across the Atlantic and produced from strip mining forests in southeastern United States as “green energy.”
> Or as effective as their USB-C regulation
How was USB-C regulation effective? Yeah Apple complied, but are customers’ lives better? In aggregate? By what metric? I for one had to buy a new iPhone cable for the first time in half a decade to connect my phone to my car. By its stated aims, the regulation was not effective in my case.
> Regulation is not the free market’s job, as you evidently believe
Innovation is. The European Union was not founded to build a better Nuclear Reactor (nor would it tangibly impact their citizen's freedom). Regulating the market those citizens participate in does. I'm not so sure why you're complaining about this so much. If Apple's self-righteous crusade to own all digital IP was truly worth it, they could abandon Europe and continue on. But it's not- for one because they value money, and for two because they already work with FIVE-EYES and every domestic European nation to surveil on their users. No conspiracy, Apple documents it themselves: https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/
> I for one had to buy a new iPhone cable for the first time in half a decade to connect my phone to my car. By its stated aims, the regulation was not effective in my case.
You do realize, if anything, the DMA itself is cope. The EU's consumer electronics industry has been lapped by the rest of the world, and now all they can do is nitpick connectors and firmly demand that Apple support something almost no users care about.
Again, if Apple shared your opinion then maybe they'd call Europe's bluff. Again, Apple is chronically incapable of doing this because it would mean being eaten alive by shareholders that make $DIS owners look rational. Leaving the European market would be the trigger-pull of Apple's suicide.
> and now all they can do is nitpick connectors
...you're still mad about a $4 gas station cable? Seriously?
> and firmly demand that Apple support something almost no users care about.
"Why is the United States wasting their time with these Rockefeller people? They're coping over things the unbridled success of Standard Oil, pushing legislation that none of their customers care about!" - imagine the free market with a bunch of yous at the helm.
How do you explain Japan also mandating this? As I recall, South Korea, India, Australia, and several other nations have also been calling for Apple to open up iOS as well.
The mere fact that you had to buy a cable does not speak to the efficacy or lack thereof of the regulation, any more than the first tweet I found by searching "USB-C Apple" does.
You made no claim. A single contradiction is not a refutation or even a counterarguement. It is the bare-minimum disagreement you can assert without attacking the speaker instead of the problem: https://issuepedia.org/File:Graham's_Hierarchy_of_Disagreeme...
This argument may not be worth continuing if you don't have anything left to say.
Ah, but you are claiming that the regulation was ineffective, by advancing your anecdotal case as evidence. And with one simple search there is at least two anecdata points that cancel out yours.
It can be argued (I think effectively) that we don’t know how to make non-general purpose computers. We can kind of fake it by putting blocking software in the way, but you can’t have math that only works when the data isn’t copyrighted.
> If you sell a general-purpose computing device and market it as one, you should relinquish any control of it once it's sold.
The freedoms we have, and the freedom that should be protected is market choice to buy or not buy any consumer product.
If you don’t like Apple, don’t buy its products and purchase a device from a large number of competitors. It is really that simple.
There is no rule that consumers have a right to do anything. You are not guaranteed a right to install a Windows app on your iPhone, or iPhone apps on Windows. You aren’t guaranteed that your coffee machine can run Python.
> You are not guaranteed a right to install a Windows app on your iPhone, or iPhone apps on Windows.
This is a complete red herring and a very sly one at that.
Sure, MS have no obligation to make it so that Safari can run on Windows.
However, Microsoft also cannot stop Apple from building a version of Safari that runs on Windows. Or iTunes on Windows. And when Apple built iTunes on Windows MS had no right to force them to fork over 30% of every song they sold within iTunes to MS. MS had no right to force Mozilla to build Firefox around the IE6 engine, or Chrome around IE6.
It’s very likely Apple, Google, or Mozilla would not have existed if governments (specifically the EU) hadn’t stopped Microsoft from pushing it’s options as the default, never mind blocking alternatives altogether.
Yep. Microsoft also hasn’t banned Steam from windows, forcing everyone to buy games from their own official windows App Store where they take a juicy cut of all sales.
Microsoft also doesn’t charge a ransom fee for 3rd party applications to use the hardware features of my computer, that I’ve already paid for. Apple does this with the NFC chip in iPhones - public transit companies the world over need to pay Apple money to use the nfc chip present in iPhones to pay for transit.
You seem to have high opinions about what others don’t have the right to do with software they invest their own money into. Here’s an idea, let’s drop the coercion and let free men make free choices.
I would be very surprised if someone could demonstrate that the reason Apple’s platform is more valuable to developers than Android doesn’t have quite a bit to do with things Apple has done, and continues to do.
Nothing? They provide and run the marketplace that distributes your app anywhere in the world, and handles nearly frictionless payment. And they have created a marketplace where users feel safe downloading your app. As an Apple customer I value these things pretty highly, more than I value any one app.
> They provide and run the marketplace that distributes your app anywhere in the world
It's nice that they provide that service for those developers that want it. It's not nice that I don't have a choice to distribute my own app however I see fit.
See, I want to build an app, and people want to install it, but Apple is standing between us, dictating how we must and must not interact.
> As an Apple customer I value these things pretty highly, more than I value any one app.
Then you're free to not enable sideloading when it eventually inevitably materializes, and miss out on apps that aren't available on the app store. This decision is still yours to make. We've had this on Android and macOS since forever.
So you’re advocating freedom for you and coercion for others. You’re free to buy an Android, no one’s forcing you to do anything. Free not to buy Apple. But you won’t extend that to others, forcing them to bow to your demands or lose their freedom to conduct trade.
Where did you see coercion? MacOS offers both options. You and I both know how popular the Mac app store is among both users and developers. I'm sure there are people who use a Mac and would not install anything from outside of the app store out of principle. It's their right to do so.
They also write and maintain the primary frameworks by which one creates software on their devices, a set of tools that help developers create apps far better than any competing mobile operating system. These frameworks are available for all developers to use for free!
I propose Apple start charging some pennies for every million UIView calls.
What is the price of devices for then? It's a sane expectation that when you buy a device with a preinstalled OS, you pay for both the hardware and the R&D costs for the OS.
Apple sets prices and there’s no reason they need to charge customers for the R&D costs of supporting public APIs. In fact, if they charged developers per call, maybe customers could pay less. It used to be pretty standard to charge for better application development frameworks. Heck, people used to pay for compilers!
I remember how Microsoft wanted non-insignificant amounts of money for its official SDKs and Visual Studio (and I always pirated them).
But Apple always offered Xcode for free and, iirc, some Macs even came with an Xcode installation CD in the box. But major macOS updates were also paid back then. But the version that came with your computer out of the box was still free. So no, I feel like "we need the $99/year and the 30% to support the R&D cost of our APIs" is a mostly made-up excuse. It's not like Apple would operate at loss if they remove the $99 and 30% fees tomorrow.
What I'm saying is that Apple can fuck around and find out. 2 years ago there weren't protections for arbitrary digital market gatekeeping, now there is. If Apple wants European market access, being the vanguard for the World's Dumbest pricing model is a bad start.
Remember: Apple is considered a gatekeeper for app installation regardless of the cost they pay to maintain the platform. Charging per-call on a literally free API would be so profoundly stupid that it would force a second Digital Market Act.
Being the vanguard? Usage based pricing is not new, and framework makers have charged developers for access for a long time.
Making an API public, even if the necessary code runs entirely on-device, is not free. It incurs immense upfront and perpetual R&D costs. Apple has spent the last three releases trying to slowly fix privacy issues with API as basic as copy and paste.
The digital markets act is about facilitating competing entrants to “essential platform services.” Charging for the Apple technology those entrants use would not be inconsistent with its aims. A developer could use their own UI framework that draws straight to the window server itself! And maybe use some of that famous Android audio processing software!
> Charging for the Apple technology those entrants use would not be inconsistent with its aims.
Sorry, that's like saying the Apple Developer program fulfills the DMA qualifications because it's not "inconsistent with it's aims".
Apple is of course welcome to try any of these things; nothing stops them as a private business. They failed to defend the mandatory value of the App Store in Europe though, so I fail to see how they could defend an arbitrary charge on other API calls. Apple quite literally cannot call Europe's bluff - that's what my original upstream comment was about in the first place. You can talk confident smack about Apple's talent in the pissing contest, but none of that means anything when the capitalist leash gets tugged and the alternative is losing money.
There is not a single value Apple holds that they would not forgo for money.
I have bought an iPhone and not your app. You have no relationship with me without me choosing iOS. That’s it. I’m your user and I want to get my apps from the App Store. Respect that decision. Don’t make me go outside the ecosystem I have chosen so you can make you 30%. I say that as a developer who gets charged the 30% as I respect the fact the user decided to use that specific platform for whatever reason they have.
Mine as a consumer is that Apple doesn’t have dark patters when I want to cancel my subscription with your app. When I try to cancel my membership for something else like a magazine or the gym I have to go over 10 steps…
> I’m your user and I want to get my apps from the App Store
Then you're not my user. And I'm not talking about anything involving money anyway.
> When I try to cancel my membership for something else like a magazine or the gym I have to go over 10 steps…
It's the government's job to enforce consumer rights, not Apple's. I'm sorry that consumer protection in the US is so terrible. Where I'm from, "credit card on file" is just not a thing and most of everything is prepaid. If a service really insists on charging you against your will, you can block your card and get a new one but I've yet to hear about this actually happening to someone.
There was a time when people would give up their job if they truly believed in what they preached. But you like your work (or money) enough to not make a choice to change
Competition is the natural state of affairs. Nobody has to enable it. IBM/Microsoft weren't forced by the EU to give up market dominance in PCs. And if the EU tried, it couldn't ever do a better job than Apple did. It's no surprise that EU lags so much behind the US in tech innovation.
This is not even remotely true. Economies of scale mean that power accumulates and monopolies emerge, and monopolies are the antithesis of competition. In order to ensure competition, you need regulation to shake the jar regularly.
The App Store is the monopoly. Once you own an iPhone, you have no choice but to use their software ecosystem where they double dip and charge everyone again to buy apps. It’s dirty.
I love Apple’s hardware. But I want to be able to get software from other sources just like I can on my Mac and my windows computer.
Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo restrict their game consoles in the same way. Are all three monopolies that are somehow competing with each other? Why is it good for the government to force Apple to open up their hardware, but bad to do the same to game console makers?
I can think of a few differences with game consoles:
- Phones are designed and used as general purpose devices, complete with thriving app ecosystems. I’ve installed software from dozens of companies on my phone - for gaming, work, leasure, health, everything. Phones are used much more like computers than an Xbox. We buy them to use them like computers.
- Unlike most game consoles, phones aren’t subsidised by the App Store. Apple makes a profit from iphone sales even if you don’t buy any apps.
- Phones matter more. I carry an iPhone in my pocket every day. I don’t carry a Nintendo switch.
A big reason why consoles aren't as general purpose is because their app stores are more restrictive than phone app stores. Also this reasoning leads to some odd policy outcomes. If console manufacturers increased their prices so that their consoles weren't loss-leaders, would you be swayed towards forcing them to open their app stores? Likewise if Apple sold iPhones as loss leaders, would you be swayed against forcing them to open their app store?
I should be free to buy software for my iPhone from other vendors. I should be free to write & run software on my iphone without paying apple for the privilege.
Its my phone. I bought it with my own money. I do feel like I'm entitled to do whatever I want with my device. Its mine.
You bought that thing wide eyed as to its capabilities. Now you’re complaining and want to use coercion to get a feature. Yea it’s entitled and unnecessary. I can understand if Apple murdered someone and you want to punish them, use the law. But “I like their hardware and totes wish it had side loading” is immoral and egregious.
This is a big difference in viewpoint between the US and EU. The US has an undying belief in free market forces. Yet its government is beholden to those same big money forces through campaign contributions. Leading to a peculiar corporate oligarchy (really how democratic is it if you need millions in donations with strings attached to have a chance to win?). We in the EU want to avoid this and keep government serving the interests of citizens.
The EU tries to balance this out with more regulation to prevent the stalemate and conflict of interests that exists in the US. Things like the Senate launch system that just exists for pork. Our welfare is for citizens, not big business :)
And it's fine, Apple doesn't have to enable sideloading in the US. But if they want to sell here they'll have to play by our rules.
Actually the web browser is exactly one of the things that microsoft had to change to reduce their enforced market dominance. They made microsoft stop forcing IE down everyone's throat.
It's eerie how similar the iphone browser situation paralllels that.
OS and device vendors forcibly inserting themselves between developers and users like Apple does is unprecedented. Because Apple has a literal technological supremacy over most of the humanity (since iOS devices use secure boot that can't be disabled and relies on keys burned into silicon that you can't change because you lack the technology to do so), regulation needs to happen to enable fair competition among iOS apps.
In other words, no one needed to enable competition when adversarial interoperability was possible. It is not possible on iOS devices because of combination of secure boot and code signing policies.
You’re advocating for freedom for you and coercion for someone else. These double standards are immoral. You are not coerced into buying anything, but see nice hardware and your greed gets the best of you.
But people have a choice. They can choose Android, but they don’t, even though they know iPhones are locked down. By this point, you have to assume that the people who buy iPhones are okay with it. Apple doesn’t have a monopoly by any means.
I buy iPhones, but I'm not okay with it. Android has some of what I want, but a lot of what I don't.
The market is not competitive enough to actually be able to vote with my feet/dollars. Options are give up control (choose Apple) or give up privacy (choose Google). That is not a choice consumers should be forced to make.
So we should allow random app stores and browsers and magically keep the privacy?
Yeah 100% the other stores will not allow for private APIs and circumvent privacy protections and anti-tracking mechanisms. I would 100% believe Facebook on the App Store vs Facebook on the Meta store will be the same…
Private APIs and anti-tracking mechanisms are part of the operating system, not apps. As long as Apple's services don't get those same access, neither does any other app from a 3rd party app store.
Part of Apple's anti-tracking requirements are non-technical and exist only as App Store policy. That's the part that opponents of this change are concerned about losing should they end up pressured into using another store.
That said, there's not a whole lot an app can do to track you (without requesting special permission) that a random website you visit couldn't.
So dont fk... install fb/meta apps? If these orgs want to screw ppl, ppl are free to not use them, they even can use them from a browser.
So yeah, allow everything, maybe not by default, but let consumers du what they want with the device. If consumer want pristine experience, they will have it by default, if not, they can install what they want
So you’re advocating freedom … by coercion? This is immoral.
Besides immoral, obviously tons of apps would leave the App Store for a different store making it a much crappier experience for folks that use those very popular apps.
yeah, that's exactly what happens on android! looks like you can have some nostradamus genes!
Immoral is not owning a device when you bought it. Being able to sideload after passing some big warnings and red buttons is ok, just give me the option to do what i want with the device i've bought. This experience is default for macos, windows, android for decades and still, i haven't seen apps refusing being part of google store even if it cuts big part of profit (well i just remembered the dji app), but fb/insta/any other big player is still on google store
People that don't want to sideload will not sideload, it's pure freedom
This argument holds less weight, when you consider things like iMessages, where there are network effects and no cross-platform support. Also, there are a number of apps that are only available on IOS, due to its higher market share and greater user spend. So there is a high switching cost, which is a direct function of Apple's dominant market position.
However, Microsoft’s most significant tactic was the infamous “shell execute bug.” This bug caused some users to fail when trying to install Netscape, but it was not present when installing Internet Explorer, giving Microsoft yet another advantage. While Microsoft claimed the bug was unintentional, many believed it was a deliberate attempt to prevent users from installing Netscape. The bug caused significant damage to Netscape’s market share and cemented Microsoft’s dominance in the browser market."
Microsoft required PC manufacturers to have IE installed along with Windows, which is shitty, but not nearly as shitty as preventing users from installing Netscape, which they did not do.
They absolutely did. The whole antitrust case revolved around Microsoft threatening OEMs to terminate their reseller agreements if they sold the machines with Netscape Navigator pre-installed. It is the literal definition of monopoly abuse!
By that logic Apple does not prevent end users from rooting the phone and installing anything they like, it just makes it very inconvenient... and less shady than Microsoft's shell execute bug.
If we assume for the sake of argument that a particular customer would knowingly buy a computer from an OEM who pre-installed Netscape on it, then the OEM is the user of the computer before the end user buys it. Why should Microsoft be allowed to prohibit such a pre-installation? For security, maybe, but that probably wasn't Microsoft's motivation.
It was a different situation. Microsoft Windows was considered a monopoly, with around 95% of the desktop market (there was no mobile market yet). Microsoft used this to gain a monopoly in desktop browsers. When you are a monopoly, other rules apply, you cannot just abuse your customers and competitors with it.
Microsoft's anti-trust problems were not primarily about Netscape. If that's all it had been it would have been a trivial resolution.
They were about vendor abuse, vendor contracts. Which is one of the key ways Microsoft tried to maintain its power over the tech industry.
And of course as another person noted, Netscape was not in any manner blocked off of Windows. Netscape lost because it was charging for a browser while IE was free and usually installed by default. Then Netscape compounded the disaster by producing a couple of particularly terrible browser versions in a row while IE kept improving.
There was no scenario where a $49 browser was going to win regardless.
It's funny that Microsoft had to fight so hard when they could have just developed an operating system from the start, like iOS, that limited installations to whatever they pre-approved. It's always harder to take something away than never give it as an option in the first place.
They weren't preventing you from installing Netscape. They were bundling IE with their computers by default, and less technical savvy people didn't know they could install and use another browser.
Webkit is __not__ stable in any sense. It is the most buggy render engine I even seen. To make things even worse. Safari restrict the debugging of itself and also viewing the logs in the name of "s e c u ri t y". So you can't even see the reason that causes crashs and workaround it.
Apple goes out of their way to make it time consuming and annoying enough to use that most people won't bother using it, and the alt store has substantial restrictions compared to the App Store.
It's really funny that there are hackers arguing sincerely that software freedom is worth any price but think it's a "pain in the ass" to press a couple buttons for software freedom once a week (or annually, for $99).
That's a disgusting perversion of the word "freedom" -- being beholden to corporation's whims, having to dance to their tune and jump through their hoops is what you unironically call "software freedom"?
Well you argued that paying Apple $100/year to install software of your choice on a device that you supposedly own constitutes "software freedom". I argue that this is perversion of the word "freedom" considering it's neither free as beer, nor free as speech.
Ultimately you're still forced to ask Apple for permission to run your "sideloaded" app, and they can deny that request for any reason. "Software freedom" that you mockingly refer to is just a slightly longer leash inside the confines of their walled garden.
You can sideload for free. You have to press a button to renew your local signature every week. The $100/year is to skip pressing the button. You don’t have to get permission to run locally signed apps.
> You don’t have to get permission to run locally signed apps
You absolutely do need permission, that's how Apple enforces the app expiration. Apple will grant you a developer account and sign your apps for local use, but you cannot load your own apps without them doing so.
1. Valid Xcode signature is subject to Apple's approval. They might blanket approve everything now, but they could pull that rug tomorrow if they wanted to.
2. Having to re-sign every 7 days is a completely unworkable proposal, it means that you can't be away from your Mac for more than a week or the apps that you rely on will just stop working
3. Most people don't own a Mac, much less the have knowledge to sign apps with Xcode, for this to even be a realistic proposal
1. Then tomorrow you could argue human rights are violated. Not today.
2. So like I said: being able to run whatever software you want for more than a week at a time without having to click a button is the human right? Is that so?
2+3. I propose you start a human rights defending company that rents people a Mac Mini in the cloud for a minute a week and auto-signs any locally signed apps. All the necessary API already exists, and the marginal cost is in the cents. Cheapest welfare ever!
(ii) each lease period must be for a minimum period of twenty-four (24) consecutive hours;
It also depends on whether auto-signing qualifies as a Permitted Developer Service, which sounds like it might-
> (B) Permitted Developer Services means continuous integration services, including but not limited to software development, building software from source, automated testing during software development, and running necessary developer tools to support such activities.
Great, 52 hours of rent a year! Marginal cost is approaching $1/yr. Still very cheap welfare if you think this kind of thing is a human rights violation.
I'd be happy if the EU deemed these terms unenforceable. That sounds like it could allow for real innovation.
TestFlight was born out of sidestepping an onerous app provisioning process, so you are unironically correct. Would be nice if the EU weighed in on behalf of Corellium as well.
Hackers do not care about 99% of users, as evidenced by the fact that Apple created the most popular and accessible consumer software in history, not hackers.
You make a reasonable point that the poster didn’t imply painfulness made the Altstore not worthwhile for them personally.
iOS was popular far before it was a dominant global business. It was probably one of the most popular software projects of all time even in its first version.
iPod and iTunes Store were probably more popular than any project ever built by hackers. Why haven’t hackers, who care about 99% of users, ever been able to make software those users care to use? What private API stands between hackers and epiphany?
I just want an operating system free from the types of capabilities attractive to sanctimonious, user-hostile crusaders who have strong opinions about software freedom. I keep a laptop collecting dust with a half-broken install of Arch when I want to experience their paradise.
Making iOS more like macOS (which seems contrary to the current trajectory of the platforms) does not mean turning it into a half-broken install of Arch.
I'm sure there are many ways, but I used https://sabre.io/baikal/ to get a CalDAV and CardDAV server on cheap (shared, bog standard) web hosting, and then pointed Thunderbird to it. Apart from automatic syncing of contacts between devices, I can now edit my phone contacts on the desktop, which is so awesome.
It uses CalDav and CardDav to sync calendars and contacts with the android system, not with these apps.
If you build android from source it doesn't come with the GApps suite and you can use any other calendar and contacts apps which then use the calendars and contacts provided by the system.
Because I like iPhone hardware. It's high quality and lasts.
The EU has the right to mandate rules on what corporations sell to its population. No one is forcing Apple to keep selling phones in the EU. They could even create a version of iPhone exclusively for them. Hopefully that hasn't been the case and finally we all have USB-C. Thanks EU.
Hopefully they start being much more strict about repairability and openness.
Should you be able to buy any drug, organ or children? I don’t think so, no government on this planet has a free market because there are laws and regulations.
This comment comes every single time the EU asks Apple anything.
And yet, every time Apple gives in to the demands of the authorities of the largest market in the world, unsurprisingly (even if Europe is only Apple's second region per revenue, because they lag very much behind Android there).
Anyone who thinks Apple will give up about 100 billion dollars of revenue to spite the EU is not being realistic.
> iOS is a fantastic operating system. iPhone and iPad are stellar hardware with brilliant physical UX. Apple Watch is leagues beyond anything else in its class. I will keep buying Apple stuff until I can't anymore.
People want Apple’s quality, reliability and performance, but also want no restrictions so they can run any app and install anything.
Those things aren’t compatible.
E.g., Windows and Linux (Desktop distros) don’t have many restrictions. But they can be unreliable.
Yes, let’s ignore the macOS elephant in the room, and jump to Windows and Linux to straw-man an argument. There are “no restrictions”, one can “install anything” and “run any app” on that, and still it is … “reliable”?
But actually both Windows and Linux are “reliable” too. Windows is much, much stable in terms of backwards compatibility than macOS and certainly iOS. Linux is so reliable that it runs about 99.9% of the server, appliance and mobile world.
Windows has lost its design forte (peaked in Windows 7), but so has Apple’s claim on design. macOS is a mishmash of OK, bad and worse, as is iOS.
The worst experiences on macOS come from companies with enough clout to piss on the standard mechanisms. Installing their BS installers, having "updaters" to run on the background, not shipping a DMG or PKG, asking you to disable the SIP, never bothering to update to newer APIs, not using the Mac App Store, and so on...
(and it's usually some of the more expensive software)
Well, given that mobile is a much newer platform, and a lot more regulatory scrutiny than desktop, perhaps the itchy regulators at the EU and the current FTC might be predisposed to go after those companies, especially since most of them are already in their crosshairs for other misdeeds. I don't think regulators are going to be asleep at the wheel and just let Meta force users to use a Facebook store stuffed with trackers.
Not to mention, what if Apple still exerted influence over alternative app stores by providing the SDK and certified security/privacy standards for them to build them?
Facebook’s shady coding in the past was all using sanctioned APIs, including the VPN it was using to spy on teens. With a private store also goes the static analysis of private API usage, which can enable software some looser restrictions (but not much, as some fear—most stuff is protected for at the kernel level).
Given that it’s already present in App Store apps as you say would show that the App Store itself, and perhaps the current app review process, is insufficient!
I don’t know. It’s a cat and mouse game, and you can only win in such games if you don’t play. By moving the security from static analysis to kernel, Apple has sidestepped most malicious API mishaps. My project isn’t malicious, it just uses API not as intended, but it can do little malice in wrong hands. I think this is a good system overall.
Like on a possible iOS future, “don’t support what you don’t want to support”. You have the choice. Unlike current iOS, where some boogie-man chose for you.
That's like "having the choice" to decide how to defend and protect yourself in a shithole city of competing kingpins and anarchy (the bad kind, not the theory of government) in the streets, vs having a police.
And that's why I use Citrix through an UTM Mac VM. That installer will create at least 3 background services running on root plus the app protection hooks (which happily run on a vm from which I can do pretty much it is meant to prevent through the host OS).
I sadly have to use a Macbook for my dev job and I've literally never come across anything you're mentioning here, I can't see how any regular user would be coerced into disabling SIP
I’ve been using Windows for 25 years now. Please don’t lecture me about its reliability, especially in the last 15 years. I’m also having a weekly kernel panic on my M1 Max Mac, a sight unseen on any of my Windows machines for more than a decade, even when using beta nVidia drivers.
Presumably someone who uses beta graphics drivers and reasons from personal anecdotes is not a good judge of the reliability of a mass market operating system for the average consumer.
It's mostly a matter of how much you can throw at it in terms of resources. If there was a five dollar charge for every Linux kernel running you could have all of those and you'd probably still have cash left over.
I guess you either are unaware or have an outdated device. I have Brave set to the default browser on iPadOS and iOS.
There was/is previously a restriction on including dynamic content or non UIWebView/WKWebView rendering, but I'm unaware of current IAS-MAS policies.
You're also demanding the impossible/very difficult because mobile browsers don't support extensions. It's just not a thing.
Also, Firefox is already available for iOS. If it doesn't meet your requirements, then it's FOSS and you're welcome to contribute improvements that meet your requirements.
Firefox on Android does support addons (in a limited way, though you can install any addon if you _really_ want to). I wish iOS users had access to diverse rendering engines and browser addons.
Extensions that are less powerful and must go through App Store review. Which is fine, if you want that keep using Safari! But I'd like to run actual Firefox.
I disagree. i just want to run firefox or chrome directly and completely without using apple's unnecessary & required piece of safari on ios. Let people run the whole web browsing app, if they want to. I'm skeptical of any significant security advantage to the limits on web browsers - after all apple gets hit by the zero days just like other cell phones.
Who would be coerced if I could run whatever software I wanted? Oh, the precious apple corporation? They are coerced all the time by legal restrictions. I'm just asking them to stop blocking it.
I'm hoping anti-trust law will come to bear on software from apple.
The men who work at Apple would be coerced. Of course we are all coerced by the law in matters of morality, I.e. the 10 commandments. But you’re wanting to put “my sideloading” at the level of theft or other such crimes. That’s unreasonable and entitled thinking.
Life is about compromises. Sometimes people value a specific set of hardware and software support that comes with Apple devices even if they have to make certain trade-offs versus the competition.
At least in my case, I wasn't attracted to the iPhone because of forced Webkit and the Lightning port.
> Sometimes people value a specific set of hardware and software support that comes with Apple devices even if
Yes, but that's the misunderstanding. You want those features without the trade-offs. Apple's hardware and software support come at the expense of "features" like "side loading". If you add in these featuers you want, you lose the hardware and software support you bought the iPhone for in the first place.
It's like the RCS nonsense that Google is pushing (hint, if you have to advertise a standard, it's not a good standard). The iPhone is its own thing. If you want these other features and "more freedom" then the iPhone isn't the device for you. I don't buy an Xbox expecting to play Zelda or with the expectations that it is highly portable. It's just a suite of product features and you have to choose what features you want.
Ppl are not buying iphone bc they think they can't install ff with gecko lol, they buy iphones bc these are good hardware and longterm support. Both of these will remain unchanged with ability to sideload apps
Incorrect. A select few greedy people are using force for stupid ends.
Besides immorally using force now the iPhone will be littered with alt stores where you can only get certain popular apps making the iPhone a nightmare.
Those who thought they were so clever in forcing change will be seen to be fools.
Alternate web browsers are allowed on iOS. The rendering engine is a boring, unimportant implementation detail that users do not care for. The success of Chrome for iOS is proof that rendering engine doesn't matter for diversity.
> The rendering engine is a boring, unimportant implementation detail that users do not care for.
Then I'm sure users won't mind when I'm allowed to install my own rendering engine on my own computer, that I own, because I bought it, and, therefore, own it.
You sending money to Apple doesn't mean you "own" anything really. You have the right to use it indefinitely, a sort of usufruct. It's like when my dad died, my moms had infinite use of the family house until she dies, while the children had the naked property.
Apple is the same: they own the IP, they can remote upgrade and forbid you to downgrade the software, they have no obligation to repair if broken after a while and do not allow you, for any reason, to use that thing you got to make copies. You don't "own" that phone in any full property sense. You own a license to use it.
So, ofc we other users won't care, but you bet Apple will not start letting you do anything that could harm their bottom line, like for example find a way to use browsers to launch Javascript apps that deal with online payments with them unable to get any revenue from it. Browser are not rendering engine only, they are also javascript interpreters and that is a giant scare for Apple.
Apple is trying to prevent familial and household abuse where people install invasive software on devices of household members to spy on them or otherwise take away their privacy and freedoms.
What solution would
you suggest? Just look the other way?
The same solutions that prevents people from going to "scamwebsite.com" to steal their credit card information and ask for social security numbers. That's already an issue with a web browser like Safari is it not?
The same solutions we use for kids: parental controls that do not allow them to install new apps or give permissions like location permissions to apps. iOS already supports this.
Your idea of parental controls does not address the case where the parent is prone to spy on and do an honor killing of their own child, to state just one example scenario. This happens in some cultures. Apple can’t prevent all abuse obviously but it doesn’t want to be on the side of helping the abuser.
I'm otherwise indifferent to alternate browsers/engines on iOS, but this is a complete fiction. You made this up just to prop up your personal preference.
Disregarding the fictional/"but think of the children" nature of this for a second, apple airtags can also be used for nefarious reasons/invasion of privacy, would you advocate banning them from the market, or are you going to look the other way?
Good! I'm looking forward to having to uninstall a crypto miner on my mom's phone because it told her the only way to play a slots app is to allow third-party apps.
Computers overflowing with naively self-installed adware/malware is a recurring and persistent problem with some relatives of mine. Nothing you can say stops them from inadvertently doing it again, they simply lack the sophistication to understand, and then complaining that their computer is slow or doesn't work anymore. Putting these people on iOS is a godsend, these kinds of issues don't happen there.
Am I misunderstanding something or couldn't this just be made an optional setting?
So users can lockdown the ability to install stuff if they want without overcoming various hurdles (maybe allow users to add customised message so if a user tries to do it a message will pop-up saying "Your Son/Daughter/whoever has said you should never disable this! Call them before doing this if someone has asked you to!").
I feel like there is so many options/info hidden from consumers about their devices that really shouldn't be. And preventing it or hiding it only really serves the companies themselves, not the end user.
Far too defeatist an attitude and a poor comparison that plays directly in companies that want walled-gardens hands.
Fortnite is an immensely popular game people search for to buy, whereas malware etc are almost by definition not something you think "gee whiz, might go buy that".
For the type of user being discussed it seems very simple to just say/have a setting of "only allow downloads from official app store" combined with the above. Although tbh this may all be rendered moot by AI LLM security style tools that can actively monitor and prevent users from doing stuff like this.
Nope, my parents had 20 things installed on their Android devices because they clicked yes to something.
I insist on the fact that you should respect the end user’s choice of platform and not try to change the platform to earn your 30% more. If you really hate it - don’t develop for Apple. I mean at the end of the day you can tell your customers buy an Android phone and see what they prefer - your app or the Apple eco system.
You need to first go to the settings to allow installations of Third Party Apps, then you get a warning of Google Play Protect that you have to expand, and then you have to confirm that you know the App is a security risk and explicitly go forward with the installation.
Your parents did this on purpose
We don't get by just fine - there are lots of viruses. But it is much easier to install an iPhone app than a program on your computer, so it is definitely more likely.
Nokia’s Threat Intelligence Report of 2021[0] shows that Windows made up over 23% of all malware infections, in 2020[1] that was almost 39%.
They seem to have skipped 2022 and 2023 doesn’t seem ready yet.
More interesting however is looking at Android since Google has made efforts to match iOS in sandboxing the last few years, as well as the context provided with the statistics.
Where 2020 “only” saw Android come in at 26.64% with iOS coming in at 1.72%, in 2021 Android accounted for a whopping 50.31% of the infections while iOS didn’t even register on the charts.
Let me repeat that again: over half of all infections in 2021 were on Android devices.
Were these super sophisticated attacks? Let’s see, because Nokia, understandably so, dedicated significant sections of their reports to Android.
In 2020 they stated (emphasis mine):
> In the smartphone sector, the main venue for distributing malware is represented by Trojanized applications. The user is tricked by phishing, advertising or other social engineering into downloading and installing the application. The security of official app stores, such as Google Play Store, has increased continuously. However, the fact that Android applications can be downloaded from just about anywhere still represents a huge problem, as users are free to download apps from third-party app stores, where many of the applications, while functional, are Trojanized. iPhones applications, on the other hand, are for the most part limited to one source, the Apple Store.
In 2021 they stated (emphasis again mine):
> Among smartphones, Android devices remain the most targeted by malware due to the open environment and availability of third-party app stores.
> […]
> The number of Trojans targeting banking information through Android mobile devices has skyrocketed, putting millions of users around the world at financial risk.
> […]
> Banking Trojans can arrive on smartphones in a variety of ways, often disguised as common and useful apps. When run, they request a variety of permissions needed to perform their desired behavior, then often remove their icon from the application pane, effectively disappearing from the device. In many cases, the apps never provide the promised functionality that enticed the phone's owner to install them and are forgotten quickly after disappearing. However, they remain installed and continue to run as background tasks, using a variety of tricks to collect user information. These may include capturing keystrokes, superimposing their own transparent overlays onto bank login screens, taking screenshots and even accessing Google Authenticator codes.
So it looks like in most cases users are being tricked to install malware and grant permissions.
This all also explains why the whole “muh sandbox” argument carries little weight.
Not only is the sandbox but a single layer of a bigger Swiss cheese model, the sandbox isn’t gonna help your mom if she’s tricked into granting permissions.
So I ask you again to define “just fine”, because from where I’m standing Windows making up more than 20% of all malware infections is far from “just fine”, let alone Android’s more than half.
And I know you said x86, but the two and a half Linux users don’t really make a significant dent in statistics, nor is x86 the relevant platform for this discussion.
On top of that you can bet your ass that iOS users will be prime targets, certainly more desirable targets than random Android and Windows users, because of potential ill gotten gains.
This sounds like a false dichotomy. It's possible to opt-in for a "dev" mode which gives the user more choice, but not implemented because of the potential profit loss.
Imagine arguing against press freedom because a relative might fall for some disinformation.
Of all the arguments in support of Apple's prohibition against third party browsers, your mother's gambling addiction is the saddest, most bizarre, and by far the least convincing.
Good lord, this is the whinge that never ends, isn’t it? If you want an Android phone, dozens if not hundreds of companies will sell you one. You can quite literally choose the level of openness you desire.
Personally I prefer the Apple ecosystem where things just tend to work well. It would be difficult to care less about running something other than Safari on an iPhone.
Nobody is forcing anyone to buy Apple’s products. I truly don’t understand treating them as some kind of monopoly.
I downvoted this because you're ignoring iMessage. The fact that Apple purposefully not only gives Android users a shitty experience when communicating with iOS users, but also ensures that the presence of an Android user can break the experience for everyone else in a group chat (e.g. degraded videos now for everyone) in iMessage is a blatant attempt to abuse their monopoly power (in the US at least where iMessage dominates). I've been an Android user for years and am reluctantly seriously considering getting an iPhone solely because my friends bitch at me all the time when I'm in a group chat.
RCS is a half baked implementation from google; the company that has killed every single chat app they've released. It's a spec that relies on carrier implementation of any feature and if actually implemented by a majority would immediately go the way of SMS and people would cry for a new better spec in a few years. We have seen all of this before and the push for RCS from google is propaganda because iMessage is effective for iOS lock-in and Apple sales. Users have the freedom to install any third party chat app and use that if they don't like iMessage.
> Even if you could snap your fingers and magically roll out RCS to every device, you wouldn't actually create a competitive messaging solution. Being a standard created in 2008 means RCS has standards from 2008, and it's lacking things you would want from a modern messaging service, like end-to-end encryption. The Google Messenger strategy strangely insists on using RCS as the base protocol, but the service also keeps trying to build features on top of it that kick in when both users are on Google Messages.
RCS is not a consumer benefit: RCS gives strange powers to the carrier that your phone connects to (as opposed to the company you contract with; i.e. your mobile carrier), powers over your camera, microphone, radio, power levels, and motion sensors. I don't care if T-Mobile can offer "true" 4G video calling with it with other T-mobile customers. Nobody fucking wants that.
Google deciding to partner with American Telcos and the American Government to get RCS standardized has confused you into thinking Apple did something wrong, or is continuing to do something wrong by not adopting Google's RCS (and paying Google's license fees for RCS, integrating with every carrier, and so on) instead of Google paying Apple for iMessage (and paying Apple's license fees for iMessage). This isn't your fault, you're just proof that Google's advertising is working and that Google is really good at advertising and marketing.
> has confused you into thinking Apple did something wrong, or is continuing to do something wrong by not adopting Google's RCS (and paying Google's license fees for RCS, integrating with every carrier, and so on) instead of Google paying Apple for iMessage (and paying Apple's license fees for iMessage). This isn't your fault, you're just proof that Google's advertising is working and that Google is really good at advertising and marketing.
Sorry to be blunt, and I realize this may not be in-tune with HN guidelines, but seriously, fuck off, because this style of passive aggressive "I'm sorry little simpleton, it's not your fault for being so simple" comment deserves nothing better than a fuck off. Especially since there are parts of your message that make it clear that you don't know what you're talking about, e.g. Google doesn't receive any license fees for RCS.
I know exactly what the issues, and history, are. I don't deny that Google is pushing this for selfish reasons. At the end of the day Apple is intent on keeping their iMessage lock in because it essentially shames other people (especially teenagers and young people) into getting an iPhone.
I don't think neither Apple's nor Google's motivations are "more pure", but one is in favor of interoperability regardless of device (which was supposed to be the entire purpose of the Internet), while another favors device exclusivity.
I think a lot of Android manufacturers would be willing to pay Apple for iMessage access/licensing. I strongly doubt that Apple would be willing to sell that without the EU forcing them to.
> I think a lot of Android manufacturers would be willing to pay Apple for iMessage access/licensing.
I think you overestimate the markup Android manufacturers make, and underestimate what Google makes.
> I strongly doubt that Apple would be willing to sell that without the EU forcing them to.
You would be wrong! Apple already allows programmatic access to iMessage (call centers can dial/message directly with it including number-fronting, do apps, etc), so it really is just a matter of the fact that Google isn't willing to pay.
> The fact that Apple purposefully not only gives Android users a shitty experience when communicating with iOS users
Because it’s an iOS-to-iOS product feature. Because its functionality is predicated on Apple Hardware features. If you want iOS features, buy an iOS device.
The green bubbles break Apple's accessibility guidelines - making it more difficult to read (especially for visually impaired users). The better option is switching to Signal, but some people have strange hangups.
The opposite is true in the US. I'd guess that 95%+ of iOS users in the US text primarily on iMessage (excluding those who are primarily texting international contacts).
I'm fact, that's probably the biggest reason I think Apple has been able to abuse their iMessage stance for so long: the EU has been far stronger at regulating compatibility and interoperability (we can thank the EU for the fact that we can finally get rid of tons of dongles), but I think they've been less vigilant about iMessage solely because it's much less of a factor in Europe.
It would be pretty hard to argue that iMessage has a market domineering position in Europe and therefore not appropriate for the EU to regulate it.
That being said, I hope that once the other services are forced to interop apple will have no choice than to do the same.
It's probably hard to imagine in the US but people here absolutely will abandon iMessage over this. Their market position is weak enough that none of my family/friends/acquaintances who own an iPhone has even considered asking for anything but the "default" aka WhatsApp.
Nothing prevents Apple from offering a non interoperable format in addition to the interoperable one. For example, offer both MIMI and Apple iMessage protocols in the iMessage app.
And it sucks so horribly to the point that it's nearly unusable in modern group chats (or, rather, MMS is the protocol that's used for group chats and that one also sucks horribly).
I suggest you stop drinking the Google Koolaid, they’re not being honest.
> The fact that Apple purposefully not only gives Android users a shitty experience when communicating with iOS users
You mean utilizing the standardized SMS and MMS protocols?
How is that purposeful? Just because they refuse to rollout iMessage on Android?
> but also ensures that the presence of an Android user can break the experience for everyone else in a group chat (e.g. degraded videos now for everyone) in iMessage
Again, they switch to SMS/MMS to be compatible with Android devices. Video quality (and photo quality for the master) can only be as good as the limitations of MMS.
Contrary to what Google implies, Apple isn’t doing something on purpose to make videos shitty, the MMS protocol simply can’t handle original quality photos.
> is a blatant attempt to abuse their monopoly power (in the US at least where iMessage dominates)
No, a blatant attempt at abusing a monopoly power would be them saying they drop support for SMS and MMS so you can’t text to Android users anymore because people keep repeating nonsense talking points fed by Google so they’d rather just not deal with the headache.
There is no “RCS”, not as a working standard anyways.
The BS Google is peddling is their proprietary flavor of RCS that runs on their Jibe servers, Google’s own attempt at iMessage if you will.
Google wants Apple to adopt “G iMessage” or at the very least hook Apple’s iMessage into Google’s proprietary “RCS” implementation, presumably in part to get a whiff of all the data that would be routed through their servers.
We know this based on slew of things:
1. Half of the features listed on that propaganda website aren’t part of the RCS “standard”, they are however part of Google’s proprietary RCS implementation. So it stands to reason that Google is talking about their proprietary RCS solution
2. Google is using “RCS” as a brand name, when they talk about “RCS” they talk about their proprietary flavor of RCS, similar to how Apple uses the brand “iMessage”[0]
3. Pretty much all of the “RCS” out in the world is Google’s proprietary RCS implementation that runs on Jobe servers.
The original RCS standard was conceived by the GSMA (its full members being carriers) intended to be implemented at the carrier level.
Carriers however had no appetite of implementing it so now what passes as “RCS” is almost exclusively run by Google.
This is either done via the Google branded Messaging app or with a white label construction bearing the logo of carriers and manufacturers via either a direct relationship with Jibe or one of the middlemen[1] that sell Jibe’s services.
This means that globally, whether offered by an OEM or carrier, close to all “RCS” offered is just Google’s proprietary implementation of RCS.
The only thing stopping Google from having a true monopoly on texting services is the fact that Apple refuses to run the iMessage network through Google’s Jibe service.
If what is being touted as RCS would’ve been a true standard like SMS or MMS then I could see Apple adopting it as a fallback option like they already do with SMS and MMS, but since the handful of specs that are cobbled together as a “standard” are hardly any better than those two ancient standards and since what Google is pushing for is essentially Apple adopting Google’s own iMessage, I don’t see it ever happening.
This will continue to be a problem as long as infinite throwaway accounts are permissible. "Assume good faith" falls apart when the commenter is so obviously lying for fake internet points. Mods are asleep.
Just be careful getting anything that you barely use (I.e., less risk of breaking). Since we are locked to the AppStore, older iOS products can’t even download certain apps and there isn’t a way to get a previous app version that works with your product.
Simple apps like YouTube require iOS 14+. If you didn’t download before or had to factory reset once the app version updates, you are SoL.
And what? Your security is still untouched. Want pristine xp, you get it, want to sideload? Ya, no prob. This is called freedom. You can keep your apple experience while others can get more
It is a psychological quirk of the human mind when people have choices. You see it all the time here on HN and in the real world. People agonizing about what different "ecosystems" they should use or which things they should purchase.
The truth is that you can have both an iPhone and an Android phone and use both of them as you please. You can have a computer for OS X and one to dual-boot Linux and Windows. You can use a bunch of different text editors, depending on which suits you for the task at hand. You don't have to chose between Gmail and Fastmail, you can use them both. You can have several different web browsers installed on your machine and use them as you please.
People in these forums agonize over tech choices like it is something that they will have to stick with exclusively for the rest of their lives. I really don't get it. You don't have to chose between having a car or a bicycle. You can have both, and are free to walk as well when you feel like.
I like Apple's products and services, but if they don't offer something that is important to me and some competitors offer this, I can simply use the products of a competitor. Why would I trust the most corrupted bureaucrats this planet has ever seen to start interfering?
your regurgitated talking points are copy pasta at this point, they have been thoroughly refuted a billion times - so I'm gonna keep it short and sweet, if Apple doesn't like the European guidelines they are welcome to stop selling their products there.
I do think Apple withdrawing from the EU would be preferable to degrading the experience, quality, and safety of the platform for the vast majority of people who are not in the EU.
Apple is not following standards, web standards , messaging standards and this hurts developers , especially smaller ones, and prevents competition. How would you force them to follow the standards ?
Maybe not surprising but if you read the comments on the website there seems to be only Apple fanboys commenting who are butt-hurt about it. You can not make this up, consumers who root for a monopoly.
This reminds me of gamers who hate the Epic Games Store with passion even though they give the actual devs of the games a bigger cut.
Competition is always good for the consumers. And I get the security part when it comes to Apple BUT it does not justify that they take a cut of 30% from every dev, its basically a money printing machine they do not deserve AT ALL. The same for Valve, they only take 30% because they can, not because they provide any value for it. All the do it provide some servers for distribution and a discussion forum, that hardy costs 30% of a games profits.
So lets have a walled-garden OS compete with a sideloading-enabled/free-for-all/anything goes OS.
But no, instead they have to break a good thing.
Now every idiotic company like Adobe will demand their own installers, and updaters, and background processes that you can't turn off, and piss all over the iOS, like they do on the macOS.
And let's not get started onto forced sideloaded Facebook (or having to make do without), and such, with all the tracking mechanisms dialed up to 11.
Or Chrome getting closer to total dominance and Google having its way with the web.
All of that is already accounted for and protected by in the OS. An app cannot normally register daemons or agent (or even an XPC service). Installing is already limited to FrontBoard standard installation mechanism. All that will remain in a possible open iOS future.
> An app cannot normally register daemons or agent (or even an XPC service). Installing is already limited to FrontBoard standard installation mechanism. All that will remain in a possible open iOS future.
EU law doesn't have any requirements to change that.
The only requirement is that any APIs first party Apple services use can also be used by competing 3rd parties. If Apple isn't using those features in any competing services, they don't have to open it up for everyone. Alternately they could remove those APIs from their own apps and still be complying.
The goal is fair competition. I should be able have Google Pay to compete with Apple Pay, but Apple don't let other apps use the NFC for that. It's not fair competition when iMessage can be your default SMS app, but WeChat/WhatsApp can't. But if Apple choose to, they could separate iMessage and SMS and still be fine under EU law, cuz now none of the competing iMessage/WeChat/WhatsApp will be your SMS app.
I can hide any private API usage already for normal store submission. If I am the tiniest bit careful, I will get away with most private stuff that is still not protected by the kernel using entitlements. For example,
So don't use adobe? Why you are writing like you are forced to sideload? You can just not sideload and stay in the apple's ecosystem and be safe. Don't install chrome if it's worse experience than safari? That's the thing with freedom: if you value your privacy, you'll still get it without sideloading/not using products that are screwing you
dont use their apps at all? They already have scammy behavior for cancelation. It's like saying if you need medicine and you can only find it on dark market: the action isn't buying medicine on dark market, it's finding/asking for a replacement that is easy to buy. If adobe will exit appstore, another players will pop out with similar functions and that are present on the store
“Sorry boss, I can’t open the email and attachment you sent, because MS and Adobe both decided they need to side load their apps, and I’m not about that on devices I use”
Yeah that’ll go down so well.
I need you to understand that orgs will abuse their standing and power, regardless of what users want. At least in the existing walled garden setup, they’re forced to at least try and behave.
like yes? if my job requires an app that can't be installed from official app store something is wrong and I'll not install that sh...? or at least they should provide work phone? Or at least install app on another account just for that(not sure if ios has this)
In many professional situations, that would be like telling your boss you don't feel like using Teams or Github or AWS, because you don't agree with their business practices. Or telling your clients.
work is work, personal device is personal device. What you use for work doesn't matter since you either should be provided with a work device or at least be able to install apps on separate account
God, mental gymnastics some people perform to justify ios limitations... Like WE HAVE THIS ALREADY, on macos, windows, android... and insta/wh/fb apps are still on google play... and you can still access them in the browser. Not to say that if apple makes the process to install these sideloaded apps a bit harder (like multiple warnings 'DANGER' and confirmations, the possibility apps will migrate fully outside appstore tends to zero
What monopoly? Android has a larger market share than Apple by quite a large factor in the European Union.
Saying that Apple does not provide value is laughable - saying that it isn't worth 30% of the transaction value might be one thing, but they provide the R&D to create the device, the platform, the review infrastructure, update infrastructure, development environment, etc.
I'm not even sure I disagree with you, but you have to at least describe what you are against correctly.
> Saying that Apple does not provide value is laughable - saying that it isn't worth 30% of the transaction value might be one thing, but they provide the R&D to create the device, the platform, the review infrastructure, update infrastructure, development environment, etc.
By that same measure I should be allowed to ask how this R&D benefits the majority of app developers on the app store. Honestly, when it comes to the value Apple provides to their developers, a much stronger argument would be their marketing that leads to extraordinary customer loyalty, in addition to the higher value market in terms of what customers they attract.
But R&D? Honestly you're joking right? The majority of the platforms "cool" features are locked down and not available to developers. Can I make use of the iPhones SOS feature for my emergency service? Nope, this is an Apple exclusive service, only offered by and through them themselves.
What about NFC/digital payments? Yeah no. Can't access that as an developer without a heavily restricted API.
What about their industry leading Bluetooth stack? Nope, also locked down. I can only pair certain devices, hell I can't even enable platform interoperability between Android and iOS, even though we _know this works_ due to the covid contact tracing feature.
Good luck with trying to offer a competing product to the Apple Watch on their platform. You can't.
Development infrastructure? You mean the infrastructure that I can also only procure through them? The infrastructure that consists of a Mac that I need to actually publish iOS apps, even though nothing would be stopping me from developing these apps on another platform, say Linux?
What about CI/CD and testing and security research? Remember, up until 1-2 years ago, Apple actively went to court against offers such as those of corellium, like when you wanted a virtual device to test your app with.
Google had all this and more on a free app store with a much more fractured ecosystem.
I could go on and on about this, but the majority of app store developers doesn't make use of a large part of their "R&D". A large part of what you call "R&D" I call the typical Apple BS of claiming well established technologies and practices as their own invention and then somehow finding a way to charge you for it.
I'd accept this argument in smaller markets what with the VR goggles and whatnot, and I agree that from a design standpoint, all of these API's / lockdowns are well intentioned and make sense.
But at the same time, the antitrust violation standpoint holds for me as well. Even if I tried, I could not offer a competing product to say, the Apple Watch, because Apple will not allow me to create a device with the same interoperability like their own devices.
You know nothing about markets or real life market engagement if you blindly believe "competition is always good for consumers".
There are costs to competition, inherently. Competition is only of benefit to consumers if they capture the more of the new surplus utility generated by competition than they capture the new costs.
There will be marketing costs, there will be the costs of the data policies of these new models, there will be time that consumers have to spend becoming engaged in the market for not only software but also the market for markets for software, they will have to understand a greater amount of technical details of how these software marketplaces perform on their devices.
Now, these costs can be paid internally or externally. And guess what... corps always want these to be externalised. So the user/society can pay these costs and they can rack up unearnt surplus.
Curious about this answer. Do you have any example in which prices of goods and services actually went up after more competition entered an industry? In case you do, are you sure you aren't cherry picking?
I don't have any of my old economics notes nor the market reports I have read on hand but generally it's natural monopolies that have competition introduced, these are not particularly good analogue for software but they do have similarities with social media and mapping applications. Competition is generally good for consumers who are engaged but it's a means to an end. It is not good for its own sake.
Markets where competition works really well are elastic and have consumers with the appropriate amount of engagements from the consumers.
> if you read the comments on the website there seems to be only Apple fanboys commenting who are butt-hurt about it
It makes sense, though: Apple is all about making things easier for the user at the expense of third party developers. Users don't need to deal with app reviewers denying bugfixes because they used the demo credentials on the wrong app, they can just be mad at apps for being buggy. Banks all around the world are paying a secret Apple tax to let Apple users pay with iPay or whatever it's called.
I think the situation with Valve is different. Valve has competition and has had competition before; game launchers on Windows (and Linux, I suppose) are perfectly viable, it's just that none of their competition put any effort into making their game launchers as good as Valve's.
I think Apple should be able to charge whatever percentages they want, as long as you can install alternative app stores. If their customers accept the higher app prices in exchange for Apple's convenience features, the percentages are perfectly fair.
Valve had a 17 years or so time to develop a launcher b4 Epic entered the market. And even if their laucher would be bad, its just where the people are, where they have their collection, they do not want to leave it. Its actually not such much about how good Steam is, its about the time advantage Valve has.
And of course they have the better launcher. But now they are soo big, and they have such a de-facto monopoly that Epic had to go to extreme measures to get some market share. And that is using Fortnite kids parents money to give out free games all the time while actually paying the devs for the games and pay massive amounts of money to devs for exclusive deals. Its all money they have from Fortnite and (Chinese) investors. That also sucks but its better then just one store in town. Bethshitsda has given up on their own distribution and they are back 100% on Steam and they just suck it up and pay the 30% because they failed to compete, no surprise there.
I actually think the situations are pretty similar. Except that there is not even a open door to try to compete with the Apples Appstore right now. But they both take 30% and everyone is basically forced to pay it. Game devs can not just release on Epic. They must release on Steam and they must then pay 30% to Valve. If you release a mobile app you must release on Apple and Google play and they take 30%, its the same thing. Even thou there are other stores like Amazons shitty store you are just forced to publish on Google/Apple.
I just hope one day decentralization is so mainstream and consumers just buy from creators directly or some blockchain or something without a gatekeeper middlemen that sucks 30% off.
Apple claims they make things easier but that is not actually the case.
They may make a few things easier than Microsoft or Google but they make a lot of things harder too. All their hardware is harder to repair than what is available from competition. Their documentation is inferior (if it exists at all) to even open source project. Software from Apple is hard to use for anyone not used to it which negates their "intuitive" claims and people who are used to it are just keep buying more of their hardware when software fails so there is no incentive to fix anything.
I find their software to be as hard to use as any new OS paradigm. Their design differs from their competition, but I don't think it's superior or inferior necessarily.
Repairability and open source software isn't what the lay person cares about, at least not until they break their phones.
Apple's fix to failing software is the same as what any computer service will do for a random customer: reinstall the entire OS, see if that helped, restore the backup you definitely didn't forget to make. Someone deeply knowledgeable can often use tricks to get a broken system to run like normal again, but that's not easy or time efficient to offer as a service.
Apple removed the worst UI to intuit (3D Touch, or "you didn't press the unmarked location hard enough"). After that, I think their software isn't any better or worse than their competition's in terms of usability, unless you have a visual disability; iOS is still king when it comes to the quality of built in accessibility features for those who can't/struggle to see a screen.
> Apple claims they make things easier but that is not actually the case.
> They may make a few things easier than Microsoft or Google
Enough few things that make them worthwhile purchasing.
> All their hardware is harder to repair than what is available from competition.
Possibly true, but at least my Apple hardware is built well and lasts. The awful MS ”flagship” I had the misfortune of being forced to buy flexes when I type on it. The Android phones I’ve had have been of such poor build and material quality I’m not surprised people need stuff repaired all the time. Not saying repair isn’t important, but in the last 5 years of Apple devices the one repair I’ve needed was a screen replacement which was done in 10 mins, for free.
> This reminds me of gamers who hate the Epic Games Store with passion even though they give the actual devs of the games a bigger cut.
Most of the hate for Epic Games Store I read is that they do exclusives.
It's great that they take a lower cut and give away free games, but them taking away my freedom to buy games from my preferred store is not something I will accept. Yes, almost all games are on Steam because they have a near monopoly on PC gaming, but that's because they actually provide value with their platform. Though I'm biased since I'm gaming on Linux and any other store than Steam is an absolutely terrible experience.
It's more than that. It's 30% of a games revenues. Could very well end up being more than the entire profit of an app/game. Insane to me that if the devs costs are more than 40% of revenue apple makes more off the app than the dev does.
I tend to drop the bot/shill-detector part of my brain when I'm on HN, but whenever this topic crops up it's always a deluge of people with the same exact arguments saying "ohh my poor grandma will be coerced to install a Virus if we allow the owner of an iDevice any freedom whatsoever with hardware they bought!!!", and it's quite interesting to me the volume of comments with the exact same identical sentiment copy/pasted ad nauseam.
Hope this passes the same way the USB-C thing passed. All these parasitic megacorps with more money than many countries need to be whipped into submission for their shenanigans
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
I've literally never had an infected Android device, and neither has any member of my family despite the existence of sideloading.
Also, when's the last time anyone's installed a virus on Macs? They're infinitely more open than their mobile counterparts, yet there's barely any issues there.
I'm willing to bet the large majority of people don't even know what sideloading is in the first place, and even if you somehow accidentally happen upon an APK you need to go through some scary warning screens before it even lets you do it. I genuinely don't see this ever being an issue, it just sounds like shilling for Apple to keep their dominance and closed APIs
> They're infinitely more open than their mobile counterparts, yet there's barely any issues there.
That are marginally more open than mobile, but by default, there are still a lot of protections that (certain) developers complain about. Really, this is probably the model that you’re going to see — a phone that is locked down with a bright red shiny button that says “if you click this, you can run unsigned programs, but don’t ask us for help if you get hacked”. That’s basically how it works on Macs, except the button is grey. However, the OS is still far from open — certain developer rights are still blocked by signing keys/privileges.
The reason why they keep hearing people defend the App Store model is because it works.
iOS has the lowest malware share out of all of the major platforms by an utterly staggering margin. On the other side of the spectrum is Android and Windows.
It's not some random shill argument that Apple's model protects users, it's proven, we have the data.
Yet somehow these types want you to believe that if a single piece of malware slips into the App Store that the entire approach is negated, as if the alternative isn't an absolute clusterfk. Or worse that some side-loading middleground hasnt already been abused. (Does no one remember the certificates fiasco? It's why they have a device limit.)
At least they've stopped with the equally absurd argument that Apple's platforms aren't a target "because they have a smaller userbase".
Also super tired of counterarguments based on the pretence: "I've not had any malware experiences, therefore this extremely well studied field in computing is wrong."
Same could be said for Android. Moreover, exploit brokers are paying more for Android exploits than iOS ones [1], and that could be used as a good counter argument against Apple's security and privacy fearmongering.
> Hope this passes the same way the USB-C thing passed. All these parasitic megacorps with more money than many countries need to be whipped into submission for their shenanigans
It has already passed and is active legislation as of this year, but there is some built-in grace period for making the changes.
People who disagree with you aren't shills - they might just be better informed about Malware statistics for example.
Quoting Apple and Nokia here:
>In the Android ecosystem, which has 50 times more malware than iOS, Nokia found that “the fact that Android applications can be downloaded from just about anywhere still represents a huge problem, as users are free to download apps from third-party app stores, where many of the applications, while functional, are Trojanized.
Source: Apple response citing the Nokia Threat Intelligence Report 2021
Nokia's 2023 report continues to point the finger at side loading being the main culprit behind Android's security woes:
>Android based devices are not inherently insecure. However, most smartphone malware is distributed as trojanized applications and since Android users can load application from just about anywhere, it’s much easier to trick them into installing applications that are infected with malware.
Source: Nokia Threat Intelligence Report 2023.
The same is experienced app repos for Jail-broken iOS devices.
I remember years ago, when the EU first announced they would force Apple to switch to USB-C (well, not specifically Apple, but mandate a single cable type), there were droves of users on HN wailing that "what business does EU have to dictate which cable companies should use?"
Yet here we are, everyone praising iPhone 15 for having a USB-C connector. I am looking forward to a couple of years down the line when we can say the same about the App Store.
Worldwide, Android has a bigger market share than iPhone and it also allows alternative stores, and lo and behold, none of the things that users here complain about have come to pass.
With no regard for specified speed / power capabilities, USB-C is in and of itself a vastly physically inferior connection. It becomes easily impacted with pocket lint, and the tolerances are so small it can't be cleaned with normal tools. Not even just the phone, but the cable as well.
I'm an Android user and I have spent years dreaming that Apple would just open Lightning to the community.
I am kind of lightly thrilled at least that the Apple user base will soon realize what a nightmare it truly is.
But just on physical characteristics, I've had to deal with multiple iPhone with a broken pins whereas broken pins for USB is just a replacement cable.
Lightning does also support USB 3 (5Gbps) speed. It was used on iPads before they switched to USB-C.
Do your research before posting false information.
What you're saying is, Lightening supports USB 3.0 speeds on the 3 devices below when and only when using a £40 dongle which lets you connect an actual USB cable.
> 12.9-inch iPad Pro 1st Gen
> 12.9-inch iPad Pro 2st Gen
> 10.5-inch iPad Pro
That's ignoring all the form posts stating it doesn't work even with the adapter and ignoring the dongles product page stating it supports specific file encodings.
> The Lightning to USB 3 Camera Adapter supports standard photo formats, including JPEG and RAW, along with SD and HD video formats, including H.264 and MPEG-4.
The cable was a means of vendor lock-in, nothing more.
I've had Macbooks with USB c chargers for few years now. I've never had any of these problems. On the other hand I had to delint my sisters phone because the charger wouldn't full connect.
Tbh I think there's very little difference in their physical properties. Both work well.
Big disagree. You just clean it out with a brush or something. Maintain your shit. God, imagine if you ever owned the roof over you head or something.
USB-C has the retaining clips in the cable which is a replaceable and sacrificial item. Lightning has it in the device so once it goes the whole device is essentially dead.
I take very good care of my things. The plug on my phone should not require daily maintenance though. I have had cell phones since the late 90s and USB-C is the only plug that has given me trouble.
USB-C over a pretty short period collects lint. It gets compressed into the connector little by little every time you seat the cable and eventually your cable won't seat anymore. You then find a very solid plug in the bottom of the port that no amount of brushing will get it out.
You basically have to use a very fine needle to scrape the bottom.
I am guessing you have never had a USB-C phone before.
I've had a USB-C phone for 7 years. I did indeed have to use a needle to remove the lint that built up one time. One time in seven years. I enjoyed it. It was so satisfying and it's a shame I've never needed to do it again.
It's really not a big deal. It's just a needle. An incredibly common tool found in most households.
The advantages easily outweigh this one small downside.
The main advantage is ubiquity. You can thank Apple for Lightning not having that. They could have made USB-C redundant, but of course that just isn't the Apple way.
What kind of linty clothes are you guys wearing? I have had usb-c phones for what seems like forever now.. Never had any issues or had to clean it even once.
I can only tell you my personal experience, but I can say with total confidence that the usb-c slot is significantly more irritating.
The lightning slot is physically almost exactly the same size, but the usb-c one has a huge damn tab in the middle that makes cleaning the slot out a) more of a pain in the ass, b) harder to see what you’re doing, and c) requires a physically smaller tool to do it.
/shrug
Yes, lightning isn’t magically immune to lint.
…but usb-c is harder clean, and seems more prone to collecting lint in my experience.
You make it sound as if it's their god given right to make products as they please but that is not how the law works, and it's a good thing, because without laws we'd end up with stuff that works only in the vendor's best interest and ends up as e-waste sooner than necessary. It is also fair, because society is what ultimately allows these companies to exist.
Of course it’s their God given right. It shouldn’t be their right to violate God’s law, but “my totes fav phone provider totes doesn’t have side loading” is just entitled, and an unjust use of coercion.
Fundamentally, no. Because in many EU countries people have given their lives for freedom. These people and their offspring have the right not to be bullied by large companies. If Apple wants 100% freedom in producing what they want, then Apple can start/fight for their own country with its own army, education system etc.
This whole idea of a free market existing in a vacuum must stop.
I’ll let you have the last comment and won’t comment after this, but you’re equating a company not providing the feature set you want with bullying. Especially when they’re multiple alternatives with the feature you want, I think it just comes down to an entitlement mindset.
Generally laws should protect negative rights, not enforce positive ones. I can’t think of a more entitled law than “my fav phone maker totes doesn’t have side loading”. What an egregious use of force.
Needless regulation? If corporations are people, they are psychopaths. Literally. Of course we don't let psychopaths do what they want. As for the individuals working for Apple, we don't do slave labour. Nobody is being forced to do anything.
Extraterritoriality? If you sell something in the EU (or Asia, or Australia etc) you have to abide by their laws. Just because the company is headquartered somewhere else doesn't absolve them of that
It's kinda noticeable when that happens but it also makes sense that a lot of people will individually read the article and post similar sentiments at similar times, even all within 3 minutes. If they were all green names there's probably a point but it's another matter to think that some anti-Apple organization is just sitting on these accounts for years waiting for their moment to strike.
Ok. Then tell me what's stopping us from using Adobe products on macOS without filling the computer with Adobe™ Updater and Creative Cloud™ daemon processes and other junk?
As soon as developers have other options for distribution (that is cheaper), that’s what they will use. Look at Epic for an example. I used to play Fortnite with my kids on my iPad, but can’t anymore. So, my choices from the App Store will be more limited.
That’s both illustrative and damning. Developers will leave and consumers will be less protected. And I’m not really even thinking about malware, but dark patterns like uncancelable subscriptions or surprise in app purchases.
I mean I don't know a single apple user that trusts apple but maybe I understand the concept differently than what you're implying. I love my iphone but that's in SPITE of apple's app store meddling, not because of that.
The one exception I can think of is apple forcing twitter to keep the block functionality.
I trust Apple that if I subscribe to some paid app from the AppStore, the subscription can be cancelled anytime from a unified place. And Apple is forcing every shady company to adopt this system if they're offering subscriptions.
Apple is forcing every shady company to disclose their tracking practices in the AppStore page of their app.
Apple is forcing every shady company to provide good reason to the app review board why their app needs permission for background execution, bluetooth usage, location permissions, and any other sensitive stuff. They can't just ask for a ton of permissions and count on the user blanket-approving them due to popup blindness.
Apple is forcing every shady company to offer pseudonymous Apple login if they require registration, so they can't harvest my email address or spam me after I stopped using their app.
> Apple is forcing every shady company to disclose their tracking practices in the AppStore page of their app.
I mean, who gives a shit about awareness if they knowingly allow and even put resources towards enabling the tracking practices? The real boon would be forcing apps to not track. The fact that apple has gotten into selling ads and has not offered any functionality to the user controlling the internet access of particular apps should clue you in to the fact that you're getting fucked.
IMO, any alternative to the App Store can only strengthen apple's ecosystem. It would help if we had anti-trust legislation from this century but it's gonna take a lot more pain to get there.
After the revolution you no longer need those who made the transition happen.
Like there is no more use for communist revolutionaries after victory.
Independent repair men are useful while you conquer the tractor market.
Software shops can iterate over designs while you charge them rent, then you take the popular features and make them part of your platform using superior api's specially intended for it. You cant not update the platform or not notice the popular 3rd party tools.
Is this capitalism? Is this how competition should work? You have to fight the undefeated champion 10 000 times your size, but to keep things honest we tie both your arms behind your back?
There is no future for programmers here. There is no need to progress beyond owning everything. If there are 2 or 3 owners doesn't really matter.
One will have to wait forever for the thing that should logically come after x84 it doesn't make sense to manufacture electric cars.
Governments have a monopoly on rent. It's all locked down, there is no competing with them, not even for Apple.
There are plenty of other planets if you don't like the EU. Infinite doors and windows.
I love my Galaxy phones. I draw with the stylus constantly. I think they have better cameras. I love the Android back button.
After almost 15 years of Android, I'm buying an iPhone specifically for iMessage. I had a daughter, and I'm so tired of getting and sending videos of her and her peers over SMS. I'm constantly uploading to Google drive and sending links, or asking people to get on an alternative chat platform.
All Apple needs to do is support RCS. They don't do it because they want everybody else to inconvenience iPhone users with their green bubbles. They want tiny garbled videos and no read receipts. Everyone thinks that this is Android holding back Apple users when it's specifically the exact inverse. Accept the open standard for communication! It's one of their most nefarious business moves. "Get your mom an iPhone."
A glaring problem with RCS is that Google sells a way to run ads on it:
> RBM is a messaging platform that brands use to send One-Time Passwords (OTPs) and engage customers in dialog about transactions, customer service, promotions, and more. RBM is provided through a Google API and delivered to end users through Google servers. [1]
Google should work with carriers to increase MMS size limits for the sake of their users rather than end-run around SMS/MMS marketing laws.
EU should follow the EU's lead and open itself up in the name of openness and fairness. Instead, they're working to make it easier to expel immigrants.
I have never owned an iPhone and even I find this a very bad idea. A lot of people buy iPhones because they prefer the choices made by Apple. If there were secondary AppStores, you would have a Metastore and a Googlestore very quickly, since Whatsapp and Google Maps have become indispensable for large parts of the world. You don't even have to take them off Apple store, but make newest features custom store only. The amount of money to be made by precisely targeted advertising by ignoring Apple's rules is immense.
Sure Apple is not as open as Google, and neither is as open as Arch Linux, but that doesn't have to be the best solution for every product. Phones are too personal and loaded with tons of personal data. Opening everything to it's rivals is just another phrase that consumer data is now in a free for all, a 21st century gold rush, just offer few bucks/conveniences that are hard to ignore and by the time you blink your entire social group is on 5 custom stores.
Nobody is forcing anyone to use third-party app stores. The EU is just forcing Apple not to engage in anti-competitive practices.
If you want the security of an all-Apple ecosystem, you will still be free to do so. If I want the freedom to install whatever I want to my iPhone, I will be free to do so.
Nobody is trying to take away your right to use your phone as you want, they are trying to grant you the right to use your phone as you want.
Yes, nobody wanted virues/malware on Windows, and nobody was forced to install them. We all know how it went.
If people didn't want malware, they were free to read carefully and not click on untrusted files/links.
What if you want the freedom to install whatever you want on your gaming console? What about your Printer? Your watch? Your car infotainment system? The list is endless.
Consumer choice is off course being taken away here, for good or bad I am not sure. But to pretend as if it's not is wrong. Apps like Whatsapp are such must haves that their mere extra features on a diff store will propel that store to stardom.
You could always install anything beyond the App Store on macOS (and Mac OS), and that issue wasn't there. Sure, you can claim it was a security through obscurity thing (far fewer Mac users), but that truly ignores the vast differences in terms of UX and under the hood security (and simply stability) between Mac and Windows. Yet, Macs are not known for having tons of viruses and malware.
(The "no one wants to hack Macs because there are far fewer users" argument also seems strange to me when, as with iOS devices opposed to Android, there is a degree of higher-paying users with Macs, which might present a lucrative target for scammers and hackers.)
Point is, openness is relative. iOS might permit alternative app stores, but those app stores can still be reined in by security precautions at the OS level, Apple can still provide protection over non-App Store apps much like notarizing, they can have an iOS version of their desktop malware scanner XProtect, heck they can even warn users installing unverified apps like they do with Gatekeeper on macOS.
> What if you want the freedom to install whatever you want on your gaming console? What about your Printer? Your watch? Your car infotainment system? The list is endless.
Don't threaten us with a good time!
> Apps like Whatsapp are such must haves that their mere extra features on a diff store will propel that store to stardom.
One could argue that once Facebook moves all its software to its own iOS store, all users would follow, installing any insecure software Facebook decides to shove down their throats. But people should have the choice.
