I agree with your position statement. However I think your point of view is developer centric, not user centric.
Firstly the 60% have chosen iOS. They are not "hostage" they can leave. And this is not new behavior- it has existed since the iPhone shipped. Consumers are voting for this. [1].
Secondly Google doesn't control what you install, so by definition doesn't keep a potion of "all revenue". And most value from mobile apps comes from elsewhere [2], so even the Apple number isn't accurate.
As -developers- of course we want unfettered access to users devices to run any code we like. Unfortunately some proportion of developers want that access for reasons unhealthy to the consumer. So yes developers game the system. And your honest app gets rejected.
But it's worth understanding that users -want- this curated access, and are voting For it not Against it.
[1] you can argue about messenger, but that's about messenger not apps.
[2] most all apps I install are free. The company that makes them gets revenue from some other part of the system. We have a "free app" that integrates with our product (which people pay for).
Have we really made an informed choice or did I just go into a store to "buy a phone". I don't recall a booklet with each device what you can and can't do on it? e.g. iPhone "can't play Fortnite, Apple temporarily doesn't like Epic" would have been a good warning.
> They are not "hostage" they can leave
I think if you try changing ecosystems today, you will realise it's a very painful process. Apple and Google don't interoperate, don't follow standards (or just invent their own) and there are aspects of both ecosystems that are closed so no "move my stuff" app can ever be smooth and feature complete. Also, how do I convince my family and friends to switch so we don't downgrade to a green bubble situation.
It's been close to 20 years since iPhone shipped. None of these restrictions are new.
There are pros and cons to any consumer choice. I think users are well informed an making their choice explicitly.
Yes, both eco systems employ lock-in and network-effects to keep customers. And yes that is an issue (separate from the app store issue.)
It may interest you to know that outside the US (and some parts of Europe) Apple has a smaller network share and people avoid the green bubble effect by using alternate messengers (mostly WhatsApp).
There are -choices- which you may or may not like. In the US folk have largely -chosen- to use iPhones despite Fortnite.
What's new is that Apple/Google now effectively control our lives. Their presence is everywhere.
And so yes, in this case it really matters what happens in every ecosystem. These corporations are effectively dictating policy for how my life is supposed to work, although nobody elected them, there is no oversight. I live in Europe, so both Apple and Google are really an ocean away in terms of mindset and values.
Yup. I lost all respect for Apple's arguments that they should be allowed to gatekeep after they colluded with Google and Twitter in blocking the Parlor app right as it started to take off.
I have a possible workaround for the "how can I pay for things" part: don't use Goopple wallet, carry a card (and maybe some cash)?
Tap to pay is your phone emulating an iso14443 smart card, which is what a contactless bank card is. Carrying a card is of course another thing to carry, but on the plus side they don't need charging every 24h and they won't be old tech next year when the iPhoxel n+1 incrementally better edition is released.
So you bought an iPhone 20 years ago as your introduction to smart phones and whenever you visit the topic of switching you learn that your apps don't go with you, it won't work with your apple devices, and it's a pain in the ass so you abandon the idea altogether. Such choice!
The “everybody other than me is too stupid to make decisions for themselves” argument is not very compelling, especially when you have to curate the hypothetical model of stupidity to fit nicely with your stance on the topic.
I don't use an ad blocker, not because I'm not aware of them, but in order to support the creators of content I view via ad revenue, and to avoid installing a potential MITM vector directly into my browser.
If there's a site with a really bad ad experience, such as audio playing video ads with audio, constant pop-overs, or using an ad vendor that allows ads to redirect or run super-heavy scripts, I simply stop visiting.
Short term, sure, blocking ads would be in my interest. Longer term, having content producers I'm interested in be able to get paid, and thus be able to continue to produce content is in my best interest.
Installing software that puts me one malicious update away from surveillance and/or credential theft, however unlikely, is not something I want to do. Perhaps there are protections against such things in the browser, and perhaps there are workarounds against those protections. Keeping up with the latest security status of browser plugins isn't something I want to invest any time in doing, and not something the majority of people would be able to do.
Your typical user understands perfectly well that iPhones don’t support 3rd party distributed software. This has been a well publicised fact ever since the iPhone was first released. When it was first launched one of the most well publicised talking points about it was that it didn’t support flash. Trying to claim that this isn’t well known is borderline gaslighting.
This claim you’re making here though is far more insidious. Who are you to decide what software choices are best for other people? I doubt most people care about ad blocking at all. But you think a persons right to make their own software choices should be restricted just because you think this is important? Why should anybody have any regard for what you think?
I don't claim that people don't know of alternatives existing. I don't think the reason adblockers aren't more widely used is people not knowing about their existence.
I also don't believe your implicit claim of people prefering watching ads over using an adblocker. I believe the vast majority of people would prefer a browser (or other software) that blocks ads over one that doesn't.
So if people know about adblockers and prefer not watching ads, why don't they use adblockers?
Because most people do not want to invest even a few minutes in finding the best option for them. They simply choose the default configuration of the software they have always used (e.g. Windows) or that they were introduced to by ads (e.g. Chrome).
I do believe that most people are capable of making the best decision; I don't think most people are willing to make the best decision.
People who aren't heavily into the topic will usually go with the default option. And that option is usually the worst.
(This isn't limited to software. There are many non-software products where I will chose the "default" option, too. Simply because I don't care about figuring out what the best option is for me. I will simply use the default: If it works, it's good enough. But I recognize that by doing so I, too, am promoting markets that are not trying to compete on product quality, but simply their marketing/advertising and the attention they get.)
> I do believe that most people are capable of making the best decision; I don't think most people are willing to make the best decision.
The error you’re still making, and the source of the massive level of arrogance in this statement, is presuming you know what’s best for people.
Firstly, there’s plenty of things in my life that I have no interest in learning how to optimise, and this is the best decision for me, because I get what I want, and I don’t waste my time on something I don’t care about.
But even if I did suddenly take an interest in optimising one of these things, I’m sure as hell not going to do it based on your preferences, or the preferences of anybody other than myself.
Going through life assuming you know what’s best for everybody is not only incredibly arrogant, but it’s also incredibly dangerous. Because it naturally leads to you wanting to start making decisions for everybody else as well, and the idea that they might want something different to what you want doesn’t even seem like it’s conceivable to you.
> the source of the massive level of arrogance in this statement, is presuming you know what’s best for people.
So it's ignorant for them to say it, but correct and well-reasoned when Apple says they know whats best for people?
This is exactly why they're going to get legislated. You and Apple can maintain whatever weird interpersonal relationship you percieve while letting others sideload too. It's already happening in some parts of the world. Your ivory tower hasn't crashed-down yet; it's all just been fearmongering and whataboutism from people with $AAPL shares weighing down the perceptive part of their consciousness.
I agree that going through life trying to make decisions for people is a bad idea; that's why I reject the Play Store on Android and use F-Droid for better software. You should be allowed to do that on your iPhone; Apple is making your choice for you in an attempt to force you through their payment services. If that's not illegal bundling, then nothing is.
Apple never claims to know what’s best for people. I’d presume they do their best to anticipate what people want, turn that into a product, and then people are free to either buy it or not. What you’re suggesting in this comment is that people shouldn’t be free to make that choice.
Your comment about payment services illustrates this perfectly. For starters, you're not forced to use it at all. Out of all the paid services I use on my phone, exactly none of them require me to pay via the App Store. I do however choose to use it for every single one of them, because the Apple App Store is by far the most consumer friendly subscription manager I’ve ever seen.
Can’t wait for the corporate lobbyists to take that choice away from me…
> What you’re suggesting in this comment is that people shouldn’t be free to make that choice.
I am suggesting that people in other countries are already making that choice, and it hasn't even remotely impacted your or their freedom. In fact, users that live in countries covered by the DMA have more freedom to use their iPhone than ever before.
> When it was first launched one of the most well publicised talking points about it was that it didn’t support flash.
> Trying to claim that this isn’t well known
Well known by who? I know about it, you know about it. Look where we are and what we read.
If I ask my friends if they knew about this, the first thing most would say is "What's Flash?"
Many of them would say the App Store shipped with the iPhone on Day 1.
We are in a bubble, and it's not gaslighting to point that out.
> But you think a persons right to make their own software choices should be restricted just because you think this is important? Why should anybody have any regard for what you think?
This is always the argument peddled out, like "now you'll be forced to use these things". You like the Apple way, then keep doing that. I like the Apple way and will keep doing it. It's weird for you to describe being given additional options is having something 'forced' upon you, or that your choices are being 'restricted' by having additional options now. Now that is getting to some 1984-ish language games.
> Firstly the 60% have chosen iOS. They are not "hostage" they can leave.
Your are are hostage once Apple stops supporting your device, and it becomes officially impossible to install any software on it.
Consider the case of a perfectly functioning iPad 4. If I wipe it and hand it to my nephew, there's nothing he can do with it. Nothing in the AppStore will install on it, and sideloading is impossible. Aside from chucking a perfectly working device into the e-waste, which I hate to do if someone else might get a year out of it, the only other options are complex, dubious hacks.
You can't call something "perfectly working" and then complain that it doesn't work. You're talking about machine contemporary to netbooks, the Lumia 900, the Nexus 7, etc. None of that stuff is perfectly functional out of the box in 2024, either.
To be fair though, the ability to sideload on any of those devices has arguably expanded their usable lifetime beyond any depreciated iPhone. That's a feature that doesn't break when your TLS functionality gets depreciated, unlike iOS.
That's a nitpick. The hardware is perfectly working. And who even mentioned restricting this to "out of the box" functionality? The point is whether or not it's even possible to make it useful. I guarantee you I could install software on a Nexus 7, whereas I can't install anything on the iPad. Oh wait, except for VLC. But that's about it.
The trouble I have with Apple is that while it's possible to install software on an old device you can only do it if you're "grandfathered in" via a previous install years ago. Take Garage Band for instance. My nephew has a 2014 Macbook Pro, can't install Band Camp. But if I wipe a 2014 Macbook and sign into App Store using my account I can install it simply because I chose to install it on a Mac I owned back in 2015.
That does not make me jump for joy. Instead it tells me that I don't wanna touch another Apple product.
Yeah, we switched our phones to Apple after my wife's 9 month old Galaxy stopped being usable for her main purpose... Google Calendar. Visiting Google Calendar website, it refused to load and said to use the app. App refused to load saying it needed a newer OS. There was no newer OS available for her phone. She was SOL.
At the time only Google supported devices more than 1-2 years. Every Android partner had zero support. The message was clear. Switch to iPhone if we wanted >1-2 years of support, so we did, and we've been happy since (~15 years).
He could visit all the apps in the world from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube to Spotify on the web, right? Of course, he cannot use Friendster or Tumblr or Vine — all great iPad 4 era apps but can you really blame Apple for those apps _not_ existing anymore? — So I wouldn’t say “there’s nothing he could do with it”
Well if your argument is: “a perfectly good 10 year old iPad is held hostage by Apple because they don’t provide side loading” then isn’t that the same case with your perfectly good 10 year old Toyota? Or 10 year old Target Toaster oven or 10 year old Samsung fridge?
I think we will live in a strange world if we start demanding our refrigerators allow side loading YouTube.
To the contrary, if my refrigerator has a screen and speakers then I will be pretty upset if the OEM waggles their finger and blocks me from running YouTube on it.
Why does everyone on HN promote laying down and giving up when your manufacturer tells you not to do something that loses them money? It's like there isn't a living hacker left on this website.
> then isn’t that the same case with your perfectly good 10 year old Toyota?
A good 10 year old Toyota can have its head unit replaced and you can add new features if you so chose. When I was a kid it was a rite of passage to mod at least your speaker system.
> Or 10 year old Target Toaster oven or 10 year old Samsung fridge?
> I think we will live in a strange world if we start demanding our refrigerators allow side loading YouTube.
You set up a strawman argument. Who is demanding this of fridges and toasters?
Exactly. A computer is a general computing device that can be made to do thousands of things through software. When a computer hardware manufacturer wants to limit what software I can run on my computing device, it is not a good thing.
It's odd that people will defend Apple for this, or laugh when you say that you want to use a 10 year old device, when on the same forum people applaud when someone blogs about getting their old Commodore / Sinclair / Toshiba 8bit to connect to the Internet. Wait, is the iPad too old to be useful, but simultaneously not old enough to be worth repurposing?
The iPad 4 has wifi, bluetooth, a retina screen and several days of idle battery life. If I could install a terminal and a VNC client, I could save this thing from e-waste for another 5 years. The way some people talk on here, it'll like they think that there's something wrong with that.
>He could visit all the apps in the world from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube to Spotify on the web, right?
Do you really think that the web browser is going to load those pages? Try using a really old web browser on the web today and see how far you get.
> Well if your argument is: “a perfectly good 10 year old iPad is held hostage by Apple because they don’t provide side loading” then isn’t that the same case with your perfectly good 10 year old Toyota? Or 10 year old Target Toaster oven or 10 year old Samsung fridge?
Your fridge still keeps things cold. Your Toyota still drives. Your toaster still makes toast. What does a ten year old iPad do besides collect dust because all of the features you bought it for don't work anymore?
Indeed. The point of a computing device is that it runs software. With the right software a 10 year old iPad could absolutely browse the web, play music and videos and post crap on Facebook. It did it 10 years ago, so it could do it today if Apple allowed the software to be installed.
listen... it's this simple: I should have the ability to install software of my choosing on a hardware device I own. End of story. If a hardware manufacturer provides an App Store, then it should be an added extra, not a padlock.
You greatly overestimate the capacity of the average person to care about the nuances of their phone's OS, the amount of environmental harm their way of life brings, the corruption of the politicians they vote for, etc.
Obviously if you ask people, they'll say they don't want to not be able to install some apps on their phone, they don't want to destroy the environment, they want an honest government, etc. Yet when it comes time to act, they act contrary to all the above, because it's so hard to act otherwise.
This is like saying shopkeepers are happy with mafia protection because they keep paying for it.
One of my coworkers switched from iOS to Android. She immediately stopped getting invited to events by her friends, because all those invites went over iMessage. She switched back to iOS.
People say these things and I just have no idea how its possible. You can text android phones. Yes the bubble will be green. No, no one past middle school cares about the color of the bubble.
For one-to-one messages, SMS is mostly OK. Group chat via MMS is a bad experience. Group chat via internet-based chat like iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc... is a good experience.
Now the obvious solution is for the group to pick a cross-platform chat app and use that, but it's weirdly difficult to get a group of people to do that. Sometimes they would rather exclude someone from the group than switch apps, which might suggest that the excluded person needs better friends.
> No, no one past middle school cares about the color of the bubble.
This is just objectively not true. The nature of green vs blue messages feeds into the in-group out-group dynamics that humans (children and adults alike) are prone to.
If your “friends” stop communicating with you and stop inviting you to group events just because of the brand of mobile phone you use, then I have some bad news for you: they might not really be friends.
Or they need to de-register with iMessage (because of course, how could you not have known?!?).
Apple is the company that gates iMessage because if they don't, in Craig Federighi's words, they are "[removing an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones".
I also cringe at the corporate speak of "iPhone families". "We're an iPhone family". What?
That's as stupid as saying that anyone that doesn't have you added on Facebook doesn't care about you. Sometimes technology erects pointless barriers with the intent of making people FOMO. This is like Social Media 101 right here, people 10 years ago had this figured out.
Maybe some people don't know, or have forgotten that Apple was dead set against an App Store, or third party apps when the iPhone came out. It only relented after it was jailbroken so many times. Apple's view was it would be a closed phone of apps how they said so.
Perhaps some of that mindset moved to the respective App Stores. User's don't have as much choice as people think.
The new App Stores being regulated in the EU are interesting for that reason.
Still reading about phones like WebOS on Palm that was maybe a year too late, could be a different world if we had a phone running JS as front end and for apps like it did.
Getting a walled garden up as quickly as possible was critically important.
When most apps cost $1 in total, paying 30 cents for all that was probably good value. Now that many high-end apps cost more than $100/yr, paying >100x more for the same service is not good value.
I was using Kagi (the now-defunct store/payment API provider whose domain name later got bought by the search engine) at the time, and Kagi worked out at around that percentage for me* — though at the time, hosting and bandwidth was also a significant cost on top of that.
And this weekend, I'm starting to convert some of my old Mac (PPC era Java) shareware into web games so I can play them again. No ads, no cookies, hosted for free (for now) on github. I tried it out on my iPad, which didn't exist as a product when I wrote the original, and turns out this is fine.
* I can't be bothered to dig out the archive link for the pricing to figure out the exact percentage, there was both a fixed fee per transaction and a percentage fee that varied by payment method.
> Bad choice 1, or bad choice 2 is not really choice.
While true (and indeed so generalisable that one can say this of e.g. two-party politics), there are phones which ship with other app stores (Samsung's Galaxy Store).
Also: so far as I can tell the specific apps you need to get through life are themselves not monetised via the app store — e.g. banking apps, healthcare, and (as I read it) items bought within but not used within apps (such as groceries or travel passes) would not be subject to any commission from Apple.
My point was that since most ‘necessary for life’ apps (e.g. corona vaccine app, bank, travel etc) are only offered on one of two platforms, those platforms cannot really be considered a choice.
A duopoly is a choice. Not a lot of choice granted, but still a choice. There are also other platforms (like Samsung etc) but you won't like them for other reasons.
I don't think you understand the point. You're taking about poor decisions that those companies made several years after Apple and Google entered the market, but ignoring the years long head start that they had and squandered. Why weren't Symbian, BlackBerry OS PalmOS, or Windows Mobile good enough in 2007 to not get obliterated by two brand new platforms?
At some point we have to admit that one of the main reasons for the duopoly is that the rest of the competition wasn't that good.
You have the choice of starting a competing company. You can convince investors that there is in fact a market who are unsatisfied with the current options which can sustain your new company. Of course, if everyone is satisfied with the current options it will be difficult to get investment, but then there is no problem either.
The whole world will be against them. Nobody wants to develop apps for dozens of different competing platforms. In fact, for the longest time, I thought this was the reason Android/ open handet alliance exists but nobody talks about OHA anymore.
That's an important point. Microsoft wasn't lacking the resources to develop a phone OS and Windows Phone didn't fail because "it sucked".
Instead it's a demonstration of the power of two-sided markets. When Apple came out with the Apple ][, Silicon Valley had a competitive advantage in electronics because of networks across firms. Need parts? Need specialty talent? You got it.
Now the "competitive" edge of Silicon Valley is that it is the home of great monopolists such as Facebook, Apple and Google. That is, it crushed the competition and prevents it from emerging.
There's also the reality that (1) brands feel the need to express their brands through apps, (2) they are already annoyed enough that app development cost is at least doubled because you have to support iOS and Android, (3) many would express the belief that being forced to develop apps for a third (fourth, fifth, ...) mobile OS would be "extortion" or the equivalent. My understanding was that Windows Phone went EOL because carriers in the US were refusing to activate them because they too think it is bad enough to have to be able to deal with two OS.
If Android didn't exist, however, you'd probably being paying less than a 30% rake to the app store because the App Store would have been seen as a monopoly and the court would have done something about it. As it is the zombie OS Android doesn't really make money for Google or anybody else (Samsung is just proud it makes phones) and wastes money for app developers but it does make money for Apple. From that perspective a third mobile OS is like a fifth wheel.
There is such a thing as "pernicious competition" where fake competitors prevent the entrance of a real competitor, for years cable TV was a great example because you'd see several cable operators, several satellite operators, and later several IP based operators that all offered the same crummy channels with the same crummy UI at the same high price. Not only did the cable operators not serve the same customers but the structure of the industry caused them to "collude" to offer customers the same thing.
Android is like that. It adds $10-15 billion profit a year to the Apple App store just by keeping the court away.
> Can you book slots with TSMC for 3nm chips to put in another device?
I imagine if Google or Microsoft turned up to TSMC and offered to beat Apple's price with similar guarantees of volume and capacity utilisation, TSMC would be happy to have that conversation, yes.
> Firstly the 60% have chosen iOS. They are not "hostage" they can leave. And this is not new behavior- it has existed since the iPhone shipped. Consumers are voting for this. [1].
Are you assuming users would still feel this way if they were made thoroughly aware that Apple's intermediation increases the prices of app services by up to 43%?
You also can't leave a non-mobile operating system without pain. Mac to Windows: pain. Windows to Mac: pain. Windows to Linux: pain. Linux to Windows: pain. Linux to different Linux distribution: pain. Mac to Linux: pain. Linux to Mac: pain.
Some pairs might have lesser pain, such as Linux to different Linux distribution or Mac to/from Linux, if you mostly stick to more basic command line stuff, but the same is true for mobile device operating systems if you just stick to the basic mobile phone stuff which would be telephone, SMS messaging, camera, calendar, web browsing, and non-cloud syncing.
Good point but I think that it's another self-inflicted pain. Everyone can open this website no matter their operating system, architecture, etc. Why is that?
So... what if the developers are right, and their activism is warranted? It certainly seems like the courts are leaning towards the sides of the developers in the US and Europe.
> Firstly the 60% have chosen iOS. They are not "hostage" they can leave.
Competition laws are about fostering competitive markets. Customers and what they want is completely irrelevant past establishing that the market is not competitive.
Firstly the 60% have chosen iOS. They are not "hostage" they can leave. And this is not new behavior- it has existed since the iPhone shipped. Consumers are voting for this. [1].
Secondly Google doesn't control what you install, so by definition doesn't keep a potion of "all revenue". And most value from mobile apps comes from elsewhere [2], so even the Apple number isn't accurate.
As -developers- of course we want unfettered access to users devices to run any code we like. Unfortunately some proportion of developers want that access for reasons unhealthy to the consumer. So yes developers game the system. And your honest app gets rejected.
But it's worth understanding that users -want- this curated access, and are voting For it not Against it.
[1] you can argue about messenger, but that's about messenger not apps.
[2] most all apps I install are free. The company that makes them gets revenue from some other part of the system. We have a "free app" that integrates with our product (which people pay for).