381–390 of 600 posts
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They also favor their own apps or downright remove the competition.
Can you name one category of app that Apple sells where there aren’t competitors on the App Store?
https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/29/apple-ceo-tim-cook-questio...
The ability to communicate by smartphone is so ubiquitous in our society that it has effectively become a basic need on the level of electricity, water, natural gas, and internet access. The utility service that was land-line telephones is becoming obsolete, and it's becoming increasingly harder to participate in society without a smartphone and the ability to install apps on that smartphone. In light of that reality…
If you support Apple and Google in their claims to 30% of the profit, then you support Comcast charging an additional fee for Netflix. If you support Apple and Google having locked down authoritative control over the code run on their devices, then you support the Great Firewall. The only choice of a free and open society, and one mindful of the great benefit of open source and open platforms, is to remove these comp…
On ios you can't.
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It's their product and they can do whatever they want with it. If anyone doesn't like that, they can easily not purchase iDevices. Apple doesn't force people to buy their products.
Microsoft didn't force people to buy Windows, "all" they did was install IE by default and they got done for that. Precedent disagrees with you.
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More appropriate analogy: Let say Apple is BMW, and when you buy BMW your gas tank has a proprietary connector that will work only on BP gas stations. You can choose different gas there (different octane number, etc.), but you can't tank at e.g. Statoil.
As long as this is disclosed to the customer up-front and as long as you can buy a different car to a BMW, then I do not have any moral objection to this. I admit I probably wouldn't buy such a car myself as I don't see any advantages. I do see advantages to the Apple model - simplicity and cleanliness. If you disagree then you should probably do as I would with the BMW - buy something else instead.
Lets say at some point drivers of GM vehicles buy 60% of the gas sold. Gas stations must agree to use proprietary connectors to service GM cars. Because of GM's market share, the majority of gas stations decide to use GM-only connectors, which then sells more GM cars...
Such a cycle is great for GM but probably not good for consumers if you think competitive markets are pro-consumer. And it affects people who don't even buy GM cars, because it influences what 3rd party business are viable. I think that's a key difference between companies with enormous market share engaging in anti-competitive behavior and companies with minority market share (like BMW) doing it.
As another example, I think it would have been unfortunate if home internet service providers (of which many people have a choice of only one or two, and it's a big hassle to change) became a bottleneck for other types of services such as online streaming (perhaps by charging exorbitant bandwidth costs to competitors). Luckily I think that ship has mostly sailed, and even in the absence of regulation abuses are probably somewhat kept in check by the very real possibility that regulation will happen if things go too far.
I think there's an argument to be made that it would be bad for a duopoly in the mobile OS market (Apple/Google) to lead to a reduced level of competition in app stores, payment processing, and possibly computer software in general (because of the approval process). And even though Apple may not have an absolute majority on market share, the percent of software revenue is probably more important and Apple's share of that is probably quite high.
There's probably reasonable ways to address this too. Maybe by allowing other app stores (that follow the same sandboxing / security rules), which seems to work out fine on platforms like Windows with options like Steam. And maybe they could let Apple continue to require support for a common payment method, but not let them prohibit other payment methods or require that those other payment methods are the same price (when the fees on the other payment methods may be much less than 30%).
I am a big Apple fan, but seriously, you guys are bending yourselves into pretzels to make up excuses for Apple. we already know what a market without a mandatory App Store looks like because it is like that for the Mac. I still prefer buying apps through Apple’s store. Due to safety, ease of use etc. But I am happy alternatives exist when I need them. They could follow a similar model for iPhone where non-Apple stor…
I fear the inevitable end down that path lies people who bought an iDevice, enabled alternative stores, were duped/hacked/otherwise-invaded, visited a Genius only to be told Apple won’t help them, and then lawsuits against Apple for their trouble.
The hypothetical lawsuits you describe don't seem very likely to succeed. No doubt a few people will complain, and then they'll discover the hard way that there is no technological cure for carelessness and whatever other platform they go to next will similarly be compromised if they are similarly careless about what they install on their equipment.
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If we make some laws that say they do then yeah they will have to.
And Tesla? Will they also have to allow third parties to “upgrade” their cars since many of the additional features are software controlled? Why stop there? Kindles? Roku sticks? WebOS TVs? TiVo’s? Cable boxes?
I am a big Apple fan, but seriously, you guys are bending yourselves into pretzels to make up excuses for Apple. we already know what a market without a mandatory App Store looks like because it is like that for the Mac. I still prefer buying apps through Apple’s store. Due to safety, ease of use etc. But I am happy alternatives exist when I need them. They could follow a similar model for iPhone where non-Apple stor…
Recall also how Apple forced out Tumblr, a blog reader app (simply a window to UGC) on iOS because they didn’t like the UGC.
In fact, there was a business in US that did just that. Hollywood's Studio System. Movie studios were vertically integrated with theater chains, and you could only see Paramount or MGM movies in the theaters that that owned. And you know what? Customers were really unhappy, because studios made all kinds of bad tricks like forcing to buy a week pass to see just one movie. Of course, you could refuse to watch other 15 crap movies that were bundled with High Noon, or, like Apple defenders here say, go watch some other movie.
I imagined some arguments that some HN commenters could make:
"It's not a monopoly if you can watch other movies in other theaters"
"Paramount movie chain is just 15% of total number of theaters"
"They made this movie and they should decide how you are allowed to see it"
It all ended with an court decision [1] that ended this monopoly abuse.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_P....
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You seem to be stuck on continually making the point that if something hasn’t happened already that it should never happen. Phones are a lot more important than consoles but, if a law doesn’t exist let’s make one that applies to both phones and consoles. This is our country. If Apple doesn’t like it they can go do business somewhere else.
Right because giving the government more power can’t possibly have negative consequences. Did you watch the congressional testimony a few days ago? Would you trust this government to pass laws with regards to tech?
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It's not like someone will force you paying without your consent. If you don't want to give random apps your credit card, don't give it to them. Why do you oppose other people's right to do that, if they need it?
Beyond the security of not giving our credit cards, and the convenience of not having 8 different game updater/launcher clients, Apple’s App Store policies also limit 3rd party software’s ability to fuck up my devices in a myriad of ways. If they’re forced to open up to 3rd party stores, I hope they can do it in a way that prevents Adobe from running 8 background processes to make sure my license is current and there…
Obligatory glance over at Steam goes here.
Apple’s App Store policies also limit 3rd party software’s ability to fuck up my devices in a myriad of ways.
It would be a much safer solution if Apple's operating system limited 3rd party software's ability to do things it shouldn't. Trying to filter malware at the app store level might improve your odds, but it's not a robust, scalable solution to malware and it never has been.