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Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

appfairness.org

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Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#251

Post by echelon »

temp667 wrote: post #219
echelon wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your perspective makes me sad. I'm honestly depressed because people rush to defend bad behavior of their favorite monopoly. Like, physically holding back tears. Serious. What is wrong with us? Our computers and technology have been locked down by anti-competitive juggernauts. Our legislators have written laws that cede more of our liberties and privacy. This modern internet sucks so much and I want to go back to whe…

The "bad behavior"? Are you joking. You realize people pay apple EXTRA because they value their product? Their product holds its value far LONGER on the secondary market because it is maintained so well? You can get unlocked android phones and install whatever you want. But the reality for our parents / grandparents etc is that the folks who want to have root on their device want to scam them, auto bill them with non…

> Go use another phone if you don't like it.

Half of my audience is on your favorite device. I didn't have to pay for them before Apple sunk their claws in.

Even if there wasn't a tax, the lack of freedom is what really gets me. Apple built itself atop open source. They leveraged it to gain control over 40% of the CPUs used by consumers. Now we can't run code for these people.

I applaud their privacy stance. But freedom to run software is a separate issue.

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#252

Post by im3w1l »

dleslie wrote: post #34
emptysongglass wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have one competitor on which users are allowed to install their own market (see F-Droid.) [1] [1] https://www.f-droid.org/

F-Droid itself relies upon Android's openness to allow it to be installed. If you don't like Apple's walled garden then use Android.

And if you want to install whichever apps you want, AND not be spied on by your OS, there are basically no options.

Linageos is a possibility, but with the play services situation, running any mainstream app without phoning home to google is if not impossible, extremely difficult and filled with footguns.

Pine and Librem are exciting emerging possibilities but they have only been available for a very short time so it remains to be seen what will happen there.

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#253

Post by kbenson »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #180
echelon wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your perspective makes me sad. I'm honestly depressed because people rush to defend bad behavior of their favorite monopoly. Like, physically holding back tears. Serious. What is wrong with us? Our computers and technology have been locked down by anti-competitive juggernauts. Our legislators have written laws that cede more of our liberties and privacy. This modern internet sucks so much and I want to go back to whe…

> I want a world where we're free to install whatever we want on our devices or distribute our hard work to others without having to implement it 5 different ways. I do too, but your appeal to emotion is off-topic. This has nothing to do with the lawsuit. None of these companies want that, nor are they working toward that. Epic and Spotify are pushing their own walled gardens, they just want to do it with a bigger pr…

> None of these companies want that, nor are they working toward that.

Being able to choose to run whatever you want on your own device is a necessary first step to opening up app stores to competition.

They support the ideal because it's the only way to get what they want. It's a mistake to assume that since they are doing it for their own benefit that we all can't benefit as well.

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#254

Post by notatoad »

dleslie wrote: post #9
mFixman wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a monopoly, and it's illegal.

Apple clearly has competitors that have a much larger share of the market.

you don't need to have a literal monopoly to engage in illegal anticompetitive behaviour, nor is having a monopoly even illegal. Apple has monopoly-like control over the mobile app market - if you don't make an iPhone app, your product is dead in the water. and apple is using that power to crush any competition to their own in-app payment solution.

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#255

Post by abc-xyz »

jpambrun wrote: post #194
kemiller wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No... many people actually appreciate the walled garden as consumers.

Allowing other stores doesn't mean you have to use them. You could still have your curated experience on the Apple store. Why do you want to impose your views on others?

Why are you, tech-savvy users, forcing Apple to allow third-party app stores/installations, which would no doubt lead to malware like we see on Windows, Macs, and Android?

I and my software friends/colleagues might be capable of avoiding this malware (assuming you don’t consider Zoom and such to be malware), but my family and everyone else I know are not. I suspect 70+% of the user base could easily be tricked into installing malware that would spam them with sex notifications, hijack their search engine, etc.

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#256

Post by AlexandrB »

izacus wrote: post #41
dimitrios1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling a company that has ~13% of the market share in mobile devices is quite the take. It will never hold up in court.

Just a few months ago Apple was happy to explain to everyone that they secured more than 80% of mobile markets profits. Hiding that by citinng some nebolous market share of questionable market definition is perhaps not a good idea.

This is a bizarre definition of monopoly that, if it were applied to any other industry, would turn common sense on its head. If Amazon runs its retail operations at a small loss, is it now less of a monopoly than a boutique retailer with big margins but < 1% of the market share?

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#257

Post by temp667 »

tmotwu wrote: post #225
nicetryguy wrote: post #75

I'm surprised at all of the negativity here. The changes proposed would be great for developers, even if (most) of the companies involved are shady, their reasons are selfish, and the obvious "astroturfiness" of the website is laughably dissonant and reeks like a dirty think tank that hasn't been cleaned in months. Apple has no qualms about absolutely screwing developers historically. I'm happy to see some pushback.

Not exactly sure if it's astroturfing, but there's definitely been a lot of non-devs commenting on this issue. You can see this when they go off on some security tangent while the App Store is in fact host to thousands of malware in disguise. They trust that Apple is manually reviewing each and every App for security holes, that's why the App Store exists in the first place and totally why there's a 30% toll. I'm sta…

"illusion"? It's relative security.

On the iphone, if I buy a used phone and a scammer has popped a cheapo battery in to show no battery life slow down - apple alerts me (also unpopular on HN BTW).

If I buy an android phone from most carriers, their "security" involved pre-loading it with unremovable adware and tracking apps. This is more secure - are you serious?

The google play store has less malware? The permissions process for android apps has been terrible.

With apple, I can now give apps access to specific photos in my camera roll, it works great. It alerts me to folks doing background tracking and makes it easy to turn off (even after I said yes earlier).

What's nuts is that developers don't understand why consumers benefit or like this and want the DOJ to blow open this little bubble of sanity so they can push their crapware through or their auto-billing app stores through.

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#258

Post by danShumway »

_qulr wrote: post #93
gbil wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Which for me is a reason - no matter how much I hate Apple's tactics- to dismiss also this counter action. All of these entities just don't care for the users one way or the other

Yes, I was thinking of joining, but the fact that the site didn't work without turning off my ad blocker was a turnoff. Why do they even need cookies? Terrible first impression.

The amount of blindness I'm seeing from companies on both sides of this fight about how to handle their optics is kind of staggering.

One of Apple's core arguments for why they need this kind of control is privacy. If someone is launching what is essentially a PR campaign against Apple, one of the first things to do is to make sure the website doesn't have any appearance of violating people's privacy.

Make it work without JS, make it work without cookies. Be conscious of the target audience. Requiring cookies is a really tone-deaf decision for them to make.

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#259

Post by croissants »

echelon wrote: post #229
croissants wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question, can you expand on what you mean by this: > Before they stood up the walls, I could reach all the people I wanted for free. What are you referring to? Blogging, social networks, forums, etc.?

The web and web downloads were 100% of the distribution channel. Now you can't distribute binaries without oversight and taxation. Also, web browsers on mobile are much less capable than on desktop.

Thanks for the response. When you say

> Now you can't distribute binaries without oversight and taxation.

do you mean selling software?

On a slightly different note, I'm curious about how much of the change in your experience of the internet comes down to a change in its user base. I'm not sure when this happened, but I think the vast majority of internet users now consists of people who don't care about these issues at all, for better or for worse.

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#260

Post by ghostwriter »

jpambrun wrote: post #194
kemiller wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No... many people actually appreciate the walled garden as consumers.

Allowing other stores doesn't mean you have to use them. You could still have your curated experience on the Apple store. Why do you want to impose your views on others?

Who is imposing views in this situation? You don't have to use Apple devices as your platform either. Most likely you use it because you benefit from it. Especially these companies that get huge profits from it. The platform was provided to them under certain conditions that they are free to reject at any moment and to walk away if they find that they will benefit more from that decision.
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