311–320 of 388 posts
I have always found it problematic that on mobile safari you cannot change search providers. They have a small list to choose from (bing, yahoo, duckduckgo, google). but no way to add anything else. You have to jailbreak the device just to add a different search provider. This seems anticompetitive IMO.
bing.com doesn't work?
Why is the plaintiff, California Crane School, suing Apple and Google? As far as I see, the plaintiff is not in the tech business, as they're a school that teaches how to operate cranes[1] [1] https://www.californiacraneschool.com/
Also, why is this crane school spending the money to hire 9 lawyers to work on this lawsuit?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple hates any sort of technical customization in their mass-market products. They always have, and keep stripping them down to the most dumbed-down settings screens they can figure out while still allowing the bare necessities (which they apparently don't consider adding an alternative search engine to be). I don't like this approach, but it is very consistent in their products, features tend to disappear over time…
Every customization option means more complaints from some customer who managed to mess up that setting. “My search no longer works!” “Sir you have the search registry key set to ‘turkey bake time’” “Well that’s what I was searching for, and then the search stopped working completely. iPhones are the worst, I’m gonna tell all my friends”
[1] Due to circumstances, I have needed to demo a certain location web app to quite a few people. I am not exaggerating.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
Do you have a better answer or do you prefer devolving this into meta?
Of course, the last one is: "Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry you're being downvoted but this is HN and it's common to give Apple benefit of the doubt. You are right, and the term is monopolistic power, which is different from monopoly. Monopolistic power involves platform abuse which is what you're describing. Additionally they use their position to enforce their own services, so their forced rollout of Apple Login was an example. Another example is all browsers being fo…
> It's a repeat of the MS-IE escapades of a few decades ago but everyone's OK with it. Is it though? Safari seems to be pretty close to the HTML standard and at least not implement any proprietary features. Sure there may be bugs or they may lag behind but they are making an effort to be compliant. I'd say Google seems to be the one leading a lot of decisions regarding to standards and implement them the way they wan…
- Missing features, supper buggy to a absurd point where you need to wonder if Apple isn't intentionally crippling it. But hey, because some many people in management use it companies tend to work around all this bugs spending millions on it.
For users Chrome is like IE in the past.
- Having all kind of new features no one else has and people developing sites which only work for it correctly.
Still that has little to with the original comment.
I mean how is Apple outright banning competition (for example like Steam) from a marked coverying hundreds of million of people not a massive abuse of power which needs to be stopped for all the same reasons a monopoly is bad.
To just name one point (((there are other like absurd cuts for something which is just a payment service (in-app payments after paying for an app), often abusive/absurd behaviour on publishing apps, stiffing innovation (if not made/controlled by them), intentionally hindering repeatability and repair-ability regulation, including creation of an repair program where they pretend to help but actually just make sure you can't provide a proper repair service under it (let's see what will happen with the more recently announced program), intentionally vendor lock-in for developer all through their eco-system, surprisingly bad software quality for many parts facing developers at least parts which are not iOs, a whole bunch of subtle things which forces people to write apps instead of e.g. just providing a website or similar service, etc. etc. etc.))) Oh did I forgot to mention how they use the marked power to push down the prices of suppliers that they basically only can make profit by employing bs. like inhuman working conditions or resources mined with child labor and similar and then pretending it's not their problem because they also forced the supplier to sign a contract that they don't do that.
Just because it's "per definition" not a monopoly doesn't mean it hasn't the same bad effects and other equally bad, not monopoly specific effect.
Also tbh. the problem with Safari isn't that it's slow in adapting standards Google forces through. The problem is that it's complete unreasonable buggy including on many old features with absurd bugs sometimes, and that they also lack behind on features which widely agreed to not "have been forcefully pushed through by google", like WASM. Often they support this things on paper but so buggy that it's unusable/very expensive to support them. And guess what most of this problems are focused on more "web appish" features instead of classical "web siteish" features, but that is surely a coincidence that this greatly benefits them by forcing people into the app store.
”The complaint claims that the means used to effectuate the non-compete agreement included; (1) Google would share it's search profits with Apple; (2) Apple would give preferential treatment to Google for all Apple devices; (3) regular secret meetings between the executives of both companies; (4) annual multi-billion-dollar payments by Google to Apple not to compete in the search business; (5) suppression of the comp…
This. I always sort of hoped that Apple would either enter the market at some point or acquire DuckDuckGo and try to build out to a larger user base. I realise this is pretty unrealistic, as I'm sure there are far more people out there who would much prefer DDG to remain independent of a megacorp. I assumed the reason Apple haven't entered the market is that there's likely no way to make money at it without becoming…
Here's the complaint: https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_Distri... The putative class they're suing to represent is apparently "All consumers and businesses who paid Google to place advertising on Google search in the United States since January 1, 2005." I think the basic argument is "Apple might have created a competing search engine business, but Google paid them not to, which hurt people buying…
So the assumption is that Apple would run Ads against search? There is a good chance that if Apple did have a search engine it would be Ad free, which might still depress prices of Google ads, but it would also decrease effectiveness of those ads.
I'm not convinced Apple could make a viable search product to compete with Google. Their Maps app is OK, but not as good as Google's, and I can't imagine anyone other than the privacy conscious installing an Apple Maps app on their Android phone. It's possible Apple knows it has no interest in the search business, but Google doesn't know that, so they might as well squeeze a few extra dollars out of them.
> Their Maps app is OK, but not as good as Google's Except Apple Maps has definitely been improving and Google Maps doesn't seem to be substantially improving anymore. At the current apparent trajectory Maps will catch up quickly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple is a monopoly in tech just like Louis Vuitton is a monopoly in luggage, so no. Okay, maybe for US it's Samsonite but for the rest of the world Apple is more like Louis Vuitton - a premium brand that is one of the leaders in design that everyone else follows. Just being popular in some circles doesn't change the fact that they hold a minority share in the market. Maybe people in Orange County might believe that…
If you’re not happy with Apple and Google behaving monopolistically “buy Google Pixel” doesn’t seem like a great solution. Nor does buy a phone running Google’s operating system feel like a great answer.