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Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

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Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#101

Post by numpad0 »

annexrichmond wrote: post #21

Just like how Apple killed Tumblr for porn problems but gave Twitter a pass

This is just me rambling but I think there's a simple explanation to Tumblr, Twitter and WeChat: Tumblr was a global app with English speaking userbase. Twitter and WeChat are de facto country-specific apps that Apple has no clear pictures on.

The latter two are "big in ___" apps that are hardly known anywhere else, namely SA, Japan, and China, to which anything HQ in California do will only cause unpredictable and unobservable, likely negative financial impacts. I'm from "Asia" but all I know about WeChat is about as much as that it's a brand with a logo, that's it.

Apple et al allows maximum leniency, budget and local decisions for those local apps because of that. "No one's using it anyway", only cash is coming in, so whatever happens there won't matter anyway, as long as the gig won't stop. Hell, if they need datacenter for all data to stay in China, so be it, if they need extra rapid payments to keep Shinjuku going, so be it.

Tumblr is different; they have US users and negative impacts can be readily measured. So they - its owner Yahoo! US at the time of its death - were not scared to do whatever.

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#102

Post by n1b0m »

deciplex wrote: post #88
derefr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is becoming more liberal in the classical sense (more money accruing to regular "new money" entrepreneurs instead of to oligarchs); they just haven't hit the "borgeoisie-funded revolt against the aristocracy" phase of liberalization yet. Give them 50 years.

What aristocracy? And over half the Chinese economy is state-run.

CCP leadership

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#103

Post by em-bee »

vanjajaja1 wrote: post #81
em-bee wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the concept is that the primary feature that wechat provides is your identity with your wechat account. you connect to other people and you have verified their identity as well. from there it is most logical that you then want to use that identity to share work, make appointments, pay for things, etc. the miniapp that we used the most was a voting tool. you could see who in the group had voted for what and it was ver…

I'm not even anon on twitter, but bonkers to think that people would want to directly connect their finances to things they say in online in public in this day and age

wechat content is not public. the one feature it does not have is a public space where you can see what people say or share without being connected to them (or being in a group with them. groups are limited to 500 people, so even there not many people see what you share). there is also no algorithmic pushing of content from people i am connected with.

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#104

Post by dvt »

deciplex wrote: post #90
dvt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and trying to force every country around the world to adopt their 'values'. Hot take: Yes. Because classical liberalism, the free market, and bottom-up government has done more for the advancement of humankind than sharia law, tyrants, oligarchies, theocracies, or dictatorships have ever done. Let's stop pretending like all values have the same ethical valence.

Well, Marxism-Leninism did more good for the Soviet Republics in its first 40 years there (beating back an imperialist invasion, rapidly developing industry, beating the Nazis, putting the first man in space, raising the standard of living nearly to par with the West despite being a feudal backwater in 1917, etc) than capitalism has done for those countries since we finally beat them thirty years ago. And, public opi…

> raising the standard of living

Ah yes, you must be referencing the Holodomor here. That sure raised the standard of living. Marxism-Leninism is, without a shadow of a doubt, a fundamentally evil ideology.

> rapidly developing industry

What industry are you even talking about (-oh that's right, the Soviet obsession with steel)? Have you ever actually been in the industrial cities of the Eastern Bloc? Have you toured their inefficient brutalist factories? The same factories that ended up being shuttered in the 1970s. Even ignoring the grave human rights abuses, the communist satellite states were bureaucratic behemoths that collapsed under their own weight. It's like you've never even heard the word "Perestroika."

But in any case, the communists not only persecuted my great-grand-parents for their religion (they had to flee from Ukraine), but also stole my grandparents' land, and destroyed my parents' youth. I was also born in communism (I barely remember the Romanian revolution as I was an infant) and posts like this remind me how quickly people forget and that the Jewish people are really onto something in never letting us forget the horrors of the Holocaust. In similar ways, I've taken it upon myself to never let people forget the horrors of communism.

> despite being a feudal backwater in 1917

Imagine calling regions that gave birth to cultural gems like Prague, Budapest, Kyiv, or Warsaw "feudal backwaters." Did you know that in 1884, Timișoara (the Romanian city I grew up in), became the first European city to implement DC electric street lighting? Backwaters my ass.

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#105

Post by arp242 »

deciplex wrote: post #87
woooooo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the 90s, we really were that arrogant. Policy makers believed history was over and we had won. We had just done it to Russia successfully (short-term). Why not China?

Bold to claim that anything that happened in Russia in the 90s could be called a "success." If that's what was in store for China then good on the CPC and President Xi for averting it. The "integration" of Russia into the global capitalist system was an utter disaster from both a humanitarian and a strategic perspective.

China also adopted capitalism, in some ways more extreme and enthusiastically than anywhere else in the world.

There's a reason both the USSR and China started doing reforms in the 80s: neither system was working well, leading to stagnation at best and outright absurdities and poverty at worst. In both cases, the economic reforms mostly worked out well.

There are a bunch of differences between Russia and China: China never seriously attempted to introduce democracy and has had a fairly stable political system since the late 70s, whereas in Russia the entire communist political system collapsed and was replaced (which is always tricky business). China also never experienced a breakup similar to the breakup of the USSR, didn't have "let's sell off all state properties to my friends for peanuts" kind of corruption, had quite a different make-up (before the reforms most of China was rural and profoundly poor), and probably a few other differences.

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#106

Post by veave »

dvt wrote: post #36
goodbyesf wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> and trying to force every country around the world to adopt their 'values'. Hot take: Yes. Because classical liberalism, the free market, and bottom-up government has done more for the advancement of humankind than sharia law, tyrants, oligarchies, theocracies, or dictatorships have ever done. Let's stop pretending like all values have the same ethical valence.

You came to hacker news, posted an American-centric progressive argument, and called it a hot take?

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#107

Post by kelnos »

goodbyesf wrote: post #38
dvt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and trying to force every country around the world to adopt their 'values'. Hot take: Yes. Because classical liberalism, the free market, and bottom-up government has done more for the advancement of humankind than sharia law, tyrants, oligarchies, theocracies, or dictatorships have ever done. Let's stop pretending like all values have the same ethical valence.

> Hot take: Yes. Because classical liberalism, the free market, and bottom-up government has done more for the advancement of humankind than sharia law, tyrants, oligarchies, theocracies, or dictatorships have ever done. That's not 'the west' and has never been. The US was born protectionist and pretty much stayed protectionist til today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_St... Of course today…

> 'sharia law, tyrants, oligarchies, theocracies, or dictatorships have ever done' have given us civilization and nearly all human progress since the dawn of time.

"Given" is a bit of a weird way to put that. We had those things not because they were the best, or were even desired, but because people accumulated power and forced those forms of government on their local populations. Maybe civilization and human progress could have gone much faster, and better, without as much death and strife, if people hadn't lived under repressive regimes for most of human history. These forms of government concentrate power among a relative, unaccountable few. I hopefully don't need to enumerate all the bad things those kinds of people often end up doing.

Western democracy has a ton of problems, certainly. And the US's practice of secretly and overtly interfering in the development of other nations nearly always ends poorly for both sides.

But I'd much rather live in a world where Western democracy exists, if the alternatives are sharia law, tyrants, oligarchies, theocracies, or dictatorships.

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#108

Post by zoltrix303 »

joshstrange wrote: post #5

I'm not sure this article has the slam dunk it thinks it does. Those aren't "apps" they are at best "web apps". They use a JS framework and some special markup from what I can tell. In this sense WeChat is more akin to a web browser than having multiple "apps" inside it. > Since these are “apps within an app”, many of these mini-programs are flouting the App Store rules since they were not downloaded from the App Sto…

I've never actually developed a mini program, but worked on projects with our china teams to develop some activation for our brand on WeChat.

What I understand is that a mini program needs to be "packaged" and shipped to WeChat as a bundle. The size of the bundle is relatively small. (~10mb ?)

Of course you can load some content from outside, not everything is within those 10mb, but I think it's still relatively limited. Calling it apps within apps is a stretch.

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#109

Post by kelnos »

pavlov wrote: post #28
sdfghswe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Much like Adobe did to Macs in the 1990s, WeChat has become so powerful they control the platform. I'd enjoy listening to the story here, spacebanana.

The story with Adobe on Mac in the 1990s is that their apps were so important to the platform that they practically had a veto on the API for Apple’s next-gen OS. When Apple acquired NeXT, the original plan was for the NeXT API (now called Cocoa) to become the only way to build apps on the new Mac OS. But Adobe made it clear they were not going to port everything to Objective-C. In response Apple came up with Carbon,…

I think Apple was the one who was unreasonable here, not Adobe.

I loathe the idea of giving Microsoft credit for anything, but one thing they got right was their focus on backward compatibility. Certainly that has frayed at times here and there, but MS generally doesn't ask their developers to completely rewrite their applications to use a new application framework.

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#110

Post by selectodude »

deciplex wrote: post #94
selectodude wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russian GDP tripled from 1988 to 2008. They were doing all right until Putin went full dictator.

I'm not sure the average Russian would agree that the precipitous drop in life expectancy in the 90s, the rampant child prostitution, etc., along with what our idea of "democracy" for them turned out to be - you want to talk about election interference let's start with Russia in 1996 - was worth selling off their natural resources so a few oligarchs could get rich.

That’s why I picked 1988.
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