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EU tells Apple to open everything up to its rivals

appleinsider.com

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Re: EU tells Apple to open everything up to its rivals

#371

Post by xdennis »

faeriechangling wrote: post #227
nunez wrote: post #166

Fucking good. It's bullshit that you can only run Safari on iOS or that the App Store is the only store you can use. Yes, I understand the security implications of a third-party browser having deeper integrations into the OS and potential battery life concerns. I also don't care. I want to run Firefox on my phone. The actual thing. With containers and extensions. Let Safari compete on the merits. I want the choice of…

>you can only run Safari on iOS Apple mandating WebKit is the only thing holding v8 back from a total monopoly, while WebKit itself has no chance of being a monopoly in the forseeable future, so I doubt there's a good anti-competitive case to be made for forcing Apple to stop doing this. It would only accelerate the monopolisation of the browser market if this happened. It would be good for consumers in the short ter…

> Apple mandating WebKit is the only thing holding v8 back from a total monopoly

No, V8 has almost total monopoly because countries are ignoring anti-competitive practices. The EU is doing something about Apple in this case, and it should look at Google too.

Re: EU tells Apple to open everything up to its rivals

#372

Post by Daishiman »

diego_sandoval wrote: post #358
kibwen wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fucking good. Seconded. Perpetually baffled by the so-called hackers in all of these threads arguing vociferously against user freedom.

To me, actual freedom, understood as being free from unjust coercion, is more important than "user freedom", understood as having a wide range of services and goods to choose from. In this case, the former is being attacked in order to achieve the latter.

Users in a duopoly are getting coerced to a degree far more important to individual freedoms than the largest publicly traded corporation.

Re: EU tells Apple to open everything up to its rivals

#373

Post by xdennis »

dnissley wrote: post #167
nunez wrote: post #166

Fucking good. It's bullshit that you can only run Safari on iOS or that the App Store is the only store you can use. Yes, I understand the security implications of a third-party browser having deeper integrations into the OS and potential battery life concerns. I also don't care. I want to run Firefox on my phone. The actual thing. With containers and extensions. Let Safari compete on the merits. I want the choice of…

Switch to another phone then. Easy peasy. Why would you buy a phone with this known limitation if you care about it?

The only choice is Apple or Android. That's hardly a choice. Governments need to force companies which have too much power.

Re: EU tells Apple to open everything up to its rivals

#374

Post by nouveaux »

cmcaleer wrote: post #216
tinus_hn wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only there were phones that did exactly what you wanted

The Pixel 5's security update end of life is in two weeks[0]. This is a phone that launched October 2020. My iPhone XS which I bought in 2018 just got the iOS 17 update and it's working pretty well. I want to be able to load whatever I want on my phone, but I also don't want to have to buy a new phone every couple years (or sooner! Looks like the 5a is still in production with security updates ending in 11 months) to…

Just spitballing here but it's possible that Android's openness is exactly why Google Pixel doesn't have better resources to have long term support. Some bean counters probably determined that Google doesn't make enough money to have teams supporting older Pixels. Samsung is taking a ton of profits from Pixel and the end result is piss poor Android support on Pixels.

Guess what? Samsung doesn't care about long term Android support. They're in it to sell phones. It's better for Samsung if Android's ecosystem continues to drop older phones.

At some point, Apple realized that long term support is a competitive advantage they can leverage. Due to their enormous profits, they can increase their support costs. With their closed ecosystem, Samsung can't come in and pull their shenanigans to undercut Apple.

IMO, Android’s openness is exactly why the Android experience on older phones suck.

Re: EU tells Apple to open everything up to its rivals

#375

Post by [deleted] »

pavlov wrote: post #346
nargella wrote: post #336

I do wonder if Tim Apple would be so bold as to stop selling in the EU for all the rules and regulations that they have been required to follow. It would be amazing to see that play out imo. Like a reverse boycott could happen? The secondary strategy Timmy could pull is a dumbed down ecosystem in the EU which I’m sure is even worse for everyone. But hey, you’d be able to buy audible books straight in the app. Is it w…

Sure, there are companies that choose not to be in a particular jurisdiction, like Meta has long chosen not to be in China. But it’s a lot easier to make that choice early when you don’t need to give up on revenue. In Apple’s case, leaving EU would mean losing around $90 billion in annual revenue and ceding a large chunk of their global market share to Android. It’s really hard to justify that kind of thing to shareh…

[deleted]

Re: EU tells Apple to open everything up to its rivals

#376

Post by xdennis »

dnissley wrote: post #174
partiallypro wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now apply this argument to PCs in the 90s and you can probably see how dumb it is.

Was Microsoft preventing people from installing firefox on their PCs? Am I misremembering this era?

Microsoft was forcing people to pay for Windows when they bought a computer even if they didn't want to use Windows.

PC makers had to pay for licenses based on the number of computers sold, regardless of whether they were bundling Windows with them or not.

Re: EU tells Apple to open everything up to its rivals

#377

Post by perryizgr8 »

Theoretically it is hard to argue against letting apple configure and manage the devices they sell as they see fit. After all of users don't like iphone they can buy a galaxy. It's not like apple is a monopoly in smartphones.

However, the current market situation is definitely limiting customer choice and freedom in a way very similar to a monopoly. There are only 2 options in the market. Iphone or android. So even if I do care about having a device with full control, I literally cannot buy one, without sacrificing the last half decade of tech improvements.

If the next version of android totally disallowed side loading, what recourse would people have? Literally nothing. You would be forced to take it.

This thing has happened multiple times before with removable batteries, headphone jacks, memory cards, etc. I care about having a headphone jack a little bit, but there is literally no new phone coming out with that feature now. You can still get some, but not without major degradation in areas like CPU/GPU, battery, screen, cameras, etc.

So effectively, I do think that iphone and android should be related in some ways like a monopoly. Simply because that's how they are affecting customers.

Re: EU tells Apple to open everything up to its rivals

#378

Post by nouveaux »

Apocryphon wrote: post #212
sbuk wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who decided the iPhone is a general-purpose computing device?

Apple did for iPads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S5BLs51yDQ https://9to5mac.com/2017/11/16/ipad-pro-whats-a-computer-ad/

I have a different take on the ad. The ad is saying that computer is the obsolete experience, not that the iPad can do everything a computer can do. If Apple truely believed that, they would not have a mac line up.

For a certain demographic of people, I would agree. I continue to push the iPad for my aging parents because it can do what they need to do without my tech support. They don't need all the flexibility of a computer as a general purpose computing device. They just need to browse the web, write emails and watch videos, and the iPad is perfect for them.

Re: EU tells Apple to open everything up to its rivals

#379

Post by EMCymatics »

lacker wrote: post #293
grishka wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good solution to apps wanting to track your every click is not organizational but technical. Just don't give them APIs for reliable cross-app tracking. That advertising ID? It simply does not need to exist at all . Same for all the attribution bullshit. Besides, sideloading enables installation of modded apps giving users more choice.

Making it a really technically hard problem is great news for Facebook and Google. They will happily hire software engineers that do the best possible job of detecting who a user is, using machine learning and all sorts of other tricks. And then sell this functionality (either explicitly or implicitly) to developers that use their ad platforms.

Well it is an arms race of sorts. If you can build it you can fake it.

Re: EU tells Apple to open everything up to its rivals

#380

Post by ajdude »

matrix12 wrote: post #320
cmcaleer wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Pixel 5's security update end of life is in two weeks[0]. This is a phone that launched October 2020. My iPhone XS which I bought in 2018 just got the iOS 17 update and it's working pretty well. I want to be able to load whatever I want on my phone, but I also don't want to have to buy a new phone every couple years (or sooner! Looks like the 5a is still in production with security updates ending in 11 months) to…

Graphene OS.

At least when I looked into it, Graphene stops supporting pixels as soon as Google does.
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