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EU tells Apple to open everything up to its rivals

appleinsider.com

871–880 of 1001 posts

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

#871

Hey EU, can you please ask BMW to open everything up to its rivals so that I can use Toyota's infotainment system instead of BMW's iDrive. I also want to be able to run PS games on XBox & vice versa without having to buy separate copies. And lastly, how about you open up your very own market to everyone by lifting protectionist taxes

The "protectionist taxes" are the way the U.E. give a chance to local corps against exported of slave-labor, which two of the world's biggest exporters are quite fond of. It doesn't matter that they don't call it slave labor locally, label don't change the facts. Seems more than justified to me.

I hope you're not referring to the US and H1B workers, because if so, wait until you learn how hard it is to immigrate to the EU and how bad the situation of immigrant workers is here. These people would love to have something like H1B available here in EU. As an EU citizen, I feel very bad about the stuff we do to immigrants, and I hate how there's a class of unequal not-citizens among us, doing the dirtiest jobs the high EU society doesn't like to do.

It starts with access to healthcare insurance, for example. Try to get it as a non-permanent resident (who's not attending a school)! You have to have a job, there's no option to pay for yourself - unlike the US, where it's expensive but possible.

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

#872
post #318
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…

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

I find it confusing. I've never walked into a bakery that only sells chocolate cake, bought the cake and moaned about it not being vanilla. That would be insane.

No educated tech people are buying into Apples ecosystem without awareness of the limitations. If this is an issue, why be in this ecosystem at all?

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

#873

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Who doesn't want Apple to be more open?

People that have bought into the "iPhones let you join a super special secret club with superior products" rhetoric. Only good things can come from this, if people want a vanilla Apple experience then just don't install alternatives to Apple's stuff, pretty simple. All they're worried about is their special locked down "what's a computer?" being "ruined".

Or... They recommended a device to their family, friends - those who need support from them - that is closed intentionally?

For many people this will be a support nightmare, and opens new avenues to problems (little cousin installing spyware on mums phone because he wanted free gbux, vulnerable older family member told by scammer to install alt store rootkit, etc).

Your comment is pretty closed minded and fairly rudely toned. You should probably read things back before you post them.

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

#874

I tend to drop the bot/shill-detector part of my brain when I'm on HN, but whenever this topic crops up it's always a deluge of people with the same exact arguments saying "ohh my poor grandma will be coerced to install a Virus if we allow the owner of an iDevice any freedom whatsoever with hardware they bought!!!", and it's quite interesting to me the volume of comments with the exact same identical sentiment copy/p…

It's amusing your comment is critical of other comments when you clearly didn't read the article!

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

#875

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's a bug in the Edge implementation then? Because it works fine in Chrome.

It’s much simpler than that. Home screen shortcuts open in the default browser on iOS regardless of where you created the shortcuts from. So they just didn’t have Edge set as default

Ah that would explain our differing experiences then. Thanks for the info!

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

#876
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…

I mean, it is a very neat and easy-to-use platform at this point with relatively good privacy. I hope that doesn't entirely go away and I hope Apple will move some of the restrictions they make in the App Store into the OS. I really like that apps have to disclose what personal data they process and that apps can't just use private APIs for unlimited spying (two things I'm sure Instagram and my bank would love to get…

> I'd be happy enough with just side-loading apps I write myself

I say this every time this topic comes up.

You can side load on your iPhone. Like right now. And it’s easiest if you compile from source. About a quarter of the apps on my phone are side loaded. It’s git-clone-click easy. No jail break required. No App Store restrictions.

We can complain about other things, like that you need a Mac (usually), there’s restrictions without a small fee, and you can’t debug other processes. But that’s a separate set of issues.

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

#877
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rumors are that the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro will launch with a promise of 7 years of updates, including not only security fixes and bug fixes but also feature drops. We’ll see what’s announces next month, but Google might be about to jump ahead of even the iPhone on this point. Disclosure: although I have worked for Google in the past, I haven’t worked for them in more than 8 years, never worked on Android or Pix…

I think a challenge of pixels and android in general is they don't seem to care about how well older hardware works with new os releases (or even some updates). I have an iphone se and it seems to work just fine after installing multiple os releases. Pixel type phones seem to struggle after a few os releases, as well as android in general. I should say I usually end up buying one generation behind cur on pixel. So on…

This is one of the first generations of Pixel phones, maybe the first, where Google has had sufficient top-to-bottom vertical control over everything from the CPU on up to plausibly make this kind of promise. Apple got there before Google did, but Google may have finally arrived there.

Again, I have no inside info on this despite having worked for Google many years ago. We'll see what the announcement is on October 4.

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

#878

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Blink becomes a monopoly, and with it chromium, then Google can finally be "properly" hit with an antitrust case over Chrome. Especially when combined with the fact the big G can't keep directly funding Firefox to create a fake competition anymore under the new rules from the digital markets act. Google should've been hit with an antitrust case on Chrome years ago and their recent shenanigans with the topics api o…

> If V8 becomes a monopoly, and with it chromium, then Google can finally be "properly" hit with an antitrust case over Chrome V8 isn't a monopoly in the antitrust sense, at all. Google gives away the source code to most of Chrome that allows other people to make browsers with it, and they do. Something being popular doesn't indicate a monopoly. Microsoft could choose to make a browser engine, but they don't, and it'…

The browser isn't the product. The product is the ads Google pushes through their browser.

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

#879

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If V8 becomes a monopoly, and with it chromium, then Google can finally be "properly" hit with an antitrust case over Chrome V8 isn't a monopoly in the antitrust sense, at all. Google gives away the source code to most of Chrome that allows other people to make browsers with it, and they do. Something being popular doesn't indicate a monopoly. Microsoft could choose to make a browser engine, but they don't, and it'…

> Something being popular doesn't indicate a monopoly Being on the standards board for "what browsers need to do", having the standards board under your thumb, and continually adding in requirements that only the highest spenders can afford to implement securely, that does indicate a monopoly. Embrace (web standards), extend (with a billion features), extinguish (rival browser engines)

Apple can afford to implement anything they want. But they clearly have a very strong business interest in not letting web apps gain all the features that native apps may have.

Also, there is no legal requirement to implement every single API that the standards body specifies. The point of having standards is to make sure that _if_ a browser maker decides to provide some functionality, then they can implement the standardised API rather than inventing their own.

This is a good thing in spite of the fact that it doesn't solve other problems related to market dominance.

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

#880

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…

So you want Apple to not be able to earn money from you having the device, yet spend money on providing security updates for it.
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