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U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

nytimes.com

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Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#871

Post by ZekeSulastin »

robgibbons wrote: post #476
ben7799 wrote: post #391

One thing I don't get about this is say DOJ wins and significantly weakens Apple. They'll basically hand the market to foreign companies. Seems odd. Google does not need an assist here, last I checked they are doing great, and could fix a lot of the things iPhone users don't like about Android if they wanted to.

Not necessarily. If Apple allowed third-party app stores, alternative browser engines, had better cross-platform messaging support, et cetera, a lot of Android owners would buy iPhones. A significant reason why Android appeals to many folks is that it represents a more open alternative to the iPhone. By opening up their walled garden, Apple still stands to benefit by magically becoming more appealing to a big chunk o…

I unfortunately think you're dramatically overstating how many people would actually switch after they're forced to open up rather than finding some other goalpost or simply not caring anyways.

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#872

Post by joemazerino »

xpe wrote: post #553
ChuckMcM wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like it reflects similar actions taken against companies that are dominant in a market. The first one I heard about[1] was IBM versus Memorex which was making IBM 360 "compatible" disk drives. IBM lost and it generated some solid case law that has been relied on in this sort of prosecution. In the IBM case it opened up an entire industry of third party "compatible" peripherals and saved consumers a ton of…

> This feels like it reflects similar actions taken against companies that are dominant in a market. Not simply that a company is dominant; it is more about how and why they are dominant. Update 2:40 pm ET: After some research, the practices below may capture much (though not necessarily all) of what the Department of Justice views unfavorably: * horizontal agreements between competitors such as price fixing and mark…

Excellent breakdown. Much more concise compared to other versions of the story. And, to boot, all entirely true.

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#873

Post by matheusmoreira »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #643
aabajian wrote: post #358

The blue background on messages sent between two iMessage users has to be one of the most brilliant vendor lock-in strategies. It is an artificial form of discrimination. I feel a slight annoyance whenever a non-Apple user forms a group chat as I know that person will limit the messaging functionality. In my opinion, the "monopolistic" aspect of it comes down to the fact that they tied it into an otherwise open messa…

What I want to know is how there’s any legal basis to compel any business to implement and service specific, arbitrary software features. It would be one thing if there were a law that mandated a class of messaging apps interoperate on a certain standard if they use certain regulated communication networks. But “Apple messages must implement interoperability with Android messages” feels very hamfisted as an expressio…

They don't even need to mandate anything. They need to neuter intellectual property, unambiguously legalize reverse engineering and circumvention, and make it illegal for corporations to retaliate against consumers who exercise those rights. Then all this stuff will happen on its own via adversarial interoperability.

Want to use a custom client to connect to some service? Want to bridge two rival networks? Such things should be our rights.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#874

Post by jll29 »

Fripplebubby wrote: post #287

For folks who don't have time to read a 90 page document, the case rests on specific claims, not just the general claim that iPhone is a monopoly because it's so big. Here are those claims: 1. "Super Apps" Apple has restrictions on what they allow on the App Store as far as "Super Apps", which are apps that might offer a wide variety of different services (specifically, an app which has several "mini programs" within…

Thanks for this excellent summary.

With regards to the "super apps", Apple can just as well argue that it aspires to retain access for multiple players ("avoiding monopoles", ironically), so naturally it does not want only a single app becoming the majority of all downloads, which leads the app store idea ad absurdum.

Makes you wonder about something else: Could Apple one day be broken apart like "Ma Bell"? It seems the Apple brand is inconsistent with notions of modularity and openness (which brings with itself a certain messiness), everything is supposed to look at feel alike up to the slightly silly (as a problem to solve, as long as there are still children starving on this planet at the same time) device unpacking experience.

It's good that the U.S. government are doing their job as expected, in this case that's relevant for all other countries, where a lot of the device owners/users are based.

My ultimate wish would be some someone to launch a third mobile platform - beside Apple IOS and Alphabet-Google Android - based on a new open W3C standard (not HTML). Such a standard would get a chance to grow with the support of the legal apparatus: judges should force the oligopolists to implement said standard, and then people might just say "hey, I can just implement ONE app, and catch all THREE platforms."

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#875

Post by dugite-code »

endisneigh wrote: post #129

I assert it is trivial to not buy Apple products, easy to make alternatives to Apple products and easy to buy feature equivalent devices to Apple products. In lieu of this what is the problem? If the government has a problem why not say any code should be able to be run on any device? Honestly I’m curious - what’s the problem? There are android phones that are superior to iPhones and let you run anything you want. Wh…

> I assert it is trivial to not buy Apple products, easy to make alternatives to Apple products and easy to buy feature equivalent devices to Apple products.

Swap the name Apple with Microsoft and you might see a different perspective. Microsoft was beaten over the head for anti-competitive practices with browsers back in the day and Apple is behaving no different. It's easily arguable that they are behaving much worse in multiple aspects to what Microsoft was up to.

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#876

Post by 0x38B »

nouryqt wrote: post #483
brink wrote: post #217

Apple frustrates the hell out of me with their deceptive tactics to create walled gardens while pretending not to. They feign ignorance to keep you stuck and create the illusion of open doors out of their walled garden that are actually broken and they have no interest in fixing. I've been paying for iCloud for my wife's iphone for the last several months because of how difficult Apple makes it for us to export our p…

If you're on linux I can only recommend ifuse with the libimobiledevice package. I followed the guide on the arch wiki[0] and could simply mount my iPhone to a directory[1] and then just drag and drop them over. For some reason there were 1000 pictures per folder so I had a few different folders, but otherwise it was super simple. [0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IOS [1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IOS#Man…

I connect and disconnect my iPhone often, so I prefer Gnome's default file manager Nautilus with gvfs-afc and or gvfs-gphoto2 (1).

My devices show up when I plug them in and I can see all my apps that expose storage in Apple's Files, with accompanying icons (2). Device folders like Downloads are off limits, though (3).

1: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IOS#Using_a_graphical_file_...

2: https://nexus.armylane.com/files/Gnome-Nautilus-iPhone.png

3: This entails much pointless duplication of files on the iPhone just to be able to see them from my PC. Apple would prefer, no doubt, that I use AirDrop or iCloud. But my Linux laptop means staying out of Apple's walled garden.

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#877

Post by metrognome »

aabajian wrote: post #358

The blue background on messages sent between two iMessage users has to be one of the most brilliant vendor lock-in strategies. It is an artificial form of discrimination. I feel a slight annoyance whenever a non-Apple user forms a group chat as I know that person will limit the messaging functionality. In my opinion, the "monopolistic" aspect of it comes down to the fact that they tied it into an otherwise open messa…

Remember everyone, your bubbles are green because you have an iPhone, not because the person you are texting has an Android.

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#878

Post by hunterrr »

Fripplebubby wrote: post #287

For folks who don't have time to read a 90 page document, the case rests on specific claims, not just the general claim that iPhone is a monopoly because it's so big. Here are those claims: 1. "Super Apps" Apple has restrictions on what they allow on the App Store as far as "Super Apps", which are apps that might offer a wide variety of different services (specifically, an app which has several "mini programs" within…

Super Apps sounds like an app that takes away resources from other apps

Re: U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

#879

Post by Aloisius »

metabagel wrote: post #255
tiahura wrote: post #67

If Apple wanted to, they could drag this out for a decade. In the end, there are probably some details of what they've done with Imessage or the store that you could convince a jury are "unfair." It's good to know that with everything going wrong on this administration’s watch, they’ve got their laser focus on vacuums, video games, and phones.

The article is chock full of examples where Apple prevents competition on their platform or in connection with their platform. Apple's argument is generally that they are making the platform safer for their users, but I was just on the App Store looking for the Google Authenticator, and the first item listed was a scam third party authenticator which was intended to fool users looking like the Google Authenticator. T…

Pretty sure that's an ad and yeah, it is misleading.

However, there's no comparison between the Apple app store and Android stores. There is an outrageous amount of straight-up malware on Android. FFS, one actually needs third-party antivirus/malware scanners on Android it's so bad.

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