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The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

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Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

#91

Post by jpalawaga »

abaymado wrote: post #88
joecot wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have yet to find anyone outside the tech industry who actually knows or gives a crap. Lots of school kids who get mocked for being "Green Texters" with crummy images and videos in their group texts. They really want their parents to shell out for an iPhone so it stops. Just because non-tech people don't know the cause, doesn't mean it doesn't affect them.

This is an outrageous take. Is iMessage the only group messaging app? If Apple was gate keeping all group messaging, I could see your point.

no, it's not, but is the default that works well for a large chunk of people, with an (intentionally) poorly degrading experience if one person in the group is not with the "in-crowd."

Yes, life would be better if everyone mutually agreed to use things crossplatform all of the time. but they don't/haven't, so there is this friction.

Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

#92

Post by jncfhnb »

cjk2 wrote: post #3

I’ve got to be honest while I appreciate the direction they are forced in, I have yet to find anyone outside the tech industry who actually knows or gives a crap. Also the only reason Epic and Spotify are after them is not some altruistic reason but they want to be the guys charging the 30% margin. It’s a bit of a grey victory but I’ll take it.

Spotify does not want to charge a “30% margin”. Spotify wants to not give up 30% of their revenue to Apple, who coincidentally had a competing service effectively free from the 30% tax.

The epic game store charges 12%; against which developers are partially handcuffed due to steams price matching requirement.

Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

#93

Post by jncfhnb »

ChilledTonic wrote: post #32

I’ve been a recent convert to the iPhone. It gives me a unique perspective since I’ve spent almost my entire life in the Android ecosystem. I first bought an iPhone 5c on a whim, which is well out of support by apple, 5 versions behind the modern iOS. If you turn it on, all the default Apple apps work, in 2024. You can stream Apple Music and download podcasts with no App Store whatsoever. It’s a powerful little devic…

Nobody notices a difference when companies lose 30% of their revenue?

Would anybody notice a difference if they lost 60% of their revenue? How about 95%? I mean it’s just a third party’s ledger right, so who cares?

Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

#94

Post by Apocryphon »

aurareturn wrote: post #81
taxikabs wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a poor option to regulate from. They could just as easily have required messaging apps to make their protocols open, allowing for competition in the app space messaging over them and not facing lock in.

So what's the financial incentive for companies to develop & maintain open standard messaging protocols? For example, I'm sure it costs Meta a pretty penny to facilitate messages with central servers, store historical messages, and pay engineers to maintain and develop new features. If they have then be forced to open up Messenger for free, they might not have started Messenger in the first place. Also, SMS is the op…

Facebook users needed to be able to communicate with each other. That’s a business requirement no regulation can deter.

Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

#95

Post by layer8 »

nozzlegear wrote: post #86
layer8 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait a bit, you will encounter lots of stuff that doesn’t work, or that has you jump through hoops or buy a subscription, soon enough.

Can you name some examples, instead of being vague?

HomeKit fails a lot for me, as does Safari syncing of favorites, including sometimes the wrong icons being shown for a given favorite. There are bugs in Safari browsing history, such as when you select some history entry, the underlying links of other entries sometimes get shifted (with respect to the displayed labels). Apple Mails takes multiple minutes to sync read/unread status between devices, and sometimes doesn’t sync at all until you open the app. Even on the same device, the Mail app badge only updates half a minute or so after having read an email. When editing text and cutting and pasting around, the text suggestions tend to see a different internal state than what is displayed (you get suggestions for terms you have cut out or deleted concatenated with words that are still there or that you pasted). Apple services have regular hickups. Just today we had https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40177617. ICloud backup requires a subscription beyond 5 GB, or else you have to backup via Mac or PC, which at least on PC Apple doesn’t allow you to automate. (You have to manually authorize each new connection to the PC, even after a small interruption. There used to be a persistent “trust this PC”, but that’s gone.) That’s from the top of my head.

Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

#96

Post by jwagenet »

jpalawaga wrote: post #91
abaymado wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an outrageous take. Is iMessage the only group messaging app? If Apple was gate keeping all group messaging, I could see your point.

no, it's not, but is the default that works well for a large chunk of people, with an (intentionally) poorly degrading experience if one person in the group is not with the "in-crowd." Yes, life would be better if everyone mutually agreed to use things crossplatform all of the time. but they don't/haven't, so there is this friction.

Blame the carriers for not implementing rcs and getting stuck in horrible mms. Then blame Apple if they don’t implement it.

Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

#97

Post by adolph »

manquer wrote: post #52
aurareturn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's just say that the government decided in the year 2005 that no private company can ship something that will replace SMS as the defacto messaging system because it wants interoperability. We would have never had iMessage, Whatsapp, Messenger, etc. Other countries would have far surpassed us in messaging communication tech. Regulations are a double edged sword.

SMTP, IMAP and POP did not prevent gmail or outlook from launching products 2G/3G/4G/5g did not hinder the mobile industry it only fostered it . Standard payment interface like UPI did not stop apps for payments being built , India didn’t need a Venmo or WeeChat to innovate here before standardization Innovations happen despite or without regulations if there is market demand for it . FRAND patents exist for a reason…

> SMTP, IMAP and POP did not prevent gmail or outlook from launching products

. . . and likewise did not require regulation for companies to be interested in adopting.

Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

#98

Post by jncfhnb »

tebbers wrote: post #29
ukuina wrote: post #2

It was very surprising that Apple did not strong-arm the EU by threatening to pull out of the area. The short-term loss of revenue from leaving the EU is nothing compared to the long-term decline this is going to cause in Apple's services/subscriptions revenue if the iPhone is commoditized.

I honestly doubt opening up the App Store will cause much of a hit. Maybe 5% of users will download another App Store.

And those users will be the whales who are benefiting from lower prices the most.

Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

#99

Post by sonofhans »

s1k3s wrote: post #5

> Apple executive Eddy Cue pushed for an Android iMessage app in 2016, but Craig Federighi responded in an internal email that “iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.” This conversation happened 8 years ago and it was about a product released 12 years ago. If anything, this shows how slow regulators are before they take any action and how they…

I’m struggling to see what’s wrong with Federighi’s argument. Why should he not want to protect Apple’s position? Apple has no monopoly on mobile messaging or hardware, and they didn’t 8 years ago either, so they can do what they like here.

What is Apple supposed to do? Spend time and money on interop to better the lives of Android users? There’s nothing wrong with them doing so if they like, but I fail to see any obligation they have.

Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

#100

Post by talldayo »

Jtsummers wrote: post #85
talldayo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes. It's a great reason to not let businesses decide on these things, because their petty interpretation will always override a communal solution. Once you reach Apple's scale, you shouldn't expect to start replacing stuff like SMS with a proprietary alternative and get away with it.

Apple didn't replace SMS. It is still there on every iPhone, and they expanded SMS reach for iPhone users who have other devices like iPad and macOs systems. In what universe do you exist where SMS was removed?

HN tells me that there's only one more step left after embracing and extending. Apple didn't make some mistake putting iMessage and SMS in the same app, they want you reliant on their service so that SMS seems (rightfully) poor by comparison.

There would be nothing wrong with that if Apple wasn't equally as miserly with that power as the carriers they want to valiantly protest against. I'm no fan of cell carriers either, but now that we see Apple's end-goal I don't think their cause is righteous at all. In the friendliest of interpretations, they are a competing alternative enabled by disproportionate first-party integration on Apple's behalf. It doesn't take long to extrapolate their motives for deliberately neglecting cross-platform interoperability to bolster their market presence.

If it harms the market, prevents fair competition, and doesn't benefit the general public, there is no rational reason to let iMessage persist the way it is today.

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