Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 429 posts

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

#141

Post by stuartd »

INGSOCIALITE wrote: post #116
Teever wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. They obviously have no motivation to do the correct thing, so the solution is government regulation. We live in a world where every landline telephone can dial another with no trickery or fuckery from your phone manufacturer. That is a good thing. We should extend that functionally to smartphones.

what "correct thing"? i can text people who use android phones just fine. TBH this all boils down to the ridiculous blue / green bubble thing. that's the ONLY difference in texting between devices. i honestly have no clue why apple would be regulated in any way over this!

It's not the only difference, at least where I live - I have to significantly reduce image sizes to send them to Android users..

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

#142

Post by pompino »

fidotron wrote: post #16

The thing people love forgetting is a huge part of the iPhone success is based on the North American cellular comms industry being a trustless disaster area. The deal Apple did with AT&T opened the floodgates. Android was initially designed so that operators could customise it. The idea was apps were developed (and sold) only by operators, and everything else would be via the browser. If you had used a Nokia device i…

The only thing Apple cares about is Apple making more money. they will gladly gouge the end User so that their executives can line their pockets. there is nobody here you can actually ”trust”.

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

#143

Post by mfuzzey »

hyperbovine wrote: post #63
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.

Maybe Apple’s “scale” is because its users do not enjoy being shackled to crappy SMS?

Why shackled to SMS? I don't have an iPhone don't use iMessager and haven't sent a SMS in the past 10 years. Everything these days is What'sApp / Telegram / Signal

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

#144

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

I think this article is overstating the effect that Apple's walls have on lock-in effect.

I'm an Android user, and a little less than a year ago I actually bought an iPhone, specifically due to Apple's iMessage lock-in (nearly all of my friends have iPhones, and the especially broken group messaging between iMessage and Android was the primary driver of my desire to get an iPhone).

Except the problem was that, after over a decade on Android, I had zero desire to switch over all of my data and apps over to iPhone. For better or worse the "Google ecosystem" is where all my stuff lives and I just didn't have a desire to spend a bunch of effort just to switch. I ended up giving the iPhone as a gift to an iOS-loving family member.

That's the thing about both iOS and Android platforms - I think you'll find anyone who has been in those platforms for more than a couple years will be extremely reluctant to switch just due to the effort. Our cell phones are often the center of our digital lives now: apps, headphones, watches, etc. The lock-in I think is more from that "ecosystem effect" than any amount of particular lock down.

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

#145

Post by Longhanks »

hu3 wrote: post #101
jwagenet wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Fortunately it's up to regulators to decide what favors the population best. At least in EU they seem to be active (USB iPhones anyone), albeit slower than I'd like.

In democracies, usually it's up to the population to decide what favors the population best.

Also, in democracies with a somewhat free market, you can simply choose not to buy phones that do not ship the port you prefer.

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

#146

Post by distances »

rpdillon wrote: post #126
cjk2 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's more a problem with the humans than the technology.

I think it's economic. The US has free texting these days, which means SMS has more usage here than in another countries. This has prevented the entire nation from coalesing around one chat app, as so many others have.

Every country in Europe I'm familiar with has free texts, but I think I can count with one hand the SMS I've received in the last ~10 years from actual people. Absolutely nobody sends SMS over here.

Might be that US got the free texts first though. Not sure anymore what was the timeline with that.

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

#147

Post by rezonant »

fidotron wrote: post #16

The thing people love forgetting is a huge part of the iPhone success is based on the North American cellular comms industry being a trustless disaster area. The deal Apple did with AT&T opened the floodgates. Android was initially designed so that operators could customise it. The idea was apps were developed (and sold) only by operators, and everything else would be via the browser. If you had used a Nokia device i…

> Android was initially designed so that operators could customise it. The idea was apps were developed (and sold) only by operators, and everything else would be via the browser.

I'm not sure where you got this information. The Android Marketplace arrived with version 1.0 of Android on the T-Mobile G1. Side loading has been available since the very beginning.

What you describe more closely resembles what iPhone did, except that it was never a given that Apple's carrier partners were going to be able to ship their own user facing software on the device.

Operators and OEMs can absolutely customize Android and it was more allowed in the beginning than now. As a way to reduce fragmentation and gain more control over the platform, Google started attaching more and more stipulations to allowing it's suite of software (including Marketplace, now known as Google Play) to be included on handsets.

Was there ever a case of a mobile operator launching their own software store on Android? Certainly OEMs did it, with the Samsung app store being the most prominent. Genuinely curious here, as others do note that (see the Japanese handsets post) OEMs have and even still do a bunch of customization and pre installed apps.

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

#148

Post by criddell »

jncfhnb wrote: post #92
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.

Small correction: Apple was getting 15% from Spotify, not 30%.

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

#149

Post by Longhanks »

alangibson wrote: post #65
rootusrootus wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The EU would let them and good riddance as far as we're concerned. But there is this pesky notion that it's a huge market and Apple earns a lot of money there. So, they really can't walk away from that. Does that not seem contradictory to you? If it's a huge market they make a lot of money in, then there's by definition a lot of people who don't think "good riddance" if they leave. Apple has more leverage than you…

American living in Europe here. in the EU, you can't just apply economic logic to everything like you can in the US. Policymakers will absolutely piss off a huge number of people over some basic principle. Look for instance at Germany's willingness to burn it's industrial base to the ground over Ukraine.

> Policymakers will absolutely piss off a huge number of people over some basic principle.

...which is why a lot of countries are shifting to the right, people are fed up with policymakers ignoring the public will.

(Examples: Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Italy - next up: Germany in 2025, maybe France..?)

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

#150

Post by kristjansson »

redwall_hp wrote: post #123
jncfhnb wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Relevant: Spotify already hands over 70% of their revenue to music rights holders to cover the various performance and mechanical royalties. All of their other operating expenses have to fit into the remaining 30%, meaning they often have quarters that report a loss. Apple trying to take 30% of subscriptions while operating a competing service as a value-add that can afford to be a loss leader is highly anticompetiti…

Even the most extreme Apple position isn’t trying to take 30% of all of Spotifys revenue, they’re trying to take 30% of each subscription originated on-device, for the first year of that customer. Which is still a huge cut, and still a problem that doesn’t encumber Apple Music, but the business question for Spotify is “do the incremental subscribers make sense (in quality and quantity), not “sell one subscription and Apple eats our entire operating budget”.

A better Apple (with less adversarial partners) might have tried to structure the commission as a profit share, not a rev share, to keep high and low margin businesses on the platform, but alas.

Post reply on HN