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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

#151

Post by robocat »

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!

Costs me $0.5 to send an image or other MMS locally to Android. Even a txt costs me if the Android is overseas. I have a cheap plan in New Zealand.

Blue/green might be irrelevant to you, but it is definitely not irrelevant to many people.

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

#152

Post by Rinzler89 »

baby wrote: post #89
Dalewyn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Android was initially designed so that operators could customise it. ... The exclusion of carriers from being able to make modifications to the phone was, and remains, an active feature for end users. Japanese Android phones bought from carriers are fucking horrible because they have modifications both from the manufacturer (eg: Sony, Samsung) and the carrier . I wonder if this is partially why Japan is among the fe…

If you think about it, this is one of the reasons I like macOS. Back then, buying a PC with windows meant having a lot of crap installed by default. Not sure if it's still the case because I haven't bought a PC in ages, but I remember that formatting my computer and reinstalling windows was step 1 when I was buying a brand new laptop/PC.

>Back then, buying a PC with windows meant having a lot of crap installed by default.

Maybe in the US/West when you bought prebuilt form the likes of Dell. But in my home of EE, most PCs we had for sale in shops were locally assembled with no OS, or just vanilla OEM Windows installed (sometimes even pirated).

Crap installed by default on PCs is not something I ever encountered where I live.

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

#153

Post by jncfhnb »

kristjansson wrote: post #150
redwall_hp wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m not sure that needed clarification but sure

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

#154

Post by jncfhnb »

criddell wrote: post #148
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.

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

Yes, but a sweetheart deal to avoid a legal battle for the greater good with the few entities that have sufficient mass to potentially win at court is a scummy thing in its own right

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

#155

Post by s1k3s »

ChilledTonic wrote: post #60
s1k3s wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do with the classic Apple vs Android debate. It's about Apple's practices of pushing people to purchase the iPhone even if they might not want to.

Right, and I’m trying to state that those practices are ancillary at best reasons when the end user just sees a functional phone. Joe Consumer doesn’t even notice the garden has walls.

Joe Consumer doesn't know a lot of things. That doesn't mean the government should allow them.

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

#156

Post by s1k3s »

op00to wrote: post #76
s1k3s wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do with the classic Apple vs Android debate. It's about Apple's practices of pushing people to purchase the iPhone even if they might not want to.

SMS still works fine. No one is forced to purchase an iPhone because they want to message someone.

The comparison doesn't make any sense, SMS and iMessage are not the same thing. It's incredible how many people bring it up in the comments here...

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

#157

Post by Rinzler89 »

harpiaharpyja wrote: post #48
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…

Pretty much. What made the PC era work as well as it did was a strong base of power users, that could choose what tech to use and what to sideline.

>What made the PC era work as well as it did was a strong base of power users

No, power users rarely influenced mainstream adoption of any tech. Apple and the rest didn't become trillion dolar corps by catering to power users. Power users are niche and very picky market not worth catering to if you want to make it big.

What made the "WIntel/IBM" PC gain majority mainstream market share was that is was all open(not to be confused with open source) which allowed everyone, not just power users, but regular users too, and also any HW vendor and SW developer to decide what HW and SW they can develop and sell to users, and what users can install on their system, without the consent or added 30% tax from the original vendor or manufacturer of the system.

It was basically an open bazaar and a cost race to the bottom, where the free market decided the winners and losers based on consumer preference, but there was no global authority to say "I'm not gonna allow your SW/HW to run on the platform we developed". Microsoft or Intel couldn't gatekeep what you installed or ran on the Intel/Windows platform.

Sure, the PC platform had it's own set of issues due to overabundance of cheap low quality HW/SW that caused poor UX, and anti-trust issues from the Windows and Intel monopolies, but it was overall a net benefit due to the open playing field. Can you imagine 3dfx, ATI and Nvidia GPUs not being allowed to run on the PC platform because Intel had a closed PCI standard that only worked with their own GPUs?

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

#158

Post by gretch »

robocat wrote: post #151
INGSOCIALITE wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Costs me $0.5 to send an image or other MMS locally to Android. Even a txt costs me if the Android is overseas. I have a cheap plan in New Zealand. Blue/green might be irrelevant to you, but it is definitely not irrelevant to many people.

> Costs me $0.5 to send an image or other MMS

> Even a txt costs me if the Android is overseas

Sounds like your telecom sucks. Why are you demanding something of Apple. Why don’t you get your government to regulate your own telecoms?

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

#159

Post by robocat »

da768 wrote: post #6
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.

If Android becomes the only platform with a worldwide reach, no one's going to bother writing apps for iOS anymore.

> no one's going to bother writing apps for iOS anymore

Bullshit. By that logic there would be no Mac specific software. There was Mac software when Macs were 1% or less of computers. 2022:

  74% of computers worldwide run on Windows, according to StatCounter. This dwarfs macOS, which accounts for 15%

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

#160

Post by pxeboot »

rezonant wrote: post #147
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,…

>Was there ever a case of a mobile operator launching their own software store on Android?

I believe Verizon launched their own app store at one point. It was called V Cast.

A quick search led me here: https://www.pcworld.com/article/498393/verizons_android_app_...

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