251–260 of 452 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Telemetry allows people to make better decisions. It's not a bad practice. Information deserves to be free.
Let's not forget that "better" is from the viewpoint of a giant corporation whose primary reason for existence is to suck as much profit out of you as it can...
" Modern cars regularly send basic data about vehicle components, their safety status and service schedules to car manufacturers, and mobile phones work in very similar ways." -Google This is a beautiful quote because it is an example of one industry's bad behavior leading to another industry's bad behavior, upon which the first industry then users the second's similarity to justify themselves. Cars only started doin…
I suspect that statement was to placate people with "your car does it too", but mine certainly doesn't --- it doesn't even require a computer to run --- and the statement had the exact opposite effect, namely to revalidate the reason I don't drive a "modern car". That said, I do have an Android, but it is rooted and spends most of its time off. As I type this message, it is on the other side of the room.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't help but feel like having it this way is breaking one of the huge reasons that made computers so absurdly exciting and enticing in the past. The fact that there was this wide open field, where, sure, maybe you paid Microsoft for the OS, but then the rest was up to you. Trade shareware CDs, install stuff from the internet, type in code from a book or whatever, it felt like an infinite open field of possibiliti…
> I can't help but feel like having it this way is breaking one of the huge reasons that made computers so absurdly exciting and enticing in the past. We live in a bubble, so it was exciting for us . The iPhone was exciting for everyone, for the whole world , and in no small part because normal people finally felt confident enough to try all that sweet sweet software that became available thanks to people like you wh…
The iPhone only became a device for the masses, truly, when carriers started subsidizing the older models for zero down, around the iPhone 4g era. This has continued today where Verizon currently offers the iPhone SE for "$0/mo" like some cheap flip phone of old. Before that, the iPhone was exclusively rich persons phone, and probably still would have been in the U.S. at least (like it is in the rest of the world) had it not been for carrier subsidies and cheaper mobile internet plans (or maybe just the normalization of spending so much on a mobile plan every month). The iPhone didn't even get third party apps until years after launch, and when it did, the most popular of that sweet sweet software during those early days were mostly dumb stuff like apps that make gunshot sounds, or flash game clones. The real gems during that era was software written by the jailbreak community, and a lot of that added functionality was cloned by apple in later OS versions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which Apple is apparently doing - they send location, local IP, and nearby wifi mac addresses even when you're not logged in. Similarly Apple is collecting more data types than Google according to the research paper.
Please provide evidence of this because Apple's official documentation says otherwise: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203033 They do send nearly WiFi hotspots for crowd sourcing purposes but it is never in conjunction with your local IP address (which is an identifying piece of information).
" Modern cars regularly send basic data about vehicle components, their safety status and service schedules to car manufacturers, and mobile phones work in very similar ways." -Google This is a beautiful quote because it is an example of one industry's bad behavior leading to another industry's bad behavior, upon which the first industry then users the second's similarity to justify themselves. Cars only started doin…
And, as with most things, there’s an XKCD for that: https://xkcd.com/978/
A lot of this reveals the way that Google itself perceives Android devices, and also ChromeOS devices to a lesser extent, to be inside their infrastructure. Years ago Google SRE wanted to extend observability beyond their edge so that there could be an SRE team responsible for the performance of first-party mobile applications. So, there's an SRE team at Google with a dashboard that shows them Google search latency f…
> A lot of this reveals the way that Google itself perceives Android devices, and also ChromeOS devices to a lesser extent, to be inside their infrastructure. This quote should be more than enough to justify legally separating Google from ownership of both platforms. It is a similar problem we're seeing Tesla now extend to it's cars . Regardless of who legally owns the device, the company's employees feel entitled to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree - there's no competition. What's your solution to change in the law that will create competition?
At minimum if you operate an app store on your own platform that takes a cut the platform should allow alternative 3rd party stores to be used. Android/Windows/web/MacOS are already there on that software front. iOS/Consoles/SmartTVs and many others are not. It's probably why you hear about the Apple App Store 30% but not the Play/Microsoft Store 30% - those aren't the only options to distribute an app on those platf…
So basically, Microsoft Windows should have an Apple app store and Android should have an Apple app store?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This may be pedantic, but Steam was collecting its 30% long before the App Store opened. Thought maybe that was inspired by Apple's cut of music revenues in the iTunes Store.
I could walk into Best Buy and buy the game I want off the shelf. I have no such option if I want to buy an iOS app from a store or the developers themselves. Steam also don't engage in anti-competitive behavior and prevent billions of people from using alternative game distribution methods like Apple does. What we need is real competition in the mobile app distribution market to determine whether or not that 30% is…
What percentage of that transaction do you think Best Buy would take?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is such a nonsense justification. You want to sell software you wrote to run on an iphone. You have zero choice. Apple tax your revenue. You want to sell software you wrote to run on a pc. Steam is not your only choice. I am not defending steam or valve here, I've never sold anything using their stuff, nor am I suggesting anything other than that their market power over pc compared to apple's store over the ipho…
The situation on Android shows us that consumers like consolidation and they like walled gardens and simple choices. These things benefit them. Plenty of Android phones come with 2 or 3 app stores. One for the carrier, one for the vendor and Google Play Store. There plenty are others as well, but the market has spoken. Even Epic had to fold and move to Play Store. Maybe Google played dirty, but I think it's perfectly…
That has happened. The majority of my 20,000 Steam games were acquired from outside of Steam.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 30% cut was considered very good at the time. It was way better than the 50-90% cut that traditional publishers would take. A sibling comment notes that Steam charged 30% at the time (though some had better deals) but it's worth noting that Steam was not an open platform that anyone could publish on. Much like for consoles, to put a game on Steam you had to have a preexisting relationship with Valve, or try to de…
"The 30% cut was considered very good at the time." Let me fix this. There was a full range of views. Some considered the 30% cut to be good at the time, some didn't consider it much at all, some considered it to be a criminal abuse of market power. I remember commenting myself that microsoft would be crucified for attempting to tax everyone who wanted to write software for windows 30% of revenue. I don't recall anyo…
The fact is that 30% was far less than the carriers and Qualcomm were taking with their stores.