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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

#281

Post by nerdix »

glitchcrab wrote: post #104
lupusreal wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a nice history lesson but sideloading alternate appstores (namely F-Droid) on Android works great and Apple shouldn't be allowed to forbid the same on iOS. And I don't give a damn about the "grandma conned into sideloading scam apps" scenario. Grandma is getting scammed over regular phonecalls already anyway.

So to extrapolate, you're fine with your grandma being scammed via a new avenue because she's already being scammed in other ways?

Or I don't think computing freedom has to be completely abandoned to protect someone's grandma.

Put tight controls in place. You can make it extremely difficult to bypass. You could have a recovery mode like Android and bury the setting in there. I think that makes it sufficiently hard that you don't have to worry about a grandma being tricked into rebooting her phone while holding down a specific button combination and then navigating through a bunch of arcane menus without touch controls to enable side loading. But its enough that someone that is technically inclined and who wants that control over their device can have it.

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

#282

Post by jwells89 »

asddubs wrote: post #237
tammer wrote: post #218

I’ve come full circle on this but I now think native applications on smartphones was a mistake. There is no technological reason why applications can’t be distributed as PWA packages similar to the days prior to the App Store. This would serve two important functions: 1. Remove most if not all distribution monopoly concerns 2. Create application standards that function nearly identically across the myriad of screen s…

my half-hearted counterpoints: 1. what about something like a usb flir heat camera? yes i know webusb exists, but having to go to a website to use a peripheral (and give it permissions to that peripheral) is not ideal 2. apps can change on you at any point, potentially maliciously. I'm not naive enough to think the app store will catch this kind of thing every time, but at least you have control over updating apps, a…

PWAs can also just disappear if devs get tired of running them or become incapable of maintaining them. In similar situations with native local-first apps, the binary will at least remain on your phone and continue to work for several years, offering better a better opportunity to find and transition to alternatives.

Native apps can also be archived for use with emulators at some point down the road, as we’re now seeing with efforts to emulate iOS 2/3 and some of the earliest iOS apps. Had those apps been PWAs they’d all be gone for good outside of the tiny handful where the dev decided to open source them.

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

#283

Post by raincole »

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.

Power users like to think so. But it's, at best, a very doubtful statement.

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

#284

Post by jjtheblunt »

jncfhnb wrote: post #153
kristjansson wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I found it useful. (Your comments too.)

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

#285

Post by dangus »

This article acts like Apple is going to get anything more than a slap on the wrist anywhere outside of the EU.

Even in the EU, Apple is complying with alternate App Store requirements as minimally as possible.

I’ll believe that Apple’s walled garden is tumbling down when I see it. The iPhone is still a money printing machine, and their users aren’t going to go through the hassle of doing a huge cloud data migration to leave.

Yes, replacement cycles are getting longer, but we are talking about averaging replacements every 2.5 years to every three years. https://www.statista.com/statistics/619788/average-smartphon...

On top of that, Apple’s marketshare is increasing in many of its important markets. The only one that is in some peril IIRC is China.

Finally, Apple’s service revenue is their fastest growing segment, and they don’t need a walled garden to earn that revenue.

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

#286

Post by raincole »

talldayo wrote: post #100
Jtsummers wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eit…

> HN tells me that there's only one more step left after embracing and extending.

Perhaps you should read HN less then. Along this line of thinking, any business adopting any open standard is a bad thing. Don't you think it's a very weird take?

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

#287

Post by nerdix »

Jtsummers wrote: post #246
talldayo wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see that removing or crippling an option a lot of users rely on improves the market, or competition. It certainly doesn't need to be removed, just expanded. Apple can't have their cake and eat it too, you either replace SMS and the multiplatform commitments that come with it or you don't. Pretending to hold down a halfway-house to keep selling iPhones is not only a bundling tactic, but combined with Apple's…

> Apple can't have their cake and eat it too, you either replace SMS and the multiplatform commitments that come with it or you don't. You keep suggesting that Apple replaced SMS. They didn't. So per this new statement, they have no multi-platform commitments because they haven't done anything to warrant it.

Is there an example of Microsoft ever actually "extinguishing" something? The extinguish bit is more about making the competing services non-viable. Microsoft's whole strategy was built around making it so a user on its platform either couldn't or wouldn't want to use a particular technology without their proprietary extensions. That perfectly describes iMessage if we're to believe all the commentary on social media about how iPhone users get the "ick" from seeing a green bubble.

In fact, I'd argue that iMessage has been one of the most successful implementations of EEE ever. Maybe only behind ActiveX and Microsoft's slow adoption of web standards in the late 90s - mid 00s (but MS never actually replaced HTML or JavaScript with its proprietary stuff).

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

#288

Post by makeitdouble »

Dalewyn wrote: post #45
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 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…

To add to that, Japan still has that horrible structure where phone makers sell to carriers, which then sell the phone to customers. For instance newer Samsung phones can't be bought outside of a single carrier (docomo/ahamo etc.).

Subsidies are also stil the wild wild west, with the regulators teppidly trying to do something about it but with no real change in sight. Buying from a carriers will reduce the real phone price up to a quarter depending on how you do it, and the carrier will have buy backs to sweeten the deal further, so you'll be eating what the carrier feeds you.

And that's all compound with the same phone supporting different network bands depending on where they're sold, and resale value plumetting because of that (even if you carrier unlock the phone, it won't support all of other carriers' network bands)

The iPhone winning so big is in no small part thanks to Apple not getting in bed with the carriers.

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

#289

Post by yinser »

015a wrote: post #230
yinser wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“AI is only successful because these other unrelated tech super cycles are failing (they’re not)” is an insane argument. No one researches AI because 3D printing failed. Meta doesn’t buy H100s as a last resort. It’s a huge opportunity and the start of a an enormous super cycle that offers new services to customers and improves existing platforms.

> No one researches AI because 3D printing failed. Yes you do. Maybe not specifically, but: AI research only happens because companies and capital firms have invested billions of dollars into paying the salaries of people who do the research. AI is the latest category in a string of categories which have dominated the zeitgeist, to varying degrees of success; crypto was definitely the most recent prior, and AI defini…

lol

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

#290

Post by huytersd »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #14

Something I keep thinking about is how we’re seeing the end of what I call the “tech zeitgeist”. Started upon realizing that we‘ve likely seen the end of the social network era. No new social networking startups have popped-off in a while, and the recent ones are arguably more about connecting you to entertainers than friends. Besides that, a lot of the tech ideas from 2012-2020 have kind of fizzled out. 3D printing…

3D printing has plenty of usage. I don’t think the “mainstream” has any need for it (atleast until the point where the printers can print multi material slices to print out entire products) but the people that use it are still a sizable segment.
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