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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

#411

Post by stanleydrew »

lupusreal wrote: post #37
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…

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.

> Grandma is getting scammed over regular phonecalls already anyway.

This is not a good argument. Yes things aren't perfect in many areas of technology, but that doesn't mean we should give up.

The better version of this argument acknowledges that there are tradeoffs: allowing side loading may introduce risk but the risk is low relative to the other risks users face and the benefits outweigh the costs.

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

#412

Post by paulmd »

eropple wrote: post #248
paulmd wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The vast majority of spam is explicitly permitted by Google. What are you talking about? It is certainly not lmao - try sending mail to google from your own smtp server on your own doma Seeing some spam occasionally doesn’t mean the vast majority isn’t being rej > They have a Promotions tab, they could make spam - that is, marketing emails - go away in an afternoon, if they wanted to. opting into newsletters is exp…

> opting into newsletters is explicitly not spam C'mon. Signing up for a store to buy a thing doesn't grant permission to bother me with a newsletter, you very frequently just can't opt out until they've sent you something . That's the "I'm not touching you" of compliance and spam-in-spirit should have a mudhole stomped into it--and yet does not.

Store newsletters that you sign up for are not spam. Nobody is making you click the "allow marketing emails" checkboxes. If they do it anyway, yes, that's spam, but that's not what actually happens.

"C'mon" indeed.

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

#413

Post by doctorpangloss »

paulmd wrote: post #412
eropple wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> opting into newsletters is explicitly not spam C'mon. Signing up for a store to buy a thing doesn't grant permission to bother me with a newsletter, you very frequently just can't opt out until they've sent you something . That's the "I'm not touching you" of compliance and spam-in-spirit should have a mudhole stomped into it--and yet does not.

Store newsletters that you sign up for are not spam. Nobody is making you click the "allow marketing emails" checkboxes. If they do it anyway, yes, that's spam, but that's not what actually happens. "C'mon" indeed.

You sound like me, when I was 22 and worked on a virtual slot machine game, trying to convince people that a virtual slot machine game was a real game in some sense.

Anyway, I think what everyone wants is an email tab called “Personal and Transactional,” which would omit all emails of all other categories, including marketing or spam or whatever you want to call it. And even then, I find it so fucking annoying that my ISP and my bank sends me marketing emails via its transactional domains, obviously with the blessing of Google, because people mark those as spam and yet their domains are not blocked. Google already has the capability to do this easily, and chooses not to because email marketers are part of their customer ecosystem.

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

#414

Post by 0x457 »

logicprog wrote: post #393
0x457 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After 5 years of android, I've never been happier to switch back to iPhone.

After five years of iPhone, I was so relieved to switch back to Android! People are different :P

I mean, I was happy to switch from iPhone to Pixel as well.

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

#415

Post by talldayo »

tekknik wrote: post #405
nerdix wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it? Globally, iMessage is far from the most popular messaging application. If it's an attempt at EEE it's not a great one. IE was far more successful in degree and longevity of impact. I basically already said it was second to IE. What else did MS do that was more successful than iMessage? There were definitely many attempts by Microsoft that were not as successful like Visual J++. They also had a similar strate…

All this over green bubbles. Life has gotten so good in the US that all that’s left to focus on is green bubbles. We’ve solved homelessness, wealth gaps, housing crisis, so now it’s time to take down Apple because those green bubbles need to die. I wish this current generation would learn what’s actually important to fight for. Green bubbles are not on the list.

The problem is that Apple, the world's largest tech company, is reluctant to create or join messaging standards.

I'm not sure if you're very familiar with the prevalence of texting (or Apple) in the 21st century but it stands to reason that this is a rather important thing to regulate. It certainly was worth regulating when Ma Bell tried monopolizing communication protocols 50 years ago.

So tell us; what is worth fighting over? I'd be tickled pink to hear what consumer harms you'd prioritize over something as supposedly-diminutive as Apple's actions.

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

#416

Post by [deleted] »

riffic wrote: post #258
talldayo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe so; it doesn't really matter when you're looking at damages. It's Apple's job to solve interoperability with their own platform, and not only have they failed to provide SMS-levels of interop, they actively work against it to promote ulterior products. It's exactly the sort of anticompetitive bundling that harms the market without improving competition. Maybe Ma Bell's success was in-part due to their free long…

the only "free long-distance" calling on Ma Bell was with a blue box.

[deleted]

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

#417

Post by talldayo »

inkyoto wrote: post #272
talldayo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. It is a wild projection, a common one amongst members of this esteemed congregation. Removing SMS supports invalidates and revokes the 3G/4G/5G network compliance with standards and certification, whether you are Apple or an invisible fifth column. It also voids the right to display the very same 3G/4G/5G sign in the upper part of the s…

You don't have to remove support to extinguish a protocol; just sufficiently degrade it to the point that it's unusable.

With that in mind (and how outrageously useless SMS is in 2024), I think you can absolutely accuse Apple's reluctance to standardize as extinguishing. Unless they correct course, iMessage's greatest contribution to text-messaging will be making it a proprietary affair. That would be the lamest way to go down in history, which is why I really hope Apple does the right thing and either a) commits to a better standard than RCS or b) extends iMessage to some more reasonable and open protocol.

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

#418

Post by talldayo »

zarzavat wrote: post #358
Jtsummers wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many chat platforms did they blow through? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-... Which, to me, demonstrates the core problem: Apple succeeded by remaining focused. Google failed because it has some form of institutional ADHD when it comes to messaging services. Google even had a six year head start on Apple with Google Talk, and still managed to fail because they couldn't remain focuse…

It is so funny how differently the Messages app is viewed. In NA, Messages is the true source of Apple’s power and the key to their evil anticompetitive empire, the only ones who can stop their masterplan are the men in suits from the DOJ. Outside of NA, it’s the app you use to get TOTP codes and phishing attempts. You’re right that the real story isn’t that Google missed out competing with iMessage, it’s that they m…

Google isn't really part of Apple's messaging roadmap aside from RCS (which is also not great). For the most part, for better (and absolutely worse), Google's default messaging app on Android has always been SMS. There were no cheeky attempts to weasel Google Talk or Hangouts into my texting app; they were separate things.

It's a mistake to assume that Google wants to pick a fight with carriers just because Apple does. Their goal isn't to replace SMS or use it as an obtuse marketing stunt, and whether or not that's the right or wrong decision is a hilariously irrelevant distraction to the actual problem. SMS sucks, and replacing it is either a community effort or a regulated one. Apple chose "regulated" a long, long time ago by making an insular service their replacement candidate.

WhatsApp too is a problem in it's own right; but again, it's a strawman when we're discussing Apple's specific damages (which neither Google nor Meta copy in-full). Apple uniquely uses their vertical integration to create a less competitive environment for third-parties, which is damned for scrutiny everywhere they try it. There is no reality where Google announces that WhatsApp comes preinstalled in the messaging app without immediate and legitimate antitrust bundling accusations.

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

#419

Post by talldayo »

endemic wrote: post #384
Repulsion9513 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embrace: include HTML Extend: add ActiveX Yeah, it is.

Could users still access functionality of pages with ActiveX content, albeit in a “degraded” state?

Given that it never fully replaced HTML, yes.

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

#420

Post by talldayo »

edanm wrote: post #353
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.

If you don't "let business decide on these things", the result isn't better more communal solutions getting made, the result is no solutions getting made because they're not worth making for the business.

You'd be a lot closer to the truth if Apple didn't spend the last 10 years of their corporate existence resisting message standardization like it was a plague. There were alternatives, even solutions Apple found acceptable, but they refused to adopt them.
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