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Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers

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Re: Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers

#451

Post by dxdm »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #279
spogbiper wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if all you want is for your apps to come from Apple's store and your payments to go through Apple's system, you would simply continue to use only those options and allowing other people to have other options would not impact you. what you actually want is to force all developers to use Apple's distribution and payment systems, so that you can have every app and service from any provider delivered via your chosen mech…

If it was actually stifling competition we would see many more good apps for Android that don’t exist for iOS. That’s not the case. If anything most companies I know develop first for iOS and then for Android if they have sufficient resources. Why? Because accessing Apple’s user base, even with the Apple Tax, is more lucrative than developing for Android.

The point is that more, different, better and cheaper options might exist. The fact that people are still willing to trade in a large captured market does not mean that competition is not greatly distorted in favor of the market's owner.

Re: Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers

#452

Post by immibis »

pjc50 wrote: post #389
ClaraForm wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have disorganized thoughts about this, but it's not just a debate about vertical isolation vs not. 1. The size of Apple/Alphabet/Samsung makes it difficult to enter the market (see: factories having ridiculous MOQs for small-batch phone manufacturing), pushing everyone else out. 2. The size of the smartphone market makes it impossible to not have to deal with one of the above companies for certification, market pen…

Exactly. All the free market logic assumes that barriers to entry are low. They are incredibly high and the market is naturally prone to converging on a single solution. There's basically room for two smartphone ecosystems. Microsoft/Nokia couldn't sustain a third. Android-adjacent things like Amazon Fire and Tizen have little market share. > factories having ridiculous MOQs for small-batch phone manufacturing Ironic…

Note: There's room for more smartphone ecosystems, but not mainstream ones. There are a few nonmainstream phones out there, from Linux phones (Pine, Librem, MNT I think now?) to more openish Android phones (Fairphone) to completely different platforms (that I'm pretty sure exist but I don't remember any of).

Re: Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers

#453

Post by immibis »

gilfoy wrote: post #439
Nevermark wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try shipping a web browser not based on Apple’s browser functionality on iOS. See how free of gatekeeping the internet is.

I’m not convinced opening up the platform to Chrome skins is good for the web, we’ll just end up with one browser that much faster

Are Safari skins any better? If they opened it, you could run Firefox.

Re: Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers

#454

Post by immibis »

piperswe wrote: post #349
lenkite wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are free to pay ~30% extra for your preferred customer experience. The rest of us can leverage discounted pricing. Customer Choice for the win! Also, thinking that all businesses will lock one in using friction and timewasting is not a rational argument. There are a lot of honest businesses there forced to pay the Apple Mafia's tax.

If businesses don't have to offer the more consumer friendly option, they won't offer it.

Well then the rule could be: All apps must offer the possibility to use Apple Pay for payments.

Or Apple could do one of those virtual credit card things. Or do they already? So you could use an Apple virtual credit card with any processor.

But then the 30% extra fee would be visible to the user. Apple's whole schtick is making things way more expensive and hiding the competition pricing from the user. If "$10 with Stripe" was placed side by side with "$13 with Apple Pay", Apple would immediately lose all of their payment customers and about $2,000,000,000 in revenue, which is a lot. They can only prevent this by preventing "$10 with Stripe" from being there at all. (And if they did it with virtual credit cards, they'd have to tell users there's a 30% fee on each transaction)

Re: Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers

#455

Post by GuB-42 »

andrewinardeer wrote: post #20

I'm not an Apple enthusiast—my rarely used iPad mini is my only Apple device—but let me play devil’s advocate. If a company invests billions in R&D to create hardware and its integrated software, shouldn’t it have the right to control who or what interacts with it? Why should I be forced to open up the carefully designed ecosystem I’ve built? If my pitch is premium, high-speed hardware and intuitive software so user-…

It is complicated, but I think the big thing is that Apple is huge. Not a monopoly, but your may miss >50% of your potential revenue if you take the "other option" of not supporting the Apple ecosystem.

But in this case, I still think Apple has a point. It is not a lawsuit so that consumers can truly own their device, it is not about opening bootloaders and things like that. It is just about not paying the 30% tax to Apple. And while not an Apple fan myself, I understand the appeal of Apple controlling the ecosystem, and paying 30% more for it is not a big deal. By simply buying an Apple device, you show that you are ready to pay a premium for this, so paying a premium for software too seems fitting.

Proton has a point regarding ads though, but it can be seen the other way: maybe Apple should control the ad delivery service too and take its cut too. If Apple does it right, it could actually be a good thing for privacy.

I repeat that it is not what I want, I like being able to do what I want with my hardware, but I see the value in what Apple offers. In this case, let the courts decide.

Re: Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers

#456

Post by gilfoy »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #167
danaris wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is hopelessly exaggerated and bad-faith. First of all, when Apple created iMessage, there was no possible way for them to predict that friend groups would use it as a reason to treat members of their groups poorly due to using Android phones. Second of all, Apple did not deliberately make interacting with non-iMessage users in group chats "look like trash" in order to exclude them. Apple went out of its way to m…

http://theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375128/apple-imessage-android... >“iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” was Federighi’s concern according to the Epic filing. Among other statements. Apple was very aware of the social effects of iMessage, and leveraged it to force people into getting iphones. Tech companies have done lots of evil shit. But…

Your family being willing to isolate you and leave you out of conversations because it would slightly inconvenience them says more about you and them than it does about Apple. I downloaded WhatsApp to include random neighbors in our neighborhood group chat, and your family who has known your forever won’t do the same? Ever thought about why?

Re: Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers

#457

Post by rekoil »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #410
rekoil wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% agree with this. Apple should be allowed to put whatever restrictions they want on apps in the App Store. The problem is they don't allow apps to come from anywhere else, this is the core of the issue and what everything eventually comes down to. Make it possible for users to control their own app installation sources on the hardware they own, show them what is happening when they do so, that they are replacin…

One reason that I support alternative (non-Apple) app stores, is that it allows differentiation between mediocre and higher-Quality apps. You can get your clothes from Target or Saks Fifth Avenue. For most folks, Target is fine, but there are people that insist on paying $30 for every pair of skivvies. I think that they should have that choice. If they can afford it, then let them eat cake (for the record, I tend to…

> I’m a bit cynical on this, myself. I feel that Apple has been doing a great job of damaging their own brand, in the past few years. I feel as if the quality of their internal engineering has declined precipitously.

Agreed. The quality of Apples own software has declined, as has the outcome of app reviews, there's never been as much crap on the App Store as there is today.

And obviously Apple wants to "have their cake and eat it too", who doesn't? I'm just saying that this is the reason why they're being dragged to court now, because they aren't "playing fair" when they're acting as both store operator and store participant in multiple segments, and are acting as gatekeepers of software for literally hundreds of millions if not billions of devices now (congrats to them).

Re: Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers

#458

Post by onion2k »

microtherion wrote: post #449
dcow wrote: post #270

> Companies that monetize user data in exchange for “free” services that abuse your privacy aren’t affected by this [the app store tax], as they don’t process payments through the App Store. However, privacy-first companies that monetize through subscriptions are disproportionately hit by this fee, putting a major barrier toward the adoption of privacy-first business models. Huh. I’ve never seen it framed this way an…

Yes, in a way it's a rather good argument. But if you take it to its conclusion, if Apple finds it harder and harder to monetize the App Store through fees, then THEY might eventually decide to switch to privacy violating advertising as their revenue strategy.

At that point consumers would be free to make a choice to switch away from Apple if they value their privacy enough. The problem right now is that Apple is 'abusing' the fact that privacy-aware consumers are drawn to their platform to charge onerous fees to app developers. They're leveraging their (de facto) monopoly on high-end mobile privacy-aware devices to restrict competition in mobile app fee charging. It's that business practice that's wrong - having a monopoly is fine so long as you don't start using your monopoly position to make money from people who are your customers for some other business.

Microsoft fell foul of this in the early 2000s. It wasn't their monopoly on desktop PC OSs that lost them an anti-trust case. It was the fact they used their monopoly on Windows to push users into adopting IE. They abused their monopoly position. That's the problem.

Re: Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers

#459

Post by 8fingerlouie »

wredcoll wrote: post #231
8fingerlouie wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are other options out there. That's the catch-22, said ecosystem is what they want to use because it's considered "secure", but it's only considered secure because it's closed. It's the same with all the other stuff like frequent locations, photos, etc. It's a walled garden yes, but one that protects your data from bad actors (like Meta heisting whatever they can get their grubby little hands on), and the pri…

This continues to be a wild take. People aren't demanding that the app store host every application someone submits, they're asking for apple not to take a cut of things other people sell their own customers. Also, facebook can already be a "bad actor" right now, they just have to pay apple their 30%.

> People aren't demanding that the app store host every application someone submits, they're asking for apple not to take a cut of things other people sell their own customers

There are two scenarios to this (probably more)

1) A developer wants to use a 3rd party app store to distribute their apps, using 3rd party payment solutions. This is fine, it puts no load on Apple. That's what we've had in EU for a year or more, and truth be told, nobody uses 3rd party app stores. It's a desire that exists because vendors don't want to pay Apple 30%, users have no desire for it.

2) Which leads to the second scenario, where developers will want to publish their apps on the App Store, because that's where the users are, but still use 3rd party payment solutions, meaning Apple essentially hosts their apps for free.

Even after a year in EU, there are literally no users (and not many 3rd party app stores): AltStore has about 1.5 million users, Epic Games Store has about 29 million users across iOS and Android, so best case they're all iOS users, or worst case it's less than half. There are 450 million people living in the EU.

The Apple App Store is overwhelmingly dominant in EU, despite there being a free choice. So, which scenario do you think is most likely ? 1 or 2 ? The store where nobody shops, or the store where the users are, and developers wants to live rent free ?

> Also, facebook can already be a "bad actor" right now

Facebook, and later Meta has been involved in several "controversies" over the past decade or so, too many to be an accident.

In 2015-2018, people discovered that the Facebook app on Android had been collecting call logs and SMS metadata, presumably to help you connect with people you know, but it was being done without your consent.

in 2016-2020, there were rumors that Facebook listened on conversations using the iOS and Android microphones for use with targeted ads. Nothing was proved, but it was verified in 2019 that Facebook kept the camera active on iOS while you browsed the feed.

The Onavo VPN 2013-2019 (later Facebook Research) app collected various stuff like App usage stats, Web browsing, private messages and network activity on both iOS and Android, until the App was removed from Play Store and App Store in 2019.

Facebook also tracks your location, despite you disallowing this, by using background access, Photo EXIF data, and WiFi//bluetooth beacon.

All of the above were default on, without any informed consent, and the behavior of Meta (and others) are a large part of why both iOS and Android have severely hardened their cross application data access.

Re: Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers

#460

Post by robertlagrant »

whstl wrote: post #407
robertlagrant wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a lot of people seem to agree with me Apple have over a billion iPhones out there I believe, and your phrasing of "it's all of us vs just you" is really inappropriate - both from an argumentation perspective and probably a fact perspective too.

This phrasing is not the good representation of what I mean at all. And the fact that people have iPhones doesn't invalidate my assertion, also it doesn't affect my right to an opinion.

> also it doesn't affect my right to an opinion

No-one's saying you don't have a right to an opinion. Everyone has that right. It's bad faith to try and misrepresent what the person you're talking to is saying.

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