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Apple blocks Google from running its internal iOS apps

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Re: Apple blocks Google from running its internal iOS apps

#521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple should not have the right to enforce those conditions to begin with. Same as they should not be allowed to kick out apps from their whole platform on a whim. Inacceptable. Such a company should not be allowed to do business in EU. Much worse than what happened with Microsoft in the 90ties.

>> Apple should not have the right to enforce those conditions to begin with Apple is not a state-owned company. They can do whatever they like, and you can choose to support them by purchasing their stock and/or their products. You can choose not to support them by purchasing neither their stock or their products. There are several federal and state laws that define what they "can not do", and this isn't one of them…

> They can do whatever they like

Thats not really true. There are a multitude of anti monopoly laws and consumer protections that may apply to Apple's actions.

> Why should a business owner(s) "not have the right" to run their business any way they see fit

Because one company having too much market power, and being in an oligopoly type situation is bad.

Because we have consumer protection laws for a reason.

Because when a consumer buys a device, they have the legal right to do whatever the heck they want with it, and Apple tried, and failed, to sue consumers for doing things to devices that the consumer owns.

The courts have sided quite a few times in favor of consumers, regarding how they have the legal right to do what they want with devices that they own.

And if the current laws don't 100% cover this situation that we are in right now, then hopefully the law will be reinterpreted to apply to it.

But even beyond that, it makes perfect sense to criticize, and retaliate against, companies that hurt consumers, and try to take away their rights.

Apple is a chief offending, in just how many bad things that they have done, to try to take away consumer's legal rights to doing what they want with devices that the consumer owns. They tried, and failed, to sue people. This deserves to be criticized, and retailiated against.

Re: Apple blocks Google from running its internal iOS apps

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what kind of "in-depth control" you're referencing. This change did nothing to individual phones. This simply prevents two organizations from deploying applications to phones with specific certificates. That's all.

They can control what happens on your phones and affect what apps can and cannot run. That's rather invasive.

No, they can control what applications are allowed on their app store and control how the OS they distribute runs. Aside from those two things they can't really force anything that you haven't already allowed, or continue to operate.

Apple can't physically confiscate the phone or the data that you put onto it's hard drive (not talking about iCloud). It's yours. You can put linux on your iPhone if you want and there is nothing Apple can do about it.

Re: Apple blocks Google from running its internal iOS apps

#523
post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's absolutely nothing anti-competitive about this from a legal standpoint whatsoever.

Apple completely forbidding the availability of certain types of software on their devices from third party developers? Not anticompetitive? Although sure, in this particular case it wasn't because of the type of app, but it still has the same effect because certain apps ARE forbidden from the store, and this does indeed mean that nobody can effectively offer such apps because of Apple's rules There's no actual legal…

Nothing about this maneuver has caused people to be forbidden from installing apps on their own devices.

A convenient and inexpensive mechanism for installing apps to lots of other people’s devices has, however, been revoked.

Re: Apple blocks Google from running its internal iOS apps

#524
post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong, you're just in the wrong place. Apple is the sysadmin and the phone holders are the users. They WANT apple looking out for them. Anyone who says otherwise stupidly wasted $1000 when they could have bought any number of unlockable devices for that money. I say this with an unlocked and de-googled android phone next to me, and several hacked arm devices at home. I OWN THEM, with no doubt, so I agree w…

Is this true of people who voluntarily signed up to be paid for data collection? It's like saying that Nielsen panelists need to be protected from Nielsen by Vizio. (Insert standard caveat about the degree to which kids' autonomy is in the hands of their parents).

It's funny you should mention Nielsen, I did a bit of digging and found these very familiar-looking installation instructions: http://www.arbitron.com/research/installhelp/install_ios9_en...

Re: Apple blocks Google from running its internal iOS apps

#525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it doesn't sit well with me that Apple yields so much power on what software their phones can run after it sells them At the end of the day, you can compile and run anything on your machine. This is just regulating distribution. Given the specific breaches at hand by Facebook and Google, a balance seems to have been found (acceptable to most users) between freedom and security.

Please correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t this change retroactively prevent installed apps signed with the enterprise license from running on iOS devices?

If the article is correct, you are correct. The article seems quite clear this was about already installed apps that stopped working because Apple revoked their certificate.

Re: Apple blocks Google from running its internal iOS apps

#526
post #21
post #4

I don't want to pass judgment on whether Google (or in the previous case, Facebook) was in the wrong, but it doesn't sit well with me that Apple wields so much power on what software their phones can run after it sells them. You may very well think that they're using their power sparingly and benevolently, but who is to say that will be the case next time around?

I used to feel that way, and I used Android for years for that reason. But since switching to an iPhone, I've found that what I really want from my phone is not a totally open platform, but a tool that's simple, secure, and effective. Something I don't have to mess with, something I can trust to do its job and respect my privacy and be pleasant to interact with. They tried going that direction a bit with macOS when t…

> I used to feel that way, and I used Android for years for that reason. But since switching to an iPhone, I've found that what I really want from my phone is not a totally open platform, but a tool that's simple, secure, and effective

The problem with that is that the nature of the issue is that it doesn't matter to you ... until it does. Like freedom of speech - you will never notice that your government is censoring you until you have a controversial viewpoint. And then it will matter. But all the people without those viewpoints will still wander around saying they can't see what all the fuss is about freedom of speech. This is intrinsically a problem you have to care about in advance of when you need it.

Re: Apple blocks Google from running its internal iOS apps

#527
On the one hand it sounds like it was legitimate enforcement of their policies. On the other hand, it might be stupid for Apple to do it because it highlights that they are running a walled garden and any fortune 500 could - rightly or wrongly - find their line of business application shut down arbitrarily by Apple on any given day. Who wants to be in that position?

Re: Apple blocks Google from running its internal iOS apps

#528
post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if Apple bought Duckduckgo?

Then they still need to build a search engine, DuckDuckGo is just a proxy for google.

No it's not. If anything it's a proxy for Bing, but that's one of many data sources[0] (another of which being DDG's own crawler[1]). I'm not aware of Google actually being one of those data sources; you might be thinking of StartPage, which is a proxy for Google.

[0]: https://duck.co/help/results/sources

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot

Re: Apple blocks Google from running its internal iOS apps

#530
post #214

Let’s say you’re using a Google API like Maps, and you violate terms by snapshotting sections of their maps and storing them on your severs so you can serve static maps without making API calls. They’d shut down your API access immediately Google and Facebook both knew the terms. They both knew that the Enterprise Distribution Program was for internal use only. They still put ads out in the wild to recruit regular co…

Because lots of people still think that if you own a piece of hardware, you should be able to run whatever code you want on it.

Correct. Unfortunately for this argument, Google also disagrees with those people, so there's a certain degree of difficulty inherent to it.
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