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Comment by kylehotchkiss | Hacker News Reader

Not trying to be an Apple fanboy here, but at least apple can generate revenue without resorting to something this low.

Guess they gotta make sure Mr. McAdam can earn his $18,000,000 check.

This has nothing to do with Apple vs. Google. It has more to do with Android being Open Source. So they modify Android + put the Google stuff on it (which Verizon is paying a fee for).

But it does. Follow the money - the consequences flow directly from the differing business models.

Verizon can't poison Apple's phones, because Apple profits by not selling out their customers.

Google benefits from surveilling their customers, so their OS is surveillance-friendly. By piggybacking on Google's purpose-built surveillance-friendly OS, Verizon's commonality of interest with Google benefits them.

The app store is Apple's way of selling out access to their customers, it just happens to be to developers instead of advertisers.

I use Android and iOS so I don't have a horse in the race, but it's disengenous to claim that Apple's business model makes it any more your device than Apple's.

App Store revenue is a drop in the bucket for Apple. The App Store's raison d'être is to drive more hardware sales.

That's not what apple tells shareholders:

http://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/17/02/01/see-how-app...

What does apple have to do with this?

Presumably that since Apple directly controls it's software updates, that this sort of thing doesn't occur on their platform.

Well, if you buy an unlocked phone, then it won't happen to you either. That's why I bought the Pixel from the Google Store and not through a carrier.

Are you sure? It seems like Android 6.0 and up has features to allow carriers to deploy code to devices with their SIM cards: https://source.android.com/devices/tech/config/carrier.html

I am honestly unsure of the limits on this feature.

It seems it just provides regular configuration stuff required for certain things. I guess they made this so that people get a good OOB experience when replacing sim cards etc.

They fought hard to create a platform where this type of thing doesn't/can't happen.

closed platforms FTW!

While we're getting a bit into "flame war" territory, it's hard to argue that the current iteration of Android is an "open platform"; practically speaking, most of the useful features of the OS are hidden in the (closed) Google Play Services. Yes, you can go for a custom ROM, but not on all devices and most people don't want to deal with the effort/UX downgrade.

IMO, it is very ignorant to think they are not getting the data from apple. They just have the ability to openly do it on their own with android.

What makes you think they're getting the data from Apple? The entire OS is sandboxed and siloed out the proverbial wazoo, and Apple is demonstrably a very pro-privacy company that doesn't allow most forms of carrier fuckery.

Apple has the power here. Verizon needs the iPhone on their network more than Apple needs to support Verizon as a carrier.

If you can demonstrate that, you could use that knowledge to make a ton of money in various ways.

If you can't, bluntly, you're blowing smoke.

Which is it?

The FBI paid $1 million to "get the data from apple", and that was a phone that was several generations of hardware and software security updates old. If you have a magical iPhone exploit, there are people who will pay you a lot of money.

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