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Comment by notgood | Hacker News Reader

"publication independence"? Really? The man who is famous among other things for supporting the most closed ecosystem there is around: iOS, where a single company decides what apps are worth publishing and wish ones doesn't. Or does newspaper publication independence is really that more important than software publication independence. The irony is so clear that it's weird that he didn't even mention it.

That genie is out of the box, when you decided that you didn't mind a company gatekeeping which software you can install on "your" devices you opened that can of worms, the one where any company can gatekeep anything they want as long as it is "convenient" for most people.

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>"publication independence"? Really? The man who is famous among other things for supporting the most closed ecosystem there is around: iOS, where a single company decides what apps are worth publishing and wish ones doesn't.

First of all, that's an ad hominem. If publication independence is important, then it remains important whether Gruber is hypocritical about it or not.

Second, one might want apps to be curated (for the better experience), but stand for independence from control and censorship when it comes to journalism and personal commentary.

And indeed, one can think that "newspaper publication independence" is really far more important than software publication independence. The main difference being of course that Apple controlling apps is a huge inconvenience to those being rejected, but not so much to the users (especially with 1.5 million other apps to chose from). Whereas someone controlling the news is bad for the readers.

>That genie is out of the box, when you decided that you didn't mind a company gatekeeping which software you can install on "your" devices you opened that can of worms, the one where any company can gatekeep anything they want as long as it is "convenient" for most people.

Actually there's nothing (no law of physics or history for example) to force someone being ok with the one (company control of its walled app store) to be ok with other (company controlling content publication). You can be angry and/or stop and/or speak against any combination of the two.

Pointing out a seeming contradiction in an advocate's advocacy is not an ad hominem.

But rebutting an argument by attacking the character of the person making it, is.

Ad hominem attacks are considered logical fallacies only when they're used instead of a dismantling someone's arguments. If they're not making a sound argument at all, yet they continue to make it, there's no way to argue the argument, the problem is a character defect - so attacking the character of the person is logical in that case and accepted in debate.

Not all people are good. And not all smart people argue logically.

>Ad hominem attacks are considered logical fallacies only when they're used instead of a dismantling someone's arguments.

Which is precisely the case here.

I don't think he is arguing against independence for publication. He is instead arguing against the app store restrictions on account that they are equivalent. It is not illogical to point out an hypocrasy if the point is that his own arguments should be more broadly applied. The tone was unnecessarily ad hominem but not the overall argument.

Yeah, my comment was a bit more emotional than required and ended up sounding like an ad hominem, but the overall point was that people (not just the author of the piece) vote with their wallet, and they voted that gatekeeping is OK; mostly they have been showing that "convenient"=OK regardless of how many privacy issues it rises or how much free speech could be affected.

Still, I understand the point of those who consider news publishing independence to be more important than software publishing independence. But I think they may be missing the bit of irony (regardless of AMP) that Google is still the search engine they use to find those news, Google may as well delete a full domain from their search results and make a site disappear into oblivion. But at least Google-search has been forced -in some cases- to keep some level of neutrality there. Apple is just freely deleting and adding whatever they want to iOS/App-store, with some of their apps having access to APIs no other app can (e.g. Safari), which is as monopolistic as software gets.

Having your central argument against his case focused on his personal contradiction, is:

  "That genie is out of the box, when you decided that you 
  didn't mind a company gatekeeping which software you can 
  install on "your" devices you opened that can of worms, the 
  one where any company can gatekeep anything they want as 
  long as it is "convenient" for most people."

Wikipedia agrees it's an ad hominen, but NOT fallacious (if true): "However, in some cases, ad hominem attacks can be non-fallacious; i.e., if the attack on the character of the person is directly tackling the argument itself. For example, if the truth of the argument relies on the truthfulness of the person making the argument—rather than known facts—then pointing out that the person has previously lied is not a fallacious argument." Lied and contradicted oneself are a close-enough match - but outright contradictions are rare; complex opinions and judgments common.

That central argument you're talking about doesn't look like it was aimed at Grubber's case. I don't see any disagreement with Gruber's post. I believe it's an attack against Gruber himself, that says the hypocritical bastard got it coming, and even shares some responsibility for advocating the brand that single handedly popularised that kind of lock down.

But it could be an argument from fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy

You're correct, technically. It's "tu quoque", which is arguably a more forgivable fallacy.

It's tu quoque. Not much better.

Ad hominem arguments are chiefly problematic in pure logical discourse. In normal human rhetoric, the reputation of the person making the argument often factors in to whether listeners view the argument as truthful. It's not a problem to point out things that reduce the impact of reputation on rhetoric.

Essentially, any time a public figure says something, there's an implicit, "I have been truthful before, I am being truthful now," leading the statement. If someone's opinions are self-inconsistent, it's important to know that one can discount that implied statement.

> First of all, that's an ad hominem. If publication independence is important, then it remains important whether Gruber is hypocritical about it or not.

I agree! It's a poison in the well lazy people use to discredit something they don't like without thinking about it.

However, in this particular instance it raises questions of whether or not Gruber is arguing in good faith. It lends credence to accusations that editorial independence might not be his overriding concern.

No, it doesn't. I don't even understand why you're making such an argument. What exactly are you implying is his secret concern?

>First of all, that's an ad hominem

Technically it's an argument from hypocrisy, more commonly known as "Tu Quoque".

Sorry, just get a bit anal about people confusing different fallacies because it makes it hard for some people to understand =P

Well, it is Gruber we are talking about. He believes in openness when it suits Apple - AMP outputs standard HTML5 which Safari renders - it does its own scrolling but he doesn't quite like it. Google doesn't 'respect' that closed platform. On that 'crime' Gruber has this to say - "If I had my way, Mobile Safari would refuse to render AMP pages."

You might have valid reasons not to use AMP but Gruber's are merely that he ends up sharing google.com URLs on twitter, it's Google, and it does its own scrolling on iOS.

AMP does NOT outperform HTML5 unless the HTML5 page is horribly designed and ridiculously bloated. But that can be fixed without Google's help.

I'm not sure why your dismissive of the scrolling thing. Having something breaks the feel of the web browser is a really bad idea.

Additionally he's completely right that it breaks other platform conventions that users expect to use. You can't use the share button, you can't tap at the top of the article to jump back to the top.

I can tell you as someone who uses mobile Safari, AMP is incredibly infuriating. It's gotten to the point where I actively avoid AMP search results.

Google has single-handedly broken the way it's search results feel for a number of top sites on iOS, and doesn't seem to care. Further, there is NO OPTION to turn it off.

I would LOVE to have a way to tell mobile Safari not to render the AMP version of the page. Then I could use Google easily again.

> AMP does NOT outperform HTML5 unless the HTML5 page is horribly designed and ridiculously bloated. But that can be fixed without Google's help.

And yet, noone cared enough to fix it until now. It's really really hard to sympathize with publishers when they brought this upon themselves by turning their pages into giant autoplaying video infested places.

If that's all Google truly cared about they could've simply put a heavy penalty on Pages that rendered slow or presented garbage.

Instead they invented their own thing which caused you to stay on Google sites using Google services to read other peoples content… and said they did it to speed things up.

It feels like that was either justification after the fact or that was with the original engineer had in mind but was not the point of the project once it got approved.

All those horrible infested pages? That's why I run an ad blockers, use RSS, and stopped reading a lot of sites. As every publisher got more and more aggressive other people were going to start doing it too. Eventually, I think it would've had an effect.

This feels a lot more like when Birders (or was it B&N?) outsourced their web sales to Amazon. Remember how well that went? Outsourcing a key part of your experience to another company it's a bad idea, especially if they like being in control of everything.

> If that's all Google truly cared about they could've simply put a heavy penalty on Pages that rendered slow or presented garbage.

There already is a penalty for slow-loading pages, but you make a good point that the penalty could be increased to the point where publishers would be forced to adapt accordingly. However, outside of the news ecosystem, that would end up penalizing a much larger base of content creators who don't have the means and infrastructure to handle this.

To say that "well users who have good content should also get their shit together" rings a bit hollow, especially on HN, where technical/deep/interesting articles get upvoted to the front page only to crash from the traffic. If authors of those articles/sites can't do it, then it's a problem for most folks.

I understand. But I don't know what else I'd want google to do other than turning up the penalty a lot. If there are pages that have to load slow for some reason then hopefully they're good enough to overcome that penalty. Or maybe they could choose to apply it only to news sites?

The problem is that Google took this in such and embrace-and-extend direction that seems to benefit them and give them a lot more power than they had before. And I already think Google is way too powerful.

Their solution annoys me and creeps me out more than the problem did. By a large factor. I don't like them being so deeply involved at this kind of level. If they are going to do something, I can't think of something I would like for them to do other than just tuning the penalty.

If you increase the penalty you also increase the artifacts from measuring the speed. Should it measure first byte, content above the screen size (and which size then), or fully loaded site. What about lazy load which neither method represent when a site is usable, but rather at what point javascript takes over the responsibility to load the site.

A small penalty devalues gaming the way google measure the speed.

This penalty also can have negative consequences on image quality on websites.

I had to worsen JPEG image quality to get good score for a website in Google's PageSpeed tools [1] because our management believes it affects search rankings.

That tool is awful. I would never follow Google's recommendations on my own site. The compressed versions of images it suggests one should use have visible artifacts.

[1] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

> However, outside of the news ecosystem, that would end up penalizing a much larger base of content creators who don't have the means and infrastructure to handle this.

AMP does the same thing. Many sites don't have resources to convert their content to AMP pages and they will get worse positions in search results.

But by favoring websites that support AMP, isn't Google already "penalizing a much larger base of content creators who don't have the means and infrastructure to handle this"?

Exactly... Saying that it's "technically possible to fix all performance issues" is like saying that it's "technically possible to write your script in C instead of Python".

Sure it is, but no one has been doing it and if it wasn't for AMP, it would've stayed a slow hell for users, if not getting even worse. If you've got a better suggestion to motivate all these news sites to spend thousands rewriting their website from scratch and optimizing it, go for it. But right now, this is the best we've got.

It's not perfect, but it has actually been making huge strides in solving common issues over the past year.

See what I wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14384560

You say it's been solving problems, but for me it's only been causing them. It's made it significantly harder to use Google search on iOS. Also the slow pages? Reader mode on safari has worked fantastically on them for years. Slow pages wasn't even a problem for me because of reader mode. Not only were they faster they were also easier to read because they didn't have crazy styling applied to them.

I kind of wonder if this whole thing is an accidental android/iOS litmus test. People who use android don't seem to have problems with it because the experience sounds good there.

That's NOT my experience using Mobile Safari. I have a literally considered switching my search engine over it. I've dug through all the Google account settings looking for a way to turn it off. If someone put some sort of content blocker in the App Store that would disable AMP? I buy it in a heartbeat.

> It's made it significantly harder to use Google search on iOS.

Works well enough on Android Chrome. Irony is, AMP, Android, Chrome and Google Search are all Alphabet (Google) products. I am personally all for platform portability, but certainly it's been Apple who have been pushing for One Closed Ecosystem since the introduction of iPhone, and Apple users have been very happy about it and playing down the vendor lock-in issue - some even as far as claiming it desirable that The One Benevolent Vendor control everything (note that real Chrome is not available on App Store simply because Apple has decided that iOS users should only use the Safari rendering engine!)

Now that there's a shard in the walled garden, another player seemingly using the very same tactics as Apple, it's frustrating to see the same users complain about how much it sucks to be disenfranchised from modern computing because they use a different vendor - only this time Apple is the "other" vendor.

Should Google succeed to marginalize iOS (assuming this is intentional and not just a bug in Safari), I bet many of these folks will soon be writing about how great it's that Google controls everything, how Material embodies the latest hip in UX and how the new Pixel has become so integral to their daily life.

> Now that there's a shard in the walled garden, another player seemingly using the very same tactics as Apple, it's frustrating to see the same users complain about how much it sucks to be disenfranchised from modern computing because they use a different vendor - only this time Apple is the "other" vendor.

I don't think they're actually are a lot of Apple fan is claiming that the one benevolent company should control everything as you posited earlier your post.

I'll also tell you this: I was an Apple user long ago. I would back to the platform in the early 2000's, years before the iPhone came out. I distinctly remember what it was like to be on the minority platform that no one bothered to support. In many ways, OS X is still like that today.

I don't think you'll get a bunch of people switching over to the "winning" side and claiming google is better just because it's "winning".

I see a lot of problems with what they're doing, outside of simple issues of my personal taste.

Also, you can complain about whatever you don't like about Apple, but they NEVER tried to break the web. If anything they did a huge service by making a browser that was not IE6 extremely important and drastically hastening the demise of flash.

Google can do whatever it wants on android, my problem is that they can use the web to force people into the rest of their ecosystem that's removing the one big open thing that made it possible to use Apple computers back in the "bad old days" of having a little software. By the mid to thousands people use the Internet enough that switching to a Mac wasn't a big deal because so much of what you wanted to do involve the web browser. If google "fixes" that, they now have a very heavy hand over all of computing .

> I don't think they're actually are a lot of Apple fan is claiming that the one benevolent company should control everything as you posited earlier your post.

Not of course directly, as that would sound obviously fanatical, but the walled garden is almost universally cited as the "best thing" about iOS compared to more open platforms like Android.

This recent article in MacWorld invokes it at least five times, saying it makes iPhone more secure, more private, more user-friendly, more uniform, more polished etc:

http://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/iphone/iphone-vs-android-5...

Those are all magnificent adjectives, and unquestionably makes the Apple user's life great. (And surely then, if Google wants to make life great for Android users, they are perfectly entailed to it as well.)

But from 3rd party developer's perspective, I can assure the more open platform is better. Google is enhancing the experience for stock Android users, but if you don't like it you can write and publish a competing search engine or browser. On iOS, you don't have a chance to replace the browser, and I bet had Apple actually developed a search engine of their own, like Microsoft with Bing, you'd never been even able to use Google on an iPhone..

> But from 3rd party developer's perspective, I can assure the more open platform is better.

I'm not sure that follows.

But anyway, if being more open is a good thing then Google purposefully trying to shove everyone into their various products and ecosystems seems precisely the opposite of "open" to me.

I was never really a big fan of chrome but when you Google released it and the web started getting a lot better that was fine with me, it was even nice. Same thing with many of the other things they've done.

Now it seems to me like they often try and corral or cajole users into using other parts of their ecosystem by making other people stuff broken in unnecessary ways when you try and use one of their "open" products. It's starting to look very 90s Microsoft to me with a different spin on it. And that worries me. And they're big enough/powerful enough that they can get pretty far and do a lot of damage before it becomes extremely obvious to a lot of people.

Certainly Google is not any less brutal corporation to Apple once afforded a monopoly, as the AMP case shows.

> I don't think they're actually are a lot of Apple fan is claiming that the one benevolent company should control everything as you posited earlier your post.

True, of course. But I think many like the fact that Apple is not an advertising company, that Apple has a transparent business model, that Apple (for now) defends its users' privacy.

They said AMP outputs HTML5, not outperforms it.

Oh. I guess I just read it that way because I'm used to people saying that AMP is much faster than HTML five (and given a horribly bloated page it is).

What else would it output?

Obviously its not a third party native plugin, so it should output some kind of HTML5 content to play in browsers, even if it was just a canvas view.

I have to admit, I've been on iOS for years and only ever use Safari for browsing, and NEVER had I heard about this tap the top bar to scroll to the top behavior.

I use it constantly, it works across almost all apps in iOS.

Its literally the behavior for 99% of scroll bars across iOS. I don't know how you made it this far without it, it's in almost every application.

It's not something developers have to implement so only if you are rolling your own UIScrollView/UITableView components would you have to worry about it.

Also it's been there since iOS 1.0 so quite a while now.

It's one of the standard iOS gestures and works nearly everywhere.

iOS is FULL of handy little things like that, but I'm not sure many of them are ever explained. You just have to stumble across it or read about it somewhere like reviews of the new versions of iOS.

Did you know in mail (and many other places) you can swipe table rows left or right for quick actions? Marco Arment recently changed Overcast to make features more visible because it seems many people, including power users, weren't even aware that gesture existed.

Now that I have an iPhone 7 re force-touch stuff can be very handy. But I forget it exists for weeks on end because I went so many years without it and it's totally hidden.

Another nice gesture that's lesser known is hold down on the left side of the screen in any app then drag to the right to open the app switcher.

That's one of the new force press gestures that came around in the 6S. It really is useful, but I'm having trouble getting over almost 10 years of muscle memory that no such gesture existed.

Plus it's a bit fiddly.

> Marco Arment recently changed Overcast to make features more visible because it seems many people, including power users, weren't even aware that gesture existed.

So that's what that was all about. I noticed the changes because for me they reduced the usability of Overcast massively. The features I used the most were resuming the current podcast, playing a different podcast, and setting a sleep timer. All of these things now take double the taps they did before, with much smaller controls that are hard to hit in the car. You tap a podcast and some miscellaneous options jump out. Ugh, when I tap a podcast I want it to open and start playing! The sleep timer durations move around, so it takes 7 presses and some squinting to set a 25-minute timer. By this time my retinas are seared because the UI for that is white even in night mode.

I know full well about swiping in tables and I'd love the old behaviour to be an option. The author could probably make some good coin by making it available as an IAP.

"Horribly designed and ridiculously bloated" describes the majority of popular websites. If companies won't fix their shit, somebody else will come along and do it for them.

Or Google do things the right way, ad could start punishing them instead. Google pushes those to the top of results, and then sweeps in to fix the "problem" that they created

AMP is HTML5, so by definition it cannot outperform it. It is just the web. That is a feature.

> AMP does NOT outperform HTML5 unless the HTML5 page is horribly designed and ridiculously bloated. But that can be fixed without Google's help.

My personal experience demonstrates that the latter statement is not the case. People are indeed not making performant HTML5 without Google's help. It might be physically possible, but it's not actually happening.

"...it does its own scrolling but he doesn't quite like it."

Nothing should be doing its own scrolling. Everything should let the native scroll do its thing. Computers work for me and should work the way I expect. I expect the default native scroll.

See comment below. Soon all pages will scroll like AMP. It is just overflow scrolling, and Apple decided to make that the standard.

With respect to scrolling: We (AMP team) filed a bug with Apple about that (we didn't implement scrolling ourselves, just use a div with overflow). We asked to make the scroll inertia for that case the same as the normal scrolling.

Apple's response was (surprisingly) to make the default scrolling like the overflow scrolling. So, with the next Safari release all pages will scroll like AMP pages. Hope Gruber is happy then :)

I actually had never noticed that it was possible to scroll with AMP because it's different from the way it normally should work. So, yes I think the scrolling issue is a real issue.

So, whenever I've seen AMP, I've just clicked on the link to get the hell out of it.

> Or does newspaper publication independence is really that more important than software publication independence

Well, yes. It really is.

Err… No?

Software is ubiquitous now, and that tend to make it more important than basically everything else. It is also a means of expression (not the only one of course, but still). Finally, how software is build can alter how you read the news (start with profanity filters, then block Tienanmen or something).

The key difference is that there are alternatives to iOS, which isn't even a majority share of the market.

Google, by contrast, has a far larger share of the search engine market than Apple has of the mobile device market. That means it's more of a concern by default.

Then Apple should make their own search engine...

I suppose Apple could modify Safari to skip through AMP pages and go to the original source.

That requires releasing new versions of iOS. Google can work around that way faster than Apple can try to play catch-up. It's a losing battle.

It doesn't require it, except that Apple has failed to decouple Safari from iOS, and so it can't be updated like regular apps.

Apple has certain things that they can push any time, such as the lists that safari looks at to find out if websites are dangerous or some of the security stuff they have.

However they ship it, they'd still be in an arms race against google to keep AMP pages hidden from Safari users. That doesn't seem like a productive use of anyone's time.

I think encrypted.google.com doesn't use AMP yet, so they could make that the default search

Except iOS is a captive market. Once you have owners of i-devices, switching requries capital investment and time moving to an alternate platform. You can exploit them heavily before they start leaving.

If we are talking about search, you can stop using google by typing bing.com or duckduckgo.com in your url bar any time you want, and every major browser supports changing the default search engine, even Chrome.

While I get your point, your rebuttal is a pretty hardcore ad hominem.

It's not a rebuttal - he's not trying to say Scott is wrong. He's pointing out Scott is a hypocrite. An insult is not an instance of the ad hominem fallacy.

>He's pointing out Scott is a hypocrite.

Gruber, not Scott. He's not talking about the original writer, but for the guy that quoted him.

He is arguing against Johns stance on AMP by calling him a hypocrite citing his views on iOS, literally a perfect example of an ad hominem.

> "the cat is out of the bag".

This is where he says his argument is rubbish because he supports iOS.

Dismiss someone's position on one terrible thing because they hold a position you disagree about on a different topic.

Seems legit.

It's a shame you hijacked this thread with a critique of Gruber. There's no good argument that AMP is anything but a bad thing for publishers, and that has nothing to do with Gruber's support for Apple's approach to iOS.

This does not address the argument at all. Pretend someone else made it, if Gruber bugs you.

Whataboutism is just as distasteful here as it is when Fox News does it.

I wish there was a big red “I know what I'm doing” button on iOS that allowed the user to download and install a binary from a simple web page.

But technically, you can download the source and/or write your own code, compile and install on your iOS device without jailbreaking or going through the AppStore. It's a hassle, sure, but doable.

As I understand it, you can only do that by registering yourself to Apple, and paying them $100 for the privilege.

Nope, pretty sure you can do it with a free account

Correct, but your self compiled app will only work for 7 days on your own device. And than you have to recompile and reinstall. Unless you pay the $100

Didn't know the 7 days thing, thanks. Even more of a hassle then.

That's actually no longer true, you need to join the free dev program, but can publish to your own device without paying $100/year. The $100 is only needed for the App Store now.

Well, as long as you're willing to reinstall your app every 7 days. Otherwise, you must remit the Software Development Tax.

Not anymore. You can deploy to your own device for free (with an Apple ID): https://developer.apple.com/support/compare-memberships/ (scroll to the bottom).

The app will run only for 7 days

I understand the impulse, but so many security issues happen to people because they're tricked into running things… I can't help but think that this would cause a dramatic rise in the number of security issues on iOS.

Security isn't everything.

Remember what happened just over a week ago to the NHS and all sorts of other computers?

Security is becoming EXTREMELY important, although it was already pretty important.

Apples very strict (occasionally draconian) app model on iOS is one of the reasons it has so few problems with the software destroying the system or viruses or other such things. There's a reason Microsoft is eyeing it jealously for Windows. That kind of heavy sandboxing makes exploit much much more difficult.

The appstore-only policy is probably what has kept iOS from having any noteworthy large outbreak of malware. Unfortunately, the Darwin kernel as well as the various iOS frameworks have huge glaring security vulnerabilities patched in every minor update. A free-for-all unvetted code-exec option would open the floodgates for deceptive downloads and compromised iOS devices.

Of course, it also makes good business sense for both Apple and third party developers as it keeps piracy to a minimum (though I'm sure a subset of 3rd party developers might find skipping the 30% Apple cut valuable)

noteworthy large outbreak of malware

Depends on how you define noteworthy and large. The xcode backdoor thing was in 500.000.000 downloads.

The xcode backdoor thing could have been much worse if iOS allowed sideloading for regular users. With the centralized appstore, most users having installed backdoored builds would be auto-updated to clean builds, current backdoored builds would be removed from sale, and new backdoored builds are likely to be blocked during uploads to itunesconnect/app review.

Also, don't forget the whole xcode backdoor fiasco happened because people were installing side-loaded xcode distributions instead of getting it from the mac store. So even where sideloading is and should remain allowed - on the mac - people will click big red "I know what I'm doing" buttons without knowing what they're doing. And that's for people who really should know what they're doing - developers!

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