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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

We all love Google's products but your comment is needlessly emotional.

Google is not charity, it's always good to remember that.

Google is not giving away the source code of Android for philanthropic reasons, it's just part of the business model, i.e. the process of money making to pay the employees and the shareholders.

Oh and Apple is definitely not putting arbitrary restrictions to anything, all the restrictions have a reason - that you might or might not agree to but definitely not random. In case you want to bypass Apple and run a code on your iPhone, you can do it by compiling it and installing it personally.

I think EU will investigate the companies that have large enough marketshare that they can abuse their position.

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>Google is not giving away the source code of Android for philanthropic reasons, it's just part of the business model, i.e. the process of money making to pay the employees and the shareholders.

They're also "giving away" a smaller and smaller fraction of Android with each release. This article is four years old, but quite relevant: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on... A non-exclusive list of Android apps that are no longer open source: Camera, Gallery, Keyboard, Music.

In order to include any Google apps or use the Android trademark, you are required to include almost all Google apps and make no other apps default. Further, Google makes it substantially easier to license their apps if you join the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), which contractually prohibits you from building non-Google approved devices.

I agree with some of your critique, but I also think you are giving Apple a little too much credit. Yes you can compile and install your own software, but AFAIK, you have to pay a yearly fee for the privilege of doing so. This isn't nearly as open as Android phones, where it is a simple matter of checking a box.

I definitely agree with you that Google isn't giving away the code for philanthropic reasons, though. I can't really feel bad for them for having to incentivize handset makers to do things that make Google even more money.

> AFAIK, you have to pay a yearly fee for the privilege of doing so.

That hasn't been the case for a number of years. As long as you have a Mac, you can download Xcode for free, compile an app, and sync it over to your iOS device.

Super simple to do as an end user, for sure.

Your average end user who requires things to be simple is never going to install their own apps outside the approved, simple channels.

There are multiple thriving app stores in the global android market

I’ll take one App Store over many anyday if it severely lessons the chance of getting malware.

Would you also take one news source over many if it lessens the chance of seeing "fake news"?

Would you take one false equivalency over another if it lessens the chance of an "ironic reply"?

Choosing your app store and choosing your news source aren't equivalent, but they're both desirable (for related reasons).

> Would you also take one news source over many if it lessens the chance of seeing "fake news"?

Yes. This is why, every morning, I first get my news from trusted sources.

Who picks those sources - you or your phone's operating system vendor?

You are not replying to my meaning or intention. The context of the discussion was clear. You’ve taken it in a wholly different direction.

Needing a Mac is an extra expense in itself. I fail to see much difference.

Sure. A company doesn't choose to spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per year to port their development tools to a third-party platform.

I'm sure if they believed they would get more & higher quality developers to build apps by doing so, they already would have.

Makes since, especially since Windows historically hasn't done the same for Visual Studio / C# (I know they're supposedly trying now or planning to but I confess I haven't followed along closely enough to determine if it's cancelled, delayed, or the scope was actually smaller than full dot net + c# support).

> Yes you can compile and install your own software, but AFAIK, you have to pay a yearly fee for the privilege of doing so.

While this was true in the past, this hasn't been the case for a while if you want to build and run on your own personal device. There are some minor caveats, but if you want to compile and run an app locally on your device you don't need to pay Apple the $99 any more.

The idea that the version of Android that most people actually use is "open" is arguably a myth - when you look at what the "closed" parts of Android now include, it's a large amount of the feature set that actually matters to most ordinary consumers, and is often the "stick" Google uses to get OEM partners to follow the overarching vision for the platform.

This is only true if you're fine with reinstalling the side-loaded app every week. This is a pretty major caveat imo. If you want the app to stay on your device past a week you need to buy the paid Apple Developer subscription.

I keep reading this but my experience is different: I have built and installed two applications on my iPhone more than a month ago and they still run just fine. I didn't have to re-install them every week.

My paid developer subscription expired two years ago. I suffer from all restrictions of the free tier (can't publish to App Store, can't use StoreKit, SiriKit, etc) except for the need to re-install the app every week.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Could other people confirm/deny the claims in this comment thread?

> There are some minor caveats

One of the "minor caveats" is that the app only runs on your own device for max 1 week, after which it will have to be reinstalled via Xcode.

Which basically makes this useless even if all you wanted to do was run your own code on your own device. I have tried this for small apps I made for myself, but after re-installing 2-3 times, the annoyance was too high for me to continue.

In contrast, and while I am way more experienced and comfortable with the Apple SDKs/dev environment, deploying a small app that I built for my wife was ridiculously easy, and continues to run fine without me touching it for more than a year now.

>Yes you can compile and install your own software, but AFAIK, you have to pay a yearly fee for the privilege of doing so

Yes. And you have to own one of their overpriced computers too.

Not necessarily. There are third-party tools (such as Cydia Impactor) that are cross-platform.

You don’t need to pay a fee but you do need a Mac.

Oh for goodness sake, go and get yourself a GNU Stallmanphone or whatever along with the other five or six owners and leave the rest of the world alone. What the heck did Apple ever do to you?

Hilariously enough, your comment only makes sense if you assume that everyone else is as pathetically and irrationally emotionally invested in their consumer choices as you clearly are. It's entirely possible to complain about one of the downsides of apple's approach without thinking being an extremist on the position of consumer control of their computing devices.

For example, I use Ubuntu instead of eg Windows; someone as simple-minded as you could make the exact same complaint: "why don't you go compile Linux from scratch and leave the normal people alone".

But this would be missing the part of the picture where eg I chose Ubuntu over Debian because the small extra hassle of Debian's extra commitment to free software means not being able to do things out of the box like use certain codecs.

People are capable of choosing different points on the spectrum of convenience vs controlled solutions, and those of us who aren't incredibly immature are able to discuss their pros and cons without turning everything into a holy war.

> What the heck did Apple ever do to you?

Jeez, this part is just embarrassing.

> your comment only makes sense if you assume that everyone else is as pathetically and irrationally emotionally invested in their consumer choices as you clearly are...this part is just embarrassing

Your comment is stronger without this.

Look, I agree with you to some degree, and I'm sorry that you got downvoted for simply calling for being nicer.

But if my comment was simply "here's why you're technically not correct, easy mistake to make", it wouldn't quite be communicating the same thing. Namely, what a low opinion I have of turning every discussion into a fight, and how damaging I think it is to discourse of any kind (and without even including the actual rebuttal! The comment was 100% insults). I appreciate the feedback, but I'm not sure I agree that my comment would be stronger. If anything, it would be legitimizing ss part of the conversation a comment with no substance except broad, irrelevant insults.

Hmm, I just find it frustrating when posts imply that one company or other, Apple, Google, etc is somehow cheating just simply by being better at something than everyone else. And yes I know there are some sharp and anticompetitive practices out there, but just being good isn’t anticompetitive.

If Apple computers were overpriced, they wouldn’t sell. Why is it strange that you’d need and Apple device running Apple software to develop software for other Apple devices? Isn’t that sort of expected? Should Apple be required by law or even moral imperative to port all their development tools, libraries and services to other operating systems? Why? Yet it’s somehow a terrible injustice that you can’t write iOS apps on Windows it Linux it Solaris or VMS or whatever.

It’s just funny how someone can look at the millions of happy Apple users and successful app developers and lose their shit over it. Move on with your life. Other people being happy and enjoying and thriving on something shouldn’t take away any of your fun.

Sorry you're getting downvoted to oblivion.

These types of comments belong on reddit, not HN.

Really tired of this argument. Do you really expect to do software development with little to no investment in software and hardware? Even if you are just developing for Android you need to buy a PC and an Android device. If you want to test Android software on a PC be prepared to spend money to get a machine powerful enough to run Android emulators at a tolerable speed.

This a bit of a ridiculous response. If I'm developing for Android I can use a PC of my choice using Windows, Mac or Linux. Android emulators run acceptably fast with KVM even on low end PCs.

I have no interest in Mac hardware, it is stupidly overpriced for what it offers and what I need it to; and what I need it for it's bad at: Running Linux well.

But guess what? I can still actually _run_ that android development environment on any damn machine I want to.

Why would you be 'really tired of this argument'? It is a verifiable _fact_ that Apple requires you to own one of _their_ PCs in order to develop IOS apps. I can't use a Lenovo. I can't use a Dell. I can't use an iBuyPower gaming laptop that blows the specs of their shiny Macbook Pro out of the water. You see the problem? You have no actual _choice_ with your development machine when developing IOS apps.

There is no 'argument'. That is just how it is. And it keeps vast quantities of people that _might_ develop quality IOS apps out of their ecosystem.

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