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Comment by brenden2 | Hacker News Reader

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brenden2

If you think it's unfair, don't use it.

As long as people keep using Apple's products and platforms, they will do what they do.

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> If you think it's unfair, don't use it.

This is tired “advice” and does nothing to help developers, who have little control over what their users use.

Everyone has complete control over what they do with their own lives. People should focus more on that, and spend less time writing long winded articles about what other people do. Worrying about what other people do is the path to insanity. Just my 2 cents.

> Everyone has complete control over what they do with their own lives.

No, as I just mentioned.

You are not being forced to use those platforms. There are other ways to be a developer. They may not be convenient for you but that's a different problem. I know pivoting your skillset can be hard but it's an option that is always available to you.

It’s more than just inconvenience. If Apple can be protectionist about its Apple store than the developers can be protectionist of their skills and careers as developers on the Apple platform.

>the developers can be protectionist of their skills and careers as developers on the Apple platform.

Legally, no, they cannot. Apple owns 100% of the platform and the developers own 0%. I would not bank on this changing any time soon.

What legal standing is preventing someone from posting “Apples treatment of Developers is neither fair nor consistent”????

I agree that it's not fair or consistent but saying that alone means nothing. For any impact, action must be taken on those words: you can use legal means to try and change their behavior like Spotify did, you can negotiate like Amazon did, you can apply pressure by trashing them in the press like Epic did, you can attempt to circumvent the app store fees using various measures, you can leave for a different platform. Or you can apply some combination of any of these. Which one is the least expensive is entirely dependent on your situation. The reason why I spoke of the last option initially is that for the average individual developer your only real immediate action is to leave, everything else is collective in nature.

This is naive and childish maxim as argument.

As far as I know it’s an important realization in Buddhist practice, maybe it deserves a second thought. Or at least a valid refutation, instead of an opinion such as this one.

> Or at least a valid refutation

Except that it isn't. While it's also technically true that we could all decide to live in the forest tomorrow and refuse to be part of the world, what do you think is the likelihood of that?

Real problems require real solutions, not back of the hand pontificating about how all choices are 100% free and just choose not to you lazy bastard.

A real argument would recognize the complexity rather than act like it doesn't exist.

We’re not talking about living in the woods. We’re talking about a small segment of developers who feel entitled to benefit from Apple’s products and also set their terms while they are at it. I think people that think this way also ignore complexities at play, which you bring up and I agree exist.

The post that kicked off this chain made the point that you can choose not to develop on Apple platforms. I think it’s a mistake to conflate “first-world” decisions like which platforms or languages to use, or market segmentation or where we can make the most money the quickest with hockey stick growth to please our VC investors, with “third-world” lifestyles or asceticism.

As though if one doesn’t develop on Apple tech, they may as well wander off into the woods? We should check our privilege here.

This kind of statement always comes with the underlying assumption that Apple is where it is without any kind of artificial crutch, and likewise the developers should suck it up and show their own rugged individualism in dealing with the problem.

In reality a company like Apple depend on tomes of rules and government enforcement to defend its fortune. Rules that are themselves an artificial construct that it and its peers have championed and lobbied for. Rules that give legal backing and physical force to its contracts, relationships with suppliers, IP, that together allow an artificially restricted system like the App Store to even exist.

To suggest that individuals then cannot petition to have some additional restrictions put in to provide some balance is disingenuous and will only maintain and encourage systems like this in the future.

That's one approach, however it's hard to just exclude oneself out of the one of the two large mobile phone application stores, through which apps must be installed and sold (at least if you're going to make a living as an app developer.) Monopolies and duopolies have disproportionate power.

Even if mostly ineffective, there's some value in protesting a corporations inconsiderate actions. At the very least, it reveals a potential market opportunity for an eventual competitor (as hard as it'd be for anyone else to unseat Apple and Google at this point.)

Except that on hardware that's so worshipped and recommended to everyone here in HN you cannot do that at all: on iOS devices, presumably the future of computing, you cannot build a product doesn't pay tax to Apple and isn't approved by their censors.

Well there is the web loophole.

Safari on iOS is significantly crippled when it comes to building apps and Apple has been adding more restrictions lately.

Note that you're not allowed to use something like opensource Firefox on that platform either.

People are free to come up with other ways to make devices that are malware resistant.

>Apple has been adding more restrictions lately

Apart from long term storage, what restrictions have been added?

In the age of big tech where there no more than a handful of legitimate competitors in a lot of areas this just isn't practical

the problem is that Apple, Google, Facebook, Uber understand pretty well how to play the game dirty. Normal consumers get a nice experience when they use their services. They are 99% of the people and are happy enough. The (smaller) content creators and developers who are in the absolute minority are treated like shit. Big tech doesn't give a single F#$k about any of those. And normal consumers on average do not care about implicit negative consequences for others when using/buying services. Whether its a child labor, pollution or mistreated developers/publishers. The only way of changing this is by some firge political actions.

Yeah, this will not be effective. Legal remedies would be.

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