HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427
Monopolies are almost always bad for consumers.
I kind of chuckle when I think about how Microsoft had such a huge battle over IE being integrated into Windows, and now we sort of accept a situation 100x worse on our mobile phones without batting an eye.
I'd definitely agree there should be a decoupling (made mandatory if needed) to prevent this conflict of interest.
On both platforms, the OS maker enjoys an anticompetitive position of being able to provide their own services without the platform fee (see Apple Music and Spotify dispute), as well as being able to inhibit the visibility of third party rival apps at their whim.
I wonder if the issue is that now we don't have a platform with 90+% penetration, this isn't perceived as a monopoly scenario, even though the effects of it are effectively identical as there are significant (cost and practical) barriers to switching, and no feasible ability to enter and provide an alternative. And on iOS, not even feasible - no actual ability at all.
But that 30% platform tax must be pretty attractive when justifying your position with legal internally...
The "why is this not being discussed as an anti-trust violation like Microsoft was hit with" is because the US government of the last 10-15 years doesn't have the same viewpoints on anti-trust that they did 20+ years ago.
The Nintendo NES came out in 1983. Didn't they have control of all apps allowed to run on their machine? They weren't charged with anti-trust violations.
Duopolies seem to be a natural state
The comparison breaks down somewhat though when you consider the size of the NES market (61.91 million units sold) vs. smartphones (1 billion+ sold). Nintendo, and the whole gaming market, may have just been too small for the justice department to pursue anti-trust charges.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System#...
They didn't.
The security of the consoles from that era was based on trademarks. The hardware would refuse to execute software unless it could find the manufacturer's name at some predefined memory location. Since these were trademarks, game companies had to obtain permission in order to use them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade
The judges ruled that people had every right to reverse engineer existing games and produce compatible software for those consoles regardless of the manufacturer's wishes. The trademark violations were the manufacturer's fault since they made it necessary for games to work.
The world was a much better place before the DMCA.
The US government went after MS multiple times. Most were over anti-competitive contracts. But the list includes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor.... Which definitely did go after MS over bundling IE.
The penalties that Microsoft suffered under from the USA were sufficiently weak that they considered it a cost of doing business. It was only the much larger EU penalties that caused them to change course. But the USA definitely went after them for bundling IE.
Unfortunately, the vetting process has issues and I think even though the quality will improve over time due to more/better usage of ML/AI techniques but that will make the process more opaque.
Most smartphone apps seem like a way for a bank to wedge themselves between you and what you want to do.
Even then at least power users would be happy. At least I could load up apps that aren’t approved without having to jailbreak.
The problem with side loading us social engineering attacks.
Imagine how many iPhone users could be persuaded to sideload ‘corona 5g bioshield app detunes the software radio in your phone away from the harmful frequencies the NWO is trying to expose us to’.
I've tried Android, I don't like it. Apple has put a lot more thought into their UX. Also the Apple hardware is better.
Telling someone to use Android because they want control of their iPhone is a ridiculous argument because they aren't substitutes for each other.
> The problem with side loading us social engineering attacks.
Exactly, which is why I said to make it hard to side load. Require you to run an app on a Mac laptop and write some code to make it work. Make it so that there are so many steps that only the most dedicated are interested. But just make it possible.
And besides, somehow Android doesn't seem to have a widespread problem with this, despite allowing side loading.
Exploiters don’t need to leverage side loading because the platform and store are insecure enough as it is.
As to making it into a huge pain to sideload, what you want is already available. You can install whatever you like by downloading XCode.
Only if the source is available. Or the creator is under their 100 user limit.
Can't you do exactly that with xcode?
Only if the source is available. Or the creator is under their 100 user limit.
There is no way for someone to make an iPhone app and put it up online and let anyone who wants to download it and install it.
Less than 0.5% of them, apparently.
But also, what do you care what idiots do? Nobody is forcing you to install it on your phone. Freedom of choice is not an obligation to choose poorly.
I think there’s good reason for the sideload feature to be there, but your argument seems to be about it being unimportant because 0.5% isn’t a big percentage.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/7/18528297/google-io-2019-an...
ON the other hand some wise open app store wild west... the android app store is bad enough with malware, can you imagine one with nobody minding the store?
Finding software for Palm and Windows phones was often a trek through random forums and websites to download garbage that didn't work.
There needed to be a central registry before smartphones would be adopted by the average person, and the registry needed some quality assurance so that the average person would have a good experience.
Tucows wasn't going to cut it, and the only open model that worked at the time was linux distro package repositories, which would need a dozen features tacked on before it was usable, and only added packages glacially (that QA problem again.)
Smartphones wouldn't be a thing without centralized app stores, but I'm also in favor of allowing users to add third-party app stores, in the belief that 99% of people won't do it, and the 1% would understand the security risks.
And also at the time, the company (Lindows/Linspire) that created an app store based on that foundation caught hell for doing so (my first job out of high school was doing QA on that app store).
So even if it was necessary to have app stores for consumers it wasn't an easy transition to make.
This is revisionist. The iPod/iPhone originally didn't even have third party apps and it caught on anyway. Even now, 90% of the value of a smart phone is having a web browser in your pocket and most "apps" could have just as easily been web pages.
I think the only apps on my phone that can actually justify being apps instead of web pages are Signal (so it can store my conversations on my phone and not a third party service) and Firefox (because it's a web browser). Meanwhile the iOS app store won't allow Signal to be my SMS app and requires Firefox to use Apple's browser engine, so the utility it provides is strictly negative. I could have been just as happy to get Firefox from firefox.com and Signal from signal.org.
I still don't understand why Facebook is an app. Facebook is a web page. (I mean I do understand, it's because the app can hoover up more of your personal information, but why should I want that?)
They will be very soon. PWA is spreading like wildfire.
Now we just need to teach people to use secure browsers. (Not just ones people think are private.)
Do you mean on Android? I've read they're a bit crippled on iOS
The functional web browser was the main killer app, but the additional functionality of native applications is a non trivial part of the modern smartphone's success.
Contrast the iPhone where the only real things apps get you are push notifications and there’s nothing you can do even if you’re a decent programmer because you’re totally locked out. Plus nowadays we have github so there’s no need to “hunt” for software.
She isn't going to Github to download Whatsapp either.
IT folks are extremely tech savvy and do not count as normal when it comes to the market as a whole.
Google copied them because they wanted a piece of the app store tax.
I'm being snarky, but it seems a little naive to think either of these companies wasn't eager to capitalize on the lucrative mobile software market. Aren't you also prevented from buying subscriptions or making other in-app purchases within iOS apps (but not through the app store's integrated system)? Seems like that has little to do with malware as it's not just a ban on malicious IAP, but rather any type of IAP that doesn't include the "app store tax" as you put it.
I think both the Google and Apple stores purport to be a generally safe repository of mobile software in order to encourage the sale and distribution of apps, strengthen the appeal of their respective platforms, and generate revenue by providing these markets (for a cut).
Apple's motivations for continuing to charge outrageous fees are, of course, that they want to keep the free money rolling in. And they must have hoped to generate a revenue stream. But establishing tight control had lots of other motivations.
By contrast Google was deliberately creating an open platform on open sourced software. Their decision to lock down this piece was opposite the rest of the product direction. And it is hard to believe that they weren't looking at the demonstration of what happened with the iPhone and were trying to replicate the revenue model.
Yes, but I see this as Apple desiring tight control, first and foremost (as you hint at). Helping cut a potential malware problem off at the pass was a nice side benefit. I see the flow of causation in the other direction here. Apple just wanted control, because that's just how they do things. Initially they weren't even going to allow third-party apps.
This cuts both ways: while you can't distribute obvious malware on Apple's App Store, you also can't distribute perfectly benign things that people want, but Apple has decided is distasteful... to them.
> By contrast Google was deliberately creating an open platform on open sourced software.
I think that's a fairly naive view of it. They believed that open-sourcing the OS was the best way to gain market share (which worked, for all Android's fragmentation and faults). I sincerely doubt it had much to do with some desire for openness; that would contrast pretty sharply with most of the rest of Google.
> Their decision to lock down this piece was opposite the rest of the product direction.
Except they didn't lock it down! I have several apps on my phone installed via F-Droid. The Facebook Lite app used to (I uninstalled FB a couple years ago, so not sure if it's still the case) have the ability to manage and install its own updates (I assume for lower-spec/non-Google-Apps phones in developing markets). If I feel I can trust an app I download off the internet, I can install it. I have a couple of my own apps installed on the phone, without needing to pay Apple a $99 gate-keeping fee, and the software to install them is open source, not wrapped up in proprietary Xcode.
I will be the first to agree that most people don't avail themselves of this option, and an app developer who doesn't publish in the Google Play Store is kneecapping their market reach. But the fact that it's possible (and not even difficult) to do is the point. Sideloading on an iPhone is something that costs money; requires specialized skills, tools, and a particular brand of hardware; and is out of reach for the vast majority of people who (for example) would otherwise sideload on Android.
> * And it is hard to believe that they weren't looking at the demonstration of what happened with the iPhone and were trying to replicate the revenue model.*
I'm sure that was part of it, but... so what? I don't really see this as indicative of a particular mindset.
No approval process, no banned from App Store.