Hacker News Reader

Comment by jarjoura | Hacker News Reader

This article is just repeating the same Apple messaging points they've given us.

First off, the article's biggest point, the security sandbox, is not the issue at all with the App Store. The entire internet runs inside of a sandbox.

Developers understand they must play fair on a device that is shared with other developers. I don't think I've seen anyone complain of this anywhere.

However, what Apple has employed its engineering team to do is create and enforce only one path to getting usable apps on the device and that's through installing via the App Store.

View on HN

> This article is just repeating the same Apple messaging points they've given us.

Unrelated, but this is just about my least favorite criticism of an argument. "Messaging points" are used/reused because they're usually the strongest arguments. By pointing this out, you're just saying "this person is just repeating the strongest arguments". Attack the argument, not its provenance!

That's true, but I've read GP's post more along the lines of "we've already heard those arguments and debated them, there's nothing new here".

Just repeating the same arguments (whether they're right or wrong) doesn't really help move the discussion forward...

The post can be a recap though or targeted at the general audience, not to us who "heard those arguments" before.

I don't know, it would be great if any of these people had bothered talking to a lawyer or an anti-trust scholar, a provenance that would matter a lot to understanding this issue.

For example, almost everyone here will learn more reading "Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox" (https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...) to understand why Epic set things up the particular, exact way they did - because they got Apple to take down a store page that clearly gave consumers the option to buy something at a lower price.

If you don't want to be prejudiced by educational background, which is reasonable, you can easily tell if a take on the Apple v. Epic case is well-informed by simply Ctrl+F searching "consumer welfare." Additionally if the writer makes the distinction between the legal realism (what will happen, which is that Epic will relist but not sell IAP on the App Store anymore, and the outcome of the case will be non-precedent-forming), the legalism (what should happen, which is that Apple is reducing consumer welfare), and what you hope will happen, which surprisingly, for Ben Evans, I guess Apple makes even more money?

I'm not sure why people think this was some great legal trap pulled off here. Everyone already knows that Apple's commission is 30%. Simply charging less in the app doesn't actually show that Apple's commission is harming consumer welfare (or conversely with Spotify, charging more in iOS). Epic would have to show that Apple's alleged monopoly power is raising prices at a supracompetitive level in a relevant market.

You have a page, it says “if you pay using a credit card versus the same exact credit card except you give to Apple earlier, here is a 20% discount,” that is obviously increasing consumer welfare. Apple booted them when they made that page. It sort of doesn’t have to say anything about the commission, because it doesn’t matter.

Epic could have offered 20% off and STILL paid the commission, and if Apple booted them, it would still harm consumer welfare!

That’s why Ben Evans and Stratechery and so many tech takes are wrong, they’re just not informed on the status quo of antitrust. It’s not material where the consumer welfare comes from, it’s not material the goods being sold are imaginary IAP, etc etc.

> I don't know, it would be great if any of these people had bothered talking to a lawyer or an anti-trust scholar, a provenance that would matter a lot to understanding this issue.

By this logic, the vast majority on this forum have no business talking about this issue.

> Attack the argument, not its provenance!

Eh, it seems you didn't read past GP's first sentence.

I had no issues (at least procedurally) with the arguments past GP's first sentence, hence why I prefaced it with "unrelated". I was strictly attacking the first sentence. It is entirely possible to have targeted criticism of something...

>First off, the article's biggest point, the security sandbox, is not the issue at all with the App Store. The entire internet runs inside of a sandbox.

The web has become one horrible user experience. When left alone, developers apparently don't play nice, they hog bandwidth and user resources left and right. A few tabs on a web browser easily saturates the machine resources these days, be it internet bandwidth, RAM or CPU.

Ads, user tracking or poor developer skills, the cause doesn't matter. Apart for HN and few more, the web is a horrible place for the user and the techie ones are taking active measures to fight it(tab killers, ad blockers, script blockers and so on).

Good behavior on an iOS device is not enforced by the app store, but by the OS. Background processing is limited on a timer, the OS throttles processes that use too much background processing & networking depending on context, etc.

The OS also suspends background apps fairly aggressively compared to the foreground app. Mobile apps also give you more tracking variables to do fingerprinting with than browsers do and it's pretty much impossible to practically add a local firewall to iOS devices to block ads. Adblocking isn't a practical thing on mobile apps.

Similarly, managing bad 'tabs' is really the browser's responsibility.

Do you suggest that browsers should adopt Apple's approach? I kind of like the idea of tabs being active only when selected and browsers rejecting pages that are too much resource intensive.

That said, I wrote that in response to the claim that "Developers understand they must play fair on a device that is shared with other developers" but apparently missed to quote it.

So no, developers don't play nice, in fact a lot of them are horrible greedy people and that's why we can't have nice things. Ethics are very poor in that profession and that’s why we need very tight screws to have good user experience.

This is already similar to Apple’s approach, as you can notice tabs refreshing and losing data when you come back to it.

I don’t notice such a thing. How can I reproduce it? What OS and browser?

iOS and macOS Safari.

In iOS it's mostly when you have a lot of things open and too little memory. In macOS they don't reload (or maybe it's rare) but they do sleep. But it's very hard to notice.

Yeah browsers do to some point and probably can do more to improve the situation.

One annoying thing about apple's aggressive approach although is it's difficult to have actual background processes running on your device. Stuff like arc app keeps on getting shut down, it's difficult to have a mail client or an image syncing service actually be running in the background as frequently as apple's first party ones and so on.

Also you can't run something like little snitch on your mobile device.

In the desktop case this is ok, since you have the escape hatch of electron apps in the web tech example, but in iOS you don't have anything.

> Good behavior on an iOS device is not enforced by the app store, but by the OS.

Unfortunately, both.

It shouldn't happen, but in practice (on another OS, but I doubt there's a correlation between cognitive capabilities and preferred mobile device vendor, lol) people were installing those "brightest" flashlight apps mindlessly granting them every single permission they ask for.

The machines can't yet analyze appropriateness of the request. That's where human moderation comes into play.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com