Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

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> The reason why developers want to make apps for iOS is because there's a large market. That market exists because Apple has done a great job prioritizing the protection of their customers' privacy and payment information.

You vastly overestimate the number of figs the average user gives about most of the privacy problems that HN grapples with. The average user, after all, uses Facebook. What the average user wants is for shit to just work.

The reason that iOS is a huge market has less to do with that, and more to do with all the other aspects of what makes a good phone.

You argument is also somewhat undermined by the existence of... A rather large amount of crap on the App Store. Somehow, the iPhone has managed to survive.

... Also, cutting side-deals with apps created by billion-dollar players, and telling all other app developers to pound sand (Regardless of the quality of the apps in question) is the main problem we're talking about. Whether or not Apple does this has no bearing on the current quality of the iPhone (But has a lot of bearing on their bottom line), but has a large bearing on the future quality of the iPhone (A vibrant app ecosystem is healthier then one where a few hand-picked winners are rewarded, and their competitors can never compete on an even playing field. At least, that's what advocates of open markets tell me.)

Breach a user's trust and/or misuse their data and you'll know about it pretty quickly. I'd wager that the average user cares much more about protecting, say, their browsing history, than they care about petty B2B contract drama.

> Breach a user's trust and/or misuse their data and you'll know about it pretty quickly.

> I'd wager that the average user cares much more about protecting, say, their browsing history,

No, you won't, for a lot of reasons.

1. If people gave a fig about their browsing history, they wouldn't have Facebook accounts. (Which, combined with tracking cookies, do a great job of leaking their browsing history.)

2. If people gave a fig about their browsing history, they wouldn't use browsers with omnibars.

3. Or browsers which sync their accounts across multiple computers/devices.

3. People don't even understand which part of the tech stack (The OS, the app, the browser, the website, the third-party cookies served by the website) that they use actually compromises their information.

4. Unless you're a political dissident being hunted by the CIA, the House of Saud, and the Mossad, when this information is compromised, the harm is difficult to quantify, and is never directly linked to the part of the stack that caused the compromise.

Ask five different people 'Who knows your browsing history?', and you will get five different answers, all of which will be wrong. If normal people cared about this in the particular, they'd be tech-literate about this sort of thing. They aren't. As long as some asshole is not using that compromised browsing history to harass them personally, as long as it's being used in the abstract, by some information broker to show them ads, most of them don't give a damn. I know that they don't, because they don't take any steps to secure it.

Obviously, the users don't care about the B2B spat between Apple and developers. I'm not asking them to - I'm pointing out that rigged markets rarely produce good products.

This is a good example of the contradictions in free market dogma. The reality is that the Facebook as it exists in the "rigged market" of the App Store violates users' privacy less than the "free market" versions on other platforms. Apple's restrictive policies have made them the only company to (have the power to) put checks on Facebook's information harvesting.

The issue is not that Facebook is restricted from doing some things in the App Store, that they aren't on other platforms. That's a strawman, that nobody in this thread is complaining about.

The issue is that the rules for Facebook on the App Store isn't subjected to the same rules as <Small competitor> on the App Store.

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