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Comment by dxuh | Hacker News Reader

> She also said that walled gardens have existed for four decades and that what Apple's doing isn't too different.

In relation to this lawsuit it's mostly the same, but in general it's way different. The iOS is not a gaming platform. While gaming consoles are purely for entertainment and mostly optional in almost everyone's life, phones are not. The iOS walled garden is a lot more like a Windows or Mac walled garden would be, if it existed, which would be horrible.

Phones are somehow not accepted as a general purpose personal computing platform, while they clearly are. I don't think Epic Games could reasonably sell that argument in their position, but it doesn't mean they are wrong.

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The reason that consoles are not accepted as a general purpose platform is because the manufacturers have gone even farther than phone manufacturers in locking them down. Consoles are just computers with gaming-oriented operating systems.

Consoles couples hardware generations with appstore, the iphone store has one appstore for all hardware generations. That is a huge difference. There is no iphone3 appstore where I can buy iphone3 apps, in fact iphone3 stopped being supported so likely there are many apps that you can no longer install that worked just fine before. However there is still a ps3 store where I can buy 14 year old games and they still work with no maintenance required from the developers because their ecosystem doesn't break things.

> There is no iphone3 appstore where I can buy iphone3 apps

Of course there is. It's called the App Store, and it's where all of the apps that support the iPhone 3g are. And just like your example with the PS3 these apps are likely not maintained. The fact that you can't download the latest version and run it on an iPhone 3g is no different than not being able to play PS4 games on a PS3.

I have an iPhone 4 in my desk, as a reminder of how quickly the world moves. I just turned it on. It connected to wifi and worked just fine. I'm sure no different than your PS3.

Many apps you could get and run on iphone 4 like youtube no longer exists or no longer supports iphone 4. It isn't the same thing. If you could open up your iphone 4, go to the appstore and buy the same apps and run them just fine like you could 9 years ago then it would be the same thing.

Actually you can.

I had a first generation iPad that I dug up last year. If the newest version isn’t available, you can still download the “last compatible version”. In some cases, the backend APIs that are needed to support the app have been deprecated.

So as soon as I use a PS4 to do something other than play video games, Sony should be forced to abandon their current business model? Seems like a shaky distinction to me. “General purpose computer” is an opinion, nothing more.

Replace /PS4/PS3 with OtherOS/ and we see that Sony wasn’t forced to open their platform.

I wish I could side with one of the parties in this case but it's too complicated, too fucked up.

Epic would be perfectly happy with a big-boy exemption for Fortnite that the "little devs" (who actually might be hurt by the 30% cut or "walled gardens") would never see. They're half owned by Tencent, which stands for everything wrong with exploitative F2P tactics and China's foot-in-the-door politics. I don't want them to win.

But Apple, of course, is clearly planning to cut off open platform development in favor of a single-store system, slowly creeping into macOS. Worse: Microsoft is learning from them and will clearly attempt to replicate any such system should they be successful, which would end up in something closer to a true monopoly.

It's kinda awful. I wish this wasn't two companies suing each other over creed but an actual investigation by a government agency for exploiting a monopoly position.

There is some hope from Europe, but I agree with the rest of your comment.

Unfortunately, there are no antitrust laws whatsoever differentiating products based on whether they are "general-purpose" or not in the United States, and there is also no court precedent for such a distinction. Thus, from the law's perspective, an Xbox is a product just like an iPhone, and any ruling affecting one also affects the other. "General-purpose" has no legal meaning.

I don't really agree that my phone is a "general purpose computing platform". What detail makes something a general purpose computer? Is it true that only games can run on it (what about Netflix clients and media browsers)? My Android media player has a CPU, video output, and runs some games and some non-games. Does that make it a general purpose computer?

TBF, Apple is trying to make Mac a walled garden.

Trying? It virtually is already.

Want to put out some software and not pay the $99/year Developer Fee and still have a simple install process for your users? Good luck with that.

Install Brew

Brew install whatever you need.

Apple is doing a decent job here. Art Student gets a very easy to use computer with a safe app store.

Comp Science student can compile and install whatever they need.

They even ship brew now, don’t they?

> simple install process for your users

Those are the pertinent words. Yes, folks like us have no issue going to Terminal.app and `brew install whatever`, but most "regular" users are going to baulk at that idea.

People have been saying this for years but there is no evidence. You do need to sign your apps in most cases these days but they don’t restrict you from downloading anything you want.

No evidence? Every release it gets slightly more difficult to download apps from non apple sources. If you download an app you need to know to go to the security panel, log in, and then click allow. It's only to get more difficult. Apple has so much to gain by pushing osx to be more like ios.

Not really. The Mac is increasingly a only professional tool. Apple needs developers and scientific users to continue to use the platform.

More importantly they are on record in detail as completely denying this idea and asserting that they want people to be able to install whatever they want, and have access to all levels of the system. This is why you can switch things like SIP off.

If you download an unsigned app you need that rigamarole, but it’s easy to distribute a signed app from your website, and a user who knows what they are doing has no real difficulty.

This reduces the chance my 85 year old mum will accidentally download malware while still making it easy for me to install whatever I like on my machine or, for that matter, hers.

And they document how to switch off that protection if you’d like as well.

This is a similar argument lawyers made.

And the judge explicitly disagreed.

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