Proposed EU rule may mean you can finally delete some apps from your phone
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It basically killed my first android phone, which was very low end but fine for my needs when I got it. But it came with a ton of non-removable apps which were fine at first, but then they slowly grew to take up more and more of the storage as they updated, til nothing left. I could downgrade them again, I think, but they would soon update again and use up the storage. I guess I could have disabled update, but I wanted that for other things. Ended up jailbreaking my phone so I could remove them. But then other apps like the one for online banking refuse to run because "security reasons"
https://www.xda-developers.com/uninstall-carrier-oem-bloatwa...
can't you disable updates?
I want to delete Apple Music, TV, Podcast, etc. I never use them, why do they force me to have them on my device that I paid $3000 for?
I know for a while i had music deleted, although Siri would complain about needing music to be installed for certain functionality. (i think that has since been changed? all my defaults are installed so idk)
> Apple is also highly likely to object to a provision that would effectively prohibit gatekeeper firms from blocking side-loading or alternative app stores or payment methods—the entire heart of the current dispute between Epic and Apple.
>As part of its new Digital Services Act, the EU is planning to force the likes of Apple, Amazon, and Google to hand over customer data to smaller rivals in an effort to loosen the grip of big tech on consumers. A draft of the legislation stated that tech companies "shall not use data collected on the platform... for [their] own commercial activities... unless they [make it] accessible to business users active in the same commercial activities."
https://apkpure.com/scheduled-airplane-mode-root/com.galaxy....
Not giving users full control over when they broadcast their effective location to the mobile phone network seems like it should also be a GDPR violation.
As a current Apple user, this feels wrong. I bought iDevices because I don't want my data shared, and want reasonable stock apps—I don't want to spend days comparing every single calendar app because the choice is "necessary". Apple promote third-party apps in the App Store anyway, even when they do the same as their stock apps.
With each OS update, I keep finding new annoying apps like Apple TV which seem to pop up at screen without me launching them.
And, surprise, it is hurting customers.
This is exactly an attempt to make an entrenched duopoly face some actual competition.
Apple's commanding lead in processor design is entirely unavailable to anyone except Apple. How do you propose the free market to solve that? Oh wait, it didn't and it hasn't: there are no regulations governing processor designs. You're free to go ahead and implement anything you want.
We have no patent laws? Or are you saying that the “technologies” are obvious and non-novel?
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A patent is a form of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of years in exchange for publishing an enabling public disclosure of the invention.
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So the best product, that violates the ideas of ownership in this case (if I own a device I should decide what apps run on it) might win in a free and open markets. But it's still OK to, for example, enforce normal expectations of device ownership, or enforce disclosure of information to ensure the consumer choice is genuine.
What makes you thing there is a problem that the free and open market won’t correct?
Moreover, the whole premise of the free market is "survival of the fittest". Well, Apple and Google are the fittest, and they survived.
This simply isn’t so. Apple and Google (especially) are both showing signs of ossification.
There are competitors like Amazon slowly building ecosystems around them.
There is no reason an alternative, either from the community as a whole, or from a competitor could not be built over the next 10 years.
If that seems like too long to wait, consider that it’s less time than it took for the current situation to arise.
> This simply isn’t so. Apple and Google (especially) are both showing signs of ossification.
One: I never said this. Two: this has nothing to do with "free market will solve things"
> There is no reason an alternative, either from the community as a whole, or from a competitor could not be built over the next 10 years.
Once again: you bemoan that free market should be able to solve the problem of the duopoly. It has already solved it: by creating the duopoly. A free market will always tend towards monopolisation for the simple reason: the best way to stay alive is by destroying and/or buying the competition. The many regulations (from antitrust law to basic things like food and safety regulations) have arisen precisely because free market never arrives at good solutions.
And even if a competitor arises, it will, once again, be a competitor with nearly unlimited power and money creating a yet another, you guessed it, duopoly or monopoly.
> There is no reason an alternative, either from the community as a whole
"Community as a whole" does not "build an alternative". "Community as a whole" is a nation/country. So now you want government intervention for some reason.
> If that seems like too long to wait, consider that it’s less time than it took for the current situation to arise.
The current situation took about 10 years to arise. And Apple and Google are quite deeply entrenched now. So now you're taking a number out of the blue, and pretend it's a given. Try this for size: "there's no reason an alternative could not be built in the next 50 years". Just as out of the blue. Doesn't sound too good now, does it?
If it’s in so many people’s interests to develop an alternative, then there are billions of dollars, and thousands of developers available to do it.
No reason at all it has to be another company with nearly unlimited power.
Those who believe the problem cannot be solved will not be the ones to solve it.
Where are those billions of dollars suddenly materialise from?
> No reason at all it has to be another company with nearly unlimited power.
What do you think billions of dollars are?
> Those who believe the problem cannot be solved will not be the ones to solve it.
Riiight. So this problem will be solved by a magical community of thousands of people working in unison and spending billions of dollars that materialise out of thin air. Got you. As we've seen this happen with Firefox phones. And Pine phones. And Librem phones. And Meizu. And PuzzlePhone. And Shiftphone. And...
Nobody is talking about money materializing out of thin air. All but two companies would stand to benefit from an alternative to the duopoly. Between them they certainly have many billions of dollars invest in an alternative.
Linux solved the problem of proprietary operating systems, and the Linux we see today was in fact built by a magical community of thousands of people working in unison and spending billions of dollars.
However the billions of dollars didn’t materialize out of thin air. They came from corporations and investors who saw that they could benefit from a free platform that wasn’t under the control of one or two companies.
> What makes you thing there is a problem that the free and open market won’t correct?
And here's why:
- the main problem is that in a free market the only measure of success is profit. It has nothing to do with "whoever has a better product will win". A "better product" doesn't necessarily mean "better profits" or even "any profit at all".
- free market assumes that everyone will be free to compete, free "from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities". This fallacy assumes that humans don't exist. That they won't create monopolies, give money and capital to the people they want to (thus creating economic privileges) and deny goods to whoever they want (thus creating scarcities).
- free market assumes that all markets are created equal, and that all markets are driven by supply and demand. This is not so. We don't have infinite resources. We don't have infinite demand for those resources. Many markets are inelastic. Many markets are not even markets at all. Cancer patients are not a market, for example. And if they are treated as such, you end up with people dying, because the drugs are costly, their supply is (or will be artificially) constrained, and the demand for them is high.
- free market assumes that any new product or innovation can be made instantly or nearly instantly available by whoever came up with this product and they will be free to compete. And that it's equally easy to come up with a competing product anything that exists. This not only ignores fundamental rules of physics, biology, chemistry etc. It also ignores the complexities of modern life. "Oh, it's simple to solve the problem of a monopoly: all we have to do, as a community of thousands of developers, is to find billions of dollars and create a competing product in the next 10 years. Easy". And while we're at it, we can also go ahead and quickly create an alternative chemical reaction to produce vitamin C because China has a monopoly on it. And so on.
- free market assumes that all knowledge there is is instantly available to everyone and everyone can just build on that knowledge. Even though companies routinely create and protect trade secrets. And if you want to try and create something similar, you have to spend an insane amount of time and resources retracing the same steps and reverse-engineering stuff. Can anyone recreate Apple's A-series chips? No, not anyone. Maybe one or two companies in the world at the cost of billions of dollars and 10 or so years. And they would have to go through many of the same steps that Apple has gone through. And while they are doing that, Apple will have had 10 more years to improve stuff. And a lot of that work depends on other trade secrets like CPU manufacture that another monopoly/duopoly will or will not be willing to provide to you. And a lot of that stuff is undoubtedly relying on a lot of knowledge that's in the public domain precisely because of copyright laws.
And finally: the reason so many government regulations exist is because free market failed to find solutions that don't result in life being a misery:
- food and drug safety? Free market had no qualms of selling contaminated drugs for children: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_(horse) and so no need in testing food and drugs
- labor laws? Free market has had no qualms of working people to death for 15 hours a day with no days off and saw no problems with that
- free (as no pay) education? Free market had no qualms with only the rich getting proper education (what happened to "free from all forms of economic privilege" huh?)
- public services such as police and fire departments? Free market had no qualms about letting private fire brigades fight each other and protect only those who had enough money to pay.
- and the list just goes on and on and on. Minimum wage, polluting rivers (Cuyahoga River), exploding cars (Ford Pinto), health (tobacco), ... Until governments intervened, free market was more than happy with the "solutions" it came up with.
"There is no problem the free market can't solve".
People do that all the time with game consoles, cars, fridges, smart light bulbs, etc.
So, does anything differentiate smartphones from those? If not, arguing all of those should be opened up, I guess, wouldn’t make it through the justice system (¿yet?)
If it’s “if the seller allows installing some apps, they have to open up for all apps”, game consoles would be affected, too, and one could argue that the likes of Fortnite would be, too (that isn’t hardware, but neither is iOS, and it’s iOS that people want to install apps on. If Apple opened the iPhone, but not iOS, I doubt people would be happy)
If it isn’t that, what is it that differentiates smart phones?
> In a free and open market,
Could you tell me were to find one? Even Amazon had issues getting its kindle product line produced and it doesn't exactly lack the money to get that done.
There is a glaringly large hole in that claim: Despite Googles best efforts the Amazon Kindle exists and people used it. I even explicitly mentioned that Amazon had issues finding a manufacturer to produce it.
I don't buy Apple precisely because of their golden walls and not being able to install custom apps.
I consider Android to be good enough though, and I use most of the pre-installed apps from Google.
Another law from the EU which will make it even harder for a competitor to come up.
Because if you don't, you'll sound like you're just parroting the generic (and generically false) old "regulations are bad for business".