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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

This is where antitrust attention needs to be laser focused.

Our freedoms are at stake, and this should be our rallying point.

The iPhone is a general purpose computer (email, photos, dating, payments, reminders, docs, web, games, etc.) and computer manufacturers should not be allowed to control the only means to run software on computers they sell.

This is less drastic than breaking the company up into constituent parts. But honestly we ought to also be asking ourselves why a computer manufacturer gets to be a film studio and distribution chain.

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Currently the iPhone is a great device for almost everyone on the planet and the trust their users have in the 3rd party apps is a big part of that.

If Apple made it easy to put custom apps on the device it would mean you could more easily be tricked into installing malware and so reduce the trust in the security.

The iPhone is as popular as it is today due in no small part to how they have policed the App Store.

Android has over 70% market share.

And significantly more malware than iOS has.

Malware can't do all that much but drain your battery with Android's sandboxing unless you're rooted.

> unless you're rooted.

There we go :)

You can run custom / 3rd party software without being rooted. Not that rooting should be impossible.

I thought there was a significant adware problem, rooted or not?

You can easily find the app responsible for any push notification and uninstall it. Not sure about other avenues.

According to [1], Android makes up 60% of the US smartphone market share; but you're comparing many different brands of phones, all of which use Android, to the iPhone which isn't exactly fair.

You can see that the iPhone is still has the largest smartphone market share in the US.

Also, bear in mind that Android phones thrive in less rich countries like Mexico [2] or the Philippines [3]. The price of the iPhone is perhaps the largest burden for these people, but I'm willing to speculate that if given the choice, most would favor iOS over Android.

[1]: https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-sh...

[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/867948/market-share-smar...

[3]: https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/philip...

Well, I'm from India and I still prefer Android to an iPhone. It is lightyears ahead in customization, which I prefer the most.

What did you mean by this one?

A big reason for me to switch to Android was this. I'm reasonably tech savvy, but still it was becoming painful to manage all sorts of app permissions on Android. Not to talk about all kinds of tracking that Google does by default some of which may even be impossible to turn off.

Between me and Apple I'm reasonably clear about the business transaction. I pay to buy a high margin device. In turn Apple assures me that they have a vested interest to do what's best for me (i.e., my privacy, no trackers allowed etc.,).

With Android we have bewildering choice of hardware/forked-Android and what not which come with pre-burned apps and app stores that one can't get rid of.

Google Pixel comes closest to iPhone but at that price point I might as well buy iPhone as Apple has better track record of respecting user's privacy.

We are. Just don’t buy an iPhone.

You never seem to explain why that freedom doesn’t suffice.

Because it is essentially a duopoly, and switching platforms is not as easy as just not buying an iPhone.

For example, I recently broke the screen on my iPhone 7 and for this exact reason (not being able to run some Apple unapproved applications on my device) wanted to switch to an Android, but when I tried one out for a couple days

* My BMW would not show music cover art because only Apple had a deal with them in early 2010s

* iMessage no longer worked and I had to maintain an iPad for communicating to friends who only use iMessage and Facetime

* Macbook was suddenly a lot less interoperable with the phone - the easiest way to transfer photos was to push them to Google photos and download them on the mac

* Homepod speaker would no longer be controllable from my phone

* Apple obviously won't publish AppleTV(Remote) or HomeKit apps for android

BMW not supporting Android is not Apple’s problem.

iMessage is for Apple devices. You are free to choose from SMS, What’s app, and all the others.

You should be able to transfer files by plugging in your Android to the MacBook via USB. Something that you can’t do with an iPhone in the same way.

The rest are all Apple products in Apple’s ecosystem.

I pay to use Apple because the ecosystem is closed.

Nor am I saying it is, I'm telling you why switching is not an option for me which is what the parent comment asked.

I'm slowly reducing my reliance on Apple and have already abstained from getting the new watch or adding homepod minis to my current apple tv and homepod setup. And hopefully, as these devices weather out I will definitely make it a priority to not buy into a closed system like this again.

This seems wise.

I made the same move away from Google about 5 years ago. It took me a year or so, mostly because it took a while to unthread Gmail from everything.

That we can do this means we do in fact have a choice.

Yes, but that choice is getting harder with time. What happens when home automation and car automation is also controlled by these tech giants?

What if some day your account was banned because you said something against the "community guidelines" of Apple? Will your car, phone, TV still work? Will Apple buy them back?

“What if some day your account was banned because you said something against the "community guidelines" of Apple?“

That is a fictional what if.

More importantly, it would be a field day for lawyers.

That's already happening with facebook (oculus) and google as well (what happens to your android device? what about the photos you had stored on the cloud? what about all the sign-in with google?)

Don't see any lawyer field day yet.

Oculus is an extremely niche product, barely out of the experimental stage.

Can you point to cases where people have been locked out of their Android phones?

If so, I’m surprised lawyers aren’t involved.

It’s not clear though, what this has to do with app stores.

If we think companies shouldn’t be able to lock us out of their products for speech violations, that seems like an important consumer protection that should apply to all companies.

Homebridge will allow you to add almost any device to Apple Home. If they don’t have a plug-in you can build one yourself.

> You are free to choose from SMS, What’s app, and all the others.

But none of the others are allowed to integrate into the phone the way imessage does.

This "choice" is such a complete lie and I've heard it repeated so many times it's actually starting to make me angry.

What integration does iMessage have that the others do not?

- iMessage is built into the sms/MMS GUI and opportunistically "upgrades" sms chats to iMessage chats. This alone is a huge deal and makes me wonder why you would even ask this question.

- Everyone with an iPhone will have an account (the phone is practically unusable without one.)

- The app is built into the OS, when combined with the previous 2 integrations that makes it the only thing most iphone users are willing to use unless they have a very very good reason not to.

- I think the sharing UI has some special imessage-only shortcuts

The first three are all the same as saying ‘it’s pre-installed’

The fourth hasn’t been true for a long time.

A carrier can pre-install whatsapp, it still won't show up with normal text messages in the messages app but iMessage will.

Why are ‘normal text messages’ somehow a big deal?

Because that's what people use first.

How is this so hard for you to understand, iMessage gets shoved in people's faces and is activated automatically. It's extremely anticompetitive and isolates people not on apples platform. It's far worse than anything microsoft did in the 90s.

How exactly is anyone ‘isolated’? There just doesn’t seem to be any basis for saying that that.

All it does is improve the use experience for people who do use Apple’s platform. They are just as able to communicate with people who have SMS as they were before and vice versa. You are going to need to explain this ‘isolation’.

Literally billions of people use competing messaging apps such as WhatsApp or Facebook messenger.

- You're not forced to create a Facebook account to use your phone

- Switching operating systems doesn't prevent you from receiving messages in Facebook groups you were in.

I'm not going to respond again because I don't think you're reading my responses. If you can't understand that ask your parents or caretaker for help.

It's not just preinstalled, it forces you to make an account to use the phone and inserts itself into what was previously the most popular messaging system in the US. If apple did something like this with the mail app everyone would probably completely flip out, the only reason they don't is because SMS was already terrible.

At least your USB-C Apple Macbook charger could charge the Android. (Not your Apple iPhone I'm afraid.)

In other words, you love and love paying for literally everything about Apple's platform, but you still haven't figured out what you are paying for, and you think you should get all the benefits of that platform (including the benefits accrued by it being a walled interoperable garden that doesn't suck), magically, even if you want to use other hardware and other platforms.

Sorry, but it just doesn't work that way.

That's exactly my point, I don't love and love everything about Apple's platform and I want to move away but they won't let my Android device interop with Homepod or Homekit or Apple TV.

I just realized too late, what exactly I paid them for - it wasn't the device - it was the "experience" and I regret spending every penny on this experience because it is essentially a sunk cost now.

Based on your tone you are implying that for these reasons, and possibly more, Android is basically an unusable alternative.

While we're at it, we can also just stop paying credit card swipe fees too by paying cash as well and avoid artificial preservatives by growing our own food, and while we're at it we can bicycle everywhere in order not to exhaust Carbon into the air.

Or as a democratic country, we can debate the laws and rules in which we would like businesses to follow for the privilege of selling products in the market and so they do not unhealthily, dominate the market.

Nobody is forcing you to buy an iPhone. All of the other examples are in fact increasingly popular things to do.

Sure - we are debating it here. It just doesn’t seem like there is any real argument being made why people are forced to choose Apple.

Flawed argument similar to the one used around privacy: People who don’t have anything to hide should not worry about big brother.

Well, turns out that you are telling me that companies with ungodly amounts of power and influence should be allowed to dictate our rights. This is why we desperately need regulation that puts consumers first.

Is that really the same type of argument? While I don't think, "Don't buy apple products then" is really a great argument it's not the same as the privacy argument. You do have other options. I don't have other options than to be spied on by the US government.

You can move to another country. /s

How does this solve the problem where my family refuses to switch to a reasonable problem and I can't even talk to them without pirating an apple OS?

The problem seems to be with your family’s refusal, no?

Can't you phone her?

Sure, but I'm left out of the group chat if I don't leave my OSX VM running.

This is just as true for Facebook or Google or any messaging system. There is nothing special about Apple in this regard. It’s just a feature of current messaging technologies.

I stopped using Facebook earlier this year, and I am missing out on a bunch of social groups the contain people I know in real life.

What we need to do is build technology that doesn’t these downsides.

You can still use a flip phone and a desktop PC running arch Linux.

Most users , even some of us can accidentally break a Linux install. Saving me from myself is what IOS effectively does. Look at the Android fortnite fiasco with users installing the wrong app and getting malware on their phones.

Even open source smart phones exist. Your more than free to custom write your own software on them.

Assuming Apple is ever kept at bay, they'll just ratchet up their already prevalent "soft coercion" tactics (warnings, unforced security errors, etc.)

The question is literally: 1. Comply fully and lose billions in revenue 2. Figure out a way to continue cheating the system

We have decades of data setting a precedent that this specific company will choose Option 2 unless absolutely forced to fundamentally change.

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