Brave Complies With Apple iOS Guidelines
brave.com
brave.com
"Brave Rewards is built on the Basic Attention Token (BAT) and is a new way to value attention, connecting users, content creators, and advertisers. Users are rewarded in BAT with 70% of the ad revenue share of the privacy-preserving ads they opt into viewing, and they can support content creators they love by rewarding them with BAT."
This is, almost literally, Black Mirror stuff.
Brave is using cryptocurrency as an alternative revenue model for content creators than advertisements, and in some ways it's much more of a "white mirror" kind of tech.
The web needs a real solution to the problems ads present at the moment, but we're unlikely to get one when the dominant browser vendor has deep interests in keeping users trackable.
Sigh.
Noise has a cost.
We need a better way of assessing what is and isn't clickbait.
I'd also like to pay a la carte. I'm not buying 15 different website subscriptions.
Brave is privacy preserving. Tips and contributions are anonymous.
I am pretty sure it is a massive improvement over the current way of doing things. Sure Brave would get a big cut because of being in the middle of this. But it manages to use ads in a way that profits everyone: users, content creators, ad companies, and Brave themselves.
Well they give you access to a bunch of useful services.
But you have a point, I have to admit.
1) Block existing ads (like any other ad blocker)
2) Opt in to Brave ads (which are served via system notifications).
If you opt in, you can get "paid" in BAT. You can cash this out (from an exchange) or donate them to the sites you visit.
Realistically, it will never be an amount worth cashing out, so I suspect most people donate it to the sites and content creators they like. Thats what I do anyways.
And actually, some episodes have been realized since their release.
Maybe they could have substituted some kind of factory assembly work, although that might have raised questions of why it's not automated.
By contrast, every credit card with "rewards", retail loyalty card, or coupon app (e.g. Honey) you've ever signed up for is — very explicitly — selling your consumer profile to advertisers/market research companies. Then, to make you interested in being on the other side of that deal, they take some of the money they make from those data-buyers and pass it back to you as rewards/points/offers.
If neither of these business models already existed, and both were pitched at the same time, I think it'd be the second one that would put people in mind of dystopian speculative fiction.
Something where your privacy is not violated and the value generated from your attention goes directly to the content producers you like most.
Maybe there is a backdoor in Google Chrome or something.
What if they just "cache it", or make it available on other devices etc?
Apple does it with iCloud. And google does it too. You log in with your google account everywhere on your browsers, they don't even hide it.
Isn't this how Google ads work?
Not to say I personally have a problem with that (I looove my Google Maps history) but it's a very different model.
Okay.
"A shitty company uses its monopolistic power to forbid another shitty company to apply its shitty business model".
You can buy BAT directly from any crypto exchange (or better yet exchange ETH / any ERC20 token for it on a decentralized exchange). Then you can put that BAT into a wallet on your Brave browser, enable a setting, and every month your browser will automatically disburse the BAT proportionally to the content creators you are consuming, as long as they have their own BAT wallet.
That's what I do. I don't opt in to the Brave Ads. But you can if you want, and it's worth pointing out that Brave's ad system is very privacy focused, in that all classification of you as an ad-target happens in your browser. The only thing sent to Brave is basically just a list of keywords. Then Brave lets advertisers bid on putting up ads for people with certain keywords.
If anything we should be asking google to name their own price
This made me laugh! But hyperbole aside, this premise would seem to (by nature of efficient laziness) eventually result in people spam watching ads with bots - despite any ways of preventing this, people will find a way.
I'm particularly interested in applications of dynamic open-sourced metrics (ranging from corporate carbon footprinting to labour tokenization) - is this the vision for hmt? Only things I've found online so far are Grafana/Prometheus (etc) and Uber's m3, which is built on top of the former. Anything else you know of tackle that topic?
Brave allows me to do that easily.
Advertisers are included because they're part of the status quo, but the system works pretty well if you just have content creators + users that pay them with BAT (the key part being it's automatic and doesn't require 10 different subscriptions to support 10 different creators).
If they allow you to load your own money into it and make the amount required explicit for transactions, all the better, we're even closer to direct payment for resources again. Then the watching of adds to pay for the content is just like doing the dishes at the restaurant to pay for your dinner (as long as you work it out in advance). I don't see any problem with that, it's still just an exchange of goods and services.
The best case for content creators is that they have to worry about upsetting their advertisers and them pulling their ads.
The worst case is that content creators turn into traffic farms with click bait titles and shallow content.
The worst case for society is the use of AI to pull people into spending more and more time on websites and redicalising them into conspiracy theorists or worse.
This is all due to the advertisement model as opposed to paying directly for the content we consume. Most bad incentives would disappear and creators would focus on the quality of their content.
So Brave 'removing' adverisements that track you, if that is even truly possible with regards to fingerprinting, just fixes a small piece of the problem and in a way that thinks like uBlock Origin are already doing anyway. And something that would already be fixed by not having the ad model in the first place.
They position themselves as a user focused privacy company, but they’re not really.
They’re just trying to insert themselves as the middleman selling attention in place of the ads.
It keeps the same problem and bad incentives that the ad model has and still involves tracking behavior.
I get that they’re trying to come up with some model that does the same monetizing that ads do without the ads (and of course inserting themselves in the middle of that to capture all that ad revenue).
I think a true focus on users would block all ads and tracking. If this leads to the ad supported model collapse causing business failure that’s good - it creates a space for competition in the for pay space again.
That's basically the case now. Most content by volume on the web is click bait farms littered with Ads.
At least Brave and BAT make it more of a transaction between you and the advertiser. The advertiser now pays you for your attention to their ad, rather than paying a third party to do their best to trick you into viewing the Ad.
I dislike Ads as much as the next person, I block ads, and when I tried brave I opted out of any Ads. But BAT does seem like a viable answer to the constant complain from "publishers" about how ad block is ruining their businesses.
You should plan your business accordingly and if you feel that you will not be profitable with this arrangement, then you should seriously reconsider if you want to spend the time and resources to build and maintain this business as you will face heartache later on when Apple takes either a major chunk of your revenue or outright removes your app.
browser independence should be the first pillar of a real free web.
The only interesting thing about Brave is they haven't yet been sued into oblivion.
I actually don't want it, but this argument that Braze is doing something wrong is stupid and ridiculous.
This is 100% false. The opt-in ads are not injected into the page.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/mozil...
I know this is probably the wrong audience here but I’m getting fed up with whining from companies who have dubious funding models based on trading something less honest and more invasive than money for gain. Operating like this is an existential business risk when regulation and platforms are heading in the direction of privacy and data security so get over it. Come up with a product which is worth throwing actual money at not proxy money, advertising, tracking, data collection or invasive crap. If you can’t do that, bugger off.
Yea no thanks. As you said come we should be heading towards privacy not finding new ways to value “attention”.
Eg lets say we have 100% privacy tomorrow. Some magical browser, 100% anonymous. That doesn't mean no one is going to try and have an ROI for published content on the internet.. producers still want to get paid for content and/or products, and consumers still want to avoid paying.
So yay we got privacy, but what is the next step? You said it, finding new ways to value attention - or more specifically adjusting monetization to this new anonymous reality.
Not that i'm defending BAT here at all - just that the idea of both respecting privacy and paying content creators are not mutually exclusive.
The internet doesn't exist without cash flow, simply put. And no one wants to pay.. so....
(note: i do want to pay, but i'm the minority - imo. "Free to Play Internet" reigns supreme)
For me, if I was to write content it’d be open, free and be used for marketing my skills which you can’t copy easily.
Value comes from scarcity, consumer apathy, skill and trade off gains. Content doesn’t win anything there.
As it stands, their system is just a crypto implementation of Flattr that site authors never asked to participate in.
Imagine the end user chooses/creates an OS (e.g., I use NetBSD plus own software; Apple uses FreeBSD plus Apple software). Then you make "stipulations". And all these browser companies have to comply. That is how things should be. It is the user's computer, not Apple's.
In the crypto world many users want to move tokens around without paying tax. Catering to these users is not how you build a legitimate business.
First, I want my browser to be upfront about what they are doing. "We monetize through ads distribution." Honestly that won't throw me off. I don't dislike ads. In fact, I used to insist on not running ad-blockers when YouTube started to play ads. "that's how you support internet", I thought to myself at the time. My attitude changes when I realize YouTube is not a great representative for the internet.
Second, I want to see more diverse ads. Not new amazon prime titles, not the same mobile games, not Udemy, not square space, not the same thing over and over. I remember the first few years the ads on podcasts are quite interesting and diverse, and I can even find helpful business and products from the ads. Maybe it is because the entry fee is low so small businesses have a chance to market themselves. And maybe all you need is to write a appealing script instead of hiring professionals to make a Hollywood grade video with celebrities shouting brand names. Unfortunately that dynamics is certainly lost today.
I know I am asking too much as someone who's opinion does not matter at all. But place like Show HN and products hunts kind of give me hope that someday maybe paid ads can become something useful instead of hateful, someday maybe people with good products and honest marketing strategy can have the equal chances to get attention as big players.
How is this not extortion?
I know there is some nuance to this but a paragraph or two earlier they say:
> Users are rewarded in BAT with 70% of the ad revenue share of the privacy-preserving ads they opt into viewing,
It kind of sounds like "tasks for BAT". I couldn't find out if you could actually exchange BAT for fiat currency but maybe I'm missing something.
They control all ingress onto their platform. Nothing gets on that they don't want.
Then they proceed to control the economic activity of everyone in the Apple ecosystem.
You literally cannot do business with Apple customers.
This is as bad as Standard Oil.
It is one that is separately analyzed, well reported, clearly delineated, demonstrably an arena of choice, and significant to the consumer. This makes it difficult to ignore on any taxonomic basis of irrelevance.
No threshold is itself enough, since there's no strict liability; generally speaking, it's not unlawful to have market power, it's unlawful to abuse it. Any regulatory or private action has to make a qualified case. But as far as thresholds go: that 60%, plus Apple's contractual requirement for market participants to actively mislead the consumer, is pretty terminal.
It's specifically about the goalposts, that's my entire point. It's not as straightforward and clear-cut as you're suggesting.
Even saying something like "mobile applications market" doesn't make it clear whether we're talking about number of users, revenue, number of apps, number of app downloads, which mobile devices and so on.
There's an arrogance in tech that we can make up definitions to suit ourselves. I guess it's related to the fallacy that the law is some kind of programming language.
So if Apple had 100% of all phone users and 100% of all apps but the apps were entirely free, that wouldn't be a monopoly?
> there being no other universal unit.
I suggested a number of other units above.
> There's an arrogance in tech that we can make up definitions to suit ourselves.
The question of defining the market is the basis of how the decision is made in court and the biggest point of argument between the legal teams. This isn't about tech arrogance.
I also feel like this back-and-forth isn't constructuve so I'll stop here.
Notwithstanding which, sure, monopolies are indeed not defined by revenue, they are defined by market control, which is enabled by market share, which is quantified by value (there being no other universal measure), i.e. by sales i.e. revenue, which is why it's part of the consideration but you still need some qualification to support the quantification. Such as, by way of painfully topical example, Apple successfully forcing other market participants to actively mislead the consumer or withdraw products, which is not merely a naked display of market power but also an egregious misuse thereof.
Hate to break it to you but there is and I showed it which is why you made this salty reply. Certainly in the US there is no major Anti-Trust case which revolved around revenue as a measure of monopoly. Not Microsoft, not ATT and not Standard Oil.
Sadly I fear it is as grounded in reality as the rest of this ... scrawl.
Abusing your monopoly position in the market, to the detriment of consumers and fair competition is against the law.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/monopoly
Amazingly, hundreds of very thick books about what legally defines a monopoly are not the same as a single sentence from a web site.
But keep in mind that there are legal definitions of some things, and those often differ greatly from the colloquial definitions we use from day-to-day.
Exactly, which is why it's in no way clear that "Apple's market share comes nowhere near close to being a monopoly." If you defined Standard Oil's market as "fuels," it wasn't a monopoly because it was competing against coal and wood. If you defined AT&T's market as "communication services," it wasn't a monopoly because it was competing against TV, Radio, and the Post Office. And if you defined Apple's market as "3rd party software distribution, in general," you'd get the same result, but maybe not if its market is "3rd party software distribution for ~45% of all American phone users."
Since the advent of antitrust law, every monopolist has a definition of its market that magically makes it not a monopoly and obscures its anticompetitive behavior; but that's not the definition we should use to judge them.
Not really, if you look at it from the perspective of software developers. If an Android developer no longer wants to be a customer of the Play Store (or gets rejected by them), they can go to a 3rd party app store or tell their users to sideload. An iOS developer has no options besides Apple: they either stick with them or essentially `rm -rf AllMyIOsInvestment/`.
I think it’s reasonable to put some restrictions on the choices a company can make about their product direction, but just “it screwed a third party that built on my product” is a bad one.
Market dominance paired with leveraging that dominance in a way that hurts consumers.
If it’s levered in a way that doesn’t hurt consumers, that may be hyper competitive and other businesses may not like it, but that’s not a monopoly abuse.
At least that’s my layman’s understanding of the law.
Apple’s behavior is arguably good for most users (restricting tracking/spying). I don’t think Apple’s behavior meets that consumer harm standard.
Apple may not be a monopoly. They've definitely set up the ecosystem to be anti-competitive. Whether that's harmful to consumers (which is what matters) is debatable. I tend to think it's harmful, but they've done such a complete job of locking it down that it's hard to even compare without having to change a lot or things, since they control and exclude others from the hardware all the way up to sales transactions for services, and everything in between.
That said, the fact that Apple was able to quickly cut their fees from 30% to 15% for some developers just because of growing public sentiment seems to indicate that competition is not working well to normalize these app store fees, and that likely means developers and by extension users are paying more because of that.
I really don't understand all this hyperbole on this subject. Somehow everyone on HN decided to become democratic socialist only when it pertains to App Store commissions lmao
Remember, MS bundling IE is nothing compared to the tightly coupled ecosystems of today.
This sounds rather hyperbolic. Sure, if you want to do business with customers through Apple's platform then you need to abide by their terms, but you can do business with them.
On the surface it feels a bit like complaining that you can't do business with customers through Stripe, because Stripe has Ts&Cs that you need to abide by. Apple's situation is more complex, but I think the underlying reasoning on this specific point is the same isn't it?
I can't do the same with Apple.
You could only accept MasterCard, but you’re choosing to limit your audience.
I can't reach iOS customers for payment processing without going through Apple's offering in payment processing (which interestingly enough takes a 10x higher cut than Visa, Stripe, et al.)
If Visa used their market leadership in payment processing to try to dominate other markets, then it would be comparable (and then they should absolutely get antitrust scrutiny).
> Then they proceed to control the economic activity of everyone in the Apple ecosystem.
> You literally cannot do business with Apple customers.
This describes every brick & mortar store ever and just about every gaming console since the NES. I'm not sure what differentiates Apple from Nintendo or Target here.
NTDOY's market cap is two orders lower than AAPL and their impact on the worldwide software application market is comparably quite small. TGT is also under $100B and they have essentially no impact on the software application market.
What makes Apple different? Their size and market power. How much of the world economy is now dependent on their devices and services?
Amazon.com
Edit: Actually I wish Amazon exercised the kind of control that Apple does so I wouldn't have to guess if the phone charger I bought will set my house on fire.
Amazon.com takes in hundreds of billions from online stores, tens from physical:
Retail has limited space. Also, I can buy milk from dozens of different places.
"Cyperbunk 2077" is being sold just about everywhere, retail and digital. Target, Walmart, Amazon, Steam, ...
Where do I buy games and productivity apps for my iPhone?
Software sales and the marketplace capacity are infinite. Apple is artificially limiting it and should open up. They have no argument other than platform protectionism. (They're doing it for themselves, not you. They sure as hell track you and run experiments on your usage.)
These kinds of dynamics already exist in brick & mortar retail with wholesale clubs. Very few people have memberships to more than one and are usually very loyal to the one they like so if you want to reach their customers you don't have many options.
The issue with Walmart is the monopsony concerns:
* You have to use my payment system.
* I get 30% of your gross revenue.
* You have to follow my guidelines about what you can and can't sell and how you're allowed to sell it.
* You can't, while you're at the market, advertise how customers can reach you outside the market. I'm not about to just let you use my space as an advertising channel for free.
And in this hypothetical universe my customers love it! They do all their shopping here. I can both see how businesses that don't want to follow my rules would feel super frustrated but those rules are what makes my market worth coming to. My rules basically boil down to "fuck you pay me" and treat my customers well.
This exact thing exists. From bazaars to food courts to antiques centers. There are hundreds of thousands of these situations around the world.
But for some reason because "it's on the interwebs!" it's supposed to be magically different.
You argue you don't have a monopoly because your tenants can always move, even though most of their possessions cannot be moved to other housing.
Reasoning by analogy is bad, but I think it's important to note that most people's phones are their digital home. It is not a low friction situation to just "shop elsewhere" for a single product when it wouldn't be compatible with your home.
I'm not saying it's low friction at all. Hell I would try to make my hypothetical market as high-friction as possible by having a prepaid high-cost membership fee, as many exclusives as I could find, and lots of benefits and services tied to it. This just seems like business.
You might even say I'm paying them to protect me from your poor business practices.
(There are other problems with PayPal, so if that bothers you, replace X with PayPal that has the same privacy and subscription management features)
This we need to regulate. This is what our lawmakers should be doing.
Apple isn't doing this out of their own generosity. They're trying to get a slice of the pie.
It's also why they shut down mobile advertising IDs, which on the surface sounds delightful. Ultimately that's more commerce going through Apple rails. More pie.
Apple is strong-arming here to put more people in their walled garden. The government should craft legislation to protect privacy and should stop the "pretend privacy" game Apple is playing.
Apple doesn't care about you, otherwise you wouldn't have to pay extra for a phone charger and they wouldn't squash 3rd party repair shops.
> You don't get my email address or my information unless I want you to.
This prevents businesses from establishing their own, hard-earned relationships with customers.
Apple has your email and sends you promotional material all the time. Do you send those to trash?
> slipping in "features" that abuse my privacy
Apple already abuses your privacy, and if you don't see it you're being naive.
They track which apps are running on Mac, and they recently caused an outage doing so. This is part of their push to ultimately lock down that platform behind an App Store.
They do the same on iPhone. They know your location, your files, your chat history. You trust them. Mark Zuckerberg had a quote for that.
Sorry for the privacy-invading Giphy/Facebook link, but Apple is literally this: http://gph.is/XJxIL3
It requires them to earn the relationship instead of leveraging a single transaction into an unwanted intrusion.
It's the fact that Apple doesn't let you, the owner of your phone and licensed user of iOS, take full advantage of what you purchased.
The inability to side load apps you want to use outside of the App Store (or to use another app store) is an artificial limitation. It's created from greed or fear of competition from a better managed app store.
I think what people are arguing for is a similar model to macOS. Have you ever heard anyone get mad that they were able to download apps outside of the App Store on macOS? No! You can use the App Store if you want, but you're still able to trust a third-party developer to use the device you purchased to it's full potential.
You know what other benefit I get from it? My parents, children, and friends who have iPhones have the same benefits. When my mom calls me for help, I know for sure where all her apps came from. I know that they've been at least somewhat vetted and come from a singular trusted source. I know that "some kid from school" didn't show my kid how to use this "cool other app store" where you can download "all kinds of free stuff". I have not yet had to help one of them get malware off of their iOS devices.
My point here is that this has been the deal for over a decade. If you bought an iOS device, you knew the deal. This isn't new. Many of us bought it BECAUSE of these. And you may think that having access to other app stores doesn't affect me, but it does. At this point, I don't understand why people who don't like it are buying iOS devices. There are options out there that do exactly what you want. Why did you buy an option that doesn't have the features you want, and now you want to take away a feature many of us like?
Your parents are consenting adults. What makes you think your parents don't deserve to be trusted to use an app they want to use?
As for children, just don't give out your Apple ID password. Children under 13 are not allowed to create accounts.
> I have not yet had to help one of them get malware off of their iOS devices.
This is a completely different issue. Apps can still be sand-boxed for security.
> Why did you buy an option that doesn't have the features you want, and now you want to take away a feature many of us like?
You have nothing to lose here. I really don't understand why you're still calling this a feature.
It’s the exactly same mentality of intelligence agencies: There’s a microphone, location tracker and communication logger in the pocket of every citizen but they are not allowed to access those! Ban encryption to make my job easier! Give me a backdoor to everyone to make my job easier!
I am a developer too but I try not forgetting that I am also a user. As a user I don’t feel obligated to make developers job easier who screwed me many times before, I love dealing with Apple and I like keeping it that way.
If you think you can do it better, go do it on Android and if it happens to be good I may switch. There’s no monopoly.
I don’t know why developers think they have right to access me. Apple made the thing and I bought it from them knowing what I am getting into and I have no complaints. I am being taken care well and I will ditch Apple if this changes.
Trust is the key. People can not trust thousands of random companies/developers. Trust is built up over time through a relationship.
Without Apple, most of these transactions would not take place. This trust, App Store etc., has been built up and cannot be transferred automatically to another party.
I respectfully disagree. As an iOS user who interacts with android devices daily (and used to be primarily an android user, Moto 360 watch and all), I really like that it’s locked down.
Yes, there are things I can’t do, like run v8, or have a built-in IR blaster, or sell my attention.
What’s more important to me is what hostile actors (Google, AT&T, Verizon) can’t do. My phone doesn’t get malware, it doesn’t show me notifications that can’t be dismissed (I don’t know how android users tolerate this), it doesn’t prevent me from removing apps like Facebook (also something android phones like to do), and it generally doesn’t let app developers get away with nonsense.
If anything, my biggest concern with the state of iOS is that it isn’t strict enough with the larger players. From the the business side of things there are some self-owns on Apple’s part that I won’t go into.
Tl;dr please stay the f* away from my iPhone, I chose it for all the reasons you hate it.
Safari and Firefox both have good options for blocking ads on iOS.
The larger point is that the benefits of lots of garbage being filtered out are worth it even at the expense of niche capabilities, like IR blasters or selling my attention.
Facebook, for example, could immediately take their app off the App Store and tell their users that in order to keep using it, they have to effectively jailbreak themselves.
Whether that’s a good enough reason to disallow the existence of the switch is certainly something we’ll argue about until the end of time.
* malware
* a notification that can't be dismissed that doesn't justify not being able to be dismissed
* bundleware can exist on android, especially on budget phones. Pay the price you pay for an iPhone and this generally is no longer an issue. On the off chance there is something bundled, you can disable system installed apps, which removes them visually from everything except for deep within the settings app.
* The only time I've encountered what I would consider "nonsense" is on shared testing devices. Sometimes they have all sorts of strange apps installed that cause the phones to behave strangely. I've never ran into this myself on an actual device used by someone. However I also don't install a bunch of random apps. And neither does anyone in my family it seems (at least that I'm aware of--and I'm the go to for technical issues within my extended family). So my opinion here is limited. I'd also add that Apple's rules create "nonsense" in some peoples opinions (app developers for one, but also iPhone owners who can't install what they want, or can't pay the way they want to pay).
For what it's worth, I also interact with iPhone(s) on a daily basis (for testing software primarily).
Have you bought a Samsung in the past 5 years? Literally filled to the brim with "Bundleware" and these are considered the top tier Android phones so I don't know what your are talking about. It's extremely pervasive.
* Two notifications that can't be hidden, one about a postponed update, the other about a system configuration update it probably should handle on its own.
* Another unhidable notification about there not being a SIM card, but that is niche enough I can't feel bothered about it.
* Pre-installed apps I can't remove: Netflix, Facebook, Samsung Notes, OneDrive, YouTube, Duo, Maps, GMail, Bixby. This phone cost $300 more than my iPhone new
I'm glad you've never experienced malware. Unfortunately, it is common enough on Play and other stores that users have to worry about antivirus: https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-android-antivirus-apps Even if users don't seek it out, many phones come with it preinstalled.
Notifications about phone os updates seems like a bit of a stretch. When my Windows device has updates I can't remove those notifications. And on MacOS I can't close the update window though the notification can be dismissed (at least for the Big Sur update I just did last week).
iPhone's have apps that can't be removed that come from Apple. Ever tried removing Siri? Bixby seems like Samsung's rough equivalent. Some Apple apps you can remove but then the phone's "system functionality" becomes questionable (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208094).
Seeing as android=Google, and Samsung=Note10 it's not too much of a stretch for them to bundle apps. I'd agree--it'd still be nice to be able to remove everything. But the bundleware you're complaining about, outside of the device manufacturers and OS owner, amount to Netflix, Facebook, and OneDrive. Yea less than ideal. But disable them if you don't want them there and they'll be as good as gone aside from a few mb of space. Again--not ideal, but it's hard to believe this is that big of a deal breaker.
How would my ability to use another App Store or payment provider affect your ability to continue using Apples'?