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Discontinuing FlickType Keyboard for iPhone

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503 pointskeleftheriou164 comments

There's another angle to the App Store scam: Family Sharing.

Most people don't know this but the "Parent" (read:credit card holder) of a family sharing account can't see, let alone cancel, any subscriptions a minor on the account has purchased.

Let that sink in for a second. Apple will happily charge the parents' credit card a weekly recurring fee but there is nowhere in their interface (on device nor on the web) where the parent can even see that subscription.[0]

Apple expects the child to go into their interface and cancel the recurring subscription. Something many (most?) adults find confusing. In my case, the child just deleted the App when the trial was over. Which is of course perfectly logical thinking. No bueno.

So if the child is away at school (as in my case), or the phone gets left at a friend's house, or worse... stolen. The only way to get it cancelled is to call them.

There's more to this story, including details on how the built in parental controls are intentionally crippled (IMHO) but I've got to run. In summary: The entire "Family Sharing" system is built to rip off people while still maintaining plausible deniability.

[0] A senior Apple rep told me this is for privacy reasons. But two things: the minor should have no expectation of privacy when spending their parents money (how is that a good thing?). And secondly, Apple does email a receipt for the subscription to the card holder... so the privacy excuse was pure bullshit. In my case I missed the email because I have more than 6 or 7 recurring Apple subscriptions. I do take partial blame because of that. But I've still not been given a good reason why a parent can't easily cancel a childs subscription.

The whole scheme is such an obvious dark pattern. You have 2 options:

1. About 5 prompts every time a child wants to "buy" something including free stuff.

2. An absolute free for all where a child can have unlimited spend.

Competing app stores would have a MUCH better family sharing setup with proper budgets and controls. Microsoft gets the money end of it right, but sucks at the actual app sharing. Google can't even make their gift cards work properly.

We need app store competition.

Then you get to learn 5 different systems with dark patterns

Like watching TV over internet? dozens of players with different ff/rew/pause/resume/seek behavior

Probably more like the GDPR-non-compliance popups which make it not merely unnecessarily hard to say “no” but which also do it differently in each case so you can’t even learn a pattern for how to quickly say no to everything.

Where would competing app stores get funds to build all these features? And why wouldn't half of them be scams?

Because I as the parent can choose the kid-friendly app store that allows managing subscriptions in a sane manner. At least until Apple inevitably sherlocks the feature, which they will, because competition forces all participants to improve.

It's far more likely you will end up with alternatives competing by lowering their margins until the point that they need to employ dark patterns to stay viable.

If you think the App Store is bad now I think you will be in for a surprise once it is opened out.

While I agree that most alternative stores will be awful, their mere existence can force Apple to do stuff they don’t currently do.

That said, I expect that a month after the alt stores open, many of the same American lawmakers currently complaining about Apple will suddenly start complaining about how non-American stores don’t give so much as a wet fart what American lawmakers think. (The non-American lawmakers also complaining about Apple are likely to be in favour of this, given at worst the alt store is doing the status quo while at best they're now a local business).

Why? Apple has had no problem moderating it up until this point, if their service is as great as it claims then developers will have no problem forking over 30% of their annual profits for the incredible developer experience the App Store provides! Apple is offering a superior product here, right?

If a small group of people can create, maintain and improve F-Droid[0], I do not think it is that hard when you are the size of Apple/Google to implement something without dark patterns.

As a side note, the parental control stuff on an Android phone are also really bad if you want to help your kids to learn how to cope with the addictive apps while preventing them to fall on really bad content.

A simple stuff, you cannot easily group all the addictive apps together and say "2h max of them in a day".

[0]: https://f-droid.org/

Receive a photo that an AI thinks is porn? Your parents will now instantly receive a notification on their iPhone, for safety reasons.

Spend $500 on in-app-purchases? Your parents aren't even allowed to know, since you're such a vulnerable little person. Privacy is a human right, you know!

Leave it to Apple to find the most ironic contradictions.

> Your parents will now instantly receive a notification on their iPhone, for safety reasons.

Only if you choose to view it, from a prompt that tells you it will notify them if you do.

And if you're under 13, have an Apple ID that says you're under 13 in a family group with your parents, and your parents have enabled that feature.

Would you please stop posting this sort of low-information, snarky/ranty comment? You've been doing it a lot, unfortunately, and it's not within either the spirit or the letter of the rules here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Being competent and not giving your child access to your credit card or devices you can't also access seems like it solves this problem. I don't understand how it's 2021 but we're still giving parents a pass on being illiterate.

The child has a learning disability and, as I already mentioned, is away at a (special) school for much of a year. Thus - I don't have immediate access to the phone.

But thanks for your thoughtful and measured contribution.

> Apple does email a receipt for the subscription to the card holder... so the privacy excuse was pure bullshit.

I called Apple support today for an unrelated issue and verified that what you say is true. That truly is egregious that they're hiding that information, and you have to notice it via your bank statement. At the very least the primary account holder should be able to see that an unspecified member of their family account has a subscription to an unspecified service, and have the ability to summarily cancel it. It's not unheard of to imagine that even with the "Ask me first" feature enabled to allow members to make purchases, you might accidentally click yes while trying to click something else - I've unintentionally answered incoming calls that way. Granted, there's likely a confirmation prompt, but between having your fingers fly across the screen from muscle memory, and having FaceID enabled - it seems like even with a confirmation prompt it would still be possible to inadvertently approve purchases.

That does suck. What about canceling the credit card?

Depends on how sophisticated the company one is subscribed is. Let's take Netflix for an example. As a service to you to not miss out and get your account suspended, they will assume you have "forgotten" to update the service with your new card information. Surely, you wouldn't get a new card and not update them, right? So, again, as a service for you, they will contact card issuers to see if you have a new number and automatically start billing that new card. All without you having to lift a finger.

To be fair, Netflix will also stop charging you if you, you know, click the unsubscribe button in the app.

I wasn't really trying to highlight Netflix as a company, but that there's a service that can be used to "ensure" that people stay subscribed.

However, I don't give damn who you are. If I did not personally provide you my credit card information, I did not give you permission to use it. If I did not remember to update my info, then shut down my account and make it obvious. What ever this service is, it needs to go away.

The only service I can think of where I'd want them not to cancel my account is a domain registrar.

Yeah, so cancel was the wrong word. Suspend. Domain registars send out many many notices that domains are expiring. Even when one has expired, there is a definite grace period. I have benefittted from that grace period on occassions.

To outright cancel an account would be bad.

I’m pretty sure this is standard practice? I’m not a fan of auto-renewing subscriptions period (which is why I don’t use them—I always cancel immediately after signing up—), but tying the end of your subscription to when your credit card happens to expire doesn’t make any sense, and likely is annoying for most people.

I was thinking more along the lines of disposable/virtual credit card numbers..

If you cancel the card to stop one subscription, or chargeback, you risk losing your whole Apple account and any and all purchases.

I didn't need to cancel the card because they did refund the money (and cancel the subscription) after speaking with a few reps.

I'll give them credit for that, but I feel like they use the fact that chargebacks are easy to make themselves feel better about all the dark patterns.

Apple just launched a feature where parents can see their kids conversations, but not see their kids spending of parents' money.

No, they didn't. They're going to be launching a feature that will send an alert to parents if the kid opens and views or sends an image determined to be sexual by ML. There's no indication it will let you see any part of the conversation, much less the entirety.

This problem is almost solved by UPI payment service in India. All payments need manual approval. Credit/Debit card not required to be added here. Apple was forced to add UPI payment because that’s what people use here. I will trade the payment safety anytime over whatever convenience credit cards offer for auto debit recurring transactions.

Interesting. How do you manual approve App Store charges?

Every purchase incurred on a credit card will only go through if you approve it via a call or text message sent when the purchase is incurred.

Now, I’m not actually sure this works for the Apple case because I believe Apple bundles all your purchases and charges your credit card once a day or once a month?

If the store uses upi , your bank app pops you up with a notification and the transaction only goes through if you click yes , It also auto generates an invoice for you to download while youre at it (depends on the bank tho)

Don’t they have ask to buy as a setting? You can have it ask you prior to child accounts purchasing stuff.

Good question - this was one of the details I left out of my comment because I ran out of time...

The feature called (as you say) "Ask to buy" is not what the name implies. It's actually "Ask to download anything, including free stuff".

You end up turning it off after being interrupted 5 times a day to approve free stuff. Many are free games, some are even apps needed for school (the Apps needed for school are sometimes time sensitive - if I don't approve it within a few hours it can be a problem).

This is what I alluded to with the "plausible deniability" comment. Apple can say we have an "Ask to buy" feature but they cripple[0] the feature so as to make most parents turn it off.

[0] I'll leave it up to the reader to decide whether this is intentional or not. Based on the dark patterns present, I personally think it's 100% intentional.

I wrote to Tim about it. Never heard back. Wasn't surprised.

Ah yeah I think the ask for credentials for free downloads is similarly annoying.

There should definitely be something just for stuff that charges your card.

Even ignoring the parental side of things: I've never quite understood why the flow to download a free app triggers the same UI as the purchase UI.

I always assumed it’s about having you “accept” something for legal purposes?

I thought it was to get you used to the idea of just mindlessly tapping yes and thus unintentionally spending money.

Exactly. Build up that muscle memory for when you have to actually pay for something so everything feels familiar.

Most of the problem you describe here can be overcome by talking with your kids. My 11 year old knows full well that I’m going to say “no” to anything that isn’t related to his school work or something that we’ve had a prior conversation about. He has his phone for communication and his school scheduling software (isams). No social media, no games. My younger kids have iPads and we use built in functionality to make the App Store entirely invisible to them. If they discover something they like through other means they know they can talk to us and discuss.

It’s really not that difficult to communicate with your kids and then this kind of problem goes away.

Thanks for the well intentioned comment but not all kids are the same. Nor are their needs. I don’t want to get into my child’s details (special needs, learning disability, needs some apps for a special school that he attends)

I’ve since cleared all this up with him but that’s not even the point.

The point is Apple was charging me (weekly) without providing the means to even see what I was paying for nor the ability to cancel it.

It was $10 /week for a ringtone app ($520 per year) which is a blatantly obvious scam. The app had a “3 day” trial which requires the child to cancel 24 hours before the trial period ends.

In reality, that is a two day trial. How they can legally call that a three day trial is beyond me.

It’s a scam, plain and simple. They should be ashamed.

If Apple was serious about preserving privacy while promoting healthy spending habits for minors, they'd let parents set a budget that can't be exceeded, make this visible at purchase time to the minor, give the minor the ability to ask permission for a specific purchase that exceeds the budget, and keep all other purchase information private. But of course this would cut drastically into their revenue.

I'm actually somewhat surprised that legislators haven't tried to regulate this. The cynical part of me says that if legislators don't have kids or grandkids who are spending too much of their money on app stores, they either don't have kids or are too wealthy to care, either of which would make them grossly out of touch with their constituents...

This Family Sharing problem has been known for what? 4+ years if not longer?

That is precisely why all the games are Ad based with subscription option. These Ad based Games offer 1 min of Game play and 30sec of Ads and . These Ads are also showing games the kids might like, so they go to download this new game which Apple gets to come up with new download or installation milestone. The new games are also ad based with subscription, showing ads that..... until you hit subscription.

And the great things about these Subscription is that are so cheap, so they can easily pile up without getting noticed. And this example is only the tip of the iceberg. All these changes came after they announced their Services Strategy in 2015.

It is literally impossible to convince Apple Fans there are any wrong doing of Apple. Go to Macrumors or 9to5 comments you will see Apple Apologist working there 24/7. But A lot of people are starting to question, if Apple were really doing what they said were doing.

And I mean if you are starting to doubt, you may finally understand why I have been saying Apple reeks of hypocrisy for the past few years. ( I have comparatively little to no problem with Steve Jobs's Apple )

It’s such a “perfect” circle of non-communication that benefits only the fruit company, isn’t it?

- Can I update my app inside your store? Fruit company: No.

- Can I find out why? Fruit company: No.

- Can I find out who or what makes this decision? Fruit company: No.

- Can I update my app outside your store? Fruit company: No.

- Can I contact my customers? Fruit company: No.

- Can I even identify my customers in order to help them? Fruit company: No.

- Can I directly give my own customers a refund? Fruit company: No.

- Can I be removed from your list of featured apps? Fruit company: No.

- Can customers prevent this one app from being auto-updated into brokenness? Fruit company: No.

- Can you tell customers that this new brokenness is your fault and not the developer’s? Fruit company: No.

And on, and on, and on, and on.

This is a completely absurd system that has never, ever, ever benefited customers or developers nearly as much as fruit companies.

Congress can’t act soon enough.

Don’t forget - can I use common PWA features to build my app on the web instead? No because Apple doesn’t allow that either.

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5675

seems to be relevant

It's such a nasty side effect of demand aggregation platforms which is what everyone has been trying to build for the last decade+. It's a real prisoner's dilemma too. Earlier adopting developers get to be "fart app millionaires", but there's a definite tipping point where the supply side becomes commoditized.

I think Ballmer got unfairly criticized for laughing at the iPhone. I always thought he looked at it and thought it was such a ridiculously bad deal for both developers and users that no one would adopt it. His biggest mistake was underestimating the ability for people to act in their own long term self interest.

Please tell me which option we had that was “in our interest”.

Blackberry started smartphones with the user having root by default. iphone changed that and people were perfectly ok with a sudden paradigm shift.

Blackberry really gave you root? Huh. Symbian S60, which was an attempt at a Blackberry clone as far as I understand it, had a mandatory app signing policy (but no app repository or review, just a rent on developers).

That's a very charitable take on Ballmer's reaction. The Windows mobile platform may have been more hackable, but from an end user's perspective it was pretty awful.

Windows Phone is still the best mobile OS. I really miss it.

Windows Phone came three years after the iPhone. At the time of Balmers rant it was Windows CE, which was crap.

OH ok in that case I agree.

> but from an end user's perspective it was pretty awful.

Wasn’t it more that it never reached critical mass? Every time I read or hear about Windows Mobile, users seem to have loved it.

> I always thought he looked at it and thought it was such a ridiculously bad deal for both developers and users that no one would adopt it.

That famous video of him laughing on TV was from the first announcement when there were no plans for an app store at all.

If we’re thinking of the same interview, he laughed at the iPhone because it lacked a physical keyboard and cost $500 fully subsidized.

There was no App Store or any indication of a developer platform.

And yet people keep buying it. It's not like there aren't alternatives. I just don't get it.

The alternatives aren't very good. Was recently looking at Android options, and of the three things I care about, and which I don't feel are a particularly high bar (1. Non-huge phone. 2. Close-to-stock OS. 3. Good update policy.), as of the next set of Pixel devices (which are all growing bigger), it looks like a "pick two" situation. (ZenFone 8 is small and close-to stock, Pixel 6 is stock with good updates, Galaxy S21 is small with good updates.)

> Close-to-stock OS, Good update policy.

Also look at phones with Android One. Although in 2021 only Nokia is delivering phones for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_One#2021

My current daily driver is actually a G7 One from 2018 - it's still getting updates, but probably not for much longer. Sadly, it looks like any Android One phone from 2020 or 2021 would be both slower and larger than my G7 One.

another possible reason might be due to iMessage being de facto messaging platform in the US, amplified by the societal pressure to not have "green bubbles".

add to this the fact that video recording on Android has a horrible rep for being blurry and blocky, staining the reputation further.

the time has come for legal action against Apple. this is textbook early-2000s MS behavior.

Most of issues are developer only. Maybe that's why?

As an user I'd prefer to interact with larger company that is not going anywhere rather than each developer separately. This has downsides as described in grandparent post but also increases trust a bit for unknown developers.

And yet people (with some exceptions) don't stop developing for it. And that's because iOS is still where the money is - iOS users are much more willing to pay for an app than Android users.

For a user, the typical interaction with a large company is a nightmare of emails with stock replies that don't have anything to do with what you were asking, or hours spent on the phone; while interacting with individual developers (especially as a paying customer) is typically much less of a hassle.

I think I need to point out, it isn't your customer. Apple have been very explicit in all of their public communication and in court. They are Apple's customers. Apple's customer are trusting Apple and App Store to use your App. And Apple is sharing 70% of revenue to you and they only keep 30%.

While I have lots of things I disagree with DHH, his point on App Store were spot on. It wasn't just about the commission, It was the company Basecamp has no relationship with its customers signing up via iOS. It only has it with Apple. And that is not how a business should work.

- Can my users become customers of mine? Fruit company: No

The submitter of this story here on HN is the developer of FlickType. He had also filed a lawsuit against Apple for allowing apps that have been outright cheating people with incredibly high in-app purchases and has pointed out several instances of scammy apps.

I thought larger companies keep tabs on the "noisy and popular" ones in media (and social media) and would take more care not to annoy them further. But this story makes it seem like Apple has decided to just keep pushing his buttons as some sort of punishment.

I don't believe there's anyone capable in Apple top leadership who's spending any time in leading the App Store team appropriately. The scammy apps and the contrasting meaningless rejections of praiseworthy apps only tell one thing – the App Store is an abandoned space run by "bots" with almost no oversight.

As an Apple iDevice user for long, this story (from the beginning) as well as others have made me wish for alternate app stores on iDevices enforced through regulation. The wait has been too long already, and Apple isn't being the steward it imagines itself to be or portrays itself in media to be.

Just vote with your money and do not buy Apple products instead of wishing - this is the way.

Right, if enough people buy the non-apple, non-android phones, perhaps we'll get a viable competitor.

Isn't that the case for Librem 5 and Pinephone?

I switched to iPhone recently but still thinking about getting one of above.

That’s a hell of a sacrifice to make, however, given how much of duopoly it is for mobile “apps”

About voting with money, I always wondered why you are not advocating for the literal meaning of it: finance lobbies representing your interest to have rules matching your expectations.

It feels to me way more direct than trying to find alternatives that Google and Apple spend their time crushing away.

Yes, donating to EFF is a good way to vote with your money.

The ability to sideload APKs is the single thing I appreciate most about Android vs iPhone. I don't use it often; the main app I sideload is Mendhak's GPS Logger. (He finally gave up trying to comply with the Google Play Store's changing restrictions on location trackers.) But it's nice to be able to install the software I choose to on my phone without having to have Apple or Google's approval.

Unlike iOS there's no complicated jailbreak required, I can't remember if you even have to enable developer mode (an easy supported thing). And there's a reasonable ecosystem of safe alternative app stores. F-Droid mostly, APKMirror also comes in handy for things that have disappeared.

I understand the value of a curated app store. I get the benefit of that too on Android! But it's nice to have an override in the cases it's needed.

As someone who is beginning to really dislike both Google and Apple, is it possible to buy/use an Android phone without the Google store where you only sideload software?

Yes, but it may require you update things manually. You can disable the Play store and any other apps and only use F-Droid.

With one or two exceptions, I only install Google software on my Android phone. Since I'm already on their platform, I don't guess that makes me any more open to their data gathering. And I don't trust any of the other apps.

There's a few different approaches to this.

Here's one page about it, I'm sure there are plenty more.

https://fsfe.org/activities/android/liberate.en.html

Look for Android models that have been confirmed to work with LineageOS or E-foundation OS. Both are de-Googled, I believe.

It is definitely possible with some limitations.

Totally ungoogled you won't have the google service layer, if you still want to use some proprietary apps, it is possible but some won't work. The biggest constraint is often push notifications not working.

As an alternative you can use microg [1] which is a client side re-implementation of google services. Some part uses alternative service as backend, some will use google though, like push notifications.

Side loading can have its limitations has you need to find sources for APK that you can trust.

The best non google store is f-droid [2] in my opinion, all open source and build reproducible.

If you need some proprietary apps from google store, you can use the client Aurora Store [3] which still sources app from google play store.

In term of buying a phone with most of that, /e/ does sell phones with android + microg + their own store [4]

Otherwise plenty of phones allow to easily replace the operating system. You can look for phones supported by lineageos which comes with no google apps. [5]

[1] https://github.com/microg [2] https://f-droid.org/ [3] https://gitlab.com/AuroraOSS/AuroraStore [4] https://e.foundation/ [5] https://lineageos.org/

Another option: you can choose not to sign in to Google play. And just use other app stores. This limits Google's data collection somewhat as they don't know your account.

It's not as good as micro g or a completely ungoogled phone but the benefit is you can use manufacturer roms with all security features like bootloader locking turned on.

I do this with my OnePlus as I don't like leaving the bootloader unlocked. Anyone can pull a disk image off it through recovery then.

Another benefit of this is that Google play services like location and push still work, they don't require an account. But you do give up extra privacy compared to the other options.

There are grapheneos and calyx which do allow bootloader locking but they only work on pixel phones and those are really poor value for money IMO (expensive but still having fingerprint on the back, midrange soc etc). And really hard to get in Europe now. The 5a 5G is not coming here and probably the 6 isn't either.

So this is why I ended up with this option. At least Android has a wide spectrum of choices. With Apple it's take it or leave it.

You can relock the bootloader with other roms as well, some people do it on the oneplus 3.

> The biggest constraint is often push notifications not working. A massive problem, but the UnifiedPush project is trying to change that with an open spec for push notifications.

Apps that support it: https://unifiedpush.org/users/apps/

This is why I don't understand how Microsoft can't compete in the mobile market. They could be successful just by using AOSP with Office and an alternate app store that doesn't screw developers and users.

I'm pretty sure MS would like to push the same kind of limitations, take the same cut etc. They really saw a cloud of dollars went they went all in with Tablet design in Windows 8 and UWP etc.

They're coming back from that now because nobody wanted it but I don't doubt they still want to create their own walled garden. It's free money off app sales, control that gives them leverage over their customers and develops, data which they love (they're always pushing telemetry).

I don't really see what's in it for them to make a really open store.

Feels like a chicken and the egg problem: no one is buying Android phones without Google Play Store (except in China, which has no Google Play Store), so no developers are releasing apps for it.

Look at Amazon App Store, and it's failed Fire Phone. Amazon has cornered the market on low-end tablets with it and people still try and install Google Play Store on it. And according to Epic's lawsuit, Google has been actively preventing hardware manufacturers from packaging alternative app stores with products.

> Look at Amazon App Store

Also the Huawei AppGallery outside of China since they lost access to Google apps.

Maybe they looked at the Fire Phone and didn't want to repeat that disaster.

Why do you feel Microsoft wouldn't "screw developers" too?

CalyxOS offers a preloaded Pixel 4a on their site and also lists all of the handsets they currently support: https://calyxos.org/get/ .

Yes. Completely. Never sign in. Never allow any Google install on original boot.. Disable all Google at that time. Pre copy fdroid into SD card ahead of time. Also can copy on, a collection of already downloaded apks. Don't forget the keyboard apk. You need that one almost first, so you can enter letters into fdroid. Then you may also use other apk sites than fdroid - which are good, just not as verified. You may miss some Google layers or other so called "ease of use." I don't.

What on earth is "curated" about the Google Play store? It is the most spyware ridden, spam filled "store" I've ever had the displeasure of using.

If I need an utility app, I now just look for it on F-Droid. Need something to track AirPods charge? You can find the original open-source app for it on F-Droid, or download one of 100 ad-filled, GPL-breaking clones of it on Google Play.

Sadly Android is becoming more user-hostile all the time. For example there are fewer and fewer devices that will give you root access. Imagine buying a PC and finding the manufacturer decided you can't have access to an administrator account.

To my knowledge every Samsung can be rooted with Magisk, but at the cost of losing Knox, which makes a bunch of apps relying on biometrics go bonkers - Telegram, Chrome and the unlock screen work, but some banking apps outright crash or lose their data, even with "SafetyNet Fix" - they are expecting the presence and usability of Knox vault.

For Google's Pixel lineup, the situation is similar.

The really problematic stuff are Huawei (which can't be rooted at all with something trustable and open source such as Magisk), Xiaomi (these need to flash a custom recovery first, IIRC) and all the fly-by-night ops that don't have any kind of support other than hoping for a web/apk exploitable bug (I believe KingoRoot is using that method, but since it's closed source I wouldn't use it!).

Only Exynos-based Samsung handsets can be easily rooted, which requires unlocking their bootloader. An exploit exists for Snapdragon based devices running Android 10 and below but it's a paid service and isn't cheap. To complicate things, Exynos based galaxy devices will lose access to the AT&T network and every sub-carrier that operates on it in February when AT&T adopts a whitelist model.

Really? What about roaming travelers? Are they going to cut them all off? Here in Europe all Samsung phones are Exynos. Weird.

As far as I can tell, yes. They're dropping their 3G network and anything not on their VoLTE whitelist will no longer be usable.

https://www.att.com/idpassets/images/support/wireless/Device...

Ah but that's only for voice calls, right? Would it still be possible to connect for data?

I personally hardly use regular voice anymore. Some months I have 2 to 3 minutes, most of my calls are over WhatsApp or Teams :) I don't think I've had more than 10 minutes on my bill for years.

Also, 5G is coming and I hope they finally standardised the voice part well enough and don't make the same mistake as VoLTE. However I haven't really looked into that.

If it's not on the whitelist the network will refuse to activate the SIM at all.

Hmm that's bad for roaming. At least there's more networks and as a roamer you're not bound to a specific network. But it does raise a problem once more networks start doing this.

I'm looking at Wikipedia page of most sold Android devices ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_... ). We've got Samsung, Xiaomi and Huawei devices. Samsung and Xiaomi are root able (as far as I know without issue, having 4 Samsung devices in my collection, though sibling says otherwise). Only Huawei isn't (and it's actually much lower than Samsung and Xiaomi). I'm speaking only of root ability without security flaw (Huawei had some.), Since we're discussing user hostility

That being said, there is one feature that is user hostile with regard to owning your software, it's contactless payment. Contactless payments all require stupid security requirements, that the community well knows how to circumvent (so it doesn't provide any actual security), but are pretty annoying for the user. I would guess Google isn't to blame there (even though GPay does have this anti-feature just like all other services, and Google being more monopolistic manage to make it even more annoying. But still insecure)

Rooting nexus and pixel devices makes them unable to be updated directly, so you need to update them via fastboot/adb and with a cable + root again with every update

Just flash something like LineageOS, which has a built in updater that works seamlessly.

It's not surprising that making changes to an OS designed for delta updates and an immutable OS partition breaks updates. That's just how the technology works; the solution is to use an OS that is designed for that kind of use case. Root patches for original vendor OSes are never a particularly clean or secure experience.

But that then breaks all the google goodies that you get with a pixel.

I'm just trying to say that rooting (and then updating) is not something you'd have your parents do by themselves.

What google goodies? The camera works fine with Google Camera, if that's what you mean. So do things like the background song identification and such.

While it is bad it is still not as restrictive as Apple policies. Even at non-rooted device you can side-load APKs. Rooting device gives you an extra level of freedom of loading custom OS. This is something none of iOS device never had officially.

This is such a standard apple developer experience. I've been rejected so many times without making changes related to the rejection reason. I've re-submitted the same app 3 or 4 times and eventually it just gets "approved" all of a sudden. Their review process is complete BS. It's all just luck of which off-shore vendor you got reviewing your app.

It really is. A past company made an application that was in the app store for a couple years. Three different customers paid us to white-label the app for them, so we ended up with three additional versions that were new app packages and differed from the original only in fonts, colors, and logos. Two were approved after a short back and forth with different questions for each, and we eventually gave up on the third after 9 months of fruitless back and forth.

Worked for a company with a similar approach (circa 2010) and we got rejected and had to just use the one. Can’t say I feel Apple is wrong for fighting app spam, however.

But Apple created the problem. No company that offers white label applications wants to have to upload a completely separate app for every client, but there is no other option.

And has any of this caused you to re-evaluate building software for Apple devices or purchasing Apple devices for either home or work? If so, what was the outcome of this re-evaluation?

It has for me. I've mentioned it before, but I had an app to help with D&D stuff rejected for describing how to harm someone in one of the descriptions of a spell somewhere.

Some variation of this happened three times. Eventually the level of stupid was too much for me to handle, and on the third time, I just pulled the app rather than resubmit things.

It has for me. I had been working on a Mac app but decided it wasn't worth the hassle.

I prefer the platform but there is no way I'm going to sign up for an abusive relationship with Apple.

I also had random rejections, and a couple years ago, the review process took some days to a week, making oneself pretty anxious while waiting it out.

These days I doubt I would create anything for iOS anymore, since the risk of getting banned over some nonsense without any recourse whatsoever is just too big and I just dont want to deal with losing my precious time and money. There are better alternatives, like the web, etc.

Unfortunately macOS will be going down that path soon, once they remove the ability to install from any source (and they will do it, no doubt).

It’s a real shame.

>Unfortunately macOS will be going down that path soon, once they remove the ability to install from any source (and they will do it, no doubt)

People have been saying that for ten years now and it hasn't happened yet.

They're just slowly boiling the frog.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

I suspect we will be having the same discussion in ten years and nothing significant will have changed.

I'll drop this reminder here: donate to your local linux phone OS projects! Donate money, code, bugs, triage, design... Donate PR time. They're all running on shoestring or non-budgets.

We've all let these projects die of starvation, and now we keep having these threads but frankly none of the big two platforms have to be afraid people might flock away. Maybe to the other big platform, until they flock back during the next brouhaha...

This. We need to put our money where our mouths is, and accept the discomfort NOW (both to our wallets and to how convenient it is to use a device), so that things can be better LATER, for us and for users who can't tell a Terminal command from gibberish and just want to get on with their lives.

tbh not even using but just donating could help

The Appstore is just so broken. No support, no communication. Just like the bug bounty program. It feels like throwing a message in a bottle into the ocean. They aren't alone, Google can do it too, but damn, this is an embarrassment. I always love the topics about how the iPhone would be a dumpster fire with sideloading, meanwhile Apple promotes apps that charge $10 a week known scams.

My theory of why the App Store sucks so much is that every manager at Apple is aware of the risk that antitrust action could kill its profitability at some point, therefore nobody good wants to be at the wheel when this particular titanic goes down. So it gets no real love or investment, even though it’s still a major profit center right now.

It’s useful to look at Mac AppStore. You can use it to estimate how many apps will prefer alternative ways to reach users.

But how many users would prefer to get all their apps from the MAS instead of elsewhere?

Very good question. I wonder if some dual publishing app developers could answer that question.

The anti-trust is just one more nail in the coffin.

The primary issue is that any solution to App Store "problems" means reduced profitability. So, quite simply, nobody is going to pass that up the management chain.

Sure, Apple gets a PR bruise, but they know that everybody is locked into their iOS ecosystem, so who cares?

"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." https://vimeo.com/355556831

May as well make it explicit given it is true:

"We don't care. We don't have to. We're Apple."

To back up at least the outline hypothesis of this point, this is in Apple's 10-K SEC filing:

> If developers reduce their use of the Company’s platforms, including in-app purchases, then the volume of sales, and the commission that the Company earns on those sales, would decrease. If the rate of the commission that the Company retains on such sales is reduced, or if it is otherwise narrowed in scope or eliminated, the Company’s financial condition and operating results could be materially adversely affected.

This does feel like the kind of situation that few would want to be at the helm of, if blame was to be passed around in the event of an adverse approach being taken.

There's now a number of international regulators all looking at Apple and the competition aspects of their App Store model, and legislators in the US seem to claim to have bi-partisan support as well on the point. If individuals feel they might be blamed, that might explain why nobody wants to step up and improve things.

> And this is entirely separate from the technical side, where Apple's 3rd-party keyboard APIs are - quite frankly - terrible. Since 2014 keyboard APIs have been buggy, inconsistent, ever-changing, and broken - particularly when it comes to accessibility features like Direct Touch.

This actually ties into the foremost reason I don't use an iPhone. I'm a Dvorak user for 20+ years and have no ability to use QWERTY, or any interest in learning. iOS doesn't have a Dvorak option for the first-party keyboard, and every third-party keyboard I've tried with a Dvorak option is glitchy in ways that make them effectively unusable. (e.g. the system QWERTY keyboard will sometimes come up for OS-level events.) So, I use an Android phone.

Whoa! WTF? I always just assumed that would be there in Settings as an option, like it is on the Mac—but nope!

I'd have expected that to be added in iOS 3 at the latest. (I'd say at launch, but then it did take until iOS 3 to get copy and paste.)

It kinda is there in iOS like it is on the Mac - you can set hardware keyboards to Dvorak - it's just the software keyboard that can't be changed.

But Macs come with a hardware keyboard, and iOS comes with a software keyboard, so the right equivalent should be the software keyboard. :)

I don't know, it's just broadly weird to me that it isn't there. They have tons of keyboard layouts for different languages built in, why not Dvorak?

Kinda funny because my Apple IIc has a built-in switch just for Dvorak!

As Miguel de Icaza said on Twitter today, this is exactly the kind of behavior that makes Apple look terrible to regulators. Big popular app that has been promoted in the past and Apple just seems to want to keep screwing with them.

I've been bearish on the Open App Markets bill because I just can't see a hyper-efficient, trillion-dollar company being defeated by our dysfunctional, infighting-plagued congress, but the more stories like this that reach senators and representatives, the less of a moonshot such legislation becomes.

There are some players with fairly deep pockets on the other side as well. Nobody on the scale of Apple or Google, perhaps, but not mom-n-pop shops either. Plus if I were Microsoft or Amazon, I would be salivating at the chance to run an alternate store on iOS and Android, so there could be some dark money flowing through K Street lobbyists for all we know.

Of course Amazon kinda already does that on Android with Fire OS. It surprised me they never teamed up with phone manufacturers.

Not that Fire OS or its store is very good but they have the infrastructure.

Imagine if they could operate an Amazon (or MS) app store on an equal footing with Apple and Google themselves. And then they can pitch to app makers a 5-10% commission instead of 30%. I bet they'd get a lot of takers and maybe some popular apps would even be "Exclusively from the Amazon (or MS) Store." That would cause Apple and Google some serious discomfort.

That's exactly what epic is doing on the game side. But will they keep those conditions once they get big? I really doubt it.

I think a Steam managed AppStore on iOS would be great. I don't particularly like the Steam app with it's web based interface, but it's much more responsive than Apple's native app and features like wish lists, content discovery queues and such are really great and help apps and games reach a larger audience.

Or GOG, even better. They really have some great ideas like integrating the different platforms, and they're really great for protecting their customers, not allowing DRM etc.

If I can get the same game on Steam and GOG I will always pick the latter.

I'm so excited to see things like the Librem 5, Pinephone, and Fairphone popping up along with non-iOS and non-Android operating systems. I hope they get enough support to become a viable alternative to the walled gardens of today. Apple and Google have extracted enough rent; it's time to open things up and build things for the users, not the shareholders.

People who critizise Apple in public often seem to have trouble updating their apps.

I'm sure Apple has their reasons for blocking this app, but I'd prefer a world where customer choices what apps they can use don't depend on the whims of a very secretive company.

> I'm sure Apple has their reasons for blocking this app ...

Perhaps, but I found this Tweet interesting:

> App Review problems & broken APIs isn't even all. The broader relationship Apple has with keyboard developers is hostile, as my decade of relevant experience can confirm. And it's not just my own assessment: the former head of keyboards at Apple has admitted to this hostility.

I'd like to know more about Apple's hostility towards keyboard devs.

He could be referring to this thread, though it's not specific to just keyboard devs.

https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1273732626331791360?lang...

To be fair I could see why they might want to be extra careful about 3rd party keyboard software. The potential for malware is huge.

What makes this insidious is that Apple became successful on the backs of App developers, and now they're kicking down the ladder after reaching the top.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1427292830523744257.html

Conquest's third law - "The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies."

Apple will keep being Apple and you'll all keep buying shovelling money into their pocketbooks. There's nothing new under the sun.

> and you'll all keep buying shovelling money into their pocketbooks

Because for me as a user everything else is even worse. Generally nowadays _everything_ is pile of crap in some way or another, Apple's is just a pile that stinks for me a little less.

Mobile alternative my recent Android phone from Motorola (Moto 5G Plus):

- I haven't seen ROM update in a while and

- Unremovable hidden Facebook services binaries in the very core of the OS (de-bloater from F-Droid dealt with it)

- Facebook pre-installed

- No mail client (no, Gmail doesn't count)

- No caldav client (purchase for 15 AUD in Google Play, comes stock on every Apple device)

- No cardav client (purchase for 15 AUD in Google Play, comes stock on every Apple device)

- No way to stop apps running in background

- Absolute barrage of notifications about features I don't care about that won't go away until I click them.

- Absolutely idiotic approach to photos where every app lists _every_ image on the device in photos. My 100gb music collection with folder images simply crashes most gallery apps.

- The amount of ads is just staggering compared to iOS

- No ad-blocking in the browser (Safari on iOS provides a framework, you install an app and you don't see ads anymore, I was unpleasantly surprised when I tried surfing the web in Chrome on that Moto phone)

- Google Photos simply blocks the screen with suggestion to back up everything to the cloud on each launch and I have to dismiss every time.

OS Alternative:

- Linux - good luck making 4k scree snappy and god forbid you have your laptop monitor with different scaling settings

- Linux - general hardware support is meh, had huge troubles with my wifi printer

- Linux - convenience apps - like photo gallery and stuff, almost none - there are either too simple apps or monstrous combine harvesters.

- Linux - public wifis is still a trouble, getting to those login portals is flakey, sometimes you get there automatically, sometimes you have to figure out yourself how to get there.

- Linux - good luck finding a decent email client. Best I could do is neomutt + notmuch but Apple's Mail achieves the same setup I had there in 5 minutes of clicking instead of couple days of tweaking configs.

- Linux - still comes to a halt when I'm trying to copy a 10GB file somewhere.

- Windows: spyware-as-a-service

- Windows: no native unix tools, only through a layer of virtualisation

- Windows: terminal emulator still sucks and slow af, see "refterm" by Casey Muratori.

- Windows: convenience apps nearly impossible to find (on Apple platform you get full office suite, video editor, photo library solutions, music making thingy, etc, etc for free).

- Widows: usability choices suck, like hibernating my surface sometime after I lock the screen so I have to wait good 10 - 20 seconds for it to wake up when I need it. Had to hack something in registry to get "old" power controls back to remove that crap.

- Windows: email clients _all_suck_, the last half-decent client was Outlook 2010. (Well, Thunderbird is ok-ish)

- Windows: still no caldav, no cardav (you can hack shit together by going iCloud road and replacing URLs in buil-in clients)

EDIT(s):

%s/worth/worse

%s/have seen ROM/haven't seen ROM

I believe you made a few very good points, but I will argue against some that I disagree and some disadvantages that you overlooked from Apple (I'm an iphone user).

> No way to stop apps running in background

Its been three years since I used Androids but there was absolutely a way to kill / freeze background Apps

> No ad-blocking in the browser (Safari on iOS provides a framework, you install an app and you don't see ads anymore, I was unpleasantly surprised when I tried surfing the web in Chrome on that Moto phone)

Adblocking is what I hate the most on iOS and what will probably drive me away from the platform. Good luck finding anything remotely as useful as ublock origin on Apple (No, no amount of content blocking apps can deliver the granularity of uBlock, if you want an example, try blocking youtube ads lately)

> Absolutely idiotic approach to photos where every app lists _every_ image on the device in photos. My 100gb music collection with folder images simply crashes most gallery apps.

You probably never heard of the ".nomedia" flag right? You can easily prevent any image from going into gallery apps by appending this file to a folder like Music folder.

While were re still on the topic of music management. Messing with iTunes to manage my music library makes me die a little bit inside every time.

> Absolute barrage of notifications about features I don't care about that won't go away until I click them.

Ha, one thing that I miss the most about android was that I could fine control my notifications to an OCD level. Apple is getting better on iOS 15 but its still not as great as my android experience from 3 years ago.

…

My bottom line is, I left the Android world not because I hated the system but because I thought that apple was championing privacy and I wanted to support this goal. I dealt with every iOS limitations just because of the privacy propaganda, but now that it’s all over? I will go back to android. At least I have some degree of freedom if I can’t have privacy anyway.

Good talk!

> Its been three years since I used Androids but there was absolutely a way to kill / freeze background Apps

I mean that in iOS is have a toggle in Settings as to which apps are allowed to run in background at all. This toggle is turned off for everything like Twitter and others dodgy apps.

> You probably never heard of the ".nomedia" flag right?

It is still marked as a bug in their bag tracker AFAIR so that doesn't count. The solution need to be better/smarter/easier customisable.

> privacy

Yeah, with the recent move it went out the window.

For everything else - I acknowledge your preference =)

Don't support walled gardens people.

As a Voiceover user this is disappointing. If the law changes to allow third party app stores or side loading this is the app that would convince me to go down that road.

Once iOS and MacOS are merged, will Apple open up its app store to the wild west or will every little OS hack have to depend on their approval? I would certainly be put off by the latter. I was willing to accept the walled garden for my little iOS consumer toy but for my PC I want to have the freedom of messing with it as I see fit.

Thread reader version: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1427292830523744257.html

It almost like the want Congress to get down on them.

A little more of crap like from all of the involved - Google, Facebook, Apple, doesn't matter, they are digging their own graves here.

I'm always happy to read this kind of stories.

And I know that such things happen on Android too.

The things is, apple/Google is a duopoly and the app market needs to be regulated.

To people going through this kind of issue, I say: you chose to be in that position, bring Apple to court or just close your business.

Perhaps it might bring about change, but until that happens a lot of good developers are suffering…also, FWIW, the developer of this app has filed a court case against Apple for exactly this.

> FWIW, the developer of this app has filed a court case against Apple for exactly this.

I'm really glad they did and I'm rooting for them.

Regarding people suffering... It takes suffering to realize that the current situation is not right.

> you chose to be in that position

I’m always confused by these statements. Would you rather nobody develop apps for iOS/Android, because they had the same amazing foresight as you, and decided to not beholden to Apple/Google?

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