Comment by cookingmyserver | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cookingmyserver | Hacker News Reader

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cookingmyserver

The key difference is the product. What a company has a monopoly over is important and is a factor in whether the government takes action and what kind of action they take. Heck, the government even enforces temporary monopolies of specific technologies to promote R&D.

A video game console is marketed and used as a video game console by most people. Mobile phones and tablets are used as mobile general purpose computing devices. I know many people who only have mobile phones and tablets as their computer.

This means everything they do online and in their cyber lives is through their phone. That means two companies have complete control of communications, banking, emergency alerts, voting information, dating/relationships, political discussions, job functions/searches, photo storage, shopping, education, entertainment, identification cards, health care, physical access credentials, schedules, location data, IoT device control, password managers, news, navigation/travel, religious apps, etc.

If gaming consoles begin to be used for most of these things.. then maybe we should look at it as a monopoly that needs to be broken or regulated, but until then its apple and oranges.

> This means everything they do online and in their cyber lives is through their phone

You make a great case for an absolutely locked-down device, especially given that it's something that's bristling with microphones/cameras/accelerometers/GPS and logged into the most sensitive services in your life. The market agrees with this stance - Google offers sideloading, and vast armies of people are lining up to never use it. Apple's locked-down product is so successful with consumers that we're complaining about their monopoly power.

You can buy a general-purpose computer for cheaper than a cell phone. The fact that people choose the locked-down pocket computer over the general-purpose device tells me that the locked-down experience is the one the mass market prefers.

The people who I hear complaining about this aren't the regular users, they're the companies who aren't making the maximum profit they feel they're entitled to.

You can have a locked down and secure phone without a monopoly controlling your device. Apple is good at marketing security via security theater. Look at all the 0 days coming out. Hell the thing that probably embarrasses Apple the most about the Epic saga is that their justification for their 30% and not allowing sideloaded apps fell on its face when Epic's in app payment waltzed right through app review.

I have a hard time buying that the same users we struggle to convince to not use the same 7 character long password for every site care about security. They don't even know what sideloading means. They don't care about a secure experience, they care about the native experience. Ya click the blue icon with a white triangle and press Get on whatever catches your fancy.

> Hell the thing that probably embarrasses Apple the most about the Epic saga is that their justification for their 30% and not allowing sideloaded apps fell on its face when Epic's in app payment waltzed right through app review.

It's always been possible to dynamically load content like a payment signup form after the application loads, app review was never about preventing that. The enforcement mechanism for that is lawyers, which Apple used and collected >3 million from Epic for the breach of contract.

> It's always been possible to dynamically load content like a payment signup form after the application loads, app review was never about preventing that.

Exactly. Its always been about security theater. The review process is holier than the TSA. But you still go through the same often nonsensical rigmarole for "security's sake", but don't worry when someone gets through we have a team of lawyers to sue people after the adversary got your data! So don't worry, if you see something you like just click the Get button and know we've taken care of it.

> The people who I hear complaining about this aren't the regular users, they're the companies who aren't making the maximum profit they feel they're entitled to.

The people I hear complaining about this are generally normal users who have given up. If I mention google's tracking or apple's walled garden they say that they dislike it, they would prefer something else but there is no other choice.

People who never buy a device they can install their own applications on tend not to be technologists and fall easily for marketing that is obviously disingenuous and intended to scare the general public away from software freedom.

Feels like a pretty big stretch to claim that only technologists use Android devices.

I didn't claim that. I said that technologists and people who are not easily influenced by marketing prefer Android devices.

Gaming consoles are also used like this as well, given the web browser, app store and media device that they are.

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