Apple, its control over the iPhone, and the internet
matthewball.vc
matthewball.vc
Otherwise we have systemic risk associated with a digital monoculture.
E.g. Imagine how fast a zero day zero click iOS worm could brick every device and cause a huge disruption to daily life.
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>E.g. Imagine how fast a zero day zero click iOS worm could brick every device and cause a huge disruption to daily life.
how would a 0click iOS worm be mitigated by allowing users to run whatever apps they want? You can run whatever apps on windows, but that didn't stop eternalblue from ravaging corporate networks.
edit: it seems like I misinterpreted what "other software" meant. my reply to swiley takes this into account.
0: https://projectsandcastle.org/status#:~:text=WHAT%E2%80%99S%...
0: https://github.com/corellium/projectsandcastle/commit/03db9c... (the latest commit)
People generally buy iPhone for the no-nonsense (or low-nonsense) UX provided by iOS compared to Android - as in, they want to purchase iOS, but obviously it's only compatible and available on certain hardware. An extremely, extremely small majority would install an alternative OS on their phone unless that OS is something like "iOS but with built-in hacks for mobile games", or "iOS but paid app store apps can be sideloaded for free".
Apple's US market share is currently 55% of the smartphone market, down from 65% a year ago.
In the rest of the world, Whatsapp and FB Messenger appear to be the dominant messaging apps (outside China of course).
Who would pay more for an iPhone they didn't want, gambling on future regulation forcing Apple to let them run Android [LineageOS, etc] at some point, when they could have bought a cheaper phone running what they wanted in the first place?
This same fallacy gets used for political parties as well. Just because someone picked an option, doesn’t mean that they approve of every single thing that comes with it. Only that they found overall that the package was preferable.
You like the OS and its integration, so it wouldn't be you buying it in the hope that you could replace the OS, right?
This is already a problem to some degree with software that only works on iPhone and Android; today I got a PCR test and the hospital apparently only sends the results over WhatsApp. I don't have WhatsApp. They looked at me as if I'm crazy when I asked if they could just email me the results; it was all a bit difficult (although they said they would; we'll see what happens, otherwise I'll just pick it up tomorrow morning before flight I guess).
If you want to use iPhones or WhatsApp or whatever: great! Your device, your life, your choice, I'm not bothered by it. But I don't like it when I'm more or less forced to use the same things, even if I don't want to. It really reminds me of the "you need Windows"-days.
(1) "Competing with the house" - Apple should remove all iAP requirements for apps it competes with. Spotify, Fastmail (because iCloud+ Mail supports custom domains), Kindle/Audible, etc.
(2) Supra-competitive take rates - Google Play Store has moved to 15% across the board. Apple should do the same.
(3) Unnecessary restrictions that are not related to device performance or user safety, and solely related to Apple's revenue streams -- for example, cloud gaming.
As macOS shows, when the use of the app store is optional, most developers would rather pretend it doesn't exist.
That's the critical issue. Why should Apple be able to own users? It's such an offensive idea. If I buy an iPhone then I'm actually a product that gets sold to software developers. Imagine paying to be the product. At least other companies give out stuff for free when they do that.
I do mind (quite a fucking bit) when
- I don't do the abusive shit and Apple still keeps all my customers
- I'm forced to give 30% of my operating revenue to apple for this "favor"
- Apple is not neutral: they will happily monitor items that sell well on their store, release a shoddy half-baked internal version, bump it right to the top of the store, and eat all my revenue.
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The first two I could maybe stomach - The third is entirely bullshit, particularly in combination with the first two.
It's ok though, We're watching Apple lose this fight (correctly, IMO) in every jurisdiction that's not the US.
I'm Russian. We're fine with porn on the internet and we pirate everything. The company I worked at had these problems incessantly. They once rejected our app saying, I'm not kidding, "we opened the video section, typed 'porn' into the search field, and naked people came up, this is not allowed under App Store Review Guidelines™". You typed "porn" into search. What did you expect, Karen? Cat videos?
http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
> If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft’s terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS.
> And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft.
History repeats.
On the device I happily bought from them, knowing how they operate. There are tons of other high quality devices of the same variety that I can buy and use to run whatever I want. I don't see the problem with this arrangement, nobody is deceived about how this works when they decide to buy Apple's devices, yet they stubbornly insist on buying them.
You know how they operate now. It's entirely possible for them to change strategies and start oppressing you out of the blue.
> As macOS shows, when the use of the app store is optional, most developers would rather pretend it doesn't exist.
Okay, wow. Have you used an Adobe Creative product on macOS recently? It comes with so many junk processes constantly running in the background 24/7, I wish Apple could step in on my behalf.
Meanwhile in Android it seems I can install any .apk I wish by just downloading the .apk file.
I'm selling my iphone and getting an android this black friday. What phone is the most "open" and functional?
$12 just to remove ads is way too steep though. There are premium streaming services with big budget movies and TV shows that cost less than that.
This is my hill to die on: we already do. I bought a computer and pay an ISP for bandwidth, back when audio and video was just pirated there was no one to demand we watch ads in return for a few pennies of remote storage.
If Joost was still around I highly doubt Apple would block it from the App Store.
What does that leave?
- State-sponsored media
- Boredom
But also, there was actually quite a lot of quality content on the internet before there was any monetization at all. People like to hear themselves talk and some subset of them are worth listening to.
It's never been easier for an independent writer/vlogger to get their content out there without having to get it past a focus group committee.
There will always be good free content.
> What does that leave?
It leaves the people who create because they have something to say rather than a desire to make money. The internet used to have a lot more of those before these advertisers came and corrupted everything. I don't understand why people assume nothing will be created if there's no money in it despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, including free software. I suppose it's due to copyright monopolist propaganda.
If you have some time on your hands it’s not too difficult to setup a cloud based Wireguard VPN + Pihole to blocks ads. Oracle has a free tier with a generous bandwidth cap.
> What phone is the most "open" and functional?
Android is not truly open. Google is closing it little by little. Soon rooted phones with custom software will start failing hardware attestation and Android apps will refuse to work.
I seriously hope the pinephone takes off. We need some serious alternatives to this Google garden.
The pinephone will never be more than a Linux enthusiast or developer device who doesn’t need their phone to properly function. It’s just a developer’s test device that will eventually make a version of mobile GNU/Linux that works better on newest more powerful formerly android devices (probably Qualcomm) that get mainline support in kernel.
The type of person in the future who will buy a $150 phone that was underpowered at launch in 2014 or one that wants a $400 720p LCD phone with a stronger 2018 chip that runs mobile Linux is a niche even now.
You could also go with a device that runs the most popular custom ROM, LineageOS. An example would be a flag ship phone from last year that received official LOS support. Installing LOS requires some messing around with an installation guide, but it's one of the easiest methods to de-google and de-apple yourself. I suppose you could also achieve that by buying Huawei, but I'm not sure if that would be a good idea.
Here's a list of devices with official LineageOS support, which means that your experience should be pretty close to clean Android: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/ I run the nightlies on my Oneplus One from a few years back and I don't have any problems with the software at all.
Here's a list of device code names that have a prebuilt LineageOS ROM with MicroG support. MicroG allows you to run apps that depend on Google's APIs without installing Google Play. Do note that compatibility is not perfect, though it works well for most use cases. The code names are the same as the LineageOS ones (if you click the link above) so if you've found a nice LineageOS device, you can use that to check for a MicroG ROM if you prefer that https://download.lineage.microg.org/ Installing it should work the same way installing LineageOS works, so you can usually follow the official LOS guide with the MicroG ROM files to get started.
If you're willing to go the extra extra mile, you can root your phone through Magisk and install all kinds of things to customize and alter your phone. I use it for enabling clipboard access to KDE connect from the background despite Android's limitations, and to install YouTube Vanced, a nodded YouTube app with all the premium features and no ads.
If you're going for open hardware, Samsung is a rather odd choice. Then again, any Android phone is more open than iPhones are.
Software support is more important rather than open design, like the market for aftermarket for iPhone batteries is going to be much cheaper for them, so maintenance is cheaper, and because of project treble all newer Android phones will have mainline linux kernel support and have updated kernels, I don't see how Fairphone is more "open" compared to the alternatives or what you can do better when the volume of developers will matter for support more.
What is it that doesn't work with MicroG?
There's an extensive list here [0] on the /e/ forum, though I'm not sure how up to date it is. The comments seem to go on for up to quite recently, however.
[0]: https://community.e.foundation/t/list-apps-that-work-or-do-n...
Exactly. This is why I'm holding on to my S10 for the next few years. I just got the battery changed and it feels like brand new.
Only thing it doesn't have is microSD but it does already have 256Gb or 512Gb storage.
Also I just found out it is supported in LineageOS.
Any Android phone is 'mostly open' in the sense you can sideload apps super easily. Google apps are functional. There's some 'truly open' options out there but they're typically expensive for the specs and the included apps are less useful than Google apps.
Note the word "like". The future I envision has palmtop servers with monitors that boot UNIX-like OS written by computer enthusiast volunteers, not staff at a trillion dollar advertising company. Virtual machines, subsystems, Cygwin/MSYS, or whatever, are no substitute for the real thing.
We are getting there, slowly.
I would like to see a more "general purpose", wifi-only version without cellular baseband and other advanced features that effectively restrict the OS options to Linux kernel only. Same small form factor, battery and screen. Boot from SD card, external storage or network.
And also quoting Steve from 2011. I mean iPhone was in an existential threat in 2011 and could repeat the same mistake with Mac in the 80/90s. I dont blame Steve for his ecosystem lock in thinking.
But we are in 2021, the tides have turned. Google is no longer a threat. As a matter of fact there are no threat from market competitors. iPhone user are growing in every single operating countries. Mac has performance, quality and soon even BOM cost advantage. Arguably the same on Smartphone as well.
Judging from the fanfare I wont be surprised if Mac user jump to 200M user within this decade.
The only threat is regulatory and government. And it is kind of sad Apple is now in this place. But there are few signs Tim Cook's Apple is changing. At least Tim Cook's PR response is changing for whatever reason.
Combined with their sick lock-in mentality especially, Apple's influence on the market and industry is very damaging.
TL;DR: Apple should be blasted with competition laws to reduce the damage they are causing. So I hope all these anti-trust cases against them succeed.
the bigger view is that this is horrific. it's ghastly. it's a prison of thought/control imposed on most people.
> Just join the Android ecosystem then
just stop being intollerant to other options. Apple: stop putting your way of the high way as the only acceptable choice on Apple.
this is a machiavellian demand, to constrain a general purpose computer's internet connectivity so.
The bigger issue with Apple is their 30% cut on nearly all transactions that happen on apps acquired through the App Store.
I think a fair compromise might be 30% on the first month of a new subscription, followed by 2.5% on subsequent months. That way Apple gets their initial cut for providing the ecosystem and app store exposure, followed by a very small cut on top of the usual payment processing fees.
Having just moved from android to iphone, what a load of horse shit. I willingly choose to be in Apple's ecosystem. That control is not imposed, it is given (and can be taken away at any moment by me simply turning off my iphone and not using it again).
I have thoughts about the restricted nature of the hardware, but that's a different discussion to the openness of the software ecosystem.
no, this is horseshit. don't call me horseshit.
> I willingly choose to be in Apple's ecosystem.
apple is the only "general purpose computing" system on the planet that allows apps but only their approved apps, approve connectivity. this this is, as you say, a load of horse shit. i reassert:
> it's a prison of thought/control imposed on most people
as I said I think freedom costs nothing. what you say offers no counter, no reposte, no reply to this.
you can defend the jailers but I'm not sure why you would? why benefit do you see in keeping such immense gates? why raise the drawbridge so high? why the desire to tell people to buzz off, get the frag out if they don't like it? i don't get any of this attitude, this corporate-punk anti-individual spirit. why must this be zero-sum, you and apple teaming up versus choice, freedom, & capability? you're not the only one- there's an active, hating, negative crowd, booing & downvoting capability & choice. in this one circumstance. it's a wild call, such a call to prevent. unfathomable to me.
everything about this yearn to control & reduce & assert authority feels like manufacturing consent. for control. for fascism. it's hard to figure out what genuine earnest positive intent it could have.
The issue is for developers. The duopoly means developers who demand a first-class mobile presence are forced to abide by Apple's rules.
Would Spotify exist today if Apple disallowed its presence in the App Store? That's 60%+ of US mobile subscribers only reachable via the "open web"; a poor experience for a mobile music player. Its likely they would not exist; but Apple Music would.
This may sound like a theoretical argument; a problem that isn't a problem because obviously Apple allows Spotify. But consider cloud game streaming services; these compete directly with Apple's mobile gaming revenue. Apple won't allow them on the store. When you get right down to it, their only sin is that, unlike Netflix, Spotify, and Kindle; cloud game streaming apps do not pre-date the App Store. That's the only reason these other cloud media streaming apps are allowed; consumers adopted the iPhone with expectations concerning the nature of their existence. Apple got there first on gaming, then shut the door.
Thus, the greatest sin of the iPhone is its behavior toward destroying true innovation. Not a slightly better note-taker or a prettier weather forecast; the App Store is great at distributing that. But, rather, applications Apple hasn't foreseen, now hampered by both the App Store's distribution rules, financial rules, and more fundamentally, the intentionally limited operating system.
This is not a situation where these innovations can't exist on the iPhone, but will flourish elsewhere; Apple's stranglehold on the consumer US smartphone market, the primary means of computing for many, many people, means these innovations may never exist at all. Possibly because they can't find a market. Or, more disturbingly; because they would have been invented by our next generation's Steve Wozniak or John Carmack, but instead of growing up with a computing environment which (safely!) nurtures creation, they grew up with the iPhone. And maybe an iPad.
Apple wants users of their iPhone device, the thing that they actually sell, to have a phenomenal experience. And they're going enforce rules across the ecosystem to make sure that experience remains solid.
Flash was a fantastic technology. It gave birth to an entire generation of game developers, software engineers, and content creators, and certainly gave many young people plenty of hours of entertainment.
Are we actually better off because Apple killed Flash? Or, is it just that Apple is better off, having killed literally the only web-based gaming technology to ever see mainstream success and secured the gate for the App Store to remain the single source for gaming content on iOS?
And if Adobe had cared enough, they had enough clout to push Apple sometime in the past 5-10 years when the battery and CPU and GPU on iPhones/iPads hit the threshold that it made sense to return Flash to it.
But browser plugins like Flash and ActiveX were doomed once people started caring about the security of browsers, and once Google (via Chrome) and others started investing heavily in JS performance bring it closer to parity with Flash and removing features (like video playback) from Flash's domain and making it native to the browser.
It's also worth noting, that while Flash was barred from the browser, it wasn't barred from iOS once Apple opened up 3rd party development tools including Flash, which happened in 2010.
And because a better, cheaper, alternative came out: HTML5 + modern JS (powered by V8).
Consumers are not an undifferentiated mass. There are people who would have been better off with Flash support. Certainly at the time there were -- it was a hardship back when there were still many Flash sites.
And customers don't need Apple for this. If you dislike Flash enough to endure the hardship of not having access to Flash sites when they're still popular, don't install it. If many other people feel the same, Flash will go away. If hardly anyone feels the same then it's Apple doing it for their own benefit and against the will of most of their customers.
The way to settle this is to allow multiple app stores. If customers really want only the Apple one, that's what they'll choose. If that's not what they want and they're only after the operating system or the hardware, how can you claim that Apple is doing what the customers want?
Apple achieves this sensibility by making choices on behalf of their customers that they feel leads to a superior user experience. They don't present the user with pedantic choices. Instead they allow users to select only choices that they feel will lead to a great experience.
This is similar to other purveyors of premium and luxury goods. For example, a 5-star restaurant won't present you with (in their opinion) a shitty choice of meal. Tesla won't sell you a car with steering wheel--only a yolk. LV won't sell you a basic plastic purse. And BestBuy won't sell you just any old shit off of Alibaba.
Discerning consumers look to these companies to make these choices for them. To make the experience of owning those the products wonderful. And Apple's customers look to Apple to do the same thing with their phone.
Now, not all customers want or can afford these choices. So, there are competitors that see it differently.
If you really want flash, buy Android. Flash available from several publishers in the the Android app store.
I have two ideas:
For starters; Their, and Mozilla's, tracker obfuscation technology is something I'd label as an innovation for the web, and I'm happy that they've taken a stance toward privacy and not against it. Its easy to imagine a parallel reality where they didn't adopt such a strong stance, and iOS users have less of a recourse for a privacy-respecting web browsers.
Additionally; I'd say, micropayments. Now, you can interpret that as crypto-based, or traditional card based, and both have issues beyond just innovation in web standards and browser implementation. But: I strongly believe that some kind of web-native micropayment framework would fundamentally reshape the landscape of the web for the better. There are so many news articles behind paywalls I would have gladly given $0.50 to read; but with the requirement to create an account, dig out my credit card, and agree to pay $10/month (which they make hell to cancel); I click away. Or, supporting a creator; even a commentator here on Hacker News for an especially insightful comment. Not everything is worth $5.
A really obvious example: Fullscreen for webpages and PWAs on iOS is broken on purpose - the browser can do it, but won't allow you to stay in full-screen for anything except a <video> tag. Apparently they changed this on iPad? In any case, fullscreen is an absolutely ancient, uncontroversial web API they've chosen not to support that is essential for things like games and multimedia. There are other browser APIs that require fullscreen too, like pointer lock (if for some reason you've plugged a mouse into your iDevice... maybe that's why fullscreen is enabled on iPad.)
So in practice, if you want to watch videos or play a game fullscreen on your iPhone, you have to go to the app store. Which is an intentional choice, because Apple gets to siphon 30% of all game transactions over there.
I don't completely agree on innovation. While they are limiting, developers can always launch on Android which has a massive, if less affluent, marketshare and leverage that against Apple's ecosystem. Clearly it isn't a perfect solve. I'm still happier to not have my kids downloading bloatware, spyware, and battery killers on their Apple devices.
As this does not infringe on your freedom in any way, I expect my government to legislate on my behalf to force Apple to do what I want.
But I couldn't find a single quality calculator app and got really frustrated.
This was more than 4 years ago though.
That being said, I could imagine Apple classifying apps into game and non-game apps. For game apps, they could have terms similar to the Nintendo eShop, and for non-game apps they could have terms similar to the Mac App store.
Exactly and this post can be summed up as such.
Developers chose the App Store to distribute their apps there.
Don't like it? There is always PWAs and the user can pin their app on the screen and there you go.
Job done.
Devs chose to address the iOS market.
Every other choice from there is Apple's, and it's their way or the highway. No, PWAs don't work in most cases, as it doesn't benefit Apple as much.