Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Apple controls 50+% of modern American consumer computing. They tax it heavily. They scrutinize every program that wants to run on it, adding undue and unfair process, stress, and burden. They don't allow browsers other than artificially limited Safari. No runtimes. No auto updates outside of their control.

Recent changes to tracking and ads sent billion dollar ripples through the industry, forcing Facebook to seek a new business model. Even if you hate ads, the scale of this force is a sure sign of a monopoly. And of course Apple is free to monopolize and take advantage of this data for their own purpose and profit.

Apple never lets you form a business relationship with your customer. You'll have to use sign in with Apple, throwaway emails, Apple payments, subscriptions, etc. Customers are on loan, a grace from Apple, and you can be cut off anytime. Solid footing for any startup.

Apple loves to clone app ideas, remove APIs, etc. There are countless stories of small app devs going out of business thanks to the platform they built upon.

Apple is now becoming a payments company. Soon they'll own physical space and both sides of the relationship there too.

They're also a movie studio, potential automaker, and gaming company.

Companies shouldn't be able to get this big and control every aspect, every interface. Not of 50+% of American digital activity. The Internet is not Apple, and yet for many people, it is.

I'm scared of Apple. They can do my business in on a whim. Yours too.

We should ask for better regulation to support smaller business and innovation. We shouldn't have to run our ideas by Apple. We shouldn't have to pay them for providing no service or service we didn't ask for.

> They don't allow browsers other than artificially limited Safari.

This one alone strikes me as the worst offender.

And to think, back in the 90s, people found it objectionable that Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows. Apple's behavior now would be like if in addition to bundling, Microsoft also completely blocked the installation of any competing browsers.

The tech crowd was up in arms about Microsoft doing this in the 90s yet today Apple is acting even worse yet many self proclaim tech enthusiasts rush to their defense. Were the Microsoft defenders in the 90s this loud or has the tech community deteriorated?

Most of the tech community that I remember hated what MS was doing. Somehow Apple has created fanboys in a way MS never managed to (thankfully).

I kinda disliked the default bundling, but I have always been a power user so it never affected me. It’s like tech users that complain when a device/OS defaults to Google Search rather than Duck Duck Go. So long as I have the power to change it from the default, I simply don’t spend that much effort caring about the “tyranny of the default”.

And requiring that apps use the Safari Mobile browser engine doesn’t seem anticompetitive to me. I simply see the browser engine as yet another smartphone API that every smartphone OS requires that developers use (like a file system or a network API).

Modern browsers are a rats nest of complexity. I can’t go a day without HN-type people complaining about the resources that Electron apps suck up - full native browsers embedded into iOS apps would not be much different.

What about not having any form of programming language, interpreter what not on your phone? Or the heavy censoring of available apps, that one might very well not agree with?

For programming language/interpreter that's not true.

Lately I've been doing a lot of "self-hacking" on iOS and I'm quite satisfied with it. There are Python environments, some JS ones. Of course, they're not 100% desktop-like, but limitations aren't that different from various embedded systems. Those can be integrated into widgets/watch faces, on-demand and remote triggered scripts. There's also possibility to write webapps that run in full-screen form (good for calculators, small snippets, there's some iOS API to be used but I didn't bother that deeply to check). Some stuff can be ran completely, there's rich automation library and plenty more.

Could you give some examples? There is nothing for Java or Haskell, other than perhaps the almost killed iSH, but that is also a giant hack trying to balance on a thin wire. Apple didn’t take it down only because the huge backlash, which is not the case for smaller apps, unfortunately.

Most likely for Java and Haskell you won't be able to find anything. I personally used Pyto and Pythonista 3 for Python (there's also Juno for local and remote development if you're into Jupyter notebooks). I also use Drafts, which is editor, but uses JS for scripting and I and few my peers use it for automation and whatnot. I also seen Scriptable in use but I haven't used it myself.

As for other things - I'm Shortcut user and there are few extension to it like Pushcut or Toolbox Pro which extend it. I have shortcuts that manage my devices at home, when I'm there or when I leave, plus stuff I automated some with NFC stickers & Watch. Usually I start with it, when I want to get something automated. Shortcuts + servers provides a lot of automation (especially since I can get the data for widgets or make an action through it).

As for the other (especially compiled) languages I'm not sure if it's possible even possible without more advanced tools (and as far as I remember jailbreak voids warranty, but is confirmed to be legal). One can, however, create iOS applications without being part of developer program (this requires re-signing every week or two, which is inconvenience, but still something that can be automated) and for those 99$/year you don't have to re-sign every period. AppStore presence is not obligatory so one can make use of all sensors and data iOS applications have and even more (as AppStore rules don't oblige to your own personal apps) - and even share it to a small group of friends assuming they trust you, as they'd have to manually accept your dev certificate - something you can quite easily do with family or friends. It works for me but YMMV.

In general I'd say that for power user Apple's ecosystem isn't that restricted as people make it. On MacOS you get widely supported AppleScript that I personally despise due to syntax (and it seems like Apple dropped the idea of supporting JXA lately), on iOS there's reasonable x-callback/Shortcuts automation framework and quite a lot of commercial tools.

I thought embedding compilers and the like wasn't permitted on iOS? I've seen reports of apps being pulled due to embedding lua, among other things.

Afaik, JIT compilation is disallowed other than for Safari’s javascript engine. This is why x86 interprets instructions for example, which is more of a gray category.

If it's merely "yet another smartphone API" then why is bundling your own prohibited? This has nothing to do with (warranted) complaints about the state of browser complexity and resource usage. It's anticompetitive because you literally aren't permitted to compete with them.

An example, hopefully valid but I didn't double check. Android provides a file system API but presumably I can do FUSE-type stuff in an app without it getting banned from the Play store, right? Maybe "mount" an iso image and let the user browse around in it?

“It's anticompetitive because you literally aren't permitted to compete with them.”

That’s not what anti-competitive legislation says. You are making a cute argument using a slogan term and ignoring the definitions within the statutes.

The internals of a browser aren’t significant when it comes to product differentiation. They are significant when it comes to user-impacting features like battery life, security of data on the device outside of your app, and reasonable app sizes. These are the arguments I have seen that defend AAPL and their walled garden.

Anti-competition legislation is prosecuted based on whether prices for the end user are impacted, not whether there is freedom for a developer to rewrite some internal API that Apple already supplied.

There are much better arguments for anti-competitive behavior against Apple than the proprietary browser engine.

The tech community just changed, that is all. A community can't grow this much without changing a lot, the old voices are probably still there but the group is too small and gets drowned out by the rest.

> Were the Microsoft defenders in the 90s this loud

No, definitely not. Then again, very few people used computing technology in the 1990s and had no idea what Microsoft was up to, or cared. A computer was used sparingly. Today, you use one every waking minute in your pocket. So things change.

A computer was used sparingly.

This is not true. Even in the mid-90s most things were computer based. Offices were full of them. A lot of people had them in their homes. Business software built in VB was a massive industry. I was getting paid to make websites in 1998, and they were immensely popular. People had LAN parties where they took their PCs to other peoples houses to play Doom on a network.

No doubt people use computers more now, but don't underestimate how much we sat in front of Windows 95.

“The tech crowd” is not a monolith. The two issues are not exactly the same.

Nothing fruitful came of the MS IE bundling antitrust lawsuit. The browser still came bundled with the OS and was the default.

OS X doesn’t have any App Store limitations and doesn’t restrict browsers to only use the safari engine, only iOS does that. But iOS is not a general purpose computing device. It is a very flexible embedded device. I want Apple to remain hands-off on restricting what I can install on my laptop and desktop, but I see the security and privacy value in having my smartphone apps being sandboxed.

I have always been heavily critical of MS and far less of Apple. People are tribal. I do see lots of value in Apple’s safeguarding of smartphones and the authentication + payments spaces, even if it comes at the expense of competition on their embedded platform.

I'm pretty sure the iPhone could run a full general purpose os if you wanted to. It could certainly run something at the level of the 90s full OS that Microsoft's control was criticised for.

Really anything with a browser is a general purpose computing device.

Majority of the world has mobile phones now, so Mobiles are the general computing devices now. Its the PCs and macs which have become specialized devices.

The population of users that have a thing doesn’t change the category of the thing.

It is a proprietary device that runs a proprietary OS. The FCC doesn’t allow the average citizen to reprogram devices with cell phone modems. It is an embedded device with lots of capabilities.

>yet today Apple is acting even worse

Microsoft slaughtered companies that dared to compete with it in the bad old days, as noted in the findings of fact from the antitrust lawsuit.

>Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued his findings of fact on November 5, 1999, which stated that Microsoft's dominance of the x86-based personal computer operating systems market constituted a monopoly, and that Microsoft had taken actions to crush threats to that monopoly, including Apple, Java, Netscape, Lotus Software, RealNetworks, Linux, and others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...

There was also the contractual matter of forcing OEMs to pay for a Windows license on computers they shipped that didn't have Windows on them.

In the EU antitrust case, Microsoft was forced to open up the their client server protocols (too late to save Novell) but we did get a SAMBA implementation that works out of it.

Some people are not concerned with being handcuffed, if the chains are polished, shiny, and look good.

And allow me to never have to spend time removing malware from my parents’ devices, or worry about someone stealing their credentials.

This statement is false. The availability of third party appstores does not in any way affect the security of your parents devices. Just instruct them not to install other appstores.

And yes, time and again, fans of handcuffs are proving that they are willing to trade other people's freedoms for their own convenience.

Perhaps, all I know is there is currently only one product offering / ecosystem that frees up my time from doing tech support for my parents.

My dad had a OnePlus phone from 2016 to 2018 or so and it was a mess. I don’t know what he clicks on, but he does not have those problems on iOS.

Think of it as a church. You being a zealous Jehovah's witness shouldnt stop others from praying in other churches, not does it break your relationship with your JW cell.

One plus phone was a mess because the product is mess. It wouldn't get any better if users weren't allowed using any other apps. For example, my wife's parents use Ubuntu desktop for many years, with next to zero maintenance. Ubuntu does have an ability to install other apps but through its software repository, but it is made in such a way that an unskilled user just can't break the system. A simple switch buried in the settings enabling third party repositories would be enough.

Now they're only vulnerable to phishing and social engineering attacks!

apple is making the app developers wealthier, whereas micrisoft was pitting them out if business.

not as much momey as they could be making, but much more than without apple

Well the difference is Microsoft had a monopoly with no great products. As Steve Jobs would say "Yes but It Sucks." I cant even record a single moment where I look at Microsoft's product, software, or services and thought wow this is pretty great. Mediocre is probably the best word to describe Microsoft.

Despite my objection to Apple in the recent post Steve Jobs era, they still make some of the best product in each category. Their attention to detail, while fallen from their peak, is still in a league of their own.

It is a rather sad state of things.

Even now Microsoft seems to periodically switch people's default browsers to Edge on Windows. No clue how they get away with it.

Apple doesn’t force me to hide my email, it is my choice to click hide vs not. Apple is just enabling the consumer choice — a choice that a lot of consumers do take (As you noted).

There are good parts about the way Apple operates, they execute well and in a consumer-friendly manner — that’s honestly pretty rare and one reason to like Apple.

Could you elaborate on the consumer friendly part? I'm not an Apple user so I don't know the specifics, but it seems to an outsider that many of the practices that the original commenter suggested were monopolistic are not at all consumer friendly.

When singing up for something that is after an email address, the prompt for an email address that Apple populates the box with is the list of addresses for the contact and the option to create an email address that is only used for that service and forwards to your own email.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210425

In a world where email address lists get sold, using the random address generated by Apple means that if that provider sells the list, you can disable the random address without exposing your real underlying address.

The original commenter is not painting an accurate picture. For instance:

> Apple never lets you form a business relationship with your customer. You'll have to use sign in with Apple, throwaway emails, Apple payments, subscriptions, etc.

Sign In with Apple offers the user a choice whether to expose their email address to the application or whether to use a forwarding address.

Why? Well if you do what I do and register a different email address per application, you’ll quickly find that some applications either sell your data to spammers or get compromised and give it to the spammers for free. There’s nothing like registering for My Fitness Pal to track your progress and getting spam for Chinese casinos delivered to the email address you gave them and nobody else. And once they have your real email address, there’s no undoing that.

If Apple gives a forwarding address to those applications instead, when that email address starts to receive spam, the alias can be shut off to stop the spam to you, and even to everybody else who had their privacy compromised if it’s a widespread breach.

This is good for consumers, bad for spammers. If your users are given a choice between giving you their real email address and giving you a forwarding one, and they choose to keep their email address out of your hands, that’s not Apple being mean to developers, that’s your user’s privacy preference. Respect it.

Also, you don’t have to offer Sign In with Apple at all unless you also offer other social logins, like Facebook Login. Basically, if you’re going to centralise authentication with one of the giants, you have to offer Apple’s privacy-friendly option as well.

Apple payments? Nope, you don’t have to use them. Anything physical, you can use whatever you like. Many things digital, you can take payment outside the application using any system you like but have to use Apple within the application. Would it be better for developers if you could use whatever you like within the application? Sure! Is it the same thing as an unqualified “You must use Apple payments”? Not at all.

Subscriptions? Nope. Don’t have to use them at all under any circumstances. There’s loads of applications that are entirely free or have a one-time fee. You aren’t forced to use subscriptions at all.

Apple gives consumers choices that agree with Apple’s business model and takes away choices that don’t - just like any other company. Consumer friendliness is ultimately a function of overlapping interests.

But the anti-trust debate is not about that. It’s about whether or not the opportunities for companies to compete on finding overlapping interests with consumers are unduly restricted, which would indirectly be consumer hostile.

I’m not saying that Apple always acts altruistically, it is a business after all. I am pointing out that if you are relying on the original comment in this thread to understand the situation, you are going to be misled.

I don't see anything consumer friendly in not being able to install Signal on an iPhone in China, or an app with opposition voting suggestions in Russia.

The only alternative is that iPhones wouldn’t be available in those countries, and so you still wouldn’t be able to install those apps.

That's not the only alternative. If iOS allowed sideloading or third-party app stores, banned apps would be available to iOS users in those countries. Since Apple is not directly offering those apps, iPhones would also remain available in those countries, just as Android device makers aren't banned for retaining Android's sideloading capabilities.

Or the app could just be offered as a web app.

That would be a fine option if it were fully supported by Safari. This excludes all web apps that require push notifications (including a hypothetical web app for Signal in China) until Safari implements the Push API on iOS. Safari would also need a web telephony API to answer calls for feature parity with the native Signal app.

This is oversimplified to the point of being wrong.

Consumer electronics is massive versus general purpose computing devices. Apple is big in the latter, but a much smaller market share of the former.

What you claim is a tax is (or was) the same rate as Google Play Store and Steam.

Scrutiny isn’t a terrible thing considering how weak app security is on some platforms. Also worth considering that OS X is a general purpose computing device (which doesn’t require the App Store), whereas iOS is an embedded device.

The “ask this app develop not to track me” seems to benefit and empower the user. In what antitrust framework would Facebook’s interest be defended? The US antitrust frameworks would have to be contorted severely to treat Facebook as the victim of antitrust behavior in this scenario.

The “Apple never lets you form a business relationship with your customer” is the best point you made. I’m not familiar with how the Apple contract leverages that off-app. Yet it is still the user’s option to use Login with Apple or ApplePay from outside of an iOS app.

> and Steam

I don't need to use Steam to play games on PC or OS X. I can get them from anywhere else.

Heck, Steam allowed me to activate my Humble Bundle keys on steam for free allowing games to be enabled on their platform when they are bypassed as the sourcing medium.

There is no way Steam can be compared to a monopolist like Apple. .

> whereas iOS is an embedded device.

In your opinion. For lots of people that is their main computing device and that is how they access a lot of services. iOS on iPad Pro is frequently advertised at replacing even laptop like use cases.

Even for people using laptops, it is hardly an "embedded" device as such, the same editing docs, crafting emails, editing photos is done on it as a complementary device.

> The “ask this app develop not to track me” seems to benefit and empower the user.

Yes, it does and it is good for the user to have control. But here is the deal, Apple has their own ad platform, in fact if memory serves me right, they used to have their Ads SDK in form of iAds as well which didn't do well so they scaled it back. The rules will help Apple the most in expanding their ad presence as personalised ads was where they struggled.

I like Steam as well, but Steam has behaved in an Apple-like fashion by removing/banning games by coming up with rules regarding content out of thin air and retroactively applying them. I don't think that's a behavior that will change any time soon.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/16/hatred-sh...

https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/valve-has-been-quietly-ch...

https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/steam-is-removing-nft-g...

I wasn't aware about this and as someone who doesn't like censorship, I don't like Steam doing this.

But the good thing is that even if Steam doesn't distribute them, these devs can distribute it through other stores or on their own, that is simply not an option on iOS.

Steam doesn’t control your hardware though, you are entirely free to go to the game maker’s website and do business directly with them. Play store is very much in the same leage, but there is at least side loading.

And come on, iOS is not an embedded device, this joke of a defense has to die. These are very expensive general purpose handheld computers with processors having insane performance, not your smart fridge.

For all practical purposes, one who bought such a device should have control over what gets installed on it. Sideloading should be mandated by law. They could be free to put it behind any warning/setting so that your granny won’t install some scammy program, but it should be a right.

Apple forced every online service to add "Sign in with Apple" if they have "Sign in with X" or GTFO the App store and every developer complied very quickly. That's some serious power

"general purpose computing device (which doesn’t require the App Store), whereas iOS is an embedded device."

wait what? are you a lawyer or trying to sound like one?

"The ask this app develop not to track me seems to benefit and empower the user"

ofcourse, if you phrase it like that but if you phrase it as "ad personalization" it'll feel different

> iOS is an embedded device.

Embedded in what? Is it part of a car? That word means exaclty what it sounds like, this game of 'personal dictionary' is preposterous.

"An embedded system is a computer system ... within a larger mechanical or electronic system."

Apple has been getting away with serious anti competitive practices in the name of better user experience and arguably they do a good job with the user experience part. but in the US they hold an absolute majority share and shouldn't be allowed to maintain all their existing practices of locking out everyone else because they are the ones who control the iPhone OS.

Your customers don't want a business relationship with you because they don't like or trust you anyways. It's worse for the customer to have a business relationship with your app. Good for you sure, you can trick them into signing up for a subscription using dark patterns that they can't cancel without showing up in person in the middle of nowhere Wyoming. Your customers don't want that though

> I'm scared of Apple. They can do my business in on a whim. Yours too.

They can't. My business is manufacturing for wholesale, nothing whatsoever to do with computers.

These kinds of over-generalizations and FUD only serve to reduce your credibility.

I think it was implied they meant tech businesses, seeing as this is Hacker News

It is beneficial to all participants of a forum if everybody payed attention to context in which something is said. You aren't doing that here.

On the contrary, these kind of extremely obvious knowledge bits destroy your credibility.

> Earth is round...

No it's not, it's an oblate spheroid!

These kinds of over-generalisations and FUD only serve to reduce your credibility. Now I can't take your warning about climate change seriously!

Huh, and I thought people on this forum were smart and would not stand for obvious FUD.

Personally I’d never choose to use rhetoric like this. (“My life is in danger because of X, and so is YOURS!”/“They are coming for you and yours next!”) - that’s the kind of thing leads to the worst of humanity. Good for you if you like that (and who wouldn’t, when you have a personal hatred of X, right?), but some people have to stand against it.

> that’s the kind of thing leads to the worst of humanity

I think most people are perfectly capable of processing this statement correctly, it's up their with 'videogames cause crime and violence'.

"Soon they'll own physical space and both sides of the relationship there too."

The iTrashBin will get a software update to DNA scan your garbage and report to the police if it sees something suspicious.

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