Apple absolutely needs to be checked in other ways—-the fact that it’s selling advertising while setting policies that hurt other advertisers stinks to high heaven. Let antitrust rake them over the coals for that.
Apple sets a restrictive and privacy-centric set of rules for advertisers, which it then follows. The fact that this is a problem for other advertising companies is an indictment of those companies and their bleak surveillance-enabling business model.
Contrast this with the "use WebKit or go home" rule, which, like it or not, is favoring Apple's product over others. It's not like these advertising policies are "be headquartered in Cupertino", it's "if you want to track our users you must ask them first".
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I dislike it. I think buttons should be buttons. But this isn't a special case, so unless you consider every instance of two buttons looking this way a dark pattern, this one isn't either.
A button posts, a link gets.
As a step in the device setup, the button infers some form of enablement or configuration while a link is perfect for skipping.
I still don't like it! But I also never had any trouble using it. Except Apple Music. Don't get me started.
The entire point of this pattern is to guide the user into a "default" option so using it for anything where the user is suppposed to provide informed consent is a dark pattern. The only places where it is not a dark pattern is where default choice actually aligns with the interest of the average user and I think that is hard to argue for a choice whose purpose is primarily to be allowed to better manipulate the user into spending more.
It's a dark pattern, and I really doubt it's accidental.
Darker patterns would be a preselected checkbox with a ok button or a default consent with a "go to settings to update your selection".
This is a "Personalized Ads" popup with an On and Off option, it looks pretty ok to me.
Incidentally, that doesn't mean the alternative has to be the wild west - that's a false dichotomy. Controlling access is fine; it's simply not fine that it's the platform that holds exclusive sway, especially if the answer is "only if we're the ones providing that app."
I'm sure there are some subset of app-store rules that taken by themselves, without the context of the other app-store rules are not self-serving. But that doesn't mean the rules overall are - and that's the reality that competitors need to deal with. Unlike apple, they can't change the restrictions they need to comply with. Both in actually immediate sense, and in a more meta process sense Apple has an unfair advantage they can and do exploit to extract tolls from the interactions between users and third-party providers.
The fact that some of those protections also protect user privacy to the extent the user stays in Apple's walled garden is almost akin to blackmail: rather than trying to protect the user's privacy regardless, they've tied the user's privacy to the Apple ecosystem. It's all or nothing. Would be a shame if anything happened to that privacy of yours - are you sure you want to leave our walled garden? There aren't any other curated gardens (we made sure of that!), and your device unfortunately has no way to safely and conveniently opt in to risks worth taking, so it's our way, or the wild west out there... oh, and if you really want the wild west, we'll take your hardware too, you'll need to use android, and we use obvious UI patents to ensure it's inconvenient to switch a lot.
It doesn't take an evil, machiavellian plan to end up in a situation in which the rules are so slanted in Apple's favor. All it takes are lots of tiny by themselves reasonable features - but steps that are always tested against Apple's interests, since those get a voice in the decision-making process, and rarely tested against third-party interests. It may well be that Apple was well intentioned in its privacy rules, and that those rules truly do protect the user - yet still have those rules stifle competition in a way that also harms the user down the line.
They aren’t a monopoly as long as you don’t consider income demographics.
Apple is very much a 'private from everyone but apple' company, they smartly just don't talk about it out loud. For their high level apps like TV and such, have things like privacy review. But their security, activation and map parts do record a lot of info.
Apple kindly publishes IP exception lists so you can still receive notifications, while blocking the rest of 17/8.
Since notifications are user-visible, one can audit for unexpected, non-notification traffic to Apple's advertised notification-only IPs.
If a large corporation officially advertises to enterprise customers a bounded, testable claim (e.g. traffic to these IP addresses is limited to notifications), then that claim can be subject to ongoing audit by the IT teams of multiple, independent, enterprises.
Verified accountability is far superior to trust. Step 1: vendor corporation makes a bounded, testable, claim.