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Comment by _yb2s | Hacker News Reader

This whole app store thing with Apple/Google is BS. Imagine if your car could only drive to locations approved as safe by the car manufacturer, and they could auto-ban your Grandma's house with no recourse.

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At least on Android you can install alternate app stores like F-Droid. All you have to do is allow apps to be installed from unknown sources.

If you use Apple, you're just out of luck unless you want to mess with whatever hacky workaround is popular this week.

I have never felt the need to do so on iOS. I cannot say the same about Android.

Lucky! I felt it very early on in iOS and that does not seem to have abated.

Your use case might be fine for their app store only, but it doesn't mean thats true for others.

Can you share more about your experience with android?

Death by 1000 cuts of little frustrations, lags, etc.

because you're an consumer and not a power user.

there's nothing wrong with that, but a very wide array of preferences different than yours does exist.

You mean aside from when you see every free android app cost $6.99 on iOS?

I’ll take a 6.99 price over android craware loaded with ads.

What if I told you there are blockers that work through the Android VPN API that can strip out ads out of every app. Using Blokada 5 myself.

Having an ad blocker is a core essential on today's internet. Even Apple makes $4B/year in just ads.

I've been using altstore successfully, minor hindrance of resigning side loaded apps every week, but if you can leave your PC on it does that automatically.

This is not “minor hinderance” for 99.9% Apple users. It’s absolutely unusable unless you are an “enthusiast”.

With a free apple developer account, you're also limited to only three "active" sideloaded apps. It's a huge hindrance. If you want more, you've got to shell out those 100 bucks per year.

> Imagine if your car could only drive to locations approved as safe by the car manufacturer

We're not very far away from that. Example: Tesla sells auto insurance based on real-time tracking of driving behavior, and explicitly lists "where you live" as a factor. So it's quite possible "real-time location safety" is already part of their model. So you may already be charged more for driving to your Grandma's house. Granted this is not a ban, but it is close enough for discomfort and all it takes is the right (or wrong) motivation and the loop can be trivially closed.

Location of the insured vehicle has been a factor since I started having insurance about 24 years ago (speaking for 20 years of Geico, and more recently Progressive).

The scale at which manufacturers and insurers like Tesla can use real-time location data in actuarial models (and whatever else they like) is quite new, though.

The important distinction is that the same entity tracking your real-time location also has unprecedented control over the car and your ability to use it, and very little transparency. This is basically the same dynamics as app stores.

Is it obvious that they can charge low enough prices the rest of the time to make this dynamic pricing an attractive offer?

Are people somehow forced to buy Tesla insurance when they buy a Tesla?

There needs to be a way to have 3rd party app stores on these platforms. Tired of the private platform argument. Google/Apple works hard to crush viable competition. It's time for laws to be written to step in and fix this.

Thats why most of the Apps i download are from F-Droid

It's more like if you could only drive approved cars on the regular roads.. which is already the case but regulated by the government instead.

> if you could only drive approved cars on convenient roads.. which is already the case

huh?

I think the analogy is more if you could only drive your car on government approved roads.

My car happily drives on private roads, and even dirt and gravel, without government approval.

You’re getting the analogy backwards - you can’t drive an unapproved car on a public road.

It's a terrible analogy no matter how you interpret it.

Approval of cars is based on whether those cars can harm other cars.

If I want to "drive" (use) an unapproved "car" (app store) on a "public road" (my own device), I should be able to do that.

This already happens with Drone. you can only flight to locations approved as safe by the manufacturer, and they could ban a location without recourse.

Isn't that based on "drone no-fly" maps from respective governments rather than what the manufacturer decides?

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