Curation and decentralization is better than millions of apps
f-droid.org
f-droid.org
I guess what I am saying is: "Absolute number of stores does not equal better access to anything." For all my beef with Apple and Android ecosystems, there are ways to bypass most of it ("control over market"). I am not sure, it is an option in China despite having 5 stores as opposed to 2.
Among Internet brands, the classic $100bn+ market cap companies of Tencent/Alibaba/Meituan/PDD/JD/Bytedance are followed by Baidu/Kuaishou both around $30bn and then not many other meaningful names.
Compare this to the US where Google/Amazon/PayPal/Netflix/Facebook/Booking.com/Airbnb/Uber/Square/eBay/DoorDash/Zoom form a much smoother distribution, probably because the scaling advantages of US app stores.
Could the Apple ecosystem of devices be the factor that enables the distribution of market caps? (Very interesting point, by the way)
I wonder if it explains the somewhat odd gap in the middle of the China market cap distribution, since Android absolutely dominates the China market at the tail end and Apple dominates at the high end.
Apple conflates their walled garden with the high perceived value of their devices, which I'm intentionally ignoring for the purpose of this question.
How? Favorable regulatory environment? Cash payments/subsidies?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphjennings/2018/03/15/corrup...
So merely having an accusation doesn't really say much.
Part of it is state-owned banks (the dominant form of banking in China) offering attractive lending to state-owned enterprises, as loan officers avoid the risk of being accused of corruption.
Also, there likely is/was more direct encouragement of exporters (e.g. by subsidies), similar to other countries, but my source doesn't specify if this currently applies to China.
Source: Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (2010)
People don’t buy AirPods because they are locked in, they buy them because they are an absolute marvel of technology.
So it put the AirPods on a level playing field with everyone else, we would have to cripple them because they would have to exist in the same low trust environment. Is this actually better for consumers?
I certainly don’t want my 3rd party Bluetooth headphones to be loading their own kernel modules.
Apple has the market share they do because they copied the playbook of fashion marketing and applied it to technology products in a time of significant industry change. They have continued to make some innovations of course, but mainly in business strategy and marketing. Their products are never really cutting edge technology nor are they remotely the best value for the cost.
Apples takes existing but not mature technology and makes it fashionable then ties it to their ecosystem. You can't even use air-tags without fully getting into the Apple system.
That's a matter of opinion. The times I have actually tried the good value competitors options that are supposedly just as good at half the price, it's not a good experience at all. Most competitors put everything it to a couple of specs that look good on a comparison sheet while neglecting the complete experience. Yeah the obscure android phone might have a 4k display and more ram at a lower price, but they only give 1 year of updates and the ROM is full of bugs and malware.
Having gone through a lot of laptops from a lot of OEMs, the current M series macbooks are the only ones which have actually seemed close to flawless. The value you get is incredible.
On an American silver dollar, though, the two faces added together have more than 95% of the coin's total surface area.
This is a highly meaningful comparison.
(I have sympathy for the article's main thesis statement, but this particular argument in support was a little silly)
I just switched Android phones last week, and the system offered me to copy over everything through plugging a USB C cable into both phones. To my surprise, Google/Android copied over all apps installed through Google Play, and just ignored all F-droid installed apps! Not even a notice or message that not everything could be copied...
A good feature is that the Android OS allows you to whitelist sources of Apps, so once you install a "store" you can grant permission to that store to install apps without completely disabling the OS installer security. That didn't used to be a thing - either the setting was Play Store Only or it wasn't and you could grab APKs from the browser.
As an Android dev, I suspect it's not actually copying the apps over, but rather looking at what apps you have and redownloading them (and maybe copying over app data/the cache), as there may be some device specific customization in the APK's: https://developer.android.com/guide/app-bundle
> An Android App Bundle is a publishing format that includes all your app’s compiled code and resources, and defers APK generation and signing to Google Play.
> Google Play uses your app bundle to generate and serve optimized APKs for each device configuration, so only the code and resources that are needed for a specific device are downloaded to run your app. You no longer have to build, sign, and manage multiple APKs to optimize support for different devices, and users get smaller, more-optimized downloads.
of course google play gets preferred treatment on a pixel phone. that's what happens when you own the platform - you get to prefer your app store. but other stores do exist and you can use them if you want. in what way is that not user choice?
The augment put forth is partly that an app store / hub not accepting all possible apps is a form of censorship, but simultaneously asserts that that there are too many apps and an app store that doesn't accept all apps is providing a "curation" service that is beneficial to the user.
Maybe they are trying to make a delineation between a large scale app store and a small scale app store, but the point doesn't feel well defined or fleshed out.
Unsure what was meant by the statement "The freedom to get apps will always be in tension with the things that people want to keep out of their life"... applications being available to install doesn't mean you have to install them.
I agree that the iOS App Store and Google Play store enjoy a monopoly over much of the world, but I don't see that China has a less censored market. I understand China to have far greater government censorship over the internet and their applications than most other regions, so having a more even market share over multiple app stores doesn't necessarily improve the censorship issue.
The censorship angle makes sense regarding app devs who complain about getting their app removed for unknown "policy violations", and the fact that a would-be malware dev would (hopefully) hesitate before publishing on an open-source repo is a positive type of curation/censorship.
I believe they are saying that a _monopolistic_ app store that doesn't accept all apps is a form of censorship. And then the article (along with some comments in this thread) explain how Google Play and Apple App Store are monopolistic
The mega-corporations will not change. It is up to you to change your behavior.
Correction: telco doesn't, only vendors since modems with open firmware are banned in most of the world.
This trend will not reverse ever. What can happen is governments can force the companies to open things up. They don’t even have to regulate. They can just dangle the threat of regulation and companies will move first. Apple has been doing a whole lot to open up repairs and the OS. It’s not far enough but it’s moving in the right direction.
I am not suggesting that everyone will change. I am suggesting that you, reading this text, chose to change. Or not, but I figure people on HN definitely have the positive liberty to be able to.
There are actually two parts in a smartphone: the baseband/radio processor and the app processor. They are both complete systems, with their own CPU and software, sometimes, each have their own chip. The baseband controls the radio as well as a few other devices, it runs proprietary code, usually an encrypted, signed blob. It is only accessible through a well defined interface and doesn't run arbitrary code. This is the part you can't control.
The app processor is the thing that runs your main OS (ex: Android) and all your apps. It can run arbitrary code and that's the "computer", the part you can control.
In a traditional PC, the baseband could take the form of a PCIe card, and in fact, it is often exactly that. For example, a lot of laptops have a separate WiFi module slotted into the main board.
I don't have anything against Apple's app store, and I think it's up to them how they want to run it, what they want to include or not, what policies and requirements they want to set, even what payment processor they will accept.
But as a user, I want to be able to choose a store that can make different choices... like f-droid, or maybe something completely different.
Plus, I think Apple has little to fear. You can have alternative stores on Android devices and it's not killing the Google store.
Also: MacOS already allows you to install software from different places. It's not some dystopian malware armageddon.
They're not going to have a choice.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_22_...
Edit: P.S. Amazon is the other obvious one.
So this all comports: you’re free to make your own App Store and not get the 30% cut, but in exchange you will not have a billion device user base on day 1 to ship your apps to.
Maybe apple makes the nicest hardware and someone buys for that reason but it doesn’t mean they support the App Store lock-in.
The market for applications is entirely separate from the market for hardware. By tying the two together, Apple is dipping into a revenue stream that they have no right to, just as Ford has no right to profits from sale of gasoline.
This seems like a matter of opinion, and one that Apple has disagreed with for decades as far as I can tell.
So when you say that the lines between markets is a matter of opinion, of course it is. When you say that Apple has a different opinion on the matter, of course they do. Those were not in dispute, and so your comment on it being "a matter of opinion" is both true, and so widely applicable as to convey effectively no meaning.
Instead, you could have responded with pointing out inconsistencies in the analogy given. You could have pointed out ongoing work done by Apple to justify the ongoing payments. These would have worked to shift the opinion on Apple's business practices, not merely to point out the general category of "matters of opinion".
If you just assume the issue at hand resolves in your favor then it’s trivial to come up with analogs that appear in your favor! It just isn’t very convincing.
Consider if 50%+ of people moving from horse and buggy to automobiles picked Ford and in order to support this new market creation Ford had to invest billions to create gas stations all over the country. It does not seem crazy at all that they would prevent other manufacturers from utilizing those gas stations, and that they’d take a cut from every gas station operator who chooses to service the giant market that Ford created.
Regarding the gasoline/automobile being "obviously two distinct markets" and computing software/hardware being "not obviously distinct", I'd say that's a description of how the markets current are, and not a argument for how they ought to be. I intentionally selected an analogy where two complementary good (gasoline/automobiles) are treated as separate markets, to state that goods being complementary, just as computing hardware/software are complementary, does not mean that they are the same market.
> Consider if 50%+ of people moving from horse and buggy to automobiles picked Ford
Looking it up, Ford did have 56% of US automobile market share in 1920 [0]. Not really relevant to either of our arguments, but was interesting to find.
> and in order to support this new market creation Ford had to invest billions to create gas stations all over the country.
I tried to find history of gas stations, to see what historic parallels could be drawn, but it looks like gasoline was either sold at general stores or hardware stores, with dedicated gas stations being either owned independently or by oil companies, and were started in response to the rise in automobile ownership [1]. That is, the existing infrastructure was used for the automobile.
I'd say this is a pretty good parallel for Apple's App Store. The existing infrastructure for software deployment, the internet, was and is the primary method by which software is distributed to iOS. This infrastructure predates Apple, and is a far larger part of the software deployment. Apple's primary role is not one of enabling software deployment (i.e. enabling deployment where it would otherwise be impossible), but one of restricting software deployment (i.e. preventing software deployment where it would otherwise be possible). That strikes me as entirely undeserving of an extra cut of payments.
Another potential analogy would be in vehicle repairs. Your manufacturer warranty is valid, even if the car is serviced by a mechanic not employed by the manufacturer. This required legal battles to resolve, and established that even closely tied markets such as car sales and car repairs should be considered as separate markets.
[0] https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/how-ford-cre...
It isn't even retaliation anymore, they can say "well they can use their own app store, which is what they wanted anyway." Don't get your hopes up.
Or Microsoft.
This is exactly what the case study looked like for Microsoft when they were producing phones and were just getting their app store up and running. People were hesitant because their app store didn't have all the apps they used like YouTune, Facebook and Twitter.
The one classic example is how Google refused to allow MS to have a YouTube app in their store - that single app alone kept thousands of people from switching to the MS mobile platform which in turn contributed to their low market share and eventual collapse and MS killing off most of their mobile platform.
I have nothing against Steam or Epic Games; rather, I am curious why the discourse around the two seems to be different, even though they're quite similar as services?
Did Epic Games do "something wrong" (not sure what the right term here is, please do suggest a better one if it comes to mind) in comparison to what Steam does?
Gamers, and PC gamers in particular, are quite stubborn. I suspect there's a lot of loyalty to Steam for many reasons and Epic making their own copycat store split their already well-curated libraries. That and they literally yanked games already released on Steam and moved them to Epic, so I'd say that's where most of the bad blood comes from.
Valve doesn't have anything in the phone space AFAIK.
But it isn't. Or it shouldn't be. Apple is a corporation, and as long as the corporation is an American corporation, the corporation should be regulated for the benefit of the citizens of America. (insert laugh track here)
If you could install your own App Store, there would be no issues.
you can use the App store without a credit card. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204316
>4. Enter your credit card and billing information, then tap Next. You can also choose None.
And contactpicker is behind an experimental flag. When are they launching it??
What more do you want :)
Google tends to do the same thing with Chrome or perhaps it's that frontend developers tend to implement Chrome experimental features a lot.
It would be great to deploy a simple site or PWA without a lot of catches where "if it's this browser do X or if it's another do Y.
I'd argue it's really good in 2022. We only distribute our software as a web app these days. Many of our customers exclusively use iOS Safari to access it.
We even got the PWA stuff working reliably. Our web app runs full-screen on iOS devices and is launched from an icon on the home screen. For most users, there is absolutely zero difference between this and a native iOS app experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox
Microsoft got hit because it had, what, >90% of the desktop PC market? And that at the time where the mobile market was so niche (Palm etc) that it could be disregarded.
Apple is hovering around 50% of the market. It's certainly market-dominant, but by the standards of the 90s and the Microsoft anti-trust case, it's nowhere even close. By the pre-Bork standards, that's a very different story. Here's how we used to run things:
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/370/294/
"The District Court found that the merger would increase concentration in the shoe industry, both in manufacturing and retailing, eliminate one of the corporations as a substantial competitor in the retail field, and establish a manufacturer-retailer relationship which would deprive all but the top firms in the industry of a fair opportunity to compete, and that, therefore, it probably would result in a further substantial lessening of competition and an increased tendency toward monopoly. ... The District Court was correct in concluding that this merger may tend to lessen competition substantially ... The judgment is affirmed."
And how much market share did the two companies in question have?
"... the combined share of Brown and Kinney sales of women's shoes (by unit volume) exceeded 20%. In 31 cities -- some the same as those used in measuring the effect of the merger in the women's line -- the combined share of children's shoes sales exceeded 20%; in 6 cities, their share exceeded 40%. In Dodge City, Kansas, their combined share of the market for women's shoes was over 57%; their share of the children's shoe market in that city was 49%. In the 7 cities in which Brown's and Kinney's combined shares of the market for women's shoes were greatest (ranging from 33% to 57%), each of the parties alone, prior to the merger, had captured substantial portions of those markets (ranging from 13% to 34%); the merger intensified this existing concentration. In 118 separate cities, the combined shares of the market of Brown and Kinney in the sale of one of the relevant lines of commerce exceeded 5%. In 47 cities, their share exceeded 5% in all three lines."
Now some apps have to be native, but most of the apps I see people using can be saved as a PWA and still do the almost the same stuff the do in the native app. Ie doom scroll for hours.
Since you can't filter away ads or "up selling" you have to grind through like 15 shovel ware apps giving up and settling for a crappy one.
There is a huge market for trustworthiness in general. It's getting really hard to get honest advice anywhere these days. It's nothing but sales pitches.
If I've already made a billion being scum it pays for me to buy your trustworthy platform when it is still in the millions stage, then corrupt it and pump as much money out of it as possible based on its good name.
We see this on non internet products often. Some popular 'small farm' product gets bought by a megacorp but they don't change their marketing.
I agree. Give me an indie game store that doesn’t allow in app purchases or ads and I’d abandon the existing stores faster than you can blink.
+ 1000x. This has been on my mind for a while. The problem of decision fatigue. I was trying to explain this to my parents and in-laws recently: If you go to a library, and there are
1. 2 books, how much time will you need to decide between the two? 2. 10 books, how much then? 3. 1000 books?
And does your happiness increase with the amount of choices?
I don’t want only content some algo thinks I’ll enjoy. (At least not exclusively)
I also want to know what other people are interested in. The context that my friend thinks thing thing is ‘the best thing they’ve ever seen’ could make it worth consuming, even if it’s way out of my wheel house.
Brave Goggles was the last project I saw that gave a hope that something more curated could be enables on (web) search results. But it doesn’t seem to have gone far.
There's not. In order for it to be a market, a customer needs to pay for it.
Emphasis mine. It goes from claiming they don't "work badly" to finally conceding they merely "work", no attempt to demonstrate that they work well.
Apparently a great example is Windows, a notorious dumpster fire so filled with unverifiable garbage it spawned a secondary market of antivirus software.
Or GNOME software, which I assume they just meant Linux software, where apt/dnf/Flatpak/Snapcraft has definitely not caused user confusion and a million help articles about how to use it and which to use with weird fan rivalries over which ones should take the crown (I'm referring to the animosity around Snap vs alternatives) /s. Or works so well it allows users to accidentally delete their desktop environment [1].
Don't know much about the Chinese app store market, but it's not like any Chinese market could be considered decentralized when the central government has deeper restrictions on apps than any Western app store.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/qqa44e/linus_tech_t...
Pop store is a different story, but that's a very specific thing.
GNOME's software centre issues very clearly stem from the diversity of package managers and formats and environments it has to support because Linux actually has a decentralized application ecosystem. On Android, F-Droid likes to claim that the "technical skill" needed to install other packages is an artificial barrier which is just imposed by Google, yet it merely piggybacks off the usability & simplicity of Google's centrally developed package formats (.apk or .appbundle) and package manager (PackageManager). When the ecosystem is actually decentralized, GNOME software shows just how user unfriendly things become.
it's great if you're an indie software developer who cares about things like fairness and other apps not being featured above your own, but it's certainly a long ways off from the app store experience of android or iOS in nearly every metric that my mum might care about.
Also, web performance is still a concern on mobile devices which means it's still impractical as a native replacement for some use cases.
I develop apps, I get the downside of these centralized services for me, but I'm not sure what they're selling me as a user here.
They seem to sell me on privacy / censorship concerns, but I see no privacy benefits stated. I don't see any reason distributed stores are more privacy focused. China is their example? If anything that indicates the store itself is less of a potential privacy / censorship issue than other factors.
>From the point of the user, the ideal app store would contain exactly what the user wants, and not one thing more.
I don't really care if there are more apps on there that I might try and not use. I don't understand what I'm being sold here / why I would like that / how that even could happen.
* https://f-droid.org/2022/09/30/free-software-and-inspection-... * https://f-droid.org/2022/02/28/no-user-accounts-by-design.ht... * https://f-droid.org/2020/01/16/tracking-the-trackers.html * https://f-droid.org/2019/05/05/trust-privacy-and-free-softwa... * https://f-droid.org/2019/04/15/privacy-preserving-analytics....
one killer feature that is still nascent (except for a few KDE apps) is to offer complete bundles of compatible open source apps, e.g., with uniform look and feel and, maybe, interoperability. in an open source world there is no reason why the metadata of different projects could not be used more actively to provide a high quality experience.
"It looks like F-Droid does not have any apps matching your search string "Lyft" "
I'm talking about the backend services being opened up so that it can be utilized by other clients. Apps can be gated behind payment or authorization similar to how RHEL or SLES package managers work.
Would we still be having this discussion about the limitations of only two players in the marketplace?
I honestly don't know, but I always thought they had a good thing going and provided a lot of competition to both platforms. The bad thing is then Google and Apple went out of their way to not put any of their apps in the MS app store (youtube was a classic example), essentially cutting them off in order to get rid of the competition.
My long term outlook is there will never be a third competitor to either because now they own so much of the apps, it will be easy to starve off any competitor who wants to promote their apps for another platform. They've already proved already their willing and able to do anything to keep their dominance, sans a lawsuit over anti-competitor or monopolistic business practices.
they have an inclusion policy[2] for apps in their index which requires an OSS license but doesn't say anything about moderation standards, but they do say 'Trademarks must not be infringed, and any other legal requirements must be adhered to'.
Third party repositories are not under our control what so ever. If you think a 3rd party repository is violating your rights you will have to get in contact with their respective operators. Procedures described here apply exclusively to f-droid.org."
From your first link.
I'll also recommend people use an app like FoxyDroid instead of the default (barebones, visually unappealing, and feature-stunted) F-Droid app. I install the F-Droid app only for downloading and installing FoxyDroid itself.
You can connect whatever "collection of apps" source you desire but you're correct that you do get the "F-Droid List" out of the box.
It may feel odd to show no apps when initially using F-Droid but, in theory, one improvement may be to have the user explicitly choose a source list and maybe the "F-Droid List" is first in the list among others.
Going in that direction would also help expose that particular feature as I wasn't even aware that you could add / change sources for F-Droid, which sounds like if easy enough to add may be an easier avenue to self publish apps than the major app stores.
> F-Droid also makes it easy for anyone to publish their own repository, with their own curation rules.
It's a constant source of friction with quasi-monopolists, whose employees bristle about how they'd feel if they went independent and their own company was held to these standards. Your $10M company doesn't have to do this stuff. Nor your $1B company 9 times out of 10. But if you're FAANG you're goddamned right you have to follow these extra rules.
What I'd hope we'd get in this space here is metacuration. Give me a curated list of curators for subject areas. I want a feed that's 30% environmentalism, 20% futurism, and a mix of random stuff I should care about but maybe don't look at too often.
I believe this reduces the censorship element by splitting responsibility into more of a chain.
I would love this. The closest I can think is a manually-curated RSS feed, and https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome
At the end, isn’t it one entity vs others’ opinion whether they like you or not?
> If f-droid.org is the one source of software, then our curation would be censorship, since we would be preventing speech. [...] That’s where decentralization comes in. Decentralization means people can choose who they trust in a fine-grained way, not all or nothing. We have put a lot of work into making it easy for anyone to make their own app repos, and those repos can follow any rules that its creators want.
Basically, if you curate apps in one location without preventing others from curating/publishing/installing apps to/from other locations (ie decentralization), then it is not censorship
They call it "curation", I call it a ghost town.
If they are against the monopolized market make a clear argument, preferably consumer-focused. Don’t hide behind “censorship” and abstract ideas that have proven not to scale - such as users should be able to chose who they trust. This shows such an insane disconnect from the reality of the vast majority of consumers that it’s laughable to include it.
And as usual, a great example of a censorship free open market - China.
You're thinking of censorship as a consumer that I presume lives in a developed country. Consumers elsewhere can face censorship [0][1]. I hope this can change your perspective a little bit.
0. Apple takes down Quran app in China https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58921230.amp
1. Apple Removes New York Times Apps From Its Store in China https://nyti.ms/2hTHtWd
B) lots of content online that doesn’t my comply with government censorship. The app store model simply presents an easy choke point.
> The app store model simply presents an easy choke point.
Alternative frame: How could you possibly know? Have you experienced an app store system outside the western duopoly?
Saying that, I agree that alternative rendering engines should be allowed in AppStore. Don’t think we need an alternative app store for that.
I have worked in IT for a few years and dealt with many very tech illiterate people. Apple AppStore is a relatively safe space for them, if they get scammed into installing an alternative MyApps store with a ton of trackers and other scam software they will suffer tremendously.
Points you make in other comments about how official app stores are relatively "safe" for the average user are strong and I don't want to sound like I disagree with your conclusion. Just that this reason to believe "I have not experienced censorship" is misguided.
However, we are not discussing censorship as a state-level concern. An app censored on iOS can still exist as a web app or as an Android app. Apple's AppStore does not encompass the entirety of our cultural narrative. On the contrary, an app banned from AppStore often generates a lot of press.
(again, anecdotal) I can't remember a single app that I have discovered on the AppStore. The process always starts with hearing about an app from someone else, or reading about it.
> I can't remember a single app that I have discovered on the AppStore.
Does fairly well suggest that the store itself is not implementing censorship. Again, I don't want to sound like I disagree. Just wanted to pick your brain a bit more.
(I guess Apple could be involved with censorship efforts to prevent news from getting out about a ban, but that's obviously harder to do when the information is disseminated outside their store. The kind of censorship I suggested is much more of a state-level actor concern.)
If China looks like a more competitive and healthy ecosystem, as an anti-China person you can respond either by thinking that's a problem, or by smirking about China.
> make a clear argument
Their arguments are a lot clearer than yours, which seem to be an expansion of "oh, come on!" You're appstore-splaining to people who run a successful appstore by telling them they're out of touch.
And yes, they are out of touch. But not from ignorance - they are intentionally appealing to our sense of fairness while pursuing their own interests.
If you don't like it, don't use it, but it's not a "bad" thing for it to exist.
I think it's great that we have the option of different app stores.
Is there some ulterior motive they have that I am not aware of?
Personally I think these aspects are important and will probably play a bigger part in the future. But censorship is not why I think we should open up such a huge risk surface on iOS.
with vague talk about twitter possibly getting some kind of boot from appstores, which will invariably result in some kind of act of censorship to mold it to fit the appstore policies, i don't really get how one could go 'yeah, these things aren't actually impacting people in their day-to-day life'. they absolutely do. literally all of those things mentioned are playing out in real time for twitter and people who use it or affected by it in some kind of way. which turns out to be increasingly everyone.
Tumblr, Twitter, TikTok - ok, let's focus on preserving access to these apps if you feel this is important. Allowing users to install any unverified app is a massive problem. Just look at what we use our phones for: banking, health, investment, personal info, 2FA, and more.
I'm sorry if I misread this. I read it through carefully a few times now.
Did you just actually say that people's "freedom to chose who you trust" is irrelavent to their lives?!
That must win the prize for the all time most patronising semtiment I've read on HN. Surely you're trolling at this point?
In practical terms what we get is "Banks are not your friend" being proclaimed by a scammer arguing that you should trust them, not a tightly regulated industry. And millions of people suffer from that. Sure, "it's their fault" because they didn't "look into it".
Forcing everyone to use a decentralised system where anything goes "wild west" style is probably a terrible idea.
I don't think that is what is being argued.
What is being argued is the right to use a decentralised system over a centralised walled-garden, if you so wish.
I'd rather my mum used a walled garden where the apps are (probably) safer and much less scammy.
F-droid is a great app repository, no problem with them whatsoever. I am highlighting the fact that a purist argument for a technological change that does not extensively invest into understanding the negative impacts on consumers is bogus. How many iPhone users really need an alternative store? Versus how many iPhone users want to have safeties around installing apps critical to their well-being?
To your point: maybe a hard to enable setting for allowing sideloading would satisfy both the safety and the flexibility concerns. But at the end of the day, if I ever need a hackable device I will just get an Android or jailbrake my iPhone. I explicitly separate my own needs from what I perceive as a very dangerous change for 99.99% of iPhone users.
We have recently implemented some rudimentary controls where you can use Device Admin mode to lock F-Droid to a given set of repositories. That strictly enforces the walled garden, but doesn't require a single monopolist have all the power.
You and I differ on digital literacy. To me it's the only way to ultimately solve this problem. It's not about educating people technically. See my paper on "Digital Self Defence as Civic Cyber-Security". Here in the UK we're taking that line (officially) at last. And starting young!
Before limiting peoples' options to corporate walled gardens on the assumption that "its safer" we can try actually scuring the products, hardware and OS is the foundation. Got to stop listening to the negative, defeatist voices who say "that's impossible".
And y'know there are laws against computer misuse. We ought to seriously try enforcing them, even if that means the inconvenient truth of exposing criminals with fancy brand names and logos. :)
My skepticism is rooted in two phenomena:
1. Our society seems to be unable to address criminal behavior at the current scale, how can we expect it to improve if we expand the attack surface? Counties are unable to stop basic phone and tech support scams for decades now. There are just a few dozen companies that are responsible and we still fail. I can’t trust the authorities to be able to address more sophisticated scams at a bigger scale. Corruption is at the core of this. So now we also have to solve corruption.
2. Tech literacy is not enough to effectively avoid tech scams. It’s helpful for sure, but look at how many educated people got burned by crypto. I agree it’s work in progress and maybe we will become better as a society. But I need to see more proof to feel confident in that.
But is it our place to make decisions for people that way? I say not.
> This means F-Droid gives you selected apps by default without bans or censorship. When you install the F-Droid app, it automatically connects to the collection on f-droid.org that is maintained by this community. F-Droid also makes it easy for anyone to publish their own repository, with their own curation rules.
i.e., yes, you do get the "F-Droid List" by default, but you are welcome to connect to a different list or publish your own "list" of apps that has its own curation rules.
Imagine if you could view Apple or Google's app store with an "awesome app" list curated by a list of experts you follow without all the junk of suggested apps or ads. That would go in the direction of "meta-curation" akin to what /u/hinkley is referring to in a another comment [1].
That said, Apple seems to be more targeted now precisely ( compared to non-Apple linux and Windows ) because it has more people, who are lulled by the sense of security Apple curation model provides.
edit: I kinda get that the article is mostly about mobile devices, but the app-store concept appears to have moved to desktop world as well.
This post is very manipulative in my view. It would be really easy to avoid that for the authors - just list the downsides of allowing any app to be installed on an iPhone. What are the consequences of allowing your parent to install "Bank of Amerika" on their phone? Exactly.
I think the main question I see is - do multiple stores benefit the user?
I'm not sure of that answer but I think we can agree that multiple stores do NOT help the default app store, which in turn could be beneficial to the consumer (multiple stores that have to compete on pricing w/ deals, self publishers offering a cheaper price directly, etc. - think more like grocery stores selling the same stuff vs farmers market vs direct from farm).
I'm no economist but I think we could also agree that having at least a few options is generally A Good Thing.
edit: regardless, even in a world with multiple stores the point re: attack surface is a good one and one of your other comments regarding what users actually value like safety is an important one, which as a business are the things you need to weigh on to make a profit
1. Less trusted software. Can I trust Russian Yandex app store? Can I trust Amazon app store?
2. Focus on upselling their own / affiliated apps.
3. No actual increase in choice. Some devices just come preinstalled with alternative stores for no other reason than their own monetary benefit.
4. A theoretical benefit that "I have choice" and if someone bans something I _might_ be able to install it from a different store. Of course oppressive regimes don't just ban apps, they often restrict internet in more severe ways.
My highschool history teacher once said the answer to nearly everything is money.
Why don't we have mobile app stores that operate in a manner similar to package managers? Money. Why can't I install what I want on my iPhone? Money.
Anyone can make a web page with apps they think are great, and links to those apps that will go straight to store pages. Very few people do.
These are done rarely because there's little or no money in it. Give the curators a significant cut, and now you have a lot of curators and a lot of gaming of the system.
Now you need to curate the curators, which is still a significant problem.
Throughout all of that, you'll have those claiming that curation is censorship. They don't matter because you can never satisfy them.
Who ensures security in decentralized app stores? Curators, independently? Or can they "inherit" that from the major app stores?
None of this is anywhere near simple.
the article is talking about the Chinese consumer application ecosystem, not the state and is indeed correct on this. The platform ecosystem offers significantly more choice and Apple for example does not enforce its monopolistic powers as it does in the Western market. As a result you have genuine competition on the distribution end, like WeChat.
It's a little ironic you're demanding they make a clear argument when your argument is just a simple anecdote that doesn't even hold up well. Sure you haven't experienced censorship in default app stores because you aren't actually trying to do much with your device.
Do I want you to be able to install an emulator? Of course. This is pure protectionism by a monopoly.
Do I want my family to be able to install a fake banking or health app? No.
So based on this principle, I would say jailbraking is a viable option for tech-savvy people who really need something special on their phone that is being unfairly restricted by Apple.
What is the benefit to me (as a user) to install a non-webkit browser? Do most users know what webkit is? Do they care?
Or, the other browser implements part of the `webext` API that WebKit does not, and there's an extension out there that you'd really like to use. Maybe one that integrates with your existing password manager, or rewrites Twitter URLs to nitter.net, or whatever, and the extension just won't work with WebKit.
Or, maybe WebKit's JavaScriptCore just isn't fast enough for some web-based game you like, and you'd like to run a browser that uses V8 or SpiderMonkey instead.
You're right, a lot of users don't have these problems, and don't care... until maybe one day they do. And maybe 99% of users will never have these problems at all, but 1% of Apple's userbase is still a lot of users who could benefit from browser choice, one day.