Having it open to everyone for only a limited amount of time actually kind of seems like the right thing, but it's hard to come up with a legit explanation for why they rushed that change to China first.
1: https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/11/netizen-voices-apple-r...
They don't, for instance, have the flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, instead using the flag of the former Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
The parent poster was referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Afghanistan
Here's a podcast interviewing someone who created an emoji
This is surely related to the political climate but I believe the entities involved applied that change worldwide.
Apple made that change around the same time as the Rio Olympics. In the leadup to the Olympics, there was a push to create an emoji for every event. Unicode 9 added emojis for handball, wrestling, water polo, fencing, etc.
However the almost comprehensive set still had some gaps, because Apple veto'd the marksmanship/air rifle and pentathlon emojis... but not in time to prevent the creation of the corresponding unicode glyphs
Yandex is an interesting showcase of how bad this can get - they literally dropped country borders from their maps last year "for better user experience". And I don't mean just lines that you normally see while browsing the map, but even when you ask for it deliberately. For example, if you look up a city, you get its territory highlighted on the map - but that's not the case for countries, it just puts a marker "somewhere in the middle".
They also removed administrative regional boundaries without announcing that change - probably because looking up regions at the border would have to include a part of said border into the displayed boundary, making it discoverable.
How does that standard apply to Taiwan?
“The maritime border is disputed in a part of the Ems estuary outside the Dollart bay, where Germany has the view that the state border runs on the left bank of the Ems, while the Netherlands regards the Thalweg as its border.
[…]
In 2014 the two nations' foreign ministers met to put an end to the dispute. It was decided that the border should remain ambiguous and responsibility for the region in question shared”
More info (in German) at https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsch-Niederländische_Grenzf....
Or maybe more ideas are also in play? Perhaps recognizing the existing power dynamics? Perhaps playing the game over a longer time frame?
Not all ethicists recommend "dying on your sword" so to speak. Sometimes it is useful to maintain influence and fight another day. These things are far from simple.
If you want Apple to push back on censorship in China, let's talk about the details. What would China likely do in return?
If you add ten more years, did it work out for Russia? Belarus? Ukraine? It did work out for Poland, Latvia and some others. But getting rid of an oppressive regime is the easy part of transforming an autocracy into democracy.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HKmap.live
² https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/news/apple-telegram-belarus/
³ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/google-apple-remove-nav...
⁴ Check the bio: https://twitter.com/tim_cook
All we know is what has been reported.
It would seem improbable what a multi trillion dollar company with it's manufacturing base in China wouldn't be dealing and negotiating with the Chinese authorities as part of day to day operations.
To say Tim Cook fights no battles seems unlikely. We cannot make that statement because the reality is that we just don't know what goes on behind closed doors!
(Or perhaps, that was your point!)
They are not 'hiding' anything, which implies they have more to hide.
Apple are a secretive company that does not tend to discuss their internal politics and supplier arrangements.
The internet could argue about this all day long, but my point stands that we just don't know!
But I get your point as well. Maybe I'm feeling generous towards Apple!
I'm not normally a fan of Mr Tim Cook! :-)
If you can't then you'll have to rely on the "it would've been worse but for his efforts" but I doubt you're going to provide evidence for that.
What we do know is that Apple have repeatedly sided with censorship, I can certainly provide evidence of that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_d...
Yet icloud is dencrypted in China as soon as that's what the authorities want.
Standing up for things doesn't really mean much when you have nothing to lose. It's like the world cup players talking about LGBT rights and then stopping it as soon as they are threatened with yellow cards. That's boring cowardly virtue signalling, it's not standing up for something regardless of consequences.
by "power dynamics", do you mean lies propagated by the CCP?
> Perhaps playing the game over a longer time frame?
Apple isn't a government. What do you mean here exactly? Money? That propagating lies for money is a legitimate way of doing business?
Parent is likely referring to Apple's position in the market[1], where their profit - not revenue - alone ( 141b in 2021 ) dwarfs many nations' GDP[2] in the world.
I would not call it a lie.
[1]https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/gross-p... [2]https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?most_rec...
[0]: https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/apple-iphone-7-and-...
Wasn't the Pixel 6 assembled by Foxconn? And the upcoming Pixel 7 / foldables apparently also going to be assembled by Foxconn? That's not pulling out...
[edit to clarify we're only talking about Google]
If one believes Elon Musk's view of the Twitter situation with the app store, Apple seems to be for more censorship!
When playing fullscreen video on my phone, I do not see the home indicator, as it hides after a short delay due to most developers adopting this API. Just tested in VLC and the home indicator is hidden after about 3 seconds of fullscreen video playback
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiviewcontro...
Getting app developers to fix it is a very mixed bag. One app I use a lot (F1 TV) had had this issue forever, and many many many people have complained to F1 Media about it. They don’t care, apparently, and that’s a high end app that costs upwards of $80/yr
Also, erm, Safari. I was actually complaining about this (with a screenshot) just yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=33770571
[1] https://webkit.org/blog/7929/designing-websites-for-iphone-x...
It’s instinctual behavior.
Like imagine if a desktop pc had 3 dime sized dots on the bottom of the screen to remind you a mouse has 3 buttons.
It’s noise, not signal.
It's also a clear indication that you can swipe up to go home. If the indicator is invisible, you cannot swipe up. You need to interact with the app to make the indicator appear (eg. tap the screen). I appreciate the visual indicator and that it can be disabled when there is full screen content
In my experience as an iOS developer using this API, the only time the preference to hide the home indicator is respected is in the case you mentioned, when a full screen video is playing. Otherwise the home indicator always appears whenever the user stops interacting with the screen. So the GP is correct that there is no user control to make it hidden, and not really any developer control either.
I just compiled two of my apps with `prefersHomeIndicatorAutoHidden` set to true. This resulted in the home indicator disappearing after a second or two on the view controllers where it was configured. Neither of the apps were video apps.
The home indicator does come back if you interact with the screen. Tap the screen and it will appear briefly, before disappearing again.
That's a term I haven't heard in years. I wonder if anyone still remembers the literal thousands of settings that were possible to change and all the "tweaking" programs that were made for it.
I want enough space on my phone. A: No. You Can't. We're taking that for OS stuff to sell you things you don't want. A: "Buy a new phone with more storage and a vastly inflated flash price." Or A: "You can pay apple a sub to have your private files hackable and released as "the fappening" like happened to Jennifer Lawrence." You'll have to take steps to avoid this if you are able which you might no be, ha!
I don't want any of my private files from my phone or my computer on someone else's computer. Have you tried using apple without paying for their backup service? You probably did manage, do a survey of your friends to see how they went.
I want to use firefox with uBlock origin (or whatever) on my phone. No, you can't. I'm sure there's a way to pay apple for something to do something I don't want here. Chime in with it.
I want to run Kodi on my appleTV to be able to watch my DVD library that I own, using the device that I own plugged into the tv that I own. A: "No. You can't. You can pay apple a sub for appleTV the app which entitles you to pay again for anything you actually want to watch that you already own."
The answer is always pay apple more money and probably a recurring payment. Always. And by design. They pay economists to optimise the models to make it happen.
I want to pay Mary for her app. A: "No you can't, you can pay apple and apple can tax Mary 30% of her gross revenue for a service you can't opt out of.
You pay apple to be their product. The market power is utterly phenomenal. The answer is always pay Apple more money.
Unfortunately, <queue some made up story from Apple's PR team about how some soldier's lives were saved by limiting AirDrop time to exactly 10 minutes>.
This is absurd. Apple is doing this because of government pressure, not because of their own desire to crack down.
Yes, not doing business in China means less revenue, and unhappy shareholders. This is why capitalism sucks: it more or less requires companies do unethical things, when not doing those things means much less money.
Behind the curtain there are humans making decisions. They may be hedge funds, investors, board members, etc. There are humans that deliberately want to do business with China and know exactly what is happening with those workers. It wasn’t capitalism that outsourced iPhone production to a sweat shop, it was a group of real people who are morally bankrupt.
Power and corruption are ubiquitous in every system.
And it is a weird kind of "force" they face. Apple, over the course of decades, has willingly made a huge investment in a state with an authoritarian government in order to pursue their goals. They did this knowing full-well that China's suppression apparatus would take great interest in Apple's pocket bugs, and that China shows little hesitation about using their leverage. Apple knew they would be asked to make these sorts of concessions. There's no chance they didn't think this over.
So when people say they "Apple doesn't have a choice", what they mean is Apple made the choice some time back.
This is the part you're wrong about: Apple, like any public corporation with effectively-zero internal controlling-share ownership, is constitutionally incapable of doing things that would make its share price drop; and is constitutionally compelled to do things that make its share price rise. Any CEO who attempts to do anything "against" the share price is fired by the board (which consists of external shareholders, not idealists) and replaced by a CEO who will serve the share-price god.
"Things that make Apple's share price rise" include "entering the Chinese market", "committing to the Chinese market", and "doing whatever customization to their products is required to stay in the Chinese market."
Which is all to say: Apple never made a choice. Free-market capitalism made this choice. If individual Apple employees don't like "the market" being their true boss, they're free to leave and work instead for a private company, or an internally majority-owned company, or a non-profit, or a B Corp. But Apple itself — the aggregate emergent behavior of the organizational entity — is not free to do anything, any more than a train is free to drive off of its rails.
Consider:
1. The market has an ability to "lose faith in" an equity, and do a mass sell-off of that equity, destroying/bankrupting the company — see e.g. what almost happened with British bonds a few months ago. Essentially, an uncoordinated boycott, as a result of a suddenly different output to a Keynesian beauty-contest (i.e. everyone thinks that a sufficient number of other people will sell based on the news to trigger a collapse of the price; so they have to sell first.)
2. In companies owned by majority-external shareholders — especially when those shareholders are market-makers (as is true in Apple's case: https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s...) — the board is very well aware of #1, and so hires/fires the CEO based in part on whether they will avoid actions that will result in the market "losing faith" in the company. (How do they know? Because those market-makers are the ones who would, in aggregate, do most such selling-off!)
That's what I mean by "Apple is constitutionally incapable of doing X" — not that they'd face some sort of corporate malfeasance suit if they did (who even cares?) but that any CEO hired by a public corporation is operating under a dagger of Damocles that they know will fall the moment they do anything to lose the public's faith in their company's stock.
Costco paying above-market, and Amazon not putting out any dividends, are not actions that result in mass sell-offs — especially because they're things the companies have done from the start (so if anyone got in on these companies in the first place, they got in knowing that these are things these companies do.)
Apple exiting China is the opposite: a stark, sudden shift in strategy, in a direction the self-interested parts of the global(!) market wouldn't care for. (Emphasis because mutual funds et al have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders, and those shareholders aren't just American, but all over the world — including China!)
You're trying to paint Apple as a helpless victim here, but they didn't get blindsided by CCP tyranny. The company has spent years developing this exact situation and repeatedly choose to do the bidding of the Chinese government.
"Just following orders" is a pitiful excuse, and even worse when the orders are coming from an oppressive foreign government.
I think it would be more accurate to say that the CCP is cracking down, and Apple is one target of that push.
I don't think it's completely accurate to say that Apple can "choose" these things. There's no "choosing" with the CCP, and there's no "choosing" to manufacture outside of China, at this point [1]. This isn't an Apple problem, it's a worldwide supply chain problem, that all tech companies are stuck in [2].
They're choosing to continue business in China. They're choosing to continue to manufacture in China. Like everyone else, they're choosing to leave China, with manufacturing being pushed to India, Taiwan, Vietnam, and S.Korea. But, in the short term, there's exactly one choice, for both, for them and the rest of the tech sector, that keeps the bills paid. This is a systemic problem, not an Apple problem. It's good to see the world is, finally, waking up to this, beginning the transition, and I think the beginnings of the transition should be celebrated.
1. https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/28/tech/apple-china-manufacturin...
2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/timbajarin/2022/08/30/shifting-...
Which request? Android's version of AirDrop, "Nearby Share" is disabled in China [1].
> even though their Pixel uses many Chinese parts and some are made in China, because they don't service in China.
Google is an ad company. Only 5 million Pixel 6 sold in the first 6 months [2]. It's just a few percent of their income. Nobody would notice if they decide to stop selling the Pixel line, worldwide.
Apple is a hardware company, with around 50% of their income from iPhones [3]. It's a very different context. Again, they appear to building speed to move out, and like the previous reference shows, that's all any of these established companies can do in the short term: build speed.
1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72812112/android-nearby-...
2. https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/android/274544/pixel-smartph...
However some people think that Apple should bear the cost in its own, since it’s the not an existential choice. It’s simply the choice between taking a loss this year then recovering later, or continuing to make the maximal amount of money this year.
I think I agree with this. What could you see that mandate looking like, and what would the "standard" be? Would it be something stronger than the sanctions we have now? As my previous links show, complete isolation is impossible, in the short term, so I imagine this would have to be a slow process.
> It’s simply the choice between taking a loss this year then recovering later, or continuing to make the maximal amount of money this year.
I would suggest reading the references I provided. This definitely isn't a "loss this year" thing. It's losses for decades. It not only requires rebuilding direct vendors, but vendors that supply to them, and to them, and so on.
Edit: The alternative is Apple doesn't comply w/ government orders and leaves the country. That is the alternative.
> Apple won’t admit why this change is being made in China, but the peer-to-peer nature of AirDrop has made it popular for spreading anti-government protest material, and hopping into your settings every 10 minutes to re-enable the ability to receive AirDrop from strangers makes it a lot less useful for that.
Then it can be default "contacts only" and you can turn to everyone with a single press, and it turns itself back off.
It was brought in because of protests in mainland China. Just not because of the current ones, but previous ones.
Not hard at all.
On Oct 13, 2022 this protest happened (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Sitong_Bridge_protest), which the CCP considered a serious offense, potentially on the same level of the 1989 protest.
At the time people, especially college students around that area (lots of universities nearby), were using AirDrop to share photos of the protest, because social medium was heavily censored. University administrators were tasked to make sure iPhone-carrying students to disable allowing AirDrop from everyone to stop the spread of the images.
A few weeks later, iOS public betas were found to come with the change to limiting AirDrop to 10 minutes, and nothing about it was ever mentioned in release note.
Was Apple pressured by the CCP to rush this? I don't know. Look at the evidence and judge by yourself.
But there's a more nuanced perspective.
It is rumored that CCP has the ability to actually track and uncover the identity of iOS devices sending AirDrop. Think about it: how else AirDrop can limit to receive from contacts only? If so, AirDrop would provide a false sense of anonymity and deniability, and Apple would put some of its customers in jeopardy if they do nothing.
By limiting AirDrop from everyone to 10 minutes, Apple achieved three objectives:
1. They showed compliance (they have to, if they want to keep the business in China); 2. They avoided the potential reputation damage in the scenario where protesters are caught AirDropping offensive materials (e.g. “iPhones aren't as secure as Apple advertises after all”); 3. They closed a loophole in which people get spammed (yes, allowing AirDrop from everyone gets you mostly spams anyway).
The “mistake” Apple made was that it did not a) rush the change to all regions, and b) mention it explicitly in release note, therefore completely exposed them to the first objective and failed to convey the nuances.
Adding one more option could make some sense, but it's weird anyways. Why arbitrary 10 minutes? How turning it for 10 minutes in a crowded place is better than turning it on for an hour? It's silly.
Force 10 minutes with no optoon to turn it back? Yeah...
> but it's hard to come up with a legit explanation for why they rushed that change to China first.
The China told them to and they complied. They have every interest in China's government keeping their people in check so the Apple factory production continues without problems.
Follow the money and all that
The ability for dissidents to airdrop messages to passers-by seems silly as well. All of a sudden spamming people is good due to the content of the message? Never mind that there's nothing stopping the other side from doing the same thing.
It ultimately feels to me like the country that's always in the news for hackers and ubiquitous surveillance should be the last place in the world you want to have AirDrop on, period. Even the contacts-only mode has leaked personal information in the past.
I’ve gotten AirDrop spam here in America and welcome this change.
Also, it's not like they just receive the file without consent, last I used an iPhone there was a popup allowing the other user to accept/decline the file.
So it's less like "anyone with airdop set to everyone wants to receive your file" and more like "anyone with airdop set to everyone wants to be asked if they want to receive your file".
By your logic Apple's default setting of "contacts only" AirDrop visibility is also a nefarious way to prevent protest literature from being distributed
It's entirely possible it's misleading, but the tweet in this post pretty heavily implies it was from protester to protester, you're the one who brought up the "spamming tourists" thing.
Also, I'm not even sure I agree with the "a tool can be used for evil so therefore taking features away is good". Anyone can email you a dick pick, does that mean email provides should stop accepting images in emails that aren't from contacts (with no option to disable this filtering, except in 10 minute increments)?
> By your logic Apple's default setting of "contacts only" AirDrop visibility is also a nefarious way to prevent protest literature from being distributed
Context matters. If the default used to be everyone, and Apple pushed out a new default to users in China immediately around when protests, then yes I would say it was nefarious.
There's nothing you can do to keep it working as it did, due to iOS being so incredibly locked down. Because this has been used as a free-speech feature whether you like it or not, this makes it a very questionable thing to do whether it was done for good causes or bad.
All they would have needed to do was to introduce a new 10 minute option along with the other existing options, and leave the forever option available for those who wanted to keep it and didn't care about spam.
They can easily add a ‘temporary everyone’ button for people that want to use that.