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Comment by musictubes | Hacker News Reader

Discussions about alt stores for iOS always infuriate me. There are some legitimately useful things that can only be done outside of Apple’s strictures but the conversation usually ends up with people salivating over ways to pirate things. Incidentally, this is also the bulk of the sentiment I hear when sideloading on Android is discussed as well.

Pirating YouTube, Spotify and games as well as torrenting seemingly make up 90% of desires of an alt store. I expect this from 14 year olds, it’s frustrating to see it on HN. “I need to not only block all ads on YouTube but all sponsor reads too. They’re sooooo annoying!” Grow up. Content makers need to be reimbursed. YouTube Premium subscribers and sideloading enthusiasts have very little overlap.

The side loading crowd is its own worst ambassador. Entitlement to free entertainment is an ugly look. I want to hear about useful, legit stuff that Apple prevents from being on the App Store.

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> Entitlement to free entertainment is an ugly look

You see it as entitlement, I see it as empowered consumers rejecting business practices they don't like. If more people had the technical skills to do it, they would.

And what would happen? Would the entertainment industry collapse? No, it would adapt and stop doing the things that are driving consumers towards piracy in the first place. The businesses that don't adapt will die. The only reason they can get away with it today is because of the prevalence of anti-consumer walled gardens like iOS and Android, and increased consolidation thanks to the informal legalization of monopolies in the US (at least for tech/telecom companies) which results in consumers having very little bargaining power.

The classic example is Steam. Before Steam, PC game piracy was an epidemic because actually trying to buy a PC game was a nightmare, but nowadays only the really cheap/impoverished consumers do it since it's so much easier to just buy it legally on Steam, and you get a ton of other benefits, like cloud saves, fast and safe downloads, achievements, social features, etc.

Heck, Steam has one other killer feature that I wish more digital storefronts understood: if I want to play a multiplayer game with a friend, or even if it's just their birthday or I feel like doing something nice, I can buy a game and send it straight to their account as a gift. There's, like... zero friction here, it's a checkbox and a dropdown and done. This can help considerably with the income gap since it permits otherwise impoverished users to occasionally receive games from their friends, and the platform still gets a sale. I've lost count of how many copies of Magicka I've gifted to people this way, since it's the kind of wonderfully silly game you can pick up and enjoy without lengthy tutorials.

It's just a very loud part of the crowd. The other part, which includes myself, are control freaks. I personally pay for YouTube Premium, but for longer train trips I download everything using yt-dlp and view the files in VLC. I've been burnt a few times with the YouTube app deleting the downloaded videos after they've been taken down.

The other sideloading example is Telegram - some channels are simply banned by Apple/Google, but on Android it's possible to sideload the unfiltered app (even though RT is still banned there in EU, for example). Yes, 90% of those banned channels are irrelevant, but it infuriates me beyond anything that I don't have any control over my phone and can't decide myself what is available.

Is anyone building an unfiltered iOS telegram for distribution on these alt stores? If not I might have a project for my downtime this month.

Honestly I think the best reason to use an altstore is to avoid the 30% tax that Apple and Google charge for using "their infrastructure". Both claim that users could use alternative stores and therefore charging 30% is not an abuse of a duopoly market position -- but what realistic options do they have? Samsung store?

As a consumer why would I care? If anything signing up through Apple means I have all my subscriptions in one place with only a click away from cancelling. The only reason I moved Disney+ off of my iCloud was to get a $7 monthly rebate from AMEX.

All of the services that I’ve used don’t charge 30% less if you skip Apple. I’m sure there are examples where it is cheaper.

At one point in time very recently I had to actually call newspapers and magazines to get a subscription cancelled. These were well known like Economist and WSJ.

As a consumer, you arguably shouldn't care. This is a fight between Apple and the App distributors, if it still makes sense for you to use Apple's payment processing then nobody should stop you. However, that doesn't mean Apple can preclude other people from competing with them. Who knows, you (the customer) might be missing out on a better experience because of a lack of market competition. If you aren't, then the App Store still exists. It really seems like a win-win to me.

>“I need to not only block all ads on YouTube but all sponsor reads too. They’re sooooo annoying!” Grow up. Content makers need to be reimbursed. YouTube Premium subscribers and sideloading enthusiasts have very little overlap.

In Europe, there are gambling sites constantly running their youtube ads, tagging them as "Family" category so you can't disable them in your Google ad settings. Not to mention outright pornography sometimes.

Not going to pay for the privilege of disabling gambling and pornographic ads being shoved down my throat, it is a very low bar. Once Google actually starts monitoring what ads they show it becomes a non issue.

Or you could pay the 12 euros a month for YT premium to turn off ads if this is something that upsets you so much? I just don't really understand the entitlement

Or you could use AdBlock and tell YouTube to pound sand. I don't understand how that's entitled when YouTube still serves me the video content.

>Pirating YouTube, Spotify and games as well as torrenting seemingly make up 90% of desires of an alt store. I expect this from 14 year olds, it’s frustrating to see it on HN. “I need to not only block all ads on YouTube but all sponsor reads too. They’re sooooo annoying!” Grow up. Content makers need to be reimbursed.

So blocking ads is pirating in your opinion? I'm sorry, but I have better things to do than deal with malvertisment or watch the same old adverts for the latest VPN honeypot or online casino.

The fact that people consider the mere circumvention of advertising as piracy shows very well that the forced propaganda of the content mafia in front of their inferior films serves its purpose...

Circumvention of payment for media is indeed piracy. The idea that it is noble to do it shows that some people have never grown up. Entertainment is a service, you should pay for what you consume. Entitlement is the word that keeps popping up but it perfectly describes the sentiment that creators or the platform that enables them shouldn’t be compensated for entertaining or educating you.

Don’t want ads on YouTube? Buy Premium. Feeling righteous for doing the equivalent of sneaking in the movie theater is immature at best, bratty at worst. Be better.

So you sit there and watch every sponsor segment? You don't skip past them or mute them?

Get sponsored by something worth buying and I'll watch the sponsor reads. Hell, get sponsored by something that isn't actively a scam and I'll watch the sponsor reads. So long as people are shilling Raid Shadow Legends and Established Titles I'm gonna skip that crap.

>the conversation usually ends up with people salivating over ways to pirate things.

Really says a lot about your product if this is the reaction of your would-be customers. To me it sounds like people are voting with their wallets and willing to inconvenience themselves just avoid to said service.

The film/music industry survived the napster/torrent age by giving people a better deal. That deal is slowly overdue for a revisit apparently.

My computer belongs to me and nobody else. Anything I desire to do with it is "legit" and "useful".

If you truly think so, why do you use a pseudonym?

How is that related to the point they were making?

Hiding behind a pseudonym implies that there are compelling reasons to hide.

If one can truly do whatever they want on their computer, whenever, then I don't see any compelling reason to hide.

Do you shut the door when you shit?

Is it because you have something to hide?

Yes?

Most people have a sense of modesty…

My pseudonym is due to my overactive sense of modesty

Modesty in relation to what?

On the toilet it's clear a person can expose themselves to by-passers if the door is open, but I can't think of a similar taboo on HN, or even internet forums in general.

This is just complaining about "the youth these days", with some snark about how they consume media "wrong". It even calls them entitled, just like those articles about millennials!

In an economy in recession with awful wages and banks falling over, only just recovering from a pandemic, is it surprising that people want to spend less money?

On another note: content creators aren't individuals, they're small businesses with employees and contractors like any other and if that business is unsustainable, no matter the reason, then that business failing is the free market working as intended. Every business needs to adapt to the realities they face.

> “I need to not only block all ads on YouTube but all sponsor reads too. They’re sooooo annoying!”

I pay for YouTube Premium to block ads. Content creators get paid more from me than from people who watch ads. Then they go and insert even more promotions inside the video. I don't feel even a little bad for automatically skipping that promotional content. It's my phone. I'm not going to sit through ads if I don't want to. You complain about entitlement while arguing that content creators are entitled to my time. They are not.

Is privacy really that big of an issue? Netflix had insanely good revenue when they started out and there wasn’t much competition. The age-old saying is still true: “We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem”.

We again got to a point where you have to be subscribed to like 4 different providers, so torrenting is looking good again.

There will be people who will steal this and that, always have, always will. A tiny percent of this is just cheap, the rest is likely from poorer countries, and the (mind you, completely made up) value of these goods weren’t made for them - sure that $2 app really is cheap for you, but that is not globally true. (And it’s not like downloading that file cost anything to anyone). How do you fight against that? By making a good service and you make up a reasonable price.

> Netflix had insanely good revenue when they started out and there wasn’t much competition.

I'm really curious about when you think this was, and what you mean. They started out shipping DVDs at a loss and took a very long time to become profitable--or to start the streaming service we know today.

Don't content creators get paid the same regardless of whether we automagically skip their sponsor reads or not?

Everything should be free. Except the stuff I make. I should be paid a lot of money for that.

No, the stuff you make should also be free. Yet somehow, you should be paid a lot of money for it anyway. Probably from investors channeling Saudi oil money.

Yeah—being able to play pirated Gameboy games on my iPhone and turn my iPad Pro (or, even better, Apple TV) into the heart of a console emulation station is about the only thing that'd change about my use of iOS if sideloading were opened up to a free-for-all rather than the annoying time-limited thing they do now. Might also pirate discontinued iOS games. It'd 100% be piracy-related, for sure, all the non-piracy stuff I want to do, I already can.

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