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Comment by shepherdjerred | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the conversation here seems to be that you can't trust Apple, or that Apple is doing something user hostile.

I don't get it.

What's the alternative? Most people with a phone are going to be using iOS or Android. Those are the two options. Apple has the chance to improve data privacy, and they've done it. Android (essentially, Google) is certainly _not_ going to take such action.

Apple could always use this to their advantage, or double-back on it. Who cares? They've moved the needle in a positive direction, that's all that should matter.

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> I don't get it.

It’s Apple. There is nothing else to understand. Just because of who they are, some people will claim it will change the world and some people will claim it’s bullshit or not working or evil. There are many more of the latter and they are quite annoying, but the best that can be done is ignore them.

> They've moved the needle in a positive direction, that's all that should matter.

Some people cannot seem to understand that a company whose interests align with those of the consumers, however imperfectly, is better than a company whose policy relies only on ideology. Then you have the contrarians who will claim that they are lying and black is white anyway.

Apple keeps focusing the privacy discussion on things like 3rd party trackers, since this doesn't affect their business model in any way but gives them good PR. They do nothing against the more serious issue of government surveillance, they even let the government run their iCloud servers in China. Their interests align with consumers and they align with governments even more.

I think it’s completely healthy to remain skeptical of a massive corporation. But that doesn’t mean we have to be tribal about it. I dunno. Sometimes I wonder if it’s just intellectually less exhausting to “black and whiteify” everything rather than explore the nuances of a corporation doing stuff that we sometimes benefit from.

We should remain skeptical and scrutinize and shape their actions through consumer feedback.

> Apple could always use this to their advantage, or double-back on it. Who cares? They've moved the needle in a positive direction, that's all that should matter.

Because all of business history has told us that the market dominant company strong-arming its opposition has never worked out for the consumer.

So exactly which “market” does Apple dominate by market share ?

Well, about 2/3 of the mobile market in Norway, and nearly the same goes for the US.

> They've moved the needle in a positive direction

They've moved the needle towards building their ads business. As hardware refresh cycles become longer, Apple is moving towards other sources of revenue, including ads.

These changes, while positioned as Privacy, give them a huge moat and in the end, harm consumers.

Before these changes, if an app wanted to drive installs on iOS, they could choose FB or Google. Now, Apple is the only game in town and their cost-per-install are already exceeding FB's last published cost-per-install.

The Apple consumers pay for this additional revenue to Apple.

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