They have actively thwarted attempts by the likes of Facebook and Google to track me. Facebook got totally fucked by iOS14+ and I love it.
While I don’t trust any of them, I’ve gone with the lesser of the two evils in this regard.
YMMV.
While I don’t trust any of them, I’ve gone with the lesser of the two evils in this regard.
YMMV.
Apple fucked Facebook because iPhones only allow Apple the power to fuck Facebook. Meanwhile software history is full of examples of abusive corporations being put in their place by casual side projects. I don’t think this dichotomy is real, I think we could both have control of our devices and prevent facebook from stalking us, maybe even more effectively than Apple.
Exactly. Why? Because no other manufacturer who ships millions of devices an stays in control of their ecosystem was interested in this move. Millions of difficult to track iPhone users are still valuable to Facebook because they need MAUs. So Facebook had no choice but bend.
Who is "we" in this sentence?
Apple doesn't have a ton of secret sauce that allows them to screw advertisers over and protect privacy. What they do have is money. Google sells advertisements. Advertisers are their customers and they give their customers what they want. Apple sells hardware that happens to come with pretty decent software.
The reason we don't have a truly open platform that solves this problem through similar technical means is... money. It costs a crap ton of money to design a great phone. It costs a crap ton more money to build the software for it. And there's really only two players in the game right now.
…and the exclusive ability to determine what software runs on your phone and how it functions. Facebook can’t collect your data if they are prevented from collecting your data, but no one but Apple can do that because no one but Apple can technically restrict Facebook.
> Who is "we" in this sentence?
The broader technical community. Facebook’s app isn’t magical, it uses your phone’s OS features to stalk you and can be prevented from doing so through technical restrictions. Is this not precisely what Apple did? Facebook’s abuse exists at the mercy of its users under an open ecosystem.
> It costs a crap ton of money to design a great phone.
That’s why iPhones cost so much. I don’t see why they can’t just sell phones and let people decide on software if they want.
There's nothing stopping Google from restricting Facebook other than... pissing off their advertisers.
> I don’t see why they can’t just sell phones and let people decide on software if they want.
I suspect a big part of it is that the intersection of (people who want to run their own OS) and (people who are willing to spend a lot of money on a device) is probably pretty small and would have a pretty high cost to support. Additionally, the secure boot chain end-to-end is part of the selling point here. On the Android side, I definitely know non-technical users that have jumped through a ton of hoops to enable developer mode so that they can install hacked APKs, only to discover later that those were actually full of malware. They followed random guides they found on a search engine to get themselves into that spot. With an iOS device, as is right now, it's pretty much impossible to get yourself into that situation.
The original post I replied to in this thread was arguing that Apple restricting Facebook had nothing to do with Apple's market position. You nailed it, thank you. Google's market position maybe does make it impossible for them to do what Apple did. And I guess to the other comments about an open pro-privacy platform, this is exactly the answer to what would need to be done. "We" would need a company that:
- values privacy
- values being an open platform
- has the technical capability to build fantastic hardware and software
- has figured out a profitable business model that doesn't involve selling out on either of those values and can support that technical capability
Three things come to mind:
1. Supporting a diverse ecosystem is hard and expensive. 2. It's easier to build a seamless platform when you have control over hardware and software. Look at Mac trackpad as an example; it's pretty much beats any PC trackpads. 3. Software sales is where the money is at. I used to work for a dell subsidiary and it was a common knowledge that Dell (and other vendors too) sold servers at a loss and made it up on software and support contracts. Apple has like ~80% profit margins on app store sales which is insane.
Historically Apple always has adjusted the quality of the product to match desired 35% margins and price points. I would be very surprised if the App Store is any different, although they may have had issues ramping up to eat that much money. Apple gouges users... but they tend to gouge consistently. The other 65% likely includes costs like advertising, cloud services, editorials, legal, fraud costs, WWDC, corporate overhead and the like but it far more than just hosting and evaluation costs. They may be blowing it on Apple TV+ content though. Services is a tricky number to nail down.
It takes something the size of a corporation to fend off other corporations. And it’s not as if many have not tried and failed to break the phone OS duopoly; the walled garden aspect of iOS is a fairly small obstacle.
Wouldn't it be great if we had one of those? An organisation powerful enough to boss companies around, making it so companies didn't have to race-to-the-bottom to compete with each other, and we'd get to tell it what to do?
The logistics might be a bit hard, though. We'd have to have some kind of large-scale organised vote, probably on a schedule of some kind. That might take a lot of resources to arrange, so either a lot of people would have to volunteer to work on it, or it would have to acquire money through some mechanism… We could vote on that, too.
Hmm. There are actually quite a lot of things we'd have to vote for, thinking about it. Including which things to vote for! Most people wouldn't have time for all that, leaving the people who would as the ones calling the shots. So we'd need some mechanism for people to delegate their vote to somebody else: a representative of some kind. And those representatives could form groups – councils, perhaps? – to discuss and vote on matters relevant to the people they represent.
Once we've got all that set up, though, it should be easy enough to get uninstallable bloatware banned from computation devices. Right?
Utilizing our government to effectively curb abusive market practices is overall a good idea. It's how we scare predatory markets like cryptocurrency into submission. It's been harder to do with domestic inventions like the NYSE or the iPhone, but its increasingly relevant as the rest of the world cries foul. Whatever the case is, masturbating shareholders for infinite profit is not how you progress common interests.
> You can make micro votes on every product you buy to get what suites you best.
Iff you are wealthy enough, and the market hasn't race-to-the-bottom'd that option away. No amount of "vote with you wallet" can get rid of leaded petrol, for example.
What bloatware was verizon installing on my Nokia 3390?
If bloatware could be install it would be as Nokia like most phone makers will try to curry favour with the carriers to get them to promote their phones.
Apple is probably the only phone maker who didn’t do that. They didn’t need to. Heck it was the other way around - carriers wanted to sell iPhones so they can get an edge over / won’t fall behind their competitors. If carriers have a problem with Apple’s refusal of their demands, they could go screw themselves. Their loss.
Also. You didn't answer the question. What bloatware did Verizon put on my Nokia 3390?
The Nokia 3390 was a phone.
Please tell me what bloatware was on the 3390.
Verizon also used to run their own app stores full of games and low quality music; the fact that it was free or $.99 on Apple’s stores was generally a net price decrease.
This is nonsense. Downloading ringtones isn't bloatware. Charging users to transfer pictures isn't bloatware.
The Nokia 3390 was not burdened with bloatware. Neither was the Treo 180 or the Nokia 9500i. And my G1 didn't have bloatware.
It's ridiculous to say the iPhone was the first phone without bloatware.
But if your point is Verizon was trying to monetize their customer base after the first sale, then I would heartily agree.
I never asserted that every phone would have it. I asserted that I buy iPhones specifically because they don’t permit anything like that, and that it would be a fairly obvious target for those shenanigans once sideloading became permitted. US carriers already do dubious things like lock SIMs on phones.
Your assertion was that Apple disallowed carriers from loading up phones with bloatware. So what? So did other phones. That there exist phones with bloatware does not imply that all non-apple phones are festooned with bloatware and all Apple phones are free of bloatware except safari.
But if your assertion is to be interpreted as anything else it's a distinction without a difference.
Yet, strangely enough, I can't uninstall Safari from any of my iPhones and replace it with Firefox.
(I only ever used flip phones before the iPhone. Those were filled with VZW stores for ringtones and $5+ versions of Tetris.)
> Could you sideload on those either?
AFAIK, the Treo was just a Palm PDA with phone functionality. IIRC, what you call "sideloading" was the only way to install applications on Palm PDAs (including the Treo).
Of course times have changed, but people are quick to forget what a mess cellular used to be in the US.
The problem there is I have to use inferior hardware (IMO) and I won’t be able to as easily interoperate with my preferred laptop hardware and software.
30 years ago I had the time to fuck around with hardware and OSs. Work, kids, and life are more important to me now and I consider the options provided by Apple to be good enough and a solid middle ground for where I want to spend my time today.
Unilateral bargaining power. Facebook is willing to write an app for iOS that doesn't track people as well as they'd like, because Apple is there on the other side of the table, with 40% market share, saying "do it our way or don't do it at all."
Compare/contrast Windows PCs, where everything really is ultimately "whatever the user wants." You can arbitrarily modify the executables that run on your computer, sure. But can you get a modded game to let you play online, without running some Intel SGX rootkit that verifies the game's code signature and watches every HID input you make to ensure you're not cheating? No, you can't — because despite owning the PC itself that the software is running on, you don't have a negotiating position that enables you to tell the company that runs the servers that that game connects to for online play, to allow a non-rootkit-monitored version of their game client to connect to them.
Apple made $2B from ads in 2022 from a total of $394 billion, 0,5% of total revenue.
Google made $224 billion from ads about 50% of total.
I still trust the company that makes the vast majority of their money from stuff that doesn't need a profile about me and my personal life to function.
That is far from the world we are in and the budget tech has to defeat any law that would attempt to implement those protections.
As it is many developers seem not to care if whatever frameworks they use are affecting system integrity or stability if it would generally not be noticed by the end user. Most users are going to need a trustworthy gatekeeper why can make some of these evaluations so you do not need extensive research just to play a game.
Not to say I agree with the position Apple appears to be taking here on not allowing macOS apps to run directly on the device, and not allowing it to function as a display for every device in the home. For single people in small spaces who currently burn wall space for monitors and televisions or just do not like big black slabs in their living space this could have been a useful gizmo.
I decided to buy a Pixel and run GrapheneOS because I literally can't live without Termux anymore but I definitely understand your point.
- Apple was the most valuable company (founded in 1977)
- Microsoft had been in the top 5 most valuable companies since 2000 (founded in the 70s)
- Facebook was already dominant
- Amazon was dominant in online retail (founded in the 90s)
- Google was the dominant search engine. (Founded in 1998)
Which startup or “side project” has had a meaningful impact since 2010? And been successful and profitable?
Before you mention OpenAI, it’s only surviving because of the deep discount it gets on compute from Microsoft.
As far as phones the current market is littered with race to the bottom barely profitable Android phones. Samsung, the only successful Android manufacture, has been around since 1938.
The entire VC market has been a Ponzi scheme since 2010 where all of the value was captured before the company went public.
I haven’t thought about this before - who are the others?
All of the workstation vendors: IBM, HP, Dec/Compaq/HP, SGI, Sun. I don't think any of these are particularly popular, but AIX (IBM) and Solaris (Sun) are probably more popular than the others. I wouldn't be surprised if IRIX (SGI) is totally dead.
And funnily enough, Microsoft. Although they sold Xenix to Sco. I think it's in a lot of POS devices (so probably dying to iPad installs).
Edit: Oops - just realized that "Dec/Compaq/HP" probably doesn't belong in the list. I guess technically there was Tru64 Unix, but everyone I've ever heard of who ran Alpha boxes used VMS.
HP/UX and Solaris are barely on life support and basically moribund. I seem to recall a recent announcement that HP/UX goes end-of-support in 2025. As far as Solaris...Oracle is gonna Oracle. Illumios, et. al., won't save it.
SGI IRIX is long dead. RIP.
SCO (the part with a product, not the part that fails miserably at litigation) got sold to someone noone has ever heard of and probably never will. I speculate there's an SMB PoS market out there supporting it and that'll turn out just as well as the OS/2+ATM market did. No innovation going on there, just milking a dwindling revenue stream. I doubt anyone has sold a Xenix license in decades.
I figured as much for HP/UX. The failure of Itanium was the death knell there.
I mostly lump Solaris together with Illumos/SmartOS. Is there a good reason not to (unless when talking about Oracle specifically)?
That's fair.
I know that, after Oracle re-closed OpenSolaris, they can't (legally) incorporate the innovations happening in Illumos into Solaris proper, so the 2 siblings will continue to drift apart.
And it sounds like there was quite a lot of bad blood that proceeded the founding of Illumos (unsurprising when Oracle is involved), so I'm not super surprised that users would talk that way.
IBM 4690's supposedly run a SuSe derivative, and Walmart doesn't seem to be replacing them with iPads. I think Sears & KMart also used 4690s, but also a mix of predecessor systems which ran an unholy assemblage of OSes: flex, dos, a bizarre mix of Os/36 and IMS, etc. As best I can tell, they never ran an OS from CMU.
Next time you're in a gas station, grocery store, cinema or chain restaurant look closely at the cash register. It's not an iPad.
Square did a mightily brilliant thing to marry its dongle to a consumer friendly iPad to support small retail, but apple is not in the business of selling PoS systems. Heck, apple stores didn't use apple devices for PoS for the first two or three years after they were launched.
The assertion that iPads are "taking over" PoS seems to be based on an inappropriately small sample.
That's fair. I think I notice iPad PoS devices when ever I run into them, whereas the other devices are less remarkable to me.
But my experience really mirrors what you say - gas stations and grocery stores aren't running iPads. It's usually restaurants and small vendors where I see them.
By 1997, Apple wasn’t a “casual side project”. It had already existed for 20 years.
Saying that Apple is a Unix vendor because of Mach/Darwin/NeXTStep and Android/Google, Red Hat/IBM, Ubuntu/Canonical, Amazon/Amazon Linux aren't Unix vendors because they're Linux is an interesting take.
By that logic we could call MSFT a Unix vendor 'cause they once sold Xenix and NT originally shipped with BSD networking code.
It kind of isn’t, though. If you compare top companies by market capitalization from December 31, 2010 to today, the only two companies that are in both lists are Apple and Microsoft. You’ve got to go to 2013 for Google to enter the list, 2015 for Amazon, 2017 for Facebook. Heck, Apple didn’t even enter the top 10 until the end of 2009.
The only company still in the top 10 (as of market close today) to remain a player consistently for more than 25 years is Microsoft, and Exxon should get a special mention for being the erstwhile first or second place leader for decades and only dropping out of the top 10 at the end of 2017 (it reappeared at the end of 2022).
Others are capable, they just don't take the same pride in their devices to bother making the effort. They are a mix of happy taking part in the race to the bottom, not wanting to harm stalkers because their own business model is partly or wholly reliant on such stalking, and in some cases both. Not just in the phone market either: look at MS slowly turning Windows into a glorified as platform, the way IoT devices try to lock you in to being followed around your daily life, etc.
I'm no fan of Apple or their devices overall, but on this they deserve credit IMO. Even accounting for the fact I know they'd be playing the other game if advertising were more important to them than their key competitor in at least one market.
They did this because Apple wants to boost its own ad revenue.
"The adoption of Apple Search Ads by advertisers grew 4% to 94.8% year-over-year"
"Apple announced this summer that it will add two more advertising slots to the App Store. Developers will be able to buy ad space on the central “Today” page as well as on individual app pages"
"In order to know which ads to show which users, Apple collects their account data, information about in-store purchases, search queries, news stories they read, as well as the information about their device and location."
"Apple’s Anti-Tracking Transparency only applies to the apps that use third-party data to track users. Since Apple’s tracking stays within its own ecosystem, the company’s native apps are not subject to the policy."
Basically in order to conquer a nation, you need to get rid of its existing rulers. That is what Apple is doing boss, they don't care about you. But naive opinions like yours really do help them in propping up their image.
Why do I need an iPhone to not be fucked by Facebook?
Epic tried to stare down Google, wielding peak Fortnite as a crowbar, and Epic still came back to the Play Store with its tail between its legs.
The App and Play store still offer phenomenal discoverability (warts and all).
Sideloading wouldn’t be a default and thus something only a tiny percentage of users does, probably deterred even further by the myriad of warnings Apple will spam at you.
It's a source of malware and viruses. It prevents the ability to unsubscribe in one place. It allows apps to use private APIs which Apple can't prevent (i.e. Obj-C dynamic dispatch) thus opening up all sorts of attack vectors e.g. "phone" apps that record conversations etc.
And I assure you that it wouldn't be a tiny percentage of users if companies like Facebook would use it to do a run-around Apple's privacy controls. Sideloading could unlock tens of billions in lost advertising revenue to many companies.
Those private APIs also mean Apple gets to play favorites with its own apps in a lot of ways, which they have.
> And I assure you that it wouldn't be a tiny percentage of users if companies like Facebook would use it to do a run-around Apple's privacy controls.
This was addressed by my Fortnite example already.
All in all, if you don’t like sideloading, you’ll never have to engage with it.
I hate this kind of attitude, and it’s the same as the office lovers trying to prevent WFH as much as possible. Stop trying to lock us both in the cage because you’re too afraid to step out of it.
Apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc will immediately move because they would be able to side step Apple's privacy controls. Billions are on the table here. Outlook will move because they can tie the app to Edge which will now be able to use JIT.
And a bit hypocritical to say that I should stop locking us both in a cage when it's your choice to be in there. Support companies who allow side loading. Win win for everyone.
While I shouldn’t be surprised, I’m always surprised that a technical audience brings up the “private APIs” bugaboo. Once you make an API public, you have to continue to support it warts and all. Apple should dog food their own stuff before they make it public.
On the other hand, do you expect Apple to make every API available to random developers?
You can reply to messages from Slack on your watch and it use to be better when they had a Watch app 5 years ago.
https://www.techradar.com/news/slack-is-dropping-its-apple-w...
You can not reply to SMS or iMessage notifications on non-Apple smartwatches. It's not allowed.
But as far as third party watches replying to SMS/iMessages, they could do it just like you respond to messages from cars before CarPlay was a thing - you support the appropriate Bluetooth profile.
Microsoft did it on computers without official Apple support
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/24/23654672/microsoft-phone-...
Why wouldn't you trust it? Yes, in theory a smartwatch could abuse my trust and send my friends spam or something but so could some no name Bluetooth keyboard yet I can use those just fine on iOS. Why should APPLE get to decide what devices I trust?
Microsoft did a hacky workaround with a whole host of limitations that proves my point. Apple is keeping the proper way to do it to themselves to make their products seem better.
The iPhone has supported that for at least a decade.
This is a limitation common across non-Apple smartwatches on iOS. If it was SO simple you'd think they'd all do it and wouldn't have taken Microsoft 5+ years since the rollout of Phone Link.
I get that you love Apple but my man they are not the good guy you seem to believe. Have fun living in the reality distortion field, I hope you wake up one day.
> Have fun living in the reality distortion field, I hope you wake up one day.
Yes a standardized Bluetooth profile that has been available on iOS devices for over a decade is “not reality”.
And now your excuse is that “maybe Bluetooth takes too much battery life”?
> This is a limitation common across non-Apple smartwatches on iOS
Have you ever thought that Android devices makers who are competing on price decide it’s not worth making the investment in supporting iOS devices since the Apple Watch is so dominant?
I told you exactly how it could be done using an existing Bluetooth standard that Apple has supported for over a decade. You’re really pulling at straws.
You could also at one point send “canned messages” from third party watches before the Apple Watch was introduced.
And here is an existence proof
https://help.fitbit.com/articles/en_US/Help_article/2344.htm....
And I’m sure that’s all crappy Android watch makers with horrible processors and battery life would have to do to convince Apple Watch owners to switch is to enable message replies.
The app store is a condom (or a covid mask). It's not all about "you"; it doesn't matter a damned sight if YOU are careful, or if YOU are responsible. Other people can make god-awful decisions that screw you over, and you have no power to stop them. Or rather: the app store IS your power to stop them.
I can't count the number of times I've seen windows users get duped by phishing that gives a bad actor root access. If that's your family member, that's YOUR problem; it doesn't matter if you were super careful — if your 18 year old son fucks up because he just didn't realize he was getting hacked, well — you're liable. That's what regulations are about; just like the FDA, just everything else.
I like having a platform where there is no fear. Same reason I like vaccines, same reason I like food safety regulations, etc. It's about network effects.
———
The worst thing about all this stuff is: when tragedies like this happened back in the day (and I remember, clearly, friends having their drives get wiped by script kiddies) — you suffer in silence. You sob and cry about whatever happened to you, and try to "raise awareness" in the open-source community about how maybe we should do something better, and nobody listens.
A lot of this stuff in the OSS community reminds me of gun nuts and school shootings; people wring their hands when a personal tragedy happens, the solution is right in front of them should they dare to actually adopt it, but they refuse to adopt it because it's ideologically untenable. So they just pretend the problem never happened until it personally hits their own family — and the worst thing is watching their friends, around them, engage in the same denial.
The two "real consequences" are losing your data (drive wipes, randomware, etc), and financial fraud (someone getting your CC number or bank access). I personally know people who've been hit by this. It's heartwrenching when it happens.
Have the political will to adopt the solution.
I think generally in Android there are enough warnings (those with timers and large "SECURITY RISK" warnings that are difficult to ignore) when enabling side loading, and also going out of the way to download malware apks in the first place, that the number of affected users has to be quite low. And you can have default on malware scanning too (which I believe Google Play does). Also you can malware scan before install as well. I think this is low enough risk that the benefit is greater than disabling it entirely.
Same could be said for allowing root and different OS install. I could install something very insecure or make bad choices. But then I want to have that choice, and I think it shouldn't be so easy that users would just do it by chance. We need to remember there are other social engineering attack vectors against the most secure systems (like asking for passwords, or even asking to lend the phone and so on) too. The attacks I hear on Android users recently mostly seem to be related to hijacking SMS auth and so on -- I really don't believe side loading has proven to be a large security issue at all (or other OS images for that matter).
In fact I think they should be making installing alternate OS images and alternate app store easier, if Google wants to earn my vote of confidence (at least as far as Android goes) :)
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-...
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/
Given history, this feels pretty dismissive.
Why would you want to outsource enforcement of individual rights (to privacy) to private companies?
Privacy should be enforced by the government (like it is in the EU), not by buying hardware from companies who sell stands for 1000 dollars.