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Comment by malwrar | Hacker News Reader

Why is Apple the only entity capable of doing this in your mind? Why couldn’t we live in a world where Facebook can’t abuse you because you don’t want them to?

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.

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People seem to forget the history of cellular. Apple refused to let carriers bloat up phones with uninstallable shovelware that had been on every phone before them, and they only relented because it represented a market opportunity too big to ignore.

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.

Apple Pay had a similar uphill battle. So were OS releases - carriers would blame it on “network compatibility testing”. Apple fought them at every turn. If carriers had their way, iPhones would be irrelevant after 2 years because Apple can’t update the OS. Similarly if side loading was allowed, companies that skirt the rules would simply list them outside and incentivise people to use that version. Once they have enough traction they’ll kill the App Store version. Although Android apps surviving so far would be a counterpoint. (I personally prefer it and want side loading. I’m just saying I understand the need for the wall).

> It takes something the size of a corporation to fend off other corporations.

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?

Coulda, shoulda, woulda. We can’t even get the deluge of spam effectively addressed by the government, and that is absolutely despised across the aisle. The same government that has enabled the concentration of wireless carriers is now expected to effectively prevent them from doing something?

So far, resigning ourselves to failure has created capitalist horrors on all sides of the aisle. Everyone but Big Tech hates Big Tech.

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.

Because governments are completely incapable of regulating minute details like how tracking IDs on phones should work. The best part of the current system is your choice of phone isn't tied to how education is funded or what the immigration rate should be. You can make micro votes on every product you buy to get what suites you best.

They are capable of empowering other bodies. The UK has the concept of "secondary legislation".

> 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.

[Citation needed]

What bloatware was verizon installing on my Nokia 3390?

The only thing saving your 3390 from irremovable bloatware is its weak hardware.

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.

Okay. What bloatware did Verizon put on my Treo?

Also. You didn't answer the question. What bloatware did Verizon put on my Nokia 3390?

I answered your question, they can't put bloatware on your 3390 because its hardware like other phones of that era is too weak to support any.

But your assertion was every phone before the iPhone had bloatware.

The Nokia 3390 was a phone.

Please tell me what bloatware was on the 3390.

Back in the day if I wanted a non-stock ringtone, you would have to purchase it through Verizon, it would’ve likely cost $3-5. iTunes was comparatively a lot cheaper, and also basically allowed any arbitrary mp3 to be used as a ringtone.

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.

But... the assertion was "every phone" before the iPhone was festooned with bloatware and the iPhone was the first phone not to have it.

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 mean, the software also worked poorly even if you did cough up. And at least the iPhone lets you move default apps off the home screen, out of sight never to be seen again.

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.

I can move bloatware icons off the main screen on android. That's different from uninstalling them.

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.

Irremovable bloatware was a big reason I stuck with Apple. I hate that crap so much - so much of it is poorly written trash that does nothing but advertise the carrier’s other services every freaking day for the device’s life span.

My Treo didn't have shovelware, my Nokia didn't have shovelware, and my BlackBerry didn't have shovelware.

Yet, strangely enough, I can't uninstall Safari from any of my iPhones and replace it with Firefox.

Could you sideload on those either?

(I only ever used flip phones before the iPhone. Those were filled with VZW stores for ringtones and $5+ versions of Tetris.)

> > My Treo didn't have shovelware, [...]

> 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).

The carriers had an iron grip on the phones and stores. People were cheering when Apple said the App Store only took a 30% cut. The reason the iPhone started on a smaller regional carrier (Cingular, but then purchased by ATT) was because they were the only ones willing to let Apple do Apple and stay hands off. Once the iPhone got traction it forced the others to follow suit.

Of course times have changed, but people are quick to forget what a mess cellular used to be in the US.

> Why couldn’t we live in a world where Facebook can’t abuse you because you don’t want them to?

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.

But again... the counter-claim is Apple is telling Facebook they can't track iOS users because Apple doesn't want to share that data with Facebook. But they (Apple) still track users.

Apple also has their own burgeoning ad business…

"Burgeoning" :D

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.

Totally agree. I own Apple products (iPhone and Mac) for that reason. It’s something to keep an eye on though.

If you don't like rootkit-monitored games on your PC, it's really simple: don't install them. No one is forcing you to buy and use those games.

Nah. We'll defeat their monitoring and have fun on our terms. It's offensive that they even think they can dictate what can or can't happen on our machines. The audacity of these corporations.

That would be easier if there was a required nutrition label "Requires root access which will not be revoked on uninstall", "requires background services when app is not running", "shares telemetry with developer".

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.

The ultimate negotiating position is law. Simply make what they're doing illegal until it stops happening. Computing freedom must be enshrined into law. It doesn't matter how much money it costs them.

Ok, that's still an option. At any moment governments could step in, but they haven't. So rather than waiting forever while being abused by companies, I'm going to buy an iphone and have a nice experience now.

It's the only option. It's either that or give up. Look at Android. It's honestly a piece of shit but at least we were in control. Well, not anymore: now apps can use remote attestation to see if you "tampered" with your own device. So you're not in control anymore because if you exercise that control you get locked out of every service. Hell my fucking bank's app complains and refuses to run if I have developer mode turned on. Might as well choose the better kept garden if it's gonna be like this.

I decided to buy a Pixel and run GrapheneOS because I literally can't live without Termux anymore but I definitely understand your point.

I could roll my own or use an Android device that I rooted I suppose.

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.

So by 2011

- 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.

2010 is still pretty recent, where was Apple in 1990? If someone said they would become the largest company in the world because they manufactured premium telephones, offered a replacement to cable TV, and were one of the few remaining Unix vendors that would surprise anyone you told it to including any Apple employee or executive.

> one of the few remaining Unix vendors

I haven’t thought about this before - who are the others?

> 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.

IBM is the only one really left...for now. They just shuttered US-based AIX development and moved everything to India, so the writing is on the wall.

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.

> 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.

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)?

Last time I tied Solaris and Illumos/SmartOS at the hip in a comment someone from the Illumos camp responded adamantly that while they were based on Solaris, they were their own thing evolving their own direction. I dunno, I'm not so much involved in the Solaris world anymore (having started on SunOS 3.5), but I suppose I take them at their word.

> Last time I tied Solaris and Illumos/SmartOS at the hip in a comment someone from the Illumos camp responded adamantly that while they were based on Solaris, they were their own thing evolving their own direction.

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.

That matches my perspective. I personally don't get the impression that Illumos, et. al., have the critical mass for a robust long-term future, but I surely don't see all the places it's being used. Fortunately, I guess, a lot of the nifty things Solaris brought to the table (ZFS, dtrace, etc.) have been pulled up into the BSDs and Linux with varying degrees of success.

Square ships iPads, most of the other payment terminals are some brand of leenucks (some are android, some are not.) There are more WinCE terminals still out there than you would expect (verifone's been around for a LONG time and has probably used every embedded toolchain/cpu architecture/rtos that's come down the pike. And that's just one example.)

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.

> 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.

And it's a brilliant idea for small businesses. People are already familiar with it and trust Apple. I mean... I'm a BSD & Leenooks person and generally have a decent opinion of apple products. They just don't do what I want to do. But square piggy-backing on Apple's reputation was a great idea.

Yeah, it’s pretty wild. Apple is the basically the last Unix company. All the others are gone or are winding down.

> Meanwhile software history is full of examples of abusive corporations being put in their place by casual side projects

By 1997, Apple wasn’t a “casual side project”. It had already existed for 20 years.

Um... what Unix (tm) product does Apple sell. They stopped selling A/UX decades ago and it's a bit of a stretch to call AIX Unix. And Mach is absolutely NOT Unix.

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 very much is: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

This means that Apple has licensed the right to use the Unix(r) trademark, not that they have the right to use code from AT&T or its successors (USL, Novell, SCO, Caldera &c). It means that Apple will not be sued if they call macOS Unix, but it most assuredly did not use code from the SVR lineage.

This is the situation I was attempting to make light of. Apple is not what someone from 1990 would think of as a Unix vendor, but due to paying the licensing fee they are one and there are very few left.

Why wouldn’t they? By definition they passed every certification requirement to be Unix

So... if I take Mach and use it as the basis of a product for a different company, does that company get to say it's Unix? Or does the Unix moniker only apply to products released by Apple? If so, why?

Because Apple went through the certification and validation tests

> 2010 is still pretty recent

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).

> Why is Apple the only entity capable of doing this in your mind?

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're not the only one capable. But of the two mobile OS providers, they're the one that is.

Apple did that to Facebook because of their market position. Governments couldn’t do it, yet a hardware manufacturer could. And they could exactly thanks to the tight grip on the ecosystem.

Apple’s market position had nothing to do with it, just their ability to restrict Facebook’s app. Why couldn’t we do the same thing on an open platform through similar technical means? Whose to say that we couldn’t do it better?

> Why couldn’t we do the same thing on an open platform through similar technical means? Whose to say that we couldn’t do it better?

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.

> Why couldn’t we do the same thing on an open platform through similar technical means? Whose to say that we couldn’t do it better?

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.

> What they do have is money.

…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.

> no one but Apple can technically restrict Facebook.

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.

Google restricting Facebook tracking and ads would be a good setup for a lawsuit that Google would likely lose. Unlike Apple (who does still have an ad business), Google and Facebook are direct competitors in that space. For Google to block their competitor on their OS would turn into a major boon for Facebook.

So I guess that's a good argument that... if you don't want a phone with unrestricted ads and tracking, you shouldn't buy one from a company whose primary business model is selling ads and analytics.

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

> 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.

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.

That ~80% figure comes from an Epic argument. At that time Apple had argued the number was completely wrong and they were going to refute. I do not see any article online with an updated number, but it is almost certainly wrong. It is super annoying the tech bloggers never pestered Apple to reveal what they said they were going to.

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.

Gotcha. You still want to preserve that margin anyway.

Governments definitely could do it. Pass a law and imprison executives for not following it, as a simple example.

In a dictatorship, sure. But what about countries where companies buy their representation fair and square?

I really don't understand all the government worshippers in this thread bringing up how good the government is at solving problems they haven't solved for the last 50 years.

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