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Comment by tonyarkles | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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