Comment by guru4consulting | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guru4consulting | Hacker News Reader

guru4consulting

I consider HN users to be smarter and rational than average internet crowd. Surprised to see folks here comparing the Google Apple store to other business models like Starbucks, Donut shops, Restaurants? does not make sense to me. Consumers have a choice to switch all other businesses but not the mobile app stores. I can live without Starbucks or Netflix if I want to, or switch to different providers if needed. But there's no such an option in mobile app store world. My banks, wearable devices, even many government services provide their apps via Apple/Android app stores and I'm forced to use only these app stores.. ignoring mobile and just using browsers is not practical. At this point, the app stores are monopolies and consumers are the ones who are impacted. Let Apple/Google give a top notch app store and claim it to be more secure, reliable, trust worthy (they are not today).. but let them also give other options to consumers if they want to take the risk and download apps from another app store if they want to.

And these are already trillion dollar companies. Why do some people support them to grow even more bigger and more powerful? It's a nightmare to see power getting accumulated into few hands. It's high time they are regulated. Don't treat them with kid gloves. They are not your typical mom & pop stores.

The average person needs safeguards to prevent them from being tricked into installing malware by seemingly trustworthy black hats. They should not be given devices that lack safeguards. That means having a gatekeeper that curates things. Be it Apple or Google, a gate keeper is a necessity for security.

Even for non-average people, gatekeepers like Gentoo's or Debian's package maintainer(s) do a great deal of good.

Those safeguards should be on a technical level and with the human gatekeepers being swappable for whoever you trust most. Which is what different app stores effectively do: different human rating, moderation and trust descriptions.

The monopoly isn't necessary for that though. It can just present you with choices of app store during phone setup. It's not like some Amazon app store is going to be automatically less secure.

The free market would have created many trustworthy gatekeepers itself.

And given how much scammy shit there is on the two major AppStores, I would say that it is clear as day and night that Apple and Google utterly suck as "gatekeepers".

The idea that only these 2 companies can provide a platform for secure apps is patently absurd. What's stopping another company other than these companies' stranglehold? If you want to say resources, I guarantee I'm not alone in a desire to use smaller vendors if they had a good track record of hosting secure apps.

I lean WAY left and still agree the free market would have solved this ages ago.

These 2 companies having a stranglehold is the free market. Antitrust legislation is what would allow other companies to compete with these 2, and antitrust legislation doesn't exist in a free market.

Free markets only ever exist because of regulation.

Yes, that is why the government needs to make better regulations so people are safeguarded against Google / Apple malware.

yeah, agree that gatekeepers are needed. But why only Apple and Google should be the gatekeepers? why not others? why not crowd curated, open sourced gatekeeping for at least the nerdy folks? And we all know that the current gatekeeping is subpar quality.

My friend’s 11 year old plays games on his iPhone, downloaded from the Apple App Store.

I spent a few minutes looking over his shoulder.

A bit of gameplay followed by increasing amounts of gambling for power ups and constant reminders to buy power ups. This should be absolutely illegal.

Dark patterns upon dark patterns manipulating the kid to squeeze his parents for real money, by habituating gambling habits and normalizing a horrible experience.

Apple will never address these issues because these games make them truckloads of money.

Shouldn’t your friend be monitoring his kid’s usage? Why is everything always some government/capitalist entity’s responsibility?

You could say the same about the post above it.

Why is it different?

Having safer defaults is fine, but why is there no way for alternatives to exist? (30% of all revenue is why BTW)

Gambling is closer to smoking than regular gaming.

All the boy’s friends play the game and similar games. It’s an uphill battle and an extraordinary pressure on the parents to control each game that gets played and micromanage to that extend - to the detriment of their relationship with the child, because fighting these intentionally instilled addictive patterns will create upset in the child and tension in the relationship. The game devs pay psychologists to create the addiction at scale which the parents just cannot compete with.

In reality parents have finite amounts of energy and a finite numbers of battles to fight. Eat your food, go to school, do your homework, keep your phone charged and call me when you need me to pick you up. That kind of thing.

Having week longs drama forbidding a game that everyone else plays is just not on the map.

I agree with you in spirit, but I also can't help but think that most other internet denizens won't be satisfied with just banning the loobox aspects. most of the AAA games industry already moved past that and into battlepasses or flooding a store with direct purchase cosmetics.

It's more the nickle and diming people hate, not the actual gambling. And I don't know if we can or should regulate that.

The gambling patterns are related to taking additional action to getting the rewards - like spinning a wheel, choosing to take an additional step risking the current reward for the chance to win another one. That’s gambling, intentionally constructed to be addictive. It changes habits, normalizes addiction and is harmful.

Sure, and the console industry is already moving past it. It's now just asking you to lay $10-20 for a "season" of a battle pass, where you grind and get more rewards for your grinding. No RNG at all, just one input, and X actions to guarantee Y rewards. No more, no less.

But the games discourse online isn't exactly giving games like Fortnite any slack despite no longer using lootboxes for its monetization. Or on a fighter game (of which few ever used lootboxes) for offering dozens of skins.

That's the dangerous part on what to or not regulate. Do we want thr government regulating how many add-ons or cosmetics a game can sell?

Apple/Google can be the GateKeepers of App Stores.

Look at the PKI industry, they have a greater need for integrity but there's still a healthy market of certificate suppliers.

Exactly - the fundamental problem is that it takes an above average person to understand this. Tech is something that most lawmakers, judges, attorneys and jurors don't get and asking them to regulate it is a mistake.

They'll open up the floodgates and average people will end up dealing with fake Epic apps. A decade from now maybe that same courtroom would better appreciate the value of a trusted gatekeeper.

TBF Google does have alternative app stores. That's why people who didn't read the article or lawsuit are confused that this lawsuit succeeded but Apple failed. Of course all this fails to take into account why Google actually loss. it was using that monopolistic pressure to push away OEM deals. That's defintiely where the monopoly was being used anti-competitively.

But yea, really would like both mobile OS's to open up more. Apple is especially bad because they can effectively ban stuff of an entire OS if it doesn't follow store policies. no 18+ apps, no emulators, no file explorers (tho these two were loosened overtime), no alternate browsers unless it's a safari skin. Can't imagine Microsoft getting away with this on Windows at any time.

Customers don't necessarily want a choice.

Sometimes choice equates to complexity, if it doesn't work for you, don't use the product. Apple is very well known (and probably very successful) for limiting choice, in product lines and features.

IMO Android devices are already open enough - there are alternative app stores and you can sideload apps. Banks not distributing on these channels is not Google's responsibility.

> Customers don't necessarily want a choice.

But that's not a requirement for something to be a monopoly.

> Customers don't necessarily want a choice.

I was going to say that it's something for them to decide, but then the conversation was going to be circular.

Nobody should have the right to not have a right.

Take it a step further – the power grid. I don't want to have to choose which power grid to use, and we shouldn't bother making duplicate power grids. It makes sense they operate as a monopoly. Those companies are heavily regulated though.

> Those companies are heavily regulated though

Without that regulation it is a very different beast.

Having the government decide the platform cut would very much change the conversation.

It's right and wrong at the same time, you can only say "most of the customers don't want a choice", so we just gonna ignore the minority and let big companies take all the cake?

Customers don't want a choice right up until the moment they need to do something but can't (e.g. install Fortnite).

Let the customers have the choice to decide whether they want choice or not. Historically, more choices have always benefitted the common folks in the end.

Capitalism without competition isn't capitalism; it's exploitation without competition, innovation is slowly strangled if there is no free market, the wealth in the market accretes upwards to those who control the market; i.e. those businesses which do not have competition

FWIW you don't really need an app store, you could download APKs off vendors/publishers, verify signatures and mind updates (except Apple won't let you, but that's a different story).

You want to use an app store, fine, use an app store and pay some commission on what you buy there, it's not a problem, reaching into any purchase done after the initial download is.

> you don't really need an app store

> except Apple won't let you, but that's a different story

You're saying you can comment, but no one will give you access to the keyboard?

The whole discussion is about Google, they do let you use whatever store, and also let you compile and deploy your own Android if you're up for the task and your phone manufacturer allows you to boot what you want.

I'd too prefer Apple to be forced by court to open their devices for everything, not holding my breath.

you may be able to breathe one day on that aspect. Sounds like the EU is putting groundwork to do that exact thing on IOS.

Many applications such as banking applications are only available in the official app store.

Google is not to blame for the fact that your bank won't trust you to verify an apk signature. There's no fundamental need for the OS vendor to oversee app distribution.

Definitely. Blackhats are much better at overseeing application distribution than the OS vendor. :P

In all seriousness, you already have to trust the OS vendor not to be trying to do bad things. Having them oversee software distribution at least does not increase the number of organizations you need to trust. If you have someone else do it, you will be opening the door to black hats that will be clamoring to take that role. Not relying on the OS vendor to do that is how we have scams where the victims installed the malware that harmed them. :/

Have you used an AppStore? They’re both full of scammy apps

Trust is a Social/People problem that most techies are uniquely unequipped to scalably solve.

Where exactly can I download my bank's app as an APK? Except random shady websites...

How is this a Google problem? Ask your bank.

They say I should use the app store.

So? Google isn’t forcing them to only publish on the Play Store.

Your point being? Maybe you want to read the comment I was replying to again:

> FWIW you don't really need an app store, you could download APKs off vendors/publishers.

Very evidently I do.

I don't doubt you used Googles app store to access the banks app (as would I), but it's not because of something Google forces you to do. It's because your bank put it there, and it's a very a convenient service for both you and your bank. Unlike the iPhone environment the bank had a choice in using the app store. They could have you side load it, or they could put it in an alternate app store, or hell they could open source it and use FDroid's app store.

It seems to me there is very little stopping there being a whole pile of competing Android app stores out there. Technically there's nothing stopping it in fact, as the existence of FDroid illustrates. It's purely a matter of convenience - which is the same thing that drives Chrome's dominance on Android despite there being better browsers available for free. The play store app is pre-installed and is almost a one stop stop for all the apps you could possibly want, so who is going to bother loading another app store?

Turns out that edge in convenience is enough to create an effective monopoly in app stores, for most people anyway.

Feel free to read about the case and how Google was not in fact just using convenience to maintain its status as the only App Store...

It wasn't, but they aren't forcing banks on the store either (they HAVE done it with other companies, I'm not debating that).

Even if there was a popular alternative, there will simply be apps only on one store out of convenience. Just look at the PC market.

Who is to say that store wouldn't be the Amazon store?

And most of the time PC leads to multiple releases as platforms tend to make it as easy as possible to release across multiple.

Sure the majority of games are on one but a significant fraction of the popular ones are on multiple.

I did read it, I’m just not sure what are you suggesting? A law obligating everyone who publishes their apps to any app store to also provide an .apk?

Hahahaha, yes, let's rely on the famously tech savvy banks to securely distribute their app.

probably still better than myfreebankapps.ru

They seem to be pretty good considering I can't just hack someones bank account and fill my pockets.

APKmirror is not a shady random website. It's well established.

That would be impractical and nearly impossible to do. Name even one other computing platform that works this way.

Oh, wait a minute …

worse, Apple and Google worked together (without the public knowing, of course) "as if they were one company".

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-20/apple-goo...

https://www.benzinga.com/news/23/11/35888191/apple-google-wa...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/technology/apple-google-s...

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-apple-deal-default-se...

the sources go on and on, which makes sense, I guess. when two of the world's biggest and most powerful companies have interests that overlap (exclude any OS that isn't Android or iOS) collusion seems like a natural choice.

You don't need to have Android/iOS. You can access webmail, bank accounts, Netflix using web browser on an open source platform like Ubuntu Touch or Sailfish OS. I am using both just fine and both support Android apps.

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