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Comment by shellac | Hacker News Reader

I think you have to appreciate just how egregious the behaviour of Microsoft was in the 90s. We're talking about systematic attempts to use their absolutely dominant market advantage to move into new areas and kill rival technologies, plus quite deliberate sabotage of open standards process to prevent the web taking off. (I knew a few people involved in W3C then and Microsoft's behaviour was breathtaking)

Personally I'd avoid comparisons since you're looking at one of the worst situations imaginable, so anything else is bound to seem less harmful.

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Apple is predatory on a level that 1990s Microsoft could not have dreamed of, which is all enabled by Windows being an open platform while iOS is locked down with strict technical measures.

Microsoft would make competition harder by bundling "good enough" versions of competing software into Windows, with business deals restricting pre-installs of competing operating systems (if you pre-install Windows on 100% of machines, you'll get a massively better deal than when installing on it on 95%), and (arguably) by making interoperability harder by not having stable documented interfaces and having the interfaces change with new releases every few years.

That was bad. But Apple... Apple hasn't been just making competing harder, but outright impossible. It's one thing to compete against a free pre-installed product. It's another thing to try to compete when the platform owner straight out forbids you from shipping a product that competes with them, or applies draconian business terms to the competition that their own business units get to ignore. They weren't just making interoperability harder by not documenting interfaces, but (in the case of iMessage) by actively breaking any attempt to interoperate.

> Apple hasn't been just making competing harder, but outright impossible.

That's why Android marketshare is much larger than iOS marketshare and why Windows marketshare is much larger than MacOS marketshare.

After reading maybe 8000 posts complaining about Apple "monopoly" I just can't get my head around how hackers can earnestly believe such a thing.

It makes a lot of sense to me.

I think a lot of people were less affected by Microsoft’s actions than by Apple’s. After all, Microsoft didn’t stop people from making money off their platform or modifying their computers.

And Microsoft was three decades ago.

Apple is causing people far more harm now than they remember Microsoft doing in the past. (Assuming they were around for it in the first place.)

Edit:

I should have said "a lot of the people talking" instead of just "a lot of people".

I was around for Microsoft and would classify them as evil. The worst you can say about Apple is they are greedy. For all of Apple's flaws, they are competing in the consumer market on merit.

If by "people" you mean "a vocal minority of app developers", then sure. But the average iOS user not only doesn't care about Apple's app store policies, they actively appreciate them (whether they know it or not).

All apps being required to use a single payment system is a great example: it sucks for the app developers but only for the app developers. From the consumer perspective, Apple's app store is the only place in the internet economy where they're not subject to pervasive dark patterns trying to get them to not cancel a subscription, not back out of a free trial, or otherwise separate them from their money. People pay good money for Apple phones in part because Apple successfully protects them from predatory anti-consumer behavior.

Contrast that with 90s Microsoft, where people bought Windows because that's mostly all that was available (because Microsoft made sure of that). Today there are more non-Apple phone choices than Apple choices, and yet a substantial number of people consistently choose Apple.

I'm both a developer, and a user.

As a user I love the ability to easily turn a subscription on and off, without having to call someone/chat with someone. Also, did you know that a requirement of the app store is you can delete your data from within the app? It's a great way to reduce your digital fingerprint.

As a developer, we rolled out in app subscriptions and our revenue essentially tripled. They handle refunds. That saves me a LOT of time.

Perfect? No, but I do as most pragmatists do: compromise and make the best of it.

In Europe we can do that without Appstore.

> doesn't care about Apple's app store policies, they actively appreciate them (whether they know it or not).

Don't think anyone actually noticed this fly past yesterday [0] but as I commented here [1] Apple have set out their position clearly as patrician and protective (under the dishonest guise of "security").

This is right for some people.

There is a place for the digitally bewildered, like a kind of care home for those who've basically given up on trying to make sense of their place in the digital world, given up all agency, and essentially conceded control of their lives. Ironically the polar opposite of Apple's 1984 Superbowl advert [2].

But we really ought to tell them they're being put out to pasture.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/security/complying-with-the-dma....

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39580678

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_(advertisement)

>After all, Microsoft didn’t stop people from making money off their platform or modifying their computers

This is incredible whitewashing of Microsoft. Microsoft didn’t stop people from modifying their computers? Part of the anti trust case was Microsoft ending licenses with OEMs if they dared to sell a PC with Linux installed.

I was referring to after purchase. Wasn't it still possible to install Linux on computers that came with Windows?

Granted, drivers were a massive issue.

And if anything, this only furthers the point that Apple isn't anything close to what Microsoft was doing.

I think they fiddled with the bootloader of some pc vendors in the mid-90s,but we're quickly told to stop that. It might have destroyed a competitor though.

> After all, Microsoft didn’t stop people from making money off their platform or modifying their computers.

That is literally what they did.

Be built a business, lined up customers, and had every one of them fail because of exclusivity agreements with Microsoft. Unless you were a vertically integrated software/hardware business you couldn’t get your OS on PCs because of Microsoft.

It might seem quaint now, but there was a market for web browsers! They weren’t free until Microsoft duped Mosaic into giving them a license for a percentage of sales and then gave it away for free as Internet Explorer, instantly destroying any market for selling web browsers. That’s not only preventing others from making money on their platform, but anyone from making money in that entire segment.

Literally the entire world was affected by Microsoft’s business practices as the PC industry was booming.

Implicit to that statement is "on apple machines".

Android market share is on non-macs, an non-iphones.

This isn't about marketshare, it's about Apple making things impossible. You're a hacker, tell me how I can solve this problem:

I am with a friend in a place with no Internet access. They have an iPhone. I have an Android phone. We don't have any cables. My friend took a video and I would like them to send me the video right now over Wifi.

I think there are some ways I could solve it, but I don't think there are any ways I could solve it that would be reliable for nontechnical users (and even for me it's hard.) This isn't an accident, Apple is abusing their control over iOS to make this sort of thing impossible. And it's worse than anything Microsoft ever did. Apple is actively standing in my way, even though I don't own any iOS devices.

> You're a hacker, tell me how I can solve this problem:

Feem, but I'm interested to learn more about this contrived example where phones don't have internet access and so can't use SHAREit, Send Anywhere, or any number of other solutions.

Not a contrived example. happens to me often and iOS users are paralyzed when AirDrop doesn't work. (And like, it is possible but it's a lot harder than it should be.) People who transfer lots of media for work don't even bother, they just accept AirDrop as the only functional solution, which means you carry an iOS device.

Gotcha. In addition to the off- and online apps above, it looks like web-based solutions like snapdrop.net work on Safari/iOS as well.

Without prior downloads happening before going offline I’m not sure you could share a file between mobile operating systems out of the box, regardless of which OS is trying to supply the file.

If I’m allowed to pre-download software before encountering your scenario, running a web server or an app that serves FTP or other server types hosting files is trivial on either OS. iOS may require shuffling the video file into an app sandbox first.

> This isn't about marketshare, it's about Apple making things impossible.

Of course it is about marketshare. The more you have, the more you can make things hard for your competitors. The less you have, the more you're the weird one with the odd platform.

> I am with a friend in a place with no Internet access

That's a vanishingly rare situation not worthy of legislation, IMO.

> And it's worse than anything Microsoft ever did

In 2003 I bought a PowerBook. It was the only commercially available laptop that could be bought without buying a Windows license. Microsoft had put any competitors out of business by that point and OEMs weren’t ready to sell Linux laptops. Apple only existed because Microsoft injected them with cash to show they had a competitor.

Get a USB drive.

You've been able to access SMB shares from the Files app just fine for years now. Linux supports SMB. Windows supports SMB. You're welcome.

So now I have to lug my synology file share around just in case I want to share a file with a friend, instead of just transmitting it wirelessly?

The answer is obvious, play the video on one phone and film the screen with the other.

It looks like Samsung and Google only merged their airdrop utilities in Summer 2023, so how would you have done this with two different android phones?

Think in terms of market power, not share.

>Apple is predatory on a level that 1990s Microsoft could not have dreamed of.

That's hilariously wrong.

In the 1990s, there were only two computing platforms to speak of: Windows and the Mac. Windows had *90%* of the marketplace. Microsoft had deals with PC makers that required them to include (and charge for) a Windows license on ever machine they sold. When Netscape happened, Microsoft leveraged their immensely dominant desktop position to squeeze the upstart browser company out -- Gates famously said "I'll cut off your oxygen supply," which is more or less an overt confession to monopolistic behavior.

Nobody has anything close to the kind of market power and predatory behavior that MSFT had in 1996. To suggest otherwise is to either display profound ignorance of that period of time, or to show you have a weird axe to grind about Apple that causes you to overlook actual facts.

Yes, Microsoft had 90% of the desktop OS marketplace, and did use that dominance to gain an edge in other markets. But despite that large market share, their leverage was kind of limited by the platform being open. Apple, on the other hand, has unlimited technical leverage. They can make up whatever anti-competitive rule they want to, and enforce it totally.

When Microsoft chose to neglect the web after IE6, it didn't take that long for competition to work around it. When Apple chose to neglect Safari in exactly the same way (and probably for the same reasons as Microsoft did with IE6), that was it. There was no workaround, nor any way for anyone to compete with a better browser.

PC games are a >$50 billion market, with Microsoft only getting a small slice of that. That's because Microsoft wasn't just able to outlaw direct installs nor competing digital games stores. Games for Windows Live had to compete against e.g. Steam, with the predictable outcome. The size of the iOS gaming market is comparable. Apple collects a 30% cut of it, and will do so indefinitely. Competing with them is literally impossible; nobody else can make a different app store offering better terms or a better user experience.

Apple is at around 60% market share in the US. The difference between 60% and 90% is a minor difference in scale. The difference between Apple's absolute control of iOS vs. the limited control that Microsoft had over Windows is a difference in kind. Apple got to choose whether competing software was even allowed on the platform. They could opening up special capabilities to only their own software, and actually enforce that (unlike Microsoft, whose undocumented APIs could still be reverse engineered). They can charge their competitors a 30% cut of revenue, while obviously ignoring it in their internal accounting for their own competing businesses.

At what point did Apple neglect Safari?

They didn’t chase Google to implement features that solely benefit ChromeOS, but iPhones have completely dominated Android and any other browser engine for mobile rendering performance since the iPhone 4. A miserably slow browser that can receive push notifications is pointless.

Exactly. People claim Apple neglects Safari because its priorities are not aligned with Chrome's.

Maybe not allowing a website to store GBs of data, run in the background or show notifications is a feature for some users.

It’s really only been in the past 3 years or so that I’ve started to see real pushback from Devs on Apple being overly pushy. Prior to that so many of the complaints were on the order of “Apple won’t allow me to do [insert insanely user-hostile or non-performant thing here] woe is me!”

I've been a huge fan of Safari since its introduction.

My only major complaint is that they replaced the old dev tools by this current atrocity which forces me use Chrome for development.

IE and Safari are vastly different situations. IE started off with near-total dominance and was truly left to rot, with the teams responsible for it having been scattered across the company because Microsoft was no longer concerned with cornering the market on web browsers. Safari on the other hand has only ever seen ~20% marketshare, has never been truly abandoned, and at least covers core competencies well (recall that IE couldn’t even handle transparent PNGs without DirectX filter hackery). IE made even basic static pages a pain to develop compared to Firefox, whereas most of Safari’s significant shortcomings have to do with more advanced functionalities.

If Google got complacent and decided to reallocate nearly the entire Chrome and Blink teams to other projects leaving only tiny skeleton crews on them, allowing both Firefox/Gecko and Safari/WebKit to leave it in the dust in terms of features that would be almost a 1:1 analogue for the situation with Microsoft and IE back in the day.

Besides, IE was closed source and WebKIt is open source. So are all other engines. And web standards are really a thing now.

The late 90s early 2000s were a dark period, software-wise. Nothing compares to that, thankfully. People either forget, weren't there or were just oblivious Windows users.

> web standards are really a thing now.

Chrome starts a proposal, implements it and “intends to ship” it before anyone really has time to discuss it. Recently (2 months ago?) they introduced a new WebExtension API that nobody cared about nor really understood the need for, but it’s still there, making it look like it’s a “standard”

It’s far from perfect but no comparison to our lowest point in history.

> Besides, IE was closed source and WebKIt is open source. So are all other engines. And web standards are really a thing now.

Even today, this doesn't mean much if Apple decides to ignore web standards that are harmful to their business model. Web Notifications were implemented by Safari Desktop, Chrome Desktop and Firefox Desktop[0] in 2012 - and Safari Mobile in 2023. That's 9 years that a pretty useful and important API couldn't be relied on by PWAs. And this is just one of many examples.

This has a real effect on what technologies developers can actually use, which is fairly similar to the effect IE6 had on newer APIs during its time.

[0]: Chrome & Firefox desktop because I can't find a way to see historical dates for mobile on caniuse - but it was around that time, or a bit later, for mobile as well

> Safari on the other hand has only ever seen ~20% marketshare, has never been truly abandoned, and at least covers core competencies well (recall that IE couldn’t even handle transparent PNGs without DirectX filter hackery). IE made even basic static pages a pain to develop compared to Firefox, whereas most of Safari’s significant shortcomings have to do with more advanced functionalities.

The definition of what is a core feature and what is advanced functionality changes with time. When IE6 came out it was the most advanced browser available, including support for what was considered advanced functionalities back then. But over the long time IE6 existed expectations changed and things which were once advanced or not even thought of were now core. The same is happening with Safari, with the difference that thanks to Apples blocking of different browser engines people cannot just switch to another browser and light a fire under Apples ass.

My fear is that no matter how good Safari is or gets, it won’t be enough to withstand the crushing force that Chromium has become. Devs would much prefer to test against only one engine if they had the choice, which I believe will ultimately end up stripping choice from the user.

Many choices have already been stripped. My electric company’s payments portal only works in Chrome. When I called their helpdesk to say it doesn’t work in Safari, the person told me to use their iOS app instead of my phone’s browser.

When I told her I’m using Safari from my desktop she was confused. Her helpdesk script literally didn’t have a path in the reply tree for someone using a desktop and not using a chromium based browser. That should tell you how uncommon it must be. I guess everyone’s just using the App now and doesn’t notice.

I’ve encountered this several times in the past few years too, usually in the form of sites acting bizarrely or functions not working in Safari and/or Firefox. There’s been some active useragent sniffing too, though ironically enough in those situations it’s usually enough to spoof the user agent after which the sites in question as far as I can tell work properly.

Either way it gives the impression to non-technical users that non-Chromium browsers are subpar even if site devs are to blame (especially when “upgrade your browser” messaging is misused to equate your up-to-date Safari/Firefox with some derelict version that hasn’t been updated for years) and will only serve to strengthen Chrome’s hold. The only recourse Mozilla and Apple have are to perfectly emulate Chrome’s behavior and in the case of UA sniffing even pretend to be Chrome, which sounds an awful lot like the bad old days of Gecko needing to emulate IE to make sites work in Firefox.

> Microsoft had 90% of the desktop OS marketplace

As mentioned elsewhere, they didn’t get to 90% by selling to a free market. They demanded exclusivity across the entire PC market. They didn’t just let IE stagnate. They told Mosaic they would license their renderer for a percentage of sales and then gave IE away for free.

It would be like Apple saying if you wrote an iOS app you couldn’t write an app for any other platform.

The platform wasn’t “open.” Technologies like ActiveX were ways that Microsoft was trying to make the Internet depend on owning a Windows PC. Everything surrounding IE was an attempt to make other web browsers completely unviable.

I don’t know if you remember how it was back then, but huge chunks of the Internet simply did not work if you weren’t using Internet Explorer.

They would also sink your PC OEM business if you dared to ship a computer with an operating system alternative. They used their 90% marketshare to force companies like Dell to only sell computers with Windows installed. If someone like Dell wanted to provide an alternative like BeOS, Microsoft could terminate their contract or raise their royalty rate to unsustainable levels.

> When Microsoft chose to neglect the web after IE6, it didn't take that long for competition to work around it. When Apple chose to neglect Safari in exactly the same way (and probably for the same reasons as Microsoft did with IE6), that was it. There was no workaround, nor any way for anyone to compete with a better browser.

This isn’t even remotely true. The entire front-end web development ecosystem came to an absolute standstill in terms of browser support for five entire years because Microsoft decided that, since they had killed off the competition, they didn’t need to work on Internet Explorer any more. That’s five whole years without a single new release of Internet Explorer, which had >90% market share.

And then after they restarted development, the next version mainly focused on adding tabs and a few CSS selectors. It wasn’t until Internet Explorer 8 was released that it actually started to properly move forward again. But web developers still had to wait years before enough people had upgraded because Internet Explorer wasn’t evergreen and people didn’t upgrade very often.

Supporting Internet Explorer 6 was still a battle developers were fighting in 2010, nine years after it was released.

Apple releases new major versions of Safari with improved support for web standards every year like clockwork. And people upgrade promptly. And Apple take part in interop efforts with other browser vendors. The two situations are absolutely nothing alike.

>They can make up whatever anti-competitive rule they want to, and enforce it totally.

On iOS, maybe. MacOS isn't controlled in that way.

And, again, if you don't like iOS or Apple's rules, there's another completely viable OS you can use on mobile that actually has a larger global market share, so there's no monopoly play here.

>When Microsoft chose to neglect the web after IE6, it didn't take that long for competition to work around it

We have different definitions of long, and perhaps very different memories of the web from the years 2001-2012[0]

almost a decade for any real traction for competing web browsers to put a dent in Microsoft, and that is after the anti-trust trial and the EU browser ballot mandate.

Don't forget, it was so entrenched that even by 2015 IE had over 1/3 of browser share, really only defeated by Google Chrome (which had the infamous "kill IE" initiative[1]) in 2013 or there about.

To put it simply, a decade of dominance is a long time.

[0]: Data supports that Internet Explorer had majority market-share up through the first half of 2012 (globally), per https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid... and in North America, it held on to majority position through at least 2013.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in...

You're comparing Microsoft's behavior now, after they've been smacked down in 1994 to how they operate now. MS had a long track record of breaking applications that competed with their offerings. If they hadn't been forced into the consent decree, they'd be 1)in a much stronger position than now, 2)behaving much worse.

IE6 was released in 2001, after the consent decree. So the reason other browsers were able to compete was because MS couldn't kneecap them.

30% is a huge difference.

What does MS charge game owners on Xbox? Sounds like the exact same thing. Xbox dominates the US console market [1] far more than iPhone does.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/console/north-ame...

Apple doesn’t have 90% of the phone or computer markets. Microsoft had near total dominance over every desktop computer on the planet.

The only argument than can come close to that is Apple has a large share of phone app revenue because people using Android don’t pay as much.

Microsoft never attempted dominance of the kind Apple asserts. You look at threads like this: https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/issues/445

This doesn't just affect iOS users - if I want to use Briar to communicate, it's just impossible to involve anyone who has an Apple device. They don't need a total monopoly for this to be anti-competitive. They've made it so that if you have 10 devices and you want some feature like AirDrop, it's impossible for that feature to function unless Apple wrote it, because 4 of the devices are Apple devices and Apple monopolizes all network code to those devices.

Platform restrictions aside, maybe I’m missing something but requiring a permanent open socket seems like an awfully brittle design. There’s a lot of network conditions which phones are highly prone to that’d make apps with that requirement barely functional.

That's small potentates compared to what MS was doing. Windows was actively updated to break other browsers and then IE was actively leveraged to kill off competing browsers and server side web technology. For years the only thing that survived their onslaught was OSS.

And that's on the tech side of things, business wise they would do even less ethical things. If Apple bought Briar specifically to kill it because it ran on Android then you might get a taste of what MS was getting up to.

Dr Dos was a perfect example of MS trying to squash competitors. MS didn't tolerate ANYONE competing with them.

I HATE these arguments. Peter Thiel talked about this in one of his lectures. He said: when you're a small company you define your market as small as possible in order to compete; when youre a large company, you define your market as large as possible in order to avoid antitrust. To illustrate the example, if you're the only grocery chain in California, you'd argue that "the united states has many grocery chains and we're just one of them!" thats true, but it doesnt mean that you arent acting monopolistically from within California. To bring this analogy back to Apple, we have to look at areas of competition: the area of competition that Apple meaningfully engages in is the apple app store. This would be the equivalent of california. Is any app in the apple app store prevented from meaningfully competing with Apple? Yes! 1. higher prices via app store fees 2. not allowed access to the same apis (e.g. files syncing in the background or no native messaging capabilities) 3. browser + messaging restrictions (e.g. cant link to a website which has any way of spending money). The reason I look at the "app store" as a place of competition is because apple is allowing competition in the space. If Apple removed the app store, or ONLY had Apple apps in the app store, then they would be acting perfectly fine IMO. But they allow this competition because it allows their platform to succeed, but they behave monopolistically wrt that competition to gain the upper hand over time.

Interesting, I haven't quite seen that perspective before. The reasoning of Apple creating a market is the first argument that actually makes sense to me. And I actually agree with the spirit of it. I definitely lean very heavily on Apple's valid security issues, but the fees and deliberate blocking of things that have absolutely no security concerns are a problem.

The grocery chain example has one very important difference: You can choose to buy Apple - they aren't a monopoly by any means in any market. Whereas with the grocery chains - you must go to the store in California or not get groceries.

I think Peter Thiel's logic is flawed. Apple does not conglomerate, does not have a monopoly in any sense, and has actively avoided those situations. In order to please shareholders it does need to innovate and attempt new markets (Project Titan is a good example).

Microsoft in the 90s was completely different - they wanted domination.

They should remove non-apple apps from their 'marketplace' if this is not a market then. Or single out apps: only one tuner, only one recording, only one scanner... If they allow competition for everyone but themselves, it's anticompetitive behavior.

No, but they control access to nearly 100% of the IOS market (all devices except a tiny number of rooted ones).

That is a sensible definition in some cases because their terms for developers, app store charges etc. apply to that whole market. There is also a lot of lock-in and control: Spotify (much less any smaller business) cannot realistically get people to switch to Android to use their app - and with a duopoly that would not be an effective tactic long term anyway.

Does this apply to any software integrations provided by enterprise vendors? Can I use your logic to force Oracle/SAP to list random software on their "integrations" storefront?

I think the answer would be no, and for good reasons.

Do Oracle lock down devices so you cannot install other software on them?

Via license contracts, very much so (if you assume devices = their software as well as hardware).

I’m not sure if you lived it, but Microsoft was actively targeting companies to destroy, and destroying companies because they could. Read about Mosaic, Be, their role in the SCO case, the Halloween documents, the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish philosophy.

Their monopoly case wasn’t about draconian terms. They were savagely destroying competition as a company culture.

Edit to add: bad terms on a vertically integrated platform is cute compared to Microsoft dictating what the entire PC industry was allowed to sell. It’s not that Windows was the best game in town, it was that vendors couldn’t sell Windows pre-installed if they sold anything else.

> Be

example https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/

msft forced PC makers to ship bootloaders that would lockup on sight of Be's boot chain

They literally left comments in their code saying, "we should crash here if using DR-DOS". Digital Research had a compatible but different DOS implementation at the time.

I do remember Steve Jobs wanted "to go thermonuclear" on Android (mostly Samsung and Google), saying "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product."

Other motives, same behavior.

No, different behaviour. If Apple had announced its own Android derivative called Apple Android++, somehow forced all major OEMs to pre-install it, designed it such that 'Android' apps written for it wouldn't work on real Android, then killed it, that might be the sort of behaviour that would be closer to the mark.

Like, Steve Jobs making vague threats isn't really in the same league as what MS was getting up to in the 90s.

Different results. MS was pretty effective at destroying the competition.

Similar behavior would have been to go to all of the retailers and say they couldn’t sell iPhones if they sold Android phones.

Apple sued for patent infringement and that was about the extent of it.

Suggesting that their behavior is at Microsoft’s level is naive.

> Apple sued for patent infringement and that was about the extent of it.

You're massively understating the scope and scale of Apple's war on Android. Apple transfered patents to a NPE that sued Android vendors - possibly Google itself. Apple also spent billions on this war - Apple et al spent over $4B to outbid Google on Nortel patents, Google spent even more billions to buy Motorola and its patents, prior to that, Google had virtually no defensive parents.

I said Apple sued over patents, you said Apple sued over patents. I think we’re agreeing.

I'm quibbling with the phrasing of the last half of your sentence, as it's a bit of an understatement, no?

> that was about the extent of it

Apple didn't only sue over patents they already owned: they went out of their way and bought billions worth of more patents to sue with, partnered with patent-trolls who also sued OEMs on their behalf. So we agree, but the breadth and depth of Apple's actions was remarkable - they didn't just sue, they went to great lengths to do so.

> Other motives, same behavior.

If you are absolutely committed to doing zero further analysis, then sure I can see why you would think that.

To be fair, Apple today is more about going thermonuclear on apps inside its own ecosystem, as compared to Android or Android apps. (I don't mean just the commission rate, but the blatant copying of successful app concepts).

It is possible (and is) for both things to be true.

Both Apple and Microsoft were/are abusive of their market position.

It’s about the difference between someone saying something mean to people and someone killing people. Sure, they are both socially unacceptable, but we typically don’t equate those.

At the time Microsoft was caught logging all communication in computers was new and business leaders hadn't adapted to it, but today you want catch them with their pants down like that, so today we wouldn't know if Apple or Microsoft were deliberately targeting and killing companies since they know to say "We are doing this to serve the customer, killing that company was just an unfortunate side effect" and they know the US court wont go after them.

EEE is still very much alive nowadays, especially how they got into Linux spaces with WSL(2) and into the wider FLOSS community with the GitHub acquisition. We're just in the Extend phase at the moment.

> For nearly 10 years now Microsoft's VS Code has been the dominant text editor among the soydev community. I use it on my Microsoft Windows machine to write Microsoft Typescript code with help from the latest AI models in Microsoft Copilot, it installs my Microsoft npm packages, pushes my code to Microsoft Github and automatically deploys to Microsoft Azure which I then admire from the Microsoft Edge browser.[1]

For real it's scary how much developer experience is controlled by Microsoft.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGz7Ou0Nwo8

Isn’t it slightly different since Apple designs and sells the hardware with the OS, whereas Microsoft was manioulating entirely separate hardware companies and not designing their own hardware product (until recently)

> having the interfaces change with new releases every few years.

That's a level of stability many mobile and web developers dream of today ;)

Web APIs are forever. What's unstable are the dreadful frameworks built on top of it that people seem to think are essential.

"gopher" feels forgotten!

gopher is not web :)

Since people don’t seem to understand Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior, I recommend you start with Groklaw[0] and decide if you want to dive any deeper. Microsoft was akin to US Steel or Standard Oil. We really haven’t seen anything like it since.

0 - http://groklawstatic.ibiblio.org/staticpages/index.php%3fpag...

One way I think they differ is that Apple is, at its core, traditionally a hardware vendor, whereas Microsoft is not.

You can, today, for example, install other OSes on Apple hardware, and they themselves have helped significantly to enable such until relatively recent architecture changes.

I, for example, run Fedora on a modern Macbook Air and it's super useful.

It's possible this reality deflects some of the antitrust attention.

But only on macOS hardware. All other devices have their boot loader locked.

It's possible that still buried in legal agreements between network operators and Apple there's a clause requiring Apple to ensure Apple knows what behaviors the network operators' networks will endure when Apple issued hardware connects.

I wonder (and can not prove, but remember this concern at Qualcomm and Apple back around then) if the issue was forced by Cingular Wireless originally.

In particular, iOS devices were dependent on carrier cooperation, and Cingular may have required only vetted software builds to connect to their network.

That's an artifact of them switching to the standard hardware platform of the industry for a while (basically a PC with some niceties on top). When it was PowerPC it was not as easy and your options were pretty limited.

And now with their custom silicon, no other system is officially supported and your "options" are basically hacks that can only use some parts of the hardware.

The platform is notoriously undocumented so it's not like if Apple is making it easy to install any other system. In fact, the best you can say is that they didn't outright block running other OSs but you can't really use the hardware properly that way (for example the fingerprint reader).

When it comes to iThings, they actually go out of their way to make sure you can't even install any version of the OS than what they chose (sometimes people run into cases where it's extremely annoying to be unable to downgrade the OS because the hardware has become way too slow to be useful).

So, when you say they helped significantly that makes me laugh, they used the fact that their hardware that was very close to the common PC could indeed boot other systems as a marketing tool but not much more.

Dude what the hell are you smoking Microsoft was 95% of the personal computer market in 1996 you can easily purchase an Android phone with no Apple influence.

Hell you don’t even need to buy a smartphone, That’s how little it has to do with the modern day. If you wanted the internet you had to go to Microsoft.

So I guess apple learned how to be slightly more subtle, and to let their rabid fanbase do some of their work for them. It's still wild to me how they managed to get people to argue against the freedom to install whatever they want on their device.

People buy product. People like product. People that don’t buy product try to change product.

>rabid fanbase

Yeah, those linux and netscape crazies trying to stop OS monopolies and internet explorer bundling. Let Microsoft sell the better product to their users !

I own an iphone (because google is even worse) but I want to run Firefox

Unfortunately the impact is not limited to Apple product, but a wider ecosystem. For example the browser. If a feature is not implemented in Safari, as only available browser on IOS, every website needs to be compatible with it. Songs must be available on Apple Music if you want to be available for Apple owners...

I think it's a combination of subtlety and normalization in the rest of the industry.

I wouldn't say the fanbase is arguing against it. Apple just have a good understanding of their average user. While you may have no issue installing unsigned apps and dealing with any troubleshooting, their average user, or most users, don't.

It's not to say they don't have a financial incentive to disallow app installs outside of their App Store, but there is a predictable cost in terms of support man hours and device troubleshooting they will incur in addition to lost revenue. So long as it is legal for them to continue business as usual, they have no incetive to allow it and the large majority of the userbase don't care.

Ahem, let me show you how that's not it :

> While you may have no issue using a different browser/media player/OS/... and dealing with any troubleshooting, their average user, or most users, don't.

> […] but there is a predictable cost in terms of support man hours and device troubleshooting they will incur in addition to lost revenue.

There is also the cost of externalities of more systems being infected that the rest of the connected world has to deal with.

You're doing it right now.

I feel like that must be a sarcastic response without the "/s"

Congratulations, you lack even the mental capacity to see that I was explaining the situation not defending it. How do you manage to breathe on your own I wonder.

> While you may have no issue installing unsigned apps and dealing with any troubleshooting, their average user, or most users, don't.

These average users shouldn't come near a MacBook then.

Average users, don't.

My sister does everything on a phone or tablet and doesn't see the point of a "proper" computer, the guy at the bank plugs an iPad into a monitor.

A MacBook is a work tool, like an angle grinder or a JCB. Most people don't know how to get the most out of them if they were given one.

I’m a computer nerd, and even then, all my actually-important-for-real-life computing takes place on my phone.

Many years ago I used to despair every time I used my dad's windows machine. Every time, his browser window was filled with loads of toolbars installed by various sites and utilities, leaving him with a tiny usable content area. I kept explaining why this happened and he never changed his behaviour.

I got him to buy a Mac and for a few years things went well. But then he started complaining about it behaving weirdly or running slowly. I'd take a look and find he'd installed some free utility or some other odd bit of software that was screwing up his machine. I kept explaining why this happened and he never changed his behaviour.

I keep telling him to get an iPad, as at least then everything would be sandboxed and iOS would kill background tasks. But he says, no, he needs a real computer.

This is the end user reality HN generally fails to empathize with. Users need computing consoles or appliances.

PS. Now that you can dock an iPad with an external screen and keyboard and trackpad, try that for him, tell him it's the new Macpad Pro.

I would encourage the HN audience to do tech support (outside of family) for a few friends/customers and charge for it. You learn a LOT.

You should charge a lot. As much as a doctor. Because that's what you are, really.

The metaphor totally works because half your customers end up ignoring your advice anyway.

Still medical staff looks down on the IT crowd.

> by Terretta 6 hours ago: Now that you can dock an iPad with an external screen and keyboard and trackpad, try that for him, tell him it's the new Macpad Pro.

ROTFL, someone made this and posted to HN four hours ago:

https://www.macstories.net/stories/macpad-how-i-created-the-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39592288

> he never changed his behaviour

That's the real problem. People just refuse to learn. They refuse to put in any effort at all. They don't want to have to think about what they are doing.

It's making me become ever more elitist over the years. I no longer believe computers should be for everyone. Computers are world changing technology and they are wasted on people who don't give a shit.

And you feel like it is your responsibility to take control of his life, because you know better? For his own good? This is called fascism.

If this is how he wants to live, it is his right as a free adult. Even if it annoys you.

Any chance you could lock down his account (gatekeeper) and keep your own admin user? It's too bad there's no easy way to simply "grant access" to installs remotely (if you're the admin).

Why not? The average user can get a ton of apps from the App Store.

Statistically speaking, most of them don’t.

Your framing is disingenuous by trying to frame this as an uneconomic and non-rational fanboying.

I don't think you truly appreciate how comfortable I am handing my parents an iPhone, and how uncomfortable I was helping them with their Windows computer replete with multiple spyware browser toolbars back in the day.

The onslaught of quasi malware on their computers was sickening, and they'd always ask me about insane popups that would show up due to some pre-installed thing nobody had control over.

Exactly. You gain a visceral appreciation for this when you watch your elderly parents get scammed for tens of thousands of dollars and taken of advantage of via technology channels.

We've created a very nasty internet - one that isn't safe for the old or the young - and without the law enforcement or age boundaries that we use in the physical world to keep our public spaces suitable for the broader population.

Like the appstore is any better, remember that the vast majority of money made on the appstore is for casino-like apps which I would not be comfortable giving to my parents or my family.

Casino apps werent pre-installed. Do you really not remember what Windows computers were like, fresh out of the box, back in the day?

Hardware companies pre-installed any and all sorts of software from vendors. Spyware, adware, gambling games, toolbars, "free" trials to internet services. Computers used to be up to their neck in absolute garbage.

I do, people installed those malware by clicking on random ads, about the same way they now install those undesirable apps, funny how history kind of repeats itself.

I guess the biggest difference is that the OS manufacturer now gets a cut on those.

And yet for some reason my dad never has any malware on his iOS and iPadOS devices, whereas he always did on Windows devices.

Since you talk about this subject, I actually had to remove two calendar malware on two different family iPhones (and it was pretty annoying to find where to remove that, even as a dev) so while it's true that there's less malware, it's not non-existent.

And my point still stands anyways, the line between some of those top appstore casino-apps and malware is very blurry.

They also came preloaded by manufacturers like Compaq, HP, and Gateway, who got a kickback.

"Better" != "Good enough"

An app store (any app store, not just Apple's) can be the former without being the latter.

> remember that the vast majority of money made on the appstore is for casino-like apps which I would not be comfortable giving to my parents or my family.

Talk to your lawmakers to make these sort of apps illegal. Apple is not the government.

I never said that they were, I'm just deconstructing the marketing myth that the appstore is a wonderful safe place of productivity apps.

Stop infantilizing adults. Teach them computer safety.

The young and the old can have cognitive impairments making this very difficult.

Would you give them a gun or a knife? Do you think no one should be allowed to own a gun or a knife?

Cars have seatbelts, airbags, ABS, crumple zones, etc.

Almost everybody has to use a computer for work and other stuff, and they are willing to pay for a safe and sound system. They are not interested in becoming full time Arch Linux root administrators just to conduct their daily business on their device. Just like almost none of the people who drive a car are full time mechanics and welders.

> They are not interested in becoming full time Arch Linux root administrators just to conduct their daily business on their device.

They don't need to if they don't want to.

I'd be one of the users who are not inclined to transform my iPhone back into my days using Linux on desktop and suffering the pains of doing it. I do have the option to turn my computer into that if I want, I do not have that option for my phone even though it's just a computer.

No one would be forcing users into doing that, it's about allowing the users who want that control over their own devices.

You are attacking a strawman.

At what point should a private company be compelled to develop or expose APIs because you want to tinker around with their system?

My system, not their system, and since you're asking for a personal opinion here: immediately.

Well, you own the hardware, but not the software. So at least part of the system is not yours.

Since we're discussing prescriptivism (how things should be) rather than descriptivism (how things are in a subset of legal jurisdictions): I didn't force them to leave a copy of their code on my device, but I own every single bit of electricity and magnetism and metal and plastic within it. I thus have the right to flip 0s into 1s, and 1s into 0s, or smash the whole thing. It's mine. Redistributing anything, admittedly, might be somewhat related, but would be a different discussion.

Any effort to disenfranchise me from those rights is, in my opinion, unethical. If a company were to try to do so under the guise of a semantic argument, I would find it even more distasteful.

own the hardware but cant do what we want on it, because we're forced to use the software

Great question, which has now been answered by new laws like the digital markets act!

The "point" at which such things should apply is when they are large enough that anti-trust laws and pro competition laws apply to them. IE: when they are very very large and are worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

You have that option, just buy another phone. Because there is no monopoly. Likewise if you want to install a non-Apple OS, there are thousands of different non-Apple models available for purchase.

Apple offers security and convenience on their devices, which is why many people like them. Windows offers no security but some convenience, Linux offers security and no convenience.

Like I said in another comment, if Spotify is not happy with Apple they can manufacture their own device and sell to consumers. People buy and use Apple devices of their own free will, and developers develop for their devices of their own free will as well. And there is plenty of competition in the market.

Sure, I will buy another phone and all the apps I paid for in 15 years of usage. It's very trivial and simple.

I invested money in the ecosystem and now there's vendor lock-in, I'm bound to it unless the usage becomes so unbearable that the pain to change vendors is less than continuing the one I have, the pain threshold only grows for each passing year I'm invested in the ecosystem. Do you comprehend that?

Opening a phone for others to develop apps on top does not encroach anywhere into Apple's sale of phones, it just creates a massive wall to guard against other competitors selling apps to their platform. They charge for the phone, and now they extract rent from something they sold through the App Store. Please, think deeper about this, you are missing the point entirely.

> Like I said in another comment, if Spotify is not happy with Apple they can manufacture their own device and sell to consumers.

No, they can't. That's not their business, they don't have the capital to develop and foster a whole 3rd platform of devices + OS just to move away from Apple's ecosystem, that's the whole point of developing a platform: creating a massive lever against competition because of network effects. Network effects are very hard to break from, hence why most major tech companies try to leverage that (look at Meta/Facebook, they are shit but still it's very hard to compete against due to their size).

> People buy and use Apple devices of their own free will, and developers develop for their devices of their own free will as well. And there is plenty of competition in the market.

There's only 1 competitor in the market: Android, manufacturers using Android are not 1 competitor each since none of them are providing a full platform, the platform is Android on top of some devices.

Free will is a massive naïvete to throw here. Is there free will when there are no other options to reach a market? Is there free will for online sellers in the USA to not put their products on Amazon since you'll be living on the outskirts of the market without any meaningful way to penetrate into it if other competitors have an advantage simply by paying the Amazon tax and selling their products through Amazon?

I think you are too naïve and ideological, that blinds you from understanding market forces and markets in general.

> Sure, I will buy another phone and all the apps I paid for in 15 years of usage. It's very trivial and simple.

I know you're being sarcastic, but it is extremely trivial and simple to buy another phone. Because you can also keep the phone you have!

There is a hang-up among hackers that think it is impossible to use different phones, different computers and different browsers. You can have one phone for this and another for that. You can use both vim and emacs to edit a document and you can have several computers with different systems. Hell, you can even have different sets of cutlery at your home.

> No, they can't.

They sure can. Being incompetent or lacking in capabilities is an acceptable excuse for a person, not for a billion dollar company like Spotify. I have here on my desk a pocket music player of excellent quality that was manufactured in 2023. It is not Android nor iOS and the company making it is much smaller than Spotify. So why can't they? "Not our business"? If they're that incompetent, the CEO and the leadership should apologise for being failures, step down, pay back to shareholders all salary they have received and go hide away.

Yes there is free will for sellers to not put their products on Amazon. That's called retail, and it's a tough market. If your product is good enough you can sell it without putting it on a third-party marketplace. Just like with hotel aggregator websites and food delivery apps. Companies are doing fine without being there.

> There's only 1 competitor in the market: Android

There's thousands of different Android phones in the market, that's the competition. And it's not that difficult for a tech company to develop their own mobile OS if they'd like. Microsoft made Windows Phone which many people liked, Nokia made the excellent and ahead of its time Meego OS, BlackBerry 10 OS was excellent as well. And there is absolutely no blame on Apple for these tech giants discontinuing their OSes. They were discontinued because they weren't profitable enough for the owners taste. So now Apple should be forced to make sure that their competitors can make a profit from their customers? Because that's the core of the matter. Other companies do not want to do the work and investments that Apple did to get a loyal customer base willing to spend money, so they're using EU regulators to freeload.

No sympathy to any of them. Make better ecosystems if you want to compete, you have the money and the means. Try giving a fuck about your customers and your business. That's something that the general public and consumers also would benefit from.

> Like I said in another comment, if Spotify is not happy with Apple they can manufacture their own device and sell to consumers.

Well, actually, it seems that spotify won the lawsuit.

So, it is instead that Apple will have to pay a fine, and if they don't like it then they can pull out of the EU entirely.

> people buy and use Apple devices of their own free will

And Apple participates in the EU market of its own free will, and can shutdown if they don't like the law.

And users who buy from Apple will be free to install or not install whatever they want on their devices soon.

If those users don't like it, then they can simply not install apps that they don't like and are free to only install apps from Apple.

> No one would be forcing users into doing that, it's about allowing the users who want that control over their own devices.

The moment this is a thing is when the social engineering attacks to get people to root their own phones, to set up untrusted app stores that firehose shitware down onto phones, etc. starts to happen. "I'm from Microsoft, you need to add the Microsoft Store to your iPhone, here's how." I get your concern, and in a world less built on open grift I would share it, but our esteemed tech brainlords have built a tech ecosystem that exists to enable scams. (Hell, I almost got popped a few months ago by a scam, and I tend to be pretty cautious about things.)

Unless the opt-in mechanism is something like "open the phone and turn a jumper" or "buy a different model of the same phone" I genuinely think it's way too dangerous for the average target of a social-engineering attack. People buy iPhones to not deal with this shit as much as is possible; taking that away hurts a lot more people than it helps.

Hilarious, good one. How did you make the leap from "apple should allow people to install stuff if they wish" to "Arch Linux administrator"?

Be real.

They were being hyperbolic to illustrate a point.

Sort of like how you keep bringing up guns, knives, and car safety in a conversation about phone apps, to illustrate your point.

Back when he was still alive, I had to turn on "Parental controls" on my parent's Mac Mini, to stop my dad from accidentally removing things from the Dock and being unable to put them back.

It took him years to realise Google search results had a scroll bar, and it wasn't just the 3 items that fitted on the screen.

He wrote simulation software for the radio propagation of military IFF transponders before he retired, and his idea of "computer safety" was therefore somewhere between "do not connect them to the internet" and "put them in a faraday cage".

Okay, that's a nice anecdote. Is your point that no one should be allowed to have the freedom to install whatever they want on their devices because your parent was incapable of dealing with the responsibility?

Do you also want to take away everyone's cars because of traffic deaths? That's far more serious than someone's parent installing malware on their shiny digital toys.

What about taking away kitchen knifes? Those things sure are dangerous!

You're missing the point entirely. The idea of a "freedom to install" is incidental to what happened in the market which is that Apple made a platform that people felt secure and happy in. Consumers Apple's product to the extent that Apple became a dominant force in the market.

That's the house they chose to live in. It's a house in which no knives existed. Now you're saying "let them put knives in, how dare you restrict them from having a knife!" whereas most consumers are saying "I like this house, wow living here feels great.". It's not a knife issue. You're trying to make it a knife issue.

The success of the iPhone was never obvious from day one. To attribute Apple's success to monopolistic behavior and consumer oppression, rather consumer behavior and expression, is just denying reality.

> It's still wild to me how they managed to get people to argue against the freedom to install whatever they want on their device.

And it is the "they" that I'm arguing against, not the rest of it.

> Do you also want to take away everyone's cars because of traffic deaths? That's far more serious than someone's parent installing malware on their shiny digital toys.

This isn't the same thing. The equivalent in your anecdote is that Car A comes with a three point seatbelt that you don't want to use, and you want Car A to be sold without it so you can use your preferred safety device, despite multiple current owners of Car A telling you that they _want_ the three point seatbelt. And you can always buy Car B if you want to install a lap belt instead.

> Okay, that's a nice anecdote. Is your point that no one should be allowed to have the freedom to install whatever they want on their devices because your parent was incapable of dealing with the responsibility?

That this isn't "infantilizing".

> Do you also want to take away everyone's cars because of traffic deaths? That's far more serious than someone's parent installing malware on their shiny digital toys.

My mum did that for my gran when my gran got Alzheimer's and my mum realised she'd been driving for 6 months without paying road tax.

And then the same happened to my mum.

Also, you're giving the exact argument in favour of self-driving cars as soon as the tech is actually ready, and also the reason that crumple zones and seatbelts are mandatory.

And also the reason we have (revokable) driving tests to be allowed to use the vehicles in the first place.

> What about taking away kitchen knifes? Those things sure are dangerous!

https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives has a high degree of popular support, and has done since I was a kid myself.

> Also, you're giving the exact argument in favour of self-driving cars as soon as the tech is actually ready, and also the reason that crumple zones and seatbelts are mandatory.

No, that's dangerous! Everyone should crawl everywhere while wearing an iHelmet if we were to apply apple's modus operandi to transportation.

> And also the reason we have (revokable) driving tests to be allowed to use the vehicles in the first place.

Hmm, so you think that maybe qualified people should be allowed to use dangerous devices? I'm fine with you taking devices away from your parents. That's up to you and your parent.

> https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives has a high degree of popular support, and has done since I was a kid myself.

Is your argument that your iphone should not be allowed outside where it might scare other people? Odd take. Even in the UK an adult is allowed to buy & posses a kitchen knife.

> That's up to you and your parent.

I wrote "Back when he was still alive", so… no.

> Is your argument that your iphone should not be allowed outside where it might scare other people? Odd take.

No, and I don't know why you'd think that. In fact, that's such a weird take, I think you wrote that in bad faith.

> Even in the UK an adult is allowed to buy & posses a kitchen knife.

Buy, yes. Possess in public without "good reason" as defined by the police and prosecution, no.

> It took him years to realise Google search results had a scroll bar, and it wasn't just the 3 items that fitted on the screen.

I wonder if this is because today's interfaces are actually so much worse for scrollbar UX (usability and discoverability) than anything we had since they were invented 43 years ago.

Just look at it... https://scrollbars.matoseb.com/

He was using Vista, I think. Died a while ago now, it might have been XP.

My dad, when was a kid, would bust out a soldering iron and he'd show me how to swap out the quartz timing crystals on digital wristwatches to repair them (or, for fun, make them intentionally run fast or slow). On occasion, he'd even do it on PCs to under- or over-clock them and make them last a little longer.

By the time I was in college, he was on his way towards retiring, and knowing that I was into software, decided that I would be his IT support person. He went through various laptops and desktops (PCs, Macs, he even gave Linux a real try but gave up when he couldn't get his financial planning software to run on it), Android phones, etc. The one platform he liked using in his later years was iOS/iPadOS specifically because, in his words, "there's not a bunch of other s--- here, and I don't need to manage it".

It's ease-of-use dovetailing with computer safety, and that's a _hard_ problem.

My dad had installed a QR code reader app on his iPhone that was a monthly paid subscription. He was wasting hundreds of dollars every year for something his phone already did automatically for free by just opening the camera. Apple will happily let scammers create garbage paid apps to do the same thing their phones already do for free. No side-loading to let viruses in required.

He can also ping apple's support to get a refund on that subscription, which they will happily do.

Why should a refund even be necessary? What’s the point of Apple’s highly selective review process if they let apps like this through? The only reason that I can fathom is it’s because Apple will gladly take a 30% cut of that revenue. And that is my overall point here.

Everybody always jumps to Apple’s defense by explaining how iPhones are built for inept users that just want a phone that works with no BS. Therefore, they claim, it’s a good thing that Apple has a highly locked down environment. But what good is this locked down environment if Apple will happily allow scam apps to charge their customers for features the phone already does for free? What’s the difference between a user downloading a scam app from an untrusted source and downloading it directly from the App Store? If Apple is going to have a locked down environment, at the very least, they should make it effective.

No ex-ante process will remove scams from the app store and I think you're bordering on arguing in bad faith. That's why the ex-post ease of refund part matters.

Your post reads to me as if you thought all users shared the same exact needs as you do

That’d be quite an ignorant POV to take on IMO

> It's still wild to me how they managed to get people to argue against the freedom to install whatever they want on their device.

This isn't because of Apple, or at least it isn't in my case.

Even as an iPhone app developer with the means to do so whenever I want, and even though I find Apple's content restrictions derisory and "big brother"-y, I actively don't want a system that can install "whatever".

This is due to all the malware everywhere on the internet, and owing to this unfortunate reality, also means I think it is unwise even to have 3rd party libraries as project dependencies. I have an entire spare computer dedicated to learning scientific python because I don't feel I can rely on the absence of vulnerabilities in the stuff.

This makes me sad. I miss the old days of 2002 where I didn't feel any reason to worry about random apps from random websites. But part of my carefree youth was that I had a Performa 5200 running OS 8, which wasn't a popular targets for malware authors, and another big part was that my bank didn't have an app.

But before someone replies to point out that malware gets past the App Store tests: yes, of course it does, I see all this as a "defence in depth" strategy, not a silver bullet.

Why would having the ability to install sideloaded apps change this? Apps will not be able to just install themselves or other apps without prompting. And we've already had zero-click exploits in Safari leading to entire phone rootkitting more than once without sideloading

> But before someone replies to point out that malware gets past the App Store tests: yes, of course it does, I see all this as a "defence in depth" strategy, not a silver bullet.

Most of the apps I install are mandatory apps. It's not illegal to not have them, but if you don't install you can't access your doctor, file an insurance claim, bank, see your childs grades, enter the front door of your child's preschool, etc. All of these are malicious actors who will steal as much of my data as possible at all times, but I do actually need a preschool. As long as I can only install these through the app store, we are at an uneasy truce where these apps comply with app store rules.

The operating system can apply restrictions to apps, and in fact already does. It does not need the officially sanctioned store for this. You are arguing for detailed privacy controls for all apps (including those installed by Apple), which is a good thing to want!

There are bad actors, like Facebook, who will prompt users to sideload so they can do bad things.

If the bad actors were all shady fly-by-night looking companies it’d be one thing. But once the gates are opened, if it’s easy enough, you’ll see people being pressured to open the gates by all sorts of companies that they will have no choice but to comply with. Imagine, for example, if your insurance company, in order to pay your bill, starts making you install the app through some alternate pathway that brings a side-dish of keylogging to adjust your rates based on your browser behavior.

> I have an entire spare computer dedicated to

> my bank didn't have an app

Exactly my reasoning last week when I read about one more dependency attack on GitHub.

Do you have a mac? What's your setup? I need CoreML so VMs are not an option, and I'm a freelancer so I use my own MacBook for work. I have a different session for each client, but at this point I don't even know if it's useful at all. Of course I also have a personal session with banking stuff... which is what made me realise I was probably doing something dumb.

> Do you have a mac?

Yes, two.

(Well, three, but the third is in a box waiting to go to recycling or someone who wants it "for parts", as that's from 2013…)

> What's your setup?

It's literally an entire second mac. I bought an MBAir/M1 second hand, then was given an MBPro/M1 Pro; the Pro became my main machine, the Air became my "mess around" box.

While I have two Mac (A mac mini as a workstation and a MBA for portability), I think next time I have to work on a contract, I’ll just setup a VM for the client. NPM always made me uneasy.

It’s really kinda crazy how normalized it’s become to pull in hundreds of dependencies (aggregate of dependencies and subdendencies) from unvetted sources on the regular. Combined with the popular insistence of developers to run with all protections disabled (SIP, immutable system, non-admin user, etc) it makes for a whole lot of easy targets.

Android and F-Droid user here. I choose to buy hardware that allows me to install what I want, but I also consistently advocate for the right of consumers to buy into a closed ecosystem.

There is a large class of technology users that is uninterested in installing whatever they want on their device. They want their device to be predictable, they want their app store to be curated, and they don't want to deal with dark patterns on a company by company basis. These customers choose Apple because it provides a tightly integrated experience.

Forcing Apple to alter enough of their rules will eventually cause that user experience to no longer be an option, which is bad for consumer choice.

The problem with Apple's walled garden is that there's literally zero consumer choice for interoperability. If you have 10 devices and 4 of them are Apple, it doesn't matter that 6 of them are running F-Droid. Anything that requires you to install your app on all 10 devices is impossible to do. Everyone is limited to what Apple allows in their walled garden whether they choose it or not.

Yes, if you buy walled-garden devices you won't have a great time trying to install things that were meant for devices outside of the walled garden. I can see how that is unfortunate, but I'm not convinced that it's an argument for tearing down the walls.

The alternatives that most here on HN are pushing for would ultimately lead to a walled garden no longer being an option for consumers at all. I think the status quo is preferable: consumers who don't want to participate in the walled garden can choose to not buy devices that are explicitly sold as being part of said garden.

> The alternatives that most here on HN are pushing for would ultimately lead to a walled garden no longer being an option for consumers at all. I think the status quo is preferable: consumers who don't want to participate in the walled garden can choose to not buy devices that are explicitly sold as being part of said garden.

Why do apple fans always come up with bizarre fantasies like this? This isn't a problem for Android today, and it won't be a problem for mainstream apps when apple is finally forced to open up thanks to the EU.

More than 99% of the users will never install anything other than from the official Play store. But they are allowed to without Big Daddy Apple telling them "No". And that's what matters.

Did you miss my first comment where I said I'm an Android and F-Droid user? It's not like I don't know how Android works. The only Apple device I use is my work-issued MacBook.

The difference between Android and iOS is that Apple actually has rules that are strict enough to motivate the likes of Facebook to actively encourage people to side load if given the chance. I'm not comfortable looking at Android as a precedent, because Google is extremely lax with what kinds of things they allow on the Play Store, so the path of least resistance is acceptable to basically everyone. I do not believe the same would be true of Apple's store.

> because Google is extremely lax with what kinds of things they allow on the Play Store

Not really. They are pretty strict, actually.

> The difference between Android and iOS is that Apple actually has rules that are strict enough to motivate the likes of Facebook to actively encourage people to side load if given the chance

I doubt it. Especially after Apple will have submitted to the rest of the DMA.

> because Google is extremely lax with what kinds of things they allow on the Play Store

And Apple is known for being just so diligent with their App Store reviews, huh? https://www.pcmag.com/news/beware-theres-a-fake-lastpass-app...

> Everyone is limited to what Apple allows in their walled garden whether they choose it or not.

And those limitations are?

iMessage? The world outside the US doesn't use iMessage that much. It's Whatsapp, and Facebook Messenger, and Telegram, and Viber, and...

Apple Photos? I have Google Photos on my iPhone, and they work better and faster than Apple's own

Actually, I struggle to think what Apple-exclusive things I use apart from Safari (and I've been using it on macs since 2007 or so).

So, one example I can give is Briar, which is a distributed messaging app. I don't know that I actually want to use Briar, but in order for it to be useful to me it would need to run on iOS, since I have too many people I would want to use it with who use iOS.

You can't see the things that aren't allowed, because they don't exist. The Briar team hasn't even built an iOS app because they know it would be rejected.

Of course Briar would not be rejected. It's not on iOS for a purely technical reason: it just wouldn't work there the way it's designed to work:

- https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/issues/445

- https://sourceforge.net/p/briar/mailman/message/36415432/

> zero consumer choice for interoperability

I can use WhatsApp, Signal, Google Chat for messaging instead of iMessage. I can use Spotify, YouTube Music, Sirius instead of Apple Music for streaming music. What do you mean by zero consumer choice for interoperability? I see plenty of choices.

> Everyone is limited to what Apple allows in their walled garden whether they choose it or not

What software is Apple not allowing? I see competitors’ software available on their platform. The only issue is that these competitors want to avoid paying fees to Apple and argue under the guise of protecting consumer freedom.

> What software is Apple not allowing? I see competitors’ software available on their platform. The only issue is that these competitors want to avoid paying fees to Apple and argue under the guise of protecting consumer freedom.

Porn apps and hate speech mostly.

They supposedly also bar a lot of outright scams and malware, but a lot also sneaks through.

And yet they allow a lot of gambling and pseudo-gambling apps (probably because at least the latter makes bank with IAP). It's a strange morality that says "porn bad, gambling good".

Apps exist on multiple platforms just fine. The fact that dealing with App Store approval rules & timing sucks is just a cost of doing business. Plenty of outfits deal with it to get the exposure/userbase or ignore it.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that users should be able to choose to remain within a walled garden if that's what they actually want. There are benefits to Apple being able to use their market position to enforce certain rules on behalf of their customers.

The problem is that same leverage can just as easily be used to enforce rules that benefit Apple at the expense of their customers. In theory competition from other platforms limits the extent Apple can abuse their position in that manner. But there's only one other major platform in the mobile space. That's not a lot of options for the market to optimise around.

Further, Apple is a large, vertically integrated company which does a lot to try to lock consumers into their ecosystem. If I'd like to chose a more open mobile phone operating system but feel like I can't because Android isn't allowed to interoperate with iMessage or AirPlay or AirDrop or AirTags or Apple Watch or iCloud and I like those products and want to continue using them... well, that's a problem.

There's also the software freedom issue. As a consumer, once Apple sells me a piece of physical hardware it should no longer be their place to dictate what software I'm allowed to run on that device. If I want to install an app that's not on Apple's App Store but Apple doesn't want me to, there's no question in my mind as to whose rights should win out in that scenario.

Overall, my take is that Apple should be allowed to offer a closed ecosystem to users who want that, but they shouldn't be allowed use technical measures or anti-competitive bundling to force or coerce consumers into remaining inside that ecosystem. If consumers want to buy their apps exclusively from Apple's app store because they see a benefit from that, then they should be allowed to. But if they don't, Apple shouldn't be able to hold their entire ecosystem hostage from the consumer as leverage to prevent them from leaving.

I realize this gives Apple a bit less leverage in their ability to advocate on behalf of their customers when dictating the terms under which companies can sell products within their walled garden, since those companies will now have the option of going over Apple's head and selling their product directly to consumers, sans Apple's rules. But that's how free markets work, in contrast to the monopoly-like situation we're currently in. If enough consumers see the value in Apple's rules to avoid other app stores with less restrictive policies, companies will still have to comply with them to access those consumers. (I'll note this is basically how things already work on Android. Google still operates the most popular app store on Android despite competition being allowed, and they're still able to dictate the terms under which apps are allowed in that store.) But if those terms are so egregious that consumers start to prefer alternative app stores instead, that's a good thing too.

> They want their device to be predictable, they want their app store to be curated, and they don't want to deal with dark patterns on a company by company basis. These customers choose Apple because it provides a tightly integrated experience.

I’m glad someone in this thread gets it. If anything, my main criticism of Apple’s App Store curation is that they have too light of a hand on cracking down on scammers and other abusive business practices. Indie developers making honest mistakes get jerked around but the professional skeezeballs keep gaming their way through.

But the tone of a lot of the regulation seems to be trying to push Apple to make the thing I value about its ecosystem worse while adding me nothing I actually care for. With the phone, in particular, I am almost always using it while I’m half distracted with something else. I’m much more open to tinkering on my PC or even my tablet, but as far as I’m concerned having my phone being as locked down as can be and imposing as little additional cognitive burden on me as possible is a huge feature.

> deliberate sabotage of open standards process to prevent the web taking off

Whether Safari is this way deliberately or by chance, is something to be found on a court. But Apple's behavior here isn't different from the Microsoft one with IE.

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