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Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

At least in the case of Apple, it’s not at all specific the the EU. That company is run by children.

Everybody who works with Apple, be it developers or suppliers complains about how shitty they are to work with. They maintain relationships by the strength of their market power alone. Bridge burning is ingrained into the company culture.

Apple is treating the EU like they do everyone else: they are being dicks. Unfortunately they seem to have missed that the EU is not able to be bullied or pushed around.

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I wouldn't say they're children.

Rather, Apple is ran by people who are used to the ~20 years of free corporate reign granted to them by the complete defanging of groups like the FTC in the US while Europe was still trying to fruitlessly coax them into being cooperative.

It's not just Apple who is struggling to work in an environment where regulators have teeth; Amazon tried to treat the EU the same way and got banned from lobbying the EU parliament for not taking them seriously.

Basically the only GAFAM company that took regulators seriously for a while was Microsoft (due to the IE lawsuits) but even they are starting to act out again as of late.

The meteoric rise of MS Azure in Europe is best explained by how they have already had their war with the EU and learned how to work with the EU instead of against it.

Apple saw what happened when Google was nice to developers and got shitty camera views in apps and adobe flash.

Apple has rightfully concluded that developers do not deserve to have any freedom on their platform because they immediately abuse it for their benefit and to the detriment of the user. Devs got so bad meta lost billions in value when Apple set up a privacy transparency feature in the App Store, say what you want about their repair practices but no other tech company takes this much care in managing their platform.

Any platform operator needs policies to protect users against spam and abuse. But does Apple do a good job at this? No. Many of the popular app store apps are low quality games that exploit addiction with loot-box mechanics. But those scam apps make money for Apple so it's fine.

Apple does not keep spam and other crap from the App store, but it does police high quality apps that offer their own subscription services. Because Apple feels entitled to their cut.

For every shitty spam app in the App Store there’s straight up malware on the play store

So after your basic premise was demonstrated false, you instead just deflect to a nothing statement that couldn't be more false? "Apple is good" "no, they aren't" "for every bad app Apple let's on the platform that makes them extremely rich that they will never ban, and all the spam apps they seem un able to ban, there are definitely way more malware on the play store because Google lets people do whatever"

Which is just not true. It has permissions, app review, and the same broken financial incentives as Apple.

I don't understand how anyone defends Apple's walled thornbush garden. Sure it's in neat rows with paths and it says it's a garden. But it's designed to maximize the amount it gets out of you for Apple's benefit just like Google, to make sure you can't leave, and to make you feel like the thornbush garden of Google is worse because they use gravel for their paths instead of paved stones.

The basic premise isn’t false, you just decided it was.

Snapchat and Instagram did irreparable damage to Android’s reputation for an entire generation of people because of how relaxed Google’s restrictions were on lazy developers.

Instagram, the application that was so infamously Apple-only for a long time that there was public backlash for making an android version, when one of the main reasons for not having android app was simply that they had a small team and wanted to avoid splitting effort?

You forgot about the 10 years that the instagram app just used the camera preview for pictures (as did snapchat), and now the average person thinks Android phones have bad cameras.

That's how badly Google mishandled Android, they listened to smooth brained tech bros who thought giving developers freedom would be a good idea, and Apple has always said they would ruin the user experience. Years later that "closed" ecosystem is so good Google has to beg lawmakers to let them access it because now there's a whole generation of people who see Android as a steaming pile of garbage, because it's exactly what Google let it become to the average person.

-1: all large companies throw their market power around. There's nothing special about Apple in this regard.

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