This is one of those things where there is only upside for everyone involved.
Apple (and Google) need to be saved from themselves sometimes.
Meanwhile the repeated reversals are making Apple look guilty and nefarious.
Apple (and Google) need to be saved from themselves sometimes.
Meanwhile the repeated reversals are making Apple look guilty and nefarious.
I get the sentiment, but it's nice to finally have lawmakers and regulators standing for what's right - for once.
It’s funny how when Apple threatens a European company the EC can act within days, but when a German company is violating the GDPR, it takes 4 years for them to act. What a strange coincidence.
That's not up to you. What you get to decide is which stores you're willing to install apps from. If lots of people refuse to install apps from unrestrictive stores then developers who want to reach those users will have to meet the requirements of more restrictive stores.
You would only not have this choice if the app has a dominant market position, and then can force you to get it from a store you don't want to use. But then your problem isn't an overabundance of trust busting, it's an insufficiency of it.
The only solace is that you can modify Android to the point where there's almost no Google interference whatsoever. But of course some apps choose to rely on that (e.g. Banking).maybe one day Apple will begrudgingly get to that point.
Microsoft execs had their heads buried too deep in their own asses to be able to understand what was needed at the time.
They pushed a platform (Windows phone) that lacked interesting features out of the box, lacked cloud services integration to fill the gap left by the lacking base features, and required Windows as a development platform (and, iirc, C# as well?). It didn't even have any particular windows-ecosystem speciality: no special exchange integration, no special windows pc integration, nothing. Microsoft could have exploited the same reasons they exploited with Azure, Office365 and the general enterprise: microsoft phones should just integrates perfectly with other microsoft stuff. It could have been the no-brainer choice: we use ActiveDirectory and Office365 as a suite, we'll get a Windows Phones as everything just works immediately. No, nobody had thought of that.
The value proposition was just not there.
So basically another walled garden, but dumber. And the hardware didn't have anything special to make it "worth".
Seriously, the original iPhone had little going for it technically. No GPS, poor data bandwidth, no apps, and minimal ability to make phone calls. (It took the combined efforts of Apple and AT&T a couple generations before you could reliably place a call.)
But it had a touch screen that felt nice, and you could watch videos and play music! The web browser actually performed well despite the low bandwidth. It could zoom. And Steve Jobs marketed it well, whereas Steve Ballmer was terrible at marketing.
IMO the iPhone was considerably worse for business use than Windows Mobile, and neither one held a candle to the BlackBerry. But it didn’t matter.
you could have just shortened that to "Steve Ballmer was terrible" and been more accurate.
Basically an observation that consumers were interested in digital media players, which Apple had some expertise in building (iPods, for younger folks).
And that a usable browser was a killer feature (most of the web not having reactive mobile sites, and no apps, then).
And if you combined all of the above with a cell phone, customers would rather carry 1 device than the 3 it previously took.
And not coincidentally this is exactly how Jobs pitched the original iPhone unveil.
An iPod, a phone, an internet communicator, an iPod, a phone…
Things that apparently were not that important at launch. Apple did negotiate "unlimited" data plans with Cingular/AT&T.
> But it had a touch screen that felt nice, and you could watch videos and play music! The web browser actually performed well despite the low bandwidth
Better UI, better media playback, web browser that worked. Sounds like a classic example of Apple taking what is out there and simply doing it better.
IMO the real problem with Windows Phone was the complete failure to produce an actual platform. Windows Phone 7 was incompatible with Windows Mobile, and _Windows Phone 8 was largely incompatible with Windows Phone 7_! The whole thing was comically developer hostile.
(Second mistake; Windows Phone 7’s UI ran at 30fps, presumably in an attempt to save battery. This made it feel a lot worse than iOS and Android.)
Now, Apple is achieving per-eminance in the cross-device consumer OS market in the latop+tablet+smartphone space and Windows is slowly dying. Microsoft will just set to become yet another boring cloud services company.
Only in the US and global high-end market. This is an extremely profitable market to be leading and I'm not trying to minimize Apple's achievement, but globally relatively few people use their phones and tablets, and ever fewer use their traditional computers.
Apple has a sizable lead, but I think the "idea" of what a smartphone is has been locked in essentially in the mind of consumers and their technological lead will only last so long as time passes. They are Microsoft but of smartphones and 20 years younger than windows desktop PCs. They know this, which is why they constantly make new things and try to develop new products (vr headsets, etc).
MS beat Apple to market by a considerable margin. Windows Mobile substantially predates the iPhone, and it was actually usable. (I had one of their flagship devices.)
But MS’s OS concept was incoherent, their UI was laggy, their web browser was unbearably slow despite arguably superior hardware, their form factor was not snazzy. And, unlike Apple, they utterly failed at marketing to consumers.
Also, Apple out their foot down against carrier nonsense, so Apple users didn’t have to deal with $14.99/mo for Verizon Location or whatever they called it. (Although, to be fair, the original iPhone didn’t have GPS. Blackberry had far superior hardware at the time and really ought to have been able to compete, but they didn’t.)
By the time the App Store showed up, it was pretty clear that Apple was beating MS.
windows was well windows 8 and everyone hated it and everything about it. (and pre-windows phone 8 it was to fragmented with to many incompatible versions and little 3rd party support)
Palm/HP WebOS was the real mobile OS with the best chance to win but failed because well HP... need i say more.
Has trapped so many businesses.
Enterprise customers can afford to pay enough to support good profit margins...
... but there are many more regular consumers, and regular consumer demands tend to produce better solutions than baroque enterprise demands (usually company- or VP-specific).
Blackberry was doing great with keyboards and refused to sell more of. Windows Mobile had tons of muscles as market share they just trimmed off. Windows Phone had Marketplace trust issue that couldn't be solved. Nokia burned itself down before Google. Palm did most of it right, but couldn't be bothered with exclusivity reneg.
I can't say solving any one of them could have saved each of the brands, but they all had one giant elephant each that were enough to drag them down.
That was the attitude for a minute until the CEO got a cool iPhone.
Same with Macs. And jeans.
This is the main point, not the "also". Apple's revolution was actually getting it in the hands of real life consumers who paid for cell phone plans. The tech was already there with blackberry, but you had to have business to afford it. Yes, the original iPhone itself was a technical marvel, but it would have been a dead fish if it wasn't for the at& t deal that came out as part of it.
Apple didn't invent anything in the original iPhone, except the software. And the first version was really lacking and very buggy.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/steve-jobs-rigged-first-iphon...
Other phones that predated the iPhone release had more capabilities and more software. There was nothing really "marvelous" about the original iPhone, it was many years behind Microsoft.
The HTC Wizard was a "technical marvel" in 2005. Apple was playing catch-up in 2007.
At the time I had an HTC TyTN 2 phone that did everything the iPhone could do and more, and had a removable battery, about the same size as the battery inside the iPhone 1. If you look at photos of the TyTN 2 battery, and the iPhone 1 battery, they are very close to the same size.
There was very little difference between those batteries. The TyTN 2 had a 1350mA hour lithium battery. The iPhone 1 had a 1400mA hour lithium battery. Practically no difference there in size or capacity.
So, no, the iPhone's battery was not a "technical marvel" any more than other phones of that era.
And in fact Apple's was a step back by being non-removable. I absolutely loved having a removable battery, because I could bring 2 or 3 with me on a long trip and never have to charge the phone. Apple was less functional in that way.
> "The iPhone "couldn’t do what [Apple was] demonstrating without an insanely power hungry processor, it must have terrible battery life," Shacknews poster Kentor heard from his former colleagues of the time. "Imagine their surprise [at RIM] when they disassembled an iPhone for the first time and found that the phone was battery with a tiny logic board strapped to it."
https://www.redmondpie.com/blackberry-maker-rim-thought-appl...
This was a marketing and perception issue, not a price issue. When the original iPhone came out, I had a very nice blackberry, with a personal plan, effectively unlimited data, and the full blackberry suite (minus corporate integration, obviously). And I think it was less expensive than the iPhone plan. But it was a pain in the neck! I had to pick the correct phone plan, add the correct data supplement, negotiate the correct discount (basically everyone was eligible for a discount, but you had to find your particular reason for being eligible in a ridiculous menu), and then convince the sales person to add the special $3.99/mo supplement for blackberry services. It clearly never occurred to anyone involved that this was not a competent way to sell to consumers!
I did make fun of my friends for paying several dollars more per month for a device with no keyboard, no GPS, slower data, less efficient text input, and dramatically worse performance in marginal network conditions.
When I finally switched to an iPhone 3G, I could do real in the browser, but wow, the ability to make phone calls was seriously downgraded. I feel like my old blackberry may have had the best behaved cellular modem of any smart device I’ve ever owned.
I think that, if RIM had gotten YouTube and a music player working, had improved the web browser, and stuck a capacitive touch sensor on their device, and if they had marketed it competently (make it so that customers could walk into a store, pay $55/mo, and walk away with a working device without a fight!), they might have remained competitive.
Apple didn’t bother, they used an entirely different UI from the start, and it was a UI aimed at everyone from kids to grandparents, not just tech people.
that's because they half assed it.
There's always the risk that mobile phones supersedes the desktop, and thus cannibalize the desktop windows sales. Microsoft also likely not able to force OEM licensing in the same way that they could with windows on PC sellers.
If you could literally run windows apps on a phone back then, i reckon the MS phones would've at least grabbed some marketshare. Of course, the mobile hardware back then isn't as powerful, so there's the excuse that win32 cannot run there.
You don't need to do radical changes, just small actions like do not steal the tips students send to teachers.
Going full-goblin mode and demanding 30% of all the money that moves through a phone is what is destroying Apple.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/21/in-a-reversal-apple-is-now...
Smart people can make mischief visible or invisible without necessarily getting caught defecting or cooperating.
Oops did I draw that regulator’s attention to the room where we keep the bodies? Silly me.
Except all of us who value privacy and security.
Face it: the major competition between app stores is not going to be on price, but a race to the bottom on who can allow apps to fuck over users the hardest.
If there's one company I don't expect that from, it's Apple. They may have highly dubious ethics but they are damn good at business and marketing, and I would be utterly shocked if they don't position themselves as the safe, privacy-friendly official app store. For people who don't enable side-loading, I wouldn't expect they'll even notice any changes.
And I'm sure Facebook is anticipating not having to ask for permission to hoover up all your personal data. Sure you don't need facebook, but if you want to be using WhatsApp to communicate with your friends and family, you might not have a choice. Shady companies that sell shady spyware to schools "for the children" are looking forward to a much easier time rolling out the most invasive ideas they have. The ad companies are I'm sure salivating over telemetry libraries with extra detailed modes for non-Apple app store installations.
But most of all, I look at Android where alternative app stores are possible with essentially no cost, and even with Amazon's enormous resources behind it, they could not get an alternative app store to catch on. I can't think of any reason why it would be different on iOS, so ultimately I suppose I expect this to go nowhere and a few years from now there will be the epic game store and the main app store and everything for nearly everybody will just be on the app store like it is now. The alternative stores will just have the apps that Apple wouldn't approve, like porn apps or privacy invasive, etc
Considering this hasn't happened on Android yet, I doubt you are in real trouble. Like it's not that they can really gain extra permissions (other than I guess tracking anything the app already has access to, but that isn't any different than currently) because they are sandboxed by the OS and limited in access through the permission system... I HOPE? RIGHT? @APPLE
And on the side of other app stores: there is F-Droid which is decently popular for OSS apps.
As far as I can tell, Apple doesn't plan to let this happen.
Nobody would be going after Apple if they had simply stopped their monopoly pricing scheme.
Its too late for that now. Now Apple is going to be forced, under threat of government action, to stop its anti-competitive actions.
We're a society of laws and they apply equally to everyone. If you don't like the laws either vote accordingly, talk to your representative, organise a political action, or leave for a more agreeable jurisdiction.
Also, the US fined Airbus $582 million in 2020.