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Comment by gxs | Hacker News Reader

Because people are incredibly entitled and want to have their cake and eat it too.

So you bought an iPhone knowing you can’t download apps and then go cry because you can’t download apps?

Then your argument is that well, all my friends have iPhones or there are some other good features, or whatever else you make up?

So you obviously find value in the product, it’s missing a feature, but you will consciously buy it anyway, it doesn’t make any sense.

Does the standard simply change when a company is big enough?

Imagine ordering a steak salad even though the restaurant doesn’t allow modifications to the ingredients, then throwing a temper tantrum when you get it because it has steak. It’s unbelievable.

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You might find this hard to believe, but people buy products based on a number of factors. For smart phones, the number of factors is dizzyingly complex, and yes, the effects it has on smoothness of communication with the people in your life is one of those factors. Sometimes a specific feature is one of those factors.

What "doesn't make sense" is reducing a complex decision down to a specific factor, and then trying to create the narrative that your specific chosen factor is the sole reason anyone chooses a specific product.

It is completely fair for people to prefer iPhone and also argue for Apple changing their policies.

Apple is the only one acting entitled here. Why doesn't the App Store deserve competitors? Why should we accept Apple's fees and failures when they deliberately limit competition?

They're acting like an anticompetitive wuss if you ask me. If Apple is the righteous one here (imagine that), they can pack up their bags and tell the whole EU to shove it. They can individually invite all 27 markets to kiss their ass and watch as the relevancy of Apple products plummets in the first world. Problem solved, Apple saves the day. 中国梦!

Or, they can take the king's ransom of iPhone revenue and surrender their asinine software double-standard. This doesn't end well for them either way, there's no sense it making it last longer.

Agreed, and well worded. Never in computing history has a walled garden like Apple's existed until the iPhone. Distributing and finding apps wasn't always simple, but then again, the need for a central browsing experience to find and download apps was never truly a thing before -- maybe outside of Steam for games. The key difference with Steam is that the same games have always been available on other distribution platforms, generally, so it doesn't suffer from the same limitations.

Show of hands, how many people actually spend multiple minutes (or hours) just swiping through their respective App Store just to find something new and interesting?

Aside from the store experiences, the web's powerful (gasp!) ability to find and download content including Computer Applications™ has always been its greatest strength. App stores are a net detriment seeking to protect the lowest common denominator: the uneducated computer user who hasn't bothered to learn everyday security practices to avoid downloading malicious apps or vetting software developers on their popularity and/or security themselves.

This takes a little knowledge and practice, but this isn't much different from shopping for good produce in a grocery store. Avoid the rotten fruit, and use your friends/family to help you judge what's best! That's the beauty of freedom on our devices, as it enables the power users and enthusiasts to enjoy these devices at their fullest, without senseless obstacles offering unsolicited "protection".

> . Never in computing history has a walled garden like Apple's existed until the iPhone.

wot...

How was playing that Super Mario Bros with on your Sega Master System back in the day? I don't remember Sega having the 10NES subsystem.

Ever heard of this little place in the early to mid 90s called AOL? Compuserve? Prodigy? Any cell phone company long before Apple's app store

And you act like anyone who has a Kindle or a Nook isn't in a walled garden, at least for 99% of the people who don't know/care that you can install books via Calibre or something.

And you know you can sideload apps on Apple devices right? Even before the EU ruling. It was just a massive pain in the ass and drumroll... 99% aren't going to do it.

This is not new, Apple wasn't the first to do it, and everybody railing again Apple loves to accept it in basically every other facet of their lives.

> This is not new, Apple wasn't the first to do it

Microsoft got pretty far, up until "the inquiry".

> And you know you can sideload apps on Apple devices right? Even before the EU ruling.

If by sideload you mean "repeatedly sign apps until your face turns blue" then yes. If you mean "install software like a normal person", then no.

> If by sideload you mean "repeatedly sign apps until your face turns blue" then yes. If you mean "install software like a normal person", then no.

Yep. Exactly.

And breaking free of the walled Kindle/Nook garden is similarly out of reach for about the same number of people that don't care about Apple's walled garden, which is the majority.

Again, they literally exist in every corner of our lives, and the 99% of consumers/normies don't care.

If they don't care, then it shouldn't matter that third-party options exist. The same thing happens on Android, nobody uses F-Droid even if the apps are better and cheaper. The fact that it exists puts meaningful pressure on competitors though, and fills the niche that I use the device for.

The "walled Kindle/Nook garden" isn't similar Apple's ecosystem. A Kindle or Nook will let you access it's EMMC and put Epub files or PDFs wherever you need to. It functions indistinguishably from a store-bought file and doesn't even make you enable Developer Mode to get there. It's "out of reach" in the sense that you need the skills to follow a Wikihow article to do it - my grandma could figure it out.

iPhones don't let you install IPA files on equal-footing as Apple, ever. That's the problem, and it's what the DMA remediates. I don't care how you or the normies feel about it any more than I consider the public sentiment towards Bell telephone or Internet Explorer.

> It functions indistinguishably from a store-bought file and doesn't even make you enable Developer Mode to get there.

This is incorrect. Modern Kindles classify books added as "documents" rather than books, which limits their features and treats them as second class citizens.

I doubt most people care, but you're not on equal footing to Amazon loading a book onto a Kindle.

Oh. My Kindle Touch is coming up on 10 years old, I probably shouldn't assume it's the same for everyone.

My primary mechanism to load books on my Kindle is via emailing ePubs, granted, I'm probably in the minority of users but I couldn't ask for an easier workflow.

> So you bought an iPhone knowing you can’t download apps

I didnt know that when I entered the apple ecosystem. Can I have a refund for all the apps Ive bought on my phone?

Why are you defending a trillion dollar company lmao?

Why do you care so much that Apple has been forced to give consumers more choice, you can still just use the app store yourself, nobody is forcing you to use apps from alternative stores.

This is the standard "one true religion" reaction imo.

maybe because forcing people or companies (property of people) is wrong?

The phones are not property of Apple though.

The users should not be forced to run Apple approved applications.

Are you familiar with the history of antitrust intervention and the laundry-list of real-life examples that proves you wrong?

https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust-and-cartel...

We have been forcing people and companies into compliance of some sort since the dawn of civilization.

Imagine there are only two restaurants in the world and they both only serve steak, yet when you want a salad people say go to the other restaurant.

This is a great metaphor because if we accept it then the salad is the web, yet no one wants that.

I think there is a great desire for web-like application distribution to work well on smartphones, but with none of the drawbacks like poor rendering performance and lack of native features.

Of course, native apps that wrap web-based apps is almost the reverse of that, and we still often get laggy, sub-par experiences as a result of broader platform support for lower maintenance costs.

PWAs fill the opposite gap where you get native-like apps at the expense of low performance, distributed any way you like.

What we really need is for high-performance native applications to be distributable via the open web, and that's exactly what the EU is enforcing here, in a way. What would be better is for WebAssembly to take off and offer native performance in apps that can be visited at URLs, just like we're used to.

Except in this case your beloved android lets you do whatever you want, so why not go use them?

And there are multiple manufacturers that aren’t associated with Google who make phones.

If this were truly such a shortcoming, more companies, in addition to already existing ones, would create phones with side loading apps.

Imagine me pitching my idea to YC, it’s like an iPhone, but with side loading apps! It’s brilliant!

You’d be laughed out of the room.

The issue is you want those good Apple features, you want that Apple ecosystem, the blue bubbles, etc, but you also want to have a feature that the phone doesn’t have and people are crying that Apple won’t give them that feature.

I don’t even care, and I even if I did, decisions already been made so there’s nothing to argue.

This is simply an amusing situation, the grandstanding is simply funny.

Imagine using YC as a corollary for consumer demand (or hell, corporate righteousness).

> I don’t even care

> This is simply an amusing situation, the grandstanding is simply funny.

Wait till the Commission delivers the punch-line.

I don’t think you made the point you think you made here.

It’s possible to not care about something and still submit an opinion. Or maybe it’s the degree of caring that is confusing you, I care enough to comment and have a viewpoint, but I don’t care to the degree that I am upset or will lose any sleep over it.

There you go, hope this helps you understand what I meant there so that you are no so hung up on it so as to feel the need to quote it.

Please do save me the suspense and share the punchline now!

It’s perfectly reasonable to use YC here as at the end of the day they’ve helped launch of ton of companies that are popular with consumers.

Regarding the irony in using them as an example of corporate righteousness, well you did get me there and I agree with you.

> Please do save me the suspense and share the punchline now!

Apple hasn't finished their setup! You might be able to guess where it's going though, we've heard this one before.

Dude this is the foundation of capitalism. Its not supply and bend over. Its supply and demand.

It is totally reasonable to demand a better steak salad from some restaurant that doesn't allow modifications and moreover totally reasonable to point out how asinine they are for not making easy-to-do modifications when you point it out since that is what you as a paying customer want.

Imagine we lived in a world where 95% of restaurants never ever and vehemently so denied any modification to menu items. It is unreasonable then to demand they change? I need to move towns to get lunch?

This is the insanity we live in with the walled gardens of Apple.

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