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Comment by Fripplebubby | Hacker News Reader

For folks who don't have time to read a 90 page document, the case rests on specific claims, not just the general claim that iPhone is a monopoly because it's so big. Here are those claims:

1. "Super Apps"

Apple has restrictions on what they allow on the App Store as far as "Super Apps", which are apps that might offer a wide variety of different services (specifically, an app which has several "mini programs" within it, like apps within an app). In China, WeChat does many different things, for example, from messaging to payments. This complaint alleges that Apple makes it difficult or impossible to offer this kind of app on their platform. Apple itself offers a "super app" of course, which is the Apple ecosystem of apps.

2. Cloud streaming apps

Similar to "super apps", the document alleges that Apple restricts apps which might stream different apps directly to the phone (like video games). It seems there are several roadblocks that Apple has added that make these kinds of apps difficult to release and promote - and of course, Apple offers their own gaming subscription service called Apple Arcade which might be threatened by such a service.

3. Messaging interoperability

Probably most people are familiar with this already, how messages between (for example) iOS and Android devices do not share the same feature-set.

4. Smartwatches

Other smart watches than the Apple Watch exist, but the document alleges that Apple restricts the functionality that these devices have access to so that they are less useful than the Apple Watch. Also, the Apple Watch itself does not offer compatibility with Android.

5. Digital wallets

It is claimed that Apple restricts the APIs available so that only Apple Pay can implement "tap to pay" on iOS. In addition to lock-in, note that Apple also collects fees from banks for using Apple Pay, so they get direct financial benefit in addition to the more nebulous benefit of enhancing the Apple platform.

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This feels like it reflects similar actions taken against companies that are dominant in a market. The first one I heard about[1] was IBM versus Memorex which was making IBM 360 "compatible" disk drives. IBM lost and it generated some solid case law that has been relied on in this sort of prosecution.

In the IBM case it opened up an entire industry of third party "compatible" peripherals and saved consumers a ton of money.

[1] I had a summer intern position in Field Engineering Services in 1978 and it was what all the FEs were talking about how it was going to "destroy" IBM's field service organization.

> In the IBM case it opened up an entire industry of third party "compatible" peripherals and saved consumers a ton of money

I’m curious what market opportunities the Apple suit could open up.

- Xbox cloud game streaming

- WeChat like super apps w e-commerce (X wanted to do this play but more likely Facebook Messenger and the like)

- iMessage on android

- a receipt tracking app or something directly tied into Apple Pay tapping

From a hardware standpoint third party fitness trackers with full integration into iHealth and third party ear buds with the same (or better) features than airpods.

Part of the IBM settlement required them to document interoperability. That was used by the DoJ to force Microsoft to document their CIFS (distributed storage) and Active Directory (naming/policy) protocols.

The latter might be particularly instructive as my experience with CIFS when I worked at NetApp was the different ways that Microsoft worked to be "precisely" within the lines but to work against the intent. Documentation like "this bit of this word must always be '1'" Which as any engineer knows, if it really was always '1' then that bit didn't have to be in the protocol, so what did it do when it wasn't '1'?

> From a hardware standpoint third party fitness trackers with full integration into iHealth and third party ear buds with the same (or better) features than airpods.

As someone who makes apps in the health space, I couldn’t care less if other tracker data was integrated into HealthKit. HealthKit honestly sucks - it's some bastard of objc naming schemes and methods jammed into Swift. The async is horrible to debug, too. No one has a good time in HK.

The issue with other trackers is that they are more locked down than Apple. You can't just get HR from Oura for instance - and that's not a health kit issue either.

The reason you can't get heart rate data from Oura is that they don't want people looking at it except in aggregate, because then they would notice the accuracy problems and data gaps.

I'm not a developer in this space myself, but my impression is that HealthKit is one area where 3rd party apps have access to the same data as 1st party apps.

I had a similar experience with MSFT docs when working at Sun. The docs were not very good, and though they seemed somewhat redacted, it felt like in fact their internal docs probably weren't much better.

Don't tall into that trap of thinking.

Many years ago I knew an ex-microsoft engineer. Microsoft had poor interoperability with something, and I speculated that engineers in microsoft didn't know what 3rd parties were doing and accidentally broke things.

He told me, "don't be naive - microsoft would have meetings saying 'how can we own this?'"

Not to cast doubt on your friend's story, I worked on both the SQL Server team and later on the Windows kernel team in the early 2000s (the bad years). I came from "outside" meaning I had already had a career at non-Microsoft-related companies (mostly startups using linux on the server). I was continually shocked at how _little_ the MSFT employees seemed to know about the industry, or how their customers used their own products.

As an example, this was the era of the J2EE App Server. Almost none of the people I worked with knew what an App Server was, despite the #1 database in use by App Server customers being MSFT SQL Server.

This was before that, early to mid 90's era

I still don't know what an app server is. Isn't that one of those things from the enterprise programming era where they'd get "architects" to design an "enterprise system" and it would come with twenty different things with names like "message bus" and "dependency injection" that no program in history has ever actually needed?

In case you are honestly interested--although your hyperbole suggests otherwise--an app server then was what the docker daemon (or podman or other container launcher) would be now. The two most common in my career were JBoss and Tomcat. Since Java packaged applications into Jars which could be run anywhere (up to environmental assumptions made by developers), you could simply scale up by sending these jars to the app servers to run. Actually, the Alibaba group was quite annoyed in the JCP that western members had given up on these aspects of the Java platform and were moving to support containerization. Arguably, CGI servers for php/python etc. were also a type of app server, although I rarely heard them referred to as such. App servers standardize what it means to start an application which makes operating many applications much easier.

Message buses were generally in memory or in process streaming brokers. Most of these have moved externally today via Kafka, RabbitMQ or cloud proprietary versions like SQS. Some people may lean on ZeroMQ to build similar behaviors when doing multiprocessing and some people may even do it in process if they like the api. Definitely very much part of large scale application development today although the terms of art have changed.

Dependency injection is just a fancy name for polymorphism via fields in your struct, although if you have too much exposure to spring you will associate it with that plus an inversion of control on the actual injection part: that is, you will associate it with heavy use of annotations. If you have polymorphism with a switch (or chained ifs) on a parameter, you don't have dependency injection but if you have polymorphism by having different inplementations of a field of your struct then you are doing dependency injection. Very much part of good software design today, the annotation driven wiring possibly not so common outside of Java + Spring.

I think of dependency injection as a generalization of LD_PRELOAD, the point being that the "injection" is done via configuration that is external to the application's code.

That's a good take, I hadn't really thought of that one before and I had certainly used LD_PRELOAD or some incarnation thereof (forgive my memory is was more than a decade ago) to swap out different implementations of the same API.

> In case you are honestly interested--although your hyperbole suggests otherwise--an app server then was what the docker daemon (or podman or other container launcher) would be now.

Sure. I have worked on JVMs before, but not server side, and I never had to touch anything sold by IBM.

> Arguably, CGI servers for php/python etc. were also a type of app server, although I rarely heard them referred to as such.

No, I think there's a difference. The deployment story for PHP was that you copied it to the web server and that was that. The mandatory part was a webserver you had anyway. There is FastCGI, but in PHP's case it can be thought of as purely a cache and is not necessary.

> App servers standardize what it means to start an application which makes operating many applications much easier.

A PHP web app does have some moving parts like needing to start nginx/fastcgi/mysql, so in that sense it still needs a container.

But the difference between the PHP source itself and Java is that PHP is 1. stateless and 2. doesn't take nearly as long to start up.

The first one is the big one and means you don't need to restart anything to update the app. This part of PHP is so well designed it practically makes up for how bad the rest of it is.

The second one was more of a Java flaw; the runtime is undercooked (which is why it had all that other super complex stuff on top of it) and everything has to go on the heap, instead of having more of a concept of constant data that could just be mapped in from the binary/jar file. That's what they got for not adding value types I guess.

The Kubernetes of the 90s and early aughts

During the Ballmer era MSFT was famous for the lack of cooperation between and within teams. That's what you get when you use stack ranking to decide compensation.

Microsoft's documentation for Microsoft's own technologies (as in, the C# libraries they provide) is terrible. What's the competitive advantage there?

That is not true in my experience, Windows API is superbly documented and C# docs are of far higher quality than Java's

The C# documentation was, at least in its initial years, very good. It even had working examples that demonstrated functions. Compare that to typical javadoc of its time.

MS documentation used to be amazing back when I programmed for Windows. It was one of the hardest parts of moving to Java for me.

Reminds me of Bob Colwell's talk, although it's not from the same angle: https://youtu.be/jwzpk__O7uI?si=NZmfU6av_2D-uPgk (around 1:04:10)

>Documentation like "this bit of this word must always be '1'" Which as any engineer knows, if it really was always '1' then that bit didn't have to be in the protocol, so what did it do when it wasn't '1'?

Maybe it was a deprecated part of the protocol, and setting it would cause an error or do nothing.

Maybe it's there to prevent desyncing errors that occur for long strings of zeroes. Information theory isn't the only possible consideration.

Or it could be a placeholder for future expansion and while it would do nothing now, in the future it might break things if you've ignored the documentation.

If you design a protocol without at least one field reserved for future expansion you are a bad engineer. Generally I would call this the protocol version number field, but there are other options. The important thing is there is some field that currently has a defined range, but can get an a larger range in the future and you check that field and abort if it is out of range.

I also recommend a second field called protocol ID which is set to a known random value (your wife's birthday) so that if someone gets an unknown message if they see that value they can guess what the protocol is.

Forget iMessage, I just want media messages from iPhone to not be sub-144p pictures/videos. I know sms is limited but I doubt that's a technical limitation.

And yea, Gamepass was an immediate thought of something a company wanted to ship but Apple blocked. Between that and the Epic Games store it looks like there's gonna be a lot more options to game on IOS by the turn of the decade.

It's not sms, it's mms, and it is in fact a technical limitation.

Honestly we should just sunset MMS entirely. It's like using 56k dialup.

yeah, but the one blocking its sun-setting is apple with their artificial barriers. if apple didn't do it's shenanigans, RCS or something similar with a different name would've have replaced MMS by now.

  if apple didn't do it's shenanigans, RCS or something similar with a
  different name would've have replaced MMS by now.

The only reason there's any RCS interoperability right now is because most carriers have bought into the Google RCS stack. Before that you absolutely had to be aware of which carrier the recipient was using. If memory serves T-Mobile is running both a Google and non-Google RCS stack. RCS is and was a mess.

Hell, if you've a rooted Android you can't access Google RCS and any RCS messages sent your way will disappear into the ether.

There are no third party RCS apps outside of hardware manufacturer skins on Google Messages as Google has shut them all out.

If you want to interact with the RCS world as a non-wireless carrier, expect to pay upwards of 10 cents a message and have a minimum revenue commit of thousands of dollars a month. Carriers also don't get paid for inbound texts on RCS, creating a huge new cost center instead of symmetrical texting volume resulting in minimal costs like the current SMS/MMS ecosystem.

This is untrue, the US carriers had a "cross-carrier" consortium that had built most of its own RCS stack, complete with animating dots when the other party was typing, and good image and video support. But Samsung refused to use it (not sure if Google was bribing them in the background) so it got killed in favor of supporting Google's flavor of RCS.

Any source for that? Afaict, every Telco now use Google's RCS stack.

I also can't remember what it was called, but every Telxo uses Google's because of its failure.

> In October 2019, the four major U.S. carriers announced an agreement to form the Cross-Carrier Messaging Initiative to jointly implement RCS using a newly developed app. This service was to be compatible with the Universal Profile.[34] However, this carrier-made app never came to fruition. And later, both T-Mobile and AT&T signed deals with Google to adopt Google's Messages app.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

Um no, if the powers that be who control the LTE and 5G (and soon 6G) standards would improve or replace MMS, apple would be forced to improve their ability to send images/videos because they must comply with the standards to have their phone allowed on the carrier networks.

This is a dumb complaint honestly. The carriers and Qualcomm closely control the standards bodies and could address this problem. Instead they focused on the bag-of-garbage that is RCS, which Apple has finally said they will support. But because RCS is a bag-of-garbage, Apple plans to support a different flavor (the basic standard) from Google's. $0.50 says Google will magically start supporting the basic standard too once Apple ships it.

I can count on one hand the number of MMS messages I've ever received.

MMS was much more common before data messaging apps like Discord or Facebook Messenger became some of the normalized places for cell phone chatter, which anecdotally I think that switch started happening (or at least I began recognizing that switch) around the early 2010's.

So I'm guessing you're a very young person based on how little MMS you claim to have received. Which is fine, it's fair to point out that technologies us old folk use may differ slightly from what the whippersnappers are doing. And there are no wrong answers there, except that it's also fair to point out that when you purchase a cell phone, before you install any apps, you have some ingrained cell phone messaging features. One of which is a messenger app built on top of SMS and MMS.

I've probably sent and received thousands of MMS messages over the years, because it was the primary method for a cell phone user to send a picture to your friends and family. Back in the day, at least, and still today for some. It was also the way that us old folk were able to send group texts at a time.

I'm in my forties! It may depend on the region of the world you grew up in, but in the UK at least MMS was quite expensive for what it offered.

Until 2010 I worked for Route Messaging (now they are called Telesign) on internal systems as well as integrations with mobile operators and other "messaging brokers" around the world.

MMS was indeed order of magnitude more expensive than SMS and several orders of magnitude less used.

Reasoning for such high prices was more about mobile internet/data back then being really expensive "1G" - and MMS was (still is I guess) using mobile data to send/receive "multimedia messages".

At this point I expect that cost of MMS is more about maintaining legacy systems/servers for that.

Although in something like 2008/2009 integrating through legacy SMS protocols (those previously used by beepers/pagers) was cheaper than through modern protocols. Some operators had hardware boxes supporting those that were already paid off long time ago.

Ah then I was very wrong, you are in fact a bit older than me :)

Thanks for teaching me a new thing about life outside of the US. Out here, cell data plans (which is the budget that sending/receiving MMS would eat into) were relatively affordable (even for my somewhat modest household) through the latter half of the 2000s and early 2010s. And now it's basically assumed that most people have "unlimited" data. So I guess MMS was a regional phenomena based on prices.

You didn't miss out on much, not that you probably thought you may have. MMS was a useful tool for sharing pictures digitally, but it was somewhat poor user experience waiting for it to reach the other person. Sometimes waiting for a reaction for an hour because the person on the receiving end wasn't near enough to a cell tower owned by their provider. Less of an issue with all the cell towers around now, but there are better mediums than MMS now.

MMS has always been extremely rare here, and I am around ~30 years old, so I guess it depends, of course. Personally I have never received, nor have I known anyone who has either received or sent a single one that was not by accident.

Must be a regional thing. Where I live in Europe, MMS were just too expensive to use regularly, roughly 5-10x more expensive than SMS, and they came roughly around the time when phones were slowly getting simple email clients and usable data (GPRS and sane pricing).

I’m around 30, I grew up with a dad who was a fan of modern phones and technologies (first camera phones, Windows smartphones, PDAs) so I always had fancy phones, and I’ve received < 20 MMS in my whole life.

I remember MMS being used here (Poland) as, essentially, faster postcards. Most people would only use it when on holiday to send pretty pictures to their family back home.

That might be it then. I'm around your age from the US, and the cell phone plans I grew up with were not prohibitively expensive, even for my somewhat modest household.

  it is in fact a technical limitation.

No, it's not. Carriers limit the attachment sizes quite severely, but that's not an inherent limitation of MMS.

The file size limits on iOS for MMS are far below what most carriers permit, making photos and videos sent from iPhone look much worse when sent via MMS.

Doubt that. AT&T still limits attachments to 1 megabyte for picture, video, and audio files. That's not an iOS limitation. I just sent an animated GIF to a Google Voice number and it was compressed to about 800 kilobytes.

I suspect the people whining the most are communicating with folks that have "Low Quality Image Mode" enabled on their iPhone.

https://www.att.com/support/article/wireless/KM1041906/

Below are the limits per carrier. You are correct AT&T is 1m. The iphone has a limit of 200k which can be raised to 300k. Parent was correct.

https://www.infobip.com/docs/mms/message-types

The other thing though is that even if attachment limit were not a thing, I don’t think it’s spec compliant to send a video codec other than 3GP or whatever the format is formally called (ironically it’s a QuickTime format dating back to when 3G was an exciting up and coming standard and the iPhone didn’t exist).

If you sent an h.264 for instance, many flip phones would be unable to play it. So I think the MMS standard itself is holding us back.

I still blame Apple. If they prioritized the experience of their own customers above the value of the blue bubble in getting teens to bully Android users they could have obviously been the ones pushing a good RCS implementation with carriers by threatening credibly to drop MMS support. Instead they left it to carriers and Google who each screwed things up pretty well.

H.264 is indeed part of the MMS spec. As for which carriers support it, who knows.

I still want to see Matrix get adopted for messaging by default. Purism actually did it with their Librem 5 (probably one of the few good things about that company, but that's a rant for another day).

That sounds like hell. If you think that carrier interop is bad now, wait till everyone is using a different matrix provider with different optional features turned on or off. At least today there are some barriers to SMS spam, matrix would open the floodgates while making blocking it exponentially worse.

If you pay for iCloud ($4 a month) you can send an iCloud link easily to any video that anyone else can access at full resolution

I realize this isn’t what you are asking for. But it works well and doesn’t depend on Google’s closed version of RCS

long-time iPhone user here, i did not know this!

thank you for posting!

FYI for those others who don't know: click on a video in your photos app. click share --> "Copy iCloud Link"

Careful, it will leak your real name. It's no good for anonymous sharing.

Indeed, your real name will come out.. but otherwise its a nice feature

Pretty sure Apple will make the recipient sign up for an Apple account to view the content. At least it does this for notes sharing.

EDIT: Tried it on my iPhone and it does not require an Apple account, kudos Apple. It does show my full real name as others have mentioned.

That’s via email, right? Or is there something they offer in the messages app now?

you can send the icloud link via SMS or really anywhere, telegram whatever, using the copy icloud link button

That is, indeed, a technical limitation of MMS.

The newer RCS standard would be better, but Apple has already announced they're going to support it this year (after dragging their heels for a few years).

  That is, indeed, a technical limitation of MMS.

No, it's not. It's an implementation detail. MMS is basically just SMTP on the back end. There's no technical reason you couldn't allow much larger attachments aside from cost and shitty implementations.

The last time folks got worked into a frenzy over RCS I ended up looking at the MMS specs. If memory serves 3GPP recommended an upper bound of at least 5 megabytes. American carriers typically limit attachments to like 3 megabytes or less and they mandate ancient video codecs.

I guess rephrasing it to a practical limitation of MMS would be fair, though? Insofar as it’s not something we’re blaming Apple for.

Apple has a 200k limit. We can blame Apple for having the worst mms limits

No, they don't.

Prove this, because I'm pretty certain this is not the case. I helped build a messaging app for iOS (Technically a TeleHeath app that needed to accept MMS/SMS also) and I saw absolutely none of this. That was a few years ago so it's possible it's changed but I'd have to see actual documentation for that. Otherwise I firmly believe this is BS and completely made up.

I’m curious how you did that, given that iOS doesn’t allow 3rd-party SMS/MMS apps.

https://videoconverter.wondershare.com/compress/mms-video-si....

Do we really believe though that Apple doesn’t like it? I believe their top executives are glad it sucks because things like this make people (especially teens) bully anyone who’s not on iMessage, resulting in additional sales.

I think Apple has enough pull with carriers to tell them whatever configuration parameters for MMS they want.

This. And it actually doesn't even need to be done through SMTP.

MMS being basically SMS with a link/url to where the phone fetches multimedia part from - it could also be sent via older EMI-UCP (that was originally used for pagers).

At some point pre 2010 (when I worked in Routo Messaging - now called Telesign) we also got an SS7 connection - so we could finally start doing stuff like a real mobile operator/provider.

Media messages from Androids to iPhones are in fact technologically-limited by MMS. That's not an Apple-imposed limitation, it's written in stone in the MMS standard.

Please show me where that's written because iPhones have no problems sending full-resolution images to my droid device but I can't do the same to them.

Works fine over WhatsApp/Telegram/…. Not a technological limitation.

What do you think those have to do with SMS/MMS?

The GP comment is about sending media between iPhone and Android, and claims that that is limited by MMS. That’s obviously not true. And has nothing to do with SMS/MMS.

Huh? Sending MMS between any two devices is pretty clearly limited by MMS.

Sending media isn't.

Other mechanisms of sending media are entirely irrelevant to a discussion about using MMS and the technical limitations of the MMS spec.

We're not in that discussion.

I was referring specifically to using the text messaging system, not the Internet.

You still cannot send livephotos via Whatsapp/Telegram. They convert to still photos. So you still lose something there.

MMS limitations are only relevant because Apple makes them relevant. I have never sent or received an MMS outside of the iMessage interoperability context. This is obviously deliberate.

You can send whatever you want through SMS, as a link.

Apple opened up the app store for game streams back in January.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24050430/apple-app-store-...

Cloud game streaming has been recently allowed worldwide under a few conditions ( https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=f1v8pyay ).

Forcing Apple to allow third party payments without Apple's cut would improve market opportunities for many businesses. Facebook could have its marketplace conduct peer to peer transactions. Amazon could allow the purchase of digital goods (books, movies, etc.) and put it on more equal footing with Apple itself. While big businesses are best positioned to take advantage today, the effects directly trickle down to small startup businesses.

While I personally don't care for it, cryptocurrency use would have more potential. Apple blocked apps for NFT features in the past because they couldn't get their 30%.

Having third party marketplaces might make it so that there is some actual curation at the App Store.

I wonder if this will have a trickle down effect on other app stores, specifically gaming consoles. Would XBox Live or Playstation Store, for example, be on the hot seat if they rejected an application or "game" that was basically a storefront for streaming other games?

I don't think so, at least not as a consequence from this case if Apple loses. Antitrust cases are usually very limited in scope. Microsoft's loss required many actions (documenting Active Directory and other protocols/formats, browser choice screens, etc.), but no one else in tech were required to do so.

John Sircacusa (from ATP.fm) pointed out years ago that the heart of Apple's biggest issues is business relationship management. This was when Apple only had a handful of issues with a few companies and made some poorly received statements about developers. Their ability to build mutually agreeable relations has only gotten worse in recent years.

Sony and Microsoft have kept their relations with third parties tough but ultimately agreeable. They promote practically all of their third parties (unlike the App Store which has so many apps that its like winning the lottery to be promoted). Consoles have stores which are probably more curated but which third party publishers/developers actually like.

IMO, DoJ, EU, etc. are acting primarily because they have received so many complaints from Spotify, Microsoft, Epic Games, Google, Meta, Tile, etc. Governments don't take action for the "public" interest on its own.

> Forcing Apple to allow third party payments without Apple's cut would improve market opportunities for many businesses.

It would, but that is how Apple collects their commission. Where regulations where Apple has been forced to provide this separation (such as the US), they have split 3% to cover payment fees out of the commission, and put additional considerations for when leaving the app to make a payment would result in a commission and that Apple may audit that you are properly reporting commissions.

The DMA mandated that Apple decouple their commission structure from a single App Store in favor of multiple marketplaces, and they put in a 50 Eurocent core technology fee per user per year (after a margin of free installs).

> Amazon could allow the purchase of digital goods (books, movies, etc.) and put it on more equal footing with Apple itself.

Amazon does have digital purchasing of Video. Amazon added the ability to subscribe to a limited video version of Prime using in-app purchasing, and that kind of account will bill purchases using in-app purchasing.

They likely have razor thin margins for anyone who chooses to do this, but expect customers to either have existing Prime accounts or to want to upgrade from Video to the full Prime account for the other services. I suspect they did the math and think their margins on Kindle wouldn't support this.

> Amazon does have digital purchasing of Video. Amazon added the ability to subscribe to a limited video version of Prime using in-app purchasing, and that kind of account will bill purchases using in-app purchasing.

Sorry, I do not parse this. What did they add?

Amazon Prime was originally an add-on to regular Amazon accounts that provided expedited delivery as a flat rate subscription. Later, Amazon got into the streaming business and bundled access to films and shows into the Prime subscription. For a while it was kind of a useless perk since the available content was old or low quality.

Later, as Amazon acquired more popular content and then created an in-house production studio, they added the ability to rent or "purchase" (rent) streaming video content on a per-episode/season/film basis without requiring the full Prime subscription service.

This was designed to address Amazon customers who were primarily (pun intended) interested in the video content, not the physical goods.

I think he’s saying you can subscribe to Amazon Prime Video via in-app purchase.

Yep, not the full Prime account, but a cheaper video-limited one.

The DMA did not mandate that they decouple their commission structure. That is Apple’s interpretation of the DMA which seems to change every few weeks so far. PWAs on home screens were disallowed and then allowed again. Apple looks like they do not have legal and execution discipline and is being caught flat footed. It is somewhat alarming that they have made so many mistakes (see Epic being revoked from their third party marketplace and then Apple being strong armed to re-allow because of a EU comment about investigation).

The idea that Apple is compliant with the DMA has yet to be tested. There are many direct statements by the enforcing commissioner and complaints from third parties that I think only a direct ruling will settle things.

I forgot about Prime Video purchases having a special back door deal for some of their purchases. I wasn’t referring to the subscription service but the purchase of digital books/movies. My point stands though. Digital goods could be sold and bought without special exceptions or loopholes from the 30% fee. That alone is a huge market opportunity.

Facebook tried this with games and cash transfer within Messenger but it never really took off.

Personally, I don’t think Western (or at least American) consumers are all that interested in a super app. Asia has a ton of players in this space like WeChat, QQ, Line and Kaokao but those have never taken off in the West outside of diaspora communities.

Kind of sideline here but..

Tim Hortons had gift and loyalty cards ("every 7th coffee free"). Then they introduced an app with "rewards" as an alternative to loyalty and gift cards. Then the app turned into a bank. Then they stopped the physical loyalty cards. Now you can't "earn" free coffee without giving them your personal information and signing up for the bank of Tim Hortons. It's ok though. I stopped being a customer because of it.

Facebook’s attempt didn’t work out because they lost the youth market to Snapchat, TikTok, Discord and Instagram(It’s funny, I know). They tried to bring in Instagram users into Facebook but that didn’t(hasn’t) work out yet.

I mean even the old people barely play Facebook games or use Messenger money transfer. Western consumers just tend to trust product specialists rather than an all in one app.

Facebook marketplace has been the unexpected success in drawing Instagram users and youth in general. It's thrifting central for Gen Z.

Why don't twitter. com just do the super apps w/ e-commerce thing? It's financial regulations, not App Store regulations, isn't that the case?

What are challenges for implementing such "payment" system on iOS that can transfer, say Monopoly money vs real USD? Aren't those almost entirely legal or compliance matters for very good reasons? The Alaskan 737 MAX 9 landed largely intact thanks to still-working parts of regulations and we all value that.

So why not they just do that? Or CAN'T they?

> Why don't twitter. com just do the super apps w/ e-commerce

X, the company formerly known as twitter, fairly explicitly plans to, they are just taking time to pivot, in part because they don’t seem to have any real clear roadmap from where they are to where they want to be.

>fairly explicitly plans to,

>don’t seem to have any real clear roadmap

not your fault, but that's pretty funny

I see the apparent contradiction, but the goal has been made pretty explicit, but from the outside the plan seems to be missing.

Sounds like you meant fairly explicit goal, not fairly explicit plan.

s/plans/desires/

And also because they're in a technical quagmire of their own creation

> And also because they're in a technical quagmire of their own creation

Could you expand on that?

What you call "fairly explicitly plans to" I call "supposedly is working on, according to statements by its owner, who has a history of vaporware announcements".

Fair enough.

But also having a history of announcements that take longer than expected, and come true. (Reusable rockets come to mind.)

Super apps are a dud. China has them because the regulators want them, not because they're a good business.

Why do they show up in other asian markets, like Grab and such?

A lot of people are used to WeChat, so it can feel natural to make another one. LINE is also basically WeChat.

I don't think that's enough to make them competitive though. For instance, a scandal in one feature of the app (or Facebook being considered lame by kids) will hurt the rest of it.

Exactly. Most people would rather use the best app for the niche thing they want to do rather than the shittier version from some mega-app they happen to have for some other reason.

Yes, but don't underestimate the power of convenience. That factor seems to inordinately raise the shittiness toleration threshold these days.

My understanding is the reason they are dead in the US is even though the banks might let you build payments into it they will not let you negotiate any discount in fees so you will have to add your own fees on top of their own fees. It begs the question of why a bank or consortium of banks hasn’t developed a super app.

When I gave this talk in late 2016

https://www.slideshare.net/paulahoule/chatbots-in-2017-ithac...

there was huge interest in messaging-centric apps as this runs around the boondoggle of having even the tiniest patch to your app get reviewed.

I would be happy if iMessage threads could be exported and saved.

if I was going to dream big, I would like to point the iCloud hooks to a personal server instead of apple in a meaningful way.

If you have a Mac, your messages are stored locally with SQLite, so you can export them that way.

It is possible to export iMessage threads by purchasing an Apple computer and enabling "iCloud for Messages", at which point the messages will be synced to the computer and stored locally in an SQLite database then exported using open source tools... unless you sent too many messages or attachments, at which point you also have to purchase an additional iCloud subscription based on how much storage you need.

Hopefully you can accomplish all this within the return window of the computer (or purchase a used one). The iCloud subscription fees are non-refundable. You can also just give up, keep the computer, and embrace the Apple ecosystem.

Thank you Tim Apple, very cool!

Sent from my iPhone

> It is possible to export iMessage threads by purchasing an Apple computer and enabling "iCloud for Messages"

And hoping Apple's broken client actually downloads full history or by forcing it to download by scrolling up through years of chat by hand.

And hoping Apple doesn't interpret a read lock on the db as malicious activity and temporary ousting you from iMessage and causing every message you send on unrelated hardware to drop to SMS until you login / logout from every device you "own".

nothing you’ve cited has any factual basis in reality other than that you have convinced yourself that it’s a possibility. it’s purely a mirror of your own personal preconceptions and fears, none of which have a supportable factual basis.

gotta love when someone is so deep into fanboyism that they go through life utterly paralyzed and victimized by the apple that only exists inside their head.

literally, unsarcastically, why do you do this to yourself? it’s a fearsome depth of parasocial attachment in a way that’s incredibly unhealthy and warping. Why do you choose to get this bent out of shape about what phone other peolle buy? it doesn’t matter.

https://paulgraham.com/fh.html

Everything above is an anecdote that happened to me personally when I pointed a SQLite client at chat.db on my Mac.

I'm someone who has primarily used OS X, iOS, and Linux for pretty much the entirety of my life. The story about getting data out of iMessage comes from 100% personal experience. This isn't fanboyism — Apple's hostility toward people like me is palpable and factual.

Interacting with Apple's products as a software developer who cares about open source, data portability, etc. is getting harder and harder to justify. The same goes for Google.

What drew me to Apple initially was that they had an actually-existing polished POSIX-compliant desktop environment that was far more open than anything Windows had (or has, to this day).

What you're seeing here are the lamentations of early adopters witnessing all those great features, and the philosophy behind them, slowly going away.

- Music Apps (Spotify) that properly integrate with Siri, like on Amazon and Google devices.

I'd just like to be able to get music off my iPhone to my mac without having to buy a third party app or buy a subscription to Apple Music.

Your Mac has a microphone. A less analog option is Air Drop.

This is one thing that no-one else seems to mention (not even Spotify).

When Apple Music launched it was around the time that 3rd party apps were allowed to hook into Siri - so you could say "Hey Siri, tell MyToDoApp to remind me to do X in six hours" and MyToDoApp would add the reminder.

But it was only allowed for certain categories of app (strangely enough, categories where Apple didn't have a paid service). It wasn't permitted for music apps until a few years later, by which time Apple Music was established.

Similarly - when I connect my iPhone to my car over Bluetooth or wired connection[1] - with Spotify I get the normal play/pause/skip controls. But I can't see the upcoming play-queue, nor browse my playlists through the car's interface. If I listen through Apple Music, I can see not only my queue, playlists, albums and artists but also podcasts from the totally separate Apple Podcasts app.

Of course, the car interface is shite, but why can Apple's app do this and the third party not? Is it just that Spotify didn't bother implementing the relevant APIs or because those APIs were not available?

As a long-time Apple fan, my distrust of them is so great at the moment, I suspect the latter.

[1] The inbuilt head-unit doesn't do CarPlay, but I have a standalone wireless CarPlay screen. I like to connect the phone through Bluetooth (or wired) so the display unit shows my apps but I can adjust the volume and skip tracks using the steering wheel controls.

> It wasn't permitted for music apps until a few years later, by which time Apple Music was established.

My understanding - Siri is at its heart a command and control system. It was able to do Music (and iTunes before) because it knew The Who and The Rolling Stones from the hosted music catalog, even if those weren’t downloaded locally.

Apple needed to provide the localized commands, but also still needed the nouns to go with the verbs.

> Is it just that Spotify didn't bother implementing the relevant APIs or because those APIs were not available?

The former. There are plenty of other CarPlay media apps. They are all limited (first and third party) in that CarPlay is basically like a low bandwidth VNC display.

I meant the Bluetooth API so the head unit can see playlists and so on. the Spotify CarPlay interface is OK, but if I'm just on bluetooth, the head unit can't see my Spotify playlists, but it can see Apple Music's.

> This feels like it reflects similar actions taken against companies that are dominant in a market.

Not simply that a company is dominant; it is more about how and why they are dominant.

Update 2:40 pm ET: After some research, the practices below may capture much (though not necessarily all) of what the Department of Justice views unfavorably:

* horizontal agreements between competitors such as price fixing and market allocation

* vertical agreements between firms at different levels of the supply chain such as resale price maintenance and exclusive dealing

* unilateral exclusionary conduct such as predatory pricing, refusal to deal with competitors, and limiting interoperability

* conditional sales practices such as tying and bundling

* monopoly leveraging where a firm uses its dominance in one market to gain an unfair advantage in another

Any of these behaviors undermines the conditions necessary for a competitive market. I'd be happy to have the list above expanded, contracted, or modified. Let me know.

Thank you

I’ve read a few takes on this from smart people. This is the first time I’ve seen anything that sounds like a real winnable case. Thanks for the distillation. It’s good to know this isn’t as boneheaded as I’d thought (though they still need to go after the App Store).

Excellent breakdown. Much more concise compared to other versions of the story. And, to boot, all entirely true.

And that is stuff Apple absolutely does. I have been at a company for which Apple was a customer. But you'd think that Apple owned the company the way they through around their power and demands.

It's like that everywhere unfortunately. You get a client with enough disparity in size and they are pretty much calling the shots. Can't even imagine that scaled up to Apple size.

It’s not though. My company partners with several other Apple sized and larger tech companies. Some are better than others, and we have running jokes about the ones that like to try to throw around their weight. Because, as you might expect, they are unpleasant to work with.

how many tech companies are apple sized or larger? i think youre full of shit.

very few companies sign an agreement with "Apple". You sell a good or service to a single person, small group or maybe a department. There are countless customers this size, the difference is do they treat you like they are the embodiment of "Apple"? We have lots of big, well-known clients and for the most part they do not.

I mean, Apple does have a procurement process. If you're selling at the large team / department level or up (i.e. not individuals within Apple), you're dealing with "Apple" at least for the sale through security and contract reviews, etc.

Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, OpenAI, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Netflix just to name a few.

From experience, the size doesn’t matter as much as the delta in revenue, or size of that client’s project vs. typical projects. And on the flip side some of the clients that paid least were the hardest to get to sign off on projects, but at least those don’t actually think they’re entitled to harass your team.

> Can't even imagine that scaled up to Apple size.

Have you ever dealt with a big government? Then you can imagine, Apple doesn't have as much weight as typical governments but it is close.

Typical how? Weight as defined how? Here is one way of looking at it.

First, look at purchasing power of various governments. See https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/real-gdp-purcha....

> Real GDP (purchasing power parity): GDP (purchasing power parity) compares the gross domestic product (GDP) or value of all final goods and services produced within a nation in a given year. A nation's GDP at purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates is the sum value of all goods and services produced in the country valued at prices prevailing in the United States.

Second, look at COGS for Apple: "Apple annual cost of goods sold for 2021 was $212.981B" according to https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/cost-go.... COGS is arguably "close enough" to a nation-state's GDP to make for a useful comparison.

Given the above two, if Apple were a country with a GDP matching its COGS, it would rank about 66th, using a mix of 2022/2021 numbers from the sources above:

    1  China           $24,861B
    2  United States   $21,132B
    3  India            $9,279B
    4  Japan            $5,126B
    5  Germany          $4,523B
    6  Russia           $4,027B
    7  Indonesia        $3,246B
    8  United Kingdom   $3,136B
    9  Brazil           $3,128B
    10 France           $3,048B
    11 Turkey           $2,817B
    12 Italy            $2,478B
    13 Mexico           $2,418B
    14 South Korea      $2,289B
    15 Canada           $1,832B
    ...
    36 Switzerland        $618B
    37 Belgium            $600B
    38 Sweden             $580B
    39 Singapore          $578B
    40 Ireland            $516B
    ...
    63 Kenya              $251B
    64 New Zealand        $220B
    65 Burma              $217B
    66 Dominican Republic $207B
    67 Angola             $204B
    68 Kuwait             $192B
    69 Ecuador            $190B
    70 Belarus            $184B
    ...
    150 Namibia            $23.1B
    151 Kosovo             $21.2B
    152 South Sudan        $20.0B
    153 Iceland            $20.0B
    154 Somalia            $19.4B
    ...
    220 Palau             $248M
    221 Falkland Islands  $206M
    222 Anguilla          $175M
    223 Montserrat        $167M
    224 Nauru             $149M
    225 Wallis and Futuna  $60M
    226 Tuvalu             $55.2M
    227 Saint Helena...    $31.1M
    228 Niue               $18.7M
    229 Tokelau             $7.7M

But I wouldn't stop here. What happens if we compare Apple's COGS with the _technology spend_ of each of the nation-states above? If we estimate that 10% of GDP is technology-related, making it comparable to Apple, then Apple's ranking would be 15th on the list, right in front of Canada.

It should be based in size of contract, not size of company. If Apple wants to buy a stick of bubble gum from me, they go to the back of the line like everyone else. If my contract with Apple represents 80% of revenues for the year, yeah, they own me.

> If Apple wants to buy a stick of bubble gum from me, they go to the back of the line like everyone else

Unless you're the people I've worked for, you would drop everything for the chance to impress Apple.

But my comment did have the false assumption that the contract size would be large.

It's a trap! The notion that doing well on a small contract will net you bigger and bigger ones is a nice fantasy, but I've not seen it play out. I have seen it crush a lot of hopes and dreams, though.

The reality is (IMHO) running a small contract and running a big one requires different skills sets, procedures in place, etc. Doing well at one will not guarantee doing well at another, and I think they know it.

so true. got my ass handed to me chasing a large client and their promises of massive expansion with a bit of exclusivity. We got over exposed because I ignored some of the risks involved, and the large firm ultimately found a similar sized firm that could offer mostly the same product, with the benefit of also being a public company.

It boils down to the fact that iPhone is a pervasive computing device and similar to a "public good" should be regulated tightly.

For millions of people, it's their main/sole computing and internet access device so should be a neutral platform - with clear evidence as cited that Apple has not maintained its neutrality. As a neutral platform, customers should have the freedom to use their devices without undue interference or restrictions from Apple.

These are similar arguments made in the Microsoft vs. Netscape case. The lone example of being unable to install non-App Store apps is enough to justify the DOJ's case. Question is what would the verdict be? Similar to the EU's DMA rules would be a likely starting point.

> It boils down to the fact that iPhone is a pervasive computing device and similar to a "public good" should be regulated tightly.

Extremely authoritarian / communist take.

A $1000 luxury phone is not a "public good" just because many have FOMO and feel like they need one. There are many cheap alternative Androids that are just as good with virtually identical features. Nor is it a device that is absolutely necessary to function in society, like say other real public goods like running water or electricity.

> Extremely authoritarian / communist take.

that's how you know he's right

Apple sells several different models of phones which, in fact, are not $1000

Ha, my point is iPhone has become so ubiquitous that is has created a natural monopoly for Apple (50%+ US market share).

Like it or not, there are different rules for the biggest players who wield market power. If you want an iPhone, then Android is not an alternative option. DOJ's argument is that Apple has added artificial disincentives to enable switching to a non-iPhone and also favor its own apps/services.

This is verbatim the argument against Microsoft and how it was wielding its Windows monopoly to stifle competition like Netscape. Easy to forget that Microsoft had closed APIs for 3rd parties and dictated how OEMs installed its OS before the US government judgement. You could've made the same counterpoint at the time that there's theoretical alternative OSes like Linux and Unix.

Which part is “verbatim”? Citation?

> Extremely authoritarian / communist take.

What's authoritarian is Apple's lockdown of the iPhone. I should be able to run whatever application I want on my own device. Not the governement telling Apple, "Hey, people should be able to run what they want on their own device".

If you want to run a non-default os, an iPhone is not for you. There are several other options out there for you to choose from.

If you want to run a non-default OS, don't install one. Blocking competitors for competition's sake is a regulatory tightrope walk, the exact same mentality that nearly annihilated Microsoft.

Some calibration is needed here.

“Authoritarianism is a _political_ system characterized by the rejection of democracy and political plurality.” - Wikipedia

When a company _sells_ you a device (that you choose to buy or not), it is _not_ about political freedom.

There are countries that are actually authoritarian. Let’s not blur the lines between that and a corporation. I can appreciate the free software movement as well as the right to repair and so on, but let’s keep things in perspective here. There are governments that jail people for dissent.

If it is used by a high % of the population, it is not a luxury good regardless of price. Luxury implies exclusivity imho.

> This feels like it reflects similar actions taken against companies that are dominant in a market.

Maybe they should be. Our societies are ostensibly consumer-centric. It's about time our laws and organisations strongly sided with consumers against any opposition, especially against business.

As a small business owner, I'm actually keen on the benefits to other businesses that antitrust enforcement and pro-competition enforcement can have.

As a really specific example in the case of Apple, I really hope the DMA causes wider availability of browser choice on iOS so that we as a business that ships a web app can offer our customers features like notifications and other PWA benefits. Our customers are somewhat willing to switch browsers to get the best experience when using our app. But switching to Android? Not a reasonable ask from us.

Most consumers also have jobs right? Making their lives better and easier at work, increasing competition to give their employers more opportunity to thrive, is just as important as making their groceries cheaper.

The flip side of this as a consumer is that I'm happy that mandating safari on iOS means I can be relatively sure any given site is going to work in Safari. I'm glad I don't live in the days where I needed 3 separate browsers on my computer (Safari, Firefox and IE) to ensure that I can use websites when I need to. In "ye olde days", even if you were using Safari for most of your browsing because it gave the best battery life on MacOS, you'd run into some sites that wouldn't work with it. You'd try Firefox maybe next, hoping that it was just some site that didn't have any developers who knew what a mac was. But even then, you'd run into sites where, no the problem was the developers just assumed everyone used IE and used a bunch of IE specific stuff.

I can't remember the last time I saw a "this site only works in XYZ" message. Some of that is a lot of modern sites are all built on big frameworks, but some of that is also because only supporting Safari, or only supporting Chrome or only supporting IE is going to lose you huge swaths of customers.

What if I don't want to switch browsers for the "best experience" when using your app? What if I want you to make your app the best experience on my browser of choice?

As always these things are tradeoffs and balances.

> What if I don't want to switch browsers for the "best experience" when using your app? What if I want you to make your app the best experience on my browser of choice?

What if I cannot do that due to there being no incentive for Apple to support web standards in Safari?

We don't want our users to have to switch browsers, but that leaves us with no ability to use lots of the features that make modern web apps competitive at all with native apps.

Like I said, it's all tradeoffs. It's worth noting though that software companies definition of "best experience" and the consumer definition of "best experience" aren't always in sync, and plenty of Apple's restrictions align more with the consumers version of things. The most obvious example is mandating apps ask for tracking permissions, or location permission or access to photos and calendars. I'm sure Facebook and Google and plenty of other vendors would argue the "best experience" is a seamless one where the user doesn't need to be bothered with such minutia. And yet, I for one am quite glad they can't deliver their "best experience" to me.

True. On my iPhone, I just did an extremely complicated checkout flow involving registration on multiple websites as well as a credit check, and it worked like a charm.

Several years ago I wouldn't have even bothered trying to do that on my phone. There is some benefit to Safari being so ubiquitous.

Why not just have the government mandate that the only browser in the world is now Safari for everyone on every platform then?

Then all websites would be designed for the one browser!!

Because then there would only be one option? How did you go from "hey the fact that Apple has enough clout these days and control over iOS to ensure that the web doesn't suck as bad for alt browser users like it did in the IE days is a good thing" to "it would be awesome if the federal government outlawed all other browsers"

If it goes through, your customers can switch, once, to Chrome.

After that, Google leverages its other service monopolies, Chrome goes to 95%+ market share, standards fall by the wayside, and nobody has any choice.

I guess the answer to that is antitrust against Google, but I’d rather do that first than go through the Chrome domination phase.

The DMA also applies to Chrome, so there'll be some pressure from that direction.

Nothing in the DMA does anything about Chrome taking over completely. Actually the DMA is more or less a dream come true for Google, Amazon and Meta, it drastically strengthens their market hold at the cost of making the Apple ecosystem more diluted.

It will be a sad day in the near future when the web becomes “Chrome”, even on mobile, much as it was “IE” not that long ago, alas, we seem to never learn.

The biggest threat to the open web is Chrome’s dominance. Firefox is dwindling away and even Mozilla doesn’t seem to care about it, leaving Safari the only thing stopping Chrome from completely taking over. Google are already executing the Embrace & Extend playbook with non-standard functionality.

Everybody who says “Safari is the new IE” seems to be too young to know what IE and front-end web development were really like during the 00s. I’d take WebKit on iOS over a Blink monoculture any day, and so should any web developer.

No argument from me, I disregard anyone who says “Safari is the new IE” as someone who doesn’t know better but claim to do, or someone who is just trolling. I had to work with both IE on Mac and IE6 on Windows, Safari is not even remotely close to the isolated non-conforming nightmare it was back then. It’s also a bit terrifying how many seem to think Chrome gets it right all the time, even when they blatantly ignore standards or leave implementations with bugs for what feels like forever. But they get away with it since they’re so big, just like Microsoft did with IE.

I don’t know what the solution would be, not like you can mandate the existence of a web browser engine into existence and making one gets harder for every new thing added.

The EU has designated the following Google services as gatekeepers:

Google Chrome, Google Search, Google Play, Google Maps, Google Shopping, YouTube, Android, Alphabet's online advertising service.

https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en

And here's what that designation means for them:

https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...

I am aware but that does nothing to prevent total dominance of Chrome as the primary browser on all platforms moving forward. The EU is not calling for a random subset of the population to forcibly run Firefox. With the power of Google they will corner the market incredibly fast, and it will all be “user choice”.

What it means is that it's going to be difficult for Google to give Chrome an unfair advantage by leveraging their other services.

If Chrome wins on merit and Chromium remains a viable option to build competing browsers then that is fine.

I don't want Apple to prevent that by forcing an inferior browser down peoples' throats to make sure the web can't win against native apps.

Maybe, but I doubt it, and who will prosecute them? I doubt EU will keep good track of their entire portfolio and their push for dominance, I could be wrong of course.

Isn’t chromium still bloated with tracking? Last time I read about it, it was far from a “clean Chrome” at least, now if it was truly open sourced and not mainly controlled by Google I would be much more hopeful.

As someone who’s heavily invested in web I don’t see it being a competition with apps at all, different sports altogether, but sure, supporting notifications are nice, allowing websites to scan networks and Bluetooth, not so much.

>Isn’t chromium still bloated with tracking?

I don't think Chromium based browsers such as Brave, Vivaldi or Edge have to send data to Google.

Chromium development is highly dependent on Google of course. Google could theoretically do to Chromium what they have done to AOSP, i.e make sure it's not longer a viable platform for competitors. But I think that's exactly what the DMA could prevent.

>As someone who’s heavily invested in web I don’t see it being a competition with apps at all

I think it's an empirical fact that they do compete. Almost all the installed apps I use could be web apps if it wasn't for arbitrary restrictions.

>but sure, supporting notifications are nice, allowing websites to scan networks and Bluetooth, not so much.

How about not randomly deleting or arbitrarily restricting local data?

Google has already given Chrome an unfair advantage by leveraging their other services. I suspect the browser market is an unstable system where absent outside intervention Chrome’s 65% market share naturally becomes 100%.

Chrome is such a complicated piece of software that the “forks” are highly dependent on Google and when Google unilaterally makes decisions they have to follow suit. Brendan Eich explains that Brave will continue to support Manifest V2 as long as Google doesn’t remove the underlying code paths: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1534893414579249152

I think a lot of people don’t appreciate how delicate the balance of web standards is right now. We have it so good (three high-quality implementations of an open spec) and I’m not willing to throw that away just to run Chrome on my iPhone.

A lot of small business is more similar to consumers than to large corporations. It's really no wonder that some pro-consumer regulations might benefit small business.

Agitation for consumer rights might actually be an easier way to get benefits to small business.

Because when you try to lobby for small business it becomes lobbying for all business and in the end it's the big business that benefits because somewhere in the process they outlobbied every other interested party and the end form of legislation or action benefits them the most.

Like the right to repair. If it was focused on helping small business it would have been defanged way easier.

Yes, historically the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) and the Clayton Act (1914) define the roll of "regulated capitalism" rather than simply "free market capitalism". There has been a continuous battle between people who wanted to get infinitely wealthy by exploiting their dominance and the Government ever since.

I've had some great conversations with folks about why this form of "American Capitalism" is the most efficient economic engine with regard to an industrial economy. As a system, this, and a graduated taxation that provides a damping function on "infinite wealth" and feeds it into government services has the potential to create an economy where everyone has a chance to get rich, and everyone's basic needs are met. That combination maximizes participation in the economy and thus GDP.

The macroeconomics class I took spent several weeks on this relationship and the "Great Courses" economics class also talks about it.

The challenge is that rich men (typically its men) don't like being told they can't do something, or told they have to do something which will reduce their total wealth, and they respond by corrupting legislators into changing the rules.

It isn't "good" or "bad" per se, some people always eat all the cookies if they think they can get away with it. As a systems analyst though the system is an excellent study in 'tuning.' In theory, as a government maximizing GDP is a goal because the more GDP the more gets done the happier people are, etc etc. Technology strongly affected the rate of change of wealth, people who were middle class at a startup suddenly being in the top 10% in terms of wealth over the course of a few years, rather than a life time of work and savings. Others leveraging their wealth in technology startups having it rocket them into the 1%.[1] Something that the US system of laws does not do well is respond to changes "quickly" (my lawyer friends tell me that is a design feature not a bug). But as we saw with Microsoft's antitrust case they do respond eventually.

[1] Back in the dot com days there was an article in Wired about the "Billionaire Boys Club" which talked about members of the several VC firms whose net worth had ballooned to over a billion dollars.

Do you think the feature is a good thing though?

I think if the system could limit the ability of rich guys to corrupt legislators, then regulation would just work. I think "Citizen's United VS FEC" kind of broke regulation in that sense. It probable had a positive effect on the economy for some years, but imo it broke American politics. We've even started to see regulators like the EPA and SEC lose high profile court cases.

I'm no lawyer and I think this looks like a great case, but I'm not too confident.

Economies are producer-centric when you have international competition.

An example being Intel, which is currently getting billions in government subsidies via the CHIPS Act, because their business fell behind because it was impeded by the government suing them for antitrust issues.

Political action that benefits the business is the default mode. It's the easiest because businesses have easiest way to accumulate enough captital to bribe the politicians. Business is naturally concentrated while consumers are naturally dispersed.

While the business in US was content to sit on their throne and milk the consumers, US consumers uplifted the entire country of China. Consumers are way more economically powerful than the business. Seeing economy through business and workers lens is as misguided as it is traditional.

> It's the easiest because businesses have easiest way to accumulate enough captital to bribe the politicians.

This is the easiest way to tell someone is wrong about politics. This doesn't happen, but everyone who doesn't know how anything works thinks it does. You just can't handle the truth that other voters actually believe different things than you.

> While the business in US was content to sit on their throne and milk the consumers, US consumers uplifted the entire country of China.

Think you forgot every other country exists here.

> This doesn't happen

The alternative is that either supporting largest business is completely accidental or that it's done for the good of the voters.

Both alternatives are completely rudiculous. You can be sure that money is flowing. You can see some of the money flowing in the form of lobbying and cosy retirements if government officials in corporate boards. You can be sure there's more. US is incredibly overtly and covertly corrupt at every level.

> Think you forgot every other country exists here.

All other countries that are running trade deficit for decades without much issue?

Ironic that the worst business decisions (hardware or software lockdowns that pave the way for antitrust suits) come from the business heads.

Long-term thinking isn't super trendy, or even incentivized maybe?

Ironic that Jobs started by fighting the big, fat, corporate IBM, and now they turned the company he founded, Apple, into a big, fat, corporation with despicable practices...

When are people going to stop buying Apple?

Jobs turned Apple into that himself. He installed the cultlike behemoth attitude and threw famous tantrums and fits when he didn't get his way.

Just look at how he reacted even back when Woz invented the universal remote.

When someone else makes a better product ecosystem.

Interesting, I've had 2 Garmin Smart Watches and never felt like Apple was restricting them.

I am curious what things the iPhone does that others aren't allowed to do.

Most of the differences between Garmin and Apple Watch seem like they were conscious decisions where they each decided to take a different direction.

It's one of those weird things where it seems like the case has a bunch of holes. You can use an iPhone with some but not all non-Apple Smart watches. You can use a non-Apple phone with non-Apple smartwatches. There are other non-Apple smart watches that those manufacturers have decided can't be used with an iPhone, no different than Apple. Lots of choices in the market, I certainly don't feel restricted.

I am not sure how requiring something like WeChat to break into multiple apps would be a big issue. Apple even breaks it's own apps up into different apps.

My guess is around notifications and handoff to iPhone apps.

I tried Garmin watches, and they're certainly better as "exercise tracking devices" than anything Apple offers, but they weren't tightly enough integrated with my iPhone to make it "worth it" to me to wear them all the time.

An Apple Watch Ultra - on the other hand - is a poorer exercise tracking device, but gives me enough "integrated with my iPhone" benefit to become the first watch I've worn consistently in 30+ years.

I assumed this was the result of design and development choices by Garmin, but it'll be interesting to see if their are meaningful ways that Apple restricts smartwatch developers from including similar levels of integration.

Can you expand on what "integrated with my iPhone" means in concrete terms? I don't really understand what you mean.

Not the original poster but for me it means not having to look at my phone for many tasks. I can see who texted or messaged me and the message without opening my phone. I can take or ignore a call. Basically anything that hits your message alerts can be displayed on the watch in most cases.

Maybe the Apple Watch is not the best fitness tracker watch but it’s plenty good for me and it’s health integration is pretty good especially with the ultra.

Yep. That's exactly right.

When a phone call comes in, or I get a notification (text, calendar, app notification etc) - my Apple Watch does a really good job of (quite often) giving me enough info from my wrist that I don't need to pull my phone out of my pocket.

Garmin watches have some of this integration (IIRC you can definitely get texts, I don't remember what else) - but certainly not all of it. I haven't tried smartwatches from other manufacturers.

Does a Garmin watch not do that? I often see people looking at notifications on their non-Apple watch.

When setting up my Windows machine I was given the opportunity to pair it with my iPhone via Phone Link. In doing so, my Windows machine was able to get all of the notifications that I saw on the Lock Screen of my iPhone, and call history (make and receive calls too).

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sync-across-your-dev... and https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2023/04/26/phone...

I assume that this functionality is available to other devices too.

It’s a poor subset of the functionality available to the Apple Watch. One obvious example is that you can reply to a message on an Apple Watch, not so over the API Windows uses.

Here's a description of the functionality on Windows which includes replying to a message. https://youtu.be/M4ihxL7B2ug?t=157&si=AaA6wvzbTuIL3eOC

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2023/04/26/phone...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sync-across-your-dev...

> Read and reply to messages with ease, make and receive calls, and manage your device’s notifications right on your PC (1) (2)

> 1 Messaging feature is limited by iOS. Image/video sharing and group messaging is not supported. Messages are session based and will only come through when phone is connected to PC.

> 2 Phone Link for iOS requires iPhone with iOS 14 or higher, Windows 11 device, Bluetooth connection and the latest version of the Phone Link app. Not available for iPad (iPadOS) or MacOS. Device compatibility may vary. Regional restrictions may apply. Trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

I can do all of that with my Garmin watch though?

I don't use smart watches but I have an example on the trackers.

Tile created trackers and every so often I get an annoying popup

> ~"Tile has been using your location, do you want to stop this?"

Apple then created a competitor product, 'AirTags', but their product does not have these popups.

This is anti-competitive because Apple bypass the restrictions they made on their platform for their product that their competitive have to follow.

I would bet most people already know using an Apple product and agreeing to the Find My and other terms in intial setup means Apple is always tracking you. So a pop up from Apple saying that Apple is tracking you makes no sense, it is already known, and accepted by the device user.

Someone other than Apple tracking you, however, is notable, and so people (at least I) would always want to know if someone other than Apple is tracking me via software operating on the device.

Why? Because a user allowed them to track them when using one app, it doesn't mean should extend automatically that to every app they ever develop.

This is clearly Apple apps being treated differently.

>Why? Because a user allowed them to track them when using one app, it doesn't mean should extend automatically that to every app they ever develop.

The whole point of the notification is to notify you when an entity is tracking you. If you already know Apple is tracking you, then it does not make a difference if Apple's App A or App B or App C is tracking you, it is all Apple.

I must be missing something because that's simply not true in Android. I can individually grant/revoke tracking permissions for each app. I assumed the same would be true for iPhone.

For me it makes no sense to make it only about the entity. It's like saying "the US government is tracking you", instead of saying "the US government is tracking you through this app right now"

I'm pretty sure you're asked whether or not you want to enable Location Services when going through Setup Assistant during the initial device provisioning.

I would bet most people buying tracking devices know those tracking devices are tracking location.

The point is Apple as a platform provider made something (location without warning) on the platform available to themselves as a platform user (Airtags), that they didn't make available to other platform users who are their competitors (Tile).

But, some Apple apps do in fact tell you that. This actually does make sense, too. When you collect information for one specific reason, it doesn't mean the user has granted you consent to use it for other purposes carte blanche.

One might retort "Fine, but then granting that permission once is enough." Apparently, that is only true sometimes, and only for Apple.

Not really defending Apple here since they do have an unfair advantage over on these trackers.

But even the weather app triggers that same location pop up.

Longest-running example is Apple Maps displaying mapping on the lockscreen and having special bespoke turn-by-turn notifications, using a private API to which no other navigation app has access to.

The other big one is Apple muscling itself into the music streaming market by converting Music.app into Apple Music. In a fair world, Apple would have been required to show a pop-up that offered Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer etc. in a random order. You can’t unmake an omelette, so I feel Apple should be forced to pay billions to these competing services as recompense.

RIP lala.com, my first and favorite music streaming service - bought out by apple and summarily closed with previous users encouraged to migrate to Apple Music. I think I got a $15 credit or something. As if I needed a reason to further resent Apple.

> by converting Music.app into Apple Music

Apple made iTunes (which already supported Apple Music) into a dedicated Music app, and offloaded some of the other stuff iTunes could do into separate apps and the Finder.

I’m mostly talking about iOS. Mac market share isn’t too huge, but iPhone market share in the US (where Apple Music exploded in user count immediately after) is.

Ordinarily I hate market interventions like this, but with iOS+Android being a duopoly, we don’t have a free market so special rules start to apply.

People know how to use the App Store. If they want Spotify they know how to find it. It is by no means unfair, immoral, or unethical for a company to prefer and promote their own products.

On a personal note, I never in my life want to see advertisements for third-party software by default.

It is when they charge those companies 30%. It’s a competitive advantage only a monopoly can sustain

>On a personal note, I never in my life want to see advertisements for third-party software by default.

Maybe I misunderstood your point, but could you clarify a bit what you mean? If I open App Store on my iPhone, it is full of third-party software advertisements by default and I don't even know if they can be turned off.

After downloading the software that I know I need I rarely ever open the App Store. I really only do for updates every once in a while. I don't mind them in the App Store because that is an appropriate place for them. Seeing them as apart of the normal platform UI (Microsoft Start menu, looking at you) is distasteful. I go out of my way to avoid advertisements both on and off the internet and my QOL has improved greatly as a result.

> After downloading the software that I know I need I rarely ever open the App Store.

> Seeing them as apart of the normal platform UI (Microsoft Start menu, looking at you) is distasteful.

Then it doesn't sound like a one-time prompt as part of setup would be an issue.

> People know how to use the App Store.

Apparently they didn’t because Apple Music boomed right after that change.

> It is by no means unfair, immoral, or unethical for a company to prefer and promote their own products.

It is when that company is one part of a duopoly, especially for a device pretty critical to daily life :+)

> On a personal note, I never in my life want to see advertisements for third-party software by default.

It’s a one-time pop-up, on opening the music app the first time. Same as the browser choice pop-up on your desktop. Hardly an advertisement.

> Apparently they didn’t because Apple Music boomed right after that change.

I wonder how much offering discounted subscriptions to students or iCloud Family users also contributed to its success.

> It’s a one-time pop-up, on opening the music app the first time. Same as the browser choice pop-up on your desktop. Hardly an advertisement.

I don't like browser selection options either. Then again, I tend to use Apple's default apps unless I have an unusual reason to use something else.

You already see them on the App Store.

> It is by no means unfair, immoral, or unethical for a company to prefer and promote their own products.

Unfairness is at the heart of so many antitrust lawsuits (whether successful or not). Anyone old enough to recall Microsoft in the 1990s would say that many people (not at MSFT) were pointing out how unfair bundling Internet Explorer was. You may disagree but it was one of the reasons MSFT got sued.

> On a personal note, I never in my life want to see advertisements for third-party software by default.

You might want to avoid buying any new Apple products then, or your iPhone settings screen will regularly show you adverts for free trials for Apple News, Apple TV, Apple fitness, Apple Arcade.

Better still, unlike every other free trial in this ecosystem, these terminate the moment you cancel the trial, rather than at the end of the trial period.

> Longest-running example is Apple Maps displaying mapping on the lockscreen and having special bespoke turn-by-turn notifications, using a private API to which no other navigation app has access to.

This is a huge one! I love this feature, but really would like to see it shared with Google and Waze.

Not saying this to defend Apple, but last week I had that same location tracking pop up for Apples Weather app.

Yes but that doesn't distract from the airtags issue, because airtags are supported by the OS itself, not a specific app. Good on Apple for applying the same rules to it's apps, but not so good on Apple for not giving Tile a way to work in the same manner as airtags.

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/04/tile-ceo-on-competition...

> > The main points of differentiation of AirTags vis a vis Tile are enabled by platform capabilities that we don't have access to.

> Apple has, in fact, launched the Find My network that gives third-party accessories some of the same access that AirTags have, and Find My network accessories will be able to access the U1 chip in the iPhone 11 and 12 models much like the AirTags, but Tile won't be able to use the Find My network unless it abandons its own app and infrastructure, which it is likely unwilling to do.

> Prober said that Tile has been "seeking to access" the U1 chip since its introduction in the iPhone , and has been denied.

---

Here's the developer docs for accessing the U1 chip https://developer.apple.com/documentation/nearbyinteraction/...

... and a presentation on the use of the U1 chip with 3rd party accessories at WWDC 2021 https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10165/

This is different. This is Apple saying use our network, not allowing Tile to use their own.

Using the U1 chip for precise location finding in the local area doesn't appear to require using the Find My network for items. That API has been opened up to all 3rd party developers - probably not initially (the "we can't get access to the U1 chip" was from May 4th, 2019. It was opened up to 3rd party developers with iOS 16 ( https://www.macrumors.com/2022/07/20/ios-16-expands-u1-enabl... ).

For "find my" integration this would suggest two things.

First, that Find My should also query some 3rd party services for location of items - that I should be able to register a 3rd party with a standard API (akin to IMAP for email) that has location tracking info. That's reasonable - I look forward to a standard (and secure) API that doesn't leak my own location data when querying it.

Secondly, if it was "I want tiles to seamlessly be found by Apple devices just like AirTags are - the entire Apple network can find them" this gets into a question of how much cryptography and security would Apple need to open up to have 3rd party BLE devices ping to other services outside of their control that may leak the location information of people walking past them. Why should {arbitrary phone creator} need to ping a 3rd party whenever someone comes within range of the BLE device? That is, if Android devices aren't required to ping Apple's Find My network when in range of an AirTag, why should Apple be required to ping Tile's servers when in range of a Tile?

> how much cryptography and security would Apple need to open up to have 3rd party BLE devices ping to other services outside of their control that may leak the location information of people walking past them.

None, simply proxy it through Apple's existing servers and do not include any information about the device that found the tracker. If you are worried about rogue devices telling iPhone to ping rogue services, then just add a service whitelist to the scheme: Apple trusts Google's service and Tile's service, Google trusts Apple's service and Tile's service, but <random URL> isn't going to get pinged.

Now just make a process by which you prove legitimacy in order to get added to the list and require platform approval.

> Why should {arbitrary phone creator} need to ping a 3rd party whenever someone comes within range of the BLE device?

Because if every phone could ping the network associated with every tracker, then the strength of the network is all participating devices, not just OEM's brand. Apple gets the benefit of having a better Find My network outside the US where Android dominates, and Android gets the benefit of a better Find My network inside the US where iPhone dominates.

> That is, if Android devices aren't required to ping Apple's Find My network when in range of an AirTag, why should Apple be required to ping Tile's servers when in range of a Tile?

Required is a strong word, but Android should ping Apple's network when it sees an airtag, and I bet Google would take that deal if it were available.

All this is sidelong to the point though, that Tile cannot build an app that iPhone users can use that can tie into the beacon functionality the iPhone is already doing in order to enable Tile users with iPhones (that is, those iPhone users with the Tile app installed) have as reliable and friction-free an experience as iPhone users have with airtags.

> None, simply proxy it through Apple's existing servers and do not include any information about the device that found the tracker. If you are worried about rogue devices telling iPhone to ping rogue services, then just add a service whitelist to the scheme: Apple trusts Google's service and Tile's service, Google trusts Apple's service and Tile's service, but <random URL> isn't going to get pinged.

Doing a "ping this other service" leaks information about the device that has been found. It also opens up Apple to knowing about who found the device or where it was found from information sent across the network. This is an important thing in security of the AirTag (and the rest of the Find My network) - the person detecting the BLE message has zero knowledge about it (other than its existence), Apple has zero knowledge about the person finding it or the device - only the Apple account that is associated with, and the person who owns the Apple account only has knowledge about where and what device - not who found it.

To not compromise the security of the Find My network, other vendors

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sec6cbc80fd0/...

> In addition to making sure that location information and other data are fully encrypted, participants’ identities remain private from each other and from Apple. The traffic sent to Apple by finder devices contains no authentication information in the contents or headers. As a result, Apple doesn’t know who the finder is or whose device has been found. Furthermore, Apple doesn’t log information that would reveal the identity of the finder and retains no information that would allow anyone to correlate the finder and owner. The device owner receives only the encrypted location information that’s decrypted and displayed in the Find My app with no indication as to who found the device.

This would be an opportunity for Tile to work at trying to establish a standard like was done with UWB ( https://www.nxp.com/applications/enabling-technologies/conne... ) so that multiple vendors could use the technology and chips for interoperability.

> probably not initially

Apple giving their tracking product a 3 or 4 year head start over it's competitors.

If you're going to compete against other products on your platform, give it a level playing field.

From 3 years ago https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/05/tile-to-launch-to-launch-a...

> Tile is preparing to introduce a new product this year that will serve as a rival to Apple’s long-awaited AirTags and other lost-item trackers coming to the market, including those from Samsung, TechCrunch has learned. While previous Tile trackers have leveraged Bluetooth to help users locate lost items — like a misplaced set of keys, for example — Tile’s new product will take advantage of UWB (ultra-wideband) technology to find the missing items. It will also use augmented reality to help guide users to the lost item’s location via the Tile mobile app.

> ...

> Apple last year began to give third-party developers access to its U1 chip, which uses UWB technology to make the iPhone spatially aware, via its “NearbyInteraction” framework. Some Android devices also ship with the technology. It’s unclear to what extent Tile is using the new frameworks with its forthcoming product, and the company is likely under NDA with regard to its work with Apple specifically, per earlier reports.

> ...

> Meanwhile, according to a new research note from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple will reveal its own Tile competitor, AirTags this year. Apple has already all but confirmed AirTag’s existence, as it even accidentally published references to its lost-item tracker in an official support video at one point. Leaked images of the AirTags also began to circulate this week, adding fuel to these reports of a “soon-ish” AirTags launch.

> A UWB-powered tracker could help allow Tile to maintain its position in the market. Tile, as of last year, had sold 26 million Tile devices, and was locating around six million items per day across 195 countries. Tile’s website now says its devices reach over 230 countries and territories. With this scale, Tile today leads the market. But Apple’s AirTags could have a first-party advantage with deep integrations into its “Find My” app — a concern that was brought up by Tile in last year’s antitrust hearings in reference to how Apple wields its platform and market power to overrun competitive businesses.

----

I would like to see an integration similar to how mail and homekit work for the Find My : Devices. Enter in the server and account info and be able to get the location of a device registered to that service. Note that that has all sorts of privacy issues if not properly designed.

However, such integration would also eliminate the moat that tile perceives that it has for its product and the differentiation for it.

Also, Apple licenses out the Find My tech to other trackers. But... you don't get the new precision finding features.

> But... you don't get the new precision finding features.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10165/ appears to suggest differently.

Maybe it's new because existing ones that work with Find My cannot.

They have to buy the chips (and integrate them) from a vendor like https://www.st.com/en/wireless-connectivity/ultra-wideband-p... or https://www.nxp.com/applications/enabling-technologies/conne...

It isn't something that any device can do by default. For example, Samsung integrated it into their Smart Tags ( https://www.androidpolice.com/samsung-smarttag-2-uwb/ )

A Garmin watch can’t track heart rate during an Apple Fitness Plus workout, an example.

Yeah but that’s a separate paid service tied to specific hardware, not so much an iPhone feature as an Apple TV and Watch feature. Garmin can integrate into HealthKit as well as any other fitness tracker.

That is to say, they communicate directly with each other and not through the iPhone?

So IIRC, you need the Apple TV to actually participate in the Fitness+ workouts, this is used to display them and as far as I know this hasn’t changed, but if it has, someone else can chime in and correct me.

The Apple Watch itself has WiFi and optionally LTE. It does like to boost off an iPhone’s Bluetooth and let the iPhone do the heavy lifting, but it isn’t required to connect to the Internet and honestly works better when it does (at the cost of battery life). So yeah, more or less, but you still need the Watch paired to an iPhone (because it is an iPhone accessory at its core), and the data is going to be logged to the Health app, and the relevant data (heart rate, workout time, whatever else gets logged for the workout) can be made available to an ecosystem of independent hardware and services. The weight my scale logs for example gets tracked by the vendor service, the Health app, and my food tracker via the Health app.

Either way, Fitness+ is a premium service, not a feature of the iPhone. That it requires specific hardware doesn’t make it particularly special in this regard either.

Apple's main fitness competitor Peloton supports non-peloton fitness bands, cadence meters, etc.

Good for Peloton. Fairly certain you still need to use their workout equipment, unless that changed.

It’s a different business model.

Most Garmin users wouldn't ever be using Apple Fitness+ to workout.

Totally different markets. The lack of sensor compatibility and lack of battery life make the Apple Watch a non-starter for a lot of the really serious fitness/sports use cases.

Not the parent, but just a few things I’d guess would be Apple Watch specific:

- I’ve had employers that require a confirmation step from an app as a form of 2FA. If my phone isn’t awake, the notification comes to my watch and I can approve my login from my wrist

- If some action requires typing on my watch, I get a prompt on my iPhone to do the typing there instead of on the tiny watch keyboard. The characters I type via the phone appear in real time on the watch as if I were typing directly

- Dismissing and snoozing notifications syncs so I don’t have to dismiss and snooze notifications on multiple devices

- Similarly, if I set an alarm on my phone, the alarm will ring on my phone and, if I’m wearing it, vibrate my watch without further setup. Again, actions I perform to that alarm can all be performed on the watch or phone.

I’d guess these are all tiny, tiny quality of life features, but I’d be very surprised if other non-Apple watches have the ability to implement them.

It's been years, but IIRC the main disparity was with responding to notifications.

On Android you could pick a pre-written reply to texts or even dictate a response.

On iOS you couldn't do anything but close the notification.

For example, the Apple Health App automatically talks to my dieting app, so when I walk, I get credit for the calories.

>weren't tightly enough integrated with my iPhone to make it "worth it" to me to

To buy them in the first place, for many consumers. Which is exactly what apple had hoped to achieve.

Likewise, I'm a happy Garmin watch owner. Wondering what I'm missing because I don't feel like I'm missing anything.

Almost all the stuff Garmin leaves out is the stuff I don't want to do on my watch anyway.

I bought an Apple Watch and it was so fiddly and always trying to get my attention to the point I returned it.

> Interesting, I've had 2 Garmin Smart Watches and never felt like Apple was restricting them.

Sending messages from watch for example. Apple only allows that for Apple watches

I've also had two Garmin watches and I've always been on Android. I also have had Tiles since long before Airtags existed.

Both Garmin and Tile work flawlessly on my Android devices. I've tried to help my wife add them to her iPhone and it's just not worked right, it's a fight to keep things connected and the Tile app only works when it's open and you can't reply to messages from the Garmin and on and on.

I appreciate the efforts to protect privacy and battery life, I can certainly imagine a different Bluetooth device than the Garmin with a worse app that would use the permissions granted it for nefarious purposes, or a worse tracker than the Tile that would wear down battery life with poorly-coded constant background activity, but Apple are clearly also acting in their own selfish interests.

The Pebble was very obviously hampered by iOS limitations. In order to offload any code to the phone, you either had to write the code in Javascript (so it was basically a web app) or direct the user to manually download a separate companion app from the App Store. If iOS killed the companion app because it hadn't been opened on the iPhone recently (because, y'know, you were using it on your watch and not your phone), you had to manually relaunch the app on your phone.

This is all before even getting into things like ecosystem integration.

The Pebble was released in 2013. The two way communication SDK with Pebble was released in May of 2013. In February of 2015, the 2.0 Pebble SDK was released with further integrations.

The first iWatch was announced in September 2014 and released in April of 2015.

The Pebble was discontinued in 2016.

What integrations are you expecting Apple to have released prior to its own release? What functionality did iOS lack that android provided that hampered Pebble's development on iOS?

"The first iWatch was announced in September 2014 and released in April of 2015."

Just a side note: apple has in past started limiting other companies products as soon as they decide to create a competitor and sometimes years before it hits the market.

IIRC Spotify has been bitten by this at least once, which resulted in a lawsuit.

What limitations did Apple place in 2013 (or 2014 or 2015) that reduced the functionality of Pebble in light of a forthcoming iWatch?

If it was a "it worked and then Apple took away this API that we were going to use" that would be one thing. If it was "the iPhone didn't have the functionality for other devices to read messages over BlueTooth until 2015 with iOS 8" - that's a different claim.

I don't know about Pebble, but Tile got restricted really hard once Apple decided to make the Apple Tag. There's many rants/statements from the Tile CEO on this subject.

So this behavior isn't a relic of old APIs

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/04/tile-ceo-on-competition...

> > If you look at the history between Tile and Apple, we had a very symbiotic relationship. They sold Tile in their stores, we were highlighted at WWDC 2019, and then they launched Find My in 2019, and right when they launched their Find My app, which is effectively a competitor of Tile, they made a number of changes to their OS that made it very difficult for our customers to enable Tile. And then once they got it enabled, they started showing notifications that basically made it seem like Tile was broken.

> Prober is talking about changes that Apple made to location services permissions. For privacy purposes, Apple stopped making it easy for apps to get permanent access to a user's location. Apps in iOS 13 were not initially allowed to present an "Always Allow" option when requesting location access, and the feature had to be enabled in the Settings app. Apple also started sending regular reminders to customers letting them know their location was being used.

> Tile was not happy with these privacy changes and that privacy tweak set Tile against Apple, with Tile in 2019 calling on Congress to "level the playing field."

> > The main points of differentiation of AirTags vis a vis Tile are enabled by platform capabilities that we don't have access to.

> Prober said that Tile has been "seeking to access" the U1 chip since its introduction in the iPhone , and has been denied.

----

Should Apple have a "grant once for app, always allow location service?" (note: this would allow an innocuous app to turn into a tracker with a later update). Or should Apple have a "this app has accessed your location {N} times in the last 24 hours?" ... or some other functionality?

Is "grant once, always allow" a security risk for users?

For U1 chip access: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/nearbyinteraction/... and https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10165/

Does Apples own stuff have the same limitations?

Yes. And you need to go and configure them in settings if you want them to have the access. https://www.idownloadblog.com/2020/08/24/manage-widget-locat...

The example given there is the Weather app and widget which I've gotten notifications for myself.

You will also note:

> Navigation apps like Google Maps, Waze, Apple Maps, and so forth work best when they can pinpoint your exact location with precision. But a weather app, on the other hand, works just fine even if it’s only allowed to determine the city where you live or just an approximate region.

Maps, Messages, HomeKit, Clock, Siri, Weather, Wallet - they're all in there. System services too (and you can disable the system service's access to location data - e.g. Apple Pay Merchant Identification, Compass Calibration, Setting Time Zone).

For things that like to access the location in the background (Weather especially does this) you may get "Weather" has been using your location in the background. An example of this can be seen at https://www.lifewire.com/turn-on-mobile-location-services-41...

Its not just "I am using the location data always" but also "this has been accessing your location in the background" which is the type of thing that Tile does.

Apple tends to not have apps that access location information in the background and so this sort of message is not one that people tend to see. Weather is the one that does for weather alerts.

Apple Maps doesn't access location in the background so one wouldn't ever see the a message from it.

I have received these messages for e.g. the weather app, but never Find My. Find My seems to be immune.

"Find my".app (for lack of a better designator) doesn't use the location information in the background. Weather.app does use location services in the background. Weather (like all user space apps) can also be restricted to only getting the approximate location rather than exact location.

Find my system is part of the operating system itself - not an application running in user space. It can be disabled in the "Share My Location" settings in Location services in settings and in System Services "Find My iPhone" because that part of is not a user space app running but rather part of the kernel.

Yes, but isn't that an example of Apple giving special privileges to their own product? How would Tile go about doing this?

What functionality that Apple has are you suggesting be extended to Tile?

Access to the U1 chip? They can do that.

Show up in Find My? Let's get some standards for secure and authenticated transmission of item location to other parties.

Have Apple's phones automatically detect 3rd party BTLE products and report their whereabouts to a 3rd party? This is a privacy nightmare. Side note - why Apple's phones? How about a patch to Android too?

Something else?

From OOP,

> Apple stopped making it easy for apps to get permanent access to a user's location.

> The main points of differentiation of AirTags vis a vis Tile are enabled by platform capabilities that we don't have access to.

Apple makes it easy for their product (AirTags) to have always on location permissions. Apple makes it hard for their competitor (Tile) to have always on location permissions.

Apple is using their ecosystem to advantage their AirTag business instead of competing on the same playing field as Tile.

You are asking to have Apple pick up random BLE messages and send them to various 3rd party vendors with corresponding location information?

Does Tile have a secure way of receiving those messages that does not compromise the security and anonymity (exposing the identity of either the device or the receiver, or the location of either) of the person whose device picked up the message so that this can be implemented in Android core and Apple?

Pre launch of AirTags, users could opt in to always on location permissions for the Tile app. Post launch of AirTags, Apple makes it hard for Tile users to have always on location permissions.

> You are asking to have Apple pick up random BLE messages and send them to various 3rd party vendors with corresponding location information?

I'm not asking for anything. This is just one of many examples of the form: Apple offers API for 3rd party accessory, accessory is successful, Apple launches 1st party accessory, Apple restricts 3rd party accessory API.

Is this behavior illegal? The Department of Justice says it is. The courts will decide.

> Should Apple have a "grant once for app, always allow location service?" (note: this would allow an innocuous app to turn into a tracker with a later update)

Users should be allowed to grant grant “always” permission, for that app version. The next time it gets updated, they get hit with the prompt again.

In fact I’d like that to happen for all permissions, so I regularly review them, and I know when an app update has occurred.

Apps can change their functionality without an official update as long as they can access the internet, and if they're enabling secret trackers they have no reason not to do this.

> Users should be allowed to grant grant “always” permission, for that app version. The next time it gets updated, they get hit with the prompt again.

I think users would hate that since they don't understand why the app keeps asking again and again. Some apps are updated on a weekly basis.

At a minimum if there were no changes in permissions wanted a notification saying X app updated and is using the same permissions, click here to see how many times each permissions was used (with the more privacy related ones at the top of the list) would be nice.

Then you don't run the risk of normalizing people always just clicking allow on the prompt that happens all the time (hello windows 7 UAC), which still giving them easy diacoverability and hints of poor behavior with existing permissions.

there are many examples on this, IOS makes warning messages for other developer apps, but none for their own apps. I received warnings that google maps has used my background location, or than google photos or synology photos have access to my photos, but not a message on the same access from apple maps or apple photos.

> IOS makes warning messages for other developer apps, but none for their own apps.

This is not true. Apple's own apps, like the Weather widget, will display location permission "nag" screens occasionally just like third-party apps do.

> ... but not a message on the same access from apple maps or apple photos.

Apple Maps doesn't use your location in the background. It only uses your location while the app is open, or while you're actively navigating using it.

Apple Photos is your photos. It'd be weird to warn the user that it "has access" to itself.

The complaint is outlined directly in the document

https://x.com/ericmigi/status/1770832870870827149

Well to begin with, it is my understanding that the specific limitations listed still exist. Can Bluetooth devices remotely start apps now, or keep them in the background? I only used Pebble as an example because I owned a Pebble, I'm not familiar with Garmen's watches.

But seperately, I think it's really bad for innovation if no new product categories can exist unless Apple makes them first! You can imagine a different type of company that would have been delighted to work with Pebble and add functionality to their operating system, because third party compatibility strengthens their core product.

And of course, if this were the Mac, Pebble would not have needed Apple's cooperation...

Bluetooth devices can start apps in the background. I have two that do this, Beddit and <redacted because they famously don't let you mention you have one>.

replying to sms is one: garmins can do this on Android but only recently (venu 2+, venu 3) got limited ability to do so on ios.

> Interesting, I've had 2 Garmin Smart Watches and never felt like Apple was restricting them. >

The two main differences are notifications filtering (choosing which apps can send notifications to the watch) and actioning notifications from the watch.

Huh? I can filter notifications with third-party smartwatches. Did it on Pebble, Fossil, and others.

Maybe Garmin chooses not to implement it but it is all or nothing on iOS-> Garmin.

Huh yeah looks like they just push anything for which “Notification Center” is enabled. Seems like a crude proxy.

Not on a garmin sadly.

In the Garmin Connect iOS app, you can choose to display notifications for any combination of Calls, Texts (i.e. Messages app), or Apps (i.e. every other app). With Pebble and Fossil, are you for example saying you can choose to display Instagram notifications but hide Snapchat? Garmin seems to indicate that their limitation of iOS, as the Android Garmin Connect app allows the user to choose individual apps to display on the watch.

https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=TLeDN92ZU0AgN4df6HakwA...

Yes, that is absolutely possible. I did that on my Pebble 5 years ago, on a Fossil 3 years ago, and on various other devices (Amazfit GTR4?) when I was testing out devices a year ago.

IIRC, when the Fossil hybrid smartwatches first launched, this capability was not enabled, and they got a lot of feedback on it. By the time I tried one a few months later, the capability was live.

It looks like on Garmin you can only roughly affect which apps send notifications through via the "notification center" designation. If you otherwise don't care about the notification center (I don't), then it's a decent way to filter. But if you otherwise would care about what's in your notification center, then it's not great.

I wonder if Garmin thought they were helping people by mirroring the notification center preferences? If so, they should have let people choose between "use my notification center preferences" and "I'll choose my own apps".

I don’t have a Fossil smartwatch, but the way they’re describing the notification filtering is you have to get a notification first to be able to filter that app’s notifications. That’s markedly different than how it’s done for Apple Watch, which allows mirroring the iPhone’s notification settings or changing them on just the watch.

It’s pretty obvious what Apple’s argument would be for why third party smartwatches can’t access the notification settings of all apps - security. It’s totally feasible for them have iOS manage those notification settings and send the desired notifications to the smartwatch. They just don’t because… why would they? It makes the Apple Watch enticing. I love my Forerunner enough that this only slightly annoys me.

Both the notification center workaround Garmin created and the “wait for a notification from the app before you can start filtering them” workaround suck. Apple should be providing the APIs to implement the same notification options on a third party smartwatch.

The Garmin solution is not great. I didn't mind the Pebble/Fossil solution. Basically, if an app sends notifications a lot, you can pretty quickly set the setting for it. And if an app rarely sends notifications (like the United app, if you travel rarely) then it will show up by default the first time and you can change the preference if you want. I didn't really mind this process, and in some ways it's better than having to scroll through every app that could conceivably send a notification. I wore my Pebble for almost 5 years — until the battery was down to 1 day — and this was never something that I minded or even thought about. I would slap my Pebble back on if the battery were fixed, for sure!

If you clear a notification on your watch does it clear it from the phone? It's a tiny thing, but it's really nice to have.

Similarly, if the notification has a "Reply" option (say a Slack message), can you reply on your watch? Very useful when I get a work message when I'm walking the dog.

I don’t think clearing a notification on the watch affects the phone, but that’s not actually bad for me. Since I can’t reply from a Pebble anyway, having the notifications still on my Lock Screen is helpful so I can immediately reply from the phone.

As I mentioned in another comment, the inability to reply from third party watches is a bummer.

Both of which are possible on Android, with a Garmin Fenix 6s.

With non-Apple Watches, you can't 1) reply to texts, 2) answer phone calls (or place calls), 3) interact with other native iPhone applications (like Apple Health).

You'll pry my Garmin from my cold, dead hands but there's no mistaking it for an actual "smart"-watch. I value it entirely for health & fitness, and the very few "smart" things it can do are just nice-to-have icing on the cake.

not sure "non-apple watches" is accurate here. I can do all of those things with my Pixel watch

edit: as comment below points out, I was missing the obvious context of paired with an iPhone.

OP obviously meant non Apple watches paired with iPhones.

FWIW you can answer and place calls via smartwatches on ios.

Also, you can interact with Apple Health from any smart device via a companion app. You just have to grant permission.

#1 is valid though.

Also I don't believe you can control music

You can! I use my garmin a lot to switch songs on my iPhone, change volume, etc.

But like the other commenter said, you can’t reply to notifications or calls when the watch is paired to an iPhone, but you could when paired to an Android, which is a feature I definitely miss from when I had a Pixel.

I couldn’t get the Afib tracker working consistently on my Fitbit Charge 5. Had to switch to an Apple Watch and an iPhone. Much more reliable.

You can't reply to text messages from other smartwatches, or at least not organically (only canned responses).

Yeah, there are some inconsistencies with Apple products interop-ing with non-Apple stuff.

I've noticed this with wireless bluetooth headphone pairing. Sometimes it works, othertimes there are odd limitations and devices unpair randomly.

Also Samsung's Adaptive Fast Charging sends lower wattage through the cable if it detects a non-Samsung device. So Apple is not the only offender here.

I’ve got an iPhone and an Apple Watch. Wife has an iPhone and a Garmin.

The Garmin sadly misses out on notification filtering, focus modes, replies, solid Bluetooth (it drops out from time to time and the app needs reopening).

> Interesting, I've had 2 Garmin Smart Watches and never felt like Apple was restricting them.

Apple block Garmin watches from replying to text messages as they do on Android for example.

Only Apple Watches are allowed to do that.

I also note that iOS regularly tries to nag me into blocking Garmin Connect from sending notifications to my watch.

Ostensibly that’s to preserve battery life but they don’t do that for their own watches either.

I've had friends that have trouble syncing their Garmin devices with syncing to their iPhone. I've wondered if this is caused by their wireless communication protocol that is proprietary and only available on other apple devices.

Airpods and other bluetooth Apple devices seamlessly sync with iPhones because of a wireless protocol they use that is only available on Apple devices. I forget what it's called, but this definitely limits connectivity of devices that aren't made by Apple.

I used to be able to approve my duo notifications from my Garmin when I had an Android phone, but that functionality isn't available when using an iPhone. I found out recently that you can still do that from an apple watch on an iPhone, when my wife got one. So there is at least one area of functionality that Apple is likely restricting.

I like the app store, I like the restrictions, I don't want apple to change anything about it. I sort of think apple shouldn't try to comply with these sorts of potential lawsuits by making their app store worse, they should just let people jail break the phone and offer zero support for it.

If people want to buy an iphone and shit it up, let them do it.

Doubtful, Google got dinged pretty hard in part because there were too many steps to allow other app stores to exist, and becsuse app stores couldn't auto-update apps like Google Play could.

And all that is way easier than rooting/jailbreaking. I doubt that will be enough of a deterrent considering the anti-trust angle being that you can't compete with apple's native software

No Google got dinged because they claimed their ecosystem was “open” and changed it after the fact.

The reason that Google lost the same type of cases that Apple won was because consumers knew iOS was closed before they bought it.

I'm sure this comment will get downvoted and dunked on, but I agree and I would be that if Apple is forced to make changes like these, many peoples' only experience of it would be their iPhone/Apple Watch/etc getting worse.

Some examples:

  - A lot of these changes are like mandating that cars have a manual transmission option. Sure, there are plenty of people that love the control, but there are many, many more that appreciate not having to deal with it.

  - Every dollar and engineering hour that Apple spends complying with these new requirements is time they won't spend on things people actually want, as well as increasing the surface area for bugs and security holes.

  - Apple is the intermediary between other companies like FB, Google, ad networks, data harvesting, government apps, etc. They can't do things on my phone because Apple forbids it. The more Apple is forced to open up, the less protection I have from other powerful players in the tech market.

  - Every place where Apple is forced to open up is a place where there's a choice that many users didn't ask for but will have to make (e.g. default browser). 

  - I've never had to help a relative with their phone. I've had many of them come to me for help with their computers. Their and my experience with computing platforms is worse without the guardrails

I think many computer savvy people don't realize how freeing and liberating it is for normal people to have an "appliance" computer.

Explain how.

This seems a baseless statement.

nothing changes for you, keep living in apple prison. how does other people having more choice make your experience worse? all arguments I heard so far are completely far fetched and contrived scenarios that dont amount to anything but fear mongering.

Every time I refresh you keep adding more contrived BS excuses to allow the trillion dollar company to keep extorting devs and users with obscene fees.

" - A lot of these changes are like mandating that cars have a manual transmission option. Sure, there are plenty of people that love the control, but there are many, many more that appreciate not having to deal with it."

Nonsense analogy. Computers are General Purpose Computing Devices which people increasingly depend on in their lives where single point of control from Apple makes their lives artificially more difficult solely for the purpose of being able to squeeze out profits. It increases prices for consumers and allows oppressive dictatorships to demand certain apps to be removed and Apple always complies, leaving users without alternatives.

" - Every dollar and engineering hour that Apple spends complying with these new requirements is time they won't spend on things people actually want, as well as increasing the surface area for bugs and security holes."

Boohoo, the trillion dollar company has to do a little more work. They could just stop putting so much work into anti-consumer propaganda so they would have more time for actual work.

"- Apple is the intermediary between other companies like FB, Google, ad networks, data harvesting, government apps, etc. They can't do things on my phone because Apple forbids it. The more Apple is forced to open up, the less protection I have from other powerful players in the tech market."

This is exactly the kind of exaggerated, fear mongering narrative I've expected. Increased competition and openness could also lead to better privacy and security solutions as companies would need to compete on these features to win over users. Also, despite Apple's policies and safeguards, there have been instances where apps have found ways around these limitations or have used data in ways that are not transparent to users, because Apple only cares about Privacy as far as it benefits their bottom line, that why Apple also started to work on an advertising platform. They care about "Privacy" because now they can exclusively monetize user data.[Apple is becoming an ad company despite privacy claims - https://proton.me/blog/apple-ad-company]

" - Every place where Apple is forced to open up is a place where there's a choice that many users didn't ask for but will have to make (e.g. default browser)."

Nonsense, the only thing that changes is that other people can change the default app, so when they don't care nothing changes for them, they don't have to do anything. this argument of yours is the kind of absurd reach that makes your overall position look absurd.

" - I've never had to help a relative with their phone. I've had many of them come to me for help with their computers. Their and my experience with computing platforms is worse without the guardrails"

I've read this meme so many times and every time I read it I doubt that it's an actual thing instead it's something you desperately need to say in order to uphold your indefensible position of defending Apple's anti-competitive practices. It's not a good argument either, just because your relatives are incompetent we all should suffer under that?

" I think many computer savvy people don't realize how freeing and liberating it is for normal people to have an "appliance" computer."

Ah yes, less choice is actually more choice, slavery is freedom and war is peace.

  - A lot of these changes are like mandating that cars have a manual transmission option. Sure, there are plenty of people that love the control, but there are many, many more that appreciate not having to deal with it.

Please let governments pass legislation which mandate a manual trasmission model. I will never buy an auto!

  - Every dollar and engineering hour that Apple spends complying with these new requirements is time they won't spend on things people actually want, as well as increasing the surface area for bugs and security holes.

Except that Apple are literally the richest company in America. They could hire a thousand new programmers in a team to work 24 hours a day on these requirements and it wouldn't even tickle their profits, let alone revenue.

  - Apple is the intermediary between other companies like FB, Google, ad networks, data harvesting, government apps, etc. They can't do things on my phone because Apple forbids it. The more Apple is forced to open up, the less protection I have from other powerful players in the tech market.

If apple is forced to open up, it creates a market for more security products, meaning healthier competition and more transparent security.

  - Every place where Apple is forced to open up is a place where there's a choice that many users didn't ask for but will have to make (e.g. default browser).

Not really, safari is the only browser which is installed on a iphone by default, so normal users just use it like they did before and dont need to do anything. However other people that do want to use something different are free to.

  - I've never had to help a relative with their phone. I've had many of them come to me for help with their computers. Their and my experience with computing platforms is worse without the guardrails

Nobody is suggesting making the iphone harder to use, just allowing additional choices if thats what the user wants. The choices can be hidden away from normal users and grandma, but why cant they be there in the background for people that want them?

> If apple is forced to open up, it creates a market for more security products, meaning healthier competition and more transparent security.

Have you not had to use a third party security product on your work computer? All third party security products for computers are scams and inefficient

Adding more choices, especially for fundamental stuff like we're discussing here, actually literally does make the device harder to use.

All anyone is asking them to do is allow different types of app on the app store. How is that making the device harder to use?

Because if you allow apps that haven't been vetted by Apple to be downloaded and executed via the app store, then grandma is inevitably going to run some malware that drains her 401k to a teenager in Russia.

> - Every dollar and engineering hour that Apple spends complying with these new requirements is time they won't spend on things people actually want, as well as increasing the surface area for bugs and security holes.

Small indie company, btw.

I want iOS to be like macOS in that there's one "blessed" store, but I can sell, distribute, and install apps outside of it without giving Apple a cut.

macOS has proven for decades that a reasonably proprietary OS can be distributed and kept reasonably secure when apps are installed on it outside of an App Store. There's even third-party App Stores on macOS like Steam, Homebrew, and a few more that Indie developers use to distribute apps.

> , but I can sell, distribute, and install apps outside of it without giving Apple a cut.

I want this personally for me. But I paid extra money to get my mom an iPhone exactly because she won't be able to stuff like this.

I used to regularly have to fix her android phone and the last time she was trying to download an app for tracking hours at work, and somehow downloaded the wrong app with a similar name, this app loaded with 3 different pop ups telling her to install other ad filled apps with generic names like "PDF reader".

OP is right, it should be an explicit jailbreaking process that has a technical barrier to entry where my mom can't be talked into doing it over the phone but an enterprising young person could figure it out.

Are you suggesting your Mom has/would have the same experience on macOS? For whatever reason it doesn't seem to be as much of an issue.

It probably doesn't need to be as cumbersome as a jailbreak. Maybe it's just a "Allow apps not approved by Apple" toggle hidden deep in the settings. I actually would love the ability to set "IT administrator account" on device setup. Then mom can't even change the setting without notifying "dmix" :)

There are plenty of junk apps in the App Store now. Apple does a good job marketing trustworthiness, but having competing app stores may at least get them to put more effort into backing it up.

Please link to a single one that installs malware or does backgrounf popups as is possible in Android.

Apple has a setting in macOS that disables installing apps outside of the App Store. This would be a completely reasonable setting for iOS for less tech savvy people.

It's fine if it's the default honestly, as long as it exists as a setting you can change.

This is literally default Android setting, and it even shows scary dialog that sideloading can negatively impact your device.

Yet the EU got mad at android for ‘barriers’ to sideloading like this since it ‘unfairly’ makes it harder to install third party App Stores.

Agreed! macOS has really done a fantastic job balancing out the needs of security with usability.

They'll lock it down like an iPhone soon enough. The writing has been on the wall for years. Apple and Microsoft are frothing at the mouth to do this. But they have to do slowly boil the frog, because they know it's the only way people will accept these kind of changes.

> The writing has been on the wall for years

People have been saying this for more than a decade, but it still hasn’t happened; there are still zero restrictions about what you can and can’t install on macOS.

Apple app store has the exact same problems. There was even a post on HN last week about an scam app being the first result in the app store.

I urge you to ask anyone who provides technical support to the elderly or tech inept what the split is iOS to Android RE scams, malware etc. Nobody's arguing the app store is perfect, but "the exact same problems" is absolutely an incorrect statement.

You're either lying or not reading.

> but "the exact same problems" is absolutely an incorrect statement

> the last time she was trying to download an app for tracking hours at work, and somehow downloaded the wrong app with a similar name

> There was even a post on HN last week about an scam app being the first result in the app store

it's the _exact same problem_

Maybe there a language barrier here.

To me, for the problem to be "exactly" the same, it would need to occur at a similar level. I do not believe (based on my personal or professional experience) that this is occuring at a similar level on iOS or Android.

You're right the same specific style of problem happens at both, but if it's significantly more on one than the other then it's hard to honestly say they're the same.

Your mom would have to go out of her way to find and install a separate app store. You could make it give all sorts of warnings that would scare off a non-tech user like your mom.

IMO the issue is that people get tricked into doing stuff like this. Elderly people seem even more vulnerable.

Agreed. I primarily work as a sysadmin and the amount of people in my organization that fall for phishing is alarming. It’d be incredibly easy to get someone to turn on the “Allow third party apps” setting and install malicious software. People don’t read warnings, they’ll just click “ok” as many times as they need without reading.

That being said I don’t think that’s necessarily a valid reason to completely lock things down, but it definitely should be prohibitively difficult for a vulnerable-to-phishing person to enable.

As a heavy Linux user for most things I feel the same.

I love that I have all non tech savvy people in my life are using. Devices that just work, they all seem happy too. I get the idealistic nature of these lawsuits but people buy these phones for the fact they work and for the protected App Store. Including myself.

I used to regard myself highly as somewhat of an expert in tech, with my relatives and friends as a reference. I would spend days (cumulatively, weeks) customizing and locking down my Windows and Linux machines. I could not imagine paying for a closed product if an open alternative was available, even if it meant more ongoing hassle.

At first I got into Apple’s ecosystem because it ticked the boxes of being Unix-compatible yet very capable (perhaps rivaling Windows) of working with multimedia, which I did and do.

However, the older I get and the more I lurk here and elsewhere, the more I realize there is another reason: I am not an expert, the aforementioned weeks spent on securing my device are not substantially benefitting my life and are better spent on something else, and while no one should completely give up on keeping up-to-date with modern attack vectors paying someone to do that work more competently is worthwhile.

I still go to crazy lengths to avoid closed products in actual work I do, but I consider a base system that is maybe proprietary but just works, and securely enough, to be providing value in that way and enabling me to provide more value in turn.

And I still consider myself more knowledgeable than 95% of my friends and relatives, so there’s them to think about.

Now, everyone bow to dmix'es preferences about his mom.

If you want to child-lock you mom's phone, you should have the ability to do so. Default for adults getting any sort of hardware should be that they are in charge, and any nanny should be opt-in.

You can buy an android if you want. Nothing stops you.

I like how iOS works and I would prefer the government does not force Apple to change anything about it.

Imagine a car manufacturer (say Tesla, who has an edge over others much like Apple) could decide where you can go and who your passengers could be?

It's much safer! Just think what could happen to you in some ghetto! And that guy is completely creepy anyway.

That's pretty much what your argument sounds like to me. Hardware vendors (perhaps other than hardware preconfigured for a particular purpose, i.e. picture frame) should have no say in what runs on that hardware, full stop.

> Imagine a car manufacturer (say Tesla, who has an edge over others much like Apple) could decide where you can go and who your passengers could be?

I assume it is legally possibly to sell a car under those conditions, so I don’t even have to imagine. Nobody does it because it would be unpopular and serve no benefit to anyone, not because it’s illegal.

If the first manufacturer to offer decent cars did that and captured the market, it's quite possible that many would put up with it, just as they put up with iphones today.

Oh, and pay a 30% tax on all petrol purchases straight to Mr Ford, how's that?

If after 15 years people were still buying the car despite alternatives, maybe you need to accept that is what people want?

> Imagine a car manufacturer (say Tesla, who has an edge over others much like Apple) could decide where you can go and who your passengers could be?

That’s called public transit.

It would be if you couldn't buy a bus.

It’s awful twisted that the people trying to use government fiat to reduce consumer choice and narrow the range of acceptable business models try to cloak themselves in the language of rights and freedoms.

Just not the freedom to choose a walled garden (with its own set of - yes - positives). That choice needs to be taken away. For your freedom.

One might say - managed freedom.

Should this be judged against Apple, nothing prevents Apple from maintaining their walled garden, and nothing prevents you from staying in it. It's more freedom, not less.

If nothing would prevent Apple from doing what they're doing today, then what is this case all about? Apple's value proposition with iOS isn't just the app store. It's that the app store IS the only way to get something on to iOS. It has to go through them and their review process first. Their value claim is that if you can install it on an iPhone, then you can be assured that it goes through some review process that Apple controls and has been checked against some set of restrictions Apple has, and complies with various things Apple demands. Whether that value is sufficient for any individual consumer is up to them, but very clearly they can't make that same claim if they're required by law to allow apps to come from outside sources and bypass those restrictions.

"If you check the box 'only allow Apple store' on first startup and never uncheck it, you get only apps reviewed by Apple and giving up 30% of revenue".

There, problem solved.

Remind me again why "buy any other phone in the world" isn't sufficient for everyone else if this check box is supposed to be sufficient for current iPhone customers? If the only viable smart phone in the world was Apple's, there might be a point to all of this. But the market is almost exactly split right in half and there is nothing at all that you can't do in an Android phone that you would suddenly be able to do if only Apple allowed side loading on the iPhone. So why does Apple and their customer base have to give up things they seemingly want for the minority of people who want to install apks from websites?

> So why does Apple and their customer base have to give up things they seemingly want

Wrong, they are not giving anything up. They gain an option and lose nothing. Gaining a new opt-in feature is not a loss and is in fact the opposite. Nobody has to "give up" anything.

You appear to have decidedly ignored the key of the comment you replied to:

> Remind me again why "buy any other phone in the world" isn't sufficient for everyone else if this check box is supposed to be sufficient for current iPhone customers?

Also - whilst you're correct in spirit - people are giving up an element of safety. The concept of being able to install anything I want on my iPhone is appealing to me, but not to when I support the technology my 90 year old grandmother uses. Having a locked down device is appealing to me and a complete non-issue to her.

We (in my country, I assume yours has similar rules) don't allow children to buy alcohol, cigarettes, knives or spraypaint, don't allow people to drive without seatbelts, don't allow guns without a license, don't allow cars to be sold without minimal safety ratings etc. These restrictions are annoying for a few but are a positive for most of society.

And unlike most of the above examples, you can easily and legally purchase another smart phone without the guard rails in place. This is for sure a loss for the consumer market as a whole.

Your grandma being scammed is not dependent on being able to install software. The vast majority of phone scams are reliant on browser-based phishing pages, convincing the victim to send a bank transfer, or getting a gift card code from the victim. If you believe it is an issue regardless then safeguards can be implemented such as child safety features or simply allowing you to opt-out (or even not opt-in) when you're setting up your grandma's iPhone for her or whatever.

Yes, you can buy a different phone, but Apple still has a serious hold on the market that affects its competitors, especially when it acts in a way that is anti-competitive. If Apple locking down their store in a way that is extremely user-hostile makes them a billion dollars and they walk away unpunished, how long will its competitors refrain from doing the same for? Apple is large enough that they affect me personally even if I do not use their products.

> Your grandma being scammed is not dependent on being able to install software.

Agreed. But just because there are multiple potential vectors doesn't mean we should ignore them.

> If you believe it is an issue regardless then safeguards can be implemented such as child safety features or simply allowing you to opt-out (or even not opt-in) when you're setting up your grandma's iPhone for her or whatever.

You can MDM lock an iPhone (and I assume Android), but only from initial setup. This also requires a technical skillset and a backend or paid subscription. I agree opt-in safeguards are more appropriate. However until those are a simple option, taking away the alternative is not great.

> If Apple locking down their store in a way that is extremely user-hostile makes them a billion dollars and they walk away unpunished, how long will its competitors refrain from doing the same for? > Apple is large enough that they affect me personally even if I do not use their products.

How? I genuinely don't understand this rationale, it always seems so vague.

If a vendor acts in a way you don't like, you purchase from elsewhere. If an Android vendor decided to follow suit, another would choose not to and you could stick with them.

If bizarrely they all chose to, ColourOS, Graphine etc are all options, significantly easier than in the past.

Even Linux phones and KaiOS are potentially viable alternative to fill the needs of the average user.

How does Apple having a walled garden have any impact on you at all, aside from a theoretical house of cards that consumers wouldn't tolerate?

Some ways I wrote about elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39784683

It’s reasonably secure because no one has bothered to write malware for it.

But there was nothing on the Mac stopping Zoom from putting a backdoor web server on Macs.

Apple could revoke Zoom's signing certificate, if they were discovered to be doing this.

That's the thing: they were. Apple did act, but not by revoking the certificate.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/10/20689644/apple-zoom-web-s...

The thing is, Zoom was not being malicious, and weren’t any exploits hypothetical? That server was a good idea, because it allowed launching Zoom calls without the constant warning popups that Apple injected into the process of launching of a custom URI scheme, which was what it used before and after that era. With the local server it was one click to join. Calling it “a web server” was a scare tactic to get people to think Zoom was serving a site to the public, or hosting your public files.

No, I don’t want Apple to set the precedent that they will delete your whole business if you make an architecture choice they feel is not perfect.

> macOS has proven for decades that a reasonably proprietary OS can be distributed and kept reasonably secure when apps are installed on it outside of an App Store.

That’s not really true. Despite the dangers of centralized app censorship, the state of security on iOS is far beyond that of macOS.

iOS also has even more security threats, because a phone is in your pocket and has GPS, and your laptop isn't.

Also, macOS has like 13% market share vs 60% for iOS - in USA.

Open source store would be nice. Apple reviews the release ($$$), builds on their server and guarantees it does what it says it does.

This would be lovely. As far as I know, right now its entirely possible for an app developer to show clean, trustworthy code on github. And then ship an app bundle on the app store which contains malware.

I'd love it if Apple provided a way to protect against this sort of thing.

This seems reasonable and I like the idea of unlocking the capabilities the hardware already has. What makes iPhone different from Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo Switch?

We should be forcing game consoles to open up as well. As well as every other computing device that you can purchase.

This is Hacker News; maximizing the freedom to hack our own property is an inviolable position.

This is mostly as simple as striking out DMCA 1201. The device maker need not bless the activity so long as they do not have a cudgel with which to threaten users from modifying their own devices they bought.

I agree we should force platforms to be more.open and interoperable, but we can get at least part way there by not allowing them to sue innovators.

Do you prefer not being able to send or recieve good quality images and videos to anyone using Android?

> Do you prefer not being able to send or recieve good quality images and videos to anyone using Android?

Bit confused by this. What prevents me from sending or receiving good quality images to/from Android users?

By default was missing from the sentence. You can do it with Whatsapp etc, but both you and the other party need to download a 3rd party app to do so.

> By default was missing from the sentence. You can do it with Whatsapp etc, but both you and the other party need to download a 3rd party app to do so.

So... what?

I think the point is that it's kind not entirely accurate to say that Apple doesn't allow messaging interoperability with Android. They in-fact do through dozens of available third party apps. They don't allow non-apple devices to implement the iMessage protocol, which could be argued to be anti-consumer but it's not really evidence of apple being a monopoly.

Edit: Just realized that you I misread your comment and you and I agree

It's an obvious abuse of their monopoly to suppress competition. Most kids use iPhone and for the general public in the US iPhone has >50% market share, so to expect most people to stop using iMessage to get better support with Android users is not happening, and it's silly to think that will change without a change in laws, so most kids end up getting iPhones so they're not left out.

Remember, this is all a very arbitrary restriction by Apple that lets them take advantage of their monopoly to suppress sales of competitive products. That's the illegal part.

2.6 billion WhatsApp users exist. All switched from native SMS to a third-party app (WhatsApp). Clearly this expectation is fine.

Part of that is that outside the US, iPhone isn't as dominant in the market, so their anticompetitive tactics don't work as well.

Nobody uses iMessage outside the US, by choice, even in iPhone-dominated markets. So clearly it's possible to avoid it. US iPhone users have the same choice.

Do you have an example of a place that has a similar rate of usage for iPhones but primarily uses WhatsApp for texting? In the US the rate is 87% for teenagers, I'm surprised it's that high elsewhere.

I don’t as I don’t know the numbers, but note also the US is a rich country.

Bear in mind that WhatsApp adoption is often driven by the costs involved with SMS especially when sending to an international number.

WhatsApp also enable free international voip calls.

iMessage and FaceTime Audio are also free.

iPhone has 51% market share in Japan across all age group[1] (and even as high as 84.8% in some demographic[2]). From my 5 years of living here, I’ve never seen anyone use iMessage even once. The dominant messaging app is LINE.

[1]: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prAP51933524

[2]: https://japantoday.com/category/tech/study-shows-iphone-the-...

Seems like LINE became the predominant app way back in 2012 (it released even before iMessage did in 2011), so my guess is that it took hold before iMessage ever had a chance, unlike in the US where texting was always the main way to communicate on phones up until iMessage integrated texting to absorb all those users.

> It's an obvious abuse of their monopoly to suppress competition.

Apple has a monopoly on what, exactly?

Let me answer. Apple has a monopoly on iPhones.

Just like Chevy has a monopoly on Corvettes and Ford has a monopoly on Mustangs.

> Remember, this is all a very arbitrary restriction by Apple

What are they restricting? I am still unclear. Their choosing not to do something is not restricting anything.

> that lets them take advantage of their monopoly to suppress sales of competitive products.

And we're right again back to them having a monopoly on iPhones.

You ever notice you can -use tires from arbitrary manufacturers -use oil from arbitrary manufacturers -drive to arbitrary locations (even offroad in your Corvette) -use nearly arbitrary accessories -use a universal port to get error codes (OBD-II) -make modifications and keep your warranty on unrelated parts

Ask yourself, would MacOs have all of the restrictions an iPhone has? If not even Macbooks block installation of 3rd party applications, why does it change when you add a cell radio?

Honestly,if someone were being paid to change public opinion around the case, this is what i would expect to read. Don't fall for Apple's marketing

> -use tires from arbitrary manufacturers

Just like I can put cases from arbitrary manufacturers on my iPhone.

> -use oil from arbitrary manufacturers

Just like I can use chargers from arbitrary manufacturers.

> -drive to arbitrary locations

Visit arbitrary websites...

> -use a universal port to get error codes (OBD-II)

OBD-II is actually a good analogy because it exposes only a small set of standardized data, but the more interesting data (and ability to run diagnostics) is sometimes behind a manufacturer proprietary protocol and requires something more than just the standard OBD-II interface. Similarly Apple can choose what standard interfaces and protocols to implement and which proprietary ones they would like to create.

> why does it change when you add a cell radio?

Because that's what Apple chose to build and sell. You're free to build your own phone with your own feature set and sell that.

> Don't fall for Apple's marketing

Fortunately I'm capable of my own rational thought.

When friends with iPhones send me images or videos using iMessage, they are very low-quality compared to what iPhone users receive. But when Android users send me the same, they are higher quality.

So I think the specific answer to your question is "iMessage and its lack of support for <protocol (RCS?)>".

> So I think the specific answer to your question is "iMessage and its lack of support for <protocol (RCS?)>".

But there are other ways to send images or arbitrary files. Why does iMessage need to support it?

Cause it would be better for Apple's customers. This one doesn't even have the "my parents security" defense like installing non app store apples does. Do you honestly think any costumer WANTS iPhone to be shitty at sending images?

Why do you have to defend every little thing that Apple does as if you were their lawyer? I get that you like some parts of their walled garden, but why do Apple stans behave as if Apple was a sacred company that could do no wrong, when there examples like this that they are literally harming their own customers to protect their moat. I get why Apple does it, I don't get why anyone here would side with Apple.

You're conflating things. What some people might want Apple to do is different from what Apple should be legally obligated to do.

If someone doesn't like the fact that the Messages app doesn't support <X>, they should not buy an iPhone then, if it's that important to them.

Pretty simple calculus. Apple made a choice, and then they can suffer the consequences of a lost sale because of that choice.

When I send photos to an android user, I just use a different method. it really is not a big deal.

> Why does iMessage need to support it?

imessage (the protocol) doesn't. iPhones should, because it's a common way for people to communicate. It was fine for us to start laissez faire but now that we see Apple abusing things by not interoperating -- deliberately in order to sell more phones [1], the people should intervene.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375128/apple-imessage-an...

> "The #1 most difficult [reason] to leave the Apple universe app is iMessage ... iMessage amounts to serious lock-in"

> "moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us, this email illustrates why."

> imessage (the protocol) doesn't. iPhones should, because it's a common way for people to communicate.

iPhones are fully capable of transmitting images (and even other types of files--what an amazing world we live in). Feel free to install any of the numerous apps available that allow you to do this.

I never said iMessage needs to support anything, I was merely answering a question that I thought was asked in good faith.

The US government claims that Apple is engaging in anticompetitive practices by degrading the behavior of iMessage when communicating to non-Apple devices.

Your stance seems to be, this should not be something for the government to be involved in, let the market decide.

This is ambiguous. Perhaps you believe that US antitrust laws shouldn't exist, or should be changed so they don't apply to this case, or actually don't apply to this case (ie the government is wrong that Apple's behavior violates the law).

Those are all coherent stances you could have, though I think it would be helpful if you identified which of them you hold if you want to engage in meaningful discourse with others.

My understanding is that Apple wont add RCS support until end-to-end encryption is part of the RCS standard, which it currently isn't. And they wont use property add-ons such as what Google use for encryption.

Competitors stuffed around trying to build a competitor for over a decade and failed. Is that Apple's fault?

Lack of iMessage support on Android.

> Lack of iMessage support on Android.

Plenty of other ways to send images.

I do this every day using WhatsApp.

I guess there’s WhatsApp etc, but it’s not a great experience. And that’s in part due to the ecosystem. I can swipe 200 photos and send them to my wife - it shares them on my iCloud behind the scenes, and sends a link. Messages makes it seem like I’ve sent 200 full quality photos in an instant.

That’s hard to do without the vertical integration.

In the UK nearly everyone is using Whatsapp (or Signal, Telegram, even FB Messenger - never iMessage) and it's completely fine.

In the UK here, using WhatsApp regularly too, but the image quality is hopeless on it, and it won’t let you send many at a time.

If I can, I always use iMessage as the integration is just better - especially for media.

I don’t think you can send images to friends on Xbox from a PS5, no? How is that different?

That argument would make sense of iPhone couldn't send any messages at all to Android or call Android phones.

There's a reason Apple hasn't taken their garden wall that far, lmao. Same as being able to use "non Apple WiFi and Bluetooth devices".

Half the replies in this thread make me think they'd be happy if Apple restricted iPhone WiFi to only connecting to Apple APs becuz muh security, muh feature ecosystem

I am very pro-users-owning-their-computers, which makes me highly critical of Apple's behavior. However, these sorts of lawsuits or regulations that seek to force Apple to change App Store policies feel so wrong-headed and out of touch. The problem with Apple is not that they take a 30% cut of app sales in their store, or that they don't allow alternative browser engines or wallets apps or superapps or whatever in their store. It's their store and they ought to be able to curate it however they like. The problem is that users cannot reasonably install software through any means other than that single store. The problem is that Apple reserves special permissions and system integrations for their own apps and denies them to anyone else. That is not an acceptable way for a computer to work.

Isn't that exactly what the EU went after?

They didn't tell Apple not to charge 30% for their App Store. They can charge 90% for all they care.

They told Apple they mustn't block other installation methods.

Sort of. My reading of the DMA is basically what you're saying; Apple has to let people install what they want on their phones, Apple cannot self-preference with app capabilities. Apple is planning to comply not by allowing users to install what they want on their devices, but instead by offering companies an avenue to enter a business relationship with Apple through which Apple will allow users install that company's applications, provided that Apple has vetted and signed them. That is, all told Apple still has final say over what apps are allowed on peoples' phones. It sounds like the EC is going to nix those app-signing requirements, but the rest of the scheme may or may not be deemed acceptable.

So the question remains whether the spirit of the DMA is "users should be able to install the software they want on their computers" or "businesses offering apps and services should be able to compete with Apple on the iPhone". Is this a fundamentally a pro-user law or a pro-business law? There may be overlap, but they are not the same.

If there was alternatives Apple wouldn't be able to charge 30% anymore.

Wouldn't they? Google gets away with it.

Google Play charges 30%, despite F-Droid, Samsung Galaxy, TapTap, Itch.io, Aptoide, Amazon, Aurora, Uptodown, etc.

It really is amazing hearing Apple people talk about the world.

The preferred alternatives seems to be to charge 30% more when buying things through the app rather than the website or not doing in app purchases at all. Presumably the restrictions or the not user friendly experience Google enforces for users makes it not worth doing it on Android, so the other options are better.

They both charge 15% for most developers. Google charges 15% for the first million for all developers.

You are exactly describing the recent EU lawsuit

> That is not an acceptable way for a computer to work.

Luckily, you have a choice. Other companies make handheld computers that align better with your definition of ownership.

Phones are unique in the consumer space because of how thoroughly they can restrict end user usage. Once you buy an iPhone you can use it physically as a hammer if you wish, but if you want to digitally use a non-Apple wallet then you are restricted. Most consumer goods don't behave this way; my TV lets me watch anything I input into it, my bike lets me ride to wherever a pedal to, my vacuum lets me clean my counter if I want it to. Consumers are choosing a desirable physical good with undesirable digital restrictions. Apple is flexing its hardware power to its advantage and end user's disadvantage in software.

> Phones are unique in the consumer space because of how—

—they were marketed as phones that can compute, instead of as computers that can phone.

That's the crux: people would never have accepted the restrictions on computers like the iPhone, if that thing were instead sold as a general computer called the iPalm or similar. But since it's sold as a phone, any thing else it can do is more easily perceived as a bonus, and we hardly feel the restrictions at the beginning.

Only people who see smartphones for what they really are, general purpose palmtops that can make phone calls, can really perceive the egregiousness of those restrictions. The first step then, is generalising this understanding to everyone.

A good first step, I think, would be to start naming those things more accurately. I'd personally suggest "palmtop".

It isn't a general purpose computer. The form factor is compromised to make it work as a phone and it doesn't matter how good the CPU is.

A general purpose computer would be hard to use if it had an OOM killer instead of swap and if running the CPU full speed shut it off because it got too hot inside. (Using it too hard can also drain the battery even if it's on a full strength charger.)

you can add a keyboard to a phone the same way i can add a keyboard to my desktop to function.

phones are actually more general-purpose since they travel with you and know where you are.

> It isn't a general purpose computer.

This is straight up lala-land. Phones do banking, browsing, document writing, printing, video editing. Many people don't even have a computer.

> OOM killer instead of swap

Windows 10 apps work like that.

> Running the CPU full speed shut it off because it got too hot inside.

Happens to some crappy laptops. These are basically irrelevant details.

Phones do browsing only until you switch to another app and it has to kill the tab to save memory.

And remember, they don't do Flash ;)

It's web pages that changed to fit on phones, more than the other way round.

>Happens to some crappy laptops. These are basically irrelevant details.

Don't most modern (>2010) CPU's thermal throttle until they are back within operating temps? You'd have to stuff a laptop inside a backpack while maxing it to get it to overheat to the point of resetting

At this point, most people likely associated the word "phone" with something closer to a modern smartphone than a landline. Language can change. From my point of view, the problem is more that Apple set a precedent of these restrictions due to them being the first mover, and few mainstream phone companies have tried to break out of this idea (even though other phones are technically more flexible if you try hard enough).

Surely first-mover for smartphones is palm or blackberry or even Windows Mobile.

Yes, apple has about half the market today, that’s not the same thing as being first-mover. In fact it’s actually completely different because people had to make the choice to move away from the first-movers to apple.

People literally did give up their blackberries and palms and Jornadas for iPhone, consciously and deliberately, because it was a better product. And now you want to change the product and erode the benefits back to the minimum standard defined by android. That’s a taking.

It was a better product. But it would be quite a take to say their tolling & gate keeping was a significant contributor.

It was a better product because of its capacitive multi-touch screen and its overall speed (which I must insist depends more on what apps are installed by default than on the restrictions on third party apps).

> But it would be quite a take to say their tolling & gate keeping was a significant contributor.

Do you remember the first iPhone? Or for that matter what "mobile development" looked like before the iPhone? The first iPhone was more "tolled" and "gate kept" than any iPhone we have today. There was NO app store. To get an app on the iPhone, Apple had to make it, which meant you had to be big enough for Apple to care. Google got a Youtube app because they were that big. At some point Facebook had a built in integration (though I don't remember if it was a full fledged app). That was it. Development for the phone was going to be "web apps" only, without the biggest "web app" framework at the time, Flash. Compared to the first iPhones, a modern iPhone is wide open to all sorts of developers.

But perhaps more than that, even that first iPhone was leaps and bounds for most people over what prior devices were (save perhaps Palm Treos) in terms of "openness". Before the iPhone, the carriers decided what your phone could and couldn't do. A Razr phone from AT&T could send and receive data over bluetooth (like contacts and ring tones). That same exact phone from Verizon could only use bluetooth for headsets. Data transfer was locked down to vVrizon's own service (with a fee of course). Mobile app development was a crap shoot of different sdks and licensing costs per device, and then a hope that each carrier would allow your bejeweled clone, and served up through their services, of which they took HUGE cuts of the revenue. The 30/70 split of the iPhone app store was quite literally "revolutionary" in the cell phone space.

Which leads one to wonder if the tolling and gate keeping is such a hinderance, why is it that the iPhone remains so successful despite their largest competitor having none of those restrictions, pretty much from the get go. It's not like Apple was open and suddenly slammed the gates down on apps and iPhone development. And it's not like Android's openness is brand new. So the question that has to be asked is why does Apple continue to sell so well despite the restrictions? Why hasn't Android eaten all of Apple's market share as a massive open platform where anyone can do anything?

> Which leads one to wonder if the tolling and gate keeping is such a hinderance

I don't know, perhaps you should ask that to someone who actually made that argument? If I recall, people are still buying cigarettes, are they not? Stuff doesn't have to be good for you to sell good.

---

I don't dispute the facts you lay out here. I'll even cite game console as other general purpose computers that were (and still are) quite heavily locked down too. Apple however made one step further, and managed to sell a locked down general purpose computer for purposes other than gaming.

At the root of it all, I think, is how hardware vendors got away with selling their stuff without the full manual. Some instead provide a proprietary Windows driver. Others hide keys in them, don't tell users what they are, and then lobby to send heroic reverse engineers to jail. If I was the regulator I would probably start there.

> From my point of view, the problem is more that Apple set a precedent of these restrictions due to them being the first mover, and few mainstream phone companies have tried to break out of this idea

It's even worse than that: though I stand by what I said, you're correct, people are gradually realising that the difference between their smartphone and laptop/desktop (if any), is one of degree, not kind. But we don't see the push back we would have seen if they had realised right away. Instead, as you rightly point out, companies are building on Apple's precedent to try and expand their model to our good old laptops and desktops.

And it looks like they're succeeding. It would seem one has to pay Apple to even get the right to distribute a regular MacOS program regular users can actually execute (no Apple developer plan, no code signing). And newer versions of Windows are displaying increasingly scary warnings for programs telling you they "protected" your computer, which are bad enough that we get tutorials about how to get past them.

> Consumers are choosing a desirable physical good with undesirable digital restrictions.

So long as it is the customers making that choice, and they have access to alternatives, then it's not really a problem. If apple were advertising the iphone as a consumer product that had no such digital restrictions in an effort to hoodwink people into buying them, or if iphone were the only serious game in town, then those restrictions would be an issue, but right now iphones are advertised as being worth more than their competitors specifically because of those restrictions, and people are willing to pay such premiums. That you personally would not make the same decision does not mean they've been manipulated by anti-competitive measures into making theirs.

If someone were to make a consumer product that worked better for my use cases at the expense of being worse at or even incapable of doing things I don't intend to use it for, I should have the option to buy it. If you don't like the restrictions, buy something else. That's not anti-competitive, that is exactly how competition is supposed to work.

There is literally only one other competitor. That is not flourishing, competitive market when consumers can make many different choices. There are two companies that control nearly the entirety of the mobile software market, how can you expect that there would be no oversight to make sure they don't advantage their own software offerings?

But the reason is there only one other competitor isn't at all because of Apple or the competitor and doesn't have anything to do with their practices. The reason for it is because it's incredibly difficult and complex to put together a device like that and only certain types of companies have the resources and funds to create a product like that.

> isn't at all because of Apple or the competitor and doesn't have anything to do with their practices.

Can you buy the display from a supplier that supplies Apple and put together your own phone? No, they have exclusive agreement with apple.

Their anticompetitive practices Make It incredibly difficult and complex to put together a device. That's the whole point!

Is the assertion that Apple's supposed monopoly is because they have exclusive agreements on their hardware?

Exclusive agreements are legal.

Not if you are a dominant company.

I think you could buy an OLED display from Samsung if you wanted.

Samsung, Sony, Google, LG, Xiaomi, Motorola, Nokia, TCL, Kyocera, Fairphone, Pine64, Purism, and many others are more than "literally only one other competitor". And even if your complaint is that the only other option is "Android", there's no reason why those manufacturers couldn't make their own OS if they wanted to. There's no reason why even if they didn't want to, they couldn't make their own custom Android distribution.

If the linux community as small as it is can produce multiple varied and unique linux distributions largely on the backs of volunteers, there's no reason why these manufacturers (especially some of the bigger names) couldn't do the same with Android / Linux and their own hardware. And whatever reason is behind the failure of literally the entire cellphone industry to do what they were doing before the advent of iOS and Android, it isn't because Apple is somehow stopping them from making their own OS, and SDKs and app stores.

> right now iphones are advertised as being worth more than their competitors specifically because of those restrictions

Huh, I must've missed all the iPhone ads touting the device's inability to play Fortnight as a premium feature.

But these computers are so different… But if Apple does that it would be differently different… /s

I mean, what gp wants is literally just there on the shelves and they don’t want it. But they also want it, but in Apple, because it’s nicer when Apple does[n’t] it. Why would they want it after Apple does it?

Surprise, people want more than one thing out of a product.

Voting with your wallet works very badly when there are two main options. Which anti-consumer behaviors do you pick? When something is bad enough, it's better to make it illegal for all options.

I’m all for your device = your control, and I mean your.

But allowing software vendors to ignore AppStore will eventually lead to my bank apps, local maps apps, delivery apps etc to go non-AppStore-only route and do whatever they want on my phone, because I have no alternative (except for not using my phone). The first thing one of my bank apps did on my android phone was to install some sort of an “antivirus firewall” which abused every access and semi-exploit to make sure I’m “safe”.

Your ideas will affect me, and I can’t see why your (and my) inconvenience is more important than my security. It’s not just “better”. I’m asking to consider this perspective as well.

The controls on apps that prevent them from taking over should be part of the OS, not the app store.

The controls are in the app store because there is no way of doing it in the OS.

Whatever an "antivirus firewall" does, it sounds like something that should be tied to permissions or not have an API for it, either way easy to stop all apps from doing.

And I'm skeptical that governments would stop Apple from enforcing a rule that says apps have to let you refuse permissions.

By definition apple can’t do anything in that situation, because people don’t want third-party app stores and sideloading to be managed or notarized by apple at all.

This is the very definition of bad-faith motte-and-bailey argumentation, and it’s logically incoherent to boot. Get apple out of regulating apps and App Stores, no more telling developers what they can do! Oh and i guess they can tell developers to do one thing…

These apps usually simply refuse to work without permissions, so this is not a solution. Empty/fake permissions are easily detectable too. Someone will make a “framework” for that and we’ll see it in most important apps.

Motor companies should not be able to gate physical features (seat heaters) behind software.

My opinion isn't changed by the fact that I can purchase from a company that doesn't do that.

> Motor companies should not be able to gate physical features (seat heaters) behind software.

Why not? If you don’t want a car with this property, don’t buy one — how are you being harmed?

Because its stupid and annoying

Then don’t buy one.

It would be fine if companies were extremely clear about it, saying “the car is $30k, but the average customer ends up paying an additional $2k in subscriptions for basic features”. Or “the phone is $1000, but most software will be more expensive due to our 30% tax”. Of course they’re not that clear, and I would argue these business models only make sense when there’s deception involved.

Just because you aren’t being harmed doesn’t mean you can’t think it’s wrong or try to prevent it. There are lots of things people fight against that doesn’t directly impact them (yet).

One good reason in this particular examples is I don’t want subscription based heated seats to become popular, because then I won’t have a choice anymore.

No, the part that's really bad is that they lock up features behind software locks, but these aren't that hard to break for hackers. But then they get laws passed which make it illegal to change these features on your car, or even to tell other people how to do so.

How the DMCA hasn't been struck down by the Supreme Court as an abridgment of the 1st Amendment, I really don't know.

Luckily, we have anti-trust and other forms of law and regulation specifically because assuming markets will alway provide meaningful choices has historically proven a bad assumption.

In this case, we don't have to assume. There is meaningful choice in which platform you use.

We only have to assume that our legal system will do it's job. Personally, I think the government has a weak case. No customers are being harmed by Apple's restrictions and there is certainly no monopoly.

I am quite aware of the landscape. I use a Pixel phone with GrapheneOS and an iPhone. I prefer many aspects of my iPhone, and can understand why many people choose one as their primary or sole mobile computer. A phone is a very special product category, it's where most users keep their digital lives. As such switching costs are quite high, and user agency is quite important. In general software introduces some very odd dynamics into ownership. If you buy a vacuum cleaner you can take it home, plug it in, and vacuum every room in your house; the vacuum cleaner is yours. If you buy a Roomba and take it home, it demands that you sign a unilateral EULA, then install an app on your phone, and then informs you that it will only clean one room unless you sign up for Roomba Pro for $20/mo[0]. So clearly Roomba still owns the vacuum cleaner they just sold you; they have the final say in what it does or doesn't do. That's ownership. Now, technically, you can legally disassemble your Roomba, and if you manage to dump, modify, and reflash its control software, then you'd be allowed to use your product to clean multiple rooms without paying monthly for the privilege. That would require a lot of effort and specialized skills and tooling, and you would then not be allowed to share your modifications with less skilled Roomba owners because doing so would almost certainly involve trafficking DRM circumvention technology, which is a crime. So in practical terms you only own the Roomba as an inanimate plastic puck.

This whole situation maps to iPhones as well. As things stand when you purchase an iPhone you own a glass brick, and Apple owns the phone part. They graciously allow you to use their phone to perform a certain limited set of activities. I am fundamentally opposed to this sort of non-ownership. Whether the buyer had an option to purchase a roughly-equivalent item with different terms is irrelevant; selling someone a product while retaining ownership of it is a mockery of property rights. Some rights are too important to allow people to sign them away with the tap of a button. When the market missteps by rewarding bad behavior like this it is the job of our democratic governments to step in and mandate good behavior.

[0]: this is made up to illustrate a point, I don't actually know how Roomba service works

This is all so exhausting and goes in circles over and over. I honestly can not believe that there are people on HackerNews of all places that want two companies to control pocket computers and just because one is only marginally better it's totally okay that the first one is draconian.

I feel like someone who woke up in the middle ages with a fever and they are trying to cure me with leeches. Yes yes. No need to worry. Let the leech do it's work and you too will be secure from the plague.

Does anyone actually know anyone that has gotten hacked on their Android phone?

People like their iPhone and get mad when you point out it is not the best for everyone and go back to I got mine. Really sad to see on HN especially.

No… I like my iPhone and get mad when people want the government to force Apple to change how it works. I like how it works now, which is why I bought it.

And you could continue to enjoy that experience by only using Apple's own app store, while everyone else would also be free to use other app stores to install apps they want which Apple does not like. See how this still works? You don't lose here, you win freedom even if you don't want to take advantage of it. You might even win financially because competition from other app stores might force Apple to lower their fees.

Great news! I don’t see many people on HN getting mad when you point out that Apple isn’t the best for everyone. I’m not saying you made it up. Maybe I just don’t read enough comments.

I do see people saying they like how Apple devices work, and that they consciously choose Apple devices over devices from other manufacturers. Those are informed consumers making a choice you wouldn’t make. It’s not sad. Some people won’t agree with you in life. That’s normal.

Choice does exist in the market. There are far more than 2 manufacturers, and some of them focus on more HN-ish people who have more principles than I do.

I don’t really want the government to limit my smartphone choices in this way, but I also realize that Apple devices will continue to exist and will mostly work the way they do today, so it’s not that big a deal to me.

There are 2 parts to this argument, first being people are justifying their iPhone ownership,(and cult membership) with "Apple should do exactly what they are doing" because I like what I get, and I don't want the other folks in my cult ;).

Point 2 being the H in HN stands for Hacker defined as: "a person who uses computers to gain unauthorized access to data." Then the argument becomes why are people who are reading HN and, presumably, calling themselves hackers so interested in keeping status quo and letting Apple control everything? I think we go back to argument 1 and excluding others, green bubbles and such making a subset "better" than others. Elitist as F and some folks, like myself cannot stand for this and take time to explain the failure to others.

Pretty simple really ;)

> There are 2 parts to this argument, first being people are justifying their iPhone ownership,(and cult membership) with "Apple should do exactly what they are doing" because I like what I get, and I don't want the other folks in my cult ;).

It sounds like you’re assuming that people are in a “cult” because they don’t share some of your opinions. I’m sure that’s not what you’re doing, because you are a rational person engaging in a rational discussion. Can you help me understand what you really meant?

> Then the argument becomes why are people who are reading HN and, presumably, calling themselves hackers so interested in keeping status quo and letting Apple control everything?

Because they like Apple devices. Next question.

> I think we go back to argument 1 and excluding others, green bubbles and such making a subset "better" than others. Elitist as F and some folks, like myself cannot stand for this and take time to explain the failure to others.

It sounds like you’re upset because some people who buy Apple devices make jokes about “green bubbles” and “blue bubbles”. I’m sorry that happened to you. Nobody likes getting their feelings hurt.

I’m generally opposed to snobbery, but I don’t think it’s illegal.

> Pretty simple really ;)

Cool winky face.

The reply was mostly tongue in cheek via elaboration... The point about hackers wanting to change their devices still stands though and as one of other replies noted there is no reason both cannot coexist, some use their iPhone as Apple wants and some don't, if Apple doesn't want to relinquish control, we'll make them, just like MSFT was made to do things it didn't want to.

I don't even use an iPhone, I do use some Apple hardware as well as my household, but still stand for openness and am not in favor of walled gardens.

Snobbery is mostly about people trying to explain their usage of devices that break core tenements of open [internet, hardware, software ...] with poor arguments of "I like what I get" or simply "I got mine" and you can't for reasons.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Pretty sure some of the shills here are heavily invested in Apple stocks.

Apple revenue would likely go up in an open ecosystem. See Microsoft if you don't believe me.

Everyone is, it's the second biggest company in SPY.

"...selling someone a product while retaining ownership of it is a mockery of property rights."

Excellent comment, it sums the situation up very well. And the above extract encapsulates the matter in just a few words.

If I buy an iPhone, I can legally sell it. Thats ownership.

> Luckily, you have a choice. Other companies make handheld computers that align better with your definition of ownership.

The issue is that your choice is constrained by vertical integration. If you like Apple's hardware, or iOS, or iMessage, or any number of other things, these are all tied together with Apple's app store when they should not be. It's like encountering a retail monopoly in California and someone tells you that you're lucky because you can shop at another store and all you have to do is move to Florida, which also has a retail monopoly, but a different one.

Obviously this is not the same thing, and does not have the same benefits, as multiple stores being right next to each other and allowing you to choose the one you want on a per-purchase basis.

The opposing view, in this retail metaphor, is that they like living in a state with this retail monopoly, because the store will not sell them or anyone else... say, bacon. And they find bacon distasteful and like being able to live in a community where nobody eats it. If the retail monopoly were broken, then their neighbors would be able to purchase bacon, and some would have cookouts and they would have to smell it. Perhaps their favorite snack would discontinue its regional bacon-free variant and sell its normal variant in another store now that it is able to. Don't you know that bacon is bad for you?

The counterpoint is: if bacon is so bad awful and bad for you we should probably regulate its sale, rather than leave that up to a company bullying other companies.

The better counterpoint is, if you don't like bacon, don't buy it, and stop trying to control other people, lest they try and control you.

Careful. You start applying that to other things like, say birth control or planned parenthood, people lose their minds.

> The issue is that your choice is constrained by vertical integration.

No it’s not. It’s constrained by one’s preferences as a consumer. If I am concerned about vertical integration, I will not choose an Apple device. Personally, I am not concerned about vertical integration. It seems to make my devices work better.

> If you like Apple's hardware, or iOS, or iMessage, or any number of other thing, these are all tied together with Apple's app store when they should not be.

Why not? Because you say so? Or because it harms consumers? Can you describe how it harms consumers? Smartphones are cheap and plentiful. Cloud-based apps and services are too.

Yes, I might have to make some tough choices as a consumer. Maybe no company makes the perfect device for me. I might really like iMessage, but hate iPhone hardware. But there are lots of viable competitors to iMessage and plenty of viable mobile devices on which to run them. “I don’t get to use iMessage on my Pixel phone” is not evidence of harm.

> It's like encountering a retail monopoly in California and someone tells you that you're lucky because you can shop at another store and all you have to do is move to Florida, which also has a retail monopoly, but a different one.

No, it’s not. Switching mobile platforms is nothing like migrating 2000+ miles in terms of difficulty or expense. If you want to use a retail analogy, it’s like complaining that you can’t buy Kirkland-branded products at Wal-Mart.

Luckily, people can like something despite shortcomings and ask for it to become better.

Unfortunately regulations and lawsuits like this one seek to reduce the amount of meaningful choices consumers have in the smartphone market.

“You can buy this other thing” is not a good defense against antitrust allegations simply because that’s not what it’s about.

What is it about?

> The problem with Apple is not that they take a 30% cut of app sales in their store, or that they don't allow alternative browser engines or wallets apps or superapps or whatever in their store.

Nope, the problem very much is that they won't allow alternative browser engines, specifically so that they can force a crippled Safari browser with limited APIs to force people to write apps instead of web apps, forcing more traffic to their store. It's explicitly anti-competitive behavior.

>It's their store and they ought to be able to curate it however they like.

It's kind of forced fraud to call Chrome in iOS as "Chrome". It's like trying to sell someone a Ferrari that's just a facade bolted onto 2010 Honda. It's not Chrome, it's actually Safari - and its seems like people are finally starting to wake up to this abusive behavior that Apple has been getting away with for far too long.

Microsoft had a famous anti-trust case against them for simply bundling IE with Windows - not from forcing their engine on every other "browser" that gets installed. Apple is doing far worse than that and getting away with it for far too long.

>The problem is that users cannot reasonably install software through any means other than that single store.

That's one of the many other problems outlined by the DOJ today.

>The problem is that Apple reserves special permissions and system integrations for their own apps and denies them to anyone else.

Also another problem.

>However, these sorts of lawsuits or regulations that seek to force Apple to change App Store policies feel so wrong-headed and out of touch.

I was clapped out loud when I watched the DOJ announcement today. I cheered. They actually mentioned "Developers", which is a group I am part of, and I feel the pain that dealing with Apple and Safari is. Apple absolutely deserves this, and it's about time.

It is not a “mobile computer”. The fact that it has a CPU and other computer parts is an implementation detail (your dishwasher also probably has a CPU). If you want a mobile computer then buy one, don’t buy an iPhone, and don’t advocate for the government to force Apple to change how iPhones work for those of us who like them.

Sony and Microsoft obviously don’t benefit from opening up the platforms, it’s not just something they don’t care about but something they actively oppose, and they specifically ensured they got legislative exceptions to ensure they would never have to reciprocate under the DMA.

Your goals aren’t aligned, you’re just a useful idiot to them and they’ll cast you aside as soon as they no longer need you. The end result of the push isn’t going to be “free as in freedom” for everybody here, just Microsoft capturing 90% of a revenue stream instead of 70%.

Classic populism moment - but of course it’s “populism, but on the computer”.

Freedoms for users and freedom for business are two fundamentally opposed and conflicting goals, see: GPL vs MIT/BSD. And in their moment of victory, businesses will just steamroll right over you - just like they literally already did with consoles.

It’s just crazy that they have these exceptions when their own hardware is very much general-purpose on a technical level, and when they’re actively pushing to use that general-purpose capability to ensnare users with AI features and other crap.

Sony and Microsoft are two of the platforms that stand to gain the most from AI adoption literally purely on the basis of being closed platforms with proprietary APIs (plus a minimal amount of interop for embrace-extend-extinguish) with millions of active users and a captive audience of dev studios who have no choice but to use Sony and Microsoft’s closed, gatekept platforms.

Somehow the plight of poor little Larian being stepped on by Sony and Microsoft and Epic just doesn’t make the front page of HN like apple hate.

The game console exception in the DMA is very disappointing, but phones are the largest gaming platform regardless. As hardware improves and ownership becomes even more obligatory I suspect we will see more development effort focused there. I can only hope that F2P/Gacha game culture on mobile is destroyed by that point. Perhaps by anti-gambling laws?

Is Macbook less secure because I can install whatever app I want, even my own app? No, it's not. I want to be able to do the same with my iPhone. It's as simple as that.

Well, yes, it is less secure. Though Apple has been adding more restrictions around apps having full disk access and stuff.

And yet no one would ever want or think of locking down MacOS like they have locked down iOS. Turns out that grown ups don't need Apple to babysit them for additional "security" when everybody knows that Apple's real reason is just money+greed and the "security" talking point is just a convenient smokescreen.

I wouldn't want it, but I can see both Apple and heads of a lot of IT departments loving the concept of a locked-down MacOS.

That's a completely different scenario and those IT departments already have their own mechanisms of enforcing lockdowns, they wouldn't want others to impose lockdowns on them (the administrators) too. For devs, such an Apple imposed lockdown on MacOS would destroy the Macbook's popularity, since it would regress and turn into a glorified ipad.

A locked-down MacOS would be awful but at least you’d still have Linux (thanks Asahi).

With an iPhone you are stuck with whatever new decision from Apple with no opt-out. That’s abnormal.

See, I’d be ok to say that Apple can do whatever they want with iOS the day they give me the keys to the boot loader. Until then, they’ll have to assume their role of gatekeeper.

I have no issues with walled gardens as long as you’ve got the key to leave. Here the key to leave is called "throw your $1000 phone to buy another".

That the iPhone is a general-purpose computer is an implementation detail, not a product feature or guarantee.

> heads of a lot of IT departments loving the concept of a locked-down MacOS

And Airport security loves invasive search - why do people understand one is a violation of privacy, but tolerate the other?

I don’t carry my MacBook around with me everywhere I go, though, so it’s different.

For some people in the world the iphone is the only general purpose computing device they own, so it is even more important that they aren't artificially constrained so Apple can milk users with absurd fees while citing bogus reasons as justification.

Just look at cases where governments abuse Apple's power over users to squash protests and delete important Apps from the Appstore. Without competing Appstores users are left at the mercy of a trillion dollar company which cares about profits and profits only. Not being able to freely install apps from any source the owner of the computing device prefers is outrageous and we can only thank the EU commission for recognizing that.

https://www.npr.org/2019/10/10/768841864/after-china-objects...

This is basically what an iPad with a keyboard attachment is, and iPads sell very well.

And one of the main reasons why people feel the need to upgrade their device to a "real computer" is when the users hit those artificial boundaries which they are not allowed to bypass.

Which iPad owner ever thinks "oh I wish my iPad were even less capable"? Most people are annoyed by its limitations but they accept it as a trade off. I personally would use my iPad much more if it were as capable & open as a Mac.

> Which iPad owner ever thinks "oh I wish my iPad were even less capable"?

Me, kinda. I've disliked most of the moves to make it more like a general purpose computing platform and less like a slab of glass that becomes different tools (but mostly one at a time!). I have other options for that other crap, the iPad was (still is... barely) a distinct different category that I liked also having. iOS 6 is peak-iOS to me.

If the iPad pro came with macOS I'd have one instead of my macbook.

>And yet no one would ever want or think of locking down MacOS like they have locked down iOS.

https://www.qubes-os.org/intro/, snapd and BSD jails are all forms of locking down a general computer OS ways similar to the way iOS is locked down, and things that individual users choose to do on their own computers. Sure those users can install anything else they want as well, but then there's also a reason why these things are niche, even within the nice of *nix users. Because the administration and management is a headache and people don't generally want to do that.

>Turns out that grown ups don't need Apple to babysit them for additional "security"

I think you have an over estimation of the average "grown ups" ability to judge the safety and security of their computer or the software they run on it. There are plenty of people out there who do not want or need to understand system security and administration and are much better served by having someone else manage that for them. There's a reason why Windows and MacOS are still more popular than Linux, and there's a reason why in the Linux world, Red Hat, CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu are more popular than Arch. People only have a limited amount of time and energy to dedicate to things and not everyone wants to dedicate theirs to our shared hobby.

You forgot to mention that all those Operating Systems you mentioned allow the user to break free from restrictions if they desire to do so because the machine is their property after all. Mechanisms for "Security" only become a jail if there is absolutely no way to break free.

And having certain restrictions to hide complexity from users to hide complexity is by no means comparable to "security" whose only purpose is to shackle users so they can never escape obscene fees because Apple uses the same strategy as the mafia: "pay us for protection".

If it's not voluntary, what's the difference between Apple's behavior and Tony Soprano's behavior?

>You forgot to mention that all those Operating Systems you mentioned allow the user to break free from restrictions if they desire to do so because the machine is their property after all.

If you read past the first sentence, you would discover I wrote more than just that one. In fact, the second sentence which starts with:

>Sure those users can install anything else they want as well

and then goes on to explain why super hardened security OSs aren't even mainstream among tech people who should in theory be all about super hardened security in their OS.

>If it's not voluntary, what's the difference between Apple's behavior and Tony Soprano's behavior?

Except it is voluntary. Apple didn't force anyone to buy an iPhone. They didn't walk into people's homes with a baseball bat in hand commenting on the "nice general purpose computers you've got here". They didn't promise free computing and the ability to install anything from anywhere and then suddenly switch away locking people in after investing in a huge open system where none of their apps are available anywhere else. Any user can walk away from the iPhone simply by buying a device from any one of a number of other sellers, all of which offer Android OSes with all the freedoms they could possibly want, and Apple can't do anything about it, nor will Apple show up at their house in the middle of the night to leave a headless server in their bed sheets.

>>Sure those users can install anything else they want as well

>and then goes on to explain why super hardened security OSs aren't even mainstream among tech people who should in theory be all about super hardened security in their OS.

You are intentionally arguing in bad faith, the point is and was that Apple's intention is not restriction for the sake of "security" but for the sake of funneling everything through their gate so they can impose a tax on everybody. It's the same with their sanctimonious "privacy" arguments, it's all BS and the DOJ realized this too. [0]

>>If it's not voluntary, what's the difference between Apple's behavior and Tony Soprano's behavior?

>Except it is voluntary. Apple didn't force anyone to buy an iPhone.

That's a bullshit framing that's a bait and switch in level, which is similar to saying "well the rail barons didnt force you to use their railroads, just use other railroads LOL". If a product or service becomes so prevalent in society then certain rules and regulations apply in a fair market and the EU commission has recognized that and finally the U.S has recognized that as well. By making that argument you also implicitly admit that the "security" argument is actually bogus and not really for the user's protection otherwise they would see no problem in granting an escape hatch for power users, but they don't do that because it's not about security an it never was.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/21/doj-calls-apples-privacy-j...

Security is a consideration, but ultimately it's a design decision for the product. Companies can generally make design decisions for their products as they see fit. Apple is no more obliged to provide the escape hatch you describe for the iPhone, than Zojirushi is obliged to let me to change the song that plays when I press the start button.

> Companies can generally make design decisions for their products as they see fit. Apple is no more obliged to provide the escape hatch you describe for the iPhone, than Zojirushi is obliged to let me to change the song that plays when I press the start button.

That's not true, if those "design decisions" are anti-competitive in nature then they are absolutely not allowed to do that, that's what the EU commission is fixing with the DMA and now the U.S. is suing Apple too.

I guess this would be relevant if Apple had a monopoly in the phone market.

> And yet no one would ever want or think of locking down MacOS like they have locked down iOS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux

the delightful irony is you’re literally so wrong they put it right in the name. Security Enhanced.

The military knows damn well that limiting unprivileged users to running a limited selection of vetted and approved apps and restricting their ability to make tools that might aid their ability to jump the sandbox increases security. They literally built the canonical OS extension to do it. It’s not sufficient for security by itself, but it does additively increase security vs a non-policy-enforced environment with higher freedom.

It is, however, necessary for security. Literally every enterprise sysadmin, every single one, windows or Linux or otherwise, knows that letting users set policies on their own devices decreases security. And in the real world, those policies/access control are either: (a) mandatory, or (b) ineffective. If you allow a mechanism for users to opt out - they will opt out 100% of the time, and it’s ineffective. There is no middle ground, if there is a way to go around then users will do it, it's either a matter of policy or it functionally doesn't exist.

Facebook et al will certainly exploit their network power to push users to do that, just like any other attacker. No different than Chinese agents going after a debt-laden private. They literally already got caught using their dev credentials trying to pull a sneaky and tunnel users data via a VPN for data mining purposes.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-...

But I’m sure you know infosec better than the NSA. This is HN after all.

And again - such escape valves already exist. You can sideload apps on an iphone without paying any extra money. Altstore/Appstore++ exist to refresh your app notarization automatically etc.

Almost as if this is really all about the transaction fees and apple's cut of money that tim sweeney sees as rightfully his, and not user freedom at all... but I'm sure there's a very good, very pro-consumer reason Sony and Microsoft exempted themselves from the DMA?

it's amusing how you can miss his point so badly and still think that's he is wrong and not you for applying a false analogy and making the false conclusion.

The example you mentioned is fundamentally different, why? The owner has the option to completely disable anything they dislike or install a different OS, especially on linux which prides itself on maximum user choice. And even then it's asinine to compare features that are for enhanced security and Apple's version of "security" which just limits user choice to products that have to pass Apple's gate so they have to pay a tax to enrich Apple.

It’s definitely less secure. IMO that’s an acceptable tradeoff but it’s still true that MacOS allows you to install potentially harmful software in a way that an iPhone doesn’t. With great power comes great responsibility and all.

The problem is that "less secure" is not exactly meaningful without a lot of clarifications.

I'm no security expert, but I know that security is certainly not a linear, at the very least it's some multi-dimensional thing that's exceptionally hard to generalize.

One system can be more or less secure than another for some party or parties, for some particular threat models if you can or cannot install certain apps, etc etc. Skipping all those bits makes the statement vague, increasing the risk of misunderstanding of the implied conditions.

Just a quick example. Installing an app could paradoxically make the device simultaneously more and less secure for the owner. Let's say it's an advanced firewall app. On the one hand it improves the network hygiene, improving the device security against its network peers. On the other hand, it may help in compromising the device, if someone gains access to its control interface and exploits it for nefarious purposes.

Objectively, yes.

It is. That's why I do all of my banking on iOS.

Yes it is, it just isn’t as big of a target for bad actors because it’s a much less personal device with way fewer users.

I don't even let my users have browser extensions without them going through the formal review process. Managing the proliferation of PWAs (potentially unwanted apps) is one of the most unsolvable issues in security. iOS is the gold standard for secure mobile computing due to inability to support alot of these risky use causes.

> we’ve removed all features in the name of security

Wow, gold standard for sure. Is this why iOS zero day costs less than Android one?

https://zerodium.com/program.html

Exactly, this is marketing talk. Pixel is secure, get regular updates, lesser target than iphone and in terms of privacy can be "hardened" just by going over the Google services setting menu and opting out of everything. Rest can be achieved by using Firefox (which actually runs on Android not like FF on iOS which is a shell) with ad blockers and choosing a different search engine.

I would argue it's much more secure and more private this way

or you could enable ios lockdown mode in one click if you feel like going full "im a targeted individual". I'm more talking appsec here. Even from the personal non-enterprise security angle android has the sideloaded boyfriend stalkerware issue and the flavor of the week banking Trojan PDF readers on google play issue. Apple just seems to stay out the news on the app store security front.

i wouldn't put much stake a zerodium numbers as the benchmark of platform security. People who sell these kind of gray market mobile zero days for big bucks aren't going public about it. Mostly because the only buyers that aren't the OEM are nation states, maybe the top end of criminal land and of course the NSO group. Plus android's at least 10x the market when you start talking IOT and point sale etc.

Wouldn't the value of a zero day be the expected return on what you can get from it? So a lower cost on iOS zero days means less buyers want them, presumably because they're less capable than a zero day on Android?

Of course it's less secure.

Whether or not it's more secure is moot as far as Apple's concerned. For them it's about control of the market, not device security.

Yes. That’s why there is substantially more malware for Mac than iPhone despite iPhone having far, far more users.

If you want to treat your phone like a general-purpose computer, that's fine, but the iPhone doesn't work that way, very much by design. I understand that you want a different user experience, but them's the breaks.

if you like your prison, that's your thing, you have the right to stay in it, just don't force other people to live in misery under your preferences when they'd rather live in freedom. we also have rules and regulations which decide if something is lawful or not, so it's not just about what you personally like or not.

No one is forcing anyone to buy an iPhone. You still have that choice, you just want to force someone else to make another choice. It's hypocritical.

I like the iPhone in general but there’s a ton of things I need to keep an old Android around for, because of functionality apple blocks for no good reason: connecting to many non approved bluetooth devices, vehicle gauges and other useful driving data in carplay, etc.

None of these require allowing alternative app stores. Just allowing more apps in. You don’t have to use these apps, and theres nothing inherently insecure about it.

You know that nobody forces you to use features you don't want to, right?

> they should just let people jail break the phone and offer zero support for it

That would be significantly more fair to the end users than the current status quo, if they won't intentionally make obstacles for those users.

Obviously, that's not happening.

Note there could easily be even more obstacles than there are. Third party apps like banking apps actually have extra jailbreaking checks; first party apps don't, you can still watch DRM movies, and afaik it doesn't void the warranty. At least not if nobody notices.

Same here. I use linux VMs and containers for all my "hacking" where I need total control and customizability of the OS. On my workstation and phone, where I do my banking and read emails, I'm willing to trade control and customizability for an extremely locked down high trust operating environment. I feel like Apple's closed ecosystem, despite all its flaws, gets this compromise right.

You don't do banking on a laptop?

Not often, no. What’s banking in this context mean for you? I’m assuming viewing accounts and depositing checks?

Exclusively, yes. Except for that second factor authentication they forced me to install on my phone (without which doing online payments would be a pain). I like and trust my Ubuntu laptop.

I do avoid Windows for those things, though.

Do banks have mobile check deposit on a laptop? I don't think mine does.

Nerd here who started on MS-DOS and later spent nearly a decade running Linux on a laptop as my main computing device. Gentoo, for about half that time. Various other stuff in between, developed software targeting probably a seven or eight different operating systems and/or platforms, et c., et c. I've got a reasonable amount of computer-dork cred, is the point, though around these parts, nothing all that remarkable.

Very nearly every halfway serious computer-involved activity I do these days (=last seven or eight years) that matters in my actual, real life takes place on my phone, including approximately all banking. All the other computers—even the "real" ones—in my life are basically toys. 90% of my real-life important or meaningful stuff I do with computers happens on my phone, 9% on a tablet, and at-most 1% on everything else.

(in my personal life, I mean—unfortunately I still have to try to use "real" computers to accomplish allegedly-important things at work)

I'd kill for an Apple-sanctioned way to load Linux VMs on my iPad and have them run at full speed. It's got an M1 in it, the virtualization hardware is there, Apple just doesn't want me using it.

As it currently stands, the options for Linux VMs on an iPad are:

- iSH, a Linux kernel ABI compatible user-mode x86 emulator that uses threaded code (ROP chains) as a substitute for a proper JIT, but doesn't support all x86 applications[0].

- UTM, a port of QEMU that requires JIT (and thus, either an external debugger or a jailbreak) to run a full x86 or ARM OS.

- UTM SE (Slow Edition), which is UTM but using the threaded code technique from iSH, which is not only slower than iSH because it runs both kernel and user mode, but also got banned from TestFlight before they could even make an App Store submission (probably because it can get to a desktop while iSH can't).

All of these suck in different ways.

[0] Notably, rustc gives an illegal instruction error and mysql crashes trying to do unaligned atomics

> I use linux VMs and containers for all my "hacking" where I need total control and customizability of the OS

> On my workstation and phone, where I do my banking and read emails, I'm willing to trade control and customizability for an extremely locked down high trust operating environment.

Excuse my French, but uh what? A browser accessing a bank in a Linux virtual machine running on bare metal is by far more secure than desktop MacOS running on bare metal.

At the end of the day, for the activity you described (browsing), what you must be able to defend against is the inherent insecurity of the browser. Linux provides all manners of process, network, etc isolation via CGroups and can be enhanced by SecComp to limit the usage of typical exotic syscalls used in kernel exploits.

MacOS has what for that? The best opportunity you have for defense is to run qemu so that you can run... Linux. The corporation you work for doesn't use Apple because of their stellar security posture, it uses Apple because they can buy mobile devices (phones, laptops) preconfigured with MDM which saves a lot of money.

> MacOS has what for that?

It has sandboxing, which does all that stuff.

(iOS has even more, like JIT protections.)

> Excuse my French, but uh what? A browser accessing a bank in a Linux virtual machine running on bare metal is by far more secure than desktop MacOS running on bare metal.

Facts are most definitely not in evidence for this claim.

I don't buy into this narrative. I have a Pixel phone, you can do quite a lot of privacy "hardening" just by going over the Google settings and turning off a lot of tracking (which they were probably forced to put in by regulators). The rest you can achieve by using Firefox instead of Chrome and choose a different search engine.

I get a lot of hard to solve Google CAPTCHA on many websites I visit so I know Google is having a hard time tracking me :-)

In terms of security, I don't think Pixel is less secure than the iPhone. It gets security updates regularly, Google invests a lot in security and I don't think the Pixel has more zero days than the iPhone...

So all in all, I don't buy into the "iPhone is more secure and handles your privacy better than Android" narrative

Nothing like arguing against software freedom because of "checks notes", security by obscurity. I thought I'd read higher effort content on HN.

> offer zero support for it.

If only they had it left it there.

> they should just let people jail break the phone and offer zero support for it.

Just let people wipe the phone completely - no drivers, no kernel, nothing, and bring their own. That's the proper solution to people wanting to own their hardware and do whatever they want with it. Want to install a different app store/browser/etc? Go for it, start by installing the new kernel and drivers.

That is the right way to think about it.

If your walled garden (App Store) is really better, people will stay in it voluntarily.

If they would only verify quality and provide safe APIs and paths to safely integrate they can have their platform. The issue is that they are both managing the plantform and (unfairly) participating themselves.

If they had one set of APIs for smartwatches that can be used by them for the apple watch and everyone else for their smartwatches they wouldn’t get sued. But instead they give themselves deep integration into the OS and limit everyone elses access. When you are one of the only available platforms thats not okay.

> If people want to buy an iphone and shit it up, let them do it.

The next generation isn't necessarily choosing, though.

Their parents are giving into their demands for *an iPhone due to social pressures entirely originated by Apple's monopolistic behavior (iMessage green bubbles).

Then, when they're locked into the Apple ecosystem from the start, it's almost impossible to break out -- even if you grow up into a mature adult that doesn't give a shit about bubble colors.

Interoperability (being able to exit an ecosystem without massive downsides, specifically) between the only two parties in a de facto duopoly is absolutely necessary and morally right, and it's a shame market failures force the judiciary to intervene. But we are where we are and there's no use putting lipstick on a pig -- the system as it stands is broken, and if left alone will feed on itself and become even more broken.

> Their parents are giving into their demands for *an iPhone due to social pressures entirely originated by Apple's monopolistic behavior (iMessage green bubbles).

First of all, we don't have that problem here in europe. People just use cross-platform messengers.

Secondly, I don't understand why a company should be forced to bring its service to a platform it doesn't care about. Apple supports the default carrier messaging standards (SMS/MMS). It's not Apple's fault that they suck. In fact Apple explicitely created iMessage because SMS/MMS were absolutely terrible.

If RCS is considered a standard (is it?), then Apple should absolutely support it and apparently they plan to do so. Seems fine to me.

While I personally don't use iMessage I'd prefer it if the service was available everywhere, but I don't see why Apple should be forced to support other platforms. Just because iMessage is popular? Imagine a world where WhatsApp was either an iOS- or Android-exclusive app. Should they be forced to develop for a platform they don't care about too? What about popular iOS-exclusive apps like Things? What about Garageband or Logic? Or Super Mario games on Nintendo?

  > Their parents are giving into their demands for *an iPhone due to social pressures entirely originated by Apple's monopolistic behavior (iMessage green bubbles).
  First of all, we don't have that problem here in europe

We also have a smaller percentage of iPhone users here in Europe.

Apple could have open up their API. Or not try to shut it down so hard when someone finds a way around to use their API

> Or not try to shut it down so hard when someone finds a way around to use their API

Find me any other service that would ok with this? Beeper wanted to piggyback on Apple's network _and_ charge users for using Apple's servers for free. Are we going to force companies to provide an open API for all their services _and_ offer them at a reasonable cost? We saw what happened with Reddit and I have no doubt Apple would similarly charge high fees. I'm not saying I think this would be bad thing (forcing open APIs) but it better be a wide sweeping change not something targeted at a single company.

Lastly what are the rules around spam? Where is the line where Apple can tell a client or a company they refuse to do business with them due to the spam/malicious messages they send. Say what you will about iMessage being locked down but I can count on 2 hands max the number of spam iMessage messages I've recieved. On the other hand I get multiple SMS spam messages every day that I cannot unsubscribe from or block (they change numbers with every message). Aside from TOTP (which I wish they'd just let me use my own client instead of sending them) I could block pretty much all SMS and be happier for it.

That's the biggest thing, allowing sideloading is 100% optional and lets people stay in the walled garden if they want. Apple not allowing it is absolutely about suppressing competition, which given their >50% market share is a blatant abuse of their monopoly.

I can’t wait for every data hoarding app (Facebook, Reddit, Google) to require sideloading so now we’ll have the choice to either use Android or Apple when being tracked down to granular details.

I want it to be semi onerous to enable apps outside the App Store, for this reason.

The real question is : is it Apple’s role to protect people against Facebook or Google ? I mean, if you want to be protected against Facebook, just delete the app.

It’s the role of regulators to stop data hoarding.

Also this narrative is complete bullshit from Apple since those protections never came from App Store’s policies enforcement but from iOS sandboxing mechanisms which are not going to disappear for sideloaded apps.

I’m pretty amazed that on HN, of all the places, people still believe the narrative that the Apple reviewing process can enforce app behavior while all they’ve got to review is a binary. The App Store reviewing is just there to check if you are loyal into Apple.

> It’s the role of regulators to stop data hoarding.

Okay well they can stop Apple's enforcement of their tracking policies after they make regulations against data hoarding. Not beforehand leaving us with the only choices of be tracked or give up on the app entirely when we currently have a third option to use apps without accurate tracking.

> I’m pretty amazed that on HN, of all the places, people still believe the narrative that the Apple reviewing process can enforce app behavior while all they’ve got to review is a binary.

You don't need to believe Apple. You can believe all the ad companies revenue dropping by 30% for mobile users the quarter after Apple rolled out the tracking changes. There's a reason all these apps began you to click yes before showing the iOS system popup for tracking permissions.

It’s not just sandboxing. The number of users who can be tricked into approving access to services (essentially phishing) is quite large.

The App Store review process actually does do a surprisingly good job at keeping malware apps off it.

Just how it happened on Android! Oh, wait…

If you're so scared of Facebook, don't use it. Trotting it out as a scare tactic is just whataboutism, considering the scenario you're paranoid about hasn't happened on Android, macOS, etc.

This FUD remains as if they don't know situation on Android.

Sideloading is already a thing on Android, and I am not forced to use these apps to use the Android ecosystem. Mind you there are certain phone manufacturers who pack their phone full of crap, but I have a large selection of Android phones to choose from to avoid that. Even Google doesn't force me to use their app store.

You could use the same point to argue that you have a large selection of phones to avoid walled gardens like iOS.

Honestly, as an iPhone user I don't mind these changes as long as apps and services don't force me to use alternative app stores.

How much does Apple's privacy restrictions affect a company the size of Meta ?

Sure, there was the direct commercial impact the moment the changes were implemented. But Meta is still doing the same business, it still keeps track of a tremendous amount of user data, and it's revenue is back to where it was before Apple's changes.

Same for Google or Reddit, they are in a position where Apple limiting their tracking range seem to have little to no impact on their whole business.

I still think some limitation is better than none, but it also doesn't look like a huge deal for any of them. At least not enough to force all users to go through sideloading just to get that extra bit of data.

The great thing about allowing sideloading is that it enables the community to build 3rd party apps for accessing services like Facebook, even though doing so violates the service's ToS. You can't put a lightweight and tracking-resistant FB client in the App Store.

I don't that's a problem of distribution but rather getting the data in the first place. Why wouldn't Facebook prevent those services from accessing the data? Ask the developer of Apollo, the Reddit client, how well relying on a third-party works.

Wasn't Apollo killed exactly by the fact that it would no longer be allowed on app stores?

Don't use said data hoarding apps, then? Or use the web versions?

> I sort of think apple shouldn't try to comply

I know some of us like to think of Apple as some kind of corporate diety, but even Apple has to answer to the US government.

Does this chain of thought apply to any company or just to Apple? At what market share does this become a problem in your opinion? Or are we assuming that the market is ‘free’ and people wouldn’t buy such a device/service because of these ‘restrictions’?

I agree with this take. My one concern is it has the potential to diminish the entire brand. Even with giant warnings about losing warranty/support when installing 3rd party app stores or side loading apps, at the end of the day the back of the phone has a big Apple logo on it. So when the customer fucks it up and Apple refuses to fix it, they’ll still blame Apple.

Apple's hardware house of cards might come down if developers are allowed to push the devices past what Apple allows due to form-over-function design decisions they make, and I'm okay with that.

If consumers find that's a problem, then they should be willing to pay the 30% premium in the app store.

My guess is that this is not as much of an issue as Apple claims, and this 30% premium will not be worth it to the consumer.

I think plenty of software development companies quite like to keep that 30% to themselves. I could imagine Microsoft, Adobe and others refusing to ship their software on the app store at all if using their own store let them keep more of the purchase price.

If you're concerned about the brand value then sell your stock before it happens or buy some put options at a nice price.

Yeah exactly, for some of us this is a feature not a bug. And I say this as a customer that also supports open source software. Yes it's possible to support both.

Like damn, what if I intend to build this ecosystem from the outset, does that mean as soon as it reaches critical mass the government is going to come in and dismantle it? It's bullshit. This is essentially saying you're not allowed to build ecosystems.

Consumer products don't demand the same flexibility in this regard that enterprise products do. This is just other companies crying that they want a slice of the pie.

Companies are not allowed to leverage their dominant market position in one market in order to gain an advantage in other markets. If you dislike monopoly and antitrust laws, go vote against them.

I’m familiar with the concept and it doesn’t apply as clearly as you make it seem to here, which is why it’s taken so long to sue Apple.

Their ecosystem was closed from the beginning.

> I like the app store, I like the restrictions, I don't want apple to change anything about it.

This is basically saying you only use TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, Tinder, Gmail, Google Maps, and play zero to some handful of mega huge F2P games.

Why have an App Store at all then? You don't use it. It's an installation wizard for you, not a store.

Don't you see? This stuff doesn't interact with restrictions at all. The problem with the App Store is that it sucks, not that it's restricted.

> making their app store worse

I've heard this take from so many people. It is already as bad as it gets. The App Store is an utter disaster. They have failed in every aspect to make a thriving ecosystem. It is just the absolute largest, hugest, best capitalized, least innovative apps and games.

This doesn't have to be the case at all. Look at Steam. Even Linux package managers have more diversity with more apps that thrive.

For your first point that is a fairly wild accusation of that user.

For me, one of the features of a centralised app store is that I buy and subscribe to apps through the app store, which centralises my app subscriptions within my Apple account. I wouldn't have this functionality if I was pulling in apps outside of the app store.

I can go into my Apple account and see every subscription I have and cancel it from within. No shoddy dark website behavior that makes it hard to unsubscribe, I can do it all there.

This just one feature that I find handy in having a single store.

If Apple had your best interests in mind they would provide a way to integrate third party payment systems into their management interface so all apps could expose their subscriptions to the user in a consistent way regardless of payment backend. Instead they will keep it as an exclusive feature and point to other processors' lack of compatibility as a harm to end-users inflicted by the DMA. They would rather have a talking point in their ongoing temper tantrum than provide a good experience for their users.

I actively don't want third-party payment systems on my phone. I also actively don't want the ability to load and run arbitrary third-party applications on my phone. Adding these things would make my user experience worse, not better.

My phone isn't a general-purpose computer in the way that my laptop is. My phone is an appliance. When I use my phone, I'm not actually using the phone itself, I'm using the email app to manage my emails, or the web browser to look at some news website, or Instagram to watch some reels, or Slack to communicate with my colleagues, or etc. The phone is just a conduit for apps/workflows.

You say that, but the Google Play store doesn't allow you to do that either, so do they not have my best interests in mind?

Yes, of course they don't.

Stay within store, nobody forces you to sideload or download certain apps.

You and I will do this. So will anyone else on HN.

My grandma won’t understand the difference. So when she gets a text saying, hey install this cool new thing, and then gets hacked, these changes will be to blame.

Why can’t we have a close ecosystem and an open ecosystem? If you want to side load, Android is right there ready for you.

How will she install it if it is behind security toggle?

She'll change the toggle and then install it. It's obvious that a lot of HN users didn't live through the period of time where IE was overrun with toolbars for nearly every user because websites would walk people through how to override their security settings so that they could install all kinds of shit. BonzaiBuddy, Yahoo Toolbar, MacKeeper, etc... they all walk people through how to turn off the security settings needed to get themselves installed.

That's the whole problem. People don't know any better so they follow the instructions to get what they think they want. They don't know what they don't know.

You can definitely tell who has and has not done some for of tech support sort of job interacting with the general public, in these kinds of discussions. "But the user would NEVER do..." oh my god, not only would they, they would in large numbers, it wouldn't even be some super-rare occurrence. Nobody who's done that kind of work would type those words in that order.

I was in such a role in the exact time period you're writing about. At the time, most computer users were still at least kinda enthusiasts, if not particularly well-educated on their new toy. It's no accident that ordinary people got seriously interested using computers for important things in their lives when smartphones came around, and especially the iPhone—phones are like computers that are 80% less rage-inducing utter shit, as far as normal folks are concerned. "Real" computers are horrible for a majority of people. Notoriously horrible, like, listen to people talk about how they interact with "real" computers and their attitudes toward them; they don't trust them at all and often hate them, to them they're like expensive bulky frustration-machines that barely make any sense, don't do very much (the pieces of crap can't even replace a pocket camera, what a joke), and break entirely at random and frequently.

I did support a few older folks.

And I don’t give a crap. If it’s so bothersome for you - don’t do it. Just say no. People complain about shit all the time, shall we now remove all advances of humanity?

So let’s say shady website posts instructions:

Open your bank account:

* Enter IBAN

* Enter amount

* Press send

Shall banks remove “send” feature completely to protect user?

Banks can and will block transfers that they believe are fraudulent. They specifically train their customer facing employees to stop customers when they feel like the customer is being scammed. And people have been demanding that banks do even more to help prevent fraud. And if you think Apple's restrictions are invasive and overbearing ... banking regulations and restrictions make Apple look like a freedom loving hippy.

I've told this story before, but I'll tell it again. Years ago I worked for Apple retail when Bootcamp was a thing and it was "unsupported" and not only was it behind security switches, but you had to go out of your way to download and set it up.

I had a customer come in one morning steaming mad and demanding a refund for her new macbook. She was mad because (to paraphrase) she has been told that she wouldn't have all the problems and crashes her windows machine had and wouldn't have to deal with viruses and a host of other windows specific issues if she used a mac. But after a few weeks she was still having all of the same problems. The more she described the issue, the more it sounded like she'd never even bought a mac, but here she was with a 3 week old macbook in a box. And beyond that, she described having some hardware issues that had been corrected with a firmware update months earlier. The first boot and software update should have corrected all of that.

So I asked her to show me some of what it was doing. She took it out of the box, switched it on and it booted right into windows. And then proceeded to dump a ton of malware popups all over the screen just as she'd said. It turns out, she did indeed buy the macbook 3 weeks earlier, and then gave it to her "computer smart nephew" to setup for her. Well Mr. Nephew apparently decided in his infinite wisdom that is aunt didn't need macOS, she just needed an expensive windows machine. And so he'd downloaded bootcamp, shrunk the macOS partition to the smallest size it could be, and then installed windows and configured the machine to boot into windows by default. She'd never used macOS and didn't even know it was there, and so had never gotten the firmware updates for the hardware, and was of course having all the same problems she had in windows normally, because she was still using windows, only this time without any malware software because "macs don't need Norton".

The end result is I showed the customer what had happened, got them squared away with the mac OS side an asked them to give it a try for a few weeks with a personal guarantee we'd return it if she still didn't like it. She became one of our best customers. But the moral of the story is twofold:

1) Not everyone who uses tech makes the decisions for how that tech is configured

2) "no support" is a good way to ensure that those #1 people hate your product

What a great story. I wonder at what stage of Idiocracy lore we’re at, to require locked down software to “protect” people from “smart nephews”.

The more I read from you people, the more I get amazed. I can’t believe how somebody would use such anecdotes with serious face against software freedom.

> What a great story. I wonder at what stage of Idiocracy lore we’re at, to require locked down software to “protect” people from “smart nephews”.

Have you ever had to do tech support for non-technical users? People will make poor tech choices and fault the manufacturer for it.

Yes, I did.

It never crossed my mind to reduce literal supercomputer that costs 1,5k euro, and can fit into my pocket, to a feature phone.

You mean like apple did by making the iphone? /s

Who's "requiring" anything? Android is there if you want open smart phone computing. iOS is there if you don't. And at a near 50/50 split, that means both are about as close to continuously feature parity as you could hope for. Listening to all arguments over why iOS should open itself up when Android is right there for anyone that wants that sort of freedom feels like listening to a bunch of C programmers bitch about Rust's borrow checker or Java's Garbage Collector. Your "software freedom" goal is already here in the world's most popular smart phone OS and supported on more devices from more vendors than even the most "open" iOS version will ever be. But not everyone wants or needs to write code in C and not everyone wants or needs the sort of "software freedom" that Android is giving.

Sit in your cage if you want.

I want Apple hardware, iOS, sideloading and custom browsers with plugins.

Ok, it's great that you want that, Apple clearly doesn't want to provide that for you any more than they want to provide you with Intel based macs, watches that run Linux, or touch screen laptops. No one has explained yet why Apple should be legally obligated to provide that for you. There's a lot of hand waving towards Apple having a monopoly on their own products, which is something of a tautology, but notably no one claims they have a smart phone monopoly or a smart phone OS monopoly because that's patently absurd given the sheer magnitude of the non-iphone smartphone market. Nor has anyone explained why they're not satisfied with getting those things from that non-iphone market.

This isn't like the late 90's computer era. Apple doesn't fine BestBuy and AT&T for carrying non-apple smart phones. They don't obligate Samsung and Sony to buy licenses to iOS for every phone they ship, regardless of whether iOS is installed on it. Heck, even though they're bundling the web browser with the OS you can't even reasonably make the argument doing so is giving them a monopoly in the web browser space.

We’ll see how the lawsuit will play out.

Replace "macbook" with "iphone" and have the computer smart nephew jailbreak and install shit on it and the result is the same.

At the end of the day, virtually any hardware you hand over to a user they will be able to break past its security.

Yes, and? The question asked was "how would a person [wind up with sketchy software installed] if it is behind a security toggle?". The answer I gave was that not every person that uses tech makes the decisions about setting it up, and that officially sanctioned routes imply support costs regardless of any disclaimers. Are you saying that if Apple had an official ability to root the OS that the number of people who wind up with unknowingly rooted would be the exact same as there are now when the only way to do that is with a jailbreak?

The suit is not about user choice between iPhone and Android. The suit is about control 60% of the digital market. Sure, a user can go buy a different phone. But, an App developer can not reasonable not support iPhone given it has 60% of the market and apple requires 30% of all digital transactions on that market.

I agree people should be able to choose different things. But I also agree with the suit, that once someone gets in the position to control the market of 1000s and 1000s of companies, it's not longer just about user choice in phones. It's about the digital goods (apps/subscribtions/IaP) market itself.

>If people want to buy an iphone and shit it up, let them do it.

Those choices also affect me, though. Any shared albums, messages or other data I transmit with these users has a higher risk of being leaked.

There's some security in knowing almost all phones are not jailbroken and thanks to regular os upgrades, have a pretty solid security floor.

One way to handle this would be to decorate the comms ID, email / phone name whatever to show they aren't running a standard iOS. But I would want to know as easily as I do that messages I exchange with someone are going to an android device.

>One way to handle this would be to decorate the comms ID, email / phone name whatever to show they aren't running a standard iOS.

I shudder to imagine the headlines complaining about the "scarlet bubbles apple is using to shame freedom loving users" or whatever nonsense the media would scare up if they tried to do something like that.

Mostly agree with this except for "... and offer zero support for it."

Nope, that's covered by basic consumer protections. Apple still has to offer support if the user has issues that weren't likely to have been caused by the modifications.

Your car maker doesn't get to refuse to honor your powertrain warranty just because you put in a custom stereo.

It doesn't matter if you like it. It doesn't matter if you don't like it. What matters is their actions and behavior are against the law. It can be proven,/according to the US Gov.

Yes exactly. If Apple allowed users to download alternative app stores or directly install apps, none of this would be a problem.

Here's my take on the App store:

Almost none of the "free" apps are actually free. However, the App store makes it impossible to find this out without first supplying credit card information and installing the app, and possibly setting up an account with an app.

It used to be great. Frankly, it's now abusive.

> Apple itself offers a "super app" of course, which is the Apple ecosystem of apps.

Not sure I buy this point. Competitors can also offer their own suite of apps. Apple has an advantage that they can come pre-installed. But they aren't really building super-apps, just a variety of default apps - nothing stops third parties from offering multiple apps on the platform, that is actually a common thing to do.

EDIT: My comment was wrong, please see helpful corrections below!

I think there are technical limitations when you have different apps vs. one app. Simples being you need to log in to multiple different apps, but things like data moving between them etc are also complications.

Apps on iOS are allowed to communicate and share data so long as they are published by the same developer.

I didn't know that, can they share logins across apps?

E.g. if I'm logged into Google Spreadsheets, am I also logged into Google Docs automatically?

Yes all apps by the same developer have a shared container.

Yes, exactly.

See here for details: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/keychain_...

On top of this keychain stores logins by domain. Even if an app is in a different developer’s container you can retrieve the credentials with just a couple taps.

> Simples being you need to log in to multiple different apps, but things like data moving between them etc are also complications.

I don't think this is actually true. Specifically, once I've logged into one Google app (like Gmail), others automatically pick up the user (like Calendar), so it seems to at least be technically possible.

Having an app that competes with an existing Apple app is considered a duplicate app and you can be rejected because of it.

Wouldn't that rule out so many apps? E.g. Netflix competing with Apple TV, Goggle Photos vs Apple Photos, Google maps vs Apple maps, any note-taking app, camera, email client, browser, or weather app... What actually gets you rejected?

Does Apple ever have to give you a reason why you're rejected, or tell the truth even if they give you a reason?

That's probably the biggest reason I think that Society (with a capital S) should rein in Apple a bit. They have a lot of power and money over the consumer, but on top of that they have no obligation to provide transparency and truthfulness. Given how dependent people are on their phones, I think it's perfectly fair for the state to step in and say that the power imbalance between consumers and Apple should be equalized a bit.

This was more of an issue early in the App Store’s history than later on. Apple’s relaxed on that a lot a long time ago and you can use any number of contacts, calendars, email clients, browsers, camera apps, messengers, maps apps and so on.

But it still exists in their rules. That they don’t enforce it as often as they used to is cold comfort: they still can whenever they feel the need to do so. So if you get too successful they can still very easily chop you down.

not really for browsers, they allow them but they all have to use Safari's engine

Yeah but browser ≠ rendering engine. I know they get conflated a lot in tech, but when I’m using e.g. Arc on my Macintosh, I’m not using Chrome despite using the same rendering engine.

ehhhh kind of, what's a browser without a rendering engine? just a fancy bookmark manager?

Most browsers don’t have a rendering engine unique to them. Apple made that a policy for iPhones and its derivatives, but a browser is more than its rendering engine.

My point still stands though, I want to use an alternative browser engine like I do on every other computer... but Apple doesn't allow it

So do I, but that doesn’t negate my original point: for almost every category of App that comes on a stock iPhone, you can replace it with a 3rd party alternative.

The exceptions are: SMS, Settings, and the Phone app for the numbers tied to your SIMs (there’s still a billion VoIP options including extra lines from carriers like T-Mobile’s Digits) and probably a couple others I’m forgetting. I think the Clock app has a couple of privileges not available to 3rd parties actually.

You can use a 3rd party browser, but that browser will use the version of WebKit that comes with the operating system (except soon, in the EU, whenever 3rd party browsers with their own rendering engines ship there).

"almost every" is the problem:

* no alternative browser engines

* no alternative wallet apps

* no alternative app stores (specifically so Apple can capture a % of sales)

* no software streaming

* no super apps

* Apple-only special SMS features

* Apple hardware (watches) get special access to iPhone hardware

that stuff adds up

Note that the "rendering engine" on iOS also takes care of JS, implementing web standard APIs, etc. And it is tied to the OS version.

So, something like WebUSB comes out? Gotta wait for Apple to implement it, and also for your customers to upgrade their devices.

Correct. Except the part about waiting for Apple to implement WebUSB because they’re not going to.

The extension ecosystem of browsers is pretty important though, and that is tied to the rendering engine.

On Android, I can install firefox-for-android and run ublock origin to no longer see ads on websites.

On iOS, that's not possible. Apple prevents mozilla from shipping a browser capable of running firefox addons.

This is a case where Apple's policies are hampering security since, well, blocking ads on the web is the thing has had the single largest positive impact on security for my elderly relatives. Giving them ublock origin stopped them from clicking on a ridiculous number of scammy ads and popups.

Not sure why you are getting downvoted.

I also want alternate web tech, WebAssembly, Javascript implementations.

And as a developer, to be able to create tools that use the memory allocation/permissions API for JIT compilation.

Either provide a platform or compete in one. Don't do both.

The problem here is that platform is not precise. You could say this means that Apple should just make the iPhone hardware, and software vendors should compete to create operating systems for it. There's no hard line.

It's not really a hard problem.

Even if you argue that for example a phone and messaging app should/must be preinstalled on a phone, Apple could allow competing apps for that, and uninstalling or disabling the preinstalled one. Then it would be much harder to argue for that they are unfairly competing in the platform they provide.

Courts are used to arguing over problems where there are no hard lines, I don't think they take "there's no hard line" as an excuse to do nothing to enable competition.

> Then it would be much harder to argue for that they are unfairly competing in the platform they provide.

No it wouldn't, because you could argue that they should allow competing OSes on their hardware platform.

> I don't think they take "there's no hard line" as an excuse to do nothing to enable competition.

I'm not saying they should. You're not responding to what I said. They didn't need to enable apps at all. They did, and allow things like Whatsapp to compete with their phone and messaging apps. They've enabled competition. Courts don't do anything like that.

It is a hard problem because the line between an OS function and an application function is very blury. Take for example the FindMy functionality. It's open to third party devices and manufacturers like Tile, but to get all the functionality the OS has, you need to use FindMy, not your own app (like Tile used to/still does). But is FindMy an OS functionality as a built in, privacy preserving, low powered tracker service) or is it an application? Or WebKit. Webkit is the only web rendering engine in iOS. Every app has equal access to WebKit, but is it part of the platform or competing in the platform? Sure, on general purpose computers, browsers are applications, but is there any reason they can't / shouldn't be an OS service? The lower level networking stacks are OS services. The higher level screen drawing stacks are OS services. Why would gluing those two things together not be an OS service?

Indeed, WebView is an attempt to deploy a browser runtime separately to the browser application.

I also agree with this. Not permitting the owner of a device to use a different operating system on it should be illegal, by a similar principle

Doing both is fine so long as you as a platform provider don't give any preferential treatment to you as a user of the platform.

Why? Won't this result in vastly inferior products?

Stifling competition though anti-competitive-means results in vastly inferior products.

> Apple has an advantage that they can come pre-installed.

Not only that, apparently updates automatically push their apps on you as well, without even asking. Suddenly I had a "Journal" app added to my homescreen from nowhere, and I thought my device had been hacked before I realized what was going on.

Apple also have the advantage of not having to follow their own rules. Their apps can send notifications without asking for permission about it. "Journal" again is an example here where the app sent me a notification and after going to the app, then they asked me for permission to send notifications.

Since iOS 12 apps can send “provisional” notifications, meaning permission isn’t required right away. Other apps can use this, but few do.

I think it refers more to a hypothetical app that, when you're using it, would allow you to completely ignore the entire Apple software ecosystem. It would have its own home screen with launchers to things like a web browser, office tools, media, etc. I think this sort of thing never came to fruition because (aside from it being very hard to make) it would be way too bulky what with having to come in the form of a single app package. The ban on third party stores means it wouldn't be able to offer its own app store or come in segments so you can pick only the apps you want.

> I think this sort of thing never came to fruition because (aside from it being very hard to make) it would be way too bulky what with having to come in the form of a single app package.

Note that the Android equivalent (custom launchers) doesn't need to, and iOS's implementation (Springboard.app), while more integrated than that, is still more modular than you describe. It's only App Store restrictions that prevent you from having an app that opens other apps. (If all apps cooperate, you can use the custom URL handler mechanism to work around the App Store restrictions.)

Is that not like the Bing app and the Google app which have mini apps inside

I think part of the lawsuit is that there are glaring exceptions to some companies that Apple gives preferential treatment to. WeChat was mentioned elsewhere in the thread, apparently it does something like this and is given a pass arbitrarily whereas Apple disallows other companies from competing with them.

I bet the Apple apps have much, much, better background activity/services support. Doing "background" uploads is nothing short of painful compared to Android.

While we never want to compete with core Apple apps, we're constantly having to say 'sorry that's the restrictions running on Apple' with background support.

(our usecase is we have a B2B app that has visual progress reports - so we'll have the same people on a team - the Android ones get their progress reports uploaded instantly, the iOS ones 'sorry keep your phone open'.)

You also have to buy all apps through Apple's app store to natively download to a device. The Digital Markets Act addressed something similar, requesting that developers can sell through alternate marketplaces. Apple came back with a proposal to (1) stick with the status quo with 30 percent commission on sales, (2) reduce commission to 17 percent with a 50 cent charge on downloads over a million, (3) sell through a competing app store and pay the download fee every time. (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/technology/app-store-euro....)

I've designed several apps (Fitstar, Fitbit, theSkimm) that were dependent on the Apple ecosystem. While it's a huge tax to comply with their rules, they also do a TON to help developers succeed, especially early on. They maintain components, provide developer tools, build entire languages, design new paradigms, and ensure quality. I've had a respect for the tax on a service they provide to both developers and end users. At this point though - they're acting as a monopoly, and it feels anti-competitive.

It's not just the developer tax that's a problem. Hiding behind a veil of privacy also doesn't forgive the introduction of "dark pattern" end user experiences - such as the inability to have a group chat with non Apple users. And no non-Apple share links on Apple Photo albums. These create digital "haves" vs "have-nots" - and not everyone in the world can afford to buy physical Apple devices. There must be protocols that allow information to be more interoperable so people have optionality and control over their digital identities.

One thing I hope they mention: Apple put in proprietary extensions to give Apple-made Bluetooth headphones an advantage over all others, then removed the headphone jacks.

“Apple improved upon the notoriously unreliable Bluetooth standard and then slightly degraded wired listening by requiring a $9 dongle” is quite a weak anti-trust argument. Almost all innovation comes from this type of vertical integration.

Huh? It sounds more like they deliberately broke everyone's devices except their own so you either have to pay them more to continue using your existing headset with an adapter, or if you have a bluetooth headset you're just shit out of luck unless you buy an Apple headset. How is that not anticompetitive?

No actually any iPhone with a headphone jack continued to have a functioning headphone jack. And competitors marketed their phones with headphone jacks for a year and ended up also abandoning that feature.

It's not feasible to use an old iPhone forever, I tried. If the required app updates don't get you, the carrier will.

The big competitors like Samsung removed the jack too once they started selling their own wireless earbuds. They realized they could use Apple's strategy too.

Basically every smartphone vendor removed the headphone jack. So you’re saying Apple is a monopoly because they have good ideas everyone else copies?

The others who did this are also trying to fleece their users. There are loyal Samsung users too, don't ask me why.

No? Who said that? Wrong on every count, especially the word "good" to refer to removing the headphone jack.

> Almost all innovation comes from this type of vertical integration.

In what world?

This is widely accepted business theory. It’s hard to innovate when you depend on suppliers external to you for key technology.

I'm fine with this. Apple can extend sucky BT, Apple can make their faster Apple Silicon chips, Apple can make iMessage since SMS is trash, Nvidia can do CUDA cause OpenCL sucked, whatever. Just don't also intentionally kneecap the competitors by removing their interfaces.

That is very different from saying "Almost all innovation comes from this type of vertical integration."

Innovation comes from many sources and while vertical integration does assist in some cases, your assertion steps so far past plausible that it is simply ridiculous.

These days the reliability problems of Bluetooth are effectively gone. Sure, it's not a perfect technology, but Bluetooth devices work completely reliably for me across tons of vendors.

Saying Bluetooth itself is unreliable is an outdated view. There are shitty Bluetooth devices yes, but the protocol works fine when paired with good devices

I have high-end Bose headphones from 2020, a new iPhone, and a new Mac. Bluetooth sucks. You're far better off with AirPods than anything else if you're going to use BT.

By the way, it's so bad that I don't use headphones anymore with the iPhone. I use the phone in speaker mode. And the only reason I even have a new iPhone is because AT&T dropped support for my old one.

I have a low end Bose bluetooth speaker that connects up instantly to any of my powered on devices (2x Macbook, iPhone), and can switch between them seamlessly with a button press. I've also never had any issues with Sony WHM1000XM* headphones regarding bluetooth across these devices.

My AirPods frequently hop between my MacBook and iPhone without asking though, because the other device played a split second audio clip.

Strong YMMV I guess.

I mean, bose is known for selling cheap devices as high end for the past few decades. It's not uncommon for the BoM to be ~10% of the final price.

Yeah, and don't get me started on the audiophile perspective on Bose. Bose is an ear candy brand, what you hear out of them is not even close to what the audio engineer intended the experience to be. I won't fault anyone who's fine with them, but I would never buy a pair of Bose.

That being said, they absolutely excel at noise cancellation, and that's because their core market is airmen, Bose is used almost universally by pilots for their in-flight headsets. It's where they make their actual money.

Yes, they're nice headphones overall, but not the best for audio fidelity.

They're also not the best for firmware putting it mildly.

They don't have much of an engineering org anymore, they're just a marketing brand that white boxes contracted out designs.

I dunno, nobody is doing noise cancellation better than them.

I have multiple pairs of high end Sony headphones, Pixel buds, numerous Bluetooth speakers, and Bluetooth works reliably when I pair those phones to my AV receiver, my PS5, my Pixel phone, my tablet, or my TV. I rarely have any problems: the audio is clear, the latency is not noticeable, and devices connect quickly and without fuss.

There are corner cases that cause annoyance, and those corner cases are indeed around where Apple is adding on top of Bluetooth: The ability to instantly switch the connected device without needing to disconnect from a previous device, and the ability to pair just by having the devices close. Those features are replicated in the Android ecosystem but are not standard.

If those two features are what you mean by "sucks" then fine. But that doesn't imply that Bluetooth doesnt work reliably, just that it doesn't have these two features broadly supported.

A difference here is that fast pairing and device switching on Android, while not a standard part of the protocol, is open for device manufacturers to support, unlike Apple's versions of these features.

I tried my Bose NC700 with my Pixel 6. It gave me the quick-pairing notification, asking me also to install an app, which ofc I said no to. Then when it was already paired, I got the pairing notification 6 more times during my call.

Probably doesn't happen for everyone, otherwise it'd be fixed. But that's how it always is with overly complicated stuff, edge cases everywhere.

What causes issues with the Bose? Both my QC35 and QC45s have been paired with multiple iPhone/pad/Mac and seem to work better than most other things.

My Bose NC700 can only remember 3 devices it seems. My corp-supplied laptop+phone put it over the limit, meaning I have to repair whenever I want to switch to another device, and it forgets one as a result (idk how it works, FIFO?). Pairing often takes a few tries, and it's even glitchier on the corp Android phone.

Earphone quality drops to something awful whenever the mic is in use. That's just cause of the BT standard. This gets more complicated with multiple devices involved.

I'll be listening to music on my work laptop with my headphones, my iPhone will get a call, it'll switch to the iPhone only to play a ringtone in my ears, then when I accept the call the iPhone will switch back to its own earpiece instead of my headphones. Juked!

Then some unpredictable things. Like it gets stuck connected to the wrong device, or it starts playing music when I turn them on, or it won't connect even with a device it should remember. I've had my BT headphones connect during a meeting, make my laptop start playing random music, then disconnect, causing the laptop to switch to full volume speakers and blast music into my meeting.

I don't fault Bose for any of this. These are the most reliable BT headphones I've ever owned. The standard just sucks. The iPhone side has issues like randomly switching to my car BT when I walk by wearing my headphones. The car BT can only pair to 1 device at a time, so my wife or I have to disable BT to free it up. Overall it's not worth vs just plugging in the darn cable.

I was gifted AirPods, but I'm on the Android ecosystem. I see a huge difference between what I can configure on an Apple device vs my Android devices. For example, on an Apple device I can enable features to help me hear better in a noisy environment which would be nice to have.

I wonder if they are using a proprietary configuration API that is deliberately kept secret or if no Android devs have figured out how to reverse engineer it yet (seems very unlikely).

If the likely former, I'd like someone to address this as well as it almost feels like if they're getting into hearing assistance features, then accessibility becomes important.

AirPods came out 8 years ago. It’s good to hear it’s better now, though that doesn’t comport with my experience. Are you saying you’d prefer a world where innovation was held from the market for almost a decade while standards caught up and made them available to everyone and every product simultaneously?

> Are you saying you’d prefer a world where innovation was held from the market for almost a decade while standards caught up and made them available to everyone and every product simultaneously?

Not really, I don't particularly have a problem with how Airpods went, except that Apple could have moved to standardize or at least open up fast pairing and instant switching, but they didn't.

I’d prefer if Apple spent its scarce engineering resources on bringing new innovations to market and not facilitating other people to copy what they build. From Apple’s perspective the request is even more twisted: they should move to standardize all their technology and also give it away for free (lest folks complain about paying a “Core Technology Fee”!)?

"Scarce"? They are a trillion dollar company.

So? Do you think great engineers or engineering orgs are a dime a dozen? The US government is a many trillion dollar organization. Have you used a government website?

That is my understanding talking with devs who have worked at the lower layers of bluetooth. Well, two problems. The spec is not an easy one to read with a lot of caveats. But the bigger issue is, a lot of companies half ass their bluetooth implementation. Whether we are talking Windows, Android, iOS, macOS, Linux, etc, if you experience bluetooth problems, often it is the device and not the bluetooth code in the OS.

Sounds like XMPP.

Or USB. Unfortunately, not all USB cables are equal and this used to annoy me so much.

USB-A always felt fine, even though there's v3 vs v2. But USB-C is a mess.

Do you actually use the dongle? It doesn't work with inline mics, making it useless even if you were to carry it around everywhere. It also doesn't work with previous iPhones, so you can't share say a car aux between an old and a new iPhone.

I used the dongle. I left it permanently attached to my headphone cable, and it was a non-issue to “carry it everywhere.” Needing a wired inline mic is a niche of niche, making the argument about antitrust monopoly even weaker.

Needing a mic on a phone is not niche. What made you stop using the dongle?

Wireless headphones are a better experience is basically every way, and yes microphones on phones aren’t a niche which is why every phone has one. Totally unrelated to wired inline external microphones, though.

If you're taking a call on a phone with headphones, you need an mic on the headphones for anyone to hear you. There were several years you had the option of using BT headphones while the iPhone had both BT and the jack, but you were using the jack.

> It doesn't work with inline mics

Is this a new thing? I haven't used this in a while, but the lightning dongle used to work fine with my headphones+mic (also intended for Apple's headphone jack). I know there's some difference in how the headphone connector is set up between Apple and everyone else though.

I'm pretty sure the commenter is misinformed. The dongle worked with the inline mic on my B&O headphones. But it wasn't worth engaging with that point because I think they're wrong even if the dongle doesn't work perfectly for them.

It certainly does does. There are multiple TRRS patterns for wired mics mind.

I use the dongle, fwiw. It stays attached to my "good" wired earphones.

I don't really have any strong feelings either way about it. I dropped my phone once, and the dongle took the brunt of it (saving the expensive stuff) but I did have to buy another.

> Almost all innovation comes from this type of vertical integration.

Really? That's a bold claim. Having a large number of companies that are able to offer competing products and services tends to lead to innovation.

Vertical integration and competition are orthogonal. Vertical integration is when Apple improves upon Bluetooth with a proprietary enhancement to the standard. Competition is Pixel Buds advertising a similar feature set.

Yes, basically non-Apple headphones are pointless for iPhone owners now. Doesn't matter how much Bose or anyone improves their tech, the port they relied upon got removed. Apple has locked together iPhones and headphones.

Are you aware there are plenty of wireless headphones that work with iPhone?

Yes, there have been since 2007. Almost nobody used them until the jack got removed, because they don't work well. BT standard improved over the years, but not enough.

I don't get the sense that third party headphones don't work just fine with iPhone, other than a seeming indication that iPhone users seem to think normal Bluetooth doesn't work well, which might indicate Apple has either not invested in their standard Bluetooth stack or at worst, actively degraded it.

But I'm doubtful of this, it seems more likely that some Apple users have an outdated view of how reliable standard Bluetooth actually are, even when paired with their iPhones.

I don't know what you mean. My Sony headphones work perfectly with both my iPhone and Mac

What innovation? At the time of removal from iPhone, the LG V35 had a headphone jack but was thinner and lighter than an iPhoe with the same IP rating, and a better camera.

It's hard to tie all that together. Generic Bluetooth devices work just like you are used to everywhere else -- that is, kinda shitty and unreliable. Must we suffer a universally crappy experience by preventing Apple from improving BT for their own headsets?

Maybe they should be required to license the tech, if they are not already. But I don't want to degrade my experience just because that's the only way to have a level playing field. Maybe the BT standards group could get off their ass and make the underlying protocol better.

This isn't accurate, normal Bluetooth works much better than you might imagine. The kind of things that are added on top with Apple's solution are things like fast pairing and instant device switching. They also have their own custom codecs, but most other Bluetooth communication devices also support custom codecs which, on Android for example, are enabled by installing a companion app.

Re: Bluetooth being better than you portray: Don't get me wrong, you can certainly run into problems, but in normal usage it works just fine. And Apple isn't fundamentally improving on the potential issues with their proprietary solutions.

Normal BT drops to very low sound quality when the mic is in use, because it goes into "headset" mode. Apple got around that with an extension. Combined with the jank pairing and device switching, the difference is pretty big.

AirPods also drop audio quality severely when their mic is active, just as with Bluetooth. Apple hasn’t solved that in any way with some nefarious extension.

This is the reason consoles do not support Bluetooth audio and wireless headsets all need a dongle.

Reminds me of how wireless keyboards and mice often don't use BT despite it being totally designed for that use case. They use some random 2.4GHz USB dongle. And well there are BT kbms, but they're unreliable.

I actually love Bluetooth mice and keyboards, especially when they support multi device so I can switch between my phone/laptop/watch with the press of a button. Currently using [0] for a few years, love the build quality and form factor. Then a random Microsoft BT mouse. No problems with reliability.

[0] https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/keyboards/mx-keys-mi...

My Apple BT keyboards+mice run out of battery very quickly and sometimes randomly disconnect/reconnect. A newer non-Apple BT keyboard seems ok on its own, but then there are issues on the other end. My fairly new Windows PC can't wake up from Bluetooth keyboards/mice, so I have to keep a USB one attached. And the BIOS menu requires a USB keyboard too. Dongle eliminates all that complexity.

There are also some BT limitations at play. Key rollover is capped, and mouse polling rate is lower. But that'd only matter to me if I were playing PC games. Ability to switch devices is a plus for BT.

> but in normal usage it works just fine.

I emphatically disagree. Not in my experience at all. Nearly every single time I use Bluetooth it is a dance of connecting, forgetting, re-pairing, reconnecting, looking for old connected devices to shut them off, etc. Half the time I give up and don't use it. This happens to any combination of Bluetooth devices I have, at all locations, in any situation.

So why is there such a difference between my experience, and the experiences of the other posters here, so different to yours? Could it be that there's something about your situation leading your experience to suck that I'm not having?

I'd put my money on buying cheap devices and painting your experience with them in broad strokes on the technology as a whole. After all, if you have no faith in the tech, why spend money on a good experience? After all, why would $5 earbuds from Walmart have a different experience to a quality pair of headphones for a few hundred dollars to pair with your nearly thousand dollar smartphone?

I don't mean to gatekeep good Bluetooth, because try as I might I can't get my mom to stop getting her own and let me buy the expensive stuff for her, but she still manages to reliably get her Bluetooth paired, connected and working at the start of the phone call whenever I call her despite using budget headphones.

She does have a Pixel though. But it's just the budget one.

I have expensive Bluetooth stuff, and in my experience it's always glitchy. Also, even the cheapest wired stuff doesn't have these problems.

> normal Bluetooth works much better than you might imagine

And then..

> The kind of things that are added on top with Apple's solution are things like fast pairing and instant device switching.

So I guess you admit they add improvements.

I'm fine with Apple implementing BT to spec (i.e. crap) and having their own extensions to improve it. I'm not fine with them eliminating the only alternative, the jack. Since the first iPhone, there's been both BT and jack, and people clearly preferred the jack until Apple decided it was time to grow their accessories sector.

I don't really know how all this tech works, but when I bought my new Xiaomi buds, the moment I opened them my Android phone recognised I have new buds and asked me to pair them with one click. It was like magic. My understanding is that this would not be possible on an iphone, whereas this exact behavior works with Apple buds on an Apple phone.

Hey I briefly worked on that feature at Google! It looks like it's now known as Fast Pair - https://developers.google.com/nearby/fast-pair

It's not part of AOSP, but something modern Google phones support. It's not a fully open thing - device makers must register with Google - but better than the iPhone situation where only Apple devices can have a nice pairing experience.

Apple has historically sucked at external, non-Appme Bluetooth device support.

All of these look important to me, but I've been particularly frustrated recently by the smartwatch issue. I've been a Fitbit user for several years and briefly tried an Apple Watch before returning it and resume Fitbit use— I had a few issues with the Apple Watch, most notably around battery life. But that brief experience showed me really starkly how much Apple is able to lock out third parties from doing things that their own stuff can do trivially by hooking right into private operating system APIs:

- Apple Watch can directly use your credit cards without needing to separately add them to Fitbit/Google Pay.

- Apple Watch can "find my" your phone, whereas Fitbit's version of this is limited to just making it beep, and even that only works if the phone is running the Fitbit app in the background (which it often isn't).

- Apple Watch can stream data to the phone all the time, whereas Fitbit relies on the app being opened, meaning your morning sleep data isn't available immediately since opening the app (to look at it) just enables it to begin transferring.

- Apple Watch can unlock itself when your phone unlocks.

- Apple Watch gets much richer notification integration.

And yeah, you can argue that all of this is optional "extra" stuff that is just Apple's prerogative to take advantage of as the platform holder, and maybe that's so to some degree... but these little things do add up. Particularly when Apple doesn't even have a device that competes with Fitbit, it feels unfair that they shouldn't be made to open up all the APIs necessary for this kind of interoperability.

My Apple Watch tracks Afib (atrial fibrillation) much more consistently and reliably than my Charge 5 did.

I believe Apple needs more regulatory action taken against it for abusing it's dominant position. But apart from cloud streaming apps (which they've resolved recently by allowing them), I find these claims to be pretty weak and not significantly market-affecting.

I strongly believe Apple is under no obligation to make iMessage cross-platform. It's their service they invented, and they get to run it how they chose. SMS is the interoperable standard between different platforms, and RCS is the new standard which they've comitted to supporting.

I would much rather action taken on Apple for the anti-steering provisions restricting competition for payments. I think this has had a much bigger market impact than limitations on game streaming or smart watches.

That's one of the things I like about this complaint - it points out that they don't allow any other apps to support SMS, so only iMessage has the ability to message anyone with just a phone number, seamlessly upgrading if the other party has iMessage and using SMS otherwise.

It's not solely about iMessage not being open, it's about reserving key features for only iMessage to give it a significant advantage. (Also mentioned are other key bits like running in the background, etc)

Where does that "dominant position" idea come from, that you and others are claiming in this thread? Apple is nowhere near having a dominant position in any of the markest where they compete, such as cell phones or computers.

iPhone has a 55-60% market share in the US & Canada. So Id be pretty happy with saying they have the 'dominant position' in the North American mobile market.

https://explodingtopics.com/blog/iphone-android-users

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/iphone-ma...

Fair enough, that's dominant in the US.

In the U.S. where this lawsuit was filed, Apple controls 50-60% of the smartphone market, where the next largest competitor Samsung holds only 20-25% [1]. Among U.S. teenagers the iPhone has a massive 87% market share [2]. That is indisputably dominant.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/620805/smartphone-sales-...

[2] https://www.pipersandler.com/teens

It is a term of art. How Apple acts has an impact on markets. Indeed, as the EU says directly

> The European Commission has fined Apple over €1.8 billion for abusing its dominant position

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...

They control a huge swath of the market and block/limit ability of users and 3rd parties to use their devices, so it's not just about being dominant, it's about how you act as a dominant corporation/company.

As sibling points out and I have argued strongly for in past discussions here, at issue is Apple's control of texting: That is, the ability for a phone to message any other phone with a text message without requiring the other participant to use a custom app. Only iMessage can do this on the iPhone.

In the consumer's eye, all phones can text, so it is a universal way to reach someone who has a phone number. It removes the complexity of having to coordinate ahead of time with a contact about what messaging service they both have. It's why texting is so popular in the US (along with historical actions by US carriers to make texting extremely cheap and ultimately free)

Once they had this control, they then used it to make texting better only when the conversation participants each had iPhones, which produced a network effect where friends would be incentivized to pressure their contacts to also use iPhones. Apple leveraged convenience, features and security to make this happen.

I don't anticipate Apple's upcoming RCS support to materially change this. If we're lucky, we'll get higher quality pictures out of it, but it's possible to support RCS while not supporting a lot of the features that make RCS better than SMS, such as read receipts, replies, typing indicators, and yes, encryption. Encryption is not a standard part of RCS yet, but it could be made so by Apple forcing Google to standardize their encryption and then implementing it. But it's not in Apple's interest given the above to bother. More likely they will do as their initial complaint/announcement about RCS hinted at: Not even engage on encryption because it's "not part of the spec", leaving iPhone/Android messaging unencrypted.

Google is not blameless here, it's insane that they haven't worked themselves to standardize encryption.

When you put it that way, it certainly sounds a lot like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. And I've never seen any tech oriented person who is familiar with EEE argue that it is a legitimate business strategy that should be permitted except in this case.

It is exactly embrace, extend, extinguish.

> I strongly believe Apple is under no obligation to make iMessage cross-platform. It's their service they invented, and they get to run it how they chose.

So if it were up to you all telecom operators would be on separate networks, because you can always use smoke signals to get your message across?

(I'm with you for niche applications where the number of users is small. But we're talking mainstream communication here.)

I think that telecom operators are free to offer phones that don’t send SMS, and see how many customers that gets them.

What i meant to say in my original comment - it’s not Apple’s fault SMS sucks and people don’t want to use it.

But it is apples fault that they let the alternatives stagnate and refuse (until recently) things like RCS that would make SMS suck less.

It is clear that Apple considers iMessage a significant network effect and is not interested in having feature parity between iOS and non-iOS

This is exactly my thinking. I can fully understand why green bubbles are annoying, why not being able to send multimedia is annoying, why it all being unencrypted is incredibly unsafe... but why is this Apple's fault? Why is the complaint that Apple is stifling innovation and not that phone carriers are refusing to innovate and or provide these services at a reasonable cost? Why is Apple effectively being required to act as a phone carrier?

>It's their service they invented, and they get to run it how they chose.

That argument only works until there is market dominance, which is the point of anti-trust regulations.

...but Apple doesn't have dominance. They may have slightly more than half the market, but that's not usually considered antitrust territory.

Apple is in a dominant position. It feels wrong to say that their behaviour does not impact the market.

"Impacts the market" is not the same as "controls the market," which is the threshold (usually) for antitrust litigation.

Microsoft, by comparison, OWNED desktop computing in the 90s. Apple was on the ropes badly, and Linux wasn't viable for most people. And they used that dominance to attempt to strangle the open web in its crib. People literally had no where else to go.

Apple has nothing like that control today. Android enjoys a healthy chunk of the market. A host of other messaging tools exist if you don't like iMessage. You can avoid using Apple's tech at every turn if you like (and I know many people who do, as a matter of personal policy).

This is not a situation that warrants governmental intervention. This is a situation where the government is overreaching, and if they succeed the precedent will be set that Washington gets to decide what features a vendor can control on their own platforms. That's not a good place to be.

>This is not a situation that warrants governmental intervention.

I agree that the government has a weak case - but they can make their case in the court of law. And to another degree in the court of public opinion.

There is a case to be made for constraining the dominant consumer tech company. Consider this hypothetical scenario. A tech company has a one year lead over their competitors because their hardware and software is objectively one year ahead. And let's project that every year that lead grows by a couple months. I assume that all would agree that this is a huge threat.

What government oversight and intervention is warranted to address this threat?

In my opinion, all the reasons that the government gave to call Apple a monopoly are just weak rationalizations they've come up with that still hold enough legal validity, and allow them (them being the powers that be who perceive the real long-term threat) to start slowing Apple down.

>I assume that all would agree that this is a huge threat.

I do not. I do not think most people would agree with that. A lead in one area is historically difficult to sustain and extend into another. When attempts have been made that could have been successful, they were made on the back of actual market-controlling dominance, which Apple manifestly and obviously does not have here.

The 90s is not the 20s.

Market share does not equal market power.

> It's their service they invented, and they get to run it how they chose.

So was the Bell telephone network.

They aren't in a dominant position in the market by any normal measure, though.

My biggest problem is how hard it is to get my data out of apps in usable formats, move it between apps, or put in custom apps. My iPhone would be great if I could use my own data and apps as easily (and freely) as my old Samsung Galaxy.

You can download all your data from the Apple Website. Heartbeat, GPS etc. are plainly available. I wrote an app that converts Lat/lon to distance traveled.

It's hard to use iphone as a general purpose computing device when they make it hard to share between apps. I know it's part of apple's "security model" but it can also be interpreted as killing competition between 3rd party apps and apple apps

They’ve long been anti-competitive against alternatives like Hackintosh’s or file lawsuits over interface similarities. That aggressive suppression of competing suppliers is partly how they got tens of billions of dollars. They’re not doing it for security.

One test, though, would be to look at customizability of Mac OS vs iOS. They claim to be securing both. Can we run custom apps easily on Mac OS, script it, get full access to our files, etc? If so, why would they restrict the iPhones from doing those things, but leave Macs wide open, if it was merely a security issue?

Another example might be remote, access tools. Aka remote control of iPhones. If App Store has any, then they’d put iPhones at much higher risk than users running their own code on their own devices. Even with a review given that a RAT might have a zero day that gives attackers full control. If they restrict user freedom, but allow RAT’s, that would be another hint that they restrict user freedom for anti-competitive reasons.

I don’t have Mac OS, though. It might be as locked down as the iPhone. That would make my argument useless.

I think they are hitting apple pretty broadly on all things you're mentioning. I don't think everyone will agree on all of them but many will agree on various ones and it's left up to courts after that.

> It's their service they invented, and they get to run it how they chose.

What does that have to do with anything? They have a dominant market position and they abuse it. Different position, different rules.

Thanks for this excellent summary.

With regards to the "super apps", Apple can just as well argue that it aspires to retain access for multiple players ("avoiding monopoles", ironically), so naturally it does not want only a single app becoming the majority of all downloads, which leads the app store idea ad absurdum.

Makes you wonder about something else: Could Apple one day be broken apart like "Ma Bell"? It seems the Apple brand is inconsistent with notions of modularity and openness (which brings with itself a certain messiness), everything is supposed to look at feel alike up to the slightly silly (as a problem to solve, as long as there are still children starving on this planet at the same time) device unpacking experience.

It's good that the U.S. government are doing their job as expected, in this case that's relevant for all other countries, where a lot of the device owners/users are based.

My ultimate wish would be some someone to launch a third mobile platform - beside Apple IOS and Alphabet-Google Android - based on a new open W3C standard (not HTML). Such a standard would get a chance to grow with the support of the legal apparatus: judges should force the oligopolists to implement said standard, and then people might just say "hey, I can just implement ONE app, and catch all THREE platforms."

>Also, the Apple Watch itself does not offer compatibility with Android.

This is the reason I am now on an iPhone after being on Android since ~2009. But this could also apply to Samsung too. There were two watches I was considering - Samsung's and Apple's (for health monitoring reasons, I have a family history of heart problems, and am already nearly 10 years older than my dad was when he died). I would either have to buy a Samsung phone or an iPhone to get the functionality I wanted, and TBH I really don't like Samsung's take on Android (I've been either Cyanogenmod or Motorola for over a decade), so an iPhone it was. But I would have preferred to get an Apple Watch and have that work fully with my Android phone, but that's not even a starter, let alone the limited-functionality you would get with a Samsung watch with another Android phone.

I'm happy with the watch, and I now like a lot about the iPhone. But it was 4x the price of my previous phone.

Was this before the Google Pixel Watch, or did you eliminate it for other reasons? Also, newer Galaxy watches run Androids WearOS instead of Tizen, and from what I understand, work much better with other Android phones.

It is interesting that in this case "pro-competitive" does not necessarily mean "pro-consumer". I am not sure how stuff like "super apps" are a good thing for consumers (sounds like a nightmare mass surveillance scenario to me). Similar cloud streaming apps where the whole fuss is really about microtransactions in games or less regulation. Message interoperability is not a bad thing, but not sure why we still talk about "MMS" in 2024 when so many different chat apps are around. I don't know about smartwatches, maybe that is a fair point. And as for digital wallets, I already trust apple for the OS, I would not see why I would put the effort to download an extra app from a third party I would need to also trust to put bank details, except if we were talking about some open source gold standard of trust and privacy. I do not care if it is apple or a third party that gets a commission from banks or who gets my transaction history to sell to brokers.

On the other hand, I would like to see interoperability in stuff like airdrop. But that would not be something that other FAANG would make money of, so that is probably not so interesting for these regulators.

> And as for digital wallets, I already trust apple for the OS, I would not see why I would put the effort to download an extra app from a third party I would need to also trust to put bank details

Do you think no one else should be able to build a mobile payment service? Should banks be block from making, say, ChasePay?

It's fine to prefer Apple Pay and to choose Apple Pay even if there are other options. The question is, should everyone be locked into Apple Pay vs choosing Apple Pay because it is better than ChasePay?

I don't think nobody else should be able to build a "mobile payment service", I just do not care and I do not think this is about consumers.

If it was just up to me, the "mobile ecosystem" would just burn to the ground.

Another vote for Airdrop, but with no strings attached please (i.e. no silent failing on MP3 containing folders)

The NYT article is making the case look weaker than it really is, especially for armchair lawyers.

You can read the full document but of course very few of us would do that.

Instead, I think this Youtube video of the US Attorney General is giving a good summary of the case.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ6JycDyYj4

Thanks for summarizing. As someone deeply entrenched in Apple's ecosystem, and who admittedly prefers the walled garden, I really have no problem if any of these five things were struck down.

Better competition for cloud streaming apps? Seems good for me as a user. Better messaging interoperability? I don't have anyone in my family or friends group who wasn't already on an iPhone, and I thought this was coming already with RCS anyway, but sure let's go. Better smartwatch support? If it makes Apple want to build even better Apple Watches, I'm all for it. And all of my cards already work with Apple Wallet so this has no bearing on me either.

The only one that's really ambiguous is "Super Apps". I'd be greatly inconvenienced if Apple things stopped working so well together, but I wouldn't be inconvenienced at all if others get a chance to build their own "super apps".

> I don't have anyone in my family or friends group who wasn't already on an iPhone, and I thought this was coming already with RCS anyway, but sure let's go.

I'm skeptical that adding RCS will actually fix the problems because of how Apple is likely to implement it. Their malicious compliance in the EU strongly hints that they are going to hobble their RCS implementation just enough to maintain the status quo just like they are with the DMA requirements. Hopefully legal efforts like this push Apple more towards actual interoperability.

I suspect the "Super Apps" is the real reason for this lawsuit. The other giant tech companies are probably pushing for this.

This would let Google get rid of dedicated apps like Gmail or Google Maps, and then just force everyone to go through a central Google app itself.

All of these are pretty sane, except for:

> Also, the Apple Watch itself does not offer compatibility with Android

Will they force Samsung and Google to have their watches interoperate with iOS too, or are they exempt because they are bit players in the field?

Here's a quote from the complaint:

> Apple’s smartwatch—Apple Watch—is only compatible with the iPhone. So, if Apple can steer a user towards buying an Apple Watch, it becomes more costly for that user to purchase a different kind of smartphone because doing so requires the user to abandon their costly Apple Watch and purchase a new, Android-compatible smartwatch.

Then don't buy an Apple Watch? They're pretty upfront about what it is.

This actually kind of happened to me. My iPhone 12 Pro was stolen out of my hands last year in July. I had an Apple watch, but decided to replace the iPhone with a Pixel 7 Pro [1] since it was a bit cheaper than replacing the iPhone and I didn't have a job, and as a result my watch didn't work. Initially I was happy enough to use a dumb analog watch, but shortly after this happened, I was diagnosed with sleep apnea and wanted something that would track sleep. I ended up getting a Garmin Instinct (per a recommendation on HN actually).

I gotta admit that it would have been pretty nice to not have been forced to buy a new smartwatch, and just use the one I already had. I love the Garmin Instinct, more than I liked the Apple Watch [2], it's a very good, well-made product, and I'm happy that it appears to work fine on iOS and Android, but I really didn't need another watch. If there hadn't been an artificial limitation forcing me to get another watch, I would probably still be using the Apple Watch.

[1] I don't have that phone anymore because the Pixel 7 Pro is a horrible product that Google should be ashamed of themselves over.

[2] In no small part because the battery is like 16 days instead of the 1.5 days I was getting with the Apple Watch.

1. Samsung watch actually used to support iPhones. They dropped the support, likely due to business reasons and the limitations as described here 2. My naive understanding is that the question is not forcing anyone to support anything, but rather the ability to make it possible to do so. If Apple wants to have full support for Android phones, they are welcome to do so, but not vice versa -- nobody can possibly create a smartwatch that works as well as Apple Watch with iPhones.

I think no because an android compatible watch would be compatible with any other android phone, not only Google Watch <--> Google Phone.

I'm surprised no mention of Apple's forced 30% on all transactions, complete with hard requirement that you never mention the fee to your users.

> Apple also collects fees from banks for using Apple Pay

15 basis points (0.15%) from the issuing bank on something that _undoubtably_ increases tx volume and associated interchange revenue. Sure, the issuing banks would like tx volume for absolutely free. Sure, DOJ should argue the point on NFC access. But 15bp from the party that's making more money on a service that's free and beneficial for {consumer, merchant, card network} just seems like good business.

> Sure, DOJ should argue the point on NFC access.

That's the point of the lawsuit. Chase can't currently make Chase Pay to compete with Apple Pay and offer a mobile payment service with less than 15 basis points.

Lmao no. How will it increase tx volume.

And fine, let apple collect their fee, but also open up payments on iPhone to other providers. Why can't my native bank app use the nfc hardware itself, hmmmmmmmmm? Oh Apple lock in so they can collect their $$$ for literally no reason; the payment network already exists, Apple is just a middleman.

Did they mention copying photos from your phone to a PC via USB? This is intentionally crippled and such an unpleasant experience in comparison to the experience if you have a Mac, for me at least.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39781722

The messaging interop point is probably DOA since Apple has stated that they will be adding RCS support to iMessage.

The smartwatch point is interesting and not an argument I've seen made before, but it's a very good example of Apple's vendor lock-in.

Quote from the article:

> The company “undermines” the ability of iPhone users to message with owners of other types of smartphones, like those running the Android operating system, the government said. That divide — epitomized by the green bubbles that show an Android owner’s messages — sent a signal that other smartphones were lower quality than the iPhone, according to the lawsuit.

I read that as 'interop' is a secondary issue, if an issue at all; the actual case is the green/blue segregation. If Apple embedded a fingerprint in every interoperable message and shown blue messages for iMessage-sent content, green background for others, it'd still be a problem even if messages are otherwise identical - unless all the features truly work on both, in which case the color split is purely status signaling.

Strage to see that as an issue; SMS is clearly an inferior protocol compared to iMessage and it's useful to know when messages have been downgraded.

I agree. That's why I'm saying interop is not the root of the problem. Segregation of people based on whether they are using iMessage or something else combined with inability to install iMessage on non-Apple devices causes a social problem and a significant smartphone market pressure.

> Strage to see that as an issue; SMS is clearly an inferior protocol compared to iMessage and it's useful to know when messages have been downgraded.

Except that's not why the blue/green difference was created (at least historically).

It dates back to the time where SMS messages cost money for each one sent (though plans often came with x free messages), so the green message was telling you it was (potentially) costing you money when sending/receiving messages. (US$ = greenbacks -> green = cost)

That's also ahistorical.

The green bubbles came first.

iMessage didn't even exist for the first few years of the iPhone's life. All messages were green. Green could not have been chosen to indicate it cost money, because there was nothing to distinguish it from.

Then, in 2011 (IIRC), iMessage was introduced, and the blue bubbles were to indicate both that it doesn't cost money, and that it supports several other capabilities (which have changed over the years—IIRC, it did not start out with end-to-end encryption, so the people boldly asserting that that's the primary reason for the distinction are also wrong).

The intent of the color doesn't matter. The actual effect of the color is what matters. Hopefully to the courts, anyway.

The actual effect is to know when my message is secure. No, RCS or another protocol does not mean it’s secure, even if they have some encryption. The other app can still eavesdrop after the message has reached the end.

But perhaps the courts would want to weaken security. It’s definitely a thorn in their side.

The actual effect is ostracism of green bubbles. You literally get kicked out of social circles and get peer-pressured into buying an iPhone.

Does this.... actually happen? To like, people over the age of 10?

If so, I'd almost be thankful to Apple for letting me know who not to bother being friends with.

If someone in my social circle ostracized someone else because of their phone, they (the person doing the ostracizing) wouldn't be in my social circle anymore.

if you're not joking you can see countless examples on social media sites. it's not just friends it's family, coworkers.

my friend group has a separate group chat for just android users and they get party invites after the main group does.

I'm not joking, at all.

I have never heard of this actually happening outside of when iPhone is a topic on HN. I don't really have other social media, so that might be a part of it. But in real life? Never once experienced this, or even know someone who has.

my friend group has a separate group chat for just android users and they get party invites after the main group does.

This makes no sense to me. You exclude some portion of your friends because your text bubble is green instead of blue? Why?

It absolutely happens in real life because of basic human nature. It creates friction in relationships, and even the most minimal amount of unecessary friction can cause divides or make it harder to connect. You seem to underestimate how lazy people can be.

Imagine in 2010 you meet a potential romantic partner and they say, "Hey! Add me on Facebook!" And you reply, "Oh, I'm not on Facebook... can we just talk on the phone instead?" The person may go, "Oh, umm... sure, I guess." But then you never connect because you haven't made it as easy as possible; you've introduced a tiny amount of friction that a lot of people are just not willing to tolerate. If everyone else is on Facebook, why aren't you?

In real life, it creates so much friction that yes, there is pressure to buy an iPhone and change your entire software ecosystem just to fit in and remove this barrier to relationships. It's just text messaging; it's ancient technology at this point and no company should have a monopoly on it in any form. At a minimum they should let other operating systems download iMessage—show them ads, charge a fee, I don't know. But creating a hardware-enforced wall around basic telecommunication is wrong.

>It creates friction in relationships

I do not understand how the color of a chat bubble creates friction. I text Android friends the same way I text iPhone friends. We exchange phone numbers, then we text each other.

You sound very rational as the core function of a text is maintained. It's a fact that Apple neuters the features when texting Android. It's a social faux pas to have android as a kid, in college, or even as adults.

For me personally, I find that young professional women on the dating scene see it as a signal / red flag for lack of status or wealth when starting an interaction. It puts you in a negative light at the start of it dating, whether a tease or serious concern. There's dumber things people judge, but this is up there. Once you establish trust and comfort, I haven't found issue with texting in this scenario.

So there's initial friction in some cases like dating. And with children/families there's ongoing friction.

This must be some kind of sharp generational divide, right? I'm over 40 and I can't think of anything that has made me feel as old as I do reading the "green message shame" discourse.

Anybody from any generation has experienced this is some form or fashion, don't be coy.

the chat bubble color misses the point. it's more the loss of features. because as soon as you add a single android user the experience degrades. reacting becomes clunkier and imessage exclusive features wont work. so it's better to manage two chats

> my friend group has a separate group chat for just android users and they get party invites after the main group does.

This is beyond ridiculous. All of my group chats that need to be cross-platform just move to Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp

that's the problem. not everyone has that, but we've had the same number since middle school. sms is the default. i could delete fb tomorrow.

This happened in my family. Except my cousins just banded together and bought our Android using family member an iPhone. She was pleased with the result

How has apple pulled off an encryption scheme that prevents people from seeing the iPhone screen over somebody's shoulder?

Eye to eye encryption?

Let me propose a thought experiment.

Remove the color from the equation entirely, and what do you think would happen when someone without an iPhone joins a group chat? Do you think everyone would ignore the change completely, even though it would mean they'd lose all the iMessage features that SMS/MMS group texts lack? Or do you think they'd just be more frustrated about it because it's harder to tell when it's happening, but treat people the same?

Do you really think it has anything to do with the color of the bubbles, rather than the fact that SMS's featureset is much smaller than iMessage's?

Yes, because it's the other way around now: if you have a green bubble, you don't get invited to the chat in the first place. A different thought experiment for you: assume feature parity between green and blue bubbles starts today, what do you think happens? Do green bubbles suddenly start getting invites to group chats?

...Yes, and that's my point. It's not about the color, but lots of people are talking about it as if the color is the primary or sole cause of the ostracization—as if Apple marking iMessages differently than SMS messages is the root of the problem, rather than the disparity in features.

I'm not going to try to deny that there are some people who a) would shun (ex?)friends for using an Android phone, and b) continue to shun them even once the actual reason for that goes away, because Lord there are some petty, shallow people in the world.

I am going to say that I don't think it's Apple's or the government's business to try to fix that problem. If the government wants to force Apple to open up iMessage in some fashion, I think that's potentially reasonable, but holding Apple responsible for the cruelty and cliquishness of what must be a tiny subset of its users is just absurd.

> The intent of the color doesn't matter. The actual effect of the color is what matters. Hopefully to the courts, anyway.

Intent (often?) matters:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea

iMessage is the monopoly part. They could make an App or even just an API available on other platforms but don't because they want the lock-in.

> “The #1 most difficult [reason] to leave the Apple universe app is iMessage ... iMessage amounts to serious lock-in,” was how one unnamed former Apple employee put it in an email in 2016 > “iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375128/apple-imessage-an...

Not getting on board with RCS or any other way to improve SMS/MMS until they were (implicitly) forced was motivated by that desire to lock their users in to a messaging platform that only works on Apple devices.

Only because of Apple's refusal to implement RCS for feature parity. They're doing this on purpose, claiming anything else is just wool.

Gruber gives a pretty good breakdown of the blue/green bubble history: https://daringfireball.net/2022/01/seeing_green

Short version: SMS has been green since the first iPhone, blue iMessage was added later. Green was not invented to "punish the poors"

It doesn’t matter. That’s how teens are using it today.

So maybe someone should talk to the teens, rather than wasting taxpayer money trying punish a company for building a better product...

Maybe Apple shouldn't use their dominant position as a smartphone manufacturer to knowledgeably exploit human insecurity and exacerbate user woe in hope of selling families another iPhone: https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/21/24107676/buy-your-mom-an-...

How long until the government mandates that Apple start directly parenting teenagers?

Or perhaps regulators will just require Apple to adopt Google's messaging app strategy, which is clearly much better for consumers:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...

> Green was not invented to "punish the poors"

No, but blue was only given to the first class citizens.

The colors indicate the features available. Even with RCS, there will be a significant list of features available to iMessage users that are not available over RCS. No matter what Apple does there must be some mechanism to visually indicate that standard iMessage features are no longer available. What would be the alternative, pretending that these features exist and then failing silently when one client doesn't support them?

The green/blue bubble thing is irrelevant. It reflects a fundamental reality of the platform technology.

Technology doesn’t matter here. What matters is whether people feel pressured to buy iMessage capable devices by others. In the US the answer is yes. Elsewhere it’s WhatsApp everywhere (with its own homogenous ecosystem issues which should be regulated).

That would be an interesting development, because apparently the other monopolist in this game is implementing RCS with some proprietary crap, and Apple will deliberately implement the current standard feature set. So they will continue being incompatible but now because of Google. I'll continue investing in the popcorn futures :) .

I’ve never understood the messaging interop angle when there are so many non-phone network based messaging apps available. It’s just always seemed the weakest of the arguments against Apple w.r.t. the iPhone. SMS/MMS/RCS standardization was historically a train wreck so it made sense to me for Apple to just support the minimum and be done with it. All of my groups chats that involve a mixture of iPhone and Android users has usually been on something like WhatsApp for this reason.

The other points seem much more specific and actionable.

To be fair, Apple has said a lot of things. Wasn't FaceTime supposed to be an open standard and that never happened? If they give a specific target date I'd feel more encouraged.

> 3. Messaging interoperability

The richest company in the world is purposefully generating social and psychology stress for young people so they can edge up their market share just a little bit more. In a just world, people would be imprisoned over this.

Or alternatively in a just world we would teach our children not to be little shits to each other because of their tech choices. I just can't wrap my head around how the whole SMS vs iMessage color thing has become such a dominant "problem". It's been that way for as long as there was any distinction to be made between SMS and non SMS messaging. It's valuable information to the end user, and it's easily dealt with by using any other messaging system other than SMS to communicate, like apparently the entire rest of the world does. But somehow it's too difficult for american teenagers to figure out how to install Signal, or Whats App, or Telegram, or Facebook Messenger, or use email, or Discord, or IRC, or Matrix, or Skype, or Google Chat or literally any other of a few hundred messaging / chat systems that are out there.

Even though I am somewhat gainst Apple I dont think that is a fair assessment.

I do however find them extremely hypocrite of suggesting how they "care" about young people and yet not acting on it while causing this problem.

In terms of (4) Why would the apple watch want to have to build and maintain their apple watch on the google platform. Its funny that a company not wanting to work on another platform (probably due to business costs of doing that) is being considered anti-competitive.

Making it difficult for 3rd party .. sure but trying to force apple to have their hardware work on other platforms is a business decision .

Apple is the old Microsoft but much worse. WinTel PC was so much more open comparing to Apple.

1. Seems odd, given WeChat is on iOS… the example you used is literally a counterpoint for the allegation.

3. Messages do interop. But it’d be hilarious if the US created some kind of precedent where everything has to work on everything.

4. Samsung, and Google both fall into this trap, where more functionality is available between like devices.

5. So when my Amex isn’t accepted, that’s Visa or Mastercard restricting APIs - and causing lock in right?

These strange legal cases are odd to me. If we think these large tech conglomerates should be regulated, then write laws for them, don’t use the court system to muck things up for no reason.

"For folks who don't have time to read a 90 page document, the case rests on specific claims, not just _the general claim that iPhone is a monopoly because it's so big_. "

But that's not a claim. It might be a fact that supports a claim. One which Apple might contest. It seems that no matter how many times web publications in spades remind readers that monopolies are not per se illegal, i.e., something more is required, e.g., anti-competitive conduct, forum commenters remain convinced of some other reality.

Right. The legal theories are:

- Monopolization: actual, attempted, conspiracies, etc.

- Restraints of trade. Horizontal (rigging bids, fixing prices, allocating markets to avoid competition) and Vertical (resale price limits, exclusive deals)

- Tying: leveraging one monopoly to gain another

- Merger, where the resulting market would not be competitive

- other Unfair Competition (FTC)

While lawsuits are not uncommon, actual relief is rare, in part because the few judgments are overturned on appeal. Antitrust has been steadily eroded for decades.

Recent relief includes US v AT&T 2018 (imposed conditions on the Time Warner acquisition), but there are many more overturned.

So: 1. Super apps and 2 cloud streaming apps (restraint of trade): it's hard to compare all of apple to all of these multi-function apps. One question is whether all the apple functionality in fact complies with whatever constraints are imposed. I suppose the theory is restraint of trade. In NCAA v. Alston (2021) the NCAA lost their ability to restrict student compensation, but that was a blanket restriction.

3. Message interoperability: Apple also color-codes SMS messages, and will argue it helps to indicate the kind of data that can be transferred. That's a losing argument.

4. Smart watches (Restraint and tying): Unclear what limits are placed on other watches. Easy to fix with an updated API, but some risk the court will try to order Apple to license WatchOS. As with patent, watches may end up adding more legal exposure than the product is really worth in the portfolio.

5. Digital wallets (tying): Hard to see the courts requiring openness here when they have not done so for other financial networks, and the government doesn't really want this.

Most are based on tying, but tying has not been effective for some time. Virtually every successful tying case lacked a distinct business or technical rationale. (The right to repair and maintain (from Xerox on) is the furthest they go in rebutting technical rationale's, and they still permit technical standards.)

To be honest, I never got why the message interop was such a big deal. Do people still use text messages in 2024 as opposed to a third party app like Signal, Discord, Whatsapp, Telegram, etc?

I just find it a bit questionable that Apple is being forced open this much. If you want a super app, why don't you just use the browser? Also, is cloud streaming apps such a big deal?

And re smartwatches, isn't it somehow expected that apps made by the same company will always have an edge? You can see this in the Windows+Microsoft Auth combo where Microsoft apps can do stuff that non-Microsoft apps can't just because it is a Microsoft app.

Maybe iPhones are much more popular in the US, but I feel Apple doesn't have such a strong hold of the mobile market in Europe.

My worry is that Apple is be forced open and will have to allow everyone to access the same APIs with all the security implications of it. Surely, if people don't like the way iPhones work they can move to Android or Tizen. I personally wish people moved away from iPhones AND Androids so we could have the thriving and healthy competition we had at the beginning of the smartphone revolution with Android, iOs, Symbian and similar. Support a market full of mobile OSes competitors and not a duopoly with open APIs.

4. Smartwatches

This is true, my wife and I have Huawei smart watches.

After my wife's android phone broke she got an iPhone and the watch is basically useless.

It can't receive notifications, can't control music playback, it can't use "find my phone" which makes the phone shout "I'm here" really loud.

The only thing it can do is sync the step counter.

My 2 cents:

1 - Might have an argument there.

2 - OK, but only if the user is willing to accept the security risk to their apps, Apple and non-Apple. Apple has an interest in keeping the apps they create, or sell for others, secure but should bear no responsibility if a third-party fails to keep to the same standard.

3 - OK. I personally kind of like it because I am a bad person, but OK.

4 - Aren't most of them behind Apple's watches, anyway? I don't have an issue with Apple Watch not being compatible with Android - while Apple shouldn't prevent a third-party (see 2 above) from creating a bridge, they should, in no way, be forced to do it themselves.

5 - (see 2 above) And I don't have an issue with Apple torquing the nuts of banks - the banks do the same to us. And yes, it's my money they're taking from banks, but the banks don't like that, so ... I'm gonna call that one a tie.

>Apple itself offers a "super app" of course, which is the Apple ecosystem of apps.

Isn't this .. not "super apps" then? If it's multiple apps? Said 3rd party super apps could instead be multiple apps people install a la carte. But companies want to do uber apps for funnel purposes etc.

The "messaging interoperability" point strikes me as a weird one.

In the US, people tend to use iMessages, which is not interoperable with other ecosystems. But iPhone place no limitation on third party messaging apps. Indeed, the rest of the world simply ignores the existence of iMessages and uses other applications for messaging (these vary per country/region, but I don't think that iMessages has any significant market share in any other country).

There's not technical reason preventing people in the US from using another messaging platform, and there are no limitations imposed on third party messaging apps. It's really just a cultural issue of people _choosing_ iMessages. Probably just network effect.

Most of this sounds like the DOJ doesn't understand the tech at all.

iMessage is an Apple service, created as a way to provide additional value to people on Apple platforms so that they aren't limited by SMS. The DOJ argument appears to be "oh, you made a better mousetrap, and now you have to let people outside your platform use it." Why? What's the rational argument there?

They then extend that argument to the watch, which is just bananas. It's designed to work with one set of platforms. The tightly coupled nature of Watch/Phone/Mac provides benefits, but Apple is never going to open the technical kimono up to Samsung (e.g.) watches to use the same hooks, and they shouldn't be required to do so.

For a second, let's just assume that Apple is 100% guilty. What will the fine be? If it's anything less than many billions of dollars, there is zero incentive for Apple to do anything at all different in the future.

Suing Apple(or any other company over stuff like this) when the fines will be a tiny slap on the wrist at worst will not incentivize proper behaviour, so there is literally zero reason for doing this except for the govt to feel good about itself, see!! we got a few hundred million from that evil corp for doing bad things. LOL. Apple could plead guilty tomorrow, pay the fine and continue doing business and not even notice.

Ongoing fines until they achieve compliance, or legally barring them from operating in the US. I think that's usually how rulings go in these kinds of cases.

Page 76 of the lawsuit PDF goes into some specifics under the section "Request for relief".

The US govt would never ever bar the worlds largest, most profitable public company from operating in the US. That's ridiculous and nowhere in the Request For Relief that I just read: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24492020/doj-apple-an...

It basically boils down to: stop doing the bad things and pay a fine. The fine being an amount equal to it's costs for bringing the suit, pennies on the dollar next to the dollars Apple made.

There is no incentive to change future behavior here. When the govt broke up AT&T's monopoly, there was an incentive to change behavior. Since then it's weakly enforced "fines" that do nothing to curtail future monopolistic behavior.

I imagine this will happen: Some of this will stick, but it will be stuff Apple has already promised (like adopting RCS) and they will pay a small(to them) fine and will continue on business as usual with no actual changes being made, just like all the other lawsuits of this type the US govt has done in the last few decades. Some people will feel better I suppose, even though absolutely nothing of substance will have changed.

1. Super Apps are notorious for tracking the user across the "mini" apps within it, which is the argument made by Apple for making them hard to get approval for. I'm on Apple's side here

2. I was able to use PS Remote Play on my iPhone even many years ago (pre-COVID). A quick google search shows that Steam Link and Shadow PC (my ATF) are also available on iOS. I'm on Apple's side here too

3. I think the situation has recently changed here as someone else has commented, so this feels solvable without a lawsuit. Also it's hard to single out Apple here when everyone out there has their own messaging platforms. It's not like WhatsApp is encouraging third-party clients. An argument can be made that iMessage blurs the line between what's Apple-provided vs. carrier-provided, so I can see the user confusion and the issues that come with it. I'm on the FTC's side here

4. Who cares about smartwatches. It's niche at best. Besides, there are countless other watches you can use and they work with many devices. I'm on Apple's side here

5. It's not like you can't tap your card instead of your phone. I don't think the phone needs to be just a husk with apps created by third parties, especially for things like wallets. I'm happy to trade away that freedom for increased security, Benjamin Franklin's quote notwithstanding. The payments ecosystem is made up of players charging fees from the next player down the chain, so also hard to single out Apple here, but I can see why there's need for increased transparency (I wasn't explicitly aware they charged any fees, even if I would probably guess they were if prompted). I'm on neither side here.

So based on my biases and incomplete understanding of the facts, Apple wins 3-1

It's worth remembering that this administration is suing seemingly everyone in Tech, in what I can only assume is being done in the hopes they can make a name for themselves. Lena Khan literally said "you miss all the shots you don't take".

I would prefer a more focused approach with higher signal to noise ratio.

> Who cares about smartwatches

219.43 million people use smartwatches

I assume that's worldwide? That definitely seems niche to me compared to the global population.

Regardless of the size, it does that make it okay to hamper competition like they do.

If this was such an insignificant niche, Apple Watch wouldn't even exist, would it?

I don't think global population is a factor in antitrust law.

It's a factor in whether "219.43 million people" is a lot of people. If that's 219 million people in the US (i.e. well over half the population), that's obviously massively more significant than 219 million people worldwide.

But for the question of anti-trust action it doesn't matter whether it's "a lot" of people, it matters whether it's an insignificant number of people - if there were 10 smartwatch users in the US, the argument "who cares about smartwatch users" could be valid, but it makes no difference whether there's 219 million people in the US or 219 thousand people in US, since even 219 thousand users is definitely much, much more than sufficient to justify intervention.

How large does a business need to be on a global scale before we can smack down bad actors for abusing it? If you are a street corner business and your competitors down the street sell things at a loss just until they can put you out of business, should that be allowed because you were only a local business and didn't have millions of customers?

I don't really know about sourcing market data, but this[0] page cites Deloitte and Pew:

>The global smartwatch adoption rate has reached an impressive 21.7% of the adult population

...

>The adoption rate of smartwatches is expected to continue growing, with industry projections suggesting that it will surpass 25% of the adult population shortly.

I don't believe a fifth or a quarter of the adult population could rationally be called 'niche'.

0. https://scoop.market.us/smartwatch-statistics/

This is irrelevant. The primary argument people have against Apple is their platform indirectly impacts how other businesses can operate generally. The smartwatch never took off as a platform, so it exercises no such influence.

> The smartwatch never took off as a platform

And you think Apple had no role to play in this by making most of them useless on their devices?

There is no reason to believe lack of background activity support on iPhone is the reason smartwatches haven’t taken off as a computing platform.

I love how whenever Apple makes a clearly anti-trust move it's always about privacy.

That would be true, if Apple couldn't literally write any TOS they want that allows other App stores or billing methods and then add "but you can't include tracking that invades our users privacy or resell their data".

That's just as enforceable on their end, and not anti-competitive, assuming Apple themselves don't launch their own ad platform and tracking...

Apple having access to everything related to end user, every step they can take regarding privacy can be deemed as anti-competitive.

Here’s another example: Facebook knows exactly the 100 people they show my ads but not giving me their full name, relationship status, list of friends, their gender, sexual orientation, etc.

> Apple having access to everything related to end user, every step they can take regarding privacy can be deemed as anti-competitive.

But does Apple have access to things? Or do they (sometimes?) design things so that even they don't have the information?

A lot of the time they do things 'on device'.

Agreed. And that’s something I very much enjoy.

My general worry is that the entire discussion is shifting “from what’s good for the customer to this other company cannot do something shady because you protect the customer”.

Does Apple enjoy this gatekeeping practice? Of course they do, but so does Google with Android and they abuse the crap out of it.

Google's also being sued for their antitrust actions, so they're not above reproach here either.

If I care about my privacy, I much prefer the world where Apple just restricts APIs/integrations that are harmful to it than that they have to employ armies of lawyers and auditors to go after TOS violations after the fact.

They are more than free to restrict any APIs/integrations they want, as long as these restrictions apply to their own apps as well.

It’s much easier to identify and detect an app that does multiple things than identify trackings across multiple parts of an app.

> I love how whenever Apple makes a clearly anti-trust move it's always about privacy.

Who else is going to care about privacy though?

For the payment situation for example, Apple Pay (and Google Pay) use EMV Tokenization so that your actual credit card number is obfuscated:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pay#Technology

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Pay_(payment_method)#Te...

Credit card numbers are used by retailers to data mine their customers:

* https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

> For the payment situation for example, Apple Pay (and Google Pay) use EMV Tokenization so that your actual credit card number is obfuscated

As does Samsung Pay. As could any number of tap to pay providers, if Apple would let them on iOS.

Actually Samsung Pay for the longest time supported MST which was not secure and supported transmission of payment credentials that could be intercepted by a MITM.

1) Apple makes an exception if you're China, unfortunately. This is how WeChat has taken off, and I bet WeChat could bully its way around the App Store rules to the detriment of competitors, another "special deal" from Apple.

2) This is about cloud gaming, when you're streaming the game from hardware in the cloud, like Xbox Game Pass. Streaming the game from your own hardware isn't as competitive to Apple since it requires you buy a $500 console or gaming PC.

3) The biggest issue was Apple not implementing RCS and defaulting every iOS user to iMessage, which has created a two-tier messaging system, friends getting locked out of chat groups, etc simply because Apple doesn't want to use the standard.

4) "Who cares" is not a valid argument in using your dominance in one market to dominate another, which is textbook anticompetitive behavior. They also do this with AirTags, Airpods, any accessory where the Apple product gets to use integrations with the OS and third-parties are forbidden from doing so.

5) Tapping your phone is more secure because the card number is randomized and single-use, protecting it from replay attacks.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply

Re: #2 FWIW Shadow PC doesn't require a PC. You get a virtual one for like $20-50 / month depending on the level of virtual PC you'd like.

And Microsoft Cloud Gaming is still in beta. Why would Apple even need to consider supporting it?

Apple doesn't need to support it, they need to not block it and let the user decide if they want to participate in a beta.

Based on your biases and incomplete understanding of the facts, I think tapoxi wins 1-0.

I think you mean 4-1 ;)

You're still missing the point. PlayStation Plus and GeForce Now are both production products, and you can't get apps for iOS/iPad OS/tvOS

1. Presumably it’s equally likely causality flows in the other direction: WeChat took off before Apple instituted strict controls but the cat was already out of the bag in that market. WeChat is an exceptionally user hostile app, and arguing for more of it is anti-consumer. It’s probably the best example of what can go wrong if you require the freedoms that give rise to superapps.

Apple Pay doesn’t offer single use card numbers for third party cards. They are different from your regular card number but they stay the same between purchases.

3) there are tons of other apps in which exluded users can have groups an use other features with other multiplatform users. You can't sue a company because in just their official app it won't support a protocol develop by others. Just install another app, no monopoly here.

I'm not sure Apple makes or don't make an exception in China. From what I can see, Chinese chat-pay superapp features are something largely chat and web based. From what I can see, it works something like following:

a) Users may reload HNPay balance by credit card, debit, or bank transfer, through in-app browser.

b) Users may use "send money" button to create some special chat message or link, which will be intercepted at server side, to send HNPay balance to a HNPay address/user ID.

c) (Deprecated)The user may scan QR code on a fading sticker at storefront that does the same as above.

d) The user may also use "show QR code" button, have the other user/store machine scan the code, which allows the other user/store computer to do b) with a negative amount for withdrawal.

e) The HNPay balance can be refunded to bank accounts if needed.

I'm sure people here can come up with half a dozen applicable financial regulations, restrictions imposed by banks and payment processors, cybersecurity attack vectors and massive lawsuit potentials for each of above, plus perhaps couples of solvable App Store guideline difficulties across a)-e). I think those would be problems towards realizing Facebook Messenger pay or TwitterPay, not App Store special treatment that only applies to China. Not many of them, if any, use NFC and secure element hardware in iOS devices like the point 5. misleads.

Even if Apple supports RCS, iMessage supports many features that RCS does not. It will still be a two-tier system but the tiers will be somewhat closer.

>> Who cares about smartwatches

The Justice Department, 16 US states, and the District of Columbia, among others. Anti-trust violations are crimes.

in #2 you’re talking about something else. those are streaming games from a console you own.

_cloud_ streaming where the game is running a ms/sony owned server is only available in a browser.

i don’t know about the sony side of things, but apple rejected ms’s native cloud streaming app.

Those barely exist... Microsoft Cloud Gaming is still in beta.

Does Apple have a rule that says beta apps aren't allowed on the app store?

As far as I'm concerned Microsoft cloud gaming is like a 1.0 version and works fine on Windows and Android. I had no idea it was a beta product until just now.

You keep bringing up MS Cloud Gaming, but there are others that are more established.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/

https://luna.amazon.com/

Luna can only support iOS by using Safari, for example.

> 3.

Every single group chat that I use on a day-to-day basis has a non iPhone participant. The biggest argument against the way apple treats SMS vs iMessage I see is people feel ostracized for having green bubbles. I just don't understand why this rises to anti-trust.

What is this “having green bubbles” stuff? My messages are green on threads with Android users, to indicate the capabilities of the messages I am sending. Not theirs. I don’t even know how to tell who’s on what in a mixed-ecosystem thread.

messages from Android users show up as green to iOS users in group chats with mixed users, so everyone invariably makes fun of them / complains about "the person with the green bubble"

Do you have an iPhone? I do and my bubbles are green on group chats that involve Android users. Theirs look the same as everyone else’s.

yes, and if we're in a chat with Bob Android, we will blame Bob for forcing all of us to be in this inferior chat that's green ewww

or so the argument goes

The bubbles are green if you talk to someone with an Android, and they're blue if you talk to someone with an iPhone. People simplify this by saying "you have blue bubbles."

That isn’t how it works. Your own bubbles are green, all the “external” people in the chat have “regular” colors. Ex: I am using dark mode, so their bubbles show as dark for me, and mine are green.

Green Bubble Bellied Sneetches

Or you could show an ounce of maturity and just move to a cross-platform messaging app. This antisocial behavior is absolutely crazy to me; maybe it's because my first experiences with IP messaging was Skype and not iMessage. My iMessage-only group chats are the vast minority; Facebook Messenger is where most live, then WhatsApp and some Slack/Discord.

Videos. Every time I get a video from an iphone user it is trash quality. Other iphone users don't have this problem. It's just me on the android. I cannot seem to get any iphone user to understand linking out from whatever icloud or whatever, so whenever someone sends me a video they took, i basically don't get to see. I'm sure there are more, but this the one that actually makes me mad.

From the iphone side, there has to be something, because my family keeps 2 group chats. One with android users and one without. Someone when using an iphone is annoying when group texting android users.

To be fair, on this particular point, you aren't Apple's customer in this scenario. This is like complaining that Tesla has supercharger stations and your non-Tesla has a different charging connector, so your interactions with Supercharging stations is degraded. This really wouldn't be Tesla's problem.

Apple supports the video standards that were available via MMS/SMS when iMessage rolled out, the higher res videos only available in the first place because Apple added it via iMessage. The newer 'standard' was a Google dominated way of trying to make inroads on Apple's superior implementation and in most of the world, Messages isn't even the top Messaging app.

Now that Apple has announced support for RCS incoming, even including messaging in the suit doesn't make sense in the slightest.

It remains to be seen how apple handles RCS. It's a pretty lax standard.

> The newer 'standard' was a Google dominated way of trying to make inroads on Apple's superior implementation and in most of the world, Messages isn't even the top Messaging app.

The RCS standard was is just about as old as the iPhone and older than iMessage. Google began supporting and pushing the standard forward in a way that benefits everyone. Apple could have done the same, or made iMessage an open protocal or any of a number of things. Instead Apple has consistently chosen to go the anti-competitive route.

> Apple's superior implementation

It was 'superior' in some ways inferior in other ways, such as communicating with people without an iphone. iMessage isn't particularly better than any other messaging app, but the benefits of user lock-in, and being the default, replaceable sms app. These anti-competitive behaviors do clearly harm users.

> Now that Apple has announced support for RCS incoming

Perhaps once the support actually lands you'll have more of a point. However, I expect half-assed support and the bare minimum given Apple's previous reluctance.

> To be fair, on this particular point, you aren't Apple's customer in this scenario.

But Apple's customer is also affected, in two ways:

1. I then have to text the person back, asking them to re-send the video using another chat app, or emailing a link, or something like that. That's annoying for the iPhone user.

2. In the other direction, if I didn't know better, and I tried to send a video to the iPhone user, it would end up looking like crap for them. That's not a good experience for the Apple customer.

> The newer 'standard' was a Google dominated way of trying to make inroads...

Not sure why "standard" is in scare quotes; it's an actual standard, whereas iMessage is just some proprietary thing Apple made. And it's not newer: RCS is from 2008, which is older than iMessage, and almost as old as the iPhone itself. Likely work on the standard started before the iPhone's release.

> ... on Apple's superior implementation

This is of course a matter of opinion, but to me, any protocol that is locked down, with the owners refusing to enable interoperability, is by definition inferior, regardless of its other merits.

> Apple has announced support for RCS incoming

And we'll see how that goes. If Apple works with Google to enable full interoperability, including E2EE, I'll be pleased. Anything less, though, and it'll feel like Apple is just doing the bare minimum to try to avoid regulatory action. It also remains to be seen as to how much Google cooperates in the other direction. The RCS E2EE stuff is a proprietary Google extension; hopefully that gets made into a public standard as well.

The bottom line, though, is that Apple doesn't interoperate until they believe that they're going to be legally forced to. At least if they get in ahead of the regulatory action, they can do their implementation more or less on their own terms. It's a smart move, but IMO is also scummy.

The thing that has always baffled me about Apple keeping iMessage iOS-only, and not supporting RCS, is that they've been hurting their own customers with this stance too. Plenty of iPhone users live with a degraded, less-private experience wen communicating with non-iPhone users, or have to remember to use a different chat app when conversing with certain contacts. This makes a lot of Apple's rhetoric (in general, not just regarding messaging) about protecting user privacy feel a bit hollow at times. Clearly their primary motivation for the privacy stance isn't to protect users, it's because they believe it gives them a competitive advantage.

Google's RCS isn't the standard-RCS. You can't use Google's RCS without using Google's RCS servers and you can't run your own. You can run your own standard RCS, but it's not compatible and does not do the same things either.

>To be fair, on this particular point, you aren't Apple's customer in this scenario.

Yes, but my mother, who wants to text a video to her sons to share a moment from her day, is, and Apple prevents her from doing that. There is no way to spin this as anything but Apple being openly user hostile to anyone who wants to communicate with an android user.

("She can just-" No, she cannot "just". My mother is in her 60s, and she shouldn't have to learn a workaround to use a basic feature of her phone that just works on android.)

I suppose that really depends on where you are in the world and how phones are used. Sending video works over WhatsApp here, and nobody uses anything telco or native for that (so no iMessage, MMS or RCS). Next one down would be FaceBook Messenger and then apps like LINE, Telegram and finally Signal. iMessage, MMS and RCS don't even make the list, including the entire 12 to 70 age range.

> the higher res videos only available in the first place because Apple added it via iMessage.

iMessage replaced iChat, which was an XMPP client. XMPP supported high-res videos in 2011. (I'm pretty sure it supported them in 2004.)

Why not use an app like WhatsApp?

Isn't the video issue an MMS problem, not an Apple problem? What do you want them to do, reduce the quality for everyone so at least everyone suffers the same?

Not mine cause we leave those people out. It's not Apple's fault that SMS sucks, and RCS adoption was very slow even on Android. Even with all Android phones, a group chat is a disaster unless they use FB Messenger or WhatsApp, which is in fact what most people use. Market working as intended there.

My new phone supports RCS, but I have several frinds who use dual SIM where only one of the devices support RCS. If I turn on RCS, only the device supporting RCS gets the message.

Since it's a global switch, I've had to turn it off...

My phone has RCS and sometimes my RCS messages just don't go through for hours. It will randomly switch between RCS and SMS/MMS. Honestly I find Android to iPhone texting to be more reliable than Android/Android texting nowadays because at least I know it will just be SMS/MMS.

It's pretty awful lol. You can say "it's the carriers" but if you make something that relies on some other people who won't do it right, you haven't made something good, you've made something where you can blame other people for it not being good.

FB Messenger is better and I try to use it over texting whenever I can (in part because I don't need my phone at all to use it)

Yeah it's really hard to make something complex work with so many parties involved. 2-way SMS works well enough at least.

> Even with all Android phones, a group chat is a disaster unless they use FB Messenger or WhatsApp

Excellent point. This is a large part of why I don't agree with iMessage "exclusion" somehow rising to the level of antitrust.

iMessage doesn't make Android texting worse, it just reveals how bad it already is.

Becuase the green bubble makes the user move to an IPhone. Then the user can only use Apple Pay, not Google Pay or Samsung Pay, can only use Apple's Store, can only.. And from having teenagers, the green bubbles MATTER. very, very, very much.

Google Pay is absolutely available on iPhone.

It's not just this administration going after tech. The other guys got the ball rolling, although they use a different narrative to sell it. I think most people recognize there are various problems with the industry that essentially all boil down to the amount of power big tech has. There have been warnings from governments and other players in the private sector for years. I happen to like my iPhone a lot, but it's about time Apple and the rest of them get their teeth kicked in.

> 1. Super Apps are notorious for tracking the user across the "mini" apps within it, which is the argument made by Apple for making them hard to get approval for. I'm on Apple's side here

Never heard this argument, could you name an example of this? I figured the reason for the ban was that it would sidestep most of the Apple software that comes with an iPhone, which Apple obviously wouldn't want since they would prefer to lock users in.

I came across it somewhere I Apple developer docs, I think, when I was building my app. Or maybe it was RevenueCat docs or some tutorial... I'm on my phone now but will try to find it later

From what I'm seeing in other places, there are also some pretty weak claims being made beyond this.

The first is their attempt to redefine what the market is in order to declare Apple a "monopoly": they've posited a completely separate market for "performance smartphones", and tried to use total revenue rather than number of units sold in order to push Apple up to having a very high percentage of this invented market.

The second is their characterization of how Apple got to where they are. Like them or not, you have to be seriously down a conspiracy rabbit hole to believe that the iPhone became as popular as it is primarily through anticompetitive tactics, rather than because it's a very good product that lots and lots of people like. Regardless of whether you, personally, find that value proposition to be compelling.

They also point at some of Apple's offerings and make absolutely absurd claims about how they're anticompetitive—for instance, that they're going to somehow take over the auto market with CarPlay 2.0 and the fact that AppleTV+ exercises control over the content it serves.

There are some things Apple does that are genuinely concerning and deserve more antitrust scrutiny (for instance, their anti-steering provisions for the App Store are pretty egregious), but so far as I can tell, they're not even mentioned in this suit. I'm frankly disappointed in the DoJ for how they've put this together, and would have loved to see something that was narrower and much more robust.

> The first is their attempt to redefine what the market is in order to declare Apple a "monopoly": they've posited a completely separate market for "performance smartphones", and tried to use total revenue rather than number of units sold in order to push Apple up to having a very high percentage of this invented market.

This comes across as very strange, they must not have much confidence in their ability to prove that Apple holds monopoly power in the overall smartphone market. I suspect if they lose this case it's going to be because the court rejects such an intentionally narrowed market definition.

> It's worth remembering that this administration is suing seemingly everyone in Tech, in what I can only assume is being done in the hopes they can make a name for themselves

Of all the points in your low-effort manifesto I find this the most absurd. Even if you don't see any merit in the case, you must admit that it's likely that the DoJ does.

This is like nailing Al Capone for tax evasion. They missed the one actual example of Apple abusing its ownership in one industry (the OS) to then give itself a monopoly over another industry (app stores/app store fees).

Holy mother of based.

I love the current US government. Cracking down on pretty much all of Apples bullshit in one fell-swoop. Now just stop them from offering 8gb of ram on the base model macbooks, and apple might be the perfect tech company.

This is somewhat aligned with the recent trouble they had in EU as well, so now two different regulatory agencies call them out for the same topics. Are they going to claim "security reasons" again?

> "Apple has restrictions on what they allow on the App Store as far as "Super Apps" ... In China, WeChat does many different things, for example, from messaging to payments."

The WeChat super-app is available on iOS, complete with installable "mini apps", and most of the same functionality that is available on Android. So it's not clear exactly what the complaint is here. Unless Apple makes exceptions for WeChat and China that are not available to developers elsewhere?

I am sure each of these items are a pain for a different sets of people. The most irritating one for someone who moved recently is: NFC lock down.

Like my Xiaomi phone was able to store any card I wanted and do a Tap to Pay, but I have to use Apple Pay and I can’t do that because my region is locked to somewhere Apple Pay isn’t a thing. Here in Melbourne even public transport is affected by this. The local myki transport cards can be digitally carried on an Android phone but not an iPhone.

Yet the most important issue for many is missing (unless something changed recently) - inability to access filtered cesspool of scam, malware and annoyance that modern ad-infested internet is.

Jihad against anything actually working well (ie firefox and ublock origin) due to to be polite dubious reasons. Apple gatekeeping is just a move to ads for themselves, it was already multibillion business for them last year. Thats monopolistic behavior in plain sight.

I'd be more sympathetic to the government's arguments if Android phones didn't exist. But they do, and people can use them if they don't like Apple's walled garden.

As things are, this lawsuit seems like the government striking an aggressive posture torwards tech companies for no good reason. It's almost like -- as the tech companies get bigger and more powerful -- the government wants to remind them who's really in charge.

If phone OSes and ecosystems were fungible, then I'd agree. It's reasonable to prefer iOS for many reasons, but still be disappointed in the walled-garden, non-interoperable aspects.

Customers don't really have great choices right now when it comes to smartphones:

1. One OS is locked down, has a walled-garden ecosystem, but has many privacy-protecting features.

2. The other OS more open (interop & user-choice-wise, not really in the FOSS sense), but is run by a company that seems hell-bent on eroding user privacy.

These properties are dictated by Apple and Google. But due to the barrier for entry, there are no alternatives that come even close to duplicating Android's and iOS's feature sets. Even simply using a community-developed Android-based OS can cause you to lose access to many useful features Android provides.

I guess I went off on a little tangent here, but my position is that the existence of Android is only a defense if switching between the two doesn't incur high costs, both financial and non-. That's demonstrably not the case.

> 1. One OS is locked down, has a walled-garden ecosystem, but has many privacy-protecting features.

I wonder, if you open up iOS, do you lose the privacy-protecting features? One of the benefits of iOS is that it makes good privacy decisions for you, where it can

If you take away the defaults, you kind of take away the design choices that were made to improve privacy. People (myself included) are not the best at making decisions that preserve their own privacy

Many people will hit whatever button gets them to the next stage of whatever it is they are trying to achieve. If Apple is not allowed to intervene in that experience, will we see a lot more people being taken advantage of by dark patterns and other software tricks?

You see this as about two major phone companies when in reality it is about all the small phone/os/app companies(competition is good in a free market) that get pushed out because the only two major companies (apple and google) share insane contracts between eachother essentially creating a horizontal monopoly that squashes competition.

> Apple itself offers a "super app" of course, which is the Apple ecosystem of apps.

Does Apple not let others offer a suite of apps?

Individually, yes. But each app has its own app store approoval process and fees. Also they are jailed privately so they cannot share information with each other. Only Apple Apps are the ones that can do that.

> Also they are jailed privately so they cannot share information with each other

This is one of my favourite things about iOS vs Android.

> Also they are jailed privately so they cannot share information with each other.

If the information isn't just stored on the device then it should work fine, right?

I don’t see Messaging interoperability of the iMessage protocol in the complaint.

I see:

* third-party apps not being able to send/receive carrier messages (SMS)

* only Messages getting background running

* blue/green colored bubbles.

The background running thing is a bit of a surprise. If you had asked me, I’d have said iMessages didn’t run in the background given it’s load delay for new messages.

Yeah, iMessage completely craps out when sending messages without signal. A red dot and manual “retry now” button? What is this? ICQ in 1995?

WhatsApp on iOS does a much better job, ironically (it just sends all queued outgoing messages once connectivity is back in the background, like every email client did back in dialup days).

I remember how Apple Watch wouldn't let you download podcasts or songs on Spotify. Apparently they changed that to allow some recently, but that change did get me to switch to the Apple Podcast app for awhile, which I feel like is inferior.

Thats for the writeup. I tend to agree with most of those, although the "super app" things is weird to me...I don't like the idea of "super apps" because it is hard for the user to share only the minimal permissions.

Interesting! So this doesn’t include the 30% Apple tax in this lawsuit?

Epic losing their suit pretty much torpedoed that plank. The findings there would basically tread the same ground and were already found in Apple's favor as a matter of law.

> The findings there would basically tread the same ground and were already found in Apple's favor as a matter of law.

Because the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of Epic v. Apple, even the exact same legal question with the exact same fact pattern would only be bound by that decision if it was (1) between the same parties (res judicata), or (2) in a district court under the Ninth Circuit.

Since US v. Apple is filed in the District of New Jersey, which is under the Third Circuit, the decision in Epic v. Apple is, at best, persuasive precedent, not binding precedent.

Unless there is legislation that forces something, the ship for the app store has sailed. Not to mention, several companies have some version of this, including game consoles. And even legislation in the area seems hard to draft, as seen by DMA.

> Unless there is legislation that forces something, the ship for the app store has sailed.

Simply asserting that doesn't make it true. Even if the app-store related claims in US v. Apple were identical, legally and in alleged facts, to those in Epic v. Apple, the ruling in the latter is not binding precedent for the former because Circuit Court decisions don't bind Districts in other Circuits. And, they aren't identical, anyway.

> Not to mention, several companies have some version of this, including game consoles.

So what? “Other companies do similar things” is not an argument against it being part of an illegal monopolization scheme when others do it. Like browser/OS bundling with Internet Explorer, its not the act in isolation, but its function in context and in conjunction with other business practices that is at issue.

Its not a question of whether an app store fee is on its face illegal, its a question of whwther Apple’s app store fee is part of a broader anticompetitive effort to defend and extend monopoly intthe smartphone and/or performance smartphone markets.

> Apple itself offers a "super app" of course, which is the Apple ecosystem of apps.

...if that counts, is the suit claiming that they somehow don't let other developers have multiple related apps? Because it seems that something like Meta's suite of apps (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) that all share login data and suchlike should qualify if "the Apple ecosystem of apps" does.

> the case rests on specific claims

In this case, could a resolution involve resolving the individual claims, or are the plaintiffs looking for a more all encompassing solution?

Does it indicate what the trigger was on the timing? As far as I can tell, most if not all of this has been Apple SOP for some time.

> 3. Messaging interoperability

> 4. Smartwatches [interoperability]

Where do you draw the line on forcing interoperability?

This is kind of like (in-person) movie theaters.

Movie theaters don't allow you to bring your own food, you have to buy their food/drink.

Why should a movie theater be forced to allow patrons bring their own food?

Why should Apple be forced to allow it's patrons to brining competitive things to their business?

Note: I ask these questions out of genuine curiosity. Not to troll/stir-the-pot.

Even better analogies:

- Should the government force marketplaces to allow competing marketplaces to set up shop within their area, collect fees, but not pay any fees to the larger market?

- Should the government make laws to require restaurants to allow competing chefs to bring a hot plate and start cooking food at the tables and serve them to their customers?

- Should Google be forced by the government to include support for formats in Android that are used by Apple such a HEIF and HEIC? What about Microsoft and Linux?

These rules are not about individual choice or freedom. This is about giant corporations using the government to give them a way into the walled garden built by a competing mega corporation. This is completely self-serving and in no shape, way, or form serves the common good.

As an iPhone user I do not want government interference in a market place that has been kept mostly free of malware precisely because it keeps out the riff-raff. I want the hucksters and the scammers blocked. I really don't care if they scream "unfair!" at the top of their lungs from outside of the fence.

Similarly, general SMS messaging is a cesspit of unceasing spam precisely because it is so interoperable. Because Apple keeps out garbage devices with zero security, I've seen precisely zero iMessage spam in the last decade. I got a spam SMS in the last hour. I'll get several more today.

> I do not want government interference in a market place

This is just not the world we live in. The Play store is also malware-free, and yet you can sideload apps on Android phones.

The Play Store is absolutely not malware free unless you don’t consider apps that take over your launcher and Lock Screen, serve you ads, and links to their own apps malware. Had to remove this garbage from my grandmother’s Pixel

Even better: no stupid analogies and just talk about topic at hand.

> Should Google be forced by the government to include support for formats in Android that are used by Apple such a HEIF and HEIC? What about Microsoft and Linux?

Yes, please.

> As an iPhone user I do not want government interference in a market place that has been kept mostly free of malware precisely because it keeps out the riff-raff.

Citation needed.

> Yes, please.

Those are patented formats. This would make Android no longer open source in the truly free software sense.

Are you sure you want this kind of precedent on the books?

Whatever runs on Pixel is not AOSP anyway.

I presume the question is about impact: At Apple's scale, restricting competition has a very broad impact on the economy. In contrast, a movie theater not allowing outside food is probably not reducing all that much food-related competition in aggregate.

I don't think there's a good real-world "venue/food" analogy. However, hypothetically: Imagine if half of all homes/apartments were controlled by the same company and they also happened to be the largest food producer. They then decided to limit what food could be brought into your home, saying "We have the safest food, so you can only buy our food." Now, they might even be right that their food is the safest, but the market impact would be significant enough to warrant anti-trust action.

Let's say that a movie theatre chain becomes very successful by selling high-quality food instead of stale popcorn laden with artificial butter flavoring. They also curate movies and refuse to screen low-brow garbage pushed out by the studios. The customers love the good movies and good food, so this chain slowly takes over the market, nearly, but not quite, to a level of monopoly. You can still go to competing theatres, but the seats will be sticky, the food will clog your arteries, and you won't enjoy the movie.

So you're saying in this situation the government should step in and force the successful chain with standards to allow competing movie theatres, junk food sellers, and low-budget movie producers to sell their wares in their theatres?

That's literally what's happening with these moves against Apple.

The peddlers of crap are upset that they're locked out of a well-managed market frequented by discerning customers.

That's it.

No, that's a totally different analogy. The point is the impact of their market power other people who want to sell food, not other people who want to sell movies. Apple controls a very large share of the app market; no movie theater, however successful, controls a significant part of the food market.

They 100% control the food sold inside their theatres! It’s their shop, they can decide what’s sold in it.

People have a choice: it’s called Android.

I don’t see why a private company that isn’t a monopoly should be forced to open up their proprietary products to direct competitors.

This is a very slippery slope and the people advocating for it in the case of Apple will be screaming about how unfair it is for the government to get involved when it happens to them.

Let’s say you have a successful startup selling something like an API marketplace.

One day the government says: It’s unfair to MalwareAPI Co that you lock them out of the market and require a fee. You now have to let them sell their viruses to your customers and you don’t even get a cut.

Would you make the same arguments? Why not?

Once you become large enough to have a say in how significant chunk of online commerce is done by inserting yourself as the mandatory 3rd party in any transaction that takes place on the platform, you stop being "just another business" and become a "gatekeeper", or in Apple's case specifically a TWO sided market.

"Gatekeeper" is an EU legal term, which I'm aware doesn't apply in the US, but the term is on point. These gatekeepers are nothing more than unelected, unregulated, and unaccountable points of taxation that limit and control the flow and type of trade that is allowed to happen in the economy. Through network effects, they keep a stranglehold on both sides of the TWO-sided market because one of the sides (providers) doesn't have any alternatives and the other side (users) is chained to the platform through a variety of lock-in effects.

Financial transactions? Give Apple 30%. Porn? Apple says no! Perhaps 20 years from now, the only way to get a tech job will be to go through a an intermediary called Apple Jobs, and they'll take a 30% of your salary. How would you like that?

You seem pretty certain of your opinion, so I doubt anything I can say will sway you.

Nonetheless, it isn't an issue of "quality" or "discerning customers". A company can earn market-share by providing a better product (or a worse product at a lower price) and that's fine.

The issue is when that company uses their market dominance to limit competition. Then it becomes an anti-trust issue. Movie theaters aren't a good analogy since they're far less central to our day-to-day lives, and therefore will have less overall impact on the economy. Nonetheless, imagine your dominant chain makes deals with film producers to prevent their competition from screening popular movies. This prevents the other chains from competing, even if they wanted to.

That analogy breaks down when you look at the state of Safari on iOS. Even ignoring the features of the browser itself, the way its version is tied to the OS version causes tons of support issues for our customers.

In some countries with strong consumer laws, movie theaters are not legally allowed to forbid customers from bringing their own food and drinks.

I always wonder why safari doesn't get more attention in these sorts of claims against apple.

They probably could have avoided all this if they’d caved on messaging interop.

Super Apps sounds like an app that takes away resources from other apps

None of these arguments are very satisfactory to me as a consumer and this appears to be more Mafia like behaviour than a genuine concern for market based competition.

Are you an Apple customer currently?

Why would that matter? It's completley possible to be harmed by a companies market manipulation without being a customer of theirs.

I'm trying to understand bias. I don't think you read the GP comment correctly.

Ah if that is your true point, then no, I am not an Apple fanboy. My daily primary use phone is Android but my work machine is typically the highest available MacBook. (I can not stand windows). I buy iPhones for my family members.

Yes. Thought customer means a lot of things. I have purchased their MacBooks recently, iphones for family and such.

How so?

What's stopping people from buying or using any other kind of phone, new or old? Or from producing one? None of what's listed here is relevant to that regard.

Absolutely nothing. The claim that Apple has a monopoly on the smartphone market is just laughable. Android has 40% market share in the US and 70% globally.

To reverse your statistic, Apple has 60% of mobile market share in US and Canada, meaning the whole of North America.

On top of that, 87% of the teen mobile market in the US own an iPhone.

Apple definitely has a dominant position in the western smartphone market.

I keep seeing references here to the teen market and teen attitudes toward green bubbles. Should the anti-monopoly law toward a large, but globally minority market-share company hinge on the attitudes of US teenagers?

In 10 years, teenagers will be the adult population.

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/10/10/iphone-teen-survey-2023...

90% of marketshare with monopolistic practices is relevant?

Thanks for the summary. My "Open Apple" wishlist includes:

• Allowing alternate web browser implementations, including alternate Javascript and WebAssembly implementations.

• Which would include third party developer access to the memory allocation/permissions API used for JIT compilers. Make iOS a first class ARM development OS. Please.

Perhaps removing restrictions to general APIs for competitive apps and "Super apps" would implicitly include those changes?

Interesting that this doesn't address Apple's iOS "taxation" of tangential non-web transactions, or the lack of App Store alternatives. If Apple has monopoly power, those seem like suitable concerns.

Thanks this simplifies things a lot.

Thank you for the summary

I specifically prefer apple because they don't let others fuck around like android does.

is a browser a super app? a cloud streaming app?

Do they mention CarPlay? It drives me crazy that it only integrates notifications with Apple first party apps. It will send me notifications for iMessage or Apple calendar, but completely silences and hides Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Google calendar, Google voice, etc no matter what settings I try. It's frankly dangerous because it forces me to check my phone while driving in case of an urgent message or call. Meanwhile Android auto will show me all notifications and I can silence them while driving if I choose.

CarPlay supports notifications with non-first party apps like Microsoft Teams. I don't use everything on your list, but WhatsApp definitely supports CarPlay notifications. You may have them muted. You can mute/unmute on a per-app basis -- go to the app settings and adjust the "Show in CarPlay" toggle.

I haven’t used WhatsApp for while so maybe I’m wrong about that one, but Messenger definitely doesn’t work. I wish it was opt in by default for all notifications, it’s annoying so many don’t work.

As someone who never uses Apple devices, iMessage is the only true form of monopoly based control that Apple imposes. Apple's 30% costs are harsh, but it is not like Google or MSFT charge anything less.

Such cases always seem to reach a pre-determined conclusion, that has more to do with the political winds of the era, than true legal determinism.

Looking at the accusations from that lens:

1. Super Apps - I don't see how 'Apple doesn't share enough data with Chinese super apps' is going to fly 2024 America. It also has huge security and privacy impliciations. This accusation seems DOA.

2. Streaming games is tricky, but it isn't a big revenue stream. The outcome for this point appears immaterail to Apple stock.

3. iMessage - This is the big one. I see the whole case hinging on this point.

4. Smartwatches. Meh, Apple might add inter-op for apple smartwatches on android. I don't think this will lead to any users switching over or an actually pleasing experience.

5. Digital Wallets. This seems tacked on. Apps are PhonePe and PayTm work just fine on Apple and Android. I have never heard of anyone using a Digital Wallet that is not Apple pay, Google Pay or Samsung Pay. Are digital wallets a big revenue stream for Apple ?

> Google or MSFT charge anything less.

Google: true, BUT you can install and publish other app stores

MSFT: false, they charge 15% for apps and 12% for games (talking about the Microsoft Store)

You can't possibly equate the situation on windows or android with iOS. It's trivial to install an app from outside of the app stores on both, whereas it's entirely impossible on iOS.

We do have "Super Apps" in the Western world. They're called "web browsers."

Note that Apple doesn't allow alternative web browsers on iOS, so Safari/WebKit is the only Super App allowed on iOS.

https://open-web-advocacy.org/apple-browser-ban/

> When you download Chrome, Firefox or any other browser that isn't Safari on an Apple device, that browser is forced to use Safari's rendering engine WebKit. Chrome normally uses Chromium, and Firefox Gecko. However, Apple will not allow those browsers to use their own engines. Without the ability to use their own engines, those browsers are unable to bring you their latest and greatest features, and can only go so far as whatever WebKit has added.

This is no longer correct I believe at least in the European union.

Not the case anymore in EU thx/because DMA (since ios 17.4)

Although Apple now has to allow alternative browsers to ship their engines in the EU, they actually set out ridiculous conditions for browser vendors to be able to do so. Therefore, as of now, none have done it.

This is malicious compliance from Apple to try and make the law ineffective.

It'll get done sooner than later, that's money just left on the table right now for EU browser makers. And the enforcement of the DMA correcting Apple's most obvious malicious compliance has been swift (backtracking on EU PWAs).

Does enforcing a single rendering engine make things like Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) possible?

(It's not just a link to a web app on the homepage, it can also hold state, receive notifications, and (within reason) take over most of the screen.)

https://web.dev/explore/progressive-web-apps

Enforcing a single browser engine is in no way a requirement for PWAs, no.

Windows, macOS and Android all support PWAs while also allowing them to be run by different browser engines.

Arguably, F-Droid is a (Android-only, not possible to make such an app on iOS) super app that very much exists in the western world.

> Apple itself offers a "super app" of course, which is the Apple ecosystem of apps.

To be fair to Apple, both Google and Meta have loads of apps for iOS that compare to the Apple suite of apps. Although there is definitely a pre-installed advantage for the Apple apps.

> F-Droid is a (Android-only, not possible to make such an app on iOS) super app that very much exists in the western world.

I’d call that an app marketplace, not a super app.

Then wouldn’t the same argument apply to the Apple App Store?

I think it does. Calling iOS a "super app" seems weird and doesn't explain a lot, in my view.

First, Chrome's rendering engine is Blink. Chromium is not a rendering engine, it's the open-source version of Chrome.

Second, third-party browsers use their own rendering engines (Gecko, Blink) on MacOS, while iOS only allows WebKit.

> Note that Apple doesn't allow alternative web browsers on iOS,

Nor [embedded] programming languages (e.g. Python).

That’s how Steve Jobs put down Flash.

No, for a a platform to survive, its maintainers need the leverage to call out laggards and make them truly sweat and work with it. Not just build 10 layers of Cordova fluff

Your second paragraph is incorrect and is explained why in your quote. Apple does allow alternative browsers, it does however restrict the rendering engine. Saying there is only one browser on iOS is like saying Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are the same browser because they both use chromium.

Chromium is open source and both Google and Microsoft do whatever they want to it as part of developing their browsers. WebKit on iOS is a closed source blob of rendering engine and assorted bits that it is not possible to deeply extend or alter.

None of what you said is incorrect.

WebKit is also open source. https://webkit.org/

Yes, you can use open source WebKit to make a browser for Windows or Mac.

You cannot for iOS. On iOS, you have to use the WebKit framework. Your app will not be compiled with any WebKit open source code.

I see it as Apple allowing a facade around their browser. You can't really call Chrome on iOS as "Chrome" if it's still just Safari under the hood. It's like putting Ferrari body on a 2010 Honda frame. Is it a "Ferrari" or is it really a "Honda"?

No, I do not think it's fair to say that Apple allows other browsers, and neither does the DOJ.

People get confused by this because "engine" is being used too loosely (to mean totally different things).

That means I cannot install uBlock origin and other extensions on FF, so we can call it one way or the other, but it's restricting.

You got that right. I have an old basic 6th gen ipad with a cracked screen and slowly disappearing battery life but I refuse to get a new one until they drop the requirement for webkit because the web has become a miserable place without ublock. It's amazing that what was once a surfing champ has been reduced to almost unusable with all the trackers, frameworks, adworks, et. I'm mostly reading text, I should not need a super computer.

Blink is the name of the rendering engine, not Chromium.

> Saying there is only one browser on iOS is like saying Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are the same browser because they both use chromium.

This is the correct take, though. They ARE the same web browser, just with different skins.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. Chrome and Safari on iOS aren't using Webkit because they both use the WebKit source and compile it into their browsers... They are both using webkit because Chrome offloads rendering to a WKWebView. Chrome on iOS is not rendering anything at all

Microsoft __chose__ to use Blink, ostensibly because they felt that maintaining EdgeHTML was too costly. On iOS, you either use WebKit or your browser is technically and legally banned.

> it does however restrict the rendering engine

This isn't a sufficient description. Apple actually requires all third-party browsers to use the WebKit framework. If they actually allowed browsers to use the WebKit engine, then you could make a new browser incorporating the open source WebKit engine compiled into it. But this is not allowed.

> Saying there is only one browser on iOS is like saying Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are the same browser because they both use chromium.

No, Edge and Chrome both use the Chromium engine. They are different browsers that incorporate the same engine. Edge can do this because Chromium is open source.

But Chrome on iOS doesn't have its own engine at all (not even the Webkit engine). It just offloads to the WebKit framework.

That’s a specific strategic choice, wanted by Steve Jobs himself to maintain leverage on the browser ecosystem.

If Chrome was let loose indiscriminately on any platform, how long before it became a Macromedia Flash, hobbling battery life and performance on whatever platform didn’t align to Alphabet’s strategy?

Also, how long before Alphabet began prime-timing Android, leaving Apple versions trailing months of not years behind, and restoring the “Works best on IE” experience of the ‘00s?

That is stretching the definition of a browser. Superapps enable all the miniapps in them to access the same user data, the history of app interactions (e.g., message history, shopping history), and to integrate closely. Webapps are nowhere close to that.

They should have added claims for:

- NFC

apple does have full NFC support for their products but for other apps there are tons of road blocks for using anything close to full NFC functionality

- Bluetooth

same, similar more usable, but some functionality is still not available for 3rd party apps at all meaning certain things can only be provided 1st party by Apple

- Strange behaviour when releasing questionable competive Apps

There had been multiple cases where Apple released 1st party apps and it "happened" that the previous leader(s) of previous existing 3rd party apps "happened" to have issues with releasing updates around that time (or similar strange coincidental behavior). Additionally such new apps often had some new non-documented non public APIs which makes it harder for 3rd parties to compete.

- Questionable app store reviews

Stories of apps running in arbitrary you could say outright despotic harassment when wrt. the app store reviews are more then just few (to be clear legal non malicious apps which should be fully legal on the apple app store).

EDIT: To be clear for the first 2 points apple always have excuses which seem reasonable on the surface until you think it through a bit more (e.g. similar to there excuse for banning PWAs in the EU, I think they might have undid that by now). And for the other points it's always arbitrary enough so that in any specific case you could call it coincidence, but there is a pattern.

Bluetooth remains my biggest gripe with my iphone. When I walk out of range of any connected device, my call switches from my headset to the phone, and I have to manually go in and reconnect to my headset every third or fourth time I want to connect to it.

It stands in stark contrast to literally everything else about the device, which is almost universally easy and thoughtless.

my biggest gripe is NFC, through more then their not-so-competitive parts but also that they didn't support it at all until they had their own 1st party use-case for it (which isn't anti-competive just sucks)

the reason is that it crippled a whole industry of smart door looks

NFC is (by far!) technically the best way to handle them (for many of the common security levels). (Through I mean proper secure application of NFC, something you often do not get in a satisfying way with a lot of the RFID card solutions. And I'm aware that a ton (most?) of smart door room solutions are a complete security nightmare, but that is companies cheeping out and/or not hiring anyone who know anything about security etc.)

EDIT: stuff like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39779291 is what I mean with most RFID based solutions are shit. Through not sure how much this specific case was very competent hackers and how much bad security.

Sure, Apple should jump both feet into whatever shaky tech standard and go to umpteenth lengths to guarantee simultaneous interoperability and compatibility with all of them as they evolve to something workable , forever.

Otherwise if they fail to walk on their own feet it’s not the fault of their stewards and their poor performance. Nope, it’s Apple’s fault for not having helped enough.

sorry but you seem to have absolutely no idea what you are speaking about

NFC has not been a "shaky" standard long long long before Apple adopted it

and most other phone vendors had at least some models which support it

even before that there where extension systems to try out and test it before phones did support it

so it was pretty much Apple holding the industry in that specific area back

and like I said it wasn't anti-competive, it was there right to do so

but it shows how apple often doesn't care too much about what would be good for the user if it isn't good for them, I mean they are in the end a stock traded company it would be strange if they didn't

and if one vendor has a huge usage base to a point it has monopoly like powers (even if the usage base is only around ~50% that still is monopoly like power in the phone marked due to the marked/usage dynamic of phones) then you can't rely on a technology 50%+(1) of your customers can't use because the vendor they use doesn't support it or artificially locks it down especially if it's something like a phone where the network effects makes it basically impossible to expect people to switch it (1: 50%+ as while the marked share wasn't 50%+ the marked share in the audience such a system would reach was.)

EDIT: And yes I'm fully aware of the while NFC<->SIM secure module<->carrier power being annoying thing. But that thing had been solved a long time ago outside of the US (and later in the US by virtual secure modules) and while the initial solutions to that problem (e.g. in the EU) where still annoying non of it was a major road block and would have been resolved if there would have been insensitive to do so. But if your product doesn't work with iPhone users and you potential customers are mainly people which high end phones it just never mattered because the marked was dead anyway.

One of the big reasons I buy into the Apple ecosystem is for that next level of first-party interoperability. It works far better than any collection of more open systems I’ve even seen/used.

I don’t use Apple in spite of this, I use it because of this. Trying to support everything will likely lead to a worse experience for everyone in a multi-device world.

Apple is a hardware company making their own software to run that hardware, much like a game console. It seems like many of the criticisms here could be adapted and applied to Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation. Why can’t my PS VR work with my Xbox… it’s a Sony monopoly /s

There are areas where I think Apple can improve, such as right to repair and reliability in general. But it seems like some of what these governments are trying to kill is the very reason some people went to Apple in the first place. That doesn’t lead to more choice, it leads to less choice… as the government tries to turn iOS into an Android clone. Kind of odd that Apple is being told to act more like the platform that has the lead in global market share.

I just don’t understand the appeal of “Super Apps”. Do users really want to hire a taxi with the same application they use to message their friends, and have that be the same application they use to buy household goods, and have that be the same application they use to control their garage door? It doesn’t make sense to me. These are totally different tasks. Why would a user want to use the same app to do them?

Imagine the extreme end result of this: You buy a phone, and it’s OS comes with only one app installed: The Super App which you launch and do everything through it. How is that Super App not in fact the OS at that point?

> Do users really want ...

The answer is clearly yes in a lot of markets, even if purpose-built apps might be better at a specific tasks, a single app that does dozens of things "well enough" is more convenient than having to juggle dozens of login infos and para-relationships with app developers (managing graymail etc).

Does't this "the market is right" logic also apply to Apple itself and its walled garden? E.g.: "Do users really want a walled garden where they can't install 'everything apps'? The answer is clearly yes in a lot of markets..."

both things can be true, apple has over a billion users

The extreme result is indeed what Apple wants to avoid because you would more or less have a custom operating system at that point and could ignore Apple's software, which they would hate. Obviously it is not as good as being able to flash an actual new OS onto the device but it would still impact Apple's bottom line.

Google itself is a superapp at this point as you only have one account. But to answer your question, I think it’s because of interoperability issues. Why can’t my calendar services message me? Or why can’t I quickly create an event inside a chat? If you remember PDAs, they fell under the definition of one ecosystem to manage your communication and time, but now you have several services that refuses to talk to each other. One of the core strength of Apple is that kind of integration. It’s not that you want one company managing it all, you just want an integrated app ecosystem.

The one area I have concerns about is superapps. I’m of the opinion that user experience is better when an app does one thing and does it well. WeChat and Facebook as platforms or just a digital variant of platform lock-ins.

> In China, WeChat does many different things, for example, from messaging to payments. This complaint alleges that Apple makes it difficult or impossible to offer this kind of app on their platform.

But WeChat is available on iOS isn't it? If not the iPhone would be pretty impossible to sell there, just like Huawei's android without Google play don't sell here in the west.

It's a good list, but I'll be interested to see how it becomes anti-trust actionable and not just "a good list of reasons not to buy an iPhone."

Why is any of this a problem when consumers who find all that too constraining can just use Android?

Because its bad for consumers to have to choose a different device solely because of Apple's anti-competitive practices. This is exactly the sort of scenario when regulation is good - Apple is acting in their best interest, but its on-the-whole bad for the American consumer. We can have the good of Apple without the anti-competitive bullshit like a lack of message interoperability. We just need the government to enforce it

Consumers would have to choose a different device if, say, Apple saved money by putting in a lousy screen or a cellular radio that was unreliable... What transitions these ecosystem misfeatures to anti-consumer in a way that an inferior screen isn't?

(I submit they aren't anti-consumer; they're ecosystem control and some consumers find that to be a feature. I know I feel safer recommending my grandma an iPhone because scammers won't trick her into side-loading a root kit into it or loading some fake banking app that she pays money into that just disappears).

This makes me so angry. You have a choice in the market! Everything on this list is a feature which I am choosing as the customer. If I didn't want these features and benefits then I would make a different choice as a consumer. As a consumer I am not a victim. I can choose between iOS, Android, or something else.

You are specifically choosing to not have message interoperability? Why?

We have message interoperability already. I can install any messenger of my choosing. I can install WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Signal, etc, etc.

But I don't need any of those because 99% of the people I communicate with are on iMessage.

And again, you choose to not be able to communicate with that 1% over iMessage why? It sounds like being able to do so would only benefit you.

I actually offered to buy that person an iPhone. But regardless, no one is a victim here.

Android has a 70% global market share. You really only communicate with one person of that 70%?

Everyone I communicate with who has an Android device has WhatsApp or Signal installed. Same is true of 99% of iPhone users.

Seems it would have costed you a lot less if Apple just didn't arbitrarily block that person in the first place.

If that person had taken you up on that offer, you would literally be a victim of their anticompetitive practices.

I wonder if people made comments like these in support of Internet Explorer when Microsoft was dealing with antitrust law in court.

Uh, yeah they did. Many people thought at that time that DOJ was overstepping. Many still do. In hindsight, Microsoft’s behavior at the time seems like small potatoes compared to the ecosystem protection that occurs today.

You can look at adoption rates of IE vs Firefox and Chrome, and compare them to iOS vs Android.

It isn't about you, it's about me who can't install iMessage on an Andorid phone or a Linux desktop and participate in your group chats in reasonable capacity.

One question: Who owns iMessage? Who pays to run the servers? Who pays for the bandwidth?

Do you allow your neighbors to use your yard and driveway that you pay for?

If I had billions of dollars and a yard the size of a small country I probably wouldn't mind...

I postulate people would gladly pay a cup of coffee's worth for a first party app and/or subscription. Certainly easier than shelling out a few hundred bucks for an iDevice.

That’s kind of what I think. Make an iCloud subscription tier that includes access to messages and then include it in the web-browser version of iCloud and make an Android app for messages. I can’t imagine it would have to cost much more than $10-$15.

This would be an Apple service. It'd cost $99/month to view the text of messages on non-iPhone devices, and an additional $99/month to view any photos/videos/emojis attached to messages.

The base plan for iCloud+ is 99 cents a month and the next tier is $2.99, they're pretty reasonable about these services.

> Who pays to run the servers? Who pays for the bandwidth?

I f%$@ing do. I paid when I bought an iPhone, Mac and iPad.

And even if it’s not enough - provide it as a service for a fee.

Many victim are adamant that they are not actually a victim no matter what evidence is provided. Luckily anti-trust law doesn't care about your opinion.

But are you really a victim ?

While the smartphone market is not exactly a broad selection of competing standards, you can chose between Android and iPhone, and over time they've more or less come to represent opposing poles, where Android initially embraced openness and iPhone was the walled garden.

People picked based on preferences, but it's not like any of the platforms lock you in. They even have tools to facilitate easy switching between platforms.

Many companies, especially in highly regulated industries, specifically pick iPhone over Android for the ability to lock down the device. In my industry, our IT department has essentially given up getting Android "certified" to comply with regulations.

Apple recently opened up the App Store in the EU, in theory allowing 3rd party stores, but despite almost everybody i know using iPhones, i have yet to see anything 3rd party installed.

You're not buying a literal apple. Purchasing context does not stop at point of sale.

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