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Comment by jorvi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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