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Comment by amadeuspagel | Hacker News Reader

> In 2010, a top Apple executive emailed Apple’s then-CEO about an ad for the new Kindle e-reader. The ad began with a woman who was using her iPhone to buy and read books on the Kindle app. She then switches to an Android smartphone and continues to read her books using the same Kindle app. The executive wrote to Jobs: one “message that can’t be missed is that it is easy to switch from iPhone to Android. Not fun to watch.”

This attitude explains a lot. This logic applies to every app that's available on both iPhone and Android, and to every web app.

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This behavior is so overt that I am constantly baffled that otherwise rational people continue to make up excuses for Apple. See also this article where they overtly state that the green bubble thing is deliberately intended to cause lock-in: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375128/apple-imessage-an...

I have been called a "violent criminal" on this very site because I criticized Apple's decision to remotely brick swapped components to prevent DIY repairs. I do not understand what it is about Apple that causes this behavior in people when they make it so, so, so obvious that they are just trying to lock people in for cash.

“Locking people in for cash” is a common business practice in tech and other industries. Try mounting a Nikon lens on a Canon camera, for example. You might not like it, but I’m not sure why Apple deserves special condemnation in this regard.

There's little you can do with a camera, even if you're able to swap lenses from another vendor. There are infinite things you could do with a modern smartphone if had access to it.

So because phones are useful, lock-in should be prohibited? I don’t think that’s how the law reads. Should we also prevent lock-in for car parts, because there are infinite places to go in cars?

> Should we also prevent lock-in for car parts, because there are infinite places to go in cars?

...yes. Of course we should protect the personal transportation of hundreds of millions of Americans. And we do via the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act.

In the same way, of course we should protect the primary form factor of personal computer for roughly a hundred of million Americans.

> Try mounting a Nikon lens on a Canon camera, for example. You might not like it,

Right, I don't. Things like these not being standardized when it would be so easy for them to be just so that one provider can make a little extra money selling their own peripherals is scummy and I would love to see it stopped. Apple does this, Nikon does this, both can either fix it or burn.

Also, what exactly is your point? That you admit Apple is doing anti-competitive things to lock customers in, just that you don't care?

But if you buy an e-mount camera, you can adapt damn near any lens.

There is a big gap between lock in by screwing competitors (Apple) and lock in by screwing customers. The latter can be solved by jumping ship and will resolve itself when enough people get pissed off and stop buying, but the former needs regulatory oversight

just because something is a "common business practice" doesn't mean it isn't wrong.

> Try mounting a Nikon lens on a Canon camera, for example.

You can simply buy the adapter from amazon or almost any shop. You've really chosen a bad example because companies have tried to patent their connectors to limit production of these kinds of adapters and the courts always rule the patents invalid. Locking people in for cash is a common illegal practice; it happens and take time to remediate, but is and should be illegal.

> You can simply buy the adapter from amazon or almost any shop.

Not if you want to use autofocus.

Yes, even if you want to use autofocus. I don't really like posting product links, but you can google it. Maybe at some point in your past you were personally not able to find such a product and make a purchase and that may have shaped your ideas of the situation. Also they keep making new connector types to keep this arms race going. As I said, the law takes a dim view of such shenanigans and certainly protects interoperability.

You can buy a Tamron or Sigma lens and mount it on a Nikon or Canon camera.

You can buy an android. It’s not hard. You can eliminate all your problems. The solution exists. I do find any further argument temping when not only can you buy an Android, you can buy a cheaper phone that does all the same things.

I do not angry when I use Netflix and the program I wanna watch is on Hulu. I do not complain to Hulu. They offer a app/website and I can buy it that very day. You can, this very day, buy an Android

I wish everything good was free too and I only had one app and one computer OS and didn’t have to choose between car brands too but that’s not Reality

How does buying an android fix the issues surrounding the green bubble? How does buying an android let you use an apple watch? How does buying an android fix all the cross dependencies of super apps that would be utilised between android and iphones?

To fix the apple issue in the US you don't need to buy 1 android phone you need to buy 175 million of them (and, to apple's credit, not the cheaper ones if you want to match apple performance)... or you could enforce the law to curtail the more aggregious of apple's anti-competitive behaviours.

I do use an Android. Doesn't mean I can't point out glaringly obvious issues across the pond. Apple's decisions affect me regardless:

- If I develop an app and want to port it to an Apple device, I need to spend a ton of money on devices from their ecosystem to do so or else I miss out on their whole market.

- Members of my close family use iPhones and will ask me for help with things like getting videos off of them. Lock-in features like iCloud make it extraordinarily difficult and prevents them from getting an Android without leaving their things behind.

- Apple has enough market pull that if they do something user-hostile for money and walk away unpunished legally, others in the market tend to copy them. See the headphone jack issue and how Samsung and Google have dropped it.

- When my family sends me videos over text they look terrible. It's a small thing, but considering that the Beeper Mini thing revealed how easy it would be for Apple to just not actively break iMessage solutions, it's pretty annoying.

Being able to use your own software on your own device is not a fantasyland, it is the default for most devices. Apple is a standout exception and it is insane to me that Apple users will shrug that off with "well, that's just reality," because it clearly isn't. It is a conscious decision by Apple to block you from owning your device and you are rolling over and taking it.

> Apple has enough market pull that if they do something user-hostile for money and walk away unpunished legally, others in the market tend to copy them. See the headphone jack issue and how Samsung and Google have dropped it.

Great point. For many years Google police was that in app purchases, if you were not using Googles play service to handle them for you, were allowed and without any Google tax. That meant that the Kindle app on Android allowed you to buy books. After they changed their policy to be more like Apples, now I need to open the browser to buy a book. Why should either Apple or Google get ANYTHING from me buying a book from Amazon? Do they own me or something?

What an asinine comment. What you are basically saying is to buy an iPhone to use with friends that use iPhone and then buy an Android to use with friends that have an Android phone or that you pick your friends based on their phone.

Because you cannot have only one of them and not either have a problem or cause a problem for others. So which of those are you? The one that cause problems?

Can you not call iPhones with an android? You can receive text messages too?

>You can receive text messages too

Not really. It isn't that simple, which you'd know if you read only a few comments here. For example, my mother has only one friend with an iPhone. Of all her friends, she is the only one she cannot send images to directly. Her friends iPhone refuses and sends back an "image too large" SMS error message. The only way to get the iPhone to accept the image is to first reduce it in size via an app. Huawei, OnePlus, Samsung, Nokia - they all send and receive just fine (most on the same provider as the iPhone) but if the same image is sent from the iPhone the problem disappears, unless you try to send it back, then the error message reappears.

Then there's all the iMessage versus SMS/MMS/RCS green/blue issues. Read the comments. Apple is using lots of small dirty tricks.

I have sent many a images on an iphone via sms when imessage lacks any connectivity so this is a little weird for me to read. Maybe my OS version automatically sizes these images for sms.

Or we could be allowed to use the hardware we purchased how we want?

How is that not an improvement to you?

The solution to "this device engages in bad/anticonsumer behaviour" is not "buy something else" when the said device is 60% of all devices in its category (smartphones) sold. The only true solution is to either petition Apple to stop it, or like in this case, use the available laws. Apple isn't the first company trying to pull a fast one nor will it be the last.

The green bubble complaining must have the lowest level of credibility among all the anti-apple complaints. The method of "monopolization" here is to make their product cooler than their competitors product. The idea that we need to government to step in and force apple to make android cool too is so silly.

The method of monipolization is to increase lock in, by Apple's own internal emails. There are emails of them literally saying that to themselves. Why do people conjure hypotheticals on why Apple is just "acting for their users interest" when we have legal evidence of them saying that their plan for iMessage is to cause user lock in.

If the green bubbles didn’t violate Apples own accessibility standards for text contrast (https://medium.com/@krvoller/how-iphone-violates-apples-acce... would agree it’s a silly complaint. But there is no technical limitation requiring that a message be less readable because it came from an Android. So it’s not just “less cool” they actively make the user experience worse for you when you are messaging someone that doesn’t have an iPhone.

Apple Fanboyism Is A Religion: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-is-a-religion-neurosci...

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