The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

iOS is not close to a monopoly. People are perfectly free to have Android devices and side load apps on to them. It is curious that the campaigning focuses so strongly on destroying the high trust part that exists and not on promoting a trusted setup on Android.

This is not a good argument. Yes things aren't perfect in many areas of technology, but that doesn't mean we should give up.

The better version of this argument acknowledges that there are tradeoffs: allowing side loading may introduce risk but the risk is low relative to the other risks users face and the benefits outweigh the costs.

https://9to5google.com/2024/03/06/japan-google-pixel-sales-i...

Subsidies are also stil the wild wild west, with the regulators teppidly trying to do something about it but with no real change in sight. Buying from a carriers will reduce the real phone price up to a quarter depending on how you do it, and the carrier will have buy backs to sweeten the deal further, so you'll be eating what the carrier feeds you.

And that's all compound with the same phone supporting different network bands depending on where they're sold, and resale value plumetting because of that (even if you carrier unlock the phone, it won't support all of other carriers' network bands)

The iPhone winning so big is in no small part thanks to Apple not getting in bed with the carriers.

No, power users rarely influenced mainstream adoption of any tech. Apple and the rest didn't become trillion dolar corps by catering to power users. Power users are niche and very picky market not worth catering to if you want to make it big.

What made the "WIntel/IBM" PC gain majority mainstream market share was that is was all open(not to be confused with open source) which allowed everyone, not just power users, but regular users too, and also any HW vendor and SW developer to decide what HW and SW they can develop and sell to users, and what users can install on their system, without the consent or added 30% tax from the original vendor or manufacturer of the system.

It was basically an open bazaar and a cost race to the bottom, where the free market decided the winners and losers based on consumer preference, but there was no global authority to say "I'm not gonna allow your SW/HW to run on the platform we developed". Microsoft or Intel couldn't gatekeep what you installed or ran on the Intel/Windows platform.

Sure, the PC platform had it's own set of issues due to overabundance of cheap low quality HW/SW that caused poor UX, and anti-trust issues from the Windows and Intel monopolies, but it was overall a net benefit due to the open playing field. Can you imagine 3dfx, ATI and Nvidia GPUs not being allowed to run on the PC platform because Intel had a closed PCI standard that only worked with their own GPUs?

The answer to that will be different for different customers, or potential customers. A lot of iPhone customers like me are quite happy with the devices more or less as they are. The vast majority of people complaining about iPhones aren't iPhone customers. Frankly I don't really see why I should care what they think.

I'm more sympathetic to actual iPhone customers, or former customers that left, but looking at the numbers satisfaction levels with iPhones are through the roof. This is a teeny tiny proportion of customers. The case for Apple harming the interests of customers directly is super thin.

The other main dimension to this is Apple's commercial relations with other companies, mainly app store developers. I'm sympathetic to the idea that such relationships should be regulated to at least some extent. I'm glad controls on links to external payment options are being opened up, and there's pressure towards more equitable revenue structures. I think this is the main area Apple's control of the platform is open to abuse, but IMHO that doesn't extend to third party app stores. The current app store should be properly regulated, I think third party stores are a complete distraction. They'll never take off, and are probably going to be a worse experience for users.

If all Apple cared about is making money, would they have spent upwards of 10 Billion+ on an Apple Car only to cancel it later. At its height, Vision Pro R&D cost 2 billion per quarter, yes you read that correctly, almost 25% of their yearly net profits went into development of Vision Pro Alone. Does this sound like gouging the customer to line their executive pockets to you?

If Apple executives had lined their pockets, then why is the top Apple Executive only worth 2 Billion when Apple is worth close to 3 Trillion, that is less than 0.1% of Apple’s valuation. Apple’s top executive does not even make it to the world’s top 100 by wealth. Does that not make you think?

I believe Verizon launched their own app store at one point. It was called V Cast.

A quick search led me here: https://www.pcworld.com/article/498393/verizons_android_app_...

I was working in mobile games at the time and ended up working with Google on the Play Store launch, among other things.

But what I mentioned was not some big secret. Everyone knew Android was supposed to be the response to google having to keep stashes of j2me devices in drawers, which is ironically what everyone ended up needing to do with Android devices.

People have memory holed just what a shock the iphone caused, not just technically but strategically, and how it altered who has the power over distribution. The whole industry (google included) did not see this coming because of the power of the carriers.

Just something else I was thinking about with Android. I love the Android OS but Google’s implementation is far and away the best version and while you could technically run Android with just the bare necessities and without google apps, it may as well be unusable. So, google has “technically” made it available without their services but the juice isn’t worth the squeeze to get it working how you want it.

(Or to take another example of the operate-blatantly-illegally-until-you-bribe-your-way-to-legalization and loss-lead-til-monopoly industry, it's almost like having the taxi market controlled by Uber and Lyft instead of myriad local cab companies is a bad thing)

(Or to bring it back to the point of the thread, it's almost like having the mobile phone app market controlled by Apple and Google is a bad thing)

It is just a statement of the obvious. Price tends to trump every other consideration, unless the difference is pretty big. See also airline ticket pricing and the race to the bottom in comfort & features. If there is no differentiator, a lot of people will just get Android phones because they cost less. They'll put up with quite a lot of abuse as long as they save a few bucks. It'd probably end up like gmail.

Turns out that the curated experience of iPhone combined with a lot of fumbles from various android vendors has kept iPhone image of being the best and most desirable phone.

It is very vaguely feeling like if another big player was to come in they could actually make some waves that causes everyone else to jump. To the benefit of the users. But I doubt that will happen.

We live in a world where every landline telephone can dial another with no trickery or fuckery from your phone manufacturer.

That is a good thing. We should extend that functionally to smartphones.

I'm not saying is impossible or something, but it's just way more effort than it was worth to me. E.g. so many iOS apps by default are set to use iCloud. All of my photos for years were in Google Photos. There is a Google Photos app for iOS, but it is in no way as seamless an experience as on a Pixel (e.g. camera integration). And I think a lot of people would say that if you get an iPhone but specifically avoid Apple's services like iCloud for photos so you can stay on Google's services, that defeats a huge part of the value of being on the iOS ecosystem in the first place.

That's less likely to happen to you in Scandinavia, perhaps since Puritans found it safer to set sail for New England than keep trying to evangelize Vikings.

Also, yes, everyone's perfectly free to use a different messaging app, and in different cohorts everyone does, which suggests it's not Apple's "walled garden" causing these difference.

* This has been true at various times, including times FB has said it isn't true. I did see the WhatsApp founder walk away from a billion dollars over various issues, and stopped using it then too.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/im-a-sellou...

The fact of the matter is that in the US, especially for specific socioeconomic groups, iOS is by far the dominant platform, and for many people since iMessage is the default, their definition of "texting" is simply iMessage. You state, "it's baffling to me that your friend group wouldn't simply switch to a messaging app with good group chat support" - except that completely ignores network effects, and many times I am literally the only person on Android. If I'm, say, going on a vacation with friends and literally 10 of them are on iOS and I'm the only one on Android, it's a losing battle to try to convince the other 9 to switch, especially since nearly all of their other contacts are on iOS/iMessage. A restaurant in Austin, TX, famous for their funny signs, even had a joke about it: https://www.instagram.com/p/CwLKeGRLieb

The reason the situation in Europe is different is primarily due to 2 factors:

1. iOS was never as dominant in the EU as the US

2. Perhaps more importantly, what is often forgotten is that in the EU and elsewhere about ~15 years ago, per-SMS rates from telecoms were egregiously expensive, while in the US by that time they were mostly unlimited with a flat monthly rate. So there was never a huge drive to get off SMS in the US (this is why WhatsApp first took off much faster outside the US than within it). In a pretty brilliant "Embrace/Extend/Extinguish" move, iMessage initially simply because the default SMS app on iPhone. Users never really "picked" any messaging app, they just continued to use the "texting app" that had always been on their phones.

Joe Consumer doesn’t even notice the garden has walls.

Without Apple’s introduction of the smart-phone, millions of app development jobs would not exist. Apple’s 30% tax is reducing profits of some developers, the biggest ones are complaining but none of it is gutting the economy, app development is not being shifted overseas because Apple made the cost of development too high. If anything it is the literal opposite, SWE salaries are still increasing because the demand for app developers still outpaces the supply, and people are more than willing to pay 6 figures+ for a good SWE.

The funny thing is your frame has some truth to it, it’s just your entire thinking is hopelessly muddled that you focus on everything that doesn’t matter. There is case, where the government can step in, raise the price of the iPhones to employ more people, cause net consumer harm but still be better for society. That is in iPhone manufacturing where all the jobs have been shifted overseas and no trade worker in US gets employed to make iPhones. This is a real problem, and yet no one in the FTC cares about this, they may not even know this problem exists in their desperate bid to grab power and come up on the front page of NYT with a big win. And what will they achieve? They will let some other app developers make more money, but no offense to 99% of HN, you guys are highly paid and a 30% higher potential margin really doesn’t matter. They will dictate design decisions to a company that is probably 100000x better at design than the FTC is and get fawning reviews from NYT, get invited to talks at universities, maybe even get called to a late night show (has happened before) and that is probably all that matters to them.

Spotify is a loss making company finding reasons to blame its problems. What annoys Spotify is that Apple Music exists, this is the age old problem between vendors and distributors, where vendors hate it if Walmart comes out with its own peanut butter jar to sell. The fundamental problem with the vendor here is their product is not differentiated, Apple isn’t worried if Walmart sells other smartphones, they don’t care but Reese’s is extremely worried and will make a huge hula about private labels and such. Spotify as a technology has nothing unique, their audio isn’t even lossless yet, their music is now available through Apple, Amazon, YouTube, Tidal and who knows what else. They basically have some network effects due to social media and are living off a first mover advantage, meanwhile as their see their dominance erode they are trying to find boogeyman’s to blame. If Apple removes 30% tax, Spotify won’t magically become a successful business, Spotify still needs to find something more differentiated than the sea of music streaming apps out there. Netflix kind of did it with originals and superior efficiency, Spotify won’t be able to do anything until they take a hard look at their business and truly diagnose why it’s such a trash heap.

Actually we don't even tend to bother even talking about which phones you have. It's just meh. My best friend doesn't even know what iMessage is as an example.

So, you decided to try solving a social problem with a technological solution?

Don’t make me tap the sign.

Open SMTP relays never made anyone not get bullied in the email days either. If the apple is a status symbol, then kids will use it to be cruel regardless of the internals or regardless of the services it uses on the backend. They will find something else to ostracize you over.

Using something as an excuse to be a piece of shit is not the same as giving a crap. This isnt an example of a good reason to do this.

Apple trying to take 30% of subscriptions while operating a competing service as a value-add that can afford to be a loss leader is highly anticompetitive.

The others are also kind of mute points, No one is auditing app updates, and I'm not sure how an app can be more trusted with access to a usb/bluetooth device than a website. they are both 3rd party programs doing the same thing.

Native apps can also be archived for use with emulators at some point down the road, as we’re now seeing with efforts to emulate iOS 2/3 and some of the earliest iOS apps. Had those apps been PWAs they’d all be gone for good outside of the tiny handful where the dev decided to open source them.

On HN, all the time, but it's not something that regular users notice or care about. It's not that native apps can't be on some level superior, but most people can't tell the difference and frankly, most native apps I've had to use are just as bad on all performance metrics as Slack and company.

What people are really complaining about is that most apps are made as quickly and cheaply as possible, and those lazy apps are disproportionately web apps because web is cheap and easy.

How many microseconds do you think it'd take before someone noticed and made it into a huge PR nightmare?

Apple has a brand of trust and security. If they decided to become even the tiniest bit evil in that dimension their “secure” brand would evaporate overnight.

Unless you think they control all media and levers to power too?

Steve Jobs was barely out the door before Cook ran to allow PRISM access, something Job's had fought against for years.

but true detective is not good, it's good bad.

If you have no CAD/modeling experience, making something custom is limited to the simple variation available in the software, or you just buy off the shelf models. 3D printing skeptics said that 3D printers were just for making worthless junk.

There’s an opportunity coming with an LLM-style text-to-model generator. I saw one recently and it is pretty exciting.

And the "only" thing that Apple has is just happy users, who aren't as bound to having to buy or use Apple products and could in theory switch whenever they wanted. It's much easier to give up using Apple products than say wean on Google products.

Yes you do. Maybe not specifically, but: AI research only happens because companies and capital firms have invested billions of dollars into paying the salaries of people who do the research. AI is the latest category in a string of categories which have dominated the zeitgeist, to varying degrees of success; crypto was definitely the most recent prior, and AI definitely seems to be doing better than that.

AI is only successful because there exists billions of dollars in undeployed capital looking for returns. That's reality; and it states something similar enough to "AI is only successful because the other super-cycles failed" that the statement gets a pass; if crypto still offered strong ROI, there would be a lot less capital available for AI, and AI is extremely capital intensive.

Bullshit. By that logic there would be no Mac specific software. There was Mac software when Macs were 1% or less of computers. 2022:

  74% of computers worldwide run on Windows, according to StatCounter. This dwarfs macOS, which accounts for 15%

Does that not seem contradictory to you? If it's a huge market they make a lot of money in, then there's by definition a lot of people who don't think "good riddance" if they leave. Apple has more leverage than you give them credit for.