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Comment by ChilledTonic | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been a recent convert to the iPhone. It gives me a unique perspective since I’ve spent almost my entire life in the Android ecosystem.

I first bought an iPhone 5c on a whim, which is well out of support by apple, 5 versions behind the modern iOS. If you turn it on, all the default Apple apps work, in 2024.

You can stream Apple Music and download podcasts with no App Store whatsoever. It’s a powerful little device, more then ten years later.

Compare this to the Android system, where google has wholesale deprecated their podcasts app. You’ll have to find a 3rd party one if you want to access that functionality.

The point I’m trying to make is that for Joe Consumer, everything on an iPhone just works. Modification isn’t even something they consider doing.

In the end, Epic and Spotify get a fat 30% boost in revenue and nobody notices anything different.

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Guess what? Joe Consumer lives in a society that has an economy. And that economy thrives on open markets and competition. US antitrust law knew this from Teddy Roosevelt all the way until Ronald Reagan gutted that notion, and began to focus only on consumer harm. But consumers aren’t the only part of an economy! They’re probably not even the most important part. Open competition is vital for a diverse and open economy where all sorts of market entrants can participate, and create companies that pay taxes, and create jobs for people who are also, in turn, consumers. Sometimes higher prices are worth it if an economic sector is open and thriving. We know this intuitively when it comes to trade protections, as countries like Germany go to great lengths to protect domestic manufacturing at the expense of cheaper cars.

You make no sense. Germany protects domestic manufacturing to keep their engineers and workers employed, admirable. Who exactly is US trying to keep employed? Please tell me something concrete, don’t use Orwellian terminology like Open markets when you mean Govt Regulated markets.

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.

If my comment didn't make sense to you, read it again, slowly. "Open markets" is not an Orwellian phrase - it's well-understood by anyone with any economic literacy that competition in markets requires those markets to be regulated in order to avoid monopolies and other trusts. Apple introduced a great product in the iPhone, no question about that. And Apple is rewarded through its efforts by enjoying large profit margins on the handsets it sells. This should be obvious. What Apple isn't entitled to is to charge rents for the right to simply exist on its devices. Anyone who understands the power of open systems in the technological revolution over the last thirty years can grasp this easily. It's what gave us the web, and spawned trillions of dollars in economic growth as companies developed for the web and for hundreds of millions of personal computers. It isn't economically productive to have one or two or three gatekeeping companies capture a slice of that revenue just because they can. That 30% revenue that's lost to Apple is paid for directly by the consumer, obviously.

To help unmuddle your thinking, Apple doesn't subsidize the cost of the iPhone with its services revenue. Apple makes blockbuster profits on every phone it sells, and always has. I'm not an app developer, and I'm not even in the technology industry. But I understand economics and antitrust law, and don't wear my ignorance of either as a badge of honor while shitposting replies to people's comments.

Compare this to the Android system, where google has wholesale deprecated their podcasts app. You’ll have to find a 3rd party one if you want to access that functionality.

My Galaxy S1 still plays podcasts just fine....I keep it hooked up to bluetooth speakers just for that.

Google disabled the ability to download new/updated apps that could run on this phone long ago, but the apps already on the phone still work. Indeed, it works better than the iPhone 5c, since I can use any micro usb connector to charge my phone, but the 5c is stuck with a proprietary connector that isn't made or sold anymore.

The point I’m trying to make is that for Joe Consumer, everything on an iPhone just works.

This hasn't been true for years, if it ever was. Siri never worked properly, and most people complain about the horrible accuracy of the fingerprint and face unlock. Text messages sent to/by Apple users frequently disappear into the ether, discovered only when the communicants physically meet up. The cloud software is prone to overwriting files or accidentally deleting them. And don't even get me started about all the people holding their phones the wrong way...

Nobody notices a difference when companies lose 30% of their revenue?

Would anybody notice a difference if they lost 60% of their revenue? How about 95%? I mean it’s just a third party’s ledger right, so who cares?

This has nothing to do with the classic Apple vs Android debate. It's about Apple's practices of pushing people to purchase the iPhone even if they might not want to.

Right, and I’m trying to state that those practices are ancillary at best reasons when the end user just sees a functional phone.

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

Just wait a bit, you will encounter lots of stuff that doesn’t work, or that has you jump through hoops or buy a subscription, soon enough.

Can you name some examples, instead of being vague?

HomeKit fails a lot for me, as does Safari syncing of favorites, including sometimes the wrong icons being shown for a given favorite. There are bugs in Safari browsing history, such as when you select some history entry, the underlying links of other entries sometimes get shifted (with respect to the displayed labels). Apple Mails takes multiple minutes to sync read/unread status between devices, and sometimes doesn’t sync at all until you open the app. Even on the same device, the Mail app badge only updates half a minute or so after having read an email. When editing text and cutting and pasting around, the text suggestions tend to see a different internal state than what is displayed (you get suggestions for terms you have cut out or deleted concatenated with words that are still there or that you pasted). Apple services have regular hickups. Just today we had https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40177617. ICloud backup requires a subscription beyond 5 GB, or else you have to backup via Mac or PC, which at least on PC Apple doesn’t allow you to automate. (You have to manually authorize each new connection to the PC, even after a small interruption. There used to be a persistent “trust this PC”, but that’s gone.) That’s from the top of my head.

Just an example I had recently, my friend replaced his iPhone 8 because after two years of it functioning perfectly fine, apps started crashing/closing out of nowhere. Not to mention he constantly complained about apps being slow.

His Apple maps frequently pointed to slightly wrong places (like 50 meters off) when given coordinates shared by messaging apps. Sometimes closing the maps app and reclicking the link fixed the position. It got to a point that he started sharing destination coordinates with me so I could open Google Maps on my phone so we could navigate confidently.

Also he complained that Canva and Instagram apps were slow or broken for some operations on the phone. For example trying to share a longer video in reels resulted in app crashing. But those are not Apple apps so I'm not even counting all these third party issues. But it was like death by a thousand cuts.

Since replacing his iPhone for a newer model, everything was fixed. For now.

Joe Consumer doesn't know a lot of things. That doesn't mean the government should allow them.

SMS still works fine. No one is forced to purchase an iPhone because they want to message someone.

In US, green bubble social peer-pressure does force many teens to buy iPhones.

“Force”? No one is forced to give in to peer pressure by buying something.

It’s one thing to want to fit in, but then we should also force clothing to not have visible brands so kids can’t compare what clothes they have, and youth sports teams so kids can’t exclude non-sports playing peers.

The analogy doesn't hold because Nike shirts looks and behaves just the same regardless of my jeans brand.

Whereas a green bubble means degraded experience for the entire messaging group just because of that one guy.

Then use the myriad other cross platform apps.

Also, one’s appearance can also cause a group to be viewed and treated differently, akin to degrading the “experience”.

Yes, it would help US teens were convinced to use another communication app that treated people equally in a group regardless of their phones. But they are teens and culture from network effects is hard to change.

Or a much easier approach, Apple could fix that, if they wanted. But they don't because iPhones would lose their status symbol (blue bubble) and teens could then buy other phones without suffering rejection in groups. Apple can't have that.

If culture among teens is hard to change and Apple values income above all, it's up to regulators. But US regulators aren't as active than EU.

By this rational the government should be forcing nike to part with the Jordan brand so someone can make a discount version that every one can buy.

Changing the color of the bubbles would just shift the shitty behavior to another product.

The comparison doesn't make any sense, SMS and iMessage are not the same thing. It's incredible how many people bring it up in the comments here...

> In the end, Epic and Spotify get a fat 30% boost in revenue and nobody notices anything different.

Well, let's be clear here: Neither Epic nor Spotify are selling anything with Apple today. Epic's games are not available on iOS, and Spotify requires you to make all purchases through their website.

Spotify's motivation for wanting change on the iOS platform is primarily due to how limiting Apple's profit share and App Store rules are toward expanding its lines of business. Spotify wants to be able to sell one-off audiobooks; but the margins are already razor thin, and would become impossibly thin if Apple had to be paid 30% of every sale. In the most egregiously and obviously monopolistic thing Apple has ever done, they also sell audiobooks via the Books app, where I'm (wink) certain they're paying the 30% fee to (wink) themselves.

One alternative Spotify hasn't tried is marking audiobooks up 30% to account for the fees. Maybe this is something that is contractually extremely difficult to do? Like, authors and publishing agencies don't assign pricing rights to Spotify, they have to sell the audiobooks at the same price they're available for sale on Amazon/Apple Books/etc. I don't know. But, regardless of that, it's a shit card to deal consumers, anyone with half a brain would just buy the audiobook from Apple Books where its 30% cheaper, and Spotify is very reasonably trying to drive traffic to platforms they have higher agency within.

This isn't really about boosting revenue by 30%. Its about unlocking fundamentally different business models from Apple's grasp; business models which Apple has found extremely profitable for itself, yet refuses anyone else to share in.

No one I know uses Apple audiobooks, I thought it was only Audible in this market.

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.

> No one I know uses Apple audiobooks, I thought it was only Audible in this market.

Yes, I'm sure Apple keeps it around out of the goodness of their heart and not because its used and is profitable.

> Spotify is a loss making company

Spotify is profitable [1].

> as their see their dominance erode they are trying to find boogeyman’s to blame

19% YoY MAU growth, 14% premium subscriber YoY growth, 20% YoY revenue growth, 31% YoY profit growth... Spotify is a strong business, in quite a lead over Apple Music [2].

But, none of that matters to you. You've got your narrative you need to construct to support your worldview. Before your misinformation was corrected, it was "Spotify is a trash business, Apple is a great business, go Apple". Now that you've learned that Spotify is a strong business, your narrative will shift: "Spotify pays artists poorly, no wonder their profit is up, Apple Music pays artists more, go Apple". You struggle to imagine a world where Apple might not be the good guy. Metaphor, like mortar on the foundation of your tech worldview.

The Walmart metaphor is interest-- no, I can't even fake cordiality, as proud as you may be to have came up with it, you're roughly fifty-ith in line on claiming originality on that one. My god, Epic sued Apple in 2020, four years ago, your intuition if its worth anything should be screaming at a hundred decibels that there have been infinite conversations on this very site, every argument permuted a thousand times, torn apart, countered and counter-countered, and you trot out something so banal as the "well, Walmart has the Great Value brand" line? Wake me up when Walmart has 60.8% of US citizens exclusively shopping at their stores, and the remaining 39% exclusively shops at Kroger, there's zero other places to buy food (by design, its for Food Security), and as I rub the sleep from my eyes I say "Wow, I guess that guy on HackerNews was right. I bet the food economy Walmart and Kroger gatekeep is a super fair and balanced market which suppliers super-enjoy participating in! Man, I bet there's so much sick innovation happening!"

[1] https://s29.q4cdn.com/175625835/files/doc_financials/2024/q1...

[2] https://9to5mac.com/2023/07/03/apple-music-spotify-us-subscr...

Do you just blatantly lie thinking no one will click on your links or are you just absolutely ignorant and have no understanding how to read company financials? Here’s the net income on statista : https://www.statista.com/statistics/244990/spotifys-revenue-...

They’ve lost 532 million in their most recent year, the lowest they’ve lost is 32 million. They’ve not had a single profitable year in their entire public history and it seems to only be getting worse for them. I just cursorily follow the stock market and the second you told me Spotify is profitable all the red flags in my head blew up, glad that you confirmed my bias, they are even worse than I thought.

Then you talk about Spotify user metrics, either you are willfully ignorant with no understanding of how to read metrics or you’re just hoping I won’t respond? The obvious metric that you need to judge Spotify by is market share, which Spotify has been on a slow decline on since at least 2019 where they went from 34% to 31% according to tech crunch. The internet is growing, their MAU, revenue etc will all grow, most internet companies can boast that. I literally don’t need to shift my narrative, I know Spotify pays artists poorly, Apple Music does too, any system that pays by stream count is a winner takes all that benefits the biggest artists in my view, Tidal does a much better job.

Probably the fact that I actually know what I’m talking about, and am not falling for your ignorant citations and stats, might be a crack in your world view, you might have been under the comfortable delusion that everyone who doesn’t agree with you has not done the research and is not smart when it turns out that you are actually incredibly ignorant in your research. In fact if you take this as a learning lesson for your life and maybe probe further you will find that for most complex issues, at the highest levels everyone deeply understands the facts, but still can turn out with radically different interpretations of them, consensus on anything other than pure math is hard to achieve. I reckon you’ll be stuck in Plato’s cave forever though, I heard it’s quite comfortable down there.

Net income on Statista? You know you don't need to rely on that shoddy site, right? Spotify is a public company. I linked their Q1 2024 public disclosure. Did you even click on it?

Statistia is more accurate in this case. You didn’t link to a public disclosure per se, you linked to an investor marketing statement formatted like a financial statement. Spotify’s 20-F at the SEC shows that any “operating income” is more than offset by share-based compensation expenses which your investor presentation doesn’t adjust for at all. When counting the liquid stock Spotify pays employees as an expense, they are unprofitable.

When my Android phone broke in the past I was lent an iPhone 6s to use in the meantime. It was absolutely slow and many things didn't work. I ended up getting rid of it because having no phone was better than using it.

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