Musi fans refuse to update iPhones until Apple unblocks controversial app
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
How exactly did they think that was going to be able to continue to run and not expect any pushback? If the ads were not there then you could argue it was just a free app, but they seem to be trying to make money off of other people's services.
While I am not crying for the money lost to google or the record labels. I still question how Musi thought this would work.
Is there some big part of this that I am missing?
However I think the part missing (which again I am trying to fully understand what is happening here, their website really glosses over what is happening) is if Spotify was pulling podcasts from a place that served their own ads to instead serve Spotify ads without compensating where they got it from.
Which my understanding here, is what Musi is doing.
Sure, as far as I know Spotify doesn't block the authors ads but they add ads to podcasts where there are none. The average user doesn't know that Spotify is responsible for that and might stop listening. Some podcasters intentionally publish the first episodes ad free to grow their listener base
Well, the simplest way was to count downloads. Which, while slightly inflated, is a reasonable approximation for "One download, one likely listen". Because we all know it's inflated, it's easy for you and the ad agency to add a fudge-factor of "...minus the ten percent or so that have stopped listening but haven't stopped the auto-download"
But only Spotify knows how many people listened to the episode that Spotify grabbed, then served to their subscribers. Spotify is artificially shrinking the audience podcasters can say they're advertising to, especially smaller podcasters - because with less than a thousand streams or so, no fucking chance Spotify will tell you [in a timely fashion] how many people listened to you
That seems... wild.
I could understand an App no longer being supported such as major version iOS update. But off load feels like to be a new blacklist with new iOS update.
At what point will Apple "off load" my contacts, photos or videos?
Installing an OS update would need temporary storage space on the phone, which could trigger the offload process if the storage space is low. Then the app wouldn’t be able to be downloaded again if it was removed from the store.
To your last question: Contacts don't take much space, so probably never.
Photos and videos, if you use iCloud sync, you can choose to hold lower or original quality on your device but either way iCloud is the authoritative storage point. I don't think they get offloaded like apps when you need more space but they're big enough for that to be realistic. Conversely I think when your local storage is full, new photos taken elsewhere won't sync down.
The current generation is so obsessed with streaming that downloading music locally and "owning" it seems like a completely foreign thing to them. All piracy to them is just finding out the next shady streaming website.
Not only are you infringing on copyright, which like... Fine, I get it, and I do it. I don't get all self-righteous about somehow having the "right" to do so, and accept when a method of doing it is taken offline, but I can't be hypocritical and criticize the practice itself.
But you piggy-back off someone else's service, block their ads and run your own instead, making $100 million?? They incur all the costs (licencing, hosting), and you collect all the revenue?
Please, someone, rationally defend this business model, because nothing other than "grift" comes to mind.
So many capitalist activities work in exactly the same way: socializing the costs while privatizing the benefits.
If anything, the Musi app is one of the more harmless examples of this.
- tons of public research (medicine, tech, etc.) gets privatized. taxpayers fund it, but companies patent the results and rake it in.
- 2008 financial crisis: banks made reckless bets, tanked the economy, got bailed out with public money. profits stayed private.
- gig economy: workers rely on public benefits (like food stamps or medicaid) because wages suck, but the companies make billions.
- resource extraction: companies lease public land super cheap, destroy it, and leave taxpayers to deal with the mess.
- Musi uses YouTube videos of songs instead of audio files to stream music
- I'm gonna assume that they clip YouTube ads and do not require a YouTube premium account, otherwise why would anyone care
So like, yeah, your business gets a lot more profitable if you just don't take on the expenses of providing the service you're providing, in this case, using YouTube to host your media, with an in-between app that doesn't support their monetization by itself. A streaming service makes a lot more money if you don't... license the music.
And granted the "harmed" parties in this are Alphabet and the Music industry so like, I am certainly not going to be crying myself to sleep over this. But like... come on. This is extremely into the gray area of music piracy, and like, I don't respect those laws either, but if you just automate piracy and put it on the fuggen App Store, yeah I imagine Apple would do something about that? Frankly I'm shocked Google is still okay with it on Android.
But yeah, as I said in an older comment, if you want a unicorn, the formula is actually quite straightforward if cynical as fuck: find a way to provide a service real businesses provide, without paying any of the expenses. A taxi company that owns no taxis, a hotel company that owns no hotels, or in this case, a music streamer that doesn't buy or even host the music.
Nope. That’s not unreasonable. That’s the work you took on when you decided to be the moderator of what apps can be installed on iPhones.
While these are fantastic, I think most people would find these as UX downgrades from Google Pixel's stock OS.
Last time I tried nixos-gnome and mouse-scrolled a window in the settings app, it got caught on a slider, started adjusting the slider instead, and I couldn't tell what the original value was, and when I searched about it, there's no setting to not adjust sliders with mouse scrolling. Don't get me started about copy and paste being different keystrokes in a terminal. Windows has the same problem and many more.
Well, phones don't have those exact problems, but you get the idea. It's little papercuts everywhere, sometimes caused by settings that could fix them but have the wrong defaults.
My real point was that I want them to have competition so I can have options I like.
Maybe they think everyone just uses Siri for this stuff; I don't and never will, so it's annoying.
You should be able to web install anything without a gatekeeper. Without scare tactics or deeply hidden menu toggles.
Apple and Google's role here is to provide a hermetic sandbox with permissions layer and do occasional malware scans. That's it.
If you want a computer, get a Linux box.
The iOS guardrails are a major selling point.
Without government intervention we'd still have Standard Oil. Without Microsoft being forced to invest in Apple in the late 90's to avoid DOJ scrutiny, Apple would have gone bankrupt and we wouldn't even have an iPhone.
And before "iPhone is not a monopoly" arguments, there are only two smartphone platforms and both are strong arming marketplace participants in a function essential to navigating the modern world.
Google is being told to relinquish Chrome and that's good. But we need both Apple and Google to relinquish control over what can be installed on devices as well.
The time for scare-free web installs by default is now. Apple and Google will still keep their trillion dollar market caps, but the rest of the market will be able to innovate with many more degrees of freedom.
It is (in most cases). The problem is rather that most people don't care: the market delivers, and turns into an oligopoly.
This is why the DOJ function is essential.
Most people aren't informed enough to understand how this effects them or even have the awareness that this is happening at all.
Ordinary citizens would need hours of lectures and study to understand the dynamics at play and how that impacts everyone in the market negatively.
That's why this is a job for the DOJ.
Imagine if the car you bought could suddenly stop driving you to Publix or Starbucks because they didn't pay the tax to the manufacturer.
People also have the right to start a new phone brand (if they feel like burning a couple hundred billion).
The reason it’s so hard to break into this market is because its mature. The duopoly will only be supplanted by the next tech - smart glasses perhaps.
No amount of regulation can change technological realities.
How much does it bug you that Xerox has (had?) a monopoly on copiers? Or that Windows + Intel dominated the 90's? Or that the train barons had their monopolies in the 1800's?
The best solution is to make a monopoly irrelevant by supplanting it.
Apple is either going to invent the next big thing, or they will go the way of IBM. Even now their peak quarterly revenue was back in 2022.
The most you can say is that a segment of the market is willing to accept a walled garden. Some may want it. Some may not care about it. Some may not want it, but feel there are compelling reasons to use iOS and put up with the walled garden.
An honest question here: is it actually a walled garden you want or is it an extra layer of security that the walled garden provides? (I can see people wanting the latter, but have a bit of trouble wrapping my head around people wanting a business to control who can offer which software on a device.)
Definitely the latter, with the App Store being is one of many elements of that.
It's that old marketing adage: People don't want to buy a drill, they want to buy the ability to make holes. And really, they want to buy the ability to hang a picture of their family on the living room wall, to install a shelf for their daughter's awards, etc.
Their relationship with technology is very different from most folks that post here.
They don’t want tech. They want functionality, and in as approachable and “don’t make me think” fashion as possible.
Apple provides that. There are many reasons, and many of the cynics are right.
But at the end of the day, Apple has a three trillion-dollar market cap.
Can’t argue with the results.
I honestly believe that the overwhelming majority people with a phone or computer don't actively want a walled garden, or a non-walled garden, good security, bad security or anything else that we pontificate about. They just want a device that kinda-sorta "works" -- web, email, Amazon, YouTube, Instagram, etc -- even though most websites, software, services we pay for, etc actually are constantly changing, constantly having issues, constantly under-delivering on even the most basic promises -- and on top of that, people want everything to be free too.
With the way the world is these days (dancing on the razor's edge of chaos, and I'm not necessarily speaking politically; just that everything cuts corners, moves fast, breaks things, and rarely fixes them once they’re broken) it's better for the average consumer to restrict what they can and can't do for the sake of the entire ecosystem remaining functional.
That Apple even attempts to keep their stuff "just working" at all is an anomaly with regards to most of the industry.
It's specious to conflate guardrails against spam and malware with—what this story is about—"guardrails" meant to enforce copyright!
One's about the consumer's best interest; the other is not at all.
You, the consumer, are being treated livestock to be eaten, or milked, or sheared. Livestock’s reasoning about freedoms is usually ignored.
This is just not true. People who want an iPhone, get an iPhone - warts and all.
Consider the combination of:
* winner-picking trade policies
* regulatory capture
* establishment-protecting intellectual property regimes
* enormous state interplay with TSMC and Qualcomm (both economic and regulatory, both publicly known and classified)
Taken together, this configuration amounts to an insurmountable subsidy of the status quo, such that there are no serious opportunities to explore market appetite for an ecosystem which is more empowering to the user.
Edit: Downvote if you must, but this is the timeline we are stuck in.
Unlike what Apple wants us to believe ...
The gradient ascent to build a smartphone right now is a mile high. It's impossible to compete with Apple and Google, and you know this.
This is exactly why we need the Department of Justice (and the equivalent in every other country) to start bringing those barriers to competition down. This can start by forcing both companies to allow nag-free, scare-free web installs of apps.