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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't blame them, Americans on the whole fall over themselves to defend Apple. Apple is the magic entity that figured out how to send full videos and pictures in text messages. Something a google android could never figure out. Apple phones didn't come bloated with garbage. You go to the apple store for help rather than the verizon store. You are above others when you have an iPhone.

Apple's external veneer is stellar, and the overwhelming majority of people don't know and don't care what it is holding up that veneer.

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I want Apple to protect me from app developers. For me, it’s a feature not a bug.

I want them to prevent social media companies from tracking my device across my other apps.

I want them to integrate billing so I can easily cancel subscriptions or get refunds.

I want them to require Oauth that allows me to keep my email private from app developers.

These features make my customer experience better not worse. I’m sorry it sucks for app developers to make less money but for customers it’s mostly a good thing.

None of that requires a 30% cut.

Requires, no but in all regards it’s a great deal for app developers. You write code they do everything else. You want options? They exist (Windows/Android) but are all shitified minefields of commercial ads and poor design choices that I only use when required. Is Apple perfect? No far from it. When I buy and use their products though I feel more like the customer than the product. It’s a tool built for me not their advertisers.

This is correct.

App devs hate "paying" the 30% cut, but often aren't smart enough to realize that they make more on iOS than Android specifically because it's a high-trust environment and people trust that Apple has their back.

There's a reason most of us app devs make most of our money on Apple devices.

Except there are markets where Apple is hardly present, so this doesn't hold, as those money making apps on iDevices are mostly from tier 1 countries.

I assume most app vendors would gladly get some money from those countries as well, if they want to grow their user base.

They also happily pay 3+% for charging a card with stripe. And more than happy to fork a few percent for some accounting / VAT handling.

That’s included with the App Store.

Kinda dishonest to cite that 30% number when most developers don't pay it. The fee has been 15% for years now if your revenues are under $1M.

And it is the same cut that console companies take from developers. And then when we point this out, people respond with some bullshit that consoles are not "general purpose computers"...

Consoles are trivially avoidable. Family group chats that require a blue-bubble-capable phone, grandmothers that only know how to use facetime, those are actually important.

I can't get into my coworking space without a door unlock app on my phone.

On the other hand, exactly 0 times in my life have I ever been told "yeah, you need to own an xbox to go to the dentist's office".

Phones are indeed in a different class from game consoles and should be held to a higher standard.

But yes, also, game consoles should allow you to develop your own programs and side-load them.

> I can't get into my coworking space without a door unlock app on my phone.

And that app is probably free, covered by the costs of the paid apps, the majority of which are brainrot games and social media[1].

Honestly this system isn't half bad, it's essentially a tax on idleness that funds a bunch of virtuous activity.

[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/29389/global-app-revenue-by-s...

The app is free for users, but the coworking space pays the app's company a considerable fee to manage access to the doors and audit logs and such, so it's not that it's subsidized by brainrot games.

Free apps on iOS should be subsidized by, I don't know, the purchase price of the phone and the $100 yearly developer fee I'd think.

> Honestly this system isn't half bad, it's essentially a tax on idleness that funds a bunch of virtuous activity.

The system isn't funding "virtuous activity", the system is a for-profit system for the benefit of the richest company on the planet.

> the coworking space pays the app's company a considerable fee to manage access to the doors and audit logs and such, so it's not that it's subsidized by brainrot games.

I think you're well aware that these fees don't go toward the iOS SDK licensing/infra/staffing/security/distribution costs of the app and the App Store. That's what is being subsidized by the brainrot games.

Furthermore, there's nothing stopping that app maker from bypassing the app store and simply making a webapp, so this argument that you need an iphone to open the door is really moot. It's not the smartphone makers' fault that the door company's customers demand this product.

> Furthermore, there's nothing stopping that app maker from bypassing the app store and simply making a webapp, so this argument that you need an iphone to open the door is really moot

The door opener uses NFC, and iOS does not allow webapps to use NFC, only app-store apps: https://caniuse.com/webnfc

Apple has consistently made the experience of using webapps worse, including making installing them so convoluted that most users continue to not even know they exist.

> Family group chats that require a blue-bubble-capable phone

This is a social walled garden they've built over years and has been solidified by users choosing it over and over again. Are they exploiting our brain's capacities regarding social pressure to extract profit? Sure, but so does every fast food company, social media company, marketing company, etc.

I think it's interesting that you phrase it as "require" regarding a group chat made by your family members. Apple doesn't require this, your family members chose Apple when they purchased their phones.

Practically every other chat ecosystem I've used has worked fine from android or ios, or for the most part my desktop computer. Signal, XMPP, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Twitter DMs, Google Chat, all of these work _fine_ from every general computing device I own (iPhone, android, linux).

Somehow it's only iMessage which doesn't have an android or desktop or web app, despite Apple having more money than every other messenger app I mentioned.

> your family members chose Apple when they purchased their phones.

Apple chooses the default and integrates it into the OS more deeply than any third-party app can be integrated. It's not a free choice... and then Apple also refuses to provide open access to this ecosystem to other devices.

I know other people have sometimes said that it's an anti-spam measure to tie the iMessage account to an apple ID which is associated with a purchase. I'd be fine making an apple ID and paying up to $300 to get iMessage access for it if that would allow me to not use iOS and still communicate with my family (via an officially supported / recognized android + linux iMessage app).

When my iPhone finally breaks (and may it be soon), I am planning to get a mac mini server and install https://bluebubbles.app/ to solve this.

I am mildly worried that apple will eventually ban me for that, as they did with beeper (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39156308), and also not thrilled about the increased electric bill that'd entail.

> Apple chooses the default and integrates it into the OS more deeply than any third-party app can be integrated

And this is well known by everyone, and your family still chose Apple (in fact, I'm fairly certain this is why most people choose Apple - they want everything to "just work"). Apple has no obligation to provide any "ecosystem".

At the end of the day there isn't some mass hypnosis at work here. People choose Apple en masse because it works for them. Nothing stops Apple users from making an SMS (now RCS) group chat, either, nor from you and your family hosting a group chat on any other app on the App Store.

Free the consoles, too.

Not in gamedev myself but have friends who are, and while it can be argued the 30% (I think they're also around 15% or 20% under X amount actually, so it affects smaller games less) Steam takes hurts, it also comes with a lot of benefits to the publishers. Global CDN and delivery network, all the steam social/community features, all the Steam APIs for multiplayer, cloud saves, achievement framework, hell even the steam community market. Steam handles a lot for you, whereas with Apple it's little more than a tax on just existing within their storefront.

Sure, they handle the CDN/Delivery part just like Steam (and Steam has to deal with assets that can easily surpass 100GB, mind), but beyond that? You're forced to buy Apple's hardware, and forced into paying them for access to their app store, while making it literally impossible (until recently) to sideload apps. Many games that are on Steam are also available from alternate storefronts like GOG, and Steam doesn't care if you link to those or mention them, and in fact many of Valves competitors have killed off their own equivalent apps because it's hard to beat Steam's quality (which is hilarious, cause Steam has so much room to grow and become better IMO).

As to the state of the consoles, I'm not entirely sure as I haven't had one since the PS2, but IMO if they're anything like Apple, then yes we should open them up in the exact same way Apple should be opened up

Those features have fat apple tax overhead and are not unique to iPhones.

That's why I talk about the veneer that users don't care to look beyond. Customers get bent by Apple and aren't even aware of it.

If you don't like social media, don't use it. Isn't that what all apple fans tell when someone dislikes apple practices?

> I want them to prevent social media companies from tracking my device across my other apps.

They didn't say anything about not liking social media, only that they don't want to be secretly tracked.

This is good advice. I do that. HN and occasional reddit browsing (on the "old" design, the "new" one sucks ass) is where I draw the line.

The problem is that other apps advertise on Facebook, and in order to attribute new installations to the ads (to find out how effective they are), they had to add the Facebook SDK in those other apps. Then when the social media-avoiding users ran those other apps, they ran Facebook code on their device without knowing and still got tracked.

This is what Apple’s ATT was designed to prevent. If app developers want to do that now, they need to ask the user for permission. The more Apple’s control over the platform is rolled back, the more stuff like this happens.

As a user, I don’t want to be using, say, a recipe app and be secretly tracked by Facebook in the background.

All those are awesome features, and I use them all the time.

But that's no reason to prevent them from being opt-out. It should be possible to not use OAuth, integrated billing, social media tracking etc.

> that's no reason to prevent them from being opt-out

I’m genuinely surprised Meta and e.g. Citrix haven’t launched their own app stores in the EU. Maybe GDPR disincentivises the worst shenanigans.

If privacy or security protections are opt-out, Facebook, et al. will try to use any leverage they can to push their users to opt out. There's real value in a platform that doesn't give Facebook, et al. that opportunity. There are also obvious downsides; it's a tradeoff that might not be right for you but definitely isn't one-sided.

> I want them to prevent social media companies from tracking my device across my other apps.

Apple is the one who implements the advertising ID companies use to track you. And preventing that tracking is a os-level feature, not a thing they review out of app.

> I want them to require Oauth that allows me to keep my email private from app developers.

You are describing a private email address.

We're on Hacker News, not Granny News.

Being a hacker means having curiosity about the things around you, having the desire to be able to change and understand things.

On android, I wrote small toy apps for myself, I could build and self-sign an APK, I could poke at how the system worked and read all the source code I wanted.

Tragically, due to blue bubbles and group chats within my family, I was forced to switch to iOS, and I thought sure, it wouldn't be so bad...

No, it sucks for hackers, you can't build and sign apps from linux reliably, you need an apple account and to pay $100 even if you do have a macbook, the APIs are limited, you can't see the source code for the most of the kernel or platform, apple has a ton of APIs you're not allowed to use.

My firefox addons I developed for myself installed fine on android, but I can't even use those on iOS.

I want apple to let me use the device I paid for.

You weren't forced to do anything. You submitted to peer pressure, and that was a decision that, along with millions of others making that same decision, led to the current state. The very state that you're now complaining about.

Don't like it? Don't use it. (I don't.)

Government intervention, or legal system intervention is one way in which millions are collectively deciding to move away from the current state. In theory at least.

> Don't like it? Don't use it.

Life is slightly more complicated than this.

It's true, I like my Granny phone. And you can choose a hacker phone if you want!

I personally do my hacking on Mac, Linux, and on my RasberryPis, in my secure home and behind a firewall. But I don't want a hacker-friendly phone holding my passwords, credit cards, social media, email, photos, GPS location, cameras, microphones, etc., with a persistent cellular connection to the internet and at constant risk of being left in a taxi or cafe. I would never put the effort into locking everything down, and I'd probably fuck it up if I tried anyway.

I want Apple to protect me from app developers. For me, it’s a feature not a bug.

Security is not mutually exclusive with informed consent. Apple's greatest trick was convincing you -- and, evidently, themselves -- that it is.

Every attempt at providing the general public with an "informed consent" escape hatch to security or privacy features ends degrading to either consent fatigue or "misinformed consent" dark patterns.

What do you suggest, then? As users, does rent-seeking paternalism really serve us better in the long run?

The rent-seeking is fundamentally a separate issue from the paternalism. Lots of the anti-Apple lobbying and PR is drawing attention to the 30% fees, but for many of those companies, they care much more about winning the freedom to spy on their users or engage in other predatory or abusive business practices.

But aside from that, you cannot simply point people at the approach that led to Windows UAC and GDPR cookie consent banners and consider the problem adequately solved.

So you'd prefer that instead of the (rare) UAC prompt, Windows should simply refuse to do what the user asks, unless they pony up for a developer license?

No, but I think it's incredibly naive and shortsighted to suggest that we should impose a legal requirement that any platform adopt such an obviously imperfect approach. Your memories of Windows Vista may have faded, but UAC prompts were certainly not rare when UAC first showed up, and they're still common enough to cause consent fatigue and undermine their effectiveness as a security measure.

I would like to know what is running on my phone, what it is doing and who it is communicating with.

I would like to be able to prevent it, like running a firewall or disabling bluetooth for certain processes or more...

I think apps have to request permission to use Bluetooth on iOS with the exception of audio playback

No phone can really give you that. Even if the OS were better, the wireless chipsets themselves are black boxes that do their own thing giving you zero insight or control into what how or why. There's plenty of room for improvement, but ultimately they'll always be insecure and untrustworthy by design.

And they also tie you into systems you don't control. That power can be wielded against you when you least expect it. When you trade security for freedom, you deserve neither.

Have you ever used a PC or laptop? I bet you have at least a computer and the fact that you can download and install software without an intermediary doesn't make you lose any of the things mentioned above.

So it's okay to leave your macbook wide open to all of the things you described? Because Apple doesn't force any of that on their macbooks. So are you really that safe?

> Americans on the whole fall over themselves to defend Apple

No, we don't. Apple fans from all nations do, but there is literally zero national pride in Apple.

"americans on the whole"

blanket statements like this are never accurate

Your comment also makes a blanket statement.

That's the joke. All generalizations are false.

That's a generalization.

THAT'S THE JOKE.

I know. I was doubling down on pretending not to understand. But guess it wasn't obvious enough.

Not magic although it seems like it. Pixel perfect graphics and smooth video go a long way even if you’re not a graphic designer. Silicon Graphics had this figured out.

> Americans on the whole fall over themselves to defend Apple.

What does it have to do with nationality? I've seen Apple fanboys from all countries. Sure, Apple's market share in the US relative to other phone manufacturers is high, but that's mostly due to the "trust" Americans have in US-based companies (you can argue this trust is misplaced).

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