Apple is ruining the open web | Hacker News Reader

Apple is ruining the open web

victorwynne.com

33 pointsvictorwynne10 comments

I think forcing developers to develop for more than just Chrome is not ruining the web.

People knowingly buying expensive status-signaling devices with locked down ecosystems is not ruining the web for everyone else.

iPhones aren't "status signaling" devices anymore. They're the best UX for a pocket computer you can buy if you're not a tinkerer. Samsung + Google is not better.

Agree about locked-down ecosystems.

Safari is the last browser standing between the open web and a Chromium monoculture.

Absolutely not. It is its own highly dominant monoculture, arguably worse, and an enabler of their ongoing platform abuse and holding back of web standards.

It has for a long time been a dual culture, it doesn't take long to run into this when doing web dev work. Applogists love to trot this line out when trying to defend their favourite trillion dollar company, and fail to see the effects it has on a much wider ecosystem.

True of pretty much anything Apple. "For our user's security" they lock down devices entirely. No custom firmware, no custom apps, no ... and ... of course they charge for it, and when you look at how much their efforts to improve user's security cost them.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/250918/apples-revenue-fr...

Apple charges developers and users "for our user's security" (the App store is the vast majority of service income) about 27 billion dollars per year for it. In fact, this income is the ONLY new product Apple has made since the iPhone ...

But at least iPhones are fabulously secure.

Security is a major reason I changed to an iPhone from Android (I also think Apple beats Google for privacy). I'm definitely no fanboi (actually I've disliked Apple as a company after ][). I'm really impressed with some of Apple's security features - especially the custom hardware-backed measures.

I'm unsure the financial argument makes much sense.

A browser is hard to make secure, and a third party browser would need access to deeper Apple security information than App developers currently get (Apple only allows their JavaScript for scripting at present).

I do hope that we get a competitor browser (I remember Microsoft Internet Explorer), but I also hope that Apple manage to do it without fucking up security.

> But at least iPhones are fabulously secure.

That's the argument apple makes. And yet the biggest app store restrictions are about payment to apps (only allowed through apple, with a 30% cut, slightly reduced). Besides, I don't really see a big difference between Android and iPhones.

> I'm unsure the financial argument makes much sense.

That's the argument apple makes. Despite this being the only growth area in their financial reports, while everything else on their financial report is going down.

> I do hope that we get a competitor browser

That's the argument apple makes, while preventing competing browsers from coming onto the platform.

Yes, it may well be the cure for Apple's monopoly on this is worse than the disease.

Apple using security and privacy as an elastic shield is such transparent BS. Even apple supporters acknowledge it as BS and go with it only because of their loyalty.

The govts need to bring a 11% revenue penalty via anti-trust laws. Then's when it'll start showing effect.

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