- sent from my iPhone
That's a strange take on Apple's actual relationship with standards. Like every tech company, Apple has used proprietary technologies when necessary to deliver an experience that meets its (including its users') requirements. But Apple also has a long, well-documented history of adopting, participating in, and pioneering the use of standards.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/qffbgp/which_standar...
If, in your view, Apple is incapable of doing anything Not Evil, you can still frame its contributions to the history of computing standards as "commoditizing their complements".
The author of this post is one of them who actually has a long list of these horror stories which I don’t know he has talked about much publicly but he has very good reasons for making the claims he is making.
FWIW, you're saying this to an ex-Apple person who has actually been in the room with people from Apple when talking about standards, both internally and during standards committee discussions and meetings.
To be fair to them, I think a very meaningful part of that comes from upper management and is not necessarily the fault of the representative in the room and multiple people have gone out of their way to make that point to me explicitly and I think it’s worth repeating here.
But there is absolutely 100% a huge culture problem inside of Apple on this specific topic.
https://infrequently.org/2023/02/safari-16-4-is-an-admission...
And it was only this year that I wrote up the broader thesis:
https://infrequently.org/2025/08/how-do-committees-fail-to-i...
Most of my current and former colleagues wouldn't dare for (legitimate) fear of reprisal in the form of even worse blockage in important design areas.
The links proved here are incredibly damning and are exactly the kind of shit I’ve heard from many different people over many years at this point.
Don’t gaslight me and others and tell me there isn’t a problem here when there clearly is.
That's a very rosy, even naive, view of the relentless move to proprietary walled gardens over the last 30 years.
Apple, like nearly every tech company, uses proprietary extensions to lock users into their ecosystem and to lock out standards-compliant open source implementations.
In 1990 everything interoperated with everything based on open, standard protocols published in RFCs. Today, interoperability is a legacy exception and the norm is proprietary walled gardens that only serve their owner. Everything the Internet was not supposed to be. We on the Internet used to make for of the people locked inside AOL, and now the whole Internet is basically AOL.
I've been charging my Android with my Apple's 96W USB-C charger from my work's 16in MacBook Pro for "free". What's exactly so nice about not being able to do that with an iPhone? Why would you carry a separate cable/charger just for the phone, when you could share with an Android?
BTW, there's no Firefox or Chrome on iOS, either; the stuff you'd find in the App Store are simply skins for Safari, and they have the exact same rendering bugs as Safari does, so, there's little reason to use either one on iOS.
It's hard to believe anyone would defend a time when you had to have a separate charging cable for each device.
Yet evidently, every iPhone used is happy to do just that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I get that sentiment with Google given their primary color palette, but Firefox? The selling point of the browser, for me at least, has always been that I can configure it however I want and avoid the abomination that was/is IE/Safari/Chrome.
When they were small nobody cared about firewire (even if it was better). Then they did it with lightning to keep hold of their devices again. Then there is the whole not supporting USB 3.X but 3.0 and 4 for "reasons". Now they also don't care about software and web standards, same company, same problems. They clearly see "standards" as "competition" at a corporate/management level.