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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

> …it’s essentially correct that Apple have been unwilling to cooperate on standards (despite overtly signalling the opposite) and have had to be forced by regulation or market forces.

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".

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> Like every tech company, Apple has used proprietary technologies when necessary to deliver an experience that meets its (including its users') requirements.

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.

Anyone who’s actually being in the room with people from Apple when talking about standards I’m sure would be more than happy to correct you on the fantasy you have constructed here.

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.

> Anyone who’s actually being in the room with people from Apple when talking about standards I’m sure would be more than happy to correct you on the fantasy you have constructed here.

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.

I might have chosen my words slightly differently but my point still stands. Apple has an incredibly well known horrible reputation inside of standards meetings and bodies from their peers. It has been that way for well over a decade at this point. It’s not a one off thing and it’s not a subtle thing. It’s a very strong and very bad reputation they have built.

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.

Original author of the article here; I went out on a limb to document a bit of this in a footnote to a post a few years ago. Saying that it is unusual to call this behaviour out is a drastic understatement:

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.

It’s even worse than I described.

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.

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