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Just buy an Android. You can configure what browser opens links. You can configure what map application opens maps. You can configure what video player opens videos.

Yes, this is much like Microsoft a decade ago; in fact, it's worse, the iOS offers significantly less choice than Windows did back then; you could develop your own software for your own computer without joining a restrictive developer program from Microsoft.

If you don't like it, my recommendation is that you don't buy into it. Get an Android. I've been perfectly happy with mine.

<<nothing related to what you said, just a general comment>>

If more people just bought what they liked, shut the hell about it, and didn't rage jihad against the opposite platform, the internet would be WAY better.

No, it won't be. Bad things must be criticized (or boycotted), to force them to become good. Your use of Apple is affecting my life badly - it's just like passive smoking. No one promoted the culture of ridiculous patent law exploitation as much as Apple did. They are not just doing their own work, but indulging in UGLY competition killing tactics(like they don't want anyone to make rectangular phone with rounded corners). To give you some insight of your own logic, if everyone "not killing someone" will just not kill people as they like it, and didn't say a word to the 'opposite party' - who kill (as they like it as well), according to your logic the world would be WAY better. Jihad is a bad word, but I'll fight against the injustice to my world of technology that Apple is doing.

Remind us how snarky zealotry tells Apple to stop (ab)using the patent system. If that's the problem you have with them, I think the world would be improved if you directed your energy at patent reform.

And comparing IP litigation to murder is just ridiculous, not that you didn't already know that. Among all the other problems, you can fix a bad call from a judge. Murder, not so much.

It's not ridiculous. I explained and it's not hard to understand why opposing bad things (any) is important. And it's always a good test to validate your logic with extreme cases. It helps - if a logic suddenly breaks by increasing the 'intensity' of the subject, then there's something wrong in it.

Again, I don't think the patent law is getting 'reformed' overnight. I have written to state officials to improve it, have signed petitions, and have written to Apple as well. But on top of that, if more and more people stop using their products for this reason, they will understand it much more quickly.

>>and it's always a good test to validate your logic with extreme cases

Uh, no. Hyperbole weakens your argument. If you want to be taken seriously in discussions among adults, I suggest you avoid it.

> And it's always a good test to validate your logic with extreme cases. It helps - if a logic suddenly breaks by increasing the 'intensity' of the subject, then there's something wrong in it.

I would suggest avoiding doing so publicly. People can come to the same conclusions if they want to apply theory of extremes, but when you jump to that kind of thing in your initial comparison (especially without a disclaimer) it just makes you come off as a crazy person. Doubly so since the extreme didn't hold up.

It didn't help that some of the more rational points are easily countered (even if not wrong). Stating that my use of Apple harms you because of my "support" of their business and legal decisions may not be entirely false; however, it's a) unreasonable to expect consumers to know about the operational choices of every company they do business with and b) also helpful because it promotes competition in the market. Again, your points had merit, but so does the other side of the equation.

The unfortunate reality of being a publicly-traded US company is that you are more or less legally required to try to litigate your competition out of existence if the numbers support it. This instance is unfortunate because Apple was granted some patents that they should not have been, and there was inept jury in deciding to uphold them (never mind the fact that it was a jury-based trial at all). The Apple/Samsung thing should have been a trademark case which I think actually had some merit, but patent litigation has a higher potential upside so the finances said that was the way to go.

Patent law exploitation? They are going after people who take their products, sit down with a drawing board, and copy them feature by feature, logo by logo, and interaction by interaction. It's exactly what the patent system is designed to make legally actionable.

This isn't a case of Amazon suing every online shopping cart with a "click to buy" button.

(Fifthly, why does a game of multi-hundred-billion-dollar corporate chicken impact your life at all? They aren't going after a kid on the street corner -- they are going after themselves dressed in different clothing. This does not change anything in your world except an extreme branching narrative in your mind which you think the world cares about.)

You have to be pretty naive to think it's not affecting my small world, OR to believe that Apple is only litigating against those who "copy them feature by feature". You probably didn't even read my full message. Now any company I prefer can't make phones without fearing about how to save themselves from a useless litigation of rounded rectangles. And in my small world, I might have wanted to open that coffee shop whose logo is just a plain old red apple fruit made by nature, with a child's head in that. But it seems I can't do that now.

I respectfully disagree.

I used the word Jihad as it best reflects how personal it becomes to some people. It's not a matter of taste, but a matter of "being".

My main point, which clearly wasn't well articulated, was STEP YELLING AT ME. I can't change it. Nor do I care.

Yell at Apple, or Google, or whoever can act on it. Boycott them all you want. Just don't vilify me simply because I happen to like the platform you happen to hate.

You do that, and I promise to not yell at you for the platform you like that I happen to hate (as an example, I honestly could give two shits about Apple or Android .... it's a god damn phone).

The thing is, Apple makes really nice hardware. Really, really, nice hardware. There are some pretty good Android phones, but Apple nails it in a way that nobody else seems quite able to pull off.

I'd love to have an iphone 5 running Android! :]

Hmm.. Are there hardware level-blocks on jail breaking an iPhone so far as to run android on it?

No, surprisingly.

And yes, the Android port is well underway: http://www.idroidproject.org/

From the link it looks like it's pretty dead.

It's a years old version of Andriod. I tried to install it on my old iPhone 3G a couple of months back and it barely worked and couldn't make phone calls. There hasn't been updates for years. It's an abandoned project.

According to the site, the project is pretty much dead. Shame, as I agree with the OP that Apple hardware is better than anything an Android manufacturer has turned out - or is interested in turning out. I can't remember the last time I saw an Android phone under 4.3" big.

Yep.

It's not quite like that, but essentially that's true (I think it's possible to run Android on iPhone 3G S and older, but that was a long time ago and I don't think you could use it as a phone).

Have you looked at the Nexus 4? Feels a lot nicer and the screen seems a lot better than the iPhone 5 to me.

Not available on Verizon.

Never seen the nexus 4; it's too huge and heavy for my tastes anyway (the iphone 5 is already pushing it)...

Can't speak to the feel, but I do like the aluminum of the iphone 5 a lot.

I don't think this was as much of a complaint about the situation a question, so your recommendation doesn't offer much in regards to the question in general. I do understand what you're saying, I just don't think it's really what robbiep was asking nor is it the place for it.

As one who worked for Netscape, and was 12' away from Marc Andreessen when the ruling was handed down, the ENTIRE case against Microsoft was predicated on them (A) Being a Monopoly (that was critical) and (B) Trying to leverage said monopoly into another line of business.

Nobody is going to suggest Apple has a Monopoly in the mobile phone, nor even the Smart Phone industry. In fact, I think Eric Schmidt publicly said that "Android had Won" today - so that kind of puts an end to that thread.

Apple's market share in smartphones also pales in comparison to the Microsoft's dominance in desktop computing during that era.

This is something that can be surprisingly hard to grok for someone immersed in the SF startup crowd, where everyone uses an iPhone and a MacBook.

And indeed next to Android's in smartphones. Isn't the more apt question about what Android ship as defaults for mail and browsing as an anti-trust question?

After all, the MS issue wasn't about IE being the only browser so it's not about the ability to change it, it was about it being the default browser and therefore what many unsophisticated users will use by default.

> Isn't the more apt question about what Android ship as defaults for mail and browsing as an anti-trust question?

There is no "Android default". It varies according to carrier and OEM.

Is that true? Doesn't Google's Android agreement to get the apps outside the core OS demand certain things?

I'm certainly struggling to think of an Android phone I've seen that doesn't ship with a Google browser.

(Edit: I take that back. Obviously the Kindle's don't and nor do most of the Android phones sold in China - an estimated two thirds not running Google apps suggested recently).

No, it's not a similar situation because Apple doesn't have a monopoly on the mobile OS market. Microsoft was accused of abusing it's monopoly on the PC operating system market to prevent competition on the web browser market.

Today, the situation is different: if you as a customer don't like iOS you can go and easily buy a smartphone with Android or Windows OS.

This is an important distinction. Otherwise for example every car manufacturer could be accused with similar grounds because they use their propriety software or custom parts instead of providing totally configurability.

That's right. The key point is that the rules for running a business change when you have a monopoly. Having a monopoly isn't illegal but the government doesn't want you abusing that special power with anticompetitive tactics.

Read the "Findings of Fact" and "Conclusions of Law" documents from that case. The big missing piece is a monopoly in the relevant market.

http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm

http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f218600/218633.htm

If Apple have 98% of the mobile phone market and threatens OEM's that they will have licenses taken away if they include competitors products, then we'll talk anti-trust.

The primary difference is that it's Apple's software going on Apple's own hardware, rather than Microsoft requiring that manufactures installing Windows on their systems include their web browser as well.

And Apple doesn't have 95% of the phone market.

I have no legal basis for this, but my theory is that as long as Apple keeps up a high level of quality, nobody will care enough to fight it.

This is probably why there was no drama with Google releasing maps: Apple knew they were beat, so they did nothing to stop it.

Google pretty much kills it with map apps. Unless Apple keeps up people will eventually complain that they want to change their default map app. I think already there are companies making better mobile browsers, mail, calendar, etc. As people become aware of them, or Apple slips like they have with maps, I think they'll start getting more pressure to allow users to change their default apps.

I agree with the first part. If Mobile Safari had the reputation to be a security nightmare - with public attention rivaling the iOS6 Maps release, or IE in its worst days - then people would probably ask for a system-wide alternative.

But I don't think that Apple ever considered to cause drama about the Google Maps release, just like they didn't cause a drama about YouTube, or Nokia Maps, or whatever. That seemed more like Google trying to take a cheap shot at Apple's approval process.

Just for your information, we don't have a "real" Chrome on iOS, we have UIWebViews with Chrome branding. So Google can only innovate in the UI surrounding the web pages, not the rendering and interaction of the websites themselves.

Chrome and Safari already share the rendering engine, the only difference is that experimental stuff gets released much earlier in Chrome.

Not 100% true: iOS Chrome bundles its own networking stack which is a differentiator (it supports SPDY for a start). They are hampered by UIWebView’s slower JS engine though.

Thanks! Was not aware of the networking part, nice to know.

The rendering engine is also much more than "just rendering". When I click two small links close to each other on Android Chrome, a small clickable popup containing a zoomed in portion of that part of the page will appear. Very useful for avoiding misclicks!

Microsoft was sued simply for bundling IE with Windows, which sounds crazy when you think about it. But at the time it seemed like selling browsers was going to be huge and Microsoft basically killed Netscape. With Windows, though, you were always free to install other browsers and set them as the default unlike iOS.

In the end the case kinda fizzled out as the times were changing so fast. Browsers kinda became an accepted "default" application to go along with an operating system.

I have to admit with all of the lawsuits in the software industry, I'm kinda surprised that Apple hasn't gotten more heat.

There was a lot more to it than that. Microsoft actively threatened to withdraw licenses from OEMs that preinstalled/bundled rival software as defaults. Given the Windows monopoly, OEMs had to comply or die. Given the massive inertia against the average non-technical user installing an alternative to IE, this effectively equated to Microsoft using their Windows monopoly to dominate an unrelated market.

Apple are nowhere near close to this until they own 95% of the global cellphone market and start making credible threats to destroy HTC or Samsung if they dare to sell an Android phone, or an iPhone with Chrome preinstalled.

I think the difference is apple makes all the hardware which this runs on. Microsoft software was essentially the only option for pc's made by anyone.