Oh the horror, it must be so hard for Apple to cave to an open system for these people. What will they ever do without their unbelievable tax on app profits simply for existing on their nearly unlimited real estate, that is, the web?!
I have no sympathy for their concerns. I can download apps on my MacBook machines all day from many different sources, and it harms no one. While I understand the associated risks, computers have been this way long enough that the free and fair use of software on my devices is far more valuable than the brittle safety a marketplace offers.
Apple's greed knows no bounds, and while I'm no big fan of the EU, there are some regulations like these that ensure these big bears in the industry can't abuse their positions for profit, at such unreasonable expense to consumers (not always monetarily, but be it fair access, availability, and choice), and developers especially.
If commercial real estate charged XX% cuts of all sales from a business, every business would crumble with enough time, and only the big hitters would succeed with great resentment towards their gracious corporate overlords.
You are not a big fan of the EU after this? They seem to care more about privacy and rights of the people within the majority of the countries that make up the EU then any other outside country that I could name.
Then again, I'm not American so I can easily see the influence your country has on most other countries, so to say the "EU have enormous capacity for overreach at the expense of participating countries and their citizens" is completely ignorant and oblivious.
"We urge all EU citizens with Apple devices to have an alternate means of accessing critical internet services like banking, to protect themselves in the event we are forced to block all Apple services EU-wide for legal non-compliance."
... then watch AAPL stock drop below NVDA ...
... and Apple come crawling back, suitably obedient.
or more likely learn extremely quickly that their citizens prefer their iPhones to their politicians, there would be protests within the hour if they ever blocked iPhones.
Weird to me how common it has become in the last 5 years for people to gleefully cheer for tyranny and control.
Yes, the tyranny of... forcing Apple to open up its walled garden. I am cheering for that and more. Mandate open bootloaders. Mandate user installed EK (Endorsement Key) on all TCB enabled devices.
A product you consent to is hardly the same as the government cutting off the ability to use your phone and it sounds very silly to compare the two.
By no means do I agree with the walled garden, I just think cheering for such an absurd idea of the government disabling your phone to fight something most users don't even understand or care about is bizarre.
> A product you consent to is hardly the same as[...]
...The government you also consent to in elections and by deciding where you live?
I'm so sick of this argument: you chose to buy iPhone, it was your decision... But a large part of the law protects citizens against their bad judgement: we don't allow slave contracts or selling your organs.
Within some use-cases, and to a larger degree within some groups of people, Apple is a monopolist. People get *addicted* from Apple ecosystem. If you had a Mercedes house, with a Mercedes charger to your Mercedes Car, that you would park on a Mercedes parking spot near your workplace, it wouldn't be so easy to replace your car with another brand.
no, they shouldn't, this will affect customers who already purchased the product and have no fault in this silly war that apple wants to start. no matter what they do, it should only apply to new devices.
Excuse me, Apple started it? That's absurd. Apple have been running their little fiefdom mostly unchanged for almost fifteen years and it's only in the past few years that the EU has chosen to intervene in their marketplace. The EU started this fight; Apple is just doing whatever they can to resist change.
> Apple have been running their little fiefdom mostly unchanged for almost fifteen years and it's only in the past few years that the EU has chosen to intervene in their marketplace
You literally just described Apple "starting it". They took the initial action (~15 years ago, by your words), starting it, and the other parties reacted, after that action.
They started engaging in the sort of anticompetitive behavior that the EU laws in question were written to discourage or forbid, as you yourself noted when you pointed out that apple's actions took place before said legislative reactions. Here's the quote from you:
> Apple have been running their little fiefdom mostly unchanged for almost fifteen years
Apple could have started out being more consumer friendly from the beginning, and it wouldn't have been starting a fight with consumers. But they didn't, and now they're reaping the consequences.
That's a wholly different claim than the one I disagreed with. Be careful with your language.
Opposing a powerful entity's behaviour is not an excuse for sloppy language or misleading hyperbole. In fact it's especially important to avoid it because the powerful entity only needs to re-frame the criticism around that hyperbole and then proceed to factually disprove it.
Regardless, your new framing is still a ridiculous claim. To suggest that Apple was being "anti-competitive" in 2009 is self-evidently absurd — because their marketplace was simply too small to matter with respect to any competition regulation. They grew their marketplace under the supposedly "unfair" rules which means that the rules cannot be framed as an antitrust violation. This is arguably the most significant point of fact which lost Epic their case against Apple.
If you disagree, then you need explain why every two-bit little nobody who creates any kind of marketplace of any size shouldn't be required to follow strict market fairness rules. Under that logic, Tide could force your local chicken shop to sell Tide products, because they should be entitled to fair access to that chicken marketplace.
It's self evident that apple was engaging in anticompetitive behavior first, because you yourself said they've been operating unchanged for ~15 years, and they're getting in trouble for it now. The obvious conclusion to draw here is that their behavior was always bad.
Indeed, your entire argument relies on some rule about anticompetitive behavior apparently invented just now, something to do with market size? Maybe if we were talking about monopolies, that would be relevant. But a business of 1 user can engage in anticompetitive behavior by locking the user into their ecosystem, or restricting what they can do with their property when it involves competitors.
Apple should have made better choices, earlier: They're engaging in anticompetitive behavior now, so if you claim that they're unchanged, that means they were engaging in anticompetitive behavior before, too. Your framing and claims to the contrary, then, we see are patently ridiculous.
The EU is not exactly doing this exclusively for privacy. This is a geopolitical ploy to thwart America's dominance in Tech, as a cope for not being able to produce any homegrown rivals to America's tech giants.
Why do Americans always read backroom politics into everything.
How does the GDPR help EU tech companies? I hope you're not about to tell me it's a ploy to bundle up resources for compliance in US companies or it levels the ground for the EU to be able to compete somehow. It caused enough headaches for us too.
Sometimes a good thing is just a good thing. The US supposedly was a country that had laws made without sinister corporatism at work at one point too.
An alternative - and you have to admit reasonable counter-hypothesis - is that everything you just wrote as a belief is - to some degree - American Cope to explain away why the US can't have what Europe does.
No, it's the builders of the consent notifications who are responsible for that. They are often skirting or even breaking EU law to make it a headache to refuse. The GDPR says, for example, that refusal should be just as easy as acceptance. Having to click to another screen to do that is... not that.
In reality a cookie consent notification can just as well be a small widget somewhere with an accept and refuse button, but it's the builders of these frameworks that have a vested interest in getting you to press accept.
I've applied for a job at one of these companies about a year ago, and I asked them about it. They said to me that according to their metrics, there's about 30% more acceptance if they only bury their Refuse button, so it's a legal risk they are willing to take.
Needless to say, when they invited me for a second conversation, I politely refused.
No, the shitty cookie screens with dark patterns is not the responsibility of the EU - although you could make the argument that the EU should have been stricter or more prescriptive.
It's not just the dark-pattern cookie popups that are a problem - it's having any mandatory cookie popups --even the fairly-designed ones-- on virtually every website that you ever open. That's what's crappy about the implementation.
I once read a light-hearted analysis of the cumulative time wasted by humanity due to the original USB plugs/sockets being unidirectional. I suspect a similar analysis of these cookie popups would be shocking.
Cookie banners are not mandatory. If you're just using technical cookies you don't need a banner at all. Websites with them want to track you, that's why they have them. They need to ask for your permission to do so, which I think is a good thing. So instead of being mad at the EU we should be mad at those websites trying to get as much data as possible from their users.
Actually, websites could "not track" BY DEFAULT (so no popup) and have a nice widget in a corner asking for consent to track, explaining why they need it, without this widget being obstructive...
The problem is definitly NOT THE REGULATION but the way that websites have become a data/cash machine...
The regulation could have been much better though. For one, it's unclear if Google Analytics cookies qualify. Spain and Austria say one thing, The Netherlands says another, so out of an abundance of caution websites put them everywhere.
I also think it would have been very feasible for the EU to define that a browser could ask for consent once and then apply that to many/all sites by sending a header. So the popup would only be needed for people without a browser that has implemented it.
Well, note that I said it could just as well be a widget on the website somewhere.
There's no such thing as a mandatory cookie popup. You don't need to get explicit consent if your website needs certain cookies to do what the user wants it to do. Placing a session cookie to log in is fine, for example. And it's also fine to place tracking cookies if and only if the user goes to aforementioned widget and presses the "please track me" button.
But users don't want that, obviously, so websites are built to force you to acknowledge the choice. The problem here is not the implementation of the law - it's the attitude of the website builders.
What if the websites respected my user-agent (browser) setting called "Do not track"? Zero hours would be wasted. I think geizhals.at is one of the few that does this.
In other words, the websites are showing cookie popups in you face because they really, really do want to track you, and for that they need your explicit consent. Nobody forced them to track you. The implementation does not matter; the intentions are crappy.
I think there is a recent court ruling saying websites should respect DNT settings as a (rejection of) consent; if that would be adapted universally, we would be done with the popups.
Law making bodies are responsible for all consequences of their legislation whether they are intentional or not. They are the ones in charge so the buck stops with them. Make better laws.
But they're not mandatory. There is nothing stopping websites from not doing it, the previous poster was wrong. The GDPR requires consent, how you obtain that consent is irrelevant. Websites could not store cookies by default and you'd have to manually go and opt in. Maybe we even can have a per browser setting.
Specifically, GDPR requires consent before you do (some) things the user might not want. You could simply not try to do those things and then you won't need to obtain consent at all.
It's absurd how used we have become to wantonly collecting user data that some people can't even imagine not doing that.
GDPR provides mechanisms for getting implicit consent for technically required cookies. For other types of data storage, explicit consent is required. And that's the problem, there are a lot of terrible websites out there that value their ability to stalk you and sell your information more than your ability to use the website.
For consent, the old "hide tracking terms in the terms of service" approach is not allowed anymore. That's where the popups come from, the user needs to know what they're consenting to if the data processing isn't actually required for the website to work.
I would like to see something like P3P (but better) to make a return. We have DNT and its followup, but they're not sufficiently scopable in my opinion.
There's no implicit consent, technically required cookies have a different basis for processing. And, yes, I'm aware of that, my point is that people who create websites choose to force the consent box in front of you, there's nothing in the GDPR that mandates that. It could be a link at the bottom, some header...
Then enforce the law. Making the regulation and letting people halfway get around it and not holding them accountable just made things worse for everyone
Also, and too often overlooked or silently ignored:
You don't need cookie popups! Really. You don't.
You only need to get consent to track users with software you don't run yourself. Or when you sell your data off to other companies.
Both are, unfortunately, the norm. But there's absolutely no technical reason to have these in place. Non at all. Plenty of alternatives for tracking that doesn't need consent. Or just not sell your customers' data off.
I would be infuriated if I found the bakery down the street is selling its security footage with my face on it, next to my sales and spending in that bakery. I'd expect them to at least warn me about this at the door. So I can then buy my bread elsewhere. That's what a consent banner is!
Thank you for this accurate analogy. Similar to what if the post office delivered all your mail for free but they also opened it and read it in order to send you advertising.
> The GDPR says, for example, that refusal should be just as easy as acceptance.
Not true, actually! GDPR is a framework, and every EU country implements a national law according to that framework (e.g. the Dutch implementation is called "AVG"). The specific requirement that refusal must be as easy as acceptance is not in the GDPR, but several countries added it to their national implementation of the GDPR.
This is a misconception that I've seen going around, and I still wonder where it came from.
The Dutch implementation is called "Uitvoeringswet Algemene Verordening Gegevensbescherming", which, as the title states, is the law that implements the GDPR. "AVG" is just a translation for "GDPR", not the name of the law that implements it.
The Uitvoeringswet describes how the GDPR functions within Dutch law, for example, it describes the role that the Dutch Data Protection Authority plays. You can read the Uitvoeringswet right here: https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0040940/2021-07-01
The GDPR (in Dutch AVG, in French RGPD, in Spanish RGPD, etc.) actually DOES state that it should be just "as easy to withdraw as to give consent" in Article 7. The directive (2016/679) can be found here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679.
> The data subject shall have the right to withdraw his or her consent at any time. The withdrawal of consent shall not affect the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal. Prior to giving consent, the data subject shall be informed thereof. It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent.
I think this can be interpreted as, you ask for consent, it doesn't have to be as easy to say no, but once consent is given - it should be as easy to withdraw it as it is to re-give it after it was withdrawn.
Somewhat badly worded, in my opinion. It doesn't unambiguously say "refusing consent every time it is requested should be as easy as accepting it."
That is a common misconception. In EU law, there are regulations and directives. Regulations are immediately active in all EU countries. In contrast, directives need to be translated into national law by each individual country. The GDPR is a regulation. (for details: https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-budget/law... )
Disabling cookies will cause _more_ of the "cookie prompts" to appear, not less. Some pages these days even will prevent visiting them unless they can set a cookie...
Also, cookies are not the only method of tracking which is supposed to be disabled when you hit Deny.
I'll go further in one regard: the App Store in fact hurts Apple because it has caused a kind of filtering of apps down to those that are the sleaziest.
I used to enjoy exploring the App Store — I resent it now. I'll download half a dozen apps only to delete them within minutes of launching them because of their rent-ware attitude or just plain shitty functionality.
Can you elaborate on that filtering? I agree with you that the App Store is full of chaff, but I don't understand why there'd be a causal relationship between a highly centralized App Store and sleazy apps.
Indeed. Put another way, how would lifting Apple's restrictions result in an improved wheat-to-chaff ratio? I can't see how it would increase the amount of wheat, nor can I see how it would reduce the amount of chaff.
Different stores can have different rules and moderation.
I'm not going to argue about the signal to noise ratio between e.g. fdroid vs Google Play, but it should be obvious that while the signal looks the same for both, the noise is very different, with fdroid having outdated, "developer UI" apps as noise and Google Play having fraudulent scams and malware as noise.
Logically this makes sense, but I can't imagine how many decent apps Apple may have rejected for other petty reasons, only to accept the ones that are lambasting people with rentware and other issues the OP mentioned.
Absolutely. But while we know there are a number of kinda dodgy apps in the App Store, one could only imagine how many more they would be without Apple’s oversight/gatekeeping. Not to mention how much better camouflaged the scam apps could be.
Not just high end real estate. Your local mom & pop in a strip mall somewhere (at least in the US) has a high chance of paying % of gross receipts to the landlord + rent.
This may vary by location and landlord but it absolutely is a thing. And a guarantee for any high-end, high-traffic location.
Sometimes there's something else at play though, because there are situations which cannot be explained by offer and demand. For example, developers are paid less in average than for example some consultant jobs while in my view (and I'm a consultant) both the skills required for a developer are higher while additionally the available workforce (supply) is lower for developers as well.
I mean, consultants, they grow on trees and I know what I'm talking about, I sometines interview new hires as part of my job. Developers, less so.
I don't have an explanation for this, it's a strange effect. But it's just an example, I have observed multiple times this unexpected deviation from the law of supply and demand.
My point is, this law is not a sure fire way to explain any price.
There is a higher demand for a certain kind of consultants (let’s call them “good”) and fairly low supply. There are plenty of people who call themselves consultants but nobody needs them since this is a bit of a winner takes all market (.e.g. like being a broker or even a lawyer to some extent)
To answer directly, I actually really love the Framework conceptually. What they're doing is immensely important for notebooks, and I'd love to see Apple follow suit one day (but I doubt that'll ever happen).
I just can't stand Linux. I've tried several distros and after using macOS since 2009 and Windows since 1995, I just can't be bothered by all the things Linux distros lack, if muscle memory for the other two aren't already the biggest obstacle for me.
I am insanely efficient on macOS, and I almost never have to think about global hotkeys, global search & calculations, managing apps & settings, and seeing nearly zero interruptions while I work -- including popups, notifications, performance dips (if I'm being reasonable with my usage), OS UI bugs, etc.
These all do occasionally happen, but never to the extent I see in popular Linux distros and even Windows. It's just a fact, after nearly 30 years of first-hand usage and comparison.
I also use macOS because it is as extensible and open as I need it to be for downloading and installing packages, and customizing the OS to suit my needs -- which is something iPhones can't do without jailbreaking and such.
I've never owned an iPhone, and seldom use my iPad. I'm an Android guy, and being able to sideload apps in rare, but important, moments is important to me. The openness of Android has been important as well, namely the fact that Firefox has always been allowed to use its own browser engine since the start, enabling the same freedoms I have using it on desktop platforms, as a primary example.
PopOS most recently, and I ran into significant UI lag, jank, bugs all over the place with the correct NVidia drivers installed and everything. I tried it on two machines, and had pretty much the same experience. After troubleshooting and seeking resources/answers, I eventually gave up and told myself, "maybe in another 5-10 years", as we all say.
That was a few years ago. Anything older I've forgotten honestly at this point. It's been a long time, and I'm certain things are probably better these days, but I have absolutely no reason to switch. My muscle memory and setups on my current machines are too good to let go of.
I have a Steam Deck -- but their experience is so tailored that I'm not sure it counts. I'm not actively using the desktop environment unless I need to use a different game platform. I wouldn't be using this machine for work at all though.
People complain about the products that are best for them. Nobody (with the power to decide what they use) complains about a product long, unless it is still their best choice.
And suppliers of products being complained about are not companies "not worth supporting". They are making the product that is the best fit for the complaining customer! They are not perfect. They can do better. So customers speak up.
Your last point is exactly where I'm coming from here. People complaining about a product is usually a sign of its wide, and possibly avid, use.
After trying UI design tools and web development on Windows and Linux machines and finding the experience very sub-par for my needs, I've found macOS, and by extension, Apple's hardware quality, choice of keyboard layout, ease of use, etc. to be superior for my needs. I have almost no complaints about the Mac platform with the ways I've been able to customize it, and its nag-free experience. As they say, it just works™. ;)
It feels made for UI design & development, with minimal to no configuration, no late nights fixing file permissions or access issues, fixing Linux subsystems, fiddling with very limited terminals, and suffering from buggy piecemeal UI shell packages that prioritize fancy, laggy animations over functionality.
On the contrary, I've found not only doing these tasks and multitasking to be very frustrating when getting serious work done on other machines, primarily frequent interruptions (Windows) and major inconsistencies with global keyboard shortcuts.
For what it's worth, I'm also a staunch Android user, never owned an iPhone, occasionally use an iPad for reading and other content creation, absolutely love my Windows PC for gaming and surfing on my TV, and work exclusively on my MacBook. I'm very particular about using the most suitable machines for the tasks at hand, but well-rounded enough not to be completely captured by Apple.
If it's been a few years since you gave Linux a try, I'd strongly recommend giving it another go.
I had 2 macbooks fail simultaneously over the new year, and instead of laying down the $$$ for a new m3 mackbook, I put a linux station together, with the intent for it to be a windows dual boot.
At this point a couple of months later, windows is no more than a KVM/QEMU virtual machine (and runs its DAW/synth apps, significantly faster and with greater stability than either of my dead m1 macbooks ever did.)
Best tool for the job has changed.
An equipment manuifacturer who's goal is for hw failures to trigger a new purchase and not a repair should be enough incentive to ditch them. We all know Apple has fallen way further than that.
They're a litigious, anti-consumer company that hides behind some fake, faded, John Lennon esque / hipster image.
> If it's been a few years since you gave Linux a try, I'd strongly recommend giving it another go.
I've heard this since around 2004, and did try it every once in a while. And while I have the utmost respect for the Linux desktop developers... the experience was never comparable to me. I'm a sucker for well-thought out and coherent user interfaces, and the rigid principles Apple developers have to follow are no match for a loose group of open source devs.
I will continue to follow their progress, but as it stands, using a Linux desktop on my main machine feels like swapping a Mercedes with a home-built Gokart.
I've been using only Linux (Manjaro) for the last six years, and although there's been marked improvement it's still in many ways buggier and clunkier for everyday use than even Windows.
and they're not "supporting" a company by merely buying their product.
They are deciding that said product is the best fit for price on their individual criteria.
To "support" would require you to make sacrifices - aka, buy an inferior/worse-fit product from a company you want to support, instead of from the company that actually offers the best-fit for yourself.
When I bought my MacBook Pro M1 Pro (ugh, stupid names, c'mon Apple!), it was probably the most confident I felt about a technology purchase in years, at least since Apple finally ditched the ridiculous touch bar and gave us back the Escape key and function row.
Aside from me throwing too much at it (should've sprung for 32GB), it's the single best notebook I've ever owned, and the most reliable.
To say it was the best fit for me is an understatement! It's truly great!
Because Apple is a company that does actually make great hardware, just marred by their idiot suit and tie MBA best schools social ties 1% tax dodging executive team that wants to foster the cultish attitude of their consumers and...
well they succeeded in a way.
Did you entertain the possibility that Framework might not be available at OP’s place. Because that’s very much likely to be the case, just like it’s not available to a lot of us :)
Potentially because Macbooks represent a more sustainable model for software distribution and don't prevent people from downloading apps directly from websites.
Precisely! That's the key difference between iOS and macOS devices, essentially. I've never owned an iPhone primarily because its environment is so constrained, and the possibility of losing access to important apps due to failure of approval or other frivolous issues Apple hysterically deems unfit for publishing, is a huge single point of failure not worth risking.
In reality, it's safer to assume that most or all major apps don't have problems with this, so I'm being a little facetious here. Regardless, after nearly 20 years on Android, nobody could possibly pry my muscle memory and features I've come to expect from my cold dead hands. :D
‘Nearly 20 years’ got me. I thought ‘no way, the very first iPhone was released a little bit more than 10 years ago and Android was released a year after’. Then I realised we’re closer to 20 years than we’re to 10 years. It was almost 17 years ago, the very first iPhone!
Because MacBooks are just better. (Have owned both.)
I have owned, and continue to own, all sorts of laptops and phones. I could rant about Apple all day long online, but in the end their product is simply superior.
And yet if your statement were true, it would not explain why others who also own "both" disagree with you. Absolutism does not serve you, there are few subjects in this world that lack nuance.
I'm not sure how that implicitly conveys an opinion.
Saying "the sky is blue" is not an opinion when the sky is blue, it's a fact. Saying something is better is also not an opinion, it's a fact. Saying "in my opinion" or "I believe/think/feel like/etc" makes your statement an opinion, ommiting that is ambiguous and is left for interpretation.
Within the corporate monopolist called Apple, that is to say within the minds of all its collective employees, lies an old idea still warm and vibrant after decades of waning indifference. This idea is called Apple Computer, and it makes the best gosh-darn computers in the world: the Mac.
It is such a powerful and self-evident idea that those computers are still above and beyond the best ones in the world, even with all those years of indifference.
The people who do are a significant minority just around ~30-40%. Wouldn't be a tremendous market for ear hooks otherwise. There are thousands sold every day on some retail sites and sometimes thousands every hour if discounted. Out of the 2 dozen folks I know who have bought airpods, 8 have also bought ear hooks. That's ~33%. Anecdotal, but you can look at sell figures and the vast variety of airpod earhooks products if you don't believe me - and look at the 10k-100k product ratings.
I am surprised to hear your experience here. Many of my friends have them and only one has ever mentioned a fit issue. He bought larger tips and they now fit perfectly apparently.
Researching I can indeed see such products exist, although given Apple appear to be selling over 100 million pairs a year[0] (also surprising to me!), I suspect your estimate is inflated. Note this is over 300,000 pairs per day.
Anecdotally, I see people with Airpods daily but have not once ever seen hooks on them. Maybe there's a cultural element at play?
Until battery life starts deteriorating any that happens real soon and you can’t even know when it started and where it is currently unlike that of, say, an iPhone. Then it’s unusable — hurrah, buy a new pair. The Apple way! :)
This is not unique to Apple. All headphones with tiny batteries in the drivers take the piss after a few years aging.
That said, my MacBooks have the best laptop batteries of any computer I’ve owned. My wife went through multiple laptops in the time I kept one in college. Turns out some electronics just suck!
"You hate capitalism so much, _and yet you live under capitalism!_ How very hypocritical of you..."
Don't get me wrong, Framework makes a lot of neat stuff, but you can't swap out a Macbook to _anything_ without consequences. It does not take a lot of imagination and empathy to see that for some people, those consequences aren't acceptable at all, or not simply not worth the utterly undetectable sting that a company such as Apple would feel by us not buying a single Macbook from them.
If someone has to alter their entire work environment and process, while Apple doesn't even notice, is that truly worth the moral superiority they'll feel? For a whole lot of people, that answer is "no", and I can't blame them.
Good point -- With great power comes great inevitable irresponsibility and abuses. The human condition never fails to pollute and corrupt anything as untouchable as Apple. Too big to fail, by definition!
Because people are incredibly entitled and want to have their cake and eat it too.
So you bought an iPhone knowing you can’t download apps and then go cry because you can’t download apps?
Then your argument is that well, all my friends have iPhones or there are some other good features, or whatever else you make up?
So you obviously find value in the product, it’s missing a feature, but you will consciously buy it anyway, it doesn’t make any sense.
Does the standard simply change when a company is big enough?
Imagine ordering a steak salad even though the restaurant doesn’t allow modifications to the ingredients, then throwing a temper tantrum when you get it because it has steak. It’s unbelievable.
You might find this hard to believe, but people buy products based on a number of factors. For smart phones, the number of factors is dizzyingly complex, and yes, the effects it has on smoothness of communication with the people in your life is one of those factors. Sometimes a specific feature is one of those factors.
What "doesn't make sense" is reducing a complex decision down to a specific factor, and then trying to create the narrative that your specific chosen factor is the sole reason anyone chooses a specific product.
It is completely fair for people to prefer iPhone and also argue for Apple changing their policies.
Apple is the only one acting entitled here. Why doesn't the App Store deserve competitors? Why should we accept Apple's fees and failures when they deliberately limit competition?
They're acting like an anticompetitive wuss if you ask me. If Apple is the righteous one here (imagine that), they can pack up their bags and tell the whole EU to shove it. They can individually invite all 27 markets to kiss their ass and watch as the relevancy of Apple products plummets in the first world. Problem solved, Apple saves the day. 中国梦!
Or, they can take the king's ransom of iPhone revenue and surrender their asinine software double-standard. This doesn't end well for them either way, there's no sense it making it last longer.
Agreed, and well worded. Never in computing history has a walled garden like Apple's existed until the iPhone. Distributing and finding apps wasn't always simple, but then again, the need for a central browsing experience to find and download apps was never truly a thing before -- maybe outside of Steam for games. The key difference with Steam is that the same games have always been available on other distribution platforms, generally, so it doesn't suffer from the same limitations.
Show of hands, how many people actually spend multiple minutes (or hours) just swiping through their respective App Store just to find something new and interesting?
Aside from the store experiences, the web's powerful (gasp!) ability to find and download content including Computer Applications™ has always been its greatest strength. App stores are a net detriment seeking to protect the lowest common denominator: the uneducated computer user who hasn't bothered to learn everyday security practices to avoid downloading malicious apps or vetting software developers on their popularity and/or security themselves.
This takes a little knowledge and practice, but this isn't much different from shopping for good produce in a grocery store. Avoid the rotten fruit, and use your friends/family to help you judge what's best! That's the beauty of freedom on our devices, as it enables the power users and enthusiasts to enjoy these devices at their fullest, without senseless obstacles offering unsolicited "protection".
> . Never in computing history has a walled garden like Apple's existed until the iPhone.
wot...
How was playing that Super Mario Bros with on your Sega Master System back in the day? I don't remember Sega having the 10NES subsystem.
Ever heard of this little place in the early to mid 90s called AOL? Compuserve? Prodigy? Any cell phone company long before Apple's app store
And you act like anyone who has a Kindle or a Nook isn't in a walled garden, at least for 99% of the people who don't know/care that you can install books via Calibre or something.
And you know you can sideload apps on Apple devices right? Even before the EU ruling. It was just a massive pain in the ass and drumroll... 99% aren't going to do it.
This is not new, Apple wasn't the first to do it, and everybody railing again Apple loves to accept it in basically every other facet of their lives.
My primary mechanism to load books on my Kindle is via emailing ePubs, granted, I'm probably in the minority of users but I couldn't ask for an easier workflow.
> If by sideload you mean "repeatedly sign apps until your face turns blue" then yes. If you mean "install software like a normal person", then no.
Yep. Exactly.
And breaking free of the walled Kindle/Nook garden is similarly out of reach for about the same number of people that don't care about Apple's walled garden, which is the majority.
Again, they literally exist in every corner of our lives, and the 99% of consumers/normies don't care.
If they don't care, then it shouldn't matter that third-party options exist. The same thing happens on Android, nobody uses F-Droid even if the apps are better and cheaper. The fact that it exists puts meaningful pressure on competitors though, and fills the niche that I use the device for.
The "walled Kindle/Nook garden" isn't similar Apple's ecosystem. A Kindle or Nook will let you access it's EMMC and put Epub files or PDFs wherever you need to. It functions indistinguishably from a store-bought file and doesn't even make you enable Developer Mode to get there. It's "out of reach" in the sense that you need the skills to follow a Wikihow article to do it - my grandma could figure it out.
iPhones don't let you install IPA files on equal-footing as Apple, ever. That's the problem, and it's what the DMA remediates. I don't care how you or the normies feel about it any more than I consider the public sentiment towards Bell telephone or Internet Explorer.
> It functions indistinguishably from a store-bought file and doesn't even make you enable Developer Mode to get there.
This is incorrect. Modern Kindles classify books added as "documents" rather than books, which limits their features and treats them as second class citizens.
I doubt most people care, but you're not on equal footing to Amazon loading a book onto a Kindle.
Why are you defending a trillion dollar company lmao?
Why do you care so much that Apple has been forced to give consumers more choice, you can still just use the app store yourself, nobody is forcing you to use apps from alternative stores.
This is the standard "one true religion" reaction imo.
Except in this case your beloved android lets you do whatever you want, so why not go use them?
And there are multiple manufacturers that aren’t associated with Google who make phones.
If this were truly such a shortcoming, more companies, in addition to already existing ones, would create phones with side loading apps.
Imagine me pitching my idea to YC, it’s like an iPhone, but with side loading apps! It’s brilliant!
You’d be laughed out of the room.
The issue is you want those good Apple features, you want that Apple ecosystem, the blue bubbles, etc, but you also want to have a feature that the phone doesn’t have and people are crying that Apple won’t give them that feature.
I don’t even care, and I even if I did, decisions already been made so there’s nothing to argue.
This is simply an amusing situation, the grandstanding is simply funny.
I don’t think you made the point you think you made here.
It’s possible to not care about something and still submit an opinion. Or maybe it’s the degree of caring that is confusing you, I care enough to comment and have a viewpoint, but I don’t care to the degree that I am upset or will lose any sleep over it.
There you go, hope this helps you understand what I meant there so that you are no so hung up on it so as to feel the need to quote it.
Please do save me the suspense and share the punchline now!
It’s perfectly reasonable to use YC here as at the end of the day they’ve helped launch of ton of companies that are popular with consumers.
Regarding the irony in using them as an example of corporate righteousness, well you did get me there and I agree with you.
I think there is a great desire for web-like application distribution to work well on smartphones, but with none of the drawbacks like poor rendering performance and lack of native features.
Of course, native apps that wrap web-based apps is almost the reverse of that, and we still often get laggy, sub-par experiences as a result of broader platform support for lower maintenance costs.
PWAs fill the opposite gap where you get native-like apps at the expense of low performance, distributed any way you like.
What we really need is for high-performance native applications to be distributable via the open web, and that's exactly what the EU is enforcing here, in a way. What would be better is for WebAssembly to take off and offer native performance in apps that can be visited at URLs, just like we're used to.
Dude this is the foundation of capitalism. Its not supply and bend over. Its supply and demand.
It is totally reasonable to demand a better steak salad from some restaurant that doesn't allow modifications and moreover totally reasonable to point out how asinine they are for not making easy-to-do modifications when you point it out since that is what you as a paying customer want.
Imagine we lived in a world where 95% of restaurants never ever and vehemently so denied any modification to menu items. It is unreasonable then to demand they change? I need to move towns to get lunch?
This is the insanity we live in with the walled gardens of Apple.
True, though the situation isn't exactly equivalent.
Using another real estate analogy -
Imagine you bought a house from Fruit Builders company. The house came with a pool.
Now unlike every other pool in existence, this is a very special pool that just really cares about your privacy and security a lot.
It won't let you use any random pool toy (it has lasers), no it must be a well-behaved toy that is rigorously tested and officially notarized by Fruit company themselves (= non-employee contractors taking one look to make sure Fruit's cut is not being circumvented).
So you go to the supermarket, purchase a marked-up toy, the toy company reports its earning to Fruit, and Fruit takes their cut.
Why not? You are presumably less-clothed in a pool, it could take pictures. Or record private conversations. Or both.
But sure, here's another -
You can run any company's software on a MBP, downloaded from the internet, without paying a dime to Apple. Similar situation applies to Windows / Microsoft.
The iOS model is advocating for rent-seeking in MacOs and Windows binaries.
Why can apps installed from anywhere steal your data?
Surely Apple's OS/framework that they tried to say they spent so much money developing, sandboxes and protects all running code from said data vacuuming behaviour?
Or did you really believe Apple when they said it would reduce security™
Because the only reason it would is if Apple let it happen on purpose so they can create a consumer backlash by saying "I told you so".
> If commercial real estate charged XX% cuts of all sales from a business, every business would crumble with enough time
FWIW, at least in the US, this is actually how a lot of commercial/retail real estate works. Every mall or shopping center you visit charges rent based on sales revenue.
> If commercial real estate charged XX% cuts of all sales from a business, every business would crumble with enough time, and only the big hitters would succeed with great resentment towards their gracious corporate overlords.
That's more or less what happens in real life. If you are having any success with your physical business, you can bet your ass that your landlord will increase rents. They keep a keen eye on this. Sometimes they'll even state that it's not more than fair that they should get more in rent, since your business is doing so well.
This is a geopolitical ploy to thwart America's dominance in Tech, as a cope for not being able to produce any homegrown rivals to America's tech giants.
In general I lean libertarian, and governing bodies like the EU have enormous capacity for overreach at the expense of participating countries and their citizens.
I won't pretend to know exactly how their processes work in detail, as I'm an American citizen, so the EU's concerns generally don't interest me much, but if the U.S. Federal gov't versus State governments can be used an analogy, I have similar feelings, in principle.
I do, in fact. My parents both use Android phones, and I'm more than happy to support their needs when something goes wrong. 99% of the time, they love their phones and use them regularly without issues.
Supporting families downloading bad software is in itself a job. Im always torn if i should get them a password manager or just stick with the handwritten notebook. I feel like the book approach is safest
Unfortunately for many senior folks, using them is just too complicated. I've badgered my parents into using theirs, which is already setup, and it confuses them every time, so they prefer to memorize or write their passwords on a sheet of paper they never lose in their apartment.
It's just easier than fiddling with a buggy mess of auto-fill prompts that only work half the time, and when they do show up, they fail to fill in the password, so then you have to open the app, hunt down the entry, copy it to the clipboard, and go back to the app or site you were signing into.
Multi-tasking on phones is already very difficult for my parents, and they're well aware of it being a feature. Eventually all of these frustrations add up, and the path of least resistance is writing passwords down, as much as it kills me.
> Alternative app marketplaces. Marketplaces can choose to offer a catalog of apps solely from the developer of the marketplace.
How does that count as a "marketplace"?
> Web Distribution ... will let authorized developers distribute their iOS apps to EU users directly from a website owned by the developer
All of this just makes it crystal clear what Apple's goal is: to prevent competition. It's not about security like they've been lying about; it's all about maintaining their app store monopoly.
Before this, if you had an alternative marketplace, you had to accept submissions from other developers. You are still allowed to accept submissions from other developers, but are no longer required to.
I suppose the point is that, if we're being pedantic (and after all, that is what the internet is _for_), you cannot have a single vendor marketplace based on the commonly understood meaning of the word 'marketplace'.
(But yeah, this is just slightly silly naming from Apple).
Isn't that kind of the point? The goal was to get out of Apple's clutches when your customers have their devices, so Apple made the thing meant to be independent even more dependent than the original in order to deter adoption.
The parent comment cited Web Distribution as evidence that Apple doesn't actually care about safety and security, when in fact Web Distribution is more secured than Marketplace distribution.
> The goal was to get out of Apple's clutches when your customers have their devices
Whose goal? Read the DMA. It is very explicit that it expects Apple to maintain security of devices and apps.
> Apple doesn't actually care about safety and security, when in fact Web Distribution is more secured than Marketplace distribution.
That's a contradiction in logic there. If they cared for security, they would choose the more secured option. But they didn't?
Either they then have provided worse security all along: web distribution could have offered more security than an app store?
Or they could have provided even better security in their app store all along: if they implemented this stricter checking there. Why not?
These arguments are poor and don't stand up to scruteny.
The very simple conclusion is that it's not about security, that it never has been.
No, you're making assumptions about what "secured" means in this context and clearly have no understanding of how any of it actually works. None of what you wrote makes sense.
You could have stopped at "means". No need to be condescending or telling me I don't know how stuff works. I know how stuff works.
My point is, and remains, purely non-technical though. And I also know how language works.
If you say "we don't allow X, only Y, because we prioritize security". Then change that to "we do allow X but will perform extra security scrutiny over what we do at Y" then it does not compute. Again: it proves your first statement was a lie (intentional or not). Because a) it was possible to allow for your level of security and you could've allowed both X and Y all along, or b) you are now lowering your security, proving you don't really prioritize security, or c) you are merely frustrating X in a different way now and security was never the reason not to allow X.
I'm convinced it's both a and c. I surely hope not that it's b.
> The parent comment cited Web Distribution as evidence that Apple doesn't actually care about safety and security, when in fact Web Distribution is more secured than Marketplace distribution.
Which goes to the parent's point that their intent is to prevent competition. Otherwise why would the alternative need more onerous security measures, if not to act as a deterrent through friction?
> Read the DMA. It is very explicit that it expects Apple to maintain security of devices and apps.
It also says that the security measures have to be "strictly necessary" and "there are no less-restrictive means to safeguard the integrity of the hardware or operating system" and "[t]he gatekeeper should be prevented from implementing such measures as a default setting or as pre-installation" etc.
Which implies to me that you not only have to be able to turn them off, they have to be off by default.
The comment literally says "It's not about security like they've been lying about", when the opposite is actually true. They were implying that Web Distribution was a way to get around security of a Marketplace, which is not possible.
Without a kill switch, gatekeepers would lose control over apps, making them "strictly necessary." Most interpretations of the DMA agree.
> The comment literally says "It's not about security like they've been lying about"
The comment literally says: "All of this just makes it crystal clear what Apple's goal is: to prevent competition. It's not about security like they've been lying about; it's all about maintaining their app store monopoly."
There is no reason for the security measures to be more onerous for the competing thing if they were sufficient for Apple's thing, unless the purpose of the security measures is to prevent competition.
> Without a kill switch, gatekeepers would lose control over apps, making them "strictly necessary."
Gatekeepers having control over apps isn't necessary for security. The device's owner having control over apps is. They can opt into a particular gatekeeper's control if they choose to. How is it "strictly necessary" for the gatekeeper to force them to use one provider of vetting services over another? Isn't the point of the act to enable competition?
> There is no reason for the security measures to be more onerous for the competing thing if they were sufficient for Apple's thing, unless the purpose of the security measures is to prevent competition.
Web Distribution means Apple is handing over responsibilities previously handled by the Marketplace directly to the developer. Allowing developers to police themselves is obviously riskier.
> The device's owner having control over apps is.
This is simply not true. Device owners are hopeless at maintaining the security of their devices.
> How is it "strictly necessary" for the gatekeeper to force them to use one provider of vetting services over another?
There are 2 tiers of "vetting services": 1. Marketplaces determine the appropriate content or type of apps allowed in their listings, 2. Apple determines if an app, developer, or marketplace is an outright threat, e.g. if an app turns out to be a scam, or if a bug in an app exposes an exploit, it is "strictly necessary" for Apple to be able to yank the app immediately.
> Web Distribution means Apple is handing over responsibilities previously handled by the Marketplace directly to the developer. Allowing developers to police themselves is obviously riskier.
Doesn't that depend on who the developer is? Certainly it isn't the case that no one exists who the user might trust at least as much as Apple.
> This is simply not true. Device owners are hopeless at maintaining the security of their devices.
"Device owners" includes substantially all people. Many of them are not hopeless and are entitled to make their own decisions. Some of them are even more qualified to do it than the people Apple has reviewing apps.
The hopeless people may be better off sticking to trusted stores, but they can do that without prohibiting others from doing otherwise.
> There are 2 tiers of "vetting services": 1. Marketplaces determine the appropriate content or type of apps allowed in their listings, 2. Apple determines if an app, developer, or marketplace is an outright threat, e.g. if an app turns out to be a scam, or if a bug in an app exposes an exploit, it is "strictly necessary" for Apple to be able to yank the app immediately.
That doesn't change the question. How is it "strictly necessary" for Apple to do that, rather than whoever the owner of the device chooses to do it? It would obviously be possible for a third party like Symantec, Malwarebytes or the makers of uBlock to do the same thing.
Sure, the amount risk probably varies, but you are talking about going from a Marketplace that implements some level of app review to no-review. It's more risk.
> Many of them are not hopeless ...
Exactly, and "many" is not enough. It's not possible to design a special switch only for those qualified "many" - and only them. Platform owners and the EU insist on protecting the unqualified everyone else too.
> How is it "strictly necessary" for Apple to do that, rather than whoever the owner of the device chooses to do it?
It's not in the sense that someone else could do it, but the DMA doesn't require it, so obviously no gatekeeper will. Also, it's a terrible idea because there's no market for it. Everyone already expects it to be free.
> Sure, the amount risk probably varies, but you are talking about going from a Marketplace that implements some level of app review to no-review. It's more risk.
Only if the developer isn't as trustworthy as Apple. In fact, it could be lower risk even if they are less trustworthy than Apple, when it's their own app, because someone who is less competent but not overtly malicious who posts their own app is much less likely to be supplying malware than a general-purpose store that tries to vet everything but accepts submissions from just anyone at all including overtly malicious actors, and could thereby miss something.
And the user, in choosing which alternate stores or developers to trust, can decide that.
> It's not possible to design a special switch only for those qualified "many" - and only them.
Well of course it is. In the worst case scenario you could make the switch irreversible and then once enabled the device could never add another store. But that's really no different than requiring a device wipe to change it back, because a wiped device should be no different than a new device that never had the switch enabled to begin with.
> It's not in the sense that someone else could do it, but the DMA doesn't require it, so obviously no gatekeeper will.
Isn't whether it's "strictly necessary" the condition on which they can demand it?
> Also, it's a terrible idea because there's no market for it. Everyone already expects it to be free.
How is it free? They're charging $100/year and a percentage on top of that.
I love how a never-used-by-courts-before regulation would supposedly already have "most interpretations" with any sort of authoritative value. I can probably walk into a pub tonight and get 27 other "interpretations", they will have the same value of yours. Technically speaking, even the Commissioner's own interpretation might well be flawed - we won't know until a court spends some time on it. I would humbly suggest, though, that when the very same lawmaker who wrote the law is publicly pulling your ears in public on related matters, your interpretations are probably not the right ones.
Apple pay enough real lawyers to defend them, they really don't need pro-bono amateurs.
It's not my interpretation, self-proclaimed humble person. Educated people have been discussing this ad nauseam for months. I would not-humbly suggest you actually read up on topics before breathlessly dismissing them deep down an HN comment thread.
> it's all about maintaining their app store monopoly.
Does this only makes sense if you assume payments are tied to the App Store? They aren’t.
If you remove payments from your list of motivations, what do you presume Apple’s motivation is to encourage apps to list themselves on the App Store and not a third-party marketplace?
It is much harder to explain to consumers why Apple should get a percentage-based rent (sorry Core Technology Fee that enables Privacy and Security™) if they go to a non-Apple website, download a non-Apple app, to do non-Apple-related things.
Like literally the only participants in that business transaction are the consumer and the company, Apple does not even enter the picture.
It would be like car manufacturers charging you a percentage for going to the grocery store, because they provide a Private and Secure™ transportation platform.
Consumers will soon catch up, and if the EU does not put pressure on Apple about this, they definitely will.
It’s more like car manufacturer charging license fees to the dealership for their use of the original manuals and tools to provide services that rely on their diagnostic tools and manuals.
But a car is used for more things than going to the dealership, and the dealership does not sell me groceries. Perhaps I want to race, or carry ikea furniture, or jump start another car - it is a general-purpose transportation device.
Similarly, I dream of going to Epic's website to download some Fortnite, maybe charge a thousand vbucks to mom's credit card if I'm feeling adventurous, and that has nothing to do with Apple or iOS.
This is how every single general-purpose computing platform (including Apple's MacOs) and the open internet has worked for multiple decades.
we don’t care how the car is used. It’s the dealership that pays the fee on service manuals and access to tools, not the customer. The dealership can choose to pass the cost to customer but it doesn’t have to.
Oh but we do care. Not every app developer is a dealership, a car is used in a much broader context.
Some may be like Uber, turning the car into a taxi service, or like Turo, allowing it to be rented. Others may be independent mechanics that can work on the car perfectly fine without access to blessed tools.
There is no cost passed on to the customer because the car manufacturer does not enforce a percentage cut of Uber's or Turo's revenue.
That said, there is likely no perfect analogy in cars. We can instead turn to MacOs / Windows / Linux etc., general purpose computing platforms that do not suffer from a gatekeeper's stranglehold.
An independent dealership can choose to not service particular make of the car, pay for the OEM tools and license for manuals or can choose to obtain those via other means.
You can see where the lack of respect to IP rights leads to when it comes to current espionage claims between some of the world largest economies entangled in a myriad of IP disputes. Ultimately, the question I ask myself is: am I happy with unverified random parts I want to put in my car? Instead of having easy traceability and ability to sue for damages I now have to also vet provenance, authenticity and take on additional risk of an unvetted supplier that I often won’t be even able to sue.
The independent auto shop isn't paying the auto maker a fee every time they change the spark plugs on one of their cars though. They buy a license to the service manual collection and can use that knowledge for however many cars they work on.
This would be the developer buying a license to the SDK and documentation and then that would be it.
Most platforms would offer the core libraries and services for free as an incentive to attract developers to the platform/make development easier.
This is how it used to be, until Apple got too large and instead of being beholden to developers it flipped the other way around, and now releasing an app for Apple's platform is a supposed privilege.
Take the games industry, where developers and publishers are often given huge incentives by a platform (mostly consoles) to develop for that platform; because games developers are providing value for the platform owner by making the platform more attractive because it has more content options for the consumer.
Why is it so hard for people to wrap their heads around that concept.
> Most platforms would offer the core libraries and services for free as an incentive
Right, as an incentive. That's exactly right. Makers of other platforms chose a particular funding model to suit their commercial strategic environment, not because they were obligated to. Why should Apple be obligated to follow other (or even their own) prior business models?
Sure. Remind me where I can download the free developer kit for the PlayStation 5? Remind me who I need to pay in order to distribute a PlayStation game?
Even back when Visual Studio did cost you an arm and a leg, you didn't need it to build and distribute software for Windows. Free options were always available; you paid for the comfort.
In fact, Windows itself came with everything that you needed to build just about any userspace app in the box since Windows XP SP1 (the first one that included .NET Framework).
Apple fans would always claim that this was a security measure to prevent malware. I have always found the claim dubious.
If you believe in that as a security measure, you could still have a signing requirement and apple could revoke trust on known-bad binaries. Which is probably what they will do.
Mind giving some high level clarification on how Apple would revoke entitlements on applications they’re not allowed to manage? Honestly curious about the infrastructure involved, is it really simple from a technological stand point?
If the developer needs to use Apple resources to track and manage said entitlements, and the consumer expects Apple to police bad actors, then are we asking Apple to do this for free on the bad actor’s behalf (oops, I didn’t mean to use your microphone, GPS, BLE in order to sell the info to an enemy state, law enforcement, angry ex!) or should the cost of said infrastructure be passed to the customer when purchasing hardware? OR does Apple wait until an application is exposed, generally through an echo chamber after the damage is done and is made aware of the issue?
I thought they already do this with notarized binaries on macOS. Conceptually it's no different from certificate revocation. The platform can phone home periodically to discover binaries for which notarization has been revoked.
You may be correct? Then the assumption would be developers need to pay the $99 fee to be part of the Apple dev program (pretty sure that’s the only way to get notarized). Next step in Apple’s playbook might be upping that fee for third party stores?
The vast majority of Android users use the Play Store (or the Amazon thing) exclusively. So Android is not different than iOS in this regard.
The vanishingly few remaining users use F-Droid (sometimes exclusively), which is probably the safest app store on Earth, with GNU/Linux and *BSD distros' base repositories. Open source only, reproducible builds with public recipes written independently, trackers removed (because they usually rely on non-free libs).
I honestly don't see how having only one store makes an OS safer. That store could be an unchecked mess.
We could talk about policies around app inclusion and permission management though.
If the argument is "the number of stores is not a useful metric", I agree.
If the argument is "Apple in particular has a huge vested interest in making sure that their first party App Store doesn't distribute malware", that's somewhat stronger.
I don't know which argument nektro was trying to make, I could read it either way.
Personally, I lean towards the point about vested interests, although it is only "lean towards" not "fully embrace": what they care about isn't strictly security, but their bottom line, and being a US company with US moral norms and US payment providers, this can also be observed in the form of their content rules — they seem to treat sex as a much more important thing to hide than violence[0]. This does not sit well with people like me who think violence is bad and sex is good.
[0] A bit over a decade ago, the app submission process flagged the word "knopf" in German translations, telling me it was a rude word and I might get in trouble if I was using inappropriate language. It's the German word for button… or knob (but in the sense of button, it's never a dick), and so I can only assume someone got a naughty words list in English and translated it literally rather than asking for a local list of naughty words.
> The vast majority of Android users use the Play Store (or the Amazon thing) exclusively
Are you sure? Android phones are pretty big in China, which is by far the world's largest smartphone market, and I guess Play Store & "the Amazon thing" (I don't remember the name either) adoption there is close to 0%. Anecdotally I have noticed a lot of people using phone vendor app stores in India (the second largest market, though half the number of devices as China) and Indonesia (another huge market). Taken together I'm very skeptical that Play Store + Amazon have a majority of Android users.
Google and its services are mostly blocked in China, so using the Play Store would require the use of a VPN or a foreign SIM card. There are a variety of local app stores. I've found that people often just use whatever came on their phone (which is often the phone manufacturer's own app store).
But does it? I haven't seen any hard evidence, and lots of anecdotal tales of technology illiterate grandparents, fathers and mothers being better off.
> lots of anecdotal tales of technology illiterate grandparents, fathers and mothers being better off
I'll bite. Is there anyone here that thinks overall security for elderly (and lower skilled users) will *not* be hurt by additional app stores? I find it hard to believe. And, I write this post an an uber geek is is neither an Apple fan boi, but is very impressive by their overall security and UX. For the geeks, it would be great to have more stores. For the average users... maybe... For the least tech-savvy users, I cannot believe it will benefit them.
> For the least tech-savvy users, I cannot believe it will benefit them.
My parents are in their 80s and use Android with F-Droid (I set it up for them). No scams. No account or password. No ads. Simple apps. They have definitely benefited from having more choices available to them, specifically a repo of software built with something other than profit motive in mind. Apple's not very good at offering that.
I still feel like that argument is like a "won't somebody please think of the children" one.
If app stores need to be locked down to protect the elderly, then surely the Internet needs to be locked down to protect all children. After all, Safari still navigates little Jimmy to pornhub if he clicks the link.
I feel like the real solution, same as the one most parents should be using instead of forcing it into everyone else is the same it's always been; don't give young Jimmy unfettered access to the Internet (and use a child/safety filter in your own home/on your own devices) and for Apple to provide a setting that enables/disables alternative app stores, so that children of the elderly can choose for them in the same way they'd choose for their children.
In fact, Apple devices already ship with something called "Assistive Access", which is a mode that you can enable that limits what can be done with the phone. In particular, it limits the ability to install apps.
I think you are overall correct that the iOS store does improve the experience of the elder. But I suspect it's more due to the lack of 'side loading' and locked user experience and less so do to do with apple inspection/code review. I have no evidence to support this.
My original question was a request for hard evidence which I think is lacking in arguments of security and safety.
I think I've seen an equal amount of press surrounding fake and useless apps on both android and apple platforms. But this is purely observational.
Particularly when there are better alternatives. For example, put a physical hardware switch on the inside of the device that disables new stores from being added. Now you can set up your technically disinclined relatives with Apple's store, and a couple of others you trust if it pleases you, then flip the switch and they can't get into trouble because they can't add others.
Move the switch back and the device won't boot without a factory wipe. That's going to deter both anyone who can't successfully disassemble the device to flip the switch (i.e. severely technically illiterate people) and the people who aren't willing to press YES to a prompt that says it's about to erase all their data (i.e. mildly technically illiterate people), while leaving it possible for exactly the people it should be possible for.
What happens when Meta, X, Google et al. move to their own stores where they distribute apps unencumbered by Apple's privacy policies? Your relatives then contact you and insist that you flip the switch for them so they can install Facebook and Instagram from the Meta store so they can continue scrolling cat memes.
I have yet to hear a convincing argument (from multi-store proponents) about how to prevent this. If the big social media companies pull their apps from Apple's official store and move to their own stores (with unfettered access to spy on users) then they will be successful at dragging their users with them. Furthermore, there is no evidence that GDPR has had any success stopping them from siphoning up all the data they want.
You tell them to use the service's web page because their app isn't available from a trustworthy source. And if their web page sucks, you encourage them to use a competing service whenever possible and only use the inconvenient one when strictly necessary. Which, as others do the same, pressures the service to do what you want and put their app in the existing store.
This is the same thing that Apple does if they refuse to follow the process as it is, right? You're being insufficiently stubborn. And excessively dismissive if you think users making choices have no power. There are demonstrably people committed to having it their way:
Unless you think tech companies have gotten too big and people don't have a choice anymore. If you have a monopoly, what you want is not another monopoly to fight them over which gets to fleece you, it's to smash them both by any available means. One of which is resistance through personal choices, one of which is... anti-trust enforcement.
Users don't have much power, individually. They express their power collectively through the political system. I'm just very skeptical of the approach taken by Europe with the DMA. It seems to be less about empowering individual users and more about letting other large players carve up the Apple/Google 2-slice pie into a few more big slices.
> about letting other large players carve up the Apple/Google 2-slice pie into a few more big slices
Do you not believe that increasing competition for app stores will "empower individual users"? If yes, please provide an alternative to DMA that will benefits users more.
Apple markets their offering on its privacy and security. In effect, they act as a bargaining agent on behalf of their users which says no to a lot of the tracking Google, Meta, et al. want to do. Due to Apple's marketshare and the nature of this arrangement (the walled garden), these trackers are forced to bargain with Apple as a unit. The DMA seeks to put an end to this arrangement and allow the trackers to bargain with users individually.
So, to answer your question: no, I do not believe it will empower individual users. If we really want to empower individual users we should be looking to inject more competition into the social media markets as well. More "app stores" that do nothing but offer the same apps while bypassing Apple's protections will not benefit users. And if the 30% Apple tax is the real problem then why not legislate against that directly?
> If we really want to empower individual users we should be looking to inject more competition into the social media markets as well.
Sure, but you can do both.
> More "app stores" that do nothing but offer the same apps while bypassing Apple's protections will not benefit users.
It's not just the same apps though. For example, the license Apple uses for the app store is incompatible with the GPL, so no one can make an iPhone app under the GPL or use existing GPL code in one. That license is one of the things that allows collaborative projects to form and right now that can't happen for iPhones.
Likewise, the $100/year fee deters hobbyists from creating apps.
And Apple prohibits certain types of content in their store, e.g. adult content or P2P apps, which some users would want.
> And if the 30% Apple tax is the real problem then why not legislate against that directly?
Price controls are generally a bad idea. The cost of hosting the app installers is generally negligible, but a few apps could be huge, and then it isn't, so how much should it cost? Can they charge a flat percentage of sales or does it have to be per-GB of transfer? What happens when the market price of storage or bandwidth changes over time? What if it's different in different regions?
Legislating rules to handle all the edge cases is a fool's errand when competition would handle it for you because anyone who charges too much would lose business to someone who charges less.
Users have a lot of power individually. The most obvious example is when there is competition. You could be a single person and your counterparty could be the world's largest corporation, but if you have ten other viable alternatives, they can do no worse to you than the best of your other alternatives or you just choose the other one.
But you can also do it by being stubborn. Some people seem to have completely forgotten how to do this. There is a transaction with a surplus of $100, the counterparty is some egregious monopolist and the deal they offer you is that they get $99 and you get $1. A lot of people take the deal, because $1 is better than nothing, but that's not it. What you do is flip over the table and walk away, because that costs you $1 but it costs them $99 (or $50 or whatever their share would be after offering whatever it would have taken to satisfy your sense of fairness).
People are so lazy now, or they've been conditioned, so now they always just take the $1 even if the alternative is only a minor inconvenience for them. Okay, you have to use Signal instead of WhatsApp, so what? But being willing to walk away from an unfair offer can sometimes be to your advantage even in an individual negotiation, because you both know the other party has more to lose. It's definitely to your advantage when other similarly-situated people do the same thing at scale. See also:
> They express their power collectively through the political system.
They express their power collectively however they want. Organizations (e.g. FSF, EFF) can do things like pool money to create competing systems. Even for-profit corporations can do this -- you don't like the incumbent? Start a competitor, and raise funding from all the other people who don't like the incumbent.
But again this seems like something people have been conditioned to believe doesn't work, even though it obviously does. To take a simple example, the EFF created Let's Encrypt, which cut the legs out from under the certificate mafia and made TLS free for everybody. All it took was an organization to pool enough resources to develop the initial implementation.
> I'm just very skeptical of the approach taken by Europe with the DMA. It seems to be less about empowering individual users and more about letting other large players carve up the Apple/Google 2-slice pie into a few more big slices.
Government regulations often fail as a result of incompetent administration or some corruption. But some forms of anti-trust can only be fixed through the law because the trusts themselves were created that way.
If government enforce contracts in restraint of trade then people will enter into contracts and form a cartel or enforce a monopoly. That is not acceptable, so then governments have to constrain what kinds of contracts they're willing to enforce, and somebody has to write down what "restraint of trade" means to establish how that works. It's not fun and they'll often get it wrong but the only alternatives are to either not have governments enforce contracts or allow cartels to form that become de facto private governments. So we do the best we can.
The EU is not great at this, but the problem they're trying to address is real, so sometimes you just get to sit back and watch two entities you don't really like have a fight with each other.
Except that Signal is free and nothing prevents anyone from having both installed at once, so you being stubborn can get your contacts to install the free app that takes two seconds to install.
Then everyone ends up on Signal because anyone can install Signal but the stubborn people refuse to install WhatsApp, at which point "everyone you actually need to communicate to is on Signal, WhatsApp is pretty much useless."
But in order to get there, you (the collective you, the median pedant) have to be more stubborn than the people who want to use WhatsApp, instead of the other way around.
Most casual contacts aren't going to install Signal just for you, no matter how stubborn you are. They'll just shrug and go their way.
I've been there, actually running Signal as my primary IM for several years. The number of people I "converted" who stuck around was, in the long run, zero.
>What happens when Meta, X, Google et al. move to their own stores where they distribute apps unencumbered by Apple's privacy policies?
I guess pigs fly or hell freezes over. Musk and Zuckerburg had years after such changes to make their own store on Android (which put in similar privacy policies at the same time as Apple). It doesn't make any sense for them because being off the main store is worse than gleeming off a bit more data to sell.
>I have yet to hear a convincing argument (from multi-store proponents) about how to prevent this.
How about proving that the subjects in question are on multiple stores to begin with, or otherwise have shown interest?
You're questioning GDPR's validity, but your own premise isn't a thing to begin with.
Why should that be prevented exactly? Why shouldn’t users be able to download apps directly from companies if they want to? Isn’t the whole point of the EU legislation to make all this possible?
> Your relatives then contact you and insist that you flip the switch for them so they can install Facebook and Instagram from the Meta store so they can continue scrolling cat memes.
You should not have to police adults on what they're allowed to do with their property. If someone asks me to help them setup their computer, I may gave some advice and warning about things to avoid. If they asked me to do something that may be dangerous, I can refuse to do it, but I will not actively prevent them from doing so. They're not children.
If someone is ok with putting their whole digital life at risk, then let him do so. Just like you can't prevent someone who wants to eat cake all day. It's not your life.
> You should not have to police adults on what they're allowed to do with their property.
The fundamental problem with this "power to the people" mentality is that adults don't actually know how to use technology. The average person is technologically illiterate.
You can go on about giving adults full control over their property, etc. etc. but we both know that this is how you get security disasters: old people getting scammed, people losing their life savings and what not.
Part of being an effective security engineer, is realizing that you need to protect people themselves. 2FA is a prime example of security driven via this mindset: necessary because the technologically illiterate masses reuse passwords. There are other benefits, but that's the main reason.
So you shouldn't have to police people, but practically, in the end you do.
> If someone is ok with putting their whole digital life at risk, then let him do so.
All fun and games until people lose their life savings and get forced into homelessness or whatever.
Then these people start to blame you. Then technologically illiterate senators and regulators will also blame you. Lose-lose scenario.
Crypto is a prime example of what happens when you give people control. "Power to the people!," tons of people get scammed, and this prompts regulatory lockdown.
TL;DR is that the EU regs wouldn't be a problem if Apple could hide the functionality behind developer settings, but they can't. Exciting times, people in the EU are gonna get totally fucked by shady apps. GG.
> You can go on about giving adults full control over their property, etc. etc. but we both know that this is how you get security disasters: old people getting scammed, people losing their life savings and what not.
This happens when senile people are legally authorized to exercise control over their assets. It has nothing to do with technology and has been happening since before computers existed. The general solution is to appoint a conservator who is required to authorize major transactions.
Which hardly justifies using the same measures for someone of sound mind.
> 2FA is a prime example of security driven via this mindset: necessary because the technologically illiterate masses reuse passwords.
And then their phone number changes or they lose access to their email and you've locked them out of their account.
This is particularly egregious when the second factor is required to be a phone number, because people in financial straits will have their service canceled for non-payment and now you've magnified their problems at the worst possible time. But phone numbers serve as a convenient tracking ID since most people only have one of them, which may explain the popularity of requiring them "for your own protection".
> All fun and games until people lose their life savings and get forced into homelessness or whatever.
We build insecure systems and then blame the users for it and offer to lock them in a cell to protect them from our bad choices.
Why is it that anyone can charge a credit card or a bank account who has the account number? Public key cryptography has been a thing for decades. Put a USB-C connector on the credit card itself and require the card to be plugged in to the device the first time each merchant wants to charge the account. 99% of credit card fraud, gone, because you can't breach one merchant and use the card info at a different one without physical access to the card.
Meanwhile anyone could trivially cancel a subscription because the list of authorized merchants would be listed on the bank's account webpage and the user could remove one at any time.
> Crypto is a prime example of what happens when you give people control.
Anybody can go to the bank, right now, and withdraw cash and hand it to a scammer. Sometimes they do. You can also give them your television or company ID badge. Cryptocurrency is no different. Most of the crypto scams are get rich quick schemes, which people have been getting scammed by since the invention of barter.
What made cryptocurrency so susceptible to scams wasn't that people were in control, it was that some people were actually getting rich, which made others credulous, and that attracts con men.
"We have to protect people from themselves" is only true for small children and the mentally ill. Adults get to make their own choices -- because there is no one else to make them. As soon as you appoint someone else to do it, that person has a conflict of interest and the incentive to defect, and the person affected needs the right to choose differently unless you can prove that this specific person is mentally incapable of exercising reason.
"Nobody is ever completely reasonable" doesn't cut it because that applies to the gatekeepers too.
Apple is just trying to protect users from scammers! I'm sure all this sensible authorization and notarization business will continue even after the fees are removed from the equation
I am really impressed how much time and effort Apples legal department spends to find every single loop hole in the wording of the DMA. The 50ct per install for alternate app stores, 50ct per install for non-App Store apps after the millionth install, 1 million dollar in securities for alternate app stores, etc all follow the words of the DMA, but not the spirit. I am really interested to see the European Commissian drag Apple in front of a court and them having to legally defend their actions. I assume that all of those things they are setting up to circumvent people from using their rights will really blow up in their faces.
The EU has always been enthusiastic about the spirit of the law, and Apple is not used to this. You can see their temper tantrum unfold every time they find this out.
Is it? Developers used to determinism in software frequently don't understand that in all jurisdictions the law is ultimately interpreted by humans. I've been going through some legal processes myself, and my friend who is a lawyer reminded me more times than I care to admit that this is the case.
In the US, SCOTUS's job is literally to interpret the spirit of the law in the event of ambiguity.
Developers are fully used to this ambiguity and "spirit of the law" when interpreting standards. Search for WeirdNIX (popularly known as Windows NT and other names too).
There's different ways to interpret laws for courts. One of them is called teleological interpretation where you follow the intent of the law. For this courts also look into the documentation the legislation provided when defining the law. This is usually not done by lower courts, but courts like the CJEU use those when the letter of the law is unclear to define this for the lower courts to follow.
The situation in the US seems to suggest that trying to finely analyze the exact sequence of words in a law or the consitution still leaves a whole lot of room for arbitrary decisions. Abortion was a constitutional right until it wasn't and the constitution was not changed between.
All language carries inherent ambiguity. However, developments in American constitutional law aren’t really about that. The Constitution is very general and it uses terms that lack an objective meaning (for example, “Due Process” - what counts as “process”? What process is “due”?) It can’t really be implemented without bringing in a pile of philosophy and policy making.
At the same time, SCOTUS has been guilty of stretching its terms to include ideas that are clearly out of scope. (For example, the dubious invention of “substantive” due process - which all of the abortion stuff hinges on.)
Of all the examples you could've brought up and you thought a person's right to control their body is a stretch? Try "qualified immunity" if you want an example of justices reasoning with their bare ass showing.
Also, substantive due process was not invented for reproductive rights. It was invented in Dred Scott v. Sandford, to prevent “free” states from depriving slave owners of their “property”.
"The phrase substantive due process was not used until the 20th century, but the concept arguably existed in the 19th century. The idea was a way to import natural law norms into the Constitution; prior to the American Civil War, the state courts were the site of the struggle. Critics of substantive due process claim that the doctrine began, at the federal level, with the infamous 1857 slavery case of Dred Scott v. Sandford.[11] Advocates of substantive due process acknowledge that the doctrine was employed in Dred Scott but claim that it was employed incorrectly. Indeed, abolitionists and others argued that both before and after Dred Scott, the Due Process Clause actually prohibited the federal government from recognizing slavery. Also, the first appearance of substantive due process, as a concept, had appeared in Bloomer v. McQuewan, 55 U.S. 539 (1852)"
While there is a trace of the idea in Bloomer, it is relatively faint. Dred Scott is much more commonly recognized as the origin of substantive due process. For example:
> We should note right at the outset some of the many remarkable facts about the case.
> * Dred Scott was the first Supreme Court case since Marbury v. Madison invalidating a federal law. Since Marbury created judicial review in the context of a denial of jurisdiction, Dred Scott might plausibly be said to be the first real exercise of the power of judicial review.
> * Dred Scott was the first great effort by the Court to take an issue of political morality out of politics. In that sense, it is the great ancestor of many New Deal and Warren Court cases.
> * Dred Scott was the birthplace of the controversial idea of "substantive due process," used in Roe v. Wade, in many important cases endangering the regulatory/welfare state, and in the recent cases involving the "right to die."
> * Dred Scott was one of the first great cases unambiguously using the "intent of the framers" and in that sense it was the great precursor of the method of Justice Scalia and Judge Bork.
I don't think it's controversial at all to say that substantive due process is understood to have its origin in cases like Dred Scott and Lochner, cases where the Supreme Court overrode the results of the democratic process to protect economic interests. Or, for that matter, that the court took significant license in "interpreting" the Fifth Amendment that way.
Also, I think many people are too teleological when they evaluate judicial doctrines and philosophies. "Reproductive rights are good, so let's find a way to justify substantive due process." Jurisprudence is part of a structure and process that is bigger than any specific outcome, and bad jurisprudence shouldn't be excused just because it leads somewhere we might like.
Maybe substantive due process links the two cases in the most nebulous and abstract way, but fundamentally Roe v Wade is about a person's right to control their own body (e.g., nobody can force me to donate a kidney even if I'm a perfect match), whereas Dred Scott was about the exact opposite.
Edit: I also disagree that looking at where judicial philosophies lead is a bad idea. At the end of the day, the judicial system exists for two main purposes: 1) enforce contract law and 2) enforce the moral zeitgeist in the most fair way possible. If an inflexible judicial philosophy is unable to keep up with the morals of the times, we should consider revising the judicial philosophy. I believe this is considered fairly mainstream legal philosophy, and a big reason "originalism" is considered basically a sham by the legal profession.
But that's the thing, when your law is legally binding in 24 different languages it's really impractical if not entirely impossible to have a system based on letter-of-the-law interpretations...
I’m so tired of this, instead of doing the right thing, Apple just keeps trying to brute force the legal framework. You don’t need fancy legal team to know this is not the way.
From a business point, I can totally understand what Apple is doing. Making this as painful and unpredictable (as a developer you never know if your app will be successfull and gain more than 1 million installs) is the way to keep developers using the old contract and keep them on the app store. This makes sense for Apple to find every loophole possible ...
As a consumer, and an Apple users, I want them to be slapped as hard as possible for how they implement this.
Funny how things go. As a consumer especially, but even as a developer I don’t want the DMA to succeed and purposefully want iOS to be a walled garden. It’s literally one of the reasons why I’m on iOS!
That's the nice thing about the DMA ... Nobody forces you to install a 3rd party app store, nobody forces you to install apps from websites, nobody forces you out of the walled garden. For you nothing changes. Those that want to use their 1000€ device differently than you now have the chance to.
As the “tech guy” in the family things might change actually.
(One of) the reasons why I like the walled garden is how it simplifies everything troubleshooting-wise. I have a few quirks to know, the rest is because of hardware failure and that’s it.
My peer not being tech-savvy might install stupid things from stupid places and it might be a problem.
The way it’s done it’s unlikely, but still it just complexify things for next to no reasons in my book. (Yes 30% is a lot; I personally don’t care, though I do recognize I’m a good position and I can afford not to–but then again, the most vocal about the 30% are not the most unwealthy…)
That's also solveable. For android you need to enable deep inside of the settings to allow 3rd party installs. Nobody is preventing Apple to do something like this. Or that you can create a profile that disables that setting that you can install on your familys devices. Nothing in the DMA prevents this.
Just because it makes your life easier as the family tech support is a pretty selfish reason to hope for a very good pro-consumer law to fail.
The way it’s going I’m actually pretty sure if they did that they’d get reprimanded…
Also it makes my life annoying when I open Safari and am presented w/ what can be told as the worst pop-up ever and have to spend literally minutes dismissing it for something I neither wanted nor needed. It’s the cookie banner all over again.
Does not seem like a lot, but as a developer I use devices in a factory configuration a lot, and it’s just as annoying as it’s useless.
Basically it’s the cookie banner again. Served no-one (at least definitely not the consumers), but annoyed a lot.
As for the “those that want to use their 1000€ device differently than you now have the chance to,” well……… nobody forced them to buy a 1000€ device did they?? They knew of the limitations; they had to, or they’re very dumb.
The law is not pro-consumer contrary to people say, it’s anti-garden, which is definitely not the same, and I’ll die on this hill.
Nearly no sites comply with the cookie-banner law, if they did, you wouldn't mind it.
It essentially says "Tell the user you're tracking them, give them a button to click not allow you to do that". If sites actually did that, I honestly couldn't care less about the extra second it would take to click "No, fuck off".
> Basically it’s the cookie banner again. Served no-one (at least definitely not the consumers), but annoyed a lot.
Oh no, you have to be given the option to not permit your data to be shared with ~1000 different partners with "legitimate" interests. Honestly, the only thing that is wrong with GDPR is that it came out too late.
Every time you dismiss a "we care for your privacy" banner, you're being made aware that your data is shared with hundreds or thousands of data brokers with "legitimate interest". The fact that vendors prefer to make your experience miserable rather than give up tracking is another example of "malicious compliance".
What happens is that you now have the right to request a copy of the personal information a site has collected and ask them to delete it. You can also sue them if they don't fulfil your request. You're welcome to exercise your rights as an EU citizen at any time.
> Also it makes my life annoying when I open Safari and am presented w/ what can be told as the worst pop-up ever and have to spend literally minutes dismissing it for something I neither wanted nor needed. It’s the cookie banner all over again.
Know what's cool? Firefox on android supports ublock origin. There are some chromium forks too with desktop extension support (on android). Funny what an open(er) market and easy of installing apps does, huh?
People (myself included) say the same thing about why they buy their tech illiterate relatives macOS computers. And it works. And guess what, it works despite Apple not getting a cut of every everything.
My girlfriend only install the handful of apps she wants both on her Mac and her iPhone and doesn't go back to the app store. She just put things on auto update. Most people don't fiddle with their computing device. And if installation steps are confusing, she just asked me to do it. I guess that's why Microsoft are enabling so many things on Windows as most users won't enable them by themselves.
That's neither here nor there for whether Apple has the right to insert themselves into every transaction on their platform and gets to decide which apps are allowed to exist.
And let's not kid ourself: Microsoft is enabling (and re-enabling and re-enabling and re-enabling) so many things because they are slowly turning their OS into spyware to make more money, not because they care at all about their users.
I'll re-iterate Cory Doctorow's quote: "Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit".
It's perfectly reasonable to create even more walled gardens than the Apple walled garden, once you open up for different markets. That's the beauty of choice.
I doubt it. "Walled" and "Safety" are getting confused here.
I think you like the App Store for its safety. You trust it, enough to be happy with it.
What does that have to do with wanting others to be denied alternatives? That deliver however much safety and different benefits that other people want?
If safety is one of Apple store's selling points, then competitive app stores will push Apple to deliver even more safety. Perhaps new forms of safety others pioneer. Apple didn't invent security or sandboxes. While also encouraging it to loosen non-safety driven (and therefore quietly non-customer friendly) restrictions on innovation.
For years Apple has placed deliberately crafted limitations on 3rd party apps that put theirs at an advantage. They've done anything but treat developers fairly. If they did, maybe this legislation was unneeded, but with the way they've been acting, it feels like a long time coming.
Until some apps are not in the App Store or a website is chromium-compatible only… Or that apps (e.g. youtube) outside the App Store is surprisingly more feature-complete than the equivalent in the App Store…
Don’t worry they’ll find a way to make it socially mandatory (the same way not having a google account nowadays seems impossible (I don’t personally but still do because of work for instance)).
And if you don't trust an app vendor without Apple's underpaid Chinese reviewers playing with it on an iPad for 5 minutes to guarantee your safety, then don't use those apps that pull out of the App Store. If YouTube or FB pull out of Apple's App Store and go to their own, Apple will have to cut it's hosting fees to get them back or lose that business and you'll suffer not because Google and FB pulled out of the App Store but because Apple pushed them out with exorbitant fees. You should want Apple facing that threat because it'll lead to lower App Store prices as developers won't pad a $5 app with $1.50 in extra cost to you to cover the exorbitant Apple fees. But you'd rather blame users who want to run what ever software they want on the computers they purchased than blame Apple's shitty business practices. That's on you, bud.
> And if you don't trust an app vendor without Apple's underpaid Chinese reviewers
This misses the mark so badly that it’s not even worth reading the rest.
App Review is based out of Sunnyvale and has more than 300 people that make on average $85k/y in their first few years, and mostly over $100k/y after three years.
Long tenured people, the ones that last more than 5 years and are advancing towards a decade of doing the work get close to $200k/y with some exceptions over that number.
Many of those 300 people are multilingual, some specialize in a specific language, but to expand and better serve non-English markets, Apple recently opened a branch in Ireland and one in Shanghai.
The latter mainly focusing on the Chinese market and the one in Ireland specializing in European languages and supplementing the English market.
Once again there are alternatives; nobody forced anybody to buy iPhones.
It’s not like Apple lied at any point saying “buy our phones and do whatever you want on them!” No. It’s clear. You do what they want. In what name should they be forced to “open” it to anybody?
What’s next? Force google to make their map data open? How would that go? It’s mostly the same thing.
To be blunt, Apple, Google, and other tech megacorps should be glad that we as a society allow them to exist in the first place, even despite growing to the size where they are clearly hindering free market (by actively blocking competition). Never forget that corporations are artificial entities chartered by governments; and nobody has a natural right to a corporate charter, so those can and should come with hefty strings attached.
I have no idea what your argument is here. That people shouldn't advocate for greater competition in the marketplace just because they already bought a phone?
It's not at all the same thing? Also there's a more apt comparison, which is forcing Google to make Android open and allow alternative app stores (oh wait, they already do).
App stores are a natural monopoly. An app store with more users attracts more developers. An app store with more apps attracts more users. It has a strong network effect and economies of scale. Natural monopolies should be regulated to prevent abuse by the first companies that capture wide market share.
> I am really impressed how much time and effort Apples legal department spends to find every single loop hole in the wording of the DMA.
Maybe this is an American trait, but I would be surprised at any company that wouldn't be doing this. A law has been made that affects our business: How do we comply with the law with as little impact as possible to us?
Some of the comments here seem to expect Apple to simply give up, as though a parent just walked in the room and said "You better do it or else."
If it's really the spirit of the law that counts, then the law should require no specificity. A simple "Treat everyone fairly, installs can come from anywhere" would be sufficient.
Perhaps it seems unusual, as Apple has so much technical control, an unusually extensive legal budget, and doing a very effective job of castrating any "threats" or as the EU might say "significant competition".
And Apple has the cash to play chicken with any potential fines if it comes to it, so its not hedging much if at all.
It is clear that the EU is going to have to get very tough, before Apple is going to proactively take into account any of the "spirit of the law" that the EU would like it to understand.
Theres literally billions of dollars of pure profit on the line here. Id be surprised if they dint do absolutely everything they could to keep the app store the way it is.
Being a complacent market leader may come back to bite them in the backside.
The world is getting more technical. People will demand openness. If I buy a product, I should have reasonable flexibility to use it how I want. Even if I break it, repurpose it or improve it, I want the choice to do so, just like I have with pretty much every other thing I own.
People will vote with their wallets if Apple refuses to open things up a bit.
Complying with what you guess at the lawmakers' intentions was/were is a fool's errand. The law is the text, nothing more, nothing less. That's the point of the law. If the law falls short or has loopholes, it's a bad law and it's the legislature's job to fix it, not citizens' to suss it out.
To assume the law means things that aren't written in the law is, quite basically, undemocratic.
The DMA is perfectly clear regarding its intention and context. Trying to split hairs to find wiggle-room in the text just so a gatekeeper can maintain the status-quo for a while longer is absolutely malicious.
Furthermore, Apple’s behaviour is quite discouraging for us EU based developers who actually understand and aspire to the EU’s values and what we consider “normal” treatment of the people using our apps and services.
Obviously Apple doesn't hold the EU's values in high regard (few people in the Bay or even the US do), so of course they will try to fight it. It's perfectly rational and even expected behavior.
And it's perfectily rational for the EU to take appropriate actions against companies that hold its values in contempt. Apple should expect that and temper their contempt accordingly if they intend on continuing to do business here.
Written it in another comment. If there are ambiguities in the written law, for example because the legislature did not specify in the text of the law, that you can't charge for the access to the platforms, high courts like the CJEU will take approaches where they determine the spirit of the law (i.e. by looking at the discussion material the legislature presented for passing the law) to find out what the intent of the legislature was and then defines this law.
This is for example how Germany now has a basic right to data protection. It's not written in the constitution, it was formed by our supereme court by looking at what the intentions of the author's of our constitution were. Same principle applies to EU laws.
I agree that this is not a citizen's job. That's why I wrote that I am very happy to see the EU commission drag Apple in front of the CJEU.
