I personally don’t care about alternative app stores, but I know many do, especially here.
I really want two things:
* companies cannot engage in any activity a common person would consider “spying”, cannot take the data collected by users of that service and transfer it to another entity, and third parties may not aggregate data collected about persons for any reason. There are a million and one useful reasons to do each of these things, but companies have proven themselves morally bankrupt and should lose that ability. This would go beyond “opt-in”, just make it illegal or the impractical (e.g. it would require a notary, licensed broker, or lawyers on both sides to engage in the practice)
* digital “purchases” are transferrable and have all of the rights and privileges afforded to physical goods. The producer/consumer balance shifted completely in favor of the producer with digital goods. Terms need to be more favorable to the purchaser as well as protections following the dissolution of a digital marketplace.
> digital “purchases” are transferrable and have all of the rights and privileges afforded to physical goods.
I concur. We need to establish a "secondary markets act", which would allow individuals to transact accounts and digital items worth under a certain amount (let's say $10k, as a non-waivable right, so it wouldn't apply to larger B2B contracts). Essentially, these things should be viewed as property of the consumer and be freely sold. Without the freedom to transact, there can't be a free market.
The problem with enforcing resellability on digital goods is the technical ability to copy them.
If I have full ownership of a digital good, then I have the ability to copy it.
Any limitation of my ability to copy requiring removing some control from the owner and escrowing it with another party (e.g. DRM).
As much as I hate to say it, allowing digital good resale is a good use for a blockchain: uniquely identifying an instance and then keeping a decentralized ledger of who owns it at any time.
However, there would still need to be a carrot to make this system attractive.
If there isn't, then why wouldn't people just create infinite copies off-ledger and ignore it?
And without any viable digital goods ownership system, who wouldn't companies default to the current model of only offering licenses / subscriptions?
Piracy has always existed and will always exist. The issue is that it only takes one determined pirate to overcome the DRM and that piece of information is freed from DRM. You can already do all this even without a legally recognized right of ownership.
I assume plenty of people are willing to pay for things they appreciate. Maybe the carrot can be some kind of recognition: you get to make a digital signature from that token that you can display as a part of your digital identity. There could be discussion forums that require you to have such a token to participate in.
I hate that crypto ever had this big money swell associated with it. If we could divorce the technical protocols from the scams and shilling people associate with it, it actually has some interesting uses that barely anyone is willing to talk about it a non-shill or non-disgust way.
yeah people in this thread are fumbling around in the dark pining for something they don't realize is.. NFTs
resaleable digital licenses. that's why Steam banned them, not because Valve is noble but because if your video game license was an NFT you could resell it outside of their marketplace and they like their little monopoly
Yes. This is the killer app for blockchain. I want Movies Anywhere, but for everything and without an industry gatekeeper. If I am subscribed to Netflix, I should be able to watch every video in their catalog through any service that has the bits.
That secondary markets thing has been an earlier subject (but not really covering app stores etc at that time), there were issues where larger companies didn't want you selling CD Keys or Windows license keys you weren't using, and they didn't want the ones that were bought in one market to be used in another (i.e. grey market import etc). I think they (the EU) ended up telling the corporations to suck it up since whoever owns the thing is free to sell it when they don't want it anymore.
This is of course also a factor in the move to subscriptions since you'd no longer own a persistent license or product and as such there's nothing to sell. Ironically this should also mean the 'product' (subscription) has far less value than the actual product, even if it's technically the same system/software. Yet subscriptions are more costly than a one-off you repeat every couple of years. Sigh.
> very easy way to get around such a requirement from legislation: Just call it licensing instead of a purchase.
Licensing should come with enhanced consumer rights e.g. an explicit license duration and allow the consumer to return the license for pro-rata refund within that duration. The license should be for the IP and honoured for all formats and platforms that meet some regularity threshold. The absurdity of having to rebuy things you "own" because you switch device or format has to end.
Along similar lines, hardware should be called "hire" not "sell" when the manufacturer maintains control over the device e.g. locked bootloaders, encryption keys, online service dependencies, forced updates with no downgrade, remote-access privileges, telemetry, not meeting "right-to-repair", hardware locking preventing component replacement or choice of consumable (e.g. ink) etc.
Similar return rights should apply if hardware is leased. Seller would need to be insured/escrow to meet consumer refunds if they break their side of the lease (e.g. going bust and shutting down required online services).
This is a part of it, but I don't think it's all there is. Words mean little when there is such a large power and information asymmetry between consumers and sellers.
The law should formalize the concepts of rentals (licenses) and purchases. Purchases create non-waivable rights of transferability and allows the owner to demand compensation when a service closes: for example if I shut down my movie platform, you should get to download a copy of everything you own.
Licenses on the other hand do not confer such rights, but should still be transferable under a certain value and have a set period during which its terms must be fulfilled, otherwise the licensee needs to be compensated. No "we change the terms at our sole discretion at any moment" nonsense.
Vendors can give you extra rights (like prorated returns or exchanges), but they can't take any of the codified rights away. I assume there needs to be some details about companies just setting a license of one day but never revokes access to avoid the regulation, but someone smarter than me can probably figure that out.
For larger licenses I think the customer (usually customers) has a greater negotiating leverage, so it isn't as necessary to codify these terms, but of course this is contingent on there not existing trillion-dollar corporations, which is not the world we live in.
If you buy a physical book or DVD, you basically have a perpetual right to read, watch, listen to that copyrighted material. But you can sell that physical item to anyone and with that the right to consume that material.
This is not (or at least should not be) different even if there is no physical item or even if the copyrighted material is software and not audiovisual media.
To play devil's advocate, the common person accepts credit scores, and has no idea how they work. Should credit bureaus also be illegal? Or some medium whereby the credit companies _can_ collect the information, but can't sell it, or share analytics or even anonymized data?
I didn't realize there were many people defending credit scores. I mean yeah, I would just assume they should be illegal. At least in their current opaque form where it's impossible to contest or even get someone to explain your score to you.
A large component of interest rates is a risk premium that depends on the likelihood of a borrower defaulting.
Credit scoring significantly outperforms any other methodology for assessing default risk, including credit matricies and especially human assessments (humans are shockingly bad at assessing default risk, rarely much better than a biased coin flip).
It's all well and good to say we should get rid of credit scores, but because they are so much more effective at assessing default risk than other methods, the consequence will be significantly higher rates of default, which means more people in financial hardship, and higher interest rates generally (though especially to low risk borrowers who will now be assessed as having closer-to-average default risk)
It's also not often appreciated, but credit scoring is also the single best technique we have to stop people borrowing beyond their means and entering into financial hardship and debt spirals. There are other techniques that exist to identify at-risk borrowers but these alone aren't as good as an approach which also incorporates credit scores.
As for explainability, unfortunately the best credit models are trained using AI techniques, which results in low explainability (since the risk signals are complex and multivariate). Older GLM approaches can be used, but aren't as good, so if we want high explainability, the trade off is worse performing credit models, and thus higher borrowing costs.
I think much of the distaste for credit scores comes from their use for purposes other than making loans.
I think it's reasonable for people to want a society where past financial difficulties (self-induced or otherwise) do not make it difficult for a person to get a job or rent an apartment. That's probably a reasonable preference to impose through legislation even if a credit score has predictive value for the legitimate interests of employers or landlords.
The challenge would be that there isn't just one "credit score". The scores published by bureau's exist more for marketing and as a stick to improve consumer behaviour.
A credit bureau's real product is the credit file, which contains your history of inquiries, defaults, collections, court judgements etc. In some countries it also includes granular payment history information.
From this file, many lenders compute their own internal credit scores. They do this because the credit scores published by the bureaus are the likelihood to default on any loan, however in practice consumers are often more likely to default on certain types of debt than others. Also, many lenders have additional data points that can be considered which the bureau's don't capture, such as the structure of the loan.
If there's anything questionable going on (e.g. using variables which act as proxies for factors prohibited by ECOA or FHA) it will be occuring in these proprietary lender-specific models, however the parameters used in these models also embed commercial sensitive information about the behaviour of their customer base, so I doubt many lenders will be keen to release them.
So why not ask the prospective customers for the right to fetch and use their data? If it gives them better rates then people have plenty of incentives to allow them to continue.
Well, I come from a country without credit scores and I was able to get loans there. It was much easier than getting a loan in the US. Credit scores are a pretty bad system, all things considered.
They significantly improve the ability of a lender to model the default risk associated with a borrower, which results in lower borrowing costs for higher quality customers, as well as stopping debt spirals for people struggling.
In the absence of credit scores, higher quality borrowers will be charged higher interest rates or require higher collateral, since they are less differentiated from average quality borrowers, and/or access to credit will be restricted to a narrower proportion of the population.
Credit scores often oversimplify risk, ignore nuanced factors, and can worsen financial struggles for those with low scores by pushing them toward higher costs. Countries without credit scores don't have higher interest rates or higher rates of defaulting. If we really want to, creditworthiness can be predicted more accurately and fairly with AI models, although that brings another level of bias.
> and can worsen financial struggles for those with low scores by pushing them toward higher costs.
Shouldn’t those costs be higher because of the increased risks they represent? If someone has a habit of not paying their debts, why would a lender take on the higher risk without getting paid more? They wouldn’t, so they simply won’t loan the money.
However on the other side of this, nobody has to borrow money. If you don’t borrow, credit scores are irrelevant.
> nobody has to borrow money. If you don’t borrow, credit scores are irrelevant.
Except if they want their own place to live.
And for the period of about a decade or two, if they want to buy anything over the Internet. For some reason, e-commerce in its early years would only accept credit cards. Took quite a while before debit cards started working for on-line shopping, and by that time, the damage was already done - credit cards got a boost in popularity both in the US and worldwide.
> In the absence of credit scores, higher quality borrowers will be charged higher interest rates or require higher collateral, since they are less differentiated from average quality borrowers, and/or access to credit will be restricted to a narrower proportion of the population.
Given we're talking about alternatives here, I think this should be: "In the absence of credit scores, or some other mechanism for comparing potential borrowers". There's lots of ways to compare borrowers, and if you assume credit scores are the only way to do it, all your solutions are going to involve them.
The term 'credit score' is sufficiently general to encompass literally all methods of comparing borrowers. You could certainly take issue with some specifics of how particular agencies calculate it, but the idea that there is some "alternative way of comparing borrowers" then I'd invite you to invent another formula for determining loan parameters, that does not boil down to a scalar value.
Loans involve the calculation of parameters. You can either choose those implicitly through personal knowledge, or explicitly through a scalar metric (credit score). There is no viable third option, and the first option is just a bad version of the second, in the end.
It's worth pointing out that credit scores actually are actually just the P(^default) expressed on an integer rather than fractional scale.
There's also multiple credit scores, there are the scores computed by credit bureaus which look at your P(default) against all lenders, but many lenders also compute their own internal credit scores using models trained against their own customer base (and possibly also taking into account additional data that they hold about you).
Wasn't the current system used in the US developed as a hack for a particular situation that then got extended for things it wasn't actually meant to do? I remember reading something about it in the Big Short.
I got a loan for a house 2 years ago. The process included showing our 3 last pay slips, the expected cost of the house (new build) and showing the bank how much money we had in our accounts (I loaned at a different bank that gave me better rates). There was a base percentage that lowered based on your level of income and the ratio of own contribution/loaned amount.
Eastern Europe: I must consent and they do check whether there are any other loans and how good I have paid them. So they do evaluate credit rating at least here.
Having bought a house a couple times and having a 800+ credit score each time it doesn't sound like extra steps at all. I also had to provide all that information and more to get a mortgage
> and no rewards (lower interests) for people who could prove that they are solvent and responsible with money.
That's really what's driving support for credit scores, isn't it? That they provide some some people the (perception of an) ability to prove their character, their moral superiority, and to feel rewarded for all their hard sacrifices.
Similar, I believe, to credit cards and all those rewards and air miles shenanigans - everyone feels they're gonna be winners, so they support a private tax on everyone.
For example, credit card points are a zero sum game. Credit scores are not. Everyone could be creditworthy, but many are not, and it’s highly beneficial to the entire system to be able to identify which group a person fits into (including for the person who isn’t creditworthy!)
My mind isn't made on credit scores, though I do feel it might be a case similar to insurance - it's not strictly a zero-sum game, but it's also socially harmful to have such a system be 100% efficient. I.e. with insurance, if everyone was correctly pooled into small bucket that near-perfectly reflects their actual risk profile, insurance would stop making sense - those who need it most wouldn't be able to afford it, and those who could afford it need it the least and would be better off putting that money into savings accounts.
There's a lot of areas in the economy where increasing efficiency past some point just makes systems inhumane and exacerbates social problems.
I feel default risk estimation may just be like that - the more reliable you want your credit score, the more invasive you need to be wrt. what information you collect and how you do it; meanwhile, the system becomes less and less tolerant of mistakes and unfortunate circumstances, while also exerting more control over how people live their lives.
Already the US credit score makes people obsessed about credit, and getting credit cards and loans to improve/game their credit scores with their future mortgage in mind. That very much affects people's life choices at scale. I don't think having everyone leading their lives to optimize their credit score is a way to have a healthy society; conversely, maybe letting the lenders eat a little more risk, and the wealthiest (and most responsible with money, and most morally superior) have a little smaller line, actually improves overall well-being.
I agree with your concerns but don't feel like we're at that tipping point to be honest, relative to the value of credit being generally easy to get for the legitimately creditworthy.
> Already the US credit score makes people obsessed about credit, and getting credit cards and loans to improve/game their credit scores with their future mortgage in mind
I've encountered very, very few people doing this to an inappropriate degree (obviously yes you should consistently demonstrate creditworthiness, that's not gaming though). Anecdotally, the people I see doing this are actually seriously not creditworthy. A whole lot of "you bought 3 cars and fucked your score, here's how to dig your way out." But like... the evidence actually shows you can't be trusted with credit!
I don't disagree with any of your big picture concerns about the system and the possible edge cases or distortions of priorities. I just haven't seen evidence those are huge problems relative to the value of the system.
Spain - the bank asks for evidence of income (payslips or tax returns), existing funds (bank/broker statements) and checks outstanding debts (via a public register: https://www.bde.es/wbe/en/para-ciudadano/gestiones/informaci...). Risk analysis runs on that data directly. There's no credit history where you need to have ever borrowed money before.
Average interest rate on mortgages in Spain with this system appears to be _half_ that of the US, so it seems this isn't so ineffective that premiums have to spike to match. (is that right? https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/mortgage-rates/ suggests 6% interest mortgages is a current average in the USA while Spain is below 3% now - personal anecdotes plus gov stats shows 3.25% average on all issued mortgages in 2024: https://ine.es/dyngs/INEbase/en/operacion.htm?c=Estadistica_...)
They are creating a credit score for you. They’re asking for the essentially the same data a credit scoring agency would use. The difference is that they manually underwrite everything.
Spain also enforces a much stricter debt to income ratio, which means it’s much harder to get loans for people that already have debt, which means the risk profile is reduced for those that do get approved.
Also Spain’s unemployment is among the highest in the EU — and almost three times higher than the U.S., so the central bank’s lower interest rates reflect less of a concern over inflation and more of a concern towards encouraging growth. The low interest rates in Spain aren’t a reflection of reduced risk but of lower central bank rates. You could get 30 year mortgages in the U.S. just a few years ago approaching 2%.
Comparing mortgage rates across countries is a pointless endeavor because the macroeconomic circumstances are vastly different. For example, one would think that lower interest rates would result in a increase of housing supply in Spain as investors build more housing because the loans would be cheaper — however that isn’t the case because of the post-tax return on investment (and regulatory risk) for real estate is far worse than an equivalent investment in the United States despite higher lending costs. A €10 million housing project in Spain has a lower ROI than the same project would in North Carolina. Interest rates could be zero in Spain and it wouldn’t change the housing market much because of the myriad of other factors that go into the spreadsheet.
Well you're in luck because almost all US residential mortgage lenders perform that due diligence. Credit scores may be a factor in determining loan approval and interest rate but they also look at other metrics including DTI, LTV, and others.
Those aren't really "scoring agencies". The credit reporting agencies make most of their money with mortgage lenders by selling high-quality data. Credit scores are more of an add-on, and mainly of interest to other types of lenders dealing with smaller loans who can't afford to do rigorous underwriting themselves.
In the credit score system, you get no visibility into the data that is used for your decision. I think in GDPR there's actually a right that any algorithmic decision has to be able to be appealed to a real human. With credit scores, all you'd get is "your magic number is below our magic threshold"
I'm from denmark, and happen to work at one of the larger regional banks here. We similarly don't have "credit scores" in the American sense. We have scores that are calculated internally at our institution, but they're based on whatever we deem to fit our "risk appetite" we do not make use of any external centralized/opaque 3rd party rating agencies. We also have one of the highest household debt rates of any 1st world country, so getting a loan still seems possible.
We do have a centralized registry of "bad debtors" and that has a highly negative effect on your ability to get a loan.
Switzerland - a public service collects a number of Boolean flags in the vein of “has ever refinanced a loan”, serves the raw set to the person or institutions that can request it according to the regulations.
Any EU country - regulations tend to be strict and vary from country to country. There is usually a central registry with either history of violated agreements and/or currently active loans. In pre-approval for a loan the borrower typically self-declares their credit capacity and the lender checks the registry for red flags. Before concluding the approval the lender will require supporting documentation (typically salary certificate, bank statement and/or tax returns).
There are still credit bureaus, and things like defaults, judgements, etc are recorded, and when you apply for credit this is checked.
However there are crucial differences to a score system like the UK and (I assume) the US - there is no 'building good credit', you don't get any benefit from having existing credit products and using them well. In fact the opposite - having other forms of credit like a credit card available is seen as a negative when you apply for a mortgage and will impact the amount you can get loaned. They'll literally knock the credit card limit off the top of the mortgage offer.
In Germany you just get a mortgage amount calculated as your yearly income multiplied by some factor (iirc depending on the city)
In Spain they look at your last few months of bank movements and calculate how much to loan you (usually something like max a third of your income can go to mortgage payments)
A loan for a house typically isn't really "credit", because the value of the house covers the loan. The small print in your mortgage will say that if you default the bank will get the house.
There is some risk to the bank because the house may have declined in value and it may be tricky to sell it when you default. That's why they do a risk assessment, but it can be a lot less invasive than for providing a personal loan for an education.
Large banks were unwilling to loan $20k to me for a used car, even though I had $60k in cash in the bank and a $70k a year job I had for over 5 years, and no history of debt, because Transunion said I had no credit history.
So instead a local credit union got a free $1500 for servicing that loan. A loan that I explicitly only took to "build credit" ie, pay a bank profit so they would vouch for me, which is what a credit score is designed to show, how much profit you give to banks and credit card companies for financing.
They don't want to loan out money that might be less profitable than a loan to someone who has paid a thousand credit card payments.
The credit union then proceeded to Not report my loan to the credit agencies! meaning I still have no credit. Awesome.
It is possible that prices would go down but that will be an incentive to rent instead of selling. So less houses on the market. That could keep the prices up. And no matter how low the price is, if people have no savings and no credit even one year worth of salary would be too much of a price.
The combination of all those factors could lead to a final state of a lot of houses owned by companies and a few extremely wealth people. Everybody else would be paying a rent.
As a counterpoint: Most countries in Europe don't really have credit scores, but mortgages still exist. We even balk at the idea of needing to take on debt to show you are good for it.
You could have credit scores that are designed to help people instead of the current mess where nobody can even tell you how it's calculated. The concept of a credit score is very different from what we have implemented in the United States. There's effectively zero transparency into how it works.
Which countries use credit scores? I didn’t know it was a widespread thing, I always thought it was an American deviation.
Here in Sweden we don’t have it. When you apply for a new loan the bank can request information of other debts you have. And you have to send info about your income and answer questions about your expenses (living costs, number of children living at home, etc).
We do have credit scoring, but I don’t think it is in the same sense as in the US though. If you look at ”your” UC (for example using the app Kreddy) you will get a credit score back.
This is great example of how people struggle to see possibilities beyond the environment they’re raised in. The credit score system is not necessary to have loans and mortgages, as evidenced by all the countries that don’t have such a system. The notion that you have to take on debt to “build up your score” is particularly absurd nonsense to most non Americans
I mean, yes? Credit scores are forbidden in many countries because of how opaque they are and because of the data collection aspect.
In a lot of countries, the only external thing the bank is allowed to use when you apply for a loan is whether or not you have existing loans (which is just to prevent you from borrowing money to pay off other borrowed money), the amount of money you make annually and what you currently have saved up.
And?
The common person accepted cigarettes as part of their daily life, and leaded fuel, and many other things which should’ve been changed and ended up being changed. Do you think hackers like to leave the world as is?
> I personally don’t care about alternative app stores
That's because it's difficult to imagine how alternative app stores would force first party app stores to be better, or risk losing business. For a start, everything would become much cheaper for you. They would also have a real incentive to provide new features and innovations. You don't have to switch to a third party app store to realize the benefits that follow from allowing them to exist.
> For a start, everything would become much cheaper for you
That, I doubt. Most stuff already is dirt-cheap on the App Store (and riddled with ads). It’s not like, for example, getting into Apple’s App Store is so expensive that it adds dollars to the price of apps.
> Most stuff already is dirt-cheap on the App Store (and riddled with ads).
Are we using the same App Store? Anything of worth is behind a $10 monthly subscription. Apple has intentionally made subscriptions the only viable commercial model on the App Store. Then they take 30% (with some exceptions). They forbid competition, so developers aren't free to distribute to iOS customers in any other way.
> Apple has intentionally made subscriptions the only viable commercial model on the App Store
How do you think Apple has done that? They’ve always had the option for a one-time payment for apps, and those can be fairly high ($999,99 until December 2022 and $10,000 after that time, according to https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/6/23496734/apple-app-store-...)
Even if Apple did that, I don’t see any evidence that was intentional.
I think it’s more that the market has spoken, and said that “you can’t sell $100 apps on the App Store”. And even then, there are counterexamples.
The only thing Apple may hav head to do with that is that it ‘gave’ zillions of developers visibility for their $0,99 apps on the App Store. That may have led users to think software should be cheap.
1. They aggressively deprecate and modify endpoints. Microsoft maintains APIs for decades. Apple deprecates and modifies them with frequently little or no warning, necessitating expensive and time-consuming maintenance. This makes the one-time purchase unviable as a business model for developers.
2. Apple doesn't permit paid application upgrades (v2). Everything has to be done with IAP. This means developers can't abandon old versions and start selling and supporting new versions without losing all their SEO, affiliate links, marketing, branding, coupons, etc.
3. Apple doesn't facilitate wishlists, meaning sales are much less effective.
4. By disallowing competition, Apple ensures iPhone users are a captive audience. They can't purchase one-time software elsewhere. They have to accept the subscription to get the most value out of their phones.
This is entirely by design. It's hardly "the market" speaking. There is nothing free about the "market" on iPhones.
A difficulty developers have cited is that it isn't possible to have paid major version upgrades while keeping the same identity (links, reviews, etc...) for an app.
... but they have exactly the same business model, and people genuinely promote valve as if they want it to be a monopoly. (though I am aware that it's not one now- first-party launchers are universally reviled by gamers).
Valve allow you to install whatever game store you want on the Steam Deck. They win custom by making a better experience than everyone else, Apple win because they have formed an environment where you have no other option.
If Apple wanted the same business model, they would allow alternative storefronts, they wouldn't block updates if they decided they didn't like you anymore, and they wouldn't block you from even replacing the OS on the device you bought if you wanted to.
In fact, I'm not entirely sure apart from running stores that they are the same thing at all.
Steam was not appreciated when it launched. It made a foothold as a requirement for HL2. Valve has done a good job making relatively painless over the last 20 years, but it was originally reviled.
Merely being in the app store makes everything 30% more expensive! Including any subscriptions through the app, which is just ridiculous. This was the whole basis of the Epic lawsuit. And you can't tell people to sidestep the Apple cut by not putting the payment through them, that will get you banned from the app store.
I think that profit margin would often, though perhaps not always, go to the developers rather to the consumers. That some already offer same thing at 30% discount on their website may be a sign of cheaper future, or may be a way to get price sensitive people to buy more.
Subs, kinda agree.
Also it's only 30% for the top of the market (15% for a lot of apps), and only for digital goods (so not my banking apps or Amazon), and it has to be stuff bought in app (so not two of my last three employers).
And even 30% was good when it was new. Only looks bad now because the market grew so much — but the market did grow, and I was expecting monopoly action around when they first passed one trillion dollar valuation.
With Epic especially, that felt like one arrogant giant swiping at another giant. Especially due to concerns that Fortnite was designed to be addictive, that loot boxes are gambling.
Things are more than 30% more expensive. For a developer to get the same profit on the apple app store with Apple taking 30% of revenue they have to charge 43% more.
There will always be beneficial change for consumers if input costs drop in competitive markets. Markets are dynamic systems. Even if the costs don't drop, the person that is actually providing you value via the app will get the money where they can use it to hire more people to improve the product you use.
> The DMA is about developer choice, not consumers
Ultimately it is about both. The idea behind that is pretty much the idea of capitalism: competition drives innovation.
While I personally do not care about the alternative stores, I care very much about stuff like the in app purchases. I am not using Apples subscriptions and all the rules and steps to circumvent the rules make it horribly inconvenient to deal with subscriptions.
I also hate the fact that I cannot buy an ebook in app because of Apple‘s 30% cut
I think many, especially smaller, developers don’t realize the value they get for that commission: distribution, payment processing, billing, tax processing/collection, dispute handling, marketing (i.e. a storefront,) management of versions/updates for users, not to mention security benefits (for users.)
If people don’t like that, nothing is stopping them from choosing not to sell to Apple device owners. If Apple device owners don’t like it, they can switch to a competitor.
> If people don’t like that, nothing is stopping them from choosing not to sell to Apple device owners. If Apple device owners don’t like it, they can switch to a competitor.
The whole point of this regulation is to enable both sides to make that choice without having to give up on the iPhone and the rest of their app purchases etc. in that ecosystem.
> For a start, everything would become much cheaper for you.
People say this, but of all the apps I have on my phone, I'm not sure I actually paid for any. Browser, smart-device controllers, a few games, streaming services (that I pay for direct), messengers of various sorts, banking, transport, ticketing, government apps.
I know people must pay for apps as Apple make a lot of money off it, but it's not really something I do.
We can add this comment as a data point of 1 and compare this to the tens of billions Apple makes from the AppStore, then we can try to figure out which side is more relevant for lawmakers (who inherently have to lean towards statistics).
> Of the $127 billion in total consumer spending globally in 2024, $91.6 billion came from the App Store, up 24% year-over-year. Google Play consumer spending declined by 1.5% year-over-year to reach $35.7 billion globally.
That doesn’t answer the question really, does it? What proportion of users use paid apps?
I can easily find those figures on App Store revenue you gave, and on the proportion of paid apps in the app stores (5% on iOS, less for Android), but not the details on distribution of payments vs number of users or whatever. Do we have a few users spending a lot and lot of users spending little to nothing? Or am I in a tiny minority as implied?
Given there are approx 1.38 billion iOS users, that’s a mean of $60ish per user per year… a few larger users could easily be skewing that.
For those advocating for multiple app stores, I have a 2 questions.
EU users might be best suited to respond, as they are currently experiencing this change (though I believe the impact will be different once it's rolled out globally).
1. How do you think having multiple app stores will affect user experience and app discoverability? It seems likely that not all apps will be available in every store, meaning users may have to search across multiple platforms to find what they need.
We’ve seen similar issues in the gaming industry, where each company has its own launcher, or in the movie industry, where content is locked behind different providers, making it difficult to figure out where to access it. This is why platforms like Netflix and Steam initially succeeded.
Meanwhile, the Windows/PC model has shown that an open ecosystem can be a security and privacy nightmare for the average user.
2. On that note, how do you envision ensuring privacy and security in these alternative app stores? Risks could range from major tech companies like Google or Facebook running their own stores and collecting even more user data, to scammers creating fake stores that steal credit card information.
I’ll speak only for iOS since that’s what I’m most familiar with.
The important thing to realise is that no one wanted alternative stores. Not really. What everyone wanted was for the existing store to not be stressful oppressive garbage. If Apple didn’t have draconian rules where they charge too high margins and repeatedly reject apps for stupid petty reasons, they wouldn’t have found themselves in this situation. The other big players would even likely accept having to sell via in-app purchases (offering better consistent protection to consumers) if Apple weren’t egregiously eating into their margins.
Don’t take my word for it, we have (now public) internal emails where Apple executives discuss these very issues and question how long they could keep it up.
Alternative stores were the next best thing. When it became clear that Apple wouldn’t fix their behaviour, the only choice was to fight for legislation where they don’t have as much of a say. Make no mistake, they (Tim Cook in particular) brought it on themselves.
As to your specific questions:
1. App discoverability has been unusable for years. The App Store is the last place where I look for apps.
2. The App Store is already filled with privacy-violating apps and scams. Apple ensures jack shit. Scammers don’t need to create fake stores, they are already doing pretty well for themselves in the main store selling flashlight apps with expensive weekly subscriptions.
Is this situation worse for non-technical users? Maybe. Right now there are big scary warning when trying to add third-party stores, and that does make some sense. But Apple will have to get off their ass and make better privacy protections at the OS level.
> For a start, everything would become much cheaper for you.
That's such a fallacy that pro alt-app store people like to trot out. What evidence do you have that will happen? Are you basing it one the assumption that if devs no longer pay Apple a cut that the devs would lower their prices? Why do you think that would happen and the devs wouldn't just leave prices where they are and keep this cut no longer going to Apple? Why would devs leave that money on the table? Why do you think the alt-store would also not take the same cut or only slightly lower? Why would they leave money on the table?
At the end of the day, the biggest alt-store push is by devs wanting more money in their pockets, not the end users.
Are you questioning the basic function of competition in a free market? Why would devs lower prices? Because other devs would release better apps cheaper.
No, I'm questioning your belief in the charity of developers or their lack of greed. "Better apps cheaper" is also a fallacy. If that were the case, they'd be doing it on whatever app store is available, not just some alt-store.
I'd go further and apply something like the notary/broker approach to the collection of data. Types of data should be defined in law. Some (say, email address) would be "free" to collect, but subject to strict sharing requirements like you describe (e.g., you can ask anyone for their email address, but you can't do anything with it except use it yourself to contact them). Others (mailing address) would be allowed for certain purposes (e.g., you need to mail the person a package). Companies should expect regular audits and stiff financial penalties if they collect such data but cannot objectively demonstrate that they actually need it to perform a service they are providing to the person who provides it. (This means you can't collect someone's mailing address unless you actually need it to do a specific thing for that person; simply using it as input to your internal analytics isn't good enough.) Others (e.g., location tracking) would require an approval process akin to being licensed to transport hazardous waste or something, so that it would be straight-up illegal to collect such data without prior approval. That approval process would involve full public disclosure of all intended uses of the data. You can't collect sensitive data without telling everyone exactly what you're going to do with it.
A large portion of the data that is illegally shared should never have been collected in the first place.
I was about to say - GDPR has been pretty effective at warding off any kind of such non-sense here in the EU. Having been on the other end, it makes entire teams not indulge in certain methods. I never had to argue with marketing department why we want our users not be bombarded with spam.
What I would like to see regulated are all those dark-pattern surveillance techniques that are slapped on absolutely everything these days. I’m just looking at a toaster, I don’t want the toaster company looking back at me just because I looked at a fucking toaster once. Makes me weary of looking at stuff. This wasn’t even that freaky pre-AI, but now it’s a whole other ballgame. Stasi would love this stuff.
I also don't really care about alternative app stores, I just want to be able to develop apps without paying a license or abusing a testing system (Apple, Testflight), and be able to install them without "jailbreaking" my device.
That's the reason why even with its warts, I have been a very happy Android user. It's my device, and I can modify it to become whatever I want it to be (with some constrains that don't really affect me atm).
Yeah I’m an Apple user and this is one reason I’d consider switching. I don’t mind consoles like the switch or PS2 being sold at a loss, and making it up via expensive games. But Apple double dips here. They make a profit on my phone. Then they charge a crazy marketplace fee for the App Store. Then they have the gall to charge 3rd party companies for access to the NFC chips in our devices. It’s outrageous.
We could probably implement your first thing but just extending HIPAA to cover all entities, not just health care providers. HIPAA's privacy, security, data selling, and breach notification rules are exactly what we need and could effectively apply to any business.
Digital purchases are often subscription based which for physical goods (eg newspapers) is also non transferable (as it does not make much sense). In contrast, “one-of” licences are already transferable mostly. Either because the licence keys is a bearer token or companies support transfer (if you’ve registeted).
So you dont accomplish much here, I think, but still I agree it’s a good idea to get the details right and fixed in law.
> I personally don’t care about alternative app stores
I've seen this sentiment a couple of times here and I think it's the wrong framing on what the EU is trying to do. Third party app stores aren't the point; they're just a vehicle enabling users to choose which software they want to use without interference from Apple. The indie devs using AltStore PAL don't all necessarily want to use it, but they're forced to because of the way Apple chose to implement DMA compliance.
In fact, the DMA doesn't even explicitly require that gatekeepers allow third party app stores; they can only allow direct distribution (e.g. via web sites) instead, if they want (this is to the best of my understanding of the text, but IANAL).
When you say you don't care about alternative app stores, what you're really saying is that you don't care about the end user's ability to use apps that aren't approved by Apple. That is certainly an opinion that many folks have, but I'd prefer that they refrain from hiding behind the shield of "third party app stores are weird and who even cares", whether deliberately or not.
> In fact, the DMA doesn't even explicitly require that gatekeepers allow third party app stores; they can only allow direct distribution (e.g. via web sites) instead, if they want.
Is Apple actually complying with the DMA then? They are still requiring notarization, which means apps still have to be approved by them.
The DMA allows Apple to take "strictly necessary and proportionate" measures to ensure that alternative apps do not "endanger the integrity of the hardware or operating system". IMO iOS notarization (which is a different and more involved process with many more rules than notarization on macOS) goes well beyond that, but it's up to the EU to decide.
Having grown up through ad-bars, Windows malware, email worms and everything else that could go wrong for most people during the late 90s on and not wanting to do IT for my entire extended family, I don’t mind having a popular platform with guardrails. Unfortunately, I think providing non-curated access and opening up platform features that are currently gated by security features to unscrupulous actors will make things worse for more people than it will help. After over 15 years of iPhone use, I’ve never had any of the problems that plague PCs and I attribute a lot of that to a restrictive app distribution model, sandboxing, etc.
End users can (and do!) use apps not approved by Apple on mobile devices every day. They just do it on something that’s not an iPhone (or have the capability to jailbreak their iPhone and know what they’re getting themselves into). Corps and devs can also run custom software without Apple approval. I’m personally fine with that delineation and I’d much rather have stronger GDPR-like and property laws.
Some good points overall, and I think I agree in a lot of ways, actually.
> (or have the capability to jailbreak their iPhone and know what they’re getting themselves into)
It is a common misconception that people can "just" jailbreak their iPhone if they're not happy with the walled garden. This requires someone finding a critical-impact zero day vulnerability in iOS, quite literally worth around half a million dollars [1]. Apple is hard at work as we speak trying their hardest to prevent those from slipping in -- and that is a good thing, in general. It's not currently possible to jailbreak any up-to-date iOS device.
I'm all for sandboxing and other iOS security features; I'm not proposing that we get rid of any of that. Sideloaded apps would presumably still be fully sandboxed, and would still only be able to access sensitive data with explicit user consent. This is very different than the situation on Windows, where in 2025 you can still double click an .exe and instantly have all of your passwords and credit cards stolen (not an exaggeration; this literally happens).
I'm also not against the idea of making it difficult enough to enable sideloading so as to make social engineering attacks against grandma effectively impossible. This is what Chromebooks are doing; nerds get root, but grandma doesn't.
However, the DMA is more concerned with delivering alternative apps to everyone than it is concerned with empowering techies. So I can see why you might not support it even if you want to have a little more control over your phone, as a techie.
> The DMA designates six tech companies as “gatekeepers” to the internet — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft — and limits these technology kingpins from engaging in anticompetitive tactics on their platforms, in favor of interoperability.
DMA seems like a no-brainer for those that support users’ freedom. Since DMA came into effect almost two years ago, can anyone comment on its effectiveness?
Side note, I’m glad the EU takes normal people’s rights seriously. Wish the US was a leader on this too.
Executive summary: Epic Games benefits greatly from the DMA, but powerusers and smaller developers don't get much benefit. This is due to Apple's lackluster compliance measures that are currently being investigated and may be deemed illegal.
This is a great site, and thank you for the effort.
One suggestion for an addition to the section on FOSS: Related to the issue of not being able to modify the source of apps we use, we also can't verify that an "open source" app on iOS is built from its claimed source code. We just have to trust the developer. This blocks true auditing of iOS apps for data privacy practices, something we know is needed given that the "privacy labels" are often deceptive https://archive.ph/Ak6qU. As such, this is a data security issue as much as a user freedom issue.
I'll probably end up adding it myself if you don't want to, because it's actually something I wanted to include originally but forgot to.
This is definitely a huge issue with the current implementation of DMA compliance. Apple's mandatory DRM encryption scheme as part of the notarization process doesn't just block reproducible builds and the improved security that those offer, but also means that third party app stores aren't capable of auditing the apps they offer in any way. If Apple lets something slip through their notarization review (which is not an impossibility, since it's happened on the App Store before), then the third party store carrying that app will be unfairly blamed for the incident.
That is listed under "unofficial sideloading methods". A more accurate title would've been "Does iOS support sideloading yet?" but I wanted to keep the domain name as short as possible :)
The Apple Developer program is not intended as an option for end users to enable sideloading on their device, even if that is a side effect of joining it. It is only intended to allow developers to briefly test new builds of their own apps in a limited capacity before uploading them to the App Store (or third party stores in the EU). Apps "installed" this way expire after a certain length of time and you must ask Apple's cloud service for a new certificate each time that happens in order to keep using them. You're still tied to Apple indefinitely this way. If your developer account is terminated for whatever reason, or Apple decides to increase the price such that you can no longer afford your account, then suddenly you no longer have sideloading, and you no longer have access to any of the apps you previously sideloaded.
Therefore, I lump it into the same category as jailbreaking -- yes, you can argue that the existence of that means iOS already has sideloading, but it's not officially supported.
Sidenote: You don't need to spend $100/yr if you want to go the "unofficial sideloading" route; AltStore (Classic) is available for free: https://altstore.io/
Apple has been really against this one, but you can now have p*rn apps on your iPhone in the EU. Which I think is great, because why should I be restricted in the use of my own device by the moral code of an American corporation?
> why should I be restricted in the use of my own device by the moral code of an American corporation?
I would argue that, while it's true that some of your rights are restricted by corporations, others are just there waiting for you to exercise them.
Use your freedom, take chances, write the word "porn" in HN without fear. Otherwise there's no point in demanding freedoms that we're too afraid to use.
Good point, I wasn't sure if writing "porn" would be flagged by some kind of badwords filter, so I didn't bother, but apparently it's no problem over here :-)
No badwords filter here, just good old fashioned handcrafted moderation by dang and artisinal flagging by individual users. You don't have to resort to weird euphemisms like "unalive".
Interesting take. Why would porn be less deserving of freedom of speech than other forms of speech? Sounds to me you only believe in freedom of speech you like.
Such bad faith. Videos of people fucking are bad and moral to censor but neonazi memes must be protected? That's the twisted logic that is currently leading your venerable democracy to its death.
I mean, if protesting for the Palestinian cause can get your green card revoked, I don't think America has any moral high ground on the topic of free speech anymore.
There's an enormous difference between expelling a foreigner and imprisoning a citizen.
America absolutely has the upper hand in free speech. In Europe you will get sentenced for blaspheming against the Quran.
Edit: That's why the Quran burnings in Sweden was such a big deal. It was one of the countries who hadn't outlawed blasphemy against Islam. Of course any blasphemy against Christianity is perfectly legal in Europe and strongly encouraged.
You are facing a constitutional crisis right now, something most EU members can say they do not.
> Khalil called his lawyer, Amy Greer, from the building's lobby. She spoke over the phone with one of the ICE agents, who told her they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Greer said when she informed the agent that Khalil was a permanent resident of the U.S. in possession of a green card, the agent responded they would revoke the green card instead. When Greer said she needed to see a warrant before Khalil could be detained, the agent hung up. Abdalla said they were not shown a warrant and that "within minutes, they had handcuffed Mahmoud, took him out into the street and forced him into an unmarked car". A Columbia spokesperson declined to say whether, before the arrest, the university had received a warrant for the ICE agents to access property the university owned. The spokesperson also declined to comment on the arrest.
> On March 9, Greer said she was uncertain of Khalil's whereabouts, noting the possibility that he could be as far away as Louisiana. Abdalla, who sought to visit him at a detention center in New Jersey, was informed that he was not there. Khalil is detained at the LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana. [0]
Without appropriate warrants or being accused of a tangible crime in the court of law, a permanent USA resident has been detained, while being denied his right to speak with his lawyer for a significant part of his detention, with the post-hoc justification being his engagement in "anti-American", though not illegal, activity, ignoring claims of monetary ties with terrorist orgs made on national TV without being able to provide any corroboration when pressured.
Let's ignore political affiliations, who's on what team, and who you're rooting for. Applying abstraction, replace America with "Country X" and you see, plain as day, this as an attempt at silencing unfavorable speech. As a Ukrainian, sharing a language, geography, and personal connections across the border with Russia, I can tell you with certainty: this is how "disappearing" someone looks like. The target does not matter; the "enemies of people" set has a funny tendency to expand, starting from those for whom the least will stand up.
The government breaking the law isn't a constitutional crisis. It becomes a constitutional crisis when different parts of the government pull it in drastically different directions and the whole thing breaks apart. Currently the government is moving in exactly the direction the executive branch wants it to, the judicial branch has found that it has no traction to pull it back and the legislature isn't really even participating except for cheering on the executive. Like it or not, the possibile crisis has already been resolved by the executive discovering that it can do whatever it wants.
> you see, plain as day, this as an attempt at silencing unfavorable speech.
Of course it is. But there's a huge difference between making a foreigner leave, and sentencing a citizen. Any foreigner can be denied entry to a country for any and no reason whatsoever, without any due process. So a foreigner's "right" to stay in a country sits very loosely.
> Any foreigner can be denied entry to a country for any and no reason whatsoever
That's a completely different thing than what happened here. Those are the rules, everyone knows that, and acts accordingly. The biggest problem in the US right now, is that the government isn't being ruled by it's own laws (sort-of). That's what's meant by a "constitutional crisis".
If the US government changed the rules to allow non-citizens to be arrested & held without warrants, then that would a different kind of thing. It would be a little totalitarian, but not a breakdown of the rule of law.
Note, I said sort-of above because the laws are written in such away as to be somewhat vague so that some people claim the government is acting legally.
And outside the US this wouldn't even be a discussion, because you don't have freedom of speech. That's why people consider him a victim for being kicked out.
I think the word "foreigner" is perfectly correct. The difference is that as a foreigner, you have chosen to come to another country – among hundreds to choose from. As a native citizen, you haven't made any such choice and you might not be able to even if you wanted to.
> there's a huge difference between making a foreigner leave, and sentencing a citizen
The White House has shown open contempt for the judicial and legislative branches. Why do you think they'd stop, simply because the person they've chosen to make an example of is a citizen?
But fine, he's a foreigner. What's so hard about the human right of due process, here? Serve the warrant. Appear in court. Argue the case that is, according to those in favor of yeeting this guy out the country, so blindingly obvious.
> Why do you think they'd stop, simply because the person they've chosen to make an example of is a citizen?
The ink was barely dry on my own comment:
> President Donald Trump’s administration asked the Supreme Court in a series of emergency appeals Thursday to allow him to move forward with plans to end birthright citizenship
> But there's a huge difference between making a foreigner leave, and sentencing a citizen
Not nearly as huge as one wants it to be, especially when the current executive is experimenting legally with citizenship revocation.
You divide human beings under your jurisdiction into wide categories with hugely unequal rights and the incentives are heavy for rulers to remove the inconvenient in their society by reclassifying them. It's much safer for citizen and non-citizen alike to strongly protect the non-citizen in your borders.
where do you get sentenced for blaspheming the Quran in the EU?
Italy is a traditional religious country and blaspheming gets you <checks notes> a 50€ fine. Also, not a big deal if your blasphemies ara against Mary, that's ok.
What they were probably referring to is the times people made a nuisance of themselves or harassed Muslims in public with Quran blasphemy.
Nowhere in Europe is it illegal to sit at home and eat pork. It is illegal to harass other people. I gather that's not illegal in the US (unless the people you harass happen to be powerful) and the general mindset in the US is so far in that direction that a lot of Americans can't even conceptualize what harassment is.
"The UN Human Rights Committee has urged Finland to change the criminal provision, arguing that it restricts freedom of expression."
You can easily find the law in matter, the prime minister on video saying that burning the Quran is outlawed, and many other media links from government channels talking about this. And there are court cases where people have been sentenced in Finland for burning the Quran – not in public as has been the case in Sweden.
Before you write that the law applies to the Bible and Christians as well – it is not the case. Police, prosecutors and judges will not use the law against any other blasphemy than against Islam.
Directly from the courts of law. When European governments and courts do unflattering things, the media makes sure to shuffle it under the carpet. There's a very different culture around free speech and public debate in Europe vs America.
Yeah, but all you reference is Finland. That’s one country with strict blasphemy laws, not specifically about Islam, but about any religion. It’s curious you seem to only care when they apply it to Islam. You get into the same amount of trouble there whether the book you’re burning is a bible or a quran.
And, yeah, I agree. Finlands blasphemy laws are bad and need to be abolished. But the way you’re representing them as specifically about islam and as being representative for most of Europe comes across as disingenuous to me.
And, yeah, there’s more European countries classified as red (worst category) on https://end-blasphemy-laws.org/countries/ but definitely not a majority. Israel is on there too by the way.
> That’s one country with strict blasphemy laws, not specifically about Islam, but about any religion. It’s curious you seem to only care when they apply it to Islam.
The police, the prosecutors and the courts only care about this law when it applies to Islam. Yes, it is very curios indeed!
> You get into the same amount of trouble there whether the book you’re burning is a bible or a quran.
That's absolutely not true. You in fact get into no trouble at all.
I have downvoted your comment because of "the media makes sure to shuffle it under the carpet". These cases are widely reported in national media.
I wasn't familiar with the Finnish politician, but it's easy to find coverage of the case and related news on Finland's national broadcaster: https://yle.fi/a/74-20015426
Well I'm not talking about any Finnish politician. I'm talking about everyday people who get sentenced by the courts for blasphemy against Islam. These cases get local media coverage at most.
Believe me, I think blasphemy laws should be abolished everywhere, but publicly burning Bibles/Qurans/whatever doesn't sounds like a "everyday people" activity to me.
It's not, but it should be allowed to be an everyday kind of thing. If your society does not allow open critique of itself to be normalized, that's bad.
But the US right definitely has no high ground to go around complaining about freedom of speech in the one country that has exceptionally weird and dumb blasphemy laws, seeing as we now live in a USA where the Whitehouse is explicitly saying only they can choose what information journalists have access to. The evangelical right were explicitly calling to deport US citizens for expressing their opinions on college campuses. IMO, reacting at college kids saying the country sucks is one of the most unamerican and pathetic things you could possibly do, but we did once shoot a bunch of college students who dared to stand in a crowd because we shouldn't have been bombing Cambodia, and 58% of the country, when surveyed by Gallup, blamed the students for the incident, so hey, maybe we have made progress, since we only deport them now, instead of murdering them.
This is a somewhat typical European response, even though you might not be European: always blame the victim.
Everyday people are killing each other in trenches in the Ukraine as we speak.
The cases I know where "everyday people" have been sentenced for blasphemy against Islam is when people have emotionally lashed out. One case where a gay man live streamed himself spitting at the Quran and cursing it after the Orlando nightclub massacre in the name of the Quran. It wasn't a real Quran, but the court said that it didn't matter. He might not be an "everyday person" to you. You might have acted more cool in such a situation.
And there are a plethora of other cases where Europeans have been sentenced for publicly criticizing Islam, where no Quran burning has been involved.
The situation in reality, beyond hacker ideology, is that European countries are prosecuting and sentencing people for blaspheming or criticizing Islam. And it usually is not activists who are targeted.
"Not opposed to food in theory, but its connection with obesity and bad labor practices is undeniable so the quantifiable harm it causes is much greater than the hypothetical harm of being offended by a meme or so-called hate speech."
Delta is on the official iOS App Store for what it’s worth. There are also a couple apps that support watching YouTube with sponsorblock and Adblock available too.
Delta seems to be allowed (at least partially) because of the DMA and the EU.
I'd also love to hear your suggestions on those couple of apps. Last time i checked, proper apps either charge whatever they want to because of their monopolistic position(+ the cost of an Apple Developer Program to a hobbyist) , and free apps unclear if they even solve the problem are designed to harvest and sell almost everything you have.
Orion is a very rare exception in both of these cases but they weren't able to make uBO work
> ... Everybody knew that Apple would be uncongenial, borderline malicious ...
> Therefore its pointless to blame Apple
The entire fault is on Apple. The EU that is notoriously depicted as overly bureaucratic and slow-moving managed to make the largest consumer walled garden to relax its gates and give some form of authority to people who own the damn device.
Remember, no form of official sideloading existed before the DMA.
Apple still indirectly controls what is distributed and charges developers outside their app store money[1]. So it hasn't been effective enough to actually open up the platform for arbitrary apps to be installed.
I object to this foul, tainted union. The children will have crossed toes and webbed eyes. God expressly forbids this in Romans: “Yea, unto thee I say, no man shall lay with an algorithmically-endowed data sucking Beast With A Billion Bucks as they would with a woman…shit, or with a guy, it’s 2025–evangelicals are off the rails, political leaders are depriving a suffering majority of life saving services while propping up a gilded minority, all manner of unsavory acts are being committed in My name, frankly I think it’s well past time I gave Adam and Steve my official blessing. You do you, as long as it’s all love, go with Me, God” (paraphrasing a bit at the end there)
Anyway, what was this originally about? Armageddon?
I have honestly slowly over the years lost my love for the iPhone. Back in the early days they were exciting and you could jailbreak and do lots of fun things not typically possible on a non jailbroken phone. Some of those fun things eventually became features of the stock iPhones but in the end the phone is very locked down and can only do a very small portion of the things it actually could do if not so locked down.
> Some of those fun things eventually became features of the stock iPhones
iOS has since stagnated without the field laboratory of jailbreak innovations.
When VMs return to iOS to compete with Android Linux VMs, a new innovation cycle can begin. Concepts proven within the freedom of Linux or macOS VMs can be reimplemented in stock iOS or native iOS apps, for integration with native workflows.
I can indirectly say that, as someone that understands the opposition to sideloading, we are one year in since the DMA took effect and I've seen no incredible massive threat has imperiled the digital lives of iPhone users like Apple claimed it would.
Apple would probably say that's because of the measures they've take in implementing the sideloading mandate, but I would rather assume that there are generally less risks that they say there are.
Macs are pretty popular with a lot of non-tech-savvy people nowadays, and despite being able to install all you want, there is absolutely no major incredible threat coming from it.
I believe it's time for Apple to stop the madness and re-unify iOS globally under a system that works more like macOS.
My "fear" has always been that Meta/Alphabet would slowly but surely migrate their apps over to their own third-party App Store to get past the pesky IDFA limitations[0] and other tracking hurdles.
So far nothing seems to indicate that it's happening. The question is if it's due to Apple's "measures" or just because it is not worthwhile for Meta/Alphabet. I think it's a combination of. But if it was as easy to "side-load" an app on iOS as on macOS - per your suggestion, I'm confident Meta would have done the switch in a heartbeat.
Just imagine if Apple provided nice API's for auto-updating, essentially no limitations on what binaries can be attested, API's/mechanisms for easy migration between AppStore apps and side loaded ones, no scary screens etc. Essentially implementing the DMA to the fullest extent, really honouring the intent of the law. Why wouldn't all the mega apps just move over? And what consequences would it have?
I think it would be awesome to e.g lift the JIT blocking and allow more strange niche things in alternative app stores. But getting all regular people on a wild-west third party app stores for the (ad financed) apps the use every day is just begging for a huge _actual_ loss in privacy.
I think it's just not worth it for them; look at Android, where sideloading was always available as an option.
Facebook does offer separate APKs on their website (so do, in fact, most major services - Netflix and Spotify also offer APKs from their website), but practically the only reason people end up using them is if they're on a device that doesn't support the Play Store (for whatever reason).
The only serious Play Store competitors on Android are either vendor specific (like Amazon's store) or wouldn't host Facebook apps to begin with and are unambiguously a positive force for users due to their standards (F-Droid, whose policies are designed to protect users from the typical mobile app rugpull of filling it with ads down the line). Anything outside of this tends to be independent hobby projects or corporate business apps.
The inertia of being the default is still really strong (for a slight alternative, much of Google's strength comes from the fact they paid millions to browsers to be the default search engine for them, a practice that's been found to have violated antitrust laws - it's telling that Google really wanted to keep doing this), which is still enough to keep Facebook attached to the Play Store and is probably why they won't try to leave the App Store either.
Good. They keep making laws intended to control some of the negative impacts of these companies, but they usually have the resources to mostly get around these laws, and they end-up affecting smaller companies in ways that the government didn't intend or consider.
lmao you notice something was up right??? because most of this company are US based companies
you are crazy to think US would do the same because it is would hampering their economy directly, EU doing this because they want EU counterpart gain benefit
It's about as effective as the GDPR - which means very strong regulation and penalties on paper, but no actual enforcement of said penalties once you breach it - all bark and no bite.
(please, don't reply with that "enforcement tracker" link - a billion is nothing for Facebook and especially not when it's in exchange of 7 years of continuous and blatant breach of the regulation)
I have no data on enforcement but since it went into effect, every place I've worked has taken it very seriously so it has definitely had consequences, very positive ones in my opinion.
Same. Used to work for a government agency, and our test data was just replicas of the prod database. Little access control, and PII was floating everywhere. It got really tightened up to be ready for GDPR.
And then every company since have also been very stringent and conscious about privacy. It's just part of being a good engineer in Europe. The same way you think of how a feature will be performant or maintainable or secure, you also automatically think about privacy implications and raise any issues.
GDPR has allowed me access to my data from multiple companies, where before I would have had no way or a long and expensive way of getting my data. More than a dozen other countries have implemented some versions of it.
Could enforcement be better? Sure
Could some of the rules be better? Sure
Is it being updated to be better? Yes, it has happened and will continue to happen.
What do you mean not effective? I worked in a digital marketing/advertising company and we needed to re-architect our whole system to comply with GDPR, it was a pain in the ass for both backend team and analytics team.
That the GDPR is “all bark and no bite” is factually untrue.
As an example of a service that was forced to change to get in line with GDPR: Facebook.
For user profiling, they first tried to use their Terms of Service, then they tried claiming a legitimate interest, then they tried offering paid subscriptions, and now they are at the point where they somewhat degrade the experience of those refusing to be profiled. I'm not talking about the fines, I'm talking about EU citizens being able to use Facebook while refusing to give their consent for profiling. I'm also talking about the ability to download your data or to delete your data from their servers, which was also the outcome of GDPR.
Facebook has also received multiple GDPR-related fines, maybe it's not enough, but it's only going to get worse, as EU regulators are also eyeing them for the spread of election misinformation. Actually, Zuckerberg has been kissing Trump's ring because he's hoping for some protectionism from the US. He said so in his now infamous Joe Rogan podcast episode.
And for the DMA — well, Apple now allows alternative browser engines within the EU, as just one example.
So I just don't understand why people make this claim. The DPAs may be slow, but that's not a good argument. Law enforcement in general is slow. And the fact is that the GDPR is changing the Internet, which is undeniable.
Not in the EU myself but I don't think so. There's a specific entitlement that has to be granted and last time I looked nobody has ever done it.
I learned one interesting tidbit from the latest Ladybird progress report: apparently, in order for an engine to actually be eligible to get this entitlement, it actually has to have a higher than 90% WPT pass rate. I think it is absolutely fascinating that this is part of the criteria. The differences between the era of more-or-less free distribution on desktop platforms couldn't be more different than the totalitarian control of iOS and the slightly less restrictive control of Android. It almost feels like what happened with home computers was an accident, a circumstance that was only temporary and that once it is finally taken away we'll never get it back.
It's weird to think about. The evolving nature of computer security has definitely created some serious challenges for having a more open distribution model, but by and large nobody wants to try to solve that, and there's not much of an incentive to. The problem is, though, that closing down distribution doesn't just magically solve the problem of trust, it centralizes it to a single entity, with all of the many problems that comes with.
People, of course, seem to defend this practice tooth and nail. Like, it's not enough to just have the option of curated walled gardens: it's important to be forced to use them, because your agency could be used against you by other massive corporations, by coercing you to sidestep security measures. (Nevermind the fact that the existence of said abusive mega corporations is, in and of itself, a problem that should be dealt with directly...)
Meanwhile, I'm just blown away. I have an iPad with an M1 processor. It has virtualization capabilities. It could run VMs, if Apple would let it. Volunteers have gone great lengths despite JIT restrictions and sandboxing to make decent virtualization software for iOS, entirely free of charge. But instead, they updated iPadOS to explicitly remove the hypervisor framework in a major OS upgrade, and of course, it being an iPad, you can't even choose to downgrade it. Now I'm not saying running a desktop OS in a VM is an ideal experience for a tablet, but the damn thing has a keyboard cover and all manner of connectivity, it would be extremely useful to allow this, especially given how relatively powerful the device is. Yet, you can't.
And sure. If you don't like it, don't buy it. I largely don't buy Apple products anymore, but I have a few for various reasons. They're very nice pieces of hardware. But the thing is, the market isn't incentivized to offer alternatives to Apple. What Apple has accomplished with the App Store is absolutely unparalleled: 30% of all revenue. Everywhere, in every app. Perpetually. Forever. Holy Shit. And sure, there are technically exceptions, but let's face it: they play fast and loose with their own rules. When even Patreon is forced to pay 30% you know they are just going to push anyone with enough revenue into it with some rationale. So I personally struggle to believe that there will be alternatives if nothing is done. It's not a matter of people not being willing to buy viable alternatives, it's more a matter of nobody being able to sell them, because doing the arguably unfair thing profits hand-over-fist and nobody can fucking compete with that.
So we're here, bargaining with the richest company in the world, for the ability to be able to download a web browser that isn't Safari in a trenchcoat.
I don't like all EU regulation, but it's kind of unreal to watch this unfold and see how people actually defend this status quo. I still struggle to reconcile how people who consider themselves hackers or at least adjacent to hacker culture can see all of this and not feel dead inside.
> It almost feels like what happened with home computers was an accident, a circumstance that was only temporary and that once it is finally taken away we'll never get it back.
Home computers gave full control to the owners because there was no other choice. There was no internet, no way to push updates or hoover up data. Anything that happened on those machines had to be initiated by the user. They have been working on pulling all that back ever since always-on internet has become something that can basically be taken for granted.
And thankfully a lot of people realize that’s utter bullshit and are taking measures to fight off further enshittification. I’m not a nationalist but things like the GDPR and DMA make me proud to be European.
> I'm also talking about the ability to download your data or to delete your data from their servers, which was also the outcome of GDPR.
I’ll admit that I did this years ago so it may be different now. Facebook just gave me a copy of the data that I explicitly uploaded to Facebook: text posts and images. There was no other data about my login history or request history or anything else that (I believe, perhaps mistakenly) the GDPR considers as my personal data (cross-site tracking is the big one). There’s also no way to verify that my deletion request was honored, even for those text posts and images, but that will probably never be false so that’s kind of a weak point, IMO.
Not that I disagree with your overall point, just wanted to offer some words of concern on this particular point.
The GDPR is very clear (despite those who profit from breaching it would like you to believe): consent for non-essential data collection/processing should be strictly opt-in. You can't opt-in by default, you can't use dark patterns to trick people to opt-in, and you can't degrade the experience to coerce people to opt in.
Yet by your own comment's admission, Facebook has tried multiple blatant breaches of the regulation, and is still in business and trying their latest iteration of pseudo-compliance, which means whatever enforcement there is, it's clearly not enough.
When it comes to the DMA, Apple is currently on track to receive a (very low) fine for not actually complying by still preventing developer from letting users know they can pay for apps/services outside the App Store for cheaper. So clearly the potential penalties and actual enforcement is low enough that Apple is (rightly) calling their bluff.
I can now use Facebook without being profiled for ads. I can also delete my account.
It took longer than expected, but it happened. The GDPR has forced Facebook and others to change.
People may want huge fines, but then the EU is accused of targeting US companies or suffocating innovation. I don't want fines necessarily, I want results.
Big tech has always driven me mad with how they leverage their monoplies once they reach a certain size.
Why can't I swap cloud backends on the mobile platforms?
I shouldnt need a gmail/icloud account to setup an android/ios device. Open those api's and let me use another hosted service or host my own.
After a device becomes unsupported release the unlock codes or whatever. At that point it becomes a security hazard anyway. I should be able to create custom roms/software to keep using it if I want.
I’ve never seen it in a library, but you can occasionally find used copies, if you don’t want to buy a brand-new book that is a roadmap to doing things you disagree with.
For those not in the know, Carl Shapiro [1] and Hal Varian [2] are well known economics researchers. Hal Varian ended up working at Google building the AdWords auction after writing this it seems.
For anyone wondering, there's this person called *Anna* that has an *archive* where the book can be found.
Somebody was telling me how Hal Varian was "evil" the other night and I added that Vint Cerf was one of the people Upton Sinclair meant when he said “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” [1]
> Somebody was telling me how Hal Varian was "evil" the other night and I added that Vint Cerf was one of the people Upton Sinclair meant when he said “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” [1]
The real problem with these giant companies is that they can move into entirely new markets, eg. film production, and afford to lose massive amounts of money. They can effectively lose billions of dollars while gobbling up market share and starving the oxygen out of all the existing players in that market who need profits to sustain themselves.
Amazon and Apple are undercutting Hollywood and losing money. They're subsidizing their Hollywood efforts with funds from unrelated business units (hardware, grocery stores, primary care doctors, etc.) You can get cheap (free) entertainment if you subscribe to Amazon Prime shipping, so why spend money on the competitor's product if entertainment is (at some gross sense and scale) fungible?
The thing that needs to be broken up is the ability of these giants to subsidize moves into healthy existing markets or even nascent markets. They push out the incumbents with their massive cash hoards gained from unrelated business unit activity. They don't even try to profit at first until they've captured the market and suffocated the existing players.
It's unfair that Amazon and Apple can make movies, buy out James Bond, Lord of the Rings, etc. off of their trillion dollar market caps, iPhones, and AWS profits. It's unfair that they can plaster free advertising on the side of their delivery vans or get free ad placement front and center in their App Store. That costs everyone else millions of dollars - a large percentage of the unit economics. Big tech has every advantage and is literally murdering entire markets with these insane, unfair advantages.
These giant companies are like an invasive species. They're like lionfish moving into the Caribbean, killing all the local fauna. No natural predators. Complete decimation of the local ecology.
Their behavior disconnects innovation, healthy and rational market monetization, and the actual rewards that should go to the investment and labor capital pioneering those areas. Institutional giants are snuffing out anything they see that they can expand into.
Big companies need to be broken up for the sake of healthy markets and innovation. Big companies are gravitational singularities that distort everything.
Over the years, I come across thought provoking comments from time to time on this platform. I usually take a moment to ponder what I just read. Then I ask myself who wrote this..? Then return to look at the username. More than once I find the name echelon. Echelon, you have a great mind and do a lot to further the HN commentary. Thank you.
Thank you so much for the kind words. There isn't a lot of that going around on today's internet with its ephemeral interactions, dopamine-driven engagement, and deep polarization. I too often allow this disposition to infect my own arguments and occasionally lean too heavily into emotion.
I feel like this line of argument is gaining broader traction. When I was making these points four and five years ago I was frequently downvoted. I feel powerless to affect change, but I'm starting to notice that many powerful players seem to be echoing this sentiment. Tim Sweeney, Marc Andreessen, and now YCombinator.
YCombinator hasn't had many centicorns lately, and the reason for that is that big tech is sucking out all of the oxygen in the room. You have to pay their tolls to play - discovery and distribution incredibly frictionful, and you're always in some manner paying the gatekeepers. They're bloodletting margin from the innovators and practitioners that need it the most.
VC firms are certainly thinking this over. Google, Apple, and the rest put a ceiling over what portcos can ultimately grow up into, and they can even force M&A when in a different world that would be a subpar outcome. These firms and mid-cap tech companies can be a powerful voice to help shape regulation.
I shouldn't even have to mention how this hurts the small business, lifestyle business, and mom and pop operations. Tech giants are finding every way to squeeze the lemon that they possibly can. If we can get enough of them talking about their pain points, that can be another set of voices to add to the angry cacophony.
Europe has gotten louder in beating this drum, and I'm hoping the wave is starting to come to shore domestically. It'll make the world better for all players - even the tech giants.
Google, as a sum of its parts, is frankly undervalued. They aren't properly monetizing all of their properties. If they were forced to break up and make each business unit anti-fragile, actually competitive, actually profitable, and wholly standalone, most of those business units would emerge stronger and better for customers. Shareholders would see benefit.
But the broader impact to the health of the overall market is what's most important, and that could be tectonically massive. Everything and everyone who isn't "big tech" - every industry, every individual - has been ensnared in this Pacific garbage patch of netting. The once-free Internet has so many artificial barriers that you have to pay to bypass, platforms are walled gardens that don't play together, and the companies that own the gates aren't good stewards. Their role is just to accrue power and tax.
Freeing the markets up again will make everyone collectively so much more innovative and profitable.
> Thank you so much for the kind words. There isn't a lot of that going around on today's internet with its ephemeral interactions, dopamine-driven engagement, and deep polarization. I too often allow this disposition to infect my own arguments and occasionally lean too heavily into emotion.
You’re welcome, I too find my disposition infected from time to time.
> VC firms are certainly thinking this over. Google, Apple, and the rest put a ceiling over what portcos can ultimately grow up into, and they can even force M&A when in a different world that would be a subpar outcome. These firms and mid-cap tech companies can be a powerful voice to help shape regulation.
I’m skeptical that this will happen in an environment of deregulation. However, it is possible that we’ll see change on a longer timeline.
> Google, as a sum of its parts, is frankly undervalued. They aren't properly monetizing all of their properties.
I couldn’t agree more. Every time I see Google kill a product line, it bothers me that it wasn’t spun off into its own company.
> Freeing the markets up again will make everyone collectively so much more innovative and profitable.
I’m not sure if I subscribe to the belief that markets were ever free. I do agree that we should do as much as we can to open them up though.
> I hope we see change soon.
Indeed, I simply hope we can see a return to reasoned discourse.
Thank you again echelon. May the winds ever be to your back, the sun to your face, and free markets on your horizon.
And also with their overvalued stock they can pay employees in stock and also buy competitors in stock. Amazon might not be that much better than Target or Walmart but the market prices them in much better.
Over sufficient time, a corporation eventually hits a tipping point where it becomes more economically viable to starve out and/or buy out your competitors rather than to innovate, and then to further entrench one's monopoly through special interest lobbying groups with their massive capital reserves.
Preventing the predictions of Marxists like Lenin around "Late Stage Capitalism" (disregarding the imperialist/colonialism overtones) from becoming a reality was supposed to be the job of trustbusting organizations like the FTC and DOJ but well... here we are.
Could we apply a progressive tax to large corporations (like big tech monopolies) to force them to figure out what aspects of their own business should be split up and spun out to keep the size of companies roughly equal to "one layer of the stack".
Seems like a progressive corporation tax would be an easy way to allow "the market" to naturally limit the size of corporations and find the correct separation points for separate businesses.
Really random thought: the tax you pay on profit is proportional (or even 1:1) to your market share. Become a monopoly? 100% of your profit is now taxed.
Nicer to stay at eg. 25% and have competition. Maybe ramp it exponentially
(yes, I know there are loopholes in this pie-in-the-sky)
North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). NAICS uses a hierarchical structure with sectors represented by 2-digit codes, such as Manufacturing (31-33) or Retail Trade (44-45).
In antitrust law, a "market" is defined as an area of effective competition that includes both product (or service) and geographic dimensions. The US Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission use market definitions to evaluate competition under laws like the Clayton Act.
Tools like the hypothetical monopolist test are used to determine whether a market is too narrow by assessing if a monopolist could profitably raise prices.
> Also, if you invent something so novel it makes a new market, that would imply you are immediately taxed at 100%.
I'd be more inclined to scale it based on total revenue. There's a big difference between having 100% of a new market you just recently created that only makes $1M/year and having 90% of a decade-old market that makes $10B/year.
(That said, there are a hundred other things that'd need fixing for such a hypothetical to be viable, let alone desirable. This was just the thing that stood out the most to me, particularly on a site centered around startups.)
> Also, if you invent something so novel it makes a new market
That's innovation, which is not the issue here. Creating new markets is usually win-win (initially), even with big tech leading the way.
The more damaging issue is in taking over existing markets in ways that do not benefit that market. e.g Big tech Moving into film and TV, it's not simply a buyout with massive capital, it's about burning money in one ancillary market to benefit their primary market, but usually at a detriment to the ancillary one. They are unfairly leveraging their primary market position, tying products together, even if they don't ever make any profit in the movies, they create more and more lock-in with their platforms, making it harder and harder to not use them. The overall affect, more profit, without a chance of competition.
Bundling is explicitly recognized as antitrust concern. Using a monopoly in one area to undercut a competitor is what Microsoft and Google were both found guilty of by the DoJ, so it's funny you should mention them. It's not about being prohibited from developing new products, but in how you price them, and giving away things for free because you can afford to due to your monopoly in one area, and your competitors can't is the crime, or forcing people to buy both of your products together at the same time, is the problem, as enforced by the DoJ. Google should be free to develop Chrome, but funding all of its development from advertising profit and then giving it away for free because you can because you have a monopoly in search advertising is the problem, because Mozilla doesn't have search advertising monopoly money or desktop operating system monopoly to be able to give their browser away for free and fund further development from those sales. This is why, as part of the Google breakup is for them to sell off Chrome.
This also means google should not give away for free any of their gmail service, youtube?, chrome, maps or any such thing. All of these are funded by the ad money
> That's innovation, which is not the issue here. Creating new markets is usually win-win
You're preaching to the choir here. The post I was replying to described a policy that would have made that an issue, without some way of addressing that case.
It's a good idea and a systemic nudge towards the outcome we want. (Probably minimum 3 large competitors in every market)
Market definition should be tied to revenue source. It'd be difficult, but doesn't seem insurmountable.
The Android/iPhone problem is somewhat of a unique case, given mobile's size. IMHO "unreasonable to non-monopolize" should be an option... but come with FRAND interconnection requirements as a consequence of designation (e.g. Android/iPhone both have to offer the ability for other apps stores to be implemented, and can only charge those stores FRAND fees)
And novelty / new markets could be solved by progressively implementing the tax rate increases as the market matures (e.g. first 5 years).
As an engineer, I can tell you it's not even easy to keep things working internally - let alone support every possible integration. Just because it's easy to say, doesn't mean it's feasible to do.
But if you're convinced its what people want, there's nothing preventing you from making it your life - like other people have done with their strategies.
No one is asking for support for every possible integration.
What people are asking for is not actively preventing other integrations. That means through business means and deals as well as technological measures.
I gotta be honest, I really feel like these comments are completely divorced from reality.
No one (p99.99) wants to get rid of Google/Apple on their phones. But "how do I install Play services" is a wildly popular search for people who own Kindle Fires.
No one wants to deal with the Windows 98ificaiton of phones.
> I gotta be honest, I really feel like these comments are completely divorced from reality.
> No one (p99.99) wants to get rid of Google/Apple on their phones. But "how do I install Play services" is a wildly popular search for people who own Kindle Fires.
Just like no one wants to get rid of Internet Explorer, right?
No one wants to, in large part because it's a fucking nightmare. I say that as someone who not only knows how, but knows how to write the code for it too. Why is it so hard? What makes it a nightmare? Their business model requires a walled garden, because otherwise...
Anyways, People have no issues migrating from myspace to facebook, or from youtube to instagram to tiktok. If it wasn't a fucking nightmare full of bullshit, user hostile rules (e.g. manifest version, or max age of TCP connections) there'd be a market for Google alternatives.
Right now the only motivation is privacy, and Graphiene works pretty well. Turns out, caring about privacy is a lot more motivating than wanting some feahure to work. Especially when "they" have a vested interest in making sure no one else can provide that feature.
You probably simply don't know what this is about. When Android phones "age" to a certain point, they become locked (user cannot log into the OS), and the only way to circumvent this is by jailbreaking them and installing a different firmware / OS.
I have a Galaxy S7 that is in this condition, and I haven't the time to try to reinstall it.
Many users never face this problem because they buy new phones before their old ones hit this particular point, often because many applications will stop working before that due to developers discontinuing support effectively rendering the phone useless. I ran into this problem because I kept my phone around due to some images stored on it (well, now that's lost forever).
I know this requires changing the SoC to x86_64 or ARM but I want bog standard Linux any distribution to run on the cell phone, at least run in the sense of the kernel. The applications would be up to the distribution maintainers. Talking to the modem should just be a Linux kernel module that has been blessed by Linus Torvalds. The code must be clean enough that at no point is he tempted to raise the middle finger or start writing an email. No obfuscated code, no lawful intercept JTAG debugging code, no dodgy BIOS just bog standard Linux and standard x86_64 or ARM hardware. Maybe something like coreboot as the BIOS.
In fairness I also want a goose that lays golden eggs.
Nobody wants that because there's currently no market for it, so no solutions for it.
(And yes, we can quibble about alternate Android app stores in countries that aren't China, but Google's rigged that game heavily in their favor via defaults)
I appreciate the engineering perspective, and you're right that supporting every integration isn't trivial.
Is there a difference between providing an "unlock code" upon deprecation, and requiring "support for every possible integration"(?)?
Setting that aside, it seems it not every possible combination needs official support, but rather that providing an open or documented way for motivated users or communities to build upon or repurpose devices would be beneficial. Many projects exist precisely because tech companies allowed or at least tolerated community-driven solutions.
It's less about expecting everything to be effortless for the original manufacturer, and more about avoiding deliberate restrictions that prevent the community from extending a device's useful lifespan.
> Is there a difference between providing an "unlock code" upon deprecation, and requiring "support for every possible integration"(?)?
As a different engineer than the one you where replying to, I can say that yes, there is a substantial difference between the two. What the original comment was likely referring to with unlock codes, is the ability of unlocking a smartphone's bootloader so that one is able to install custom ROMs. But this is very different from providing support for said ROMs. A company can totally say: "here's the unlock code, but you use this under your sole responsibility, we will void your warranty if you do this". Being able to install custom ROMs at the cost of losing the warranty is a compromise I'm willing to accept: one can still wait for the warranty to expire and then install custom ROMs.
Do the tech companies that make the devices that we now require for daily life because they decided to make the world that way release all of the resources necessary for independent people to do what you're suggesting?
The regulations stop more people from being able to do this than competition does. "because they decided to make the world that way" Who is "they"? Participants in the free market? I don't think inept politicians should supersede them.
A useful big step would be to just use the exact antitrust regulations and laws we have had on the books since the first time we had to figure this out over a hundred years ago. Teddy Roosevelt helped take care of this, though we definitely didn't wield them against AT&T for too long.
They served us okay enough right up until Reagan decided that monopolies would be fine if they "benefited the consumer", as if that isn't a trivially stupid concept to anyone who has dealt with any system ever. Thanks to Reagan's admin, we allowed companies to nakedly take aggressive control of any market they want as long as they pretended they wouldn't raise prices.
We need to be less accepting of mergers and acquisitions too. If Google can just throw an absurd amount of money at any startup competitor to kill competition, it doesn't matter that it's not efficient, what human being will turn down $100 million just to stop competing? "Acquihires" are an anti-competitive practice
A company just having a lot of cash on hand can purposely pervert markets if you let them.
Conservatives complain about "punishing winners" but if you want a market to stay competitive, and therefore allow market forces to actually function, you cannot HAVE a "winner", or at least you can't let someone win so comprehensively that their resources end up warping the market just like a lot of mass warps spacetime. You must ensure that any company can be threatened by upstarts.
Depending on what you want to use it for, the device and the ROM is one aspect, but secondary to that is the online services and apps accepting your device. I think android ROMs are a dead-end now because of aspects like safetynet/play integrity, unless you put the work into countering/spoofing them a lot of the tasks people use phones for now such as online/accounts/payments require the device to appear untampered/modified for security purposes. I have my old 2018 phone on android 14 via an unofficial lineage build because there was the freedom to do that, but I expect a bunch of apps will also make use of their freedom to deny me entry.
If you're only using it for on-device tasks then you're probably fine, although at that point the benefits of updating a ROM are probably marginal
I'm on grapheneOS on my daily driver, and that ROM officially passes basicIntegrity compliance without spoofing, but it lacks SafetyNet compliance (and fundamentally won't ever be able to get it officially) and the project refuses to fake/spoof it.
This is enough for absolutely everything except Google Wallet/Pay.
I haven't had to put much effort into keeping my Play Integrity bypass working. I might touch it once a year. I do fear the day Google starts actively fighting it.
> Why can't I swap cloud backends on the mobile platforms?
The real answer is because this is a ton of work for very little customer benefit and creates tons of headaches to solve a mostly theoretical problem. It's not worth it to anyone involved.
Exactly, Apple will put in all the work to implement cloud features in a way where you can swap out the backend just so Hacker News Guy, as the "techie" guy in the family, can set up his whole family with his own hacked together cloud backend for their phones which will regularly fail and cause people to like their iPhone less, and/or support calls to Apple that will be 100x harder to troubleshoot.
No? Why would you. "Expandable" open standards are perfectly possible, though they do lead to some market fragmentation, but "market fragmentation" is just another name for "Product differentiation".
Early in the 20th century, the telephone network was NOT an open standard. You had to ask AT&T to come to your home and wire a new telephone into THEIR network, and you weren't allowed to do anything else with that network. Opening that network up allowed us to build good modems (instead of relying on acoustic couplers which had abysmally low data rates due to bad quality coupling), build things like fax machines etc.
Open standards with open networks is a driving force to innovation. The internet is another one. We should be pushing very hard for basic rights to interact with networks and infrastructure.
If the power companies had the kind of control that we've given """Tech"" businesses over their "networks", you wouldn't be allowed to plug anything "unapproved" by a business into the wall. Your local utility could literally extract a tax on any product that needed electricity.
Open standards and laws that explicitly allow working in someone else's system for the purpose of Fair Use and interoperability are a requirement for continuous progress. A patent can encourage someone to make an initial investment into improvement, but the very moment they have any advantage the patent system means nobody else will be able to offer that kind of functionality for 20 years or so. Consider how long none of us were able to "Buy now" on any website other than amazon.com because of a stupid patent.
The entire PC ecosystem only exists because the law says that there was a way you could, legally protected, interact with someone else's intellectual property. It doesn't have to be easy, just possible. Clean Room reverse engineering is an insane endeavor, but without it, IBM would have strangled PCs as a platform in the crib, because that would be more profitable a business than what we have now.
If we want technological advancement and the ability to buy what you want, use what you want, do what you want with what you buy, then we need to forcefully wrest control away from these big companies who would really prefer to maintain tyrannical control over their "platforms" because it's just more profitable.
So everytime they want to make a change to their backup system they’d need to update the standard for everyone else ? Or make an extension of it just for them
The entire PC ecosystem only exists because the law says that there was a way you could, legally protected, interact with someone else's intellectual property.
Right, which is why we should abolish the FDA, because forcing someone to follow my ideology of "stuff sold as medicine shouldn't kill me (99% of the time) if I follow the directions" is immoral.
We should also abolish copyrights, because forcing companies to respect my IP is an ideological stance.
Trademarks are gone too, because you can't force a company to not trample my trademark and abuse my brand position without forcing an ideology on them.
You maybe tilting at windmills. The problem is greed-oriented corporations will inevitably find the path of least resistance to more money against the interests of its workers, customers, and even the environment. Only worker-/user-owned co-op organizations have a real chance to break this cycle. We must stop feeding billionaires our time, our money, our labor, and our votes because they will never look out for us.
Supporting a policy or a regulation which looks at just competition with zero incentives to care for users because it may help the portfolio is not a good look. People may argue otherwise, but DMA exists to make sure the gatekeepers lose market share to their rivals, even if it comes at the expense of consumers.
Eg: Google asked to remove maps from their search page, which means a user has to do extra clicks to get to the info they want. Bad experience yes. And now, they still did not lose market share so EU is asking google to do more.
I am not against the spirit of the act, but their goal is to listen to competition and ask for changes accordingly. If it screws up users, so be it. There would be no winning. Yes, google search is a monopoly, and should not be so big. The act is unbalanced.
A lot of proponents of iMessage example miss out that WhatsApp won outside of USA. By just building a better product and utilizing network effects.
> DMA exists to make sure the gatekeepers lose market share to their rivals, even if it comes at the expense of consumers.
It sounds like you're not very familiar with the DMA. Most of the regulations have direct benefits to both consumers and developers. From the consumer side, it permits me to:
* Install any software I like, including software Apple doesn't like. For the longest time Apple wouldn't let me install Microsoft xCloud. It was only after the DMA that the loosened this restriction. Ditto for emulators. They still forbid many apps focused on gambling, porn, and cryptocurrencies.
* Install any App Store and choose to make it default. I can choose a default browser now. Soon I will be allowed to choose a default navigation software. It's INSANE that this was locked down until the DMA.
* Use third party payment providers and choose to make them default. Why should I be forced to use Apple Pay?
* Use any voice assistant and choose to make it default. Siri is the worst of all personal assistants. Why can't I use another one?
* User any browser and browser engine and choose to make it default. The fact that Apple forces everyone to use WebKit in 2025 is nothing other than a farce.
* Use any messaging app and choose to make it default. I am currently forced to use Apple's SMS app.
* Make core messaging functionality interoperable. They lay out concrete examples like file transfer.
* Use existing hardware and software features without competitive prejudice. E.g. NFC. A focus area for the Commission is cloud backup. Apple currently doesn't permit the use of competing cloud backup provides, or one's own, for that matter. iOS can only be backed up to Apple servers, and other apps on a per-app basis.
* Not preference their services. This includes CTAs in settings to encourage users to subscribe to Gatekeeper services, and ranking their own services above others in selection and advertising portals
* Much, much, more.
This is before we have explored the various ways the DMA improves the competitive landscape. Apple is clearly abusing their dominant market position to block competition. This is always bad for everyone except the one company in the dominant position.
I did not mention apple in my comment. And what you wrote does not contradict what i wrote.
If they truly started with customers, perhaps we can agree that having to click another site to get to a simple one line answer is wrong. Thats why people prefer LLMs, they get the answer without having to click to multiple sites. But it's good for competition. In cases where customers and competition is at odds, ideally the law should favor customers. Except in EU, it favors competition. Customers dont have a seat at the table, competition does.
> I did not mention apple in my comment. And what you wrote does not contradict what i wrote.
I believe it does. You wrote that the DMA is intended to make gatekeepers lose market share, "even if it comes at the expense of consumers." Clearly this is coming at the expense of no consumers. On the contrary. This is a major improvement to way we use these essential products. I provided concrete examples of the iPhone that I use. This is a major win for consumers across the EU. It's also a major win for competitors. The only company it hurts (ever so slightly) is Apple and a handful of other trillion dollar companies, and I think they'll be just fine.
As for "intending" to make gatekeepers lose market share, one could argue that all anti-competitive laws "intend" to make market abusers lose market share. We still consider anti-competitive laws a net good for the market and society.
Strange to use WhatsApp and "utilizing network effects" as part of your rhetoric. Haven't they been commonly used to harm users?
And to address your general argument, I don't think bad UX can be put in the same category of harm as monopolistic market manipulation. Of course you can have the most integrated, slickest, most clairvoyant apps if you're Google. They have the money, data and access for it. And you could justify walled gardens for this but not abuse of monopoly. It's unbelievably shortsighted to do so.
We should not pay more to Google/Apple to do less clicks, they use the same logic to make it difficult to cancel or stop paying for things. You seem to be confused about what screwing up users mean.
So, after the first round of compliances, they did a review of the changes and did meetings with the likes of Yelp etc. This led to the next round of changes.[1] I am for the changes, just that I think you should also look at it from user perspective too, especially when what the user wants vs the competitor wants is conflicting.
What worries me is the way big tech is forced to build some kind of law book (they call their TOS) some kind of detective apparatus, some kind of kangaroo court and a model for punishing the citizen (user) which is not something anyone should want them to do including them. It is like the old time court where every decision is made though the lens of profit. It gets even more dystopian in a closed ecosystem.
This is really our (US) fault. Terms of service is not the law. It should never be the law. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is a terrible piece of legislation that is completely out of touch with reality. It should have been abolished a long time ago and yet we have taken no steps to abolish it here in the US.
This is all our (US) doing. We blazed the trail like this and have done nothing to correct our mistakes.
Did I download the game from Dell’s servers? Was the game made using tools authored by Dell? Did the game go through a quality assurance process run by Dell? I know at one point they ran a digital distribution platform and I’d be highly surprised if they weren’t charging some sort of fee.
Any claim of fees for hosting a distribution platform is nullified by the lack of alternatives. I don't get to kidnap you can then charge you rent and food costs.
The main thing that reduces the value of hosting is that it's become cheaper over the years. Back when the App Store was new, privately hosting shareware games on my own domain was a substantial cost, IIRC around 10% of my total income from those games.
But it's somewhat hyperbolic to compare a mandatory cost that you have to pay to someone regardless, to being kidnapped.
It's silly in that it shows how ridiculous the situation is. No one asked for Apple or Google to be the wardens of what users can or can't install on their devices. Asking for a fee for this "service" is the cherry on top.
We've been able to install whatever we want on our PCs since the dawn of personal computing and it never was an issue. I don't see why we couldn't have a similar system on mobile devices too.
There are some people who are indeed asking for that and I have no problem with app stores taking a cut for publishing and marketing on their stores as long as there are other paths for people to get apps on devices.
Are you an LLM? Because you seem to have advanced an argument that you just called silly.
edit: maybe pull the entire thread into the prompt, rather than just the comment you're replying to? Preprocess to add some context around previous replies so you know they're yours? Not knowing anything about your previous responses is a tell.
The initial comment I replied to said "why would you pay Dell to install a game?" No one is making that argument. It is a strawman and that is in fact silly. App stores absolutely have the right to charge a cut to be on their platform and I have no problem with that as long as there are other means of getting apps on devices. I'm not sure what isn't clear here.
We should also apply the same logic to game consoles. Why should Sony get a cut of every game I buy? It's not like they even have hosting costs associated with it--I'm buying a physical game from a store. Why should I need to get Nintendo's blessing in order to make a game for Switch? Why can't I download games directly from the game developer's web site for any of these console platforms?
In the 90s we DID apply the same logic to game consoles. Sony, Nintendo, and Sega all lost or settled court cases that established a precedent of interoperability.
Sega's trademark rights were literally ignored as a "Fair Use" for a 3rd party to be able to release games for Sega's console, because the alternative was that it would be impossible to legally release a third party game cartridge, which the court did not like as an outcome.
But then we got the DMCA and laws and rules that make it not legal to circumvent DRM in an attempt to do the normal Fair Use things. That's the primary legal limit to running whatever you want on consoles. Companies were given the legal right to make a technical protection of their IP, and if you tried to get around those technical measures to do things that you had a legitimate and legal case to do, you would still fall afoul of the law.
Basically the DMCA completely obliterated the previous "You can't prevent a third party from touching your stuff after you sell it" that was status quo before. There's all sorts of vagaries in US copyright law about Fair Uses and "legal backups" but the DMCA destroys all of that. All you have to do is encrypt or even just xor your program/movie/whatever with a simple key and suddenly it's completely illegal to use any tool other than one provided or licensed by that company to interact with that data. It's insane.
The courts had given americans fairly strong property rights with digital property, much more closely aligning with rights for physical items and the doctrine of first sale, but the DMCA destroyed all that, because that's what IP companies wanted.
I think I didn't communicate well: I am all for forcing game consoles to also open up. If one can argue against walled gardens for mobile devices (and I would), the same argument works for game consoles, too. They're both, at their cores, general purpose computers that just have DRM and restrictive licensing slathered all over them.
Breaking up monopolies used to be one of America's greatest strengths—Standard Oil, AT&T, even Microsoft faced real antitrust action. That willingness to enforce competition fueled economic growth and innovation.
But under Trump, there’s little chance of that happening. Big Tech has only grown more entrenched, and instead of being challenged, it’s likely to gain even more influence. The era of real trust-busting is over for now, and these companies aren’t going anywhere. I hope for the best in future.
I'm interested how it would be with Musk. He has enormous influence over the markets but he is not an "company" but an individual. I wonder how this would be resolved. I guess just let him choose what he can keep? That's sounds fishy to me.
The DMA does make it so you can unlink your Google account from your YouTube account, or your Facebook account from your Instagram account, and that they can't share data. Or what are you meaning?
So, when was the last time a company was split by the SEC or such? I can only think of older examples (Boeing, AT&T, etc)
What I think regulators are seeing is that they split, wait a bit then merge all over again, negating that effect
And I agree about the GDPR, though the DMA seems to have had bigger effects (including preventing EU from getting the wet dud known as Apple Intelligence - I guess we can recognize this was a cop-out from Apple for a poor product instead of an actual hurdle)
Does the law define criteria by which gatekeeper companies are identified, or does it explicitly call out six companies for scrutiny?
In the US, in general, that kind of targeted law is highly frowned upon (bills of attainder were a tool the King used to target political opponents and the Constitution wrote them out as a result).
This is absolutely not what I would have expected.
I love Paul Graham but he's always criticised the EU for having too much of a heavy hand regulating things and 'stifling innovation' while there is plenty of room for nuance here -- the EU can be doing both. I think this suggests many in YCombinator are not as 'Libertarian' as they originally thought and there small mindset change happening.
If you are against heavy handed regulations I think supporting the DMA is only logically as those regulations are now coming from gatekeepers such as Apple or Google so limiting them in what they are allowed to do is fully compatible with this mindest I believe.
The Libertarian philosophy is concerned with limiting the powers of government not companies.
I think people are seeing that companies can wield as much power and influence as governments can and yet have no democratic mandate or similar accountability mechanisms that we impose on governments.
By this point, it should be fairly clear that unregulated markets lead to monopolies. If modern libertarianism still entails "the freer the markets, the freer the people" I would consider this to be empirically disproven[1].
[1] Except for minimal states which have not succeeded in reality because some type of strong organization's force will likely always exceed the market's implicit one.
I'm hoping YCs next 'big' move for growth is to open an accelerator in either the UK or the EU. The US is moving in the wrong direction and the EU needs institutions like YC. Plenty have tried and failed to replicate YCs success both in the US and the EU but I think YC could make it happen.
YCs success has nothing to do with just YC (not to take credit away) but rather from the fact that the US is a large unified well-regulated market. EU has sensible rules sure but the market isnt unified and the individual countries dont have big enough markets to sustain large numbers of software companies. YC itself is honestly quite open with their knowledge but its just that EU in itself is a pretty terrible place to run a business. Lots if regulation, some good ones.
you have to judge people for their actions, not their philosophical essays.
ycombinator (which, nota bene, also spawned sam) is nothing but distilled capitalism with a fig leaf to appeal to a subset of nerd culture and you all ate it up
This is also about being a monopoly, when there's a monopoly there's no competition. It would be similar to a dictatorship. Developers and customers should've more freedom to buy or sell without being controlled by a dictator. Briefly, there should be more choices from different competitors. This will be healthy for developers and customers.
> Specifically, YC in its letter points to Apple reportedly delaying its LLM-powered version of Siri until 2027, years after competitors brought generative AI voice assistants to market
Apple reportedly delayed its iPhone until 2007, years after competitors brought smartphones to market.
I think where this will fall on deaf ears is due to its branding.
~Europe's~ America's Digital Markets Act might work better with this administration, irrespective of how good or bad the content contained within it is.
In terms of what to focus your efforts on, this can be re-evaluated in a few years time when staff will actually dig in, beyond the optics.
I would not change my language to that preferred by the segregationist political movement that has seized power but then I was born with a spine and not everyone is so lucky.
Folks, let me tell you, our Big Tech is going to be absolutely massive—bigger and better than anybody's ever seen. We don’t need Europe, okay? Their tech companies? Total losers. We’re going to keep on winning—so much winning you’re gonna say, “Please, Mr. President, enough with the winning!” But we won’t stop. If we don't win the first time, we'll slap tariffs on them so fast their heads will spin. And if tariffs don’t work, guess what? We’ll just buy them out—it’ll be huge. And if that doesn’t do the trick… well, let’s just say you really don’t want to know what comes next. We’re gonna win bigly, folks. Tremendous.
Trop break that duopoly, we need rules for hardware manufacturers to store complete spécifications in a trusted public registry, with fines if the doc is incomplete, misleading, etc...
We all are trapped by TOS into data mining operation. There is no denying this fact. You don't own your computer or smartphone. You don't own your data. Practically speaking, we don't have an accessible and user-friendly tool to protect ourselves.
The humanity collective data output is weaponized, and the surveillance state is transforming itself to an AI governance.
Publicly announced by the WEF. And embraced by the masses, which have nothing to hide.
Moreover, this thing is labeled as inevitable progress and the only option is transhumanism and post human ethos.
Add to this incoming digital dollar/euro plus social scoring systems, and we are cooked.
I don't see this happening although I would have a beer belly laugh if all of these tech oligarchs got on their knees just for Trump to piss on their heads.
Supposedly, he's not into watersports. Given his temperament, his attitude toward SiliValley CEOs could change in the next 5 minutes, then go another direction 5 minutes later.
We are not dealing with a stable individual here. The only predictable trait he has is vindictiveness.
What's wrong with "cherry-picking" things you like, and supporting those?
Honestly the more I think about your comment, the less I can make sense of it. You are talking about their support of the DMA as "cherry-picking", right?
everything's so partisan and not nuanced today - tons of people go with the idea "the [political party] are 10,000% correct, and nothing you say can make me think otherwise!!
i don't like any one party or group unconditionally. while I have a leaning, nuanced opinions on issues can be a good thing :)
It's hard to believe that so many Americans, including prominent industry leaders like YC, are so delusional about the political situation in America today. You are not getting such regulation. You aren't getting any regulation. If rules do pass it will be because of politics and corruption, not the public good.
I really want two things:
* companies cannot engage in any activity a common person would consider “spying”, cannot take the data collected by users of that service and transfer it to another entity, and third parties may not aggregate data collected about persons for any reason. There are a million and one useful reasons to do each of these things, but companies have proven themselves morally bankrupt and should lose that ability. This would go beyond “opt-in”, just make it illegal or the impractical (e.g. it would require a notary, licensed broker, or lawyers on both sides to engage in the practice)
* digital “purchases” are transferrable and have all of the rights and privileges afforded to physical goods. The producer/consumer balance shifted completely in favor of the producer with digital goods. Terms need to be more favorable to the purchaser as well as protections following the dissolution of a digital marketplace.