It is painfully obvious, but Apple's singular goal is to make money (profit for shareholders) and THAT IS A GOOD THING. They'll cut corners, test the boundaries in pursuit of that, and sometimes cross over it.
Suing them is the right way to fix those behaviors.
Is it really though?
It requires money. Regular people can't to this.
The problem we have with quasi-monopolies is that they have too much power and don't have to care about regulations.
> Suing them is the right way to fix those behaviors.
The problem is that it doesn't work. I am still waiting for Apple or one of the other TooBigTech to get a fine that really, actually hurts. But nobody will do that: the US like monopolies (as long as they are US companies of course) and others (like the EU) don't dare regulating US companies because... well because the US governement won't accept it.
REQUESTED INJUNCTIVE RELIEF
To remedy Apple’s unlawful unreasonable restraints of trade, monopolization, attemptedmonopolization, and unfair competition, Plaintiff requests that the Court enter injunctive relief,including but not limited to the following:
(a) Enjoin Apple from conditioning any payment, revenue share, or access toany Apple product or service on an agreement by an app developer to launch an app first orexclusively on the Apple App Store;
(b) Enjoin Apple from conditioning any payment, revenue share, or access toany Apple product or service on an agreement by an app developer not to launch a version of theapp with enhanced or differentiated features on a third-party iOS app distribution platform orstore;
(c) Enjoin Apple from conditioning any payment, revenue share, or access toany Apple product or service on an agreement with an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM)or carrier not to preinstall an iOS app distribution platform or store other than the Apple AppStore;
(d) Require Apple to provide rival iOS app stores with access to the App Storecatalog to ensure interoperability and to facilitate consumer choice;
(e) Require Apple to permit the distribution of rival iOS app stores through theApple App Store on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms;
(f) Enjoin Apple from requiring developers to use Apple’s IAP system as acondition of offering subscriptions, digital goods, or other IAPs;
(g) Require that third-party application developers be given functionality andaccess to iOS application programming interfaces on terms no worse than the terms Apple allowsfor its first-party applications;
(h) Require Apple to allow developers to fully disable Apple’s IAP system;
...
among other things
I'm not smart enough to get into the politics of other parts of the world, but just because the EU found something illegal doesn't mean its the basis of a good lawsuit under the US rules. Will be interesting to see how this unfolds.
- You agree to the letter of the ToS when you click "I Agree" when you set up the iPhone,
- You also already agree to the spirit of the App Store when you buy it. After all, it's not some big secret
- You can get by with webapps for the most part anyway
- You can buy an Android, a flip phone, or pull a power move and have no phone
Buying an iPhone and then demanding that it has to work differently is acting in bad faith IMO.
Buying something used to mean something. If you're still beholden by company rules of a product you _bought_, you have been leasing/renting it.
If I buy a house from a builder, and it came with a requirement that you can only use Amazon Ring cameras, or builder-approved groceries - you'd be pretty pissed.
But you're right, maybe we should invent a new word for a purchase that is encumbered by legal agreements or subscriptions.
Furthermore, in the US (and some other countries), you don’t _actually_ own a house or it’s land. you own the rights to that house (a deed) as long as you continue paying your property taxes. see what happens when you stop paying uncle sam… it’s kind of like a subscription lol.
As a developer, there is no choice. Apple should not be able to abuse their dominant position.
These companies have been dominating the landscape for decades now, most likely for longer than most app developers have been app developers. As a developer, there's definitely a choice: don't make an iPhone app; don't make an app at all. Make something else.
If you say you want access to the walled garden because that's where the people are, then consider that they are in there because they like the walls. From this point of view, you don't have a right to demand that the walled garden have free entrance.
Sure it's their car and they can do whatever they want with it, but consumers are losing choices - which is what anti-monopoly rules are for. Say, Michelin or Pirelli tires are strictly better but Tesla doing this harms consumer choice and that's why it is bad.
Imagine if this were extended to Tesla branded chargers. Or Tesla branded paint. It's your damn car so you should be allowed to do whatever you want with it.
But if someone then bought a Tesla the day after, they'd have far less right to be outraged.
And if the new tires & paint were integral to fundamental value-add of the car (the analogy breaks down here), then there's just zero grounds for it.
if tesla mandated tesla-only tires since day one (2012?), and they claimed it’s a perk/feature of the car, AND i bought the car anyway. Did i as a consumer not sign up for that?? There is more than 1 car manufacture after all.
None of the ios consumers are hoodwinked and apple offers free returns within 2 week in the US. The locked-down app store has been apples way since (almost) day one. Consumers voted with their wallets to not buy an android phone. I think that’s the difference?
IF android didn’t exist it wound be a different story, and it would also be a missing opportunity in the phone market.
Microsoft was hit with monopoly on browser even though you can install anything or go buy a Mac.
But when you control a huge portion of the PC market, and you put it in by default, you are cascading your monopolistic benefits down to installed software.
Apple does not have complete domination of smartphone across all demographics, but they do have domination in many segments.
For example, it is estimated that around 88% of teenagers have iPhones. Apple makes it very hard to leave their ecosystem because of iMessage, Facetime, and ALL of your digital purchases being tied to their ecosystem. So, what happens when all those teens grow up? Do we really think they will leave Apple ecosystem?
What cascades from that is a long term digital domination strategy, and when you have that only one digital store option, now you have a monopoly argument.
Now why would Apple do this? Because they have hobbled Safari so that it does not have modern web APIs which would allow web developers to create web-apps that use APIs that are only allowed on App-store apps on IOS devices.
This forces developers to either make an app for the App-store, or don't have any IOS users.
This is one of many reasons Apple is being sued by the DOJ - because they won't allow any other browser engines on IOS, at least not in the US, the EU slapped them on the wrist and now it's allowed there.
Safari is the current worst web browser in terms of features and bugs, and Apple wants to keep it this way for no better reason but greed. They want to push people to make App-store apps, which they can extract 30% revenue from.
That is anti-competitive, and monopolistic behavior.
By this logic, there is also no requirement for one to eat and breathe, anyone can simply stop. The problem is the consequences.
Building an iOS app is requirement if you want to provide lots of services and compete on lots of market. The mobile phone OS landscape has become a duopoly, and society is free to impose certain obligations on those companies.
Either this is bad faith, or you are uninformed.
> that's the cost of doing business.
All the question is there. Is that the cost of doing business, or is Apple abusing their dominant position?
If a company invests billions in R&D to create hardware and its integrated software, shouldn’t it have the right to control who or what interacts with it? Why should I be forced to open up the carefully designed ecosystem I’ve built?
If my pitch is premium, high-speed hardware and intuitive software so user-friendly that a monkey can use it, the trade-off is that you agree to my Terms of Service. There are other options out there.
Apple isn't dominant in the market worldwide (Android is), and they are competing against Android. Apple often implements things Android did first. That's how competition works.
Apple's global marketshare is 30% or just under.
Anybody (possibly except Epic Games) can develop and publish on the App Store. There's a cost associated with it, which in Apples case is 30% (or whatever you negotiate apparently). If you play by the rules, you can keep doing that as long as you like.
If you rent a shop in a shopping mall, there will be costs associated with that as well, and it's almost guaranteed to be more than 30%.
That is essentially what Apple is providing for those 30%, they provide a shopping mall where you can expose your goods, and people can pay for them. They handle the pesky stuff like refunds, (international) taxes, compliance with various government requirements, EU rules, and everything else. They even handle potential lawsuits for you (provided your app wasn't the one breaking laws).
They also vet (mostly automated) apps to ensure they're not using private APIs. That is for your protection. It's not an evil scheme by Apple to keep competitors out, it's for protecting the end user from bad actors like Meta scooping up all your personal data for "backup purposes" via some internal API.
Here in Europe we've had "alternative app stores" for a year or so, and despite living in a country where ~70% of the population uses iPhones, I don't know a single person that has ever used an alternative App Store, just like I don't actually know anybody that has downloaded an alternative keyboard despite those being available for a decade or more.
There is really very little you cannot do on the App Store in terms of features, so for many end users it is not a problem.
You may not like the price associated with it, which is what most of these complaints are about, the fact that Apple scoops up 30% of recurring subscriptions created through the App Store as well. People tend to forget that running your own infrastructure is also not free, especially when you need to handle refunds, legal matters and international compliance.
And that's the core of the problem, most of these companies complaining wants to use Apples built in App Store tools, but they want to direct them to their own App Store for free, ditching the complicated stuff of dealing with users on Apple. They're more than happy with Apple to handle payments and refunds if they do it for free.
Sideloading is usually a very bad idea in this day and age. In northern europe at least, your phone is quickly becoming your most trusted device in matters concerning anything state or municipality, and here we have a national ID app on our phones, along with social security, healthcare, drivers license, micro payments, taxes, childcare, hell, there's even video conferencing with your GP, in an app that has access to your medical records, including bloodwork and various scans. There's literally no way in hell I'm trading the perfectly walled garden for the Wild West outside.
Anecdotally, where I live, most companies don't allow Android phones as company phones as they're considered insecure, and instead mandate iPhones. The more regulated the industry (medical, banking, power, etc), the more certain it is that you'll be getting an iPhone.
I wrote a comment about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426128#44427725
> You may not like the price associated with it, which is what most of these complaints are about, the fact that Apple scoops up 30% of recurring subscriptions created through the App Store as well. People tend to forget that running your own infrastructure is also not free, especially when you need to handle refunds, legal matters and international compliance.
Simply having a link in my app to a page where someone pays through Stripe instead of through Apple Payments, costs nothing to Apple and creates no obligation for Apple to do anything.
> Sideloading is usually a very bad idea in this day and age.
Then don't do it. Who exactly is forcing you to?
The problem is, when the option exists it opens up an attack vector that I need to defend against, as it will surely be exploited by malware at some point, downloading an app when you visit some scam site, and boom you're now infected.
> Simply having a link in my app to a page where someone pays through Stripe instead of through Apple Payments,
But it hardly stifles competition, except alternative payment methods ?
> costs nothing to Apple and creates no obligation for Apple to do anything.
The problem is, when stuff breaks, people will contact Apple support. Yes, one call is negligible, but Apple has 2.2 billion users, and it all adds up.
Provided you provide your app for free and charge subscriptions, that also has a cost to apple, as they're providing downloads for your app (again, potentially 2.2. billion of them), as well as any legal troubles (app contents excluded).
I guess Apple could enforce a alternate subscription model where they require you to charge for your app and they take their 30% cut off of that, and lets you use whatever payment provider you like for recurring payments.
It would of course either cut into sales, as people aren't as likely to buy an app and then subscribe to it, though something with "first month free" could probably lure some people in. Alternatively a developer would have to develop a free app, and if people want to have the full experience they'd have to purchase the full version.
Except, developers don't want that. They want to be able to give away their app and sell subscriptions, and they expect Apple to foot the bill for the infrastructure required to provide downloads.
There is nothing wrong with sideloading applications. Protection against malicious applications is taken care of by the OS through sandboxing and a granular permission model. Malware scanning and app signing also have no dependency on the App Store.
Really all you are missing out on is the App Store review process, which is not worth much from a security perspective anyways.
That's the catch-22, said ecosystem is what they want to use because it's considered "secure", but it's only considered secure because it's closed.
It's the same with all the other stuff like frequent locations, photos, etc. It's a walled garden yes, but one that protects your data from bad actors (like Meta heisting whatever they can get their grubby little hands on), and the price is that you can't let others into your garden, or it's no longer walled.
In their own machines they can do whatever they want.
Once they sell it to you, not anymore.
I think people are conflating ease of modification from legally being able to do so. If it's legal, then Apple retains no control over the device.
The bar isnt whether it is legal or not. You know that no company can create laws, and either you're saying it out of ignorance, or willful ignorance.
When Walmart drives away mom and pop shops, and dominate a certain town and then hikes the prices for groceries, you cant say "but it isnt illegal to go buy groceries from elsewhere, what did we - Walmart - do wrong?"
Say it with me - monopoly rules are about consumer choice.
> I think it's perfectly fine to prevent you from having this
Yes I can, legally and morally.
What Apple is taking away is practical control for owners of a class of device that has become essential to my practical participation in society.
I actually desire my country to intervene and change laws forcing Apple give me that control.
"Vote with your wallet" is a BS argument in such a duopoly, because people care about other stuff.
In my opinion it is perfectly fine for society to order a company to hypothetically limit you on this minor thing (and let's be frank: this is super minor), because opening up iOS would benefit companies, countries, economies and other users of phones.
Especially in the light of the only real complaint being that "there is a possibility of loss of security".
It's legitimately easier to just buy a UMPC with an LTE card and use VOIP than do that. That's how bad the situation is at this point.
I say this as someone who gets paid to work on open source and used PostMarketOS on my primary cell phone for years. Even technical people really only have two options right now.
What about we meet in the middle and governments force Apple to only open 50% of the phones, for the same price. Would that satisfy you?
And I 100% guarantee that the piece of this 30% pie is way bigger than the effort it would require them to divert their development like you're suggesting.
EDIT: Oh, and I also bet their lawyer bill for fighting this is bigger than that too. :)
And if the argument has become about security, as others have said, Jailbreak has repeatedly relied on security issues, so the security problems have always been there.
If they wanted that right they shouldn't have sold the computer.
I believe that's why they're calling it "a phone", or "a tablet". The computer they actually sell has plenty of shells available, and lets you tinker with whatever you like.
A phone is not simply a computer, it's a regulated piece of hardware that must comply with local laws and regulations regarding radio transmissions and other stuff. You can't just peek and poke around anywhere you like in the system.
Besides that, it must be able to talk to carefully tuned 3G/4G/5G cell towers, which sounds easy in theory, but it's not. When I made mobile phones 20 years ago, we had people driving around all countries where we sold it, with a test setup where the phone connected to every cell tower it could "see", and recorded logs and GPS coordinates, and that work (and that of countless others) is partially what became the beginning of A-GPS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GNSS), which allows you to triangulate your phones location purely from the cell towers it can see.
Of course that's not how it works today, as most carriers these days register their cell towers in a central database with GPS coordinates, so A-GPS these days is simply a database dump (and a whole lot of math).
As a "fun" anecdote, when I wrote software for mobile phones, it was the only place I've ever worked that had a bug category for "potential harm to user". I'm certain companies working in Medicare and other critical industries also has that, but it was the first and only time I ever saw it.
No. They're computers with a modem peripheral. This is like saying once you plugged your e machine into the phone line it could interfere with 911 calls so they need to be regulated by the FCC. We settled that one over 50 years ago.
Besides the FDA (and similar international counterparts), you're also using your phone for a bunch of other stuff that you probably don't want anyone having root access to. Wallets are one, banking apps, medical data and devices, password managers, and more.
If you have root access, that means that the apps can also get it, after all the app providing root access is itself an app.
Yes I have my bitcoin-qt wallet, Etrade, my ssh keys, and my password manager on a machine I also have root on. I don't run non-free code on it (and I'm very picky about the open source code I do run.) Also just because I have root access doesn't mean I'm running all my apps as root. That's in insane statement to make. I run administrative tools as root and that's it.
The same thing is happening on your phone, you're just not allowed access to those tools, instead various other companies are and when they do things you don't like your options are: throw out your device and data, or bend over and take it.
Again at the end of the day a computer is a computer regardless of you being administratively locked out of yours.
Do you think the same about printer ink?
Regardless, we need to look at the law - and interoperability has a long history of legal support. Patents protect the product itself, but allow interoperable products. Trade secrets product the product from theft but not reverse engineering.
Even the DMCA has explicit carve-outs for interoperability, though that doesn't stop copyright-abusers from trying to wield it (and sometimes winning due to the money game).
Yes, except when they use that control to stifle competition. Competition is good, so we want to promote it.
That is sort of the basis for all anti trust law, to my layman’s understanding at least.
Was that not the sort of rationale Microsoft used to defend its IE shenanigans back in the day?
It was considered to be a violation of antitrust laws then. I don't think Apple would be off the hook now. Especially considering how much more ubiquitous smartphones are in comparison to web browsers back then.
In antitrust terms, it is a form of Vendor Lock-In[0], and could be seen as a form of Tying[1]:
> Tying is often used when the supplier makes one product that is critical to many customers. By threatening to withhold that key product unless others are also purchased, the supplier can increase sales of less necessary products.
As an example, Apple was sued successfully in the early 200s for selling music in a format that could only be played on iPods. iTunes is a platform Apple controls and invented, yet still it was deemed illegal for them to unfairly lock in customers and prevent them from using competing portable music players.
It's one thing to design and built an iKettle in such a way that every aspect from the water filter to the power cord is well thought out but propitiatory. It's another to refuse to plug in to another "inferior" socket because that cuts into your cut of propitiatory cable sales.
If their stuff is so superior, then people will see that and prefer it. They wouldn't need to make it impossible or deliberately painful to use competitors services.
I never really understood the monopolistic argument against Apple. In the first place, there are very clear legal criteria that define what a monopoly is and what anti-competitive behaviors are, and it’s not even the case that majority of the world runs on iOS. It is actually Android that is the most popular OS globally by a wide margin, though the split is somewhat equal in the US.
But the core of my contention is that: if you make the platform that others run on and which creates entirely new economies and allows businesses to thrive, don’t you get to define the constraints that you want since it’s _your_ platform? What’s effectively happening here is that companies are using the courts to force the design of OSes in a certain way: That only open OSes can ever be made, not closed ones.
Note that the businesses who are lobbying against Apple are operating on the very same capitalist, profit-optimizing interests that drove Apple to choose a walled-garden approach. They are not doing this to make the world a better place, and the vast majority of smartphone users do not even care about this “issue”.
This question has already been asked to the United States Court of Appeals, and the answer was "no"[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
Huh, the __user__ paid for the product, so they own it. After the user handed over their money, Apple has nothing to say about who I do business with on that product, or what the conditions are.
You can say "platform" as much as you like, but that's just Apple's way of forcing their way into the argument.
Someone has to make the platform. If they want recognition for that or compensation, maybe they should apply for government funding. Don't bother the consumer with it.
And if you don't like a government regulating a market, then you haven't seen a company regulate one.
Probably you meant it differently, but guaranties and warranties exist exactly due to this. Users have right to expect their device performs as advertised and in a reasonable manner.
But this is already the case. You own the device, you can do whatever you want with it (legally ofc). If I buy a fridge without a freezer, the fact that I can't freeze food with it doesn't mean I don't own the fridge.
Furthermore I don't appreciate other companies using the legal system to profit by forcing Apple to design their products in a specific way.
Aww, does it hurt when your favorite multi-trillion dollar company is taken to court?
If the Nike sweatshops lawsuit were happening today, you'd be the person commenting on the news saying "It does hurt that I cannot purchase cheap shoes. Screw those kids .."
> Note that the businesses who are lobbying against Apple are operating on the very same capitalist, profit-optimizing interests that drove Apple to choose a walled-garden approach. They are not doing this to make the world a better place, and the vast majority of smartphone users do not even care about this “issue”.
They’re all blatantly self-interested, but Spotify is perhaps the biggest hypocrite among them. They’re continuously bolstering their dominance in the streaming music space at the cost of both users and artists, and when Apple gives them features they’ve asked for they refuse to use them because that’d weaken their case. They only care because if it weren’t for Apple Music they’d for all practical purposes have a monopoly.
And while Facebook and Google would still be hoarding data, there are a huge amount of games and apps I'd rather pay 5 for that are now ad-fueled invasive crapps and "pay to remove ads" costs 15 instead of 5.
When a significant percentage of the population uses your products and services, expect regulators to prevent you from abusing that significant group.
The capitalism idea that "markets solve all issues" only works when it's regulated so market players play on even-ish odds and the players don't have control of the market. (And even then it doesn't seem to work for public utilities really).
The naive idea that "Apple makes the product let them decide" would fly well for a device with millions of units, but billions is 1000x more and it comes with responsibility, sometimes the responsibility comes late because regulators are slow bureaucrats.
"With power comes responsibility" used to be a thing, now it's "With power responsibility might knock on your doorstep eventually if you abuse it to an extreme level like imposing a third of all REVENUE transacted through their forced store"
The thing with this 30% tax the private company Apple imposes on a majority of US adults is reasonable?
When you're "competing" with the government (30% tax sounds pretty government like to a Swede, we have 25% VAT) the government will get involved because you're operating a "shadow government" eventually (you set all the rules and set the tax rate, you're now a government).
Supporting Apple here is unreasonable, sure they should be able to take a margin on the app store, but not allowing other stores OR allowing external payment methods to be advertised is definitely predatory behavior and the government already has a monopoly on that.
And the "core fee" response was entirely unreasonable, it is unreasonably expensive. If Apple were operating like Sony on the Playstation where the console is a loss leader for much of it's lifetime then you ofc deserve a cut from developers since you enable them to build profitable games for your platform which markets the game for you and stuff. But Apple makes a profit of iPhones, they make a profit on iCloud, they make profit on App Store... They make a profit everywhere. It's predatory and I don't know how to agree with them here.
I did not read this claim. I read the claim that Apple's approach unevenly benefits companies that engage in surveillance capitalism. No one's ad revenue, for instance, must pay a 30% cut of their revenue.
You are making an argument (and then arguing against it) that Proton did not make, as far as I can read.
> if you make the platform that others run on and which creates entirely new economies and allows businesses to thrive, don’t you get to define the constraints that you want since it’s _your_ platform?
I don't think you do. We constrain what companies are permitted to do all the time. Apple must abide by regulatory constraints first, and then they can add the additional constraints they like.
A simple test -- could Apple say, "Everyone is allowed to use Messages, except Hindus"? It's their platform, don't you get to define the constraints because it's your platform? No, we've collectively decided that kicking some people out based on certain characteristics is generally bad.
Intuitively, this feels right to me, but I think that in this case my intuition fails, because I think of this "right" from the perspective of a person. "They made that thing, it's theirs, they have the right to decide what to do with it."
I don't think the same right applies to a company, though. Especially one so big that it has a significant impact on society, and so big that it's entirely driven by the incentives of capitalism (and not, for example, by a founder's ideals).
In this context I see companies as amoral automata whose only goal is maximizing profits, regardless of the wider consequences of their actions. This seems to produce very good results for the societies in which these companies operate, but it also comes with some side effects. By putting constraints on what companies can do, we can reap most of the benefits and avoid most of the side effects.
</couch-economist>
Not if you effectively have a monopoly. If there were plenty of (relevant) other app stores, Apple wouldn't be able to tax 30% on every app. The only reason they can is that developers don't have a choice: there are far too many Apple users to ignore, and the only way to sell them an app is through the Apple Store.
"We don’t question Apple’s right to act on behalf of authoritarians for the sake of profit, but Apple’s monopoly over iOS app distribution means it can enforce this perverse policy on all app developers, forcing them to also be complicit"
It's not a question of what you like, it's a question of antitrust laws. You can disagree with them of course, but it is their right to sue Apple if they think Apple is breaking laws.
Few things are more enraging than people being left out of chats with friends and family because they didn't bend over for Apple. Even worse being a teenager and having to endure social shaming for it. It wasn't until the EU signaled it was going to bring down then axe that Apple capitulated to RCS.
- Yes, I know you are part of the domestic US long tail that use signal/telegram with all your friends.
- Yes, I know no one outside the US uses iMessage.
ETA: A note because people are pretty incredulous about "most evil". Tech companies do a lot of evil stuff, no doubt.
But there is something special about putting social connection behind an expensive hardware purchase and walled garden lock in. Every other messaging app I know of is open to anyone on most platforms for little or no cost. Apple on the other hand purposely leveraged social connections in your life to force you into their garden and keep you there. Lets not pretend that Apple couldn't open up iMessage or even charge a nominal fee for outsiders. Instead you get an iphone and just seemlessly slide into iMessage. So seemless that most users don't even know that it is a separate service than sms/mms/rcs. Apple muddies that too.
But they would never do that, because using people's closest social connections to force them into the ecosystem and lock them there is just too juicy. "Oh you don't want an iPhone anymore? Well looks like you have to leave your social circles main discussion hub to do so..."
It's just evil on another level.
Don't you think this is _maybe_ an overstatement? I was annoyed about this for years but reading your take is borderline satirical.
> For example, when a user purchases an iPhone, the user is steered to use Apple’s default email product, Apple Mail. It is only through a complex labyrinth of settings that a user can change her default email application away from the Apple “Mail” application towards an alternative like Gmail (Google) or Proton Mail.
> At least for mail a user can in theory modify the default setting. On the calendar front the situation is even worse. A user’s default calendar is Apple Calendar, and the default cannot be modified
That's pretty evil & predatory to me. The fact that it is by design (someone decided it needed to this awful) is why Apple is being evil here. And this is just one example.
There's more
> For example, Apple banned apps from its App Store that supported Google Voice because Apple sought to advantage its own services over Google’s
That's not what the parent is asking. The OP said it was the most evil ever done.
Big Tech does predatory and evil stuff all the time. That's not what's being claimed. The OP is claiming that this specific thing is the worst, the singular event that is above and beyond all others.
EDIT: Actually, there already is a “Default Apps” section right at the top of the page of Settings > Apps. Yeah, if that’s a “labyrinth” then the assumed level of user intelligence is quite low.
Go try to sign into your open-standards-abiding calendar and notes accounts in the Calendar and Contacts bundled with nearly every Android phone on the planet and see how well that goes.
Compared to Android?
Yes.
I have no idea why iPhone users put up with this shit.
I use both iOS and Android.
> It is only through a complex labyrinth of settings
I have no love for the way iOS settings are done, but calling the setting for this in particular a complex labyrinth is some pretty blatant editorializing.
> A user’s default calendar is Apple Calendar, and the default cannot be modified
I don't think this is a true statement? My default calendar is a Google calendar. Actually switching to instead use my Apple iCloud calendar has been something of a chore.
In the difficulty of non-iMessage compatibility, I have had people close to me say "Why don't you just get an iPhone?" with an incredulous tone.
Perhaps tech companies have had more evil things happen on their platforms, that for whatever reason they were slow to react to.
But
"Why don't you just get an iPhone" was a precisely and meticulously engineered line, pure social manipulation, that was intentionally orchestrated to be delivered to me through the mouths of the people I trust most in my life turned unknowing pawns.
That is why I consider it the most evil.
Yes, people in the EU use WhatsApp, by Meta & Zuckerberg, and from what I've seen, often act as if that is some sort of mark of superiority.
Feels like you weren't able to have a proper discussion with those people. In many EU countries, using SMS made/makes no sense because SMS was/is super expensive as compared to WhatsApp. And using iMessage makes no sense because most people don't have an iPhone. From their point of view, it actually makes no sense.
Now if you tell them "well, where I come from everybody has an iPhone" or "SMS have always been free", probably they won't say "still, I'm better than you for no apparent reason".
I don't think that it is actually seen as a mark of superiority anywhere in the EU to use WhatsApp. Unlike apparently in some places it is seen as a mark of superiority to have an iPhone vs an Android phone.
If you go in a EU country where SMS were not prohibitively expensive in the beginning of WhatsApp (e.g. France), you'll see that WhatsApp has been less successful (at least in the beginning). WhatsApp was a killer app because it was free SMS, really.
Since when can WhatsApp interact with SMS users? They're so evil and predatory that they have entirely walled themselves off from that method of communication entirely.
Is that really the worst thing you've seen big-tech do? That's very fortunate.
What about Blackberry Messenger which was the mobile instant-messaging golden standard for years and BB exclusive for as long as it mattered in the market? Was that too long ago to remember?
Apple refusing RCS integration is a very clear example of hurting everyone in pursuit of profit
it's likely not the most evil, but I do think it qualifies as evil. it stands out by being inarguably willful, and having a very broad impact
I find harming hundreds of millions (probably billions) of friendships to be quite evil
I know many MANY people who have lost chats with their loved ones (especially deceased ones) because there is no way to export and save their conversations.
I think this should be as easy as saving photos, which apple makes (somewhat) easier to export.
Back to email, it is pretty horrible to set up my local email server on an apple device. You have to go through these dialogs, apple servers have to be contacted (for "redirection"), and I usually barely get it working.
No escape hatches turns walled gardens first into a jail and then into a brig on a sinking ship.
I think you might be living in a bubble, if this is the "most evil" thing you have heard of a big tech company doing. Go read up on IBM's history, especially in the 30s and 40s. Or a more contemporary example, read up on Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Or Amazon's mistreatment of workers in both corporate and warehouse settings. Or Meta scraping data off your devices without permission to train AI.
And, though I know some folks here disagree, plenty of people around the world believe what's happening in Gaza is a genocide, and Big Tech has materially contributed to making it happen. Or, if you want another example of human cost, talk about how resources for electronics are mined, or how electronics are manufactured.
Saying, "the most evil thing big tech has ever done is make some chat bubbles blue" puts a whole lot of human lives below the color of some chat bubbles.
You can think Apple did a really bad thing by doing that, that's fine. No complaints. But to call it the most evil thing ever done erases an incalculable amount of human suffering.
This is a textbook strawman. OP never said 'chat bubbles blue' as the reason why Apple has evil & predatory practices. You are trying to weaken the argument by finding the easiest target ("the strawman") and then attack it.
The lawsuit pdf has a bunch of examples of active harm Apple has inflicted on users, app developers & ecosystem.
Also, bringing up IBM, Microsoft or Facebook is "whataboutism".
Which lawsuit PDF related specifically to iMessage interacting with Android was mentioned in this comment? I see a comment about RCS.
Now, maybe you are right, maybe I narrowly interpreted RCS in iMessage to mean chat bubbles, and there's a wider interpretation. Even still, there's no possible way that's the singular most evil thing tech has ever done. The OP is free to be anti-Apple, more power to them, but like, let's be real about levels of evil.
> Also, bringing up IBM, Microsoft or Facebook is "whataboutism".
It's absolutely not whataboutism. The claim the OP made was about Big Tech broadly. Bringing in examples of Big Tech doing evil things is a direct and appropriate rebuttable to the argument that Big Tech doesn't do evil things.
This whole thread is the complete opposite of "thoughtful and substantive" and the "Converse curiously" from HN guidelines and I regret participating on it.
I wouldn't count the IBM thing because I don't see it as part of the vernacular "big tech" of today; however I do think it's the most evil so far in this thread.
The others? They are mostly aggressive competition, especially the MS stuff, and altogether I don't see them as more evil than Apple's exclusionary UX. What's at the bottom of it for me is that it harms users directly, e.g. what others said about kids getting shamed for having a non-Apple phone. The one thing not mentioned yet that would qualify for me would be Meta's product altogether with its impact on teenagers; and various gambling simulators like Roblox.
First of all, when Apple created iMessage, there was no possible way for them to predict that friend groups would use it as a reason to treat members of their groups poorly due to using Android phones.
Second of all, Apple did not deliberately make interacting with non-iMessage users in group chats "look like trash" in order to exclude them. Apple went out of its way to make it possible for iMessage to interoperate with the ubiquitous (in the US) SMS, with reduced features because SMS did not support the better features. If, instead, Apple had just made iMessage not interoperate with SMS at all, you'd be screaming about that instead.
Third of all, if people are leaving others out of chats, that's not Apple's fault. That's something for those families and friend groups to work out amongst themselves. "Hey, guys, I don't have an iPhone, and don't really have the money to get one, so maybe we could use GroupMe/GChat/WhatsApp/Signal/IRC/email/smoke signals/meeting in person/any of the myriad other ways of communicating instead?" A) "Oh, sure, that shouldn't be a problem!" (everything is solved) B) "What? No, we're not going to change anything just because it makes it impossible to actually include you in stuff. That's a you problem!" (turns out, the problem is your friends are assholes)
Apple cannot by any reasonable standard be held to blame for the way bullying, status-seeking teenagers treat each other.
If some teenagers see green bubbles as some sort of challenge to their identities, it's probably a useful life lesson.
The problem is not that iMessage exists, it's that it operates in opaque and unpredictable ways, mixing SMS and iMessage (and now RCS) communication in a way where even more tech-savvy users do not understand how it works (first-hand experience - had to explain to someone why their images are super compressed when they send them to me, but OK when they send them to their friend with an iPhone).
And now it's the same with RCS (Android-iOS). I send person A an image, the conversation switches to RCS. They use the "automatic reply" when I call them, conversation switches back to SMS. With person B, the switching between RCS and SMS is even more unpredictable.
>“iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” was Federighi’s concern according to the Epic filing.
Among other statements. Apple was very aware of the social effects of iMessage, and leveraged it to force people into getting iphones.
Tech companies have done lots of evil shit. But never, not once, has one ever crossed the line into turning my friends and family against me (however slightly) because I didn't want to lock myself in Apple's cage, however comfortable it is.
Yeah, you can call my friends and family shitty, but the reality is that the are regular non-tech people, explaining the situation to them is impossible, and iMessage Just Works(TM).
Are you saying Google should freely give away their products?
Apple didn't make SMS bad, it just was. Apple has since implemented RCS and it hasn't changed how I communicate with people from my iPhone at all.
Google should probably take most of the blame for repeatedly fumbling messaging on non-Apple platforms for the past 2 decades. Every time they had something that was getting any amount of traction it got quickly replaced with some stupid new, worse messaging app so a PO could get a promotion.
Regardless of the merits of Apple's actions as regards technical interoperability I feel compelled to point out that this in particular is a cultural problem, not technical malfeasance. RCS users still appear as green bubbles and even if the lack of functionality has been remedied the stigma has not. People at my lunch table 20 years ago were drawing artificial distinctions between "MP3s" (portable DAPs) and iPods because the latter were expensive luxury products and the former were not. The same thing is at work here because owning an iPhone is a proxy for one's socioeconomic stratum. I own an iPhone and as soon as an Android user appears in an iMessage group chat some joker immediately makes a green bubble quip - no degraded picture message required.
People that define themselves by conspicuous consumption don't care about interoperability. They care about brand recognition.
If you want that, you can purchase any number of Android devices.
Shouting "monopoly" from the rooftops is not enough to affect real change. If I wish not to pay property taxes, my options include moving to another state, but courts do not recognize a general right to challenge tax liability on the grounds of personal preference or disagreement with taxation. Perhaps it's worth sparing a thought as to why, and who ultimately empowered that stance.
Plus, this is often the “if I can’t have it no one can” line of thought, sometimes from companies engaging in anticompetitive practices themselves (like Epic Games).
Edit:
WAI stands for working as intended
iPhones are a premium product and they don't have a natural right to 30% of transactions going through it if the participants don't want Apple to know about it.
> It’s the “if I can’t have it no one can” line of thought
That describes what you and _benton are advocating. "If I can't have the phone be the way I want, no one can".
As others have repeatedly said, you can still opt to not use any other kind of app from outside the AppStore.
But as I asked on another thread, as a thought experiment: What about we meet in the middle and governments force Apple to only "open" 50% of the phones, for the same price. Would that satisfy you?
> third parties wish to intervene on a transaction between me and Apple so they can illegitimately get a piece of the pie.
It's actually Apple that wants to intervene in transactions where I don't want them to be a part of. I don't want to pay 10 euros and give 3 to them.
I don't particularly like my iPhone, in fact I see as a worse device in many ways to my old Android phone, but the interoperability with my Mac makes the trade-off worth it. So ironically, the only reason I want it is because of even _more_ anticompetitive practices.
And yes, the day the Mac is as closed off as the iPhone, there will be zero Apple devices in this house.
Anyways- jail breaking requires being or remaining on certain iOS versions on certain specific hardware models. You can’t “just jailbreak” your apple device that you daily drive/use regularly. If you’re not on an old version on the right hardware already, you’re fucked. And waiting for a new jailbreak exploit is a (anecdotally, for me at least) nondeterministic amount of time on the order of O(years), with a significant probability that it will not be relevant for whatever device you’re waiting on.
If you don't want to buy on Walmart and their custom payment system, then just go to a competitor.
With that said: this is an unrealistic scenario. Walmart doesn't pay the famous 30% to ApplePay, only a regular CC-like fee (probably less). Also, physically they can just accept contact payments where they don't interact with Apple but it still works with the iPhone wallet. Online, they can just use credit cards instead of ApplePay, which iPhones have autofill for, and probably not lose much.
There’s also situations where you don’t have a choice. In many parts of the US the only reasonably accessible store (and sometimes grocery store) is a Walmart.
There is a real solution to this, where we codify our social limits through legislation and open standards to prevent these horrible "leopards ate my face" scenarios that everyone seems to hate so much. Or we could keep trusting Apple, and see how many F1 advertisements that nets us in the long-run.
The ones that get into office are most often out of touch and in someone’s pocket because they grandstand on polarizing topics that information-deficient and single-issue voters flock to. I try to vote for candidates who I think will do good that way, and it makes some impact on the micro scale, but on the national scale it’s like trying to drain the Pacific Ocean with a thimble.
The point of this is so that there is the possibility of escaping that walled garden, arguably welcoming more users into the ecosystem.
Nothing would change for you. Just like android users can keep using all things Google, they have the possibility of installing apps from other sources.
If apple is incompetent and makes it less secure, I'm sure they'll fix it.
If my apps are changing, yes it is changing for me.
Right now I can manage all of my app subscriptions from the Subscriptions screen in the Settings app of my devices. If they open up to other payment methods, my subscriptions are no longer centralized, I have to give my credit card information to more parties of variable trustworthiness, I have to worry about subscription renewal policies for every individual app, I have to figure out different methods of cancelling which could be a more difficult process than hitting "cancel" and trusting Apple will stop the payments, etc.
but we cannot have these until the lock in is removed
Whenever I want a subscription I want inside an app, I actually take the effort to go to their website and buy it from them directly, because it's cheaper (not that they're allowed to tell me this in their app though).
When I want to stop paying for the subscription, I cancel it and I'm done. At least in the EU, this is always an easy thing to do.
We need to craft legislation saying software vendors have to support some kind of standardized payment system with easy cancellation built in to it rather than relying on Apples good will.
what you actually want is to force all developers to use Apple's distribution and payment systems, so that you can have every app and service from any provider delivered via your chosen mechanisms. that takes away freedom from developers and users who prefer other systems. it eliminates the market for anyone to make or use something better than your chosen options
If users and developers prefer other systems they can simply use those.
If Apple prefers anticompetitive practices, it can simply only do business in those regions.
bitpush•4h ago
Ouch. Those are some fighting words.