Completely correct.

The only way to ensure this doesn't happen is to criminalise device manufacturers being in charge of what software runs on their devices.

Anyone who's ever remotely (1) been involved in the exercise of utter worship that is owning and using an apple product and (2) developed even the slightest bit of self awareness around this could probably tell you that the app store is only the tip of the iceberg.

I speak from experience as someone who realized that my data / energetic investment in apple platforms were being constantly sacrificed to achieve that authoritarian cohesion.

the internet was fine before appstores. sure, occasionally an idiot downloaded virus.exe, but that was never the end of the world.

I don't think Google has handled Android particularly well, but you have to be on some 1990s Netscape kool-aid to think that the web is or should be "the primary way for users to experience computing". Computing is just one kind of online service, and despite decades of effort to attempt to force-fit all applications into a browser, sometimes just a damn program that runs natively on the CPU is a much better fit for the task. Computing through the use of such programs is not a bad thing. Providing a central distribution point for such programs is not a bad thing—Linux distros do it all the time. Some of the fuckery-duckery Google has tried to pull with Android should be criticized, but it's not as cut and dry as "the web is open, everything else is proprietary vendor lock".

Heh, that’s all very cool and lots of smart words, but have you thought of children? Have you thought of elderly falling and unable to get up[1]?

Surely you don’t want your fellow citizens to fall for Russian, Chinese, Another State Actor propaganda?

State surveillance on unprecedented level? Don’t be paranoid! Surely a state actor would never abuse the power to snoop for your private photos[2]!

Electronic waste? Duopoly? Censorship? Ownership? Those are made up words, comrade!

[1] - https://youtu.be/cwCtM6D4GOc

[2] - https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/karen-r...

As a user the one thing I love[d] about the Apple App Store was that they easily g[a/i]ve refunds for sc[a/u]mmy apps, no questions asked.

I actually wish it was MORE aUtHoRiTaRiAn to keep out the crap that's still on it.

Agreed, Alex... but the Chrome team is not different. Nor is Edge. All three companies are willing to use all of their products for authoritarian control. The web platform feels no less captured than the app market.

Corporate tax in China is 25%

Corporate tax in Apple land is 30%

Funny?

Maybe it's not a great idea to allow a company to decide what software users can run, and I am inclined to believe that Murphy's Law will apply. Ultimately, software is freedom of speech.

> Google is not creating moral distance between itself and Apple

I laughed out loud at this. Google lost two antitrust lawsuits this year alone.

I just want to remind people that the alternative to authority is anarchy. No, not the utopian kind, Star Trek style. Think: Mad Max.

I’m trying to communicate with relatives of my partner while on holiday. We have iPhones, they all have Androids. We asked them to install “ChatGPT” because its voice mode is shockingly good at near-real-time translation.

When I type “ChatGPT” into the Apple App Store, the top hit is… drumroll… the very same, by OpenAI.

My uncle in law was struggling a bit on his phone and showed me what came up: a wall of fakes. Scam app after scam app, all with similar icons and similar names “GPT Talk”, “Chatty GTP”, and garbage like that.

Why would anyone want this?

Why would I prefer this?

Why would you… unless you’re an “app developer” working for… not the company that ought to be getting the first and only search result.

The problem here — specifically here on Hacker News — is that a lot of you work for those companies. Startups faking till they make it, engaging in guerrilla marketing, less then perfectly legal practices… hoping to be the next Uber or AirBnB by emulating them.

Politely, and with all due respect: Bugger off.

Your arguments come from unclean hands.

Most of the world likes the authority of the App Store.

If you don’t, if you’re vocal about “rules are bad!” it says volumes about you, not the rules and the people that enforce them.

Well written, but its starting point seems to be “Apple used to be force for good”. — It is a corporation. It wants your money. This is not new. This is not any different from Lilly (Mounjaro), or Google, or any other, er… corporation.

The idea that a CEO will stand up to his democratically elected dictator is absurd. Why should he, when the dictator is merely implementing the policies he said he would during the campaign and still got elected? Why should he make himself and his company and his shareholders martyrs?

Because many people hold Apple to higher standards, that is why.

The problem with authoritarianism is that it does not scale. The ecosystem covers now whole lives of people across the globe - humongous difference.

Note that Apple's app store transparency report (thanks to them for publishing this, they don't have to)

https://www.apple.com/legal/more-resources/docs/2024-App-Sto...

says that there are over 1700 apps removed per year due to "government takedown demands". Since this is separate from about 2 million (!) apps they rejected from the app store and about 80,000 apps they removed from the app store on their own initiative, it stands to reason that they would have disagreed with quite a lot of those requests, but they still obeyed them.

One could think about this in at least two ways:

(1) If the 2,000,000 apps they rejected or the 80,000 apps they removed on their own initiative were very dangerous or very harmful in some way, one might believe that Apple's huge and arbitrary power over iPhones is ultimately beneficial because it's mostly used to protect people, and only slightly used to uphold state power over citizens.

(2) If you compare this to the baseline of "OS developers shouldn't decide what software you can run", then it's already, well, thousands of programs, probably often quite popular ones, that people are being intentionally prevented from using because their governments disapprove. And probably quite routinely for reasons that large parts of the population would disagree with. It is already a frequent event; in some countries (it's a long tail so the absolute majority of the removals in 2024 were attributable to the PRC!) it's plausible that most iPhone users directly experience the results of app censorship.

(You could add to this that users would also be divided about some of Apple's decisions on its own initiative, primarily apps that the company banned for sexual or violent content, usually fictional. Some users may agree with Apple using its power this way and other users may disagree. A recent example is that they've banned the SpicyChat AI erotic chat app, and probably many other "AI boyfriend/girlfriend" apps. In the past, they've banned apps created by various porn sites.)

I think this issue is confusing. I've always believed that device owners should have complete control of their computing devices and not be subject to other people's power when using them. You can see people in this thread pointing out that sometimes this power is being used to protect users (including from having their devices hijacked by malicious third parties, which would also tend to significantly undermine their control of their devices... although one can then argue about what responsibility different parties had to actively prevent that outcome). The argument that technological paternalism contributes to maximizing users' practical control is an argument that must be engaged with. And also, sometimes it's simply not being used to protect users at all.

By the way, if you get into the object level issue then you can get even more confused:

(1) I think the U.S. government probably wanted to ban this particular app merely because it was successful at helping people avoid deportation. But it might turn out that, with this app or with some future app that looks superficially similar, it actually is being used to coordinate violent attacks, even if the developer didn't intend that outcome. At some point, governments will have a case that there is some kind of meaningful physical-world harm associated with the observed usage of some piece of software. (More on that in other points below.)

(2) If Apple literally prevented itself from having the power to approve or reject software for iOS (e.g. by allowing "sideloading", which was the norm for almost all historical computing environments), then you literally could have apps that explicitly describe themselves as meant to coordinate violence (against law enforcement, against minority groups, against specific people, or whatever). This is not a strawman. It's really easy to write such an app. There is no reason to think that people who know how to write apps are all refraining from writing violence-coordination apps. In other contexts, people might be able to agree not to blame toolmakers for downstream uses of their tools, like not blaming radio manufacturers for having their radios be able to receive the broadcast incitements to genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s. So maybe we would eventually similarly be able to agree not to blame Apple for making an OS that could run the "Let's Kill ______" third-party app. But we should understand that on some occasions such an app would probably exist. You know, there are video games whose content is actually pretty gross by almost any given standard. A lot of people have been able to agree that those games can exist, or at least that people other than the developers bear no responsibility for their availability.

(3) You could say that Apple should just make good ethical object-level case-by-case decisions about how to use its power, which is probably what they try to do most of the time, but they sometimes fail, or sometimes there isn't a consensus within the company or within a society about what the right call should be. In this case, we're going to be back here again and again talking about the merits of different app bans, when they manage to get wide enough attention. Remember, again, there were already 1700 app bans per year last year, and presumably lots of governments are only just waking up to the possibility of demanding them!

(4) Governments are already using offline harms to justify incredibly intrusive control of computing and communications. Some of those offline harms are real, not speculative. For example, there really were lynchings coordinated via WhatsApp groups and via WhatsApp memes in several developing countries. The remedies and "solutions" that many governments have suggested in response to such things are incredibly scary.

To me, Apple has BEEN far behind. It's been far behind since the removal of the headphone jack. It's been far behind in the lack of USB integration. It's been way, way far behind the standard of technology, yet people are so pseudo-intellectual about it, to cope for the fact that they spent a ridiculous amount of cash on what is basically mainstream Linux. You can't do anything really interesting with it. You can barely game. It's simply for the mind-numbing office work, and nothing else. You're stuck in this room - this office work Eco system - and you don't know how to leave, and it's all Apple's fault you fell for the bait. You just want to open a window (pun intended) and let fresh air in, but there are no windows, and it's all Apple's fault.