Android has more ads if you buy it through a carrier, but you can easily make it have far fewer ads by installing LineageOS, and then installing Firefox with the real uBlock origin (not ublock origin lite).

iOS does not allow you to install alternative browsers, nor can you customize the OS to the level of lineageOS, so iOS simply cannot match the best that you can do on android.

Android has more of a free market because on my pixel phone, I can choose either Google's android distribution, or LineageOS, or Graphene, or build my own ROM. I can use F-Droid or the google play store.

What we need is laws requiring that all iDevices apple makes are open hardware which support installing android, iOS, or a custom OS you build yourself, all hardware-essential drivers are free, and so on. That would let people compete on the software side of thing while Apple's hardware team iterates on that. If iOS really is better on its merits, people would install it even with the option to pick other OSs.

Or just none? I'm not doing anything special and the only ads I ever see are from some games.

I strongly disagree with this sentiment, Apple shouldn’t be forced by the government to allow other OSes on their products. There is a solution to this, it’s simply to stop buying Apple products if that’s a concern.

Your proposal is that the way to address market consolidation is to buy a different product. You can see the problem with that, right? Products with a network effect need a critical mass of users to be viable, e.g. to be targeted by third party developers and hardware OEMs. The way they achieve that is by starting off with compatibility with existing apps and devices. If the incumbents can lock them out of doing that then new challengers are doomed and your proposed solution is unavailable.

Moreover, it stops being "Apple's product" when they sell it to the customer.

Almost every company, tech or otherwise, even expanding into things like sports have faced this. It’s nothing new. If Android or Linux OEMs want to convince people to move to their ecosystem they should just produce better products that the majority of a population would actually want. Not run to the government to hinder another company because they can’t or won’t compete technologically or brand wise.

There is nothing Apple is doing to lock competitors out of the market. iMessage, Facetime? Convince customers that your option is better.

And also Apple customers buy the hardware knowing it runs macOS/iOS. Apple has never once advertised the OS is changeable or the ecosystem is “open” unlike Google who started that way and is trying to claw things back. You don’t go to a BBQ place and get mad that it serves meat and demand they start serving vegetarian food.

"Bad thing has occurred previously, therefore nothing should be done about it"?

> If Android or Linux OEMs want to convince people to move to their ecosystem they should just produce better products that the majority of a population would actually want.

That's what they're trying to do. "OS that people would actually want" is the one that runs their existing apps on their existing hardware. That's the thing the incumbents are blocking them from doing.

"If you want to make a new OS you must first reproduce the entire hardware supply chain and replace the entire installed base of user devices with a new system that has no existing users" is basically saying that you're not allowed to do it.

> There is nothing Apple is doing to lock competitors out of the market. iMessage, Facetime? Convince customers that your option is better.

If I create a messaging app which is exactly as good as iMessage, but Apple preinstalls theirs and not mine on the majority of US phones and messaging apps have a network effect, what happens?

If I make a better messaging app, but Apple bans it from their app store which is the only way to install it on the majority of US phones and messaging apps have a network effect, what happens?

> Apple has never once advertised the OS is changeable or the ecosystem is “open”

Ma Bell never once advertised that you can use your own phone on their phone network.

The solution isn’t degrading another company’s product or forcing them to do x when there’s already existing competition.

> That's what they're trying to do. "OS that people would actually want" is the one that runs their existing apps on their existing hardware. That's the thing the incumbents are blocking them from doing. "If you want to make a new OS you must first reproduce the entire hardware supply chain and replace the entire installed base of user devices with a new system that has no existing users" is basically saying that you're not allowed to do it.

I mean I just disagree here, I don’t know what else to say. People were fully aware of what Apple was when they bought the products, Apple didn’t trick anyone, or anything. They also are not the sole phone OEM and they don’t have a monopoly.

Other companies can step up and provide actual competitive hardware. There’s nothing stopping Samsung or (especially) Google from putting more effort into their lineups to match the performance, fit and finish that Apple users like. They’ve just settled for mediocrity in some aspects (i.e. Google holding onto their Tensor chips, or not improving the UX/UI of Android, or even improving its brand perception).

> If I create a messaging app…

Not the same thing at all as far as other OSes go, this is more applicable to something like allowing Chromium on iOS. The appropriate comparison would be if another OEMs OS had a messaging feature baked into their OS. Google attempted it (or still does?) and their branding and advertising are just so incredibly bad they do nothing to sway the average population.

I think like a lot of the HN users here, the Android and Linux OEMs and even companies like Framework are disconnected from the average consumer and can’t comprehend why people choose Apple and don’t care about all the technical stuff like an unlockable bootloader, installing apks, etc.

> Ma Bell never once advertised that you can use your own phone on their phone network.

Again, not the same thing as Apple holds nothing near a monopoly in the US or worldwide.

How does it in any way "degrade" their product to allow the customer to do something with it that the customer is not required to do?

> People were fully aware of what Apple was when they bought the products, Apple didn’t trick anyone, or anything.

We can disagree about this one too. Consider what happens if a company simultaneously has no ads and prohibits ad blockers. People aren't really going to object to the prohibition on ad blockers in that case, right?

Then they introduce ads and suddenly the prohibition on ad blockers becomes relevant, but your reply is that ad blockers have always been banned. Okay, but now there are ads.

If your claim is that you can't object if something doesn't change, does that imply you do get to object every something does change?

> They also are not the sole phone OEM and they don’t have a monopoly.

They have more than 50% market share in the US. The trope that anyone who has less than 100.0% market share can't violate antitrust laws is invalid.

Moreover, "two companies together have >99% of the market" is an oligopoly the likes of which is exactly what is meant to be broken up, regardless of what the split between them is. A duopoly is not a competitive market.

> There’s nothing stopping Samsung or (especially) Google from putting more effort into their lineups to match the performance, fit and finish that Apple users like.

We're talking about competition for operating systems. The GrapheneOS Foundation isn't Samsung -- and Samsung locks their bootloaders, so they can't even use Samsung.

> The appropriate comparison would be if another OEMs OS had a messaging feature baked into their OS

Only in the sense that then they would both be engaged in anti-competitive behavior.

You might if there were only two restaurants and both were really meaty.

Yes, there are more than 2 phone OS options but nearly the whole of the market is those 2.

Linux phones are currently a subpar product and it’s not because of Apple. The device hardware sucks and the actual use of desktop Linux hammered into a mobile OS is an extremely poor experience even without app compatibility.

"Your honor, the defense assumes a fact which is not in evidence."

Why is that a safe assumption in this market in this decade? There are huge barriers to entry, both natural and artificially-created through market-clout and lobbying.

Capitalism is the art of making your customers act like this.

If your branding and product is good enough you can overcome this. I mean just look at social media networks too that constantly come in and out of the picture.

Have a look here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_social_pl...

Can you find a US or EU-based social media platform launched in the last 15 years that isn't now a subsidiary of one of the incumbents?

The closest you can come is things like Signal or Discord that are more like messaging apps than social media, and even then both of those are more than 10 years old and both of them put together have less than 10% of Facebook's user base.

Network effects are wicked when incumbents are allowed to purposely impede interoperability.

The problem is that history has proven time and time again that it doesn't. While the homebrew scene for the DS was vibrant, even with the barriers, it was lacklustre on the GP2X, even without the barriers. There were likely a lot of reasons for that, but they all pretty much add up to the idea that not buying locked down products will not help.

It's no longer theirs once they sell it.

Android's "free" market comes with the freedom to be bombarded by ads. As much as i used to like that, i now recommend only apple phone and computers to normal people. The average person has no idea what lineageOS is, forget about knowing how to install it.

The beauty of it is that the average person can buy a LineageOS-enabled system without having to know it's not "normal Android". Look at /e/OS for instance, and hopefully soon GrapheneOS will come preinstalled on some Motorolas.

It's not Google that adds the code that makes your banking app fail: it's the goddamn bank itself.

But I agree with your point that the reason it sucks is not the AOSP-based system, and it's sad to blame the system when it's the app (or many times just Google) that is to blame.

A solution that’s just for computer nerds is close to no solution at all. It’s certainly not one I care to talk about. I may do it myself, but I don’t for a second consider it in any legitimate discussion about how any non-negligible portion of the market behaves.

  > What are you going to do? Switch to android which has even more ads?

I don't disagree with your main point, but the H is important context here

BTW, in iPhone I tend to get lots of ads because Safari doesn't have ad block, I can't repackage APKs, can't edit DNS, not to mention all the spam calls/texts (especially from icloud emails...). Thank God the ublock folks got an iPhone app. I mean it isn't a fair comparison, a rooted Android vs stock iPhone, but it's trivial to root a pixel and on an iPhone I can't even access my photos from a terminal emulator... so there's no fair comparison that can be made

I also don’t install the YouTube app so I use the browser to visit the YouTube site and have an ad free experience and can even have audio playing on it while the screen is off or I’m in another app so it’s an objectively better experience than using an android device with the YouTube app that is automatically installed on it.

It's not better than YouTube after Morphe. Morphe is an app that can patch other apps. It makes the official YouTube app nice by removing ads, skipping over sponsored segments, remove tracking from links, improves the player, etc.

Would be extremely hard to do something similar on iOS.

I have had until now 4 Android smartphones, which did not have any ads whatsoever.

Like other posters have said, if you do not buy the phone directly, but subsidized by some carrier, then it might come with crap installed on it.

Of course, currently Google appears to make efforts to make Android worse, so it would not be surprising if ads would appear.

The primary exceptions are GrapheneOS and Lineage, but it's not like people can buy a phone with them in the store (yet).

No ads on any of those, and moreover I never had and still do not have any Google account.

The only problem that I had for not having a Google account was that one of the banks with which I was working terminated their on-line banking and replaced it with a smartphone app. That would not have been a problem, except that they refused to provide the app directly for download, but only from the Google store, which cannot be used without a Google account.

I have a Samsung and I've never seen such ads.

The kind of ads they are talking there in the article would be in cheap Chinese phones in the Android world I think.

My Xiaomi has no adverts.

But then the Samsung S22 I had before didn't have adverts. Certainly didn't come with McAfee.

You are right though. A duopoly is rarely a competitive market, especially for complex products (it can be for commodities)

Probably. There aren't many ads on iOS either aside from when you buy another Apple product and add it to your collection. If you just have the phone you won't see most of the ads mentioned in the article.

Every time I opened the system settings, it would insert an ad for an Apple TV Trial after a 2 second delay, causing all the items to shift down, forcing me to either wait every time I opened Settings or else mis-click when it finished loading the ad.

Android doesn't do this, it just shows me the system settings. I was so glad to go back to Android.

Not going to lie, it's a holistically bad experience, very similar to iOS in this regard. But Android doesn't show ads. The closest thing would be the Google Photos pestering to back up to cloud, things like that. It's per app, and usually there are better apps to replace the offending ones. (And vendor garbage can even be uninstalled, although it's very deliberately inconvenient to do.)

Bonus points for having Brave browser with built-in adblock, for the free YouTube Premium-ish ad-free experience.

I was horrified about how many ads my wufe has on her iPhone. I mean web ads in Safari. It's unsusable.

That’s just the internet isn’t it?

Not sure we can blame Apple for that, but I’m sure they could cook up a decent blocker if they wanted.

They could easily resolve that by allowing alternate browsers, but choose not to.

About Photos: why not disable notifications for the Google Photos app?

I never see ads on my android phone

I am on Android, I have no ads.

I use Android

No ads.

I feel left out, thank Dog for that!