> Apple is too big for that. Hard regulation is the only way out
Apple is not 'too big' for savvy customers to choose differently but all the Mag 7 tech companies are too big for regulation to be a 'way out'. They now all have 'Regulatory Compliance' divisions which are about compliance as much as the 'Ministry of Truth' is about truth. Instead they are filled with highly-paid former regulators, lobbyists and lawyers who use their inside knowledge to avoid, skirt or nullify regulatory impact.
Company strategies are now purposely designed at conception to be almost impossibly difficult to prosecute or enforce. It's been working so well over the last decade that when the size of the prize is big enough, mega-tech corps are increasingly willing to just overtly violate regulations knowing they can fight in court for years until the govt settles for a reduced fine that's less than the profit already made.
> Apple is not 'too big' for savvy customers to choose differently
Except that won't matter. The "savvy" user is such a tiny minority and only an even tinier minority will be willing to coordinate a boycott. Its a drop in the bucket even if you do get a boycott going.
Good luck trying to get YouTubers to stop making endless content about these products, and, most importantly, good luck getting YouTuber fans to stop demanding this type of content.
Connecting the world via the web was always gonna result in unbreakable monopolies. We screwed ourselves and, honestly, there’s no way back now.
Yes. Hence the privileged should fight for privacy and security on behalf of everybody and not spread the nihilsm. For example, by supporting user-respecting companies or NGOs fighting for user rights.
Are there known cases of people killed or attacked for their support of digital freedoms? I don't mean becoming famous for political actions or organizing large events. I mean buying non-mainstream devices or sending a few dollars to EFF.
It doesn’t actually matter, because your phone is only working as a coincidence. Every website and app is tested for Google phones and iPhones. If you lose the ability to do something one day, the chances of you getting that functionality back without major effort from your phone manufacturer or the kindness of bored people working for free, is essentially zero.
My phone runs a desktop GNU/Linux OS with desktop Firefox (or Chromium if installed). If Firefox on desktop stops showing websites correctly, we will have a larger problem than an unsupported niche phone.
I probably never opened one of my banking apps away from home. My main use for them is to authorize the operations I'm doing from my computer. I think that I could keep an Android phone in a drawer and use it as a costly and inconvenient hardware token. By the way, for some reasons credit card companies are doing 2FA by SMS which is both stupid (security wise) and convenient (to break out from Android or iOS.)
I expect that the real problem with using a Linux phone would be WhatsApp, Google Maps (the navigation part), OSMAnd. Telegram desktop maybe works.
Then you’re not using a phone. You’re using a computer which happens to have phone capabilities. Surely you can see how this isn’t particularly useful for most people?
On modern phones, 99% of interactivity for 99% or users comes via the App Store. Many websites will actively ducktype and send phones to an App Store, which just becomes a broken link on your laptop-with-LTE. Hell, nowadays, some sites will cripple interactions via phone browsers to encourage app use.
If you’re downloading 200 mb pages every time because you’re loading desktop pages on your phone, it’ll be pretty slow and inefficient.
You asked me to explain why it’s not useful to most people and I did. I don’t particularly care what people do with this information, I just find it annoying to see incomplete pictures.
Most people use some sort of service where the owner sells their data. Certainly it's better to have our own open source platform that you control but interacting with the outside world in anyway exposes you to data harvesting again.
The pixels on their screen turn green instead of blue, and they get mad that you reminded them that Apple is a conscious choice they made instead of something they were forced into.
I agree boycotting Apple will never matter. My main point was that calling for "regulation" is a cop-out because it no longer stops Mag7 mega-corp abusers.
I also pushed back on claiming Apple is "too big" because it's another cop-out those neck-deep in the Apple plantation parrot as if it somehow makes it slightly more okay they're enabling the worst of the Mag7 rapacious abusers. Buy Apple if you want, it won't matter. Just own your choices and spare us the fig-leaf rationalizations.
No, it is an acknowledgement of reality, and a plea not to pretend to be doing something when you're not. Apple is horrible, but are no worse than Google. Better in my opinion, because they never pretended to value freedom, and have a sense of ownership over their customers that is sometimes protective. Also, the phones are simply useful longer.
> My main point was that regulation is no longer a reliable check on Mag7 mega-corp abuses.
It is a bad point that was not made at all. The fact that corporations are effectively, and often literally currently unregulated is not proof that regulation is not "a reliable check on" abuses any more than my not wearing an oven mitt and constantly being burned is proof that wearing an oven mitt is not reliable protection against being burned.
Apple is too big to choose differently. There are two choices. Both are horrible. Eventually you will need to make a choice between one or the other to participate in banking, paying your utilities, buying things in stores, logging onto any internet site, maybe paying tolls, maybe even driving (your license might be issued to your phone.) To some extent, some of these things are true now.
Why would anybody owe you a "fig-leaf" excuse? Nobody is trying to placate you. They're just telling you what they think and why they are doing what they're doing, you should be grateful.
I'm speaking as someone who uses Debian on everything, who went from N900 to Firefox's phone to a $20 Android stuck on 8 that I've never hooked to the Google Play store because I don't have (and have never had) a "Google Account," only F-Droid - a phone that I refuse to browse the internet on or connect to my email (I don't have any social media except HN.) It is nothing to brag about, it is stubbornness. It does not move the needle in any way, and I would not have to make an excuse for not doing it, especially to you.
Anyway, I don't use coreboot, don't have a Linux phone anymore, and accept binary blobs in some of my packages, so am I really doing anything?
There's nothing more annoying than this purist faux-radical attitude I hear from people so much dirtier than I am. Are you sure you're not using Apple just so you can lecture people who do? Is that the real sin that Android is committing by closing up and becoming indistinguishable from Apple on policy?
Nobody will cry for a second about you not using Apple or Android except for you. The only way to stop this is through regulation.
"[S]avvy customers" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. No consumer products technology company gets to be that large off the backs of savvy customers.
I think that it is necessary a radical political change in the US, akin to a revolution, to be able to pass and enforce meaningful regulation against big tech companies. It's the same as going against the military-industrial complex or big finance. They integrated themselves to this power structure that guarantees their interests come first not only in internal policy, but also in foreign policy. Big tech is a limb of the US empire.
As I said, in my opinion, of course, one regulator trying to do solve it could never succeed in the regulation having its intended consequences. As it is, trying to control big tech fails, and tend to leat to those that try being replaced from their positions, being them elected officials or not.
There is a legal, political, informational and economic system in place guaranteeing that those who have real power (big tech, finance, military-industrial compelx, etc) can not have that power challenged through the regular means that, formally, do exist to keep them in check. They are able to circumvent and rewrite rules, to manipulate public discourse and elections through lobbying, traditional media and the algorithm.
This system could only be broken through a very radical change akin to a revolution, I think.
You ignore our history of doing this very thing. There was a time when the Robber Barons held US politics in an iron grip, funding the politics, the media, steering the discourse. We defeated them before and we can do it again.
But that's precisely my point: they must be defeated, putting in a new status quo that is a radical rupture with how things are right now. Antitrust laws, forcing monopolies to break themselves into smaller companies, the big labor movements and their conquests, and the New Deal were radical changes!
This flak was all over the news at the time, but it never explained to me why a merger would have been better for consumers than a bankruptcy sale. In both cases, the competition goes down and the unprofitable business model gets adjusted until it is profitable. In no case would the assets go to waste, in no case would the effective freebies continue. So what was lost? Can you explain that to me? Or were you mindlessly repeating the flak?
I mean Lina Khan singlehandedly f-ed over consumers by blocking the merger and causing Spirit to collapse. I wouldn't necessarily say tight regulations are good
I'm blind. Apple has explicitly said they wouldn't consider the "bloody ROI" of accessibility (will fund it no matter what). This is important to me. Software freedom is also important to me. What am I to do?
Pick your priorities. There will never exist enough products to check all of the boxes that all of the people say is important to them. There is someone out there who would much rather have a product cost some amount less at the cost of accessibility features but they think a device that 'just works' is important so they buy the iPhone anyway.
The point is that your conclusion here is both the correct/obvious one, and that it ensures one explicitly cannot vote with their wallet. They have priorities too significant to be able to take part in the protest. They are invisible to the company they WANT to vote for.
Perhaps what allows Apple is to be better at certain things like that or security for average consumer is indeed at odds with some aspirations? At least in practice, not utopian dreams, that seems to be the case.
So you vote with your wallet for accessibility despite freedom and the rest of hacker news do the opposite and it all works itself out.
You grab an Android phone anyways because Android accessibility is very much on par or even better than whatever slop Apple is putting out with VoiceOver these days, and developers also somewhat care about it more on Android.
You're also going to benefit from European mandates to have accessible mobile apps anyways, it's coming for free to you.
Even this long is too long. Apple devices don’t just provide better accessibility, they make lives easier by providing better accessibility, Android lagging behind is not just a matter of feature-parity, it’s an entire ecosystem making it harder for people to engage with itself.
- Apple's own UI is widely non accessible and noncompliant. Their toggles are an accessibility nightmare, for example.
- VoiceOver is notoriously non-customizable. It's good enough for blind users, and catastrophic for any motor issues. All of Apple's accessibility is entirely focused over on blind users. Your grandma with the shakes can go fuck herself however.
- VoiceOver is catastrophically unaware of context. I can't count the times it read "Walk fifteen em" instead of Walk 15 meters.
- Apple's solution to accessibility is to not care about their apps and to just make an "accessible" copy.
- Implementing accessibility properly in UIKit/SwiftUI is a kludgey piece of shit where it's extremely common to see people entirely modifying how text is being read, which in an accessibility nightmare and only considers basically blind users.
Source: the software I work on has to be 80%+ accessible, with regular accessibility audits and a panel of various users.
> You're also going to benefit from European mandates to have accessible mobile apps anyways, it's coming for free to you.
Not true, the EU tried to become a regulatory superpower and largely failed to export its rules to the rest of the world. Instead, Apple and Google just aren't bringing new features to the EU anymore.
That was the UK because it was Apple complying with a specific UK law that says the government must be able to access everyone's phones at all times.
The more common one is GDPR. Things like AI features come to Europe late, or don't come at all, because it's illegal to just record everyone all the time and transmit that information back to the mothership, which is what the feature does.
If you know of any company that would bother to spend days making accessibility improvements, yet for some reason decide to not bring those to the US release, they're the dumbest fucking company in existence.
The EU accessibility mandates will be followed by apps, not by platforms. I don't care if Apple Music wants to keep being trash, Spotify, Deezer and Tidal will improve and lift everyone with it.
What banking business? Use a web browser, or just bank in person like everyone did not long ago. Carry a credit card instead of Apple/Google Pay. That's what degoogled Android users do and it's a very minor inconvenience anyone with a little bit of maturity should be able to accept. Also, cash is much better for your privacy.
And if you require a one-time SMS code for purchase (which can be adjusted via their website, most likely), then you still have an option that is not Apple and Google. I use a dumbphone for "banking" (SMS)... and a credit card, and the website. Those are really all the 3 things I need to do banking, as you have said so correctly.
Choose a different bank, then. I've gradually stopped using the phone apps, not really by design but just because I don't often feel like that works better than the real web site. Both USAA and my local credit union have perfectly good desktop web sites.
More info on this is going to come out, but banks are going through hell right now with AI agents accessing user accounts and even firing off transfers and other accounts activity, and their legal teams are losing their minds.
So a bank shutting down a website right now and the "forcing" some Google/Apple "verification" makes a lot of sense in that context.
Belfius for example of you have ever used itsme with them. Also Digi (a mobile phone company in Belgium) since it uses itsme for authentication. Itsme is strictly an Android and iOS app.
Somebody downvoted you but I agree: I must use a banking app to either enter a code or use my fingerprint to authorize operations, login included. No bank is using SMSes anymore here (Italy.)
SMS are an American thing. Only credit card companies are using them and they are American.
The country I live in (VN) recently banned online banking without using a mobile app and biometric verification via selfie. The sites had to withdraw access.
If an entity has a product that has a trillion people choosing it, the marginal benefit to society to build an entirely new product for 1000 people or so isn't worth it. The people whose time would be required to produce that second product for a very, very small 1,000 person market would better serve society by working on other goals.
Nor should those 1,000 people get to try to use the government to tell the other trillion what product they should have to buy.
Nobody is trying to bar anyone from anything. We are talking about options. We need ways out, otherwise it's an unfair market and all we get is enshittification.
Yes, I can vote with my wallet, but no, it doesn't make a difference. I've been voting with my wallet since day 1 by never buying an iPhone because of how closed it is, and unsurprisingly, this has done absolutely nothing to change how open the iPhone is.
You and I have very different definitions of "take away".
I also think you might benefit from rereading the context here; someone said that government regulation is needed to make the iPhone ecosystem open, and someone else disagreed on the basis that voting with one's wallet is a viable alternative. I disagreed with that disagreement, arguing that voting with one's wallet doesn't produce the change that the original commenter said regulation was needed for; telling me "that's not what voting with your wallet does" is redundant, because that's literally what I was already saying. You're certainly entitled to disagree with my opinion that making the ecosystem more open is a desirable goal, but that's not a premise I introduced here, so if disagreeing with that is your intention, it's unclear to me why you picked out my comment as the one to express that when the original statement of that goal was several parent comments up from mine.
It's not redundant and he isn't disagreeing with your opinion about openness. He's saying that it's immoral to want to force your personal preferences about phone design on other people.
Buying a phone you like? Moral.
Trying to force every phone to be one you like? Immoral.
That's all it's about. Not a difference in definitions or confusing on his part, he's just saying you've got morality all wrong and need to reconsider your position.
Again, my comment that he responded to literally was just making a claim that the iPhone ecosystem is not going to become more open due to voting with one's wallet. Yes, I obviously also think it should be more open, and that's an opinion that someone can strongly disagree with, but that's not what I was saying in the comment he responded to, because whether an action is moral or not is irrelevant to the question of whether it would produce a certain effect.
My point in the comment you responded to is that if person A says "we need to eat more vegetables to be healthy", person B says "no, you will be healthy if you only eat meat", and person C says "I tried only eating meat and I was unhealthy, so I think that's evidence that meat alone might not make you healthy", it's a non-sequitur to respond to person C by saying "it's immoral for you to say someone else should eat vegetables". If you responded to person A saying that, it wouldn't be as weird, but to remain silent when person A and B are debating the health effects of vegetables but then suddenly take issue with person C trying to provide evidence about whether the claims for A and B are correct or when they didn't introduce the topic that you have moral opinions on is very weird.
That is like saying prosecuting murder is immoral because it is taking away the murderer and victims rights.
For a society to function there needs to be balance. ‘You can do whatever you want as long as enough people pay you to cover your bills’ gets bleak fast.
It's not like that because nothing to do with iPhone security is comparable to murder.
There's a whole set of philosophies on this topic, for example the non-aggression principle. You can't just make an arbitrary comparison and then use it to argue for your position.
> Especially when you look at the malware and viruses that don't exist, because it's so protected.
There are fewer viruses on Linux than on Windows, despite being far more open. I imagine your response will be that there are a lot more iPhone users than Linux ones, but my point is that there are a lot more factors than treating "open or closed" as a binary, and at best you can make a principled hypothesis about why something doesn't exist. For all you know, maybe making it more open would allow security researchers to find and report more potential attack vectors; extra attention from being more widely used cuts both ways.
If you did that then you probably made clear your reasons which probably created mindshare with others which probably has helped the EU open up the iPhone. Don’t be so defeatist because the outcome isn’t immediately apparent.
I'm not being defeatist; I'm pretty much arguing for what you're saying, which is that I think government intervention is needed. The parent comment I was responding to said that regulation isn't needed because voting with our wallets is sufficient, and I was disagreeing.
Convincing people to vote with their wallets is much easier than convincing them to write their pols to make laws. The latter is much harder while the former allows a message to be spread. Should people do both? Yes.
Sure, I just don't see how you read my comments as inconsistent with that viewpoint though. Literally the only point I was trying to make was that when a parent comment said regulation is necessary, and someone responded "No it's not. You can vote with your wallet right now.", I thought that was a very weak counterargument to the idea that we needed regulation.
The responses to my rebuttal are honestly confusing to me; one person seems to think that I'm arguing against voting with your wallet (which seems bizarre, given that my comment was literally saying that's something I actively do), one person seems to think I introduced the idea that Apple should have a more open ecosystem to the conversation rather than inheriting it as a premise from the grandparent comment, and one person upvoted my comment. I have absolutely no clue how three different people managed to read something completely different from my comment when the context and content seems clear to me, but I guess I'm missing something here because the point that I thought would be apparent is not consistently being understood.
> this has done absolutely nothing to change how open the iPhone is.
And tell me how that doesn’t sound defeatist or come off as giving up on voting with your wallet.
I can only speak for my replies but you were too concise on your opinion that it spawned multiple interpretations. Brevity breeds misinterpretations or something or other.
> And tell me how that doesn’t sound defeatist or come off as giving up on voting with your wallet.
"This" has done nothing doesn't imply "nothing will do anything". From my perspective, it sounds like you basically were assuming that anything I didn't explicitly repeat from the parent comments was no longer relevant, whereas I would have assumed that it would be noisy and annoying for me to repeat it directly.
Pal, I’m not going to keep discussing this because I have nothing left to add. I don’t know why your comment was interpreted 3 different ways, but it looks like you are resistant to taking any blame for authoring the comment. So what is there left to discuss? We’re all here to annoy you I guess is what you’ve concluded.
No, I'm honestly more confused about you to a degree much more than how my comment was interpreted. Over time, the responses to my comment seem to have stabilized closer to what I'd expect, but as far as I can tell you seem to be saying one thing and doing another, so it's hard for me to feel like I'm understanding where you're coming from on any level.
vote with your wallet here is to make a new phone company that uses only these user owned devices.
its not particularly feasible to do for the end customer, similar to trying to buy EVs in the US when the upstream dealer decides whata available for you.
vote with your wallet is for the ultra-wealthy.
the rest of us can vote with our votes instead, and get much better results
> the rest of us can vote with our votes instead, and get much better results
Not sure where you live or what votes you are making, but "much better results" is hardly what I've seen or expect from US politics, politicians, and the uber wealthy that run the corporations that dominate many of the most important aspects of our daily lives.
Yeah, I don't understand the parent comment, buying EV's in the US is even easier than ICE vehicles in most states. Now if they are talking about BYD being blocked in the US, so access to extremely cheap EVs, much of Europe is doing the same thing.
Pixel phones have an unlocked bootloader. One can load GrapheneOS onto those phones without needing to jailbreak them.
Even without flashing a new OS, one can install third party app stores (e.g. F-Droid) with open source apps and/or side-load modified versions of those apps.
There is no "viable third platform" because people don't vote against the two existing ones with their wallets.
Can you name an example where a government succeeded in breaking up a monopoly, and the result was better for consumers? AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft were all "broken up", but it didn't make a difference for consumers. In every case, a competitor forced them to change their ways.
I mean, breaking up Standard Oil wasn't exactly great for consumers either. And those companies eventually re-merged anyways. But ole Rockefeller sure did make out well due to the breakup.
True. But so long as only 1% of people care enough to do this, and they can make >1% more profit per customer with their crap - then it's more profitable for them to continue the crap.
Wake up. These mega corporations are too big to care now. Most people are uninformed or unaffected. America has been brainwashed into a FU I got mine mindset.
The tiny fraction of people willing to vote with their wallet has effectively a 0% chance of pushing big corporate to act right.
Not that many. The differences are trivial and 99%+ of people don't care, not even on forums like HN. But... how is that relevant? If you have very niche tastes then it'll be harder for you to satisfy them, whether that be in art, music or tech. Go more mainstream and you'll have plenty of options. The free market can deliver, you just may not like the level of effort the size of your market justifies.
Well, last time I checked the number was 0 and I am still lurking in some pine chat groups, so I doubt that changed. So the free market does not deliver something working here.
Since part of what I'm purposely purchasing from Google or Apple is a more secure by default system I'm probably the wrong person to ask. My wallet vote is effectively for something different than yours.
Yesno. Not fully because a functionality is not enabled yet.
It wouldn't be advised to buy the latest pixel now anyway, either get the previous one or wait a few months for Motorola Signature 27, where GrapheneOS will be first party OS, and not hated-by-the-vendor bolt-on.
If you insist on the latest pixel, go check the GrapheneOS discussion forum for all the details.
If only the Motorola Signature 27 had a headphone jack, so that I could listen to high quality music with my quality headphones.
Instead I have to buy the shitiest locked full of crapware android phone and hack it with an LLM to make it usable because apparently that's what I deserve for wanting a headphone jack.
DAC have been more than good enough since the maturation of mp3 players in the early 2000s. The smartphone has a DAC and amplifier for its various speakers already. Heck the computer inside usb-pd power converter in the phone is many times more hardware and work and EMI constraints to respect than a DAC + amplifier for a headphone output.
The DACs/amps you linked are bigger than the Sony mp3 player I had in 2004. It had two jacks and a user replaceable battery. And it was water resistant.
The DAC I specifically linked is the size of my index finger, but since you seem to be casually suggesting that the "shitiest locked full of crapware android phone" and PCs dac are comparable with the dedicated hires dac, maybe you don't really need a phone jack and your audiophile headphones :D
Many things are stopping you. I see this response all the time as a counter to inappropriate behavior by monopolistic giant entities.
It's the wrong way of thinking about the problem. The whole point is that they've gained too much market power for any individual to be able to stop them meaningfully, and that collective action using the power of government is the only way.
Any argument that tries to talk people out of that is on the same side as the tech oligarchs, in my opinion.
I don't personally want them to stop. I like what they produce and how they produce it. As long as there are enough people like me there will be a market for this.
Voting with your wallet doesn’t mean stopping them. That isn’t what it is about. You shouldn’t get to choose to stop them because you don’t like their actions any more than I should be able to choose banning you from carriers because I don’t like your choices.
Yes, some of us simply don't give a damn. I'll continue buying Apple products because they work and I don't have to do much of anything to keep them working. Just because I like tinkering or customizing other computers/devices, doesn't mean I want to be a sysadmin to my phone lol
I also exclusively use cash, and do not carry any electronics, and only use FOSS software. Willing to bet my data footprint is smaller than most other tech workers.
"I don't have any friends, I cover up in a burka, I put a stone in my shoe so my gait changes"
There are a few problems here. For example a huge number of stores and parking lots correlate how you show up to what you buy. So if you come in your car it doesn't matter if you use cash or not, your purchase can still be identified to your vehicle ID.
There are all your friend, well if you have any, that create a you shaped profile in their data.
There is also a U shaped hole in your actions that shows up pretty well depending on how many people around you use cards.
At the end of the day you're probably on more watchlists because you're an outlier.
Ah, so because second hand smoke exists, we should all smoke?
You seem obsessed with conformity and your arguments read as "Just stop being weird!"
I have a family, active social life hanging out at events or with friends weekly. I travel the world often, been to 6 countries in the last year. I am also a serial tech founder, and security researcher with piles of finds that impact nearly every fortune 500 company.
If anything I live a much more active and successful life than most of my haters, and I do not need to agree to the terms of service of any corpo-tech to do any of it.
People should make decisions based on personal conviction, not crowd conformity.
It's not only about driving Apple out of business. If you don't use Apple, you simply don't have to deal with any Apple bullshit. All your Apple-related worries just disappear. And you even have enough money left over to afford a separate non-rooted phone for your bank (in the unlikely event you need one).
~3 square kilometres is absurd amount of forest to be removed for something as silly as a data centre. I hope Google gets fined and made to restore the area.
Both serve different purposes and I think it's a reasonable distinction to have between products. One is for managing your openai workspace, API, etc, the other is a consumer product. Reasonable to expect an admin to whitelist the openai cli tool but not codex
How is the difference not obvious to you just from the name? Do you think that every CLI is an interactive agentic application? Sorry, but this is baffling.
It's a generic insult that a lot of people throw out, but when they're using the term seriously, they mean that the code doesn't get properly reviewed by a human. It probably still gets QA'd by a human, but in the final form, not reading the code.
AI-assisted generally means that a human is reviewing the code, though there's a lot of doubt about how well that can really be done with the amount of code an AI can output. It's generally capable of being as fast or faster than a human can review it.
> but when they're using the term seriously, they mean that the code doesn't get properly reviewed by a human
"vibecoded" is also a synonim for incomplete, messy, lacks cohesion, vision. In this case, I think OpenAI partially duplicates without superseding one of the CLIs with another (and same for their different chat modes... remember they had 3 not long ago).
I'm ok for Apple to allow (or be forced to allow) users to install alternative operating systems. We all use iOS not because it's great but because there is no other choice.
Of course, this will never happen, it's Apple... they can't even spell competition let alone "libre".
> I will stop using your app long before I'll install another app store.
m'okay bye.
Seriously, what are you trying to accomplish by saying this? Do you think you or app developers have any leverage with Apple? A corp that's the size of several countries?
Not OP, but I get where they're coming from. I see how for some people, having a phone where the only (reasonable) path to getting an app is to have it vetted is a feature, not a bug. It's not "restricting my choices", it's "restricting what developers can do to me".
I don't have a super strong opinion here. I lean a bit more towards thinking that the current status is better than the alternative: Based on what I see in news / tech news / in general it sounds like "the price of apps"* is less of a problem in today's day and age than "app _X_ tracks every thing you do and your location, sells that data and now [elections are skewed | supermarkets implement dynamic pricing | ICE can track you], etc".
* I am aware that is more than "price of apps", I'm simplifying a bit here. I'm not a fan of Apple imposing restrictions on how you can purchase stuff.
Epic will still be dissatisfied. They were dissatisfied when they had their android store. It didn’t turn out like they thought. They thought they were gonna be making bank but most people did not flock to their store.
You are in fact literally required to purchase an Apple or Google phone to participate in an OECD economy. Your employer will require it, your government will require it. Increasingly, your banks and doctors will require it. Unless you're telling people to live off the grid? But maybe we can have something between the two extremes of living in a fucking jungle or submitting to an enforced duopoly wherein two companies control what billions of people can publish and take a 30% cut from it all? No? That too unreasonable for you?
> I won't be surprised to see Apple using that for all the loophole its worth.
That has already happened on several occasions (Apple refusing notarisation, since you still need to be a member of their Developer Program thus subject to their ToS and all the crazy in it).
Hopefully, the next revision of EU's DMA and equivalent in other countries will close the loop hole.
Or maybe... John Ternus would wake up one day and decide to be a better human being and just fix this globally for everyone.
That’s good news for people who enjoy the freedom of using the device they own in the way they want.
Having (alt store) presence in Australia, Brazil, EU and Japan is in fact more than enough for many indies - one can even begin to imagine ignoring the US as a region.
I’ve been thinking about open source replacements of proprietary companion apps. It’s easy enough to reverse engineer Bluetooth protocols now, but you can’t run these in websites. Putting stuff on the App Store is too expensive but sideloading could be viable.
Ages ago there was this term "Device Neutrality", first introduced in 2011 at the European Parliament and later incorporated in the Digital Markets Act
You actually can use most bluetooth apis in websites on most browsers outside of iOS [0]. I used recently this tool [1] to program my baofeng radio and the bluetooth aspect of it worked great, but I did end up having to reverse engineer aspects of the payload to get it encode and decode all the channel configuration correctly.
> one can even begin to imagine ignoring the US as a region
As someone from that region, this is probably a good idea for all parties, right now. I'm not fond of our current trajectory, and the outside pressure to change isn't sounding unreasonable.
This is actually outdated information. The inflection has already happened and the split is 40% Asia and 40% North America with NA losing ground over the last years and Asia gaining that ground.
Combine with that other markets also getting bigger like South America.
The reality is that NA had their smartphone / mobile boom already and the rest of the world is still catching up. There are more smartphones, apps, features, services, etc. to be gained by selling to the massive influx of new customers versus trying to cater to the old audience of North America.
My experience is that while other regions have a lot of users, my revenue is still 90% from the US for a location-agnostic product.
In the vast majority of cases, Asia and SA won't touch your product if you don't have deep familiarity with their markets, their idiosyncrasies and have a competitive business model there. Getting folks in these markets to pay isn't easy, friend.
And that's why we keep having these conversations in English on a US site about products made by US companies.
It's terrible news for anyone who has some responsibility for the security of environments in which these devices are used.
Right now we have a relatively high confidence that as long as the devices are not jailbroken and are kept up to date they are relatively secure.
What this change means for people like me is that either there is some capability to detect whether third-party app stores are in use on a device and we will set a policy that disallows anyone using such things from accessing company data/services, or we have to lock out the devices altogether.
The entire world doesn't want their devices that they bought and own to be beholden to the corporate whims of Apple or Google just so your job can be easier.
Surely it's possible to treat phones the same way as computers in corporate settings? Normal users aren't usually allowed to install whatever they want on their work PC, so why their work phone?
How many people bring their own laptop to work? (ignoring self-employed people and the like which this line of thinking really doesn't apply to) Phones should be treated the same way.
Personal devices shouldn't be used for work purposes to begin with. If work has security requirements regarding what phone and what condition it is in, they better be supplying their own phone to ensure those requirements are satisfied.
Vast majority of the people don't have the need for a separate work phone. But they benefit from accessing their work email, Teams chat, calendar, etc. from their phones.
If work wants to be picky about what devices can access those things, but still want their employees to do so, they should provide devices for that. If they don't, well, then the employees get to not do work during non-work hours.
The ruling doesn't ask Apple to get rid of app sandboxing. The ruling explicitly notes this:
> Moreover, because iOS apps are sandboxed, as implemented in other jurisdictions, apps available through alternative distribution will be sandboxed, which further strengthens security and reduces the likelihood that any app will compromise other apps [...]
Or your company buys phones for its employees and allows only those work phones on its networks. I understand that this is an extra cost and phones are maybe more expensive than some laptops good enough for working with Office.
"Billions of consumer phones must be locked down because our IT department is completely incompetent and incapable of providing locked down work devices"
Uhm, disallowing third-party stores, sure, but you draw a line that allows a non-jailbroken and updated device to be able to access company data? How is the lack of third-party app stores gonna prevent someone from sending sensitive data through the Mail app or to iCloud? Shouldn't company devices be managed with MDM to begin with?
It also allows it to be much worse too. I can't wait to do tech support for my grandparents that followed the instructions to install ScamAppStore to install an app they saw on a Facebook ad.
I do tech support for my parents that both use Android. Haven't had a sideloading incident once in the decade+ they've used it (although I did show my dad NewPipe, which he uses constantly now).
That's a great idea. I wish streaming services would have a first-party toggle in settings or something to just not see AIgen content (including album arts).
This is the real solution. Having this as a secondary barrier, but just a filter/toggle should be allowed. Problem is the owners of the AI music are sometimes also the owners of the platform so less of incentive to implement such a feature.
When you're a gatekeeper / the phone company like Apple, the expectation is that as a general purpose device, you will adhere to at least some level of quality... simply because users have no alternative.
By constantly enforcing their walled garden and making it harder to use alternatives, Apple assumes the responsibility for the quality of their software. If they can't deliver, they should make it easy to pick and choose alternatives.
Apple is too big for that. Hard regulation is the only way out right now. Maybe breaking them up too.
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