[gbhn]

I have some direct experience with this. It is summed up as "open standards people are extraordinarily hard to work with, uncompromising, and subject to infinite fine splitting of the space. Meanwhile, 5 billion users do not care and want things to be easy, fast, work well, and be well integrated."

The result of these two forces is that it ends up being extremely difficult to work on open standards for any kind of data that people care about. (Users can't see HTTP, so it is fine to standardize. They can see blog titles, so... no dice.)

[thwarted]

"…Meanwhile, 5 billion users do not care and want things to be easy, fast, work well, and be well integrated."

They can see blog titles, so... no dice.)

Hard to place all of the blame on the open standards people if the other side doesn't want to do anything other than wall people in by not cooperating, with open standards or each other.

[Swizec]

As an enginner I really love and support open standards.

As a user I’m on Apple everything because shit just works and gets out of my way.

[onion2k]

As a user I’m on Apple everything because shit just works and gets out of my way.

Every time you load a webpage or send an email that content could be coming from dozens of different servers that all work together to deliver content seamlessly. A website Just Works whether it's served by nginx or Apache or IIS or caddy or.. you get the idea.

The delivery mechanism of Internet content is a perfect example of standards working. The content side of things is getting there but there's a way to go yet.

[Moru]

It's funny how I always hear this about apple but every time I try to use the company issued iPhone I get stuck trying to do something that just can't be done. Can't even plug in a standard sd card or an audio plug...

[dmitriid]

Thank god that you can't plug in an SD card into an iPhone. Disallowing that was one of the smartest decisions by Apple.

In Android world there's the constant flow of "why can't I save the app, or app data, or why doesn't the app save the data onto the SD card, and keeps dumping everything into internal storage".

[worble]

>Thank god that you can't plug in an SD card into an iPhone. Disallowing that was one of the smartest decisions by Apple.

Thank god people can't expand their own storage and instead have to pay inordinate amounts for internal storage? What?

[dmitriid]

> Thank god people can't expand their own storage

If that expansion worked reliably, consistently and in non-confusing manner. If apps could be reliably, consistently and in non-confusing manner bet told to install to external storage, keep their data there, and save their data there.

[Swizec]

What kind of mad man uses SD cards with their phone? That’s what the 256gb of internal storage is for.

Modern Androids don’t have audio plugs anymore either by the way.

But really it sounds liek your problem is that only the company phone is Apple. The argument really only works when all your devices are apple. Preferably including your whole family.

If you prefer Android, then all your devices should be that and you’re gonna hvae a great time.

That’s kinda the joke here. Nobody cares about open standards as long as everything they do belongs to a single “stack” because interoperability sucks. Like really sucks. Probably on purpose.

Look no further than trying to repeat a Spotify song on Alexa. “Sorry repeating songs is not supported on Spotify”. My ass it isnt you just don’t want to.

[TeMPOraL]

Upvoted for conclusion, with which I wholeheartedly agree, but wrt. the first two things - come on. Audio jacks are still a thing (despite some companies being assholes and removing it; I guess the next round, I'll still stay with Samsung). As for SD card - well, they have their uses. They're pretty good for storing and swapping data, and flash degradation is a problem for longevity of smartphones. TBH, I'd pay extra for a phone that lets you easily replace its internal flash.

> Probably on purpose.

Totally. A lot of cases look like deliberately breaking what could be better implemented in an interoperable way. And Apple isn't beyond blame here; what's up with breaking Bluetooth, for instance?

[JohnFen]

> What kind of mad man uses SD cards with their phone?

I do. It's extremely handy to use them to transfer for very large files, amongst a million other things. Soldered-in storage does not eliminate the need for removable storage.

> Modern Androids don’t have audio plugs anymore either by the way.

Yes, they do. Not the super-high-end phones (which is one of the several reasons why those aren't of interest to me), but tons of mid-range and lower phones do.

[Moru]

I'm a dinosaur, I only use winamp for music. It still works as I want it. I can change songs faster at any time I want to, no matter what I'm doing on the computer with global keys. No need to break away from my flow state.

I fully expect to be moded into oblivion for speaking anything except praise for the apple frenchise.

I'm also aware that some androids don't have what I want but I still have a choise what I buy. Most of my phones have replaceable batteries for example. And sd cards can prevent me from having to buy another phone when the 256 GB internal storage is full.

I'm old enough to remember "640 MB should be enough..."

[grepballsoffire]

I'm mainly a dinosaur for wanting audio jacks as i still use my old Sennheiser headphones that I bought in 2006, and still work perfectly. I did switch to Bluetooth headphones for a while but they fell apart after 12 months.

I feel like prices haven't moved in line with inflation, it's just planned obsolescence has moved further up the price range.

That said, I'm aware that I could buy a second hand iPhone with an audio jack if I really wanted.

[wycy]

> I fully expect to be moded into oblivion for speaking anything except praise for the apple frenchise.

No one speaks praise about iTunes.

[welly]

> 640 MB should be enough...

MB? I'm old enough to remember Bill say 640KB is enough!

[Nicksil]

I feel you've way over-generalized here.

> open standards people

Who are "open standards people?" Are you talking about the individual folks who author/edit/audit/etc. RFCs? Or small-ish groups of people organized into a committee who then create and publish various standards? Or giant corporations and non-profits butting heads to eventually produce some semblance of an agreed-upon standard?

> 5 billion users do not care

5 billion people don't care? I'd argue that there are less. If you asked a selection of that population a question using terms and phrasing commonly used in tech circles their eyes will indeed likely glaze over and their reply will be equivalent to a "don't care" because they genuinely do not care about an open chat standard nor should they. However, asking something like "Would you like to be able to chat with the same friends, families, colleagues, using well-known identifiers[1], regardless of which application you use?" You may begin to hear some "care."

You see and hear a similar argument with the folks who argue that a majority ("most") of Internet users "don't care" that their information is being Hoovered up around every corner. If all we were asking is "Do you care that ostensibly non-identifiable information about you and your browsing habits is being transferred to <some service> so that <some service> is able to provide you with a pleasurable browsing experience," you'd likely get something along the lines of "don't care." Instead present the individual with every data point collected from them, along with what is inferred by their data in aggregate (and everything else that goes in that package), and couple that with the difference they may expect in browsing experience between continuing to permit <some service> collecting their data and not. Now that they've been asked a question, using words and terms with which they may be more familiar, you might begin to see a shift from _everyone_ not caring to some amount less. Or not.

[1] "well-known identifiers" is still eye-glaze inducing, but am too tired to come up with something better.

[gbhn]

By "open standards people" I mean "people who prefer open standards". Nothing more sinister than that. :-) (I am one, BTW)

This is already a very small subset of the population -- they've bothered to take a stand on something virtually no-one seems to care about. (At least not directly.)

This last part seems crucial to me. You're right that people care that they can chat with friends. It's the clause I think they glaze over at. Something about applications? I just want to chat!! Of course standards folks, being experts in this, care a lot, but messaging is a canonical example of this. I've personally witnessed years of strategy aimed at open standards go nowhere while proprietary standards win out. It's not because billions of people have strong preferences for open standards!

I do think that there are enough open standards fans, and enough open standards-adjacent folks, to make a strong play for something like messaging. But it's not "abstract XMPP" that's the problem -- it's "real XMPP" with fractures, federation headaches, delays in having it be caught up with capabilities of closed platforms, etc. That's the actual competitor. :-(

[arendtio]

I doubt that the standards are the cause. I mean we have XMPP and companies use it to build products but if they prefer to disable the federated features (as WhatsApp did back in the day) you can't blame the standard.

The problem seems to be more along the lines of 'standards don't make money'. So the problem is that companies implement those standards and they do so after their purpose which is to create value for the shareholders.

[dmitriid]

> I mean we have XMPP and companies use it to build products but if they prefer

they prefer standards and protocols that work well in the smartphone era. As late as 2016 XMPP had next to zero support for features expected in a mobile-first world: https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html. Most XEPs in the article were at experimental stage or draft at the time, and are still in the same status nearly three years later. Some of them like XEP 0352 are "Implementation of the protocol described herein is not recommended for production systems".

[arendtio]

As far as the standard process goes that is true and I honestly don't know why those XEPs are not recommended yet. From my perception as a user and server administrator, they work just great. Nevertheless, just because the standard process didn't finalize those extensions, the developers out there don't care and take the draft specifications anyway.

Therefore, suggesting that XMPP had zero smartphone support in 2016 isn't true when talking about the actual applications. I used XMPP back then (still do) and the only problem I remember from that time was the Push-Notification issue for iOS (was solved a year ago or so). With every other OS, you had no problems you (or your server admin) couldn't solve.

But my point was a different one: Companies actually use XMPP (despite being incomplete in the 'recommended' state) but they disable the parts which do not benefit their purpose (e.g. Federation).

[dmitriid]

Thing is: if there's still work on those standards, it's not apparent. Are the abandoned? Are they going to change? Especially when it comes to warnings like "Deferred after 12 months of inactivity in its previous Experimental state. Implementation of the protocol described herein is not recommended for production systems."

> Therefore, suggesting that XMPP had zero smartphone support in 2016 isn't true when talking about the actual applications.

There was (and still is) only one actual application: Conversations for Android. Support and implementation across the rest (servers and services, desktop applications, iOS) varies widely (or wildly? :) ).

> Companies actually use XMPP (despite being incomplete in the 'recommended' state) but they disable the parts which do not benefit their purpose

I know that quite a few start with XMPP (or its parts), but it looks like most abandon it when they move to mobile (for various reasons, including the ones I listed).

[jblwps]

I'm too tired to really comment on this now, but this makes me think of a Signal blog post by Moxie[0] about the decision to disallow federation/third party Signal clients. Whether or not you ultimately agree or disagree with him (I'll admit I'm pretty convinced), it's a pretty good read and parallels very neatly with this topic here.

[0] - https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/