[ericmay]

You do have the option to choose. You can buy any number of Android phones, or you can jailbreak an iPhone with custom software.

Ultimately this will be bad for regular people, and good for crypto scammers, ad agencies, and companies that rely on hovering up personal data.

[WastingMyTime89]

Apple advances this argument all the time. Meanwhile most European use Android which allows side-loading and the predicted apocalypse didn’t actually happen. I know it’s annoying: this pesky reality showing to everyone that your argument is actually specious.

[drcongo]

Didn't it? Every Android user I know is a data leak firehose.

[aaaaaaaaata]

Same here for iOS users in the US.

Add some details and maybe we can compare better.

[cmdli]

Here's a detail: iOS stopped apps from tracking you, and it worked so well that Facebook (an ad company) fought it tooth and nail and lost quite a bit of money because of it. Do you have any such details of similar things happening in Android?

[Apocryphon]

It's coming:

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/16/google-plans-android-privacy...

[root_axis]

Based on what? How would you even know?

[izacus]

And now you'll be able to choose WHILE still keep using iOS which is much better for you as a consumer.

This being bad for "regular people" is typical monopolistic corporate scaremongering. Apple has proven that they're more than capable of providing secure devices that provide choice with their MacBook series.

[ericmay]

Kind of. So the primary issue is that Apple collectively bargains on behalf of customers against developers. So if you take something like privacy rights, Apple can say "hey, we've got all of these users and if you want to participate in the ecosystem you have to not track their data" - as an example.

Now what happens is that companies like Facebook and others who really want to get your data without that pesky Apple interfering is they launch legal attacks and marketing campaigns to convince people that Apple is a big bad monopoly and their "locking down" is bad for customers, etc. (so ya know, typical monopolistic corporate scaremongering) and then Apple goes and gets regulated.

With Apple finally being forced to allow a third-party app store on iOS, it makes financial sense for, well, Facebook and others to start such stores that don't respect privacy rights - Apple can't make them and then Facebook creates a neutered version of its products on Apple's App Store and creates the best version on their own (or one they support) app store. It didn't make a lot of sense to do this with just Android because you're maintaining a lot of software and it's not worth the money + you don't want to show your hand. Now with this new legislation these companies will basically eliminate a lot of customer protections that we have.

Many day-to-day people will just say "oh I need the X store for Facebook and TikTok and YouTube" and they'll sign away privacy rights to get those apps because they don't have an immediate feedback loop. They just get more and more invasive applications and then that's that.

With Apple maintaining control of the App Store ecosystem, customers could have their cake and eat it too. They got privacy rights because Apple could collectively bargain for them, but they also got their apps because so much money stands to be made anyway that companies would comply with these rules.

It absolutely blows my mind that people are rallying the pitchforks around Apple for "monopolistic corporate scaremongering" all the while missing that its all of these other "monopolistic corporate scaremongering" corporations like Facebook, Google, TikTok, Uber, and others who they're out in the streets for. I mean, you do know that Facebook is a giant corporation, right? (Not picking on Facebook here).

For me personally as a user, it means companies leave the App Store ecosystem, and devalues the iPhone and other devices.

[j-pb]

Except that we didn't get our apps.

I'm still waiting to be able to use my iPad to write code.

To be able to use the iPad as a platform for tools that contain their own WASM ecosystem of user purchase-able plugins.

To use a browser on iPhone and iPad that is actually secure.

iPhone and iPad are little addiction machines, with little value for productive work that goes beyond email and powerpoint. These legislations give us a fighting chance of regaining the quality of 00s personal computers, with advanced 20s technology.

[dijit]

To be perfectly fair here, you're responding as if "productivity" means "Code" and that's not exactly true.

For the overwhelming majority of people: coding is not productivity.

What is? Checking email, jotting down notes, recording meetings and transcribing/dictating them, joining meetings and having reliable video/audio.

Being able to respond to an email with a little drawing is _absolutely_ a killer feature for productivity, having a little 10" portable device which can perch on a desk and allow you the full gammut of features for a _good_ meeting is also pretty damn awesome.

One could argue that these have some moderate competence at artistic creation machines (photos, videos, drawing, some combination), but I'm not creative so I'm not sure how competent these devices realistically are.

I wont comment much on the statement you can't actually code on an iPad, technically you can; gitpods, code-server, coder.com, (and if you work at google CitC) means you already have everything you need. These work with safari; because those features Chrome demands we have are not actually needed for such tasks.

[concinds]

This misses the problem.

Countless, countless, countless iOS devs, even extremely high-profile ones like Marco Arment, can talk all day long about problems they've had with App Review and the capriciousness of the App Store. Tons of high-profile, reputable devs can talk about specific apps they were making or wanted to make, never saw the light of day, not because the apps violate App Store policy, but because App Review is such a minefield that they didn't want to bother.

Apple literally publicly said that devs criticising the App Store, or App Review practices, could expect retaliation.

It's insane that devs are expected to only provide apps through a single storefront, that operates at such a huge scale that moderation is necessarily arbitrary, mostly algorithmic, and inconsistent. The App Store monopoly is indefensible.

[ericmay]

You're just shifting the target from one monopoly app store that's high profile to a dozen or so (maybe fewer) app stores who will also have their own arbitrary rules and moderation.

You might say, well at least they have alternatives from Apple. Sure, but then if those alternatives are sufficiently good competitors we likely lost all of the privacy benefits and so forth from the Apple App Store and they'll have their own arbitrary review practices and retaliatory nature. And if they as good of alternatives then most likely the majority of these apps with "problems" are just scam artists and should be rejected anyway except now they can thrive on people who are susceptible to being scammed.

To me this is a little bit like having a debate over the First Amendment where I'm kind of sitting here and saying yea you shouldn't be allowed to yell fire! in a crowd as part of the amendment from the start and others are just asking for maximum freedom of speech, only to have this legislated later anyway.

[j-pb]

> means you already have everything you need.

Your lack imagination of how much better software development could be given the right interfaces, and interaction modes, is somewhat representative of how the stagnation of iPad OS has crippled our optimism and taste for futurism, constantly improving user experiences and new models of computation.

The iPad has amazing input capabilities, from the pen to laser scanning that could all be used to further improve developer experiences. Be it by augmenting your scrum board, to sharing code annotations with your coworkers, or foregoing coding completely and turning flow-charts to code directly.

But sure, let's all be middle management, and write emails all day.

[smoldesu]

> I wont comment much on the statement you can't actually code on an iPad, technically you can

That's not coding on an iPad, since the code is not being interpreted/compiled on-device. You're right that an iPad can remote into a build server for "development", but so can a $6 Raspberry Pi.

[seti0Cha]

I don't know why I should give a rat's ass what CPU is doing the work as long as the work can be done. Your point seems kind of pedantic in a world where a vast amount of code executes in the cloud or is intricately tied up with networked services so that a freestanding computer is of little value.

[Apocryphon]

> Facebook and others to start such stores that don't respect privacy rights

This is trotted out every time, but these doomsaying scenarios always miss out that this is far harder to achieve than it seems, from a product and business perspective. They can build it, but consumers are unlikely to come.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30808926

[ericmay]

If consumers are unlikely to come and major corporations aren't going to open their own app stores or migrate to third-party app stores, then what kind of companies are going to need to have a third-party app store that's uncontrolled by Apple? Do you think these companies have spent this much money on marketing and bankrolling lobbyists in the US and EU for no reason?

[Apocryphon]

> major corporations aren't going to open their own app stores or migrate to third-party app stores

The major corporations will try, but consumers are just burnt out by managing all of the user accounts and dealing with different ecosystems. Not to mention even casual users are vaguely aware that these companies are out to take their data and sell them ads now.

I foresee that any attempt to put their apps exclusively on competing scammy low-privacy third party app stores will end in tears and mea culpas, leading them to put those apps back on the Apple App Store. As I've said before, creating a compelling alternative app ecosystem is hard, and if you think a Facebook App Store is going to be so scary, just look at the current state of the Amazon Appstore on Android, or the Samsung Galaxy Store. These are real world case studies, not hypothetical doomsday scenarios, and they do not show consumers flocking to these alternatives.

Finally, it's possible that antitrust logic can apply to these companies just as they apply to Apple. If Google tries to make Gmail, YouTube, G-Suite, etc. apps available only on a Google iOS Play Store, the courts aren't going to be happy about that.

> then what kind of companies are going to need to have a third-party app store that's uncontrolled by Apple?

Epic, mostly, with their games store. Piracy (for game emulators, ROMs, etc.), Porn and other adult content, and open-source Purists a la F-Droid. Also, potentially governments such as China or Russia.

> Do you think these companies have spent this much money on marketing and bankrolling lobbyists in the US and EU for no reason?

It's perfectly possible for companies to waste a lot of money on boondoggles that won't actually help their bottom line, yes.

[Vespasian]

And we mustn't forget that Big Tech companies neither pay many taxes in Europe nor do they employ a lot of people either. Most of their development and production happens elsewhere.

(Relative to their size).

They have therefore little political pull on European legislator's (beside flat out bribing them which, despite everything, isn't helping them).

The cherry on top is that all those regulations can be used in negotiations with the US in the future (e.g. to provide EU law enforcement with equal access to the data of American citizens)

[izacus]

Apple has completely forgotten their privacy bargains in China when their profits were threatened. They've also special-cased their own Ad data collection (a business that's growing in revenue) to be opt-out. So your trust in Apple collectively bargaining in your interest is misplaced because they ALREADY haven't proven themselves to be trustworthy (and they repeatedly lied and misled in their marketing and court hearings when it trusted them). They're an unaccountable and unelected corporation, not a government.

I prefer to put my trust in "collectively bargained" and voted for GDPR (and similar) legislation which affects all apps, all corporations. This gives us both choice (critical for freedom), market competition (critical for healthy economy and society - growing up in socialist single-choice markets wasn't fun) AND privacy across the board.

I honestly don't understand your penchant to cross your fingers and hope a for-profit corporation will protect you over actually ensuring they do via privacy legislation.

[ericmay]

> Apple has completely forgotten their privacy bargains in China when their profits were threatened.

Couple of things here. First, I live in America so I don't really care and apparently the Chinese people for whatever reason want to live in that privacy hellscape. Second, Apple unfortunately (like many corporations) is not in a position to dictate privacy regulations to the Chinese government. The interactions here, frankly, are complicated so I'm not really buying this as a valid criticism w.r.t the App Store. If you really want to try and take a moral high ground here, well, let me know when the EU stops supporting genocide in Xinjiang. I'll wait.

(but it's complicated, so let's not sling mud here alright?)

> They've also special-cased their own Ad data collection (a business that's growing in revenue) to be opt-out.

Yes, and I don't like this. It's something I agree with criticizing Apple for.

Similarly: "They're an unaccountable and unelected corporation, not a government"

Yes. And? They're ahead of government regulation here (in many instances and in many countries). You're framing this as if my choices are an unelected corporation and a government, but we're just switching between one unelected corporation (Apple) and others (Facebook, et al).

> I honestly don't understand your penchant to cross your fingers and hope a for-profit corporation will protect you over actually ensuring they do via privacy legislation.

We are not talking about GDPR or "socialism" or whatever. We're talking about regulating Apple so that other mega corporations can create their own app stores on iOS and then do whatever they want. You're just wrestling control away from one mega corporation that ostensibly has some sort of values that align with the interest of the public and giving it to other mega corporations that, as far as I can tell, don't.

[ginko]

>We are not talking about GDPR or "socialism" or whatever. We're talking about regulating Apple so that other mega corporations can create their own app stores on iOS and then do whatever they want.

So don't use those. Personally I'll mostly stick to Apple's app store along with some Free Software one where I download Firefox and some other open source apps.

[ericmay]

> So don't use those.

The problem is that it lessens Apple's collective bargaining power. They can't make Facebook (again just as an example) comply with privacy rules on the iOS App Store because Facebook can and will offer its product exclusively on its own store or on a third-party store where they don't have to use these rules.

The feedback loop for privacy rights is such that people will say screw the privacy rights and go download Facebook anyway - so now customers that previously had the best of both worlds (privacy rules and Facebook) will be forced to choose, and they'll definitely choose Facebook.

So what was gained? Well, it's good for mega corporations like Facebook. Bad for single megacorporation Apple, and bad for me as a customer. It's good for payday loan type crypto companies or other scam artists, and bad for my grandma. Etc.

That's the problem here. Saying "don't use those" doesn't make sense. But if you wanted to say that then I just say don't use the iPhone if you want third-party app stores.

[TimPC]

Except even with a third-party app store Apple still has control over what permissions apps need as well as the developer API itself. So it's not clear to me that a third-party app store can ignore privacy without getting a user to click Allow to whatever privacy violations the API permits. I guess Apple can no longer enforce that apps can't use parts of the internal API that leak, so a third-party app store might get around some things that way but it seems they are still quite limited in options.

[orangecat]

It absolutely blows my mind that people are rallying the pitchforks around Apple for "monopolistic corporate scaremongering"

Meanwhile it blows my mind that on a site called Hacker News, people are not only enthusiastically handing control of their computing environments to a megacorporation, but insisting that everyone else should do the same.

[Klonoar]

Where do you think you are?

This site started is effectively a Y-Combinator watercooler. Just because it has the term “Hacker” doesn’t mean what you think it means.

[Jcowell]

> people are not only enthusiastically handing control of their computing environments to a megacorporation, but insisting that everyone else should do the same.

Who here is advocating that Everyone else should get iPhones or that Android should be as locked down as iPhones? (These are the only two interpretations I can imagine from this sentence)

[tchocky]

Don't know if it will be bad. Apple still can make this securely. It doesn't mean that the system needs to be completely open, just that apps need to be able to access hardware features. NFC for example can be asked upon like GPS on the OS level. Doesn't mean that the apps need to access NFC on the direct hardware level. And I don't want to have Android, but I would like for Apple to open up things like the forced browser engine stuff. With this Apple is blocking so much innovation for the web because they are not implementing so many things.

[Jcowell]

One thing I hope for is that API access comes with the following agreement:

1) Use of APIs means an App must be listed on the App Store or be used the regular way. You want location data? Sure but in exchange, I want to see an App Store listing along with the Data Privacy Report. You want access to NFC but you’re a bank? Sure but your cards must also be available to be added directly without an app. You’re free to create another version of your app and list that on another App Store , but I want a version that adheres to the App Store rules.

[anonymousab]

> or you can jailbreak an iPhone

That's often not an option due to Apple's choices, but if Apple offered an official way to break out of the garden with your own iPhone then I think things wouldn't have gotten this far.