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by paulmd
901 days ago
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in general, a lot of people get pretty worked up about anything having to do with the fruit company so I find it often helps to just substitute in "discord" and see if the argument sounds hyperbolic. "discord is intentionally causing problems by blocking interoperability with third-party clients and using that to funnel sales via peer-pressure from his peer group" why does discord have to allow third parties to run off their infrastructure and development spends? is discord a gatekeeper in this context? certainly it would hurt me socially to not be able to access the space where all my friends hang out, and they monetize that further by forcing me into shitty pay-by-month upgrades that are only possible via their gatekeeping (otherwise I'd trivially be able to add animated emojis back etc). or how about slack? email is another great example... if you figure out how to spoof some headers and trick gmail into thinking you are another gmail SMTP relay, do you have the right to build a commercial service on the ability to send email through gmail's infrastructure, and gmail is legally prohibited from closing the open relay ever again? And bear in mind that google is DEFINITELY a gatekeeper in all senses of the word - it is very hard to convince gmail and outlook to take your emails from a self-hosted server. XMPP allowed interoperability, but it was never a legal requirement. And if you do create this legal requirement, you turn it into an email-like situation where there are certainly parties who would love to use that relay to worsen your customers' quality-of-life. |
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You have exactly two relevant phone infrastructures in the Western World. One is pretty open and the other is locked. Usually it doesn't cause many problems besides envy. People can still talk with each other. It works quite well all over the planet because of third party commutation software like Whatsapp, Facebook, etc.
However, on the locked ones biggest market there is a special situation where the fact that third party software is not that popular. This situation grew out of historical reasons and has created a toxic problem which divides the whole country almost in half. None of your examples above is so widespread and creates such a huge divide.
So what is it you can do about it as a company? You could allow for interoperability within the established communication methods your customers use. Or you could just ignore the problem and be happy about all those customers who have to buy your expensive devices and services only because they don't want to be outcasts in their class, in dating, at work, etc.
The decision Apple made here shows their attitude towards their customers and their potential customers. An attitude towards the society at large, actually. Looking at it from outside the US-bubble it's quite shocking and pretty much disgusting. I wonder how people working there are not ashamed of themselves for keeping such a problem up.