[Wowfunhappy]

Maybe that's true, and consumers don't know what's best for them. However, we live in a free society, where consumers are supposed to be able to decide for themselves what they value, and spend their money accordingly.

Where we do impose regulations to ensure public safety, they are decided by a democratic process. And as imperfect as that process may be at times, it is better than letting a single for-profit corporation set the terms.

[gms]

Consumers are indeed able to decide for themselves: they can buy any number of Android phones from many manufacturers for a different experience.

[Nevermark]

> Consumers are indeed able to decide for themselves

> they can buy any number of Android phones

I can imagine a world in which iPhone's and Android phones were drop in replacements for each other.

And I can imagine Apple selling many wonderful interoperable products into an open standards ecosystem, with a tiny fraction of its current market cap.

But we live in a world with a huge global corporation with a highly knit ecosystem, quietly investing billions of dollars retarding threatening innovation, continually raising switching costs, and the costs of interoperability with alternatives, growing a tax base of third party efforts having little to do with Apple's efforts (streaming media and games, third party stores, creator economy, ...), shifting inconveniences from users to third parties, etc.

There are worse forms of coercion, i.e. the systematic privacy violations and manipulative media of the surveillance economy (run in part by Google the major benefactor of Android, and which even Apple dips its toes into).

But the choice between iOS and Android ecosystems is anything but a simple easily informed choice, free of supplier leverage, conflicts of interest, with predictable long term implications in cost efficiency and future freedoms of choice for most users.

[gms]

That's clearly not the world most consumers want, otherwise they would have directed their money towards Android in the early days. They didn't.

For the minority who do want this world, again, there is a laundry list of Android variants they can buy.

Coercion implies the threat of violence due to non-compliance. There is no coercion here. Apple, Google, etc aren't governments.

[danShumway]

Arguably it is clearly the world that most consumers want or they wouldn't have voted for a government that enacted these policies.

I think it's a little silly to argue that purchasing decisions for a device are an endorsement of every single aspect of that device. There are features that are desirable on iOS that would be enough to influence a consumer to buy an iOS device that have nothing to do with whether or not the device supports sideloading.

But if we are arguing that purchasing decisions are an endorsement of every corporate decision about a device, then it seems silly to argue that voting decisions are not a similar endorsement of government policy. And of course, Apple is not legally obligated to serve the EU, they're one of richest companies on the entire planet so if anyone is equipped to be choosy about the markets they support, it's Apple. However, Apple has freely chosen to do business in the EU, and EU residents have freely chosen to vote for politicians that have imposed regulations on Apple's presence in the market.

Of course I don't actually think it's that simple. But ignoring the lock-in present in government policy and market participation is no less silly than ignoring the lock-in on in a device where moving away from the ecosystem can cause your credit card to stop working. A more reasonable take is that consumers make purchasing decisions for complicated reasons, some of them having nothing to do with lock-in (if they are even aware of lock-in or security or user freedom debates to begin with, which is usually not the case), and their preferences about these systems can change wildly depending on the circumstances and affordances and research that they do.

As an example, Facebook argued that users were clearly opting in to tracking on iOS by choosing to use the Facebook service instead of the many other available social networks they could sign up for. Thankfully, Apple didn't agree, and when users were offered a more clear choice about whether to share advertising IDs with Facebook, many of them said no. If we took a view that participation in an ecosystem was endorsement of the entire ecosystem, we'd be arguing that Apple adding privacy controls in front of Facebook was somehow circumventing the social-media market. But as it turns out many users did want privacy controls in front of Facebook, just not so much that they were willing to avoid Facebook entirely. When offered the best of both worlds, they were happy to use Facebook while sharing less information with the service.

[gms]

You can switch vendors any time (e.g. to Samsung, LG, Google, or any other Android/Microsoft variants). That's not the same as governments - that feedback loop is way longer. Especially with something as sprawling as the European Commission.

Given the size of Facebook's userbase and its revenue growth over many years, most people don't care about the tracking that goes on there.

[danShumway]

> You can switch vendors any time (e.g. to Samsung, LG, Google, or any other Android/Microsoft variants)

You'll have to dig yourself back out of the vendor lock-in in order to do so. If you have an Apple device and you use an Apple credit card, switching to Android means changing your credit card and changing your subscriptions. It means different compatibility rules between devices, it means different app availability. Sometimes it means giving up related services that are not available on other platforms (almost like the switching costs inherent in bundling services together is part of what this debate is about).

Of course, you can do all that. But you can also emigrate between countries in many cases. The EU and US will allow you to move someplace else if you want to. It'll be expensive, it might be prohibitively expensive, there might be large switching costs and things you have to give up -- but that's just another system of vendor lock-in. The United States will not (generally) say that it's illegal for you to move to France.

And note that with Apple in particular, Apple has the resources to move out of countries if it wants to. Apple is not a single family struggling to make ends meet that can't afford legal advice on how to exit a market. Apple is one of the richest companies in the world. If Apple doesn't want to be part of the EU market, Apple has the freedom to walk away from that market -- and in fact, corporations have done this before, they have exited markets over policy. There are few companies in the world where participation in a market is more of a choice than it is with Apple.

To say that developers have a choice about which ecosystems they work with but that Apple doesn't have a choice about whether it does business in the EU... it's just wildly inconsistent. Oh, Apple would have to give up a lot of revenue, sure. But I wonder if developers making a decision about whether to support iOS have ever faced that conundrum? ;)

I'll concede that the scale is different, but there is no bright line here that makes vendor lock-in fundamentally different, you're just quibbling over where to draw a line on a continuum. And it's a lot simpler and more accurate to the real world to just say, "yes, governments can impose more switching cost but that doesn't mean that switching costs and the concept of coercion stop existing outside of governments." People like to pretend that the extreme power of governments and the extreme danger of government overreach means that they're fundamentally the only system of coercion and that means that markets are always pure expressions of free choice, and it's just obviously not true.

Governments are coercive and are often coercive on a level beyond the market. There is a reason why we care more about freedom of speech as applied to the government than as applied to businesses. Scale matters. But scale is not the same as a binary system. The fact that government has more tools at its disposal to coerce people does not mean that the market (or Apple) has none.

----

> Given the size of Facebook's userbase and its revenue growth over many years, most people don't care about the tracking that goes on there.

And yet, when offered the choice when booting up Facebook on iOS, many users chose to disable tracking. Why? I thought we knew their preference. How do we explain this difference in behavior if using Facebook is an expression of approval over how users are tracked? Are we supposed to believe that all of those users suffered concussions and then suddenly became not OK with the tracking anymore?

It's one thing to say that consumers are choosing to opt into a system, but here we have an example of consumers literally demonstrating two separate choices in opposite directions. So it just doesn't make sense to act like using Facebook means users like being tracked when we have extremely clear signals that those same users immediately opted out of being tracked as soon as they had the opportunity to do so.

The only way to explain that behavior is to say that their usage of Facebook did not provide a clear indicator on their preferences on privacy/tracking and that their decision to use Facebook was a complicated decision based on multiple factors and was not some kind of full endorsement of Facebook's business model.

[Nevermark]

Wow, that was really well stated.

I can only add, that votes for Putin are similarly not simple votes. Centralization and consolidation of power, or product categories, encompassing a myriad of implications, into one, two or three entities, completely derail the meaning of seemingly normal expressions of preference.

[gms]

Sure, but that's not the case with Apple. There are a number of smartphone manufacturers (even 'Android' isn't one category - there are many variants) and there aren't many laws preventing new entries into the market that can be sustained by potentially happy customers.

It's not like governments (which also have a monopoly on legal violence, something no corporation has) or political parties at all.

[danShumway]

Very good point.

To be clear, I'm not saying that Apple is the same as Putin; there's different kinds of "voting" in any government system. But I really like the way you phrase that: "consolidation of product categories" is a really good description of how Apple's ecosystem works, and it's clear (to me at least) that this consolidation is purposeful and deliberate; Apple wants iOS to be a composite product that is all-or-nothing. And you're completely right that both votes and purchases are often at best decisions about the entire composite ecosystem as a whole and not about the individual parts of those ecosystems.

The consequence is that once consumers are in a place where there are only a few choices about ecosystems that actually make sense to use, there's no longer pressure to change the parts that people don't like as long as the overall ecosystem still remains better than the alternatives. In the same way that single-issue voting allows parties to pass otherwise unpopular policies in other areas, products can excel in specific important areas that allow companies to ignore other flaws and criticisms in other areas. It's very easy for markets to hit local maximums where having a clear market winner in a particular category removes any incentive for the market to otherwise improve, because improving those areas would require at least temporarily moving away from the current best choice.

[dns_snek]

Thankfully the EU regulators have decided otherwise.

[HumblyTossed]

So, what other features do you wish to prevent and or remove from iOS/iPhones because you don't have a use for them even though they would not affect you one iota?

[gms]

They do affect me - non-technical members of my family are on iPhones and I’m glad they can’t install malware by accident.

More generally, I don’t believe I nor anyone else should mandate anything about a private software company’s product roadmap (least of all spiteful bureaucrats obsessed with targeting American technology companies).

The precedent this sets is absurd. The market already provides a solution outside of arbitrary coercion: we all have the freedom to purchase other products.

[Wowfunhappy]

Do non-technical members of your family accidentally disable Gatekeeper on their Macs?

[mrmanner]

> we live in a free society, where consumers are supposed to be able to decide for themselves what they value, and spend their money accordingly

…except if they value a device that enforces audited software only, because they find it safe and convenient. If they value that they’re wrong, because wanting that is unfair to some businesses who want to sell them things.

> it is better than letting a single for-profit corporation set the terms

This is sort of true, government regulation is better than a single corporation dictating terms. But it’s not that relevant, is it? There are two major corporations in the mobile OS business. Plus a bunch of open source projects and a few small businesses for the adventurous. And web standards making it reasonably possible to not depend on any one of them, if that’s a priority.

Are the big technology companies powerful? Yes. Should they be regulated? Yes. Like this? Probably not.

[Wowfunhappy]

> …except if they value a device that enforces audited software only, because they find it safe and convenient.

What is the legitimate reason for tying this to hardware? If you only want to use audited software, then don't install software from outside the official app store. I agree that the iOS App Store is a great service, I just object to it being the only option.

Apple locks up the supply chains for the best screens, the best cameras, the most advanced chip fabrication processes, etc etc. Then practically all of the consumers with enough disposable income to care about those things buys iPhones, and Apple turns around and says "clearly, these people buy our hardware because they like being locked into the App Store!" I don't buy it.

[danShumway]

> …except if they value a device that enforces audited software only, because they find it safe and convenient.

There's a lot of selective reasoning on both sides of this debate. We both know that consumers don't think about security enough that they would consciously avoid an alternate app store in order to keep themselves safe. We've all worked with tech-illiterate people long enough to know that they don't have survival instincts around security, they will happily walk out of a walled garden at the first opportunity, disable their firewalls, and install malware.

But it's also pretty obvious that consumers don't think about security enough that the majority of them are consciously opting into a curated app store as an informed decision. If Apple suddenly decided to throw open the flood gates and became even more open than Android, these users would not switch to Android. I have never heard an ordinary, non-techy, non-HN user tell me that they're buying an iPhone because it doesn't support sideloading.

The reality is, consumers don't think about this at all and they probably don't have much of a conscious preference for any outcome. Some tech users do, but the majority of Apple users are neither so security conscious that they would inconvenience themselves in any way to avoid 3rd-party installs, nor so conscious of consumer freedoms that they would inconvenience themselves in order to buy a device that supports sideloading.

I do not believe that this is a behavior that the market selects for in either direction. The smartphone market is not a reflection of social preference towards either security or freedom.

So I think it's just kind of nonsense to act like this is a question of consumer choice. If Apple is allowed to run a curated store, customers will keep buying Apple products and they'll ignore any apps that they can't install and they'll lose zero sleep about that arrangement. If Apple is forced to run a more open store, customers will keep buying Apple products and they'll install anything they want regardless of the warnings, and they will once again lose zero sleep over it.

And of course that's the case because there's no other way to square the idea that people willingly buy into the Apple ecosystem and also that those same people wouldn't avoid sideloaded apps if given the choice. There's no way we can pretend that one of those decisions is a consumer preference and the other one is the opposite and their brains have magically turned off -- the only explanation that explains both behaviors is that consumers are not making either of these decisions based on security/freedom.

----

Most consumers are apathetic to this entire debate. Again, there are some tech users that doesn't apply to. They are an extreme minority, but they exist. Some people use Android out of principle, some people consciously choose to use Apple devices because they don't want sideloading. Most people do not fall into either of those categories, and I just think it's a mistake to interpret consumer buying trends of Android/iOS devices like it's some kind of general expression of customer will about technical issues that they don't even understand in the first place.

You have to remember the majority of both Apple and Android customers probably don't even know what sideloading is; they certainly are not making informed decisions about it in any direction. To the extent that they are thinking about privacy or security at all, they are primarily thinking about the number of TV ads that they've seen for each product that used the word "privacy."

So when we talk about regulation, it's more valuable to talk about the effects on the overall market for smartphone apps and software innovation, the practical effects on security regardless of people's supposed choices about the risks they want to take, and about whether the market/security benefits outweigh the downsides. "What consumers want" is a misdirection; consumers don't want anything to do with this debate and they couldn't care less about whether or not Apple has an API for 3rd-party web browsers or whether or not the app store allows distributing GPL apps. They don't know or care what those words mean.

[Wowfunhappy]

I mostly love this post but I want to quibble about one thing:

> And of course that's the case because there's no other way to square the idea that people willingly buy into the Apple ecosystem and also that those same people wouldn't avoid sideloaded apps if given the choice.

I think there is a universe in which:

1. Apple allows sideloading on iOS.

2. 95%+ of users don't ever sideload apps, preferring the safety and security of the official App Store.

Note that #2 does not mean consumers need to understand the precise risks of untrusted software, provided they generally understand that malicious apps exist and can harm their phone, whereas Apple promises everything in the app store is safe.

To make this happen, Apple would need to do some work, aka actually compete in the market! They would need to run an advertising campaign about the value of app store curation. They would need to improve search and discoverability, such as by not auctioning off the top search result spot. They might need to take a lower percentage of app revenue.

And Apple should have to do these things because it would be good for consumers!

[danShumway]

I don't necessarily disagree, just that what you're describing is an education effort.

I do think that general users can understand what the security/freedom tradeoff of sideloading is; this is not something that's beyond the ability of normal people to reason about. I just think that in the current market they don't. I don't believe that the current behaviors we see where lots of people simultaneously buy into iOS as a closed platform and are also pretty bad about staying in walled gardens without being forced to can be explained by saying that one of those things is an educated decision and the other one isn't.

But you're right, that's not to say that in theory consumers couldn't be educated about the tradeoffs or that it wouldn't be good to have a general education effort in that direction. But I think it would need to be a shift and we would need to start doing that education. I'm only trying to push back on the idea that absent consumer education we can still make inferences about their preferences through just surface-level choices that they might be making for arbitrary reasons.

[seanmcdirmid]

> To make this happen, Apple would need to do some work, aka actually compete in the market! They would need to run an advertising campaign about the value of app store curation. They would need to improve search and discoverability, such as by not auctioning off the top search result spot. They might need to take a lower percentage of app revenue.

Apple already does that marketing. It’s why I bought an iPhone rather than an android phone. Apple doesn’t have a lockdown on the smart phone market. They don’t even have a majority of it, I choose an iPhone because I don’t want to deal with my phone like a Linux box.

Yes, Apple has a monopoly on iPhones. But making the iPhone suck as much as other phones doesn’t seem like it will correct that monopoly.

[danShumway]

> Apple already does that marketing. It’s why I bought an iPhone rather than an android phone.

Do you believe that if sideloading is offered on the iPhone that the majority of Apple users will be able to make an informed decision about whether or not it's safe to use 3rd-party stores?

This is exactly what I'm getting at: it cannot simultaneously be true that iOS customers already know the security/choice tradoeffs and are opting into the market fully informed about their decisions specifically because they want a walled garden, and also be true that those same people's brains are going to suddenly, magically turn off and they'll be incapable of making security decisions if they ever have an option in the iOS settings to enable sideloading.

Given that we know that lots of people buy Apple phones, and given that we know that many of those same users would choose to sideload possibly malicious apps without hesitation even though doing so would open them up to security risks -- the only explanation that reconciles those two contradictory facts is that the majority of iOS users are not thinking about security or user choice at all. And that's an explanation that's supported by what we seen in the real world as well: when talking to non-technical iOS users they don't tend to have strong opinions about this (if they even know what the debate is in the first place). If you go to a random person on the street and ask them why they bought an iPhone, "app store policy" will not be their response.

You may not be in that category; maybe you did buy an iPhone specifically because you wanted a closed ecosystem. But if so, you are not representative of the majority of iPhone users. The majority of iPhone users don't know what an "alternate browsing engine" is. The majority of iPhone users have probably never thought about how the app store works or whether they agree with it. They don't have preferences in any direction; the majority of iPhone users currently think we're all giant nerds for having this conversation at all.

And being informed about that conversation is what we're talking about when we talk about education. None of this is to say that people couldn't be educated enough to make informed decisions about sideloading or that they're incapable of thinking about security, but you're fooling yourself if you think an average smartphone user is currently thinking about app store policies at all when they buy a smartphone.