Comment by jodrellblank
4 years ago
Apple devices aren't crippled by it, they're improved by it. By curation and restriction. Users don't buy Apple gear to pay the lowest possible price for software, or to sideload software, users buy Apple to get something that works. The whole point is that Apple is selling an Apple experience, not an overwhelming flood of "fix it yourself" freeware. Users who want that can get it elsewhere, they shouldn't be forced to suffer it on iOS as well. Taking the restrictions away isn't an improvement. They aren't mandatory restrictions until using iOS is mandatory, and it isn't.
This is like a restaurant demanding smart shoes for customers, and you complaining that it's anti-competitively hurting your sneaker business and the restaurant should be forced to change. Customers going there are going there knowing the dress code applies to them and others, forcibly blocking that removes part of their reason for going there at all.
> "You aren't making much sense. You won't have any semblance of adoption if you don't have presence on iOS."
That is the sense, you aren't required to have any semblance of adoption. Apple is successful by building a curated, restricted, "exclusive" (by perception if not fact) experience. You want access to the customers and their money, without upholding the reasons the customers are using that platform.
> "Yet no one raises any objections about not being able to run arbitrary code on them. Precisely because of the marketing and expectations."
Now you aren't making sense. Apple never marketed or set expectations that you could sideload apps on iPhone or iOS, did they?
> "By the way, washing machines and microwaves also have a full computer in them — there's CPU, RAM, and ROM. Yes, tiny and underpowered. Probably not quite powerful enough to run Doom. Computers nonetheless, technically."
So you're going after Bosch for anti-competitively not allowing you to sell software that runs on their washing machines, and not allowing owners to sideload? Because this is all about anti-competitive, you said? No obviously you aren't doing that, which calls into question your claimed reasons. You can easily list your app on Apple's store and compete, what it's about is you want more money. Which is fine in its own way, until you try to get some legal mandate for Apple to force me to worse platform so you can avoid paying Apple money for using Apple's platform and reputation.
>"You want access to their customers"
Last time i checked, corporations were not allowed to own people, has that changed?
>"So you're going after Bosch for anti-competitively not allowing you to sell software that runs on their washing machines, and not allowing owners to sideload?"
You are not helping your case by making these daft comparisons.
Perhaps referring to people who buy and use X's products and services as "X's customers" is unfamiliar to you, but it's in very common usage, and conveys no element of ownership:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22apple%27s%20custome...
> "You are not helping your case by making these daft comparisons."
The person I was originally replying to is the one who brought up washing machines as having general purpose computers inside them. It's not my comparison, it's me using their comparison to make a point. The point being, that because Alice bought a device that contains a microchip, doesn't entitle you to be allowed to sell software that runs on that microchip, and worsen her experience to do that. Like if Alice chooses to live in a gated community and pays someone to filter her mail, it would be obviously unreasonable to say "I object to gates, I should be allowed to post my fliers through her mailbox for free", as if that's your decision to make, not hers.
What if Alice lives in a gated community because it has a pool and would like to receive mail that hasn’t been pre-screened?
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That argument would be fine if we had plenty of mobile OS providers, except we have only two and it's a duopoly with very clear market issues.
If you don't like Bosch, there's hundreds of other manufacturer, if you don't like a restaurant, there's hundreds of other ones you can pick, if you don't like Android and iOS, well, you're screwed.
That's the market analogy, secondly, those monopolies are essential in today's computing world and currently power a great part of the tech industry, easy to see some issues there.
> The whole point is that Apple is selling an Apple experience, not an overwhelming flood of "fix it yourself" freeware. Users who want that can get it elsewhere, they shouldn't be forced to suffer it on iOS as well.
> That argument would be fine if we had plenty of mobile OS providers
So your problem is Apple solved the customer problem so well with “an Apple experience” that all other phone OSes were abandoned.
And as a result Apple should be forced to ruin that experience beloved by their customers, so that the relatively small number of software developers make a little more money?
As an Apple customer, I’m glad your software is being gated from me. I don’t trust your judgement.
> So your problem is Apple solved the customer problem so well with “an Apple experience” that all other phone OSes were abandoned.
I don't really care how and why those two companies got their monopoly, that's beside the point.
> And as a result Apple should be forced to ruin that experience beloved by their customers, so that the relatively small number of software developers make a little more money?
There's hundreds of thousands of developers on mobile platforms and juste two single companies on the other side with blatant anti-trust issues, that's an easy argument here.
> As an Apple customer, I’m glad your software is being gated from me. I don’t trust your judgement.
I really don't care if you use my software or not either. I'm currently forced to use one of those two mobile platform for my daily use and both choices are terrible in their own way due to anti-trust issues. You have absolutely zero power over Apple which owns your device anyway so I'm not sure why you would say that, it's not like your opinion would matter to them.
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> The whole point is that Apple is selling an Apple experience
Once you bought a thing, you own it. That's it. It's cool to have a curated app store for those developers who want it. It's uncool for Apple to retain control of devices after they've been sold.
> This is like a restaurant demanding smart shoes for customers
You can't make this comparison. You don't get to choose what kind of mobile device other people use. You do get to choose which restaurant you visit.
> Apple is successful by building a curated, restricted, "exclusive" (by perception if not fact) experience.
Apple is successful by building great hardware and mostly good UX. Macs have had no app store for most of their history, and even though presently do have restrictions by default, there's a manual override to allow running unsigned or self-signed code.
> You want access to the customers and their money, without upholding the reasons the customers are using that platform.
I'm having issue with there being a gatekeeper AT ALL. I don't give a crap about "their customers" and "their money". I just want to make an app and distribute it straight to my users. That's it. Apple forcibly inserting itself in between me and my users doesn't do any good to either side. Especially if it's a free app and I'm doing my own marketing. It's simply a rent-seeking prude intermediary that creates more problems than it solves.
People buy smartphones because you need one to function in the modern society. They choose either Google or Apple. Neither of these corporations deserves all the credit they feel entitled to.
> Apple never marketed or set expectations that you could sideload apps on iPhone or iOS, did they?
Apple set expectations that you can do pretty much anything on an iOS device.
> You can easily list your app on Apple's store and compete, what it's about is you want more money.
I don't give a crap about money. I despise intellectual property and proprietary software. I'll never sell a byte.
I'm simply sick and tired of how relentlessly Apple wants to eradicate sex and piracy form the internet, for example. Even if you have a free app, Apple literally dictates you how you should change your ToS to be approved on the app store. Is that acceptable? I don't think so. No one should have this kind of power. If the web was invented today, a web browser would be rejected from the app store for allowing the user to view any content without restrictions.
Meanwhile they approve all sorts of scam apps, like a bunch of wallpapers with a $20/week subscription on it. Because they take a 30% cut on those. This is hypocrisy.
> I just want to make an app and distribute it straight to my users. That's it. Apple forcibly inserting itself in between me and my users doesn't do any good to either side.
As an iPhone user, I invited (even pay) Apple to gate me from abusive software. Don’t blame Apple, blame me, and charge more for it if you need (this is how I pay Apple for the service).
> "I don't give a crap about money. I despise intellectual property and proprietary software. I'll never sell a byte."
> "People buy smartphones because you need one to function in the modern society. They choose either Google or Apple. Neither of these corporations deserves all the credit they feel entitled to."
And you can sideload on Android, and they chose not-Android. and you could do so on Blackberry, and WindowsPhone, and Maemo and Symbian, and they all failed for not offering what people want. The only remaining good experience left is Apple, and you want to take that away as well. We know what that world looks like. It's not paradise of free choice, it's this: https://i.imgur.com/Ko5QcQl.jpg
And by "this", that's what an Android phone looks like. If you want to live in that world as a personal choice, you can easily not install the toolbars. But if there is an ecosystem you can buy into which avoids that, that should be an option. You want people who chose a limited experience to have the limits removed - but they chosing the limited experience in the first place, who are you to say that shouldn't be allowed?
> "Apple is successful by building great hardware and mostly good UX. Macs have had no app store for most of their history, and even though presently do have restrictions by default, there's a manual override to allow running unsigned or self-signed code."
Agreed, so people who want unsigned or self-signed code can buy macs, right? Choice. Nobody is forced to buy an iOS device, nobody is surprised when they can't side-load a program, because that has been the same for 10+ years and 10+ major iPhone versions, it's never been an expectation.
> "I'm having issue with there being a gatekeeper AT ALL."
I'm having issue with the idea that people willingly buying into an optional gatekeeper is some problem you think will be improved by forbidding people from having that option. The good it does is removing floods of junk from iOS users attention. It's like saying "My email isn't spam" and ignoring that spam is a huge problem and people willingly subscribe to gatekeepers at massive effort and cost industry-wide to try and protect themselves. So are robocalls, and dredmorbius suggests they might bring down the phone networks entirely[1] in the coming few years from a complete inability and unwillingness to defend itself. "Pay to send me an email or call me" would stop it in its tracks. Buying into a gatekeeper environment is another. "I should be able to bypass your spam filter because my emails aren't spam"?
[1] https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102357651020681668
You aren't making sense, again.
> And you can sideload on Android, and they chose not-Android.
How many people actually know anything about what it takes to publish to the app store? Developers literally aren't allowed to tell them. If you write the very sensible "this content is not available on this device due to Apple App Store policies", you app will be rejected. Almost no one says bad things about Apple because of the fear that they might be denied presence on iOS. This is a very large power imbalance, and this absolutely needs to be dealt with. I'm so looking forward to those antitrust cases.
> and you could do so on Blackberry, and WindowsPhone, and Maemo and Symbian, and they all failed for not offering what people want.
"I wish my phone didn't allow me to install on it what I want" said no one ever. They failed for other reasons.
It's okay to have an app store as a default way of installing apps. What's not okay is making it THE ONLY way of installing apps, thus robbing people of choice.
> Agreed, so people who want unsigned or self-signed code can buy macs, right? Choice. Nobody is forced to buy an iOS device
Computers and phones aren't the same thing, you can't compare them like that. I use a Mac precisely because it's great experience AND it allows me to run whatever the hell I tell it to. I use Android for the same reason.
> It's like saying "My email isn't spam" and ignoring that spam is a huge problem and people willingly subscribe to gatekeepers at massive effort and cost industry-wide to try and protect themselves.
Calling things "spam" or "not spam" is users' own choice. You as an email user always have the last word in whether something is spam. You don't have this as an iOS user. If Apple says something isn't good for you, this decision is final. You just aren't getting that app no matter how much you want it.
By the way, if Google says something isn't good for you, the developer can still distribute an apk from their website. Yes, it won't be as prominent, and it won't have a listing page, but the users would still have the option to install it if they want it.
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