Comment by realusername
4 years ago
> 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.
> I don't really care how and why those two companies got their monopoly, that's beside the point.
How do you expect to beat Apple or even an argument on the internet, let alone with Congress, if you’re not even willing to learn from your (so called) competitors?
Which competitors? They aren't any. I expect anti-trust laws to be applied, as simple as that.
What anti-trust measures made Blackberry give up and switch to Android? Was it Apple's doing that Microsoft bought Nokia and Nokia imploded with Symbian and Maemo and inability to compete with iOS? Was it Apple's doing that Microsoft went from Windows CE to Windows Mobile to Windows Phone 7 to Windows Phone 8, each incompatible with the previous, and they couldn't attract developers because they couldn't keep a stable API and didn't embrace the web? Was it Apple's doing that all the featurephone providers from Motorola to Sony, and all the PDA providers like Psion and Palm and Dell, and all the computer companies like IBM and Intel, all completely failed to release a credible competitor device?
Apple have 27% of the mobile OS market.
Simple as what? What do you expect, what do you want, anti-trust laws being applied to do? Magically conjour up a competitor from nowhere? Or just smash iOS in resentment for its success so you can have avoid having to suffer Android?
9 replies →
> "I don't really care how and why those two companies got their monopoly, that's beside the point."
It isn't; over the past decade the tech world has shifted more and more towards telemetry, advertising, and low quality user experience. Popular sites like Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube have added more and more adverts and less and less social connection, become more centralized (Microsoft buying LinkedIn and GitHub, Facebook buying WhatsApp and Instagram), Windows has added more advertisements and telemetry, and iOS has held out as a comparatively stable, predictable, clean, low-ad, low-telemetry, user focused platform through all of this.
> "blatant anti-trust issues"
Allowing my proverbial elderly mother to buy a device which cannot, in any way, be the subject of a scam like this:
https://old.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/mfy1sw/my_...
by having someone talk her through disabling the sideload protection and installing a malware, is not "anti-trust", it's "pro-trust". And yes I do understand that I'm swapping the meaning of "trust" here between your use and mine, and that's deliberate. Look at the comments in that thread:
"Sounds dumb, but my 79 year old dad fell for it completely. Something like $100 and they got him to install remote control software while they ran a virus scan. Of course that was just what was on the screen, who knows what they were really doing."
"My parents were scammed in a very similar way out of $50,000 about a month ago."
"This happened to a relative of mine, but for $80K. Though the thieves claimed they were working with the Shanghai police. The thieves were brazen enough to get her to not only transfer everything she had in her bank account, but to also cash in her 401K"
"I know somebody who fell for something similar about two years ago. Also out about $20k"
"My SO was inches away from walking through the finale of the scam, I caught it before we lost money"
The argument "nobody should be able to buy a system which has some protections in the design, because I want {geek code} on every device" just isn't good enough. And neither is the tech-world answer "they're dumb and deserve it". Buy an iPad and someone can maybe be conned into setting up a bank transfer, but not into side-loading a crypto coin ransomware, it's one level of defense in depth.
> "I'm currently forced to use one of those two mobile platform for my daily use"
And your solution is to drag iOS down to the level of Android or Windows? Who is forcing you? Why can't you use a dumbphone? Is this a "forced because I don't want to change jobs" thing?
> "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"
Apple owns your device is a lie, you bought it, you own it. Take it apart, take the LCD out and plug it into something else, see if Apple comes at you for breaking "their" device. They won't, because they don't own it. Turning "they didn't build it so I can run Linux on it" is not the same thing as them owning it, any more than Bosch not building a washing machine to let you run Linux on the controller does not imply Bosch own your washing machine in perpetuity.
All your talk about scams is just completely outside the topic, you can totally scam people of their bank account on iPhone right now (as you even realized in your message) and it's done daily, you just ask them to create gift cards or wire money for the "taxman".
By the way, in terms of security, the iPhone isn't even the most secure platform right now, you still have tons of private apis, privacy issues and ways to snoop data back, that's exactly why companies ask you to install their app instead of directly going to their website because on the web they can't do any of that...
> And your solution is to drag iOS down to the level of Android or Windows? Who is forcing you? Why can't you use a dumbphone? Is this a "forced because I don't want to change jobs" thing?
Because even banks and government apps are locked down to these two monopolies, that's enough proof as it is.
> Apple owns your device is a lie, you bought it, you own it. Take it apart, take the LCD out and plug it into something else, see if Apple comes at you for breaking "their" device. They won't, because they don't own it. Turning "they didn't build it so I can run Linux on it" is not the same thing as them owning it, any more than Bosch not building a washing machine to let you run Linux on the controller does not imply Bosch own your washing machine in perpetuity.
You don't own your device because Apple can decide to remove everything from it remotely, can decide that you can no longer can switch it on if they wanted to and actively prevents you to see what it does, that's why you don't own it. You should treat Apple's device as Apple's property that could vanish at any point.
> By the way, in terms of security, the iPhone isn't even the most secure platform right now, you still have tons of private apis, privacy issues and ways to snoop data back, that's exactly why companies ask you to install their app instead of directly going to their website because on the web they can't do any of that...
Don't forget the fact that iOS exploits are cheaper than Android exploits because iOS exploits are so plentiful[1][2].
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/14/zerodium_ios_flaws/
[2] http://zerodium.com/program.html
2 replies →
> "All your talk about scams is just completely outside the topic"
Only if you completely ignore all the things I've been writing. The appstore has restrictions. Those are useful. They are a layer of defense in depth, user protection.
> "By the way, in terms of security, the iPhone isn't even the most secure platform right now, you still have tons of private apis, privacy issues and ways to snoop data back, that's exactly why companies ask you to install their app instead of directly going to their website because on the web they can't do any of that..."
Then Apple should close those gaps. "It has flaws" is not a reason to turn it into a wide-open free-for-all, that would be worse, not better.
> "You don't own your device because Apple can decide to remove everything from it remotely"
That's like saying you don't own a TV because the TV station can stop broadcasting and then the device is useless. You can throw it in the trash without telling anyone, and nobody will care. You can sell it. You can smash it with a hammer. You own it. What the software and online service licenses are, is a different matter. That you can see a processor inside it and wish it could run Linux and wish Apple had built it differently, is irrelevant to whether you own it.
2 replies →