Comment by Fripplebubby

And that is stuff Apple absolutely does. I have been at a company for which Apple was a customer. But you'd think that Apple owned the company the way they through around their power and demands.

It boils down to the fact that iPhone is a pervasive computing device and similar to a "public good" should be regulated tightly.

For millions of people, it's their main/sole computing and internet access device so should be a neutral platform - with clear evidence as cited that Apple has not maintained its neutrality. As a neutral platform, customers should have the freedom to use their devices without undue interference or restrictions from Apple.

These are similar arguments made in the Microsoft vs. Netscape case. The lone example of being unable to install non-App Store apps is enough to justify the DOJ's case. Question is what would the verdict be? Similar to the EU's DMA rules would be a likely starting point.

I’ve read a few takes on this from smart people. This is the first time I’ve seen anything that sounds like a real winnable case. Thanks for the distillation. It’s good to know this isn’t as boneheaded as I’d thought (though they still need to go after the App Store).

Excellent breakdown. Much more concise compared to other versions of the story. And, to boot, all entirely true.

Thank you

From a hardware standpoint third party fitness trackers with full integration into iHealth and third party ear buds with the same (or better) features than airpods.

Part of the IBM settlement required them to document interoperability. That was used by the DoJ to force Microsoft to document their CIFS (distributed storage) and Active Directory (naming/policy) protocols.

The latter might be particularly instructive as my experience with CIFS when I worked at NetApp was the different ways that Microsoft worked to be "precisely" within the lines but to work against the intent. Documentation like "this bit of this word must always be '1'" Which as any engineer knows, if it really was always '1' then that bit didn't have to be in the protocol, so what did it do when it wasn't '1'?

Forget iMessage, I just want media messages from iPhone to not be sub-144p pictures/videos. I know sms is limited but I doubt that's a technical limitation.

And yea, Gamepass was an immediate thought of something a company wanted to ship but Apple blocked. Between that and the Epic Games store it looks like there's gonna be a lot more options to game on IOS by the turn of the decade.

Cloud game streaming has been recently allowed worldwide under a few conditions ( https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=f1v8pyay ).

Forcing Apple to allow third party payments without Apple's cut would improve market opportunities for many businesses. Facebook could have its marketplace conduct peer to peer transactions. Amazon could allow the purchase of digital goods (books, movies, etc.) and put it on more equal footing with Apple itself. While big businesses are best positioned to take advantage today, the effects directly trickle down to small startup businesses.

While I personally don't care for it, cryptocurrency use would have more potential. Apple blocked apps for NFT features in the past because they couldn't get their 30%.

Having third party marketplaces might make it so that there is some actual curation at the App Store.

Super apps are a dud. China has them because the regulators want them, not because they're a good business.

Facebook tried this with games and cash transfer within Messenger but it never really took off.

Personally, I don’t think Western (or at least American) consumers are all that interested in a super app. Asia has a ton of players in this space like WeChat, QQ, Line and Kaokao but those have never taken off in the West outside of diaspora communities.

Why don't twitter. com just do the super apps w/ e-commerce thing? It's financial regulations, not App Store regulations, isn't that the case?

What are challenges for implementing such "payment" system on iOS that can transfer, say Monopoly money vs real USD? Aren't those almost entirely legal or compliance matters for very good reasons? The Alaskan 737 MAX 9 landed largely intact thanks to still-working parts of regulations and we all value that.

So why not they just do that? Or CAN'T they?

I would be happy if iMessage threads could be exported and saved.

if I was going to dream big, I would like to point the iCloud hooks to a personal server instead of apple in a meaningful way.

- Music Apps (Spotify) that properly integrate with Siri, like on Amazon and Google devices.

As a small business owner, I'm actually keen on the benefits to other businesses that antitrust enforcement and pro-competition enforcement can have.

As a really specific example in the case of Apple, I really hope the DMA causes wider availability of browser choice on iOS so that we as a business that ships a web app can offer our customers features like notifications and other PWA benefits. Our customers are somewhat willing to switch browsers to get the best experience when using our app. But switching to Android? Not a reasonable ask from us.

Most consumers also have jobs right? Making their lives better and easier at work, increasing competition to give their employers more opportunity to thrive, is just as important as making their groceries cheaper.

Economies are producer-centric when you have international competition.

An example being Intel, which is currently getting billions in government subsidies via the CHIPS Act, because their business fell behind because it was impeded by the government suing them for antitrust issues.

Yes, historically the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) and the Clayton Act (1914) define the roll of "regulated capitalism" rather than simply "free market capitalism". There has been a continuous battle between people who wanted to get infinitely wealthy by exploiting their dominance and the Government ever since.

I've had some great conversations with folks about why this form of "American Capitalism" is the most efficient economic engine with regard to an industrial economy. As a system, this, and a graduated taxation that provides a damping function on "infinite wealth" and feeds it into government services has the potential to create an economy where everyone has a chance to get rich, and everyone's basic needs are met. That combination maximizes participation in the economy and thus GDP.

The macroeconomics class I took spent several weeks on this relationship and the "Great Courses" economics class also talks about it.

The challenge is that rich men (typically its men) don't like being told they can't do something, or told they have to do something which will reduce their total wealth, and they respond by corrupting legislators into changing the rules.

It isn't "good" or "bad" per se, some people always eat all the cookies if they think they can get away with it. As a systems analyst though the system is an excellent study in 'tuning.' In theory, as a government maximizing GDP is a goal because the more GDP the more gets done the happier people are, etc etc. Technology strongly affected the rate of change of wealth, people who were middle class at a startup suddenly being in the top 10% in terms of wealth over the course of a few years, rather than a life time of work and savings. Others leveraging their wealth in technology startups having it rocket them into the 1%.[1] Something that the US system of laws does not do well is respond to changes "quickly" (my lawyer friends tell me that is a design feature not a bug). But as we saw with Microsoft's antitrust case they do respond eventually.

[1] Back in the dot com days there was an article in Wired about the "Billionaire Boys Club" which talked about members of the several VC firms whose net worth had ballooned to over a billion dollars.

Long-term thinking isn't super trendy, or even incentivized maybe?

Jobs turned Apple into that himself. He installed the cultlike behemoth attitude and threw famous tantrums and fits when he didn't get his way.

Just look at how he reacted even back when Woz invented the universal remote.

When someone else makes a better product ecosystem.

The Pebble was released in 2013. The two way communication SDK with Pebble was released in May of 2013. In February of 2015, the 2.0 Pebble SDK was released with further integrations.

The first iWatch was announced in September 2014 and released in April of 2015.

The Pebble was discontinued in 2016.

What integrations are you expecting Apple to have released prior to its own release? What functionality did iOS lack that android provided that hampered Pebble's development on iOS?

FWIW you can answer and place calls via smartwatches on ios.

Also, you can interact with Apple Health from any smart device via a companion app. You just have to grant permission.

#1 is valid though.

I couldn’t get the Afib tracker working consistently on my Fitbit Charge 5. Had to switch to an Apple Watch and an iPhone. Much more reliable.

Also I don't believe you can control music

not sure "non-apple watches" is accurate here. I can do all of those things with my Pixel watch

edit: as comment below points out, I was missing the obvious context of paired with an iPhone.

Can you expand on what "integrated with my iPhone" means in concrete terms? I don't really understand what you mean.

>weren't tightly enough integrated with my iPhone to make it "worth it" to me to

To buy them in the first place, for many consumers. Which is exactly what apple had hoped to achieve.

Both of which are possible on Android, with a Garmin Fenix 6s.

Huh? I can filter notifications with third-party smartwatches. Did it on Pebble, Fossil, and others.

I've also had two Garmin watches and I've always been on Android. I also have had Tiles since long before Airtags existed.

Both Garmin and Tile work flawlessly on my Android devices. I've tried to help my wife add them to her iPhone and it's just not worked right, it's a fight to keep things connected and the Tile app only works when it's open and you can't reply to messages from the Garmin and on and on.

I appreciate the efforts to protect privacy and battery life, I can certainly imagine a different Bluetooth device than the Garmin with a worse app that would use the permissions granted it for nefarious purposes, or a worse tracker than the Tile that would wear down battery life with poorly-coded constant background activity, but Apple are clearly also acting in their own selfish interests.

Almost all the stuff Garmin leaves out is the stuff I don't want to do on my watch anyway.

I bought an Apple Watch and it was so fiddly and always trying to get my attention to the point I returned it.

> , but I can sell, distribute, and install apps outside of it without giving Apple a cut.

I want this personally for me. But I paid extra money to get my mom an iPhone exactly because she won't be able to stuff like this.

I used to regularly have to fix her android phone and the last time she was trying to download an app for tracking hours at work, and somehow downloaded the wrong app with a similar name, this app loaded with 3 different pop ups telling her to install other ad filled apps with generic names like "PDF reader".

OP is right, it should be an explicit jailbreaking process that has a technical barrier to entry where my mom can't be talked into doing it over the phone but an enterprising young person could figure it out.

This seems reasonable and I like the idea of unlocking the capabilities the hardware already has. What makes iPhone different from Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo Switch?

> macOS has proven for decades that a reasonably proprietary OS can be distributed and kept reasonably secure when apps are installed on it outside of an App Store.

That’s not really true. Despite the dangers of centralized app censorship, the state of security on iOS is far beyond that of macOS.

It’s reasonably secure because no one has bothered to write malware for it.

But there was nothing on the Mac stopping Zoom from putting a backdoor web server on Macs.

Open source store would be nice. Apple reviews the release ($$$), builds on their server and guarantees it does what it says it does.

> That is not an acceptable way for a computer to work.

Luckily, you have a choice. Other companies make handheld computers that align better with your definition of ownership.

Isn't that exactly what the EU went after?

They didn't tell Apple not to charge 30% for their App Store. They can charge 90% for all they care.

They told Apple they mustn't block other installation methods.

It is not a “mobile computer”. The fact that it has a CPU and other computer parts is an implementation detail (your dishwasher also probably has a CPU). If you want a mobile computer then buy one, don’t buy an iPhone, and don’t advocate for the government to force Apple to change how iPhones work for those of us who like them.

You are exactly describing the recent EU lawsuit

> The problem with Apple is not that they take a 30% cut of app sales in their store, or that they don't allow alternative browser engines or wallets apps or superapps or whatever in their store.

Nope, the problem very much is that they won't allow alternative browser engines, specifically so that they can force a crippled Safari browser with limited APIs to force people to write apps instead of web apps, forcing more traffic to their store. It's explicitly anti-competitive behavior.

>It's their store and they ought to be able to curate it however they like.

It's kind of forced fraud to call Chrome in iOS as "Chrome". It's like trying to sell someone a Ferrari that's just a facade bolted onto 2010 Honda. It's not Chrome, it's actually Safari - and its seems like people are finally starting to wake up to this abusive behavior that Apple has been getting away with for far too long.

Microsoft had a famous anti-trust case against them for simply bundling IE with Windows - not from forcing their engine on every other "browser" that gets installed. Apple is doing far worse than that and getting away with it for far too long.

>The problem is that users cannot reasonably install software through any means other than that single store.

That's one of the many other problems outlined by the DOJ today.

>The problem is that Apple reserves special permissions and system integrations for their own apps and denies them to anyone else.

Also another problem.

>However, these sorts of lawsuits or regulations that seek to force Apple to change App Store policies feel so wrong-headed and out of touch.

I was clapped out loud when I watched the DOJ announcement today. I cheered. They actually mentioned "Developers", which is a group I am part of, and I feel the pain that dealing with Apple and Safari is. Apple absolutely deserves this, and it's about time.

Sony and Microsoft obviously don’t benefit from opening up the platforms, it’s not just something they don’t care about but something they actively oppose, and they specifically ensured they got legislative exceptions to ensure they would never have to reciprocate under the DMA.

Your goals aren’t aligned, you’re just a useful idiot to them and they’ll cast you aside as soon as they no longer need you. The end result of the push isn’t going to be “free as in freedom” for everybody here, just Microsoft capturing 90% of a revenue stream instead of 70%.

Classic populism moment - but of course it’s “populism, but on the computer”.

Freedoms for users and freedom for business are two fundamentally opposed and conflicting goals, see: GPL vs MIT/BSD. And in their moment of victory, businesses will just steamroll right over you - just like they literally already did with consoles.

It’s just crazy that they have these exceptions when their own hardware is very much general-purpose on a technical level, and when they’re actively pushing to use that general-purpose capability to ensnare users with AI features and other crap.

Sony and Microsoft are two of the platforms that stand to gain the most from AI adoption literally purely on the basis of being closed platforms with proprietary APIs (plus a minimal amount of interop for embrace-extend-extinguish) with millions of active users and a captive audience of dev studios who have no choice but to use Sony and Microsoft’s closed, gatekept platforms.

Somehow the plight of poor little Larian being stepped on by Sony and Microsoft and Epic just doesn’t make the front page of HN like apple hate.

> Their parents are giving into their demands for *an iPhone due to social pressures entirely originated by Apple's monopolistic behavior (iMessage green bubbles).

First of all, we don't have that problem here in europe. People just use cross-platform messengers.

Secondly, I don't understand why a company should be forced to bring its service to a platform it doesn't care about. Apple supports the default carrier messaging standards (SMS/MMS). It's not Apple's fault that they suck. In fact Apple explicitely created iMessage because SMS/MMS were absolutely terrible.

If RCS is considered a standard (is it?), then Apple should absolutely support it and apparently they plan to do so. Seems fine to me.

While I personally don't use iMessage I'd prefer it if the service was available everywhere, but I don't see why Apple should be forced to support other platforms. Just because iMessage is popular? Imagine a world where WhatsApp was either an iOS- or Android-exclusive app. Should they be forced to develop for a platform they don't care about too? What about popular iOS-exclusive apps like Things? What about Garageband or Logic? Or Super Mario games on Nintendo?

For your first point that is a fairly wild accusation of that user.

For me, one of the features of a centralised app store is that I buy and subscribe to apps through the app store, which centralises my app subscriptions within my Apple account. I wouldn't have this functionality if I was pulling in apps outside of the app store.

I can go into my Apple account and see every subscription I have and cancel it from within. No shoddy dark website behavior that makes it hard to unsubscribe, I can do it all there.

This just one feature that I find handy in having a single store.

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> I use linux VMs and containers for all my "hacking" where I need total control and customizability of the OS

> On my workstation and phone, where I do my banking and read emails, I'm willing to trade control and customizability for an extremely locked down high trust operating environment.

Excuse my French, but uh what? A browser accessing a bank in a Linux virtual machine running on bare metal is by far more secure than desktop MacOS running on bare metal.

At the end of the day, for the activity you described (browsing), what you must be able to defend against is the inherent insecurity of the browser. Linux provides all manners of process, network, etc isolation via CGroups and can be enhanced by SecComp to limit the usage of typical exotic syscalls used in kernel exploits.

MacOS has what for that? The best opportunity you have for defense is to run qemu so that you can run... Linux. The corporation you work for doesn't use Apple because of their stellar security posture, it uses Apple because they can buy mobile devices (phones, laptops) preconfigured with MDM which saves a lot of money.

I'd kill for an Apple-sanctioned way to load Linux VMs on my iPad and have them run at full speed. It's got an M1 in it, the virtualization hardware is there, Apple just doesn't want me using it.

As it currently stands, the options for Linux VMs on an iPad are:

- iSH, a Linux kernel ABI compatible user-mode x86 emulator that uses threaded code (ROP chains) as a substitute for a proper JIT, but doesn't support all x86 applications[0].

- UTM, a port of QEMU that requires JIT (and thus, either an external debugger or a jailbreak) to run a full x86 or ARM OS.

- UTM SE (Slow Edition), which is UTM but using the threaded code technique from iSH, which is not only slower than iSH because it runs both kernel and user mode, but also got banned from TestFlight before they could even make an App Store submission (probably because it can get to a desktop while iSH can't).

All of these suck in different ways.

[0] Notably, rustc gives an illegal instruction error and mysql crashes trying to do unaligned atomics

Nothing like arguing against software freedom because of "checks notes", security by obscurity. I thought I'd read higher effort content on HN.

I don't buy into this narrative. I have a Pixel phone, you can do quite a lot of privacy "hardening" just by going over the Google settings and turning off a lot of tracking (which they were probably forced to put in by regulators). The rest you can achieve by using Firefox instead of Chrome and choose a different search engine.

I get a lot of hard to solve Google CAPTCHA on many websites I visit so I know Google is having a hard time tracking me :-)

In terms of security, I don't think Pixel is less secure than the iPhone. It gets security updates regularly, Google invests a lot in security and I don't think the Pixel has more zero days than the iPhone...

So all in all, I don't buy into the "iPhone is more secure and handles your privacy better than Android" narrative

You don't do banking on a laptop?

Well, yes, it is less secure. Though Apple has been adding more restrictions around apps having full disk access and stuff.

I don't even let my users have browser extensions without them going through the formal review process. Managing the proliferation of PWAs (potentially unwanted apps) is one of the most unsolvable issues in security. iOS is the gold standard for secure mobile computing due to inability to support alot of these risky use causes.

Yes it is, it just isn’t as big of a target for bad actors because it’s a much less personal device with way fewer users.

It’s definitely less secure. IMO that’s an acceptable tradeoff but it’s still true that MacOS allows you to install potentially harmful software in a way that an iPhone doesn’t. With great power comes great responsibility and all.

The problem is that "less secure" is not exactly meaningful without a lot of clarifications.

I'm no security expert, but I know that security is certainly not a linear, at the very least it's some multi-dimensional thing that's exceptionally hard to generalize.

One system can be more or less secure than another for some party or parties, for some particular threat models if you can or cannot install certain apps, etc etc. Skipping all those bits makes the statement vague, increasing the risk of misunderstanding of the implied conditions.

Just a quick example. Installing an app could paradoxically make the device simultaneously more and less secure for the owner. Let's say it's an advanced firewall app. On the one hand it improves the network hygiene, improving the device security against its network peers. On the other hand, it may help in compromising the device, if someone gains access to its control interface and exploits it for nefarious purposes.

Whether or not it's more secure is moot as far as Apple's concerned. For them it's about control of the market, not device security.

If you want to treat your phone like a general-purpose computer, that's fine, but the iPhone doesn't work that way, very much by design. I understand that you want a different user experience, but them's the breaks.

Yes. That’s why there is substantially more malware for Mac than iPhone despite iPhone having far, far more users.

Of course it's less secure.

Objectively, yes.

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It is. That's why I do all of my banking on iOS.

I can’t wait for every data hoarding app (Facebook, Reddit, Google) to require sideloading so now we’ll have the choice to either use Android or Apple when being tracked down to granular details.

I want it to be semi onerous to enable apps outside the App Store, for this reason.

No Google got dinged because they claimed their ecosystem was “open” and changed it after the fact.

The reason that Google lost the same type of cases that Apple won was because consumers knew iOS was closed before they bought it.

> Do you prefer not being able to send or recieve good quality images and videos to anyone using Android?

Bit confused by this. What prevents me from sending or receiving good quality images to/from Android users?

I guess there’s WhatsApp etc, but it’s not a great experience. And that’s in part due to the ecosystem. I can swipe 200 photos and send them to my wife - it shares them on my iCloud behind the scenes, and sends a link. Messages makes it seem like I’ve sent 200 full quality photos in an instant.

That’s hard to do without the vertical integration.

I don’t think you can send images to friends on Xbox from a PS5, no? How is that different?

I do this every day using WhatsApp.

Note there could easily be even more obstacles than there are. Third party apps like banking apps actually have extra jailbreaking checks; first party apps don't, you can still watch DRM movies, and afaik it doesn't void the warranty. At least not if nobody notices.

You and I will do this. So will anyone else on HN.

My grandma won’t understand the difference. So when she gets a text saying, hey install this cool new thing, and then gets hacked, these changes will be to blame.

Why can’t we have a close ecosystem and an open ecosystem? If you want to side load, Android is right there ready for you.

If consumers find that's a problem, then they should be willing to pay the 30% premium in the app store.

My guess is that this is not as much of an issue as Apple claims, and this 30% premium will not be worth it to the consumer.

Apple's hardware house of cards might come down if developers are allowed to push the devices past what Apple allows due to form-over-function design decisions they make, and I'm okay with that.

If you're concerned about the brand value then sell your stock before it happens or buy some put options at a nice price.

Companies are not allowed to leverage their dominant market position in one market in order to gain an advantage in other markets. If you dislike monopoly and antitrust laws, go vote against them.

  - A lot of these changes are like mandating that cars have a manual transmission option. Sure, there are plenty of people that love the control, but there are many, many more that appreciate not having to deal with it.

Please let governments pass legislation which mandate a manual trasmission model. I will never buy an auto!

  - Every dollar and engineering hour that Apple spends complying with these new requirements is time they won't spend on things people actually want, as well as increasing the surface area for bugs and security holes.

Except that Apple are literally the richest company in America. They could hire a thousand new programmers in a team to work 24 hours a day on these requirements and it wouldn't even tickle their profits, let alone revenue.

  - Apple is the intermediary between other companies like FB, Google, ad networks, data harvesting, government apps, etc. They can't do things on my phone because Apple forbids it. The more Apple is forced to open up, the less protection I have from other powerful players in the tech market.

If apple is forced to open up, it creates a market for more security products, meaning healthier competition and more transparent security.

  - Every place where Apple is forced to open up is a place where there's a choice that many users didn't ask for but will have to make (e.g. default browser).

Not really, safari is the only browser which is installed on a iphone by default, so normal users just use it like they did before and dont need to do anything. However other people that do want to use something different are free to.

  - I've never had to help a relative with their phone. I've had many of them come to me for help with their computers. Their and my experience with computing platforms is worse without the guardrails

Nobody is suggesting making the iphone harder to use, just allowing additional choices if thats what the user wants. The choices can be hidden away from normal users and grandma, but why cant they be there in the background for people that want them?

> - Every dollar and engineering hour that Apple spends complying with these new requirements is time they won't spend on things people actually want, as well as increasing the surface area for bugs and security holes.

Small indie company, btw.

Explain how.

This seems a baseless statement.

nothing changes for you, keep living in apple prison. how does other people having more choice make your experience worse? all arguments I heard so far are completely far fetched and contrived scenarios that dont amount to anything but fear mongering.

Every time I refresh you keep adding more contrived BS excuses to allow the trillion dollar company to keep extorting devs and users with obscene fees.

" - A lot of these changes are like mandating that cars have a manual transmission option. Sure, there are plenty of people that love the control, but there are many, many more that appreciate not having to deal with it."

Nonsense analogy. Computers are General Purpose Computing Devices which people increasingly depend on in their lives where single point of control from Apple makes their lives artificially more difficult solely for the purpose of being able to squeeze out profits. It increases prices for consumers and allows oppressive dictatorships to demand certain apps to be removed and Apple always complies, leaving users without alternatives.

" - Every dollar and engineering hour that Apple spends complying with these new requirements is time they won't spend on things people actually want, as well as increasing the surface area for bugs and security holes."

Boohoo, the trillion dollar company has to do a little more work. They could just stop putting so much work into anti-consumer propaganda so they would have more time for actual work.

"- Apple is the intermediary between other companies like FB, Google, ad networks, data harvesting, government apps, etc. They can't do things on my phone because Apple forbids it. The more Apple is forced to open up, the less protection I have from other powerful players in the tech market."

This is exactly the kind of exaggerated, fear mongering narrative I've expected. Increased competition and openness could also lead to better privacy and security solutions as companies would need to compete on these features to win over users. Also, despite Apple's policies and safeguards, there have been instances where apps have found ways around these limitations or have used data in ways that are not transparent to users, because Apple only cares about Privacy as far as it benefits their bottom line, that why Apple also started to work on an advertising platform. They care about "Privacy" because now they can exclusively monetize user data.[Apple is becoming an ad company despite privacy claims - https://proton.me/blog/apple-ad-company]

" - Every place where Apple is forced to open up is a place where there's a choice that many users didn't ask for but will have to make (e.g. default browser)."

Nonsense, the only thing that changes is that other people can change the default app, so when they don't care nothing changes for them, they don't have to do anything. this argument of yours is the kind of absurd reach that makes your overall position look absurd.

" - I've never had to help a relative with their phone. I've had many of them come to me for help with their computers. Their and my experience with computing platforms is worse without the guardrails"

I've read this meme so many times and every time I read it I doubt that it's an actual thing instead it's something you desperately need to say in order to uphold your indefensible position of defending Apple's anti-competitive practices. It's not a good argument either, just because your relatives are incompetent we all should suffer under that?

" I think many computer savvy people don't realize how freeing and liberating it is for normal people to have an "appliance" computer."

Ah yes, less choice is actually more choice, slavery is freedom and war is peace.

>One way to handle this would be to decorate the comms ID, email / phone name whatever to show they aren't running a standard iOS.

I shudder to imagine the headlines complaining about the "scarlet bubbles apple is using to shame freedom loving users" or whatever nonsense the media would scare up if they tried to do something like that.

No one is forcing anyone to buy an iPhone. You still have that choice, you just want to force someone else to make another choice. It's hypocritical.

Since iOS 12 apps can send “provisional” notifications, meaning permission isn’t required right away. Other apps can use this, but few do.

This was more of an issue early in the App Store’s history than later on. Apple’s relaxed on that a lot a long time ago and you can use any number of contacts, calendars, email clients, browsers, camera apps, messengers, maps apps and so on.

Wouldn't that rule out so many apps? E.g. Netflix competing with Apple TV, Goggle Photos vs Apple Photos, Google maps vs Apple maps, any note-taking app, camera, email client, browser, or weather app... What actually gets you rejected?

Apps on iOS are allowed to communicate and share data so long as they are published by the same developer.

> Simples being you need to log in to multiple different apps, but things like data moving between them etc are also complications.

I don't think this is actually true. Specifically, once I've logged into one Google app (like Gmail), others automatically pick up the user (like Calendar), so it seems to at least be technically possible.

> I think this sort of thing never came to fruition because (aside from it being very hard to make) it would be way too bulky what with having to come in the form of a single app package.

Note that the Android equivalent (custom launchers) doesn't need to, and iOS's implementation (Springboard.app), while more integrated than that, is still more modular than you describe. It's only App Store restrictions that prevent you from having an app that opens other apps. (If all apps cooperate, you can use the custom URL handler mechanism to work around the App Store restrictions.)

Is that not like the Bing app and the Google app which have mini apps inside

The problem here is that platform is not precise. You could say this means that Apple should just make the iPhone hardware, and software vendors should compete to create operating systems for it. There's no hard line.

Doing both is fine so long as you as a platform provider don't give any preferential treatment to you as a user of the platform.

This isn't accurate, normal Bluetooth works much better than you might imagine. The kind of things that are added on top with Apple's solution are things like fast pairing and instant device switching. They also have their own custom codecs, but most other Bluetooth communication devices also support custom codecs which, on Android for example, are enabled by installing a companion app.

Re: Bluetooth being better than you portray: Don't get me wrong, you can certainly run into problems, but in normal usage it works just fine. And Apple isn't fundamentally improving on the potential issues with their proprietary solutions.

I don't really know how all this tech works, but when I bought my new Xiaomi buds, the moment I opened them my Android phone recognised I have new buds and asked me to pair them with one click. It was like magic. My understanding is that this would not be possible on an iphone, whereas this exact behavior works with Apple buds on an Apple phone.

I'm fine with Apple implementing BT to spec (i.e. crap) and having their own extensions to improve it. I'm not fine with them eliminating the only alternative, the jack. Since the first iPhone, there's been both BT and jack, and people clearly preferred the jack until Apple decided it was time to grow their accessories sector.

Apple has historically sucked at external, non-Appme Bluetooth device support.

Do you actually use the dongle? It doesn't work with inline mics, making it useless even if you were to carry it around everywhere. It also doesn't work with previous iPhones, so you can't share say a car aux between an old and a new iPhone.

These days the reliability problems of Bluetooth are effectively gone. Sure, it's not a perfect technology, but Bluetooth devices work completely reliably for me across tons of vendors.

Saying Bluetooth itself is unreliable is an outdated view. There are shitty Bluetooth devices yes, but the protocol works fine when paired with good devices

> Almost all innovation comes from this type of vertical integration.

In what world?

What innovation? At the time of removal from iPhone, the LG V35 had a headphone jack but was thinner and lighter than an iPhoe with the same IP rating, and a better camera.

> Almost all innovation comes from this type of vertical integration.

Really? That's a bold claim. Having a large number of companies that are able to offer competing products and services tends to lead to innovation.

Huh? It sounds more like they deliberately broke everyone's devices except their own so you either have to pay them more to continue using your existing headset with an adapter, or if you have a bluetooth headset you're just shit out of luck unless you buy an Apple headset. How is that not anticompetitive?

When you put it that way, it certainly sounds a lot like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. And I've never seen any tech oriented person who is familiar with EEE argue that it is a legitimate business strategy that should be permitted except in this case.

I think that telecom operators are free to offer phones that don’t send SMS, and see how many customers that gets them.

What i meant to say in my original comment - it’s not Apple’s fault SMS sucks and people don’t want to use it.

...but Apple doesn't have dominance. They may have slightly more than half the market, but that's not usually considered antitrust territory.

It's hard to use iphone as a general purpose computing device when they make it hard to share between apps. I know it's part of apple's "security model" but it can also be interpreted as killing competition between 3rd party apps and apple apps

You can download all your data from the Apple Website. Heartbeat, GPS etc. are plainly available. I wrote an app that converts Lat/lon to distance traveled.

In the U.S. where this lawsuit was filed, Apple controls 50-60% of the smartphone market, where the next largest competitor Samsung holds only 20-25% [1]. Among U.S. teenagers the iPhone has a massive 87% market share [2]. That is indisputably dominant.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/620805/smartphone-sales-...

[2] https://www.pipersandler.com/teens

iPhone has a 55-60% market share in the US & Canada. So Id be pretty happy with saying they have the 'dominant position' in the North American mobile market.

https://explodingtopics.com/blog/iphone-android-users

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/iphone-ma...

It is a term of art. How Apple acts has an impact on markets. Indeed, as the EU says directly

> The European Commission has fined Apple over €1.8 billion for abusing its dominant position

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...

They control a huge swath of the market and block/limit ability of users and 3rd parties to use their devices, so it's not just about being dominant, it's about how you act as a dominant corporation/company.

I don't think nobody else should be able to build a "mobile payment service", I just do not care and I do not think this is about consumers.

If it was just up to me, the "mobile ecosystem" would just burn to the ground.

This actually kind of happened to me. My iPhone 12 Pro was stolen out of my hands last year in July. I had an Apple watch, but decided to replace the iPhone with a Pixel 7 Pro [1] since it was a bit cheaper than replacing the iPhone and I didn't have a job, and as a result my watch didn't work. Initially I was happy enough to use a dumb analog watch, but shortly after this happened, I was diagnosed with sleep apnea and wanted something that would track sleep. I ended up getting a Garmin Instinct (per a recommendation on HN actually).

I gotta admit that it would have been pretty nice to not have been forced to buy a new smartwatch, and just use the one I already had. I love the Garmin Instinct, more than I liked the Apple Watch [2], it's a very good, well-made product, and I'm happy that it appears to work fine on iOS and Android, but I really didn't need another watch. If there hadn't been an artificial limitation forcing me to get another watch, I would probably still be using the Apple Watch.

[1] I don't have that phone anymore because the Pixel 7 Pro is a horrible product that Google should be ashamed of themselves over.

[2] In no small part because the battery is like 16 days instead of the 1.5 days I was getting with the Apple Watch.

Then don't buy an Apple Watch? They're pretty upfront about what it is.

Strage to see that as an issue; SMS is clearly an inferior protocol compared to iMessage and it's useful to know when messages have been downgraded.

The colors indicate the features available. Even with RCS, there will be a significant list of features available to iMessage users that are not available over RCS. No matter what Apple does there must be some mechanism to visually indicate that standard iMessage features are no longer available. What would be the alternative, pretending that these features exist and then failing silently when one client doesn't support them?

The green/blue bubble thing is irrelevant. It reflects a fundamental reality of the platform technology.

Gruber gives a pretty good breakdown of the blue/green bubble history: https://daringfireball.net/2022/01/seeing_green

Short version: SMS has been green since the first iPhone, blue iMessage was added later. Green was not invented to "punish the poors"

The US govt would never ever bar the worlds largest, most profitable public company from operating in the US. That's ridiculous and nowhere in the Request For Relief that I just read: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24492020/doj-apple-an...

It basically boils down to: stop doing the bad things and pay a fine. The fine being an amount equal to it's costs for bringing the suit, pennies on the dollar next to the dollars Apple made.

There is no incentive to change future behavior here. When the govt broke up AT&T's monopoly, there was an incentive to change behavior. Since then it's weakly enforced "fines" that do nothing to curtail future monopolistic behavior.

I imagine this will happen: Some of this will stick, but it will be stuff Apple has already promised (like adopting RCS) and they will pay a small(to them) fine and will continue on business as usual with no actual changes being made, just like all the other lawsuits of this type the US govt has done in the last few decades. Some people will feel better I suppose, even though absolutely nothing of substance will have changed.

1. Presumably it’s equally likely causality flows in the other direction: WeChat took off before Apple instituted strict controls but the cat was already out of the bag in that market. WeChat is an exceptionally user hostile app, and arguing for more of it is anti-consumer. It’s probably the best example of what can go wrong if you require the freedoms that give rise to superapps.

Apple Pay doesn’t offer single use card numbers for third party cards. They are different from your regular card number but they stay the same between purchases.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply

Re: #2 FWIW Shadow PC doesn't require a PC. You get a virtual one for like $20-50 / month depending on the level of virtual PC you'd like.

And Microsoft Cloud Gaming is still in beta. Why would Apple even need to consider supporting it?

I'm not sure Apple makes or don't make an exception in China. From what I can see, Chinese chat-pay superapp features are something largely chat and web based. From what I can see, it works something like following:

a) Users may reload HNPay balance by credit card, debit, or bank transfer, through in-app browser.

b) Users may use "send money" button to create some special chat message or link, which will be intercepted at server side, to send HNPay balance to a HNPay address/user ID.

c) (Deprecated)The user may scan QR code on a fading sticker at storefront that does the same as above.

d) The user may also use "show QR code" button, have the other user/store machine scan the code, which allows the other user/store computer to do b) with a negative amount for withdrawal.

e) The HNPay balance can be refunded to bank accounts if needed.

I'm sure people here can come up with half a dozen applicable financial regulations, restrictions imposed by banks and payment processors, cybersecurity attack vectors and massive lawsuit potentials for each of above, plus perhaps couples of solvable App Store guideline difficulties across a)-e). I think those would be problems towards realizing Facebook Messenger pay or TwitterPay, not App Store special treatment that only applies to China. Not many of them, if any, use NFC and secure element hardware in iOS devices like the point 5. misleads.

Even if Apple supports RCS, iMessage supports many features that RCS does not. It will still be a two-tier system but the tiers will be somewhat closer.

3) there are tons of other apps in which exluded users can have groups an use other features with other multiplatform users. You can't sue a company because in just their official app it won't support a protocol develop by others. Just install another app, no monopoly here.

> I love how whenever Apple makes a clearly anti-trust move it's always about privacy.

Who else is going to care about privacy though?

For the payment situation for example, Apple Pay (and Google Pay) use EMV Tokenization so that your actual credit card number is obfuscated:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pay#Technology

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Pay_(payment_method)#Te...

Credit card numbers are used by retailers to data mine their customers:

* https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

Apple having access to everything related to end user, every step they can take regarding privacy can be deemed as anti-competitive.

Here’s another example: Facebook knows exactly the 100 people they show my ads but not giving me their full name, relationship status, list of friends, their gender, sexual orientation, etc.

If I care about my privacy, I much prefer the world where Apple just restricts APIs/integrations that are harmful to it than that they have to employ armies of lawyers and auditors to go after TOS violations after the fact.

It’s much easier to identify and detect an app that does multiple things than identify trackings across multiple parts of an app.

Those barely exist... Microsoft Cloud Gaming is still in beta.

I assume that's worldwide? That definitely seems niche to me compared to the global population.

This is irrelevant. The primary argument people have against Apple is their platform indirectly impacts how other businesses can operate generally. The smartwatch never took off as a platform, so it exercises no such influence.

Videos. Every time I get a video from an iphone user it is trash quality. Other iphone users don't have this problem. It's just me on the android. I cannot seem to get any iphone user to understand linking out from whatever icloud or whatever, so whenever someone sends me a video they took, i basically don't get to see. I'm sure there are more, but this the one that actually makes me mad.

From the iphone side, there has to be something, because my family keeps 2 group chats. One with android users and one without. Someone when using an iphone is annoying when group texting android users.

Becuase the green bubble makes the user move to an IPhone. Then the user can only use Apple Pay, not Google Pay or Samsung Pay, can only use Apple's Store, can only.. And from having teenagers, the green bubbles MATTER. very, very, very much.

What is this “having green bubbles” stuff? My messages are green on threads with Android users, to indicate the capabilities of the messages I am sending. Not theirs. I don’t even know how to tell who’s on what in a mixed-ecosystem thread.

Not mine cause we leave those people out. It's not Apple's fault that SMS sucks, and RCS adoption was very slow even on Android. Even with all Android phones, a group chat is a disaster unless they use FB Messenger or WhatsApp, which is in fact what most people use. Market working as intended there.

I came across it somewhere I Apple developer docs, I think, when I was building my app. Or maybe it was RevenueCat docs or some tutorial... I'm on my phone now but will try to find it later

> The first is their attempt to redefine what the market is in order to declare Apple a "monopoly": they've posited a completely separate market for "performance smartphones", and tried to use total revenue rather than number of units sold in order to push Apple up to having a very high percentage of this invented market.

This comes across as very strange, they must not have much confidence in their ability to prove that Apple holds monopoly power in the overall smartphone market. I suspect if they lose this case it's going to be because the court rejects such an intentionally narrowed market definition.

> 1. One OS is locked down, has a walled-garden ecosystem, but has many privacy-protecting features.

I wonder, if you open up iOS, do you lose the privacy-protecting features? One of the benefits of iOS is that it makes good privacy decisions for you, where it can

If you take away the defaults, you kind of take away the design choices that were made to improve privacy. People (myself included) are not the best at making decisions that preserve their own privacy

Many people will hit whatever button gets them to the next stage of whatever it is they are trying to achieve. If Apple is not allowed to intervene in that experience, will we see a lot more people being taken advantage of by dark patterns and other software tricks?

> Also they are jailed privately so they cannot share information with each other

This is one of my favourite things about iOS vs Android.

> Also they are jailed privately so they cannot share information with each other.

If the information isn't just stored on the device then it should work fine, right?

> The findings there would basically tread the same ground and were already found in Apple's favor as a matter of law.

Because the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of Epic v. Apple, even the exact same legal question with the exact same fact pattern would only be bound by that decision if it was (1) between the same parties (res judicata), or (2) in a district court under the Ninth Circuit.

Since US v. Apple is filed in the District of New Jersey, which is under the Third Circuit, the decision in Epic v. Apple is, at best, persuasive precedent, not binding precedent.

Let's say that a movie theatre chain becomes very successful by selling high-quality food instead of stale popcorn laden with artificial butter flavoring. They also curate movies and refuse to screen low-brow garbage pushed out by the studios. The customers love the good movies and good food, so this chain slowly takes over the market, nearly, but not quite, to a level of monopoly. You can still go to competing theatres, but the seats will be sticky, the food will clog your arteries, and you won't enjoy the movie.

So you're saying in this situation the government should step in and force the successful chain with standards to allow competing movie theatres, junk food sellers, and low-budget movie producers to sell their wares in their theatres?

That's literally what's happening with these moves against Apple.

The peddlers of crap are upset that they're locked out of a well-managed market frequented by discerning customers.

That's it.

> I do not want government interference in a market place

This is just not the world we live in. The Play store is also malware-free, and yet you can sideload apps on Android phones.

Even better: no stupid analogies and just talk about topic at hand.

> Should Google be forced by the government to include support for formats in Android that are used by Apple such a HEIF and HEIC? What about Microsoft and Linux?

Yes, please.

> As an iPhone user I do not want government interference in a market place that has been kept mostly free of malware precisely because it keeps out the riff-raff.

Citation needed.

Yes. Thought customer means a lot of things. I have purchased their MacBooks recently, iphones for family and such.

Why would that matter? It's completley possible to be harmed by a companies market manipulation without being a customer of theirs.

To reverse your statistic, Apple has 60% of mobile market share in US and Canada, meaning the whole of North America.

On top of that, 87% of the teen mobile market in the US own an iPhone.

Apple definitely has a dominant position in the western smartphone market.

I haven’t used WhatsApp for while so maybe I’m wrong about that one, but Messenger definitely doesn’t work. I wish it was opt in by default for all notifications, it’s annoying so many don’t work.

Although Apple now has to allow alternative browsers to ship their engines in the EU, they actually set out ridiculous conditions for browser vendors to be able to do so. Therefore, as of now, none have done it.

This is malicious compliance from Apple to try and make the law ineffective.

That’s how Steve Jobs put down Flash.

No, for a a platform to survive, its maintainers need the leverage to call out laggards and make them truly sweat and work with it. Not just build 10 layers of Cordova fluff

That means I cannot install uBlock origin and other extensions on FF, so we can call it one way or the other, but it's restricting.

I see it as Apple allowing a facade around their browser. You can't really call Chrome on iOS as "Chrome" if it's still just Safari under the hood. It's like putting Ferrari body on a 2010 Honda frame. Is it a "Ferrari" or is it really a "Honda"?

No, I do not think it's fair to say that Apple allows other browsers, and neither does the DOJ.

> Saying there is only one browser on iOS is like saying Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are the same browser because they both use chromium.

This is the correct take, though. They ARE the same web browser, just with different skins.

> it does however restrict the rendering engine

This isn't a sufficient description. Apple actually requires all third-party browsers to use the WebKit framework. If they actually allowed browsers to use the WebKit engine, then you could make a new browser incorporating the open source WebKit engine compiled into it. But this is not allowed.

> Saying there is only one browser on iOS is like saying Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are the same browser because they both use chromium.

No, Edge and Chrome both use the Chromium engine. They are different browsers that incorporate the same engine. Edge can do this because Chromium is open source.

But Chrome on iOS doesn't have its own engine at all (not even the Webkit engine). It just offloads to the WebKit framework.

Microsoft __chose__ to use Blink, ostensibly because they felt that maintaining EdgeHTML was too costly. On iOS, you either use WebKit or your browser is technically and legally banned.

Chromium is open source and both Google and Microsoft do whatever they want to it as part of developing their browsers. WebKit on iOS is a closed source blob of rendering engine and assorted bits that it is not possible to deeply extend or alter.

Blink is the name of the rendering engine, not Chromium.

> F-Droid is a (Android-only, not possible to make such an app on iOS) super app that very much exists in the western world.

I’d call that an app marketplace, not a super app.

my biggest gripe is NFC, through more then their not-so-competitive parts but also that they didn't support it at all until they had their own 1st party use-case for it (which isn't anti-competive just sucks)

the reason is that it crippled a whole industry of smart door looks

NFC is (by far!) technically the best way to handle them (for many of the common security levels). (Through I mean proper secure application of NFC, something you often do not get in a satisfying way with a lot of the RFID card solutions. And I'm aware that a ton (most?) of smart door room solutions are a complete security nightmare, but that is companies cheeping out and/or not hiring anyone who know anything about security etc.)

EDIT: stuff like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39779291 is what I mean with most RFID based solutions are shit. Through not sure how much this specific case was very competent hackers and how much bad security.

Does't this "the market is right" logic also apply to Apple itself and its walled garden? E.g.: "Do users really want a walled garden where they can't install 'everything apps'? The answer is clearly yes in a lot of markets..."

Consumers would have to choose a different device if, say, Apple saved money by putting in a lousy screen or a cellular radio that was unreliable... What transitions these ecosystem misfeatures to anti-consumer in a way that an inferior screen isn't?

(I submit they aren't anti-consumer; they're ecosystem control and some consumers find that to be a feature. I know I feel safer recommending my grandma an iPhone because scammers won't trick her into side-loading a root kit into it or loading some fake banking app that she pays money into that just disappears).

Uh, yeah they did. Many people thought at that time that DOJ was overstepping. Many still do. In hindsight, Microsoft’s behavior at the time seems like small potatoes compared to the ecosystem protection that occurs today.

You can look at adoption rates of IE vs Firefox and Chrome, and compare them to iOS vs Android.

One question: Who owns iMessage? Who pays to run the servers? Who pays for the bandwidth?

Do you allow your neighbors to use your yard and driveway that you pay for?

We have message interoperability already. I can install any messenger of my choosing. I can install WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Signal, etc, etc.

But I don't need any of those because 99% of the people I communicate with are on iMessage.

But are you really a victim ?

While the smartphone market is not exactly a broad selection of competing standards, you can chose between Android and iPhone, and over time they've more or less come to represent opposing poles, where Android initially embraced openness and iPhone was the walled garden.

People picked based on preferences, but it's not like any of the platforms lock you in. They even have tools to facilitate easy switching between platforms.

Many companies, especially in highly regulated industries, specifically pick iPhone over Android for the ability to lock down the device. In my industry, our IT department has essentially given up getting Android "certified" to comply with regulations.

Apple recently opened up the App Store in the EU, in theory allowing 3rd party stores, but despite almost everybody i know using iPhones, i have yet to see anything 3rd party installed.