Comment by ChuckMcM

It's like that everywhere unfortunately. You get a client with enough disparity in size and they are pretty much calling the shots. Can't even imagine that scaled up to Apple size.

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

Extremely authoritarian / communist take.

A $1000 luxury phone is not a "public good" just because many have FOMO and feel like they need one. There are many cheap alternative Androids that are just as good with virtually identical features. Nor is it a device that is absolutely necessary to function in society, like say other real public goods like running water or electricity.

> 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.

As someone who makes apps in the health space, I couldn’t care less if other tracker data was integrated into HealthKit. HealthKit honestly sucks - it's some bastard of objc naming schemes and methods jammed into Swift. The async is horrible to debug, too. No one has a good time in HK.

The issue with other trackers is that they are more locked down than Apple. You can't just get HR from Oura for instance - and that's not a health kit issue either.

I had a similar experience with MSFT docs when working at Sun. The docs were not very good, and though they seemed somewhat redacted, it felt like in fact their internal docs probably weren't much better.

>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'?

Maybe it was a deprecated part of the protocol, and setting it would cause an error or do nothing.

I'm not a developer in this space myself, but my impression is that HealthKit is one area where 3rd party apps have access to the same data as 1st party apps.

Reminds me of Bob Colwell's talk, although it's not from the same angle: https://youtu.be/jwzpk__O7uI?si=NZmfU6av_2D-uPgk (around 1:04:10)

It's not sms, it's mms, and it is in fact a technical limitation.

Honestly we should just sunset MMS entirely. It's like using 56k dialup.

That is, indeed, a technical limitation of MMS.

The newer RCS standard would be better, but Apple has already announced they're going to support it this year (after dragging their heels for a few years).

If you pay for iCloud ($4 a month) you can send an iCloud link easily to any video that anyone else can access at full resolution

I realize this isn’t what you are asking for. But it works well and doesn’t depend on Google’s closed version of RCS

Apple opened up the app store for game streams back in January.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24050430/apple-app-store-...

Media messages from Androids to iPhones are in fact technologically-limited by MMS. That's not an Apple-imposed limitation, it's written in stone in the MMS standard.

> Forcing Apple to allow third party payments without Apple's cut would improve market opportunities for many businesses.

It would, but that is how Apple collects their commission. Where regulations where Apple has been forced to provide this separation (such as the US), they have split 3% to cover payment fees out of the commission, and put additional considerations for when leaving the app to make a payment would result in a commission and that Apple may audit that you are properly reporting commissions.

The DMA mandated that Apple decouple their commission structure from a single App Store in favor of multiple marketplaces, and they put in a 50 Eurocent core technology fee per user per year (after a margin of free installs).

> Amazon could allow the purchase of digital goods (books, movies, etc.) and put it on more equal footing with Apple itself.

Amazon does have digital purchasing of Video. Amazon added the ability to subscribe to a limited video version of Prime using in-app purchasing, and that kind of account will bill purchases using in-app purchasing.

They likely have razor thin margins for anyone who chooses to do this, but expect customers to either have existing Prime accounts or to want to upgrade from Video to the full Prime account for the other services. I suspect they did the math and think their margins on Kindle wouldn't support this.

I wonder if this will have a trickle down effect on other app stores, specifically gaming consoles. Would XBox Live or Playstation Store, for example, be on the hot seat if they rejected an application or "game" that was basically a storefront for streaming other games?

My understanding is the reason they are dead in the US is even though the banks might let you build payments into it they will not let you negotiate any discount in fees so you will have to add your own fees on top of their own fees. It begs the question of why a bank or consortium of banks hasn’t developed a super app.

When I gave this talk in late 2016

https://www.slideshare.net/paulahoule/chatbots-in-2017-ithac...

there was huge interest in messaging-centric apps as this runs around the boondoggle of having even the tiniest patch to your app get reviewed.

Exactly. Most people would rather use the best app for the niche thing they want to do rather than the shittier version from some mega-app they happen to have for some other reason.

Why do they show up in other asian markets, like Grab and such?

Kind of sideline here but..

Tim Hortons had gift and loyalty cards ("every 7th coffee free"). Then they introduced an app with "rewards" as an alternative to loyalty and gift cards. Then the app turned into a bank. Then they stopped the physical loyalty cards. Now you can't "earn" free coffee without giving them your personal information and signing up for the bank of Tim Hortons. It's ok though. I stopped being a customer because of it.

Facebook’s attempt didn’t work out because they lost the youth market to Snapchat, TikTok, Discord and Instagram(It’s funny, I know). They tried to bring in Instagram users into Facebook but that didn’t(hasn’t) work out yet.

> Why don't twitter. com just do the super apps w/ e-commerce

X, the company formerly known as twitter, fairly explicitly plans to, they are just taking time to pivot, in part because they don’t seem to have any real clear roadmap from where they are to where they want to be.

It is possible to export iMessage threads by purchasing an Apple computer and enabling "iCloud for Messages", at which point the messages will be synced to the computer and stored locally in an SQLite database then exported using open source tools... unless you sent too many messages or attachments, at which point you also have to purchase an additional iCloud subscription based on how much storage you need.

Hopefully you can accomplish all this within the return window of the computer (or purchase a used one). The iCloud subscription fees are non-refundable. You can also just give up, keep the computer, and embrace the Apple ecosystem.

Thank you Tim Apple, very cool!

Sent from my iPhone

If you have a Mac, your messages are stored locally with SQLite, so you can export them that way.

[dead]

This is one thing that no-one else seems to mention (not even Spotify).

When Apple Music launched it was around the time that 3rd party apps were allowed to hook into Siri - so you could say "Hey Siri, tell MyToDoApp to remind me to do X in six hours" and MyToDoApp would add the reminder.

But it was only allowed for certain categories of app (strangely enough, categories where Apple didn't have a paid service). It wasn't permitted for music apps until a few years later, by which time Apple Music was established.

Similarly - when I connect my iPhone to my car over Bluetooth or wired connection[1] - with Spotify I get the normal play/pause/skip controls. But I can't see the upcoming play-queue, nor browse my playlists through the car's interface. If I listen through Apple Music, I can see not only my queue, playlists, albums and artists but also podcasts from the totally separate Apple Podcasts app.

Of course, the car interface is shite, but why can Apple's app do this and the third party not? Is it just that Spotify didn't bother implementing the relevant APIs or because those APIs were not available?

As a long-time Apple fan, my distrust of them is so great at the moment, I suspect the latter.

[1] The inbuilt head-unit doesn't do CarPlay, but I have a standalone wireless CarPlay screen. I like to connect the phone through Bluetooth (or wired) so the display unit shows my apps but I can adjust the volume and skip tracks using the steering wheel controls.

I'd just like to be able to get music off my iPhone to my mac without having to buy a third party app or buy a subscription to Apple Music.

The flip side of this as a consumer is that I'm happy that mandating safari on iOS means I can be relatively sure any given site is going to work in Safari. I'm glad I don't live in the days where I needed 3 separate browsers on my computer (Safari, Firefox and IE) to ensure that I can use websites when I need to. In "ye olde days", even if you were using Safari for most of your browsing because it gave the best battery life on MacOS, you'd run into some sites that wouldn't work with it. You'd try Firefox maybe next, hoping that it was just some site that didn't have any developers who knew what a mac was. But even then, you'd run into sites where, no the problem was the developers just assumed everyone used IE and used a bunch of IE specific stuff.

I can't remember the last time I saw a "this site only works in XYZ" message. Some of that is a lot of modern sites are all built on big frameworks, but some of that is also because only supporting Safari, or only supporting Chrome or only supporting IE is going to lose you huge swaths of customers.

What if I don't want to switch browsers for the "best experience" when using your app? What if I want you to make your app the best experience on my browser of choice?

As always these things are tradeoffs and balances.

If it goes through, your customers can switch, once, to Chrome.

After that, Google leverages its other service monopolies, Chrome goes to 95%+ market share, standards fall by the wayside, and nobody has any choice.

I guess the answer to that is antitrust against Google, but I’d rather do that first than go through the Chrome domination phase.

A lot of small business is more similar to consumers than to large corporations. It's really no wonder that some pro-consumer regulations might benefit small business.

Agitation for consumer rights might actually be an easier way to get benefits to small business.

Because when you try to lobby for small business it becomes lobbying for all business and in the end it's the big business that benefits because somewhere in the process they outlobbied every other interested party and the end form of legislation or action benefits them the most.

Like the right to repair. If it was focused on helping small business it would have been defanged way easier.

Political action that benefits the business is the default mode. It's the easiest because businesses have easiest way to accumulate enough captital to bribe the politicians. Business is naturally concentrated while consumers are naturally dispersed.

While the business in US was content to sit on their throne and milk the consumers, US consumers uplifted the entire country of China. Consumers are way more economically powerful than the business. Seeing economy through business and workers lens is as misguided as it is traditional.

Do you think the feature is a good thing though?

I think if the system could limit the ability of rich guys to corrupt legislators, then regulation would just work. I think "Citizen's United VS FEC" kind of broke regulation in that sense. It probable had a positive effect on the economy for some years, but imo it broke American politics. We've even started to see regulators like the EPA and SEC lose high profile court cases.

I'm no lawyer and I think this looks like a great case, but I'm not too confident.