Comment by slibhb
2 years ago
I'd be more sympathetic to the government's arguments if Android phones didn't exist. But they do, and people can use them if they don't like Apple's walled garden.
As things are, this lawsuit seems like the government striking an aggressive posture torwards tech companies for no good reason. It's almost like -- as the tech companies get bigger and more powerful -- the government wants to remind them who's really in charge.
If phone OSes and ecosystems were fungible, then I'd agree. It's reasonable to prefer iOS for many reasons, but still be disappointed in the walled-garden, non-interoperable aspects.
Customers don't really have great choices right now when it comes to smartphones:
1. One OS is locked down, has a walled-garden ecosystem, but has many privacy-protecting features.
2. The other OS more open (interop & user-choice-wise, not really in the FOSS sense), but is run by a company that seems hell-bent on eroding user privacy.
These properties are dictated by Apple and Google. But due to the barrier for entry, there are no alternatives that come even close to duplicating Android's and iOS's feature sets. Even simply using a community-developed Android-based OS can cause you to lose access to many useful features Android provides.
I guess I went off on a little tangent here, but my position is that the existence of Android is only a defense if switching between the two doesn't incur high costs, both financial and non-. That's demonstrably not the case.
> 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?
You see this as about two major phone companies when in reality it is about all the small phone/os/app companies(competition is good in a free market) that get pushed out because the only two major companies (apple and google) share insane contracts between eachother essentially creating a horizontal monopoly that squashes competition.