Comment by flomo
1 month ago
Always fun to interact with some internet Thomas Jefferson giving freedom speeches from his mother's basement.
Reality is that people pay a lot of money because they 'trust' Apple (and to a lesser extent Google), but Meta is the sleaziest one of them all. (And I don't use their shit either.) But people want Whatapp and Instagram, and so you are telling them now they have sell-out and go to the "Meta App Store" to talk to their friends. That fucking sucks. And I think you agree with that.
Under such topics there are always comments about each vendor making their own store, yet it didn't happen on Android, where it's currently perfectly possible.
Sorry, I haven't had an Android phone since the original Nexus, so hopefully you can clarify. Could you install some hypothetical 'Meta Store' from the Google Store? Or do you mean more like Meta could just sell their own phone (eg Amazon)?
Both are possible.
You can have alternative app stores on Android without any restrictions — the most famous example would be F-Droid which hosts free software. Nothing stops Epic, Meta or any company from also having such a store.
When you ship a certified Android, it has to come pre-installed with the Google Play Store but some vendors like Amazon and Huawei ship an alternative OS with their own stores to replace the Google one. It's not officially Android but can be based on the Android Open Source Project.
Very few companies have chosen to do either and it was usually because they were forced to (Huawei).
And yet you're apparently not losing your mind over Mark Zuckerberg having his products on the web? He's doing everything you claim on the open web - third party trackers embedded on other websites, etc. Do you want to lock down the web?
I think you have a reason for defending Apple. Maybe you love the company, maybe you've got their stock, maybe you've worked for them.
Apple is a trillion dollar behemoth that has distorted the market and removed freedom and choice. They're a menace that needs to be regulated. Period.
I also think Zuckerberg's tracking needs to be regulated, but that's a battle for another day. It's one we haven't so egregiously lost yet.
People don't need Meta. People need smartphones. And smartphones are draconian dictatorships that the government has been too asleep and too lax to regulate.
> I think you have a reason for defending Apple.
Guilty as charged. My parents had a Windows laptop and all sorts of evil shit was "sideloaded", and when I started reformatting it, some indian 'microsoft tech support' guy was actually screaming at them through the speakers. This is what happens in your world.
I bought them an iPad (and another) and it's now been almost 15 years with zero tech support calls, zero problems, zero scammers. That is fucking great for me. Money well spent. So yeah, I wish you guys could just buy a free software phone with no ABI and go away to recompile your software. But it is fucking terrible idea on a societal level.
We keep mocking and laughing at the "internet Thomas Jefferson"s of the world but they seem to be getting increasingly prescient about the dystopian world where we are giving bad actors disproportionate control over our lives on the pretext of keeping us or children safer.
I will agree with your point, and will also say a lot of the "bad actors" are actually in the house here. So don't take anything on face value. Hacker news has some straight computer criminals, adware types, cryptobros, dubious startup types, whoever is vibe-coding these crawlers, and etc. So of course they all believe in "maximum freedom" (to scam people).