Comment by echelon
3 days ago
Is Gruber starting to realize Apple's monopoly is bad?
App stores should not exist in a world where only two phone operating systems exist. All apps MUST be installable via web.
Come on, EU. Help us out here. Free us from distribution tyranny. Do it before Google morphs into the same hell beast.
Soon you won't be able to read unapproved, unattested bytes. It's coming. We need as many freedoms as we can get.
Apple can be a great company without the app store monopoly. So can Google.
> Is Gruber starting to realize Apple's monopoly is bad?
"I do not see the conflict between the view that the App Store review system is failing and the view that it's not the government's business to intervene. Allowing failing systems to fail is how market forces work." https://mastodon.social/@gruber/117055639204173161
The criticism of monopolies is that market forces aren't able to let a failing system fail.
The App Store doesn't compete on its own merits because Apple actively prevents competition from letting it decide what the better system is.
I believe Gruber's view is that the market forces in question are between iPhone and competing smartphones.
7 replies →
He's myopic to the actual conflict. The system isn't failing, it's a very profitable business for Apple.
One of my issues with this is that the market is often pretty slow. With a lot of things, it feels like the market won't have resolved it until I've been dead for 150 years, and, to me, that's just about as good as not solving the problem at all.
Oof. Gets screwed by a monopoly, defends monopolies: idealism is a chain. It frustrates me how some people are buried in this ideology, given 90% of it would be denied with Economics 101.
Yes, free markets are good to a lot of things. No, they don't adjust for complex matters if consumers don't understand then. No, they don't work when monopolies are involved. No, the government setting some boundaries is not the same as socialism.
Example: company adds a cheap ingredient to food that makes it tastier. Studies show a high chance of cancer. This doesn't affect the company margins, so it keeps adding and selling. Consumers are unaware, they keep buying. A good willing competitor has a dillema: poison its customers or lose clients to competition. Guess who can help? The state: it can forbid that ingredient! Now this levels the field for all companies and customers are healthy.
Why couldn’t the competitor make customers aware?
The other side of your coin is that I need to periodically visit my relatives and remove all sorts of malware and adware from their phones. Just like I've done with PCs over the past few decades.
I get your point but neither the Play store or the Apple app store are devoid of malware.
Obviously the solution is to restrict the stores to a small, government-licensed list of apps that are known to be safe and regulated.
4 replies →
Then Apple should do its fucking job correctly. It is not a poor little company, they have no excuse for this rank incompetence. None.
The problem is largely structural. Debian has huge repos and swaths of maintainers, and it works out because they read and audit source code to a degree. The end-result is that the Debian repos definitely have much less malware than either the play store or the Apple app store.
Apple does not audit source code, they do very simple behavioral analysis. And, evidently, even get that wrong, this post serving as an example.
I'm sure the number of submissions has gone up exponentially due to AI.
Since real people review apps, Apple should charge per app / version submission.
4 replies →
God forbids your relatives ever touch computers!
> Come on, EU. Help us out here. Free us from distribution tyranny. Do it before Google morphs into the same hell beast.
No can do, EU is busy mandating only Google/Apple devices for national digital ID.
> Soon you won't be able to read unapproved, unattested bytes. It's coming.
happy EU noises