> Companies that monetize user data in exchange for “free” services that abuse your privacy aren’t affected by this [the app store tax], as they don’t process payments through the App Store. However, privacy-first companies that monetize through subscriptions are disproportionately hit by this fee, putting a major barrier toward the adoption of privacy-first business models.
Huh. I’ve never seen it framed this way and it might be the most compelling argument I’ve heard to date. It’s not simply a debate about whether a company should be allowed to be vertically integrated in isolation, but whether that vertical integration allows them to exert unfair distorting pressure on the free markets we are trying to protect.
I have disorganized thoughts about this, but it's not just a debate about vertical isolation vs not.
1. The size of Apple/Alphabet/Samsung makes it difficult to enter the market (see: factories having ridiculous MOQs for small-batch phone manufacturing), pushing everyone else out.
2. The size of the smartphone market makes it impossible to not have to deal with one of the above companies for certification, market penetrance or such. This makes them kingmakers. If a company somehow manages to become Facebook, Netflix, or Amazon, then the phone companies slide them a secret deal under the table. Everyone else gets a market-limiting set of terms that makes sure "tech" stays one of the "top" industries.
Combined, with no entry allowed, and with forces exerted outwards, we see broad social structures orienting /around/ how we use our phones, rather than the other way around, and that includes ad-monetized-absolutely-everything.
Phones and social media, today, are where TVs and broadcasts were in the 1950s/60s. Ubiquity and centralizing forces. If someone told us in the 1950s a TV manufacturer was exerting pressure on our forms of information distribution and was choosing which voices get a seat at the table, we'd rightly call that archaic and wonder why people would accept a technology provider as a market-shaping force. But today we accept it nonetheless. I refuse to believe the argument that the world's largest company can't figure out how to build a secure pipeline without making plenty of my decisions on my behalf...
Exactly. All the free market logic assumes that barriers to entry are low. They are incredibly high and the market is naturally prone to converging on a single solution. There's basically room for two smartphone ecosystems. Microsoft/Nokia couldn't sustain a third. Android-adjacent things like Amazon Fire and Tizen have little market share.
> factories having ridiculous MOQs for small-batch phone manufacturing
Ironically in the contract manufacturing area the market is actually efficient. Small batches just cost more as an intrinsic fact about manufacturing. I guarantee you could get a quote for any quantity of manufacturing above 1, you just wouldn't like it.
> If someone told us in the 1950s a TV manufacturer was exerting pressure on our forms of information distribution and was choosing which voices get a seat at the table, we'd rightly call that archaic and wonder why people would accept a technology provider as a market-shaping force. But today we accept it nonetheless.
A smartphone from Google or Apple is also pretty much required for certain government apps, banking/financial services, and so forth. I wouldn't call it a stretch to say that in the future it would be mandatory to have these duopoly controlled devices on your person at all times, like how you need to carry an ID card.
Many of those apps don't work on rooted phones or custom ROMs without workarounds and doing so is a TOS violation in many cases as well. Also imagine what it would be like if your Google or Apple account got banned by accident with no human support to sort it out.
The entire business model that monetises user data, where the actual customer is the advertiser, users do not vote with their wallets, and honest competition is impossible because no one can compete with free, should simply not exist and maybe regulated against—especially in social media, where it incentivises algorithms to push aggravating content in the name of engagement and ad views.
Whether Apple should be regulated into reducing the fees they charge for access to their hardware and software ecosystem (the ecosystem they unarguably did a pretty stellar job at) is a debatable matter of its own, but it doesn’t strike me as addressing the issue of ad-supported business and how it messes with the way the market is supposed to work.
It is true that platform fee means this distorted business model is unfairly favoured. However, this is just an extension of the business based on ad/data mining (especially social media) being generally unfair in so many ways, and even with zero platform fees that business won’t stop being unfair and won’t be seriously challenged. To reiterate, no one can honestly compete with free; fee reduction merely tweaks the formula from “free vs. $X” to “free vs. slightly less than $X”.
Furthermore, there is the obvious issue that even if an app or service is paid, it can still be additionally monetising user data. Reducing fees will only favour this doubly shady business.
Perhaps what could actually move the needle a bit and make this model less attractive is if walled gardens somehow found a way charge a big fat fee off the ad/data mining revenue, in conjunction with appropriately reducing fees for regular sales of B2C apps and services. Could this be technically possible without walled gardens additionally owning ad exchanges (which might be a can of worms that shouldn’t be opened)?
I think the fix we need is comprehensive legal privacy protection and (even less achievable) significant restriction on advertisement. That would actually curtail the market for user data and prevalence of ad funding as a model.
What’s weird for me is that users can effectively vote with their wallets - they can refuse to engage with ‘freemium’ or ad-supported media - and they can refuse to consume ads when presented, refuse to engage with calls to action, refuse to pay for products advertised to them in this way.
Have you ever been shown a mobile ad, and thought to yourself, “this is a good thing, this is an honest description of a product that I am eager to spend money on?” No, on the contrary, they’re the subject of universal ridicule… and yet they persist. Why? How? Who is paying for them? How are they generating revenue? How can that be worth anything? Where is the value coming from?
So even though I delete apps that force you to sit through ads, and I refuse to be led by ads towards spending money - even though I am in effect ‘voting’ by doing so - it doesn’t seem to have any impact. The ads keep happening anyway, I can only assume because they do actually work on other less canny consumers.
Is the problem really an inability to vote with our wallets? Or is the problem a complete lack of media/marketing literacy, that leads the credulous to engage with ad slop, against their own best interests?
Yes, in a way it's a rather good argument. But if you take it to its conclusion, if Apple finds it harder and harder to monetize the App Store through fees, then THEY might eventually decide to switch to privacy violating advertising as their revenue strategy.
> if Apple finds it harder and harder to monetize the App Store through fees, then THEY might eventually decide to switch to privacy violating advertising as their revenue strategy.
They already do this right now anyway, with App Store ads. Apple doesn't care about privacy. It cares about money, and it makes money any way it can. Unlike pretty much every other phone or tablet, iOS devices don't let you install apps without telling Apple. That privacy violation exists because it makes Apple money.
At that point consumers would be free to make a choice to switch away from Apple if they value their privacy enough. The problem right now is that Apple is 'abusing' the fact that privacy-aware consumers are drawn to their platform to charge onerous fees to app developers. They're leveraging their (de facto) monopoly on high-end mobile privacy-aware devices to restrict competition in mobile app fee charging. It's that business practice that's wrong - having a monopoly is fine so long as you don't start using your monopoly position to make money from people who are your customers for some other business.
Microsoft fell foul of this in the early 2000s. It wasn't their monopoly on desktop PC OSs that lost them an anti-trust case. It was the fact they used their monopoly on Windows to push users into adopting IE. They abused their monopoly position. That's the problem.
> if Apple finds it harder and harder to monetize the App Store through fees, then THEY might eventually decide to switch to privacy violating advertising as their revenue strategy.
Schiller argued that App Store should be free after a billion dollars was earned from it. Apple execs pretend they don't even know how much money App Store makes or loses.
And App Store is already monetized: Apple's hardware pays for everything, and more.
Nobody will use an iPhone without Uber, their banking and transit apps. Apple used to think all 3rd party services will be accessed via Safari, but boy was that a long time ago.
It's a good argument but I'm not sure it'll hold up. Apple went to great lengths to clamp down on privacy-abusing advertising via ATT. I think Facebook have been quite open about the huge revenues it cost them alone.
In the short-term, this happened. Facebook recovered though, as what Apple actually accomplished was destroying all of the smaller providers who didn't have huge first party datasets for modelling.
It's similar to the notion that killing third party cookies is basically a gift to Facebook and Google.
And lets be honest here, Apple themselves are not subject to ATT and (potentially coincidentally) have a rather large ads business. Many moons ago Apple suddenly started becoming the number 1 provider of installs on Apple as they claimed credit for the click to install which is also bonkers.
One can agree that targeted advertising is bad but also note that Apple made these "privacy focused" decisions for commercial rather than idealistic reasons.
It's really the most interesting thing I read in this screed, the rest of which seemed to be clueless BS like, "changes to App Store policies that will improve the state of the internet."
No. Unlike Google, Meta, and Amazon, Apple is not a gatekeeper to the Internet. They are the gatekeeper to one thing: their own app store. It's tiresome to hear the same anti-"big-tech" hysteria aimed at Apple. They aren't a monopoly, period.
But back to this: "The App Store policies hurt privacy"
No, they don't. The plaintiff bases this admittedly novel whine on the fact that Google and its ilk make money on things other than their software. So by that logic, every company that doesn't conduct business through its app hurts every company that does. Give us a break.
> They are the gatekeeper to one thing: their own app store.
They also control the OS and don't allow side-loading or other app stores (without putting absurd obstacles in the way) So in the end they completely control the devices they sell.
I'm not so sure it's the best argument but I get what they're saying. The problem is, the argument basically says all free apps are bad, all paid apps are good. The price of an app isn't a good indicator of its intentions.
No, it doesn't say that. It says free apps are not hurt by this as much as paid apps, so charging a percentage fee to maintain the app store disproportionately hurts paid apps.
This is probably a controversial opinion but I actually use my iPhone because it's locked down with a curated app marketplace and secure payment system. I don't want alternative payment methods or app stores. So I find it distasteful that other companies are seeking to control Apple's product design through the legal system. They're essentially trying to make it impossible to purchase a product I want, which is more monopolistic than the current status quo. iPhones do not have any sort of monopoly on phones.
If you want that, you can purchase any number of Android devices.
if all you want is for your apps to come from Apple's store and your payments to go through Apple's system, you would simply continue to use only those options and allowing other people to have other options would not impact you.
what you actually want is to force all developers to use Apple's distribution and payment systems, so that you can have every app and service from any provider delivered via your chosen mechanisms. that takes away freedom from developers and users who prefer other systems. it eliminates the market for anyone to make or use something better than your chosen options
Except, what happens when apps get removed from the iOS App Store and moved to another store for distribution? If people want to continue or need to use those apps then they would have to use these other app stores.
What if those apps moved to other stores so they can skirt Apple's review and other consumer-friendly restrictions? How is that better for consumers that use Facebook, Insta, etc... for them to have apps with less review and less scrutinized for their behavior? Some of Apples policies have been good for consumers of apps.
Just witness how Fb, etc... already try and skirt those rules that are in place to protect users from tracking and other abuses. Seems pretty logical to assume they would all jump ship to another store to not be under Apple's review process if they could.
I don't doubt for one minute that Fb, etc.. would not jump to another store with less restrictions, and either pull their existing apps or leave them severely restricted in the Apple App Store as an "incentive" to download from the other store.
Developers are not forced into using Apple's distribution and payment systems because there are a multitude of other competing devices (with a higher market share mind you) they can and do develop for.
If users and developers prefer other systems they can simply use those.
If it was actually stifling competition we would see many more good apps for Android that don’t exist for iOS. That’s not the case. If anything most companies I know develop first for iOS and then for Android if they have sufficient resources. Why? Because accessing Apple’s user base, even with the Apple Tax, is more lucrative than developing for Android.
Not very. Plenty of people, including on HN, agree with you.
> but I actually use my iPhone because it's locked down with a curated app marketplace and secure payment system.
Except it’s not. That argument would be much stronger if the App Store weren’t full of scammy predatory apps which regularly top the top grossing charts.
> I don't want alternative payment methods or app stores.
And I don’t want everything to be a subscription, yet here we are. Just like I have to avoid the majority of apps today, you’ll avoid other App Stores if that is what you want.
You’re at a significant advantage because ignoring other stores is much easier, and opening up the iPhone to third-party stores has an effect on the policies of the main App Store. This is plainly demonstrated by the acceptance of the emulator from the creator of an alternative store. So even by not using those third-party ones, you’re benefiting.
> They're essentially trying to make it impossible to purchase a product I want, which is more monopolistic than the current status quo.
That doesn’t make sense. There’s no monopoly on a product which doesn’t exist.
> iPhones do not have any sort of monopoly on phones.
You don’t have to be a monopoly to be harmful to consumers. Companies have realised that long ago and it’s time consumers do too.
> Except it’s not. That argument would be much stronger if the App Store weren’t full of scammy predatory apps which regularly top the top grossing charts.
Not just that - they also actively interfere with search results for essential apps people need. Looking up government or banking apps in the iOS app store will always surface either dodgy insurance sellers or dodgy banks that aren't the one you want to use before the actual app you want to download.
The App Store's curation is absolutely horrendous - these are also bought/sponsored placements, meaning Apple is actively profiting off of people being led to these sorts of misleading apps.
It's not controversial, you can still have your walled garden as-is.
The point of this is so that there is the possibility of escaping that walled garden, arguably welcoming more users into the ecosystem.
Nothing would change for you. Just like android users can keep using all things Google, they have the possibility of installing apps from other sources.
Things would actually change—developers would instead choose to distribute via the alternate means instead of the App Store.
So, you see, it doesn’t matter whether Apple has the walled garden or the third-party devs have the walled garden. Either way, users will be forced to accept someone’s distribution policy. But the difference really lies in the trust on Apple and its security and privacy practices, which is a choice that will be robbed from people buying iPhones to use apps exactly for this purpose.
If my apps are changing, yes it is changing for me.
Right now I can manage all of my app subscriptions from the Subscriptions screen in the Settings app of my devices. If they open up to other payment methods, my subscriptions are no longer centralized, I have to give my credit card information to more parties of variable trustworthiness, I have to worry about subscription renewal policies for every individual app, I have to figure out different methods of cancelling which could be a more difficult process than hitting "cancel" and trusting Apple will stop the payments, etc.
Except implementing the functionality to optionally open up your device to the world inherently makes it less secure. I now have no ability to purchase the phone that I want. It's actually decreasing consumer choice.
This is how you know Apple's marketing is effective. When users think they have a sense of security by using Apple's apps and apps on Apple's store and advocate against competition against Apple.
Controversial maybe, but we have to suffer through this exact same incredibly odd opinion in every thread that makes contact with this issue. No one is asking you to leave your walled garden.
iPhone's other aspects would still remain comfortably locked down and strictly controlled for you by them if there was the opt in for those interested to have alternative ways of paying for subscriptions.
I could hardly believe you only pay through Apple for everything, I mean everything, as THE trustful, others are not trusted, not using other safe payment methods for some products due to security concerns. Not only Apple is secure in this regard.
As there are opt ins on iPhone for so many highly unsecure matters, you could share the most sensitive data with the individual apps with a flick if you wish (sharing personal and very sensitive data, sometimes personal data of others without their consent, like contacts) it is very hard to understand why this particular opt in is ringing your alarm bells of security irrevocably lost and get locked out completely ("impossible to purchase product") that hard....
You can have your choice of not choosing still, while Apple's product design would otherwise remain intact in its current form. Your arguments are very inconsistent.
Same here. I don’t want to hack around with my phone like I do my computer. I want it to just work and be as feee as possible from malware etc. Other considerations are a distant second.
Apple's app store practices are an abusive monopoly, and I wish the Proton folks luck.
We once had a Zulip update rejected by Apple because we had a link to our GitHub project with the source code for the app in the app itself. And it turns out, if you then click around GitHub, you can find a "Pricing" page that doesn't pay Apple's tax.
Not related directly and not related to subscription — a recent case of Apple’s anticompetitive and user hostile policies is Apple essentially locking down email push notifications and essentially forcing everyone to use fetch. They had given a way via some signing and now they just shut it down or it broke and they didn’t fix it. Now if every mail provider have their own app then they can circumvent via some shenanigans of non mail push notifications and then fetch mail or some circus. My mail provider doesn’t have their own app so I am stuck with third party apps where push stopped working.
We can play technical gymnastics around this but this just sucks!
> We don’t question Apple’s right to act on behalf of authoritarians for the sake of profit, but Apple’s monopoly over iOS app distribution means it can enforce this perverse policy on all app developers, forcing them to also be complicit.
Reply to a couple hundred comments: You don’t have to be a monopoly to be deemed to be acting in an anti-competitive manner.
Just dominant by some significant measure, in some significant dimension, enough for many people to complain. And for a judge to review the practices and find the company is leveraging that dominance to maintain dominance or hold dominance over adjacent markets in a way that is blocking competition.
Apple is using their control of their phone hardware and OS to preclude any alternate source of apps or app stores, in order to charge a large vig on every app and in app purchase. And block competitive, tech like alternate web browser engines, and any app they don’t like.
They are big enough to warp the whole market for mobile apps and browsers. A large percentage of apps become much less viable if they don’t supportiOS. So “choose another phone” isn’t a viable solution to the harm.
Nothing stops Apple from having an App Store. Using it to enforce security rules. Nothing stops users from using it exclusively (EDIT: Don’t download from other sources, or if you do, click “no” when you get asked if you want to install apps from other sources. This is trivial for Apple to do.)
The problem is the app market is massive, highly dependent on having iOS versions to compete in the overall mobile device space, and Apple is both blocking alternative app sources and taxing all those apps, and completely prohibiting some apps, while prohibiting any other options.
Enforcing rules against anti-competitive behavior isn’t a zero cost practice. it is reasonable for some people to prefer the status quo.
But it’s better than allowing anti-competitive behavior, which would encourage more such behavior because not having competition is incredibly profitable. And the harms of letting anti-competitive behavior go unchecked tend to be significant but only obvious in hindsight, or never. That’s part of the problem. Without healthy competition lots of significant but non-obvious progress gets snuffed out before it has a chance.
Either you nip it in the bud, or end up dealing with much worse abuses.
Imagine how quickly we’d answer the question of whether consumers actually prefer Apple’s walled garden and are voting with their wallets, or if they’re just locked in and being taken advantage of, if 3rd party app stores with much lower overhead were allowed. If your monthly subscription cost $10 on the Apple app store but $7 on the other one, for the same product, I think we’d get an answer rather efficiently.
Besides the "One App Store" policy (that tbf keeps out the worst scams you can find on android), what bothers me most is that an app can be banned fors speech like "here's the FAQ on our HOMEPAGE".
Huh? "One App Store" is bad, it forces you into a vendor lock-in, to have no choice but to accept whatever a store wants you to do. I'd rather have the freedom of choice rather than being limited to a monopoly.
How is the 30% tax different than other platforms?
Further, how much do you think should this be (20%? 10%? 5%?) and if zero, why?
Finally, do you believe Apple should be compensated for the services and marketplace that they are offering, if so, what other strategies do you recommend that they deploy to make everyone happy?
> How is the 30% tax different than other platforms?
Because it doesn't have to compete with third-party distributors like MacOS? The App Store on MacOS is almost entirely empty, every real developer abandoned it years ago. It's almost impossible to buy professional Mac software on the App Store, because real developers like Avid or Adobe or Affinity don't think Apple's deal is fair either.
> Finally, do you believe Apple should be compensated for the services and marketplace that they are offering
They already are, through their developer fees. If Apple can't compensate themselves without forcing people to use their services, then they need to redesign their business model.
Installing software is not a service, arguably Apple has no right to demand compensation for it in the first place.
Amazon charges 15% for physical media, including software [1]. Since Apple is not shipping physical media, it seems something less than 15% would be more reasonable.
Of course I think Apple should be compensated for their services. But the idea that software businesses should have to pay 30% of their income to Apple is insanity. How are they meaningfully contributing to every sale? Should I have to pay 30% of my income to my landlord? Should online retail businesses have to pay 30% to UPS or FedEx? Software distribution is the lowest-cost distribution business imaginable. I'm not saying bandwidth is free, but if it would make more economic sense for Fortnite to ship you a USB drive with their software on it rather than go through the App store, then there might be some extortion going on.
Why can't Apple set whatever pricing they want? Unless you're arguing that Apple has a monopoly.
Also it's not a tax, though arguably it can be termed an "economic rent" (a technical term) that can be considered excessive, but I'm not sure about that.
Apple can't do whatever they want. They are subject to consumers through market choices and through government legislation. When one company has a monopoly, e.g. when almost every kid at school has an iPhone, that company needs to be regulated so that the interests of the public are not completely sacrificed to protect one company's personal interests. Just because they made the iPhone doesn't mean they are entitled to dictate everything digital to every iPhone user. They still have to play ball with the rest of society and can't deploy anti-competitive practices, they still can't dictate what rights their users have, and consumers need protections from their decisions as well as the decisions of others. I think the idea that market forces should be the only thing that gets companies to stop doing wrong is missing the fact that choices are removed as things centralize, that no man is an island, and that companies who sell you a product that locks you into a service doesn't make them your Lord.
And regulating Apple is quite different from regulating someperson. If you made a Linux phone in your basement, nobody would tell you what kind of charger you should use. But companies that claim ownership of a substantial economy and can dictate the rights and culture and economic output for a large section of society do need to have more checks on their power than just, "Well if I'm so wrong, then why do I have so much money? Maybe you should make your own phone that won't work well with anyone else's and see if you can sell it."
Same reason any company can't set whatever they want. Vast majority of companies aren't deemed monopolies so this doesn't apply to them but this restriction holds over them once they grow to a certain size nonetheless. Even the most ardent capitalists/free market advocates agree that monopolies have to be regulated by the government.
The real questions are what makes company a monopoly. You can always argue you aren't a monopoly but it's what convinces people that makes most sense and many people are beginning to be convinced that Apple/Google etc are monopolies in certain markets.
> Unless you're arguing that Apple has a monopoly.
Exactly this. There's no competition, because Apple blocks iPhone owners from installing apps through any method other than their App Store (in the US, where this lawsuit is being filed). It's a programmatically-enforced monopoly.
Frankly I'd much rather change that situation than quibble about exactly how much Apple is allowed to charge for their services. Let them charge whatever they want in a free market where they have to compete on a level playing field with everyone else. If developers don't like it, they can use a competing app store to sell their software to iPhone users.
I don’t think any developer considers it reasonable. I mean, apart from apple and the really brainless section of their fanboys, who thinks this is reasonable?
I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage, giving the impression that Apple phones were high technology, and interacting with peasant androids is what made group chats fragment and pictures and videos look like trash.
Few things are more enraging than people being left out of chats with friends and family because they didn't bend over for Apple. Even worse being a teenager and having to endure social shaming for it. It wasn't until the EU signaled it was going to bring down then axe that Apple capitulated to RCS.
- Yes, I know you are part of the domestic US long tail that use signal/telegram with all your friends.
- Yes, I know no one outside the US uses iMessage.
ETA: A note because people are pretty incredulous about "most evil". Tech companies do a lot of evil stuff, no doubt.
But there is something special about putting social connection behind an expensive hardware purchase and walled garden lock in. Every other messaging app I know of is open to anyone on most platforms for little or no cost. Apple on the other hand purposely leveraged social connections in your life to force you into their garden and keep you there. Lets not pretend that Apple couldn't open up iMessage or even charge a nominal fee for outsiders. Instead you get an iphone and just seemlessly slide into iMessage. So seemless that most users don't even know that it is a separate service than sms/mms/rcs. Apple muddies that too.
But they would never do that, because using people's closest social connections to force them into the ecosystem and lock them there is just too juicy. "Oh you don't want an iPhone anymore? Well looks like you have to leave your social circles main discussion hub to do so..."
> For example, when a user purchases an iPhone, the user is steered to use Apple’s default email product, Apple Mail. It is only through a complex labyrinth of settings that a user can change her default email application away from the Apple “Mail” application towards an alternative like Gmail (Google) or Proton Mail.
> At least for mail a user can in theory modify the default setting. On the calendar
front the situation is even worse. A user’s default calendar is Apple Calendar, and the default cannot be modified
That's pretty evil & predatory to me. The fact that it is by design (someone decided it needed to this awful) is why Apple is being evil here. And this is just one example.
There's more
> For example, Apple banned apps from its App Store that
supported Google Voice because Apple sought to advantage its own services over Google’s
No, I don't think it's an understatement at all....
In the difficulty of non-iMessage compatibility, I have had people close to me say "Why don't you just get an iPhone?" with an incredulous tone.
Perhaps tech companies have had more evil things happen on their platforms, that for whatever reason they were slow to react to.
But
"Why don't you just get an iPhone" was a precisely and meticulously engineered line, pure social manipulation, that was intentionally orchestrated to be delivered to me through the mouths of the people I trust most in my life turned unknowing pawns.
That is why I consider it the most evil. Apple is by design purposely exploiting a core human function, close social circle communication, to trap people in their garden.
I am plugged into the Apple ecosystem daily and shamelessly and yeah I think it’s arguably accurate. What makes it so sinister is how benign it seems yet how devastating the consequences have been.
I think gp's statement is a pretty accurate, Apple's behavior was intentional, they know it ends up creating artificial social pressure and bullying. Most appalling and disgusting.
> I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage
Is that really the worst thing you've seen big-tech do? That's very fortunate.
What about Blackberry Messenger which was the mobile instant-messaging golden standard for years and BB exclusive for as long as it mattered in the market? Was that too long ago to remember?
Actually, iMessage happily harms apple customers all the time.
I know many MANY people who have lost chats with their loved ones (especially deceased ones) because there is no way to export and save their conversations.
I think this should be as easy as saving photos, which apple makes (somewhat) easier to export.
Back to email, it is pretty horrible to set up my local email server on an apple device. You have to go through these dialogs, apple servers have to be contacted (for "redirection"), and I usually barely get it working.
> and from what I've seen, often act as if that is some sort of mark of superiority.
Feels like you weren't able to have a proper discussion with those people. In many EU countries, using SMS made/makes no sense because SMS was/is super expensive as compared to WhatsApp. And using iMessage makes no sense because most people don't have an iPhone. From their point of view, it actually makes no sense.
Now if you tell them "well, where I come from everybody has an iPhone" or "SMS have always been free", probably they won't say "still, I'm better than you for no apparent reason".
I don't think that it is actually seen as a mark of superiority anywhere in the EU to use WhatsApp. Unlike apparently in some places it is seen as a mark of superiority to have an iPhone vs an Android phone.
If you go in a EU country where SMS were not prohibitively expensive in the beginning of WhatsApp (e.g. France), you'll see that WhatsApp has been less successful (at least in the beginning). WhatsApp was a killer app because it was free SMS, really.
I don't think most of US in the EU really mind, or even know what messaging app people in America use. The privacy conscious folk around here do tend to prefer Signal over Whatsapp though.
A lot of people, in Austria at least, have moved to signal in my experience. My communities in the US and Austria have trended toward adoption of Signal with very few holdovers between messages and WhatsApp, some partly due to my pressure but overall it’s just getting away from the BS of the alts
> Even worse being a teenager and having to endure social shaming for it. It wasn't until the EU signaled it was going to bring down then axe that Apple capitulated to RCS.
Regardless of the merits of Apple's actions as regards technical interoperability I feel compelled to point out that this in particular is a cultural problem, not technical malfeasance. RCS users still appear as green bubbles and even if the lack of functionality has been remedied the stigma has not. People at my lunch table 20 years ago were drawing artificial distinctions between "MP3s" (portable DAPs) and iPods because the latter were expensive luxury products and the former were not. The same thing is at work here because owning an iPhone is a proxy for one's socioeconomic stratum. I own an iPhone and as soon as an Android user appears in an iMessage group chat some joker immediately makes a green bubble quip - no degraded picture message required.
People that define themselves by conspicuous consumption don't care about interoperability. They care about brand recognition.
But that's what so insidious about it - by also actively degrading the chat experience it makes excluding non-Apple users not merely social signalling but also a rational decision even if you don't care about conspicuous consumption whatsoever.
So pick your poison, either you exclude them because of in-group signalling/conspicious consumption or exclude them because you want non-potato resolution, with Android users getting the blame for Apple's UX. Either way Tim Cook says the solution is to buy an iPhone.
Yes, but this is precisely the point isn't it? It's blatantly enabling and embracing "othering" for no technical reason as an explicit strategy to exploit social pressures to maximize profit.
The most evil thing a tech company has done is make a proprietary messaging app?
Apple didn't make SMS bad, it just was. Apple has since implemented RCS and it hasn't changed how I communicate with people from my iPhone at all.
Google should probably take most of the blame for repeatedly fumbling messaging on non-Apple platforms for the past 2 decades. Every time they had something that was getting any amount of traction it got quickly replaced with some stupid new, worse messaging app so a PO could get a promotion.
This reads like public affairs copy from Meta/Alphabet/et al looking to distract from the real, measurable harm produced against teens by social media and AI products that are either directly (Instagram) or indirectly (character ai) owned.
Apple does not owe Android users a superior non-Apple experience. Android a pretty damn huge platform, right? Way bigger than Apple, I hear? Blame Google. Google failed to compete.
The evil is (so-called) social media in all of its forms. Human connections of all kinds have been comprehensively distorted and enshitified by unchecked corporate opportunism and manipulation.
I don't really agree with this framing. The fundamental issue is user ignorance, full stop. The fact is that our collective tech education is in a terrible state. Apple exploiting this to sell iPhones is just natural behavior for a profit-driven enterprise.
Instead of shaming Apple (which won't be very effective IMO), we should aim to improve education. Teach users how SMS/MMS/iMessage work. Tell them that they can install universal messaging apps and so on.
Perhaps the fundamental issue is your ignorance? Don't you know that users require tools that just work and that they should not be required to understand all of this technical nuance?
google with their android anti-fragmentation-agreement is pretty predatory. basically release any/all android devices with google services and pay us cut or release none and use pure aosp. it is some next level shit.
huh. Isnt that what business deals are supposed to be? Two businesses entering into a business relationship, where both parties get something. OEMs get Google services & operating system, or OEMs are free to use open source project.
Are you saying Google should freely give away their products?
> I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage
I think you might be living in a bubble, if this is the "most evil" thing you have heard of a big tech company doing. Go read up on IBM's history, especially in the 30s and 40s. Or a more contemporary example, read up on Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Or Amazon's mistreatment of workers in both corporate and warehouse settings. Or Meta scraping data off your devices without permission to train AI.
And, though I know some folks here disagree, plenty of people around the world believe what's happening in Gaza is a genocide, and Big Tech has materially contributed to making it happen. Or, if you want another example of human cost, talk about how resources for electronics are mined, or how electronics are manufactured.
Saying, "the most evil thing big tech has ever done is make some chat bubbles blue" puts a whole lot of human lives below the color of some chat bubbles.
You can think Apple did a really bad thing by doing that, that's fine. No complaints. But to call it the most evil thing ever done erases an incalculable amount of human suffering.
> I think you might be living in a bubble, if this is the "most evil" thing you have heard of a big tech company doing. Go read up on IBM's history, especially in the 30s and 40s. Or a more contemporary example, read up on Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Or Amazon's mistreatment of workers in both corporate and warehouse settings. Or Meta scraping data off your devices without permission to train AI.
I wouldn't count the IBM thing because I don't see it as part of the vernacular "big tech" of today; however I do think it's the most evil so far in this thread.
The others? They are mostly aggressive competition, especially the MS stuff, and altogether I don't see them as more evil than Apple's exclusionary UX. What's at the bottom of it for me is that it harms users directly, e.g. what others said about kids getting shamed for having a non-Apple phone. The one thing not mentioned yet that would qualify for me would be Meta's product altogether with its impact on teenagers; and various gambling simulators like Roblox.
First of all, when Apple created iMessage, there was no possible way for them to predict that friend groups would use it as a reason to treat members of their groups poorly due to using Android phones.
Second of all, Apple did not deliberately make interacting with non-iMessage users in group chats "look like trash" in order to exclude them. Apple went out of its way to make it possible for iMessage to interoperate with the ubiquitous (in the US) SMS, with reduced features because SMS did not support the better features. If, instead, Apple had just made iMessage not interoperate with SMS at all, you'd be screaming about that instead.
Third of all, if people are leaving others out of chats, that's not Apple's fault. That's something for those families and friend groups to work out amongst themselves. "Hey, guys, I don't have an iPhone, and don't really have the money to get one, so maybe we could use GroupMe/GChat/WhatsApp/Signal/IRC/email/smoke signals/meeting in person/any of the myriad other ways of communicating instead?" A) "Oh, sure, that shouldn't be a problem!" (everything is solved) B) "What? No, we're not going to change anything just because it makes it impossible to actually include you in stuff. That's a you problem!" (turns out, the problem is your friends are assholes)
Apple cannot by any reasonable standard be held to blame for the way bullying, status-seeking teenagers treat each other.
What Apple could have done, for sake of clarity, sanity, and good practice is to handle SMS using one app, and handle iMessage using another, *separate* app.
The problem is not that iMessage exists, it's that it operates in opaque and unpredictable ways, mixing SMS and iMessage (and now RCS) communication in a way where even more tech-savvy users do not understand how it works (first-hand experience - had to explain to someone why their images are super compressed when they send them to me, but OK when they send them to their friend with an iPhone).
And now it's the same with RCS (Android-iOS). I send person A an image, the conversation switches to RCS. They use the "automatic reply" when I call them, conversation switches back to SMS. With person B, the switching between RCS and SMS is even more unpredictable.
>“iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” was Federighi’s concern according to the Epic filing.
Among other statements. Apple was very aware of the social effects of iMessage, and leveraged it to force people into getting iphones.
Tech companies have done lots of evil shit. But never, not once, has one ever crossed the line into turning my friends and family against me (however slightly) because I didn't want to lock myself in Apple's cage, however comfortable it is.
Yeah, you can call my friends and family shitty, but the reality is that the are regular non-tech people, explaining the situation to them is impossible, and iMessage Just Works(TM).
Apple was perfectly right when they did this way back as they were not a dominant platform. Different legal rules applied.
However making an argument that some key aspects of the iPhome were not designed for viral growth is disrespectful to Steve Jobs who, like many of that time, was very familiar with engineering platform growth - probably more and better than most.
> I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage
What a ridiculous statement. Even with your edit it's still an utterly stupid conclusion to come to.
Off the top of my head I can think of way worse things tech companies have done. Cambridge Analytica scandal, Gmail scanning, the Google Shopping lawsuit, Amazon's product clone hijack, Facebooks mood manipulation experiment, Ring doorbell viewing, Uber spying, to name just a few FAR worse things tech companies have done.
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Huh. I’ve never seen it framed this way and it might be the most compelling argument I’ve heard to date. It’s not simply a debate about whether a company should be allowed to be vertically integrated in isolation, but whether that vertical integration allows them to exert unfair distorting pressure on the free markets we are trying to protect.
1. The size of Apple/Alphabet/Samsung makes it difficult to enter the market (see: factories having ridiculous MOQs for small-batch phone manufacturing), pushing everyone else out.
2. The size of the smartphone market makes it impossible to not have to deal with one of the above companies for certification, market penetrance or such. This makes them kingmakers. If a company somehow manages to become Facebook, Netflix, or Amazon, then the phone companies slide them a secret deal under the table. Everyone else gets a market-limiting set of terms that makes sure "tech" stays one of the "top" industries.
Combined, with no entry allowed, and with forces exerted outwards, we see broad social structures orienting /around/ how we use our phones, rather than the other way around, and that includes ad-monetized-absolutely-everything.
Phones and social media, today, are where TVs and broadcasts were in the 1950s/60s. Ubiquity and centralizing forces. If someone told us in the 1950s a TV manufacturer was exerting pressure on our forms of information distribution and was choosing which voices get a seat at the table, we'd rightly call that archaic and wonder why people would accept a technology provider as a market-shaping force. But today we accept it nonetheless. I refuse to believe the argument that the world's largest company can't figure out how to build a secure pipeline without making plenty of my decisions on my behalf...
> factories having ridiculous MOQs for small-batch phone manufacturing
Ironically in the contract manufacturing area the market is actually efficient. Small batches just cost more as an intrinsic fact about manufacturing. I guarantee you could get a quote for any quantity of manufacturing above 1, you just wouldn't like it.
A smartphone from Google or Apple is also pretty much required for certain government apps, banking/financial services, and so forth. I wouldn't call it a stretch to say that in the future it would be mandatory to have these duopoly controlled devices on your person at all times, like how you need to carry an ID card.
Many of those apps don't work on rooted phones or custom ROMs without workarounds and doing so is a TOS violation in many cases as well. Also imagine what it would be like if your Google or Apple account got banned by accident with no human support to sort it out.
Whether Apple should be regulated into reducing the fees they charge for access to their hardware and software ecosystem (the ecosystem they unarguably did a pretty stellar job at) is a debatable matter of its own, but it doesn’t strike me as addressing the issue of ad-supported business and how it messes with the way the market is supposed to work.
It is true that platform fee means this distorted business model is unfairly favoured. However, this is just an extension of the business based on ad/data mining (especially social media) being generally unfair in so many ways, and even with zero platform fees that business won’t stop being unfair and won’t be seriously challenged. To reiterate, no one can honestly compete with free; fee reduction merely tweaks the formula from “free vs. $X” to “free vs. slightly less than $X”.
Furthermore, there is the obvious issue that even if an app or service is paid, it can still be additionally monetising user data. Reducing fees will only favour this doubly shady business.
Perhaps what could actually move the needle a bit and make this model less attractive is if walled gardens somehow found a way charge a big fat fee off the ad/data mining revenue, in conjunction with appropriately reducing fees for regular sales of B2C apps and services. Could this be technically possible without walled gardens additionally owning ad exchanges (which might be a can of worms that shouldn’t be opened)?
Have you ever been shown a mobile ad, and thought to yourself, “this is a good thing, this is an honest description of a product that I am eager to spend money on?” No, on the contrary, they’re the subject of universal ridicule… and yet they persist. Why? How? Who is paying for them? How are they generating revenue? How can that be worth anything? Where is the value coming from?
So even though I delete apps that force you to sit through ads, and I refuse to be led by ads towards spending money - even though I am in effect ‘voting’ by doing so - it doesn’t seem to have any impact. The ads keep happening anyway, I can only assume because they do actually work on other less canny consumers.
Is the problem really an inability to vote with our wallets? Or is the problem a complete lack of media/marketing literacy, that leads the credulous to engage with ad slop, against their own best interests?
They already do this right now anyway, with App Store ads. Apple doesn't care about privacy. It cares about money, and it makes money any way it can. Unlike pretty much every other phone or tablet, iOS devices don't let you install apps without telling Apple. That privacy violation exists because it makes Apple money.
Microsoft fell foul of this in the early 2000s. It wasn't their monopoly on desktop PC OSs that lost them an anti-trust case. It was the fact they used their monopoly on Windows to push users into adopting IE. They abused their monopoly position. That's the problem.
Schiller argued that App Store should be free after a billion dollars was earned from it. Apple execs pretend they don't even know how much money App Store makes or loses.
And App Store is already monetized: Apple's hardware pays for everything, and more.
It's similar to the notion that killing third party cookies is basically a gift to Facebook and Google.
And lets be honest here, Apple themselves are not subject to ATT and (potentially coincidentally) have a rather large ads business. Many moons ago Apple suddenly started becoming the number 1 provider of installs on Apple as they claimed credit for the click to install which is also bonkers.
One can agree that targeted advertising is bad but also note that Apple made these "privacy focused" decisions for commercial rather than idealistic reasons.
No. Unlike Google, Meta, and Amazon, Apple is not a gatekeeper to the Internet. They are the gatekeeper to one thing: their own app store. It's tiresome to hear the same anti-"big-tech" hysteria aimed at Apple. They aren't a monopoly, period.
But back to this: "The App Store policies hurt privacy"
No, they don't. The plaintiff bases this admittedly novel whine on the fact that Google and its ilk make money on things other than their software. So by that logic, every company that doesn't conduct business through its app hurts every company that does. Give us a break.
Which is also the only allowed way to run software on 58% of US smartphones?
> Unlike Google, Meta, and Amazon
I could agree with Google, but how are Meta and Amazon gatekeepers of the internet? Especially _more than Apple_
They also control the OS and don't allow side-loading or other app stores (without putting absurd obstacles in the way) So in the end they completely control the devices they sell.
If you want that, you can purchase any number of Android devices.
what you actually want is to force all developers to use Apple's distribution and payment systems, so that you can have every app and service from any provider delivered via your chosen mechanisms. that takes away freedom from developers and users who prefer other systems. it eliminates the market for anyone to make or use something better than your chosen options
What if those apps moved to other stores so they can skirt Apple's review and other consumer-friendly restrictions? How is that better for consumers that use Facebook, Insta, etc... for them to have apps with less review and less scrutinized for their behavior? Some of Apples policies have been good for consumers of apps.
Just witness how Fb, etc... already try and skirt those rules that are in place to protect users from tracking and other abuses. Seems pretty logical to assume they would all jump ship to another store to not be under Apple's review process if they could.
I don't doubt for one minute that Fb, etc.. would not jump to another store with less restrictions, and either pull their existing apps or leave them severely restricted in the Apple App Store as an "incentive" to download from the other store.
If users and developers prefer other systems they can simply use those.
Not very. Plenty of people, including on HN, agree with you.
> but I actually use my iPhone because it's locked down with a curated app marketplace and secure payment system.
Except it’s not. That argument would be much stronger if the App Store weren’t full of scammy predatory apps which regularly top the top grossing charts.
> I don't want alternative payment methods or app stores.
And I don’t want everything to be a subscription, yet here we are. Just like I have to avoid the majority of apps today, you’ll avoid other App Stores if that is what you want.
You’re at a significant advantage because ignoring other stores is much easier, and opening up the iPhone to third-party stores has an effect on the policies of the main App Store. This is plainly demonstrated by the acceptance of the emulator from the creator of an alternative store. So even by not using those third-party ones, you’re benefiting.
> They're essentially trying to make it impossible to purchase a product I want, which is more monopolistic than the current status quo.
That doesn’t make sense. There’s no monopoly on a product which doesn’t exist.
> iPhones do not have any sort of monopoly on phones.
You don’t have to be a monopoly to be harmful to consumers. Companies have realised that long ago and it’s time consumers do too.
Not just that - they also actively interfere with search results for essential apps people need. Looking up government or banking apps in the iOS app store will always surface either dodgy insurance sellers or dodgy banks that aren't the one you want to use before the actual app you want to download.
The App Store's curation is absolutely horrendous - these are also bought/sponsored placements, meaning Apple is actively profiting off of people being led to these sorts of misleading apps.
The point of this is so that there is the possibility of escaping that walled garden, arguably welcoming more users into the ecosystem.
Nothing would change for you. Just like android users can keep using all things Google, they have the possibility of installing apps from other sources.
So, you see, it doesn’t matter whether Apple has the walled garden or the third-party devs have the walled garden. Either way, users will be forced to accept someone’s distribution policy. But the difference really lies in the trust on Apple and its security and privacy practices, which is a choice that will be robbed from people buying iPhones to use apps exactly for this purpose.
If my apps are changing, yes it is changing for me.
Right now I can manage all of my app subscriptions from the Subscriptions screen in the Settings app of my devices. If they open up to other payment methods, my subscriptions are no longer centralized, I have to give my credit card information to more parties of variable trustworthiness, I have to worry about subscription renewal policies for every individual app, I have to figure out different methods of cancelling which could be a more difficult process than hitting "cancel" and trusting Apple will stop the payments, etc.
I could hardly believe you only pay through Apple for everything, I mean everything, as THE trustful, others are not trusted, not using other safe payment methods for some products due to security concerns. Not only Apple is secure in this regard.
As there are opt ins on iPhone for so many highly unsecure matters, you could share the most sensitive data with the individual apps with a flick if you wish (sharing personal and very sensitive data, sometimes personal data of others without their consent, like contacts) it is very hard to understand why this particular opt in is ringing your alarm bells of security irrevocably lost and get locked out completely ("impossible to purchase product") that hard....
You can have your choice of not choosing still, while Apple's product design would otherwise remain intact in its current form. Your arguments are very inconsistent.
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We once had a Zulip update rejected by Apple because we had a link to our GitHub project with the source code for the app in the app itself. And it turns out, if you then click around GitHub, you can find a "Pricing" page that doesn't pay Apple's tax.
Details are here for anyone curious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28175759
We can play technical gymnastics around this but this just sucks!
I had made a post recently which didn't see any traction https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44398136 maybe it can be a pointer
Ouch. Those are some fighting words.
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Just dominant by some significant measure, in some significant dimension, enough for many people to complain. And for a judge to review the practices and find the company is leveraging that dominance to maintain dominance or hold dominance over adjacent markets in a way that is blocking competition.
Apple is using their control of their phone hardware and OS to preclude any alternate source of apps or app stores, in order to charge a large vig on every app and in app purchase. And block competitive, tech like alternate web browser engines, and any app they don’t like.
They are big enough to warp the whole market for mobile apps and browsers. A large percentage of apps become much less viable if they don’t supportiOS. So “choose another phone” isn’t a viable solution to the harm.
Nothing stops Apple from having an App Store. Using it to enforce security rules. Nothing stops users from using it exclusively (EDIT: Don’t download from other sources, or if you do, click “no” when you get asked if you want to install apps from other sources. This is trivial for Apple to do.)
The problem is the app market is massive, highly dependent on having iOS versions to compete in the overall mobile device space, and Apple is both blocking alternative app sources and taxing all those apps, and completely prohibiting some apps, while prohibiting any other options.
Enforcing rules against anti-competitive behavior isn’t a zero cost practice. it is reasonable for some people to prefer the status quo.
But it’s better than allowing anti-competitive behavior, which would encourage more such behavior because not having competition is incredibly profitable. And the harms of letting anti-competitive behavior go unchecked tend to be significant but only obvious in hindsight, or never. That’s part of the problem. Without healthy competition lots of significant but non-obvious progress gets snuffed out before it has a chance.
Either you nip it in the bud, or end up dealing with much worse abuses.
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Further, how much do you think should this be (20%? 10%? 5%?) and if zero, why?
Finally, do you believe Apple should be compensated for the services and marketplace that they are offering, if so, what other strategies do you recommend that they deploy to make everyone happy?
Because it doesn't have to compete with third-party distributors like MacOS? The App Store on MacOS is almost entirely empty, every real developer abandoned it years ago. It's almost impossible to buy professional Mac software on the App Store, because real developers like Avid or Adobe or Affinity don't think Apple's deal is fair either.
> Finally, do you believe Apple should be compensated for the services and marketplace that they are offering
They already are, through their developer fees. If Apple can't compensate themselves without forcing people to use their services, then they need to redesign their business model.
Installing software is not a service, arguably Apple has no right to demand compensation for it in the first place.
1. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external...
Nintendo for example has NDA where you cannot even share online how much they take.
Also it's not a tax, though arguably it can be termed an "economic rent" (a technical term) that can be considered excessive, but I'm not sure about that.
And regulating Apple is quite different from regulating someperson. If you made a Linux phone in your basement, nobody would tell you what kind of charger you should use. But companies that claim ownership of a substantial economy and can dictate the rights and culture and economic output for a large section of society do need to have more checks on their power than just, "Well if I'm so wrong, then why do I have so much money? Maybe you should make your own phone that won't work well with anyone else's and see if you can sell it."
Same reason any company can't set whatever they want. Vast majority of companies aren't deemed monopolies so this doesn't apply to them but this restriction holds over them once they grow to a certain size nonetheless. Even the most ardent capitalists/free market advocates agree that monopolies have to be regulated by the government.
The real questions are what makes company a monopoly. You can always argue you aren't a monopoly but it's what convinces people that makes most sense and many people are beginning to be convinced that Apple/Google etc are monopolies in certain markets.
Exactly this. There's no competition, because Apple blocks iPhone owners from installing apps through any method other than their App Store (in the US, where this lawsuit is being filed). It's a programmatically-enforced monopoly.
Frankly I'd much rather change that situation than quibble about exactly how much Apple is allowed to charge for their services. Let them charge whatever they want in a free market where they have to compete on a level playing field with everyone else. If developers don't like it, they can use a competing app store to sell their software to iPhone users.
App fees have basically been the same amount for all time. Literally every single developer looked at the numbers and decided to go into business.
Few things are more enraging than people being left out of chats with friends and family because they didn't bend over for Apple. Even worse being a teenager and having to endure social shaming for it. It wasn't until the EU signaled it was going to bring down then axe that Apple capitulated to RCS.
- Yes, I know you are part of the domestic US long tail that use signal/telegram with all your friends.
- Yes, I know no one outside the US uses iMessage.
ETA: A note because people are pretty incredulous about "most evil". Tech companies do a lot of evil stuff, no doubt.
But there is something special about putting social connection behind an expensive hardware purchase and walled garden lock in. Every other messaging app I know of is open to anyone on most platforms for little or no cost. Apple on the other hand purposely leveraged social connections in your life to force you into their garden and keep you there. Lets not pretend that Apple couldn't open up iMessage or even charge a nominal fee for outsiders. Instead you get an iphone and just seemlessly slide into iMessage. So seemless that most users don't even know that it is a separate service than sms/mms/rcs. Apple muddies that too.
But they would never do that, because using people's closest social connections to force them into the ecosystem and lock them there is just too juicy. "Oh you don't want an iPhone anymore? Well looks like you have to leave your social circles main discussion hub to do so..."
It's just evil on another level.
Don't you think this is _maybe_ an overstatement? I was annoyed about this for years but reading your take is borderline satirical.
> For example, when a user purchases an iPhone, the user is steered to use Apple’s default email product, Apple Mail. It is only through a complex labyrinth of settings that a user can change her default email application away from the Apple “Mail” application towards an alternative like Gmail (Google) or Proton Mail.
> At least for mail a user can in theory modify the default setting. On the calendar front the situation is even worse. A user’s default calendar is Apple Calendar, and the default cannot be modified
That's pretty evil & predatory to me. The fact that it is by design (someone decided it needed to this awful) is why Apple is being evil here. And this is just one example.
There's more
> For example, Apple banned apps from its App Store that supported Google Voice because Apple sought to advantage its own services over Google’s
In the difficulty of non-iMessage compatibility, I have had people close to me say "Why don't you just get an iPhone?" with an incredulous tone.
Perhaps tech companies have had more evil things happen on their platforms, that for whatever reason they were slow to react to.
But
"Why don't you just get an iPhone" was a precisely and meticulously engineered line, pure social manipulation, that was intentionally orchestrated to be delivered to me through the mouths of the people I trust most in my life turned unknowing pawns.
That is why I consider it the most evil. Apple is by design purposely exploiting a core human function, close social circle communication, to trap people in their garden.
Specific example: When on dating apps you see "green bubbles" as a red flag/un-dateable trait, it has done considerable harm.
Is that really the worst thing you've seen big-tech do? That's very fortunate.
What about Blackberry Messenger which was the mobile instant-messaging golden standard for years and BB exclusive for as long as it mattered in the market? Was that too long ago to remember?
Apple refusing RCS integration is a very clear example of hurting everyone in pursuit of profit
it's likely not the most evil, but I do think it qualifies as evil. it stands out by being inarguably willful, and having a very broad impact
I find harming hundreds of millions (probably billions) of friendships to be quite evil
I know many MANY people who have lost chats with their loved ones (especially deceased ones) because there is no way to export and save their conversations.
I think this should be as easy as saving photos, which apple makes (somewhat) easier to export.
Back to email, it is pretty horrible to set up my local email server on an apple device. You have to go through these dialogs, apple servers have to be contacted (for "redirection"), and I usually barely get it working.
Yes, people in the EU use WhatsApp, by Meta & Zuckerberg, and from what I've seen, often act as if that is some sort of mark of superiority.
Feels like you weren't able to have a proper discussion with those people. In many EU countries, using SMS made/makes no sense because SMS was/is super expensive as compared to WhatsApp. And using iMessage makes no sense because most people don't have an iPhone. From their point of view, it actually makes no sense.
Now if you tell them "well, where I come from everybody has an iPhone" or "SMS have always been free", probably they won't say "still, I'm better than you for no apparent reason".
I don't think that it is actually seen as a mark of superiority anywhere in the EU to use WhatsApp. Unlike apparently in some places it is seen as a mark of superiority to have an iPhone vs an Android phone.
If you go in a EU country where SMS were not prohibitively expensive in the beginning of WhatsApp (e.g. France), you'll see that WhatsApp has been less successful (at least in the beginning). WhatsApp was a killer app because it was free SMS, really.
Well, you could argue that it's morally superior to be reachable by everyone, regardless of what brand of phone they use.
The ability to install a 3rd party messaging app also shows some technical skill.
Regardless of the merits of Apple's actions as regards technical interoperability I feel compelled to point out that this in particular is a cultural problem, not technical malfeasance. RCS users still appear as green bubbles and even if the lack of functionality has been remedied the stigma has not. People at my lunch table 20 years ago were drawing artificial distinctions between "MP3s" (portable DAPs) and iPods because the latter were expensive luxury products and the former were not. The same thing is at work here because owning an iPhone is a proxy for one's socioeconomic stratum. I own an iPhone and as soon as an Android user appears in an iMessage group chat some joker immediately makes a green bubble quip - no degraded picture message required.
People that define themselves by conspicuous consumption don't care about interoperability. They care about brand recognition.
So pick your poison, either you exclude them because of in-group signalling/conspicious consumption or exclude them because you want non-potato resolution, with Android users getting the blame for Apple's UX. Either way Tim Cook says the solution is to buy an iPhone.
Apple didn't make SMS bad, it just was. Apple has since implemented RCS and it hasn't changed how I communicate with people from my iPhone at all.
Google should probably take most of the blame for repeatedly fumbling messaging on non-Apple platforms for the past 2 decades. Every time they had something that was getting any amount of traction it got quickly replaced with some stupid new, worse messaging app so a PO could get a promotion.
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Instead of shaming Apple (which won't be very effective IMO), we should aim to improve education. Teach users how SMS/MMS/iMessage work. Tell them that they can install universal messaging apps and so on.
Are you saying Google should freely give away their products?
I think you might be living in a bubble, if this is the "most evil" thing you have heard of a big tech company doing. Go read up on IBM's history, especially in the 30s and 40s. Or a more contemporary example, read up on Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Or Amazon's mistreatment of workers in both corporate and warehouse settings. Or Meta scraping data off your devices without permission to train AI.
And, though I know some folks here disagree, plenty of people around the world believe what's happening in Gaza is a genocide, and Big Tech has materially contributed to making it happen. Or, if you want another example of human cost, talk about how resources for electronics are mined, or how electronics are manufactured.
Saying, "the most evil thing big tech has ever done is make some chat bubbles blue" puts a whole lot of human lives below the color of some chat bubbles.
You can think Apple did a really bad thing by doing that, that's fine. No complaints. But to call it the most evil thing ever done erases an incalculable amount of human suffering.
I wouldn't count the IBM thing because I don't see it as part of the vernacular "big tech" of today; however I do think it's the most evil so far in this thread.
The others? They are mostly aggressive competition, especially the MS stuff, and altogether I don't see them as more evil than Apple's exclusionary UX. What's at the bottom of it for me is that it harms users directly, e.g. what others said about kids getting shamed for having a non-Apple phone. The one thing not mentioned yet that would qualify for me would be Meta's product altogether with its impact on teenagers; and various gambling simulators like Roblox.
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First of all, when Apple created iMessage, there was no possible way for them to predict that friend groups would use it as a reason to treat members of their groups poorly due to using Android phones.
Second of all, Apple did not deliberately make interacting with non-iMessage users in group chats "look like trash" in order to exclude them. Apple went out of its way to make it possible for iMessage to interoperate with the ubiquitous (in the US) SMS, with reduced features because SMS did not support the better features. If, instead, Apple had just made iMessage not interoperate with SMS at all, you'd be screaming about that instead.
Third of all, if people are leaving others out of chats, that's not Apple's fault. That's something for those families and friend groups to work out amongst themselves. "Hey, guys, I don't have an iPhone, and don't really have the money to get one, so maybe we could use GroupMe/GChat/WhatsApp/Signal/IRC/email/smoke signals/meeting in person/any of the myriad other ways of communicating instead?" A) "Oh, sure, that shouldn't be a problem!" (everything is solved) B) "What? No, we're not going to change anything just because it makes it impossible to actually include you in stuff. That's a you problem!" (turns out, the problem is your friends are assholes)
Apple cannot by any reasonable standard be held to blame for the way bullying, status-seeking teenagers treat each other.
The problem is not that iMessage exists, it's that it operates in opaque and unpredictable ways, mixing SMS and iMessage (and now RCS) communication in a way where even more tech-savvy users do not understand how it works (first-hand experience - had to explain to someone why their images are super compressed when they send them to me, but OK when they send them to their friend with an iPhone).
And now it's the same with RCS (Android-iOS). I send person A an image, the conversation switches to RCS. They use the "automatic reply" when I call them, conversation switches back to SMS. With person B, the switching between RCS and SMS is even more unpredictable.
If some teenagers see green bubbles as some sort of challenge to their identities, it's probably a useful life lesson.
>“iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” was Federighi’s concern according to the Epic filing.
Among other statements. Apple was very aware of the social effects of iMessage, and leveraged it to force people into getting iphones.
Tech companies have done lots of evil shit. But never, not once, has one ever crossed the line into turning my friends and family against me (however slightly) because I didn't want to lock myself in Apple's cage, however comfortable it is.
Yeah, you can call my friends and family shitty, but the reality is that the are regular non-tech people, explaining the situation to them is impossible, and iMessage Just Works(TM).
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However making an argument that some key aspects of the iPhome were not designed for viral growth is disrespectful to Steve Jobs who, like many of that time, was very familiar with engineering platform growth - probably more and better than most.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
What a ridiculous statement. Even with your edit it's still an utterly stupid conclusion to come to.
Off the top of my head I can think of way worse things tech companies have done. Cambridge Analytica scandal, Gmail scanning, the Google Shopping lawsuit, Amazon's product clone hijack, Facebooks mood manipulation experiment, Ring doorbell viewing, Uber spying, to name just a few FAR worse things tech companies have done.