Well written, but its starting point seems to be “Apple used to be force for good”. — It is a corporation. It wants your money. This is not new. This is not any different from Lilly (Mounjaro), or Google, or any other, er… corporation.
The idea that a CEO will stand up to his democratically elected dictator is absurd. Why should he, when the dictator is merely implementing the policies he said he would during the campaign and still got elected? Why should he make himself and his company and his shareholders martyrs?
Because many people hold Apple to higher standards, that is why.
> The idea that a CEO will stand up to his democratically elected dictator is absurd. Why should he, when the dictator is merely implementing the policies he said he would during the campaign and still got elected? Why should he make himself and his company and his shareholders martyrs?
This is exactly what Apple did when they stood their ground against the FBI in the case of the San Bernardino shooter though. Of course, Obama could hardly be called a dictator, and wasn't a petty, vindictive man like our current president. But it'd still be good to see Cook rediscover that "fuck you, make me" attitude from the old Apple.
From a spectators perspective I'd say they called the presidents bluff back then - but it's not bluffing right now... So if they try that attitude with Trump, there is going to be catastrophic fallout. Hence their compliance.
It was made clear to the public in that dinner with tech CEOs, how they bent the knee, spoke sweet flattering words, and gave gifts to the naked king. That was some medieval theater, and they all knew if they upset the king, he will crush their wealth like a tower made of Lego bricks.
Not sure what you mean by “responsibilities are a function of scale”. “With great power comes great responsibility”?
Like I said, it is a good article, about an important topic, but you already knew that. I mostly agree with you - not that my opinion is particularly important. It prompted me to comment for only the second time.
> Surely you don’t want your fellow citizens to fall for Russian, Chinese, Another State Actor propaganda?
Centralized Appstore monopolies are best friends of the authoritarian governments. Both Google and Apple readily removed any app the local government points them to, saying that they are committed to working in accordance with the legislation of countries where they provide their services.
"....but added that it complies with the local laws of each particular country." [0]
Maybe it's not a great idea to allow a company to decide what software users can run, and I am inclined to believe that Murphy's Law will apply. Ultimately, software is freedom of speech.
I get that point as a person who frequents HN, but for many regular people that’s probably a net positive. People would install random apps or browser extensions just to gain an advantage in some Facebook click came.
Having some kind of hidden “I know what I’m doing” mode would make sense, but would probably defeated the same way as “I’ll teach you how to open browser console” to paste some command exploits.
I think the change has been the general user doing many aspects of their real-life interactions (money, government, housing, travel, work, etc) easily and at speed via computing device compared to slower offline or face-to-face, and there's huge consequences if that gets screwed up if it can't be isolated from interference.
What I find interesting is that there's been little interesting making something like QubesOS for as many consumer devices (portables as well as desktop) as possible with an interface as painless as possible so people actually use it, and then the blast radius from any problem is smaller. There's also the hosted services side of computing where isolation on the same host is an expected feature and vulnerabilities like meltdown/spectre are such a big deal over the past 8 years, but it only gets seen as a curiosity on consumer devices.
> What I find interesting is that there's been little interesting making something like QubesOS for as many consumer devices
I know it's on a much, much smaller scale, but I'd say the move to sandboxing apps / browser tabs / profiles is aiming for precisely that and in a way that's invisible to most users, which is probably for the better.
Just as a thought experiment: Governments could mandate banks to prevent their customers from spending beyond what'll go to rent/mortgage. It'd certainly prevent overdue or missed payments. Would that be a net positive, or would that prevent or slow people from learning fiscal responsibility and the benefits that go along with that?
Overdraft limits restrict how much into the negative your bank account can go. Credit ratings are designed to help paint a story about risk, for lenders to consider when deciding how much money you can be loaned, and at what interest rate.
Both of those things existed in the early 2000s, but if the risk of a loan can (appear to) be shifted onto someone else, banks can and will issue bigger and riskier loans to people, and will reward the individual people selling the loans personally.
I don't think it's a compelling example, because fiscal responsibility requires very little education. Detecting malware by comparison requires literal experts. I think a better comparison might be requiring regulation around investment vehicles to eg root out ponzi schemes. Whatever our success there is definite buy in for that.
This is a false dichotomy. There are plenty of options in between "one company has total dictatorial control over an app store" and "it's a free for all of downloading software willy nilly off the internet".
The DMA in EU has alternate app stores being created, for example. That's some kind of point in between these two. But it still feels like if that's your only option, you'll get ICEBlock blocked in those markets too in many cases.
I know several non-technical people who use F-Droid to get reliable, free software. This is the only option to get updates after the phone is no longer supported. Ideally, it should be possible to install a different, supported OS for that.
iPhones become e-waste at that point, due to the discussed restrictions.
If you are not smart enough and need a big tech company to lead your life you can do it by yourself without thinking it's okay to subject the whole world to this duopoly.
You can very easily turn that argument around and say: if you are smart enough, use an operating system that doesn't babysit you and switch to Linux which is a very valid option.
It seems we expect the government to step in and fix this. But it’s not a neutral party. Even before Trump collusion between moneyed interests and politicians was high. Those who hold the money hold the power. And those with the money have decided that even free speech has worn out its welcome. To the point of using its military to invade its own cities.
I just don’t see us righting ourselves through the electoral process. If we are ever going to fix our government it will need to happen through mass strikes. That’s the most credible alternative. In the meantime our state of affairs will likely continue to decay. Climate change, authoritarianism, debt and austerity. These are only going to get worse. Eventually we will be forced to get our collective act together.
(It was later partly rejected by other courts in the DMCA anticircumvention context.)
This argument doesn't imply that companies have to help you publish your software, because they might be entitled to some kind of editorial control over which speech they do or don't distribute. But it does at least imply that the stakes of such control are very high and that free speech norms may be implicated by them!
One of which only existed because Android was open source in the first place (but the app store was not). Something far more generous than most companies.
says that there are over 1700 apps removed per year due to "government takedown demands". Since this is separate from about 2 million (!) apps they rejected from the app store and about 80,000 apps they removed from the app store on their own initiative, it stands to reason that they would have disagreed with quite a lot of those requests, but they still obeyed them.
One could think about this in at least two ways:
(1) If the 2,000,000 apps they rejected or the 80,000 apps they removed on their own initiative were very dangerous or very harmful in some way, one might believe that Apple's huge and arbitrary power over iPhones is ultimately beneficial because it's mostly used to protect people, and only slightly used to uphold state power over citizens.
(2) If you compare this to the baseline of "OS developers shouldn't decide what software you can run", then it's already, well, thousands of programs, probably often quite popular ones, that people are being intentionally prevented from using because their governments disapprove. And probably quite routinely for reasons that large parts of the population would disagree with. It is already a frequent event; in some countries (it's a long tail so the absolute majority of the removals in 2024 were attributable to the PRC!) it's plausible that most iPhone users directly experience the results of app censorship.
(You could add to this that users would also be divided about some of Apple's decisions on its own initiative, primarily apps that the company banned for sexual or violent content, usually fictional. Some users may agree with Apple using its power this way and other users may disagree. A recent example is that they've banned the SpicyChat AI erotic chat app, and probably many other "AI boyfriend/girlfriend" apps. In the past, they've banned apps created by various porn sites.)
I think this issue is confusing. I've always believed that device owners should have complete control of their computing devices and not be subject to other people's power when using them. You can see people in this thread pointing out that sometimes this power is being used to protect users (including from having their devices hijacked by malicious third parties, which would also tend to significantly undermine their control of their devices... although one can then argue about what responsibility different parties had to actively prevent that outcome). The argument that technological paternalism contributes to maximizing users' practical control is an argument that must be engaged with. And also, sometimes it's simply not being used to protect users at all.
By the way, if you get into the object level issue then you can get even more confused:
(1) I think the U.S. government probably wanted to ban this particular app merely because it was successful at helping people avoid deportation. But it might turn out that, with this app or with some future app that looks superficially similar, it actually is being used to coordinate violent attacks, even if the developer didn't intend that outcome. At some point, governments will have a case that there is some kind of meaningful physical-world harm associated with the observed usage of some piece of software. (More on that in other points below.)
(2) If Apple literally prevented itself from having the power to approve or reject software for iOS (e.g. by allowing "sideloading", which was the norm for almost all historical computing environments), then you literally could have apps that explicitly describe themselves as meant to coordinate violence (against law enforcement, against minority groups, against specific people, or whatever). This is not a strawman. It's really easy to write such an app. There is no reason to think that people who know how to write apps are all refraining from writing violence-coordination apps. In other contexts, people might be able to agree not to blame toolmakers for downstream uses of their tools, like not blaming radio manufacturers for having their radios be able to receive the broadcast incitements to genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s. So maybe we would eventually similarly be able to agree not to blame Apple for making an OS that could run the "Let's Kill ______" third-party app. But we should understand that on some occasions such an app would probably exist. You know, there are video games whose content is actually pretty gross by almost any given standard. A lot of people have been able to agree that those games can exist, or at least that people other than the developers bear no responsibility for their availability.
(3) You could say that Apple should just make good ethical object-level case-by-case decisions about how to use its power, which is probably what they try to do most of the time, but they sometimes fail, or sometimes there isn't a consensus within the company or within a society about what the right call should be. In this case, we're going to be back here again and again talking about the merits of different app bans, when they manage to get wide enough attention. Remember, again, there were already 1700 app bans per year last year, and presumably lots of governments are only just waking up to the possibility of demanding them!
(4) Governments are already using offline harms to justify incredibly intrusive control of computing and communications. Some of those offline harms are real, not speculative. For example, there really were lynchings coordinated via WhatsApp groups and via WhatsApp memes in several developing countries. The remedies and "solutions" that many governments have suggested in response to such things are incredibly scary.
Excellent points. I don’t think anyone has a problem with app removal per se, but with the fact that Apple is bending the knee to a corrupt government to buy favours. When that happens, people lose trust that apps were removed for safeguarding and start wondering “what are they hiding from me”.
It's not "their devices". I recently bought a house and the previous owner kept trying to influence what I did with it, and everyone -- even those in government who ultimately had to help enforce my ownership rights -- agreed with me that that was ridiculous and intolerable. When Apple, Samsung, or whoever else sells something it isn't their's anymore! They have no right to continued involvement in it! That's how selling works!
They have a responsibility to engineer it properly and to fix consequences of poor engineering, since they are selling something as capable of various features and presumably safe.
Sounds like a right to repair argument. It will lose. Try putting linux on a windows-10 laptop. That BIOS is nailed down hard. It can be done but its a right PITA
Can you elaborate? I bought a ThinkPad early this year. It probably had Windows 11 (didn't check, wiped it immediately) and it works fine?
I don't doubt that there are laptops where it is hard, but I would love to hear some examples and in what way the UEFI firmware is nailed down such that you cannot install Linux?
Agreed, Alex... but the Chrome team is not different. Nor is Edge. All three companies are willing to use all of their products for authoritarian control. The web platform feels no less captured than the app market.
It is very different. I develop and app that has iOS, Android and web version and iOS is by far the most problematic platform in this regard. Takes a few minutes to deploy a fresh web app. It takes a few weeks of being bullied by Apple to ship iOS app, and it's very miserable experience.
98% agreed. Sometimes even smart and savvy persons end up doing it, I did once on SourceForge via their confusing buttons. But the virus was a Windows variant and would not run on my Mac. SourceForge has since cleaned up their act so no shade on them today.
The C(I)SO, chief information security officer of Maersk, the worlds largest logistics company that lost billions to an infected accounting program that wrecked their global infrastructure at once.
> ...and Apple is all but refusing, playing games to prevent powerful and safe iOS browsers and the powerful web applications they facilitate. Web applications that can challenge the App Store.
I have been patronized about this for years, but I still maintain that Jobs' opposition to Flash was its conflict with the App Store, and not that it was a security problem as he and his flying monkeys insisted.
I used "Apple land" deliberately, a single unelected gatekeeper stealing 30% straight off the top line feels more authoritarian than China's 25% on profit
If Apple were a country, it wouldn't just be authoritarian, it'd be a dictatorship with a 30% flat tax on revenue, no appeals, and the power to erase your business overnight
Hence the parallel, but yeah fair point, I wrote the comment too fast
I don't think Google has handled Android particularly well, but you have to be on some 1990s Netscape kool-aid to think that the web is or should be "the primary way for users to experience computing". Computing is just one kind of online service, and despite decades of effort to attempt to force-fit all applications into a browser, sometimes just a damn program that runs natively on the CPU is a much better fit for the task. Computing through the use of such programs is not a bad thing. Providing a central distribution point for such programs is not a bad thing—Linux distros do it all the time. Some of the fuckery-duckery Google has tried to pull with Android should be criticized, but it's not as cut and dry as "the web is open, everything else is proprietary vendor lock".
Most applications are forms and slow moving visualizations. Consider banking - banking is very complicated. It's just forms and slow moving visualizations. It can, and should, be on the web.
Banking is one kind of app where additional security constraints make a mobile app experience more convenient than a web app. Yes, you can do security stuff in a web app, no it isn't as seemless or nice as a mobile app. Everything else, sure, but anything that requires higher stakes authentication (beyond just buying things) I'm ok with it being a mobile app.
> despite decades of effort to attempt to force-fit all applications into a browser, sometimes just a damn program that runs natively on the CPU is a much better fit for the task
WebAssembly will run natively if ECMAScript is holding you back.
While it's still on a VM, so is Java, and that's the only mainstream game in town for "native" Android apps.
It'd be exciting to see what the web could be if Apple didn't spend decades dragging their heels implementing standards for progressive web apps (PWAs) because they know it'll cut into their app store gravy train.
I miss the native apps + Internet protocols of the 1990's, even though Web pays most of the bills, it should have stayed as an hypermedia documents platform.
I just want to remind people that the alternative to authority is anarchy. No, not the utopian kind, Star Trek style. Think: Mad Max.
I’m trying to communicate with relatives of my partner while on holiday. We have iPhones, they all have Androids. We asked them to install “ChatGPT” because its voice mode is shockingly good at near-real-time translation.
When I type “ChatGPT” into the Apple App Store, the top hit is… drumroll… the very same, by OpenAI.
My uncle in law was struggling a bit on his phone and showed me what came up: a wall of fakes. Scam app after scam app, all with similar icons and similar names “GPT Talk”, “Chatty GTP”, and garbage like that.
Why would anyone want this?
Why would I prefer this?
Why would you… unless you’re an “app developer” working for… not the company that ought to be getting the first and only search result.
The problem here — specifically here on Hacker News — is that a lot of you work for those companies. Startups faking till they make it, engaging in guerrilla marketing, less then perfectly legal practices… hoping to be the next Uber or AirBnB by emulating them.
Politely, and with all due respect: Bugger off.
Your arguments come from unclean hands.
Most of the world likes the authority of the App Store.
If you don’t, if you’re vocal about “rules are bad!” it says volumes about you, not the rules and the people that enforce them.
- Mad Max is not a great example of anarchy, as the last couple of movies featured a government led by an autocrat (haven't seen the other ones)
- The Play Store being bad does not mean the App Store is not also bad
- How do you know most of the world likes the authority of the App Store? Is it not more likely that most of the world are ignorant of its rules, and assumes a free and open marketplace?
A gaggle of feuding warlords a government does not make.
> The Play Store being bad
The Play Store is actually merely “slightly worse” than the App Store. The problem was that my uncle in law was using some other “alternative app store” because Android allows this and then … inevitably … some lazy or corrupt app vendors encourage their use or outright require it. Or a phone manufacturer will try to make an extra 50c per device by inserting themselves (or a “valued partner”) between users and legitimate providers.
You’ll see arguments for this, right here, espoused vehemently by people that must really,
desperately get away from oversight.
I partially agree that the authority has its use and that restricting the freedom to publish apps in some way is reasonable to prevent problems.
The problem with Apple (and to a lesser extent Google) is that it goes way further than that. It dictates what technologies you can use, it dictates a ton of specific rules for how your app should behave, it gatekeeps your bug fixes, it takes an absolutely obnoxious share of your revenue while providing just bare minimum service, with decades old bugs you have to workaround. Many of those things also makes the service worse for their users - it really feels like as a developer for their platform, you're in a hostile relationship with them, and pay for it.
Seems like the app stores could just seperate into App Store Recommended and Community apps. Then you keep both but the app store vetted ones are top always.
The place where your uncle in law was finding scam apps was not some obscure website where he was downloading scam APKs. It was a centralized store from Google, just a poorly managed one.
I, for that matter, use Android. Not out of love for Google (much to the opposite, I despise them and everything they do), but out of a lack of alternative. I do value the freedom to at least use an alternative store (F-Droid), and a system that is not completely hostile to a user that has at least a semblance of an idea of what he is doing.
> the alternative to authority is anarchy.
No. Anarchy always devolves into authoritarianism. Those with the bigger stick will rule over the others through strength.
The only alternative to authority is the very imperfect freedom that comes with democracy. It sort of sucks, it is full of compromises, and is something that ensures that no one will be perfectly happy. But it's so much better than your desire to have a boot on your neck.
I always wonder at the logic that leads the these kinds of statements. What alternate universe do people come from… without Apple?
I regularly see a similar attitude, most often here, that Microsoft and Azure don’t even exist.
Apple and Microsoft are imperfect, sure. But they do exist, and they’re perfectly viable options for … checks notes … billions upon billions of people.
> I always wonder at the logic that leads the these kinds of statements. What alternate universe do people come from… without Apple?
Apple is not an alternative for my needs.
> Apple and Microsoft are imperfect, sure. But they do exist, and they’re perfectly viable options for … checks notes … billions upon billions of people.
There is no Microsoft smartphone OS (and back when one existed, it was a piece of turd).
I know that there is are Linux smartphones. Unfortunately many apps I need do not support that.
Currently, my options are limited to Lineage OS. Graphene or e/OS may be a possibility once I switch cell phones again.
As much as I despise Google, that sentiment pales in comparison to my hatred and disgust for anything Apple. Having to use their awful laptops for work is enough annoyance.
To me, Apple has BEEN far behind. It's been far behind since the removal of the headphone jack. It's been far behind in the lack of USB integration.
It's been way, way far behind the standard of technology, yet people are so pseudo-intellectual about it, to cope for the fact that they spent a ridiculous amount of cash on what is basically mainstream Linux.
You can't do anything really interesting with it. You can barely game. It's simply for the mind-numbing office work, and nothing else. You're stuck in this room - this office work Eco system - and you don't know how to leave, and it's all Apple's fault you fell for the bait. You just want to open a window (pun intended) and let fresh air in, but there are no windows, and it's all Apple's fault.
Well written, but its starting point seems to be “Apple used to be force for good”. — It is a corporation. It wants your money. This is not new. This is not any different from Lilly (Mounjaro), or Google, or any other, er… corporation.
The idea that a CEO will stand up to his democratically elected dictator is absurd. Why should he, when the dictator is merely implementing the policies he said he would during the campaign and still got elected? Why should he make himself and his company and his shareholders martyrs?
Because many people hold Apple to higher standards, that is why.
> The idea that a CEO will stand up to his democratically elected dictator is absurd. Why should he, when the dictator is merely implementing the policies he said he would during the campaign and still got elected? Why should he make himself and his company and his shareholders martyrs?
This is exactly what Apple did when they stood their ground against the FBI in the case of the San Bernardino shooter though. Of course, Obama could hardly be called a dictator, and wasn't a petty, vindictive man like our current president. But it'd still be good to see Cook rediscover that "fuck you, make me" attitude from the old Apple.
From a spectators perspective I'd say they called the presidents bluff back then - but it's not bluffing right now... So if they try that attitude with Trump, there is going to be catastrophic fallout. Hence their compliance.
It was made clear to the public in that dinner with tech CEOs, how they bent the knee, spoke sweet flattering words, and gave gifts to the naked king. That was some medieval theater, and they all knew if they upset the king, he will crush their wealth like a tower made of Lego bricks.
That, for me, was a turning point in the western society as well knew it.
Author here. You seem to have missed the bleedingly obvious point that responsibilities are a function of scale.
Nothing you allege was missed, and indeed it was considered at length in the longer series on these topics:
https://infrequently.org/series/browser-choice-must-matter/
Not sure what you mean by “responsibilities are a function of scale”. “With great power comes great responsibility”?
Like I said, it is a good article, about an important topic, but you already knew that. I mostly agree with you - not that my opinion is particularly important. It prompted me to comment for only the second time.
I’ll take a lot at the rest of the series later.
> Because many people hold Apple to higher standards, that is why.
Not really; I'd have the same expectation of any other individual or company of the given size.
Right, but you wouldn't realistically expect any opposition from most companies. Apple sometimes opposed.
Heh, that’s all very cool and lots of smart words, but have you thought of children? Have you thought of elderly falling and unable to get up[1]?
Surely you don’t want your fellow citizens to fall for Russian, Chinese, Another State Actor propaganda?
State surveillance on unprecedented level? Don’t be paranoid! Surely a state actor would never abuse the power to snoop for your private photos[2]!
Electronic waste? Duopoly? Censorship? Ownership? Those are made up words, comrade!
[1] - https://youtu.be/cwCtM6D4GOc
[2] - https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/karen-r...
> Surely you don’t want your fellow citizens to fall for Russian, Chinese, Another State Actor propaganda?
Centralized Appstore monopolies are best friends of the authoritarian governments. Both Google and Apple readily removed any app the local government points them to, saying that they are committed to working in accordance with the legislation of countries where they provide their services.
"....but added that it complies with the local laws of each particular country." [0]
[0]: https://www.techspot.com/news/67701-russia-tells-apple-googl...
Not an Apple user, but they support their devices for a long time, so there is that.
So does raspberry pi. They are supported even longer.
Maybe it's not a great idea to allow a company to decide what software users can run, and I am inclined to believe that Murphy's Law will apply. Ultimately, software is freedom of speech.
I get that point as a person who frequents HN, but for many regular people that’s probably a net positive. People would install random apps or browser extensions just to gain an advantage in some Facebook click came.
Having some kind of hidden “I know what I’m doing” mode would make sense, but would probably defeated the same way as “I’ll teach you how to open browser console” to paste some command exploits.
I think the change has been the general user doing many aspects of their real-life interactions (money, government, housing, travel, work, etc) easily and at speed via computing device compared to slower offline or face-to-face, and there's huge consequences if that gets screwed up if it can't be isolated from interference.
What I find interesting is that there's been little interesting making something like QubesOS for as many consumer devices (portables as well as desktop) as possible with an interface as painless as possible so people actually use it, and then the blast radius from any problem is smaller. There's also the hosted services side of computing where isolation on the same host is an expected feature and vulnerabilities like meltdown/spectre are such a big deal over the past 8 years, but it only gets seen as a curiosity on consumer devices.
> What I find interesting is that there's been little interesting making something like QubesOS for as many consumer devices
I know it's on a much, much smaller scale, but I'd say the move to sandboxing apps / browser tabs / profiles is aiming for precisely that and in a way that's invisible to most users, which is probably for the better.
Just as a thought experiment: Governments could mandate banks to prevent their customers from spending beyond what'll go to rent/mortgage. It'd certainly prevent overdue or missed payments. Would that be a net positive, or would that prevent or slow people from learning fiscal responsibility and the benefits that go along with that?
Isn’t that exactly what over draft limits and credit ratings are already doing?
Overdraft limits restrict how much into the negative your bank account can go. Credit ratings are designed to help paint a story about risk, for lenders to consider when deciding how much money you can be loaned, and at what interest rate.
Both of those things existed in the early 2000s, but if the risk of a loan can (appear to) be shifted onto someone else, banks can and will issue bigger and riskier loans to people, and will reward the individual people selling the loans personally.
I don't think it's a compelling example, because fiscal responsibility requires very little education. Detecting malware by comparison requires literal experts. I think a better comparison might be requiring regulation around investment vehicles to eg root out ponzi schemes. Whatever our success there is definite buy in for that.
This is a false dichotomy. There are plenty of options in between "one company has total dictatorial control over an app store" and "it's a free for all of downloading software willy nilly off the internet".
The DMA in EU has alternate app stores being created, for example. That's some kind of point in between these two. But it still feels like if that's your only option, you'll get ICEBlock blocked in those markets too in many cases.
I know several non-technical people who use F-Droid to get reliable, free software. This is the only option to get updates after the phone is no longer supported. Ideally, it should be possible to install a different, supported OS for that.
iPhones become e-waste at that point, due to the discussed restrictions.
If you are not smart enough and need a big tech company to lead your life you can do it by yourself without thinking it's okay to subject the whole world to this duopoly.
You can very easily turn that argument around and say: if you are smart enough, use an operating system that doesn't babysit you and switch to Linux which is a very valid option.
I did switch to a GNU/Linux phone as a daily driver, but pressure from the duopoly still troubles me a lot.
No, it is not a valid option when you want to restrict companies from having such a power. The world does not spin around you or me.
It seems we expect the government to step in and fix this. But it’s not a neutral party. Even before Trump collusion between moneyed interests and politicians was high. Those who hold the money hold the power. And those with the money have decided that even free speech has worn out its welcome. To the point of using its military to invade its own cities.
I just don’t see us righting ourselves through the electoral process. If we are ever going to fix our government it will need to happen through mass strikes. That’s the most credible alternative. In the meantime our state of affairs will likely continue to decay. Climate change, authoritarianism, debt and austerity. These are only going to get worse. Eventually we will be forced to get our collective act together.
I never thought about this topic to have an opinion on this, but this is the best take for sure!
The "software is speech" idea was popularized partly by being used (successfully) as an argument in litigation about U.S. software export controls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_as_speech
(It was later partly rejected by other courts in the DMCA anticircumvention context.)
This argument doesn't imply that companies have to help you publish your software, because they might be entitled to some kind of editorial control over which speech they do or don't distribute. But it does at least imply that the stakes of such control are very high and that free speech norms may be implicated by them!
> Google is not creating moral distance between itself and Apple
I laughed out loud at this. Google lost two antitrust lawsuits this year alone.
One of which only existed because Android was open source in the first place (but the app store was not). Something far more generous than most companies.
It's not generous, it's a calculated business decision no different than a drug dealer giving out hits for free.
Note that Apple's app store transparency report (thanks to them for publishing this, they don't have to)
https://www.apple.com/legal/more-resources/docs/2024-App-Sto...
says that there are over 1700 apps removed per year due to "government takedown demands". Since this is separate from about 2 million (!) apps they rejected from the app store and about 80,000 apps they removed from the app store on their own initiative, it stands to reason that they would have disagreed with quite a lot of those requests, but they still obeyed them.
One could think about this in at least two ways:
(1) If the 2,000,000 apps they rejected or the 80,000 apps they removed on their own initiative were very dangerous or very harmful in some way, one might believe that Apple's huge and arbitrary power over iPhones is ultimately beneficial because it's mostly used to protect people, and only slightly used to uphold state power over citizens.
(2) If you compare this to the baseline of "OS developers shouldn't decide what software you can run", then it's already, well, thousands of programs, probably often quite popular ones, that people are being intentionally prevented from using because their governments disapprove. And probably quite routinely for reasons that large parts of the population would disagree with. It is already a frequent event; in some countries (it's a long tail so the absolute majority of the removals in 2024 were attributable to the PRC!) it's plausible that most iPhone users directly experience the results of app censorship.
(You could add to this that users would also be divided about some of Apple's decisions on its own initiative, primarily apps that the company banned for sexual or violent content, usually fictional. Some users may agree with Apple using its power this way and other users may disagree. A recent example is that they've banned the SpicyChat AI erotic chat app, and probably many other "AI boyfriend/girlfriend" apps. In the past, they've banned apps created by various porn sites.)
I think this issue is confusing. I've always believed that device owners should have complete control of their computing devices and not be subject to other people's power when using them. You can see people in this thread pointing out that sometimes this power is being used to protect users (including from having their devices hijacked by malicious third parties, which would also tend to significantly undermine their control of their devices... although one can then argue about what responsibility different parties had to actively prevent that outcome). The argument that technological paternalism contributes to maximizing users' practical control is an argument that must be engaged with. And also, sometimes it's simply not being used to protect users at all.
By the way, if you get into the object level issue then you can get even more confused:
(1) I think the U.S. government probably wanted to ban this particular app merely because it was successful at helping people avoid deportation. But it might turn out that, with this app or with some future app that looks superficially similar, it actually is being used to coordinate violent attacks, even if the developer didn't intend that outcome. At some point, governments will have a case that there is some kind of meaningful physical-world harm associated with the observed usage of some piece of software. (More on that in other points below.)
(2) If Apple literally prevented itself from having the power to approve or reject software for iOS (e.g. by allowing "sideloading", which was the norm for almost all historical computing environments), then you literally could have apps that explicitly describe themselves as meant to coordinate violence (against law enforcement, against minority groups, against specific people, or whatever). This is not a strawman. It's really easy to write such an app. There is no reason to think that people who know how to write apps are all refraining from writing violence-coordination apps. In other contexts, people might be able to agree not to blame toolmakers for downstream uses of their tools, like not blaming radio manufacturers for having their radios be able to receive the broadcast incitements to genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s. So maybe we would eventually similarly be able to agree not to blame Apple for making an OS that could run the "Let's Kill ______" third-party app. But we should understand that on some occasions such an app would probably exist. You know, there are video games whose content is actually pretty gross by almost any given standard. A lot of people have been able to agree that those games can exist, or at least that people other than the developers bear no responsibility for their availability.
(3) You could say that Apple should just make good ethical object-level case-by-case decisions about how to use its power, which is probably what they try to do most of the time, but they sometimes fail, or sometimes there isn't a consensus within the company or within a society about what the right call should be. In this case, we're going to be back here again and again talking about the merits of different app bans, when they manage to get wide enough attention. Remember, again, there were already 1700 app bans per year last year, and presumably lots of governments are only just waking up to the possibility of demanding them!
(4) Governments are already using offline harms to justify incredibly intrusive control of computing and communications. Some of those offline harms are real, not speculative. For example, there really were lynchings coordinated via WhatsApp groups and via WhatsApp memes in several developing countries. The remedies and "solutions" that many governments have suggested in response to such things are incredibly scary.
Excellent points. I don’t think anyone has a problem with app removal per se, but with the fact that Apple is bending the knee to a corrupt government to buy favours. When that happens, people lose trust that apps were removed for safeguarding and start wondering “what are they hiding from me”.
I don't believe it.
The problem with authoritarianism is that it does not scale. The ecosystem covers now whole lives of people across the globe - humongous difference.
Completely correct.
The only way to ensure this doesn't happen is to criminalise device manufacturers being in charge of what software runs on their devices.
It's not "their devices". I recently bought a house and the previous owner kept trying to influence what I did with it, and everyone -- even those in government who ultimately had to help enforce my ownership rights -- agreed with me that that was ridiculous and intolerable. When Apple, Samsung, or whoever else sells something it isn't their's anymore! They have no right to continued involvement in it! That's how selling works!
Do they have any continued responsibility for it to not explode or break in other ways?
They have a responsibility to engineer it properly and to fix consequences of poor engineering, since they are selling something as capable of various features and presumably safe.
What about warranty?
I’d love to be able to clean up the shitty touch interface on my oven.
Or just criminalize device manufacturers holding more than a certain market share.
Sounds like a right to repair argument. It will lose. Try putting linux on a windows-10 laptop. That BIOS is nailed down hard. It can be done but its a right PITA
Can you elaborate? I bought a ThinkPad early this year. It probably had Windows 11 (didn't check, wiped it immediately) and it works fine?
I don't doubt that there are laptops where it is hard, but I would love to hear some examples and in what way the UEFI firmware is nailed down such that you cannot install Linux?
It's easy to put Linux on a Windows 10 laptop. You must be holding it wrong.
I remember when Mozilla censored Dissenter.
Agreed, Alex... but the Chrome team is not different. Nor is Edge. All three companies are willing to use all of their products for authoritarian control. The web platform feels no less captured than the app market.
It is very different. I develop and app that has iOS, Android and web version and iOS is by far the most problematic platform in this regard. Takes a few minutes to deploy a fresh web app. It takes a few weeks of being bullied by Apple to ship iOS app, and it's very miserable experience.
All companies are authoritarian, and competition ensures they can't get very far. Unfortunately we've been dismantling competition for decades
the internet was fine before appstores. sure, occasionally an idiot downloaded virus.exe, but that was never the end of the world.
98% agreed. Sometimes even smart and savvy persons end up doing it, I did once on SourceForge via their confusing buttons. But the virus was a Windows variant and would not run on my Mac. SourceForge has since cleaned up their act so no shade on them today.
The CSO of Maersk might have a different opinion on this.
who?
The C(I)SO, chief information security officer of Maersk, the worlds largest logistics company that lost billions to an infected accounting program that wrecked their global infrastructure at once.
> ...and Apple is all but refusing, playing games to prevent powerful and safe iOS browsers and the powerful web applications they facilitate. Web applications that can challenge the App Store.
I have been patronized about this for years, but I still maintain that Jobs' opposition to Flash was its conflict with the App Store, and not that it was a security problem as he and his flying monkeys insisted.
Corporate tax in China is 25%
Corporate tax in Apple land is 30%
Funny?
Tax is only on profit, Apple "tax" in 30% (15% in some cases) of revenue.
Comparing apples (pun intended) to... a country? Profit vs revenue.
I used "Apple land" deliberately, a single unelected gatekeeper stealing 30% straight off the top line feels more authoritarian than China's 25% on profit
If Apple were a country, it wouldn't just be authoritarian, it'd be a dictatorship with a 30% flat tax on revenue, no appeals, and the power to erase your business overnight
Hence the parallel, but yeah fair point, I wrote the comment too fast
I don't think Google has handled Android particularly well, but you have to be on some 1990s Netscape kool-aid to think that the web is or should be "the primary way for users to experience computing". Computing is just one kind of online service, and despite decades of effort to attempt to force-fit all applications into a browser, sometimes just a damn program that runs natively on the CPU is a much better fit for the task. Computing through the use of such programs is not a bad thing. Providing a central distribution point for such programs is not a bad thing—Linux distros do it all the time. Some of the fuckery-duckery Google has tried to pull with Android should be criticized, but it's not as cut and dry as "the web is open, everything else is proprietary vendor lock".
> is a much better fit for the task
Such as?
> Providing a central distribution point for such programs is not a bad thing—Linux distros do it all the time.
It is a bad thing if it is
A) the only source of distribution
B) controlled only by the software vendor providing the OS
Most applications are forms and slow moving visualizations. Consider banking - banking is very complicated. It's just forms and slow moving visualizations. It can, and should, be on the web.
Also, most native apps are just web views anyway.
Banking is one kind of app where additional security constraints make a mobile app experience more convenient than a web app. Yes, you can do security stuff in a web app, no it isn't as seemless or nice as a mobile app. Everything else, sure, but anything that requires higher stakes authentication (beyond just buying things) I'm ok with it being a mobile app.
> despite decades of effort to attempt to force-fit all applications into a browser, sometimes just a damn program that runs natively on the CPU is a much better fit for the task
WebAssembly will run natively if ECMAScript is holding you back.
While it's still on a VM, so is Java, and that's the only mainstream game in town for "native" Android apps.
It'd be exciting to see what the web could be if Apple didn't spend decades dragging their heels implementing standards for progressive web apps (PWAs) because they know it'll cut into their app store gravy train.
I miss the native apps + Internet protocols of the 1990's, even though Web pays most of the bills, it should have stayed as an hypermedia documents platform.
I just want to remind people that the alternative to authority is anarchy. No, not the utopian kind, Star Trek style. Think: Mad Max.
I’m trying to communicate with relatives of my partner while on holiday. We have iPhones, they all have Androids. We asked them to install “ChatGPT” because its voice mode is shockingly good at near-real-time translation.
When I type “ChatGPT” into the Apple App Store, the top hit is… drumroll… the very same, by OpenAI.
My uncle in law was struggling a bit on his phone and showed me what came up: a wall of fakes. Scam app after scam app, all with similar icons and similar names “GPT Talk”, “Chatty GTP”, and garbage like that.
Why would anyone want this?
Why would I prefer this?
Why would you… unless you’re an “app developer” working for… not the company that ought to be getting the first and only search result.
The problem here — specifically here on Hacker News — is that a lot of you work for those companies. Startups faking till they make it, engaging in guerrilla marketing, less then perfectly legal practices… hoping to be the next Uber or AirBnB by emulating them.
Politely, and with all due respect: Bugger off.
Your arguments come from unclean hands.
Most of the world likes the authority of the App Store.
If you don’t, if you’re vocal about “rules are bad!” it says volumes about you, not the rules and the people that enforce them.
- Mad Max is not a great example of anarchy, as the last couple of movies featured a government led by an autocrat (haven't seen the other ones)
- The Play Store being bad does not mean the App Store is not also bad
- How do you know most of the world likes the authority of the App Store? Is it not more likely that most of the world are ignorant of its rules, and assumes a free and open marketplace?
A gaggle of feuding warlords a government does not make.
> The Play Store being bad
The Play Store is actually merely “slightly worse” than the App Store. The problem was that my uncle in law was using some other “alternative app store” because Android allows this and then … inevitably … some lazy or corrupt app vendors encourage their use or outright require it. Or a phone manufacturer will try to make an extra 50c per device by inserting themselves (or a “valued partner”) between users and legitimate providers.
You’ll see arguments for this, right here, espoused vehemently by people that must really, desperately get away from oversight.
> free and open marketplace
That’s not a good thing.
I partially agree that the authority has its use and that restricting the freedom to publish apps in some way is reasonable to prevent problems.
The problem with Apple (and to a lesser extent Google) is that it goes way further than that. It dictates what technologies you can use, it dictates a ton of specific rules for how your app should behave, it gatekeeps your bug fixes, it takes an absolutely obnoxious share of your revenue while providing just bare minimum service, with decades old bugs you have to workaround. Many of those things also makes the service worse for their users - it really feels like as a developer for their platform, you're in a hostile relationship with them, and pay for it.
Seems like the app stores could just seperate into App Store Recommended and Community apps. Then you keep both but the app store vetted ones are top always.
This is a shockingly bad argument.
The place where your uncle in law was finding scam apps was not some obscure website where he was downloading scam APKs. It was a centralized store from Google, just a poorly managed one.
I, for that matter, use Android. Not out of love for Google (much to the opposite, I despise them and everything they do), but out of a lack of alternative. I do value the freedom to at least use an alternative store (F-Droid), and a system that is not completely hostile to a user that has at least a semblance of an idea of what he is doing.
> the alternative to authority is anarchy.
No. Anarchy always devolves into authoritarianism. Those with the bigger stick will rule over the others through strength.
The only alternative to authority is the very imperfect freedom that comes with democracy. It sort of sucks, it is full of compromises, and is something that ensures that no one will be perfectly happy. But it's so much better than your desire to have a boot on your neck.
> out of a lack of alternative.
I always wonder at the logic that leads the these kinds of statements. What alternate universe do people come from… without Apple?
I regularly see a similar attitude, most often here, that Microsoft and Azure don’t even exist.
Apple and Microsoft are imperfect, sure. But they do exist, and they’re perfectly viable options for … checks notes … billions upon billions of people.
> I always wonder at the logic that leads the these kinds of statements. What alternate universe do people come from… without Apple?
Apple is not an alternative for my needs.
> Apple and Microsoft are imperfect, sure. But they do exist, and they’re perfectly viable options for … checks notes … billions upon billions of people.
There is no Microsoft smartphone OS (and back when one existed, it was a piece of turd).
I know that there is are Linux smartphones. Unfortunately many apps I need do not support that.
Currently, my options are limited to Lineage OS. Graphene or e/OS may be a possibility once I switch cell phones again.
As much as I despise Google, that sentiment pales in comparison to my hatred and disgust for anything Apple. Having to use their awful laptops for work is enough annoyance.
You'll change your mind when Apple will remove the app that you actually need. For now, you remind me of a certain poem:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
To me, Apple has BEEN far behind. It's been far behind since the removal of the headphone jack. It's been far behind in the lack of USB integration. It's been way, way far behind the standard of technology, yet people are so pseudo-intellectual about it, to cope for the fact that they spent a ridiculous amount of cash on what is basically mainstream Linux. You can't do anything really interesting with it. You can barely game. It's simply for the mind-numbing office work, and nothing else. You're stuck in this room - this office work Eco system - and you don't know how to leave, and it's all Apple's fault you fell for the bait. You just want to open a window (pun intended) and let fresh air in, but there are no windows, and it's all Apple's fault.