8 ms·

In the midst of the world (rightly) turning on big tech's abuses, efforts like these make me optimistic about our industry on a whole and help me recover some o

In the midst of the world (rightly) turning on big tech's abuses, efforts like these make me optimistic about our industry on a whole and help me recover some of the enthusiasm that led me into tech in the first place. I love how this effort relies on & amplifies what were before relatively obscure specialties The mapping wars elevate cartographers, mapping specialists, GIS data nerds, mobile computing / compression phds, GPS parsing engineers, ex-dod intertial navigation specialists, etc. And rallied them around a massive, insanely big problem of mapping and organizing the entire physical world in real time and relying on consumer grade hardware to drive incredible fidelity. It's humbling and really cool to see people that have dedicated their lives to these disciplines that were somewhat relegated to specialized use cases enter the "rockstar" stadium to deliver something that legitimately changes the way that billions of humans interact with the world

theboat 7y ago
As much as I agree with your general sentiment, Apple Maps, like many of Apple's mobile apps, gets a boost from Apple's anti-competitive practices. It's utterly ridiculous that we can remove default apps from iOS, including Maps and Safari, but we can't set new default apps to replace them. If we ever get serious about increasing competition in the tech sector, an easy place to start is letting users set default browsers, maps, and email clients on their devices.
- dkonofalski 7y ago
  Isn't that kind of self-defeating, though? Like the ACA without the individual mandate? The only way this works is if people use the apps on the iPhone. There's nothing stopping you from using Google Maps on an iPhone but, in order for the tech to improve while remaining strong with privacy, is for Apple to utilize their existing technology. Also, I disagree that it's anti-competitive. Users are always allowed and able to switch to another device/ecosystem.
  - judge2020 7y ago
    It's extremely similar to the microsoft IE issue, users should be able to set a default web browser.
    - criddell 7y ago
      The difference is that Microsoft dominated the market. Apple has a relatively small slice of the smartphone pie. If Google restricted the user in the same way, that would arguably be closer to the Microsoft situation because their marketshare is 2x Apple's.
      - airstrike 7y ago
        I think that depends on how you define "market". Globally, sure, but in the US that's not the case https://www.statista.com/statistics/620805/smartphone-sales-market-share-in-the-us-by-vendor/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/620805/smartphone-sales-...
        criddell 7y ago
        The market is all the places the devices are sold. So global makes sense. If you define the market as San Francisco then Apple might have a monopoly. But that feels a little like market gerrymandering. Even if you were going to restrict to just the US, Apple still sells fewer than 50% of the phones.
        airstrike 7y ago
        Fewer than 50% is different from "Google sells twice as many" > The market is all the places the devices are sold. Certainly US regulators / courts don't purport to have jurisdiction over foreign markets, agreed? The aforementioned EU case against Microsoft was about the EU market alone.
      - ASalazarMX 7y ago
        How about we bake in competitive openness regadless of company size? Why is it right to build corrals as long as yours is not the biggest?
- kylemh 7y ago
  and then, even if we could set the default browser, having a webkit-Chrome is stupid also...
  - t223 7y ago
    and webkit firefox
- skizm 7y ago
  One specific thing that bothers me is that Microsoft got in trouble for bundling IE with Windows, but apple doesn't get in trouble when they block all browser apps that don't use Safari under the hood. How is this different? I want Google and Mozilla (and anyone else) to be able to make iOS browser apps from scratch if they want. It wouldn't be an issue if you could sideload apps easily, but the app store is really the only legit way to get apps on your non-jailbroken iPhone.
  - taywrobel 7y ago
    Apple doesn’t have sufficient market share to be considered a monopoly. That’s generally how they’ve skirted around the issue, and by positioning themselves as a premium brand, they can raise prices on their hardware to the point that market share remains sufficiently small to not be subject to monopoly laws. At the time of the MS/IE lawsuit (2001), Microsoft Windows had well over 95% of desktop operating system market share.
    - skizm 7y ago
      Fair point.
  - milesskorpen 7y ago
    Apple doesn't have the market share MSFT did back then.
  - jonfw 7y ago
    The big differentiator here is that Microsoft had a dominant monopoly on PCs. Apple is a huge huge player in the smartphone space, but they're still in no danger of having a majority of the market.
  - krrrh 7y ago
    Because the DOJ suit against MS was misguided and unnecessary. It had little effect on eroding Microsoft's supposed stranglehold on the browser market. When browser monoculture began to really hurt consumers and innovation the market found solutions through improved collaboration (W3C getting its act together, and developers embracing web standards), business model innovation (mozilla foundation embracing open source vs. Netscape charging $40 for a commercial license), and better technology and industry/community collaboration (khtml and webkit). Even some eventual deadends like Flash played a role at the time in routing around the untenable, but very temporary, situation of IE v.4-6 dominance. Edit: I want to add that during the suit MS reps had a glib but prescient defense: "we think web browsers should be free". They meant as in beer, but they were right in the larger sense, and few would disagree with them today. Netscape was arguing that their by-then totally crappy commercial browser deserved protection from the state, when their demise had a lot more to do with insane bloat and their embrace of groupware.
- krrrh 7y ago
  What's worse for consumers in the end though? One profession missing in the parent comment are the researchers innovating on differential privacy. Apple has taken great pains to figure out ways to improve their maps without storing massive amounts of private user data, to the extent that they split routes in half, fuzz addresses, and analyze the start and end of trips independently. There's an argument that Google had such a huge head start on maps, that without Apple having the capacity to set defaults (on a platform that is not even a plurality of users), Apple Maps wouldn't have gotten enough users to justify improvements to where it is now. Apple also didn't get serious about having its own maps until Google attempted to exercise their at-the-time near-monopoly power to jack up licensing costs. Now the mere existence of Apple maps puts pressure on Google to improve the privacy features of its own map products as we've seen recently. Apple funds map development through device sales, and Google does it through targeted advertising, map services for third parties, and profiling users. Do we value competition only of mapping products, or should we also value a diversity of business models for mapping products? It's no small decision to bring in the Kommissar.
  - selectodude 7y ago
    Google didn’t try and raise the price, they demanded user data in exchange for access.
    - krrrh 7y ago
      Good correction! Though I recall that negotiations broke down across both factors.
    - tinus_hn 7y ago
      Anyway it was clear that Google got leverage out of the deal, for instance they wouldn’t allow navigation while it was available on Android, no vector maps while they were available on Android etc. That was never going to work for Apple.
  - theboat 7y ago
    While I sympathize with your viewpoint, you're imposing your personal values on consumers who demonstrate their willingness to exchange personal data for free services every day. You and many HN users may balk at this, but most people are ok with trading privacy for real-time traffic predictions. Apple shouldn't receive an unfair market advantage because they embody the values you hold dear. Sidenote: I disagree that Apple Maps' success puts pressure on Google to up their privacy game. On the contrary, Google Maps comparative advantage is their data trove, as there are many more users of Google Maps than Apple Maps, so they seem more likely to lean on that to succeed. I wouldn't look to the market to improve privacy, since as I said above, the market clearly doesn't care about privacy much at all. Without a seismic shift in public attitudes towards privacy, it's up to the government or the companies themselves to adapt.
- tssva 7y ago
  Apple won't even let you remove the Chess app from macOS without disabling system integrity protection.
- hyperbovine 7y ago
  > letting users set default browsers, maps, and email clients on their devices. This is so disingenuous. It's called Android. People hate it. Although the walled garden may offend you personally, the market at large has spoken.
  - pgodzin 7y ago
    Of all the options to hate Android, having the option to change default clients is probably pretty low... It's probably enough to make anyone switch to Android, but it can still be a welcome addition to iOS
  - BlewisJS 7y ago
    Are you implying people hate Android and that iOS is way bigger in terms of market share?
- wolco 7y ago
  You can remove them? Android doesn't allow me to remove them wasting my space. Not setting a default is bad too. Wish I could get there.
AWildC182 7y ago
....what are you talking about? This is just an update on yet another closed platform. If apple cared about elevating the discipline and righting the abuses of big tech with their mapping app they'd partner with OpenStreetMap and make the data public rather than continuing to silo all the data about you and everyone around you. Instead we're continuing the closed source data gathering land rush and trying to beat google at its own game.
- georgebarnett 7y ago
  Why do you equate “elevating the discipline” with “give away the data?”. Are you suggesting Google didnt elevate the discipline of search because their backend is closed?
  - AWildC182 7y ago
    How do you elevate a discipline by hiding literally everything behind NDAs?
    - crgt 7y ago
      By raising the quality bar of what is expected?
- rmc 7y ago
  Apple Maps _is_ OpenStreetMap in many countries. In Denmark it's used for turn-by-turn navigation even. (Source: Talk by Apple employee at the OSM'a 'State of the Map' conference 2018 https://2018.stateofthemap.org/2018/T081-Working_with_the_Community/ https://2018.stateofthemap.org/2018/T081-Working_with_the_Co... )
  - AWildC182 7y ago
    Then why not do it everywhere and upstream the changes?
    - 7y ago
throawayguy 7y ago
What abuse? how is it right? It's the news industry that is leading and fuling attacks on tech companies for selfish financial reasons, and "big tech" is their term, it's a testament to their efficacy that people in tech drank that kool aid.
wwweston 7y ago
> It's humbling and really cool to see [cartographers, mapping specialists, GIS data nerds, mobile computing / compression phds, GPS parsing engineers, ex-dod intertial navigation specialists, etc.] enter the "rockstar" stadium to deliver something that legitimately changes the way that billions of humans interact with the world The thing is, they did this before. But the interaction just wasn't direct. All of those people were doing important work for government and business organizations wherever getting around and knowing where you and other things are mattered, and improving the quality of services. Now we get first-hand experience with their work, which is fantastic. Map apps are probably the thing that most enticed me onto a smart phone and the thing I'd have a hardest time giving up. I just hope that every time we remember the before and after for these amazing conveniences, we remember that all these disciplines and professionals were important beforehand, and that there are others that are woven quietly into public and private life. Because there's a lot of voices right now that seem interested in burning down institutions and not enough curiosity in what those institutions have done for us.
ThrwyAcnt 7y ago
> relatively obscure specialties This is such a Silicon Valley perspective.

theboat 7y ago

As much as I agree with your general sentiment, Apple Maps, like many of Apple's mobile apps, gets a boost from Apple's anti-competitive practices. It's utterly ridiculous that we can remove default apps from iOS, including Maps and Safari, but we can't set new default apps to replace them. If we ever get serious about increasing competition in the tech sector, an easy place to start is letting users set default browsers, maps, and email clients on their devices.

dkonofalski 7y ago
Isn't that kind of self-defeating, though? Like the ACA without the individual mandate? The only way this works is if people use the apps on the iPhone. There's nothing stopping you from using Google Maps on an iPhone but, in order for the tech to improve while remaining strong with privacy, is for Apple to utilize their existing technology. Also, I disagree that it's anti-competitive. Users are always allowed and able to switch to another device/ecosystem.
- judge2020 7y ago
  It's extremely similar to the microsoft IE issue, users should be able to set a default web browser.
  - criddell 7y ago
    The difference is that Microsoft dominated the market. Apple has a relatively small slice of the smartphone pie. If Google restricted the user in the same way, that would arguably be closer to the Microsoft situation because their marketshare is 2x Apple's.
    - airstrike 7y ago
      I think that depends on how you define "market". Globally, sure, but in the US that's not the case https://www.statista.com/statistics/620805/smartphone-sales-market-share-in-the-us-by-vendor/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/620805/smartphone-sales-...
      - criddell 7y ago
        The market is all the places the devices are sold. So global makes sense. If you define the market as San Francisco then Apple might have a monopoly. But that feels a little like market gerrymandering. Even if you were going to restrict to just the US, Apple still sells fewer than 50% of the phones.
        airstrike 7y ago
        Fewer than 50% is different from "Google sells twice as many" > The market is all the places the devices are sold. Certainly US regulators / courts don't purport to have jurisdiction over foreign markets, agreed? The aforementioned EU case against Microsoft was about the EU market alone.
    - ASalazarMX 7y ago
      How about we bake in competitive openness regadless of company size? Why is it right to build corrals as long as yours is not the biggest?
kylemh 7y ago
and then, even if we could set the default browser, having a webkit-Chrome is stupid also...
- t223 7y ago
  and webkit firefox
skizm 7y ago
One specific thing that bothers me is that Microsoft got in trouble for bundling IE with Windows, but apple doesn't get in trouble when they block all browser apps that don't use Safari under the hood. How is this different? I want Google and Mozilla (and anyone else) to be able to make iOS browser apps from scratch if they want. It wouldn't be an issue if you could sideload apps easily, but the app store is really the only legit way to get apps on your non-jailbroken iPhone.
- taywrobel 7y ago
  Apple doesn’t have sufficient market share to be considered a monopoly. That’s generally how they’ve skirted around the issue, and by positioning themselves as a premium brand, they can raise prices on their hardware to the point that market share remains sufficiently small to not be subject to monopoly laws. At the time of the MS/IE lawsuit (2001), Microsoft Windows had well over 95% of desktop operating system market share.
  - skizm 7y ago
    Fair point.
- milesskorpen 7y ago
  Apple doesn't have the market share MSFT did back then.
- jonfw 7y ago
  The big differentiator here is that Microsoft had a dominant monopoly on PCs. Apple is a huge huge player in the smartphone space, but they're still in no danger of having a majority of the market.
- krrrh 7y ago
  Because the DOJ suit against MS was misguided and unnecessary. It had little effect on eroding Microsoft's supposed stranglehold on the browser market. When browser monoculture began to really hurt consumers and innovation the market found solutions through improved collaboration (W3C getting its act together, and developers embracing web standards), business model innovation (mozilla foundation embracing open source vs. Netscape charging $40 for a commercial license), and better technology and industry/community collaboration (khtml and webkit). Even some eventual deadends like Flash played a role at the time in routing around the untenable, but very temporary, situation of IE v.4-6 dominance. Edit: I want to add that during the suit MS reps had a glib but prescient defense: "we think web browsers should be free". They meant as in beer, but they were right in the larger sense, and few would disagree with them today. Netscape was arguing that their by-then totally crappy commercial browser deserved protection from the state, when their demise had a lot more to do with insane bloat and their embrace of groupware.
krrrh 7y ago
What's worse for consumers in the end though? One profession missing in the parent comment are the researchers innovating on differential privacy. Apple has taken great pains to figure out ways to improve their maps without storing massive amounts of private user data, to the extent that they split routes in half, fuzz addresses, and analyze the start and end of trips independently. There's an argument that Google had such a huge head start on maps, that without Apple having the capacity to set defaults (on a platform that is not even a plurality of users), Apple Maps wouldn't have gotten enough users to justify improvements to where it is now. Apple also didn't get serious about having its own maps until Google attempted to exercise their at-the-time near-monopoly power to jack up licensing costs. Now the mere existence of Apple maps puts pressure on Google to improve the privacy features of its own map products as we've seen recently. Apple funds map development through device sales, and Google does it through targeted advertising, map services for third parties, and profiling users. Do we value competition only of mapping products, or should we also value a diversity of business models for mapping products? It's no small decision to bring in the Kommissar.
- selectodude 7y ago
  Google didn’t try and raise the price, they demanded user data in exchange for access.
  - krrrh 7y ago
    Good correction! Though I recall that negotiations broke down across both factors.
  - tinus_hn 7y ago
    Anyway it was clear that Google got leverage out of the deal, for instance they wouldn’t allow navigation while it was available on Android, no vector maps while they were available on Android etc. That was never going to work for Apple.
- theboat 7y ago
  While I sympathize with your viewpoint, you're imposing your personal values on consumers who demonstrate their willingness to exchange personal data for free services every day. You and many HN users may balk at this, but most people are ok with trading privacy for real-time traffic predictions. Apple shouldn't receive an unfair market advantage because they embody the values you hold dear. Sidenote: I disagree that Apple Maps' success puts pressure on Google to up their privacy game. On the contrary, Google Maps comparative advantage is their data trove, as there are many more users of Google Maps than Apple Maps, so they seem more likely to lean on that to succeed. I wouldn't look to the market to improve privacy, since as I said above, the market clearly doesn't care about privacy much at all. Without a seismic shift in public attitudes towards privacy, it's up to the government or the companies themselves to adapt.
tssva 7y ago
Apple won't even let you remove the Chess app from macOS without disabling system integrity protection.
hyperbovine 7y ago
> letting users set default browsers, maps, and email clients on their devices. This is so disingenuous. It's called Android. People hate it. Although the walled garden may offend you personally, the market at large has spoken.
- pgodzin 7y ago
  Of all the options to hate Android, having the option to change default clients is probably pretty low... It's probably enough to make anyone switch to Android, but it can still be a welcome addition to iOS
- BlewisJS 7y ago
  Are you implying people hate Android and that iOS is way bigger in terms of market share?
wolco 7y ago
You can remove them? Android doesn't allow me to remove them wasting my space. Not setting a default is bad too. Wish I could get there.

AWildC182 7y ago

....what are you talking about? This is just an update on yet another closed platform. If apple cared about elevating the discipline and righting the abuses of big tech with their mapping app they'd partner with OpenStreetMap and make the data public rather than continuing to silo all the data about you and everyone around you. Instead we're continuing the closed source data gathering land rush and trying to beat google at its own game.

georgebarnett 7y ago
Why do you equate “elevating the discipline” with “give away the data?”. Are you suggesting Google didnt elevate the discipline of search because their backend is closed?
- AWildC182 7y ago
  How do you elevate a discipline by hiding literally everything behind NDAs?
  - crgt 7y ago
    By raising the quality bar of what is expected?
rmc 7y ago
Apple Maps _is_ OpenStreetMap in many countries. In Denmark it's used for turn-by-turn navigation even. (Source: Talk by Apple employee at the OSM'a 'State of the Map' conference 2018 https://2018.stateofthemap.org/2018/T081-Working_with_the_Community/ https://2018.stateofthemap.org/2018/T081-Working_with_the_Co... )
- AWildC182 7y ago
  Then why not do it everywhere and upstream the changes?
  - 7y ago

throawayguy 7y ago

What abuse? how is it right? It's the news industry that is leading and fuling attacks on tech companies for selfish financial reasons, and "big tech" is their term, it's a testament to their efficacy that people in tech drank that kool aid.

wwweston 7y ago

> It's humbling and really cool to see [cartographers, mapping specialists, GIS data nerds, mobile computing / compression phds, GPS parsing engineers, ex-dod intertial navigation specialists, etc.] enter the "rockstar" stadium to deliver something that legitimately changes the way that billions of humans interact with the world The thing is, they did this before. But the interaction just wasn't direct. All of those people were doing important work for government and business organizations wherever getting around and knowing where you and other things are mattered, and improving the quality of services. Now we get first-hand experience with their work, which is fantastic. Map apps are probably the thing that most enticed me onto a smart phone and the thing I'd have a hardest time giving up. I just hope that every time we remember the before and after for these amazing conveniences, we remember that all these disciplines and professionals were important beforehand, and that there are others that are woven quietly into public and private life. Because there's a lot of voices right now that seem interested in burning down institutions and not enough curiosity in what those institutions have done for us.

ThrwyAcnt 7y ago

> relatively obscure specialties This is such a Silicon Valley perspective.