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> Apple never asked for my input on App Store rules. But they really did. They asked "Walled garden, restrictive app publishing, no BS", or "Sideload to your

> Apple never asked for my input on App Store rules. But they really did. They asked "Walled garden, restrictive app publishing, no BS", or "Sideload to your heart's content", you choose! And Apple customers said "Walled garden, please and thank you!" This is a completely respectable choice -- but of course it is not everyone's choice! I was unintentionally (and unexpectedly) a unionized employee once. They didn't ask me to ratify their agenda, but they did require me to pay dues!

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> But they really did. No they didn't. Choosing whether there is a walled store and choosing what gets into the store are two different things. And on top of that, you didn't even get the first choice independent of a hundred other variables like hardware, operating system, app availability, the network effect of peers with iMessage etc. To really drive this home, keep in mind that the same argument could be applied to giving Comcast control over which websites and video streaming services you can use. If you don't like it, just choose to move out of their service area. So if you choose to subscribe to Comcast then you must want that, right? > They didn't ask me to ratify their agenda, but they did require me to pay dues! Actually they did. Union members get to elect the union leadership. Apple customers don't get to elect the Apple leadership. And if a union set your union dues at 30% of your salary, how long do you think it would take for them to get voted out?
- quesera 6y ago
  This is nothing like Comcast. There are very rarely two cable providers in a given area. Moving house is not equivalent to buying a different consumer gadget. ... Union members get to elect union leadership. Phone customers get to elect phone manufacturers. Equivalency restored.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > This is nothing like Comcast. There are very rarely two cable providers in a given area. That's why the analogy fits -- if you have an iPhone you're in Apple's service area. You can't get your apps from Google Play unless you move to their platform. But having both a cable provider and a telco in the same area is actually very common. And even if there is a strong competitor (singular), e.g. FiOS, it's still hugely problematic. You choose Comcast and you only get Comcast video service, you choose FiOS and only get FiOS video service, no option for Netflix or YouTube because there are still only two of them and neither of them want you to use that over theirs. The forces of competition don't actually work if they both know they can get away with it as long as the other one does and the market is concentrated enough with sufficient barriers to entry that they don't have to worry about newcomers. Which is true of both ISPs and phone platforms. > Moving house is not equivalent to buying a different consumer gadget. Buying a new phone (~$1000) compared to buying an app (~$1). Then re-buy all your existing apps, because new platform. Learn the other OS, training cost. Any apps that don't exist there, like iMessage? Problematic. Move all your data from iCloud to Google. It's very much like moving house. > Union members get to elect union leadership. Phone customers get to elect phone manufacturers. Equivalency restored. Equivalency would be the customers electing Apple's board, which they don't. Equivalency would be an actual co-op store which you do get to elect the leadership of. The thing you're claiming is that it would be just as good to have an unaccountable union because you could always go work for another company (which had its own unaccountable union). And we could do even better -- because it's not like unions are a panacea -- and have a co-op store which isn't tied to specific hardware or a platform, which you can choose to opt out of without simultaneously opting out of anything else. Which is what you would be able to have in a competitive market.
    - quesera 6y ago
      I like the idea of allowing alternate App Stores on iOS (or even setting a flag to allow running unsigned binaries). I do not agree that Apple has an obligation to develop this functionality for me. I can think of plenty of reasons they would not want to do so (and almost zero of them have anything to do with protecting their 30% cut of app sales). I think iOS is a better consumer product because it has never allowed ad hoc app installs. If I felt differently, I could switch. Mobile platform mobility is very high. People do it all the time! Most people have fewer than a dozen apps on their device, which itself costs a couple dozen dollars per month with a mobile plan. Switching costs, if synced to your contract period, are really very low. Apps which are platform-exclusive (Apple Messages) are a different kettle of wax, and I don't think germane here. Complicated product/ecosystems inevitably fan out to imperfect sets of compromises. Sure, this contributes to intangible switching costs, but that's hardly Apple's responsibility to mitigate on my behalf. I have varied opinions and experiences with Comcast, co-ops, and labor unions (negative, positive, disappointing), but I don't think any of the analogies make sense.
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        > I do not agree that Apple has an obligation to develop this functionality for me. The issue isn't they should have to do it for you, it's that they've taken purposeful action to prevent anyone else from doing it. > I think iOS is a better consumer product because it has never allowed ad hoc app installs. But this doesn't require the store to be glued to the device. You could get the same experience by using only Apple's store, or some other store you trust, even if others were available. Linux package managers are a fine example of this. The large majority of Linux software is installed through them, and doing what the packagers require to get included is enough of a benefit that developers do it, but there is nothing at all preventing there from being multiple independent packaging systems or preventing people from installing software from the internet. They just don't, in general, because they prefer to get it from the package manager. > Mobile platform mobility is very high. People do it all the time! People move house all the time too, that doesn't mean the cost is low. You're essentially arguing that it's possible for it to be low. If you're about to buy a new phone anyway and you don't have many apps and none of your apps only run on iOS, then all you have is the retraining cost of learning a different operating system and the differences between the hardware of different platforms and so on. But this is just arguing that if you're about to move house anyway then the cost of switching away from Comcast isn't as high. For one thing it's still high, because the differences between different houses/platforms is still quite significant and decisions are made based on a multitude of considerations in addition to app stores. But for another, what happens to the people in the opposite circumstances? They're not halfway through their contract and have many expensive iOS-specific apps with a network effect, and then they want to buy your app. No way they can switch just for that. > Apps which are platform-exclusive (Apple Messages) are a different kettle of wax, and I don't think germane here. Complicated product/ecosystems inevitably fan out to imperfect sets of compromises. Sure, this contributes to intangible switching costs, but that's hardly Apple's responsibility to mitigate on my behalf. They don't have to mitigate it but then it's a significant component of switching costs. Eat your cake or have it.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> But they really did. No they didn't. Choosing whether there is a walled store and choosing what gets into the store are two different things. And on top of that, you didn't even get the first choice independent of a hundred other variables like hardware, operating system, app availability, the network effect of peers with iMessage etc. To really drive this home, keep in mind that the same argument could be applied to giving Comcast control over which websites and video streaming services you can use. If you don't like it, just choose to move out of their service area. So if you choose to subscribe to Comcast then you must want that, right? > They didn't ask me to ratify their agenda, but they did require me to pay dues! Actually they did. Union members get to elect the union leadership. Apple customers don't get to elect the Apple leadership. And if a union set your union dues at 30% of your salary, how long do you think it would take for them to get voted out?

quesera 6y ago
This is nothing like Comcast. There are very rarely two cable providers in a given area. Moving house is not equivalent to buying a different consumer gadget. ... Union members get to elect union leadership. Phone customers get to elect phone manufacturers. Equivalency restored.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > This is nothing like Comcast. There are very rarely two cable providers in a given area. That's why the analogy fits -- if you have an iPhone you're in Apple's service area. You can't get your apps from Google Play unless you move to their platform. But having both a cable provider and a telco in the same area is actually very common. And even if there is a strong competitor (singular), e.g. FiOS, it's still hugely problematic. You choose Comcast and you only get Comcast video service, you choose FiOS and only get FiOS video service, no option for Netflix or YouTube because there are still only two of them and neither of them want you to use that over theirs. The forces of competition don't actually work if they both know they can get away with it as long as the other one does and the market is concentrated enough with sufficient barriers to entry that they don't have to worry about newcomers. Which is true of both ISPs and phone platforms. > Moving house is not equivalent to buying a different consumer gadget. Buying a new phone (~$1000) compared to buying an app (~$1). Then re-buy all your existing apps, because new platform. Learn the other OS, training cost. Any apps that don't exist there, like iMessage? Problematic. Move all your data from iCloud to Google. It's very much like moving house. > Union members get to elect union leadership. Phone customers get to elect phone manufacturers. Equivalency restored. Equivalency would be the customers electing Apple's board, which they don't. Equivalency would be an actual co-op store which you do get to elect the leadership of. The thing you're claiming is that it would be just as good to have an unaccountable union because you could always go work for another company (which had its own unaccountable union). And we could do even better -- because it's not like unions are a panacea -- and have a co-op store which isn't tied to specific hardware or a platform, which you can choose to opt out of without simultaneously opting out of anything else. Which is what you would be able to have in a competitive market.
  - quesera 6y ago
    I like the idea of allowing alternate App Stores on iOS (or even setting a flag to allow running unsigned binaries). I do not agree that Apple has an obligation to develop this functionality for me. I can think of plenty of reasons they would not want to do so (and almost zero of them have anything to do with protecting their 30% cut of app sales). I think iOS is a better consumer product because it has never allowed ad hoc app installs. If I felt differently, I could switch. Mobile platform mobility is very high. People do it all the time! Most people have fewer than a dozen apps on their device, which itself costs a couple dozen dollars per month with a mobile plan. Switching costs, if synced to your contract period, are really very low. Apps which are platform-exclusive (Apple Messages) are a different kettle of wax, and I don't think germane here. Complicated product/ecosystems inevitably fan out to imperfect sets of compromises. Sure, this contributes to intangible switching costs, but that's hardly Apple's responsibility to mitigate on my behalf. I have varied opinions and experiences with Comcast, co-ops, and labor unions (negative, positive, disappointing), but I don't think any of the analogies make sense.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      > I do not agree that Apple has an obligation to develop this functionality for me. The issue isn't they should have to do it for you, it's that they've taken purposeful action to prevent anyone else from doing it. > I think iOS is a better consumer product because it has never allowed ad hoc app installs. But this doesn't require the store to be glued to the device. You could get the same experience by using only Apple's store, or some other store you trust, even if others were available. Linux package managers are a fine example of this. The large majority of Linux software is installed through them, and doing what the packagers require to get included is enough of a benefit that developers do it, but there is nothing at all preventing there from being multiple independent packaging systems or preventing people from installing software from the internet. They just don't, in general, because they prefer to get it from the package manager. > Mobile platform mobility is very high. People do it all the time! People move house all the time too, that doesn't mean the cost is low. You're essentially arguing that it's possible for it to be low. If you're about to buy a new phone anyway and you don't have many apps and none of your apps only run on iOS, then all you have is the retraining cost of learning a different operating system and the differences between the hardware of different platforms and so on. But this is just arguing that if you're about to move house anyway then the cost of switching away from Comcast isn't as high. For one thing it's still high, because the differences between different houses/platforms is still quite significant and decisions are made based on a multitude of considerations in addition to app stores. But for another, what happens to the people in the opposite circumstances? They're not halfway through their contract and have many expensive iOS-specific apps with a network effect, and then they want to buy your app. No way they can switch just for that. > Apps which are platform-exclusive (Apple Messages) are a different kettle of wax, and I don't think germane here. Complicated product/ecosystems inevitably fan out to imperfect sets of compromises. Sure, this contributes to intangible switching costs, but that's hardly Apple's responsibility to mitigate on my behalf. They don't have to mitigate it but then it's a significant component of switching costs. Eat your cake or have it.