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> Developers of certain apps should run to Congressional antitrust committees. Some of them already have. Questioning the standard HN stance on this topic has

> Developers of certain apps should run to Congressional antitrust committees. Some of them already have. Questioning the standard HN stance on this topic has led to instant downvotes for me before, but I'd genuinely like clarity on why it's considered a matter of civil liberty to develop whatever you want and force Apple to distribute it on their store? I honestly don't understand it, and I'd really like someone to explain it to me, instead of just downvoting. PS: I develop apps for the Apple store.

pjmlp 6y ago
That is the rainbows and cheerful music subgroup, that sees Apple as the man.
_huayra_ 6y ago
It's mainly because Apple (or Google or whatever other monopoly you can think of) has accrued so much power that they can stifle competitors by replicating the competitors' features, entire products (and offer them for free), and engage in anti-competitive practices. All of these companies have hoards of cash and can basically ice out any smaller contender indefinitely. This is basically why the exit strategy of many startups is "get acquired by FAANG and friends". The issue about civil liberty is a byproduct, a stop-gap measure to deal with the monopoly that currently exists. The actual issue is that these companies have accrued for too much power that it prevents competition. Is the product good? Yes or folks wouldn't buy it. That doesn't negate the incentives to behave in an anti-competitive way due to shareholder supremacy. I recall that most publicly-traded organizations could be sued by their shareholders for not pursuing clearly profitable ventures (e.g. replicating a popular product with their vast resources).
- jordan_curve 6y ago
  > Is the product good? Yes or folks wouldn't buy it. This would indicate that there is no monopoly.
  - _huayra_ 6y ago
    Correct, there is a duopoly with Google, but that's the other side of the same coin.
Nullabillity 6y ago
> but I'd genuinely like clarity on why it's considered a matter of civil liberty to develop whatever you want and force Apple to distribute it on their store? Ideally the store wouldn't exist, or at least it would be possible to bypass it. You supposedly bought the device, you should be able to run whatever you damn please on it.
- Toutouxc 6y ago
  Are you able to build your own programs on the dishwasher? On the vacuum cleaner? Is your car's ECU readily programmable? Because the way I see it and the way Apple markets the iDevices, they're not general computing devices. They're not computers in the Wozniak, IBM, Stallman, Torvalds sense. They're not DIY devices. The DIY tinkerer friendly computers exist and are sold as of today with various levels of DIY-ness -- and their user friendliness and security often suck because of their very nature. It's literally because of the openness and customizability that the Linux desktop experience sucks HARD for any kind of non-programmer professional usage. (And before you hit that reply button, i KNOW that YOUR i3 no-mouse vim emacs org-mode Arch setup works just fine. I'm not talking about you.) It's because of it, that your parents and grandparents' Windows boxes get viruses, because Windows apps regularly ship 200kB custom "installers" that download everything and spawn per-app daemons that handle software updates and everything is permitted and nothing makes sense. It's because of it, that sw piracy is rampant on Android, that the Google Play is full of shitty iOS app clones, fakes and outright malware, that end users can buy Android devices that are outdated on their launch day, that are full of LONG KNOWN vulnerabilities that the manufacturer doesn't give a shit about. And what you're saying is you want the manufacturer (Apple) introduce new, insecure functionality (app sideloading) into an appliance (iDevice) that was never supposed to have said functionality, because the appliance reminds you somehow of a general purpose computing device, despite the fact that neither Apple nor the (overwhelming) majority of the users consider it to be one.
  - thekyle 6y ago
    > Are you able to build your own programs on the dishwasher? On the vacuum cleaner? Is your car's ECU readily programmable? I sure hope so. You should be able to do whatever you want with your own property. > It's because of it, that sw piracy is rampant on Android I don't see how Android app piracy is bad for consumers. If anything it seems to be a selling point to many in low income regions. > Google Play is full of shitty iOS app clones, fakes and outright malware Yes indeed. Just goes to show that walled gardens are not necessarily an effective strategy for stopping malware. The Apple App Store has had it's own fair share of malware also. > Android devices that are outdated on their launch day Because makers of appliances (such as those you mentioned in the beginning) are well know to always provide software updates with the latest security patches for many years (No, they aren't).
andreareina 6y ago
[ed: completely missed that this is macOS, not iOS, so much of the criticism here isn't valid] Wouldn't have to force Apple to put it on their store store if they allowed third-party stores. These devices aren't just phones, in fact the phone is the minor function these days. They're computers in fact and in the marketing copy, yet Apple exerts monopoly power[1] to capriciously decide what may run on the device that I bought, paying upwards ofa thousand dollars for[2]. [1] in terms of app revenue iOS is dominant. Apple is able to dictate usurious and abusive terms and vendors are effectively forced to capitulate due to the size of the market they control. [2] I don't actually have an iPhone despite the superiority because of this, but couching it in third-person terms is awkward.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  In this case, of course, the software could have been distributed outside of the store since the platform was macOS. As such, much of the issue was that Apple claims to apply their rules fairly and sanely on their store, and it was clear that this was not happening.
  - andreareina 6y ago
    Missed that it was macOS, thanks for pointing that out. Agreed that in that case it's more an issue of inconsistency.
- null_object 6y ago
  > capriciously decide what may run on the device that I bought, paying upwards of a thousand dollars for But aren't there alternative phone devices that you or anyone else is free to choose? There are even phones that can install open-source operating systems. So an Apple device isn't strictly a 'monopoly' is it? In fact, the high price of the device could be said to operate against it being a monopoly: unlike (say) Amazon, that squeezes out local competition by strategically under-pricing until all other alternatives are unable to remain economically viable. For me, these contentions seem to conflate a company's success with monopoly power.
  - 6y ago
manigandham 6y ago
Antitrust legislation is decades out of date to properly handle the modern tech oligopoly of trillion-dollar corporations that rule our lives. That's the root of the issue, and why saying "it's a private company" is not a good defense in context.
snovv_crash 6y ago
This isn't a civil liberties issue, it is an antitrust issue. Companies that produce good products and market them well accrue power. At some point the incentives change, and the company starts to squeeze locked in customers, suppliers etc. who have nowhere else to turn to. In order to maintain a healthy market economy the government is forced to handicap the 'winner' by splitting them up, enforcing regulations, etc. We've already seen Google prepare for this with Alphabet; Facebook went the other direction, integrating their acquired subsidiaries to make such a breakup technically difficult. Microsoft narrowly escaped a breakup in the early 00's but with the new surveillance capitalism companies I see much bigger market threats and winner-take-all power than Microsoft had then. If you look at Apple, they are much harder to compete with than Microsoft was due to their complete vertical integration. At some point the government needs to step in and restore market balance, some way or another, or the entire small business and hobby side which is the seed for the next generation of technological innovation will die before it can really be born.
ben0x539 6y ago
I'm not sure it's a matter of civil liberty, but I think it's definitely an issue of social responsibility. imo, it's desirable to live in a world where anyone can code up any app they want, and share it with people. This seems like a given to me if you care about equitable access to information technology or whatever. Apple is creating a world where they're the only realistic way to get apps onto the personal computing devices of a large share of society. Since that's Apple's choice, it's their responsibility to reconcile these two points.* If they're not doing that, it seems appropriate for society to create better incentives for Apple. (* Promoting and processing payments for every sketchy unverified submission is probably not the right way to go about that, sure.)
paulnechifor 6y ago
> I'd genuinely like clarity on why it's considered a matter of civil liberty to develop whatever you want and force Apple to distribute it on their store? Some value the civil liberties of individuals more than that of corporations.
hutzlibu 6y ago
I consider it to be the lazy/pragmatic approach to change things without having to deal with drastic problems that would arise from changing plattforms, like with many other topics. People who are inside apples universe don't want the hazzle to get out of it. They rather want to influence the universe they are in, by all means avaiable. Where the legal system is the most powerful one to have an direct impact. Same applies to facebook, microsoft, etc. I can understand it as pragmatic, but personally I rather want to invest in open plattforms by default, instead of trying to change fundamentally flawed ones to make them somewhat bearable.
ksec 6y ago
>I honestly don't understand it, Let me put a simple analogy. Assuming the future continues with digitisation, whether that is online or offline, and Visa or MasterCard dedicate what you can sell, use or buy with their Network. People will come and argue you can use cash with Offline. But what about online? Are these people left without a large portion of online opportunities? People will argue you should start your own OS / Smartphone if you dont like it, Why dont people start their own Payment network ? The reason why we dont have those problem with payment much is because of regulation. I couldn't think of a single industry which has more regulation than Finance. One you have grown big enough into a Duopoly, and a foundation platform of the Digital Society, there are more responsibility to be hold. You can no longer act like Apple in 2010 when they dont have the market shares or the importance. So the question is, why should two companies be so powerful to dictate all of our Digital Life, when Digital has increasingly become the norm. Before Apple shifted its strategy to Services Revenue. App Store as an App Distribution platform was fine. That was 2015. Teaching App is't required to have Apple Sign in, 30% wasn't required for Education Apps to more than a few peoples. IAP wasn't strictly enforce for non-gaming Apps. And what apple calls "Reader" Apps, that is Netflix or the recent Hey.com didn't have much a problem. Right now Apple is trying to extract all the values it can, while being the gate keeper of the possibly largest Economic platform known to human history. That doesn't just make Apple the Judge Jury and the Executioner. They are also the Tax Code writer and the Collector.

pjmlp 6y ago

That is the rainbows and cheerful music subgroup, that sees Apple as the man.

_huayra_ 6y ago

It's mainly because Apple (or Google or whatever other monopoly you can think of) has accrued so much power that they can stifle competitors by replicating the competitors' features, entire products (and offer them for free), and engage in anti-competitive practices. All of these companies have hoards of cash and can basically ice out any smaller contender indefinitely. This is basically why the exit strategy of many startups is "get acquired by FAANG and friends". The issue about civil liberty is a byproduct, a stop-gap measure to deal with the monopoly that currently exists. The actual issue is that these companies have accrued for too much power that it prevents competition. Is the product good? Yes or folks wouldn't buy it. That doesn't negate the incentives to behave in an anti-competitive way due to shareholder supremacy. I recall that most publicly-traded organizations could be sued by their shareholders for not pursuing clearly profitable ventures (e.g. replicating a popular product with their vast resources).

jordan_curve 6y ago
> Is the product good? Yes or folks wouldn't buy it. This would indicate that there is no monopoly.
- _huayra_ 6y ago
  Correct, there is a duopoly with Google, but that's the other side of the same coin.

Nullabillity 6y ago

> but I'd genuinely like clarity on why it's considered a matter of civil liberty to develop whatever you want and force Apple to distribute it on their store? Ideally the store wouldn't exist, or at least it would be possible to bypass it. You supposedly bought the device, you should be able to run whatever you damn please on it.

Toutouxc 6y ago
Are you able to build your own programs on the dishwasher? On the vacuum cleaner? Is your car's ECU readily programmable? Because the way I see it and the way Apple markets the iDevices, they're not general computing devices. They're not computers in the Wozniak, IBM, Stallman, Torvalds sense. They're not DIY devices. The DIY tinkerer friendly computers exist and are sold as of today with various levels of DIY-ness -- and their user friendliness and security often suck because of their very nature. It's literally because of the openness and customizability that the Linux desktop experience sucks HARD for any kind of non-programmer professional usage. (And before you hit that reply button, i KNOW that YOUR i3 no-mouse vim emacs org-mode Arch setup works just fine. I'm not talking about you.) It's because of it, that your parents and grandparents' Windows boxes get viruses, because Windows apps regularly ship 200kB custom "installers" that download everything and spawn per-app daemons that handle software updates and everything is permitted and nothing makes sense. It's because of it, that sw piracy is rampant on Android, that the Google Play is full of shitty iOS app clones, fakes and outright malware, that end users can buy Android devices that are outdated on their launch day, that are full of LONG KNOWN vulnerabilities that the manufacturer doesn't give a shit about. And what you're saying is you want the manufacturer (Apple) introduce new, insecure functionality (app sideloading) into an appliance (iDevice) that was never supposed to have said functionality, because the appliance reminds you somehow of a general purpose computing device, despite the fact that neither Apple nor the (overwhelming) majority of the users consider it to be one.
- thekyle 6y ago
  > Are you able to build your own programs on the dishwasher? On the vacuum cleaner? Is your car's ECU readily programmable? I sure hope so. You should be able to do whatever you want with your own property. > It's because of it, that sw piracy is rampant on Android I don't see how Android app piracy is bad for consumers. If anything it seems to be a selling point to many in low income regions. > Google Play is full of shitty iOS app clones, fakes and outright malware Yes indeed. Just goes to show that walled gardens are not necessarily an effective strategy for stopping malware. The Apple App Store has had it's own fair share of malware also. > Android devices that are outdated on their launch day Because makers of appliances (such as those you mentioned in the beginning) are well know to always provide software updates with the latest security patches for many years (No, they aren't).

andreareina 6y ago

[ed: completely missed that this is macOS, not iOS, so much of the criticism here isn't valid] Wouldn't have to force Apple to put it on their store store if they allowed third-party stores. These devices aren't just phones, in fact the phone is the minor function these days. They're computers in fact and in the marketing copy, yet Apple exerts monopoly power[1] to capriciously decide what may run on the device that I bought, paying upwards ofa thousand dollars for[2]. [1] in terms of app revenue iOS is dominant. Apple is able to dictate usurious and abusive terms and vendors are effectively forced to capitulate due to the size of the market they control. [2] I don't actually have an iPhone despite the superiority because of this, but couching it in third-person terms is awkward.

saagarjha 6y ago
In this case, of course, the software could have been distributed outside of the store since the platform was macOS. As such, much of the issue was that Apple claims to apply their rules fairly and sanely on their store, and it was clear that this was not happening.
- andreareina 6y ago
  Missed that it was macOS, thanks for pointing that out. Agreed that in that case it's more an issue of inconsistency.
null_object 6y ago
> capriciously decide what may run on the device that I bought, paying upwards of a thousand dollars for But aren't there alternative phone devices that you or anyone else is free to choose? There are even phones that can install open-source operating systems. So an Apple device isn't strictly a 'monopoly' is it? In fact, the high price of the device could be said to operate against it being a monopoly: unlike (say) Amazon, that squeezes out local competition by strategically under-pricing until all other alternatives are unable to remain economically viable. For me, these contentions seem to conflate a company's success with monopoly power.
- 6y ago

manigandham 6y ago

Antitrust legislation is decades out of date to properly handle the modern tech oligopoly of trillion-dollar corporations that rule our lives. That's the root of the issue, and why saying "it's a private company" is not a good defense in context.

snovv_crash 6y ago

This isn't a civil liberties issue, it is an antitrust issue. Companies that produce good products and market them well accrue power. At some point the incentives change, and the company starts to squeeze locked in customers, suppliers etc. who have nowhere else to turn to. In order to maintain a healthy market economy the government is forced to handicap the 'winner' by splitting them up, enforcing regulations, etc. We've already seen Google prepare for this with Alphabet; Facebook went the other direction, integrating their acquired subsidiaries to make such a breakup technically difficult. Microsoft narrowly escaped a breakup in the early 00's but with the new surveillance capitalism companies I see much bigger market threats and winner-take-all power than Microsoft had then. If you look at Apple, they are much harder to compete with than Microsoft was due to their complete vertical integration. At some point the government needs to step in and restore market balance, some way or another, or the entire small business and hobby side which is the seed for the next generation of technological innovation will die before it can really be born.

ben0x539 6y ago

I'm not sure it's a matter of civil liberty, but I think it's definitely an issue of social responsibility. imo, it's desirable to live in a world where anyone can code up any app they want, and share it with people. This seems like a given to me if you care about equitable access to information technology or whatever. Apple is creating a world where they're the only realistic way to get apps onto the personal computing devices of a large share of society. Since that's Apple's choice, it's their responsibility to reconcile these two points.* If they're not doing that, it seems appropriate for society to create better incentives for Apple. (* Promoting and processing payments for every sketchy unverified submission is probably not the right way to go about that, sure.)

paulnechifor 6y ago

> I'd genuinely like clarity on why it's considered a matter of civil liberty to develop whatever you want and force Apple to distribute it on their store? Some value the civil liberties of individuals more than that of corporations.

hutzlibu 6y ago

I consider it to be the lazy/pragmatic approach to change things without having to deal with drastic problems that would arise from changing plattforms, like with many other topics. People who are inside apples universe don't want the hazzle to get out of it. They rather want to influence the universe they are in, by all means avaiable. Where the legal system is the most powerful one to have an direct impact. Same applies to facebook, microsoft, etc. I can understand it as pragmatic, but personally I rather want to invest in open plattforms by default, instead of trying to change fundamentally flawed ones to make them somewhat bearable.

ksec 6y ago

>I honestly don't understand it, Let me put a simple analogy. Assuming the future continues with digitisation, whether that is online or offline, and Visa or MasterCard dedicate what you can sell, use or buy with their Network. People will come and argue you can use cash with Offline. But what about online? Are these people left without a large portion of online opportunities? People will argue you should start your own OS / Smartphone if you dont like it, Why dont people start their own Payment network ? The reason why we dont have those problem with payment much is because of regulation. I couldn't think of a single industry which has more regulation than Finance. One you have grown big enough into a Duopoly, and a foundation platform of the Digital Society, there are more responsibility to be hold. You can no longer act like Apple in 2010 when they dont have the market shares or the importance. So the question is, why should two companies be so powerful to dictate all of our Digital Life, when Digital has increasingly become the norm. Before Apple shifted its strategy to Services Revenue. App Store as an App Distribution platform was fine. That was 2015. Teaching App is't required to have Apple Sign in, 30% wasn't required for Education Apps to more than a few peoples. IAP wasn't strictly enforce for non-gaming Apps. And what apple calls "Reader" Apps, that is Netflix or the recent Hey.com didn't have much a problem. Right now Apple is trying to extract all the values it can, while being the gate keeper of the possibly largest Economic platform known to human history. That doesn't just make Apple the Judge Jury and the Executioner. They are also the Tax Code writer and the Collector.