4 ms·

The hell are you even on about? Epic making their own phone? Epic can create an alternative store on Android TODAY. If you don’t like your phone, get another o

The hell are you even on about? Epic making their own phone? Epic can create an alternative store on Android TODAY. If you don’t like your phone, get another one. This is the most ridiculous first world problem, and associated whining, I’ve ever seen. You have alternatives, but you’ve willingly chosen the iPhone. Then you whine that it’s not sufficiently like the competition, despite this being the headline feature of this product and company. It’s completely childish and ridiculous. Let me make this very clear for you: I, as an end user, want Apple to have complete control over its platform. That’s precisely why I bought into this, and not another ecosystem. I do not want sideloading, I do not want alternative stores, I do not want the so-called “healthy competition”. And I should be able to make that choice, as a consumer.

josephg 6y ago
Epic can't create an alternate store on iOS. At all. The headline feature of apple devices for me is that unlike Google, Apple cares about my privacy and security. Apple doesn't offer a devil's bargain with every first party feature. "We can turn this great new thing on - but in exchange, we're going to track your physical movements everywhere. We can turn this other thing on, but we'll record, save and send audio recordings of your life." Right now I have to decide between having control of my device but no control of my data (google). Or having control over my data but no control over my device (apple). That decision is crap. > I, as an end user, want Apple to have complete control over its platform Good for you. In comparison, I want to have more control over the devices I paid good money for. I don't want to live in a digital serfdom, where my only freedoms are those granted to me by the local lord of the cloud. I don't want accidentally offending an algorithm to result in banishment (google). Or, in Apple's case, for the local lord to tax and morally judge every trade that takes place under their watch. If you want to spend your life in Apple's walled garden, great! But I don't want owning the best phone to mean I'm trapped there with you. I demand to be able to enter into a voluntary financial agreement with Epic games if I like. I don't want my own phone to have the power to stop me or levy a tax, just so some Apple VP gets a bigger bonus.
- leadingthenet 6y ago
  > Epic can't create an alternate store on iOS. At all And I pray it stays that way. I’m sorry mate, but the reality of the situation is that your wishes mean nothing and Apple owes you zilch. You don’t like that, feel free to go somewhere else. You imposing your views on all of us is not freedom. It’s the opposite of that. You want open software? Linux is a thing, I should know, I use it every day. You want a walled garden? Well you should be able to have that choice, too. You want to take that away from me while pretending to do it for the greater good, when in reality it’s just a selfish desire to impose your will on others.
  - josephg 6y ago
    >> Epic can't create an alternate store on iOS. At all > And I pray it stays that way. If Epic had an alternate app store, you know you wouldn't have to use it right? You could still use Apple's walled garden. Granting me the ability to run more software on my device doesn't restrict your ability to control what runs on your device. > it’s just a selfish desire to impose your will on others. You're the one arguing for restrictions about what I can do on my phone. I don't care what you do with yours. Nothing Epic is proposing would stop Apple from reviewing apps and selling them in the app store. And if opening the door to free and open marketplaces, with the user in the driver's seat is selfish, guilty as charged! Sign me up! The engine of capitalism works best with healthy competition. (And no, the phone megacorp duopoly is not healthy competition.) Reigning in monopolies is what healthy regulation is made for.
    - dmak 6y ago
      I don’t see how willingly deciding to use a closed platform and criticizing it for not being open and then asking the platform to open up affecting everyone else who also decided to use a close platform is logical.
      - josephg 6y ago
        The situation is that there's healthy competition between phone makers (Apple and Google/samsung/etc). If there was only one company making phones, that would be a monopoly and monopolies tend toward rent seeking extraction - which may require regulation, or consumers would have a bad time. Apple has a clear, technologically enforced, complete monopoly on apps distributed on their phones. And google has a weak monopoly on their phones - you can distribute your app on other app stores, but its difficult for everyone. The situation on Android is slightly worse than Microsoft distributing IE with windows. And when that happened, the feds initiated a huge antitrust case against microsoft and nearly broke up the company. Does the fact that there's competition in the phone market mean we should forgive monopolistic behaviour in the app markets on those phones? Thats a tricky question. Its too simple to just fall back on heuristics. Is there monopolistic behaviour in the app market? - Does the monopolistic provider use their position to block competition? Yes. Apple doesn't allow any competitors to their own software in the app store. - Does the monopolistic provider rent seek, and extract far more money from the market than they would if there was healthy competition? Uncertain - I'm not sure if 15% is a reasonable or unreasonable cut. 30% almost certainly wasn't reasonable for the services apple provided. - Do people buy phones mostly because of their app stores? If they do, then phone competition == app store competition. If they primarily choose a phone on other factors (cameras, etc) then these are separate markets and should be considered separately. Answer: ??? Is there a precedent? Its not exactly the same, but Australia didn't like telstra (an ISP who owned most of the cable at the time) renting their cables at unreasonable prices to other ISPs. They stopped anyone else from reasonably competing with them. You could make the same argument - "You willingly bought a house there so you can't complain. If you don't like it, move". But we regulated them anyway. Notably the US hasn't regulated comcast / etc from doing the same thing over there. Longer answer than you were expecting. tldr; its complicated. Heuristics aren't enough. Personally I don't think competition in phones means its acceptable that we have monopolies in app stores. I find the justifications for letting apple have a monopoly in the app store unconvincing and I favor regulation.
agiroth 6y ago
> I do not want sideloading, I do not want alternative stores, I do not want the so-called “healthy competition”. Good. Don't use them. Do you use every single feature of your phone? Of course not. There are probably features you don't even know about. So don't use them. The mere presence of the feature doesn't obligate you to use it.
- leadingthenet 6y ago
  The entire point is that it does. Opening up the walled garden isn’t “a feature”, it’s something that will completely, and irreversibly change the incentives on the platform. Why the hell should Facebook comply with Apple’s every whim and wish, if they could just publish on a different store with less stringent privacy rules, and force you to download it that way? “You want Facebook? Go to Settings -> Privacy, then uncheck the bla bla bla box, and install Fb Store. Then...”. Yeah, no, that’s my worst nightmare. Seriously, how do you people not get this?
  - alickz 6y ago
    Privacy should be built into the OS, not rely on fallible human review. Not to mention a 3rd party app store could be even MORE privacy focused than Apple's App Store, if the market was there for it. There's no reason Apple can't enforce the same privacy options OS wide, even for sideloaded apps. Of course they don't want to, they would lose their 30% cut. But if they are forced to allow 3rd party app stores they would have to, if they wanted to continue their privacy focused marketing.

josephg 6y ago

Epic can't create an alternate store on iOS. At all. The headline feature of apple devices for me is that unlike Google, Apple cares about my privacy and security. Apple doesn't offer a devil's bargain with every first party feature. "We can turn this great new thing on - but in exchange, we're going to track your physical movements everywhere. We can turn this other thing on, but we'll record, save and send audio recordings of your life." Right now I have to decide between having control of my device but no control of my data (google). Or having control over my data but no control over my device (apple). That decision is crap. > I, as an end user, want Apple to have complete control over its platform Good for you. In comparison, I want to have more control over the devices I paid good money for. I don't want to live in a digital serfdom, where my only freedoms are those granted to me by the local lord of the cloud. I don't want accidentally offending an algorithm to result in banishment (google). Or, in Apple's case, for the local lord to tax and morally judge every trade that takes place under their watch. If you want to spend your life in Apple's walled garden, great! But I don't want owning the best phone to mean I'm trapped there with you. I demand to be able to enter into a voluntary financial agreement with Epic games if I like. I don't want my own phone to have the power to stop me or levy a tax, just so some Apple VP gets a bigger bonus.

leadingthenet 6y ago
> Epic can't create an alternate store on iOS. At all And I pray it stays that way. I’m sorry mate, but the reality of the situation is that your wishes mean nothing and Apple owes you zilch. You don’t like that, feel free to go somewhere else. You imposing your views on all of us is not freedom. It’s the opposite of that. You want open software? Linux is a thing, I should know, I use it every day. You want a walled garden? Well you should be able to have that choice, too. You want to take that away from me while pretending to do it for the greater good, when in reality it’s just a selfish desire to impose your will on others.
- josephg 6y ago
  >> Epic can't create an alternate store on iOS. At all > And I pray it stays that way. If Epic had an alternate app store, you know you wouldn't have to use it right? You could still use Apple's walled garden. Granting me the ability to run more software on my device doesn't restrict your ability to control what runs on your device. > it’s just a selfish desire to impose your will on others. You're the one arguing for restrictions about what I can do on my phone. I don't care what you do with yours. Nothing Epic is proposing would stop Apple from reviewing apps and selling them in the app store. And if opening the door to free and open marketplaces, with the user in the driver's seat is selfish, guilty as charged! Sign me up! The engine of capitalism works best with healthy competition. (And no, the phone megacorp duopoly is not healthy competition.) Reigning in monopolies is what healthy regulation is made for.
  - dmak 6y ago
    I don’t see how willingly deciding to use a closed platform and criticizing it for not being open and then asking the platform to open up affecting everyone else who also decided to use a close platform is logical.
    - josephg 6y ago
      The situation is that there's healthy competition between phone makers (Apple and Google/samsung/etc). If there was only one company making phones, that would be a monopoly and monopolies tend toward rent seeking extraction - which may require regulation, or consumers would have a bad time. Apple has a clear, technologically enforced, complete monopoly on apps distributed on their phones. And google has a weak monopoly on their phones - you can distribute your app on other app stores, but its difficult for everyone. The situation on Android is slightly worse than Microsoft distributing IE with windows. And when that happened, the feds initiated a huge antitrust case against microsoft and nearly broke up the company. Does the fact that there's competition in the phone market mean we should forgive monopolistic behaviour in the app markets on those phones? Thats a tricky question. Its too simple to just fall back on heuristics. Is there monopolistic behaviour in the app market? - Does the monopolistic provider use their position to block competition? Yes. Apple doesn't allow any competitors to their own software in the app store. - Does the monopolistic provider rent seek, and extract far more money from the market than they would if there was healthy competition? Uncertain - I'm not sure if 15% is a reasonable or unreasonable cut. 30% almost certainly wasn't reasonable for the services apple provided. - Do people buy phones mostly because of their app stores? If they do, then phone competition == app store competition. If they primarily choose a phone on other factors (cameras, etc) then these are separate markets and should be considered separately. Answer: ??? Is there a precedent? Its not exactly the same, but Australia didn't like telstra (an ISP who owned most of the cable at the time) renting their cables at unreasonable prices to other ISPs. They stopped anyone else from reasonably competing with them. You could make the same argument - "You willingly bought a house there so you can't complain. If you don't like it, move". But we regulated them anyway. Notably the US hasn't regulated comcast / etc from doing the same thing over there. Longer answer than you were expecting. tldr; its complicated. Heuristics aren't enough. Personally I don't think competition in phones means its acceptable that we have monopolies in app stores. I find the justifications for letting apple have a monopoly in the app store unconvincing and I favor regulation.

agiroth 6y ago

> I do not want sideloading, I do not want alternative stores, I do not want the so-called “healthy competition”. Good. Don't use them. Do you use every single feature of your phone? Of course not. There are probably features you don't even know about. So don't use them. The mere presence of the feature doesn't obligate you to use it.

leadingthenet 6y ago
The entire point is that it does. Opening up the walled garden isn’t “a feature”, it’s something that will completely, and irreversibly change the incentives on the platform. Why the hell should Facebook comply with Apple’s every whim and wish, if they could just publish on a different store with less stringent privacy rules, and force you to download it that way? “You want Facebook? Go to Settings -> Privacy, then uncheck the bla bla bla box, and install Fb Store. Then...”. Yeah, no, that’s my worst nightmare. Seriously, how do you people not get this?
- alickz 6y ago
  Privacy should be built into the OS, not rely on fallible human review. Not to mention a 3rd party app store could be even MORE privacy focused than Apple's App Store, if the market was there for it. There's no reason Apple can't enforce the same privacy options OS wide, even for sideloaded apps. Of course they don't want to, they would lose their 30% cut. But if they are forced to allow 3rd party app stores they would have to, if they wanted to continue their privacy focused marketing.