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Why is Apple the only entity capable of doing this in your mind? Why couldn’t we live in a world where Facebook can’t abuse you because you don’t want them to?

Why is Apple the only entity capable of doing this in your mind? Why couldn’t we live in a world where Facebook can’t abuse you because you don’t want them to? Apple fucked Facebook because iPhones only allow Apple the power to fuck Facebook. Meanwhile software history is full of examples of abusive corporations being put in their place by casual side projects. I don’t think this dichotomy is real, I think we could both have control of our devices and prevent facebook from stalking us, maybe even more effectively than Apple.

joshgachnang 3y ago
They're not the only one capable. But of the two mobile OS providers, they're the one that is.
rad_gruchalski 3y ago
Apple did that to Facebook because of their market position. Governments couldn’t do it, yet a hardware manufacturer could. And they could exactly thanks to the tight grip on the ecosystem.
- malwrar 3y ago
  Apple’s market position had nothing to do with it, just their ability to restrict Facebook’s app. Why couldn’t we do the same thing on an open platform through similar technical means? Whose to say that we couldn’t do it better?
  - rad_gruchalski 3y ago
    > Why couldn’t we do the same thing on an open platform through similar technical means? Whose to say that we couldn’t do it better? Exactly. Why? Because no other manufacturer who ships millions of devices an stays in control of their ecosystem was interested in this move. Millions of difficult to track iPhone users are still valuable to Facebook because they need MAUs. So Facebook had no choice but bend.
  - tonyarkles 3y ago
    > Why couldn’t we do the same thing on an open platform through similar technical means? Whose to say that we couldn’t do it better? Who is "we" in this sentence? Apple doesn't have a ton of secret sauce that allows them to screw advertisers over and protect privacy. What they do have is money. Google sells advertisements. Advertisers are their customers and they give their customers what they want. Apple sells hardware that happens to come with pretty decent software. The reason we don't have a truly open platform that solves this problem through similar technical means is... money. It costs a crap ton of money to design a great phone. It costs a crap ton more money to build the software for it. And there's really only two players in the game right now.
    - malwrar 3y ago
      > What they do have is money. …and the exclusive ability to determine what software runs on your phone and how it functions. Facebook can’t collect your data if they are prevented from collecting your data, but no one but Apple can do that because no one but Apple can technically restrict Facebook. > Who is "we" in this sentence? The broader technical community. Facebook’s app isn’t magical, it uses your phone’s OS features to stalk you and can be prevented from doing so through technical restrictions. Is this not precisely what Apple did? Facebook’s abuse exists at the mercy of its users under an open ecosystem. > It costs a crap ton of money to design a great phone. That’s why iPhones cost so much. I don’t see why they can’t just sell phones and let people decide on software if they want.
      - tonyarkles 3y ago
        > no one but Apple can technically restrict Facebook. There's nothing stopping Google from restricting Facebook other than... pissing off their advertisers. > I don’t see why they can’t just sell phones and let people decide on software if they want. I suspect a big part of it is that the intersection of (people who want to run their own OS) and (people who are willing to spend a lot of money on a device) is probably pretty small and would have a pretty high cost to support. Additionally, the secure boot chain end-to-end is part of the selling point here. On the Android side, I definitely know non-technical users that have jumped through a ton of hoops to enable developer mode so that they can install hacked APKs, only to discover later that those were actually full of malware. They followed random guides they found on a search engine to get themselves into that spot. With an iOS device, as is right now, it's pretty much impossible to get yourself into that situation.
- dontlaugh 3y ago
  Governments definitely could do it. Pass a law and imprison executives for not following it, as a simple example.
  - svachalek 3y ago
    In a dictatorship, sure. But what about countries where companies buy their representation fair and square?
  - spiderice 3y ago
    I really don't understand all the government worshippers in this thread bringing up how good the government is at solving problems they haven't solved for the last 50 years.
bobthepanda 3y ago
People seem to forget the history of cellular. Apple refused to let carriers bloat up phones with uninstallable shovelware that had been on every phone before them, and they only relented because it represented a market opportunity too big to ignore. It takes something the size of a corporation to fend off other corporations. And it’s not as if many have not tried and failed to break the phone OS duopoly; the walled garden aspect of iOS is a fairly small obstacle.
- 8ytecoder 3y ago
  Apple Pay had a similar uphill battle. So were OS releases - carriers would blame it on “network compatibility testing”. Apple fought them at every turn. If carriers had their way, iPhones would be irrelevant after 2 years because Apple can’t update the OS. Similarly if side loading was allowed, companies that skirt the rules would simply list them outside and incentivise people to use that version. Once they have enough traction they’ll kill the App Store version. Although Android apps surviving so far would be a counterpoint. (I personally prefer it and want side loading. I’m just saying I understand the need for the wall).
- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  > It takes something the size of a corporation to fend off other corporations. Wouldn't it be great if we had one of those? An organisation powerful enough to boss companies around, making it so companies didn't have to race-to-the-bottom to compete with each other, and we'd get to tell it what to do? The logistics might be a bit hard, though. We'd have to have some kind of large-scale organised vote, probably on a schedule of some kind. That might take a lot of resources to arrange, so either a lot of people would have to volunteer to work on it, or it would have to acquire money through some mechanism… We could vote on that, too. Hmm. There are actually quite a lot of things we'd have to vote for, thinking about it. Including which things to vote for! Most people wouldn't have time for all that, leaving the people who would as the ones calling the shots. So we'd need some mechanism for people to delegate their vote to somebody else: a representative of some kind. And those representatives could form groups – councils, perhaps? – to discuss and vote on matters relevant to the people they represent. Once we've got all that set up, though, it should be easy enough to get uninstallable bloatware banned from computation devices. Right?
garciasn 3y ago
I could roll my own or use an Android device that I rooted I suppose. The problem there is I have to use inferior hardware (IMO) and I won’t be able to as easily interoperate with my preferred laptop hardware and software. 30 years ago I had the time to fuck around with hardware and OSs. Work, kids, and life are more important to me now and I consider the options provided by Apple to be good enough and a solid middle ground for where I want to spend my time today.
derefr 3y ago
> Why couldn’t we live in a world where Facebook can’t abuse you because you don’t want them to? Unilateral bargaining power. Facebook is willing to write an app for iOS that doesn't track people as well as they'd like, because Apple is there on the other side of the table, with 40% market share, saying "do it our way or don't do it at all." Compare/contrast Windows PCs, where everything really is ultimately "whatever the user wants." You can arbitrarily modify the executables that run on your computer, sure. But can you get a modded game to let you play online, without running some Intel SGX rootkit that verifies the game's code signature and watches every HID input you make to ensure you're not cheating? No, you can't — because despite owning the PC itself that the software is running on, you don't have a negotiating position that enables you to tell the company that runs the servers that that game connects to for online play, to allow a non-rootkit-monitored version of their game client to connect to them.
- midoridensha 3y ago
  If you don't like rootkit-monitored games on your PC, it's really simple: don't install them. No one is forcing you to buy and use those games.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    Nah. We'll defeat their monitoring and have fun on our terms. It's offensive that they even think they can dictate what can or can't happen on our machines. The audacity of these corporations.
  - LexGray 3y ago
    That would be easier if there was a required nutrition label "Requires root access which will not be revoked on uninstall", "requires background services when app is not running", "shares telemetry with developer". That is far from the world we are in and the budget tech has to defeat any law that would attempt to implement those protections. As it is many developers seem not to care if whatever frameworks they use are affecting system integrity or stability if it would generally not be noticed by the end user. Most users are going to need a trustworthy gatekeeper why can make some of these evaluations so you do not need extensive research just to play a game. Not to say I agree with the position Apple appears to be taking here on not allowing macOS apps to run directly on the device, and not allowing it to function as a display for every device in the home. For single people in small spaces who currently burn wall space for monitors and televisions or just do not like big black slabs in their living space this could have been a useful gizmo.
scarface_74 3y ago
So by 2011 - Apple was the most valuable company (founded in 1977) - Microsoft had been in the top 5 most valuable companies since 2000 (founded in the 70s) - Facebook was already dominant - Amazon was dominant in online retail (founded in the 90s) - Google was the dominant search engine. (Founded in 1998) Which startup or “side project” has had a meaningful impact since 2010? And been successful and profitable? Before you mention OpenAI, it’s only surviving because of the deep discount it gets on compute from Microsoft. As far as phones the current market is littered with race to the bottom barely profitable Android phones. Samsung, the only successful Android manufacture, has been around since 1938. The entire VC market has been a Ponzi scheme since 2010 where all of the value was captured before the company went public.
- jrumbut 3y ago
  2010 is still pretty recent, where was Apple in 1990? If someone said they would become the largest company in the world because they manufactured premium telephones, offered a replacement to cable TV, and were one of the few remaining Unix vendors that would surprise anyone you told it to including any Apple employee or executive.
  - criddell 3y ago
    > one of the few remaining Unix vendors I haven’t thought about this before - who are the others?
    - nordsieck 3y ago
      > I haven’t thought about this before - who are the others? All of the workstation vendors: IBM, HP, Dec/Compaq/HP, SGI, Sun. I don't think any of these are particularly popular, but AIX (IBM) and Solaris (Sun) are probably more popular than the others. I wouldn't be surprised if IRIX (SGI) is totally dead. And funnily enough, Microsoft. Although they sold Xenix to Sco. I think it's in a lot of POS devices (so probably dying to iPad installs). Edit: Oops - just realized that "Dec/Compaq/HP" probably doesn't belong in the list. I guess technically there was Tru64 Unix, but everyone I've ever heard of who ran Alpha boxes used VMS.
dspillett 3y ago
> Why is Apple the only entity capable of doing this in your mind? Others are capable, they just don't take the same pride in their devices to bother making the effort. They are a mix of happy taking part in the race to the bottom, not wanting to harm stalkers because their own business model is partly or wholly reliant on such stalking, and in some cases both. Not just in the phone market either: look at MS slowly turning Windows into a glorified as platform, the way IoT devices try to lock you in to being followed around your daily life, etc. I'm no fan of Apple or their devices overall, but on this they deserve credit IMO. Even accounting for the fact I know they'd be playing the other game if advertising were more important to them than their key competitor in at least one market.

joshgachnang 3y ago

They're not the only one capable. But of the two mobile OS providers, they're the one that is.

rad_gruchalski 3y ago

Apple did that to Facebook because of their market position. Governments couldn’t do it, yet a hardware manufacturer could. And they could exactly thanks to the tight grip on the ecosystem.

malwrar 3y ago
Apple’s market position had nothing to do with it, just their ability to restrict Facebook’s app. Why couldn’t we do the same thing on an open platform through similar technical means? Whose to say that we couldn’t do it better?
- rad_gruchalski 3y ago
  > Why couldn’t we do the same thing on an open platform through similar technical means? Whose to say that we couldn’t do it better? Exactly. Why? Because no other manufacturer who ships millions of devices an stays in control of their ecosystem was interested in this move. Millions of difficult to track iPhone users are still valuable to Facebook because they need MAUs. So Facebook had no choice but bend.
- tonyarkles 3y ago
  > Why couldn’t we do the same thing on an open platform through similar technical means? Whose to say that we couldn’t do it better? Who is "we" in this sentence? Apple doesn't have a ton of secret sauce that allows them to screw advertisers over and protect privacy. What they do have is money. Google sells advertisements. Advertisers are their customers and they give their customers what they want. Apple sells hardware that happens to come with pretty decent software. The reason we don't have a truly open platform that solves this problem through similar technical means is... money. It costs a crap ton of money to design a great phone. It costs a crap ton more money to build the software for it. And there's really only two players in the game right now.
  - malwrar 3y ago
    > What they do have is money. …and the exclusive ability to determine what software runs on your phone and how it functions. Facebook can’t collect your data if they are prevented from collecting your data, but no one but Apple can do that because no one but Apple can technically restrict Facebook. > Who is "we" in this sentence? The broader technical community. Facebook’s app isn’t magical, it uses your phone’s OS features to stalk you and can be prevented from doing so through technical restrictions. Is this not precisely what Apple did? Facebook’s abuse exists at the mercy of its users under an open ecosystem. > It costs a crap ton of money to design a great phone. That’s why iPhones cost so much. I don’t see why they can’t just sell phones and let people decide on software if they want.
    - tonyarkles 3y ago
      > no one but Apple can technically restrict Facebook. There's nothing stopping Google from restricting Facebook other than... pissing off their advertisers. > I don’t see why they can’t just sell phones and let people decide on software if they want. I suspect a big part of it is that the intersection of (people who want to run their own OS) and (people who are willing to spend a lot of money on a device) is probably pretty small and would have a pretty high cost to support. Additionally, the secure boot chain end-to-end is part of the selling point here. On the Android side, I definitely know non-technical users that have jumped through a ton of hoops to enable developer mode so that they can install hacked APKs, only to discover later that those were actually full of malware. They followed random guides they found on a search engine to get themselves into that spot. With an iOS device, as is right now, it's pretty much impossible to get yourself into that situation.
dontlaugh 3y ago
Governments definitely could do it. Pass a law and imprison executives for not following it, as a simple example.
- svachalek 3y ago
  In a dictatorship, sure. But what about countries where companies buy their representation fair and square?
- spiderice 3y ago
  I really don't understand all the government worshippers in this thread bringing up how good the government is at solving problems they haven't solved for the last 50 years.

bobthepanda 3y ago

People seem to forget the history of cellular. Apple refused to let carriers bloat up phones with uninstallable shovelware that had been on every phone before them, and they only relented because it represented a market opportunity too big to ignore. It takes something the size of a corporation to fend off other corporations. And it’s not as if many have not tried and failed to break the phone OS duopoly; the walled garden aspect of iOS is a fairly small obstacle.

8ytecoder 3y ago
Apple Pay had a similar uphill battle. So were OS releases - carriers would blame it on “network compatibility testing”. Apple fought them at every turn. If carriers had their way, iPhones would be irrelevant after 2 years because Apple can’t update the OS. Similarly if side loading was allowed, companies that skirt the rules would simply list them outside and incentivise people to use that version. Once they have enough traction they’ll kill the App Store version. Although Android apps surviving so far would be a counterpoint. (I personally prefer it and want side loading. I’m just saying I understand the need for the wall).
wizzwizz4 3y ago
> It takes something the size of a corporation to fend off other corporations. Wouldn't it be great if we had one of those? An organisation powerful enough to boss companies around, making it so companies didn't have to race-to-the-bottom to compete with each other, and we'd get to tell it what to do? The logistics might be a bit hard, though. We'd have to have some kind of large-scale organised vote, probably on a schedule of some kind. That might take a lot of resources to arrange, so either a lot of people would have to volunteer to work on it, or it would have to acquire money through some mechanism… We could vote on that, too. Hmm. There are actually quite a lot of things we'd have to vote for, thinking about it. Including which things to vote for! Most people wouldn't have time for all that, leaving the people who would as the ones calling the shots. So we'd need some mechanism for people to delegate their vote to somebody else: a representative of some kind. And those representatives could form groups – councils, perhaps? – to discuss and vote on matters relevant to the people they represent. Once we've got all that set up, though, it should be easy enough to get uninstallable bloatware banned from computation devices. Right?

garciasn 3y ago

I could roll my own or use an Android device that I rooted I suppose. The problem there is I have to use inferior hardware (IMO) and I won’t be able to as easily interoperate with my preferred laptop hardware and software. 30 years ago I had the time to fuck around with hardware and OSs. Work, kids, and life are more important to me now and I consider the options provided by Apple to be good enough and a solid middle ground for where I want to spend my time today.

derefr 3y ago

> Why couldn’t we live in a world where Facebook can’t abuse you because you don’t want them to? Unilateral bargaining power. Facebook is willing to write an app for iOS that doesn't track people as well as they'd like, because Apple is there on the other side of the table, with 40% market share, saying "do it our way or don't do it at all." Compare/contrast Windows PCs, where everything really is ultimately "whatever the user wants." You can arbitrarily modify the executables that run on your computer, sure. But can you get a modded game to let you play online, without running some Intel SGX rootkit that verifies the game's code signature and watches every HID input you make to ensure you're not cheating? No, you can't — because despite owning the PC itself that the software is running on, you don't have a negotiating position that enables you to tell the company that runs the servers that that game connects to for online play, to allow a non-rootkit-monitored version of their game client to connect to them.

midoridensha 3y ago
If you don't like rootkit-monitored games on your PC, it's really simple: don't install them. No one is forcing you to buy and use those games.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  Nah. We'll defeat their monitoring and have fun on our terms. It's offensive that they even think they can dictate what can or can't happen on our machines. The audacity of these corporations.
- LexGray 3y ago
  That would be easier if there was a required nutrition label "Requires root access which will not be revoked on uninstall", "requires background services when app is not running", "shares telemetry with developer". That is far from the world we are in and the budget tech has to defeat any law that would attempt to implement those protections. As it is many developers seem not to care if whatever frameworks they use are affecting system integrity or stability if it would generally not be noticed by the end user. Most users are going to need a trustworthy gatekeeper why can make some of these evaluations so you do not need extensive research just to play a game. Not to say I agree with the position Apple appears to be taking here on not allowing macOS apps to run directly on the device, and not allowing it to function as a display for every device in the home. For single people in small spaces who currently burn wall space for monitors and televisions or just do not like big black slabs in their living space this could have been a useful gizmo.

scarface_74 3y ago

So by 2011 - Apple was the most valuable company (founded in 1977) - Microsoft had been in the top 5 most valuable companies since 2000 (founded in the 70s) - Facebook was already dominant - Amazon was dominant in online retail (founded in the 90s) - Google was the dominant search engine. (Founded in 1998) Which startup or “side project” has had a meaningful impact since 2010? And been successful and profitable? Before you mention OpenAI, it’s only surviving because of the deep discount it gets on compute from Microsoft. As far as phones the current market is littered with race to the bottom barely profitable Android phones. Samsung, the only successful Android manufacture, has been around since 1938. The entire VC market has been a Ponzi scheme since 2010 where all of the value was captured before the company went public.

jrumbut 3y ago
2010 is still pretty recent, where was Apple in 1990? If someone said they would become the largest company in the world because they manufactured premium telephones, offered a replacement to cable TV, and were one of the few remaining Unix vendors that would surprise anyone you told it to including any Apple employee or executive.
- criddell 3y ago
  > one of the few remaining Unix vendors I haven’t thought about this before - who are the others?
  - nordsieck 3y ago
    > I haven’t thought about this before - who are the others? All of the workstation vendors: IBM, HP, Dec/Compaq/HP, SGI, Sun. I don't think any of these are particularly popular, but AIX (IBM) and Solaris (Sun) are probably more popular than the others. I wouldn't be surprised if IRIX (SGI) is totally dead. And funnily enough, Microsoft. Although they sold Xenix to Sco. I think it's in a lot of POS devices (so probably dying to iPad installs). Edit: Oops - just realized that "Dec/Compaq/HP" probably doesn't belong in the list. I guess technically there was Tru64 Unix, but everyone I've ever heard of who ran Alpha boxes used VMS.

dspillett 3y ago

> Why is Apple the only entity capable of doing this in your mind? Others are capable, they just don't take the same pride in their devices to bother making the effort. They are a mix of happy taking part in the race to the bottom, not wanting to harm stalkers because their own business model is partly or wholly reliant on such stalking, and in some cases both. Not just in the phone market either: look at MS slowly turning Windows into a glorified as platform, the way IoT devices try to lock you in to being followed around your daily life, etc. I'm no fan of Apple or their devices overall, but on this they deserve credit IMO. Even accounting for the fact I know they'd be playing the other game if advertising were more important to them than their key competitor in at least one market.