5 ms·

I wonder why Apple doesn't open up their platforms to have everything best on their devices instead of fighting and agonising developers and governments. Yes ye

by mrtksn 3y ago

I wonder why Apple doesn't open up their platforms to have everything best on their devices instead of fighting and agonising developers and governments. Yes yes, the commission is nice but they might be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. I mean, Apple is amazingly good in some areas but in some other areas their products are used only because they don't give a choice and they intent to keep it this way. They also want to control everything and provide all the services. A bit short sighted and futile IMHO because the competition is catching up with their user experience but Apple doesn't catch up as quickly with the "smart" bits of the modern tech. I recall a Steve Jobs speech about Apple doing a few things %20 better and other things worse and how he intents to change this by embracing the industry standards because they simply can't do everything by themselves. I feel like Apple is doing the same mistake again where their products are becoming slightly better at few things and worse in others simply because you can't have the better stuff installed on Apple devices.

Brian_K_White 3y ago
Steve hated industry standards. The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash. Every iphone user was reminded daily about how kneecapped it is when they can't pull up the web site for the restaursnt to check hours or call up for a reservation. That kind of life experience was his entire focus and his showpiece product failed utterly at it. And so he said flash is bad and html5 and pwa is the better way to do what flash does. Since then they only say anything even slightly similar only as a defense against monopoly charges about native apps "what? you can use pwas" but only on Safari and castrated functionality. If Steve could have sold a product that didn't even use the same tcp/ip and html as everyone else, he would have. The only time he allowed the tiniest shred of interoperability is when there is no way to sell the product without it.
- mrtksn 3y ago
  Maybe the word he used wasn't "industry standards", I couldn't find the video now. The idea of the speech was that you can't do everything by yourself because you have just this much capacity and if you stretch yourself too much you end up with overall worse experience even if you do some things better. I think he was explaining why he is abandoning some internal Apple projects in favour of the established ones made by others.
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    Right but the point is he never said such things sincerely, only ever in service to some goal. He absolutely could not stand to share anything. But he could say anything necessary to attain goals.
- fancyham 3y ago
  Flash WAS crappy - it had so many vulnerabilities (and probably would have run terribly on the early iPhones) Just as importantly, Apple and Steve learned not to rely on someone else’s technology. PowerPC and all that (when Motorola stopped keeping up with Intel and Apple suffered) Look at things through this lens and their behavior over the past decade makes a lot of sense.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - serf 3y ago
    flash was crappy, had poor compatibility and tons of vulnerabilities but it was replaced with.. nothing. and there is still a gap in that market for novice creators that all the webgl/html5/toolkit-of-the-week has yet to cater towards. Jobs interest in bad-mouthing it in the early days had more to do with cutting development costs on his side, if flash and adobe is the devil there is no need to spend time and effort developing compatibility layers for it, and it's a chance to wedge the populous towards a solution he can control more closely. 'vulnerabilities' was just the talking point he used to do so.
    - musiccog 3y ago
      > but it was replaced with.. nothing. and there is still a gap in that market for novice creators that all the webgl/html5/toolkit-of-the-week has yet to cater towards. The reason Flash (and Director before it) was so popular is that it had a very low barrier to entry for creatives. I still miss Director because of how easy it was to quickly create cross platform apps that could do just about anything.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    > Flash WAS crappy - it had so many vulnerabilities (and probably would have run terribly on the early iPhones) Flash was the great battery killer. I hated it on laptops. I'd have hated it on phones if it were available. I even hated it on desktops because it made the fans turn up. Sometimes more than a proper 3d native game that used all the hardware you could throw at it. Of course now we have Javascript and Unity games on the native side so we just changed what screws us up.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > Steve hated industry standards. > The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash. NeXTSTEP, the Steve Jobs thing that got renamed as Mac OS X when Apple bought it, was based on BSD Unix. In the early 2000s, Apple produced and used a lot of open standards. "Darwin" was open source. Bonjour is mDNS. Apple developed CUPS and open sourced it. Then they got big and greedy and stopped.
  - pvg 3y ago
    The BSD use in there wasn't because of love of standards but permissive licensing. Apple didn't develop CUPS. Apple's relationship with 'standards' has always been pretty complicated although it's mostly worked out for them.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      They used BSD because then it could run Unix/POSIX applications instead of the ~0 third party applications that would have existed for a new operating system. Apple hired the maintainer of CUPS and provided the resources necessary to make it good enough for the publishing market, while continuing to publish the source code. They had enough involvement in RFCs 5227, 5387, 6761, 6762 and 6886, among others, for their company name to be listed in the RFC.
      - pvg 3y ago
        The Unix 'applications' they got for free. The OS itself shipped with a bunch of apps plus the various bits and pieces that now form the Voltron of Xcode and those were all Nextstep apps. Did the Unix part help to market the thing as a workstation? Sure. But, again, this wasn't for love of standards. The actual machine didn't ship with X11. Next didn't, I dunno, join Motif or whatever. The thing was one of the more non-standard workstations around.
        AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        X11 shipped on the OS X install discs.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  So now the truth. Adobe claimed that if Apple had let them, they could have gotten Flash running on the first iPhone that had 128Kb of RAM and a 400Mhz processor. Safari could barely run on the phone. If you scrolled fast, you would get a checkerbox while waiting for the page to render. When Adobe did finally bring Flash to mobile in 2010-2011 on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM and it still ran badly. An iPhone with similar specs didn’t come out until 2011. The iMac came with only USB in 1997 before most PCs fully adopted it. The original iPod played MP3s and later AAC files and even later standard H.264 and MPegs files. The original iPhone only supported HTML5.
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    An Andoid user could actually afford a phone that could run flash.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      Well, the high end phones in 2011 that could run Flash…badly… in 2011 were the same cost as iPhones.
- misnome 3y ago
  > That kind of life experience was his entire focus and his showpiece product failed utterly at it As did every other phone and tablet ecosystem, even the ones that tried to add flash. Turns out it was bloated, slow, insecure and battery hungry - all the reasons he stated!
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    He was always willing to use any true fact that served his goal. A rational position is different from a rationalization, even though they both involve making a rational statement along the way.
- JimDabell 3y ago
  > Steve hated industry standards. > The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash. This is wildly inaccurate. Flash was never anywhere near that popular and it wasn’t an industry standard. The industry standards were HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and sites that used those were way more common than sites that ran on Flash. We’re not talking a lot more common, we’re talking at least 30–40x as common. Flash-only sites were an annoying but small minority. The iPhone was the first phone with excellent support for the HTML/CSS/JavaScript industry standards. It literally changed the web development industry it was that good. In 2007, mobile sites tended to sit on m.example.com separate from the main site, and use WAP/WML. The “really good” ones had a severely cut back plain HTML version. None used Flash, that wasn’t even a factor on mobile at all. Then along comes the iPhone with Mobile Safari. Practically overnight, people were asking for “iPhone-compatible” websites to be built, which were really just normal websites with CSS media queries to offer a mobile-friendly layout. That’s what Steve Jobs was talking about when he was describing a “desktop-class web browser” in his keynote speech. And because WebKit was open-source, all the other smartphones started using it and got the same capabilities. In the space of a year or two, the mobile web transformed from something virtually nobody wanted to something useful and fun – all using industry standard HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Ignoring the fact that Flash was terrible quality, which other people have responded to, that whole era of the iPhone is practically defined by Steve Jobs betting hard on industry standards instead of Flash and other proprietary stuff.
izacus 3y ago
It is incredibly hard to change a culture of a corporation. Apple is not a thinking human, it's a bunch of people that have their own egos, preferences and wishes. It may not even be currently feasible to propose an idea like you have because the person doing so would be unpopular internally in Cupertino. Culture is hard. This is why you see corporations and businesses fail constantly despite "obvious" choices being ahead of them.
amelius 3y ago
The point is not to create the best possible user experience. Apple's goal is to build the best possible vending machine and put it in all our pockets.
pornel 3y ago
Tim Cook’s Apple is all about increasing the Services Revenue. The line has to go up. Apple exists for their shareholders, not users.
- Terretta 3y ago
  > The line has to go up. Apple exists for their shareholders, not users. Who does Epic exist for? This "they exist for the shareholders" is an argument that cancels itself out, as it's true of all firms. So you have to look at who's next on the list. Is the company for people looking to place ads? Is the company for publishers of games? Who is it for?
  - antisthenes 3y ago
    #1 is major shareholders #2 is senior management and senior employees (so minor shareholders and OG value creators) #3 is probably a tossup between regular employees and customers, e.g. doing the bare minimum not to alienate either one.
  - ben-schaaf 3y ago
    Epic is privately owned with Tim Sweeney having a majority. One man's whim is a lot more dynamic than a mass of public shareholders' expectations.
  - pornel 3y ago
    For a while Apple existed for Steve to make products he’s proud of. I have a very deep resentment for the App Store, because that was a turning point towards controlling the platform, and start of a feudal relationship with developers. They’ve went from (half-assed) open source efforts to outright banning GPL completely. They’ve went from trying to use open protocols to putting DRM throughout entire stack on everything they could. Apple has been high margin company with expensive products, but arguably worth the cost if you appreciated their style and attention to detail. But the OS and services side has shifted to just extracting as much money as they can, because they can. Their 27% cut on purchases made outside of iOS is just pure greed and spite.
Apocryphon 3y ago
I've argued before that Apple should've semi-opened up iOS in a way that they could manage it to their interests. Now they've forced the hand of regulators to do it instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32170848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32170848
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  it didnt work for google, who is also in the sights of regulators despite having a considerbly more semi-open OS
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    Maybe it would've delayed this for longer- less of a casus belli for the likes of Epic. Apple was lucky for avoiding App Store scrutiny for over a decade.
  - dugite-code 3y ago
    It's arguable that one of the issues Android has in this regard is it has become less open as time goes by, making it look just as bad in regulatory eyes. More locked down and more core functionality being put into proprietary apps in the play store in the name of timely updates, they could have achived the same effect with open source apps in the play store but chose not to. Yes they are now quickly pivoting to allow side-loading to be simplified but if the EU wasn't cracking down on such things I imaging they would have eventually removed side loading in it's entirety.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Workaccount2 3y ago
If there is an anti-culture youth movement against iPhones, apple will be in serious trouble. Their revenue is heavily dependent on selling iphones and people using the app store.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Fortunately for Apple, there definitely is not a movement against iPhones. If anything, the youth associate status with iphones, and if you don't have one you are a loser deserving ridicule. My kids have stopped asking as they know I'm not going to give Apple any of my money, but for a very long time they begged for iphones because kids made fun of them for "having a droid." Today's youth are definitely not the rebellious counter-culture youth from my younger days. They are very much conformists.* *Speaking very generally of course, and only from anecdotal experience which is a very small slice of the market that my kids know
  - Workaccount2 3y ago
    Kids are fickle and run with trends though. Apple has a good foothold, for sure, but banking on teenagers to carry your banner is an idea that would have me sweating. Older people tend to care much less about what phone they have, and care much less about upgrading.
    - freedomben 3y ago
      Yes fair points all around. It's quite possible that 10 years from now the youth are rebellious again and could cause quite a stir.
  - kbf 3y ago
    >Today's youth are definitely not the rebellious counter-culture youth from my younger days. They absolutely are, you have just become part of the culture they’re countering. Of course there’s conformity within a group or it wouldn’t really exist, but the main reason young people are so turned off by Android phones is that they are mainly associated with older family members who wanted to save a few bucks and substantially compromised on utility in the process. I’m in my 20s and I know this from experience, my mom gets substantially more utility out of her iPhone than my dad who’s an order of magnitude more technologically literate gets out of his Android phone. It doesn’t matter to teenagers that an Android phone could be as good as their iPhone when the optics are so bad. It doesn’t help that, for them, there isn’t a meaningful difference between the platforms beyond price and maybe piracy either. The actual movement among youth against iPhones is against phones in general, it’s a trend to use “dumbphones” because many feel smartphones are taking too much space in their lives.
doctorpangloss 3y ago
> embracing the industry standards The iPhone has legendary levels of crapitude. Consider every app you use on the iPhone that is authored by Apple. Would you or its stakeholders still use it if you weren't forced to? Mail? Calendar? Safari? Photos? Music? Fucking Messages? No, no, no, no, no, no. Don't misunderstand me. I am talking about access to the exact same first party APIs and integrations Apple's software has, and giving it to third party developers. The functionality is so painfully basic, but nonetheless gated, of course a third party would be able to author something better. Like you think Spotify wouldn't give you Siri compatibility? It's just not allowed to. The App Store is just the crappiest of them all. I don't think people realize how fees and its absolutely horrible discovery is responsible for the shitty state of apps today. I have been in this business a long time, and have met a lot of people, and it is absolutely, 100% Apple's fault that App Store games suck, and Steam's don't. The device is as powerful as a Nintendo Switch nowadays!
- mrtksn 3y ago
  Safari, Photos and Music are apps that I legitimately like and enjoy using. I wouldn't use anything else. I'm generally happy iPhone user. From Apple's offerings, the one I don't like is iCloud because lacks any granularity whatsoever. I want my photos synced but I don't want to waste my space and bandwidth with the videos. I also would like to have full API access to everything so I can experiment with stuff. Also I want to be able to re-purpose my old iPhone but its too much locked down for the things I would like to do. However, I'm generally very pleased. I can't stand the Android experience, honestly.
  - doctorpangloss 3y ago
    > I can't stand the Android experience, honestly. The average Android phone is like $180. You can't stand cheap phones, which is legit, but that's what "Android" is. I don't know if this is in the zeitgeist yet. People spend more on a pair of airpods as people spend on a whole Android phone. That works because 10% of a $1,400 phone is $140. It doesn't work when 10% of $180 is $18. Where is there space for a third party ecosystem if there's only $18 on the table? Android users used to be 2.5x less valuable than iOS, and maybe it's closer to 5x-10x now. This is essentially Apple's value proposition to developers: "We have the rich users." And it's true, that's valuable. But do they deserve 30% of every transaction, to the most disfavorable agents in every software category? The way Apple and Steam conduct themselves is apples to oranges. > Safari, Photos and Music The Photos app is profoundly shitty. Lightroom Classic is like 13 years old now. How long did we have to wait for Lightroom Classic's 2009 featureset? The sharing features are abysmal. Why not open the API to the same shared photos backend Photos uses? Apple doesn't charge for access to the API, it charges users for storage - what difference does it make to them? It only matters because they are smart people, they know their software sucks, and if they allowed that level of compatibility, people would immediately abandon Photos, and yes, there would be a cross compatible Photos-like experience with Android and desktops, it would be superior, and it would harm Apple's primary idea of forcing people to use their trash.

by mrtksn 3y ago

Brian_K_White 3y ago

Steve hated industry standards. The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash. Every iphone user was reminded daily about how kneecapped it is when they can't pull up the web site for the restaursnt to check hours or call up for a reservation. That kind of life experience was his entire focus and his showpiece product failed utterly at it. And so he said flash is bad and html5 and pwa is the better way to do what flash does. Since then they only say anything even slightly similar only as a defense against monopoly charges about native apps "what? you can use pwas" but only on Safari and castrated functionality. If Steve could have sold a product that didn't even use the same tcp/ip and html as everyone else, he would have. The only time he allowed the tiniest shred of interoperability is when there is no way to sell the product without it.

mrtksn 3y ago
Maybe the word he used wasn't "industry standards", I couldn't find the video now. The idea of the speech was that you can't do everything by yourself because you have just this much capacity and if you stretch yourself too much you end up with overall worse experience even if you do some things better. I think he was explaining why he is abandoning some internal Apple projects in favour of the established ones made by others.
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  Right but the point is he never said such things sincerely, only ever in service to some goal. He absolutely could not stand to share anything. But he could say anything necessary to attain goals.
fancyham 3y ago
Flash WAS crappy - it had so many vulnerabilities (and probably would have run terribly on the early iPhones) Just as importantly, Apple and Steve learned not to rely on someone else’s technology. PowerPC and all that (when Motorola stopped keeping up with Intel and Apple suffered) Look at things through this lens and their behavior over the past decade makes a lot of sense.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- serf 3y ago
  flash was crappy, had poor compatibility and tons of vulnerabilities but it was replaced with.. nothing. and there is still a gap in that market for novice creators that all the webgl/html5/toolkit-of-the-week has yet to cater towards. Jobs interest in bad-mouthing it in the early days had more to do with cutting development costs on his side, if flash and adobe is the devil there is no need to spend time and effort developing compatibility layers for it, and it's a chance to wedge the populous towards a solution he can control more closely. 'vulnerabilities' was just the talking point he used to do so.
  - musiccog 3y ago
    > but it was replaced with.. nothing. and there is still a gap in that market for novice creators that all the webgl/html5/toolkit-of-the-week has yet to cater towards. The reason Flash (and Director before it) was so popular is that it had a very low barrier to entry for creatives. I still miss Director because of how easy it was to quickly create cross platform apps that could do just about anything.
- nottorp 3y ago
  > Flash WAS crappy - it had so many vulnerabilities (and probably would have run terribly on the early iPhones) Flash was the great battery killer. I hated it on laptops. I'd have hated it on phones if it were available. I even hated it on desktops because it made the fans turn up. Sometimes more than a proper 3d native game that used all the hardware you could throw at it. Of course now we have Javascript and Unity games on the native side so we just changed what screws us up.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> Steve hated industry standards. > The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash. NeXTSTEP, the Steve Jobs thing that got renamed as Mac OS X when Apple bought it, was based on BSD Unix. In the early 2000s, Apple produced and used a lot of open standards. "Darwin" was open source. Bonjour is mDNS. Apple developed CUPS and open sourced it. Then they got big and greedy and stopped.
- pvg 3y ago
  The BSD use in there wasn't because of love of standards but permissive licensing. Apple didn't develop CUPS. Apple's relationship with 'standards' has always been pretty complicated although it's mostly worked out for them.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    They used BSD because then it could run Unix/POSIX applications instead of the ~0 third party applications that would have existed for a new operating system. Apple hired the maintainer of CUPS and provided the resources necessary to make it good enough for the publishing market, while continuing to publish the source code. They had enough involvement in RFCs 5227, 5387, 6761, 6762 and 6886, among others, for their company name to be listed in the RFC.
    - pvg 3y ago
      The Unix 'applications' they got for free. The OS itself shipped with a bunch of apps plus the various bits and pieces that now form the Voltron of Xcode and those were all Nextstep apps. Did the Unix part help to market the thing as a workstation? Sure. But, again, this wasn't for love of standards. The actual machine didn't ship with X11. Next didn't, I dunno, join Motif or whatever. The thing was one of the more non-standard workstations around.
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        X11 shipped on the OS X install discs.
scarface_74 3y ago
So now the truth. Adobe claimed that if Apple had let them, they could have gotten Flash running on the first iPhone that had 128Kb of RAM and a 400Mhz processor. Safari could barely run on the phone. If you scrolled fast, you would get a checkerbox while waiting for the page to render. When Adobe did finally bring Flash to mobile in 2010-2011 on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM and it still ran badly. An iPhone with similar specs didn’t come out until 2011. The iMac came with only USB in 1997 before most PCs fully adopted it. The original iPod played MP3s and later AAC files and even later standard H.264 and MPegs files. The original iPhone only supported HTML5.
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  An Andoid user could actually afford a phone that could run flash.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Well, the high end phones in 2011 that could run Flash…badly… in 2011 were the same cost as iPhones.
misnome 3y ago
> That kind of life experience was his entire focus and his showpiece product failed utterly at it As did every other phone and tablet ecosystem, even the ones that tried to add flash. Turns out it was bloated, slow, insecure and battery hungry - all the reasons he stated!
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  He was always willing to use any true fact that served his goal. A rational position is different from a rationalization, even though they both involve making a rational statement along the way.
JimDabell 3y ago
> Steve hated industry standards. > The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash. This is wildly inaccurate. Flash was never anywhere near that popular and it wasn’t an industry standard. The industry standards were HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and sites that used those were way more common than sites that ran on Flash. We’re not talking a lot more common, we’re talking at least 30–40x as common. Flash-only sites were an annoying but small minority. The iPhone was the first phone with excellent support for the HTML/CSS/JavaScript industry standards. It literally changed the web development industry it was that good. In 2007, mobile sites tended to sit on m.example.com separate from the main site, and use WAP/WML. The “really good” ones had a severely cut back plain HTML version. None used Flash, that wasn’t even a factor on mobile at all. Then along comes the iPhone with Mobile Safari. Practically overnight, people were asking for “iPhone-compatible” websites to be built, which were really just normal websites with CSS media queries to offer a mobile-friendly layout. That’s what Steve Jobs was talking about when he was describing a “desktop-class web browser” in his keynote speech. And because WebKit was open-source, all the other smartphones started using it and got the same capabilities. In the space of a year or two, the mobile web transformed from something virtually nobody wanted to something useful and fun – all using industry standard HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Ignoring the fact that Flash was terrible quality, which other people have responded to, that whole era of the iPhone is practically defined by Steve Jobs betting hard on industry standards instead of Flash and other proprietary stuff.

izacus 3y ago

It is incredibly hard to change a culture of a corporation. Apple is not a thinking human, it's a bunch of people that have their own egos, preferences and wishes. It may not even be currently feasible to propose an idea like you have because the person doing so would be unpopular internally in Cupertino. Culture is hard. This is why you see corporations and businesses fail constantly despite "obvious" choices being ahead of them.

amelius 3y ago

The point is not to create the best possible user experience. Apple's goal is to build the best possible vending machine and put it in all our pockets.

pornel 3y ago

Tim Cook’s Apple is all about increasing the Services Revenue. The line has to go up. Apple exists for their shareholders, not users.

Terretta 3y ago
> The line has to go up. Apple exists for their shareholders, not users. Who does Epic exist for? This "they exist for the shareholders" is an argument that cancels itself out, as it's true of all firms. So you have to look at who's next on the list. Is the company for people looking to place ads? Is the company for publishers of games? Who is it for?
- antisthenes 3y ago
  #1 is major shareholders #2 is senior management and senior employees (so minor shareholders and OG value creators) #3 is probably a tossup between regular employees and customers, e.g. doing the bare minimum not to alienate either one.
- ben-schaaf 3y ago
  Epic is privately owned with Tim Sweeney having a majority. One man's whim is a lot more dynamic than a mass of public shareholders' expectations.
- pornel 3y ago
  For a while Apple existed for Steve to make products he’s proud of. I have a very deep resentment for the App Store, because that was a turning point towards controlling the platform, and start of a feudal relationship with developers. They’ve went from (half-assed) open source efforts to outright banning GPL completely. They’ve went from trying to use open protocols to putting DRM throughout entire stack on everything they could. Apple has been high margin company with expensive products, but arguably worth the cost if you appreciated their style and attention to detail. But the OS and services side has shifted to just extracting as much money as they can, because they can. Their 27% cut on purchases made outside of iOS is just pure greed and spite.

Apocryphon 3y ago

I've argued before that Apple should've semi-opened up iOS in a way that they could manage it to their interests. Now they've forced the hand of regulators to do it instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32170848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32170848

whimsicalism 3y ago
it didnt work for google, who is also in the sights of regulators despite having a considerbly more semi-open OS
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  Maybe it would've delayed this for longer- less of a casus belli for the likes of Epic. Apple was lucky for avoiding App Store scrutiny for over a decade.
- dugite-code 3y ago
  It's arguable that one of the issues Android has in this regard is it has become less open as time goes by, making it look just as bad in regulatory eyes. More locked down and more core functionality being put into proprietary apps in the play store in the name of timely updates, they could have achived the same effect with open source apps in the play store but chose not to. Yes they are now quickly pivoting to allow side-loading to be simplified but if the EU wasn't cracking down on such things I imaging they would have eventually removed side loading in it's entirety.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Workaccount2 3y ago

If there is an anti-culture youth movement against iPhones, apple will be in serious trouble. Their revenue is heavily dependent on selling iphones and people using the app store.

freedomben 3y ago
Fortunately for Apple, there definitely is not a movement against iPhones. If anything, the youth associate status with iphones, and if you don't have one you are a loser deserving ridicule. My kids have stopped asking as they know I'm not going to give Apple any of my money, but for a very long time they begged for iphones because kids made fun of them for "having a droid." Today's youth are definitely not the rebellious counter-culture youth from my younger days. They are very much conformists.* *Speaking very generally of course, and only from anecdotal experience which is a very small slice of the market that my kids know
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  Kids are fickle and run with trends though. Apple has a good foothold, for sure, but banking on teenagers to carry your banner is an idea that would have me sweating. Older people tend to care much less about what phone they have, and care much less about upgrading.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Yes fair points all around. It's quite possible that 10 years from now the youth are rebellious again and could cause quite a stir.
- kbf 3y ago
  >Today's youth are definitely not the rebellious counter-culture youth from my younger days. They absolutely are, you have just become part of the culture they’re countering. Of course there’s conformity within a group or it wouldn’t really exist, but the main reason young people are so turned off by Android phones is that they are mainly associated with older family members who wanted to save a few bucks and substantially compromised on utility in the process. I’m in my 20s and I know this from experience, my mom gets substantially more utility out of her iPhone than my dad who’s an order of magnitude more technologically literate gets out of his Android phone. It doesn’t matter to teenagers that an Android phone could be as good as their iPhone when the optics are so bad. It doesn’t help that, for them, there isn’t a meaningful difference between the platforms beyond price and maybe piracy either. The actual movement among youth against iPhones is against phones in general, it’s a trend to use “dumbphones” because many feel smartphones are taking too much space in their lives.

doctorpangloss 3y ago

> embracing the industry standards The iPhone has legendary levels of crapitude. Consider every app you use on the iPhone that is authored by Apple. Would you or its stakeholders still use it if you weren't forced to? Mail? Calendar? Safari? Photos? Music? Fucking Messages? No, no, no, no, no, no. Don't misunderstand me. I am talking about access to the exact same first party APIs and integrations Apple's software has, and giving it to third party developers. The functionality is so painfully basic, but nonetheless gated, of course a third party would be able to author something better. Like you think Spotify wouldn't give you Siri compatibility? It's just not allowed to. The App Store is just the crappiest of them all. I don't think people realize how fees and its absolutely horrible discovery is responsible for the shitty state of apps today. I have been in this business a long time, and have met a lot of people, and it is absolutely, 100% Apple's fault that App Store games suck, and Steam's don't. The device is as powerful as a Nintendo Switch nowadays!

mrtksn 3y ago
Safari, Photos and Music are apps that I legitimately like and enjoy using. I wouldn't use anything else. I'm generally happy iPhone user. From Apple's offerings, the one I don't like is iCloud because lacks any granularity whatsoever. I want my photos synced but I don't want to waste my space and bandwidth with the videos. I also would like to have full API access to everything so I can experiment with stuff. Also I want to be able to re-purpose my old iPhone but its too much locked down for the things I would like to do. However, I'm generally very pleased. I can't stand the Android experience, honestly.
- doctorpangloss 3y ago
  > I can't stand the Android experience, honestly. The average Android phone is like $180. You can't stand cheap phones, which is legit, but that's what "Android" is. I don't know if this is in the zeitgeist yet. People spend more on a pair of airpods as people spend on a whole Android phone. That works because 10% of a $1,400 phone is $140. It doesn't work when 10% of $180 is $18. Where is there space for a third party ecosystem if there's only $18 on the table? Android users used to be 2.5x less valuable than iOS, and maybe it's closer to 5x-10x now. This is essentially Apple's value proposition to developers: "We have the rich users." And it's true, that's valuable. But do they deserve 30% of every transaction, to the most disfavorable agents in every software category? The way Apple and Steam conduct themselves is apples to oranges. > Safari, Photos and Music The Photos app is profoundly shitty. Lightroom Classic is like 13 years old now. How long did we have to wait for Lightroom Classic's 2009 featureset? The sharing features are abysmal. Why not open the API to the same shared photos backend Photos uses? Apple doesn't charge for access to the API, it charges users for storage - what difference does it make to them? It only matters because they are smart people, they know their software sucks, and if they allowed that level of compatibility, people would immediately abandon Photos, and yes, there would be a cross compatible Photos-like experience with Android and desktops, it would be superior, and it would harm Apple's primary idea of forcing people to use their trash.