5 ms·

I’ve been a recent convert to the iPhone. It gives me a unique perspective since I’ve spent almost my entire life in the Android ecosystem. I first bought an i

I’ve been a recent convert to the iPhone. It gives me a unique perspective since I’ve spent almost my entire life in the Android ecosystem. I first bought an iPhone 5c on a whim, which is well out of support by apple, 5 versions behind the modern iOS. If you turn it on, all the default Apple apps work, in 2024. You can stream Apple Music and download podcasts with no App Store whatsoever. It’s a powerful little device, more then ten years later. Compare this to the Android system, where google has wholesale deprecated their podcasts app. You’ll have to find a 3rd party one if you want to access that functionality. The point I’m trying to make is that for Joe Consumer, everything on an iPhone just works. Modification isn’t even something they consider doing. In the end, Epic and Spotify get a fat 30% boost in revenue and nobody notices anything different.

s1k3s 2y ago
This has nothing to do with the classic Apple vs Android debate. It's about Apple's practices of pushing people to purchase the iPhone even if they might not want to.
- ChilledTonic 2y ago
  Right, and I’m trying to state that those practices are ancillary at best reasons when the end user just sees a functional phone. Joe Consumer doesn’t even notice the garden has walls.
  - layer8 2y ago
    Just wait a bit, you will encounter lots of stuff that doesn’t work, or that has you jump through hoops or buy a subscription, soon enough.
    - nozzlegear 2y ago
      Can you name some examples, instead of being vague?
      - layer8 2y ago
        HomeKit fails a lot for me, as does Safari syncing of favorites, including sometimes the wrong icons being shown for a given favorite. There are bugs in Safari browsing history, such as when you select some history entry, the underlying links of other entries sometimes get shifted (with respect to the displayed labels). Apple Mails takes multiple minutes to sync read/unread status between devices, and sometimes doesn’t sync at all until you open the app. Even on the same device, the Mail app badge only updates half a minute or so after having read an email. When editing text and cutting and pasting around, the text suggestions tend to see a different internal state than what is displayed (you get suggestions for terms you have cut out or deleted concatenated with words that are still there or that you pasted). Apple services have regular hickups. Just today we had https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40177617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40177617. ICloud backup requires a subscription beyond 5 GB, or else you have to backup via Mac or PC, which at least on PC Apple doesn’t allow you to automate. (You have to manually authorize each new connection to the PC, even after a small interruption. There used to be a persistent “trust this PC”, but that’s gone.) That’s from the top of my head.
      - hu3 2y ago
        Just an example I had recently, my friend replaced his iPhone 8 because after two years of it functioning perfectly fine, apps started crashing/closing out of nowhere. Not to mention he constantly complained about apps being slow. His Apple maps frequently pointed to slightly wrong places (like 50 meters off) when given coordinates shared by messaging apps. Sometimes closing the maps app and reclicking the link fixed the position. It got to a point that he started sharing destination coordinates with me so I could open Google Maps on my phone so we could navigate confidently. Also he complained that Canva and Instagram apps were slow or broken for some operations on the phone. For example trying to share a longer video in reels resulted in app crashing. But those are not Apple apps so I'm not even counting all these third party issues. But it was like death by a thousand cuts. Since replacing his iPhone for a newer model, everything was fixed. For now.
  - s1k3s 2y ago
    Joe Consumer doesn't know a lot of things. That doesn't mean the government should allow them.
- op00to 2y ago
  SMS still works fine. No one is forced to purchase an iPhone because they want to message someone.
  - hu3 2y ago
    In US, green bubble social peer-pressure does force many teens to buy iPhones.
    - op00to 2y ago
      “Force”? No one is forced to give in to peer pressure by buying something. It’s one thing to want to fit in, but then we should also force clothing to not have visible brands so kids can’t compare what clothes they have, and youth sports teams so kids can’t exclude non-sports playing peers.
      - hu3 2y ago
        The analogy doesn't hold because Nike shirts looks and behaves just the same regardless of my jeans brand. Whereas a green bubble means degraded experience for the entire messaging group just because of that one guy.
        lotsofpulp 2y ago
        Then use the myriad other cross platform apps. Also, one’s appearance can also cause a group to be viewed and treated differently, akin to degrading the “experience”.
        hu3 2y ago
        Yes, it would help US teens were convinced to use another communication app that treated people equally in a group regardless of their phones. But they are teens and culture from network effects is hard to change. Or a much easier approach, Apple could fix that, if they wanted. But they don't because iPhones would lose their status symbol (blue bubble) and teens could then buy other phones without suffering rejection in groups. Apple can't have that. If culture among teens is hard to change and Apple values income above all, it's up to regulators. But US regulators aren't as active than EU.
earthling8118 2y ago
When my Android phone broke in the past I was lent an iPhone 6s to use in the meantime. It was absolutely slow and many things didn't work. I ended up getting rid of it because having no phone was better than using it.
gamblor956 2y ago
Compare this to the Android system, where google has wholesale deprecated their podcasts app. You’ll have to find a 3rd party one if you want to access that functionality. My Galaxy S1 still plays podcasts just fine....I keep it hooked up to bluetooth speakers just for that. Google disabled the ability to download new/updated apps that could run on this phone long ago, but the apps already on the phone still work. Indeed, it works better than the iPhone 5c, since I can use any micro usb connector to charge my phone, but the 5c is stuck with a proprietary connector that isn't made or sold anymore. The point I’m trying to make is that for Joe Consumer, everything on an iPhone just works. This hasn't been true for years, if it ever was. Siri never worked properly, and most people complain about the horrible accuracy of the fingerprint and face unlock. Text messages sent to/by Apple users frequently disappear into the ether, discovered only when the communicants physically meet up. The cloud software is prone to overwriting files or accidentally deleting them. And don't even get me started about all the people holding their phones the wrong way...
jncfhnb 2y ago
Nobody notices a difference when companies lose 30% of their revenue? Would anybody notice a difference if they lost 60% of their revenue? How about 95%? I mean it’s just a third party’s ledger right, so who cares?
phmqk76 2y ago
Guess what? Joe Consumer lives in a society that has an economy. And that economy thrives on open markets and competition. US antitrust law knew this from Teddy Roosevelt all the way until Ronald Reagan gutted that notion, and began to focus only on consumer harm. But consumers aren’t the only part of an economy! They’re probably not even the most important part. Open competition is vital for a diverse and open economy where all sorts of market entrants can participate, and create companies that pay taxes, and create jobs for people who are also, in turn, consumers. Sometimes higher prices are worth it if an economic sector is open and thriving. We know this intuitively when it comes to trade protections, as countries like Germany go to great lengths to protect domestic manufacturing at the expense of cheaper cars.
- sashank_1509 2y ago
  You make no sense. Germany protects domestic manufacturing to keep their engineers and workers employed, admirable. Who exactly is US trying to keep employed? Please tell me something concrete, don’t use Orwellian terminology like Open markets when you mean Govt Regulated markets. Without Apple’s introduction of the smart-phone, millions of app development jobs would not exist. Apple’s 30% tax is reducing profits of some developers, the biggest ones are complaining but none of it is gutting the economy, app development is not being shifted overseas because Apple made the cost of development too high. If anything it is the literal opposite, SWE salaries are still increasing because the demand for app developers still outpaces the supply, and people are more than willing to pay 6 figures+ for a good SWE. The funny thing is your frame has some truth to it, it’s just your entire thinking is hopelessly muddled that you focus on everything that doesn’t matter. There is case, where the government can step in, raise the price of the iPhones to employ more people, cause net consumer harm but still be better for society. That is in iPhone manufacturing where all the jobs have been shifted overseas and no trade worker in US gets employed to make iPhones. This is a real problem, and yet no one in the FTC cares about this, they may not even know this problem exists in their desperate bid to grab power and come up on the front page of NYT with a big win. And what will they achieve? They will let some other app developers make more money, but no offense to 99% of HN, you guys are highly paid and a 30% higher potential margin really doesn’t matter. They will dictate design decisions to a company that is probably 100000x better at design than the FTC is and get fawning reviews from NYT, get invited to talks at universities, maybe even get called to a late night show (has happened before) and that is probably all that matters to them.
015a 2y ago
> In the end, Epic and Spotify get a fat 30% boost in revenue and nobody notices anything different. Well, let's be clear here: Neither Epic nor Spotify are selling anything with Apple today. Epic's games are not available on iOS, and Spotify requires you to make all purchases through their website. Spotify's motivation for wanting change on the iOS platform is primarily due to how limiting Apple's profit share and App Store rules are toward expanding its lines of business. Spotify wants to be able to sell one-off audiobooks; but the margins are already razor thin, and would become impossibly thin if Apple had to be paid 30% of every sale. In the most egregiously and obviously monopolistic thing Apple has ever done, they also sell audiobooks via the Books app, where I'm (wink) certain they're paying the 30% fee to (wink) themselves. One alternative Spotify hasn't tried is marking audiobooks up 30% to account for the fees. Maybe this is something that is contractually extremely difficult to do? Like, authors and publishing agencies don't assign pricing rights to Spotify, they have to sell the audiobooks at the same price they're available for sale on Amazon/Apple Books/etc. I don't know. But, regardless of that, it's a shit card to deal consumers, anyone with half a brain would just buy the audiobook from Apple Books where its 30% cheaper, and Spotify is very reasonably trying to drive traffic to platforms they have higher agency within. This isn't really about boosting revenue by 30%. Its about unlocking fundamentally different business models from Apple's grasp; business models which Apple has found extremely profitable for itself, yet refuses anyone else to share in.
- sashank_1509 2y ago
  No one I know uses Apple audiobooks, I thought it was only Audible in this market. Spotify is a loss making company finding reasons to blame its problems. What annoys Spotify is that Apple Music exists, this is the age old problem between vendors and distributors, where vendors hate it if Walmart comes out with its own peanut butter jar to sell. The fundamental problem with the vendor here is their product is not differentiated, Apple isn’t worried if Walmart sells other smartphones, they don’t care but Reese’s is extremely worried and will make a huge hula about private labels and such. Spotify as a technology has nothing unique, their audio isn’t even lossless yet, their music is now available through Apple, Amazon, YouTube, Tidal and who knows what else. They basically have some network effects due to social media and are living off a first mover advantage, meanwhile as their see their dominance erode they are trying to find boogeyman’s to blame. If Apple removes 30% tax, Spotify won’t magically become a successful business, Spotify still needs to find something more differentiated than the sea of music streaming apps out there. Netflix kind of did it with originals and superior efficiency, Spotify won’t be able to do anything until they take a hard look at their business and truly diagnose why it’s such a trash heap.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

s1k3s 2y ago

This has nothing to do with the classic Apple vs Android debate. It's about Apple's practices of pushing people to purchase the iPhone even if they might not want to.

ChilledTonic 2y ago
Right, and I’m trying to state that those practices are ancillary at best reasons when the end user just sees a functional phone. Joe Consumer doesn’t even notice the garden has walls.
- layer8 2y ago
  Just wait a bit, you will encounter lots of stuff that doesn’t work, or that has you jump through hoops or buy a subscription, soon enough.
  - nozzlegear 2y ago
    Can you name some examples, instead of being vague?
    - layer8 2y ago
      HomeKit fails a lot for me, as does Safari syncing of favorites, including sometimes the wrong icons being shown for a given favorite. There are bugs in Safari browsing history, such as when you select some history entry, the underlying links of other entries sometimes get shifted (with respect to the displayed labels). Apple Mails takes multiple minutes to sync read/unread status between devices, and sometimes doesn’t sync at all until you open the app. Even on the same device, the Mail app badge only updates half a minute or so after having read an email. When editing text and cutting and pasting around, the text suggestions tend to see a different internal state than what is displayed (you get suggestions for terms you have cut out or deleted concatenated with words that are still there or that you pasted). Apple services have regular hickups. Just today we had https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40177617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40177617. ICloud backup requires a subscription beyond 5 GB, or else you have to backup via Mac or PC, which at least on PC Apple doesn’t allow you to automate. (You have to manually authorize each new connection to the PC, even after a small interruption. There used to be a persistent “trust this PC”, but that’s gone.) That’s from the top of my head.
    - hu3 2y ago
      Just an example I had recently, my friend replaced his iPhone 8 because after two years of it functioning perfectly fine, apps started crashing/closing out of nowhere. Not to mention he constantly complained about apps being slow. His Apple maps frequently pointed to slightly wrong places (like 50 meters off) when given coordinates shared by messaging apps. Sometimes closing the maps app and reclicking the link fixed the position. It got to a point that he started sharing destination coordinates with me so I could open Google Maps on my phone so we could navigate confidently. Also he complained that Canva and Instagram apps were slow or broken for some operations on the phone. For example trying to share a longer video in reels resulted in app crashing. But those are not Apple apps so I'm not even counting all these third party issues. But it was like death by a thousand cuts. Since replacing his iPhone for a newer model, everything was fixed. For now.
- s1k3s 2y ago
  Joe Consumer doesn't know a lot of things. That doesn't mean the government should allow them.
op00to 2y ago
SMS still works fine. No one is forced to purchase an iPhone because they want to message someone.
- hu3 2y ago
  In US, green bubble social peer-pressure does force many teens to buy iPhones.
  - op00to 2y ago
    “Force”? No one is forced to give in to peer pressure by buying something. It’s one thing to want to fit in, but then we should also force clothing to not have visible brands so kids can’t compare what clothes they have, and youth sports teams so kids can’t exclude non-sports playing peers.
    - hu3 2y ago
      The analogy doesn't hold because Nike shirts looks and behaves just the same regardless of my jeans brand. Whereas a green bubble means degraded experience for the entire messaging group just because of that one guy.
      - lotsofpulp 2y ago
        Then use the myriad other cross platform apps. Also, one’s appearance can also cause a group to be viewed and treated differently, akin to degrading the “experience”.
        hu3 2y ago
        Yes, it would help US teens were convinced to use another communication app that treated people equally in a group regardless of their phones. But they are teens and culture from network effects is hard to change. Or a much easier approach, Apple could fix that, if they wanted. But they don't because iPhones would lose their status symbol (blue bubble) and teens could then buy other phones without suffering rejection in groups. Apple can't have that. If culture among teens is hard to change and Apple values income above all, it's up to regulators. But US regulators aren't as active than EU.

earthling8118 2y ago

When my Android phone broke in the past I was lent an iPhone 6s to use in the meantime. It was absolutely slow and many things didn't work. I ended up getting rid of it because having no phone was better than using it.

gamblor956 2y ago

Compare this to the Android system, where google has wholesale deprecated their podcasts app. You’ll have to find a 3rd party one if you want to access that functionality. My Galaxy S1 still plays podcasts just fine....I keep it hooked up to bluetooth speakers just for that. Google disabled the ability to download new/updated apps that could run on this phone long ago, but the apps already on the phone still work. Indeed, it works better than the iPhone 5c, since I can use any micro usb connector to charge my phone, but the 5c is stuck with a proprietary connector that isn't made or sold anymore. The point I’m trying to make is that for Joe Consumer, everything on an iPhone just works. This hasn't been true for years, if it ever was. Siri never worked properly, and most people complain about the horrible accuracy of the fingerprint and face unlock. Text messages sent to/by Apple users frequently disappear into the ether, discovered only when the communicants physically meet up. The cloud software is prone to overwriting files or accidentally deleting them. And don't even get me started about all the people holding their phones the wrong way...

jncfhnb 2y ago

Nobody notices a difference when companies lose 30% of their revenue? Would anybody notice a difference if they lost 60% of their revenue? How about 95%? I mean it’s just a third party’s ledger right, so who cares?

phmqk76 2y ago

Guess what? Joe Consumer lives in a society that has an economy. And that economy thrives on open markets and competition. US antitrust law knew this from Teddy Roosevelt all the way until Ronald Reagan gutted that notion, and began to focus only on consumer harm. But consumers aren’t the only part of an economy! They’re probably not even the most important part. Open competition is vital for a diverse and open economy where all sorts of market entrants can participate, and create companies that pay taxes, and create jobs for people who are also, in turn, consumers. Sometimes higher prices are worth it if an economic sector is open and thriving. We know this intuitively when it comes to trade protections, as countries like Germany go to great lengths to protect domestic manufacturing at the expense of cheaper cars.

sashank_1509 2y ago
You make no sense. Germany protects domestic manufacturing to keep their engineers and workers employed, admirable. Who exactly is US trying to keep employed? Please tell me something concrete, don’t use Orwellian terminology like Open markets when you mean Govt Regulated markets. Without Apple’s introduction of the smart-phone, millions of app development jobs would not exist. Apple’s 30% tax is reducing profits of some developers, the biggest ones are complaining but none of it is gutting the economy, app development is not being shifted overseas because Apple made the cost of development too high. If anything it is the literal opposite, SWE salaries are still increasing because the demand for app developers still outpaces the supply, and people are more than willing to pay 6 figures+ for a good SWE. The funny thing is your frame has some truth to it, it’s just your entire thinking is hopelessly muddled that you focus on everything that doesn’t matter. There is case, where the government can step in, raise the price of the iPhones to employ more people, cause net consumer harm but still be better for society. That is in iPhone manufacturing where all the jobs have been shifted overseas and no trade worker in US gets employed to make iPhones. This is a real problem, and yet no one in the FTC cares about this, they may not even know this problem exists in their desperate bid to grab power and come up on the front page of NYT with a big win. And what will they achieve? They will let some other app developers make more money, but no offense to 99% of HN, you guys are highly paid and a 30% higher potential margin really doesn’t matter. They will dictate design decisions to a company that is probably 100000x better at design than the FTC is and get fawning reviews from NYT, get invited to talks at universities, maybe even get called to a late night show (has happened before) and that is probably all that matters to them.

015a 2y ago

> In the end, Epic and Spotify get a fat 30% boost in revenue and nobody notices anything different. Well, let's be clear here: Neither Epic nor Spotify are selling anything with Apple today. Epic's games are not available on iOS, and Spotify requires you to make all purchases through their website. Spotify's motivation for wanting change on the iOS platform is primarily due to how limiting Apple's profit share and App Store rules are toward expanding its lines of business. Spotify wants to be able to sell one-off audiobooks; but the margins are already razor thin, and would become impossibly thin if Apple had to be paid 30% of every sale. In the most egregiously and obviously monopolistic thing Apple has ever done, they also sell audiobooks via the Books app, where I'm (wink) certain they're paying the 30% fee to (wink) themselves. One alternative Spotify hasn't tried is marking audiobooks up 30% to account for the fees. Maybe this is something that is contractually extremely difficult to do? Like, authors and publishing agencies don't assign pricing rights to Spotify, they have to sell the audiobooks at the same price they're available for sale on Amazon/Apple Books/etc. I don't know. But, regardless of that, it's a shit card to deal consumers, anyone with half a brain would just buy the audiobook from Apple Books where its 30% cheaper, and Spotify is very reasonably trying to drive traffic to platforms they have higher agency within. This isn't really about boosting revenue by 30%. Its about unlocking fundamentally different business models from Apple's grasp; business models which Apple has found extremely profitable for itself, yet refuses anyone else to share in.

sashank_1509 2y ago
No one I know uses Apple audiobooks, I thought it was only Audible in this market. Spotify is a loss making company finding reasons to blame its problems. What annoys Spotify is that Apple Music exists, this is the age old problem between vendors and distributors, where vendors hate it if Walmart comes out with its own peanut butter jar to sell. The fundamental problem with the vendor here is their product is not differentiated, Apple isn’t worried if Walmart sells other smartphones, they don’t care but Reese’s is extremely worried and will make a huge hula about private labels and such. Spotify as a technology has nothing unique, their audio isn’t even lossless yet, their music is now available through Apple, Amazon, YouTube, Tidal and who knows what else. They basically have some network effects due to social media and are living off a first mover advantage, meanwhile as their see their dominance erode they are trying to find boogeyman’s to blame. If Apple removes 30% tax, Spotify won’t magically become a successful business, Spotify still needs to find something more differentiated than the sea of music streaming apps out there. Netflix kind of did it with originals and superior efficiency, Spotify won’t be able to do anything until they take a hard look at their business and truly diagnose why it’s such a trash heap.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]