| ▲ | echelon 2 days ago |
| Is Gruber starting to realize Apple's monopoly is bad? App stores should not exist in a world where only two phone operating systems exist. All apps MUST be installable via web. Come on, EU. Help us out here. Free us from distribution tyranny. Do it before Google morphs into the same hell beast. Soon you won't be able to read unapproved, unattested bytes. It's coming. We need as many freedoms as we can get. Apple can be a great company without the app store monopoly. So can Google. |
|
| ▲ | lapcat a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Is Gruber starting to realize Apple's monopoly is bad? "I do not see the conflict between the view that the App Store review system is failing and the view that it's not the government's business to intervene. Allowing failing systems to fail is how market forces work." https://mastodon.social/@gruber/117055639204173161 |
| |
| ▲ | madeofpalk a day ago | parent | next [-] | | The criticism of monopolies is that market forces aren't able to let a failing system fail. The App Store doesn't compete on its own merits because Apple actively prevents competition from letting it decide what the better system is. | | |
| ▲ | lapcat a day ago | parent [-] | | I believe Gruber's view is that the market forces in question are between iPhone and competing smartphones. | | |
| ▲ | snackbroken a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Market forces are not effective at creating good outcomes when there is an oligopoly. If there are two producers each with ~50% market share, it's not profitable for one of them to improve their product such that they capture an additional 5% of the market but reduces the profit margin of their product by 10%. If there are 50 producers each with ~2% market share, one of them would happily capture 5% of the market (more than doubling the size of their business!) by sacrificing 10% of their profit margin. In the Google-Apple duopoly it's much more profitable to engage in tacit collusion than it is to defect. | |
| ▲ | jgruber a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | No. It’s broader than that. The market forces are the entire realm of what’s possible, now and in the future. When Windows seemed entrenched forever, the platforms that eventually surpassed weren’t the competing desktop OSes (Mac and Linux). It was the web first, in the late 1990s-2000s, then mobile (iPhone and Android) in the 2010s. Necessity really is the mother of invention, and the more we need something new, the sooner someone will invent it. But it will look no more like an iPhone than the iPhone looked like a PC. | | |
| ▲ | lapcat a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > The market forces are the entire realm of what’s possible, now and in the future. I actually suspected as much and left "competing smartphones" somewhat vague. > When Windows seemed entrenched forever It's still entrenched! Microsoft got a slap on the wrist by the government right before September 11, and antitrust enforcement has been on a holiday ever since. > the platforms that eventually surpassed weren’t the competing desktop OSes (Mac and Linux) In terms of revenue, desktop computers were surpassed by smartphones, but they were not replaced by smartphones. I don't consider them to be directly competing products, and most of us who can afford it own both. A smartphone fits in your pocket, whereas a keyboard and pointing device and large screen will never fit in your pocket. | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is a ridiculous take. The iPhone was enabled by unrelated advances in computer hardware miniaturization, it had absolutely nothing to do with Windows' dominance creating "necessity". It was not competing with, and never did, replace Windows. Regulation is needed to ensure that people can compete within a market, not just create an entirely new market as enabled by technological advances which would have happened anyways. | | |
| ▲ | jgruber a day ago | parent [-] | | It's a little simplistic, sure, but I mean how much nuance do you expect me to fit into a HN comment? What I left out is Windows Mobile, which was Microsoft's attempt to extend the Windows hegemony to mobile devices. Here are Windows Mobile's US market share numbers, per Wikipedia: 2004 11%
2005 17%
2006 37%
2007 42%
2008 27%
2009 15%
2010 7%
2011 3%
What do you think happened in 2007? | | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon a day ago | parent [-] | | Somebody came up with better phone technology. Which would have happened anyways. Your argument was that it was necessary for Microsoft and now Apple to have a monopoly in order to create "necessity" for innovation, but Microsoft's monopoly was not driving Moore's law. The iPhone would have happened with or without Windows Mobile. |
|
| |
| ▲ | madeofpalk 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The question is whether it's possible for a genuinely new competitor to arrive. Back in the earlier days, before Apple and Google were so entrenched, competitors weren't able to do it. The modern smartphone became popular and dislodged the previous status quo because they were genuinely new form factors and interfaces. They didn't just steal the market away from Blackberry and Windows Phone, they invented a new one and starved out the previous. And if a new platform were to arrive, they're so broad that it's entirely possible they wouldn't even compete on the App Store. When companies squeeze out and screw over others, and the market isn't able to signal that its not good, it's time for regulators to step in. |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | eviks a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | He's myopic to the actual conflict. The system isn't failing, it's a very profitable business for Apple. | |
| ▲ | protimewaster a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | One of my issues with this is that the market is often pretty slow. With a lot of things, it feels like the market won't have resolved it until I've been dead for 150 years, and, to me, that's just about as good as not solving the problem at all. | |
| ▲ | pnt12 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Oof. Gets screwed by a monopoly, defends monopolies: idealism is a chain. It frustrates me how some people are buried in this ideology, given 90% of it would be denied with Economics 101. Yes, free markets are good to a lot of things. No, they don't adjust for complex matters if consumers don't understand then. No, they don't work when monopolies are involved. No, the government setting some boundaries is not the same as socialism. Example: company adds a cheap ingredient to food that makes it tastier. Studies show a high chance of cancer. This doesn't affect the company margins, so it keeps adding and selling. Consumers are unaware, they keep buying. A good willing competitor has a dillema: poison its customers or lose clients to competition. Guess who can help? The state: it can forbid that ingredient! Now this levels the field for all companies and customers are healthy. | | |
|
|
| ▲ | starik36 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The other side of your coin is that I need to periodically visit my relatives and remove all sorts of malware and adware from their phones. Just like I've done with PCs over the past few decades. |
| |
| ▲ | baby_souffle a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I get your point but neither the Play store or the Apple app store are devoid of malware. | | |
| ▲ | iamnothere a day ago | parent [-] | | Obviously the solution is to restrict the stores to a small, government-licensed list of apps that are known to be safe and regulated. | | |
| ▲ | baby_souffle a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > Obviously the solution is to restrict the stores to a small, government-licensed list of apps that are known to be safe and regulated. I've been curious about the north korean mobile OS... | |
| ▲ | doublerabbit a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Then you get government censorship. China for example. | | |
|
| |
| ▲ | Arodex a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Then Apple should do its fucking job correctly. It is not a poor little company, they have no excuse for this rank incompetence. None. | | |
| ▲ | preg_match 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The problem is largely structural. Debian has huge repos and swaths of maintainers, and it works out because they read and audit source code to a degree. The end-result is that the Debian repos definitely have much less malware than either the play store or the Apple app store. Apple does not audit source code, they do very simple behavioral analysis. And, evidently, even get that wrong, this post serving as an example. | |
| ▲ | turtlebits a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm sure the number of submissions has gone up exponentially due to AI. Since real people review apps, Apple should charge per app / version submission. | | |
| ▲ | Timon3 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Oh, is the 100$/year developer fee not enough? And all the money people pay for their devices? And the 30% cut for any App Store transaction? And the money from the advertisements? Poor Apple needs to ask for even more money to do their job? Sure seems like they could find some other way. | |
| ▲ | Arodex a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You really can't just imagine Apple is doing a shit job. None of what you say can explain that Apple reviewers falsely accuse an app of being astrology when absolutely nothing proves it and double down when shown they are wrong. Again, absolutely nothing there could be explained by an "exponential number of submissions" nor solved by charging developers (even more than they already do!). Stop defending the indefensible. | | | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Since real people review apps, Apple should charge per app / version submission. Or they could let developers upload apps to another app store. Apple isn't reviewing them out of charity, they're doing it to enforce a monopoly where they get a 30% cut of every developer's income. |
|
| |
| ▲ | epolanski a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | God forbids your relatives ever touch computers! |
|
|
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > Come on, EU. Help us out here. Free us from distribution tyranny. Do it before Google morphs into the same hell beast. No can do, EU is busy mandating only Google/Apple devices for national digital ID. > Soon you won't be able to read unapproved, unattested bytes. It's coming. happy EU noises |
