> If you sell a general-purpose computing device and market it as one, you should relinquish any control of it once it's sold.
The freedoms we have, and the freedom that should be protected is market choice to buy or not buy any consumer product.
If you don’t like Apple, don’t buy its products and purchase a device from a large number of competitors. It is really that simple.
There is no rule that consumers have a right to do anything. You are not guaranteed a right to install a Windows app on your iPhone, or iPhone apps on Windows. You aren’t guaranteed that your coffee machine can run Python.
> You are not guaranteed a right to install a Windows app on your iPhone, or iPhone apps on Windows.
This is a complete red herring and a very sly one at that.
Sure, MS have no obligation to make it so that Safari can run on Windows.
However, Microsoft also cannot stop Apple from building a version of Safari that runs on Windows. Or iTunes on Windows. And when Apple built iTunes on Windows MS had no right to force them to fork over 30% of every song they sold within iTunes to MS. MS had no right to force Mozilla to build Firefox around the IE6 engine, or Chrome around IE6.
It’s very likely Apple, Google, or Mozilla would not have existed if governments (specifically the EU) hadn’t stopped Microsoft from pushing it’s options as the default, never mind blocking alternatives altogether.
Yep. Microsoft also hasn’t banned Steam from windows, forcing everyone to buy games from their own official windows App Store where they take a juicy cut of all sales.
Microsoft also doesn’t charge a ransom fee for 3rd party applications to use the hardware features of my computer, that I’ve already paid for. Apple does this with the NFC chip in iPhones - public transit companies the world over need to pay Apple money to use the nfc chip present in iPhones to pay for transit.
You seem to have high opinions about what others don’t have the right to do with software they invest their own money into. Here’s an idea, let’s drop the coercion and let free men make free choices.
I would be very surprised if someone could demonstrate that the reason Apple’s platform is more valuable to developers than Android doesn’t have quite a bit to do with things Apple has done, and continues to do.
Nothing? They provide and run the marketplace that distributes your app anywhere in the world, and handles nearly frictionless payment. And they have created a marketplace where users feel safe downloading your app. As an Apple customer I value these things pretty highly, more than I value any one app.
> They provide and run the marketplace that distributes your app anywhere in the world
It's nice that they provide that service for those developers that want it. It's not nice that I don't have a choice to distribute my own app however I see fit.
See, I want to build an app, and people want to install it, but Apple is standing between us, dictating how we must and must not interact.
> As an Apple customer I value these things pretty highly, more than I value any one app.
Then you're free to not enable sideloading when it eventually inevitably materializes, and miss out on apps that aren't available on the app store. This decision is still yours to make. We've had this on Android and macOS since forever.
So you’re advocating freedom for you and coercion for others. You’re free to buy an Android, no one’s forcing you to do anything. Free not to buy Apple. But you won’t extend that to others, forcing them to bow to your demands or lose their freedom to conduct trade.
Where did you see coercion? MacOS offers both options. You and I both know how popular the Mac app store is among both users and developers. I'm sure there are people who use a Mac and would not install anything from outside of the app store out of principle. It's their right to do so.
They also write and maintain the primary frameworks by which one creates software on their devices, a set of tools that help developers create apps far better than any competing mobile operating system. These frameworks are available for all developers to use for free!
I propose Apple start charging some pennies for every million UIView calls.
What is the price of devices for then? It's a sane expectation that when you buy a device with a preinstalled OS, you pay for both the hardware and the R&D costs for the OS.
Apple sets prices and there’s no reason they need to charge customers for the R&D costs of supporting public APIs. In fact, if they charged developers per call, maybe customers could pay less. It used to be pretty standard to charge for better application development frameworks. Heck, people used to pay for compilers!
I remember how Microsoft wanted non-insignificant amounts of money for its official SDKs and Visual Studio (and I always pirated them).
But Apple always offered Xcode for free and, iirc, some Macs even came with an Xcode installation CD in the box. But major macOS updates were also paid back then. But the version that came with your computer out of the box was still free. So no, I feel like "we need the $99/year and the 30% to support the R&D cost of our APIs" is a mostly made-up excuse. It's not like Apple would operate at loss if they remove the $99 and 30% fees tomorrow.
What I'm saying is that Apple can fuck around and find out. 2 years ago there weren't protections for arbitrary digital market gatekeeping, now there is. If Apple wants European market access, being the vanguard for the World's Dumbest pricing model is a bad start.
Remember: Apple is considered a gatekeeper for app installation regardless of the cost they pay to maintain the platform. Charging per-call on a literally free API would be so profoundly stupid that it would force a second Digital Market Act.
Being the vanguard? Usage based pricing is not new, and framework makers have charged developers for access for a long time.
Making an API public, even if the necessary code runs entirely on-device, is not free. It incurs immense upfront and perpetual R&D costs. Apple has spent the last three releases trying to slowly fix privacy issues with API as basic as copy and paste.
The digital markets act is about facilitating competing entrants to “essential platform services.” Charging for the Apple technology those entrants use would not be inconsistent with its aims. A developer could use their own UI framework that draws straight to the window server itself! And maybe use some of that famous Android audio processing software!
> Charging for the Apple technology those entrants use would not be inconsistent with its aims.
Sorry, that's like saying the Apple Developer program fulfills the DMA qualifications because it's not "inconsistent with it's aims".
Apple is of course welcome to try any of these things; nothing stops them as a private business. They failed to defend the mandatory value of the App Store in Europe though, so I fail to see how they could defend an arbitrary charge on other API calls. Apple quite literally cannot call Europe's bluff - that's what my original upstream comment was about in the first place. You can talk confident smack about Apple's talent in the pissing contest, but none of that means anything when the capitalist leash gets tugged and the alternative is losing money.
There is not a single value Apple holds that they would not forgo for money.
I have bought an iPhone and not your app. You have no relationship with me without me choosing iOS. That’s it. I’m your user and I want to get my apps from the App Store. Respect that decision. Don’t make me go outside the ecosystem I have chosen so you can make you 30%. I say that as a developer who gets charged the 30% as I respect the fact the user decided to use that specific platform for whatever reason they have.
Mine as a consumer is that Apple doesn’t have dark patters when I want to cancel my subscription with your app. When I try to cancel my membership for something else like a magazine or the gym I have to go over 10 steps…
> I’m your user and I want to get my apps from the App Store
Then you're not my user. And I'm not talking about anything involving money anyway.
> When I try to cancel my membership for something else like a magazine or the gym I have to go over 10 steps…
It's the government's job to enforce consumer rights, not Apple's. I'm sorry that consumer protection in the US is so terrible. Where I'm from, "credit card on file" is just not a thing and most of everything is prepaid. If a service really insists on charging you against your will, you can block your card and get a new one but I've yet to hear about this actually happening to someone.
There was a time when people would give up their job if they truly believed in what they preached. But you like your work (or money) enough to not make a choice to change
> iOS is a fantastic operating system. iPhone and iPad are stellar hardware with brilliant physical UX. Apple Watch is leagues beyond anything else in its class. I will keep buying Apple stuff until I can't anymore.
People want Apple’s quality, reliability and performance, but also want no restrictions so they can run any app and install anything.
Those things aren’t compatible.
E.g., Windows and Linux (Desktop distros) don’t have many restrictions. But they can be unreliable.
Yes, let’s ignore the macOS elephant in the room, and jump to Windows and Linux to straw-man an argument. There are “no restrictions”, one can “install anything” and “run any app” on that, and still it is … “reliable”?
But actually both Windows and Linux are “reliable” too. Windows is much, much stable in terms of backwards compatibility than macOS and certainly iOS. Linux is so reliable that it runs about 99.9% of the server, appliance and mobile world.
Windows has lost its design forte (peaked in Windows 7), but so has Apple’s claim on design. macOS is a mishmash of OK, bad and worse, as is iOS.
The worst experiences on macOS come from companies with enough clout to piss on the standard mechanisms. Installing their BS installers, having "updaters" to run on the background, not shipping a DMG or PKG, asking you to disable the SIP, never bothering to update to newer APIs, not using the Mac App Store, and so on...
(and it's usually some of the more expensive software)
Well, given that mobile is a much newer platform, and a lot more regulatory scrutiny than desktop, perhaps the itchy regulators at the EU and the current FTC might be predisposed to go after those companies, especially since most of them are already in their crosshairs for other misdeeds. I don't think regulators are going to be asleep at the wheel and just let Meta force users to use a Facebook store stuffed with trackers.
Not to mention, what if Apple still exerted influence over alternative app stores by providing the SDK and certified security/privacy standards for them to build them?
Facebook’s shady coding in the past was all using sanctioned APIs, including the VPN it was using to spy on teens. With a private store also goes the static analysis of private API usage, which can enable software some looser restrictions (but not much, as some fear—most stuff is protected for at the kernel level).
Given that it’s already present in App Store apps as you say would show that the App Store itself, and perhaps the current app review process, is insufficient!
I don’t know. It’s a cat and mouse game, and you can only win in such games if you don’t play. By moving the security from static analysis to kernel, Apple has sidestepped most malicious API mishaps. My project isn’t malicious, it just uses API not as intended, but it can do little malice in wrong hands. I think this is a good system overall.
Like on a possible iOS future, “don’t support what you don’t want to support”. You have the choice. Unlike current iOS, where some boogie-man chose for you.
That's like "having the choice" to decide how to defend and protect yourself in a shithole city of competing kingpins and anarchy (the bad kind, not the theory of government) in the streets, vs having a police.
And that's why I use Citrix through an UTM Mac VM. That installer will create at least 3 background services running on root plus the app protection hooks (which happily run on a vm from which I can do pretty much it is meant to prevent through the host OS).
I sadly have to use a Macbook for my dev job and I've literally never come across anything you're mentioning here, I can't see how any regular user would be coerced into disabling SIP
I’ve been using Windows for 25 years now. Please don’t lecture me about its reliability, especially in the last 15 years. I’m also having a weekly kernel panic on my M1 Max Mac, a sight unseen on any of my Windows machines for more than a decade, even when using beta nVidia drivers.
Presumably someone who uses beta graphics drivers and reasons from personal anecdotes is not a good judge of the reliability of a mass market operating system for the average consumer.
It's mostly a matter of how much you can throw at it in terms of resources. If there was a five dollar charge for every Linux kernel running you could have all of those and you'd probably still have cash left over.
If a user is at a conference or on an online meeting and they mention your company to another user, they will likely have to spell the name out. Just hearing the name, it would be hard to know how to spell/search for it.
It is also not very memorable. A month later if I wanted to recall the name of your company I would likely have a bit of a hard time recalling the exact name.
Yeah, we actually get feedback about this pretty often. At this point (because Infisical is used by many thousands of developers), it might hurt more in terms of recognition, SEO, etc. Some companies do it when they are much more advanced (Fb -> Meta, Square -> Block) but I think it requires a large marketing investment.
To make it easier to find us, we have purchased a number of other domains like http://inphysical.com/ and made them redirect to our main website.
I run Linux on a few dozen servers currently and have been using it for at least 20 years.
However, I can’t imagine running it as my primary desktop OS.
Reading these posts about the hassle and battles it takes to get a desktop linux OS running sounds like madness to me.
And the end result is usually not entirely stable, and often involves many tradeoffs like trackpads not working correctly or trying to print causing WIFI to drop.
A good operating should Get Out Of The Way, so you can work, build, create, explore, play.
Honest question: do you run Linux OS primarily because it is the best OS for you, or do you run it more because you identify with the philosophy and ethos of open source software? (Both options are completely fine.)
> And the end result is usually not entirely stable, and often involves many tradeoffs like trackpads not working correctly or trying to print causing WIFI to drop.
So have you actually tried desktop Linux, or are you working from 20-year-old stereotypes?
> A good operating should Get Out Of The Way, so you can work, build, create, explore, play.
That rules out Windows, and MacOS is 50/50 depending on whether you stay 100% on the happy path and nothing goes wrong; what are you using?
Seriously. If you aren't on 100% Apple hardware it gets annoying quickly. Things like scroll wheel acceleration, which gives you the option of scrolling a quarter line or 10 lines at at time. No problem, you can just turn it off, right? Nope, that option was removed a few major releases ago and now you need third-party accessibility software.
I agree. I think some people use Linux to avoid paying Windows license fees or Apple's premium. There are tools only developed for Linux, but the opposite is also true for Windows and macOS. I've found most macOS apps follow Apple's core philosophy to be simple, aesthetically appealing, and easy to use. Can't say that for Linux packages (and to some extent, even Windows apps suck).
I view Linux mostly as an environment where you're free to do whatever you want, even shoot yourself in the foot. But I'd never recommend that to average Joe, for reasons such as the fact that this article exists.
