Yes. The HN crowd is overcomplicating the issue, and Apple has as much a right as an individual to design their platform as they wish. We like to talk about giving businesses the freedom to build the products that they want and keeping regulators out of the picture and instead letting people vote with their money, yet when people actually vote with their money to buy Apple products precisely for how they are built, we want to regulate the crap out of the company. It doesn’t make sense.
I disagree. The mobile OS market is just not open and big enough to vote with my money.
I don’t buy iPhones because I like being unable to side load apps. I miss it a lot.
The point is that when I make my list of pros and cons of buying Android vs iOS, I still prefer iOS because, as much as I dislike Apple commercial policies and artificial lock-ins, I just loathe Google for what they are.
And don’t even call me some sort of "fanboy", I’ve used and loved Android as an OS since basically the first versions.
It’s just that iOS have a quantity of advantages I’m not willing to lose by going back to Android and that there are basically no alternative platform to run apps on.
Putting aesthetics aside, iOS has a better app ecosystem and part of that is driven by Apple hardware (including having fewer devices to support) and software advantages. For example, I’ve read that the iOS audio stack has lower latency.
If you like GarageBand, then you aren’t going to want to go back to Androi because there’s nothing as good.
The integration with Apple desktop computers is pretty compelling as well. It’s part of the reason I wish Microsoft would buy Android from Google. I think they would do something similar for the rest of us.
I recently got an iPhone and I still don't understand the integration bit. If you don't use iMessage (everyone here uses Messenger, Telegram or Signal), barely make phone calls, use OneDrive for cloud storage (because it's way cheaper than iCloud), and use BitWarden for passwords there isn't really anything left. I guess being able to AirDrop a file is nice? But then also my Macbook and my iPhone have different chargers so from a hardware PoV they're less integrated. Is there anything I'm missing here?
Sorry for the analogy but this reminds me joke about the guy who replaced all ingredients in recipe and then said: "I do not get what is so special about this food".
Lots of users (especially in the US) do the things you don't do. They use iCloud, talk on the phone, and use Keychain and iMessage. They use Safari on both platforms and the features that let you send stuff back and forth easily. If they have an iPad some even use Sidecar which lets you use the iPad from your Mac.
Oh yeah, I use SideCar all the time but that's not an iPhone feature. And I get that people in the US use iMessage a lot but I don't see the value proposition of an iPhone if most of your contacts use Androids, even if you've gone fully Apple. Safari integration is nothing special (heck, Brave can do almost the same syncing without an account), OneDrive and Google Photos do just as good of a job as iCloud in my experience, and there are so many better alternatives to Keychain. The only truly handy integration between my MacBook and iPhone is being able to automatically switch which device my Airpods are connected to but even that is sometimes buggy.
I see no moral issue with government regulation to make our lives better.
People would still buy cars if seatbelts weren't a standard feature. They'd still by deodorant if it put holes in the ozone.
Vote with their money only works if companies make a product you can buy. Where's the iPhone "unlocked edition" that costs $20 more that I can buy? They don't make it.
$appliancevendorname also doesn’t make +$20 programmable washers. Arguments like this only appear when there’s an urge for an argument. Just buy an unlocked android phone, they exist with similar or better hw for $500 less.
I mean, even desktops can barely do raytracing so I wouldn't hold my breath on phone SoCs being able to do it competently for a while. Also, afaik there is no high-profile game that uses the RT cores on newer Snapdragons.
The damage the App Store causes is far, far wider than iOS users. The entire online ecosystem is shaped by app store censorship - we've seen again and again massive sites actively discrimate against kink, BDSM and queer communities because Apple requires to do so, and building different moderation for different end user devices is effectively impossible at scale.
How can you "vote with your money" in these cases? Most of the problems here stem from Apple misusing their monopoly against other app makers. Only indirectly harming consumers.
For instance, when purchasing a music subscription through an apple device, they receive 30% and the developer 70%. Apple have their own competing service where they make 100%. This makes it impossible for others to compete on equal terms, hence you as a consumer probably see less choice than you could have.
> and Apple has as much a right as an individual to design their platform as they wish.
Well, no, actually they don’t. The EU just passed a law mandating competition on platforms when it comes to store because as often in a duopoly the ability of people to vote with their money is significantly limited. That decidedly solves this question.
We aren’t overcomplicating the issue. The premise of this question is wrong, and you like it because it has a very obvious “winning side”, which happens to be the “side” that you’re on.
