Wait, so the Google Play Store, which you can install alternatives to (F-Droid, Aurora, Amazon,...), and where you can easily install apps through other means (such as downloading an APK through your browser and running it from the file manager) is an illegal monopoly while the Apple App Store isn't?
Well, I guess Google's market cap is only 2 trillion compared to Apple's 3 trillion, so I guess that's fair.
It is ridiculous. From Google's reply (https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/epic-...): "These Epic-requested changes stem from a decision that is completely contrary to another court’s rejection of similar claims Epic made against Apple — even though, unlike iOS, Android is an open platform that has always allowed for choice and flexibility like multiple app stores and sideloading."
If apple literally hadn't won their own case 2 years ago you'd be right.
If the company that literally doesn't allow users to install ANY application, yet alone a whole store, is in the clear, it's mind boggling that Google's situation is the one they took issue with.
Apple literally has a higher market share in the US.
Android has the appearance of an open platform that could accommodate alternate app stores, and so the court comes by with an order to allow alternate app stores. IOS never had the appearance of an open platform, so the court does not have the opportunity to do the same thing.
What's the lesson for future leaders in tech companies?
I’ve been working with React Native and Flutter and every time I have to interact directly with iOS/Android, I find that Android is much easier to work with and feels much better designed from a software/api/config perspective. Where Apple wins,
however, imho is in hardware. The iPhone is a masterpiece and users can tell, even ~16 years in. I feel that when Apple finally chokes on hardware, or some player in the Android spaces releases something incredible, the game will change quickly.
It’s highly unlikely for Apple to choke on hardware given their cash.
And as someone who’s done native for both, Android’s native SDK is a mess that even Android devs actually hate it.
Meanwhile, iOS’ SDK is incredibly exhaustive and coherent. I don’t know what your basis is for “better designed software”, but being able to fork a desktop OS from 20 years prior, make it into a mobile OS, then to a tablet OS, then to a watch and a headset OS, and then have billions of users on it all and make a trillion-dollar company out of it⸺does that not sound like good engineering to you? All while the competition can hardly build anything that actually lasts.
> being able to fork a desktop OS from 20 years prior, make it into a mobile OS, then to a tablet OS, then to a watch and a headset OS, and then have billions of users on it all and make a trillion-dollar company out of it⸺does that not sound like good engineering to you?
Microsoft and Google basically did the same thing, and in neither case it's really a testament to how "good" their respective software is engineered. If the amount of driver cruft on MacOS is anything to go by, the engineering underneath iOS and WatchOS is probably a fucking nightmare in most respects.
I used to be "the Android guy" at a big games publisher. In my time the billing component had to be rewritten three times solely because of Google changes. The Apple one was written once and left alone.
We can't even discuss why those Google changes happened because doing so would get you shot, or worse.
The tech direction that was going on at Apple was enormously better than other companies. It does feel like they've gone off the rails a bit, but things like Swift are underappreciated entirely because they're so successful, just with the wrong sort of developer.
Interesting, I have the exact opposite: I'm also a React Native developer and it's _always_ Android that creates all sorts of problems when developing where iOS is just fine. And it's not me: many devs in my team (and all the teams that I've also worked in the past) think the same way.
Though I'd agree with provisioning+codesigning can be a mess with iOS.
I think that this boils down to people wanting a handheld computer that sometimes can make phone calls (android), or a phone that can do other stuff (apple).
Just compare how android and iOS handle backgrounding.
I think that comparison would need some support. It is exceedingly rare that I hear any normal person mention doing something on Android that they couldn’t do on iOS, and the number of enthusiasts isn’t enough to drive a market that large.
As of today, there is no player in the Smartphone space who has even remotely the amount of secured income to come up with a similarly volume-scaled device, and there is little incentive for anyone to enter this space.
A new entrant would be unable to secure the investment, because even if he would produce the exact same piece of hardware with the same quality, the carrier distribution channels, the brand-image and (walled garden) ecosystem of Apple will prevent users to even notice and adopt the product, and the press would jump onto it and rip it to pieces.
So how would this normally work?
--> You disrupt the market by doing something particularly good, while being average in other areas, succeed, then iterate.
But this doesn't work in the Smartphone space as:
1.) iOS users are unlikely to leave their ecosystem because they can't take _anything_ with them
2.) the Google ecosystem leaves little room to disrupt and secure return-of-investment, and
3.) for Android you need to (re)build your own ecosystem to _match_ Google/Apple from the start.
That's why it's not a competitive market anymore, and needs to be (wait for it:) regulated to restore an even competition field for Hardware, Applications and Services.
What would I take with me? My photos and email will move just fine. The last app I bought was a while ago, and it was an app to block Google AMP. I’m honestly not sure I use any other paid apps.
Also no iTunes, Apple Music, Apple Messages, Apple Pay, Apple Fitness, any kind of native Mac integration (Safari Bookmark sharing, Shared Bluetooth devices, clipboard sharing, Continuity Camera, AirPlay,...)?
No Apple Wireless charger, Apple Watch, Airpods, Apple-specific Accessories, Apple App-based carkeys or Apple CarPlay?
As an experiment I recently switched from iPhone (last 10 years?) to Android. It's been a little painful but:
- nearly all apps support Android as well. The ones I used (navionics, banking apps, WhatsApp) you just log in on Android, no cost involved.
- most Apple first party apps have a Google equivalent (google wallet, google keep notes, google messaging etc.) that is very similar
- my AirPods work equally well with android
Fine - but that took Google billions and a decade of work to reach near-parity. A new entrant will not have any of that. Web apps can do much more than they could 10 or 15 years ago but still takes massive effort.
Google's been ahead of Apple on tons of core user-facing features since the start (widgets, backgrounds, folders). The two platforms have extremely slowly converged to near-total feature parity. The only "advantage" of Apple's total ecosystem lock-in is relative seamlessness due to the vertical integration between their various services.
The thing is, it's barely any harder to set up an equivalent Google/Android ecosystem and has been for well over a decade as well. The real issue on the Google side of things is the renaming/shifting of services. Messages -> Gmail Chat -> Talk -> Duo -> Messages, Google Play Music -> Youtube Music, etc.
Do you use MFA? How about meetings (zoom/teams)? What about MS Office or Google Apps? Is the new email client up to snuff? All of these are much better as apps.
Users do not want to browse the web on mobile for all their activities, when Apps are generally faster, more secure, and has all their prefs recorded EVEN if a webapp is functionally equivalent (and most are only 70-90% equivalent)
So the new entrant has to curry favor with all these large software vendors (some of whom are now competitors) and offer something for some key uses of a smartphone.
You're right that apps can be better, but phone apps seem to always miss functionality compared to desktop web versions of the same thing. Even phone web version of Google doesn't have functional parity with desktop web Google. The phone app for Google is even worse.
There were smartphones before the iPhone. I'm not sure you can label Apple's position as "first mover advantage".
They got where they did by leapfrogging the competition, dominating the supply chain, having incredible customer trust/service (with a sprinkle of Jobs' magic), thus reframing the entire category of smartphone.
It's unclear if anyone has delivered all these together. Google has dominated all other players at the OS level.
Apple isn't usually the first mover, though. It's not like the Mac was the first desktop computer, or the iPhone was the first smartphone, or the Apple Watch was the first smartwatch. Apple usually ends up with their market position whether or not they're the first mover.
gosh, if they hadn't basically created the market for phones like this it's hard to see how they would be dominating the market for phones like this, given their behavior.
because that's what first mover advantage is in this case. They created a market, in hardware - that's pretty difficult.
regarding other posts saying Apple wasn't first mover in smartphones:
Hey, I remember what those old things looked like. There was such a qualitative difference between the iPhone and its competitors at the time that it seemed like a whole new category of product.
I owned one. I barely used the keyboard. I barely used the internet connectivity. I even sat out the first iPhone. But I went into a store and tried one out and I knew I was getting the 3G when it came out. Phones may have had those features before, but they were strictly checkbox exercises. The iPhone was revolutionary.
Only: the iPhone did not have first mover advantages.
There were plenty of mobile phones out there before that could download and run apps, and Apple didn't even have their famous app store at the beginning of the iPhone, either.
They were the first device with a big display and a first-class web browser. That created the smartphone market you now take for granted but was completely revolutionary at the time when most devices had tiny screens and half their physical size was a keyboard.
The other big thing is more subtle: the iPhone was the first major break in the carriers’ value-extraction model. It was common that you’d get phones with half the storage used by promo apps the carrier wouldn’t let you uninstall, and the carrier app stores were both limited and unbelievably expensive. We had multiple clients who were interested in mobile apps but the cost of being in the stores was like $50k per carrier plus half of the proceeds, and that was an improvement over the time Qualcomm demanded to see the balance sheet so they could decide what percentage of their TOTAL revenue was fair – we asked and they confirmed that they expected a cut of every sale, even ones which never involved the mobile app. The energy at WWDC08 was incredible because the app stores were both terms were so much better than anyone had gotten before, and you only had to do it once. I still think it should be better now but it used to be so much worse.
There were high-end WinCE and Symbian devices with large displays and no physical keyboards (or sliders where keyboard doesn't encroach on screen size). To remind, first-gen iPhone was 3.5" @ 320x480 in 2007; for comparison, Dell Axim was 3.7" @ 480x640 in 2005, and by 2007 there were some WinMo handhelds with 480x800.
The thing that really made iPhone different was capacitive touchscreen, and the OS designed around that. WinMo pretty much required the stylus for many things.
Also note “and a first-class web browser” in my compound statement. If you used devices of that era, the browsers sucked at handling most of the web. I knew people who had the previous generation devices (I’m excluding the PalmOS ones I owned since they required a stylus) but nobody used the mobile browser much because it was so unrewarding, and everyone I know replaced them with iPhones due to the web experience.
Opinions varied widely on that - the Flash experience on mobile was horrible enough that it works equally well as an argument that “the web” and Flash were substantially not the same.
It was definitely horrible, but given how pervasive Flash was on the web then, I think a more reasonable takeaway is to say that no mobile device had first-class browser support until HTML5 <video> became prevalent. To me, "first class" implies "I can visit any popular website and expect it to work", which was decidedly not the case for iPhone at introduction.
Everything you say might be true, but I wouldn't necessarily call that first mover advantage.
> [...] when most devices had tiny screens and half their physical size was a keyboard.
Ie Apple introduced a new, arguably better, entrant into an existing market, and managed to grow that market.
But I can see your argument that you can re-interpret being that first to really commit to a big touch-screen only and (almost) no buttons to be a 'first move'. (Though a different comment mentioned that Apple wasn't the first here either?)
Also note the part after “and” - I wrote that as a compound sentence because I saw more people than I expected go from both earlier smartphones or PDAs because the iPhone gave them the web in a way that earlier devices just didn’t. None of my clients had seen much in the way of public mobile web (or WAP) adoption prior to that, but that changed surprisingly quickly when the iPhone launched.
I worked with a number of organizations which built public web apps. Nobody really asked about support for mobile browsers before the iPhone - some people checked that, say, an order form was technically functional but the assumption was that if it was slow or hard to read that was more to be expected than something they were going to pay to improve.
Yes, though touchscreens weren't exactly an Apple invention either.
I seem to dimly remember that they had some early lead on multitouch. But that one specific nifty technology is a far cry from a general 'first mover advantage' in phones with apps.
Apps weren't what drove people to the original iPhone (the original iPhone didn't have an app store). Apple was essentially the first mainstream company to commit fully to the current smartphone design — a flat, rectangular, portrait aspect ratio brick, with a single slab of capacitive multi-touch glass. There were many other competing form factors at the time. Apple correctly deduced that touching your screen is the most intuitive way to interact with smaller devices, and they had a huge first mover advantage by committing to that paradigm early.
They also included WiFi in every model and iOS had transparent prioritization of WiFi over cellular. Apple's deal with Cingular (AT&T) also gave the iPhone plan unlimited data.
That meant the iPhone had a full fledged browser that you could actually use. The browsers on PalmOS and Windows Mobile were jokes compared to Safari and most devices didn't have WiFi so we're always stuck on relatively slow cellular. A lot of smartphone plans also didn't include unlimited data. The BlackBerry plans were equally terrible, tied to BBM accounts, and the browsers were even worse.
The iPhone also had a real e-Mail client that could connect directly to a POP/IMAP server. A lot of competing smartphones only supported e-Mail through gateways run by the carriers or an enterprise connection. Even lacking features early on like BCC early iOS Mail was a lot better than the competition for normal users.
I think these all come down to Apple approaching the iPhone from asking what normal people might want to do with their phones instead of what "corporate" wanted people to do with their smartphones. This was 180° from the design approach of RIM, Microsoft, Palm, and even Nokia.
Nokia did pioneer using the smartphone as a decent digital camera (among other things).
For instance decent enough to take a picture of an A4 page and be able to read it afterwards.
And IMAP support.
And Opera mini was a good enough browser, though mostly for text, as indeed 3G cellular (which the first iPhone didn't have) then cost 1000€/Go (funnily enough, that felt cheap and fast at the time, because it indeed was compared to what came before).
(Also video calls, though those are still niche for phones.)
And I hear Nokias were themselves quite primitive compared to what Japan had ?
> The browsers on PalmOS and Windows Mobile were jokes compared to Safari and most devices didn't have WiFi so we're always stuck on relatively slow cellular.
Again, everything in your comment this seems like Apple made an arguably better offering in an existing market. That's not a first mover advantage.
If anything you can say, Apple was late to the party and learned from the mistakes of others?
> Again, everything in your comment this seems like Apple made an arguably better offering in an existing market. That's not a first mover advantage.
I never claimed Apple had a first mover advantage. They made a smartphone much more aligned to consumer desires than any of the competition. Palm, Microsoft, RIM, and Nokia all approached smartphones from the angle of business/enterprise users.
You can call Apple's approach being late to the party but that presumes that them entering some market is a forgone conclusion. Apple has rarely if ever been truly first to market with a product.
Apple doesn't even have any data plans, do they? I mean Google sometimes plays at being an ISP with projects like Loon or Google Fibre, but Apple has never done that?
It was exclusive to the iPhone, in that the iPhone + ATT plan was the only unlimited data plan you could get at release on a non-carrier controlled general purpose smartphone.
Which is to say, not one that locked away features and functionality (ringtones! games!) to create additional revenue channels for carriers.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but per memory Jobs used iPhone exclusivity to crack carrier "Our pipes" models open.
> in that the iPhone + ATT plan was the only unlimited data plan you could get at release on a non-carrier controlled general purpose smartphone.
I had unlimited data on non-carrier controlled phones pre-iPhone on AT&T, and it was far cheaper than the iPhone data plan. Dumbphone plans had cheap data add-ons in comparison, just take the SIM from the ultra-cheap phone they included in the plan and drop it in whatever unlocked GSM phone you wanted. It supported 3G before the iPhone even launched. You just had to get a 3G-enabled cheap dumbphone with your plan to ensure you got a 3G-activated SIM.
Obviously, they didn't market this so most consumers didn't know this was an option.
Apple wasn't ruled not a monopoly. It was ruled that the evidence Epic brought in the case was insufficient to show Apple was a monopoly, and the court would entertain other arguments in the future.
Apple didn't need to do anything, but they didn't "win" that convincingly.
That’s splitting hairs. By that logic nobody ever wins when they defend a lawsuit, the plaintiffs just fail to prove their point and different plaintiffs and/or different evidence might prevail in the future.
In the coming weeks or months the judge in the Epic case will decide if gacha games can link directly to their own payments without Apple, that threatens 70% of spending on the App Store in Apple's worst-case scenario (per the Epic case it was revealed 10% of users do 70% of spending, in such games). Minus the tens of billions in annual fees on gacha games, and with litigation and regulation around the world I think they will just abandon their most contentious restrictions.
On top of that is the DOJ antitrust case starting next year.
On top of that is the stalled, but not dead, legislation that would bring the US somewhat aligned with the EU in terms of competition.
I don't think Apple weathers all of this without broadly opening-up iOS.
Apple would probably just start charging gigantic fees for apps that meet certain criteria to replace some of the lost revenue or maybe even drive higher and more consistent revenue. If I recall correctly, that’s what they did in the European Union.
I’m not very convinced that “opening up” the Apple App Store will amount to much but
I know this is a contrarian view.
Changing the accounting to decide what split multi-billion dollar company Epic gets versus multi-hundred-billion dollar Apple gets has nothing to do with innovation or competition, and this is particularly true in gaming.
In fact, it seems like these rulings are likely to have the opposite intended effect on new and innovative apps as costs to do business increase and navigating publishing across various app stores will come with their own rules, costs, and headaches all the while establishes firms who already have the resources can create their own app stores and further extract rent.
Epic charges I think 12% or 17% on their store? Maybe the costs are lower than Apple, idk, but now Epic who is your competitor dictates what you publish on their store and you get the privilege of paying them to do so.
I think we’re cutting off the head of a snake and it’s growing 10 more in response.
> Changing the accounting to decide what split multi-billion dollar company Epic gets versus multi-hundred-billion dollar Apple gets has nothing to do with innovation or competition, and this is particularly true in gaming.
I vehemently disagree. When a user buys a game, where does their money go?
On the desktop, their money is sent to the storefront where the game was bought. Their payment is processed, the service's fee is exacted, and the user is given their game while the developer is paid their revenue. This is true even for MacOS, where the Mac App Store offers it's own experience in fair competition with Steam and other third-parties like GOG. iOS is unique in attempting to appear as a multi-purpose computer while also restricting user options to a small subset of profitable selections. That is not fair, to anyone.
> In fact, it seems like these rulings are likely to have the opposite intended effect on new and innovative apps
Pending evidence, you're just wrong. As a user of Android I will tell you from firsthand experience that my absolute favorite apps would not exist without sideloading. MacOS and Windows simply wouldn't have games at all if their distribution terms weren't free enough to attract publishers. And if you sort the iOS app store by top-grossing games, you'll quickly realize that the iPhone doesn't have real games either. Publishers like Nintendo left after their initial experiments - others like Epic and Microsoft were literally forced to leave.
You say that Epic's fee is just as bad as Apple's, but you don't substantiate how that's worse for users. Having two similar fees encourages competition - it creates an incentive to innovate in delivery and provide a superior service to users. Apple can charge twice as much if they want, but they (same as Epic) have to justify their pricing for it to compete fairly. Currently Apple answers to no one, which creates an obvious price fixing incentive on their behalf. This is demonstrably anticompetitive.
> I know this is a contrarian view.
Have you ever considered that it's not contrarian, and just wrong? People are eager to look at this from an "us vs them" perspective rather than an "profitability vs righteousness" one. Apple's stance is literally indefensible. When asked to justify their market position, the absolute best defense HN can present is that Apple abused the market first and never reneged their abuses. It's time for us to stop giving Apple a benefit of the doubt they don't deserve - the iPhone is not an appliance, and can be perfectly profitable without service revenue despite Apple's complaints.
> I vehemently disagree. When a user buys a game, where does their money go?
Microsoft
Sony
Nintendo
Ubisoft
Epic
Valve
Square Enix
etc...
I just don't really care if Apple gets a larger cut of the venue or if these large corporations do. Even on Desktop things aren't that great. My friends and I wanted to play Civ VI recently and they were on the Epic game store and I had purchased the game on Steam and they weren't compatible for cross-platform play. I know that's mostly a one-off, but it's not like I can buy Nintendo's games on Steam, nor can I transfer my license of Elden Ring on Xbox to my Epic Game Store.
None of this helps small developers they just now have to publish their games to multiple app stores which you may or may not have or may or may not want to set up an account for and you're paying Epic 17% instead of Apple.
Of course you can argue (and should, in my view) that those things suck and we shouldn't support those things either and I would agree! But where I disagree is then saying well Apple's the only malicious actor here. They're all in it together.
> Pending evidence, you're just wrong. As a user of Android I will tell you from firsthand experience that my absolute favorite apps would not exist without sideloading. MacOS and Windows simply wouldn't have games at all if their distribution terms weren't free enough to attract publishers. And if you sort the iOS app store by top-grossing games, you'll quickly realize that the iPhone doesn't have real games either. Publishers like Nintendo left after their initial experiments - others like Epic and Microsoft were literally forced to leave.
Well, it is a recent change. So yes it is pending evidence. If Epic and Microsoft left it's because they want to gain control and more of the Apple revenue slice instead of paying out. Neither helps small game developers. Most of the limitation on mobile for gaming is that mobile gaming sucks and always will because the interface is bad compared to keyboard and mouse or a controller.
> You say that Epic's fee is just as bad as Apple's, but you don't substantiate how that's worse for users. Having two similar fees encourages competition - it creates an incentive to innovate in delivery and provide a superior service to users. Apple can charge twice as much if they want, but they (same as Epic) have to justify their pricing for it to compete fairly. Currently Apple answers to no one, which creates an obvious price fixing incentive on their behalf. This is demonstrably anticompetitive.
Well as a user now I have to install yet another app that has my payment information and its own arbitrary rules. I might forget what App Store has what app. Maybe Epic makes me agree to some privacy considerations that Apple didn't in order to play their game and they only publish this "must-have" game on their store so they can collect data on me.
As someone who uses a Mac it's frustrating that not all games work on macOS. Why does Microsoft get to release Age of Empires only on the Windows-only Xbox Game Store (or whatever)? That's ok? There's a lot more of these dark patterns going on than these companies are leading you to believe.
YMMV but stores are incentivized to conduct activities to keep people using their store. Sometimes it's helpful to users and results in lower cost, other times it results in gatekeeping and other things that suck. My point is just that it's not a net moral good, but instead it's neutral and probably worse for developers since they have more bureaucracy to deal with and users since they have to deal with all of these app stores and payment mechanisms and whatnot.
> Have you ever considered that it's not contrarian, and just wrong?
I've considered it, and then considered that it's not wrong and it's just contrarian to what most people here on HN think.
Most people day-to-day don't really care about this and just prefer a single App Store, but then on HN people who like to jailbreak their phones and install and tinker with their phones and want lots of app stores with apps and are over-represented here.
> If apple literally hadn't won their own case 2 years ago you'd be right.
how does some previous judge decision matter for weather you _should_ crack down on a company?
it doesn't, right
the government can change laws, and judges can overrule decisions and as the US supreme court has shown even if there isn't "any new evidence in favor of the new decision but even evidence in favor of the old decision" decisions can be overruled and be done 100% in opposition to precedence of the same court.
yes but that doesn't mean that the us should not crack down on marked power abuse
being atm. in a position where suing you doesn't work well doesn't mean you are not causing harm nor doesn't mean you are not acting outside of the law. It only means that there is currently no effective way to use the law against you. But that can always change. And the US cracking down on them isn't limited to judge orders from cases of 3rd party companies against them. More specifically it's not even part of the state cracking down as that only refers to legislative and executive organs of the state judicial organs are supposed to be neutral.
Apple maintains a fully closed platform, while Google appears open yet is closed in practice. Like how Windows bundled IE, meaning that alternative browsers were never used in practice - the EU made them add a browser selection page.
For years, OEMs were made to install a number of Google apps onto the homescreen at predefined places. One of which is the Play Store. Amazon (for example) absolutely did not have this advantage, despite this kind of thing happening on non-Google hardware.
Or we can look at why Google's Play Store is allowed to auto-update apps without user interaction, and... that's it. That's the only store that's allowed to do that. And while the tech community might like being able to control which apps auto-update, everyone wants some apps to be allowed to update without user interaction.
Speaking of OEMs (and non-Google Android in general), Google has moved some functionality from base Android into Google Play Services so some apps won't work unless you get that installed.
This is easily seen to be false, but I see it repeated often. The functionality in Google Play Services requires a server. If you don't use Google services, you don't need Play Services. https://developers.google.com/android/reference/packages
That functionality was never available in phones with Google builds without Google Play Services, so it doesn't fit GGP's claim. The reason it's not in base AOSP out of the box is that it requires a server, and any carrier can build an implementation for downloading carrier profiles without Google Play Services and any OEM can build an LPA using https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/esim-overview.
You don’t have GPS satellite data, “location services” without Google Play services. That means a gps lock takes minutes. This data could be stored on the phone, but it’s better for google if you fetch it from them when you need it.
Another example of something that was never in AOSP and so does not fit GGGGP's claim. You can still get your GPS location without Google Play Services exactly the same as you always could.
And Google heavily pushes them to, to the point of (when I last made an android app years ago) automatically adding its libraries to your project every time you open the project, then giving compiler warnings if you use the old ones.
the only thing you miss out on without google play services is the wifi/bluetooth location service
gps satellite data comes from a supl server, and supl support is built in to aosp.
now, unfortunately one of the most reliable supl data sources is google, but it's also trivial to run a proxy to mask where you're requesting the supl data from (neither the request nor payload vary)
> the only thing you miss out on without google play services is the wifi/bluetooth location service
not true. A standalone gps unit can use an almanac to get a gps lock, but supl suppplants using an almanac.
supl is a spec created by the telecom industry[1][2]. I don't think they want people to have good offline gps.
> it's also trivial to run a proxy to mask where you're requesting the supl data from
Lmao. It is definitely not trivial. I have an Android that is running lineage and microG, it's an endeavor for someone who likes tech.
Regardless, according to my understanding of the spec, the supl server authenticates your identity[3] and is already effectively tracking you, so using a proxy would only obfuscate your IP address. As such, I don't think IP alone is enough to maintain privacy from Google. You would need middleware to anonymize your device ID.
But really, I find it egregious that I can't choose to use simple gps almanac data and must instead either use a blind fix on my phone or give my data up to some random server. Standalone GPS units that use almanac data get a lock virtually instantly compared to my Note 10. I'm trying to create a disconnected smartphone for backpacking. It's garbage to have to burn battery needlessly.
eh. you can't provision the esim without google play services today. after the esim is provisioned you can put whatever firmware on the phone you like, and it will just work.
i'm running lineageos with no google play services on a verizon esim as my daily driver
> Amazon (for example) absolutely did not have this advantage
Google incentivized the OEMs to do that. Amazon could have incentivized OEMs to do that also, but the business plan that Amazon pursued did not involve third parties building their own Kindle devices.
> Or we can look at why Google's Play Store is allowed to auto-update apps without user interaction, and... that's it.
This has never been true for Android in general. This hasn't been true for phones that only ship with the Play Store since Android 12, which I credit Epic for.
So, something similar then. OK, not as onerous as removing the whole OS, which they can’t do because Android uses an open license, but the next big thing. No play store, no Google services. May as well remove the OS.
Many of the fundamental apps on Android, and the Play store itself, can only be used under license. Android OSP does not contain many things that you would expect to be part of Android.
Also, most modern devices won't even let you flash your own OS, even a modified copy of Android. It's irrelevant if the source code is available if you can't actually run it anywhere. It's the TeVo case all over again.
You now have a third party app repository on your phone. And actually every Samsung device comes with their own app store installed in addition to Google Play. It's not perfect, Play having the privilege to automatically install updates, but good enough.
Also, AOSP is completely usable even without Google's apps or Play Services, and one proof of that is that Amazon forked it for their Kindle Fire.
No matter how much hackers and activists try to redefine the word "monopoly" to mean what it isn't, the word still will have the same meaning. And being a market leader doesn't mean you are a monopoly. Toyota does not have a monopoly on motorized transportation.
Having two competing companies being tried for the same monopoly is tragicomic, and only to show how rotten the courts have become.
That's not quite a fair comparison. The issue isn't Google v Apple--it's Google/Apple creating vertically integrated software platforms where they have a monopoly on App Stores.
Imo this is more similar to John Deere creating tractor DRM to lock out other entities from repairs. If Toyota came up with a proprietary motor design such that no other repair shop or parts manufacturer could make repairs, it'd be a similar situation. As it stands, there's 3rd party companies making replacement parts and a secondary market with used parts in addition to varying degrees of interoperability with other parts.
There is no secondary market for apps since they're all sold as licenses and never own anything. They also intentionally put restrictions in place to prevent 3rd parties from creating "replacement" apps
To build out this metaphor a little more, John Deere makes the tractor (phone OS) which pulls machinery (apps - plow, fertilizer spreader, harvester, etc). This would be John Deere controlling which equipment the tractor may or may not be allowed to pull, only machinery allowed by John Deere who gets a 30% cut for the privilege. This would be a great deal for Johnny D!
This. I'm so tired of people (and Google/Apple themselves) trying to change the narrative and say that this is about Android and iOS competing. It's not. Both companies are effectively saying you have no right to change the upholstery in your car unless you buy the package from them.
This is about the economic freedoms of end users and app developers within a platform, not whether lock in is a feature for consumer comparison when buying a phone.
> That's not quite a fair comparison. The issue isn't Google v Apple--it's Google/Apple creating vertically integrated software platforms where they have a monopoly on App Stores.
That's the exact reasoning I'm calling tragicomic: They are competitors, neither of them have a monopoly on app stores. If you say that two competitors have a monopoly, then you can say that for example all car manufacturers are in a monopoly on making cars. Sure, then the word monopoly doesn't mean anything, and we have simply removed a word from the vocabulary and made everybody dumber.
Your points and comparisons are valid, but they haven't anything to do with a monopoly.
You are being overly semantic. There is a monopoly and duopoly, and regardless of the number of companies involved, antitrust laws can be used to break up these businesses and prevent anti-competitive practices to encourage market growth.
The e-book pricing scandal is an example of antitrust activity against a number of companies forming a cartel. The US government isn't bringing this case under those laws, but effectively for lay person conversations, using monopoly where more technical terms like duopoly is okay
In your comment above you've suggested two terms that fit better: "Duopoly" and "cartel".
Anti-competitive actions should be combated, but why do people insist that anything has to do with being a "monopoly"?
To draw a comparison, in criminal cases the courts will not determine if an accused is "a bad hombre" – they will determine if he committed the crime or not.
This is like those people (and lawmakers sadly) who try to define any sexual offense as "rape". Thinking that the severity of the crime is only tied to one single word.
You are ignoring the relevant market. Sure, Google and Apple are competitors in the smartphone market (where they have a very dangerous duopoly, but let's leave that aside). But they each have a monopoly in the software distribution market for their respective platforms. Additionally, Google has a monopoly position in the smartphone OS market: if you want to build a smartphone, Google Android is basically the only option in town (Apple doesn't sell or license iOS, so it's not a competitor at all in this market).
Additonally, Google have used their position in the Android software market to cement their position in the smartphone OS market, and vice-versa. For example, they de-list certain apps from Google Play Store is they are offered on certain competitor stores (notably, Amazon's). And they don't allow Google Play to be installed on a phone that doesn't ship with it from the factory. And there are numerous other examples. Plus, they've been foolish enough to discuss a lot of these strategies internally over email as ways of ensuring competitors don't succeed, which came out clearly in the discovery process.
> a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area.
Note the "typically", and other courts never even had this rule of thumb to begin with...
While the term “monopoly” is being misused, it shouldn’t be that difficult to determine, with basic reading comprehension, that the intent is “seemingly anti-competitive behavior”.
Sure, but I would argue that Google's platform was open enough in that it was possible to download and install alternative app stores. They shouldn't need to do most of the things that are being requested here, like distribute play store apps in those alternate stores or change their requirements about what payment systems are used in apps downloaded through their app store. For the most part I think they should still be able to do what they want to do in their own app store, just like Apple.
Why should that matter? If anything, shouldn't that mean that Google doesn't have a monopoly on Android apps in the way that Apple has on iOS apps because the device manufacturer can pre-install their own store on their devices? Like Galaxy Store on Samsung devices
It matters because Google got to the current state (Play Store installed on more devices than it would have been) through anti-competitive behavior.
Ergo, the redress isn't to say "Keep the ill gotten gains, but don't do it any more" -- it's to attempt to return things to the competitive playing field that might have existed if Google hadn't broken the law.
From that perspective, forcing them to use their market share to distribute alternatives makes sense.
It's not a court of public opinion. This isn't a popularity contest; they're not running for public office or something here.
In real court (with real lawyers and real judges), precedent often matters (often, it matters quite a lot).
Informing the court of [what may be] meaningful precedent is important; without this deliberate informative step, the court might not know about it at all. The court cannot take anything into consideration that it has no knowledge of.
(Despite the black robes and literal ban-hammers, judges aren't all-seeing or all-knowing.)
Although Epic appealed to SCOTUS, and SCOTUS rejected their appeal, which makes it seem like SCOTUS is unlikely to rule that app stores have to be open.
In general the judicial system's bizarre treatment of Apple baffles and somewhat infuriates me. If Google has to allow alternative app stores on Android due to monopoly power, and has to allow alternate billing options due to monopoly power, and yet is the smaller of the two in the U.S., how on Earth does the legal system continue to give a free pass to Apple doing the same thing while having more market power in the U.S. than Google? It's obscene and makes me deeply question the integrity of the judicial system in the U.S. as a whole.
Personally I think both Google and Apple should have to open up their app store system and billing systems more broadly, but it's pretty despicable for the judicial system to simply pick winners and losers like this.
The difference is that Apple doesn't try and pretend their platform is open-source, whereas Google wants to have its cake (i.e. impose competitive blockers on their own platform) and eat it too (i.e. benefit from calling their platform open source and having free development fed back into it).
Yeah the code being open-source vs closed-source didn't have anything to do with the legal ruling here. The judge claimed that the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store are not competitors (LMFAO), and therefore Google can be held liable even if Apple wasn't. https://www.theverge.com/23959932/epic-v-google-trial-antitr...
(FWIW, the journalist who wrote both articles is ethically barred from reporting on Apple due to his wife being an Apple employee, but still apparently covers Google/Android, so... Take the slant of his coverage with a grain of salt.)
You have two walled gardens and two monopoly-esque distribution platforms within those walls.
Nobody with an iPhone can use Google Play, and nobody with an Android can use the app store.
Which is why disallowing, or hindering, competing app stores within one walled garden is clearly anti-competitive.
It's not reasonable to expect consumers in one ecosystem to completely leave the ecosystem for one specific app, just like it's not reasonable to expect a homeowner to sell their house and move somewhere just so they can pay a lower utility bill.
Is the utility company serving your house a competitor with the utility company across the street if I have to move houses to switch between them?
Yes, if you look at the market as a whole. Clearly not if you use a reasonable interpretation and consider costs of switching.
If Apple and Google are truly providing unique value to developers and consumers, then they have nothing to fear from alternative app stores. Their profits won't be affected.
Android as a platform is open source. Android does not promise any of Google Services' features.
Meanwhile, Apple literally reinvents apps/features that developers on iOS have made and rolls them into the base OS/you can bet when an API is blocked or deprecated that Apple is just about to release their own version of something.
People like to joke that Google's "don't be evil" is no longer applicable, but they completely ignore just how evil Apple really is. Totally brainwashed.
I can see why they'd want to say "our competitor does it worse but we're the only ones being regulated". Sure, they'd rather not be regulated at all... but, if they are, then they want to be regulated no worse than their competitor.
I liked the absurdity of one of the top comments on the Verge article, which was that under the requirements of this ruling, Apple could open up an app store for Android and Google would be forced to put it on their Play Store.
Is a rendering engine still a web browser if you remove all the chrome and extra features built around the rendering engine?
I would say not.
And it has a rendering engine: the iOS WebKit engine. It’s not Google’s preferred rendering engine and Chrome isn’t my choice of browser well, anywhere at all actually, but it’s still a functional web browser.
> Is a rendering engine still a web browser if you remove all the chrome and extra features built around the rendering engine?
> I would say not.
No, obviously not. If Apple were to allow third-party web rendering engines but disallow third-party web chrome that would be equally ridiculous. But just because one part of a browser is important doesn't mean that other parts of a browser aren't also important.
> And it has a rendering engine: the iOS WebKit engine. It’s not Google’s preferred rendering engine and Chrome isn’t my choice of browser well, anywhere at all actually, but it’s still a functional web browser.
It may be a functional web browser (honestly arguable given how old and buggy the iOS rendering engine is), but it's not "Google's wildly popular web browser".
> But just because one part of a browser is important doesn't mean that other parts of a browser aren't also important.
Sure, but both halves are still there. WebKit is just filling in for Blink.
> but it's not "Google's wildly popular web browser".
You want to know the screwed up part? It actually is. There’s no gun to Google’s head to list any web browser at all for iPhones in the App Store, but they do, and they themselves chose to brand it exactly the same as their desktop and Android browser; and that’s exactly how people perceive it: Google Chrome. It’s also wildly popular. I ask people about it sometimes when I see them using it and all that geeky crap that you and I know about how it’s not the same as Google’s “real” browser is beyond them. They don’t care and it’s just Google Chrome to them.
> It may be a functional web browser (honestly arguable given how old and buggy the iOS rendering engine is)
WebKit is still a top class rendering engine and only about as buggy as any other rendering engine. Blink is of the same lineage given it is a fork of WebKit and Gecko is even older.
No they're not. Google is only being allowed to distribute half their browser, frankensteined together with half of Apple's, because Apple does not allow distributing a complete browser.
> WebKit is still a top class rendering engine and only about as buggy as any other rendering engine. Blink is of the same lineage given it is a fork of WebKit and Gecko is even older.
Mainline WebKit is a fine rendering engine, but the iOS distribution is significantly outdated and buggy. "Safari is the new IE" caught on for a reason.
>WebKit is still a top class rendering engine and only about as buggy as any other rendering engine. Blink is of the same lineage given it is a fork of WebKit and Gecko is even older.
But we should have the option to choose. Apple is very anti-consumer, making all the choices (often bad ones) for us, giving us none. The court should rule to open Apple more. Android is open enough that you can do whatever you want, yet not complicated enough so people get confused with all the options you have.
I agree we should have the option to choose, but I’m not going to consign any statement that it should be done by government force. That’s reckless and unnecessary.
Also Epic lost their case, so “the Court” isn’t in a position to do anything here. Even if they were, there is no law on the books anywhere in the country to serve as the basis for what you want the courts to do and someone new would have to bring a case, with standing.
The Feds are trying, I don’t remember web browsers being part of their filing, but it’s also been a while since I read it so I may have forgotten; but the problem is not only did Epic lose their case, they lost it in a way that thoroughly screwed over the Feds who were trying to build an antitrust case against Apple by getting a Federal district court to rule that Apple isn’t a monopoly, and if they can’t get to a monopoly ruling under a different district court that will stand up to appeal, they’re going to have a hard time getting Apple or a court to force Apple to agree to anything.
>>> Is a web browser still a web browser if you remove the rendering engine?
>> Is a rendering engine still a web browser if you remove all the chrome and extra features built around the rendering engine?
> Is that supposed to be a counterargument?
Only as much as what I was responding to was an argument.
> If you can't replace the rendering engine, then you're not able to install your own web browser.
Except that is literally not true if a rendering engine is available to you to use.
> Which is replacing the one that was removed.
“Removed” would imply there was ever another rendering engine in use on Chrome for iPhones. The Chrome that is in the App Store now is one that Google chose to ship and call Chrome. People like and use it too.
I think we can agree that WebKit is being subbed in over Google’s preferred choice of rendering engines though.
> Only as much as what I was responding to was an argument.
What you said could be the start of a counterargument to someone that says renderer==browser.
But they never said that. Their argument only depends on replacing the renderer being a sometimes-necessary component of installing your own browser. Talking about replacing the renderer but not the UI is a thought experiment that doesn't counter that.
> Except that is literally not true if a rendering engine is available to you to use.
Only if everyone agrees with your personal definition of browser. Many people don't.
> “Removed” would imply there was ever another rendering engine in use on Chrome for iPhones.
No, it just implies their starting point for making their iOS browser included the chrome codebase.
Apple does not compete with Google to distribute apps on Android and Google does not compete with Apple to distribute apps on iOS.
The value (to consumers) of the App Store is not that it is so locked down, but rather that it is the only way for people to put apps on the phones they have already bought.
But wait, you might say, Apple actually can open an app store on Android and compete with Google now!
But c'mon, it'll be a cold day in hell when Apple helps make the case that these rules should also apply to them.
The issue is that the precedent they point to was categorically ruled _not_ an illegal monopoly in a similar court case. I don't disagree that there should be more competition in for platforms, but I also can recognize that the legally binding opinion on that disagrees with mine.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple, the ruling definitively stated that Apple does not need to add third party app stores to its platform, and the appeal upheld that ruling (with the Supreme Court declining to hear further appeals, meaning the case is finished). The only change Apple had to make is supporting third-party payment platforms.
> Judge Rogers issued her first ruling on September 10, 2021, which was considered a split decision by law professor Mark Lemley.[63] Rogers found in favor of Apple on nine of ten counts brought up against them in the case, including Epic's charges related to Apple's 30% revenue cut and Apple's prohibition against third-party marketplaces on the iOS environment.[64] Rogers did rule against Apple on the final charge related to anti-steering provisions, and issued a permanent injunction that, in 90 days from the ruling, blocked Apple from preventing developers from linking app users to other storefronts from within apps to complete purchases or from collecting information within an app, such as an email, to notify users of these storefronts.
> ...
> The Ninth Circuit issued its opinion on April 24, 2023. The three judge panel all agreed that the lower court ruling should be upheld. However, the Ninth Circuit agreed to stay the injunction requiring Apple to offer third-party payment options in July 2023, allowing time for Apple to submit its appeal to the Supreme Court.[79] Both Apple and Epic Games have appealed this decision to the Supreme Court in July 2023.[80][81] Justice Elena Kagan declined Epic's emergency request to lift the Ninth Circuit's stay in August 2023.[82]
> On January 16, 2024, the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeals from Apple and Epic in the case.
Given that the claim I was responding to implied that it was foolish of Google to cite Apple due to them being a monopoly, can you elaborate on why you think this ruling somehow was an obviously bad idea for them to argue as a precedent? To repeat myself from before, I'm _not_ expressing personal opinion about whether iOS and Android should be allowed to operate the way they do, but asserting that the court ruling does in fact state that the current way Apple handles third-party app stores is legal.
I believe it is too late for that and we are stuck with bad mobile OS. Additional stores don't solve the problem of hardware not being open at all.
People have accepted that either manufacturer or mobile provider owns their phone. You do not have administrative rights and some apps even disallow being run in a more free environment.
They could preinstall a bunch of competitors and you'd choose the ones you keep at first startup (like Microsoft had to do with browser). This would allow fairer competition for competing stores.
Also they need to make sure the playstore is not required for the phone to work correctly which I'm not sure is the case on stock Androids currently.
You can disable them, which is functionally uninstalling. Actually being able to uninstall them isn't technically possible because their base images live on a read-only partition so they survive factory reset (which erases all RW partitions). The OS could _pretend_ they're uninstalled, but that seems strictly worse than the existing presentation which more accurately reflects reality.
Not exactly the same situation, but I keep wondering : is deleting personal data only "pretending", since most of it could potentially be restored for quite some time (especially on transistor storage) ?
Sure, but I think it's fair to say "why are you regulating us significantly more than you are regulating our similar competitor?" Android is already more open than iOS; you can already install third-party app stores, where the only hoop you have to jump is agreeing to a warning about installing things from "unknown sources".
But yeah, Google doesn't allow rival app stores to be distributed through the Play Store, nor does it give access to the full Play Store catalog to third-party app stores. Frankly I'd never even thought of the latter thing as something I or anyone would want, but sure, ok, make them do that.
Meanwhile, Apple gets to keep their App Store monopoly (in the US at least), a situation that is even more locked down than Android's has ever been.
I absolutely agree that Apple's platform needs to be opened up too. And while I'm often not sympathetic toward Google on a lot of things, I can absolutely be sympathetic toward them feeling like they are being treated vastly unequally by the law.
It's simple. There exists a market for app stores on Android, there doesn't exist such a market on iOS. So, Apple can't be said to have a monopoly position in the iOS app distribution market, because, again, such a market doesn't exist, and there is no general obligation to create one (there is a different discussion about the app market, which Epic was attacking and which failed for now).
But on Android, you do have a market for app stores - there is Google, and then there are various bit players (F-Droid, Samsung Store, Amazon Store, and others). And Google is by far the biggest, and using their position to set the rules for all the others, including actively hostile actions like de-listing some apps if they don't offer exclusivity to Google Play, disallowing Google Play installation if the OEM doesn't ship it by default, etc.
The reductio ad absurdum of this style of argument would hold that every retailer is a monopoly, because once you walk into the store, you can only buy things from them.
It has allowed it, but it intentionally cripples alternative markets. For example, I cannot allow F-Droid to autoinstall and autoupdate apps on my phone if I don't have a rooted device.
> Apple's claim is simple: The monopoly was from the very beginning, when the iPhone had 0.0% market share. If it was anti-competitive, the iPhone would have failed. If developers didn't like it, the iPhone would have failed. Has Apple unfairly done anything new now that they have a monopoly? No. Did Apple raise their 30% royalty to 70% when they had a monopoly? No.
The problem is not a monopoly on hardware. The problem is gatekeeping access to software markets.
The logical consequence of this argument is that there is no such thing as a business practice which is illegal for a monopoly, but which is legal for a startup. As long as you start doing it when you're small, it must be OK.
I don't think that holds water. The standards should definitely get higher as you gain more market share.
> The problem is gatekeeping access to software markets
However, it started out this way, from the beginning, and developers accepted it. This is easily demonstrable - customers would not have bought devices without apps, and vice versa. Very hard to show, in a court of law, that the terms which were once acceptable now magically aren't.
The law isn't interested in people who say, "yes, it was a perfectly fine contract, 10 years ago, but now it's a problem even though it hasn't changed." Imagine what would happen to mortgages.
> it started out this way, from the beginning, and developers accepted it.
Developers did not accept it. Some did, but any amount does not constitute complete acceptance. From the very beginning, iOS had people developing alternatives to the App Store a-la Cydia. Apple's terms were always controversial.
Apple's constituent of app developers does not even remotely reflect the attitude (or assent) of the development community as a whole. It certainly doesn't represent a competitive or regulated market of software comparable to the web, the Mac, Android or Windows.
The legal agreement, and the fact developers signed it, even if begrudgingly, back when iOS did not have a monopoly in any way, is the only assent the law needs to consider.
Student loans certainly don't have much assent 5 years after graduation.
Not everyone has student loans. Non-signatory parties aren't beholden to other people's terms, and even then their agreement doesn't inherently prove the legality of a particular loan provider.
Apple's de-facto control of iPhone software can be illegally abusive without violating the terms of their developer agreements. If that wasn't true then I don't know why the FTC would be actively investigating them.
If any of this were remotely true, then I have a contract for you-- it involves a small loan for relocation, no big deal. You'll just have to work for me exclusively for the next 20 years, and if you can't pay it off, no problem, we'll assign the remainder to your kids.
True; except that the iPhone didn't allow apps from anywhere, at all.
Consider damages, from a legal perspective. Can you claim damages, because you can't write apps for your proprietary 3D Printer? Can you claim damages, because you can't write apps for your dishwasher? Can you claim damages, because you can't write apps for an ecosystem which is, and was, always closed?
No, no, and (currently) no.
You absolutely can claim damages though for building up an ecosystem that then turns into a bait-and-switch. Case: Android.
Edit: Also, the commenter below is wrong. Steve Jobs talked about the 30% cut in the very introduction of the App Store. The 30% cut was also required on all in-app purchases, but by a legal agreement instead of an automated collection method.
As someone mentioned, the app store started without a 30% cut so they also baited and switched. The only difference is that Apple won the case because Justice works like that. Different judges and it would have lost too.
Except the App Store was announced 16 years ago and the 30% cut was definitely part of the announcement. There’s a whole slide with Steve Jobs discussing it 3 minutes in. The other commenter was mistaken.
> Apple's claim is simple: The monopoly was from the very beginning, when the iPhone had 0.0% market share. If it was anti-competitive, the iPhone would have failed. If developers didn't like it, the iPhone would have failed. Has Apple unfairly done anything new now that they have a monopoly? No. Did Apple raise their 30% royalty to 70% when they had a monopoly? No.
Apple did not have a 30% cut for in-app purchases when the iPhone was created, just App Store purchases. In-app revenue tax was instituted in 2011
THIS. And this is the main reason why I hate the EU decisions. Apple was always 100% clear on their message. The App Store is a closed ecosystem. You hate it? You don’t have to use it. You can do PWAs.
If they attacked Apple on their PWA support, I’d have backed the case (though nobody cares, obviously). But the case as it is now is dumb.
When it occupies half the market and life is increasingly dependent on your phone it’s no longer “don’t like - don’t buy”. How about “don’t like the changes - stop using Apple”? Huh? What’s stopping you from finding another Apple if there are thousands of alternatives?
There are no closed-ecosystem alternatives!! However there are thousands of alternatives to Apple. It is don’t like don’t buy, as literally NO ONE NOR ANY SITUATION FORCES YOU TO BUY AN iPhone. You need a PHONE, not an iPhone.
Also in what world does Apple have half the market?
They got caught doing the same thing Microsoft got caught doing in the 90s with IE/Netscape -- using their monopoly position on one piece of software (Windows, the Google app suite) to prevent their OEMs from shipping another piece of software by default (Netscape, Epic Games Store) that directly competed with their own offering (Internet Explorer, Google Play Store). Since Google and Microsoft both use OEMs, unlike Apple in their parallel case, there's a clearer line to how Google is being unfair compared to how Apple is being unfair.
In short, Epic sued and won because Google got between them and Samsung.
In general, in the courts, it's a lot easier to ask a judge or jury for someone to stop doing a thing (blocking their software from being pre-installed) vs. forcing someone to do something they're not currently doing (allowing any third-party app stores).
Couldn't you reword that as allowing unsigned and self signed software to be installed? You can push your own apps to your iOS device but iirc Apple artificially limits the number of self signed apps that can be installed
Aside from the EU explicitly mandating it, the developer agreement you sign with Apple in order to ship software on their platform prohibits you from doing so. And while you theoretically can write your own storefront, running self-signed apps isn’t going to be a viable user story with the way Apple’s set it up (intentionally, in my opinion).
It's not just allowing alternative stores, it's stuff like:
- Stop requiring Google Play Billing for apps distributed on the Google Play Store (the jury found that Google had illegally tied its payment system to its app store)
- Let Android developers tell users about other ways to pay from within the Play Store
- Let Android developers link to ways to download their apps outside of the Play Store
- Let Android developers set their own prices for apps irrespective of Play Billing
Removing those restriction on billing in the app will probably have way more impact in the end.
- wow, this is an exact case Apple more or less won in Apple v Epic. They got some minor slap on the wrist about steering but they still got around that. Apple must have paid their judge off big time
- Yup, this is the steering that Apple "lost".
>Starting January 16, developers can apply for an entitlement to provide a link within their app to a website the developer owns or is responsible for. The entitlement can only be used for iOS or iPadOS apps in the United States App Store.
There's so many stipulations to getting this approved that it's hard to call it a win. Just more delays
- good, but ofc irrelevant on Apple for now.
- And good. Somewhat relevant for Apple but the stipulations above make this hard.
I mostly hope this precedent can be used against future Apple proceedings to get that store opened up.
This might explain (or be related to) why when I installed an Amazon app through Amazon's store it would get hijacked by the Play Store version eventually.
Generally no that doesn't happen. It may be very specific to Amazon though. Android uses signing keys to validate updates, and if the signing key doesn't match, it is impossible to install the update. My guess is Amazon (was?) using the same signing keys between the two stores.
Most developers use Google's app signing service to ensure that a loss of the signing key will not strand their users on old versions. In that case, it would not have been possible for Amazon distributed apps to use the same signing keys. I say would not have, because these new requirements mean it will actually now be possible since Amazon could distribute the updates published to Google Play, and doing resigning shenanigans would throw the baby out with the bathwater (allowing users to seamlessly switch app stores)
Interesting. I assumed there was some kind of internal identifier, which was the same between the two variants of the app, but I guess that identifier is just (a hash of?) the public key. Nevertheless, it seems like the Play Store had priority for providing updates.
Tangentially, how does Android handle signing key rotation/expiration?
The identifier would be the package name baked into the APK, "com.amazon.mshop.android.shopping" in this case, likely the same for both versions. I'm sure there's several ways that issue could have happened but my first guess would be some OEM nonsense, a lot of them bundle Amazon and probably have poorly written updaters that can't tell you've modified the install.
This happened on Pixel devices, so the OEM is Google (which might be related). As I recall, no Amazon apps come preinstalled, but I have installed them from the Play Store first, then removed them, so maybe that could have flipped some flag too.
Interesting, yeah could be. Disabling Play Store auto-updates for the app if enabled might help.
Actually I'm not sure how you installed Amazon Shopping from the Amazon store anyways? I installed it a while back assuming they would have versions of Shopping and Kindle that would let me buy books, but they didn't seem to distribute those apps at all which I thought was strange. Still not seeing them there now.
Wow, you're right. Now I'm not sure of my own memory on this. I remember installing Kindle (or pre-Kindle Comixology...?) from somewhere and being able to buy on it, but then it got replaced with the version where you couldn't. Maybe that was because it got discontinued on the third-party app store (which I thought was Amazon's)?
The Epic v Google and Epic v Apple cases are a great showcase about how the law actually works in practice.
Epic v Google was a jury trial, and also there was plenty of evidence in discovery to Epic’s favour[1], and also there was evidence that “Google destroyed evidence and repeatedly gave false info to court”[2].
There was a fair amount of coverage and analysis among legal commentators about why Google lost. It’s worth reading for people interested in trial law.
(Especially read [2] about how Google sought to hide conversations from discovery. It’s cringeworthy.)
If you claim the platform you create is open, but use anticompetitive actions to retain control of it, you end up in a worse legal position than you would have by being clear that the platform is closed.
Look at Microsoft. They have been found guilty of anticompetitive conduct related to their open Windows platform in multiple jurisdictions, but not so with XBox.
Either never claim your platform is open, or refrain from anticompetitive behavior in the "open" market you choose to create. .
This is a terrible incentive structure to set up for platforms.
I get the reasoning, but I chose Android because it's open and I've never run into any of the anticompetitive problems people claim are so damaging. If Google had known that this was the deal at the beginning, I doubt they'd have created Android the way that they did and I wouldn't have an open platform to use—we'd just have two walled gardens.
> Stop requiring Google Play Billing for apps distributed on the Google Play Store (the jury found that Google had illegally tied its payment system to its app store)
> Let Android developers tell users about other ways to pay from within the Play Store
> Let Android developers link to ways to download their apps outside of the Play Store
> Let Android developers set their own prices for apps irrespective of Play Billing
Have you really never ran into any apps that would have hit these restrictions ?
If you've never have use the Play Store in the first place that would be the case, but otherwise I'd assume every app you got from there are subjected to those.
Yes. I install everything I can through F-Droid or sideloading and only fall back on the Play Store for a few things like banking apps which couldn't care less about Google's monetization rules.
On banking apps, I wonder how isolated they are. My bank offers insurance services, and they can be paid through other means than my bank account. But I can't contract them in my app, it's only available by phone or through the web site.
I wonder if they just took the safest route and removed any "buying" operation from their app instead of having to fight Apple or Google later (used both apps, had same limitations)
As an Android user, I've paid for two, maybe three? apps. And got a refund on one because the paid version didn't do what I thought it said it did.
The restrictions on non-Google billing did impact my employer, but it was less of a problem in the US as in some other countries where Google only billing meant we couldn't charge users as very few had Google compatible payment methods and Google wouldn't let us use other providers that could accept money with the payment methods people actually had. We had other methods in our apk download, but I recall having to take those out, too.
Of course, Apple made payment go through them, but most Apple can accept payments from most of their users, and a lot of their users have a payment method on file.
> I get the reasoning, but I chose Android because it's open ....
I suspect you mean, you chose Android because Google _said_ it was open.
Plenty of tech people chose Android because they knew others would be able to carve out a workable system based on the open source bits even if Google didn't actually keep it open.
This ruling is basically against Google rug-pulling - for example, looking the other way on third-party billing until deciding (after critical mass) that you are going to start enforcing the use of Google's payment services for certain classes of apps. At that point you are destroying businesses with such back-tracking.
They were slapped down because Google claimed they were open because you allow third party stores, but creating roadblocks (Play services, DRM licensing and device certifications for streaming apps) and applying pressure or doing revenue-sharing schemes with device manufacturers on the back-end to keep them from making their own store.
It is very difficult for a judge to slap Apple down for antitrust when Apple has been very careful to keep consistent rules and to only change them when it is considered invariably considered a benefit to the App Store developer (subscription rate reductions after one year, small business program, opening up new categories of apps like legacy emulators).
It is hard to argue a point when Apple started abusing their position when their behavior is consistent. If the App Store is a bad deal then why has it grown to be such a juggernaut from nothing?
That is why the EU took a different philosophy with the DMA.
I already responded to the condescending "you didn't really know what you were choosing" comment below. The tldr is that I knew exactly what I was choosing and have never had any issues with it.
If Google had tried to make an iPhone style ecosystem, all evidence is clear that they would have utterly failed, like almost every other consumer device that Google has tried to promote, and we would have had at least a few more iOS competitors (maybe Windows would have lived? Maybe Samsung would have finished Tizen?). The reason Android succeeded was precisely because it was open and available to multiple OEMs. But that also opens Google up more to anti-competitive scrutiny.
Google could have licensed Android to OEMs, not allowed 3rd party app stores, made 3rd party app installation functionally infeasible (need to reinstall every week), and forbidden other web browsers.
I appreciate that Android did not go down this route because I don't believe any of these choices would have caused Android to fail.
> I've never run into any of the anticompetitive problems people claim are so damaging
That sounds like you either haven’t heard all of the indie developers complaining or are inclined to find reasons to say problems with “your side” have some other explanation. For example, this was just a couple weeks ago where Google’s “open platform” blocked a popular app from doing what their mutual customers wanted:
If you chose Android because it’s open, then the judge has just forced Google to make it more open for you.
If someone chose iOS because it’s closed then the judge has decided it can stay mostly closed.
Also Google is where it is because they pitched a platform that was friendlier for carriers to load up with crapware than Apple was. It wasn’t really openness for openness’ sake. If Google hadn’t done that we might have been in a world where Palm or Microsoft were the secondary or primary player next to iOS.
I'm not really concerned about what will happen to Android—worst case scenario at this point, the community forks it and I use the fork.
I'm concerned about the precedent this sets. As long as this is the state of US law, we won't see another open platform developed in the US because these rulings together say that the only way to be sure you're not punished for anti-competitive behavior is to ensure that no one can ever define a "market" around your platform. Only a fully walled garden is safe.
Google is not being punished for being “open”. It’s being punished for pressuring OEMs and app developers into illegal contracts behind closed doors, or in other words using its monopoly position in anti competitive ways.
Apple published the rules for their App Store over a decade ago and has largely stood by them so Apple is not being punished.
Having a closed platform isn't illegal. Just ask Nintendo.
Anticompetitive behavior is illegal, even when you are anticompetitively competing in a market that you yourself chose to create by creating an open platform. Just ask Microsoft.
If Google's leadership didn't understand that legal restrictions their choice placed upon them, that failure is on Google's leaderhip.
Like I said, I get the reasoning, I just think it's a terrible outcome.
> "If the law supposes that," said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, "the law is a ass—a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience."
You know as well as I do that no company will ever do that. The result will be that there will be no new platforms that aren't either fully locked down or built by and for FOSS enthusiasts.
Heck, just look at WordPress for an example of what happens when a company tries to create a purely open platform and then still be a for-profit company. You can have open platforms maintained out of altruism or closed platforms maintained for profit. Android was a middle path that has now been shown to be illegal.
Google did not compete in an anticompetitive matter (w.r.t. app stores) and a federal judge determining that they did means nothing because it will likely be appealed by another judge. They will probably win their appeal because the verdict is insane.
But it never was. You were defrauded and everyone who made that choice for those reasons were illicit market gains because of the secret agreements Google exerted over the entire ecosystem around you.
It was never really open but you also never really knew about that because all of the real options were taken out back and killed before you saw them.
Your lack of understanding of how you were defrauded does not change that you were. This is exactly why the government sometimes steps in to fix things even when a company is considered popular by consumers.
Everything you have bought on Android was illegally taxed, and numerous things you bought outside of Android you also overpaid for as companies tried to absorb the abusive fees as well.
You didn't "see" the anticompetitive concerns but you also never benefit from any of the options you would have if Google had operated a legal business model.
> Everything you have bought on Android was illegally taxed
I can't even remember the last time I bought something on the Play Store. Nearly everything I've installed for years has been open source from F-Droid or was my own personal code that I wrote and loaded onto my phone without passing through any gatekeeper.
You can keep being condescending if it makes you happy, but you could also consider that maybe you don't know me?
I think the problem everyone is having is the government is seeing something that isn't there. We don't have a "lack of understanding" but are rather just so much more informed and educated then the legal system on this matter that we came to the correct conclusion while they failed to reach a basic understanding.
This is an incredible example of the hubris and ego of tech nerds. The court got it right, because the issue isn't tech, it's economics. The idea that understanding some code makes you more qualified than a judge to handle antitrust law is laughable.
It doesn't matter that 0.01% of users can technically install F-Droid. Reality, is that 99.99% of people fundamentally can't. Apparently the judge can understand this, and you can't.
But you said they technically can. Can you technically do this on iOS? Lack of technical knowledge means jack shit. Write documentation for laymen as to how to do it, because they could; make it simpler for them if you so wish. Or can I make a website that has a direct link (just a tap away) to an APK and have users install that on Android? What about an app for iOS? It is a matter of "difficult" (arguable) vs "impossible", is it not?
it's not about whether your platform is open or not, but about who's making the devices and what you're forcing them to do.
XBox is only made by Microsoft, there are no XBox OEMs, and Microsoft can do whatever they like to their devices. They're not forcing any manufacturer to do anything, because they are the manufacturer. Same with iPhones, Play Station consoles and so on.
Windows computers and Android phones are manufactured by many companies, and Microsoft and Google were engaging in anticompetitive behavior by forcing everybody who wanted their OSes to do certain things, and that's the problem here.
> Look at Microsoft. They have been found guilty of anticompetitive conduct related to their open Windows platform in multiple jurisdictions, but not so with XBox.
It helps a lot that they are the only sellers of the XBox. With Windows they were strong-arming third party manufacturers. The situation is similar with Apple and iOS. Because it’s “their” phone they have more control. Google was telling other manufacturers of android phones what to do, which crossed a line.
Not commenting on anything else about this but only pointing out that the law treats a company that sells a complete widget to the end user very differently from a company that sells a piece to someone who then sells the finished widget to the end user.
A lot of people don't seem to appreciate reasoning from principles around any of this stuff. They just want to be able to do X, Y, or Z and any ad-hoc law or court ruling that gets them there is A-OK with them, consequences be damned. Personally I find that unfortunate. I enjoy well-reasoned debate that thinks through the logical consequences of various policy decisions and how it affects everyone, not just end users exactly like themselves.
"Principles" as in arbitrary precedents set by bribed politically-motivated lawmakers and judges.
No, people are correctly pointing out the fact that this is blatantly unfair. You are claiming that 2+2=5 because a judge said so.
If you are concerned about the "consequences" maybe you should start thinking about how open platforms are now legally disadvantaged to closed platforms.
My belief is that, fundamentally, everything should be open. Users should have full control over their devices, and manufacturers should have no place in dictating anything about how they are used, what software can and can't run on them, etc. (Note that I'm not being anti-proprietary-software here; I don't think companies should be required to give away their source code if they don't want to.)
I get that this isn't relevant from a legal perspective. But so what? I can talk about where I want the laws to go.
If some random app now wants me to use their random payment system, I will 100% just delete the app. Not a chance. I will and do install apps outside the app store, but I will not start using random payment systems. In other words, although I agree the amount developers pay is too high, for me and probably many other end users, the most valuable part of the Play store is the payment system.
> The problem is that we will have proprietary software (distributed for free) doing bad things, and people blame their phone being slow.
The solution to this remains the same as ever: curation of software packages. You can install any app you want, but you're probably going to use some front-end to manage that (Play Store, App Store). It's up to those platforms to curate what apps they host, and up to the user to delegate safety c he checks to platforms they trust.
There is a contingent of Hacker News that strongly opposes the opening of iOS to third party app distribution, usually with the reasoning that doing so would prevent Apple from strong-arming third party developers into abiding by rules that benefit users (no notification spam, billing for subscriptions must be centrally managed, users must be able to opt out of tracking). If developers have other distribution options on the platform then, if they're successful enough, they'll be able to have their users install their misbehaved (but popular/necessary) app by some channel that Apple doesn't control. Comments where I support opening of the iOS platform are the most consistently downvoted of any that I make, though most do recover to a positive score eventually. There are exceptions, but that is the overall pattern I observe.
Google does both. And you haven't made an argument or brought any facts at all to the discussion, you just vaguely waved your hands at the court system and said "A is not B".
It's because android is licensed to third party manufacturers and google changed the terms in a way contrary to law. Whereas Apple has had the same terms since the app store's launch and only used the app store on Apple devices.
It's the same way that playstation can set its own terms for playstation game sales. They make both the software and devices.
Android has far more users both globally and in the US specifically, and the Play Store has triple the amount of downloads that the App Store has. This gives it far less lenience than Apple got in the EU, where it isn't even as dominant as in the US. Apple also has the benefit of being a sole operator of its platform, whereas Android and the Play Store aren't Google-only.
Also Amazon was a key reason why the ruling indicates the other stores must have access to play store apps as well.
Additionally, Google royally messed up this entire case from the start by being so openly egregious. Amateur hour sending emails about buying a company to shut them up from suing you.
> Android has far more users both globally and in the US specifically
Globally, yes. Not in the US, though. iOS sits at around 57%, with Android at around 42%.
> Apple also has the benefit of being a sole operator of its platform, whereas Android and the Play Store aren't Google-only.
But yes, I think this is the key reason why Google and Apple are being treated differently by the law.
I think that's garbage, though, from the perspective of what feels reasonable to me (regardless of the law): Android has always been more open than iOS, and available to many different manufacturers and organizations. It's a bit weird that this openness means that they are required to be even more open, while a platform that has always been much more closed can remain that way.
To some extent it's an illusion of openness and availability.
Want to actually call it an 'Android' device and/or avoid an ugly warning message to your users? [0] Gotta agree to a bunch of Google's terms including preference for their mobile app suite over others. But hey if you want some extra revenue from search you can just agree to not offer a 3rd party app store [1]. Oh also anyone in OHA (most major phone OEMs) can't make a product with a fork without getting into hot water...
To be clear I hate them both and miss the future that could have been with Maemo. As it stands however Apple is just being consistent and having full ownership, whereas Google is arguably strong-arming other manufacturers in a way that limits consumer choice, even if it is a bit more open.
[0] - AARD Code, anyone?
[1] - Smells of MSFT/Intel Bundling/exclusivity Rebates that resulted in various levels of antitrust action/settlements
Google is bad too but Android is still much more open than iOS today even if it has gradually become less open over time.
I think punishing the more open platform and not the completely closed one will just incentivize companies to develop completely closed platforms from the beginning. And I don't see how that's actually good for consumers.
The best outcome would be to force both to open up more.
> I think punishing the more open platform and not the completely closed one will just incentivize companies to develop completely closed platforms from the beginning. And I don't see how that's actually good for consumers.
I certainly agree, the problem from the legal standpoint is that stuff google was doing was too close to stuff that other companies have gotten in trouble for one way or another.
> The best outcome would be to force both to open up more.
This is a bad understanding. First of all, it's much harder to develop a successful fully closed platform than an open one. If Google though they could build an iPhone, they would have. So the legal incentive is completely irrelevant here: with or without it, companies prefer to build closed platforms; with or without it, companies can't do it because it's too hard for them.
Not really. They didn't have to go the iPhone route. They could have gone the 1980s Microsoft route: a fully closed source, propriety OS that they license to hardware manufacturers.
The same forces that led to wide spread adoption of open source Android would have also led to wide spread adoption of closed source Android. Namely, the need for a fully touch optimized OS with enough reach to have a robust app ecosystem to compete with iPhone (and the need for it quickly so no time for home grown solutions). All the non-Apple manufacturers were always going to coalesce around a single platform. It could have just as easily been closed source Windows Phone had Microsoft released 3 years earlier.
Google could have also licensed it to manufacturers for free and funded it Play Store and mobile search revenues.
> Google could have also licensed it to manufacturers for free and funded it Play Store and mobile search revenues.
This is an interesting point, but it now does make me ask other questions.
Mostly about historical players... Specifically, Symbian and Blackberry's OS.
Both are good cases to consider because Symbian was pretty close to your suggested model (and I'd argue, feature wise, was a benchmark for some of Android's initial state, as well as likely helping the decision for the preferred app language to be a form of Java for the sake of adoption by existing players.)
> All the non-Apple manufacturers were always going to coalesce around a single platform.
My other statements aside, I feel like Android really started stagnating/enshittifying various policies once WP was fully killed. And TBH I hope the DOJ brings up the treatment of Youtube on WP8/10 if they go ahead with antitrust action [0]. Pre-downloading maps? Here Drive (part of standard WP app suite) let you do it way before others. A polite non-nagging "you're going more than 5 over" beep? Showing speed limits whether or not I have a destination set? Still don't have those in base apps.
And wow, WP never had me deal with all of this carrier bullshit more than once per phone, vs every Android update is a new "oh hey uncheck all these boxes for crapware or try to find the way we changed the 'dismiss and do not show again (but really till the next update)' workflow".
[0] - Short version, The level of shenanigans around Google 'approving/maintaining' a youtube app meant that for a lot of my time in WPland, I could only view youtube videos through a browser. [1]
> is an illegal monopoly while the Apple App Store isn't?
This lawsuit is focused on Google. It's existence or the facts conveyed within do not provide any cover to Apple. They don't prevent Apple from facing the same lawsuit or from being covered by the same judgement.
Do you feel this way when we put a murderer away? I mean, "his murder was illegal, but yet, some people still get away with it?! What is this injustice?!"
> so I guess that's fair.
Would you prefer court cases to involve several dozen defendants at once? Would that be more "fair?"
The core difference is Apple had a bench trial and Google let actual people decide in a jury trial, which is a lot harder to swindle with legal technicalities, and also much harder to overturn on appeal.
Better to say Apple failed to lose. The court explicitly left open the question as to whether they are a monopoly. They just didn't provide any meaningful injunctions as a result of that case.
>The court explicitly left open the question as to whether they are a monopoly.
Presumably because that's not a question that generally needs answered. A lot of people growing remembering microsoft getting sued have this flawed idea that monopoly always equals bad. There are plenty of legal monopolies, companies don't get in trouble until they start doing illegal stuff to keep their monopoly. A lot of areas naturally favor a monopoly, that's not illegal or necessarily bad.
Having the second ruling be consistent with the first? Following precedent? This is terrible for competition where two companies in the same market can live under different rules in the same jurisdiction.
While I agree with you in principle, in practice Google makes side loading so convoluted and scary that I think they do need / deserve some censure here. The fact you have to go deep into settings, toggle weird settings that tell you how dangerous it is to side load and then it toggles the setting back after you put it on without asking you - this is not all that different to Apple letting you use an alternative payment provider but putting so many warnings in place that no user would ever do it.
I want Google to make ability to side load an actively supported first class feature of the platform. There can be a warnings and additional security measures (scanning, permissions boxing etc if necessary) but nothing that in practice has the effect of preventing a commercial entity from shipping a functional app outside of their store.
It's not quite as convoluted as you describe, and I don't think Android ever changes that setting on your behalf. The fact of the matter is that it is dangerous. IMO it's a good thing that they provide you with appropriate warnings.
It's only dangerous if Google has better judgment than the end user. This may be the case for the majority of users, but there's a significant subset for whom it's not the case. It'd be nice if there were a way for the end user to nudge Google to step aside.
Convoluted how? I have literally installed third party app stores on Android many years ago and continued to have done so in the same manner to this very day. You download the APK and when you install it, you have to click two buttons to confirm (one to go to settings, and one to turn on installed apps from untrusted sources).
No clue what you're talking about. What device do you use? On a Pixel (Google's phone) you download it, then you open it (it warns you that it could have anything) and then it is installed.
I'll take convoluted over outright impossible any day.
I'll also take convolutedly unlockable bootloader over the vendor having access to my device even when I don't.
Sideloading and ability to disable including system app (--user 0) have never been easier. Its the PlayProtect which being disabled still insists on scanning apps intrusively and constantly nagging you while installing apps either package installer or side loading.
Two different cases in two different courts, it’s bound to happen. No judge has to abide by the decision of other judges except when it finally hits SCOTUS
> Wait, so the Google Play Store, which you can install alternatives to (F-Droid, Aurora, Amazon,...), and where you can easily install apps through other means (such as downloading an APK through your browser and running it from the file manager)
Easily ? No. But yes, you still can do it. Though Google restricted for example Total Commander from installing software and automatically updated it to the latest version even though it was prohibited in settings.
When two cases have different defendants making different arguments, the same plaintiffs making different arguments, and obviously different sets of facts and evidence, yes, those cases can have different outcomes.
Though obviously its quicker to lookup the market cap of the defendants, if you actually want to understand why the outcomes are different, it requires engaging with the evidence and arguments.
If I remember correctly the problem here is that in Googles version of an "open platform", they hide alternative app install behind fifteen menus of settings, restrict functionality (auto updates) and issue scary popups to users. These are deliberate choices that expose them. They also keep having to pull more anti-competitive moves with device manufacturers to keep control of Android.
Which scare screens? I've sideloaded on Android for nearly a decade now, and the only one I've seen is the reasonable warning about third-party app sources when enabling it for the first time.
There weren't scare screens, at least I don't remember any, but the upgrade flow was comically bad for apps installed outside of the Play Store.
Let's say you install 15 apps on F-Droid. Every time you want to upgrade your apps, you were forced to manually initiate, and then sit through, each app update as they're installed in the foreground. This was because of deliberate limitations in Android.
Whereas on the Play Store, you could hit one button to update all of your installed apps and the installations happened in the background.
I believe it was after Google was threatened with lawsuits that they modified Android to be less tedious when it comes to managing and upgrading apps outside of the Play Store.
I believe the right thing I wanted to refer to is unattended app updates, enabled for third party sideloaded stores only with Android 12 or so. Maybe 12 added it back after it was taken away at some earlier point?
I am an Android user for a long time (since Android 2.2) and used pretty much every version from then on. Google devices (from Nexus to Android One devices and now Pixels) pretty much always allowed unattended updates for a long time (you may be right about Android 12, my memory is fuzzy here). And I never remember having scary warnings for sideloaded apps, sure, Android made it more difficult to install them (by having a permission per app instead a global permission, but I would say this was a very welcome change), but it was never convoluted or difficult.
But yes, non-Google devices make this way more difficult, e.g.: Xiaomi devices actually has a scary warnings and they trigger at each reinstall. Also, they messed up something in the install APIs so you can't update apps unattended, needing to trigger the popup to install at each update.
So yes, in general, this is not the fault of Google but third-party companies.
I think what people upthread are talking about is allowing third-party stores (like F-Droid) to do unattended updates. That has not been possible until recently. Up until Android 12 or so (possibly later), I had to manually approve it any time F-Droid wanted to update an app I'd installed through F-Droid itself.
Unlike with apps installed via the Play Store, which can update them without needing my manual approval.
I don't remember how far back, but I remember third party apps working just fine at least, say, 5-6 years ago. The case was brought 2020, so I doubt this is true.
Android 12 was what fixed what I meant to refer to: unattended updates with third party sideloaded stores. It's from 2021 and probably didn't get 50% marketshare until ~2023 or so. Developers for those app stores had to deal with their users being out of date all the time to a much bigger extent than Play store and officially partnered stores.
And Android WearOS is still hard for side-loaded stores to work with at all without developer debugging mode I think and is tightly integrated with the phone stuff.
This comes up a lot but when did Google say their platform was "open"? Maybe a few times in the early days when Google was still considered "cool" in hacker circles, but probably not in consumer-facing advertising? Moreover, "open" can mean a lot of things. I don't think I ever signed an agreement with Google that promised me source code for Android or the ability to sideload on my Android phone?
Android is acknowledged as a Linux distribution. Linux, also known as GNU/Linux, incorporates significant GPL-licensed code. By contrast, Apple has used BSD derivatives for a codebase, and BSD licenses, while F/OSS, are not "viral" in the way the GPL is, so Apple is not required to redistribute source code, or submit their patches upstream, and they can make proprietary additions anywhere they like.
AOSP is a separate initiative from Google to release the source code of Android to the public on a regular basis. Development of Android happens almost entirely in-house and contributions/requests from the general public are treated with minimum priority. The public AOSP repo is only updated with these changes after each new release of Android is finished. Google is not forced to release the source code, aside from their changes to the Linux kernel, which are minimal anyway as Android is moving closer to mainline. They may have separate agreements with OEMs that guarantee source code access but that's of no concern to Epic Games as a user/developer on the platform and not an OEM.
This isn't just about which store is a monopoly, but about what companies choose to do with that fact.
Google is (was) free to only ship Google Play on Pixel phones, just as Apple only ships the App Store on their iPhones. What Google wasn't allowed to do was to "bribe" and force carriers and OEMs to favor Google Play over other stores. This is what they did, and now they have to face consequences.
The business models are very different here. Apple makes their own phones with their own OS, and can do with them as they please. In Android land, however, it's other companies making the phones, using a custom fork of the open source Android operating system, and Google is engaging in anticompetitive behavior by pushing these companies into Google Play if they want to get any of the other Google services on that OS.
the decision is indeed contrary to previous decisions about apple
Through we should consider that monopoly law wasn't created for monopolies specifically but for companies which can wide spread systematically abuse their marked power in a way which undermines any free marked dynamics and is detrimental for the state and/or population. Just when the term(s) where coined you needed to have at least a local monopoly for this in practice (or rarely duopoly). But with how IT changes the marked and how this allows artificial constraints and apps being written for specific platforms etc. this isn't true anymore and we really should stop using the term monopoly it's misleading.
Anyway if you take this spirit of the law and a (IMHO misguided) believe that Apple has abusable power but is not (much) abusing it (i.e. it's not detrimental) you could argue in favor of this decision.
---
IMHO closed platforms are detrimental per-se even if it's a duo, quad, or even bigger pole. I.e. your OS should be free anything else is just inviting detrimental market power abuse and often in subtile hard to properly list ways. To be clear while I thin you OS should be free (as in you are free to use it however you want ant it shouldn't have not legally required artificial limitations) it doesn't imply free hardware (as in you can use whatever OS you want). While the later is grate I'm not sure it's necessary.
Anyway what also needs to be considered are how it can be made artifical harder to freely use your OS. Like e.g. inventing a new term for installing (side loading) making a lot of PR about how dangerous it is, making it require additional steps etc. I.e. yes you should be able to install your app store of choice through the "default" app store with the default store having little say in the matter (outside of refusing fraudulent/illegal store operators, through not in a way where they can just declare someone as such and thats it).
Also as a side not the marked cap for a company operating in many fields isn't necessary relevant at all for deciding if it engages in market power abuse in some specific field.
Apple's business model is more amenable to current law's obsession with "intellectual property". If the government grants you a monopoly over a market, it's not a crime to exert monopoly power over that market. Apple's argument is "we can sell iOS however we want", and this works because the US has the best copyright laws money can buy. We need to fix them.
Google, in contrast, started with a FOSS operating system and then added proprietary components provided under licensing terms deliberately intended to claw back your right to use the FOSS parts. For example, if you want to ship Google Play on a device, you can't also manufacture tablets for Amazon, because Fire OS is an "incompatible" Android fork. Google provided AOSP as Free Software and then secretly overrode that Freedom with the licensing terms for GMS.
I don't usually care about politics at all but is there any concrete evidence supporting either potential future administration being tougher on Apple? The previous president doesn't seem to like Apple very much (and his administration filed DOJ v. Google #1 near the end), but at the same time the current administration's DOJ was responsible for filing the DOJ v. Apple lawsuit.
Edit: Can the downvoter please explain why you downvoted? I am
legitimately not trolling, I just want to be able to factor this in my decision in November because I think it's an important issue and I don't see a "direct vote" on it taking place any time soon.
> is there any concrete evidence supporting either potential future administration being tougher on Apple?
Trump’s trade war with China would probably hurt Apple. But his allies’ plans to gut federal regulatory powers and cut corporate taxes still make him a net friend to one of the world’s richest corporations.
Note that the FTC and DoJ remain independent agencies [1].
> Can the downvoter please explain why you downvoted?
Didn’t downvote. But a partisan aside about a judicial decision on a case between private parties is off topic. (I’d also be shocked if there is any overlap between undecided likely voters and HN users, the latter who tend to be informed.)
> But a partisan aside about a judicial decision on a case between private parties is off topic
Surely politics has something to do with this decision? These things don't just happen in a vacuum. The judge presiding over this case was appointed by Barack Obama and generally government deregulation is something that Republicans advocate for.
> Surely politics has something to do with this decision?
Why? Plenty of judges rule without partisan predictability. This case doesn’t seem to have any more politics involved than any federal case.
If you have evidence of something interesting, sure, bring it up. But “maybe there are other interests involved, find the evidence for me” isn’t a conversation.
>a partisan aside about a judicial decision on a case between private parties is off topic.
Given the FTC going after Amazon, I think it's a relevant question to consider. these cases will inevitably influence if Apple is gone after, but who goes after them will depend a lot on the US's government.
The court having asinine double-standards when it comes to Apple? What's their HN account? edit: the replies basically just reinforcing the point, absolute :chefskiss:
The review part is much more concerning IMO and completely exiles FOSS from the platform (free as in the GNU definition -- you should be able to make arbitrary changes to your copy of the app without some asshole from Apple telling you that they believe your changes constitute a joke or prank [1]). The review part also re-enforces the revenue part because it costs $100/year to submit apps for EU notarization.
The review is very TBD for me. If they really do just check for viruses that's fine. But if it's basically the App store rules without the App store, or we get "we don't like your app" cases like Beeper than this basically ruins the point of an alternative app store.
The Apple cut is also absurd but I'm sure that will be rectified sooner rather than later.
None. Code review is about ensuring the user has a good experience, which Apple claims to value. Pay for it then with some of the absurd profits they've made off of me purchasing Macs and iOS devices regularly for the last decade or so.
The idea that we aren't allowed to sell limited purpose electronics seems pretty novel. A lot of the things I own have processors in them nowadays, are you suggesting the courts should require them all to create methodologies for us to run our own code on them?
I think there is a big difference between devices that don’t easily support running third party code and apple devices which they have had to spend lots of money developing multiple signing schemes, bug patches, threatening jailbreak communities, etc. just to prevent people from running 3rd party code
Stallman literally buzzing with excitement at the prospect. Honestly if you're gonna go, you should probably go all the way in the manner you describe and level the playing field for everyone.
Smartphones are special, since they're practically mandatory at this point, are the primary gateway to the Internet and digital platforms for a lot of people, and are specifically designed to be general purpose computing devices (even if unnecessary restrictions on who gets to write apps for them are placed on top of that). I mean heck, even Apple all but advertises the iPad Pro (an iOS device) as a computer [*]. I don't care if Nintendo locks down their gaming console. Nobody needs a gaming console. The Nintendo Switch's OS was made solely to run games and has very limited functionality by design. (I'm also overjoyed when I see people hack it, but that's a bonus and I have no expectation of that.)
For example, the EU's DMA provides a precise definition of "digital gatekeeper" and the rules only apply to them [1]. Gaming consoles and other embedded devices are excluded.
If there were more than two real choices available, I'd feel less strongly about this. And I realize that Apple isn't necessarily responsible for there only being two options (if anything, Google may be more to blame for this). But that's just how it is.
[*] I don't know if their marketing materials ever unambiguously refer to the iPad as a "computer", perhaps intentionally, but they've run ads like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S5BLs51yDQ
What is the downside for the consumer here? Put all the scary warnings in front that you want, just have a "developer mode" toggle that unlocks the bootloader and lets us run arbitrary code. There's a huge reverse-engineering hurdle to get over anyway, this just stops the cat-and-mouse game of having to find exploits to run code on your device.
Destroying their products and flooding customer support with dozens of stupid "I know what I'm doing and your stupid machine stopped working, your product sucks! I want a free replacement" type tickets.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like very much to have the ability to do that. But it doesn't change the fact that there are plenty of good reasons, not even consumer hostile, to not let people muck about in firmware.
To be honest, and this is purely fantasy, but I would absolutely love some kind of "I am a techie" registration process that would:
- Let me access functions like customizing firmware
- Always elevate my support tickets to tier 2 (yes I turned the fucking thing off and on again, if I'm calling you I have a REAL problem)
- Always ensure I get the "grown up" interface for settings and customization
> A lot of the things I own have processors in them nowadays, are you suggesting the courts should require them all to create methodologies for us to run our own code on them?
Don't play coy here, you understood what he/she said.
If you don't want to install apps outside of the App Store, you don't have to.
If other iPhone users want to install their own apps without jumping through absurd hoops, let them instead of telling them what they can and can't do with the hardware they own.
People say this as though teens and tweens aren't just going to find something else to latch onto immediately to bully the fuck out of one another.
I never dealt with the "blue bubble" thing but it's not like I wasn't mercilessly bullied for basically my entire education about everything else you could possibly think of past the fourth grade. I'm all for tackling bullying, I think it's fucking heinous the kinds of things schools let happen under their watch, but let's not kid ourselves that Apple opening up iMessage is going to do a fucking thing about this.
Well, I guess Google's market cap is only 2 trillion compared to Apple's 3 trillion, so I guess that's fair.