First of all, that's an ad hominem. If publication independence is important, then it remains important whether Gruber is hypocritical about it or not.

Second, one might want apps to be curated (for the better experience), but stand for independence from control and censorship when it comes to journalism and personal commentary.

And indeed, one can think that "newspaper publication independence" is really far more important than software publication independence. The main difference being of course that Apple controlling apps is a huge inconvenience to those being rejected, but not so much to the users (especially with 1.5 million other apps to chose from). Whereas someone controlling the news is bad for the readers.

>That genie is out of the box, when you decided that you didn't mind a company gatekeeping which software you can install on "your" devices you opened that can of worms, the one where any company can gatekeep anything they want as long as it is "convenient" for most people.

Actually there's nothing (no law of physics or history for example) to force someone being ok with the one (company control of its walled app store) to be ok with other (company controlling content publication). You can be angry and/or stop and/or speak against any combination of the two.

  "That genie is out of the box, when you decided that you 
  didn't mind a company gatekeeping which software you can 
  install on "your" devices you opened that can of worms, the 
  one where any company can gatekeep anything they want as 
  long as it is "convenient" for most people."

Not all people are good. And not all smart people argue logically.

Which is precisely the case here.

Still, I understand the point of those who consider news publishing independence to be more important than software publishing independence. But I think they may be missing the bit of irony (regardless of AMP) that Google is still the search engine they use to find those news, Google may as well delete a full domain from their search results and make a site disappear into oblivion. But at least Google-search has been forced -in some cases- to keep some level of neutrality there. Apple is just freely deleting and adding whatever they want to iOS/App-store, with some of their apps having access to APIs no other app can (e.g. Safari), which is as monopolistic as software gets.

Technically it's an argument from hypocrisy, more commonly known as "Tu Quoque".

Sorry, just get a bit anal about people confusing different fallacies because it makes it hard for some people to understand =P

Essentially, any time a public figure says something, there's an implicit, "I have been truthful before, I am being truthful now," leading the statement. If someone's opinions are self-inconsistent, it's important to know that one can discount that implied statement.

I agree! It's a poison in the well lazy people use to discredit something they don't like without thinking about it.

However, in this particular instance it raises questions of whether or not Gruber is arguing in good faith. It lends credence to accusations that editorial independence might not be his overriding concern.

You might have valid reasons not to use AMP but Gruber's are merely that he ends up sharing google.com URLs on twitter, it's Google, and it does its own scrolling on iOS.

I'm not sure why your dismissive of the scrolling thing. Having something breaks the feel of the web browser is a really bad idea.

Additionally he's completely right that it breaks other platform conventions that users expect to use. You can't use the share button, you can't tap at the top of the article to jump back to the top.

I can tell you as someone who uses mobile Safari, AMP is incredibly infuriating. It's gotten to the point where I actively avoid AMP search results.

Google has single-handedly broken the way it's search results feel for a number of top sites on iOS, and doesn't seem to care. Further, there is NO OPTION to turn it off.

I would LOVE to have a way to tell mobile Safari not to render the AMP version of the page. Then I could use Google easily again.

And yet, noone cared enough to fix it until now. It's really really hard to sympathize with publishers when they brought this upon themselves by turning their pages into giant autoplaying video infested places.

Instead they invented their own thing which caused you to stay on Google sites using Google services to read other peoples content… and said they did it to speed things up.

It feels like that was either justification after the fact or that was with the original engineer had in mind but was not the point of the project once it got approved.

All those horrible infested pages? That's why I run an ad blockers, use RSS, and stopped reading a lot of sites. As every publisher got more and more aggressive other people were going to start doing it too. Eventually, I think it would've had an effect.

This feels a lot more like when Birders (or was it B&N?) outsourced their web sales to Amazon. Remember how well that went? Outsourcing a key part of your experience to another company it's a bad idea, especially if they like being in control of everything.

There already is a penalty for slow-loading pages, but you make a good point that the penalty could be increased to the point where publishers would be forced to adapt accordingly. However, outside of the news ecosystem, that would end up penalizing a much larger base of content creators who don't have the means and infrastructure to handle this.

To say that "well users who have good content should also get their shit together" rings a bit hollow, especially on HN, where technical/deep/interesting articles get upvoted to the front page only to crash from the traffic. If authors of those articles/sites can't do it, then it's a problem for most folks.

The problem is that Google took this in such and embrace-and-extend direction that seems to benefit them and give them a lot more power than they had before. And I already think Google is way too powerful.

Their solution annoys me and creeps me out more than the problem did. By a large factor. I don't like them being so deeply involved at this kind of level. If they are going to do something, I can't think of something I would like for them to do other than just tuning the penalty.

A small penalty devalues gaming the way google measure the speed.

I had to worsen JPEG image quality to get good score for a website in Google's PageSpeed tools [1] because our management believes it affects search rankings.

That tool is awful. I would never follow Google's recommendations on my own site. The compressed versions of images it suggests one should use have visible artifacts.

[1] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

AMP does the same thing. Many sites don't have resources to convert their content to AMP pages and they will get worse positions in search results.

Sure it is, but no one has been doing it and if it wasn't for AMP, it would've stayed a slow hell for users, if not getting even worse. If you've got a better suggestion to motivate all these news sites to spend thousands rewriting their website from scratch and optimizing it, go for it. But right now, this is the best we've got.

It's not perfect, but it has actually been making huge strides in solving common issues over the past year.

You say it's been solving problems, but for me it's only been causing them. It's made it significantly harder to use Google search on iOS. Also the slow pages? Reader mode on safari has worked fantastically on them for years. Slow pages wasn't even a problem for me because of reader mode. Not only were they faster they were also easier to read because they didn't have crazy styling applied to them.

I kind of wonder if this whole thing is an accidental android/iOS litmus test. People who use android don't seem to have problems with it because the experience sounds good there.

That's NOT my experience using Mobile Safari. I have a literally considered switching my search engine over it. I've dug through all the Google account settings looking for a way to turn it off. If someone put some sort of content blocker in the App Store that would disable AMP? I buy it in a heartbeat.

Works well enough on Android Chrome. Irony is, AMP, Android, Chrome and Google Search are all Alphabet (Google) products. I am personally all for platform portability, but certainly it's been Apple who have been pushing for One Closed Ecosystem since the introduction of iPhone, and Apple users have been very happy about it and playing down the vendor lock-in issue - some even as far as claiming it desirable that The One Benevolent Vendor control everything (note that real Chrome is not available on App Store simply because Apple has decided that iOS users should only use the Safari rendering engine!)

Now that there's a shard in the walled garden, another player seemingly using the very same tactics as Apple, it's frustrating to see the same users complain about how much it sucks to be disenfranchised from modern computing because they use a different vendor - only this time Apple is the "other" vendor.

Should Google succeed to marginalize iOS (assuming this is intentional and not just a bug in Safari), I bet many of these folks will soon be writing about how great it's that Google controls everything, how Material embodies the latest hip in UX and how the new Pixel has become so integral to their daily life.

I don't think they're actually are a lot of Apple fan is claiming that the one benevolent company should control everything as you posited earlier your post.

I'll also tell you this: I was an Apple user long ago. I would back to the platform in the early 2000's, years before the iPhone came out. I distinctly remember what it was like to be on the minority platform that no one bothered to support. In many ways, OS X is still like that today.

I don't think you'll get a bunch of people switching over to the "winning" side and claiming google is better just because it's "winning".

I see a lot of problems with what they're doing, outside of simple issues of my personal taste.

Also, you can complain about whatever you don't like about Apple, but they NEVER tried to break the web. If anything they did a huge service by making a browser that was not IE6 extremely important and drastically hastening the demise of flash.

Google can do whatever it wants on android, my problem is that they can use the web to force people into the rest of their ecosystem that's removing the one big open thing that made it possible to use Apple computers back in the "bad old days" of having a little software. By the mid to thousands people use the Internet enough that switching to a Mac wasn't a big deal because so much of what you wanted to do involve the web browser. If google "fixes" that, they now have a very heavy hand over all of computing .

Not of course directly, as that would sound obviously fanatical, but the walled garden is almost universally cited as the "best thing" about iOS compared to more open platforms like Android.

This recent article in MacWorld invokes it at least five times, saying it makes iPhone more secure, more private, more user-friendly, more uniform, more polished etc:

http://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/iphone/iphone-vs-android-5...

Those are all magnificent adjectives, and unquestionably makes the Apple user's life great. (And surely then, if Google wants to make life great for Android users, they are perfectly entailed to it as well.)

But from 3rd party developer's perspective, I can assure the more open platform is better. Google is enhancing the experience for stock Android users, but if you don't like it you can write and publish a competing search engine or browser. On iOS, you don't have a chance to replace the browser, and I bet had Apple actually developed a search engine of their own, like Microsoft with Bing, you'd never been even able to use Google on an iPhone..

I'm not sure that follows.

But anyway, if being more open is a good thing then Google purposefully trying to shove everyone into their various products and ecosystems seems precisely the opposite of "open" to me.

I was never really a big fan of chrome but when you Google released it and the web started getting a lot better that was fine with me, it was even nice. Same thing with many of the other things they've done.

Now it seems to me like they often try and corral or cajole users into using other parts of their ecosystem by making other people stuff broken in unnecessary ways when you try and use one of their "open" products. It's starting to look very 90s Microsoft to me with a different spin on it. And that worries me. And they're big enough/powerful enough that they can get pretty far and do a lot of damage before it becomes extremely obvious to a lot of people.

True, of course. But I think many like the fact that Apple is not an advertising company, that Apple has a transparent business model, that Apple (for now) defends its users' privacy.

iOS is FULL of handy little things like that, but I'm not sure many of them are ever explained. You just have to stumble across it or read about it somewhere like reviews of the new versions of iOS.

Did you know in mail (and many other places) you can swipe table rows left or right for quick actions? Marco Arment recently changed Overcast to make features more visible because it seems many people, including power users, weren't even aware that gesture existed.

Now that I have an iPhone 7 re force-touch stuff can be very handy. But I forget it exists for weeks on end because I went so many years without it and it's totally hidden.

So that's what that was all about. I noticed the changes because for me they reduced the usability of Overcast massively. The features I used the most were resuming the current podcast, playing a different podcast, and setting a sleep timer. All of these things now take double the taps they did before, with much smaller controls that are hard to hit in the car. You tap a podcast and some miscellaneous options jump out. Ugh, when I tap a podcast I want it to open and start playing! The sleep timer durations move around, so it takes 7 presses and some squinting to set a 25-minute timer. By this time my retinas are seared because the UI for that is white even in night mode.

I know full well about swiping in tables and I'd love the old behaviour to be an option. The author could probably make some good coin by making it available as an IAP.

Plus it's a bit fiddly.

Also it's been there since iOS 1.0 so quite a while now.

My personal experience demonstrates that the latter statement is not the case. People are indeed not making performant HTML5 without Google's help. It might be physically possible, but it's not actually happening.

Obviously its not a third party native plugin, so it should output some kind of HTML5 content to play in browsers, even if it was just a canvas view.

Nothing should be doing its own scrolling. Everything should let the native scroll do its thing. Computers work for me and should work the way I expect. I expect the default native scroll.

Apple's response was (surprisingly) to make the default scrolling like the overflow scrolling. So, with the next Safari release all pages will scroll like AMP pages. Hope Gruber is happy then :)

So, whenever I've seen AMP, I've just clicked on the link to get the hell out of it.

Well, yes. It really is.

Software is ubiquitous now, and that tend to make it more important than basically everything else. It is also a means of expression (not the only one of course, but still). Finally, how software is build can alter how you read the news (start with profanity filters, then block Tienanmen or something).

Google, by contrast, has a far larger share of the search engine market than Apple has of the mobile device market. That means it's more of a concern by default.

If we are talking about search, you can stop using google by typing bing.com or duckduckgo.com in your url bar any time you want, and every major browser supports changing the default search engine, even Chrome.

However they ship it, they'd still be in an arms race against google to keep AMP pages hidden from Safari users. That doesn't seem like a productive use of anyone's time.

Gruber, not Scott. He's not talking about the original writer, but for the guy that quoted him.

This is where he says his argument is rubbish because he supports iOS.

Seems legit.

But technically, you can download the source and/or write your own code, compile and install on your iOS device without jailbreaking or going through the AppStore. It's a hassle, sure, but doable.

Of course, it also makes good business sense for both Apple and third party developers as it keeps piracy to a minimum (though I'm sure a subset of 3rd party developers might find skipping the 30% Apple cut valuable)

Depends on how you define noteworthy and large. The xcode backdoor thing was in 500.000.000 downloads.

Also, don't forget the whole xcode backdoor fiasco happened because people were installing side-loaded xcode distributions instead of getting it from the mac store. So even where sideloading is and should remain allowed - on the mac - people will click big red "I know what I'm doing" buttons without knowing what they're doing. And that's for people who really should know what they're doing - developers!

Security is becoming EXTREMELY important, although it was already pretty important.

Apples very strict (occasionally draconian) app model on iOS is one of the reasons it has so few problems with the software destroying the system or viruses or other such things. There's a reason Microsoft is eyeing it jealously for Windows. That kind of heavy sandboxing makes exploit much much more difficult.