No one is forcing anyone to use Apple or Google products. Anyone that wants the nominal "benefits" that they provide, continues to make the moment-by-moment choice of using them. You can throw your iPhone or Android phone away (or sell it and give the proceeds to the poor, e.g. child cobalt miners or Foxconn workers). You can get a dumb phone. You can live (shockingly!) without having a cellphone at all. Your job requires you to have a MacBook? Get a different job. The lifestyle you choose may require you to have these things, but that's because you choose the lifestyle over personal integrity.
No one can actually follow their own morality and someone else's. You either prove a hypocrite to yourself or a hypocrite to others. You can't serve both justice and the marketplace.
You could take no thought for your career, nor how you would make your living, nor where you would live; nor even the clothes you would wear in the morning. Is living not more than jobs, money, and clothing?
A company is not allowed to use its position as a "market" to ALSO give an unfair advantage to its own products - or to shut out competitors without reasonable cause.
...but these laws aren't being enforced. It's funny to remember Microsoft being forced to de-couple Internet Explorer from Windows, and yet the idea of de-coupling the app Store from IOS or the Play store from Android does not seem to occur to regulators.
I have a conspiracy theory that they like that American companies have this market strangle-hold and are unwilling to give market share to EU or Chinese competitors. Imagine all the data collect lost!
Now we’re still(!) in a place where standards are being fought by the likes if Apple, because they have an incentive to weaken open standards in favor of their closed platforms.
This is a grotesque strategy that needs to stop.
To me, “laws” are something the majority massages into a state where they benefit the most people. This looks like one of those cases. Changing the laws (or in this case probably just enforcing them) is different from acting outside the law or breaking laws.
The app stores/systems on all of the walled gardens are problematic, but the way I see it it's largely because they don't want to create a web of trust including all of the other app stores (the weakest one's security would cause a loss of profit for all).
> What about X or Y
This behavior is largely a feature of the market and a failure of governments to choose to do anything about it. We are ~12 years into the iOS app ecosystem, and much further (~30 years) when it comes to packaged disk software/games which were sold separately for Apple/Windows/game consoles.
I'm more worried about the trajectory -- governments don't seem to identify this as a problem (except for a few select legislators) and other industries seem to be moving in this direction (John Deere DRM, Tesla apps, AWS Marketplace, etc).
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202915
[2] https://support.apple.com/guide/itunes/itunes-plus-itns1ec4e...
I don't use Apple or Google products and I use technology every day.
You may also be recorded by Assistant or Siri when visiting friends or relatives, or even just when their phones are near you.
You likely hit Google's cloud every day when visiting websites on its platform.
Rather, whenever it is my choice, I prefer to select products and technologies that don't belong to Apple, Google or similar companies.
@hkarthik implied that it's impossible to use technology and also boycott Apple and/or Google. I agree with them.
You seemed to disagree by saying that you do boycott Apple and Google.
The point I was trying to make is that you're part of their revenue stream even if you yourself don't have any consumer relationship with them. That's why they feel like a monopoly to so many of us and why we criticize them rather than leaving their ecosystem. We can't leave their ecosystem!
One thing I try to do is to minimize how much revenue they get out of me. For example, I use uBlock Origin and uMatrix to block their ads and scripts, their cookies, Google Analytics, etcetera. I hope they are losing money on me, that'd make my day!
I have not avoided technology in general, not by a long shot.
Perhaps we are just quibbling about which definition of the word "support"? In which case I agree that there is one definition of support in which you are right and another in which your parent is right.
Go far enough down any business transaction and you'll find a cause you disagree with. If the tree you planted makes oxygen for your worst enemy, will you cut down the tree to spite them?
There are plenty of people who would look at this situation, and do whatever they can to make sure they don't enable that person.
Even if you could simply stop using X, "voting with your wallet" is often a fallacy, especially when voting with your voice and actual vote have consistently enacted meaningful change throughout history.
Moreover, for people who are not citizens of the USA (the large majority of the people!), there's no other clear course of action.
Are you suggesting people stop using smartphones altogether?
I do not have a smartphone and my life is alright, but I was not suggesting that.
You can certainly have a smartphone that is not controlled by neither Google nor Apple. For example, by installing an OS like LineageOS, or even some "freer" stuff that is out there.
App ecosystems have network effects. Do your {bank, 2FA vendor, paycheck vendor, retirement vendor, etc} all support apps for LineageOS?
Additionally, the number of tech jobs which support those smartphones, their apps, testing websites on smartphone browsers, and the related marketing all require many of us to participate in the core smartphone markets, even if we choose not to use them outside of work.
I have a lot of trouble to force my mom (nearly computer illiterate) to live without google and similar stuff. But I bully mercilessly my co-workers for that. At least they agreed to use jitsi instead of zoom, so that's something
If you don’t like how Google does business, stop using their products.
If you don’t like how either one does business, stop using technology all together.
I am being facetious, but mainly to illustrate the point that we now have a series of entrenched monopolies in the tech world so “stop using X” isn’t a realistic solution.