We do not know if the MacOS store will undergo a similar transformation if not outright rebranding so that it follows the same rules.
It is possible if they continue down this path they will be the only members of their walled garden and this segment of the industry will pass them by; streaming of games and shows and possibly just hosting apps remotely.
addendum, there are times where I think they are asking to be regulated, perhaps just to see how far they can go or to get regulation which prevents or limits future competition
And the worst is that higher management probably convinced themselves they're not.
Yeah, i believe only a trial will make them realize what they've become.
PS: planning on buying a non-google non-apple phone in the future, after having had to buy a new iphone just so that i could install ios 13 and keep working (the old one being perfectly fine btw). Any advice ?
What would be good candidate phone for that? Is there a phone that is friendly towards hackers in that way?
It has lots of RAM, an SD card slot, a headphone jack, a high-end processor, a large battery and most importantly is very repairable (a screen costs about 20€).
The initial unlocking process is a bit annoying and stupid, but after that it's quite nice. The only thing you could say it really lacks is NFC.
It is also extremely concerning how little backlash there is for this behavior, because that is what stopped Microsoft.
> Any advice ?
Last I checked, all Google phones (Pixel, Nexus) can be rooted/flashed in a supported manner. There's irony for you. You can't do anything about the binary blobs for the baseband/radio.
If one is a shareholder of a company, that gives incentive to defend them no matter what.
Of course they will relive their desktop experience because some other environment will at some point be better due to fierce competition. It's kind of their omen that the company with the bitten apple from paradise has to created a walled garden. The difference will be that there is no Steve to rescue them again.
Funny thing is, their first logo was Newton's apple. Imagine the difference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Later_life_of_Isaac_Newton#Ach...
Can you install iOS 13 on a non-Apple phone? If not, why not just stay on iOS 12? What software requires that kind of upgrade and is available on a phone OS other than the iOS/Android duopoly?
But yeah the problem doesn’t get solved by moving devices.
As i said, i'm both an iphone user AND mobile professional developer. The first is quite easy to change, but the second will take a bit more time for me to get rid of Apple (or google).
And more info about the PinePhone and it's OS support: https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone_Software_Release...
When the instructions involve a bunch of convoluted commands and the terminal, Sailfish doesn't stand a chance. Like, their chances of growing in popularity are literally zero with this model.
If there was ever a time to do this it would be right now as they undergo changing Mac to ARM, but they're not.
The real question is if they can convince all the professionals those companies cater to to adopt an ecosystem where software providers have to go through an arbitrarily and closely controlled App Store.
If their hardware and base OS is too attractive to those professionals relative to the loss of freedom Adobe, etc. will follow.
Thankfully, though, I don’t think Mac users will actually be ok with that. There’s been quite an exodus of professionals from Mac to windows based on much smaller things so far.
Why not ? It's probably only a matter of time.
1) Apple has much more leverage on iOS because it has a bigger market share and many more iOS users than macOS.
2) macOS has traditionally been an open platform
3) Many desktop app developers wouldn't be able to keep installing and running the products the way their do it now. For example, Adobe has an app called Creative Cloud that manages installs, licenses, active computers, and other things. It's practically malware at this point, but if you want to use Adobe apps there is no other way.
But it's not, the Mac App Store is a dumpster fire.
I understand the MAS is not a great fit for all use cases, but IMO this statement is wrong for the use cases where the MAS is a good fit.
I used the MAS as a dev, and it adds other benefits such as updates, cloud storage, etc.
I used it specifically for an education app and it was just great to tell macOS users to simply download it from the MAS and let it handle the updates from there.
Implementing updates on your own is not trivial in a desktop app. Before using the MAS we used Electron with Squirrel. We had to manage a server exclusively for the updates. Squirrel worked great in macOS but in Windows it was a nightmare. Also the Electron apps were huge, as you probably know.
For the MAS app, we kept the web UI but moved to Swift + WKWebView. The app went from a 50MB download to about 4MB. Memory consumption also decreased dramatically, I think the Swift version used something like 10-15MB of RAM.
Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by corporate incompetence.
if you really cared, you would vote against them with your dollar.
But you keep buying their product, so apparently... you can?
It's impressive Apple so blatantly say this when we know for a fact big companies get a different/better deal.
Everyone is equal, some are just more equal, it seems.
I hope a large company/developer/celebrity with a massive following will pressure Apple/Tim Cook into responding to this hypocrisy. I realize Apple are in the business to make money, but it's insulting for them to say "Everyone gets the same deal" when that is clearly not true.
They've cut apps from big companies like Microsoft (now, with their game platform) and Amazon (Kindle purchases) in the past...
It‘s not like a car dealer where there are probably more than one in your small town each dealing with different brands. There you can ignore one dealer and one brand and you still have enough dealers & brands to select from. With phones you have exactly 2. And at some point you‘ll also want to eat food and not only don‘t do stuff because of reasons.
As a developer, you can’t have a successful app and not be on the Apple app store.
Anyway, even if neither of those were true, as human beings we certainly always have the right to talk shit about Apple and tell them to go fuck themselves. Even while we’re using their products.
I make sure to cost Apple money by convincing entire companies to not use their stuff. And any Apple products that my family buys aren’t new. We also never buy apps from their app store.
'"Voting with your wallet" isn't voting for change; it's giving up.'
I love the subtext I'm reading that boycotting companies that are doing bad things is for dirty quitters who lack grit.
This brings to mind a Musashi quote, from the book of five rings.
“You should not have any special fondness for a particular weapon, or anything else, for that matter. Too much is the same as not enough. Without imitating anyone else, you should have as much weaponry as suits you.”
If you're more concerned about "gamer-centric" titles, there's also Fortnite and F2P versions of Call of Duty.
How is not allowing streaming Xbox games limiting screen time?
I don't know how this works but from my experience I found that Google's got this one right.
Apple's restrictions don't matter at all here.
I'm not for removing apple's store...
Well, ultimately, it is. If a "store within a store" (or a second independent store) gets too much traction, it will hold the platform back.
If such a store/third entity becomes powerful Apple can't direct the future and make the changes it wants (the jump to Apple Sillicon is just a recent example, deprecating Carbon, notarization, etc) but has to placate to that too, or risk the ire of tons of dependent users.
Apple has seen that play out when it gave too much power to Adobe, MS and others, and has been correcting for that ever since Jobs came back...
A better solution would be for the DOJ to force Apple to allow other app stores and open installs.
> If such a store/third entity becomes powerful Apple can't direct the future and make the changes it wants (the jump to Apple Sillicon is just a recent example, deprecating Carbon, notarization, etc) but has to placate to that too, or risk the ire of tons of dependent users.
Where is that a problem in reality? They've changed their desktop architecture, and that's a completely open platform.
> Apple has seen that play out when it gave too much power to Adobe, MS and others, and has been correcting for that ever since Jobs came back...
Apple built something that is now widely used for conducting business, finance, communication, etc. They no longer deserve to have a singular stranglehold on it. The world depends on iPhone, and it needs to be opened up.
Force them to make a different product that the one users buy on their own volition, despite a more open alternative with double the adoption, and which took Apple from a bankrupt company in 1997 to the largest company on Earth in 2020?
Did it ever occured to anyone that some of the success iOS has is precisely because it does restrict things a certain way (which enable other things, from security to quicker platform tech changes)?
And that as users we like it because of those things, not despite them?
Nobody would force anyone to install alternate stores.
Here's the thing. We're talking about objective, concrete examples. Allow Microsoft's and other trusted partners app, but reject others. Apple likes to pretend it sets the same rules for all developers and there's no exceptions, which is categoricly false, as has been documented time and time again[1].
Google Stadia and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate game streaming services are not "alternate app stores" which will hold the iOS platform back. Arguably as these are all streaming services, where there's no code executing on the device, it makes it easier for Apple to make architectural changes to its platform because the games playable within the apps do not require those changes!
Apple can still reject "alternate app stores", but allow specific applications like XGPU because it just seems like the right thing to do? Preventing these services on iOS holds back iOS and ultimately makes the platform less capable and hurts consumers.
[1]: Apple taking only 15% cut from Amazon, letting Amazon use their own payment provider for in-app rentals, extending private entitlements for certain developers
"risk the ire of tons of dependent users": This argument doesn't hold: the reason an OS is successful isn't for the OS, but for the apps. So, unless you think apple should actually write all the successful apps themselves, to remain in control and easily make deep technical migrations feasible, i really don't see how that could work.
Meanwhile Amazon can sell digital movies à la carte on iOS. A literal store downloaded via a store.
The world has worked in many different ways before, and will work in different ways in the future. Let's have a discussion about how we'd like to see it work, ya?
It's broken, and the government is going to slap the shit out of Apple.
The App Store eats away more profit than taxes, and is single handedly responsible for teaching the public that an eternity of app updates are for free. They drove the public to expect apps should be cheaper than coffee.
While still continuing to charge the developer 99USD a year.
I doubt it. Apple would get out it like they got out of their European Tax-ish.
I don't understand - did Apple set app prices? Or did the app developers?
Now, contrary to econ 101 thought experiments, you don't always want to approach the ideal of perfectly-competitive marketplaces too closely. It can be bad for overall market health and even, ultimately, harm choices available to consumers for exactly the reasons cited.
[EDIT] actually it could also indicate that they've done one part of market-creation really poorly, which is that they're making reliable information other than price way too hard to discover, though again, that the market has not just survived this defect/cost but thrived indicates they did an uncommonly good job at other parts.
My recollection was that if anyone taught this to the public it was the press and the blogosphere.
This argument was had at the time, and review sites vilified anything that wasn’t $1 as greed.
Can you say what Apple did that contributed to this?
And they were one of the very few companies that could have done something.
They saw it happening and they chose to not intervene.
And a clear violation of anti-trust law.
* iOS upgrades were free and macOS upgrades turned free a few years after the iOS App Store became available * the lower price tiers available for app developers started with 0 and $1, and in steps of $1 * for many years, the iOS App Store free and paid charts were huge drivers for downloads. It was worth making an app much cheaper and making it up in volume. That strategy worked for many years.
Apple cultivated that environment and developers lived it
That is where the idea that software should be free or cheap came from.
As for ‘allowing’ one dollar apps. It seems like you are proposing that Apple should be punished for not entering into a price fixing arrangement to artificially inflate software prices.
I have some sympathy for wishing they had done this, but this is exactly what they tried with books, and they were subjected to antitrust action.
Keeping prices artificially high is illegal - you can’t blame Apple for not doing it.
Making software free or cheap was already a fait accompli, thanks to the web and VC funded startups.
Apple actually reversed that partially by creating a store that was trustworthy enough for people to spend some money on software again.
It is simply not true that Apple caused the race to the bottom. Look back at media from the time and you can confirm this.
There is always downward pressure on prices because well-funded startups can provide their product free. But charts and the emphasis on them were very very unhealthy. I don’t think Apple can ever fix it now.
This is a serious problem for the entire consumer and prosumer industry. While competition that drives prices down is often good, but past a certain limit and it can do long term harm to the industry that is irreversible. I fear we might have already crossed that threshold.
I just don’t think that Apple could have done much about it at the beginning. If they weren’t producing charts, someone else would have been because people want to know what other people think is good, and on a global scale this results in winner takes all dynamics.
I agree with you about everything in this comment except the sentiment that it’s Apple’s fault or that they could have done something about it from the start.
My view is that we actually now do have a chance to do something about it, but anti-trust action against Apple will almost certainly destroy that chance and leave us stuck with this situation for much longer.
As an iphone customer and an iphone developer, let me just say apple can just go f* themselves... This hypocrisy is making me mad. the OS is secure, the access permissions are secure, at this point the only thing they need to ensure is that the game store isn't a scam and then it'll be fine. So, please, stop pretending it's to protect anyone (or in this case macOS doesn't provide a secure environment, right ?).
Just admit it's for your own personal greed, and that you're leveraging a totally unfair position to impose your app store to win against its competitors.