kelthuzad
You and your third party Apple PR colleagues also need to make your coordinated engagement efforts less obvious (timing, style, rhetoric).
Then stop using sock puppets, simple as. Also, you don't engage in arguments at all, you simply ignore everything that's inconvenient for your Apple PR narrative and then you keep regurgitating the exact same debunked arguments ad nauseam. You are in no position to lecture anybody on what makes a productive discussion, since you have been behaving like a member of Apple's 3rd party lobbying division: https://gizmodo.com/apple-lobby-app-developers-1849554671
I'm judging based on hard evidence, analyzing arguments, style, timing, and other properties that are highly indicative of suck puppet behavior. In contrast to you, I'm backing up my claims and also arguing the issue, while you're busy defending the character of your alt account.
>But have fun imagining whatever you want. Conspiracies are everywhere, I guess, if you have that kind of mindset...
This is exactly the kind of rhetoric, which you have been using on your main and your alt. Resorting to the strategy of hastily smearing people or facts as "conspiracies", because your Apple apologia crumbles under the overwhelming weight of opposing facts, which you can't handle. That's why you didn't even bother discussing the evidence I've provided, which has debunked your false narrative so robustly, that you simply ignored that part.
>I dunno, man. It's claiming a literal conspiracy between Google and Firefox to make Firefox worse. In reality, it's an outlandish proposition because Google already holds such high market share for Chrome, they need Firefox as a viable competitor to avoid antitrust concerns. The idea that they'd contractually (or behind-closed-doors) engage in hobbling Firefox is fantasy territory -- literally conspiracy theorizing. Because of the huge legal and financial risks that would entail if ever discovered. So, when something's an actual conspiracy theory, it's right to call it out as such.
The definition of a conspiracy is "a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful", and since both Google and Mozilla are public companies, his simple statement of "_Maybe_ part of their agreement is to not implement some features because it would compete with Chrome. _I don't really know_, and I don't really care what Firefox does or doesn't do." is not even remotely the distorted version from which you've created that straw man which you're now shadowboxing against. That's exactly the style of arguing in which you've been engaging in with your alt account.
>I'm Ctrl+F-ing here through troupo's comments and not seeing anything like that. Their points seem perfectly reasonable, that Firefox also doesn't implement these features, and therefore Apple's actions might be very reasonably explained as having the same genuine reasons.
Amusing, so you think that the "arguments" you have been making with your alt account are "perfectly reasonable" - who would have thought.
>It looks like you're the one imagining conspiracies in Apple's behavior -- "that motivates every single one of their decisions"
Again, you fail to understand and apply the word "conspiracy" properly, because all of my statements are based on publicly verifiable facts, trying to hastily smear that as conspiracy is exactly what you have been doing with your alt account already, so you had to use your main account to feign neutrality, but you failed again.
These observations have also been made by many other people in tech:
infrequently.org/2025/09/apples-antitrust-playbook
ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-awesome-with-iphones
Even the American government itself has observed and documented Apple's anti-competitive business practices, for which the Department of Justice has even sued Apple:
"Justice Department Sues Apple for Monopolizing Smartphone Markets - Apple’s Broad-Based, Exclusionary Conduct Makes It Harder for Americans to Switch Smartphones, Undermines Innovation for Apps, Products, and Services, and Imposes Extraordinary Costs on Developers, Businesses, and Consumers: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
You know very well, that your usage of "conspiracy" is an act of smearing, but as a dedicated Apple propagandist, you obviously are more interested in manipulating conversations with deceptive rhetoric and roleplaying with your alt account.
> And you're the one using incredibly insulting and inappropriate language. It seems to be your comments that have a lot of inappropriate tone for HN, which is presumably why I see a lot of them downvoted. Maybe you should think about whether this is really the best way to engage here, maybe re-read the HN guidelines?
You're projecting, it's you who has been using insulting and inappropriate language, plus you're using alt accounts to roleplay as "neutral" third party, so take your own advice and re-read the HN guidelines. Regarding "downvotes"? My net positive upvote score increased in this thread despite you double downvoting with your main and alt account, so your biased analysis failed again. You ain't fooling anybody.
That line of roleplay of yours also seems to be just 'Doomsday Defense' part 2. Now you’re adding an arbitrary time limit ("next two years") to justify inaction. We don't need to "unwind" Google before we stop Apple's anti-competitive behavior, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. The fact that you view "allowing other browsers" (like Firefox) as "handing Google control" reveals the flaw in your logic. You are effectively arguing that we must destroy the village (the open web) to save it from the dragon, if this isn't concern trolling then I don't know what is.
It's incredible how you insist on being so obnoxious, that you refuse to understand the most obvious of arguments that others make. You can't just detach a single sentence from the broader point he's making. Namely, him not caring about what browser do or don't implement, is connected to demanding that Apple stops with its anti-competitive business practices such that Apple's bad decisions should only affect Safari instead of holding back the entire web.
>It's just extremely unfortunate that Safari is now between a rock and a hard place (only because of Apple) as really they are the only web engine of note to withstand "whatever Chrome spits out is standard now"
That reads like an #ad that Apple would pay for to reframe their hostile actions as somehow poor old Apple fighting a 'heroic' fight against Google. The reality, however, is Apple simply acting based on their conflict of interest, so spare us such Apple whitewashing narratives. Apple is a company in a capitalist society, whose entire raison d'être is nothing but maximizing shareholder value. You are not on r/apple, in case you forgot.
Then you should have been more specific, but that is still not even remotely a conspiracy. It is a completely valid potential thesis. Thus, your attempt to hastily dismiss it as "conspiracy" is factually an act of smearing.
>I literally say nothing avout Apple's business practices. All I'm talking are a bunch of Chrome-only non-standards that people on HN pretend are standards and claim that everyone must immediately implement them
Your diatribes and foul language against the Chrome dev team have been in constant service of justifying Apple's actions at all cost, while outright ignoring and downplaying their evident conflict of interest. Furthermore, you need to stop with these gross misrepresentations of "HN pretend are standards and claim that everyone must immediately implement them" which is a distortion, that you keep forcefully putting in people's mouths, despite many people calling you out on it numerous times throughout this thread.
It's absolutely insane how you keep repeating the exact same argument with no additional information like a bot who is incapable of processing new information, because you can't understand how it has been debunked several times now. You insist on distorting nuanced arguments into gross misrepresentations, because that's the only way you can uphold the illusion that your underhanded Apple propaganda is anything other than a whitewashing of Apple's conflict of interest that motivates ever single one of their decisions.
>Which literally has nothing to do with Chrome-only non-standards. Chrome wants them. It's on Chrome to design and implement them safely. Neither Apple nor Mozilla owe them anything regardless of the amount of demagoguery around their decisions. Both Apple and Safari pointed out the issues they have across many discussions. Chrome didn't care.
Your framing around this is absurd, you're the one turning a technical discussion into some team sport where you try to inflate your argument by pretending it's Google vs A&M, when it has been proven that Mozilla accepted new iterations of proposals which you yourself have admitted! This is evidence that, just because a current implementation is temporary rejected by Mozilla, it is not an eternal rejection similar to Apple, whose motivations are not guided by (faux) privacy concerns but by fear of losing their App Store dominance and revenue. You however, take this to underhandedly create anti-competitive Apple apologia, where you downplay Apple's conflict of interest by writing your own "Google vs A&M" screenplay.
>Safari has multiple issues, that's true. None of them stem from refusing to support every shitty thing that Chrome vomits into the world and calls a standard.
Wrong. That's a claim which you didn't even bother elaborating on, because if you were to elaborate, it would become clear that your claim is not only wrong, but outright deceptive. Your biased and shallow rhetoric is not a substitute for an actual argument.
>Speaking of "denying rival technology equal rights". Do you know that WebSQL was implemented by Chrome and had approval from Safari, but got killed due to opposition from Mozilla? Did Mozilla "deny rival technology equal rights"? Or perhaps, just perhaps, they had valid concerns that lead to rethinking of the approach?
Irrelevant and misleading. Not every single feature is directly relevant to establish equal rights for competing technologies, but when Apple realizes that it does, then they realize that it would threaten their App Store's dominance and they act accordingly. None of that diminishes Apple's conflict of interest either, but it makes clear how you're consistently arguing in bad faith to downplay Apple's conflict of interest. No matter how hard you try, you will fail. Apple makes billions from their conflict of interest, so as long as that conflict of interest exists, people have the right to make other people aware how that poisons Apple's motivations in relevant decisions.
>You can't even come up with proper rebuttal of Mozilla's and Apple's concerns (you don't even know about their concerns to begin with) beyond "but native apps" and diatribes about Apple.
Your rhetoric is so vapid and detached from reality, that it feels like I'm arguing with a LLM that loses context and forgets that I refuted your claims several times. Again, you yourself have admitted to cases where Mozilla initially refused a specific implementation, but later have accepted it. This alone debunks your whole biased narrative. Your whole rhetoric is a constant regurgitation of that single spiel, but you can simply not move on, completely incapable of processing evidence that has debunked it, that's why you fail to realize how shallow and misguided your Apple propaganda is.
>BTW here's Mozilla relenting on just one of the hardware APIs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33995022 (sadly, the twitter account has been locked)/ Original quote: "Just a day after shipping an impl to Firefox Nightly, this is the first discovered case of WebMIDI-fingerprinting... Chrome still allows web developers to enumerate attached MIDI devices without user consent or even a notification, btw."
Amazing. This is exactly what I was referring to above. I swear, you're like a bot who constantly and stubbornly regurgitates the exact same debunked arguments, regardless of how many times your talking points have been already addressed and refuted. And you're not even realizing how your own argument undermines and invalidates your own position. Wonderful.
The existence of a threat from Google does not justify the existence of anti-competitive business practices by Apple. We do not have to "pick a favorite" monopoly, we can and should use legislation to handle both. Framing this as a binary choice is a defeatist tactic that serves only to protect the Gatekeepers and preserve the status quo.
It isn't factually and certainly not "literally" that. I've explicitly stated that the problem isn't the rejection of the specific implementation in its current form, but the wholesale refusal of features to deny rival technology equal rights, instead of helping to implement a safe standard. That is evidence of Apple's bad faith motivation to hobble competing technology in favor of their App Store tax funnel. You consistently refuse to understand this and resort to deflecting from and distorting that fact.
>There's no broader argument.
There is, it's the one you've been deflecting and distracting from, because it refutes your biased talking points completely.
>You literally dismiss Firefox as irrelevant [1][1] Their position on these Chrome features is literally the same as Apple's https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/
No I don't. You're literally making stuff up and ignoring the fact that I have actually even started my response with an acknowledgement of that point: "You're right that Firefox also opposes some of these specific implementations in its current form, and that Google often rushes features. However, that doesn't diminish Apple's conflict of interest at all, so sometimes their arguments happen to align with reality just as a broken clock is correct twice a day." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46457938
>and assumes that Apple is both a bad actor driven entirely by money an must implement whatever Chrome comes up with
There is no such assumption, only the fact that Apple has a conflict of interest, which manifests itself in anti-competitive behavior, for which I've provided documented evidence. I've also never stated that they "must implement whatever Chrome comes up with", that's a gross misrepresentation, which you are stubbornly repeating, despite me having refuted it several times now. Your bias in this matter couldn't be more obvious, due to your dedication to distorting any evidence that refutes Apple's propaganda narrative, so you keep blindly repeating the same tired and old talking points despite evidence to the contrary.
Says who?
"Yes, PWAs have become popular on these platforms. I work for Microsoft on the Microsoft Store (app store on Windows) and I work with the Edge team, and I work on PWABuilder.com, which publishes PWAs to app stores. Some of the most popular apps in the Microsoft Store are PWAs: Netflix, TikTok, Adobe Creative Cloud, Disney+, and many others.
To view the list of PWAs in the Store, on a Windows box you can run ms-windows-store://assoc/?Tags=AppExtension-microsoft.store.edgePWA" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46457849
There is nothing "funny" about me acknowledging facts, that's what a reasonable person should always do, try it. What's not funny though, is how you're butchering and misrepresenting my arguments to such a gross degree. I've never stated that everybody "must implement these non-standard features from Chrome", instead I've made a much more nuanced argument about how Apple's conflict of interest is motivating them to reject entire feature sets for competing technology instead of helping to implement a safe standard, which is indicative of their bad faith motivations. That anti-competitive strategy has been essential for Apple in collecting billions in app taxes by systematically hobbling any competition before it can emerge.
>BTW literally the moment Firefox relented and implemented WebMIDI they had originally opposed, they immediately ran into tracking/fingerprinting attempts using WebMIDI that Chrome just couldn't care less about.
So? Just as native apps give users certain freedoms that can have problematic aspects, web apps should have _equal rights_ and be able to play on a level playing field. The choice and freedom should be the users' and not that of Apple's finance division. None of this gives Apple the right to uphold its anti-competitive strategy with its corporate double speak. And the fact that you're so hyperfocused on specifics while failing to grasp the broader argument, so you can cheerlead for Apple's anti-competitive behavior, is revealing a clear bias.
>Can you give an example?
Web Bluetooth, Web USB, Web NFC, Web Serial...
Of course Apple will uphold its usual charade to claim that it's about pRiVacy & sEcuRiTy to maintain plausible deniability. They could easily implement it and keep it disabled by default, such that users could make the conscious choice to enable it or keep it disabled. Any adequate analysis of Apple's behavior and motivations must mention Apple's conflict of interest, because Apple will be biased against technology that could diminish the value proposition of "native" apps which Apple has been taxing so unchallenged for all these years.
Everything that's inconvenient for your preferred narrative can just be dismissed as conspiratorial thinking, makes the world so much easier - doesnt it? I've compiled some of the evidences that makes clear how one of the Gatekeepers (Apple) has a tremendous conflict of interest, which manifested itself in systematic sabotaging of PWAs over the years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45534316
Obviously. When a major Gatekeeper systematically holds it back to prevent it from challenging its taxation funnel, then it has no chance of competing and will thus not be chosen on competing platforms either, which will prevent its adoption and any investment in it.
>Even if unencumbered on iOS, it will still fail, because PWA is an intrinsically confusing technology.
PWA is not an "intrinsically confusing technology" and making such an absurd statement without proper elaboration reeks of pure bias.
What? This is literally what you are doing. You want to restrict other people's devices and rob them of their freedom "because of your Grandma". We want to give people more freedom such that everybody can use their devices as they see fit. Should you still want more restriction, that's also an option that's included, since you have the freedom to just keep using it with its restricted defaults. It's insane that you are incapable of understanding this.
>That decision has zero impact on you.
No, quite the contrary. It robs 99.9% of people of their consumer rights and robs them of their freedoms, just "because of your Grandma". While our aims have zero impact on you, since you can just keep using your device as you always have. You're literally putting the logic on its head. So take your own advice and "you can simply ignore how we and 99.9% of society use our devices, and move along with your life. Mind your own business and simply buy your Grandma a different phone from a different company which meets your needs. There is no shortage of such devices and companies."
>The whole point of a marketplace is to encourage differentiated products from a variety of companies. You are saying that a company should not be allowed to sell me a red car because you prefer blue cars. The correct solution is for you to go buy a blue car from one of the many companies that sells blue cars.
Here comes the expected nonsense analogy. Yet more evidence that you have zero understanding of the topic and that you're yet another Apple shill who blindly regurgitates the same old debunked talking points ad nauseam. Let me briefly debunk it. "The whole point of a marketplace" is not to sell "differentiated products", that's just your primitive understanding; the point of a marketplace is to connect buyers and sellers, price discovery and competition - without which price discovery is impossible; all of these have to operate under fair market principles which are enforced by the state which has laws to enforce and ensure that no market participant becomes too dominant and anti-competitive and thus breaks fair market principles. Famous examples are:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._AT%26T_(2019) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
So your claim that I'm supposedly stating "that a company should not be allowed to sell me a red car" is false and a gross misrepresentation of what I'm saying and a clear indicator that you will simply ignore any argument and any evidence just to blindly regurgitate absurd analogies that make zero sense in the given context just to recycle old and debunked talking points in defense of Apple's anti-competitive and consumer hostile business practices.
What? You don't disagree with Apple anywhere in this thread; you are hellbent on defending their consumer hostile and anti-competitive business practices with the most absurd narratives and that's exactly the problem. It's a strong indicator that you're highly likely to still be an Apple shareholder since you've worked there, which perfectly explains your persistent bias in your Apple apologia.
> But I also worked at Google, so that too. Man… I’m screwed on so many topics then…
Yes imagine, but the proper terminology is "conflict of interest". It seems new to you, have a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest
I know reading comprehension is hard, but you will get better at it, if you put in some effort: "It is irrelevant what system I am personally using, since it's about the principle and not about personal preferences" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45859640
>Also “shill”? I don’t work for Apple. I am not Tim Cook. I have no reason to shill for anyone. That’s just an ad hominem.
Your profile states "Places we might have crossed paths: VMWare, Google, Apple", so you have an evident conflict of interest, that's just an objective fact worth mentioning; especially when one is dedicated to making bad faith arguments in defense of anti-competitive business practices regurgitating bogus narratives[1].
[1] https://infrequently.org/2025/09/apples-antitrust-playbook
>And she is perfectly happy with her iPhone. If you aren’t, Google makes Android phones you can use where you can side load anything you wish.
It is irrelevant what system I am personally using, since it's about the principle and not about personal preferences; which you clearly have no interest in understanding. This is also where your "just get an Android" propaganda falls apart. Google learned from Apple that they can get away with much more anti-competitive BS so they followed suit: https://www.makeuseof.com/androids-sideloading-limits-are-an.... This where big tech shills lead society towards; depriving everybody of their rights and freedoms with their bogus apologia.
Finally, the world still does not revolve around your grandma. And if she can use all those apps, then she can also learn to just keep using the Apple Store. None of your contrived fear mongering narratives hold up to scrutiny, any astute observer will see right through them.
People have vivid imaginations and still none of that is relevant to what constitutes an anti-competitive business practice that is in violation of fair market principles and relevant laws.
>I cannot buy her a dumbphone because we use whatsapp to keep in touch and google photos to share photos with her.
Good news! Yes you can! There are dumb phones with whatsapp and you can share images on whatsapp too! https://www.dumbphones.org/ - check the "Whatsapp Support" filter option.
Furthermore, the most potent attack vector was, is and will always be social engineering, which is much more likely on smartphones than on dumb phones. So if it's not concern trolling, then the obvious move is to buy a dumb phone for grandma instead of depriving everybody else of their freedoms and rights.