shimman 4 days ago

Me? I'm working to help people get elected to Congress to help regulate this mess.

  • pixl97 4 days ago

    At the end of the day Apple is doing their damnedest to force the requirement to support other app stores. They want their cake, and they want to eat it too. Unfortunately they are going to make an epic fuckton of money before they get told to stop.

  • dyauspitr 3 days ago

    There is so much stuff that needs to get fixed in congress over this issue is even a blip on the radar.

    • shimman 3 days ago

      True but people need to understand there is a wide public acceptance on this issue. No one likes big tech fleecing both users and businesses alike, people want action. If you aren't collectively organizing to exert toward this action how do you honestly expect things to get better? Because the opposition has no issue throwing hundreds of millions behind a super pac to enact the law as they see fit.

      It doesn't have to be like this.

      Also, contrary to current political environments, Congress is more than capable of doing multiple things as once.

    • pxoe 3 days ago

      Tech companies are involved in lobbying, so maybe it's not as irrelevant or unconnected as you might think. Fees are how they make the money that goes into it.

  • nout 4 days ago

    Why would you want to give the government such power? That always amazes me... when there is an issue, people jump on "let's vote for government to regulate this", but then they are surprised when a new government gets to power and uses this new regulation/capability against you.

    • johnnyanmac 4 days ago

      >Why would you want to give the government such power?

      Because the government is the only body equipped to create and enforce consumer rights laws. Do you think we'd have refund policies if the government didn't regulate them?

      >then they are surprised when a new government gets to power and uses this new regulation/capability against you.

      Okay. How is the act of forbidding platforms from banning alternative payment processors going to backfire?

    • pessimizer 4 days ago

      I want them to use antitrust regulation against everyone, including me. That's what having values is like.

      Markets without competition degenerate. Markets are also artificial and always rely on government enforcement to exist - Apple sues people who try to get around its market manipulation. You just prefer that governments help enforce trusts and destroy competition that those trusts denote as unfair.

      • bigstrat2003 4 days ago

        > Markets are also artificial and always rely on government enforcement to exist - Apple sues people who try to get around its market manipulation.

        Historically, markets are destroyed by government interference, not propped up by it. Your own example is a case in point: were it not for the government making laws in favor of entrenched companies, Apple couldn't sue the people trying to get around its market manipulation.

        > You just prefer that governments help enforce trusts and destroy competition that those trusts denote as unfair.

        This is a grossly unfair mischaracterization of the post you are replying to. Bad show, old chap.

        • cyberax 3 days ago

          Apple doesn't _need_ to sue people. They can just stop distributing their apps.

          That's it. No "government monopoly" or anything, just regular commercial monopolism.

    • cephi 4 days ago

      I may regret asking but what is your solution, then?

      • nout 3 days ago

        My (user) solution would be to use Patreon on the web, or on Android. No one is forcing you to use specifically the native Apple app.

        On top of that Patreon is a closed centralized platform that's bound to have issues like this and that's where I very much prefer using protocols (vs platforms) that enable the same. There are very similar solutions to Patreon, but based on nostr and related protocols.

        What is your solution to the government that you may not like using previously established "regulations" against people? My point is that you ask for regulation hoping that it will prevent this type of issue, but the regulation that you actually get will be barely having any effect and it will enforce ID + picture verification, it will enforce downloading specific government sanctioned keylogger app, it will enforce specific US state association, etc. New systems, new complexity, harder for newcomers to start business... Things like this are always added in the fine print. It will just lead to excluding so many people from using the service and making the overall space so much worse. That's why I'm encouraging people to think twice before immediately asking the government to expand its overreach via new regulations.

    • mattnewton 4 days ago

      there is little other remedy to monopoly power?

teejmya 4 days ago

Yeah, lol.

Was all Apple since the iBook G4. Bought a Pixel last week. It's nice.

tcoff91 4 days ago

launch an in-app browser and don't use apple as the payment processor.

The Epic v Apple lawsuit verdict makes this allowed now.

  • 1v1id 4 days ago

    My understanding was that you could have a button that could take the user outside of the app to pay (i.e. your website). So progress, but not this level of freedom yet.

fblp 4 days ago

This is also a political issue. The administration could have ftc investigate this under anti-trust, and the government could also pass tighter laws preventing this. But this current administration is likely too friendly to big corporate interests.

tootie 4 days ago

Use Android or use websites instead of apps. Apple pushes their app ecosystem so hard because it's their walled garden. If you want to support a creator, go their website and click whatever they offer.

Imustaskforhelp 4 days ago

Can we please just have cheap/affordable linux phones at this point.

I am so close to having raspberry pi phones but even rasp pi 's are getting expensive because of AI dammit

  • johnnyanmac 4 days ago

    What's the big barrier stopping Linux from becoming a viable mobile OS? Or at least some completely de-googlefied AOSP?

    • fragmede 4 days ago

      Hardware. Mass manufacturing, plus the deep pockets of a corporation, mean that we've come to expect cheap prices for inanely powerful hardware. Yes I'm calling an $1,800 iphone cheap for what you get. That's cheap for what you get because if you're a tiny company, you can't get a phone of that level manufactured that you can still for anywhere near that price, and that's a super high end model. How many people are going to shell out $1,000 for a model with the specs of a $500 model just because it runs Linux? And that's before you even actually deal with the software. Specifically, driver support, battery life, and app support are the three big show stoppers there. The best option this second is a Pixel running GrapheneOS, and that's based on Android on Goolge hardware. (They did just announce getting off Pixels tho.)

      A Linux smartphone has been tried before. That's not too say someone shouldn't try again, but just to say there are lessons to be learned from those attempts.

      • johnnyanmac 4 days ago

        Yeah, that makes sense on the hardware end. It's really hard to compete and even some large players like LG ultimately fell out because of that.

        But I was more speaking on the software end. You can certainly piss off Google if enough people decided to buy an android phone but have it boot up Linux instead. Might even piss off Samsung, so that's a plus. I assume the infrastructure to get APK support on Linux is a herculean task, though (that's the only way I see as a middleground until native linux apps work on mobile).

        • Imustaskforhelp 4 days ago

          There is a way to run waydroid/android applications in Linux. I have personally tried it and honestly it does work great for the most part.

      • Imustaskforhelp 4 days ago

        > How many people are going to shell out $1,000 for a model with the specs of a $500 model just because it runs Linux? And that's before you even actually deal with the software

        Thanks for writing this comment because that's exactly something which I wanted to convey with my original comment too

    • handedness 4 days ago

      GrapheneOS is already a viable de-Googled and significantly hardened and improved fork of AOSP. It runs on Google Pixels at present, with an OEM device planned for release in 2027.

      • Imustaskforhelp 4 days ago

        I guess yeah, Most of my concerns were with Privacy but yea looks like grapheneos is a tradeoff I might have to make some day

        but honestly its also the fact that I love cli tools and yea I can and I have used termux in the past but I really wish for a more first class for cli tools as well and I don't know but I just really wish to support linux tools.

        Like I am just not satisfied with the current options we have right now and you can look at fragmede's comment as to why I mean that. I mean I just want a cheap affordable linux phone with just decent specs nothing too fancy. By decent I mean that I used to be on a dumb phone for a year with 32 mb ram iirc so perhaps my specs can be considered to be minimal but I feel like 2-4GB ram might be a good start. (prefer the 4gb option as to favour both me anad the masses)

        Can framework or some other company go ahead and create a linux phone too please?

esseph 4 days ago

GrapheneOS

  • tasty_freeze 3 days ago

    It is more clunky and less polished than android. On the other hand, it is far more secure.

    I was a user of android for 15+ years, and I had been using a pixel 4a when the battery issue came up last year. Google handled that so terribly I bought a used pixel 7a and installed Graphene.

    Installation is quite easy. The lack of native voice-to-text was a pain; I installed a 3rd party utility (FUTO) for that, but unlike the native one where it translates while you talk, FUTO waits for you to finish then translates everything.

    The messaging app is less integrated too. Android finally fixed things up with Apple such that emoji responses (heart, thumbs up, +1, etc) would appear as an annotation after the text message I sent, but now I'm back to getting "So and so likes your comment <full text of my comment>".

    Some of the other pain was because I have tried to cut down on other google properties. I use "here we go" for mapping instead of google maps. Due to the scale of things, the real time traffic updates on google maps is far better than on here we go. I use fastmail instead of gmail and I'm 100% happy with that solution.

pjerem 3 days ago

Well. I own an iPhone, a Macbook, Airpods, Apple Watch. I'm in the Apple ecosystem since the last 16 years.

Unfortunately, due to their behavior in the latest years, I'm not going to buy anything Apple anymore.

Fortunately for me, I prefer Linux to MacOS so I never have been totally tied in the Apple ecosystem and I know how to leave the boat without a lot of hassle.

I'm really saddened because they know how to make great products when they want to. It's just infuriating that everything that is shitty in their products is never due to randomness or bugs or whatever, but ALWAYS because they decided to fuck you.

hilti 3 days ago

Half of the apps on the app store can easily be replaced by a PWA that works on iOS and Android.