Could an admin please adjust the typo in the title? Goolgle -> Google

Not mentioned in the headline: When the user is _not_ logged in, iOS collects "location" whereas Android does not.

I am actually a little surprised that iOS would gather this information. What use would it serve?

Find my iphone?

This is for logged-out. I believe find-my-iphone is only for users logged into their iCloud accounts.

Find My Phone? It is a choice to enroll in this, and it’s mighty convenient when you lose or get your phone stolen.

That works when you're not logged in?

Can you even imagine? Lost your phone? Did you make sure that you were logged in before you lost it? Did the thief reset the phone and log you out? Oh, guess you can't find your phone now. Sorry.

No, it's the location it uses to report to Apple Maps for the purposes of improving traffic.

It's possible this is referring to this feature: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/12/apple-explains-mysteriou...

Generally speaking, Apple is drastically better about location services privacy. For instance, Apple Maps does not tie any location data nor direction requests to your Apple ID, and regularly rotates identifiers for devices used by the service: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212039

That link is returning "429 Too Many Requests." What feature is it you're referring to?

There's an Ultra Wideband radio in the iPhone 11 and newer that isn't legal to use in all countries. Apple uses a location request sometimes just to determine if the device can legally run that radio or not.

It's nice of you to accept Apple's calling it "radio" but UWB is radar technology. Newer iPhones have radar built into them to make their location tracking more precise. Most people don't understand (or can't understand) the details, which is why the semantic load of calling UWB "radar" instead of "radio" is important for conveying its intended purpose.

The RA in RADAR stands for RAdio. It’s like saying “light pointer” instead of “laser pointer”. For most people the distinction is irrelevant.

If that's the case, they wouldn't need to report the location back to themselves, would they? The phone would simply check its coordinates, and turn it on or off.

I don’t think anyone is saying that iOS does report back to Apple (and I don’t think there is any evidence that iOS does this).

The original concern was caused because iOS would still activate location services and display the icon during these checks, even if you had turned location services off completely in settings.

That is exactly what the article is talking about.

I’m not sure which article your looking at, but neither the OP article, or the Kerbs article suggests that Apple is collecting location data derived from location services on a phone and sending it back to the mothership.

The OP article suggests that IP data from the uploads could be used to estimate location, and their table has a “location” column. But that column seems to be referencing the fact that iOS reports when location services are turned on and off, rather than a specific location derived from the phones sensors.

This is of course ignoring opt-in telemetry which is used to improve maps etc. Which obviously involves sending your location back to Apple.

When the user is _not_ logged in

Does this matter? How many people do you know that aren't logged in on their phones? It is literally one the first things Android asks you to do even before showing you the main screen.

I didn’t think iOS even lets you past the welcome screen without signing in.

" Modern cars regularly send basic data about vehicle components, their safety status and service schedules to car manufacturers, and mobile phones work in very similar ways." -Google

This is a beautiful quote because it is an example of one industry's bad behavior leading to another industry's bad behavior, upon which the first industry then users the second's similarity to justify themselves. Cars only started doing this because phones made it normal. It's wrong in both cases.

It's similar to when Apple defended it's 30% store cut by claiming it's an "industry standard"... specifically, an industry standard that Apple established.

This may be pedantic, but Steam was collecting its 30% long before the App Store opened. Thought maybe that was inspired by Apple's cut of music revenues in the iTunes Store.

You pay 30% for all the hosting and listing and payment processing. But then you aren't required to use Steam to distribute your game — you could as well set up your own website. There's nothing preventing you. There's no predatory code signing on desktop OSes.

On the other hand, you can't sideload apps onto iOS devices. You HAVE to go through Apple. You either publish on the app store, or you don't have an iOS app. That's different. That's very different. That's antitrust-can't-happen-sooner different.

You aren't required to use the Apple store to distribute your product. You can sell to Android users and desktop/laptop users.

"That's different. That's very different

Is it? Why is it? You can't sell software to run on Kindle Paperwhite even though it's a full computer inside. What's the specific difference between that and iOS, other than "Apple's ecosystem and customers are desirable, so I want to use it" and "I don't want to pay for it"?

Your argument rests on the strange assumption that people who are against IOS restricting apps on the iPhone would for some reason support Amazon's restrictions on Kindle apps.

I can also easily load PDFs and other formats to a Kindle even if I didn’t go through the Amazon store.

And you can easily load PDFs and music onto an iPhone/iPad without going through the Apple store or iTunes store. So they're even and that's good enough for Kindle therefore it's good enough for iOS, right?

Oh wait, on top, iOS has an app store so you can do more, so that's a win for iOS? And the app store can have free apps on it where Apple take no money, but still review and curate for some minimum standards of quality, which is nice.

You aren't required to use the Apple store to distribute your product. You can sell to Android users and desktop/laptop users.

You aren't making much sense. You won't have any semblance of adoption if you don't have presence on iOS. Except maybe in India where iOS market share is tiny.

You can't sell software to run on Kindle Paperwhite even though it's a full computer inside.

It's an appliance. It's marketed as a device to serve one purpose — read books. Amazon isn't making apps for it either, as far as the user is concerned, there's no notion of application software on these things.

By the way, washing machines and microwaves also have a full computer in them — there's CPU, RAM, and ROM. Yes, tiny and underpowered. Probably not quite powerful enough to run Doom. Computers nonetheless, technically.

Yet no one raises any objections about not being able to run arbitrary code on them. Precisely because of the marketing and expectations.

What's the specific difference between that and iOS

iPhones and iPads are marketed as general-purpose computing devices. They are not appliances by any stretch of imagination. Yet they are crippled because Apple has knowingly and deliberately put in a limitation so they only run code that was signed by Apple. This limits their general-purposefulness. This forces developers who don't want or need the hosting and listing still go through the app store.

Apple devices aren't crippled by it, they're improved by it. By curation and restriction. Users don't buy Apple gear to pay the lowest possible price for software, or to sideload software, users buy Apple to get something that works. The whole point is that Apple is selling an Apple experience, not an overwhelming flood of "fix it yourself" freeware. Users who want that can get it elsewhere, they shouldn't be forced to suffer it on iOS as well. Taking the restrictions away isn't an improvement. They aren't mandatory restrictions until using iOS is mandatory, and it isn't.

This is like a restaurant demanding smart shoes for customers, and you complaining that it's anti-competitively hurting your sneaker business and the restaurant should be forced to change. Customers going there are going there knowing the dress code applies to them and others, forcibly blocking that removes part of their reason for going there at all.

"You aren't making much sense. You won't have any semblance of adoption if you don't have presence on iOS."

That is the sense, you aren't required to have any semblance of adoption. Apple is successful by building a curated, restricted, "exclusive" (by perception if not fact) experience. You want access to the customers and their money, without upholding the reasons the customers are using that platform.

"Yet no one raises any objections about not being able to run arbitrary code on them. Precisely because of the marketing and expectations."

Now you aren't making sense. Apple never marketed or set expectations that you could sideload apps on iPhone or iOS, did they?

"By the way, washing machines and microwaves also have a full computer in them — there's CPU, RAM, and ROM. Yes, tiny and underpowered. Probably not quite powerful enough to run Doom. Computers nonetheless, technically."

So you're going after Bosch for anti-competitively not allowing you to sell software that runs on their washing machines, and not allowing owners to sideload? Because this is all about anti-competitive, you said? No obviously you aren't doing that, which calls into question your claimed reasons. You can easily list your app on Apple's store and compete, what it's about is you want more money. Which is fine in its own way, until you try to get some legal mandate for Apple to force me to worse platform so you can avoid paying Apple money for using Apple's platform and reputation.

The whole point is that Apple is selling an Apple experience

Once you bought a thing, you own it. That's it. It's cool to have a curated app store for those developers who want it. It's uncool for Apple to retain control of devices after they've been sold.

This is like a restaurant demanding smart shoes for customers

You can't make this comparison. You don't get to choose what kind of mobile device other people use. You do get to choose which restaurant you visit.

Apple is successful by building a curated, restricted, "exclusive" (by perception if not fact) experience.

Apple is successful by building great hardware and mostly good UX. Macs have had no app store for most of their history, and even though presently do have restrictions by default, there's a manual override to allow running unsigned or self-signed code.

You want access to the customers and their money, without upholding the reasons the customers are using that platform.

I'm having issue with there being a gatekeeper AT ALL. I don't give a crap about "their customers" and "their money". I just want to make an app and distribute it straight to my users. That's it. Apple forcibly inserting itself in between me and my users doesn't do any good to either side. Especially if it's a free app and I'm doing my own marketing. It's simply a rent-seeking prude intermediary that creates more problems than it solves.

People buy smartphones because you need one to function in the modern society. They choose either Google or Apple. Neither of these corporations deserves all the credit they feel entitled to.

Apple never marketed or set expectations that you could sideload apps on iPhone or iOS, did they?

Apple set expectations that you can do pretty much anything on an iOS device.

You can easily list your app on Apple's store and compete, what it's about is you want more money.

I don't give a crap about money. I despise intellectual property and proprietary software. I'll never sell a byte.

I'm simply sick and tired of how relentlessly Apple wants to eradicate sex and piracy form the internet, for example. Even if you have a free app, Apple literally dictates you how you should change your ToS to be approved on the app store. Is that acceptable? I don't think so. No one should have this kind of power. If the web was invented today, a web browser would be rejected from the app store for allowing the user to view any content without restrictions.

Meanwhile they approve all sorts of scam apps, like a bunch of wallpapers with a $20/week subscription on it. Because they take a 30% cut on those. This is hypocrisy.

"I don't give a crap about money. I despise intellectual property and proprietary software. I'll never sell a byte."

"People buy smartphones because you need one to function in the modern society. They choose either Google or Apple. Neither of these corporations deserves all the credit they feel entitled to."

And you can sideload on Android, and they chose not-Android. and you could do so on Blackberry, and WindowsPhone, and Maemo and Symbian, and they all failed for not offering what people want. The only remaining good experience left is Apple, and you want to take that away as well. We know what that world looks like. It's not paradise of free choice, it's this: https://i.imgur.com/Ko5QcQl.jpg

And by "this", that's what an Android phone looks like. If you want to live in that world as a personal choice, you can easily not install the toolbars. But if there is an ecosystem you can buy into which avoids that, that should be an option. You want people who chose a limited experience to have the limits removed - but they chosing the limited experience in the first place, who are you to say that shouldn't be allowed?

"Apple is successful by building great hardware and mostly good UX. Macs have had no app store for most of their history, and even though presently do have restrictions by default, there's a manual override to allow running unsigned or self-signed code."

Agreed, so people who want unsigned or self-signed code can buy macs, right? Choice. Nobody is forced to buy an iOS device, nobody is surprised when they can't side-load a program, because that has been the same for 10+ years and 10+ major iPhone versions, it's never been an expectation.

"I'm having issue with there being a gatekeeper AT ALL."

I'm having issue with the idea that people willingly buying into an optional gatekeeper is some problem you think will be improved by forbidding people from having that option. The good it does is removing floods of junk from iOS users attention. It's like saying "My email isn't spam" and ignoring that spam is a huge problem and people willingly subscribe to gatekeepers at massive effort and cost industry-wide to try and protect themselves. So are robocalls, and dredmorbius suggests they might bring down the phone networks entirely[1] in the coming few years from a complete inability and unwillingness to defend itself. "Pay to send me an email or call me" would stop it in its tracks. Buying into a gatekeeper environment is another. "I should be able to bypass your spam filter because my emails aren't spam"?

[1] https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102357651020681668

"You want access to their customers"

Last time i checked, corporations were not allowed to own people, has that changed?

"So you're going after Bosch for anti-competitively not allowing you to sell software that runs on their washing machines, and not allowing owners to sideload?"

You are not helping your case by making these daft comparisons.

Perhaps referring to people who buy and use X's products and services as "X's customers" is unfamiliar to you, but it's in very common usage, and conveys no element of ownership:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22apple%27s%20custome...

"You are not helping your case by making these daft comparisons."

The person I was originally replying to is the one who brought up washing machines as having general purpose computers inside them. It's not my comparison, it's me using their comparison to make a point. The point being, that because Alice bought a device that contains a microchip, doesn't entitle you to be allowed to sell software that runs on that microchip, and worsen her experience to do that. Like if Alice chooses to live in a gated community and pays someone to filter her mail, it would be obviously unreasonable to say "I object to gates, I should be allowed to post my fliers through her mailbox for free", as if that's your decision to make, not hers.

That argument would be fine if we had plenty of mobile OS providers, except we have only two and it's a duopoly with very clear market issues.

If you don't like Bosch, there's hundreds of other manufacturer, if you don't like a restaurant, there's hundreds of other ones you can pick, if you don't like Android and iOS, well, you're screwed.

That's the market analogy, secondly, those monopolies are essential in today's computing world and currently power a great part of the tech industry, easy to see some issues there.

The whole point is that Apple is selling an Apple experience, not an overwhelming flood of "fix it yourself" freeware. Users who want that can get it elsewhere, they shouldn't be forced to suffer it on iOS as well.

That argument would be fine if we had plenty of mobile OS providers

So your problem is Apple solved the customer problem so well with “an Apple experience” that all other phone OSes were abandoned.

And as a result Apple should be forced to ruin that experience beloved by their customers, so that the relatively small number of software developers make a little more money?

As an Apple customer, I’m glad your software is being gated from me. I don’t trust your judgement.

You can side load apps onto your iOS devices.

You just need to publish on the store in order to sell to other users.

I could walk into Best Buy and buy the game I want off the shelf. I have no such option if I want to buy an iOS app from a store or the developers themselves.

Steam also don't engage in anti-competitive behavior and prevent billions of people from using alternative game distribution methods like Apple does.

What we need is real competition in the mobile app distribution market to determine whether or not that 30% is actually fair, efficient and competitive. As it stands, there is no competition in mobile app distribution.

That's simply not true, Android outsells iOS, it has multiple App Stores and allows sideloading. Plenty of phones come with 2 or 3 different app stores from the network, vendor and Google. The fact is consumers like app stores, they like consolidation because it makes it simpler for them and a lot of them like the benefits they get from a walled garden. Developers like consolidation too, which is why they have converged on the Play Store en masse on Android. These things benefit them, and the vast, vast majority appreciate those benefits more than they appreciate the benefits of managing multiple competing stores and side loading downloaded APKs.

You can't magic those preferences away. Even if you forced iOS to become an Android clone with multiple app stores and sideloading you can't force people to like those things. You'd just be giving an extra option to a very small subset of techies who have Android now to do that on already anyway. The market has spoken and it likes nice simple well managed choices because that's what the people want.

Why is it that Apple have to make the solution a small subset of people want. Why is that their problem to solve?

Maybe these stores converged on 30% because it's a nice round number and a roughly 1:2 split makes intuitive sense. Consoles, music stores, Steam, mobile app stores, they've all circled around about that number for a very long time. Some have tried around 20/80 to grab market share but it never worked, Nintendo tried 35/65 for a while before going to 30/70. In the end it's natural that competitive forces will tend to a convergence.

I could walk into Best Buy and buy the game I want off the shelf.

If you try doing it for any PC games released over the past decade, you are more likely than not gonna have a disk with some installable files and a Steam code in the box. Without that Steam code, there is no way for you to play the game.

At this point, there isn't any difference between buying directly from Steam, as opposed to "walking into Best Buy and buying the game you want off the shelf".

Steam does not take a cut from steam keys sold off steam.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

I could walk into Best Buy and buy the game I want off the shelf. I have no such option if I want to buy an iOS app from a store or the developers themselves.

What percentage of that transaction do you think Best Buy would take?

The 30% cut was considered very good at the time. It was way better than the 50-90% cut that traditional publishers would take.

A sibling comment notes that Steam charged 30% at the time (though some had better deals) but it's worth noting that Steam was not an open platform that anyone could publish on. Much like for consoles, to put a game on Steam you had to have a preexisting relationship with Valve, or try to develop one with no certainty of success. This was also considered a very generous cut because getting on Steam was almost a guarantee of financial success.

The 30% cut was considered very good at the time.

No, it wasn't. I'm not going to dig up links, but one could pop a web site storefront and Fastspring for payment processing (as one example of a company I used) for less than 10% (Fastspring would take something like 6-7%, IIRC). Discovery has always sucked on Apple's store, so no value-add there. In fact, I'd argue that the only value-add one gets out of Apple's store is access to their closed garden.

And "50-90%"? Is that in reference to putting software in physical boxes and on CompUSA shelves? Because no mobile publisher charged 90% before Apple's store came along.

IIRC 50% (60%) was the rate for the app distributor I used for selling my PalmOS app. It was digital download, too.

For the Apple case: access to the walled garden is the majority of the benefit. But still, setting up payments, customer service, chargebacks, fees, etc., is nice to have taken care of. 30% nice? Who knows. But more than just the raw payment processor overhead, surely.

AFAIK physical boxes are way above 50%.

There were a couple of stores that were more expensive.

But there's 2 reasons the comparisons aren't valid:

1) The revolution Apple brought to mobile phones was making them personal computers. So the relevant comparison really should be with personal computers and I doubt any of them had stores that took as much of a cut.

2) More relevant, the vast majority of such app stores which charged 40-50% were optional marketplaces. A customer didn't need to go through them to install an app on their phone (I believe Palm was like this. I'm pretty sure the likes of WinMo allowed many different ways to install apps). So if a marketplace was charging 40-70% it was entirely for the fact that they were bringing a customer to you. If you were able to acquire a customer by yourself, you didn't need to pay anyone any cut.

The big problem with Apple's 30% cut has always been that they charge you that amount just for having a user, even if you did all the work to get that user to use and pay for your app. Outside of the maybe 3% credit card fees, Apple provides 0 value.

One may argue (as many Apple folks do) that they charge for the frameworks, etc., but that argument is absolutely backwards. Apple creates the frameworks and APIs because they need the apps, not because the apps need them. If Apple was to get rid of its 3rd party APIs and frameworks, so there were no 3rd party apps, it's not the app developers who would suffer because all those users would migrate to Android. It's the iDevices and Apple that would basically disappear.

In fact, App developers would be thrilled because now they only need to support 1 Operating system.

My phone can’t run an IDE or compile code, can’t run solid works, can’t be shared with multiple people, can’t render CGI, can’t mine BTC, and can’t run office, etc.

If this is a personal computer, solely because it runs a browser, then the goalposts have shifted dramatically.

It can run Microsoft Office. You can program in a Python IDE and run code (Pythonista). You can create CGI on an iPhone.

Most of the limitations you mention like compiling are completely arbitrary and added by Apple. The devices are powerful enough and it's easy enough to do everything on a $300 Android phone.

I really don’t care much about Androids, I haven’t used/been educated about them in 6 years and don’t plan to.

That said, a general purpose personal computer is defined by its advertising not its hardware. My iPhone was never advertised to be able to run any arbitrary binary. The fact it can JIT some version of Python, or run a watered down variant of a program I want does not change what I purchased.

In fact my iPhone was advertised as a multi-purpose, specific device, “arbitrarily limited” to my satisfaction, with a walled garden for my personal protection. This is the device I very intentionally purchased and recommended to family and friends!

Forcing it to be ruined for billions of customers because a few hundred thousand developers are less happy is not only ok with me, I paid for that privilege, thank you.

If “developers” (which I am one of) wanted more open access computing devices, they should have self regulated and ensured viruses, scams, malware, bloat ware, etc were not so common as to drive away every user!

Now it’s time to switch jobs, or be successful with a 30% (which hopefully in the future is 3% - I’m happy for you and anyone to push for a reduction in this value). Now is not the time to complain that Apple is anti-competitive and should be forced to ruin a billion customers experiences, given its users are actively inviting Apple to their defense.

Your phone likely has an order of magnitude more computational power than the machines that were used to code and build some of the programs you mentioned.

The fact that iOS/Android prevents you from installing gcc does not mean it is unable to do so.

You could use a bluetooth mouse and keyboard and output HDMI over the usb/lightning port and have a super portable dev machine if the OS was so inclined.

I can't help but feel like having it this way is breaking one of the huge reasons that made computers so absurdly exciting and enticing in the past.

The fact that there was this wide open field, where, sure, maybe you paid Microsoft for the OS, but then the rest was up to you. Trade shareware CDs, install stuff from the internet, type in code from a book or whatever, it felt like an infinite open field of possibilities.

I guess it's normal that the exciting frontier shifts around, but I really can't believe that it's somehow a good thing in this case.

It’s a 15% cut for developers who makes less than $1 million and for most other developers after year 1 on the App Store.

You can still do all those things on a computer.

And now it’s so easy to put up a web app that I’d argue barriers are much, much lower than when you had to figure out how to get your physical software distributed.

The goals of “keep grandpa from getting his life savings stolen by malicious software” and “allow a power user to do whatever they want” can literally never be solved by the same device. If there’s any way to disable protections then the scammers will get grandpa to do it. And the market for grandpas is much larger than the market for tinkerers.

And the market for grandpas is much larger than the market for tinkerers.

This kind of thing has become a meme. It's basically irrelevant. If the market of tinkerers was big enough 20 years ago, it's more than big enough now, and the GPU shortage kind of proves that. It's also an all-or-nothing fallacy -- nobody can protect all financial victims, and restricting the tech device market is probably one of the least effective ways to try. There are much better chokepoints for combatting both malware and fraud than the sanitized amusement park experience.

You can still do all those things on a computer.

Have you tried to distribute software on macOS out of the App Store recently?

This is false.

Windows used to be a sieve. The infection rates and general abuse Windows received went down by orders of magnitude once they added UAC and the default malware scanner/antivirus.

And they didn't need to lock down everything, completely.

The rest is an easy money grab from the OS vendors who obviously don't want to remain "dumb pipes".

Before Windows Vista there was no real file permissions.

Linux file permisdions are still kinda rubbish. Move a file from system A to system B and it's oner is no longer Rob, its now Bob because they have the same Id!

I can't help but feel like having it this way is breaking one of the huge reasons that made computers so absurdly exciting and enticing in the past.

We live in a bubble, so it was exciting for us.

The iPhone was exciting for everyone, for the whole world, and in no small part because normal people finally felt confident enough to try all that sweet sweet software that became available thanks to people like you who don't need a safety net to tinker with stuff.

People were still doing iPhone stuff before the iPhone. You had blackberry and palm offering email, internet, games, and mms to the masses and the devices were quite popular for those who could afford them.

The iPhone only became a device for the masses, truly, when carriers started subsidizing the older models for zero down, around the iPhone 4g era. This has continued today where Verizon currently offers the iPhone SE for "$0/mo" like some cheap flip phone of old. Before that, the iPhone was exclusively rich persons phone, and probably still would have been in the U.S. at least (like it is in the rest of the world) had it not been for carrier subsidies and cheaper mobile internet plans (or maybe just the normalization of spending so much on a mobile plan every month). The iPhone didn't even get third party apps until years after launch, and when it did, the most popular of that sweet sweet software during those early days were mostly dumb stuff like apps that make gunshot sounds, or flash game clones. The real gems during that era was software written by the jailbreak community, and a lot of that added functionality was cloned by apple in later OS versions.

"The iPhone was exciting for everyone, for the whole world"

You live in a buble, most of the world can't afford to spend $1000 on a phone.

It depends of course on how you published.

When I was authoring software (over two decades ago) and a company acted as publisher they took 85% of gross.

For author/publisher relationships at that time, this was pretty typical (book authors/publishers being the closest analog).

Needless to say there was, in addition to the cost of creating and shipping floppies, advertising that the publisher had to cover.

Apple's 30% cut seemed fair to me when the App Store arrived.

I'm not sure if I would try to ship an iOS app these days though. Not because of Apple's cut but because of the race to the bottom that was unleashed shortly after the App Store gold rush: where now you don't appear to even be able to sell a $0.99 app.

This is such a nonsense justification.

You want to sell software you wrote to run on an iphone. You have zero choice. Apple tax your revenue.

You want to sell software you wrote to run on a pc. Steam is not your only choice. I am not defending steam or valve here, I've never sold anything using their stuff, nor am I suggesting anything other than that their market power over pc compared to apple's store over the iphone is not remotely comparable.

It actually works against you to suggest apple's iphone software store and steam are comparable at all because it's so incredibly bogus.

You want to make the case that steam suck too but with loads less market power. Go right ahead. We're listening. You don't need absolute and total market power to be abusive of it. Apple will immediately attempt redefine the market to include android or people spending money on coca cola instead of apple product to suggest that customers have real choice so there is no market power abuse here.

Are you implying that you feel entitled to sell software on Apple's tightly controlled consumer devices?

I am stating, very clearly, that Apple have massive market power that they are abusing. This is known in economics circles as "market failure" and across the spectrum from Keynsians to Neo-classical economists is seen as a compelling case for regulation.

Why are you implying I am saying something different to what I /said/.

The situation on Android shows us that consumers like consolidation and they like walled gardens and simple choices. These things benefit them. Plenty of Android phones come with 2 or 3 app stores. One for the carrier, one for the vendor and Google Play Store. There plenty are others as well, but the market has spoken. Even Epic had to fold and move to Play Store. Maybe Google played dirty, but I think it's perfectly clear users benefit from consolidation. They like the simplicity of having everything in one store and when they change devices they just set up their Play Store account and there everything is. That's a massive advantage to them. Fragmentation is a nightmare.

Developers have come to the same conclusion, it's to their benefit for the customers to all be on one store with one set of policies and features so that's where the majority of the apps go.

So what are you going to do, force Apple to become a fragmented Android copy with multiple stores and side loading that a tiny fraction of techies actually use? Those people already have that on Android if they want it. Honestly you'd just screw over Apple and a few other people over a principle hardly anybody actually cares about or benefits from. It certainly wouldn't make any significant commercial difference. We ran that experiment and the results are in.

The idea that users would all be side loading apps and developers would be making far more money having their apps spread across 5+ different stores that would compete down to lower prices is delusional. If that were the case, why has this not happened on Windows or MacOS where side loading is actually the default yet Steam, GOG, etc still charge 30%? It's crystal clear that's just the split the market has converged on through a competitive process. After all Steam has competed from day one with a default split of nothing for direct downloads from the software publisher but has thrived charging 30%. If that's not direct market validation I don't know what is.

Fragmentation and walled gardens are a false dichotomy. Steam is actually a great example of this, there are many other stores (Humble Bundle, Fanatical, GMG, whatever) that sell you Steam keys so you can keep your game library in one comfortable place.

Yes Steam are still perfectly comfortable staying at 30% as I said it's clearly a market driven level.

Steam keys sold off steam do not give valve a cut.

Valve is definitely getting some kind of money out of the deal.

I wonder what a user is worth to Steam?

They didn’t have to acquire the user themselves and now they have more eyeballs on their service. How many of these users buy a few things later and make waiving the fee worth it?

Steams not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.

Are people buying software through steam because they like the consolidated experience? Or because they trust it more than an exe from a random website? Or because steam already has their credit card info stored? Or because it's the only place to obtain certain games?

It's some combination of these things (and some others I haven't considered), and the value all of this added up, minus steam's downsides, is apparently worth an extra 30% if this cost is sufficiently hidden from the consumer.

Would people still pay a 30% fee if the store were forced to actually show the fee, and there were alternatives? I'm not so sure.

You're right that there's some value there, but it's probably closer to 3% than 30%.

The idea that users would all be side loading apps and developers would be making far more money having their apps spread across 5+ different stores that would compete down to lower prices is delusional. If that were the case, why has this not happened on Windows or MacOS where side loading is actually the default yet Steam, GOG, etc still charge 30%?

That has happened. The majority of my 20,000 Steam games were acquired from outside of Steam.

For you. You don’t speak for the rest of the market though, and Steam comfortable holds its lead for good reason.

You are in a teeny tiny minority. I made it clear I'm talking about the mass market. These arguments are made under the false presence (or delusion) that they are in the interests of the broad base of users who would get lower prices. They would not, we can see that clearly from the Android and PC games markets.

These arguments are being made by a tiny minority for the benefit of a small community of techies who already have platforms available to them that work they way you want and take advantage of it, like you do. It's like coupon clippers insisting on a law that all products sold must some with discount coupons.

You are in a teeny tiny minority

Minority? Probably. Tiny? Absolutely not.

Here [0] is a breakdown of 70 popular Steam games by the source of purchase for their reviewers as of a year ago. About 28% of all Steam purchases happen outside of Steam itself, with Valve getting a 0% cut. Note that for many games a majority of reviewers did not purchase it on Steam itself.

0: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1ICv-UE4i651yMkpD...

Reviewers are a tiny minority of users and there's no reason to suspect they are typical.

Side note but what does one do with 20,000 games? Do you actually play this many?

Genuine curiosity, not trying to troll or anything.

I've 100% completed about 2500 of them, so I don't have a great completion rate but it's not like they're just there for show. I've probably played around 6000 total.

A very large number of them I would not have bought individually, but they came in a bundle with other games I wanted.

Maybe not a great completion rate respective to the amount of games you've got but probably (surely?) with respect to other gamers! If someone asked you to pick your favourite three...?

"The 30% cut was considered very good at the time."

Let me fix this.

There was a full range of views. Some considered the 30% cut to be good at the time, some didn't consider it much at all, some considered it to be a criminal abuse of market power. I remember commenting myself that microsoft would be crucified for attempting to tax everyone who wanted to write software for windows 30% of revenue. I don't recall anyone suggesting that was a controversial comment.

Let me fix this.

Microsoft did worse, they did charge more than 30% to everyone that published software for the xbox.

People with skin in the game, game publishers, game developers, mobile app developers for nokia, blackberry, samsung, motorola, etc, considered Apple taking "only" 30% to be an excellent deal at the time. It was so good in fact, almost all other store splits collapsed shortly thereafter to the same 30% to compete with Apple.

Others complained, sure. I too complain Ferrari charges way too much for customizing the color of the thread of the interior lining on their cars, I don't know why they don't seem bothered.

You don't think there was a range of views. And anyone who disagreed with your view had no skin in the game and so can be ignored. I disagree with that.

I know there was a range of views. I'm pointing out not all opinions have the same weight.

I have worked in mobile since 2004. How anyone felt about it is irrelevant.

The fact is that 30% was far less than the carriers and Qualcomm were taking with their stores.

the iPhone is a PDA. There's 20 years of PDAs before iPhone. There was no price to put an app on my 1998 Windows CE PDA, nor my Sony Clie, nor my Dell Axim. Just install the software same as PC. The software vendors had the option to sell direct, go through a distributor, a publisher, various stores, etc..

Phones were an entirely different world.

For instance, Verizon was sued for disabling the ability of phones on their network to transfer photos using Bluetooth, because they wanted to charge you money for a simple file transfer.

https://www.eweek.com/mobile/verizon-wireless-users-sue-over...

I think there's a lot of truth to this take. Pre-iPhone phones were a completely different category of phone. They ran limited, special-purpose operating systems. Smartphones of today are pocket computers that just happen to be able to make phone calls.

And yes, they connect to a wireless carrier's network. But I can also connect my laptop to a wireless carrier's network by buying a USB dongle and a SIM card. I'm certainly not expecting anyone to pay 30% of their revenue to sell me an app on my laptop.

Also consider the iPod Touch. It is much closer to being a PDA than a phone, despite the fact that it's essentially an iPhone without a cellular modem.

You want to talk about a criminal abuse of market power?

Microsoft used to charge ridiculous fees for things as simple as submitting a patch for an XBox 360 game.

Double Fine's Tim Schaefer pegged the cost of submitting an Xbox 360 patch at $40,000 in an interview with Hookshot Inc. earlier this year.

"We already owe Microsoft a LOT of money for the privilege of being on their platform," he said. "People often mistakenly believe that we got paid by Microsoft for being exclusive to their platform. Nothing could be further from the truth. WE pay THEM."

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/microsoft-comes-under...

People who think a 30% fee is outsized tend to have no idea whatsoever what the costs were previous to that.

I don't know the specifics of Xbox and patches but I do know that in general, at least in the past, shipping a game on Playstation required thousands of hours of testing by Sony employees. They didn't take your word for it that your app worked. They ran it through a battery of manual testing. Examples, does it recover if someone turns off the power in the middle of saving a game. At that point the save game file may be corrupted. The game better at least boot and let the player start a new game and not just crash.

Other examples include checking all the text meets the platforms spec. It's says "DualShock Controller" not "Joypad". It's always Press ○╳□△ and in the correct color for that button, and responds to the region/system setting. For example that X = select in USA, and ○ = select in Japan

The point being that the game console owners don't just trust that your patch didn't break the rules of their technical requirements checklist. Someone actually has to check and it's not a small amount of work. Maybe $40k is too much but $0 is arguably too little

AFAIK, Apple and Google don't do this much. Certainly not to the same extent as Sony/Nintendo/XBox

What does that have to do with submitting a simple bug fix?

How can that possibly cost $40,000 except through an extreme abuse of monopoly power?

A simple 30% cut with no other price gouging additional fees was a huge improvement over the status quo.

That article has a developer literally saying that in the end, their percentage of the profit on the XBox 360 was a negative number.

How can that possibly cost $40,000 except through an extreme abuse of monopoly power?

Microsoft has to handle patch distribution, patching itself, tech support for patching, complaints and rollbacks and so on for many years after release -- remember, they still provide patches for Xbox 360 games sold in 2005!

If something breaks then I expect the total costs for all that could easily exceed $40k for very popular titles. Just imagine how many installs of FIFA '06 - '19 (the versions available for Xbox 360) there is! This is obviously not the case with an indie platformer purchased by a few thousand players, though, so for smaller businesses $40k would hurt badly, while it's probably a very good bargain for EA and the likes.

Considering the recent backlash regarding Cyberpunk 2077 on Xbox One/PS4 (not to mention Mass Effect: Andromeda a few years ago), I'd say rigorous testing is warranted. I doubt CP2077 would even have been released for those platforms if they had been properly tested in the first place (not that it would have been an option to not release the game -- It's been pre-orderable for over a year, and the Xbox live store was full of ads for it for many months before the release).

The same logic applies to patches -- if a patch were to actually break a game then it needs to be handled and that isn't necessarily cheap.

I doubt CP2077 would even have been released for those platforms if they had been properly tested in the first place

They were, Sony and Microsoft just believed CDPR when they lied about fixing it before release [1]

[1] https://screenrant.com/cyberpunk-2077-developer-cdpr-admits-...

Microsoft has to handle patch distribution, patching itself, tech support for patching, complaints and rollbacks and so on for many years after release -- remember, they still provide patches for Xbox 360 games sold in 2005!

Apple bears all the same costs for iOS and it all comes out of that same 30% fee. For free apps, they eat all those costs.

Hell, Apple provides free in-person customer support as well as support by phone.

$40,000

There are probably a few developers who’d love to pay just 40k to Apple.

Given that review costs are fixed, what is the cost of distribution?

I don't get it, why make a exclusive game and pay Microsoft for it...a vulcan would say illogical...it's not like MS has any Hardware, that no one else has.

The costs of making a game work on multiple platforms might exceed the expected revenue from the additional platforms, especially for a smaller organisation.

The 30% cut was considered very good at the time. It was way better than the 50-90% cut that traditional publishers would take.

Why didn't Steve Jobs go with web distribution of first class web apps or allow Flash on his platform? If they truly wanted to be remarkable, this would have been the future.

The answer is control.

Apple is a cutthroat business just like any other, and their "privacy first" veneer is just a wolf in sheep's clothing. They're playing it up as an attack against Google and Facebook, meanwhile they still phone home about the apps you're running and can shut them off remotely.

Microsoft never taxed software on their platform. Jobs had to invent that business model. It flourished like wildflowers thanks to him.

Why didn't Steve Jobs go with web distribution of first class web apps

That was exactly his intent when he announced the iPhone, and he got absolutely obliterated by the internet for it.

Not allowing Flash on the iPhone is probably the best thing Apple ever did

Destroying an open, low barrier to entry animation and application platform that was used by teenagers to develop and share interactive content?

Destroying a way to deliver native-like, cross-platform applications without an app store was good?

Jobs did it for control. He didn't want interop between Android and iPhone, and he didn't want any web browser with enough flexibility to do anything sophisticated.

Android had Flash. It stank, and the blame for its stinkiness lies entirely on Adobe.

Better than the neck brace we wear around our throats today.

It's similar to when Apple defended it's 30% store cut by claiming it's an "industry standard"... specifically, an industry standard that Apple established.

I thought Apple chose that figure as game developers were already used to it from consoles and Steam.

cars regularly send basic data

My car doesn't and I absolutely would never buy one that does even if that meant walking/taking the bus.

Which makes it weird that we accept this bullshit from our phones, considering that you have your phone with you whether you're driving or walking or taking the bus.

I don't accept it on my phone either.

My Oneplus runs Lineage, and I explicitly omitted Google services.

I had previously run the MicroG rewrap of Lineage, but the maintainer dropped maintenance for six months, so I found ways to do without the GMS emulation.

The more concerning thing about the car data is that the manafacturers resell it to third parties and those third parties have the right to resell it again. It's a mess.

As a comparison, I don't know if much of Google's data ever leaves Google.

i'm getting the impression that iot providers have far, far lower privacy standards vs dedicated tech providers. This to me indicates that they don't take the internet capability of their kettles/cars seriously enough. It's just a gimmick. This is not a constructive way to advance iot.

I honestly don't mind information about crashes being sent as long as it is very sanitized and easy to disable- similar to how Fedora reports issues.

They send only a list of functions on the stack without any of the arguments or data.

Example: https://retrace.fedoraproject.org/faf/problems/bthash/?bth=3...

Where Google goes too far is sending everything in the name of security or better yet to "serve" the user.

IMEI and serial number make sense, I think too: Apple’s activation lock is a big reason why I bought an iPhone and as far as I can tell, it requires interaction with the server on every boot to work.

It's similar to when Apple defended it's 30% store cut by claiming it's an "industry standard"... specifically, an industry standard that Apple established.

Apple established a standard for the Apple app store. There was a lot of complaint about "Apple Tax" and Apple merely pointed out that it wasn't a "Apple Tax". Sure, Apple started it but others which are not even connected to the Apple ecosystem simply followed. They could have not decided to but they did (Re:Table 1) [0]. Microsoft, Samsung, Google and Amazon all have the same 30% tax. Heck, even commission rates for Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo have the same rate (Re : Table 2). I am sure Apple is not forcing them to have those rates.

Somehow, this conversation turns into an "Apple" vs rest conversation. There's no conversation had upon the charges on a digital distribution store. I'd say - let's have that conversation and come up with a number. Currently, the number is decided in a "free market". I would be open to come up to an alternate number. Most arguments against the 30% is that it is too high. Well, every penny that goes out from the developer's pocket is too high. The cost of an iPhone might be too high. Something, being too high is not an argument to not have that rate.

[0] https://www.analysisgroup.com/globalassets/insights/publishi...

this is a classic example of how companies collude without direct communication. it's a type of game theoretic outcome that's actually taught in business school - how to read your competitor's intentions from public information (like pricing intentions) and legally act and counter-communicate publicly your own intentions to not compete (in many cases by not lowering price).

this can practically only happen in oligarchic markets (those controlled by a few large players) who can safely assume a smaller competitor won't undercut them. unfortunately, most major markets in the US are oligarchic, if not downright monopolized (e.g., cellular service).

this is a classic example of how companies collude without direct communication.

In that case, let's have that conversation as a society and as a government. "Are companies listed in Table 1 and 2 in collusion as defined by current law?".

In most of the Apple 30% conversations, the conversations seem to be about an instance (Apple) instead of an object (Digital Store Tax, Collusion etc). Lets set the frame and be clear about the conversation we want to have regardless of the business we talk. We can use Apple, Microsoft et al as examples to make the point. We shouldn't replace them with the overarching discussion.

as i understand it, by not communicating directly, companies avoid the most damning potential evidence that they are colluding. it's theoretically possible to still determine that their behavior is collusive, but quite difficult in practice.

i personally think anti-trust/anti-monopoly regulations should be tightened by an order of magnitude or so. any market that exhibits such extended, obviously inflated profit margins needs to be sliced up more finely. any market participant with more than ~10% market share should be scrutinized closely. piercing the corporate veil should be the norm with any anticompetitive infraction (as well as embezzlement, insider trading, and other such executive crimes).

in short, make markets fair (not just 'free').

and in turn, that should allocate capital more efficiently throughout the economy, rather than letting it accumulate inefficiently in fewer and fewer hands.

"Fair" and "free" are almost opposite values in regards to markets, what you want is not "free", you want regulation. Fairness means you got to oppress a party in favor of another party.

a fair market is one that is devoid of coercive influence by any market participant, almost diametrically opposed to oppressiveness. whereas in a "free" market, oppression is the expected steady-state, because it inherently invites manipulation to produce advantage, as with any game (in the academic sense) without rules. try playing basketball without rules and see what happens.

in short, make markets fair (not just 'free').

I'm all for it. What's your concrete proposal to change in the current law for digital store distribution "tax"?

you don't necessarily need new laws, just executive will to allocate earnest resources (diverted from, say, useless programs like the tsa or military boondoggle projects) put toward robustly promoting competitive markets.

for instance, make platforms like apple allow other app stores equal footing on their platform. then they would have to compete on price and features to get the best apps to be on their app store rather than resting on their laurels of being the only viable option. apple already has lots of advantages, so they don't need monopoly power on top of that to be able to compete effectively.

Yea you can force them to have multiple markets on the phone but that doesn’t mean that they won’t be colluding again. Apple and Google can have their stores on both iOS and Android and still keep 30%.

Also this would mean that you are killing off a feature to the end user (me in this case) where I actually like the walled garden as I don’t need to check and verify apps I download.

I understand where you are coming from but if I bought an iOS device (for my parents) I want them to not have a way to install other apps. For me that’s a feature. I don’t want there to be a way to enable anything that allows them to side load or use a different store. This is me as a consumer.

As a developer I see it like this: my (potential) customers decided to use Apple for a reason. I have to respect their decision. If that means I make 30% less than I can try and convince them to use Android and side load but I should respect their choice. Would I like the 30% off for myself - sure.

I think a big part of the discussion misses the reason ppl have chosen iOS and the arguments come from only one side.

If we can get to a position that makes sure that you keep you current state (gatekeeper + trust in iOS App Store + can’t get scammed with malware apps) but allows the option to distribute outside of that would be ideal but I’m too stupid to think of it :D

I just don’t want to kill off a feature I paid a huge amount of money (iOS devices for every close family member) to have and I feel that should be respected. :)

There's no conversation had upon the charges on a digital distribution store. I'd say - let's have that conversation and come up with a number. Currently, the number is decided in a "free market".

There is no competition in the mobile app distribution market. Apple and Google have a duopoly on mobile app distribution, and they behave like a cartel when it comes to price fixing.

For over a decade now, consumers and developers could have benefited from real competition in the mobile app distribution market. Real competition between companies means that consumers can benefit from increased efficiencies and reductions in cost when it comes to distributing mobile apps.

Instead, Apple and Google have kept a stranglehold on the mobile app distribution market, and it took over a decade and the threat of regulation before Apple chose to lower costs to developers somewhat.

How can anyone know what prices are "industry standard" or "too high" when it comes to mobile app distribution if there is no real competition in that market, just a cartel consisting of two trillion dollar companies controlling mobile app distribution for nearly 13 years?

I agree - there's no competition. What's your solution to change in the law that will create competition?

At minimum if you operate an app store on your own platform that takes a cut the platform should allow alternative 3rd party stores to be used. Android/Windows/web/MacOS are already there on that software front. iOS/Consoles/SmartTVs and many others are not. It's probably why you hear about the Apple App Store 30% but not the Play/Microsoft Store 30% - those aren't the only options to distribute an app on those platforms. Users are definitely steered and incentivized to use them but not forced.

That in itself isn't a fix all, for example the Amazon app store for Android based devices still takes a 30% cut at the moment, but it opens the floodgates to stores like this that could start to create natural competition. And even if not at least you have the choice to try not to do that, look at Fortnite. Not for the court case but because they took a 0% cut on Android by distributing the app via their own store when they got kicked off due to that battle. Obviously not an option for everyone but you can still load the app on Android devices and Epic Games Store actually only takes a 12% cut as it's trying to compete. Even if none of this ends up mattering - at least one can load what they want on their devices.

.

At the more extreme end there is always antitrust action like the oft cited idea of splitting the likes of Apple or so on into "Apple Hardware" and "Apple Software" which would definitely blow away some anti-competition tendencies (How many use ios+safari+apple-hardware because that's what they would pick vs that's the only option to get any of the above? Probably less than 100%...) but at the same time are probably a bit extreme when we have tried tamer things like the above before.

At minimum if you operate an app store on your own platform that takes a cut the platform should allow alternative 3rd party stores to be used.

So basically, Microsoft Windows should have an Apple app store and Android should have an Apple app store?

Not quite, just that they should _allow_ such app stores if the app store so wanted to go on the platform.

Microsoft Windows and Android already allow this today which I think is why you hear about Apple's App store so much - it does not allow this. E.g. on Windows you can install iTunes and listen to Apple Music without Apple having to use Microsoft's app store or pay a cut of the subscription to Microsoft. The same is true on Android, Apple does not need to go through Google Play - it's possible to load the APK without it. That being said Apple Music still has the option of listing in the native stores (which it is in both the Microsoft Store and Google Play) it's just not _forced_ to be the only way to get the app _forcing_ the 30% cut to be paid.

As a result you do see competition to the Microsoft Store on Windows and you do see competition to the Play store on Android. Each is still an option though but it's not without competition. On the Apple App store your option is "30% app store cut or get the fuck out, this user owns an iPhone so you can't sell to them direct now".

But there is no reason to force any particular stores to be available on a particular platform, simply making sure stores are allowed has seemed to enabled competition in every place that has tried it so far.

As an Apple customer, I will lose value from my purchase if iOS was required to have additional (non-Apple controlled) AppStores. This change cannot be made retroactively to my previous purchases.

The law (if it ever exists) should only apply to new iPhones and Apple should let users decide what they want.

Unlocking extra AppStores would likely also be more expensive than a locked in iPhone because of Apple’s ROI from the controlled AppStore. I don’t want to subsidize other people using a non-Apple controlled store when I know I wouldn’t.

It even polluted into other markets, like Wolt.com taking a 30% (!!) cut of food delivered using their platform. On top of the actual delivery charges.

I remember thinking that Just-Eat.com were criminals for taking 10%.

Hungry.dk takes 1-2%.

cars regularly send basic data

I'm still terrified by the fact that some cars now apparently have network interfaces for some reason.

Got a courtesy call from BMW the other day to let me know my brake fluid needed changing and would I like an appointment made at my nearest garage?

I get that there are privacy concerns, but also that's pretty cool. It also has GPS and will automatically alert BNW if air bags are deployed. Has saved lives.

We can save a lot of lives if we monitor everyone/everything. I'm sure there was very little early death in the Matrix universe.

Cars only started doing this because phones made it normal. It's wrong in both cases.

I don't know that this is true, planes have been doing it for quite some time now, although obviously they existing in a totally different bracket of price and complexity.

I disagree that telemetry is inherently bad. As product engineers, telemetry is often our only visibility into whether or not a system is functioning healthily. How else can you detect difficult-to-spot bugs in production?

Once upon a time fixing bugs in production didn't happen because the product got all the bugs out before production. If it had bugs in production, the product failed.

+1 to this. As long as proper privacy concerns are addressed and the data gathering is imperceptible to the product experience, telemetry signals are immensely valuable for improving the product in a variety of ways.

Many users care more about their privacy than your product.

Certainly true, but it doesn't counter the original claim: Anonymized telemetry collection with proper privacy considerations can have a net positive impact on the product.

So why does $product need to send telemetry data via google? Why can highly complex software that runs most of the worlds internet infrastructure (linux) work without telemetry? Why is telemetry not opt-in or relies on reports in situation where a bug causes an issue like firefox crash reports? I'd rather have privacy and buggy software then bug free software in exchange for no privacy at all

So why does $product need to send telemetry data via google?

Because Google is responsible for most of the software on said product. Who would be receiving that telemetry data if it wasn't Google?

Why can highly complex software that runs most of the worlds internet infrastructure (linux) work without telemetry?

First, this is a false premise because it ignores the potential that telemetry could help improve this software but most Linux distros have decided against it for other reasons. Secondly, it ignores that some distros do in fact include telemetry.

Why is telemetry not opt-in

It probably should be when it comes to something that has potential to invade privacy, but we have to be realistic that practically no one will actively turn on telemetry if it is initially set to off. That drastically decreases the value of the collected data and it basically turns into nothing more than something customer service can tell someone to turn on while trying to troubleshoot a specific issue.

or relies on reports in situation where a bug causes an issue like firefox crash reports?

Telemetry isn't just about bugs. It is also about guiding future development, knowing what features are used, knowing the workflow for users, etc. It can provide value beyond crash reports.

I'd rather have privacy and buggy software then bug free software in exchange for no privacy at all

This is completely fair. I would generally agree with you and bet that most HN readers would too. However this is not a binary choice. Not all telemetry is inherently bad. Not all loss of privacy is inherently damaging. This is a complicated issue that will involve compromises and anyone sticking to a complete extreme of it being all bad or all good isn't going to offer anything productive to this conversation.

Because Google is responsible for most of the software on said product. Who would be receiving that telemetry data if it wasn't Google?

Depends, on Android maybe. On my Android Device, not really i don't use google software with the exception of the core android system without gplay services. On iOS, the HTML Based Web, or Desktop Systems, I see no need for google to exist. If you need telemetry, run your own damn telemtry server instead of feeding the FAANG Privacy nightmare even more.

First, this is a false premise because it ignores the potential that telemetry could help improve this software but most Linux distros have decided against it for other reasons. Secondly, it ignores that some distros do in fact include telemetry.

Distros may, Linux itself does not. The fact that the majority of Linux Distros work just fine without telemetry shows that large scale software developement and deployment work just fine without invading peoples privacy needlessly.

It probably should be when it comes to something that has potential to invade privacy, but we have to be realistic that practically no one will actively turn on telemetry if it is initially set to off.

so, if given the fair and free choice everyone will chose against telemetry? And that doesn't make you ask yourself "are we the baddies?".

That drastically decreases the value of the collected data and it basically turns into nothing more than something customer service can tell someone to turn on while trying to troubleshoot a specific issue.

So, wheres the problem here? Sounds EXACTLY how a good telemetry system should work. If the bugs don't bother the users there's no need to invade their privacy to fix them, if they do bother them, telemetry can be a tool to help them. There's no need to generate "valuable data" except to invade peoples privacy.

Telemetry isn't just about bugs. It is also about guiding future development, knowing what features are used, knowing the workflow for users, etc. It can provide value beyond crash reports.

Why is it any of your effing buisness what my workflow is like? If i need a feature i request it. This shit is only accepted because the majority of users lack a meaningful understanding of the depth of invasion by app and web developers into their privacy.

Depends, on Android maybe. On my Android Device, not really i don't use google software with the exception of the core android system without gplay services. On iOS, the HTML Based Web, or Desktop Systems, I see no need for google to exist. If you need telemetry, run your own damn telemtry server instead of feeding the FAANG Privacy nightmare even more.

The article is specifically about the mobile OSes and the default apps and services. I'm not sure why your general complaint about third parties using FAANG tracking is relevant here, but I have no argument against it.

Distros may, Linux itself does not. The fact that the majority of Linux Distros work just fine without telemetry shows that large scale software developement and deployment work just fine without invading peoples privacy needlessly.

You are doing the same thing again. You are assuming a level of "work just fine" without having a comparison for what it would look like with telemetry. Ignoring the privacy issues for a second, can you say definitively that Linux would see no technical improvements from developers having access to telemetry data?

so, if given the fair and free choice everyone will chose against telemetry? And that doesn't make you ask yourself "are we the baddies?".

Because the benefits of telemetry are widespread while the downsides are localized. The incentive for an individual user to participate is low and isn't well understood so they will default to off. Expand that to everyone and you end up with the tragedy of the commons.[1] It has nothing to do with skulls on a cap, it is basic individualized economic incentives playing out that lead to less than ideal results for the whole.

So, wheres the problem here? Sounds EXACTLY how a good telemetry system should work. If the bugs don't bother the users there's no need to invade their privacy to fix them, if they do bother them, telemetry can be a tool to help them. There's no need to generate "valuable data" except to invade peoples privacy.

Why is it any of your effing buisness what my workflow is like? If i need a feature i request it. This shit is only accepted because the majority of users lack a meaningful understanding of the depth of invasion by app and web developers into their privacy.

Once again you are returning to bugs. This is about more than just bugs. Very few pieces of software are published and then abandoned beyond bug fixes. Today most software needs to constantly evolve and add new features. Maybe you are the type who will request those features from a developer in official channels, but that isn't common.

Also most users will simply decline when presented with the option to submit a bug report. They just don't see the a strong enough or immediate enough connection between a bug report and the bug being fixed. I would bet any developer who has spent time informally talking to their users would have heard some complaints about their software that were never previously voiced through official channels. That is just the nature of things. A developer will get more valuable data if they don't leave the sending of this information up to the whims of the user in the moment when a bug report screen might appear in front of them.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

This argument does not hold because you can compare Google to Apple (in this case and based on the article) and say that if this was the case, then Apple which gathers less data would have inferior (more bugs, slow feature development, etc.) than Google. I see the competition, which is Apple in this case, doing relatively fair without (presumably) gathering as much data, therefore I absolutely don’t buy this claim.

Funny enough you are saying my argument doesn't hold but your reasoning actually falls perfectly in line with my comment.

The argument isn't that all telemetry is good or that we should accept any level of it.

The argument is that all telemetry is not inherently bad.

As the article states, Apple does telemetry too. If you are ok with Apple and not Google, you are agreeing with me that this is a nuanced issue and the specific level of telemetry needs to be debated. If you are taking the stance that all telemetry is bad. You need to find another company to champion besides Apple.

As a software engineer I disagree. You are saying that you want to collect my personal information so you can fix your bugs. I don't see it being a valuable trade. I'll just find someone who can fix their bugs without tracking me.

You are saying that you want to collect my personal information so you can fix your bugs.

How do you define personal information? Let's use Chrome as an example. Recording what website I visit is clearly personal information. What about recording how many tabs I have open, how much RAM each tab is using, and when each tab was last viewed? Is that personal information to you? I personally don't value keeping that private and it is probably a valuable piece of information that could help the developers improve what has been one of the biggest user complaints about Chrome since almost its release.

I think that is generally OP's point. Each piece of data exists on a spectrum in value for both the user and the developer. Data should be kept private when it has value to the user. There is little harm in sharing the data with the developer when the user would deem it low value and the developer would deem it high value.

It's pretty easy to understand what information is technically static and could be used to track you. Number of tabs: low possible range and pretty variable, even for tab hoarders, so it's low entropy information. Amount of RAM used in each open tab: that should be statistically significant and I'm pretty sure could be used to identify people if there are enough tabs open for a long enough period. When each tab was viewed: every (not-)clicked tab is a bit of information, you don't need much to narrow down a person. Interesting reading on de-anonymizing people on seemingly anonymized data: https://www.wired.com/2007/12/why-anonymous-data-sometimes-i...

Personal information is a bit nebulous. Do we consider the list of function calls in a stack trace "personal information"?

our only visibility into whether or not a system is functioning healthily.

Your problem here is viewing the end user's setup as part of your system.

It's the user's private system -- why should you have any visibility into how it is functioning?

They said a system, not their system.

Car computers report telemetry to mechanics, and given that digitization allows for economies of scale, this isn't that different.

Car computers report telemetry to mechanics

Yes -- and they shouldn't.

Yes, they should. It assists with repairs, increases safety, leads to recalls, and in cars with GPS units, even reports road emergencies and saves lives.

You can feel uncomfortable that this is happening, which is an entirely okay opinion to have, but when it comes to forcing that opinions on others, please don't.

Imagine if we were debating the qualities of buttons because the Amish were uncomfortable using them.

Sure but Amish have the right to choose to use the button or not. You should have the option to opt-out.

Or at least have that option until society says “well given how many life’s are save we need to collect this data from everyone”. But you’d get a say in that conversation as well.

Telemetry allows people to make better decisions. It's not a bad practice. Information deserves to be free.

Let's not forget that "better" is from the viewpoint of a giant corporation whose primary reason for existence is to suck as much profit out of you as it can...

OT, but since you mentioned it, does anyone happen to know what the most recent model years without any kind of cellular radio might be?

In a similar vein, can the radios be physically removed from any newer cars without the car complaining about it?

Depends on the package you opt for, but I'd guess up to 2011 for cars without onstar

I suspect that statement was to placate people with "your car does it too", but mine certainly doesn't --- it doesn't even require a computer to run --- and the statement had the exact opposite effect, namely to revalidate the reason I don't drive a "modern car".

That said, I do have an Android, but it is rooted and spends most of its time off. As I type this message, it is on the other side of the room.

Out of curiosity, how old is your car?

I mean at this point it's obvious if you're using a digital device data is going to be collected, that's part of society and living in the 21st century; could be your toothbrush, fridge, washing machine, car...All these devices generate data that is going to be collected.

It's also changing how crime is investigated; Google can be asked for a list of smartphones in an area at a given time, can be used to collect evidence or information (were you in this building on this floor at this time?). Carrying a smartphone can implicate you (or not) and you can be photographed by anyone at any moment regardless of your "rights".

I think people need to understand you are responsible for what you do on a computer; your clicks, searches, taps, installed app list, and basically everything is being recorded regardless of consent (which appears to be an illusion these days).

This is neither shocking nor unexpected. Humans generate data, data is going to be collected and used.

That's not going to change any time soon. Some thought Google would introduce a similar privacy feature to Apple's tracking consent but I lol'd at anyone who believed that.

As users, we are assured that telemetry is only for the purpose of "improving products and services", "improving user experience", etc. If one company is collecting 20x as much as another, all else being equal, one would expect that this would be reflected in the quality of the product/service/experience.

Of course, Google's service is to advertisers, first and foremost. Users generally do not pay for what they receive from Google. Perhaps Google's paying customers, advertisers, are the ones seeing the improvement in the quality of service as a direct or indirect result of telemetry.

I don't think this is necessarily true. I believe that Google Maps navigation and location accuracy is significantly better on Android than iOS (no claim on 20x...but anectdatally better)

Google Maps getting more precise telemetry data is actually so useful in improving the navigation experience in tricky intersections, overlapping roads, or low bandwidth areas where GPS signal and service can be spotty. I can speak from experience that friends with Android phones experience less jumpiness in their GPS location, less errors in navigation, and less of that pesky "You've Arrived" notification triggering when still far away from the destination.

YMMV, but as much as I like Apple Maps and use it as much as I can, for the more complex/unknown routes I definitely rely more on Google Maps to get it right. I don't know if telemetry is the cause for the better service, but it is noticeably better for me.

Separately, I'm also a google customer as I run an Ad campaign for a small business (skilled labor), and the dollars spent on search ads are extremely efficient with an incredible ROI. Even with CACs in the 10s of dollars, with the size of the contracts being signed it typically costs much less than .5% of the total.

Just quickly comparing Apple Maps and Google Maps:

There is no Apple Maps web page. With Google I can do a complex route plan on my PC and my phone will have the "recent searches" in it ready to go when I get in the car.

Apple Maps doesn't show how packed the trains are. Google Maps shows me how full individual train carriages are!

Apple Maps can't provide cycling directions in my area (a world city!), Google can.

Apple Maps routinely provides driving time estimates that are 2x longer or 2x shorter than the actual time. The Google maps estimation error is more like 5-10% instead of 100%!

Google Maps has a trustworthy "star" review score for local restaurants. Anything that's mid-4s or higher with over a hundred reviews is definitely worth going to. For a popular local cafe Apple maps shows the worthless Tripadvisor score with just 16 votes. Google shows its own data with 357 votes.

Etc...

I've found it varies by area to area. I switched from iOS to Android about a year ago and I miss Apple Maps. Apple's mapping and navigation is better here in New Zealand compared to Google. Overseas I've found that different services have strengths/weaknesses in different cities/areas.

If telemetry is used for improving services then why does every project who's UI decisions are based on telemetry[1] consistently rebuild their UIs in less usable and less user friendly ways?

[1] Pretty much anything from Mozilla or Google, Reddit, lots of others.

Smartphones are personal tracking devices that also allow you to browse the web and make phone calls.

I've always thought of them as "endpoints for deploying cooperate software into your life" but this is also a pretty good description.

The iPhone is basically a vending machine for entertainment, owned by Apple and paid for by you.

What are the best alternatives to iOS and Android? Is it reasonable to consider the hardware itself "safe", given that the software tracks and calls home about every single thing it does? What are the alternatives?

Manjaro Phosh edition on the Pinephone is pretty good these days. There's still a lot of work to be done, but it works just fine as a phone.

None of the distributions on the PinePhone work well for all the things that people use that little computer in their pocket (which is no longer just a phone) for. For maps, for instance, all of the PinePhone's choices are little more than lightweight tech demos compared to, say, OSMAnd on Android. There is no official Signal client, no powerful browser beyond the clunky Desktop-Firefox-for-Postmarket-OS hack, etc.

It is unlikely that "all the work that would need to be done" to make the PinePhone as useful as an Android phone (even with pure libre software) will even get done. The problem is that the PinePhone is just too underpowered in CPU and RAM, comparable to devices from many years ago. Plus, the PinePhone dev community just doesn’t appear to be large and motivated enough to cover all the bases of e.g. battery optimization that the corporate mobile developers have done.

Well it can make calls, transfer data over cellular networks, and access a web browser. For some people, that's all they need. For maps, I use Nextcloud Maps through Firefox. You can also use Google Maps that way or whatever OSM provider. It comes with a Telegram client and Matrix client.

no powerful browser beyond the clunky Desktop-Firefox-for-Postmarket-OS hack, etc.

I don't really know what you mean by this. It's the exact same Firefox that's in desktop Linux. You can install all the add-ons and such. Do note that Manjaro is not PostmarketOS.

The biggest problems are the weak CPU as you've mentioned, and the fact that the entire OS is in a very alpha (or even pre-alpha) state right now.

For some people, that's all they need.

History tells us that when you have a device that does a few things that only for a tiny minority of people – within already a tiny minority of nerds – are "all that they need", and the dev community is so small, there is no future to the device. For someone who was around in the OpenMoko and Nokia N900 days, it is hard not to see the PinePhone as a stillborn device, which will never progress beyond "pre-alpha" state. A year after I got my PinePhone, it remains just as disappointing an experience as in the beginning.

You can also use Google Maps that way or whatever OSM provider.

Browsing Google Maps is a joke on the PinePhone's weak processor. And again, OSM on the PinePhone is vastly inferior to the OSM choices on Android. Merely showing OSM tiles does not a good map app make.

It's the exact same Firefox that's in desktop Linux

And that is the problem. Desktop Firefox was never designed to work at those screen dimensions. Many features of the Firefox UI do not actually work on the PinePhone. (They might possibly work if you dock the PinePhone with a monitor and mouse – I haven’t checked – but they don’t work on the PinePhone as a phone.)

Browsing Google Maps is a joke on the PinePhone's weak processor.

So you probably need Librem 5 for more performance. There is also OpenStreetMap, which is much faster.

Desktop Firefox was never designed to work at those screen dimensions.

It already mostly works. Software updates make it more usable every week.

So you probably need Librem 5 for more performance

Librem has its own set of problems and does not change my opinion that this iteration of the free Linux mobile ecosystem is stillborn. My feeling is that we'll have to wait another decade for new players to appear and try everything all over again.

There is also OpenStreetMap, which is much faster.

The OpenStreetMap.org website is a tech demo, it isn’t really meant to be used for one's map needs. For that, apps are out there. However, as I said, the PinePhone's OSM-based apps are also little more than tech demos that just serve OSM tiles.

Software updates make it more usable every week.

The Desktop-Firefox-for-PinePhone hack doesn’t get updated often (or possibly at all).

The Desktop-Firefox-for-PinePhone hack doesn’t get updated often (or possibly at all).

I still have no idea what you're referring to. It's the same build of Firefox on your desktop. It was just updated from version 86 to 87 this week. Same as the desktop. There is no "mobile Linux ecosystem". Just 1 Linux ecosystem, with some apps supporting a 360px screen width, and some not. It is simply desktop Linux, on a phone.