Apple is the only one acting entitled here. Why doesn't the App Store deserve competitors? Why should we accept Apple's fees and failures when they deliberately limit competition?
They're acting like an anticompetitive wuss if you ask me. If Apple is the righteous one here (imagine that), they can pack up their bags and tell the whole EU to shove it. They can individually invite all 27 markets to kiss their ass and watch as the relevancy of Apple products plummets in the first world. Problem solved, Apple saves the day. 中国梦!
Or, they can take the king's ransom of iPhone revenue and surrender their asinine software double-standard. This doesn't end well for them either way, there's no sense it making it last longer.
Agreed, and well worded. Never in computing history has a walled garden like Apple's existed until the iPhone. Distributing and finding apps wasn't always simple, but then again, the need for a central browsing experience to find and download apps was never truly a thing before -- maybe outside of Steam for games. The key difference with Steam is that the same games have always been available on other distribution platforms, generally, so it doesn't suffer from the same limitations.
Show of hands, how many people actually spend multiple minutes (or hours) just swiping through their respective App Store just to find something new and interesting?
Aside from the store experiences, the web's powerful (gasp!) ability to find and download content including Computer Applications™ has always been its greatest strength. App stores are a net detriment seeking to protect the lowest common denominator: the uneducated computer user who hasn't bothered to learn everyday security practices to avoid downloading malicious apps or vetting software developers on their popularity and/or security themselves.
This takes a little knowledge and practice, but this isn't much different from shopping for good produce in a grocery store. Avoid the rotten fruit, and use your friends/family to help you judge what's best! That's the beauty of freedom on our devices, as it enables the power users and enthusiasts to enjoy these devices at their fullest, without senseless obstacles offering unsolicited "protection".
> . Never in computing history has a walled garden like Apple's existed until the iPhone.
wot...
How was playing that Super Mario Bros with on your Sega Master System back in the day? I don't remember Sega having the 10NES subsystem.
Ever heard of this little place in the early to mid 90s called AOL? Compuserve? Prodigy? Any cell phone company long before Apple's app store
And you act like anyone who has a Kindle or a Nook isn't in a walled garden, at least for 99% of the people who don't know/care that you can install books via Calibre or something.
And you know you can sideload apps on Apple devices right? Even before the EU ruling. It was just a massive pain in the ass and drumroll... 99% aren't going to do it.
This is not new, Apple wasn't the first to do it, and everybody railing again Apple loves to accept it in basically every other facet of their lives.
My primary mechanism to load books on my Kindle is via emailing ePubs, granted, I'm probably in the minority of users but I couldn't ask for an easier workflow.
> If by sideload you mean "repeatedly sign apps until your face turns blue" then yes. If you mean "install software like a normal person", then no.
Yep. Exactly.
And breaking free of the walled Kindle/Nook garden is similarly out of reach for about the same number of people that don't care about Apple's walled garden, which is the majority.
Again, they literally exist in every corner of our lives, and the 99% of consumers/normies don't care.
If they don't care, then it shouldn't matter that third-party options exist. The same thing happens on Android, nobody uses F-Droid even if the apps are better and cheaper. The fact that it exists puts meaningful pressure on competitors though, and fills the niche that I use the device for.
The "walled Kindle/Nook garden" isn't similar Apple's ecosystem. A Kindle or Nook will let you access it's EMMC and put Epub files or PDFs wherever you need to. It functions indistinguishably from a store-bought file and doesn't even make you enable Developer Mode to get there. It's "out of reach" in the sense that you need the skills to follow a Wikihow article to do it - my grandma could figure it out.
iPhones don't let you install IPA files on equal-footing as Apple, ever. That's the problem, and it's what the DMA remediates. I don't care how you or the normies feel about it any more than I consider the public sentiment towards Bell telephone or Internet Explorer.
> It functions indistinguishably from a store-bought file and doesn't even make you enable Developer Mode to get there.
This is incorrect. Modern Kindles classify books added as "documents" rather than books, which limits their features and treats them as second class citizens.
I doubt most people care, but you're not on equal footing to Amazon loading a book onto a Kindle.
They're acting like an anticompetitive wuss if you ask me. If Apple is the righteous one here (imagine that), they can pack up their bags and tell the whole EU to shove it. They can individually invite all 27 markets to kiss their ass and watch as the relevancy of Apple products plummets in the first world. Problem solved, Apple saves the day. 中国梦!
Or, they can take the king's ransom of iPhone revenue and surrender their asinine software double-standard. This doesn't end well for them either way, there's no sense it making it last longer.