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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

> If you think it's unfair, don't use it.

This is tired “advice” and does nothing to help developers, who have little control over what their users use.

Everyone has complete control over what they do with their own lives. People should focus more on that, and spend less time writing long winded articles about what other people do. Worrying about what other people do is the path to insanity. Just my 2 cents.

> Everyone has complete control over what they do with their own lives.

No, as I just mentioned.

You are not being forced to use those platforms. There are other ways to be a developer. They may not be convenient for you but that's a different problem. I know pivoting your skillset can be hard but it's an option that is always available to you.

It’s more than just inconvenience. If Apple can be protectionist about its Apple store than the developers can be protectionist of their skills and careers as developers on the Apple platform.

>the developers can be protectionist of their skills and careers as developers on the Apple platform.

Legally, no, they cannot. Apple owns 100% of the platform and the developers own 0%. I would not bank on this changing any time soon.

What legal standing is preventing someone from posting “Apples treatment of Developers is neither fair nor consistent”????

I agree that it's not fair or consistent but saying that alone means nothing. For any impact, action must be taken on those words: you can use legal means to try and change their behavior like Spotify did, you can negotiate like Amazon did, you can apply pressure by trashing them in the press like Epic did, you can attempt to circumvent the app store fees using various measures, you can leave for a different platform. Or you can apply some combination of any of these. Which one is the least expensive is entirely dependent on your situation. The reason why I spoke of the last option initially is that for the average individual developer your only real immediate action is to leave, everything else is collective in nature.

This is naive and childish maxim as argument.

As far as I know it’s an important realization in Buddhist practice, maybe it deserves a second thought. Or at least a valid refutation, instead of an opinion such as this one.

> Or at least a valid refutation

Except that it isn't. While it's also technically true that we could all decide to live in the forest tomorrow and refuse to be part of the world, what do you think is the likelihood of that?

Real problems require real solutions, not back of the hand pontificating about how all choices are 100% free and just choose not to you lazy bastard.

A real argument would recognize the complexity rather than act like it doesn't exist.

We’re not talking about living in the woods. We’re talking about a small segment of developers who feel entitled to benefit from Apple’s products and also set their terms while they are at it. I think people that think this way also ignore complexities at play, which you bring up and I agree exist.

The post that kicked off this chain made the point that you can choose not to develop on Apple platforms. I think it’s a mistake to conflate “first-world” decisions like which platforms or languages to use, or market segmentation or where we can make the most money the quickest with hockey stick growth to please our VC investors, with “third-world” lifestyles or asceticism.

As though if one doesn’t develop on Apple tech, they may as well wander off into the woods? We should check our privilege here.

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