Comment by FreezerburnV | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FreezerburnV | Hacker News Reader

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I'm going to get downvoted to oblivion for this, and I say: bring it on, destroy my karma. I will not squelch my opinion when I care greatly about this. So:

I legitimately hate this. I use an iPhone because I don't have the attention span (I'm ADHD) to manage things being fiddly with a ton of different choices. Because it's set up in such a way that it's much easier to live my daily life due to how Apple forces things to be done in general. (and don't get me wrong, I KNOW the App Store has problems that NEED to be solved) All this is going to do is make my phone into the nightmare that Android is for me. I've tried to use Android multiple times, and it ALWAYS ends up with me extremely frustrated.

Get the heck away from my iPhone legislators. And people who literally constantly go on about "you don't have to side load an app" or "I should be able to do anything with my phone" PLEASE stop for 5 minutes to consider how a bullheaded move like this is going to massively disrupt not only my own life, but a lot of people's lives and make them more confusing and harder to manage. For example: People who don't know much about using a phone/tablet are going to have a harder time when Facebook becomes more hostile when they have their own store. Or if utility apps such as for parking put themselves in something like Facebook's store, suddenly you have NO CHOICE but to use that store and their app if you want to park somewhere with a meter. Such as when you're visiting another state for a vacation. Subscriptions are going to become a potential nightmare, and those scam apps that you can currently easily unsubscribe from their thing might become WAY HARDER to do because they're in some other store that doesn't tightly control that with an easy UI.

I hate this. So much. Maybe I'll just go back to everything being on paper and use a flip phone for calls/texts if this garbage goes through and the doom scenario becomes real. It would have been a good run of having something usable.

I also want a phone which is deliberately locked down for the folks in my family who don't care to exercise freedoms that takes nuance and confidence to navigate between the pros and the cons.

If FB wants people to go outside the app store they will. FB has the power.

I want every single app vendor to support Apple Pay because it's much safer and reveals far less private information. I want every single app vendor to support Apple's anonymous account registration process. I want every single app vendor to have to be approved to track users. I want every app to make recurring subscriptions easy to find.

If this could happen without the side effect of Apple bullying companies into giving up revenue, that'd be great.

I agree with you. I assume your disappointment comes from the fact that most HN commenters don’t understand/empathise with the needs of the general public, and continue to demand their way of things. There are options like Android, Linux phones, etc. These might not be perfect for the things HN commenters are demanding, but they exist as options. Yet, instead of going with an attitude of “iPhones are the way they are, they are not for me, so I will use something else”, they seem to demand that even iPhones become open, adopt alternative stores, etc.

I am not clear where the entitlement comes from, but it does bother me too when I see tone deaf comments like those.

Your inability to pick your subscriptions is hardly a justification for limiting me to enduring 2x slower phone CPUs because the app I need is not allowed in Apple app store by an arbitrary rule, that violates anti-monopoly laws.

> Your inability to pick your subscriptions

It's the ability to easily stop a subscription. And considering the amount of stuff out there that makes it as hard as humanly possible to cancel a subscription (there's an entire Bojack episode making fun of this with newspaper subscriptions) I appreciate this quite a lot. Because it's VERY hard for me to do something simple for a lot of people like make a phone call and wade through an absurd phone tree to get to the actual way to stop someone from taking money from me. Or potentially other stuff like that.

> hardly a justification

It's more than just Apple's UI around subscriptions like you pointed out. It's just one example of something that I really appreciate. I also appreciate their work on privacy, that apps from their store are generally safe to download and open, that apps from their store will work well on my phone and interact with my device in the manner that I expect, that I can do things like control notifications, prevent access to my contact list, etc. There's a lot of stuff that "just works", that I can prevent from messing with me if I don't want it to, and it's often only a single step to do so, which helps me function on a day-to-day basis.

> enduring 2x slower phone CPUs because the app I need is not allowed in Apple app

Are you saying that you have to use an Android device which is slower because something you need to function is not allowed in the Apple App Store? If so: I am legitimately sorry that you are forced into that position. This is something I would viciously advocate to be fixed. But not by opening up the floodgates for bad actors to do even WORSE things because there isn't a behemoth standing behind them, threatening them with destruction if they don't follow the rules. (and there are still issues even there as scam apps show, and I desperately want those to be fixed as well for the sake of everyone)

> that violates anti-monopoly laws.

I cannot say whether or not Apple's App Store violates anti-monopoly laws. And unless you're a lawyer, and if you are then I will defer to your judgment, I don't know if you can legitimately claim to know that either. People on HN love to sling around the "monopoly" word a lot when it comes to Apple, but it could very easily be the case that by and large people who say that are just armchair lawyering and have not studied enough of law/case law to say anything about whether or not that's actually true.

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