Elon Musk: Apple Is Threatening Twitter's Presence in the App Store | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk: Apple Is Threatening Twitter's Presence in the App Store

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12 pointsdoener23 comments

Elon knows that Apple is one company that he is completely powerless against. Apple has the visionary founder, all the money in the world, all the power (iPhone) and hundreds of millions of loyal fans. Apple has all the people with disposable income. Elon is using his tweets to rally his Twitter followers to put pressure on Apple.

Just Elon? Everyone is powerless against Apple. If Apple disagrees with you (regardless of who's right) you have no path of recourse.

Not necessarily. If Elon wishes, he can go after (or at least credibly threaten to go after) Apple's core iPhone business with a Tesla Phone. There a lot of conflicts of interests with Twitter, but a phone is a great product for Tesla considered on its own merits.

Tesla has manufacturing capabilities and talent that can rival Apple, and crucially a respected brand whose hundreds of millions of fans are even more loyal than Apple. They have a considerable pile of extra cash, which is why a large faction of shareholders has been demanding stock buybacks on a scale of 5-10 billion to pump the stock price. Investing in a smartphone product is probably a better use of cash than pumping the short-term stock price.

Developers will rush to the Tesla Phone if it is a skin over AOSP and compatible with Play Store apps (following the Amazon model) and if Tesla doesn't charge a cut of app revenue.

They don't have to actually build this, just show that it can feasibly displace over $10 billion of Apple's annual revenue. It's probably better to just bypass Tim Cook and go directly to Warren Buffett and other top shareholders, and ask them if they're willing to risk their cash cow for a totally unnecessary war with Twitter.

In the meantime, a pseudonymous hacker called Peorge Potz can release a jailbreak for iOS 16 :)

Also, Twitter's mobile web experience is the best among social media platforms. They should immediately stop annoying users with the 'Twitter is better in the app' pop-ups.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA this is priceless

This would be perfectly risible satire, but I suspect you're earnest about this, and I think that's even more funny.

Funny, that's the same thing people said when Elon pitched his Twitter bid.

Amazon tried that with the Fire Phone and failed. AOSP doesn't do much by itself. Recreating all of the Google Play APIs necessary to have a viable consumer product would be an enormous project.

Another tweet on that: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1597300125243944961

Why not? Twitter is now Elon’s private property, existing only to serve his personal interests. There is no reason for it to be given special treatment.

I think the counter-argument is that if advertisers choose not to buy ads from him, it must be because something something woke activists.

The scary thing is, I think he really believes that.

I'm still not sure. Billionaire titan buys what he has called "the public square". I think it's safe to assume that he's more interested in the effect that his speech can have, not whether he buys into the meaning of any given utterance.

You think he really doesn’t care about ‘woke activists’?

I do, but I thought the question was whether or not he believed that woke activists are the proper blame for an advertiser not buying his services.

I wouldn't be surprised if he knows that advertisers have other valid reasons for not wanting to place their brands on his site, but that he's playing to the far-right base anyway.

For example, he used the number "88" in a hostile back-and-forth with Alex Vindeman yesterday, a pretty clear dog whistle.

Agreed - He is what he appears to be. Although I think the kind of doublethink you suggest he’s engaged in has a way of becoming one’s actual beliefs.

Do you have a link to the “88” tweet?

I don't. I left Twitter yesterday. I did find a tweet with a purported screenshot, though.

https://twitter.com/JustSchmeltzer/status/159723568323130982...

This is further confirming that big tech is all in on controlling the conversation and controlling who can participate or not. Why isn't Apple blocking the phones of those toxic users? Why aren't phone carriers like ATT blocking phone calls they deem problematic? This is only happening with social media and online communication, which is increasingly the main way to communicate.

> which is increasingly the main way to communicate.

It’s not. Twitter is a publishing medium. Let’s be real about that.

It's not just a publishing medium. You can use it privately as well. Social media is blurring those lines. People broadcast their messages daily to their own audience, whether it's family, group of friends, or the world. Eventually voice calls will just be another feature, and I guess providers will make a deal with the various apps like discord, whatsapp, etc., at that point these companies are effectively deciding what information people can consume.

> You can use it privately as well.

Yeah yeah. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a publishing platform. If you don’t think Twitter is about public conversation then you take a look at it for yourself some time.

Even if it is publishing, companies align in intent and wield incredible amounts of power with how information flows. They decide what is a legitimate story, and what is a conspiracy theory, and I personally don't trust large corporations to make these decisions. They are far from moral actors. Twitter is attempting to strip this power away from itself, and Apple does not like that.

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Elon Musk: Apple Is Threatening Twitter&#x27;s Presence in the App Store

Elon Musk: Apple Is Threatening Twitter's Presence in the App Store