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Comment by dismalpedigree | Hacker News Reader

Apple controls the browser on iOS with an iron fist. Even if you are using a different app, its still Safari under the hood. And even though they control the rendering, they still open all links from Apple apps in Safari.

Oh and music. I use an alternative to Apple music because I choose to. That doesn’t stop Apple music from being the auto play choice even when I don’t use Apple Music.

If Apple’s products are so much better they should allow choice and bot be threatened by it.

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Somehow they manage to control it with an iron fist but still allow apps to intercept links, opening them in their nasty embedded version with injected JS.

If you don't use Apple Music at all, you can uninstall it from your phone and it will stop being the default choice. I do this on my phone without any problems.

I don't have an extensive list, but Apple preferring their own apps on iOS is not hyperbole and evident in lots of places.

Two examples: In "Find My" their is a "navigate" button for your various things, this will always use Apple Maps instead of giving you the choice. Same with the tapping the "address" field in your contacts list.

And if you don't have Apple Maps installed, does it give you any options? No, instead it'll ask you if you want to install Apple Maps...

I may be wrong, but audio types are standardized, while geo or map ones are not.

Meaning that it wouldn’t be much of an issue to open an audio file with anything that isn’t Apple Music, but FindMy would need to support a myriad of map app formats to work as intended.

URL types for geo locations are standardized. And even if they weren't or the standard isn't sufficient (which one could reasonably argue), you are talking about features made by the platform owner. Apple can trivially declare "this is the iOS geo share format, apps intending to share or handle shared geolocations should use this format" and expect the ecosystem to deal with it.

That’s a good point, although it seems that this kind of behavior, at least specifically to map apps, is quite common.

Out of curiosity, I opened the Google app in iOS, searched for a place, and tapped on the result to open a map. Even with the default app set to Apple Maps, it goes straight to Google Maps.

I haven’t been able to find the correct MIME type or URL protocol for a generic geo call, either, which makes me suspect that there is more to it than it seems.

Google specifically handles all links in its apps so that they go to the corresponding google app if possible.

> I may be wrong, but audio types are standardized, while geo or map ones are not.

Regardless, it seems strange that other applications can show you a list of navigation apps when clicking on an address while Apple cannot. You're saying it's too technically difficult for Apple to achieve what others can?

Somehow, by some magic, Telegram asks you if you want to open the navigation to an address in Apple Maps, Google Maps or Waze (for me, possibly different for others). I'm not sure I'm buying it's too difficult for Apple to do the same, if they wanted to.

Music settings like the Equaliser actually only apply to Apple Music. You can uninstall it but there is no systemwide equaliser, because why would you need one when you can use Apple Music?

Same with MacOs and using it with a studio display makes the bass ridiculously loud.

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