Hacker News Reader

Comment by xenadu02 | Hacker News Reader

Not commenting on anything else about this but only pointing out that the law treats a company that sells a complete widget to the end user very differently from a company that sells a piece to someone who then sells the finished widget to the end user.

A lot of people don't seem to appreciate reasoning from principles around any of this stuff. They just want to be able to do X, Y, or Z and any ad-hoc law or court ruling that gets them there is A-OK with them, consequences be damned. Personally I find that unfortunate. I enjoy well-reasoned debate that thinks through the logical consequences of various policy decisions and how it affects everyone, not just end users exactly like themselves.

View on HN

"Principles" as in arbitrary precedents set by bribed politically-motivated lawmakers and judges.

No, people are correctly pointing out the fact that this is blatantly unfair. You are claiming that 2+2=5 because a judge said so.

If you are concerned about the "consequences" maybe you should start thinking about how open platforms are now legally disadvantaged to closed platforms.

After some reflection I'm not too proud of this comment :)

I think we just have different priors.

My belief is that, fundamentally, everything should be open. Users should have full control over their devices, and manufacturers should have no place in dictating anything about how they are used, what software can and can't run on them, etc. (Note that I'm not being anti-proprietary-software here; I don't think companies should be required to give away their source code if they don't want to.)

I get that this isn't relevant from a legal perspective. But so what? I can talk about where I want the laws to go.

The problem is that we will have proprietary software (distributed for free) doing bad things, and people blame their phone being slow.

I don't like that app stores engage in rent seeking behavior when it comes to payments, but that is a separate issue.

If some random app now wants me to use their random payment system, I will 100% just delete the app. Not a chance. I will and do install apps outside the app store, but I will not start using random payment systems. In other words, although I agree the amount developers pay is too high, for me and probably many other end users, the most valuable part of the Play store is the payment system.

> The problem is that we will have proprietary software (distributed for free) doing bad things, and people blame their phone being slow.

The solution to this remains the same as ever: curation of software packages. You can install any app you want, but you're probably going to use some front-end to manage that (Play Store, App Store). It's up to those platforms to curate what apps they host, and up to the user to delegate safety c he checks to platforms they trust.

Why is this being downvoted? It doesn't break any guidelines, and it's obviously correct to boot.

Curation is the status quo, the only thing that would change is that people could choose to trust another entity to curate their apps.

There is a contingent of Hacker News that strongly opposes the opening of iOS to third party app distribution, usually with the reasoning that doing so would prevent Apple from strong-arming third party developers into abiding by rules that benefit users (no notification spam, billing for subscriptions must be centrally managed, users must be able to opt out of tracking). If developers have other distribution options on the platform then, if they're successful enough, they'll be able to have their users install their misbehaved (but popular/necessary) app by some channel that Apple doesn't control. Comments where I support opening of the iOS platform are the most consistently downvoted of any that I make, though most do recover to a positive score eventually. There are exceptions, but that is the overall pattern I observe.

Google does both. And you haven't made an argument or brought any facts at all to the discussion, you just vaguely waved your hands at the court system and said "A is not B".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com