It's good to see that a chunk of HN (the ones who upvote/downvote, including myself) see that HN is formed by humans and therefore it has its own biases and that fake news aren't an external evil that can't just appear here.
That being said, if we dig a bit this also shows how Apple is being seen as a bit of a villain by many people (again, including myself) nowadays and had no problems believing Apple was doing this because it pretty much aligns with their IMHO abusive practices when it comes to grabbing money from devs.
Apple will keep selling and having some bad PR isn't going to affect sales much I guess but I can't stop thinking that some day some competitor will show up, or some law will change and they'll be forced to lift the app store restrictions and most of the devs will fly. Maybe it's time for Apple to start considering reducing the greediness with the people who make their platform attractive when these kind of news pass all filters, even in communities like this.
With restrictions I meant if you want to distribute your apps in iOS, you must use the App Store and pay your fee (the yearly one as well). What other option do you have right now? None, and that's why devs are there right now.
The devs are there because there is no other option where there are sufficient paying customers.
So in order to have that option, there must be sufficient paying customers, but it can be argued that the paying customers are there because of Apple’s restrictions.
What store? I specifically buy the elderly people in my family iOS devices so that they are restricted to things from Apple’s App Store.
Unless someone came around and showed they have a better track record than Apple, I wouldn’t be interested in changing. But I suspect they would be just as restrictive as Apple is now.
Not worrying about malware and tech support is worth so much in saved time.
The “Apple being a greedy bully” narrative was always just an opinion, and never grounded in their actions.
That’s why this piece of fake news was so easy to believe for those people tied up in that narrative: because they’d already built up an opinion that Apple was the evil empire through sensationalized editorial pieces. (e.g. Hey being pissed off and publicly complaining that their business model wasn’t compatible with App Store rules, and yet, we don’t see Fastmail having any issues).
In reality, Apple has a monopoly on absolutely nothing, and doesn’t really engage in anything particularly evil or abusive.
Apple has a 14% global market share in smartphones, even less for computers, 19% market share of streaming music: what I’m getting at here is that Apple basically isn’t a leader in nearly any of the segments it sells to except for smart watches and fully wireless earbuds (which are not the entire market).
I can't speak for more than myself, of course, but my anti-apple sentiment comes from my experience where apple removed all apps for the iPod Touch 1st gen from the app store. I didn't realize they'd done this, and after resetting my device (to un-jailbreak it, ironically enough), I found myself unable to reinstall any of the apps that I'd been using a moment ago.
That's when I swore off of walled gardens in general. I still use them sometimes, but I won't let myself become dependent on them. So, I use Spotify for exploration, but buy anything I would mind losing access to.
In case you or someone else may find this helpful, you can install Whited00r on older iOS devices like the iPod touch 1st gen to access AppTimeMachine, which gives you access to a community-contributed collection of legacy iOS apps.
> some bad PR isn't going to affect sales much I guess but I can't stop thinking that some day some competitor will show up
I feel like this is basically what happened to Microsoft in the 2000s. They developed a bad reputation and then came the then much cooler underdogs Apple and Google to use that in their marketing materials.
That being said, if we dig a bit this also shows how Apple is being seen as a bit of a villain by many people (again, including myself) nowadays and had no problems believing Apple was doing this because it pretty much aligns with their IMHO abusive practices when it comes to grabbing money from devs.
Apple will keep selling and having some bad PR isn't going to affect sales much I guess but I can't stop thinking that some day some competitor will show up, or some law will change and they'll be forced to lift the app store restrictions and most of the devs will fly. Maybe it's time for Apple to start considering reducing the greediness with the people who make their platform attractive when these kind of news pass all filters, even in communities like this.