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Because Apple is worse, everything you do on the Apple platform has to be taxed, something like Italian mafia did in the past. Until things got heat in 2020, Apple wasn't even allowing payment competition in their iOS App Store. Think about that. Roman empire did the same with their provinces, wanna get romanised (civilised)? You got to pay the tax.

More so, Apple is #3 in the world in game revenue and guess what, Apple doesn’t even make games.

I can't buy an Apple device because of the ideology behind their products. Why expect Apple to put other storefronts on their platform? They have all the rights not to but this also implies that their ecosystem is less liberal, which is also fine. They made the OS and the device. If you hate the App Store, don’t use iOS. It's simple. They run 1984 ads but they are the core of 1984.

There is basically no reason for not providing an OS interface for others to build their own storefronts on your platform. Android showed that it's possible, there's no excuse. Period.




None of this is hidden though. We have the absolute choice of not using Apple products. Simple. None of this seems relevant to the discussion at hand either. We can definitely disagree with two companies at the same time.

Facebook is objecting to allowing people to know that they're being tracked everywhere by them. Lots of people don't really understand how that works. I think this is a good thing Apple is doing in this particular case.


The Zuckerberg defence: “but Apple stuff is expensive; surely that has to be immoral, right?”. As if it had anything to do with this issue.


> None of this is hidden though.

It absolutely is hidden. Apps are not allowed to be transparent with the user, for how much money is being taken by Apple, directly in the app purchase screen.

That is against the app store TOS, to show as a line item, the cost of the Apple cut.


>>> None of this is hidden though

are you sure about this? "Apple blocks Facebook update that called out 30-percent App Store ‘tax’" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24301332]

disclaimer: I work for fb


“I work for fb“

Does any of this make you want to reconsider that?


Let's not be apologetic towards oligarchs. Apple had broken EU privacy law by allowing iPhones to track users for advertising purposes without obtaining consent. Apple is doing the rIgHt ThInG just because they got caught. Facebook is complaining because Apple got caught and now their revenue has to suffer.


When 50% of my customers (in the US) have an iPhone, there's no choice for me, the developer, but to deal with Apple.

If I were marketing to youths, I'd have to deal with Apple's 90% market share among my customers!

In this particular case I don't care because FB is garbage IMO but the point stands - Apple has too much power in the US and we need to force them to allow third party app stores.


I'd rather pay the apple tax (money) than the google/facebook tax (my data and privacy).


I don't want to pay the Apple tax.


It’s a good thing nobody forced you to buy one, then.


I'm not using Google and Facebook either. I've restricted the traffic from my router to their domains. I have a Samsung phone, using Samsung's store. I use Yahoo for mails. DuckDuckGo as preferred search engine. Only WhatsApp (which is owned by Facebook unfortunately) and Discord for social stuff. My browser of choice is Edge. I don't pay oligarchs. Show me respect and openess, I will use your products. Restric my freedom, I will give you the middle finger. Also, I own Twitter and Medium fake accounts.


> I have a Samsung phone, using Samsung's store... I don't pay oligarchs.

Have you come across criticism of the chaebol system or Samsung as a company before? It’s pretty intense what has been going on and what Samsung has been convicted of doing. The wikis give a good overview.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung


Thanks for sharing, I will go through those wikis. As an user it treats my right. I have the freedom I desire when I'm using their products. And I also get quality among other things. Something that I can't say about Chinese brands, though I've owned Huawei, Xiamoi and ZTE phones before.


Samsung is actually a company that was specifically called out for bypassing permissions that you denied them. They would dig through the logs of other applications on the filesystem, look through EXIF tags on the files on your camera roll, etc in order to scrape information that they'd send back to Samsung to sell.

https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/facebook-scraping-call-m...

https://www.xda-developers.com/android-permissions-bypass-pl...

These spyware kits are hardcoded into the first-party apps on Samsung phones that you cannot remove without replacing it with a custom ROM.

Samsung is also the point of the spear on pushing advertising into their television sets and scraping your viewing for marketing purposes.

Buying Samsung products is as bad as using Google or Facebook products in terms of your privacy.


I feel like this happens on HN all the time. You make this really grandiose display about all these choices you've made while ignoring that 99.9% of the people using these products are clearly not as informed or aware as you are about the ins and outs of the technologies they're using. That's literally why Apple is pushing for user consent and for users being informed. Not everyone has the same experience you do.




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