FUUUUCK YEAH, long overdue.
- Force them to allow users to use different chat apps with SMS.
- Force them to allow “side-loading” 3rd party apps and stores (exactly like you can already do on MacOS).
- Require unlockable bootloaders and/or 3rd party OS with reasonable security protections.
- Ban “parts pairing” and require Apple to make OEM components available for purchase from 3rd parties, on all devices.
- Force them to allow the use of hardware without an account.
That will be a good start. Hell I might even buy an Apple device if they were able to get all of that.
And to be clear, all of this should apply to all other companies but Apple are the most egregious violators.
- Force them to allow the use of hardware without an account.
This should be a rule for all products.
all of this should apply to all other companies
cough Windows cough
… and make it easy to find
You can, you just can’t install any apps
problem is that they are ready to do anything to keep their locked ecosystem (see how they sabotaging alt stores in EU)
you have to stomp apples anticompetive strategies HARD
Yeah and then keep stomping.
I’m loving how governments are finally starting to stomp on corporations. I only wish they’d stomp *harder. *
If you’re in the US, vote for Biden or Trump is going to direct all of that to stop.
I’m not. But yeah, I’d easily vote for Biden. Not because he strikes me as a good and capable president, quite far from it, but because he’s obviously leaps and bounds better than the other train wreck of a human being.
Honestly American politics would be funny in their ridiculousness if they didn’t set the tone for politics here in the years to come.
Can’t you already do #5?
I have Macs and iOS devices that aren’t logged into an iCloud account.
I dunno. I used one for 5 minutes last week and I wasn’t able to update the operating system or install any apps without logging in with Apple id
I was trying to upgrade a family member’s SSD and it was an absolute nightmare but I got it done eventually.
Installing apps on iOS is good point. You need an account. MacOS doesn’t have that constraint.
Mac is what I was referring to
You need an Apple ID for the Mac’s App Store, but the Mac’s App Store is very much the second banana on MacOS. You can open up Chrome or Firefox and download an installer for any ‘ol app, or another app marketplace entirely.
That said, if a developer hasn’t registered as a “Trusted developer” with Apple, installing an app will ask the user if they’re sure that they want to install the program. All of the settings around trusting known developers are at the OS account level. They require a local admin login, not an Apple ID. Its somewhat similar to what Google does with Android.
You need an Apple ID for the Mac’s App Store
Listen, I know nothing about this, but I had to update a Mac recently, and as far as I can tell, the only way to do that is through the App Store.
Yeah, I was mostly referring to the “install apps” part of your comment. You can just download installers from websites. Very few Mac developers rely on the AppStore as their only means to distribute apps.
As for the OS updates, the stuff around major point releases keeps changing. They were forcing people to download installers for major point releases in the AppStore for certain versions of MacOS. I don’t know if that’s still the case with Sonoma. The update experience got refactored about a year and a half ago.
Was thinking that too, although there are some caveats, you need to at least log into the store to download apps as it stands right now. I think you can log out after installing them, but still. Also using FaceTime or iMessage require accounts, when Apple otherwise could have it set up to just register with the phone number only, have no account, and just be ephemeral to that specific device. (But then at that point, they might as well just follow the IMS video call standard that is cross-platform and do away with FaceTime altogether, and the mobile industry should figure out the SMS replacement to then eliminate iMessage.)
Can I use a web browser not based on Safari finally?
dewebkiting browsers hasnt happened yet, but in EU, they arely have the select a browser on launch instead of installing safari by default iirc
they arely have the select a browser on launch instead of installing safari by default
That sounds like a net negative, considering Chrome is basically the only mainstream competition to Safari.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/14/brave_mozilla_europe_ios/
i mean theres already news about what people are installing
That’s news about a few other browsers that people are also installing, and nothing to do with Chrome, which is probably 100x more.
Forced bundling of their preferred apps like a browser was what triggered the Microsoft anti trust, this is well overdue and Apple should have known it was coming
I mean MS has gotten away with exactly that, and so much more since then. The modern government hardly ever gives a shit anymore. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple totally expected to get away with it in perpetuity, and I won’t be surprised if they walk away from this unscathed because they filled the right pockets.
I don’t see how this was a monopoly though. Don’t like their phone? Buy a competitors.
No one said it’s a monopoly, and they’re not a monopoly, in the strictest sense, but:
- It doesn’t have to be a monopoly to violate anti-trust laws.
- Apple has an enormous market share of national and global OSs
- It’s a Duopoly, since there is really only 1 other legitimate competitor for the OS.
And while I agree no one should buy Apple products, people continue to do so and that doesn’t mean they deserve to be forced into these arbitrary anti-competitive restrictions that benefit Apple exclusively, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.
It’s in the title, the justice department said that. There’s no way they are a monopoly.
My mistake, then. You’re right, they are not a monopoly, again, in the strictest sense of the word.
Many people use “monopoly” to just mean “company with overwhelming market share”, and that is not correct, but it is unfortunately how it is colloquially used and likely what was meant in this context.
It is a moot point, regardless.
They don’t even have that. Android phones are really popular
Have what?
overwhelming market share
Nobody is forced. You have language comprehension or usage issues.
Apple has kept an illegal monopoly over smartphones in US, Justice Department says
About damn time. They should have never been allowed to grow so big in so many markets to become the only player. They’re literally mentally crippling a generation of youngs that now don’t know how technology works. I remember a young coworker at a technology company a while back remarking, upon finding another coworker’s Android phone, “Oh wait, this is Android? Well, we’re going to need a hacker to figure out how to use that thing,” and he sat it back down, defeated. Wat.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
My boss was kinda giving me and another guy some shit for having Android phones (he has an iPhone). Not in a mean way, just kind of razzing us about it.
Other dude looked at him and goes, “Sorry for being poor, I guess,” and then started laughing, haha. But yeah, I’ve had several people over the years be perplexed by anything that wasn’t an iPhone.
Europe doesn’t surprise me but I am actually surprised to see this happen in the US.
I wonder what took so long, but anyway. I’m glad they’re working on it now.
My guess is that it took a while because they’ve been able to argue that they’re not a monopoly in the market. It’s a duopoly in the US because Android controls 40% of the market and Apple has 60%.
It’s a stupid argument and it’s still anticompetitive. That said, the last time the US government cracked down on an operating system manufacturer like this, it was Microsoft, and they had over 90% of the market.
So the stupidest thing happened with my iPhone. My mom and I are going on an 8-hour drive and I loaded a bunch of radio dramas on my phone and wanted to print out the track listing for her to choose from what to listen to on the drive. We have multiple machines with multiple OSes, but my desktop was a Mac, so I plugged the phone in and started the Music app… and there was no way to do it. No way at all. I did some searching and that’s just not something that is on the Music app. And there are no other Mac options either.
But… Windows doesn’t run Music. It runs iTunes. And the way to do it is to print it from iTunes as a PDF. Something that is not an option on a Mac.
They removed a feature for their phone from their own OS.
Highlight the tracks, command+c, paste into numbers, and then print it.
Was my first idea and it works, took about 5 seconds.
Apple Music on MacOS has this. Create a playlist with the tracks. File -> Print
When I tried with my iPhone, it was greyed out.
Music finally replaced iTunes a few weeks ago on Windows.
I guess I’m glad I didn’t upgrade iTunes when it asked.
iTunes still exists on Windows, but it’s only covering Podcasts, Audiobooks, and back ups on Windows. Only music and video have been broken out in to the Music and TV apps.
It’s pretty stupid and half ass. Windows needs parity with MacOS. MacOS has a Music, TV, Podcast, and Books app. Also there is a back up experience that integrates into the OS’s file management system. Bloated iTunes is totally dead.
I feel like Apple and Microsoft are slipping back into the late 90’s. Each company’s software is pretty janky on their competitor’s machines.
I read the whole article and it didn’t fucking mention the specifics of the case at all. Which part are they suing over specifically?
At least one thing is supposedly rejecting payments apps and things that competed with built-in Apple apps and services.
The article said that was already disallowed by a prior court ruling. I want to know what’s in the new case.
This means that the reporters haven’t read through all the hundreds of pages yet.
Don’t think that’s going to go far:
https://backlinko.com/iphone-vs-android-statistics
As of early 2024, Android has a 70.69% market share worldwide.
In the US, iPhones hold a market share of 60.77%.
More than 1 billion iPhones and over 3 billion Android devices are currently active.
Android smartphones accounted for 56% of all smartphone sales worldwide in Q4 2023.
It’s 100% not about how much market share they have, it’s about the restrictions on hardware and software:
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/business/live-news/doj-apple-antitrust-lawsuit-03-21-24/index.html
The DOJ claims Apple has used anticompetitive tactics, such as blocking innovative new apps and degrading how Android messages appear on iPhones, to maintain a monopoly on the smartphone market.
It’s 100% not about how much market share they have
It’s an anti-trust suit. They pretty much exclusively apply to companies with overwhelming market share.
Not sure how a different color constitutes “degrading”. Regardless, they don’t have a monopoly outside the US. If their policies were effective, why do they only have a majority share in the US? 🤔
Do you think the color difference is just to mess with android users or something and is otherwise meaningless? It represents differences in abilities. The abilities are the “degraded” part.
Probably means using SMS instead of RCS which forces photos into a lower quality and all the reactions get sent as:
so-and-so liked “message text”
I don’t know what the criteria the FTC uses is, or what exactly Apple is accused of, but economically, I’d say that Apple and Google largely have different markets. There are Android users and iOS users. Because apps are not portable across these, a user’s software library largely locks them into and constrains them to use the same platform, as shifting away from the platform would require throwing out their software library.
So if you’re an iOS user, for example, there’s really one app store out there that you can use. Android isn’t really an option.
And I’d say that there’s probably fertile ground for a company to have a monopoly position there.
This isn’t about an Appstore monopoly though, it’s about a monopoly in the smart phone market, which clearly Apple does not have.
I’m not sure that that’s true, and that’s why I pointed out that it’s not clear what exactly Apple is accused of. That’s what the title says – and it’s also wrong, I might add, in that having a monopoly is not illegal. Just places limits on some behavior that is then considered anticompetitive.
But the article text, for example, talks about the walled garden crossing multiple devices. If that’s part of the complaint, then yeah, it can be an issue.
Here’s some text from another article that quotes the DoJ:
“Apple exercises its monopoly power to extract more money from consumers, developers, content creators, artists, publishers, small businesses, and merchants, among others,” the DOJ wrote in a press release.
Those are people who are gonna be selling in Apple’s app store.
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Bullshit. The App Store is anti-competitive. The hardware is not. Wrong thing to attack. It will likely fail as a result.
I’m beginning to agree with a take I saw online. Someone said Lina Khan’s tenure has been a failure because despite gesturing at all the right players, her FTC has failed to make progress because they’re calling the wrong plays.
You’d be right, if the hardware AND software weren’t made by the same company and locked to each other and that same company didn’t simultaneously have a massive market share
The App Store is anti-competitive. The hardware is not.
Not sure what that means, exactly. The hardware is not competitive because it is locked to a proprietary OS created by the hardware manufacturer. This is an arbitrary limitation that benefits no one but Apple, and stifles competition with other OS’s.
That’s without even mentioning the limitations on repairs that contribute to e-waste and costs consumers money unnecessarily.
It seems that the App Store and other walled garden restrictions are what the suit is about. The posted article is vague and confusing: first talking about an “illegal monopoly in smartphones” but then referring to the “walled garden”, etc.
This article notes that
The heart of the lawsuit centers around claims that Apple stopped smaller companies from accessing the hardware and software in its iPhones, which led to fewer options for customers.
referring to hardware monopoly power may be some legalese needed to meet the requirements to file an antitrust suit, or to head off defense arguments by making a distinction between Apple and other instances of walled gardens, like game consoles.
Someone said Lina Khan’s tenure has been a failure because despite gesturing at all the right players, her FTC has failed to make progress because they’re calling the wrong plays
All by design, it’s only a failure to us stupid prolies. They’re intentionally giving their corporate donors softballs that they know will never hurt their bottom line so that they can turn around come election season and say “Well, at least we tried!” and hope we don’t look any further.
FWIW, I don’t think this is failure is Khan’s fault. She seems to have spent her professional career developing anti-trust philosophy. The only issue is that the FTC is the state mechanism to protect the wealth funnel and there’s very little a individual can do within the Commission to protect consumers.
Don’t want to upset that S&P100 number.
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In the US, Apple has 60% of the smart phone market.
My mistake. Was looking at the global marketshare of iOS vs Android, where Android has just over 70%. US is 60/40 in favor of iOS.
How? Like maybe 1 in ten people i see are I phone users
What country are you in? I mostly see iPhone in the US outside of tech circles or people who just can’t afford them
Western Canada. iPhones are significantly more expensive here though, as compared to an equivalent android.
They’re also way more expensive here but still are extremely popular due to most of the stuff listed in the lawsuit.
that again, sound like not a monopoly
I’d recommend you read the lawsuit. There’s a LOT in there.
This is a nonsense suit. We have Android. I mean great hopefully alternate app stores and payment methods… eh.
I’d rather them go after the only internet provider for like half the country instead: Comcast.
Comcast also sucks but I’d highly recommend you look at the lawsuit. It’s got a lot of stuff in there and 1 or 2 that I didn’t even know about.
