Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers

Every colleague in my company only targets and tests against Chrome because they honestly considers _everything_ and anything Chrome does as the standard.

As a FF user it hurts me because even if Apple and Mozilla has implemented some feature according to spec these people ignore that in favour of the Chrome way of doing things.

Calling Safari the new ie6 is ignorant of reality.

This isn't about the a consumer's right to buy a different phone. It's about a business's right to do business with customers without Apple in the middle. And it's specifically about Apple's monopoly power over those businesses. No government is going to accept that some company, Apple, gets that kind of control.

In antitrust terms, it is a form of Vendor Lock-In[0], and could be seen as a form of Tying[1]:

> Tying is often used when the supplier makes one product that is critical to many customers. By threatening to withhold that key product unless others are also purchased, the supplier can increase sales of less necessary products.

As an example, Apple was sued successfully in the early 200s for selling music in a format that could only be played on iPods. iTunes is a platform Apple controls and invented, yet still it was deemed illegal for them to unfairly lock in customers and prevent them from using competing portable music players.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)

Once a company becomes massive enough and displays properties of a monopoly, the rules of free commerce change

(that being said, I agree that Apple largely provides users with a high-quality product)

Because not doing so harms the market and society (the article details how). Governments do not exist solely to enforce contracts and property rights. Ideals (e.g. "a man is entitled to the sweat of his brow") are valuable guides, and worth bearing even significant costs to keep, but they are not to be followed blindly, at any cost.

> There are other options out there.

Law and politics (should) step in when "voting with your feet/wallet" fails. You also ignore Apple's middle-man role - consumers can choose (among the very few) different options, but companies serving Apple's captured market cannot.

So then we get to like, why do we have laws, what's the goal? And this is where you get down to brass tacks. Almost everyone will agree on three basis vectors in principle:

- aggregate prosperity - broad prosperity and security from want - individual liberty

You've got to grind through a bunch of thought on a spectrum ranging from Das Capital to Atlas Shrugged to make it really tight, but it sort of simplifies down to: pick two. Put differently, for a given raw capability and Gini-like target, you get to allocate so much liberty to which people: if you don't impose punitive taxes on wealth, it centralizes and calcifies into fungibility. Rich people buy laws. This is a super linear process.

So then it becomes about:

- would I want to be rich if it was part of a system that engineers avoidable want

- if yes, could I realistically make it into the rich group

For me the answer to one is no, and so I think we should re-impose the punitive taxes and regulations that break the backs of rich people and megacorps.

But on HN a common if not typical answer to #1 is yes, and so my appeal is: be realistic, you already missed.

I suppose you have the legal right to do whatever you're able to up until people notice the problems you're causing and pass laws against it (or enforce existing ones, as is being attempted here).

Why should it be legally permissible to "sell" general purpose computing devices that are locked by the manufacturer or vendor? How does such behavior benefit society? Aren't locked down, effectively unauditable devices anathema to a free and open society? Isn't the current situation evidence enough that their existence is damaging to the concept of a free market?

You're asking a rhetorical question without providing any argument for why the answer should be yes, which makes it pretty easy to just answer the question with the word no.

> Why should I be forced to open up the carefully designed ecosystem I’ve built?

The premise of this question is that they have the right to interfere with how other people choose to interact with each other.

Meanwhile the premise of the government-granted copyright monopoly they've used to build their lock-in system is that you build something and in exchange you can charge money for it. Leveraging that into control over markets external to the one you developed is a thing that should be expressly prohibited.

I think general purpose computing devices should be open.

This is a moralistic argument, putting legal and business reasons to the side.

Go ahead and lock down specific purpose computing devices, like ATMs, fridge, mouse firmware.

The practice of setting up fiefdoms to become the landlord is an abhorrent practice.

In their own machines they can do whatever they want.

Once they sell it to you, not anymore.

That's the catch-22, said ecosystem is what they want to use because it's considered "secure", but it's only considered secure because it's closed.

It's the same with all the other stuff like frequent locations, photos, etc. It's a walled garden yes, but one that protects your data from bad actors (like Meta heisting whatever they can get their grubby little hands on), and the price is that you can't let others into your garden, or it's no longer walled.

Do you think the same about printer ink?

Regardless, we need to look at the law - and interoperability has a long history of legal support. Patents protect the product itself, but allow interoperable products. Trade secrets product the product from theft but not reverse engineering.

Even the DMCA has explicit carve-outs for interoperability, though that doesn't stop copyright-abusers from trying to wield it (and sometimes winning due to the money game).

If they wanted that right they shouldn't have sold the computer.

Was that not the sort of rationale Microsoft used to defend its IE shenanigans back in the day?

It was considered to be a violation of antitrust laws then. I don't think Apple would be off the hook now. Especially considering how much more ubiquitous smartphones are in comparison to web browsers back then.

Yes, except when they use that control to stifle competition. Competition is good, so we want to promote it.

That is sort of the basis for all anti trust law, to my layman’s understanding at least.

If anything, it's the opposite - the bigger Apple is, the worse is the damage they cause.

Does the manufacturer of your refrigerator have the right to control what food you're allowed to put into it? If not, why do you have different standards for computing devices? Why did it ever become okay for Apple to decide what you do with your device after they've sold it to you?

It's one thing to design and built an iKettle in such a way that every aspect from the water filter to the power cord is well thought out but propitiatory. It's another to refuse to plug in to another "inferior" socket because that cuts into your cut of propitiatory cable sales.

If their stuff is so superior, then people will see that and prefer it. They wouldn't need to make it impossible or deliberately painful to use competitors services.

Apple can. They can retain ownership of "their" devices. Instead of selling electronics, they can rent iPhones and iPads to users and thereby retain all control over how/when/if they are used. But good luck pitching that to consumers.

Don't you think this is _maybe_ an overstatement? I was annoyed about this for years but reading your take is borderline satirical.

Is that really the worst thing you've seen big-tech do? That's very fortunate.

What about Blackberry Messenger which was the mobile instant-messaging golden standard for years and BB exclusive for as long as it mattered in the market? Was that too long ago to remember?

Yes, people in the EU use WhatsApp, by Meta & Zuckerberg, and from what I've seen, often act as if that is some sort of mark of superiority.

Apple didn't make SMS bad, it just was. Apple has since implemented RCS and it hasn't changed how I communicate with people from my iPhone at all.

Google should probably take most of the blame for repeatedly fumbling messaging on non-Apple platforms for the past 2 decades. Every time they had something that was getting any amount of traction it got quickly replaced with some stupid new, worse messaging app so a PO could get a promotion.

Regardless of the merits of Apple's actions as regards technical interoperability I feel compelled to point out that this in particular is a cultural problem, not technical malfeasance. RCS users still appear as green bubbles and even if the lack of functionality has been remedied the stigma has not. People at my lunch table 20 years ago were drawing artificial distinctions between "MP3s" (portable DAPs) and iPods because the latter were expensive luxury products and the former were not. The same thing is at work here because owning an iPhone is a proxy for one's socioeconomic stratum. I own an iPhone and as soon as an Android user appears in an iMessage group chat some joker immediately makes a green bubble quip - no degraded picture message required.

People that define themselves by conspicuous consumption don't care about interoperability. They care about brand recognition.

I know many MANY people who have lost chats with their loved ones (especially deceased ones) because there is no way to export and save their conversations.

I think this should be as easy as saving photos, which apple makes (somewhat) easier to export.

Back to email, it is pretty horrible to set up my local email server on an apple device. You have to go through these dialogs, apple servers have to be contacted (for "redirection"), and I usually barely get it working.

I think you might be living in a bubble, if this is the "most evil" thing you have heard of a big tech company doing. Go read up on IBM's history, especially in the 30s and 40s. Or a more contemporary example, read up on Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Or Amazon's mistreatment of workers in both corporate and warehouse settings. Or Meta scraping data off your devices without permission to train AI.

And, though I know some folks here disagree, plenty of people around the world believe what's happening in Gaza is a genocide, and Big Tech has materially contributed to making it happen. Or, if you want another example of human cost, talk about how resources for electronics are mined, or how electronics are manufactured.

Saying, "the most evil thing big tech has ever done is make some chat bubbles blue" puts a whole lot of human lives below the color of some chat bubbles.

You can think Apple did a really bad thing by doing that, that's fine. No complaints. But to call it the most evil thing ever done erases an incalculable amount of human suffering.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

First of all, when Apple created iMessage, there was no possible way for them to predict that friend groups would use it as a reason to treat members of their groups poorly due to using Android phones.

Second of all, Apple did not deliberately make interacting with non-iMessage users in group chats "look like trash" in order to exclude them. Apple went out of its way to make it possible for iMessage to interoperate with the ubiquitous (in the US) SMS, with reduced features because SMS did not support the better features. If, instead, Apple had just made iMessage not interoperate with SMS at all, you'd be screaming about that instead.

Third of all, if people are leaving others out of chats, that's not Apple's fault. That's something for those families and friend groups to work out amongst themselves. "Hey, guys, I don't have an iPhone, and don't really have the money to get one, so maybe we could use GroupMe/GChat/WhatsApp/Signal/IRC/email/smoke signals/meeting in person/any of the myriad other ways of communicating instead?" A) "Oh, sure, that shouldn't be a problem!" (everything is solved) B) "What? No, we're not going to change anything just because it makes it impossible to actually include you in stuff. That's a you problem!" (turns out, the problem is your friends are assholes)

Apple cannot by any reasonable standard be held to blame for the way bullying, status-seeking teenagers treat each other.

It is painfully obvious, but Apple's singular goal is to make money (profit for shareholders) and THAT IS A GOOD THING. They'll cut corners, test the boundaries in pursuit of that, and sometimes cross over it.

Suing them is the right way to fix those behaviors.

what you actually want is to force all developers to use Apple's distribution and payment systems, so that you can have every app and service from any provider delivered via your chosen mechanisms. that takes away freedom from developers and users who prefer other systems. it eliminates the market for anyone to make or use something better than your chosen options

The point of this is so that there is the possibility of escaping that walled garden, arguably welcoming more users into the ecosystem.

Nothing would change for you. Just like android users can keep using all things Google, they have the possibility of installing apps from other sources.

Huh, the __user__ paid for the product, so they own it. After the user handed over their money, Apple has nothing to say about who I do business with on that product, or what the conditions are.

You can say "platform" as much as you like, but that's just Apple's way of forcing their way into the argument.

Someone has to make the platform. If they want recognition for that or compensation, maybe they should apply for government funding. Don't bother the consumer with it.

And if you don't like a government regulating a market, then you haven't seen a company regulate one.

This question has already been asked to the United States Court of Appeals, and the answer was "no"[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

And while Facebook and Google would still be hoarding data, there are a huge amount of games and apps I'd rather pay 5 for that are now ad-fueled invasive crapps and "pay to remove ads" costs 15 instead of 5.

When a significant percentage of the population uses your products and services, expect regulators to prevent you from abusing that significant group.

The capitalism idea that "markets solve all issues" only works when it's regulated so market players play on even-ish odds and the players don't have control of the market. (And even then it doesn't seem to work for public utilities really).

The naive idea that "Apple makes the product let them decide" would fly well for a device with millions of units, but billions is 1000x more and it comes with responsibility, sometimes the responsibility comes late because regulators are slow bureaucrats.

"With power comes responsibility" used to be a thing, now it's "With power responsibility might knock on your doorstep eventually if you abuse it to an extreme level like imposing a third of all REVENUE transacted through their forced store"

Not if you effectively have a monopoly. If there were plenty of (relevant) other app stores, Apple wouldn't be able to tax 30% on every app. The only reason they can is that developers don't have a choice: there are far too many Apple users to ignore, and the only way to sell them an app is through the Apple Store.

Intuitively, this feels right to me, but I think that in this case my intuition fails, because I think of this "right" from the perspective of a person. "They made that thing, it's theirs, they have the right to decide what to do with it."

I don't think the same right applies to a company, though. Especially one so big that it has a significant impact on society, and so big that it's entirely driven by the incentives of capitalism (and not, for example, by a founder's ideals).

In this context I see companies as amoral automata whose only goal is maximizing profits, regardless of the wider consequences of their actions. This seems to produce very good results for the societies in which these companies operate, but it also comes with some side effects. By putting constraints on what companies can do, we can reap most of the benefits and avoid most of the side effects.

</couch-economist>

I did not read this claim. I read the claim that Apple's approach unevenly benefits companies that engage in surveillance capitalism. No one's ad revenue, for instance, must pay a 30% cut of their revenue.

You are making an argument (and then arguing against it) that Proton did not make, as far as I can read.

> if you make the platform that others run on and which creates entirely new economies and allows businesses to thrive, don’t you get to define the constraints that you want since it’s _your_ platform?

I don't think you do. We constrain what companies are permitted to do all the time. Apple must abide by regulatory constraints first, and then they can add the additional constraints they like.

A simple test -- could Apple say, "Everyone is allowed to use Messages, except Hindus"? It's their platform, don't you get to define the constraints because it's your platform? No, we've collectively decided that kicking some people out based on certain characteristics is generally bad.

> Note that the businesses who are lobbying against Apple are operating on the very same capitalist, profit-optimizing interests that drove Apple to choose a walled-garden approach. They are not doing this to make the world a better place, and the vast majority of smartphone users do not even care about this “issue”.

They’re all blatantly self-interested, but Spotify is perhaps the biggest hypocrite among them. They’re continuously bolstering their dominance in the streaming music space at the cost of both users and artists, and when Apple gives them features they’ve asked for they refuse to use them because that’d weaken their case. They only care because if it weren’t for Apple Music they’d for all practical purposes have a monopoly.

REQUESTED INJUNCTIVE RELIEF

To remedy Apple’s unlawful unreasonable restraints of trade, monopolization, attemptedmonopolization, and unfair competition, Plaintiff requests that the Court enter injunctive relief,including but not limited to the following:

(a) Enjoin Apple from conditioning any payment, revenue share, or access toany Apple product or service on an agreement by an app developer to launch an app first orexclusively on the Apple App Store;

(b) Enjoin Apple from conditioning any payment, revenue share, or access toany Apple product or service on an agreement by an app developer not to launch a version of theapp with enhanced or differentiated features on a third-party iOS app distribution platform orstore;

(c) Enjoin Apple from conditioning any payment, revenue share, or access toany Apple product or service on an agreement with an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM)or carrier not to preinstall an iOS app distribution platform or store other than the Apple AppStore;

(d) Require Apple to provide rival iOS app stores with access to the App Storecatalog to ensure interoperability and to facilitate consumer choice;

(e) Require Apple to permit the distribution of rival iOS app stores through theApple App Store on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms;

(f) Enjoin Apple from requiring developers to use Apple’s IAP system as acondition of offering subscriptions, digital goods, or other IAPs;

(g) Require that third-party application developers be given functionality andaccess to iOS application programming interfaces on terms no worse than the terms Apple allowsfor its first-party applications;

(h) Require Apple to allow developers to fully disable Apple’s IAP system;

...

among other things

https://res.cloudinary.com/dbulfrlrz/images/v1751299117/wp-p...

"We don’t question Apple’s right to act on behalf of authoritarians for the sake of profit, but Apple’s monopoly over iOS app distribution means it can enforce this perverse policy on all app developers, forcing them to also be complicit"

It's not a question of what you like, it's a question of antitrust laws. You can disagree with them of course, but it is their right to sue Apple if they think Apple is breaking laws.

Microsoft was hit with monopoly on browser even though you can install anything or go buy a Mac.

But when you control a huge portion of the PC market, and you put it in by default, you are cascading your monopolistic benefits down to installed software.

Apple does not have complete domination of smartphone across all demographics, but they do have domination in many segments.

For example, it is estimated that around 88% of teenagers have iPhones. Apple makes it very hard to leave their ecosystem because of iMessage, Facetime, and ALL of your digital purchases being tied to their ecosystem. So, what happens when all those teens grow up? Do we really think they will leave Apple ecosystem?

What cascades from that is a long term digital domination strategy, and when you have that only one digital store option, now you have a monopoly argument.

Because you've redefined the market.

Which part of this article quote don't you understand?

> but Apple’s monopoly over iOS app distribution means

Either this is bad faith, or you are uninformed.

> that's the cost of doing business.

All the question is there. Is that the cost of doing business, or is Apple abusing their dominant position?

Sure it's their car and they can do whatever they want with it, but consumers are losing choices - which is what anti-monopoly rules are for. Say, Michelin or Pirelli tires are strictly better but Tesla doing this harms consumer choice and that's why it is bad.

Imagine if this were extended to Tesla branded chargers. Or Tesla branded paint. It's your damn car so you should be allowed to do whatever you want with it.

Now why would Apple do this? Because they have hobbled Safari so that it does not have modern web APIs which would allow web developers to create web-apps that use APIs that are only allowed on App-store apps on IOS devices.

This forces developers to either make an app for the App-store, or don't have any IOS users.

This is one of many reasons Apple is being sued by the DOJ - because they won't allow any other browser engines on IOS, at least not in the US, the EU slapped them on the wrist and now it's allowed there.

Safari is the current worst web browser in terms of features and bugs, and Apple wants to keep it this way for no better reason but greed. They want to push people to make App-store apps, which they can extract 30% revenue from.

That is anti-competitive, and monopolistic behavior.

By this logic, there is also no requirement for one to eat and breathe, anyone can simply stop. The problem is the consequences.

Building an iOS app is requirement if you want to provide lots of services and compete on lots of market. The mobile phone OS landscape has become a duopoly, and society is free to impose certain obligations on those companies.