It is criminal that Apple gets away with not allowing alternative defaults

http://ma.tt/2013/11/apple-defaults/

by libovness • 13 years ago

56 55 13 years ago

ma.tt

kolinko• 13 years ago

The dofference is thhat Microsoft was a monopolost at the time, and Apple right now is far from being the only choice.

btilly• 13 years ago

Exactly.

Also on current growth trends, Apple is going to lose to Android. So not only don't they have a monopoly, they don't have any prospect of gaining one either.

anko• 13 years ago

I guess losing depends on a matter of perspective.. are you losing if you have less market share but more profit?

simonh2• 13 years ago

Not so. Apple is increasing (1) it's market share in the US, and that was in the quarter before the new phones were released. I assume you're talking about the US market, since that's the region the DOJ has jurisdiction over to scrutinize monopolies.

Apple is doing just fine against Android in the US market, and most developed markets, though I don't expect them to get anything like a monopoly and don't think they're interested in pursuing one.

(1) http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/11/05/apple-samsung-leng...

adventured4• 13 years ago

Anti-trust and DOJ scrutiny have no requirement of monopoly status to pursue market abuses.

It's strictly subjective, and dependent on proving consumer harm. It so happens that more often than not, market share enables companies to more easily cause consumer harm as far as the DOJ is concerned.

Given Apple has, by some accounts, half the smart phone market in the US, they are absolutely a prime candidate for DOJ scrutiny on this matter.

This for example (from comscore):

http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/09/06/apples-iphone-hold...

has them at 40.4% as of July and gaining share, by far the leading individual smart phone company. Easily a market position that can draw the DOJ's attention given how large and important the market is.

gonzo• 13 years ago

Nor is Apple the market leader.

adventured4• 13 years ago

Apple had almost no market share in e-books when the DOJ pursued them over price fixing. Amazon was dominant to a dramatic degree.

Being the market leader is not the prime qualifier. Consumer harm is.

I would however argue that Apple is in fact the market leader in the US. Individual companies are what matter, not open source platforms; that is, the DOJ is going to look at the behavior of companies. It's the companies who make the money, and charge consumers, and that's where the DOJ looks. If Apple does something with its 40% share (with Samsung at 24%, and companies like Motorola all the way down at 6%), that is viewed as meaningfully harming consumers, the DOJ will pursue them.

raverbashing• 13 years ago

Well, by default Wordpress doesn't present me with alternatives to Akismet as well.

adventured4• 13 years ago

If the DOJ decides that blogging is an important market, and the theoretical abuse is meaningful in terms of impacting consumers, they could pursue Wordpress over the matter.

Smart phones in the US is a market measured in the tens of billions of dollars per year. Apple has over 40% of it. The money involved makes it a much bigger issue than eg blogging.

frank_boyd• 13 years ago

Criminal or not - if you let commercial entities dictate things this way and you accept this, it shows that your self-esteem is too low.

If you respect yourself, you don't let others play you.

quadrangle2• 13 years ago

Yeah, people with low self-esteem deserve to be victims right? If you're a sucker or a victim, it's because you deserve it. Very compelling argument… (I'm being sarcastic obviously)

csmuk• 13 years ago

No one deserves to be a victim but it certainly doesn't stop people finding a large source of victims.

Agree with you and the OP.

jlmorton• 13 years ago

It's interesting that Google reportedly demanded Apple allow Latitude in Maps on the iPhone as a prerequisite for providing turn-by-turn navigation. Apple refused, built their own maps product...and then Google cancels Latitude?

http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/09/26/disagreements-over...

chalst• 13 years ago

I think the Apple Insider piece is a problematic summary of Paczowski's piece, and leads to a mistaken idea of what went wrong with the Google-Apple negotiations The original article is at http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/09/26/disagreements-over...

Paczowski's article says that Google's request to include Latitude was one of four items that were "major points of contention between the two companies" (besides the general deterioration in the relationship between the two companies), while claiming that voice navigation was the most important. Nowhere is it suggested that inclusion of Latitude was non-negotiable or the point on which negotiations crumbled.

hahainternet2• 13 years ago

Don't trust a single word that comes out of AI. It's literally a pro Apple conspiracy theorist site.

steelcm• 13 years ago

This is the hacker news comment thread from yesterday which I presume sparked off this post: "Apple maps: how Google lost when everyone thought it had won" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6711551

pkaler• 13 years ago

Except that Google does the exact same thing with Google Play Services on Android. Ask Skyhook. On top of that, Google keeps pushing organic SERP listings further and further down the page to push people to Google+.

We actually live in much better times than the Microsoft monopoly days. Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook have asymmetric business models. Consumers benefit in the long run as they all battle each other.

Apple doesn't have to monetize Maps so they can chip away at Google's ad revenue. Google doesn't have to monetize Android OS and devices so they can chip away at Apple's hardware/software revenue.

Doctor_Fegg4• 13 years ago

Indeed. Google pushes Google Maps as an unchangeable default just as much as Apple does, just not on Android.

iOS market share: 54% (or less, who you believe).

Google Search market share: 67%.

So when Google Search lets you replace Google Maps as the in-page default with Bing Maps/OpenStreetMap/whatever - you know, when you search for a city or zipcode - I'll start worrying about the iOS defaults.

sdoering• 13 years ago

Could you explain, what your argument does to the discussion? I mean, if on my desktop/laptop I am feed up with Google Maps in SERPs, I can use Bing or DDG or whatever.

On iOS (and maybe on Android) not that much.

Your argument should have been: Imagine a world, where on your desktop on Windows you can only use Bing Maps. Then your argument might have been valid.

cromwellian3• 13 years ago

Please explain how that's technically going to work. You're talking about federating the huge Google search query volume out to third party sites, which have to respond typically in just a few dozen milliseconds, and have to work with Google Instant and Google Suggest without significantly adding to user interface delay.

At best, you could stick an <IFRAME> in the page and point it at a user configured maps site, only you don't know if it is going to return a maps result. What if the query isn't for a location? Or what if the user's third party map supplier doesn't have the location? Then you get a big empty <IFRAME> with nothing in it, and a bad user experience. You'd also increase the perception that the Google search results are slow because it would take longer for the page to finish loading.

Allowing pluggable providers on the client for launching URL intents makes sense, I don't think it makes as much sense for search engines to federate queries in this way, there are much more difficult performance and privacy issues with such a model.

The Portal/Portlet model of "search" has been tried before and users didn't really like the experience.

quadrangle2• 13 years ago

Apple is accused of being criminal. So showing that Google does the same thing is a refutation?

If Bank of America illegally forecloses on people, it's okay because Citibank does that too?

nknighthb2• 13 years ago

Apple is not being accused of being criminal by anyone who understands antitrust law. The proof is the comparison to Microsoft, an entity that held a clear monopoly where Apple does not.

netcan2• 13 years ago

"So showing that Google does the same thing is a refutation?" - genuinely interesting question.

Do common law principle apply in some way here? IE, assuming there is no legal precedent, is the lack of litigation elsewhere relevant?

parley2• 13 years ago

I have both the GMail and Chrome apps installed on my iPad, though I mostly prefer Safari. When I open a link in the GMail app, it opens it in Chrome. I can find no way to alter this setting.

One might argue that it's not the same situation, but it's quite clear that no player wants us to step outside their dome, and it's equally sad - however not surprising in any way.

magicalist2• 13 years ago

well, the first search result I get for "gmail ios chrome" has a screenshot and mentions how to turn it off, but for more specific help, here's the help page on how to enable or disable opening gmail links in Chrome: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/3114652

(tl;dr: go to "google apps" in the settings)

parley2• 13 years ago

There it was, thanks! That's commendable of them. While I hope everyone now disregards the specific example in my comment, I'm afraid it doesn't change my personal view of the involved companies and their intentions very much.

johnsea3• 13 years ago

It is also criminal that Apple and Microsoft get away with enforcing a 'single point of app store'.

Monopoly or not, states set the rules and these two are points where imho government should enforce choice.

simonh2• 13 years ago

The problem with that is that you'd be making the Kindle business model illegal too. Same for games consoles, both handheld and portable. There's nothing novel or unique about app stores. Companies have been able to tightly control the media ecosystem for their devices for decades. Disrupting that would make the entire business model of subsidizing the device on the back of controlling access to the media nonviable.

Goodbye video console market. Asta la Vista Gameboy. So long Kindle e-book reader. Unless you want to pay triple the current price for your next model of any of those. A sudden price hike like that would kill those markets stone dead.

Be careful what you wish for, lest you get it.

Packeteer4• 13 years ago

Except the parent is wrong, the federal government limits states in matters of commerce, the bulk of which would be conducted interstate, not intrastate.

States cannot limit the prosecution of commerce outside itself. It was an attempt to limit state rivalries, such as Texas telling Other states it had to pay a premium to use its ports.

johnsea3• 13 years ago

I don't understand your point about 'goodbye'. Are you saying that the hardware is subsidized?

But it's a problem I didn't think of. While I don't mind Kindle, consoles I mind for phones, tablets and 'normal' computers. Probably a distinction should be made.

pyalot23• 13 years ago

The choice of default is meaningless for browsers, even if you had it, because the only browser that exists on iOS is Safari.

Yes, you might be able to download something called "Chrome" or "Firefox", but what you're getting isn't those browsers.

What you're getting is iOS Safari the browser, with the interface around it replaced by Google or Mozilla.

This is because Apples TOS forbid you from creating a program that downloads and executes code from the internet to drive your application, which basically means no downloading html/JS and no "executing" html by rendering it, or running JS.

And this is the really criminal part, the default choice, that's just the icing on the cake.

magicalist2• 13 years ago

I originally came to a similar line of reasoning as you, but I've found a surprising number of people use Chrome on iOS. It's probably not large in relative terms, but they are out there. The primary benefit seems to be being able to sync their browser with their phone, which I do find handy on Android, so I can see the appeal. Obviously if you use Safari on your desktop machine, you're then doubly invested in using mobile safari. Often javascript execution isn't the bottleneck anyway, network is, so interpreted JS can be good enough (maybe at least if you don't know what you're missing out on when it does hurt you).

pyalot23• 13 years ago

If you think of a browser as "just this thing that renders the page", you're correct, it's basically irrelevant how it technically is implemented.

However that'd be a very poor view of what a browser is. A browser is the platform, the runtime if you will, that lets us build applications on the internet.

The first browser was pretty much good at nothing but rendering bits of text, shortly followed by images, and it grew from there.

Today browsers have a myriad of capabilities that make exciting applications on the internet possible, such as: CSS transitions, CSS animations, CSS gradients, CSS calc, html5, WebGL, Web Audio Data, media streaming data, video elements, audio elements, binary data handling, object URLs, zip URLs, binary data requesting, cross origin resources sharing, WebSockets, WebRTC, realtime video/audio capture/encoding/transmission/decoding/playback, and so forth.

This are features of the "browser engine implementation". And not all browsers implement the same features. For instance take iOS safari which lacked the CSS capability for position:fixed and usable overflow:scroll handling until just about a year ago. All browsers in 1997 already implemented this flawlessly, and correctly. But for whatever reason, Apple didn't until more than a decade after the inception of that feature.

Similarly other features aren't implemented, too numerous to list, save for the one that annoys me personally most, that is WebGL.

A similar situation was evident on the desktop internet in the time period between 1998 and 2004, where Internet Explorer 6 ruled supreme. But other browsers (chiefly Firefox) offered a different implementation, and hence put Microsoft under pressure to improve internet explorer if they wish to stay relevant.

The same kind of pressure cannot be exerted on Apples iOS browser, because you're forbidden from exercising it. This is bad for the Web, it's bad for me and it's bad for you.

Unsurmountable barriers to competition are always bad for everybody, except the one building the barrier.

esolyt• 13 years ago

I agree but even now it's not meaningless. A browser isn't just a rendering engine. I use Chrome on iOS for several reasons (Bookmark sync, Tab sync, better interface). Being able to set the default browser and the default maps app would be good start for Apple.

netcan2• 13 years ago

There's the software politics side of this. They're abstract and legalistic. I think there is merit in thinking about this stuff in terms of freedom, abuse of market power & such. There are definitely things companies can do that make the tech ecosystem worse for users and we need to watch out for them. But there are also costs to legal interventions, antitrust and such.

Getting regulators involved means these decisions will be made based on provable things and rigid rules and that's not ideal here. The best thing for users, progression of technology and such are pretty subjective issues. Legalistic systems are not good at making these kinds of decisions.

They're not optimal either, perhaps worse than just eating things play out. Remember that the IE/MS stuff from the 90s basically sorted itself out. The legal interventions had little effect on the long term. Yes, IE dominance may have slowed down the development of the web for a while. But, the quality gap between IE & Firefox/Chrome combined with improvements in software distribution via the web got the market back to solid competition pretty quickly. Meanwhile the long antitrust stuff was a huge, expensive distraction.

There are genuine reasons for locking down iOS. The reality is that putting power in users hands also creates complexity. The ability to change settings is also the ability to screw up settings. Can't change also means "can't screw up." If a computer has features like this which a user doesn't understand, they effectively reduce the power of that computer for them.

I'm not saying that Apple made the right decisions. I'm not saying their motivations are all about user experience or that the desire to dictate users' maps, browsers, calendars, doesn't play a role. "blatantly self-interested and user-hostile stance" sounds a little strong to me, but it's not completely unreasonable. What I am saying is that we have no perfect solution to these things.

If the choice is leave it to Apple & competition or get judges & lawyers involved, I prefer to let it play out unless things get pretty bad.

Cthulhu_• 13 years ago

Link bait title; it's not criminal, it's Apple's prerogative to not allow default apps to be replaced, just like how it's Google's prerogative to demand a Google account to be installed before using an Android phone or the Play store.

nickstinemates• 13 years ago

I couldn't disagree more about the problem statement or the solution.

First, people do have a choice. Don't buy iOS/iPhone/Tablet. Buy something else that fits your needs. Competition is strong. Problem solved. There's plenty of alternates. As they say, 'vote with your wallet/eyes/?'

Second, shouldn't Apple ultimately fail if this is a bad choice? Won't they get out innovated? Someone pointed out Microsoft, and I agree. They were great 15 years ago. Less so and less so every year, enough so that OS X is considered the 'leader' in the tech community. Hell, even my mom wants a mac now.

Packeteer4• 13 years ago

Apple provides a solution that is a single unit, hardware AND software that is tied together. Think of it as a car, the whole thing is purchased at one time, functions entirely on its own from end to end, but you can add features to it.

The alternatives are allowed, but you are buying a singular device, not a platform for other developers per se, it just happens to allow developers to create software for it.

On the other hand, you have Microsoft which has historically been a platform software solution, building a culture of allowing anyone to build on it, licensing portions and features to developers for them to build on. Until recently, there was only tepid attempts at hardware branded Microsoft where as Apple has always been hardware bound to software to the point you can't easily install OSX on anything other than Apple hardware. The same cannot be said for Microsoft, the only other company that is bound by this rule of multiple defaults.

That rule came about because Microsoft had licensing rules that prevent devs from using MS software on their own hardware if that hardware included competing software. If you wanted to use Windows, you HAD TO use IE only. Microsoft was using monopolistic practices, but did not have a monopoly btw.

In a nutshell, Apple is selling a singular device that happens to have a doorway that allows users to install addition software to expand the hardware/OS beyond its default intended (by Apple standards based on analyzing the user market) purposes.

Other alternatives are hardware solutions that allow your choice of software as middleware to gain access to the hardware functionality. Two hugely different ideologies.

One is a fork, the other is build-a-bear.

It is criminal that Apple gets away with not allowing alternative defaults

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