I can't tell you how much I dislike the non-removable apps.
It basically killed my first android phone, which was very low end but fine for my needs when I got it.
But it came with a ton of non-removable apps which were fine at first, but then they slowly grew to take up more and more of the storage as they updated, til nothing left.
I could downgrade them again, I think, but they would soon update again and use up the storage.
I guess I could have disabled update, but I wanted that for other things.
Ended up jailbreaking my phone so I could remove them.
But then other apps like the one for online banking refuse to run because "security reasons"
Adb allows to uninstall non removable apps also in non rootable devices. It helped me to remove all junk, including most Google crap, from an old tablet making it useable gain.
It's extremely annoying to me that Apple devices don't allow you to delete their apps. I have youtube music on my laptop and every time I search for "Music" in spotlight or Alfred, it picks Apple Music instead of Youtube Music app, so I often have to wait until it starts up to close it.
I want to delete Apple Music, TV, Podcast, etc. I never use them, why do they force me to have them on my device that I paid $3000 for?
I can't speak for Mac, but at least on iPhone, I think all of the default apps can be deleted. At the very least, they hide from search, although I don't know if they are actually gone from storage.
I know for a while i had music deleted, although Siri would complain about needing music to be installed for certain functionality. (i think that has since been changed? all my defaults are installed so idk)
>but then they slowly grew to take up more and more of the storage as they updated, til nothing left. I could downgrade them again, I think, but they would soon update again and use up the storage.
One poster mentioned ADB, but another quicker way is to disable the app. It still uses storage, but can't start. If you do this early on, or after downgrading, then the phone can remain like new. Did this a lot on a phone I had 5+ years ago, shame it needs to be done though.
It's very telling that a rule needs to be created to allow users to perform an otherwise obvious action. It shows that big tech don't have even the minimal amount of ethics.
> Apple is also highly likely to object to a provision that would effectively prohibit gatekeeper firms from blocking side-loading or alternative app stores or payment methods—the entire heart of the current dispute between Epic and Apple.
The rule says the app must be removable or the data collected by the app must be shared with smaller competitors, this will probably evolve to also share data with governments at later stage.
>As part of its new Digital Services Act, the EU is planning to force the likes of Apple, Amazon, and Google to hand over customer data to smaller rivals in an effort to loosen the grip of big tech on consumers. A draft of the legislation stated that tech companies "shall not use data collected on the platform... for [their] own commercial activities... unless they [make it] accessible to business users active in the same commercial activities."
How is this not going to end up as:
1. Manufacturers installing their own apps... and some junk app by someone else whose name I don't even know well enough to trust.
2. Main vendors sharing data with even more entities who have no business having it, and even less incentive to protect it?
It would be nice if the EU also looked at which APIs these platforms allow third-party apps to use. For example, Android 4.2.2 removed the API for putting the phone into / out of Airplane Mode, requiring phones to be rooted to run apps like this:
Not giving users full control over when they broadcast their effective location to the mobile phone network seems like it should also be a GDPR violation.
As a previous Android user, this feels right. I think the tipping point was the replacement of the e-mail app with Gmail. After that, I got frustrated with the stock app situation and switched to LineageOS to avoid it.
As a current Apple user, this feels wrong. I bought iDevices because I don't want my data shared, and want reasonable stock apps—I don't want to spend days comparing every single calendar app because the choice is "necessary". Apple promote third-party apps in the App Store anyway, even when they do the same as their stock apps.
I would love if this can be extended to laptops. I have no need for apps like Safari, Apple TV, Podcasts and Music. Apple doesn't give an option in Launchpad for this. I would prefer to rather not force delete application contents from terminal.
With each OS update, I keep finding new annoying apps like Apple TV which seem to pop up at screen without me launching them.
Why can't this just be reached by market pressure? In a free and open market, producers offering unpopular products should not be able to survive for long.
Two locked-down ecosystems, controlled by two large corporations that act largely without competition between their respective market segments and who keep the barriers to entry high enough that no other competition can enter is exactly not a free market.
And, surprise, it is hurting customers.
This is exactly an attempt to make an entrenched duopoly face some actual competition.
Copyright laws _are_ overly restrictive, but that's not what gives Apple and Google such power. It's how much they're established in the mobile systems market - which is not a free market. At this point it would be a miracle if any other OS maker made a dent in their marketshares without huge government intervention (think the US, EU or China forcing a new OS) – otherwise no way users _and_ developers would come. So there needs to be some regulation to stop anticonsumer practices.
Copyright laws are by no means perfect, but they solve a very significant flaw of the free market: without the "overly restrictive copyright laws" you would have literally thousands of technologies under lock and key and unavailable to anyone except the inventor of those technologies.
Apple's commanding lead in processor design is entirely unavailable to anyone except Apple. How do you propose the free market to solve that? Oh wait, it didn't and it hasn't: there are no regulations governing processor designs. You're free to go ahead and implement anything you want.
The patent laws solve the actual problem of a free market: they give access to a technology to everyone (after a period of time). Something a free market would never agree to because that destroys the advantage of a company.
--- start quote ---
A patent is a form of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of years in exchange for publishing an enabling public disclosure of the invention.
Hilariously anti competitive licensing agreements that companies like Google require for example. All the large phone manufacturers are required to preinstall Googles software on any Android they sell and give it preferential treatment, selling an Android phone without would be a Play Store license violation in the U.S. . Market pressure against Google Play would have to be gigantic to get them to completely abandon their existing product lines.
> In a free and open market,
Could you tell me were to find one? Even Amazon had issues getting its kindle product line produced and it doesn't exactly lack the money to get that done.
It is possible and legal to build and sell an Android phone using the free AOSP with no Google Play store or other Google services. However very few customers would buy it because it would be missing many of the features they expect.
> However very few customers would buy it because it would be missing many of the features they expect.
There is a glaringly large hole in that claim: Despite Googles best efforts the Amazon Kindle exists and people used it. I even explicitly mentioned that Amazon had issues finding a manufacturer to produce it.
What could be achieved by some theoretical model of an open market is largely irrelevant. The more relevant point is what HAS been achieved by the actual market. If the market, given enough time, is still doing things that are hurting consumers, at some point the government must intervene.
The current status quo is the result of a free market. There is no magical law of nature that prevents monopolies, it is in fact a very common outcome of a free market.
Sometimes the market chooses the best of various bad options, if the only options available are those bad options, or information to avoid the bad options is not readily available (e.g. you should be able to know which apps are undeletable before buying the phone).
So the best product, that violates the ideas of ownership in this case (if I own a device I should decide what apps run on it) might win in a free and open markets. But it's still OK to, for example, enforce normal expectations of device ownership, or enforce disclosure of information to ensure the consumer choice is genuine.
It’s been decades and computers still come with bloatware. Phones will likely have garbage for decades as well. If there’s a few pennies to make off doing it, companies will just do it and not leave many options.
Fair enough - that’s not what I meant. I believe there may be such problems, but I don’t believe this is one of them, so merely mentioning their existence is insufficient to add to the argument.
These problems always exist. "Free market that corrects itself" is nothing but a thought experiment. Additionally, the whole idea of such a market directly comes from an era when one person or a small group of people could potentially compete with anyone and everyone else, that is, from before industrial revolution.
And here's why:
- the main problem is that in a free market the only measure of success is profit. It has nothing to do with "whoever has a better product will win". A "better product" doesn't necessarily mean "better profits" or even "any profit at all".
- free market assumes that everyone will be free to compete, free "from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities". This fallacy assumes that humans don't exist. That they won't create monopolies, give money and capital to the people they want to (thus creating economic privileges) and deny goods to whoever they want (thus creating scarcities).
- free market assumes that all markets are created equal, and that all markets are driven by supply and demand. This is not so. We don't have infinite resources. We don't have infinite demand for those resources. Many markets are inelastic. Many markets are not even markets at all. Cancer patients are not a market, for example. And if they are treated as such, you end up with people dying, because the drugs are costly, their supply is (or will be artificially) constrained, and the demand for them is high.
- free market assumes that any new product or innovation can be made instantly or nearly instantly available by whoever came up with this product and they will be free to compete. And that it's equally easy to come up with a competing product anything that exists. This not only ignores fundamental rules of physics, biology, chemistry etc. It also ignores the complexities of modern life. "Oh, it's simple to solve the problem of a monopoly: all we have to do, as a community of thousands of developers, is to find billions of dollars and create a competing product in the next 10 years. Easy". And while we're at it, we can also go ahead and quickly create an alternative chemical reaction to produce vitamin C because China has a monopoly on it. And so on.
- free market assumes that all knowledge there is is instantly available to everyone and everyone can just build on that knowledge. Even though companies routinely create and protect trade secrets. And if you want to try and create something similar, you have to spend an insane amount of time and resources retracing the same steps and reverse-engineering stuff. Can anyone recreate Apple's A-series chips? No, not anyone. Maybe one or two companies in the world at the cost of billions of dollars and 10 or so years. And they would have to go through many of the same steps that Apple has gone through. And while they are doing that, Apple will have had 10 more years to improve stuff. And a lot of that work depends on other trade secrets like CPU manufacture that another monopoly/duopoly will or will not be willing to provide to you. And a lot of that stuff is undoubtedly relying on a lot of knowledge that's in the public domain precisely because of copyright laws.
And finally: the reason so many government regulations exist is because free market failed to find solutions that don't result in life being a misery:
- food and drug safety? Free market had no qualms of selling contaminated drugs for children: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_(horse) and so no need in testing food and drugs
- labor laws? Free market has had no qualms of working people to death for 15 hours a day with no days off and saw no problems with that
- free (as no pay) education? Free market had no qualms with only the rich getting proper education (what happened to "free from all forms of economic privilege" huh?)
- public services such as police and fire departments? Free market had no qualms about letting private fire brigades fight each other and protect only those who had enough money to pay.
- and the list just goes on and on and on. Minimum wage, polluting rivers (Cuyahoga River), exploding cars (Ford Pinto), health (tobacco), ... Until governments intervened, free market was more than happy with the "solutions" it came up with.
Because the duopoly you see is the direct consequence of such a free market. There were no regulations saying there must only be two, there have been dozens of competitors free to do whatever they please, and this is the situation we've arrived at.
Moreover, the whole premise of the free market is "survival of the fittest". Well, Apple and Google are the fittest, and they survived.
> You say ‘we’ve arrived here’ as if technology and culture have stopped evolving and all new work is being done within these two companies.
> This simply isn’t so. Apple and Google (especially) are both showing signs of ossification.
One: I never said this. Two: this has nothing to do with "free market will solve things"
> There is no reason an alternative, either from the community as a whole, or from a competitor could not be built over the next 10 years.
Once again: you bemoan that free market should be able to solve the problem of the duopoly. It has already solved it: by creating the duopoly. A free market will always tend towards monopolisation for the simple reason: the best way to stay alive is by destroying and/or buying the competition. The many regulations (from antitrust law to basic things like food and safety regulations) have arisen precisely because free market never arrives at good solutions.
And even if a competitor arises, it will, once again, be a competitor with nearly unlimited power and money creating a yet another, you guessed it, duopoly or monopoly.
> There is no reason an alternative, either from the community as a whole
"Community as a whole" does not "build an alternative". "Community as a whole" is a nation/country. So now you want government intervention for some reason.
> If that seems like too long to wait, consider that it’s less time than it took for the current situation to arise.
The current situation took about 10 years to arise. And Apple and Google are quite deeply entrenched now. So now you're taking a number out of the blue, and pretend it's a given. Try this for size: "there's no reason an alternative could not be built in the next 50 years". Just as out of the blue. Doesn't sound too good now, does it?
“Community as a whole” is anyone who is interested in a different software environment, e.g. open source, corporations who don’t like the duopoly, consumers who pick something that feels better.
If it’s in so many people’s interests to develop an alternative, then there are billions of dollars, and thousands of developers available to do it.
No reason at all it has to be another company with nearly unlimited power.
Those who believe the problem cannot be solved will not be the ones to solve it.
> If it’s in so many people’s interests to develop an alternative, then there are billions of dollars, and thousands of developers available to do it.
Where are those billions of dollars suddenly materialise from?
> No reason at all it has to be another company with nearly unlimited power.
What do you think billions of dollars are?
> Those who believe the problem cannot be solved will not be the ones to solve it.
Riiight. So this problem will be solved by a magical community of thousands of people working in unison and spending billions of dollars that materialise out of thin air. Got you. As we've seen this happen with Firefox phones. And Pine phones. And Librem phones. And Meizu. And PuzzlePhone. And Shiftphone. And...
Your resort to sarcasm suggests that your argument isn’t holding up.
Nobody is talking about money materializing out of thin air. All but two companies would stand to benefit from an alternative to the duopoly. Between them they certainly have many billions of dollars invest in an alternative.
Linux solved the problem of proprietary operating systems, and the Linux we see today was in fact built by a magical community of thousands of people working in unison and spending billions of dollars.
However the billions of dollars didn’t materialize out of thin air. They came from corporations and investors who saw that they could benefit from a free platform that wasn’t under the control of one or two companies.
One could argue they also are free to decide to buy some property that makes that so hard to be effectively impossible.
People do that all the time with game consoles, cars, fridges, smart light bulbs, etc.
So, does anything differentiate smartphones from those? If not, arguing all of those should be opened up, I guess, wouldn’t make it through the justice system (¿yet?)
If it’s “if the seller allows installing some apps, they have to open up for all apps”, game consoles would be affected, too, and one could argue that the likes of Fortnite would be, too (that isn’t hardware, but neither is iOS, and it’s iOS that people want to install apps on. If Apple opened the iPhone, but not iOS, I doubt people would be happy)
If it isn’t that, what is it that differentiates smart phones?
It basically killed my first android phone, which was very low end but fine for my needs when I got it. But it came with a ton of non-removable apps which were fine at first, but then they slowly grew to take up more and more of the storage as they updated, til nothing left. I could downgrade them again, I think, but they would soon update again and use up the storage. I guess I could have disabled update, but I wanted that for other things. Ended up jailbreaking my phone so I could remove them. But then other apps like the one for online banking refuse to run because "security reasons"