> This is going to be a big mess. PayTM as a company isn’t known for respecting user privacy.
Controversial opinion here, but this is part of the reason I like that Apple makes (practically) all purchases run through them. They don’t sell my information, and they have an incentive to not change that.
> but this is part of the reason I like that Apple makes (practically) all purchases run through them.
I vehemently disagree - in the name of "protecting privacy" Apple has been fooling users to believe that only Apple can be trusted with user data, and the biggest lie they sell is that they don't do anything with your data, unlike other corporates. From crippling Safari by allowing full cookies by default, and claiming to block trackers and browser fingerprinting (which a Google study itself has busted), to collecting user data in "anonymised" form Apple has been disingenuously mining its user's data with users given no choice.
> Because of all the browsers they have led the way in reducing the ability for advertisers to track you.
Certainly when compared to Chrome, but Firefox? Brave? Tor Browser? No. Which is why it's so unfortunate that you can't get a real third party browser for iOS.
Tor Browser is terrible for security, and I don’t think Firefox started doing tracking prevention before Safari did. I may have the timeline wrong though. As for Brave, well. They have a different business model but I’m not entirely clear on what their technological innovation is?
The exit node can't do anything your ISP can't. Meanwhile you can choose the exit node, which you often can't for your ISP, which means you can choose one operated by someone you trust.
And even if you don't, what are they going to do to a TLS connection?
> and I don’t think Firefox started doing tracking prevention before Safari did
Tor Browser is based on Firefox, so the anti-fingerprinting work they do regularly gets merged back into Firefox proper. Moreover, Firefox has had some of the best anti-tracking addons since forever, but you can only have those if you actually have Firefox.
But Tor Browser is still more stringent about certain things, e.g. they always reset the window to a standard size when you open it so the page can't track you based on that, which Firefox itself doesn't do because it's kind of annoying to the user. Which is another reason why there is benefit in having multiple browsers -- they each have different trade offs.
> They have a different business model but I’m not entirely clear on what their technological innovation is?
They do a lot of good work on ad blocking, and are willing to be a lot more aggressive about it, since it aligns directly with their incentives.
Tor itself is not what I was referring to, although it has its problems as well, mainly that it's extremely identifiable. Tor is not a good idea for most people to use full-time.
The rest of this doesn't really answer my question about Safari vs Firefox, and I'm pretty much uninterested in appeals to Tor Browser as something that should be universally adopted.
The main point your link is making is that Tor Browser is purposely a monoculture to avoid fingerprinting and monocultures are bad for security because it gives attackers somewhere to concentrate their attacks. You're using this to argue in support of Safari as a monoculture on iOS?
Meanwhile, Tor Browser is based on Firefox ESR, but that doesn't mean they can't backport patches, which they regularly do.
> Tor itself is not what I was referring to, although it has its problems as well, mainly that it's extremely identifiable. Tor is not a good idea for most people to use full-time.
It's extremely identifiable as Tor, but that's exactly why most people should use it more of the time, so that it isn't regarded as suspicious when somebody has a more serious reason to.
You didn’t read the whole thing if that’s what you drew from it. Safari on iOS is used by everyone with an iPhone, Tor Browser is used (typically) by people with something to hide or a lot at stake, which makes it a singularly desirable target that is especially dangerous because it doesn’t receive security patches at the same speed as mainline Firefox. The monoculture is only part of the problem, the bigger part is using a browser with an inferior security model and leaving it hopelessly out of date. Using Tor with an up to date version of Chrome is much less hazardous to your health, and I really recommend that approach if you want to use Tor.
> It's extremely identifiable as Tor, but that's exactly why most people should use it more of the time, so that it isn't regarded as suspicious when somebody has a more serious reason to.
No. That’s just not going to happen, for a number of reasons, and hoping it does happen is not a strategy for helping the significant number of people who are already using it because they do have a serious reason to, and are consequently at risk because of how vulnerable their browser is.
Not in the sense that you can de-anonymize people easily (though easier than you might think) but that it makes your traffic identifiable as Tor traffic, which can be worse than the anonymity benefits. VPNs (setup with WireGuard, possibly via Algo, though never a commercial provider) are a better choice for most users.
Apple’s careers page has job listings indicating they are using an industry standard data warehousing, ETL, star schema etc. user analytics stack for something. I don’t think any specific claims they made about privacy are false (they have many different products and services), but they are definitely doing some kind of data mining.
Whenever you install/update iOS/OSX they specifically ask you if you want to send anonymised data to Apple which details how you are using the OS. They couldn't be more upfront and clear about it.
And when I was working at Apple years ago they were using a very old and clunky SAP system for all of their customer purchases. It would be pretty common sense to ETL this to a data lake in order to do reports e.g. which apps are popular.
> Even if Apple can’t be trusted with my data, I’d rather that it lie with them.
May I ask why? If hypothetically Apple isn't trustworthy with your data, why would you prefer them over any other company with a hypothetically similarly-bad level of trustworthiness?
> Controversial opinion here, but this is part of the reason I like that Apple makes (practically) all purchases run through them. They don’t sell my information, and they have an incentive to not change that.
I'm sympathetic to this, because I do think it's great that Apple values user privacy. But I think it's unfortunate that the perception is that the only way to get that privacy is to use a heavily locked-down device that the user doesn't actually have control over, and that the entity protecting your privacy has to impose strict restrictions on what you can do with that device.
Obviously Google will never be a good example of a company that protects user data and user privacy; their entire business model depends on the opposite. But that doesn't mean that the concept of a company selling a premium product that protects user privacy by default couldn't also allow users to do whatever they want with their device.
The problem with open devices is that at some point someone is going to undercut you by providing a "free" product and then we're back in square one of trading user data - and in the process you created a fragmentation hell.
Nah, give me expensive, locked down products (as long as they work). Clearly its something the consumers want, hence Apple's monstrous pile of cash.
> The problem with open devices is that at some point someone is going to undercut you by providing a "free" product and then we're back in square one of trading user data
Except that the stores have to compete with each other, so who is going to choose the one with all the apps that trade user data? Certainly not the users who are allegedly patronizing Apple only because they don't want that.
> and in the process you created a fragmentation hell.
I don't understand what this is supposed to be about. Is it "fragmentation" that you can get books from a book store and a library and online and a thrift store? How is that a problem? If the books in the thrift store are torn up and written in, why not just buy from a different one?
> Clearly its something the consumers want, hence Apple's monstrous pile of cash.
People keep saying this, but the fact that you have no alternatives to Apple's store on their devices is precisely why you can't prove it that way. We have no data on how many people are buying their devices for the store vs. despite the store and for the hardware or the OS or iMessage etc.
“Except that the stores have to compete with each other, so who is going to choose the one with all the apps that trade user data? Certainly not the users who are allegedly patronizing Apple only because they don't want that.”
They will when many of the key apps are only available through the privacy agnostic stores.
How are the "key apps" going to move there when the users refuse to install apps from there? If it was so easy, why don't all the "key apps" do this already and stop using Apple's store so that everybody has to switch to Android?
Key apps have zero incentive to try to get people to switch to Android. Even if there was, there is a prisoners dilemma - it would only work if many of them switched at once.
This is absolutely nothing like the situation with multiple app stores, where not all apps have to switch at once.
Most users do not refuse to use Facebook. New people take up smoking daily. The idea that users would ‘refuse’ to buy apps from a store run by Facebook (or worse) is an idealistic fantasy.
As for why apps would switch to other stores? Paid exclusives, just as with every other media type - TV, Movies, Books, Podcasts.
People who have hits get paid a huge premium for exclusives, because it forces customers to use the new store or platform.
Epic is already buying exclusives. Amazon and Facebook, and TenCent et all would obviously do so too.
The only choice for users would be to install all of the stores.
The only choice for developers will be to deal with all of the stores.
Apps will be the new TV. Costs will rise. Almost everything will be funded by the store networks.
The long tail of small developers will be absolutely decimated.
Users won’t care and will barely remember the difference. The ten years of Apple’s store will be a quaint memory from the early days.
> Key apps have zero incentive to try to get people to switch to Android.
Google Play is less stringent about privacy than Apple (right?), so the same incentives would exist.
> Even if there was, there is a prisoners dilemma - it would only work if many of them switched at once.
Which would still be true with alternate stores. Nobody wants to be the first to switch to a shady store that customers don't trust and abandon the one they do.
> Most users do not refuse to use Facebook. New people take up smoking daily. The idea that users would ‘refuse’ to buy apps from a store run by Facebook (or worse) is an idealistic fantasy.
Then what's stopping them all from switching to Android right now? Why haven't they done it already?
> As for why apps would switch to other stores? Paid exclusives, just as with every other media type - TV, Movies, Books, Podcasts.
That only gets the user to use the store to install one app which they're already familiar with. It doesn't require anyone to trust the same store for apps they're not familiar with. For that to happen the store would still have to establish a reputation for trustworthiness, which would require it to not carry shady apps.
> The only choice for users would be to install all of the stores.
> The only choice for developers will be to deal with all of the stores.
These are obviously contradictory positions. If all the apps were in all the stores, a user would only need to use one of them (presumably the one they like the best). If all the users had all the stores, a developer would only need to be in one of them (presumably the one users like the best, to maximize competitive advantage over alternative apps).
The stores still have to compete with each other for users.
None of your conclusions make any sense. Competition reduces costs because all else equal people will choose the alternative which takes a smaller profit margin and passes that money to the user or the app developer, which either makes apps less expensive for the same amount of developer revenue, or increases developer revenue at the same price to the user which leads to more and better apps.
Monopolies are abusive and inefficient, so removing them makes things better. It's why we have antitrust laws.
Paid exclusives cause other stores to be more popular. They don't cause other stores to be less restrictive, if that's what the users want, because having an exclusive on a garbage app the users don't want would fail to get anyone to use the store, and getting users to buy anything other than the non-garbage exclusive app from the other store is only done by getting the users to trust the store, by not having it be full of garbage apps.
As someone in Kenya pointed out to me once, I asked someone (at Safaricom, their biggest tech company) why Kenyans seemed to prefer Android. He laughed and said: We don't prefer Android, it's what we can afford. I suppose coming from my first world bubble of friends of family it's reality check.
It's not about selling your store activity. The apps on these stores do not comply with basic guideline like having a privacy policy, not forcing users to give access to all permissions, etc.
So basically just like the internet and PCs - no guarantees given ? I don't have a problem with this and I don't really see the value add for the 30% cut.
You may be smart and wise and know how to avoid dodgy apps, but can you trust everyone you want to have a private chat online with to not unwittingly install a screen recorder? And differently from PCs, can you trust everyone you chat with in real life to not unwittingly install an app that turns on the microphone and/or camera?
Don’t get me wrong — I want there to be 3rd party app stores, even if only because of the sexual Puritanism that Apple displays. That don’t mean there aren’t valid reasons to be extremely skepticism about any attempts to do so.
I think it's reasonable for Apple to make it difficult for shady third-parties to get you to install their malware-ridden app store, but I don't agree that the only way to keep users safe is to disallow any third-party app installs entirely.
Apple just currently has little incentive to do the former, because a) it's more difficult, b) they have a financial benefit to keeping everyone in their own app store.
Given that, it's naive to think that Apple's main motivation here is to protect users. Sure, that's a part of it (maybe even a big part!), but they could protect their users in other ways, but those other ways would likely hurt their bottom line.
And I think that is why people cry anti-trust all the time when it comes to this: in a perfect world where no one was motivated by profit (and consumer lock-in), we can imagine that Apple would find a way to open up the platform a bit more.
This has nothing to do with Apple, specifically, though. This is an argument for citizens to get more involved in their government process, and to avoid being suckered by government fear-mongering that results in citizen's accepting ridiculous intrusions into their lives.
Apple deciding to allow or not allow third-party app stores is irrelevant in the face of a government that has decided to pass a law that requires a particular app to be on all phones. If that law is passed, that app will end up on phones, regardless. The only alternative is that Apple would give up a market consisting the second-most populous country in the world, which isn't likely.
But I want to install them. Forcing them to go trhough Apple forces them to follow certain guideline. I like the fact that there is no alternative for those who do not want to follow those guidelines.
One of the biggest reasons why people fucking loved the iPhone to begin with was that Apple made the decision to not let AT&T or anyone else bundle any bloatware with it.
The problem is transparency — nobody has perfect information about what apps do. People on HN will be better informed than most, but do you think your mom or dad will know not to install certain apps that might be widely known (except to them) to be predatory? What about malicious apps that, say, steal credit card information?
I don't see where in the article they say that PayTM would be processing payments. From what I read, it just says that PayTM was in violation of store policy. I think the parent poster was implying that PayTM shouldn't be hosted on the app store because their violations needed to fixed.
That's not an argument for Apple forcing everyone else out. You can still choose to just interface with Apple services, even if other app stores or payment services are available.
Thought experiment. Imagine that MasterCard charged 30% of every purchase at the groceriy store, restaurant, pay gas or shop online.
Or... what if Windows charged software developers 30% of sales of any product. And Microsoft wouldn't let you give away free software, in the name of "privacy" whatever that means for Apple.
On the flip side, they become the central honey pot for every apple user ever. Most of whom sit generally further along the wealthy/important person scale. Incredibly high incentives there for exploit. The high stakes should translate to proportionate attention? One can only hope.
Controversial opinion here, but this is part of the reason I like that Apple makes (practically) all purchases run through them. They don’t sell my information, and they have an incentive to not change that.