> Both Apple and Google can be guilty of anti-competitive and anti-freedom behavior.
I said as much. I mentioned twice that I wasn't trying to defend Apple.
The article is nominally about web standards, but the WHATWG—whose steering committee includes Google and Microsoft—hijacked web standards. The article is painting a picture where Apple is largely acting alone, but that's not even remotely true.
> Android is caving to the pressure to follow suit more and more every day.
Pressure? What pressure? Are you claiming that Apple is somehow pressuring Google into locking down Android?
You were trying to re-focus the discussion away from Apple's behavior by pointing to Google.
Yes, both stepped over the line trying to anti-competitively make their browser dominant. Everyone had an ostensible choice to not use Chrome but if you spend enough money to be pre-installed, bundled, advertised, etc everywhere, you can take over. Good old fashioned monopoly tactics, right?
Apple took the novel, and IMO far more disturbing and reprehensible, approach by simply not giving anyone any choice. Since then, we've seen a huge expansion of DRM, integrity checks, eFuse, etc to strip everyone of their freedom. Companies got a taste of that sweet total control with iOS and wanted more.
> Apple took the novel, and IMO far more disturbing and reprehensible, approach by simply not giving anyone any choice.
Users who disagree with the concept of walled gardens have the choice of buying into an open platform.
As long as the platform creator is honest and doesn't try to yank away the supposed freedom to run any software you like that they fraudulently promised when they announced and marketed the platform.
> You were trying to re-focus the discussion away from Apple's behavior by pointing to Google.
No, I was trying to re-focus the discussion on all of the monopolists: Apple and Google on mobile, Apple and Microsoft on desktop. To talk only of Apple is to ignore the crucial roles of Google and Microsoft as monopolists.
I didn't say they invented the walled garden. I said Apple made it acceptable and successful for general purpose computing. "I can't use Firefox on my phone" doesn't quite have the same ring as "I can't use Firefox on my Switch".
Ask yourself who was the adversary for this DRM model? Game console lockdowns were built to target publishers. Mobile lockdowns are squarely targeted at users. Both are bad but the implications, magnitude, and overall consequences are very different, IMO.
> I said Apple made it acceptable and successful for general purpose computing.
So why did Windows Phone fail as a walled garden?
I'd say that it was because of Google's fraudulent promise that Android would be the platform that allowed users to run anything they liked. Google traded false promises of "openness" for market share.
(As well as Google using it's internet video monopoly as an anticompetitive weapon to prevent Windows Phone from having a YouTube client)
Why did Windows RT fail in the tablet market if walled gardens were so acceptable?
It turns out that users were perfectly capable of rejecting walled garden platforms even after the iPhone.
Your average person who wants to use Snapchat, if given a choice between a phone that runs Snapchat versus one that doesn’t, simply chooses the one that can. (Windows Phone never had Snapchat.)
Same with Photoshop. Neither Windows Phone or RT had any software support. It’s like buying a game console with no games — what’s the point?
No regular person even knows what a walled garden is. It’s not a decision factor.
By that logic, Windows RT/Windows Phone should have succeeded since they supported running versions of Microsoft Office and the other platforms did not.
This is a nonsequitor. You fear a loss of control (someone will force you to install Google and MS apps) so you choose iOS because it has less control.
That’s not true for me. And I get my family on Apple devices because it’s vastly easier to be their de facto IT department that way. When I go to visit my sister, I know my nephew hasn’t sideloaded a virus into her iPad, except that if he somehow did, it’d be so unlikely that we’d have fun talking about it.
I’m not arguing that you shouldn’t use more open portable devices. I contend that there are practical reasons why I greatly prefer them.
(But lock down my laptop to a degree that I can’t install and run software from wherever, and I’d fling it out the nearest window. The above applies to tablets and phones and that’s it.)
I'm on it for the software + hardware combo. Take either away and I'd just get whatever cheap crap instead, and probably use my computers, phones, and tablets a lot less (wouldn't bother with a tablet at all, most likely).
FWIW my intro to computers was DOS and later Windows, and Linux was my daily driver for a little over a decade before I finally gave Macs a fair shot. My first three or so smartphones were Android, before I ever tried an iPhone.
This is all true if you only look at 1-2 countries. However taking the rest of world into account and this quickly falls apart. In China for example you can use a custom rom and still use digital payments like Alipay no problem.
So you’re saying Apple legitimized some bad behavior, and now Google does it too, but we should only blame Apple, but Google does it too. You’re seriously blaming Apple for Google locking down Google pay on android?
> That's a long response that boils down to whatabout-ism.
When someone's saying "X is destroying Y!" and you point out that A and B have at least as much culpability for whatever is happening to Y as X does, that's not whataboutism. It's accurate assignment of blame.
