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I am arguing against their appeal. Censorship, decentralization, freedom to chose who you trust, etc. It’s the same appeal crypto uses to deceive inexperienced

I am arguing against their appeal. Censorship, decentralization, freedom to chose who you trust, etc. It’s the same appeal crypto uses to deceive inexperienced people into believing that these things are really relevant to their life. It’s manipulative. Personally I think these aspects are important and will probably play a bigger part in the future. But censorship is not why I think we should open up such a huge risk surface on iOS.

pxoe 4y ago
here's one example where app store policy disrupted one platform and thousands of people's lives: tumblr. the way it played out ended up very directly impacting online communities and creators. even those who might've been not as directly affected by policy changes, still end up getting disrupted by shifts in audience. those appstores end up affecting users well outside of where their reach supposedly ends, not limited to the actual customers of those appstores. they continuously engage in censorship, and it doesn't stop at 'good censorship', it can be opinionated, prudish, or materialistic and self-serving (such as, prohibiting apps from telling people that they can subscribe directly, instead of going through the appstore). personally I don't need a frigid nanny with a hollier-than-thou 'let us decide for you' attitude. but even when you pick a platform that won't involve being beholden to such decisions, you still end up getting fallout from other platforms that do make decisions like that, even though you're not using them. and this is why it's worth raising a huge stink about monopolistic control over platforms. some policy decisions end up spreading to everyone, no matter what platform they use. with vague talk about twitter possibly getting some kind of boot from appstores, which will invariably result in some kind of act of censorship to mold it to fit the appstore policies, i don't really get how one could go 'yeah, these things aren't actually impacting people in their day-to-day life'. they absolutely do. literally all of those things mentioned are playing out in real time for twitter and people who use it or affected by it in some kind of way. which turns out to be increasingly everyone.
- carewell 4y ago
  We have to fight censorship, not introduce a new attack vector that will result in a whole new class of scams targeted at hundreds of millions of people. Tumblr, Twitter, TikTok - ok, let's focus on preserving access to these apps if you feel this is important. Allowing users to install any unverified app is a massive problem. Just look at what we use our phones for: banking, health, investment, personal info, 2FA, and more.
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    F-droid is safer (reproducible builds of open source software) than the Play Store (static analysis followed by dynamic analysis in a cloud emulator), which is safer than the Apple App Store (human looking at a HIG checklist).
    - carewell 4y ago
      To be clear, F-droid is an excellent piece of software. It's small and is used mostly by quite technical people, so it's not as an attractive target as Apple's AppStore. But that's the thing: some technical solutions work amazingly well for the 0.001% (like HN users). But they do not scale to tech illiterate people. It's a completely different problem space.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
> I am arguing against their appeal. Censorship, decentralization, freedom to chose who you trust, etc. It’s the same appeal crypto uses to deceive inexperienced people into believing that these things are really relevant to their life. It’s manipulative. I'm sorry if I misread this. I read it through carefully a few times now. Did you just actually say that people's "freedom to chose who you trust" is irrelavent to their lives?! That must win the prize for the all time most patronising semtiment I've read on HN. Surely you're trolling at this point?
- carewell 4y ago
  In absolutist, idealistic terms - yes, everyone should be 100% responsible for who they trust, should have no limits on this choice. In practical terms what we get is "Banks are not your friend" being proclaimed by a scammer arguing that you should trust them, not a tightly regulated industry. And millions of people suffer from that. Sure, "it's their fault" because they didn't "look into it".
  - guntherhermann 4y ago
    I think I see where you are coming from, but I don't think that's the argument being made. Forcing everyone to use a decentralised system where anything goes "wild west" style is probably a terrible idea. I don't think that is what is being argued. What is being argued is the right to use a decentralised system over a centralised walled-garden, if you so wish. I'd rather my mum used a walled garden where the apps are (probably) safer and much less scammy.
    - carewell 4y ago
      I might sound too antagonistic on this topic, that's not my intention. F-droid is a great app repository, no problem with them whatsoever. I am highlighting the fact that a purist argument for a technological change that does not extensively invest into understanding the negative impacts on consumers is bogus. How many iPhone users really need an alternative store? Versus how many iPhone users want to have safeties around installing apps critical to their well-being? To your point: maybe a hard to enable setting for allowing sideloading would satisfy both the safety and the flexibility concerns. But at the end of the day, if I ever need a hackable device I will just get an Android or jailbrake my iPhone. I explicitly separate my own needs from what I perceive as a very dangerous change for 99.99% of iPhone users.

pxoe 4y ago

here's one example where app store policy disrupted one platform and thousands of people's lives: tumblr. the way it played out ended up very directly impacting online communities and creators. even those who might've been not as directly affected by policy changes, still end up getting disrupted by shifts in audience. those appstores end up affecting users well outside of where their reach supposedly ends, not limited to the actual customers of those appstores. they continuously engage in censorship, and it doesn't stop at 'good censorship', it can be opinionated, prudish, or materialistic and self-serving (such as, prohibiting apps from telling people that they can subscribe directly, instead of going through the appstore). personally I don't need a frigid nanny with a hollier-than-thou 'let us decide for you' attitude. but even when you pick a platform that won't involve being beholden to such decisions, you still end up getting fallout from other platforms that do make decisions like that, even though you're not using them. and this is why it's worth raising a huge stink about monopolistic control over platforms. some policy decisions end up spreading to everyone, no matter what platform they use. with vague talk about twitter possibly getting some kind of boot from appstores, which will invariably result in some kind of act of censorship to mold it to fit the appstore policies, i don't really get how one could go 'yeah, these things aren't actually impacting people in their day-to-day life'. they absolutely do. literally all of those things mentioned are playing out in real time for twitter and people who use it or affected by it in some kind of way. which turns out to be increasingly everyone.

carewell 4y ago
We have to fight censorship, not introduce a new attack vector that will result in a whole new class of scams targeted at hundreds of millions of people. Tumblr, Twitter, TikTok - ok, let's focus on preserving access to these apps if you feel this is important. Allowing users to install any unverified app is a massive problem. Just look at what we use our phones for: banking, health, investment, personal info, 2FA, and more.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  F-droid is safer (reproducible builds of open source software) than the Play Store (static analysis followed by dynamic analysis in a cloud emulator), which is safer than the Apple App Store (human looking at a HIG checklist).
  - carewell 4y ago
    To be clear, F-droid is an excellent piece of software. It's small and is used mostly by quite technical people, so it's not as an attractive target as Apple's AppStore. But that's the thing: some technical solutions work amazingly well for the 0.001% (like HN users). But they do not scale to tech illiterate people. It's a completely different problem space.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

> I am arguing against their appeal. Censorship, decentralization, freedom to chose who you trust, etc. It’s the same appeal crypto uses to deceive inexperienced people into believing that these things are really relevant to their life. It’s manipulative. I'm sorry if I misread this. I read it through carefully a few times now. Did you just actually say that people's "freedom to chose who you trust" is irrelavent to their lives?! That must win the prize for the all time most patronising semtiment I've read on HN. Surely you're trolling at this point?

carewell 4y ago
In absolutist, idealistic terms - yes, everyone should be 100% responsible for who they trust, should have no limits on this choice. In practical terms what we get is "Banks are not your friend" being proclaimed by a scammer arguing that you should trust them, not a tightly regulated industry. And millions of people suffer from that. Sure, "it's their fault" because they didn't "look into it".
- guntherhermann 4y ago
  I think I see where you are coming from, but I don't think that's the argument being made. Forcing everyone to use a decentralised system where anything goes "wild west" style is probably a terrible idea. I don't think that is what is being argued. What is being argued is the right to use a decentralised system over a centralised walled-garden, if you so wish. I'd rather my mum used a walled garden where the apps are (probably) safer and much less scammy.
  - carewell 4y ago
    I might sound too antagonistic on this topic, that's not my intention. F-droid is a great app repository, no problem with them whatsoever. I am highlighting the fact that a purist argument for a technological change that does not extensively invest into understanding the negative impacts on consumers is bogus. How many iPhone users really need an alternative store? Versus how many iPhone users want to have safeties around installing apps critical to their well-being? To your point: maybe a hard to enable setting for allowing sideloading would satisfy both the safety and the flexibility concerns. But at the end of the day, if I ever need a hackable device I will just get an Android or jailbrake my iPhone. I explicitly separate my own needs from what I perceive as a very dangerous change for 99.99% of iPhone users.