Far too many optimistic voices here and that scares me. I don't see this app store being about providing alternatives. that's just a talking point.
This app store is all about forcing every android sold in India to have a system installed govt driven app, which will report back to the govt on tons of private information about the device and owner. Information that Indian govt will be too incompetent to keep safe and given its authoritarian nature, should never have access to.
This is an authoritarian nightmare abut to happen. Modi wants India to move in the direction that China chose. And this scares me a lot.
I agree with you, the worst is about to happen worldwide.
The Indians clearly want more control. The Chinese obviously are never going to relinquish any control. Even the South Americans and especially the Africans are starting to look at regionally fenced mobile and internet services as a method of both more control over social media and growing their economies. (As well as providing jobs for their youth.)
I think the saying was something like freedom dies to thunderous applause.
I'm not happy with governments taking such an active role. Ideally they help home-grown alternatives and push out American/Chinese corporations to give them space.
That is probably too little too late at this point though. Google, Facebook, Apple et al. have shown they will not stop until they dominate digital markets worldwide. Aggressive intervention by governments is the only way for them to wrestle back control.
At least with the "Indian Government App Store" there is no smoke and mirrors with regards to who has access to the data. Tech companies hand over whatever governments ask for anyway.
All we need is a proper way to tax these companies. It is totally okay that Google or Facebook is doing the work, the people can tax them and get a fair cut from the profit.
Yes you are right, taxing global companies effectively would help greatly. There seems to be no will (in the West at least) to do anything about it though.
Closing loopholes is a problem and it just becomes a war of attrition with accountants and lawyers. Maybe there does need to be the global coordinated effort on tax reform that is the typical excuse for why nothing is ever changed.
I can see why punitive action against foreign corporations could be seen as the easier option.
> Closing loopholes is a problem and it just becomes a war of attrition with accountants and lawyers.
I think that's unfortunately true, but there must be a point of diminishing returns. Close enough loopholes (intentional loopholes or otherwise) and companies end up spending more money on tax lawyers than the value of the actual tax break. Even if some companies are able to use some loopholes, closing many of them still means more tax revenue for states. We don't need to get to a "perfect" state here.
If you read the subtext of the other Epic v. Apple threads, this is the point: government is somehow going to do a better job than Apple or Google.
That or government will mandate the Libertarian Wild West on our phones where anyone can install anything from any store. Mobile operators alone will balk at that.
This is a fever dream from a new generation of publishers and developers that have to learn how this worked in the past: the market evolved, the old platforms withered or became irrelevant. Consent decrees don’t fix things, at best they add a counterweight on the scale. See: Microsoft, still making money hand over fist due to the PC monopoly that no one cares about.
I don't think that's a consideration anymore. When the iPhone was brand-new, Apple had a ton of trouble negotiating with carriers who were used to controlling what goes on their network. Nowadays, carriers have very little say beyond things like PCTRB certification and a mostly-cursory review of OS-level OTA updates. When it comes to apps (or even app stores), the carriers don't even get notified, let alone get veto powers.
> That or government will mandate the Libertarian Wild West on our phones where anyone can install anything from any store.
It's a little disconcerting to me that you would see allowing me to install whatever software I want on a device I fully own as a "Libertarian wild west."
> Mobile operators alone will balk at that.
Why? Don't fixed-location ISPs have the same issue?
> the market evolved
I think the concern is it didn't evolve naturally.. it evolved to this configuration due to the whims of a few companies in strong monopoly positions. Believing that we have the best solution available is again, a bit disconcerting.
> due to the PC monopoly that no one cares about.
They were sued for this. The government won. Then the next administration basically vacated the actions against them. People care.
If the device wasn’t connected to the global telephone network then you’d have a point. Mobile carriers and governments have never allowed just “anything“ installed on phones.
> I think the concern is it didn't evolve naturally.. it evolved to this configuration due to the whims of a few companies in strong monopoly positions.
What’s “natural?” Markets are not created by god, they’re created by customers. Apple didn’t build the most successful product line in history because of monopoly practices - they built it because customers wanted it. And, Apple isn’t a monopoly by any historical definition of the term. Google is one in search and have tried to parlay that into Android. Illegally? We will see.
> Believing that we have the best solution available is again, a bit disconcerting.
I don’t claim we have the best solution available, I claim that government regulation of app stores or forced disaggregation of app stores would make the current situation far worse.
Want a better situation? Build a new and better ecosystem. It wasn’t even 6 years ago that Apple and iPhone and iPad was declared dead by most pundits, about to get trammelled by Samsung and Chinese Android makers. Now we want government to turn them into a utility? These decisions and laws take decades.
> The government won. Then the next administration basically vacated the actions against them. People care.
There was a second consent decree. It arguably didn’t really matter, because the next generation was mobile.
And I’m sure some people care about Microsoft’s continued dominance of PCs, but not enough to convince a government to do anything about it.
The same likely goes with iOS and Android. I see a lot of devs/publishers complaining and not a lot of users.
> Want a better situation? Build a new and better ecosystem.
The problem is it's chicken and egg. To get users you need apps, to get app developers you need users. To overcome that you don't just need something which is as good as the status quo, you need something so much better that people will switch to it despite the apps conundrum.
Apple got there by being first to market with a modern smartphone. Google got there by undercutting the competition on price. Neither of those are a possible path for a new competitor. They can't be first to market anymore, and they can't undercut Android on price because its price is already zero.
The usual way underdog platforms avoid this is by establishing compatibility with the competitor's apps. Sun created Java so that people would write their apps in Java, which would then run on Solaris/SPARC as well as Windows/Intel. Wine allows Windows programs to run on Linux.
But that doesn't work here either, because of the very problem the new platform would be needed to solve. Even if you created a competing platform that could run Android apps or iOS apps, it wouldn't have Google or Apple's store, which is where all the existing apps are. The user of your new platform can't go to the developer's website to get the existing app and run it on your new platform because the existing platforms don't allow apps to be distributed that way. So you have to convince all the existing developers to use your store, and avoid use of Google Play Services etc., before you have any users that would give developers the incentive to spend their time doing that.
Moreover, the incumbents are vertically integrated. If I think I can make a better OS than Apple, to capture their customers I don't just need to convert all their developers, I also have to make competitive hardware. Where do I get the money to develop a CPU competitive with Apple's? I would have to be a company as big as they are to do that, or bigger to overcome the advantages of incumbency, but nobody is as big as Apple. Microsoft, which is nearly as big, tried and failed. Amazon's Fire line is just an Android fork running on commodity hardware.
Who do you propose has the resources to unseat the incumbents at this point?
> I see a lot of devs/publishers complaining and not a lot of users.
That's a big part of the problem -- the users lack visibility into the inner workings. How many iPhone customers even realize that competing stores are prohibited, or that Apple bans things they may want? They don't see the apps they want that Apple prohibits, because when they're prohibited they don't exist. When they're prohibited the developers are starved of access to their own customers and destroyed, or never exist to begin with, which means they can't campaign to the users for their inclusion.
The developers can't even show the users how much they're paying, or offer discounts for purchases made through other channels, because Apple prohibits it.
So of course it's the developers complaining, because they're the ones who can see what's happening behind the scenes. But the users are still being harmed, even if that's being hidden from them.
And the lack of user awareness is another impediment to establishing a new competing platform.
> The problem is it's chicken and egg. To get users you need apps, to get app developers you need users.
I didn't say it would be easy. :-) It is a huge can of worms to declare the current smartphone + app store design as a public utility to be preserved for 50 years, when this industry is barely 12 years old at this point.
> To overcome that you don't just need something which is as good as the status quo, you need something so much better that people will switch to it despite the apps conundrum.
Yes. I don't think it will come from "the smartphone" market which has already been won. It will come by some disruptor that eats into adjacencies: AR, VR, wearables, etc. Apple actually has a good chance to retain their position because everyone has underestimated how important Apple Watch could become, plus their investments in AR.
> Who do you propose has the resources to unseat the incumbents at this point?
Alibaba group, Facebook, Valve, Tencent, Huawei, Amazon, and Microsoft.
> That's a big part of the problem -- the users lack visibility into the inner workings. How many iPhone customers even realize that competing stores are prohibited, or that Apple bans things they may want?
I think most users are broadly aware that Apple control things and take a cut. Most people have to deal with Kindle or Audible and having to buy that content via a different app or the browser. IMO the current legal argument is broadly not about banned apps, it's about profit margins.
> The developers can't even show the users how much they're paying, or offer discounts for purchases made through other channels, because Apple prohibits it.
So does every other platform provider though. Publishers and retailers can't discount Nintendo switch games unless Nintendo approves it. This goes back 40 years to Atari.
> And the lack of user awareness is another impediment to establishing a new competing platform.
I think the bigger issue is if users actually prefer the current curated arrangement.
> It is a huge can of worms to declare the current smartphone + app store design as a public utility to be preserved for 50 years, when this industry is barely 12 years old at this point.
Who is making it a public utility? Just prohibit anyone from restricting users from using alternative app stores or sideloading their own apps. It's the opposite of making it a utility -- it's ensuring that competition exists.
> I don't think it will come from "the smartphone" market which has already been won. It will come by some disruptor that eats into adjacencies: AR, VR, wearables, etc.
You also have the problem that the successor need not be any better. If one of those things replaces the smartphone, but the new incumbent still restricts users in what apps they can install, unseating the old incumbents hasn't actually solved the problem.
> Alibaba group, Facebook, Valve, Tencent, Huawei, Amazon, and Microsoft.
Microsoft and Amazon already tried and failed, and none of those others are as big or even making an attempt.
> I think most users are broadly aware that Apple control things and take a cut.
They're vaguely aware that it happens, but not of what that means to them. The opaque and arbitrary criteria they use for rejections, or the implications for app price and quality of transferring wealth from small developers to the world's largest corporation. So it feels like somebody else's problem. And when Apple and Google both do it, something they have no meaningful choice in regardless.
> So does every other platform provider though. Publishers and retailers can't discount Nintendo switch games unless Nintendo approves it. This goes back 40 years to Atari.
And they should prohibit the lot of it. It was never different, it had just never been big enough to matter this much, because before it was only games and not everything.
> I think the bigger issue is if users actually prefer the current curated arrangement.
Which we could find out if the vertical integration was removed and the users could choose a curated store or not, independent of which phone they buy.
There will be no wild west. If you're in India, you will be using the Indian government approved service. In China, you will be using Chinese government approved services. In Africa, you will be using ECOWAS, EAC, or SADC approved services. In Brazil, you will be using.. well, you get the idea.
Material point being, none of these services will be made by developers outside of those regions. There will be no wild west, what's forming up is very much the opposite of the wild west. It is governmental control with radical reach. Worse, it's forming up to be balkanized governmental control with radical reach.
> In China, you will be using Chinese government approved services.
First of all, this is only about app stores. When it comes to “services” in general, people in China already do mostly use government approved ones; the Great Firewall makes sure of that.
Today, you use Apple’s App Store, but Apple blocks whatever apps the Chinese government tells them to. Is that really such a great situation? Under a sideloading model, at least you’d have the technical ability to opt out of whatever app store anyone told you to use.
As for legal ability, who knows, but any legal restrictions on where you can get apps from would be hard to enforce. And why would phones be any different from desktops, where such restrictions don’t currently exist?
> Libertarian Wild West on our phones where anyone can install anything from any store
An important distinction is that while I can install whatever I want on my phone and you can install whatever you want on your phone, removing Apple's monopoly on distribution wouldn't make our phones world-writable to "anyone".
> Mobile operators alone will balk at that.
They didn't. We already had multiple app stores for J2ME, Windows CE and Symbian apps before Apple started the trend of locking things down.
> They didn't. We already had multiple app stores for J2ME, Windows CE and Symbian apps before Apple started the trend of locking things down.
There were no "App Stores" for J2ME apps, per se. You certainly could buy and install apps from ISVs, but they were heavily locked down based on carrier policy. I developed apps for WinCE, Palm and Blackberry and the carrier-mandatory permissions were strict depending on the jurisdiction. The devices that weren't restricted were e.g. WinCE devices that were sync'd and not network connected.
Apple just took the decades old old trend started by console manufacturers and applied it to Mobile.
By "locking things down" I meant locking down distribution to a single app store. Certainly J2ME apps were locked down via a system of permissions, where you had to buy a code signing cert to be granted the more interesting ones.
But you could still install them from multiple sources, e.g. the phone manufacturer, the carrier, the software vendor directly, or even via Bluetooth. And unsigned apps were granted enough permissions to be perfectly viable in many cases.
The "carrier policy" you mention might be a US-specific problem.
This is the "Libertarian wild west" option, and it will not happen under even the EU. Multiple app stores will only exist with government oversight and an agreed regulatory framework for reviewing apps for admission.
Privacy and Freedom are the same thing. If you dont have privacy, you cannot do anything as a group or individual that goes against anyone powerful. Freedom can also be thought of as sovereignty. I think if any government including USA has to be sovereign, it has to take privacy of citizens in its own hands. Democratic countries have to devise ways that this data cannot be used to influence elections. Otherwise, Keep in mind Google is no democracy. This data cannot be better off with a corporation because they maintain their database security better.
>If you dont have privacy, you cannot do anything as a group or individual that goes against anyone powerful. Freedom can also be thought of as sovereignty.
Seems like a pretty one-sided American cowboy version of freedom.
More accurate take I think is that privacy is often a tool of the powerful stopping collective action of citizens. Finance, taxes, and payment compensation are a pretty trivial example. The rich and powerful love their financial privacy, ordinary citizens gain little from it. Wage earners who benefit from their status love that they don't have to share their income with coworkers who may be discriminated against.
I think the opposite is true. It's not privacy but transparency that is required if groups are supposed to be able to take action against the powerful.
can you build a company if you were required to make all your future plans transparent to all competitors? Transparency and Privacy both have their place. Everyone should have privacy of information but the rules of privacy should be open to everyone.
This is the downside to involving regulation in a technological space. Government intervention isn't a technological problem and doesn't admit technological solutions. The government can ban any alternative or workaround you can imagine in specific or in general, and moreover can ban the act itself of working on alternatives and workarounds.
Fact of the matter is there's nothing too scary about living in China as long as you are not involved in politics. The scary thing about a BJP lead authoritarian regime is that unlike the CCP, BJP is made of a bunch of idiots. CCP is authoritarian, but they have made sure every Chinese has food on the table, a roof on their head and one can live an honest life in China without having to be corrupt. Crime rates in China are fairly low and one can walk on the street in the middle of the night without living in fear of lynching or raping. This is not true of India. Even doing simple things requires you to have connections or pay bribes.
Additionally, CCP actually thinks through its policies whereas BJP rolls a policy out and then does a 180 degree turn. Just look at the COVID-19 epidemic. China actually managed to end it because it was authoritarian (even if you don't believe the CCP's numbers you cannot deny that they have managed the situation far better than a lot of other governments). BJP had the opportunity to do so but somewhere along the way decided that they could just follow Trump.
The fact that the CCP are competent authoritarians and the BJP are incompetent semi-authoritarians isn't really in dispute. But the claim that there's nothing scary about living in China if you're not "involved in politics" (whatever that means) is completely absurd.
I lived there, I've also lived in India. I hate to put it this way but for practical reasons it is far safer to live in China than in India. CCP also takes the pains to make sure Children are not out on the street begging. I could go out at midnight without worrying about being lynched - to me this is a more fundamental freedom than freedom of political expression. Believe it or not China does allow their authorities to be criticized. If I wrote this comment online in China, I would not actually be censored. Yes there are topics that are considered taboo. But such topics are fairly limited.
> there's nothing too scary about living in China as long as you are not involved in politics
Does "being an Uyghur" count as involved in politics, as that sounds difficult to avoid if you're stuck with it? The reports of torture, forced sterilisation, detention sound rather scary to me.
> every Chinese has food on the table, a roof on their head and one can live an honest life
Maybe I'm misinformed, but what I read tells me "every" is a stretch here. I don't automatically trust Wikipedia on everything. But the fact the USA passed a law with strong bipartisan support makes me treat it a little more seriously.
authoritarianism is when a ex judicial company has so strong influence over regulations and those adjudicated arbitrarily and in-transparent and the effected party couldn't do a damn thing about it..
while it's not the best solution, there is merit to it.
one of the role of governance could be to help setup an environment for healthy competition. Well it took decades of work at NASA before one private player like space x created momentum outside government.
This app store is all about forcing every android sold in India to have a system installed govt driven app, which will report back to the govt on tons of private information about the device and owner. Information that Indian govt will be too incompetent to keep safe and given its authoritarian nature, should never have access to.
This is an authoritarian nightmare abut to happen. Modi wants India to move in the direction that China chose. And this scares me a lot.