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- Hacker News
- I'm guessing the number of non-developer Apple users is at least an order of magnitude larger than the developer users. So, no, I don't think developers can vote with their wallet to fix this crappy ecosystem. We'd be better off to just stop developing apps for the ecosystem in general - but that requires developers/companies to ignore the honeypot that is the Apple user base. Which will probably never happen.
So yeah, it's a crappy situation, that is obviously engineered in Apple's favor.
by aliasxneo - The EU shows that regular voting is also an option.by zaik
- I've been incubating a heresy for years: the free software movement was actually counterproductive. It helped kill user-focused autonomous privacy-respecting personal computing.
It created a tech environment where there is no money in good (as in good intent, socially responsible, user-focused) tech. Everyone expects good software (in the social/moral sense of good) to be free.
So we get an environment where the good people have no economic forcing function and no resources, and the exploiters have a business model.
We should not be surprised at what happened next.
You get what you incentivize. Always. We got what we incentivized.
by api - The standard problem with "just voting" to solve problems is that you can only vote for the options you're offered. If all the options on the market suck, voting for the lesser of the available evils will not address the fundamental source of your dissatisfaction, and may help entrench it. If you vote "with dollars" there's the additional problem that dollars are not uniformly distributed, and a few wealthy "voters" can and will disenfranchise everyone else.
Abstaining from buying from companies you disagree with can help, but it is only one part of the broader solution. When there aren't alternatives yet "on the market" you may be forced to hold your nose for a while and buy from the vendors you hate while advocating for change and working toward their replacement. You don't have to solve every problem in your world at once so long as you're building in the right direction.
- I haven't purchased an Apple product for myself since the classic iPod over 20 years ago, yet nothing has changed.
Turns out, you need to also convince a whole lot of people to vote with you to have an impact. And then you have the whole group of people who would rather put up with Apple's annoyances than switch to something unfamiliar and annoying in its own ways.
Voting with your wallet is only step 1.
by cwnyth - There is a puzzle piece missing from this article and others like it, which I think is crucial but often overlooked.
It's not enough to "vote with your wallet", you also need to make it very public and very clear "why" you're casting that vote at all.
Otherwise execs are typically more than happy to infer a completely wrong "why", and are very happy to not understand the real reasons, because a) either the real reasons are not actually necessarily that obvious in the first place, and b) even when they are, unless they are made too obvious and public to ignore, then people will happily fail to understand the things that they stand to benefit from not understanding to begin with (Upton Sinclair's law). All while collecting fat paychecks and bonuses.
by tpoacher - Voting with your wallet doesn't work usually, because your wallet isn't big enough.
Vote with your vote! Our system is dysfunctional in the united states, but if you look at the political unity behind something like blocking datacenter construction and how much of a headache it's causing for big tech, it's clear we still can have an effect. Most of the problem with big tech are solvable through existing anti-trust institutions IF we actually empower them. Things got bad because we stopped enforcing the rules; the rules used to work.
by overgard - People have been voting with their wallets since forever, and look where it got us.
The reality is that asking people to vote with their wallets does not work. But this specific case is even worse, because it's not possible to "vote with your wallet" to begin with.
The specific things the blog post notes are "how terrible the experience of developing apps for the iPhone/iPad is, how Apple takes 30% of all app store and in-app purchases, how awful Xcode is as a development environment"
So let's say you want to build a mobile app that actually reaches people. There's a duopoly, so you have to support Android and iOS. What are your options for "voting with your wallet" then? There's nothing you can buy that lets you reach iOS with your app without using Apple's ecosystem.
"Voting with your wallet" is what people tell you to do if they don't want you to do the things that actually work, which, in this case, is regulation. We have two companies controlling both viable mobile platforms. There is nowhere else to go for 99.9% of people. You can have a billion dollars, and you still can't "vote with your wallet." You're still going to own either an iPhone or an Android phone, and support both if you want to publish an app.
The obvious answer is that the two companies that control these platforms need to be regulated. Apple can play dumb if it's only Europe, but even so, the cracks are starting to show (e.g. Apple's recent copy/paste interoperability announcement). If the US joined in, the dam would break.