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- Hacker News
- Voting with your wallet only works when there is a enough meaningful alternatives and switching between them isn't prohibitively costly. You can vote with your wallet for which bottle of water you are going to drink, but you can't do that if the same company sells you the same bottle under different brand names. You can't vote with your wallet also when every other offering has significant downsides (which is less common that people think on software, but it's on other products).
What we need is to vote for standards. A floor that no product must fall below. Markets are useful when competition can actually discipline companies. When market forces aren't enough to make competitive products, other forces must pick up the slack.
by braiamp - I had a weird feeling back in late 2007 when iPod touch launched and I had to run the jailbreak tool written by someone astronomically above my paygrade to get custom apps running on it. It was first real-computer-class-computer I had that had no official terminal access or total freedom to run anything I want - a lot of devs started fighting "algorithm" issues as soon as App Store opened. I was much younger but I still thought, this is going to replace all PDAs despite having what we know all knows it's called software freedom, and needs to be antitrusted ASAP, or we'll lose that thing. I was not smart back then and still isn't, probably like first few thousand millionth person to realize that in the world.
Fast forward 20 years(!?!?!??!???), we did lose software freedom. Did the world really have to wait 20 years?
by numpad0 - Voting with your wallet can work, but consolidation increasingly makes voting with your wallet a double or triple whammy.
1) alternatives may be more expensive by dollars
2) alternatives may be more expensive by time
3) time/money lost to altered consumption has proportional opportunity cost
Market consolidation reduces the cost of using “bad” services and increases the cost of using “good” services over time.
by killbot5000 - The video referenced in the article contains nothing new; those things have existed for nearly two decades. People simply create similar videos to boost engagement and it seems they're quite successful at it.
It's actually quite the opposite. It became easier to create apps for Apple platforms, Apple also reduced the commission to 15% for small businesses.
by mertbio - 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 - especially since apple customers are more likely to shell out $$$ to buy the developer's wares.by pydry
- The EU shows that regular voting is also an option.by zaik
- They are WEF compliant and allow the AI IP theft.by watrr
- The EU isn't producing a domestic alternative to iOS or Google Android anytime soon. And no amount of "regular voting" is going to change that.by petcat
- The top 5 smartphone brands are:
1. Samsung (KR)
2. Apple (US)
3. Xiaomi (CN)
4. Oppo (CN)
5. Vivo (CN)
Yeah, it worked so well for EU at ensuring that they can't compete against the US and Asia. The rest of the world should be very grateful to EU voters.
by raincole - 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 - You could package and sell a FOSS (and free/open hardware even) device tomorrow. The license doesn’t forbid it. Some have even built businesses on this!
It’s also possible to run service businesses that produce FOSS, like Bitwarden for example.
“Good” businesses get outcompeted on price by “bad” businesses, not by FOSS. Want a powerful workstation that is 100% open POWER architecture? Only $10k from Raptor Computing. Willing to go a little lower spec and use x86? Get one from Purism or System76. Reasonable, but still more expensive than mainstream alternatives, and user support on the software side is still mostly driven by the community.
Most FOSS is still finicky and geared towards either devs or “power user” amateurs who wouldn’t be paying for a license or subscription anyway. It’s getting better in some areas, but it’s generally not there yet.
by iamnothere - 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 - If you are not buying Apple products, you are saving yourself their suckiness. Win! And other people can make their own choices.by cuu508
- To a windshield in motion, the impact of a fly is meaningless.by nullstyle
- 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 - >Voting with your wallet doesn't work usually, because your wallet isn't big enough.
Our collective wallets are HUGE. You need to do more than just boycott, yoiu need to spread the word.
by Noaidi - Voting with your wallet lets you send dozens of fine-grained messages a day. You support companies you want to support, and don't support those you don't want. Others will choose differently and that's fine for them. The mere existence of businesses you dislike is not a sign that this process has failed, you don't have the right to stop others from getting what they want to pay for.
Voting in federal elections in the US lets you send a message of less then one bit per year. It's a horribly ineffective method.
Apple exists because plenty of people vote for it with their wallets. I don't. But I don't mind that it exists.
I vote against Google when I can. I block ads and use Duck Duck Go as my default search engine. But the results are so poor compared to Google that I switch to use Google often. That's a sign to me that their product is worth my occasional, small "vote", and I'm okay with that.
by zugi - > Voting with your wallet doesn't work usually, because your wallet isn't big enough.
> Vote with your vote!
My wallet is bigger than average. My vote is not.
Of course in neither case are they big enough to make much of a difference by themselves.
by lapcat - Voting with your wallet is like voting with your vote. It both works, but to an extent that will never be noticeable by you. You vote more often with your money than with your vote though. Don't buy into the nirvana fallacy nor be fatalistic. Be a responsible consumer and inform others on why they should vote wisely too.by lobofta
- 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.
- You forgot Harmony OS from Huawei used by 50 million people, oh wait, no you can't vote on anythingby Kuyawa
- Hiring someone to make an alternative. If your country makes labor difficult to buy then that's on your country, not Apple.by casey2
- Regulation is a part of it.
But most of tehse companies make money off of the services. So if you want tos end Apple a message, cancel all your services...Music, iCloud, etc.
Android phones are easy to use without a google account.
by Noaidi - “Regulating” in the current environment just means mandated coziness with intelligence and law enforcement: scanning your files (Chat Control 1.0), backdoors (Chat Control 2.0), suppression of ideas through mandatory moderation, age verification.
What we need is antitrust enforcement, breaking of digital locks, and adversarial interoperability. This can be accomplished through certain forms of regulation, but you need to be specific or you’re going to get the bad kind of regulation.
by iamnothere - You're right that to deploy an app to Apple's app store you have to pay them. The $100/yr access ransom is unavoidable if you want to have the option of making money there. But I've gone to great lengths to avoid the rest of the stuff that genuinely sucks about building for Apple: I use Flutter to avoid most of the iOS nonsense. I use Android Studio on Linux for the vast majority of my development. I target Android/web/iOS and test mainly on the first two. I use codemagic.io to avoid having to have a mac to run ios builds.
I did have to borrow a mac and use xcode to set up my project, I wish that weren't the case.
I'd love to tell iOS users to just use the web version, but in-app purchases on web are a real headache compared to mobile and I haven't set up Stripe or equivalent. And Apple has crippled the web experience on iOS anyway with Safari.
Does any of my approach "vote with my wallet"? No. It's just for me, to avoid the horrible experience of Apple to the extent possible while also reaching users that choose to use iOS.
by flax - > You're still going to own either an iPhone or an Android phone
Don’t forget that option C) “none of the above”, is no longer viable since we’ve reorganized the world around the smartphone. The analog alternatives for basic, vital life transactions are dwindling or eliminated in many circumstances.
by teeray