Proton joins suit against Apple for predatory practices
proton.me158 points by moose44 6 hours ago
158 points by moose44 6 hours ago
I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage, giving the impression that Apple phones were high technology, and interacting with peasant androids is what made group chats fragment and pictures and videos look like trash.
Few things are more enraging than people being left out of chats with friends and family because they didn't bend over for Apple. Even worse being a teenager and having to endure social shaming for it. It wasn't until the EU signaled it was going to bring down then axe that Apple capitulated to RCS.
- Yes, I know you are part of the domestic US long tail that use signal/telegram with all your friends.
- Yes, I know no one outside the US uses iMessage.
ETA: A note because people are pretty incredulous about "most evil". Tech companies do a lot of evil stuff, no doubt.
But there is something special about putting social connection behind an expensive hardware purchase and walled garden lock in. Every other messaging app I know of is open to anyone on most platforms for little or no cost. Apple on the other hand purposely leveraged social connections in your life to force you into their garden and keep you there. Lets not pretend that Apple couldn't open up iMessage or even charge a nominal fee for outsiders. Instead you get an iphone and just seemlessly slide into iMessage. So seemless that most users don't even know that it is a separate service than sms/mms/rcs. Apple muddies that too.
But they would never do that, because using people's closest social connections to force them into the ecosystem and lock them there is just too juicy. "Oh you don't want an iPhone anymore? Well looks like you have to leave your social circles main discussion hub to do so..."
It's just evil on another level.
Apple does not owe Android users a superior non-Apple experience. Android a pretty damn huge platform, right? Way bigger than Apple, I hear? Blame Google. Google failed to compete.
> I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory
Don't you think this is _maybe_ an overstatement? I was annoyed about this for years but reading your take is borderline satirical.
From the lawsuit
> For example, when a user purchases an iPhone, the user is steered to use Apple’s default email product, Apple Mail. It is only through a complex labyrinth of settings that a user can change her default email application away from the Apple “Mail” application towards an alternative like Gmail (Google) or Proton Mail.
> At least for mail a user can in theory modify the default setting. On the calendar front the situation is even worse. A user’s default calendar is Apple Calendar, and the default cannot be modified
That's pretty evil & predatory to me. The fact that it is by design (someone decided it needed to this awful) is why Apple is being evil here. And this is just one example.
There's more
> For example, Apple banned apps from its App Store that supported Google Voice because Apple sought to advantage its own services over Google’s
> That's pretty evil & predatory to me.
That's not what the parent is asking. The OP said it was the most evil ever done.
Big Tech does predatory and evil stuff all the time. That's not what's being claimed. The OP is claiming that this specific thing is the worst, the singular event that is above and beyond all others.
Except that those claims feel like intentional exaggerations and not meaningfully true?
I use both iOS and Android.
> It is only through a complex labyrinth of settings
I have no love for the way iOS settings are done, but calling the setting for this in particular a complex labyrinth is some pretty blatant editorializing.
> A user’s default calendar is Apple Calendar, and the default cannot be modified
I don't think this is a true statement? My default calendar is a Google calendar. Actually switching to instead use my Apple iCloud calendar has been something of a chore.
The "complex labyrinth" is only reinforcing the impression that you and the author of that brief are both cranks. "Email" is the top setting under "Default Apps". My iPhone doesn't even offer Apple's Mail app in that screen, probably because I deleted it, which also was not labyrinthine but actually quite trivial.
home screen > settings > default apps > email
Easy if you know where to look. If you end up in the wrong sub menu you might simply search the web for instructions.
Apple provides web pages where they explain how to use the iphone. There is a section called "mail" under "apps" that shows up in the search results. It really wants me to read the help in dutch, the "apps > mail" section has 14 pages that don't talk about changing the default app, in stead they explain how to use the various features of their own mail app (that is also configured by default)
I don't get why the help pages need a different menu structure.
One has to go to "personalize your iphone" which has 18 pages, changing default apps is towards the end.
Searching the Dutch help website for "mail" I get only 3 unhelpful search results. If i change it to US English it immediately redirects to Dutch again. lol?
Using the "English" for Latin America and the Caribbean works. There I get 5 pages worth of results. Changing the default app is on page 3.
Not impossible but it is not a simple prompt on launch of the app "Banana mail is not currently your default email client. Do you want to set Banana mail as your default app for sending email?"
I'm quite dense of course, if they are going to be like that I will NEVER create an email client for this platform.
The web and their TOS is full of good reasons to never create an app for iphone.
In a laps of sanity I created a pwa one time. I've explained to exactly one user how to add the option to add a web app to the home screen to the menu so that they can add a web app to the home screen. It was a really hard sell and it took a long time.
I of course had to laugh at myself for acting against my better judgement.
Imagine someone made a web app email client and tried to compete with the build in client. Then in the middle of the struggle apple jokes about discontinuing PWA.
Seems a pretty level playing field?
I mean, does Settings > Apps > Gmail (or whichever other app) > Default Mail App really qualify as “a complex labyrinth”? Sure, it’d be a good thing to add a “Default Apps” section under Settings > General or something, but calling the current route complex almost sounds like an insult to users.
EDIT: Actually, there already is a “Default Apps” section right at the top of the page of Settings > Apps. Yeah, if that’s a “labyrinth” then the assumed level of user intelligence is quite low.
I've probably used Apple Mail and/or Apple Calendar at some point in my ownership of Apple products but they're both using Google products at the moment on my phone and I have no recollection of setting those up as being complex through a variety of hardware transitions.
It’s also probably worth noting that most of the stock iOS apps are the most service-provider-agnostic in the industry. Mail and Notes work on bog standard IMAP, and Calendar and Contacts are built on CalDAV and CardDAV, respectively. Google services work fine in all of them (though could be better if it weren’t for Google’s crappy IMAP implementation). The only case where they don’t work is with non-standard providers like Proton.
Go try to sign into your open-standards-abiding calendar and notes accounts in the Calendar and Contacts bundled with nearly every Android phone on the planet and see how well that goes.
> I mean, does Settings > Apps > Gmail (or whichever other app) > Default Mail App really qualify as “a complex labyrinth”?
Compared to Android?
Yes.
I have no idea why iPhone users put up with this shit.
See my edit. I have two Android devices sitting right in front of me, and they’re identical to iOS in this regard: Settings > Apps > Default apps.
No, I don't think it's an understatement at all....
In the difficulty of non-iMessage compatibility, I have had people close to me say "Why don't you just get an iPhone?" with an incredulous tone.
Perhaps tech companies have had more evil things happen on their platforms, that for whatever reason they were slow to react to.
But
"Why don't you just get an iPhone" was a precisely and meticulously engineered line, pure social manipulation, that was intentionally orchestrated to be delivered to me through the mouths of the people I trust most in my life turned unknowing pawns.
That is why I consider it the most evil. Apple is by design purposely exploiting a core human function, close social circle communication, to trap people in their garden.
Reminds me of "Consuming kids" where the marketeers conclude the children in the family decide which car brand dad will buy.
Considering how much it's messing up with kids and young people's social circles, this is seriously very fucked up even for big tech standards.
> Even worse being a teenager and having to endure social shaming for it. It wasn't until the EU signaled it was going to bring down then axe that Apple capitulated to RCS.
Regardless of the merits of Apple's actions as regards technical interoperability I feel compelled to point out that this in particular is a cultural problem, not technical malfeasance. RCS users still appear as green bubbles and even if the lack of functionality has been remedied the stigma has not. People at my lunch table 20 years ago were drawing artificial distinctions between "MP3s" (portable DAPs) and iPods because the latter were expensive luxury products and the former were not. The same thing is at work here because owning an iPhone is a proxy for one's socioeconomic stratum. I own an iPhone and as soon as an Android user appears in an iMessage group chat some joker immediately makes a green bubble quip - no degraded picture message required.
People that define themselves by conspicuous consumption don't care about interoperability. They care about brand recognition.
Yes, but this is precisely the point isn't it? It's blatantly enabling and embracing "othering" for no technical reason as an explicit strategy to exploit social pressures to maximize profit.
Actually, iMessage happily harms apple customers all the time.
I know many MANY people who have lost chats with their loved ones (especially deceased ones) because there is no way to export and save their conversations.
I think this should be as easy as saving photos, which apple makes (somewhat) easier to export.
Back to email, it is pretty horrible to set up my local email server on an apple device. You have to go through these dialogs, apple servers have to be contacted (for "redirection"), and I usually barely get it working.
The inability to manipulate most objects on iOS in any meaningful way is a big part of what killed it for me. Everything on my network is just an scp away now. No dumb hacks to deal with some retarded Cupertino PM's idea of how computing should work.
No escape hatches turns walled gardens first into a jail and then into a brig on a sinking ship.
This drives me crazy on iPad! Such a missed opportunity to dominate personal laptop market is given up buy horrible UX.
> - Yes, I know no one outside the US uses iMessage.
Yes, people in the EU use WhatsApp, by Meta & Zuckerberg, and from what I've seen, often act as if that is some sort of mark of superiority.
> and from what I've seen, often act as if that is some sort of mark of superiority.
Feels like you weren't able to have a proper discussion with those people. In many EU countries, using SMS made/makes no sense because SMS was/is super expensive as compared to WhatsApp. And using iMessage makes no sense because most people don't have an iPhone. From their point of view, it actually makes no sense.
Now if you tell them "well, where I come from everybody has an iPhone" or "SMS have always been free", probably they won't say "still, I'm better than you for no apparent reason".
I don't think that it is actually seen as a mark of superiority anywhere in the EU to use WhatsApp. Unlike apparently in some places it is seen as a mark of superiority to have an iPhone vs an Android phone.
If you go in a EU country where SMS were not prohibitively expensive in the beginning of WhatsApp (e.g. France), you'll see that WhatsApp has been less successful (at least in the beginning). WhatsApp was a killer app because it was free SMS, really.
>because it was free SMS, really.
Since when can WhatsApp interact with SMS users? They're so evil and predatory that they have entirely walled themselves off from that method of communication entirely.
I like how they (just like imessage) allow you to message someone who cant possibly read the message because they have no whatsapp. Then again, I think they cant even deliver the message over sms on iphone? SMS is only available in the apple app if you first force it to send SMS?
I don't think most of US in the EU really mind, or even know what messaging app people in America use. The privacy conscious folk around here do tend to prefer Signal over Whatsapp though.
A lot of people, in Austria at least, have moved to signal in my experience. My communities in the US and Austria have trended toward adoption of Signal with very few holdovers between messages and WhatsApp, some partly due to my pressure but overall it’s just getting away from the BS of the alts
> I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage
Is that really the worst thing you've seen big-tech do? That's very fortunate.
What about Blackberry Messenger which was the mobile instant-messaging golden standard for years and BB exclusive for as long as it mattered in the market? Was that too long ago to remember?
my understanding is that BBM was different because there was nothing to interoperate with at the time
Apple refusing RCS integration is a very clear example of hurting everyone in pursuit of profit
it's likely not the most evil, but I do think it qualifies as evil. it stands out by being inarguably willful, and having a very broad impact
I find harming hundreds of millions (probably billions) of friendships to be quite evil
The most evil thing a tech company has done is make a proprietary messaging app?
Apple didn't make SMS bad, it just was. Apple has since implemented RCS and it hasn't changed how I communicate with people from my iPhone at all.
Google should probably take most of the blame for repeatedly fumbling messaging on non-Apple platforms for the past 2 decades. Every time they had something that was getting any amount of traction it got quickly replaced with some stupid new, worse messaging app so a PO could get a promotion.
How did you manage to shift the conversation to Google in a thread about Apple?
> I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage
I think you might be living in a bubble, if this is the "most evil" thing you have heard of a big tech company doing. Go read up on IBM's history, especially in the 30s and 40s. Or a more contemporary example, read up on Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Or Amazon's mistreatment of workers in both corporate and warehouse settings. Or Meta scraping data off your devices without permission to train AI.
And, though I know some folks here disagree, plenty of people around the world believe what's happening in Gaza is a genocide, and Big Tech has materially contributed to making it happen. Or, if you want another example of human cost, talk about how resources for electronics are mined, or how electronics are manufactured.
Saying, "the most evil thing big tech has ever done is make some chat bubbles blue" puts a whole lot of human lives below the color of some chat bubbles.
You can think Apple did a really bad thing by doing that, that's fine. No complaints. But to call it the most evil thing ever done erases an incalculable amount of human suffering.
> I think you might be living in a bubble, if this is the "most evil" thing you have heard of a big tech company doing. Go read up on IBM's history, especially in the 30s and 40s. Or a more contemporary example, read up on Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Or Amazon's mistreatment of workers in both corporate and warehouse settings. Or Meta scraping data off your devices without permission to train AI.
I wouldn't count the IBM thing because I don't see it as part of the vernacular "big tech" of today; however I do think it's the most evil so far in this thread.
The others? They are mostly aggressive competition, especially the MS stuff, and altogether I don't see them as more evil than Apple's exclusionary UX. What's at the bottom of it for me is that it harms users directly, e.g. what others said about kids getting shamed for having a non-Apple phone. The one thing not mentioned yet that would qualify for me would be Meta's product altogether with its impact on teenagers; and various gambling simulators like Roblox.
Oh, Roblox by far and away is worse than Apple. But also, Facebook is pretty clearly implicated in a genocide in Myanmar. It's difficult for me to put any genocide in a bucket less important than some kids being put into out-groups.
The difference is that those evil things are second order effects. Nobody in the executive suite at FB was saying "Damn, this genocide is super profitable, let's stole the flames".
Nobody at Roblox is saying "We want to have children do nothing else except play Roblox from dawn to dusk, we lobby against schooling and extra-curiculars to increase Roblox time"
Apple however very intentionally made messaging people not on iPhones painful, and purposely made it out like androids were inferior. They purposely make it so you lose your group chats if you leave iPhone.
Thats why it's the most evil. It's a planned system to use peoples social connections as pawns to rope people into Apples ecosystem. This isn't hypothetical, or "C'mon of course they are saying that!". There are court documents that show it.
> the most evil thing big tech has ever done is make some chat bubbles blue
This is a textbook strawman. OP never said 'chat bubbles blue' as the reason why Apple has evil & predatory practices. You are trying to weaken the argument by finding the easiest target ("the strawman") and then attack it.
The lawsuit pdf has a bunch of examples of active harm Apple has inflicted on users, app developers & ecosystem.
Also, bringing up IBM, Microsoft or Facebook is "whataboutism".
> Apple walling off iMessage, giving the impression that Apple phones were high technology, and interacting with peasant androids is what made group chats fragment and pictures and videos look like trash.
Which lawsuit PDF related specifically to iMessage interacting with Android was mentioned in this comment? I see a comment about RCS.
Now, maybe you are right, maybe I narrowly interpreted RCS in iMessage to mean chat bubbles, and there's a wider interpretation. Even still, there's no possible way that's the singular most evil thing tech has ever done. The OP is free to be anti-Apple, more power to them, but like, let's be real about levels of evil.
> Also, bringing up IBM, Microsoft or Facebook is "whataboutism".
It's absolutely not whataboutism. The claim the OP made was about Big Tech broadly. Bringing in examples of Big Tech doing evil things is a direct and appropriate rebuttable to the argument that Big Tech doesn't do evil things.
Focusing on the "the most" part is extremely petty.
This whole thread is the complete opposite of "thoughtful and substantive" and the "Converse curiously" from HN guidelines and I regret participating on it.
This reads like public affairs copy from Meta/Alphabet/et al looking to distract from the real, measurable harm produced against teens by social media and AI products that are either directly (Instagram) or indirectly (character ai) owned.
Or you could use an actual program on a desktop computer to do it. When did everyone forget how that works?
google with their android anti-fragmentation-agreement is pretty predatory. basically release any/all android devices with google services and pay us cut or release none and use pure aosp. it is some next level shit.
huh. Isnt that what business deals are supposed to be? Two businesses entering into a business relationship, where both parties get something. OEMs get Google services & operating system, or OEMs are free to use open source project.
Are you saying Google should freely give away their products?
This is hopelessly exaggerated and bad-faith.
First of all, when Apple created iMessage, there was no possible way for them to predict that friend groups would use it as a reason to treat members of their groups poorly due to using Android phones.
Second of all, Apple did not deliberately make interacting with non-iMessage users in group chats "look like trash" in order to exclude them. Apple went out of its way to make it possible for iMessage to interoperate with the ubiquitous (in the US) SMS, with reduced features because SMS did not support the better features. If, instead, Apple had just made iMessage not interoperate with SMS at all, you'd be screaming about that instead.
Third of all, if people are leaving others out of chats, that's not Apple's fault. That's something for those families and friend groups to work out amongst themselves. "Hey, guys, I don't have an iPhone, and don't really have the money to get one, so maybe we could use GroupMe/GChat/WhatsApp/Signal/IRC/email/smoke signals/meeting in person/any of the myriad other ways of communicating instead?" A) "Oh, sure, that shouldn't be a problem!" (everything is solved) B) "What? No, we're not going to change anything just because it makes it impossible to actually include you in stuff. That's a you problem!" (turns out, the problem is your friends are assholes)
Apple cannot by any reasonable standard be held to blame for the way bullying, status-seeking teenagers treat each other.
What Apple could have done, for sake of clarity, sanity, and good practice is to handle SMS using one app, and handle iMessage using another, *separate* app.
The problem is not that iMessage exists, it's that it operates in opaque and unpredictable ways, mixing SMS and iMessage (and now RCS) communication in a way where even more tech-savvy users do not understand how it works (first-hand experience - had to explain to someone why their images are super compressed when they send them to me, but OK when they send them to their friend with an iPhone).
And now it's the same with RCS (Android-iOS). I send person A an image, the conversation switches to RCS. They use the "automatic reply" when I call them, conversation switches back to SMS. With person B, the switching between RCS and SMS is even more unpredictable.
> What Apple could have done, for sake of clarity, sanity, and good practice is to handle SMS using one app, and handle iMessage using another, separate app.
That sounds like a terrible user experience ?
http://theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375128/apple-imessage-android...
>“iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” was Federighi’s concern according to the Epic filing.
Among other statements. Apple was very aware of the social effects of iMessage, and leveraged it to force people into getting iphones.
Tech companies have done lots of evil shit. But never, not once, has one ever crossed the line into turning my friends and family against me (however slightly) because I didn't want to lock myself in Apple's cage, however comfortable it is.
Yeah, you can call my friends and family shitty, but the reality is that the are regular non-tech people, explaining the situation to them is impossible, and iMessage Just Works(TM).
I'm in a frequently-used group chat in which some people apparently have Android phones and others use iPhones. It works perfectly well.
If some teenagers see green bubbles as some sort of challenge to their identities, it's probably a useful life lesson.
> We don’t question Apple’s right to act on behalf of authoritarians for the sake of profit, but Apple’s monopoly over iOS app distribution means it can enforce this perverse policy on all app developers, forcing them to also be complicit.
Ouch. Those are some fighting words.
I'm not an Apple enthusiast—my rarely used iPad mini is my only Apple device—but let me play devil’s advocate.
If a company invests billions in R&D to create hardware and its integrated software, shouldn’t it have the right to control who or what interacts with it? Why should I be forced to open up the carefully designed ecosystem I’ve built?
If my pitch is premium, high-speed hardware and intuitive software so user-friendly that a monkey can use it, the trade-off is that you agree to my Terms of Service. There are other options out there.
I think it's specifically anticompetitive for Apple to force app developers to go through Apple Payments (with a 30% fee to Apple) for all purchases, otherwise their app is disallowed from being sold on the App store. There's no technological reason for app developers to be restricted from using other payment processors - it's purely a strategy for increased revenue for Apple.
In antitrust terms, it is a form of Vendor Lock-In[0], and could be seen as a form of Tying[1]:
> Tying is often used when the supplier makes one product that is critical to many customers. By threatening to withhold that key product unless others are also purchased, the supplier can increase sales of less necessary products.
As an example, Apple was sued successfully in the early 200s for selling music in a format that could only be played on iPods. iTunes is a platform Apple controls and invented, yet still it was deemed illegal for them to unfairly lock in customers and prevent them from using competing portable music players.
> There are other options out there.
That's the catch-22, said ecosystem is what they want to use because it's considered "secure", but it's only considered secure because it's closed.
It's the same with all the other stuff like frequent locations, photos, etc. It's a walled garden yes, but one that protects your data from bad actors (like Meta heisting whatever they can get their grubby little hands on), and the price is that you can't let others into your garden, or it's no longer walled.
> shouldn’t it have the right to control who or what interacts with it?
In their own machines they can do whatever they want.
Once they sell it to you, not anymore.
Are you legally prevented from controlling your device in any way you wish after purchase?
I think people are conflating ease of modification from legally being able to do so. If it's legal, then Apple retains no control over the device.
> Are you legally prevented from controlling your device
The bar isnt whether it is legal or not. You know that no company can create laws, and either you're saying it out of ignorance, or willful ignorance.
When Walmart drives away mom and pop shops, and dominate a certain town and then hikes the prices for groceries, you cant say "but it isnt illegal to go buy groceries from elsewhere, what did we - Walmart - do wrong?"
Say it with me - monopoly rules are about consumer choice.
This analogy makes no sense because you are not prevented in any way from purchasing the many other devices that provide almost identical functionality. It's like complaining that Walmart hiked their prices but ignoring the fact that the mom and pop stores still exist, at a higher number compared to walmarts, and are selling the same products for cheaper. You have incredible consumer choice for phones, you can't chose to purchase a luxury phone and then complain about it.
You're wrong. It's like complaining that Walmart hiked their prices after they drove away all Mom and Pop stores.
> I think it's perfectly fine to prevent you from having this
Yes I can, legally and morally.
The mom and pop stores in this analogy are the multitude of devices which are not produced by Apple and provide the same features, like Android phones and phones which are trivial to flash your own custom OS and software on. So no, your analogy does not support your conclusions.
It is not about devices, but rather about mobile OSs. There are only two really viable ones for practical use.
And one gives you the control you want over your device ie. sideloading and alternative app stores right? So why not simply purchase devices that use that operating system?