I get some push back from a few tech friends because I avoid using apps (except for things like Chess game apps). I can’t say for sure that preferring web versions of services helps with censorship, but it can’t hurt.
Using web versions, not apps, is important because companies keep user device statistics and if enough people insist in using web versions, the the web will continue to be at least partially supported by big tech.
> Using web versions, not apps, is important because companies keep user device statistics and if enough people insist in using web versions, the the web will continue to be at least partially supported by big tech.
It's also frequently just better. If I'm looking for hotels, flights, apartments, restaurants, hiking trails, ect., doing so in a browser allows me to keep dozens of comparable offers open for direct comparison - just by jumping between browser tabs.
Doing the same in the app means endlessly navigating between offers, favorites, and new searches. It's often very obvious that the app was built explicitly to be less powerful.
The main downside to many mobile web sites is the desperate plea to use the app you have to dismiss every time. I feel sorry for the devs who build a great mobile version only to be forced to put a stupid "$SITE is better in the app" banner on it.
uBlock Origin Lite is available for Safari on mobile, though that's not exactly the same extension. Orion supports standard uBlock Origin on mobile, but then that's not a browser "of note."
There’s also companies which seemed to break their Web experience specifically to drive people into the app. Credit Karma hasn’t worked on a browser on mobile or desktop for me in years. But the app version always works.
I guess it’s my fault for trying to use an Intuit product to begin with when I already know they’re evil.
This is a reason I also like the web is that after the page loads I can just do stuff instead of getting kicked out to have to update the app ... Or even having to re-log in ...
If a mobile app like that supported tabs AND somehow allowed you to see key things between tabs, you wouldn't even reach for the browser. Crazy how much different that landscape could be if they thought about such a critical use case. My guess is non-power users just look at one offer at a time.
What is really stupid is when the app is just a web browser limited to one tab like for Amazon. The web site is better on phones because you can open links in new tabs but you can't in the app even though the app is obviously just displaying the exact same web page.
> I can’t say for sure that preferring web versions of services helps with censorship
The linked article isn't enough to convince you? Look up Gab or Parler. (Yes, I find most of the speech there reprehensible. No, I don't think they should be denied the right to publish and distribute an app.)
Using a social media app instead of a website, as most people do, means that everything you are seeing has essentially been pre-approved by Apple and Google.
If the tide swings even a little further to the right on X, expect the X app to be banned as well. I was secretly hoping that it would be banned when Musk took over just to remind the right of why centralized app stores are a terrible idea. But with ICEBlock the left has finally been alerted to that fact as well, which might be even more beneficial to the cause of software freedom in the long run, since the left is generally less afraid of the proper solution to this problem, regulation.
In the meantime, keep using web apps instead of native apps.
AWS isn't the only way to host a website, and his been an obviously bad choice for hosting something controversial since it denied service to Wikileaks.
They also bent a knee to previous Democratic party administrations and will bend the knee to them again the next time the Democratic party is in power. Large tech companies aren't interested in spending money and poltical capital fighting censorship demands of anyone who is likely to have power within the US government.
And therein lies a problem. Each 'side' has no problem with it as long their team is not affected. Just yesterday -- on AM radio of all places -- I had democratic pundit openly wondering how Epstein's list is going to be used against them after spending a fair amount of political capital pushing for its release. It is all a game and, sadly, we are getting played. In such an environment, it is hard not to become cynical.
There is a huge difference between a president using the “bully pulpit” and threatening to take away a network’s broadcast license because they said something he didn’t like. That was a road too far for even Ted Cruz who criticized both Trump and the FCC.
A democratic president also didn’t accept personal bribes from companies to allow a merger to go through (Paramount) or accept bribes from other companies that were afraid of retaliation - Meta, Google, Twitter and Disney.
The current administration has carved out outs for companies that bend a knee when it comes to tarriffs. This is the worse case of false whataboutism yet.
Which reminds us of the difference between AWS and Apple -- Amazon Web Services is the web and the web is an open platform. If AWS denies you, you go sign up at any of their competitors or buy your own servers and plug them into the internet. If Apple denies you, iPhone users can't get your app, and if you go sign up at a competitor or buy your own servers, they still can't get your app.
> As far as X being banned, if you haven’t heard Tim and every other tech CEO bends a knee anytime Trump and conservatives asks him to.
That's because they currently control the government. Now think ahead by more than two days and consider the possibility that the other party might win an election again someday. What should you do right now when you're in control of the government to prevent yourself from getting screwed the next time that happens?
So now you just have to get deplatformed by Cloudflare, AWS, Fastly, Azure, Radware, Google, Akamai, F5, Imperva and every other DDoS protection company in the world all at the same time while simultaneously suffering from a DDoS attack that never lets up or your site immediately comes back.
Meanwhile a DDoS attack is a crime, so Apple doing something with the equivalent effect is now something you're equating with the commission of a crime.
Sorry for going off on a tangent, but last week I asked Gemini about security and privacy advantages of running Gmail and Google Calendar using Safari and DuckDuckGo Browser - Gemini made good arguments for using the browser versions: ironic!
The recent Facebook scandal of running a service to receive requests for tracking shows the app store sandbox model is far more of a denylist vs an allowlist, it's leaky by design in the name of "developer enablement" or "user experience".
I also think that it sends the right signal in terms of "Hey, this really doesn't need to be an app". I don't need an app for my newspaper, I need a shortcut/bookmark to its web page.
And once you start thinking about it, the same thing goes for a surprisingly large amount of apps.
I feel like in the coming years the facade big A and big G put up in order to push everyone into their distinctive walled garden of apps will crumble in public opinion.
It never was "yeah, it needs to be an app because the web platform doesn't have an API standard for it", geez, apple even forced a single web engine. They could have easily allowed access to their APIs on the browser. It just never was in their corporate interest to do so.
Okay, this devolved into an anti corporate rant without it being my intention to... So, go web!
I don't really know how to articulate exactly how I'd classify into one bucket or the other but I think there are two types of "app" and I tend to have differing preferences on whether they should be native apps or web apps as a result.
One is where relatively-static content is the priority, deep-linking is important or essential and the web platform is pretty ideal for those. News articles or blogs or Wikipedia pages or those sorts of things. Things where I might want to be switching between tabs or forgetting about for a while and coming back to later.
The other is where the app is primarily interactive or where the content is a lot more likely to be real-time or ephemeral. Not least because if you're on a low-bandwidth or high-RTT connection, navigating between web pages or having interactivity blocked behind a backlog of XHRs (particularly where caching isn't permitted) is utterly miserable. My experience is that native apps usually continue feeling responsive to input even when the network itself is not responsive but that is often not true with many clickable elements in many web pages.
PWAs might be the middle-ground here but they feel a lot like Electron apps to me: still foreign to all platforms, not responsive in the way that native UI controls are, weird/missing "back" behaviours and still no better support for deep-linking than the average app would have.
I just wish a culture of quality would become the rule and not the exception in web app development. It's a far more frequent thing for web apps to stutter and make my phone hot (or on a computer, keep an entire core pegged doing nothing) than it is for native apps to do the same. This experience is universal between browsers and platforms, too; I've observed it on Chrome under Android and Edge on Windows for example.
Of course there are plenty of crappy native apps too, but the incidence and severity is comparatively lower and in many cases, there are well-behaved "handcrafted" small dev alternatives to crappy native apps which are much less common (or at least, more difficult to find) on the web.
Need to have standardized native web components for the "culture of quality". Everyone building their own special widget in JS+CSS+virtual DOM Framework does not enforce UX quality.
Totally agree, it's the inevitable result of infinite wheel reinvention; none of the wheels ever receive the level of refinement they need. By the time the first stone wheel starts showing hints of a polished sheen, it's time to go carve a new stone wheel.
I'm a big proponent of browsers including something resembling a traditional UI framework out of the box. It doesn't have to try to be perfect or fit everybody's needs (which is impossible anyway), but it will serve many developers well and give everybody else a solid foundation to build their own (much lighter) stuff on top of.
You tell this to frontend experts and they are totally against it. "Lack of UI customization", "this is already possible", "you should skill up and learn web-tech", "use one of the popular (multi MB) component libraries", "we don't need more bad browser APIs", yadda yadda yadda.
The real reason is that most of them are afraid it would reduce the number of frontend jobs. But nowadays that is already being eaten by AI...
I also avoid apps. I tell everyone that I meet to avoid apps because the general population is going to drive us right into a future where there are no more web-based options and almost everything must be accessed through a separate app. People are simply not aware of what they're giving up by using apps that would work perfectly fine as websites.
In almost all cases, phone apps talk to that same central server as the web browser, just with a different (much worse) client that you have less control over.
If it were the case that phone apps weren't networked and could only sync through another channel like icloud/syncthing, then you'd be onto something.
But right now most apps are "web browser but worse".
Native apps might need networking, Web apps require networking, they might simulate offline to various degrees depending on local storage, which they don't have any control over, and is shared.
What you want is a better (and easier to use) sandbox for native apps, so that users can feel as comfortable installing an app as visiting a web page as long as the app doesn't have any more permissions than the web page would have, and then you don't need central gatekeepers approving them.
Just because the US has consolidated many ISP's doesn't mean the rest of the world has. Also, even in the US, that figure is just under 2k. Globally, it is >16k.
Personally I generally prefer the UX of apps for software that I trust, ie, open source software downloaded via F-Droid. I feel the same with native desktop clients. For untrusted software, web apps are the way to go.
Glad to see I'm not alone. I never install apps unless there's no other way, and often remove them as soon as possible. My home screen is a collection of web shortcuts. Amazon, YouTube, X, bank, all web links. But I also use LineageOS with MicroG.
I've been asked why, and it's not really fear of surveillance (although I'm not a fan of it) or making a difference or whatever, just because it's one of the few ways I'm able to give the finger. Sure, noone will notice but it makes me feel better :)
PWA was an awesome idea and should have been the way forward.
Unfortunately both Google and Apple very early on identified that it was in their best interest to keep the concept around in a half-dead state and ensure nobody really built on it...
You get notification. You can autoplay video/audio. You get whaterver video or element full screen with all necessary UI. You get rotation lock. You have a fullscreen to do what ever you want for any purpose. You probably can't touch hardware APIs(for example: bluetooth/nfc) like native app. But that isn't really needed for most apps either.
On the other side. Apple seems sabotage the PWA as much as possible. You can't autoplay video/audio. You can't even fullscreen anything other than video, and when fullscreen video, UI is ignored. Also there is no way to disable gesture so your app will misfire system gesture. And you can't lock the rotation either. There is no way to auto rotate the video player or whatever when maximized either.
It's really a golden example for pretend to do something while actually not. It seems you can do pretty much everything with ios pwa. And when you try to do it. You will figured out it will have a worse experience than native app because all sort of issues.
To be fair, Android also sabotages PWAs, it's just done behind your back. You see, in order to get a PWA to properly install, you'll have to use Chrome, and you'll have to have a Google Play account and Chrome will submit the PWA manifest for validation to a Google server, which in turn will decide whether the PWA is worthy, and if it is, it will generate a so called WebAPK, which is then installed on your device. If it's not worthy however, then it will become a bookmark instead, and many of the features that can be described in the manifest will not work at all.
So if you wanted to use a different browser or install a PWA without a connection to the internet, or without Google Play, all you get is a bookmark.
In my personal experience, it only validate whether manifest is malformatted though. Although it's still up to google if they want to do something wonky.
I saw someone claim on SO that they were not able to get a PWA to install properly until they changed their IP address, supposedly because they were from Iran, a sanctioned country.
To my knowledge, every PWA installed from Firefox on Android will become a bookmark. For Firefox I believe that means for example that if you try to open a link elsewhere that is within the manifest scope, it will not open in the PWA. That's because it's not possible to deep link to the PWA without it having an AndroidManifest with a corresponding intent filter, which is what the Chrome WebAPK achieves and why they can support for example custom protocol handlers or share targets or launch handling options.
Google invented PWAs and broke their back trying to make them a thing. I'm not a fan of Google but credit where credit is due.
They were also highly incentivized to develop the APIs that make it all work as Chromebooks are basically hosts for browser apps. Apple, as well as the other tech giants involved in the W3C had no such incentives and were dragging their feet.
Admittedly I am not up to date on the latest developments but as far as a couple years ago the PWA runtime on both ecosystems was significantly stymied in comparison to the APP runtime. No access to real storage functionality, significantly less platform APIs, yada yada.
Sure, you could build "better (installable) websites" but even to get standardized stuff like background execution or notifications working was either impossible or a long series of jumping through hoops. Even installation prompts bugged out way too often.
But to be clear, if that isn't the case any more I will be positively surprized by either platform provider.
I respect PWAs, but they take away so much that I personally want. No address bar, no tabs, no history, no extensions. It's a reversion from the glorious amazing user agency of the web to the sad state that computing had held us victim to for decades.
They also don't require a dump truck load of third party dependencies just to have a serviceable set of widgets to use. Every time I start looking into web app development I'm always shocked at what's required to replicate what one gets for "free" in a UIKit app.
Swift doesn't need a service worker to proxy all browser behaviour, and make use of local storage, with unspecified limit, to prentend to be working offline.
You do realize that there are many APIs that exist so that your Swift app works offline, right? There are specific persistence frameworks, tools for controlling caching, extensions for managing external files, etc. The argument that writing JavaScript that doesn’t make network requests and needs to store state to disk is somehow super special and different than any other regular JavaScript makes no sense.
You do realize that neither do browser apps require having a network card on your laptop, right ? You can run local browser apps (HTML + CSS + JS) on a computer with no network card.
I've been a web/ux guy for a long time now and I don't think I've ever used a single mobile app/site that is better than a proper full screen piece of software. It's always been a compromise no matter how hard myself or my designers try. Maybe quick photo/video edits but that's less because they're good or they have quality user experiences but more because its often overkill to pop open Photoshop just to cut out a dog pooping in the background or whatever. Most times I feel like mobile devs (myself included) don't even utilize the various unique features mobile devices do have.
I'm also old, cranky and turning into a crusty CLI guy as I get even older and crankier. If you kids need more than a TUI, get off my lawn!
I subscribe to the NYT and find it so irritating that they regularly prompt me to download their app from safari on ios I may cancel. I do not want their app ever.
let's say for the ICEblock or whatever - pull up a map pin (geotag), that can be done in a web app.
the things most people advocate apps for e.g notifications are nuisances that some of us permanently turned off. My phone is always on do not disturb, I get 0 notifications. The only time I prefer notifications is something actionable - I pay online then the bank says open app to approve in-app notification (pop up) not those things (notifications) that just come to your phone asynchronously and bother you.
I have a smartwatch (if at all) garmin it's not hooked up to my phone for notifications.
unless you're making games / hell now games can leverage webgpu - no reason to make native apps at all for 96% of things. just make a web app - service workers enable offline access for some things.
- my simple take -> do what the porno companies do in regards to tech. simple & effective. but please don't copy their ads thing.
"People in tech" has grown so large that the term has become a bit meaningless.
For every person in tech that knows who Stallman is and what he stands for, there's a person in tech that believes that NFTs and AI will bring about world peace and end poverty.
You should install F-Droid. lmoat every app on there is completely ethical, and there are many (not enough but many).
Many of the ones that require a server side connect to your self hosted server instead of some central server on the cloud, which is a reason they will never get popular, but sounds perfect for you. There are some that use central servers, and this fact will be clearly stated in the antifeatures section. Many other F-Droid apps just work offline. And hardly any have ads.
Yep. Not using apps and avoiding the cloud at all costs (e.g. not backing up everything to iCloud, turning off one drive) are litmus tests for having a clue. Using Bluetooth is almost the same but it’s hard to get by without it nowadays. Same for connecting your tv to the internet.
I'm disappointed by the EFF not mentioning PWAs and web apps. Fighting censorship means fighting for those too. Platform owners will always have more direct control over sideloading.
While censorship is one thing, they forgot another overlooked ability of these app stores: pushing unwanted apps/services to our personal devices without our knowledge.The fact that the majority of people don’t care about this censorship and backdoors makes me think we don’t really appreciate the concept of freedom, and maybe we are okay with being slaves—at least until we cannot take it anymore. Maybe that’s why history repeats itself every few decades to remind us about these values.
>While censorship is one thing, they forgot another overlooked ability of these app stores: pushing unwanted apps/services to our personal devices without our knowledge
When was the last time the play store or app store pushed apps "without our knowledge"? I've only heard of it done by shady third party bloatware that OEMs bundle with the OS. The actual issue is a system that can perform OTA updates, not app stores themselves.
>What about when Google pushed Android Safety Core to all Android devices out there?
You mean the package that apps have to opt in to use? I guess that's technically counts as "unwanted apps/services", but that's like complaining about firefox "pushing unwanted apps/services", because they added some javascript function to every firefox installation out there.
>And you also realize they can push modified build of any apps, now that they also own the keys to sign the apps?
If you read my original comment more carefully, you'll notice I'm not denying they have the capability to do so, only that there's no precedence of them doing so.
It happened a few months ago with Gemini at least for Android, probably similar for Apple Intelligence on iOS although I can't comment since I don't use it anymore.
I’m very happy to see a US organisations picking this up finally. Apple/Google clearly want to fight this on a country by country basis so they can stretch it until forever. Hope the pressure results in meaningful changes for all.
If it's not done on the basis of jurisdiction, then laws about what constitutes illegal content in Germany or China or United States applies to everyone.
Taking the stance of "we're not going to follow any laws and publish everything" puts the companies in very difficult places in those countries as publishers of the content.
They’re welcome to curate a store if they want to but installation and configuration of any 3rd party software, freely, without attestation mandates should be available. Also, Apple introduced a very complex process of fear mongering for the Alt Store in the EU - all that must go away in order to rectify the user’s right to own their device.
Or just.. make it easier to not be constrained to app stores. I realize losing that sweet, sweet 30% fee on every transaction hurts their wallet but I think my $1000 phone should be mine to freely install things on.
*and hurts design and development of their products... which you bought... because you're complaining about it.
I get in trouble for this a lot, but didn't you as a consumer know what you were getting into? I know I did when I bought into the apple ecosystem.
What's the actual argument? Apple doesn't have a monopoly on smartphones, computers or applications. This boils down to. I use their products by choice, but I want the government to force them to change. Their platform their rules. idk why this is controversial.
It's not called a duopoly for no reason, both Apple and Google have very similar policies and if there's any competition, I'm not seeing it.
You can use Apple which controls everything you are allowed to see and do on your phone or you can chose Google which ... controls everything you are allowed to see and do on your phone.
And as a developer, both fees are exactly the same (what a coincidence!)
The duopoly comes about from a few things forcing it.
There's the "it took a while to build it." iOS and android had decades of time to get to where they are now and centuries of developer hours put into writing it. That makes it challenging for others to get in. It isn't impossible, but it's really challenging. For the company, it's likely a loss for a long while before it becomes a possibility of not being a loss. The windows phone was being worked on for 3 years before the iPhone was released and wasn't released for another 3 years... and wasn't exactly a success.
Next is the licensing of the modems for the phone spectrum. That takes FCC approval in the US and isn't something that random companies do without good reason. Part of that licensing is the requirement that it is locked down sufficiently that the user can't do malicious things on the radio spectrum with the device... and that tends to go against many of the open source ideals. It's a preemptive Tivoization of the device.
Assuming that those two parts are down, the next challenge is to make it a tool that you'd use in place of an iPhone or an android phone. Things like holding PCI data. That again makes it difficult to do. Persuading a bank that the device can act as a payment card and that the authorization is sufficient to avoid fraud from either the apps on the device or the user being able to inject other payment cards that they don't own into the device.
I'd love to see an iPod touch like device (non phone) that allows me to run apps or develop my own and build up an ecosystem and demonstrate that trusting it is feasible... but so far I haven't seen many that have lasted beyond kickstarter money running out. I've got a Remarkable ... which isn't exactly small (or cheap). I'd like to see more things like that in other form factors that allow me to do things with it akin to https://developer.remarkable.com
> That makes it challenging for others to get in. It isn't impossible, but it's really challenging.
Huawei made Harmony OS smartphones in 2 years. That said, they were uniquely motivated by the Google Mobile Services ban, Chinese state support, and likely had set the groundworks for such a transition much earlier.
> Reports surrounding an in-house operating system being developed by Huawei date back as far as 2012 in R&D stages with HarmonyOS NEXT system stack going back as early as 2015.
It wasn't green field to release in two years and likely had almost a decade of prep. It probably got additional resources with the Google Mobile Services ban... but even without that it would likely have shown up within the next few years.
One of the classic roles of the government is to prevent certain unfair business setups. For instance, providers of a service aren't supposed to have agreements to not compete and carve off markets from each other. Likewise price fixing is prohibited.
Apple already lost here when it attempted to prevent people from even linking to other payment platforms. That was "their platform" until it wasn't, thanks to a court.
Giving them exclusive control to police speech - legal speech - without an opt out that doesn't involve thousands of dollars of loss is also "part of their platform" today.
I actually disagree with the ICEBlock app.. but that's for the courts to decide if it's legal, not a private company.
At least in the US, every single app maker can link out of an app and accept payments. But most still don’t.
You know why? It came out in the Epic Store that 90%+ of App Store revenue comes from pay to win games, coins, and loot boxes. Game developers love to have direct access to whale’s wallets.
They only do this now because Trump is president. It's very dishonest that they didn't fight for it before. ACLU etc are pro-censorship, they also want to censor other viewpoints, don't be fooled. They are screaming now because they are the ones targeted. I won't fall for it.
I donated to ACLU during Bush vs Gore and they promptly sold my name and address everywhere and I got junk mail and spam for years as a reward for supporting their efforts. They can kiss my ass.
At least on iOS, Apple controls the singular web browser implementation. If they wanted to, they definitely could do a thing about any site. The same arguments for policing their App Store would apply to the open internet too, it's scary and dangerous!
Sure they can. Mobile users have no path of recourse if Apple updates WebKit to break or blacklist the site. There is no working alternative on iPhone or iPad.
Maybe the people advocating for browser diversity on iOS were onto something...
Yes, no recourse. But there are still legal consequences. If Apple blocks certain web content they have a harder time arguing that they are not responsible for blocking other we content: copyrighted material, etc.
The title is correct. The landscape became dangerous because governments withdraw from regulating the space unleashing big corporates on citizen's privacy and options.
Apple / Google did not but should sue the Gov't for this abuse. Perhaps it could be more popularized, to sway Goo-Apple's mind and take the expensive plunge.
Glad the ACLU is starting to talk about it, at the least.
I wish I had more control over what the app stores show me. I should be able to block or hide apps on the storefront. Stop showing me TikTok Temu or Shein.
It's possible to criticize something without having the law "on your side". The OP characterizes Apple's action as "unacceptable, censorious overreach", but doesn't claim it was illegal. Once upon a time, slavery was illegal, but it would be daft to oppose emancipation on the basis of "How about slaves sue DOJ and/or slave owners if the law is on their side?".
Imagine working on a team in Apple and waking up to the news that the ACLU is now criticizing your work. Talk about being on the wrong side of history. Do Apple employees even care anymore? Or are they just there for the resume prestige? The mental gymnastics you must be doing in this moment to keep yourself from feeling cognitive dissonance.
The ACLU only writes these articles when the system is being used to take down something they like politically.
They never had a problem with the App Store removing Gab, Parler, or Infowars. It’s hard to take institutions like the ACLU seriously when they have such obvious bias. If the ACLU had taken a principled stance when the system was being used to take down things that they didn’t like, they would have been able to keep their legitimacy.
Yes. Apps are now just another layer of privacy invasion. 95% of apps could just be a website with zero reduction in function. Literally a bookmark on your home screen to the thing.
This is why a real, committed FLOSS OS is needed for smartphones. Something like how Debian works. You have a non-commercial entity steering the project, it has a governance model, and the goal is to create something that ultimately, no one owns or can take full control over.
there are plenty of "real" open source mobile OSes. the issue is third party apps. if Debian couldn't run NGINX, Apache, Docker, Kubernetes, etc, it wouldn't matter how mature or solid the OS is, because 90% of software people want to run on a server doesn't work.
if FAANG apps and banking apps don't run on a mobile OS it will never be viable. the government, these big companies, and the device manufacturers all have a vested interest in making sure it never happens.
Honestly, at least for me, it doesn't have to run those things. It has to run a private browser and Signal, and it needs to run on easy-to-obtain smartphone hardware with no dependency on anyone's app store. I would hope that is at least somewhat doable.
I have no delusions about there ever being a year of the GNU/Linux smartphone. Google will make damn sure that never happens, like you say.
EDIT:
I should say, I see this being a "second" device. Something to use when you don't want someone generating profit off of your data.
- Companies: comply with legislations they are bound to comply with
- you: Censorship!
I understand that not everyone gets a chance to vote for laws in the world, but for a company to do business in any country you have to comply with regulations.
Democracy is a tool we hope makes good decisions. If the democracy voted to have you killed, would you agree with that? If not, stop fetishizing democracy as a process, and instead start supporting outcomes that agree with liberty and justice.
Some types of censorship are popular and voters in democracies vote for polticians who pass and enforce such laws. A company that is censoring you because they are legally obligated to is still censoring you.
It is not your smartphone. The user computer is yours but the phone is owned by the telcom. You do not have a license to operate it. The telco does. They are the owners of your smart phone. Smart phones are terrible computing devices. They are excellent shopping/bank terminals and navigational aids, but they are not allowed to compute. Set it to host a hotspot and use a real computer if you want control. A smartphone will never, can never, allow you to own it. It would be illegal.
Well, there is the issue of security. While the app stores are also far from perfect on that issue, it’s still better than the Wild West given the sheer number of apps they have to do deal with. Then there’s also the issue of hosting and deploying the client app. Convenience has a cost
Another way these app stores enable censorship is by having arcane and inscrutable review processes, where they often ban your app for no reason with no recourse (unless you know a Googler or Apple employee, who can investigate).
For example, we work with Aween Rayeh [1], an app that provides real-time traffic information about Israeli checkpoints in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The author's account was banned for no reason at all on Google Play [2]. There was no means to get an appeal or a review.
What typically we see happening is that someone internally at these companies issues a ban for what we assume are ideological reasons. Then when someone looks into it there's no actual reason for the ban to have happened, and it sails through. We see similar thing with shadow banning on social media: someone gets hard flagged and their account is completely shut down, and then when someone looks into it, there was never a reason to do it in the first place.
In the United States reporting on the presence of law enforcement on your street is protected by the first amendment. You can even film them and broadcast their activity in public places to the world.
You may not like it. Apple may not like it. But there's not much ambiguity here.
Censorship by a website moderator means you need to move to another website to express your ideas. Censorship by the government means you need to move to another country.
Censorship on an app hosting page means you need to host your app somewhere else. Censorship on the only app hosting page allowed means you can't host your app at all.
Silos. You can create your own and say anything you want (only constrained by the law). Everyone else can join it, or blacklist it, for themselves. Nobody gets to shut off someone else's silo, they can only ignore it for themselves. Nobody gets to decide what other people choose to read or write.
For the case of Reddit, a silo maps nicely onto a subreddit. Within any subreddit the moderator can have full control, they can moderate it exactly as they choose. If you don't like it, create your own where you will have free rein.
What about content that is illegal in the country that your "silo" is hosted in, like, say, CSAM (but you can really really substitute anything else illegal there, like eg. planning terrorist attacks)? If a "silo" is CSAM-friendly or its express purpose is posting it and its moderators don't want to remove illegal content, what then?
I hope there are no legal jurisdictions that are actually CSAM-friendly. But this isn't a unique problem, there are many situations in the world where legal jurisdictions are muddy. For example, when over-the-air television signals can be received across country borders. Just let the law sort it out. Admittedly, it's more difficult for companies that operate in multiple countries, but they're already managing to do it today. The main hope is, that companies will not add any additional censorship themselves, and that an attitude of free exchange and tolerance, would be the default position for more of us than it is today.
That's a good point. But for all practical purposes, Facebook, Reddit, and other major social networks represent what the web means to an average person. Many of them never even open a browser. So those major social networks should be treated more like a public square, for the discoverability that provides, if nothing else. And in the context of sites being delisted and apps being banned (Google, Apple, etc), it would be nice for major social networks to be committed to free speech on their platforms.
I think it's inversely correlated with power, influence and reach. HN and Reddit don't have guns, can't throw you in prison, and there are lots of social medias to choose from, so a fair bit of censorship can be tolerated. Apple can't deport you, but you also don't have a lot of other choices, very low tolerance for censorship. The Government can really ruin your life if you get on the wrong side and your options for changing it or escaping it are pretty limited, we should demand the highest levels of transparency. Sure, some secrecy around military and intelligence for a little while, but we should eventually know what they decided and why.
This is dogmatic reasoning. If censorship wasn't necessary, neither would the government. At sufficient scale, humans stop behaving in the best interest of the group, and you need ways to correct that. It'll never be perfect, but much like democracy, we don't know of a better system.
Surely, in a conversation, the most damaging thing you can do to the integrity of that conversation is to selectively nullify the voice of a participant.
It ceases to be a conversation then. It is something else, posing as a conversation.
Maybe it would be better if this censorship-power is democratically controlled. But if this power is given to an individual. Well that's different.
In order to have a conversation at all, you need to deal with the guy with the megaphone first. If you do not have moderation, you drown in spam, and do not have a conversation at all.
But is HN the only forum for tech discussions available to you?
The whole point is that both phone platforms are required to participate in modern life. Imagine if your water or electricity company decides not to supply your house. There is a reason such fundamental services are made into universal rights and do not follow the usual competition rules.
Apple/Google can’t be both the store, the device and the OS.
Whenever you enter a community, you implicitly agree to a small contract with the community. If I enter a running community, it's assumed that I'm not there to talk about cooking pasta, if I sign up to a book club, people will surely get tired of me if I don't stop yapping about music.
There's of course leeway around this, but communities, generally, have purpose, implicit (built by the community) and explicit (what it says on the sign).
We are okay with censorship when it serves to that purpose. We like it when HNs and Reddit delete viagra ads in comments. We don't like it when it runs contrary to or subverts the purpose of the communities. The userbase here would have gotten pretty mad if the threads about Cloudflare yesterday were deleted, as they evidently are of interest regarding current tech, and they would also have been pretty mad if anyone criticizing Cloudflare was banned, as we are supposed to be able to freely comment on such matters.
This is much more common on Reddit, where mods (and users!) will often silence stuff they don't like, even if relevant. This creates conflict regarding the two types of purpose mentioned before.
Now, countries should have as much censorship as they want, this is already patent in hate speech laws around the globe, before anyone brings up the 1st, do note that the US could also (at least in theory) change the constitution if the people so wished. Extreme caution should be taken in this regard though as one does not simply "stop being member of a country".
>Whenever you enter a community, you implicitly agree to a small contract with the community. If I enter a running community, it's assumed that I'm not there to talk about cooking pasta, if I sign up to a book club, people will surely get tired of me if I don't stop yapping about music.
No. If you're running, you can talk about pasta all you want. If you participate in the book club discussion, no one cares if you also talk about music.
Just because it's here doesn't mean it's liked. Various factors contribute to whether any given site is moderated, and to what degree. It's almost never just "the will of the users".
It seems obvious to me that we just don't mind delegating this task some of the time, as long as we largely agree with the results.
I don't think you need an appeal to authoritarianism to appreciate a forum that isn't 80% penis-enlargment ads. A few people spending their time to moderate this content saves the whole group a lot of time.
In the same way that I'm okay with other people deciding a tomato is too moldy to sell (whether that's the farmer, health inspector, or grocer), I'm also okay with some people having the power to remove the equivalent speech from certain spaces.
You just need to be more careful when the jurisdiction becomes larger, because it becomes harder to "vote with your feet" to go to a place whose policies you agree with.
The fix for that is to join your own community spam filter. It's the same way ad-block works. Community run blocklists.
I don't think servers blocking denial-of-service spam attacks is the same socially as moderators censoring speech they don't agree with. The same goes for content that is illegal for servers to host.
Moderation is okay when it properly adjusts signal-to-noise ratio of discussion.
Censorship is about suppressing opinions which fall out of Overton's window, which is not okay, as all it does is to enforce status quo.
There was a good blogpost by Ex-reddit engineers about it where the idea was to treat it as signal which you cannot understand, and your core purpose as moderation(from automated PoV) is to adjust the signal to noise ratio without being able to comprehend/read the underlying data.
A bit hypocritical of them, looking at how reddit's moderation works.
Frankly i'm also against private censorship in case of social media - as it is basically outsourced government censorship.
The problem is that there are regulations passed to centralize requirements on censorship, it helps incumbents by making it too burdensome for new companies to enter the market. Existing corporations publicly state their desire to let the government be the arbiter. It's a delicate balance and governments prefer to act slowly to ensure the right outcome.
Are there other sites where you can discuss the things you use Hacker News for, without much of a loss? Then it's probably moderation.
Is this the only forum that matters with respect to a certain topic? Then it's probably censorhip.
For example, if a private company controls the de-facto subreddit for a topic or product and uses that to control the narrative then it's more like censorship than moderation.
Also, it sounds like you think it's black-and-white but it's much more gray than that and something one might call moderation someone else might call censorship, and there might not be a clear-cut answer.
The article is clearly an advocacy/op-ed that uses "loaded-framing" ("totalitarian control", “cop-in-your-pocket”) and a lot of speculation. A one-sided point of view, as is common in modern "journalism".
That said, code should never be banned in the U.S. But U.S. companies need to operate within U.S. laws.
Well, you're right that this isn't journalism per se. But it's not trying to be, so your comment is a bit weird. Nobody is confusing the ACLU with CNN.
idk what's weird about my comment. Many people don't know that the ACLU is unapologetically a biased left-wing organization riddled with controversy, starting with its founder, to funding by George Soros, to very biased takes and use of their legal resources.
Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government “prohibited” the company “from sharing any information,” but now that Wyden has outed the feds, Apple has updated its transparency reporting and will “detail these kinds of requests” in a separate section on push notifications in its next report.
> Apple has admitted to the government forcing them to cover-up backdoors
Handing over push notification data stored on a company's server is not any type of "backdoor".
That's how the law works in the US when the Federal, State, or local authorities come to you with a warrant.
If the Feds come to you with a National Security Letter, then you are forced to hand over the data stored on your servers, and are indeed prohibited from speaking out about it.
The only way to defend your customer's privacy is to minimize data collected and stored on your servers, which is what makes the surveillance capitalism business model of companies like Google and Meta so dangerous.
It's a backdoor. A rose by any other name is just as thorny.
I'm sorry that it upsets you. If it's any consolation, I consider Google and Meta's complicity equally disgusting. But I consider it disgusting because they are doing the same thing Apple does; hiding the existence of interception and privacy-degrading functionality that benefits the government. The pedigree that Apple once garnered through publicity stunts like San Bernadino has been entirely negated in posterity. The federal government has a much closer relationship with Apple than any customer ever could; the "privacy is a human right" advertisement was always conditional on where you lived and how you're oppressed.
The only way to defend customer privacy is to offer genuine freedom. As you've admit in this comment, federal coercion of a platform like iOS is like shooting fish in a barrel. iMessage, App Store, WebKit dylibs, Push Notifications, OCSP servers; none of them have any alternatives. If Apple were to lose control over the security of those products, the implications could be lethal. They could never argue that proprietary code or privately-managed security is a benefit to mankind ever again.
It's no coincidence that Tim Cook greeted Kashoggi's killer last night over dinner. Welcome to the new normal, a surveillance state where Apple was priced-out of defending freedom, safety or privacy.
Most people on here should consider the opposite extreme: a free for all where millions of idiots are carrying devices where they can install and run anything on a device where arbitrary radio signals can be transmitted and received at will under software control. Once you accept that would be ridiculous then the question becomes where to draw the line.
You are so brainwashed by app stores' talking points that you don't realize you are describing computers.
Just let users install whatever they want. Maybe add a verification process (a-la app verification for Mac) if users want to be restricted to verified apps. Show a "this is from an unverified developer" messages if the app comes from an unverified developer (is not signed).
There's no need to draw lines. Leave that to painters and architects.
I don't get your point. This article is about control of the high level software running on your phone, not the firmware controlling your phone's radios. Even if an app store allowed any software without filter, this would not allow anyone to transmit "arbitrary radio signals". The much lower level firmware ensures that the radio communicates at proper power and protocol.
The phone hardware is not capable of arbitrary radio signals anyway. People can buy software defined radios off the shelf, but people generally don't abuse this because a) there really isn't any motivation for them to and b) they would quickly land in really hot water with the FCC.
1. A world where every human's smartphone is an open-field install-anything no-controls-beyond-antivirus device similar to your desktop PC would be a functionally and utilitarian-ly worse world than the one we live in today where these devices for most people exhibit strong, centralized, corporatist control.
2. There are use-cases these devices are now being adopted for that open-field install-anything desktop PCs have never, even to this day, adopted. You cannot install your drivers license and passport into your desktop PC, nor can you tap-to-pay. Its likely many of these use-cases needed the level of hyper-security Apple and Google are pushing toward in order to digitize these use-cases, validly or not.
3. Apple's extreme of restricting the installation of anything outside of the App Store (and, for that matter, even severely restricting the things you can distribute through the app store for no reason, such as until recently alternate payment providers) is a step too far. As you say, the opposite extreme is bad, but that doesn't mean Apple's extreme is good.
4. There's a middleground we need to find, and by the way, I don't think Android strikes the middleground very well today. A couple examples of things that would move in a more positive direction toward this middleground: (a.) I think phones should be able to be purchased from the factory immutably with the quality of requiring binaries to be signed by Apple/Google. Google should sell Pixels that are hyper-locked down similar to the iPhone and that characteristic can never change about them; its etched into the security coprocessor itself. Conversely, maybe if I have an Apple developer account, I should be able to buy an iPhone that allows me to install binaries from any source. (b.) Apple should have an "App Store Extended" backend capability where developers still distribute their apps through the App Store, all the same security scanning happens, but the developer has to handle their own marketing via the web; the app never appears in the App Store App itself. In exchange, their distribution rules are more relaxed (alternate payment processors, applets, sensitive content, etc).
> Apple's extreme of restricting the installation of anything outside of the App Store... is a step too far.
This is the key for me right here. I think it's fine to offer preferred services and distribution platforms on a piece of hardware. But actively preventing other software from running on that hardware is silly. The user really doesn't own the thing at that point.
Contrast Apple's treatment of iPhones and iPads with Valve's position on the upcoming Steam Machine:
>Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
Yes, that's the point of freedom. People can carry devices that do things. If they break the law, that's another question, but everyone should be allowed to have computers that communicate that they can control
The risk is if you have unfettered control then it's easy to get tricked into installing malicious apps, and now my device is getting zero-day attacks over bluetooth or wifi from state actors using your phone.
I don’t want someone to walk around, I don’t know, forcing all the phones around them in a 10m radius to blow up their batteries and hurt people.
Handheld radios, like my wireless tx/rx for lavaliers have to have their spectrums cleared by the FCC. As do most transmitting devices. There are baseline requirements before they can be sold/used.
I get often with these things if you give an inch they take a mile, but there have to be some foundational guardrails here IMO. You can’t just have a bunch of laws punishing people for behavior and no attempts at preventing it in the first place.
The ability to just transmit anything indiscriminately is just a dicey proposition to me. Like how we used to just allow a free for all with drones.
Can you show an example of a phone blowing up its battery with the potential to hurt people because of a harmful radio signal?
This seems like something the phone should be able to handle. People already have root access on devices with radio transmitters, they're called laptops. I don't recall many incidents of a malicious actor with a laptop forcing all the laptops around them to blow up and hurt their owners. If that were a reasonable possibility then they certainly wouldn't be allowed on planes.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding but the prior comment seemed to say “people should be able to transmit whatever they want, however they want, with whatever device they want.”
I imagine it’s not insanely difficult to get a phone to crank up voltage or something until the battery starts melting down. Maybe I’m letting sci-fi/thrillers pollute my sense of reality though
My point is that transmitting whatever you want doesn't mean the devices around you will "blow up", devices also have controls on how they receive radio transmissions.
A malicious transmitter could likely jam signals, but this is already illegal and that comment said "If they break the law, that's another question"
Your hypothetical doesn't make sense. People can already hack around with radios and transmit whatever they want, doing so doesn't result in devices around them blowing up or hurting people.
Malicious transmitters are illegal. There is liability for the person operating the malicious transmitter along with the sale, marketing, and manufacturing of the transmitter.
If the maker of a phone allowed a user to break the law by having the phone become a malicious transmitter and the phone maker didn't try everything in their capacity to prevent it, they'd be in trouble too.
Yes, you can hack your own. You can get a CB radio and boost its power by replacing parts of it. That's on you. If you were able to get a phone from a company that knowingly allowed you to install some software or do this "one silly trick" that allowed the phone to broadcast at 10x the power, you'd be in trouble - but so would the company that made the phone.
Sure, but we already have consumer devices with root access that have radio transmitters. Is this a common problem with laptops? Why would it be a larger problem with smartphones?
The amount of integration between the system and the wifi modem, the frequencies that it can broadcast on, and the regulations for that part of the spectrum.
You'd be quite challenged to make your wifi modem connect to an access point a few miles away. Phones do it all the time. A phone may be broadcasting with as low as a milliwatt when near a transmitter to a few watts when further away ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_device_radiation_and_... ). Wifi has a much smaller range of acceptable broadcast power available (and at the most powerful end of acceptable is less than a phone).
That's called a weapon (EMP discharge), and there's quite a lot of people in the US that are ready to defend even such devices. There's even a Constitutional article about it IIRC.
Why not? As we get pushed more into a corner on this obviously self evident logic chain. Many of us WILL NOT EVER comply with this absurd oppressive tyrannical control of computing and communication and information. We might as well embrace the same non arguments of the over the top second amendment people.
It's literally the silly meme. You will take my gun/GNU from my cold dead hands lol
> a free for all where millions of idiots are carrying devices where they can install and run anything on a device where arbitrary radio signals can be transmitted and received at will under software control
I get some push back from a few tech friends because I avoid using apps (except for things like Chess game apps). I can’t say for sure that preferring web versions of services helps with censorship, but it can’t hurt.
Using web versions, not apps, is important because companies keep user device statistics and if enough people insist in using web versions, the the web will continue to be at least partially supported by big tech.
> Using web versions, not apps, is important because companies keep user device statistics and if enough people insist in using web versions, the the web will continue to be at least partially supported by big tech.
It's also frequently just better. If I'm looking for hotels, flights, apartments, restaurants, hiking trails, ect., doing so in a browser allows me to keep dozens of comparable offers open for direct comparison - just by jumping between browser tabs.
Doing the same in the app means endlessly navigating between offers, favorites, and new searches. It's often very obvious that the app was built explicitly to be less powerful.
The main downside to many mobile web sites is the desperate plea to use the app you have to dismiss every time. I feel sorry for the devs who build a great mobile version only to be forced to put a stupid "$SITE is better in the app" banner on it.
uBlock can stop those, if your device is allowed to have it.
Shoutout to Firefox for Android for being the only mobile browser of note that lets you use uBlock Origin
uBlock Origin Lite is available for Safari on mobile, though that's not exactly the same extension. Orion supports standard uBlock Origin on mobile, but then that's not a browser "of note."
You win this round!
Edge does as well.
Really? I thought it was a Chromium wrapper and subject to the same nerfing done to it and Chrome.
There’s also companies which seemed to break their Web experience specifically to drive people into the app. Credit Karma hasn’t worked on a browser on mobile or desktop for me in years. But the app version always works.
I guess it’s my fault for trying to use an Intuit product to begin with when I already know they’re evil.
Or feature limit the mobile web version.
In both cases, requesting the desktop version (i.e. using a non-mobile user-agent string) will give you back the normal, full-fat web version.
Does Credit Karma's app from last month work too?
This is a reason I also like the web is that after the page loads I can just do stuff instead of getting kicked out to have to update the app ... Or even having to re-log in ...
Fucking Menards and home Depot on mobile are two of the worst websites that exist. They're slow and full of bugs.
Desktop is fine. Mobile sucks. I have to imagine it's intentional to push mobile users towards the app.
And copying text. That's such a killer app for the web that's barely supported in native apps.
It's such a killer feature for the web, some of the more egregious websites try to remove it using JavaScript!
Some corporations just really hate their users, and will never understand why
Yeah, both copying text and the search function, IMO.
If a mobile app like that supported tabs AND somehow allowed you to see key things between tabs, you wouldn't even reach for the browser. Crazy how much different that landscape could be if they thought about such a critical use case. My guess is non-power users just look at one offer at a time.
What is really stupid is when the app is just a web browser limited to one tab like for Amazon. The web site is better on phones because you can open links in new tabs but you can't in the app even though the app is obviously just displaying the exact same web page.
> I can’t say for sure that preferring web versions of services helps with censorship
The linked article isn't enough to convince you? Look up Gab or Parler. (Yes, I find most of the speech there reprehensible. No, I don't think they should be denied the right to publish and distribute an app.)
Using a social media app instead of a website, as most people do, means that everything you are seeing has essentially been pre-approved by Apple and Google.
If the tide swings even a little further to the right on X, expect the X app to be banned as well. I was secretly hoping that it would be banned when Musk took over just to remind the right of why centralized app stores are a terrible idea. But with ICEBlock the left has finally been alerted to that fact as well, which might be even more beneficial to the cause of software freedom in the long run, since the left is generally less afraid of the proper solution to this problem, regulation.
In the meantime, keep using web apps instead of native apps.
Parler was also kicked off of AWS…
As far as X being banned, if you haven’t heard Tim and every other tech CEO bends a knee anytime Trump and conservatives asks him to.
AWS isn't the only way to host a website, and his been an obviously bad choice for hosting something controversial since it denied service to Wikileaks.
They also bent a knee to previous Democratic party administrations and will bend the knee to them again the next time the Democratic party is in power. Large tech companies aren't interested in spending money and poltical capital fighting censorship demands of anyone who is likely to have power within the US government.
And therein lies a problem. Each 'side' has no problem with it as long their team is not affected. Just yesterday -- on AM radio of all places -- I had democratic pundit openly wondering how Epstein's list is going to be used against them after spending a fair amount of political capital pushing for its release. It is all a game and, sadly, we are getting played. In such an environment, it is hard not to become cynical.
There is a huge difference between a president using the “bully pulpit” and threatening to take away a network’s broadcast license because they said something he didn’t like. That was a road too far for even Ted Cruz who criticized both Trump and the FCC.
A democratic president also didn’t accept personal bribes from companies to allow a merger to go through (Paramount) or accept bribes from other companies that were afraid of retaliation - Meta, Google, Twitter and Disney.
The current administration has carved out outs for companies that bend a knee when it comes to tarriffs. This is the worse case of false whataboutism yet.
> Parler was also kicked off of AWS…
Which reminds us of the difference between AWS and Apple -- Amazon Web Services is the web and the web is an open platform. If AWS denies you, you go sign up at any of their competitors or buy your own servers and plug them into the internet. If Apple denies you, iPhone users can't get your app, and if you go sign up at a competitor or buy your own servers, they still can't get your app.
> As far as X being banned, if you haven’t heard Tim and every other tech CEO bends a knee anytime Trump and conservatives asks him to.
That's because they currently control the government. Now think ahead by more than two days and consider the possibility that the other party might win an election again someday. What should you do right now when you're in control of the government to prevent yourself from getting screwed the next time that happens?
> If AWS denies you, you go sign up at any of their competitors or buy your own servers and plug them into the internet
And then your ISP kick you out.
All of them? It's a website, the servers don't have to be in the same place as your bedroom. They don't even have to be in the same country.
And then what happens when CloudFare de platforms you? It doesn’t take much to DDOS most websites that aren’t protected by something like CloudFare.
So now you just have to get deplatformed by Cloudflare, AWS, Fastly, Azure, Radware, Google, Akamai, F5, Imperva and every other DDoS protection company in the world all at the same time while simultaneously suffering from a DDoS attack that never lets up or your site immediately comes back.
Meanwhile a DDoS attack is a crime, so Apple doing something with the equivalent effect is now something you're equating with the commission of a crime.
I prefer web versions because I trust the browser sandbox more than I trust the developers at Super Store 01.
Yes! I meant to also say that, thanks.
Sorry for going off on a tangent, but last week I asked Gemini about security and privacy advantages of running Gmail and Google Calendar using Safari and DuckDuckGo Browser - Gemini made good arguments for using the browser versions: ironic!
The recent Facebook scandal of running a service to receive requests for tracking shows the app store sandbox model is far more of a denylist vs an allowlist, it's leaky by design in the name of "developer enablement" or "user experience".
I also prefer web versions for similar reasons, and enjoy them while I still can.
It's even funnier when the desktop app is just the web app with a wrapper, but the desktop app is worse.
I also think that it sends the right signal in terms of "Hey, this really doesn't need to be an app". I don't need an app for my newspaper, I need a shortcut/bookmark to its web page.
And once you start thinking about it, the same thing goes for a surprisingly large amount of apps.
I feel like in the coming years the facade big A and big G put up in order to push everyone into their distinctive walled garden of apps will crumble in public opinion.
It never was "yeah, it needs to be an app because the web platform doesn't have an API standard for it", geez, apple even forced a single web engine. They could have easily allowed access to their APIs on the browser. It just never was in their corporate interest to do so.
Okay, this devolved into an anti corporate rant without it being my intention to... So, go web!
I don't really know how to articulate exactly how I'd classify into one bucket or the other but I think there are two types of "app" and I tend to have differing preferences on whether they should be native apps or web apps as a result.
One is where relatively-static content is the priority, deep-linking is important or essential and the web platform is pretty ideal for those. News articles or blogs or Wikipedia pages or those sorts of things. Things where I might want to be switching between tabs or forgetting about for a while and coming back to later.
The other is where the app is primarily interactive or where the content is a lot more likely to be real-time or ephemeral. Not least because if you're on a low-bandwidth or high-RTT connection, navigating between web pages or having interactivity blocked behind a backlog of XHRs (particularly where caching isn't permitted) is utterly miserable. My experience is that native apps usually continue feeling responsive to input even when the network itself is not responsive but that is often not true with many clickable elements in many web pages.
PWAs might be the middle-ground here but they feel a lot like Electron apps to me: still foreign to all platforms, not responsive in the way that native UI controls are, weird/missing "back" behaviours and still no better support for deep-linking than the average app would have.
I just wish a culture of quality would become the rule and not the exception in web app development. It's a far more frequent thing for web apps to stutter and make my phone hot (or on a computer, keep an entire core pegged doing nothing) than it is for native apps to do the same. This experience is universal between browsers and platforms, too; I've observed it on Chrome under Android and Edge on Windows for example.
Of course there are plenty of crappy native apps too, but the incidence and severity is comparatively lower and in many cases, there are well-behaved "handcrafted" small dev alternatives to crappy native apps which are much less common (or at least, more difficult to find) on the web.
Need to have standardized native web components for the "culture of quality". Everyone building their own special widget in JS+CSS+virtual DOM Framework does not enforce UX quality.
Totally agree, it's the inevitable result of infinite wheel reinvention; none of the wheels ever receive the level of refinement they need. By the time the first stone wheel starts showing hints of a polished sheen, it's time to go carve a new stone wheel.
I'm a big proponent of browsers including something resembling a traditional UI framework out of the box. It doesn't have to try to be perfect or fit everybody's needs (which is impossible anyway), but it will serve many developers well and give everybody else a solid foundation to build their own (much lighter) stuff on top of.
You tell this to frontend experts and they are totally against it. "Lack of UI customization", "this is already possible", "you should skill up and learn web-tech", "use one of the popular (multi MB) component libraries", "we don't need more bad browser APIs", yadda yadda yadda.
The real reason is that most of them are afraid it would reduce the number of frontend jobs. But nowadays that is already being eaten by AI...
I also avoid apps. I tell everyone that I meet to avoid apps because the general population is going to drive us right into a future where there are no more web-based options and almost everything must be accessed through a separate app. People are simply not aware of what they're giving up by using apps that would work perfectly fine as websites.
The problem is that the Web has turned into ChromeOS Platform, the only reason it hasn't yet is iDevices and Safari.
Also Web apps are basically the 21st century version of timesharing like in the good old days, where we had one server for everyone.
Even better for censorship purposes.
In almost all cases, phone apps talk to that same central server as the web browser, just with a different (much worse) client that you have less control over.
If it were the case that phone apps weren't networked and could only sync through another channel like icloud/syncthing, then you'd be onto something.
But right now most apps are "web browser but worse".
Native apps might need networking, Web apps require networking, they might simulate offline to various degrees depending on local storage, which they don't have any control over, and is shared.
But now we're getting into the crux of it.
What you want is a better (and easier to use) sandbox for native apps, so that users can feel as comfortable installing an app as visiting a web page as long as the app doesn't have any more permissions than the web page would have, and then you don't need central gatekeepers approving them.
The platform that software is delivered through is independent of whether it works offline.
You mean the ISPs, whose permits are controlled by goverment authorities?
Easier to threaten one Store rather than 10,000 ISP's.
Also easier to install a VPN than to replace your phone with one that isn't controlled by Apple or Google.
> 10,000 ISP's.
Lol, you must be from the 90s. There's like 10 now.
Just because the US has consolidated many ISP's doesn't mean the rest of the world has. Also, even in the US, that figure is just under 2k. Globally, it is >16k.
Personally I generally prefer the UX of apps for software that I trust, ie, open source software downloaded via F-Droid. I feel the same with native desktop clients. For untrusted software, web apps are the way to go.
Glad to see I'm not alone. I never install apps unless there's no other way, and often remove them as soon as possible. My home screen is a collection of web shortcuts. Amazon, YouTube, X, bank, all web links. But I also use LineageOS with MicroG.
I've been asked why, and it's not really fear of surveillance (although I'm not a fan of it) or making a difference or whatever, just because it's one of the few ways I'm able to give the finger. Sure, noone will notice but it makes me feel better :)
Sont listen to naysayers. There are dozens of us. Maybe hundreds!
(The actual number is millions.)
There's also PWA, which while not perfect, is supported on iOS.
PWA was an awesome idea and should have been the way forward.
Unfortunately both Google and Apple very early on identified that it was in their best interest to keep the concept around in a half-dead state and ensure nobody really built on it...
PWA on android's side is at least usable.
You get notification. You can autoplay video/audio. You get whaterver video or element full screen with all necessary UI. You get rotation lock. You have a fullscreen to do what ever you want for any purpose. You probably can't touch hardware APIs(for example: bluetooth/nfc) like native app. But that isn't really needed for most apps either.
On the other side. Apple seems sabotage the PWA as much as possible. You can't autoplay video/audio. You can't even fullscreen anything other than video, and when fullscreen video, UI is ignored. Also there is no way to disable gesture so your app will misfire system gesture. And you can't lock the rotation either. There is no way to auto rotate the video player or whatever when maximized either.
It's really a golden example for pretend to do something while actually not. It seems you can do pretty much everything with ios pwa. And when you try to do it. You will figured out it will have a worse experience than native app because all sort of issues.
To be fair, Android also sabotages PWAs, it's just done behind your back. You see, in order to get a PWA to properly install, you'll have to use Chrome, and you'll have to have a Google Play account and Chrome will submit the PWA manifest for validation to a Google server, which in turn will decide whether the PWA is worthy, and if it is, it will generate a so called WebAPK, which is then installed on your device. If it's not worthy however, then it will become a bookmark instead, and many of the features that can be described in the manifest will not work at all.
So if you wanted to use a different browser or install a PWA without a connection to the internet, or without Google Play, all you get is a bookmark.
> in turn will decide whether the PWA is worthy
In my personal experience, it only validate whether manifest is malformatted though. Although it's still up to google if they want to do something wonky.
I saw someone claim on SO that they were not able to get a PWA to install properly until they changed their IP address, supposedly because they were from Iran, a sanctioned country.
Other browsers on Android support PWA, such as Firefox.
To my knowledge, every PWA installed from Firefox on Android will become a bookmark. For Firefox I believe that means for example that if you try to open a link elsewhere that is within the manifest scope, it will not open in the PWA. That's because it's not possible to deep link to the PWA without it having an AndroidManifest with a corresponding intent filter, which is what the Chrome WebAPK achieves and why they can support for example custom protocol handlers or share targets or launch handling options.
Google invented PWAs and broke their back trying to make them a thing. I'm not a fan of Google but credit where credit is due.
They were also highly incentivized to develop the APIs that make it all work as Chromebooks are basically hosts for browser apps. Apple, as well as the other tech giants involved in the W3C had no such incentives and were dragging their feet.
Google seems to be all in on PWAs, they even have a way to monetize them in the play store via TWAs.
Admittedly I am not up to date on the latest developments but as far as a couple years ago the PWA runtime on both ecosystems was significantly stymied in comparison to the APP runtime. No access to real storage functionality, significantly less platform APIs, yada yada.
Sure, you could build "better (installable) websites" but even to get standardized stuff like background execution or notifications working was either impossible or a long series of jumping through hoops. Even installation prompts bugged out way too often.
But to be clear, if that isn't the case any more I will be positively surprized by either platform provider.
I respect PWAs, but they take away so much that I personally want. No address bar, no tabs, no history, no extensions. It's a reversion from the glorious amazing user agency of the web to the sad state that computing had held us victim to for decades.
PWAs are a pain to develop, with tons of boilerplate.
They also don't require a dump truck load of third party dependencies just to have a serviceable set of widgets to use. Every time I start looking into web app development I'm always shocked at what's required to replicate what one gets for "free" in a UIKit app.
What? It's less boilerplate than native apps.
Native apps are offline by default.
PWAs require a ton of JavaScript junk to simulate that.
You can make a PWA fully offline with someting like a 10 line service worker.
Yeah, for a hello world app, and with something like Workbox.
As opposed to Swift junk?
Swift doesn't need a service worker to proxy all browser behaviour, and make use of local storage, with unspecified limit, to prentend to be working offline.
You do realize that there are many APIs that exist so that your Swift app works offline, right? There are specific persistence frameworks, tools for controlling caching, extensions for managing external files, etc. The argument that writing JavaScript that doesn’t make network requests and needs to store state to disk is somehow super special and different than any other regular JavaScript makes no sense.
You do realise using Swift doesn't require having a network card on your laptop to run 100% of all applications compiled with swiftc?
You do realize that neither do browser apps require having a network card on your laptop, right ? You can run local browser apps (HTML + CSS + JS) on a computer with no network card.
Most things that are worth doing usually involve some level of pain.
I've been a web/ux guy for a long time now and I don't think I've ever used a single mobile app/site that is better than a proper full screen piece of software. It's always been a compromise no matter how hard myself or my designers try. Maybe quick photo/video edits but that's less because they're good or they have quality user experiences but more because its often overkill to pop open Photoshop just to cut out a dog pooping in the background or whatever. Most times I feel like mobile devs (myself included) don't even utilize the various unique features mobile devices do have.
I'm also old, cranky and turning into a crusty CLI guy as I get even older and crankier. If you kids need more than a TUI, get off my lawn!
I just will not install an app unless it specifically provides some features not available on the site. I can block ads/tracks with ublock then.
I'm not installing my electricity providers app with any permissions when their website shows the same.
I subscribe to the NYT and find it so irritating that they regularly prompt me to download their app from safari on ios I may cancel. I do not want their app ever.
bingo!! web apps solve most of these issues.
let's say for the ICEblock or whatever - pull up a map pin (geotag), that can be done in a web app.
the things most people advocate apps for e.g notifications are nuisances that some of us permanently turned off. My phone is always on do not disturb, I get 0 notifications. The only time I prefer notifications is something actionable - I pay online then the bank says open app to approve in-app notification (pop up) not those things (notifications) that just come to your phone asynchronously and bother you.
I have a smartwatch (if at all) garmin it's not hooked up to my phone for notifications.
unless you're making games / hell now games can leverage webgpu - no reason to make native apps at all for 96% of things. just make a web app - service workers enable offline access for some things.
- my simple take -> do what the porno companies do in regards to tech. simple & effective. but please don't copy their ads thing.
I'm curious that tech friends would push back on this. I'd expect them to be the ones to agree with the idea, oddly.
The standard layman, on the other hand, wants to be able to trust that they can trust people.
"People in tech" has grown so large that the term has become a bit meaningless.
For every person in tech that knows who Stallman is and what he stands for, there's a person in tech that believes that NFTs and AI will bring about world peace and end poverty.
Fair. I'd still expect most "in tech" people to be more sympathetic to how bad apps have become.
You should install F-Droid. lmoat every app on there is completely ethical, and there are many (not enough but many).
Many of the ones that require a server side connect to your self hosted server instead of some central server on the cloud, which is a reason they will never get popular, but sounds perfect for you. There are some that use central servers, and this fact will be clearly stated in the antifeatures section. Many other F-Droid apps just work offline. And hardly any have ads.
Yep. Not using apps and avoiding the cloud at all costs (e.g. not backing up everything to iCloud, turning off one drive) are litmus tests for having a clue. Using Bluetooth is almost the same but it’s hard to get by without it nowadays. Same for connecting your tv to the internet.
> Using web versions
ahem, heard of cloudflare? web hosters and developers are voluntarily centralizing themselves.
I'm disappointed by the EFF not mentioning PWAs and web apps. Fighting censorship means fighting for those too. Platform owners will always have more direct control over sideloading.
How long before smartphone providers start controlling your web browser?
It's even better to avoid the internet entirely. It's purely a liability at this point.
While censorship is one thing, they forgot another overlooked ability of these app stores: pushing unwanted apps/services to our personal devices without our knowledge.The fact that the majority of people don’t care about this censorship and backdoors makes me think we don’t really appreciate the concept of freedom, and maybe we are okay with being slaves—at least until we cannot take it anymore. Maybe that’s why history repeats itself every few decades to remind us about these values.
>While censorship is one thing, they forgot another overlooked ability of these app stores: pushing unwanted apps/services to our personal devices without our knowledge
When was the last time the play store or app store pushed apps "without our knowledge"? I've only heard of it done by shady third party bloatware that OEMs bundle with the OS. The actual issue is a system that can perform OTA updates, not app stores themselves.
What about when Google pushed Android Safety Core to all Android devices out there?
And you also realize they can push modified build of any apps, now that they also own the keys to sign the apps?
>What about when Google pushed Android Safety Core to all Android devices out there?
You mean the package that apps have to opt in to use? I guess that's technically counts as "unwanted apps/services", but that's like complaining about firefox "pushing unwanted apps/services", because they added some javascript function to every firefox installation out there.
>And you also realize they can push modified build of any apps, now that they also own the keys to sign the apps?
If you read my original comment more carefully, you'll notice I'm not denying they have the capability to do so, only that there's no precedence of them doing so.
The play store doesn't even update my apps for me anymore often
It happened a few months ago with Gemini at least for Android, probably similar for Apple Intelligence on iOS although I can't comment since I don't use it anymore.
There was the time Apple dropped a U2 album on everyone, to widespread annoyance, but that's not the same thing.
I’m very happy to see a US organisations picking this up finally. Apple/Google clearly want to fight this on a country by country basis so they can stretch it until forever. Hope the pressure results in meaningful changes for all.
If it's not done on the basis of jurisdiction, then laws about what constitutes illegal content in Germany or China or United States applies to everyone.
Taking the stance of "we're not going to follow any laws and publish everything" puts the companies in very difficult places in those countries as publishers of the content.
They’re welcome to curate a store if they want to but installation and configuration of any 3rd party software, freely, without attestation mandates should be available. Also, Apple introduced a very complex process of fear mongering for the Alt Store in the EU - all that must go away in order to rectify the user’s right to own their device.
Or just.. make it easier to not be constrained to app stores. I realize losing that sweet, sweet 30% fee on every transaction hurts their wallet but I think my $1000 phone should be mine to freely install things on.
*and hurts design and development of their products... which you bought... because you're complaining about it.
I get in trouble for this a lot, but didn't you as a consumer know what you were getting into? I know I did when I bought into the apple ecosystem.
What's the actual argument? Apple doesn't have a monopoly on smartphones, computers or applications. This boils down to. I use their products by choice, but I want the government to force them to change. Their platform their rules. idk why this is controversial.
Google isn't much better and there's no more serious competition.
It's not called a duopoly for no reason, both Apple and Google have very similar policies and if there's any competition, I'm not seeing it.
You can use Apple which controls everything you are allowed to see and do on your phone or you can chose Google which ... controls everything you are allowed to see and do on your phone.
And as a developer, both fees are exactly the same (what a coincidence!)
The duopoly comes about from a few things forcing it.
There's the "it took a while to build it." iOS and android had decades of time to get to where they are now and centuries of developer hours put into writing it. That makes it challenging for others to get in. It isn't impossible, but it's really challenging. For the company, it's likely a loss for a long while before it becomes a possibility of not being a loss. The windows phone was being worked on for 3 years before the iPhone was released and wasn't released for another 3 years... and wasn't exactly a success.
Next is the licensing of the modems for the phone spectrum. That takes FCC approval in the US and isn't something that random companies do without good reason. Part of that licensing is the requirement that it is locked down sufficiently that the user can't do malicious things on the radio spectrum with the device... and that tends to go against many of the open source ideals. It's a preemptive Tivoization of the device.
Assuming that those two parts are down, the next challenge is to make it a tool that you'd use in place of an iPhone or an android phone. Things like holding PCI data. That again makes it difficult to do. Persuading a bank that the device can act as a payment card and that the authorization is sufficient to avoid fraud from either the apps on the device or the user being able to inject other payment cards that they don't own into the device.
Likewise, things like allowing the device's digital wallet to act as the identification card. https://www.tsa.gov/digital-id/participating-states https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/11/apple-introduces-digi... - those require trust between the government and the company that is likely absent with a open source device.
I'd love to see an iPod touch like device (non phone) that allows me to run apps or develop my own and build up an ecosystem and demonstrate that trusting it is feasible... but so far I haven't seen many that have lasted beyond kickstarter money running out. I've got a Remarkable ... which isn't exactly small (or cheap). I'd like to see more things like that in other form factors that allow me to do things with it akin to https://developer.remarkable.com
> That makes it challenging for others to get in. It isn't impossible, but it's really challenging.
Huawei made Harmony OS smartphones in 2 years. That said, they were uniquely motivated by the Google Mobile Services ban, Chinese state support, and likely had set the groundworks for such a transition much earlier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS#Early_development
> Reports surrounding an in-house operating system being developed by Huawei date back as far as 2012 in R&D stages with HarmonyOS NEXT system stack going back as early as 2015.
It wasn't green field to release in two years and likely had almost a decade of prep. It probably got additional resources with the Google Mobile Services ban... but even without that it would likely have shown up within the next few years.
Because there’s a lot more of us than there is of them and the government steps in to make things better for most of its citizens.
One of the classic roles of the government is to prevent certain unfair business setups. For instance, providers of a service aren't supposed to have agreements to not compete and carve off markets from each other. Likewise price fixing is prohibited.
Apple already lost here when it attempted to prevent people from even linking to other payment platforms. That was "their platform" until it wasn't, thanks to a court.
Giving them exclusive control to police speech - legal speech - without an opt out that doesn't involve thousands of dollars of loss is also "part of their platform" today.
I actually disagree with the ICEBlock app.. but that's for the courts to decide if it's legal, not a private company.
At least in the US, every single app maker can link out of an app and accept payments. But most still don’t.
You know why? It came out in the Epic Store that 90%+ of App Store revenue comes from pay to win games, coins, and loot boxes. Game developers love to have direct access to whale’s wallets.
They only do this now because Trump is president. It's very dishonest that they didn't fight for it before. ACLU etc are pro-censorship, they also want to censor other viewpoints, don't be fooled. They are screaming now because they are the ones targeted. I won't fall for it.
I donated to ACLU during Bush vs Gore and they promptly sold my name and address everywhere and I got junk mail and spam for years as a reward for supporting their efforts. They can kiss my ass.
EFF >> ACLU
Apple couldn’t do a thing about a hypothetical iceblock.com
At least on iOS, Apple controls the singular web browser implementation. If they wanted to, they definitely could do a thing about any site. The same arguments for policing their App Store would apply to the open internet too, it's scary and dangerous!
Sure they can. Mobile users have no path of recourse if Apple updates WebKit to break or blacklist the site. There is no working alternative on iPhone or iPad.
Maybe the people advocating for browser diversity on iOS were onto something...
Yes, no recourse. But there are still legal consequences. If Apple blocks certain web content they have a harder time arguing that they are not responsible for blocking other we content: copyrighted material, etc.
They don’t want that cost/responsibility.
App stores hold significant control over what we can access, effectively enabling corporate and government censorship on devices we own.
The title is correct. The landscape became dangerous because governments withdraw from regulating the space unleashing big corporates on citizen's privacy and options.
It is a Corporate-Government dystopia.
Apple / Google did not but should sue the Gov't for this abuse. Perhaps it could be more popularized, to sway Goo-Apple's mind and take the expensive plunge.
Glad the ACLU is starting to talk about it, at the least.
I wish I had more control over what the app stores show me. I should be able to block or hide apps on the storefront. Stop showing me TikTok Temu or Shein.
Apps have their place. But collecting them like Pokémon isnt wise.
How about app creators sue DOJ and/or Apple if the law is on their side?
It's possible to criticize something without having the law "on your side". The OP characterizes Apple's action as "unacceptable, censorious overreach", but doesn't claim it was illegal. Once upon a time, slavery was illegal, but it would be daft to oppose emancipation on the basis of "How about slaves sue DOJ and/or slave owners if the law is on their side?".
Did you miss the Epic lawsuit?
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Imagine working on a team in Apple and waking up to the news that the ACLU is now criticizing your work. Talk about being on the wrong side of history. Do Apple employees even care anymore? Or are they just there for the resume prestige? The mental gymnastics you must be doing in this moment to keep yourself from feeling cognitive dissonance.
The ACLU only writes these articles when the system is being used to take down something they like politically.
They never had a problem with the App Store removing Gab, Parler, or Infowars. It’s hard to take institutions like the ACLU seriously when they have such obvious bias. If the ACLU had taken a principled stance when the system was being used to take down things that they didn’t like, they would have been able to keep their legitimacy.
Yes. Apps are now just another layer of privacy invasion. 95% of apps could just be a website with zero reduction in function. Literally a bookmark on your home screen to the thing.
LaLiga matches may not be shown on any device that allows alternative app stores or side loading: https://torrentfreak.com/laliga-says-isps-joining-its-piracy...
Google probably knew about this rule change long in advance and it's what motivated them.
This is why a real, committed FLOSS OS is needed for smartphones. Something like how Debian works. You have a non-commercial entity steering the project, it has a governance model, and the goal is to create something that ultimately, no one owns or can take full control over.
there are plenty of "real" open source mobile OSes. the issue is third party apps. if Debian couldn't run NGINX, Apache, Docker, Kubernetes, etc, it wouldn't matter how mature or solid the OS is, because 90% of software people want to run on a server doesn't work.
if FAANG apps and banking apps don't run on a mobile OS it will never be viable. the government, these big companies, and the device manufacturers all have a vested interest in making sure it never happens.
Honestly, at least for me, it doesn't have to run those things. It has to run a private browser and Signal, and it needs to run on easy-to-obtain smartphone hardware with no dependency on anyone's app store. I would hope that is at least somewhat doable.
I have no delusions about there ever being a year of the GNU/Linux smartphone. Google will make damn sure that never happens, like you say.
EDIT:
I should say, I see this being a "second" device. Something to use when you don't want someone generating profit off of your data.
Biggest problem is banking apps.
Let me get this straight:
- You: vote for people makings laws
- Companies: comply with legislations they are bound to comply with
- you: Censorship!
I understand that not everyone gets a chance to vote for laws in the world, but for a company to do business in any country you have to comply with regulations.
Democracy is a tool we hope makes good decisions. If the democracy voted to have you killed, would you agree with that? If not, stop fetishizing democracy as a process, and instead start supporting outcomes that agree with liberty and justice.
I mean, Constitution? Nobody 'fetishizing' democracy, what you describe is just not how it works.
value outcomes, not process
Some types of censorship are popular and voters in democracies vote for polticians who pass and enforce such laws. A company that is censoring you because they are legally obligated to is still censoring you.
It is not your smartphone. The user computer is yours but the phone is owned by the telcom. You do not have a license to operate it. The telco does. They are the owners of your smart phone. Smart phones are terrible computing devices. They are excellent shopping/bank terminals and navigational aids, but they are not allowed to compute. Set it to host a hotspot and use a real computer if you want control. A smartphone will never, can never, allow you to own it. It would be illegal.
Well, there is the issue of security. While the app stores are also far from perfect on that issue, it’s still better than the Wild West given the sheer number of apps they have to do deal with. Then there’s also the issue of hosting and deploying the client app. Convenience has a cost
The web is much safer than the App and Play Store while been also absurdly bigger.
android 15 has a new volume control limit which prevents full volume from media and calls from bieng used to suposedly save us from ourselves
if I get time,I will see if there is way to do something through adb, but I have already deleeted all media and media apps
and am prepared to trash the phone
also there are impossible to deleet pre loaded phone contacts
and my first choices(now changed) for sim settings, come back on each phone restart
nasty fashist garbage
Another way these app stores enable censorship is by having arcane and inscrutable review processes, where they often ban your app for no reason with no recourse (unless you know a Googler or Apple employee, who can investigate).
For example, we work with Aween Rayeh [1], an app that provides real-time traffic information about Israeli checkpoints in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The author's account was banned for no reason at all on Google Play [2]. There was no means to get an appeal or a review.
What typically we see happening is that someone internally at these companies issues a ban for what we assume are ideological reasons. Then when someone looks into it there's no actual reason for the ban to have happened, and it sails through. We see similar thing with shadow banning on social media: someone gets hard flagged and their account is completely shut down, and then when someone looks into it, there was never a reason to do it in the first place.
[1] https://www.aweenrayeh.com/ [2] https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/thre...
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In the United States reporting on the presence of law enforcement on your street is protected by the first amendment. You can even film them and broadcast their activity in public places to the world.
You may not like it. Apple may not like it. But there's not much ambiguity here.
"Befehl ist befehl."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
There's no difference between ICEBlock and Google/Waze reporting on police activity on I5.
They weren't "just doing their job", they were also doing something else. You'll find the something else as legitimate reasoning for ICEBlock.
At high risk, eh?
What of the people that have done nothing wrong that were just living their lives now at high risk because of ICE’s ridiculous false agenda?
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The Gestapo, too, was "law enforcement officials, who are just doing their job".
Sometimes the job is to be an armed thug for a racist authoritarian. In that case, just doing it is not a good excuse.
Omg... Trump is Hitler, ICE is gestapo. Lay off the CNN for a bit man, go touch some grass.
I studied History in Austria. Those who do not know it are doomed to repeat it.
Studied in Austria? OMG.. do you know who else studied in Austria? That's right. You are a f...ing Hitler.
Ridiculous take on the situation. You’re either a bot or a maga pos. Not sure which yet.
Butthurt much that your landscaper for deported?
When is censorship ok?
We have moderators, here in hn. We also have them in reddit.
So sometimes we like censorship and sometimes we don't.
Censorship by a website moderator means you need to move to another website to express your ideas. Censorship by the government means you need to move to another country.
Censorship on an app hosting page means you need to host your app somewhere else. Censorship on the only app hosting page allowed means you can't host your app at all.
Speaking of reddit: that doesn't justify a miniscule amount of people deciding what the rest of users may express.
What is your proposed alternative, though?
Silos. You can create your own and say anything you want (only constrained by the law). Everyone else can join it, or blacklist it, for themselves. Nobody gets to shut off someone else's silo, they can only ignore it for themselves. Nobody gets to decide what other people choose to read or write.
For the case of Reddit, a silo maps nicely onto a subreddit. Within any subreddit the moderator can have full control, they can moderate it exactly as they choose. If you don't like it, create your own where you will have free rein.
What about content that is illegal in the country that your "silo" is hosted in, like, say, CSAM (but you can really really substitute anything else illegal there, like eg. planning terrorist attacks)? If a "silo" is CSAM-friendly or its express purpose is posting it and its moderators don't want to remove illegal content, what then?
I hope there are no legal jurisdictions that are actually CSAM-friendly. But this isn't a unique problem, there are many situations in the world where legal jurisdictions are muddy. For example, when over-the-air television signals can be received across country borders. Just let the law sort it out. Admittedly, it's more difficult for companies that operate in multiple countries, but they're already managing to do it today. The main hope is, that companies will not add any additional censorship themselves, and that an attitude of free exchange and tolerance, would be the default position for more of us than it is today.
That already exists, it’s called a website.
That's a good point. But for all practical purposes, Facebook, Reddit, and other major social networks represent what the web means to an average person. Many of them never even open a browser. So those major social networks should be treated more like a public square, for the discoverability that provides, if nothing else. And in the context of sites being delisted and apps being banned (Google, Apple, etc), it would be nice for major social networks to be committed to free speech on their platforms.
What is censorship except arbitrary enforcement of a funnel that leads to centralization (of ideas, app stores, etc.)
On reddit moderators can even be local to a sub, so you may just need to move to another one.
I think it's inversely correlated with power, influence and reach. HN and Reddit don't have guns, can't throw you in prison, and there are lots of social medias to choose from, so a fair bit of censorship can be tolerated. Apple can't deport you, but you also don't have a lot of other choices, very low tolerance for censorship. The Government can really ruin your life if you get on the wrong side and your options for changing it or escaping it are pretty limited, we should demand the highest levels of transparency. Sure, some secrecy around military and intelligence for a little while, but we should eventually know what they decided and why.
Censorship is fundamentally poisonous. Even without all that other stuff.
This is dogmatic reasoning. If censorship wasn't necessary, neither would the government. At sufficient scale, humans stop behaving in the best interest of the group, and you need ways to correct that. It'll never be perfect, but much like democracy, we don't know of a better system.
Surely, in a conversation, the most damaging thing you can do to the integrity of that conversation is to selectively nullify the voice of a participant.
It ceases to be a conversation then. It is something else, posing as a conversation.
Maybe it would be better if this censorship-power is democratically controlled. But if this power is given to an individual. Well that's different.
In order to have a conversation at all, you need to deal with the guy with the megaphone first. If you do not have moderation, you drown in spam, and do not have a conversation at all.
But is HN the only forum for tech discussions available to you?
The whole point is that both phone platforms are required to participate in modern life. Imagine if your water or electricity company decides not to supply your house. There is a reason such fundamental services are made into universal rights and do not follow the usual competition rules.
Apple/Google can’t be both the store, the device and the OS.
Whenever you enter a community, you implicitly agree to a small contract with the community. If I enter a running community, it's assumed that I'm not there to talk about cooking pasta, if I sign up to a book club, people will surely get tired of me if I don't stop yapping about music.
There's of course leeway around this, but communities, generally, have purpose, implicit (built by the community) and explicit (what it says on the sign).
We are okay with censorship when it serves to that purpose. We like it when HNs and Reddit delete viagra ads in comments. We don't like it when it runs contrary to or subverts the purpose of the communities. The userbase here would have gotten pretty mad if the threads about Cloudflare yesterday were deleted, as they evidently are of interest regarding current tech, and they would also have been pretty mad if anyone criticizing Cloudflare was banned, as we are supposed to be able to freely comment on such matters.
This is much more common on Reddit, where mods (and users!) will often silence stuff they don't like, even if relevant. This creates conflict regarding the two types of purpose mentioned before.
Now, countries should have as much censorship as they want, this is already patent in hate speech laws around the globe, before anyone brings up the 1st, do note that the US could also (at least in theory) change the constitution if the people so wished. Extreme caution should be taken in this regard though as one does not simply "stop being member of a country".
>Whenever you enter a community, you implicitly agree to a small contract with the community. If I enter a running community, it's assumed that I'm not there to talk about cooking pasta, if I sign up to a book club, people will surely get tired of me if I don't stop yapping about music.
No. If you're running, you can talk about pasta all you want. If you participate in the book club discussion, no one cares if you also talk about music.
It's ok when users have choice. Those who don't like HN moderation can hang out somewhere else (and many do).
Not using app stores isn't an option for most users, especially on iOS.
"If you don't like it you can leave" strikes me as an evasion of my point.
The fact is, we sometimes like censorship. Which is funny.
Just because it's here doesn't mean it's liked. Various factors contribute to whether any given site is moderated, and to what degree. It's almost never just "the will of the users".
When the subject arises, the consensus seems to be that moderation (and thus censorship) is indispensable.
I blame a deep, possible even genetic, authoritarianism.
It seems obvious to me that we just don't mind delegating this task some of the time, as long as we largely agree with the results.
I don't think you need an appeal to authoritarianism to appreciate a forum that isn't 80% penis-enlargment ads. A few people spending their time to moderate this content saves the whole group a lot of time.
In the same way that I'm okay with other people deciding a tomato is too moldy to sell (whether that's the farmer, health inspector, or grocer), I'm also okay with some people having the power to remove the equivalent speech from certain spaces.
You just need to be more careful when the jurisdiction becomes larger, because it becomes harder to "vote with your feet" to go to a place whose policies you agree with.
One answer is client-side based moderaton social networks.
If I want to read moderated comments I should be allowed to. Or in the same way I could choose to let others block things for me.
Doing this entirely on the client side falls down when you want to moderate something because there's too much of it (e.g. bulk spam)
The fix for that is to join your own community spam filter. It's the same way ad-block works. Community run blocklists.
I don't think servers blocking denial-of-service spam attacks is the same socially as moderators censoring speech they don't agree with. The same goes for content that is illegal for servers to host.
This is kind of a "why do we have law at all" level conversation.
Moderation is okay when it properly adjusts signal-to-noise ratio of discussion.
Censorship is about suppressing opinions which fall out of Overton's window, which is not okay, as all it does is to enforce status quo.
There was a good blogpost by Ex-reddit engineers about it where the idea was to treat it as signal which you cannot understand, and your core purpose as moderation(from automated PoV) is to adjust the signal to noise ratio without being able to comprehend/read the underlying data.
A bit hypocritical of them, looking at how reddit's moderation works.
Frankly i'm also against private censorship in case of social media - as it is basically outsourced government censorship.
The problem is that there are regulations passed to centralize requirements on censorship, it helps incumbents by making it too burdensome for new companies to enter the market. Existing corporations publicly state their desire to let the government be the arbiter. It's a delicate balance and governments prefer to act slowly to ensure the right outcome.
The mods on HN don't have police forces and standing armies with guns.
I think the key here is choice.
Are there other sites where you can discuss the things you use Hacker News for, without much of a loss? Then it's probably moderation.
Is this the only forum that matters with respect to a certain topic? Then it's probably censorhip.
For example, if a private company controls the de-facto subreddit for a topic or product and uses that to control the narrative then it's more like censorship than moderation.
Also, it sounds like you think it's black-and-white but it's much more gray than that and something one might call moderation someone else might call censorship, and there might not be a clear-cut answer.
The article is clearly an advocacy/op-ed that uses "loaded-framing" ("totalitarian control", “cop-in-your-pocket”) and a lot of speculation. A one-sided point of view, as is common in modern "journalism".
That said, code should never be banned in the U.S. But U.S. companies need to operate within U.S. laws.
Well, you're right that this isn't journalism per se. But it's not trying to be, so your comment is a bit weird. Nobody is confusing the ACLU with CNN.
idk what's weird about my comment. Many people don't know that the ACLU is unapologetically a biased left-wing organization riddled with controversy, starting with its founder, to funding by George Soros, to very biased takes and use of their legal resources.
I happened to like when Apple thumbed their nose at the government about the san Bernardino shooter
(a few months after that incident) - Mr. Fart’s Favorite Colors https://medium.com/@blakeross/mr-fart-s-favorite-colors-3177... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11231631
That was 10 years ago. Since then, Apple has admitted to the government forcing them to cover-up backdoors: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
> Apple has admitted to the government forcing them to cover-up backdoors
Handing over push notification data stored on a company's server is not any type of "backdoor".
That's how the law works in the US when the Federal, State, or local authorities come to you with a warrant.
If the Feds come to you with a National Security Letter, then you are forced to hand over the data stored on your servers, and are indeed prohibited from speaking out about it.
The only way to defend your customer's privacy is to minimize data collected and stored on your servers, which is what makes the surveillance capitalism business model of companies like Google and Meta so dangerous.
It's a backdoor. A rose by any other name is just as thorny.
I'm sorry that it upsets you. If it's any consolation, I consider Google and Meta's complicity equally disgusting. But I consider it disgusting because they are doing the same thing Apple does; hiding the existence of interception and privacy-degrading functionality that benefits the government. The pedigree that Apple once garnered through publicity stunts like San Bernadino has been entirely negated in posterity. The federal government has a much closer relationship with Apple than any customer ever could; the "privacy is a human right" advertisement was always conditional on where you lived and how you're oppressed.
The only way to defend customer privacy is to offer genuine freedom. As you've admit in this comment, federal coercion of a platform like iOS is like shooting fish in a barrel. iMessage, App Store, WebKit dylibs, Push Notifications, OCSP servers; none of them have any alternatives. If Apple were to lose control over the security of those products, the implications could be lethal. They could never argue that proprietary code or privately-managed security is a benefit to mankind ever again.
It's no coincidence that Tim Cook greeted Kashoggi's killer last night over dinner. Welcome to the new normal, a surveillance state where Apple was priced-out of defending freedom, safety or privacy.
Most people on here should consider the opposite extreme: a free for all where millions of idiots are carrying devices where they can install and run anything on a device where arbitrary radio signals can be transmitted and received at will under software control. Once you accept that would be ridiculous then the question becomes where to draw the line.
You are so brainwashed by app stores' talking points that you don't realize you are describing computers.
Just let users install whatever they want. Maybe add a verification process (a-la app verification for Mac) if users want to be restricted to verified apps. Show a "this is from an unverified developer" messages if the app comes from an unverified developer (is not signed).
There's no need to draw lines. Leave that to painters and architects.
If laptops really were as ubiquitous as cellphones they would end up regulated the same way.
Laptops are regulated on their radio transmissions. Just not on which games you are allowed to install.
How old are you? You are describing literal history... It's called FCC compliance
I don't get your point. This article is about control of the high level software running on your phone, not the firmware controlling your phone's radios. Even if an app store allowed any software without filter, this would not allow anyone to transmit "arbitrary radio signals". The much lower level firmware ensures that the radio communicates at proper power and protocol.
The phone hardware is not capable of arbitrary radio signals anyway. People can buy software defined radios off the shelf, but people generally don't abuse this because a) there really isn't any motivation for them to and b) they would quickly land in really hot water with the FCC.
Facts that I find myself in-agreement with:
1. A world where every human's smartphone is an open-field install-anything no-controls-beyond-antivirus device similar to your desktop PC would be a functionally and utilitarian-ly worse world than the one we live in today where these devices for most people exhibit strong, centralized, corporatist control.
2. There are use-cases these devices are now being adopted for that open-field install-anything desktop PCs have never, even to this day, adopted. You cannot install your drivers license and passport into your desktop PC, nor can you tap-to-pay. Its likely many of these use-cases needed the level of hyper-security Apple and Google are pushing toward in order to digitize these use-cases, validly or not.
3. Apple's extreme of restricting the installation of anything outside of the App Store (and, for that matter, even severely restricting the things you can distribute through the app store for no reason, such as until recently alternate payment providers) is a step too far. As you say, the opposite extreme is bad, but that doesn't mean Apple's extreme is good.
4. There's a middleground we need to find, and by the way, I don't think Android strikes the middleground very well today. A couple examples of things that would move in a more positive direction toward this middleground: (a.) I think phones should be able to be purchased from the factory immutably with the quality of requiring binaries to be signed by Apple/Google. Google should sell Pixels that are hyper-locked down similar to the iPhone and that characteristic can never change about them; its etched into the security coprocessor itself. Conversely, maybe if I have an Apple developer account, I should be able to buy an iPhone that allows me to install binaries from any source. (b.) Apple should have an "App Store Extended" backend capability where developers still distribute their apps through the App Store, all the same security scanning happens, but the developer has to handle their own marketing via the web; the app never appears in the App Store App itself. In exchange, their distribution rules are more relaxed (alternate payment processors, applets, sensitive content, etc).
> Apple's extreme of restricting the installation of anything outside of the App Store... is a step too far.
This is the key for me right here. I think it's fine to offer preferred services and distribution platforms on a piece of hardware. But actively preventing other software from running on that hardware is silly. The user really doesn't own the thing at that point.
Contrast Apple's treatment of iPhones and iPads with Valve's position on the upcoming Steam Machine:
>Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
is silly
The word you're looking for is oppressive.
Are you anti handheld radio?
Yes, that's the point of freedom. People can carry devices that do things. If they break the law, that's another question, but everyone should be allowed to have computers that communicate that they can control
The risk is if you have unfettered control then it's easy to get tricked into installing malicious apps, and now my device is getting zero-day attacks over bluetooth or wifi from state actors using your phone.
I don’t want someone to walk around, I don’t know, forcing all the phones around them in a 10m radius to blow up their batteries and hurt people.
Handheld radios, like my wireless tx/rx for lavaliers have to have their spectrums cleared by the FCC. As do most transmitting devices. There are baseline requirements before they can be sold/used.
I get often with these things if you give an inch they take a mile, but there have to be some foundational guardrails here IMO. You can’t just have a bunch of laws punishing people for behavior and no attempts at preventing it in the first place.
The ability to just transmit anything indiscriminately is just a dicey proposition to me. Like how we used to just allow a free for all with drones.
Can you show an example of a phone blowing up its battery with the potential to hurt people because of a harmful radio signal?
This seems like something the phone should be able to handle. People already have root access on devices with radio transmitters, they're called laptops. I don't recall many incidents of a malicious actor with a laptop forcing all the laptops around them to blow up and hurt their owners. If that were a reasonable possibility then they certainly wouldn't be allowed on planes.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding but the prior comment seemed to say “people should be able to transmit whatever they want, however they want, with whatever device they want.”
I imagine it’s not insanely difficult to get a phone to crank up voltage or something until the battery starts melting down. Maybe I’m letting sci-fi/thrillers pollute my sense of reality though
My point is that transmitting whatever you want doesn't mean the devices around you will "blow up", devices also have controls on how they receive radio transmissions.
A malicious transmitter could likely jam signals, but this is already illegal and that comment said "If they break the law, that's another question"
Your hypothetical doesn't make sense. People can already hack around with radios and transmit whatever they want, doing so doesn't result in devices around them blowing up or hurting people.
Malicious transmitters are illegal. There is liability for the person operating the malicious transmitter along with the sale, marketing, and manufacturing of the transmitter.
If the maker of a phone allowed a user to break the law by having the phone become a malicious transmitter and the phone maker didn't try everything in their capacity to prevent it, they'd be in trouble too.
Yes, you can hack your own. You can get a CB radio and boost its power by replacing parts of it. That's on you. If you were able to get a phone from a company that knowingly allowed you to install some software or do this "one silly trick" that allowed the phone to broadcast at 10x the power, you'd be in trouble - but so would the company that made the phone.
Sure, but we already have consumer devices with root access that have radio transmitters. Is this a common problem with laptops? Why would it be a larger problem with smartphones?
The amount of integration between the system and the wifi modem, the frequencies that it can broadcast on, and the regulations for that part of the spectrum.
You'd be quite challenged to make your wifi modem connect to an access point a few miles away. Phones do it all the time. A phone may be broadcasting with as low as a milliwatt when near a transmitter to a few watts when further away ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_device_radiation_and_... ). Wifi has a much smaller range of acceptable broadcast power available (and at the most powerful end of acceptable is less than a phone).
Fair enough. I think I’m not following the thread well here. I’m also probably too tired after a very early start day lol
That's called a weapon (EMP discharge), and there's quite a lot of people in the US that are ready to defend even such devices. There's even a Constitutional article about it IIRC.
If you’re going to respond like that then don’t bother responding.
Why not? As we get pushed more into a corner on this obviously self evident logic chain. Many of us WILL NOT EVER comply with this absurd oppressive tyrannical control of computing and communication and information. We might as well embrace the same non arguments of the over the top second amendment people.
It's literally the silly meme. You will take my gun/GNU from my cold dead hands lol
How would arbitrary radio signals blow up a battery?
> a free for all where millions of idiots are carrying devices where they can install and run anything on a device where arbitrary radio signals can be transmitted and received at will under software control
As a matter of fact, I can consider that opposite extreme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG3uea-Hvy4
The same can be done with a laptop, and millions of idiots carry those around.
> Once you accept that would be ridiculous
No, I don’t think I will.
Yes, keep "all those potential idiots" in check, except the rich and the powerful.
How about no?
It is their device after all.
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