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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I can’t see a business reason why Apple would degrade image sending purposefully- it would drive its own users to get third party apps.

    Depends on what the majority of people are using.

    In markets where iPhone users are not in the majority, that’s exactly what’s happening: iPhone users are switching to third party apps.

    If iPhones users are in the majority, though, then people will just default to iMessage, and non-Apple phones get associated with poor messaging quality. Which creates social pressure for non-iPhone users to buy an iPhone.

    So it makes perfect business sense for Apple to degrade the messaging quality when a non-Apple phone joins the conversation.



  • It’s probably just a definition thing.

    To me, constructive criticism means that the criticism doesn’t just point out failure, but that it then also shows how to correct that failure.

    By itself, “you’re doing it wrong” is just destructive: it takes something apart, it destroys it. Without a subsequent “and here’s how you would do it right,” it doesn’t become constructive, it doesn’t help in putting things back together in the correct way.

    Sure, as a first step, “you’re doing it wrong” is completely justified when something is actually wrong.

    But without the second step - the constructive part - it just doesn’t constitute constructive criticism. By itself, it’s just criticism.







  • Once I saw that Google wasn’t going to honor steam library on stadia

    That is such a weird complaint.

    Google doesn’t own Steam. Google has nothing to do with Steam. Why would Google give you free games just because you purchased those same games on a competing platform?

    Are you also complaining that Sony isn’t honoring your Steam library on the PlayStation? Are you complaining that Microsoft isn’t honoring the Steam library on the XBox?

    Heck, are you complaining that Steam isn’t honoring the Nintendo Switch library on the Steam Deck?

    I mean: what gives?




  • “Market dominance” simply means that a single company has the means to shape the entire market - not that it must have 90+ percent market share.

    You’re essentially arguing that it’s easier for a user to find a third party app in the App Store, install it, create an account in the app, and start messaging than it is to start messaging with the pre-installed first party app.

    I don’t find that persuasive.


  • Apples to oranges.

    The reason is that messaging services like WhatsApp became popular in Europe because carriers charged exorbitant fees for SMS messaging at a time when no single phone manufacturer absolutely dominated the market. Apps like WhatsApp made it possible to communicate with people, no matter which specific phone or brand or platform they were using.

    If the iPhone (with iMessage pre-installed) had been the dominant smartphone and ecosystem at the time, chances are that what’s happening in the US would have happened in Europe in exactly the same way.

    It’s exactly the same argument as with Windows and Internet Explorer: if Windows had been one podunk operating system out of many, nobody would have cared. The whole issue was that Microsoft used the market dominance of Windows to quasi-lock users into Internet Explorer.


  • Are WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Signal, and such blocked in the US?

    Of course they’re not blocked.

    People just default to the app that comes pre-installed with their phone and sits right there on the first screen, because it’s marginally easier than picking a third party app in the App Store, installing it, and creating an account.

    It’s the exact same argument that Microsoft made when they bundled Internet Explorer with their OS.


  • With the official Apple app, you had to know that it existed, find it in the Google Play Store, install it, and then manually run it every single time you wanted to check for trackers.

    With AirGuard, you had to know that an unofficial implementation existed, find it, install it, and then either run a manual sweep or have it permanently run in the background if you wanted to get notified of trackers near you.

    Neither implementation would tell you how long a tracker had been following you, or where it first started following you. Neither option would allow you to ring the tracker. Neither option would allow you to read the information on the tracker via NFC.

    So no, this has not “objectively existed for a long time now.”

    What you mean is that other, far more limited options have existed for a while now.