Facebook and a preparing the case and does not care at all about either group, except perhaps to be able to take a slice of the action themselves.
If the Facebook app was also an App Store, we’d be in a much worse situation than we are now.
Some kind of intervention in the market might help those groups.
This has absolutely nothing to do with that. It’s just dressed up in that language to mislead people about what it’s intent is.
Developer here, top mod of /r/iOSProgramming. Making iOS an open platform will _absolutely_ help developers AND consumers for a myriad of reasons. Facebook being able to open their own app store means ANYONE can distribute their own apps, which is GOOD because that's how the web works and how every other general purpose computing platform works (Windows, macOS, even Android). See:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25375711&p=2
I encourage you to read the full lawsuit, as it outlines the harm Apple is actively doing to its users and developers:
“which is GOOD because that's how the web works and how every other general purpose computing platform works”
What’s good is that we have these alternatives.
The web is a shit medium for application delivery and people don’t trust it.
Android is much less trusted for app delivery than iOS because the store is less policed.
Forcing alternative stores on users will erode trust in the platform as well as creating fragmentation, and developers will definitely suffer.
If you don’t like the 30% fee - that can be solved, buy let’s not destroy the only trustworthy app market.
If you find yourself unable to contemplate that the thousands of people at company X as something other than a unified blob of evil, it might be a useful exercise to seek other perspectives and practice some empathy. It’ll make the world easier to understand.
Yes one can, and one can make a case for that based on the aggregate of the companies behavior and statements of their executives.
If you don’t look at the actual companies, it’s easy to make a false equivalence like this.
In this case actually looking at Facebook’s behavior, incentive structure, and the statements of its executives support the position I have taken.
