I'm not sure what this means -- does this just mean that Apple can't prevent a third party from selling an app that does something an Apple app does, or does it mean they have to allow third party app stores? Or is it more about opening the payment platform so an app can take direct payments instead of having to go through Apple?

The hardware manufacturer needs to ensure that software doesn't break the device.

Apple and Google are going well beyond any reasonable grey area, though. Demanding a cut if I buy a book through the Kindle app is absurd and has nothing to do with ensuring that Kindle doesn't break my smartphone.

Preventing software from breaking a device is a solved problem. All you need is a CPU that supports memory protection, and an appropriately designed OS.

If you want to only run software that's been OK'ed by a third party, that's certainly a choice you can make for yourself or your organization.

I don't like that this choice is imposed on almost-all cellphone users by monopoly.

Without doing a bunch of research, it looks like things were more split on the Mac side; some Mac models had fancy MMUs while others didn't until the switch to PowerPC. Classic Mac OS didn't support memory protection, and Apple's quest for a replacement operating system cumulating in the acquisition of NeXT is well known.

Conversely, Windows 9x could have made more aggressive use of the processor's protected mode, but it would have broken a lot of programs that worked fine on Windows 3.x. Windows 9x was still capable of running most 16-bit real mode software and generally allowed it to access BIOS and hardware, which NT couldn't allow without breaking the security model. Many "enterprise" customers even stayed on 9x instead of NT simply because it ran the software they used.

It took another few years before the hardware got fast enough and the software base moved to mostly 32-bit protected-mode code to merge the two product lines. However, there were still problems when it finally happened with XP.

The best example that comes to mind for me is Windows 95 having a special case in its memory management to work around a bug in SimCity. From a technical perspective, that's nuts, but from a business perspective I imagine not doing that would have hurt both immediate sales and consumer trust in the brand.

What about those of us who want to break our devices? (At least, according to the manufacturer's idea of what "broken" is.)

"Ensuring that Kindle doesn't break my smartphone" requires time and effort. That's funded by the cut they take.

Apple / Google do not need to take a 30% cut of every e-book ever sold to fund their review. That's absurd and illogical.

One estimate is that Amazon sells 487,000,000 ebooks a year. If we assume they cost $10 each, that's almost a $1.5 billion cut for Apple and Google.

It does not cost $1.5 billion for Apple and Google to review Kindle to make sure it doesn't damage devices.

What if this is a service I don't? Why am I paying for it? The vendors selling in app items are certainly passing on some of the cost of this.

Free apps, apps that make money off ads, apps that cost $1, apps that charge a monthly fee, apps that resell products where a 30% cut exceeds their margin.

Perhaps the stores should change to a model of choose your own adventure: pay per release or % cut. What would you say is a fair amount to charge per release - keeping in mind apple/google will want to maintain their insanely high profits from the app stores?

The problem isn't in that transaction, the problem is conflicts of interest. Platform vendors engaged in both gatekeeping and building their own apps have an inherent conflict of interest. I think that Apple in particular (but not Apple alone) abuses it quite brazenly.

The issue isn't that the police exist (a tradeoff of freedom for temporary security, we'd all be freer if they didn't), the issue is when they start shaking me down, or otherwise brutalizing me.

But I think it's also true that people are more than capable of adapting to such landscapes because we already do that with our desktop/laptop computers. Yes, malware exists and people do get their computers infected. But I believe the reliance of a sort of "watchful eye" also makes us lazy.

I mean, the ideal situation is not one where Apple doesn't have an app store. But imo more like what Google does with android where you can install anything if you really want.

I think the cuts these companies take from having a curated store is too high though. And in the case of apple there's simply no alternative (well, there's the nascent stage of an alternative forming in Europe I guess).

This is a common point, but similar to how there was widespread fear that seatbelts would encourage people to drive dangerously.

Security should be baked into the platform and not a task for an 89 year old grandfather to have to deal with.

More specifically, the radio in an iPhone can almost certainly be made to operate outside of licensed/compliant limits by tweaking the software. Should they be forced to allow that but still held accountable when their device is noncompliant?

Yes, absolutely. The responsible party is the operator of said equipment, and if they tinker with it, it's up to them to be compliant with FAA/FDA/HHS/etc. regulations or face proper legal reprecussions.

> More specifically, the radio in an iPhone can almost certainly be made to operate outside of licensed/compliant limits by tweaking the software.

See above. We can already do that today with WiFi chipsets that can be made to use frequencies that are illegal in a certain country. It's on the operator to ensure compliance. Alternatively, device manufacturers are free to use components that only work in a certain frequency spectrum - but that wouldn't prevent an operator from using them in another country.

We already solved those problems long ago.

no, because there's this weird concept that seems to be foreign to the modern software folk - Ownership.

Owner is held liable for that, not device manufacturer.

I can see an argument for this. Nothing forced Apple to design their hardware this way: they could have built licensing/compliance limits into the hardware itself. But they didn't want to do that because they wanted to use the same HW for all markets, and different governments have different rules about which frequency bands are allowed. Of course, this then brings up the question: if they did make slightly different HW per-market (perhaps with 1-time fuses), what happens when someone brings their iPhone from one country to another and they've modified it to ignore any new region restrictions (Apple could still use SW to force new restrictions, though they can't allow anything new because of the HW restrictions) and it's broadcasting on an unallowed band?

Anyone who claims it’s an intractable is using it for a different purpose -/ either trying to keep their sweet monopoly - or wishing they could sue apple.

Even if someone wants to ignore this concept, where is the line drawn? Should a hardware manufacturer, or OS vendor, be allowed to make a product that blocks malware on their systems (like Windows Defender)? Windows was seen as a poor product because of all the adware that infected it in the early 2000s. That issue has largely been resolved, thanks to efforts from Microsoft. Should they not be allowed to solve the biggest issue that plagued the public perception of their product?

I realize I'm move the goalpost slightly, from hardware to OS vendor, but ultimately, it isn't Apple's hardware that's creating these controls, it's iOS, the operating system. And in the case of Google, it's clearly an OS vendor issue, as Android is installed on a wide variety of hardware from many different OEMs.

Defender doesn't do this: it's an optional security application by MS that's included with Windows. Users are free to disable it if they wish. Nothing is preventing Windows users from running whatever software on top of Windows that they like. Defender will prevent some malware from running, and many users like this for obvious reasons, and the fact that it's included for free unlike competing anti-malware software, but it's not so baked into Windows that you can't turn it off. An antitrust argument could possibly be made, along the lines of Windows including IE and putting competing software out of business, but that's a different issue than what we're discussing.

So you're right about this being really an OS vendor issue, but Microsoft doesn't force anyone to use Defender, and doesn't prevent anyone from using competing products. Google also allows using competing app stores (or even side-loading .apk files), though only a tiny fraction of users take advantage of this. Apple is really the problem here because it doesn't allow these things at all.

Car makers shouldn't own dealerships.

Hardware makers of general computing devices (non-appliances) shouldn't make Apps.

This game has played out a few times. Lets see how this one goes.

They are perfectly reasonable under a certain interpretation of monopoly. It's just that the US definition and that in Europe (and elsewhere) differ quite profoundly.

United States anti-trust revolves around the idea of harms. You have to show that Mr Moneybag's empire causes material harm to customers - such as paying more than they could in a more efficient market.

The European (and it seems Japanese) take is directed at power. Even if it benefits consumers it's wrong to leverage dominance in one area to obtain power in another.

But we can outlaw lying in advertisements and product information.

It basically comes down to the scale and context. Things don't need to be completely morally black and white for us to see that something is generally bad.

Contracts can't contradict existing law. Even in the US, I think.

I release an app that BOTH plays music AND is malware. Under this law, Apple can't ban the app (because it's malware) because the law prevents it to (because the app plays music, competing with one of Apple's apps).

Bonus: you haven't read the Japanese law in the original Japanese legalese*, just an english summary.

* And since it's in legalese, you probably couldn't even if you spoke some Japanese.

Thankfully, our legal systems are much better equipped to deal with ambiguity like this than I think you are proposing.

But that's me thinking common law thoughts, not sure whst Japan's legal system is like.

(There are alot lf things like this, such as when you are a distributor selling to more than your own stores.)

Why can't my non-Apple laptop start a tethering session automatically with an iPhone when I open its lid? What good reason is there that a 3rd party tool can't generate an auto-reply to a notification from a chat app with my consent? Lots of user experience niceties that Apple keeps only for their 1st party apps to the detriment of us all.

Google does similar things on Android, but at least you can get most of these features through 3rd party stores like F-Droid.

It is extremely dumb and uncompetitive that iPhones cannot install any apps under the guise of security or whatever. Apple has rested on its laurel and made some stupid choices that seriously limit the potential of their hardware. It's funny how they announced many features that people have wanted for years at this WWDC; they are starting to feel the pressure, I guess.

The EU and Japan have decided that's unfair.

Apple used to charge for MacOS. And then they made it free because hardware sales more than made up for any costs of the platform.

Apple themselves claim they don't care if AppStore is profitable. Schiller himself suggested they cap AppStore revenue at 1 billion.

If it's so costly for them to run why don't they let devs and users use the alternatives? Alternative payment methods, alternative app distribution etc.?

Edit.

Here's Apple financial report for 2023: https://s2.q4cdn.com/470004039/files/doc_earnings/2023/q4/fi...

- iPhone alone generated 200 billion in sales

- The entirety of their operational expenses is 54 billion

Apple's customers have already paid for whatever expenses Apple is incurring for the "core platform"

Apple Watch doesn't have to play by the same rules.

So yes, there is totally a place for private enforcement of a comprehensive developer agreement (read: contract) backed by automated review tools and human review. It’s not perfect, but it is pretty good.

And as usual, the problem is not fixed, Apple just gets to chose who they get cosy with. Historically Japan Railways had privileges the France national railway didn't, for instance.

Allowing people to choose an Apple News backend would save the news industry.

Apple’s P2P payments are a huge flop. Let any vendor do it.

Don’t even get me started on the App Store.

Come to think of it, almost every Apple app I use nowadays either sucks or is absolutely terrible. Notes might be the only thing I use that I would still choose to use despite alternatives, everything else is compulsory (or someone else’s compulsory thing). Like fuck Gmail for not blocking Promotions. So it’s all a win for consumers and producers alike.

And I think it would be good! Why don't they get a cut of every game sale and get to block other companies for producing software for their hardware.

I think the important keyword here is “services” which can mean a lot of things. App stores can be considered services. An alternative payment platform is fair game too.

Why would it happen with iOS when it has not happened in the 15 years or so since Android exists?

There's basically just one relevant alternative app store which is F-Droid, and it's just all around much better than Google's Play Store, although of course it doesn't have any proprietary, closed-source apps.

This is an oft-repeated misconception.

Even if transaction fees were 0%, we'd be way better off with alternative stores.

You're just so used to how shitty things are that you can't conceive of a better alternative.

Consider that there are plenty of completely free games on Steam that are popular and help those creators find thriving communities. How? They have good discovery.

App Store and Google Play sucks in every way. Discovery is awful. Their approach is awful. Why even show download counts and top lists? Stupid, stupid stupid. But you have no choice as a consumer or developer. So the top developers will not complain. What's the point?

And anyway, you're complaining about a world where alternatives are viable. Why are alternatives being viable a bad thing. If EGS is paying up front for games and giving them away for free as cross-promo for Fortnite, better that than ad supported garbage.

What exactly is the bad thing here, for consumers? The negative aesthetic experience of having more icons? Everyone has to oppose this crushed-in-head line of thinking. One meaingless detail that impacts an extremely low brow part of the aesthetic experience - the fucking home screen icons - should not preclude the gain in meaning from 10k-100k more developers who could flourish in the mobile ecosystem if it were to have working discovery. It has the same energy as requiring Helldivers users to create PSN accounts - offensive only in a strictly aesthetic sense even though successful competition and cross promo benefits everyone. The users' fixation on meaningless aesthetics is wrong.

I mean Apple could make discovery pluggable too, all of it could be pluggable and have fewer "icons," this isn't even a real obstacle. There are many, many ideas in this space, and no permissions to do any of it.

As it is, the App Store and Google Play are glorified install wizards. Open, install TikTok, Google Maps, whatever. Never visit again. That is 98% of people. That's horrible and its Apple's fault. TikTok already does not pay any fees. This is just to show that you are not right in general, even if you are right about the one company you've heard of that went and took these people to court in this country for an outcome that you should be in favor of.

Using stock iOS and Android today, it feels like both sides have lost the script. The entire pipeline of "consumption" dominates both platforms, and demands you pay money or accept a competitor's inferior product. Google didn't even let F-Droid auto-update apps until recently, it's a racket on either side. We need to bring the hammer down and enable people to stop supporting shit businesses. The current loop of consumption is going to kill everything we love about computing with a long and painful extortion process.

1) Hijacking an already-approved application

2) Creating a forked/new fraudulent application and submitting it to the store

Option 1 requires you to fool the repository owner, first of all. That would mean submitting a pull-request with your malicious code, having that malicious code reviewed by the app author, and then getting it into a major release. In most apps with a significant userbase that's nigh-unimaginable; especially if there are testers or multiple contributors testing and debugging on recent builds.

Option 2 requires you to fool the F-Droid admins. This means one of two things. Either creating a forked application with plausible yet distinct features that make it necessary to be forked from the main project. Alternatively, you get ChatGPT (or just copy boilerplate ffs) and make a calculator app or whatever, commit it all to Github and send it in for review. Both of these routes are horribly suspicious - a reviewer is going to want to see if you have multiple contributors, a long history on Github, linked social media accounts or websites, other repositories, binary blobs, that sort of stuff. Maybe they aren't the most cautious, but suffice to say anyone making an attack like this is going to be covered in red flags.

So; it's a feasible attack. But it requires so much social manipulation for so little feasible gain (especially when F-Droid wasn't even auto-updating for most people) that it's not worth the effort. If you do manage such a daring attack, your reward is maybe 300-odd sideloading users that mistakenly clicked your install button instead of the other guy's.

That feels like the natural direction App Store competition would take us. But, on the other hand, it doesn’t seem to have happened on Android, so maybe I’m being overly pessimistic.

I'm not sure I see the problem here. If some apps are only available through shitty ad-packed vendor-controlled stores, then hopefully that'll push people to simply avoid them. I mean, if I want to video-chat with someone and to use Skype/Teams I have to download the Microsoft store app and suffer with all that, or I just could use Facebook Messenger on the regular Google Play store (assuming they don't force their own store like MS) and it's easy, I'm going to tell my friend, "let's use FB Messenger instead; these MS apps are a pain in the ass." And if someone insists on using some shitty MS app that I can only get through the shitty ad-laden MS Store, I might re-evaluate how much I really want to chat with them. Smarter app vendors are going to try to avoid putting their users through that experience.

(Also, this is just an example; for all I know, Meta/FB in this possible future would be the stupid one pushing an ad-laden store while MS might be the smarter one making it easier for users to install their apps.)

For everything else I'd expect publisher's to just put their app in my favorite place, or risk me choosing something else.

For example im not going to install a new store just to get a note-taking app, unless that app was in some definitive way superior to all the others. (Which seems unlikely for a note taking app.)

A lot of dumber app vendors will just drain the suckers dry and rebrand and if Microsoft pulled their apps from the App Store some unfortunate souls would click the first Google hit and get sucked into the scam.

> And if someone insists on using some shitty MS app that I can only get through the shitty ad-laden MS Store, I might re-evaluate how much I really want to chat with them.

It’s comments like this that show a huge lack of understanding of how the majority of people feel. I don’t give a shit if my parents like WhatsApp, but I still want to talk to them. And it’s hard enough to get them to use technology, never mind navigating whatever is to come here.

Are you honestly telling me that you think Meta are going to not use this opportunity to skirt around the limits placed on their apps by the apple App Store? If you believe meta, or byte dance are going to have your best interests at heart, I have a bridge to sell you

Android has curated a market of users who don’t buy apps. I don’t know that we can extrapolate their alt-store outcome to iOS where the buyers are.

Do you think you'd have all those sales every 2 months if Steam were still the only pc games store? :)

Epic has given a lot of free titles away, which is a big difference, but only because they're trying to buy favor and want to be the winner who takes all.

Ok, but Steam is a third party store. The alternative isn't "just Steam", it's "just Microsoft". I'll gladly accept the occasional annoyance of multiple stores to avoid being locked into a monopoly.

But both Apple and Googles stores are slow and packed with ads. Pretty much every search you do for an app even with the exact name gives you some ad supported shovelware as the first one or two results (ads).

So how is this meaningfully any worse? (outside of one more login you might need to setup).

The solution is to allow sideloading by the user (which incidentally Google allows you to do).

* Epic's Launcher

* EA's Origin

* Ubisoft Connect

* Steam

* GOG

* Xbox Store

* Battle.net

I had a brief Gatcha game phase (before I realized how pay-to-advance it was) and that game had its own damn game-specific "launcher" as well.

Each one of these required creating an account, installs its own "overlay", background windows services, anti-cheat system (more background services!), has its own "social" system, and defaults to running at startup and minimizing (not quitting) when you click the window-close button unless you dig through the options.

Of course, each one of these games also has at least one type of currency unique to the game, which you can only convert in one direction, nor is there any way to move currency in the "store". Often that currency, and anything you bought with it, is locked to the particular platform on which it was purchased.

It's a complete mess, and nearly every single one of them is worse than Steam in terms of UX design and features.

Do we see any competition, resulting in lower prices, better terms of use for customers, or better quality software? Nope. Games are as expensive as ever, have even worse day-of-release bugs, more cheaters, and more microtransactions. Games are exclusive to one particular store either indefinitely or during the period after its release.

But according to Epic, why...if Epic can make its own app store for iOS, consumers will benefit! Bullshit. All that will happen is we'll have to install multiple app store apps on our phones, having each one collect data constantly about us...

On steam and GoG you pay with government issued currency. If the others have a currency system just hard pass on them. If you could cure yourself of Gacha, you can do it.

The gaming industry has enormous amounts of monetization and gameplay innovation, with the huge and vibrant middle that is disappearing from movies, books and music, so I have no idea what you’re talking about. It has never been a better time to find games.

Most of Epics arguments are that the developer will benefit by them taking a smaller cut then Apple/Google/Steam/etc so if they sell the game for the same price the developer gets to keep a couple percentage points more money.

I don't remember any argument they have made that has put the customer as the beneficiary though there probably are some.

Gaming is surely popular on phones, but I suggest that AAA games on on a tiny minority of phones overall. (My mom has literally no games on her phone etc.)

For Windows the proportion of games-machines to others is tiny. The number of people with "a dozen game lauchers" would be a microscopic percentage.

Yes, there are home PCs that are dedicated to gaming. Yes they will likely have lots of shortcuts, launchers, auto updates etc. And in some demographics (think male, under 25 etc) there will be proportionally more games installed.

But "average" ? I'm not sure.

Lots of things suck and make money, tons of money. OPEC absolutely sucks and makes tons of money, are you going to tell me “OPEC could be better. It doesn’t suck.” Monopolies and cartels don’t just suck, they are horrible, they are the biggest antagonists in our lives, because everyone’s income is someone else’s expense, and we don’t all work for Apple or OPEC.

    > The App Store sucks.

It needs an iCloud log in, so you can't install free software on a kiosk without a throw away account. Which is hard to set up.

Why do you first need to 'get' an app and then install it?

How many affirmations do you need?

If apple truly is bringing the market what it wants at a price folks find reasonable surely this competition wouldn't impact anything!

I should be able to install hacking tools, background apps that might kill my battery, sandbox breaking apps that allow adversarial interoperability, porn apps, protest apps that track cops, or apps that do legal things that nonetheless assist me in breaking the law.

Apple allows none of this.

That said, I'm not particularly sure Japanese politicians can handle those complicated matters efficiently. I mean, our "cyber-security minister" was accused of never using a PC and not knowing what a USB memory stick is [0]. I can't help but think that this will end in disaster and IT giants will use these examples as evidence of how bad it is to make strict regulations against them...

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/15/japan-cyber-se...

> I mean, our "cyber-security minister" was accused of never using a PC and not knowing what a USB memory stick is

From what I've read about Japan it was probably the usual small set of local megacorps that Japanese politicians protect heavily that seeded the regulations, not out of a genuine interest in the protecting or improving regular customers lives or opening up competiton to smaller players.

But regardless hopefully it is more than just the pipe dreams of the existing entrants and there really is upstart competition that is capable of operating in a meaningful way.

> "If a hacker targets this Minister Sakurada, they wouldn’t be able to steal any information. Indeed it might be the strongest kind of security!"

I love this comment from your article.

It's not as if this law was actually written by the elected politicians, and furthermore, it's based on an EU law. Japan is only one of the many countries that are now using EU laws as a model for their own legislation for issues like privacy and antitrust law.

However, someone who's deaf and doesn't know anything at all about music or the music industry would probably also be a poor choice. At least Slash has decades of experience working with major players in the industry and could probably advise on it to some lawyers who know about anti-trust regulation and at least understand the basics about the industry.

Otherwise, do we regulate differently based on _sound_!? I hope not! We don't regulate based on music theory either! Do we need him to know chord progressions to be able to write laws? I hope not!

With tech it's a little different, we do regulate based on aspects that touch on fundamental theory, like manufacturing processes, cryptography, etc.

Yes, we absolutely do, and we already do this. That's why deaf people can't write these laws: they don't even know what music or chords are: they have no way of sensing them.

There absolutely have been court cases about plagiarism where the arguments were about whether certain chord progressions can be copyrighted or not.

Also Japanese(-American), this will not fundamentally change the situation of Japanese irrelevance. You cannot and will not win if you have no players to begin with, and Japan is by far the absolute worst country when it comes to tech now.

Once upon a time NEC was one of the biggest microprocessor manufacturers in the world, Sony was the world's boutique brand, Toshiba was bleeding edge, and Panasonic was the Samsung of the time, but it's the 21st century now and Japan hasn't been relevant for a looooooooong time. Top down government regulations won't solve this.

Only Hitachi has remained mostly unchanged, relevant then and still relevant now. Not much room for comfort, though.

While it is true that unfortunately Japan is no longer a leader in the development of new technologies, like it has achieved to be in the past, when looking at its public infrastructure, at least in the big cities, and at the applications of modern technologies for solving various problems of the day-to-day life, which actually matter most for the majority of people, Japan is still well ahead of almost all other countries and I have very little hope that I will ever see any country in Europe or America matching Japan in certain aspects of the quality of life.

It is true however that Japan is facing some serious economic problems, with declining revenues for many people. However, this appears to have artificial causes, due to mismanagement at high levels that does not result in a meaningful change of the managers.

I'll be the first to complain about the bad state of software in this country, but it still sits very comfortably in the top half of that list.

Top-down government regulations are necessary to curb big tech's power because big tech has subverted the normal mechanisms of market competition that are supposed to make dictatorial control unprofitable. The question is whether or not Japan denying market access to Apple or Google will be a sufficient punishment to get companies to comply.

No, Japan stopped being relevant because Japanese companies are legendary in their hostility towards each other. They themselves are their worst enemy. Not to mention Japanese society is more interested in looking in the mirror than out the window.

In fact, it's not even the US who really drove Japan into irrelevancy, it's South Korea, China, and Taiwan. All countries whose companies spent more time taking on the global market instead of squabbling amongst themselves and thus succeeded at out-Japan'ing Japan as a mere stepping stone.

Samsung, LG, and Foxconn killed off NEC, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, Sharp, Sanyo, and Elpida. Huawei and such cleaned up what remained. Renesas is basically on legacy life support, and who knows if Rapidus won't be stillborn.

The US dominance that is Apple and Google is a result of Japan loving to hoist petards, not because the US has power and has no qualms about using it legally or otherwise.

No, it really isn't at all. It's better than the US in many ways:

1. Eating out. At many Japanese restaurants, you have a tablet computer at your table, or you get a QR code to order on your phone. You use the tablet/web app (which admittedly doesn't always have the greatest UI, esp when you switch to English) to order your food and maybe pay. It's not just big chains like Jonathan's; you'll even see this sometimes at small non-chain restaurants with 1 or 2 workers. This kind of tech is mostly unheard of in the US; you have to verbally tell your order to some annoyed worker and hope they don't screw it up, and then they expect a gigantic "tip" for simply doing their job. Partially thanks to the much lower staffing needed at Japanese restaurants, it's quite inexpensive to eat out.

2. Toilets: they all have electronic controls to spray your butt after you poop. You can select water pressure, activate seat heating, etc. These washlets as they're called are actually available in the US, but no one buys them except maybe Japanese expats. Even after the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020, Americans steadfastly refuse to improve their hygiene and adopt this technology.

3. Public transit fare cards: in Japan, virtually every public transit system uses "IC cards" based on the Felica NFC chip. It's twice as fast as other NFC technologies, so it gets people through fare gates quicker, which is critical in the crowded Tokyo subways. These stored-value cards can mostly be used nationwide (tip: get a Suica or Pasmo card, they're good almost everywhere). In addition to train fares, you can also use them to pay for vending machines, many restaurants, and lots more. On top of this, the Felica chip is built into Japan-market smartphones, so you can do all this with your phone instead of a card. In the US, the NYC metro system still uses magnetic stripe cards, and while the DC system is more advanced (using stored-value cards that aren't as fast as Japan's), like all other transit systems in the US, the cards are only good on that one transit system in one city, and for nothing else at all.

4. Remote-control air-conditioners. Called "mini-split" in the US, the typical A/C units in Japan are only good for one room, but they come with a remote control and have many functions: cooling, heating, dehumidification, etc. You can control whether the vents are fixed in one direction or oscillate. I'm sure I've missed many other useful functions. Since the A/Cs are room-sized, you don't have to waste energy cooling/heating rooms you're not using at the moment, or you can set them differently. These systems have become increasingly popular in the US, especially for retrofitting older buildings that don't have ducts.

5. Interpersonal messaging. In Japan, everyone uses LINE. It's not perfect, but it has great privacy and lots of features. In the US, most people are still using telephone-number-based SMS from the 1990s. The US is decades behind on basic communications, easily the worst in the world. I don't think I need to go any further here.

6. Bullet trains. Japan leads the world, and will have the world's first serious maglev train between Tokyo and Nagoya in around 5 years. The US doesn't have anything to speak of.

7. Combination washer/dryers. Americans think this is a brand-new thing, but they've been here in Japan for many years now and are very common at the higher-end.

8. Chip manufacturing. The US only has Intel, and TSMC is trying to expand there with government subsidies but it's not going well at all. Japan has Renesas and TSMC is expanding here too, with far better success. Time will tell how this pans out, but given how dysfunctional US society and politics are these days, I wouldn't bet on the US doing well here.

> This kind of tech is mostly unheard of in the US

Massively untrue. A large chunk of the restaurants I go to have extremely similar setups. Tons have Ziosk terminals at the table. Lots of others allow scanning a QR code and ordering at the table through a website/app. At least half the restaurants I frequent have some kind of digital ordering system. Some of these restaurants started implementing these systems over a decade ago.

> Remote-control air-conditioners

I generally greatly prefer central AC. Either way, remote controlled single-room AC units have been a thing in the US for several decades. It is not like IR remotes are some fancy new techology that only Japan could have figured out.

> Combination washer/dryers

They're great if you're space constrained, but with the two separate units I'm able to run multiple loads through faster. They've been for sale in the US once again for decades but have never really been popular outside of really space constrained spaces. And they're also often more expensive than two separate units meanwhile end up getting less laundry done in the same time period. So spend more money and have it take longer to do multiple loads of laundry. Great!

> Public transit fare cards

Everything I need to do can generally be done through NFC/Bluetooth on my phone these days. Payments, transit access, car keys, etc. Having to carry around a specialty payment card is a step backwards from my normal day to day.

What restaurants are these, Chipotle? I just visited the US for a few weeks and didn't see ANY of this.

>Some of these restaurants started implementing these systems over a decade ago.

I never saw it when I lived in the US, except for Panera.

>Either way, remote controlled single-room AC units have been a thing in the US for several decades.

No, they haven't. You're thinking of those shitty window units. They aren't the same; those are horrible. That's why the mini-split systems have gotten so popular, and they're all made in Asia (by companies like Daikin and Mitsubishi, rather than by the typical US brands like Westinghouse). So yes, apparently only Japan could have figured this out.

>but with the two separate units I'm able to run multiple loads through faster.

Sounds like you save up your laundry too much. Anyway, you can only do this if you're physically present to move the laundry between machines.

>They've been for sale in the US once again for decades

You're making the same mistake as with the A/C. No, they're brand-new, they haven't been available for decades. You're thinking of those shitty "over-under" units, with a dryer mounted on top of the washer. I'm talking about combo drum-style washer-dryer units with heat-pump drying: you put the clothes in, hit "start", and a few hours later your clothes are clean and dry.

>Everything I need to do can generally be done through NFC/Bluetooth on my phone these days.

Let's see you do that in NYC.

You visited for a few weeks and feel you have a good sample size of one of the largest countries in the world. I've been to Cozumel, I take it the rest of Mexico is exactly like that. Everyone in Mexico just hangs out at the beach all day every day right?

Just one example restaurant from 2014:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/chili...

> You're thinking of those shitty window units.

No, I'm definitely thinking the mini-splits. I grew up in Houston. You can't survive without air conditioning there. I've seen every kind of AC setup hundreds of times over. Mini-splits were pretty common for a DIY add to a garage or a backyard shed/studio even back then. I saw dozens of them in the 90s. I'd still take a central air system for my home.

And ooh, so fancy, an IR remote controller! So high tech. I guess I'll just throw out my thermostat that logs my environment data to my home system along with how often the unit and fan have run, its impact, outside weather data, its total energy usage, its pressure levels, and more. It'll also automatically adjust dampers to ensure proper airflow to help target whatever rooms I'm using. A basic IR remote and noisy shit tacked on the wall is way fancier.

And yeah, instead of just having ducts properly planned into the construction of my home I'll just have loads of copper pipes with highly compressed and often toxic/flammable refrigerants run to the dozen or so spaces that currently have vents. Seems so superior. Mini splits make a lot of sense when you only have a handful of spaces you're trying to cool, much less sense when it's a four bedroom two living room single family home in a place where it's 90F+ at 70% RH half the year.

> I'm talking about combo drum-style washer-dryer units with heat-pump drying: you put the clothes in, hit "start", and a few hours later your clothes are clean and dry.

Once again, I'm very aware of what you're talking about. Notice how I was suggesting two units is faster for multiple loads? Notice how an over/under is technically two units? See how I know the kind you're talking about?

> Sounds like you save up your laundry too much

Or maybe I've got a family with kids that make a lot of messes in my household.

They're not that new, they've been around for a while. Only recently popular in large full-size units. Once again, I saw them in the 00s in the US. People would often have them in a fancy big RV/camper trailer or on a yacht due to the fact you can have a single unit and still do laundry on the go. They're not new, you just hadn't seen them much before.

It turns out maybe you don't know everything and experienced it all before. Who would have thought?

> Let's see you do that in NYC.

Ah, so that's what it is. You lived in and visited NY and assumed that's life for the rest of the US? Turns out the entire US isn't just NYC, for better and worse.

Well, before I moved out of the US 2 years ago, I lived there for over 40 years. Is that good enough for you?

>Just one example restaurant from 2014:

Interesting, that's Chili's. I stopped going there about 15 years ago because it was so lousy (and also seems to be absent on the east coast where I moved). Still, I've been to countless other places and didn't see such things outside of Panera.

>You lived in and visited NY and assumed that's life for the rest of the US? Turns out the entire US isn't just NYC, for better and worse.

There's only a small handful of cities besides NYC that actually have public transit systems, and NYC's is by far the largest and most famous, so I think it's a pretty important data point.

> only a small handful of cities besides NYC that actually have public transit systems

So yeah, a New Yorker that seems to think the whole US is their experiences in NYC. Thanks for clarifying that.

Chili's is one restaurant chain I used as an example. Places from the scale of Chili's and McDonald's to mom and pop restaurants near me have such things. It's not just Chili's, but it's easy to find a news article talking about it around that time compared to finding an Atlantic article talking about a hole in the wall Italian restaurant in North Texas that offers mobile table side ordering.

Once again, maybe your experiences aren't representative of the entire United States, so saying things like table side ordering is "unheard of in the US" or suggesting nowhere in the US can you do mobile based transit tickets. FFS I was in NEW YORK recently and used NFC-based mobile transit tickets!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.justride.s...

> I think it's a pretty important data point.

McDonalds is the most widely known and biggest US restaurants. I think it's a relevant data point. I guess all food in the US is like McDonalds. Hey what do you know they have table side mobile ordering. I guess all food in the US is like that, all restaurants have mobile ordering. Anything outside of that is just unheard of.

That experience is horrible, and not just because pecking at a small screen for ants is horrible. Quite often the thing flat out doesn't work and/or is laid out in the most incomprehensible way possible that it's just faster to call a waiter over.

Also, owing to this being computer hardware sitting right next to food, the things are almost always grimey. Proper menus at least are ostensibly cleaned between customers. This isn't a problem specific to Japan, though.

>Toilets: they all have electronic controls to spray your butt after you poop. You can select water pressure, activate seat heating, etc.

Yeah, they have that since at least the 90s or something. Nothing new. I appreciate the engineering that goes into them, but it's a case of Galapagos.

>Public transit fare cards: in Japan, virtually every public transit system uses "IC cards" based on the Felica NFC chip.

They're great, but the world is starting to move ahead of them with everything moving to smartphone NFC and in a way that is carrier and brand and network agnostic.

>Remote-control air-conditioners.

They're great, particularly with how quiet they are. If it wasn't obvious from the toilets, Japan is great at hardware engineering. The problem is this doesn't translate to software engineering and high tech in general.

>Interpersonal messaging. In Japan, everyone uses LINE.

LINE is a perfect example of Japan's irrelevancy in software. Why? Because LINE is a South Korean product.

>Bullet trains. Japan leads the world,

Yup, top notch engineering as mentioned. Bad news for the maglev since that's being held up in political power struggles, though.

>Combination washer/dryers.

They've become such a mundane commodity thanks in no small part to South Korean and Chinese mass manufacturing that Japan is hardly relevant there anymore.

>Chip manufacturing. The US only has Intel,

The US also has Micron and Global Foundries, along with old school guys like Texas Instruments and more. Though I agree it's mostly Intel (and Micron) pushing the envelope.

Japan has a very bad track record with chip fabrication ever since they lost sight of everything, Elpida and Toshiba by far being the most tragic examples. The jury is indeed still out on Rapidus, TSMC expansion, etc., but I'm personally not holding my breath.

This is Japan: if any place cleans things reliably, it's here. If you think most American restaurants clean menus between customers, I have a bridge to sell you. Many don't even bother cleaning the table, in my experience, and then get mad if you point out the table is dirty.

>it's just faster to call a waiter over.

American waiters absolutely hate this, but they still expect a huge "tip". But yeah, in Japan it's perfectly acceptable and normal.

>Yeah, they have that since at least the 90s or something. Nothing new.

It's not new in Japan, but the rest of the world still hasn't heard about them apparently (or just doesn't care about hygiene), so it might as well be new.

>They're great, but the world is starting to move ahead of them with everything moving to smartphone NFC and in a way that is carrier and brand and network agnostic.

I don't see that at all in the US. Transit systems there all have their own separate cards that haven't changed in 20 years.

> If it wasn't obvious from the toilets, Japan is great at hardware engineering. The problem is this doesn't translate to software engineering and high tech in general.

There's more to "high tech" than just software and microservices or whatever. Most software is pretty useless without hardware to run it on. Sure, if you're just focusing on stuff that's only online, you'll just use commodity HW and Japan has nothing much to offer here, but most of us have a little more to our lives than just sitting in front of a PC and surfing the internet.

>LINE is a perfect example of Japan's irrelevancy in software. Why? Because LINE is a South Korean product.

Sure, but that's irrelevant. What's important is what's actually used, which is what my whole post is about: what technology is actually used day-to-day by average people in Japan? Japan: LINE. US: SMS. (And it's just US/Canada that are dinosaurs here; all other countries use some kind of modern chat app.)

>Bad news for the maglev since that's being held up in political power struggles, though.

I haven't seen anything concrete here, just the one thing about Shizuoka prefecture (I think) complaining.

>They've become such a mundane commodity thanks in no small part to South Korean and Chinese mass manufacturing that Japan is hardly relevant there anymore.

They're relevant in Japan, where they're fairly common (and made by Japanese manufacturers mostly). Back in the US, they're almost completely unheard of.

How many US transit systems have you ridden on? Several? Dozens? There's 6,800 or so public transit systems in the US, you think you've ridden a representative sample of them?

Apple, Google, Microsoft and all the rest of them should've been nuked into a trillion tiny little pieces years ago.

But there's nothing close to Google Search or iPhone.

What will happen is here, a bunch of shady companies will sell gambling spyware and porn apps on a third party app store. Everyone who wants to make money will sell on the legitimate app store. DMM, for example, will have an app store, and it will be filth.

Japan has a massive elderly population who will just get sucked in installing shady crap on their devices.

I sympathize with the idea, but in practice, it won't work out the way people think it will.

Maybe this would be a good plan if it was more complete. For example, who moderates any new app stores, who vets the software, what government incentives are in place for better, more secure competitive software to emerge domestically?

This just seems like monkey see monkey do with Europe.

DMM already has an app store at least on Android, and as far as I'm concerned it's fine assuming you're there to buy the stuff DMM sells.

Was it motivated purely or mainly by a need for a workable kanji/kana interface for mobile texting, with no sense of the larger implications of such a capable system as a basis for a very comfortable head start 10 years later into the smartphone adoption cycle?

It feels like such a perfect textbook example of a culture that embraces "how" much more than it embraces "why," a culture that is not endemic to Japan but actually quite common at various scales globally, because most of the time its the right mindset. But when it isn't, it becomes an enormous handicap.

By the time iPhone came out, the tech debts and bureaucratic overheads had grown so much that nothing could be done to save the industry and platform. Everything from devices to institutional knowledge and existing moats all went down the drain until enough was shed off that reasonably usable Android phones could be manufactured, but not much points were left in making those.

> Was it motivated purely or mainly by ...

I'm sure Docomo execs had sane long-term plans, but ideological and hierarchical thinking isn't Japanese forte so executions were counterproductive and/or micromanagement mess. Kanji/kana interface has nothing to do with it, all Nokia phones handled Japanese language perfectly fine, certainly more than adequately for ... a dozen model or so sold over a decade.

Nothing, really. Remember that most advancements in computing still happened outside of Japan (Windows 95, Pentium, et al.), or in the case of NAND flash happened in Japan but was shitcanned only to be picked up by the US.

Japan never was great at tech beyond a certain point, but that only became really obvious in the 2000s when even their Galapagos phones were finally outdone.

Two major mistakes made by Japanese phone manufacturers was that they didn't ship the phones globally from being scared to death with language barriers, and that no one cared about horrible organizational mess.

They had a decade and half to make MOAP(L) work out as a usable touchscreen OS that runs on Renesas SH processor with Toshiba DRAM and paired with a Fujitsu modem, they didn't take that route and instead spent that engineering man-hours on processing PDF file returned from payment gateway on a phone, and let it all bleed out.

IIUC, Korea was in an almost exact same situation. They managed to come out of it. Japan could not.

I still wonder what could have happened, if Japanese companies pushed their phones (and technology) more worldwide. Well, we will never know.

However it was expensive as shit.

I’m glad that both WAP and i-mode failed and we got the real Internet though.

I think that content density disparity still exists today. The Western Internet is kind of content lean.

Apple and Google are dominant because Japan simply cannot do software (and tech in general). They have no domestic players, so this conclusion is natural.

Some amount of regulation might be necessary, but fundamentally Japan cannot break the US-held monopoly so long as they fail to bring their own players to market.

Wouldn't the counterpoint here be the games industry? Sony PlayStation and Nintendo seem to make globally competitive software.

One thing I happen to know is Japanese dev type people loves to victim blame for usability and unintended path issues. It seems omission of subjects/actors in spoken Japanese make it hard for them to comprehend issues. Japanese stoicism certainly isn't helping too.

Maybe entertainment for its own sake is technical exception, as joy, ease, addictiveness, are clear goals rather than potential excess. Or maybe there are somthing else to it. But it's certainly an interesting inconsistency.

You're watching the fox leave the henhouse and asking why the chickens won't hatch.

I do spend a lot of time in Japan though. A lot more then most down voters that's for sure.

For most people visiting Japan, their first interaction will be buying a a train ticket for the NEX Airport express or the Shinkansen, it's a horrendous and confusing experience. Their interactions with Japanese software will only get worse from there however.

Japan still has that system in place, but the basic fare is usually replaced by your IC transit card or integrated into an eTicket (which contains both basic fare + express surcharge and is tied into your IC card).

So if you buy a ticket to NEX on the Ekinet app you'll be offered a ticketless option, but you probably wouldn't know that means you still need to tap your Suica in order to pay the basic fare.

Shinkansen trains are generally using eTickets, which would be even more confusing for visitors, but many visitors are using JR Pass which is completely outside the fare systems (but does need reserved seats).

Most of this complexity is inherent complexity, not accidental complexity that comes from bad software. The main issues I've seen with the software in question are: Lack of English version (Ekinet), Complex registration flow (SmartEX) and flaky authentication (Ekinet). This is not a great UX, but the apps don't feel worse than train operator apps in other countries. These are not tech companies.

What's so bad about Nintendo's or the Sony PlayStation's software? From my perspective they're like... almost perfect, except for the fact that there are updates sometimes, but they're fast.

What's so bad about JR's ticket vending machines? What could be improved?

It's also not completely relevant to third party payment processors. They don't have to use the secure enclave at all. They could theoretically just ask for your credit card info every time. They're not allowed to do that currently for no other reason than Apple's bottom line.

For convenience, they'd probably want to store it encrypted on your device, using a private key from the secure enclave to decrypt it when you pass the biometrics test. That's the normal level of "access" to the secure enclave that all apps should have. It's in no way concerning because private keys and biometrics never leave the enclave, but can still be used to decrypt data elsewhere on the device when the biometrics test is passed. It's the whole reason why the secure enclave exists in the first place.

It's a trade-off, and it can't be fine when it benefits Apple, but nonnegotiable when it benefits the others.

As an Android dev I'm growing tiresome of this "Google doesn't restrict anything" argument.

The number of Android users that even know what f-droid is is less than 1%.

The Play Store is the only option.

This is unlike how Apple does things where they literally block your app from running on your customer's devices unless you get Apple's approval (and pay them), and there's no option whatsoever to cut them out of that process.

Of course that will still cut into their unfair monopoly profits. But they can likely maintain a huge chunk.

Anecdotally, have seen a few positions for their internal ad tech team; and have been pinged a couple of times by recruiters.

1. Privacy makes them a lot of money right now; it's a huge part of their brand, and one the CEO talks about frequently.

2. Media coverage of Apple Intelligence talks a lot about how privacy is a core differentiator for Apple's AI approach compared to Google, Microsoft, or OpenAI. Apple's approach is on-device-by-default approach, going as far as to have an explicit opt-in per interaction if you want to talk to chatGPT.

3. Apple clearly spent a lot of time and money on their "private cloud compute" approach to larger server models -- why would they immediately squander that by switching to ad-tech.

4. If they were going to use that treasure trove of information, why would they spend so much time not doing that in the lead-up to their big launch of Apple Intelligence?

5. Apple has spent a lot of effort making that personal local context local-only, and designing APIs and training models on schemas for apps to provide local context & local actions to local Siri. That's part of their killer feature set.

Ad tech team doesn't really require any of this data. That's an entirely different business model, and Apple is a lucrative business because they didn't do what Google did.

It all comes down to this: Apple spent the past decade plus building up a brand based on privacy, and spending a lot of extra time, money, and effort doing things more privately than their competitors. It's now a compelling differentiator for Apple, and I have a lot of trouble seeing why they would squander a reputation they clearly spent a lot of energy building.

    > Privacy makes them a lot of money right now

Most users do not care about privacy. They care about price and convenience.

It’s a bit moot without surveying users, and I’m sure those surveys exist somewhere. But I don’t accept at face value that users don’t care about privacy.

    > why are they buying iPhones?

1) Write an Android wrapper and integrate it to Xcode so swift/SwiftUI can run normally on Android

2) Release the App Store for Android, with full App Store purchase/subscription support

They could collect a TON of revenue on the Android platform doing this, and most developers would opt to re-release their iOS apps on Android to save on dev costs.