Apple and Google Crowd Out the Competition With Default Apps (theverge.com) 79
If you use an iPhone or Android phone, chances are the majority of your most-used apps were made by Apple and Google. From a report: That's the takeaway from a new Comscore study that ranks the popularity of preinstalled iOS and Android apps, such as Apple's Messages, alongside apps made by other developers. The results show that the majority of apps people use on their phones in the US come preinstalled by either Apple or Google. The first-of-its-kind report was commissioned by Facebook, one of Apple's loudest critics, and shared exclusively with The Verge. Preinstalled services dominate when it comes to basics like weather, photos, and clocks, according to the report, suggesting these categories will be difficult for other apps to compete in. Defaults don't win out exclusively, though: Apple Maps and Music don't appear on the iOS list at all, and Gmail makes the iOS list several entries below Apple Mail.
The timing, as Facebook likely intentioned, is apt: Apple and Google are increasingly under scrutiny for how they favor their own services over competitors like Spotify. US lawmakers are currently reviewing a new set of bills designed to curb the power of Big Tech, including legislation that could potentially bar Apple and Google from giving their services the upper hand against rivals. The pushback stems from how Apple and Google bundle their apps and services with their mobile operating systems in ways that some of their competitors think is unfair. The criticism is harsher against Apple, given that it more tightly controls the apps that come preinstalled on the iPhone and doesn't allow developers to circumvent its App Store.
The timing, as Facebook likely intentioned, is apt: Apple and Google are increasingly under scrutiny for how they favor their own services over competitors like Spotify. US lawmakers are currently reviewing a new set of bills designed to curb the power of Big Tech, including legislation that could potentially bar Apple and Google from giving their services the upper hand against rivals. The pushback stems from how Apple and Google bundle their apps and services with their mobile operating systems in ways that some of their competitors think is unfair. The criticism is harsher against Apple, given that it more tightly controls the apps that come preinstalled on the iPhone and doesn't allow developers to circumvent its App Store.
Sadly, the default Apps are some of the worst (Score:3)
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The counter argument is Microsoft.
IE/Edge are the default. MSN/Live are the default. And yet they are still falling. Have been falling for decades, since the 90s.
Being default is powerful but not enough to save Microsoft.
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As computer literacy has taken off, people learn internet usage and safety from an early age. Things like using a different browser or search engine are now more accessible than before. So it seems plausible that users are more likely to go to an app store and find a non-default version of an app.
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Downmod? Some Microsoft fans in the house?
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True, but that's in part because MS decided that it didn't need to keep burning money competing in "the browser wars" any more, and IE fell so far behind that it's now just a wrapper around Chrome's engine. So even when people use IE (Edge) now, which is pre-installed and default for Windows, they're essentially using Chrome.
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Being default is powerful but not enough to save Microsoft.
What do you mean by save, what do you mean by falling, and why does your post coincide with the year Microsoft Edge beat Firefox to second place in the market share?
https://www.bleepingcomputer.c... [bleepingcomputer.com]
Doesn't sound like it's falling to me.
Also what is MSN/Live the default of? A browser that in the past decade is almost exclusively used in corporate environments where companies force a different default homepage? No I'm genuinely curious here, I've not seen the MSN/Live page, not on a fresh install of Windows,
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The Fisher-Price version of Gmail had about 1/3rd of the features as an old freebie from yester-year.
That doesn't make them worst. I ran K9 for years, I didn't use about 99% of its features. Most people rarely use even a fraction of the features afforded to them.
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More features does not equate to "better." Many times, loads of dubious features add up to crappy functionality. GMail may not have all the features of K9, but it works, and works well.
For many apps, good luck trying to find quality in the App Store. Most are total junk, and most of the "good" ones are loaded down with ads.
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Nothing to see here (Score:3, Insightful)
They just wait to see what's popular on their store/platform and then release their own default-installed version. Same thing Microsoft did, same thing Amazon does with physical goods.
Nothing to see here, move along.
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Samsung does the same with their phones.
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:5, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Same thing WoW did with addons, turned them into default game features.
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When functionality provided by a third party is popular enough that users might leave your app when it's no longer supported, or doesn't work for a while after an update, or is changed significantly enough to affect their usage, or gets infected with spyware, etc etc - there's plenty of room for discussion about building that feature into your application/platform/whatever. Sure, it's a problem when a popular and well-run mod/app gets jacked by the app/platform. But behind a lot of those stories are other s
Apple will never do social media (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't see what Facebook is worried about, sure whatsapp on Apple is a no go but social media has too much reputational risk. Apple will not try to invade Facebooks bread and butter service, they couldn't even directly monetize it any way.
Re:Apple will never do social media (Score:4, Informative)
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Apple already made a social media app and failed. See: Ping.
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Google has tried several times to compete with FaceBook, and failed.
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Re: Apple will never do social media (Score:2)
Google can monetize social media with advertising and doesn't rely on reputation for massive margin hardware and building a closed garden with 30% entry fees.
Maybe we should legislate (Score:5, Funny)
We can make a law that says what services each type of device is allowed to provide out of the box. Messages is ridiculous, no previous phone came with the functionality to send text messages out of the box... and a CLOCK APP!?! Who does apple think they are bundling the ability to tell time into a cellular phone? Phones never needed that before, that should be a protected area of innovation for third parties.
And its not just the phone either, do you have any idea how hard it is to market a time telling Apple Watch app? Apple just includes that functionality out of the box... in a watch! unbelievable!
Re: Maybe we should legislate (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'm assuming here that if you were inclined to tinker with Raspberry Pis the DIY solution would already be pretty obvious, so your only option really is just to get an old Android or iOS device and set up parental controls to lock out everything except the clock functionality.
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Part of the problem is that used to be done by a single chip - it had a clock, a display driver, an alarm and that's it.
So it was easy to build a $5 alarm clock, or a $10 clock radio.
If you want all those features, they would require programming and a complex UI to do with 7 segment displays and a few buttons. So a device with a full touchscreen makes far more sense because the biggest issue isn't the chip, it's the UI - you don't want a million buttons, you don't want a million little lights or cryptic thi
Re: Maybe we should legislate (Score:2)
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Combining those features so that you can make damn sure you get notified, with backup alarms if needed.
Oh you're one of *those* people.
Re: Maybe we should legislate (Score:2)
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Ha. For us it's the leg they get in the small of their back after the second alarm that gently increases in pressure until the guilty party falls out of bed and turns off her damn alarm so I can sleep :-)
Re: Maybe we should legislate (Score:2)
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Sounds like a job for the ejector bed https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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(leaving Li-ION plugged in all day kills it)
That depends on the charging circuit in the device. Yes, leaving a Lithium battery (any type) on trickle charge will degrade the battery very quickly.
Many new devices have adaptive charging circuits built in with an interface to allow you to select the upper and lower value for initiating charging. By default many of them start charging when the device is down to 50% charge and stop at the 80% level.
Charging to 100% repeatedly also over taxes the battery. Some charging algorithms see that you dischar
Re: Maybe we should legislate (Score:2)
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We can make a law that says what services each type of device is allowed to provide out of the box. Messages is ridiculous, no previous phone came with the functionality to send text messages out of the box
Yes back in my day, you had to use smoke signals to send text messages via phone. The game changer was the Motorola Razr which was so thin that cutting down a tree only took 1 or twice chops as opposed to my blocky Nokia.
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Ahhh.. for the days when you needed an app just to use your flash LED as a flashlight. Good riddance.
IMO I shouldn't have to download any apps at all to do basic things. And basic things are all I want my phone to do. And I shouldn't have to sign into an app store to get free apps I'm not payng for anyway. Just post the damn hash of the genuine unhacked apk on a public site.
Still plenty of room for "innovation" in the area of tet file editors apparently. Astounds me those are still not installed by def
Carrier and Content (Score:1)
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It’s definitely a good thing that, unlike the pre-iPhone days, AT&T and the like cannot decide what goes on the phone and that’s left up to the phone manufacturers. Those greedy telecoms loved to load phones up with junk.
However, I don’t see how that’s relevant to this story. Perhaps we have different definitions of “carrier,” as I don’t think of Apple or Google in this situation,
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If you are a carrier you should not be able to supply the content. This is the exact same issue as cable companies owning the "stations" or "content providers" that are shown over them. They have too much leverage on prices and availability.
Worse than that. An example is Bell in Canada, which is both an ISP and a content creator and distributor. This conflict causes them to advocate for things like DNS based censorship and banning VPNs, which are clearly bad for their internet customers, but they just can't help themselves because, aaar, pirates!
https://www.michaelgeist.ca/20... [michaelgeist.ca]
https://www.michaelgeist.ca/20... [michaelgeist.ca]
Incredibly douchey company IMHO, and an ever present threat even to people who are not their customers.
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Is this essentialy bad? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not saying it isn't bad in practice, but is it essentially bad? It is not outrageous to claim each new developer or company you involve with your phone is another potential vector for violations of privacy and security. They might be lazy and use insecure code, or be excellent but then sell their application to an outright criminal. This is without getting into the tertiary services some developers use and abuse on the backend. I have been to websites that want twenty plus domains be whitelisted to work properly. Try not to add any more plugins on your way to the parking lot. First party applications can minimize the number of places problems can arise.
An obvious counter argument with Google is that, well, you are starting off with zero respect for your privacy to begin with. They have a proven track record of tricking and lying to people about settings. Apple are dicks, but I think they have more often than not put their money where their mouth is regarding users deciding where their data goes. I dunno.
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There is an argument to be made that any functionality that an app provides can be usurped when the OS adds it regardless if the app has better functionality.
Also that they use their platform to promote their products over others. They promoted their own Files app over competitors like DropBox by artificially boosting it to the top of search results.
They also insert ads into the operating system (the Settings app in particular) for their own subscription offerings (but nobody else can) like Apple Music trials and Apple Arcade trials. iOS is becoming Apple adware to push users to their products.
The Android clock app kind of sucks (Score:2)
And finally when there is a good paid app it's successful, you can bet y
Google Allegedly Is Spying On Rival App Telemetry (Score:2)
https://hothardware.com/news/g... [hothardware.com]
Google Allegedly Is Spying On Rival App Telemetry Data To Advance Its Competitive Apps
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It Is Called CamelCase and any half-decent software developer will know all about that. Sadly muscle memory is hard to get around. At least it is better than flaming with all caps, isn't it?
Why is this a surprise? (Score:5, Insightful)
The apps are free, they are not loaded with ads and/or spyware, they don't report telemetry to third parties, ...
Are they the best apps? Maybe not, but they are functionally complete and don't suffer from any of these downsides that most other "competition" does.
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Chrome reports to google, but they are already flooded with the other personal info we given them (whether from android, their other apps, our google searches and usage of their other apps, ...). Any extensions you install will report to third parties, but not chrome itself.
It's not only about the default apps, stupid! (Score:2)
I use iMessage because all my family and friends are also on iMessage, for example.
The real problem here is that, unlike email, messaging is a complete mess in which each network only works with itself. The only fix for that would be for all governments to sit down and force all companies to drop their own networks and establish a new world-wide standard. Which of course would trigger all the tinfoil conspiracy nuts. But we do have one standard for email, one standard for the web, a few standards for photos
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I use iMessage because all my family and friends are also on iMessage, for example.
The real problem here is that, unlike email, messaging is a complete mess in which each network only works with itself. The only fix for that would be for all governments to sit down and force all companies to drop their own networks and establish a new world-wide standard. Which of course would trigger all the tinfoil conspiracy nuts. But we do have one standard for email, one standard for the web, a few standards for photos and videos but most of them are cross-platform aside from licensing issues. But messaging is just a huge freakin' mess. How and why did we allow that to happen?
SMS, you say? That's an old pile of crap that cannot meet modern needs and needs to die too.
RCS then?
Oh, it's not supported on iPhone? I wonder why that would be...
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It's also about the problem of developing a better mousetrap.
I'm not aware of a feature in another messaging app that interests me more than saying, "Huh. Neat. Can't think of a situation where I want that." Same with the people trying to sell 3rd party clock apps.
On email, I'm not at all interested in a fully-featured email client. That's what my PC is for. Email on my smartphone is only used at it's bare minimum of functionality, like seeing I got an email, and maybe composing 4 sentence replies.
If y
Why do you want an OS that does nothing by default (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead make your paid and advertisement filled apps better than the default and people will use it! If your app can't compete then it probably sucks or is over priced.
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Oh come on! Total BS (Score:2)
I have two calculators I paid for on my iPhone. There is absolutely nothing that bundled Apple apps do better than anything else, or even sufficiently better that your average user would not look for something better.
Ok, my wife might be a little different in her priorities than me, over-using things like Notes, and I might be complicit as well, despite having at least two text processing apps and four word processing apps on my iPad.
But, for things that 90% of people use every day, it is stupid for basic
"difficult for other apps to compete"? (Score:2)
I'm really honestly and truly sorry. If you're an app developer, and you're trying to "compete", maybe you should design an app that wasn't available on my 486 DB2 50MHz -- or my AT (still the best power toggle ever).
Weather, calculator, schedule, photos, clocks, are you insane? These had better be of absolute-zero value by now.
Thirty-six hundred ways to know the weather without looking outside -- and it's wrong 90% of the time.
Here's your new weather app: "tomorrow's weather will be pretty similar to tod
I want to uninstall preinstalled apps. (Score:1)
I personally don't mind having default apps preinstalled as long as I can pick a better option for myself and install it.
The big issue I have is that you cannot uninstall the preinstalled apps even if you don't use them and have no plans to use them in the future. Maybe those can be stored in the firmware and mirrored to the app storage area where you can delete it from there and can reinstall it later from the firmware if needed -- I'm talking about my iOS phone.
My Android phone came with the Facebook app
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My Android phone came with the Facebook app preinstalled and there was no uninstall option. However, there was a disable app feature and that did remove it from the app drawer. I know it's still on the phone hiding in firmware somewhere but it doesn't bother me as much having it there and knowing it's not running in the background. It would still be nice to have an option to completely uninstall the app even from the firmware.
You need to get yourself a phone on which you can unlock the bootloader, gain root access, and install LineageOS. You can uninstall and delete apps and files to your heart's content. While you're at it, install F-Droid and then nuke Play Store as well. Add a firewall - with root access it offers good protection.
If I had to go back to a phone from which Facebook and YouTube and Gmail and Twitter and a zillion other pieces of unwanted bloatware and spyware couldn't be excised, I'd go back even farther and buy
Maybe I'm just weird, but . . . (Score:2)
. . . I have very little use for almost any app besides the browser, mail client, the phone app, and a messaging app.
The other shit is so seldom used that frankly I wouldn't miss it if it was unavailable
Re: Maybe I'm just weird, but . . . (Score:2)
. . I have very little use for almost any app besides the browser, mail client, the phone app, and a messaging app.
The other shit is so seldom used that frankly I wouldn't miss it if it was unavailable
And of course your use-case should work for everyone, right?
Consider the source and methodology (Score:2)
Facebook paid for the Comscore study to show the “impact of preinstalled apps on the competitive app ecosystem,” according to [a Facebook] spokesman
To make the report last December, Comscore used data it regularly gathers from apps and websites alongside a survey of roughly 4,000 people asking about the default apps they used during the month of November
1. This is a Facebook-funded study with an explicit agenda stated from the horse's mouth
2. It's six months out of date and contradicted by more recent, unsponsored data from the company generating the report
3. The "apps" from which data was gathered didn't include the preinstalled apps in question (Apple and Google don't sell their data or use third-party analytics)
4. The "websites" from which data was gathered can't provide useful data, given that these apps come preinstalled
5. The "survey" they relied on
What's what always happens on another's platform.. (Score:2)
Sure, this dynamic has been going on forever - when you develop on someone else's platform, over time the platform expands to include features that were first introduced by third-parties. That's been the case in Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android, and even in Linux. And that's not evil, it's pretty natural - if something's of general use, it makes sense to include in the platform one way or another. Sometimes the third party sells or licenses the technology to the platform owners, sometimes the platform owner
Problem is Preinstalled Apps, It's Integration (Score:2)
I have no trouble using Gmail instead of Mail on iOS, the problem comes when I'm in some other app that uses iOS API to call for the Mail app and there is no way to say that I want to use Gmail by default, not iOS's Mail. Particularly aggravating is Maps, I'd rather use Google Maps, but for any address it asks me to install Apple Maps. I haven't tried recently, but my first shot at trying a third party alarm clock in iOS made me late for work because apparently at that time Apple didn't allow processes to r
Samsung here (Score:1)
After my first smartphone (Moto Droid), all the rest have been Samsungs. I'm a huge fan of the Note line. Yes, I skipped the 7. lol
Looking at my phone, I have ALMOST no Google apps in the "most used". They are Samsung apps. Samsung Notes, Camera, Gallery, Calendar, etc. I use Truecaller & Signal for phone/text, and Protonmail for email (used to use k-9 before I switched ISPs).
I suppose though that if I wasn't a Samsung fanboy, I'd probably be using more Google apps thought. But I agree with the o
No Default Apps, and no Trusted App Stores: Perfec (Score:2)
Enjoy your new phoneâ¦
What a perfect world we are crafting here!
Go Governments!!!
As it should be (Score:2)
It's the same argument as twenty years ago about building in IE or CD-R capability: it's part of a functional system, and there need to be default apps for standard operations. I pick up a smart phone, I expect it to have a calculator app, an email app, a weather app, a web browser, all that stuff. That's just basic functionality in the TYOOL 2021.
Should it all be easily replaceable? Yes. But if the built-in app is 'good enough,' too bad, go write different software. Nobody should be whining that apple
Small Exception (Score:1)
I think that people prefer apps from known names (how many must-have pieces of software for the mac aren't in brew or are MS/Adobe?) because most of us are sick of abandonware.
So? (Score:2)
So? In my experience Google apps are much less buggy than their competitors, and usually have better UI also.