People have been voting with their wallets since forever, and look where it got us.
The reality is that asking people to vote with their wallets does not work. But this specific case is even worse, because it's not possible to "vote with your wallet" to begin with.
The specific things the blog post notes are "how terrible the experience of developing apps for the iPhone/iPad is, how Apple takes 30% of all app store and in-app purchases, how awful Xcode is as a development environment"
So let's say you want to build a mobile app that actually reaches people. There's a duopoly, so you have to support Android and iOS. What are your options for "voting with your wallet" then? There's nothing you can buy that lets you reach iOS with your app without using Apple's ecosystem.
"Voting with your wallet" is what people tell you to do if they don't want you to do the things that actually work, which, in this case, is regulation. We have two companies controlling both viable mobile platforms. There is nowhere else to go for 99.9% of people. You can have a billion dollars, and you still can't "vote with your wallet." You're still going to own either an iPhone or an Android phone, and support both if you want to publish an app.
The obvious answer is that the two companies that control these platforms need to be regulated. Apple can play dumb if it's only Europe, but even so, the cracks are starting to show (e.g. Apple's recent copy/paste interoperability announcement). If the US joined in, the dam would break.
> You're still going to own either an iPhone or an Android phone
Don’t forget that option C) “none of the above”, is no longer viable since we’ve reorganized the world around the smartphone. The analog alternatives for basic, vital life transactions are dwindling or eliminated in many circumstances.
You're right that to deploy an app to Apple's app store you have to pay them. The $100/yr access ransom is unavoidable if you want to have the option of making money there.
But I've gone to great lengths to avoid the rest of the stuff that genuinely sucks about building for Apple: I use Flutter to avoid most of the iOS nonsense. I use Android Studio on Linux for the vast majority of my development. I target Android/web/iOS and test mainly on the first two. I use codemagic.io to avoid having to have a mac to run ios builds.
I did have to borrow a mac and use xcode to set up my project, I wish that weren't the case.
I'd love to tell iOS users to just use the web version, but in-app purchases on web are a real headache compared to mobile and I haven't set up Stripe or equivalent. And Apple has crippled the web experience on iOS anyway with Safari.
Does any of my approach "vote with my wallet"? No. It's just for me, to avoid the horrible experience of Apple to the extent possible while also reaching users that choose to use iOS.
“Regulating” in the current environment just means mandated coziness with intelligence and law enforcement: scanning your files (Chat Control 1.0), backdoors (Chat Control 2.0), suppression of ideas through mandatory moderation, age verification.
What we need is antitrust enforcement, breaking of digital locks, and adversarial interoperability. This can be accomplished through certain forms of regulation, but you need to be specific or you’re going to get the bad kind of regulation.
Didn’t mean to criticize, I see the word “regulation” thrown around often here without any clarification, and sometimes the people using it don’t have our best interests in mind.
The apps you actually need to participate in society (digital IDs, banking apps, etc.) will never run on your homegrown OS. Having a billion dollars changes nothing about the fact that you need either iOS or a Google-blessed Android version.
Then perhaps we should have regulations to ensure that social participation is not locked behind these gatekeepers.
In particular, government and financial services should not require smartphones. Especially in an era when devices often require an “account” with the manufacturer that can be suspended or cancelled.
Huawei can't sell fully functional phones anywhere outside of China, including in Europe. You need Google Mobile Services and the Google Play Store to be able to install stuff like your banking app, and the US government is preventing Huawei from shipping phones with it. China has its own app ecosystem, so they're fine locally but screwed everywhere else.
Voting with your wallet doesn't work usually, because your wallet isn't big enough.
Vote with your vote! Our system is dysfunctional in the united states, but if you look at the political unity behind something like blocking datacenter construction and how much of a headache it's causing for big tech, it's clear we still can have an effect. Most of the problem with big tech are solvable through existing anti-trust institutions IF we actually empower them. Things got bad because we stopped enforcing the rules; the rules used to work.
Voting with your wallet is like voting with your vote. It both works, but to an extent that will never be noticeable by you. You vote more often with your money than with your vote though. Don't buy into the nirvana fallacy nor be fatalistic. Be a responsible consumer and inform others on why they should vote wisely too.
Voting with your wallet lets you send dozens of fine-grained messages a day. You support companies you want to support, and don't support those you don't want. Others will choose differently and that's fine for them. The mere existence of businesses you dislike is not a sign that this process has failed, you don't have the right to stop others from getting what they want to pay for.
Voting in federal elections in the US lets you send a message of less then one bit per year. It's a horribly ineffective method.
Apple exists because plenty of people vote for it with their wallets. I don't. But I don't mind that it exists.
I vote against Google when I can. I block ads and use Duck Duck Go as my default search engine. But the results are so poor compared to Google that I switch to use Google often. That's a sign to me that their product is worth my occasional, small "vote", and I'm okay with that.
"Collective" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Are the top 1% in that collective? The top 10%? I don't think so - with that in mind, do you still think our wallet is huge enough for the job?
> You need to do more than just boycott, you need to spread the word.
Spreading the word is now done with a huge wallet and access to politicians - whose word is being spread can tell you who's got these. Are there other ways? Yes - still peaceful but complex, laborious and thankless - boycott isn't integral to any of them though.
There is a puzzle piece missing from this article and others like it, which I think is crucial but often overlooked.
It's not enough to "vote with your wallet", you also need to make it very public and very clear "why" you're casting that vote at all.
Otherwise execs are typically more than happy to infer a completely wrong "why", and are very happy to not understand the real reasons, because a) either the real reasons are not actually necessarily that obvious in the first place, and b) even when they are, unless they are made too obvious and public to ignore, then people will happily fail to understand the things that they stand to benefit from not understanding to begin with (Upton Sinclair's law). All while collecting fat paychecks and bonuses.
I haven't purchased an Apple product for myself since the classic iPod over 20 years ago, yet nothing has changed.
Turns out, you need to also convince a whole lot of people to vote with you to have an impact. And then you have the whole group of people who would rather put up with Apple's annoyances than switch to something unfamiliar and annoying in its own ways.
The standard problem with "just voting" to solve problems is that you can only vote for the options you're offered. If all the options on the market suck, voting for the lesser of the available evils will not address the fundamental source of your dissatisfaction, and may help entrench it. If you vote "with dollars" there's the additional problem that dollars are not uniformly distributed, and a few wealthy "voters" can and will disenfranchise everyone else.
Abstaining from buying from companies you disagree with can help, but it is only one part of the broader solution. When there aren't alternatives yet "on the market" you may be forced to hold your nose for a while and buy from the vendors you hate while advocating for change and working toward their replacement. You don't have to solve every problem in your world at once so long as you're building in the right direction.
I'm guessing the number of non-developer Apple users is at least an order of magnitude larger than the developer users. So, no, I don't think developers can vote with their wallet to fix this crappy ecosystem. We'd be better off to just stop developing apps for the ecosystem in general - but that requires developers/companies to ignore the honeypot that is the Apple user base. Which will probably never happen.
So yeah, it's a crappy situation, that is obviously engineered in Apple's favor.
Yeah, it worked so well for EU at ensuring that they can't compete against the US and Asia. The rest of the world should be very grateful to EU voters.
The video referenced in the article contains nothing new; those things have existed for nearly two decades. People simply create similar videos to boost engagement and it seems they're quite successful at it.
It's actually quite the opposite. It became easier to create apps for Apple platforms, Apple also reduced the commission to 15% for small businesses.
I had a weird feeling back in late 2007 when iPod touch launched and I had to run the jailbreak tool written by someone astronomically above my paygrade to get custom apps running on it. It was first real-computer-class-computer I had that had no official terminal access or total freedom to run anything I want - a lot of devs started fighting "algorithm" issues as soon as App Store opened. I was much younger but I still thought, this is going to replace all PDAs despite having what we know all knows it's called software freedom, and needs to be antitrusted ASAP, or we'll lose that thing. I was not smart back then and still isn't, probably like first few thousand millionth person to realize that in the world.
Fast forward 20 years(!?!?!??!???), we did lose software freedom. Did the world really have to wait 20 years?
Voting with your wallet only works when there is a enough meaningful alternatives and switching between them isn't prohibitively costly. You can vote with your wallet for which bottle of water you are going to drink, but you can't do that if the same company sells you the same bottle under different brand names. You can't vote with your wallet also when every other offering has significant downsides (which is less common that people think on software, but it's on other products).
What we need is to vote for standards. A floor that no product must fall below. Markets are useful when competition can actually discipline companies. When market forces aren't enough to make competitive products, other forces must pick up the slack.
Here’s a more positive take on it: alternatives need customers and/or patrons. Becoming an early adopter for some software or service or artist that you like is beneficial for both you and for them.
The trouble is finding them. Writing or sharing product reviews, etc. will help get the word out.
You shouldn’t expect to change the world this way. If they become generally popular, it will mostly be due to other people becoming customers, and that’s not up to you. Also, there are reasons why the leading products are popular. Such as, some people are probably happy with them! But at least you did your bit.
The argument about Apple not even allowing devs to run their own app without periodically resigning the app every 7 days ( without paying 99$ to Apple) is so true.
So far AI has democratised SaaS based products. I’ve vibe coded many niche web apps that is very specific for my use case rather than paying for a generic service. However, I cannot do that with iOS. I practically cannot install and keep on using an app that I created without any interruption on the phone that I paid more than 1k$ to buy.
"Voting with your wallet" does absolutely nothing. This is a fallacy and a falsehood repeated by communities online.
People are saying to "vote with your wallet" regarding Sony's poisonous murder of physical games media. I haven't ever owned a Playstation and have "voted with my wallet" for 30+ years. Doesn't stop anything.
If you don't participate, someone else will, or a large investor or some entity will fill the void.
For things like these, change needs to happen a layer above the individual. This article's advice is just false and wrong.
Consumer dollars are worth nothing in tech. All of the money is B2B. B2C businesses exist to support, bootstrap, or grow the value (via ads) of B2B businesses.
Vote with your wallet works when you’re talking about local businesses. It doesn’t work when the only factor that determines where the money goes is the executives signing the contracts.
You can also vote with where you apply to work for. Employees in these companies are your fellow developers, unless they are drowned deep enough in their role in which case they are part of the problem.
I vote with my wallet exactly by buying apple products over the competition. The alternatives just suck. Framework is looking promising though. But I’ve also slowed down my apple purchases. My M1 Max mbp still works great, I have no need to upgrade. My iPhone 14 still does everything I need. Not many companies supports their hardware this long.
What do you do when "voting with your wallet" makes you unhappy?
I'm not here to bash Linux, Android, Apple, or Windows. I like windows (10 at least) better than OSX or any distro for desktop use. I like iPhone better than Android.
Voting with my wallet just means I'm not as happy as what I currently have chosen.
Billionaires love it when you try to vote with your wallet, because while billionaires only represent 0.00004% of the population, their wallets are 100,000 times larger than average. [1]
I've been incubating a heresy for years: the free software movement was actually counterproductive. It helped kill user-focused autonomous privacy-respecting personal computing.
It created a tech environment where there is no money in good (as in good intent, socially responsible, user-focused) tech. Everyone expects good software (in the social/moral sense of good) to be free.
So we get an environment where the good people have no economic forcing function and no resources, and the exploiters have a business model.
We should not be surprised at what happened next.
You get what you incentivize. Always. We got what we incentivized.
You could package and sell a FOSS (and free/open hardware even) device tomorrow. The license doesn’t forbid it. Some have even built businesses on this!
It’s also possible to run service businesses that produce FOSS, like Bitwarden for example.
“Good” businesses get outcompeted on price by “bad” businesses, not by FOSS. Want a powerful workstation that is 100% open POWER architecture? Only $10k from Raptor Computing. Willing to go a little lower spec and use x86? Get one from Purism or System76. Reasonable, but still more expensive than mainstream alternatives, and user support on the software side is still mostly driven by the community.
Most FOSS is still finicky and geared towards either devs or “power user” amateurs who wouldn’t be paying for a license or subscription anyway. It’s getting better in some areas, but it’s generally not there yet.
It's interesting that so much of the 'Anti-Big-Tech' movement over the last decade focused on tangential things like potentially forcing Google to sell Chrome or breaking up Facebook while Apple had this chokehold on the actual financial transactions in their ecosystem.
App store fees is a much more obvious example of something subject to regulatory scrutiny vs what much of what Biden's FTC under Lina Khan was working on.
As with many questions of what people seem to be focused on, I think this has a lot more to do with media coverage dynamics than the facts on the ground. A major case against App Store fees has been ongoing since 2020, you just don’t hear as much about it because it’s less controversial.
I distinctly remember the transition from "Tech used to be good" to "Tech is actively malicious" being when Epic Games decided to pull a Stallman-tier stunt against Apple over something that had become the industry standard. In fact, it was such a direct shot against Apple's monopolistic control that when the Biden FTC did attack Apple, it was over a handful of side issues[0] that Epic hadn't addressed and were thus still open to pursue[3].
There is still a subset of people who still think Apple's 30% is a religious tithe to keep the App Barbarians out rather than an usurious tax, but those people got a lot quieter once Tim Cook started bribing Trump with shiny plaques.
One other issue with antitrust action against Apple is that, strictly speaking, Apple did nothing (legally) wrong. The mistake we made was in the 1970s when we decided to grant the protections of creative expression to computer code[1]. Apple's argument - which, so far, courts have been willing to accept without issue - is that they are allowed to charge whatever they want for their work. It is very difficult (though not impossible) to argue that Apple deciding to bill developers for the OS instead of users is anticompetitive - in fact, Epic's lawsuit failed specifically on those grounds.
Anyway, you should probably bug your politicians to sponsor OAMA, or whatever new bill is being introduced to replace OAMA. The solution to Apple has to be legislated, not litigated.
Aside from that, the rest of Big Tech is significantly more vulnerable to antitrust than Apple is. Breaking up Facebook would actually be way more consequential than you think. Basically all of Facebook's apps were things bought specifically to destroy competition. They control the political narrative in every country in ways most newsmedia would only dream of[2]. There's a book you ought to read - Careless People - written by an ex-Facebook exec that Mark Zuckerberg is currently trying to sue into the ground.
[0] "Super apps" and third-party Apple Watch pairing
[1] To be clear, I do NOT believe code should be considered expression and I have far less qualms about AI slop code than I do AI slop art.
[2] This is also why Elon Musk bought Twitter - although, in that case, he was a lot less successful than Zuck was.
[3] To be clear, if any DOJ attempted to sue Apple over the 30% today, it'd probably fail at the pleading stage.
Voting with your wallet is not a thing when what you want does not exist. You get to choose from what's on the market. The only way to vote for anything else is to make it yourself.
Finding a laptop with even a keyboard layout I like is difficult. Finding one with both a keyboard and a display I like is seemingly impossible. Then add on performance desires... there will be no such thing. I want portable workstation but with high DPI and no numpad and those don't exist in the PC world.
Now, say I buy a MacBook Pro, and compromise on just a few things I didn't like, but that don't critically impact usability. I mean things like full-size function keys, or only 3 Thunderbolt ports (only one on the right!), small stuff. I don't feel especially limited by speed or memory capacity nowadays (although memory bandwidth is still about an order of magnitude off for local LLMs).
I'm still upset that it won't play games, but at least a capture card lets me pass through my Windows machine, and I heard Nvidia support in SteamOS might happen in the next year or two. Maybe Asahi might also grow to support my hardware before it expires (unlikely but possible)
All of you saying "My wallet is not big enough" are suffering from the individualization that the internet created.
Our wallets, collectively, are what gives them the money. What needs to be taught to people is the benefits of sacrifice. This is an easy thing to teach Christians.
You need to do more than just boycott, you need to be evangelical. You need to show people the sacrifice is not only easy, but beneficial. The bigger sacrifices will come from those working in tech and we need to support them with GoFundMe's when they lose their jobs.
While I agree you shouldn’t pay for a company that treats you poorly, but it’s not necessarily true that if you stopped paying or buying their stuff they will improve, remember Nokia? They were the gold standard when it comes to phones, I personally knew people back in the day believed Nokia is unbeatable and noway the devices will ever get bad, I personally too was planning to get the ultimate one the N900 (which also supports other OSes) then we all witnessed the fall of the company, and how everyone was complaining and ranting (or building open source OSes) in an attempt for them to ditch the ancient symbian OS or get in time with “apps” when android and iOS started, sales plummeting, people are switching to other competitors, and that didn’t change Nokia in the slightest, then they failed and now can only survive on B2B cellular modems and equipment industry.
I think the best strategy is having competitors, at least 4 worthy ones, it’s only when the consumers have an upper hand.
I am tired of voting with my wallet, I would like to vote with my actual votes, thank you very much.
When you make the mistake of voting with your wallet, you play a game you are bound to lose. There are people with billions of dollars that can outvote basically anyone with an opinion about this. And most people buying consumer products are not treating it like a vote, they are treating it like a purchase of a thing they need, and the monopolistic autocrat of trade that is Apple happens to be very good at producing those things. The base of their power are people who don't care, or people who cannot afford to care (i.e. they need the hardware no matter how bad Tim Apple pisses them off).
The advantage of voting with your actual votes is that there is no malapportionment: one vote is one vote. You don't get more votes by being richer. Your vote is not conditional upon buying a product.
And to be clear, I'm writing this on my Framework laptop which I deliberately bought because I like the concept and I didn't want to deal with Apple's nonsense. I grinned and bore several years of Intel mediocrity, broken sleep, a fingerprint reader that only works half the time, and an increasingly unreliable[1] trackpad until I could buy a new motherboard[0] that gave this thing reasonable amounts of battery life. I have voted with my wallet, I just don't think it's actually good for any political change.
In contrast, the EU managed to get Apple to piss its pants multiple times, and has done way more for rolling back Apple's monopoly than a handful of turncoats ever could.
Does it look silly that Theo is using Apple while complaining about Apple? Yes.
Would Theo chucking all that Apple tech out the bin to be politically consistent do anything? No.
also
> In it, Theo spends an hour ranting about how terrible the experience of developing apps for the iPhone/iPad is, how Apple takes 30% of all app store and in app purchases, how awful Xcode is as a development environment and how even as a developer you have to get Apple's approval to run your own app on your own device. And how you need a second device (MacBook) to build an app for your target device (iPad) because Apple won't allow you to build the app straight on the iPad itself. And a lot more.
The funny thing is, basically all of these have been Apple edicts from day 1. Xcode was never good. But what I find really galling about all this is that Apple actually does have a way to build apps on iPad... if you're willing to totally marry yourself to Swift and SwiftUI. When Apple announced real app development on Swift Playgrounds, I assumed more improvements and capabilities would follow, but Swift Playgrounds is such a low-tier priority for Apple they can barely even keep it up to date with the iOS SDK - it wasn't until months after iPadOS 26 where you could actually build apps to work on Liquid Glass. Then again, that's symbolic of basically everything Apple does with the iPad: it's an aspirational computer, something that exists mainly for Apple to dream of a world where all work can fit inside nice containerized and locked-down workflows and nobody ever needs to go off the golden path.
[0] Intel Core Ultra Series 3 specifically, as a friend of mine informed me it could idle better than the AMD one, even though the AMD had better peak perf.
[1] The diving board mechanism on my Framework 13 has worn to the point where the activation point does NOT coincide with the click anymore, and it's also developed a significant keybounce problem. I have to click multiple times and really reef on the trackpad to get it to register. I've also damaged the bottom cover... so I'm really just waiting for the battery to cack out before I just buy a 13 Pro bottom upgrade kit and replace all of it.
This argument is tired when at the end of the day, demand for some products is more or less inelastic and the majority of consumers consume them because all the alternatives are equally enshittified.
I don't think it's a tired argument. It's the everyman trying to regain their time while being constantly reigned in harder by tech giants. You sacrifice convenience and privacy, so you kind of always feel somewhat like an asshole buying this stuff. Mostly because you have to. Many people don't move off of things because of the inherent time sacrifice and potential for future time sinks from things not working correctly and the knowledge required to troubleshoot it. If you make it easy people will switch, articles like this are the beginning of the right direction.
For example I moved off cloud services for my media in favour of fixing up a $25 BDP-CX960 400-disc bluray player with a few bucks in parts and a few weekends. When someone complains to me about modern tech, I can't in earnest recommend it though because its not easy. But I can write about it or tell them about it to expose them to the mindset more. Articles like this help IMO.
People have been voting with their wallets since forever, and look where it got us.
The reality is that asking people to vote with their wallets does not work. But this specific case is even worse, because it's not possible to "vote with your wallet" to begin with.
The specific things the blog post notes are "how terrible the experience of developing apps for the iPhone/iPad is, how Apple takes 30% of all app store and in-app purchases, how awful Xcode is as a development environment"
So let's say you want to build a mobile app that actually reaches people. There's a duopoly, so you have to support Android and iOS. What are your options for "voting with your wallet" then? There's nothing you can buy that lets you reach iOS with your app without using Apple's ecosystem.
"Voting with your wallet" is what people tell you to do if they don't want you to do the things that actually work, which, in this case, is regulation. We have two companies controlling both viable mobile platforms. There is nowhere else to go for 99.9% of people. You can have a billion dollars, and you still can't "vote with your wallet." You're still going to own either an iPhone or an Android phone, and support both if you want to publish an app.
The obvious answer is that the two companies that control these platforms need to be regulated. Apple can play dumb if it's only Europe, but even so, the cracks are starting to show (e.g. Apple's recent copy/paste interoperability announcement). If the US joined in, the dam would break.
> You're still going to own either an iPhone or an Android phone
Don’t forget that option C) “none of the above”, is no longer viable since we’ve reorganized the world around the smartphone. The analog alternatives for basic, vital life transactions are dwindling or eliminated in many circumstances.
You're right that to deploy an app to Apple's app store you have to pay them. The $100/yr access ransom is unavoidable if you want to have the option of making money there. But I've gone to great lengths to avoid the rest of the stuff that genuinely sucks about building for Apple: I use Flutter to avoid most of the iOS nonsense. I use Android Studio on Linux for the vast majority of my development. I target Android/web/iOS and test mainly on the first two. I use codemagic.io to avoid having to have a mac to run ios builds.
I did have to borrow a mac and use xcode to set up my project, I wish that weren't the case.
I'd love to tell iOS users to just use the web version, but in-app purchases on web are a real headache compared to mobile and I haven't set up Stripe or equivalent. And Apple has crippled the web experience on iOS anyway with Safari.
Does any of my approach "vote with my wallet"? No. It's just for me, to avoid the horrible experience of Apple to the extent possible while also reaching users that choose to use iOS.
“Regulating” in the current environment just means mandated coziness with intelligence and law enforcement: scanning your files (Chat Control 1.0), backdoors (Chat Control 2.0), suppression of ideas through mandatory moderation, age verification.
What we need is antitrust enforcement, breaking of digital locks, and adversarial interoperability. This can be accomplished through certain forms of regulation, but you need to be specific or you’re going to get the bad kind of regulation.
It's pretty obvious from context and from the specific example what I'm talking about.
Didn’t mean to criticize, I see the word “regulation” thrown around often here without any clarification, and sometimes the people using it don’t have our best interests in mind.
Hiring someone to make an alternative. If your country makes labor difficult to buy then that's on your country, not Apple.
The apps you actually need to participate in society (digital IDs, banking apps, etc.) will never run on your homegrown OS. Having a billion dollars changes nothing about the fact that you need either iOS or a Google-blessed Android version.
Then perhaps we should have regulations to ensure that social participation is not locked behind these gatekeepers.
In particular, government and financial services should not require smartphones. Especially in an era when devices often require an “account” with the manufacturer that can be suspended or cancelled.
Exactly.
Regulation is a part of it.
But most of tehse companies make money off of the services. So if you want tos end Apple a message, cancel all your services...Music, iCloud, etc.
Android phones are easy to use without a google account.
> easy to use without a google account
I'm doing that and I had to get a second phone with a Google account just for banking and government apps. Not exactly easy I would say.
You forgot Harmony OS from Huawei used by 50 million people, oh wait, no you can't vote on anything
That one is aligned with another totalitarian-lite country, not great.
Harmony OS is de-facto blacklisted by the American junta to prevent competition for their propaganda.
Huawei can't sell fully functional phones anywhere outside of China, including in Europe. You need Google Mobile Services and the Google Play Store to be able to install stuff like your banking app, and the US government is preventing Huawei from shipping phones with it. China has its own app ecosystem, so they're fine locally but screwed everywhere else.
My point precisely
Voting with your wallet doesn't work usually, because your wallet isn't big enough.
Vote with your vote! Our system is dysfunctional in the united states, but if you look at the political unity behind something like blocking datacenter construction and how much of a headache it's causing for big tech, it's clear we still can have an effect. Most of the problem with big tech are solvable through existing anti-trust institutions IF we actually empower them. Things got bad because we stopped enforcing the rules; the rules used to work.
Voting with your wallet is like voting with your vote. It both works, but to an extent that will never be noticeable by you. You vote more often with your money than with your vote though. Don't buy into the nirvana fallacy nor be fatalistic. Be a responsible consumer and inform others on why they should vote wisely too.
Voting with your wallet lets you send dozens of fine-grained messages a day. You support companies you want to support, and don't support those you don't want. Others will choose differently and that's fine for them. The mere existence of businesses you dislike is not a sign that this process has failed, you don't have the right to stop others from getting what they want to pay for.
Voting in federal elections in the US lets you send a message of less then one bit per year. It's a horribly ineffective method.
Apple exists because plenty of people vote for it with their wallets. I don't. But I don't mind that it exists.
I vote against Google when I can. I block ads and use Duck Duck Go as my default search engine. But the results are so poor compared to Google that I switch to use Google often. That's a sign to me that their product is worth my occasional, small "vote", and I'm okay with that.
> Voting with your wallet doesn't work usually, because your wallet isn't big enough.
> Vote with your vote!
My wallet is bigger than average. My vote is not.
Of course in neither case are they big enough to make much of a difference by themselves.
But what about relative power?
US GDP / #votes in last presidential election = 208608 USD
You must indeed have a big wallet if you perceive it to be more powerful than your vote. Only a small percentage of people spend that much in a year.
People with big enough wallets have a bigger vote than everyone else
>Voting with your wallet doesn't work usually, because your wallet isn't big enough.
Our collective wallets are HUGE. You need to do more than just boycott, yoiu need to spread the word.
> Our collective wallets are HUGE.
"Collective" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Are the top 1% in that collective? The top 10%? I don't think so - with that in mind, do you still think our wallet is huge enough for the job?
> You need to do more than just boycott, you need to spread the word.
Spreading the word is now done with a huge wallet and access to politicians - whose word is being spread can tell you who's got these. Are there other ways? Yes - still peaceful but complex, laborious and thankless - boycott isn't integral to any of them though.
There is a puzzle piece missing from this article and others like it, which I think is crucial but often overlooked.
It's not enough to "vote with your wallet", you also need to make it very public and very clear "why" you're casting that vote at all.
Otherwise execs are typically more than happy to infer a completely wrong "why", and are very happy to not understand the real reasons, because a) either the real reasons are not actually necessarily that obvious in the first place, and b) even when they are, unless they are made too obvious and public to ignore, then people will happily fail to understand the things that they stand to benefit from not understanding to begin with (Upton Sinclair's law). All while collecting fat paychecks and bonuses.
[dead]
I haven't purchased an Apple product for myself since the classic iPod over 20 years ago, yet nothing has changed.
Turns out, you need to also convince a whole lot of people to vote with you to have an impact. And then you have the whole group of people who would rather put up with Apple's annoyances than switch to something unfamiliar and annoying in its own ways.
Voting with your wallet is only step 1.
If you are not buying Apple products, you are saving yourself their suckiness. Win! And other people can make their own choices.
To a windshield in motion, the impact of a fly is meaningless.
The standard problem with "just voting" to solve problems is that you can only vote for the options you're offered. If all the options on the market suck, voting for the lesser of the available evils will not address the fundamental source of your dissatisfaction, and may help entrench it. If you vote "with dollars" there's the additional problem that dollars are not uniformly distributed, and a few wealthy "voters" can and will disenfranchise everyone else.
Abstaining from buying from companies you disagree with can help, but it is only one part of the broader solution. When there aren't alternatives yet "on the market" you may be forced to hold your nose for a while and buy from the vendors you hate while advocating for change and working toward their replacement. You don't have to solve every problem in your world at once so long as you're building in the right direction.
I'm guessing the number of non-developer Apple users is at least an order of magnitude larger than the developer users. So, no, I don't think developers can vote with their wallet to fix this crappy ecosystem. We'd be better off to just stop developing apps for the ecosystem in general - but that requires developers/companies to ignore the honeypot that is the Apple user base. Which will probably never happen.
So yeah, it's a crappy situation, that is obviously engineered in Apple's favor.
especially since apple customers are more likely to shell out $$$ to buy the developer's wares.
The EU shows that regular voting is also an option.
The top 5 smartphone brands are:
1. Samsung (KR)
2. Apple (US)
3. Xiaomi (CN)
4. Oppo (CN)
5. Vivo (CN)
Yeah, it worked so well for EU at ensuring that they can't compete against the US and Asia. The rest of the world should be very grateful to EU voters.
The EU isn't producing a domestic alternative to iOS or Google Android anytime soon. And no amount of "regular voting" is going to change that.
They are WEF compliant and allow the AI IP theft.
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Voting with your wallet can work, but consolidation increasingly makes voting with your wallet a double or triple whammy.
1) alternatives may be more expensive by dollars
2) alternatives may be more expensive by time
3) time/money lost to altered consumption has proportional opportunity cost
Market consolidation reduces the cost of using “bad” services and increases the cost of using “good” services over time.
The video referenced in the article contains nothing new; those things have existed for nearly two decades. People simply create similar videos to boost engagement and it seems they're quite successful at it.
It's actually quite the opposite. It became easier to create apps for Apple platforms, Apple also reduced the commission to 15% for small businesses.
I had a weird feeling back in late 2007 when iPod touch launched and I had to run the jailbreak tool written by someone astronomically above my paygrade to get custom apps running on it. It was first real-computer-class-computer I had that had no official terminal access or total freedom to run anything I want - a lot of devs started fighting "algorithm" issues as soon as App Store opened. I was much younger but I still thought, this is going to replace all PDAs despite having what we know all knows it's called software freedom, and needs to be antitrusted ASAP, or we'll lose that thing. I was not smart back then and still isn't, probably like first few thousand millionth person to realize that in the world.
Fast forward 20 years(!?!?!??!???), we did lose software freedom. Did the world really have to wait 20 years?
Voting with your wallet only works when there is a enough meaningful alternatives and switching between them isn't prohibitively costly. You can vote with your wallet for which bottle of water you are going to drink, but you can't do that if the same company sells you the same bottle under different brand names. You can't vote with your wallet also when every other offering has significant downsides (which is less common that people think on software, but it's on other products).
What we need is to vote for standards. A floor that no product must fall below. Markets are useful when competition can actually discipline companies. When market forces aren't enough to make competitive products, other forces must pick up the slack.
Here’s a more positive take on it: alternatives need customers and/or patrons. Becoming an early adopter for some software or service or artist that you like is beneficial for both you and for them.
The trouble is finding them. Writing or sharing product reviews, etc. will help get the word out.
You shouldn’t expect to change the world this way. If they become generally popular, it will mostly be due to other people becoming customers, and that’s not up to you. Also, there are reasons why the leading products are popular. Such as, some people are probably happy with them! But at least you did your bit.
The argument about Apple not even allowing devs to run their own app without periodically resigning the app every 7 days ( without paying 99$ to Apple) is so true.
So far AI has democratised SaaS based products. I’ve vibe coded many niche web apps that is very specific for my use case rather than paying for a generic service. However, I cannot do that with iOS. I practically cannot install and keep on using an app that I created without any interruption on the phone that I paid more than 1k$ to buy.
"Voting with your wallet" does absolutely nothing. This is a fallacy and a falsehood repeated by communities online.
People are saying to "vote with your wallet" regarding Sony's poisonous murder of physical games media. I haven't ever owned a Playstation and have "voted with my wallet" for 30+ years. Doesn't stop anything.
If you don't participate, someone else will, or a large investor or some entity will fill the void.
For things like these, change needs to happen a layer above the individual. This article's advice is just false and wrong.
Consumer dollars are worth nothing in tech. All of the money is B2B. B2C businesses exist to support, bootstrap, or grow the value (via ads) of B2B businesses.
Vote with your wallet works when you’re talking about local businesses. It doesn’t work when the only factor that determines where the money goes is the executives signing the contracts.
You can also vote with where you apply to work for. Employees in these companies are your fellow developers, unless they are drowned deep enough in their role in which case they are part of the problem.
I vote with my wallet exactly by buying apple products over the competition. The alternatives just suck. Framework is looking promising though. But I’ve also slowed down my apple purchases. My M1 Max mbp still works great, I have no need to upgrade. My iPhone 14 still does everything I need. Not many companies supports their hardware this long.
What do you do when "voting with your wallet" makes you unhappy?
I'm not here to bash Linux, Android, Apple, or Windows. I like windows (10 at least) better than OSX or any distro for desktop use. I like iPhone better than Android.
Voting with my wallet just means I'm not as happy as what I currently have chosen.
What about the extreme reliance and funding of advertising where even using a free product makes significant cash flow for a company?
It's not good enough now to vote with your wallet, you need to vote with your time and wallet.
I've been incubating a heresy for years: the free software movement was actually counterproductive. It helped kill user-focused autonomous privacy-respecting personal computing.
It created a tech environment where there is no money in good (as in good intent, socially responsible, user-focused) tech. Everyone expects good software (in the social/moral sense of good) to be free.
So we get an environment where the good people have no economic forcing function and no resources, and the exploiters have a business model.
We should not be surprised at what happened next.
You get what you incentivize. Always. We got what we incentivized.
You could package and sell a FOSS (and free/open hardware even) device tomorrow. The license doesn’t forbid it. Some have even built businesses on this!
It’s also possible to run service businesses that produce FOSS, like Bitwarden for example.
“Good” businesses get outcompeted on price by “bad” businesses, not by FOSS. Want a powerful workstation that is 100% open POWER architecture? Only $10k from Raptor Computing. Willing to go a little lower spec and use x86? Get one from Purism or System76. Reasonable, but still more expensive than mainstream alternatives, and user support on the software side is still mostly driven by the community.
Most FOSS is still finicky and geared towards either devs or “power user” amateurs who wouldn’t be paying for a license or subscription anyway. It’s getting better in some areas, but it’s generally not there yet.
Sorey man, my wallet aint beating 12 yearolds and trillionaires and multitrillion dollar companies.
We need regulators free of monied interests.
You can vote with your vote too.
There's a reason Tim Apple gave Trump a golden trophy.
I think that was an example of voting with the wallet. Tim Apple's wallet just happens to have more votes in it than Joe Dirt's.
It's interesting that so much of the 'Anti-Big-Tech' movement over the last decade focused on tangential things like potentially forcing Google to sell Chrome or breaking up Facebook while Apple had this chokehold on the actual financial transactions in their ecosystem.
App store fees is a much more obvious example of something subject to regulatory scrutiny vs what much of what Biden's FTC under Lina Khan was working on.
So yeah there is a weird pass this company gets
As with many questions of what people seem to be focused on, I think this has a lot more to do with media coverage dynamics than the facts on the ground. A major case against App Store fees has been ongoing since 2020, you just don’t hear as much about it because it’s less controversial.
I distinctly remember the transition from "Tech used to be good" to "Tech is actively malicious" being when Epic Games decided to pull a Stallman-tier stunt against Apple over something that had become the industry standard. In fact, it was such a direct shot against Apple's monopolistic control that when the Biden FTC did attack Apple, it was over a handful of side issues[0] that Epic hadn't addressed and were thus still open to pursue[3].
There is still a subset of people who still think Apple's 30% is a religious tithe to keep the App Barbarians out rather than an usurious tax, but those people got a lot quieter once Tim Cook started bribing Trump with shiny plaques.
One other issue with antitrust action against Apple is that, strictly speaking, Apple did nothing (legally) wrong. The mistake we made was in the 1970s when we decided to grant the protections of creative expression to computer code[1]. Apple's argument - which, so far, courts have been willing to accept without issue - is that they are allowed to charge whatever they want for their work. It is very difficult (though not impossible) to argue that Apple deciding to bill developers for the OS instead of users is anticompetitive - in fact, Epic's lawsuit failed specifically on those grounds.
Anyway, you should probably bug your politicians to sponsor OAMA, or whatever new bill is being introduced to replace OAMA. The solution to Apple has to be legislated, not litigated.
Aside from that, the rest of Big Tech is significantly more vulnerable to antitrust than Apple is. Breaking up Facebook would actually be way more consequential than you think. Basically all of Facebook's apps were things bought specifically to destroy competition. They control the political narrative in every country in ways most newsmedia would only dream of[2]. There's a book you ought to read - Careless People - written by an ex-Facebook exec that Mark Zuckerberg is currently trying to sue into the ground.
[0] "Super apps" and third-party Apple Watch pairing
[1] To be clear, I do NOT believe code should be considered expression and I have far less qualms about AI slop code than I do AI slop art.
[2] This is also why Elon Musk bought Twitter - although, in that case, he was a lot less successful than Zuck was.
[3] To be clear, if any DOJ attempted to sue Apple over the 30% today, it'd probably fail at the pleading stage.
Voting with your wallet is not a thing when what you want does not exist. You get to choose from what's on the market. The only way to vote for anything else is to make it yourself.
Nothing is something that exists. Cancel Apple services, use a linux laptop, they exist.
Finding a laptop with even a keyboard layout I like is difficult. Finding one with both a keyboard and a display I like is seemingly impossible. Then add on performance desires... there will be no such thing. I want portable workstation but with high DPI and no numpad and those don't exist in the PC world.
Now, say I buy a MacBook Pro, and compromise on just a few things I didn't like, but that don't critically impact usability. I mean things like full-size function keys, or only 3 Thunderbolt ports (only one on the right!), small stuff. I don't feel especially limited by speed or memory capacity nowadays (although memory bandwidth is still about an order of magnitude off for local LLMs).
I'm still upset that it won't play games, but at least a capture card lets me pass through my Windows machine, and I heard Nvidia support in SteamOS might happen in the next year or two. Maybe Asahi might also grow to support my hardware before it expires (unlikely but possible)
What alternatives are there to Apple hardware that people like this Theo person would use?
Pixel and Samsung phones now exceed Apple quality (especially with GrapheneOS)
What do you mean by quality? Are you talking about control?
Not our problem to solve.
Since we now have to vote with things other than our actual votes, apparently, here's some more things you can vote with:
3D printers
Torrent clients
Unlicensed radios
DJI drones
Custom firmware
(FOSS in general)
HN hug of death?
Yes, more of this please!
(Seems like the site was hugged to death HN)
All of you saying "My wallet is not big enough" are suffering from the individualization that the internet created.
Our wallets, collectively, are what gives them the money. What needs to be taught to people is the benefits of sacrifice. This is an easy thing to teach Christians.
You need to do more than just boycott, you need to be evangelical. You need to show people the sacrifice is not only easy, but beneficial. The bigger sacrifices will come from those working in tech and we need to support them with GoFundMe's when they lose their jobs.
While I agree you shouldn’t pay for a company that treats you poorly, but it’s not necessarily true that if you stopped paying or buying their stuff they will improve, remember Nokia? They were the gold standard when it comes to phones, I personally knew people back in the day believed Nokia is unbeatable and noway the devices will ever get bad, I personally too was planning to get the ultimate one the N900 (which also supports other OSes) then we all witnessed the fall of the company, and how everyone was complaining and ranting (or building open source OSes) in an attempt for them to ditch the ancient symbian OS or get in time with “apps” when android and iOS started, sales plummeting, people are switching to other competitors, and that didn’t change Nokia in the slightest, then they failed and now can only survive on B2B cellular modems and equipment industry.
I think the best strategy is having competitors, at least 4 worthy ones, it’s only when the consumers have an upper hand.
I am tired of voting with my wallet, I would like to vote with my actual votes, thank you very much.
When you make the mistake of voting with your wallet, you play a game you are bound to lose. There are people with billions of dollars that can outvote basically anyone with an opinion about this. And most people buying consumer products are not treating it like a vote, they are treating it like a purchase of a thing they need, and the monopolistic autocrat of trade that is Apple happens to be very good at producing those things. The base of their power are people who don't care, or people who cannot afford to care (i.e. they need the hardware no matter how bad Tim Apple pisses them off).
The advantage of voting with your actual votes is that there is no malapportionment: one vote is one vote. You don't get more votes by being richer. Your vote is not conditional upon buying a product.
And to be clear, I'm writing this on my Framework laptop which I deliberately bought because I like the concept and I didn't want to deal with Apple's nonsense. I grinned and bore several years of Intel mediocrity, broken sleep, a fingerprint reader that only works half the time, and an increasingly unreliable[1] trackpad until I could buy a new motherboard[0] that gave this thing reasonable amounts of battery life. I have voted with my wallet, I just don't think it's actually good for any political change.
In contrast, the EU managed to get Apple to piss its pants multiple times, and has done way more for rolling back Apple's monopoly than a handful of turncoats ever could.
Does it look silly that Theo is using Apple while complaining about Apple? Yes.
Would Theo chucking all that Apple tech out the bin to be politically consistent do anything? No.
also
> In it, Theo spends an hour ranting about how terrible the experience of developing apps for the iPhone/iPad is, how Apple takes 30% of all app store and in app purchases, how awful Xcode is as a development environment and how even as a developer you have to get Apple's approval to run your own app on your own device. And how you need a second device (MacBook) to build an app for your target device (iPad) because Apple won't allow you to build the app straight on the iPad itself. And a lot more.
The funny thing is, basically all of these have been Apple edicts from day 1. Xcode was never good. But what I find really galling about all this is that Apple actually does have a way to build apps on iPad... if you're willing to totally marry yourself to Swift and SwiftUI. When Apple announced real app development on Swift Playgrounds, I assumed more improvements and capabilities would follow, but Swift Playgrounds is such a low-tier priority for Apple they can barely even keep it up to date with the iOS SDK - it wasn't until months after iPadOS 26 where you could actually build apps to work on Liquid Glass. Then again, that's symbolic of basically everything Apple does with the iPad: it's an aspirational computer, something that exists mainly for Apple to dream of a world where all work can fit inside nice containerized and locked-down workflows and nobody ever needs to go off the golden path.
[0] Intel Core Ultra Series 3 specifically, as a friend of mine informed me it could idle better than the AMD one, even though the AMD had better peak perf.
[1] The diving board mechanism on my Framework 13 has worn to the point where the activation point does NOT coincide with the click anymore, and it's also developed a significant keybounce problem. I have to click multiple times and really reef on the trackpad to get it to register. I've also damaged the bottom cover... so I'm really just waiting for the battery to cack out before I just buy a 13 Pro bottom upgrade kit and replace all of it.
This argument is tired when at the end of the day, demand for some products is more or less inelastic and the majority of consumers consume them because all the alternatives are equally enshittified.
I don't think it's a tired argument. It's the everyman trying to regain their time while being constantly reigned in harder by tech giants. You sacrifice convenience and privacy, so you kind of always feel somewhat like an asshole buying this stuff. Mostly because you have to. Many people don't move off of things because of the inherent time sacrifice and potential for future time sinks from things not working correctly and the knowledge required to troubleshoot it. If you make it easy people will switch, articles like this are the beginning of the right direction.
For example I moved off cloud services for my media in favour of fixing up a $25 BDP-CX960 400-disc bluray player with a few bucks in parts and a few weekends. When someone complains to me about modern tech, I can't in earnest recommend it though because its not easy. But I can write about it or tell them about it to expose them to the mindset more. Articles like this help IMO.
And there are few alternatives because of a lack of trust law enforcement. Which of course is because of government/regulatory capture.