6/230 seems closer to 3%. And while the number is relatively low, it seems to be a niche where they might lose customers to other platforms. It must have been unprofitable/very expensive to maintain that they killed it.
OTOH, it's Apple, so users would rather buy a bigger iPhone and complain than switching brands (see other comments here), in which case Apple loses nothing.
There's a lot of truth to this: Execs want their own use case covered. In addition, everyone wants to be better than the competition at basic use cases, because that's what people compare first - even though we all know they are not a good reflection of reality.
I'm currently working on exactly a project like this.
Google also has millions of lines of code in several languages written over decades. Probably access to more non-public (quality) code than most other companies in the world.
Most devs choosing Macbooks has a lot to do with culture. It's boutique, cool, and all the other successful people have it. Yes, officially it's always for technical reasons, but no one would ever admit to get something just because it's shiny.
A large majority of windows devs choose Apple hardware has to major challenges for MS.
If devs just want shiny flashy then MS has failed at providing that directly or through their partners. If devs are able to make credible technical reasons, year after year, that sustain IT & budgetary scrutiny, that also is a failure from MS.
Personally “being able to run docker without this bs” was credible for many years, tech that now is a de facto expectation for most .NET dev jobs and well-integrated-ish into windows and WSL.
We chose Azure for our startup because of data location, and it was cheaper than the other two as well. Data center locations may not matter much in the US (because everyone has this covered well), but it does in other places of the world.
Exactly. The same for Windows Phone. Both was amazing software on great hardware. They just never gained enough traction because MS was a bit late to the party and wasn't willing to push through (e.g. by compensating the late start and poor market position with heavy marketing investments and partnerships), so they eventually trashed those projects.
It's such a shame that the shitty MS products survive the ages while the great ones never gain real traction. I feel a bit sorry for the people who built such amazing stuff just to see it being cancelled and then having to work on the unsolicited background execution of the SharePoint 365 rev4.7 update manager (I made this up, but it probably exists).
Also, in my experience the Windows Phone hardware was dodgy. The first one I bought was a Dell and failed under warranty…and the replacement failed out of warranty. Then after an LG Android, I bought one of the last Lumia’s. The camera failed just out of warranty. Then the whole thing failed while I was traveling.
Yes, the death of Windows phone was a tragedy for the mobile phone market; it had a fresh take on things, and could have stirred up healthy competition with the duopoly of iPhones and Android phones.
I never could understand why MS would not put heavy muscle behind it. Maybe they deep down knew hardware execution was not their strong suit. People think the software was the problem, but I think if MS really believed in the product, the software side was eminently solvable.
At the time when they killed Windows Phone they had a $7 billion write off and that was huge. A decade or so later they would buy Activision for $69 billion without blinking. I would happy swap those in an instant.
It felt like once they dropped mobile, their whole direction become misguided. Also UWP made sense when there was also a mobile/tablet side to it, could even deploy those apps to the Xbox and it kind of worked. But then they kicked out that supporting support and suddenly they got working on trashing what good Windows still had.
I actually hate that apps are allowed to blank out content on screenshots, and this can't be disabled. There are apps completely mis-using it, e.g. mobile payment apps which hardly show any sensitive data in most cases, but now I can't share e.g. infos on screen with someone else easily.
It's a classic case of someone discovering a feature and thinking "hell yeah, so much security" without understanding or caring about UX impications.
I've yet to see someone saying "oh, I'm so glad my screenshot was blacked-out because I didn't realize I was in a banking app". It feels patronizing.
> I've yet to see someone saying "oh, I'm so glad my screenshot was blacked-out because I didn't realize I was in a banking app". It feels patronizing.
Yes, this. Payment apps, government apps, IM communications.
The other day I almost rooted my phone in anger trying to get around this, before pausing and realizing that this would only cause even more problems with those apps, thanks to remote attestation "features".
My favorite recent case, I almost locked myself out of mobile government services when changing phones recently[0], and it would've made for a stellar bug report showing when "fail safe" design can easily become "fail deadly"[1], with UI view of access and invalidation history clearly showing the timeline of a problem... if only I could take a screenshot of it. But I can't, because "much sekhurity".
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[0] - Well, it's not really that big of a deal. With government services, there's always a way back. Might involve walking to a local civil affairs office or, worst case, a police station or a notary, but there is a way back. Big cloud services, on the other hand...
[1] - Invalidating a certificate prior to issuing a new one sounds like a good security idea, but in the real world fails critically if the two operations aren't an atomic group. In my case, issuing a new certificate failed, and I ended up walking around for half a day with old one invalidated and not even knowing it.
On a similar note in terms of frustration, my bank ended up getting me to memorize my randomly-generated passwords twice because it blocked pasting. I guess it's to discourage writing them down in plaintext files, but I bet it just makes most people choose meaningful (and therefore weak and guessable) passwords.
I once ran into a signup/login flow that allowed 36 characters in password when signing up but when logging in, the password field was limited to 20 characters.
I think I must have changed my password several times thinking I just copied it wrong or it had special characters that weren't allowed, but nope, the truth was somehow stupider than that.
Yeah, few moments ago it hit me there could be a market for a phone case with in-built camera(s) that photograph your screen at a shallow angle on demand, and transform that into a screenshot automatically.
However, my idea happens to hit a very new limitation: for some reason, "privacy filters" are suddenly a thing. New phones have them built-in as some new magic display function, and for everyone else, there's this mad marketing push to get people to buy and use privacy foils in place of glass/foil screen protectors.
IDK what's up with those. Since when "shoulder surfing" with smartphones is a real problem, and why do marketers and product designers bet there's so much latent demand for it?
Recently handled someone's phone who had it. Neat technology. But the use case for it doesn't make sense, for the reason you specified.
The only thing I could think of is if you want to browse TikTok or Instagram in public and don't want people seeing the weird shit that's on your algorithm, but even then, that's kinda weird.
That's exactly my idea. My phone is a lost cause, not really "mine" anymore. The good thing is that I stopped caring about the device. I take what's cheap and well supported (Samsung "A" series is the right kind of boring to me), no more expensive flagships.
> before pausing and realizing that this would only cause even more problems with those apps,
In my view that's a feature, not a bug. I refuse to use services that break under "reasonable" conditions (non-chrome, ublock, no widevine, rooted, etc, etc).
I feel that too, but the practical reality is, many services happily exploit the leverage they have over me - I need them more than they need me.
Banks are the canonical example - changing one is a huge hurdle, with consequences that can drag on for years. One by one, they're all ditching their websites (if they had one in the first place) in favor of apps. Even those with full-featured websites increasingly force you to use their app as the second factor to log in, confirm transactions, even confirm viewing some data. Some offer physical tokens, most don't advertise that, and it's only a matter of time before they convince regulators that Attested Phones are Safer and Everyone Has One, and that option will disappear. And because they want their app to be the second factor, they can argue it needs to be secure, creating demand for remote attestation, and boom - there goes your option to work around any other bullshit limitation they throw at you.
The day has only 24 hours, I don't want to spend them clearing bushes by walking off the beaten path wrt. every single important service - payment services, government services, IM services, ${whatever bullshit SaaS app I need right now because you're using it for the thing you just shared with me, and I need to view that}, etc. So I submit. So does everyone.
It's why I put blame on platforms here. Features protecting the device from the user should not be built in the first place - they always start justified by some legitimate security reason, and always end up broadly abused to serve business reasons.
Banks are the stereotypical example, but they are really not that hard to change, especially now that many decently reputable ones are entirely online. I've changed my bank in an afternoon.
Software that intentionally subverts the intent of the user is malware. We now live in a world where most financial institutions literally ship malware as their primary or only interference to access their systems.
I understand the sentiment, but think about the non-technical user. Every time I use my mothers or any elderlies phone there are a lot of screenshots in the gallery, because they accidentally click the combo. How many people get scammed using screen sharing? It isn't that unreasonable to prevent this vector just to be more safe, especially if the bank might be partially at fault if a scam happens.
People also take pictures of their government IDs (passports, drivers license, etc) and utility bills.
Should the phone identify those things and automatically blur out all of the sensitive information in those photos too?
I’d prefer if my phone did neither that nor told the apps that a screenshot was being taken nor allowing the apps to hide anything that was on screen when a screenshot is taken.
It’s my phone, I want to decide what I take photos and screenshots of.
> especially if the bank might be partially at fault if a scam happens
That's the crux.
Yes, it is unreasonable, because scams have proven to be just as effective at getting people to just read the details out over the phone line, and bank these days are not showing much sensitive information in the open anyways (my recent annoyance - someone thought it's a good idea to never show the full account number on screen, showing just first and last few digits, and an option to copy to clipboard...).
Meanwhile, those very apps tend to be ones people would most often want to screenshot for legitimate reasons - e.g. to communicate or make a record of specific transactions, accounts, their states, metadata, etc. None of which is copyable text in the app, and most of it isn't even properly exportable, so it's not like there's any other way.
Add a system setting to ON/OFF this feature. Add a recommendation to set this as ON in the "Security Checkup" section which all modern systems have as of lately, that pops-up a couple times a year for suggesting good defaults to the user.
Unfortunately “are you sure?” checks simply don't work, too many people are trained to just click yes/OK to close the message and get back to what they were trying to do.
And worst of all, it doesn't matter if you are one of those people or not, for some reason all software you get to use must be designed for the lowest common denominator.
Trained by the many more prompts that are irrelevant in practice, and merely stand between a person and the task they're trying to accomplish.
It's not like computers give people a good reason to read the error popups. 90% of them these days are just "oops, computer pooped itself, a well trained army of monkeys is on its way to clean it up; try again later <tinyprint>0xbunchofbullshit-hexadecimal-uuids-for-vendor-telemetry</tinyprint> ;-)" anyway.
Most of the time, people are given only two options: give up on their task, or ignore the popup. No point in reading the message in such cases, it brings zero value.
I'd say the problem is that delete usually has a popup. Sure you don't really want to delete without any kind of confirmation, way too many people would click something on accident and if there's not a way to undo it (which has it's own issues), then a popup is a simple solution, but it does result in this unfortunate behavior.
Honestly, if I were to dig, then for my generation[0], I'd blame save and close popups more, but even more than that, flaky component-based software. At some point in the Windows 98/NT and then 2000/XP era, you'd often see software throwing "fatal errors" and then continuing to happily chug along, possibly with subtly broken features, and ready to throw more inconsequential "fatal errors" if you moved your mouse the wrong way.
Repeated exposure built immunity.
You get a scary error with incomprehensible details[1], maybe the app closes, so you open it again and continue until the next error happens; maybe it doesn't close, just keeps going - maybe partially broken, maybe not. Either way, text is incomprehensible, but dismissing the message lets you keep going, so you learn that. At some point you see the message, think "oh this again", and close it without thinking. Works 90% of the time, for the other 10% you have coping strategies like "press CTRL+S every 30 seconds", "use Save As instead of save", or "make a copy of the file at start of your work session" all committed to muscle memory.
The modals with two or more buttons were the annoying ones. Asking you to make a decision. Asking you to stop. Eventually you learned to press the right button for ones where it mattered, and go straight for [X] or "Cancel" for everything else. And it worked.
Then came the web, and that's a rant for another time, but suffice it to say, the advertisers successfully taught everyone that you should always click the "X" button on anything that pops up without reading it, way before web apps became a thing.
We've worked out some useful UX patterns since. Non-blocking notifications, side panes, undo, undo history (still annoyingly uncommon). I don't think there's a single solution to the problem, but I am sure of the underlying principle that should guide it:
Whatever you do, do not become an obstacle standing between the user and the thing they're trying to do.
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[0] - Can't speak for the kids these days, who learned computers after Windows ME times, or just grew straight into mobile revolution and mostly skipped dealing with PCs.
[1] - That was bad, but we've since overcorrected in the opposite direction. Ideal is IMO enough information to give you a clue about internal and external causes and state of the program, even if you have no technical background, because people bent on doing a task and even minimally curious can use that to random-walk into a solution. Basically: something you can act on as a user if you really care to.
People also get scammed using accessibility services, so some banks deliberately make their app inaccessible unless you're running a whitelisted screen reader. If you are running a non-whitelisted screen reader...
Hoping to not sound like a broken record, this is why having full ownership of your device and OS is important. My stock Pixel Android recently told me something along the line of "A security policy blocks screenshots for this app. Talk to your administrator if you want to change the policy". I looked in the mirror and my administrator said "time for a policy change, we're moving to GrapheneOS".
And just as important: Help your friends and family to move as well, so they can have ad blockers, NewPipe etc. We need a critical mass of users invested in their freedom, otherwise its going to be crushed by malicious/dumb security measures of their banking apps, corporate greed ("oh, a simple misunderstanding, when you clicked 'buy' you rented a limited license. Did you not read the ToS?") and police overreach. It's a perpetual battle.
The remote tech support scam using screen sharing apps like team viewer is unfortunately very common and is basically why this exists.
It's also patronizing to ask during setup or whatever if the user is dumb enough to get scammed like this, even though that is kinda the actual piece of information needed
I went to screenshot my upcoming Verizon Fios fiber install out of excitement and got an immediate warning dialog.
WARNING: You are in violation of the My Fios app end user licensing agreement that prohibits duplication of this screen. Please immediately delete this from your device.
... apparently buried in the app T&Cs is a "Distribution of the technician's picture or information is prohibited". Even if there's no tech assigned, the screen with the picture of the grey fake man with a fake hat apparently causes a big old warning if you screenshot it.
So yeah, I have a screenshot of the generic technician's ID photo, I guess.
Later on it did populate an actual name and photo when a human was assigned, but still, yeah, I don't get why they didn't just automatically redact it and just throw you the stupidest bullshit warning error ever on the honor system.
> “Security” that makes ordinary sharing unusable is often just UX debt wearing a security badge.
Very true.
> The right fix is selective redaction, not disabling screenshots everywhere.
That's still a partial fix, though. It would address the problem of accidental screenshots in a better way, but the main point of contention is around intentional ones. Here, the problem is that the app vendor and the user have different notion of what is "sensitive".
I get why it's the default but anyone who'd had to navigate an elderly relative around their banking app just via them describing the screen because iOS blanks it out when screen sharing definitely wishes there was a way to opt out of it.
There's a very easy way out for them: Just claim that the bible is rather metaphorical than literal, and many things can be interpreted to be in line with scientific findings. That seems to be at least what protestant churches in Europe seem to do.
Easy for you to say, but who says they're looking for a way out? It's often easier to find a reason to stay where you are, and easiest to not even need one.
> [...] dark patterns are a short term strategy for winning and I'm optimistic that in the long run they will be replaced with those that are more respectful and oriented to the greater good
This is definitely not the way most software has been going in the past decades. It's rather the opposite: Companies play friendly to obtain a user base, then start applying more and more dark patters to further increase their profit. Facebook, Evernote, Instagram, Komoot... The list goes on and on.
I don't think that's the economical definition of monopoly. It's not about 1 single actor owning the market but rather about unilateral change. Obviously a single actor owning 99.99% will be able to shape the market ... but also one owning a lot less, e.g. 30% if even if they don't collude with another actor owning e.g. 21%.
what you are describing sounds like an oligopoly not a monopoly. A company cannot realize monopolistic benefits without > 50% control of a market. That's not to say there aren't benefits to a large market share, but they are different and we have different terms for them.
US law sets the breakpoint for when a company is considered a monopoly at 30% of a market. It's never actually enforced, of course, but may be worth noting.
Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area. Some courts have required much higher percentages. In addition, that leading position must be sustainable over time: if competitive forces or the entry of new firms could discipline the conduct of the leading firm, courts are unlikely to find that the firm has lasting market power.
>A company cannot realize monopolistic benefits without > 50% control of a market.
I don't think that's true at all. Why 50% specifically? This is not about political votes or anything like that. It's about being the largest player by a margin, usually.
Huge difference while both are competing. But it’s a huge risk in a market with such high cost of entering. If either divests then it rapidly degrades.
OTOH, it's Apple, so users would rather buy a bigger iPhone and complain than switching brands (see other comments here), in which case Apple loses nothing.
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