> Gosh, it’s almost like Apple serving as the exclusive gatekeeper for what software can be installed on the iPhone (and iPad, and Apple TV, and Apple Watch, and Vision Pro) is a bad thing that creates a single point of failure which can be abused by increasingly authoritarian governments.
Apple should not be able to decide which apps their customers are allowed to use. It's one thing to make decisions about which products are allowed in your store, and quite another to unilaterally ban software from what is many people's primary computer.
There should have always been a side-loading switch. It doesn't have to be easy to find, it just needs to be available in the event of an emergency. Any possible security arguments to the contrary pale in comparison to the importance of maintaining a free society.
We live in a digital age, and software is a form of free expression. We would not (I hope) find this situation acceptable for eBooks, and we should not find it acceptable for software.
I am horrified that Google has decided to move in the same direction on Android, and I urge them to reconsider before it's too late. Right now, these apps can still be sideloaded on Android phones, so to be honest I don't care that much what Google does with the Play Store. But what happens next year?
I understand why some people have a negative reaction to the word "sideloading", but to me it just means acquiring media from a place other than the manufacturer's official channels.
On Debian, compiling software from source or installing a deb you downloaded via a web browser would be "sideloading".
”The 15.18.5 update is also having an adverse reaction to sideloaded books. If you deliver a book using Send by Email or copy it to your computer via USB, a critical issue may arise, where a pop-up appears with an ‘Invalid ASIN‘ number. The new DRM system is attempting to locate the book in the Amazon store to decrypt it, but since it can’t find it, it reports that the book is invalid. Amazon claims they are working on the issue, ... ”https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45393505
I don't know how I would live my life without access to mainstream mobile apps. I have to use an app to pay for the laundry machine in my apartment building. At school—I'm a teacher nowadays—we use an app to mark student attendance during fire drills.
Freedom of speech should not require living in the woods secluded from society. It is the responsibility of all of us—especially major institutions—to work to preserve that. I can't do it on my own.
Keep an old android phone in a drawer somewhere. Take it out when you do laundry.
> mark student attendance
If your workplace requires you to use an app then your workplace can issue you a phone that you keep at work. I don't use my personal devices for anything work-related and you shouldn't either.
On top of that, someone brings a lawsuit against your company? Well your personal phone that you used for work is now being impounded as evidence. Both inconvenient and invasive.
I can't practically carry around two different phones all day at work, especially given how big they are now. (It's not like I work at a desk, I'm constantly running between different classrooms and other spaces.) The "work" phone would end up being the one I had on my person most of the time.
...but frankly, I am such a geek that it doesn't really matter for me. I have a tiny 11-inch laptop that I usually keep somewhere nearby, or I can VNC into my home desktop computer from my phone.
The thing is that normal people shouldn't have to do this! I say this as someone who does believe that everyone should become more tech-literate and capable with computers. One of the subjects I teach is 5th grade computer science. I don't expect all or even most of my kids to become professional software engineers, but I want them to know enough that they'll be able to make computers work for them instead of the other way around. This is one of the reasons I became a teacher.
I don't expect all of my students to buy and carry around multiple phones in order to protect democracy.
If you expect people to take real-life inconvenience over an abstract perceived freedom you will be disappointed until the day you die. People buy computing devices to do things. If the device has freedom but can't do the things they want it's a really cool paperweight.
Streaming services which lock you into DRM won over the slightly inconvenient but free thing.
Your time will always better be spent getting government to make the convenient thing more free than trying to move a river by gathering people with buckets.
Oh, I don't expect people like them to take real-life inconvenience over freedom. I am just tired of them pretending they care about freedom, when all it takes for them to give up is having to use a "fiddly" operating system.
I've been running Linux on the desktop for 20 years. I'm happily running Linux on a tablet (a Microsoft tablet at that). I run a third-party Android build with root on my primary phone. I am the ideal user for a fiddly operating system.
I put PostmarketOS on a spare phone and spent a good bit of time playing with it. It would be painful to try to daily it at this time, and completely unusable for many of the common smartphone use cases.
Google has been clamping down over the past year or two on sideloading too. I used to be able to install games restricted to Japan if they were uploaded to apkpure, but every one lately gets stopped either by Play Services or the Play Store under the claim of "safety" and can't be worked around.
I love the DMA in theory, but as currently implemented it doesn't fix this problem, because they're letting Apple enforce their stupid notarization scheme for alternate app stores. Apple can just pull notarization from a politically inconvenient app.
I also haven't heard anything about Europe being excluded from the upcoming Android crackdown, so apparently Google has decided it's DMA compliant. Which makes sense given what Apple is doing.
> “removed apps that share the location of what it describes as a vulnerable group after a recent violent act against them connected to this sort of app"
Apparently armed, masked thugs covered in body armor dragging people off the street for the federal government count as a "vulnerable group" now?
I already lost all remaining respect for Tim Cook when he kissed the ring in the oval office. I wonder how Steve Jobs would have handled the current political challenges.
Given what has been learned through neuroscience, how ossified and normalized for life most become, it feels like a good argument can be made much of the elder cohort is stuck in a pseudo religious and pseudoscience middle ground of thought.
Most > 50 were born into a more traditional and religion-centric life and only adopted technology. The first generation educated along vaguely scientific lines.
In the US at least, born after 1980 is roughly when opinions begin to veer into favor of empiricism and less "anything goes" new age woo and post world war extravagant capitalism due to being the only functioning manufacturing economy after the war.
I will say you have to respect that he would eat his own dog food though. It's one thing to be wrong and contradict it in private, it's another to be wrong and actually live it.
Americans elected a mob boss to their highest office and he also appointed many of the judges in the legal system. As a corporation your choices are to give in or to get crushed.
This is literally how extortion by organized crime works. It's the same mechanism. Of course they'll be back for more, but if you don't give them your money, they will beat the shit out of you and then come back for more anyway. You know what's expected of you, and the alternatives are generally much worse.
Incidentally it's also a textbook presentation of the Manufacturing Consent Propaganda model, except it's not only propaganda, it's an outright authoritarian coup.
Except Apple and Google are incredibly powerful, and the Trump administration has shown they mostly fail to follow on their threats (yet, at least). If some entities are able to stand up against the nascent fascist regime, it's them. But as we all know, corporations and fascism are like peanut butter and jelly.
There seems to be an implicit assumption here that Apple and Google managements don't like Trump's ICE policies and are doing all this under duress.
But is this a valid assumption? Or is it mere wishful thinking?
If almost half the US population revoted Trump into power, it's logical to assume the same proportions apply to the managements and employees of A and G too.
I'm against granting any management any benefit of the doubt without solid proof they deserve it.
For sure, that's what I implied in that "corporations and fascism" line. If they wanted to make a stand, I believe they could. But as history tells us, businesses are a fascist's biggest allies, so they won't.
I think the Trump administration has been rather good at following through on their threats. US import tariffs are insanely high right now and he's been able to successfully fire whoever he wants.
All Trump has to do to destroy eg. Apple is get rid of the exemption from the tariffs they've been given for electronics manufactured in India.
I mean, Jimmy Kimmel won and Apple is way more powerful with far deeper pockets.
This admin isn't all powerful, as much as they try and project that image. Apple and I think Google have a pretty big reservoir of good will among the public at large.
These folks won't be in power forever, but the cowardice of people like Tim Cook will always be remembered.
It looks OK on the surface, but it gets worse the more you look into the details.
It doesn't really matter that the administration keeps losing in federal court, because the justice department doesn't really care and keeps doing the thing they were told to stop doing anyway, because there's nobody to enforce the ruling.
The executive branch is being actively purged of anyone and anything that is not aligned with and loyal to Trump and the vision of Project 2025, and the institutions that might be used to halt or reverse the damage are being specifically targeted and attacked.
Not only that, but all the other major industry players have already bent the knee and kissed the ring. You don't want to be the only one who doesn't, otherwise you will get singled out and targeted for extortion or worse. Several very powerful law firms were successfully targeted for political extortion by executive order. Major universities have conceded to demands. Conservative news media is in lock step with the administration and can push any narrative at any time. Threats might've already been made privately to begin antitrust enforcement, for some other form of targeted corporate punishment.
Moreover, it's obvious that one of the goals of this administration is to destroy consumer protections and employee protections, creating an environment where powerful corporations can do whatever they want in the name of profit. As the CEO of a large corporation, you might be actively under pressure to cooperate and collaborate. So there is a large downside to resistance, and a large upside to playing along.
Tim Cook will be remembered as one of dozens and dozens of cowards, but only in private whispers, because if they say it in public they will be blacklisted or worse.
> This is the thing: dooming is itself a liberation from the burden of choice. If everything is ruined forever, if your allies have already forsaken you, if the battle is already lost, you aren't responsible for your choices. They can't affect the outcome. You're free. Dooming is another escape from the burden of war mindset. Clausewitz knew this as well: "As a rule, most men would rather believe bad news than good,"
I never said all is lost so give up. I just said that it's bad and even worse than it might seem. Trying to pretend it's not as bad as it is, is also capitulation.
Oh I have no sympathy for them. I understand their behaviour but to me it's just a reason to avoid patronising American companies.
I also think there's a little bit of quid pro quo happening here - in exchange for giving into Trump's whims and kissing the ring they've had antitrust investigations watered down and patent disputes solved.
The right wing's long-cultivated victimhood narrative is reaching its natural climax. Nowadays you can literally be the boot stomping on a human face forever and also be a victim because you stubbed your toe.
Government will just hijack the domain as they have with torrents and other things they don't like
Am working on a mobile app that requires in person keygen/sharing via Bluetooth, syncs selected data between devices once keys exchanged and new local IP is shared (over something like Signal; discovery is hard/expensive so I am going with a low tech manual option to notify peers how to reconnect)
Flood the field with alternatives to keep The Man on his toes and distracted.
The main problem with hyper normalized and streamlined society is it just makes it easier for The Man to spot and squash dissent. What is dissent when the people are peacefully not following orders by making passive surveillance difficult.
That sounds like a nice setup for decentralization.
I've long thought people should just fork DNS. This already sort of happens with ad blocking commercial services, but I'm thinking it might be time for something that runs over a mix network, where devices have multiple trust roots for DNS services, and run a quorum computation when there's disagreement.
Ideally, disagreements between the roots could be escalated to a web browser UI.
So... we're building the most secure devices ever, so secure that only two megacorps have final say on what we can and can't install on said devices (if we want a usable device). Browsers are heading the same way, we sure enjoy our Manifest V3 security.
The CEOs were all there at the inauguration. Is anyone really surprised that they're taking orders from this administration?
That there isn't a free software implementation here is indeed bad. Trying to fight about software liberties at this moment when the apps are being de-facto banned is Just Not the Time.
But absolutely start a project under a permissive license. That's a great idea.
Seems to me like it would be a great opportunity to make a list of subversives, judt by exfiltrating their identity via the "app". Cooperation from the developer is optional.
There's precious little reason to distribute as an app, except for exploiting the user. If all you wanted to do was show things on a map then the web is already well set up for that. In fact the apps are probably just embedding a web browser anyway (haven't checked).
I'm no fan of ICE, but I wouldn't trust these developers either.
> There's precious little reason to distribute as an app, except for exploiting the user.
This is a very Hacker News centric perspective; most of us probably use the browser on our phone for hours every day. But a lot of normal people simply don't - if it isn't an app, they won't really use it. I find it strange, but I've seen this over and over again.
It's the equivalent of posting on social media that you just saw some ice agents at such and such an address. Completely protected speech... At least it is unless the Roberts court shadow dockets it.
But publishing location information of where authorities happen to be in public at a certain time... I don't think is actually illegal. The Apple app author also believes he is 100% legal and is seeking to go to court over this.
Another point I forgot to make (can't edit anymore)...
It could possibly be found that the government illegally pressured or "coerced" a company like Apple/Google to remove "speech" (an app) they didn't want.
there's a difference between not allowing very harmful hatespeech and saying something like "I saw a cop at this address"
yes, the web exists, and while it's not functionally preventing all possible phone access to the app, it's increasing the barrier to entry in a way that meaningfully massively reduces its use
I have no problem saying that good things are good and bad things are bad. The idea that nobody is allowed to have content preferences is ridiculous and not actually a thing that anybody believes.
Most people also seemed to celebrate Parler and Gab being pulled/denied. It was perfectly obvious that the same logic could be used to do things like this, but many people seem to be totally surprised or oblivious.
We've had multiple leaks and reports that the government was directly involved in these censorship cases prior to January 20, 2025. So no, that's not the difference.
On this very forum, people (not you) argued it was perfectly acceptable because the government was only "asking", not requiring.
Unfortunately, the civil libertarians have been drowned out for years by people who believed that it was right to do whatever it took to shut down right-wingers/misinformation/disinformation/hate speech/Russian propaganda/conspiracy theorists/Hunter laptop posters/whatever. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, they are shocked and outraged, even as they built the tools, institutions, mechanisms, and political support used to do this.
When it's removed due to the chilling effect of the government attacking our first amendment rights this gets murkier. Do you think they make this choice if the regime weren't going after their political enemies?
It is not legal for the government to induce a corporation to do that with threats of unrelated, bogus litigation, enforcement fishing expeditions, interference with the legally required government contracting process, or the like. Since the Trump administration has a consistent, well-established pattern of doing all those things, we can all assume that's what's going on.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power"
Is a quote often wrongly attributed to Mr. Fascism Benito Mussolini himself, but whoever said it had made a damn good point. Be aware that what you are seeing now fits the exact and precise definition of fascism.
It's amusing seeing the US descend so quickly in pure unadulterated fascism and the amount of denial and attempts to sugar coat it or window dress in places like HN. Then forums like this will go dark, and next thing you know, the brownshirts from
the modern Gestapo/Stasi/ICE would be knocking on your door.
Make no mistake about Google and Apple: moderating anti fascist apps or content is abetting fascism (that applies to HN mods as well).
Some people are still under the impression that they live in a democratic republic under a constitutional doctrine of permissive freedom and the rule of law.
Governments are universally based in having a relative monopoly of coercive force. It would be fascinating to explore alternatives, where the coercion was based in algorithms, AI, or other systems relatively free from perverse incentives. Perhaps an effective system of government without coercive force might even be explored, if someone could figure out a strong enough incentive alignment to make that work(doubt).
The principal obstacle to fair, enduring, and prosperous governance is that the built in perverse incentives are much, much stronger than the aligned incentives, and only are held in check by the ratio of coercive power of the perverse vs aligned incentive holders.
When a population becomes to compliant, obedient, or distracted in the presence of a strongly misaligned state, disaster always follows.
Fascinatingly, we can presently watch this unfold in real time on a global scale.
A nuisance app that generated zero revenue for these app stores was used in a murder. It’s a PR no-brainer to simply remove it just as they constantly remove other apps for all sorts of reasons.
Why would it? The key difference is businesses / people making choices and the government coercing businesses / people to make choices the government wants. One is a first amendment violation, one is exercising the first amendment.
A company with significant coercive power (through sticky market effects) is much better thought of as a governmentesque censoring entity rather than some mere group of individuals exercising their individual speech. What you're describing is not a virtue of the first amendment, but rather a shortcoming of its implementation and a subsequent failure to properly regulate corporations/LLCs/etc. OP is right - people's ready embrace of corpo-authoritarianism when it lined up with their social mores set the stage for where we are at now. That comic has always been a low point of Munroe's.
This is a long winded way of ignoring the fact that this is government coercion, something the 1st amendment was designed to prevent. What you're talking about is _not_ something the 1st amendment was designed to prevent.
Ask yourself who is more legitimized to take such enforcement actions: a handful of privately owned corporations acting in concert or a democratically elected government?
No, the "first amendment only applies to government" is cope of the highest degree, it was always a cope.
You accepted that an oligopoly could dictate what you could do with devices you owned because it suited your preferences and now that you are on the other side of the sword you squirm.
XKCD's point stands as long as nobody has a monopoly on an important medium. Apple and Google effectively do have a duopoly on mobile app distribution, and mobile apps are an important medium for speech in 2025.
From the first part of your comment, it directly follows that neither Apple nor Google has a required monopoly on the important medium.
IMO, we need to stop thinking in this broken paradigm of "-opolies" (with its loaded requirement to define what constitutes a given "market") and look at the actual coercive power they wield through market stickiness. Apple and Google both wield much coercive power with regards to software running on mobile devices.
I am all for letting low effort labor exploiters create low effort comics. Same as I am for my having no obligation to support them directly by reading their comics.
Entertainers are a kind of contemporary secular faith healer and tribal shaman, imo.
To mix metaphors, stopped clocks who can be right and worth listening to only in very specific situations.
From: https://onefoottsunami.com/2025/10/03/iceblock-blocked/
> Gosh, it’s almost like Apple serving as the exclusive gatekeeper for what software can be installed on the iPhone (and iPad, and Apple TV, and Apple Watch, and Vision Pro) is a bad thing that creates a single point of failure which can be abused by increasingly authoritarian governments.
Apple should not be able to decide which apps their customers are allowed to use. It's one thing to make decisions about which products are allowed in your store, and quite another to unilaterally ban software from what is many people's primary computer.
There should have always been a side-loading switch. It doesn't have to be easy to find, it just needs to be available in the event of an emergency. Any possible security arguments to the contrary pale in comparison to the importance of maintaining a free society.
We live in a digital age, and software is a form of free expression. We would not (I hope) find this situation acceptable for eBooks, and we should not find it acceptable for software.
I am horrified that Google has decided to move in the same direction on Android, and I urge them to reconsider before it's too late. Right now, these apps can still be sideloaded on Android phones, so to be honest I don't care that much what Google does with the Play Store. But what happens next year?
If phoneposters cared about that, they would buy a general computer. And yes, situation with ebooks is the same.
Please direct me to the general computer in a phone form factor that isn't some fiddly Linux gadget.
What e-reader doesn't allow side-loading books?
> sideloading books
This madness is straight out of Right to Read [0].
[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I understand why some people have a negative reaction to the word "sideloading", but to me it just means acquiring media from a place other than the manufacturer's official channels.
On Debian, compiling software from source or installing a deb you downloaded via a web browser would be "sideloading".
”The 15.18.5 update is also having an adverse reaction to sideloaded books. If you deliver a book using Send by Email or copy it to your computer via USB, a critical issue may arise, where a pop-up appears with an ‘Invalid ASIN‘ number. The new DRM system is attempting to locate the book in the Amazon store to decrypt it, but since it can’t find it, it reports that the book is invalid. Amazon claims they are working on the issue, ... ”https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45393505
Ah the old "I want freedom but I refuse to accept any inconvenience to get it"
I don't know how I would live my life without access to mainstream mobile apps. I have to use an app to pay for the laundry machine in my apartment building. At school—I'm a teacher nowadays—we use an app to mark student attendance during fire drills.
Freedom of speech should not require living in the woods secluded from society. It is the responsibility of all of us—especially major institutions—to work to preserve that. I can't do it on my own.
> laundry
Keep an old android phone in a drawer somewhere. Take it out when you do laundry.
> mark student attendance
If your workplace requires you to use an app then your workplace can issue you a phone that you keep at work. I don't use my personal devices for anything work-related and you shouldn't either.
Reminder: the moment you start using your phone for work-related material, your workplace has the right to access and remove data from your phone.
Never, ever use your personal phone for work stuff.
On top of that, someone brings a lawsuit against your company? Well your personal phone that you used for work is now being impounded as evidence. Both inconvenient and invasive.
I can't practically carry around two different phones all day at work, especially given how big they are now. (It's not like I work at a desk, I'm constantly running between different classrooms and other spaces.) The "work" phone would end up being the one I had on my person most of the time.
...but frankly, I am such a geek that it doesn't really matter for me. I have a tiny 11-inch laptop that I usually keep somewhere nearby, or I can VNC into my home desktop computer from my phone.
The thing is that normal people shouldn't have to do this! I say this as someone who does believe that everyone should become more tech-literate and capable with computers. One of the subjects I teach is 5th grade computer science. I don't expect all or even most of my kids to become professional software engineers, but I want them to know enough that they'll be able to make computers work for them instead of the other way around. This is one of the reasons I became a teacher.
I don't expect all of my students to buy and carry around multiple phones in order to protect democracy.
Put them in a sac? You don't need the phones to be attached straight to your body, they only need to be within 40m from you.
> how big they are now
Request that your work phone be this: https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-star
If all it is doing is taking attendance then you don't need a large phone.
> normal people shouldn't have to do this!
I agree, but this is what's happening. Google and Apple are taking away the freedom, it's time to put up or shut up.
If you expect people to take real-life inconvenience over an abstract perceived freedom you will be disappointed until the day you die. People buy computing devices to do things. If the device has freedom but can't do the things they want it's a really cool paperweight.
Streaming services which lock you into DRM won over the slightly inconvenient but free thing.
Your time will always better be spent getting government to make the convenient thing more free than trying to move a river by gathering people with buckets.
Oh, I don't expect people like them to take real-life inconvenience over freedom. I am just tired of them pretending they care about freedom, when all it takes for them to give up is having to use a "fiddly" operating system.
I've been running Linux on the desktop for 20 years. I'm happily running Linux on a tablet (a Microsoft tablet at that). I run a third-party Android build with root on my primary phone. I am the ideal user for a fiddly operating system.
I put PostmarketOS on a spare phone and spent a good bit of time playing with it. It would be painful to try to daily it at this time, and completely unusable for many of the common smartphone use cases.
No, not inconvenience, safety and security.
There are limited choices if you want to keep it in mind.
Ahh the old "I'm going to pretend my utterly ridiculous suggestion is a reasonable and rational and expectation of the average human"
Google has been clamping down over the past year or two on sideloading too. I used to be able to install games restricted to Japan if they were uploaded to apkpure, but every one lately gets stopped either by Play Services or the Play Store under the claim of "safety" and can't be worked around.
Once again we are back to deriving the DSA/DMA from first principles.
I love the DMA in theory, but as currently implemented it doesn't fix this problem, because they're letting Apple enforce their stupid notarization scheme for alternate app stores. Apple can just pull notarization from a politically inconvenient app.
I also haven't heard anything about Europe being excluded from the upcoming Android crackdown, so apparently Google has decided it's DMA compliant. Which makes sense given what Apple is doing.
> “removed apps that share the location of what it describes as a vulnerable group after a recent violent act against them connected to this sort of app"
Apparently armed, masked thugs covered in body armor dragging people off the street for the federal government count as a "vulnerable group" now?
[flagged]
I think that attack was independent of the app. Everybody is "vulnerable" to bullets, perhaps they should ban the guns instead of the app?
How many ICE officers were shot?
Yes, more extremist rightwing violence that targeted vulnerable people (immigrants ICE were treating as subhuman)
A mentally ill right-winger 4chan edgelord shooting at immigrants, to be precise. No ICE officers were harmed in this hatecrime, don't you worry.
I already lost all remaining respect for Tim Cook when he kissed the ring in the oval office. I wonder how Steve Jobs would have handled the current political challenges.
He'd probably be up to his eyeballs in magic crystals and antivax nonsense by now
Lol - exactly - why do people expect the politics or broader principles of Steve Jobs to be any good?
The dude literally tried to cure his cancer with fruit. There would probably be an RFK edition iPhone.
his reality distortion field became too powerful and backfired on himself
Given what has been learned through neuroscience, how ossified and normalized for life most become, it feels like a good argument can be made much of the elder cohort is stuck in a pseudo religious and pseudoscience middle ground of thought.
Most > 50 were born into a more traditional and religion-centric life and only adopted technology. The first generation educated along vaguely scientific lines.
In the US at least, born after 1980 is roughly when opinions begin to veer into favor of empiricism and less "anything goes" new age woo and post world war extravagant capitalism due to being the only functioning manufacturing economy after the war.
This might give you some insight: https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/09/how-tim-cook-sold-out-st...
I will say you have to respect that he would eat his own dog food though. It's one thing to be wrong and contradict it in private, it's another to be wrong and actually live it.
So many powerful people are the former.
Americans elected a mob boss to their highest office and he also appointed many of the judges in the legal system. As a corporation your choices are to give in or to get crushed.
Giving your lunch money to a bully all but guarantees they'll be back for more.
This is literally how extortion by organized crime works. It's the same mechanism. Of course they'll be back for more, but if you don't give them your money, they will beat the shit out of you and then come back for more anyway. You know what's expected of you, and the alternatives are generally much worse.
Incidentally it's also a textbook presentation of the Manufacturing Consent Propaganda model, except it's not only propaganda, it's an outright authoritarian coup.
Except Apple and Google are incredibly powerful, and the Trump administration has shown they mostly fail to follow on their threats (yet, at least). If some entities are able to stand up against the nascent fascist regime, it's them. But as we all know, corporations and fascism are like peanut butter and jelly.
There seems to be an implicit assumption here that Apple and Google managements don't like Trump's ICE policies and are doing all this under duress.
But is this a valid assumption? Or is it mere wishful thinking? If almost half the US population revoted Trump into power, it's logical to assume the same proportions apply to the managements and employees of A and G too.
I'm against granting any management any benefit of the doubt without solid proof they deserve it.
For sure, that's what I implied in that "corporations and fascism" line. If they wanted to make a stand, I believe they could. But as history tells us, businesses are a fascist's biggest allies, so they won't.
I think the Trump administration has been rather good at following through on their threats. US import tariffs are insanely high right now and he's been able to successfully fire whoever he wants.
All Trump has to do to destroy eg. Apple is get rid of the exemption from the tariffs they've been given for electronics manufactured in India.
I mean, Jimmy Kimmel won and Apple is way more powerful with far deeper pockets.
This admin isn't all powerful, as much as they try and project that image. Apple and I think Google have a pretty big reservoir of good will among the public at large.
These folks won't be in power forever, but the cowardice of people like Tim Cook will always be remembered.
It looks OK on the surface, but it gets worse the more you look into the details.
It doesn't really matter that the administration keeps losing in federal court, because the justice department doesn't really care and keeps doing the thing they were told to stop doing anyway, because there's nobody to enforce the ruling.
The executive branch is being actively purged of anyone and anything that is not aligned with and loyal to Trump and the vision of Project 2025, and the institutions that might be used to halt or reverse the damage are being specifically targeted and attacked.
Not only that, but all the other major industry players have already bent the knee and kissed the ring. You don't want to be the only one who doesn't, otherwise you will get singled out and targeted for extortion or worse. Several very powerful law firms were successfully targeted for political extortion by executive order. Major universities have conceded to demands. Conservative news media is in lock step with the administration and can push any narrative at any time. Threats might've already been made privately to begin antitrust enforcement, for some other form of targeted corporate punishment.
Moreover, it's obvious that one of the goals of this administration is to destroy consumer protections and employee protections, creating an environment where powerful corporations can do whatever they want in the name of profit. As the CEO of a large corporation, you might be actively under pressure to cooperate and collaborate. So there is a large downside to resistance, and a large upside to playing along.
Tim Cook will be remembered as one of dozens and dozens of cowards, but only in private whispers, because if they say it in public they will be blacklisted or worse.
It's all very bad, for sure, but doomerism is capitulation.
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/democrats-must-embrace-war-m...
> This is the thing: dooming is itself a liberation from the burden of choice. If everything is ruined forever, if your allies have already forsaken you, if the battle is already lost, you aren't responsible for your choices. They can't affect the outcome. You're free. Dooming is another escape from the burden of war mindset. Clausewitz knew this as well: "As a rule, most men would rather believe bad news than good,"
I never said all is lost so give up. I just said that it's bad and even worse than it might seem. Trying to pretend it's not as bad as it is, is also capitulation.
Nah. They are the most powerful members of a society. It is ridiculous how they get treated with less expectations then anyone else.
They have choices and they are consciously choosing this.
I think the world’s richest company could have at least attempted to push back. They aren’t some helpless victim here.
Corporations and especially Silicon Valley were pushing hard for Trump because they were furious about Lena Khan.
Don't let them pretend that they are innocent in all of this. They're all polishing their jackboots right now.
Oh I have no sympathy for them. I understand their behaviour but to me it's just a reason to avoid patronising American companies.
I also think there's a little bit of quid pro quo happening here - in exchange for giving into Trump's whims and kissing the ring they've had antitrust investigations watered down and patent disputes solved.
Yes, they all conveniently gave in the moment after. Google just paid another $25M. Is this the lawful order defence?
Exactly the same.
Steve Jobs was the kind of person who would do anything for more money. He would have kissed the ring even harder.
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"vulnerable group"
Google, name your non-vulnerable groups. Could those being taken away be considered a "vulnerable group" or a non-vulnerable group?
This is pure hypocrisy in the wild.
The right wing's long-cultivated victimhood narrative is reaching its natural climax. Nowadays you can literally be the boot stomping on a human face forever and also be a victim because you stubbed your toe.
Happened in 2019 in Hongkong: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/10/20907596/apple-hong-kong...
In 2025 in USA?
I've wondered for a while if the experience with protesters organizing on apps was what made China prioritize TikTok more.
TikTok's initial rise predates the protests by about a year. But it explodes and overtakes other social media apps starting in 2019 and into 202.
I’d say this is a perfect candidate for a web app / PWA.
These days you can even add notifications to iOS/Android PWAs with no registration
Government will just hijack the domain as they have with torrents and other things they don't like
Am working on a mobile app that requires in person keygen/sharing via Bluetooth, syncs selected data between devices once keys exchanged and new local IP is shared (over something like Signal; discovery is hard/expensive so I am going with a low tech manual option to notify peers how to reconnect)
Flood the field with alternatives to keep The Man on his toes and distracted.
The main problem with hyper normalized and streamlined society is it just makes it easier for The Man to spot and squash dissent. What is dissent when the people are peacefully not following orders by making passive surveillance difficult.
That sounds like a nice setup for decentralization.
I've long thought people should just fork DNS. This already sort of happens with ad blocking commercial services, but I'm thinking it might be time for something that runs over a mix network, where devices have multiple trust roots for DNS services, and run a quorum computation when there's disagreement.
Ideally, disagreements between the roots could be escalated to a web browser UI.
It's forked since..... at least mid-90's? Not that the alternatives have any real reach.
While I’m down with the spirit of your idea, What keeps your app from being banned on the App Store as well?
As an unbannable alternative, Make the web app trivially hostable, and use IPFS as a data backend maybe?
Would love to learn more about this once it’s ready
So... we're building the most secure devices ever, so secure that only two megacorps have final say on what we can and can't install on said devices (if we want a usable device). Browsers are heading the same way, we sure enjoy our Manifest V3 security.
The CEOs were all there at the inauguration. Is anyone really surprised that they're taking orders from this administration?
Perhaps this should have been thought about when devices started to be secured completely from the user.
Hmm how different is this fundamentally from the ability to report police locations (speedtraps) in Google Maps?
You know why...
No I think the parent is saying why not use Waze or whatever in an off brand way.
There were no terrorist attacks on traffic cops lately.
Gosh, was I asleep and missed a new terrorist attack on ICE agents? How did you know they were ICE agents, did they identify themselves?
there was one a few weeks ago, with a shooter targeting an ice facility.
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/09/24/dhs-issues-statement-tar...
Neither ICEBlock nor Red Dot are OSS. Seems a little hypocritical. Why not provide the code on GitHub? Why not offer alternative download sources?
That there isn't a free software implementation here is indeed bad. Trying to fight about software liberties at this moment when the apps are being de-facto banned is Just Not the Time.
But absolutely start a project under a permissive license. That's a great idea.
Seems to me like it would be a great opportunity to make a list of subversives, judt by exfiltrating their identity via the "app". Cooperation from the developer is optional.
There's precious little reason to distribute as an app, except for exploiting the user. If all you wanted to do was show things on a map then the web is already well set up for that. In fact the apps are probably just embedding a web browser anyway (haven't checked).
I'm no fan of ICE, but I wouldn't trust these developers either.
> There's precious little reason to distribute as an app, except for exploiting the user.
This is a very Hacker News centric perspective; most of us probably use the browser on our phone for hours every day. But a lot of normal people simply don't - if it isn't an app, they won't really use it. I find it strange, but I've seen this over and over again.
This app wasn't even the safest, see here:
ICEBlock handled my vulnerability report in the worst possible way | https://micahflee.com/iceblock-handled-my-vulnerability-repo...
Couldn't someone port that to a WEB interface ? Then you access it via Firefox.
Maybe a PITA to use compared to a app, but at least it could not be banned.
Despite how shitty Google and Apple are being, this is probably the best way to accomplish the project's goal in a reasonable timeframe.
Is it illegal for Americans to track their authorities or are the corporations all doing this quite voluntarily?
It's the equivalent of posting on social media that you just saw some ice agents at such and such an address. Completely protected speech... At least it is unless the Roberts court shadow dockets it.
IANAL but I research this stuff quite a bit.
Doxxing of federal employees' personal information in certain circumstances is technically illegal (but many people think it isn't): https://www.robertreeveslaw.com/blog/doxing-arrested/
But publishing location information of where authorities happen to be in public at a certain time... I don't think is actually illegal. The Apple app author also believes he is 100% legal and is seeking to go to court over this.
https://www.kpbs.org/news/science-technology/2025/10/03/lega...
Another point I forgot to make (can't edit anymore)...
It could possibly be found that the government illegally pressured or "coerced" a company like Apple/Google to remove "speech" (an app) they didn't want.
https://robertslaw.org/1st-amendment-protection-against-usin...
Not illegal, not exactly voluntary either. Companies are caving to threats from the Trump administration
It’s perfectly legal, but also perfectly legal for a corporation to choose not to sell or distribute a particular software application.
In a free market the consumer always has a choice between companies doing censorship and companies doing censorship.
Not sure you intended the double positive but I think it’s funny and apt.
Intended.
Yep and one day maybe we'll get one on mobile devices.
Today isn't that day alas.
How many times are we going to re-litigate this? Until there’s a law requiring side loading options, you have the web.
Everyone here was totally fine with the “gay cure” apps being pulled.
there's a difference between not allowing very harmful hatespeech and saying something like "I saw a cop at this address"
yes, the web exists, and while it's not functionally preventing all possible phone access to the app, it's increasing the barrier to entry in a way that meaningfully massively reduces its use
“I saw an abortion provider at this address”
I have no problem saying that good things are good and bad things are bad. The idea that nobody is allowed to have content preferences is ridiculous and not actually a thing that anybody believes.
Most people also seemed to celebrate Parler and Gab being pulled/denied. It was perfectly obvious that the same logic could be used to do things like this, but many people seem to be totally surprised or oblivious.
The difference is the government's hands in such actions
We've had multiple leaks and reports that the government was directly involved in these censorship cases prior to January 20, 2025. So no, that's not the difference.
On this very forum, people (not you) argued it was perfectly acceptable because the government was only "asking", not requiring.
Unfortunately, the civil libertarians have been drowned out for years by people who believed that it was right to do whatever it took to shut down right-wingers/misinformation/disinformation/hate speech/Russian propaganda/conspiracy theorists/Hunter laptop posters/whatever. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, they are shocked and outraged, even as they built the tools, institutions, mechanisms, and political support used to do this.
When it's removed due to the chilling effect of the government attacking our first amendment rights this gets murkier. Do you think they make this choice if the regime weren't going after their political enemies?
Yes, I believe they would have removed this app during the Obama and Biden administrations if it had become associated with political assassination.
This hasn't happened.
It is not legal for the government to induce a corporation to do that with threats of unrelated, bogus litigation, enforcement fishing expeditions, interference with the legally required government contracting process, or the like. Since the Trump administration has a consistent, well-established pattern of doing all those things, we can all assume that's what's going on.
Could a web app be as secure and useful?
If you needed a reminder for how awful Google's new sideloading restrictions will be, then this is it.
These restictions will give governments total control over what apps you can run on your phone.
Earlier source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45468219
GitHub (while it still works)???
Cowards.
"Cowards" implies they're doing this against their will.
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This is awful. The US is rapidly declining.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power"
Is a quote often wrongly attributed to Mr. Fascism Benito Mussolini himself, but whoever said it had made a damn good point. Be aware that what you are seeing now fits the exact and precise definition of fascism.
It's amusing seeing the US descend so quickly in pure unadulterated fascism and the amount of denial and attempts to sugar coat it or window dress in places like HN. Then forums like this will go dark, and next thing you know, the brownshirts from the modern Gestapo/Stasi/ICE would be knocking on your door.
Make no mistake about Google and Apple: moderating anti fascist apps or content is abetting fascism (that applies to HN mods as well).
The more it's fascism, the less you're allowed to call it that.
I don’t understand what anyone was expecting.
Some people are still under the impression that they live in a democratic republic under a constitutional doctrine of permissive freedom and the rule of law.
It's just a monopoly.
Governments are universally based in having a relative monopoly of coercive force. It would be fascinating to explore alternatives, where the coercion was based in algorithms, AI, or other systems relatively free from perverse incentives. Perhaps an effective system of government without coercive force might even be explored, if someone could figure out a strong enough incentive alignment to make that work(doubt).
The principal obstacle to fair, enduring, and prosperous governance is that the built in perverse incentives are much, much stronger than the aligned incentives, and only are held in check by the ratio of coercive power of the perverse vs aligned incentive holders.
When a population becomes to compliant, obedient, or distracted in the presence of a strongly misaligned state, disaster always follows.
Fascinatingly, we can presently watch this unfold in real time on a global scale.
That is fascinating to think about. Could we have a model where there wasn't?
A nuisance app that generated zero revenue for these app stores was used in a murder. It’s a PR no-brainer to simply remove it just as they constantly remove other apps for all sorts of reasons.
A perfectly legal application was arbitrarily removed from distribution without any due process because it displeases those in power.
Funny how perspective on things can change depending of the amount of boot licking people enjoy.
Unfortunately, somebody figured out that if they put cocaine in boot polish, people kneel and lick easily.
> Google told 404 Media that it didn’t receive any warning from the DOJ, but that it “bans apps with a high risk of abuse”
Seems to be something else in this case.
Hopefully this will give people pause the next time they think about linking to https://xkcd.com/1357/.
Why would it? The key difference is businesses / people making choices and the government coercing businesses / people to make choices the government wants. One is a first amendment violation, one is exercising the first amendment.
A company with significant coercive power (through sticky market effects) is much better thought of as a governmentesque censoring entity rather than some mere group of individuals exercising their individual speech. What you're describing is not a virtue of the first amendment, but rather a shortcoming of its implementation and a subsequent failure to properly regulate corporations/LLCs/etc. OP is right - people's ready embrace of corpo-authoritarianism when it lined up with their social mores set the stage for where we are at now. That comic has always been a low point of Munroe's.
This is a long winded way of ignoring the fact that this is government coercion, something the 1st amendment was designed to prevent. What you're talking about is _not_ something the 1st amendment was designed to prevent.
No, I am most definitely not ignoring or downplaying that.
> What you're talking about is _not_ something the 1st amendment was designed to prevent.
Yes, in fact I explicitly acknowledged it as a "shortcoming of its implementation".
What I'm taking issue with is your whitewashing corporate censorship as "exercising the first amendment" in your first comment.
Ask yourself who is more legitimized to take such enforcement actions: a handful of privately owned corporations acting in concert or a democratically elected government?
No, the "first amendment only applies to government" is cope of the highest degree, it was always a cope.
You accepted that an oligopoly could dictate what you could do with devices you owned because it suited your preferences and now that you are on the other side of the sword you squirm.
The correct answer was neither all along.
XKCD's point stands as long as nobody has a monopoly on an important medium. Apple and Google effectively do have a duopoly on mobile app distribution, and mobile apps are an important medium for speech in 2025.
From the first part of your comment, it directly follows that neither Apple nor Google has a required monopoly on the important medium.
IMO, we need to stop thinking in this broken paradigm of "-opolies" (with its loaded requirement to define what constitutes a given "market") and look at the actual coercive power they wield through market stickiness. Apple and Google both wield much coercive power with regards to software running on mobile devices.
That does seem to be what the EU is trying to do with its "gatekeeper" classification.
I am all for letting low effort labor exploiters create low effort comics. Same as I am for my having no obligation to support them directly by reading their comics.
Entertainers are a kind of contemporary secular faith healer and tribal shaman, imo.
To mix metaphors, stopped clocks who can be right and worth listening to only in very specific situations.