Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

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.

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.

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.

Voting with your wallet is only step 1.

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.

The EU shows that regular voting is also an option.

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.

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 can vote with your vote too.

There's a reason Tim Apple gave Trump a golden trophy.

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

What alternatives are there to Apple hardware that people like this Theo person would use?

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.

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.

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.