3mo ago

Apple facing near-£3bn UK lawsuit over cloud storage ‘monopoly’

www.theguardian.com Apple facing near-£3bn UK lawsuit over cloud storage ‘monopoly’

Which? claims firm engaged in anti-competitive practices that led to 40 million people ‘being overcharged’

Apple is facing a near-£3bn lawsuit over claims it breached competition law by effectively locking millions of UK consumers into its cloud storage service at “rip-off” prices.

35 comments

Would be cool if this results in being able to store the Photos library in Nextcloud. Not holding my breath though.
- You can already set up your photos to automatically save in Nextcloud? With Nextcloud sync client’s auto-upload feature? I have photos on phone and Nextcloud only.
  
  Meeeeh, that sucks though compared to iCloud. I haven’t tried it but it seems like it will upload only and not download, and it will not store the entire Photos database (including faces, etc.).

They are a TRILLION DOLLAR company. They aren't flinching.
- They are not a trillion dollae revenue company, not to defend them but it would still hurt. Assuming 50% of the UK population is paying £2 a month for 1tb of storage that £70m a month which is £840m a year. The fine would be three and half years earnings on this product.
  
  Wait - you can get 1tb for £2 there?
  I wouldn't mind as much if it was that price.

My sister was telling me she saves space by deleting attachments from texts, but on the screen to do that, you have to select each one individually... There is no select all button...
But if you buy iCloud, it magically resolves the issue and your phone has free space again. Talk about friction points and abusing their position as makers of the os
- Dan Olsen on Folding Ideas talked about Fortnite and a bunch of the dark patterns that they do in regular mode until you pay:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0
  He called it "manufactured discontent".

Not getting it. There’s nothing stopping you from storing your photos in Amazon Photos, or Google photos, or Dropbox, or whatever.
- This is false. Apple OS's contain numerous blockers and friction points that not only stop users from storing much of their data in other clouds, but prevent competitors from being able to develop them at all. Apple does this via elevated privileges/processes and proprietary API's available ONLY to Apple's own local apps and cloud servers, for example:
  If you backup your photos to iCloud, everything happens in the background with elevated priviliges and "just works".
  If you backup your photos to ANY other provider, they run in a separate sandboxed process which doesn't "just work" because the OS can kill it at any time, meaning users often need to leave 3rd party apps open for their photos to sync at all.
  This is the same for every 2nd/3rd party service in comparison to Apple/iCloud across Apple OS's. Nobody can develop a true competitor for anyone who purchased Apple hardware as Apple has access to a range of processes, services, and API's which are not available to external developers. You can't boot up an iphone and set Backblaze B2 or Amazon S3 as your authoritative cloud data or backup provider. You must use iCloud, or you get an inferior experience – not because of any technical limitation, but specifically because Apple designed non-Apple integrations to be inferior.
- Except the API non-neutrality.
  Only Apple applications are allowed to operate in the background. Element (Matrix chat application) actually had to disable its app showing up in the share context menu because the encryption method breaks when it was used.
  I don't know what features Apple photos or files have, but other apps wouldn't be able to do background downloads (downloading files added to a folder by another device,) on-device photo digestion (apple photos classifies what is in your photos and what text is in them in the background for privacy reasons,) and similar things.
  Edit: and yes I know that there's a background refresh toggle, but it doesn't work. It just straight up doesn't work. That feature is entirely up to the OS when it wants to schedule that "background refresh". In my experience it never does.
  Edit 2: Also, only Apple storage integrates directly with the photos app and files app. And that only one comes preinstalled.
  
  Is this the feature you’re saying doesn’t work?
  https://developer.apple.com/documentation/backgroundtasks
- It’s also not just about photos. If you want to do automatic backup of your phone you can only do that with iCloud. Otherwise you have to connect your phone to a computer and do a manual backup with iTunes/Finder. Apple even killed off automatic local wifi backups by forcing you to enter your unlock code every time you trigger a backup via iTunes/Finder.
- From the top of my head, you need to keep those apps open in the foreground if you want to sync your photos/files, while iCloud does it automatically on the background for you, showing that iCloud has an unfair advantage over the rest.

I don't get it. I mean, their free tier is a bit chintzy, but I give 'em a dollar a month and get 50GB. You can get 2TB for 3 bucks. This hardly seems a ripoff.
- For me (europe) it is:
  2,99 = 50GB
  9,99 = 2TB
  Everyone with a family or social life has between 20-200GB photos and videos. Notice how there is no plan for 5,99 = 1TB. You either do not back up everything and pay 3€, or you pay a tener per month to have a cloud storage that is always 50-70% empty but still have to pay for.
  I will be the first to leave Apple iCloud if there is a viable solution that works like apples own OS integration without jumping through hoops and losing albums and meta data
- I don't get it either, what does perceived affordability have to do with a "monopoly"?
  
  It's not the price that is the problem, it's how iCloud is integrated into the device, in a way Apple don't allow other cloud services to do. iCloud has access other apps simply do not, so they cannot compete fairly.
- It’s $3 per month for 200GB for me currently in the US.

35 comments