I’m trying to communicate with relatives of my partner while on holiday. We have iPhones, they all have Androids. We asked them to install “ChatGPT” because its voice mode is shockingly good at near-real-time translation.
When I type “ChatGPT” into the Apple App Store, the top hit is… drumroll… the very same, by OpenAI.
My uncle in law was struggling a bit on his phone and showed me what came up: a wall of fakes. Scam app after scam app, all with similar icons and similar names “GPT Talk”, “Chatty GTP”, and garbage like that.
Why would anyone want this?
Why would I prefer this?
Why would you… unless you’re an “app developer” working for… not the company that ought to be getting the first and only search result.
The problem here — specifically here on Hacker News — is that a lot of you work for those companies. Startups faking till they make it, engaging in guerrilla marketing, less then perfectly legal practices… hoping to be the next Uber or AirBnB by emulating them.
Politely, and with all due respect: Bugger off.
Your arguments come from unclean hands.
Most of the world likes the authority of the App Store.
If you don’t, if you’re vocal about “rules are bad!” it says volumes about you, not the rules and the people that enforce them.
The place where your uncle in law was finding scam apps was not some obscure website where he was downloading scam APKs. It was a centralized store from Google, just a poorly managed one.
I, for that matter, use Android. Not out of love for Google (much to the opposite, I despise them and everything they do), but out of a lack of alternative. I do value the freedom to at least use an alternative store (F-Droid), and a system that is not completely hostile to a user that has at least a semblance of an idea of what he is doing.
> the alternative to authority is anarchy.
No. Anarchy always devolves into authoritarianism. Those with the bigger stick will rule over the others through strength.
The only alternative to authority is the very imperfect freedom that comes with democracy. It sort of sucks, it is full of compromises, and is something that ensures that no one will be perfectly happy. But it's so much better than your desire to have a boot on your neck.