Base iPhone is midrange device, not a flagship.

Why do you go there then? If you don’t, they won’t get their $3 out of you and universe is in balance again :-)

if that were not true, they wouldn’t be in business.

Why? They are not loosing anything while developers are gaining time using their website.

They had 66 million dollars revenue in 2021. They have about 20 million registered users (and much more unregistered, and that’s revenue not income, but let’s forget that). Do you really, honestly feel, that SO doesn’t save you $3 worth of time per year?

Because if he’s able to help anyone on SO, he very likely profited many, many times from free access to knowledge there before he got to this point. Given activity of average user he probably gained orders of magnitude more than he given.

I find rambling about money and compensation in such context distasteful.

SO provided platform which, while not perfect is used by millions of people. They aren’t overloaded with ads and dark patterns as many of the clones. If it’s worthless, why people are using it instead self hosted blogs for example?

Well guy complains about compensation for his “work”. I assume he’s ready to shell out a few dollars for when he’ll need it :-)

Would you prefer SO to be paid?

No company bigger than a few tens of people has principles. They have sales KPI, that go up or down depending on marketing campaigns.

If by “responsibly” you mean strip customers of privacy under old story of protecting children then sure.

Why are you manipulating people?

EU version has review process built-in. Anyways it’ll be hard to get more outdated than lightning.

They have to be certified by Mastercard/Visa, so no chance for open source. A few banks have their own implementation. Apart from mentioned samsung has its own version.

I see PLN 99.99.

In general I strongly prefer open source, because lots of propertiary software will try to vendor lock you and then extract money from you, when it’s hard to escape for you.

In this case however I can change back to Connect or other any second, so amount of control this program has is extremely minimal and experience in exchange is better.

Informed choice is better than picking and following dogma, because dogma doesn’t work in some cases.

Chinese company is buying Polish company. Where’s the place for FCC opinion here?

I don’t believe in ethical companies. Microsoft was cool once, then Google was cool, now some people seem to think that Apple is cool.

Best way to not get burnt is not to get vendor locked with one of them. Android allows me to install Firefox(real one, not Safari re-skin), replace launcher or even entire OS with Graphene. Google sucks in many ways, but if I’m not happy with them I just install software from another vendor. With ios I have to throw away half of the hardware I own.

I never wrote they are objectively inferior. I even admitted they can be marginally better in some areas. My point is they’ll vendor lock the hell out of you and the trade off isn’t worth it.

Meanwhile you wrote two walls of text to defend company that uses your children and technology worse than ICQ (released in 1996) to make you buy their products. You’re free to do so, but I’m not sure which one of us is salty :-)

Leaked emails indicate, they use iMessage to actively lock down users in their walled garden. This is area with literally zero innovation (or even regression) for past decade. At least.

Giving money to Apple basically equals to strangling innovation in exchange for getting (sometimes or even rarely) marginally better UX in boring, well explored areas.

Also once you are bought into their ecosystem you are stuck with some mediocre products like iPhone, because if you want alternative, you have to throw away watch, tv and speakers and then redo entire home automation due to lack of elementary interoperability.

Negative cash flow means they are spending more than they are earning.

It doesn’t mean they don’t have money already.

Nope