Dear Tim, I heard you read your emails

It has been four years now, and I don’t know how many times I started writing you an email, but I overthought too much the fact that there must be 1000s of others like me sending you emails every day. I never had the chance to be in direct contact with you so far.

I would appreciate if you could spare a few minutes of your time to read my thoughts below…

About eight years ago, I attended my first web development lecture at college. On the lecturer’s table laid a 15" MacBook Pro. The lecturer — for me — already seemed somehow unusual from the rest. His empathy towards his students (me included) was shocking to me. He made us feel like we’re all suddenly free to reach our goals and desires. His favourite tool — the MacBook Pro — surely played a big role that day, as he clearly explained the benefits that came along with it. From then on, the Internet somehow became a bit of my personal obsession, and so did my privacy, as a week later from that day I had purchased my first laptop: the little 13" MacBook Air. I promised my mother that one day I will earn the money back from itself.

A few months later, I had my first client and from that project I earned €400 more then I had spent on that Mac. I was impressed, and I wanted to learn more. Coming back to today, I have earned over €30,000 worth of web development work from that 13" MacBook Air. For this Tim, I sincerely thank you for what you keep doing at Apple.

…

I’m the one that turned most of my family towards using Apple products, not just for the great tools that come with it, or maybe the fact that I admired Steve’s work for the past decade of my life, but mostly because of privacy.

This year I’m starting to give up Tim. The Internet is growing to such a certain extent that we have companies like Facebook and Google (both having big interests in AI) that are abusing its power. They’re basically shoving users’ data around like dust, and we both know that the majority of the people around us use their services every day. Whether or not we use Apple products does not matter much anymore, and this is what frustrates me the most.

I’ve built web-products of my own and I’ve learned from my own mistakes. I’m soon launching an e-book I’ve been working on for a couple of years. I love teaching, as I want everyone else to have the same opportunities that I have. But along the way I found a lot of things on the Internet that are not so justice. Something has to change, and I spent these past few years writing down a vision, of what I’m becoming to think could be the next era of Internet browsing experience. I do wish I could just talk to you about it over a coffee…

Tim I can’t sum up everything I have in my mind. Today I skipped the office again, and decided to send you an email instead. I hate being infantilized, and I don’t like money driven companies that only look at their own benefits. I want to help make a dent in the Internet world so that together we show how the rest of us that use it everyday should be respected, but unfortunately, I’m constantly being drowned over and over before I can even see a change starting to happen anytime soon. Seems like every one else is living in the “Matrix” world now.

I don’t expect anything in return, and maybe this is me wanting everything to happen by yesterday. I wish you healthy years ahead, and I can’t explain how grateful I am to you and your team. You remind me that I’m not alone, and people still want to do real good in this world.

Best regards,

Owen

…

I think that one of the only reasons Apple only “supports” major updates for the web, and the fact that Google is leaps ahead of Apple on the “Internet of things”, is because they know it will inevitably cannibalize their own App Store. Apple has been always keen on keeping their own ecosystem integrated to their hardware as close as possible, but they also knew what would have happened to the iPod if they didn’t release the iPhone themselves first, and I feel that this very similar situation will happen to the App Store, and the Play Store — if you mind. On the contrary, I think that this will not effect Google at all, as their ecosystem is already pretty much open to everyone else, and this is the main reasons I think Google is a few steps ahead of Apple in integrating the Internet experience seamlessly with the rest of their mobile devices.

Why shouldn’t have Apple by now released an “Add to home screen” banner API? Or web push notifications API? Connection to blue-tooth API? The Internet has been an open-source community from the very start, and I guess some rules do not align well with Apple’s “internal” guidelines.

The Internet is only getting bigger and if we don’t define some kind of privacy, tracking rules, and standards now, things will only keep getting worse and harder to improve as time keeps ticking. I wouldn’t mind having to go through a few guidelines to be searched and visited online through some sort of “verified web-apps” interface. There is a lot that Apple can do to improve the Internet for the better, and to keep the competition hyped and challenged so that together we create the best Internet experience, and continue keeping it free, open-source, and available for everyone to learn, explore, and discover new opportunities.

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Dear Tim, I heard you read your emails was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.