Well of course - it's acidic.

Other things that will clean rust off metal: freshly squeezed orange juice, vinegar, tomato ketchup.

Sodium benzoate is not a carcinogen, either as the sodium salt or as the acid.

It is possible for the benzoate ion to react with vitamin C to form benzene (which is a carcinogen), but which is present in such low concentrations that there's really no solid science to state that "coke is a carcinogen" (since many sodas also contain vitamin C). When beverages were tested, coke changed the recipe for anything that caused a positive test over a few ppb. Of course, this is a nefarious scheme because they didn't yell about it.

I get it: big corporations don't ever do anything in the best interests of anyone but themselves and everything is a grand conspiracy.

It's not a straw man, it's the crux of the argument. My original argument centred on that.

You then asked what numbers were used to justify that and I pointed out it was metrics conduced by Apple on its customers and you then sarcastically dismissed them out of hand as untrustworthy - in other words, Apple is so untrustworthy that it can't trust its own data when making a decision about releasing an app on Android targeted at platform switchers.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to argue here? That Apple is bad? I understand that it's not enough that you just enjoy the platform that you have decided works for you but that you must bash opposing platforms as much as possible, but your arguments are not staying coherent.

Yes it does.

And as of iOS9 you can side load apps onto your device without paying as long as you build from source.

Where's the "-5 hilariously wrong" mod?

I think you just demonstrated that your dislike of a company is strong enough that you don't mind lying to spread FUD.

Today I learned that $0 is a paywall!

No wonder things are so expensive!

Of course Apple have a monopoly on their own products... I'm not sure how you can't see that this is obviously legal.

There's no legal problem with being the only store on a product that you sell, *especially* when Android makes up the bulk of the smartphone market.

So, "how that can even be legal" is that Apple are not a monopoly as far as smartphones are concerned, nor are they leveraging their non-monopoly position in one area to promote their business in another.

No, this is where the marketshare numbers fall down.

It is possible for Apple's marketshare to fall while still gaining switchers from Android *and* for Android's marketshare to rise because it's not a zero sum system. The total numbers of smartphones are still rising, with android taking the lion's share of them since they have the whole market segment to aim at and not just the premium end.

People switching back to iPhone will not necessarily increase Apple's share relative to Android if even more people buy an Android phone who didn't have a smartphone before - the figures for total phones sold year on year bear this out.

And yes, your exact quote was "Yeah, of course we should blindly trust these numbers." - numbers that specifically tell Apple (collected by themselves and other polling services) about what *they* should do.

The question purely becomes "do you trust that Apple's choice to release a migration app is a genuine use of funds and effort, or is it part of some grand conspiracy designed to make it look like people are buying iPhones" ?

So?

How does that affect the metric of "number of new iPhone users who used a non-iPhone"?

Apple has collected this data. It has talked about this data. It has shown this data during keynotes. They obviously believe that there are enough Android>iOS switchers out there to make the release of a migration app worthwhile (or at the very least, officially support the one that has been on the Play store for some time - it is effectively a licenced version with official Apple artwork and support).

It doesn't matter how many total android phones there are relative to iPhones. It doesn't matter how many people are switching away from iPhone. The piece of data that is necessary to evaluate whether a migration app is worth it is how many people are migrating to your platform.

Well, since you forgot to log in I can see why you'd have trouble understanding that the metric by which to judge whether to release a migration app is the number of people who have migrated to your platform from another platform, which is data you can easily collect (and has been shown during WWDC keynotes on slides), rather than the raw marketshare numbers for that rival platform, regardless of what you believe the status of the Holy Platform War to be.

Keep up, kid! It's not difficult, at least for those of average intelligence.

But the size of the Android market itself is not the important metric - everyone knows it is large. The issue is whether Apple thinks it is worth making a migration app - the only thing that will tell them if this is worthwhile is the figure for "what was your previous phone before this iPhone?" survey answer, which Apple knows.

The reason for that figure is immaterial - either way, Apple sells lots of iPhones and the total is seeming to rise regularly - and it wants to make the experience of owning one good for all of its customers.

I'm not 100% on the details yet - it seems to have been mentioned on AnandTech during the iOS9 roundup and reviews - I'm sure someone will provide more official details soon. There was no fanfare from Apple about it, so it might ultimately turn out to be an error with Xcode. I am hoping not.

Xcode has always been free, of course, and this new development (if accurate and not misquoted) is clearly designed to encourage app development, and even if true will be limited to those with a Mac or the ability to run Xcode in a VM.

Wow, the Apple Hate is strong in this one!

Who cares if you trust the numbers. Apple clearly trusts the numbers enough to write and publish an app for the Google Play store because it believes it will be worth the effort (whatever small effort it costs them to assign people to develop and test it).

I'm not sure what your point is here? Apple has said that an increasing number of iPhone buyers are coming from Android (something it mentioned after the 6 and 6+ launch, and which seems to be continuing) and so it decided to release a migration tool.

I know it's hard not to try and frame this as some sort of Holy Platform War, but there's really nothing more to it than a company that sells a product that has identified that a migration tool is worth the effort to develop.

Apple's numbers from polling people who buy iPhones. They have been tracking this for several years and have determined that an increasing number of people buying iPhones are switching from Android.

The overall numbers of Android phones sold worldwide is irrelevant - only the proportion of iPhone users who were using something other than iOS on their previous phone.

It's no surprise that Android phones outsell iPhones overall - Android phones cover the whole gamut from premium to basic, while iPhone is only in the premium category.

More than you think. Apple's own numbers are showing that there are still a lot of people switching, hence the release of the app. It will likely tail off somewhat now that the sizes of the iPhone are set - they had a lot of converts when they released the 6 and 6+ last year.