Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store
theverge.com
theverge.com
"Take the power back" by not continuing to give them your money.
Google makes money off of advertising. Apple makes money, in part, off of taxing apps. If Apple can't tax apps, then suddenly their business model isn't nearly as appealing, and they start needing to make changes to keep things profitable -- things like maybe selling more of your data, or "encouraging" you to upgrade by not supporting older phones as well.
This whole discussion always makes me angry because right now I have a choice: I can choose to buy a product supported by app taxes, or I can choose to buy a product supported by spying on me. If Apple is forced to allow other app stores, and thus forced to look for other business models to remain profitable, I may not have that choice any more.
If Fortnite doesn't like it, why don't they just charge 50% more for the app on iOS? If people complain, just show them the math, so they know that it's the Apple Tax making things more expensive. I'm happy to pay 30% more for apps.
It all holds well too, until you realise, however, that Apple is sitting on 200 billion dollars in cash.
Also: Epic did actually give an option to pay less for their microtransactions if you paid them directly, and were about to refund people for their transactions in the past month for the Apple tax itself. Their rebellion is the main reason Apple retaliated like this.
how does that negate the given points? These 200b is an indicator of a healthy business that can survive major downturns for a long period of time, which should be much more appealing that an open credit line and piles of debt in accounting tables, so much prevalent in the industry nowadays.
The issue is that Apple would be still be comfortably profitable at a much lower and less predatory level of Apple-tax-rate. They are fundamentally not entitled to the profits of the companies who have to be on their market. The value they provide to the developers and customers collectively for simply hosting and reviewing these apps is not 30%. As other commenters have pointed out, they are willing to pay a portion of this extra 30% if and only if it goes to the people who build the applications. It's not a supply-demand mismatch issue, it's overreach and exploitation.
On the other hand, I don't quite get what your point is about Apple being a healthy business or them not accumulating debt (which is arguably wrong, Apple has ~91,807,000,000 USD in long-term debt (out of 142B USD in non-current liabilities)). I don't think that is relevant here, let alone discounts my point about the excessive profits they've accumulated.
that's not how markets work. Apple is absolutely entitled to charge whatever amount of money they wish, firstly because other companies engage into trade with Apple voluntarily and no one is forcing companies into App Store, they enter it because they know they are going to make money there, and secondly because if Apple is not entitled to this money by their right of ownership of the platform that millions of customers find outstanding, everyone else is even less entitled to own and dispose of these earnings.
It is also up to Apple shareholders to decide what is comfortably profitable.
As for the debt that you mention, accounting doesn't work that way either. Their total long-term and current operational debt as of 2020 can be paid in full, by the half of their immediately available disposable cash. This IS a prime example of a healthy business.
How about the money they make selling iPhones?
But at the same time, do not pretend that there are not any alternatives. Yes, perhaps those alternatives are not as convenient, but choosing them over the "wrong" choice should be an equal part of the fight.
And "Live in a hut"? Please do not be overly maudlin. We are talking consumer electronics here - something that is still considered luxury - not fundamental philosophies of life or economic models of society.
I disagree. A smartphone is a necessity in this current era. If for example your government requires you to install a Covid tracing app, what choice do you have besides Apple and Android (both of which removed Fortnite)?
You can't meaningfully participate in society without access to the Internet, especially during a pandemic.
Just a few weeks ago there were a bit of news where you could not sign up for a corona test unless you had the bank verififed identification smartphone app installed. When the local government in charge of testing was interviewed, they said that for people without the app they would help them install it. Problem solved.
Some luxury products are very different to other luxury products.
But I know too many people who are very vocal about how Apple is bad and how they should be stopped, and yet these people keep buying a new iThing every year.
I was merely trying to point out that people tend to put too much emphasis in being safely vocal (online, where you're sitting safely in your own home) against bad behavior, and not enough emphasis in actually not rewarding said bad behavior. For many, the latter option is not even present in their mind anymore.
It shows three situations, two of which depict normal progress ("there is this useful thing that has flaws because nobody has cared enough to fix those flaws, let's try"; Mr. Gotcha's burn is out of line), and one depicts standard corporate behavior ("a brand is willfully behaving in several ways that the society knows is abusive, and fans of that brand are willfully blind towards that)"; Mr. Gotcha's burn is very much deserved).
In short, one of these things is not like the others.
Even if you go the route of sacrificing your social life for these principles nothing will change - you are just a single lost sale amongst billions. Having people talk about the problems might actually spark change. What does pointing out this alleged "hypocrisy" achieve, besides making yourself feel smarter/superior?
The linked comic talks about underpaid factory workers in China - every company that sells smartphones suffers from this to some extend because tracking down supply chains many links in becomes very difficult. It is not so easy to determine with 100% certainty where the guy that sold you the refined metal for the CPU chip got his unrefined metal from. Apple has actually made big efforts in attempting to eradicate slave/child labor [1] - so if you care about human rights of labourers in third world countries you should probably buy an iPhone.
None of this is black and white, both Google and Apple have tons of problems. If you say "don't buy Apple if you don't support walled gardens", then someone else will say "don't buy Google if you don't support extensive privacy invasion". There is no correct choice - you can only fight the specific problems.
[1] https://www.voanews.com/archive/apple-wins-global-award-effo...
This was not unusual in the late 90s.
I guess that's what's going to change more and more in our future. Just like apps/programs, movies, books, music tracks were our properties.
Where I am the loan would be on the purchasing money, so technically you own the device, but would have to pay your carrier the remaining price + some penalty if you needed to stop the contract, or give back the device + penalty if you are not in a position to pay. The device stays with you after the loan/contract period is done.
There is still the carrier lockin, so you can't change carrier willy-nilly before the loan is paid, but that wouldn't stop you from selling your phone to someone else using the same carrier for instance.
You can still finance the phone at a subsidized rate but the deals are with leasing.
Telus has "bring it back". You pay 0$ upfront for the phone, but do pay an additional recurring monthly fee for the phone.
After 2 years you bring the phone back. If u want to keep it you have to pay for the remaining cost of the device.
If I just financed it, lower end or older phones would be $0 upfront, but high end phones be paying $500 as an example upfront on top of the financed recurring fees.
Rogers has "upfront edge" where you pay 0$ upfront for a top end device. You have to return at 2 years.
Bell does the same thing with "device return options Lower upfront costs. The choice is yours: at the end of the 2-year term, you have the option to return your smartphone in good working condition, upgrade if you wish, or keep it and pay back the Device Return Option deferral amount.
Very much leasing.
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2020/8/13/21368079/for...
But I do wonder, can and _would_ you do payments in a non store app with their own payment provider? E.g. the fortnite you have downloaded and installed outside of the play store?
There won't be anymore than what the web already has. Stripe or Paypal would likely be popular choices. Payment processors are required by law to be PCI compliant, though that doesn't guarantee they are.
Yes I would do payments in a non app store app with their own payment provider if I felt I trusted the app. It's no different than paying on any website (there's no Apple review process for websites).
At this point it's just like any software on your computer, you can pay outside of it, and use a code or similar to indicate you paid for it.
It's only a matter of convenience to want to pay in-app. It can also be a lock-in strategy from the developer - and this is what this whole thread is about.
They've explicitly stated this in their marketing: "There's an app for that."
30% is laughable, long term.
Not even a "one more thing" cut to 29%, lol, ever!
Not so much when you're slapping 30%, kicking back, and resting your feet up on the table.
Sure, the App Store and its services however are not the user's property.
What makes you think that 3% cut is enough?
But Apple can ask whatever they want. They can't block side-loading though. That's the uncompetitive part.
You can run your store and pick whatever terms you like. You can't use your marketshare in hardware sales to bundle a forced store.
Imagine Tesla charging you 30% of any grocery shopping (i.e. would refuse to open the doors if the store didn't share 30% of its gross revenue).
I mean, its literally, textbook anti-competitive. The App Store as a store isn't competing fairly, on its own merits.
Also keep in mind, that this whole getting raped with transaction fees is a 'america-only' thing. This is much better regulated in the rest of the world.
Specifically the costs are fixed, so anything that is a percentage is just fucking nonsense. It doesn't cost more to charge 5 euro's than it does to charge 1 euro. It uses the same electricity, the same personel costs. There is a point where its get more expensive because of risk management, but thats above 100 euro per transaction.
Percentages on transactions are generally only allowed when its a loan. Which is why Americans are always buying things with credit cards ("loaning the money"). Most people pay for things with their own money, not with a loan. (i.e. direct bank transfer). And those transactions have a fixed transaction costs. Worst case 1 euro (low-volume, your personal webshop) all the way down to 5 euro cent (high-volume, i.e. the supermarket).
So explain to me where the hell you get your 3% from? You just sound like an already boiled frog saying 'are you sure we can survive in cold water?'
Yeah, the government has a monopoly on that.
> I can see private companies doing the same.
You must be American then. This is where all this friction comes from. Corporations aren't people, nor should they be government.
This is not because the people who work there are bad people or something, but because they are legally binded to do whatever maximizes profits. They are by definition not operating in the common good (they are not supposed to!). There is no democratic oversight.
You can imagine companies doing the same. As a European, i can't. It's a problem. And its fake innovation anyway. Where is the America that did real research and real innovation? That put people on the moon? These days all you guys are good for is 'bussiness model innovations'. Ways to cheat, extort or externalize the costs. Quality of life is just going downhill the more of these type of products one uses. Technology is regressing.
You can't. You can't know if whatsapp was replaced with whatsapp that syphon your data.
"Don't side load then." is a poor argument.
Side loading is not the same as installing apps as a developer for testing.
2nd, sure you need a passcode etc to accept the install, this every-now-n-then gets by passed.
They're not just a payment provider though. They offer infrastructure, promotion, a huge locked-in userbase with the means to pay for software, etc
30% of revenue is like taxes, you can build infrastructure for a country.
Payment processing alone would cost Apple that much. You easily lose 1.5%-2% in payment fees and another 2% in handling fraud and customer support queries about payments.
For example, if a payment for an app is $1.99, Apple now takes $0.60. If a customer calls support to ask a question about the purchase it can cost anywhere from $15 to $30 in call center fees, so it takes 50 purchases to make good on that. If you lower that to a $0.06 take apple would have to make 500 sales for every phone call to support.
People don't realise good customer support is very expensive.
Epic would like to proccess these themselves. They dont want apple to turn on their economic output. When you charge money for the work others do -- that's like communism.
This discussion is about Epic charging for in-app things outside of Apple's control. So apple can't use the argument that they have costs (support, payment) for those transactions.
If I buy a hat in the Epic store (and pay to epic) I don’t see why it would be very different.
Should it matter if I make the purchase in Safari or in another app?
Also: let’s forget the apps for a while. Assume I buy a navigation app for $10 on the App Store and then I visit a website and purchase gps maps for 3 countries to use in the app, for $100 each. Apple isn’t involved in that transaction. Should they claim a cut of the $300 because I can use the maps in the app?
Accept what is and don't buy stuff you don't need. Hopefully we learn this before something worse than covid destroys all.
Also it's very hard task to keep a good eco system running, both Google and Apple do their best here. Most organisations crumble from the inside at their size.
Hey, actually several companies reached a size where they have the stability to offer the same service to most part of the world and it allows us to communicate basically free. We also have gadgets that is super duper advanced in our pockets. Embrace that give them some slack. Lead them by example and create a counter culture that takes all the good parts and makes them better. You got a silver plate of goodies, anyone in the past would trade that spot with you in an instance.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2018/01/06/apples-ap...
I wonder if auction based app store costs are a possible solution to the increasing developer frustration with Apple? Self Assessed Licenses Sold via Auction across many marketplaces may help combat monopoly.
I can see Apple (with their privacy angle) moving towards facilitating users selling their data/data unions. Perhaps some other radical-liberalism ideas could come through too.
https://www.radicalxchange.org/concepts/
https://blog.radicalxchange.org/blog/posts/millennials-zoome...
Apple App Store customers are NOT blind sheeple afraid of freedom; I am NOT interested in having a phone that can run any and all software! The industry has proven it cant be trusted, so I pay Apple to gatekeep that for me.
If you still dont get that, I dont know what to tell you...
All developers are scummy and trying to make a living without paying 30% of your earnings to the platform is just too much to ask.
Even though YOU purchased the device YOU don't want to be able to run any and all applications, even when YOU might really really want to, full stop. Apple should own what YOU can do on your device, and since YOU said it, EVERYONE should just agree to it.
Heck, do one better and install Ubuntu mobile.
A few of us see the road of fragmentation and shady businesses and currently trust one company, Apple.
Well, at least you included "currently" in your remark.
Oh please. Nobody who actually uses Apple feels that way. Though I agree they should allow a way to sideload apps.
One of the downsides of being primarily an iOS dev is not being able to participate in activities like game-jams because there's no way to casually share my stuff with other users.
> Taking a cut of say, 3%, to keep the app store running is forgivable. But 30%
Do you know how much Google, Microsoft, Steam and Epic themselves take from sales on their stores?
Apple protects its users better than the other major players. Their privacy and accessibility features alone are unparalleled, and they do a lot to curtail scummy developer practices. The entities which Apple protects users from are often the ones crying foul.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24154647 and similar comments:
> the magnitude of this is not immediately apparent unless you’ve worked in an agency / freelanced building iOS applications. You have no idea how many user-hostile and abusive things I’ve seen blown completely out of the water with the golden phrase "Apple won’t allow that". It wins arguments in favour of the user instantly and permanently.
> I’ve run up against Apple’s capricious review process more times than I can count, so I’ve got more reason than most to complain about it. But it’s impossible for me to argue that these rules don’t help the user when I’ve personally seen it happen so many times. It’s a double-edged sword to be sure, and I believe the best way of balancing things in favour of the end-user is to be more open than Apple is, but there are undeniable benefits to the user with the current system.
Apple uses techniques from totalitarian regimes. They decide, judge and control everything. There's no freedom at all. You can only use what Apple decide you can use. But it does provide some kind of safety, or at least a feeling of safety (there will always be security flaws). After, is it a good thing?
In that sense, its worth it to me.
I can tell you that across all my devices I don't think any malicious apps made its way there neither (as for you with your ios device, I will never be entirely sure). And this, without apple random reviews.
Which is excellent. Apple taking a cut for apps I have no problem with. They have support, I trust them with privacy/security and so on. That costs money.
The interesting discussion is how much apple can claim to own a part of profits made in the apps, by selling content (in-app purchases).
On one hand: if a game is free for a trial, and you can unlock the full game I think that should count as an app purchase (the alternative would be to not have in-app upgrades and just have 2 apps, which was a worse situation).
But on the other hand: if I buy a recipe app for $10 and then recipes for $1 a piece which I could also buy on the corresponding website, then I don't think apple should have a cut at all.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/30/18120577/valve-steam-gam...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-windows-10-sweetene...
No one is angry about cuts from app prices (or prices that are effectively upgrades of an app e.g. from trial to full).
What I'm angry about is when apple wants X% of the price of content whhen they don't produce the content, they don't process the transaction. All they do is host the store where the $0 client app sits. I don't think it makes sense.
And Epic takes 15%, (some of which goes to Epic's 40% owner Tencent).
Ah that sounds like a fair point at first, but it could be argued that you gained access to those sales because of Apple.
More importantly, they're processing payments for you, and every payment processor out there takes a cut, one way or the other.
I did get access to a market/users via the store but I still don’t think that makes Apple eligible for a cut of sales in all apps that they don’t process.
Jokes aside, I'm sure you can find processors charging < 2% for customers with high volume. But you're right, it's certainly not standard. Maybe 2-4% is a more accurate range.
Point stands that it's a lot lower than 30%.
How does the Windows Store and Xbox Marketplace work?
What about Epic's own games store?
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/windows
Windows/Android are different because the operating system itself is the product. People don't necessarily buy a Google phone or a Microsoft desktop, but they can still buy and run the operating system separately from the physical product.
The question is: if Apple should be forced to open up the iPhone ecosystem, why shouldn't Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo be forced to open up their systems for third party stores? Why are they allowed to take a mandatory cut from anyone that wants to publish on their platform, but Apple is not? To me it seems like a double standard if only Apple is forced to open up, but Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo are not.
Perhaps all hardware that is sold should be open and customisable, and I should be able to install a fresh OS on any piece of hardware I buy. That makes sense to me, but then that doesn't actually solve the problem at all. People will still buy an iPhone and use iOS, so now the OS itself needs to be open in some way. How do you write any of this in law at all?
On an iPhone, apple has made plenty of money already.
In any case, the main thing here is not the 30% that they charge when you buy the software, is that they want to keep getting 30% for the services and such, which is crazy.
That seems directly comparable. The store wouldn't have any sales without the mall's infrastructure so it seems like they would be owed a cut of everything that happens in the store
I consider Amazon and the Apple App store to be not like stores or malls but like streets or cities. They are the market, not in the market, and if someone wants to enter the market they have to pay Apple/Amazon for the privilege. They bought/built the street and now instead of charging a cut they are charging a tax.
On the other hand, if they offer a recipe app for free (because it contains no recipes, and let's face it, that's how you get quick user interest), then purchase recipes for $1.x each to cover the amortised app creation cost, you're basically just sidestepping the app store cut by any other name.
The dominant ios business model for apps currently is a basic version free to download, bigger functionality unlocked via in app purchase. Up front app costs are fading.
The first I think is obviously right the second is insane (and in between there are an infinite number of cases).
I don’t think the status quo is acceptable though.
>Apple protects its users better than the other major players.
If "other major players" are the baseline, then nothing is going to improve. They all stink.
For example, think why apple made it super easy to approve auto renewing payments but made it so hard to unsubscribe (which is hidden deep in settings).. if that's not dark UX then I don't know what is? Lots of scammy apps make use of this. Do they get removed from the app store inspite of all their negative reviews and customer complaints? mostly not.. best case, takes months..
I think this sentence means you agree with the comment you're replying to. That's basically all Apple needs to do, if you can install apps in a way that doesn't involve Apples store then they can do and charge whatever they want with it.
The only reason people have a problem with Apples 30% cut and review restrictions is because there's no other option.
Nice job of misinformation right there! Apple should send you a check for that one! Let me quote you the article we are commenting on:
> Apple has removed Epic Games’ battle royale game Fortnite from the App Store after the developer on Thursday implemented its own in-app payment system that bypassed Apple’s standard 30 percent fee
How many of the one you named did the same? Weird how it's 0 right?
Okay now let bring something you said yourself, how many of them block side loading, which is a great way to bypass this? Again 0.
A fee for a service is perfectly fine, you are the only one trying to argue anything about this. What we are arguing is that Apple is forcing people to pay that fee, even though there's perfectly valid alternative that can be done, and that this practice is wrong. None of the company you are citing does that.
This would suggest that Apple is shooting itself in the foot—which is exactly the opposite of antitrust policy. Put simply: Apple’s behavior seems to be hurting itself and benefiting competitors (Samsung/Google) which, broadly speaking, would seem like an uphill battle for anyone arguing to open up the iOS ecosystem.
IMO the fact that both processors kicked them off strengthens their case, because it's a strong argument in favour of oligopoly.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/13/21368363/epic-google-fort...
It's not like anyone going to switch phones because your app is not on there. Your app is just one of many other apps I use on my phone.
Developers are very much looking at this the wrong way - the 30% fee is the price developers must pay to access Apples customers.
If I could get all the games and educational apps we use on the iPad on another platform, I would ditch Apple in a heartbeat.
That's my bugbear with Apple, If I own a iPhone I should be able to install software from any source - even if it is risky.
Despite what many folks say, the App Store review process doesn't protect from bad developer behavior. See the various controversies surrounding social media apps that used many shady tracking techniques. And those apps are among the most popular... you'd think they would be "reviewed" more thoroughly!
How well do Apple, Google, Microsoft perform against that perfect system? What resources do they dedicate to the task?
There's apparently some ways for malware to avoid detection. So yet another arms race whackamole.
Frankly, as a noob consumer, it's exhausting. It definitely impacts my spending.
FWIW, one of my besties worked on an audit tool which runs apps in a sandbox, screening for malware and whatnot. My impression was that it was a lot of effort for little reward.
In conclusion, sorry for braindump, thank you for reading this far:
Freemium will be sidelined into its own wasteland. Like that recent piece about journalism: "truth is expensive, lies are free."
Critically, if I was able to sideload apps, Apple wouldn't charge 90%, because then no developer would ever use the store. A central repository of curated, vetted apps is a key selling point for the iPhone. Apple will want to maintain that feature, as they should, but they have to put in the work to compete.
And in the case I agree the Phone should not be able to side load Apps. It is locked precisely because it is a Phone. And there would be 100x fewer support calls just because of that . Remember there are 1 Billion iPhone users. I can bet 900M of them dont even know what HN or programming.
I am wondering if Apple shoudl allow iPad to side load App, given iPad is more like PC working in Tablet form factor. And release an iPad Nano.
I mean if customer really think they should have side load Apps they would buy the Nano.
( That is of course ignoring the complexity of line up )
Personally I dont want the hassle of supporting people side loading apps and then calling for help. I would much rather Apple keep it the current way.
And I have no problem with Games being charged 30% cut.
But for some reason I think Apps and other Services should be charged 15% of less. Given Apple already split the Apps and Gaming Section in the App Store. I dont see this would be a problem.
But really why not talk about how we think things should work on platforms like iOS? What should the law be? What protects essential human rights, encourages creativity, and allows business to function to some extent?
Personally, I would argue that consumers should have a legal right to install whatever software they wish on a product they have purchased, including onto the bundled operating system. I don't think it should be permissible for a company like Apple (or Microsoft or whoever) to sell me a gadget and then use various sorts of locks to try to keep me from putting whatever apps or app stores or services I like on it.
Does anyone have any argument for why this right would be a bad thing? People would get bad software on their phones, but last I checked, this is happening already, including on iOS. Apple would lose some margin, but last I checked, their investment in creating and maintaining iOS has been handsomely rewarded and would surely continue to be.
Yes, I have. You put unnecessary limits on our freedom to agree on certain contracts.
Hence your measures are authoritarian, you try to restrict my freedom. In my opinion it's unethical to restrict people's freedom to make contracts willingly, if it hurts not any third party.
As a consumer, I think apple is doing the right thing, and I totally agree on their terms. We both, Apple and I, agree on what an ipnone is and how it works.
If you don't like it, there is a plethora of other OS: sailfish, mer, postmarket, android, use them.
As for apple, yes it asks for 30% fee, and it builds a walled garden. But they also offer what others don't: 8 years of support. I'm totally agree to have a walled garden (convenient enough for me), if I could use my phone for 8 years instead of 2-3 as in the Android case.
One of the reasons they support their devices for so long is that the earn on the ecosystem. With the laws you propose they would be incentivized to sell more phones supporting them less, turning iphone into another short term phone, like any android one.
Hence you would significantly diminish the choice, hurting me, the consumer.
If Apple allowed sideloading then you're experience would be 100% identical. You would have the freedom to continue using the App Store just like you do today and have a nice curated experience. Contracts would continue to work just like they do today. The thing is, the rest of us would have -more- freedom as we could, optionally and of our own accord, use apps outside of the App Store as well. Nobody is harmed and everyone is happy. Everyone either has the same amount of or more freedom and safety.
1) Apple allows sideloading, you still can use Cydia, they just don't help you with that.
2) No, because read my post carefully:
> As for apple, yes it asks for 30% fee, and it builds a walled garden. But they also offer what others don't: 8 years of support. I'm totally agree to have a walled garden (convenient enough for me), if I could use my phone for 8 years instead of 2-3 as in the Android case.
> Nobody is harmed and everyone is happy.
No. Learn how incentives work.
Though you could easily upload your soft by simply paying $99 for a dev profile.
If it was possible to side-load apps, then those advantages go out the window. To see what I'm talking about, look at apps that are skirting the apple app store.
Onavo is a good example. They:
- paid teens
- to install the Facebook Enterprise Certificate
- to side-load the Onavo VPN
- to spy on their internet traffic
- to find out about new apps or websites that might be a threat to facebook (among other things)
(VPNs and provisioning profiles are sort of an exception to this, because they can escape the sandbox, but a) the number of scary warnings presented by the system should be enough to limit their impact, and b) they will also continue to exist separately from the app store issue).
There's also:
- App store guidelines on what is and is not permissible in different cases
- Restrictions against using private APIs
- Restrictions against jailbreaking the device
There are a variety of VPN apps available on iOS. Why was Onavo blocked? Because it violated the guidelines on the use of the information, which is the kind of thing that it difficult to automate.
Restrictions against using private APIs are semi-automated, and would be difficult to completely automate.
The fact that you can't get an iOS app that jailbreaks the device in order to do whatever it wants is in part due to human review - if one existed in the store, it would get pulled, and the developer cert would get revoked. Jailbreaks exist, and human review in the app store is one way they are mitigated.
I for one remember the bad old days when playing a CD could (and did!) install a rootkit.
I haven't done enough iOS development to know for sure, but I'm assuming Apple could prevent private API usage by apps through technical means, rather than just app review.
And also because, once you’re jailbroken, you can setup software to automatically resign the app on-device every few days, so you never need a computer again.
This, of course, is a catch-22. You need to run an app to allow unsigned apps, but that app can't run if it isn't signed.
---
† The community makes a distinction between "tethered", "semi-tethered", and "semi-untethered" jailbreaks. The jailbreak I described above is "semi-untethered". You really couldn't come up with terminology more prone to getting mixed up...
Software isn't even installed, new versions are downloaded daily or more so the concept of sandboxing as been throughly tested and proven effective for those 27 years.
Nope, sandboxing is largely orthogonal to performance.
And that's before we get into resource usage.
Apple should build a better sandbox, the idea that "private APIs" exist and the only thing stopping them from being used is a basic string search on the app store review is pretty horrifying.
So what's the other option? Just don't offer your games at all on a platform like iOS, and people need to own multiple smartphones just to get all the apps and games they want?
It doesn't seem like a solution.
I'm not forced to use FDroid just because I have an Android phone. People aren't arguing that the app store should go away, just that consumers should have a choice.
As an analogy, if I want OEM care for my car, I can get that. It's more expensive, but it offers me strict guarantees about where parts are coming from, and I don't need to worry so much that I'll get substandard care.
The existence of a third-party marketplace doesn't change anything about that situation other than forcing the OEMs to compete more and push their advantages and commitment to quality.
The current situation seems more anti-business than anti-consumer (it is both). Pro-consumer would be requiring any purchase be decoupled from that distribution platform.
A lot of people credit Steam (I think justifiably) with kickstarting a huge portion of the modern indie gaming scene -- precisely because they got rid of the crazy rules, agreements, and contracts of the retail boxes, which acted as a massive barrier to entry for game developers. If Steam had never been built, I don't think modern games would be even half as diverse or creative as they are.
Then we move on to storefronts like Humble and GoG, which I think have been hugely influential in pushing DRM-free games as the norm for indies. There are a lot of games that flat-out would not have DRM-free releases if GoG didn't exist. Heck, there are a lot of games that would not run on modern Windows if GoG didn't exist.
Then we move on to Epic's store, which I know gamers hate, but trust me when I say a lot of indie developers are thrilled right now to see someone forcing Steam to lower their splits. Epic has done some serious good for the indie scene. I don't like that they're encouraging exclusives, I think that's bad for gamers. But I'm not going to pretend that as a developer I'm not happy to see someone breaking Steam's stranglehold on the mainstream PC marketplace.
So yeah, there are a lot of PC stores. This has been a massive boon to the industry, there are a lot of excellent games that (I think) would not exist today if not for the diversity of marketplaces. And a lot of these marketplaces fill different niches. GoG focuses on older games, Steam offers mainstream AA titles, Uplay/Origin offer corporate AAA titles, Itch has all the really weird, creative "true-indy" stuff.
No single PC store is expansive enough to cover all of the niches of the entire market.
Even on the console side of things, the diversity of games on the PC has pushed console manufacturers to offer much wider selections of games. Are you happy that basically every indie developer and their dog is releasing their game for the Switch? A big part of that is Nintendo opening up the development process, and they did that because after the Wii U they realized that they needed to pull indie devs away from the PC to stay competitive.
And on PC, what's actually the problem with this? You can basically ignore all of the other platforms and just download your games from Steam. You can opt out of all of the complexity that you dislike.
Sure, you'll miss out on a few exclusives if you do. But you would have missed out on many of those exclusives with a unified storefront anyway, because a lot of those games just wouldn't have been created if there weren't stores that were a good fit for them to sell on. You'll miss out on just as many games if you decide to stick with curated console storefronts.
Steam and its alternatives brought conveniences to the developers by providing easy advertisement, a streamlined way of delivering patches, an actual digital store to perform transactions, and also more recently started to serve as a major platform for the communities of many games.
I am not a game developer, but I guess that nothing that these stores provide is essential to publish a game and keep it alive, and any developer might simply put a site online, sell the game there, and allow me to pay directly to them. This is probably a niche opinion right now, but given any transaction involving digital goods such as e-books, music, software, games, etc. I am delighted whenever I see the content creator do this.
You may argue that this would limit the discoverability of games by a huge factor compared to them simply being advertised on the front page of some online store, and I agree, but I think if Steam had not grown to be as massive as it is today, that job would simply be delegated to the gaming magazines, forums, and many other independent platforms where the creators would more freely have a chance to promote their content.
Well, discoverability is a big problem. Yes, in theory we could do discoverability a different way, but in practice we haven't built that kind of infrastructure (yet).
There are other problems regarding payment processors and transactions/refunds, tracking where users came from for tax purposes... there's just a lot of infrastructure.
Now, that's not to say we couldn't ever get rid of centralized stores. It would just be a lot of work to build a lot of open infrastructure, get some better payment processors that are easier to sign up for, build the kind of systems and lists you're talking about around discoverability.
I don't think it's impossible to imagine a world with fewer centralized stores and more self-hosted games, and I don't think it's unreasonable to say that world might be nice to live in. I just think that world is far away and that getting there would be a lot of work.
Currently, I can set up an Itch account from scratch and be selling a real game to real people for real money in, like, an hour? Maybe 2? And it'll handle stuff like archiving all of my old versions, and I won't need to set up accounts for my users, and there's a nice integrated blogging platform, and people can comment, and currency conversion is just not an issue. Plus as a user, I don't need to provide my name/address to each developer either, only Itch needs to know where/who I am. So that neatly bypasses the privacy problem of payment systems like Paypal.
Again, none of that is impossible for us to provide in a decentralized way. But the decentralized tools aren't comparable right now; if you want to sell directly it's going to be a lot more work.
Maybe that will change in the future.
They put eyeballs in front of games = sales They handle logistics and payment = do game devs want to be a gaming company or a logistics / customer service company? They provide quality vetting, curation and discovery for customers with a reasonable degree of impartiality.
None of these are 'hard' but they take man hours and money to do well.
But even distribution is still an issue. Even indi games today are multiple GB in size. And on the first few days of release (or sales or bundles etc.) you have huge download spikes spikes.
Sure you can put it on aws, but better make sure to read you CDN fineprint so you don't end up with astronomical aws bill. In addition steam out of the box support partial updates,which again you can implement on your own, but that too takes time.
Payment. You can google around for problems indies who tried to roll their own store had. Today you have more options some of them explicitly catering to indies but its still an issue. Aditionaly steam supports charging in foreighen currencies, you can lower price in poorer countries etc.
Additionally steam offers their SDK that includes matchmaking and netwrking and host of other feautures, that are used by a lot of games.
Then there is in game chat, friendliest integration, cheat prevention, cloud saves and steam workshop integration, forums (which suck but are still there and have some auto moderation for spam) ...
Sure you could do all of that on your own, but some of it requires quite a bit of effort.
On Windows, publishers can choose to which store they would publish, and you can choose from where you want to buy it.
On iOS you are completely at the mercy of Apple; not only won't they allow specific apps or content on the store, they seem to make exceptions for some apps/publishers. There is no way to install and use something that Apple doesn't like.
Android is quite different, since it allows to load a different store, like the Amazon one, or FDroid for open source projects (you are still more or less tied to having Google Play Services on the device, since majority of Android apps use it, but the situation is a LOT better than on iOS.)
Also, consoles have exclusives too. I choose PC over console anyday.
I really like the idea of a purchase being decoupled from the distribution. GOG(completely) and HumbleBundle (limited extent) seems to be the only option at the moment.
Playnite is another software offering something similar, and is also quite good.
GoG Galaxy was a bad idea that undermined GoG almost immediately.
They still market themselves as "GOG.COM, the DRM-free home for a curated selection of games". But there are two forms of DRM they allow.
#1, you can't use multiplayer without providing a registration code.
#2, you can't play the game unless you're running Galaxy in the background.
I have a hard time believing they honestly think "well, DRM is a bad thing in general, but not when we're doing it".
You know what would be a better solution for that? The same one that happens with some applications now on Android: publishing an app in multiple stores. Many apps are simultaneously published in Play Store and other stores.
For example, you could have a game published on the publisher's store. If you buy it there, the price is X. Simultaneously, you could have the same app published on Apple store for $X + 30%.
Then, you let the market decide. Increasing competition is better for consumers.
If you prefer the convenience of buying from just one store, it's OK, you can buy everything from the Apple store, and pay the premium for that. But that would also let the door open for people who want to choose where else to buy their stuff.
It's like saying: how is it better to have multiple supermarkets to buy the stuff i want, if they offer the same product at different prices? Well... it's an option, nobody forces you to do it. You can always go to the same place, and know that there's going to be times when you pay more, and times when you pay less.
But you also have the chance to check on other store's offers and buy there if you want.
> How is having to navigate N stores
You don't "have to". In the end, more offer = better for consumers. It's up to each individual person to decide if they want to find better prices or just go to their default place.
Companies dont't open their own stores, and sell the games there cheaper than at a competitors store. They only sell it there.
Yes they do? Steam, GoG, and Itch don't coordinate their sales with each other. They offer different games at different prices at different times. Even Epic's weekly free game is designed to make people check in on the Epic store regularly instead of just buying those same games immediately on Steam.
There are a ton of PC games that are available in multiple stores, and comparison shopping will often give you different prices.
It doesn't just sound lovely, it's the reality of the PC market right now and you can either take advantage of it if you're willing to comparison shop, or ignore it and buy all of your games on Steam if comparison shopping is too much work for you. It's really not theoretical, it's how the PC market works right now.
Yes, there are some exclusives, but even that is fine, because a lot of the games that are exclusive to stores like GoG, Itch, and even Epic, flat out wouldn't have been made in the first place unless storefronts were competing with each other.
This is something that devs try to get across to gamers occasionally with Epic -- having someone step in and fully fund your game with the only restriction being that it's temporarily exclusive to a store is an unbelievably good deal, and it frees devs up to make more creative, interesting, risky games and passion projects that push boundaries and appeal to more niche audiences.
Not only are a huge portion of PC games not exclusive to specific stores, even where exclusives are concerned competition between different storefronts -- each trying to build the more attractive offering of games -- is still better than having one store owned by one company that only funds a small subset of games. PC gaming is better today than it was when only giant companies like Walmart could distribute games.
My frame of reference was streaming services, where more platforms meant fever content on each, and having to pay more to watch everything you wanted. But if it is indeed this was with games, maybe multiple appstores could be the way to go.
I'm not saying Apple is in the right with how it behaves, but as a user more stores have made things like playing PC games, streaming video, and even PC apps suck more.
These are billion dollar companies fighting each other for their benefit. I'm a bit skeptical about what users get.
Imagine if Walmart and Costco were the only two feasible places for most people to buy groceries. Is there anyone who doesn't think that would be a giant problem for both consumers and producers?
The vast majority of games are available just on steam, if having choice bothers you just pick steam or maybe epic (but steam probably has more) and ignore the rest.
This is a bizarre argument to me. Can you imagine if there was only one supermarket brand, or only one department store. Don't you think that might turn out badly?
If it's really DRM that bothers you then the only big option is GOG.
Now imagine that Epic wins the fight, has millions of teens on the fortnite needle and no one to prevent them or some inside bad actor to demand whatever device clearance they want. The same goes for regular apps. I'm sure there are well-intended galleries, calculators and remotes, but they are buried under tons of promoted evil contracts, never seeing neither the light, nor a profit/visibility.
Apple may be a bit greedy with a 30% share, but really acts in interest of its customers by kicking the hell out of arbitrariness.
This idea of faking may be the solution against bad actors, but not until apple and google would make that option official. And even then most of naive users will be tricked and burdened into not using it.
No. If the app wants to sell me out to bigcorps, Apple will ban them from the store.
Of course, as a consumer, I'll have the choice to leave the Apple store and follow my favorite apps elsewhere. But if the 3rd-party stores end up with a reputation of being insecure, then consumers will refuse to use them. And everything will be fine.
> Now imagine that Epic wins the fight, has millions of teens on the fortnite needle and no one to prevent them or some inside bad actor to demand whatever device clearance they want.
Then Apple will ban them from the store, and teens will either follow them elsewhere, or they won't.
In theory, this is already possible with Android. But people can't have this argument both ways.
- If jumping ship to Android is easy and available to everyone who owns an Apple device, then clearly having an escape hatch out of Apple's store isn't a big deal and consumers are smart enough to choose whether or not they want to download apps from a secure store.
- If consumers aren't smart enough to choose their own platform based on security, and the cost and difficulty of moving outside of Apple's ecosystem is the only reason why stupid teens aren't being exploited by Fortnite right now, then clearly the "consumers voluntarily choose to stay with Apple" argument is nonsense.
Nobody is talking about forcing Apple to get rid of their store. You will always have the choice to opt into downloading apps only from a secure, strictly managed, curated storefront.
This logic will not work for fortnite users, because you do not expect a knowledge about insecure stores more prevalent among them more than that there is fortnite. You logic works for highly logical and disciplined people, but not for those who want that unique thing that everyone has. Epic simply doesn't care as much as apple/google about a platform sanity, because it is not their net loss in the end. It's the reason very similar to why we ban drugs off the streets. Drugs are fun, but they have heavy strings attached, and much less than everyone realizes that in full detail, while sellers lose nothing.
>You will always have the choice to opt into downloading apps only from a secure, strictly managed, curated storefront.
You seem to have missed the "app-makers" part. If apple to allow more profiting stores, the culture of selling there will grow exponentially and there will be no apps left in appstore beyond few generic and very safe-statused. All custom calculators, galleries and unique apps will be able to demand your AB, geo, etc, because it is even more profit. And they will be listed at the top because more money means more promotion. It is a systematic problem, not just one of a choice.
Then why hasn't this already happened? Are app developers free to abandon iOS and move to Android or not? Why haven't they all done so?
And if developers can't realistically abandon iOS or reject Apple's terms and remain profitable, then doesn't that add a lot of evidence to the idea that Apple is a duopoly with a stranglehold over a significant section of the market?
> this logic will not work for fortnite users, because you do not expect a knowledge about insecure stores more prevalent among them more than that there is fortnite.
Why haven't the Fortnite users all moved to Android so they can install the manipulative apps and games that aren't available on iOS?
If they're free to switch platforms, and they're not smart enough to avoid following bad apps around to lower-quality platforms, then why have they stayed on iOS?
Some of this is due to Apple trying to push for products to be sold for money (up-front, upgrades, subscriptions) rather than being free and advertising supported. Google pushes for apps to be free and advertising based because they are an advertising company.
The second is that android phones may be bought by people who do not intend to use a lot of the smartphone/app features of the device. Apple users tend to go into the store and onto the web more often.
The third being that Apple products tend to attract more profitable demographics of people - people who actually are willing to pay money for things.
These extend outside of the App Store as well, which is one reason why Google pays quite a bit of money to Apple for Google search to be the default search engine of Safari.
If Apple users are generally higher spenders, generally more advanced users that buy apps more often -- then that sounds a lot to me like market pressures that will make an official app store attractive even if iOS allows sideloading. In which case, why are people so frightened of sideloading?
If iOS allows third-party stores, all of the same demographic forces you describe will still exist. Consumers will still want to use a store that offers up-front pricing rather than ads, the iOS market will still be filled with power users who buy apps more often, and they'll still want their apps to be included in a user-friendly, secure store.
If those users you describe are attractive enough to force companies to target them now, then they'll still be attractive enough to force companies to target them after third-party app stores are introduced.
I don't know how to reconcile "devs target iOS because of its unique, opinionated user-base who want a secure platform" with "users are dumb and just follow bad apps without thinking". It can't be both -- either Apple users are too dumb to understand security decisions and can't be taught to avoid shady 3rd-party ad-filled stores, or Apple users are smart enough to consciously opt into a locked-down environment and they understand the implications and tradeoffs of that choice. But how can they be both?
People will install insecure app stores to get a hot app. Facebook would likely launch a store with none of Apple’s spyware restrictions. Cisco and IBM and Microsoft would too, and with that come e.g. employer mandates for certain apps and thus certain stores.
Apple regulates its App Store. Remove its distribution control and that regulatory power diminish. That diminish meant is fine when Apple extends its App Store dominance to win at music streaming and payments. But it’s a poor argument against the App Store per se.
Why haven't they done this on Android already? Why aren't my employers currently mandating that I install 3rd-party stores on Android phones?
Most Android users I know have never installed an Android app outside of the official Play store. Why haven't companies taken advantage of them yet?
You have the chicken and egg problem there. There are no apps so no users and no one is going to add apps because you don't have users.
Big companies could make their own apps to promote their own shop but let's be honest they would have to put a lot of money to get something good that everyone would use, not just generic crap.
I suppose this would mean that Facebook app itself would have to be sideloaded, which would probably result in a hit they wouldn't want to take. For a while Amazon had two versions of their app on Android, one in Play store and a second one you could sideload that had their app store integrated. Based on the fact that AFAIK they now only have standalone app store for sideloading, I assume it wasn't a popular option
- The software is free and the developer doesn't want to pay $99/year to Apple
- The software is paid but the developer either doesn't want to give 30% to Apple, or they want to use a pricing model incompatible with the App Store (discounted upgrade pricing, rolling subscriptions etc.)
- The software does something that violates the guidelines, or in general is incompatible with sandboxing (or would be a worse product because of it)
Because so many applications are not, or in many cases _cannot_ be made available via the Mac App Store, users of said apps are in a sense "forced" to install outside the App Store. I believe that if sideloading was feasible for iOS, many developers (and certainly the big players) would pull out of the App Store completely.
I want to make it very clear though: I don't consider this an argument against sideloading apps at all. I consider it evidence that the App Store (on both iOS and macOS) is woefully inadequate at covering the full range of software developers want to build, and that in turn hurts customers.
I would love to use my iPad for more work related stuff, but I'm a software developer, so most of my day-to-day work involves software that just cannot run on iOS. If sideloading was available I could actually use it like the "Pro" device it claims to be, rather than just a very nice content consumption device.
I think as long as sideloading is made inconvenient enough, most consumers won't use it and therefore most developers won't provide it. But it should still be an option for the sake of consumers that want things that the walled garden can't support.
I completely agree with you though, there should always be an escape hatch.
Why do you believe that, when it hasn't happened with the only other comparable platform after years and years of supporting this model?
Windows and Mac are not comparable, as people are not as used to their respective stores, and lots of pre-existing software actually has to go out of its way to integrate with the store, instead of the other way around.
Were sideloading permitted I could see, for example, an Epic App Store, with their 12% cut and lessened restriction on external payment processing, being a popular place for apps to move to.
The key thing to me is supporting Apple's ecosystem. That ecosystem doesn't come out of nowhere; it's supported by the Apple Tax. If Apple can't collect that tax, they have to either reduce the quality of the ecosystem, or look for revenue elsewhere, like selling your data or obsoleting older models faster.
If these "alternate" app stores help to fund iOS development and maintenance, then they'll have to collect a similar amount of money. If they don't help fund iOS development and maintenance, then of course they'll be able to undercut Apple on cost; but then Apple will have less revenue, meaning they'll have to either reduce spending on iOS development and maintenance and/or look for revenue elsewhere, like forcing you to upgrade or selling your data to advertisers. At which point you have Android.
Or to put it differently: The Apple Tax is not about the value of Apple's App Store; it's about the value of the entire Apple platform.
And it's bit ironic you call it a tax when clearly Apple isn't a big fan of paying taxes themselves. I know, it's not a very good argument but I don't think the stakes are as dire as you make them to be.
They could separate the fee as fee paid for the Apple Store and the fee paid for maintaining the ecosystem. So if you build your own App Store you can avoid paying the Apple Store fee but have to pay the maintenance fee. Which should be reasonable amount, eg 10%. They get so many synergies either way and surely run a great profit in both cases. And if they will get a little less money than currently, boo-hoo.
If that's true, then someone should be able to raise money for a start-up with the same business model as Apple but charging only at 10% markup; and eventually everyone would go over to them because they get the same thing but for a lower price.
> And it's bit ironic you call it a tax when clearly Apple isn't a big fan of paying taxes themselves. I know, it's not a very good argument but I don't think the stakes are as dire as you make them to be.
I'm not saying Apple aren't often jerks; their "innovation" in tax avoidance harms society and makes the world a worse place. And possibly 30% really is extortionate, jerk-like behavior. But the arguments here about forcing Apple to allow third-party app stores would not only prevent a 30% "extortionate" rate, but would prevent even a more moderate 10% rate.
Is that why iPhones are famously cheaper than most other options on the market, and why Apple is constantly launching so many entry-level budget options for lower-income families?
It changes one other thing, customer experience. Apple believes fewer problems with a device is a better customer experience and with a better experience customers will return time and time again to purchase their products. It's not right for everyone, but I believe that is true for some people.
In order to deliver such an experience, they have to backup their products with exceptional service, and they do a better job at this than most companies. Now, that level of service is not cheap, not to mention most people don't want to deal with support anymore than they have to. So, to make that level of service feasible, they need to reduce the amount of service you need. For that, their solution is to lock the operating system and hardware down very tightly and vet every piece of software that can be loaded on to the phone.
For some people, all of that sounds terrible, and those people will choose not to buy Apple products. For others, it sounds like a carefree experience and they will choose to accept the trade offs for the benefits.
Bringing this full circle to your car example, there is a lot of crossover between these two worlds. Most cars have very good warranties and pretty amazing coverage while you car is under warranty... sounds a lot like Apple. Like your car, there are certain limitations on changes to hardware and software if you don't want to void that warranty. In other words, you are limited as long as you're under warranty.
So, I can appreciate Apple's desire to lock things down... yes, it benefits their bottom line, but I think they also do it for benefits to the consumer. Now, like your car, when the warranty runs out, the OEM service isn't quite so special anymore. The OEM doesn't care what you do at that point because you're on the hook for everything. I think the same should be true for iOS devices -- when the warranty runs out you should be able to request an unlock and then you can sideload whatever you want. If you like Apple's protective measures, you can continue to run in safe mode. Apple would never voluntarily do this of course, because that would increase the value of old phones and potentially deter the purchase of new models. But, it might be a strategy that the feds could pursue.
The last time I had a virus was on my Amiga which I got at a copy party in the Netherlands.
I think it is perfectly fine that you want the security from the Apple store and pay 30% on top for this, but why should I pay those 30%? It's not some kind of insurance that works better the more people take it.
Sure, neither did I, but Apple also has to provide a secure platform to my dad, my grandparents or any other non-tech-savvy person that will wreak havoc on any fresh Windows installation in record time.
But why should I pay for a service that I dont want or need?
Not entirely. You just don't sideload to keep those advantages. Only powerusers sideload apps on android currently.
But this also doesn't help epics usecase where they would want every user to sideload to access a popular app.
I'm an android user, and I think you have the wrong impression of what android is actually like. Have you ever used one as your primary device for a non-insignificant amount of time?
Security doesn't require a 30% cut of every transaction though, nor does it require them to ban other payment methods. Apple should be forced to compete on a level playing field, rather than leveraging their platform to bully other companies into compliance.
On the iOS hardware platform(s) it competes with nobody. The owner of an iPhone isn’t tossing up between Play or App stores. It’s Apple or nothing. There is no competition for methods to install apps. Both developers and users are completely at the mercy of Apple.
Epic’s fight, regarding Apple bundling its payment service with its App Store, is orthogonal to the “free device” cause. The former is compelling. The latter is interesting, but it’s an old debate that has never found traction.
It’s helpful to segregate these arguments.
How do you think that the iOS platform is paid for? Apple's current business model is supported by paying the Apple Tax. If they don't get that tax revenue, they're going to have to either reduce the quality of their platform, or get more revenue somewhere else, like selling my data to advertising companies.
Right now I have a choice to buy a phone whose software ecosystem is supported by hardware sales and appstore taxes, or a phone whose software ecosystem is supported by spying on me. If Apple is forced to give up their Apple Tax, I will no longer have that choice.
If Fortnite wanted, they could just make things more expensive on iOS, passing the Apple Tax on to consumers. That's how stores treat sales tax and VAT in different countries; there's no reason app developers can't do the same thing. If users don't like paying more they can go to other platforms; and if users like the iOS platform, they should accept that paying more for apps is part of what makes it possible.
Perhaps Apple should give the court an accounting of what it costs to run.
The onerous terms forbid (among other things) pricing differently on the app store.
It would be a monopoly if Apple was 80%+ of the phone market; but they're not. If you don't like Apple's business model, there are plenty of other fine phones out there to buy. It's not like Microsoft in the 90's, where they controlled 95% of the desktop market.
> The onerous terms forbid (among other things) pricing differently on the app store.
Didn't know about this; this is onerous, I agree. And I would say forcing price changes for things outside of your dominion should be illegal. (i.e., forcing Fortnite to charge people more who are not buying through the Apple platform is prima facie evidence of an abuse of power.)
The development of iOS is not funded by the app store, it's funded by iPhone hardware sales, and iOS is necessary for those iPhone sales - that's why they make iOS, not solely as a platform for third party apps.
The app store adds to the value of iOS, and thus the value of iphones, because of all the work put in by third parties. Apple should be thanking these third party developers, not sucking them dry and trying to force competitors in any domain off their store (e.g. the kindle app doesn't allow purchases and can't even link to the Amazon website because Apple wants a 30% cut of every sale).
But conversely, iOS adds value to every app on the app store -- a lot more value. iOS adds much more value to the Fortnite app than the Fortnite app adds to iOS. Nobody held a gun to Epic Games' head and forced them to put their app on Apple's app store (or Netflix or Spotify or Kindle). Epic did it because even with the 30% tax, they were going to be making loads more money with their app there than without it. And they are making loads of money with Fortnite. They're just annoyed that Apple is getting so much of it. (And Google too -- they were kicked off Google Play for the same reason.)
Cry me a river. Apple and Google have both created loads of value in developing and maintaining the iOS and Android ecosystems, which Epic wants to take advantage of without paying for. I don't feel bad for them at all.
Who's to say what constitutes an advantage? From this discussion, half the people here consider it to be an advantage to having the possibility to load whatever they want on their phone, and have control over it.
The thing is, people do have this right on Apple phones; the Library of Congress can designate exemptions from the DMCA and they have done so for jailbreaking smart phones. You have the legal right to jailbreak your phone and install whatever you want; neither Apple nor the Feds can stop you.
Now, whether Apple must make it easy for you to do that is a different question. They actually do, in a way--if you have an Apple developer account you can "side load" whatever you want onto your personal phone. You have to register and pay $99 for that privilege, though. Again--the question is how easy Apple should make it for you to do that.
Anyway, this particular lawsuit is not about Apple devices at all; it's about the contract between Apple and the App Developers in their store. If Epic wins this lawsuit, it might encourage some more developers to list their apps in the App Store, but it will have zero impact on how hard it is for you to freely install whatever software on an Apple phone.
The law isn’t that simple, and even if it was, Apple does stop most people from jailbreaking most Apple devices most of the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_jailbreaking#Digital_Mille...
> The jailbreaking of smartphones continued to be legal "where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of [lawfully obtained software] applications with computer programs on the telephone handset." However, the U.S. Copyright office refused to extend this exemption to tablets, such as iPads, arguing that the term "tablets" is broad and ill-defined, and an exemption to this class of devices could have unintended side effects.
OTOH, the thing about Epic is I think they're incredibly generous with their developers and with their customers. You can play Fortnite for free, and are only charged if you want to buy a vanity item. And if you develop using Unreal Engine, you're only charged if you literally make millions of dollars. I can see being pissed off at Apple for being incredibly rapacious, wrecking their standing with developers, and undermining their own platform. I, for one, will never develop for Apple again after awful experiences with two apps I developed for their store.
Ultimately, IMO Apple is hurting themselves very badly, but I think it might be their right to do so.
This is what Google's been doing for years. In a healthy market we could have incredible email providers, video hosting services, calendars and whatnot.
Subsidizing phones with app revenue means customers buy phones even though the benefit they gain from them is lower than the cost of the phone. Conversely, they don't buy apps when the benefit would have outweighed the cost.
Looking a bit further down the line toward a society with more prevalent and powerful AI there will need to be some kind of certification that the software you are running is safe. It will be almost impossible to enforce this without the help of device manufacturers who will be mandated to only run safe software.
I don’t like that there is currently no way to get Apple to reduce its cut due to competitive pressure but mandating a right to run any kind of software people like is very short sighted move that would likely need to be reversed in time if we don’t want to sink into chaos as a society.
What I could imagine as a solution in the long run is a consortium type governing body for the certification of software that is made up of companies, specialists, and government reps. This would allow something like sideloading of approved apps to take place in a controlled way. Question would still be who would pay for this? Do they also take a cut? Do you pay a one time fee? Is it subsidized by taxes? Also could a consortium do this better than the manufacturer itself?
Maybe we end up with sideloading of apps that still need to be approved but for a one time fee rather than a revenue sharing model?
But rejecting simply because it lets someone pay in an alternate manner crosses a line.
The argument goes, if I'm not mistaken, that by enforcing their payment gateway, they're assuring that users aren't handing over credit card info and other PPI in an insecure manner.
Whether you buy that or not is up to you, but this is definitely a defence I've heard.
Doesn't Apple specifically have a deal with Amazon to ignore the 30% cut for them?
I won‘t argue about the rest of your comment about AI, as I think this leads to discussing castles in the air.
If you want to stay with personal computing equipment (whatever that may mean exactly) the point still holds if you look a little bit down the line. You want someone responsible for harm that is created by harmful software and as a user you want an easy way to get save software. Both is much easier with an entity curating and signing vetted software.
What is interesting in this case is the question who would be responsible for this and what are the rules that would need to be followed?
I think it is difficult to untangle the vetting position from manufacturing because the manufacturer is likely the best expert on the computing platform. But other arrangements could be tried out. In terms of rules to follow I am sympathetic to some general rules that vetting should follow but much thought would need to be put into what those rules should be. My prime concern would be safety and minimization of great harm. But how does one go about this? Even external payment providers could be argued to be a potential source of harm if they are not vetted and certified. It‘s tricky!
I think a possible solution would be to make costs and revenue for app stores transparent and stipulate that margins should remain reasonable. Maybe set up a developer board that has a voice in the app store policy making similar to how employee representatives have a seat on the board in many German companies.
Duh, yes. It's like asking if i can drive my (human-driven) car anywhere. Just because it's "technology" doesnt mean all human agency goes out the window.
If all of the construction would be modularized with open interfaces, I could imagine something like this working... So, I must admit that it seems theoretically possible to set something like this up but we are currently nowhere near this. Every car is a black box that only the manufacturer really knows. Same for software. What you demand would require all software modules to be “standardized” (think API with safety requirements and guarantees) so that automatic verification could take place.
But what are appropriate “module” sizes? Do we regulate every function call? Just applications? What if Apple sells the iphone plus software as one application? What are generic rules you could use to decide what is the “right” application to regulate? By what mechanisms can we come to good decisions around this?
It’s an interesting vision... but also totally different from the world we live in today. It’s not as simple as you make it sound.
And despite all of its flaws it's the most successful software deployment platform the world has ever seen, to the point where even Apple can't afford to not include it on their platforms when we all know they'd rather not, because it's simply too valuable to consumers and would make their devices obsolete if they didn't include it.
There's no central gatekeeper for the web, and sure, it has its dark corners, but it has not devolved into absolute chaos as you so adamantly suggest all such ecosystems would, and continues to deliver such an incredible amount value to consumers and businesses alike.
The web was only possible because it was developed in an era before everybody was using closed down devices where the manufacturer dictates what software you can run on it. And at this rate, if the web ever falls out of favor (and Apple for one is doing everything it can to make sure it does), you can definitely be sure that nothing like it will ever be allowed to exist again.
As a community of founders and makers, I'm sure we can all imagine what a sad world it would be to live in if we had to first convince some platform gatekeeper that our idea is worthwhile and make sure our ideas don't conflict with their interests before being allowed to turn our ideas into reality and deliver them to users, let alone having to pay a cut of our revenues to them for the privilege.
Following the idea you present, Epic should just start making browser games with in-game purchases just over a credit card. Why doesn't it then? What's wrong with the web that Epic couldn't just publish on playfortnite.com and that'd be it?
> There's no central gatekeeper for the web, and sure, it has its dark corners, but it has not devolved into absolute chaos as you so adamantly suggest all such ecosystems would, and continues to deliver such an incredible amount value to consumers and businesses alike.
I never stated that all open systems would turn into chaos. What I suggested is that systems with unchecked advanced AI capabilities probably will. Technology is changing and old paradigms are not guaranteed to work in the future.
You seem to be looking only at the present and there I find your sentiment somewhat reasonable. However, looking at the future, safety will become much more important. If the software you are deploying has the potential to (unintentionally) kill people, shut down cities, or otherwise wrack havoc because you haven’t completely mastered the art of training machine intelligence in a safe way... you simply don’t want this to be openly sold, same as you don’t want to buy medicine or medical technology from a 5 year old kid you just met on the subway. You also don’t have the right to hurt people to fulfill your desire to make things.
I know what I am referring to requires some looking down the road but we will get there in due time. More regulation is (hopefully) inevitable.
What I still think is open for discussion are the exact terms of such vetting/control. It might very well be that terms will get less onerous. That there will be requirements for gate keepers to implement. However, freedom from control is not going to be the long term solution and this is not a bad thing!
I don’t see how we can’t get to a point where we have something similar for iOS. They can limit the APIs they have access to and the User has the choice.
Alternative web engines are a nice thought, but the reality is that the browser engine cannot be packaged as an "app", it is a new type of application sandboxing environment. Safari (and WebKit and JavaScriptCore) use significant elevated entitlements to be able to do things like control prompts to hardware features like location and NFC, JIT compile code, etc. The reality is that Chrome and Firefox have technical and security limitations which are much harder to overcome than Apple's platform guidelines.
For one thing, that is how you get viruses. This is amusingly similar to the mask refusal arguments.
> People would get bad software on their phones, but last I checked, this is happening already
"My proposal would lead to bad things, but there already are bad things" is a terrible argument.
If a website can convince someone to download a "new version of the Flash Player", those same websites will convince someone to "side-load this application to protect against identity theft!"
Because this is a time and place to call out Apple and Google, the colluding monopolists, for their de facto, if not (yet) proven de jure, criminal behavior, which costs developers, like us, enormous amounts of money.
A call to arms is what we need. It's not a difficult philosophical question. (1) Cut the ridiculous 30% fee, (2) allow other payment processors, (3) allow alternative app installation processes.
* 30% fee if app featured by apple or install initiated from app store search
* 20% provision if user landed in app store from direct app store app link
* provide accredited 3rd payment processors (e.g. paypal, stripe). Provide them API and guidelines that they have to comply with. In app store search apps that will go through apple payment processor will have label e.g. 'fulfillment by apple' similar to what amazon uses. Such app would have fee: 15% to apple + x% whatever paypal/stripe will charge. If app installed from direct link and using 3rd party processor then 10% to apple + x% to payment processor
* remove ads inside app store - I consider them unfair or indie devs
* iOS Safari WebView that is not crippled and catches up to latest web standards (Web Notifiations, Fullscreen API on iOS, Shared Web Workers just to name a few)
[edit] formatting
I fundamentally disagree and this is also a misrepresentation of the current situation.
If I buy an open operating system which advertises that I can run on it what pleases me then I should have the right to carry out this freedom of choice.
However, if a company advertises a product as a walled garden, specifically claims that one of the things it does is to vet and prohibit apps which violate their guidelines (which are also open for me to assess myself) and I buy a product for its benefits doing this, then I have a right as a consumer that the company will stick to this and not be forced to change in order to please some dodgy companies or gaming apps which I honestly couldn't care less.
It's like saying I bought a petrol car but I should have a legal right to fill it up with Diesel or make it work with electricity. It's illogical. The packaging said petrol and so I knownlingly bought petrol. The packaging says secure, long battery life, high quality phone because of walled garden, so I fucking expect Apple to deliver the walled garden promise so I don't have to do the vetting myself. When I buy an iPhone for my kids or parents, then I pay more for it because of Apple's walled garden, because it means I have to spend less time doing dumb things for them which I'd have to do on another operating system.
Though it's not really uncommon to modify a car for autogas or electric. Often it's also possible to change the radio receiver to e.g. one with android car.
I kinda expect the same freedom to modify other products including smartphones.
Unless the car is a piece of agricultural equipment, in which case, we can see exactly why walled ecosystems are bad.
Apple prevents that to a certain degree.
This is not a two-way relationship. It’s three-way. People expect businesses to have a store front in the App Store. If there is none, they don’t think it’s Apple‘s fault.
Could you please show me such an advertisement? I do not really follow Apple, and have failed to encounter it.
Further, what if I'm a user, who wants to purchase the hardware (and even operating system), but does not want the added security. Mind you that Apple has their own CPU and OS which is unlike anything in the competition. Don't I also buy the product for those benefits, and don't I have a right as a consumer to opt out of arbitrary limitations that I have no option but accepting?
In the past, you had no option but accepting tracking cookies in every website, GDPR showed that as a society, we decided to force companies to provide an option.
Tough luck my friend. I mean only because you want something unreasonable doesn't make it a right.
Example:
What if I want to buy the engine of a Ferrari but not pay the price for a Ferrari and just have it inside a Volkswagen?
The answer to that is also tough luck. You want a Ferrari engine, well it only comes in a bloody Ferrari so either buy the whole thing and then mod it yourself or tough luck. Same for Apple hardware. If you want just want one piece then you'll have to buy the whole thing and mod it yourself.
Nothing in this world gives you a right to have all your wishes fulfilled by others.
My point is that a car is a complete piece of hardware, all of which is necessary for it to fulfil its purpose, while computers have the advantage (over other machines) to be easily modified by software.
You are correct that my wishes should not affect others, but what about the wishes/needs of multiple people? Even if it's just a wish/personal preference, and not a fundamental property of software, should people's opinion affect private corporations directly?
All of this assuming that there are multiple people who agree with the notion of software freedom.
If people in your neighbourhood wish and need that you mown their lawn regularly for free, would you be happy to consider it? After all, it's multiple people's preference!
A much more apt analogy would be a Keurig machine that's only designed to take official k-cups, and your legal right to make it work with off-brand k-cups.
A better comparison would be hiring people at a maximum of 10 hours a week, and then the employee getting upset they don’t get 11+ hours.
Now arguing that consumers are disadvantaged because they don't get what they want is falsifying the actual state of the market, when really they get exactly what they want and it's only some bad actors like addictive abusive gaming companies or other dodgy businesses which are doing more harm than help to our society and they want to force Apple or Google into opening more up to allow them even shadier practices.
Nothing stops anyone to create a more open mobile OS. There is no actual barrier to enter like in what real monopolies or duopolies have.
EDIT:
It's also important to remember that Apple hasn't invented their strict walled garden after Microsoft, Nokia and Blackberry left the competition. They always had their walled garden as a feature, and that is proof that customers actively chose to use Apple despite having a healthy competition of other open marketplaces, which clearly didn't deliver what consumers wanted. Consumers don't have the time to vet everything themselves. They value Apple's proposition and are even willing to pay more for an app on average than on any other mobile system. People change their phones every 1-2 years and if the walled garden wouldn't appeal to consumers then we'd see everyone have an Android by now for a very long time.
If Apple was to change how their App Store operates and it stops appealing to the mass, then the mass will react and Apple will see sales drop over time and consumers will migrate to Android. Not the next day, but it would certainly happen like it did for Nokia users, Blackberry users, etc.
However, Apple didn't change their App Store guidelines. Users who bought a phone get exactly what they got on the day of purchase. It's Epic who tries to violate a feature which consumers have purchased and now Epic is suing Apple for having such a feature to begin with. This is not Apple vs. Consumers. This is a gaming company not finding a way to apply their shady practices on the Apple consumer based and they are pissed off. Consumers are happy for it though.
It's not, no. It's like buying a petrol car and being limited to using BP to fill it up, and not being able to use Q8, or Shell, or whatever.
No one buys Apple/iOS and expects it to run Windows (although arguably you can, and you should be able to, if you weren't locked-in)
In the hypothetical scenario where iOS permits active side loading of applications, then there should be, in my opinion, two separate brands. Brand 1: iOS (classic), Brand 2: Generic Brand. Let’s call it Epic mobile brand.
While in principle I want to install any software on any hardware. In practice if an issue comes up on non-iOS brand, let’s call it Epic Mobile OS, the fast solution is to reinstall the OS. I want these to be clearly demarcated , so that I avoid the onslaught of crappy apps in the second category requiring re-installation.
And I am old to consistently reinstall OSes.
You can always touch & hold a message, & select “Copy” to export an individual message. You can also screen shot your messages, or simply view them in the app.
How does not allowing batch export of sms messages to other apps stop you from accessing them?
Batch exporting text messages is an wholly different thing from simply accessing them. The only confusion about the meaning of the word “access” seems to be on your end. You appear to intend it to mean something like “having all the features that I personally want in order to best facilitate the activities I desire to do with the highest priority, disregarding the popular use cases entirely” which frankly is an insane definition of the word “access”, and deserves probably a much harsher tone than it’s been given thus far. The fact that you still appear to be standing by it as a serious definition is even more shocking.
Is this not one of the most common refrains among major decision-makers of this era, whether it be business or politics?
In this case, Apple has judged that the consumer doesn't care enough, or doesn't have enough power, to change this calculus. Are they right?
Maybe we will lose some Apple support or risk of hacking / payment issue around those apps. But as long as we are informed about those risks before installing the apps.
iOS App Store is so big like Facebook / Google. If Google / Facebook block something based on similar reasons I would be against them too (also I hate AMP).
BTW you might want to take a look at https://altstore.io/ for sideloading iOS apps. There are some limitations but still better than nothing.
It’s like people complaining that you can’t change the battery in a iPhone and saying that it infringes on their rights, but of cause you can actually replace it, it’s just difficult, not impossible. But Apple will void warranty on diy repairs, but is that really such a bad thing? Why should they psi if I screw up my repair of the product?
[1] https://cdn2.unrealengine.com/apple-complaint-734589783.pdf
The idea that a large platform like iOS can only have apps loaded through a market place controlled by the hardware manufactured is clearly in violation of the spirit of anti-trust laws.
However there's no legal precedent on this because no one with deep enough pockets to fight Apple has been angry enough to do it yet.
Meaning this could be great news for everyone if this goes to court and Apple loses as they should.
The big differentiator is that phones have become the most frequently used personal computing device for many people, and we expect the freedom to use it how we want.
But the situation being almost the same, a ruling in one would trigger a tidal wave in the other.
There was a fun moment in last year’s vergecast interview with a lawyer on the App store issue, also related to Epic I think. The case of console stores was brought to the conversation, and the lawyer bailed out of it pretty fast with a “there might be similarities but we need to look deeper before saying anything, let’s put that aside for now” kind of answer.
We should! I would love to run Steam on my PS4.
But Sony already invests in some studios to develop games for their platform.
In general, those console platform owners have been much friendlier to publishers than Apple (and maybe Google) since game publishers generally have much more negotiation power against console platform holders. Nintendo's primary weak point has been lack of 3rd-party games. MS and Sony compete with each other to gain more exclusive offers and they even provide substantial subsidiary to developers. If you want to enforce your own arbitrary rule at the cost of losing CoD, I don't think it's going to be a good trade-off. Creative contents are usually not replaceable and publishers don't really have incentives to attack game platform holders in this dynamic.
The same thing doesn't really apply to App stores since 1. the upfront cost for buying a phone compared to usual apps is much higher (>100x), especially for the premium phone comparable to iPhone, while it's <10x for usual consoles 2. Apple (and Google) also has their own alternative services for many popular apps so hurting competitors by setting arbitrary rules is actually beneficial for them. In short, having a monopolistic status itself is not problematic but exercising it is.
I'm no fan of Apple -- they engage in massive tax avoidance, labor arbitrage, and are just too big for my taste. Same criticism of Google. And Facebook. But you don't go from emotion --> must be illegal. There has to be some reasonable standard you can apply that will make sense across time and across companies/industries. What is that standard?
Perhaps congress should legislate the share of revenue that a platform is allowed to take. Not being ironic; if we are going to regulate this, let's do it with lawmakers instead of courts.
There no such clear cut on what is acceptable or not. In fact, typically console makers charges much more than 10% but not much companies are complaining about that because it's more negotiable compared to the app store situation. The court may decide how to remedy this, but the decision won't be made simply based on the app store cut but take care of other contexts as well.
The real issue is, Apple has designed their product in order to retain complete control on potential customer facing interactions and is blatantly exercising their market power. The game platforms are usually not in a position to do so. Android might be slightly better but IMO this also needs to be addressed.
> There has to be some reasonable standard you can apply that will make sense across time and across companies/industries. What is that standard?
The existing antitrust framework is already capable of handling this app store situation; even assuming Apple is not a dominant player (which is a very optimistic assumption in favor of Apple; app store is likely a monopoly based on hypothetical monopolist test), tying iPhone, App Store and its payment module already brings significant legal risks. Though it still needs to evolve to address other situations such as Amazon or Google.
How has apple done this in a fundamentally different way from sony? I'm not seeing the difference here, which means I'm not seeing what you consider to be the real issue. Care to elaborate?
> The existing antitrust framework is already capable of handling this app store situation;
I think you are going to be dissapointed. Maybe EU antitrust would adopt more of a philosophical criteria for fairness, but US antitrust is unlikely to side with Epic here.
Having done a little digging into the relevant case law I agree with your assessment, US courts have generally been very reluctant to find antitrust violations in aftermarket scenarios where the customer was fully aware of aftermarket limitations before purchasing a product, had the opportunity to buy an alternative product without such limitations, and proceeded to buy the original product anyway.
I think the most likely outcome is Epic's case is dismissed based on failure to establish that "iOS app distribution" is a separate and relevant market for antitrust purposes.
The Ninth Circuit reversed the district court's order and ruled that Accolade's use of reverse engineering to publish Genesis titles was protected under fair use, and that its alleged violation of Sega trademarks was the fault of Sega.
I suspect Apple will argue the oppose. The "freedom" argument has been common in the perennial "iOS v Android" discussions, from which I'd note that iOS appeals to many because it's locked down; it's easy to use and it's not junk. The Play Store was a mess last I remember it. Some consider that freedom, others dislike it. It's a brand perception thing, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple makes the same point, that an open platform would harm their brand reputation.
> The idea that a large platform like iOS can only have apps loaded through a market place controlled by the hardware manufactured is clearly in violation of the spirit of anti-trust laws.
> Blizzard raises this argument in its motion, contending that Defendants cannot establish antitrust claims based on its users' voluntary consent to the EULA and TOU. (Mot. Br. 22–23.) Although Blizzard does not argue this point in the market power analysis, the Court finds that this discussion is applicable to whether the market power requirement is established. Blizzard cites Newcal, Queen City Pizza, Inc. v. Domino's Pizza, Inc., 124 F.3d 430, 441 (3d Cir.1997), and Apple Inc. v. Psystar Corp., 586 F.Supp.2d 1190, 1201 (N.D.Cal.2008), to show that Defendants cannot base its claims on the aftermarket restrictions. ( See Opp'n Br. 17.) These cases explain that the law prohibits an antitrust claimant from asserting an antitrust claim “resting on market power that arises solely from contractual rights that customers knowingly and voluntarily gave to the defendant” when they purchased the initial tying product.
https://casetext.com/case/blizzard-entmt-inc-v-ceiling-fan-s...
If Apple changed their stance to "all services and digital goods associated with your app must included in the original purchase price", that might meet the court's requirements for legality but it would leave Epic without their current revenue stream.
The original Apple parody was to convince consumers to switch from one platform (PC) to a different platform (Mac).
Now, maybe you believe Apple, in the form of iOS, has become Big Brother. Fine, in that case, Epic should provide its own gaming platform.
But Epic isn't trying to destroy Big Brother here. It still wants to run on Big Brother's platform. It just doesn't want to give up any revenue to do so.
Shrug.
So no, Epic doesn't want to run on Big Brother's platform.
That argument would ring less hollow had they done that on the platform that does allow side loading, but they eventually published on the Google Play store.
Actually they just got banned on android as well, so now they only allow sideloading on android.
My point was, they had the chance and in fact did go completely sideloading on Android, but eventually caved and joined the Play store. Obviously there’s value enough for them to take Google’s 30% cut in the Play store, so why did they do it? Why wasn’t staying sideload only enough, especially when they are arguing they should be able to do it on iOS.
> Which was actually what their update did on Apple too
Sorry, but that’s 100% false. Adding an extra payment option in your app is not the same thing as sideloading and not going through the App Store for publishing and distribution. Apples and Oranges so you speak.
Arguably I think there would be a reasonable anti-trust suit against the OS as well, it's not clear to me why it isn't illegal to utilize their monopoly on their hardware to create a monopoly on the OS running on the device.
This way of viewing things leads to some really silly conclusions. Apple doesn't have a monopoly on the iPhone, the premise is intrinsically absurd. By this argument literally any non-commodity product is a "monopoly" of the company that distributes it.
Moreover, what Apple sells isn't hardware, it's hardware with software on it. That's the product. As far as I know there is no official way to buy either iOS or an iPhone that doesn't have iOS installed. Sometimes companies take an opinionated stance on how they distribute their products, like a firearm manufacturer that only manufactures firearms that have a safety. Framing that sort of thing as an antitrust issue is unreasonable.
In essence, any practice that helps compete in the market by other ways than increasing value to the consumer is suspect. Incidentally, this is a double edges sword, as this is the interpretation of the antitrust laws that has enabled the rise of so many monopoly-like companies in the last few decades. (e.g. Amazon: we're increasing value to customers because we can offer lower prices if we're larger)
If every Tom, Dick and Harry could setup an app store for the iPhone, this doesn't necessarily give me more control. It might mean I am then forced to use the Epic platform for all Epic related products. Now how do I know that Epic have appropriately vetted their application? What if they start producing applications for the iPhone which are terrible?
This is a big problem on the Google store whereby plenty of the apps are rubbish.
I invite you to read even the headline of the article this thread is about.
Sorry? Apple's is hovering around $2 trillion right now, Tencent's is less than trillion is it not? And they only own a minority stake in Epic…
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21357771/apple-cloud-gamin...
https://twitter.com/FacebookGaming/status/129170874980819763...
All of Apple Arcade's games are just mobile games already available in the App store and reviewed individually. The above options are quite a different proposition and Apple's only grievance is they can't review the PC-style game content they are distributing.
It's probably more like Netflix than Apple Arcade, since they are streaming arbitrary content with subscriptions. But games have always been treated different, so again they are not being uniquely targeted.
(Not that I agree with blocking them)
What about Sony and Nintendo?
Does Epic allow people to buy stuff for Fortnite from outside of Fortnite and other companies?
Same way as the Steam Workshop and other mod-able games.
Some of them are just better at bamboozling schmucks^Wmore naive consumers into becoming their loyal fans and projecting some nobler characteristics onto these corporations, and even identifying with their brand, and becoming an unpaid extension of the corporation's PR department by arguing for them ferociously on online forums.
There is nothing ideological about why Epic is doing this. The merely did their calculations and determined (or at worst made a safe bet) that the money invested in this will cause them to get more money in the long run, regardless of the outcome.
The word you’re looking for by the way is “financially”. Fiscally is to do with taxes.
The OED establishes a North American usage of this term as "relating to financial matters", and is not exclusive to taxes.
I’m confused. Is that not the purpose of the lawsuit?
It seem like something their lawyers pitched to them as “hey if it works, great, you save millions a year on the App Store percentage, and if it doesn’t, hey, at least you’ll get a whole lot of publicity, which should drive your sales up enough to more than compensate for the losses of being off the stores for a bit.”
Epic is the maker of unreal engine, which collects a 5% royalty on licensee game sales over $1M.
So they would stand to profit somewhat more than just from lower fees on Fortnite.
1. The historical origin of "decimate" does not define the English word. Many words have historical origins that differ with their current definitions.
2. The word "fiscal" does not refer only to "taxes" but also to financial matters in general.
By the way, I never the said the guy was wrong to say fiscally. It was sort of a sloppy usage of the word—in my opinion of course. Which I hope its obvious that this is, seeing as its a comment in a forum!
And I’m certainly not wrong to say that fiscally is to do with taxes. I might have been wrong assuming that he or she was looking for a less ambiguous word. I do tend to assume the best in people, and am often wrong.
No, I just understand that words can have multiple definitions and any of them is perfectly valid to use. You were simply wrong to "correct" them in both cases.
Here's what you did:
> "...a comment in a forum"
I think you meant "a comment on a web site" because a forum means an ancient Roman marketplace...see how stupid this game is?
Both comments were tongue in cheek.
Apparently since more explanation is clearly warranted, I’ll provide it.
In the comment about fiscally, I thought it odd that the person appeared to be concerned with whether indie developers, of which I am one, were going to be contributing to government revenues, since I’ve only ever heard fiscally used in a tax context by professionals. And certainly when I approach my financial strategy, taxes are always a consequence of the goal, and not the goal itself.
In the other comment, I was making a joke, which seems to have gone a bit over your head.
By the way, a “web site” is simply the location where an arachnid...
Anyway, I think you get my point and hopefully I wasn't too harsh but sorry if I was. Have a good day/night!
If I have a son, in December, then I have another son the next year in January, which one is my first son?
At which point it was no longer the tenth month.
Unless you find you had two other sons you didn't know about.
It's the large scale clients that are hurt the most by the 30% cut. Old timer indie devs who used to have to manage payment and distribution themselves, like Jeff Vogel, will tell you that Steam's cut is absolutely fair given the value it brings. On PC there are different platforms competing for Steam, which might be a reason why Valve introduced discount tiers for more successful titles. If an outcome of the PR stunt is that Apple decreases its cut, it will likely be a similar arrangement which does not benefit the small businesses.
The issue with the App Store is not the cut, but that it is the only gate to the iOS walled garden.
It's good that Steam has competition! And I wish Epic's was competing on features, but at the moment their platform only competes by having a lower cut and payed exclusives only. The only benefit to users has been that Epic funded certain games that would otherwise might not have happened.
I get what you're saying, but I think companies monopolising eyeballs then charging you an entry fee is... Kinda bull. Skimming is fine, but I want their margins to be tiny.
It's not the same.
"Fortnite" No Longer Available. The developer has removed this app from the App Store.
Monopolies lead to stagnation, rising prices, and inferior product quality. Even though Apple is not a monopoly in the strict sense, I think we consumers will benefit from alternative app store - or Apple opening up the platform.
I believe one can still have (moderately) secure ecosystem without it being a walled garden.
A perfectly suitable competitor ... which has exactly the same fees, similar policies and do not seem to have any pressure due to the competition to change them, yeah something does not sound right here.
Alternatively I could compare the number of companies I could use to host my web app (100k+) to the number of companies I could use to host my mobile app (just 2). The lack of competition when you compare that to an healthy market is obvious.
Does Apple also have a monopoly on writing the OS that runs on iPhones?
Do they also have a monopoly on creating the iPhone hardware? And choosing what they write in press releases?
Yes, of course. But I think the issue might be the extent to which this is an artificial monopoly, rather than a natural one.
Fortnite isn't just a game anymore, its where a lot of kids are hanging out. concerts, movies and other things are happening there.
I think Apple's cut is egregious but at the same time, they're not a monopoly. My main gripe is that they're behaving as if they're bringing value that the developers are riding on, when in reality nobody would buy iPhones if it weren't for the value that many developers are bringing to the platform, often at no cost to Apple.
Their strategy also adds a lot of consumer value. I use an iPhone specifically because I understand the tradeoffs between freedom and reliability/security, and I go for the reliability/security. Not everyone wants a second job playing sysadmin on their smartphone.
And there is also the fact that the government doesn't classify a trust[1] by the dictionary definition of monopoly:
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
It's a fairly difficult comparison to make though because you have to compare a single companies vertical integration to the non-integrated supply chains of several other companies.
Anytime the discussion around Apple’s take on subscription revenue comes up there are always comments from people that they wouldn’t even mind paying a premium price just to have the convenience of having all their subscriptions managed in one place, and free of company-specific dark patterns for unsubscribing.
Fortnite money has nothing to do with Apple. If they would only charge the processing fee and whatnot there would be no debate. Compare it to paying Apple for subscribing to Netflix/Spotify/Amazon. What is their accomplishment in this case?
If it were up to me, Apple would charge more like 3% and keep all other factors the same in terms of strictly shutting down developers who try to skirt the policies.
Would you care if apps could offer two subscription methods, the Apple one with no-BS and the developers' one with a lower price (but potentially shittier experience)?
It's a genuine question, as you thinking about the app store consumer experience.
Personally I like the choice. Pay with cash and get X% off, or use a credit card :)
Of course there is. You can argue that it shouldn't be the deciding factor here, but you can't argue it doesn't exist at all.
iOS is basically a geographical region. It's like saying there isn't a California market because it's instead the US market. Or that you can't be considered a monopoly because people can move. Yes, they can, but there's significant burdens to that movement. And it turns out that burden was enough to consider things like utilities to be monopolies. Is the burden on switching between Android & iOS high enough to be considered a barrier to free competition? I'd say yes, it is. As such, iOS is its own market in which Apple is abusing monopoly position.
As is well known with anti-trust lawsuits that depends on how one defines market.
As is less known, anti-trust lawsuits don't actually require monopolies.
Counterpoint: the consistency, convenience, and safety of the App Store and broader iOS platform is part of why so much money is spent there.
[EDIT] but yes I think their cut should be lower. They are definitely delivering a ton of value to developers, though, and part of that is created precisely by some of the restrictions that developers love to complain about.
This is a really interesting point. Whether this is the reason or not for me, but I make and sell apps on both platforms and the identical app, identical price sells 4 or 5 to 1 on iOS vs. Android.
Further, the market for "smartphones" is not Apple vs Google. It's Apple vs Samsung vs Motorola vs LG vs Sony. Those are smartphone makers. At the 50%+ marketshare, Apple has more than double the market share of it's next biggest competitor.
Further, as pointed out elsewhere you don't have to have a monopoly for being sued for anti-competitive behavior.
Conversely, you can have a monopoly and commit abuses and get away with it in the pro-business United States. Microsoft is noticeably intact, despite what we may have wanted to happen in the late 90s.
Apple realistically has more to fear in Europe.
In this case, the market came together to produce a solution much better for society than the state could have concocted, or predicted: high quality open source software. We can all be thankful that Netscape’s market for $40 web browsers (actually buggy groupware by that point) wasn’t protected for any longer than it should have been, because the pressure of Microsoft’s dominance drove the market towards demanding more symmetrical rights via entirely new approaches of software development and distribution across desktop applications, server and embedded operating systems and software, and web-based platform-agnostic applications.
Source? The sources I’ve seen has Samsung much closer to Apple than that (30-35% vs 40-45%).
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-sh...
Through iOS devices Apple has created a market of users they are the very protective gatekeeper for.
Windows PC user market. Not locked down. Though MS has a store you have Steam, EGS, GOG, Origin, UBS etc for games alone. Let alone productivity apps.
Android market. Not locked down. Though google play store is the gorilla other stores exist. I like F-Droid.
EPICS Unreal game engine? Doesn't have a locked down market of users. It would lock the business into a payment scheme though.
Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo consoles. I fear they are similar in terms of gatekeepering to users and should be subject to whatever outcome Apple is. They seem a bit more open to begin with though so are likely to be less affected. It also makes them not the prime offender, though offenders all the same.
Ultimately, want to sell to an Apple iOS user? One choice.
Separately then, is this anti-competitive or simply smart business? I'd answer : Why not both? The business wants to make money and until the law steps in, they will do it.
Even Microsoft kind of failed to do this. Most computers sold running Windows are not built by Microsoft.
And I have a few programs I have bought entirely outside these stores.
This suits me.
And that is the main complaint for a lot of people. The option for users to suit themselves. We can vote with the wallet and go non-apple. But we're allowed to express desires and wishes too.
I also hate having separate apps for different games. I tend to avoid most of the stores even if I want to play those games.
The worst EGS does is enumerating running processes and DLL.
Devices have been a lot more usable over the years but there does seem to be quite a lot of deliberateness when it comes to preventing competition, especially so for devices.
In the West, if Apple/Google/Facebook/Twitter decide they don't like something you're doing, you're pretty much off the radar and at a massive disadvantage in whatever market you're in.
These firms invented the mode Apple is using. Consoles have sold at a discount and made up the revenue in licensing since the Atari 2600.
The just released $399 iPhone SE could easily be serviceable 10 years from now given Apple’s track record for providing OS and security updates on older devices. Part of the reason that they can do this is that they can realize revenue from some users late in the phones life.
You don’t see this sort of deal happening in the Android world where the incentives are much more aligned towards more frequent hardware purchases and less long term support. It’s good for consumers to have choice not only in hardware, but also in business models.
We may think of how Europe deals with big business as extreme and radical, but it's only because we got so far away from the reasonable middle ground of big money and citizenry coexisting without f---ing each other over.
What has Europe done in the last decade in anti-trust? Vestager brought a series of suits that got overturned by the courts, or charged monopolists peanuts for brazenly violating the law.
They have been squeezing billions of dollars out of Facebook and Google, for one thing.
You buy a Nespresso machine on Amazon. Some amount of the purchase price goes to Amazon for facilitating the transaction and delivering it to you, some goes to Nespresso for actually making the device. Cool. Then you get a pod subscription from Nespresso – let's say there is a touch screen on the coffee machine itself where you enter your details to subscribe. Now, Nespresso ships pods to your house every month. Amazon then says that because the machine was originally bought on Amazon, they are entitled to a 30% cut of that ongoing subscription price, even though the subscription is neither facilitated nor fulfilled by Amazon.
I think we can all agree that would be ridiculous.
That is what Apple is doing.
Any comparison with physically shipped goods isn't going to be particularly relevant here
Epic providing digital currency to their users costs Apple literally nothing. Apple does not participate in it. If Apple wants to charge Epic for whatever it costs them to distribute Fortnite to users (e.g. bandwidth costs) then power to them.
It's important to understand that this definitely isn't true. It probably doesn't cost them (anywhere near) 30%, but fraud, handling upset parents, providing a ubiquitous gift card system, etc etc. does have real operational and monetary cost. It's not just basic payment processing
Just like if Amazon said Nespresso couldn't sell a machine on Amazon that doesn't use Amazon as the payment processor when handling pod subscriptions.
1) It’s none of Amazon’s business what I do with my machine after I bought it.
2) 30% for handling transactions and shipping is ludicrous.
Though, in the real world of physical goods Amazon also sells generic pods from all sorts of manufacturers, which Nespresso can’t prevent. Yet Epic demands that they are the only company that can sell hats on Fortnite.
Epic also isn't "expecting" Apple to do all that. Apple does all that as part of paying for an Apple Developer License. If their costs are not being recouped by that, they should charge what it's actually costing them to deliver those services.
They should not be charging 30% on transactions they don't need to have any hand in, and the only reason they can is because they are using their monopoly position to force participants to use them as the payment processor.
If Apple did enforce fee-for-service on developer accounts you’d see HN light up in a way that would make this thread look tame in comparison. Consumers benefit massively from free and open source apps getting access to App Store, APNS, Game Center, etc. This makes the platform more valuable for giant companies like Epic.
Perhaps you think sidewalks should be reserved for those who pay property taxes? Or that people should make per-step micropayments? Or tourists and children should require credits to access parks?
> … the only reason …
A statement like this is bound to be false. Ecosystems are complex.
Sidewalks and parks are a public good... the App Store is not.
Don't get me wrong, this statement isn't in support of Apple, I'm just saying that your analogy is bad.
What is not reasonable is for Apple to take a cut from transactions that do not need to involve them. If Epic sells hats in their own online store and don't use Apple as the payment processor, this costs Apple nothing. No bandwidth costs, no nothing.
If Apple wants to charge Fortnite whatever it costs to distribute Fortnite updates on the App Store + 30% on top as their fee for delivering that service, I am 100% sure Epic would be OK with that.
This is not what they are doing.
---
Here's an extreme hypothetical to illustrate how Apple is using their monopoly position for rent-seeking:
Imagine you have an app that is downloaded 100 times in the App Store. It is not marketed, advertised, other otherwise promoted by Apple.
In total, it costs Apple pennies to provide this service to your customers. You never push an update to the App Store – it is always on version 1.0.0. You are already paying Apple $99 per year for the privilege of your app being in their App Store, so they're pocketing a tidy profit.
Now imagine that you offer a subscription service, which all 100 customers who downloaded your app are paying for. This subscription costs $100 a month.
Apple is not involved in the delivery of this subscription at all (except in the delivery of the original app, which you are already paying $99py for), but Apple wants to take $30,000 a month from you, for something that in total cost them pennies.
If that's not ludicrous rent-seeking, I don't know what is. Obviously this is an extreme, totally made-up example, but the entire point is that it is bad to insert yourself into a transaction where you are not providing any added value – charge at the point where you are involved. Do not use your monopoly position to force yourself into transactions where you really have no business being.
I don't see anybody complaining about Sony taking cuts and requiring transactions go through the PlayStation Network, even though purchasing things for Fortnite there does not in any way, shape or form need to involve the PlayStation Network to be properly facilitated.
Is there something I'm not seeing?
I do not think marketplace providers should be able to exert monopolistic pressure on developers that use their marketplace, full stop. I think it's anti-competetive and bad for the entire digital ecosystem as a whole.
Why should Apple be required to expend any resources at all, to facilitate something where they would get literally zero revenue, but the developer would get millions?
That’s how it is different. And tricky.
Epic is implicitly making the case that consumers are harmed by having to pay $9.99 instead of $7.99 for in-game tchotchkes, but even as someone who's grown pretty skeptical of Apple's approach to the App Store in recent years, that strikes me as a reach. They were manifestly not losing money under the existing pricing agreement, and their fight here sure seems to be "we don't want to share that much revenue with Apple" rather than something akin to Hey's "Apple's revenue share materially harms our business". In-app purchase policies are arguably where Apple's policies are at their worst, but I have serious doubts whether Epic Games is a great standard-bearer to line up behind in a fight for fair business practices.
But I don’t think they need to argue that. The cornerstone of US antitrust law is cheaper prices for consumers. This example demonstrates that.
Google can have the argument that you can install different stores in their OS (or even apps directly), and so you’re not locked into the Apps provided by their store. Apple can not make the same argument.
It sucks to have to open amazon in a browser to buy kindle or audible books, but it’s great to not have to deal with multiple dodgy app stores, or sideloaded data harvesting malware. As a consumer I prefer these sets of trade offs for myself and my family’s pocket devices than the alternative. Why take that choice away?
But you have the choice between regular Windows and Locked down version.
https://download-installer.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/firefox/relea...
I think the new and problematic policy is that they now
- forbid you to use other payment systems than their own
- forbid you to just add the 30% to your price on iOS compared to other platforms
- forbid you to mention to the user that they can pay on the company's website or through other channels
Also their own product's don't have to pay the fee. So Apple Music can charge 30% less than Spotify or Spotify can distribute significantly less of the revenue to the artists.
That’s new to me. Any source of that?
But google does exactly that for their Youtube Premium(and Youtube music). I'm sure this isn't prohibited.
And I want that setting to work exactly as you imagine.
And then everything else problematic about this debate would disappear.
It also muddies things like moving to a new phone, parental controls, iCloud save/syncing, and things like refunds or expired subscriptions.
I'm not saying Apple isn't wrong here. I'm just pessimistic about what Epic is pushing for. It's way more in their interest than mine.
It's going to really suck when a normal office computer will need an OS, an "Adobe store" app (just for Photoshop), a "Microsoft store" app (just for Office), and a separate store app/account for any company big enough to push it on their users.
We are increasingly losing the right to actually control our devices as time goes on, and it scares me. Especially since you can't really DIY this kind of hardware to remove these protections.
It makes me sad to think there's a pretty a good chance of this lawsuit going Apple's way. Even more sad is the fact that many actually support these ever-increasing walled gardens.
I have root access to plenty of hardware devices. I don't need root access to every hardware device I own. What am I going to do with that capability on an iPhone, sideload Fortnite? No thanks, this is the device I use to check my email.
No dad, not the App Store. The Epic store. It’s an app that you get in the App Store. Download that. Then log on with the Epic account—-no, not that password, the one you use for Epic. Huh. It could be your other credit card? Yeah then you search for Fortnite. Backed up? No it only migrated the apps that were from the App Store...
Fortnite is not really the hill I have seen this battle take place. For example Apple also rejected the satirical app of a Pulitzer winning journalist (it does not make their app good but suggests that the content was probably not just a fart joke).
Still, people should be able to install whatever they want on their phones, without Apple playing walled garden.
It is not good for devs getting squeezed by the platform owners, it is not good for people being able to install whatever they want, and quite frankly it is not good for freedom of speech either.
I am not including Google here since their policy is a bit more defendable, you can sideload apps without too much trouble, I even believe that Epic uses that mechanism to do not have to pay the 30%.
This move hurt Apple, full stop. It will likely cost them somewhere in the range of $50-$200M per year. You can quote me Apple's annual revenue, but I know what it is. Fortnite's contribution to it is small, but its probably far, far larger than most people here realize.
Of course, it hurts Epic more on the short term. But, long term, maybe Fortnite gets to come back at a lower rate; maybe they'll get to use their own payment processor; maybe the courts will actually work, and they'll force Apple to allow competing storefronts, which would enable the Epic Games Store to release on iOS, earning huge revenue for Epic.
And what's more: Epic's bread and butter has always been Unreal Engine, which is charged at a rate of 5% of a game's revenue (above $1M I believe, below that its free). Unreal is absolutely used for iOS game development. If Epic can win even a lower rate for all game devs, it amplifies their iOS earnings on Unreal; more money in the devs pockets means more money in Epic's pocket.
Epic's warchest is massive; its not just Fortnite, but also money from Tencent. They have the support of their massive community, including impressionable adolescents. They picked a time just weeks after Tim Cook was torn apart by Congress for allegations of antitrust. They're joining the ranks of Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and every other company that Apple has screwed over with their policies. They can fight this out, and its hard to say what the exact outcome will be, but whatever it is, Apple will not like it. Apple is on the wrong side of history.
[1] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/fortnite-hits-1bn-in-...
[2] https://www.cultofmac.com/632642/apple-worlds-fourth-largest...
Thanks for clarifying that framing for me.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
[0]https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/13/21368079/fortnite-epic-an...
Google (and Apple) should have a say in what they sell in their storefronts. Suggesting that they have to carry any application submitted to them, law permitting, is taking the situation too far. Even demanding that applications submitted through the store use their IAP frameworks, at the 30% fee, feels alright to me.
The line is drawn at "is that store the only option". In Google's case, it isn't. Epic, and Android itself, has a road ahead of them getting users into alternative storefronts, but Android has the capability, and I think we're headed in the direction of alternative storefronts being the norm. This is especially true given that Google really does not control the hardware; Samsung has been working with Microsoft a lot lately, and being a Galaxy S20 user, I get a strong feeling that Samsung's relationship with Google is not a happy one.
Given the money at stake, they are also strongly motivated to do it without paying Apple's 30% ransom
Perhaps the market's innovation that solves this walled garden problem will be towards a very different or very new kind of mobile communications product altogether, rather than a mere iteration on the now rather tired smartphone theme.
otherwise, we'd all still be using internet explorer
If you can’t get that to work, I was able to side load it but it was a pain in the ass. You need to get an IPA (which you can only get by decrypting the app on a jailbroken device), then you need to bundle it in a shim Xcode app that you sign with a 24 hour certificate and deploy to your device in developer mode.
...1,000 V-bucks, which is roughly equivalent to $10 in-game Fortnite currency, now costs just $7.99 if you use Epic direct payment instead of the standard Apple payment processing. Normally, that amount of currency costs $9.99. Epic says, in this case, customers keep the extra savings, not the company. That cast the new arrangement as a pro-consumer move instead of a greedy power play.
My math skills aren't the best but it seems like epic is still pocketing almost an extra dollar there than previously (almost 10%), indicating that this is move motivated by financial gain (if not greed). Of course Apple stands out as the bigger case of "highway robbery".
I am somewhat curious on how much apple spends on maintaining the app store and how much of that %30 is net profit.
The credit card companies themselves charge 3.00%+0.10 at the reasonable maximum (or roughly $0.31). That is still not even counting the payment processor's fees (which pay the credit card company's fees for you).
I mean the "7 dollar price" is all artificial anyway, it doesn't really cost Epic anything to make the product of those 7 dollars (it's economic rent extracted from the intellectual property they maintain). Either way Epic is making more money on this move even if the whole extra dollar is fees.
This is part of why a lot of mom & pop shops still have a 5 or 10 dollar minimum for card transactions; When I worked at a computer shop in an almost-sketchy neighborhood our minimum fee was Two whole dollars.
Given the frequency of refunds and the like, I'd assume Epic is probably not making much, if anything extra on top of this.
This may actually close a ban-hopping/stalling gap. I've seen people claim that if you do a refund for an App store purchase, the publisher may not even know about the refund for 2-3 months after it was requested/granted. This likely shortens Epic's time to react and ban people for requesting fraudulent refunds.
Wow, I would have hoped for better support from the HN community. Instead there are apologists after apologists. So what if Epic is big. Really, seriously shouldn't we have had alternative app stores available form the official ones. Why is this even a point of debate? All the time we hear stories of people one of our own getting fucked by these app stores and their lordship and now that we have an opportunity to make some noise, this is the response? Fuck that. Maybe we deserve these lords.
Fuck your security and fuck your walled gardens. Fucking no alternative browser allowed. Fuck that, fuck you apple and fuck you google. Fuck your monopoly and chokehold on the devs.
It's predatory and anti-consumer. Apple can eat shit.
Oops! Apple Bad, Google Good? ;)
At least you can get other app stores on Android.
It is much more difficult to distribute apps from outside the original store when compared with desktop platforms. Changing this would be a good thing for users and developers alike, for both Android and iOS.
2. Fortnite doesn't follow rule.
3. Apple kicks Fortnite out of the App store.
What were they expecting?
There is side-loading, but there's a lot of friction there that I wouldn't expect normal users to withstand.
There are countries with 0% iOS market share, half of zero is still zero.
A single big company doing this just to cut down on some fees just reeks of greed.
The world is unfair, no one is expected to do charity for developers.
We are not a special snowflake job that isn't expected to give others the necessary payments to keep the whole chain working.
They're not perfect at all and I wish very much that they had competition, but for me to consider it real competition with the product they're providing it'd have to be similarly locked-down. The locking-down is part of the value. There are already far-less-locked-down phones and tablets available for people who want that.
I will start: Are software stores and locked down environments really a good idea, when conflicts like this determine what kind of software you can install on your devices? Without a comment on who is in the "right" here, I will just use a clear 'no'.
2. Seth says there should be less taxes as the pharaoh is too rich.
3. He gets his tongue cut out. What did he expect?
Unfair rules should not always be followed.
This is probably the most important question: what is fair in a world where there are technological platform providers that are essentially creating two-sided markets of vast size and value? If the platform provider is in a dominant position, their actions or inaction could significantly harm participants in the market. Should they then be permitted to impose their own terms and charges on one or both sides of that market arbitrarily, or should there be some form of regulatory intervention in the interests of the participants in the market (from either side)? And to what extent should competition in whatever form be a factor in this?
There are many examples of harm where a single platform has a kind of quasi-monopoly and/or quasi-monopsony status. Aside from the current topic, consider Google's dominance of web search, and the corresponding effects it can have on web developers, advertisers and searchers. Other online marketplace services might qualify as well if they have come to dominate their niche. Then we have the manufacturers of many other types of device, such as cars or smart home control systems, which are also relatively high value purchases and "sticky", but where clearly there will be an ecosystem building up around them. It may not be in the interests of either the purchaser or those who would provide related products or services to be locked into whatever arrangements the manufacturer wants to impose.
We already have precedent for overriding the wishes of manufacturers in some instances in order to protect more vulnerable parties to the arrangements. For example, various regulatory authorities have acted to prevent car manufacturers from restricting their vehicles in such a way that only approved dealers can repair or service them, and of course there is the wider "right to repair" movement that is based on a similar principle.
But as ever, the law has not necessarily kept pace with the rapid evolution of technologies, and even if certain actions may be legal today as a result, that doesn't necessarily mean they should remain so.
Not disagreeing your point though
And Epic's lawsuit(s!) aren't about brining those gardens down.
They're about Epic, and other developers, getting absolute control over their place in that garden.
They don't care that the walled garden exists.
They're just angry about the cost of the manure.
They also have limited amounts of money, and lawsuits are expensive. Better to get precedent established first before suing everyone else (I'm actually surprised that they picked two fights because of this).
Epic wants an antitrust decision from the courts and/or regulators, and that requires them to get a clear, unequivocal rejection from the platform owner to have unchallengeable standing. A game console maker would have met Epic halfway, but Google and Apple did not.
The timing is probably also critical: Google and Apple just testified to Congress that they're not engaging in monopolist behavior because they treat every applicant equally. To back down from that right now would mean they perjured themselves before Congress. That's something no one in their right mind would want to do.
He's NOT a money-grubbing two-faced CEO. He's the real deal and he clearly believes that what Apple and Google are doing is wrong. He's also willing to put his money where his mouth is, unlike anyone else.
He deserves to be lauded and respected for what he's doing here. Someone has to stand up to Apple and Google and he's the only one putting in the time, effort, and money to do it.
Tim Sweeney is the hero of this story and everyone should be backing him up.
And in the grand scheme of things, users would be much better off without being restricted to app stores. The era of closed devices ought to be ended by laws. Running arbitrary software on personal computing devices should be protected by Right to Repair or Fair Use laws.
I really wish the old world game engine programmers unite and support him such as Carmack, Romero etc.
It is impossible to fight apple in the way we fought microsoft years ago - by building out a good opensource ecosystem. The entire reason for the app store is to stop that from happening.
There are tens of thousands of people from FAANG/YC acting as self-interested agents of their organizations without any kind of disclosure or counter-measures. These are, in effect, massive voting rings and propaganda efforts which are supposedly not allowed on HN.
It's obvious how this results in the total dominance of FAANG/YC content, and how it skews the public conversation in Silicon Valley in their favor.
HN could take a variety of counter-measures but they don't. Maybe because users would quickly point out the hypocrisy of ending FAANG voting rings/propaganda while permitting the YC voting rings/propaganda.
HN is now the premier mouthpiece for tech corporate interests.
It would be great for the world if someone were to create a replacement that was designed to prevent this problem, while preserving what is good about HN. Or if HN took action even if it was 5+ years late.
As an example, HN could start requiring users to link their LinkedIn accounts. Every comment could show the user's current employer (if it's a major one) without revealing the user's real name. HN cold also disregard votes for google.com submissions for Google employees, etc. These steps alone would reduce the problem drastically.
No one would like to link their LinkedIn account, of course, but most people in tech have one and could do so in seconds.
That's an obvious solution but there are many other possibilities as well. And it would still be possible to maintain the ability for anonymous throwaway accounts to be used.
I downvoted you. If it makes you happy, know that this downvote is completely organic.
I'm just annoyed by someone suggesting that we remove one of the real advantages of HN: availability of real pseudonymity.
Edit: I also sometimes vote in the same direction as supposed voting rings and I am starting to see Dans frustration with all these accusations.
I have been here for more than 10 years and I have started to get a feeling for some of the weird voting patterns here now. It has even gone so far that I am joking that I want do go to university to hopefully do a study of group dynamics in online communities :-)
And how is:
1 point by starfox9833 (Google) 22 minutes ago
not pseudoanonymous? Google has 100k employees.
HN already has email addresses for many (most?) users and could easily map most of those to LinkedIn accounts one way or another. It also knows the IP addresses of users, which are often coming from FAANG corporate networks (at least pre-Covid).
It might cost some amount of theoretical privacy but gain us a huge amount freedom from the dominance of a few major organizations.
1. LinkedIn is probably easy to game to create fake accounts.
2. HN already has email addresses for many (most?) users and could easily map most of those to LinkedIn accounts one way or another.
One of the really great things about HN is that they've been trustworthy (AFAIK). Unlike a good number of other sites they haven't done all the things they could do.
3. The more you do to identify users the lower concentration of really high quality users one get it seems. As newspapers decided on Facebook comments the only one that would show up to comment were:
- those who didn't realize or didn't care about the privacy implications
- those who just had to anyway because they felt so strongly about the topic
- trolls with faked Facebook accounts
I don't think it would limit the high quality participation, at least not by very much, and that could be mitigated. Maybe users that do not link their accounts could still comment but not vote?
There would definitely be some trade-offs but the current wholesale domination of corporations on HN is a huge trade-off in one direction as well. It seems a very high price to pay IMHO.
What about those of us without a LinkedIn account?
And not only these pro-platform votes, look at all the negative discussion that happens here around university. In every single academic thread, where academic principles oppose big tech, the most upvoted threads are those that dismiss CS education, the university research system, the professors and humanities, while upvoting the "I dropped out of college" stories.
Big tech has done a lot of good, in elevating programmer salaries, and some companies contributing to a lot of open source. But walled gardens and subscriptions and censorship are money makers prized by capitalism. So they are always trying to "kill" the web, "boring" standards like email and XMPP, open research, and self-distributed software.
Incidentally, Samsung has actually been caught and taken to court for manipulating social media:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Samsung+paid+students+for+re...
People can defend a company on their own, because they love their products and agree with their policies.
> in the way we fought microsoft years ago
Because Apple helped us fight Microsoft.
People loved Apple almost unanimously on the internet. They were the underdog, the messiah to save us from the bullshit of Big Corp. You won't find much Apple-negging from the era before Samsung started their smear campaign to make themselves relevant by going up against the tall poppy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
Which of course is a chain. It used to be IBM, then Microsoft, now it's Apple (after a long campaign [0] starting with 1984 and continuing with the famous "I'm a Mac"), and so other companies are trying to poise themselves as the underdog to win fans.
I am wondering if Apple pays a battery of social media / marketing guys to influence the discussions in their favor.
Now let the downvotes begin.
Sigh. I guess we're going to remove a product category (the relatively safe, very consistent, managed platform you can use when you just want to use a computer and not also manage a computer) and call that consumer choice, then? I'd prefer instead that more companies make something similarly-nice and compete with Apple. I have lots and lots of options I can use if I want to have to worry about a bunch of silly stuff like "will this .exe or 3rd-party repo pwn me?" or "is this payment prompt fake?" when I'm just trying to play the piano, make art, track recipes, balance my books, or whatever. I use them all the time, in fact. When I don't want to worry about that crap I use iOS. It's nice having any option in that category. I do not want to go back to having zero of them. I don't care that 3rd party browsers on it have to render with the WebKit engine. Not even a little.
No, but it may mean some apps will use different payment prompts & systems, different cancellation systems for subscriptions, have different return policies, and so on, and it may mean that sometimes an app I want requires me to either go sign up on another app store or else not use the app, while right now 100% of apps on the platform are on one store, so that is never an issue. If I want to deal with that mental overhead and risk I can go use my PC. I have options if I want that experience. I don't on my phone and tablets.
> Are you arguing having firefox and ublock on iphone will suddenly make it more pleasant to browse the web and you don't like it? I am sure you are not.
Effectively every site works alright in Safari. It has to. It might not anymore if Google can banner-ad enough of the iOS ecosystem onto Chrome using their own renderer instead of Webkit.
My kindergartener's school iPad won't come with some cheaply-made app marketed to schools that contains an entire web engine (makes cross-platform easier, don't you know) that has a bug that lets it access the open web, bypassing the OS web controls. It can't, because if it uses a webview it has to use Webkit, which obeys the OS settings. That's a good thing.
For that matter half the apps on the app store aren't the mobile equivalent of Electron, shipping with an entire browser on board, for the same reason of developer convenience, wasting my disk space and killing my battery, because they're simply not allowed to do that. Again, good thing. I don't want to have to try to figure out the damn stack an app was built on before clicking "buy". It's bad enough they let React Native and Phonegap and such through the review process. I wish they didn't.
I don't know how it's so hard to understand that the locking down is a feature to many users. I want more devices that do that. Everyone worries about some dark future of only locked-down devices but here I am annoyed that there's a monopoly on those, while I've got a ton of options for my other computing needs. If I want a safe, low-maintenance, but still highly-capable machine for some non-tech-nerd in my life, which they'll be able to use pretty well totally independently, I have one option. That sucks.
Your children are not in danger from antitrust enforcement.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2019/09/04/why-zer...
Windows 10 ships with a firewall, schools enforce firewall rules on their PCs, therefore Surface ships with the same locked-down protections of a kindergarten computing device? If that's not the reasoning here, I guess I'm just not following.
> Your children are not in danger from antitrust enforcement.
No, but the only easy to use, highly safe, but still capable and low-maintenance computing option out there might get somewhat worse. I'd rather have more competition in that category, not in the category of "app stores on iPhones". One of those is all I want. I want someone to make an iOS killer & related ecosystem (yes, including an app store) so damn good that I gleefully and enthusiastically switch—or failing that, good enough that Apple feels the heat of competition and makes some major improvements. I don't love having just the one option in that product category.
Isn't the point here that Apple could still provide good security features in iOS and still provide their app store with whatever security or other vetting measures they consider appropriate and allow users to install software from other sources if they so wish?
Users who want Apple's version of safety and security can stick with the default configuration on their devices and install apps only from Apple's store, just like today. However, both they and Apple would pay a price if the Apple app store was then too restrictive in its policies and/or tried to charge excessively: developers who weren't prepared to provide their apps on those terms could sell them through other stores.
Then for those apps, Apple wouldn't get their cut, while users who insisted on sticking with only Apple's store wouldn't have the same range of apps available to them. However, no other users or developers would have their hands tied by Apple's policies. I fail to see how this would restrict consumer choice more than the status quo.
> while users who insisted on sticking with only Apple's store wouldn't have the same range of apps available to them.
Exactly. From my perspective my i-devices get worse if that happens, for exactly that reason. I'm stuck choosing between availability of software and safety & consistency. Again. Like everywhere else.
> I fail to see how this would restrict consumer choice more than the status quo.
Clearly, the choice of being able to buy a phone or tablet where 100% of the apps available on it, and 100% of payments for digital services in apps, go through one app store and one payment system, would be gone. My choice to buy a device that works that way would be gone, and i-devices would join literally all the other choices I have which do not work that way.
There's a chance Epic loses but Fortnite is so big, and no clone takes its place on iOS and ends up pwning it out of existence (a risk Epic is taking), that they decide to deny themselves piles of cash to keep sticking it to Apple, and that Fortnite's absence ends up eroding Apple's marketshare and so the App Store model becomes untenable that way. Or that that happens the next time a company does this. Of course that might happen. One app doing it does not yet have me worried I won't still have an excellent selection of software, all with spying and other anti-user capabilities significantly dampened versus other platforms, in two years.
Well, yes. I'm fairly sure they're trying to prompt that "major shift in the landscape" you mentioned. And I suspect that if a few of the other big players who have been unhappy with Apple's policies join them, they might even succeed, regardless of the outcome of the current legal action. Apple can almost certainly stand to lose one big name game from its ecosystem. But a "high end" phone that can't access the major streaming services or play several of the most popular games starts to look more like a phone that "just doesn't work", particularly with the sub-par web browser it also imposes.
One app doing it does not yet have me worried I won't still have an excellent selection of software, all with spying and other anti-user capabilities significantly dampened versus other platforms, in two years.
As I and others have pointed out many times, if you're relying on an app store for your platform's security and privacy restrictions, your model is already broken. The OS shouldn't be permitting inappropriate behaviour by apps, regardless of where they came from. Trying to thoroughly vet every new version of every app to ensure it will never do anything inappropriate that it otherwise could is a losing battle.
Sure, but they all do.
Or were consumers free to keep using Google search the same way they always had, and was there literally no downside at all to the people who wanted to keep using Google?
Nobody is talking about forcing you to sideload apps. If you want to stay in your walled garden, stay there. But the rest of us should get a choice.
There are a bunch of people on HN arguing simultaneously that:
A) Consumers want Apple's walled garden and Apple is meeting their needs,
and
B) The option to install apps from a 3rd party source would immediately cause consumers to jump ship from Apple's official store, and there would be no incentive for companies to release apps on the official store, and security on the device would be ruined forever.
Both of those arguments can't be true at the same time. If you're providing a service that consumers want, you don't have to force them into it. If forcing consumers not to sideload apps is the only reason why consumers use Apple's store, then maybe that's a good sign that consumers don't want what Apple is providing.
If consumers do want what Apple is offering, if consumers do want a unified storefront with strict moderation for everything, then there'll still be plenty of market pressure for most commercial apps to release on the official store.
> and
> B) The option to install apps from a 3rd party source would immediately mean that consumers all jump ship from Apple's official store and there would be no incentive for companies to release apps on the official store, and security on the device would be ruined forever.
> Both of those arguments can't be true at the same time. If you're providing a service that consumers want, you don't have to force them into it. If forcing consumers not to sideload apps is the only reason why consumers use Apple's store, then maybe that's a good sign that consumers don't want what Apple is providing.
The reason this looks like a contradiction is because it's not the actual position.
Mine, at least, is that 1) yes to A, and I'm not speculating, I personally feel that way as an iOS user, but then 2) no, on B: the concern isn't that users will jump ship from the App Store (I don't care, why would I?) but that developers will (and that I care about).
What is the practical difference to you, as a user, between:
A) Not being able to install Fortnite because it's only available on a third-party iOS storefront,
and
B) Not being able to install Fortnite because it's not available on iOS.
If apps jump ship from the official store, you personally as a security-conscious user won't be able to install them. But if apps jump ship from iOS, you also won't be able to install them. So who cares if developers move off the official iOS store? Aren't they already free to do so today?
----
I'm going to go out on a limb and say the difference is that (deep down) we all know that Epic is right, and Apple really is one half of a duopoly -- a half that controls over 50% of the entire mobile app store revenue in the US -- and that it would be insane for an app like Fortnite to drop iOS. I think the difference between the scenarios above is that (deep down) both you and I know that Fortnite isn't really free to abandon iOS as a platform, and that the stranglehold iOS has over the market is the only reason apps like Fortnite are on iOS in the first place.
We know that given the choice, consumers and developers would both choose a more open device. And we know that the only reason the closed ecosystem works at all is because many developers and users don't have a realistic choice about whether or not to accept Apple's terms.
The reason people see the two scenarios I list above as different is because, yeah, all of us on HN do actually know that Fortnite doesn't really have the option to walk away from Apple devices, and without a 3rd-party store Epic will be forced to agree to pretty much any terms that Apple requires -- they have no negotiating power. And once we admit that, then it becomes a lot more obvious why developers are asking for some kind of regulation around app store policies.
If dropping iOS and supporting only Android or PC was actually a realistic, sufficient option for most developers, then you wouldn't be worried that they'd all jump ship the moment they had a 3rd-party store as an option on iOS -- those developers would have already left the Apple app store (and iOS) behind.
I also think smaller-time developers are underestimating the degree to which Apple's iOS market is attractive precisely because of the equilibrium brought about by that situation, and the overall value it brings to the user, and their consequent willingness to spend money there, as they cheer Epic on. Maybe I'm wrong and none of the market-creating rules Apple's enforced have anything to do with it, but I suspect too many tweaks may not kill that golden goose, but might well reduce its rate of egg-laying.
As I've repeated many times here, now, though, I'd love to see more platforms compete with iOS. Not with the app store. With iOS and its overall ecosystem.
Isn't that a contradiction? App Store _IS_ "its overall ecosystem".
Interesting. Won't you agree that before 1 and 2 there is an implied 0 - must be Android or iOS (so that it can run Uber, Amazon etc)?
EDIT: maybe you misunderstood when I said "anything else doesn't matter". What I mean by that is that if $device cannot run "common" apps then it is a no-go. However, if it can then people look at 1 and 2 for sure, you're right there.
This is a false dichotomy. You still need to worry about that. Exploits for iOS are cheaper than exploits for Android[1], because exploits for iOS are so abundant[2].
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/for-t...
[2] https://www.securityweek.com/zerodium-expects-ios-exploit-pr...
Here's a better suggestion:
Stop Apple abusing their platform to force their customers to use their own book store by making others impractical.
Stop Apple abusing their monopoly to force their customers to use one browser.
Stop Apple abusing their monopoly to gouge everyone that wants to be on their platform with a 30% fee on every transaction (10% would be more reasonable, 3% a bare minimum to cover costs).
Except the browser thing—that's already fine IMO, and I think keeping other browser engines off is very nice because it keeps the Electron-type riff-raff out of the store, among other reasons, and besides it's just the browser engine that's restricted. Again, what I'd rather see is another iOS-like OS & platform come on the market, also only one browser engine allowed, but for that browser engine to be better than Mobile WebKit, forcing Apple to improve or at least giving me another option in the same product category as i-devices, but with a browser engine I like better.
Apple don't keep other browsers off to keep electron out or make things safer, it is to ensure they have complete control of the web platform, which otherwise is a viable alternative to their app store, just the sort of alternative you're suggesting in fact.
Capitalism needs regulation to work well, if unregulated, it very quickly gives rise to robber barons and bullying of both consumers and smaller companies. Unfettered capitalism leads to monopolies, coercion and rent-seeking.
FWIW I’m all for regulating the hell out of anything with a corporate charter. As far as I’m concerned the deal they made when they asked us to let them have the privileges of incorporation is that we can do whatever we like to them, should we decide it’s in our interest, and if they don’t like it no-one’s forcing them to keep those protections. Half the reason I’m so keen on iOS‘ particular model of software distribution to begin with is because we haven’t regulated massive-scale collection of personal data out of existence. Give me that and I’ll join you to burn the last iPhone on a bonfire, or whatever. That’d be wonderful.
I was thinking after that a) we could make a store (that's the simple part) b) when enough of us were behind we could pressure for it to be accepted
Because even if Epic wins and we can have some improvements, it wont fix the issues
I would donate and work for the cause, what about the rest of you? How to get started, Apache Foundation?
EDIT: I have to add, I would not work for this 'because it is the right thing to do', but to ensure that I can do business in the future without fear of A+G
No. We cant just slink off into IRC and build our own store. We cant just do The Right Thing, we also have to make the Wrong Thing prohibitively expensive for the general population.
If you start a company, and you have 50% market share [1], do you want to be treated like a monopoly?
In a free market, Apple should be allowed to operate however they see fit, as long as they don't have a monopoly. Of course it is annoying that they can demand that much, but that's how open markets work.
All those developers who want better conditions on an app store, nobody is preventing them from joining their forces and creating a better operating system that promotes their own store with more favourable conditions.
Android is a sitting duck. Take objective c, the bsd kernel and the openstep libraries and link them up to your own mobile operating system. As long as Oracle doesn't win against Google, it can even have the same api as ios and thus all the existing apps from the apple app store. At first, offer it as a ROM for android devices, then start making your own. Apple's devices are expensive. Customers will love to buy cheaper alternatives.
Judging by the upvotes of this story alone, there should be 1000 developers wanting to have their own app store. If half of them invest some time of their life to create a new objective c operating system, they should have something operational in a year or two. Most likely much faster than the legal proceedings that could create a second app store on ios, with the nice benefit of being in control of the process.
[1] Research into Android vs iOS market share in the US shows that the market leader remains Google Android, with a 51.1% market share in June 2019. https://leftronic.com/android-vs-ios-market-share/
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
Secondly, I don't believe that the law will be applied. There are plenty of big companies that are in that position. First of all google with their operating system, browser, search-engine, ad network combo and Microsoft with their office suit. If you look at the quality of MS Teams, you know that its popularity is not by free choice.
If a second app store is introduced by that law, there would be plenty of follow-ups. I doubt that killing those cash-cows will happen when there is an economic war against China. Opening up those markets would allow Chinese companies to take those positions.
So, because of the specifics of how antitrust legislation works in the U.S. Epic may very well fail in court, because they may fail to prove a monopoly. But I do expect the EU to take action. It is all but unavoidable at this point.
Apple are prepared to fuck over their users for them not getting paid, and I can’t see a good argument for anyone thinking that this is okay.
In another thread someone compared Apple with a dictatorship and this is right. Maybe you will feel safe but there is no freedom. And when you don't do as the dictator pleases you are in trouble.
Companies get too big and too powerful. Some say this is the beginning of a new world order, like the industrial revolution changed how the world was ordered.
Bordering on bad faith.
Tinfoil hat on: Apple is probably worried that if Trump gets re-elected then they would be forced out of the Chinese market unless they allow third-party app stores where people can download the Chinese apps that Trump would force them to remove. Apple will therefore opt to allow third-party app installations (which would hurt them a lot if we ignored the Chinese market) rather than lowering their fees or allowing third-party payment providers.
Thank you, that was cathartic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(No, we don't care one way or another about Apple. We just care about HN.)
Some of the arguments are that Apple’s closed ecosystem allows them to offer better products and security.
I don’t really buy that. If it was true my day job wouldn’t have me so worried about iOS and MacOS security. Exploits wouldn’t be so cheap for iOS right now too..
Thank goodness that wasn't the case.
I know it’s not the same but something feels similar to me.
Currently, there are alternative implementations of Play Services that can be installed to replace Google's. However, if it is not fair use to use even the bare bones of an API definition without permission, then we can't even create a compatible implementation of such an API without the copyright holder's permission. In which case, we cannot replace Google Play services with anything else.
AFAIK Firefox still exists as does KHTML.
Some days it really feels like there is nothing new under the sun.
How? Google controls neither the AMP specification nor the third party implementations like Bing's.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/about-amp
Isn't there a term for using dominance in one market to compel behavior in another?
This is not enforcing AMP on publishers in the results, and the argument that it is by using icons falls under the 'it's kind of the same' category.
This is how you do agnostic search results, and it is not putting the thumb on the scale as you're implying.
Ultimately, the best Reddit experience is less Reddit.
If you're still using Google and prefer a more technical approach to your inquiries, maybe it's time for to consider a more refined tool?
This is what I use on my Jailbroken iPhone.
The Reddit apps I've tried stick to the meth-addled idea to use fixed floating header bars, which are useless and really annoy me.
Yes, I know some things seem "obvious" but it's a sliding scale per person... and, well that's the slippery slope.
App Stores suck. App Stores with no side-loading are even worse. Platforms that are locked down so much that you can't even install your own OS are worse.
We used to bitch about Tivoization on HN all the time, it seems post iPhone, everyone seems A-OK.
In every day life, the number of people who think “App Stores suck” is infinitesimal.
Does that mitigate any of the concerns people have about either company?
This community used to have a strong focus on openness, open source, permission less innovation and the avoidance of checkpoints and tolls, but what it's turned into is often a battle of fanboys, who roll out excuses and lowered standards for their favorites.
Yours is an easy position to maintain, until you have invested a lot of money and work in an app which gets booted from the App Store, or because Apple decides to shake you down for even more money.
Apple fans simultaneously say Apple has a small marketshare, but also brag that earn the majority of all smartphone industry profits. If the latter is true, it means that anyone wanting to make money on mobile software has no choice but to publish on the App Store, ergo, effectively a monopoly.
I’ve made the same argument about Google, FaceBook, Apple, and Amazon (even before I started working for AWS).
This community used to have a strong focus on openness, open source, permission less innovation and the avoidance of checkpoints and tolls, but what it's turned into is often a battle of fanboys, who roll out excuses and lowered standards for their favorites.
Did the open source community whine about mean old Microsoft or did they create alternatives to the point where even Azure runs more Linux VMs than Windows VMs? They went out there and built something better. They out competed.
Every single one of the big tech companies got there through better execution.
Citation needed. Many parts of our government do just that (FDA, EPA). We need these because many decisions would otherwise be uninformed. If you don't know what is in your food, how can you make informed decisions? If you don't know what is in your drugs, or what the side effects are, how can you make informed decisions?
Are you really saying that Google doesn’t have the capital or reach to better market the “openness” of Android?
People were not making money by being shareholders, that's why.
Mind.blown.
Overall it feels a little bit like self-flagellation which I'm hoping is for the greater good, that DDG's algo will improve with use and eventually I won't need !g anymore.
Maybe DDG needs a browser extension that let's you seamlessly provide feedback with every !g to teach them what you were actually looking for.
You are calling it seamlessly providing feedback because it is DDG. If this was about Google or Facebook, it could have sounded closer to 'tracking users'.
Did you think your feigned ignorance was insightful? Google has 86% market share.
Also, the web is not even a great analogy period since it wasn't created by a private company. Apple created their phones, their App Store, they maintain it, and they provide the infrastructure for it. That's nothing like the internet.
I know, I know, people who bought iPhones knew what they were buying into.
So yes, lots of people buy iPhones exactly because if Apples iron grip.
That's incredibly disingenuous and you're either being dishonest or ignorant. The 30% is for sales made on Apple's platform. Developers can absolutely make sales without giving Apple a cut as long as they don't use Apple's infrastructure or platform. You can have people purchase things for your app as long as you don't attempt to offer in-app purchases that circumvent the App Store.
It would be like you using AOL and only being able to view the channels that AOL offered (which is exactly what it was). Apple has no authority to tell you what you can do with your device once you've purchased it but you also don't have the authority or the right to demand that Apple service your device if you jailbreak it or mod it.
This is literally the exact same situation as Xbox and PS4. Xbox doesn't allow people to play PS4 games on an Xbox. Is that anti-competitive? Is that anti-consumer? Is that Xbox having absolute authority over what you can do on your Xbox? Get out of here with that nonsense.
But in the end I guess what matters more is whether you want a single person to control what you view or not, like when they banned James Joyce because of an illustration of a man skinny dipping.
In my opinion iOS was far better when there were fewer different devices released every year, but it's still better today than Android.
Instead, Apple invented a new computing platform and a new model to pay for it, it just worked, people were willing to pay for that, and we liked it.
Also, Apple has a much bigger market share in the US simply because most of the world cannot afford an iPhone.
The question isn't whether Apple has a large enough market share in the US for the courts to get involved — it very clearly does — the question is does it exhibit exclusionary behavior to the extent courts should get involved.
(I think it does exhibit exclusionary behavior, but I can see that being much more open to interpretation than the simple fact that it clears the 50% threshold.)
Regardless, my comment was just correcting the statement that Apple doesn't have a majority market share in any market, when in fact it has majority market share in the US market.
Apple does not have more than 50% marketshare of smartphones in the US. In most analyses it is between 41-43%, with an absolute high of 46%. Android accounts for the rest. And of course worldwide iOS is dwarfed by Android.
https://www.kantarworldpanel.com/global/smartphone-os-market...
EDIT: Of course this was down-arrowed. The citation of StatCounter is akin to claiming that the rodeo's parking lot has 80% pick-up trucks, therefore pick-up trucks have 80% of the market. It's absolute nonsense but it somehow appears on HN repeatedly. Never change, HN. Never change.
By actual sales of devices, iOS accounts for between 41-46% of the market. That users on iOS tend to use the web more from their devices doesn't somehow make it a monopoly.
And to be clear I don't think whether it's a monopoly or not is particularly relevant -- it's still arguably abusive, anticompetitive behavior -- but that misleading statcounter claim is used for disinformation on here daily.
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
Come to think of it, why are web browsers excluded from the in-app fee?
Let’s be honest here, the rules of the app store are arbitrary and designed to extract the maximum amount of revenue from the ecosystem, within the limits of what apple thought people would put it with. Turns out they may have miscalculated.
> Imagine if Sony did this on Playstation. a) prohibiting the installation of non-PlayStation games and b) insisting that all purchases done via their store give them a 30% cut.
Many platforms are like this -- and many also have the majority marketshare. Is this a call to redefine what platforms can and cannot control?
I perceive capricious behaviour like this ad a threat to my liberty and well-being.
>What its marketed as and who it is aimed at.
I am not sure I can make my position any clearer than that. It's not an item in a spec sheet. It's what you're claiming to be selling.
Although interestingly, the Japanese console makers have continually tried to push the computer/development angle.
When the NES was released in Japan before the US, it was branded the "Family Computer" and you could get a keyboard and a version of BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_BASIC
Sony has had multiple attempts, with a consumer homebrew dev kit for the PS1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Yaroze ), and Linux for the PS2 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2 ) and later PS3.
Of course Sony also had OtherOS on PS3. It's a bit sad it ended the way that it did.
An Apple laptop looks like a general purpose computing device. Do we want it not to be one, and become closer to a gaming console?
I think that merely looking at the guts and seeing which processor it has is kind of a red herring.
It does seem a bit tautological. A vendor can restrict access then simply argue this is not a general purpose computing device because look, you can't run the things we don't let you run.
General-purpose is when you can install whatever software will run in that architecture, unimpeded.
Tautological was in reference to the argument about whether or not we should be able to install things if an iPhone is a general purpose device.
If that status relies on what software lets us do, then the answer is always going to be no, because if they don't let us then we aren't allowed to.
I think if I were to answer this question now it would be based on the expectation of the end consumer to be expected to, or have the ability to program the device for general purpose tasks.
Things like game consoles, phones, smart appliances, etc. all start to blur that line but I think it comes down to the consumer's expectations.
Don't get me wrong, I hate the idea of "digital anti-globalism", but if this thing went to court, both sides would have their reasonable arguments. And let's hope that if there's a ruling, it rules in favor of open platforms. At the very least, I think it would be great if the courts rule that a platform that's built open and sold as open cannot be consequently closed. But I doubt that Apple will be forced to open its hardware to non-App Store programs.
And in fact Microsoft tried this (both with Windows RT and Windows 10 S) and in both cases few people bought in (or, in some cases, wound up 'confused' that other software wouldn't run, leading to the eventual sunsetting of Windows 10 S).
I do think both sides have reasonable arguments, but at the same time 'computing' has become ubiquitous, and Smartphones arguably even more so. Personally, I think we are in a weird state when we consider historical context; once upon a time, remember that GM would in fact make moves to ensure they did not get too much market share. I can't remember the number but I think they didn't want to go over 59%.
Of course you COULD have more market share even back then, but it also typically resulted in a lot more government oversight and willingness for the government to intervene in situations like this (thinking about Modems and Ma Bell here...)
IMO Google sidesteps the problem by not having a lot of 'handset' market share. (Also, perhaps more controversial to state, but their compliance with LE/Intelligence agencies probably allows more things to be ignored.)
I just don't know what to say anymore. Apple (and, dare I say, to a greater extent, Google) are doing the sorts of things that absolutely landed Microsoft in court and caused microsoft to make a number of decisions that kneecapped them in the first decade of the 2000s. It's been happening for years, and yet we are only now seeing enough people agreeing that we can talk about it without getting shouted down.
It’s funny to me that One of Microsoft's strongest arguments is “well we tried it and consumers don’t want it that way unless forced upon them”.
A separate concern is around anticompetitive behavior. There is no way to sideload an app, or even use a competing app store, and Apple is charging rent. This is pretty clearly anticompetitive behavior that harms consumers.
But iPads (though iOS was renamed/forked to iPadOS on those devices) are definitely marketed as general purpose computing devices. The headline on https://www.apple.com/ipad/ is "Your next computer is not a computer".
iPad/iPadOS have these same restrictions as iPhone/iOS.
All of this is still unknown outside of Apple. What is known so far seems to me like it's pointing in the direction of a pretty open macOS and a very much locked down iOS, to satisfy different needs. We'll know more by late fall, I guess.
Why do you think Microsoft bothered with WSL? We know that most Windows users won't do it. It was a developer-attracting move, meant to make it easier to build Windows client applications with Linux server components. Apple benefits from the same thing being offered natively. I can't see them abandoning it, even though it does create a tension between the Mac as a consumer product and the Mac as a developer's tool for iOS.
I'm not arguing this is necessarily either wise or ethical of them, and there's a real sense in which this is orthogonal to the App Store's fee structure. But it seems to me that while Apple is going to face increasing pressure to change the way they run the App Store, the solution -- at least the solution Apple will offer -- very likely won't involve letting the iPad become a general purpose computer the way the Mac is.
For PlayStation you pay the Sony tax for the convenience of integrating with their payment services, not because they'll ban you for using anything else.
It's also a super different situation in general; for example, Sony actually often pays developers to develop for their store (e.g. PubFund [1]), and does free marketing campaigns for them. Console makers live and die by their access to a pipeline of new exclusive games, so they treat game developers well; Apple doesn't, so it squeezes app developers for what it can. Hence why game developers are suing Apple but not Sony.
Hmmm -- not to stretch the analogy too thin, but is this similar to Apple though, where they allow you to sign in to subscription services (e.g. Netflix) with your existing account to the service, but don't allow sign ups (which would trigger payment processing)? Or is payment processing baked in there as well?
> For PlayStation you pay the Sony tax for the convenience of integrating with their payment services, not because they'll ban you for using anything else.
To clarify, has any developer integrated external payment services within a Playstation game / app / etc? From all the games and apps I've played with, I never remember any other payment system built in other than Sony's.
> It's also a super different situation in general; for example, Sony actually often pays developers to develop for their store ...
Blackberry did the same thing near the end of it's life -- I was at a hackathon where they were giving away Blackberries and cash to anyone who developed a Blackberry app -- but does not giving back really reflect as monopolistic?
Actually, looking now, I think you're right. It looks like Spotify disabled setting up subscriptions on PS4. I guess PS4 subscriptions are a small enough chunk of revenue for Spotify it didn't really matter to them.
I guess the real point is that PS4 just isn't a large enough chunk of these kinds of services' market share by revenue to matter; they don't need signups, since not many people primarily use Spotify via PlayStation.
Which is why I found Microsoft's bitching about the app store hilarious. They have been taking giant pieces of the action in Xbox for 20 years and tried to do the same in their sorry excuse for a Windows Store. I'd like to see them allow Stadia on the Xbox.
I actually agree with not allowing external payment processors on these (and mobile) platforms, especially for games where the audience is frequently naive kids.
Don't agree with the platform taking a huge cut of every transaction though. Maybe take a smaller cut and the billionaires can stop squabbling.
Don't agree with the platform taking a huge cut of every transaction though
Putting aside the ethics of Apple's content stranglehold for the moment, the economic side of things seems like a very nice deal -- 30% is not bad compared to various distribution deals (for physical and virtual goods) of which I have some slight familiarity.
Are there distribution platforms that allow you to get your app/product/etc to that many people without taking a cut?
I'm kind of fed up with Apple for a variety of reasons, but this doesn't seem like one of the problems to me.
So distribution deals for physical goods are not analogous, right ? Like Best Buy doesn't get a cut if I pay netflix to watch it on the TV I bought from them.
If you sign up for a Target card, they get an initial cut and then monthly percentage based on your usage. A bank is managing that card not Target.
Like Best Buy doesn't get a cut if I pay netflix to
watch it on the TV I bought from them.
Imagine Best Buy's extremely large presence in the world of television-selling. You could get your streaming service into a lot of homes if they promoted the heck out of TVs featuring your service in exchange for a cut, right?
Depending on the % cut they wanted, that could be a great deal for you. Suppose the % cut was 0.0000001%. Certainly you would take that offer. And probably 0.0001%. Maybe even up to 10%. Maybe even 50%, depending on your business model?
Anyway, I have lots of problems with the App Store, but man... that 30% sounds pretty fine. Access to that many users, many of whom have payment information stored a mere tap away?
I'm assuming you would also want to prohibit these "naive kids" from ever browsing the Internet too, am I right?
(Since there are plenty of website that accept payments through a variety of payment processors?)
would you really be in favor of that and see that as a good thing for the general public ?
Apple wields it’s power indirectly, leading to the AppCasino and lousy UX.
Google pulls you in and monetizes you.
All of these companies do similar things in different ways.
Nintendo has had a clear monopoly on handheld consoles for several generations.
Sony had an extremely strong market position in the 5th and 6th generation gaming consoles but I wouldn't really call it a monopoly.
The only reason Sony is not charging exorbitant amounts (if they really aren't) is because they're in heated competition with Microsoft over being the preferred first release platform of popular games.
Well, neither does Apple seeing that neither Netflix (for new customers) or Spotify allow in app purchases.
Sony actually often pays developers to develop for their store (e.g. PubFund [1]),
So does Apple - Apple Arcade.
Could Fortnite have in app purchases for the game consoles and bypass the stores?
Historically, other game consoles could be used a "general purpose computing devices," such as the Sega Dreamcast with Windows CE and the Nintendo Famicom (which is short for Family Computer).
Afaik, there was never a Windows CE general purpose environment for the Dreamcast. Sega supported game developers using Sega's 100% propriatary OS or using Windows CE as embedded OS. Either way, the OS would ship on the disc, and isn't a lot more than a kernel and libraries.
Of course, BSDs and Linux were ported to the Dreamcast at some point, as with anything that can boot user provided code and has enough ram.
The dreamcast did have a web browser, and keyboard and mouse, but without significant local writable storage, would make a lousy general purpose computer.
It can be off by default, and probably should.
But trying to hair split console from computer from cellphone makes less and less sense everyday and we all know it.
Similar with Nintendo's Switch - Nintendo even tried to shut down a YouTuber's channel just for mentioning homebrew/jailbreaking for Switch.
It is such a shame and honestly i wish these devices were as open as PCs are. That they aren't is a testament to how much they have brainwashed people to think as normal that they have no control over their own devices and what they can do with them.
Of course, in this case piracy would be the primary reason for the restriction, but I think it's valid to look at places where the platform is controlled by a single vendor.
Anyway, I think platforms need to be regulated to be more open. We need a right to modify along with a right to repair. When I pay for a product that happens to support downloadable software, I should be free to put whatever software on it that I want. If apple allowed sideloading on iOS like they do on macOS this would not have blown up to the degree that it did.
The appeal of developing in Apple's ecosystem has always been the exposure to large audiences, the (relatively decent) tooling, and the ability to creatively actualize your ideas. That last one goes away when Apple starts looking more like Sony.
I'll leave it up to lawyers to decide if this is illegal, but I know this certainly makes me less excited about developing my next iOS/OSX app
Valve's decision to no longer support Ubuntu as a first-class distribution, a year ago, probably. Though that's just one distribution, not Linux as a whole.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/06/steam-announces-that-its...
Whether or not it's native or wine doesn't change the fact that Steam is pushing into Linux. They've shifted the responsibility from pushing linux support on the developer to providing linux support themselves.
Valve will have a much easier time improving proton than they will forcing devs to make Linux compatible games for little monetary reward.
If your complaint is that it's bad for the app developers or users, then that's different, and maybe deserves criticism but not ridicule.
When I see folks complain about this, I like ask "what do you think is a reasonable fee for Apple to charge?" Zero is not a realistic answer as Apple does incur costs to run the app store. Moreover, they're entitled to make a profit off the marketplace they created and support. So what's a reasonable percentage?
Let's put that % difference into perspective. Say you have an annual fee of $10. The first year, your users pay Apple $3 (you make $7), but after that for every user that subscribes you only pay $1.50 (you make $8.50). You're saying that Apples should only charge $1. You're arguing that fifty cents is the difference between life and death of your business? Really?
That's not how it works.
I doubt Epic would be making much complaint for 15% (since the app has been out more than a year). They suggest 12% after all.
The 15% is for subscriptions and nothing else. And it's on a per-user basis.
What I'm trying to show is that once you accept zero is not reasonable (and most rational people accept this) and then explore the actual $$ difference between what Apple charges and what you think is reasonable, the differences are really small. Normally when I ask folks this, the difference comes in between 0.05 and a $2 depending on the purchase price. For a 0.99 app we're talking about $0.05-0.20 difference. Life is too short for folks to get worked up about that small of a price difference.
The difference is small if you're looking at very cheap apps.
The big problem here is for tens of dollars being charged 30%. It makes a very significant difference!
For a $20 app the current model is that you pay Apple $6. If you waved a wand and made it 20% you pay Apple $4. So the difference in this case is only $2 (while you get $16). That's small potatoes.
Is it? That's 14% extra revenue. And if you were comparing a 30 percent take to a 12 percent take, you'd be going from $14 to $17.60, which is slightly over 25% extra revenue! That could double or triple the profit margin of a healthy business!
> What percentage is reasonable?
I already answered that in a different comment. If I was going to wave a wand right now, with no further time to consider, it would be 25% for the first $20 and 5% after.
So look at something like Hey. Apple right now would charge $30 for a user's first year, then $15 for each year after. My version would be $8.75 for the first year and $5 for each year after. A pretty big difference.
I wouldn't be strongly opposed to a flat 12%, but I'm trying to be generous and give Apple some extra dollars upfront for the service they actually provide. But the service they provide barely increase as the price of an app increases, so they don't deserve 25 or 30 percent of larger amounts.
EDIT: this comment aged well: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.epicgames....
> what do you think is a reasonable fee for Apple to charge?
That's an interesting situation, because if the game was free Apple would charge nothing. And the more they bang on the drum about consumer safety, the more I want them to charge a fee appropriate for payment processing.
If I was just arbitrarily setting the fees, I might go with something like 25% of the first 20 dollars per app per user, and then 5% afterwards.
If you really put the squeeze to them, the "natural" price would probably be a bit below cost for them, because the availability of apps is a selling point for their high-margin phones and tablets. That is why they are willing to host free apps, after all. (Although even then they take the developer fee)
Perhaps the hoops are fine and reasonable. That doesn't change the fact that hoops are being added.
Macs and iOS devices do different things for different use cases; their strengths and weaknesses are as much tied into their hardware design as software. People love Macs because of what they can do; Apple, too.
Apple couldn’t force people to use the Mac App Store even if it wanted, knowing how few of the biggest Mac apps outside of the larger software companies (Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, etc) actually distribute with it.
The only convergence we will see is the ability to run iOS apps on macOS, and even then that is merely a stopgap effort; any iOS apps that want to truly make the transition to the Mac will be updated as Catalyst apps. Catalyst apps are Mac apps through and through, despite their use of iOS’ UIKit.
See also: speculation in The mid-00s that Apple would drop Mac OS X for Windows during the Intel transition. It was just as devoid of factual basis then as fear-mongered “sensible speculation” is today.
I believe the defaults now extend to software sourced outside of the app store must still be notarized by Apple. This impacts developers more than consumers I would guess, but certainly requires more effort from developers to create and distribute software.
Want to run Photoshop, IntelliJ or Outlook, 30% of what you charge is going to Apple.
Just switch to a competitor! Go-to Linux or Mac. All good, no antitrust here. /s
There’s bullshit with each platform. PS4 can play, but not with servers, Mac can do Java, nothing else can but PC, etc.
Easy, reliably DoS -- and the user has no means of fixing this vulnerability, other than rooting the phone and hacking around. Which is made ever less feasible.
"As of right now, those who have already downloaded Fortnite on iOS are still able to access the game; only new downloads are disabled as a result of Apple pulling the game from the App Store."
Removing an app from the App Store, and removing it from user's devices are two very different things. When any app is removed in this fashion, all users who already have the app still have access to everything they had access to before. The app just isn't listed on the App Store for new downloads.
2020 is really an interesting year.
This is just three big corporations fighting over their respective slices of the pie, if you think any of this is being said or done for your benefit I’m sure Epic has a plentiful supply of really tasty Koolaid for you. But no pie, sorry.
I never thought about it like this. It could be viewed differently because the Xbox is a game console and the iphone is a general handheld computer, but perhaps it should be illegal to restrict users installing software on your device by any means they choose, though there's no reason for you to support those means.
It's like claiming that nobody can have a monopoly on electric car charging stations because the customer could just buy a gasoline powered car and electric cars don't even have majority market share. It's still a monopoly. It's a monopoly on charging stations, not a monopoly on cars.
Any mechanism for side loading apps would also be an Apple product, designed and written by them. They would be responsible for supporting it, and ensuring it was secure. Maybe they don’t want to do that, so who gets to force them to, and who gets to decide if they complied with that directive? Who gets to specify it and take responsibility if it causes problems and incurs costs on Apple or issues for their customers?
You’re not talking about stopping Apple from doing something, you’re taking about coercing them by legal requirement to do new different things, and you’d better be very specific and careful about what you are forcing them to do.
Personally yes, that's the textbook of unfair competition.
Yes, of course. The fact that you can't use the other company's chargers means that there are then two markets there, one for Tesla-vehicle charging stations and one for Nissan-vehicle charging stations. You can't substitute one for the other in that case, you need one compatible with your car. It's the same reason that gas pumps aren't the same market as electric car chargers, or that gas pumps aren't the same market as diesel pumps. If there is only one diesel pump in the state then it has a monopoly no matter how many gas pumps there are because you can't use gasoline in a diesel vehicle.
If you could use either type of charger with either type of car then they would be in the same market, because a customer who wants to charge their car could substitute either one for the other, so they would each actually be in competition with the other and neither would have a monopoly.
I think the fact that the "chargers" and the "cars" are hypothesized to be operated by the same company is what's messing people up.
Suppose you have two companies that each operate half the charging stations in the same region. One is Tesla, and you can only use them to charge a Tesla vehicle. The other is Exxon, which has started installing electric car chargers at their gas stations, and where you can charge any car including a Tesla. Well then Tesla hasn't got a monopoly on anything, because any Tesla owner can go charge their car at Exxon, and Exxon doesn't have a monopoly for Tesla vehicles, because they can also go charge their car at Tesla. But Exxon does have a monopoly for charging non-Tesla vehicles, because if you have a Nissan or a Chevy, you can't use the Tesla chargers, leaving Exxon as your only option.
1) The manufacturer lacks sufficient market power in the "foremarket". (In the case of Apple, this would be the sale of the phone. In your example, it would be the sale of the car.)
2) The consumer was aware of the "aftermarket" restrictions when buying the original product. (In the case of Apple this would be the App Store pricing and rules. In the car example it would be the location and cost of the charging stations.)
3) The consumer does not face substantial costs to switch to an alternative product. (The cost of buying a new car would probably be considered substantial but I'm not sure a new phone would.)
The courts have reasoned that if the consumer had sufficient information when making their initial purchase decision, then they had the opportunity to buy a competing product without those restrictions. If they went ahead and bought anyway, they knew what they were signing up for. It's like buying a razor and then being stuck with expensive replacement razor blades. Or buying a movie ticket and then being stuck buying expensive popcorn from that theater.
Yes, once you buy the movie ticket and enter the theater they have a "monopoly" on your snack purchases. No, you're not likely to win an antitrust claim against the theater.
The cost of switching phone platforms is massive compared to the app market. Phones can cost over $1000, apps are commonly $1, a difference of a thousand fold. And that's only the hardware cost. Then you have issues if there is any other app you need which is only available on one platform, or if you make use of Google or Apple services that are only well supported or supported at all on one platform and would incur substantial switching costs to move to the other.
You also have a different problem here:
> The courts have reasoned that if the consumer had sufficient information when making their initial purchase decision, then they had the opportunity to buy a competing product without those restrictions.
Which would only apply if there was a viable competing product without those restrictions. But there are only two viable phone platforms and Apple's has a strict monopoly while Google's has a de facto one where Google Play has >90% share of the Android market, and they both impose similar restrictions, so a viable option without those restrictions isn't there.
Furthermore, the customer for app distribution is at least as much the developer as the user -- they're the one who pays the app store's fee, right? -- and they don't get to choose which phone their customers have already bought.
Ultimately that is up to the courts to decide. But I will point out that in a previous case involving IBM S/390 computer systems, the court decided this requirement was not met, despite the hardware expense and associated software compatibility limitations.
> Which would only apply if there was a viable competing product without those restrictions. But there are only two viable phone platforms and Apple's has a strict monopoly while Google's has a de facto one where Google Play has >90% share of the Android market, and they both impose similar restrictions, so a viable option without those restrictions isn't there.
I'm not sure which specific restrictions you are referring to here. If the complaint against Apple is that you cannot install apps from 3rd party sources on your iPhone, there is a competing product that allows you to do that on the market.
> Furthermore, the customer for app distribution is at least as much the developer as the user -- they're the one who pays the app store's fee, right? -- and they don't get to choose which phone their customers have already bought.
This is not relevant for antitrust purposes. Developers are not entitled to demand a specific company give them access to that company's users.
And the government doesn't classify trusts[1] by the dictionary definition of monopoly:
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
It wasn’t until 2010 that IEs market share started eroding. It didn’t have anything to do with the government.
Almost 20 years later, MS still has the same market share in both operating systems and office productivity and no one cares about browser dominance except for Google.
When MS was under investigation they were the most valuable company in the US. Now they are number 3.
So how effective was the government last time?
The market solved the problem in ways that the DoJ couldn’t have anticipated. It turned out that licenses fees for closed source web browsers were just not something that businesses and consumers were interested in putting up with.
Few remember how much of an equal offender Netscape was when it came to proprietary extensions to the web.
What you may be thinking of is that the consoles are not the main source of profit. And that the profits from consoles may take some time to make up for the expenses of developing and manufacturing those consoles.
>And that the profits from consoles may take some time to make up for the expenses of developing and manufacturing those consoles.
Yup, and during which time, they sell at a huge loss.[1]
You're right that Nintendo tries to buck this trend, but they also realize it's a delicate balancing act.[2]
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/xbox-one-x-price-explanation... [1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/06/18/sony-microsoft-gam... [2] https://venturebeat.com/2016/10/26/nintendo-wont-sell-switch...
Your alternative definition applies to pretty much everything with R&D costs. The first unit sold is pretty much guaranteed to not make up for R&D costs, but for some n the margin made on the nth unit covers it, and the seller finally starts turning a profit.
I think what your citations are actually saying is that even the last unit sold does not cover R&D costs, and it has to be made up in other divisions (such as games) in order for the whole venture to turn a profit. But each individual unit is still marginally profitable - if they could sell enough of them (perhaps far more than the size of their market) they would eventually turn a profit on the console itself.
This sounds like a claim about cumulative profits, no?
Maybe you're instead suggesting that either prices rise or manufacturing costs fall over the lifetime of a console?
But what I think you mean to propose is a restriction at the software level, not hardware level. That anyone who sells an operating system must allow any app to be installed within that OS. I think we leave it as an exercise for the reader to define "operating system" when it comes to our increasingly "smart" homes and cars.
The iPhone boot ROM will only launch operating systems cryptographically signed by Apple:
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/hardware-security-o...
What is an open platform and how does it get defined? Installing software is a feature implemented by the manufacturer. Should we really be requiring Apple or any manufacturer, by law, to implement specific defined features to support and enable side loading and management of external apps. Who gets to define those features and say which products should or shouldn’t have them? Who gets to certify compliance? Who gets to specify open as a technical standard that can actually be implemented?
If this had been done in the 80s, we’d probably still be stuck with consoles having an 80s style cartridge slot on them, with specs written in legislation and updatable only by government committee.
Secondly, you can "side load" iOS apps as well. You just have to go through a process of jailbreaking your iPhone which is not illegal but it may void the warranty.
When you buy the iPhone you are also buying into the platform. If having multiple options for app stores is a necessity for you then an iPhone is the wrong device to purchase. Buy something else. There is nothing wrong with voting with your wallet as there are other phones on the market for people to buy.
The argument is that that approach is anti-competitive and unfair, especially since Apple itself gets a large cut of app sales.
I'm not coming down hard on either side, just yet. But I don't like the feel of this sort of lock-in, and almost no one would question the use of a term like "lock-in." Some lock-in is surely legal, even if almost always unpleasant. But it's only a hop, skip and a jump to full-fledged antitrust.
Heading out but you pick up a few PC games. By the way, Target was paid to put those up on the shelf.
Grab a Sony Playstation gift card. They get a percentage of that as well.
At checkout, you sign up of the Target bank card save 10%. They get a nice initial chunk from that and the bank running that card pays a monthly percent to Target for sending them over their customer.
(don't look into the publishing companies' tactics cause that will send you over the edge)
Apple themselves? Part of their marketing is literally that you can do everything on their devices.
> Should we really be requiring Apple or any manufacturer, by law, to implement specific defined features to support and enable side loading and management of external apps.
I can't see why not, the mobile app market has terrible competition, there's a big market issue here.
Yes, this is how capitalism works. The companies can be started by virtuous, far-sighted dreamers, like Steve Wozniak, Larry Page and John Lennon, but then they get infused by money from venture capitalists and investors who just want ROI.
Once they hire more than 5000 people, the edges of the company are not controlled by dreamers - worker bees are employed to make money by leveraging whatever is there to be leveraged. And so the mission drifts.
Or else, the company fails or disappears, which is what happened to John Lennon's company, Apple Music.
We need to rethink capitalism, so companies can grow to medium size, and stay there, providing good things to their customers in a virtuous, mutually beneficial way.
The article is about Fortnite being excluded from Apple's monopoly distribution platform. That platform enriches Apple at the expense of consumers and software developers.
Are you saying it's a good thing that Apple can exclude Fortnite for trying to get around the Apple tax?
I agree. Apple should not charge 30% for this type of transaction, which is just the resupply of virtual currency.
Apple should have a lower tier fee for this type of ongoing service transaction, which is clearly different to a sale in which a new customer is converted.
If Apple had a service tier with a fee of say 5% for virtual currency they’d still be compensated for providing the platform, but not excessively. Consumers and software vendors would benefit commensurately.
This two tiered model is just what happens in traditional pre-digital capitalism. Furniture stores charge 30-50% markup to cover the overheads of showroom rent and sales staff. Financial services companies like forex and credit cards charge 3-18% because they have different overheads and provide different value-add compared to retail sellers.
Wanna get a DLC? They all take a percentage. Also regardless of the money you spend on making your game. They all have to review it and only if they approve will it get published. Going to selling some XBox physical disc? You pay your percentage on what you print not what sells. Also you need to use a trusted disc manufacturer, they pay a percentage to XBox also, note this is all the same for Sony and Nintendo.
Jobs was the superior business person. At least, it turned out that way after he returned to Apple, rescued it from Scully, and spent decades turning it into a behemoth that changed the world.
Woz might have given the computers away just for the joy of it, but where would that have left us?
Tens of thousands of developers owe their livelyhood to Jobs' vision. They get to make apps and everything else, all because Steve created platforms and ecosystems that would sustain an entire industry.
Still, that doesn't excuse greed. Jobs is gone now, so he can't evolve the app store into what it should be becoming, which is a more mature version of the quality platform he created.
It wouldn't take much to fix this current hoo ha. Apple could just introduce a lower fee tier for trivial sales such as the re-supply of virtual currency in games. If they took 10% instead of 30%, the problem would be over, the platform would continue, the community would still have opportunity, consumers could play their games and buy their apps, and life would go on. Does that sound virtuous to you, eklanjo?
That's typically a broken window fallacy. You can't take this a proof of anything because you do not know what the world would have looked like if Apple did not exist - such developers could have gone and made other things on other platforms as well. A great artist will be able to produce great work even if they have to use spaghetti instead of paint. Tools are just tools.
I see.
Your original comment to me was about Steve Jobs, and what to make of his intentions and his legacy. Would you care to share your thoughts about Steve Jobs?
I recognize the fact that he was probably a good leader when it came to driving Apple focus to make quality hardware and solid software integration (the original iPhone was a big step in making portable devices actually usable by everyone).
However, I was reflecting that the word 'virtuous' was a poor fit for a person like Steve Jobs. You can typically think of someone virtuous as having high moral standards and principles.
Jobs was constantly driving his company to make ridiculous false claims (saying that Apple was the first company to invent X or Y) which is deceitful.
Apple's business practices consist in making walled gardens everywhere (which is kind of anti-competitive and entice users to be locked down in the ecosystem) instead of developing standards that can be used and shared by everyone, and this is also something that Jobs spearheaded from the get go (right since the beginning of Apple).
Of course, everyone has different standards, but being a good citizen is about taking and giving back. I can't remember Jobs ever giving anything back to the tech scene.
Personally, I like iPhones precisely because they're not general purpose platforms. I'm also not sure the phrase "general computing platform" can even be well-defined in the era of "smart" everything.
Not that you'd want to, but if you decided to do it, the option would be readily available.
Apple’s rules prevent vendors from linking to external service account setup/management. You cannot even mention the existence thereof, let alone link to it or advertise the options provided therein. Consumers are explicitly kept in the dark about any method other than payment through the App Store.
That’s the stunning uppercut. The size of Apple’s fee is merely a follow-up kick to the nads.
This is why service providers, from Hey.com to Netflix, have a special irritation for the App Store rules, and since this rule directly distorts markets by affecting consumer choice is why so many competition regulators have a file open about it.
If Microsoft was playing hardball with Rockstar over the next version of GTA, as an example, Sony would be falling over themselves rushing to get it as a PlayStation exclusive. The console market and app market just aren't comparable.
Google basically says, "we have a store. Sell through us and we take a cut. Or sell directly, or through some other store, and we'll warn users that we haven't vetted that stuff for security etc."
If anything, smartphone stores will be under more scrutiny.
I have no idea why you'd want to, but you can... UWP apps run just fine on Xbox and can be sold via the store - they just don't get access to the "exclusive" partition of the system (which you need to access certain system resources, such as > 2GB RAM). Sideloading prebuilt UWP apps is also possible. The exclusive partition is a different situation entirely - you need to be an approved developer to even access the SDKs.
I'd say there's a difference between what Xbox (and Playstation, and Nintendo) does compared to Apple by virtue of the consoles not being "open" development platforms (Xbox UWP aside). Anyone can grab the iOS SDK and start making apps, but only registered developers can do so on game consoles. Whether that's justified I don't know, I honestly haven't put enough thought into it. And whether courts would see that as a reason I definitely don't know.
Full disclosure, I work for Microsoft.
Bold of you to assume Google will keep that alive for a particularly long time.
But I don’t trust game developers to run those stores. They’re total cowboys and they’d probably be full of security holes and privacy issues.
Yes, and that's also bad.
Even if they don't though, that's a marketing offence not a product one. If there's any government interference needed it's in the form of a mandatory "walled garden" label on the box.
The most egregious part of Apple’s rules, and the reason that online service providers have a special loathing, is that apps are disallowed from linking to, advertising, or even mentioning that it is possible to sign up/subscribe/buy/rent outside of the app.
This is why you won’t see MMOs like FFXIV through the App Store, and is why you can’t sign up for Netflix, or even follow a link to their sign-up, from within the app.
Oopps... They do exactly this.
This is not to defend Apple nor Google. But Epic is by no means better, just not as big as A/G.
[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2015/05/continuing-to-protect-chro...
[2] Unless you're using Linux or the enterprise version of the browser.
The recently released new "stable" version of Firefox for Android that supports just 9 specific extensions at the moment might be actually even worse than Chrome.
Non-technical users would love it. It would offer them an environment much more secure and free of malware where they can install applications without fretting about getting the latest CryptoLocker type trojan. Finding Windows software on the open web is kind of like driving around the ghetto and cruising for drugs. Are you installing from firefox.com or fᎥrefοⅹ.com?
Apple tries to walk the line and keep both these user groups happy. It's hard. So far they've handled it by designing MacOS more for the first group (it has an App Store and controls but they're optional) and iOS/iPadOS more for the second group.
Steam, for example, does no do that: you can sell your game on Steam and outside of Steam at the same time and Valve will have no problem with it.
By maintaining control over which apps can be sold to end users via the App Store, Apple is able to offer a layer of control over how these apps can access (or not) your personal data.
There's nothing ridiculous about wanting to maintain data privacy/security on mobile devices, and that being of a higher priority with mobile than with a PC.
Wouldn’t MS want to secure its laptops by bundling a browser?
Wouldn’t I have equally private and financial documents on a PC? location/gps can’t be that much of a differentiator.
It is monopoly bullying whoever they can. They just happen to not directly affect us, unless we happen to be a developer making lot of money or compete with apple in any way.
I am an app developer for iOS. It does directly affect me.
this would allow them to not have to remove the restriction about mentioning outside of the app payment options, which I actually think prevents a lot of abuse and businesses really care about having control over their payments processor like using Stripe, say, to avoid the 30% cut)
Really this comes down to those two issues, I see it over and over again.
I know as an aside a lot of people want to be able to also ship binaries outside the App Store. The reality I have found talking to quite a few app developers that sell on the App Store, very few (I can recount one out of 13) actually want to be able to sell their app outside the App Store and ship a binary outside the App Store. I know some on HN want this and I get it, but I think reality is different from ideals on that particular issue. Though I think it has merit I also think it’s not a requirement to make nearly all parties involved happy with an outcome that would dramatically improve things for developers in respect to issues with the App store
Yes, I'm still bitter at how any attempts at a third mobile platform were brutally laughed off by the tech media, often unfairly and with undertones of glee.
Now we are in this very strange situation where Apple can rightfully claim not to be a monopoly, Google can simply ape what Apple does, and fans of either platform can tell naysayers to kick rocks if they don't like it.
Sad.
The fact is: mobile software as a market has plateaued and everyone in the ecosystem is looking around and seeing lots of profits being made by the 2 world largest digital brokers: apple and google, and very little options. It just makes economical sense to become letigious and look for other allies against the State of affairs.
I'm sure Epic also took into consideration that any blocking of their app on the store will have little inmediate impact on their bottom line (since they are already very popular and already installed by most who would want to install).
Those who already have the update can already start sending epic money without paying "apple tax".
Sure, epic won't be able to release updates until this situation is resolved but I don't think this has much short term impact on their business for reason states above.
Apple could resort to erasing apps from people's device but that would only help Epic (and EU, and Spotify and all those who are shouting "Monopoly" at Apple).
Most of articles on Verge/Vox are blogspam around other sources adding little to no value. Engadget covers gadgets, Ars Technica covers wider issues, the rest probably won't be popular on HN.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
But I agree, there is a risk that Apple locks down its platform even more.
So I think it's very unlikely that Apple will allow other payment options. It's more likely for their 30% to go down, but even that's questionable.
Yet, many apps choose have direct Play Store purchases, since that convenience might translate to a higher conversion rate.
Android also allows third party apps to be installed.
Your argument doesn't hold up in light of all of this.
You are completely wrong.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/21003553/google-play-stor...
Not really. Not being allowed to host on the Google Play Store does not mean not being allowed to install the app on an Android.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/3/17645982/epic-games-fortni...
> You are completely wrong.
He isn't wrong. Android allows developers to integrate Stripe and bypass the 30% cut.
I didn't get this from any single source, just bits and pieces put together from random forum posts and a few quora threads. And of course policies can change, so anything I found might be different right now. But I know you can buy digital books through Amazon's Kindle app on Android and it doesn't look like Google gets any of that cut: it's the normal "one click" purchase option you see in their web site, no prompt for Google Pay, just click and it's yours, downloading right away.
Similarly Audible let's me do this as well.
> Epic launched a game store on PC in which it takes only 12 percent of revenue as a way to try to encourage a similar change in competitor Valve’s Steam marketplace.
"Do not in any way"?
Well, in at least 12% of a way, right, Epic?
And Apple, after acquiring you a new customer by selling them an ecosystem, drops 30% to 15% in year two. So, Epic, you're quibbling over 3% which -- I've seen theirs, and I've seen yours, and it's more than 3% difference in value.
For subscriptions, everyone knows the majority of revenue happen in the first year due to churn.
I also find it satisfying that Epic gets so bent about “value” of App Store or Play Store taking 30% shipping and handling fee on ... virtual expendables.
You could buy an answering machine, but could not (legally) hook it up as it was not invented by AT&T, and they did not have one until the patents expired.
Most people ended up renting their phones and other equipment from AT&T. In some cases, that was the only option. Being able to buy a phone was a novel experience for many people.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1983/01/31/m...
Breaking up AT&T led to a lot of innovation, and communication options that were at most science fiction at the time. The monopoly was probably necessary at one point, but lasted way too long. Let's not let these monopolies last too long.
Then Apple would get jack shit from any sales there, so they can fight this battle with them while still offering access to the game for Apple users.
I'm probably missing some esoteric limitation Apple places on web-based games to cripple this use case.
My company spent years getting a passable Safari/iOS mobile web 360 video player working, a whole game like Fortnite would be another beast entirely.
Epic has the money to fund development to make it happen on the technical side, but currently you'd need to download so much stuff that you'd be doing the same thing as their game launcher anyway.
It’s a clear violation of the TOS and Epic clearly knows that. They likely also knew well before making the update and perhaps thought Apple would bluff and only threaten a take down. Platforms aren’t free.
I’m just hoping they don’t force Apple to open the iPhones. I really don’t want to deal with having to “redo” phones for family members regularly.
Why would anyone want to risk being deplatformed? I trust ICANN more than I trust Apple and ${CLOUD_PROVIDER}
App stores give you incredible access to new users. You literally don’t have a way to get unto iOS devices w/o the App Store.
They give you "incredible access" because they're basically the only access. Their OSes would be complete flops if app stores were the only option and nobody would use them...
Yes, and that's the problem that needs solving. If Apple allowed sideloading apps, every single of their justifications about App Store rules would start making sense. You either pay 30% and get a nice listing and discoverability, or you pay nothing but are completely on your own.
If you really want to make a radio for Lamborghini's, but they say no, then you go to a different manufacturer. "oh but Lambo owners have so much spend/revenue per owner" doesn't really hold water.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide
As far as my personal preferences go, I use Android since 2011 and can't fathom switching to iOS.
One, it had no standing, nor contractual agreement (granted, a lawsuit can be a big weapon to wield).
> Ferrari took the most offense to his custom badges and floor mats with Purrari logos
And to look at that picture, you can see why, the logos were practically identical and arguable from a trademark infringement perspective.
But he was not and was never prohibited from painting his car (and a cease and desist is not a prohibition).
Unfortunately, Apple is going to continue this nonsense unless people stop buying into their reality distortion spells.
There is no historical mainstream analog since desktop/laptop OS software has never been so locked-down that it was impossible to install software without 1st-party permission. Even early videogame consoles had unlicensed games run on them, and the console vendors could only stop them by releasing new hardware.
If people don't want to do that, that's on them.
If Epic doesn't want to invest in an open cell phone platform that can run Epic binaries, then its only options are to beg the government for help, or to take Apple's bs on the chin
A large and growing ecosystem of applications and services grew around the network which this American company controlled, and the network became central to the American economy [1]. Other businesses had to connect to this company's network, so that they could reach the company's many end users. But the company jealously guarded its end users, inflicting onerous burdens on competitors, or disconnecting them entirely [2].
That company, the American Telephone and Telegraph company, was eventually dissolved by the US Department of Justice due to charges filed under the Sherman Antitrust Act [3].
Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh, right, there aren't any historical analogs to the App Store. Apple is a bastion of innovation and an important defender of privacy rights, and I can't imagine that its management would ever recklessly endanger that by running afoul of antitrust law.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone
[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=107525656002865...
Then you haven't been paying attention. Apple at least has competition. ICANN is a government supported monopoly that has been systematically taken over by robber barons.
If Apple wasn't both the largest US phone maker and a legal monopoly, their behavior would not be as problematic, as you could (at least in theory, probably in practice too) sell other hardware to run ios/macos, or resell legally obtained, and modified software without Apple restrictions.
Whether their behavior is acceptable or not must be framed in a much larger picture. Companies are given legal rights by virtue of expectations of that being the best for society, and that's the metric that companies should be measured against.
Would it be good, and acceptable for society if all technology vendors/brands acted exactly as Apple regarding the App Store?
It's quite easy to answer that with a no, since clearly tying many frequnt small purchases indefinitely to a bigger purchase is not something that can ever increase competition. As it will form a less effective market, it can't be said to be desirable.
This wasn't true when Apple was a small fry so why would it be true when they are the largest US phone maker?
Yeah in those days 99.9% of the world didn't use it.
Seems like those that wish to use Apple (consumers, Epic) should either deal with the consequences, beg the government for help, or build their own open standard.
For me I lean towards building the open standard and teaching people how to use it. The App Store is for the lazy.
Exploits for iOS are cheaper than exploits for Android because exploits for iOS are so plentiful.
I do not buy Apple products as a status symbol. I buy them because they work. I won't even say the products are good, there are a lot of things I'd like to see change. But they are the best thing on the market for getting my work done.
My laptop and phone are my hammer and workbench. The iPhone and MacBook are far and away the best product for the work I do, which is not iOS or MacOS development. They're simply the best general computing solution on the market right now.
Secondly, this narrow-minded attitude is reflected in you calling MacBook the best general computing solution. There are a large variety of requirements for general computing solution, the most common ones that macbook can't satisfy are cost and gaming performance. Indeed no one product can satisfy them.
The model makes sense for a console, as it's a very specialized device. A smartphone or a tablet are much closer to a general computing device. How many times has Apple said the iPad is a laptop replacement?
Phones can be used to:
-communicate
-consume media
-browse the web
-play games
Consoles can be used to:
-play games
-consume media
-browse the web
-communicate
I fail to see the difference to be honest.
I used a phone to call an ambulance, provide the police with video evidence of a crime, navigate when I am lost, file company accounts, banking, and to aid in mapping for architecture and subsequently applying for planning permission.
What do you do on a console that could cost you life and limb or render you bancrupt?
Well my cousin plays ark every single day, all day on his xbox, his health has deteriorated pretty badly because of this, it's bankrupted him as, he doesn't work and spends money on the game, all his friends exist in the game, I will backtread a bit on the lack of work, he does sell creatures or something to get a bit of money, literally his entire life revolves around this game and his console. He doesn't even own a mobile phone, he just uses Xbox live chat to talk to most people and has a landline in his house for the rare times he actually needs to make a phone call.
For all intents and purposes, that console is his general computing device for everything he does or that affects his life.
-play games
-consume media
-browse the web
-communicate
Define this.
The internet is reasonably open and accessible on iOS, but utilizing the full capability of an iOS device requires the App Store.
Stallman spent a ton of time crusading about how some things are appliances, and other things are computers; those things that are computers should offer flexibility (and ideally openness) in terms of what software you can run on them. In this case, the largest manufacturer of computing devices and software wants 30% of every transaction from native software run on their devices.
Epic was basically looking for preferential treatment, but now they're stepping up to the plate and saying the App Store is not market-friendly. It seems like they could be right, seeing as large as Apple is, and what role they actually have in computing.
As it should be. If people want open and crazy, then they can flounder around on the web and try to get it to do what native apps do. That's their problem and Apple shouldn't have to bend over backwards to support that route. Developers get to make a choice - make a web app, or make a native app that gets all the benefits of Apple's curated ecosystem. As a consumer and developer, I'll take the latter any day. Others feel differently, and can choose Android.
you buy a macbook and now you can't install ANY software that is not on the macOS appstore. oh! and you can't install a different OS.
would you accept that? what's the difference?
Buy a Librem5, or a PinePhone, or whatever. It's a free market, after all.
I don't get mad at Casio because I can't hack the circuit board and change the time easily to 24hr - I buy a watch that supports it.
This is a free market solvable problem. The issue is people like the app store. The ones mad about this are software companies - because they want more money for themselves.
The use of the consumer is just appeal to emotion - but it's really about Epic ripping off another kid for vbucks and getting more money.
If Apple allowed others to create App Stores, then there would be no problem, but hardware + iOS + App Store are inseparable.
It's like U.S. citizenship forbidding non-Walmart shopping.
Anything requiring a single android component goes in the “doesn’t actually work” category.
Neither is nice but at least iOS gets updates.
I don't think you're going to really be able to reliably avoid the problem that very very very few people outside of AOSP are doing any work on OSS for phones.
They sell products. Those products have well-known rules. If you don't like the rules, don't buy the product.
An argument can be made that it's morally wrong, but if you're going down that road, there's a lot of things should be morally more compelling than Apple's AppStore policies.
This is pretty much the whole reason the GPLv3 exists.
No obligation to help vs actively hindering are not really the same thing.
The technical and social reality that giving apple the freedom to configure the majority of devices in the US is extremely unpleasant. Enough that it makes me question the principles driving the philosophy that allowed this (in particular, the legality of closed software.)
One of the main roadblocks is intellectual property law. If IP didn't exist, there would be all sorts of iPhone clones with modified versions of iOS.
I'm OK with closed source software being legal, prohibiting closed source would be tyrannical. What I'm not OK is with software patents, copyright, anti-hardware-hacking laws, etc.
We can't deny the security that apple provides over other providers. Part of that is the closed garden - it SHOULD BE a product. The market should provide alternatives.
The only people that benefit from this are big companies - small software devs will have their apps devalued by this move, and the people will just get ripped off more when Epic wins and raises their dumb scam Vbucks to 10$.
Apple saying that I'm not allowed to step outside their walled garden on a device I own is restricting my freedom.
> Apple saying that I'm not allowed to step outside their walled garden on a device I own is restricting my freedom.
Only if there is no remediation - there is. Buy an android and quit moaning. "Freedoms." Laughable. Belarus is shooting people and you're mad because you can't force a company to do what you want when the free market can easily solve the problem.
Except none of those things are the point of antitrust law. But I guess who cares anyway, when genocide is always worse than these things, so we shouldn't care about them?
You should not have to rely on security issues in order to install whatever you want on your phone.
Jailbreak should only be needed when you want to replace OS blocks, not just install something.
0: https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2019/10/checkrain-click-f...
They additionally prevent jailbreaking by patching vulnerabilities.
Only one of these things is being called out.
You can get into all sorts of theoretical discussions about how if there was a way to do it, they'd be increasing their attack surface since now they have to make sure this path is locked properly when the user doesn't want it, but people act like the only way for jailbreaking to work is for Apple to stop patching 0 days, which is not the case.
Security loopholes are a different thing.
tHiS IS nOt a Pc BUt a mAc, you know? ;p
We should be able to install what we want on a general purpose computing device. You can already see the Apple mentality creeping into other companies like Mozilla, who suddenly find it acceptable to limit user freedom for questionable reasons, and the normalization of stripped user liberties that Apple champions is worrying.
But similarly, there's no law requiring anyone to sell products that allow you to do whatever you want with them once they've been bought.
You can argue for such a law, but competition law is a pretty weak place to start.
Arguably, Apple is creating a market by their policies: the fact that it's not filled with competitors indicates only that most people don't care.
Either we do, in which case what Apple is doing in perfectly reasonable, as is Walmart selling fridges that explode when you put someone else's milk in them ("It's in the contract!"), or it isn't.
Things like the first sale doctrine give an insight into past legal thinking suggesting the latter. But it's far from simple to discern by just looking at the law.
The music/video industry asserts that you're not allowed to play/show some media item that you've bought. Amazon doesn't allow you to resell or bequeath Kindle books. Caterpillar doesn't let you repair your own tractor.
The first sale doctrine was established in a very different time.
Again, this is just out of touch. Call it what it is - software companies want more money and want to use the market apple created for every last one of them for free.
If Apple want to impose rules without any government oversight, they are free to start their own country with their own government and impose their own rules.
If they did they did this with the app store as used by existing iphones, then that would probably cause them to get in trouble, but if they made a new app store with these policies that was only used by a new model of iphone, then while extreme, I'd think it's within their rights. It's not that long ago that feature phones with limited app selection and internet browsing as a premium feature were a thing.
Smartphones and "apps services" come as a whole and are commodity (drug?) enough to be somehow regulated. Then, again, I'm french :)
Choice for non hackers feels pretty much limited to choosing apple|google|huawei|... poison pill or rejecting the whole smartphone+cloud+5g+... stuff.
--- I was a Mac user and an Apple fan in the 90s and early 2000s, and we all know that was a rough time to be a Mac user: Because it was clear that Windows had won. If you asked a typical PC buyer why they chose Windows, their answer would go something like this: "All the software I need is on Windows. Windows has the REAL version of Office. Windows has IE6, the REAL internet. Windows has all my games, and my work software." Like the iPhone, the Mac was technologically superior in many ways, but that did not stop the Mac from shrinking to only a 5% market share, ceding its place in PC history to Windows.
Today, the iPhone enjoys the breadth of 3rd party software the Mac could only dream of. People pay $1000, sometimes every year, for a phone! This has transformed Apple's fortune from a struggling company into the most valuable company in the world. Why are people willing to pay so much for a phone? Because it is so much more than a phone. And why is it so much more than a phone? Because of the all 3rd party software expanding what the smartphone could do beyond what anyone thought was possible. So, why on earth would you put a tax on something that helps you so much, that it likely made the difference between being the distant loser in the PC era, vs being one of two major winners in the smartphone era? ---
There's a lot of different angles people arguing about this, but this is my favorite: Which is that the FLOW OF VALUE GOES BOTH WAYS. I find the tone that Apple takes on this arrogant: They really believe they are doing developers this huge favor by creating the iPhone and the AppStore and the flow of value flows massively in one direction, from Apple-to-Developer. But I sincerely do believe that 3rd party software is what made the difference between the fate of the Mac and the fate of the iPhone, and the respective difference in Apple's fortune. For as much as one could gush about iPhone's incredible hardware and software lead, the Mac had those same things going for it and still lost to Windows because of the software.
For Apple to turn around an rent-seek against one of the core reasons why the iPhone is successful, is to me, an incredible betrayal, and made possible only because of the gross difference in power and market concentration.
- Ebay allow for a third party marketplace to exist without them getting a cut?
-PayPal, chase, stripe allow third party developers to offer up their own payment services without the respective companies take a cut?
Also by the same token, Amazon is a monopoly by taking a percentage fee and should allow competitors to sell on their platform without taking a listing fee. Is this not the same thing?
apple creates the marketplace, the OS, and the hardware.
it’s a much more complex issue which is more analogous to if windows required all users to use internet explorer, which we know is monopolistic.
there’s also much more friction switching software like stripe than hardware like your iphone
You can argue that Amazons web Shopping market share is larger than Apple's cellphone market share and should be subject to the same monopoly regulation.
with apple, their hardware locks you into one choice for apps. i think we should be able to download any app directly from websites that make them
However, my app has an unlimited subscription. Accepting payment for this is handled by Stripe. Once the app is on the users device, if a user subscribes to the unlimited plan, why should I have to pay 30% to Apple? They are not delivering that service in any way, shape, or form.
A better analogy would be that I buy a Nespresso machine on Amazon. Some of that goes to Amazon for facilitating the transaction and delivering it to me, some goes to Nespresso for actually making the device. Then I get a pod subscription from Nespresso. Amazon then says that because the machine was originally bought on Amazon, they are entitled to a 30% cut of that ongoing subscription price, even though the subscription is neither facilitated nor fulfilled by Amazon.
I think we can all agree that would be ridiculous. That is what Apple is doing.
If the lawsuit is about installing any software you want on iOS, then you are right and my analogy is faulty.
On iOS your only option is paying Apple $100/yr to do something similar.
A similar thing would be Google Chrome blocking access to PayPal servers because they didn’t get a 10% cut of all transactions.
But users can just install another browser, right? No, wrong again, cause Apple doesn't allow that. Every browser on iOS is basically safari with a different UI.
No other browser engines. No sideloading. No other app stores. No other payment processors in the App Store. There is no way out of their labyrinth.
A third party marketplace would be Etsy. Ebay can't stop you from going to Etsy.
Epic isn't trying to set up an app store on iOS (as they tried for Android!). They are trying to avoid using the platform payment system.
Ebay DOES have restrictions on payments![0] But you DO NOT have to use PayPal:
https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/payment-policies/accepted...
And, Ebay doesn't charge exorbitant fees! 10% vs 30%.
I don't get how chase and stripe relate to this situation.
My view is that Apple deserves a cut, maybe even 30%, by giving you users and transactions of App purchases. Sure, even IAP, since its lower friction. But not allowing you to handle your own IAP IF YOU WANT or your own subscriptions or offer a different price based on payment method or link to where you CAN sign up or even mention WHY or that Apple is taking a huge cut is... basically extortion.
As a developer I can see the financial reasoning behind implementing third party payment methods.
But Apple needs to align the charges more closely with the benefits and costs.
Charge developers for costs they incur. Make the benefits opt-in and charge them for that too. And let them go their own way if they don’t want to opt-in.
Even if it takes 20 years to reach the same market-share that Linux currently has on the desktop, it would be a win.
At least, we'd have an option.
I am not a Linux expert and apps crash sometime but I never feel BULLIED by the Linux ecosystem.
But as far as I understand Apple is not a monopoly. So why should they allow users to install app from any source if they made their OS specifically in a way that doesn't allow it? It is a product feature.
And pricing policy - sure I'd love do get 10% cut of 30%. But again, they made a product and allow you do develop apps just take a cut. A big cut? Sure. But shouldn't it be their right to price their products as they see fit as long as they don't have a monopoly?
I am thinking that if I start a company, why should the court force my price policy or tell me what features to implement (obviously as long as they don't harm users, break laws etc) if a consumer has many alternatives?
Yes, for the small percentage of the population that knows what’s doing (which nicely overlaps with HN), having freedom to install whatever you choose is great.
For >90% of the population it isn’t. Even with all of the improvements Windows has seen, for me it’s still a regular situation to feel like I won’t put one of my pen drives into the average Joe’s computer.
The freedom to install anything is the biggest security hole in most personal computers.
By not allowing it I can trust my parents and the rest of my family with phones knowing that they won’t do crazy stuff with the same device they use to log into their bank accounts and manage their authentication.
What inflames the 0.1% is a blessing for >90%.
Being limited in what you can do with your properties is never a blessing.
Hammers are dangerous yet they are sold in supermarkets.
Hell, in US even guns are sold in supermarkets so that kids can kill other kids at school and nobody stops them and we are arguing about installing apps on a phone?
Apple could make it clear that it's risky and that would be it.
The rhetoric of the "old parents that can't help themselves" is wrong and most of all agist.
There's no risk of them installing dodgy apps, because they usually don't install new apps.
My mom doesn't even know how to change time on her phone but she's smart enough to not break what's working.
I installed WhatsApp on her phone and that's all she needed, there's no way she could install something bad by chance and she's on Android, according to the Apple fanboys she should be running around with a virus bomb in her purse.
Guess what?
She's completely fine.
Another important point is that Apple is not competing with Android, Apple is competing with other smartphone producers.
Apple is a monopolyst because it locks users in, you can't change OS on your phone, you can't install iOs on other brands, you can't move your apps and data from iOs to Android, while the contrary is pretty straightforward.
You can't even use the web freely, because alternative browsers are forbidden on Apple Store.
Apple is not competing in a free market, Apple is making impossible to switch to competitors and thanks to this lock they can charge any amount they want.
I'm old enough to remember MS being bashed for proposing the TwC (trustworthy computing) in 2002 and now I have to watch people kneeling in front of the richest company around just because they don't want to help their parents?
That must be a new low for our society.
How well is that working for you?
> The rhetoric of the "old parents that can't help themselves" is wrong and most of all agist.
A lot of the family I was referring to is not only younger than me, they’re digital natives. Guess what, most computers from 15yo are full to the brim of malware. Even supposedly techie kids fall for things like Byte Defender (as opposed to Bit defender).
My car auto-brakes when it detects a static object ahead. You could say my car limits my freedom to drive at 80km/h towards a wall. It’s a welcome limit.
I'm Italian, so it's working quite good thanks, we don't sell guns to kids.
And we are very careful when we sell them to adults.
That's why we have an homicide rate ten times lower than the US 0.6/100k VS 6/100k
Prevention and correct education do miracles, even in absence of a helicopter father - Apple, if it wasn't clear - that prevents you from doing anything, out of fear you could have too much freedom.
Gunning in US is a cultural problem, not a technical one.
DO you think the solution is controlling the market or making guns safer?
Apple tells you that their guns are safer (without any real proof), but they won't stop selling them.
It's hypocrisy at its best.
To be fair, Apple devices are considered more secure only because the Android market is so large and fragmented that they can compare the numbers of exploit targeting the last couple versions of iOS with the entire Android ecosystem which includes older versions and a large number of users that skipped OS updates
But that's a feature if you ask me, you are not forced to update to keep using the device.
If you compare Apple devices with equivalent Android devices (for example high end Samsungs) you will notice little or no difference.
Of course a 50$ device is much more at risk of being compromised.
The only counterproof would be installing iOS on those devices and see how it reacts.
But we will never know...
> most computers from 15yo are full to the brim of malware.
That's a very moot point, I guess you never had a light car accident or slipped on a wet floor.
Should we lock you in your room strapped to the bed so that you don't harm yourself?
> My car auto-brakes when it detects a static object ahead
Maybe you shouldn't drive if you can't brake when you see an obstacle.
> You could say my car limits my freedom to drive at 80km/h towards a wall
It does, in a way.
But
1) you can disable it, there is __always__ an off switch for those kind of aids. Always! Can I disable Apple "protections"?
2) You are allowed to drive a car without self breaking technologies and the car have to work even if self-breaking stops working or you disable it or you completely remove it. It's you right, nobody will take the car away from you and the car will keep working without it. It__has to__ by the law.
3) as much as I love hyperboles, installing an app is hardly a life-threatening activity.
4) thank god cars have to pass very strict safety requirements, so a Tesla might be better in terms of performance than a Renault Zoe, but in terms of safety and interoperability they have to be equivalent. Apple is like a car manufacturer that uses a non standard charger, forces clients to charge their cars using Apple approved charging stations, the charging stations have to pay for the chargers and give a 30% cut on any charge to Apple, while Apple says it's best for customers because their electric current is safer.
Why computers full of malware are a moot point? You can’t expect everyone to have good knowledge about computers. Guardrails for those people are great.
In any case, I’m guessing you are a great italian farmer, because boy, that was a beautiful straw man there!
When you are in danger an ambulance can drive faster than the speed limits, because safety of people depends on their ability to act fast.
Firefighters can break safety rules, because they have to sometimes.
An on/off switch is only natural when you think about safety, if Apple believe that the only security is the one Apple decided, Apple is wrong.
I'm Italian, but I am a computer scientist.
My grandparents were farmers, and I am very proud of were I come from.
We don't know strawmans, we only know hard work and honesty.
But good stereotypes on your side, I'm impressed!
I had the impression that using ad hominems was prohibited on HN, but I am used to miseducation of Americans...
Anyway, Apple is not building guardrails, they are making bicicles with training wheels, charging a lot of money for them and calling it "security"
If you are happy with it, I'm happy for you, but I'm an adult, I am able to make choices and can, sometimes, learn new things.
Let's say everything stays the same, obviously, Apple would earn less money but let's ignore that obvious impediment, I guess they would would care less about how much an app makes in revenue, and exclusively about the quality of it.
Would that be better overall for the consumer? Would it be awful for app developers, because Apple could be a lot more (than it already is) picky about what goes into the AppStore? It could create extreme rules that it doesn't care at all about relaxing, since whether a new app is in the store or not, makes no difference revenue wise for Apple.
Maybe they could finally properly tackle some predatory IAP practices, that I assume are still allowed due to the revenue they bring in.
I'm not even sure I know exactly where I come down on the issue as I can see reasonable arguments on both sides. But I do think it deserves being tested.
(Note: obviously it IS a monopoly and does have huge negative effects. The question is whether the courts will find that it technically violates specific anti-trust definitions sufficiently to be successfully prosecuted.
More than a decade ago the EU forced manufacturers of mobile phones to commit to one standard for power plugs. Everybody used micro USB except Apple.
Microsoft had to pay a huge fine because the didn't let the user choose which browser they wanted to use and simply brought the Internet Explorer as the default with every Windows. Apple still doesn't even allow users to install alternative browsers. Yes, from the outside it looks like you can install a Firefox, but inside it is still a Safari for which Apple denies building critical APIs like e.g. the Push API [1] (which is available for all major browsers except Safari and the use cases go far beyond push notifications, like chat apps and background synchronization of data).
The App Store is yet another example. Many other platform providers allow you to install additional Software through other means than the default source (Android, Windows, Linux, etc.). I am glad a major player like Epic takes the issue head-on and hope, that in the end the eco-system will benefit as a whole.
As a parent, having to be forced to explain to your 7yr old son the dark-side of gaming/technology is not something I was prepared to do as a bonding event this fine evening.
How many companies will look at situations like this and decide not to bother with developing for Apple platforms? I've already stepped back my efforts to support MacOS (I don't target iOS at present). Too many hoops, too much control freakery, and no real comeback if they ever decide that they don't want me to publish on their platform. The balance of power in the relationship is simply skewed too far in favour of them, and a tiny misunderstanding could end my business. These companies have far too much unchecked and unregulated power.
But, situation is not that comfy with ChromeOS. If we need to side-load an .apk, we have to enable developer mode (which means powerwash) thereby Google explicitly making it an Anti-feature.
Interestingly, android 10 on mobile allows direct install/update from FDroid making it no different from Playstore. Now why this double stand when it comes to side-loading android apps in ChromeOS vs Android? The obvious statement would regarding security and that's exactly what Apple uses to prevent side-loading apps.
Now coming back to Apple, it has been allowing side-loading .ipa onto iOS devices(Although not as easy as in android) and it has also removed the need for $99 developer license which was needed earlier to side-load .ipa!
So, the line between android vs iOS w.r.t side-loading apps is getting thinner at least w.r.t ChromeOS.
On android sideloading is much easier, though still not as easy as GPS.
Obviously stakeholders and lawyers were involved. Marketing saw an opportunity and jumped in.
The beauty of their main technology product, a realtime engine is that it can create videos like that on much smaller timelines than traditional CG or a live shoot.
Honestly with the right talent that could have been pulled together surprisingly fast.
Might finally get the ball rolling on a court case to stop the huge app store abuses by Apple and Google.
Thing is, if apple lifted the in-app purchase cuts, then all apps would essentially switch from "pay to install" to "pay after install" and the apps would get their "safety certification" some for free - i.e. at apple's cost.
What seems fair in this case is to pay the platform vendors a fee for the certification and network costs (charged like aws perhaps) instead of the leeching that's happening. Even the _option_ of doing that over giving a 30% cut seems fairer than what's happening.
Of course that comes with its on risks as Apple won't be able to control what apps get installed but if Google can do it, then so can Apple. This way Apple can keep their App Store guidelines consistent across all developers and developers who don't want to go through the sometimes tiresome review process plus give apple the 30% share, can use this alternate App Store.
Can the developer still update their app, or is it stuck in update limbo?
You can request faster reviews for critical security bugs, but as far as I know, if you're rejected for guideline violations, you're stuck until you alleviate those violations.
This is actually another problem with the whole review process: There often isn't a clear guideline/way to tell. You can submit an update that goes through quickly, or wait for months, without knowing why. Valve, the company that runs Steam, also had horror stories about this. They published the Steam Chat app (not a store) and had to wait for months for approval, apparently without being able to talk to anyone at Apple.
> 1,000 V-bucks, which is roughly equivalent to $10 in-game Fortnite currency, now costs just $7.99 if you use Epic direct payment instead of the standard Apple payment processing. Normally, that amount of currency costs $9.99. Epic says, in this case, customers keep the extra savings, not the company.
Either I can't count or Epic can't.
They may have rounded those costs up to the nearest $X.99 for clean numbers.
I see people on both sides of this issue and I know it’s heated, but I’m honestly a bit confused about how it would work in practical terms.
The iOS platform has been deliberately engineered —- for better or worse —- to have this blurring of the hardware/software divide... how do you overcome that if this challenge went all the way through?
It doesn’t seem like it would be as simple as downloading the storefront from epic.
The deal, that many choose not to take, is that Apple gets 30% of things sold on their platform. Whether that’s 30% of a one time $100 fee to purchase or 30% of $1/week in digital Scooby snacks or whatever for the rest of your life.
Apple is stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place, and the only way out is to win multiple legal battles.
The app store certainly adds value by screening out abusive behaviors that can't be simply sandboxed; but 30% of revenue? That's just too much. At a minimum, we need to allow for competing app stores that can also earn the right to be trusted by consumers.
Can this be done with Android? Perhaps I could release for Android-only and allow the app to be downloaded with Chrome.
On Android you can distribute your app via the f-droid app store (if its libre/free/open source), or other 3rd party stores like Amazon's app store. You can also allow users to directly download you .apk file from your own website.
For example I can go to itch.io and download this game directly to my phone: https://majorariatto.itch.io/pureya
(sorry, Apple user here)
Google's Android (don't think this is in AOSP; probably tied to Google Play Services) also checks non-play-store apps for malware on your phone, and might reject them if they contain malware.
Some apps also try to detect rooted/jailbroken phones and won't run (or at least give a warning) in that situation.
Which is fair and reasonable. I wouldn't want my non tech savy parents to run apps by misclicking links. But I do want the freedom to run whatever I feel like on the devices I paid for.
I can't imagine being told what I can and cannot run on my $1400 android device. I'm an adult, thanks for treating me like one.
I feel they could have gone with this much simpler explanation and everyone would be happy;
"We have no problem giving apple 30% if we use their infrastructure. But if we use our own and save 30%, we want to be able give our customers lower prices"
Btw, the ad mostly confused their (mostly young ) players.
I'm not a fan of diluting the term "monopoly", I think we need modern laws to encourage competition. Maybe I just need to get over my pedantry.
And those apps can charge you money without giving Google a single dime.
I'd imagine that a sliding scale would be far more palatable for big companies, say every order of magnitude increase above say 1000 in installs, the cut drops by 5%, so if you have 1 million installs, any extra would be 15%.
I suppose there is the possibility of fake accounts but at this scale, likely hundreds of millions, is it going to be a big difference?
A $1000+ device with a moniker "Pro" is not a console. If you're trying to sell me the concept that something is "Pro" to be used for work, and can even replace a laptop, don't try to tell me its equivalent to a games console.
"Pro" means absolutely nothing. It is a marketing label. Also the price means nothing. What's $1,000 (iPad Pro) to you is $500 (PS4 Pro) to me.
Funny, I seem to member the announcements, and Apple showing iPhone Pro's shooting movies, doing professional photography, video editing, etc.
This this a game console? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7krzWNOXrFY
Gimme a break. Rent-seeking behavior dressed up in a security credit.
What's the difference between those devices that makes one ok the other not?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1nBlm2HKKY&feature=youtu.be
Do Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo allow other stores on their consoles?
How much % do they take from console game sales?
However, I really hope they do. Against both. That would be a great victory for the consumers.
What it boils down to is that a computer (iOS device) can not run apps even when I own it. So technically I do not own the device, right? Never?
Perhaps Epic could argue that their app is actually a shopping platform with game like features.
I'm sure there are many other apps that are free to sell products without paying a cut to Apple.
That would make it seem like this is targeting games and subscriptions.
There are a couple of exceptions though for digital goods (I think Amazon has an exception for their Video service, but not Kindle. People rumor this was part of a deal to get Apple TV onto Amazon Fire products.)
So this isn’t even necessarily that Apple is rent seeking on their platform - it is that Apple is charging more for the marketing and convenience of having things available directly on their platform than Epic likes.
- It's really hard to mess up apple devices for non-tech savvy people.
- I have learnt the importance of "It just works" and familiarity when my family got tired of Android and just bought everything Apple.
- I hope/wish to see Apple Pay/login implemented everywhere on web as well.
Would a tier system like the tax brackets help small developers?
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euiSHuaw6Q4&feature=youtu.be
I hope Apple looses.
For those unfamiliar with the case, Blizzard filed suit against Ceiling Fan Software for selling a World of Warcraft bot against the WoW EULA. Ceiling Fan Software filed a countersuit claiming Blizzard's monopolistic actions in the market of "add-on hardware/software for WoW" violated antitrust laws.
Blizzard argued that Ceiling Fan Software could not establish an antitrust claim because WoW users voluntarily consented to their EULA and knew the ahead of time when they purchased WoW that they would not be allowed to use third-party bots. The court agreed:
> Blizzard raises this argument in its motion, contending that Defendants cannot establish antitrust claims based on its users' voluntary consent to the EULA and TOU. (Mot. Br. 22–23.) Although Blizzard does not argue this point in the market power analysis, the Court finds that this discussion is applicable to whether the market power requirement is established. Blizzard cites Newcal, Queen City Pizza, Inc. v. Domino's Pizza, Inc., 124 F.3d 430, 441 (3d Cir.1997), and Apple Inc. v. Psystar Corp., 586 F.Supp.2d 1190, 1201 (N.D.Cal.2008), to show that Defendants cannot base its claims on the aftermarket restrictions. ( See Opp'n Br. 17.) These cases explain that the law prohibits an antitrust claimant from asserting an antitrust claim “resting on market power that arises solely from contractual rights that customers knowingly and voluntarily gave to the defendant” when they purchased the initial tying product.
...
> Based on the allegations in the FACC, users agreed to the terms of the EULA and TOU during the initial contract they sign with Blizzard regarding the use of WoW. Blizzard is entitled to condition the use of WoW on such restrictions, and any resulting market power in the aftermarket cannot be the basis for antitrust claims. The only reason why Blizzard or its licensees allegedly hold market power in the aftermarket is because Blizzard users agree not to use any unauthorized WoW add-ons. It can be inferred that users therefore agree to only use authorized WoW add-ons that advance play, and agreeing to this inherently gives Blizzard power over any market for such products. Based on the case law discussed, it is clear that such a contractually mandated monopoly over an aftermarket is not a legally cognizable market. Because the market power allegations fail, Defendants have not adequately plead antitrust counterclaims under the Sherman and Clayton Acts. Moreover, since Defendants' UCL counterclaim is based those antitrust claims, that counterclaim also fails.
If the reasoning in that case applies here, I don't see how Epic doesn't lose both lawsuits? If Apple's App Store policies are known by the consumer in advance of purchasing an iPhone, and Apple's "market power" in the aftermarket of "iOS App Distribution" is based on the iPhone's EULA saying you can only install apps from the Apple App Store, wouldn't the same reasoning apply and Epic's antitrust claim would fail because "a contractually mandated monopoly over an aftermarket is not a legally cognizable market"?
Note: the Apple Inc. v. Psystar Corp (https://casetext.com/case/apple-2) case cited above is also highly relevant, possibly even moreso than the Blizzard case. It's about whether or not "Mac OS" and "computer hardware that runs Mac OS" are two separate markets and whether Apple's monopoly over the distribution of Mac OS results in antitrust liability in the aftermarket of "hardware that runs Mac OS". The court ruled in Apple's favor, concluding similarly that Apple's market power in the latter market was derived from its EULA and therefore was not an allowable basis for an antitrust claim, because customers "knowingly agree to the challenged restraint."
Isn't Apple's 30% cut way more than even the mafia charge local businesses when they force folks to pay protection fees? Or is that standard for monopolists?
Is it justifiable from a moral standpoint? no. Is it good business? yes. Will Epic loose in court? yes.
The App Store (Apple or Google) is a software distribution platform run by the owner of the platform. The platform has rules to cover costs and generate profit. Participation is entirely voluntary.
Epic Games has violated the TOS of the platform, and for this both Google and Apple has removed their app(s) from their platforms. Again, participation is entirely voluntary, but if you participate you're expected to follow the rules of the platform.
It's really not down to Apple keeping a walled garden, or Apple vs. Users, or Google spying on you.. again, Participation is entirely voluntary, that also goes for users.
I'm not very familiar with the US wording in the US law but EC defines relevant market as: "A relevant product market comprises all those products and/or services which are regarded as interchangeable or substitutable by the consumer by reason of the products' characteristics, their prices and their intended use"
A relevant market in this case is iOS App store and the payment system. Not smartphone market. Epic is not selling phones.
(I don't know where you get the voluntary participation argument, maybe that's some idealistic political viewpoint, but it's not the only thing that matters in competition law and antitrust)
* Why did Apple trounce these folks? My first thought is, ridiculously intrusive anti-cheat? * Then, assuming that's the case and you're ok with letting someone else remote-admin your machine, can't you just install Fortnite directly anyway?
So what's the big deal exactly?
2. Apple has to enforce their ToS (there is legal precedent that if you don't enforce your own rules, then you don't care about them - so it's a good idea to follow your own rules) so they had to boot Fortnite from the App store
The big deal is that this might trigger significant legal judgements that may determine what tech giants can or cannot do on their platforms.
Why should Epic get a “special arrangement” from all other developers?
If you don't like the terms, then don't be on the Apple App store, but of course your missing a huge swath of the population thus the 30% fee. Being on the App store is essentially unlimited marketing and exposure for your app. Cost of doing business.
(The writing has been on the wall and Google is already adapting - they sent out surveys last month to some developers about dropping the 30% fee and charging developers an annual listing fee instead - possibly also fees for bandwidth/storage used like a hosting company does. The survey also mentioned plans to spin off the Google Play store as a separate non-Google company.)
The Google survey I received specifically asked about experiences as a developer with the Epic Store, whether I thought customers would pay a subscription fee for access to the Play Store & Android updates, and whether I would trust the Play Store & Android if they were no longer owned and run by Google/Alphabet. So it will be fascinating to see how the court rulings change the tech landscape.
iOS is the large reason people choose iPhones over Android. The phone is simply a portal to iOS.
Without the OS the phone is essentially a brick. To argue the hardware is the only product is an absolute falsehood.
To re-use your mom as the argument:
* Go grab her phone and point at any given app, and ask if it's available on Android too.
* Ask her if she knows the differences are between the Play Store and the App Store.
* Ask her if she thinks there is any material difference between getting applications onto an Android phone versus an iPhone.
She presumably doesn't know anything about these things, makes the assumption that apps are apps, and leaves it at that.
None of these questions get you anywhere. You made the claim that hardware was why people upgraded - which is false because of the diversity of the market and the fact that the hardware is only a portal to what they want. You haven't dealt with the argument - that the App Store is a separate product from an iPhone. It isn't.
It's extremely unethical in my opinion to force some service provider to adjust the service to your needs/preferences.
This would not be an issue if Apple allowed users to easily side load apps.
Sorry, you are building a strawman here.
1) You have the full right to do whatever you want with your phone. I don't argue with that, it's the truth.
2) Apple need not to help you to do whatever you want with your phone.
For some reason you confuse your right to do whatever you want with your phone with Apple's obligation to help you with that.
Do reverse engineering, flash custom OS, jailbreak, it's your right, but Apple has no obligation to help you with that. If it's to hard for you to do whatever you want with their device, buy another vendor's device then.
> For some reason you confuse your right to do whatever you want with your phone with Apple's obligation to help you with that.
At what point along the road from 'not helping' to 'actively hindering' does this become not ok?
When a company goes out of their way to prevent you exercising your rights, what do we call that?
It’s well within the governments rights to say a transactional middleman service can only charge a certain fee. What is important to society is the success of the producers, not the rent seeking middleman.
They're about developers not having any choice. Developers have to release on iOS. There's no other option, because that's where most users are. Apple has a captive audience, and they're using that captive audience to abuse developers, who have no recourse.
The issue with many armchair commentators on HackerNews is that we look at the philosophy of the situation, and not the reality. The philosophy is "its Apple's platform, it's their right to run it however they want." The reality is "a billion people use this thing." The rules change when you get that big; its not about philosophy, its about doing what's best for everyone. To some degree, Apple does have a right to run their platform how they want: Fuck Their Rights.
They do have a choice. You target Apple users and agree upon Apple's terms, or you don't, and publish your app in F-droid/Jolla store, hoping somebody would pay.
The reality is that apple has built an infrastructure which allow you to gain profits and deliver to a huge amount of customers.
> The reality is "a billion people use this thing.
Because Apple put quite a lot of resources to build it. It's their right to operate it as they do.
> Fuck Their Rights
Sure, but let's start with turning your home into a shelter for homeless people for the sake of the society, Fucking your Right, and then we'll fuck theirs. People are always quick to deprive others of their rights as I see.
And here, a perfect example of slippery slope. You are doing exactly what 013a called as "armchair commentators", and not looking at reality.
The reality is that there are two OSs for phones, and two stores. This arrangement is detrimental to developers and consumers, and, as it stands, there's no getting out of it without resources that no one, apart from Amazon, has.
Nope. In reality I've owned n900, n9, Jolla 1 and now iphone. I've owned phones with 4 different OS (not counting symbian).
And of course there are various stores for Android, at least some of my friends live well enough with AOSPs without Gapps.
If you don't like iphone, don't develop for it, you are free to leave.
> there's no getting out of it without resources that no one, apart from Amazon, has.
There is no getting out because people try to force apple to fit their needs instead of giving other platform chance.
Apple is dominating because it's good enough and provides some good merits which other vendors don't (like long term support). As Microsoft's attempt to enter the market has shown, you can't just beat it having the resources, devs and customers need a reason to switch.
I would prefer apple to become less convenient forcing the developers and customers to seek for alternatives and develop for good and more free platforms like Sailfish, making the market more diverse.
Anyways as Windows phone and Sailfish examples have shown, a 30% fee is not a good enough reason to start to support another platform. And if so, I don't see why we should go the authoritarian way forcing apple to change their fees.
30% seems a fair price for using the infrastructure they've built, if it's not a good reason to switch to any other infrastructure, which existed and still do.
CORPORATIONS. ARE. NOT. PEOPLE.
If tomorrow the government fined Apple a hundred billion dollars, for literally no reason except for the fun of it, I could focus my entire being, every ounce of willpower I have, into attempting to expel one milliliter-sized tear, and would still have dry eyes.
When an indie developer spends her days and nights producing a work of passion, only to pay the US Government 25% and Apple 30% of the few thousand dollars she makes, and the next day Apple announces that they made a hundred billion dollars last quarter: I stand with the indie developer, not with the faceless mega-corporation.
I couldn't lose ten seconds of sleep over some perceived injustice that this developer used the piece of literal garbage Apple excretes every year and slaps an "xcode" label on to develop her passion project, and that somehow entitles them to the billions of dollars they make in taxes.
I won't curl up in the fetal position and cry when thinking about how much Apple DESERVES the billions of iPhone users out there, stuck in a duopoly between two mega-corporations who treat ethics the same way I treat toilet paper, people who spend thousands of dollars on that hardware, and thus Apple DESERVES to control what they can and cannot use their phones for, thus Apple DESERVES to control which developers they interact with and how they compensate them.
The gall I must have, to not log on to the internet and defend a trillion dollar corporation against this horrible, mean indie developer for coming after their 30%! Hank Rearden earned that 30%! By god, through the sheer force of paying other people to build a fence, and a little luck convincing customers to live inside of it, they earned it!
There is no such thing as rights of corporations, only rights of people.
According to your logic nobody can turn my home into a homeless shelter, but if I and my friend together build a hotel, it's fine to expropriate it since we are corporation.
But we are still people and it's our rights, we're not a faceless entity.
> When an indie developer spends her days and nights producing a work of passion
Well, it's fine to fuck an indie dev's rights, if she works in a team. They are a corporation after all.
A 30% Tax Forever is a whole different problem.
Epic HAD to do this in order to force the issue in order to claim specific harm. Of COURSE Apple pulled the app, and Epic knew they would. Epic now gets to claim that Apple's behavior is consumer-hostile and anticompetitive. That's a claim they cannot make without a concrete example of harm (this is just how the courts work). Saying that "Apple was within their rights" is the same argument as "If it is legal it is moral" which we all know is not true.
> Why should Epic get a “special arrangement” from all other developers?
They shouldn't. And neither should Amazon - they do. Or any other example where Apple has made exceptions to their rules, if your company is big enough.