Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

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People should be careful drawing too many comparisons to consoles, because as someone who owns rooted consoles that run homebrew mods, I can attest that it's actually awesome and improves the user experience in about a dozen ways.

My 3DS supports savestates & backups for games like Animal Crossing that let me maintain multiple towns at the same time, custom emulators that run my old Gameboy cartridge backups that I made, really amazing mods like Project Restoration for Majora's Mask, plus custom themes and easier storage management for things like pictures and songs. By comparison, an unhacked Switch still can't even back up all of its save games to the cloud.

If you don't want us to go after consoles as well, maybe don't tempt us? I'm sympathetic to the argument that being loss leaders makes consoles unique and special and different from a smartphone, but if the general consensus here is that they're exactly the same...

If you're arguing that this case is a slippery slope, try to come up with some consequences farther down the slope that don't sound kind of nice.

I think any business model that relies on loss-leaders followed by lock-in is a bad business model. I hate it in printers, I hate it in phones, I hate it in computers. I'm not that big into consoles, but I suspect I'd hate it there too.

The consequence isn't that your 3DS would have been better upon releasing, its that it wouldn't have released if the console market had been required to operate this way.

And again, I'm sympathetic to that argument. But then don't argue that the iPhone is exactly the same.

I don't think anyone can reasonably argue that Apple would stop producing the iPhone if sideloading was allowed. The smartphone market doesn't operate the same way as the console market.

I wonder if they could just make that an option on purchase? “Do you want us to enforce security and privacy or do you want to take that on yourself?”. I for one would opt for handling my own privacy on some of my own devices, but would definitely lock my kids down with Apple approved only option.

The more reasonable thing for Apple to do is to separate the code-signing services (platform security and privacy) with the App Store services (advertising and distribution). From my vantage point that would solve all these problems.

At that point the code signing service would become the thing that Epic objects to the most because it's money they're paying Apple for all their games running on Apple products.

I assume that service would only cost ~$10/month, because that's what Apple currently charges for Developer accounts.

The 30% per transaction only really makes sense for apps for which Apple has provided the advertising, distribution and processing -- the App Store.

I'd love to just provide a direct download for my customers who also happen to be Apple (device) customers.

The point is that people would follow YouTube videos that promise CRACKED SPOTIFY to change that choice so that they can download a copy of a cracked version of Spotify filled with malware. That in turns reflects badly with Apple because it would be assumed that the platform is not secured and cannot be trusted with private / sensitive data (both in B2C and B2B settings). If anything, I think we should at least agree that it’s Apple’s choice whether run this risk or not on their own product.

> I think we should at least agree that it’s Apple’s choice whether run this risk or not on their own product

It's not "their" product. It's mine, I purchased a license to use their software on my hardware. I'm not beholden to continue using their software

It is your iPhone. And you can sideload apps onto the iPhone, for free, using a number of different non-jailbreak but still PITA options.

The App Store, however, is their store.

The comparison is the they are both devices that limit installation of software. They're rather similar in that regard. I'm not sure that "This product can only exist if you allow us to have a monopoly" is justification for allowing a monopoly when it comes to video games consoles.

There is some public good in selling consoles as loss leaders; it allows disadvantaged people to participate. Video games are becoming a big part of our culture, and it sucks that participating in that culture requires spending a bunch of money on hardware every generation.

I also think there are more substantial differences. The most major being the difficulty in switching. Switching consoles means losing my data most of the time, but they're just save games, achievements and friends list. If my console melted down tomorrow, it'd be fine. Switching phone OS is a lot harder. Contacts and calendars are relatively easy to switch, but it gets hard after that. How do I get all my data off the old phone? Am I sure I exported my 2FA keys right? If my phone melts down and takes the cloud backups with it, my life is in a world of hurt.

I am also curious how first-party software will be handled. Is it okay to have a closed marketplace on your own software if that marketplace only serves your software? Just as an example, if I get an LG smart fridge that has a marketplace to download new widgets for the display, and LG only allows the sale of LG apps there, is that okay? I'm wondering if app stores won't just shift their model. Instead of "you upload an app, and we'll pay you what users pay us for it minus our cut" it will become "You grant us a perpetual license to distribute your application, and we will pay you 70% royalties on the money we earn". I wonder if that shifts any liability around

>Switching consoles means losing my data most of the time, but they're just save games, achievements and friends list

And an inability to play every game you've purchased. Even if you didn't buy the games digitally, it'd be amazingly difficult to resell your games to buy the same ones for a different platform. Heck, just look at all the groaning online about Epic store exclusive games because people didn't want to have to deal with Steam AND Epic launchers.

>I am also curious how first-party software will be handled. Is it okay to have a closed marketplace on your own software if that marketplace only serves your software?

Similarly, why should only Epic be able to sell skins for Fortnite?

>And an inability to play every game you've purchased

Emulators exists (unlike Apple which bans any virtualization of MacOS under non-macs).

>it'd be amazingly difficult to resell your games to buy the same ones for a different platform

Selling is easy. 'Buying the same game' is often a nonfactor due to how the games market works (many games become outdated quickly, multiplayer servers go offline, etc.).

>>Is it okay to have a closed marketplace on your own software if that marketplace only serves your software?

>Similarly, why should only Epic be able to sell skins for Fortnite?

There's no duty to have a open marketplace, that is open to 3rd parties. Not having it is no different than offering different paid versions of the main software (imagine Fortnite Premium Edition with X skins, or iPhone only with Apple apps). However, once the marketplace is open to 3rd parties, there's a duty to allow fair competition, and that does limit Apple.

Minor point: sideloading is allowed, but requires you pay Apple their yearly developer tax.

> sideloading is allowed, but requires you pay Apple their yearly developer tax.

You can sideload apps with a free dev account for several years now. The only condition is that you have to resign the binary every seven days. There are even desktop apps that automate it.

Oh, didn’t know about the automation. Any examples? I was sideloading a few apps for awhile, but got sick of resigning.

AltStore/Altserver - https://altstore.io/

> AltStore will periodically attempt to refresh your apps in the background, and you can always manually refresh your apps from within AltStore.

I think you can do it without. See AltStore.

I think companies would adapt. And the 3ds has novel enough hardware that you couldn't just replace it with a phone/laptop/whatever. Consoles could also still work out exclusivity deals with publishers, and have a marketplace that is screened, they'd just also need a way to sideload apps.

Consoles that have had easy access to that have historically not done well.

doesn't the xbox have a way to sideload apps?

It allows to sideload UWP apps, however that just basically means you are running WinRT in a lightweight version of Windows on XBox hypervisor.

This is not how XBox games developed with XDK are actually developed and they can see all the hardware, instead of being into a UWP sandbox.

It is more to cater to indie devs as means to get something into the XBox similar to XNA used to allow, it is not meant for proper XBox games as such.

Also it hasn't been updated for a while.

Xbox's Dev Mode is a bit complicated and limits a lot of functionality of the console. I think there's a good argument that it's actually easier and less limiting to side load an app using Cydia Impactor, Xcode or AltStore with an iPhone.

Against locked-down ones. Which is why those need to be banned.

This stunt by Epic is absolutely about going after consoles too. Epic wants to have their store on every platform, with Epic taking a cut out of the games published on their store, leaving nothing to the host platform.

Eventually the console makers will die due to lack of funding, and Epic will release their own console which will be more locked down than an Apple iPhone.

Your conclusion cracked me up. I guess you either die a hero...

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