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Comment by Edd314159 | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't say Apple are being childlike at all. They're simply enforcing the policy they set and the consequences that Epic knew would come if they violated that policy.

The argument can be made that Apple's rules are bad rules. I think I would agree that changes to the rules should be made, and I expect that they will make some concessions eventually. But you can't fault them for enforcing those rules the way they are, especially when Epic are provoking Apple so brazenly and publicly.

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The rules are for the iOS app store (or the mac app store, but on mac os you can thankfully get your software elsewhere and the mac app store is mostly a failure). Apple has revoked Epic's license over iOS brouhaha, which means they can't sign their macOS software either. Blocking them from making mac software over an iOS dispute is very questionable, no?

It's not that much different than Google nuking an organization account because a member did something stupid with their org account. Or steam/eBay/PayPal/Amazon/etc banning an account for a rightful chargeback.

Good point. Those are examples of crap behaviour too. ;)

Thanks. To add, All the big companies behave horribly at every opportunity they have to make money. Epics trying to use the courts to increase their profit from Apple's walled garden. Apple's trying to protect their moat. Google Facebook and Amazon are trying to mine every single detail about everyone's life, for money. Instead of these ridiculous court battles we should have gambling laws that restrict underage gambling in video games, and antitrust suits to break open all the walled gardens.

Bad behaviour by some other third party does not justify bad acts by Apple.

Sure, Google tying way too many things to a single Google account is exactly the same antipattern. I'm not sure if this is supposed to refute my comment. If so, this rhetorical antipattern is called "whataboutism" ;)

I answered a question you asked, and then you accuse me of whataboutism?

Eesh.

We were told the MacOS signature system was only about security. Now it is about iOS business disputes.

Good thing you can disable Gatekeeper in five seconds if you don’t like it! That’s what I do.

I don’t understand why Epic isn’t releasing unsigned updates...

Isn’t Fortnite normally installed and launched through another launcher? Wouldn’t replacing the signed app with an unsigned version mean that the user would have to go find the app bundle in Finder (which they wouldn’t normally need to interact with) to launch it after an update?

I haven’t played Fortnite on a Mac, but I’m assuming EGS generally behaves like Steam here.

I'm pretty sure existing processes can launch other unsigned processes, unless something has changed in Catalina.

(And of course, if you were to disable Gatekeeper none of this would be a problem, although I can see why Epic wouldn't want to make users do that, and they shouldn't have to.)

That's a bit of a stretch.

Epic abused the security update workflow of the iOS app review system. Specifically, they submitted an update which was not a hotfix as if it were a hotfix. They (apparently) did that intentionally so that the update would not be inspected closely.

The signature system is built on trust. Apple allows trusted partners to submit hotfixes to address security bugs. Those updates receive expedited (read: cursory) review. Epic abused that trust to push an update which added their own payment system, not to address a bug (security or otherwise).

If Epic is going to abuse the trust of system for submitting security updates, why should they be trusted by the signature system?

Source on that? They sent a server update to activate a feature flag on a preexisting build. Apple characterizes this as a hotfix process, but not as their own expedited review hotfix process I don't believe.

If that build that first added the unactivated flagged feature used expedited review I don't see any sources saying so. But even then, expedited review isn't exclusively for security, it is also for events (Fortnite has frequent events):

"to coincide with an event you are directly associated with,"

https://web.archive.org/web/20190326213414/https://developer...

Adding an alternate payment option wasn't a security breach for users.

This is a complete stretch to relate it to desktop security in any way.

I don't have a source. It's an inference based on the public statements of both companies.

Apple characterizes it as a hotfix and Epic has not disputed that. Apple has a well-known expedited review process.

> This is a complete stretch to relate it to desktop security in any way.

I'm sorry, but this makes no sense. The same (apparently untrustworthy) entity is responsible for both Fortnight-the-iOS-game and Fortnight-the-MacOS-game. If you don't trust that entity on one platform, why on earth would you trust them on a different platform?

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