Epic Games steps up Apple fight with EU antitrust complaint

Installing the software you want on your compute device isn't sideloading. Its just installing software. Apple is aberration here not all of the users who just expect to actually own the products they buy.

On the other hand, Apple is acting as a platform owner and demanding that they continue to act as the sole store curator on their platform.

I do not see the hypocrisy.

I'd argue that it is till the case on Android.

Yes, alternate stores are possible, but they are severely handicapped. First, manual APK install has to be enabled in obscure settings that come with a "scary" warning. Then they can't provide auto-updates but require a manual confirmation for each version update.

Epic gave up on running their own store on Android due to the difficulties.

I do think that regulators need to force Apples hand - not being in control of your own device is not acceptable.

But even then most business would remain on the official stores. We also need legislation to curb the excessive fees charged by both Google and Apple.

A few years ago the EU limited credit card transaction fees to 0.3% or a fixed maximum, whichever is lower.

A similar cap is needed for app stores.

That's the equivalent of the IDFA message for Facebook. Which everyone will see, its worded in a very negative way, and it's a must.

It’s biggest company in the word, that tries to make most amount of money by monopolizing markets. And privacy sells nowadays, so they exploit that to grow even more. Of course users get something in return, but that’s not the reason why do that.

It’s one of the greatest PR campaigns of modern world, to have people believe that biggest company in the world cares about them and has their backs and interests. It’s almost Orwellian.

What about platforms like Playstation or the computers built into Teslas etc, should we allow sideloading on those? How do you define a platform?

so if platforms are going to be forced open, we should go after game consoles too, then there needs to be some means to protect consumers from predatory apps because we are just opening the door to that and more.

finally, it also means that apps you don't like will now be easily available so best be good with that and not asking government to judge every app.

finally this means apps can do what they will unless we are willing to let platforms still restrict how they use your data.. which to be honest blocking 3rd party apps is at times beneficial

as in, you can have it all but everyone gets to as well.

So what will you give up for the freedom? Do you want the platform owner to still police for privacy issues? I don't see how it can be done if they cannot control access.

Frankly let all apps stores be forced open and it will be fun to watch how fast many demand them locked up or heavily regulated or worse

Of course, that behavior makes sense in chess because the entire point of a game is to be an artificial world where only the letter of the rules are what matters and the only tangible outcome is winning or losing.

In the real world of business and politics, things like human decency and fairness should come into play. But increasingly, at least in American politics and corporations, the game is played only according to the letter of the law. Anything they can get away with, they will.

Every now and then their interests align with those of the users, but ultimately they all serve their own interests and will happily stand opposed to the users whenever it suits them best.

Using term hypocritical for corporate law seems error just like it does for using it for animals. Apple is engaging in legal battles and hypocritical is not a legal consideration. Apple is not a an entity you can judge using moral psychology.

Apple uses "corporate messaging" toward consumers that has ethical content. It may be mistaken as morality, but it's just how a company's management talks to people. It is a marketing message strategy.

Everyone I know who uses an iPhone or iPad is generally using medium to high quality apps, and not suffering from crapware, slowdowns or weird issues.

Everyone I know who uses an Android phone is always complains about weird app behavior, ranging from crummy software quality to flashlight apps that request access to your contact list. And my guess is these people use Googles Play Store.

Somehow, Apple is doing something that is beneficial to the average Joe buyer of smartphones.

In the end, apple is a private company serving its customers. They can’t please everyone. And that’s what I like about them.

Now the same shit is happening for web apis / pwa. This is really sad and really makes me hate Apple as a company.

Plus: Apple mandated better privacy for users. How could they do that with sideloading app stores? They couldn't.

The iPhone is not a computer platform, it's an integrated experience. Raspberry Pi or the PC you assemble is a platform (which you can still choose to do, if you want).

Or even macOS.

You are treating corporate entities as if they are people with emotions.

This is a mistake.

They are not people. They are legal entities, created to enable their owners and beneficiaries to have special rights regular citizens do not have, such as killing people and never going to prison (Boeing).

How does this differ from "any programmable electronics should allow sideloading"? I don't see that as a very workable solution, legally, practically, or even in a pro-consumer sense.

It would certainly drive the cost of most electronics up incredibly as all devices would need to produce APIs and upgradeability.

To be fair, until it was limited to a small section of the population, it wasn't a big deal. So rich people want to live in walled gardens, so what? But when you start talking about 20% or 30% of the whole population, then it's a significant problem. It took a bit for Apple to reach that level but they are definitely there now, and since they don't seem to be willing to change, they have to be forced to accept that it has to happen.

No - it’s not going to add anything at all for users except being forced to deal with a bunch of shady app stores, some of which will be deeply hostile to privacy.

Developers will also be forced to support multiple stores and sets of rules. Dealing with this will eliminate any possible cost advantage.

Everyone loses except for the new group of middlemen who get to take a cut.

> This isn't the case on Windows. This isn't the case on Android. Or Linux for that matter.

It sounds like you are saying there is plenty of choice for people who don’t want a walled garden.

> It's more disappointing it takes 10 years for regulators to step-in and say "that's bad, no more, open up your platform".

It sounds like you are saying this should never have been allowed, despite there being no legal reason against it.

And while the DOJ might only care about the US market... the fact that Microsoft's domination extended worldwide means not only were there no US competitors, but there weren't foreign competitors to challenge them either.

The fact that Android--with 50% US and 72% global marketshare--is so competitive with Apple makes it clear these two situations are not equivalent. Apple is more abusive/controlling in some ways, but they dont have the market power that Microsoft had.

The web is a platform. But Apple controls the browser like it controls the web store so it can selectively exclude functionality that pushes people to use its monopoly app store.

I feel your pain in the sense that that I think user UX will take a hit, but I think that's less important than breaking the monopoly of the current app store.

For example, I can't find apps with pornography or other types of things the high overlords at apple or Google have deemed inappropriate for me to have. That's bad. Apparently apps like Matrix fall under that category. It'd be nice if I can choose what I want to see.

Do you honestly think this is a worse scenario than having to buy all of your apps/games through Microsoft's app store? Can you imagine using macOS without homebrew because everything has to come from Apple's app store? Can you imagine using Ubuntu without apt because everything has to come from the Canonical's software center? Even Android is made slightly more tolerable by the existence of F-Droid.

Being able to use your preferred software manager/store for everything would be nice, but I don't know of any platform that lets you do that. You either have to deal with multiple software managers and use your preferred one as much as possible, or you're stuck with whatever the platform forces on you. I definitely prefer the former.

This is how life is as a PC gamer and it's.... actually good. Who cares if you need to open multiple stores? That is the smallest possible inconvenience, and in exchange we get an insanely competitive marketplace where consumers are regularly given free games and deep, deep discounts to lure them into competing stores.

Would you prefer every city had one car yard? Is it a major hardship for you to have to go to different car yards for Fords and Nissans?

This does mean that Apple will need to start upping their game by either lowering their fee (which means lower costs for you) or supporting other independent games that deserve attention in the App Store.

Furthermore, iOS is a well designed platform with very tight security restrictions. You don't need the App Store to do that, it's build into the platform.

https://playnite.link/

1. Buy game X from Apple's app store for $39.00.

2. Buy game X from X's own app store for $30.00.

Would you install X's app store then? Would you at least want the option of choosing that path?

Perhaps we should just name it such.

So "App Store" becomes "Content Filter".

And you can install any app you want from any URL, unless you have some content filters installed, which will limit what you can install.

No more App Stores.

In-game chat could be XMPP or a more modern alternative, too, and then you wouldn't need a separate IM client for each ecosystem.

Finally, I don't think anyone really dislikes the app stores themselves. They are annoyed that they have to pay a 30% tax. If it were 3%, I doubt anyone would be complaining. Apple took a big gamble by being as restrictive as they are -- if they win, they get free money for doing nothing; if they lose, they get $0. I think history will show that they lose; app developers have caught on. But, I could be wrong.

Sorry for the sarcasm, but why do we even need appstores, apart from it being a website to download stuff?

This was the real problem. Apple has to get a cut if you run the app on an Apple-made device and either sell the software or charge money for digital goods at all.

There is only upside for Apple with these restrictions, so I see them continuing to fight this fight with the excuse being "Customer experience, security concerns," etc, where the reality is maintaining the wall and gate in their garden.

The Mac is great, but the Mac App Store is garbage. And that's the iOS analogue there. That's because Mac has alternatives; centralized, forced big-tech App Stores don't work in the face of alternatives. The only platforms they have worked on (iOS, lesser degree Android) only work because of the Big Tech monopoly.

What sucks more for consumers: Having to install the Epic Games Store to play Fornite, or not being able to play Fortnite? Those are your two options. You want to believe there's a third option where Big Tech Opoly is allowed to run a centralized draconian app store for perfect user UX. This third option does not exist; its availability over the past decade was a blip destined for the footnotes of history.

Hell, go over to Linux and juggle the multiple package managers and package availability between them. That's the natural state of the world; developers hold the cards, and they'll do what is best for their business. The App Store is fighting against nature, and that fight is always a losing one. Always. There is no third option; its just a matter of time.

I got around this by simply refusing to install any other stores. If its not on Steam, GoG or Playstation store, I'm simply not buying that game. There are so many games I've still not played and my time is limited, I can live without playing a game that forces me to install another "app store".

Right now I'm PRETTY sure I can't get screwed by a random subscription. Having played with some of the others, definitely not true elsewhere.

Between each of these launchers they have their own chat platforms, I need to duplicate my friends list between them all and they each have their pros and cons.

It's not great and its frustrating. Clearly Steam had a fantastic solution and was ahead of its time in terms of digital distribution of content.

Why can't we move to a solution like brick and mortar stores where every game is made available at every online store? Then I can choose where I want to download the game from.

With app stores the situation is reversed. Exclusives are common, and many quite expensive devices only have one store available. And once you've got an expensive product from the Apple App store on your Apple device, you can't (usually) change to a Google device and the Google Play Store and still use the product without re-buying it.

> All of them need their App Store running in order to play their games, so half the time my computer has 4-5 App Stores running in the background so I can play a single game

You can always close down the app-stores you don't need right now, but it's true they don't tend to give you the option to do this automatically.

> And they are all electron/qt webkit apps cause nobody builds apps anymore so each one consumes about 500mb of ram.

Agree, it would be nice if they were more lean. I'm seeing Origin taking up >200MB just sitting there.

30% is completely uneconomic and drives all of the profit to the platform owner. That's why were seeing so many acquisitions.

The problem here is with the 30%.

But we can vote with our wallet, it's a free market. I only buy things on GOG.

For some reason, apt-get has been able to do that with different package repos for last 25 years or so.

This doesn't happen on Android.

> My gaming computer is already filled with like 8 different app stores

This is because game companies want to be middlemen in games distribution. Games have communities, chat, matchmaking, patches, DLC, DRM, sales and pricing engines, analytics, online gaming, and a lot more complexity than your AirBNB or CashApp.

It's also happening with streaming. Once game steaming gains adoption, you'll see it there too.

You're not going to stop this by defending Apple's moat.

Forcing Apple to open up lets small developers get around the Apple tax and draconian and arbitrary review process that hinders their growth. It also lets people control the devices they purchased, and defends software freedoms broadly by discouraging the Apple behavior across the board.

If it won't be on the ios apple store i won't install it.

Right now the only choice people have for a phone that doesn't force you to have an apple or google account is a pinephone and this could potentially fix that.

Oh wait.

[1] yes, you can also buy physical games for most systems, but that’s in its way out too. If this plays out as expected, this complaint is going to have a lot of collateral damage.

I don't see people complaining about GoG or Itch.io on this point, because you can download your games for those systems using a web browser and import them into any game manager you want.

It also sounds a bit like you're arguing for federated standards, which is also a thing that we could do. Nobody complains about there being too many repository remotes in Linux, because you wire them up to whatever package manager you're using and that's it. Your setup doesn't become more complicated just because you're using extra software sources. It's still the same commands to search for software and update your system.

This is already how F-Droid works, and it's great. Anyone can set up an alternative repository to F-Droid and I can use them as a software source within F-Droid. It's also the way that your podcast app works. Nobody complains that there are too many platforms for hosting and distributing podcasts, because as long as you avoid bad actors like Stitcher, you just install one app and manage them in one place from every source.

You're looking at games on the desktop through the lens of the model that Valve popularized by being a dominant player that refused to play nicely with anyone else. There are plenty of ways to design an ecosystem for managing stores without turning your computer into a cesspool of DRM. And Apple could do that, it could build a framework that required 3rd-party stores to work like software repositories.

----

Look at all of the fragmented broken systems you're complaining about -- the vast majority of them from video, to music streaming, to game purchases, are fragmented because they are deliberately designed to not work well with each other because the companies want consumer lock-in and DRM. But that's also exactly what is Apple is doing, they're just in a position of power so they're the only people doing it.

People didn't notice that Steam's way of managing games was fundamentally broken until other people copied Steam's strategy and made the downsides obvious. You're noticing the same thing with Apple's app store. You're noticing what goes wrong when app stores are designed using Apple's template -- when they're designed to restrict consumer rights, lock them into platforms, and force competitors out of the market, rather than when they're designed to be standardized clients that serve the user.

> And each App Store also has their own chat system along with the others like discord.

Why does a games distribution platform have a chat system in the first place? Aren't all of those chat systems basically inferior to Discord in almost every way? The Unix way of handling this is that whatever chat system you're using should be able to talk to Steam and get events from that client -- it shouldn't be bundled into Steam itself.

You know, just a thought.

They want secure app distribution? Great! Build an equitable charge model. Charge for transactions, charge for usage, don’t charge flat rates that don’t scale. Certainly don’t prohibit other payment gateways.

And certain don’t punish your competitors in ways you don’t punish yourself. ( blanket certificate removals for a company and all its subsidiaries)

The ends do not justify the means. Apple can run a profitable and secure app distribution platform. It requires being open and fair. They are not doing that.

One could expect that someone on a forum called "hacker news" knows how to close apps after running + also disable their autorun at startup.

Multiple app-stores are not that great, but still better than a monopoly of one company that takes a 30% cut for every product sold and in return provides an app that barely works (lags, constant updates, constant questions about password if you dont use it much).

It's basically the same as having multiple icons provided by multiple games. They also had different installers and privacy policies.

Competition among app stores means lower prices and cheaper service.

Is same with video streaming, the giants don't want other giants to get a big cut without working hard.

IMO , AppStore competition should be like web hosting, competition is large enough so you have enough choice to buy exactly what you want. Imagine if you want your web page to be visible on Apple stuff you need to pay 30% of your profits to Apple and only if Apple likes your page content.

Or a car, or a tractor, or...

But I guess most commentators want to eat the cake, sell it and keep it at the same time.

The "Apple Tax" pays for the maintenance of the Apple ecosystem. Epic wants access to this amazing ecosystem, but resents having to help pay to support it.

Either "third party" app stores will also pay to support this ecosystem, in which case Epic will be paying the same amount either way; or they'll fail to support the ecosystem, in which case Apple will be forced to turn to other sources to make revenue (like selling personal information).

Right now I, as the consumer, can choose between an ecosystem whose business model is based on selling personal information (Android) or an ecosystem whose business model is based on the end user paying more (Apple). Don't take that choice away from me.

Without the requirement that all apps able to be purchased on all stores at similar prices and still under Apple's review process then apps will flock to the store that makes them the most money and fewest rules and users will have no choice but to acquire that app via that store. If I have to go to X store for an app I need I don't really have my choice of store.

Do gamers like the current culture of having to have Origin, Steam, UPlay, Epic, GOGs, Blizzard Store, for no other reason than large middlemen playing Civ with marketshare and exclusives?

I think if this issue was solved we would see less people desiring Apple to have such tight control over their ecosystem because it would mean that for users that like Apple's store opening up isn't a strict downgrade for them.

A lot of comments keep saying this. So why haven't they done it on android? If they wanted to have huge amounts of users use their stores, wouldn't android give them even more of that than iOS?

Why are there all these doomsday scenarios being touted in this thread when what epic is asking already exists on another (larger) platforms, and none of the things that you and others mention happened?

And every one of them manages to lose my logged in state and force me to log in again every time I start them, apparently that "Keep me logged in" checkbox is just for show.

Do I sound bitter? It's because I am.

It depends on what you consider the market. Apple totally have a market on 'iOS App Distribution'. Which does not compete with Android because you can't get apps on each other. This is the same logic in the EU's ruling against Google's Android monopoly:

>Google's app store dominance is not constrained by Apple's App Store, which is only available on iOS devices.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_18_...

This is like saying water is not an essential liquid, there is coca cola and pepsi.

Apple could make everyone happy tomorrow vis-a-vis IAPs by charging standard credit card processing fees (~2-3%)instead of 30% while still protecting your payment info from app developers.

That said I agree and think Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft should have to open up their platforms for side loading.

I can take a tiny piece of carbon, call it a diamond and sell it for 50,000. Is it fair and equitable? Should that be allowed?

I can take a white T shirt and print a red Supreme logo on it and sell it for 100x cost of production. Is that fair and equitable? Should it be allowed?

The development cost for a book is about $10 dollars of ink and paper. Each copy is printed and distributed for 1 dollar. It took the author 10 hours to write. But the knowledge and insights are extremely valuable. Is it fair and equitable for the author to charge $100 for a copy of this book?

If 30% isn’t allowed, is 29% okay? How about 28%? What exactly is this magic number where things become okay? Don’t businesses have the right to try and profit and not just break even? (If not why would anyone start a new business venture)

If you would argue that we shouldn’t have a free market and the govt should set all the prices in the economy, well that’s a different philosophy entirely. It’s not very popular for a host of reasons

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program...

Some people do at the moment, but that's not completely the point.

This legislation should be about tail risk - protecting the people who increasingly only have an iPhone or iPad as their main computer from either forced obsolescence or restrictions on their behaviours.

Users like you have zero skin in the game. Nothing in your workflow will change, other than you might get cheaper applications.

and this is because taxes are national matters. the EU can try some legal ways of forcing some countries to take more or less tax, but all of those tries are not only being litigated, but also pushed against by the national governments.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-app-store/apple-low...

Apple isn't defending users from games with manipulative business models, and in fact is actively profiting from them. This lawsuit is about Apple's ability to profit from them.

Have they not hosted Fortnite right up until they wouldn't pay their rent?

Why limit the condemnation to virtual goods?

I am happy he has a medium to socialize but the anxiety he gets from this machine is intense.

I generally advocate for users rights, but I am siding with Apple on this one. There is no monopoly - Epic has many (mobile) platforms to distribute their games/platform, including switch and android, that I can’t imagine the EU sides with them - especially in europe where iPhones don’t constitute the same market share.

However, what I would advocate for is a possibility for officially rooting your iPhone (with lots of big scary messages along the way) and mutual app store exclusion.

If Epic wants to run their own app store, great, but I don’t believe Apple should be obligated to make it comfortable.

I would strongly support a system that forced operators to either run at cost or to charge any price but allow sideloading.

A maximum profit margin on services like could also be viable.

If we follow the logic of Phones providing access to a market that must remain "free" and allow competition, then constraints on purchase might be something decided by society/people/governments more than a single private company?

That does not sound worse than any fashion store.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/europe

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/sweden

Not only that, winning a case against a company in EU over antitrust often bolsters your defense in the US due to courts preferring to hear about established case law by other courts with similar laws.