Apple tries to get Epic to admit there's porn on its store

So it's not really entering a credit card number per se; it's more like giving someone else your credit card number so they can give you another number that you type into a different portal to make the digital goods "appear" on the iOS app.

Why are they making children jump through all these hoops just to enjoy an online video game https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005566223

Because, if they're existing friends then yeah... you could all just move to a new place to hang out whenever it's needed. But if you generally met each other through the platform, it's more acting like that Community thing (or at least ways. :)

But what does that have to with all of the other things you said? You're just saying derogatory comments about store exclusives without saying why you think they're bad.

disingenuous: not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does.

this post here is disingenuous in that no one was arguing with the technical correctness of the interpretation. and the above post is disingenuous with describing the situation.

There certainly is a difference between saying "Epic blocks game from being submitted on steam" and "Epic signs contract to sell game on EGS". Pretending these have the same connotations is in fact... disingenous.

investors assume risk. including losing the capital because of jerks.

Breaking contracts is a crime, since these contracts are not "that serious", nobody attempted to prosecute devs, but that doesn't make it stop being a crime.

Also I believe in some countries what Epic is doing is called "Tortious Interference with Contract" or something like that. I am not a lawyer though.

But for example, Shenmue devs, if they didn't had backed down from refunds and got sued, they could get convicted of literally stealing money, since they got money and ran away with it.

Then in their defense, they could point out that Epic told them to do it and gave them a lot of money to ensure they would do it.

What you think would have happened in that case?

EDIT: I will be clear, and stop arguing this point because it is being stupid now.

I am not "angry" at epic, or at anyone.

I am only explaining what I meant on my point above about Epic paying people to not sell on other stores, this is a fact, not a negative and toxic spin, Epic DID pay devs to not sell on other stores, they said that themselves on the trial. I am not "angry" at them for it, or with the devs, I am only saying what happened.

I am not a Valve fanboy, not a Epic fanboy, I am not a fanboy, I don't like Apple disallowing sideloading, but I also think Epic approach to this subject could been done differently (not breaking rules, to start).

If you promise PC exclusivity, that doesn't mean Steam. That means PC. You can promise PC exclusivity and then sign with Epic and maintain your commitment to PC exclusivity. Briefly having a Steam page doesn't change any of that.

Travel too far right or left and authoritarianism is always the result.

The obvious answer that satifies everyone would be to a) allow alternate payment processors if the developers choose to forgoe the 30% or b) give the big companies than can roll these processors a lower cut to incenivize them to make one.

But if the answer was that obvious, this case would not have started.

You can actually run GUI apps on it.

I could see both sides, but ultimately I use Firefox as an attempt to try and keep chromium's monopoly as a web renderer at bay, even if for seconds longer. Firefox on IOS being forced to basically be built on top of a chromium engine defeats that purpose.

It's for similar reasons that I don't recognize "Visual Studio for Mac" as VS, but a rebranded Xamarin. It lacks several core features of VS that devs hearing the name would expect (let alone hundreds of more specialized features).

Nothing in your 'Google Bad' diatribe challenges the fact that Safari is substandard, limited and - to your diatribe - safari in no way shape or form "makes ideas" and brings new things to the table... or "makes it easier to enter the market" (opposites of your complaint that google makes it harder).

Google is "Evil"? Okay? What does that have to do with a substandard experience and browser/app-store lock-in from Apple? It's not like Apple is "good" to counter apples "evil"...

To your IE6 point... Safari is the IE6 of Apple - stagnant, tied to the OS and blocks innovation because of company decisions. Its even worse because alternatives aren't allowed on iOS.

That might have been the idea of the California Superior Court. However, the Federal Supreme Court's role in that decision (Pruneyard) was relegated to determining the technical merits of whether the protesters' positive right to free speech guaranteed under the California State Constitution conflicts with the negative right to freedom of speech (that is freedom from government-compelled or government-limited speech)under the Federal Constitution [1]. The finding was that, in the case of shopping malls, California's interpretation is, with in its own borders, acceptable so long as protesters are given no special rights dissimilar to those of the conventional shopper. The protesters would have those rights so long as a) a protester has physical presence and b) a protestors access to infrastructure (i.e. areas to walk around) is the same as that of the common shopper. These requirements don't work for protesting at Costco[2], much less protesting on Twitter or the App Store.

If comparisons between not being able to protest on websites and "don't protest in the mall, do it at your own home" are being made, then these comparisons are superficial at best. A mall is different from a home in use and limitations. That's obvious from their respective designs. However, all websites have the same starting requirements (i.e. buy a domain name, rent/build/collocate, add HTML) and the same opportunities to be designed to the full needs of their owners. That's what one is purchasing when he or she owns a website. The right to a canvas. Not the right to a Twitter and the attention and investment that follows it. And spinning up a financially successful alt-Twitter was never a guaranteed right to begin with, anymore than spinning up an alt-Apple or alt-Microsoft would be. There is no secret money-making lever jealously guarded from the public by the mega-corporations to prevent fledging websites from becoming behemoths in their own right. The Internet is a medium. It doesn't solely or consistently function as a pulpit, product, or a content factory. It has no defined, concrete purpose in the way the Pruneyard Shopping Center did.

>The metaphor isn't perfect, but that's because the digital space is a very different area , and I sort of hate the constant comparisons of the internet to physical land in terms of ruling. If we had access to instant, worldwide teleportation technology in the 1700's, I'm sure we'd need entirely new rulesets and ethics to take this into account. That's basically what the digital space is.

I'm not requiring that the metaphor be perfect. But a metaphor or, more appropriately, an analogy, must be "like for like" even if such an analogy is not 1:1. To go back to protesting in a mall, competition in the digital space isn't banked on "land" or "territory". Facebook and its success isn't predicated on IPV4 address ownership or domain names in the same way that a manorial lord is with respect to his fiefdom. There isn't a neat division between hobby forums or commercial websites as there would be between a house and a mall. Apps are not based on "physical value" (nearly zero) or "physical size" (none). Thus comparisons to land or common areas are irrelevant. While what constitutes a "digital space" is hard to enumerate, it's clear that land or malls are not an appropriate framework with which to make such a comparison.

A better comparison for app stores, or websites in general, would be cable/satellite television. In television's case, value is determined by consumer response to content (as measured by Nielsen ratings and resulting ad dollars), not how many televisions are in every American household, how many satellites Ted Turner owns, or how many homes have cable wiring installed. The infrastructure behind it, past a certain threshold of saturation, is not the point. This is compatible with how competition for attention works on the Internet and is, certain limitations notwithstanding, a more appropriate comparison.

[1]https://www.thefire.org/first-amendment-library/decision/pru...

[2]https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/4th/...

Regardless of your feelings on the matter, corporations are not a government entity. Period.

There is no legal precedent that requires a company to be bound by the same rules as the government when it comes to free speech. They invite you to their party and they can disinvite you for any reason whatsoever.

If a corporation says they don't want guns on their property, are you going to say it's your moral right under the 2nd Amendment?

When you use an arbitrary term like "moral" (what is moral to you may not be moral to me, as it's personally defined), you can redefine the circumstances to mean virtually anything.

To continue to demand 'free speech' to mean that anything private, individual resident or company service, must continue to allow you to say what you want to say within somebody else's space is morally offensive to me. I have a right to say "No." So do the owners of Hacker News. Are you going to say every account flagged as [dead] is being deprived of their free speech?

Apple is not the only company of its kind on Planet Earth.

Whether it's Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit, Slashdot or your 10 user niche hobby forum, none of the people who own the private servers that each of those venues reside on are required to host your words.

That is the part that you're missing when you misinterpret the private party metaphor.

I'm not following. You can literally just go to a Best Buy and gaze at lots of different phone models to see for yourself. It's very realistic.

> Saying that you have a choice for the $1 app and all you have to do is replace your $400 phone and all your other apps and convince all your friends to switch away from iMessage is at the same level of practicality. Worse, because there are multiple different apps. What happens if I need both iMessage and a BitTorrent client?

A couple of things: first, you ideally should be doing research before buying a product. Second, if you need to replace a $400 phone for a $1 app, you're effectively buying that app for $401 - it must be really worth that amount for you to switch phones. If it's not, then it's just not. I think that's a personal choice and doesn't have much to do with anything other than making economic decisions for yourself. For example, I really like video games (but hardly play). There are games that I want to play that aren't available on the Mac. My choices are buy a Windows machine, or buy a Mac, or buy both (or neither). I chose to forgo a game I want to play in favor of having a Mac and to make that trade off. It's a trade off. I'm hopeful that game could come to the Mac but there's no good reason I can tell to force someone to make the game because I want to have my cake and eat it too.

Products have features and trade-offs. On the iPhone you have iMessage which might be very important to you so you can go with an iPhone. Or maybe you need a BitTorrent client and it's not available on the iPhone so you buy something else.

This is just how the world works.

Because they're working practically as I described. It's very clear how they operate on this front.

It's like Twitter saying they treat everyone fairly. Sure Jack Dorsey says that on interviews and cross-examination but as a practice Twitter certainly doesn't [1].

[1] Maybe they do, but my point isn't about Twitter specifically but how these large organizations act.