It really says something that "allowing" businesses to communicate certain information with their own customers via an independent channel was considered a concession in this settlement. I'm still wrapping my head around it.
> Apple will also establish a fund to assist small US developers, particularly as the world continues to suffer from the effects of COVID-19. Eligible developers must have earned $1 million or less through the US storefront for all of their apps in every calendar year in which the developers had an account between June 4, 2015, and April 26, 2021 — encompassing 99 percent of developers in the US. Details will be available at a later date.
Of course if something goes wrong and the customer gets litigious they'll be your customer then.
There was an article earlier today on HN about how user-hostile software has become, and I think that explains my problem. Until developers as a whole become not just less hostile, but actively prioritize my needs over their own, I don’t think I’ll change my mind.
My real problem is that I don’t have any leverage as an individual customer against hostile developers. So I’m stuck paying mega corps like Apple or Google to be the middle man for me because they _can_ leverage my interests against developers. So I just don’t feel any sympathy when developers complain that they are having a hard time abusing me.
My life has changed significantly for the better ever since I signed up for this: http://33mail.com/AQwZJR3
The real trick is using a custom domain so
A) They’re very unlikely to add it to their disposable email list (and thus block it)
B) If this service ever goes under you can still get the emails you want because you own the domain they’re being sent to.
Yes you could theoretically implement this yourself in gWorkspace or O365 but that sounds like a ton of work and $12/yr is 1000x worth it.
(Disclaimer: that’s my referral link, if enough ppl sign up with it I get a free year of service)
I’ve been using it since March of this year and it’s been wonderful, there was like 30 min of downtime once where the dashboard didn’t work but emails were still getting delivered, and I they answered any questions I had when I reached out to them. So I highly recommend it and tell everyone about it.
Unless it’s gotten easier in iOS15… right now on my iPhone it’s not possible to turn off forwarding.
I need to go to appleid.apple.com,
login, 2FA,
find the menu,
wait for it to load (bec it always seems to take like 5 seconds, even if I just opened it),
figure out which service is the one attached to the email I chose (names of company that makes the app and is thus associated with that ID may not always align with the name I know it as),
turn it off.
Also I don’t get to choose the email address, instead apple makes it a random mix of letters and numbers: which means I must save it to a password manager and hope I never need to manually type it in for some reason (say on a public PC).
With 33mail, the link to disable forwarding is in the header, like any unsubscribe link. You can still manage everything from their portal. You choose the domain and then they set it up as a catch all, to receive everything, except that which you say to deny. So you can have creative names for each service.
> B) If this service ever goes under you can still get the emails you want because you own the domain they’re being sent to.
I still don’t like the UX though compared to 33mail, I still need to go into the UI, add the email I want to use and then it’ll deliver.
I’m guessing the same is true for removal, only way to turn off the address is through the portal.
If you use gWorkspace or O365, you already have this, it’s called aliases, and at least O365 gives you seemingly unlimited aliases. My big pet peeve with that was needing to go into the O365 portal and manage the aliases.
I second their approach. By using a unique email per service you maintain a bit more control by being able to filter via “to” address or deregister the email via the service provider. It’s not perfect but it’s at least some bit of control where trust is not required.
Personally I am using simplelogin.com. And full disclosure I wish it had smoother UX in many cases but overall the price vs feature set cannot, as far as I am aware, be beat.
In general: I agree. Demanding attention, whether that be in person such as via mail, txt, or phone call or digital such as via email, should be opt in and NOT opt out. Incentive wise it simply does not make any sense for it to be opt out when the cost of contact is close to 0.
I was excited about 33mail bec the founder hangs out here sometimes.
You’re right I should have kept the disclaimer closer to the link, I’m on mobile and kept adding stuff and lost track of how it looked, it’s too late to edit now.
I think they'd actually claim that it was allowed before. The press release is after all saying that all that's happening is that they're clarifying the policy, not that they are changing it.
I'm just in the same boat... how did you make that your issue worth agreeing over? That's something Apple might have fixed on a Friday afternoon.
Nope, that's the point of coming out in front like this and donating 100 million dollars towards keeping the status quo in place. To me, it reads as an insult to anyone who thinks their processes are democratic.
There are investigations (and some proposed laws) in the US, EU, Australia, UK, South Korea, and others. If Apple were a regular business, it should be obvious at this point that losing the App Store is inevitable by now. A question of when, not if.
And yet Apple thinks that maybe, just maybe, they can buy their way out and have a chance to keep the status quo still. I think it's way too late for that now. We just need to sit back and wait for the lawmakers to finish the job.
This is a radical reading of current facts. It is plausible. But we're very far from inevitability. If you aren't seeing the broad opposition to and limited, focussed support for opening up iOS to competing App Stores, you may be in an echo chamber.