It’s completely reasonable that side loaded applications should not be entitled to use regulated payment services.
Edit: Even Android will not entitle side loaded apps for Google payment processing. Android and iOS are literally identical in this regard.
To ask you the inverse question, in what way is any of this "nearly identical" to Android sideloading which allows indefinite sideloading via any delivery method, including installation of 3rd party stores, with no more than a click on an approval prompt from the user?
It’s identical though in that <when one side loads> one is <completely disconnect from the ecosystem of the device manufacturer>.
Re: side loading binaries/APKs on my actual phone that’s logged into my actual bank account? Hard pass. There’s a time and place for lax security. This is what air gapping is for.
Anything that can run LLVM can side load.
When you personally limit sideloading to be "I compile the app and manage a personal security chain to keep it active" it may seem wild, that's not what the vast majority of Android sideloading/3rd party stores is though. Xcode, beyond requiring installation, requires a macOS install to run it on. There are other ways to compile iOS apps, each even less accessible to users or distribution by companies. And again: the obvious statement that the vast majority of revenue generating apps on the App Store are not open source.
Even amongst the Android tech nerds 3rd party stores like F-Droid are popular because users don't want to compile their open source apps constantly... and there are even less requirements around compiling Android apps than iOS apps!
> It’s identical though in that <when one side loads> one is <completely disconnect from the ecosystem of the device manufacturer>.
Not true, sideloading apps on Android means loading them from a different source not disconnecting them from Google services or the Android ecosystem as a whole. It of course allows for that if it's what you're after but it's not limited in such a scope.
> Re: side loading binaries/APKs on my actual phone that’s logged into my actual bank account? Hard pass. There’s a time and place for lax security. This is what air gapping is for.
On Android sideloading is being able to pick which app sources you trust, even if that means "not Google". That could mean "I compiled it myself on an air gapped computer" to you, "I loaded it from a 3rd party store" to another, and "I downloaded it from the developers site" to a third. Which you personally choose is irrelevant as each user gets to pick their allowed sources so it can fit any user's need.
I've never heard of this being possible.
You can install any app you compiled with your own key and it lasts for 7 days before requiring it to be recompiled.
This seven day lie/conspiracy/flat-earth is disappointing.
A far bigger limitation for me is the three-app provisioning limit. There isn't any way to work around it[1], and if you do want to do serious sideloading you almost certainly will need to upgrade to a paid developer account.
[0] Specifically iOS only allows app provisioning over USB or Wi-Fi, not locally. Locally installed software cannot actually communicate with the remote debugging daemon. You can work around this with network extensions, but you don't get to use them in dev-signed apps unless you have a paid dev account that's been approved by Apple to use them.
For the record, that isn't to make sideloading harder; that's because Facebook went and shipped a spyware VPN with their enterprise cert.
[1] Personal experience time: Even when jailbroken, and with AltDaemon and Immortal installed, AltStore still bumps up against the three-app limit.
But that everything they charge money for, they _must_ allow alternatives to exist. If they want to charge a large fee for getting on the App Store, they must allow alternative app stores. The problem is not that they charge money, but that they use their massive user lock in to force people to pay for these services to exist in the market.
And yes you do have choices. There are plenty of other phone manufacturers out there. Can I install Ford UI on my Tesla? Do you think those companies won’t make you use their own payment processing once apps become prolific in car UIs? Can I hail Uber with the Lyft app? Why are they locking me in to only using Lyft on the Lyft app? Can I buy PlayStation games on Xbox?
If you’re against all of it fine, but let’s not pretend Apple is doing anything out of the ordinary here.
And even so, many of these “issues” are not problems on Android right? You can use 3rd-party app stores and so forth right?
I’d also suggest.. why does the scale issue matter? I prefer that Apple enforces Apple Pay. I prefer that Apple enforced Sign In with Apple. That’s why I buy an iPhone. If those things bothered me I’d buy something else.
I switch between Windows, Linux, and macOS with regularity and while there are platform-specific services, the mobile platform is considerably more walled off. Mobile storage stagnated for years while the apps and any captured media became larger, really pressuring you to use their cloud services in a way I've never had with a desktop. I can store data on a NAS and access it pretty easily with any of the desktop platforms. I'm not sure how someone is supposed to be able to be able to migrate off iCloud when moving to Android without involving a non-mobile computer. It doesn't appear to be anywhere as easy as copying files from one SSD to another or using AirDrop/SMB/NFS.
The iMessage thing is another layer to this. You may not want to call that lock-in, but there have been extensive threads about this topic recently [0][1]. The Epic lawsuit surfaced some emails that strongly suggest Apple views iMessage as a way to lock customers in [2].
Regardless, the original point is switching platforms isn't going to happen without a fair bit of cost and likely some social upheaval. Switching platforms is technically an option, but it's not a realistic one for many. I don't think it follows that if someone has stuck with the same platform for several years that they tacitly agree with all the policy decisions made by that platform.
[0] -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29889492 [1] -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29851317 [2] -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26753014
What's illegal is anti-competitive use of monopoly market position.
Some textbook rulings will apply, since Apple exces admit that if they do no constrain downstream, no one will use their 30% markup product. So consumers could be better off by definition
although Apple will argue that they will charge more to downstream producers directly, but this is also difficult to argue (they can do this anyway and extract rents from consumers and producers at the same time).
If you have a monopolistic platform market on which you also produce, it seems rather hard not to get sued
It’s exactly the same dynamic as in net neutrality.
The different here is that Nintendo is not a 3 trillion dollar company, that owns 50% of a massively important market in the US.
Yes, anti-competitive practices are allowed if you aren't a huge company.
Literally it is the law, that if you become a big enough company, and have enough market power, then certain actions become illegal, that were not illegal if you weren't as powerful of a company.
> that doesn't mean a bunch of 3p companies are entitled to access to those customers.
It actually literally does mean that they are entitled to that.
For the same reason that 3rd party web browsers, were entitled access to windows users (and before you say it, yes I am aware that windows had a larger control of the market than apple, and it is not literally the same in every single exact way, but the same principle still applies, just in a smaller amount)
This is why we talk about Tesla direct sales all the time. Because we are moving car sales to the apple model.
Bad analogy. A better analogy would be if a customer already purchased a ford car, and then tried to fix the car with a 3rd party repair person.
There are literal laws about this, for cars, that require ford to provide manuals, to 3rd parties, and require ford to sell replacement parts for 3rd parties to repair cars from.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-01/apple-s-a...
For example I have no problem if a third party store forced one payment option only, but only allowing one store and one payment option is just milking your market position/rent seeking.
See that’s _exactly_ the problem I have. I don’t want to use your shitty payments system that’s likely less secure than anything Apple is doing. Allowing a single payment source that’s not Apple would directly harm consumers from a security and privacy perspective.
I do not use Apple at all. Somehow I am not feeling "harmed".
I might reconsider my attitude when / if I can have phone as a generic computing device where I can download and install whatever I need without much hassles and where I can distribute my applications without needing to sacrifice a virgin first.
Apple's attitude of "we know better than you" is the really shitty thing here.
Can you imagine being a student and being told you have to install this app from a third party store?
That’s just a terrible model for user safety and security.
On that note, I hope FedNOW works well enough to become an alternate PoS payment method[0].
0: https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/othe...
We also have the insurance component: Say some famous musician and a few influencers decide to launch a new music festival, get a lot of money paid to their festival-making company, and then, due to mismanagement, fail to have a working music festival. Most of the people that paid with credit cards will ask for refunds, and will get them, even if the festival company goes bankrupt. Some of those people managing transactions hold the bag, and end up losing millions in refunds. There's also a wide gamut of fraudulent operations that will try to extract money from the system, either by posing as merchants, or as customers. Some of that fraud is also eaten by the companies that handle the transaction.
So while fees could go down in a world with little fraud (and they do, as companies that are large enough, and have sufficient controls, end up negotiating serious discounts), it makes sense for fees to have a flat base and a percentage base, even if the entire system between you and your customer was just attempting to break even. The right percent though, barring the most fraudulent of environments, has nothing to do with a 30% cut.
And the banks that issue the cards are the ones that pay points/get interest, not Visa. Visa simply processes the transactions. If you noticed, your "Visa" card has a bank issuer, like the Capital One Quicksilver card (which uses Visa network)
The cost of running a transaction network has nothing to do with credit card points, insurance, chargebacks. Those are all handled by other parties.
I also kind of like the idea that something like that happens, except games all caps must use Apple‘s system and pay the 30%. That’s not as fair, but might be workable.
If I had my way over all of this? Do you know what I really want?
No consumable in-app purchases. Period. Outlawed.
One of my favorite things about the early iPhone was the incredible games that you could get. Now there’s almost none of them, the developers of practically abandoned the platform. The only ways to make money are ads and consumable in app purchases which are just complete scams. Like $1000 buckets of Smurfberries.
That’ll never happen. But I wish it would, because it would bring back the great games.
But I think we should be able to agree that demanding 30% of nearly everything and completely banning any sort of alternatives is extremely overbearing and ends up taking a lot of money out of the pockets of people struggling to get by.
What you are basically trying to do is visiting a vip club (user-value wise) and then making it open to every crap dj out there, because otherwise it's "unfair". Why don't you just go to a regular one then? It is the same as this vip would turn into in a heartbeat. And where should other members who liked it go after that?
Users might be ok with some extra fee for conveniences like trust and the ability to easily unsubscribe. Let the user pick and let Apple compete for those sales.
- SDK / iOS updates
- Bandwidth to upload the compiled app to their phone
- Support from Apple
- Hosting / security of aforementioned
- etc. etc.
Who pays for all of the infrastructure of the App Store and the Apple SDK then?
Granted the SDKs would probably be much less comprehensive if there were no 3rd party apps but Apple advertises how their hardware can be used incl. by 3rd party apps and providing the libraries to access that hardware is expected by users (even if they don't think about this, most people expect Snapchat to access the camera).
Bandwidth/Hosting is covered under the $100/yr but if it wasn't, they could easily charge devs for tiers of downloads. Most of the support I'd bet is on the consumer side which wouldn't apply if there were other payment processors.