Developing a new app is unreasonable condition that Apple imposes on dating apps
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They are risking having the EU as a whole slap them down and impose tougher restrictions.
That's not exactly the trade here – Apple is letting people use alternative payment providers, which does carry a lot of benefits besides not paying the fee, including better customer management and support
And most importantly, making it really difficult for the user to cancel the subscription
In contrast, with Apple Pay it's a quick subscription cancellation via one simple interface.
Regardless, Apple could still mandate use of their own payment system alongside optional 3rd-party systems, and let all options compete on their merits - ease of cancellation being one of them.
> You can dispute any transaction even on a debit card if the merchant is being uncooperative or you haven't received the goods/services promised.
You can? In the Netherlands? Which is what this is about?
Each country can have its own laws on top of that (such as Section 75 protection in the UK for credit cards only) but the basic dispute scheme is managed by the card networks.
1) Security. I'm not using my money when I use a credit card. If someone stole a credit card, my bank account is not at risk in the same way if I lost a debit card or a check.
2) Fraud protection. On top of not using my own money, if someone does spend with a credit card, I'm protected much better than if it was my own money. Disputes and fraud on bank-issued debit cards tie up my money, meaning I can't pay my bills. Fraud and disputes on credit cards tie up some of my credit, and is not interest-bearing while it's under review.
3) Grace period. I basically have 45-60 days from when I purchase something to when I have to pay the statement balance that charge is part of. This gives me 45-60 days of cash that _if I needed to use_, I could. Granted, that would typically be in an emergency-type situation. That means if I have a flat tire, and my rent is due, and I didn't happen to have the cash ready that second, I don't need to make a decision (yet) or get a payday loan. I can figure out what to do over the next 45 days while not missing rent.
4) Interest. While almost every credit card out there has predatory interests, you can get low-interest credit cards, which can help in a tight squeeze. While it might be worse than a personal loan (depending), other options, such as a payday loan or even lay-away, are very much worse.
5) Cashback & rewards. I can easily get 4% cash back average for purchases I make, without paying any more or facing any inconvenience. Sometimes you run into a 3% credit charge, which I'm okay with if I'm getting similar cash back or the above protections.
If you can figure out a system that gives me all that and can be used nearly everywhere, then I'm all ears. But any new system needs to address the above.
Cashback is only a thing because those payment providers are taxing all transactions in the US to an unreasonable level, which just raises overall prices. Great business model though, take 5% to give back 3% and the customer is happy about that.
No, there are plenty of fraud models that affect all payment methods, such as "hand over a box that's full of bricks instead of the product". Settling the payment exactly when the goods are delivered is often not practical.
That's what OLX, most popular "person-to-person marketplace" in Poland does (is there a word for it?)
If you use delivery, the funds are kept in escrow by OLX until you confirm or dispute.
For a seller it sounds more cumbersome too. Having to lock up all the payments you receive is significantly worse than receiving it upfront and paying back in the case of a dispute, and makes some kinds of business completely impossible (think travel agents). It's hard to do usage-based billing - you'd have to figure out how much to ask for as a deposit up-front instead, which is awkward if usage levels differ by orders of magnitude (think cloud providers).
And fundamentally this OLX is taking a very similar role to a credit card network and most of the downsides of them still apply. They're presumably taking a cut of most transactions that they do this for (either directly or through other fees). They presumably make judgements about what you are and aren't allowed to sell on their platform, and at the point where they're big enough to be useful to the consumer they're also big enough to be subject to political pressure about those judgements.
I think it's just that they don't make any money (their profits mainly evolve around interest and late fees), as mostly everyone here pays their CC bill on time and has only one card. There's also hardly any loyalty programs to speak of. I've never seen anyone do cashbacks and with the loyalty points you'll be lucky to get a towel set a year :P The whole situation is very different from the US.
Most people only even have the debit version of the card but even for the credit version it's like this. I still have both because some US companies don't accept the debit version of my card. Though it's becoming much less of a problem and I haven't used the card in years, will probably cancel it as it counts as an active loan.
For credit cards, that's definately a thing. But, most people use debit cards that do not offer protections.
While there are probably some companies that would like to make subscriptions difficult to cancel, I don't believe this is true of dating apps.
https://www.mofo.com/resources/insights/211006-new-two-click...
> If sufficient data to identify the subscription to be cancelled
> is entered by the consumer, the submission of the form will itself
> be a valid cancellation, the effect of which cannot be made subject
> to further steps such as logins or second factor (e.g., email, app)
> confirmations.
“we got a request to cancel your subscription. We did that, but if it wasn’t you who made that request, or you accidentally unsubscribed, click here to revert that cancellation within X days”.
I'm so mad at them.
Having apps that don't integrate with apple's payment system but still charges the huge revenue tax is both greedy and bad looking for apple, but throws the customer to the dogs.
It's 2022 and people still believe the fiction that Apple cares about users...?
They care about one thing: the bottom line. Jobs was best buddy with Larry Ellison for a reason, and it's not admiration for Japanese architecture.
Apple defines user hostility. They just get away with for reasons I have never understood. Apple doesn't want pictures or videos or any use of a mouse plugged in while being used? Put the charging port on the bottom of the mouse. Doesn't want to adopt the industry standard USB-C? Puts several different permutations of ports on devices, often incompatible without highly marked up dongles. Wants users to buy into wireless headphone ecosystem? Removes audio jack from all devices except laptops and desktops and the lowest end iPad. They refuse to fix longstanding issues with their Bluetooth and wireless cards. They refuse to cooperate and support third-party external monitors. They significantly break backwards compatibility and apps with every OS update, often intentionally.
Apple has done whatever the hell they've wanted to for a very long time. They just hide it behind what I see as inane marketing but nonetheless marketing that has been very successful.
Apple didn’t invent Thunderbolt or USB-C. Intel did. Apple is the biggest adopter, but most blame for all the crazy shitty problems with USB-C should be laid at Intel’s feet, just like they should take the blame for all the crazy weird shit with older USB standards.
I’m still pissed at the loss of a 2.5mm physical jack. Don’t get me started on this one.
Bluetooth is a big bag of shit, and way worse than Blueray. At least Apple is trying to fix some of these problems with their U1 and W1 chips.
As for external monitors, HDMI works everywhere HDMI works. And USB-C or Thunderbolt to DisplayPort adapters are easy enough to get. Apple has done nothing wrong there.
Apple works harder at maintaining backwards compatibility than any other major vendor in existence. Your extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, of which you have provided none.
Looking back at this post, your score appears to be one for six, so far. That’s not great, but you could improve on it if you were to provide adequate evidence of your claims.
Try setting 120 hz refresh rate
"Apple works harder at maintaining backwards compatibility than any other major vendor in existence."
That's the same Apple that dropped support for 32 bit applications, while on Windows I can play a game released in 1999 and run 16 bit software?
None of the 64 bits versions of Windows run 16 bits code. And lots of games are broken because the DRM used a kernel driver or some other stupid assumption.
I had a 2233RZ in 2009 - one of the first at 120hz. Prior to that 75hz was commonplace.
The modes are presented by the display through EDID.
This is messy at times, but they [Apple] simply need to look there. Windows/Linux respect these just fine.
This is more on Apple than it is the vendors. The only mistake the vendors made was marketing these to the gamer niche. Office work benefits from high refresh rate too
Office work benefitted in the CRT time when <85Hz would cause perceptible flickering giving you a headache. Since TFT's are slower there's no flickering anymore. Scrolling benefits slightly with higher refresh, and of course the top 10% of gamers will care about the latency, but I don't think I'll be typing any faster on a gaming screen ;)
The added refresh was intended for games, but I think you're selling it short - RE: office work/the CRT era.
I still to this day buy high refresh displays because being able to read content while moving windows/logs are spamming my terminal is a dream
It's not about typing faster, it's seeing things more smoothly/clearly while there's activity
Because it's impossible due to how x86-64 CPUs work.
And the statement does nothing to refute my point - that code compiled for Windows keeps working 4 times as long as it does on MacOS. It's an empirical fact, that can be measured in the real world, denying it is like denying gravity.
Backwards comparability is a priority for Windows because all the line of business apllications must keep chugging along. Corporates don't upgrade their office PCs if it breaks their terrible software.
> Apple can't help some monitor vendors take their time to get their stuff together.
Whats is wrong with them? They work fine on Windows, Linux and Android(!), sounds like an Apple problem
> Whats is wrong with them? There are lots of monitors with incorrect EDID information or buggy behaviour. Yesterday I crashed a Dell monitor's firmware while trying to find the optimal displayport settings. That's not a macOS problem...
While 27% is higher than expected, everyone knew Apple would (and had the right to) impose a fee for alternative payment methods. There isn't a magic flag you can wave to avoid paying Apple if you are accepting payments in an iOS app.
> app developers have to produce an entirely new app
This is the part the Dutch court slapped down. The development concerns in the press release are overblown, though ("must develop a completely new app") since it's more like you must submit a new app that uses the new entitlements.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-fires-back-spotify-pa...
Of course the number is very low - Spotify did not allow subscriptions through apps for a long time (do they now?)
Even if they have to pay 15% now (I don‘t know) that‘s still 15% of their margin (!). Apple is able to make much better offers because they don‘t have to pay that fee.
The 0.15% is math meant to distract, just ask Spotify.
https://newsroom.spotify.com/2019-03-13/consumers-and-innova...
If alternate App Stores and direct inatallation of IPA files off the browser was allowed, developers could have the ability to not even use any of Apple's plattform. Hell, I bet that a community-made FOSS SDK to create iOS apps would arrive. Then those devs wouldn't use or distribute any of Apple's IP while developing their apps (besides the Apple devices they already own and use for developement)
That's not the issue. The issue isn't the method of distribution. The issue is being able to get around Apple's sandboxing.
Apple has no “right to profit”… no company does. They are *allowed* to profit.
He's not describing how things ought to be, just how it is right now, given the current laws. If you really want to boil things down, the "rights" you have (guaranteed by the constitution or whatever) are a "legal fiction" as well. The ultimate arbiters of what you can and can't do are the Men With Guns working for the government. They can go away the next day if there's a coup.
I think the simple explanation is this: if Apple continues to make money with the insane software margins they have today, they're going to face regulatory action. The cat is out of the bag, developers are pissed off, and more than half of the states in the US have come forward in opposition to Apple's monopoly over iOS app distribution. Just short of incorporating in another country, there's very little Apple can do to maintain their status quo without some kind of regulatory action coming down the pipes.
What is this referring to?
What exactly are you disagreeing with in the parent post? Why would "omitting" your unrelated point from their argument be convenient?
Apple basically created the entire idea of a mobile app marketplace, transforming the entire industry with sheer innovation. They did this in an environment where they were not protected by regulation from market incumbents (anyone heard of RIM lately?) the way it is proposed to do now. Where is the justice in taking this thing that Apple has built, to all our benefit, and forcing our terms on it. The App Store is Apple's. It should be allowed to charge whatever it wants, set whatever terms it pleases, and burn it to the ground if it sees fit. Seeing Apple's creation as somehow collective when we have done nothing but queue to pay for the privilege of using it is monstrously entitled and unjust.
In exchange for the privilege of limiting your liability for your actions, you agree to follow a set of rules when forming and running a corporation. When acting on the behalf of a corporation, you are never engaging in "liberty" because any and everything a corporation can do is a privilege granted by the government.
Back to the practical problems, conflating personal liberty and rights of giant corporations to spy on your and sell your private information is rather unhelpfull. I don't think anyone is buying it.
The EU will create an investigation team to decide this, just like they did for VISA and Mastercard when they capped card transaction feed.
> Why is it any of our collective concern what apple over/under charges for?
Because unregulated capitalism doesn't work.
> just like they did for VISA and Mastercard when they capped card transaction feed.
And in so doing they significantly increased the barrier to entry in the space, effectively cementing VISA and Mastercard into market dominance. This happens everywhere everything is regulated - incumbents shape the regulation so it's easy for them to comply with and difficult for new entrants, creating all sorts of disfunction.
Let me ask, what is the cost of doing nothing here exactly? Why are you so certain that that cost is higher than the cost of intervention?
This isn't true, there are tons of alternatives to Visa and Mastercard in Europe today. Rather significantly reducing the profits and thus the warchest of these companies made it easier for small companies to compete, not harder. The same applies to appstores.
> Let me ask, what is the cost of doing nothing here exactly?
The cost is reduced innovation. Same with card fees. The future is electronic payments, they are much more efficient, anything that hampers that is hampering innovation. That includes card fees, or this tax on Appstore purchases. Many apps simply aren't feasible to make with such high fees, marketplace apps etc where you trade things with people for example.
Not to mention that the Appstore tax encourages advertisements over purchasing apps, since you lose 30% of any purchases but you don't pay anything on ads, making the advertisements effectively 40% more profitable in comparison. You'd have a more sane monetization ecosystem for apps if the appstore tax got reduced.
AAPL is not a courageous pioneer being oppressed by "The Man". AAPL is a trillion-dollar institution that by design exists only to pursue profit and enrich its shareholders, the overwhelming majority of whom can take exactly zero credit for the innovations from which they profited. It is "The Man".
Instead I'm advocating that, in the interest of long-term (say 50-100 year) public good, we maintain the relatively unregulated environment that allowed Apple to succeed in the first place, and tolerate the relatively small inefficiency that environment produces.
We need something like Right to Repair but for software, if I own a phone, I should be able to run whatever I want on it. You shouldn't be able to charge money for the privilege of installing my own software, just like an auto maker can't charge me for the privilege of repairing my own car. Companies will use all sorts of weasel words and scare tactics but at the end of the day it's simply anti-competitive.
Everyone would be happy if Apple provided a simple on/off button that allows sideloading.
If a user wants to have software restricted, then they can be given that choice, and everyone else can also choose differently.
Some people get off when they are getting publically flogged, can't cater to everyone's kinks!
At some point between becoming a publicly-traded company and becoming the sole gatekeeper of a significant chunk of the world's personal data and apps.
To provide a precise specification of which exact antitrust regulations should take effect at which threshold of growth is, I hope you will concede, a tiny bit beyond the scope of a HN comment.
> If 3 dudes in a basement are entitled to sell goods/services on their own terms, then Apple should be as well.
I see no reason why that should be the case a priori.
"Apple" does not refer to the free actions of a few individuals, but to a particolar kind of profit-seeking contract called a "public company".The capabilities of such contracts can and do get restricted all the time, often with good reason.
> Apple is still a private company, not a public service, and the case I'm making is explicitly against socializing its services simply because it is big
Whereas the case I am making, conversely, can be summed up as: once a company becomes so big and/or powerful that it can prevent competition from arising outright, it should be either broken up or socialized, preferably the former.
Do you really think that failing some public intervention Apple will be around in a century, undiminished? If it is, wouldn't that mean it is continuing to provide valuable goods and services people want?
"Apple" does indeed refer to the actions of a group of individuals, simply because there are no other agents in the system. It's individuals making decisions all the way down. "Publicly traded" doesn't mean "public service".
On the contrary, it is actively doing so. It does so in the same way that Facebook prevented Instagram from becoming a competitor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
The tech giants have such warchests that they can afford to simply buy out any competitor that has a chance to compete with them. And unlike Cronus, they're unlikely to be deceived into swallowing an omphalos.
> Do you really think that failing some public intervention Apple will be around in a century, undiminished? If it is, wouldn't that mean it is continuing to provide valuable goods and services people want?
Is that belief of yours even falsifiable?
Is there any observation that would make you conclude that a given company, despite being profitable in a free market, is nevertheless representing a net negative for the world?
Or is it an article of faith for you that an unconstrained free market always leads to an eventually optimal equilibrium?
It is trying. Yahoo tried to acquire Google too, remember? Why take millions when you can make billions? Plenty of orgs refuse to be acquired because they see more money on the table by competing.
> Is that belief of yours even falsifiable?
Not per se, but history shows that even the most entrenched monopolies are very prone to disruption. I don't see any non-banks in the Fortune 100 that are over a century old. This almost proves my point since there is hardly any industry more entrenched by regulation than banking.
> representing a net negative for the world?
First we would have to agree on what "net negative" means, agree that our vision of what to do about it would improve the situation, and agree that we have a right to take such an intervention. Do you see where the problem is?
> unconstrained free market always leads to an eventually optimal equilibrium
Of course not, only that we the people do not have the right to dictate to other free people how they can peacefully, consensually, interact. Nor do we have the right to dictate to others the meanings of words like "negative" and "positive". All this does is diminish the freedom of everyone involved.
The success rate doesn't need to be 100% for my point to be valid.
WhatsApp and Instagram could very well have eaten Facebook's lunch. Now FB is being threatened for the first time by TikTok, why? Because they're a Chinese company and FB can't simply buy them due to Chinese regulations!
Also consider this: in an idealised, perfect free market, every company is just barely breaking even, because as soon as they're making a profit it means it's possible to undercut them. (Bezos: "Your margin is my opportunity").
The existence of massive liquidity in the hands of some companies is itself evidence of inefficiency.
> Not per se, but history shows that even the most entrenched monopolies are very prone to disruption. I don't see any non-banks in the Fortune 100 that are over a century old.
Poor evidence, since antitrust action was very strong in the USA for most of the 20th century.
> First we would have to agree on what "net negative" means, agree that our vision of what to do about it would improve the situation, and agree that we have a right to take such an intervention. Do you see where the problem is?
Yes, people can disagree on what their preferred society looks like. That's the fundamental problem of politics. But that disagreement can include the exact value of freedom.
I personally rate freedom very high, yet the restraint "if you manage to build a trillion-dollar company, you must not make it unnecessarily hard for others to develop better products than yours" sounds like a slam-dunk kind of sacrifice for the sake of a more efficient innovation-oriented market.
Yes it does. You were arguing that Apple can prevent competition from ever arising. This isn't the case, clearly.
Yes of course there is inefficiency, I never said there wasn't. It would take a long time and a lot of money to build a mobile device as capable as an iPhone. That amount of time/money basically dictates how Apple can behave in the marketplace. If Apple triples its prices, for instance, competitors will become much more appealing both to users and investors.
All of this profit is Apple's return on the initial investment of developing the iPhone and App Store. This was an existentially risky thing for them to do, and we should not hinder the profits brought about by its success, lest we discourage others from attempting the same.
It's not at all clear that these regulations will create a more innovation-oriented market. It could well be that they will hinder innovation. Do you have any ideas on how we can tell for sure? I think we should be pretty confident before using regulation, don't you?
Ok, fine, it can only reduce the effectiveness of competition by a large amount. See the last point in this reply.
> All of this profit is Apple's return on the initial investment of developing the iPhone and App Store. This was an existentially risky thing for them to do, and we should not hinder the profits brought about by its success, lest we discourage others from attempting the same.
Why? Do we not want to discourage others from attempting to build rent-seeking platforms?
(a) "I want to design and sell a great device: a new kind of smartphone, with radically improved UX and capabilities"
(b) "I have a great device that everybody wants. Instead of directly raising its price, I want to make money by getting a 30% cut of all business ever done on this device, forever"
(a) is a perfectly fine business plan, and it doesn't hamper anyone else's competitive efforts. The follow-up (b) however _only_ works as a monopolistic plan. If the device isn't very successful, the rent-seeking will further drive away app developers. But if the device becomes incredibly popular, app developers will have to suck up the extortionate price because I've locked down the market.
Peter Thiel said "Competition is for suckers", and this is a good example of it. The benefits of the free market come from competition, but companies will naturally strive hard to avoid competition. Therefore, the rules should make it hard for them to do so, and easy for competition to arise.
> It's not at all clear that these regulations will create a more innovation-oriented market. It could well be that they will hinder innovation. Do you have any ideas on how we can tell for sure? I think we should be pretty confident before using regulation, don't you?
On the one side: hundreds and hundreds of promising startups whose products only ended up raising the existing giants' moat even higher, when not cancelled outright.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
On the other side: gosh, what if someone in the future had the next iPhone-level innovation in hand, but the idea of having to turn it into a semi-open platforms after a paltry fifteen years of obscene profits turned them off the idea?
I'm not so much saying that the benefits will be massive, as much as I'm saying the 'deterrent' risk is hilariously negligible.
So what is that case? If we gradually socialize organisations that get too big (based on judgements that will ultimately be somewhat vague, sure), what's the actual downside? The 3 dudes in a basement will still have the promise of literally more money than they can consume in their lifetimes. Maybe the amount of VC money sloshing around the system would drop a bit from current levels, but that might be no bad thing.
Where did you get this idea? Lets continue this line of thought:
If 3 dudes are entitled to piss in the ocean then Apple is entitled to route the human waste from their corporate HQ directly to the ocean without any treatment facilities
If 3 dudes are entitled to have racists discussions in the privacy of their home, then Apple should be fine to do the same in their HR policy in their HQ
If 3 dudes are entitled to hunt 1 deer, then Apple should be as well entitled to hunt 1 million deer.
If 3 dudes can build a shack without having to deal with fire inspections, then Apple should be able to build an office or a million shacks without fire inspections.
> If 3 dudes are entitled to have racists discussions in the privacy of their home, then Apple should be fine to do the same in their HR policy in their HQ
Yes actually, I think people should be able to discriminate based on whatever criteria they see fit. Why is discriminating based on height/attractiveness OK but race not OK?
> If 3 dudes are entitled to hunt 1 deer, then Apple should be as well entitled to hunt 1 million deer.
I'm not aware of any restriction on Apple employees applying for deer permits.
> If 3 dudes can build a shack without having to deal with fire inspections, then Apple should be able to build an office or a million shacks without fire inspections.
I think zoning restrictions apply to locations, not people.
Now that I am clear we are discussing your personal fantasy, not the real world or moral consensus, this thread makes more sence.
"I'm not aware of any restriction on Apple employees applying for deer permits."
Are you unable or unwilling to distinguish between employees individually hunting in their free time and Apple the corporation getting a permit to kill 1 million deer and handing their employees rifles?
You seem very keen on blurring the line between corporate and private life. Should we also extend this logix to sexual relationships and reproductive rights, see what kind of distopian nightmare we will arrive at?
Corporate life is private life, since it is not public life. Anyone can start a corporation - I can start one to manage a dining club, appointing a treasurer, secretary, etc. from among my friend group. Does this mean that I now have to be non-discriminatory in whom I admit to dinner? Isn't that a bit... tyrannical? There isn't any strong legal boundary between my dining club corporation and Apple.
If our government issues Apple a permit to kill 1m deer, then by golly do they have the right to do so.
Yes indeed we should allow people to participate in their private and sexual lives at-will and consensually. I'm making the point that one is no more entitled to a particular kind of app store from Apple than they are to a private relationship.
Yeah, nothing screams 'this is liberty' like holocaust of Native Americans and burning alive anyone who disagrees with you for 'witchcraft'.
"If our government issues Apple a permit to kill 1m deer, then by golly do they have the right to do so."
Ah I see, so because reproduction is a human right, you have to apply for a breeding permit? Because 'freedom of speech', you need a 'talking permit'?
"Yes indeed we should allow people to participate in their private and sexual lives at-will and consensually."
So Apple should be able to put out an official job ad "HR assistant - skills: punctual, good with emails, excellent blowjobs, doesn't mind anal"
"Does this mean that I now have to be non-discriminatory in whom I admit to dinner? Isn't that a bit... tyrannical? There isn't any strong legal boundary between my dining club corporation and Apple."
I think the number of people who have finished school in the last 30 years and are confused whether "our restaraunt doesn't allow black people" constitutes discrimination is 0%.
Yeah, we denied lots of people their liberty; it doesn't mean the definition was wrong.
> Ah I see, so because reproduction is a human right, you have to apply for a breeding permit? Because 'freedom of speech', you need a 'talking permit'?
I'm not sure what this has to do with anything. Our government issues permits to hunt deer.
> So Apple should be able to put out an official job ad "HR assistant - skills: punctual, good with emails, excellent blowjobs, doesn't mind anal"
Actually yes? What business is it of yours? What's wrong with someone wanting a job like that and taking it?
> I think the number of people who have finished school in the last 30 years and are confused whether "our restaraunt [sic] doesn't allow black people" constitutes discrimination is 0%.
It clearly is unlawful discrimination, but my point is these laws are arbitrary and authoritarian. Why is it OK to discriminate via height, figure, or beauty, but not race? All of these are rather immutable characteristics. The whole idea of some authority dictating which criteria I use to admit people to my shop/restaurant is tyrannical, just like it would be tyrannical to outlaw racial discrimination in dating. Let people choose for themselves whom they associate with in all aspects of their lives.
The same arguments used to attack the activities of companies could be used to restrict political parties, or undermine the activities of charities. It’s a dangerous road to take. Commercial groups have been recognised as legitimate vehicles for the exercising of rights for hundreds, even thousands of years. There’s nothing new about it, and it’s been recognised in legal systems throughout history across the globe.
This seems neither logical nor to have any legal basis. You have many rights related to privacy and sexual reproduction that can not and should not be exercised through companies.
There is also laxk of responsebility, if you commit crimes individually you will be in jail for the rest of your life, but companies get away with it regularly. Both due to power of money and diffusion of reaponsebility
>This seems neither logical nor to have any legal basis.
As I said, it has a long history and sound basis in common law jurisprudence in the west going back at least to medieval law, and in other cultures going back even further. The very word corporation, or incorporation (corpus being Latin for body), expresses the principle of representing and acting on behalf of a body of people.
That's easy to do. Simply change the SKU and Bundle ID, and set up a new app in iTunes App Store. Deprecate the old one. Lots of apps do this, anyway. It's sort of S.O.P. for new paid versions.
I've released a whole bunch of apps, over the years. I've retired most of them, and come out with entirely new versions of others.
It's a pain, but nothing too intimidating. I find the article to be a bit ... hyperbolic ... The process I just described would take me a day, and that's mostly because I'm fairly anal about hand-crafting a lot of stuff that many developers can integrate into their CD process.
In the case of Microsoft, did they only open up their store to alternate payment systems because they don't have much to lose?
Which to be fair has also been a problem for Apple in the Mac App Store.
Not to mention that Apple would probably just close The Netherlands appstore before fully implementing the change.
Only companies that start to really evaluate how they can free themselves from the pipeline of dependency will survive. It means going back to browser-based apps and services, not in creating apps that need to be deployed through gatekeeping app stores.
The model of VCs buying shares and then selling them to Wall St. in an IPO leads to exactly this, across the board:
Closed source software
Siloed data
Limited interoperability
Extracting rents
The proliferation of ads on YouTube, the increasing attempts at surveillance capitalism, all point to diminishing returns from the ads. The system of funding “public utilities” privately and then dumping it on Wall St is eating itself. When something becomes that big, it should be turned into an open source project, and monetized using utility tokens.
Open source, science, wikipedia, in the end unlock way more wealth than their closed counterparts based on the profit motive, private ownership and recouping investment.
Take DisneyWorld for example. It is owned by Disney Coep which is owned by shareholders, who want DisneyWorld to extract profits at the expense of both its customers and vendors. Disney Dollars are the utility tokens that customers buy, while the vendors need to unionize to get $15 an hour minimum wage (or get Bernie to help LOL). The wall street shareholders are almost just a parasite class, who are just trying to push the company to give them profits ar the expense of its customers (eg Uber riders) and vendors (eg Uber drivers).
There is a reason co-operative housing complexes in the USA don’t need rent control imposed by the city: the tenants ARE the landlord, so the prices of eg Mitchell-Lama housing in NYC is 2-5x smaller than its neighboring landlord-owned building.
Private property works for small scales. For larger scales, open source gift economies work way better. Wikipedia is far bigger than Britannica, etc. We need the same approaches for news — and, I would argue, all public discourse.
Corporations have co-opted many idealistic movements, including women’s liberation, and freedom of speech. We the people are being told what to argue about — deplatforming — rather than discuss how people got a platform in the first place.
Having an unfiltered megaphone to tweet to 5 million people at 3am doesn’t help society, it hurts and divides it. Whether it’s Donald Trump or Elon Musk, the fart tweets don’t add much value to society but they can surely move markets and drive the population nuts, too.
Science has peer review in journals, Open Source has review of pull requests, Wikipedia has talk pages, before publishing. And notice how much more balanced wikinews is, than the for-profit corporations that had to become clickbaity outlets that can only afford to report one side of a story, to pander to their readers (yes even the NYTimes and CNN have had to do this, forced by the market competition).
Having an audience is a form of capital, which is why Republican arguments about Citizens United make sense: money and “speech” in favor of candidates are both very effective because the “speech” is really a top-down centralized ORGANIZATION where some owners set the agenda and the peons have to parrot it or get fired:
Please see the Sinclair script here and the solution for freedom of speech:
Corporatism hijacking women’s liberation movements:
https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286
Corporations and government keeping us all distracted:
- A non-trivial number of lawmakers are holding stock investments in tech
- Good luck getting re-elected if said regulation affects growth and crashes the economy
- Good luck getting re-elected if you get on the wrong side of the largest advertising companies in the world. What are they going to do, run campaign ads in the newspaper?
I don't think in the EU the politicians have "the upper hand", they work exactly as in the US. The difference is that all those digital giants pay taxes (and employ people who do so) mostly in the US, so you can't touch em. EU politicians are free to impose restrictions since we don't have this industry on our side of the lawn.
In US politics, the establishment/activist division occurs within parties rather than between them. The first-past-the-post system makes it difficult for the minority faction to gain a significant number of seats, until there is phase shift and the minority suddenly becomes the majority. That's arguably what happened to Republicans, but it's too early to say if the shift has had an effect on their stance towards corporations.
I don't think any beatdown will be meaningful as politicians are very aware of the impact on the economy.
Nobody ever accused Microsoft or Sony of "getting to decide what games were allowed to be made" because they strictly controlled what works are allowed on their platforms. There are always other platforms one can publish on.
The real problem is that consumers have accepted an Apple/Google duopoly over mobile computing, which isn't defeated by destroying the free choice of corporations, but by creating a viable competing alternative. This currently exists in the form of jailbreaking, the use of third-party app stores and sideloading. Ultimately it should take the form of a competing smartphone OS.
Quite frankly, Linux is beginning to look more and more capable of breaking into this scene, and this will fundamentally turn the current broken system on its head when it happens. Android being open source and Unix-based only makes it easier since a ton of the foundations already exist.
Consumers don't have any choice. Apps are typically only available for iOS/Android. The difference with Xbox/PlayStation is that those aren't general purpose platform. Nobody needs an Xbox to access their bank or government functions. But people do (realistically) need to use smartphones. Regulation is absolutely appropriate here.
My question to you would be: why not regulate? What concrete harm do you think it would cause?
they've been general purpose platforms for years.
they just don't look like it because the manufacturers are even more restrictive with access than apple.
Phones are ubiquitous, and the vast majority of businesses have a Compelling Reason to have a presence on these devices. Allowing two companies to make any decision they want regarding what nearly every non-trivial business Can and Can Not Do, is the very definition of anti-competitiveness.
When you are a monopoly and you can influence other businesses in such an overarching way, it is Extremely Appropriate that you have to follow a Different Set of Rules than other people, rules that are more closely regulated to ensure that you are not abusing your position
Game consoles are not. Smartphones are. Obviously.
You'll need a stronger argument to claim that something that almost everyone uses despite significant cost isn't essential.
And to be clear when you say essential you mean for everyone alive right?
And for the record, governments have laws to step in when gasoline or food supplies become unavailable. And in the US, at least, being able to drive is seen as a right in the eyes of the public.
Yes, grocery stores are essential. Yes, gasoline is essential, being the only source of energy for all long range transportation.
Yes cars are essential in many places where there's no good alternative. For example most of America, geographically.
I’m trying to establish what other industries are “essential” so I can try and understand how we regulate such industries and in what ways they are similar to the discussion here about Apple. If grocery stores are essential for example does that mean they should have to stock competitor store brand products if the competitor want to sell at that store? If I live in a town with only one grocery store and I want to pay with Bitcoin should they have to set up that payment mechanism? Should they have to accept all payment mechanisms? There are lots of questions here that you can open up that draw parallels with Apple here w.r.t being “essential”.
One of the many differences is that the duopoly of Apple and Google in mobile markets is effectively unbreakable without government regulation. Today there is no amount of billions you can spend to break their moat. In contrast, grocery stores are highly competitive because they don't have insurmountable barriers to entry. Anyone can lease retail space and sign up with a distributor. There are lots of independent grocery stores operating in many towns.
There is no exact point. It is a spectrum.
And phones are clearly on the side of essential.
We do not need an exact cutoff point to make judgements about an obvious case.
The criteria would be "Whatever a jury or judge determines what the definition of essential is, in each specific lawsuit or case". Thats how the law works.
The law is not determined by some sort of exact programming code.
Instead, the law is determined by people. "I'll know it when I see it" is an actual argument, that the supreme court gave, for determining a similar question about what the definition of pornography is.
So, the answer for what "essential" is, is the same answer that the literal supreme court used, which is "I'll know it when I see it" or "whatever the judge/jury decides".
If that answer is good enough for the supreme court, then it is good enough for me.
> You’re invoking the fallacy, not me
Actually you were the one using the fallacy. Because you are attempting to demand an exact cutoff point, which is not necessary. The law does not need to define exact cutoff points ahead of time.
Instead, the law can consider those questions, as they come, in a court case/trial.
Again this is incorrect. I have not “demanded an exact cutoff point” at any time.
> Instead, the law can consider those questions, as they come, in a court case/trial.
So in other words you’re making a claim and then your defense of that claim is “the law will decide in a court case”. Ok… lol.
You said this "I asked at what point something crosses over "
This is literally you asking at what point something crosses over.
You shouldn't ask questions in the way that you are, if you don't want them to be interpreted in this way.
Because the poor way that you are asking questions, is such that other people have noticed the same similar issues that I am noticing with them, by looking at all the other questions/way that you are interreacting with people.
And now that I clarified what I meant you are still going on about it. Why? Are you interested in a discussion or are you more interested in trying to play "gotcha" on the Internet?
The issue here, is that the way you are speaking, and phrasing your questions, is leading everyone else to believe that you are the one playing gotcha. Thats what everyone else is saying to you, based on their responses.
When you ask bad questions, that you should know the answer to, it comes off as a disingenuous attempt to trick someone up (Because, since the question should have an obvious answer, it is not clear why you are asking it in the first place).
But in general something is essential when it is required to participate/function/exist/live/thrive meaningfully in society. These days lots of governments require that you have a smart phone to check in when you go somewhere or to show a digital vaccine certificate. Before that some big social media platforms (which is a big part of society) was either exclusive to mobile or designed to work best on mobile. Some services requires using a mobile app to interact with said service (account management). My current bank is mobile only as an example.
The mobile duopoly is like having a duopoly on printing or paper manufacture.
It would be crippling for businesses to have to pay a Paper Tax for all paper use, with a special surcharge for check or invoice printing, over and above the purchase cost of printer hardware.
Mobile payments and app ecosystems are no different. There might be a case if Apple was far more careful about app quality, curation, and security than it pretends to be.
But realistically it's just not doing a good enough job with any of them to justify its cut.
Would you be fine with being taxed for breathing if two or three companies hypothetically bought all the forests in your town or even state? After all, they own the things producing the oxygen you breathe, it only seems reasonable that you'd pay them.
Sometimes, maybe it's not reasonable for companies to justify their bad behaviour simply because they "own" something.
> Nobody ever accused Microsoft or Sony of "getting to decide what games were allowed to be made" because they strictly controlled what works are allowed on their platforms. There are always other platforms one can publish on.
I often just see the "consoles aren't general purpose" cop-out here but I'd go further and say: we should -- we should accuse them of being anticompetitive too.
Yeah because you could publish a game on tons of different platforms. There was competition. Sega, Nintendo, Atari, Sony, and that was just consoles, they too competed with Microsoft PC, then Microsoft XBox which was the same company but introduced additional competition nonetheless, and on top of all that, you could publish a game for Mac. And then there were the arcades, and gaming moreover competed with games that were electric but analog, like pinball and bowling. And that's excluding gambling. Another popular form of video games that didn't involve the companies I mentioned was watching a single viewer play a video game using a telephone as a controller and watching on a local TV channel, with thousands others watching the kid play, there were more platforms right there.
There was competition, and it was culturally accepted that if you wanted to show something to the world, there were many ways to go about it, but you had to go through a publisher, or a distributor, something.
Both companies need to be made to support sandboxed web installs sans taxation.
I think you are even now overestimating that number.
This is exactly what Android supports. APKs can be and are distributed on the web.
Distributing Dating Apps in the Netherlands - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30206559 - Feb 2022 (17 comments)
Apple will charge 27% commission for alternative payment systems in Netherlands - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30204604 - Feb 2022 (878 comments)
Apple's Plan for Third-Party In-App Payments Insufficient, Says Dutch Regulator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30058113 - Jan 2022 (6 comments)
Apple complies with Dutch ruling, lets dating apps use other payment systems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29945797 - Jan 2022 (61 comments)
Dutch watchdog finds Apple App Store payment rules anti-competitive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28785349 - Oct 2021 (236 comments)
More distantly related:
Netherlands ACM launches investigation into abuse by Apple in its App Store - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19664584 - April 2019 (117 comments)
Apple in Dutch antitrust spotlight for allegedly promoting own apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19640924 - April 2019 (7 comments)
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
4.3 Spam Don’t create multiple Bundle IDs of the same app. If your app has different versions for specific locations, sports teams, universities, etc., consider submitting a single app and provide the variations using in-app purchase. Also avoid piling on to a category that is already saturated; the App Store has enough fart, burp, flashlight, fortune telling, dating, drinking games, and Kama Sutra apps, etc. already. We will reject these apps unless they provide a unique, high-quality experience. Spamming the store may lead to your removal from the Apple Developer Program.
adding to sprite’s comment, they still allow new dating apps that match their guidelines.
To be sure there are other challenges raised by this for the developer. For example any app specific storage would need to be migrated to the other app, something for which there are mechanisms in the Apple ecosystem as long as the two App IDs in question come from the same developer. If they don’t, then the developer would have to cook up their own solution for that.
Also marketing would be an issue. For example the review history for one app would not be migrated to the other App ID unless Apple provides a way to do this (which I would not expect unless they are forced).
In short, while it’s not zero impact, it’s also not quite as bad as the scare headline makes it sound.
I don’t share the thinking that we can immediately conclude this is their goal, but I can see how some might think it is.
That one little step would avoid the regulation they're going to be hit with.
Your position is immoral. Coercion of any kind is bad. Approving it for egoistic reasons is equally bad.
You could freely support apps that do use Apple sign in voluntarily, but you like it that the developers are forced to provide it. Immoral and pathetic.
For each app, you have a new button to consider / remember which one you used:
* Login with email
* Login with Google
* Login with Facebook
* Login with Apple
There's a "keep me signed in" feature too. Or if this is a serious source of confusion, use local device storage to keep track.
In practice I don't consider anything for each app. If it's worked I used gsuite. If it's personal I used Apple. OAuth is the new "same password used everywhere" but now we click logos.
this reads so differently from american competition opinions, where the framework is designed around consumer protection
Literally every monopoly ever can be said to have a consumer welfare benefit. Competition is always at least a little anti-consumer - you have to consider alternatives and multiple business relationships, and consumers have a risk of those alternatives being inferior or outright harmful.
The problem is that nobody is ever purely a "consumer". There are no professional consumers whose entire life is just buying and using things[0]. "Consumer" is just a hat that people wear among many others. So whatever welfare consumers get from larger firms is mere compensation for welfare lost when those same people are either working for or operating the firms at the other end of the business. Even if someone isn't both a user and developer on Apple platforms, they are indirectly impacted when those developers are harmed by Apple's misconduct, and have to compensate in other ways, such as charging more money across-the-board or skimping on other things. (e.g. not shipping an Android version of their app because App Store compliance is taking up too much developer time)
[0] Though, the attitude I've gotten from some Apple users would imply that their entire life literally is just buying things on their iPhone.
Eh? Not at all. The entire point (in classical economic theory) is that a monopoly, compared to perfect competition, reduces consumer surplus and arrogates a part of that to itself as rent (thereby reducing total social surplus).
It's because the old standard didn't make any sense either. The most ridiculous of which was United States v. Von's Grocery Co., which blocked a merger of two grocers in LA with a combined market share of 8%.
How is forcing users to pay 30% for nothing helping them?
I am not a big fan of Kotlin but I'd love to be able to write a mobile application that uses native window library in Rust or C++.
Same goes for Apple.
But their platforms are so locked down that no matter what language you pick, you always end up having to write _some_ Kotlin/Swift to connect it to the native UI elements or register background services or whatever.
I don't know if it would have been the case, but I wonder if the Windows phone would have been more open to different development sources than Android or iOS. Linux powered devices are cool but sadly they don't have the years of polish and apps required to make them practical daily drivers.
I wonder at which point Apple will start caring about these fines.
Both Apple and Google should be compelled to admit anything from F-Droid into their relevant app stores, at whatever price the developer sets.
When an app developer is proscribed, this option will allow access to mobile platforms that Apple or Google would otherwise revoke and ban.
There is enough attention on this issue now to force this to happen.
https://nypost.com/2022/01/31/googles-online-ad-business-wou...
That's the only explanation that respects his intelligence.
It seems like EU regulators are starting to wake up (both this and the recent GDPR developments) and are able to see straight through the bullshit and recognize bad-faith behavior.
It's politically very easy to bring out the big guns here for European politicians.
At least the US government can be brought to the negotiation table if it turns out to be a problem.
If this results in a more competitive environment where we're less stalked & screwed by big tech then why not? The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
I was listening to the ATP podcast. All three hosts are big fans of Apple, they use and promote Apple products, and make all or some of their living selling apps. They all think Apple is making a huge mistake here.
Is there anybody who thinks Apple’s recent moves are going to be good for them long term? When even your biggest fans think you are being petulant and foolish, maybe it’s time to reevaluate?
Has there ever been a situation where a public company has valued consumer trust or goodwill?
To me it seems like it only matters when consumers actually have a choice and you need to convince them to give you money - once you've locked them in (because of contracts or anti-competitive practices), it doesn't really matter and you can (and should) milk them out of every dollar until you can't (as in competition or regulation disrupts the status-quo).
Did the lawyers inside Apple really expect their changes to satisfy EU-based regulators? Do they think this will just go away?
Nobody seems to think Apple is being smart right now. Usually you can find at least some supporters from their fan base, but not this time.
Hmmm…
They were fans of Apple before they ever started building in the ecosystem.
Sure, but there’s also the really obvious interpretation.
These are people who will immediately earn more if the apple tax is reduced.
Are you trying to make the argument that Apple's rules make sense and those who want to see change likely have a conflict of interest? If so, then you may be the person I didn't think existed. Do you think Apple's doing the right thing?
In fact I’d argue that it’s almost exclusively those with a conflict of interest who care the least bit about the Apple tax.
> Do you think Apple's doing the right thing?
Yes. Apple can charge whatever they feel is appropriate. If at some point their prices will be too high, I can jump ship.
I think you are answering a slightly different question than I’m asking. You might think they should be allowed to run their platform however they want but the reality is that because of their size and power, they can’t. Regulators will at least force them to allow alternate payment providers and if Apple keeps pushing back, they will eventually be forced to allow side loading or alternate app stores (which I would think would be a disaster).
So given the regulatory environment they exist in, they only way their current strategy is smart is if they can defeat the EU. I don’t think they can and I think we will all be worse off in a few years because of Apple’s petulance.
Yes, but the 27% apple tax is separate from the payment providers.
If my electricity company starts fucking around, people might literally freeze to death.
Apple store is not at all like a public utility, it would be downright madness to regulate it like such. Public utilities have very real impact on the lives of the public, Apple tax doesn’t.
I agree with you that it shouldn’t be regulated like a utility. I’m saying that Apples obstinance is going to lead them there.
If emergency calls don’t work, people die. Phone calls not working would have significant economic impact too, although less so nowadays.
The transactions covered by Apple Tax only pay a significant part in some developers lives, they don’t matter to the public in the same way utilities do.
> I’m saying that Apples obstinance is going to lead them there.
Unlikely, the iOS appdev lobbyists don’t have that kind of pull.
I never understood them, and therefore they’re totally a Chesterton’s Fence to me.
They make zero sense when it comes to stupid policy like this though.
Apple appears to be using entitlements entirely to flag that an app is using third-party payments, which is kind of a hack as there is no way for iOS to prohibit you from offering them to begin with. But this is the standard way of asking Apple for extra permissions, so I can see why they're using it. The separate app thing is there specifically so that Apple can technically enforce that apps only get third-party payments in the Netherlands and nowhere else.
The alternative would be for app developers to check for themselves if they're in the Netherlands and only offer third-party payments if that check succeeds. But there's no (easy) way for Apple to verify that your app is compliant; app developers could totally Volkswagen them. Or at least this is the pretext Apple will use to justify making compliance as friction-filled as possible.
I don't ever recall microsoft preventing you from changing the default browser on windows. How do you think google chrome got started in the first place?
But I guess companies are just that desperate for device tracking information and regularly-collected location data.
Source: I work on a major tech company's web-based messaging product.
Alternatively, if everyone who is publishing free on Apple is using an alternate payment system, and Apple doesn't collect anything from those apps, would it be reasonable for Apple to have some sort of "Developer pays $10 for every 10k push messages from a free app?" and "Developer pays $0.25/month for each app on the App Store"?
There's a question of "How does Apple pay for services?" Yes, it is currently quite profitable. If moving to a 3rd party payment processor with no associated fee causes the App Store to become unprofitable, what steps is Apple allowed to take to return it to a profit center?
You may do without push notifications on Linux, or Windows, but on iOS certain classes of apps are impossible to implement without them.
I think this has been a missing piece of the conversation for the most part. Apple needs to pay for servers, upkeep, development, etc. and deserve to make (some) profit. Why is the conversation about whether Apple can charge 30% or 0% or somewhere in between per transaction rather than based on actual usages and costs associated with operating the platform?
AWS offers similar features and technologies but we don't see them charging based on your product's revenue. Why should Apple?
Price setting is obviously a problem though if Apple continues to be the only company allowed to provide a service like "App Review" or "10k push notifications".
If apple charged for the actual costs it would be a non issue.
Instead they charge 10x the industry fees for credit card transactions and gives the rest for "free". And that puts any app that has considerable running costs at disadvantage.
And gives competitive disadvantage to Apple's own products that get to pay for the actual costs.
https://smarthomestarter.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-create...
> The determining factor of the pricing structure for creating Skills depends primarily on their complexity.
> In other words, the more complicated the request being processed (and therefore, more cloud services required), the more it will cost to publish the Skill.
With that model, free skills cost their developers money.
... Though, I'm still going to point out - https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/in-skill-purch...
> Amazon pays developers 70% of the marketplace list price for all sales.
So, not only do you pay to have AWS crunch your data, but if you're charing for that with some in skill purchase, Amazon is taking a 30% cut.
https://ios.libhunt.com/categories/1351-push-notification-pr...
Another part to this is that people have been highly critical of Apple when their battery performance is poor, not realizing that its an app that is consuming the battery. That has been mitigated some by Apple showing which apps are consuming the battery the most, but people tend to blame the OS rather than the application when something goes wrong.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
> The most impressive things to read on Raymond’s weblog are the stories of the incredible efforts the Windows team has made over the years to support backwards compatibility:
>> Look at the scenario from the customer’s standpoint. You bought programs X, Y and Z. You then upgraded to Windows XP. Your computer now crashes randomly, and program Z doesn’t work at all. You’re going to tell your friends, “Don’t upgrade to Windows XP. It crashes randomly, and it’s not compatible with program Z.” Are you going to debug your system to determine that program X is causing the crashes, and that program Z doesn’t work because it is using undocumented window messages? Of course not. You’re going to return the Windows XP box for a refund. (You bought programs X, Y, and Z some months ago. The 30-day return policy no longer applies to them. The only thing you can return is Windows XP.)
While Apple doesn't go that far to preserve backwards compatibility, they're still the ones that take the heat when a popular app is excessively battery consuming as its the battery indicator that's going down.
I wouldn't trust OKCupid to be able to do a decent mobile web UI, because they can't really be trusted to do either a regular web UI or a decent mobile app. :D Their entire UX was always just so full of jank and they were constantly tweaking it with the apparent goal of making nobody understand how anything works or is supposed to work.
The consequences of the iPhone on the internet are extreme and I don't think most of the people involved in internet protocol design have fully realized just how bad it is.
I've heard that they are finally putting some resource on the jank.
Not there yet, and also a decade late.
How should that even work with currently Apple managed subscriptions? Just cancel them all? Is Apple even allowed to require that their own payment system be present in addition under this ruling?
However I don't see anything that suggests that's what they're trying to do - what I assume they're after (which would be very reasonable) is to offer direct card payments in addition to Apple's option (with the direct option priced cheaper to offset Apple's cut).
No-one is forced to create apps for the Apple platform.
I as a non-Netherlands user don't want my apps pushing their own payment methods, so app providers should only be making separate apps with their own payment methods available to Netherlands-based users.
If you don't like it, just don't buy it!
=== I am an Apple user similar as GNOME users ouyr brains can't handle options, even the idea that some user would chose something then me SEGFAULTS my brain for days.
Not joking, this is about giving options, Apple fanboys could continue to pay with Apple and pay more. Why should some assholes decide that I should not pay with my bank account or with PayPal, I don't care that Net York times or other US companies are shit with canceling subscriptions.
"You don't own this device, Apple grants you the privilege of using it"
"Purchases on this device will include a 30% cut that will be exfilterated to US so billionaires get a bigger yacht"
"Information that can help you but cost Apple will not be shown to you, because information is power and Apple wants it"
...
Many apps are released only in a single country or a handful of countries.
Many users create an Apple ID and thus an App Store account, and purchase apps, in their home country. They they move abroad. Their country of residence is not the same as the country that their Apple ID exists in.
Apple does not offer a mechanism to move your Apple ID and App Store purchases between countries. You can move your Apple ID and lose access to your purchases, or keep your Apple ID in your (wrong) "original" country, but not both.
This burns people who move between countries. In the case of this regulation, e.g. Tinder would release an app for the Dutch market... but expats would not realistically be able to use it, hence Apple would likely still be in breach of the regulations).
In the more general case, many people are unable to access important iOS applications purely as a virtue of having moved countries. It's shitty.
Would it have to work if a user installs multiple dating apps, and picks different payment providers for each of them, changes them a few times a month, etc?
How would users configure payment providers (presumably in iOS settings, as the apps can’t be changed)?
I don’t see how iOS could come preloaded with every payment provider on the planet (if only because new ones can pop up every minute), so should it download and run code that processes the user’s money, or would Apple be allowed to restrict what payment providers can do so that iOS can configure them based on a few items (say an icon, a descriptive text, a background image, and some info on how to make a payment)?
I can see solutions here, but not ones that can be implemented in a few weeks time. Implementing such a feature takes time, even if you can throw money at it.
The specificity is because of the nature of the lawsuit. A bunch of dating apps decided to join forces and sue Apple in the Netherlands. The judge ruled against Apple, so Apple has to allow the dating apps (and probably the entire dating category) to use alternate payment options.
Sure, going by the law Apple should probably allow all apps in Europe to use alternate payment options, but Apple is making more money than the noncompliance fines. They're trying to bleed anyone enforcing the law dry by pretending to do what was asked but in the most detestable, childish, and stubborn way possible.
I hope the judge will add a couple of zeroes to these fines because another fifty million is nothing but the cost of business for a company like Apple.
For example for the given article users of dating apps can already use different payment providers, provided they go with a different phone. If these types of grievances are so bad, why don't users switch? It's worth considering these questions. Apple does certainly try to incentivize you to go-all in with Apple Watch/Fitness+ integrations, AirPod, AirTag, etc.
I believe Europe's general approach is just contributing to its brain drain. A large chunk of huge tech companies in the United States are founded by European nationals, not even children of immigrants. You cannot ignore that California alone has a larger tech industry than the entirety of Europe. It's not like Californians are smarter than Europeans, the difference is regulation.
Personally I believe it's because Europe is way too stifling in its rules and regulations. In comparison the United States is just a far superior environment for innovation and starting tech companies in general.
Resolve this problem, and then Europeans will just move over to a local national company and then the issue of Apple being anti competitive will be no longer relevant, as there will be competition.
TLDR: Help foster strong competitive companies, stop wasting time trying to neuter Apple
In order to avoid the fee, they would have to distribute the app through an alternative store or as an APK which has just as many if not more hoops than what regulators are objecting to here, although they do get to keep the last 27% compared to the Apple situation.
If Microsoft wasn't able to successfully enter the smartphone space after spending billions and making a product many consumers loved, why should we expect the results to be different for new companies just by deregulating Europe?
Network effects are the primary challenge to competing with Google and Apple, not regulatory restrictions.
Network effects can be broken. It’s not like Google and Apple are #1 in every area where they compete.
Google and Apple control the platform so they can kick you out or make your business unprofitable with shenanigans such as these.
https://newsroom.spotify.com/2019-03-13/consumers-and-innova...
Just because it's possible to compete in one product area doesn't mean its possible to compete in all of them. A smartphone experience is networks on networks on networks to the point that breaking in is next to impossible despite the fact that one of them is based on an open source OS.
Trying to directly compete with Apple and Google in the mobile OS market would be like trying to compete with Boing/Airbus or TSMC/Samsung, in that the capital requirements are so astronomical without extreme forms of subsidies and protectionism.
Bluntly, it was two factors:
1. A network effect of developers - there was too much value in the other two platforms and supporting windows phone was priority #4 (after android, iOS, and the web)
2. Negative brand recognition. Consumers didn’t find carrying a blue screen in their pocket attractive
3. Negative retailer reaction. The phones just weren’t pushed in stores. If you didn’t come in looking for a windows phone, you might not have even been shown it as an option.
That's right! Just throw out your iPhone, re-buy every app and any digital content you've ever bought for it, and switch to Android! It's easy!
This is like arguing that Microsoft wasn't monopolistic in the 90s because Linux existed.
Unless you’re exclusively using first party apps, the vast majority are on both platforms.
And speaking of Microsoft- Microsoft had a 80%+ market share and Apple obliterated them. Create a better experience and people will move
Which technologies from Europe have been objectively superior and were killed off by Apple or Google due to abusing their position?
Can you imagine people complaining for regulation on windows mobile rather than just moving to something that does what you want lol.
You're posting on a discussion board about the tech business. Surely you must understand what network effects are.
Just download the new software and then you’re done right?
They could also pick up customers.
Paid apps will have to be re-purchased, your Airpods won't work as well, your Apple Watch won't work at all with Android, you won't be able to message your contacts who use iMessage without SMS, etc.
iPhone owners tend to buy into the Apple ecosystem which ends up being a whole bunch of vendor lock in, and it becomes unreasonable to switch platforms. The ability to switch to Android certainly doesn't give Apple a free pass here.
That’s what I don’t get - people buy locked down stuff and then complain that it’s locked down. There are plenty of alternatives that aren’t locked down.
By FairPhone, use Signal, use Webapps, etc.
I don’t get the defeatist mentality.
And in many cases, you don't have a choice to use Signal or etc. What if all your contacts are using iMessage? Sure, most of them will have SMS, but that's not guaranteed. There will always be edge cases of users who are locked in due to situations outside of their control. Shouldn't we be trying to make things less locked down for them?
Take this site for example - it doesn’t display Reddit posts or work with your Reddit account.
It’s not worth energy complaining to the administrators saying that it should work with your Reddit account.
The same relationship exists with iMessage and signal
I mean... yes? Even just affording a new handset could be prohibitive if you want a parity of hardware features. But also, we shouldn't underrate the barrier presented to nontechnical users by having to learn a new interface, especially when Apple banks so hard on its (superficial) reputation for Just Working. I think we all know some (especially, but not exclusively, older) people who have just attained a sense of bare competency at driving their iPhones and will invite you to pull that from their cold dead hands.
It's still not very common knowledge. Most people wouldn't even know this is happening; keep in mind that Apple's rules also prohibit you from mentioning that alternate payment options exist (even if those are on other platforms).
Also, most people don't have the disposable cash to just throw away their iPhone and go buy an Android when encountering this issue. Frankly, it's still probably more rational to just pay the 30% tax than forego a significant chunk of value off the phone by buying a new Android replacement.
Android also has its own problems (including with privacy, etc) which hopefully will be addressed at some point, but for now it's not a silver bullet, simply a different set of tradeoffs.
I believe the role of a competition watchdog is to prevent anticompetitive practices that hurt consumers as a whole. I don't think it's far-fetched to strike down stupid rules that don't provide any value beyond allowing assholes to seek rent.
> Personally I believe it's because Europe is way too stifling in its rules and regulations. In comparison the United States is just a far superior environment for innovation and starting tech companies in general.
IMO, the US model allows a minority to legally screw the rest of the population and get rich off it, offloading the negative externalities onto society. This Apple rule is an example, albeit very small in the grand scheme of things when you consider what is possible and routinely done in the US.
> Help foster strong competitive companies
To a certain extent that's what the EU is doing here. Keep in mind that in the last couple decades a lot of business ideas & markets have been monopolized by US-based companies who are now using anti-competitive practices to prevent viable competition from emerging. The problem with the EU isn't primarily regulation (though it makes a lot of user-hostile business models impossible - a good thing in my book), it's the lack thereof that allowed US-based companies to monopolize many markets even in Europe.
But they should stop trying to control a phone they SOLD to customer and allow unimpeded running any app the customer needs, including competing stores or directly installed apps.
The tech industry in US has so much money that is just burned on shitty products, so I am not a bit surprised if you start too many projects and also buy your way into the market you get on top. There are examples where big US companies bought competitors so it is clear that money is keeping this giants on top.
Sorry I won't reveal the actual reason and just tell you a reason that is not it.
My point is that you can't blame GDPR or some "regulation" for the reason an european FB did not popped and rapidly increased 10 years ago. This is a lame excused used by anti-regulation dudes.
Regulations are necessary to preserve free and open markets, prevent monopolies and protect competition.
Two companies having total control over the app economy and taking 15-30% of revenues stifles innovation. Lack of antitrust enforcement stifles innovation. You're against antitrust enforcement, yet it would increase economic freedom, not reduce it, by allowing smaller companies to compete.
You also want Europe to come up with its dominant search engine or mobile OS. There's no longer any chance of that happening, because of network effects. There is simply no way for any European company to come up with a superior OS, or superior social network, since they lack the network effects; since they can't have a superior product, they can never compete, and can never displace US incumbents.
The only way Europe will have its own tech giants in current markets (not in some new markets, like VR, that's still perfectly possible) is if they do what China did: ban US tech, and aggressively fund alternatives. Both of which would be against your economic preferences. "Free markets" have certain benefits, but they won't achieve what you believe they will; actually quite the opposite.
"Very easy" to me would be that Apple provides support for an Android variant that runs on iPhones.
The question of consumer benefit / preference etc has gone.
Don't like apple's walled garden? Get an android phone!
The reality is at least for some segment of the market, having apple throwing it weight around with these "wonderful" providers who would NEVER thing of doing a subscription dark pattern (haha - dating apps have a horrible history here) is appreciated? Desired?
My question - the internet is subject to regulation, why don't these regulators focus on ANY of the absolute CRAP on the internet. Fake news stories, fake tech support, money scammers etc etc. Instead we are stuck with folks like scambaiters doing their thing (for free) and our billion dollar competition etc agencies sit on their butts.
Great for customers who don’t like it, not so useful if the question is “does Apple’s walled garden prevent the creation of businesses that consumers would like to do business with if only they had the opportunity”.
I don’t claim to know enough about any marketplace or business landscape to answer the latter question, but that’s what is being claimed here.
They already do prevent certain businesses from operating in the App Store anyway, irrespective of the regulatory scrutiny here. An example is present in Apple's review guidelines, where they specifically ban any apps that encourage consumption of tobacco products or vaping. See https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
> 1.4.3 Apps that encourage consumption of tobacco and vape products, illegal drugs, or excessive amounts of alcohol are not permitted on the App Store.
The same goes with all apps that feature pornography or facilitate prostitution and I'm sure many adult-entertainment businesses would love the opportunity to do business in the App Store. I'm not saying Apple should or shouldn't allow those types of businesses on the app store, mind you, but there's no law saying Apple must allow even dating apps on the App Store; if Apple decided they could probably ban dating apps altogether.
Secondly, you shouldn't be able to lie in a commercial context. Ignore the crypto itself. You claim you are 100% backed by US dollars? Someone should show up, check, and then bust you totally if needed.
BTW - these laws apply in the real world. I sell you a bridge I don't own but claim I do, I should be busted.
Signing up for a service online generally is fraught with unconcealable patterns.
The web is filled with scams and rip-offs designed by many of the same folks calling for apple to open up. Seriously, many of the alliance or whatever have very unsavory histories.