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Comment by cycomanic | Hacker News Reader

Can we stop pretending that Apple has the users best interest in mind? They just want to be the gatekeeper for lucrative applications/functions so they can charge for it. That they somehow convinced apple users that it's somehow in their interest just shows how good their marketing is.

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Apple is a company, and it’s interested in making profits. Right now, its methods of making profits are slightly more aligned with what privacy conscious users desire than some other companies’, and that’s good.

Apple absolutely needs to be checked in other ways—-the fact that it’s selling advertising while setting policies that hurt other advertisers stinks to high heaven. Let antitrust rake them over the coals for that.

I don't agree with the second paragraph at all.

Apple sets a restrictive and privacy-centric set of rules for advertisers, which it then follows. The fact that this is a problem for other advertising companies is an indictment of those companies and their bleak surveillance-enabling business model.

Contrast this with the "use WebKit or go home" rule, which, like it or not, is favoring Apple's product over others. It's not like these advertising policies are "be headquartered in Cupertino", it's "if you want to track our users you must ask them first".

Exactly. This is the popup for app store personalized ads[0], which is a full-screen popup that forces you to choose one or the other before you can access the app. It's super transparent and easy to decline the personalization.

0: https://videoweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Apple-permi...

I wonder how many people actually register that there are two buttons at the bottom? It's very obvious to power-users like us since we're used to

  [ Accept ]     Cancel

at this point, but I can only imagine the borderless design for the secondary button originating from a dark pattern.

The entire iOS operating system works that way now.

I dislike it. I think buttons should be buttons. But this isn't a special case, so unless you consider every instance of two buttons looking this way a dark pattern, this one isn't either.

> unless you consider every instance of two buttons looking this way a dark pattern

The entire point of this pattern is to guide the user into a "default" option so using it for anything where the user is suppposed to provide informed consent is a dark pattern. The only places where it is not a dark pattern is where default choice actually aligns with the interest of the average user and I think that is hard to argue for a choice whose purpose is primarily to be allowed to better manipulate the user into spending more.

That pattern may be reasonable for "Are you sure" kind of requests for actions that the user explicitly wanted - because then there really is a sane default; we expect the user didn't click on some button by accident. But it's not reasonable to portray questions that are asking the user to agree to something they did not explicitly want; that's just trying to trick the user to make the annoying popup go away by clicking the big button. There's no sane default here, so none should be preselected (and ideally, the layout of confirmation dialogs and agreement dialogs would not be identical in the first place).

It's a dark pattern, and I really doubt it's accidental.

Personally I find it subconsciously mirrors how we interact with classic HTML.

A button posts, a link gets.

As a step in the device setup, the button infers some form of enablement or configuration while a link is perfect for skipping.

That's a reasonable perspective that I hadn't considered, and probably makes even more sense to people who barely used/use desktops in the first place.

I still don't like it! But I also never had any trouble using it. Except Apple Music. Don't get me started.

The only button they provide is for accepting ads. To say no, they provide a link. That's a dark pattern.

That is at most a slightly shadowy pattern, it is the equivalent of saying "please select this one".

Darker patterns would be a preselected checkbox with a ok button or a default consent with a "go to settings to update your selection".

This is a "Personalized Ads" popup with an On and Off option, it looks pretty ok to me.

The bottom one isn't a button?

It doesn't matter what you call it. It doesn't look like a button to the vast majority of non-techies. That makes it a dark pattern.

What's the one for third-party apps? How different is the wording?

Apple have repeatedly refused to confirm that their ad system is compliant with the ATT rules.

Which ad system? Their programmatic ad inventory does not support tracking, as anyone who has access to developer ads can confirm.

Forgive my ignorance, but how do we know that Apple doesn't track more data than they provide to developers?

If you ever interview apple developers for other companies, or just inspect what is being sent to apple's servers constantly from their devices, you'll realize that apple is recording A LOT of very private info about their users.

Apple is very much a 'private from everyone but apple' company, they smartly just don't talk about it out loud. For their high level apps like TV and such, have things like privacy review. But their security, activation and map parts do record a lot of info.

Block all traffic to Apple at the router, except (e.g. use a different SSID) when you need to perform OS/app updates.

Apple kindly publishes IP exception lists so you can still receive notifications, while blocking the rest of 17/8.

Maybe that will work in practice but you have no way of knowing if it does. There is nothing really preventing Apple from sneaking tracking data through the notification channel (not to mention that centralized notifications are already a juicy opportunity to profile and track users) or retaining the data and sending it off when you do OS updates. Once a company has shown willingness to go against your interest you can't really trust them. The only real solution is to use software that respects you and increasingly that means only open source software.

All true, but less bad than competitors Google and Microsoft, which do not offer comparable segmentation of notifications and telemetry.

Since notifications are user-visible, one can audit for unexpected, non-notification traffic to Apple's advertised notification-only IPs.

Apple colluded with Google when it suited them before, I cannot see a reason to trust them any more than Google.

No large corporation should be blindly trusted.

If a large corporation officially advertises to enterprise customers a bounded, testable claim (e.g. traffic to these IP addresses is limited to notifications), then that claim can be subject to ongoing audit by the IT teams of multiple, independent, enterprises.

Verified accountability is far superior to trust. Step 1: vendor corporation makes a bounded, testable, claim.

This question is quite ambiguous about scope and definition. In the context of Apple’s tracking protections, tracking is defined as sharing identifiable information about a customer for advertising or marketing purposes. Nothing more, nothing less. Apple could collect all the information they wanted to about you from all their various products and services, and that wouldn’t be tracking. Under this definition, data they don’t make available for advertisement targeting or attribution isn’t tracking.

This is a great point. You could probably sum up Apple’s strategy as “capture the most lucrative market through initial quality/vanity, learn more about it than anyone else, then ring-fence it and protect it.”

They aren’t a monopoly as long as you don’t consider income demographics.

I think is whole platform-holder strategy is where antitrust legislation needs a significant update. We must recognize the inherent platform lock-in and the effective monopoly over the platform even if there are other platforms that the users could theoretically switch to and regulate the platform holders accordingly. Anything else would be akin to ignoring a monopoly just because alternatives are available in a different town or country.

It's easy to play by the rules when you're the one writing them.

This is only a criticism if you enumerate the deficiencies with the rules you believe are only justified by self-interest.

The linked article lists a bunch of those. Most of that bullet-point list of required or conversely prohibited behaviors apply to Apple. And all of those are justified only by self-interest.

Incidentally, that doesn't mean the alternative has to be the wild west - that's a false dichotomy. Controlling access is fine; it's simply not fine that it's the platform that holds exclusive sway, especially if the answer is "only if we're the ones providing that app."

This thread is about Apple’s privacy rules for App Store developers, and it’s not plainly obvious which items in the EU proposal enhance those protections at all, but the person I was responding to was insinuating that those protections have self-serving flaws.

Is that distinction really helpful? The App Store has _rules_ some of which relate to user privacy, and some of which are in a grey area, and some of which don't relate to user privacy. Is needing to use Apple's payment provider a privacy protection? If you squint just right it might be.

I'm sure there are some subset of app-store rules that taken by themselves, without the context of the other app-store rules are not self-serving. But that doesn't mean the rules overall are - and that's the reality that competitors need to deal with. Unlike apple, they can't change the restrictions they need to comply with. Both in actually immediate sense, and in a more meta process sense Apple has an unfair advantage they can and do exploit to extract tolls from the interactions between users and third-party providers.

The fact that some of those protections also protect user privacy to the extent the user stays in Apple's walled garden is almost akin to blackmail: rather than trying to protect the user's privacy regardless, they've tied the user's privacy to the Apple ecosystem. It's all or nothing. Would be a shame if anything happened to that privacy of yours - are you sure you want to leave our walled garden? There aren't any other curated gardens (we made sure of that!), and your device unfortunately has no way to safely and conveniently opt in to risks worth taking, so it's our way, or the wild west out there... oh, and if you really want the wild west, we'll take your hardware too, you'll need to use android, and we use obvious UI patents to ensure it's inconvenient to switch a lot.

It doesn't take an evil, machiavellian plan to end up in a situation in which the rules are so slanted in Apple's favor. All it takes are lots of tiny by themselves reasonable features - but steps that are always tested against Apple's interests, since those get a voice in the decision-making process, and rarely tested against third-party interests. It may well be that Apple was well intentioned in its privacy rules, and that those rules truly do protect the user - yet still have those rules stifle competition in a way that also harms the user down the line.

100%

That’s not what people are saying though. Whether or not apple cares about its users is completely irrelevant. The question is whether apples incentives align with its users better than other tech companies. The answer pretty clearly seems to be yes, apple makes most of its money by selling hardware, their incentive is to make a product people enjoy. Competitors make most of their money selling ads, their incentive is to lock users in while maximizing the number and effectiveness of ads served.

> their incentive is to lock users

All good apart from this. Apple does this magnificently, ie closed hardware protocols. For example there are significantly better earphones than airpads pro (and some cost +-same), but good luck getting same level of integration over apple's proprietary protocols.

While rest of whole universe at least tries to adhere to open things so we users have freedom in how we design & evolve our electronic setup, they have basic support for stuff like bluetooth and superb for their proprietary protocol. If some random chinese company can make seamless aptx hd integration with their buds, so can apple. But it won't.

Thunderbolt vs USB. Again whole world vs Apple. It required... who else than our sluggish EU to come up with way to end this cable madness that would otherwise continue forever. Seen enough 40 euro frayed cables for one lifetime. For me this was a one of few breaking points between Iphone 13 pro max and Samsung S22 ultra. I am currently very happy user of the latter. That's hardware lock-in like hell.

> Thunderbolt vs USB. Again whole world vs Apple.

WAT.

Maybe you mean Lightning vs. USB? Well, it turns out that while a whole committee was designing 15 different and confusing standards over the past 20 years, Apple designed two, and they work.

Now it's suddenly "Apple vs. the world" because the USB committee managed to spit out a semi-functional spec that ... Apple was the first to actually go full in with their desktop offerings, pissing so many people off.

Apple was involved in Thunderbolt from the beginning (and from all accounts was a major driving force for Thunderbolt in the first place) and is part of the USB-IF. The only time it lagged in adopting a new USB version was because Intel was dragging their feet for USB 3.

Some people just cannot understand that they have different strategies for desktops/laptops and mobile phones and go with “Apple walled garden bad”.

> Apple was the first to actually go full in with their desktop offerings, pissing so many people off

And also more or less designed the connector, apparently.

Umm, Thunderbolt was developed by Intel, in cooperation with Apple. And IIRC, Apple is a member of the USB consortium. Too bad design by committee sucks and has led to the disaster that is USB-C.

USB Type C is the connector and isn't a disaster. You could argue lightning is a better connector, but it's not _that_ much better. Thunderbolt 3 and 4 use the USB-C connector.

The USB naming of the protocols:

USB 3.0, USB 3.1 Gen 1, USB 3.1 Gen 2 -> USB 3.1 Gen 2 x 1, USB 3.2 Gen 1x2, USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, USB4 Gen 2x2, USB4 Gen 3x2

is ridiculous without even getting into the complexity of the protocol

I think USB 3.0 being renamed into USB 3.1 Gen 1 and then into USB 3.2 Gen 1 into just so that manufacturers can market their devices with the latest USB numbers should really count as false advertising.

> Apple is a member of the USB consortium

Apple is also a member of Khronos (and so is Microsoft btw) yet decided to push their proprietary API instead of working with open standards.

Membership in a standards organization makes just as much sense for a company competing with the standard as it does for one embracing it.

> member of Khronos (and so is Microsoft btw) yet decided to push their proprietary API instead of working with open standards

Which open standards? If you mean Vulkan, then it appeared in any viable form three years after Apple released the first version if Metal.

And Vulkan itself was donated by AMD because they couldn't figure out what to do with otherwise proprietary Mantle.

"They just want to be the gatekeeper for lucrative applications/functions so they can charge for it."...on the platforms that they have developed, invested in and are maintaining, which also don't hold a market majority around the world.

"...they somehow convinced apple users..."...by making a product that fits Apple users' needs in a market that always had lots of competition, meaning that those who for whatever reason didn't want to use Apple products could always pick anything else.

You don’t have to be the market majority for your actions to be anti-competitive.

That's not the point. "Anti-competitive practices are business or government practices that prevent or reduce competition in a market.". The point of me mentioning that Apple is not the market majority was to emphasize that even with their current positions, Apple isn't capable of effectively reducing competition in the market of electronic devices, as is already proven not by legislative bodies but the market.

Just because there is someone with more market share than you does not mean that your actions can't squeeze smaller players than you (or, more commonly for apple, squeeze players in adjacent markets. See: Spotify vs Apple Music).

True that. "See: Spotify vs Apple Music". Considering that Google has their own streaming services and takes same 30% cut, i truly wonder why Spotify didn't address their "anticompetitive practices".

Looks like Google has been offering concessions:

https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/spotify-google-billing...

And previously Spotify and Netflix had a loophole on the Play Store:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/28/google-to-enforce-30percent-...

I thought Apple was the more profitable platform however, also to develop for, which would imply that anti-competitive practices could deform the market because developers would be forced to bow to Apple since that is where the largest part of their profits would be coming from?

Considering that the definition of "anti competitive practices" is beyond stretched at this point, it's safe to say that those very practices are one of the reasons iOS is profitable for developers: they don't need to worry about piracy as much as they do on Android, because Apple learned the key lessons of phone manufacturers of the past.

> ... one of the reasons iOS is profitable for developers.

Is it profitable for many developers?

Was under the impression that making decent money was possible years ago, but in recent years it's not real profitable for the vast majority of devs.

For those who still serve "premium" apps it is (e.g gaming or industry specific applications.).

They don’t want to reduce competition in the market of electronic devices. They are in the business of service relationships with people with lots of disposable income.

A big case in point is Apple Music.

Apple turning the Music Player app in Apple Music allowed them to catch a huge part of the market that had never interacted with music streaming before. Extremely anti-competitive. IMO when they did that they should have immediately been forced by the EU to instead show a pop-up that also gave the option for Spotify, Deezer, Tidal etc.

And immediately cancel any revenue they take from competitors.

While I agree that Apple had a severe advantage in the case of Apple Music, it's also pretty clear that the advantage manifested because consumers who would otherwise be unobtainable were enticed to buy into the offering. It was an uncaptured market.

As a byproduct it does give a measure of privacy so what's it to you if apple users just don't care about your idea of freedom? I hope this European legislation at least lets apple customers opt-IN to these new features or choose the old way of doing business. I would prefer to keep access footprints to a minimum to stuff like NFC, contacts, hardware APIs, apple pay, etc on my phone.

In theory you already have the choice of opting-in by choosing not to install apps that utilize NFC, hardware APIs, other payment processors, etc.

But that's if nothing changed. My concern is that if companies are given the opportunity to have their own stores, and their own payment processors, we're going to end up with de-facto-forced-install of a store and acceptance of terms, and it favors companies that already have a strong presence in the marketplace. I might want to use WhatsApp, but now I need to install Meta's store, and I'm required to give it access to a blanket set of permissions.

And guess who doesn't have the power/influence to get you to install a custom store: The small devs, the new entrants, the challenger apps.

I absolutely agree that corporations and their apps need to be kept in check, but giving one for profit company with its own motives control over that is not a good solution.

Better would be

a) to give the user control over permissions in a way lets them deny ALL permissions without the app being able to know that it was even denied the permission wherever that is remotely possible and

b) to restrict what what market leaders can get away with which should not just apply to Apple but also to hugely popular apps

c) to require interopability from social networks and other communication platforms to counter network effects.

The entire tech space is still a wild west in what corporations are allowed to get away with and eventually what will need to change if individuals are to retain any control over their digital lifes.

Apple is not forbidden by this legislation from providing a user-controlled sandbox.

In the EU privacy is assured by actual legislation in the form of the GDPR, and I expect Apple can get away with demanding compliance with that set of laws before putting something in the appstore if they really worry about privacy.

And you think words on a piece of paper are going to be enough? You can't legislate privacy into existence if you're constantly broadcasting all the data yourself. It's better to not broadcast the data in the first place, but that's not the route we've chosen.

>Somehow

Perhaps by creating products that their users actually don't hate using.

It's not binary, one company can be worse than another.

If you're going to level this accusation about what Apple supposedly "wants", you should at least have the common courtesy to support it. In any way. At all.

Or just admit it: you're making it up, especially the part about what Apple "wants". And the part about what Apple will supposedly charge for.

>Can we stop pretending that Apple has the users best interest in mind?

Well they did, at least during Steve Jobs's era.

Jobs didn't want apps on the iPhone at all and later insisted on having the App Store being the only way to distribute apps.

The only reason why we attribute today's Apple as "greedy" and not Jobs-era Apple as such is because you have fonder memories of him. Also, Jobs was a master of the reality distortion field and could explain things easier than today's Apple could. But none of that changes whether or not locked down devices are anticompetitive or not, just whether or not Apple's own fans are complaining about it.

Furthermore, there are pro-consumer justifications for Apple's uncompetitive behavior. In fact, that's Apple's whole defense against the antitrust inquiries it faces: the digital warlord's walled garden is for the protection of its serfs, and if the serfs don't like it they can surrender all their property and swear fealty to another digital warlord.

People seems to equate everything that Apple are doing today originate from Jobs. And therefore every single sin ( if you call it so ) means it was also Jobs idea.

What people dont realise it was the best model at the time. While Jobs approved the iPhone 6 design ( or a "bigger screen" iPhone ), he died during the iPhone 4 era. When Apple was about to repeat the same mistakes as it did in the 80s /90s.

As if Steve made iPod to only buy or listen music on iTunes. He got rid of Music DRM, single handedly.

You probably meant Wozniak, not Jobs.

It's not that Wozniak wished users ill, but, for all his technical skill, there's little evidence that he had a particularly good understanding of what users wanted or needed — his post-Apple career is basically marked by flop after flop.

Now, of course, it's all different, and his blockchain surely is going to revolutionize the world: efforce.io /s

Steve Jobs was an asshole who always put money first. But even if you disagree with that, he's been dead for more than a decade. It's time to move on.

Disney buying Pixar made Jobs more money than anything he ever did with computers.

And if anybody on HN actually read Apple's Annual report every single year before the iPod even came out, they would ( or should ) have know how Apple's money or profits works very differently from Steve to Tim Cook's era.

Apple makes peanuts from the App Store relative to phone sales. After they upped the cut for developers to between 70% and 85% and CC companies still get their cut, add customer service and app reviews and it simply isn’t that profitable.

What they benefit from is selling 1,000$ phones at a 30+% profit margin, because for the average consumer they simply work better. Which actually aligns incentives between customers and Apple quite well.

Apple's App store revenue is very substantial and likely has very low overall costs and microscopic per-unit costs relative to a hardware business like iPhone or Mac. Apple paid out $45 billion to developers in 2020 with $64 billion gross, which means they had as high as $19 billion in revenue from the app store commission alone.[1]

Unfortunately Apple doesn't break out profit per category but we know that their net income for 2020 was $58 billion [2]. As far as I'm aware we don't know operating costs for the App store, but I think its fair to say that the portion of the ~$19 billion that is profit is far from being "peanuts".

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/08/apples-app-store-had-gross-s...

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/net-inc...

Apple annual gross profit for 2021 was $152 billion.

That ~19B in 2020 is before CC fees on 64B or internal expenses. App stores have a lot of customer service and charge backs on relatively tiny purchases. Actually reviewing apps isn’t cheap either, and all the relevant IT adds even more expense.

Further they upped the developers cut to between 70% and 85% from the flat 70% in 2020. So sure they might make 3-5 billion from the App Store in 2021, but that’s like 2% of total profits.

Net income is, imo, a better number to use given the sheer amount of R&D that goes into developing Apple hardware that is necessary but unaccounted for in gross profit. further, if we are looking at 2021 their App Store gross revenue went to $85 billion.

> That ~19B in 2020 is before CC fees on 64B or internal expenses. App stores have a lot of customer service and charge backs on relatively tiny purchases. Actually reviewing apps isn’t cheap either, and all the relevant IT adds even more expense.

I don't disagree with any of that, but I don't think its anywhere near 2/3 of revenue after developer split. I don't have any evidence for that because Apple is very secretive about those numbers, but I think level with which they protect that information is evidence on its own. if Apple were making a piddly 3-5 billion on $65 billion in gross revenue they would be screaming it from the rooftops to (rightfully) justify their 30% cut as being reasonable.

> Further they upped the developers cut to between 70% and 85% from the flat 70% in 2020.

the app store is extremely top heavy with top devs being responsible for a huge amount of the revenue. The policy is great for small devs but the aggregate split is probably still much closer to 30% than it is to 15%.

Defending their cut based on expenses is a losing strategy because if they 2 billion dollars or 20 Billion anyone would love to have that income stream. Further stating their actual costs simply invite the idea of competition lowering prices.

Apple clearly wants to profit from the App Store, but just as important to them is maintaining the ecosystem and the mountains of cash iOS provides when change means risk.

at 5%, cc fees would result 2.9 billion. So more like 16B in profit

It strikes me as hard to be believe it's that much - surely Apple does not pay 5% in CC fees. They _must_ have managed a better deal than that...

There is no way that Apple is paying 5% on credit card fees. Average fees paid by merchants are 1.3% to 3.5%[1].

You can bet Apple negotiates hard on that fee. It wouldn't surprise me to learn they are paying 0.1%.

[1] https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-credit-card...

If transactions are small, like 99 cents, transaction fees can exceed 29%.

And you think Apple can't negotiate that?

Not much, Apple can negotiate with the payment processor but but the minimums are still quite high.

https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/vis...

> at 5%, cc fees would result 2.9 billion. So more like 16B in profit

So you assume they can do all the stuff I just mentioned for 0$ and changing their fee structure had no long term impacts on profits.

Also your math doesn’t work out if 5% of 64B = 3.2B, though 25% or 64B is 16B. Not that actual CC fees are 5%, or that their old revenue model is relevant any longer.

Apple makes peanuts from app sales.

It’s those stupid game ISPs they make all the money off. Smurfberries and pseudo-gambling and such.

Ruined the App Store and iOS gaming, but it’s so insanely profitable it will never go away.

A quick Google suggests Apple made 64 billion from the App Store in 2021 of the 378 billion in total revenue.

Some fairly large peanuts!

And that revenue is basically pure profit as it doesn’t require the creation of any actual physical hardware either.

If not stopped it might eventually get tempting or even logical to phase out making things and focus on rent seeking alone.

The profit is more important than revenue.

Is this pre 30% or after? Also: how much does it cost to run the App Store globally? Do have the numbers?

Ya, maybe they meant this article[0]? If so, then it's 60B going to developers, and some quick math there indicates Apple only made 15B from their cut.

> Apple said Monday that it paid developers $60 billion in 2021, a figure that suggests that App Store sales continue to grow at a rapid clip.

0: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/10/apple-implies-it-generated-r...

15ish billion isn’t profit. They still need to pay credit card fees, do customer service on low value transactions, actually review apps, run data centers etc.

> how much does it cost to run the App Store globally? Do have the numbers?

I think that anyone who thought about this for even a second would come to the conclusion of "It almost certainly doesn't cost anywhere near the amount of revenue that comes from it".

So the answer is, probably not a lot, compared to revenue.

I dunno… I figure just the bandwidth costs, not to mention data center/cloud costs, for the constant stream of apps being deployed/updated is pretty significant.

I could expect them to be moving multiple terabytes of data per hour.

Its nothing compared to the piratebay.

Hosting torrents takes minimal bandwidth. Apple can’t offload bandwidth peer to peer to phones when people are on limited cellular plans.

Interesting plot twist you have there. No one at Apple ever actually said that of course but if it was true the distribution was made more expensive by preventing the use of apps on desktop computers.

However, anyone can seed from any system and that lots of people have unlimited plans and/or good wifi.

You could have a static store app with the phone manufacturer providing a feed with names, descriptions, pictures and checksums. Everything else could be distributed over a p2p network. Unpopular apps could be slow to download with the developers server having to patch holes to keep the file alive. Popular apps would have usable numbers to hint at their popularity.

Most apps need internet anyway. (Billing wouldn't be a problem.) I see a thousand pages arguing hosting for an app costs between 70 and 320 per month. I have no idea how true that is or how far apps can live from the average.

It does seem logical to assume with a reasonably smart distribution scheme p2p could also reduce that bill for somewhat more dynamic content.

I'm really impressed by how many useful and fun mobile apps were created. In the 90's I thought nothing was worth using on a mobile device. I was very wrong about that.

I now think it is equally wrong to think the 30% is not dramatically reducing interest in mobile development. Personally I wouldn't touch it with a 6 foot pole. I do web apps that are like websites, they have very limited access to the features of the device.

While I applaud these new regulations it is kinda lame it took them this long.

Remember the uproar when Apple wanted to decentralize CSAM detection?

Imagine how loud the screams would be if they tried to decentralize app distribution.

Edit: Yep, I misread this

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