Apple blocks Coinbase Wallet
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So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."
-Steve Jobs
MacOS on Apple Silicon for an extremely long time (maybe it's solved now? 2 years later?) which caused incredibly glitchy, almost unusable cursor movement if you let your battery drain to 0%, then plugged it back in and woke it from hibernate.
Screen Time in macOS is unbelievably, ludicrously, fully broken. Nothing about it works almost at all. Metrics for children don't show up. Web filtering falls open after a few hours at random (presumably because the background services crash). The "site not allowed" page predates HTML5 and randomly doesn't work. You can't block built-in apps like Apple News, the best you can do is set a 1-minute time limit. Tons of IP Addresses and Apple phone-home addresses get blocked on the "allowed sites only" mode resulting in constant popups. I had to pay for Qustodio because it's just useless. Also, it has elementary bugs that are horrifying. For example, the pane where you add allowed websites doesn't remember websites you just added when you dismiss it - so if you open the pane again without a reboot, and add another site, it forgets the one you added last time you opened the pane.
However janky other things might be on macOS, Screen Time with "Allowed Sites Only" is by far the most broken thing on macOS, bar none. Try using it with your younger children and rage in frustration as it crashes-open silently and allows Private Browsing with no filtering after a few hours.
sudo dscacheutil -flushcache;sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder
Argh. I hate it when this happens. It's infuriating that this hasn't been fixed yet.
I actually just found one that has me scratching my head...
If I plug a USB-C -> Ethernet adapter in to my M1 MBP on OSX Ventura...it brings down the entire network.
Just ethernet + adapter + power is fine, plug it into the laptop, entire network dies.
All wired devices on the network (except for an AP strangely enough) drop all connections and can't get DNS responses.
I haven't had the time to dig in further than that yet though.
Someone did reply with this link[0], which may be the same or similar to what I'm experiencing just a different scenario.
[0]: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/05/11/usb-c-hubs-breaking-ether...
Turned out that it happened when one specific USB-C dongle with ethernet and PD was left powered on but not connected to the computer (I think there were other preconditions as well like it was powered-off and you connect power to it but not a computer to it). The device will then decide to go into DHCP server mode and start sending advertisement packets and the switch would start broadcasting them, the internal firewall would see this and start blocking the switch and in turn turn off the AP that was connected to it so 26 ports would be offline essentially. Most of us were on wifi and everyone who was on an ethernet (3 ppl) would go "FFS internet is unstable again. Stupid switch is probably buggy", disconnect their cable and go on wifi. Plus they never really reported it as they had work to do and Wifi kinda worked so not a big issue.
It was just a really cool moment when we found out what caused it and we fired up Wireshark and looked at the traffic and we were right. I haven't had a moment of so much joy in a really long time.
Still trying to determine why and when though, as this adapter used to be fine.
[0]: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/insignia-7-port-type-c-hub-with...
I would argue the opposite.
Their software has historically been terrible.
OG iTunes ranks at the top of the worst pieces of software I've ever used - rendered the iPod almost useless for me.
Their software is still unimpressive, but I'd argue it's trending in the right direction.
The App Store is functional. Safari is not terrible. Their email client is fine. The Apple TV UI is pretty snazzy, etc.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/11/19/apple-podcasts-app-store-rati...
Music App sometimes breaks. It just doesn't play certain sections of some songs, even on replay, closing the app doesn't help; a device reboot is required to play songs in their entirety. And this happens on both devices that are connected via hardwire as well as wifi/LTE.
Considering Apple's revenue it is ridiculous how long bugs persist in their applications.
I actually have a whole laundry list of things I consider regressions in the Music app, but I'll just regale you with the most frustrating one for my use case:
If you use Home Sharing with wired headphones, it works. If you use wireless headphones with a local music library, it works. If you use wireless headphones and Home Sharing, it does not work. The program refuses to play anything. This was a nice surprise when I first tried to use Music after getting this laptop.
(I'm actually really curious if anybody else experiences this behavior -- anybody reading please chime in if so!)
Once they saw they could make money selling music, they started focusing on that and pushing that POS down your throat. Then when they finally realized they could sell apps on iPhones, that's where the focus went. The OS has stagnated since then, IMO. Their bread and butter has been selling apps, music and cloud storage, and it's clear (IMO) that's where all the actual development focus has gone.
Also the e-mail client is trash. It is supposed to support MS Exchange, and my co-workers and I used to use it at work just fine with OS 10.14. It was an awesome replacement for shitty Outlook. Once 10.15 came out, it would quit syncing, freeze up, stop sending email, etc. This was not just once in a while, it would literally quit working almost immediately. I was forced back into Outlook again. It felt like they never tested it with Office 365 even once. But of course, their own e-mail services work fine with it.
...iTunes was originally released with MacOS 9. It predates the public release of Mac OS X.
It abso-fucking-lutely is terrible
The second example is, I think, a perfect example of what most large companies do, which is to neglect specific features in favor of others. People want to work on the "new hotness" rather than maintain something written 10 years ago by a team that no longer exists.
I don't think either suggests that Apple software is getting worse as a whole. The simple fact that they rolled out an entirely new architecture and it's worked pretty flawlessly (except for some fraction of people when the battery drains to 0 and it hibernates and needs a restart) suggests to me that they aren't just resting and pulling in money based on their monopoly status (which they don't even have in any industry).
True... but this one has caught me, over and over, and it makes me paranoid of a low battery. Before I just had a lazy habit of not getting off the couch until the battery actually died from 0%. Now I panic the moment it turns red, because the cursor bug quickly makes working miserable and requires a restart for my sanity.
> I don't think either suggests that Apple software is getting worse as a whole.
To me, it suggests they are letting more surface-level bugs get a pass than previously. Before, they might have had poorly designed software once in a while, but not things this basic and easily discoverable.
You should try windows...
But 2 years of this bug was embarrassing.
The first real shit app was iTunes. And ever since then, the OS has just stagnated while they put more software in to sell music, apps, and cloud storage.
Which is why I speculate that overall, it might not be better. You had to wait a couple years to get the fixes. Now they probably ship the fixes and new features on a more regular basis.
One thing that really annoys me that I don't remember from High Sierra is this weird "overbounce"/"overscroll" functionality. This drives me absolutely nuts! Preview does this for example, and actually so does Firefox (but you can disable it there).
If you open up a PDF in Preview, set the zoom so that a full page width is entirely within view (i.e. no scrolling needed), then scroll a bit to the side anyway, you'll see what I'm talking about. The viewport moves even though the full page width is in view. I've found that this triggers even when I'm trying to scroll down, resulting in a weird, glitchy scroll feel.
I feel like I should temper the bad with the good a bit though. For example I have not had Bluetooth fail randomly with this new computer, whereas it failed quite a lot on my last one -- often requiring a reboot to fix.
They all miss the point. The problem with Apple in it's relentless mission of maximising vertical integration, is that you are forced to align with their decisions at every single level, whether it's technical, social or political. "Cult" doesn't do it justice, Apple is has gone far beyond this.
Most other proprietary tech is not like this because the pieces are smaller with some reasonable degree of either interchangeability or combinability. Apple isn't neutral technology it's some kind of political entity. When you sign up, you are handing over all control, which is fine until they do something you don't like at which point your only choice is abandon the entire thing or accept it - I don't give a crap about NFTs, but I give a crap about some things, and I don't want to be part of an ecosystem where I can be pushed around. I don't blame the people who are stuck in it, it's hard to exit something that can define a lot about how you work with technology, they are essentially the victim of a big bully with a very difficult to stomach exit strategy.
No seriously, I'm baffled. How was this released?
Nothing like the trifecta of ipod/itunes/iphone under Steve.
At what? Price? Performance? Gaming? I/O?
If you know a product that does, please let me know so I can buy one and run Linux on it :).
You could upgrade the ram on the 16" versions though which is nice. Although this is still not something I have ever done on a laptop. The new Macbooks now have easily replaceable batteries which is a welcome change.
I run two monitors off my M1 mbp - works for me
Lucky you. It works horribly for me - any time the screen is locked (corporate policy locks it after a certain period of inactivity) the OS forgets all about the external screens.
When I unlock the machine, all my windows are on the internal screen.
There's a setting somewhere along the lines of "each display is an individual workspace" that "fixes" the issue by making each screen an independent workspace, which still won't remember where the windows are.
I have a Dell monitor with a mouse connected to it. I can connect my Linux laptop with a single USB3 for monitor, mouse and power. The MacBook does the same.
- It randomly disconnects bluetooth for 30-40s. Especially annoying during calls. When your headset & keyboard stop working and you don't have a way of make anyone know.
- The processor goes full throttle out of blue. Makes my fan go 100% for good 5-10 minutes.
- From time to time it refuses to wake up my monitor and I need to force shut down it.
For the iPad it’s obvious, for the mac:
- third party OS support non existent (Asahi linux is good, but nowhere near completion), no dual-boot for windows anymore
- unix compatibily has fallen behind with the Apple Silicon move
- GPU capabilities unavailable for existing windows/Linux frameworks (gaming and ML impacted)
- kernel extensions getting deprecated impacts many hacks that were QOL improvements
- no touchscreen (you may want it or not, but arguably it has potential for use)
- no flip screen (goes hand in hand with the touchscreen)
They could solve these in the near future, and none of these are individually deal breakers, but cumulatively these are enough limitations that a worse hardware platform coming with better software becomes a viable choice in many cases.
Personally I’m planning moving away to probably a Chromebook + linux or windows laptop when my current setup finally dies.
I didn’t believe the hype until I got one at work and it just had… zero jankiness. And it is as good as the day I got it
I miss ssh clients that don't Philip K Dick me. I miss syncthing. I miss being able to use non-Apple services to sync my photos. I miss being able to run any apps I want from the web without identifying myself to a vendor. I miss NewPipe and I miss background apps and I miss basic local mp3 players that don't report what I play to remote parties against my will.
WinMo was SO AWFUL, man.
re: SSH clients, what does "PKD me" mean? Have you tried Blink?
1. install xcode, which requires apple id, which your company might not support
Or
2. Side load git, which your company's security policy might prohibit?
Also, pretty sure effectively all chocolate benefits from child labor because of where cocoa trees are located.
Is there any list of ethically sourced chocolate brands? The world is becoming stupid place to live with all these monopolies :(
https://www.statista.com/statistics/263855/cocoa-bean-produc...
Same with mining for materials for electronics, as well as refining and manufacturing of them effectively happening in one country.
When nobody's looking I've been known to enjoy a Hot Pocket or two, though... I can feel my dignity slipping through my fingers as I type this.
The hardware it's running on?
I don't see an issue. If users have a concern, they can use another platform.
ETA: it does seem to be the kind of thing that the market will sort out... If apple is going to build a reputation for being hostile to use as a crypto transaction platform, then Android is just a quick trip to the nearest Best Buy away.
> If users have a concern, they can use another platform.
They can't. Apple locks the bootloader even after purchasing/unlocking the device. It would be nice if we could though!
> it does seem to be the kind of thing that the market will sort out...
No, I think the arbitrary limitation of what you can execute on hardware you purchased will be a bit more of a sticking point than that. At least when we're addressing the single largest corporation in modern American history, Europe seems to agree with me.
They do it because it allows them to capture the revenue for use of their computing appliances and it saves them every headache of having to provide customer support for hardware they sell that isn't running an operating system they wrote.
Serving your use case isn't what they make computers for. Google does though. I recommend switching platforms.
I can run Doom on a refrigerator but it's still a refrigerator. Apple makes computing appliances.
Me personally? I might just let it happen (especially if it goes hand-in-glove with some other benefit, like lower cost). Or if it's too annoying I'll switch refrigerators.
> Having multiple choices benefits everyone and forces the OEM to not make bone-headed moves
That's the business model of the alternatives to Apple. Apple's business model is value delivered through vertical integration. For their end-users, they're building a better product because they own and control the hardware, OS, and software ecosystem.
It's Nintendo-Seal-of-Approval thinking, and it's not inherently wrong so long as there are alternatives (and there are many, just none that have a supported path to using Apple's hardware).
> You're arguing that Apple shouldn't do good things because... Apple doesn't care?
I don't think Apple sees opening the bootloader as a good thing. It increases the ways the machine can be in a broken state with the only benefit to people tech-savvy enough to just use other hardware. And, of course, from a pure-business standpoint, it might kick a leg out from under the money-made-through-vertical-integration stool, which is of concern to them.
You think that having to switch a working major appliance for another because of a post-purchase update by the manufacturer is an acceptable cost for consumers to have to take on? I assume this is because you think the free market forces always end up optimal in the end somehow, and that regulation will cause more harm than good?
People buy into Apple for a certain security that the company does its best to vet the store contents. Stepping on their ability to do that diminishes the product value for the intended consumer.
I want this lock-in because THAT is what I want. THAT is what I bought and THAT is why I went Apple and not Android.
If someone asks me what phone to get I say iPhone most of the time because I know their needs and that they don't want to deal with headaches. If they need more stuff I'd recommend either G Pixel or Fairphone but they I tell them to do the research.
Well, there are other options.
Other options, such as how the EU is going to force Apple under threat of government force to make changes.
Anti trust laws have existed for a century now. We can make new ones, or use those existing uncontroversial laws to apply to the newer tech monopolies.
If Apple doesn't like it's then they can stop selling their product in every country where this is the law. (So that includes the entire EU, and hopefully the USA soon, as there are laws in Congress being considered right now).
So I can see how the EU might see a way towards saying "Your ownership of the vertical stack makes you a market-maker and market-caller on a very lucrative app market; you bear some responsibility to making that market fair and competitive." This is the same kind of thinking that caused France to crack down on Amazon offering discounts on books that undercut local booksellers because they could collapse the booksellers' guild (even though Amazon's shipping integration means they actually can afford to charge so little).
But in the US, the first hurdle such a case has to cross[1] is "Why doesn't the user and app maker just go to Android if Apple's so bad?" Which, indeed, is the question I'm asking myself here; Coinbase could just jump ship and offer their app only on Android, and then, hey, the Android ecosystem is slightly better than their competition.
[1] ... unless the law changes, of course, as you've observed. I can imagine something coming out of the John Deere tractor "right to repair" angle, though I haven't been following this space.
There are other hardware manufacturers than Apple?
With the same argument you can say - open access to every device which will diminish a lot of the security by increasing the attack vector.
Why isn't my TV open or my Xbox or my PS? Why can't I edit the code of Windows is not such a stretch based on your arguments?
Also why should companies be forced to open stuff? They market it as a closed system - maybe respect the consumers who like closed systems. There are options for you - it's other vendors. So you have a choice. But even if you didn't there is no reason or expectation you should have a choice if the market doesn't want to cater.
One possible solution is for apple and other manufacturers to be forced to sell developer devices where the restrictions are minimal or non-existent. That I think will solve your quarrel.
There was a documentary that showed the price of a chicken sold in a store and how much the chicken farmer makes vs the retail price and I can’t say the situation is wildly out of tune with retail or the big SAP/ERP consulting
That said, Apple's monopolistic practices create a ripe oppty for Android to own web3's watershed moment
But it's ok because you have the option of building your own store on your own island and convincing enough people to relocate to your island to buy chicken direct.
(F-Droid is right there. It's relatively trivial to install on an Android device. As is, last I checked, replacing the whole Android OS).
Libertarianism is like the tide on hackernews, it's quite confusing
I think we are both pushing the metaphor beyond usefulness
It's more like Apple demanding a cut of your call charges.
But it's just capitalism. I'm not going to take the phone out of the hands of those for whom the answer is "Yes."
Didn't apple ban that game company because of showing an itemised bill to customers, showing how much apple was getting at every purchase?
But devil's advocate - It's agains apple's Dev ToS and I don't get an itemised bill showing me a breakdown of how much Visa or MS charge me when making other payments.
I want to know the name of the company to see if they do the same when I make a purchase with a debit card.
We need something to break this duopoly mobile market otherwise it is always gonna be problematic.
Agreed on breaking duopoly though. I'm pretty hopeful about Linux on mobile these days, there's some pretty big developments lately.
Fixed :')
I have made a choice to use apple because I know all purchases for digital products go through iAP so my card details are never passed to the developer in any way. It makes me sleep better at night. I don't want other options.
I don't want to be offered the choice with 28-27% discount because it will make me share my creds (we know most ppl will choose the cheeper option and I admit I will do so as well from time to time).
I don't need the additional cognitive overhead because some developers are unhappy they have signed up to terms they don't like.
Honestly everyone that complains about the 30% so far hasn't given me a good reason other than greed. It's not a better UX, it's not a more secure option, it's not in my best interest (except the argument it will be cheaper but we all know that if possible most if not all companies will just pocket the 28-27%), it's not respectful of my choice of OS (again my reason is that I WANT the iAP as the only option).
"Apple makes some good products but is evil" is valid criticism of Apple, which shepherdjerred hasn't disagreed with. "Apple is making bad products these days because they are lead by marketing and sales people" isn't valid criticism of Apple (in shepherdjerred's, and my, opinion).
Apple is at a scale where pithy Steve Jobs quotes don't aptly describe their relationship with the economy or world governments. We cannot trust them to do the right thing, so our best hope for turning them around is holding them accountable for the things we want.
Can you be more specific of the proofs you are talking about? I've been using Mac for 20 years and haven't noticed issues that indicate a declining trend.
As the GP mentioned there have been great products that Apple introduced in the last few years. So your evidence is wrong, or at most inconclusive, to show that marketing and sales people have taken over at Apple, resulting in worsening products and services.
> but much like Nestle they refuse to heed our warning until it's too late.
The fact is Apple has continued to grow phenomenally in the last decade. They may indeed head to a decline, but I can't see evidence of that. Can you? Are you confident that you can see the future where others can't?
They dropped support for every graphics APIs except their own. They launched a greenwashing campaign that is always out of stock of parts, updates are mandatory regularly regress performance on old hardware, and we all know you're paying an apple premium for the same performance as something 60-70% the price.
They used to define good build quality, but most laptops are pretty sturdy these days.
I know this is a little weird, and I have never talked to another person with this problem, but all of the cheap plastic ones, strangely textured ones, smooth-yet-somehow-massively-friction ones all make my skin hurt. The Apple one doesn't for whatever reason.
I think I had a Gateway laptop a long time ago that also didn't heat my fingers to temperatures comparable to the surface of the sun or cause me pain to use. Like a really long time ago.
I go to the local store and try out track pads every so often (like once per year maybe?), and they are all just shit. That's enough to keep me buying Macbooks for now.
Like I said, this is a weird issue that I have never known anyone else to have, but it is a pretty critical one for me.
Also, I just want to point out, that I only mean the materials of the track pad itself, not the drivers or anything. I have no complaints about e.g. Linux track pad drivers. I put Fedora on my wife's Surface Pro 8, and the track pad drivers there are fine, for example.
For example on you phone you will get a red alert in settings … when you click it … says Try apple music for 3 months .. or will say setup apple pay … or sometimes say sign in with icloud. (even after declining multiple times)
These are just ads disguised as systems alerts … hurts the experience and comes off as cheap.
Also on Apple Computers and Phones alike it keeps asking to sign in and use icloud. But then gives you only 5gigs of space … not enough to even backup your phone and then tries to upsell a monthly fee for expanded storage.
The software is designed to confuse users into purchasing when simply taking photos. New iphone with 64 gigs of storage 40 gigs free …. user gets message they are out of space in icloud and can purchase more space. They are quite aware that many users are not savy enough to know they don’t need to use icloud at all with photos or anything. Every time you update the phone it prompts you to “sign in” or “create and account”. Again comes off as cheap and pushy.
I can go on and on but money crunchers are definitely at the table with software these days.
Crypto carbon footprint is mind-boggling, estimates are 200 million tonnes of CO2 since the launch, not including the CO2 emitted to manufacture the hardware.
Coinbase, that popularised all that mining to the general public should be considered as evil as other large CO2 emitters. And worse, all of these carbon emissions are for nothing, crypto seem only to be contributing to more exchanges crashes, fraud, money laundering and crime. With nothing to show on the positive side.
https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption
Nor do I agree with your assessment of banning Bitcoin because its power usage doesn’t match what we would like. I assume we all somewhat believe in the free market and the free market is solving this problem. Bitcoin price appreciation has been anemic at best and is only about 2% over the SP500 (+54%) in the past five years. Ethereum is quite a different story. +177%. Innovation is working.
How much power and materials are wasted when Apple releases incremental changes with a new number each year to resell the same thing to materialistic buyers annually? Should they ban themselves for the greater good of the planet? I’d say so.
https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/apples-colossal-e-w...
>Assuming the ecosystem was made up entirely of iPhones, an iPhone, on average, weighs 150g and are 130mm long. This means that you're looking at a pile of iPhones weighing 250,000 metric tons (the Empire State Building weighs in at roughly 330,000 metric tons), and if laid end-to-end would circle the Earth more than five times.
And that’s just the e-waste. How much energy went into making them, how many dollars were wasted paying salaries and gas etc.?
You can read Apple’s environmental report. And read the recent publications that analyse the environmental impact of crypto. And one of the biggest moves that Apple and Google can do as companies, to lessen the environmental impact is actually banning bitcoins and crypto.
As someone who cares about the environment, I advocate for it. I don’t have any investments to Apple or Google or Bitcoins. Please, disclose any crypto investments, should you advocate for these.
data centers providing Netflix streaming services would consume around 370 TWh per year (Kamiya 2020) [1]
While BTC uses 87 TWh. [2]
1. https://blogs.salleurl.edu/en/energy-consumption-data-center....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting#Environment...
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/04/apple-expands-the-use...
What are the positives of crypto? I haven’t noticed any for 10 years it had been around. Only exchange crashes and hacks like MtGox, Fed investigators having to fight Silk Road and the crazy near-fraud exuberance of FTX and alike.
In OSes.. Windows, Android, Linux GUI are all jankier. Apple Music’s closest competitors are all electron-based resource hogs? Safari is still the best mobile browser
Ha. https://caniuse.com/?compare=ios_saf+16.1&compareCats=all#re...
Fortunately nowadays I don't need to support this browser anymore on my new company.
I think it only appears that way on an iPhone. I've long believed that there are extremely subtle problems with Chrome and Firefox on iPhone devices that somehow magically don't appear on their Safari browser. Slow scrolling, strange micro lag... somehow on Safari it's better. Yet on my Android phones Chrome and Firefox work smoothly with no issues whatsoever. Also Safari objectively lacks browser features.
And I'd say Firefox for Android has Safari for iOS beat by mile. I can use add-ons like Ublock Origin and no script, plus stuff like background video fixer to play YouTube videos in the background. And I can't think of a single thing it lacks over Safari.
That being said FF has made some stupid decisions - like the lack of homepage on Android. Like... WAT?!?!
In some cases software quality suffers not because of the inherent complexity but because it's changed for the sake of change.
One example is the Books app that was updated in iOS 16. The update brought some new features but also changed the UI/UX for no reason, making it unpleasant to use. There's no dearth of similar examples with Google's apps too.
I don't really mind having switched to an iPhone when I got one provided because for all the discussion, ios and Android are nearly identical but I miss both Chrome and especially Firefox. Android Firefox has actual uBlock. The experience is miles better than Safari.
This is a premium phone at a premium price paired up with a range of premium-priced accessories. I know I get more than the value out of these devices than I’m putting in but damn does it feel like Apple isn’t just double-dipping, they’re like quadruple-dipping at least.
There’s the money I paid, there’s the money I pay to Apple for services that I do actually want, which, fair, some things have an upkeep cost, there’s the money I pay to 3rd party developers which Apple takes a cut of, and then there’s the money they’re charging developers to put ads in my face when I do open the App Store. There is such a thing as a value-add, and your example of the 5GB iCloud storage? The fact that this is the base level no matter what model phone you purchase just feels downright cheap, and that’s theoretically shared with a Mac or an iPad or both. Actually gutter-dwelling penny-pinching coupon-clipping lentil-dieting cheap.
They have other product lines with more than enough room to grow in the market, but they have to hunger for it, like they did from 1998 to 2008 with the Mac, and 2007 through the current day with the iPhone. Almost anything Apple puts out will sell in quantity as long as it doesn’t have exactly a voice-controlled UI, and while Microsoft and Intel are busy shitting the Wintel bed Apple is putting out top-tier high margin computer hardware with obvious gaps on the low-end, the middle and the ultra high-end and the thing keeping Apple from fully capitalizing on that is they’re shitting the bed with their own OS and tunneled in on nickel-and-diming their existing install base.
The global music industry was $26B in 2021: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-60837880
The global movie industry in 2021 was $90.2B: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/movies-e...
The global TV industry in 2021 was $259.16B: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/televisi...
Grand total: $375.36B
Apple’s revenue in 2021 was $394.3B, and some portion of that is already accounted for in the Music, Movies and Television revenue for 2021 but if they really want to grow, then they need to go back to their roots: hardware running software of quality. Services will only be a segment and most of their “services” revenue depends substantially on the size of their hardware’s install base. They can still offer those, but if you build good products, the profit will follow. Apple was the one that built their business on that philosophy.
Either that or become a bank.
Appleonia and Facebookistan. Even though the latter may turn out to be just a parking lot with a MCDondalds
This is the real question: How is Apple going to fill the gaps you see in the low end PC market, where there are very small profits to be found, without cannibalising it's own high end profit margins?
For the wintel PC makers market share is all that matters because they are all trapped in the commodity sector, so volume is the only way to grow profits. Apple isn't, it's a premium brand, so the economics it lives by are completely different. Analysts have been getting this wrong about Apple for decades, in fact pretty much my entire adult life, and I'm in my 50s.
Commodity companies can afford to stagnate their products, Cocacola makes the same sugar water they did before I was born. Premium product companies cannot afford to do that, they have to constantly invest in renewing and updating their products. Apple has been doing that for almost their entire existence (modulo a period of stagnation in the 90s when the execs didn't understand their own business).
On the software side I don't really agree, yes they have quality issues, but so does all software and they have incredibly complex stacks these days. They're constantly pushing forward with new software features, that's part of the problem, new features means new bugs.
Only if you don't invest in testing - and Apple sadly has fallen to the trap of "bananaware" (ripens at the customer) as well as everyone else. "We ship it once it is good quality" has been replaced by "we ship it as soon as it can survive the presentation at WWDC and fix the bugs later on". For commodity manufacturers this can be excused by low profit margins (even though I don't like it), but Apple could literally double their developer headcount and they wouldn't feel it in their bottom line.
For PiP videos I have to play, lock the phone then press on play and then it might either continue the background video or play music from my library which I never really use.
The other day my iPhone would just reload and I still have no idea why? Did it run out of memory? Screen would freeze and it would stop on a black screen and then reload.
I don't remember these bugs from when I used to use an iPhone, but maybe I just didn't pay attention to them. When I travel and use a travel SIM it keeps asking me to switch everything to the new SIM. Default calls, iCloud, default messages. I say no to all of them but it still switches some of them.
Using apps from two different countries is a nightmare as well.
I do appreciate the speed of this device but ALL of these things are non-issues on Android. Something is off IMHO
Not sure what's going on with the music. I sometimes have it play random Apple Music when first connecting to CarPlay. Outside of that itt fairly reliably removes music when paused from the lock screen after a few minutes which honestly can be annoying, but keeping it on there forever isn't great either.
Their point about restarts does feel like a defect though.
And the problem is that Apple was considerably undersizing the battery compared to rivals and then compensating by throttling the CPU once it aged.
That said, I've had two trusted Apple Premium Partners that I would go to when I was still an Apple user and they were an absolute delight. Unfortunately back then I was living in a major city in Germany with tons of Premium partners, so nowadays that I don't really have a homebase and only have an iPhone I don't really know where to go for competent support.
My new problem is with Apple TV and the Dynamic Island. Now by default when I walk into a room where my wife is watching TV, the phone will pick up the proximity and show me the remote as a live activity (Which is great, usually.) Then I use my phone for something and have no sound as my volume is down and the buttons aren't responding at all (seemingly.) It turns out if ATV is in the dynamic island, your hardware volume buttons now exclusively control the TV volume, and the only way to change the phone volume is to go into control center and swipe around.
I think News looks at what you choose and offers more of the same.
I don't have specific examples, I'm just going off the several times in the past year where I've seen a news story covered in five different ways, then I see an incredibly slanted headline notification from apple news that is woefully inaccurate.
Also, Fox is just the other side of the same coin- left or right wing, when it matters, Fox is no different from CNN. It's all fake garbage. Just wait until you're belief systems or personal experiences don't exist within the mainstream collection of proffered views, and you'll see how fake all of it is.
iAd came before that - but it had a goal of benefiting everyone - users, developers and advertisers. "High quality" ads, privacy focused targeting, developers get a cut and as a result they remove other more invasive ad networks. Unfortunately it didn't work out, and with Tim Cook now at the helm the numbers for search ads spoke a little more loudly than before.
1) advertising does not belong in Settings
2) notifications - especially system notifications - should not be abused for pushing ads
With regard to iCloud - 5 gigs is stingy compared to Google drive etc., but it's more than enough for the most essential parts: iCloud keychain, continuity, and storage for non-media apps like contacts/calendar/reminders (if you use them). The part I object to is using the OS for advertising.
I pay the $0.99/mo for extra storage but every time I do it, I wince a little and it costs them literally pennies to avoid giving me a bad taste in my mouth. I wish there was a way to self-host iCloud backups.
iCloud backups of device backups requires a Mac, then setting to sync via Wi-Fi.
No more macs and iphones for me, that and the app "numbers" have been the very last straws.
I'm of the opinion that nobody makes a really nice user experience. My #1 complaint on every platform, website, device, OS, and software can be summed up as "Stop doing what you're doing, and do what I want." Computers and software should be tools that serve the user. They need to know their place!
>These are just ads disguised as systems alerts … hurts the experience and comes off as cheap.
Devil's advocate: I think a lot of users are idiots. Anyone who's been in software for a while will discover this: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*zffZ0ysfR4BokVvSxo...
I think you're not wrong that they're disguising these ads as alerts. But if it helps the user who doesn't care, or more importantly - doesn't understand - backup their photos for when they drop their phone in the lake will be better off, and overall happier with the whole experience. Save someone's irreplaceable photos one single time and you'll likely have a customer for life. Apple is very good at this kind of thing. People make fun of apple fans as idiots, but... it's hard to argue apple doesn't know their customers.
The ads are super irritating, I can't believe a phone by the company that supposedly cares about user experience is pushing a fucking credit card offer. But that really shouldn't be surprising, considering...
After the casino ads took over the App Store, it became apparent that they're just bullshitting about safety and trustworthy computing. Because why not, if you care about those things, where are you going to go, Android?
Today's Apple is a mercenary bucket of quarterly-reporting driven MBAs. Any brand loyalty or trust I used to feel is gone. I stay logged out of Icloud, because if I don't, things keep uploading... stuff... to them, which absolutely should not happen, but does.
So, Apple is qualitatively no better than MSFT at this point, worse in some ways. At least Redmond does't affect a smirky superior shithead attitude in their software.
Hopefully they’re at least vetting the casino apps. The only thing worse than shady casino ads are ads for shady casinos.
I agree but Apple had lot of software issues when Jobs was CEO. Software can get incredibly complex and subjective to the user using it.
The ReactJS type is doing fancy thin gs on screens and does it for the money and for all sorts of places. The APFS builders are more likely to be passionate and look for specific work. But 30 years ago the ReactJS types would be working for corporations using VB but the system programmers would be doing similar to now.
System programmers have always been rare and I suspectr less motivated by money more by having interesting work that affects many people.
- They removed iPhone sync from Music (nee iTunes), which makes sense, but the replacement in Finder doesn't support directories in file transfer. It shows them, you cannot expand them, placing files in a directory is possible and results in the files becoming inaccessible. Doubly stupid that the working file sync was in the Music app and not in the file management app.
- AirDrop on macOS just hangs all the time. I am completely unable to send files from my laptop and the interface is just a beach ball.
It really gives me hope that Apple is letting Linux play catch-up; I'd love to see a Linux experience that targeted the low-level usability of macOS 10! I'm talking OS-wide support for bundles, proxy icons, unified notifications interface... The target isn't moving any more, so it's reachable.
Also, apple tries to lock with hardware so might, I find it too much frustrating. For example copy paste feature from iphone and mac os won't work if we don't login. And, 2fa is compulsory
Apple hardware is top notch but software is ewwww...
Macbooks no longer can run Windows and don't quite run Linux yet (the two largest OSes in the world, and Linux On The Desktop(tm) is a bigger market share than OSX), iPhones still can't run Android after all these years (the majority phone OS), and Apple Watches suffer the issues all the smart watches have (no real good use case, battery lives of a day or less, violates "zero distraction" ethical concerns, sensors are fulltime uploaded to the cloud and there are no good Federal controls on personal data in the US, etc).
I see no reason to ever buy Apple until they actually catch up to the rest of the world. Apple is a cult, and a very expensive one to buy into.
The only people I know that own iPhones IRL are older people who aren't tech savvy (and all of them admit they don't know how to use their phone, and only make phone calls, text messages, and Facebook shit with it); I don't know a single Gen X, Millennial, or Gen Z (in or outside of the tech industry, in or outside of the US) with one.
If Android is "not suitable for real world usage", then no phone is.
Where do you live? Overwhelming majority of tech people I know in the US and UK use MacBooks and iPhones. That’s academia, systems programming, web services. Very very rarely see anyone using anything but macOS.
Most of the tech people I know have long since dropped Apple because of death by a thousand cuts. If you would have asked me even 5 years ago, I would have said half of them still belong to the cult of Mac, but not anymore; the only ones remaining are non-tech older folk.
A lot of HN's userbase lives in the silicon valley and the SF area, so maybe this is just a rather narrow focused regional thing? I only ever hear of cult members living in either the valley or SF, or alternatively, in Seattle, hardly anywhere else.
The reality is most people with a phone use an iPhone. Any tech or academic conference I go to, most people are using MacBooks.
Are you sure you aren't just confusing all the milled aluminum laptops with Macs, and all the black glass slabs with iPhones? I've even had someone confuse my OnePlus as an iPhone (until I showed them that I didn't have that giant ugly notch that iPhones have; apparently running Android wasn't a big enough hint to them).
No it’s literally over 50% iPhone.
https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/us-smartphone-market-share
https://hypebeast.com/2022/9/apple-iphone-overtakes-androids...
https://www.engadget.com/iphone-overtakes-android-us-market-...
See?
I don't know how they qualify those results; they don't publish anything resembling scientific work. Like, how do they counter-balance that Android users need to replace their phones less often? Apple users usually buy the new phone every gen, instead of every 3rd or 4th gen (Apple screens and batteries tend to die quickly); so, it seems active Apple users should be 1/3rd or 1/4th of active devices, not half.
Sales in of themselves don't mean much if you're comparing Apples to oranges (ahem) with a disposable phone vs one that isn't.
This is unsubstantiated nonsense. The resale values of iPhones are indisputable evidence that you are full of it.
Your comments in this thread are beyond stupid. Everything you’ve said is the opposite of true.
That is not true. In fact the opposite is true. The average iPhone will last longer than the average Android phone.
https://valorvortech.com/how-long-can-a-smartphone-last/
You are also saying on one hand that most iPhones are purchased by older non tech-savvy people while at the same time claiming that those same people buy a new phone every generation. That is hard to believe.
*what?*
How does that change if the majority is small or large? Like 1% or 10% what difference do you think that makes?
Does it have Excel with macros?
Windows games and Steam games? Some. See https://applesilicongames.com
App Store games, including iPad games? Lots of them.
Apple Arcade? Check, some 200+ curated games including some interesting exclusives like Fantasian.
Game streaming services? Yep.
Remote play from Steam/Xbox/PlayStation/etc.? Yep.
> Does it have Excel with macros?
Yes, it does. You might be surprised to learn that the first release of Excel was for the Macintosh in 1985. A Windows version was released in 1987.
from personal experiance the mouse movement in almost any game on my m1-pro before i sold it was borked, and even 'native' games that were supposed to work didn't feel good at all
tabbing out of counter-strike go usually froze my macbook requiring a restart
the ergonomics of the laptops are generally also poor (keyboard is flat, glossy screen, limited angle on the screen hinge so it requires serious hunching )
Some of the games I play on Mac: Slay the Spire, Civ 6, Through the Ages, Nova Drift, Wizard of Legend and quite a few visual novels/text based games.
Hmmm, I would call most of them indies.
Can you confirm this change? It must have been in last few years.
Macs had Excel for a long time, but in the past it was a simplified, toy version of the program not suitable for real work.
I mostly play strategy games like Civilization and Stellaris. Sometimes Factorio and League of Legends.
I replaced my gaming desktop with the $700 entry-level Mac Mini that came out in 2020; it had the same hardware as a MacBook, just a different form factor. It worked well. I wasn't playing at high graphics, but games worked well. I went back to my full desktop after a few months because I wanted better graphics.
My Mac Mini only had 8 graphics cores on the base M1 with 8GB of RAM. If you bought one of the newer M series devices I think you'd have a pretty good experience if gaming isn't your top priority.
> Does it have Excel with macros?
Didn't Microsoft do a full port of Excel in the last year or two?
iPhone is everything that I expected Android to be, but has failed to become. As the smartphone market has matured, iPhone and Android are essentially at parity in functionality.
Android is completely fragmented and isolated. Every brand is pushing their slightly broken version of their integration. Everything is buried behind clicks/apps/configurations. I've been amazed at how well my various Apple devices integrate and how well they optimize for the flows that I care about most.
For example, using the AndroidTV remote requires closing your current app, pulling up the app launcher, scrolling to AndroidTV, waiting for the app to load, waiting for the app to find devices, pick a target device, wait for the device to load, try to use a half-assed AndroidTV app. Switch back to whatever app you were using before.
By contrast, iPhone places it in the command center. Pull down from anywhere, click the remote-icon, boom, control your TV. Doesn't even mess with your current app.
It's exactly the same on Android - pull down the notifications shade and click on the TV remote icon.
Outside the US it's far more common to see Android phones and PCs. If you make 1k per month, buying a 1500$ phone makes less sense.
Don't get me wrong, I love my Air, but my big Windows laptop can do different thing. For music Logic alone is worth buying a cheaper Mac. But good luck gaming on a MacBook air vs a gaming laptop. Both cost the same price after all
But that gaming laptop will have your back in serious pain if you carry it every day around a college campus.
When I was younger I had the most fantastic time installing Ubuntu on a Chromebook
I need my phone, however. Some stuff like having a Google maps with GPS are very valuable. Being able to join a meeting call while still going out is also another advantage. Then you have a bunch of apps that now I can live without but don't want to (like Apple Pay, Banking Apps, Taking a photo...)
Point is: If there is an alternative, I'd switch immediately. And please don't suggest Android as that is Apple with extra-messy-steps.
I have quite a few computers on my desk these days.
* Late model Windows laptop
* M1 MAcOS laptop
* iPad
* Android phone
* Raspberry Pi
The point of telling this story is the computer with, by a long distance, best development environment/tools is the Raspberry Pi.
As for user experience, the Windows machine is not too bad, the iPad and Android phone are horrid limited little things. I prefer the Pi, but I can recognise the quality of the MacOS environment. My taste is with the Raspberry Pi. Especially because I can turn of the (fucking) GUI and use it in true text mode.
I learnt programming on the then magical Macintosh computers 1989-1992. They were really something technologically. So far ahead of anything else within ten times the cost.
Those days are gone for Apple. Thank you for the memories.
The best development environment for _you_ is the Raspberry Pi.
Most people are going to want a GUI. Most users (even the vast majority of developers!) are not comfortable using a terminal 24/7. Most are going to be using whatever IDE they learned on, or whatever their team uses. That's certainly going to be a full GUI IDE that is resource-hungry. Even not considering those aspects, just compiling code takes forever.
I've tried using a Raspberry Pi before as a day-to-day device. It works okay, but you're going to miss speed quickly
Is it good hardware? Yes. It's pretty. It's manufactured well. But to me it's basically akin to a Porsche skinned car with a motor & transmission from a US manufacturer circa 2001. It just isn't as great as everyone makes them out to be. The M series is a huge improvement, but if I'm spending my personal money I'm not plunking it down on any Apple laptop. I get far more bang for my buck with shopping out a top tier Lenovo quite honestly. They're not perfect either but I've recently invested in a new T series and handed down a T470 to a family member. Over the course of that time I've replaced one of the two batteries (in less than 20 minutes) with common tools, I've upgraded the RAM, I've upgraded the NVME and I've upgraded the wireless. All making the laptop faster and more relevant. Sure, Apple wins hands down on the convenience ecosystem. But to get things done and build things the Lenovo is my choice all day long. I don't need a Retina screen and I could care less if a pair of Airpods connects to it.
If paying the premium is worth it for those frivolous things then great. But I'm sick of the hardcore shilling of Apple as a serious work machine. Sure if you're doing A/V - I get that. But besides being better on power consumption (I still get ~7 hours out of the T470) there's no draw anymore for me. The software ecosystem has taken a huge hit over the years in quality on OS X and Apple has made too many breaking transitions for me to trust their hardware with my dollars anymore.
Finally, privacy. It's clear at this point Apple's position on privacy is a marketing effort and little else. They do just as little as they really need to make it feel "better". But Apple doesn't much care about privacy but would rather control the walled (with dollars) garden.
To clarify I'm not running Windows on my personal hardware.
Some of those things (e.g. 'garbage keyboard') are subjective. Others, like high CPU usage and external video issues, are things that most don't seem to run into. I'm not saying that excuses the problems or invalidates your experience, but I hope that you can acknowledge that most people don't have that problem with their MacBooks.
I agree that the software side of Apple products in general aren't great. There are so many issues.
Small rant ahead.
In the last updates they changed how alarms are set (rotatory dial to enter the numbers one by one and back to rotatory dial next update). Why did they change that? I believe just for change sake. Also I could see if I had an alarm set at a quick glance (next to wifi indicator top right); now it only shows on the lock screen. I wish they would let it be or hid it under a configuration option, but that goes against Apple minimalism.
While all of these changes were happening there were small bugs on the alarms, like the one with different timezones documented on a short video here https://twitter.com/mejutoco/status/1526100127668224002
Don't get me wrong, Apple is so ahead of other companies. I think until more companies rise to their standards they won't polish these issues, since they face no competition. But they are not perfect.
Macbooks are just overpriced basic laptops. A lot of people just use them to run Linux software but it's way worse than running it on Linux. Performance is great if all you're doing is video editing, which is what youtube reviewers love to focus on. For the rest of us, it's bleh.
All things considered, it wasn't much of a change. Ios and Android are not particularly different.
I would love for apple to license the M1/M2 to Lenovo.
The problem is all of these product lines were likely already in R&D during the Jobs era (With the exception of maybe AirPods.) Not the current designs of course, but the ideas. I think the real test will be this upcoming year and the supposed launch of the Apple headset, as I don't think there will be any greater test of Apple's current design/marketing/hardware/software prowess. People are already sour on the idea of the "metaverse" so it'll be interesting if Apple can sell something new/different/useful in the space.
Is the volume of crypto transactions rising. Coinbase announced something about increased volume back in September. Perhaps those sales and marketing people at Apple see an opportunity to profit as crypto investors lose their shirts.
The App Store is a product and it’s a bad product for developers and users when Apple is using their market position to take 30% of revenue.
Why would I want one, if I am not in control of it. I just want to run a program on a computer I bought.
Maybe one can argue a consumer will buy a computer in order to get the "App Store product", although it seems to me more like a product feature than a product itself. Personally, I would intentionally choose a computer without an App Store, where I can install whatever I want, and without reporting all the software I use to Apple.
After all, I know what software I want to install. As a NetBSD user I prefer to compile programs myself. The only "curation" I want is small source code size so I can read through the program before deciding whether to compile and test. Thus I have to do the "curation" myself. It cannot be delegated or outsourced. I do not need Apple to recommend software to me. Especially software they did not write. But who cares about me, if I am in a minority, because to the "tech" company proponents, only the majority matters. To the "tech" worker what is not popular is irrelevant. No surprise given the "tech" racket depends on selling adevertising services.
"Discovery" of unpopular software in an App Store is exceedingly difficult. The search capabilities are crude. The design appears to be display "Top 10" type lists and funnel computer owners toward popular programs, creating a lottery for whomever makes the "Top 10" and larger audiences for advertising.
Kind of like saying, what has a cop ever done for me?
That said, yes, everything about it could be better. I very much detest app discovery in the app store, and it's almost as difficult via web or other means. At least in amazon you can filter out under 4-star products. And if you apply at least one category filter then you can also filter out marketplace sellers. The app store should have at a minimum some kind of stars filter.
> You might not want them, but the reason more and more and more apps are written for the platform is because of market power that comes from being content friendly
[Citations needed] again basically, there's only two platforms on mobile, it's not like developers can get the luxury to chose a platform.
Maybe look at the Android situation: Malware is at least two orders of magnitude more prevalent, and it's mostly because you can type "free fortnite vbucks android" into the search bar, get on a YT video that links to a shady site, that shady site tells the user how to enable sideloading and install spyware apps masquerading as coin generators.
Apple won 51+% of American consumers. Now it taxes all of the computing and commerce workloads they engage in.
Imagine if Tesla charged Starbucks money to drive you to coffee. Because that's exactly what Apple has been doing for the last decade. They've buttoned up every single industry and put them all under thumb.
Apple is taxing the internet, basically. (And Google's scary and hidden side loading isn't much better.)
What? This is a weird statement. iPhone is 100% a product. There are many alternatives.
> Imagine if Tesla charged Starbucks money to drive you to coffee. Because that's exactly what Apple has been doing for the last decade.
This is not the current scenario. Using your example, it would be like if Tesla owned a building, a coffee shipping company, and coffee making equipment and Starbucks sold coffee using Tesla resources. In this example, it would be expected for Tesla to charge Starbucks a premium for this full service coffee company being white labeled by Starbucks.
>Apple is taxing the internet, basically.
No. Apple is charging a fee to list products for sale on their store. Similar to every other store in existence.
Do you mean that in a good way or a bad way? Taxes pay for roads, bridges, military and so on. Healthcare, in most of the developed world.
With respect to those in the US who pay the "30% tax", most of Apple's income is kept offshore so Apple pays minimal if any taxes on it. Compared this to the majority of people in the US who buy Apple computers who keep their income in the US and do pay significant US taxes on it.
Sure you do. The consumer has a voice. If AirPods Pro 2 sucked, you vote by not purchasing them, and if enough other people do the same they'll can Airpods Pro 2 and create a third version in hopes it's good enough to "win back" your vote/money. This is the basis of free market capitalism and allows Apple to make a "product" (the Apple ecosystem) that people don't have to buy into, but they do because of the R&D Apple has invested into their product for over a decade.
Going back to the original comment to which I responded, where the commenter compared Apple's "30% tax" to government-levied taxes for public services, this is like giving residents a vote on a new public services project after only it has been completed. At that point, the money has been spent. It's too late to for voters stop the government from spending their money on the project.
The product is making insanely powerful api’s so that you go from thought to code and from code to customer base at the speed of ideas while still maintaining amazing performance for the end user.
That is still happening - whether or not we agree on SwiftUI - it’s obvious they still care. These ideas BUNDLED with the AppStore is the product for developers and end users. Either enjoy it - or enjoy life on the web, the cross browser compatibilities, the crazy header vulnerabilities, the css not shaping right, the js everywhere… you name it. Just try other fields for a real commercial app - then you’ll see the iOS native app is valuable for a reason.
I think we’re probably still a good 5 years away from something like that.
Back in the days when App Stores hadn't launched Android and iOS did not exist, apps for platforms like Palm, Pocket PC, Symbian, Blackberry etc worked like how Windows software still works today - you bought them directly from the developer's website. Stores like Handdango and Pocketgear were multi platform app stores who were taking 30% cut. I remember even back then there were voices being raised against those fees. But back then, those were not the only ways one could distribute their apps. None of the smartphone platforms back then mandated developers to distribute their apps only through their store. Even when Android launched, it was open and these stores carried Android apps as well. Apple launched the app store and changed everything in the name of security and user experience. It was just a shameless money grab by a giant corporation.
Microsoft got all the flack just for bundling a browser for free with OS while Google and Apple have been arm twisting developers into paying 30% of their revenue for years.
Since then, it has become completely expected that any consumer OS includes a bundled web browser for free.
Not that MS is not doing many other shady things to try to control what you do and push their products in today's Windows, mind you. The only point is that, as bad as consumer computing was in the 90s, it's much much worse today in terms of user and developer freedom/choice.
And Apple's app store where you can't even get around it if you want to is an order of magnitude worse again.
While I too think 30% is ridiculous, Google is the only one of the two here that allows for alternative app stores and side loading. Yes, the side loading process could be better, but Apple provides no such option.
Sure, Apple has built up a platform with tens of millions of paying customers, and invests in development of APIs (though they certainly aren’t investing in any fucking documentation or quality control). But anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see that without third party apps there would be nothing left to invest in.
Did Windows Phone fail because the devices and system software were inherently worse? Of course not, it failed because Microsoft couldn’t convince developers to support it.
I know it’s in company interests to act this way—to the tune of dozens of billions of dollars—but when you read some of the things Cook, Federighi, and Schiller said during the Epic trial, it gives an impression that they genuinely do believe that all economic activity on an iPhone or iPad is thanks solely to Apple. Absolute lunacy.
When I see that their own software quality is lagging years behind the hardware despite effectively unlimited funding; and the App Store is so chaotic that big-name apps can do Porn while startups have to fear the underpaid reviewer’s wrath on every random detail —
Well I don’t feel like that’s a very stable bet to place on your business. And it makes me sad because the devices, especially the MacBooks, are still the best on many measures.
Android is still open and you still absolutely can DIY your app distribution. You can completely ignore the existence of Google and their services if you so desire. As a user, you can set up your new phone completely offline, then disable all Google services, and only then give it an internet connection.
When I see a independent developer complaining about Apple (or Google) being arbitrary in their app review process, I can at least understand how it's some low-paid employee trying to fulfill a daily quota. It still sucks, but I see the economic rationale of low-paid, low-skilled app reviewers there.
But it really surprises me that when it comes to apps from well-known tech companies like Coinbase, that Apple isn't doing a higher-quality review by people who actually know what they're doing and understand the industry. That there isn't a knowledgeable team inside of Apple making sure that corporate partners are treated like partners rather than niche indie developers.
I'm not saying a two-tier system would be more fair, because obviously it wouldn't be. I'm just saying it surprises me that a company like Apple shoots itself in the foot like this with bad decisions that then lead to bad press. It's such an own-goal. (Because in this case, the 30% cut doesn't even make sense conceptually, it's like trying to tax Amazon 30% on physical goods sold through its app.)
The bad press doesn't really matter as long as they have such a dominant profit share on all mobile software sales.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/23/15399438/apple-uber-app-s...
> The practice, called fingerprinting, is prohibited by Apple. To prevent the company from discovering the practice, Uber geofenced Apple headquarters in Cupertino, changing its code so that it would be hidden from Apple Employees. Despite their efforts, Apple discovered the activity, which led to the meeting between the two CEOs, in which Cook told Kalanick to end the practice. If Uber didn’t comply, Cook told him, Uber’s app would be removed from the App Store, a move that would be a huge blow to the ride-sharing company. According to the article, “Mr. Kalanick was shaken by Mr. Cook’s scolding, according to a person who saw him after the meeting,” and ended the practice.
Meanwhile he is cracking down on Chinese protestors and doesn’t bat an eye.
> 3.1.3(e) Goods and Services Outside of the App: If your app enables people to purchase physical goods or services that will be consumed outside of the app, you must use purchase methods other than in-app purchase to collect those payments, such as Apple Pay or traditional credit card entry.
I get so ticked off with these other tech companies that on the one hand want me to support them in their fight to get more laisez faire access to Apple devices, and on the other actively engage in what are undoubtedly some of the most consumer hostile privacy invading practices on the planet. They actively compromise security, and then lobby and payoff senators to get better access because they are unable to compromise consumer security enough to make the profits they need.
The entire industry from Apple on down to startups needs to be nuked with a "no use of user information for any commercial purposes at all" law. Coupled with draconian fines that pierce the corporate veil and are assessed per user violation. We need something like GDPR in the US, but more strict. Apple isn't the problem. I'm starting to see that this entire industry is problematic.
Apologies for the rant.
It also doesn’t matter because there’s no alternative.
“Side-loading” can’t come quick enough. I have no issue with the App Store vetting apps arbitrarily, but there needs to be an alternative where developers can provide their apps direct to consumers without this BS.
I'd have agreed with you up until I heard about that Facebook Onavo thing and now I don't trust even that. Turns out companies whose whole business is emotional manipulation are really good at dark patterning users into doing unwise and unsafe things with their machines.
What makes you confident that they don't?
Or at the very least, you get yourself in a certain relationship with Apple that it sort of is like this.
When we had a version we needed to get through quickly due to a bad bug, we'd shoot our contact an email, a few leadership members had this contact's phone number if needed. We'd make a call, and within an hour we usually had the version approved. Sometimes it did come with a caveat of "you're going to need to fix this issue before the next update" or whatever if we hadn't quite followed the rules, but they gave us a bit of leeway in emergency situations.
This does not really mean all updates went through this super fast process. We had to wait weeks at times for app approvals. So it's not really VIP reviewing, it's more like VIP treatment if you're big enough and know the right people.
Edit: and yes, we often ran into the situation of the previous version did something that we figured was fine, and approved by one reviewer but then the next update was flagged as no good by the next reviewer despite the last one approving it.
They started mentioning this in the past few weeks when I was updating clients' apps.
This has nothing to do with Apple's kafkaesque review process and everything to do with their policies, which have been increasingly strictly enforced for the last couple of years.
I don't think people would accept any percentage taken of crypto exchanges.
Let's not beat around the bush. This is Apple protecting the way it earns money, not trying to levy fines on crypto to make more money. I'm pretty sure they understand that this decision makes them unpopular with some people. Their bet is that it preserves the model where there is still a functional review system for code that runs on your phone.
They take a 15% or 30% cut of all in-app experiences (e.g. entertainment, productivity software, content subscriptions). This is levied through the App Store and IAP.
(They take 0.15% of card payments if they are routed through Apple Pay, levied from the regular merchant fee associated with all card payments. However this is not forced on anyone and bank pays anyway, willingly, as the lower rate of fraud means the fee represents good value.)
I suppose you mean like when I use Venmo or my bank. Okay, but I can't readily use those to buy other in-app things like subscriptions, right? So it's consistent.
If you want to try to use Venmo to pay for in-app content, nobody is stopping you. But if the developer accepts the payment and provides the in-app content to you, they have breached their contract with Apple.
No, it isn't. Please enlighten us.
That feature wouldn't make it through the review process, just like any other form of payment that skips the fee.
I’d agree with you provided Bitcoin’s Lightning network worked the way we hoped it would back in the early-2010s, but it doesn’t. Otherwise, your argument reads like is saying Apple should tax every PayPal transaction made through PayPal’s iOS app.
Such companies probably don't fit in a “VIP category” for an app store though.
Why do you say that they don't?
I'm not sure this is true. I know years ago they had an expedited track you could get on. Once we got on it, we had very quick reviews, re-reviews, and releases. I would read about people waiting weeks while we almost always had 48h turn around. I don't think expedited exists anymore since turn around is always quick now, but I could easily see them routing big names towards a senior review team.
>> Apple doesn't have a separate, "VIP" review process for apps
"Apple doesn't have dedicated support for established devs"
"They do, I was in it"
"Why don't they support all devs this way? Apple sux."
Added:
"They do, you get 2 free support tickets"
"Oh they do? It still wouldn't fix every problem. Apple still sux."
In this lose-lose environment, I can only expect Apple will simply end up pissing people off no matter what it does.
I realize we all know this but I've never seen it expressed so succinctly in a thread.
What features are you asking for that apply to this thread?
You do not have a god given right for them to follow your policies.
> They will always piss people off as long as they charge them for a product that should be included with their computer by-default.
The goalposts move with every comment. You don't have the right to determine what parts of their products are free vs. paid.
Apple has been the vanguard of selling software for years. People don't buy desktop software anymore, and it wasn't all that successful to begin with. They do buy software on phones, though, and Apple enables an ecosystem that might not otherwise exist. It's not clear to me that Google needs paid apps. They were happy with ads before that.
Uber geofenced Apple’s Cupertino headquarters to hide that it was tracking iPhones and yet they weren't banned entirely from the App Store. They got a mere threat from Tim Cook.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/23/15399438/apple-uber-app-s...
That sounds elitists and what is wrong with capitalism. It gets distorted by big corporations having their way with their big elbows inhibiting growth and competition. Then you have people supporting the VIP lane are part of the problem.
Corporations should get equal treatment regardless of their size or in fact small business should get _more_ help than big corporations.
If a company is giving me millions of dollars a year which is going to my employee salaries I am answering their call first. The guy paying me $10k a year will have to wait.
Something tells me you've never worked on a top 20 app before then. These VIP review processes absolutely do exist, and any company with an app consistently in the top rankings usually has a contact at Apple on the review team.
Coinbase is a very, very small fry with an app which probably less than 0.1% of iPhone users have installed. I'm not at all surprised they wouldn't make the cutoff for special treatment from Apple. Why should they?
Our companies shared an investor, and our app was the first to implement Coinbase's API. Between that and SF Bitcoin meetups, I interacted with Brian regularly enough and the App Store was a common topic because in that first year of funding for crypto, the goal was generally find a way to breaking Bitcoin mainstream. (It seemed like it might happen soon, but was in fact still quite early.)
After some press, Apple took our app down. I blogged about it [0], (I believe the first survey of App Store policy toward bitcoin) and that got picked up by Tech Crunch. [1]
I remember speaking with Brian about it on the phone. Apple's objection was on legality of sending Bitcoin in the regions our app was available, so I suggested we could file a legal brief as part of our appeal.
Brian's response was they had already tried that and that Apple was unswayed by their brief. There wasn't much we could really do other than commiserate on being under the thumb of the App Store.
Those were some heady, yet comparatively innocent days in crypto compared to now.
[0] https://blog.gli.ph/2013/12/09/the-state-of-bitcoin-mobile-a...
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/09/how-does-apple-really-feel...
> Brian's response was they had already tried that and that Apple was unswayed by their brief.
A legal brief would go to a judge. This sounds like an appeal written by a lawyer, submitted on behalf of one company to another. Not the same thing.
Or maybe there was a legal case and they filed a brief. Then it would be a judge who decides whether the brief is convincing, not Apple.
(I recommend watching the entire talk)
I'd be curious to talk with him about it, though.
The GAS is legally a separate entity from the game companies (although controlled by them), and it sets a varying fee for its delivery network. Maybe the fee is quite high, and unlocking a $6 game feature actually consists of $5.50 fees paid to the GAS and $0.50 paid to the game developer.
Would Apple say: “Sure, this delivery fee you’re paying to GAS is something completely separate from the in-app purchase. We’ll just take our cut only from the $0.50 and let you pass all of the $5.50 through to this GAS corporation that you partially own.”
Of course not, because that structure would be such a transparent attempt by the game developers to evade Apple’s fee.
The situation in crypto isn’t all that different. These gas fees are ultimately paid to Ethereum stakeholders, and Coinbase happens to be a big one.
Coinbase didn't create Ethereum, and the vast majority of Ethereum stakeholders are not apps on the app store. The fact that ETH gas is mostly unrelated to Coinbase and the app store should also matter in determining how we feel about this.
The latter is essentially similar to pseudo-gambling in-app purchases like loot boxes, of which Apple certainly takes their cut.
Besides, I can go gamble my money on stock options via Robinhood, but Apple doesn’t take a cut of that.
The purchase page for the content would show the purchase price in crypto coins but list the USD equivalent price just below.
That’s the core of this of course. It’s not the scheme, or how many intermediary there is, or wether entities are separate or not.
It’s about money flowing on the platform that Apple doesn’t get a cut of. Some cases have been grandfathered in at the start of the App Store (mainly physical goods and traditional banking) because there was no way for them to tax that at that time.
I trust Apple to fight tooth and nails to not let any additional money flow escape their tax, whatever it is.
This time, I'm sure anyone still excited about web3 will side against Apple. It's going to take a coalition of companies with enough goodwill amongst enough people to break the general conception that Apple is, overall, working more in the interests of the consumer than other businesses.
But also from the tweet thread (second tweet):
> Apple’s claim is that the gas fees required to send NFTs need to be paid through their In-App Purchase system, so that they can collect 30% of the gas fee.
Otherwise, it actually seems way more open for debate. It's possible I am mistaken and this is a reach from Apple. It might also be that Apple is claiming that Coinbase needs to obfuscate the fee in such a manner, which sounds kinda crazy to me.
At any rate, this confusion about it being the assets themselves being cut is what I intended to be speaking about, so apologies if this response is not helpful.
They do, at least for rapid transfers to banks. It was perhaps not the greatest analogy on my part since transfers within the app are free, but I fully understand what Apple is claiming here. You don't see them claiming Cash App's transfer fees, or bank fees, or other similar charges.
If Cash App charges their own fee (ie, it's not a bank fee that Cash App is passing along to the consumer) then I would actually expect Apple to want to claim their cut of that fee. At least, that would be consistent with how they've gone after this in, e.g., the Epic case. (Different type of in-app "purchase", but consistent considering who would be receiving the profit of the fee is the app developer.)
Sorry for the confusion.
Should Apple get 30%?
While I tend to think most of this web3 stuff is trash (especially the centralized stuff), I think by now so many cases of Apple's excessive control have piled up that changing opinions is understandable. Especially as someone who hasn't had to deal directly with Apple's restrictive ecosystem before.
I suppose it’s the sheer lack of linux support that pisses them, which is an impacting situation that goes beyond how they feel about the CEO ?
Obviously Epic will never be as open as Flatpak, but just because they don't want to deal with Linux doesn't mean they should be barred from any other platform they do want to support.
The Android situation is a bit different they can absolutely support that. They choose not to and went after Google's fees instead, which is a bit harder to defend (but still shouldn't need to be defended, Google should still allow app developers to opt out of their payment processing, perhaps in exchange for footing the bill for storage and network traffic).
With EU regulations coming into effect next year, I think we're going to see big tech companies squirm even more, right up to the point where they'll lose a huge lawsuit. After that we'll either see Apple leave the EU out of spite or concessions will be made, paving the way for installing iPhone applications of your choice.
For people happy with the current state of affairs: nobody will be forcing you to install third party stores or sideload apps.
I haven't seen them abusing this power except for some incompetence (i.e. injecting JS into pages that customers didn't sign up for) but maybe they're just really good at hiding it.
Maybe, just maybe, Apple has so much money nobody can stop it.
Will Apple demand 30% of bank transfers made with a bank app? 30% of a firstborn if the hookup happened on Tinder?
Those are not digital goods being purchased. That's where Apple would step in.
The "right" way to fix this is:
1. Apple allows users to download/install software that is not on the app store. If a user owns the device they should be able to do what they want with it, even if it's "risky" or whatever. But this means those users that feel the most comfortable continuing to only use apple-approved apps in the app store can continue to do so.
2. Software downloaded from the app store, using apple servers and services, must give Apple the cut (30%) they ask for. If the app doesn't use apple's infrastructure or payment system, apple shouldn't have any right to a cut of the payment.
Apple has billions of dollars of revenue at stake here, so of course they're going to fight it as long as they can.
This is the hard question.
What in the world could possibly be enough to where enabling sideloading is ONLY possible by the owner of the device, and not just someone who looked over your shoulder for an hour and saw you type in your passcode+Apple ID, and has now swiped your phone to install spyware that utilizes a 0-day to hide itself from you?
Do you worry about that with your MacBook or Windows laptop?
Is it an attack vector? Sure...I guess. Is it a reasonable reason to disallow sideloading apps? Absolutely not.
I own a mac and love it, but if Apple ever attempts to lock it down the way they have the iPhone/iPad, myself and many others will leave that ecosystem forever.
but my boomer mother? whewwwwwwwwww if someone told her she had to install a 3rd party app store to see pictures of her friend's birthday cake or some terrible grape salad recipe, she'd do it. and she'd give them all of her personal info too.
sadly this is the norm, not the exception
Doesn't matter that it's gas. It's a purchase the user is trying to make. The rules apply.
Coinbase may think it's unfair, but that's what they agreed to when they put the app in the App Store. Apple can continue to enforce this rule as long as they're legally allowed to, which doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon.
No sympathy for Coinbase here. They chose to whine in public when they could just sue Apple like a grown up.
No sympathy for Coinbase or any other app participating in the system.
Apple does not have the power or authority to tell the USG to pound sand:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
There is already a backdoor in the iPhone, and Apple already preserves it for the FBI.
You can also skip backups entirely if you want.
The US has the same power as the CCP, it’s just that the US & CCP legal frameworks are different
They wouldn't be the ones being pressured. Instead it would be lawmakers.
The EU has already passed a law, and the USA is considering one, that has already passed out of committee.
Governments can just start confiscating Apple's funds. What, is there going to be an Apple private military, that invades bank of America, and forces them at gone point to not follow a court order? Yeah no. The courts will order them to pay money, and the banks will send the money, no matter what Apple thinks.
The Fines in EU would be something like 10% of global revenue. They can't ignore that.
One of the benefits of Apple's enforcement here is their extremely generous refund policy. If you ever buy something by accident (or even on purpose, really, and just later regret it) you can ask Apple for a refund and it's almost guaranteed they grant it.
Obviously crypto users don't really think about refunds because nothing is reversible… although who knows, maybe they do.
Honestly, Apple and Google should ban ALL software crypto wallets. No one is checking to see how secure they are. A seed generated on a software wallet may appear random to the user, but there is NO REASON AT ALL to believe that it is, and no way to verify that it is. IMO every iOS software wallet is compromised simply by virtue of the fact that it's impossible to know whether the seed was generated securely.
I 100% guarantee you there will eventually be a massive "hack" on a major iOS software wallet which is nothing more than the person who wrote the code intentionally making it such that they know how the seed is generated. It would be trivial to generate seeds that appear random but are based on nothing more than a passphrase you know and a timestamp that you can increment over, allowing you at any time to generate all possible private keys for every wallet ever made with your app. That app is probably already out there and people are using it, blissfully unaware that at any time all their crypto could just disappear. If the attacker is smart they can later patch the app, remove their proprietary seed generation and no one will EVER know. They can drain wallets randomly and everyone will assume that the victim must be responsible for the compromised seed, when in reality it was compromised on generation. The attacker will never get caught. I would be honestly surprised if this isn't happening right now.
It's not a technical problem to be solved, it's part of the terms for using the platform.
And crypto is looking for a use case.
Buy NFT to access this app features.
See?
They've lost it.
A vase is a tangible real-world product. That falls under the "Apple Pay" contract route, and only if you want to use Apple Pay.
This coinbase thing, afaik, is for a digital product.
Coinbase could workaround all this if they simply launch a web browser to do the purchases, in my view.
As far as money goes, both companies have enough to be able to see a lawsuit through to completion.
So it doesn't matter much that Apple has "more money, power and influence". Coinbase would either have a case or have no case, irrespective of those factors.
Same happened during the SCO–Linux disputes.
Sure it's true that if one party can't afford legal representation, the other party will have a better outcome. But that's not the case here.
They would work out in such a way as to respect the law as written. The law as written in Texas is to outlaw abortion.
A Coinbase vs Apple lawsuit would likewise work out in such a way as to respect the law as written.
That's the point I've been arguing. What's yours?
Precedent is itself no more than an interpretation of law, in other words a line of legal reasoning that's already been ossified. I probably edited out the part about precedent because I felt it was redundant to "legal reasoning".
In any case, I don't see how "precedent" makes or breaks anyone's argument here.
Just be ready to deal with any problems yourself.
There is some inherent subjectivity to "roughly proportional to the value being added", but in my opinion, it becomes reasonably objective at some point when the value isn't being added. Not 100%, but reasonably so. I think part of the problem with Apple's policy here is that it is another example of trying to jam too large a set of cases into the roof of one policy, a pervasive problem right now with many Silicon Valley-style businesses that try to substitute expensive human insight with cheap computer code for economic decisions. There are perhaps cases where 30% is justified, because Apple is providing that much value to the target transaction. I'll leave that to the reader to decide.
But there are clearly other sorts of transactions that were going to take place anyhow, and it basically just happens to be taking place through an app. Apple did not introduce any significant number of people to Coinbase by putting the Coinbase app on the store. It does not provide a huge amount of service to Coinbase on a per-transaction basis; Coinbase has the financial infrastructure, the technical infrastructure, etc. One way you can tell Apple is not terribly involved is, what are they responsible for in this case? Not very much; even if Apple totally vaporized and all Apple services disappeared, the user could still perform the target transaction on a different platform with virtually no effort. Contrast with the answer to "what if Coinbase totally vaporized and all their services disappeared?" This transaction would become impossible.
For a transaction like this, where Apple did no marketing, where Apple provides essentially no irreplaceable technical service, where the transaction can trivially be done elsewhere and it is just happening to occur on Apple services, where the value flow doesn't need to involve Apple at all, a 30% charge seems outrageously large.
I think some of the problem in debating this, and arguably all the way down to people understanding this, is that both these cases exist simultaneously, and they are both "true". There are apps that exist and thrive only because of Apple infrastructure, services, and promotion. 30% doesn't seem unreasonable, at least in the abstract. But other apps don't have anything like that service or support from Apple, but get hit with the exact same fee. This is the sort of thing that really starts to look like monopolistic rent seeking. (Or at least oligopolistic rent seeking.)
Personally I am more concerned about Comcast's monopoly and would prioritize the FTC to look at that, but that's been out of style since 2014.
Also - does Apple take 30% from each Amazon purchase? I overwhelmingly just use the Amazon app for purchasing - I can't imagine the amount of money Apple makes from Amazon alone, if so.
If Fidelity sold you app skins and customization features they’d have to pay
Tickets as NFTs are an absolutely valid use for example, and many others.
Coinbase does not get gas fees to complete the transaction. This isn't a swap. This isn't an exchange for ETH.
Absurd and I've downvoted you.
It also highlights the insanity of the app store rules. I though Facebook being blocked from showing the percentage of purchases being sent to Apple was peak ridiculousness, but this is yet another step.
I think both Red and Blue can agree they need to be reigned in and split up.
It could be as simple as investment portfolios, or the more likely lobbyist money which fills their war chest
At this point I'm almost willing to say horizontal integration is the source of so many competitive problems and anti-consumer behavior.
For example, remember Standard Oil? They made oil super cheap, researched new oils, basically were great for customers almost like Amazon - but they were monopolistic and were shattered for being so. Similar monopolies in the past like Bell Telephone or, arguably, Amazon now are great from the consumer's perspective but terrible for businesses.
In the past, we were less afraid to say, "you're doing great, but you're still too powerful."
A big part of that popularity comes from the tight vertical integration. That’s why so many Apple users see this kind of talk as an attack on us, you want to make the things we like about these products illegal or commercially infeasible. I just don’t see how that is in our interests as consumers.
If you want to use products that work a different way, fine, but I don’t see how that’s our problem.
Would you expect a LG microwave to be forced to support other operating systems ?
And how do warranties and support work for this.
Without this you have... well, literally everyone else who haven't done this (because they couldn't or wouldn't). This is what makes it different from "specialty SOC offerings".
Keeping companies "stay hungry, stay foolish" is probably in our best interest ! :)
And yet they implemented and executed a multilayered intertwined decade-long (or actually longer) plan.
Their first custom chip was launched in 2010. It means they were designing it since at least 2008, but definitely since before then.
The original iPhone was launched in 2007.
So, they were designing and releasing a new product category, and already designing custom chips for it.
Even fat lazy companies can stay hungry and foolish. There are not that many of them, though.
Or 5-6 years earlier when they started developing iPhone?
Or in late 2010s when they decided to transition their laptops and desktops to an entirely new CPU architecture?
They had no differentiator, Apple products were seen as beautifully machined luxury trinkets. IBM, and then Intel had them by the balls because Apple couldn't improve the performance of their products unless Intel innovated on their chips - which they had no reason to.
This is a direct response to a perceived threat:
"We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution" - Tim Cook
https://explorersfoundation.org/glyphery/458.html
>Or 5-6 years earlier when they started developing iPhone?
https://www.history.com/news/iphone-original-size-invention-...
"Apple executives worried that the iPod would lose market share once cellphone manufacturers figured out how to put MP3 players on their phones. But not if Apple beat them to it."
This applies to literally every single company that "just earns the same money doing nothing, or very little".
> Apple executives worried that the iPod would lose market share once cellphone manufacturers figured out how to put MP3 players on their phones.
Again, this applies to every single company in the same space
And yet somehow Apple spent those billions of dollars on R&D and others didn't. And on hardware side they keep doing it while the rest of the industry sort of just watches, doing nothing.
As an example: Samsung is entirely dependent on Google for software and on Qualcomm for chips. Unlike Apple, their entire product lines are literally under continuous existensial threat from multiple sides. Tell me, what exactly have they done to fix that?
Whereas Apple, the richest company in the world, either takes risks introducing completely new categories of products (new for them as a company) and wiping the floor with competition (see Apple Watch, 40% market share with Samsung a distant 10%), or managing seamless CPU transition for a two-decade old OS while again wiping the floor with the competition (see the entire M1 saga of the past few years).
>And yet somehow Apple spent those billions of dollars on R&D and others didn't. And on hardware side they keep doing it while the rest of the industry sort of just watches, doing nothing.
False. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/which-companies-spend-the-mo...
>As an example: Samsung is entirely dependent on Google for software and on Qualcomm for chips. Unlike Apple, their entire product lines are literally under continuous existensial threat from multiple sides. Tell me, what exactly have they done to fix that?
https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/09/samsung-google-expand-wear...
https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-techn...
https://retailpartnerships.withgoogle.com/ads/success-storie...
https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-announce...
--
This is my last reply. I wish you good luck and godspeed. :)
So, you don't know they are threats.
> False. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/which-companies-spend-the-mo...
What's false? Your narrative that "only Apple was under threat unlike those other fat companies that... are actually spending money on R&D"?
> A bunch of links
Most of those actions are very reactionary. And again don't prove your points.
Yes, custom SoCs are nothing new. To pretend that M1 isn't any different from other "specialty SoCs" is delusional.
2-3x more energy efficient + the same performance (if not better) than other (Intel) chips ~2 times more expensive. I don't think there's been another leap like that in the last 20-25 years.
Sony is allowed to sell the Playstation but not the controllers. Tesla would be forced to have their car support other operating systems. Leica could sell cameras but not lenses.
Your idea is completely unworkable.
I feel like Apple sells false safety and there's still scams and still malware in there.
I'd rather the worst behavior they protect against were simply illegal. I'd rather Apple had other competitors offering similar things (though, absent regulation, that kinda depends on their leveraging monopoly power, so it's hard to see how robust competition would fit into that dynamic). I'd rather no companies were as big as Apple (or Microsoft, or Google, or Facebook, or...) with hands in as many pies. But given the broader environment I'd rather have Apple the way it is, than broken up or destroyed. Ideally, yes, that's what would happen, but the rest of the situation's far from ideal. Fix some of that first, so losing them doesn't remove an option I like having, and I'm with you, let's break them up.
Mind you, neither of us need to be at each other's throat. Apple can give me a Developer Mode toggle without taking anything away from you.
It's a response to saying Apple needs to be "reined in" which is hardly a concrete proposal.
A law like this only gives you more choice.
One side believes there's a risk of companies leaving the App Store if that monopoly's broken, which would make things worse for them than the current situation.
The other thinks that's bullshit because that hasn't happened on Android.
The first notes that Android hasn't restricted Facebook practices such that Facebook's blaming them for significant earnings misses, so, you know, things might play out a little differently on iOS than it did on Android, and also this group prefer the status quo to even the best-likely outcome from shaking that up, so no amount of risk to it is worth it to them (us).
Except usually instead of writing it out plainly like that, the pro-Apple poster writes something shorter and less well-considered, probably assuming certain parts of that are obvious and don't need to be written out, the other jumps on it, a flamewar ensues, and the next time around we get a sea of comments that are like "I just don't understand how this would hurt Apple-lovers, they can just stay on the App Store" and it all repeats.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62501514
Apple has a somewhat complicated (though common for large US corporations) structure too.
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-subsidiaries-are-named...
https://www.wired.com/2016/08/apple-rest-silicon-valley-avoi...
We literally already are in a situation where people have opted into a more closed garden, that's the Apple model right now, and people are arguing that it needs to be forcibly opened up, which effectively destroys the walled-garden model. Like, the reason Facebook and Google are arguing that isn't because it's the right thing to do and they're on your side, they're doing it because app review is successfully and significantly holding back their spyware bullshit and this is the mechanism they want to use to get around it, they've found the most-appealing argument that will get nerds arguing on their side to produce the desired outcome. But ultimately they're not arguing for your freedoms here, just like Sony wasn't arguing that they should have to open up their own app store on ps5. They are arguing for their freedoms, not end-users.
Facebook literally already got caught using their dev credentials to deploy a spyware build to users who opted in to additional surveillance that normally would have been prevented by the walled-garden. If you "open it up", the next step is Facebook withdraws their app from the normal app-store, and now you need to install the Facebook App-Store to use facebook, which will demand full permissions to spy on everything, just like their spyware build already did with the dev credentials. This shit is literally already ready to go, they just need the ability to pull the trigger.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-...
Yes, in a notional sense it will be "optional", in the sense you can choose to just not use google or facebook, but in the real world people need those things if they want to maintain their social networks/etc, so in effect merely allowing sideloading to exist completely neuters any possibility of a walled garden existing at all, especially against the largest players from whom you need the most protection. There are dozens of horoscope apps or whatever, there is only one facebook, so you play by their rules or you don't play, that is what the walled garden is really about preventing. Apple is using their leverage to hold back some of the facebooks of the world from preying on users with permissions bullshit and spying.
If you want to "allow some people to choose a walled garden" that's the apple position here. You can still choose a not-walled-garden option for yourself personally, if you want. People are ideologically opposed to the walled-garden existing at all, they want it eliminated, not as merely a choice. It's sort of like the people who "aren't pro-abortion or anti-abortion, they just think everyone should have all the information and as safe an environment as possible and can make their own choice". Congrats that's the pro-choice position, and if you want the option of being able to choose a walled garden but nobody is actually forced to use it then congrats, that's the apple position here, go buy an android phone. Nobody is arguing you shouldn't be able to buy an android like people are arguing about apple, these sides aren't equivalent at all. It is quite literally an "anti-choice" argument from the android side here, they want that choice to be eliminated and walled gardens to cease to exist entirely.
To go back to the original point, BSD/MIT vs GPL... Apple is the GPL freedom model in this situation. Apple is concerned about maximizing end-user freedom even if it kills developer freedom, and even if some specific kinds of user-freedoms are decreased. Yes, you are giving up the ability to sideload apps for free... and that restriction allows the app-review model to exist, which protects user freedoms in the bigger picture. Android is the BSD model, anything goes, and that means giving freedom to large players whose interests run counter to users' interests and user freedoms as a whole. You have lots of freedom on Android, as long as they're freedoms to use google services or facebook or wechat or other closed proprietary all-in-one platforms. And if you want to run google-less replacement builds... go for it but that's not the experience 99.9% of people get out of android, they are just as locked-in to google services as apple people are on apple, but they also get much less protection via app-review etc.
(and again, reminder that sideloading has NEVER been unavailable on ios... it's just not free. the cost of sideloading apps is $99 a year. If you allow anyone to do sideload with no friction, then you just enable the facebooks of the world to demand that you do it, there has to be a friction there if the walled-garden model is ever going to exist.)
And besides app review... in the big picture... what do you think happens when iOS Safari gets killed off? Google already has a basically 95% monoculture of Chrome and Chromium-derivatives (like Edge). When you look at how manifest-v3 has been handled (contrary to the interests of end-users), do anybody really think Google crushing the last 5% of the market that's holding out is going to result in more end-user freedoms? Safari on IOS is a bulwark that nobody likes using but it holds back an ocean of salty consequences if Google can assume complete control of the Browser-As-An-OS platform. Like yeah Safari iOS is trash but it’s load-bearing trash as far as the broader internet and google monoculture...
Also in the real world a lot of people "need" to use iMessage or FaceTime, so they have to use iOS whether or not they want the walled garden. Let Apple open up those protocols, and then we can talk about having a real choice.
Nobody is arguing you shouldn't be able to buy an android
Apple was arguing exactly that for many years.
they want that choice to be eliminated and walled gardens to cease to exist entirely
I'll almost bite that bullet. Walled gardens are terrible for freedom and innovation, as we've seen just recently when Apple crippled AirDrop under orders from the Chinese government. I wouldn't say that they shouldn't exist at all, but it should be something that you very explicitly opt in to rather than the default.
what do you think happens when iOS Safari gets killed off?
Alternatively, allowing competition might force Apple to spend some effort making Safari not suck so that doesn't happen.
I will cheer and laugh and celebrate the death of the most cancerous and terrible browser commonly used today.
It gave companies 6 months to comply. They are still within that period. Then the fine hammer will start coming down.
a) They would be allowed to then ban apps that exist on alternate stores.
b) They can still collect their 30% cut which no-one has ever said was not permitted. They already have telemetry about what apps are being installed on their phones and can simply bill the third party App Store. Non-payment would result in the store being banned.
Similar situation happened when Apple was forced to support alternate payment processors in Netherlands. Nobody used it because it ended up being less profitable than simply using Apple.
Even if it were blatantly monopolistic, that only matters if its bad for consumers. The vast majority of non-HN crowd is super, super happy being inside of Apple's walled garden.
[0]: https://deliverypdf.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=897001005069000...
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Standard-Oil
> Although consolidation did advance the large-scale production and distribution of oil products, many critics believed that the resulting concentration of economic power was becoming excessive. In 1906 the U.S. government brought suit against Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890; in 1911 the New Jersey company was ordered to divest itself of its major holdings—33 companies in all.
https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-standard-oil-was-a-pr...
> By 1874, his share of the petroleum market jumped to 25 percent, and by 1880 it skyrocketed to about 85 percent. Meanwhile, the price of oil plummeted from 30 cents per gallon in 1869 to eight cents in 1885. Put simply, Rockefeller increased production and lowered prices while creating thousands of well-paid jobs along the way (he usually paid his workers significantly more than his competition did). His business was a model of free-market efficiency.
> But neither his competitors nor the US Supreme Court seemed to take note. In 1911, the court declared Standard Oil a monopoly and ordered its breakup. Revealingly, as scholars have noted, the court made no mention of either predatory pricing or withholding production, as monopoly theory maintains. In fact, economist John S. McGee reviewed over 11,000 pages of trial testimony, including the charges brought by Standard Oil’s competitors. Publishing his findings in the Journal of Law and Economics, he concluded that there was “little to no evidence” of wrongdoing, adding that “Standard Oil did not use predatory price cutting to acquire or keep monopoly power."
I don't defend Apple's actions but I don't think this is a company-sized anticompetition problem. This is a regulation problem where it should be a user right to have access to alternate app stores, and to choose to run whatever software we want.
Well I'm not too sure about one of them.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/apple-inc/totals?id=D000021...
The power disparity between corporations and citizens is huge and growing. It should be expensive to be mega powerful, and trillion dollar companies should be paying huge taxes to incentivize them breaking up into smaller units: a vertically integrated trillion dollar company is enough of a monopoly to hurt the market even if there are other competitors. It's bad for society.
I would take the other side of this bet. Barrier to entry for software to make a new chat app, social network, streaming app, crypto app, etc is much lower than barrier to entry to make hardware.
Another company willing to play by Apple’s rules will swoop in in relatively little time, while an alternative to iPhone/Apple Watch/AirPods/iPads/M processor computers will not.
Meaning alternative Roblox or Fortnite is coming much sooner than alternative devices equivalent to Apple’s hardware products.
Apple killed the 3.5mm headphone jack, it was and remains a really frustrating inconvenience, and yet here I am, still using a bunch of Apple products.
And the App Store has been around for nearly a decade now and we already know that users care far more about Apple than they do any one particular app.
- Epic ended up mostly in the same situation against Apple and Google. So you’re basically advocating for leaving the whole mobile market in protest. Few game producers can survive that.
- Apple’s core revenue source is games, and there will always be scummier games pouring money into the platform (think gambling. They’ll never join your union, they can thrive under any condition). That makes boycotts way less effective.
They can do it as a channel cost which is a standard concept in business or they can do it as a fee for using their platform services again another standard concept.
If any government were to prevent this it would unravel the entire economy because supermarkets, retailers and services businesses would no longer be legal. Hence why after nearly a decade the App Store is still fundamentally the same as day one.
Ref: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#in-...
> Apps may use in-app purchase to sell and sell services related to non-fungible tokens (NFTs), such as minting, listing, and transferring. Apps may allow users to view their own NFTs, provided that NFT ownership does not unlock features or functionality within the app. Apps may allow users to browse NFT collections owned by others, provided that the apps may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than in-app purchase.
(emphasis mine)
Apple does not claim a cut of the exchange of stocks, but they do claim a cut of the transaction fees for the exchange of stocks. If eBay or Amazon charged a transaction fee to facilitate their transactions, that would be an in-app purchase of which Apple would claim 30%.
Are you sure / how? I’m not going to sign up for robinhood to confirm but my brokerage transacts with my bank, not in-app purchasing, pretty sure robinhood is the same. I’m pretty sure the differentiation is that stocks aren’t considered digital goods. And neither is coinbase’s mainline business which is allowed to facilitate buying & selling crypto without paying fees, even on their transaction fees, which users pay.
If not.. Could Coinbase Wallet offer Coinbase Wallet Prime for. $100 that provides free transactions on qualifying orders?
All these rules feel arbitrary to carve out as much money as they can from "lesser people" without upsetting the larger players that have a budget to afford a lawsuit.
The Coinbase thing is happening because it’s an all-digital purchase. There’s no physical benefit being transferred to the customer, as NFTs are wholly digital. Apple has been consistent about the fee being applied to all digital-only purchases, including for virtual yoga classes.
One can argue whether 30% is still an appropriate amount (compared to 15 years ago, it’s still a steal where pre-iPhone App Store models would take 50–75% of the revenue), but people should stop arguing in bad faith on this.
That’s why Kindle doesn’t sell directly in the ios app
Coinbase could do the same thing - sell it on the website
Which is why none of those companies offer the ability to purchase them directly through an app that is on the App Store.
It’s not great.
It's not their choice, Amazon isn't allowed to by Apple's rules. A very careful reading of the rules for reader apps reveals you're not allowed to sell content on your reader app at all.
> 3.1.3 Other Purchase Methods: The following apps may use purchase methods other than in-app purchase. Apps in this section cannot, within the app, encourage users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase, except as set forth in 3.1.3(a).
> 3.1.1 In-App Purchase: If you want to unlock features or functionality within your app, (by way of example: subscriptions, in-game currencies, game levels, access to premium content, or unlocking a full version), you must use in-app purchase. Apps may not use their own mechanisms to unlock content or functionality, … except as set forth in 3.1.3(a).
But now more and more of the economy is moving online, and the Apple/Google duopoly gets to tax everything.
This shit has to be stop now!
Free up the app stores and see if the customers and app devs will be still willing to fork over these extortionate fees.
And this security argument is just complete BS, a typical “Totschlagargument” that gets thrown around as needed.
For others just learning this gorgeous word (literally "killing-blow argument") Wikipedia says:
> A thought-terminating cliché (also known as a semantic stop-sign, a thought-stopper, bumper sticker logic, or cliché thinking) is a form of loaded language, often passing as folk wisdom, intended to end an argument and quell cognitive dissonance.
And even if someone did suddenly find Apple's policies unacceptable, there are several prominent alternatives to switch to, and switching is really not difficult for the vast majority of people. To be clear, there are some cases where Apple (and competitors) do make switching more difficult, and I do think it's reasonable for regulators to look into that stuff.
Apple is half of an entrenched duopoly in the mobile market. It is reasonable to restrict trillion dollar monopolies (or oligopolies!) from imposing a 30% tax on all web transactions. Not merely to restrict them from making it difficult to switch. It's unacceptable. It's exploitative. It's antitrust behavior. It's got to stop.
This is not the time to be strengthening the rules. You've got the Digital Markets Act already entering force in Europe which is going to most likely break App Store dominance over there in just a year or two. The US has senators eyeing the Open App Markets Act again after Elon's threat (and if it doesn't pass now, when senators see an open Europe and a closed US, what about then?). You've got antitrust investigations opened in the UK. This is time to be giving concessions hoping to keep power - not doubling down!
Edit: If Apple's claims about it being "privacy and security" are true, here's how to keep power. Drop the 30% cut, make a $25-$50 fee every time a new version comes out for a quality app review from a 3rd party independent board, drop some of the more onerous restrictions, and maybe then regulators would be willing to allow the App Store to remain. Instead...
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#goo...
It isn't an in app purchase. It doesn't pay a cut to Apple.
Apple is asking for 30% of fees charged, not amounts exchanged. It’s like if a bank app charged you $1 to deposit $100; Apple would want $0.30, not $30.
Still debatable and I’ve got no sympathy for Apple, but this kind of OMG they want to take 30% of all cash flows response is exactly the misleading PR people are trying to gin up.
EDIT: here is what Coinbase themselves say:
Apple’s claim is that the gas fees required to send NFTs need to be paid through their In-App Purchase system
I'm not supporting Coinbase here, though, and I wouldn't be mad if this policy were actually just a tacit way to ban cryptocurrency transactions in the App Store. But your analogy doesn't fit.
If anything, I suspect that Coinbase intentionally violated the rules with this update so that it can sign on with Epic and Twitter in the fight against Apple.
Exactly, the dumb/risky thing to do would be to make a special exception for Coinbase. This is no different from a consumer buying Robux to spend on a 3rd-party game.
This is more like your stock broker app letting you buy a stock, although "cryptocurrencies aren't securities, they're speculative assets". So maybe more like buying art via an app.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221030193939/https://developer... (search for NFT in the page).
edit: for those paying a broker fee, does Apple even take 30% of that?
yeah arguably if apple wanted to say "you're doing a forex trade in app, TD Ameritrade makes $10 in fees on that $20k transaction, we deserve $3 of that, and it needs to be paid via our IAP scheme" that's a consistent application of their rules at least.
again though, coinbase's PR department is doing what PR departments do, they've got you talking like coinbase would be charged 30% of the whole transaction and that's not actually what Apple is saying here... just like it turns out Qualcomm may not have been entirely honest about ARM's licensing changes and many of the specifics of EVGA's complaints are highly misleading or specific to their (atypical) business model, despite a generally-correct thrust.
Like, kinda funny that grown-ass adults don't understand that a literal PR department might not always be presenting the situation entirely fairly... and this is a business community we're discussing that in, no less. You need to apply critical thinking about why someone might be saying things now, and why they're saying them in that particular way... they're happy to lead you into a wrongful conclusion even if they themselves haven't said anything technically wrong: that is the conclusion they intended for you to draw and you consumed the information uncritically and you did draw that conclusion. They walked you right down the garden path there, give that PR guy a raise.
Just like Sony can argue for app-store openness on Apple's platforms but argue they shouldn't have to open their own platform to competitors too... they want to keep their 30% cut but force their competitors to give up theirs. And no, consoles are not sold at a loss anymore, PS5 hit hardware profitability around 6 months after launch...
Apple was never going to allow the blockchain to remove their 30% cut on these purely digital items, as much as crypto folks preached that the blockchain would remove us from the shackles of App Store IAP payments.
For anyone who understands how NFTs and blockchains work, this is clearly not possible. Apple’s proprietary In-App Purchase system does not support crypto so we couldn’t comply even if we tried.
This is akin to Apple trying to take a cut of fees for every email that gets sent over open Internet protocols.
No, only the ones sent using their hardware. And I think there’s no law or regulation that would forbid them from doing that.
Similarly, if, currently, the App Store model doesn’t support what Coinbase wants to do, they shouldn’t have made an app.
(this isn’t a statement about the desirability of the current situation)
Apologies if I'm misunderstanding, but are you saying my iPhone belongs to Apple?
(I may be confused by how you mean "their hardware".)
> No, only the ones sent using [an app distributed via Apple's App Store].
I don't want to speak for anyone, but that's (probably) more accurate to the intended meaning.
They're lucky that the US has the particular form of "democracy" that they do, because I suspect the current regulations aren't exactly "the will of the people".
Oh, wait, they can just pay in dollars. I don't think that Coinbase has their problem solving hat on :)
Trading volume has been falling 30-44% every quarter:
https://s27.q4cdn.com/397450999/files/doc_financials/2022/q3...
https://s27.q4cdn.com/397450999/files/doc_financials/2022/q2...
https://s27.q4cdn.com/397450999/files/doc_financials/2022/q1...
so I'm thinking they don't have a product and they know it. This NFT product was supposed to be so hot their servers couldn't take it!
https://www.gfinityesports.com/cryptocurrency/coinbase-nft-w...
so what gives? I think someone is lying here. Maybe even bad enough someone could get fired if this doesn't get turned around. And if that's the case, it seems plausible to me that someone looked at 30% of "their" revenue going to Apple and just said fuck it.
This is not an in app purchase, IMO.
If someone's OKR is based on quarterly revenue from App store, they aren't going to care until regulation is literally at their doorstep. That's next quarter, not this quarter. Next quarter that person could retire or quit.
Fiscal 2022 Services revenue is 77 million and iPhone revenue is 220 million, so it's not there yet, but it's beating iPad (29 million) and Mac (40 million) combined which is nothing to sneeze at.
I don't think that Apple discloses App Store revenue separate from Services revenue
https://sixcolors.com/post/2022/11/apples-fiscal-2022-in-cha...
There is something we're not being told here. Because the reasons all these commenters are throwing out make zero sense.
You're assuming the existence of a 'need'. Part of my point is that there doesn't have to be any 'need' for additional revenue beyond the revenue itself.
It also seems like you may be assuming that the person or people responsible for this and other similar decisions are incentivized to consider all of Apple's revenue as opposed to a specific subset of it, which I suspect is unlikely.
For anyone interested in the antitrust space, this is a pretty good (though excessively optimistic imho) newsletter:
They claim they gave devs ~$64Bn in 2021. That means they collected about $27Bn in revenue in 2021, and most of that is basically money for free and almost entirely profit.
It's probably about 10-12% of their profit and grows without them having to do much at all.
What will be a massive problem is if the government says "App Stores can only have at max a 20% fee", and then to enforce this law they only allow two app stores, or it increases the barrier of entry for small players even more.
I can't fathom why this decision was made.
People will still support them, as long they can have the fastest phones/laptops. I started on a mac clone in the mid 90s (they almost went under), but I finally moved away last year, though I still have an iphone. The Linux desktop works great for developing.
Its a societal and network effect problem. This isn't new. We've been warned. We've chosen to ignore.
However, it would be so contrary to the spirit, if not the letter, of the law that I expect any such attempts would quickly gain antitrust scrutiny and new legislation declaring that APIs and software included in a device may only be monetized at point-of-sale (with the exception of subscription plans marketed toward consumers). It is possible that a court would even see it as such a violation of the law's intended effect that they would step in.
A good analogy would be me making a new control panel for a mechanical machine, where the panel has metal arms and rods that connect to the machine's original mechanisms to bring about a certain result that the machine itself would be incapable of bringing on its own.
You wouldn't say I can't distribute that new panel I made because the original machine is patented, right?
Disagree with it or not, were I Apple Legal, I would never in a million years allow a concession without a fight.
Knowing when to lose is quite valuable. Microsoft learned that the hard way last time.
Its hilarious to see the difference between apple, google and microsofts reactions. Two of them went we will fight tooth and nail, microsoft who tried that last time instantly went we are dropping the fees instantly, unless you want more? and will work with regulators to make open access ...
This is what happens when customers and companies gleefully buy into the idea of a walled garden.
Because I can bet anything that there are iPhones and Macs on every desk at Coinbase.
I'm popping champagne on that day.
Wow, so decentralized. /s
Coinbase's wallet app is entirely different and largely unrelated: it is a program that manages a private key on your phone so you can directly access your funds and make transactions on the underlying decentralized infrastructure. If Coinbase goes out of business their wallet app would still function and no one has access to your money except you, using this key.
The web has played out, and I'm pretty sure most people use it for news, recipes, and Wikipedia. Everything else is done through apps. You don't see a lot of young people talking about websites. Websites are seen as something for old people, and the App Store is the easiest way to access services and social media, which is how Apple has these companies in a bind. If going to The Google or typing in a URL was as easy or easier for the average person, Apple would have lowered the cut they take a long time ago.
You can't run any sort of background code (webworkers etc). You can't have a split-view for a progressive web-app on iPad. You can't have notifications.
The lack of notifications is a big one, and one of the things that makes such apps mostly non-starters.
The China riot iOS censor-update, this, the Twitter app threats. And all in a about a weeks worth of time.
Wtf guys. Seriously.
For me this is all about their flagrant abuse of platform and gate-keeper power.
Because that's what paying Apple 30% should get you, as an Apple customer .. some protection in case Coinbase doesn't actually fulfill the gas computation service, with what this supposed issue is talking about.
In this society, big companies usually get all the breaks and the little guys get nothing, so it's nice to see the big guys forced to brawl.
Governments, for example, folded many years ago and stopped taxing big companies 30% and instead give them money. Apple isn't as easily bribed as politicians.
Coinbase, I dunno, they are some tiny nobodies right? Seems like punching down too much.
When a government taxes you 30%, the money is supposed to go for services or capital improvement products that eventually indirectly help people. That isn't how Apple hoarding this cash works.
(I only care because I pay my kids' allowance in crypto, and they manage it with Coinbase Wallet on their iPads. This is what I have been doing with all that promotional XLM I got for free from Keybase before they got resorbed into Zoom.)
So they can send me XLM,and then buy things in USD or JPY at whatever the prevailing rate is (I use Exodus, so whatever that app shows is the rate).
So far, everything they have purchased relates to video games (games, DLC, and I was particularly impressed my 8-year-old bought himself a used Wii U older than he is, and an optical disc version of Paper Mario: Color Splash).
This also lets me charge a 500% "Moron Tax" for most in-game purchases — cosmetics, pay-to-win mechanics, etc. (But they are sometimes willing to pay it, for their own inscrutable reasons...)
Paying for GAS is paying for the computation .. which is a digital service .. which is https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#bus... what Coinbase agreed to share a portion of the money taken from customers with Apple when they published an app on the App Store.
In my view, Apple is providing customers another layer of trustworthiness, since a purchase of a digital good or service is intangible .. "did anything just happen?" .. the customer has recourse via Apple for an app that theoretically abuses that "seller of digital items" relationship.
If everyone were to suddenly remove all their money from banks and the financial system, and only started transacting point to point, and (lets handwave the how and just say that everyone immaculately keeps their own set of books/accounts with everyone else, not on a public ledger), the entire political/regulatory power structure of the United States falls apart that day.
Money transmission regulation cannot be coordinated/scaled to effectively service period at a population of the U.S. scale.
A) Private books means if you really want your tax authority to see them, congratulations, send a warrant. Oh wait, due process (not enough hours in the day).
B) If we assume the magical bookkeeping extends only to facilitating a transaction, but not records retention/OFAC, that goes out the window. LE integration too.
AML, gone, KYC, gone.
On the upside, everyone can send anyone money. On the downside, there's a hell of a lot that no one talks about that goes into that than anyone probably has the patience, comfort, or intellectual fortitude to sit through.
Also Wall Street dead.
I mean, for me it's a hard choice. Possible national collapse, dead Wall Street, and chance to reaffirm and rebuild a nation...
Dead Wall Street...
Let it be known: I very much dislike what out financial system has done to the U.S.
IANAL or even novice on antitrust issues but seems Apple would just find another way to make up the slack if App Store (iOS/Android/other) fees were regulated.
As a good friend of mine likes to say about DNC vs GOP, it's "steak or fish" with Android and iOS (you can choose which is which). They take up too much space for anyone else to fundamentally reimagine and reintroduce an app ecosystem (no disrespect to PWAs and the like). I feel regulation would ultimately hurt developers and consumers more, at least in the medium to long-term, but I'm open to forming a new opinion.
Sure, Apple and their fanboys are going to say stuff like "it will be bad for privacy" and "Apple needs to control everything to protect us from malware", etc. Pretty much the exact same type of arguments AT&T was making before they got broken up in the ~80s. If that didn't happen, we probably wouldn't have gotten the internet as quickly as we did (or at all). That's a pretty clear example of how monopolies stifle competition, and how breaking them up can be lead to incredible innovation.
Hell, I don't think we even need new laws. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure what Apple is doing is already illegal, since it's so obviously anti-competitive and detrimental to society/the economy. Even investors will probably be better off in the long run if all these tech giants have their monopolies broken up, since the new opportunities in the market will undoubtedly result in new innovations and better investment opportunities.
Also, I need to say this otherwise the conversation will get predictably derailed:
* Apple is bad
* Google is bad too
* Microsoft is bad too
* Amazon is bad too
* Meta is bad too
* <insert tech company here> is bad too
This is why Microsoft lost a lawsuit about bundling Internet Explorer onto the computing platform of Windows, this is why the platform of Google search has results rigged in favor of Google products, etc.
This is also why Net Neutrality is a good idea, the company that controls the "platform" of the Internet being delivered to your device shouldn't get to stifle competition by making some websites cheaper or more expensive to visit.
In this case, phones are a physical platform that should be opened to allow any software to run, and iOS is a software platform that should be opened to allow users to easily install alternative App Stores and easily install alternative applications not offered on the App Store.
Yet when Xerox and IBM were monopolies they were at their most innovative. Xerox had PARC. AT&T had Bell Labs. IBM had --- well I'm not sure but their mainframe architecture and OS was very innovative in its day.
Now that those companies are just one of dozens that do what they do, you can't name anything groundbreaking that they are producing.
IBM Research, Thomas J. Watson Research Center.
Lots of legitimately innovative fundamental and applied sciences research.
Could one not prove that NFTs have value outside of Coinbase? Oh wait I see the problem.
A customer is to pay one network for gas, but that network won’t pay another network for their value add.
Apple didn't block fungible tokens (crypto), they only blocked non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Right now is the time for them to clarify their position.
AFAIK paying for 'gas' is paying for a digital service of computation. This is covered by Apple's App Store Guidelines https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#bus... for years and years.
Being a consumer who buys digital services through an app hosted by App Store should have some recourse. And that's, again AFAIK, what Apple does with its Guidelines...help empower the consumer should, theoretically, Coinbase not uphold their part of the digital purchase fulfillment relationship when $$ was exchanged on an iPhone app.
It is going to take more than just Epic, to get rid of the 30% cut in fees.
This route avoids Apple having ANY obligation to protect its consumers .. when they choose to use a random website to transact.
This Coinbase issue is about Coinbase using an Apple App Store App to perform a service around digital purchases which ALL Apple consumers can EXPECT a certain set of values upheld BY APPLE INC on their behalf .. sort of protection by Apple when buying anything digital via an App.
What is the point of a Coinbase wallet at this point in any case? Free tracking by coinbase, apple, the NSA etc etc?
If you consider the reason why Bitcoin, ETH etc were invented in the first place, this is beyond ridiculous, absurd and a travesty
Solutions:
1. don't offer users the ability to buy those digital goods 2. add a layer of payment indirection where users pay coinbase and coinbase pays for the digital goods - using app store payments! 3??? execute a PR campaign that "apple doesn't understand crypto" amidst a historic crypto crash
This is akin to apple demanding 30% of the funds of every wire transfer initiated within its App Store app for your bank.
They are not purchases of digital goods.
Read more at the Apple App Store guidelines page https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#bus...
What are these app stores giving us?
Or are they going to start blocking web sites next, and have a permissioned web
Apple covers a lot of scenarios https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#bus... so launching a browser MIGHT or MIGHT NOT be covered by their policies. But worth exploring.
Microsoft has been overly keen to open up their own store on Windows to use as a cudgel against Apple in future courtroom cases such as the Epic one.
Not for games. https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-zero-percent-cut-doesnt-e...
The only path would be to require jail breaking and most consumers trust that even less.
Otherwise the user would have to take the ipa, get an app like altstore on a compatible computer. Sync it. Then be stuck with the limitations of sideloading like needing to refresh the authorization every 7 days.
Either way. Most people won’t do this. We saw what happened when Fortnite was off the Play Store. It wasn’t that effective.
Apple doesn't let you install Chromium/Blink, or any other browser engine, which implements things like WebUSB and background notifications, so you're stuck with the Safari browser engine.
Coinbase might have thought about it, but anyone who looks at building a PWA for iOS for any amount of time very quickly realizes that Apple has crippled it to the point of being a bad idea.
Apple Pay vs Store Kit - first is for things like T-Shirts, second is for digital purchases like virtual currency in videogames.
... with batteries... and most likely a samsung logo.
;)
Personal opinion: That’s even more ridiculous. Coinbase has no access to or control over gas fees.