Apple just lost its lawsuit trying to ban iOS virtual machines
techradar.com
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It's absolutely abusing market position, because it ends up being that in my profession, you end up purchasing mac computers for the whole office, because then you can target all platforms without any fuss. Not because the hardware or software has any merits, but because they artificially restrict these use cases so that's the only option to target a significant market.
Is nobody interested in implementing the OSX APIs on Linux?
> WWDC videos can be immensely useful to get inside information about how things actually work
Imagine if we could have proper text based documentation on how things actually work? I don't know why this isn't the case. I'm sure they can afford it. Maybe it's just lack of respect for developers? "They seem to figure it out anyways"?
They know developers will walk on glass for the privilege of accessing a large high value consumer market.
It's exactly what Jobs said and it paid off for them as you can see in Apple's current valuation. Why is that still unclear to you?
If they hire 20 people for this and give them a few offices in their precious mothership, it won't affect customer UX in the slightest. They may continue to give it the top-most priority, which is the right choice to make.
That's why it's unclear to me. Apple's valuation is a poor argument. It could have been even higher, since there are areas where Apple is failing precisely thanks to poor developer relations. E.g. serious gaming on Macs/Apple TV, even though the hardware is amazing.
Their valuation and product success is poof that they're on the right track as a company. The fact that you think their track should be different just to make you happy is irrelevant to them and is exactly what Jobs answered in 1997 to that irate developer: The consumer product matters more than pleasing devs which are niche and picky group of people that are hard to please anyway and not really relevant as their consumer target.
I'm gonna have to stop the conversation here since we're going around in circles at this point.
>Why are you asking me? Why not ask Apple directly?
Not sure what's this supposed to mean, you are the one who decided to reply.
>The consumer product matters more than pleasing devs
This is obviously a false dilemma which I already pointed out. I never ever said that pleasing the devs should be prioritized over the consumers.
In any case, Apple sure has convinced the masses, and can rarely do no wrong. So, I suppose I'll just keep yelling at the clouds.
Buying a one time app for a few quid used to be a normal and a good deal all round (I say this as a customer and iOS developer)
But now EVERYTHING is a monthly subscription. Even for apps that really shouldn’t need any updates - but like you say, they do need constant updates just to remain functions.
It’s created a broken AppStore and I just never pay for anything anymore.
Another fabulous consequence of brexit.
This does suck when you find an "old" app that works well, but there is an upside-- the 99% of other garbage apps from 15+ years ago don't pollute ongoing search results forever. Eventually, old apps that aren't maintained get popped from the stack.
The other upside is that new developers don't have to compete with ghost apps from the past continuing to leech new interest because they're ranked higher due to cumulative downloads over time. Nobody can compete with Time.
As an example of an app store that doesn't do this-- I don't know if ticalc.org is still around or still works this way, but their catalog grew endlessly with every generation of bored students uploading new redundant renditions of Drugwars (et al.). If you want to play Drugwars, which of the 500 versions of it are the best? Maybe the 1998 version is the best, or maybe the 2020 version is-- who can tell?
It made it very difficult to figure out what to bother with unless you were using a brand new TI-83+++ Extended APU Platinum Edition with bespoke hardware specs that forced a new backwards-incompatible platform category that instantly excluded all the old cruft.
Making DAU & avg active time per day in addition to user reviews/ratings would be a pretty strong signal.
Unfortunately, it's the norm in most massive closed source ecosystems like these.
On the one hand, it makes being a developer on these platforms pretty painful at times, and on the other hand, it also increases the value in having expertise with them.
Can you give an example? I have also plenty of Windows development experience, but can't think of anything. More like, Microsoft seems to be pretty careful making sure APIs don't break.
NTAPI doesn't count, because it's undocumented in the first place and you're not supposed to use it in the userland at all. Yeah, we all do, but...
(Many APIs are pretty bad in the first place, but that's another matter.)
In the context of developing something like Wine that is irrelevant - you need to deal with what people use.
There's a truly absurd amount of software out there which runs on Windows but not Linux, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that way more effort is invested into running Windows software than running macOS software.
It is called darling: https://www.darlinghq.org/
> Is nobody interested in implementing the OSX APIs on Linux?
The reason for wine is that windows has a dominating market position and hence you often have to use some software that is windows-only. For OSX you might want to, but there is no such dire need.
https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross
> Please ensure you have read and understood the Xcode license terms before continuing.
According to the EULA you may only use the SDK on Apple-branded computers. But you can use Linux to cross compile to Apple.
Do the Visual Studio build tools have more permissive license terms? AFAIK you can have clang-cl on Linux, but you do need a lot of the SDK for it to be useful. No experience there.
> AFAIK you can have clang-cl on Linux
clang-cl is a frontent for MSVC command-line compatibility - you don't even need that for cross-compiling, just -target and then whatever -fms-* extensions you need for your non-portable code. But yes, Clang doesn't come with its own SDK so you will need headers and import libraries and possibly other tooling (although the LLVM procect covers a lot).
It’s definitely a “dick move” but, I’d have trouble calling it abusive. Having to buy expensive development kits is common in our industry
If you're reading this on macOS, have a look:
/System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleVmxnet3Ethernet.kextIt just seems so arbitrary and unhelpful, and I have a hard time imagining that the amount of hardware purchased it forces outweigh the benefits from making macOS/iOS better platforms for development and computation.
It just seems like such an odd stance to take.
Presumably they have determined that lost hardware sales would offset any increased app or service sales from allowing VMs on non-Apple hardware.
Though I don't actually know what platform macOS and iOS VMs run on in GitHub Actions and Azure pipelines.
Edit: apparently Azure pipelines uses Mac pros. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/age...
Back in 2007-2009 Nividia shipped defective GPUs to everyone, including Apple.
Every MacBook Pro from that era was affected. Nvidia and Apple couldn't come to an agreement to who should pay for the bad GPUs. It cost Apple a lot of money and Nvidia din't seem to care.
After that, Apple slowly started removing Nvidia GPUs from their products. AMD also shipped bad GPU's around ~2011 and Apple went back to Nvidia for a generation or two until AMD sorted their issues out. From Then on it was AMD GPUs only until the M1.
I only found one article about this from back in 2008. It was definitely a thing back then, I just can't find it.... But indeed likely second fiddle to the gpu issues around the same time, I totally forgot about that.
Here you go: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
Chipset Model: Intel Iris Pro
Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M
This Macbook pro was a free upgrade from Apple after I'd had 3 mainboard replacements because they'd had faulty GPU's on my 2011 MBP ( see https://web.archive.org/web/20170119031155/https://people.ca... for background) - Basically after I found out what was going on I took my 'repaired' machine home and stress tested it until it failed. After the very quick repeated failures Apple decided to replace my machine completely.
Cos been almost 10 years since apple ditched Nvidia.
And it's not like Apple would need to verify anything. They can grant the license, but say that the only supported configuration is Mac, it's up to VMWare and such to provide the support if they want to say that you can run OS X on their platform.
I remember seeing an article [1] proclaiming that more than 50% of Azure's workloads are on Linux, so I'm guessing their hypervisors are running an optimised Linux kernel somewhat.
1: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores
No. Last time I poked into Xcode Cloud, it was running on Ice Lake server Xeons, which didn't ship on any Mac.
See previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29419610
I often see posted that using VMs violates the agreement, has someone been sued or something?
“Has an individual running a few VMs ever lost a lawsuit?”
Obviously fighting Apple would be terrible, but has an individual (as opposed to a company) ever run into trouble?
Do you mean they allow VMs on iPads already?
From a current financial/business standpoint, Apple considers itself a hardware company that includes their custom OS with their hardware. From that angle it makes no sense to allow it to run on non-Apple hardware. Sort of like Sony being ok with the PS OS running on Xbox.
Apparently not, and because they subsidise the software using hardware sales, they don't want to decouple the two.
The Sony/PS situation is exactly the opposite: Sony subsidizes hardware using software (games) sales. Which is why they don't allow you to use different software on a PS.
2: Control over the platform.
They don’t charge for their OS because it is attached to their hardware.
Have a crack and you can probably get a macOS VM running on whatever hardware you have in short order.
Also you can run iMessage without mac if you really want to.
It's possible my data is out of date though because iMessage spam is real & I'm not sure how that's done if it needs a valid private key that Apple can ban.
It is true that Apple employs some efforts to prevent/discourage you from using those services illegitimately, but using iMessage and FaceTime from a Hackintosh has been possible for years, largely without jumping through any hoops.
I can be and it’s not hard to do. I assume your referring to breaking the licence agreement?
I’d bet on just not testing that use case because they don’t care enough about it. Thus not catching and never fixing any arising issue or regression.
I'm not locked in to the Apple ecosystem: I can use it on my Linux desktop, or switch to an Android phone at any time.
It's solving problems in my life. I have a calendar, it's synced across all my devices, I have no fear of lock-in, and I have full control over my data without fearing about my account getting locked (as I pay for Workspace). Same for email, same for contacts.
What's the poison there?
Do you think my data would be safer if I used UnknownCalMailCompany Inc, a company with zero track record in terms of privacy, safety, or long-term viability?
I value being able to ctrl+f my thousands of meetings across several years.
Fortunately, many of the rest of us live in the real world where there are more than just those two options.
And yes concretely, the two options if you want cloud are either the usual suspects (ms google apple), or unproven companies.
I’m sorry but yeah, if you want a concrete solution that is on par with what google offers in terms of privacy and security, you can’t go with a random company and everything I said before stands. And in this scenario, fastmail IS a random company no matter how long you’ve used them.
To the extent that they make their money from user data, their advantage is in keeping the underlying data for themselves, not in giving it to other people.
(I use a fair amount of Google tech, including paying for hardware and services, but I won't use their search engine or browser)
That’s not intentional though, it’s just that their hardware hasn’t been that successful.
I just used iCloud.com. Seems to work fine for adding reminders. Are you talking about an API, or the iCloud web UI?
It makes perfect sense that they'd be against anything that circumvents their walled garden, and a VM does just that by allowing users/developers to use their OS without buying their hardware.
I personally hate it, and it's why I'll never touch any Apple product.
It is simply unbeatable on the laptop market currently, imo.
It's true that now high end android phones are as expensive than high end iphones, so on this point of view it's not a criteria
The iPhone SE is better than any comparable Android phone and will receive updates for another 5 years.
So "You can't find a cheap new iPhone" is not true. If you're willing to take 1 extra step and get a month of prepaid service you can get a cheap iPhone.
Also, the macs are not at all locked down if we are talking about that. OSX is pretty much a general linux with a generally supported graphical environment on top.
MBP from 2017 is the oldest supported device.
Also, iphones are supported for almost 10 years.
I'm not asking about phones, we were talking about laptops.
Apple is primarily a hardware company. If people are using VMs then they're not buying hardware.
However the EU ruled many years ago on this subject (https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/apple-iphone-jail...). In effect, jailbreaking and modifying software is perfectly legal, as long as it's not for copyright infringement.
And now cars, door locks, TVs and toilers all have software. So every comoany will be telling you what to do.
This is your daily reminder that, unlike ownership of physical objects, IP os a privilidge granted for advancing sciences and arts. Not for making things worse
Which is extremely telling of how little consideration they have for their users.
It doesn't exactly open the doors for everyone to run iOS in virtual machines.
> As to count one, we agree that Corellium is shielded by the fair use doctrine. First, Corellium’s virtualization software is transformative—it furthers scientific progress by allowing security research into important operating systems. Second, iOS is functional operating software that falls outside copyright’s core. Third, Corellium didn’t overhelp itself to Apple’s software. And fourth, Corellium’s product does not substantially harm the market for iOS or iOS derivatives—so Apple’s own incentive to innovate remains strong.
The important part here is that it proves Apple does not have the defacto right to claim infringement on iOS. If your emulator is transformative, offers functionality beyond default iOS, doesn't abuse their services and doesn't threaten the iOS market (eg. iPhones) it should be considered lawful. The interpretation is still open on the infringement of their wallpapers, icon and "contributory infringement", but this spells in pretty plain text that emulating iOS is fair game. Put another way, even a company that sells iOS emulators to hackers was found to not be in direct violation of Apple's iOS copyright.
This contention seems to rely on their third response, where they claim that Corellium hasn't "overhelped" themselves to copywritten material. This sorta makes sense - their reliance on Apple basically ends once they have the commercial iOS disk image. If they've proven that everything else was lawfully developed and reverse-engineered, it sounds like Corellium had a strong case on their hands.
> The important part here is that it proves Apple does not have the defacto right to claim infringement on iOS. If your emulator is transformative, offers functionality beyond default iOS, doesn't abuse their services and doesn't threaten the iOS market (eg. iPhones) it should be considered lawful.
You are describing fair use. This isn’t establishing the precedent you think it is. Corellium said “hey, what we are doing is fair use” and the court agreed, describing why it was fair use. That’s all. The description of how it counts as fair use is not opening anything new up, that’s just the four factors of fair use that have been there all along.
(I edited this post, because I don't want to give any criminals reading this too many details.)
That means if I want to develop an app for iOS (beyond just what you can do in Swift Playgrounds), I can't just boot up a VM or AWS instance, I have to either buy an actual Mac Mini (cheapest option) or rent one.
Everything I find says that to be illegal, something must be against the law, and that a contract is not law, so the word "illegal" doesn't apply to breach of contract because it's private.
There is a difference between illegality and criminality however -- e.g. breaking the speed limit is illegal but it doesn't reach criminal, as one source uses as an example.
This is often actually an area where toubwill find conflicting info; public info provided by the California state courts says yes, they are, in California [0], while you will find other sources, including law offices, saying they aren’t. [1]
The issue is largely that they are structured as crimes in state law, but the manner of punishment available does not make them “crimes” within the purview of federal Constitutional protections, or federal statutory consequences for conviction of state crimes (e.g., in the immigration system.)
[0] https://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/CIP_AboutCriminalCases.p...
A breach of contract is against, and has remedies provided under, the law of contracts..
> A contract is not law
No, but the law of contracts is law.
And all the discussion I can find online say breaking a contract doesn't fall under the definition of "illegal".
Do you have an authoritative source that defines it otherwise?
IIUC, breaking a contract is a civil tort[0]:
A tort is an act or omission that gives rise to injury or harm to another and
amounts to a civil wrong for which courts impose liability. In the context of
torts, "injury" describes the invasion of any legal right, whereas "harm"
describes a loss or detriment in fact that an individual suffers.1
Something illegal is dealt with in a criminal court (yes, there are administrative courts in various places that handle minor infractions, but those are governed under the relevant legal code and are adjudicated as such.
Civil torts are not contained within any legal code, and as such cannot be illegal. That said, there are some harms that may also rise to the level of criminality (e.g., fraud), which may also have a civil tort associated with them.
But breach of contract by itself is just breaking the rules[1] agreed upon by the parties to a contract.
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/tort
[1] https://kids.britannica.com/kids/article/rules-and-laws/6286...
Doesn’t that depend on the country? Would it also be true in civil law countries? Or only in common law countries?
Torts are (in the US, other jurisdictions may differ) either statutory torts, which break a particular, legislatively adopted code, or breaches of the common law and, as such, illegal just as crimes under the common law are in those jurisdictions which (unlike the federal system) continue to recognize common law crimes.
Both are illegal.
Though this is also somewhat tangential since as well as being wrong about the nature of torts such that your “torts are not illegal” argument is founded on faulty assumptions, you are also wrong in that, while contracts are, like torts, civil, breach of contract is not a tort.
> Something illegal is dealt with in a criminal court
No, something criminal is dealt with in criminal court. Illegal is a superset of criminal.
> Civil torts are not contained within any legal code
The United States Code has 54 “titles”. Crimes and criminal procedure are Title 18. What do you think most violations of the other 53 titles are? Largely (but not entirely) statutory torts.
Similarly, what do you think most violations of the 28 California Codes that aren’t the Penal Code are? Especially the Civil Code? Again largely, but not entirely, torts (the Commercial Code, relevant to this conversation, also significantly deals with contracts.)
> But breach of contract by itself is just breaking the rules agreed upon by the parties to a contract.
Breach of contract — the thing actionable in court — is breaking the rules in law as to when compliance with rules agreed to between parties are compulsory. That’s what makes it actionable.
I don't think this is the standard. I think the standard is, can you find definitions of illegal under which breaking a contract or a tort don't fall? And in the dictionaries I've looked in, there are many usage senses of the word illegal that do cover things that are not criminal.
Contract law and the law of torts are laws under which the state will enforce judgements. Even though the judgements are civil matters, they are enforced by the legal system. Till I see a definition of legal/illegal that clearly covers only criminal acts, I'm going with breaking contracts to be within the penumbra of that which is illegal.
just a few more points to round out my thinking
I think what we're seeing is that there is a clear distinction between criminal and civil law. And lawyers, wanting to be clear and unambiguous, shy away from blurring that distinction by applying the term illegal to civil matters; but lawyers being hyper-specific and unambiguous doesn't necessarily govern the definitions of words.
And I once took an introductory/survey course in the law (taught by an attorney/law professor), and the first day of the course we talked about the history of the law, and what were the sources of our laws, for example religious law (thou shalt not kill), feudal law, common law, (for the US) federal law, state law, town ordinances, and then contracts were mentioned as binding just like law.
That wasn't the question under discussion -- my comment already had an example of that, of driving over the speed limit.
The question is whether breaking a contract falls under the term "illegal". And again, you're using logic to argue this, when it's simply a question of definition. It's not whether it should fall under the term "illegal", it's whether lawyers and lawmakers and other educated folks define the term that way.
And it doesn't seem like they do. It seems that someone is not acting "illegally" when they break a contract. They can be sued, the contract can be binding, but the word we use for the behavior is "breaching" or "violating", not "illegal".
contract law is the body of precedent and collective set of laws related to the legality, construction, execution and all around use of contracts, and while I’m sure there are some specific extra laws that make breach of certain types of contracts a misdemeanour or felony. Generally speaking in most jurisdictions around the world in fact, breach of contract is a civil law matter between the parties of the contract, and settlement of the civil law side of the “is this actually a breach of contract” is usually necessary first before any potential criminal liability can be applied.
An example: An contract can be invalidated for lack of sufficient consideration offered (peppercorn isn’t always enough to make it valid)… this makes the contract void, not illegal. This is a simple example but it illustrates the basic point well, and I’m not trying to write a legal theory essay while on the way to work.
Yes, remedies in the law are invariably against the party breaking the law, not the people complying with the law. What would be the point of sanctions for not breaking the law?
> while I’m sure there are some specific extra laws that make breach of certain types of contracts a misdemeanour or felony. Generally speaking in most jurisdictions around the world in fact, breach of contract is a civil law matter between the parties of the contract
So, what I just said that breach of contract is a violation of the law for which there are sanctions available, but not in and of itself criminal. That was a…very argumentative agreement.
There are also remedies against those who interfere with a contract they are not party to. This is called tortious interference [1].
there is contract law, but breaking contract law is not illegal. a tort for example, is a tort, not a crime.
Contracts are civil law. It is not illegal to breach a contract. It is a tort.
Your definition is not compatible with any common understanding of the word, or with any major dictionary.
Maybe you should check the definition of the word before taking a position on what it is, next time.
In fact, in the UK, apart from a tiny number of civil matters used in criminal law, breaking the law (ie doing something illegal) is always a criminal offence.
For example, in the US there's criminal and civil cases. You can't be incarcerated for losing a civil suit, unless you don't pay whatever judgement the court discerns (which is considered criminal contempt of court).
In the US the difference also comes into play in terms of who can bring certain charges against you. If you were to sue someone, you can't sue them for assault and battery or homicide, because these are considered criminal charges and only the District Attorney / the government can bring these charges against someone. In this case, there are typically parallel civil remedies you can sue for, such as "wrongful death" and "emotional distress" which is strictly to recuperate financial loss.
We had a situation where we chose to breach since IBM contract was abusive and not really enforceable. They never complained, despite threats.
To be clear, I'm not here to be a scold or a narc. Copyright is overly abused by large corporations. My ability to shed a tear for breaching the copyright of billion dollar corporations is limited. If you want to run macOS inside KVM on your own personal rig, all power to you. I'll cheer you on from the sidelines.
But if you're using this software as part of regular business operations, I'm not going to sit here and pretend that it's morally justifiable. And it's ridiculous to pretend that anyone should have the legal right to Apple's intellectual property without a license — save, apparently, for security researchers.
Azure Pipelines supports macOS 11 and 12.
GitHub Actions supports macOS 11, 12, and 13 beta.
If Apple is worried about cannibalizing MacBook sales, they could market-segment virtualization to the high priced iPad Pro 1TB model with 16GB RAM, which is also scheduled to receive an exclusive OLED screen alongside M3 in 2024.
Having such a monopoly on a device you purchase really means the legal system needs to take you down a notch.
I'd have to sympathy for the phone platforms, but it would have destroyed the console market overnight. No way consoles work if every penny of customer lifetime value has to be in the up-front sale price.
Platforms are hostile to the consumer and can't die quickly enough for me, that's why I wanted Epic to win.
Apple has provided the world 1000x more value than Epic ever will. Justice prevailed.
I already send much more than 25% of my annual expenses for the privilege of using the US's platform. I don't even use most of the features but I can't seem to opt out of paying this commission. What gives?
If you're fine with Apple using you, that's okay. You can still pay them 30% going forward, but Apple will eventually have to give up total control of payment processing. It's up to you to decide if it's worth the trouble then.
Competition for small business like yours is a good thing and you should be earning more compared to the big platforms because you bring in the customers, end of story.
Well, until the lord decided to come down, take their harvest and claim their lands. Also the lord built the house on the blood and tears of actual, working people. At least serfs could rebel and take down the lord were their lives threatened, but Apple can just ban your account and you'd have HN commenters claiming "iT's ThEiR pLaYgRouNd tHeY bUilT iT".
Having a userbase is not work. Apple deserves to be paid for their hardware, for their software. But for having users and giving you the privilege of letting you show them things ? That is, quite frankly, pathetic.
Epic can be as skeezy as they want. Apple can be as prudish as they want. I can imagine disliking both, but I just can’t grok cheering for skeeze.
Last time I checked the App Store was filled to the brink with worthless pay to win and gambling (sorry I meant surprise mechanics) garbage. Doesn't seem very protective of the children to me. And an opt-in authentification system for microtransactions doesn't make it okay either.
I meant Screen Time which lets you disable in-app purchases for children, not authentification which just requires you to enter your password for validation against accidental purchases. That was a mistake from my part.
> What people do with their money is none of your business.
Sure it isn't but what exactly is it that makes the App Store especially protective of users then in comparison to the competition? Play Store also gives the same controls and the same premise of guarding users from malware - which does still slip through, don't get me wrong, but so does it on the App Store - without having to block sideloading. Apple is fine with psychological mechanics designed to get particularly children to dump money into a game over and over as long as the developers paid their cut to them - which as you mentioned is fine in the context of individual responsibility, but it really does not scream "protective" to me. At that point why not give me freedom to install apps from wherever I'd like?
> The reason Epic got fined was because people whose credit cards were saved and charged didn’t consent to the purchases and Epic refused to refund even when their virtual currency wasn’t used, or they locked out the accounts entirely when the transactions were charged back.
Yes and never have I defended that. I am very glad they got zapped for that. I am simply against the idea that any corporation is a trustworthy guardian angel which only has the customers' best interests in mind. Any of the tech giants are more than happy to employ anti-competitive and customer-unfriendly tactics in the name of profit and siding with either one because of favoritism or holding a grudge against the one instead of on a rational case-by-case basis is just silly.
So cut the BS, admit you're a hardcore fan of Apple it's really that simple. You don't care about privacy or exploitation. When Apple exploits kids it's fine in your eyes.
Epic is on the right side of that particular issue.
If Apple wanted to, they could block bad practices and either allow external processors or charge a pure payment processing fee. Their current actions seem to be more concerned about the fees than the customers.
This strikes me like such as "but Big Brother good, he protects us from ourselves!" argument.
It's trivially easy to install pirated games on the Deck, without any cracking or modification of the system. You never have to make a single Steam purchase after buying the Deck, but Valve's betting that you will. And they're right, that's enough. Most people don't go redoing or even tweaking the software stack on their hardware, they just stick with what comes out of the box.
Whereas the steam deck has likely been sold as a profit from day one.
It would be better overall for competition for the games to be decoupled from the console. Same as with phone apps
Because that was Epic’s end game.
Whose job would it be to maintain all of the compatibility layers for the custom hardware that consoles generally contain?.
Who pays for all the work to allow you to do whatever you want on your device?.
The community's? I don't think anyone expects the vendor to officially support anything other than the OS it ships with. We just want the option to use our own software on the hardware we purchased.
> Who pays for all the work to allow you to do whatever you want on your device?.
Surely it's more work to go the extra mile to restrict access?
If anything, the iPhone is the odd one out for having hardware margins that don't suck.
It's not so easy to get Win 10 working right, it requires a fair bit of effort, and the experience sucks.
I'm not so sure Steam would be super happy if Epic started distributing a new frontend and store through their marketplace. I'm quite sure they wouldn't let them.
So yeah, Steam definitely allows distribution of storefronts.
That sounds like cromulent use of HN.
Fortunately, "monopoly" isn't the thing that the law cares about.
Everything to do with anti-trust law, and competition laws, is not about monopolies, and is instead about monopoly power.
> so maybe we shouldn't compare terminology across countries
Feel free to look at the the FTC says about this topic then. It to applies to companies with monopoly power, and not literal monopolies.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
"Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power"
This is obviously true because the policies in question were substantially in place by 2009, long before anyone could have said "monopoly" in Apple's direction without being drowned in laughter.
We can only hope that alternative app stores on iOS will force Apple to match Google Play's 30% platform fees:
https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/16/google-play-drops-commissi...
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/02/apple-shocks-ios...
Besides the income from services within Apple's apps: they could take 30% of an app's purchase price (which is still not justified tbh, the app store can't be _that_ expensive to run), but how do they justify trying to take a percentage of a subscription (like Spotify, Netflix etc) when they have nothing to do with it?
That would be like Apple being able to take a portion of banking fees from me because I have my bank's app installed on my phone (and the bank takes fees), which Apple doesn't do of course because as big as they are, you do not fuck with banks.
15%. Almost everybody pays 15%, not 30%. The only organisations who pay 30% earn over a million dollars a year from things other than long-term subscriptions. That’s a tiny minority.
> Apple will reduce its commission by 3% on the price paid by the user, net of value-added taxes. This is a reduced rate that excludes value related to payment processing and related activities.
— https://developer.apple.com/support/storekit-external-entitl...
100% of the top 100 paid apps on the App Store pay the full tax. It's a progressive model, and the figure itself is arbitrary anyways. People want a more Mac-like distribution model, and Apple is reluctant to provide it because services are the only thing with wider margin than slave labor cellphones.
> 100% of the top 100 paid apps on the App Store pay the full tax.
There are millions of apps on the App Store. The top 100 is a tiny fraction of that. Virtually nobody pays.
> The only organisations who pay 30% earn over a million dollars a year from things other than long-term subscriptions. That’s a tiny minority.
You’re just changing the point and arguing for the sake of it now.
Maybe the Bloomberg Law article is a bit clearer ["Apple Fails to Fully Reboot iOS Simulator Copyright Case"](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/apple-fails-to-revive-c...)
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/apple-fails-to-revive-c...
> Apple Fails to Fully Reboot iOS Simulator Copyright Case (1)
> Apple Inc. failed to fully revive a long-running copyright lawsuit against cybersecurity firm Corellium Inc. over its software that simulates the iPhone’s iOS operating systems, letting security researchers identify flaws in the software. > The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on Monday ruled that Corellium’s CORSEC simulator is protected by copyright law’s fair use doctrine, which allows the duplication of copyrighted work under certain circumstances. > CORSEC “furthers scientific progress by allowing security research into important operating systems,” a three-judge panel for the appeals court said, adding that iOS “is functional operating software that falls outside copyright’s core.”
I think thats a fair decision, always found macs looking nice, but dislike many of the apps. Windows and ms suite on mac is on my bucket list now.