Apple's punitive compliance will burn its political and developer goodwill

Its really hard to break network effects, especially at Apples scale.

If it was just gonna end with a minor gatekeeping fee, I can see myself (and other) just biting the bullet but history suggests that this is just the beginning of a massive descent.

Could you elaborate on this? It's not seen in practice - both tech progress and MBAs are contributors to the condensing of every industry (airlines, banks, supermarkets, office supply stores, appliance manufacurers, food manufacturers, etc.) into fewer and fewer megacorps with monopoly or oligopoly effects.

That mistake looks like the result of a voice-to-text conversion; I wouldn't be surprised if it was proof read, but by text-to-speech which would hide that mistake in the other direction, too.

[edit] although for context this team rolls their own engine. If you’re using Unity or Unreal > 5.2 (May 2023) things are slowly improving.

Unlike the devs in the Apple ecosystem who are used to be on the constant treadmill of app updates to accommodate Apple constantly breaking and changing things with every release, this is incompatible with the gaming industry release model, where after the patch cycle the devs can move onto the next project and rely on the backwards compatibility to trust that their released games will keep running for years and decades into the future.

So when Apple broke this unspoken agreement, the game devs have simply left their existing games in whatever broken state they were, and decided against releasing their future projects on macOS, supporting which wasn't financially viable in the long term, given the time needed and the relatively small percentage of playerbase which uses it.

As a developer and founder, grandma before developers. Every time. iOS is the first platform my family can just run with safely.

Samsung raw unit sales of smartphones have been decreasing since ... what like 2015 or something? So simply by keeping sales equal, Apple could overtake Samsung in sales. But that wouldn't necessarily indicate an increase in profit.

It's definitely true that services is Apple's biggest income growth right now. And the revenue is already double that of all Macs

Which is strange, because there's lots of governments in Brussels, and for example the Belgian Federal government doesn't. Belgian Federal employees totally overwhelm local restaurants, and this is Brussels, right, it's perhaps not London, but whatever weird thing you like eating, brussels has 10 choices in the city center. Lebanese, Chinese, 3 generations Italian, Moroccan, Algerian, and of course Belgian fries, whatever you want, square after square full of restaurants ... But at lunch, impossible to get anything around the north or central station. Or NATO people, while they have a very deserved reputation for paranoia don't hate Brussels. (Consultants are driven around on the NATO compound, phones disabled, for minimum 20 minutes, in a bus with no windows, so you never know what is in which building, and that is if you're coming over to help in one of their data centers. If it's actually classified, like a radar system ... it's not fun) EU commissars, even 2nd and 3rd level are constantly protected by large security forces (~10 people constantly surrounding them, even inside EU commission buildings, they regularly clear the entire area around the Berlaymont building to take those "see, we're approachable" interviews outside they love doing, but really they're about as approachable as a US FT100 CEO), despite that even Jens Stoltenberg mostly only has a driver. The EU is totally isolated from everything. It's a huge government, but located on a relatively small area (the "European quarter"), where you won't find many restaurants, or culture, even the metro station is pretty far away from Berlaymont. EU employees eat inside EU buildings, they live outside of Brussels, they never have meetings outside of EU buildings ...