Epic Games Store and Fortnite Arrive on EU iPhones
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
This is a small step in installing an app, but a giant leap for digital freedom. I hope that non-UE citizens can achieve this goal by the end of the decade, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
> not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
That's why i ask for first hand experience.
But amount of pass apple gets from mostly US folks even here on HN and elsewhere, despite all their intentional missteps and fuckups is staggering. Main reason for me to stay away from whole ecosystem, price wise they are just in upper middle tier, functionality wise it depends what you need/expect - from great to pretty much horrible proposition. If google would be chinese corp I would get it when crowds get into us-vs-them mindset, but this fanatism has no base in reality, its more like blind political support of candidate X despite massive character flaws, just because you already invested yourself heavily in given party direction for topic Y.
They will keep doing it exactly and only to the point when users will start voting with their wallets, hoping for some apple moral auto-correction is a pipe dream with some serious stuff in that pipe. Or leave it up to regulators with some morals, but I struggle to imagine this working anywhere else outside of EU, and I am not positive about the future change (hoping to be wrong of course). Until apple does something both nasty and visible, they will continue to be uncritically celebrated.
Due to governmental pressure, we have a chance to get a browser that can run uBlock Origin on iOS in the future...
Mozilla is an ad-supported company from every angle: Pocket, search deal, the ads built into Firefox. Why don't they get more of the blame for the current state of the browser ecosystem?
What's Orion, and is it compatible with normal desktop Firefox and Chrome extensions, or with the mobile ones?
> The lack of extensions in mobile browsers is a sign of Mozilla's decay, not a sign of Apple being unnecessarily restrictive.
Agree with Mozilla's decay, but there's also a Chrome for iOS and that doesn't have uBlock Origin either, does it?
> What's Orion
A web browser, using the same Webkit as everybody else on iOS, with support for browser extensions.
People give Apple too much flak for the mismanagement or warped incentives of browser vendors. Lack of extensions in existing browsers isn't their fault to any degree.
> and is it compatible with normal desktop Firefox and Chrome extensions, or with the mobile ones?
There's not a separate spec for "mobile" Firefox extensions and desktop browser extensions. Google WebExtensions. It's an open standard that desktop Firefox follows and that Chrome almost does.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions
Your lack of understanding of what browser extensions are is exactly why it would be better if Apple explicitly banned browser extensions from the App Store. Ignorance is a malware vector, and even you, a commentator on Hacker News, do not understand the browser extension ecosystem. Instead, they're taking a bunch of flak for something they aren't even doing, all the while iOS has had a browser supporting uBO for years.
"When using the uBlock Origin browser extension on iPhone or iPad, it is unable to block any ads or trackers on webpages. The displayed interception count always remains at 0. This result is consistent whether downloading the version from Chrome or Firefox's software store."
Sounds like from that (may be out of date, some posts complaining are 15 days ago though), it runs but doesn't work:
https://orionfeedback.org/d/7741-ublock-origin-not-working-o...
This is in there officially from Orion:
"This is because Apple limitations, we will continue to improve Orion's native ad-block."
You should maybe give an apology unless you've been actually using it successfully with all features, not just installed it successfully.
Firefox Android actually runs real uBlock Origin in the ways you would expect.
That's good for how to call it, diversity, yes.
> WebKit is crippled and always behind in standards implementations.
I would cry a river except the standards you're mentioning are mostly made to benefit Google. At best we'll get a duopoly instead of a monopoly, like we have with the actual phone operating systems.
> I would cry a river except the standards you're mentioning are mostly made to benefit Google
This mindset makes 0 sense. Yes, things like http/3 and webtransport benefit google, but it also benefits literally everyone else not named Apple.
SO MUCH? Do I look like i can afford infinite ram?
> benefits literally everyone else not named Apple.
No, it seems to me it benefits javascript app developers in addition to Google. I see zero benefit for the users.
> I see zero benefit for the users
You seem to think that all the web apps that exist would just be native apps if the web didn't support js. Your way of thinking reeks of 4chan/g from 2005. Next you are going to start complaining about "bloat".
Also fyi, people that create things tend to be users of their own creations.
And pray tell, why aren't you compiling to native?
> You seem to think that all the web apps that exist would just be native apps if the web didn't support js.
Or not exist at all if there is no market :)
However, I'm pretty sure that niche apps have always existed, even when they were native. I've used a fair few.
I hope people care more about the things you value than your apparent lack of care of others.
with altstore grant from epic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41250470), it should hopefully be easier to onboard more proper alternatives.
Anyway: https://youtu.be/_6cmu0NuM3g
This being Epic and made because of a free to play game, I'm more interested in an analysis of how predatory it is. It's not like Epic is better than Apple at their core.
Even apps requesting notification changes require users to click through manually.
Wrong. Dating apps can and do deeplink to their geolocation permissions settings.
Never seen any app able to deep link beyond the first level in Settings.
This brings the app to your apps settings page which includes the permissions toggles. We use it in our camera app when the user has denied camera permissions (kind of vital) and need help turning it back on, it brings them right to the correct toggle
Android has recently started blocking users from granting some sensitive permissions to apps from settings dialogues spawned by the app itself for this reason. You need to manually open the settings to grant the most sensitive permissions. This has the benefit of requiring the user to know what power they're granting these apps, but the process is a lot less straight-forward than this was on iOS.
Let alone you need to manually give permissions to everything.
Unfortunately, it's somewhat common among the less tech-savvy.
In countries where Android is more popular, a lot of scam callers call to tell you that your phone has a virus and to install their "special app", of course the special app needs to check that there's no virus hiding in the camera so it needs camera permissions, of course it's safe if it has made-by-the-police in the name. People who don't know how tech works absolutely fall for this.
Reminds me of the ridiculous hoops Google built into Chrome to discourage you from sideloading extensions - having you activate "dev mode" before, sure, but then also making dragging and dropping the extension file onto the Chrome window the only way to actually install it.
One of the first times I visited it I was on mobile data with like 300mb high speed data left. After opening the page and reading the article I got the notification that I have no data left.
I don't know if it was actually Ars that munched on my data or if it was something in the background suddenly doing that, but it didn't happen before. Ever since then my taste of the website has been a bit soured.
That's the reason I configured uBlock Origin on my phone browser to disable both images and JavaScript. Text-only pages have a much lower chance of eating all the data, and if I really need JavaScript or images for a site, I can easily tell uBlock Origin to temporarily unblock them for that site.
No matter what you think about the regulation, it's obvious Apple cannot in any way be allowed to win that one now.
At least in the common charger case it was an industry agreement not a law and they did it when the regulation came, this time it's much more serious.
yes, I (also) think the EU pro-consumer regulations are good and Apple ought to adhere to them simply because it's the virtuous behavior, but ... they have show time after time that they prefer (virtually amoral) profit maximization.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
I'm certainly not going to buy ports of years old games on the app store where they're expensive and mac exclusive when i can get them multiplatform and for much less on Steam - if I haven't already finished them years ago. <cough> Death Stranding lol. I preordered that on launch.
And I use one x86 box, one PS5 and two Macs. I'm just not uninformed enough to overpay Cook for games.
Does that 2.08% Linux include the Deck btw? I couldn't figure it out by expanding.
> Does that 2.08% Linux include the Deck btw?
[edit] I think I was wrong, see sibling comment which indicates that 41% of Linux users are on the Deck's OS.
Edit to answer the reply below this one:
I have no idea how many times I got the hardware survey popup, but I always click Yes on it. It's possible I wasn't counted for Linux because I don't really use that install. The x86 box is headless and I steam stream games off it to the macs that have monitors. That doesn't seem to work from Linux.
[0] Since HL2 or maybe the Orange Box. I'm old.
Or throw in the towel and do what Linux gaming did and just make a compatibility layer for Windows APIs and DirectX (wine/proton). Though this compatibility layer stuff has big issues with anti cheat software making it not really suitable for many online games.
The word "just" does a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. First you need to get your game running on ARM64, which likely won't work out-of-the-box unless you already ported to smartphone/Nintendo Switch. Then you simply map all the functionality to MacOS syscalls, debug a second version of your game, polish it, and release it but without Metal support so you can use MoltenVK to run it. The number of video games that fall into this category of "released for 64-bit MacOS but doesn't support Metal" is minuscule. 99% of the video games released today are an x86 Windows binary, and if you can't run that you're boned. Developers will not build you a special MacOS version of their Vulkan game so you can mess around with translation layers.
You could also use Linux and get upstream Vulkan drivers that work out-of-the-box. Apple's obsession over Metal is part of the reason I left MacOS and I truly pity anyone that depends on MoltenVK to run their favorite software.
But yet you think Apple is responsible for Steam pricing ?
Need to go through the motions of configuring per game as it’s not meant to be end user software.
And I don’t think you can publish games using it directly. Still have to do the port itself.
Also, at least for now, I get the impression that the GPTK (and Rosetta, for that matter) are meant to be temporary shims that will go away in the future.
How does one install it?
What if I travel to the EU? Can I install it while there?
The new georestricted iOS features, like 3rd-party App Stores, are behind feature flags that only activate in certain regions. There are multiple factors taken into account when determining whether a flag should be activated. They include GPS location, location obtained from nearby cell towers, the issuing country of your SIM card, the region you set in settings, the country that nearby WiFi networks broadcast for regulatory purposes[1], and (indirectly, through the billing address) the issuing country of the credit or debit card that you use in the App Store.
Not all of them have to match, but the threshold is high enough that you're very unlikely to meet it while physically in the US.
Feature flags stay activated for 30 days since last eligibility, so if you're an EU resident and leave for a vacation, you're fine. If you traveled here as an US resident, you (probably) could get these features activated, perhaps needing an european Apple ID and/or SIM, but they would only stay on for 30 days.
It’s impressive how much work Apple is willing to deal with in order to protect their turf outside of the EU.
GDPR applies if your an EU citizen even if _none_ of these is true. I hope the EU emends their markets law so that it grants every EU citizen the right to _easily_ install whatever he or she wants. That would put an end to this nonsense.
Does it show clearly which data each app collects?
Of course Apple would like you to have a vague feeling of fear, uncertainty and doubt about third party distribution. The truth is that the only extra layer of defense provided by Apple’s App Store is an arbitrary review process that is always overwhelmed and easily gamed.
So, for Meta, in this specific case, the law was easier to ignore than the developer agreement.
Match made in heaven?
The sandbox does not prevent iOS apps from accessing private APIs and accessing data from the OS that wouldn't be available typically. And after all these years there is still no way to curtail the power of Objective-C dynamic dispatch.
It is one of the main things that the App Store process checks for.
That sounds like a critical failure of the iOS security model that would make me uneasy about using their OS. A security issue like this needs be addressed through technical means, not by a fallible manual review process.
As things stand, it's just a fear-mongering excuse they can throw in front of clueless legislators/regulators to help them maintain a stranglehold on app distribution.
I think it would be very funny if it turns out Epic don't understand GDPR (data collection) and DSA (dark patterns), in much the same way they've already had a settlement for COPPA: https://web.archive.org/web/20221219211645/https://www.nbcne...
It's possible to win every battle, and still lose.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41265892
The companies that make those games, like Epic and miHoYo are far more directly culpable.
Really, I blame the governments for not banning this obviously deleterious crap, like the US is seriously debating banning tik-tok when gacha games are right there.
Everything always boils down to the terrible incentives of app makers paying a tax share of revenue or profit rather than just paying a fixed fee for the distribution service.
Can't decide if it's sad or funny that Epic's greed clashed with Apple's greed and they ended up getting EU users a bit more freedom to decide what's run on the hardware they paid for...
It's not. Sent from my Librem 5.
When considering competition for X, the alternative should do at least most of the things that X does. It's not realistic to expect a drop-in alternative, but the user, I think, can't be expected to turn their life around, just to use the alternative, either. If this would be the case, then a SIM-enabled Windows notebook would also be competition for the iPhone.
If the offerings differ too much, then they are not competition. They are different products.
Can that SIM-enabled Windows notebook do phone calls using the cell operator network (that is, not over the Internet)? If not (that is, if it uses the SIM only for data), then it's not an iPhone competitor. The "smartphone" category (which is where all iPhone competitors reside) requires being both "smart" (that is, with PDA functionality) and being a "phone"; the Librem 5 (and, for instance, the Nokia N900) fits comfortably in that category.
To change to the Librem 5, I would need to:
- change the way I communicate with all of my friends and family by using SMS over the _only_ method used in much of the world - WhatsApp.
- be excluded from context surrounding many social gatherings due to not being in group chats.
- change the way I travel with very, very different navigation apps that lack turn-by-turn directions.
- stop using social media when on the go - mobile websites often lack many features, if they even exist.
- accept significantly reduced quality photographs of memories, especially in low light.
- meticulously acquire local files for tens of thousands of songs I have organised in Spotify playlists for over a decade, and totally change the way I discover new music.
- lose Shazam and apps like it, so I’ll forever be wondering “what was that song I liked…?”
- entirely change from the mobile-only bank that I use (and, even then, suffer the atrocious UX of most online banking).
- change from the convenience of Apple/Google/etc. photos to setting up Syncthing, my own NAS, and making sure it keeps running and never goes wrong.
- become stranded when public transport stops running at night, as I can’t get an Uber, or try to get a normal taxi at 3am. I’m not even sure they exist where I am.
- carry a wallet, or at the very least my cards, with me for the first time in 9 years.
Unfortunately, the duopoly is well-entrenched, especially for those born after 1995 or so and outside the US (SMS is very, very rarely used in much of the rest of the world). You could tell people that there are plenty of workarounds - I listed many above - and some sacrifices to use a Linux phone, they should try it! But then they would ask “why?” and you’d be hard-pressed to give any reason they care about.
- ability to run apps from a (well stocked) store
You can run Android apps via Waydroid. F-Droid, for example, works fine for me.
I think for most people there really isn't any competition, especially with the lock in from icloud. It was painful for me when I switched to a pinephone (I just use cheogram on a laptop with a 4g modem now, I don't think most people will do that) and I'm generally very careful about using online services like that. Most people just switching between Android and iOS will turn their whole lives upside down.
I think it's amusing, it's extremely rare for incentives of a big corporation to align with ours to the point where they'd go to war against giants like Apple.
Epic is equally bad in other areas but I'm glad they fought for this.
Because I have this Android phone sitting on my desk for development. When I bought it it was almost as responsive as iPhones (and much cheaper). 4 years later the UI is a lagfest [1].
Meanwhile, my iPhone XS is over 5 years old and almost as responsive as on day one. And I have major version OS updates to blame for the "almost", while the Android one got one major update and was lagfest even before that.
[1] I don't even use it every day, Android development is kind of a side job once in a while.
As a counter anecdotal evidence: I bought my current Android phone before the pandemic started (that is, more than 4 years ago), use it daily, and it's as responsive now as it was when I first used it. While I don't have any iPhone experience to compare, I feel no lag when using it.
That isn’t the case with an iPhone
My family uses Android exclusively (including extended family) and the only cases where performance degraded is with very cheap 10+ y/o phones that could no longer keep up with system updates that now take most of the storage space.
Even those more or less still work after reflashing a leaner FLOSS ROM.
Did you perhaps buy a crapware chinese phone and are receiving bloat/spyware?
No, I know what you mean, I've seen this happen with very cheap (or not cheap but just rubbish/spyware) brands/models that quickly filled the system partition over time with bloatware during updates.
Being cheap, the system partition was already tight on purchase, so the bloat/spyware quickly turns it unusable. The cheaper models tend to have inadequate storage to begin with and install bloat/spyware to subsidize them.
I just don't think it's an "Android" thing, most of those can be revitalized by installing a custom ROM without the spyware (but the crappiest brands are probably not even FLOSS-supported).
What is your device brand+model?
/dev/block/dm-4 3.4G 3.4G 22M 100% /
/dev/fuse 23G 14G 8.2G 64% /storage/emulated
I haven't worked with AOSP in ages, just normal apps. Is root supposed to be 100% full?
I don't even know how this works anymore since I think since Android 10 they use some sort of overlay FS for updates?
I tried installing parted on Termux but it refuses to do so and I have no energy to fight it.
I know it's cliché but... have you tried a factory reset?
I will when it starts to annoy me.
Or I may just get a new phone the next time I need to do Android. This one has 12, they're at 15 now. I may need to be on whatever's the latest on a new project, whenever that comes (not soon).
No, this latest one is a crapware Samsung phone. Doesn't mean I'm not receiving bloat/spyware.
Come to think of it, the Huawei I used before this Samsung degraded less. But I had to abandon them when they got kicked out of google services. Need a full featured phone so I can develop whatever the customer wants.
There are plenty of reasons to have an iPhone even if you deeply dislike the lack of sideloading and the AppStore.
Personally, I dislike the Android look and feel more than I want the ability to install other app marketplaces.
I just wish there was a serious third option.