Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
wsj.com
wsj.com
>> In Slack communications dated November 16, 2021, the Apple employees crafting the warning screen for Project Michigan discussed how best to frame its language. Mr. Onak suggested the warning screen should include the language: “By continuing on the web, you will leave the app and be taken to an external website” because “‘external website’ sounds scary, so execs will love it.” [...] One employee further wrote, “to make your version even worse you could add the developer name rather than the app name.” To that, another responded “ooh - keep going.”
[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
That job was at an avionics company working on safety critical systems. They paid tons of lip service to always placing safety first -- and from what I personally witnessed, at least at that time, the concern was genuine. There was a culture of taking the responsibility seriously, at least at the engineering level I interacted with.
Even acting in good faith though, things happen. Planes crash (usually due to pilot error), and when they do everyone gets sued, and when that happens careless language represents a risk for a company, even if they did everything right.
Having moved on to consumer tech, I haven't seen similar cultures of doing the "right thing". That could be the modern world, my own cynicism, or just the differences inherent to industries where lives aren't explicitly on the line. Regardless, it's not at all hard to imagine that employees can be taught to self censor in ways that won't themselves create more liability.
Nobody stops you from texting your friends about buying ten pounds of cocaine, (when you actually meant confectioner's sugar), but putting it in writing may make your life more difficult if at some point, by happenstance, you might end up the defendant in a narcotics trial. Even if you are completely innocent.
To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath.
This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction.
Now, practically speaking, that exposes them to the Court taking all their frustration out on the execs. Oops.
Even if these executive positions carried a guarantee of a several year term in minimum or medium security prison, for the salaries involved they should be able to find someone who is reasonably competent and willing to do the job.
It's not like the corporate entity itself can be threatened with state violence, and it's owners (probably half the US!) are insulated from any real consequences. An entity like Apple really has diffused responsibility to the point that it transcends the law at this point, and it becomes perfectly rational for it to defy the courts.
Do they defy the courts in China or just in the US?
He probably got offered a couple mil for a slap on the wrist, he likely won't even be jailed for a day. Why wouldn't they lie? They have the money to get away with it.
Ironically it ends up getting flagged as some deliberate Apple malicious compliance BS which just sours you on the whole iOS experience.
It kind of surprises me that people working in that environment haven't been better trained about what not to write. I have zero legal background, but even twenty years ago at my very first corporate job I received a training module about legal discovery and the consequences of poorly worded emails -- and that was at a company that I genuinely believe was trying to follow the law in good faith, and was simply worried about liability due to misperception of careless language.
For a team specifically working on a legal compliance project, I am with the poster above that mentioned legal teams providing oversite. If nothing else, every one of these chats should have had a lawyer logged in to provide a mental reminder to participants that the conversation really isn't private.
Apologies, there are times I do not express myself as clearly as I would want to.
Are they supposed to say "Please use our competitor. You'll find your experience with them far superior to what we provide" or something similar?
Good faith is a requirement. Act in bad faith, and you can still be sanctioned.
Do you have any background in this, or are you just asserting what you want reality to be?
Because you are just spouting wrong information that, even for a non-lawyer, would take you 10 minutes to go find and read right information.
Is some degree of malicious compliance not extremely common when companies deal with the courts? From the outside it seems like the incentive would be to comply with a court order to the minimum degree required to avoid further legal consequences, but no more. Is compliance more enthusiastic that that in practice? Again, I have zero experience, but the idea of a company losing a lawsuit and then actually acting in good faith is a strange one to me.
An individual might be intimidated to act in actual good faith to avoid serious consequences, but Apple as an entity can't be tossed in jail for contempt of court, right? So it would seem that it is incentivized to push it's employees to take risks like this, with the understand that they can be replaced by employees who will if they refuse.
Malicious compliance is exactly why good faith is a requirement but not a defense.
Bad faith will get you contempt, good faith will not save you from contempt if you didn't do enough.
Do companies try to skirt this anyway - sure. But they run the risk of a judge finding they didn't do enough, and sanctioning them anyway, even if they didn't have obvious bad faith, or heck, even if they have objectively good faith.
There are plenty of cases where judges sanctioned good faith actors who didn't do enough.
I quoted McComb in another comment (so don't want to paste it again here), but see https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/336/187/ and friends.
In the end, once you lose, if you play stupid games, you will usually win stupid prizes.
That doesn't mean people don't play, but it's almost always against their lawyers strong advice.
As for jail - you have to distinguish civil and criminal contempt. Criminal contempt can get you thrown in jail, and has different requirements.
Once a company gets burned by scary litigation, it is often very reticent about pushing the line again.
The key here is "reasonableness", but you can't read a judge's mind, so reasonable only means what a reasonable person would infer. That is completely subjective based on an individual's implicit biases and knowledge of all surrounding circumstances.
For example, the dev team tasked with implementing this may not be familiar with the entire case, so what they consider reasonable will be different based on that. They also know much more about technology and likely have strong feelings about what is acceptable, but the judge is NOT a subject matter expert (SME) in that area. Likewise, the judge is NOT a SME on UI/UX, so the judge's interpretation of "reasonable" may well be at odds. There is also an argument that directing to these third-party sites opens 1.4B people to exploitation, so it would be reasonable to allow them access, but also to protect those users (who also aren't SMEs and often have essentially zero understanding) from potential issues by framing things appropriately. I could go on with many other qualifiers about what would be reasonable.
The judge is qualified to make rulings based on the law, but utterly unqualified to decide what the details of a reasonable implementation would be. If she were a qualified SME, she could and should have written her reasoned decision and removed the need for interpretation. If the ruling were itself reasonable and clear, there wouldn't be meaningful room for debate about reasonableness which would in turn effectively render reasonableness a mute point. As such, you can see that "reasonableness" in these kinds of cases is a crutch to protect unqualified judges making rulings they should not be making which is ironically a very unreasonable approach.
As to "good faith", who is she to dictate that you must do what she says and be happily compliant or else? After all, unhappiness will almost certainly taint all actions to a greater or lesser degree, so anything less than perfect contentment would be "bad faith" to a greater or lesser degree.
Who is the judge to single-handedly decide these people's state of mind? Has all her study of law made her an expert on what happens in other people's minds and privy to their thoughts and experiences while ridding herself of her own biases? Such a task is impossibly hard for a jury even in broad terms with lots of facts and even less possible for a single person judging the actions of many people based only on a few chat messages.
How does she ensure that every single one of those hundreds to thousands of people involved is "acting in good faith" is an impossible task and you can be assured that at least one of them at any given time isn't acting in good faith about ANYTHING. This would imply that you must ALWAYS assume that bad faith was involved.
How do you determine how much bad faith is too much? Based on outcome is the only logical answer, but in that case, you could have been explicit about the outcome in the first place and skipped all the trouble and possible excuses of misunderstanding once again rendering "bad faith" as a crutch to protect the judge from their incompetence.
She passed judgement based on the law. As long as that judgement is fulfilled to the degree specified, the state of mind of the hundreds to thousands of people involved in carrying out that judgement should not matter.
"Good faith" and "reasonableness" is a faulty and fickle metric at its best when applied to a single person by a group of peers. It is a broken and unusable metric when applied to a group or corporate entity by a single judge not an expert in the matters at hand.
It's a long rant that is not based in the law, the application of "reasonability" in the law, or other examples of "good faith" standards being used. It's made without any expertise or direct relevant knowledge, yet it is offered with the authority and conviction as if you understood more about the law than the judge in question. Reasonable isn't a state of mind, so when you ask things like "who is this judge to read these people's minds" it begs a million quesitons like, how can your worldview ever deal with laws that DO involve a state of mind? This isn't some huge problem in the legal world, we rely on evidence and the reasonable conclusions and inferences you can make from the evidence.
In addition, one of the ironic things is that I ran engineering teams that did the equivalent of project michigan, at Google.
More than once.
The upsides (downsides?) of being an engineer/manager/lawyer.
So i even have plenty of firsthand experience dealing with exactly this situation, both on the legal side, and the engineering side.
I stated that establishing reasonableness was hard enough with a jury of peers judging just one person in a more limited scope and more facts available and a very high burden of proof. The number of cases overturned based on differing views of "reasonableness" is proof that it isn't an objective standard of anything.
> Reasonable isn't a state of mind,
How can you define reasonableness without either directly or indirectly including subjectivity? If you add subjectiveness, then it is indeed a state of mind with different subjects (minds) having different conclusions.
Reasonableness is akin to Platonic Idealism. It assumes there is some hypothetical human who represents the reasonableness of humanity, but that is unreasonable.
As a simple example, would a reasonable person allow a trans person to use the bathroom of their choice? Ask a person on the left, a person on the right, a SME, and a trans person and you are likely to get a whole spectrum of reasonableness so wide that the two extremes would be complete opposites.
Would you trust the reasonableness of an all-white Mississippi jury judging a black man in the 1800s? This shows that reasonableness is at best a bad approximation of what the majority of the people in a specific group agree about a specific topic. This has almost nothing to do with objectivity and everything to do with subjectivity and is a state of mind rather than objective truth.
> how can your worldview ever deal with laws that DO involve a state of mind?
Mens Rea is taught to have both a subjective and objective component. The entire point of "beyond reasonable doubt" is that you should have clear indicators of the crime. This is no different with Mens Rea and someone should not be convicted strictly on a subjective "they look guilty to me" basis. The standard is still "beyond reasonable doubt" which means the overwhelming evidence for Mens Rea should be objective rather than subjective ("reasonableness" is subjective).
It is better to let the guilty go free than punish the innocent. If there is not objective evidence of Mens Rea beyond reasonable doubt, then there should not be a conviction on that charge. This is the only way to reduce wrongful conviction.
> This isn't some huge problem in the legal world, we rely on evidence and the reasonable conclusions and inferences you can make from the evidence.
This is a massive problem that you paper away until some trial makes the news and it is once again shown that there is very little agreement at large about what passes as "reasonable".
While we're on the topic, would you care to explain the utter unreasonable logic and outcomes behind qualified immunity? If you'd like a very specific example, what about the one where the cop draws his gun on a non-aggressive dog not caring that a little girl is behind it. He then shoots the girl instead of the dog and is protected by SCOTUS having crafted law out of nothing because it would be argued that he acted "reasonably" (even though it would 100% be a criminal conviction were the badge removed from the equation).
I'll say again that reasonableness is almost completely unreasonable.
All of this is speaking only of criminal law where the Mens Rea is (generally) limited to a single incident by a single person. When you involve many people (most not directly involved and some potentially from different places, cultures, and legal systems) over time and what all of them consider to be reasonable would be unreasonable enough. Making a judge qualified to judge the actions of these people as reasonable or unreasonable then hold an entirely different group of people (a group almost certainly unaware and with no reasonable means of becoming aware) responsible for those actions is also unreasonable.
And of course, a judge writing up stuff she isn't a SME in is going to be seen as unreasonable by a supermajority of people. Should the burger flipper at McDonalds be writing up criteria about how brain surgery should be conducted? Would you consider his judgement about how that brain surgery was conducted to be reasonable? I think not.
I absolutely did read what you wrote. What I will not read is any of your response after this sentence.
Are you writing these long nonsense posts specifically to make this claim? Because it certainly reads like you are.
You need to be better about writing more concisely. As it stands, it reads like you are trying to hide ignorance behind a large word count.
There are a lot of websites that give you a warning when you click on a link outside of their control.
I think there's a valid reason to think "if it's OK and common for banks and brokers to do it, it's OK for me to do it" and also to think "this will help protect users from being scammed by other apps who might pop open random links without any notices".
Now that I think about it, I wonder how much of the current backlash against remote work is to avoid this exact situation. Face to face conversations don't end up in evidence. Written conversations do, and video chats are increasingly being summarized and recorded by AI.
The fig leaf reason is “it’s an app we approved and we need to protect our customers.”
From a more negative point of view, so Apple knows how much it happens and gets to have some influence over it.
Injunctions are, intentionally, required only to "describe in reasonable detail the act or acts restrained or required". The key being "reasonable". They are not required to specify every detail, or every wrong or right thing, especially when the party being enjoined knows more of the details of how things work than the court does.
You seem to believe the court must specify language, etc, and they are absolutely not required to do so. It is your job to figure it out, and if you need more information, shockingly, you can ask the judge for the information, or whether your proposed approach would be compliant.
You are also required to make good faith attempts to comply with a court order. The evidence here is overwhelming bad faith - they were not trying to figure out how to actually ensure the court's goals were carried out, they are instead trying to figure out how to thwart them. That is pretty much the definiton of bad faith.
The injunction has reasonable detail. This is neither good faith, nor did they ask.
You seem to think this is game of try to find legal loopholes. That is a good way to get thrown in a jail by a judge.
It's not. Once you are found guilty and injunction entered, the adversarial process is done. You lost.
Your job is to do what the court requires of you, in good faith, as best you can.
Even if you appeal it, unless it is stayed, you are still required to do it.
In other words, could Apple have done these exact same actions and successfully argued that the language ("external website") was in fact neutral, if not for the direct written record that established their intent to do otherwise?
Everything you just said makes sense, but the details of how the courts manage to enforce orders like this are interesting, and it seems like enforcing notions of good faith must be extremely difficult.
Thanks for writing this though, this is a window into a space I have never played in. The legal system is very mysterious to me.
Yes, almost certainly. The party claiming non-compliance has to prove your non-compliance, but they do not have to prove your bad faith.
Instead, the burden falls to the enjoined party to prove good faith.
Affirmative good faith usually comes up more in trying to dissolve injunctions, etc (where the enjoined party has to prove good faith) than civil contempt of an order.
This is because in the case of civil contempt, Judges still have discretion to find you in contempt even if you acted in good faith. IE bad faith will definitely get you contempt, but good faith alone will not save you from it. You can act in good faith, not do enough, and still be found in contempt for not doing enough. This helps dissuade malicious compliance as well.
See, generally, mccomb and friends:
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/336/187/
"The absence of willfulness does not relieve from civil contempt. Civil as distinguished from criminal contempt is a sanction to enforce compliance with an order of the court or to compensate for losses or damages sustained by reason of noncompliance . . . . Since the purpose is remedial, it matters not with what intent the defendant did the prohibited act . . . . An act does not cease to be a violation of a law and of a decree merely because it may have been done innocently. The force and vitality of judicial decrees derive from more robust sanctions. And the grant or withholding of remedial relief is not wholly discretionary with the judge. . . . The private or public rights that the decree sought to protect are an important measure of the remedy."
What I don't get is that sometimes it seems that is the game, sometimes the legal loopholes are accepted and other times they are not. It feels one of the big benefits of hiring a good lawyer is that they know which loopholes are accepted and which are seen as spiting the authority of the courts.
Don't confuse the adversarial process with the post-adversarial process.
Don't confuse civil and criminal cases.
On the first: The adversarial process is between two sides, maybe you and a company, or two companies, or you and the government, whatever. The adversarial process ends when someone wins or loses.
During the adversarial process, the judge is basically a referee. This is an oversimplification, but close enough. Beyond that, they mostly are trying to get all of the info out on the table, so the dispute can be resolved.
If you want to be an asshole to the other side, you can be as much of an asshole as the referee lets you get away with, and this is going to vary depending on lots of things. This is true in many contexts (sports, for example).
But once that's done, the judge is not a referee anymore. They decide the remedy. If you are an asshole to them, that is not going to go well.
This is also true in many contexts - talk shit to the guy who knocked you down on the pitch, maybe you get a yellow card. Talk shit to the ref after they card you, they'll throw your ass out of the game, and fine or suspend you afterwards for doing it.
On the second - criminal cases have both a different burden of proof, and a different effective set of expectations of behavior, because of the stakes.
FWIW - the various rules of professional conduct explicitly go into various roles and hats that lawyers (and judges) often wear, and the acceptable behaviors during those roles.
If the judge wanted "reasonable" in that sense, then they should have defined the limits of reasonable. The assumption that "reasonable is what I the judge consider reasonable" is bad in every conceivable way. You can't read the judge's mind. If they didn't say exactly what they meant, then it is the judge that is at fault.
Next, the judge is an expert in law -- NOT an expert in humane interface, UI, or UX. They are in NO position to exert their amateur, ignorant opinion as fact and no effort was made by the judge to consult experts in the field about what would generally be considered "reasonable".
Finally, reasonable is subject to the facts and how those facts are subjectively viewed. Most Apple employees likely view this ruling as bad for their consumers and feel an obligation to protect their 1.4B iPhone users. From this perspective, discussing how to dissuade people from making decisions that could harm them would be very reasonable even if that discussion had a light-hearted tone or some joking along the way.
As an aside, I actively dislike what mostly amounts to forcing Apple to implement California state law outside of the state of California. I get no vote in California and should not be expected to abide by their laws in which I have no say. This whole thing should have been dealt with a the Federal level as it is obviously about interstate commerce and should have been legislated by congress rather than a politically-appointed judge that nobody voted for.
If the people involved don't have the brain cells to figure this out, maybe Apple should employ smarter people, because it's about to cost them a lot. And I don't even necessarily mean the UI people - anything would go through legal. I have contracted for companies that have had legal judgements similar to, but not exactly, like this, and they erred on the side of caution. Everything went through legal. And yes, that can mean not doing stuff your competitor does because you stepped too far over the line. Oh well, you fucked up big time and now you have a magnifying glass on you.
But Apple is too stupid or too bold to have an ounce of sense here.
The idea that people can follow laws based upon 'feelings' but billion dollar corporations can't is ridiculous. Fuck them, they 100% knew what they were doing.
Basically none of that applies here. This is a civil case. It did not involve a jury. The group tasked with carrying out the ruling were not involved with the trial either directly or indirectly. The ruling was vague because the judge as I understand it wasn't a SME and wasn't qualified to write what she wrote. Rather than consult SMEs to reach a reasonable conclusion, she proceeded (unreasonably I might add as it is unreasonable for someone to pretend to be an expert in something they know little about) to pretend she was an expert anyway.
After her vague guidelines didn't get the results she thought it should, it seems that rather than discuss, she doubled down on SMEs needing to read her mind to decide what she considered reasonable rather than what other SMEs might consider reasonable then leveraged her position as judge to punish their lack of understanding (which seems very close to acting in bad faith to me) instead of reflecting on what could have been done differently and changing accordingly.
Regardless of how you feel about this particular case (personally, I'm in favor of opening up iOS to other stores rather than this third-party website bandaid), the court's actions and expectations are flawed in this case.
I find these really elaborate rants about the law, which are based on nothing but presumptions, and in this case, presumptions that do not even arise from actual personal experience, to be incredibly exhausting and in service of creating more confusion than anything else.
Like, you just said upthread that courts shouldn't rely on the word reasonable? I cannot think of an easier way to express that you have absolutely no experience with the legal system than that. It's for sure a common misconception of programmers that the law should function the way code does. What's sad about that is that you are somehow so devoid of actual life experience as to not realize how it must be the case that something like the law must not function like source code out of necessity.
I never said SMEs don't testify in civil cases. My contention was that the judge should have consulted SMEs when defining parts of the ruling outside her expertise.
You aren't making a case for reasonableness as a concept. You are simply asserting that it exists, so it must continue to exist with the implication that it is good. You seem to be further implying that an assertion of reasonableness by a judge should carry the same weight as an assertion of reasonableness by SMEs or a jury of peers.
Can you defend these assertions?
>My contention was that the judge should have consulted SMEs when defining parts of the ruling outside her expertise.
The case consists almost entirely of the testimony of experts and the professionals working on both sides, so I think the judge is actually very familiar with the issues at play here and I'm not sure why you came to the conclusion that this kind of expertise was not considered when its the very nature of the entirety of the case.
>You aren't making a case for reasonableness as a concept.
I don't need to. It is not my obligation to defend the legal system because you have your own ridiculous and unfounded assumptions.
>You seem to be further implying that an assertion of reasonableness by a judge should carry the same weight as an assertion of reasonableness by SMEs or a jury of peers.
Judges make orders. SMEs don't and can't. And lol at the idea you are suggesting that a layman jury should define these things. It is clear to me that you do not understand the role of a jury in a trial. Jury's determine disputed facts. Nothing more, nothing less.
>Can you defend these assertions?
The issue isn't defending them. The issue is convincing you, an incredibly unreasonable person. That's probably not going to happen judging by the conversations I see you engaged with here.
But hey, I'm glad you came up with your own idea as to how the legal system should work, seemingly without any actual experience outside of reading the news. Very smart kid energy.
Those experts spent collective centuries learning their area of expertise, but the judge became familiar with everything over the course of this one trial...
> I don't need to. It is not my obligation to defend the legal system because you have your own ridiculous and unfounded assumptions.
I've provide an argument that it is not. You have provided an unsubstantiated assertion. If you aren't willing to engage, then why make the assertion in the first place?
> The issue is convincing you, an incredibly unreasonable person.
You have made zero reasoned arguments and outright refused to make any reasoned arguments, but consider me to be the unreasonable person who just won't listen to what you have to say. How does this make sense to you?
> Judges make orders. SMEs don't and can't. And lol at the idea you are suggesting that a layman jury should define these things. It is clear to me that you do not understand the role of a jury in a trial. Jury's determine disputed facts. Nothing more, nothing less.
If a judge rules that a bridge should be built, that doesn't mean they should tell the engineers how to build it. You are confusing the legal ruling with the implementation.
In this example, the engineers put in a suspension bridge and the judge got angry because it wasn't a truss bridge even though a truss bridge wasn't specified in the ruling and the judge has no real idea why one might choose one bridge type over the other.
If the type of bridge mattered, it was the judge's responsibility to talk with the parties involved and reach a decision then add that decision to the final ruling.
In this specific case, the judge should have gotten SMEs together to decide which approach was correct and included it in the ruling rather than complain that things weren't as the judge envisioned, but never even bothered to write down other than in the vaguest terms. Holding someone in contempt because they didn't read your mind is unreasonable.
And?
>I've provide an argument that it is not. You have provided an unsubstantiated assertion. If you aren't willing to engage, then why make the assertion in the first place?
Your argument is an unsubstantiated assertion. That you think it isn't is one of the things that makes this conversation incredibly unenjoyable.
>You have made zero reasoned arguments and outright refused to make any reasoned arguments, but consider me to be the unreasonable person who just won't listen to what you have to say. How does this make sense to you?
You being unreasonable is absolutely not predicated upon me or anything I have to say in particular, but instead seems to be a consistent pattern in your posting throughout this entire article.
>If a judge rules that a bridge should be built, that doesn't mean they should tell the engineers how to build it. You are confusing the legal ruling with the implementation.
But that's not what happened and its an incredibly strained analogy.
>In this specific case, the judge should have gotten SMEs together to decide which approach was correct and included it in the ruling rather than complain that things weren't as the judge envisioned, but never even bothered to write down other than in the vaguest terms. Holding someone in contempt because they didn't read your mind is unreasonable.
Only one of the parties is complaining. They also happen to be the party in violation of the court order. I think you do not really seem to get the point. They are in contempt because they did not bother to make a good faith effort to comply, not because they did not read his mind.
This is probably one of the most unenjoyable conversations I've had here because you are highly argumentative, incredibly uninformed on the topic you are arguing about, and starting it from such an absurdly low point that getting to a basic level conversation on this topic is impossible because you are busy arguing about things that are non-issues, like the use of the world reasonable in legal proceedings.
The purpose and reason why these concepts are absolutely good would be specifically because people like you, with your attitude exist.
The purpose of the law isn't to play this game of bad faith find the loophole. Instead, the purpose is to make people follow both the letter and the intent of it.
And The reason why vague concepts like this are good, is because people who try to get around the law should be punished as harshly as possible, through whatever teh most effective means necessary are, specifically so as to discourage this behavior of trying to get around the law.
It is much better for society if people and companies are trying to act in good faith to follow the law, instead of going around trying to find clever ways to break it. Thats why the bad actors should be punished as much as possible, if they are trying clever tricks.
The truth is that you don't believe your own argument. You want LOTS of laws specifying all kinds of unacceptable behaviors in great detail. You only differ from me in where that line should be drawn.
How do you envision the legal system dealing with issues such as intent and negligence without the notion of a "reasonable person"?
Reasonableness is a quick approximation for world view or "the majority values and lived experiences of a specific culture at a specific time and place". For example, dueling is considered murder, but was once considered absolutely reasonable and NOT requesting a duel in some circumstances would be considered a "reasonable" sign of guilt.
Would you convict someone of murder over manslaughter because your gut told you they were guilty? The Southern US has countless cases of innocent black men hanged because they had "reasonableness", but no hard evidence.
Reasonableness is fickle. For example, in self defense cases with video (probably the most important cases concerning reasonableness), the prosecution pushes to review the video frame by frame while the defense pushes to play the video in realtime. Why? because when you see the video in realtime and make snap decisions, the defense seems more reasonable. When you pick it apart frame by frame, you have tons of time to think about all the things you might have done and can convince yourself that maybe lethal defense wasn't needed.
If reasonableness changes so much just by HOW you watch the same video, how can it really be considered reasonable? What is does reasonable actually mean in practice?
It's also worth noting that not all evidence is admitted in trials and the judge has significant ability to shape the outcome of the trial based on what evidence they "reasonably" believe should be included.
> How do you envision the legal system dealing with issues such as intent and negligence without the notion of a "reasonable person"?
I'm not proposing something radically different. I'm proposing we use reasonable doubt instead of reasonable intuition as the primary metric. You can never completely remove reasonableness, but its effect should be mitigated and controlled. If you can't prove something, you shouldn't convict based on the unprovable ideas your world view fabricates that may or may not be accurate.
> You want LOTS of laws specifying all kinds of unacceptable behaviors in great detail.
I don't have a problem with detail. Instead, I am rejecting the idea that mass amounts of details is always necessary, or that the law somehow completely collapses when it doesn't have detail.
No, the law is perfectly able to handle vague situations all the time, and you are the one trying to claim that it all falls apart for some reason. It doesn't. It works out quite well, and it worked out quite well in this case.
> You only differ from me
No, you are demanding that a completely pervasive and common concept of "reasonableness", which exists in all parts of the law be changed.
No, we don't need to do that. The law deals with that concept all the time and isn't falling apart.
A huge percentage of those wrongful convictions happen because there wasn't any evidence, but the police and prosecutors were "reasonable". The judge was "reasonable" and the juries were "reasonable" too. Despite the complete absence of facts to support their "reasonable" feeling, they managed to convict an astonishing number of innocent people.
If one jury is full of suspicious people who always see the worst in others and another jury is full of people who always assume the best, the idea of reasonableness says that both should reach the exact same conclusion. You of course recognize that both will convict when there is clear evidence of guilt, but only one will convict when "reasonableness" becomes an issue.
That is the point. Reasonableness only exists when there's ambiguity or missing facts and only exists to CREATE a crime where you can't PROVE a crime (if you could prove that the act was criminal, reasonableness would be unnecessary) all while saying without evidence (and with plenty evidence to the contrary) that every other person on the planet would jump to the same conclusion as you did. Or as a paradox, reasonableness exists to create unreasonable situations.
I'm not demanding that the law be changed wholesale. The only required change is that the law only charge for crimes it can prove. For almost every greater charge, there is a lesser charge with wider scope. If you cannot prove the greater charge, then only prosecute the lesser charge (and don't prosecute the greater charge and the lesser charge while hoping "reasonableness", jury cynicism against the defendant, and randomness of the jury pool gets you a conviction).
Most good prosecutors already follow this principle and remove reasonableness as much as possible. When they do not is where many/most those wrongful convictions come into play (that and the unjust practice of plea bargaining). There seems to be very little to lose except bad prosecutions and bad convictions.
This has nothing to do with the use of "reasonableness" in law as you argue. There are all kinds of reasons a wrongful conviction could happen, such as falsified evidence. Claiming that the number of wrongful convictions is entirely because of slight ambiguity in various laws needs extraordinary sources, sources, and sources, because that is an extraordinary claim. You don't seem to realize just how widely used intent and reasonable compliance is in law.
I was previously thinking that your comments had something to do with the topic, but now that you are admitting that you just want to, like, over throw the entire system and get rid of very common concepts in the law, I can ignore it for being basically irrelevant.
Their solution didn't address any of the goals of the injunction.
IANAL.
Seriously, this is one of the top 10 largest companies in the world, and they're playing chicken with the court in order to preserve their ongoing revenue. These weren't random employees, but people part of "Project Michigan", Apple's "activities relating to Injunction compliance".
How doesn't every single person that's a part of that project have an Apple lawyer hovering over them every time they get near any sort of device that can put anything on the record?
I don't know a thing about the legal system: if someone gets caught doing that sort of thing, does that incur additional punishments?
I mean, if you do something illegal, and when the police arrest you they prove that you were trying to hide it from them, that's another charge. How does that work if the court catches you doing it?
So pretty mild thus far. As far as I remember from reading other court decisions, court-imposed sanctions against individual lawyers are also a thing. As far as the clients are considered, given production of documents is mandated by a court order, presumably this counts as defying a court order and so any punishments would fall under criminal contempt?
(Not a lawyer, in case this wasn’t clear from the above already.)
They were trying to delay the proceedings, were successful in doing so, and as a result need to pay for the attorneys' fees incurred.
Fees that probably add up to mere seconds of worldwide revenue resulting from these monopolistic practices.
"Don't threaten me with a good time" comes to mind.
Maybe that is a result of the attitudes that made them one of the largest companies in the world?
Keep in mind that once you lose, the process is no longer adversarial. In ~all cases you will be required to provide evidence and status updates and such on implementation of an injunction, among other things.
So you do practically have to keep records of what you are doing to comply. These are the kinds of records you would normally see as a result. The only shocking thing is that they didn't lie :)
They often do try to hide bad stuff through privilege anyway - I believe they tried here and lost but i will go back and look - but that doesn't often work.
I would argue that the text the parent comment has pulled out is not part of the record keeping you need to do to comply. Lawyers will tell you to have certain conversations in person, and it is surprising that some of these conversations happened in text instead of in person.
This is a very bad plan :)
On top of that I'll also offer to you that the days of trying to avoid generating evidence as a mechanism for avoiding bad things happening are fast dying after google got sanctioned for having off the record conversations for exactly this reason.
It's bad advice - the better advice i used to give my clients is - if you are not doing anything wrong, don't act like you are doing anything wrong. If you are doing something wrong, stop.
> If you are doing
> something wrong, stop.
It's not like they couldn't afford competent legal advice, and surely they either knew they were flaunting the injunction, or could have predicted that the judge would take this view of their activity.
So, they're set on doing the "wrong" thing, but could still use legal advice.
What I'm amazed at up-thread is how seemingly incompetent they were at changing their workflow so they wouldn't hand the court evidence on a silver platter.
In this case, surely they could have pulled all the stakeholders into a room with a whiteboard, and made sure nobody kept any records of the meeting.
They'd have ended up with the same wording, but the court couldn't have merely done a text search of relevant Slack conversations.
Yes, the court could have eventually forced everyone who was in that room to testify, but the end result would have been a bunch of "I think so-and-so wanted it more such-and-such".
Surely that's better than the sort of quotes the court could copy/paste into its decision.
If there is literally no documentation up until the final moment, doesn't that itself act as evidence that they were consciously and deliberately not wanting their reasoning documented?
Why not just do the right thing. Damn.
> At some point it has
> to be documented as to
> the decisions made and
> the reasoning.
In this case (approximately page 35-40) you can see the "execs" had clearly provided guidance on the interface needing to be "scary"
The teams tasked with implementing that then proceed to create an extensive and incriminating on-the-record discussion, including things that the court could subsequently use to contradict their testimony.
They could have just ... not done any of that.
Whatever "exec" involved could have written the copy themselves.
The court could still infer that the interface was in violation, as they're doing here, but didn't need to be handed incriminating statements on a silver platter.
As a lawyer, that is your time to exit the scene. There are no airquotes that should be around wrong here. This isn't advocacy for some not-ethically-amazing legal position that has yet to be decided on. They lost already. They have already been found guilty. You are now under an active (IE not stayed) court order. If your client then is basically saying "well how do we ignore the court order and do the illegal thing anyway", helping them them is not defensible.
"What I'm amazed at up-thread is how seemingly incompetent they were at changing their workflow so they wouldn't hand the court evidence on a silver platter."
You (and others) are amazed because you think this would have worked. I don't know why. I mean, i kind of get it - I would guess you assume this because hiding things from showing up in discovery (a very different part of the process) used to work better. FWIW - It doesn't work anymore, either. See google being heavily sanctioned for doing exactly this, for example.
Beyond that - assume for a second that the lawyers involved are not morons. Assume they are instead, very smart people. Given that, why not assume that maybe your view of what would have worked might be wrong?
"In this case, surely they could have pulled all the stakeholders into a room with a whiteboard, and made sure nobody kept any records of the meeting."
Try it sometime after you get enjoined and see what the judge does to you. I've never seen it go well, but hey, maybe someone has.
While sometimes very smart people are idiots, it's not that common.
"but the end result would have been a bunch of "I think so-and-so wanted it more such-and-such"."
Uh, i think you are sort of dreaming here. Or just lying to the judge? Or maybe you've never actually been grilled by a judge in this situation. I dunno.
In any case, i think the judge would have gotten nearly the same info, if not more, but also would have been a lot more pissed and made a lot more criminal referrals :)
Lots of judges are former prosecutors, litigators, or defense attorneys.
Who don't get to have that kind of fun of cross-examining people, etc, anymore.
In this case she's a former private litigator for many years.
Good luck with your strategy of telling her "I dunno what happened, we just sort of talked about stuff".
This is like the scene from the dark knight where he wants to blackmail batman.
"Surely that's better than the sort of quotes the court could copy/paste into its decision."
I don't believe so. I think the judge would have written something making them look even more stupid, evil, and criminal.
The only reason they can do that is due to Apple's own internal workflows. If it was another company, or even Apple from the 80s-90s they wouldn't have been able to do that. The document is full of those sorts of examples.
They may be trying to hang you, but you don't have to provide the rope.
assume [...] that the lawyers
involved are not morons. Assume
they are instead, very smart
people.
I'd recommend skimming through the whole thing because Judge Rogers just eviscerates Apple over and over.
Effective regulation isn't a strength of the US.
This case started in 2020. What companies like Apple and Google have done in most of these cases has been to abuse the court's willingness to provide extensions to create an incredible amount of delay. One of the tactics they use both here and in the EU is to say they need more time, and more time, and more time, and then on the very last day of the last extension just say "nah, we don't think we're doing anything wrong". They didn't need the extensions, they were just wasting time. Because the amount of money they make on the status quo is worth drawing out as long as possible.
If anything, I think the biggest reform would be to say that large companies do not get to ask for extensions on court deadlines. They have literally billions of dollars, hundreds of lawyers, there is no reason they cannot manage to get what they need to do done on schedule. Asking for more time should be viewed as bad faith.
Apple is still doing business, has three years of profits from the malicious compliance, and appears to have attracted not much more than a sternly worded letter from a judge, and possible criminal contempt charges for a couple of individuals.
What real world consequences does Apple face for this behavior?
I love whichever clerk wrote this and then got it through. The real MVP
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2025/04/gonzales_rogers_apple_app...
My concern is more about having private companies control platforms upon which we depend. I do often wish that I had a crystal ball to peer a decade or several into the future to see what the future holds for humanity in this regard. Our legal system seems ill-equipped to manage this risk.
Freedom of speech does not prevent courts from ordering defendants to say or not say specific things to make up for their past illegal behavior. In this case, the court initially allowed Apple a little flexibility around steering, which Apple misused to make web purchases sound "scary". The penalty for that is the loss of that flexibility.
Can someone explain this to me? As far as I understand apple is being ordered to do the thing it was supposed to do already. Are there extra consequences I've not understood related to them disregarding the court ruling?
The bean counters won. I guess Tim Cook does care about the bloody ROI after all.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim...
If Tim Cook is willing to lie and cheat for extra revenue, I can't trust that Apple is honest about their privacy commitments. Services revenue line must keep going up, and their ad business is a growth opportunity.
My luke-warm take is that the advertising industry is inherently evil.
Why? I like using ad-supported services, and have found some life-changing products/services via targeted ads.
Though that's the core issue, margins on services are just too addictive for big tech. Not sure Apple can keep its recipe for success with both services and hardware.
This is a funny comment for me to read. Did anyone honestly think that Apple was touting privacy as anything other than a competitive advantage for revenue maximization? They've had things like iAd, their services revenue has grown massively as hardware sales plateau, and they are nowhere near as "private" in certain countries either.
One takeaway to startups that hope to stand for something even after tremendous growth and leadership changes: you have to build governance and accountability structures into your organizational DNA if you truly want specific values to persist over the long run.
Any relationship with a corporate entity is transactional in nature. A great deal of effort is often expended to manipulate us into feeling otherwise, but that is all it is.
Companies don't have feelings. They aren't conscious entities with a capacity for guilt or morality. They are, in essence, software applications designed to execute on systems composed of human employees. In a sense they are the original AI agents.
Every organizational design and structure has the potential to be subverted. Like cybersecurity, there are many tradeoffs to consider: continuity, adaptability, mission flexibility, and more. And they don’t exist in isolation. People are often going to seek influence and power one way or the other.
One more thing. Just because it is hard doesn’t mean we should work less hard on building organizations with durable values.
Companies are revenue maximizers, period. The ones that aren't quickly get displaced by ones that are.
The simpler test is to stay away from any company that has anything to gain by taking away your freedom. THAT unfortunately is most of them.
The depressing reality in consumer tech is that anything with a CPU doesn't belong to you, doesn't work for you, and will never do more than pretend to act in your best interest.
Little doubt AMD has something similar.
This explanatory model explains a lot of what companies do but not all. It is a useful first approximation for many firms.
Still, the conceit of modeling an organization as a rational individual only gets you so far. It works for certain levels of analysis, I will grant. But to build more detailed predictive models, more complexity is needed. For example, organizational inertia is a thing. One would be wise to factor in some mechanism for constrained rationality and/or “irrational” deviations. CEOs often move in herds, for example.
> The ones that aren't quickly get displaced by ones that are.
Theory, meet history. But more seriously, will you lay out what you mean by quickly? And what does market data show? Has this been studied empirically? (I’m aware that it is a theoretical consequence of some particular market theories — but I don’t think successful financial modelers would make that claim without getting much more specific.)
I personally believe that Apple is able to make different (better), choices in the name of a consumer privacy, than Google will.
Android is built from the ground up to provide surveillance data to Google-controlled adtech - that's their revenue model. I don't begrudge them that, people should have choice, etc. but the revenue model is adtech first and foremost.
Apple want services revenue, they like services revenue, but historically they're a vertically integrated tech platform manufacturer whose revenue model is building better platforms consumers want.
It's true that the services model may start to compromise that - and they've definitely started to make some poor choices they might need to pull back on to protect the core platform model - but I do think we're not comparing like with like when we say that Apple is no different to any other company in this space.
The key difference is user choice. An iOS user has no choice but to send their location data and app usage data to Apple. No such required privacy violations on Android.
I've always read this and it seems well accepted. But I'm curious what exactly does it mean? What's Android sending to Google? Surely it's not logging what I click on apps? It's not logging what I click on my browser since the websites themselves send this info for ad purposes. So what's Android doing that let's say my Linux laptop isn't?
Edit: Answering my own question. There is a cross-app unique identifier (ignoring any privacy sandbox stuff) so developers and ad networks can get a consistent id across apps.
The single example that ascended to be the CEO of Apple though? That selection process would seem more relevant than any personal background.
My base assumption is that any impressions we have about Tim Cook (or any other executive of a company that size) are a carefully crafted artifact of marketing and PR. He may be a real person behind the scenes, but his (and everyone's) media persona is a fictional character he is portraying.
> any impressions we have about Tim Cook ... is a fictional character he is portraying
The relevant ones here are that he's gay, of a certain age, and from the South, and that he heads up a company who appear to invest heavily, over a long period of time, in privacy protections -- these all feel like they'd be easy to falsify if there existed evidence to the contrary.
I think they're more willing to build out privacy enhancing features than other companies that don't rely on surveillance capitalism to make their money. "Small" things like Filevault add up.
> “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind,” he said, “I don't consider the bloody ROI.” He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader.
> As evidenced by the use of “bloody” in his response—the closest thing to public profanity I've ever seen from Mr. Cook–it was clear that he was quite angry. His body language changed, his face contracted, and he spoke in rapid fire sentences compared to the usual metered and controlled way he speaks.
More broadly, I know that for-profit businesses are concerned with their bottom line, and I know businesses regularly throw other values under the bus in pursuit of profit. But I'm not sure it's possible to build a successful business (in terms of maintaining consumer trust, attracting and motivating decent employees, etc.) without some values beyond what's immediately quantifiable on the bottom line.
...and you believed him? I'm sorry, I'm trying to be less cynical in life, but he said exactly what people - apple fans - want to hear.
Is he above lying? We were just discussing how one of the apple executives straight up lied in court.
1. Cook only cares about pursuing profits, but at a shareholder meeting where shareholders were pressuring him to pursue profits, he lied to them (and had the presence of mind and acting chops to pretend to be uncharacteristically angry about it), because he believed that the story would get reported on and Apple fans would want to hear it, and he made the calculation that that would be more beneficial to his bottom line than being honest (or at least more politically neutral) with his shareholders.
2. Cook really does believe about accessibility, environmental issues, and worker safety, and he tries (or at least likes to think that he tries) to take steps toward those causes at the expense of profits, but he's also a complex and flawed mixture of motivations and is capable of compromising his values (and/or of letting those under him compromise their values) to varying degrees in the face of financial rewards or the pressures of the capitalist system.
#2 seems more likely and is more consistent with my view of humanity in general.
#1 seems more probable given a human being that has been selected to head one of the most valuable companies on the planet. That's his entire job -- to play a carefully crafted role for the public, the share holders and the media. He isn't paid to stand up at a shareholder meeting and let any sort of genuine feelings slip through, unless those feelings happen to be the right ones for that role at that moment.
It's entirely possible that Cook was fully sincere then, but that over the subsequent 11 years, marinating in the toxic stew that is the upper echelons of American industry has eroded his principles and he is now more willing to listen to the voices pushing for money over all else (whether those voices are outside or inside his own head).
“They don’t want <bad thing> so they choose <equally bad thing good for their revenue>”
They were never serious.
Oh, no! Who would have thought? What could we possibly do other than keep shoving money into their faces?
My feeling is that these guys who showed up to the inauguration of a self-professed "dictator on day one" might be a little light on backbone, if not moral fortitude.
Neither Bezos nor Cook has an army (or a CIA). Trump does. They are not playing the same game.
All private wealth, and businesses, and cash flows exist only at the pleasure of the state.
The pressure of the financial capitalism on the industrial capitalism is too high. Any company that produces anything is eventually forced into rent-seeking to keep delivering what has come to be expected YoY growth. C-level that won't let that happen will see the way out.
They charge 27% for purchases made using external payment processors. Including Stripe fees that's net-zero (not even accounting for any chargeback risks). They severely limit how you can display the external purchase link too, and display an obnoxious warning screen when you tap it.
I would be surprised if a single developer adopted it.
https://developer.apple.com/support/storekit-external-entitl...
[1]: https://www.macstories.net/news/an-app-store-first-delta-add...
Half of the entire HN was like „EU bad, how dare you regulate them”. What gives?
EU = bad
US = good
By the way, I don't think this is a good way of voting. IMO comments should be upvoted if they provide good insights (even if you disagree with them) and downvoted when they are low-content/trolling/full of fallacies.
> IMO comments should be upvoted if they provide good insights (even if you disagree with them) and downvoted when they are low-content/trolling/full of fallacies.
Votes are not a popularity contest. Only you see your score, and it does not matter one bit whether you have 2 or 20 upvotes on a post. Even moderate negative scores don’t matter. The grey threshold is more important, and you have to post something quite bad to end up there. I think I read a good post that was dead once.
The system is working and the end result is what you want. Sure, it could be better, but we are never going to get a perfect implementation because humans are social animals, and not always very rational.
That's OK, it shows we're human, it's not all AI slop here (yet?).
Hint: rationalization tends to be after.
Not to say that it can’t be overridden with training and/or self-reflection/self-skepticism, but first reactions tend to allows follow this pattern.
Edit: hmm, I suppose voicing your hot take about a news piece is a quick decision though.
They may be more likely to have the capacity, but no way it's amy kind of guarantee.
A lot of human behaviour is learned and becomes habitualised rather than logically thought through. Habits are sub-conscious and therefore logic doesn't (as) often get applied.
Between all of this, it'll be a lot harder to come to the comments to defend Apple for not getting fined twice in a row for the same issue despite lying under oath and intentionally delaying proceedings, even if you vehemently disagree with the original ruling.
Google tends to be the one with more sympathy in the US lately as they've gotten much more of the regulatory stick in court.
> As of the May 2024 hearing, only 34 developers out of the approximately 136,000 total developers on the App Store applied for the program, and seventeen of those developers had not offered in-app purchases in the first place. In May 2024, Apple argued that it would take more time for developers to take advantage of the Link Entitlement and that the adoption rates could not be known. Apple attempted here to mislead.
> Given the revelations of the February 2025 hearing, Apple modeled the lack of adoption. That Apple adduced no testimony or evidence indicating developer adoption of the program is no surprise. As shown above, Apple knew it was choosing a course which would fail to stimulate any meaningful competition to Apple’s IAP and thereby maintain its revenue stream
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
Apple is not just responsible for making it possible to purchase apps outside the App Store, but to convince developers to use it over the App Store as well?
I suppose it's damning when combined with the internal emails demonstrating they were trying to avoid compliance with the ruling?
> To summarize, this Court’s orders required that Apple not impose restrictions in its iOS marketplace which would prohibit consumer access to and awareness of competitive alternatives to IAP. The Injunction specifically enjoined Apple’s anti-steering provisions which at the time prohibited developers from raising that consumer awareness and access. In response, Apple intentionally devised a compliance scheme to prevent developers from deploying competitive alternatives to IAP. Apple’s discounted commission rate, on its own, forecloses a developer’s use of link-out purchases. Adding to that, Apple’s various design restrictions and purchase-flow friction arbitrarily decrease the attractiveness of competitive alternatives (if they were utilized) and increase breakage in a purchase flow.
> Apple’s conduct violates the Injunction. The non-compliance was far from “technical or de minimis.” Apple’s lack of adequate justification, knowledge of the economic non-viability of its compliance program, motive to protect its illegal revenue stream and institute a new de facto anticompetitive structure, and then create a reverse-engineered justification to proffer to the Court cannot, in any universe, real or virtual, be viewed as product of good faith or a reasonable interpretation of the Court’s orders.
I think Apple has done a great job marketing the App Store as the reason for the security/UX of their platform, when in reality, it's the OS. It's the OS that requires apps to get permission before accessing my location, it's the OS that isolates apps from each other, it's the OS that provides an easy way to install/uninstall packages.
The confusion between benefits of the OS/benefits of the App Store combined with many peoples' unfamiliarity with third party distribution has made it more difficult to convince people of the merit of these antitrust suits.
I disagree. Application developers have always been absolutely terrible at packaging. We see this all the time on linux, where publishers just fail to follow the packaging standard of the system, and instead develop an "installer" for their special little snowflake application. The OS cannot save you from that unless you also control distribution and can tell that publisher "you don't get to publish to my very valuable user group if you don't follow my rules".
Publishers have shown time and time again that if given a permission system, they'll just ask for every single permission under the sun, unless somebody stops them from doing that. The user sure isn't. They'll run whatever garbage installer script the publisher gives them because they want the application.
I don't like Apple's monopolistic behavior. I personally believe it would be a great service to the western world to break apart Big Tech, but the incentives that drive application development ARE broken. Apple has good reason to try and fix that with the app store, they just don't get to do it by running a monopoly.
I would argue that this doesn't change my previous argument. I'm talking about how the "modern" OS experience necessitates a near-monopolistic app-store. That the OS cannot be separated from the app-store. This is also the current state of the Play store, even if google technically allows competitors. I also think their reluctant acceptance of these competitors was relatively recent, and therefore that market is still young. I would think that by the time several competing app-stores exist with their own exclusive apps, you'd have a markedly different experience on these OS's than you have today.
OK, sure. Fine. Whatever.
Fuckin learn or get wrecked.
Sorry, you're just wrong. Only by analyzing the apps can Apple enforce several policies that many folks think contribute to users' security.
The prohibition against dynamic code, lying about the reason that an app needs a certain permission, and all the trust and safety policies are all stuff an OS can't do.
I have a mountain I would like to sell ya.
I am not agreeing with the other guy that it's OS.
But App Store is hardly more safe than the usual internet. Stuff...
Or they could secure the runtime and quit giving developers dangerous entitlements in the first place. Make no mistake, Apple doesn't need the App Store to develop meaningful security for their users. The Mac is living proof.
Is Mac as secure as iOS?
At some point, the diminishing returns of "muh security" do obviate positive and pro-consumer change.
It _is_ something a community of people empowered to control their devices can organize and achieve, but we were stripped of this capability when a small set of private concerns unilaterally locked us out. They just told us that they were the only ones they trusted to manage security, and everyone apparently believed them. The state of personal privacy has gotten unimaginably worse since. Not even the world's largest organizations can manage to fight, much less anticipate, the world's worth of bad actors.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-Droid
[2] According to the Wikipedia article there were (are?) some old unmaintained apps using vulnerable native libraries but that's not intentional malware and every app store has apps with vulnerabilities of some sort.
It was just asking for help getting stuff of a portable hard drive from work, so I tell him to plug it in and open up the file explorer.
He didn't know what the file explorer was, so I say "uh, the thing with the folders and shit in it, the little folder icon on the bottom". He eventually figured it out, and then I tell him to click on the drive on the left, which he figured out, and then I told him to open another file explorer window and drag the files from the first one to the second. The entire ordeal ended up taking him like ten minutes.
My brother in law isn't stupid or anything, he just didn't grow up with the typical desktop computer interface that most people who frequent HN did. He's been able to use a phone or a tablet for pretty much the entire time he's been using "computers", and those abstract away most of the lower level details.
Now that US courts are doing it more, it seems that corporations abusing their monopoly powers are the problem, not EU laws. But what do I know.
>An EU law stiffles all companies, not just the trillion dollar companies. I've essentially not considered EU audiences because I'm small and focus on the engineering + product directed toward 'everyone except Europe' because it feels like near anarchy.
>This is precision work. These companies get too big and anger the wrong person, so they get knocked. However, we obviously see that when its so big, these violations last significantly longer and often can go unpunished.
The DMA specifically only applies to platforms with more than 45 million active users.
That is true of some EU laws. Many have a disproportionate impact on smaller companies. GDPR for example, and the early versions of VATMOSS in terms of things I have dealt with.
Also, non EU laws such as the UK's Online Safety Act.
Not just in technology. It is also true of UK licensing laws for pubs - an example my attention was drawn to by comments made by the SEO of a big pub company as giving it an advantage.
On the other hand the EU's DMA and a lot of competition regulation gets that right.
In general that cost doesn't scale linearly with size, so bigger companies are proportionally less impacted.
Sometimes an attempt is made to compensate for this by exempting organizations under a certain size criteria.
It is a factor that should be considered when designing regulations. The comment with regard to the pubs was that the regulatory paperwork was a major cause for businesses being put up for sale.
There are many regulations that should exempt businesses under a certain size or with other criteria. For example small businesses that do not trade data should be largely exempt from GDPR. Small not for profits even more so.
Similarly, with VATMOSS the initial sales limit for registration was set ludicrously low.
Underlying this is a political failure to understand or even consider impacts on small businesses. When politicians talk to business they inevitably talk to big businesses.
These two... really don't work together, unless my idea of what the word 'anarchy' means is different.
Anyway, an EU based company that wants to trade in the US also has its own slew of legality to consider, including dealing with work visas when visiting, state vs federal laws, import taxes, etc. [0] is the tip of the iceberg. A lot of tech companies will just "move" to the US in order to make things easier (just like a lot of US companies move to e.g. Ireland)
[0] https://www.kvk.nl/en/international/doing-business-with-the-...
The arguments from Americans against the recent EU regulation is usually the opposite - that it is laser targeted at large US companies "because the EU is jealous that they don't have any large tech companies of their own and just want to cash in on fines"
I doubt it's very many, they just are very loud because there is a lot of money behind their complaints.
What % of the public holds these opinions? Who knows? Maybe someone will conduct a study one day, but 99.9% of internet opinions don't get studied, and 99.9% of people don't post mainly responsibly verified information.
There is so much to say about this, when most of our socialization has moved online. So much to be said.
Apols for the tangent.
Apple has zero moral justification for them. They are quadruple-dipping:
1. Consumers pay premium prices for Apple devices.
2. Developers have to pay $100 a year to be able to publish an app.
3. Developers need to buy expensive Apple hardware to develop for iOS. XCode doesn't work on Linux or Windows.
4. And on top of it, Apple also wants 30% of all the gross app sales.
All while their tools that developers _have_ to use are buggy and often nigh unsusable (Apple Connect....).
But wait, there's more! To keep the stronghold on developers, Apple is not allowing third-party apps to use JITs, resulting in a huge amount of time wasted to work around that.
A bad actor would have better luck telling a victim "just ship me your phone and login password for some emergency maintenance" than instructing a user through sideloading an app onto their smart fridge.
I, personally, would be happy if iOS had android-style side-loading where you have to enable developer mode, promise you're not an idiot, and go from there.
Even on apple's other operating system it is just downloading and running a program.
I remember when you could just stick a floppy or later cd into a system from anywhere and install and run a program.
it was called "install and run".
I'm moving to a job where I don't have to be the build/devops engineer for a product with an iOS app. To say I'm relieved wouldn't even be the half of it. What made it particularly worse was that our release cycle was every two months which is just enough time for Apple to completely wreck the build.
Absolutely terrible experience.
How do I know it was probably illegal? Because Apple finally caved and implemented RCS once it started leaking through backchannels that a legal case was being built against them.
None of the services you listed do it, but that's because they don't want to, not because it can't be done. It's a business decision problem, not a technical problem.
https://9to5google.com/2025/03/14/rcs-end-to-end-encryption-...
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406303/imessage-android...
- Most legit services move to a web based Apple Pay (note to the unaware reader: this is NOT In-App Purchases and has never had 30% fees) due to the ease of implementing and lower fee (easier to do cross platform + web) - Non-legit developers keep the In-App flow
Over time this would skew In-App Purchases to be scammy-only (and therefore, easier to spot). I'm sure people at Apple consider this possibility too – and therefore, now that there's actual competition, IAP flows will probably have to change to prevent this and compete for actual developer preference (and keep it a viable legit-developer choice)
If done through third parties directly the scammers will not make unsubscribing easy and it will not be as easy to find out where you are subscribing.
Thus I expect the scamming to increase.
I doubt a scammer will do that.
It took me about 5 seconds to google "cancel subscription apple" and find about a zillion articles on how to do it. Basically open up the App Store, go to your account, click on subscriptions, click on the one in the list you want to cancel. Done.
On the other hand, I also wanted to cancel a pet-locator subscription that was coming up for renewal (we're leaving the country, they don't have coverage outside the US) and I had to go through about 30 layers of "are you sure", "are you really sure", "you know this will stop your service, right?", "we'd sure hate to lose you", "Is there anything we can offer to change your mind", etc. etc.
There was a link in that email to a page to manage and cancel that subscription, although it might not be obvious.
I guess I just saw the title, saw it was a subscription renewal and jumped to "not just no, but hell no", missing the link at the end :)
This is fairly quickly resolved though - if anything close to 1% of customers complain to their banks that they don't want this payment and can't cancel it, triggering a chargeback, the scammers end up entirely blocked from the payment networks entirely in pretty short order. If you end up banned from Visa & Mastercard your whole operation is permanently kaput.
Also, this might be a non-US thing, but over here most modern banks (e.g. Revolut) will let you view & block recurring payment authorizations directly from your banking app anyway.
For me to get to it from App Store, I have to click a tiny profile pic (smallest allowed button on iOS?)
The next screen displays Purchase History and other items. However, no way to cancel from this page (insane?)
To get to subscriptions, I have to click my name at the top of that page (which doesn’t even look like a button) which loads for 3 seconds then pops up.
On this hidden account page, it shows Purchase History along with subscriptions list to cancel.
If any other site hid subscription cancelling behind a flat contact header secret account page, it’d be an issue, so yeah it’s an issue for Apple too.
And if that’s too tricky, you can just type “Subscriptions” (shows up after just typing “sub” for me) into Spotlight Search, and it’s the top option.
It's also Apple's specialty to create false dichotomies and shit sandwich bundles: it's either the 30% cut or daylight robbery. No third option (in reality PayPal is more consumer-friendly and allows managing subscriptions in one place from more than iOS).
The whole App Store model is a false dichotomy between the 30% cut and Disney-like moderation vs raging malware that will take down the whole mobile network. No third option (so you can't have Fortnight, or any app showing a nipple).
There is a lot to criticize Apple for -- the 30% fee is disgusting, and the subject of this order where they bar external payments without fees is criminal -- but the subscription complaint has always been weak.
Excerpt from the filing:
"In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option. To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate."
I also heartily recommend both seasons of Wolf Hall. About Cromwell rather than More, but still fascinating.
Have you been to a traffic court?
Go home, go to the DOL's website. Green text, "VALID". Weird. "Pay any monies owing on your license." Let's try that. "There are no monies owed."
Huh.
Print these out, take them to the DOL. It was a technicality where a process had suspended my license over a fine, but then unsuspended it the same day because they'd received a check.
She waives the $25 fee that should have been attached. And stamps the screenshots of this I'd taken, and prints out the status changes on my account.
Take it to court to challenge the ticket. Prosecutor doesn't want to dismiss. "They'd have generated and sent you a letter when they did that, so you had to have known."
Eventually dismissed, but only after three or four back-and-forths.
Sit on any all-hands call for a major company and it is practically guaranteed large chunks of the presentation will be executive gaslighting of its own employees with info that is objectively false or a misrepresentation. You will also never get a real answer to actual hard questions (especially if it is on the topic of something that may negatively affect workers) which is essentially lying by omission.
It doesn't help that we have now proven that you can lie all the way to the seat of being president of the united states.
That said - whether we like it or not, we are now a culture built on lying.
And it’s not just the lying that’s the problem - it’s the lack of critical thinking, the gullibility, the willingness to suspend disbelief and give benefit of the doubt and credit where it’s not due, amongst those being lied to, be they employees, or voters.
The way out is to see through it, to question it, and to stop acquiescing to it. If we all do that, the liars will never ascend to the positions of power we have allowed them to have over us today.
Are now? I mentioned Thomas More to show that this exact same thing happened 500 years ago. The whole point of the movie A Man For All Seasons is to show that this is always how it has been throughout human history, and that only a few people stand out as putting the truth higher than their own interests, such as Thomas More and Joan of Arc, which deeply impress even non-religious people like Robert Bolt and Mark Twain.
Truth for thee but not for me are the rich and powerful's greatest desire.
Boards private jet to Monaco
Don't we all? This is one of the very basic human needs. Since they don't need to worry about food and shelter, they focus on social status and entertainment.
IE this person is now useless as a witness pretty much forever.
The fines are always less than the companies' net gains from the practice. Gains are often indirect, risk-related, and/or part of a larger strategy, so they cannot be calculated.
Everything short of prison is a waste of time, waste of tax dollars, and spits in the face of decent citizens.
Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax. You can't even deploy your own apps at your own cadence, without strict review, using your own technology. You have to jump through unplanned upgrade cycles, you're forced to use their payment rails and signup flows (and don't get to know your customer or get them to use your website). You pay the taxes on everything. And even then, they let your competitors advertise against your name or trademark.
This is rotten to the core.
Neither Google nor Apple should have an app store. Apps should be web installs. The only reason things work the way they do is so that Apple and Google can tax and exert control. A permissions system, signature scans, and heuristics are all that are needed to keep web installs safe - and all of those pieces are already in place. There's no technical or safety limitation, Apple and Google just want to dominate.
These two companies were innovative 20 years ago, but their lead then doesn't entitle them to keep owning the majority of most people's computing surface area for the rest of time. They have to give up the reigns. There are still billions of dollars for them to make on mobile, even if regulators tell them to stop treating developers as serfs and locking them in cages.
No. More. App. Stores.
Regulate big tech's hold over mobile, web, search, and advertising.
> Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax.
Long before Apple and Google made phones, a huge mobile device ecosystem already existed, including app stores, and it was way more locked down and expensive than what we have now.
The iPhone did not even launch with an app store, its launch concept was 100% web apps. They only added the native SDK and app store after developers and customers demanded it.
Again: I know the world is different now. But the idea that this was all some swift inexorable coup by Apple and Google is totally inaccurate. Plenty of other companies had a chance to do things differently, many with huge head starts.
Featurephones had App Stores like Verizon’s “Get It Now” and it was obvious that they were money grabs like Apple’s.
Apple and Google won the game because the phones were powerful enough to make web browsing feasible, and had great text input.
If nobody had thought of app stores, it would have been trivial to distribute .ipa’s and .apk’s on the Web just like Windows and Mac software still predominantly is.
And as a user it just feels idiotic to have to download a dedicated program to say, pay for parking or order a sandwich, in a city I’m just visiting for the day. As though taking a credit card on the Web is a foreign concept.
People demanded native SDK because web apps were garbage, unlike the native first party apps. Some people wanted an app store. No one ever wanted or demanded an exclusive app store. Putting demand for native SDK and demand for app store in one sentence smells like gaslighting.
That’s a poor comparison IMO, because the scale of this was multiple orders of magnitude less. App stores were a niche occurrence that almost no nontechnical person had heard about. Seldom anyone „needed“ an app for their company to be successful. Now they control billions of eyes.
Of course it didn’t take long before the App Store was so full that anyone who wanted scale had to do additional paid marketing anyway.
In 2007 web apps were severely limited in performance and functionality, so this wasn't remotely feasible for most apps. I still believe Apple's original plan was a console model where hand-picked partners would get the secret native API. Then they realized the demand for native apps was much greater than they had anticipated, and decided to take a 30% cut from millions of developers rather than large licensing fees from a few.
There should be two levers used to achieve this. One is anti-trust style legislation. The other is patent misuse legislation. If you try and prevent consumers from running software on hardware they bought from you to make a profit, you shouldn't be allowed to prevent consumers from buying the same hardware from someone else - that's what patents do - they create government enforced monopolies on the hardware. You should be required to invalidate (donate to the public domain) every patent on the hardware if you want to sell hardware where you get to profit off your monopoly on letting developers write software for the hardware.
These Epic rulings are better than nothing, but I can't help but feel that their solution of "make Apple distribute software they don't like in their app store" is the wrong one.
That's what the plain language of this injunction does.
Admittedly if Apple had come to the court (or even potentially came to the court now) and agreed to the alternate solution of allowing sideloading the court might have issued a different injunction (or modify this injunction).
Google and Apple have silently achieved Microsoft's wet dream from the "trusted platform" era of effectively making it impossible for free and open source operating systems to compete with their own.
That would not work with iPhone security model, as iPhone assumes the user is inexperienced.
Personal fines too, such as returning past remunerations during the problematic time in question. Salaries. Stock grants.
There is no such thing as an incentive, that doesn't incentivize someone. Relatively small fines relative to revenues and profits don't incentivize anything.
Alternatively, if fines really were big enough to turn large companies around (i.e. not just the enforced, but other companies seeing the enforcement), heads would roll, but would they be the right ones given those in charge are unlikely to fire themselves? And shareholders are the ones really paying the fines, are they really the culprits?
The incentives to act in good faith, should be placed very directly on the individuals whose choices dictate the good/bad faith. Starting and staying largely with the CEO, and the direct line of reports from the CEO down to the relevent decisions.
You don't want anyone who mattered to have cover. You want CEO's policing their own, and their reports pushing back upward against poor directives.
The only cover for relevent actors would be a record of pushing back against those who pushed through poor behavior.
TLDR: Limited liability should protect non-managing shareholders, but not bad actors within a company. Decisions makers should always be held directly responsible for their decisions. Any other system is perverse.
As long as their job isn't to P.L.E.A.S.E.
It's wild how the public discourse on incentives is so split. On one hand, the poor are guilty until proven innocent of six dimensional chess to eek "unearned" pennies from social programs, yet the very idea that mega billionaires might pull easy, obvious levers for unethical mega million payouts is one that must beg and scrape for consideration.
If you only punish the executives for illegal business practices, but leave the company alone, then you create an incentive to hire patsies as executives, continue letting them do illegal stuff, go to jail, and pay them handsomely after they get out.
Ultimately it has to be the company that's losing money when the company made money from illegal business, otherwise the company can just find other people willing to continue and provide for everyone who gets caught.
You are so right. The board & shareholders are in the path of responsibility and not recognizing that would be a call for both to use and abuse executives as scapegoats.
So be it!
In the United States, the general perjury statute under federal law classifies perjury as a felony and provides for a prison sentence of up to five years.
Let's put money on it. I'll put $10k on it.
Oh c'mon, 16 years into a product line ain't too bad, is it?
If you had a kid when the App Store first came out, that kid would now be nearing high school graduation and you still can't do as you describe. The great recession, the pandemic, the iPad, proliferation of AI, legalization of Gay marriage in the states and weed in some places, annexation of crimea and the war in Ukraine, the foxconn suicide issue, 4G, LTE, 5G, fiber to the home, brexit, Golang, Rust, TypeScript, Swift, APFS, Arm and the downfall of Intel, the rise of NVIDIA, Netflix, TikTok, drones, electric cars, scooters, bikes, end-to-end design and construction of their mothership headquarters, and federal acknowledgement that climate change is an issue, have all basically happened in that time; but nope, it's for security reasons. Hell, even their lead industrial designer retired long before they'd let up.
Edit: Not that any of those have anything to do with the App Store, but still.
Here's the fun question though. Do Roman, Maestri et al not have any specific damages to this? (I know the answer, but it's a good question to ask....)
Well that sounds rather damning.
Consider how painful that is going to be for Apple, and Roman, with how the current administration is abusing the DOJ.
The repercussions of this could be huge.
Will walmart prevent you from selling, say, a fishing pole that allows you to buy fishing hooks from another store?
Apple's app-store review would reject any app that linked the company pricing page, and would reject any app that let you use an alternative payment method like paypal or a credit card on a non-apple site.
Also, in your analogy the customer has to be unable to buy your app from anywhere else (since the customer has an iPhone and there are no other stores or operating systems for iPhone)..
It really doesn't work as a good comparison imo.
> In retail brick-and-mortar stores, consumers do not lack knowledge of options. Technology platforms differ.
Yeah, but keep going on about how this is the same as Walmart
I remember buying DVDs from Walmart and opening them up and the first thing you would see is a slip of paper telling you in giant letters to use some reward program or streaming service rather than buying the DVDs physically.
If you buy an iPhone from Walmart, there will be a link to the apple store in the packaging. If you buy a Switch, there will be promotions for digital downloads that directly compete with Walmart in your packaging. It's not just digital links either, when I bought a Roomba it came with instructions about how to order future purchases, filters, and parts directly from the manufacturer.
Apple bans developers from including links to alternative stores in bundled manuals and help pages. I can not think of a single physical store that does the same, and I can't think of a single tech company including Apple that doesn't link to competing storefronts in their manuals and packaging inserts.
Apple is worse than Walmart on this issue.
Which noteably, Walmart doesn't restrict.
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Also not for nothing, but this was an impressively fast pivot you made from "well, Walmart wouldn't let you do this" to "Walmart is nothing like the app store" ;)
Like.. you asked the question. Would Walmart let you link to a competing store? Yes, and everybody does it. You are the one here who compared Apple to Walmart, I'm sorry if that comparison didn't go the way you wanted it to. If perhaps you want to suggest that Walmart is not like the app store.. well.. congratulations, you and the judge are in agreement on that.
I'd bet no.
You just can't show anything to anyone without kicking a wasp's nest.
I am not defending Apple, if anything, I am pro-Android here, but I understand the pickle they'd be in, were they be transparent with the cost structure.
This would kick the wasp's nest of "they (Apple) don't need this much money to operate, they can do well with 10% profit!"
Which is very hard to admit, that profit margins are arbitrary when you, indeed, dominate the market.
Apple doesn't want (nor need) to give anyone a handle to anyone to make them accountable. It is not a charity.
(Again, I'm not defending Apple, but I do defend corporate liberties, in general.)
Apple is honestly worse than Microsoft in so many ways as far as restrictions (nowadays, anyway) and yet it's taken this long even to get here.
(To be clear, I am not a fan of Google's actions in the mobile space either...)
Ad space
Search space
And more!
It is about illegal anticompetitive behavior.
Apple didn't charge tax on all app store purchases to protect themselves, it was done out of greed and malice.
You're assuming that Apple is acting in good faith. An actual, literal judge has decided the evidence shows that Apple was not acting in good faith, and in fact were behaving illegally. This isn't a "both sides" argument, Apple is definitively in the wrong.
Another word for that is "competing". And yeah, exactly.
(1) Apple’s platform technology is worth up to 30% of a developer’s revenue. (2) Apple’s developer tools and services are worth approximately 3%–16%. (3) Apple’s distribution services are worth approximately 4%–14%. (4) Apple’s discovery services are worth approximately 5%–14%.
Then Apple claimed this study was how they came up with the 27%, but the Judge basically said nah you guys came up with that number before the study, and you even know it would be a non-starter for almost all developers.
I don't know where this money is going but certainly not in the developer tooling because it's absolutely terrible
The fact that they're deadset against competition should tell the courts all they need to know about how competitively supportable the 30% is.
This is, of course, how basically every tech company works nowadays[1], because Apple lobbied to have that accounting rule removed.
None of this has anything to do with "App Store pays for iOS". That's an excuse Apple came up with after Epic Games sued them, there's no point in time I can point to where iOS is just the bundled OS vs. "paid for with app sales". The reality is, everything pays for everything, because Apple only sells fully bundled experiences. Their opposition to sideloading or third-party iOS app stores is only somewhat related to security[2], and more related to the fact that they don't want anyone dictating to them how the customer experience is, even if those changes improve the experience.
Well, that, and the fact that they make bank off App Store apps.
[0] I'm not sure if it was Enron or Worldcom
[1] Looking at you, Tesla FSD
[2] If it was, they'd be locking down macOS
Back in 2008, if you were an indie dev then their 30% ask was more than reasonable because the cost-of-doing-business on other platforms (like Windows Mobile) was much higher due to the lack of any central App Store; for example, you'd often need to partner with a company like Digital River, and pay more for marketing/advertising and overcome the significant friction involved in convincing punters to register/buy from your website, download the app *.cab files to their PC, install the app onto your device, and hope no-one uploads a copy to a filesharing network because this was before the days when an OS itself would employ DRM to enforce a license for third-party software.
...then one day Apple comes along and says: "We can manage all of that for you, for far less than what you'd pay for e-commerce and digital distribution, and our customers have lots of disposable income".
Ostensibly, competition should have come from the Android and (lol) Windows App Stores: "surely if Android's Play Store offers devs better rates then devs will simply not target iOS anymore and Apple will reduce their % to stay competitive" - but Apple's secret-sauce of a markedly more affluent customer base with already saved credit-card details meant that Android apps leant more on ad-supported apps while more iOS apps could charge an up-front amount, not have ads, and result in iOS devs still making far more money on Apple's platform.
--------
There exists an argument that Apple should not be forced to open-up the iOS platform because Apple is selling a closed platform on the merits of it being a closed platform, and Apple's customers want a closed platform (even if they don't realize it) because having a closed platform looks like the only way to enforce a minimum standard of quality and to keep malware out precisely because normal-human-users (i.e. our collective mothers) will install malware because the installation instructions for "Facebook_Gold_App1_100%_Real_honest.app" tell them to disable system protections.
The 30% that Apple announced was a game changer.
2025: "You don't appreciate how lower publishing fees foster competition, except when there's no fees at all, because that's too competitive for the OEM."
The first iPhone indie devs were Mac indie devs who already knew Objective-C and Cocoa and Xcode and paid 0% to Apple on the Mac.
Well no, the most secure platform in 2025 is still the web. You can't get as much data in a web browser as you can in a mobile app and the sandboxing is tighter.
And I may mention that the majority of the appstore revenue comes from casino like games, not really something I would give it to my family.
And sure, I'm opened to the idea that the appstore was innovative in 2008, unfortunately for Apple, we're now in 2025 and it clearly isn't anymore.
if you take the high end for all of these points, Apple is claiming 74% of the revenue is thanks to them.
Also, there's a certain level of 'hand-waving' here where if you're developing for iOS you're almost forced to have Apple hardware in the first place to run+test (hell, even Android can be dev'd from almost anything...)
That's the point of hiring consulting groups.
For "discovery" people would have to regularly check the App Store app and read the "today" page. Maybe perhaps Spotify or Netflix will appear there once a year among 15000 stories about games.
Or you mean search? If people search for Spotify/Netflix, they already know about it. And right now Apple will helpfully cover half of the screen with an ad for Gmail if you search for Spotify (and will hide all other Spotify apps like Spotify Kids and Spotify for Creators six screens down)
Apple is exactly like a mobster demanding a cut for “protection” — except they’ve designed and controlled the system so well that your business just cannot exist in the first place until your automatic extortion payment system is in place.
That must be a joke. Xcode is so bad, compared to Android Studio, it’s not even funny. As iOS dev I have to constantly apologize to my Android team members, that, no, Xcode can’t do this and that, and, no, we can’t do X in the build pipeline. And I‘m generally 10-20% slower than them because the tooling is just terrible and flaky.
BTW there was a promising IntelliJ option for Apple development, but Apple made life so hard for them that they had to give up. It was called „AppCode“ and some people are still sad that it doesn’t exist anymore.
It’s pretty trivial to bypass. Just don’t charge for your software, and use the app to access paid resources purchased outside the platform. My company distributes a few dozen apps to thousands of employees, Apple gets $0, because they utilize an existing subscription or license unconnected to Apple.
Steam might charge a similar rate but you aren't forced to use them. You can deliver games to PC gamers in a number of ways and many large games opt to not be on Steam.
That introduces insane friction and you lose a ton of customers
Additionally Apple remains the arbiter of what kind of content and apps may be listed. Until recently they were blocking all emulators and cloud gaming apps. They used to block all crypto apps. They still selectively block gambling apps. They still block torrenting and adult apps.
Additionally, Apple is famous for arbitrary and selectively enforced rules. Many developers have their updates rejected for any and no reason after an automated system rejects them for specious reasons.
Additionally, developers are blocked from linking out. They can't up-sell, which is a critical component of a SaaS business model. Nothing in the app can tell users where to subscribe or how to upgrade or change their credit card details. This one alone kills most SaaS applications unless they use Apple's IAPs.
It didn't make sense to me for media from an external subscription or store account was taxed by apple (like netflix or kindle).
Only an idiot would still be selling apps through Apple's payments next week. The only way Apple will make any money at all on apps is if it drops it's fees to 10% or below.
If there isn't a fine, the message will be that it's fine to profit off of ignoring court orders until you face thread of contempt charges.
That was 18 years ago. The times, they are a-changing
> The broader consumer base will install anything a bad actor wants them to and then blame the manufacturer for not stopping them with some draconian rule.
Has this even happened? Has anyone ever sued and won the case with a laptop manufacturer (or Microsoft or Apple), because they downloaded and executed an executable with malware on their computer? Do average people really blame Microsoft for malware? I would kind of agree that they should, but not because Microsoft allows people to run untrusted code, but because the security model of Windows (and other PC operating systems) is still bad. But not because it allows people to run unsigned code.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think we should return to security model of old operating systems - smartphone OSes definitely got that right, except for the part that forces users to give up control of their devices. It's just that the argument, that allowing people to install software not signed by Apple on their own devices would make iPhones insecure, is totally unsubstantiated to me.
I see some people still arguing that (ex. older) people will do what they are told and will install shady software. If Apple really cares, they could provide a switch that allows users to disable installing "unverified" software. Maybe ask about it during setup. Maybe allow locking it until factory reset, or allow head of icloud family to control it. There are many options to keep some people secure from all unverified apps, while allowing others to run them. Not to mention that the idea that all apps not signed by Apple are somehow malicious is just bad. You could have other entities than Apple verify code. Currently, even running apps you yourself wrote, on your own hardware, is hard and limited. For no good reason.
The only reason Apple is blocking other stores, or preventing people from installing homebrew, is to collect more money. It's good that they are investing into security of their software and hardware, but in this particular case, security is used only as a distraction.
This exists on the Mac. You can configure Gatekeeper to always allow unsigned executables and packages to run, and skip the "You should move this to the Trash it could damage your computer" BS prompts. You can only do this with a Configuration Profile.
That's big. You really have to piss off a judge for them to refer a case for criminal investigation.
Apple has close to 1/2 trillion in revenue a year. A few billion is rounding error.
As much money as they have, no shareholder wants to see a $1m/day expense on the balance sheet.
The same thing at $1b/day or rapidly increasing with time might be effective though, but I'm not sure what's really assignable by the given court or not.
Like, you know, we do for someone who was poor and starving and stole 10$ of food?
If a company is a person, it can go in jail.
Freeze their ability to do anything above basic life support without the permission of the judge or court.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/fictitious-person
Your assumptions are absurd.
Apple is a corporation.
Legally, corporations are persons.
Corporations are often referred to as fictitious persons in legal contexts to reduce confusion.
In the country I'm from, each exec gets a partial sentence in accordance with their contribution to the criminal act. And no, the total amount on years in prison needn't match the total, there's a minimum and also percentages always exceed 100%.
Limited liability doesn't and shouldn't protect criminals from imprisonment.
I think Cook will probably find that there is a dollar value that will get Trump to instruct a us attorney to drop charges
Apple Pay on websites works flawlessly and is great for impulse purchases. Its the same as the inapp experience.
I think this user experience will be fine.
For instance, say Netflix has an iOS app with 10M installs. Apple wants 30% of the subscription revenue even though their costs are static. The only variable cost is payment infrastructure which to some degree is proportional to amounts (fraud etc). But what is the market value of that? A couple percent at most? Are apple even taking any risk?
And honestly, Apple could easily take 5-10% and I’m sure lots of vendors would still use them due to user preference - it’s trustworthy, provided an overview of ongoing subscriptions, and importantly you can cancel without being on a 30min retention call with absolute garbage companies.
But that needs to be played out by the markets. Competition will make Apples option cheaper and most likely competitors will step up to match the UX at lower prices. Free markets, like democracy, have this paradox of tolerance, ie bad faith players can abuse the very system to destroy it in self-interest.
The ruling means this starts immediately it seems, as I cannot see a date listed anywhere.
If console makers have to do the same, consoles triple in price
They should go down the hall and ask the MacOS developers how they do it.
And let's not act as if people would use iOS if they couldn't have their apps. It is so much of a net gain to Apple to allow people to develop their apps there's a good chance it's indirectly profitable without any direct revenue from IAP's.
Where does it stop, should Microsoft, Nvidia, and Intel get a cut when I place an order on my PC that uses APIs and SDKs provided by those companies? Does this entitlement extend to anyone who facilitated the transaction, like my power company and ISP?
I could never imagine Apple employees doing it like this. I knew they had to have discussions about the scare screen, but come on! This is pure evil.
When saurik sued Apple for antitrust reasons over Cydia[1] (which sadly ended up going nowhere), at some point a hearing was held where his lawyer accidentally read out something that was supposed to be protected/sealed. Apple's lawyer quickly interjected, but what saurik's attorney got to read before ended up in the official transcript[2], and it's straight up disgusting. From p.18:
"For example, something where -- they are talking about an iOS update that, quote, broke Cydia Impactor. Where they said, it feels too good to destroy someone's spirit. We did something else today that will kill him again with a little smiley emoticon. That, we can specifically talk about with respect to Cydia."
[1] For those not in the know, Cydia was the de-facto App Store for jailbroken iDevices, the prominent third-party marketplace before AltStore.
[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18730843/75/saurikit-ll...
Companies do want smart machiavellian people that independently act in the interests of the company (archetypical C-suite executives).
Google has had a number of ethical employees damage Google from the inside.
A company can be damaged by smart motivated machiavellian employees using their skills against their own company.
I've noticed competitive gaming training/selecting people to win-at-all-costs. Presumably the C-suite is benefiting from the influx of people that understand manipulation and complexity.
Curious why your imagination is so limited here regarding a pretty standard human behavior pattern. Do you personally know Apple employees or is it more of a general respect for their products or ...?
You're absolutely right that it's an unwarranted assumption, yet simultaneously, I just always assumed higher class == higher morals. If anything it seemed to select for senior year of HS math class score and sociopathy.
Stuff I used to hear as grousing, from tired, defeated, adults, that couldn't hack it now ring as universal truths.
Are you serious? First off, stop using the term "high class" for immoral people. They are well beneath the whole morale chain and the fact they managed to get to your-definition-of-high-class means that lots of dirty tactics were used which are well beyond what a normal human is capable of
I'm not sure why you're reacting indignantly. I'll reconsider being vulnerable and honest next time people ask a question.
If you think this is the only time they pull this kind of crap and then hide behind some privacy/design/UX bullshit argument, then I've got news for you...
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1DXcJN
Read the opinion:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
restricting software distribution on any platform under the guise of needing to be kept “secure” always seemed anticompetitive to me - that should apply regardless of Apple’s particular behavior with the courts in this example.
Closed ecosystems only benefit the corporations that control them.
We also would have more Switch competition in the ARM gaming space instead of x64 handhelds and Android windows emulation if these walled gardens didn’t exist.
Which, given the sentiment against the very existence of these things in PC gaming circles (as a desktop, at least) in favor of self-building, would be just laptops and handhelds (Steam Decks/ROG Allys) at best.
Source?
I can't find anything that backs that up.
Are you pushing back on the word "majority" or on the concept that many people use their phones for nearly everything they used to use their computers for but that next to no one does the same with an Xbox?
That link though doesn't say that. It simply shows global ownership of smartphones is higher than computers which is rather different altogether.
iPhones are sold at a _premium_.
If iPhones were sold at-cost to consumers, then Apple would have been right to ask developers to pay 30% fees.
And since all the console manufacturers are selling the hardware at loss or with low margins, they can argue that it's just how the market works (free razors but expensive razor blades).
Yes but why? They very powerful computers. New recycling laws might force companies to give up the keys to the hardware before or after their obsoletion.
The precedent here is SIM-locked devices. At some point you must let the user do what they want with it.
Might still make sense, though. Just for general historical preservation.
However, for the consoles to make sense, they _have_ to be an oligopoly. There can't be 100 brands of competing consoles.
The main feature of traditional consoles that would be lost in this scenario: guaranteed compatibility of games.
So, who is causing this friction? Console companies. Now, there may be technical limitations due to games being such a unique kind of software. But at the end of day, they are software. Games can be packaged to support multiple formats or a standard interface.
Console games are typically highly optimized for particular console hardware. This coupling allows great-looking games for hardware that is cheap to make.
As a result, it's typical for consoles to far outperform regular PCs of the same price range. Especially at the beginning of the console lifecycle.
So it can be argued that consumers benefit from this arrangement: they get cheap special-purpose devices for gaming that can't be obtained if consoles are prohibited.
> Games can be packaged to support multiple formats or a standard interface.
Sure. But for AAA-type games that push the envelope, it's not at all trivial.
However, it seems that this pattern is fading with the recent consoles. So perhaps they also need to be unbundled.
scale and usage matters. Apple has > 50% market share in the USA (the place relevant to USA law). So, being a monopoly they get treated differently than a non-monopoly.
Even if they had less than 50%, people bank, invest, shop, talk, communicate, book hotels, flights, and effectively live their lives on smartphones. On XBox they play games and same small percent play music or watch movies there (I suspect most switch over to their Smart TV/Apple TV/.. for that).
the first sentence in the article is:
> A federal judge hammered Apple for violating an antitrust ruling related to App Store restrictions and took the extraordinary step of referring the matter to federal prosecutors for a criminal contempt investigation.
Seems like it's about antitrust law
The actual judgment: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25924283-epic-v-appl...
>After a bench trial, this Court entered judgment on September 10, 2021, finding thatcertain of Apple’s anti-steering rules violate the California Unfair Competition Law (“UCL”)under its unfair prong. ... As to the merits of Apple’s UCL violations, Apple did not directly challenge this Court’s application of the UCL’s tethering and balancing tests, instead arguing that(i) the UCL’s “safe harbor” doctrine insulates its liability because Epic failed to establish Sherman Act liability ... As to Apple’s “unfair” practices under the UCL, the Court explainedthat Epic could demonstrate unfairness under either a “tethering” test or a “balancing” test. Id. at1053. The “tethering” test required Epic to “show that Apple’s conduct (1) ‘threatens an incipientviolation of an antitrust law,’ (2) ‘violates the policy or spirit of one of those laws because itseffects are comparable to or the same as a violation of the law,’ or (3) ‘otherwise significantlythreatens or harms competition.’” Id. at 1052 (quoting Cel-Tech Commc’ns, Inc. v. Los AngelesCellular Tel. Co., 973 P.2d 527, 544 (Cal. 1999)). While the Court held that Epic’s claims basedon app distribution and in-app payment processing restrictions failed to state a claim of unfairpractices, the Court held that Apple’s anti-steering provisions were severable and constitutedunfair practices under the UCL
I'm not sure that the scale or usage really matters.
our anti-trust laws are not about being a monopoly or the size of your business: they are about abusing market dominance (where up or downstream has no choice) with unfair business practices.
a monopoly that charges fair prices and does not abuse suppliers and customers will not encounter any legal difficulty
Unless your name is T. Cook, you lack the authority to make that statement conclusively. The judge claims that Apple is guilty of perjury, and never corrected the executive that made misleading statements. If that testimony was fabricated, then there is every reason to believe Apple is obstructing information that could benefit the prosecution. There is no other feasible alibi in this scenario besides their lawyers all calling in sick. It's one thing to make a mistake, it's another thing to insist it's truth.
Let's not forget that Apple was headed down this same road with the DOJ, too. They are being investigated for a pattern of behavior that is not new, meaning they very well could be guilty of monopoly abuse right this very second. Saying "because it's not" is like telling Lance Ito to drop the OJ charges. Apple is not guilty until proven innocent; but claiming their innocence in certainty is a base lie. You do not actually know, either.
If you really ask: xbox is pretty much the same as an x86-64 PC, running Windows (and having AMD GPU). It just bit more sealed.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...
And then you immediately state a way they should be treated differently (worse).
It's far too convenient for C-level executives to reap the rewards when their leadership drives profits, only to shift blame to "the company" when things go wrong. Accountability should work both ways.
I know that this is the entire point of limited liability corporations -- to divorce ownership from responsibility -- but maybe that wasn't such a good idea.
Other than the possible contempt for the guy who lied under oath (and some bad press), doesn't this injunction just mean that apple has to do... what it was already previously ordered to do?
Are there no fines or consequences for them doing this? Am I missing something else here?
Since this basically defies what the court would require, they are now explicitly telling Apple that none of that is allowed, and that there cannot be any restrictions on placement or styling of links to outside payments. As the judge said, no reasonable person would believe that their actions are complying with that they were instructed to do.
> Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court's Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the coverup made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
> Apple employees attempted to mislead the Court by testifying that the decision to impose a commission was grounded in AG’s report. The testimony of Mr. Roman, Vice President of Finance, was replete with misdirection and outright lies. He even went so far as to testify that Apple did not look at comparables to estimate the costs of alternative payment solutions that developers would need to procure to facilitate linked-out purchases.
> The Court finds that Apple did consider the external costs developers faced when utilizing alternative payment solutions for linked out transactions, which conveniently exceeded the 3% discount Apple ultimately decided to provide by a safe margin. Apple did not rely on a substantiated bottoms-up analysis during its months-long assessment of whether to impose a commission, seemingly justifying its decision after the fact with the AG’s report.
> Mr. Roman did not stop there, however. He also testified that up until January 16, 2024, Apple had no idea what fee it would impose on linked-out purchases […] Another lie under oath: contemporaneous business documents reveal that on the contrary, the main components of Apple’s plan, including the 27% commission, were determined in July 2023.
> Neither Apple, nor its counsel, corrected the, now obvious, lies. They did not seek to withdraw the testimony or to have it stricken (although Apple did request that the Court strike other testimony). Thus, Apple will be held to have adopted the lies and misrepresentations to this Court.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/05/01/a-senior-apple-exec-could-be-...
There's a point where companies get "too big to fail"/"too big to jail" and have outsize effect on the country (especially if the country is stupid enough to pass a Citizens United law that explicitly allows them to do this). Anti-trust laws are the main way that the government tries to prevent this, and haven't really been used since Reaganomics decided that big == efficient. Until recently.
Passing a law that companies cannot exceed a certain size (market cap as a percentage of GDP, I guess?) would probably be a simpler way of achieving this. Though, obviously, the accounting profession would roll up its collective sleeves and declare "challenge accepted".
It wasn't always like that, though. We used to have antitrust with serious teeth in this country. And then it literally got borked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox
They should have made a separate Game Store and continue to collect those 30% from games, which protect 75% to 80% of their current App Store revenue.
Then 5 - 6% for all subscription based services like Netflix and Spotify. If you include the Credit Card Processing and other tax / VAT report this is a fair amount I think most company would be on board.
And 10% for everything else. Including Tipping and other IAP etc.
Apple would have protected most of their App Store revenue, generate lots of good will and continue their walled garden path.
But for whatever reason over the years every time I mentioned it I get downvoted.
Now it may be too late. The damage to developer relationship, to many business and to its brand.
If you view it on an Apple device, it takes you to the Apple News app and opens it there, rather than redirecting.
> A federal judge hammered Apple for violating a ruling in an antitrust case that required the company to loosen certain restrictions it imposes on software-makers in its App Store.
> Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordered the iPhone-maker to allow developers to steer users to alternative methods of paying for services or subscriptions offered in the App Store. The company also can no longer impose fees in such scenarios or restrict the ability of software-makers to offer links or otherwise communicate alternate payment options with consumers.
> “Apple willfully chose not to comply with this court’s injunction,” she said in the ruling. “It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers.” She referred the case to federal prosecutors to determine whether a criminal contempt investigation is appropriate.
> The order is the latest twist in the long-running legal dispute between Apple and Epic Games, developer of the popular videogame “Fortnite.”
Full article, works where archive.ph is blocked, no Javascript required, no tracking^1:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1DXcJN
1. Archive.{is,md,ph,etc.} puts the reader's IP address in a "spy pixel" URL.
On the other hand, the internet archive offers the same service with better credentials
web.archive.org
For example, the later does not serve fulltext WSJ articles
https://web.archive.org/web/20250501001608if_/https://www.ws...
The CAPTCHA, a "service" from Cloudflare, is hit when using archive.{is,ph,md,etc.} at 207.241.237.3 If not using that IP, then will not necessarily hit CAPTCHA.
One can switch to another address that works without CAPTCHA, such as 185.101.35.175
Until it too has problems; only a matter of time
I just wonder what are the next excuses going to be?
We just released Crosspay, a cross-platform in-app subscriptions SDK for iOS, Android, macOS, Linux, Windows, and Web apps, enabling users to purchase subscriptions once, and use anywhere. As this ruling becomes effective, we will also enable users to choose their payment method on any platform, instead of being tied to Apple App Store.
However, apps that charge $1 or less per transaction will continue to pay over 30% in fees (e.g. Stripe charges 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction)
See more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43714552
Apple products are status products. Especially in the USA.
No one will care.