Apple announces App Store changes in the EU
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
Reading that made me very happy. It clearly shows that EU bureaucrats - despite their bad reputation - still have teeth when it comes to reigning in overly greedy US companies. Back in '98, the EU versions of Windows were very desirable, as they were free of bloatware. Soon, history might repeat with US consumers pretending to be in the EU to free their hardware.
Very unlikely. Phones have to identify the country they are operating in for wireless emission regulations, whether it be from SIM cards, GPS, sale region, account region, etc. They have been doing this for a very long time.
Apple long standing policy is to look at the country of billing address. As an American living in Europe this has been super to keep watching the Apple TV+ content.
// I know it is tongue in cheek, but that is what this may end up being, especially if Apple is able to move non-trivial amounts of manufacturing to US.
What is non-trivial? IMO if China, India and USA become 3 tiers with each tier being half of the previous tier, that would somehow be justifiable as "hey we are almost there, we can do it any time, but let's have the hatchet ready but keep the cheap devices for now"
It is our sovereign right to make laws that determine the rules of our society. Americans can either abide by them or get out of our market.
I'm all in agreement with your emotional sentiment, but please understand "Americans" do /not/ like the same things you do not like. Our country just takes away our ability to do anything about it. Land of the free and whatnot...
edit: typo
Individual Americans are often great people - some of which I am proud to call my friends.
I think GP was talking about Americans running companies.
I appreciate that this might be true for a large portion of US-americans, but the country isn't doing anything, the people continually voted into power takes that ability away, which can be adjusted bi-annually.
There's a simple explanation for why this happened: America really believes in free market competition. Even when we're getting reamed by global competitors in cost and quality, someone always presupposes that this manufacturing capacity can come back. But that's not how it works; products are worth what people will pay for them, and if the trade value goes down then the gross domestic product will follow.
It's a blatant vulnerability of democratic capitalism. I'd like for you to be right, but I live in America. I don't know if anything on my desk was made in America; I don't even know if my desk itself was made domestically anymore. America isn't a rung on the manufacturing ladder, you could remove us entirely and only stand to increase your margins.
I'll probably just have to bite the bullet and form an LLC with a rented address and phone number once I get ready to release a paid app, which unfortunately just increases my costs even more for what is most likely to remain just a small side hustle.
I still don't see a good reason why independent developers like me should have to publish their personal address and phone number on the App Store. I'm not willing to put my family in danger like that.
Because if someone purchases an app and there's a dispute with the product, they need a business address and/or phone number to contact and resolve the problem. It seems like a very good reason to me.
This is actually still not a valid solution. You'll have to provide an address where you can be physically reached, even if you publish your app as an LLC (at least under German law). A "rented" address won't fulfill that criteria. If you run your LLC out of your personal home, you'll need to publish your personal address (again, under German law, it may be different in other EU countries).
This does make sense in principle, as it allows your customers to actually track you down in case they feel the need to sue you.
You might get away with listing the address of a co-working space, if you are actually physically present at that address during normal business hours.
You might also get away with listing your legal name and the address of your lawyer. But your lawyer would need to agree with this and you'd have to have an arrangement in place that they will represent you in any and all future cases, which might be difficult. This doesn't seem to be a settled question in german jurisprudence.
Also, you could just chance it. Not listing an address will simply result in potential exposure to a cease and desist letter, which (under German law) only results in limited financial liability. I am not a lawyer, so please get a professional to check, but if you are really serious about not exposing your personal address, it might be simpler and cheaper to run the low risk of a cease and desist instead of making a big fuss about an alternative address.
Apple doesn't even police the "trader" self-declaration. I've seen several (scam) developers in the App Store who are clearly traders but have declared that they're not traders in the EU. Apple's compliance here is mostly perfunctory.
It appears Germany appears has similar services where you can get a virtual business addresses at business centers.
Are they simply lying?
This is so unbelievably retarded.
What I have said is stupid is: your attempt to use that software as an argument in favor of loosening Apple's restrictions on iOS applications. The apps in question are such a legal nightmare that they're not available in any major app store, for iOS or Android. No business with a competent legal department would want to be directly involved with those software projects, unless they were planning to incorporate them into their own product and get it certified by regulators like the FDA. If Apple or any other company in a similar situation decided to open up their platform and even mentioned that one of the benefits of that change was to enable this DIY medical device use case, that would probably put them at substantial legal risk.
Regardless of how useful you find such software, you're not going to get a corporation on board by drawing their attention to such a big legal risk. You're also unlikely to win over government regulators, since they're likely to be of the opinion that medical devices should be regulated.
You've identified a reason why some customers may want Apple to change their strategy, but you've completely failed to provide a reason why Apple would want to change, or why a government would want to force Apple to change.
Just let people do what they want, this makes no sense.
At least make it last a year, the current limits are completely stupid.
Developers who opt for tier one will get access to a limited set of mandatory App Store services, including:
* App distribution and delivery
* Trust and safety features
* App management
[...]
Developers who opt for tier two will get access to all services provided by the App Store today.
The only "ulterior priorities" I could pick up on was that Apple was most likely following the Government restrictions in a more discerning way than Google by not breaking out the push notifications in their aggregated data for request disclosures. Once it was made public by a Senator, Apple updated their policy and started to break it out to its own section. How long Google did this before Apple is not stated and the DOJ declined to comment on the push notification surveillance or whether it had prevented Apple or Google from talking about it.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...
The document says manual updates are included but not automatic updates (which is just a setting in the App Store that I personally disable).
Whether there will be update notifications is unclear. Is that what you meant by "app notification delivery", or something else?
As an App Store developer myself, I would love to have Tier 1 in the United States, mainly due to no user ratings and reviews. I hate them, and I hate trying to solicit them. As far as I'm concerned, ditching ratings & reviews would be a bonus!
Apple will do whatever they can to ensure that developers that don't pay will suffer the costs.
I guess to each their own
I don't recognize the fun, playful Apple of the 00s and early 10s anymore. Its soul has been replaced.
I think Cook’s time as CEO will be remembered both by enabling massive scale for the most successful consumer product in history—the iPhone—while sacrificing the company’s soul on the alter of efficiency.
That's fine with me. All of my empirical evidence over the years suggests that my customers are coming mostly from the outside, and Apple is not bringing me many customers from inside the App Store.
But when I want to buy Grey Poupon Mustard, I don't want to see Heinz etc. If you don't have Grey Poupon, I don't want to see anything.
I am however pretty certain that said spinelessness wouldn't fly with the European public.
It is as democratic as the US presidency, which is also nominated by electors.
This is a tired talking point designed to sow doubt in the European project.
But one layer of indirection is not crazy, that's the way any minister in any country works - or the way the US presidency does.
You can't directly elect every single official - it just doesn't scale. It also doesn't really make sense in the commissioner case as different commissioners have different portfolios and which country gets what is subject to negotiation between member states.
You don’t have to load the app via Google play but your device needs to be managed by Google.
For android, you need to buy into all the ecosystem of Google to access their push notification service.
You can use android without google’s system, but you can’t use google push system.
On iOS you just can't unless you are fully blessed by Apple, and this is precisely the issue.
1. The ecosystem is just much better, ie. the quality of apps is in another league compared to apps on Android or Windows.
2. Many amazing apps that are at the core of my company's workflow simply don't exist on other platforms at all. With no comparable equivalents.
3. We get many apps earlier. Even up to a year earlier. Example: Clubhouse. Running a company, my marketing team can't afford to be late to a new social media platform, risking that it becomes the new status quo. I can name a dozen apps that were 6 to 12 months late to Android vs. IOS :(
If these change I would happily move to Linux, or Windows (once they make the OS usable).
We use Linux servers for running Python/Node Scripts, and APIs.
We use 1 Windows machine to use a very specific data science app that only exists for Windows.
Before anyone says I'm a fanboy. I'm here to generate revenue for my company. I don't give 2 sh*ts about AAPL.
---
But this is just me.
Why it won't matter to the public: The kids don't care. The want an iPhone.
Never mind that Mozilla manages to run one for Firefox completely free to users and devs despite being a comically mismanaged nonprofit and if it were really a problem for them they could allow users to enter the domain name for an alternative one.
This issue right here is actually why there have been so few usable open source federated chat apps on the iPhone: the client maintainers must also maintain infrastructure for notifications and are not allowed to delegate this to people hosting their own infrastructure. This is actually the core complaint many people have with how Apple runs their app store and it's very visibly made the internet less usable for everyone.
But in the general sense I agree: it would be a much better user experience and contribute to safety if automatic app updates would be included in all tiers.
From an API manageability point of view it makes sense.
- ARM is not Apple IP, it's owned by SoftBank and licensed to Apple at rates low enough that it's impossible to undercut them.
- TSMC's 5nm manufacturing capacity was entirely bought-out for Apple Silicon, blocking other OEMs from competing on equal footing.
- The SOC team, who arguably did the most innovation of all, was gutted with the founding of Nuvia immediately after Apple Silicon's launch.
They look good on specific workflows because they are focused on specific accelerators and code path optimisation that they know is more beneficial to the way most of their customers use their hardware.
But their lead is hardly uniform and there are still plenty of things where they are barely doing better than intel, if at all. And their GPUs that are supposedly good don't perform that well outside of benchmarks, efficient, surely but not exactly something to rave about.
When you look at it from a high vantage point, there have been a lot of compromises to be made to get mostly efficiency/battery life, the transition wasn't cheap and some stuff will forever stay stuck.
With the progress of Intel/AMD it doesn't feel like that big of a win. And this is also why ARM isn't working so well on the Windows side. So much to give up for not that significant gains.
At least we know it was mostly about architecture optimisation and access to better lithography processes. Eventually they will all converge to similar performances and we will regret the code compatibility. Some big software houses (like Autodesk) basically got vindicated for not building software for macOS, it's not a really good sentiment for the Mac long term.
It's not clear if any of it matters because clearly, they would rather sell iPads with a software distribution monopoly in the form of their App Store. Maybe with EU ruling they will change their mind, but I doubt it, as long as they can maintain their marketing...
It’s honestly pathetic. You don’t like it you don’t buy it, period.
If anyone dares to speak up gets strong armed. Instead of giving ordinary people a chance to earn some extra income by creating a market for them, they squeeze them out. They force their fucking, non customisable, shitty ui/ux on people and they also do everything in order to hinder diy fixing of their products. They also skim the developers because they can. They create a soulless society in the process, and they just don't give a fuck. They just love their oppressing rules, so ft.
What kind of inherently evil shitfaced scum comes up with ideas like these? Well, screw these greedy bottom-feeders. Do they think that hiding behind a facade, a faceless corporate entity, means they can do whatever they want? Pull them out into the sunshine, let them burn.
I hate pomegranate juice. Should I try to ruin the business of pomegranate juice producers until they start producing orange juice? Or should I just buy orange juice from another business instead.
It's not stupid to democratically set up ground rules to ban antisocial behavior.
Please note I don’t say I’m right. It’s just my opinion on the matter.
In my opinion capital can use their power to the detriment of society at large. At that point it is the duty of a democratic humanist government to protect its populace.
The market is a tool, not an end in itself.
Basically: “I know what I buy, why should I pay for those who do not even try to get informed?”
In a democracy, power comes from the people and not from the profit motives of a private entity. It is well within the right of the people to vote to curtail capitalist excesses.