benoau

They also say they generate $57 billion ad revenue from being default search engine on iPhone, so obviously there is a cash value to being the default search (and everything else) on Android too even if their accountants can finagle reasons that doesn't contribute to Android's development costs.

If they didn't develop Android they'd be paying $10s of billions annually for the prime positioning their apps and services and search enjoy too, so even if you buy their accounting tricks the development is paying for itself many times over.

It's a level of service above their payment processing, where they also collect and remit certain taxes which I believe is built-in to that ~8%. This is the same service that Google and Apple provide for in-app payments.

https://stripe.com/managed-payments

This is what Apple said about it:

> Stripe and Paddle are leading full-service, turnkey payment processing, and merchant-of-record providers handling all the services necessary for link-out, including payment processing, tax compliance, fraud detection, and customer service. Across the top apps, the mean implied processing and merchant-of-record fee based on Stripe’s and Paddle’s rack rates (which few, if any, large developers actually pay because they negotiate discounts or provision in-house) is 8.1% using Stripe rates, or 7.8% using Paddle rates.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...

No matter how much we differ we all have a common set of needs, food, shelter, safety.

I think the other issue is that even if it's controllable, there's nobody representing us that is controlling it, except theoretically regulators who are facing an uphill battle to bring accountability and limits to these companies.

Google is not developing Android for the IAP fees, they're doing it to sell phones loaded with their search, advertising, browser and services. They take hundreds of billions in revenue annually from this, they are being paid several times over for that work even if they get no IAP fees.

Apple recently submitted in court filings that you'd have to pay ~8% for off-the-shelf solutions like Stripe or Paddle to be Merchant of Record anyway so 15% isn't really bad except for the high-earning apps, but Google should be doing something for that extra 7%.

I think that still matches "an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function".

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/military-cybersecurity-ad-tr...

> The U.S. military has disabled advertising tracking tools in government-issued phones, computers and other devices, officials recently told Congress.

> The different military branches confirmed they had done so, some only this summer, following reporting that commercially available data taken from these devices and sold freely by data brokers, was being used by Iran and other adversaries to track and in some cases target American bases and personnel.

> so as to surveil

How does Android and iPhone meet the grade given apps have pretty consistently leaked locations, base layouts etc?

I really like to use GitHub's Copilot for my coding sessions, it means I manually write enough to shape the files and software the way I want and only ingest 10-20 lines at a time so I stay on top of everything that is produced. This is faster than I was before and it's cheap and doesn't sacrifice quality so to me it is a good combination.

It wouldn't have died - most apps are still just a thin UI over a corresponding online service, and most of the data and services proprietary APIs provide ended up achievable in a browser too. It is really just the internet that makes apps and smartphones useful.

All apps really offered was a way to gatekeep payments in games that groom impulsive spending habits, they just happened to start making very serious money on Facebook right about the moment Jobs changed his mind.

(another iOS derivative)

The last Intel Mac was actually just 3 years ago!

The last 20 years we've only seen Apple enjoying the good times. What they did when the money was gushing in from every angle is not really an indicator of what they'll do in the hard times. We're getting into the hard times now, IAP revenue is plummeting because of competition for payments and a whole bag of things are impacting consumer purchase behavior.

This has resulted in positive outcomes like services have largely gone global this last quarter but it's also resulted in negatives like more ads and service price increases in many countries.

I would also guess they practically never use the App Store. In fact I would guess there's virtually no dogfooding of it at all internally, because they have 100k+ employees but need blogs to tell them when a sanctioned Russian bank's stealth submission is topping the free charts.

I wouldn't underestimate their familiarity with dark patterns, the testimony on how they thwarted third party payments suggests they are well aware of the mechanics.

> In one model, for example, Apple worked to determine how the “less seamless experience” of using a non-IAP method would lead customers to abandon their transactions. By modeling where this tipping point was, Apple was able to determine when the links would stop being an advantage to developers, which would push them back to using IAP.

> Apple also found that more restrictive rules around the placement and formatting of the links themselves could reduce the number of apps that decided to implement these outside links.

> Lawyers suggested Cook himself was involved with how the warning to App Store customers would appear, recommending an update to the text that appears when the external links were clicked. In one version, that link warned customers they were “no longer transacting with Apple.” Later, the link was updated to subtly suggest there could be privacy or security risks with purchases made on the web.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/24/apple-exec-phil-schiller-t...

If you buy like carpet you could reasonably expect to replace it in 10-15 years, and if you allow pets you are more likely to need to. However getting 15-20 years out of it instead without pets is probably more like double-dipping than a subsidy as replacing it on the correct schedule should already be factored into the rent.

Probably should be a fee for heavy-handed people banging doors and drawers and faucets around too.

Don't really like the search, it feels like almost all the job posts are actually within the last 48 hours, which are gated by registration to view, and there are very sparse results outside of that timeframe so you search for a popular language like Python and React and there are just a handful of results.

The top search link in the navigation takes you to https://app.vcbacked.co/ which doesn't seem to work.

I'd be surprised if landfill wasn't the most popular outcome when people with lego die.

I think these thoughts on what happens without the junior-to-senior pipeline have been circulating for a while, long before the conversation even shifted to agents.

What it boils down to is AI staying just bad enough to always need a developer to make the important calls. Meanwhile every effort is being made to improve it. If there's a ceiling that preserves our jobs and the value we bring to companies it will be a bitter pill to swallow for everyone else.

I do something like this with code all the time, “is this idiomatic <foo>?”, I find it very helpful.

pgweb: web ui for postgres

https://github.com/sosedoff/pgweb

I think most of the whistles to be blown are like paper cuts, nobody's going to sacrifice their job over one papercut but nobody is singularly responsible for them all either. The threshold for something happening if a whistle were blown is very different to my standards too - I wouldn't leave security issues to rot on the backlog, I wouldn't lubricate easy and unlimited spending in a child's app, but a lot has to happen for a company to be accountable for these things.

Yep. Any tech contract worth doing gets 400+ applications on Upwork and 390+ won’t even be looked at. 50+ will be submitted within minutes of a job being posted! Many of the job posters never even return to the site to screen or select applicants.

And all your years and decades of work outside the platform barely matters, you’re competing against people who spent that time accruing verified stats within it.

Be funny if they put Musk, Cook and Altman together at a table.

The best possibility would be allowing virtualization so you could run iPadOS or macOS (or other desktops), whatever is the best solution for the task at hand.

Doubt it will ever happen though, their restrictions are two decades old and they show zero interest in modernizing them, and have subverted any attempt to force their hand, and those attempts aren't trying to enable this anyway. Triple-whammy.

Ambitious but realistically, it looks like a single-developer project and that just doesn't seem viable considering the challenges are the same faced by Asahi.

The logo is begging for trouble too, if you were an actual fruit shop and had that logo since 1975 they'd go after you for trademark infringement. Using it as a logo for an alternative OS specifically for Mac probably constitutes actual trademark infringement.

Yeah but they'll take your data and purpose it for their ads outside the games.

It's nothing to do with VR in particular. This is the top-10 from https://store.steampowered.com/charts/topselling/US, half of them are collecting data to share (and one to sell) to advertisers. The fact that this is surprising you is kind of the point, Valve's not providing enough transparency or doing enough (any?) policing of this. You won't even find the disclosures in the EULAs, at best they link to a separate privacy policy. I suspect lack of EULA isn't necessarily a good indicator of no data being collected either.

The breadth of data being collected includes browsing, installed software, identity and account identifiers, location, device and OS characteristics.

- WarDogs: not sharing/selling https://www.wardogs.com/privacy

- Marvel Rivals: not sharing/selling https://protocol.unisdk.easebar.com/release/latest_v475.html

- CounterStrike: is Valve's

- Borderlands 4: https://www.take2games.com/privacy/en-US/

"In the last 12 months, Take-Two has sold and/or shared unique identifiers, IP address, as well as Internet/Electronic Activity and Profile Inferences with third-party advertising providers to enable us to provide personalized advertising to you and others like you. We may sell or share personal information about users that we know are under the age of 18 (or older, in certain locations) with their (or depending on age, their parent's) settings or permission."

- Halloween: https://www.illfonic.com/privacy-policy-eula

"Some advertising we engage in may be “targeted advertising,” which is the practice of showing you more relevant or personalized ads based on your activity over time and across non-affiliated services. Targeted advertising often involves us incorporating third party tracking technologies into our Service or disclosing (often hashed) identifiers, such as email addresses or Ad IDs, with third parties. These third parties then match our data with their own (or their partners’ data) to deliver ads to you or similar audiences. For example, we may incorporate the Meta pixel on our website to serve ads to Meta audiences based on the data we provide.

We also use audience modeling services, where we and a partner each disclose (often hashed) identifiers to a technology provider. The technology provider then matches common factors between our and the partner’s data to help us understand audience overlap and improve campaign performance."

- Baldur's Gate 3: not sharing/selling https://larian.com/privacy

- Overwatch: https://www.blizzard.com/en-us/legal/a4380ee5-5c8d-4e3b-83b7...

"We disclose this personal information to: Online marketing or advertising partners including on our mobile games These partners may combine this personal information with information that they have collected about you when you use their services (or the websites and services of third parties) to personalize your experience or to improve the accuracy of their analytics, targeting, and measurement systems."

- Apex Legends: https://tos.ea.com/legalapp/WEBPRIVACY/US/en/PC/

"We also may share information relating to your device and your use of our Services with our third-party advertising partners so they may deliver targeted advertisements to you when you visit third-party services and websites within their networks. This practice is commonly referred to as "interest-based advertising," "online behavioral advertising," or "targeted advertising

- The Blood of Dawnwalker: not sharing/selling https://bandainamco.com/privacy-policy/

- Bodycam: not sharing/selling https://www.playbodycam.com/en-US/personal-data

I don't think they'll be taking a stance any time soon, the top grossing apps on iPhone include YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and Threads so this is probably worth billions/year in fees that are disproportionately profit too. And that's ignoring the games!

The only chance maybe is if courts and regulators lock in zero-commission or a very small fee that eliminates Apple's incentive to allow and tax this stuff.

Meta are objectively worse than Valve because Valve don't allow ads in games or offer advertising services and they're generally more trustworthy, but that's really only part of the privacy story. Each app/game usually has its own data collection and usage on top and I don't think either of them do much to police or constrain that.