Also Vox media is a clickbait site - the same one that attacked people for social distancing to avoid Covid earlier this year as 'tech bros'.
Most of articles on Verge/Vox are blogspam around other sources adding little to no value. Engadget covers gadgets, Ars Technica covers wider issues, the rest probably won't be popular on HN.
Entire verge/vox are long form tabloids but with sophisticated wording which is deliberately contrarion. I've read polygon only once and they did come across as very, very good.
> App stores give you incredible access to new users. You literally don’t have a way to get unto iOS devices w/o the App Store.
They give you "incredible access" because they're basically the only access. Their OSes would be complete flops if app stores were the only option and nobody would use them...
Dreaming of a world where everyone can press a button and buy a flashed phone with an open standards operating system much like I can do on most laptops with Linux
> You literally don’t have a way to get unto iOS devices w/o the App Store.
Yes, and that's the problem that needs solving. If Apple allowed sideloading apps, every single of their justifications about App Store rules would start making sense. You either pay 30% and get a nice listing and discoverability, or you pay nothing but are completely on your own.
Or, you know, go to Android with 70%+ global market share.[1]
If you really want to make a radio for Lamborghini's, but they say no, then you go to a different manufacturer. "oh but Lambo owners have so much spend/revenue per owner" doesn't really hold water.
I said it many times and I'll say it again: it's not a choice you get to make as a company or an individual that has a service that needs an app. If you're to have any semblance of success, you can't only have an Android app.
As far as my personal preferences go, I use Android since 2011 and can't fathom switching to iOS.
This is less weird that it might seem on the surface. If you've ever commissioned an expensive peiece of art there's usually a line in the contract that says something to the effect of "if the art is damaged, you will give $artist preference for repair" because if you get it shoddily fixed it looks bad on them.
You mean what happended to the days of getjar.com where you can develop and upload whatever J2ME smartphone app without an overlord dictating the rules and enforcing a large cut of your revenues? I miss those days.
Unfortunately, Apple is going to continue this nonsense unless people stop buying into their reality distortion spells.
In this case they have no choice. If you want to sell applications that run on Apple devices, you must sell them on Apple's store. Doesn't matter where they host their software and servers.
There is no historical mainstream analog since desktop/laptop OS software has never been so locked-down that it was impossible to install software without 1st-party permission. Even early videogame consoles had unlicensed games run on them, and the console vendors could only stop them by releasing new hardware.
I feel like making Apple devices and Apple's store seem like two separate things doesn't really make sense. The whole entire phone top to bottom is Apple's store. The "App Store" is just a pretty downloader.
Apple should just be as draconian as possible so that more people will voluntarily put in the effort to learn how to build and consume open platforms.
If people don't want to do that, that's on them.
If Epic doesn't want to invest in an open cell phone platform that can run Epic binaries, then its only options are to beg the government for help, or to take Apple's bs on the chin
Once upon a time, there was a certain large and innovative American technology company. It invented incredible hardware devices, which it sold to end users. Each device was programmed to connect to this company's network, and to access services provided by this company.
A large and growing ecosystem of applications and services grew around the network which this American company controlled, and the network became central to the American economy [1].
Other businesses had to connect to this company's network, so that they could reach the company's many end users. But the company jealously guarded its end users, inflicting onerous burdens on competitors, or disconnecting them entirely [2].
That company, the American Telephone and Telegraph company, was eventually dissolved by the US Department of Justice due to charges filed under the Sherman Antitrust Act [3].
Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh, right, there aren't any historical analogs to the App Store. Apple is a bastion of innovation and an important defender of privacy rights, and I can't imagine that its management would ever recklessly endanger that by running afoul of antitrust law.
Then you haven't been paying attention. Apple at least has competition. ICANN is a government supported monopoly that has been systematically taken over by robber barons.
Apple is a government supported legal monopoly due to patents, licences and copyrights, so are many others, but they are too.
If Apple wasn't both the largest US phone maker and a legal monopoly, their behavior would not be as problematic, as you could (at least in theory, probably in practice too) sell other hardware to run ios/macos, or resell legally obtained, and modified software without Apple restrictions.
Whether their behavior is acceptable or not must be framed in a much larger picture. Companies are given legal rights by virtue of expectations of that being the best for society, and that's the metric that companies should be measured against.
Would it be good, and acceptable for society if all technology vendors/brands acted exactly as Apple regarding the App Store?
It's quite easy to answer that with a no, since clearly tying many frequnt small purchases indefinitely to a bigger purchase is not something that can ever increase competition. As it will form a less effective market, it can't be said to be desirable.
>as you could (at least in theory, probably in practice too) sell other hardware to run ios/macos, or resell legally obtained, and modified software without Apple restrictions.
This wasn't true when Apple was a small fry so why would it be true when they are the largest US phone maker?
How can this thought persist in a world where everyone is supposedly more tech savvy than ever?
Seems like those that wish to use Apple (consumers, Epic) should either deal with the consequences, beg the government for help, or build their own open standard.
For me I lean towards building the open standard and teaching people how to use it. The App Store is for the lazy.
Imagine if Microsoft did this on PCs. a) prohibiting the installation of non-windows store software (sideloading) and b) insisting that all purchases done via apps give them a 30% cut. I think this is a ridiculous practice on the behalf of Apple.
No, you can install software outside the store. Either native ARM (though there isn't much available) or emulated x86 code. It does default to "S mode" which prevents installing apps from outside the store but it's just a settings toggle away like Android's "Unknown Sources".
Even worse. Imagine if the World Wide Web was not open and you had to go through a closed WWW like AOL and websites were "under review" by the providers and would take a 30% cut of your revenues or clicks on your web app or subscription service and websites require going only through that provider.
It could be the case if AMP grows dominant; given the market share of Google Search, it could be enough to create a controlled (er, "curated") web in a similar spirit.
We're closer than we have been in a long time to something like Google deciding to license Blink or Chromium. There are some good reasons that couldn't happen (yet), but what a world that would be.
They can't retract the open source license that already exists for Chromium. Maybe Google could start adding proprietary features to Chrome and close-source those bits, but the code that's out there is already out there.
Ironically, this is an example of where it is crucially important Oracle-Google case swings Google's way.
Currently, there are alternative implementations of Play Services that can be installed to replace Google's. However, if it is not fair use to use even the bare bones of an API definition without permission, then we can't even create a compatible implementation of such an API without the copyright holder's permission. In which case, we cannot replace Google Play services with anything else.
Actually, Google already has closed source features in Chrome that are totally not related to Google accounts and/or sync.
Take for example Android app support in ChromeOS. It is closed source even though both Chromium and Android are open-source.
How? The publishers publish AMP pages, and multiple link aggregators (including Bing) consume them. I could see an Apple News style system being controlled like that because it forces the publishers to directly integrate with a single link aggregator.
Yeah I'm really lost about the AMP doomsaying. The fact google has a standard that anyone can use that lets pages be delivered faster and shows an icon on results that do that really doesn't seem like the sort of thing to get worried about. It's weird that this gets treated not only negatively but on par or worse than closed garden platforms.
It gives Google more control over basic functionality of the internet. They already have _far_ too much control in the form of the biggest browser and the biggest search engine. Anything they do to expand or capitalize on that deserves a _lot_ of scrutiny.
Your link doesn't say that Google forces AMP on publishers. It shows that Google displays an icon next to AMP results for mobile searches to indicate the page is mobile friendly. Bing does the exact same thing: https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster-Blog/September-2018/Introdu...
This is not enforcing AMP on publishers in the results, and the argument that it is by using icons falls under the 'it's kind of the same' category.
It says they use site speed in ranking, and, well, I'm sure it would come as no surprise if Google's (largely) having served a page/site increases the speed just enough.
to put it as plainly as possible, it's absolutely hilarious that tech people buy into these insane myths about AMP, there's a reason why no serious antitrust person brings it up, it's fighting on Google's territory - it's a wide open standard, used throughout the industry, formed in response to proprietary solutions designed to tax suppliers by Facebook and Apple, immediately and fully shared with competitors.
Fuck AMP. The fact that there is no way to turn it off is one of the main reasons I don't use Google on my phone. DDG often has slightly poorer results, but I often find answers to my questions in Reddit threads and Reddit has a horrible mobile experience. Between AMP and them throwing 15 different popups at me to get their app (why would I want their single tab app?!?!), it's borderline unusable.
Reddit has a mobile view that is almost the exact same UI as the AMP page. WHY do they allow Google to run the AMP page instead? I too have switched to DDG solely to avoid Reddit AMP pages.
Because they have a gun to their cold cash craving heads, and will be demoted to lower positions in the results, lose traffic, and lose revenue if they dare withhold their content from the Internet’s biggest gatekeeper?
I've had the best experience ever since I ditched Google for DDG on my phone, and stuck Reddit on (old) desktop mode with a text wrapping browser. Don't miss Google at all, I only now use it to search for programming stuff.
I've done exactly the same thing over the last month and wish I would have made the change sooner. The mobile web is vastly improved with fewer AMP results and new Reddit is just terrible. :shakesfist:
Using Opera browser, the text reflows to always fit the screen on zoom, so nearly all desktop sites become very legible on mobile at a glance when zooming in, without having to scroll laterally. I keep withing for a FOSS browser with that functionality.
I'm still pissed that Mozilla handled the Firefox Fenix transition so badly. I had a perfectly working Redirect AMP to HTML [1] addon on mobile, and now you can only install a set of whitelisted addon for the moment. Until then, the Firefox experience is significantly degraded on Android.
The thing is - will that work longer term ? Mozilla will not maintain the old codebase anymore and unless someone else takes it over (unlikely) tje old version can become insecure & missing new APIs. All that while Mozilla still not providing the missing features for the new version.
They botched that too. On mobile (web), even if I request the desktop site and set it to the old version in my settings, always goes to the redesign. I have to manually change any link's subdomain to old.
The Reddit apps I've tried stick to the meth-addled idea to use fixed floating header bars, which are useless and really annoy me.
So you're proposing diverting the conversation to a theoretical that has little chance of happening but not discussing the actual example that's happening right now?
App Stores suck. App Stores with no side-loading are even worse. Platforms that are locked down so much that you can't even install your own OS are worse.
We used to bitch about Tivoization on HN all the time, it seems post iPhone, everyone seems A-OK.
That's the same excuse my employer (Google) makes. Competition is just a click away. You're not forced to use Google, use Bing, use Fastmail. Brand surveys show Google is also one of the most trusted brands, ergo, the number of people who think it sucks is small.
Does that mitigate any of the concerns people have about either company?
This community used to have a strong focus on openness, open source, permission less innovation and the avoidance of checkpoints and tolls, but what it's turned into is often a battle of fanboys, who roll out excuses and lowered standards for their favorites.
Yours is an easy position to maintain, until you have invested a lot of money and work in an app which gets booted from the App Store, or because Apple decides to shake you down for even more money.
Apple fans simultaneously say Apple has a small marketshare, but also brag that earn the majority of all smartphone industry profits. If the latter is true, it means that anyone wanting to make money on mobile software has no choice but to publish on the App Store, ergo, effectively a monopoly.
And your employer is correct. We don’t need the government to protect people from their own decisions.
I’ve made the same argument about Google, FaceBook, Apple, and Amazon (even before I started working for AWS).
This community used to have a strong focus on openness, open source, permission less innovation and the avoidance of checkpoints and tolls, but what it's turned into is often a battle of fanboys, who roll out excuses and lowered standards for their favorites.
Did the open source community whine about mean old Microsoft or did they create alternatives to the point where even Azure runs more Linux VMs than Windows VMs? They went out there and built something better. They out competed.
Every single one of the big tech companies got there through better execution.
> We don’t need the government to protect people from their own decisions.
Citation needed. Many parts of our government do just that (FDA, EPA). We need these because many decisions would otherwise be uninformed. If you don't know what is in your food, how can you make informed decisions? If you don't know what is in your drugs, or what the side effects are, how can you make informed decisions?
Yes because taking bad drugs which you can’t know that they are bad without multimillion dollar drug trials and stopping a corporation from polluting is the equivalent of typing in a url bar to choose an alternate search engine or choosing an alternate phone.
Are you really saying that Google doesn’t have the capital or reach to better market the “openness” of Android?
The same model dates back to the first game consoles. As much as people love freedom the utility of curated lists of applications that work without issues is a major selling point. I don’t think effectively banning consoles and app stores is a net win for consumers as long as the option exists for a competitive open platform.
I have DDG as my search portal, and pretty much every single search is followed by another with !g on it. The results are terrible. So please recommend something better.
I've been trying to use DDG for over a year now and it's not all roses either. Very frequent !g's.
Overall it feels a little bit like self-flagellation which I'm hoping is for the greater good, that DDG's algo will improve with use and eventually I won't need !g anymore.
Maybe DDG needs a browser extension that let's you seamlessly provide feedback with every !g to teach them what you were actually looking for.
>Maybe DDG needs a browser extension that let's you seamlessly provide feedback with every !g to teach them what you were actually looking for.
You are calling it seamlessly providing feedback because it is DDG. If this was about Google or Facebook, it could have sounded closer to 'tracking users'.
Yup, I hate DDG at this point. While having it as my main search on every browser/device. If there are better alternatives I'd love to know about them.
That's a little silly as an example because AOL was exactly like this back in the day and had curated channels. You could still access external sites if AOL was your ISP as well but anything inside of the AOL application was reviewed by AOL.
Also, the web is not even a great analogy period since it wasn't created by a private company. Apple created their phones, their App Store, they maintain it, and they provide the infrastructure for it. That's nothing like the internet.
Actually, I don't think most people who buy iPhones have any idea what they're buying into. They're buying a phone. In some cases, they're buying an iPhone to access things like FaceTime. if they want to communicate with their friends then they must buy an iPhone.
Actually, I bought iPhones for my parents precisely because of the walled garden and consistent experience. Back when I made this change (3 years ago), the Android App Store was just a cess pool of privacy violating trash apps. Between that and the inconsistent ways to do everything across manufacturers, I just determined android flexibility is not worth hours of support for non-techies.
So yes, lots of people buy iPhones exactly because if Apples iron grip.
You're conflating different things under the header of "Apple's iron grip" here. It is beneficial to your parents that Apple prevents spyware better than Google does. It is not beneficial to your parents that they obsessively seek and destroy any way developers might get a single dollar from an iPhone user without giving Apple 30¢.
It doesn't matter whether your parents care. My point is that they are separate practices with different pros and cons, so using the benefits of one to justify the other doesn't make sense.
>they obsessively seek and destroy any way developers might get a single dollar from an iPhone user without giving Apple 30¢.
That's incredibly disingenuous and you're either being dishonest or ignorant. The 30% is for sales made on Apple's platform. Developers can absolutely make sales without giving Apple a cut as long as they don't use Apple's infrastructure or platform. You can have people purchase things for your app as long as you don't attempt to offer in-app purchases that circumvent the App Store.
Isn't Apple's objection to what Epic did here the fact that these purchases didn't use Apple's infrastructure and platform? Unless by "using Apple's platform," you mean "done by an iPhone user," in which case that's what I said in the first place.
How are developers supposed to not use apple's payment platform when they are explicitly prevented from circumventing it? Your last two sentences dont make sense when put together.
They're not. In-app purchases have to go through Apple. You're allowed to sell things outside of the App Store so long as you don't try to use that to circumvent purchases available within it. For example, you can watch videos in several streaming services that you purchased or entered digital codes for. You can't however make a new purchase within the app without hitting an Apple server. Apple logs those purchases and backs them up to your account and hosts the servers that the actual app sits on along with the content for those in-app purchases. That infrastructure allows customers to use one account to download it and nearly guarantee no malware while also giving a platform for people to give feedback on that app.
It would be like you using AOL and only being able to view the channels that AOL offered (which is exactly what it was). Apple has no authority to tell you what you can do with your device once you've purchased it but you also don't have the authority or the right to demand that Apple service your device if you jailbreak it or mod it.
This is literally the exact same situation as Xbox and PS4. Xbox doesn't allow people to play PS4 games on an Xbox. Is that anti-competitive? Is that anti-consumer? Is that Xbox having absolute authority over what you can do on your Xbox? Get out of here with that nonsense.
It's not silly at all. Until 1995 home internet access was too expensive and AOL didn't offer support for http or any kind of internet access - only services provided by them. If they had the foresight they could of crushed the early internet and prevented it from ever happening. A 100% firewalled and paid service that wouldn't look much different than the cable companies at the time. People don't realize how lucky we are that the potential the internet provided flew under the radar for so long.
I'm not sure about any of that. Android phones are ridiculously diverse, from overpowered "gaming" behemoths to tiny ones like Unihertz Jelly.
But in the end I guess what matters more is whether you want a single person to control what you view or not, like when they banned James Joyce because of an illustration of a man skinny dipping.
Your comment doesn't really disagree with theirs. One major reason Android feels so fragmented is all the different devices. My last Android phone was an LG G3 (yeah I know I'm out of date nowadays). It had a really good camera (for the time) with a fast laser autofocus. Turns out no app used the proper APIs to take advantage of laser autofocus. If I wanted to take a picture with an app, I would have to take a picture with the camera app, and then upload it. Except certain apps like Instagram didn't allow you to upload photos from your camera roll, so any instagram photo I took was not in focus.
In my opinion iOS was far better when there were fewer different devices released every year, but it's still better today than Android.
Android phones don't suffer from this as much, though weird rejections from the Play Store do happen not infrequently, if HN front page can be trusted, and getting non-technical people to be comfortable with sideloading must be a huge security liability. Getting updates for the lifetime of my device and especially security patches, finding a phone with a decent user experience not marred by badly implemented manufacturer shells, that's still really hard though. Those have been significant problems for me with my Android phones, much more significant than not being able to sideload. I'd say it's not so black and white, both platforms have grave problems, with no immediate fix in sight.
I think you're onto something. Why is it that anyone can write a program for PC, but we failed to prevent a system from rising up that wouldn't let us do the same on mobile.
I was thinking the same at first, then I realized: if Microsoft had created a secure OS, that worked quite well all the time, that did what people wanted, and that didn't NEED 3rd party anti-virus software just to be secure, then I wouldn't mind buying all my Windows software through the Windows app store for $1-$20 with 30% going to Microsoft. But they didn't, they had a crap platform and we had to rely on sketchy shareware apps from virus-laden uncertified 3rd party websites, and the anti-virus software became indistinguishable from the ransom-ware it was supposed to prevent, and the platform was so hard to develop for that most commercial software cost $50-$500, so it got pirated, and on and on.
Instead, Apple invented a new computing platform and a new model to pay for it, it just worked, people were willing to pay for that, and we liked it.
You are trying to divert the topic to something that's likely never going to happen from something that gets HNers triggered all the time, even if it's just remotely related to Microsoft.
Because the only legal avenue to challenge Apple's policies is anti-trust law, and because Apple doesn't have a monopoly, it's hard to argue against them on anti-trust grounds.
The threshold the US government uses is 50% market share, with exclusionary behavior. 100% is not required (and would be a crazy requirement to have; even Microsoft in its heyday couldn't have been prosecuted with that kind of threshold).
The question isn't whether Apple has a large enough market share in the US for the courts to get involved — it very clearly does — the question is does it exhibit exclusionary behavior to the extent courts should get involved.
(I think it does exhibit exclusionary behavior, but I can see that being much more open to interpretation than the simple fact that it clears the 50% threshold.)
Regardless, my comment was just correcting the statement that Apple doesn't have a majority market share in any market, when in fact it has majority market share in the US market.
Your comment does not correct that statement, and uses erroneous data to claim otherwise.
Apple does not have more than 50% marketshare of smartphones in the US. In most analyses it is between 41-43%, with an absolute high of 46%. Android accounts for the rest. And of course worldwide iOS is dwarfed by Android.
EDIT: Of course this was down-arrowed. The citation of StatCounter is akin to claiming that the rodeo's parking lot has 80% pick-up trucks, therefore pick-up trucks have 80% of the market. It's absolute nonsense but it somehow appears on HN repeatedly. Never change, HN. Never change.
That's a fair point that I didn't realize. That being said, it looks like the Apple App Store has well over 50% of the market (assuming "the market" means percentage of sales by revenue), so I think it's a moot point anyway; Epic is suing Apple for its monopolistic practices with the App Store, and it looks like app sales on that do clear the 50% threshold even if device sales don't. https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/07/03/apples-app-store-...
StatCounter measures web usage, not market share. iOS users tend to jump into Safari and browse the web from their devices more than peer devices, quite contrary to the conspiratorial noise often spread on here.
By actual sales of devices, iOS accounts for between 41-46% of the market. That users on iOS tend to use the web more from their devices doesn't somehow make it a monopoly.
And to be clear I don't think whether it's a monopoly or not is particularly relevant -- it's still arguably abusive, anticompetitive behavior -- but that misleading statcounter claim is used for disinformation on here daily.
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area.
Because the rules of the App Store say that the apps that get charged the fee are those who rely on the purchases or payments as their primary function. Browsers have a different primary function.
So why don’t I owe 30% to apple when I receive a payment through a qr code shown by my banking app?
Let’s be honest here, the rules of the app store are arbitrary and designed to extract the maximum amount of revenue from the ecosystem, within the limits of what apple thought people would put it with. Turns out they may have miscalculated.
Because that's not a "digital good" and you're not buying something from your bank. It's the same reason you don't pay Apple 30% to buy something with Best Buy's app or Target's app. The rules are not arbitrary. They're set up so that if an app is using Apple's store and infrastructure, it has to pay Apple for it and it can't circumvent that infrastructure. The alternative is a clusterfuck of payment systems and transactions with Apple as the middleman with no way to ensure any kind of experience for the customer.
The 30% cut only applies to in-app content. Doesn't apply to physical goods or services delivered via the app. So things like UBER, AirBnb, SkipTheDishes etc are not part of it.
I mean, couldn't we just replace Microsoft->Sony and PC->Playstation and the argument falls apart a bit?
> Imagine if Sony did this on Playstation. a) prohibiting the installation of non-PlayStation games and b) insisting that all purchases done via their store give them a 30% cut.
Many platforms are like this -- and many also have the majority marketshare. Is this a call to redefine what platforms can and cannot control?
There is a distinction between a general purpose computing device and a gaming console. I depend on my computer for important aspects of my life, not just entertainment.
I perceive capricious behaviour like this ad a threat to my liberty and well-being.
"There is a distinction between a general purpose computing device and a gaming console." Whats the distinction? gaming console use x86 now. is it the keyboard support? the gpu ?
What its marketed as and who it is aimed at. Nobody ever bought a nintendo NES to use as a personal computing device, it wasn’t that they looked at the specsheet and it had a 6502. There were in fact PCs with 6502s and powerpcs as well. In any case, I still think video game consoles are stupid but they at least have some incentives to do a walled garden type thing (anti-cheat, anti-piracy) and lacking general code execution they actually stand a reasonable chance of accomplishing that (versus iOS where I am currently typing on a jailbroken device.)
> Nobody ever bought a nintendo NES to use as a personal computing device
Although interestingly, the Japanese console makers have continually tried to push the computer/development angle.
When the NES was released in Japan before the US, it was branded the "Family Computer" and you could get a keyboard and a version of BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_BASIC
Well, you could say one definition is that a general purpose computing device is a tool that lets you run what you want in whichever way you want to install it (sort of, of course one could nitpick exceptions).
An Apple laptop looks like a general purpose computing device. Do we want it not to be one, and become closer to a gaming console?
I think that merely looking at the guts and seeing which processor it has is kind of a red herring.
> Well, you could say one definition is that a general purpose computing device is a tool that lets you run what you want in whichever way you want to install it (sort of, of course one could nitpick exceptions).
It does seem a bit tautological. A vendor can restrict access then simply argue this is not a general purpose computing device because look, you can't run the things we don't let you run.
It seems tautological but if you think about it, it's what it actually means. A general purpose computing device is a device that can be used for any computing. If you restrict it, it ceases to be general purpose. If you turn it into a locked-up appliance, like a Playstation, it's not general-purpose anymore.
General-purpose is when you can install whatever software will run in that architecture, unimpeded.
I don't necessarily disagree, but does that imply that whether or not something is a general purpose computer is reliant on the current software status of the machine rather than the hardware? You can crack some smartphones or install Linux on older Playstations.
Tautological was in reference to the argument about whether or not we should be able to install things if an iPhone is a general purpose device.
If that status relies on what software lets us do, then the answer is always going to be no, because if they don't let us then we aren't allowed to.
Ah, now I see what you mean. Good question. I'd say the hardware within is general purpose, but the overall "product" isn't because it has been artificially constrained.
I think the definition has always been a bit gray, even more so in recent years but I don't think it's about the hardware present in the device. For example, Sony made a push to classify the PS2 as a computer by providing a BASIC interpreter and later a distribution of Linux to evade some tax laws in Europe.
I think if I were to answer this question now it would be based on the expectation of the end consumer to be expected to, or have the ability to program the device for general purpose tasks.
Things like game consoles, phones, smart appliances, etc. all start to blur that line but I think it comes down to the consumer's expectations.
One could argue that you bought your PC and the Windows license that comes with it because it's general purpose. And you would have paid less money if you knew it was going to lock you in.
Don't get me wrong, I hate the idea of "digital anti-globalism", but if this thing went to court, both sides would have their reasonable arguments. And let's hope that if there's a ruling, it rules in favor of open platforms. At the very least, I think it would be great if the courts rule that a platform that's built open and sold as open cannot be consequently closed. But I doubt that Apple will be forced to open its hardware to non-App Store programs.
> One could argue that you bought your PC and the Windows license that comes with it because it's general purpose. And you would have paid less money if you knew it was going to lock you in.
And in fact Microsoft tried this (both with Windows RT and Windows 10 S) and in both cases few people bought in (or, in some cases, wound up 'confused' that other software wouldn't run, leading to the eventual sunsetting of Windows 10 S).
I do think both sides have reasonable arguments, but at the same time 'computing' has become ubiquitous, and Smartphones arguably even more so. Personally, I think we are in a weird state when we consider historical context; once upon a time, remember that GM would in fact make moves to ensure they did not get too much market share. I can't remember the number but I think they didn't want to go over 59%.
Of course you COULD have more market share even back then, but it also typically resulted in a lot more government oversight and willingness for the government to intervene in situations like this (thinking about Modems and Ma Bell here...)
IMO Google sidesteps the problem by not having a lot of 'handset' market share. (Also, perhaps more controversial to state, but their compliance with LE/Intelligence agencies probably allows more things to be ignored.)
I just don't know what to say anymore. Apple (and, dare I say, to a greater extent, Google) are doing the sorts of things that absolutely landed Microsoft in court and caused microsoft to make a number of decisions that kneecapped them in the first decade of the 2000s. It's been happening for years, and yet we are only now seeing enough people agreeing that we can talk about it without getting shouted down.
> And in fact Microsoft tried this (both with Windows RT and Windows 10 S) and in both cases few people bought in (or, in some cases, wound up 'confused' that other software wouldn't run, leading to the eventual sunsetting of Windows 10 S).
It’s funny to me that One of Microsoft's strongest arguments is “well we tried it and consumers don’t want it that way unless forced upon them”.
Why did you put "confused" in quotes? It's pretty obvious why people who bought Windows computers would be confused when Windows software doesn't work on it.
Why would there be a difference in treatment for entertainment vs general purpose? Both are devices that I’ve bought, so I should be able to use them as I see fit.
I agree with this sentiment... But I wonder if Apple considers iPhones to be general purpose computing devices, or even wants them to be. They're not marketed that way, likely most users are uninterested in using an iPhone this way.
A separate concern is around anticompetitive behavior. There is no way to sideload an app, or even use a competing app store, and Apple is charging rent. This is pretty clearly anticompetitive behavior that harms consumers.
> I agree with this sentiment... But I wonder if Apple considers iPhones to be general purpose computing devices, or even wants them to be. They're not marketed that way, likely most users are uninterested in using an iPhone this way.
But iPads (though iOS was renamed/forked to iPadOS on those devices) are definitely marketed as general purpose computing devices. The headline on https://www.apple.com/ipad/ is "Your next computer is not a computer".
iPad/iPadOS have these same restrictions as iPhone/iOS.
Not to mention that the transition to Apple Silicon will lead to the total integration of the Mac App Store into the iOS store, so these policies are going to merge at some point and literally apply to general computers too
It's also going to require mandatory brain microchips to ensure all of the user's thoughts conform to Apple policies /s
All of this is still unknown outside of Apple. What is known so far seems to me like it's pointing in the direction of a pretty open macOS and a very much locked down iOS, to satisfy different needs. We'll know more by late fall, I guess.
I would be thrilled to learn that Apple plans to prevent anyone from running non-Apple-signed code on the Mac, because it would likely lead to better tools for writing iDevice-targetted software on non-Mac platforms (either officially supported, or jury-rigged by third parties out of necessity). As a Linux desktop user with an iPhone, this would inevitably benefit me (I don't write iPhone software right now, but if there was an iPhone compiler for Linux, I might start).
Why do you think Microsoft bothered with WSL? We know that most Windows users won't do it. It was a developer-attracting move, meant to make it easier to build Windows client applications with Linux server components. Apple benefits from the same thing being offered natively. I can't see them abandoning it, even though it does create a tension between the Mac as a consumer product and the Mac as a developer's tool for iOS.
While it looks like kortilla was being downvoted for their reply quoting back "is not a computer", I think it's actually completely on point. To date, Apple has consistently treated iOS devices -- including the iPad -- as "application consoles," not open computing platforms. It's not just that applications can only officially be installed through the App Store, but that applications are "boxed in" both literally (i.e., sandboxing) and metaphorically (no practical way to run development tools and, from appearances, no interest on Apple's part in changing that).
I'm not arguing this is necessarily either wise or ethical of them, and there's a real sense in which this is orthogonal to the App Store's fee structure. But it seems to me that while Apple is going to face increasing pressure to change the way they run the App Store, the solution -- at least the solution Apple will offer -- very likely won't involve letting the iPad become a general purpose computer the way the Mac is.
I depend on my phone for a lot more important aspects of my life than my laptop. Seems pretty obvious to me, there are apps for pretty much anything I could want to do, and I believe it's the more secure platform by far, plus I have it on me pretty much always.
FWIW, actually Sony doesn't demand a 30% cut of all revenue from any company that makes an app for their store. You can have subscriptions to non-Sony services, and Sony doesn't see a dime. Sony doesn't demand a cut of Netflix subscriptions, for example, despite having a Netflix app available for download. Similarly, it doesn't get a cut of Spotify revenue either.
For PlayStation you pay the Sony tax for the convenience of integrating with their payment services, not because they'll ban you for using anything else.
It's also a super different situation in general; for example, Sony actually often pays developers to develop for their store (e.g. PubFund [1]), and does free marketing campaigns for them. Console makers live and die by their access to a pipeline of new exclusive games, so they treat game developers well; Apple doesn't, so it squeezes app developers for what it can. Hence why game developers are suing Apple but not Sony.
> You can have subscriptions to non-Sony services, and Sony doesn't see a dime
Hmmm -- not to stretch the analogy too thin, but is this similar to Apple though, where they allow you to sign in to subscription services (e.g. Netflix) with your existing account to the service, but don't allow sign ups (which would trigger payment processing)? Or is payment processing baked in there as well?
> For PlayStation you pay the Sony tax for the convenience of integrating with their payment services, not because they'll ban you for using anything else.
To clarify, has any developer integrated external payment services within a Playstation game / app / etc? From all the games and apps I've played with, I never remember any other payment system built in other than Sony's.
> It's also a super different situation in general; for example, Sony actually often pays developers to develop for their store ...
Blackberry did the same thing near the end of it's life -- I was at a hackathon where they were giving away Blackberries and cash to anyone who developed a Blackberry app -- but does not giving back really reflect as monopolistic?
> but is this similar to Apple though, where they allow you to sign in to subscription services (e.g. Netflix) with your existing account to the service, but don't allow sign ups (which would trigger payment processing)? Or is payment processing baked in there as well?
Actually, looking now, I think you're right. It looks like Spotify disabled setting up subscriptions on PS4. I guess PS4 subscriptions are a small enough chunk of revenue for Spotify it didn't really matter to them.
I guess the real point is that PS4 just isn't a large enough chunk of these kinds of services' market share by revenue to matter; they don't need signups, since not many people primarily use Spotify via PlayStation.
Last time I used the PS4 Spotify app was a couple of years ago but you were stuck on the lowest quality settings. And you could tell. I think it's only available on there so they can say it is.
My information is about 6 years old, but I am pretty sure both Xbox and PS4 disallowed external payment services.
Which is why I found Microsoft's bitching about the app store hilarious. They have been taking giant pieces of the action in Xbox for 20 years and tried to do the same in their sorry excuse for a Windows Store. I'd like to see them allow Stadia on the Xbox.
I actually agree with not allowing external payment processors on these (and mobile) platforms, especially for games where the audience is frequently naive kids.
Don't agree with the platform taking a huge cut of every transaction though. Maybe take a smaller cut and the billionaires can stop squabbling.
I don't love the closed nature of the Apple App Store when it comes to content.
Don't agree with the platform taking a huge cut of every transaction though
Is it really a "huge" cut?
Putting aside the ethics of Apple's content stranglehold for the moment, the economic side of things seems like a very nice deal -- 30% is not bad compared to various distribution deals (for physical and virtual goods) of which I have some slight familiarity.
Are there distribution platforms that allow you to get your app/product/etc to that many people without taking a cut?
I'm kind of fed up with Apple for a variety of reasons, but this doesn't seem like one of the problems to me.
I meant "every transaction", as in in-app purchases beyond the initial 30% cut on the purchase price.
So distribution deals for physical goods are not analogous, right ? Like Best Buy doesn't get a cut if I pay netflix to watch it on the TV I bought from them.
I'd agree that there are no direct analogies, for sure. Especially physical goods.
Like Best Buy doesn't get a cut if I pay netflix to
watch it on the TV I bought from them.
Okay, but if you were launching a rival to Netflix and had many millions of dollars to play with, wouldn't you gladly consider a deal like that with Best Buy?
Imagine Best Buy's extremely large presence in the world of television-selling. You could get your streaming service into a lot of homes if they promoted the heck out of TVs featuring your service in exchange for a cut, right?
Depending on the % cut they wanted, that could be a great deal for you. Suppose the % cut was 0.0000001%. Certainly you would take that offer. And probably 0.0001%. Maybe even up to 10%. Maybe even 50%, depending on your business model?
Anyway, I have lots of problems with the App Store, but man... that 30% sounds pretty fine. Access to that many users, many of whom have payment information stored a mere tap away?
> I actually agree with not allowing external payment processors on these (and mobile) platforms, especially for games where the audience is frequently naive kids.
I'm assuming you would also want to prohibit these "naive kids" from ever browsing the Internet too, am I right?
(Since there are plenty of website that accept payments through a variety of payment processors?)
There is a difference between a web site you visit and a general purpose computer which you purchase. I'm all for the freedom of using apps not officially distributed/approved by Apple. They can still be sandboxed and use the same APIs. But they should be allowed to use whatever payment service they want.
I don't know about Sony, but I'm pretty sure Apple got the idea for their app store business model from Nintendo, who notoriously was the king of the walled garden business model. I'm pretty sure Nintendo took a 30% cut as well.
The only reason Sony is not charging exorbitant amounts (if they really aren't) is because they're in heated competition with Microsoft over being the preferred first release platform of popular games.
Sony doesn't demand a cut of Netflix subscriptions, for example, despite having a Netflix app available for download. Similarly, it doesn't get a cut of Spotify revenue either.
Well, neither does Apple seeing that neither Netflix (for new customers) or Spotify allow in app purchases.
Sony actually often pays developers to develop for their store (e.g. PubFund [1]),
So does Apple - Apple Arcade.
Could Fortnite have in app purchases for the game consoles and bypass the stores?
Historically, other game consoles could be used a "general purpose computing devices," such as the Sega Dreamcast with Windows CE and the Nintendo Famicom (which is short for Family Computer).
Sony also 'officially' (in the sense that it was targeting hackers/developers) supported Linux on the PS2. IIRC, it was a $200 item which included a hard drive, network adapter and DVD with Linux on it.
Afaik, there was never a Windows CE general purpose environment for the Dreamcast. Sega supported game developers using Sega's 100% propriatary OS or using Windows CE as embedded OS. Either way, the OS would ship on the disc, and isn't a lot more than a kernel and libraries.
Of course, BSDs and Linux were ported to the Dreamcast at some point, as with anything that can boot user provided code and has enough ram.
The dreamcast did have a web browser, and keyboard and mouse, but without significant local writable storage, would make a lousy general purpose computer.
We have to either acknowledge that PCs/Macs were a historical accident (a happy one, IMO), much like the open web of yore, or we have to legislate the shit out of everything that has a general purpose CPU, basically requiring every Turing machine sold to have an officially supported setting to enable running arbitrary code.
It can be off by default, and probably should.
But trying to hair split console from computer from cellphone makes less and less sense everyday and we all know it.
FWIW one of my biggest annoyances in gaming is how closed consoles are - i have a PS Vita, which is a great gaming handheld hardware-wise, but totally a victim to Sony's whims software-wise (they even disabled and removed all PSM games).
Similar with Nintendo's Switch - Nintendo even tried to shut down a YouTuber's channel just for mentioning homebrew/jailbreaking for Switch.
It is such a shame and honestly i wish these devices were as open as PCs are. That they aren't is a testament to how much they have brainwashed people to think as normal that they have no control over their own devices and what they can do with them.
I don't think it's a stretch to say that these platforms are being monopolistic either. Why should you not be able to write your own game and sell DVDs of it for people to play?
Of course, in this case piracy would be the primary reason for the restriction, but I think it's valid to look at places where the platform is controlled by a single vendor.
“What about” is not a valid argument though. If what apple is doing is wrong, no amount of hypocrisy by others will make it less wrong.
Anyway, I think platforms need to be regulated to be more open. We need a right to modify along with a right to repair. When I pay for a product that happens to support downloadable software, I should be free to put whatever software on it that I want. If apple allowed sideloading on iOS like they do on macOS this would not have blown up to the degree that it did.
The price was right on a PS VR, so I got one and thought briefly about playing around with VR using Unity. The ecosystem was so locked down (and becoming an official developer such a challenge) that I gave up and never looked back.
The appeal of developing in Apple's ecosystem has always been the exposure to large audiences, the (relatively decent) tooling, and the ability to creatively actualize your ideas. That last one goes away when Apple starts looking more like Sony.
I'll leave it up to lawyers to decide if this is illegal, but I know this certainly makes me less excited about developing my next iOS/OSX app
Valve's decision to no longer support Ubuntu as a first-class distribution, a year ago, probably. Though that's just one distribution, not Linux as a whole.
The fact that they are starting to put resources behind Proton instead of Ubuntu/SteamOS is in fact a clear indication that they have given up on games written natively for Linux.
That's still Steam bringing games to Linux though, right?
Whether or not it's native or wine doesn't change the fact that Steam is pushing into Linux. They've shifted the responsibility from pushing linux support on the developer to providing linux support themselves.
In order to attract more developers to develop on Linux or at least make it work through Proton, Valve is taking the path of least resistance. Proton seems to be a good step toward that end.
Valve is actively contributing to Proton and the number of supported games increases continuously.
https://www.protondb.com/ tracks the playability of each game in Linux.
This is completely false. They've been contributing massively to the gaming scene on Linux, especially with Proton – a more fine-tuned version of Wine, that makes playing Windows games on Linux seamless and easy.
And all these improvements trickle down to the respective upstream prkjects and default version. For example Fedora 33 should use dxvk for directx games by default, all at least partially thanks to the relenteless work of Valve. :-)
I'm not convinced it was ever something they wholeheartedly supported -- I suspect it was more of a hedge than anything. The Steam Machine hardware project, which was their big Linux push, wound down around 2016.
It's only ridiculous if it's not good for their business. Maybe Microsoft is the one being ridiculous by leaving money on the table and not having a closed ecosystem.
If your complaint is that it's bad for the app developers or users, then that's different, and maybe deserves criticism but not ridicule.
They have been shifting that direction with Windows 10 home edition, their "app" store, and reduced support of desktop development. It's a matter of time.
Poor analogy. iOS does not have the market dominance that Windows/Microsoft has. In this case, iPhones represent about 15% of the global smartphone sales and I think that the OS (in the US) is a 60/40 iOS vs android split. There is a viable market. Developers, unwilling to pay the Apple fee, can switch to Android. If more apps are available on Android, that will shift the users away from iOS to Android.
When I see folks complain about this, I like ask "what do you think is a reasonable fee for Apple to charge?" Zero is not a realistic answer as Apple does incur costs to run the app store. Moreover, they're entitled to make a profit off the marketplace they created and support. So what's a reasonable percentage?
Ok, 10% is your number. So after your app has been on the store for more than a year, Apple's fee falls to 15%. So you're arguing that the 5% difference is unreasonable.
Let's put that % difference into perspective. Say you have an annual fee of $10. The first year, your users pay Apple $3 (you make $7), but after that for every user that subscribes you only pay $1.50 (you make $8.50). You're saying that Apples should only charge $1. You're arguing that fifty cents is the difference between life and death of your business? Really?
Sure, but I was talking about subscriptions, but I hear your point.
What I'm trying to show is that once you accept zero is not reasonable (and most rational people accept this) and then explore the actual $$ difference between what Apple charges and what you think is reasonable, the differences are really small. Normally when I ask folks this, the difference comes in between 0.05 and a $2 depending on the purchase price. For a 0.99 app we're talking about $0.05-0.20 difference. Life is too short for folks to get worked up about that small of a price difference.
For a $20 app the current model is that you pay Apple $6. If you waved a wand and made it 20% you pay Apple $4. So the difference in this case is only $2 (while you get $16). That's small potatoes.
> So the difference in this case is only $2 (while you get $16). That's small potatoes.
Is it? That's 14% extra revenue. And if you were comparing a 30 percent take to a 12 percent take, you'd be going from $14 to $17.60, which is slightly over 25% extra revenue! That could double or triple the profit margin of a healthy business!
> What percentage is reasonable?
I already answered that in a different comment. If I was going to wave a wand right now, with no further time to consider, it would be 25% for the first $20 and 5% after.
So look at something like Hey. Apple right now would charge $30 for a user's first year, then $15 for each year after. My version would be $8.75 for the first year and $5 for each year after. A pretty big difference.
I wouldn't be strongly opposed to a flat 12%, but I'm trying to be generous and give Apple some extra dollars upfront for the service they actually provide. But the service they provide barely increase as the price of an app increases, so they don't deserve 25 or 30 percent of larger amounts.
It's bad for consumers to the extent that iOS and Android phones aren't interchangeable, and that's a very large extent.
> what do you think is a reasonable fee for Apple to charge?
That's an interesting situation, because if the game was free Apple would charge nothing. And the more they bang on the drum about consumer safety, the more I want them to charge a fee appropriate for payment processing.
If I was just arbitrarily setting the fees, I might go with something like 25% of the first 20 dollars per app per user, and then 5% afterwards.
A reasonable percentage is the one that Apple would charge if it had competition. Apple obviously cares about user experience, and does not want iOS apps to be split between multiple stores, so if they had to allow alternative install sources they would likely drop their fees by a lot, to make sure that developers have no incentive to promote alternative app stores. That lowered fee is the one developers should have been paying all along.
If you really put the squeeze to them, the "natural" price would probably be a bit below cost for them, because the availability of apps is a selling point for their high-margin phones and tablets. That is why they are willing to host free apps, after all. (Although even then they take the developer fee)
Is clicking allow when it asks to access your documents folder that crazy? Is that really a hoop not worth jumping through? Those prompts show up after a clean install and on occasion when you install a new app. Those same prompts prevent you from giving ransomware access to your whole FS.
No, why would you think that? Just because they’re on the same processor architecture? That’s a stretch. Macs are Macs whether they have Apple Silicon, Intel, or PowerPC inside; they remain the proverbial truck to iOS’ sleek car.
You seem to be arguing against each other without being in disagreement. They pointed out that there is a growing number of hoops and you replied, essentially, that the first hoop is fine and the second hoop is justified.
Perhaps the hoops are fine and reasonable. That doesn't change the fact that hoops are being added.
Have you tried running an unsigned app from the internet? There is no "allow" button. You have to go through security menus and whitelist the app. Who knows if that will still be possible in the future.
Not sensible at all. Being on the same processor architecture doesn’t mean the position within the product lineup will magically transform.
Macs and iOS devices do different things for different use cases; their strengths and weaknesses are as much tied into their hardware design as software. People love Macs because of what they can do; Apple, too.
Apple couldn’t force people to use the Mac App Store even if it wanted, knowing how few of the biggest Mac apps outside of the larger software companies (Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, etc) actually distribute with it.
The only convergence we will see is the ability to run iOS apps on macOS, and even then that is merely a stopgap effort; any iOS apps that want to truly make the transition to the Mac will be updated as Catalyst apps. Catalyst apps are Mac apps through and through, despite their use of iOS’ UIKit.
See also: speculation in The mid-00s that Apple would drop Mac OS X for Windows during the Intel transition. It was just as devoid of factual basis then as fear-mongered “sensible speculation” is today.
For now that's the case, but since the introduction of GateKeeper Apple is slowly but surely trending the default configurations to make it more and more difficult to run software source outside of their own app store.
I believe the defaults now extend to software sourced outside of the app store must still be notarized by Apple. This impacts developers more than consumers I would guess, but certainly requires more effort from developers to create and distribute software.
So basically you’ve seen white swans for 36 years therefore all swans are white? Apple is an evolving company and much different than it was 36 years ago.
Yup that is the ultimate goal - to increase software and services revenue.
That is what is mandating push to A chips in macbooks.
Once the A chips are mainstream, then Apple will require companies like Adbobe, Intellij and even Microsoft to pay them 30% if they want the privelge of running their apps on MacOS.
Want to run Photoshop, IntelliJ or Outlook, 30% of what you charge is going to Apple.
My kids both have Rasberry Pis running Gentoo and we play together, with me on a Mac (my last Mac, 2015 was the peak) via our shared server in the study.
Try to play on ARM. Or use the non-Java version on something that isn't Windows. There are always arguments to be found, but most of them are tangential to the matter at hand.
This is also a security vulnerability: one decision by Apple, or by a court of law in a far-away country, and an app is gone from your phone. You lose access to the data held by this app.
Easy, reliably DoS -- and the user has no means of fixing this vulnerability, other than rooting the phone and hacking around. Which is made ever less feasible.
In this case, was the Fortnight app removed from phones or was it just removed for new downloads from the app store? It sounds like the latter but the article is unclear.
"As of right now, those who have already downloaded Fortnite on iOS are still able to access the game; only new downloads are disabled as a result of Apple pulling the game from the App Store."
You are confused. Apple never removes apps from users' devices simply because the new version did not pass review.
Removing an app from the App Store, and removing it from user's devices are two very different things.
When any app is removed in this fashion, all users who already have the app still have access to everything they had access to before. The app just isn't listed on the App Store for new downloads.
Sorry to hijack but an outrageous example from Google: Chrome silently & automatically detects when you login to a google website and uses this to log you into Chrome with that same account. They then hide the option to disable this in advanced settings. They are now trying to create a monopoly in the browser and steal additional data.
I love that it needed a gaming company to stir up a discussion about all this and even put your comment on top on HN where it's usually the praise for this closed environment which ends up being upvoted!
If this were Target or Walmart, people wouldn’t be beefing at how they choose to stick their shelves
“Let’s equivocate over how this should feel different!”
Let’s stop ogling corporations altogether maybe.
It’s all the paying attention to how they might be screwing you specifically in the context of money markets distracting from how the current admin is giving trillions away to buddies to manipulate markets in the old way you quit paying attention to with plain old corruption.
Too boring! Let’s wax poetic about Apples slight to social correctness!
This is exactly what Microsoft did with the first surface tablet running arm. The original plan was to go all in, but the backlash and support the. Was so bad they dropped the effort going into Windows 10.
Apple says they do it because of security reasons. Windows' open and liberal way of doing things made it a fertile ground for millions of viruses. But I still think every OS should be open for developing and distribution of software no matter how serious malware threat is.
They say that, but this removal has exactly nil to do with security. Apple was getting $300m / year in revenue from this one app. Does it really cost that much to check this app for viruses? I don't think they'll be winning in court with this argument.
windows, is based because of the underlying os system fundamentals. once you've sandboxing in place. i.e apps are restricted to user level. then malware becomes something of the past.
As much as I know people who use windows would hate it, there’s really nothing preventing them from doing so morally. It’s their software, they steer it as they see fit. It would end up pushing a lot of people into Linux probably, or inspire the rise of something new.
But you don't understand, I want my uSeR eXpErIeNcE at the cost of choice and freedom.
And your point is completely true, if Microsoft did this, all hell would break loose.
Microsoft already does exactly this on console. When will we see the Google Stadia game streaming app on the XBOX? Does Microsoft really not take a cut of VBucks bought on the Microsoft store?
This is just three big corporations fighting over their respective slices of the pie, if you think any of this is being said or done for your benefit I’m sure Epic has a plentiful supply of really tasty Koolaid for you. But no pie, sorry.
I never thought about it like this. It could be viewed differently because the Xbox is a game console and the iphone is a general handheld computer, but perhaps it should be illegal to restrict users installing software on your device by any means they choose, though there's no reason for you to support those means.
Microsoft was dragged through court for it's aggressive browser install on windows back in the day. Now everybody is getting rich off apple stock and there's not much incentive to hold them to the same standard. They even started with a monopolistic policy - if it's duplicating functionality they'll remove it from the app store. People keep buying iPhones because they don't care.
The difference is market share. There was no effective alternative to Windows ecosystem at the time (arguably there still isn’t). The issue was also broader than just bundling the browsers: there were contracts with OEMs that effectively entrenched Windows as the only OS they were practically shipping (not dissimilar to Android contracts with the OEMs). Last time I checked most people don’t even have iPhones.
Except that nobody is alleging they have a monopoly on phones. The market of concern is the app store. Which they obviously have a monopoly on because a customer with an iPhone can't use any other store, and a developer with customers who have iPhones can't distribute to them using any other store.
It's like claiming that nobody can have a monopoly on electric car charging stations because the customer could just buy a gasoline powered car and electric cars don't even have majority market share. It's still a monopoly. It's a monopoly on charging stations, not a monopoly on cars.
The App Store is an Apple product, of course they get a monopoly on designing and implementing it.
Any mechanism for side loading apps would also be an Apple product, designed and written by them. They would be responsible for supporting it, and ensuring it was secure. Maybe they don’t want to do that, so who gets to force them to, and who gets to decide if they complied with that directive? Who gets to specify it and take responsibility if it causes problems and incurs costs on Apple or issues for their customers?
You’re not talking about stopping Apple from doing something, you’re taking about coercing them by legal requirement to do new different things, and you’d better be very specific and careful about what you are forcing them to do.
If one company (let's say, Tesla) owned half the electric car charging stations in town, and another company (let's say, Nissan) owned the other half, and Tesla's charging stations could only be used on Tesla vehicles and Nissan's charging stations could only be used on Nissan vehicles, would you conclude that both companies have monopolies?
It doesn't matter if Apple has a monopoly or not, they can bully other companies all day long anyway since they got the most lucrative users and you can only reach them via Apple phones. If there is no law to handle this case then we need to create one since the current situation is obviously bad. It is kinda like how workers can get bullied by companies since the worker is so much smaller, Apple is way less dependent on app creators than the app creators are on Apple creating an unhealthy power imbalance. Such power imbalances needs to be regulated.
> If one company (let's say, Tesla) owned half the electric car charging stations in town, and another company (let's say, Nissan) owned the other half, and Tesla's charging stations could only be used on Tesla vehicles and Nissan's charging stations could only be used on Nissan vehicles, would you conclude that both companies have monopolies?
Yes, of course. The fact that you can't use the other company's chargers means that there are then two markets there, one for Tesla-vehicle charging stations and one for Nissan-vehicle charging stations. You can't substitute one for the other in that case, you need one compatible with your car. It's the same reason that gas pumps aren't the same market as electric car chargers, or that gas pumps aren't the same market as diesel pumps. If there is only one diesel pump in the state then it has a monopoly no matter how many gas pumps there are because you can't use gasoline in a diesel vehicle.
If you could use either type of charger with either type of car then they would be in the same market, because a customer who wants to charge their car could substitute either one for the other, so they would each actually be in competition with the other and neither would have a monopoly.
I think the fact that the "chargers" and the "cars" are hypothesized to be operated by the same company is what's messing people up.
Suppose you have two companies that each operate half the charging stations in the same region. One is Tesla, and you can only use them to charge a Tesla vehicle. The other is Exxon, which has started installing electric car chargers at their gas stations, and where you can charge any car including a Tesla. Well then Tesla hasn't got a monopoly on anything, because any Tesla owner can go charge their car at Exxon, and Exxon doesn't have a monopoly for Tesla vehicles, because they can also go charge their car at Tesla. But Exxon does have a monopoly for charging non-Tesla vehicles, because if you have a Nissan or a Chevy, you can't use the Tesla chargers, leaving Exxon as your only option.
So, under current US case law, the courts have generally found companies to be not liable for "aftermarket" antitrust claims if:
1) The manufacturer lacks sufficient market power in the "foremarket". (In the case of Apple, this would be the sale of the phone. In your example, it would be the sale of the car.)
2) The consumer was aware of the "aftermarket" restrictions when buying the original product. (In the case of Apple this would be the App Store pricing and rules. In the car example it would be the location and cost of the charging stations.)
3) The consumer does not face substantial costs to switch to an alternative product. (The cost of buying a new car would probably be considered substantial but I'm not sure a new phone would.)
The courts have reasoned that if the consumer had sufficient information when making their initial purchase decision, then they had the opportunity to buy a competing product without those restrictions. If they went ahead and bought anyway, they knew what they were signing up for. It's like buying a razor and then being stuck with expensive replacement razor blades. Or buying a movie ticket and then being stuck buying expensive popcorn from that theater.
Yes, once you buy the movie ticket and enter the theater they have a "monopoly" on your snack purchases. No, you're not likely to win an antitrust claim against the theater.
> 3) The consumer does not face substantial costs to switch to an alternative product. (The cost of buying a new car would probably be considered substantial but I'm not sure a new phone would.)
The cost of switching phone platforms is massive compared to the app market. Phones can cost over $1000, apps are commonly $1, a difference of a thousand fold. And that's only the hardware cost. Then you have issues if there is any other app you need which is only available on one platform, or if you make use of Google or Apple services that are only well supported or supported at all on one platform and would incur substantial switching costs to move to the other.
You also have a different problem here:
> The courts have reasoned that if the consumer had sufficient information when making their initial purchase decision, then they had the opportunity to buy a competing product without those restrictions.
Which would only apply if there was a viable competing product without those restrictions. But there are only two viable phone platforms and Apple's has a strict monopoly while Google's has a de facto one where Google Play has >90% share of the Android market, and they both impose similar restrictions, so a viable option without those restrictions isn't there.
Furthermore, the customer for app distribution is at least as much the developer as the user -- they're the one who pays the app store's fee, right? -- and they don't get to choose which phone their customers have already bought.
> The cost of switching phone platforms is massive compared to the app market. Phones can cost over $1000, apps are commonly $1, a difference of a thousand fold. And that's only the hardware cost. Then you have issues if there is any other app you need which is only available on one platform, or if you make use of Google or Apple services that are only well supported or supported at all on one platform and would incur substantial switching costs to move to the other.
Ultimately that is up to the courts to decide. But I will point out that in a previous case involving IBM S/390 computer systems, the court decided this requirement was not met, despite the hardware expense and associated software compatibility limitations.
> Which would only apply if there was a viable competing product without those restrictions. But there are only two viable phone platforms and Apple's has a strict monopoly while Google's has a de facto one where Google Play has >90% share of the Android market, and they both impose similar restrictions, so a viable option without those restrictions isn't there.
I'm not sure which specific restrictions you are referring to here. If the complaint against Apple is that you cannot install apps from 3rd party sources on your iPhone, there is a competing product that allows you to do that on the market.
> Furthermore, the customer for app distribution is at least as much the developer as the user -- they're the one who pays the app store's fee, right? -- and they don't get to choose which phone their customers have already bought.
This is not relevant for antitrust purposes. Developers are not entitled to demand a specific company give them access to that company's users.
Apple certainly has the majority of the market when it comes to app store purchases.
And the government doesn't classify trusts[1] by the dictionary definition of monopoly:
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area.
Microsoft was taken to court for three reasons - forcing OEMs to pay a license fee for each PC sold whether or not the OEM shipped the PC with Windows, Office Productivity monopoly and the browser.
It wasn’t until 2010 that IEs market share started eroding. It didn’t have anything to do with the government.
Almost 20 years later, MS still has the same market share in both operating systems and office productivity and no one cares about browser dominance except for Google.
When MS was under investigation they were the most valuable company in the US. Now they are number 3.
If the state hadn’t intervened on behalf of defending Netscape’s commercial interests we may have gotten decent open source browsers a few years earlier than we did.
The market solved the problem in ways that the DoJ couldn’t have anticipated. It turned out that licenses fees for closed source web browsers were just not something that businesses and consumers were interested in putting up with.
Few remember how much of an equal offender Netscape was when it came to proprietary extensions to the web.
Consoles specifically are sold at a loss to make money on games, though. I wonder how competitive they would be with buying a gaming pc if they were forced to make all their profit on the console itself with no money coming in from games
This is untrue. The XBox started out at a loss as a specific strategy by Microsoft to break into a market that was controlled by multiple established rivals. Other than that, consoles are sold at a profit. That is, the revenue Nintendo gets from sale of a Switch is greater than the marginal cost of its manufacture.
What you may be thinking of is that the consoles are not the main source of profit. And that the profits from consoles may take some time to make up for the expenses of developing and manufacturing those consoles.
Companies generally take huge losses at the beginning of the cycle and a very modest profit towards the end. Overall, it's probably a wash. I think the statement that consoles are sold at a loss is generally/mostly true. [0]
>And that the profits from consoles may take some time to make up for the expenses of developing and manufacturing those consoles.
Yup, and during which time, they sell at a huge loss.[1]
You're right that Nintendo tries to buck this trend, but they also realize it's a delicate balancing act.[2]
"selling at a loss" generally means that the margin is negative, that is the unit price to manufacture (and ship, etc) is higher than the price the consumer pays.
Your alternative definition applies to pretty much everything with R&D costs. The first unit sold is pretty much guaranteed to not make up for R&D costs, but for some n the margin made on the nth unit covers it, and the seller finally starts turning a profit.
I think what your citations are actually saying is that even the last unit sold does not cover R&D costs, and it has to be made up in other divisions (such as games) in order for the whole venture to turn a profit. But each individual unit is still marginally profitable - if they could sell enough of them (perhaps far more than the size of their market) they would eventually turn a profit on the console itself.
Has apple ever blocked or threatened anyone for developing a rival OS? For an OS that could run on iPhones to be developed, it seems pretty clear that Apple would absolutely have to "support those means" in terms of publishing low level hardware and security chip specs. And distributing secret keys or offering an agnostic signing service.
But what I think you mean to propose is a restriction at the software level, not hardware level. That anyone who sells an operating system must allow any app to be installed within that OS. I think we leave it as an exercise for the reader to define "operating system" when it comes to our increasingly "smart" homes and cars.
Who says the iPhone is a general platform? It’s not, it’s a closed platform with specific features designed and implemented by its manufacturer. One of those features is a mechanism for installing additional software modules.
What is an open platform and how does it get defined? Installing software is a feature implemented by the manufacturer. Should we really be requiring Apple or any manufacturer, by law, to implement specific defined features to support and enable side loading and management of external apps. Who gets to define those features and say which products should or shouldn’t have them? Who gets to certify compliance? Who gets to specify open as a technical standard that can actually be implemented?
If this had been done in the 80s, we’d probably still be stuck with consoles having an 80s style cartridge slot on them, with specs written in legislation and updatable only by government committee.
I think this is a great point. We could be opening pandora's box here from a number of perspectives including the security aspect of things. This issue of app stores is not as cut and dry as people are making it out to be.
Secondly, you can "side load" iOS apps as well. You just have to go through a process of jailbreaking your iPhone which is not illegal but it may void the warranty.
When you buy the iPhone you are also buying into the platform. If having multiple options for app stores is a necessity for you then an iPhone is the wrong device to purchase. Buy something else. There is nothing wrong with voting with your wallet as there are other phones on the market for people to buy.
I have no problem with people jail breaking their devices, which they own. In fact I did exactly that on several phones and an iPod touch back in the day when I handed down some of my devices to relatives in China.
This isn't really an option if you actually want iOS apps. It's an all-or-nothing play by Apple: accept all our rules, including the ones that greatly limit you, or get none of the benefits of iOS, including the large collection of high-quality apps. And the option of jailbreaking really isn't an option either. Apple does its best to prevent jailbreaking: they'd stop it outright if they could. This is their way of keeping that market unpleasant, small, and marginal.
The argument is that that approach is anti-competitive and unfair, especially since Apple itself gets a large cut of app sales.
I'm not coming down hard on either side, just yet. But I don't like the feel of this sort of lock-in, and almost no one would question the use of a term like "lock-in." Some lock-in is surely legal, even if almost always unpleasant. But it's only a hop, skip and a jump to full-fledged antitrust.
You go to Target looking to buy a Walmart-brand bottle of bleach. Is that anti-competitive?
Heading out but you pick up a few PC games. By the way, Target was paid to put those up on the shelf.
Grab a Sony Playstation gift card. They get a percentage of that as well.
At checkout, you sign up of the Target bank card save 10%. They get a nice initial chunk from that and the bank running that card pays a monthly percent to Target for sending them over their customer.
(don't look into the publishing companies' tactics cause that will send you over the edge)
> Who says the iPhone is a general platform? It’s not, it’s a closed platform with specific features designed and implemented by its manufacturer. One of those features is a mechanism for installing additional software modules.
Apple themselves? Part of their marketing is literally that you can do everything on their devices.
> Should we really be requiring Apple or any manufacturer, by law, to implement specific defined features to support and enable side loading and management of external apps.
I can't see why not, the mobile app market has terrible competition, there's a big market issue here.
> This is just three big corporations fighting over their respective slices of the pie
Yes, this is how capitalism works. The companies can be started by virtuous, far-sighted dreamers, like Steve Wozniak, Larry Page and John Lennon, but then they get infused by money from venture capitalists and investors who just want ROI.
Once they hire more than 5000 people, the edges of the company are not controlled by dreamers - worker bees are employed to make money by leveraging whatever is there to be leveraged. And so the mission drifts.
Or else, the company fails or disappears, which is what happened to John Lennon's company, Apple Music.
We need to rethink capitalism, so companies can grow to medium size, and stay there, providing good things to their customers in a virtuous, mutually beneficial way.
This is big corporations fighting over their respective slices of the pie, and this is beneficial to consumers. That is how capitalism works. Some (somewhat small to some) amount will go directly to consumers (vbucks discounts), some (most likely most) will go toward creating a better product (hiring more developers, artists, designers etc.) and a bit might go to each of those developers, artists, and designers (and/or improve their working conditions, hopefully reducing the number worked to their limits like eg. the Rockstar employees who created Red Dead Redemption 2, and other game devs who sleep at work). Unfortunately some will be wasted on lawyers, etc., but IMO that’s not much worse than it staying in the hoard of the world’s most valuable company, and worth the benefits to everyone else.
I'm not sure what you mean to emphasise with your italics, boogies.
The article is about Fortnite being excluded from Apple's monopoly distribution platform. That platform enriches Apple at the expense of consumers and software developers.
Are you saying it's a good thing that Apple can exclude Fortnite for trying to get around the Apple tax?
I agree. Apple should not charge 30% for this type of transaction, which is just the resupply of virtual currency.
Apple should have a lower tier fee for this type of ongoing service transaction, which is clearly different to a sale in which a new customer is converted.
If Apple had a service tier with a fee of say 5% for virtual currency they’d still be compensated for providing the platform, but not excessively. Consumers and software vendors would benefit commensurately.
This two tiered model is just what happens in traditional pre-digital capitalism. Furniture stores charge 30-50% markup to cover the overheads of showroom rent and sales staff. Financial services companies like forex and credit cards charge 3-18% because they have different overheads and provide different value-add compared to retail sellers.
Then start with the Playstation, Nintendo, Xbox and Steam stores. They take 30% off the top as well. Epic's store is only doing 12% for now as they try to catch up to the bus they missed.
Wanna get a DLC? They all take a percentage. Also regardless of the money you spend on making your game. They all have to review it and only if they approve will it get published. Going to selling some XBox physical disc? You pay your percentage on what you print not what sells. Also you need to use a trusted disc manufacturer, they pay a percentage to XBox also, note this is all the same for Sony and Nintendo.
You raise an interesting point, ekanjo. What does "virtuous" mean? I think I know what you mean, and I would agree with you if it means something like giving benefits to others ahead of self-enrichment. Wozniak is probably recognised by most people as the virtuous one of the duo, wouldn't you think?
Jobs was the superior business person. At least, it turned out that way after he returned to Apple, rescued it from Scully, and spent decades turning it into a behemoth that changed the world.
Woz might have given the computers away just for the joy of it, but where would that have left us?
Tens of thousands of developers owe their livelyhood to Jobs' vision. They get to make apps and everything else, all because Steve created platforms and ecosystems that would sustain an entire industry.
Still, that doesn't excuse greed. Jobs is gone now, so he can't evolve the app store into what it should be becoming, which is a more mature version of the quality platform he created.
It wouldn't take much to fix this current hoo ha. Apple could just introduce a lower fee tier for trivial sales such as the re-supply of virtual currency in games. If they took 10% instead of 30%, the problem would be over, the platform would continue, the community would still have opportunity, consumers could play their games and buy their apps, and life would go on. Does that sound virtuous to you, eklanjo?
> Tens of thousands of developers owe their livelyhood to Jobs' vision. They get to make apps and everything else, all because Steve created platforms and ecosystems that would sustain an entire industry.
That's typically a broken window fallacy. You can't take this a proof of anything because you do not know what the world would have looked like if Apple did not exist - such developers could have gone and made other things on other platforms as well. A great artist will be able to produce great work even if they have to use spaghetti instead of paint. Tools are just tools.
> That's typically a broken window fallacy. You can't take this a proof of anything because you do not know what the world would have looked like if Apple did not exist...
I see.
Your original comment to me was about Steve Jobs, and what to make of his intentions and his legacy. Would you care to share your thoughts about Steve Jobs?
> Would you care to share your thoughts about Steve Jobs?
I recognize the fact that he was probably a good leader when it came to driving Apple focus to make quality hardware and solid software integration (the original iPhone was a big step in making portable devices actually usable by everyone).
However, I was reflecting that the word 'virtuous' was a poor fit for a person like Steve Jobs. You can typically think of someone virtuous as having high moral standards and principles.
Jobs was constantly driving his company to make ridiculous false claims (saying that Apple was the first company to invent X or Y) which is deceitful.
Apple's business practices consist in making walled gardens everywhere (which is kind of anti-competitive and entice users to be locked down in the ecosystem) instead of developing standards that can be used and shared by everyone, and this is also something that Jobs spearheaded from the get go (right since the beginning of Apple).
Of course, everyone has different standards, but being a good citizen is about taking and giving back. I can't remember Jobs ever giving anything back to the tech scene.
I'm not sure it's fair to equate smartphones to general computing platforms, regardless of the marketing speak surrounding the newest iPads.
Personally, I like iPhones precisely because they're not general purpose platforms. I'm also not sure the phrase "general computing platform" can even be well-defined in the era of "smart" everything.
One definition may be that you can use the device to write and compile all the programs it uses (any part of the OS, including the kernel itself), so that you don't need anything else. Kind of like a self-hosting compiler.
Not that you'd want to, but if you decided to do it, the option would be readily available.
Then modern game consoles and s smartphones qualify as well, they definitely have the resources to compile everything & only artificial limitations introduced by the manufacturers prevent that - which is sad & limits their potential.
No, it isn’t the same. Far from it. Microsoft and Sony don’t prohibit linking to external signup & account management, which is why I can resubscribe my FFXIV account from a console.
Apple’s rules prevent vendors from linking to external service account setup/management. You cannot even mention the existence thereof, let alone link to it or advertise the options provided therein. Consumers are explicitly kept in the dark about any method other than payment through the App Store.
That’s the stunning uppercut. The size of Apple’s fee is merely a follow-up kick to the nads.
This is why service providers, from Hey.com to Netflix, have a special irritation for the App Store rules, and since this rule directly distorts markets by affecting consumer choice is why so many competition regulators have a file open about it.
XBOX might let you do some things Apple won’t, but you can’t buy a productivity app for your XBOX. They’re just different restrictions and rules for different devices, the whole point of competition is to be able to do things differently.
I can actually open Office documents, there is OneDrive for Xbox. I’m sure of myself with the App Store having read Apple’s rules thoroughly before developing our own app, but not so sure for Microsoft. Is there an actual prohibition against productivity apps for the Xbox? Or is it just a matter of natural segmentation?
Fortnite is probably the most profitable mobile app out there and Apple's negotiating position is, effectively, "Fuck you, pay me!". So Epic turns to Apple's main competitor in Google. Google's negotiating position is, effectively, "Fuck you, pay me!". That's clear and convincing evidence that the app market is fundamentally broken.
If Microsoft was playing hardball with Rockstar over the next version of GTA, as an example, Sony would be falling over themselves rushing to get it as a PlayStation exclusive. The console market and app market just aren't comparable.
Google's position isn't so cut and dry. They allow alternative app stores, and even installing apks from any rando with a website. Google makes sure you know there's risks, but it's easy to do. That's an extremely different situation than Apple.
Google basically says, "we have a store. Sell through us and we take a cut. Or sell directly, or through some other store, and we'll warn users that we haven't vetted that stuff for security etc."
I have no idea why you'd want to, but you can... UWP apps run just fine on Xbox and can be sold via the store - they just don't get access to the "exclusive" partition of the system (which you need to access certain system resources, such as > 2GB RAM). Sideloading prebuilt UWP apps is also possible. The exclusive partition is a different situation entirely - you need to be an approved developer to even access the SDKs.
I'd say there's a difference between what Xbox (and Playstation, and Nintendo) does compared to Apple by virtue of the consoles not being "open" development platforms (Xbox UWP aside). Anyone can grab the iOS SDK and start making apps, but only registered developers can do so on game consoles. Whether that's justified I don't know, I honestly haven't put enough thought into it. And whether courts would see that as a reason I definitely don't know.
The difference is that if you own an Apple device, you knew you were buying into a walled garden ecosystem. Windows was not sold that way, so for them to cut off unapproved apps would be a bait and switch.
They might not be familiar with the term walled garden but I've definitely heard the non-tech savvy talk about iPhone being more restrictive.
Even if they don't though, that's a marketing offence not a product one. If there's any government interference needed it's in the form of a mandatory "walled garden" label on the box.
The only reason Microsoft and Apple don't do that in their desktop OSs is because they were products of their generation. They will probably will never have to do it anyways, because the marketshare of mobile will continue to grow as desktops slowly die. Eventually all major platforms will take a share.
This misrepresents and skips over Apple’s great offence, which is why a bunch of others who don’t know the half of it are piping up with their comparisons to the PlayStation store etc.
The most egregious part of Apple’s rules, and the reason that online service providers have a special loathing, is that apps are disallowed from linking to, advertising, or even mentioning that it is possible to sign up/subscribe/buy/rent outside of the app.
This is why you won’t see MMOs like FFXIV through the App Store, and is why you can’t sign up for Netflix, or even follow a link to their sign-up, from within the app.
They would like to own every step of the process, and people actually put in the time to build apps on their platform and people line up to buy their hardware.
10 years from now people will think it was crazy that you couldn't publish a totally legit app just because you had a payment button on the app. It would be one thing for APPL to charge a low fee for listing an app to cover their costs of hosting and review, but this is 100% about squeezing everyone, because they can
hosting & review are just the beginning. They also maintain substantial support around the App Store. So their costs will scale with number of downloads, usage, purchases, etc, which is why their fee scales with it too.
The paid apps also subsidize the support and distribution of free apps. This makes the App Store and platform more attractive and helps developers in the end OTOH, it is pretty wild that Facebook has never paid a dime to Apple for software distribution, aside from $99 a year.
It's the pricing too. Apple's 30% fee on the payment processing for in app purchases is insane and clearly anti-competitive. Developers can use Stripe, Paypal, etc for literally 10x less.
Imagine Epic doing the same, with a 20% cut through the Epic Game Store, for PC games. And to ensure they are the Gatekeeper, they pay guarantees to Publishers/Developers to exclude retail and other platforms.
Oopps... They do exactly this.
This is not to defend Apple nor Google. But Epic is by no means better, just not as big as A/G.
But you don't _have_ to be on the Epic Game Store to sell a PC game. You can be on Steam. Or itch.io. Or make your own store. Or just host it on your own website.
I recently learned Google Chrome does something similar with browser extensions[1]. You cannot[2] install .crx files that have not been published to the Chrome Web Store.
Sadly Mozilla seems to do something similar with Firefox, likely as another round of copying the most stupid Chrome decisions.
The recently released new "stable" version of Firefox for Android that supports just 9 specific extensions at the moment might be actually even worse than Chrome.
Tech-savvy and power users would hate it. It would represent both a loss of freedom and a loss of capability.
Non-technical users would love it. It would offer them an environment much more secure and free of malware where they can install applications without fretting about getting the latest CryptoLocker type trojan. Finding Windows software on the open web is kind of like driving around the ghetto and cruising for drugs. Are you installing from firefox.com or fᎥrefοⅹ.com?
Apple tries to walk the line and keep both these user groups happy. It's hard. So far they've handled it by designing MacOS more for the first group (it has an App Store and controls but they're optional) and iOS/iPadOS more for the second group.
Epic store is better because they're less greedy. I purchase new games in Epic just because I know that this way game developers will get a bigger percent of the money I pay.
Beyond the obvious difference that Microsoft has a monopoly marketshare on PCs, and Apple has a minority marketshare of mobile devices, mobile devices are categorically different because they are always with you. This generates a whole different slew of concerns around privacy and apps being able to access your information with or without your consent.
By maintaining control over which apps can be sold to end users via the App Store, Apple is able to offer a layer of control over how these apps can access (or not) your personal data.
There's nothing ridiculous about wanting to maintain data privacy/security on mobile devices, and that being of a higher priority with mobile than with a PC.
That is the same argument that could have been applied to any one of the controversial tech monopoly issue before
Wouldn’t MS want to secure its laptops by bundling a browser?
Wouldn’t I have equally private and financial documents on a PC? location/gps can’t be that much of a differentiator.
It is monopoly bullying whoever they can. They just happen to not directly affect us, unless we happen to be a developer making lot of money or compete with apple in any way.
I don't know what to say to you that could possibly convince you otherwise. but if you actually believe this you are a complete tool.
You don't have to vet every single program on a computer to prevent the use of peripherals like GPS and cameras. you could just make a feature of the operating system that lets the user control what programs have access to peripherals and when.
And another thing: if your argument is that people are too dumb to know how to use a computer, then they shouldn't rely on computers at all! children shouldn't even be using smartphones in the first place. but I suppose that's a separate argument entirely.
I don't think this should be regulated at all. Apple should be able to impose their rules in their systems. Let's be clear about this, if people are choosing to buy these black-box closed handheld computing devices, there are consequences that come with that choice.
Exactly. There are pros and cons to this sort of model. The pro is that the security model of an iphone is better than probably anything else one could buy. The con is that apple makes the rules about what goes and stays. Given the popularity of this app, I could see a kid wanting an android instead for this reason. On the other hand, Apple could easily make the case that this is to prevent scams, maintain parental controls, etc.
Please. Whatever strawman you are trying to construct is missing the point.
I do not buy Apple products as a status symbol. I buy them because they work. I won't even say the products are good, there are a lot of things I'd like to see change. But they are the best thing on the market for getting my work done.
My laptop and phone are my hammer and workbench. The iPhone and MacBook are far and away the best product for the work I do, which is not iOS or MacOS development. They're simply the best general computing solution on the market right now.
I never said all Apple users don't know what they are getting into. There must be other users who want Apple to have full control over its devices. If it works great for them then there's no issue.
Firstly, you are not the representative sample, I can testify that in much of russia they are definately a status symbol and most of their customers are not developers. My sample size is still not great, but at least i am not talking about myself.
Secondly, this narrow-minded attitude is reflected in you calling MacBook the best general computing solution. There are a large variety of requirements for general computing solution, the most common ones that macbook can't satisfy are cost and gaming performance. Indeed no one product can satisfy them.
The model makes sense for a console, as it's a very specialized device. A smartphone or a tablet are much closer to a general computing device. How many times has Apple said the iPad is a laptop replacement?
The difference is the spirit of the purpose they're purchased "for." Which is why (while I hate some of the walled garden) I'm skeptical of arguments to break up Apple or force them to generalize their products. Regulating the relationship between an offering and the supposed intention behind a purchase seems speculative at best, and, again, a win mostly reserved for the lawyers.
People use consoles to do all those things. As just one example, Netflix makes and maintains an app for the Playstation platform and it's not because they have nothing else to do.
I used a phone to call an ambulance, provide the police with video evidence of a crime, navigate when I am lost, file company accounts, banking, and to aid in mapping for architecture and subsequently applying for planning permission.
What do you do on a console that could cost you life and limb or render you bancrupt?
>What do you do on a console that could cost you life and limb or render you bancrupt?
Well my cousin plays ark every single day, all day on his xbox, his health has deteriorated pretty badly because of this, it's bankrupted him as, he doesn't work and spends money on the game, all his friends exist in the game, I will backtread a bit on the lack of work, he does sell creatures or something to get a bit of money, literally his entire life revolves around this game and his console. He doesn't even own a mobile phone, he just uses Xbox live chat to talk to most people and has a landline in his house for the rare times he actually needs to make a phone call.
For all intents and purposes, that console is his general computing device for everything he does or that affects his life.
Apple's, basically. That's OK. Let Apple screw people. It's a good opportunity for competition to develop. Or we can regulate Apple and competition won't develop.
True, but there are other places to buy things than Walmart.
The internet is reasonably open and accessible on iOS, but utilizing the full capability of an iOS device requires the App Store.
Stallman spent a ton of time crusading about how some things are appliances, and other things are computers; those things that are computers should offer flexibility (and ideally openness) in terms of what software you can run on them. In this case, the largest manufacturer of computing devices and software wants 30% of every transaction from native software run on their devices.
Epic was basically looking for preferential treatment, but now they're stepping up to the plate and saying the App Store is not market-friendly. It seems like they could be right, seeing as large as Apple is, and what role they actually have in computing.
> The internet is reasonably open and accessible on iOS, but utilizing the full capability of an iOS device requires the App Store.
As it should be. If people want open and crazy, then they can flounder around on the web and try to get it to do what native apps do. That's their problem and Apple shouldn't have to bend over backwards to support that route. Developers get to make a choice - make a web app, or make a native app that gets all the benefits of Apple's curated ecosystem. As a consumer and developer, I'll take the latter any day. Others feel differently, and can choose Android.
I agree that you gain a lot from having Apple involved in quality control, but I am not sure I agree that 30% of all in app transactions is fair. Especially when they've already started playing fast and loose with Amazon Prime Video.
I don't get mad at Casio because I can't hack the circuit board and change the time easily to 24hr - I buy a watch that supports it.
This is a free market solvable problem. The issue is people like the app store. The ones mad about this are software companies - because they want more money for themselves.
The use of the consumer is just appeal to emotion - but it's really about Epic ripping off another kid for vbucks and getting more money.
Apple is more than welcome to put whatever rules they want on their systems. My phone is not their system though, it’s mine! If I want to run tmux/fetchmail/ocamlc on it then it’s my problem not theirs!
I would install desktop Linux on my iPhone if I could but there are no drivers in mainline and they work hard to lock the bootloader down (and before someone suggests android, the intention there is just as bad but tends to be less well executed and there still aren’t suitable drivers available.)
I mean the Librem 5 "works" in the way you describe.
I don't think you're going to really be able to reliably avoid the problem that very very very few people outside of AOSP are doing any work on OSS for phones.
An argument can be made that it's morally wrong, but if you're going down that road, there's a lot of things should be morally more compelling than Apple's AppStore policies.
This is pretty much the whole legal theory of locked-down devices. Since you own them you're free to whatever you like to the hardware including breaking any locks preventing you from running your own software on them. But the vendor has no obligation to help, or support you in doing this.
This is pretty much the whole reason the GPLv3 exists.
Agreed it shouldn't be illegal, but Apple (or any hardware / software maker) should be allowed to do everything in their power to make this extremely inconvenient by putting in hardware blocks, bricking logic, updating their software regularly with new obfuscation techniques, etc. and also, voiding the warranty if there is evidence of tampering with hardware or software.
I understand where you’re coming from and would be ok if it were easy (or even possible) for the community to build an alternative device but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
The technical and social reality that giving apple the freedom to configure the majority of devices in the US is extremely unpleasant. Enough that it makes me question the principles driving the philosophy that allowed this (in particular, the legality of closed software.)
> if it were easy (or even possible) for the community to build an alternative device but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
One of the main roadblocks is intellectual property law. If IP didn't exist, there would be all sorts of iPhone clones with modified versions of iOS.
I'm OK with closed source software being legal, prohibiting closed source would be tyrannical. What I'm not OK is with software patents, copyright, anti-hardware-hacking laws, etc.
The same reason you have to have a car pass emissions in some states.
We can't deny the security that apple provides over other providers. Part of that is the closed garden - it SHOULD BE a product. The market should provide alternatives.
The only people that benefit from this are big companies - small software devs will have their apps devalued by this move, and the people will just get ripped off more when Epic wins and raises their dumb scam Vbucks to 10$.
You can easily argue the walled garden is for their user's common good, which it is. Less malware, safer experience, easier to use for less technically savvy people.
> Apple saying that I'm not allowed to step outside their walled garden on a device I own is restricting my freedom.
Only if there is no remediation - there is. Buy an android and quit moaning. "Freedoms." Laughable. Belarus is shooting people and you're mad because you can't force a company to do what you want when the free market can easily solve the problem.
You could argue that Microsoft bundling IE was 'for their user's common good' just the same. It was certainly nice and convenient, and made Windows easier to use. And it wasn't restricting anyone's freedom, because they could just use Unix instead.
Except none of those things are the point of antitrust law. But I guess who cares anyway, when genocide is always worse than these things, so we shouldn't care about them?
I am not defending closed platforms, but technically, you are free to jailbreak your phone, they're just not obligated to provide any support after that, right?
If Apple provided a way to jailbreak their devices, I'd be more inclined to support this argument. But they try to prevent jailbreaking at every opportunity so, regardless of the legality of it, Apple does not consider the phone your system, they consider it theirs.
No. There's no check for Cydia or other Debian Package frontends that are there to void your warranty or stop you from downloading cracked apps (they very well could do this). They only patch the security vulnerabilities that are actually used to break out of the app sandbox and run arbitrary code, something that, as we can see with Epic's Fortnite app, could be RCE'd into an app without Apple knowing. These vulnerabilities can and have been used by actual malware in the past[0], so Apple fixing them in iOS is a legitimate security measure.
Right, but there’s no non-security-vulnerability way to jailbreak. If jailbreaking was as easy as `adb oem unlock`, no one would need to use any security issues to jailbreak.
They mostly prevent jail breaking because the same processes that jailbreak a phone can often be used to hack peoples phones because they’re security loopholes.
They prevent jailbreaking by not providing a way to do it.
They additionally prevent jailbreaking by patching vulnerabilities.
Only one of these things is being called out.
You can get into all sorts of theoretical discussions about how if there was a way to do it, they'd be increasing their attack surface since now they have to make sure this path is locked properly when the user doesn't want it, but people act like the only way for jailbreaking to work is for Apple to stop patching 0 days, which is not the case.
My Samsung A40 has a toggle called "OEM unlocking - Allow the bootloader to be unlocked". That's in the developer options. My previous phone from Sony had the same option. If Apple wanted they could do the same.
Say you go and buy the latest iPhone, on the latest OS, and wanted to play Fortnite on it. How'd you do it? I don't think it's even possible to jailbreak it at this point.
People often accept restrictions on their freedom, but that does not mean those limitations aren't harmful.
We should be able to install what we want on a general purpose computing device. You can already see the Apple mentality creeping into other companies like Mozilla, who suddenly find it acceptable to limit user freedom for questionable reasons, and the normalization of stripped user liberties that Apple champions is worrying.
The current legal position / ambiguity is less interesting than the moral and principled question: do we want to live in a free market captialist society where manufacturers (typically with the upper hand in the retail power imbalance) get to continue to exert control over my property once I've come to own it through a legal transaction?
Either we do, in which case what Apple is doing in perfectly reasonable, as is Walmart selling fridges that explode when you put someone else's milk in them ("It's in the contract!"), or it isn't.
Things like the first sale doctrine give an insight into past legal thinking suggesting the latter. But it's far from simple to discern by just looking at the law.
The music/video industry asserts that you're not allowed to play/show some media item that you've bought. Amazon doesn't allow you to resell or bequeath Kindle books. Caterpillar doesn't let you repair your own tractor.
The first sale doctrine was established in a very different time.
Again, this is just out of touch. Call it what it is - software companies want more money and want to use the market apple created for every last one of them for free.
I don't agree. Millions (maybe even billions) of people user their devices and the country absolutely should regulate their systems. As an extreme example imagine if Apple tomorrow said that all apps have to pay a 95% cut instead of a 30% cut and all customers have to pay $20/month to use Wifi or internet on their iPhone. Obviously this is unlikely to happen but then I would expect the govt. to intervene.
If Apple want to impose rules without any government oversight, they are free to start their own country with their own government and impose their own rules.
That's a pretty big straw man argument. If Apple said all apps have to pay a 95% cut and all customers have to pay $20/mo to use Internet on their phones then they'd nearly instantly lose massive market share and the backlash would be so severe that they'd never regain that market share. In other words; they'd never do that.
>As an extreme example imagine if Apple tomorrow said that all apps have to pay a 95% cut instead of a 30% cut and all customers have to pay $20/month to use Wifi or internet on their iPhone.
If they did they did this with the app store as used by existing iphones, then that would probably cause them to get in trouble, but if they made a new app store with these policies that was only used by a new model of iphone, then while extreme, I'd think it's within their rights. It's not that long ago that feature phones with limited app selection and internet browsing as a premium feature were a thing.
>if Apple tomorrow said that all apps have to pay a 95% cut instead of a 30% cut
But Apple could easily say "no more 3rd party apps" -- again, equally unlikely given the values those apps bring. But zero 3rd party apps is precisely what the iPod was, no?
Regulation often does more harm than good, and I'd agree with you if intellectual property didn't exist. Apple's entire business model rests on copyright and patents which make it impossible for competition to challenge their position. (Think about the products which would emerge if people were free to reverse engineer, modify, and redistribute Apple's technology.) This artificial advantage comes with a price, and that price happens to manifest as regulation by the same entity which enforces its ability to make its insane profits. If the government thinks they've taken their artificial advantage too far, they're ethically free, or even obligated, to artificially limit that advantage.
I think that Apple will prevail in this legal fight . Apple is in good terms with this administration. Even when the social media has taken the blame by Congress, it has been google, Facebook and Twitter that have come under fire - but Apple not so much. And currently the US is in a position where how heavy handed the treatment is dependent on your relationship with the administration.
How many companies will look at situations like this and decide not to bother with developing for Apple platforms? I've already stepped back my efforts to support MacOS (I don't target iOS at present). Too many hoops, too much control freakery, and no real comeback if they ever decide that they don't want me to publish on their platform. The balance of power in the relationship is simply skewed too far in favour of them, and a tiny misunderstanding could end my business. These companies have far too much unchecked and unregulated power.
If I go to the App Store on my phone, and go to my "Purchased" list, Fortnite is still listed there. I wasn't up to date, and clicking on "update" gives the message:
"Fortnite" No Longer Available. The developer has removed this app from the App Store.
Interesting wording. I wonder if they only have one message for pulled-by-Apple vs pulled-by-dev?
Monopolies lead to stagnation, rising prices, and inferior product quality. Even though Apple is not a monopoly in the strict sense, I think we consumers will benefit from alternative app store - or Apple opening up the platform.
I believe one can still have (moderately) secure ecosystem without it being a walled garden.
If you have an iPhone the Appstore is unquestionably a monopoly. At least Google can make the case you can install other app stores so the monopoly claim is weaker.
Hell, from my perspective the app store is part of the competition. I buy i-devices over Android for a few reasons but high on the list is the set of restrictions Apple places on developers, including their payment restrictions. Those aren't harming me, they're giving me one OS where ~ none of my mind ever has to be dedicated to considering a bunch of stuff that it does on other platforms. One platform safe for less-computer-savvy relatives, that also still lets them do basically anything they might want to do and operate independently. That is choice, the fact that I can choose that.
Google doesn’t make any iOS phones though. You can make it look like there are never monopolies if you choose to only look at certain markets while ignoring others.
You’re doing just that: you’re making everything look like a monopoly by focusing on a single product. Yes, Apple has a “monopoly” on iPhones the same way that Nike has a monopoly on Air Jordans. It’s not a monopoly.
> The mere mention of Google, a perfectly suitable competitor,
A perfectly suitable competitor ... which has exactly the same fees, similar policies and do not seem to have any pressure due to the competition to change them, yeah something does not sound right here.
Alternatively I could compare the number of companies I could use to host my web app (100k+) to the number of companies I could use to host my mobile app (just 2). The lack of competition when you compare that to an healthy market is obvious.
Many industries converge on similar pricing, and that doesn’t make it anti competitive. It may be anti competitive here, but that also may just be the natural price the market is willing to bear.
Smartphones are not stand alone widgets. They are portals into vast troves of software made by legions of developers. Right now, at least for Apple, their app store is the lone chokepoint between this software and the world. Them taking 30% of every sale between the developers and their users deserves scrutiny. This percentage is not based on the market because there is no market. There is one option. There lies the monopoly.
To spell this out further: There is competition in the smartphone market... but the app store has an artificial monopoly on iOS software distribution which is a separate market serving more than 100 million people.
Nobody has really “had their game shut off”. People who have Fortnite installed already are still able to play it indefinitely. Apple could have done this by revoking Epic’s developer certificate, but that hasn’t yet happened.
Epic effectively pulled it themselves when they unilaterally broke their agreement.
I think Apple's cut is egregious but at the same time, they're not a monopoly. My main gripe is that they're behaving as if they're bringing value that the developers are riding on, when in reality nobody would buy iPhones if it weren't for the value that many developers are bringing to the platform, often at no cost to Apple.
Who else is apple competing with to put apps on iphones? Compared to android where you have indy devs, samsung store, play store, or any other store; it's a clear monopoly.
There isn't an iPhone industry, there's a smartphone industry, and Apple (despite all their profits) only controls a small portion of that business.
Their strategy also adds a lot of consumer value. I use an iPhone specifically because I understand the tradeoffs between freedom and reliability/security, and I go for the reliability/security. Not everyone wants a second job playing sysadmin on their smartphone.
Not only that, they have the majority of app store purchases.
And there is also the fact that the government doesn't classify a trust[1] by the dictionary definition of monopoly:
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
I'd think a more "fair" comparison would be "percent of dollars spent". Since Apple is purposely targeting a higher cost, lower volume segment of the market.
It's a fairly difficult comparison to make though because you have to compare a single companies vertical integration to the non-integrated supply chains of several other companies.
Also, the consumer experience of a single well-maintained, and mostly safe App Store plays a large role in why iPhone users are comfortable spending more money on third party apps.
Anytime the discussion around Apple’s take on subscription revenue comes up there are always comments from people that they wouldn’t even mind paying a premium price just to have the convenience of having all their subscriptions managed in one place, and free of company-specific dark patterns for unsubscribing.
That's not the point though. Apple wants 30% regardless of what service you offer. While it's understandable (to a degree) for the app itself, it's not for something you purchase in the app.
Fortnite money has nothing to do with Apple. If they would only charge the processing fee and whatnot there would be no debate. Compare it to paying Apple for subscribing to Netflix/Spotify/Amazon. What is their accomplishment in this case?
I completely agree that Apple's treatment of developers is terrible, and that Apple should be shining their shoes and thanking them for selling Apple's products for them. At the same time I'm happy that Apple is being strict when developers try to skirt the rules, as I appreciate the rigorously-maintained platform. I seriously appreciate the no-BS treatment of subscriptions, because so many services make unsubscribing a complete nightmare. Whenever there's an option, I will take the App Store subscription over anything else.
If it were up to me, Apple would charge more like 3% and keep all other factors the same in terms of strictly shutting down developers who try to skirt the policies.
Would you care if apps could offer two subscription methods, the Apple one with no-BS and the developers' one with a lower price (but potentially shittier experience)?
It's a genuine question, as you thinking about the app store consumer experience.
Personally I like the choice. Pay with cash and get X% off, or use a credit card :)
Of course there is. You can argue that it shouldn't be the deciding factor here, but you can't argue it doesn't exist at all.
iOS is basically a geographical region. It's like saying there isn't a California market because it's instead the US market. Or that you can't be considered a monopoly because people can move. Yes, they can, but there's significant burdens to that movement. And it turns out that burden was enough to consider things like utilities to be monopolies. Is the burden on switching between Android & iOS high enough to be considered a barrier to free competition? I'd say yes, it is. As such, iOS is its own market in which Apple is abusing monopoly position.
I can get 3rd party parts for my Ford without issue, and it can be worked on & upgraded by 3rd party shops. There's competition even within the subset of cars from Ford.
The smartphone industry is a duopoly between iOS and Android, however iOS accounts for a majority of app spending. Their actions are overwhelmingly impactful to developers. If you want to maximize your profits as a developer you design for iOS first.
> My main gripe is that they're behaving as if they're bringing value that the developers are riding on, when in reality nobody would buy iPhones if it weren't for the value that many developers are bringing to the platform, often at no cost to Apple.
Counterpoint: the consistency, convenience, and safety of the App Store and broader iOS platform is part of why so much money is spent there.
[EDIT] but yes I think their cut should be lower. They are definitely delivering a ton of value to developers, though, and part of that is created precisely by some of the restrictions that developers love to complain about.
> Counterpoint: the consistency, convenience, and safety of the App Store and broader iOS platform is part of why so much money is spent there.
This is a really interesting point. Whether this is the reason or not for me, but I make and sell apps on both platforms and the identical app, identical price sells 4 or 5 to 1 on iOS vs. Android.
The times I've seen numbers on this from the business side, from biz-intel sorts of places (think, Gartner), the figures are crazy-unbalanced in favor of Apple. Way more spending per device (not tens of % more, but an integer multiple more), larger fraction of time spent in apps (as opposed to the browser, or basic phone use like texting or calls), and on top of that way more time using the device period. My guess: some of that's demographics, some of it's how pleasant/usable the OS and device are, some of it's how consistent and safe-feeling the spending-money experience is.
Apple has 49-65% of the phone+tablet market in the USA. People keep forgetting it's irrelevant if Android is more popular the world over. Countries only bring anti-monopoly decisions based on their country's market, not the world market.
Further, the market for "smartphones" is not Apple vs Google. It's Apple vs Samsung vs Motorola vs LG vs Sony. Those are smartphone makers. At the 50%+ marketshare, Apple has more than double the market share of it's next biggest competitor.
Further, as pointed out elsewhere you don't have to have a monopoly for being sued for anti-competitive behavior.
> Further, as pointed out elsewhere you don't have to have a monopoly for being sued for anti-competitive behavior.
Conversely, you can have a monopoly and commit abuses and get away with it in the pro-business United States. Microsoft is noticeably intact, despite what we may have wanted to happen in the late 90s.
At this point it’s always important to remember that the DoJ lawsuit against Microsoft was largely about them abusing their market power by including a pre-installed web browser.
In this case, the market came together to produce a solution much better for society than the state could have concocted, or predicted: high quality open source software. We can all be thankful that Netscape’s market for $40 web browsers (actually buggy groupware by that point) wasn’t protected for any longer than it should have been, because the pressure of Microsoft’s dominance drove the market towards demanding more symmetrical rights via entirely new approaches of software development and distribution across desktop applications, server and embedded operating systems and software, and web-based platform-agnostic applications.
I think if apple rejects an update, the older version still exists. I could be wrong. What epic would have done after getting rejected for the latest update is pull the whole app. Then the message that appeared is correct. Apple didn't remove the older version of the app but epic
They will lose as the TOS clearly indicates the rules and Epic agreed to them. This is basic contract law. Apple has a massive team of experienced lawyers.
The idea that a large platform like iOS can only have apps loaded through a market place controlled by the hardware manufactured is clearly in violation of the spirit of anti-trust laws.
However there's no legal precedent on this because no one with deep enough pockets to fight Apple has been angry enough to do it yet.
Meaning this could be great news for everyone if this goes to court and Apple loses as they should.
I don't think that's true. Almost no one is complaining about Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo's "monopolies" on what software runs on their video game consoles.
The big differentiator is that phones have become the most frequently used personal computing device for many people, and we expect the freedom to use it how we want.
Relation between console makers and game studio is too different to directly trigger the same issues (Atlus wouldn’t sue Sony For instance).
But the situation being almost the same, a ruling in one would trigger a tidal wave in the other.
There was a fun moment in last year’s vergecast interview with a lawyer on the App store issue, also related to Epic I think. The case of console stores was brought to the conversation, and the lawyer bailed out of it pretty fast with a “there might be similarities but we need to look deeper before saying anything, let’s put that aside for now” kind of answer.
> Almost no one is complaining about Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo's "monopolies" on what software runs on their video game consoles.
In general, those console platform owners have been much friendlier to publishers than Apple (and maybe Google) since game publishers generally have much more negotiation power against console platform holders. Nintendo's primary weak point has been lack of 3rd-party games. MS and Sony compete with each other to gain more exclusive offers and they even provide substantial subsidiary to developers. If you want to enforce your own arbitrary rule at the cost of losing CoD, I don't think it's going to be a good trade-off. Creative contents are usually not replaceable and publishers don't really have incentives to attack game platform holders in this dynamic.
The same thing doesn't really apply to App stores since 1. the upfront cost for buying a phone compared to usual apps is much higher (>100x), especially for the premium phone comparable to iPhone, while it's <10x for usual consoles 2. Apple (and Google) also has their own alternative services for many popular apps so hurting competitors by setting arbitrary rules is actually beneficial for them. In short, having a monopolistic status itself is not problematic but exercising it is.
So I'm trying to understand your point here. If a console maker charges 10% of revenue it's OK, but if Apple charges 30% it's illegal? And a court should decide the percentage allowed?
I'm no fan of Apple -- they engage in massive tax avoidance, labor arbitrage, and are just too big for my taste. Same criticism of Google. And Facebook. But you don't go from emotion --> must be illegal. There has to be some reasonable standard you can apply that will make sense across time and across companies/industries. What is that standard?
Perhaps congress should legislate the share of revenue that a platform is allowed to take. Not being ironic; if we are going to regulate this, let's do it with lawmakers instead of courts.
> If a console maker charges 10% of revenue it's OK, but if Apple charges 30% it's illegal?
There no such clear cut on what is acceptable or not. In fact, typically console makers charges much more than 10% but not much companies are complaining about that because it's more negotiable compared to the app store situation. The court may decide how to remedy this, but the decision won't be made simply based on the app store cut but take care of other contexts as well.
The real issue is, Apple has designed their product in order to retain complete control on potential customer facing interactions and is blatantly exercising their market power. The game platforms are usually not in a position to do so. Android might be slightly better but IMO this also needs to be addressed.
> There has to be some reasonable standard you can apply that will make sense across time and across companies/industries. What is that standard?
The existing antitrust framework is already capable of handling this app store situation; even assuming Apple is not a dominant player (which is a very optimistic assumption in favor of Apple; app store is likely a monopoly based on hypothetical monopolist test), tying iPhone, App Store and its payment module already brings significant legal risks. Though it still needs to evolve to address other situations such as Amazon or Google.
> The real issue is, Apple has designed their product in order to retain complete control
How has apple done this in a fundamentally different way from sony? I'm not seeing the difference here, which means I'm not seeing what you consider to be the real issue. Care to elaborate?
> The existing antitrust framework is already capable of handling this app store situation;
I think you are going to be dissapointed. Maybe EU antitrust would adopt more of a philosophical criteria for fairness, but US antitrust is unlikely to side with Epic here.
> US antitrust is unlikely to side with Epic here.
Having done a little digging into the relevant case law I agree with your assessment, US courts have generally been very reluctant to find antitrust violations in aftermarket scenarios where the customer was fully aware of aftermarket limitations before purchasing a product, had the opportunity to buy an alternative product without such limitations, and proceeded to buy the original product anyway.
I think the most likely outcome is Epic's case is dismissed based on failure to establish that "iOS app distribution" is a separate and relevant market for antitrust purposes.
It seems I had swapped Tengen and Accolade in my memory. I am thinking of Sega v. Accolade.
The Ninth Circuit reversed the district court's order and ruled that Accolade's use of reverse engineering to publish Genesis titles was protected under fair use, and that its alleged violation of Sega trademarks was the fault of Sega.
Both of those cases were about whether reverse engineering violates copyright law, they're not really relevant to the antitrust claims Epic is alleging in their lawsuits.
I suspect Apple will argue the oppose. The "freedom" argument has been common in the perennial "iOS v Android" discussions, from which I'd note that iOS appeals to many because it's locked down; it's easy to use and it's not junk. The Play Store was a mess last I remember it. Some consider that freedom, others dislike it. It's a brand perception thing, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple makes the same point, that an open platform would harm their brand reputation.
I think everyone is just assuming that Epic will win. I don't think that's the most likely scenario. The US is a very different legal and social environment than it was 30 years ago. More likely it's going to set a precedent that device makers can do exactly the things that Apple is doing, and more than that, they'll become the norm and you can kiss any "open" hardware platforms goodbye.
While I agree with Epic's aim with this lawsuit, one should note that this has no basis in anything except wishes:
> The idea that a large platform like iOS can only have apps loaded through a market place controlled by the hardware manufactured is clearly in violation of the spirit of anti-trust laws.
Y-yes, basically. I think it's worth mentioning CFPB regularly fines businesses and debt collectors for illegal 'TOS', as certain aspects of TOS are regulated for consumer protection. Similarly goes for HIPAA protections on healthcare provider data.
It may go down that way or not. It is unwise to predict the outcomes of lawsuits of this magnitude. Epic is no small insignificant company with a public defender. Also this suit is probably more of a signal that they mean to have a fight. Epic is not without significant extrajudicial leverage in this situation.
It is likely extremely difficult to win such a suit based on challenging the terms of an agreement that you agreed to repeatedly. Every single change to the TOS for a developer account requires acceptance. I doubt there is any part of this agreement that Apple did not write with this exact circumstance in mind. No matter what Epic challenges based on this argument in the end they will give in and look like fools. Maybe if they are lucky Apple will lower the % by a little. This is not cutting edge law here.
I'm not sure why you feel qualified to comment on the legal aspects on this case based on just a primitive understanding of offer and acceptance (which isn't the point of contention here). You can't have an enforceable contractual term that is illegal, even if both parties have agreed to it. The legal issue is whether Apple's ToS contravenes some aspect of competition law.
IANAL but my understanding of antitrust cases is that voluntary consent to a EULA is indeed a relevant factor in determining market power for antitrust claims. See the discussion in Blizzard Entertainment Inc. v. Ceiling Fan Software LLC:
> Blizzard raises this argument in its motion, contending that Defendants cannot establish antitrust claims based on its users' voluntary consent to the EULA and TOU. (Mot. Br. 22–23.) Although Blizzard does not argue this point in the market power analysis, the Court finds that this discussion is applicable to whether the market power requirement is established. Blizzard cites Newcal, Queen City Pizza, Inc. v. Domino's Pizza, Inc., 124 F.3d 430, 441 (3d Cir.1997), and Apple Inc. v. Psystar Corp., 586 F.Supp.2d 1190, 1201 (N.D.Cal.2008), to show that Defendants cannot base its claims on the aftermarket restrictions. ( See Opp'n Br. 17.) These cases explain that the law prohibits an antitrust claimant from asserting an antitrust claim “resting on market power that arises solely from contractual rights that customers knowingly and voluntarily gave to the defendant” when they purchased the initial tying product.
If I give you a contract stating that you allow me to shoot you in the head, you sign it, and I pull the trigger, I still go to prison for murder. Whether or not you "agreed" to something is irrelevant if the contract cannot be legally enforced, which is what Epic is hoping to prove with this lawsuit.
However, the contract is the only thing which allows Epic to publish in the store. So it is not enough for them to simply get terms they don't like to be declared illegal, they still would have to get the terms they like into the contract.
If Apple changed their stance to "all services and digital goods associated with your app must included in the original purchase price", that might meet the court's requirements for legality but it would leave Epic without their current revenue stream.
I like the parody, but it's not really equivalent.
The original Apple parody was to convince consumers to switch from one platform (PC) to a different platform (Mac).
Now, maybe you believe Apple, in the form of iOS, has become Big Brother. Fine, in that case, Epic should provide its own gaming platform.
But Epic isn't trying to destroy Big Brother here. It still wants to run on Big Brother's platform. It just doesn't want to give up any revenue to do so.
> Epic stated that they want to create their own separate app store outside of apple, but are unable to because apple does not allow sideloading.
That argument would ring less hollow had they done that on the platform that does allow side loading, but they eventually published on the Google Play store.
They do also still allow sideloading on android. Which was actually what their update did on Apple too (you can buy things via apple pay, or directly from us for less money)
Actually they just got banned on android as well, so now they only allow sideloading on android.
> They do also still allow sideloading on android.
My point was, they had the chance and in fact did go completely sideloading on Android, but eventually caved and joined the Play store. Obviously there’s value enough for them to take Google’s 30% cut in the Play store, so why did they do it? Why wasn’t staying sideload only enough, especially when they are arguing they should be able to do it on iOS.
> Which was actually what their update did on Apple too
Sorry, but that’s 100% false. Adding an extra payment option in your app is not the same thing as sideloading and not going through the App Store for publishing and distribution. Apples and Oranges so you speak.
The hardware is not Apple's, it belongs to the owner of the device.
Arguably I think there would be a reasonable anti-trust suit against the OS as well, it's not clear to me why it isn't illegal to utilize their monopoly on their hardware to create a monopoly on the OS running on the device.
This way of viewing things leads to some really silly conclusions. Apple doesn't have a monopoly on the iPhone, the premise is intrinsically absurd. By this argument literally any non-commodity product is a "monopoly" of the company that distributes it.
Moreover, what Apple sells isn't hardware, it's hardware with software on it. That's the product. As far as I know there is no official way to buy either iOS or an iPhone that doesn't have iOS installed. Sometimes companies take an opinionated stance on how they distribute their products, like a firearm manufacturer that only manufactures firearms that have a safety. Framing that sort of thing as an antitrust issue is unreasonable.
Monopoly is indeed not technically the right term, but it's not necessarily a monopoly itself that causes antitrust issues, it's the business practices that are enabled by it. A large player in a market that uses business practices to capture and hold more of that market by erecting barriers of entry are definitely sailing into antitrust waters.
In essence, any practice that helps compete in the market by other ways than increasing value to the consumer is suspect. Incidentally, this is a double edges sword, as this is the interpretation of the antitrust laws that has enabled the rise of so many monopoly-like companies in the last few decades. (e.g. Amazon: we're increasing value to customers because we can offer lower prices if we're larger)
Except it didn't. People wish that this was true, for lots of freedom related reasons. But it's not. The proof is pretty clear in the situation we're seeing now; if you actually controlled your iPhone, you and Epic could decide not to involve Apple. You cannot do that.
Well how do you define how much control is enough? You can still download Fortnite and put it on your device, just through the app store.
If every Tom, Dick and Harry could setup an app store for the iPhone, this doesn't necessarily give me more control. It might mean I am then forced to use the Epic platform for all Epic related products. Now how do I know that Epic have appropriately vetted their application? What if they start producing applications for the iPhone which are terrible?
This is a big problem on the Google store whereby plenty of the apps are rubbish.
My favourite is trying to spin two billion dollar companies fighting over percentages as some “big brother” battle. I don’t remember this part of 1984.
They're not, really. Both companies have enough money to pay for the best lawyers and keep the case going for as long as it takes. There may be a big valuation difference, but it's a fair fight for that reason. Besides, Epic Games is owned by Tencent, which is worth considerably more than Apple, in terms of market cap.
I feel like epic has more to show off soon. Apple rejected facebook, microsoft and google in the last 2 weeks when they were trying to get their game centres approved.
Is Apple really directly competing with Nvidia’s GeForce Now, Microsoft's xCloud, or Google's Stadia?
All of Apple Arcade's games are just mobile games already available in the App store and reviewed individually. The above options are quite a different proposition and Apple's only grievance is they can't review the PC-style game content they are distributing.
It's probably more like Netflix than Apple Arcade, since they are streaming arbitrary content with subscriptions. But games have always been treated different, so again they are not being uniquely targeted.
I would say no. However, you can still buy a game on disk and play that. A big argument on the anti-apple side is that there's no way around the app store, which isn't true for most consoles. It will be soon though, with more consoles losing disk drives.
No, Epic has the money to fight for what they believe, which, like all other modern corporations is getting money, more money, all the money. That's what corporations do. That's all they do.
Some of them are just better at bamboozling schmucks^Wmore naive consumers into becoming their loyal fans and projecting some nobler characteristics onto these corporations, and even identifying with their brand, and becoming an unpaid extension of the corporation's PR department by arguing for them ferociously on online forums.
There is nothing ideological about why Epic is doing this. The merely did their calculations and determined (or at worst made a safe bet) that the money invested in this will cause them to get more money in the long run, regardless of the outcome.
You've got two "aCkShuAlly" comments in this thread and they're both wrong.
1. The historical origin of "decimate" does not define the English word. Many words have historical origins that differ with their current definitions.
2. The word "fiscal" does not refer only to "taxes" but also to financial matters in general.
I find it odd that in your first point, you seem to argue that only the most popular, most used dictionary definitions shall count as being “correct” and in your second, you seem to argue just the opposite!
By the way, I never the said the guy was wrong to say fiscally. It was sort of a sloppy usage of the word—in my opinion of course. Which I hope its obvious that this is, seeing as its a comment in a forum!
And I’m certainly not wrong to say that fiscally is to do with taxes. I might have been wrong assuming that he or she was looking for a less ambiguous word. I do tend to assume the best in people, and am often wrong.
> "...only the most popular, most used dictionary definitions shall count..."
No, I just understand that words can have multiple definitions and any of them is perfectly valid to use. You were simply wrong to "correct" them in both cases.
Here's what you did:
> "...a comment in a forum"
I think you meant "a comment on a web site" because a forum means an ancient Roman marketplace...see how stupid this game is?
I never corrected anyone, nor called anyone stupid— like you have.
Both comments were tongue in cheek.
Apparently since more explanation is clearly warranted, I’ll provide it.
In the comment about fiscally, I thought it odd that the person appeared to be concerned with whether indie developers, of which I am one, were going to be contributing to government revenues, since I’ve only ever heard fiscally used in a tax context by professionals. And certainly when I approach my financial strategy, taxes are always a consequence of the goal, and not the goal itself.
In the other comment, I was making a joke, which seems to have gone a bit over your head.
By the way, a “web site” is simply the location where an arachnid...
Nah, I didn't call you stupid. I just meant that those kinds of "technically..." comments are lame and so often wrong. And they create boring threads like the one we're in here :-)
Anyway, I think you get my point and hopefully I wasn't too harsh but sorry if I was. Have a good day/night!
Soon we will be told that a century cannot refer to a 100 year period but only a unit of Roman soldiers. The list of words that no longer mean what they once did is very long and it's lame (and wrong) to "correct" people like this.
December is actually the tenth month. Jan & Feb were added later. It’s the tenth month that was added, though not the tenth month since the start of the year. The array of calendar months was shifted to make room for two additional months at the beginning of the year.
If I have a son, in December, then I have another son the next year in January, which one is my first son?
My tenth son will always be my tenth son. Though his birthday falls 10 months after that of my twelfth son (whose birthday came in the second month of the calendar year in which he was born), my tenth son will always have come out of the womb tenth!
In that case, he would have never been my tenth son, I would have only thought he was. No matter how hard we try, birth order is one of those things that can’t be changed, even with a revelation. Our mental model of it can be corrected, but the order itself is immutable.
It seems likely the purpose was to cause more people to think about the game Fortnite by virtue of the publicity from this.
It seem like something their lawyers pitched to them as “hey if it works, great, you save millions a year on the App Store percentage, and if it doesn’t, hey, at least you’ll get a whole lot of publicity, which should drive your sales up enough to more than compensate for the losses of being off the stores for a bit.”
Apple must charge some fees so even with a 15% cut there is almost no difference in how much return you get from your app unless you have a high enough sales volume. Indies don't care about the cut because they don't get enough sales in the first place. Indies mostly focus on surviving, not about how to optimize their margin.
It's the large scale clients that are hurt the most by the 30% cut. Old timer indie devs who used to have to manage payment and distribution themselves, like Jeff Vogel, will tell you that Steam's cut is absolutely fair given the value it brings. On PC there are different platforms competing for Steam, which might be a reason why Valve introduced discount tiers for more successful titles. If an outcome of the PR stunt is that Apple decreases its cut, it will likely be a similar arrangement which does not benefit the small businesses.
The issue with the App Store is not the cut, but that it is the only gate to the iOS walled garden.
Steam provides loads of functionality and APIs to developers that is simply not on Epic's storefront: the best controller API out there, networking/server API infrastructure, achievements, friends-list, group chat/voice, a storefront to help people find games, an extensive patching and versioning system, everything is cross-platform and most windows games automatically work on windows thanks to Proton.
It's good that Steam has competition! And I wish Epic's was competing on features, but at the moment their platform only competes by having a lower cut and payed exclusives only. The only benefit to users has been that Epic funded certain games that would otherwise might not have happened.
I don't buy that, because most developers would roll each of those features on their own if it meant they could reduce the cut.
I get what you're saying, but I think companies monopolising eyeballs then charging you an entry fee is... Kinda bull. Skimming is fine, but I want their margins to be tiny.
I think the difference there is that Basecamp really is a small player compared to Apple, and it's bootstrapped. DHH's parade was a little tiring but he at least had a reasonable 'moral leg' to stand on. Epic Games doesn't even come close to that.
If Apple allowed other payment methods, that would incentivize developers not to go through Apple at all. Even paid apps would switch over to an unlock model in order to avoid the 30% cut.
So I think it's very unlikely that Apple will allow other payment options. It's more likely for their 30% to go down, but even that's questionable.
I said you cannot bypass the 30% cut on the Google Play Store. Hosting your app elsewhere is not the same thing as hosting it on the Google Play Store.
Near as I can tell, it actually depends on what you're buying. If it's for the app itself, like an upgrade to "premium" or stuff for the game you're playing, it has to go through Google Pay and they take their cut. If it's something unrelated to the app, like a physical product or digital content for use outside the app, you're not beholden to Google Pay. But it seems like there are some grey areas.
I didn't get this from any single source, just bits and pieces put together from random forum posts and a few quora threads. And of course policies can change, so anything I found might be different right now. But I know you can buy digital books through Amazon's Kindle app on Android and it doesn't look like Google gets any of that cut: it's the normal "one click" purchase option you see in their web site, no prompt for Google Pay, just click and it's yours, downloading right away.
I would be satisfied if they would allow you to charge a premium to use IAP instead of forcing all pricing to be the same (even though they take a big cut of the IAP).
They can do something like Sign in with apple. If you are offering an alternative payment option, there should be an apple payment option too. If they are forced to do that Apple probably won't allow different pricing for it too.
... the developer on Thursday implemented its own in-app payment system that bypassed Apple’s standard 30 percent fee.
...1,000 V-bucks, which is roughly equivalent to $10 in-game Fortnite currency, now costs just $7.99 if you use Epic direct payment instead of the standard Apple payment processing. Normally, that amount of currency costs $9.99. Epic says, in this case, customers keep the extra savings, not the company. That cast the new arrangement as a pro-consumer move instead of a greedy power play.
My math skills aren't the best but it seems like epic is still pocketing almost an extra dollar there than previously (almost 10%), indicating that this is move motivated by financial gain (if not greed). Of course Apple stands out as the bigger case of "highway robbery".
I am somewhat curious on how much apple spends on maintaining the app store and how much of that %30 is net profit.
I mean, in theory third party payment processors still take a cut. I don't think it's a dollar on a 7 dollar payment. But it's also not marginal.
The credit card companies themselves charge 3.00%+0.10 at the reasonable maximum (or roughly $0.31). That is still not even counting the payment processor's fees (which pay the credit card company's fees for you).
I mean the "7 dollar price" is all artificial anyway, it doesn't really cost Epic anything to make the product of those 7 dollars (it's economic rent extracted from the intellectual property they maintain). Either way Epic is making more money on this move even if the whole extra dollar is fees.
I'd also guess that the Processor/CC Companies likely charge a bit more for this specific 'industry'; Processors and CC Companies often look at the products you are selling and what the overall risk is for things like chargebacks.
This is part of why a lot of mom & pop shops still have a 5 or 10 dollar minimum for card transactions; When I worked at a computer shop in an almost-sketchy neighborhood our minimum fee was Two whole dollars.
Given the frequency of refunds and the like, I'd assume Epic is probably not making much, if anything extra on top of this.
This may actually close a ban-hopping/stalling gap. I've seen people claim that if you do a refund for an App store purchase, the publisher may not even know about the refund for 2-3 months after it was requested/granted. This likely shortens Epic's time to react and ban people for requesting fraudulent refunds.
While it's probably not 10%, the transaction cost will come out of the transaction when processed by Epic. Normally that comes out of the 30% that Apple takes. Either way, the purchaser is saving $2 and the developer gets a larger share; this doesn't seem like a bad thing, especially when the developer is going to be spending a decent amount of cash fighting the App Store monopoly.
Even if they did pass the savings to the consumer completely, they would still likely make more money as more people buy it. This effect is much larger than the $1 they gain
Fortnite is not really the hill I have seen this battle take place. For example Apple also rejected the satirical app of a Pulitzer winning journalist (it does not make their app good but suggests that the content was probably not just a fart joke).
Still, people should be able to install whatever they want on their phones, without Apple playing walled garden.
It is not good for devs getting squeezed by the platform owners, it is not good for people being able to install whatever they want, and quite frankly it is not good for freedom of speech either.
I am not including Google here since their policy is a bit more defendable, you can sideload apps without too much trouble, I even believe that Epic uses that mechanism to do not have to pay the 30%.
This will cost Epic more money than it will Apple. Either company can end up dragging the legal battle on for years. In the meantime Epic's game won't be available on Apple platforms. By the time that battle is over, the game is probably not popular anymore.
That's what I thought of Fortnite over a year ago, it's proven to have surprising longevity and seems to be rivaled only by Minecraft for capturing the attention of young people.
Honestly Fortnite has been consistently popular for a few years now. I'm betting on it becoming another Minecraft type of game where it could be still popular in 5-10 years from now.
Fortnite grosses hundreds of millions of dollars on the App Store [1]; every dollar spent is a cut Apple counts toward its $10B+ annual gaming revenue numbers [2]. It is not an understatement to say that Fortnite, as a single application, is responsible for single-digit percentages of Apple's gaming revenue (which, while small as a whole, is a TON of money).
This move hurt Apple, full stop. It will likely cost them somewhere in the range of $50-$200M per year. You can quote me Apple's annual revenue, but I know what it is. Fortnite's contribution to it is small, but its probably far, far larger than most people here realize.
Of course, it hurts Epic more on the short term. But, long term, maybe Fortnite gets to come back at a lower rate; maybe they'll get to use their own payment processor; maybe the courts will actually work, and they'll force Apple to allow competing storefronts, which would enable the Epic Games Store to release on iOS, earning huge revenue for Epic.
And what's more: Epic's bread and butter has always been Unreal Engine, which is charged at a rate of 5% of a game's revenue (above $1M I believe, below that its free). Unreal is absolutely used for iOS game development. If Epic can win even a lower rate for all game devs, it amplifies their iOS earnings on Unreal; more money in the devs pockets means more money in Epic's pocket.
Epic's warchest is massive; its not just Fortnite, but also money from Tencent. They have the support of their massive community, including impressionable adolescents. They picked a time just weeks after Tim Cook was torn apart by Congress for allegations of antitrust. They're joining the ranks of Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and every other company that Apple has screwed over with their policies. They can fight this out, and its hard to say what the exact outcome will be, but whatever it is, Apple will not like it. Apple is on the wrong side of history.
I just re read strategy letter V [1], and combined with your post, I now realize that reducing the 30% fee for developers is essentially making a "complementary good" (publishing on iOS) cheaper for developers. That makes unreal more valuable.
The difference, of course, is that Android is an open platform and users still have multiple different options of installing Fortnite if they wanted to.
Google (and Apple) should have a say in what they sell in their storefronts. Suggesting that they have to carry any application submitted to them, law permitting, is taking the situation too far. Even demanding that applications submitted through the store use their IAP frameworks, at the 30% fee, feels alright to me.
The line is drawn at "is that store the only option". In Google's case, it isn't. Epic, and Android itself, has a road ahead of them getting users into alternative storefronts, but Android has the capability, and I think we're headed in the direction of alternative storefronts being the norm. This is especially true given that Google really does not control the hardware; Samsung has been working with Microsoft a lot lately, and being a Galaxy S20 user, I get a strong feeling that Samsung's relationship with Google is not a happy one.
I wouldn't underestimate Epic here. They've already succeeded at securing cross play from xbox and playstation and are strongly motivated to keep their app on iOS.
Given the money at stake, they are also strongly motivated to do it without paying Apple's 30% ransom
The beauty of their main technology product, a realtime engine is that it can create videos like that on much smaller timelines than traditional CG or a live shoot.
Honestly with the right talent that could have been pulled together surprisingly fast.
Ok, lets just set aside our strawmen for a second and ask: why did Apple do this and what's the big deal anyway?
* Why did Apple trounce these folks? My first thought is, ridiculously intrusive anti-cheat?
* Then, assuming that's the case and you're ok with letting someone else remote-admin your machine, can't you just install Fortnite directly anyway?
1. Epic violated Apple's ToS (apparently intentionally, to start a legal battle that they want to have right now due to EU investigations into abuse of monopoly power by large tech companies like Apple and Google)
2. Apple has to enforce their ToS (there is legal precedent that if you don't enforce your own rules, then you don't care about them - so it's a good idea to follow your own rules) so they had to boot Fortnite from the App store
The big deal is that this might trigger significant legal judgements that may determine what tech giants can or cannot do on their platforms.
I want to start reading "Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History", which covers the now failed anti-trust system in the United States, but I am worried for my blood pressure, as it covers many other ways in which our government almost exclusively works for its corporate owners.
We may think of how Europe deals with big business as extreme and radical, but it's only because we got so far away from the reasonable middle ground of big money and citizenry coexisting without f---ing each other over.
> We may think of how Europe deals with big business as extreme and radical
What has Europe done in the last decade in anti-trust? Vestager brought a series of suits that got overturned by the courts, or charged monopolists peanuts for brazenly violating the law.
I’m fine with a gated App Store, and the store has real benefits and real costs and it makes sense to charge developers for that.
But Apple needs to align the charges more closely with the benefits and costs.
Charge developers for costs they incur. Make the benefits opt-in and charge them for that too. And let them go their own way if they don’t want to opt-in.
in the end i think apple relents and opens the app store in order to keep subscription revenue from music, tv, etc., because all of these high profile attacks are basically death by a thousand cuts. In the end everyone loses but the lawyers.
I think I’m completely fine with Apple doing this.
It’s a clear violation of the TOS and Epic clearly knows that. They likely also knew well before making the update and perhaps thought Apple would bluff and only threaten a take down. Platforms aren’t free.
TOS is not the law, it is a set of arbitrary rules set by Apple, and Epic wants to challenge those rules.
Which I am completely fine with Epic doing this.
I don't see the problem, Epic explicitly went around the app store's payment process and terms of service. It's within Apple's right to pull Fortnite. They are also suing Apple as well.
Why should Epic get a “special arrangement” from all other developers?
If you don't like the terms, then don't be on the Apple App store, but of course your missing a huge swath of the population thus the 30% fee. Being on the App store is essentially unlimited marketing and exposure for your app. Cost of doing business.
As a consumer, why can't there be an alternative App Store on IoS if I don't like the Apple terms? Apple shouldn't force consumers and developers to provide them with 30%.
Google Play is allowing Epic to do it. Fortnite is still on the Google Play store.
(The writing has been on the wall and Google is already adapting - they sent out surveys last month to some developers about dropping the 30% fee and charging developers an annual listing fee instead - possibly also fees for bandwidth/storage used like a hosting company does. The survey also mentioned plans to spin off the Google Play store as a separate non-Google company.)
Aha, saw that myself an hour ago too. Wish I'd downloaded Fortnite now when I could. Thanks for the correction.
The Google survey I received specifically asked about experiences as a developer with the Epic Store, whether I thought customers would pay a subscription fee for access to the Play Store & Android updates, and whether I would trust the Play Store & Android if they were no longer owned and run by Google/Alphabet. So it will be fascinating to see how the court rulings change the tech landscape.
This simply isn't true, the market is too diverse to make any assumption like you just did. Some do upgrade based on "hardware specs." Go ask your mom what mhz are. Yea, I'll wait.
iOS is the large reason people choose iPhones over Android. The phone is simply a portal to iOS.
Without the OS the phone is essentially a brick. To argue the hardware is the only product is an absolute falsehood.
The App Store didn't exist before iOS, it was created for it. It is not a separate product.
None of these questions get you anywhere. You made the claim that hardware was why people upgraded - which is false because of the diversity of the market and the fact that the hardware is only a portal to what they want. You haven't dealt with the argument - that the App Store is a separate product from an iPhone. It isn't.
Except it isn't. There is no fundamental technical limitation that prohibits Apple from allowing third party app store. It's only because of their arbitrary policy.
I bought my device. I own it outright. It should be up to me, not Apple, what software I would like to run on my device. It is extremely unethical for a company to dictate what software I am allowed to run on hardware that I own. It is even more unethical for that company to then take a portion of my payment away from the developer without allowing another avenue for the transaction to take place.
This would not be an issue if Apple allowed users to easily side load apps.
> It should be up to me, not Apple, what software I would like to run on my device.
Sorry, you are building a strawman here.
1) You have the full right to do whatever you want with your phone. I don't argue with that, it's the truth.
2) Apple need not to help you to do whatever you want with your phone.
For some reason you confuse your right to do whatever you want with your phone with Apple's obligation to help you with that.
Do reverse engineering, flash custom OS, jailbreak, it's your right, but Apple has no obligation to help you with that. If it's to hard for you to do whatever you want with their device, buy another vendor's device then.
Honestly curious, since I haven't been following news as closely as I probably should have: has Apple done anything to actively hinder those who wish to jailbreak their devices beyond patching exploits?
It is the purpose of government to work ensure a healthy market economy. Although, ethics is important, it is far from the only goal. Backwards looking regulation patches places where the reality of a companies actions, lead to a stagnant and poorly competitive arena.
It’s well within the governments rights to say a transactional middleman service can only charge a certain fee. What is important to society is the success of the producers, not the rent seeking middleman.
These proceedings are not about users having no choice (though, they really don't: Has anyone here except you even heard of "mer"?)
They're about developers not having any choice. Developers have to release on iOS. There's no other option, because that's where most users are. Apple has a captive audience, and they're using that captive audience to abuse developers, who have no recourse.
The issue with many armchair commentators on HackerNews is that we look at the philosophy of the situation, and not the reality. The philosophy is "its Apple's platform, it's their right to run it however they want." The reality is "a billion people use this thing." The rules change when you get that big; its not about philosophy, its about doing what's best for everyone. To some degree, Apple does have a right to run their platform how they want: Fuck Their Rights.
> They're about developers not having any choice. Developers have to release on iOS. There's no other option, because that's where most users are.
They do have a choice. You target Apple users and agree upon Apple's terms, or you don't, and publish your app in F-droid/Jolla store, hoping somebody would pay.
The reality is that apple has built an infrastructure which allow you to gain profits and deliver to a huge amount of customers.
> The reality is "a billion people use this thing.
Because Apple put quite a lot of resources to build it. It's their right to operate it as they do.
> Fuck Their Rights
Sure, but let's start with turning your home into a shelter for homeless people for the sake of the society, Fucking your Right, and then we'll fuck theirs. People are always quick to deprive others of their rights as I see.
> Sure, but let's start with turning your home into a shelter for homeless people for the sake of the society
And here, a perfect example of slippery slope. You are doing exactly what 013a called as "armchair commentators", and not looking at reality.
The reality is that there are two OSs for phones, and two stores. This arrangement is detrimental to developers and consumers, and, as it stands, there's no getting out of it without resources that no one, apart from Amazon, has.
>The reality is that there are two OSs for phones, and two stores.
Nope. In reality I've owned n900, n9, Jolla 1 and now iphone. I've owned phones with 4 different OS (not counting symbian).
And of course there are various stores for Android, at least some of my friends live well enough with AOSPs without Gapps.
If you don't like iphone, don't develop for it, you are free to leave.
> there's no getting out of it without resources that no one, apart from Amazon, has.
There is no getting out because people try to force apple to fit their needs instead of giving other platform chance.
Apple is dominating because it's good enough and provides some good merits which other vendors don't (like long term support). As Microsoft's attempt to enter the market has shown, you can't just beat it having the resources, devs and customers need a reason to switch.
I would prefer apple to become less convenient forcing the developers and customers to seek for alternatives and develop for good and more free platforms like Sailfish, making the market more diverse.
Anyways as Windows phone and Sailfish examples have shown, a 30% fee is not a good enough reason to start to support another platform. And if so, I don't see why we should go the authoritarian way forcing apple to change their fees.
30% seems a fair price for using the infrastructure they've built, if it's not a good reason to switch to any other infrastructure, which existed and still do.
I strongly believe in rights for People. I have less belief in rights for Corporations. And even less for mega-corporations worth two trillion dollars.
CORPORATIONS. ARE. NOT. PEOPLE.
If tomorrow the government fined Apple a hundred billion dollars, for literally no reason except for the fun of it, I could focus my entire being, every ounce of willpower I have, into attempting to expel one milliliter-sized tear, and would still have dry eyes.
When an indie developer spends her days and nights producing a work of passion, only to pay the US Government 25% and Apple 30% of the few thousand dollars she makes, and the next day Apple announces that they made a hundred billion dollars last quarter: I stand with the indie developer, not with the faceless mega-corporation.
I couldn't lose ten seconds of sleep over some perceived injustice that this developer used the piece of literal garbage Apple excretes every year and slaps an "xcode" label on to develop her passion project, and that somehow entitles them to the billions of dollars they make in taxes.
I won't curl up in the fetal position and cry when thinking about how much Apple DESERVES the billions of iPhone users out there, stuck in a duopoly between two mega-corporations who treat ethics the same way I treat toilet paper, people who spend thousands of dollars on that hardware, and thus Apple DESERVES to control what they can and cannot use their phones for, thus Apple DESERVES to control which developers they interact with and how they compensate them.
The gall I must have, to not log on to the internet and defend a trillion dollar corporation against this horrible, mean indie developer for coming after their 30%! Hank Rearden earned that 30%! By god, through the sheer force of paying other people to build a fence, and a little luck convincing customers to live inside of it, they earned it!
There is no such thing as rights of corporations, only rights of people.
According to your logic nobody can turn my home into a homeless shelter, but if I and my friend together build a hotel, it's fine to expropriate it since we are corporation.
But we are still people and it's our rights, we're not a faceless entity.
> When an indie developer spends her days and nights producing a work of passion
Well, it's fine to fuck an indie dev's rights, if she works in a team. They are a corporation after all.
Apple has a long history of using their leverage and power to extract more value from their business relationships when they can.In what way is it unethical to meet Apple on their own terms?
> I don't see the problem, Epic explicitly went around the app store's payment process and terms of service.
Epic HAD to do this in order to force the issue in order to claim specific harm. Of COURSE Apple pulled the app, and Epic knew they would. Epic now gets to claim that Apple's behavior is consumer-hostile and anticompetitive. That's a claim they cannot make without a concrete example of harm (this is just how the courts work). Saying that "Apple was within their rights" is the same argument as "If it is legal it is moral" which we all know is not true.
> Why should Epic get a “special arrangement” from all other developers?
They shouldn't. And neither should Amazon - they do. Or any other example where Apple has made exceptions to their rules, if your company is big enough.
For those complaining about their misuse of "1984", it's merely a mockery of Apple's previous misuse of it (an effective one, too!). "1984" is a satire of Bolshevism and the Stalin regime, but became of a victim of its own success, and has been appropriated as a weapon against many unrelated or very loosely related things.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 526 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24146902
Most of articles on Verge/Vox are blogspam around other sources adding little to no value. Engadget covers gadgets, Ars Technica covers wider issues, the rest probably won't be popular on HN.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Why would anyone want to risk being deplatformed? I trust ICANN more than I trust Apple and ${CLOUD_PROVIDER}
App stores give you incredible access to new users. You literally don’t have a way to get unto iOS devices w/o the App Store.
They give you "incredible access" because they're basically the only access. Their OSes would be complete flops if app stores were the only option and nobody would use them...
Yes, and that's the problem that needs solving. If Apple allowed sideloading apps, every single of their justifications about App Store rules would start making sense. You either pay 30% and get a nice listing and discoverability, or you pay nothing but are completely on your own.
If you really want to make a radio for Lamborghini's, but they say no, then you go to a different manufacturer. "oh but Lambo owners have so much spend/revenue per owner" doesn't really hold water.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide
As far as my personal preferences go, I use Android since 2011 and can't fathom switching to iOS.
One, it had no standing, nor contractual agreement (granted, a lawsuit can be a big weapon to wield).
> Ferrari took the most offense to his custom badges and floor mats with Purrari logos
And to look at that picture, you can see why, the logos were practically identical and arguable from a trademark infringement perspective.
But he was not and was never prohibited from painting his car (and a cease and desist is not a prohibition).
Unfortunately, Apple is going to continue this nonsense unless people stop buying into their reality distortion spells.
There is no historical mainstream analog since desktop/laptop OS software has never been so locked-down that it was impossible to install software without 1st-party permission. Even early videogame consoles had unlicensed games run on them, and the console vendors could only stop them by releasing new hardware.
If people don't want to do that, that's on them.
If Epic doesn't want to invest in an open cell phone platform that can run Epic binaries, then its only options are to beg the government for help, or to take Apple's bs on the chin
A large and growing ecosystem of applications and services grew around the network which this American company controlled, and the network became central to the American economy [1]. Other businesses had to connect to this company's network, so that they could reach the company's many end users. But the company jealously guarded its end users, inflicting onerous burdens on competitors, or disconnecting them entirely [2].
That company, the American Telephone and Telegraph company, was eventually dissolved by the US Department of Justice due to charges filed under the Sherman Antitrust Act [3].
Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh, right, there aren't any historical analogs to the App Store. Apple is a bastion of innovation and an important defender of privacy rights, and I can't imagine that its management would ever recklessly endanger that by running afoul of antitrust law.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone
[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=107525656002865...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._AT%26T
Then you haven't been paying attention. Apple at least has competition. ICANN is a government supported monopoly that has been systematically taken over by robber barons.
If Apple wasn't both the largest US phone maker and a legal monopoly, their behavior would not be as problematic, as you could (at least in theory, probably in practice too) sell other hardware to run ios/macos, or resell legally obtained, and modified software without Apple restrictions.
Whether their behavior is acceptable or not must be framed in a much larger picture. Companies are given legal rights by virtue of expectations of that being the best for society, and that's the metric that companies should be measured against.
Would it be good, and acceptable for society if all technology vendors/brands acted exactly as Apple regarding the App Store?
It's quite easy to answer that with a no, since clearly tying many frequnt small purchases indefinitely to a bigger purchase is not something that can ever increase competition. As it will form a less effective market, it can't be said to be desirable.
This wasn't true when Apple was a small fry so why would it be true when they are the largest US phone maker?
Yeah in those days 99.9% of the world didn't use it.
Seems like those that wish to use Apple (consumers, Epic) should either deal with the consequences, beg the government for help, or build their own open standard.
For me I lean towards building the open standard and teaching people how to use it. The App Store is for the lazy.
Thank goodness that wasn't the case.
I know it’s not the same but something feels similar to me.
Currently, there are alternative implementations of Play Services that can be installed to replace Google's. However, if it is not fair use to use even the bare bones of an API definition without permission, then we can't even create a compatible implementation of such an API without the copyright holder's permission. In which case, we cannot replace Google Play services with anything else.
AFAIK Firefox still exists as does KHTML.
Some days it really feels like there is nothing new under the sun.
How? Google controls neither the AMP specification nor the third party implementations like Bing's.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/about-amp
Isn't there a term for using dominance in one market to compel behavior in another?
This is not enforcing AMP on publishers in the results, and the argument that it is by using icons falls under the 'it's kind of the same' category.
This is how you do agnostic search results, and it is not putting the thumb on the scale as you're implying.
Ultimately, the best Reddit experience is less Reddit.
[0]: https://gitlab.com/aaronNG/reddio
[1]: https://gitlab.com/ajak/tuir
If you're still using Google and prefer a more technical approach to your inquiries, maybe it's time for to consider a more refined tool?
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/amp2html/
This is what I use on my Jailbroken iPhone.
The Reddit apps I've tried stick to the meth-addled idea to use fixed floating header bars, which are useless and really annoy me.
Yes, I know some things seem "obvious" but it's a sliding scale per person... and, well that's the slippery slope.
App Stores suck. App Stores with no side-loading are even worse. Platforms that are locked down so much that you can't even install your own OS are worse.
We used to bitch about Tivoization on HN all the time, it seems post iPhone, everyone seems A-OK.
In every day life, the number of people who think “App Stores suck” is infinitesimal.
Does that mitigate any of the concerns people have about either company?
This community used to have a strong focus on openness, open source, permission less innovation and the avoidance of checkpoints and tolls, but what it's turned into is often a battle of fanboys, who roll out excuses and lowered standards for their favorites.
Yours is an easy position to maintain, until you have invested a lot of money and work in an app which gets booted from the App Store, or because Apple decides to shake you down for even more money.
Apple fans simultaneously say Apple has a small marketshare, but also brag that earn the majority of all smartphone industry profits. If the latter is true, it means that anyone wanting to make money on mobile software has no choice but to publish on the App Store, ergo, effectively a monopoly.
I’ve made the same argument about Google, FaceBook, Apple, and Amazon (even before I started working for AWS).
This community used to have a strong focus on openness, open source, permission less innovation and the avoidance of checkpoints and tolls, but what it's turned into is often a battle of fanboys, who roll out excuses and lowered standards for their favorites.
Did the open source community whine about mean old Microsoft or did they create alternatives to the point where even Azure runs more Linux VMs than Windows VMs? They went out there and built something better. They out competed.
Every single one of the big tech companies got there through better execution.
Citation needed. Many parts of our government do just that (FDA, EPA). We need these because many decisions would otherwise be uninformed. If you don't know what is in your food, how can you make informed decisions? If you don't know what is in your drugs, or what the side effects are, how can you make informed decisions?
Are you really saying that Google doesn’t have the capital or reach to better market the “openness” of Android?
People were not making money by being shareholders, that's why.
Mind.blown.
Overall it feels a little bit like self-flagellation which I'm hoping is for the greater good, that DDG's algo will improve with use and eventually I won't need !g anymore.
Maybe DDG needs a browser extension that let's you seamlessly provide feedback with every !g to teach them what you were actually looking for.
You are calling it seamlessly providing feedback because it is DDG. If this was about Google or Facebook, it could have sounded closer to 'tracking users'.
Did you think your feigned ignorance was insightful? Google has 86% market share.
Also, the web is not even a great analogy period since it wasn't created by a private company. Apple created their phones, their App Store, they maintain it, and they provide the infrastructure for it. That's nothing like the internet.
I know, I know, people who bought iPhones knew what they were buying into.
So yes, lots of people buy iPhones exactly because if Apples iron grip.
That's incredibly disingenuous and you're either being dishonest or ignorant. The 30% is for sales made on Apple's platform. Developers can absolutely make sales without giving Apple a cut as long as they don't use Apple's infrastructure or platform. You can have people purchase things for your app as long as you don't attempt to offer in-app purchases that circumvent the App Store.
It would be like you using AOL and only being able to view the channels that AOL offered (which is exactly what it was). Apple has no authority to tell you what you can do with your device once you've purchased it but you also don't have the authority or the right to demand that Apple service your device if you jailbreak it or mod it.
This is literally the exact same situation as Xbox and PS4. Xbox doesn't allow people to play PS4 games on an Xbox. Is that anti-competitive? Is that anti-consumer? Is that Xbox having absolute authority over what you can do on your Xbox? Get out of here with that nonsense.
But in the end I guess what matters more is whether you want a single person to control what you view or not, like when they banned James Joyce because of an illustration of a man skinny dipping.
In my opinion iOS was far better when there were fewer different devices released every year, but it's still better today than Android.
Instead, Apple invented a new computing platform and a new model to pay for it, it just worked, people were willing to pay for that, and we liked it.
[*] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share
Also, Apple has a much bigger market share in the US simply because most of the world cannot afford an iPhone.
The question isn't whether Apple has a large enough market share in the US for the courts to get involved — it very clearly does — the question is does it exhibit exclusionary behavior to the extent courts should get involved.
(I think it does exhibit exclusionary behavior, but I can see that being much more open to interpretation than the simple fact that it clears the 50% threshold.)
Regardless, my comment was just correcting the statement that Apple doesn't have a majority market share in any market, when in fact it has majority market share in the US market.
Apple does not have more than 50% marketshare of smartphones in the US. In most analyses it is between 41-43%, with an absolute high of 46%. Android accounts for the rest. And of course worldwide iOS is dwarfed by Android.
https://www.kantarworldpanel.com/global/smartphone-os-market...
EDIT: Of course this was down-arrowed. The citation of StatCounter is akin to claiming that the rodeo's parking lot has 80% pick-up trucks, therefore pick-up trucks have 80% of the market. It's absolute nonsense but it somehow appears on HN repeatedly. Never change, HN. Never change.
By actual sales of devices, iOS accounts for between 41-46% of the market. That users on iOS tend to use the web more from their devices doesn't somehow make it a monopoly.
And to be clear I don't think whether it's a monopoly or not is particularly relevant -- it's still arguably abusive, anticompetitive behavior -- but that misleading statcounter claim is used for disinformation on here daily.
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
Come to think of it, why are web browsers excluded from the in-app fee?
Let’s be honest here, the rules of the app store are arbitrary and designed to extract the maximum amount of revenue from the ecosystem, within the limits of what apple thought people would put it with. Turns out they may have miscalculated.
> Imagine if Sony did this on Playstation. a) prohibiting the installation of non-PlayStation games and b) insisting that all purchases done via their store give them a 30% cut.
Many platforms are like this -- and many also have the majority marketshare. Is this a call to redefine what platforms can and cannot control?
I perceive capricious behaviour like this ad a threat to my liberty and well-being.
>What its marketed as and who it is aimed at.
I am not sure I can make my position any clearer than that. It's not an item in a spec sheet. It's what you're claiming to be selling.
Although interestingly, the Japanese console makers have continually tried to push the computer/development angle.
When the NES was released in Japan before the US, it was branded the "Family Computer" and you could get a keyboard and a version of BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_BASIC
Sony has had multiple attempts, with a consumer homebrew dev kit for the PS1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Yaroze ), and Linux for the PS2 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2 ) and later PS3.
Of course Sony also had OtherOS on PS3. It's a bit sad it ended the way that it did.
An Apple laptop looks like a general purpose computing device. Do we want it not to be one, and become closer to a gaming console?
I think that merely looking at the guts and seeing which processor it has is kind of a red herring.
It does seem a bit tautological. A vendor can restrict access then simply argue this is not a general purpose computing device because look, you can't run the things we don't let you run.
General-purpose is when you can install whatever software will run in that architecture, unimpeded.
Tautological was in reference to the argument about whether or not we should be able to install things if an iPhone is a general purpose device.
If that status relies on what software lets us do, then the answer is always going to be no, because if they don't let us then we aren't allowed to.
I think if I were to answer this question now it would be based on the expectation of the end consumer to be expected to, or have the ability to program the device for general purpose tasks.
Things like game consoles, phones, smart appliances, etc. all start to blur that line but I think it comes down to the consumer's expectations.
Don't get me wrong, I hate the idea of "digital anti-globalism", but if this thing went to court, both sides would have their reasonable arguments. And let's hope that if there's a ruling, it rules in favor of open platforms. At the very least, I think it would be great if the courts rule that a platform that's built open and sold as open cannot be consequently closed. But I doubt that Apple will be forced to open its hardware to non-App Store programs.
And in fact Microsoft tried this (both with Windows RT and Windows 10 S) and in both cases few people bought in (or, in some cases, wound up 'confused' that other software wouldn't run, leading to the eventual sunsetting of Windows 10 S).
I do think both sides have reasonable arguments, but at the same time 'computing' has become ubiquitous, and Smartphones arguably even more so. Personally, I think we are in a weird state when we consider historical context; once upon a time, remember that GM would in fact make moves to ensure they did not get too much market share. I can't remember the number but I think they didn't want to go over 59%.
Of course you COULD have more market share even back then, but it also typically resulted in a lot more government oversight and willingness for the government to intervene in situations like this (thinking about Modems and Ma Bell here...)
IMO Google sidesteps the problem by not having a lot of 'handset' market share. (Also, perhaps more controversial to state, but their compliance with LE/Intelligence agencies probably allows more things to be ignored.)
I just don't know what to say anymore. Apple (and, dare I say, to a greater extent, Google) are doing the sorts of things that absolutely landed Microsoft in court and caused microsoft to make a number of decisions that kneecapped them in the first decade of the 2000s. It's been happening for years, and yet we are only now seeing enough people agreeing that we can talk about it without getting shouted down.
It’s funny to me that One of Microsoft's strongest arguments is “well we tried it and consumers don’t want it that way unless forced upon them”.
A separate concern is around anticompetitive behavior. There is no way to sideload an app, or even use a competing app store, and Apple is charging rent. This is pretty clearly anticompetitive behavior that harms consumers.
But iPads (though iOS was renamed/forked to iPadOS on those devices) are definitely marketed as general purpose computing devices. The headline on https://www.apple.com/ipad/ is "Your next computer is not a computer".
iPad/iPadOS have these same restrictions as iPhone/iOS.
All of this is still unknown outside of Apple. What is known so far seems to me like it's pointing in the direction of a pretty open macOS and a very much locked down iOS, to satisfy different needs. We'll know more by late fall, I guess.
Why do you think Microsoft bothered with WSL? We know that most Windows users won't do it. It was a developer-attracting move, meant to make it easier to build Windows client applications with Linux server components. Apple benefits from the same thing being offered natively. I can't see them abandoning it, even though it does create a tension between the Mac as a consumer product and the Mac as a developer's tool for iOS.
I'm not arguing this is necessarily either wise or ethical of them, and there's a real sense in which this is orthogonal to the App Store's fee structure. But it seems to me that while Apple is going to face increasing pressure to change the way they run the App Store, the solution -- at least the solution Apple will offer -- very likely won't involve letting the iPad become a general purpose computer the way the Mac is.
For PlayStation you pay the Sony tax for the convenience of integrating with their payment services, not because they'll ban you for using anything else.
It's also a super different situation in general; for example, Sony actually often pays developers to develop for their store (e.g. PubFund [1]), and does free marketing campaigns for them. Console makers live and die by their access to a pipeline of new exclusive games, so they treat game developers well; Apple doesn't, so it squeezes app developers for what it can. Hence why game developers are suing Apple but not Sony.
1: https://www.giantbomb.com/pub-fund/3015-7606/
Hmmm -- not to stretch the analogy too thin, but is this similar to Apple though, where they allow you to sign in to subscription services (e.g. Netflix) with your existing account to the service, but don't allow sign ups (which would trigger payment processing)? Or is payment processing baked in there as well?
> For PlayStation you pay the Sony tax for the convenience of integrating with their payment services, not because they'll ban you for using anything else.
To clarify, has any developer integrated external payment services within a Playstation game / app / etc? From all the games and apps I've played with, I never remember any other payment system built in other than Sony's.
> It's also a super different situation in general; for example, Sony actually often pays developers to develop for their store ...
Blackberry did the same thing near the end of it's life -- I was at a hackathon where they were giving away Blackberries and cash to anyone who developed a Blackberry app -- but does not giving back really reflect as monopolistic?
Actually, looking now, I think you're right. It looks like Spotify disabled setting up subscriptions on PS4. I guess PS4 subscriptions are a small enough chunk of revenue for Spotify it didn't really matter to them.
I guess the real point is that PS4 just isn't a large enough chunk of these kinds of services' market share by revenue to matter; they don't need signups, since not many people primarily use Spotify via PlayStation.
Which is why I found Microsoft's bitching about the app store hilarious. They have been taking giant pieces of the action in Xbox for 20 years and tried to do the same in their sorry excuse for a Windows Store. I'd like to see them allow Stadia on the Xbox.
I actually agree with not allowing external payment processors on these (and mobile) platforms, especially for games where the audience is frequently naive kids.
Don't agree with the platform taking a huge cut of every transaction though. Maybe take a smaller cut and the billionaires can stop squabbling.
Putting aside the ethics of Apple's content stranglehold for the moment, the economic side of things seems like a very nice deal -- 30% is not bad compared to various distribution deals (for physical and virtual goods) of which I have some slight familiarity.
Are there distribution platforms that allow you to get your app/product/etc to that many people without taking a cut?
I'm kind of fed up with Apple for a variety of reasons, but this doesn't seem like one of the problems to me.
So distribution deals for physical goods are not analogous, right ? Like Best Buy doesn't get a cut if I pay netflix to watch it on the TV I bought from them.
If you sign up for a Target card, they get an initial cut and then monthly percentage based on your usage. A bank is managing that card not Target.
Imagine Best Buy's extremely large presence in the world of television-selling. You could get your streaming service into a lot of homes if they promoted the heck out of TVs featuring your service in exchange for a cut, right?
Depending on the % cut they wanted, that could be a great deal for you. Suppose the % cut was 0.0000001%. Certainly you would take that offer. And probably 0.0001%. Maybe even up to 10%. Maybe even 50%, depending on your business model?
Anyway, I have lots of problems with the App Store, but man... that 30% sounds pretty fine. Access to that many users, many of whom have payment information stored a mere tap away?
I'm assuming you would also want to prohibit these "naive kids" from ever browsing the Internet too, am I right?
(Since there are plenty of website that accept payments through a variety of payment processors?)
would you really be in favor of that and see that as a good thing for the general public ?
Apple wields it’s power indirectly, leading to the AppCasino and lousy UX.
Google pulls you in and monetizes you.
All of these companies do similar things in different ways.
Nintendo has had a clear monopoly on handheld consoles for several generations.
Sony had an extremely strong market position in the 5th and 6th generation gaming consoles but I wouldn't really call it a monopoly.
The only reason Sony is not charging exorbitant amounts (if they really aren't) is because they're in heated competition with Microsoft over being the preferred first release platform of popular games.
Well, neither does Apple seeing that neither Netflix (for new customers) or Spotify allow in app purchases.
Sony actually often pays developers to develop for their store (e.g. PubFund [1]),
So does Apple - Apple Arcade.
Could Fortnite have in app purchases for the game consoles and bypass the stores?
Historically, other game consoles could be used a "general purpose computing devices," such as the Sega Dreamcast with Windows CE and the Nintendo Famicom (which is short for Family Computer).
Afaik, there was never a Windows CE general purpose environment for the Dreamcast. Sega supported game developers using Sega's 100% propriatary OS or using Windows CE as embedded OS. Either way, the OS would ship on the disc, and isn't a lot more than a kernel and libraries.
Of course, BSDs and Linux were ported to the Dreamcast at some point, as with anything that can boot user provided code and has enough ram.
The dreamcast did have a web browser, and keyboard and mouse, but without significant local writable storage, would make a lousy general purpose computer.
It can be off by default, and probably should.
But trying to hair split console from computer from cellphone makes less and less sense everyday and we all know it.
Similar with Nintendo's Switch - Nintendo even tried to shut down a YouTuber's channel just for mentioning homebrew/jailbreaking for Switch.
It is such a shame and honestly i wish these devices were as open as PCs are. That they aren't is a testament to how much they have brainwashed people to think as normal that they have no control over their own devices and what they can do with them.
Of course, in this case piracy would be the primary reason for the restriction, but I think it's valid to look at places where the platform is controlled by a single vendor.
Anyway, I think platforms need to be regulated to be more open. We need a right to modify along with a right to repair. When I pay for a product that happens to support downloadable software, I should be free to put whatever software on it that I want. If apple allowed sideloading on iOS like they do on macOS this would not have blown up to the degree that it did.
The appeal of developing in Apple's ecosystem has always been the exposure to large audiences, the (relatively decent) tooling, and the ability to creatively actualize your ideas. That last one goes away when Apple starts looking more like Sony.
I'll leave it up to lawyers to decide if this is illegal, but I know this certainly makes me less excited about developing my next iOS/OSX app
Valve's decision to no longer support Ubuntu as a first-class distribution, a year ago, probably. Though that's just one distribution, not Linux as a whole.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/06/steam-announces-that-its...
Whether or not it's native or wine doesn't change the fact that Steam is pushing into Linux. They've shifted the responsibility from pushing linux support on the developer to providing linux support themselves.
Valve will have a much easier time improving proton than they will forcing devs to make Linux compatible games for little monetary reward.
If your complaint is that it's bad for the app developers or users, then that's different, and maybe deserves criticism but not ridicule.
When I see folks complain about this, I like ask "what do you think is a reasonable fee for Apple to charge?" Zero is not a realistic answer as Apple does incur costs to run the app store. Moreover, they're entitled to make a profit off the marketplace they created and support. So what's a reasonable percentage?
Let's put that % difference into perspective. Say you have an annual fee of $10. The first year, your users pay Apple $3 (you make $7), but after that for every user that subscribes you only pay $1.50 (you make $8.50). You're saying that Apples should only charge $1. You're arguing that fifty cents is the difference between life and death of your business? Really?
That's not how it works.
I doubt Epic would be making much complaint for 15% (since the app has been out more than a year). They suggest 12% after all.
The 15% is for subscriptions and nothing else. And it's on a per-user basis.
What I'm trying to show is that once you accept zero is not reasonable (and most rational people accept this) and then explore the actual $$ difference between what Apple charges and what you think is reasonable, the differences are really small. Normally when I ask folks this, the difference comes in between 0.05 and a $2 depending on the purchase price. For a 0.99 app we're talking about $0.05-0.20 difference. Life is too short for folks to get worked up about that small of a price difference.
The difference is small if you're looking at very cheap apps.
The big problem here is for tens of dollars being charged 30%. It makes a very significant difference!
For a $20 app the current model is that you pay Apple $6. If you waved a wand and made it 20% you pay Apple $4. So the difference in this case is only $2 (while you get $16). That's small potatoes.
Is it? That's 14% extra revenue. And if you were comparing a 30 percent take to a 12 percent take, you'd be going from $14 to $17.60, which is slightly over 25% extra revenue! That could double or triple the profit margin of a healthy business!
> What percentage is reasonable?
I already answered that in a different comment. If I was going to wave a wand right now, with no further time to consider, it would be 25% for the first $20 and 5% after.
So look at something like Hey. Apple right now would charge $30 for a user's first year, then $15 for each year after. My version would be $8.75 for the first year and $5 for each year after. A pretty big difference.
I wouldn't be strongly opposed to a flat 12%, but I'm trying to be generous and give Apple some extra dollars upfront for the service they actually provide. But the service they provide barely increase as the price of an app increases, so they don't deserve 25 or 30 percent of larger amounts.
EDIT: this comment aged well: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.epicgames....
> what do you think is a reasonable fee for Apple to charge?
That's an interesting situation, because if the game was free Apple would charge nothing. And the more they bang on the drum about consumer safety, the more I want them to charge a fee appropriate for payment processing.
If I was just arbitrarily setting the fees, I might go with something like 25% of the first 20 dollars per app per user, and then 5% afterwards.
If you really put the squeeze to them, the "natural" price would probably be a bit below cost for them, because the availability of apps is a selling point for their high-margin phones and tablets. That is why they are willing to host free apps, after all. (Although even then they take the developer fee)
Perhaps the hoops are fine and reasonable. That doesn't change the fact that hoops are being added.
Macs and iOS devices do different things for different use cases; their strengths and weaknesses are as much tied into their hardware design as software. People love Macs because of what they can do; Apple, too.
Apple couldn’t force people to use the Mac App Store even if it wanted, knowing how few of the biggest Mac apps outside of the larger software companies (Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, etc) actually distribute with it.
The only convergence we will see is the ability to run iOS apps on macOS, and even then that is merely a stopgap effort; any iOS apps that want to truly make the transition to the Mac will be updated as Catalyst apps. Catalyst apps are Mac apps through and through, despite their use of iOS’ UIKit.
See also: speculation in The mid-00s that Apple would drop Mac OS X for Windows during the Intel transition. It was just as devoid of factual basis then as fear-mongered “sensible speculation” is today.
I believe the defaults now extend to software sourced outside of the app store must still be notarized by Apple. This impacts developers more than consumers I would guess, but certainly requires more effort from developers to create and distribute software.
Want to run Photoshop, IntelliJ or Outlook, 30% of what you charge is going to Apple.
Just switch to a competitor! Go-to Linux or Mac. All good, no antitrust here. /s
There’s bullshit with each platform. PS4 can play, but not with servers, Mac can do Java, nothing else can but PC, etc.
Easy, reliably DoS -- and the user has no means of fixing this vulnerability, other than rooting the phone and hacking around. Which is made ever less feasible.
"As of right now, those who have already downloaded Fortnite on iOS are still able to access the game; only new downloads are disabled as a result of Apple pulling the game from the App Store."
Removing an app from the App Store, and removing it from user's devices are two very different things. When any app is removed in this fashion, all users who already have the app still have access to everything they had access to before. The app just isn't listed on the App Store for new downloads.
2020 is really an interesting year.
Microsoft ruled desktops
If this were Target or Walmart, people wouldn’t be beefing at how they choose to stick their shelves
“Let’s equivocate over how this should feel different!”
Let’s stop ogling corporations altogether maybe.
It’s all the paying attention to how they might be screwing you specifically in the context of money markets distracting from how the current admin is giving trillions away to buddies to manipulate markets in the old way you quit paying attention to with plain old corruption.
Too boring! Let’s wax poetic about Apples slight to social correctness!
This is just three big corporations fighting over their respective slices of the pie, if you think any of this is being said or done for your benefit I’m sure Epic has a plentiful supply of really tasty Koolaid for you. But no pie, sorry.
I never thought about it like this. It could be viewed differently because the Xbox is a game console and the iphone is a general handheld computer, but perhaps it should be illegal to restrict users installing software on your device by any means they choose, though there's no reason for you to support those means.
It's like claiming that nobody can have a monopoly on electric car charging stations because the customer could just buy a gasoline powered car and electric cars don't even have majority market share. It's still a monopoly. It's a monopoly on charging stations, not a monopoly on cars.
Any mechanism for side loading apps would also be an Apple product, designed and written by them. They would be responsible for supporting it, and ensuring it was secure. Maybe they don’t want to do that, so who gets to force them to, and who gets to decide if they complied with that directive? Who gets to specify it and take responsibility if it causes problems and incurs costs on Apple or issues for their customers?
You’re not talking about stopping Apple from doing something, you’re taking about coercing them by legal requirement to do new different things, and you’d better be very specific and careful about what you are forcing them to do.
Personally yes, that's the textbook of unfair competition.
Yes, of course. The fact that you can't use the other company's chargers means that there are then two markets there, one for Tesla-vehicle charging stations and one for Nissan-vehicle charging stations. You can't substitute one for the other in that case, you need one compatible with your car. It's the same reason that gas pumps aren't the same market as electric car chargers, or that gas pumps aren't the same market as diesel pumps. If there is only one diesel pump in the state then it has a monopoly no matter how many gas pumps there are because you can't use gasoline in a diesel vehicle.
If you could use either type of charger with either type of car then they would be in the same market, because a customer who wants to charge their car could substitute either one for the other, so they would each actually be in competition with the other and neither would have a monopoly.
I think the fact that the "chargers" and the "cars" are hypothesized to be operated by the same company is what's messing people up.
Suppose you have two companies that each operate half the charging stations in the same region. One is Tesla, and you can only use them to charge a Tesla vehicle. The other is Exxon, which has started installing electric car chargers at their gas stations, and where you can charge any car including a Tesla. Well then Tesla hasn't got a monopoly on anything, because any Tesla owner can go charge their car at Exxon, and Exxon doesn't have a monopoly for Tesla vehicles, because they can also go charge their car at Tesla. But Exxon does have a monopoly for charging non-Tesla vehicles, because if you have a Nissan or a Chevy, you can't use the Tesla chargers, leaving Exxon as your only option.
1) The manufacturer lacks sufficient market power in the "foremarket". (In the case of Apple, this would be the sale of the phone. In your example, it would be the sale of the car.)
2) The consumer was aware of the "aftermarket" restrictions when buying the original product. (In the case of Apple this would be the App Store pricing and rules. In the car example it would be the location and cost of the charging stations.)
3) The consumer does not face substantial costs to switch to an alternative product. (The cost of buying a new car would probably be considered substantial but I'm not sure a new phone would.)
The courts have reasoned that if the consumer had sufficient information when making their initial purchase decision, then they had the opportunity to buy a competing product without those restrictions. If they went ahead and bought anyway, they knew what they were signing up for. It's like buying a razor and then being stuck with expensive replacement razor blades. Or buying a movie ticket and then being stuck buying expensive popcorn from that theater.
Yes, once you buy the movie ticket and enter the theater they have a "monopoly" on your snack purchases. No, you're not likely to win an antitrust claim against the theater.
The cost of switching phone platforms is massive compared to the app market. Phones can cost over $1000, apps are commonly $1, a difference of a thousand fold. And that's only the hardware cost. Then you have issues if there is any other app you need which is only available on one platform, or if you make use of Google or Apple services that are only well supported or supported at all on one platform and would incur substantial switching costs to move to the other.
You also have a different problem here:
> The courts have reasoned that if the consumer had sufficient information when making their initial purchase decision, then they had the opportunity to buy a competing product without those restrictions.
Which would only apply if there was a viable competing product without those restrictions. But there are only two viable phone platforms and Apple's has a strict monopoly while Google's has a de facto one where Google Play has >90% share of the Android market, and they both impose similar restrictions, so a viable option without those restrictions isn't there.
Furthermore, the customer for app distribution is at least as much the developer as the user -- they're the one who pays the app store's fee, right? -- and they don't get to choose which phone their customers have already bought.
Ultimately that is up to the courts to decide. But I will point out that in a previous case involving IBM S/390 computer systems, the court decided this requirement was not met, despite the hardware expense and associated software compatibility limitations.
> Which would only apply if there was a viable competing product without those restrictions. But there are only two viable phone platforms and Apple's has a strict monopoly while Google's has a de facto one where Google Play has >90% share of the Android market, and they both impose similar restrictions, so a viable option without those restrictions isn't there.
I'm not sure which specific restrictions you are referring to here. If the complaint against Apple is that you cannot install apps from 3rd party sources on your iPhone, there is a competing product that allows you to do that on the market.
> Furthermore, the customer for app distribution is at least as much the developer as the user -- they're the one who pays the app store's fee, right? -- and they don't get to choose which phone their customers have already bought.
This is not relevant for antitrust purposes. Developers are not entitled to demand a specific company give them access to that company's users.
And the government doesn't classify trusts[1] by the dictionary definition of monopoly:
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
It wasn’t until 2010 that IEs market share started eroding. It didn’t have anything to do with the government.
Almost 20 years later, MS still has the same market share in both operating systems and office productivity and no one cares about browser dominance except for Google.
When MS was under investigation they were the most valuable company in the US. Now they are number 3.
So how effective was the government last time?
The market solved the problem in ways that the DoJ couldn’t have anticipated. It turned out that licenses fees for closed source web browsers were just not something that businesses and consumers were interested in putting up with.
Few remember how much of an equal offender Netscape was when it came to proprietary extensions to the web.
What you may be thinking of is that the consoles are not the main source of profit. And that the profits from consoles may take some time to make up for the expenses of developing and manufacturing those consoles.
>And that the profits from consoles may take some time to make up for the expenses of developing and manufacturing those consoles.
Yup, and during which time, they sell at a huge loss.[1]
You're right that Nintendo tries to buck this trend, but they also realize it's a delicate balancing act.[2]
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/xbox-one-x-price-explanation... [1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/06/18/sony-microsoft-gam... [2] https://venturebeat.com/2016/10/26/nintendo-wont-sell-switch...
Your alternative definition applies to pretty much everything with R&D costs. The first unit sold is pretty much guaranteed to not make up for R&D costs, but for some n the margin made on the nth unit covers it, and the seller finally starts turning a profit.
I think what your citations are actually saying is that even the last unit sold does not cover R&D costs, and it has to be made up in other divisions (such as games) in order for the whole venture to turn a profit. But each individual unit is still marginally profitable - if they could sell enough of them (perhaps far more than the size of their market) they would eventually turn a profit on the console itself.
This sounds like a claim about cumulative profits, no?
Maybe you're instead suggesting that either prices rise or manufacturing costs fall over the lifetime of a console?
But what I think you mean to propose is a restriction at the software level, not hardware level. That anyone who sells an operating system must allow any app to be installed within that OS. I think we leave it as an exercise for the reader to define "operating system" when it comes to our increasingly "smart" homes and cars.
The iPhone boot ROM will only launch operating systems cryptographically signed by Apple:
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/hardware-security-o...
What is an open platform and how does it get defined? Installing software is a feature implemented by the manufacturer. Should we really be requiring Apple or any manufacturer, by law, to implement specific defined features to support and enable side loading and management of external apps. Who gets to define those features and say which products should or shouldn’t have them? Who gets to certify compliance? Who gets to specify open as a technical standard that can actually be implemented?
If this had been done in the 80s, we’d probably still be stuck with consoles having an 80s style cartridge slot on them, with specs written in legislation and updatable only by government committee.
Secondly, you can "side load" iOS apps as well. You just have to go through a process of jailbreaking your iPhone which is not illegal but it may void the warranty.
When you buy the iPhone you are also buying into the platform. If having multiple options for app stores is a necessity for you then an iPhone is the wrong device to purchase. Buy something else. There is nothing wrong with voting with your wallet as there are other phones on the market for people to buy.
The argument is that that approach is anti-competitive and unfair, especially since Apple itself gets a large cut of app sales.
I'm not coming down hard on either side, just yet. But I don't like the feel of this sort of lock-in, and almost no one would question the use of a term like "lock-in." Some lock-in is surely legal, even if almost always unpleasant. But it's only a hop, skip and a jump to full-fledged antitrust.
Heading out but you pick up a few PC games. By the way, Target was paid to put those up on the shelf.
Grab a Sony Playstation gift card. They get a percentage of that as well.
At checkout, you sign up of the Target bank card save 10%. They get a nice initial chunk from that and the bank running that card pays a monthly percent to Target for sending them over their customer.
(don't look into the publishing companies' tactics cause that will send you over the edge)
Apple themselves? Part of their marketing is literally that you can do everything on their devices.
> Should we really be requiring Apple or any manufacturer, by law, to implement specific defined features to support and enable side loading and management of external apps.
I can't see why not, the mobile app market has terrible competition, there's a big market issue here.
Yes, this is how capitalism works. The companies can be started by virtuous, far-sighted dreamers, like Steve Wozniak, Larry Page and John Lennon, but then they get infused by money from venture capitalists and investors who just want ROI.
Once they hire more than 5000 people, the edges of the company are not controlled by dreamers - worker bees are employed to make money by leveraging whatever is there to be leveraged. And so the mission drifts.
Or else, the company fails or disappears, which is what happened to John Lennon's company, Apple Music.
We need to rethink capitalism, so companies can grow to medium size, and stay there, providing good things to their customers in a virtuous, mutually beneficial way.
The article is about Fortnite being excluded from Apple's monopoly distribution platform. That platform enriches Apple at the expense of consumers and software developers.
Are you saying it's a good thing that Apple can exclude Fortnite for trying to get around the Apple tax?
I agree. Apple should not charge 30% for this type of transaction, which is just the resupply of virtual currency.
Apple should have a lower tier fee for this type of ongoing service transaction, which is clearly different to a sale in which a new customer is converted.
If Apple had a service tier with a fee of say 5% for virtual currency they’d still be compensated for providing the platform, but not excessively. Consumers and software vendors would benefit commensurately.
This two tiered model is just what happens in traditional pre-digital capitalism. Furniture stores charge 30-50% markup to cover the overheads of showroom rent and sales staff. Financial services companies like forex and credit cards charge 3-18% because they have different overheads and provide different value-add compared to retail sellers.
Wanna get a DLC? They all take a percentage. Also regardless of the money you spend on making your game. They all have to review it and only if they approve will it get published. Going to selling some XBox physical disc? You pay your percentage on what you print not what sells. Also you need to use a trusted disc manufacturer, they pay a percentage to XBox also, note this is all the same for Sony and Nintendo.
Jobs was the superior business person. At least, it turned out that way after he returned to Apple, rescued it from Scully, and spent decades turning it into a behemoth that changed the world.
Woz might have given the computers away just for the joy of it, but where would that have left us?
Tens of thousands of developers owe their livelyhood to Jobs' vision. They get to make apps and everything else, all because Steve created platforms and ecosystems that would sustain an entire industry.
Still, that doesn't excuse greed. Jobs is gone now, so he can't evolve the app store into what it should be becoming, which is a more mature version of the quality platform he created.
It wouldn't take much to fix this current hoo ha. Apple could just introduce a lower fee tier for trivial sales such as the re-supply of virtual currency in games. If they took 10% instead of 30%, the problem would be over, the platform would continue, the community would still have opportunity, consumers could play their games and buy their apps, and life would go on. Does that sound virtuous to you, eklanjo?
That's typically a broken window fallacy. You can't take this a proof of anything because you do not know what the world would have looked like if Apple did not exist - such developers could have gone and made other things on other platforms as well. A great artist will be able to produce great work even if they have to use spaghetti instead of paint. Tools are just tools.
I see.
Your original comment to me was about Steve Jobs, and what to make of his intentions and his legacy. Would you care to share your thoughts about Steve Jobs?
I recognize the fact that he was probably a good leader when it came to driving Apple focus to make quality hardware and solid software integration (the original iPhone was a big step in making portable devices actually usable by everyone).
However, I was reflecting that the word 'virtuous' was a poor fit for a person like Steve Jobs. You can typically think of someone virtuous as having high moral standards and principles.
Jobs was constantly driving his company to make ridiculous false claims (saying that Apple was the first company to invent X or Y) which is deceitful.
Apple's business practices consist in making walled gardens everywhere (which is kind of anti-competitive and entice users to be locked down in the ecosystem) instead of developing standards that can be used and shared by everyone, and this is also something that Jobs spearheaded from the get go (right since the beginning of Apple).
Of course, everyone has different standards, but being a good citizen is about taking and giving back. I can't remember Jobs ever giving anything back to the tech scene.
Personally, I like iPhones precisely because they're not general purpose platforms. I'm also not sure the phrase "general computing platform" can even be well-defined in the era of "smart" everything.
Not that you'd want to, but if you decided to do it, the option would be readily available.
Apple’s rules prevent vendors from linking to external service account setup/management. You cannot even mention the existence thereof, let alone link to it or advertise the options provided therein. Consumers are explicitly kept in the dark about any method other than payment through the App Store.
That’s the stunning uppercut. The size of Apple’s fee is merely a follow-up kick to the nads.
This is why service providers, from Hey.com to Netflix, have a special irritation for the App Store rules, and since this rule directly distorts markets by affecting consumer choice is why so many competition regulators have a file open about it.
If Microsoft was playing hardball with Rockstar over the next version of GTA, as an example, Sony would be falling over themselves rushing to get it as a PlayStation exclusive. The console market and app market just aren't comparable.
Google basically says, "we have a store. Sell through us and we take a cut. Or sell directly, or through some other store, and we'll warn users that we haven't vetted that stuff for security etc."
If anything, smartphone stores will be under more scrutiny.
I have no idea why you'd want to, but you can... UWP apps run just fine on Xbox and can be sold via the store - they just don't get access to the "exclusive" partition of the system (which you need to access certain system resources, such as > 2GB RAM). Sideloading prebuilt UWP apps is also possible. The exclusive partition is a different situation entirely - you need to be an approved developer to even access the SDKs.
I'd say there's a difference between what Xbox (and Playstation, and Nintendo) does compared to Apple by virtue of the consoles not being "open" development platforms (Xbox UWP aside). Anyone can grab the iOS SDK and start making apps, but only registered developers can do so on game consoles. Whether that's justified I don't know, I honestly haven't put enough thought into it. And whether courts would see that as a reason I definitely don't know.
Full disclosure, I work for Microsoft.
Bold of you to assume Google will keep that alive for a particularly long time.
But I don’t trust game developers to run those stores. They’re total cowboys and they’d probably be full of security holes and privacy issues.
Yes, and that's also bad.
Even if they don't though, that's a marketing offence not a product one. If there's any government interference needed it's in the form of a mandatory "walled garden" label on the box.
The most egregious part of Apple’s rules, and the reason that online service providers have a special loathing, is that apps are disallowed from linking to, advertising, or even mentioning that it is possible to sign up/subscribe/buy/rent outside of the app.
This is why you won’t see MMOs like FFXIV through the App Store, and is why you can’t sign up for Netflix, or even follow a link to their sign-up, from within the app.
Wake me up from this horrible nightmare.
Oopps... They do exactly this.
This is not to defend Apple nor Google. But Epic is by no means better, just not as big as A/G.
[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2015/05/continuing-to-protect-chro...
[2] Unless you're using Linux or the enterprise version of the browser.
The recently released new "stable" version of Firefox for Android that supports just 9 specific extensions at the moment might be actually even worse than Chrome.
Non-technical users would love it. It would offer them an environment much more secure and free of malware where they can install applications without fretting about getting the latest CryptoLocker type trojan. Finding Windows software on the open web is kind of like driving around the ghetto and cruising for drugs. Are you installing from firefox.com or fᎥrefοⅹ.com?
Apple tries to walk the line and keep both these user groups happy. It's hard. So far they've handled it by designing MacOS more for the first group (it has an App Store and controls but they're optional) and iOS/iPadOS more for the second group.
Steam, for example, does no do that: you can sell your game on Steam and outside of Steam at the same time and Valve will have no problem with it.
By maintaining control over which apps can be sold to end users via the App Store, Apple is able to offer a layer of control over how these apps can access (or not) your personal data.
There's nothing ridiculous about wanting to maintain data privacy/security on mobile devices, and that being of a higher priority with mobile than with a PC.
Wouldn’t MS want to secure its laptops by bundling a browser?
Wouldn’t I have equally private and financial documents on a PC? location/gps can’t be that much of a differentiator.
It is monopoly bullying whoever they can. They just happen to not directly affect us, unless we happen to be a developer making lot of money or compete with apple in any way.
I am an app developer for iOS. It does directly affect me.
You don't have to vet every single program on a computer to prevent the use of peripherals like GPS and cameras. you could just make a feature of the operating system that lets the user control what programs have access to peripherals and when.
And another thing: if your argument is that people are too dumb to know how to use a computer, then they shouldn't rely on computers at all! children shouldn't even be using smartphones in the first place. but I suppose that's a separate argument entirely.
Exploits for iOS are cheaper than exploits for Android because exploits for iOS are so plentiful.
I do not buy Apple products as a status symbol. I buy them because they work. I won't even say the products are good, there are a lot of things I'd like to see change. But they are the best thing on the market for getting my work done.
My laptop and phone are my hammer and workbench. The iPhone and MacBook are far and away the best product for the work I do, which is not iOS or MacOS development. They're simply the best general computing solution on the market right now.
Secondly, this narrow-minded attitude is reflected in you calling MacBook the best general computing solution. There are a large variety of requirements for general computing solution, the most common ones that macbook can't satisfy are cost and gaming performance. Indeed no one product can satisfy them.
The model makes sense for a console, as it's a very specialized device. A smartphone or a tablet are much closer to a general computing device. How many times has Apple said the iPad is a laptop replacement?
Phones can be used to:
-communicate
-consume media
-browse the web
-play games
Consoles can be used to:
-play games
-consume media
-browse the web
-communicate
I fail to see the difference to be honest.
I used a phone to call an ambulance, provide the police with video evidence of a crime, navigate when I am lost, file company accounts, banking, and to aid in mapping for architecture and subsequently applying for planning permission.
What do you do on a console that could cost you life and limb or render you bancrupt?
Well my cousin plays ark every single day, all day on his xbox, his health has deteriorated pretty badly because of this, it's bankrupted him as, he doesn't work and spends money on the game, all his friends exist in the game, I will backtread a bit on the lack of work, he does sell creatures or something to get a bit of money, literally his entire life revolves around this game and his console. He doesn't even own a mobile phone, he just uses Xbox live chat to talk to most people and has a landline in his house for the rare times he actually needs to make a phone call.
For all intents and purposes, that console is his general computing device for everything he does or that affects his life.
-play games
-consume media
-browse the web
-communicate
Define this.
The internet is reasonably open and accessible on iOS, but utilizing the full capability of an iOS device requires the App Store.
Stallman spent a ton of time crusading about how some things are appliances, and other things are computers; those things that are computers should offer flexibility (and ideally openness) in terms of what software you can run on them. In this case, the largest manufacturer of computing devices and software wants 30% of every transaction from native software run on their devices.
Epic was basically looking for preferential treatment, but now they're stepping up to the plate and saying the App Store is not market-friendly. It seems like they could be right, seeing as large as Apple is, and what role they actually have in computing.
As it should be. If people want open and crazy, then they can flounder around on the web and try to get it to do what native apps do. That's their problem and Apple shouldn't have to bend over backwards to support that route. Developers get to make a choice - make a web app, or make a native app that gets all the benefits of Apple's curated ecosystem. As a consumer and developer, I'll take the latter any day. Others feel differently, and can choose Android.
you buy a macbook and now you can't install ANY software that is not on the macOS appstore. oh! and you can't install a different OS.
would you accept that? what's the difference?
Buy a Librem5, or a PinePhone, or whatever. It's a free market, after all.
I don't get mad at Casio because I can't hack the circuit board and change the time easily to 24hr - I buy a watch that supports it.
This is a free market solvable problem. The issue is people like the app store. The ones mad about this are software companies - because they want more money for themselves.
The use of the consumer is just appeal to emotion - but it's really about Epic ripping off another kid for vbucks and getting more money.
If Apple allowed others to create App Stores, then there would be no problem, but hardware + iOS + App Store are inseparable.
It's like U.S. citizenship forbidding non-Walmart shopping.
Anything requiring a single android component goes in the “doesn’t actually work” category.
Neither is nice but at least iOS gets updates.
I don't think you're going to really be able to reliably avoid the problem that very very very few people outside of AOSP are doing any work on OSS for phones.
They sell products. Those products have well-known rules. If you don't like the rules, don't buy the product.
An argument can be made that it's morally wrong, but if you're going down that road, there's a lot of things should be morally more compelling than Apple's AppStore policies.
This is pretty much the whole reason the GPLv3 exists.
No obligation to help vs actively hindering are not really the same thing.
The technical and social reality that giving apple the freedom to configure the majority of devices in the US is extremely unpleasant. Enough that it makes me question the principles driving the philosophy that allowed this (in particular, the legality of closed software.)
One of the main roadblocks is intellectual property law. If IP didn't exist, there would be all sorts of iPhone clones with modified versions of iOS.
I'm OK with closed source software being legal, prohibiting closed source would be tyrannical. What I'm not OK is with software patents, copyright, anti-hardware-hacking laws, etc.
We can't deny the security that apple provides over other providers. Part of that is the closed garden - it SHOULD BE a product. The market should provide alternatives.
The only people that benefit from this are big companies - small software devs will have their apps devalued by this move, and the people will just get ripped off more when Epic wins and raises their dumb scam Vbucks to 10$.
Apple saying that I'm not allowed to step outside their walled garden on a device I own is restricting my freedom.
> Apple saying that I'm not allowed to step outside their walled garden on a device I own is restricting my freedom.
Only if there is no remediation - there is. Buy an android and quit moaning. "Freedoms." Laughable. Belarus is shooting people and you're mad because you can't force a company to do what you want when the free market can easily solve the problem.
Except none of those things are the point of antitrust law. But I guess who cares anyway, when genocide is always worse than these things, so we shouldn't care about them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_jailbreaking#Legality
You should not have to rely on security issues in order to install whatever you want on your phone.
Jailbreak should only be needed when you want to replace OS blocks, not just install something.
0: https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2019/10/checkrain-click-f...
They additionally prevent jailbreaking by patching vulnerabilities.
Only one of these things is being called out.
You can get into all sorts of theoretical discussions about how if there was a way to do it, they'd be increasing their attack surface since now they have to make sure this path is locked properly when the user doesn't want it, but people act like the only way for jailbreaking to work is for Apple to stop patching 0 days, which is not the case.
Security loopholes are a different thing.
tHiS IS nOt a Pc BUt a mAc, you know? ;p
We should be able to install what we want on a general purpose computing device. You can already see the Apple mentality creeping into other companies like Mozilla, who suddenly find it acceptable to limit user freedom for questionable reasons, and the normalization of stripped user liberties that Apple champions is worrying.
But similarly, there's no law requiring anyone to sell products that allow you to do whatever you want with them once they've been bought.
You can argue for such a law, but competition law is a pretty weak place to start.
Arguably, Apple is creating a market by their policies: the fact that it's not filled with competitors indicates only that most people don't care.
Either we do, in which case what Apple is doing in perfectly reasonable, as is Walmart selling fridges that explode when you put someone else's milk in them ("It's in the contract!"), or it isn't.
Things like the first sale doctrine give an insight into past legal thinking suggesting the latter. But it's far from simple to discern by just looking at the law.
The music/video industry asserts that you're not allowed to play/show some media item that you've bought. Amazon doesn't allow you to resell or bequeath Kindle books. Caterpillar doesn't let you repair your own tractor.
The first sale doctrine was established in a very different time.
Again, this is just out of touch. Call it what it is - software companies want more money and want to use the market apple created for every last one of them for free.
If Apple want to impose rules without any government oversight, they are free to start their own country with their own government and impose their own rules.
If they did they did this with the app store as used by existing iphones, then that would probably cause them to get in trouble, but if they made a new app store with these policies that was only used by a new model of iphone, then while extreme, I'd think it's within their rights. It's not that long ago that feature phones with limited app selection and internet browsing as a premium feature were a thing.
Smartphones and "apps services" come as a whole and are commodity (drug?) enough to be somehow regulated. Then, again, I'm french :)
Choice for non hackers feels pretty much limited to choosing apple|google|huawei|... poison pill or rejecting the whole smartphone+cloud+5g+... stuff.
How many companies will look at situations like this and decide not to bother with developing for Apple platforms? I've already stepped back my efforts to support MacOS (I don't target iOS at present). Too many hoops, too much control freakery, and no real comeback if they ever decide that they don't want me to publish on their platform. The balance of power in the relationship is simply skewed too far in favour of them, and a tiny misunderstanding could end my business. These companies have far too much unchecked and unregulated power.
Monopolies lead to stagnation, rising prices, and inferior product quality. Even though Apple is not a monopoly in the strict sense, I think we consumers will benefit from alternative app store - or Apple opening up the platform.
I believe one can still have (moderately) secure ecosystem without it being a walled garden.
A perfectly suitable competitor ... which has exactly the same fees, similar policies and do not seem to have any pressure due to the competition to change them, yeah something does not sound right here.
Alternatively I could compare the number of companies I could use to host my web app (100k+) to the number of companies I could use to host my mobile app (just 2). The lack of competition when you compare that to an healthy market is obvious.
Does Apple also have a monopoly on writing the OS that runs on iPhones?
Do they also have a monopoly on creating the iPhone hardware? And choosing what they write in press releases?
Yes, of course. But I think the issue might be the extent to which this is an artificial monopoly, rather than a natural one.
Fortnite isn't just a game anymore, its where a lot of kids are hanging out. concerts, movies and other things are happening there.
I think Apple's cut is egregious but at the same time, they're not a monopoly. My main gripe is that they're behaving as if they're bringing value that the developers are riding on, when in reality nobody would buy iPhones if it weren't for the value that many developers are bringing to the platform, often at no cost to Apple.
Their strategy also adds a lot of consumer value. I use an iPhone specifically because I understand the tradeoffs between freedom and reliability/security, and I go for the reliability/security. Not everyone wants a second job playing sysadmin on their smartphone.
And there is also the fact that the government doesn't classify a trust[1] by the dictionary definition of monopoly:
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
It's a fairly difficult comparison to make though because you have to compare a single companies vertical integration to the non-integrated supply chains of several other companies.
Anytime the discussion around Apple’s take on subscription revenue comes up there are always comments from people that they wouldn’t even mind paying a premium price just to have the convenience of having all their subscriptions managed in one place, and free of company-specific dark patterns for unsubscribing.
Fortnite money has nothing to do with Apple. If they would only charge the processing fee and whatnot there would be no debate. Compare it to paying Apple for subscribing to Netflix/Spotify/Amazon. What is their accomplishment in this case?
If it were up to me, Apple would charge more like 3% and keep all other factors the same in terms of strictly shutting down developers who try to skirt the policies.
Would you care if apps could offer two subscription methods, the Apple one with no-BS and the developers' one with a lower price (but potentially shittier experience)?
It's a genuine question, as you thinking about the app store consumer experience.
Personally I like the choice. Pay with cash and get X% off, or use a credit card :)
Of course there is. You can argue that it shouldn't be the deciding factor here, but you can't argue it doesn't exist at all.
iOS is basically a geographical region. It's like saying there isn't a California market because it's instead the US market. Or that you can't be considered a monopoly because people can move. Yes, they can, but there's significant burdens to that movement. And it turns out that burden was enough to consider things like utilities to be monopolies. Is the burden on switching between Android & iOS high enough to be considered a barrier to free competition? I'd say yes, it is. As such, iOS is its own market in which Apple is abusing monopoly position.
As is well known with anti-trust lawsuits that depends on how one defines market.
As is less known, anti-trust lawsuits don't actually require monopolies.
Counterpoint: the consistency, convenience, and safety of the App Store and broader iOS platform is part of why so much money is spent there.
[EDIT] but yes I think their cut should be lower. They are definitely delivering a ton of value to developers, though, and part of that is created precisely by some of the restrictions that developers love to complain about.
This is a really interesting point. Whether this is the reason or not for me, but I make and sell apps on both platforms and the identical app, identical price sells 4 or 5 to 1 on iOS vs. Android.
Further, the market for "smartphones" is not Apple vs Google. It's Apple vs Samsung vs Motorola vs LG vs Sony. Those are smartphone makers. At the 50%+ marketshare, Apple has more than double the market share of it's next biggest competitor.
Further, as pointed out elsewhere you don't have to have a monopoly for being sued for anti-competitive behavior.
Conversely, you can have a monopoly and commit abuses and get away with it in the pro-business United States. Microsoft is noticeably intact, despite what we may have wanted to happen in the late 90s.
Apple realistically has more to fear in Europe.
In this case, the market came together to produce a solution much better for society than the state could have concocted, or predicted: high quality open source software. We can all be thankful that Netscape’s market for $40 web browsers (actually buggy groupware by that point) wasn’t protected for any longer than it should have been, because the pressure of Microsoft’s dominance drove the market towards demanding more symmetrical rights via entirely new approaches of software development and distribution across desktop applications, server and embedded operating systems and software, and web-based platform-agnostic applications.
Source? The sources I’ve seen has Samsung much closer to Apple than that (30-35% vs 40-45%).
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-sh...
[1] https://cdn2.unrealengine.com/apple-complaint-734589783.pdf
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euiSHuaw6Q4
The idea that a large platform like iOS can only have apps loaded through a market place controlled by the hardware manufactured is clearly in violation of the spirit of anti-trust laws.
However there's no legal precedent on this because no one with deep enough pockets to fight Apple has been angry enough to do it yet.
Meaning this could be great news for everyone if this goes to court and Apple loses as they should.
The big differentiator is that phones have become the most frequently used personal computing device for many people, and we expect the freedom to use it how we want.
But the situation being almost the same, a ruling in one would trigger a tidal wave in the other.
There was a fun moment in last year’s vergecast interview with a lawyer on the App store issue, also related to Epic I think. The case of console stores was brought to the conversation, and the lawyer bailed out of it pretty fast with a “there might be similarities but we need to look deeper before saying anything, let’s put that aside for now” kind of answer.
We should! I would love to run Steam on my PS4.
But Sony already invests in some studios to develop games for their platform.
In general, those console platform owners have been much friendlier to publishers than Apple (and maybe Google) since game publishers generally have much more negotiation power against console platform holders. Nintendo's primary weak point has been lack of 3rd-party games. MS and Sony compete with each other to gain more exclusive offers and they even provide substantial subsidiary to developers. If you want to enforce your own arbitrary rule at the cost of losing CoD, I don't think it's going to be a good trade-off. Creative contents are usually not replaceable and publishers don't really have incentives to attack game platform holders in this dynamic.
The same thing doesn't really apply to App stores since 1. the upfront cost for buying a phone compared to usual apps is much higher (>100x), especially for the premium phone comparable to iPhone, while it's <10x for usual consoles 2. Apple (and Google) also has their own alternative services for many popular apps so hurting competitors by setting arbitrary rules is actually beneficial for them. In short, having a monopolistic status itself is not problematic but exercising it is.
I'm no fan of Apple -- they engage in massive tax avoidance, labor arbitrage, and are just too big for my taste. Same criticism of Google. And Facebook. But you don't go from emotion --> must be illegal. There has to be some reasonable standard you can apply that will make sense across time and across companies/industries. What is that standard?
Perhaps congress should legislate the share of revenue that a platform is allowed to take. Not being ironic; if we are going to regulate this, let's do it with lawmakers instead of courts.
There no such clear cut on what is acceptable or not. In fact, typically console makers charges much more than 10% but not much companies are complaining about that because it's more negotiable compared to the app store situation. The court may decide how to remedy this, but the decision won't be made simply based on the app store cut but take care of other contexts as well.
The real issue is, Apple has designed their product in order to retain complete control on potential customer facing interactions and is blatantly exercising their market power. The game platforms are usually not in a position to do so. Android might be slightly better but IMO this also needs to be addressed.
> There has to be some reasonable standard you can apply that will make sense across time and across companies/industries. What is that standard?
The existing antitrust framework is already capable of handling this app store situation; even assuming Apple is not a dominant player (which is a very optimistic assumption in favor of Apple; app store is likely a monopoly based on hypothetical monopolist test), tying iPhone, App Store and its payment module already brings significant legal risks. Though it still needs to evolve to address other situations such as Amazon or Google.
How has apple done this in a fundamentally different way from sony? I'm not seeing the difference here, which means I'm not seeing what you consider to be the real issue. Care to elaborate?
> The existing antitrust framework is already capable of handling this app store situation;
I think you are going to be dissapointed. Maybe EU antitrust would adopt more of a philosophical criteria for fairness, but US antitrust is unlikely to side with Epic here.
Having done a little digging into the relevant case law I agree with your assessment, US courts have generally been very reluctant to find antitrust violations in aftermarket scenarios where the customer was fully aware of aftermarket limitations before purchasing a product, had the opportunity to buy an alternative product without such limitations, and proceeded to buy the original product anyway.
I think the most likely outcome is Epic's case is dismissed based on failure to establish that "iOS app distribution" is a separate and relevant market for antitrust purposes.
The Ninth Circuit reversed the district court's order and ruled that Accolade's use of reverse engineering to publish Genesis titles was protected under fair use, and that its alleged violation of Sega trademarks was the fault of Sega.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade
I suspect Apple will argue the oppose. The "freedom" argument has been common in the perennial "iOS v Android" discussions, from which I'd note that iOS appeals to many because it's locked down; it's easy to use and it's not junk. The Play Store was a mess last I remember it. Some consider that freedom, others dislike it. It's a brand perception thing, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple makes the same point, that an open platform would harm their brand reputation.
> The idea that a large platform like iOS can only have apps loaded through a market place controlled by the hardware manufactured is clearly in violation of the spirit of anti-trust laws.
> Blizzard raises this argument in its motion, contending that Defendants cannot establish antitrust claims based on its users' voluntary consent to the EULA and TOU. (Mot. Br. 22–23.) Although Blizzard does not argue this point in the market power analysis, the Court finds that this discussion is applicable to whether the market power requirement is established. Blizzard cites Newcal, Queen City Pizza, Inc. v. Domino's Pizza, Inc., 124 F.3d 430, 441 (3d Cir.1997), and Apple Inc. v. Psystar Corp., 586 F.Supp.2d 1190, 1201 (N.D.Cal.2008), to show that Defendants cannot base its claims on the aftermarket restrictions. ( See Opp'n Br. 17.) These cases explain that the law prohibits an antitrust claimant from asserting an antitrust claim “resting on market power that arises solely from contractual rights that customers knowingly and voluntarily gave to the defendant” when they purchased the initial tying product.
https://casetext.com/case/blizzard-entmt-inc-v-ceiling-fan-s...
If Apple changed their stance to "all services and digital goods associated with your app must included in the original purchase price", that might meet the court's requirements for legality but it would leave Epic without their current revenue stream.
The original Apple parody was to convince consumers to switch from one platform (PC) to a different platform (Mac).
Now, maybe you believe Apple, in the form of iOS, has become Big Brother. Fine, in that case, Epic should provide its own gaming platform.
But Epic isn't trying to destroy Big Brother here. It still wants to run on Big Brother's platform. It just doesn't want to give up any revenue to do so.
Shrug.
So no, Epic doesn't want to run on Big Brother's platform.
That argument would ring less hollow had they done that on the platform that does allow side loading, but they eventually published on the Google Play store.
Actually they just got banned on android as well, so now they only allow sideloading on android.
My point was, they had the chance and in fact did go completely sideloading on Android, but eventually caved and joined the Play store. Obviously there’s value enough for them to take Google’s 30% cut in the Play store, so why did they do it? Why wasn’t staying sideload only enough, especially when they are arguing they should be able to do it on iOS.
> Which was actually what their update did on Apple too
Sorry, but that’s 100% false. Adding an extra payment option in your app is not the same thing as sideloading and not going through the App Store for publishing and distribution. Apples and Oranges so you speak.
Arguably I think there would be a reasonable anti-trust suit against the OS as well, it's not clear to me why it isn't illegal to utilize their monopoly on their hardware to create a monopoly on the OS running on the device.
This way of viewing things leads to some really silly conclusions. Apple doesn't have a monopoly on the iPhone, the premise is intrinsically absurd. By this argument literally any non-commodity product is a "monopoly" of the company that distributes it.
Moreover, what Apple sells isn't hardware, it's hardware with software on it. That's the product. As far as I know there is no official way to buy either iOS or an iPhone that doesn't have iOS installed. Sometimes companies take an opinionated stance on how they distribute their products, like a firearm manufacturer that only manufactures firearms that have a safety. Framing that sort of thing as an antitrust issue is unreasonable.
In essence, any practice that helps compete in the market by other ways than increasing value to the consumer is suspect. Incidentally, this is a double edges sword, as this is the interpretation of the antitrust laws that has enabled the rise of so many monopoly-like companies in the last few decades. (e.g. Amazon: we're increasing value to customers because we can offer lower prices if we're larger)
If every Tom, Dick and Harry could setup an app store for the iPhone, this doesn't necessarily give me more control. It might mean I am then forced to use the Epic platform for all Epic related products. Now how do I know that Epic have appropriately vetted their application? What if they start producing applications for the iPhone which are terrible?
This is a big problem on the Google store whereby plenty of the apps are rubbish.
I invite you to read even the headline of the article this thread is about.
Sorry? Apple's is hovering around $2 trillion right now, Tencent's is less than trillion is it not? And they only own a minority stake in Epic…
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21357771/apple-cloud-gamin...
https://twitter.com/FacebookGaming/status/129170874980819763...
All of Apple Arcade's games are just mobile games already available in the App store and reviewed individually. The above options are quite a different proposition and Apple's only grievance is they can't review the PC-style game content they are distributing.
It's probably more like Netflix than Apple Arcade, since they are streaming arbitrary content with subscriptions. But games have always been treated different, so again they are not being uniquely targeted.
(Not that I agree with blocking them)
What about Sony and Nintendo?
Does Epic allow people to buy stuff for Fortnite from outside of Fortnite and other companies?
Same way as the Steam Workshop and other mod-able games.
Some of them are just better at bamboozling schmucks^Wmore naive consumers into becoming their loyal fans and projecting some nobler characteristics onto these corporations, and even identifying with their brand, and becoming an unpaid extension of the corporation's PR department by arguing for them ferociously on online forums.
There is nothing ideological about why Epic is doing this. The merely did their calculations and determined (or at worst made a safe bet) that the money invested in this will cause them to get more money in the long run, regardless of the outcome.
1. The historical origin of "decimate" does not define the English word. Many words have historical origins that differ with their current definitions.
2. The word "fiscal" does not refer only to "taxes" but also to financial matters in general.
By the way, I never the said the guy was wrong to say fiscally. It was sort of a sloppy usage of the word—in my opinion of course. Which I hope its obvious that this is, seeing as its a comment in a forum!
And I’m certainly not wrong to say that fiscally is to do with taxes. I might have been wrong assuming that he or she was looking for a less ambiguous word. I do tend to assume the best in people, and am often wrong.
No, I just understand that words can have multiple definitions and any of them is perfectly valid to use. You were simply wrong to "correct" them in both cases.
Here's what you did:
> "...a comment in a forum"
I think you meant "a comment on a web site" because a forum means an ancient Roman marketplace...see how stupid this game is?
Both comments were tongue in cheek.
Apparently since more explanation is clearly warranted, I’ll provide it.
In the comment about fiscally, I thought it odd that the person appeared to be concerned with whether indie developers, of which I am one, were going to be contributing to government revenues, since I’ve only ever heard fiscally used in a tax context by professionals. And certainly when I approach my financial strategy, taxes are always a consequence of the goal, and not the goal itself.
In the other comment, I was making a joke, which seems to have gone a bit over your head.
By the way, a “web site” is simply the location where an arachnid...
Anyway, I think you get my point and hopefully I wasn't too harsh but sorry if I was. Have a good day/night!
If I have a son, in December, then I have another son the next year in January, which one is my first son?
At which point it was no longer the tenth month.
Unless you find you had two other sons you didn't know about.
The word you’re looking for by the way is “financially”. Fiscally is to do with taxes.
[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/fiscally
The OED establishes a North American usage of this term as "relating to financial matters", and is not exclusive to taxes.
I’m confused. Is that not the purpose of the lawsuit?
It seem like something their lawyers pitched to them as “hey if it works, great, you save millions a year on the App Store percentage, and if it doesn’t, hey, at least you’ll get a whole lot of publicity, which should drive your sales up enough to more than compensate for the losses of being off the stores for a bit.”
Epic is the maker of unreal engine, which collects a 5% royalty on licensee game sales over $1M.
So they would stand to profit somewhat more than just from lower fees on Fortnite.
It's the large scale clients that are hurt the most by the 30% cut. Old timer indie devs who used to have to manage payment and distribution themselves, like Jeff Vogel, will tell you that Steam's cut is absolutely fair given the value it brings. On PC there are different platforms competing for Steam, which might be a reason why Valve introduced discount tiers for more successful titles. If an outcome of the PR stunt is that Apple decreases its cut, it will likely be a similar arrangement which does not benefit the small businesses.
The issue with the App Store is not the cut, but that it is the only gate to the iOS walled garden.
It's good that Steam has competition! And I wish Epic's was competing on features, but at the moment their platform only competes by having a lower cut and payed exclusives only. The only benefit to users has been that Epic funded certain games that would otherwise might not have happened.
I get what you're saying, but I think companies monopolising eyeballs then charging you an entry fee is... Kinda bull. Skimming is fine, but I want their margins to be tiny.
It's not the same.
So I think it's very unlikely that Apple will allow other payment options. It's more likely for their 30% to go down, but even that's questionable.
Yet, many apps choose have direct Play Store purchases, since that convenience might translate to a higher conversion rate.
Android also allows third party apps to be installed.
Your argument doesn't hold up in light of all of this.
You are completely wrong.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/21003553/google-play-stor...
Not really. Not being allowed to host on the Google Play Store does not mean not being allowed to install the app on an Android.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/3/17645982/epic-games-fortni...
> You are completely wrong.
He isn't wrong. Android allows developers to integrate Stripe and bypass the 30% cut.
I didn't get this from any single source, just bits and pieces put together from random forum posts and a few quora threads. And of course policies can change, so anything I found might be different right now. But I know you can buy digital books through Amazon's Kindle app on Android and it doesn't look like Google gets any of that cut: it's the normal "one click" purchase option you see in their web site, no prompt for Google Pay, just click and it's yours, downloading right away.
Similarly Audible let's me do this as well.
Oh, Tencent has a large stake in Epic? Who knew.
the eagerness with which people jump to conspiracy theories around chinese influence is nuts.
Might finally get the ball rolling on a court case to stop the huge app store abuses by Apple and Google.
...1,000 V-bucks, which is roughly equivalent to $10 in-game Fortnite currency, now costs just $7.99 if you use Epic direct payment instead of the standard Apple payment processing. Normally, that amount of currency costs $9.99. Epic says, in this case, customers keep the extra savings, not the company. That cast the new arrangement as a pro-consumer move instead of a greedy power play.
My math skills aren't the best but it seems like epic is still pocketing almost an extra dollar there than previously (almost 10%), indicating that this is move motivated by financial gain (if not greed). Of course Apple stands out as the bigger case of "highway robbery".
I am somewhat curious on how much apple spends on maintaining the app store and how much of that %30 is net profit.
The credit card companies themselves charge 3.00%+0.10 at the reasonable maximum (or roughly $0.31). That is still not even counting the payment processor's fees (which pay the credit card company's fees for you).
I mean the "7 dollar price" is all artificial anyway, it doesn't really cost Epic anything to make the product of those 7 dollars (it's economic rent extracted from the intellectual property they maintain). Either way Epic is making more money on this move even if the whole extra dollar is fees.
This is part of why a lot of mom & pop shops still have a 5 or 10 dollar minimum for card transactions; When I worked at a computer shop in an almost-sketchy neighborhood our minimum fee was Two whole dollars.
Given the frequency of refunds and the like, I'd assume Epic is probably not making much, if anything extra on top of this.
This may actually close a ban-hopping/stalling gap. I've seen people claim that if you do a refund for an App store purchase, the publisher may not even know about the refund for 2-3 months after it was requested/granted. This likely shortens Epic's time to react and ban people for requesting fraudulent refunds.
Fortnite is not really the hill I have seen this battle take place. For example Apple also rejected the satirical app of a Pulitzer winning journalist (it does not make their app good but suggests that the content was probably not just a fart joke).
Still, people should be able to install whatever they want on their phones, without Apple playing walled garden.
It is not good for devs getting squeezed by the platform owners, it is not good for people being able to install whatever they want, and quite frankly it is not good for freedom of speech either.
I am not including Google here since their policy is a bit more defendable, you can sideload apps without too much trouble, I even believe that Epic uses that mechanism to do not have to pay the 30%.
This move hurt Apple, full stop. It will likely cost them somewhere in the range of $50-$200M per year. You can quote me Apple's annual revenue, but I know what it is. Fortnite's contribution to it is small, but its probably far, far larger than most people here realize.
Of course, it hurts Epic more on the short term. But, long term, maybe Fortnite gets to come back at a lower rate; maybe they'll get to use their own payment processor; maybe the courts will actually work, and they'll force Apple to allow competing storefronts, which would enable the Epic Games Store to release on iOS, earning huge revenue for Epic.
And what's more: Epic's bread and butter has always been Unreal Engine, which is charged at a rate of 5% of a game's revenue (above $1M I believe, below that its free). Unreal is absolutely used for iOS game development. If Epic can win even a lower rate for all game devs, it amplifies their iOS earnings on Unreal; more money in the devs pockets means more money in Epic's pocket.
Epic's warchest is massive; its not just Fortnite, but also money from Tencent. They have the support of their massive community, including impressionable adolescents. They picked a time just weeks after Tim Cook was torn apart by Congress for allegations of antitrust. They're joining the ranks of Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and every other company that Apple has screwed over with their policies. They can fight this out, and its hard to say what the exact outcome will be, but whatever it is, Apple will not like it. Apple is on the wrong side of history.
[1] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/fortnite-hits-1bn-in-...
[2] https://www.cultofmac.com/632642/apple-worlds-fourth-largest...
Thanks for clarifying that framing for me.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
[0]https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/13/21368079/fortnite-epic-an...
Google (and Apple) should have a say in what they sell in their storefronts. Suggesting that they have to carry any application submitted to them, law permitting, is taking the situation too far. Even demanding that applications submitted through the store use their IAP frameworks, at the 30% fee, feels alright to me.
The line is drawn at "is that store the only option". In Google's case, it isn't. Epic, and Android itself, has a road ahead of them getting users into alternative storefronts, but Android has the capability, and I think we're headed in the direction of alternative storefronts being the norm. This is especially true given that Google really does not control the hardware; Samsung has been working with Microsoft a lot lately, and being a Galaxy S20 user, I get a strong feeling that Samsung's relationship with Google is not a happy one.
Given the money at stake, they are also strongly motivated to do it without paying Apple's 30% ransom
Obviously stakeholders and lawyers were involved. Marketing saw an opportunity and jumped in.
The beauty of their main technology product, a realtime engine is that it can create videos like that on much smaller timelines than traditional CG or a live shoot.
Honestly with the right talent that could have been pulled together surprisingly fast.
* Why did Apple trounce these folks? My first thought is, ridiculously intrusive anti-cheat? * Then, assuming that's the case and you're ok with letting someone else remote-admin your machine, can't you just install Fortnite directly anyway?
So what's the big deal exactly?
2. Apple has to enforce their ToS (there is legal precedent that if you don't enforce your own rules, then you don't care about them - so it's a good idea to follow your own rules) so they had to boot Fortnite from the App store
The big deal is that this might trigger significant legal judgements that may determine what tech giants can or cannot do on their platforms.
We may think of how Europe deals with big business as extreme and radical, but it's only because we got so far away from the reasonable middle ground of big money and citizenry coexisting without f---ing each other over.
What has Europe done in the last decade in anti-trust? Vestager brought a series of suits that got overturned by the courts, or charged monopolists peanuts for brazenly violating the law.
They have been squeezing billions of dollars out of Facebook and Google, for one thing.
But Apple needs to align the charges more closely with the benefits and costs.
Charge developers for costs they incur. Make the benefits opt-in and charge them for that too. And let them go their own way if they don’t want to opt-in.
It’s a clear violation of the TOS and Epic clearly knows that. They likely also knew well before making the update and perhaps thought Apple would bluff and only threaten a take down. Platforms aren’t free.
Why should Epic get a “special arrangement” from all other developers?
If you don't like the terms, then don't be on the Apple App store, but of course your missing a huge swath of the population thus the 30% fee. Being on the App store is essentially unlimited marketing and exposure for your app. Cost of doing business.
(The writing has been on the wall and Google is already adapting - they sent out surveys last month to some developers about dropping the 30% fee and charging developers an annual listing fee instead - possibly also fees for bandwidth/storage used like a hosting company does. The survey also mentioned plans to spin off the Google Play store as a separate non-Google company.)
The Google survey I received specifically asked about experiences as a developer with the Epic Store, whether I thought customers would pay a subscription fee for access to the Play Store & Android updates, and whether I would trust the Play Store & Android if they were no longer owned and run by Google/Alphabet. So it will be fascinating to see how the court rulings change the tech landscape.
iOS is the large reason people choose iPhones over Android. The phone is simply a portal to iOS.
Without the OS the phone is essentially a brick. To argue the hardware is the only product is an absolute falsehood.
To re-use your mom as the argument:
* Go grab her phone and point at any given app, and ask if it's available on Android too.
* Ask her if she knows the differences are between the Play Store and the App Store.
* Ask her if she thinks there is any material difference between getting applications onto an Android phone versus an iPhone.
She presumably doesn't know anything about these things, makes the assumption that apps are apps, and leaves it at that.
None of these questions get you anywhere. You made the claim that hardware was why people upgraded - which is false because of the diversity of the market and the fact that the hardware is only a portal to what they want. You haven't dealt with the argument - that the App Store is a separate product from an iPhone. It isn't.
It's extremely unethical in my opinion to force some service provider to adjust the service to your needs/preferences.
This would not be an issue if Apple allowed users to easily side load apps.
Sorry, you are building a strawman here.
1) You have the full right to do whatever you want with your phone. I don't argue with that, it's the truth.
2) Apple need not to help you to do whatever you want with your phone.
For some reason you confuse your right to do whatever you want with your phone with Apple's obligation to help you with that.
Do reverse engineering, flash custom OS, jailbreak, it's your right, but Apple has no obligation to help you with that. If it's to hard for you to do whatever you want with their device, buy another vendor's device then.
> For some reason you confuse your right to do whatever you want with your phone with Apple's obligation to help you with that.
At what point along the road from 'not helping' to 'actively hindering' does this become not ok?
When a company goes out of their way to prevent you exercising your rights, what do we call that?
It’s well within the governments rights to say a transactional middleman service can only charge a certain fee. What is important to society is the success of the producers, not the rent seeking middleman.
They're about developers not having any choice. Developers have to release on iOS. There's no other option, because that's where most users are. Apple has a captive audience, and they're using that captive audience to abuse developers, who have no recourse.
The issue with many armchair commentators on HackerNews is that we look at the philosophy of the situation, and not the reality. The philosophy is "its Apple's platform, it's their right to run it however they want." The reality is "a billion people use this thing." The rules change when you get that big; its not about philosophy, its about doing what's best for everyone. To some degree, Apple does have a right to run their platform how they want: Fuck Their Rights.
They do have a choice. You target Apple users and agree upon Apple's terms, or you don't, and publish your app in F-droid/Jolla store, hoping somebody would pay.
The reality is that apple has built an infrastructure which allow you to gain profits and deliver to a huge amount of customers.
> The reality is "a billion people use this thing.
Because Apple put quite a lot of resources to build it. It's their right to operate it as they do.
> Fuck Their Rights
Sure, but let's start with turning your home into a shelter for homeless people for the sake of the society, Fucking your Right, and then we'll fuck theirs. People are always quick to deprive others of their rights as I see.
And here, a perfect example of slippery slope. You are doing exactly what 013a called as "armchair commentators", and not looking at reality.
The reality is that there are two OSs for phones, and two stores. This arrangement is detrimental to developers and consumers, and, as it stands, there's no getting out of it without resources that no one, apart from Amazon, has.
Nope. In reality I've owned n900, n9, Jolla 1 and now iphone. I've owned phones with 4 different OS (not counting symbian).
And of course there are various stores for Android, at least some of my friends live well enough with AOSPs without Gapps.
If you don't like iphone, don't develop for it, you are free to leave.
> there's no getting out of it without resources that no one, apart from Amazon, has.
There is no getting out because people try to force apple to fit their needs instead of giving other platform chance.
Apple is dominating because it's good enough and provides some good merits which other vendors don't (like long term support). As Microsoft's attempt to enter the market has shown, you can't just beat it having the resources, devs and customers need a reason to switch.
I would prefer apple to become less convenient forcing the developers and customers to seek for alternatives and develop for good and more free platforms like Sailfish, making the market more diverse.
Anyways as Windows phone and Sailfish examples have shown, a 30% fee is not a good enough reason to start to support another platform. And if so, I don't see why we should go the authoritarian way forcing apple to change their fees.
30% seems a fair price for using the infrastructure they've built, if it's not a good reason to switch to any other infrastructure, which existed and still do.
CORPORATIONS. ARE. NOT. PEOPLE.
If tomorrow the government fined Apple a hundred billion dollars, for literally no reason except for the fun of it, I could focus my entire being, every ounce of willpower I have, into attempting to expel one milliliter-sized tear, and would still have dry eyes.
When an indie developer spends her days and nights producing a work of passion, only to pay the US Government 25% and Apple 30% of the few thousand dollars she makes, and the next day Apple announces that they made a hundred billion dollars last quarter: I stand with the indie developer, not with the faceless mega-corporation.
I couldn't lose ten seconds of sleep over some perceived injustice that this developer used the piece of literal garbage Apple excretes every year and slaps an "xcode" label on to develop her passion project, and that somehow entitles them to the billions of dollars they make in taxes.
I won't curl up in the fetal position and cry when thinking about how much Apple DESERVES the billions of iPhone users out there, stuck in a duopoly between two mega-corporations who treat ethics the same way I treat toilet paper, people who spend thousands of dollars on that hardware, and thus Apple DESERVES to control what they can and cannot use their phones for, thus Apple DESERVES to control which developers they interact with and how they compensate them.
The gall I must have, to not log on to the internet and defend a trillion dollar corporation against this horrible, mean indie developer for coming after their 30%! Hank Rearden earned that 30%! By god, through the sheer force of paying other people to build a fence, and a little luck convincing customers to live inside of it, they earned it!
There is no such thing as rights of corporations, only rights of people.
According to your logic nobody can turn my home into a homeless shelter, but if I and my friend together build a hotel, it's fine to expropriate it since we are corporation.
But we are still people and it's our rights, we're not a faceless entity.
> When an indie developer spends her days and nights producing a work of passion
Well, it's fine to fuck an indie dev's rights, if she works in a team. They are a corporation after all.
A 30% Tax Forever is a whole different problem.
Epic HAD to do this in order to force the issue in order to claim specific harm. Of COURSE Apple pulled the app, and Epic knew they would. Epic now gets to claim that Apple's behavior is consumer-hostile and anticompetitive. That's a claim they cannot make without a concrete example of harm (this is just how the courts work). Saying that "Apple was within their rights" is the same argument as "If it is legal it is moral" which we all know is not true.
> Why should Epic get a “special arrangement” from all other developers?
They shouldn't. And neither should Amazon - they do. Or any other example where Apple has made exceptions to their rules, if your company is big enough.