> Make messaging, voice-calling, and video-calling services interoperable with third-party services upon request.
I hope this means WhatsApp will be somewhat interoperable with equivalent messaging platforms. But I suppose this is just designed to target iMessage. Or have I misunderstood?
> Ensure that all apps are uninstallable.
Finally I will be able to uninstall Microsoft Edge.
This isn't "I can integrate WhatsApp with Slack" this is "I can set my default text app/call app/video app from iMessage/Phone/FaceTime to a third-party app". Same with setting default browser.
No, it's good news! No more forced crappy webkit browser engine in iOS. The other things can be added in a secure fashion as well. Sideloading doesn't need to be wild west. macOS also makes it possible with certificates etc. Messanger interop is also nice, when done right: basically would need a shared standard like the web that is done by a messaging consortium like the W3.
> No more forced crappy webkit browser engine in iOS.
you know this just means more chrome right?
> Messanger interop is also nice, when done right: basically would need a shared standard like the web that is done by a messaging consortium like the W3.
we went thru this before. didn’t work then, won’t work now.
I know this means more Chrome. I'm a heavy Chrome user because of the dev tools that are great. At least chrome has good support for web standards compared to Safari.
Why can't it work again? I mean the W3 works, doesn't need to support all the features. Messages and attachments would be enough.
This actually opens a race to be the best mobile browser, which might well see new entrants. As people increasingly use their mobiles as primary devices, they are more likely to move to a new browser on mobile platforms and then adapt their desktops to that choice, rather than the other way around as they did in the past. Current mobile browsers have historical baggage that a new entrant would not need to carry.
> This actually opens a race to be the best mobile browser, which might well see new entrants.
Hahhahahhahahahaha. We will end up with chrome. And developers targeting chrome and safari users being left out because “works best in chrome for my text based website that doesn’t do anything safari can’t do”.
Again, sounds like Apple needs to do a better job improving Safari. If developers and consumers choose Chrome, it's up to competitors to find a way to disrupt their lead, not engage in monopolistic practices to stop a monopoly.
It's not a shallow dismissal and your comments only prove you either don't understand the landscape or are choosing to ignore what's staring you in the face.
Try to use any google property on Safari (or non-chrome browser on any platform) and see all the times Google tries to push you to use Chrome and/or sign into your google account. When logged in it puts a banner at the bottom of every google search and when you aren't logged in it shows a modal that takes 1/3rd of the page.
Google reigns supreme on the web from everything from search to email and docs/drive/etc. Their reach is massive. They have in the past and will continue in the future to use that reach to push people to use their browser engine. How does Apple/Safari/Webkit compete with that? It's not that the browser is better but that the sites they visit push them to use a different browser.
Apple can double down on privacy and security and brand Safari as the browser that won't steal your data. Own that space, spread the marketing, they have enough capital to create solutions. You might as well ask how iOS can compete with Android. This continuous insistence that Apple is helpless is completely anachronistic and demeaning to Apple itself.
That's self-defeatist. You mentioned IE downthread; IE is not the dominant browser anymore, and the reason for that is not just that MS stagnated, but that it was challenged vigorously by competitors that exploited new opportunities better. This is one such opportunity.
Chrome was better than IE, but it won out not because of technical capabilities but through Google's constant and ruthless exploitation of its web properties and operating systems. That already happens on iOS, and I'm sure a Google SVP reading this ruling just started a project to intensify it.
Firefox and Opera browsers could run Google apps just fine. Remember the days when Firefox and Opera got a cut down version of gmail, but if you changed the user agent on the browser to chrome it worked just fine.
FF took ages to come to mobile. Opera actually became pretty popular in Asia, precisely because they exploited well the move to mobile, and was screwed only by stupid commercial manoeuvers.
In theory. Practically, creating browser & its underlying engine is an arduous task. Later, it is inevitable that Google will use dark patterns like shadow dom to optimize their website like YouTube etc. And, website owner will force you to use chromium based browser, because of course "This browser works best with Google Chrome".
In practice, probably, but at least you'll also be allowed to install Firefox.
And things don't last forever. Another browser can always gain the crown from Chrome. Without this legislation, it won't even be possible to do that on Apple devices.
I'm personally happy to stay inside Apple's ecosystem, but believe that everyone should have the option to choose. This looks like good news, a step in the direction of being more in control of the devices we buy.
Apple advances this argument all the time. Meanwhile most European use Android which allows side-loading and the predicted apocalypse didn’t actually happen. I know it’s annoying: this pesky reality showing to everyone that your argument is actually specious.
Here's a detail: iOS stopped apps from tracking you, and it worked so well that Facebook (an ad company) fought it tooth and nail and lost quite a bit of money because of it. Do you have any such details of similar things happening in Android?
Don't know if it will be bad. Apple still can make this securely. It doesn't mean that the system needs to be completely open, just that apps need to be able to access hardware features. NFC for example can be asked upon like GPS on the OS level. Doesn't mean that the apps need to access NFC on the direct hardware level.
And I don't want to have Android, but I would like for Apple to open up things like the forced browser engine stuff. With this Apple is blocking so much innovation for the web because they are not implementing so many things.
One thing I hope for is that API access comes with the following agreement:
1) Use of APIs means an App must be listed on the App Store or be used the regular way. You want location data? Sure but in exchange, I want to see an App Store listing along with the Data Privacy Report. You want access to NFC but you’re a bank? Sure but your cards must also be available to be added directly without an app. You’re free to create another version of your app and list that on another App Store , but I want a version that adheres to the App Store rules.
That's often not an option due to Apple's choices, but if Apple offered an official way to break out of the garden with your own iPhone then I think things wouldn't have gotten this far.
And now you'll be able to choose WHILE still keep using iOS which is much better for you as a consumer.
This being bad for "regular people" is typical monopolistic corporate scaremongering. Apple has proven that they're more than capable of providing secure devices that provide choice with their MacBook series.
Kind of. So the primary issue is that Apple collectively bargains on behalf of customers against developers. So if you take something like privacy rights, Apple can say "hey, we've got all of these users and if you want to participate in the ecosystem you have to not track their data" - as an example.
Now what happens is that companies like Facebook and others who really want to get your data without that pesky Apple interfering is they launch legal attacks and marketing campaigns to convince people that Apple is a big bad monopoly and their "locking down" is bad for customers, etc. (so ya know, typical monopolistic corporate scaremongering) and then Apple goes and gets regulated.
With Apple finally being forced to allow a third-party app store on iOS, it makes financial sense for, well, Facebook and others to start such stores that don't respect privacy rights - Apple can't make them and then Facebook creates a neutered version of its products on Apple's App Store and creates the best version on their own (or one they support) app store. It didn't make a lot of sense to do this with just Android because you're maintaining a lot of software and it's not worth the money + you don't want to show your hand. Now with this new legislation these companies will basically eliminate a lot of customer protections that we have.
Many day-to-day people will just say "oh I need the X store for Facebook and TikTok and YouTube" and they'll sign away privacy rights to get those apps because they don't have an immediate feedback loop. They just get more and more invasive applications and then that's that.
With Apple maintaining control of the App Store ecosystem, customers could have their cake and eat it too. They got privacy rights because Apple could collectively bargain for them, but they also got their apps because so much money stands to be made anyway that companies would comply with these rules.
It absolutely blows my mind that people are rallying the pitchforks around Apple for "monopolistic corporate scaremongering" all the while missing that its all of these other "monopolistic corporate scaremongering" corporations like Facebook, Google, TikTok, Uber, and others who they're out in the streets for. I mean, you do know that Facebook is a giant corporation, right? (Not picking on Facebook here).
For me personally as a user, it means companies leave the App Store ecosystem, and devalues the iPhone and other devices.
I'm still waiting to be able to use my iPad to write code.
To be able to use the iPad as a platform for tools that contain their own WASM ecosystem of user purchase-able plugins.
To use a browser on iPhone and iPad that is actually secure.
iPhone and iPad are little addiction machines, with little value for productive work that goes beyond email and powerpoint. These legislations give us a fighting chance of regaining the quality of 00s personal computers, with advanced 20s technology.
To be perfectly fair here, you're responding as if "productivity" means "Code" and that's not exactly true.
For the overwhelming majority of people: coding is not productivity.
What is? Checking email, jotting down notes, recording meetings and transcribing/dictating them, joining meetings and having reliable video/audio.
Being able to respond to an email with a little drawing is _absolutely_ a killer feature for productivity, having a little 10" portable device which can perch on a desk and allow you the full gammut of features for a _good_ meeting is also pretty damn awesome.
One could argue that these have some moderate competence at artistic creation machines (photos, videos, drawing, some combination), but I'm not creative so I'm not sure how competent these devices realistically are.
I wont comment much on the statement you can't actually code on an iPad, technically you can; gitpods, code-server, coder.com, (and if you work at google CitC) means you already have everything you need. These work with safari; because those features Chrome demands we have are not actually needed for such tasks.
> I wont comment much on the statement you can't actually code on an iPad, technically you can
That's not coding on an iPad, since the code is not being interpreted/compiled on-device. You're right that an iPad can remote into a build server for "development", but so can a $6 Raspberry Pi.
I don't know why I should give a rat's ass what CPU is doing the work as long as the work can be done. Your point seems kind of pedantic in a world where a vast amount of code executes in the cloud or is intricately tied up with networked services so that a freestanding computer is of little value.
Hey, if that's your attitude then who am I to stop you? By your definition, the iPad is also a great device for Windows since it can RDP into Windows machines without problems. Of course, as I outlined above, that's not a very impressive superpower, but who cares! In the future, you'll own nothing and be happy: including your own hardware/software.
For me, though, having an internet connection as a prerequisite for running my software is borderline insanity. My software should compile and run locally, I shouldn't need to trust a random third-party or connect to the internet to check how my HTML renders or test a few changes to my software. But I guess that doesn't make a difference on iPad, because even if you did have a proper text editor/compiler it would phone home with OSCP anyways.
Your lack imagination of how much better software development could be given the right interfaces, and interaction modes, is somewhat representative of how the stagnation of iPad OS has crippled our optimism and taste for futurism, constantly improving user experiences and new models of computation.
The iPad has amazing input capabilities, from the pen to laser scanning that could all be used to further improve developer experiences. Be it by augmenting your scrum board, to sharing code annotations with your coworkers, or foregoing coding completely and turning flow-charts to code directly.
But sure, let's all be middle management, and write emails all day.
Countless, countless, countless iOS devs, even extremely high-profile ones like Marco Arment, can talk all day long about problems they've had with App Review and the capriciousness of the App Store. Tons of high-profile, reputable devs can talk about specific apps they were making or wanted to make, never saw the light of day, not because the apps violate App Store policy, but because App Review is such a minefield that they didn't want to bother.
Apple literally publicly said that devs criticising the App Store, or App Review practices, could expect retaliation.
It's insane that devs are expected to only provide apps through a single storefront, that operates at such a huge scale that moderation is necessarily arbitrary, mostly algorithmic, and inconsistent. The App Store monopoly is indefensible.
You're just shifting the target from one monopoly app store that's high profile to a dozen or so (maybe fewer) app stores who will also have their own arbitrary rules and moderation.
You might say, well at least they have alternatives from Apple. Sure, but then if those alternatives are sufficiently good competitors we likely lost all of the privacy benefits and so forth from the Apple App Store and they'll have their own arbitrary review practices and retaliatory nature. And if they as good of alternatives then most likely the majority of these apps with "problems" are just scam artists and should be rejected anyway except now they can thrive on people who are susceptible to being scammed.
To me this is a little bit like having a debate over the First Amendment where I'm kind of sitting here and saying yea you shouldn't be allowed to yell fire! in a crowd as part of the amendment from the start and others are just asking for maximum freedom of speech, only to have this legislated later anyway.
Apple has completely forgotten their privacy bargains in China when their profits were threatened. They've also special-cased their own Ad data collection (a business that's growing in revenue) to be opt-out. So your trust in Apple collectively bargaining in your interest is misplaced because they ALREADY haven't proven themselves to be trustworthy (and they repeatedly lied and misled in their marketing and court hearings when it trusted them).
They're an unaccountable and unelected corporation, not a government.
I prefer to put my trust in "collectively bargained" and voted for GDPR (and similar) legislation which affects all apps, all corporations. This gives us both choice (critical for freedom), market competition (critical for healthy economy and society - growing up in socialist single-choice markets wasn't fun) AND privacy across the board.
I honestly don't understand your penchant to cross your fingers and hope a for-profit corporation will protect you over actually ensuring they do via privacy legislation.
> Apple has completely forgotten their privacy bargains in China when their profits were threatened.
Couple of things here. First, I live in America so I don't really care and apparently the Chinese people for whatever reason want to live in that privacy hellscape. Second, Apple unfortunately (like many corporations) is not in a position to dictate privacy regulations to the Chinese government. The interactions here, frankly, are complicated so I'm not really buying this as a valid criticism w.r.t the App Store. If you really want to try and take a moral high ground here, well, let me know when the EU stops supporting genocide in Xinjiang. I'll wait.
(but it's complicated, so let's not sling mud here alright?)
> They've also special-cased their own Ad data collection (a business that's growing in revenue) to be opt-out.
Yes, and I don't like this. It's something I agree with criticizing Apple for.
Similarly: "They're an unaccountable and unelected corporation, not a government"
Yes. And? They're ahead of government regulation here (in many instances and in many countries). You're framing this as if my choices are an unelected corporation and a government, but we're just switching between one unelected corporation (Apple) and others (Facebook, et al).
> I honestly don't understand your penchant to cross your fingers and hope a for-profit corporation will protect you over actually ensuring they do via privacy legislation.
We are not talking about GDPR or "socialism" or whatever. We're talking about regulating Apple so that other mega corporations can create their own app stores on iOS and then do whatever they want. You're just wrestling control away from one mega corporation that ostensibly has some sort of values that align with the interest of the public and giving it to other mega corporations that, as far as I can tell, don't.
>We are not talking about GDPR or "socialism" or whatever. We're talking about regulating Apple so that other mega corporations can create their own app stores on iOS and then do whatever they want.
So don't use those. Personally I'll mostly stick to Apple's app store along with some Free Software one where I download Firefox and some other open source apps.
The problem is that it lessens Apple's collective bargaining power. They can't make Facebook (again just as an example) comply with privacy rules on the iOS App Store because Facebook can and will offer its product exclusively on its own store or on a third-party store where they don't have to use these rules.
The feedback loop for privacy rights is such that people will say screw the privacy rights and go download Facebook anyway - so now customers that previously had the best of both worlds (privacy rules and Facebook) will be forced to choose, and they'll definitely choose Facebook.
So what was gained? Well, it's good for mega corporations like Facebook. Bad for single megacorporation Apple, and bad for me as a customer. It's good for payday loan type crypto companies or other scam artists, and bad for my grandma. Etc.
That's the problem here. Saying "don't use those" doesn't make sense. But if you wanted to say that then I just say don't use the iPhone if you want third-party app stores.
I think it's more likely that this would technically mean suicide for Facebook (or whoever would try this). And if users actually follow then the bet paid off and the users deserve what's coming to them.
I don't see this happening in the real world though.
It also makes assumptions that consumers are dying for Facebook, when engagement in the product has been mixed, especially with the reputation of the company dropping precipitously over the past six years.
Heck, even Instagram is beginning to show signs of trouble:
Facebook owns a few properties, including WhatsApp. But I think you are envisioning a high switching cost, whereas I think it would just be a simple download and install of the Meta store. You'll probably purchase products using a Libra derivative too. There wouldn't be very high switching cost for customers, and they'll rapidly click through privacy prompts (if they happen at all) with no Apple ostensibly looking out at all for this. At that point it'll just be up to government regulation.
It’s still having to sign up for another account- probably using Facebook login- but once you have the dang thing you have to manage payment options, privacy settings, email and push notifications, having the damn app store icon sit on your Home Screen, non-zero friction that comes with the current era where consumers already juggle multiple social networks, streaming services, e-commerce memberships, music or gaming stores, and so on. It’s an annoyance and a hassle and unless Meta brings out sufficient new incentives as part of it, users are gonna balk. Most users do not want to deal with yet another payment system like Libra. Finally, government regulators would probably probe Meta for antitrust violations if they withhold a critical communication app like WhatsApp from the official iOS App Store, without opening the protocol up for federation. What applies to Apple still applies to other companies.
Ok, so can you remind me what the point is then if users won't use third-party stores since they're inconvenient?
To me it just seems for a way to "get around" Apple's rules which tend to ban crypto scams, porn, and I guess sometimes legit apps. What are we trading and what do we gain?
Speaking as someone on this community ostensibly for hackers, it would be nice simply to have an F-Droid for iOS. (Or the late XDA Labs.) It would be neat if Apple allowed such a community of tinkerers, tech-heads, FOSS enthusiasts, and hobbyists their own little platform to curate apps. Just having the option for such a subculture to exist on iOS would be nice, in this present where both web and native feel like big box stores.
For a long time now, the official App Store itself has been overrun not only by scammy apps, see Kosta Eleftheriou's excellent investigatory work into top-selling fraudulent apps, but also by poor discoverability with outdated UX and obtrusive search ads. If the platform was opened, just a little, one could imagine boutique third party specialized app stores hosting curated apps for curated purposes, which would help with app discoverability greatly. (Apple has banned app discovery tools from their App Store, see the 2013 removal of AppGratis.) It would be a little like the return to the web of GeoCities and Angelfire, when websites had more free expression and control, except on native. A legitimized Cydia, perhaps.
It didn't have to be like this, all regulatory pressure and billion dollar fines. Apple could have chosen to open up the App Store on its own terms, issuing a privacy-hardened AppStoreKit that third party app stores would use, providing mandatory security scan APIs a la macOS notarization, going through reliability processes that Apple approves, heading regulators off at the pass. Apple already has authorized third party resellers and service and repair providers, why not app stores? Apple could have allowed the flourishing of an ecosystem where they are still in control, but as delegated as the code in their apps. Instead they tried to do it all themselves, making themselves the singular point of failure.
> Speaking as someone on this community ostensibly for hackers...
Yea so why not just use Android for that instead of trying to put a square peg into a round hole? That's what I don't understand. You can do anything you want with Android or any number of manufacturers but no you have to do it on iPhone and iOS...?
I think this is just an admittance that iPhone and iOS are superior to all alternatives and that the "closed" model is better than open source software. If that weren't the case, you wouldn't be here trying to use Apple's products when you have multiple options and FOSS readily available.
> For a long time now, the official App Store itself has been overrun not only by scammy apps
Ok sure. So if this is a problem then it's not one that more app stores solve. It just makes the problem worse. So can you not use this as discussion point? Either you haven't thought about this much or you're being disingenuous.
> The freedom of possibility.
Yea, for a very vocal minority of people. Now I lose privacy regulations, apps, convenience, having a phone that just works, and so many other things just so a specific community of greedy, selfish people can do things they can already do now via jailbreaking their iPhone. And once this all comes to pass, it'll just be the same group of people doing stuff that can do it now except all other users will have a worse experience on their behalf. Thanks man
> You can do anything you want with Android or any number of manufacturers but no you have to do it on iPhone and iOS...?
Because I prefer the iOS user experience and Apple hardware irrespective of their management of the App Store? Because I would like to see the platform innovate and provide more interesting opportunities than widgets? Not to mention, even while Apple does not have a majority share of the smartphone OS market, it does have exclusive control over its platform in such a way that antitrust arguments are still arguably applicable?
> It just makes the problem worse. So can you not use this as discussion point? Either you haven't thought about this much or you're being disingenuous.
If more app stores were allowed to exist, they can compete with one another, leading to improvements in quality. There can be app stores and communities built around ensuring security, with even more exclusive standards for the sake of curation. Especially in the case of stores focused on FOSS apps where the code is open for all to review. Making Apple be the sole gatekeeper promotes a single source of failure and security via obscurity. Not to mention, because Apple has control over the underlying OS, they can mandate 3rd app stores use safeguards that transcend individual app stores, like they already do on macOS via notarization.
> If that weren't the case, you wouldn't be here trying to use Apple's products when you have multiple options and FOSS readily available.
What if I have an underlying heart condition or other preexisting condition where I must rely upon the Apple Watch to save my life, as Apple claims their products can do via their own marketing?
> Now I lose privacy regulations, apps, convenience, having a phone that just works,
If you like those things, you can still have them. Just don't use another app store. Like the majority of users wouldn't.
> all other users will have a worse experience on their behalf
This all-or-nothing emotional argument is very puzzling. It seems to reduce the Apple today, the most profitable company in the history of the world since the Dutch East India Company, to the shell on the verge the bankruptcy it was in the '90s. You insult and demean Apple by accusing them of being unable to handle an open platform. That all of their engineering, product, and design prowess is unable to square the circle, that all of their resources are for naught. You do not present an argument, you do not present a debate, all you do is insult Apple and say they are incapable and helpless. That is very far and away removed from present real-world conditions. Somehow, that is even more offensive than your insults towards the hacker community.
> Because I prefer the iOS user experience and Apple hardware irrespective of their management of the App Store?
Well, that's the trade-off, right? I don't buy a sports car and get mad when it doesn't have the utility of a pickup truck.
Different products have different features. For example, Motorola released a phone that was modular at one point. Samsung has a phone with two screens. There are companies that make de-Googled phones with Android that are targeted toward FOSS. Apple sells a different product with different features. The iPhone lacks the feature of "multiple app stores" but has the best platform and operating system.
> Not to mention, even while Apple does not have a majority share of the smartphone OS market, it does have exclusive control over its platform in such a way that antitrust arguments are still arguably applicable?
That doesn't make any sense because plenty of companies have control over their own platform and that's normal and acceptable.
> If more app stores were allowed to exist, they can compete with one another, leading to improvements in quality. There can be app stores and communities built around ensuring security, with even more exclusive standards for the sake of curation. Especially in the case of stores focused on FOSS apps where the code is open for all to review. Making Apple be the sole gatekeeper promotes a single source of failure and security via obscurity. Not to mention, because Apple has control over the underlying OS, they can mandate 3rd app stores use safeguards that transcend individual app stores, like they already do on macOS via notarization.
But you said major companies won't create their own app stores or leave Apple's App Store. So who will be these companies? Who are they for? A small, vocal minority of users?
Will I have to download 3 versions of Instagram? The neutered App Store version, the version on the Meta store, and the privacy focused version?
> What if I have an underlying heart condition or other preexisting condition where I must rely upon the Apple Watch to save my life, as Apple claims their products can do via their own marketing?
Then don't use the product? I don't know what you're talking about here. Do you want third-party app stores without anyone working with the FDA to monitor your Apple Watch?
> If you like those things, you can still have them. Just don't use another app store. Like the majority of users wouldn't.
Please re-read the posts where I've discussed Apple's collective bargaining on behalf of users against developers as it relates to the App Store. I think once you understand how that works (as I've explained it) you'll see why your comment here is incorrect.
> You insult and demean Apple by accusing them of being unable to handle an open platform.
No, I said that it will make my personal experience much worse and I think that it will make the experience for most people worse as well and it will only benefit a small, vocal minority of people. I'm sure Apple can "handle" third-party app stores. That doesn't mean the user experience won't be degraded for the vast majority of people who just want to pick up their phone and use it.
> That doesn't make any sense because plenty of companies have control over their own platform and that's normal and acceptable.
The regulators disagree.
> So who will be these companies? Who are they for? A small, vocal minority of users?
Startups! App discovery companies like AppGratis and Chomp, which were killed off by App Store guidelines. A potential industry for app discoverability, curated app experiences, app lists for specialists. There is potential there for entirely new industries to be built for the iOS app ecosystem, for dynamic change and new frontiers!
> Will I have to download 3 versions of Instagram? The neutered App Store version, the version on the Meta store, and the privacy focused version?
Most people will use the App Store version. Few die-hards will bother to migrate to the Meta store, as such purists most likely already view as the Facebook acquisition and subsequent ad/brands push as compromising the indie nature of Instagram. Certainly some savvy power users may opt for the privacy-focused version, just as people already do with alternatives to the official Twitter or Reddit clients. It is fine to stick to the default option; let people have choice.
> I don't know what you're talking about here.
If Apple is making claims that go as far that its devices are life-saving, then they are not some minor player who is beyond the purview of regulators and antitrust legislation. Thus you cannot claim that "just use Android" is a valid dodge to prevent Apple from having its power checked.
> Apple's collective bargaining on behalf of users against developers as it relates to the App Store
Your arguments still relies on hypotheticals about Facebook or Google, companies who have clearly questionable abilities to launch new compelling products and platforms, being able to steal users away. Again, I find that to be dubious, especially when you examine the modern state of the industry, and the increasing sclerosis of these companies from a product perspective. I find the "data funnel 3rd party app store" threat vector to be debatable and worth examining in detail, before we base our entire policy upon this hypothetical scenario.
Basically, you are saying that Apple is protecting us from giants, when they are actually windmills.
> That doesn't mean the user experience won't be degraded for the vast majority of people who just want to pick up their phone and use it.
I disagree. I believe if Apple embraces a partial opening up, they can manage it with minimal degrading of UX, and in fact will open up many new potential to breathe freshness into iOS and smartphones in general. All of this FUD is really just covert anti-Apple skepticism.
Sure but that's not a good argument. When it comes to technology so far regulators don't have a great track record IMO. Even if they did, that's still not a good argument.
> Startups! App discovery companies like AppGratis and Chomp, which were killed off by App Store guidelines. A potential industry for app discoverability, curated app experiences, app lists for specialists. There is potential there for entirely new industries to be built for the iOS app ecosystem, for dynamic change and new frontiers!
I don't find this compelling enough to give up everything I enjoy about the iPhone. I'd rather these startups just never exist, or they can exist on Android and prove their business model successful.
> Most people will use the App Store version. Few die-hards will bother to migrate to the Meta store, as such purists most likely already view as the Facebook acquisition and subsequent ad/brands push as compromising the indie nature of Instagram. Certainly some savvy power users may opt for the privacy-focused version, just as people already do with alternatives to the official Twitter or Reddit clients. It is fine to stick to the default option; let people have choice.
Or so you think. Most likely scenario is that people will have 2-5 app stores installed because these companies have enough pull that they can get a user to click through a few buttons. You can see these kinds of user-hostile patterns all over the place where companies will interact with you initially and then stop. Take Affirm. Payment processing. They send you an email when you have an upcoming payment and then you click the email, each link takes you to an app download. Eventually users just give in and download the app because they make it hard to view payments on the web. No reason to think that a company such as Meta won't/can't transition all of their products to their own App Store even if they maintain a neutered version on Apple's App Store that constantly bothers users to switch stores. Companies such as Spotify or Netflix will move to a third-party store so they don't have to pay Apple for using the platform. So now Apple has less incentive to improve software because if they make gains then other mega corporations like Netflix will be able to access those gains without any sort of payment - in other words, they get access to the users and platform without having to pay anything to do so. You might believe that to be fair, but I don't think that's up to regulators to decide and should be left to the mega corporations to fight it out amongst themselves.
> If Apple is making claims that go as far that its devices are life-saving, then they are not some minor player who is beyond the purview of regulators and antitrust legislation. Thus you cannot claim that "just use Android" is a valid dodge to prevent Apple from having its power checked.
I think you're confused.
First, I have never stated that Apple was a minor player. You can safely retract that thought.
Second, creating "life saving devices" isn't relevant here. Medical manufacturers create life saving devices too. Seatbelts save lives. So what?
Finally, you can just use Android because there are lots of mega corporations such as Google and Samsung that manufacture phones that compete with the iPhone, and you can use various distributions of Android including completely free and open source versions.
There's a very healthy and competitive marketplace. Open-source software and the Android + manufacturer business model has turned out to be less competitive and weaker than Apple's approach. In fact, Apple's model of locked-down software and tight integration is so superior to open source software that even you use the iPhone.
> Your arguments
Look I've already explained it. You don't have to accept it but there's nothing else for me to say here. I've described the mechanics in a satisfactory wa...
> Even if they did, that's still not a good argument.
It is not argument; it is the reality on the ground.
> I don't find this compelling enough to give up everything I enjoy about the iPhone.
I don't believe you will have to give up anything on your iPhone. We will just have to agree to disagree, until this future comes to pass, if at all.
> Most likely scenario is that people will have 2-5 app stores installed because these companies have enough pull that they can get a user to click through a few buttons.
I disagree. It's far more involved to get someone to sign up for another platform and to manage another user account, than it is to simply download an app for the platform they are already on. Seems like we are at an impasse until we actually see what third party app stores are like and how popular they are.
Also, this regulation doesn't mean that Apple can't make activating third party app store/sideloading behavior a guarded one with multiple hoops to jump through. It would definitely not be as seamless as you claim.
> Companies such as Spotify or Netflix will move to a third-party store so they don't have to pay Apple for using the platform.
Not if Apple keeps cutting sweetheart deals with them, as they and Google already have. They have not shifted to third party/independent app stores on Android. Furthermore, you are once again overlooking how difficult it is to herd users off of existing platforms for no good reason. Even in the arena of games, where gamers are used to platform exclusivity, there is a lot of friction against the proliferation of new games stores from the likes of EA, UbiSoft, Epic, etc. Store runners have to woo players with free or discounted content.
Netflix and Spotify, curiously enough, are also platforms facing issues with user growth and retention. So along with Facebook, these are three platforms you've cited that have less capacity to lure users to a third party app store than it would seem. If anything this would be good news for Apple Music and Apple TV+, as users switch over rather than deal with another app store.
> You might believe that to be fair
I don't believe that is fair. I believe that is a complete slippery slope worst-case doomsday scenario that is far less probable than it is held up to be.
> I have never stated that Apple was a minor player.
Then you agree that their behavior is worth subjecting to antitrust investigation. Thank you.
> In fact, Apple's model of locked-down software and tight integration is so superior to open source software that even you use the iPhone.
I'm not actually a FOSS advocate. I use Safari on macOS not only because of past and present professional obligations, but because I am comfortable with it. But I also believe that FOSS folks and other hobbyists deserve to be accorded the ability to tinker on iOS, as they have historically done so with other Apple products. Because it is right. And because it is interesting.
> If third-party stores were a breath of fresh air you wouldn't be here complaining that you need them on yet another device.
F-Droid exists on Android, which is great. What is wrong wanting one for iOS?
> I'm not interested in discussing it further because there's no new information being presented that I haven't already considered.
Very well. I have made my case and you have made yours. You have advanced hypotheticals that I have found wanting, hurled calumny that I have endured; now let reality take its course.
> Facebook and others to start such stores that don't respect privacy rights
This is trotted out every time, but these doomsaying scenarios always miss out that this is far harder to achieve than it seems, from a product and business perspective. They can build it, but consumers are unlikely to come.
If consumers are unlikely to come and major corporations aren't going to open their own app stores or migrate to third-party app stores, then what kind of companies are going to need to have a third-party app store that's uncontrolled by Apple? Do you think these companies have spent this much money on marketing and bankrolling lobbyists in the US and EU for no reason?
> major corporations aren't going to open their own app stores or migrate to third-party app stores
The major corporations will try, but consumers are just burnt out by managing all of the user accounts and dealing with different ecosystems. Not to mention even casual users are vaguely aware that these companies are out to take their data and sell them ads now.
I foresee that any attempt to put their apps exclusively on competing scammy low-privacy third party app stores will end in tears and mea culpas, leading them to put those apps back on the Apple App Store. As I've said before, creating a compelling alternative app ecosystem is hard, and if you think a Facebook App Store is going to be so scary, just look at the current state of the Amazon Appstore on Android, or the Samsung Galaxy Store. These are real world case studies, not hypothetical doomsday scenarios, and they do not show consumers flocking to these alternatives.
Finally, it's possible that antitrust logic can apply to these companies just as they apply to Apple. If Google tries to make Gmail, YouTube, G-Suite, etc. apps available only on a Google iOS Play Store, the courts aren't going to be happy about that.
> then what kind of companies are going to need to have a third-party app store that's uncontrolled by Apple?
Epic, mostly, with their games store. Piracy (for game emulators, ROMs, etc.), Porn and other adult content, and open-source Purists a la F-Droid. Also, potentially governments such as China or Russia.
> Do you think these companies have spent this much money on marketing and bankrolling lobbyists in the US and EU for no reason?
It's perfectly possible for companies to waste a lot of money on boondoggles that won't actually help their bottom line, yes.
And we mustn't forget that Big Tech companies neither pay many taxes in Europe nor do they employ a lot of people either. Most of their development and production happens elsewhere.
(Relative to their size).
They have therefore little political pull on European legislator's (beside flat out bribing them which, despite everything, isn't helping them).
The cherry on top is that all those regulations can be used in negotiations with the US in the future (e.g. to provide EU law enforcement with equal access to the data of American citizens)
It absolutely blows my mind that people are rallying the pitchforks around Apple for "monopolistic corporate scaremongering"
Meanwhile it blows my mind that on a site called Hacker News, people are not only enthusiastically handing control of their computing environments to a megacorporation, but insisting that everyone else should do the same.
> people are not only enthusiastically handing control of their computing environments to a megacorporation, but insisting that everyone else should do the same.
Who here is advocating that Everyone else should get iPhones or that Android should be as locked down as iPhones? (These are the only two interpretations I can imagine from this sentence)
Except even with a third-party app store Apple still has control over what permissions apps need as well as the developer API itself. So it's not clear to me that a third-party app store can ignore privacy without getting a user to click Allow to whatever privacy violations the API permits. I guess Apple can no longer enforce that apps can't use parts of the internal API that leak, so a third-party app store might get around some things that way but it seems they are still quite limited in options.
> I'm personally happy to stay inside Apple's ecosystem
I used to believe that I'd stay inside the Apple ecosystem if this ever happened, but the ecosystem has become a total dumpster fire in the last few years IMO.
The App Store itself is riddled with 99% crap apps, there's a lot of advertisement that really puts me off, the macOS Store results are mostly copycat apps or very suspicious stuff (although most of the time the real Apps aren't even there), their own apps (Music, TV, AppStore itself) are buggy as heck for me, there's an incredible amount of notification spam from otherwise useful apps (bank app, Uber, delivery app, etc). They've lost control.
Opening up is more necessary than ever, for multiple reasons.
This is huge. Forcing Apple to allow app side-loading, third-party payments, etc is going to wrest away control of the iOS ecosystem (and eat pretty heavily into their revenues [1]
I don't think so. The EU market is pretty huge and financially strong. Maybe they will only allow sideloading and payment freedom for the EU with special iOS builds.
depends on the company really. some might think a bit more about offering their products to eu countries considering (some of) these rules. which imo are quite serious, and some even ridiculous.
i foresee a fiasco in general, but a few stand out:
> Share data and metrics with developers and competitors, including marketing and advertising performance data.
with competitors? :))
> Allow developers to integrate their apps and digital services directly with those belonging to a gatekeeper. This includes making messaging, voice-calling, and video-calling services interoperable with third-party services upon request.
could have been solved easily if they proposed a working group to come up with the next video and messaging standard. right now i foresee the discussions we had back in mid 00s: we use our own video encoder. they use h263. and those other guys use vp9. good luck to the team writing a transcoder that works real time :))
> The Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires platforms to do more to police the internet for illegal content, has also been approved.
I don’t see why you are surprised by the sharing with competitors and the obligation of interoperability. That’s in line with what’s imposed on dominant player in an unbalanced market. Basically Europe is saying to gatekeepers that they can keep their platform but it will come with a lot of caveat from now on.
Asking for data sharing without specifying exactly which data is included and exactly which data is exempt is ridiculous. The standard for laws need to be far higher. Which metrics? Which data? If the lawmakers mean all data they are going to discover very quickly a lot of that data is subject to privacy standards. You can't for example share the data you use to train a personal assistant without sharing queries people have made of that assistant.
Considering how far backwards companies bend over to make business in China and some Arabic countries I don't expect a single company with some profitable business in the EU to leave that market.
So what? Nobody is obliged to serve any market, or a markets obliges to open for individual companies. If company A won't, companies B and C propably will.
If by market leader you mean creating monopolies, or oligopolies, there are rules againstt that in place. So there seems to be some concensus of seeing those outcomes as non desireable. And those rules cover consumer protection and choice, Microsoft has some experience with that when it comes to Internet Explorer.
That's pretty much the point of the regulation. If you're okay with being preyed upon by billion-dollar companies, stay in the US. If you'd like to be protected as a customer, come to the EU.
Besides, the DMA has specific exemptions for small companies. Once a company reaches the "gatekeeper" level, they will have had all the necessary time to figure out how to comply with the law.
Oh please. Are any of these billion-dollar companies going to deliberately issue malware that allows them to record my passwords and empty my bank account? Side-loading will be a huge gift for scammers.
This would be very consistent with their prior actions. Apple's "opening move" with prior rulings and laws on in-app payment processing has been to require separate binaries locked to specific jurisdictions. The company genuinely believes that competition is consumer-hostile at best and outright dangerous at worst.
The question is, how far will Apple go to keep Americans from turning on "EU mode"? Will it just be the usual country toggle? Will sideloaded apps be geofenced to the EU with Location Services? Or will they start adding bootloader fuses for each jurisdiction so that you can't install the "EU sideloading firmware" on US-purchased iPads? Or all of the above? I hope the EU is ready to litigate whatever hoops Apple makes people jump through - because Apple loves inventing new hoops.
That would be a strategic mistake even if it made short-term sense (which it probably doesn't) because it would leave a big hole for to fill that could be leveraged to compete with them later in the US.
Remember that App Store revenue is also generated in the EU.
Let's assume that 15% of App Store revenue is from the EU. That would leave an additional $12.7 billion hole in Apple's pocket.
Worse, it would mean Apple's third-party developers lose about $30 billion in revenue. (Apple takes a 30% cut, so the total App Store sales volume is about $283B). Those developers would also lose all access to their existing users in those countries. It would be a massive black stain on Apple's reputation.
It's the kind of drastic move that you simply can't do as a platform provider unless your hand is absolutely forced by something like international sanctions.
And more importantly it would further erode their market share. It would be an absolutely insane move.
Much more likely they'll go the route of malicious compliance. You can side load apps but you can't add them to your home screen. You can set a third party voice assistant but it can't launch apps. Etc.
Will be very interesting to see how this plays out!
> You can set a third party voice assistant but it can't launch apps
Facebook and Google are going to love this.
They can build a voice assistant app which will provide them with all of the apps people use the most, people they contact, places they visit, searches they do etc.
It doesn't. The parent premise - that Apple is going to be severely harmed financially by any of this - is something far beyond silly.
Apple will barely see a dent from it. Their profit juggernaut will keep rolling on almost exactly the same.
The parent comment in question - "and eat pretty heavily into their revenues" - is confusing their personal projected wishful thinking (obviously desperately wanting big tech to falter) with actual reality (the one where Apple has no serious competitive threats in smartphones for what they do, and as such they'll keep marching on just the same).
Apple clearly does have serious competitive threats to what they do, it doesn't even have majority market share in the EU. But it also won't threaten their revenues much. On platforms where users and developers do have a choice from day one (Android), the app store is sufficiently useful that most devs do choose to stick with it. It seems unlikely that Apple can't make the app store competitive on its own terms.
Are you just reading the summary? It does force them to allow 3rd party apps and app stores too:
>A covered company that controls the operating system or operating system configuration on which its app store operates shall allow and provide readily accessible means for users of that operating system to choose third-party apps or app stores as defaults for categories appropriate to the app or app store
First time they're out of compliance, the fine is 10% of their global annual revenue. Then 5% of their daily average revenue until they comply.
Second time they're out of compliance, the fine doubles.
If they still breach compliance, they get investigated for systematic non-compliance. The Commission can then impose structural and behavioral changes.
Or Apple can stop providing service in the EU. But they're not going to say goodbye to a fourth of their global revenue. They will comply.
Apple's greed (in maintaining the egregious 30% commission for so long) is going to undermine their entire ecosystem.
If Apple moved voluntarily to 10% or 15% for all, there never would have been the industry pressure for this sort of regulation.
The EU would have been better to just mandate a maximum % commission for all digital marketplaces above a certain level of revenue. This new solution will get poked full of holes by Apple and lead to an inferior experience for consumers.
I see this, and it just makes me think that if they had, we'd be seeing posts that say, "Apple's greed (in maintaining the egregious 10% commission for so long) is going to undermine their entire ecosystem. If Apple moved voluntarily to 5% or 3% for all, ...".
How many people do you think Apple employees whose job is solely or primarily-centered around iOS developer relations, tools, support, store infrastructure etc. etc?
Is "the market" going to magically provide all the substantial benefits of an Apple-run store for apps, too?
No. It's not. "The market" is going to say: sorry users, fuck that, y'all can just magically research all this and provide your own security and privacy from here on out.
Which is impossible, of course.
Result: much poorer user experience for the vast majority of users. Which is why Apple did it their way in the first place. No, it was not because of revenue. Anyone who says that is either lying or is incredibly lazy and hasn't looked up where Apple actually makes its money.
> The devices and platforms help Apple lock-in the consumer into its ecosystem. First, Apple achieves hardware lock-in with the devices. Then, it achieves software lock-in with operating system software, application software, and third-party software and apps. Then, iCloud helps Apple achieve the data lock-in.
As stated elsewhere on this thread, the 30% isn’t entirely going to Apple’s pockets — they have costs such as App Store bandwidth costs, support costs for purchases made, and the likes.
Let's say Apple pockets all 30% as profit. Who is to say Apple should or shouldn't profit that much from the App Store? Who decides how much they should profit? I find the discussion around commissions shallow and entitled. We should discuss the fundamentals: market definition, competition, abuse of power, etc.
PS: In case I couldn't make it clear, my questions are not directed to parent comment.
> Let's say Apple pockets all 30% as profit. Who is to say Apple should or shouldn't profit that much from the App Store?
All of us. The very same society that gave Apple exclusive control over their "intellectual property" in the first place which allows them to pocket that profit without having to compete for it. The same society that pays for enforcing that exclusivity. Corporations like Apple and their business models are only allowed to exist because we think that suits us - and we should continuously reevaluate that decision and correct it when corporations do more harm than good.
I don't think Apple rests on any intellectual property or exclusivity rights in regard to App Store, but I agree with the general idea that society should be free to exercise its right to change course. Still, I don't think it's right to decide to use this right based on a company's gross margin. The decision should be based on society's fundamental goals.
We already have rules about how much control a single company can have over a market and what defines a market. The app store is clearly a market. Apple has an aggressive chokehold on it that artificially inflates prices and prevents competition.
As an obvious check - Amazon can't sell me ebooks through it's kindle app without Apple being involved and taking a 30% cut. That is market control and abuse.
Let's say you want to build a direct competitor to an Apple product. You can't because Apple actually won't let you do the things it's apps do if you want to be listed in the store. That's called market abuse.
> We already have rules about how much control a single company can have over a market and what defines a market.
I don't know of such rules. Can you point me to them?
To the contrary, there's Epic Games v. Apple case in which definition of the market is pretty narrow (digital mobile gaming transactions) compared to what you suggest (App Store in general) [0].
> That is market control and abuse.
In the same case, judge decided that Apple is not a monopoly, saying “Success is not illegal.” [1]
> Apple has an aggressive chokehold on it that artificially inflates prices and prevents competition.
Almost all apps are free. What inflated prices are you talking about?
The scale of the App Store, or iphone-vs-android in general, or even other markets such as semiconductor lithography - is just so mind-bogglingly massive in scale and cost, that the entire human race only has one or two entrants. It's not currently possible for new entrants to break in at all. Competition is simply non-existent.
If the barriers-to-entry are so high that you can't have real market competition, then regulation is the only option left.
But they're not billing on the basis of how much it technically costs them to provide these services. If we had a competitive ecosystem then we would expect Apple's prices for payment processing to be at least within an order of magnitude of (for example) Stripe's.
Of course security screening is expensive, but it's also not that expensive (e.g. a typical software company might have a 10-30% profit margin, so in some cases apple accounts for roughly half the operational expenses of a company – i.e. the company pays as much, or more, money to apple as it does to its entire payroll)
30% is almost 1/3 of the app price! It is higher than income tax in most countries. It is stealing money from developers because their app is not successful due to being released on App Store, it is successful because it is a great product and people would buy it on whatever store it would be available. Developers were just unable to publish it in another store or use a different payment processor with lower fees.
> Apple simply chose to pay a $5.5 million fine every week for months in the Netherlands instead of obey orders from the Authority for Consumers and Markets
How to piss off the EU political system in one simple step.
This ruling is no surprise after such behaviour from Apple. They made their own bed.
Fines, at least for corporations, really need to have increase exponentially without limit for repeat offenses so that violating the law can never just be shrugged off as the cost of doing business.
If iPhones had different app stores with 15% fees, then consumers would decide. I think the real issue here is consumers are gona get hyper confused and it wont be a better experience for anyone.
Every single app creator out there will now want their own "app store" and it's going to be a mess. 30% fee initially to capture that market was what our company factored in and grew exponentially with. A 15% fee is nothing if the market is fragmented.
> Every single app creator out there will now want their own "app store" and it's going to be a mess.
This is such an oft-repeated argument, yet overlooks that Android already allows sideloading and alternative app stores. If everyone-creating-their-own-app-store hasn't happened on Android, why would iOS be different?
Full devils advocate here, but the argument I've always heard is that the play store is a lot less arbitrary and restrictive than the App Store, so there's less reason to want to go outside of it.
Apple locks out so many useful kinds of software that there actually may be enough momentum for real alternate app stores to proliferate.
For someone who doesn't have a personal Android phone, what useful software is out there that I can get on an iPhone?
Related: What mass-market software is out there that isn't available on the iPhone? I don't mean *nix tools and niche game emulators. Things that would make many people actually care about alt stores?
> Unofficial clients for websites such as YouTube that add features that official client doesn't have.
I'm sure Google can send a cease-and-desist to all sorts of other stores instead of just Apple.
> Tools to disable advertisements in applications.
This would be breaking the sandbox model of the system, I don't think the regulation requires dismantling system security
> Programs licensed under GPL as Apple App Store bans those.
No such rule. VLC on App Store is the first example that comes to mind. There are also GPLv2 components (such as WebKit) shipping in iOS itself.
The FSF has said there are (IMHO bureaucratic) issues with GPL on an App Store, specifically that e.g. Apple takes on certain responsibilities, rather than the developer.
For that reason, it's possible a contributor may shoot down publication, which IIRC caused VLC to have to rewrite certain components before launch.
> I'm sure Google can send a cease-and-desist to all sorts of other stores instead of just Apple.
Google may dislike those applications and refuse to host them on Google Play, but they aren't doing anything illegal, so they cannot do anything about programs like https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/ on other stores.
> This would be breaking the sandbox model of the system, I don't think the regulation requires dismantling system security
I don't think it is breaking the sandbox, it could be implemented using NEAppProxyProvider, however this particular API is not available for App Store applications.
> Programs licensed under GPL as Apple App Store bans those.
iPhone version of VLC is licensed under MPL2 specifically for that reason. WebKit is LGPL2.1.
That's uBlock you were thinking about, which is owned by AdBlock. I'm 98.9% certain that Raymond Gorhill's project which I can build from source and install is not doing that.
1) Completely false for uBlock Origin; zero relationship
2) It's fully open-source so the above is verifiable
3) AdGuard and every single other (proprietary) adblocker for Mac and iOS includes content blockers, but also includes web extensions that request access to "all web page contents", including credit card numbers you type in, allegedly for the purposes of custom element blocking etc. (not open source, we can't check). Try installing it and see. Apple still allows web extensions that have complete access to all webpage contents (which is necessary for many legit extensions), they just block specific WebExtensions APIs that uBlock Origin requires. Literally zero benefit to privacy whatsoever, yet everyone buys the BS.
> You do understand that uBlock Origin has private, profit-generating relationships with advertisers.
That's uBlock without Origin. Careful where you download your ad blockers from.
Edit: I'd also love a DaisyDisk that works on iOS. It will never get permission to get on the app store. Of course, that kind of app IS a huge security issue so I'd be very careful where I get it from.
In addition to everything the others mentioned already, anything that's not a web browser that might at some point show NSFW content. Applications like Discord and Tumblr been forced to make ux-degrading changes to comply with this Victorian-era prudishness.
(and before you mention an application you know of that doesn't have this problem, remember that Apple's enforcement and reading of the rules compares unfavorably with nuclear particle decay)
Haha speaking of Apple stuff being Disney-ified, my phone stopped charging wirelessly. The solution to that is to restart it, but Apple hid that option under 3 layers of menus and I can never find it, so I asked Siri to "turn off this f--ing phone". She said "That's not nice" and did not turn off the phone.
And it would be better if Microsoft had total control over what you're allowed to run? Give them that power in 1990, and the web never exists outside of a research project.
And we would never have all the innovations in the market that Steam has brought to us if windows only allowed game installs through some Microsoft Games Market. Are you saying that would be preferable?
More likely, some apps will simply bypass the whole app store concept entirely. There are a lot of downsides to requiring every app install be intermediated by a third party, especially for internal or very niche apps where the app store isn't really adding any value because the provider is a trusted/known brand to the customer already (e.g. they may have a negotiated contract).
For consumer apps, there doesn't seem to be much appetite to do this on Android at least, though Telegram can be installed outside of app stores. It rolls its own update system and that seems to work fine.
Unfortunately, the App Stores tend to bundle both the store (i.e. curation and discovery) part and the on device package management part somewhat so apps installed outside the store will need to provide their own update mechanism. There is of course no real reason why there can't be a standard way to provide update channels that can be managed in a central package manager application without also requiring the store part, just so far no incentives for platform holders to separate these two.
This is what beats the heck outta me. A company that is sitting on nearly 150B in cash somehow feels the need to pinch 30% commissions from developers till date. I understand this as an initial business model. I mean a 15% reduction in app revenues is not even a rounding error in Apple's P&L. What the hell are they thinking. The goodwill that they'd earn from devs will go a long long way and if they signal that their share will eventually go to zero over a period of 10+ years, that'll get more devs to embrace iOS. I fail to understand the current leadership at Apple.
> This is what beats the heck outta me. A company that is sitting on nearly 150B in cash somehow feels the need to pinch 30% commissions from developers till date.
The rich don’t become rich by being generous and giving money away.
They are there to earn money for their share holders (which to be clear isn't just rich people, it's pensions including pensions for fire departments etc). They must act in their share holders interests. Cutting their fees with no justifiable reason is not something they are going to do.
There's no conspiracy, companies are there to make money, that's it.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.
And AFAIK Apple charges 15% if you earn less than a million in your net revenue, yet noone mentions that. Which, by the way, could be considered a sweetheart deal of its own, just like Steams tiered system. As for the Switch it's still 30% and to the developer it doesn't matter whether there's 5 percent going to the customer or not.
Apple only made that change after incredible pushback from their community, and it still doesn't address the real problem: Apple could be charging 2% and they would still have a monopoly on app distribution that deserves to be broken up. Steam isn't comparable, since it charges that 30% fee and competes against other distributors. Despite that, developers continue to choose Steam over alternative platforms like Itch.io or EGS. Likewise, Apple is free to charge whatever they want for their app store, they just need to compete with other service providers to ensure they're providing a fair deal.
More like "after Tim Sweeney suddenly became obsessed with Apple and started demanding things".
"...they would still have a monopoly on app distribution..." on the platform that they've created, supported and maintained over the years, in the market that already has alternatives.
"Steam isn't comparable..." ah, so Steam charging the same percentage is a whole different thing...i see.
"...competes against other distributors." on the Windows, Linux and MacOS operating systems, operating on a platform that is not exclusive to any manufacturer in partucular.
"...they just need to compete with other service providers to ensure they're providing a fair deal." They already do compete, look up alternative iOS stores.
Someone needs a tutorial on what "monopoly" means.
Controlling app distribution solely within your own platform is not a monopoly. You might wish it were. You might not like it; you might want it changed. But that doesn't magically mean you can call it a monopoly. It's not a monopoly.
If you open a market in the city, prevent any others from opening a market in the city, force all sellers to pay 10-30% to you, force all product makers to comply to your dictates about what can be sold or get kicked out then it's an effective and abusive monopoly.
Thankfully the EU in their wisdom has decided that Apple has abused their dominant position and we don't need to agree with your definition.
Except iOS devices aren't "markets in the city". It's a good thing that you decided to pick that as an example for this comparison (even though it's a bad example) as you have (on accident, i presume) contradicted yourself in a spectacular way. See, the aformentioned market is in...well, "the city" and chances are that that market is regulated by the city council/county laws/the laws of the country the market is in. The city provides infrastructure for the market as well as customers, perhaps some advertising...you get the idea. Hm, it seems that in that relationship, while AppStore is sure a market, the city that the market belongs to is...Apple? Whoops.
I hope that the wise EU is also going to decide that European car manufacturers and their infotainment systems are "abusing" their dominant position in their respective markets of manufacturer and model specific systems! Or that non-European companies should be able to provide "alternative software" to multi-billion euro manufacturing lines of European mega-manufacturers with the same disregard for any potential consequences, just to avoid any sort of "anti-consumer" behaviour. I sure hope so!!!(couldn't care less)
It originates from publishers. When Amazon was pressuring all the publishers to sell cheaper e-book versions for their Kindle, they were aggressively cutting prices to win consumers from competition. They'd then use their classic "70% of your purchases come through us, so lower your prices for Amazon or we will cut you from our store" to get more profits. The publishers obviously hated this, and especially seeing the brand damage of their brand new flagship type books on sale since it made them seem like they were in the bargain bin for not selling well. Since Amazon was a reseller, they could do whatever they wanted with the pricing.
Apple came in as a "savior" for the publishers and said that the publishers can set their own prices and take as much profit as they wanted... just as long as Apple got 30%. This 30% originally came from the music publishing industry (where they did set the price themselves, remember $0.99 songs?), went through books and now has been legacy'd onto apps. If nothing changes here it'll probably exist for metaverse stuff if they go there.
Steam's commision has also been (IMO rightfully) criticised but the situation is hardly the same because Steam doesn't (and can't) prevent other stores or direct app installations on the platforms it runs on so that 30% is much more justifiable as something the "free" market is willing to pay for the services Steam provides. Apple on the other hand doesn't even let anyone compete.
(Of course, Steam still greatly benefits from first mover advantage and network effects that IMO mean they should also be subject to more regulation, including being required to support alternate clients for all Steam services as well as federation for their social network and communication channels.)
They can't, because the platform it runs on doesn't belong to anyone in particular. It's absolutely not the same situation that Apple/console makers have.
No they shouldn't. Steam wasn't the first in digital distribution of videogames as some consoles offered similar system way before Steam. An argument can be made that "on demand" gaming options of the past can be considered the Steam of the past. And enforcing regulations for no reasons other than regulating on companies that are widely recognized as pioneers of their respective industries is the very definition of "punishing success".
They backed out from these tricks in the Netherland standoff. As you guessed, it started with horrible wording, and has now became something way saner (albeit they kept their fees requirements)
Yes, but there's few entities out there actually enforcing these kinds of laws. For example, if you ever use the manufacturer-sanctioned bootloader unlock on a Samsung phone, that blows a fuse in the phone that says "my warranty is void". Samsung refuses to service phones that have ever had their bootloaders unlocked, regardless of what was actually done to them. As far as I'm aware nobody has bothered to sue Samsung over this feature.
This had me thinking. This might be a weird take, but if nobody was bothered enough to file an official complaint against Samsung, and have it reviewed and pushed through the process, is it a significant issue in the first place ?
(Basically, I am making a "if a tree falls in a forest" argument)
They didn't back out on these: They were forced to give them up in the Netherlands. And then, when South Korea passed a similar law... Apple has announced the same tricks the Netherlands refused to accept as their plan to comply with the South Korean law.
You can bet they'll start playing the same games with the EU once this goes into effect. Regulating big tech requires not just passing the law, but a heavy handed enforcement that doesn't put up with delays and antics.
Definitely -- I can imagine them making it some kind of faustian bargain, where in exchange for enabling sideloading, you void your warranty, never get any software updates again, can't connect to any Apple online services whatsoever, etc.
Tech companies seem to believe that it is a neat trick to mislead regulators, in my opinion this is a serious mistake: regulators hold the power to destroy you and playing 'clever' may give you bragging rights but ultimately it can doom your company. Underestimating the power of nation states is a pretty dumb strategy for any company that relies on the cooperation of the countries they intend to do business with.
There have always been Android users who don’t want Google services, spurring the creation of Cyanogen and Replicant and the like. Are you sure there are no equivalent users on iOS?
I don’t think fucking around with EU regulators is something Apple should do here. They’ll probably revenge even with stronger further regulations later.
You can request and get a full copy of your data anywhere, and be fully deleted if you want. Every company has become aware and afraid of data leaks because they are required to report them.
The impact is: far fewer data breaches in the EU than before, fewer of them wiped under the carpet, security no longer seen as a cost but as an important element in the IT strategy and with a seat at the table during design, operation and decommission (and in many cases: at the C level). On the whole the change has been remarkable, the last four years have seen a sea change in how corporations look at data, security and compliance.
If all you associate with the GDPR is cookie consent dialogs then maybe these discussions are not for you?
That all sounds pretty rosy, and my BS-meter is pegged. I think it's just as likely that the corporations have figured out how to skirt the law and get everything they wanted anyway.
> If all you associate with the GDPR is cookie consent dialogs then maybe these discussions are not for you?
You realize that you are the unique one? Most people don't care about abstract concepts of digital privacy and just hit whatever button on that dialog that makes it go away. Who knows what they're opting in to, and they don't really care.
These are definitely the sorts of things we should factor into regulation lest we continue to pave that road to hell with shiny good intentions.
> > If all you associate with the GDPR is cookie consent dialogs then maybe these discussions are not for you?
> You realize that you are the unique one? Most people don't care about abstract concepts of digital privacy and just hit whatever button on that dialog that makes it go away. Who knows what they're opting in to, and they don't really care.
His point just went straight over your head. GDPR has nothing to do with cookie consent dialogues. That you think otherwise demonstrates that you don't know much about this topic, hence: "maybe these discussions are not for you?"
Incidentally, in my observation cookie consent dialogues is a pet peeve of people on forums like this, but not with the general public. It's something techies bitch about.
Cookie consent is not compliant with GDPR - I need an ability to retract my consent as easily as I gave it, which zero of those sites actually provide.
If the EU ever actually starts enforcing GDPR, I expect a quick reckoning.
> "Are you really sure?", "Apple takes no responsibility not warranty"
Sounds good to me. As a techie who maintains several phones for several family members at a variety of tech-literate levels, I certainly hope this experience sucks and is difficult to figure out.
The concern is not a voided warranty. The concern is tech-illiterate users being able to install some random app they found on the web. They find a special version of Facebook and install it, and now their phone is compromised.
>They find a special version of Facebook and install it, and now their phone is compromised.
The Android ecosystem is a bit of a cesspool, but surely even it isn't having major issues with swaths of people having their phone compromised, right? My parents aren't going to sideload an apk.
I saw a friend go through all the motions of sideloading an apk of a fake DHL app he got through a 'track your delivery' fishing email. He did the whole thing while complaining about 'How stupid DHL is', and 'How orwellian it is' for DHL to ask for screen record permission ...
The solution to that is teaching tech illiterate people not to do that. At some point you have to accept the reality that not every advanced system can be made safe. The approach to not have advanced systems is not sustainable. You end up with Candy Crush OS that negatively affects everyone. In my opinion people get scammed by that too.
In reality Apple could just implement a dummy mode. I bet a lot of people would decide against that an be completely fine.
And it can happen today as well via a website. That’s why some countries mandate two-factor authentication for example, which is a proper solution, not this “let’s sell overpriced tamagotchis” security theater.
No, they don't just "Find an obscure setting". A website tells them exactly where to look, exactly what to do, and they have motive to do it because they want whatever this app is promising. These kinds of scams are all over the place.
Open up your browser's developer console while on Facebook and you'll see FB's desperate attempt to get you to not start typing in commands.
How many Linux users run arbitrary shell commands they find online while trying to fix or install something? What about some curl command somewhere that downloads and executes whole scripts? And Linux users tend to be very technically oriented.
This is not FUD. We're there. This is happening today.
That's why it's FUD. It's happening today. There will never be a perfect circumstance where a determined enough attacker cannot get a determined enough sucker to give them their savings.
They can’t even follow how to call me up through facebook, do you honestly believe they will accidentally turn on the equivalent of Android dev mode? If Apple want to make it hard to access, they can.
Well, get them to install AppleSafe™, which will give them the curated Apple experience by locking out all sideloading, and requires them to call Apple and go through menus in order to remove it.
This works for me. I trust Apple a lot more than I trust some third party rando and I enjoyed watching Facebook whine about losing data tracking revenues and whiplash into Meta on their way to more people discovering that the world can live without them.
You know the walled garden is put up with good reason -- to keep fraud and abuse out? And that very few are actually capable of doing such a job, and the software industry has continually demonstrated the lack of that capability.
They still (rightfully, IMO) can charge third parties for getting access to their customers, just as super markets charge for getting stuff on their shelves, or as amusement parks take a cut for the right to sell ice cream.
Now, as to what’s reasonable there? That will be a separate discussion. So far, Apple has put the bar at over 20% for countries that have passed similar legislation, likely on the argument that payment processing need not cost more than credit card companies charge (a few percent, in the EU)
> They still (rightfully, IMO) can charge third parties for getting access to their customers, just as super markets charge for getting stuff on their shelves, or as amusement parks take a cut for the right to sell ice cream.
Super markets charge for use of shelf space and logistics. The customers don't belong to anyone. The super market can't prevent you from opening a store next door to sell to the same customers directly. Similarly, I don't see any problem with Apple charching for hosting, downloads, payment, curation etc. but it should not be their place to sell permission fro what you are allowed to install on your own device just as it would be ridiculous for Ikea to control what you can put on your shelf.
For many (most?) users, Apple's restrictions, especially sideloading, protect users from bad actor app owners (looking at you, Facebook). To me, allowing sideloading is like allowing chemical weapons to be used in war. Yes, it's a new tool and capability at your disposal, but it's also available to every powerful and unscrupulous participant.
Millions of people downloading .exe files everywhere are why we have an infosec industry. I trust indie developers on the App Store because of the restrictions and the review process. I’ll never side load a small developer’s app. And I worry that major players (I.e. Facebook) will require side loading so they can be free of the App Store rules about privacy.
If you got a job at Best Buy's Geek Squad for a week, you'd quickly realize just how irresponsible most people are with what they install on their devices.
More like a chemistry lab to everyone. Most won't even touch the thing because it requires too much knowledge and is intimidating. Some will doubtlessly use it to "make meth" and get burnt or blown up. But some will also use it to produce better understanding or accomplish a task on their own using their own expertise.
As soon as side loading or their own app stores are allowed, all sorts of companies may require that. Maybe most big companies will stick with Apple's.
As an iOS developer, hardening the 10k-ish apis that exist in iOS will be mostly impossible to do in a short term given the attack vectors would now be outside of Apple's control, probably resulting in incompatibilities and bugs. Android is a horrible platform already given the myriad of different OS versions that exist (and often are not updated by the users) that you have to support.
I also wonder what the law requires as to switchover to the new rules, new OS releases or going back X versions or something? Is there are time frame?
Imagine also being an app developer and having to build/test releases for multiple app stores that include different payment gateways. Without a solid and secure API environment in the OS, how do you manage that with screwing up? iOS has always been easy to do since you only have to support one major OS back. A couple jobs (like 7 years) back our Android app was a nightmare to manage, as we had multiple OS release/phone suppliers that rarely got bug fixes in at all and never at the same time, making fixing/testing some things a nightmare. Might be better today, but I remember how much of a pain it was.
So people with Android where sideloading has been a normal thing for many years have been dangerous? Could they harm other people by creating their own app and installing it on their Android without paying anyone a yearly subscription?
It used to be normal in the past that people would OWN a computer and they would run ANY software on it. Why should we allow a greedy company like Apple to change that? Both android and ios implement sandboxes and apps can't gain complete access over the device in most cases so I don't see any security benefit.
Apple will likely do as little as possible as late as possible, and try to stall as much as possible. It will be interesting to see how it will play out.
There's still plenty of money to be made until the law comes into effect, the regulatory bodies become active, the cases are prepared, rulings are made, all of the layers of appeals have gone through, the regulators have decided whether the new measures are in compliance, it becomes a repeat offense, etc.
It won't eat into any revenues. In the Netherlands Apple charges 27% commission on any revenues paid into external payment systems [1]. And what is the EU exactly going to do - ban Apple from charging for access to their software APIs [2]? That seems like one step from banning charging for software as a whole.
[2] Yes, APIs themselves are not copyrightable, but what developer is going to spend the resources to reimplement all of iOS' APIs, with no documentation of how the underlying hardware works?
Lol shit loads of psps have super simple native SDKs: PayPal, stripe, adyen….
They’re all waiting for the day developers switch to their apis. And developers usually work with them over the web, they just didn’t do so on ios because of apple policy
I don't mean payment providers, I mean Apple device APIs like HealthKit, WeatherKit, SwiftUI, CoreML, ARKit, etc. Nobody is stripping all that out (there aren't even real competitors for a lot of these things).
Happy that I might be able to install something else than Safari. I want the Gecko engine on iOS. Sad that being in UK probably means we'll ignore it because "Brexit." I got a text the other day telling me that, since we've left the EU, roaming charges are back. Hurray!
Without making this about politics, this is a great step forward. Still unsure how Apple & co. will make their proprietary video and messaging platforms "interoperable". I doubt they'll be writing an RFC any time soon.
> "will make their proprietary video and messaging platforms "interoperable"
Because it's Europe, and also FaceTime and such aren't anywhere near as popular over there, it is possible that Apple will just pull them from the market there. You can't be forced to provide interoperability with a service you aren't operating.
Whatever the result, this does mean iOS 16 is going to have many "features" that Apple didn't announce...
> it is possible that Apple will just pull them from the market there.
It's also possible that pigs will sprout wings and fly away from manure piles everywhere. Apple is the same company that backdoored iCloud for China so they could operate domestically and make money from the CCP, though. The idea that they'd stop serving the entirety of Europe because of some evil legislation is a complete joke.
You're not wrong. HN's audience is comically unaware of any population that doesn't perennially travel to Disneyland or have a history of >3 failed startups.
>Happy that I might be able to install something else than Safari. I want the Gecko engine on iOS. Sad that being in UK probably means we'll ignore it because "Brexit."
Specifically on this point, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority are taking action.
>Still unsure how Apple & co. will make their proprietary video and messaging platforms "interoperable". I doubt they'll be writing an RFC any time soon.
I'd be pretty happy if I could integrate iMessage and Signal together, since I hate the fact that iMessage is the only messaging platform with a native macOS app.
paying developers to do it. Electron vastly cuts down on the amount of time to product with apps like signal. To replicate the results native would require a engineering team.
It used to be very common for individual developers, or small teams, to publish native programs. WinZip, Winamp, 7Zip, TreeSize, Tag & Rename, Beyond Compare, Nero, PuTTY, all just off the top of my head.
It is very, very possible to create performant, maintainable native software with no larger a developer team than it takes to build web software. We're just collectively too lazy to try.
Which might sound well on paper but would be hell to actually do. iMessage and Signal are not 1-to-1 in their feature set nor is iMessage a superset of Signal. Also I find it odd that you are pushing for shoving a square peg in a round hole vs signal actually writing a native mac app. I'm not sure why it's iMessage's "fault" they have the "only" native messaging platform app for macOS.
> Happy that I might be able to install something else than Safari.
I hope you like Chrome then.
> I want the Gecko engine on iOS.
It will probably exist in some official capacity (not just the open source wrappers like IceWeasel or whatever they call it) but it will probably get about as much love as it does on Android which is to say not much at all. Also the market share will be <1% if I had to guess which means no developers are going to test on it and might even just user-agent sniff and block you. Chrome/Google will use all their properties and power to push users to install Chrome and it will become the defato browser for all of desktop and mobile. I'm not looking forward to that.
As a happy exclusive user of Firefox on Android (and PC), I have yet to meet any sites except legacy corporate apps that had any sort of problem with FF in the last 1-2 years at least.
Same here, only positive feedback. ublock origin keeps all ads at bay so internet looks like a very usable place (aka same as on my desktop). I mean just for removing all youtube ads I would install it on my socks if possible
Same here, except the only times I noticed something doesn't work in Firefox but does in Chrome, it was because of my aggressive use of ad blocking and privacy plugins in Firefox.
I suspect the compliance will be as minimal as possible, e.g. uninstalling included junk will only flip some settings bit that hides some of the user facing activity. Just enough to make a glib "look, we obeyed the law" statement as they will assume nobody will actually take them to court over it.
That's actually about how it is going to work. Apps on both iOS and Android are in the read-only system partition. Even when you disable an app on Android, the read-only system partition version remains and the latest version installed in the rewritable user folder gets deleted. It is absolutely just going to be a visual switch.
It will be interesting to see what dark patterns Apple will come up with to resist this. I imagine every time you open Firefox you will get a popup window saying "Do you want to use Safari instead?"
Using different browsers and setting them as default is already possible in iOS. They are just forced to use WebKit as the rendering engine instead of Blink or Gecko.
Android is too fragmented to having any pushing power for one company (other than Google and even Google’s pushing power is low but that’s due to a different matter). The experience too fragment , the API’s too fragmented. iPhone’s unified experience makes it easier for pushing power to come to play. If Facebook leaves the App Store and opens a new one and uses the epic games strategy to pull in developers, users will go there privacy be dammed. Privacy regulations should have came out before this.
> Using different browsers and setting them as default is already possible in iOS. They are just forced to use WebKit as the rendering engine instead of Blink or Gecko.
That's like saying gay people can legally marry in Saudi Arabia, they just have to marry people of the opposite sex.
Google already does this in its iOS apps. When tapping a link in e.g. Gmail, it won’t just open your default browser, but instead open a menu asking you to choose your default browser or Chrome. It has a “remember this choice” toggle but it shouldn’t be there at all… just obey the OS default browser setting.
I just checked and yes, the "Safari" option pushes an SFSafariViewController onto the navigation stack, which is for all intents and purposes proper Safari. Google cannot see anything you do in it because it's handled entirely out-of-process and even uses a different container (cookies, etc) than the main Safari browser.
FWIW, Google apps also ignore the default browser setting on Android in favor of their embedded Chrome instance, and consistently "conveniently reset" the internal setting that would make it use the default browser.
That's good. Choosing a default iOS browser is completely undiscoverable to average users, and unlike on Mac, can't be done within the browser itself.
Try installing Chrome/Brave/Edge on iOS. They'll suggest setting them as default, and kick you to the Settings app. It's supposed to bring you to the Chrome/Brave/Edge app settings within Settings.app, where you can set the default browser; but 50% of the time, it'll fail, and will just open the Settings app without bringing you to your browser settings (you'll just be staring at whatever you were last doing in Settings.app, whether that's iCloud settings, manage storage, whatever you were last looking at). That bug has been there literally since Apple introduced default browser settings on iOS; maintaining it is clearly deliberate.
It would be great if Apple built an identical menu to Google's into iOS when it detects multiple browsers are installed, and let users easily choose their default browser. Even better would be Windows XP-style "browser choice".
It's bad because it means that the moment that third party engines are allowed on iOS, Google apps are going to be strongly accelerating Blink/Chrome hegemony. Apple should be required to fix problems with the default browser settings pane while Google should be barred from promoting or favoring Chrome with its other apps and services.
> Google apps are going to be strongly accelerating Blink/Chrome hegemony
Because they give the user choice?
Again, this isn't just a problem with the "default browser settings pane". The first time an iOS user clicks a link, the OS should give them a list of all major browsers (like Windows XP was forced to by the EU) so that no browser is favored over another. That would be fair.
Google's browser menu isn't a response to Apple's unfair default browser setting practices, but to Apple bundling Safari with iOS and unfairly advantaging it. Platform owners' browsers should ideally not be inherently favored, regardless of the platform's marketshare.
If they're pushing a browser that the user doesn't have installed, it's more than giving the user choice, it's blatant cross-promotion.
As I said, the UI iOS provides should be fixed (including a selector when the user taps a link) but at the same time, Google should not be able to use the install base of its various other apps to bolster adoption of Chrome.
I'm personally very happy with Safari slowing down the over-arching progress of "Web browsers are an application distribution platform", but I definitely see the value in this.
I am very excited about the prospect of having federation between communication platforms... imagine sending messages from iMessage to whatsapp?! great, just like in the mid-00's!
funnily enough i was working on apps that did this back in the mid 00s. it was horrible. the standards simply couldn’t keep up. the clients couldn’t keep up. in the end it was better for the end user not use those standards and instead we rolled our own.
could be different story today but i don’t think so. just the video call feature would be an absolute mess to standardise. hell, even emojis would open up a can of worms. payments between contacts? contacts themselves? i fear this would end up being the mid 00s again.
Or rather: developers were so up their own backsides that effectively refused to cooperate. Obviously you go faster if you don't have to talk to anyone, and everybody loves lock-in. Which is why this legislation is welcome.
>it was horrible. the standards simply couldn’t keep up. the clients couldn’t keep up.
The best chat application I ever used was Pidgin circa 2008. It was so easy to be able to talk to all my friends across several different protocols in a single program.
Pidgin existed not because IM services provided interoperability but because someone wrote libgaim and equivalents for other protocols. Keeping those up to date was a massive effort.
> They might choose to do so with a special version of iPhone that only works in the EU with EU languages and EU carrier bands (no English language strictly necessary because the UK left, remember?)...
I think Ireland (and Malta) would like a word:
"English remains an official EU language, despite the United Kingdom having left the EU. It remains an official and working language of the EU institutions as long as it is listed as such in Regulation No 1. English is also one of Ireland’s and Malta’s official languages."
And in all fairness it is the only common language anyway. I read a study that compared the percentage of a generation in the EU that studied a particular foreign language that is not their native language in high school or university. English is north of 95%. The second largest are I think French and Spanish at around 30%. So when you have 27 nationalities in a room, there isn’t really any other practical alternative right now. English is the modern latin, whatever you think of the US, UK or Roman empire.
Well EU law starts off life as a proposal by the Commission, so it's virtually impossible for there to be a proposal passed by Parliament and not have Commission support (unless Parliament has made significant amendments that the Commission does not like, although I'm unaware of this ever happening).
Council not agreeing is definitely a potential problem, but given the level of support from the Commission and Parliament I doubt the Council will block this.
Council support (for the general targets/scope) is almost guaranteed before a commission proposal sees the light of day, it might get amended and / or clash with parliament amendments but the fact a proposal has been made is a good indication some form of the law will pass
Music to my ears. Apple is a junkie that's addicted to the App Store & services revenue. By opening up their walled garden, it forces them to be more proactive to regain some of that lost revenue. I guarantee the car, the AR/VR and their other underdeveloped products would've progressed so much faster if Apple depended on new product categories to grow their revenue. Right now, they're feeling too cozy.
Imagine thinking that punishing success is the way to go.
Europe loves propping up failing companies and industries. Not very surprising that they would go after a company with barely a 30% share of the market.
protectionism is not new, but it’s definitely in the eu’s dna. there are huge lobby groups that constantly want more protection in europe. and they almost always get what they want.
> protectionism is not new, but it’s definitely in the eu’s dna.
This is actually the opposite. The EU here is enforcing market competition in segments that became entrenched by monopolies (remember this is not specifically about Apple).
Considering corporate « success » in a capitalist environment amounts to the accumulation of wealth and power outside of the commons, yes, it's absolutely the way to go.
"...amounts to the accumulation of wealth and power outside of the commons..."
Considering that we're talking about a publicly traded company, "the commons" (as you decided to label them) have the ability to purchase stocks (the right to recieve a certain percentage of in of the aformentioned company as well as voting power). The legislation doesn't address anything regarding stocks and if anything, it requires companies like Apple to share their work with their competitors South Korea style.
"...doesn't mean a group/class of people..."
I'm well aware of that, as well as the definition, however, i've come across incorrect usage of the term on SMS as the short form for "common man/common people". Considering the context of that persons comment, i was under assumption that they use that term incorrectly, hence why i've put it in quotation.
Regardless, my point still stands.
"The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons can also be understood as natural resources that groups of people (communities, user groups) manage for individual and collective benefit.". Note that the definition provided by you acknowledges various form of ownerships (private vs public) and that aspect is the core of my response to that comment.
I think a trillion dollar company can afford to loose some percentage of its income.
Particularly if it opens the door for new innovation. Things like subscription services to alternative Siri/Alexa/Google. Instead of the current Alexa foisting more advertisements and things you don't want onto you, Google's complete invasion of privacy/data, and Apple's complete ineptitude. This is something that can't happen right now because the hooks aren't well designed in iOS or Android. Making it so that you don't have the concept of "private APIs" for such things levels the playing field.
That's a nice comforting story to believe in. I hope for you it's
true. Over here the bailouts were a massive transfer of public to
private wealth that led to a decade of "austerity", closed hospitals,
collapsed pension schemes and general misery for the poorest people in
society.
> Early estimates for the bailout's risk cost were as much as $700 billion; however, TARP recovered $441.7 billion from $426.4 billion invested, earning a $15.3 billion profit or an annualized rate of return of 0.6%, and perhaps a loss when adjusted for inflation.
So do you not believe in exo-planets since you haven't observed them? Macro-economics? Are foreign countries you've never visited real? What about subatomic particles and radio waves? Do you have germ theory as part of your "own lived experiences"?
Wait, am I real under this model? What about the HN server?
Well it will be a source if fines that they love, which will be handy in paying all those subsidies they are giving other large companies like Intel to build a fab.
Just wished they were proactive about such things instead of letting them fester on in the public eye's for years, but then - how would they make all that lovely income from large fines and PR.
In case someone here knows but how is it even possible that EU can fine companies based on the whole world "turnover" (which I might incorrectly presume meaning profits) when their power is restricted to the EU space.
Re: this:
> The DMA says that gatekeepers who ignore the rules will face fines of up to 10 percent of the company's total worldwide annual turnover, or 20 percent in the event of repeated infringements, as well as periodic penalties of up to 5 percent of the company's total worldwide annual turnover.
I see it this way: the EU may choose whatever way it wants to compute a fine -- they are making the law, they could have written a fixed amount, or an amount based on revenue made in the EU (which is probably a pain to define and certainly easy to "workaround"), or an amount relative to the average temperature in the Sahara over a year.
Whether it's "fair" is an entirely different topic. And I guess any company could try to fight that decision in court.
Same way you can be fined in another country while on holiday even though you don't earn any money there. They set the law, and if you (or Apple) doesn't like it don't go/have business there.
To add to Noe2097's comment, entities ignoring international bounderies is not something special.
For instance US citizens are required to disclose and pay tax on their global income, even if they are official resident of another country. Makes no sense, but the US is free to decide its own rules.
I think there are good intentions behind it, but it also misses the mark by targeting big tech specifically.
The good that could have come of it, is a sort of open sourcing of tech companies... but of course none of that is going to happen.
Yet we have standards; like USB-C which are a good thing. Question is who should enforce creating more standards (to address eg the interoperability of the messaging apps cited in the article).
The big issue I see here is it is completely unfair to Apple because Apple is really in a league of its own. It's very essence, what makes Apple.. Apple.. is that they create BOTH the hardware and software. When I buy a Mac Mini, or an iPad I buy the whole package, that is the value of it...
It's like the EU telling Apple they know better how to design products and that Apple should redefine themselves as a company.. yet.. by finetuning and crafting software for their platforms Apple offers a user experience that is simply the best.
What the EU should have done instead is try to force big tech to work together?
I don't know how to feel about this but as a European I'm tired of being a peasant... and this is going to set us back even more. :/
Unfortunately Apple, although creating technically excellent products[0] is a very bad player as far as the environment is concerned. In particular, they insistence on thinness and related design choices (gluing everything together) makes the shelf life of their products relatively short. This is wrong no matter how you look at it. I have no problem with paying premium, I have a problem with the fact that my MacBook Pro from 2019 upgrades my main tool (Xcode) for a few hours, just because it is a 128GB model - supposedly the most popular one. I mean, it has "Pro" in the name, why does it behave like a toy? Why can't I replace the tiny 128GB drive with a 2TB one I just bought from Samsung? Because Apple decided I can't.
It wasn't always this way. Before the thinness craze, I think around 2013, you could freely replace your memory and disks - and I still have several of these machines beefed up.
[0] Most of the time - let's ignore little fucups everybody makes from time to time
Hmm, I mean I wish we'd still be in the 1990's with user-replaceable RAM, batteries, CPUs/GPUs and all, but I don't know that Apple specifically is a "very bad" player in terms of longevity and sustainability. The updates you get on iOS devices for years on end (up to 10!) is notably unheard of in Android land. In fact, I'm using my original iPad Mini (from 2013 or so) still without probs, and have installed games on it as recently as a couple months ago; and so do I run a four year old iPhone 6s that's doing just fine with up-to-date essential apps for banking, auth, CoVid contract tracing (until a couple of months ago when we still needed those), etc. Likewise, Apple notebooks have way better value retention/resale value, not to speak of battery power, display and overall quality. Whereas the Dell and Lenovo (Thinkpad, Latitude/Precision so comparable in price) notebooks I've received recently for customer project work have OOTB battery and other failures (I'm actually on my third or fourth Dell/Lenovo notebook within a little over half a year), to the point that I'm refusing to buy PC hardware as it is because it's just laughably last-gen compared to Apple, and sometimes not even that, it's not even funny anmore.
> makes the shelf life of their products relatively short
I don't know if this really holds, when you look at the bigger picture.
As for me I've owned an iPad 3rd gen (the first "Retina" iPad) from late 2012 to late 2016.
Then I owned an iPad Air 2 from late 2016 to this day... and I've decided to wait to see if they redesign the base iPad model (not Air) late this year - and if not then upgrade to the new AIR.
So that's 2 iPads between late 2012 to late 2022. 10 YEARS.
Sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Considering how fast tech and software is moving these days if you can get 4-5 years out of your tablet AS A TECH USER that's pretty darn good.
If it was my Grandma, she'd probably still get to use my iPad Air 2 for another few years...
I don't see how it's different for other Apple products. The MINI's from 2012 are still being sold at a decent price and are very much sought after - Apple users love to use them as media servers. The M1 Mini likely will have a LOOOONG life ahead of them. Mine will probably resell in a heart beat even couples years from now.
I really hate having the government involved in regulating this sort of stuff but Apple has brought so much destruction in bad faith it's hard to feel sympathy.
They have nearly single-handedly killed open source chat software (people forget that before the iPhone you could actually send messages from Goolge talk to AIM thanks to XMPP, this still exists but Apple has made it nearly impossible to use comfortably on the iPhone.) Fuck them, I hope they go out of business. As for the "consumer tech industry" that's practically dead at this point anyway, no sense worrying about it.
If EU plays their hand too hard they may just end up with no Apple devices at all. Maybe that's their goal anyway. I wonder how long until the US takes them to the WTO or starts creating retaliatory tariffs.
> You are welcome to continue using the App Store.
As long as apps remain available on the App Store. I wouldn’t be surprised to see, e.g., Facebook making their messaging app available via sideloading only in order to circumvent Apple’s privacy rules.
This will 100% happen and anyone thinking otherwise is just being willfully ignorant. We saw what FB did when it was able to operate in the shadows with it's enterprise cert for it's "VPN". As for why it hasn't happened on Android I think the reasons are simple. First there is way more money to be made on iOS users and secondly sometimes you wait to strike until you can knock down all the pins, not just half. It will start innocent enough, they will add 1-2 features only available in "Facebook Pro/Full/Unleashed/etc" via their own app store/sideloading but over time they will sneak more and more sinister things into their app.
Google will use the full weight of their ecosystem to try to get you to download Chrome or their other apps anytime you touch one of their sites in Safari (it's bad enough now even with them using webkit for their "browser").
This is the logical end for at least these two companies. I agree with some or parts of the things the EU is calling for here but some are just absolutely ridiculous and/or make no sense.
> First there is way more money to be made on iOS users and secondly sometimes you wait to strike until you can knock down all the pins, not just half.
iOS users do spend more money on App Store purchases than Android. But if Meta's whole intention to build a 3rd party App Store is to mine them for data, why didn't they try that on Android- shouldn't the data of Android users be just as good, especially when they have a significantly larger user pool to do that with? Why would iOS users' data be more lucrative? Spending money on the App Store is orthogonal to having more desirable data to sell.
> It will start innocent enough, they will add 1-2 features only available in "Facebook Pro/Full/Unleashed/etc" via their own app store/sideloading but over time they will sneak more and more sinister things into their app.
Easy to conceive, difficult to execute. This scenario might have been feasible a decade ago, when Facebook was younger, their brand was fresher, and customers less jaded. If they were to do that today, they would immediately face friction from users who do not care for more fragmentation of services, and aren't even as engaged with the product as they used to. Maybe they could try to segment off a more popular product, say Instagram, but that would also cause blowback.
> Google will use the full weight of their ecosystem to try to get you to download Chrome or their other apps anytime you touch one of their sites in Safari (it's bad enough now even with them using webkit for their "browser").
And why wouldn't EU/US courts apply antitrust laws against them? Why is antitrust law assumed to be only used against Apple, when legislators/regulators are miffed at all the large tech companies?
I find the whole hypothetical of third party iOS app stores fascinating, because any examination into the landscape of app ecosystems show that they are bloody difficult to build. Ask Microsoft with the Windows Phone Store, or RIM with the BlackBerry Marketplace. Or just Amazon and Samsung with their third party Android app stores, which seem to exist mostly to service users on their own OEM Fire or Galaxy devices.
The idea that Facebook or Google can just make third party app stores and everyone will flock to them is just a questionable, reductionist scenario that flies in the face of creeping consumer burnout in the present day, those companies' continued difficulties in creating new compelling products to woo consumers, and all of the failed app stores of the past. (As Ballmer said, it's all about the developers.) They would have to be cleverer about it. So far, I've yet to see any comprehensive hypotheticals that really deal with past and present realities about the difficulties in setting up such rival ecosystems.
> Why would iOS users' data be more lucrative? Spending money on the App Store is orthogonal to having more desirable data to sell.
This just isn't true. The data of people who have more money to spend is more attractive than that of those who do not. Also having more money to spend means that data can be used for targeted advertising or just knowing what people with money are interested in and where to focus efforts.
> Easy to conceive, difficult to execute. This scenario might have been feasible a decade ago, when Facebook was younger, their brand was fresher, and customers less jaded.
I mean, if you are still on FB and use it regularly there really isn't much hope for you at this point. I don't get the impression that there is a large number of people on FB saying "If they step over the line 1 more time I'm leaving", at this point it's people who just don't care. To some degree the same is true for IG even though it's users like to think it's different. It doesn't even have to be new features, it could just be something like groups (which I think failed) or messenger that they take away features or apps and only release them on their own store. They can even make a big hullabaloo about "This lets us get fixes and features out to you faster and lets you easily opt into our beta channel".
> And why wouldn't EU/US courts apply antitrust laws against them? Why is antitrust law assumed to be only used against Apple now, when legislators/regulators are miffed at all the large tech companies?
Why haven't they indeed? Their bad behavior is clearly visible, I'm completely unclear as to what the EU doesn't seem to care. They seem to be laser focused on mobile to the determinant of desktop and consoles.
> I find the whole hypothetical of third party iOS app stores fascinating, because any examination into the landscape of app ecosystems show that they are bloody difficult to build. Ask Microsoft with the Windows Phone Store, or RIM with the BlackBerry Marketplace. Or just Amazon and Samsung with their third party Android app stores, which seem to exist mostly to service users on their own OEM Fire or Galaxy devices.
MS had devices/OS that no one wanted, RIM was late to the game and had their lunch eaten by that point. As for Amazon/Samsung they capture a lot of a value by making themselves the default but more importantly, all of these examples are platform providers, not app developers (at their root). Meaning, they make their money by taking a cut, not by selling apps themselves or even through ads in apps (maybe ads in their store). The calculus changes for someone like FB, EA, EPIC, etc, especially for less savory app creators who don't care about privacy. I'm not saying that FB will create a store and become the number 1 app store, but that they will release their apps via their own store (with it's own rules, or lack thereof) and users will be forced/tricked/incentivized into using it.
> The idea that Facebook or Google can just make third party app stores and everyone will flock to them is just a questionable, reductionist scenario that flies in the face of creeping consumer burnout in the present day, and all of the failed app stores of the past.
Flock to? Probably not and that's not even what I'm afraid of/worried about. It's being forced into using third-party stores. Either by the company removing their app from the Apple App Store or by gating features to the app only if it was installed via their store.
> This just isn't true. The data of people who have more money to spend is more attractive than that of those who do not. Also having more money to spend means that data can be used for targeted advertising or just knowing what people with money are interested in and where to focus efforts.
Still, Android has a far larger user base than iOS, and if this third party app store data funnel scheme was such a great idea, you'd think they would have tried it out there at least.
To date, Facebook's only attempts to branch off on mobile have been the Facebook Home Android UI/lock screen, and maybe the HTC First. Both don't really inspire confidence in future efforts, but sure, it's been a decade. Would you put money on modern FB being better at launching new successful products that consumers want, compared to FB ten years ago?
> I don't get the impression that there is a large number of people on FB saying "If they step over the line 1 more time I'm leaving", at this point it's people who just don't care.
It's more like, "If they ask me to sign up and manage yet another user account with payment methods and privacy settings and more notifications to worry about, I'm not going to bother and I'll use the mobile website." Or, "I don't even use Facebook much anymore, I'll just use it on desktop or not at all."
> They can even make a big hullabaloo about "This lets us get fixes and features out to you faster and lets you easily opt into our beta channel".
And users, even those who don't know or care about privacy, would be annoyed because this is another hoop they have to jump through, in the modern era where there are multitudes of social media networks, streaming platforms, and so forth to worry about. Many won't bother to sign up for yet another app store, and that will undercut Facebook's own user base.
You really need to get past this core problem of user burnout. Everything is fragmented across services these days. Perhaps there might even be a startup idea in it for easy account management/signup a la 1Password. I guess Sign In with Apple helps with this a little.
> Their bad behavior is clearly visible, I'm completely unclear as to what the EU doesn't seem to care. They seem to be laser focused on mobile to the determinant of desktop and consoles.
All in due time. Who says they don't care? Perhaps you should cast a wider net for news articles.
People didn't want their OS because they couldn't secure the apps the people wanted. Which will also be an issue for these 3rd party app stores, as people can just go to the official store, or you deal with mutually assured destruction scenarios (see below).
> RIM was late to the game and had their lunch eaten by that point.
Fair, but couldn't you say the same about Meta/Google iOS stores?
> As for Amazon/Samsung they capture a lot of a value by making themselves the default but more importantly, all of these examples are platform providers, not app developers (at their root). Meaning, they make their money by taking a cut, not by selling apps themselves or even through ads in apps (maybe ads in their store).
I'm almost certain that Amazon just has it as a means to sell the content (eBooks, music, movies) that they host, and Samsung just packages as bloatware as it their wont. They don't actually invest in their Android 3rd party stores b...
And that's why the messaging interoperability is part of it. It'll allow for new messaging apps (including some that stay on the App Store) to message people on Facebook without you having to install the app.
big tech does not want simple, but good enough to do the job, and stable in time protocols to interoperate with. Force the big to interoperate with the small, and not let the big crush the small, this is one of the whys of regulation.
For instance, in the case of the web: noscript/basic (x)html. With basic (x)html forms, you can browse tiled maps, do shopping, interact with the online administration service, etc. With the <video> and <audio> element, the noscript/basic (x)html browsers can pass an URL to an external media player, what seems missing is the type of streaming. I don't know if you can specify the type of the href, HLS/mpeg DASH/etc, kind of a mime type for those. Then the ability to seek into a big video should be standardized, very probably an URL parameter to do this, at least per mime types if those exists, like t=xxhxxmxxsxxxms.
Those are extremely simple, do not require those horrible web engines and are enough to do the job.
The current javascript-ed web engines are insane and beyond sanity bloats (SDK included), locked-in by gogol/apple/mozilla via complexity and size.
The real hard work is into "securing" those "simple" sites against corpo(=state?) sponsored hackers to make those not work and promote corpo-locked software and protocols. That could be idiotic hackers pushing the web to use those corpo-locked software and protocols.
I’d love to see separating market making from participation, similar to finance. Ie. the same company must not operate and sell at the same time on that market.
If they don’t get a cut of third party game revenue then making a console is a huge, risky investment for what? The opportunity to sell first party games to a smaller audience?
It would certainly fundamentally change their business model.
XBox already seems to be changing, though, with the majority of their games also on PC and even supporting streaming to mobile devices, without a console at all.
I could see Playstation moving towards that model as well, focusing on the games rather than the hardware.
I think the biggest change we would likely see is that classic-game-rereleases would evaporate, as it would become trivially easy to install emulators.
Disagree. “Trivially easy” must be set in common sense to the average consumer. It must be something that they can do easily without any guides or tutorials. Changing my name on Xbox is trivially easy. This[1] is not.
Disagreeing with your disagreement. How "easy" a tech-related task is to accomplish is determined by the users skills and experience, as well as software/hardware usage patterns that they've learned over the years.
Official guides/tutorials for enabling/disabling various functions exist for Google Play/AppStore too. Does that mean that one of the easiest ways to acquire apps that have ever existed is...not easy? Because there really isn't much difference between following a "how to login into my Apple/Google account" tutorial and "how to enable an XBox feature".
I'm 100% confident that if Apple told EU they were complying with the new law, with a system where you either have to run only sideloaded apps or only official App Store apps at any given time, but could reboot from one to the other, the EU would say "very funny, here's your fine".
There is a developer mode[0] so maybe that's their angle; right now nothing changes for regular apps but I can see a future API where banks, competitive games, etc. check to make sure you're not running any sideloaded code (not that that's a big problem, as iOS 15 is still unjailbroken due to the extreme advancements in the OS security model).
I sure hope not. As I age, the value prop of consoles is, I don't have to mess with settings or diagnose problems or sacrifice goats to the "did this update break something" gods.
I agree with the sentiment, but in my experience that's just not true. [1] The PS4 and PS5 are nice and pain free. The Switch even more so, because the games will run right off the cartridge without needing updates. They have available updates, but the version shipped on the cartridge is 100% playable.
[1] With the exception of the XBox because Microsoft can't get their shit together.
Your Windows + Steam experience sounds a lot smoother than mine if all you have to complain about is updates.
I experience breaking updates all the time on PC. "Wait, why is this game crashing now?" "Wait, why have all of my settings been reset?" "Wait, why has the framerate tanked since the last update?" "Wait, why isn't my controller working anymore?"
All of these happen to me on Steam games. It's infuriating. I'll happily take the console experience of updates that don't break things.
The PS5 hardware is already profitable (well, the more expensive one at least). Well, it was before the inflation ramped up at least. But still, even if sideloading was possible on the PS5, PlayStation Store revenue would not dip down to nothingness.
Then they charge money for iCloud storage beyond 5 GB so you can actually get your hardware backed up (I presume this counts as a dip if console "charging online service subscriptions" counts).
Then they charge developers a hundred bucks per year to get application on the App Store.
Then they take 15/30% off of all digital sales.
And finally they charge the developers for keyword search ads on the App Store (so that when I search for "Minecraft", my first hit is an ad for "The Ants: Underground Kingdom").
> Has there ever been a console where, over the life of the console, the hardware was sold for a loss?
All of them.
Speaking about PS5 specifically: there's quite a few advancements in there that you're not thinking about, the kraken decompressor that can run at native NVME speed in hardware and load assets directly into video memory has no PC equivalent. Though PC vendors are trying to do NVME<->GPUMem these days, it still can't do effectively 9GBit like the PS5 can (theoretically).
Even ignoring those architectural advantages and the R&D; last time someone did a cost comparison of an equivelant PC (a year ago) it was $1,600: https://gamerant.com/ps5-specs-pc/
People buying consoles are not buying them for epic frame-rates or 8k resolutions..
I bought my console because I absolutely despise Windows, and despite being a gamedev myself I cannot convince other gamedevs to work as linux for a target.
Even then, the amount of effort fighting my operating system and the spotty support you would get (even on windows) is troubling.. because PC's generally are running a complicated workload at varying degrees of state.
I buy a console game, it's going to work and if it doesn't I'm going to get my money back. My time is too precious to waste on excessive debugging to access entertainment.
Ironically the PS4's insane update sizes and slow storage adapter nearly caused me to go over to PC.. So it doesn't always work, admittedly.
By "double the graphical power" you mean it has more compute units, not the clock speed, memory or bandwidth, which tend to be more important in my experience.
It is an urban legend that all consoles are sold at a loss.
Some manufacturers, in creating an appealing multi-year technology platform, might temporarily sell at a loss. The PS 5 for example was reported to sell at a loss for the first three months.
Secondly, a reporting that a console is sold 'at a loss' initially may be talking console development, initial tooling, and partner contracts for custom parts in account. They may not be speaking of raw manufacturing costs for individual unit parts and labor.
>> Has there ever been a console where, over the life of the console, the hardware was sold for a loss?
> All of them.
Are you serious? The Wii has sold more than 100 million units over the past ten years and you think it's been a net loss for Nintendo?
PS5-to-PC comparisons are hard to do in a meaningful way. It's like saying a Toyota Camry is sold at a loss because if you build one part-by-part it's going to cost $100,000+ rather than the $30k a dealer sells them for.
If you take those PC specs and contact a manufacturer with a plan to order 20 million units, they are going to come in at quite a bit under $1600.
The first run may very well be sold at a loss, but almost every console has eventually turned a profit.
I say almost because the XBox 360 may have been unprofitable over it's entire manufacturing run due to extraordinary warranty costs (red ring of death). I've read that it may have cost Microsoft more than a billion dollars, but I don't know if that's true or if that was enough to net Microsoft a loss over the 11 years it was sold.
Sony in particular does this. For the first X years of its life, Playstation is sold as a loss.
They generate revenue through game sales and then a decade later as hardware components become cheaper and scale increases they start to make money on the consoles as well.
If they can't generate revenue through game sales the entire console model would be upended and hardware prices would rapidly increase. No company can take the risk to lose billions without a guarantee of future revenue.
> No company can take the risk to lose billions without a guarantee of future revenue.
Apparently the Nintendo Switch was never sold at a loss.
Does it really matter though? They shouldn't be allowed to abuse consumers for the sake of their business model. If it were true that they were selling consoles for an expected loss, that would act as a barrier to new competitors entering the market.
Should companies like John Deere be able to prevent third-parties from doing maintenance on farm equipment because John Deere's business model relies on that revenue stream?
The differences between the PS5 and an equivalent PC build from components account for substantial improvements in price/unit; your article doesn't include an actual price breakdown so it is difficult to call out exactly where the costs come from, but:
- Tightly integrated motherboard, designed and built in-house, including the CPU, GPU (integrated to CPU), RAM and comms removes a bunch of middlemen, with all of their testing, development and integration costs (which add substantial overhead on a home-built PC).
- Thanks to the above, thermal and power management get a lot easier, which reduces power and cooling costs.
- Economies of scale and long life-cycle planning let you make large orders of parts (at Sony's scale, economies where the manufacturer is producing to your demand) at lower unit costs, including manufacturing large numbers of custom parts (such as the case and power supply) with design features that minimize cost (rather than allowing home assembly). I wouldn't be shocked if any given part for the PS-5 were getting manufactured in quantities an order of magnitude greater than any of the SKUs in the comparison PC.
I'd be OK with the current locked down consoles not existing. Having people buy two or three functionally almost identical devices so that they can use all the software they want is wasteful and not something we should protect as a society.
If an up front $2000 fee is too much for people to bear then console manafactuers can offer loans directly instead of hiding them in the game prices - that way people will at least be informed about what they are paying.
So far everyone complaining about app lockouts have been laser-focused on phones, because they're general-purpose and thus easier to legally justify sideloading on. Nobody wants to talk about game consoles - to open them up would almost certainly require revisiting DMCA 1201[0] and removing the prohibition on circumvention tools. The US Copyright Office wouldn't entertain extending the current "mobile devices"[1] jailbreaking exception to consoles, and Epic Games had to do all sorts of mental gymnastics to explain why Apple was a monopolist but Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony weren't.
[0] Or your local equivalent.
And yes, you do have a local equivalent, unless you are living in Iran, Afghanistan, or North Korea.
> to open them up would almost certainly require revisiting DMCA 1201[0] and removing the prohibition on circumvention tools.
That law only forbids bypassing protection measures exclusively related to protecting access to a specific copyrighted work. Getting root on consoles isn't that.
That's section A of DMCA 1201 that you're thinking of. There's also section B that forbids circumvention tools and that's way broader than the first part. The law distinguishes between breaking DRM, which can be OK in certain circumstances, and telling people how to break DRM, which is always illegal if you can allege some path from your tool to piracy.
And, believe me, it is actually pretty difficult to give someone a homebrew installation vector that does not also give you the ability to just pirate games at all. While there have been some homebrew scenes that deliberately added barriers to piracy[0], there's also been cases where piracy was the only hack you could even pull off[1]. Remember: if you have the ability to install your own code, then you can also install someone else's. Whether or not a jailbreak or homebrew installer would be considered a DMCA 1201 circumvention tool is something a judge would have to decide, but it's close enough to the line that I wouldn't personally touch exploit development.
[0] Off the top of my head: before A9LH/B9S, 3DS homebrew launchers could only run a custom executable format... though this was moreso for compatibility with the GPU DMA exploit they were using first and antipiracy was just a bonus.
The Wii scene was also extremely opposed to piracy thanks to Team Twiizers pushing hard against it.
[1] Also off the top of my head: the whole mess with 360 drivechip hacks that sucked all the talent away from actual homebrew enablement.
Both sections of the DMCA don't protect against tools (and trafficking of tools) that can make piracy easier in an indirect way or somehow pave the way for ease of access to pirate conduct. What they only forbid is circumventing copyright protection systems that protect a specific work. Same goes for the anti-trafficking provisions.
The statue reads "without the authority of the copyright owner" in the end. That sentence implies that the bypassed protections must protect a specific copyrighted work, not copyright in general. Otherwise there would be no "copyright owner" to authorise the bypassing as the law is currently written.
They're talked about a fair bit tbh. All sorts of proposed legislature often goes to pains to say "except game consoles". The role of game consoles was brought up a fair bit in the Epic v. Apple lawsuit.
For no good reason. Both are effectively media consoles with the streaming apps available, and the xbox has a browser just the same as Apple[0], you can do your banking from it if you so choose (and some people saw that appeal a while ago[1]). The only difference is the form factor and the price point where the consoles are sold near-cost[2] - apple would throw in $500 worth of rare earth material if it meant they could keep their app store revenue model.
> to open them up would almost certainly require revisiting DMCA 1201[0] and removing the prohibition on circumvention tools
This is a non-sequitur. If there were a new law that requires Sony and Nintendo to offer side-loading on their platforms, they would have every right to do so, as they own the copyright of those platforms. The DMCA protects copyright holders from the actions of others, it puts no limits on their own actions. If Sony wanted to break into your PS3, you wouldn't have any standing under the DMCA to sue them about it (of course, there are other laws that protect your data, your past contracts etc).
Sony, MS, and Nintendo already allow games to be purchased from other retailers, and always have. (See, for example, Game Stop, Best Buy, Target, etc.) Even digital downloads can be purchased from other retailers (i.e., Amazon).
Thus, their in-console storefronts are just one of several options that players can use to purchase games.
In contrast, the only way to get iPhone apps is through the App Store. No side-loading, third party stores, etc.
Sony gets a cut of every new PS5 game sold through all those third party vendors.
Do you think the same setup on the iPhone would satisfy regulators? Roughly, this would mean Epic (for example), could set up an app store but every program they sell would have to be signed by Apple and Apple would probably still get their 15-30% fee.
If the regulators are fair, then soon you will be able to write a PS5 or iPhone game and give it to your friends to play.
No, it's quite different. With the consoles, publishers are paying for the right to use the console maker's commercial IP (i.e., the Playstation or Xbox logo on their marketing materials) and technical IP (access to software APIs for using the hardware functionality). They do not pay royalties to the console makers for each sale. (Source: I work for a video game company and deal with these contracts...)
Quite importantly, publishers don't have to pay the console makers if they want to (a) reverse engineer the console firmware so they can make use of the hardware (b) don't use the console maker's IP in their marketing materials (see Sega v. Accord, still good law), and (c) sell through retailers other than the console storefront. However, consoles are now complex enough that reverse engineering would take longer than the commercial life of the console, so it's cheaper and quicker to just pay the console maker the platform fee.
With Apple, you aren't allowed to use their commercial IP for marketing your app, period, but you can use the APIs without paying for inhouse apps. However, there are no alternative marketplaces for apps; even in-house apps must go through the AppStore.
That's not relevant to this discussion, because the choice is (a) recreate everything yourself from scratch vs (b) pay monopolistic rates because there are no alternatives.
But on that note, a common refrain of iOS developers is what a PITA it is to make apps for iOS given the inferior quality of Apple devtools. Meanwhile, developers generally praise the ease of programming for the PS5.
Of course it's relevant because this discussion is about removing app store restrictions from consumer devices.
You're saying there are lots of places for developers to sell PS5 software but that's irrelevant if you still need Sony's blessing and have to pay Sony some type of fee. From a distribution perspective, PS5 developers are not better off than iOS developers. There's no way, AFAIK, for a developer to release a title on either platform without jumping through hoops.
No, you don't need Sony's blessing, unless you want to use Sony's software and marketing IP. Unlike Apple, you can reverse engineer the PS5 hardware if you want, and in fact, that is the whole reason that the console market is structured the way it is.
See Sega v. Accolade for more information, but in a nutshell, the console maker can't prevent unlicensed games from running on the hardware. However, they don't have to make it easy to run unlicensed games, and they can make devkits and other IP contingent upon legal agreements that forbid using those tools/docs to develop solutions that don't require a license. (This means that the publisher would need to acquire commercial units to go the reverse engineering route.)
Have you read the PS5 TOS[1]? It's pretty restrictive. You aren't allowed to run any unauthorized software on it nor can you reverse engineer the software. Even if you were to avoid touching the OS, there's still the firmware that's covered by this. What you are claiming can't practically be done and AFAIK, nobody is using the PS5 in this way.
I don't think you can say with a straight face that the PS5 is more open than the iPhone. I can point you to a bunch of write-your-first-iOS-app tutorials that you can complete after a relatively small investment of time and money. The app you make can only be given away through Apple's app store but it sounds like that's changing. Sounds like Sony's going to have to change as well.
Edit: I should add, you can also give people your source code and they can compile it and install the executable on their phone. Is there an analogous process on the PS5? AFAIK, individuals can't register as PS5 developers. Only companies with a current domain name can access any PS5 developer info.
A TOS governs your use of the PS5 software, not the hardware, and there are a few decades of court cases on these points. Moreover, reverse engineering is a fair use issue that can't be prohibited with a TOS and there is a case exactly on point.
> Quite importantly, publishers don't have to pay the console makers if they want to (a) reverse engineer the console firmware so they can make use of the hardware (b) don't use the console maker's IP in their marketing materials (see Sega v. Accord, still good law), and (c) sell through retailers other than the console storefront.
Don't modern consoles all have signature verification? You would still need the company's blessing to even allow your game to be executed on any end user's system no matter how that executable was produced, right?
Both consoles will run unsigned executable files, but you may need to reverse engineer your own solution for getting those files to run in a user-friendly manner.
There is software created for earlier PS and Xbox consoles (for example, Kodi on the Xbox, Linux on the PS). It simply took a few years for third parties to understand the hardware well enough to write their own code to run on the consoles without using the console makers' IP.
AFAIK, Linux on the PS (2 and 3) only ran because Sony allowed it to.
Nowadays, short of exploits, there is no way for a user to simply load a program into a mainstream console and have it run out of the box without the manufacturer's blessing.
From the perspective of a game developer that distinction is irrelevant. They still need the final blessing of Sony/Nintendo/MS in order for their games to run on end user's consoles.
Yes, but you can't get a devkit for a console without Sony/MS/Nintendo approval.
No devkit, no game. Dunno if they still gatekeep the physical products.
Apple takes the $99 developer license and that's it. You get full access to all tools and the App Store. Releasing a new version doesn't cost you anything extra.
I wouldn't even know how to go about creating an Xbox or PS game. Who do I contact, where do I pay and how much? What rules do you have to follow to get your indie game on the Playstation Store or XBox Store?
What part of "reverse engineer" do you not understand?
The point of paying the platform fee is that you can make games for the console with the assistance of the console maker. If you don't want to pay for the convenience, you can spend time and money reverse engineering an OS that will run your game(s).
Also, the Apple fee isn't just $99. It's $99 plus 30% of every transaction through the app. Forever.
The console platform fee is a (non-linearly) scaled fee based on physical units shipped and wholesale price (between 5% and 30%, with the % getting larger at smaller wholesale prices), and does not apply to sales through the console storefront (MS and Sony waive the platform fee and take their earnings on the delta between the wholesale price set by the publisher and the retail price set by the store).
Who do I contact, where do I pay and how much? What rules do you have to follow to get your indie game on the Playstation Store or XBox Store?
Both Sony and MS have published this information on their websites for over a decade, and promoted indie games for over a decade, so I don't think I need to assume that comment was made in good faith. But since you're too lazy to do a 1-second google search, here are the results for you (in both cases, literally the first result: https://www.xbox.com/en-US/developers/id, https://partners.playstation.net/)
I took a quick look at the Playstation partners page. They require the following:
* Official company registration document, such as a Certificate of Incorporation.
* Latest Annual Return / Financial Statement.
* Copy of your entry on a commercial register (or equivalent) within your country or region.
* Passport (sole traders only).
* Your static IP address in IPv4 format
* Your private domain email address (public domains such as Gmail, Hotmail, etc. aren't accepted). Your email address must include your name.
* Your product pitch
Basically they can just decide they don't like your pitch and not allow you in.
Same for the Xbox store. You send an "application" and they may or may not accept it. At least Xbox doesn't want your product pitch beforehand. There is a "very modest one-time cost" though, no idea what's their idea of modest.
I'm really looking forward to seeing this EU ruling to extend to consoles as well.
In your zeal to make your ideological point you are ignoring what I said.
If you want to go the route of paying Sony/MS, the above applies. My point has always been that you don't need to go that route with consoles, and that is what makes them different from iPhone apps.
Not really. It can still be a walled garden if there is an opt out option, so you can still be able to be inside it but with the option to go out of it and be able to sideload/use different app stores. Also the Apple app store will definitely still be the main source as people usually don't switch that easily for almost no benefit.
No one will force you use a different app store as well.
I can't make up my mind if this is good or bad. On one hand, FAANG has a huge advantage over anyone else on the market, but they did build that product and they did spend their own money to do it.
I'd be curious if there are any other occurrences in history of something so big ending up regulated by the government?
Microsoft is an earlier example of a company with theoretical competition but which ended up with significant intervention due to the practical walled garden they had created and where exhibiting significant monopoly powers over.
The point I’m making is that the argument “Well they built it, shouldn’t they benefit” would make sense if these regulations posed any sort of existential threat to their success. But Apple is already so entrenched that regulation like this won’t. The “doing something you right” you speak of is apple making a great product, and they can make a great product without their monopolistic practices.
Furthermore, I don’t think these regulations apply to new/non-entrenched players either, so I don’t think they will stifle innovation.
Market competition is pretty much the only thing that keeps capitalism in check and benefits people. Without it, it breaks in such a horrible manner that it almost degenerates into feudalism with corporations replacing aristocracy.
And moves like this are way overdue to kinda brings us back in balance where we (as users, consumers) actually can again mix and match products that compete for our choice and aren't just chosen because we're forced into using a certain corporations whole ecosystem due to some unrelated wishes.
Not exactly - they were forced to publish the documentation for the binary formats, e.g. .doc publicly, without requiring royalties and with a covenant not to sue over use of any patents necessary for implementation. Previously the documentation was available to licensed 3rd parties only. OOXML is a subsequent creation.
Thanks for the correction. So MS could have decided to leave EU if they did not want to accept interoperability. So the Apple fans have a study case here where a giant was forced to open up and nothing bad happened to the users, even good stuff like I can tell people that some project of mine can import from Word if they use the docx format.
This is a particularly bad example since the OOXML standardization process was fraught with issues and there are deviations between the standard and Microsoft’s implementation.
So instead of something imperfect you prefer nothing, great I am sure Apple stuff is not perfect so don't use it.
We use open source docx tools and write code to work with docx format so the actual reality is that it works infinity times better then attempting to reverse engineer some proprietary binary stuff .
People would make open sourse stuff to connect to Apple things and if Ap[ple is as bad as Microsoft we can call them out and try to do our best with or code to workaround the imperfections.
For the trivial case where a document or a spreadsheet with just some text has to be exported out of a system, it works. But there are other formats such as CSV that already exist for this purpose and have a higher degree of.
My point wasn't about writing to those formats for these basic use cases, but rather about building interoperable applications that can both read and write from the format. Since the spec is relatively loose and Microsoft hasn't adhered to it well, there are many issues when you use something like LibreOffice. And whether you like it or not, people do like using the advanced features of the Microsoft Office suite.
But what is your point, the MSis good and people forcing interoperability are bad?
Google Docs and other open source tools can import docx and this is great even if not perfect, and if there is an issue you can read the code of the document and maybe figure the problem, is Infinity times better then the old ways where Word would probably just binary serialize the data and dump it in a file.
We are talking about giants having to interoperate with others, what is your point? It can't be done perfectly because giants are evil and we should not try?
I think it is most similar to the Hollywood anti-trust case of 1948[0]. Back then movie theaters were owned by studios, and therefore they would only book movies to their own theaters.
> I'd be curious if there are any other occurrences in history of something so big ending up regulated by the government?
Repeatedly:
Railroad companies.
Oil and gas companies.
Electricity companies.
Phone companies.
Movie companies.
You'll see a recurring theme here, most of those became what we now call utilities. Once something is so big it acts like a public good, it either gets regulated as one, or outright becomes a public good, i.e. a state affiliated/owned enterprise.
Shareholders are a limited set of the population and their interests can go against the interests of the general population, so we basically make everyone a stakeholder.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 463 ms ] threadI hope this means WhatsApp will be somewhat interoperable with equivalent messaging platforms. But I suppose this is just designed to target iMessage. Or have I misunderstood?
> Ensure that all apps are uninstallable.
Finally I will be able to uninstall Microsoft Edge.
[0]: https://www.askvg.com/fix-how-to-uninstall-new-microsoft-edg...
[1]: https://www.askvg.com/windows-10-tip-block-or-prevent-automa...
you know this just means more chrome right?
> Messanger interop is also nice, when done right: basically would need a shared standard like the web that is done by a messaging consortium like the W3.
we went thru this before. didn’t work then, won’t work now.
Why can't it work again? I mean the W3 works, doesn't need to support all the features. Messages and attachments would be enough.
Hahhahahhahahahaha. We will end up with chrome. And developers targeting chrome and safari users being left out because “works best in chrome for my text based website that doesn’t do anything safari can’t do”.
Safari is great. It works. No issues. But developers will do what they did to ie. develop for chrome and shove a banner up blocking safari.
Developers want push notifications on a web browser for mobile? That’s not an improvement.
Firefox is a better browser than chrome but you can’t move people away from chrome.
So regardless of what you think. Adding other browsers to iOS will only have a negative long term effect.
Try to use any google property on Safari (or non-chrome browser on any platform) and see all the times Google tries to push you to use Chrome and/or sign into your google account. When logged in it puts a banner at the bottom of every google search and when you aren't logged in it shows a modal that takes 1/3rd of the page.
Google reigns supreme on the web from everything from search to email and docs/drive/etc. Their reach is massive. They have in the past and will continue in the future to use that reach to push people to use their browser engine. How does Apple/Safari/Webkit compete with that? It's not that the browser is better but that the sites they visit push them to use a different browser.
That’s how chrome became popular.
In practice, probably, but at least you'll also be allowed to install Firefox.
And things don't last forever. Another browser can always gain the crown from Chrome. Without this legislation, it won't even be possible to do that on Apple devices.
Ultimately this will be bad for regular people, and good for crypto scammers, ad agencies, and companies that rely on hovering up personal data.
Add some details and maybe we can compare better.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/16/google-plans-android-privacy...
1) Use of APIs means an App must be listed on the App Store or be used the regular way. You want location data? Sure but in exchange, I want to see an App Store listing along with the Data Privacy Report. You want access to NFC but you’re a bank? Sure but your cards must also be available to be added directly without an app. You’re free to create another version of your app and list that on another App Store , but I want a version that adheres to the App Store rules.
That's often not an option due to Apple's choices, but if Apple offered an official way to break out of the garden with your own iPhone then I think things wouldn't have gotten this far.
This being bad for "regular people" is typical monopolistic corporate scaremongering. Apple has proven that they're more than capable of providing secure devices that provide choice with their MacBook series.
Now what happens is that companies like Facebook and others who really want to get your data without that pesky Apple interfering is they launch legal attacks and marketing campaigns to convince people that Apple is a big bad monopoly and their "locking down" is bad for customers, etc. (so ya know, typical monopolistic corporate scaremongering) and then Apple goes and gets regulated.
With Apple finally being forced to allow a third-party app store on iOS, it makes financial sense for, well, Facebook and others to start such stores that don't respect privacy rights - Apple can't make them and then Facebook creates a neutered version of its products on Apple's App Store and creates the best version on their own (or one they support) app store. It didn't make a lot of sense to do this with just Android because you're maintaining a lot of software and it's not worth the money + you don't want to show your hand. Now with this new legislation these companies will basically eliminate a lot of customer protections that we have.
Many day-to-day people will just say "oh I need the X store for Facebook and TikTok and YouTube" and they'll sign away privacy rights to get those apps because they don't have an immediate feedback loop. They just get more and more invasive applications and then that's that.
With Apple maintaining control of the App Store ecosystem, customers could have their cake and eat it too. They got privacy rights because Apple could collectively bargain for them, but they also got their apps because so much money stands to be made anyway that companies would comply with these rules.
It absolutely blows my mind that people are rallying the pitchforks around Apple for "monopolistic corporate scaremongering" all the while missing that its all of these other "monopolistic corporate scaremongering" corporations like Facebook, Google, TikTok, Uber, and others who they're out in the streets for. I mean, you do know that Facebook is a giant corporation, right? (Not picking on Facebook here).
For me personally as a user, it means companies leave the App Store ecosystem, and devalues the iPhone and other devices.
I'm still waiting to be able to use my iPad to write code.
To be able to use the iPad as a platform for tools that contain their own WASM ecosystem of user purchase-able plugins.
To use a browser on iPhone and iPad that is actually secure.
iPhone and iPad are little addiction machines, with little value for productive work that goes beyond email and powerpoint. These legislations give us a fighting chance of regaining the quality of 00s personal computers, with advanced 20s technology.
For the overwhelming majority of people: coding is not productivity.
What is? Checking email, jotting down notes, recording meetings and transcribing/dictating them, joining meetings and having reliable video/audio.
Being able to respond to an email with a little drawing is _absolutely_ a killer feature for productivity, having a little 10" portable device which can perch on a desk and allow you the full gammut of features for a _good_ meeting is also pretty damn awesome.
One could argue that these have some moderate competence at artistic creation machines (photos, videos, drawing, some combination), but I'm not creative so I'm not sure how competent these devices realistically are.
I wont comment much on the statement you can't actually code on an iPad, technically you can; gitpods, code-server, coder.com, (and if you work at google CitC) means you already have everything you need. These work with safari; because those features Chrome demands we have are not actually needed for such tasks.
That's not coding on an iPad, since the code is not being interpreted/compiled on-device. You're right that an iPad can remote into a build server for "development", but so can a $6 Raspberry Pi.
For me, though, having an internet connection as a prerequisite for running my software is borderline insanity. My software should compile and run locally, I shouldn't need to trust a random third-party or connect to the internet to check how my HTML renders or test a few changes to my software. But I guess that doesn't make a difference on iPad, because even if you did have a proper text editor/compiler it would phone home with OSCP anyways.
Lots of input capabilities and low processing (yes, I know it has the M1 now, but that feels more like a supply chain thing than a product thing).
I wouldn't get mad if the Sun Ray[0] didn't allow me to compile code natively.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray
Your lack imagination of how much better software development could be given the right interfaces, and interaction modes, is somewhat representative of how the stagnation of iPad OS has crippled our optimism and taste for futurism, constantly improving user experiences and new models of computation.
The iPad has amazing input capabilities, from the pen to laser scanning that could all be used to further improve developer experiences. Be it by augmenting your scrum board, to sharing code annotations with your coworkers, or foregoing coding completely and turning flow-charts to code directly.
But sure, let's all be middle management, and write emails all day.
Countless, countless, countless iOS devs, even extremely high-profile ones like Marco Arment, can talk all day long about problems they've had with App Review and the capriciousness of the App Store. Tons of high-profile, reputable devs can talk about specific apps they were making or wanted to make, never saw the light of day, not because the apps violate App Store policy, but because App Review is such a minefield that they didn't want to bother.
Apple literally publicly said that devs criticising the App Store, or App Review practices, could expect retaliation.
It's insane that devs are expected to only provide apps through a single storefront, that operates at such a huge scale that moderation is necessarily arbitrary, mostly algorithmic, and inconsistent. The App Store monopoly is indefensible.
You might say, well at least they have alternatives from Apple. Sure, but then if those alternatives are sufficiently good competitors we likely lost all of the privacy benefits and so forth from the Apple App Store and they'll have their own arbitrary review practices and retaliatory nature. And if they as good of alternatives then most likely the majority of these apps with "problems" are just scam artists and should be rejected anyway except now they can thrive on people who are susceptible to being scammed.
To me this is a little bit like having a debate over the First Amendment where I'm kind of sitting here and saying yea you shouldn't be allowed to yell fire! in a crowd as part of the amendment from the start and others are just asking for maximum freedom of speech, only to have this legislated later anyway.
I prefer to put my trust in "collectively bargained" and voted for GDPR (and similar) legislation which affects all apps, all corporations. This gives us both choice (critical for freedom), market competition (critical for healthy economy and society - growing up in socialist single-choice markets wasn't fun) AND privacy across the board.
I honestly don't understand your penchant to cross your fingers and hope a for-profit corporation will protect you over actually ensuring they do via privacy legislation.
Couple of things here. First, I live in America so I don't really care and apparently the Chinese people for whatever reason want to live in that privacy hellscape. Second, Apple unfortunately (like many corporations) is not in a position to dictate privacy regulations to the Chinese government. The interactions here, frankly, are complicated so I'm not really buying this as a valid criticism w.r.t the App Store. If you really want to try and take a moral high ground here, well, let me know when the EU stops supporting genocide in Xinjiang. I'll wait.
(but it's complicated, so let's not sling mud here alright?)
> They've also special-cased their own Ad data collection (a business that's growing in revenue) to be opt-out.
Yes, and I don't like this. It's something I agree with criticizing Apple for.
Similarly: "They're an unaccountable and unelected corporation, not a government"
Yes. And? They're ahead of government regulation here (in many instances and in many countries). You're framing this as if my choices are an unelected corporation and a government, but we're just switching between one unelected corporation (Apple) and others (Facebook, et al).
> I honestly don't understand your penchant to cross your fingers and hope a for-profit corporation will protect you over actually ensuring they do via privacy legislation.
We are not talking about GDPR or "socialism" or whatever. We're talking about regulating Apple so that other mega corporations can create their own app stores on iOS and then do whatever they want. You're just wrestling control away from one mega corporation that ostensibly has some sort of values that align with the interest of the public and giving it to other mega corporations that, as far as I can tell, don't.
So don't use those. Personally I'll mostly stick to Apple's app store along with some Free Software one where I download Firefox and some other open source apps.
The problem is that it lessens Apple's collective bargaining power. They can't make Facebook (again just as an example) comply with privacy rules on the iOS App Store because Facebook can and will offer its product exclusively on its own store or on a third-party store where they don't have to use these rules.
The feedback loop for privacy rights is such that people will say screw the privacy rights and go download Facebook anyway - so now customers that previously had the best of both worlds (privacy rules and Facebook) will be forced to choose, and they'll definitely choose Facebook.
So what was gained? Well, it's good for mega corporations like Facebook. Bad for single megacorporation Apple, and bad for me as a customer. It's good for payday loan type crypto companies or other scam artists, and bad for my grandma. Etc.
That's the problem here. Saying "don't use those" doesn't make sense. But if you wanted to say that then I just say don't use the iPhone if you want third-party app stores.
Heck, even Instagram is beginning to show signs of trouble:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/16/technology/instagram-teen...
To me it just seems for a way to "get around" Apple's rules which tend to ban crypto scams, porn, and I guess sometimes legit apps. What are we trading and what do we gain?
For a long time now, the official App Store itself has been overrun not only by scammy apps, see Kosta Eleftheriou's excellent investigatory work into top-selling fraudulent apps, but also by poor discoverability with outdated UX and obtrusive search ads. If the platform was opened, just a little, one could imagine boutique third party specialized app stores hosting curated apps for curated purposes, which would help with app discoverability greatly. (Apple has banned app discovery tools from their App Store, see the 2013 removal of AppGratis.) It would be a little like the return to the web of GeoCities and Angelfire, when websites had more free expression and control, except on native. A legitimized Cydia, perhaps.
It didn't have to be like this, all regulatory pressure and billion dollar fines. Apple could have chosen to open up the App Store on its own terms, issuing a privacy-hardened AppStoreKit that third party app stores would use, providing mandatory security scan APIs a la macOS notarization, going through reliability processes that Apple approves, heading regulators off at the pass. Apple already has authorized third party resellers and service and repair providers, why not app stores? Apple could have allowed the flourishing of an ecosystem where they are still in control, but as delegated as the code in their apps. Instead they tried to do it all themselves, making themselves the singular point of failure.
> what do we gain?
The freedom of possibility.
Yea so why not just use Android for that instead of trying to put a square peg into a round hole? That's what I don't understand. You can do anything you want with Android or any number of manufacturers but no you have to do it on iPhone and iOS...?
I think this is just an admittance that iPhone and iOS are superior to all alternatives and that the "closed" model is better than open source software. If that weren't the case, you wouldn't be here trying to use Apple's products when you have multiple options and FOSS readily available.
> For a long time now, the official App Store itself has been overrun not only by scammy apps
Ok sure. So if this is a problem then it's not one that more app stores solve. It just makes the problem worse. So can you not use this as discussion point? Either you haven't thought about this much or you're being disingenuous.
> The freedom of possibility.
Yea, for a very vocal minority of people. Now I lose privacy regulations, apps, convenience, having a phone that just works, and so many other things just so a specific community of greedy, selfish people can do things they can already do now via jailbreaking their iPhone. And once this all comes to pass, it'll just be the same group of people doing stuff that can do it now except all other users will have a worse experience on their behalf. Thanks man
Because I prefer the iOS user experience and Apple hardware irrespective of their management of the App Store? Because I would like to see the platform innovate and provide more interesting opportunities than widgets? Not to mention, even while Apple does not have a majority share of the smartphone OS market, it does have exclusive control over its platform in such a way that antitrust arguments are still arguably applicable?
> It just makes the problem worse. So can you not use this as discussion point? Either you haven't thought about this much or you're being disingenuous.
If more app stores were allowed to exist, they can compete with one another, leading to improvements in quality. There can be app stores and communities built around ensuring security, with even more exclusive standards for the sake of curation. Especially in the case of stores focused on FOSS apps where the code is open for all to review. Making Apple be the sole gatekeeper promotes a single source of failure and security via obscurity. Not to mention, because Apple has control over the underlying OS, they can mandate 3rd app stores use safeguards that transcend individual app stores, like they already do on macOS via notarization.
> If that weren't the case, you wouldn't be here trying to use Apple's products when you have multiple options and FOSS readily available.
What if I have an underlying heart condition or other preexisting condition where I must rely upon the Apple Watch to save my life, as Apple claims their products can do via their own marketing?
https://www.macrumors.com/2018/12/06/apple-watch-real-storie...
https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/1/22862543/apple-watch-911-a...
> Now I lose privacy regulations, apps, convenience, having a phone that just works,
If you like those things, you can still have them. Just don't use another app store. Like the majority of users wouldn't.
> all other users will have a worse experience on their behalf
This all-or-nothing emotional argument is very puzzling. It seems to reduce the Apple today, the most profitable company in the history of the world since the Dutch East India Company, to the shell on the verge the bankruptcy it was in the '90s. You insult and demean Apple by accusing them of being unable to handle an open platform. That all of their engineering, product, and design prowess is unable to square the circle, that all of their resources are for naught. You do not present an argument, you do not present a debate, all you do is insult Apple and say they are incapable and helpless. That is very far and away removed from present real-world conditions. Somehow, that is even more offensive than your insults towards the hacker community.
Well, that's the trade-off, right? I don't buy a sports car and get mad when it doesn't have the utility of a pickup truck.
Different products have different features. For example, Motorola released a phone that was modular at one point. Samsung has a phone with two screens. There are companies that make de-Googled phones with Android that are targeted toward FOSS. Apple sells a different product with different features. The iPhone lacks the feature of "multiple app stores" but has the best platform and operating system.
> Not to mention, even while Apple does not have a majority share of the smartphone OS market, it does have exclusive control over its platform in such a way that antitrust arguments are still arguably applicable?
That doesn't make any sense because plenty of companies have control over their own platform and that's normal and acceptable.
> If more app stores were allowed to exist, they can compete with one another, leading to improvements in quality. There can be app stores and communities built around ensuring security, with even more exclusive standards for the sake of curation. Especially in the case of stores focused on FOSS apps where the code is open for all to review. Making Apple be the sole gatekeeper promotes a single source of failure and security via obscurity. Not to mention, because Apple has control over the underlying OS, they can mandate 3rd app stores use safeguards that transcend individual app stores, like they already do on macOS via notarization.
But you said major companies won't create their own app stores or leave Apple's App Store. So who will be these companies? Who are they for? A small, vocal minority of users?
Will I have to download 3 versions of Instagram? The neutered App Store version, the version on the Meta store, and the privacy focused version?
> What if I have an underlying heart condition or other preexisting condition where I must rely upon the Apple Watch to save my life, as Apple claims their products can do via their own marketing?
Then don't use the product? I don't know what you're talking about here. Do you want third-party app stores without anyone working with the FDA to monitor your Apple Watch?
> If you like those things, you can still have them. Just don't use another app store. Like the majority of users wouldn't.
Please re-read the posts where I've discussed Apple's collective bargaining on behalf of users against developers as it relates to the App Store. I think once you understand how that works (as I've explained it) you'll see why your comment here is incorrect.
> You insult and demean Apple by accusing them of being unable to handle an open platform.
No, I said that it will make my personal experience much worse and I think that it will make the experience for most people worse as well and it will only benefit a small, vocal minority of people. I'm sure Apple can "handle" third-party app stores. That doesn't mean the user experience won't be degraded for the vast majority of people who just want to pick up their phone and use it.
The regulators disagree.
> So who will be these companies? Who are they for? A small, vocal minority of users?
Startups! App discovery companies like AppGratis and Chomp, which were killed off by App Store guidelines. A potential industry for app discoverability, curated app experiences, app lists for specialists. There is potential there for entirely new industries to be built for the iOS app ecosystem, for dynamic change and new frontiers!
> Will I have to download 3 versions of Instagram? The neutered App Store version, the version on the Meta store, and the privacy focused version?
Most people will use the App Store version. Few die-hards will bother to migrate to the Meta store, as such purists most likely already view as the Facebook acquisition and subsequent ad/brands push as compromising the indie nature of Instagram. Certainly some savvy power users may opt for the privacy-focused version, just as people already do with alternatives to the official Twitter or Reddit clients. It is fine to stick to the default option; let people have choice.
> I don't know what you're talking about here.
If Apple is making claims that go as far that its devices are life-saving, then they are not some minor player who is beyond the purview of regulators and antitrust legislation. Thus you cannot claim that "just use Android" is a valid dodge to prevent Apple from having its power checked.
> Apple's collective bargaining on behalf of users against developers as it relates to the App Store
Your arguments still relies on hypotheticals about Facebook or Google, companies who have clearly questionable abilities to launch new compelling products and platforms, being able to steal users away. Again, I find that to be dubious, especially when you examine the modern state of the industry, and the increasing sclerosis of these companies from a product perspective. I find the "data funnel 3rd party app store" threat vector to be debatable and worth examining in detail, before we base our entire policy upon this hypothetical scenario.
Basically, you are saying that Apple is protecting us from giants, when they are actually windmills.
> That doesn't mean the user experience won't be degraded for the vast majority of people who just want to pick up their phone and use it.
I disagree. I believe if Apple embraces a partial opening up, they can manage it with minimal degrading of UX, and in fact will open up many new potential to breathe freshness into iOS and smartphones in general. All of this FUD is really just covert anti-Apple skepticism.
Sure but that's not a good argument. When it comes to technology so far regulators don't have a great track record IMO. Even if they did, that's still not a good argument.
> Startups! App discovery companies like AppGratis and Chomp, which were killed off by App Store guidelines. A potential industry for app discoverability, curated app experiences, app lists for specialists. There is potential there for entirely new industries to be built for the iOS app ecosystem, for dynamic change and new frontiers!
I don't find this compelling enough to give up everything I enjoy about the iPhone. I'd rather these startups just never exist, or they can exist on Android and prove their business model successful.
> Most people will use the App Store version. Few die-hards will bother to migrate to the Meta store, as such purists most likely already view as the Facebook acquisition and subsequent ad/brands push as compromising the indie nature of Instagram. Certainly some savvy power users may opt for the privacy-focused version, just as people already do with alternatives to the official Twitter or Reddit clients. It is fine to stick to the default option; let people have choice.
Or so you think. Most likely scenario is that people will have 2-5 app stores installed because these companies have enough pull that they can get a user to click through a few buttons. You can see these kinds of user-hostile patterns all over the place where companies will interact with you initially and then stop. Take Affirm. Payment processing. They send you an email when you have an upcoming payment and then you click the email, each link takes you to an app download. Eventually users just give in and download the app because they make it hard to view payments on the web. No reason to think that a company such as Meta won't/can't transition all of their products to their own App Store even if they maintain a neutered version on Apple's App Store that constantly bothers users to switch stores. Companies such as Spotify or Netflix will move to a third-party store so they don't have to pay Apple for using the platform. So now Apple has less incentive to improve software because if they make gains then other mega corporations like Netflix will be able to access those gains without any sort of payment - in other words, they get access to the users and platform without having to pay anything to do so. You might believe that to be fair, but I don't think that's up to regulators to decide and should be left to the mega corporations to fight it out amongst themselves.
> If Apple is making claims that go as far that its devices are life-saving, then they are not some minor player who is beyond the purview of regulators and antitrust legislation. Thus you cannot claim that "just use Android" is a valid dodge to prevent Apple from having its power checked.
I think you're confused.
First, I have never stated that Apple was a minor player. You can safely retract that thought.
Second, creating "life saving devices" isn't relevant here. Medical manufacturers create life saving devices too. Seatbelts save lives. So what?
Finally, you can just use Android because there are lots of mega corporations such as Google and Samsung that manufacture phones that compete with the iPhone, and you can use various distributions of Android including completely free and open source versions.
There's a very healthy and competitive marketplace. Open-source software and the Android + manufacturer business model has turned out to be less competitive and weaker than Apple's approach. In fact, Apple's model of locked-down software and tight integration is so superior to open source software that even you use the iPhone.
> Your arguments
Look I've already explained it. You don't have to accept it but there's nothing else for me to say here. I've described the mechanics in a satisfactory wa...
It is not argument; it is the reality on the ground.
> I don't find this compelling enough to give up everything I enjoy about the iPhone.
I don't believe you will have to give up anything on your iPhone. We will just have to agree to disagree, until this future comes to pass, if at all.
> Most likely scenario is that people will have 2-5 app stores installed because these companies have enough pull that they can get a user to click through a few buttons.
I disagree. It's far more involved to get someone to sign up for another platform and to manage another user account, than it is to simply download an app for the platform they are already on. Seems like we are at an impasse until we actually see what third party app stores are like and how popular they are.
Also, this regulation doesn't mean that Apple can't make activating third party app store/sideloading behavior a guarded one with multiple hoops to jump through. It would definitely not be as seamless as you claim.
> Companies such as Spotify or Netflix will move to a third-party store so they don't have to pay Apple for using the platform.
Not if Apple keeps cutting sweetheart deals with them, as they and Google already have. They have not shifted to third party/independent app stores on Android. Furthermore, you are once again overlooking how difficult it is to herd users off of existing platforms for no good reason. Even in the arena of games, where gamers are used to platform exclusivity, there is a lot of friction against the proliferation of new games stores from the likes of EA, UbiSoft, Epic, etc. Store runners have to woo players with free or discounted content.
Netflix and Spotify, curiously enough, are also platforms facing issues with user growth and retention. So along with Facebook, these are three platforms you've cited that have less capacity to lure users to a third party app store than it would seem. If anything this would be good news for Apple Music and Apple TV+, as users switch over rather than deal with another app store.
> You might believe that to be fair
I don't believe that is fair. I believe that is a complete slippery slope worst-case doomsday scenario that is far less probable than it is held up to be.
> I have never stated that Apple was a minor player.
Then you agree that their behavior is worth subjecting to antitrust investigation. Thank you.
> In fact, Apple's model of locked-down software and tight integration is so superior to open source software that even you use the iPhone.
I'm not actually a FOSS advocate. I use Safari on macOS not only because of past and present professional obligations, but because I am comfortable with it. But I also believe that FOSS folks and other hobbyists deserve to be accorded the ability to tinker on iOS, as they have historically done so with other Apple products. Because it is right. And because it is interesting.
> If third-party stores were a breath of fresh air you wouldn't be here complaining that you need them on yet another device.
F-Droid exists on Android, which is great. What is wrong wanting one for iOS?
> I'm not interested in discussing it further because there's no new information being presented that I haven't already considered.
Very well. I have made my case and you have made yours. You have advanced hypotheticals that I have found wanting, hurled calumny that I have endured; now let reality take its course.
This is trotted out every time, but these doomsaying scenarios always miss out that this is far harder to achieve than it seems, from a product and business perspective. They can build it, but consumers are unlikely to come.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30808926
The major corporations will try, but consumers are just burnt out by managing all of the user accounts and dealing with different ecosystems. Not to mention even casual users are vaguely aware that these companies are out to take their data and sell them ads now.
I foresee that any attempt to put their apps exclusively on competing scammy low-privacy third party app stores will end in tears and mea culpas, leading them to put those apps back on the Apple App Store. As I've said before, creating a compelling alternative app ecosystem is hard, and if you think a Facebook App Store is going to be so scary, just look at the current state of the Amazon Appstore on Android, or the Samsung Galaxy Store. These are real world case studies, not hypothetical doomsday scenarios, and they do not show consumers flocking to these alternatives.
Finally, it's possible that antitrust logic can apply to these companies just as they apply to Apple. If Google tries to make Gmail, YouTube, G-Suite, etc. apps available only on a Google iOS Play Store, the courts aren't going to be happy about that.
> then what kind of companies are going to need to have a third-party app store that's uncontrolled by Apple?
Epic, mostly, with their games store. Piracy (for game emulators, ROMs, etc.), Porn and other adult content, and open-source Purists a la F-Droid. Also, potentially governments such as China or Russia.
> Do you think these companies have spent this much money on marketing and bankrolling lobbyists in the US and EU for no reason?
It's perfectly possible for companies to waste a lot of money on boondoggles that won't actually help their bottom line, yes.
(Relative to their size).
They have therefore little political pull on European legislator's (beside flat out bribing them which, despite everything, isn't helping them).
The cherry on top is that all those regulations can be used in negotiations with the US in the future (e.g. to provide EU law enforcement with equal access to the data of American citizens)
Meanwhile it blows my mind that on a site called Hacker News, people are not only enthusiastically handing control of their computing environments to a megacorporation, but insisting that everyone else should do the same.
Who here is advocating that Everyone else should get iPhones or that Android should be as locked down as iPhones? (These are the only two interpretations I can imagine from this sentence)
This site started is effectively a Y-Combinator watercooler. Just because it has the term “Hacker” doesn’t mean what you think it means.
I used to believe that I'd stay inside the Apple ecosystem if this ever happened, but the ecosystem has become a total dumpster fire in the last few years IMO.
The App Store itself is riddled with 99% crap apps, there's a lot of advertisement that really puts me off, the macOS Store results are mostly copycat apps or very suspicious stuff (although most of the time the real Apps aren't even there), their own apps (Music, TV, AppStore itself) are buggy as heck for me, there's an incredible amount of notification spam from otherwise useful apps (bank app, Uber, delivery app, etc). They've lost control.
Opening up is more necessary than ever, for multiple reasons.
Apple's Search Ad made $2B a year in 2020. And estimated to be $2.5 to $3B in 2021.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/10/apple-implies-it-generated-r...
I hope some of these regulations spill over into the U.S. and the rest of the world.
The numbers for 2021 are pretty much in line:
$89B - Apple sales in Europe (including some non-EU countries, most notably UK)
$85B - Apple AppStore revenue worldwide.
The question is: which one has more potential for growth.
> Share data and metrics with developers and competitors, including marketing and advertising performance data.
with competitors? :))
> Allow developers to integrate their apps and digital services directly with those belonging to a gatekeeper. This includes making messaging, voice-calling, and video-calling services interoperable with third-party services upon request.
could have been solved easily if they proposed a working group to come up with the next video and messaging standard. right now i foresee the discussions we had back in mid 00s: we use our own video encoder. they use h263. and those other guys use vp9. good luck to the team writing a transcoder that works real time :))
> The Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires platforms to do more to police the internet for illegal content, has also been approved.
“think of the children” legislation.
if your goal is more protectionism, then it’s great. but if you want to produce market leaders then it’s bad.
Besides, the DMA has specific exemptions for small companies. Once a company reaches the "gatekeeper" level, they will have had all the necessary time to figure out how to comply with the law.
The question is, how far will Apple go to keep Americans from turning on "EU mode"? Will it just be the usual country toggle? Will sideloaded apps be geofenced to the EU with Location Services? Or will they start adding bootloader fuses for each jurisdiction so that you can't install the "EU sideloading firmware" on US-purchased iPads? Or all of the above? I hope the EU is ready to litigate whatever hoops Apple makes people jump through - because Apple loves inventing new hoops.
Let's assume that 15% of App Store revenue is from the EU. That would leave an additional $12.7 billion hole in Apple's pocket.
Worse, it would mean Apple's third-party developers lose about $30 billion in revenue. (Apple takes a 30% cut, so the total App Store sales volume is about $283B). Those developers would also lose all access to their existing users in those countries. It would be a massive black stain on Apple's reputation.
It's the kind of drastic move that you simply can't do as a platform provider unless your hand is absolutely forced by something like international sanctions.
Much more likely they'll go the route of malicious compliance. You can side load apps but you can't add them to your home screen. You can set a third party voice assistant but it can't launch apps. Etc.
Will be very interesting to see how this plays out!
Facebook and Google are going to love this.
They can build a voice assistant app which will provide them with all of the apps people use the most, people they contact, places they visit, searches they do etc.
It's going to be a privacy nightmare.
As long as Apple keeps selling iPhones, there's still profit to be made, App Store be damned.
Apple will barely see a dent from it. Their profit juggernaut will keep rolling on almost exactly the same.
The parent comment in question - "and eat pretty heavily into their revenues" - is confusing their personal projected wishful thinking (obviously desperately wanting big tech to falter) with actual reality (the one where Apple has no serious competitive threats in smartphones for what they do, and as such they'll keep marching on just the same).
>A covered company that controls the operating system or operating system configuration on which its app store operates shall allow and provide readily accessible means for users of that operating system to choose third-party apps or app stores as defaults for categories appropriate to the app or app store
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/271...
Second time they're out of compliance, the fine doubles.
If they still breach compliance, they get investigated for systematic non-compliance. The Commission can then impose structural and behavioral changes.
Or Apple can stop providing service in the EU. But they're not going to say goodbye to a fourth of their global revenue. They will comply.
I agree it seems unlikely but the math checks out.
If Apple moved voluntarily to 10% or 15% for all, there never would have been the industry pressure for this sort of regulation.
The EU would have been better to just mandate a maximum % commission for all digital marketplaces above a certain level of revenue. This new solution will get poked full of holes by Apple and lead to an inferior experience for consumers.
Edit: downvoted for asking a question? Thanks HN.
Where is the other 26.5% coming from?
In 2020 Apple made $60bn from the AppStore.
Apple makes outrageous amounts of money from first mover advantage and a humongous moat but I guess we're ok with that.
No. It's not. "The market" is going to say: sorry users, fuck that, y'all can just magically research all this and provide your own security and privacy from here on out.
Which is impossible, of course.
Result: much poorer user experience for the vast majority of users. Which is why Apple did it their way in the first place. No, it was not because of revenue. Anyone who says that is either lying or is incredibly lazy and hasn't looked up where Apple actually makes its money.
From https://revenuesandprofits.com/how-apple-makes-money-underst...,
> The devices and platforms help Apple lock-in the consumer into its ecosystem. First, Apple achieves hardware lock-in with the devices. Then, it achieves software lock-in with operating system software, application software, and third-party software and apps. Then, iCloud helps Apple achieve the data lock-in.
PS: In case I couldn't make it clear, my questions are not directed to parent comment.
All of us. The very same society that gave Apple exclusive control over their "intellectual property" in the first place which allows them to pocket that profit without having to compete for it. The same society that pays for enforcing that exclusivity. Corporations like Apple and their business models are only allowed to exist because we think that suits us - and we should continuously reevaluate that decision and correct it when corporations do more harm than good.
https://www.nbcnews.com/businessmain/apple-faces-5-year-ban-...
We already have rules about how much control a single company can have over a market and what defines a market. The app store is clearly a market. Apple has an aggressive chokehold on it that artificially inflates prices and prevents competition.
As an obvious check - Amazon can't sell me ebooks through it's kindle app without Apple being involved and taking a 30% cut. That is market control and abuse.
Let's say you want to build a direct competitor to an Apple product. You can't because Apple actually won't let you do the things it's apps do if you want to be listed in the store. That's called market abuse.
I don't know of such rules. Can you point me to them?
To the contrary, there's Epic Games v. Apple case in which definition of the market is pretty narrow (digital mobile gaming transactions) compared to what you suggest (App Store in general) [0].
> That is market control and abuse.
In the same case, judge decided that Apple is not a monopoly, saying “Success is not illegal.” [1]
> Apple has an aggressive chokehold on it that artificially inflates prices and prevents competition.
Almost all apps are free. What inflated prices are you talking about?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple#Decision
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/08/23/apple-versus-epic...
If the barriers-to-entry are so high that you can't have real market competition, then regulation is the only option left.
Of course security screening is expensive, but it's also not that expensive (e.g. a typical software company might have a 10-30% profit margin, so in some cases apple accounts for roughly half the operational expenses of a company – i.e. the company pays as much, or more, money to apple as it does to its entire payroll)
How to piss off the EU political system in one simple step.
This ruling is no surprise after such behaviour from Apple. They made their own bed.
"So you think our fines are too puny to make you comply?"
"There fixed that for you."
20% for repeat offenders.
I can't imagine any company in the world that will shrug that off.
I wonder what their endgame was? Did they hope that users would rise up and defend apple against their government over dating apps?
Did they think the government would blink first? (Why would it?)
Was this an attempt to hinder similar laws in other jurisdictions? (If so, how?)
Where they simply too stunned and inflexible to react quickly?
It made no sense to me and I fear we will never learn?
Every single app creator out there will now want their own "app store" and it's going to be a mess. 30% fee initially to capture that market was what our company factored in and grew exponentially with. A 15% fee is nothing if the market is fragmented.
This is such an oft-repeated argument, yet overlooks that Android already allows sideloading and alternative app stores. If everyone-creating-their-own-app-store hasn't happened on Android, why would iOS be different?
Apple locks out so many useful kinds of software that there actually may be enough momentum for real alternate app stores to proliferate.
For someone who doesn't have a personal Android phone, what useful software is out there that I can get on an iPhone?
Related: What mass-market software is out there that isn't available on the iPhone? I don't mean *nix tools and niche game emulators. Things that would make many people actually care about alt stores?
- Game cloud streaming services (xCloud, Stadia, GeForce Now).
- Unofficial clients for websites such as YouTube that add features that official client doesn't have.
- Tools to disable advertisements in applications.
- Programs licensed under GPL as Apple App Store bans those.
I'm sure Google can send a cease-and-desist to all sorts of other stores instead of just Apple.
> Tools to disable advertisements in applications.
This would be breaking the sandbox model of the system, I don't think the regulation requires dismantling system security
> Programs licensed under GPL as Apple App Store bans those.
No such rule. VLC on App Store is the first example that comes to mind. There are also GPLv2 components (such as WebKit) shipping in iOS itself.
The FSF has said there are (IMHO bureaucratic) issues with GPL on an App Store, specifically that e.g. Apple takes on certain responsibilities, rather than the developer.
For that reason, it's possible a contributor may shoot down publication, which IIRC caused VLC to have to rewrite certain components before launch.
Google may dislike those applications and refuse to host them on Google Play, but they aren't doing anything illegal, so they cannot do anything about programs like https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/ on other stores.
> This would be breaking the sandbox model of the system, I don't think the regulation requires dismantling system security
I don't think it is breaking the sandbox, it could be implemented using NEAppProxyProvider, however this particular API is not available for App Store applications.
> Programs licensed under GPL as Apple App Store bans those.
iPhone version of VLC is licensed under MPL2 specifically for that reason. WebKit is LGPL2.1.
A web browser that isn't a hamstrung reskin of Safari, and that can run uBlock Origin.
And you want them to have full access to every URL that you visit ?
Rather than use AdGuard or any other ad-blocker that can't go and sell your data to third parties for money.
2) It's fully open-source so the above is verifiable
3) AdGuard and every single other (proprietary) adblocker for Mac and iOS includes content blockers, but also includes web extensions that request access to "all web page contents", including credit card numbers you type in, allegedly for the purposes of custom element blocking etc. (not open source, we can't check). Try installing it and see. Apple still allows web extensions that have complete access to all webpage contents (which is necessary for many legit extensions), they just block specific WebExtensions APIs that uBlock Origin requires. Literally zero benefit to privacy whatsoever, yet everyone buys the BS.
That's uBlock without Origin. Careful where you download your ad blockers from.
Edit: I'd also love a DaisyDisk that works on iOS. It will never get permission to get on the app store. Of course, that kind of app IS a huge security issue so I'd be very careful where I get it from.
(and before you mention an application you know of that doesn't have this problem, remember that Apple's enforcement and reading of the rules compares unfavorably with nuclear particle decay)
I'll take the current arrangement any day of the week, thank you.
For consumer apps, there doesn't seem to be much appetite to do this on Android at least, though Telegram can be installed outside of app stores. It rolls its own update system and that seems to work fine.
The rich don’t become rich by being generous and giving money away.
There's no conspiracy, companies are there to make money, that's it.
They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.
-Steve Jobs
Steam has a regressive 20%/25%/30% tiered commission structure.
There are sweetheart deals we have no knowledge of, like Apple's deal with Amazon to get Prime Video onto their devices.
"...they would still have a monopoly on app distribution..." on the platform that they've created, supported and maintained over the years, in the market that already has alternatives.
"Steam isn't comparable..." ah, so Steam charging the same percentage is a whole different thing...i see.
"...competes against other distributors." on the Windows, Linux and MacOS operating systems, operating on a platform that is not exclusive to any manufacturer in partucular.
"...they just need to compete with other service providers to ensure they're providing a fair deal." They already do compete, look up alternative iOS stores.
Controlling app distribution solely within your own platform is not a monopoly. You might wish it were. You might not like it; you might want it changed. But that doesn't magically mean you can call it a monopoly. It's not a monopoly.
Thankfully the EU in their wisdom has decided that Apple has abused their dominant position and we don't need to agree with your definition.
I hope that the wise EU is also going to decide that European car manufacturers and their infotainment systems are "abusing" their dominant position in their respective markets of manufacturer and model specific systems! Or that non-European companies should be able to provide "alternative software" to multi-billion euro manufacturing lines of European mega-manufacturers with the same disregard for any potential consequences, just to avoid any sort of "anti-consumer" behaviour. I sure hope so!!!(couldn't care less)
You're aware of Android, right?
It's not "my definition". It's THE definition.
Apple came in as a "savior" for the publishers and said that the publishers can set their own prices and take as much profit as they wanted... just as long as Apple got 30%. This 30% originally came from the music publishing industry (where they did set the price themselves, remember $0.99 songs?), went through books and now has been legacy'd onto apps. If nothing changes here it'll probably exist for metaverse stuff if they go there.
(Of course, Steam still greatly benefits from first mover advantage and network effects that IMO mean they should also be subject to more regulation, including being required to support alternate clients for all Steam services as well as federation for their social network and communication channels.)
No they shouldn't. Steam wasn't the first in digital distribution of videogames as some consoles offered similar system way before Steam. An argument can be made that "on demand" gaming options of the past can be considered the Steam of the past. And enforcing regulations for no reasons other than regulating on companies that are widely recognized as pioneers of their respective industries is the very definition of "punishing success".
They did[0], but the actual companies lobbying for this are the ones that don't benefit because they're making $x millions less due to iOS.
0: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program...
"Allow users to install apps from third-party app stores and sideload directly from the internet"
I bet this is going to be a horrible user experience. "Are you really sure?", "Apple takes no responsibility not warranty" whatsoever.
What sound usually easy on paper...
(Basically, I am making a "if a tree falls in a forest" argument)
You can bet they'll start playing the same games with the EU once this goes into effect. Regulating big tech requires not just passing the law, but a heavy handed enforcement that doesn't put up with delays and antics.
So what's the downside?
You're forgetting the "no creative geniuses"-clause, aka repeated fines of 10-20% of worldwide turnover.
The cookie banner thing is… unfortunate.
They're misused by sites. You don't need to show cookie consent if your cookies are purely technical (e.g auth)
If all you associate with the GDPR is cookie consent dialogs then maybe these discussions are not for you?
> If all you associate with the GDPR is cookie consent dialogs then maybe these discussions are not for you?
You realize that you are the unique one? Most people don't care about abstract concepts of digital privacy and just hit whatever button on that dialog that makes it go away. Who knows what they're opting in to, and they don't really care.
These are definitely the sorts of things we should factor into regulation lest we continue to pave that road to hell with shiny good intentions.
> You realize that you are the unique one? Most people don't care about abstract concepts of digital privacy and just hit whatever button on that dialog that makes it go away. Who knows what they're opting in to, and they don't really care.
His point just went straight over your head. GDPR has nothing to do with cookie consent dialogues. That you think otherwise demonstrates that you don't know much about this topic, hence: "maybe these discussions are not for you?"
Incidentally, in my observation cookie consent dialogues is a pet peeve of people on forums like this, but not with the general public. It's something techies bitch about.
If the EU ever actually starts enforcing GDPR, I expect a quick reckoning.
It did not have to be this way.
Sounds good to me. As a techie who maintains several phones for several family members at a variety of tech-literate levels, I certainly hope this experience sucks and is difficult to figure out.
For example, my dad, who has had decades of internet usage, tried to buy a USB drive that promised to speed up his computer for only $99.
These folks need an app store.
The Android ecosystem is a bit of a cesspool, but surely even it isn't having major issues with swaths of people having their phone compromised, right? My parents aren't going to sideload an apk.
I have faith that there's a way to do this right.
In reality Apple could just implement a dummy mode. I bet a lot of people would decide against that an be completely fine.
I want a foolproof thin client for myself and all the older people in my life
Complete FUD. Stop fearmongering.
Open up your browser's developer console while on Facebook and you'll see FB's desperate attempt to get you to not start typing in commands.
When Epic got up in arms about Google's fees, they published a sideload-able version of FortNite, and some users ended up installing a fake virus-laden version (https://www.theguardian.com/games/2018/aug/10/fortnite-on-an...).
How many Linux users run arbitrary shell commands they find online while trying to fix or install something? What about some curl command somewhere that downloads and executes whole scripts? And Linux users tend to be very technically oriented.
This is not FUD. We're there. This is happening today.
Just because something is possible doesn’t mean that making it harder isn’t worthwhile. Perfect is the enemy of good, after all.
Now, as to what’s reasonable there? That will be a separate discussion. So far, Apple has put the bar at over 20% for countries that have passed similar legislation, likely on the argument that payment processing need not cost more than credit card companies charge (a few percent, in the EU)
Super markets charge for use of shelf space and logistics. The customers don't belong to anyone. The super market can't prevent you from opening a store next door to sell to the same customers directly. Similarly, I don't see any problem with Apple charching for hosting, downloads, payment, curation etc. but it should not be their place to sell permission fro what you are allowed to install on your own device just as it would be ridiculous for Ikea to control what you can put on your shelf.
yes, it is exactly like that. Millions of people who download .exe to their compuyters every day are doing chemical warfare
As an iOS developer, hardening the 10k-ish apis that exist in iOS will be mostly impossible to do in a short term given the attack vectors would now be outside of Apple's control, probably resulting in incompatibilities and bugs. Android is a horrible platform already given the myriad of different OS versions that exist (and often are not updated by the users) that you have to support.
I also wonder what the law requires as to switchover to the new rules, new OS releases or going back X versions or something? Is there are time frame?
Imagine also being an app developer and having to build/test releases for multiple app stores that include different payment gateways. Without a solid and secure API environment in the OS, how do you manage that with screwing up? iOS has always been easy to do since you only have to support one major OS back. A couple jobs (like 7 years) back our Android app was a nightmare to manage, as we had multiple OS release/phone suppliers that rarely got bug fixes in at all and never at the same time, making fixing/testing some things a nightmare. Might be better today, but I remember how much of a pain it was.
It used to be normal in the past that people would OWN a computer and they would run ANY software on it. Why should we allow a greedy company like Apple to change that? Both android and ios implement sandboxes and apps can't gain complete access over the device in most cases so I don't see any security benefit.
I don't know anyone who side loads onto Android, and even Epic gave up and put Fortnite back onto Google play[0].
I'm sure that any side loading will be hidden beneath layers of warnings designed to put off all but the most determined.
[0] https://www.polygon.com/2020/4/21/21229930/fortnite-availabl...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/4/22917582/apple-netherlands...
[2] Yes, APIs themselves are not copyrightable, but what developer is going to spend the resources to reimplement all of iOS' APIs, with no documentation of how the underlying hardware works?
They’re all waiting for the day developers switch to their apis. And developers usually work with them over the web, they just didn’t do so on ios because of apple policy
Without making this about politics, this is a great step forward. Still unsure how Apple & co. will make their proprietary video and messaging platforms "interoperable". I doubt they'll be writing an RFC any time soon.
Because it's Europe, and also FaceTime and such aren't anywhere near as popular over there, it is possible that Apple will just pull them from the market there. You can't be forced to provide interoperability with a service you aren't operating.
Whatever the result, this does mean iOS 16 is going to have many "features" that Apple didn't announce...
It's also possible that pigs will sprout wings and fly away from manure piles everywhere. Apple is the same company that backdoored iCloud for China so they could operate domestically and make money from the CCP, though. The idea that they'd stop serving the entirety of Europe because of some evil legislation is a complete joke.
I think the idea comes from a US understanding of what exists beyond the border.
Specifically on this point, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority are taking action.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cma-plans-market-investig...
I'd be pretty happy if I could integrate iMessage and Signal together, since I hate the fact that iMessage is the only messaging platform with a native macOS app.
Signal.app/Contents/Frameworks/Electron Framework.framework
It used to be very common for individual developers, or small teams, to publish native programs. WinZip, Winamp, 7Zip, TreeSize, Tag & Rename, Beyond Compare, Nero, PuTTY, all just off the top of my head.
It is very, very possible to create performant, maintainable native software with no larger a developer team than it takes to build web software. We're just collectively too lazy to try.
I hope you like Chrome then.
> I want the Gecko engine on iOS.
It will probably exist in some official capacity (not just the open source wrappers like IceWeasel or whatever they call it) but it will probably get about as much love as it does on Android which is to say not much at all. Also the market share will be <1% if I had to guess which means no developers are going to test on it and might even just user-agent sniff and block you. Chrome/Google will use all their properties and power to push users to install Chrome and it will become the defato browser for all of desktop and mobile. I'm not looking forward to that.
> Ensure that all apps are uninstallable.
I REALLY want to remove some of this junk Samsung forced on my phone (while omitting screen record on this model.)
Perhaps I am too pessimistic.
That's like saying gay people can legally marry in Saudi Arabia, they just have to marry people of the opposite sex.
Try installing Chrome/Brave/Edge on iOS. They'll suggest setting them as default, and kick you to the Settings app. It's supposed to bring you to the Chrome/Brave/Edge app settings within Settings.app, where you can set the default browser; but 50% of the time, it'll fail, and will just open the Settings app without bringing you to your browser settings (you'll just be staring at whatever you were last doing in Settings.app, whether that's iCloud settings, manage storage, whatever you were last looking at). That bug has been there literally since Apple introduced default browser settings on iOS; maintaining it is clearly deliberate.
It would be great if Apple built an identical menu to Google's into iOS when it detects multiple browsers are installed, and let users easily choose their default browser. Even better would be Windows XP-style "browser choice".
Because they give the user choice?
Again, this isn't just a problem with the "default browser settings pane". The first time an iOS user clicks a link, the OS should give them a list of all major browsers (like Windows XP was forced to by the EU) so that no browser is favored over another. That would be fair.
Google's browser menu isn't a response to Apple's unfair default browser setting practices, but to Apple bundling Safari with iOS and unfairly advantaging it. Platform owners' browsers should ideally not be inherently favored, regardless of the platform's marketshare.
As I said, the UI iOS provides should be fixed (including a selector when the user taps a link) but at the same time, Google should not be able to use the install base of its various other apps to bolster adoption of Chrome.
I am very excited about the prospect of having federation between communication platforms... imagine sending messages from iMessage to whatsapp?! great, just like in the mid-00's!
funnily enough i was working on apps that did this back in the mid 00s. it was horrible. the standards simply couldn’t keep up. the clients couldn’t keep up. in the end it was better for the end user not use those standards and instead we rolled our own.
could be different story today but i don’t think so. just the video call feature would be an absolute mess to standardise. hell, even emojis would open up a can of worms. payments between contacts? contacts themselves? i fear this would end up being the mid 00s again.
Or rather: developers were so up their own backsides that effectively refused to cooperate. Obviously you go faster if you don't have to talk to anyone, and everybody loves lock-in. Which is why this legislation is welcome.
The best chat application I ever used was Pidgin circa 2008. It was so easy to be able to talk to all my friends across several different protocols in a single program.
I think Ireland (and Malta) would like a word:
"English remains an official EU language, despite the United Kingdom having left the EU. It remains an official and working language of the EU institutions as long as it is listed as such in Regulation No 1. English is also one of Ireland’s and Malta’s official languages."
- quoting https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...
Though... Apple could just pull out of those nations...
For a law to pass, you need the European parliament, the EU commission and the council, no such thing as a EU senate.
Council not agreeing is definitely a potential problem, but given the level of support from the Commission and Parliament I doubt the Council will block this.
Europe loves propping up failing companies and industries. Not very surprising that they would go after a company with barely a 30% share of the market.
This is actually the opposite. The EU here is enforcing market competition in segments that became entrenched by monopolies (remember this is not specifically about Apple).
This is a defined term and doesn't mean a group/class of people (as you seemed to have interpreted it).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons
Particularly if it opens the door for new innovation. Things like subscription services to alternative Siri/Alexa/Google. Instead of the current Alexa foisting more advertisements and things you don't want onto you, Google's complete invasion of privacy/data, and Apple's complete ineptitude. This is something that can't happen right now because the hooks aren't well designed in iOS or Android. Making it so that you don't have the concept of "private APIs" for such things levels the playing field.
You do know that the DMA and DSA are not Apple-specific laws, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Economic_Stabilizati...
Where is "over here," Europe?
At least google the fact before doubting it.
Wait, am I real under this model? What about the HN server?
While macrumors.com is, for obvious reasons, most interested in the Apple angle, these rules would obviously apply to Google et al as well.
Just wished they were proactive about such things instead of letting them fester on in the public eye's for years, but then - how would they make all that lovely income from large fines and PR.
Re: this:
> The DMA says that gatekeepers who ignore the rules will face fines of up to 10 percent of the company's total worldwide annual turnover, or 20 percent in the event of repeated infringements, as well as periodic penalties of up to 5 percent of the company's total worldwide annual turnover.
Whether it's "fair" is an entirely different topic. And I guess any company could try to fight that decision in court.
For instance US citizens are required to disclose and pay tax on their global income, even if they are official resident of another country. Makes no sense, but the US is free to decide its own rules.
The good that could have come of it, is a sort of open sourcing of tech companies... but of course none of that is going to happen.
Yet we have standards; like USB-C which are a good thing. Question is who should enforce creating more standards (to address eg the interoperability of the messaging apps cited in the article).
The big issue I see here is it is completely unfair to Apple because Apple is really in a league of its own. It's very essence, what makes Apple.. Apple.. is that they create BOTH the hardware and software. When I buy a Mac Mini, or an iPad I buy the whole package, that is the value of it...
It's like the EU telling Apple they know better how to design products and that Apple should redefine themselves as a company.. yet.. by finetuning and crafting software for their platforms Apple offers a user experience that is simply the best.
What the EU should have done instead is try to force big tech to work together?
I don't know how to feel about this but as a European I'm tired of being a peasant... and this is going to set us back even more. :/
It wasn't always this way. Before the thinness craze, I think around 2013, you could freely replace your memory and disks - and I still have several of these machines beefed up.
[0] Most of the time - let's ignore little fucups everybody makes from time to time
I don't know if this really holds, when you look at the bigger picture.
As for me I've owned an iPad 3rd gen (the first "Retina" iPad) from late 2012 to late 2016.
Then I owned an iPad Air 2 from late 2016 to this day... and I've decided to wait to see if they redesign the base iPad model (not Air) late this year - and if not then upgrade to the new AIR.
So that's 2 iPads between late 2012 to late 2022. 10 YEARS.
Sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Considering how fast tech and software is moving these days if you can get 4-5 years out of your tablet AS A TECH USER that's pretty darn good.
If it was my Grandma, she'd probably still get to use my iPad Air 2 for another few years...
I don't see how it's different for other Apple products. The MINI's from 2012 are still being sold at a decent price and are very much sought after - Apple users love to use them as media servers. The M1 Mini likely will have a LOOOONG life ahead of them. Mine will probably resell in a heart beat even couples years from now.
They have nearly single-handedly killed open source chat software (people forget that before the iPhone you could actually send messages from Goolge talk to AIM thanks to XMPP, this still exists but Apple has made it nearly impossible to use comfortably on the iPhone.) Fuck them, I hope they go out of business. As for the "consumer tech industry" that's practically dead at this point anyway, no sense worrying about it.
I will quit Apple. Wait … Google is worse … :(
As long as apps remain available on the App Store. I wouldn’t be surprised to see, e.g., Facebook making their messaging app available via sideloading only in order to circumvent Apple’s privacy rules.
Google will use the full weight of their ecosystem to try to get you to download Chrome or their other apps anytime you touch one of their sites in Safari (it's bad enough now even with them using webkit for their "browser").
This is the logical end for at least these two companies. I agree with some or parts of the things the EU is calling for here but some are just absolutely ridiculous and/or make no sense.
iOS users do spend more money on App Store purchases than Android. But if Meta's whole intention to build a 3rd party App Store is to mine them for data, why didn't they try that on Android- shouldn't the data of Android users be just as good, especially when they have a significantly larger user pool to do that with? Why would iOS users' data be more lucrative? Spending money on the App Store is orthogonal to having more desirable data to sell.
> It will start innocent enough, they will add 1-2 features only available in "Facebook Pro/Full/Unleashed/etc" via their own app store/sideloading but over time they will sneak more and more sinister things into their app.
Easy to conceive, difficult to execute. This scenario might have been feasible a decade ago, when Facebook was younger, their brand was fresher, and customers less jaded. If they were to do that today, they would immediately face friction from users who do not care for more fragmentation of services, and aren't even as engaged with the product as they used to. Maybe they could try to segment off a more popular product, say Instagram, but that would also cause blowback.
> Google will use the full weight of their ecosystem to try to get you to download Chrome or their other apps anytime you touch one of their sites in Safari (it's bad enough now even with them using webkit for their "browser").
And why wouldn't EU/US courts apply antitrust laws against them? Why is antitrust law assumed to be only used against Apple, when legislators/regulators are miffed at all the large tech companies?
I find the whole hypothetical of third party iOS app stores fascinating, because any examination into the landscape of app ecosystems show that they are bloody difficult to build. Ask Microsoft with the Windows Phone Store, or RIM with the BlackBerry Marketplace. Or just Amazon and Samsung with their third party Android app stores, which seem to exist mostly to service users on their own OEM Fire or Galaxy devices.
The idea that Facebook or Google can just make third party app stores and everyone will flock to them is just a questionable, reductionist scenario that flies in the face of creeping consumer burnout in the present day, those companies' continued difficulties in creating new compelling products to woo consumers, and all of the failed app stores of the past. (As Ballmer said, it's all about the developers.) They would have to be cleverer about it. So far, I've yet to see any comprehensive hypotheticals that really deal with past and present realities about the difficulties in setting up such rival ecosystems.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31989720
This just isn't true. The data of people who have more money to spend is more attractive than that of those who do not. Also having more money to spend means that data can be used for targeted advertising or just knowing what people with money are interested in and where to focus efforts.
> Easy to conceive, difficult to execute. This scenario might have been feasible a decade ago, when Facebook was younger, their brand was fresher, and customers less jaded.
I mean, if you are still on FB and use it regularly there really isn't much hope for you at this point. I don't get the impression that there is a large number of people on FB saying "If they step over the line 1 more time I'm leaving", at this point it's people who just don't care. To some degree the same is true for IG even though it's users like to think it's different. It doesn't even have to be new features, it could just be something like groups (which I think failed) or messenger that they take away features or apps and only release them on their own store. They can even make a big hullabaloo about "This lets us get fixes and features out to you faster and lets you easily opt into our beta channel".
> And why wouldn't EU/US courts apply antitrust laws against them? Why is antitrust law assumed to be only used against Apple now, when legislators/regulators are miffed at all the large tech companies?
Why haven't they indeed? Their bad behavior is clearly visible, I'm completely unclear as to what the EU doesn't seem to care. They seem to be laser focused on mobile to the determinant of desktop and consoles.
> I find the whole hypothetical of third party iOS app stores fascinating, because any examination into the landscape of app ecosystems show that they are bloody difficult to build. Ask Microsoft with the Windows Phone Store, or RIM with the BlackBerry Marketplace. Or just Amazon and Samsung with their third party Android app stores, which seem to exist mostly to service users on their own OEM Fire or Galaxy devices.
MS had devices/OS that no one wanted, RIM was late to the game and had their lunch eaten by that point. As for Amazon/Samsung they capture a lot of a value by making themselves the default but more importantly, all of these examples are platform providers, not app developers (at their root). Meaning, they make their money by taking a cut, not by selling apps themselves or even through ads in apps (maybe ads in their store). The calculus changes for someone like FB, EA, EPIC, etc, especially for less savory app creators who don't care about privacy. I'm not saying that FB will create a store and become the number 1 app store, but that they will release their apps via their own store (with it's own rules, or lack thereof) and users will be forced/tricked/incentivized into using it.
> The idea that Facebook or Google can just make third party app stores and everyone will flock to them is just a questionable, reductionist scenario that flies in the face of creeping consumer burnout in the present day, and all of the failed app stores of the past.
Flock to? Probably not and that's not even what I'm afraid of/worried about. It's being forced into using third-party stores. Either by the company removing their app from the Apple App Store or by gating features to the app only if it was installed via their store.
Still, Android has a far larger user base than iOS, and if this third party app store data funnel scheme was such a great idea, you'd think they would have tried it out there at least.
To date, Facebook's only attempts to branch off on mobile have been the Facebook Home Android UI/lock screen, and maybe the HTC First. Both don't really inspire confidence in future efforts, but sure, it's been a decade. Would you put money on modern FB being better at launching new successful products that consumers want, compared to FB ten years ago?
> I don't get the impression that there is a large number of people on FB saying "If they step over the line 1 more time I'm leaving", at this point it's people who just don't care.
It's more like, "If they ask me to sign up and manage yet another user account with payment methods and privacy settings and more notifications to worry about, I'm not going to bother and I'll use the mobile website." Or, "I don't even use Facebook much anymore, I'll just use it on desktop or not at all."
> They can even make a big hullabaloo about "This lets us get fixes and features out to you faster and lets you easily opt into our beta channel".
And users, even those who don't know or care about privacy, would be annoyed because this is another hoop they have to jump through, in the modern era where there are multitudes of social media networks, streaming platforms, and so forth to worry about. Many won't bother to sign up for yet another app store, and that will undercut Facebook's own user base.
You really need to get past this core problem of user burnout. Everything is fragmented across services these days. Perhaps there might even be a startup idea in it for easy account management/signup a la 1Password. I guess Sign In with Apple helps with this a little.
> Their bad behavior is clearly visible, I'm completely unclear as to what the EU doesn't seem to care. They seem to be laser focused on mobile to the determinant of desktop and consoles.
All in due time. Who says they don't care? Perhaps you should cast a wider net for news articles.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-targeted-fresh-eu-...
https://internationalbanker.com/technology/eu-antitrust-legi...
> MS had devices/OS that no one wanted,
People didn't want their OS because they couldn't secure the apps the people wanted. Which will also be an issue for these 3rd party app stores, as people can just go to the official store, or you deal with mutually assured destruction scenarios (see below).
> RIM was late to the game and had their lunch eaten by that point.
Fair, but couldn't you say the same about Meta/Google iOS stores?
> As for Amazon/Samsung they capture a lot of a value by making themselves the default but more importantly, all of these examples are platform providers, not app developers (at their root). Meaning, they make their money by taking a cut, not by selling apps themselves or even through ads in apps (maybe ads in their store).
I'm almost certain that Amazon just has it as a means to sell the content (eBooks, music, movies) that they host, and Samsung just packages as bloatware as it their wont. They don't actually invest in their Android 3rd party stores b...
For instance, in the case of the web: noscript/basic (x)html. With basic (x)html forms, you can browse tiled maps, do shopping, interact with the online administration service, etc. With the <video> and <audio> element, the noscript/basic (x)html browsers can pass an URL to an external media player, what seems missing is the type of streaming. I don't know if you can specify the type of the href, HLS/mpeg DASH/etc, kind of a mime type for those. Then the ability to seek into a big video should be standardized, very probably an URL parameter to do this, at least per mime types if those exists, like t=xxhxxmxxsxxxms.
Those are extremely simple, do not require those horrible web engines and are enough to do the job.
The current javascript-ed web engines are insane and beyond sanity bloats (SDK included), locked-in by gogol/apple/mozilla via complexity and size.
The real hard work is into "securing" those "simple" sites against corpo(=state?) sponsored hackers to make those not work and promote corpo-locked software and protocols. That could be idiotic hackers pushing the web to use those corpo-locked software and protocols.
> Allow users to install apps from third-party app stores and sideload directly from the internet.
would be huge for Playstation and Switch owners.
XBox already seems to be changing, though, with the majority of their games also on PC and even supporting streaming to mobile devices, without a console at all.
I could see Playstation moving towards that model as well, focusing on the games rather than the hardware.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/xbox-apps/devki...
0: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/enabling-dev...
It just works. I can just play games.
[1] With the exception of the XBox because Microsoft can't get their shit together.
Are they, though?
Turn them off for 6 months, 1 year, then come back to them.
Wanted to play Fifa with a friend that had a... PS4. OS update, game updates, the whole shebang. It wasn't much better than Windows + Steam.
I experience breaking updates all the time on PC. "Wait, why is this game crashing now?" "Wait, why have all of my settings been reset?" "Wait, why has the framerate tanked since the last update?" "Wait, why isn't my controller working anymore?"
All of these happen to me on Steam games. It's infuriating. I'll happily take the console experience of updates that don't break things.
Not sure a $2000 PS5 is as appealing
https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/ps5-turning-profit-sony...
This isn't conjecture we know for a fact it will happen as we see on PCs.
Steam seems to be pretty profitable…
Not to mention that they happily double dip by taxing for games, charging online service subscriptions and getting extra revenue via online stores.
So now earning profits on hardware and charging for software or services are double dipping?
I really hate the Apple used this term and it is now spreading everywhere.
First they make money from the hardware.
Then they charge money for iCloud storage beyond 5 GB so you can actually get your hardware backed up (I presume this counts as a dip if console "charging online service subscriptions" counts).
Then they charge developers a hundred bucks per year to get application on the App Store.
Then they take 15/30% off of all digital sales.
And finally they charge the developers for keyword search ads on the App Store (so that when I search for "Minecraft", my first hit is an ad for "The Ants: Underground Kingdom").
Am I forgetting something?
Has there ever been a console where, over the life of the console, the hardware was sold for a loss?
All of them.
Speaking about PS5 specifically: there's quite a few advancements in there that you're not thinking about, the kraken decompressor that can run at native NVME speed in hardware and load assets directly into video memory has no PC equivalent. Though PC vendors are trying to do NVME<->GPUMem these days, it still can't do effectively 9GBit like the PS5 can (theoretically).
Even ignoring those architectural advantages and the R&D; last time someone did a cost comparison of an equivelant PC (a year ago) it was $1,600: https://gamerant.com/ps5-specs-pc/
Consoles are certainly a good deal at the low end of gaming. If you want high framerates and resolution they won’t do it for you.
I bought my console because I absolutely despise Windows, and despite being a gamedev myself I cannot convince other gamedevs to work as linux for a target.
Even then, the amount of effort fighting my operating system and the spotty support you would get (even on windows) is troubling.. because PC's generally are running a complicated workload at varying degrees of state.
I buy a console game, it's going to work and if it doesn't I'm going to get my money back. My time is too precious to waste on excessive debugging to access entertainment.
Ironically the PS4's insane update sizes and slow storage adapter nearly caused me to go over to PC.. So it doesn't always work, admittedly.
By "double the graphical power" you mean it has more compute units, not the clock speed, memory or bandwidth, which tend to be more important in my experience.
Most people don't have TVs that can go any higher.
It’s my understanding that’s not (always?) true for Nintendo consoles. The Switch makes a profit on hardware[1] and that was a goal before launch[2].
[1]: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/79180/xboxes-arent-profitable...
[2]: https://venturebeat.com/2016/10/26/nintendo-wont-sell-switch...
Conventional wisdom dictates that consoles sell at a loss.
Some manufacturers, in creating an appealing multi-year technology platform, might temporarily sell at a loss. The PS 5 for example was reported to sell at a loss for the first three months.
Secondly, a reporting that a console is sold 'at a loss' initially may be talking console development, initial tooling, and partner contracts for custom parts in account. They may not be speaking of raw manufacturing costs for individual unit parts and labor.
> All of them.
Are you serious? The Wii has sold more than 100 million units over the past ten years and you think it's been a net loss for Nintendo?
PS5-to-PC comparisons are hard to do in a meaningful way. It's like saying a Toyota Camry is sold at a loss because if you build one part-by-part it's going to cost $100,000+ rather than the $30k a dealer sells them for.
If you take those PC specs and contact a manufacturer with a plan to order 20 million units, they are going to come in at quite a bit under $1600.
I say almost because the XBox 360 may have been unprofitable over it's entire manufacturing run due to extraordinary warranty costs (red ring of death). I've read that it may have cost Microsoft more than a billion dollars, but I don't know if that's true or if that was enough to net Microsoft a loss over the 11 years it was sold.
They generate revenue through game sales and then a decade later as hardware components become cheaper and scale increases they start to make money on the consoles as well.
If they can't generate revenue through game sales the entire console model would be upended and hardware prices would rapidly increase. No company can take the risk to lose billions without a guarantee of future revenue.
Apparently the Nintendo Switch was never sold at a loss.
Does it really matter though? They shouldn't be allowed to abuse consumers for the sake of their business model. If it were true that they were selling consoles for an expected loss, that would act as a barrier to new competitors entering the market.
Should companies like John Deere be able to prevent third-parties from doing maintenance on farm equipment because John Deere's business model relies on that revenue stream?
- Tightly integrated motherboard, designed and built in-house, including the CPU, GPU (integrated to CPU), RAM and comms removes a bunch of middlemen, with all of their testing, development and integration costs (which add substantial overhead on a home-built PC).
- Thanks to the above, thermal and power management get a lot easier, which reduces power and cooling costs.
- Economies of scale and long life-cycle planning let you make large orders of parts (at Sony's scale, economies where the manufacturer is producing to your demand) at lower unit costs, including manufacturing large numbers of custom parts (such as the case and power supply) with design features that minimize cost (rather than allowing home assembly). I wouldn't be shocked if any given part for the PS-5 were getting manufactured in quantities an order of magnitude greater than any of the SKUs in the comparison PC.
If an up front $2000 fee is too much for people to bear then console manafactuers can offer loans directly instead of hiding them in the game prices - that way people will at least be informed about what they are paying.
[0] Or your local equivalent.
And yes, you do have a local equivalent, unless you are living in Iran, Afghanistan, or North Korea.
[1] Phones and tablet computers.
That law only forbids bypassing protection measures exclusively related to protecting access to a specific copyrighted work. Getting root on consoles isn't that.
And, believe me, it is actually pretty difficult to give someone a homebrew installation vector that does not also give you the ability to just pirate games at all. While there have been some homebrew scenes that deliberately added barriers to piracy[0], there's also been cases where piracy was the only hack you could even pull off[1]. Remember: if you have the ability to install your own code, then you can also install someone else's. Whether or not a jailbreak or homebrew installer would be considered a DMCA 1201 circumvention tool is something a judge would have to decide, but it's close enough to the line that I wouldn't personally touch exploit development.
[0] Off the top of my head: before A9LH/B9S, 3DS homebrew launchers could only run a custom executable format... though this was moreso for compatibility with the GPU DMA exploit they were using first and antipiracy was just a bonus.
The Wii scene was also extremely opposed to piracy thanks to Team Twiizers pushing hard against it.
[1] Also off the top of my head: the whole mess with 360 drivechip hacks that sucked all the talent away from actual homebrew enablement.
Both sections of the DMCA don't protect against tools (and trafficking of tools) that can make piracy easier in an indirect way or somehow pave the way for ease of access to pirate conduct. What they only forbid is circumventing copyright protection systems that protect a specific work. Same goes for the anti-trafficking provisions.
The statue reads "without the authority of the copyright owner" in the end. That sentence implies that the bypassed protections must protect a specific copyrighted work, not copyright in general. Otherwise there would be no "copyright owner" to authorise the bypassing as the law is currently written.
They're talked about a fair bit tbh. All sorts of proposed legislature often goes to pains to say "except game consoles". The role of game consoles was brought up a fair bit in the Epic v. Apple lawsuit.
For no good reason. Both are effectively media consoles with the streaming apps available, and the xbox has a browser just the same as Apple[0], you can do your banking from it if you so choose (and some people saw that appeal a while ago[1]). The only difference is the form factor and the price point where the consoles are sold near-cost[2] - apple would throw in $500 worth of rare earth material if it meant they could keep their app store revenue model.
0: https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/hardware-network/console...
1: https://distantarcade.co.uk/online-banking-snes-1998-tran-di...
2: https://www.polygon.com/2021/2/3/22264242/playstation-5-sale...
This is a non-sequitur. If there were a new law that requires Sony and Nintendo to offer side-loading on their platforms, they would have every right to do so, as they own the copyright of those platforms. The DMCA protects copyright holders from the actions of others, it puts no limits on their own actions. If Sony wanted to break into your PS3, you wouldn't have any standing under the DMCA to sue them about it (of course, there are other laws that protect your data, your past contracts etc).
Sony, MS, and Nintendo already allow games to be purchased from other retailers, and always have. (See, for example, Game Stop, Best Buy, Target, etc.) Even digital downloads can be purchased from other retailers (i.e., Amazon).
Thus, their in-console storefronts are just one of several options that players can use to purchase games.
In contrast, the only way to get iPhone apps is through the App Store. No side-loading, third party stores, etc.
Do you think the same setup on the iPhone would satisfy regulators? Roughly, this would mean Epic (for example), could set up an app store but every program they sell would have to be signed by Apple and Apple would probably still get their 15-30% fee.
If the regulators are fair, then soon you will be able to write a PS5 or iPhone game and give it to your friends to play.
Quite importantly, publishers don't have to pay the console makers if they want to (a) reverse engineer the console firmware so they can make use of the hardware (b) don't use the console maker's IP in their marketing materials (see Sega v. Accord, still good law), and (c) sell through retailers other than the console storefront. However, consoles are now complex enough that reverse engineering would take longer than the commercial life of the console, so it's cheaper and quicker to just pay the console maker the platform fee.
With Apple, you aren't allowed to use their commercial IP for marketing your app, period, but you can use the APIs without paying for inhouse apps. However, there are no alternative marketplaces for apps; even in-house apps must go through the AppStore.
But on that note, a common refrain of iOS developers is what a PITA it is to make apps for iOS given the inferior quality of Apple devtools. Meanwhile, developers generally praise the ease of programming for the PS5.
You're saying there are lots of places for developers to sell PS5 software but that's irrelevant if you still need Sony's blessing and have to pay Sony some type of fee. From a distribution perspective, PS5 developers are not better off than iOS developers. There's no way, AFAIK, for a developer to release a title on either platform without jumping through hoops.
See Sega v. Accolade for more information, but in a nutshell, the console maker can't prevent unlicensed games from running on the hardware. However, they don't have to make it easy to run unlicensed games, and they can make devkits and other IP contingent upon legal agreements that forbid using those tools/docs to develop solutions that don't require a license. (This means that the publisher would need to acquire commercial units to go the reverse engineering route.)
I don't think you can say with a straight face that the PS5 is more open than the iPhone. I can point you to a bunch of write-your-first-iOS-app tutorials that you can complete after a relatively small investment of time and money. The app you make can only be given away through Apple's app store but it sounds like that's changing. Sounds like Sony's going to have to change as well.
Edit: I should add, you can also give people your source code and they can compile it and install the executable on their phone. Is there an analogous process on the PS5? AFAIK, individuals can't register as PS5 developers. Only companies with a current domain name can access any PS5 developer info.
[1]: https://doc.dl.playstation.net/doc/ps5-eula/ps5_eula_en.html
A TOS governs your use of the PS5 software, not the hardware, and there are a few decades of court cases on these points. Moreover, reverse engineering is a fair use issue that can't be prohibited with a TOS and there is a case exactly on point.
Don't modern consoles all have signature verification? You would still need the company's blessing to even allow your game to be executed on any end user's system no matter how that executable was produced, right?
Both consoles will run unsigned executable files, but you may need to reverse engineer your own solution for getting those files to run in a user-friendly manner.
There is software created for earlier PS and Xbox consoles (for example, Kodi on the Xbox, Linux on the PS). It simply took a few years for third parties to understand the hardware well enough to write their own code to run on the consoles without using the console makers' IP.
Nowadays, short of exploits, there is no way for a user to simply load a program into a mainstream console and have it run out of the box without the manufacturer's blessing.
No devkit, no game. Dunno if they still gatekeep the physical products.
Apple takes the $99 developer license and that's it. You get full access to all tools and the App Store. Releasing a new version doesn't cost you anything extra.
I wouldn't even know how to go about creating an Xbox or PS game. Who do I contact, where do I pay and how much? What rules do you have to follow to get your indie game on the Playstation Store or XBox Store?
The point of paying the platform fee is that you can make games for the console with the assistance of the console maker. If you don't want to pay for the convenience, you can spend time and money reverse engineering an OS that will run your game(s).
Also, the Apple fee isn't just $99. It's $99 plus 30% of every transaction through the app. Forever.
The console platform fee is a (non-linearly) scaled fee based on physical units shipped and wholesale price (between 5% and 30%, with the % getting larger at smaller wholesale prices), and does not apply to sales through the console storefront (MS and Sony waive the platform fee and take their earnings on the delta between the wholesale price set by the publisher and the retail price set by the store).
Who do I contact, where do I pay and how much? What rules do you have to follow to get your indie game on the Playstation Store or XBox Store?
Both Sony and MS have published this information on their websites for over a decade, and promoted indie games for over a decade, so I don't think I need to assume that comment was made in good faith. But since you're too lazy to do a 1-second google search, here are the results for you (in both cases, literally the first result: https://www.xbox.com/en-US/developers/id, https://partners.playstation.net/)
Same for the Xbox store. You send an "application" and they may or may not accept it. At least Xbox doesn't want your product pitch beforehand. There is a "very modest one-time cost" though, no idea what's their idea of modest.
I'm really looking forward to seeing this EU ruling to extend to consoles as well.
If you want to go the route of paying Sony/MS, the above applies. My point has always been that you don't need to go that route with consoles, and that is what makes them different from iPhone apps.
Depending on your definition of 'super popular', both Android and iOS are super popular. Yet I don't need both of them do I?
I'd be curious if there are any other occurrences in history of something so big ending up regulated by the government?
With these changes, Apple will go from being one of the richest companies in the world to… still one of the richest companies in the world.
Furthermore, I don’t think these regulations apply to new/non-entrenched players either, so I don’t think they will stifle innovation.
And moves like this are way overdue to kinda brings us back in balance where we (as users, consumers) actually can again mix and match products that compete for our choice and aren't just chosen because we're forced into using a certain corporations whole ecosystem due to some unrelated wishes.
For starters, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
We use open source docx tools and write code to work with docx format so the actual reality is that it works infinity times better then attempting to reverse engineer some proprietary binary stuff .
People would make open sourse stuff to connect to Apple things and if Ap[ple is as bad as Microsoft we can call them out and try to do our best with or code to workaround the imperfections.
My point wasn't about writing to those formats for these basic use cases, but rather about building interoperable applications that can both read and write from the format. Since the spec is relatively loose and Microsoft hasn't adhered to it well, there are many issues when you use something like LibreOffice. And whether you like it or not, people do like using the advanced features of the Microsoft Office suite.
Google Docs and other open source tools can import docx and this is great even if not perfect, and if there is an issue you can read the code of the document and maybe figure the problem, is Infinity times better then the old ways where Word would probably just binary serialize the data and dump it in a file.
We are talking about giants having to interoperate with others, what is your point? It can't be done perfectly because giants are evil and we should not try?
Sometimes this happens when services are provided by the state directly.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Anti-trust_Case_of_1...
Repeatedly:
Railroad companies.
Oil and gas companies.
Electricity companies.
Phone companies.
Movie companies.
You'll see a recurring theme here, most of those became what we now call utilities. Once something is so big it acts like a public good, it either gets regulated as one, or outright becomes a public good, i.e. a state affiliated/owned enterprise.
Shareholders are a limited set of the population and their interests can go against the interests of the general population, so we basically make everyone a stakeholder.