> Currently, Apple uses hard-coding techniques to restrict iOS features in specific locations. This means that most restrictions are simply tied to the region of a device, either by software settings or where that hardware comes from. But the company has been working on a new, smarter way to precisely determine the user’s location.
> Based on our findings, the new system internally called “countryd” was silently added with iOS 16.2, but is not being actively used for anything so far. It combines multiple data such as current GPS location, country code from the Wi-Fi router, and information obtained from the SIM card to determine the country the user is in.
> But why exactly is Apple developing this system? Well, we now have a clue. [...] With the new “countryd” system, Apple will be able to easily determine if the device is being used in an EU country to allow sideloading.
...so here's what I want to know. I live in the US, but I absolutely must have sideloading if there is any chance it's possible. What unholy things will I have to do to convince my iPhone I'm in Europe?
Fair, guess I missed the part where you said "of iOS apps". Then again, very few apps are iOS/Android exclusive, so most of the time you can just sideload the Android version of the app.
> I live in the US, but I absolutely must have sideloading if there is any chance it's possible. What unholy things will I have to do to convince my iPhone I'm in Europe?
You can do this now but you will have to get apple developer license for $99 and add your iPhone/iPad to the account and generate signing certificate that you can use for side-loading apps. A lot of effort and cost though but it is possible. And I don't know if Apple will go after people if this becomes popular.
Wow I recognize your name, thanks for the macOS 10.9 fixes page and your Chromium-Legacy downloader!
If sideloading becomes popular, the real goal is to just be able to run those apps that aren’t in the store, right? As a sibling comment says, just registering/paying $99/year to use those apps but signed as yourself seems like the easiest route… unless you don’t want to pay Apple ~$8/month for this feature out of principal or monetary reasons.
In the scenario where we could travel to Europe, purchase an iPhone in Europe and setup it up with a Euro iCloud account and Euro SIM, how long before returning to the US or elsewhere will Apple / iCloud consider the iPhone to be a Euro device?
As an Aussie, I already find myself region blocked from the occasional new App launch :-/
Worst case scenario: GPS spoofing at hardware level (SDR), Setup a custom SoftAP, and setup a LTE basestation (can be done with an SDR but technically illegal in most countries). Also might need to do it in a faraday cage to avoid outside stations overriding your spoofing.
I've been saying for years that I believe it inevitable there will be country specific forks/branches of iOS and Android, as countries get more and more interested in legislation concerning instant messaging, online transactions, app stores etc.
I'd go as far as to argue it's a small miracle we made it this far with a single global OS release (although I guess there are even already the minor changes for things like removing the Taiwan flag emoji in the China iOS releases...).
If it's a result of individual country legislation, who the heck knows how it might one day work - there is potential for the case that no one universal technical solution can meet the legal requirements of all States.
Except if the law covers EU citizens this daemon doesn't make sense. I'm a EU citizen outside of the EU, and GDPR still covers me. I may not have recourse against a company that solely operates in the country I'm at. But Apple surely operates here and in the EU.
Could be a huge opportunity for Valve to work their compatibility layer magic on iOS, and allow us to finally play sooo many quality games that the iPhone is perfectly capable of running - new and old.
Proton relies on DXVK, which needs relatively recent Vulkan coverage to work.
You might be able to get Game Porting Toolkit to run on iOS eventually, but that's probably a matter of hardware compatibility (and of course, Apple blessing it).
MoltenVK might work though that only does up to Vulkan 1.2, while DXVK requires 1.3. There is a legacy version of DXVK that only requires 1.1. Or maybe MoltenVK can be improved.
Does anyone else read articles backwards? It seems to be the best way for me to read articles since most of the are padded. The last part was that it needs to be done by March 2024, if the was the relevant info you care about.
I've only heard this anecdotally, and specifically for recipes, but I've heard it's for copyright (and yeah, probably SEO too). You can copyright your long-winded explanation of your recipe, but not the recipe itself.
One of my pet peeves is that online "journalists" have given up on the inverted pyramid format in favor of click bait. There is no pride in the craft anymore. shakes fist at cloud
Although I'm generally happy with Apple's walled garden model, IMHO sideloading is getting much more important than ever for a few reasons:
1) Apple engaging in rent seeking may stifle progress and create another Nokia catastrophe. When a device is locked down, Apple can make you purchase inferior services and if they can do it for long enough they can end up irrelevant. Big things are happening in China, not good idea to milk customers instead of head on competition just because there's a political pressure on China and locked down devices in users hands.
2) Political instabilities all over the world. Apple services might not be available all the time and they might be limited due to political reasons.
3) Huge appetite by the governments to control user's devices and make vendors act as the police. Maybe you support this if you feel like the power is on your side but don't forget that your enemies can take over at any time. Locked devices are extremely risky for any kind of resistance.
It's also very interesting if Apple can manage to make this EU exclusive. If Europeans manage to come up with actually popular use cases, can Apple deny this to US users? For how long? AFAIK in China WeChat can do a lot of stuff that it's not allowed in the West, can Apple pull this in EU-USA context? IMHO it would be much harder.
> It's also very interesting if Apple can manage to make this EU exclusive.
I imagine it will be configurable, since I would guess there will be region specific rules (for example China might only want to allow App Store apps, which they can completely control the distribution of).
The same states that just purchased the Pegasus software from Israel and breached the iPhones anyway? O.K. I'll tell them.
Meanwhile there are real wars happening in Europe and the Middle East, people are hacking phones to fly drones, trigger devices or detect enemy. It would suck badly if you are the one who has no access to an Android device, and you have to wait for Apple reviewers to approve the app that can use the seismometer to detect and rely the tank positions in your neighbourhood.
It's 2025, the war still goes on and Trump decides that Putin is right, to de-escalate the situation orders Apple to stop providing services to users in Ukraine because people are using their phones to film and locate Russian soldiers, prolonging the war. There you have it, someone on the other side of the planet just cut your communications as they see fit so you can be exterminated without causing much trouble.
Very dangerous stuff. These devices are expensive, people can't just get something that will work at whim.
Unfortunately, Apple's walled gardens can't protect you against tanks or missiles.
> Pegasus software from Israel and breached the iPhones anyway
Pegasus doesn't help them with all iPhones, and the set of phones it can break into becomes much smaller if you take the (not entirely simple) step of pairing your USB (Lightning) port to a management tool, even just the Apple Configurator, and/or using the features Apple added that let you emergency disable biometrics and wired unlocks together with a good self-erase config setting.
Apple now even offers you a feature that can revoke Apple's keys from your iCloud backup, so even they can't provide access to surveillance states through your cloud backups. (You lose a number of features including making your photos and messages unrecoverable if you lock yourself out, which most users would hate. That's why it's not a default.)
Of course the new Lockdown mode is useful if this matters to you, added by Apple specifically to deter nation state level skulduggery, as a belt and suspenders approach on top of the ongoing work to sandbox better.
Your scenarios seem less far fetched now that Musk switches things on and off on a whim, but journalists and human rights activists and CEOs worldwide are under attack constantly. The rest of your post ignores Apple's resistance to both state apparatus and APTs, for instance:
This iPhone in question was a 5C, old enough at the time to still be attacked (can't fix old hardware issues, for example). Situations like this led to not just software but hardware changes, and Apple continues to advance both technology fronts in efforts to ensure Pegasus-like tools are left unable to compromise your security and privacy.
So no, in a balance of harms, I don't want the device opened up, I want it provably secure with no backdoors and nothing that can be used to pry an entry. There are, as you note, plenty other devices on the market for DIY use, so the free market gives us the best of both worlds, hackable by design and secure by design.
. . .
PS. A couple levels above you wrote, "Huge appetite by the governments to control user's devices and make vendors act as the police. Maybe you support this if you feel like the power is on your side but don't forget that your enemies can take over at any time. Locked devices are extremely risky for any kind of resistance."
On the contrary, that's exactly the fight Apple is fighting, and they have been taking away their own access rather than have it available to those you're worried about in that comment. That is strictly better.
- The US fails to pass DMA-equivalent antimonopoly law. We had the Open App Markets Act (OAMA) but it's basically dead thanks to lobbying
- The EU fails to impose DMA requirements outside of their jurisdiction
One thing to note is that the EU loves extraterritoriality. They call it the Brussels Effect - they write laws in such a way that it's cheaper to just comply worldwide than try and carve out the EU. For example, GDPR protects EU citizens, rather than people in the EU, so anyone with EU citizen data has to comply with GDPR even if they have no contact with the EU.
The US and EU are both sovereign nations, so there's all sorts of ways this could play out. The EU could amend the Digital Markets Act to require worldwide compliance, which would obligate Apple to offer sideloading to Americans. The options to combat this from the US side would be fairly limited and arguably too extreme to use. Most of Apple's lobbying has been to prevent the US from mandating sideloading, but they wouldn't be arguing for, say, a full-on ban of sideloading purely to distolerate our hypothetical EU worldwide DMA requirement.
GDPR can apply extraterritorially but not to the extent you're suggesting.
For example, I am an EU citizen living in Canada. GDPR does not apply to any company interacting with me. However, for a US citizen living in an EU country GDPR would apply to every company they interact with. Even US based companies.
> For example, I am an EU citizen living in Canada. GDPR does not apply to any company interacting with me.
Weirdly enough that is not true. The sheer fact that you are an EU citizen covers you under GDPR. Now, you may not have recorse as the company you're dealing with does not have an entity in Europe that you could sue.
I certainly hope so! Apple's App Store has repeatedly had ridiculous rejections which stifles innovation, and their policy of not allowing apps to purchase outside the App Store (such as for Kindle and Netflix) is entirely customer unfriendly.
Nothing changes for people who want the full security, but for others it allows a massively better device with the tradeoff of lower security.
Or rather, another way to look at this is, if one is worried of demons lurking in the shadows of non-Apple-apps then stick to the one which are iBlessed™. Right?
It's possible to build an experimental Blink-based version of Chromium for iOS, but it seems to require an entitlement not available for free Apple Developer accounts [1]. Additionally, JIT and WASM are currently disabled, the current browser UI is very minimal, and various system integration features are incomplete according to the list of issues that are blocking [2]. 9to5Google demonstrated it earlier this year [3].
Side loading is fine, but I am legitimately worried about being forced to get apps from outside of the App Store.
Forcing that all of the applications I use on my phone (and most of what I am subscribed too) has to go through Apple's systems is a win for me since I can very easily cancel subscriptions. Same for billing so I can minimize the places that have access to my credit card information.
But if more services force me to give them my credit card information or just use an outside App Store that doesn't enforce these things, a major reason I stick with iPhone will be lost (and it isn't like moving to Android will be a solution to this problem).
If I can still get every app and every subscription I want to use on my phone through the App Store than I have no issue with this. But as soon as a developer takes that option away from me because they want to use a dark pattern on canceling or do something shady with my credit card information this is no longer about the consumer.
And don't try to say that I am coming up with a theoretical problem to be mad about considering Epic games tried this exact thing on Android.
Choosing to pay through Apple or not should be the consumer's decision, not Apple's. Especially when you're paying extra for it, which is how it is hurting consumers. The whole reason Apple removed Epic's Fortnite from the Apple App Store was an additional payment method that didn't use Apple's.
I'm sure legitimate developers would be fine using Apple's payment as long as they can pass those additional fees to the customer. YouTube does that now for example with higher rates on iOS. The issue is that apps aren't allowed to advertise that they can get it cheaper elsewhere. That's why some apps like Netflix and Kindle refuse to let you purchase on iOS at all, because it would artificially increases their prices with those additional fees.
If Apple have to compete with other payment processors, that's good for consumers too because it'll lower fees.
You’re right and we are in agreement. It should be the choice of the consumer.
As a consumer I made the choice to use Apple system.
But we are kidding ourselves if we think that once the floodgates are open and developers are no longer forced to use Apple’s system that they will. Removing the choice from consumers.
Developers will jump at the chance to “forget” to tell me my yearly subscription is about to renew or not give me a one click option to remove subscriptions. Something I get with the App Store.
Also I have said it before and will continue to repeat this. Developers think they will get more money by being out of the App Store but there is a lot of subscription I use now that I would never pay for if I couldn’t through the App Store.
For myself and many others their choice is to take the 30% (really it’s less considering there are still credit card processing fees and unless you make your own billing system the fees of other systems) or nothing.
>For myself and many others their choice is to take the 30% (really it’s less considering there are still credit card processing fees and unless you make your own billing system the fees of other systems) or nothing.
Exactly, in which case they would have to come back to the Apple App Store. Still I'm not sure how common this sentiment is with how popular Netflix and Spotify still are even without App Store payment methods.
It's still beneficial for you if Apple have to compete, cuz maybe now they'll lower that 30% fee, and you can have all the advantages of Apple's subscription management and a lower price.
The whole reason Apple blocks other payment services is because they know plenty of consumers will choose the cheaper one. Which is what Epic tried to do with allowing multiple payment options in Fortnite that got them removed. That is removing consumer choice.
They already do in year 2, and have for a long time.
Once you are looking at the recurring cut to compare, I suggest taking a look at the % fee of app stores in general, whether open or closed, with competitors, or no, and the services those stores provide for those fees.
Also look at the cost of cobbling together an equivalent quality stack, fully, including the overhead of having to manage that stack and labor to turn the crank.
Finally look at what creators get in wide open markets relative to portions that go to warehousing, logistics, distribution, product stocking/placement, sales, payments, and support. Creators are not seeing 70%.
> The whole reason Apple blocks other payment services is because they know plenty of consumers will choose the cheaper one
It's almost as if it isn't a payment processing fee at all but a platform fee that enables Apple (or Google) to make money on "free to play" apps with in-app purchases.
I can definitely see why a developer like Epic would want to pay platform fees for Fortnite to Apple and Google that are lower than what they currently pay to Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo.
Personally I don't see any reason why game developers should have to pay the same kind of platform fees for the App Store that they pay for Google Play or the Nintendo eShop.
I'm not sure what you're worried about. Facebook/meta was pretty good about respecting privacy back when it used Apple's Developer Enterprise Program[1] so I'm sure they'd be just as good for the new sideloaded Instagram and other apps.
I've argued extensively before that allowing sideloading and even third party app stores would not be nearly a threat to security and quality user experience as it's been hyped. Instead, I'll repeat a suggestion of a potential model of Apple getting behind sideloading itself, rather than being dragged screaming and kicking into openness:
> Really, Apple could have headed off regulators at the pass if they had embraced the semi-opening of their platform themselves. Allow third party app stores but on their own terms, providing SDKs and APIs for creating your own iOS App Store with security checks baked in and mandating privacy protections built in. Sort of like a software services equivalent to Apple Authorized Service Providers and Apple Authorized Resellers.
They would have then controlled this debate, and there would have been less room for the Epics of the world to complain about the platform being locked down. Not to mention users would benefit from greater choice. Imagine boutique third party app stores springing up devoted to specific interests and niches such as F-Droid, promising better curation or quality.
Companies who refuse to use the AppStoreKit that Apple so beneficently provided would then be seen as malefactors seeking to subject their users to lack of privacy and security, rather than Apple trying to uphold their 30% cut and restrictive behavior.
Instead, Apple tried to control everything and not only did they expose themselves to regulation like this, they deal with customers annoyed at scammy apps on their own App Store, and third party devs crying foul at inconsistent policing.
Maybe this is sort of happening now, if Apple is providing an app distribution framework. They're embracing managed openness. Lifting some side gates in the walled garden.
> By analyzing the new API, we’ve learned that it has an extension endpoint declared in the system, which means that other apps can create extensions of this type. Digging even further, we found a new, unused entitlement that will give third-party apps permission to install other apps. In other words, this would allow developers to create their own app stores.
> The API has basic controls for downloading, installing, and even updating apps from external sources. It can also check whether an app is compatible with a specific device or iOS version, which the App Store already does. Again, this could easily be used to modernize MDM solutions, but here’s another thing.
> We also found references to a region lock in this API, which suggests that Apple could restrict it to specific countries. This wouldn’t make sense for MDM solutions, but it does make sense for enabling sideloading in particular countries only when required by authorities – such as in the European Union.
If you’re asking about my proposal, an MDM solution is certainly a far cry from Apple endorsing and selectively approving third party app stores as a means to essentially outsource the duties of running the App Store to other parties while taking a cut through different means.
I’d love to side load my own apps for personal use. There’s a hundred use cases for my home in which our my side loaded apps would be very beneficial. I have a few network restricted websites set up for me and my partner but an app would bet better I think. The mobile web is still quite frustrating to use so a native app would be ideal.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 51.2 ms ] threadIn my enterprise land I’m excited for these cleaner integrations for MDM app distribution.
Indeed: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10041/
> Currently, Apple uses hard-coding techniques to restrict iOS features in specific locations. This means that most restrictions are simply tied to the region of a device, either by software settings or where that hardware comes from. But the company has been working on a new, smarter way to precisely determine the user’s location.
> Based on our findings, the new system internally called “countryd” was silently added with iOS 16.2, but is not being actively used for anything so far. It combines multiple data such as current GPS location, country code from the Wi-Fi router, and information obtained from the SIM card to determine the country the user is in.
> But why exactly is Apple developing this system? Well, we now have a clue. [...] With the new “countryd” system, Apple will be able to easily determine if the device is being used in an EU country to allow sideloading.
...so here's what I want to know. I live in the US, but I absolutely must have sideloading if there is any chance it's possible. What unholy things will I have to do to convince my iPhone I'm in Europe?
You can do this now but you will have to get apple developer license for $99 and add your iPhone/iPad to the account and generate signing certificate that you can use for side-loading apps. A lot of effort and cost though but it is possible. And I don't know if Apple will go after people if this becomes popular.
If sideloading becomes popular, the real goal is to just be able to run those apps that aren’t in the store, right? As a sibling comment says, just registering/paying $99/year to use those apps but signed as yourself seems like the easiest route… unless you don’t want to pay Apple ~$8/month for this feature out of principal or monetary reasons.
As an Aussie, I already find myself region blocked from the occasional new App launch :-/
I'd go as far as to argue it's a small miracle we made it this far with a single global OS release (although I guess there are even already the minor changes for things like removing the Taiwan flag emoji in the China iOS releases...).
Instead, it looks like Apple is going to dynamically enable/disable sideloading based on location.
1. Bob legitimately lives in Europe, and buys an iPhone in Europe.
2. Bob travels to a business conference in the United States.
3. Apple releases an iOS update while Bob is at his business conference. Bob installs the update.
4. Bob retains the US version of iOS even after he returns home, until the next iOS update is released, which could take months.
You might be able to get Game Porting Toolkit to run on iOS eventually, but that's probably a matter of hardware compatibility (and of course, Apple blessing it).
A quick search seems to support the idea:
>Tips for Protecting Your Recipes
>1. Include Content Beyond the Ingredient List
https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/
1) Apple engaging in rent seeking may stifle progress and create another Nokia catastrophe. When a device is locked down, Apple can make you purchase inferior services and if they can do it for long enough they can end up irrelevant. Big things are happening in China, not good idea to milk customers instead of head on competition just because there's a political pressure on China and locked down devices in users hands.
2) Political instabilities all over the world. Apple services might not be available all the time and they might be limited due to political reasons.
3) Huge appetite by the governments to control user's devices and make vendors act as the police. Maybe you support this if you feel like the power is on your side but don't forget that your enemies can take over at any time. Locked devices are extremely risky for any kind of resistance.
It's also very interesting if Apple can manage to make this EU exclusive. If Europeans manage to come up with actually popular use cases, can Apple deny this to US users? For how long? AFAIK in China WeChat can do a lot of stuff that it's not allowed in the West, can Apple pull this in EU-USA context? IMHO it would be much harder.
I imagine it will be configurable, since I would guess there will be region specific rules (for example China might only want to allow App Store apps, which they can completely control the distribution of).
Tell that to the surveillance states that hate your iPhone.
Meanwhile there are real wars happening in Europe and the Middle East, people are hacking phones to fly drones, trigger devices or detect enemy. It would suck badly if you are the one who has no access to an Android device, and you have to wait for Apple reviewers to approve the app that can use the seismometer to detect and rely the tank positions in your neighbourhood.
It's 2025, the war still goes on and Trump decides that Putin is right, to de-escalate the situation orders Apple to stop providing services to users in Ukraine because people are using their phones to film and locate Russian soldiers, prolonging the war. There you have it, someone on the other side of the planet just cut your communications as they see fit so you can be exterminated without causing much trouble.
Very dangerous stuff. These devices are expensive, people can't just get something that will work at whim.
Unfortunately, Apple's walled gardens can't protect you against tanks or missiles.
Pegasus doesn't help them with all iPhones, and the set of phones it can break into becomes much smaller if you take the (not entirely simple) step of pairing your USB (Lightning) port to a management tool, even just the Apple Configurator, and/or using the features Apple added that let you emergency disable biometrics and wired unlocks together with a good self-erase config setting.
Apple now even offers you a feature that can revoke Apple's keys from your iCloud backup, so even they can't provide access to surveillance states through your cloud backups. (You lose a number of features including making your photos and messages unrecoverable if you lock yourself out, which most users would hate. That's why it's not a default.)
Of course the new Lockdown mode is useful if this matters to you, added by Apple specifically to deter nation state level skulduggery, as a belt and suspenders approach on top of the ongoing work to sandbox better.
Your scenarios seem less far fetched now that Musk switches things on and off on a whim, but journalists and human rights activists and CEOs worldwide are under attack constantly. The rest of your post ignores Apple's resistance to both state apparatus and APTs, for instance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple–FBI_encryption_dispute
This iPhone in question was a 5C, old enough at the time to still be attacked (can't fix old hardware issues, for example). Situations like this led to not just software but hardware changes, and Apple continues to advance both technology fronts in efforts to ensure Pegasus-like tools are left unable to compromise your security and privacy.
So no, in a balance of harms, I don't want the device opened up, I want it provably secure with no backdoors and nothing that can be used to pry an entry. There are, as you note, plenty other devices on the market for DIY use, so the free market gives us the best of both worlds, hackable by design and secure by design.
. . .
PS. A couple levels above you wrote, "Huge appetite by the governments to control user's devices and make vendors act as the police. Maybe you support this if you feel like the power is on your side but don't forget that your enemies can take over at any time. Locked devices are extremely risky for any kind of resistance."
On the contrary, that's exactly the fight Apple is fighting, and they have been taking away their own access rather than have it available to those you're worried about in that comment. That is strictly better.
Yes. For as long as either...
- The US fails to pass DMA-equivalent antimonopoly law. We had the Open App Markets Act (OAMA) but it's basically dead thanks to lobbying
- The EU fails to impose DMA requirements outside of their jurisdiction
One thing to note is that the EU loves extraterritoriality. They call it the Brussels Effect - they write laws in such a way that it's cheaper to just comply worldwide than try and carve out the EU. For example, GDPR protects EU citizens, rather than people in the EU, so anyone with EU citizen data has to comply with GDPR even if they have no contact with the EU.
The US and EU are both sovereign nations, so there's all sorts of ways this could play out. The EU could amend the Digital Markets Act to require worldwide compliance, which would obligate Apple to offer sideloading to Americans. The options to combat this from the US side would be fairly limited and arguably too extreme to use. Most of Apple's lobbying has been to prevent the US from mandating sideloading, but they wouldn't be arguing for, say, a full-on ban of sideloading purely to distolerate our hypothetical EU worldwide DMA requirement.
For example, I am an EU citizen living in Canada. GDPR does not apply to any company interacting with me. However, for a US citizen living in an EU country GDPR would apply to every company they interact with. Even US based companies.
Weirdly enough that is not true. The sheer fact that you are an EU citizen covers you under GDPR. Now, you may not have recorse as the company you're dealing with does not have an entity in Europe that you could sue.
Nothing changes for people who want the full security, but for others it allows a massively better device with the tradeoff of lower security.
[1]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/i...
[2]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=141170...
[3]: https://9to5google.com/2023/03/03/first-look-google-chrome-b...
Good god, no - I want Firefox with extensions, or perhaps Vivaldi (yes, I know - chromium)
Forcing that all of the applications I use on my phone (and most of what I am subscribed too) has to go through Apple's systems is a win for me since I can very easily cancel subscriptions. Same for billing so I can minimize the places that have access to my credit card information.
But if more services force me to give them my credit card information or just use an outside App Store that doesn't enforce these things, a major reason I stick with iPhone will be lost (and it isn't like moving to Android will be a solution to this problem).
If I can still get every app and every subscription I want to use on my phone through the App Store than I have no issue with this. But as soon as a developer takes that option away from me because they want to use a dark pattern on canceling or do something shady with my credit card information this is no longer about the consumer.
And don't try to say that I am coming up with a theoretical problem to be mad about considering Epic games tried this exact thing on Android.
I'm sure legitimate developers would be fine using Apple's payment as long as they can pass those additional fees to the customer. YouTube does that now for example with higher rates on iOS. The issue is that apps aren't allowed to advertise that they can get it cheaper elsewhere. That's why some apps like Netflix and Kindle refuse to let you purchase on iOS at all, because it would artificially increases their prices with those additional fees.
If Apple have to compete with other payment processors, that's good for consumers too because it'll lower fees.
As a consumer I made the choice to use Apple system.
But we are kidding ourselves if we think that once the floodgates are open and developers are no longer forced to use Apple’s system that they will. Removing the choice from consumers.
Developers will jump at the chance to “forget” to tell me my yearly subscription is about to renew or not give me a one click option to remove subscriptions. Something I get with the App Store.
Also I have said it before and will continue to repeat this. Developers think they will get more money by being out of the App Store but there is a lot of subscription I use now that I would never pay for if I couldn’t through the App Store.
For myself and many others their choice is to take the 30% (really it’s less considering there are still credit card processing fees and unless you make your own billing system the fees of other systems) or nothing.
Exactly, in which case they would have to come back to the Apple App Store. Still I'm not sure how common this sentiment is with how popular Netflix and Spotify still are even without App Store payment methods.
It's still beneficial for you if Apple have to compete, cuz maybe now they'll lower that 30% fee, and you can have all the advantages of Apple's subscription management and a lower price.
The whole reason Apple blocks other payment services is because they know plenty of consumers will choose the cheaper one. Which is what Epic tried to do with allowing multiple payment options in Fortnite that got them removed. That is removing consumer choice.
They already do in year 2, and have for a long time.
Once you are looking at the recurring cut to compare, I suggest taking a look at the % fee of app stores in general, whether open or closed, with competitors, or no, and the services those stores provide for those fees.
Also look at the cost of cobbling together an equivalent quality stack, fully, including the overhead of having to manage that stack and labor to turn the crank.
Finally look at what creators get in wide open markets relative to portions that go to warehousing, logistics, distribution, product stocking/placement, sales, payments, and support. Creators are not seeing 70%.
It's almost as if it isn't a payment processing fee at all but a platform fee that enables Apple (or Google) to make money on "free to play" apps with in-app purchases.
I can definitely see why a developer like Epic would want to pay platform fees for Fortnite to Apple and Google that are lower than what they currently pay to Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/30-is-a-market-fee-not-a-monop...
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-match-apple-lapp-sub...
Personally I don't see any reason why game developers should have to pay the same kind of platform fees for the App Store that they pay for Google Play or the Nintendo eShop.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/
> Really, Apple could have headed off regulators at the pass if they had embraced the semi-opening of their platform themselves. Allow third party app stores but on their own terms, providing SDKs and APIs for creating your own iOS App Store with security checks baked in and mandating privacy protections built in. Sort of like a software services equivalent to Apple Authorized Service Providers and Apple Authorized Resellers.
They would have then controlled this debate, and there would have been less room for the Epics of the world to complain about the platform being locked down. Not to mention users would benefit from greater choice. Imagine boutique third party app stores springing up devoted to specific interests and niches such as F-Droid, promising better curation or quality.
Companies who refuse to use the AppStoreKit that Apple so beneficently provided would then be seen as malefactors seeking to subject their users to lack of privacy and security, rather than Apple trying to uphold their 30% cut and restrictive behavior.
Instead, Apple tried to control everything and not only did they expose themselves to regulation like this, they deal with customers annoyed at scammy apps on their own App Store, and third party devs crying foul at inconsistent policing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33978588
Maybe this is sort of happening now, if Apple is providing an app distribution framework. They're embracing managed openness. Lifting some side gates in the walled garden.
How is this any different?
> By analyzing the new API, we’ve learned that it has an extension endpoint declared in the system, which means that other apps can create extensions of this type. Digging even further, we found a new, unused entitlement that will give third-party apps permission to install other apps. In other words, this would allow developers to create their own app stores.
> The API has basic controls for downloading, installing, and even updating apps from external sources. It can also check whether an app is compatible with a specific device or iOS version, which the App Store already does. Again, this could easily be used to modernize MDM solutions, but here’s another thing.
> We also found references to a region lock in this API, which suggests that Apple could restrict it to specific countries. This wouldn’t make sense for MDM solutions, but it does make sense for enabling sideloading in particular countries only when required by authorities – such as in the European Union.
If you’re asking about my proposal, an MDM solution is certainly a far cry from Apple endorsing and selectively approving third party app stores as a means to essentially outsource the duties of running the App Store to other parties while taking a cut through different means.