> Apple said one of the reasons they terminated our developer account only a few weeks after approving it was because we publicly criticized their proposed DMA compliance plan.
In what sense did the submarine delivery of functionality clearly in violation of their contract with Apple—the inspiring incident for all this drama—represent integrity?
If my contractual partners were to violate agreements I had entered into in good faith in order to gain PR advantage in a pre-planned legal dispute, I wouldn't tend to think of them as displaying integrity.
Yes, from the perspective of a corporation being sued for acting unethically, Sweeny lacks integrity. I’m not sure that reflects poorly on Sweeny’s character.
Apple says they did it for no reason other than that they could, not because Epic violated anything.
> “Epic’s egregious breach of its contractual obligations to Apple led courts to determine that Apple has the right to terminate ‘any or all of Epic Games’ wholly owned subsidiaries, affiliates, and/or other entities under Epic Games’ control at any time and at Apple’s sole discretion.’ In light of Epic’s past and ongoing behavior, Apple chose to exercise that right.”
That quote didn't show the whole part, I realized it looks a bit strange out of context there. Here I'll break it down with some more:
> Schiller suggests that Epic’s “colorful criticism” combined with its past actions “strongly suggests that Epic Sweden does not intend to follow the rules.”
So, the main transgression here was "colorful criticism", that is the ongoing behavior by epic, nothing about safety or contractual breeches. If they believed Epic would break contract they would have banned them 5 years ago when that breech happened, not now, nobody can argue that a 5 year old breech of contract on another account actually warrants a random ban of this account today.
Why are investors seemingly blind to the fact that Apple is fighting tooth and nail to protect their App Store revenue (while looking like jackasses in the court of public opinion and pissing off regulators and their relationship with developers) because if the App Store money in their pocket dries up, all hell breaks loose because all of their hardware products are no longer growing. The stock will crash and the executive team will be in trouble.
A walled garden is difficult and expensive to maintain. In Apple's case, it also requires a constant battle against the public interest, because they've carved out various niches in domains that intrude on interoperability, consumer rights, privacy, censorship, surveillance, tax evasion, child slavery, and so on. If they cede ground, they lose money, so they develop and execute strategies that minimize or mitigate loss in conjunction with maximizing gain.
Apple has no principles or ethics or morals to which it is bound; it's governed by an optimization algorithm that pits the profit incentive against the constraints of resources, legislation, and their public image.
Apple's only as effective as the humans who execute their assigned roles within the overall algorithm, so the organization is subject to the usual human weaknesses and foibles.
Pride. Arrogance. Bullheadedness. Complacency.
If these weaknesses infect the culture, spreading across many roles, then many things can degrade and spin out of control. Apple is just as mortal and vulnerable as MySpace, Yahoo, Sears, Blockbuster, or any other big company or institution.
Without the advantages afforded by the unsavory, unethical, and unprincipled aspects of their business, Apple might not be able to maintain their walled garden effectively. Apple's particular variety of golden goose may not continue to be compatible with the markets in which it currently dominates, since much of the regulation, litigation, and legislation will focus on Apple's effects on the world.
Lots of things could happen outside their control that would kill the golden goose. Lots more things could happen if they fall prey to human failure modes.
This is indeed an analysis that we don't see often enough. Apple is viewed as a "tech company" and tech companies are all about innovation and growth. And their stocks are priced accordingly. But, Apple is actually extremely conservative with product rollouts and new markets (c.f. having essentially missed the boat on AI). They make phones and sell phone apps. They do a few other things, but at the end of the day their balance sheet says "Apple sells phones".
And the phone market is saturated now. Everyone's got one. They keep getting better and people keep them longer. And Apple already has a 50% share of units sold, and a much higher proportion of total revenue. This market is tapped out. It's not going to grow.
Really the mess happening in Europe (mostly in Europe anyway) is best seen as a desperate struggle to push the growth reckoning far enough out for them to roll out a new successful product. They're rent seeking just to keep the balance sheet clean, but it won't work forever.
Really this happens to all big tech companies. Eventually the original product set starts to commoditize and there's nothing left to fill the void.
As long as new people are growing up, they're going to need their own phones, so there will always be a market. The same of course with many other consumer goods.
But not a growing market. You don't get a 27.27 P/E ratio by selling phones to the same fraction of the general population. Indeed, that's "the same as many other consumer goods", so go check valuations of Nestle or Proctor & Gamble or whatever.
The point is that an Apple stock priced at a level commensurate with a static market would be a catastrophic loss of shareholder value.
Well of course nothing can grow forever. But Apple can still keep making profits every year and pay dividends. Why should I or anybody else care any more than that for the shareholders? Boo-hoo?
I'd recommend looking at P/S, Gross Margin and Operating Margins. They're more robust measurement tools than P/E and Net Margin, because – unlike Net Income (Earnings) – Revenue, Cost of Revenue and Operating Expenses are not accounting magic.
Today, Apple trades at 6.94 Price/TTM Sales per Share. P&G trades at 4.7.
Apple's TTM Gross Margin and TTM Operating Margins are 45% and 30.7%.
P&G's are 50% and 22%.
Apple's TTM Operating Margin is 1.395x of P&G's, and their P/S is 1.476x of P&G. This is the explanatory variable for the higher P/S – higher operating efficiency. Which makes sense because their blend of revenue includes services and insurance, not just high-margin physical products.
IDK the point you're trying to make, because these companies have essentially the same multiples today. Apple's market cap is higher because their TTM revenue is $386B and P&G's is $84B. But their key ratios are not so far apart.
I wrote all this up to show you the perils of P/E comparisons... before realizing that Apple and P&G actually have essentially identical P/E valuations (~26-27). In this instance, there's not a lot of peril, because they're both in a similar phase of corporate life: operating as late-stage growth companies surfing the wave separating innovation from profit-maximization for as long as they can – where generating income is important (so net income is not hovering around zero) but not the end-all/be-all (there're still expectations of YoY revenue growth).
Besides, Apple's customer and revenue composition is also not at all static, and you'd understand this if you read their earnings reports. They are not a dam that's waiting to burst, in spite of some people willing them to be. On the contrary, they've never been stickier or more mass-market than they are today.
That's an interesting thought and makes me think, because of declining birth rates and an ageing population, Apple will have fewer and fewer people to sell phones to as time goes on.
What boat? Not being first to market with a fancy commercial-grade model and charging $20/mo for consumer-style access (a la OpenAI)? Not having a cloud offering (MS, etc)? Not having a fancy in-your-pocket AI (like… no one? Siri is behind the times, and a better Siri would be great, but IMO the issue isn’t so much the quality of the language model but that Siri is oddly limited in what it can interact with).
I agree that Apple hasn’t been amazingly innovative in the last few years, but being off the AI hype boat seems off the mark.
AI is producing shareholder value like crazy. No, that's not the same thing as a new market, exactly, but it speaks to the same need in the C suites. Apple didn't get on that boat, and so is being forced into squeezing their partners and fighting in the trenches on essentially unwinnable regulatory points just to preserve the illusion of growth. AI is a much more effective illusion of growth!
I think the cracks will start to show the longer big apps don’t come to Vision Pro. Apple has spent the last decade pissing off developers and partners, and just when they need them the most - during the fragile time of getting an entire new platform off the ground - they are doubling down on being assholes.
Every single review I’ve seen mentions that Netflix and YouTube aren’t on Vision Pro. One of the biggest applications of VR is gaming and they’re going nuclear with Epic instead of developing a great partnership to bring high value gaming to Vision Pro. Hubris before the fall.
The reality is it's a dev demo unit but pride doesn't allow them to say it.
It's over speced with hardware as it won't be mass sold for a few more years at which point the price for the components will have naturally dropped allowing selling it for a more "reasonable" price. This is apple so it still won't be cheap.
It's made with metal to get the brand of being the "best" build, but watch them drop it on future units (while folks still keep thinking of it as best in build)
Apple themselves seem to forget that a huge selling point for the iPhone/iPod Touch was video games. Seeing those bright flashy games rendering on such a beautiful screen in the palm of your hand- it blew everything else out of the water.
Social media eventually took over as the killer apps, but for a while it was Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja on everyone's phone.
Blind? I assumed that the monopoly on iphone app distribution (and the corresponding growth in fee revenue) was why the stock has been so high recently.
The investors aren't interested in Apple selling more phones each year than previous. The investors are interested in people using the iPhone as a yearly or bi yearly upgrade cycle product in their life and giving Apple money without much bother and accepting it as a part of culture, especially American.
I wouldn't have thought India, a country that is so price sensitive, would be a place you find so many iPhones. But Indians love what America does and follow them blindly.
The iPhone might not be the next big thing, but for most invested in the cloud and app ecosystem, the choice they have to make is whether you upgrade this year or next. It's like Visa or Mastercard. You can cry all you want about high transaction fees. America is still going to keep using it and give them money.
Investors are loving this trend. Starbucks, Visa, Mastercard, Nike, American Express, Bank of America, Coca Cola and what not. Investors love companies that become part of the culture and despite their horrifying practices, people seem to still go back to them.
> I wouldn't have thought India, a country that is so price sensitive, would be a place you find so many iPhones. But Indians love what America does and follow them blindly.
Our population is too large to even 5% be enough of a market segment. 5% is still a hell lot of phones. In Tier-1 cities and urban centers, you would see iPhones everywhere in offices and restaurants. Nobody cares about blue messages here but the phone itself is definitely a status symbol here.
On the other hand, Indian government loves doing what EU does. After USB-C and moving towards AI Safety laws, we expect a DMA-like law soon.
I said 'find so many iPhones' I didn't say they were leading. Apple sells millions of units in India and with a 5% market share in a country where average annual household income is about 5 iPhones you must realise that this is a very significant and important share. I see a lot of resell market customers preferring iPhone 7 and 8 at around 100$ over similarly priced Android phones. the top 5% income households generally buy new iPhones and that trickles down to the masses after 3-5 years in the resell market. Thats how it works here as a lot of labour population seems to also have some old iPhone.
This seems like a publicity stunt to me. No one would rationally expect Epic to have a developer account with Apple. The terms allow them to remove you for any reason and not disclose it.
Given the DMA, Apple are required to allow people to develop other App Stores. If they can kick off anyone who decides to do that, then the law is entirely pointless (and the EU commission are likely to be upset).
Sure, they are required to allow people to develop other App Stores.
They can also add any number of other policies which you probably run afoul of several times a day. Then terminate you for that. You can still develop your app store, you just can't break all the rules to develop your app store.
...which is exactly the kind of thing the EU Commission will punish them for.
If they create a bunch of new rules and only punish those who are developing their own app stores they haven't given themselves a magic get out of jail free card, it'll be very obvious to everyone what is going on.
> The rest of the world doesn't have to stand still. They can just confiscate Apple's money using threat of government force.
But surely the US would not just stand still either while the rest of the world plunders one of its most successful megacorps/source of American influence.
The US government is literally right now trying to sue Apple for similar anti trust crimes.
If anything, what would happen is that the USA would finish its lawsuit and force Apple to end its illegal and anti completive behavior worldwide, instead of just in the EU.
Interesting, I didn't know the US was suing Apple right now for similar things. I don't follow it too closely, just what I see here on HN. Thanks for the info, I'll read up on it.
> No one would rationally expect Epic to have a developer account with Apple.
Really? I would 100% expect most any large company selling anything into the computing or computing-adjacent space to have an Apple dev account and a Play Store account.
My supermarket chain has an Apple dev account. Target has an Apple dev account. (Both presumably have Play Store accounts as well.) If those brick-and-mortar companies can manage to reach their customers that way, it was more surprising to me that Epic didn't have one previously than the converse.
I doubt your supermarket chain has done things which rise to Phil Schiller responding to Epic with —
> We welcome all developers to the Developer Program so long as they follow the rules. Those rules, including the DPLA and the App Store Review Guidelines, are intended to protect the integrity of the ecosystem, developers large and small, and - most importantly-users. Accordingly, developers who are unable or unwilling to keep their promises can't continue to
participate in the Developer Program.
> In the past, Epic has entered into agreements with Apple and then broken them. For example, you testified that Epic Games, Inc. entered into the Developer Program with full understanding of its terms, and then chose to intentionally breach the agreement with Apple. You also testified that Epic deliberately violated Apple's rules, to make a point and for
financial gain. More recently, you have described our DMA compliance plan as "hot garbage," a "horror show," and a "devious new instance of Malicious Compliance." And you have complained about what you called "Junk Fees" and "Apple
taxes."
> Your colorful criticism of our DMA compliance plan, coupled with Epic's past practice of intentionally violating contractual provisions with which it disagrees, strongly suggest that Epic Sweden does not intend to follow the rules. Another intentional breach could threaten the integrity of the iOS
platform, as well as the security and privacy of users.
> You have stated that allowing enrollment of Epic Games Sweden in the Developer Program is "a good faith move by Apple." We invite you to provide us with written assurance that you are also acting in good faith, and that Epic Games Sweden will, despite your public actions and rhetoric, honor all of its commitments. In plain, unqualified terms, please tell us why we should trust Epic this time.
The sooner this "ecosystem" crap dies, the better.
The sooner not needing Apple dev tools or an Apple developer account to make software for an Apple device, the better.
The sooner I can use my Apple Watch with an Android phone, the better.
The sooner Apple stops (basically) requiring me to use icloud instead of literally any other better, cheaper, higher performance cloud service for my photos, videos, settings, and etc without nagging me 24/7 and trying to default to icloud storage, the better.
As a long time user and buyer of Apple products, I'd really rather they have robust security, stable APIs, good UI design standards (once again), and create/support open standards. All of this "ecosystem" "It's secure if you use it our way and only our way" and "it just works (most of the time)" BS is annoying me.
It's annoying, because over the last 20 years I've watched their products become weirder and more gimped and full of dark patterns in an attempt to force you to buy their services and/or lock you into buying nothing but Apple products.
And don't even get me started about the thriving group of Apple-Stans that play the "YOU DON'T LIKE IT?! THEN LEAVE! I LOVE IT! ITS PERFECT AND YOU SHOULD TOO!" game lol. TBH they're even more vicious than tesla/spacex-stans....
I think the hardware still feels pretty fancy. I recently bought a macbook air and iphone 13 and they feel really nice.. the imacs I got my brothers have been excellent as well....
But buggy software filled with ads. Yes. That much I agree with!
I have an android phone (galaxy fold 4) that I've been using as a secondary for like 14 months now. When my iPhone XS finally developed a swelling battery, I decided to retire it and switch the GF4 to my primary phone. I've been bouncing between Android and iOS for many years, but this time I felt a little bit heartbroken.....
One of the reasons I like using iPhones is you can send & receive sms/imessage on a Mac. But if you use the google messages app on an android phone, you can use a webapp on any computer (any OS) that IMHO works better (kind of). For one, it works on anything!
For another: MS Windows' link-to-phone thing is pretty sweet.
For another: I like the android/samsung oneUI way of handling phone calls. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it's way less obnoxious. Especially because the speakerphone button ACTUALLY JUST WORKS! At some point iOS decided to make that button pop up a menu. Caller ID also works... and the scam phonecall blacklist thing works WAAAAY better on Android.
I still don't like any other OS as much as I like MacOS, but I miss the days of 10.4/10.5/10.6... it feels like the OS has gotten heavily enshittified since then. Honestly it feels more like Windows XP lol. I blame it all on Notification Center. Notification Center is a badly programmed turd. It steals focus, the hotkeys don't work right and aren't obvious, the notifications are like constant nags and you generally have to opt out of them instead of opting into them.... I just fucking hate it.
You could, but few people are going to fall for that. Are you offering something that would entice people away, something huge like Fortnite? Most non-technical people will stick with the App store.
My guess is that since fraud is presumably illegal in the EU, scam developers are not protected by the DMA. But I don't know EU law and didn't read the full text of the DMA although I did read some of the English version a while ago,
Sounds like they violated a non disparagement clause and signaled they will not adhere to policy. All they had to do is keep quiet and launch to minimize their liability.
Guess they will need to fight in the EU to see if they can claw back.
Not "free speech" as part of the US Bill of Rights, free speech as in "the EU ethics would never have such language in the DMA to forbid it or allow such a violation to stand."
Apple terminated Epics account for Epic criticizing Apple, not for anything Epic did with the account. That is a free speech violation, retaliating for unrelated speech is against the ideal of free speech.
USAs free speech laws mostly just bans governments from retaliating, but a more encompassing law would also ban corporations from doing so as well, there is no reason you should fear speaking up just because the corporation might retaliate and ruin your life. USA already has such anti retaliation laws for companies in some cases so there is nothing unreasonable about it.
True, but they raise a valid point in that even in the US, the government has no standing to intervene with private individuals limiting each others' speech contractually. NDAs are very much enforceable in the US.
> even in the US, the government has no standing to intervene with private individuals limiting each others' speech
In Europe the government does that though, so "even in the US" is a nonsense argument here, the US is horrible at protecting individuals rights against oppressive companies.
I am not certain about such laws that could apply to this case, but there are already plenty of laws around what you are allowed to retaliate for etc. Just like USA makes it illegal to fire based on race or to fire union organizers, it is the same principle.
Companies can't fire you for unrelated speech in most of Europe, their laws doesn't protect you as much from governments but they protect speech significantly more against private corporations.
So just because US freedom of speech is limited to government doesn't mean that applies everywhere.
This is Apple retaliating for Epic criticizing them. You aren't allowed to do that without a more reasonable cause, Apple argues that it isn't illegal retaliation since they have reason to suspect Epic will breach contract, so it isn't entirely clear. But it is clear that free speech is highly relevant to this case and the courts will decide if you are allowed to retaliate for this kind of speech or not.
The point is that EU employment law (whether somebody can be fired upon saying things) isn't relevant to a dispute between two business entities that are not in an employer/employee relationship...
I don't think it applies in this case for the exact reasons stated, but the EU does indeed have a charter on fundamental rights that covers freedom of expression, among other things.
Apple's lawyer states no such thing, only that they have the right to revoke anyone's developer account for any time and for any reason. They believe Epic will violate their rules in the future and affect iOS users' privacy and safety, so they banned them.
I know this is the internet, and no one actually reads the linked articles, but I really wish people would do so before weighing in. You did not need to make up a non-disparagement clause.
> Apple said one of the reasons they terminated our developer account only a few weeks after approving it was because we publicly criticized their proposed DMA compliance plan. Apple cited this X post from this thread written by Tim Sweeney. Apple is retaliating against Epic for speaking out against Apple’s unfair and illegal practices, just as they’ve done to other developers time and time again.
The difference is that Apple is now largely no longer in control of the rules, at least in the EU. It seems like they haven't come to terms with that yet.
so apple gave them green light _after_ breaking the rules and decided to go uno reverse after several weeks to red light the epic, because epic criticized apple, lol)
If I had a Customer that spent years relentlessly complaining about my Company, I know I wouldn't want to have them as a Customer.
It does present an interesting question on whether a Company can be forced to have a bad actor as a Customer, I guess this will be decided in the lawsuits to come.
App vendors aren't customers. They don't pay Apple anything more than the license fees for Xcode. The app's users are the customers, and if you start throwing out the partners you lose customers. Now, sure, the calculus might change depending on your relationship with each partner, but you absolutely cant say that Epic doesn't bring revenue to Apple. They do.
The key difference I see in Apple's app store business is that it's a monopolistic marketplace model. If Apple allowed an alternative to the app store then this wouldn't be an issue. Take Microsoft and Windows as an example, they have the Microsoft store which operates as a marketplace with rules but they don't get the same scrutiny because there are alternatives. Don't like what MS is doing with their app store? Fine just release the binary yourself.
With Apple though, the bring it on themselves by having a monopolistic marketplace. Since they are the sole gatekeeper to getting apps on the iDevices, there is no alternative like there is in the MS ecosystem. Apple could end all scrutiny tomorrow if they allowed a way to install apps on iDevices that bypassed the app store and Epic would have no case.
You still need a developer account to notarise apps that are published on alternative app stores. Plus you need to agree to pay Apple the Core Technology Fee.
Why didn't the EU force the removal of those requirements? Apple will keep playing games to make alternative stores uncompetitive and keep away unwanted developers.
I think 8 was intended to stop that sort of thing, but maybe Apple thinks it doesn't apply?
8. The gatekeeper shall not require business users or end users to subscribe to, or register with, any further core platform services, as a condition for being able to use, access, sign up for or registering with any of that gatekeeper’s core platform services listed pursuant to that Article.
You are probably right, and now I wonder if this doesn't also apply to the standard Apple developer program.
I have not read the DMA but in the gatekeeper section of the official website the Core platform services listed are AppStore, iOS and Safari. Let's suppose that you single out iOs, why should I sign up something about AppStore to develop apps?
As long as Apple has a higher level of access to the device than the user does, it's still Apple's device. They've just done a great job at making the user think they own it.
DMA enforcement only started today. Until today, all these plans were just words on a paper. The EC will only look at the real state of the world now that enforcement has started, and make their enforcement decisions based on that and the public feedback. They aren't giving any kind of pre-approvals or pre-denials to the plans.
(If they were pre-evaluating plans, the optimal play for the gatekeepers would be to propose something totally unreasonable, and then negotiate it to something that's mostly unreasonable but just barely acceptable to the EC. That would be a bad outcome for the EC. So from a game theory perspective, they're better of making the companies guess at what will be acceptable rather than negotiating, since the companies will want to be conservative.)
> Introducing the Core Technology Fee (CTF), a junk fee that serves no purpose other than trapping popular apps in Apple’s current shakedown scheme. By charging a €.50 fee for each install after the first 1 million, Apple effectively uses a popular app’s scale against it to prevent it from using an alternative payment system or app store.
> If you decide to use anything other than Apple’s in-app purchase system, you’re forced to display a “scare screen” designed by Apple, which you cannot modify.
> Once you choose which policy you want to implement — the current App Store policy or Apple’s proposed new policy — your decision is permanent. So if you decide to take the risk of trying out alternative payments and it ends up working worse for your business, Apple doesn’t allow you to go back and instead traps you permanently.
The CTF is the exact same thing as the Runtime Fee that Unity tried to force on devs last year. Caused a massive outroar that got Unity to reverse course and sack the CEO.
In iOS 17.4 Apple allows you to apply to create an alternative store. Apple can still deny your request and kill your alternative store, and this is exactly what happened.
Epic opened a developer account under their european subsidiary company, which applied for this, and Apple just banned that account, so Epic can't create a store. Perhaps if someone else (Google, Microsoft, Meta) made a store, Epic might be able to upload apps to that store, but because in the Apple world everything traces back to the developer accounts, I'm pretty sure that would be blocked by Apple as well.
As much as it might seem like Tim Sweeney was exaggerating about Apple's DMA "compliance" changes being hot garbage, a horror show, and malicious compliance -- he really wasn't. Apple are in full on villain mode here.
The part that doesn't make sense, is why Apple are choosing to be such dicks about everything, when the EU is already breathing down their necks. They're inviting more and harsher regulation upon themselves and making the rest of the world hate them in the process.
They don't really. Money matters aside, the apps still need to be approved by Apple. They could drop all fees and it would still mean they don't allow alternatives.
> Don't like what MS is doing with their app store? Fine just release the binary yourself.
Whip up a small windows binary and send it to your mom. See if she can run it without any help from you. MS is doing the same thing from a different angle.
Eh, you create a msi including all dependencies with tools provided to you by Microsoft free of charge and without restrictions. And mom gets a start menu icon.
If I don't think of cost as a fundamental issue, what differences would I see between either approach? They're both barriers to my intent and I'm not on board with the reasoning behind erecting those barriers.
It's an extra step in the process I only need to do on Windows, and the rationale behind it solely benefits Microsoft.
I'm not comparing Microsoft to Apple, I'm judging both of them against my intentions. Both companies throw up barriers to interfacing with their systems.
Are you saying I can distribute an unsigned MSI or MSIX without a SmartScreen warning? Are you sure about that? Others are saying the same thing, but I didn't think that was possible.
Companies in quite a few industries have a duty to do business with you, with very few limitations. For example, in some countries/cities, taxis generally can't refuse transportation to you, assuming you're able to pay and not endangering the driver. Having publicly and repeatedly expressed a dislike for taxis, or even wearing a t-shirt saying "taxis in $city are an overpriced monopoly" would not be a valid reason to be refused transportation.
In the EU/under the DMA, Apple now very likely has a duty to transact even with app developers saying mean things about them. That's certainly a very new situation for Apple, but not an unprecedented one.
I'm not sure if throwing more hissy fits and breaking more of their playmates' toys is a good idea now that adults are in the room.
Taxis in many cities operate under the authority of a government institution [0], so it makes more sense that they have a duty to do business with the public.
Whereas one can often experience waiting for a Lyft/Uber where drivers repeatedly decline service after initially accepting.
This doesn't really have anything to do with licensing. There are laws that prohibit businesses from e.g. refusing customers on the basis of race or sex and it doesn't matter if you're a restaurant or a hardware store or a flower shop.
"taxis generally can't refuse transportation to you"
The fact that it happens says nothing about whether it's right or not. In my opinion it's wrong and immoral that taxis can't refuse to service you. But taxis are very regulated in many places. In fact, for example, Uber is illegal in Colombia. And still, despite their legal status, Uber is not only very used in Colombia, but it's also safer than getting a normal taxi.
When there's a big power imbalance, putting the onus on the service provider to give a valid reason for denying customers can be more impactful than laying the burden on a user to prove there was discrimination.
Depending on your race/ethnicity/disability/socioeconomic status, taxi drivers might refuse service even though it is against the law. It is easier to win against a taxi driver if they're obligated to explain why they didn't help someone in a wheelchair.
I respectfully disagree because that goes against individual freedom. I understand that historically in the US there's been racism but that's no reason to erode individual freedom.
A corporation is not a person, though. It is a "legal person", which is a really unfortunate term precisely because it confuses the matter of natural rights and freedoms.
Now, I would agree with you if we were talking about individuals. In that case, yeah, I think you should be able to refuse service for any reason or no reason at all to whoever you want. But if you go and get a corporate charter from the government that, for legal and fiscal purposes, creates an entity that is distinct from you-the-actual-person, then I don't see any problem with the same government telling that distinct entity what it can and cannot do. That entity has no natural rights.
Criticizing defects in a product or criticizing a vendor's misbehavior doesn't make you automatically a "bad actor". A healthy vendor/customer relationship involves having channels where this criticism can be exchanged without putting the vendor or the customer in a bad position, and the criticism results in a better product.
Instead, bug reports go into a black hole because Apple doesn't care, and they especially don't care about game developers, unless those game developers are running casino games or gacha games that bring in a billion dollars a year. Then Apple cares a lot - about 30%.
If a billion-dollar company is so thin-skinned that they can't handle having their policies criticized they're run by children.
Epic has historically brought in a lot of money for Apple, both directly - via titles like Infinity Blade and Fortnite - and indirectly - by enabling the developer ecosystem so more people can release titles on Apple platforms. In the past Epic helped promote new Apple product launches. Calling them a bad actor is ridiculous.
Like I said, Apple gives you no other choice. They don't have proper channels for communication on things like software defects or policy. You have to kick up a public outcry to get any help.
Epic is trying not to call attention to it, but in the emails they published from Apple, Epic's history of violating an agreement with Apple was cited as why Apple has reason to not trust Epic. That may not be sufficient justification under EU law, but it's unquestionable that Apple has more underlying their concerns than just Epic's recent public complaining.
By what metric is Epic Games having an account a "threat" to iOS? Are they going to hack end-users' devices? Collect their private information without permission and sell it to third parties? All just by having a developer account?
Isn't the app review system combined with iOS's robust security infrastructure supposed to prevent such an outcome? If a company as big and legally accountable as Epic, with a long track record, is so dangerous - by that standard lots of other developer accounts should be closed down too, just to be safe.
It's perfectly reasonable to go "I don't want to do business with Epic due to how they've treated me" but being your opponent is different from being a bad actor. Using language like this pointlessly inflates the magnitude of what Epic actually did and misrepresents the nature of their conflict with Apple.
Epic also doesn't want to be Apple's customer. No one would describe the relationship between Microsoft and Epic as "Epic being Microsoft's customer" because they distribute the Epic Games Store and Fortnite on Windows (Xbox console distribution notwithstanding; there it is more of a customer relationship).
Apple forces everyone who wants access to 50% of the mobile computing market into a customer-oriented relationship, and then complains when not everyone Thinks The Same as they do. Its disgusting behavior.
The issue is that Epic doesn’t want to be Apple’s customer in the first place. They want to publish iOS apps. The fact that this requires them to be an Apple customer is the core problem.
Imagine if everyone wanting to publish a web app would have to be a customer of the respective browser vendors.
Everyone complains about Google and Mozilla and Safari and Edge. Luckily, that doesn’t prevent us from having our web apps running on those browsers.
Publishing a Chrome browser extension more-or-less requires being a customer of the Chrome Web Store. There are plenty of other examples, folks tend to give Playstation/Xbox/Switch stores in these conversations as well.
> Publishing a Chrome browser extension more-or-less requires being a customer of the Chrome Web Store
Emphasis on more-or-less, though. You can use Chrome developer mode (which is NOT a paid option and doesn't require an account) to import extensions from files. You can't do that in iOS. That's Epic's point.
you don't need a developer account to sideload an app on ios, and it wouldn't change anything legally if you did (feature tiering is legal)
another classic example of android users who don't understand the things they're talking about. go on, tell me more about how "you can't copy and paste between applications in ios" or "there's not even a file browser" please.
(now, still not being able to figure out a calculator app on ipad? that's a fair one lol)
I didn't believe you so I looked it up, and this[0] is what I found
> AltStore then signs the application with your Apple ID so the app can run. You'll need to trust the developer certificate in your device settings, but when you do, any apps that you install through AltStore will work... for seven days. Apple has put several restrictions in place to make the process as difficult as possible, but the developer managed to work around those restrictions. As the clock nears closer to the end of the seven-day period, AltStore will refresh the signing key on the app so that you can get an extra seven days of usage. This can also run in the background.
> AltStore makes use of a feature Apple introduced that lets you install *up to three apps* for free using your Apple ID.
> However, AltStore relies on a computer on the same network running AltServer, so you'll need both iTunes and iCloud installed on that device. [...]
Is this seriously what you're talking about? Because after reading that I still don't believe you can install apps on iOS without Apples splash of iHoly Water TM.
Yes, for user like me. I checked most of the extension I use. They directly come from github, and I generally don't update extension, so there is no fear of some sketchy website buying the extension company.
As a consumer I want and like the tight restrictions apple puts on the App Store.
It’s not like users can’t purchase stuff without paying the 30% premium added by developers to offset the apple tax. Just go to the website and buy there. And save the 30%.
My parents who are older use iPhone. They don’t have to wade through trash like android play store. Most apps are good in the iOS store.
If epic wants kids to buy more stuff have their parents pay the 30% premium. If your kid is glued to the phone I’m sure you enabled that and can continue enabling it. Sorry not sorry.
Ah yes, the classic "Think of the innocent children and grandmas" . Sorry, that isn't an argument anymore. It never was convincing before and isn't now either.
>Don’t like it? Don’t publish to it.
Yeah, why protest at all? Just leave the country. Why fight corruption? Just go somewhere else where there is less of it. Really, why complain at all?
The number of bad faith arguments here is impressive.
> Don’t like it? Don’t publish to it.
That's not how laws work, Epic have a perfectly valid complaint against Apple because Apple isn't complying with EU law. As far as valid outcomes go, Apple can either comply, face fines, or leave the EU market.
> As a consumer I want and like the tight restrictions apple puts on the App Store.
That's great, but it causes demonstrable harm to the proper functioning of our supposed "free market", so we've outlawed them.
> It’s not like users can’t purchase stuff without paying the 30% premium added by developers to offset the apple tax. Just go to the website and buy there. And save the 30%.
Except they ban you from even mentioning that this alternative exist. More harm to the free market.
> My parents who are older use iPhone. They don’t have to wade through trash like android play store. Most apps are good in the iOS store.
Nobody is forcing them to wade through alternative app stores. If most good apps are indeed on iOS, and Apple's fees are indeed reasonable, then those apps will stay in the iOS App Store. Nothing to worry about!
> If epic wants kids to buy more stuff have their parents pay the 30% premium. If your kid is glued to the phone I’m sure you enabled that and can continue enabling it. Sorry not sorry.
This legislation benefits everyone, not just Epic.
Which is also wrong, especially given how most modern consoles are basically PCs. Just see what all you can do with Steam Deck in comparison to the locked down consoles.
I was wondering around a local store, MediaMarkt I think, and I saw a random handheld games console — two sticks, a D-pad, XYAB buttons — with the well-known video game Microsoft Excel pre-installed and visible on (I think, I'm not a Windows person) the start menu.
>especially given how most modern consoles are basically PCs.
people always obsess over the hardware in these arguments when the value is in the software. You probably can eventually run windows on a PS5, but that's not what people buy a PS5 for. They don't advertise it as being able to install whatever OS you want (they made that mistake on PS3, took it back, and then got fined for taking it back), and the value for most customers is playing PS5 games. The onyl non-gaming thing you can do these days on a PS5 is watch streaming services. So at best it's a media center
Just because you can install doom on a pregnancy test doesn't mean a pregnancy test is a general purpose computer.
Still as long as you buy the hardware, you should not be prevented from running whatever you like on it.
A case of this is the Nintendo Switch, which does not even have a Web Browser (possibly due to Nintendo being scared to death of JIT exploits breaking their walled garden). Want to look up a game guide from the Internet, on a device perfectly able of doing so ? Fat chance, need another device for that!
You mentioned consoles supporting some streaming services - why should the manufacturer of the hardware be in business of deciding what streaming services you can use ?
>as long as you buy the hardware, you should not be prevented from running whatever you like on it.
Nothing is stopping you from gutting a switch and putting steam deck components in it to run Windows. You can do all that without bypassing Nintendo OS encryption.
>Want to look up a game guide from the Internet, on a device perfectly able of doing so ? Fat chance, need another device for that!
But that's a software problem, not a hardware one. If you want a browser on the Nintendo OS you either need some exploit on how it renders web pages (legal) or a way to install an app that goes around the Nintendo store (dubious, depending on how you approach it).
>why should the manufacturer of the hardware be in business of deciding what streaming services you can use ?
To be fair, Nintendo does allow streaming services. If your favorite one isn't on Switch, it's a business issue, not a store regulation issue. No different from a game you want not having a switch port.
Netflix wants market capture so it's everywhere. Hulu, not so much. Disney probably would have gotten on it if it didn't launch a few years after the Switch.
To be fair, Apple isn't killing Epic's business by denying them to bypass the app store, or even by kicking them off the app store. Epic's doing just fine without apple.
I don't. I barely have a need to print to begin with but just enough that I have a printer. Printers aren't continually iterating in what and how they can print so I can survive on 10+ year old printers.
I don’t quite understand why they happily subscribe to this model with Xbox PlayStation and Nintendo, but are adamant about getting their way with Google and Apple.
The arbitrary limitations on computers that are obviously general purpose is more clear than the arbitrary limitations on general purpose computers that are marketed as special purpose computers (gaming machines). In reality they're all equally bad.
Are you saying that the laws governing digital markets should vary based on a manufacturer's current marketing strategy?
What if they market it one way this month and a different way next month?
I wonder, would a Chromebook be considered a general purpose computer for the purposes of this argument? Should the rules change for the Xbox if Microsoft ever mentions that the Xbox is a great platform for browsing the web on a TV? You can plug a keyboard and mouse into it and Google Docs (among others) works perfectly.
Yes the rules should change. Otherwise it will increasingly go other way and what used to be general use devices will be turned into limited use computers that users wont own.
Apple has been heading in this direction with iOS, iPadOs and lately with MacOs too. I think their main reason though is to be able to force users to upgrade/trash otherwise perfectly fine devices using software. Computers are fast enough for most users already but then there is no reason to upgrade.
> Are you saying that the laws governing digital markets should vary based on a manufacturer's current marketing strategy?
Definitely not. Hence why I said:
> In reality they're all equally bad.
People who own a computer should have full control over their devices, full stop. I don't care if it's Apple, Google, Nintendo, whomever. They shouldn't have any say in what a computer can and can't do after they sold it.
To be fair though, Apple doesn't "have a say" in what you do with your computer after it's sold to you. You can do whatever you want with your computer hardware. Where they DO have a say is in what their software does, software which you don't own. You're merely granted a license to use it. It sucks, but that's how intellectual property works in today's world.
If you want to make an argument for requiring Apple (et al) to provide straightforward mechanisms for rejecting the supplied software and installing alternative operating systems (e.g. Asahi Linux) then I'll support it to the ends of the earth. I'd be your most vocal supporter. I'd be delighted if this was a legal requirement of all computer hardware, from mainframes to microwaves.
If you want to make an argument for software developers (operating system or otherwise) to be legally required to make their software do anything their customers demands it do (or what another billion dollar corporation like Epic Games demands) then I think that's utterly mad. What would be the self-limiting principle other than to only apply it to exceptionally successful products, with the threshold of success defined by lobbyists of competitors/opponents?
> You can do whatever you want with your computer hardware.
You can't swap the batteries between two iPhones that you purchased directly from Apple. It's probably true of other components too, but I am certain about the batteries.
> If you want to make an argument for software developers (operating system or otherwise) to be legally required to make their software do anything their customers demands it do (or what another billion dollar corporation like Epic Games demands) then I think that's utterly mad.
I think they should be legally required to not impose restrictions on what the user does with the software that is on the hardware that is sold to them. That means: Free Software all the way down. Obviously Apple shouldn't be legally obligated to do what people want them to do with their software. What I am saying is that it should be illegal for Apple to stop others from doing what others want with their software.
> You can't swap the batteries between two iPhones
You absolutely can. Whether the software likes it is another matter. If you don't want to be under the thumb of an operating system, don't use it.
> What I am saying is that it should be illegal for Apple to stop others from doing what others want with their software.
And that's where I simply disagree. I am an immense fan of the GPL (version 2 especially) and I recognise that the GPL license requires intellectual property rights in order to work. You want copyleft worth a damn? You need copyright. And that means you get copyright. Apple has intellectual property rights over their software and that doesn't give anyone else the right to "do whatever they want" with it.
If you want to cancel all intellectual property rights with respect to software, that's an interesting argument to make. But cancelling it under a few rare circumstances when some software irritates you seems like the height of absurdity.
> If you don't want to be under the thumb of an operating system, don't use it.
How do you do that without replacing the hardware?
> You want copyleft worth a damn?
I don't. I want a world without copyright, and I recognize that means taking copyleft with it.
> If you want to cancel all intellectual property rights with respect to software
My desire is more radical: I wish for a world without intellectual propery. Yes, that includes patents, trademarks, and creative copyright. Of course they all have different implications, but I really believe the world with be a better place without all of them. They each mainly serve to better their "owners" (almost exclusively not the creators) rather than better humanity.
> How do you do that without replacing the hardware?
As I said earlier—
If you want to make an argument for requiring Apple (et al) to provide straightforward mechanisms for rejecting the supplied software and installing alternative operating systems (e.g. Asahi Linux) then I'll support it to the ends of the earth. I'd be your most vocal supporter. I'd be delighted if this was a legal requirement of all computer hardware, from mainframes to microwaves.
> I wish for a world without intellectual propery.
Cool, but appreciate that this places you in an extreme minority position, and one which destroys your own argument. Without copyright, you don't get to assert any implied rights which normally come from "buying" software. Without copyright, you received nothing of value from Apple except the hardware. If Apple don't own the software that's on YOUR device, they cannot be held responsible for what it does.
iOS/iPadOS devices have never been marketed as general purpose computers though.
They have increasingly become that, and I’m not arguing that the limitations are good, but the limitations of the app store have always been core to the marketing of these devices.
The Mac product lines are the only “general purpose” devices.
To me, that ad underscores the point somewhat. Apple is marketing these devices as something other than a computer. Something that makes a computer unnecessary.
The underlying implication being: “You don’t need a computer”, and “our ecosystem is so good that the new generation won’t even know what a computer is”.
As a tech and Linux nerd since the early 2000s, I can understand why other tech savvy people could interpret this as “this is no different than a computer”, but I don’t think this is the right framing, and I don’t think we’re the intended audience.
Their claim has always been that this ecosystem makes general purpose computers unnecessary for a wide array of use cases, because “there’s an app for that”.
From the perspective of a layperson, I think the message is: “Computers are for tech people (and/or outdated). This is for the rest of us”.
The term “general purpose” means something very different to the HN crowd than it does for the majority of Apple customers.
I want to reiterate that I’m not endorsing their position, just trying to point out that their marketing has been consistent in trying to differentiate the i*OS products. The difference between “you don’t need a computer” and “this is a general purpose computer” is subtle but important I think.
I also don’t think it’s a good direction for tech in general, even though I value some of the benefits of the locked down ecosystem. I do most of my productive work on a Linux system and think it’s critically important to continue having this option.
I’m just not trying to use an iPad for this purpose.
Game developers and console makers tend to have a much cosier relationship because they actually care about each other. Console makers will engage in co-marketing deals or other things to entice and make good on their relationship.
> Game developers and console makers tend to have a much cosier relationship because they actually care about each other.
lmao, in what world? Apple used to bring Epic games on stage during it presentations.
The difference between a gaming console and a phone is that your phone is in your pocket and the console isn't. Both provide libraries and tools for development, both provide support, both provide distribution channel, both provide free marketing, both provide and cultivate user base.
The main difference is: console makers have publishing divisions (that btw put even worse restrictions sometimes) and as of very recently started buying every developer they can afford.
Well, duh. How different it is between publishing on PC? IMO, more useful synergy comes from developers have a good relationship with Nvidia/AMD than with publishers.
I'm not arguing about that. I'm saying that "carrying about each other" is a stretch.
Apple used to bring Epic games on stage during it presentations.
That seems to be the full extent of their collaboration. No specific deals, no specific adjustments, just having them at PR events and nothing more.
The weirdest thing to me is they couldn't even come up with a deal with Microsoft and the Xbox streaming app when historically MS saved Apple's bacon at the most crucial time.
The difference is that people buy a phone because you need a phone to function in the modern world and then play games on it because might as well. Whereas people buy a console specifically to play games. That means the gamedevs have more leverage in the latter scenario.
From the EU point of view it may be simply one of scale. If any of those held the amount of market power Apple does, I suspect the EU would designate them Gatekeepers and we would be off to the races.
From the games publisher point of view, the console manufacturer is actually adding significant value and taking a fair (or not so fair) margin in exchage. Apple detracts value, contributes nothing and then charges a huge margin for it. I can see why Epic views it differently.
>the console manufacturer is actually adding significant value and taking a fair (or not so fair) margin in exchage.
I don't get this. What does a game console manufacturer do that Apple does not? Both provide hardware, system-level APIs, dev systems, developer support, customers. In the old days, game manufacturers didn't even provide a sales channel.
And when you say Apple provides nothing, my above list is pretty solid. In the old days, developer margins were way slimmer, with physical stores taking a 50% cut on top of the console licensing fees and physical manufacturing.
> What does a game console manufacturer do that Apple does not?
Take it to the other extreme: what does a PC manufacturer do that Apple does not? Why not let Windows close down and take 30% on any program installed on Windows? Or go along with its old plans to enforce only signed Windows Store apps to be installed on Windows 12?
It's ultimately just history and culture. We consider general purpose computing to be open and specialized computing to be closed. Apple wants to keep claiming it's just a phone when in reality it's basically a PC. They even unified their hardware so that Mac and IOS run on the same architecture; hardware and software wise there isn't much a mac can do that an iPhone can't do.
> Take it to the other extreme: what does a PC manufacturer do that Apple does not? Why not let Windows close down and take 30% on any program installed on Windows?
I mean, why not? They did so in the past (Windows 10 S).
I think it turned out to be a terrible business move on Microsoft's part that didn't pan out, but why would it be regulated against now?
>I mean, why not? They did so in the past (Windows 10 S).
probably because they don't want to bring up old wounds regarding antitrust. 10 S was trying to go around it by more or less making a mobile device with some desktop functionality. Worked out about as well as Windows 10 mobile.
>but why would it be regulated against now?
well, IOS is being regulated against now, so there's your reason.
They create dedicated hardware designed to excel at gaming and then sell it at or near cost. In a very real sense they create the market that games producers sell into, and the business model is explicitly centered around those software sales. They participate in marketing, branding, etc. There's a genuine holistic value exchange that happens. Apple's value exchange is almost negative. They invest nothing in gaming as an industry, charge a premium for the hardware and then add burdensome restrictions on how the software is delivered. And then they try to take the same cut that authentic gaming ecosystem players have as their whole revenue source.
> They create dedicated hardware designed to excel at gaming and then sell it at or near cost. In a very real sense they create the market that games producers sell into, and the business model is explicitly centered around those software sales.
So like Apple releasing the iPhone, increasing graphics performance by double-digit percentages consistently year after year?
> They participate in marketing, branding, etc. There's a genuine holistic value exchange that happens.
You would need to give me examples for non-AAA games of console makers providing exceptional value here. My understanding is that this is primarily the role of the publisher, not the console maker.
Apple does showcase _certain_ apps on stage at keynotes, during commercials, with prime placement on the App Store, promoting special events, and so on. This is the level of promotion that I'm used to with game consoles as well.
> Apple's value exchange is almost negative. They invest nothing in gaming as an industry, charge a premium for the hardware and then add burdensome restrictions on how the software is delivered.
What is Playstation's big investment into gaming as an industry, if not for the hardware and the platform creating an ecosystem for games the same way iPhone/iOS have?
Microsoft created DirectX the same way Apple created and promoted Metal. Could you elaborate on the differences?
> And then they try to take the same cut that authentic gaming ecosystem players have as their whole revenue source.
Yes, could you elaborate on what additional work console makers have done here to justify their cut that Apple hasn't?
Kind of... Windows itself actually has zero native support for Vulkan, it's all implemented through backdoor APIs exposed by the three major graphics drivers. In practice that works well enough in Win32, but it doesn't work at all in the UWP sandbox, so if UWP had succeeded in the way Microsoft wanted it to then Vulkan would be locked out. Luckily UWP was a complete flop.
Apple make a huge profit on the iPhone, they make back R&D costs and then some, just from hardware sale. The same cannot be said for the game console industry. Don't be disingenuous.
Other than cultivating a base of iOS users spending 7x more than Android users on apps[1]. That sounds like significant value to me and not dissimilar to what the console manufacturers pitch to developers.
> Other than cultivating a base of iOS users spending 7x more than Android users on apps[1].
Those iOS users certainly aren't spending 7x more on AppleTV and iTunes albums. It's because of third-parties that Apple can convince users to spend money in the first place.
> That sounds like significant value to me and not dissimilar to what the console manufacturers pitch to developers.
If console manufacturers had the hardware margins Apple did, they wouldn't be console manufacturers anymore.
Right, but looked from the other angle, if Apple didn’t provide an easy enough experience for developing apps, less 3rd party developers would develop and they wouldn’t have access to a luxurious market. It’s a two way relationship, these things don’t exist in a vacuum.
If Apple didn't provide an easy experience for developing software, nobody would want to buy an iPhone. That's why the web browser portion was essential from the start - Apple needs third-parties in order to sell their hardware.
that’s not entirely true. there was no 3rd party software in the first year and people still bought it. On another note they managed to create a luxurious market although the other platform also allows 3rd party apps. What I’m trying to say is, yeah it’s undeniable that 3rd party devs bring something on the table, but so does Apple
There absolutely was third-party content and software on iPhone, at launch. The web browser was one of the biggest selling-points when it was announced, alongside the phone and music-player functionality.
> On another note they managed to create a luxurious market although the other platform also allows 3rd party apps.
Many proven monopolies seemingly "improve" their user experience to get users to defend it. Famously, Bell Telephones had imposed a severely-limiting monopoly on phone hardware, but made long-distance calling free as a consolation to users. Bell's new "luxurious market" didn't excuse their prior market abuses, though.
> it’s undeniable that 3rd party devs bring something on the table, but so does Apple
I'm trying to say the opposite. If Apple was providing first-class support to any of their hardware-products, then they wouldn't need to impose anticompetitive limitations on third-parties. What Apple brings to the table is deliberately gimped to manipulate software margins and reduce user choice as a consequence. Third party devs are the only ones bringing things to the table; Apple is charging them for the privilege.
Again - if you want to test this, ask around and see how many people would buy an iPhone with just first-party content. Nobody would, and the clear and eminent reason is that Apple does not provide a superior experience by removing user choice.
> There absolutely was third-party content and software on iPhone, at launch. The web browser was one of the biggest selling-points when it was announced, alongside the phone and music-player functionality.
That point is quite moot. If there were only first party content on the phone today, there would still be a browser. Also, this content is not specific to the Apple platforms, you can access all of them from Android too, so it’s not the kind of content that would make an iPhone particularly interesting.
> Many proven monopolies seemingly "improve" their user experience to get users to defend it. Famously, Bell Telephones had imposed a severely-limiting monopoly on phone hardware, but made long-distance calling free as a consolation to users. Bell's new "luxurious market" didn't excuse their prior market abuses, though.
I don’t see how Apple is a monopoly with less than 30% of market share in the EU, so this comparison is not apt. Even the DMA talks about gatekeepers not monopolies. I’m of the opinion that kind of dynamics do not apply here - especially because you can switch platforms and go to the other side quite easily nowadays.
> I'm trying to say the opposite. If Apple was providing first-class support to any of their hardware products, then they wouldn't need to impose anticompetitive limitations on third-parties. What Apple brings to the table is deliberately gimped to manipulate software margins and reduce user choice as a consequence. Third party devs are the only ones bringing things to the table; Apple is charging them for the privilege.
It’s the hardware and the conscious decisions that were made along the way by Apple that partly played a role in creating this lucrative market and it doesn’t seem very out of place to me for a business to charge for a market that they partly enabled. I don’t see what’s wrong here. Third parties still come and try to make a buck, so it also seems to be working for them. The third party creates apps to make money, which in turn makes the platform more attractive and hence increases the amount of customers. Apple continues investing in the hardware and software stack that takes advantage of even better technologies and capabilities each year, enabling people to come up with even better apps and experiences. They also consciously make it a closed platform, the opposite of the other platform that has much more market share, to give a choice to customers who prefer this kind of product. Two sides in this relationship feed each other, one wouldn’t be better off without the other.
> Again, if you want to test this, ask around and see how many people would buy an iPhone with just first-party content. Nobody would, and the clear and eminent reason is that Apple does not provide a superior experience by removing user choice.
Again, you’re assuming things are in a vacuum. If only Apple had first party apps and all the other platforms still exist as they are today - sure, there would be much less people buying iPhones, although I believe some still would. But that’s not a fair comparison: if we assumed all other platforms also had only first party apps and nothing else, then I’m sure people would still buy iPhones in droves. But this is still not a very apt comparison, and the reason is the App Store and third party aspect is part of the product, and it has been for a long time. It’s not a separate entity, it’s a core part of the value proposition of an iPhone for the consumer. It’s akin to asking “how many people would buy a car if cars didn’t have engines” so trying to draw conclusions from assuming they didn’t exist shifts the discussion to be something else. The question is how much this relationship between Apple and third parties feed each other - and to me it doesn’t seem like only one side is doing all the work without getting something from the other side in return.
Also, let’s not forget, the sides who are fighting here are both greedy companies and they try to impro...
Are you starting to see what's wrong here? Apple is the regulator of their own internal market, and they haven't made their closed platform a competitive ecosystem. They are directly responsible for ensuring that third-parties are offered fair terms to compete on, and they do not: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/image/conten...
> and to me it doesn’t seem like only one side is doing all the work without getting something from the other side in return.
"All the work" in this case, meaning creating an anticompetitive platform where they gimp their competitors? Again, looping back around to Ma Bell - you cannot excuse an exploitative system with it's benefits. Apple must first remediate the issues with their internal market if they intend to keep shipping iPhones in Europe. I don't see what's wrong here.
> the sides who are fighting here are both greedy companies
Which stage of grief is bartering, again?
You don't need to desperately appeal to us by comparing Epic and Apple. We know they're both greedy opportunists, but this time Epic is right. Apple is operating on a double-standard that will tear their company apart if they fight it.
> also it’s not like Apple is obligated to do charity work for free.
Here's an incomplete list of times Apple did charity work to support the whims of another market regulator:
lol Tim Cook yeah. I mean thanks for the links and the discussion, but I'm trying to argue respectfully without name calling. I have things to say but I don't think it's going in a productive direction when you are assuming that I'm somewhat grieving or have a skin in this at all. Anyway, thanks for the respectful parts of your message, not so much for the others. Have a good day.
Epic doesn't want those users. It is not asking for any placement in the app store. It just wants it's own users who have iPhones to be able to access its software which it will funnel to them through their own channel. Apple contributes nothing to cultivate the gaming market overall. No marketing, no investment, no PR, no subsidation of the hardware etc. Apple simply gets in the way, making it harder, adding restrictions, invading Epic's customers privacy and then to add insult to injury takes a huge slice of the profits.
Logistically speaking: By the time the dust settles on such lawsuits, the next generation is here while the companies can use whatever loopholes to stall out for another generation. Consoles are so ephemeral in the grand scheme of things, and lawsuits take so long, that it's not worth it.
Meanwhile, mobile OS's have been around for 15+ years and seem to be there for the long run. Playing the long game makes sense.
----
Emotionally speaking: Tim Sweeny is a game dev at heart and probably respects dedicated console gaming (despite coming to notoriety via PC gaming). They sell consoles at a loss to make gaming more accessible which is many devs' goals at the end of the day. IOS and Android are closer to a PC than a dedicated console, so closing down those environments make no sense. Android inherently isn't closed but Google was strong arming 3rd parties behind the scnes (which Epic won in court over). Apple... well, many people reading this probably know that history.
That's not really what I'm talking about. Nintendo doesn't have a "Nintendo OS" it updates for 40 years. It effectively makes a new OS each time. Any restrictions added to the Switch OS can be worked around with the Switch 2 OS.
The longest lasting console would in fact be the switch with 8 years behind it. And given how Sony is already making plans for the PS6, I don't think that will change soon. the epic/apple lawsuits took over 4 years, so any resolution would come mid-way into the lifetime of a console. Is 4 years of burning a bridge worth potentially 4 relevant years of having an epic store on the Switch? Probably not.
Getting a console game published is just not the same as a mobile app. Say what you will about the specific value but the process is much more involved and exclusive for consoles. Everything published to a console is of much higher quality than the app stores despite the mobile approval process. In this way its much easier for the console platform owners to argue that they are providing clear value.
Mobile app store approval is really a joke by comparison. Its easier to argue that mobile app approval's main purpose is to provide market control.
That said, its just about what is easier to argue in court and where to start. Epic would probably ask opt to put the store on consoles if they were given the chance.
Apple provides a general purpose computing device. Their big mistake was offering an App Store that allows developers nearly every type of app for nearly every use case (except for the ones Apple doesn't like, but Apple can ignore them and not lose money).
If Apple had run it more like MS or Sony, the only way to get on the platform would be for developers to spend millions of dollars making their case that they deserve to be on the platform. This is obviously very limiting.
I'm wondering how you're thinking this distinction should apply in the real world. Would you say that if a game console is ever sold at a profit, the rules should change for that console platform?
One difference is that most (all?) consoles are sold at a loss and they survive on profits from games. Apple would do perfectly fine with no income from games while Xbox and PlayStation would be DOA.
Strictly my opinion, but I also believe that where Sony sends engineers to help developers that struggle (case in point, Helldivers 2 mass influx of gamers after it became a social media darling causing the servers to bog down), Apple would be more likely to use their massive data from iPhones to launch a direct competitor to any app that became a big hit rather than help them out (case in point, Spotify Vs. Apple Music and the other apps Apple tried to buy, and when denied, cloned).
Everyone who publishes software that runs on iOS devices is an Apple customer, though. This isn’t the same thing as a browser — apps running on iOS devices consume APIs on the device, utilize Apple services, etc.
Also, when it comes to web apps, in most cases, the developers are also customers of the browser vendors -- from using browser developer tools and SDKs, for example, https://www.google.com/chrome/dev/ , https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ , and https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/?form=M... to name three. Safari’s dev tools etc. you get with your Apple Dev subscription.
And those browser vendors, like Apple, also provide developer training, developer support services, early access to upcoming product versions, opportunities to provide input into future product designs and features, etc.
In other words, this is not a problem, much less the “core problem”. This is normal industry practice. In fact, on some platforms, there are royalty fees due for the SDK runtime components that are required to run the software a third party developer provides. Just look at mainframes — you might buy XYZ Accounting system from them, and have to pay an additional annual license payment for the cobol runtime it requires.
That fact, by the way, is what the half a Euro per ‘download’ technology fee is about. Part of the DMA requires separation of the “app store fee” from the fee for using iOS services.
It’s also important to note, when people talk about the 30% app store fee as being high — the app store is essentially the same thing as a retail store. Back in the days when you bought software in a physical store, rather than downloading it, the margin at the retail level ranged between 30% and 50%. E.g., we would pay the distributor $25 and sell it for $49.99. The distributor in turn would buy the software in bulk from the manufacturer, for somewhere around $20-$22.
Software developers get a lot bigger share of what the consumer pays in the current model. Some, however, are greedier than others, and leverage governments to their advantage. Epic Games doesn’t want any competition - they want to be the sole retailer of Fortnite on all platforms so that they can raise the price to whatever they want.
> The issue is that Epic doesn’t want to be Apple’s customer in the first place. They want to publish iOS apps. The fact that this requires them to be an Apple customer is the core problem.
Indeed. It all boils down to: if I buy a product from company A, then want to use that product to do business with company B, why does company A have anything to say about it? Am I not the owner of my device?
Increasingly in this modern world, no, you are not the owner of the device. You're more like purchasing the right to use it for a time, in the way that the makers want you to use it. This applies across PCs, Macs, and Phones where Microsoft, Apple, and Google all try to up-sell you on their online services and now their "AI tools".
the problem with having consumers take action is that they are completely shortsighted and will take the path of least resistence - a path that the companies will have charted out to make this transition as smooth and painless _for the consumer_ as possible while retaining as much monopolistic power as possible.
There needs to be public institutions with the backing of the state to enforce property rights, including purchased devices.
To offer a modest counterweight here, every iPhone owner bought the product knowing damn well that Apple keeps the OS locked down. If you don’t want that, don’t buy an iPhone. There’s no confusion about what the product is and what you can do with it.
So how is a 3rd party going to give support to a customer with iPhone, if Apple will ban such 3rd party for whatever reason?
Let's say that given 3rd party is making a device, which can be controlled via Bluetooth from Windows, Android, MacOS and iOS. They don't make any money on any applications, but from the device.
You buy a car but now you move your TV in it. The car manufacturer prohibits you because you didn't buy their truck and sues you for it. This cannot be allowed to become the norm.
>The issue is that Epic doesn’t want to be Apple’s customer in the first place. They want to publish iOS apps. The fact that this requires them to be an Apple customer is the core problem.
The issue is that General Mills doesn't want to be Costco's customer in the first place. They want to sell to Costco shoppers. The fact that this requires them to be a Costco customer is the core problem.
If I had a Customer that spent years relentlessly complaining about my Company, I know I wouldn't want to have them as a Customer.
Epic aren't a customer. They're a supplier. They provide Apple with software that Apple's customers buy.
Apple are denying their customers, iPhone users, the option to buy Epic apps through Apple's app store. You should never lose sight of who actually loses here. It's not really Apple or Epic. They're massive corporations that will continue to make billions regardless. The loser is iPhone users who want to use their devices to play a game they enjoy.
Depends on the ruling and laws. I'm sure someone who didn't allow homosexual couples would not want to welcome them even after it was ruled as unconstitutional to discriminate to them in the US (even if they are middle eastern and laws in their homeland do allow for that). They were technically rowdy customers but the law allows them to be in as long as their rowdiness was due to their identity and not other neutral actions (although we know they will be judged much more harshly on those actions as an attempt to disciminate).
A bit of a crude comparison, but I hope it gets the point across that the behavior depends. retaliating against rules that the EU later determines to be bad rules may open a case to allow them, as long as they don't break other rules.
If one stretches ones leverage to the point where it is considered by authorities as excessive and is forced to make concessions one is not in the position to attack those who attacked ones monopolistic behavior. The technical term is is "sitting in a glass house" and while one figures out the layout of the panels one is advised to refrain from throwing rocks.
The way I see it Apple is lumping past behavior and current behavior of Epic together to make an exclusion decision. But there was a big change between the past and now so the market situation has changed and access to this changed market should not overly depend on information from a very different world otherwise it can be considered at best arbitrary or an attempt to exclude competitors with irrelevant facts. The latter could get expensive.
It's not even that, if I was Apple I wouldn't want to have them as a customer simply to deny them standing for their constant lawsuits. If the two companies have absolutely no business relationship at all, ties completely severed then it's a lot harder to demonstrate harm. All you could really sue about is that they won't do business with you.
I'm actually surprised it's not SOP to stop doing business with people who sue you after the lawsuit ends. I mean you took the nuclear option.
Whether or not Tim Sweeney has a legal leg to stand on, I'm so happy he keeps fighting this. Likewise with Spotify. I love that the EU is pushing legislation to give at least some people back control of their devices.
I'm curious why Tim Cook thinks Apple can continue to treat developers they way they do for years on end and it won't slowly but surely come to bite them hard one day.
Tim Sweeney could lead by example and remove Unreal royalty fees and make his app store free for all. There's no freedom fighter here. Just another greedy troll.
> Tim Sweeney could lead by example and remove Unreal royalty fees and make his app store free for all. There's no freedom fighter here. Just another greedy troll. -zyang
Unreal Engine is free up to $1 million revenue and 5% after that.
The fines Apple is going to collect for intentionally failing to comply with the DMA are going to be of Epic proportions, exceeding any profit they could have gotten by continuing to steal 30% from society. Ready your popcorn buckets for the next few months/years. They will likely be making an example out of Apple - after all Apple and Google are the reason for this legislation to exist in the first place.
> In the non-compliance decision, the Commission may impose on a gatekeeper fines not exceeding 10 % of its total worldwide turnover in the preceding financial year where it finds that the gatekeeper, intentionally or negligently, fails to comply with [...]
That would be a monumentally stupid decision when they could instead simply comply with the law and continue making slightly fewer billions of revenue. Investors won't let them do that, heads would roll.
Tim Cook would be deposed if he pulled out of the EU market. There’s no way that shareholders are going to allow Apple to leave that much money on the table, it’s unthinkable.
They should just comply to be honest because it won't actually change things. Barely anyone in the EU is going to use an alternative app store, nor is anyone but a few select hackers going to sideload apps.
Lots of brands of Android phones come shipped with alternative app stores, but those places are wastelands.
The main issue is that you can't develop an iOS binary without an Apple developer account.
Maybe they should. Because that's exactly the kind of attitude that they're enforcing upon their developers.
Instead, they want to have it both ways, "my way or the highway" when it comes to the App Store rules and monetization cut, but on the other hand minimal, extremely cynical "compliance" towards the rules EU has laid out for them.
Apple should get out of the European market entirely. Their product offering is literally incompatible with the laws that govern EU commerce.
There's plenty of money to be made in Asia/Pacific and the Americas.
Apple's walled-garden approach is innovative especially on the security and stability fronts and anyone who doesn't like that or wants alternative launchers should jailbreak their ios device or just use Android, which does fit better into EU market.
Apple has literally never cared and should never care what outside bodies (including to a large degree -- their own customers) want their products to be. It's what has made them unique in the past.
If Apple backs down on their vision then they are no longer Apple.
> Apple's walled-garden approach is innovative especially on the security and stability fronts and anyone who doesn't like that or wants alternative launchers should jailbreak their ios device or just use Android, which does fit better into EU market.
This how I feel completely.
I use quite few different devices & operating systems on a daily basis (MacOS, iOS, Android, Linux, Windows, FreeBSD) and they all have their place. I use a Mac for my primary workstation and an iPhone for my primary phone specifically because I want security, stability, and usability on those devices. Also, the Apple ecosystem & iCloud, are very convenient for sharing / collaborating with household family members.
Don't get me wrong - many Linux distros are very stable and secure. But the "year of the Linux Desktop" is still far out. I actually feel it's further out now than it was 5 years ago. Which is too bad, because I am an avid Linux user and have used it since Slackware 3.0 / kernel 1.2.13. Easily 50% time spent on my Mac is just using a terminal logged into Linux or BSD based servers.
If I wanted a single phone, for fun, learning, hacking, etc, it would definitely not be an iPhone. But that's not what I want / need in my phone at this point in my life.
It often seems that the people pushing so hard for Apple to change its ways are not the people that actually use Apple Products, but rather individuals projecting their own beliefs and preferences onto others.
As an EU citizen, I love Apple products and would hate if I had to use subpar alternatives like Windows/Linux laptops or Android phones, so I for one would like if this would end in a way that Apple would remain in EU.
Apple hasn't left China. They'll rather compromise both their product vision and their Chinese users than then leave a market that's smaller (for them) than the EU.
Which Epic Games account would you prefer they use, the American one?
If you want to talk about cowardly behavior, we should discuss Apple's anti-steering policy. At the root of this brouhaha is an indefensible double-standard that Apple cannot sustain in a fair market.
I wonder why Apple doesn't open up their platforms to have everything best on their devices instead of fighting and agonising developers and governments. Yes yes, the commission is nice but they might be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
I mean, Apple is amazingly good in some areas but in some other areas their products are used only because they don't give a choice and they intent to keep it this way. They also want to control everything and provide all the services.
A bit short sighted and futile IMHO because the competition is catching up with their user experience but Apple doesn't catch up as quickly with the "smart" bits of the modern tech.
I recall a Steve Jobs speech about Apple doing a few things %20 better and other things worse and how he intents to change this by embracing the industry standards because they simply can't do everything by themselves.
I feel like Apple is doing the same mistake again where their products are becoming slightly better at few things and worse in others simply because you can't have the better stuff installed on Apple devices.
The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash.
Every iphone user was reminded daily about how kneecapped it is when they can't pull up the web site for the restaursnt to check hours or call up for a reservation. That kind of life experience was his entire focus and his showpiece product failed utterly at it.
And so he said flash is bad and html5 and pwa is the better way to do what flash does.
Since then they only say anything even slightly similar only as a defense against monopoly charges about native apps "what? you can use pwas" but only on Safari and castrated functionality.
If Steve could have sold a product that didn't even use the same tcp/ip and html as everyone else, he would have. The only time he allowed the tiniest shred of interoperability is when there is no way to sell the product without it.
Maybe the word he used wasn't "industry standards", I couldn't find the video now. The idea of the speech was that you can't do everything by yourself because you have just this much capacity and if you stretch yourself too much you end up with overall worse experience even if you do some things better. I think he was explaining why he is abandoning some internal Apple projects in favour of the established ones made by others.
Flash WAS crappy - it had so many vulnerabilities (and probably would have run terribly on the early iPhones)
Just as importantly, Apple and Steve learned not to rely on someone else’s technology. PowerPC and all that (when Motorola stopped keeping up with Intel and Apple suffered)
Look at things through this lens and their behavior over the past decade makes a lot of sense.
flash was crappy, had poor compatibility and tons of vulnerabilities
but it was replaced with.. nothing. and there is still a gap in that market for novice creators that all the webgl/html5/toolkit-of-the-week has yet to cater towards.
Jobs interest in bad-mouthing it in the early days had more to do with cutting development costs on his side, if flash and adobe is the devil there is no need to spend time and effort developing compatibility layers for it, and it's a chance to wedge the populous towards a solution he can control more closely.
'vulnerabilities' was just the talking point he used to do so.
> but it was replaced with.. nothing. and there is still a gap in that market for novice creators that all the webgl/html5/toolkit-of-the-week has yet to cater towards.
The reason Flash (and Director before it) was so popular is that it had a very low barrier to entry for creatives.
I still miss Director because of how easy it was to quickly create cross platform apps that could do just about anything.
> Flash WAS crappy - it had so many vulnerabilities (and probably would have run terribly on the early iPhones)
Flash was the great battery killer. I hated it on laptops. I'd have hated it on phones if it were available. I even hated it on desktops because it made the fans turn up. Sometimes more than a proper 3d native game that used all the hardware you could throw at it.
Of course now we have Javascript and Unity games on the native side so we just changed what screws us up.
"this lens" is quite transparent and no problem to understand at all. "makes a lot of sense" is not the question.
Flash was crappy, but so what?
The fact that flash was crappy didn't matter to him. If he wasn't artificially prevented by copyright, he could have and would have just wrote his own implementation that wasn't crappy.
The only problem with flash was that Adobe did to him exactly the same thing he did to everyone else. Flash was a proprietary thing that didn't happen to work the way he'd like, and he wasn't allowed to just make his own better version, and so, "This needs to be an open standard!"
That statement doesn't mean he endorsed or preferred or recognized the value and virtue of open standards. All it means is that he was a huge hypocrite who would say anything at any time, and actually do the opposite the instant he can devise a way to.
He only ever recognized a standard when he is the beneficiary of it and there was no physically possible way to get around it, and only until he manages to devise a way to get around it.
One day he says "bicycle for the mind" and that much is absolutely true.
But the next day tries to sell a bicycle that the user can't repair or add a luggage rack, and conveniently declines to acknowledge that a large part of what makes a human with a bicycle so efficient is that the bicycle is simple and user-serviceable in the field and adaptable. The human is more efficient and powerful because they are literally empowered.
The advantage of the wheels turn completely the other way into the disadvantage of a piece of broken machine you have to carry, after you also paid money to aquire it in the first place, when you can't fix it's bent wheel, or add a headlight or a luggage bag or a lower set of gears or fatter tires etc etc to adapt it to your individual slightly different needs.
He said "bicycle for the mind", but never sold a bicycle for the mind once.
> The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash.
NeXTSTEP, the Steve Jobs thing that got renamed as Mac OS X when Apple bought it, was based on BSD Unix. In the early 2000s, Apple produced and used a lot of open standards. "Darwin" was open source. Bonjour is mDNS. Apple developed CUPS and open sourced it.
The BSD use in there wasn't because of love of standards but permissive licensing. Apple didn't develop CUPS. Apple's relationship with 'standards' has always been pretty complicated although it's mostly worked out for them.
They used BSD because then it could run Unix/POSIX applications instead of the ~0 third party applications that would have existed for a new operating system.
Apple hired the maintainer of CUPS and provided the resources necessary to make it good enough for the publishing market, while continuing to publish the source code. They had enough involvement in RFCs 5227, 5387, 6761, 6762 and 6886, among others, for their company name to be listed in the RFC.
The Unix 'applications' they got for free. The OS itself shipped with a bunch of apps plus the various bits and pieces that now form the Voltron of Xcode and those were all Nextstep apps. Did the Unix part help to market the thing as a workstation? Sure. But, again, this wasn't for love of standards. The actual machine didn't ship with X11. Next didn't, I dunno, join Motif or whatever. The thing was one of the more non-standard workstations around.
X11 didn't even exist when NeXT was founded and its contemporary predecessor wasn't available under the MIT license.
It was often used in the early days of OS X before it had native applications because the X11 version was often better than using Classic, especially after the Intel transition basically killed Classic but not X11.
There are a lot of big companies that continue to produce and use open standards. In general it benefits them, because it's "commoditize your complement." Google sells advertising so they want web standards so that more things use the web and therefore Google ads. Intel sells server CPUs so they contribute to Linux to keep customers from being locked into proprietary Unix on proprietary RISC architectures.
Doing the opposite is generally short-sighted. In the short term you lock customers in and make more money, but then you get everyone else in the industry lined up trying to find a way to cut you out, and eventually one of them succeeds.
They now run linux only because they simply have to. And so they do, in the least compatible way possible.
Almost everyone tries to do this as much as possible, not just Apple.
Initially everyone could make their own stuff 100% unique, hardware and software. Like the early HP machines, a total universe of their own. It's only over time that customers gradually insist on a few standards here and there after they get burned bad enough, and so some things get standard, but even then only incompletely and begrudgingly and always trying to find some way claw back or obsolete get around some other way.
What do you mean? You can install arbitrary third party Linux distributions like Ubuntu on IBM POWER hardware and they work fine.
Meanwhile they've been conceding most of the server market to Intel and AMD for a long time, because the OS is a commodity and then what matters is who makes the best processors, which isn't IBM.
> It's only over time that customers gradually insist on a few standards here and there after they get burned bad enough, and so some things get standard, but even then only incompletely and begrudgingly and always trying to find some way claw back or obsolete get around some other way.
That's what the walking dead platforms try to do when they're set on continuing to die. Milk every last dime out of the companies foolish enough to buy something that wasn't standardized to begin with.
Then their customers flee to open systems as soon as they can get out from under the lock-in and the legacy vendors, having ruined their own reputations, can't replace the customers they're losing and slowly bleed to death until they go bankrupt or get bought out.
Adobe claimed that if Apple had let them, they could have gotten Flash running on the first iPhone that had 128Kb of RAM and a 400Mhz processor. Safari could barely run on the phone. If you scrolled fast, you would get a checkerbox while waiting for the page to render.
When Adobe did finally bring Flash to mobile in 2010-2011 on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM and it still ran badly. An iPhone with similar specs didn’t come out until 2011.
The iMac came with only USB in 1997 before most PCs fully adopted it. The original iPod played MP3s and later AAC files and even later standard H.264 and MPegs files.
> That kind of life experience was his entire focus and his showpiece product failed utterly at it
As did every other phone and tablet ecosystem, even the ones that tried to add flash. Turns out it was bloated, slow, insecure and battery hungry - all the reasons he stated!
> The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash.
This is wildly inaccurate. Flash was never anywhere near that popular and it wasn’t an industry standard. The industry standards were HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and sites that used those were way more common than sites that ran on Flash. We’re not talking a lot more common, we’re talking at least 30–40x as common. Flash-only sites were an annoying but small minority.
The iPhone was the first phone with excellent support for the HTML/CSS/JavaScript industry standards. It literally changed the web development industry it was that good. In 2007, mobile sites tended to sit on m.example.com separate from the main site, and use WAP/WML. The “really good” ones had a severely cut back plain HTML version. None used Flash, that wasn’t even a factor on mobile at all.
Then along comes the iPhone with Mobile Safari. Practically overnight, people were asking for “iPhone-compatible” websites to be built, which were really just normal websites with CSS media queries to offer a mobile-friendly layout. That’s what Steve Jobs was talking about when he was describing a “desktop-class web browser” in his keynote speech.
And because WebKit was open-source, all the other smartphones started using it and got the same capabilities. In the space of a year or two, the mobile web transformed from something virtually nobody wanted to something useful and fun – all using industry standard HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
Ignoring the fact that Flash was terrible quality, which other people have responded to, that whole era of the iPhone is practically defined by Steve Jobs betting hard on industry standards instead of Flash and other proprietary stuff.
It is incredibly hard to change a culture of a corporation. Apple is not a thinking human, it's a bunch of people that have their own egos, preferences and wishes. It may not even be currently feasible to propose an idea like you have because the person doing so would be unpopular internally in Cupertino.
Culture is hard. This is why you see corporations and businesses fail constantly despite "obvious" choices being ahead of them.
For a while Apple existed for Steve to make products he’s proud of.
I have a very deep resentment for the App Store, because that was a turning point towards controlling the platform, and start of a feudal relationship with developers.
They’ve went from (half-assed) open source efforts to outright banning GPL completely. They’ve went from trying to use open protocols to putting DRM throughout entire stack on everything they could.
Apple has been high margin company with expensive products, but arguably worth the cost if you appreciated their style and attention to detail. But the OS and services side has shifted to just extracting as much money as they can, because they can. Their 27% cut on purchases made outside of iOS is just pure greed and spite.
I've argued before that Apple should've semi-opened up iOS in a way that they could manage it to their interests. Now they've forced the hand of regulators to do it instead.
Maybe it would've delayed this for longer- less of a casus belli for the likes of Epic. Apple was lucky for avoiding App Store scrutiny for over a decade.
It's arguable that one of the issues Android has in this regard is it has become less open as time goes by, making it look just as bad in regulatory eyes.
More locked down and more core functionality being put into proprietary apps in the play store in the name of timely updates, they could have achived the same effect with open source apps in the play store but chose not to.
Yes they are now quickly pivoting to allow side-loading to be simplified but if the EU wasn't cracking down on such things I imaging they would have eventually removed side loading in it's entirety.
If there is an anti-culture youth movement against iPhones, apple will be in serious trouble. Their revenue is heavily dependent on selling iphones and people using the app store.
Fortunately for Apple, there definitely is not a movement against iPhones. If anything, the youth associate status with iphones, and if you don't have one you are a loser deserving ridicule. My kids have stopped asking as they know I'm not going to give Apple any of my money, but for a very long time they begged for iphones because kids made fun of them for "having a droid." Today's youth are definitely not the rebellious counter-culture youth from my younger days. They are very much conformists.*
*Speaking very generally of course, and only from anecdotal experience which is a very small slice of the market that my kids know
Kids are fickle and run with trends though. Apple has a good foothold, for sure, but banking on teenagers to carry your banner is an idea that would have me sweating.
Older people tend to care much less about what phone they have, and care much less about upgrading.
>Today's youth are definitely not the rebellious counter-culture youth from my younger days.
They absolutely are, you have just become part of the culture they’re countering. Of course there’s conformity within a group or it wouldn’t really exist, but the main reason young people are so turned off by Android phones is that they are mainly associated with older family members who wanted to save a few bucks and substantially compromised on utility in the process. I’m in my 20s and I know this from experience, my mom gets substantially more utility out of her iPhone than my dad who’s an order of magnitude more technologically literate gets out of his Android phone. It doesn’t matter to teenagers that an Android phone could be as good as their iPhone when the optics are so bad. It doesn’t help that, for them, there isn’t a meaningful difference between the platforms beyond price and maybe piracy either. The actual movement among youth against iPhones is against phones in general, it’s a trend to use “dumbphones” because many feel smartphones are taking too much space in their lives.
Thank you, this is very interesting indeed and does make a lot of sense given my anecdotal experience. I suspect a good marketer could do wonders for Android's brand image given the misperception, although I doubt such thing ever happens. I get the impression that Google is only half-heartedly behind Android, controlling the reins tightly to ensure their own interest isn't harmed, but by no means truly fans themselves of Android. Every year it seems the great things about Android are slowly tightened away. I hope this changes because as it stands I worry the difference between Android and iOS is becoming an implementation detail.
I too hope Android thrives. Even though I enjoy my iPhone for it’s design choices and it works for my use, I do understand the issue of ceding so much control to a single entity. Android’s existence as an “escape hatch” is certainly part of the value proposition of the iPhone to me.
Consider every app you use on the iPhone that is authored by Apple. Would you or its stakeholders still use it if you weren't forced to?
Mail? Calendar? Safari? Photos? Music? Fucking Messages? No, no, no, no, no, no.
Don't misunderstand me. I am talking about access to the exact same first party APIs and integrations Apple's software has, and giving it to third party developers. The functionality is so painfully basic, but nonetheless gated, of course a third party would be able to author something better. Like you think Spotify wouldn't give you Siri compatibility? It's just not allowed to.
The App Store is just the crappiest of them all. I don't think people realize how fees and its absolutely horrible discovery is responsible for the shitty state of apps today. I have been in this business a long time, and have met a lot of people, and it is absolutely, 100% Apple's fault that App Store games suck, and Steam's don't. The device is as powerful as a Nintendo Switch nowadays!
Safari, Photos and Music are apps that I legitimately like and enjoy using. I wouldn't use anything else.
I'm generally happy iPhone user. From Apple's offerings, the one I don't like is iCloud because lacks any granularity whatsoever. I want my photos synced but I don't want to waste my space and bandwidth with the videos.
I also would like to have full API access to everything so I can experiment with stuff. Also I want to be able to re-purpose my old iPhone but its too much locked down for the things I would like to do.
However, I'm generally very pleased. I can't stand the Android experience, honestly.
The average Android phone is like $180. You can't stand cheap phones, which is legit, but that's what "Android" is.
I don't know if this is in the zeitgeist yet. People spend more on a pair of airpods as people spend on a whole Android phone. That works because 10% of a $1,400 phone is $140. It doesn't work when 10% of $180 is $18.
Where is there space for a third party ecosystem if there's only $18 on the table? Android users used to be 2.5x less valuable than iOS, and maybe it's closer to 5x-10x now.
This is essentially Apple's value proposition to developers: "We have the rich users." And it's true, that's valuable. But do they deserve 30% of every transaction, to the most disfavorable agents in every software category? The way Apple and Steam conduct themselves is apples to oranges.
> Safari, Photos and Music
The Photos app is profoundly shitty. Lightroom Classic is like 13 years old now. How long did we have to wait for Lightroom Classic's 2009 featureset? The sharing features are abysmal. Why not open the API to the same shared photos backend Photos uses? Apple doesn't charge for access to the API, it charges users for storage - what difference does it make to them? It only matters because they are smart people, they know their software sucks, and if they allowed that level of compatibility, people would immediately abandon Photos, and yes, there would be a cross compatible Photos-like experience with Android and desktops, it would be superior, and it would harm Apple's primary idea of forcing people to use their trash.
You say these apps are shitty, but you haven’t posted any specifics. What is it that makes these apps so bad?
I don’t mind any of the apps you mentioned. I vastly prefer the music app to Spotifys UI (at the least the last time I’ve used it which is admittedly several years ago). Mail notifications are sometimes buggy but I can read my mail just fine. Most calendar apps I’ve tried, even paid once, started spamming me with subscriptions.
I do see the issues with photos, namely that Apple pretends that downloaded images are just as important as photos I took myself.
> I don't think people realize how fees and its absolutely horrible discovery is responsible for the shitty state of apps today. […] it is absolutely, 100% Apple's fault that App Store games suck, and Steam's don't.
AFAIK Steam fees are 30% as well at least for the average developer + 100$ for publishing a game. So I don’t think the fees are responsible for the shitty state of apps. I think it’s more about customers not wanting to pay for mobile apps in general. Looking at a few successful indie games, they tend to be free (and ad or iAP supported) on the App Store but are sold directly on steam. For example vampire survivors is free (+ Ads) on iOS but costs 5€ on steam. Other games release full price on IOS but the UI is so bad that it’s barely playable.
They care about their own accounts being deleted over some disagreement. The risk of having your account banned changes how you invest in the platform.
> They care about their own accounts being deleted over some disagreement. The risk of having your account banned changes how you invest in the platform.
I wish it did but it really doesn't. You can see countless "I lost my google account for a random reason" and yet everyone I know has a google account and probably uses gmail.
No but a lot will start building PWAs wherever they can instead because they no longer need to write an entire second copy of their app that only runs in one place and can’t share code and they don’t have to just pay 30% of their revenue to someone for no good reason.
Trust me, Apple pissing off developers is absolutely going to have serious implications for them.
What was stopping companies from doing PWAs before? Were they not annoyed at 30% cut? Was the cost of maintaining a separate app for a single platform too small to care about?
Lack of support from Apple's monopoly iPhone browser engine Safari. It didn't even get notification support until 2 years ago. And then there was a recent attempt by Apple to remove PWAs altogether from iOS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39299007
Apple was and is stopping companies from doing PWAs.
Epic perhaps thought Apple might show them grace after the lawsuit in the US. A kind of repeat of the Apple-Samsung litigation where everyone has a "it's just business" attitude and keeps doing business together while simultaneously suing each other. Apple on the other hand has decided they will show them no quarter. I don't think they're being emotional about it. I think it's to show every other developer that they will actually enforce the DPLA that everyone signs, and they won't turn the other cheek.
Attempting to enforce an "illegal" contract provision seems pretty "emotional" to me. Apple is finally in a position to lose their monopoly grip on a platform software store, and they clearly will stop at nothing to stop the loss of that revenue, this is obviously an existential problem for them.
It certainly threatens their app store revenue, and by extension market value, so it's rational for them to push back, but by no means is it an "existential problem". Apple is quite a bit more than just the app store.
There's probably risks on both sides here, too: Playing hardball with EU regulators and courts could cost them a lot of money.
If your vision for your company only extends to the next quarterly earnings report, sure, it's "rational."
If you consider the fact that every other participant in the market dislikes this practice, that this dislike has finally risen to the level of government involvement, and that laws are about to be written taking it away from you, then clutching it to your chest is best understood as an emotional position.
It's rooted in a desire to not lose the past while attempting to deny that any other future could possibly exist. It's classic denial, on a trillion dollar corporate level.
Epic doesn't care whether Apple shows "grace", or needs them to, they are going in by force with the backing of the EU legislation. It might just take a year or two longer to get through the courts. They can hold out that long without any problems, preparing their store in the background.
You don't have a duty to hire in USA, but you can still get in trouble for illegally firing someone for the wrong cause. Same applies here, this isn't rocket science.
Right, the major difference being that Epic is not an employee of Apple and thus cannot benefit from employment law. The terms of their relationship is governed by contract law, and now the DMA.
DMA, Apple can't just retaliate for Epic complaining about them, this doesn't mean that Apple is forced to deal with everyone they are just banned from retaliating for certain things:
> 6. The gatekeeper shall not directly or indirectly prevent or restrict business users or end users from raising any issue of non-compliance with the relevant Union or national law by the gatekeeper with any relevant public authority, including national courts, related to any practice of the gatekeeper. This is without prejudice to the right of business users and gatekeepers to lay down in their agreements the terms of use of lawful complaints-handling mechanisms.
I am not 100% certain that would apply here, but if the DMA doesn't protect against these things then I am pretty sure that EU will plug that hole to ensure gatekeepers can't retaliate unfairly.
Even if the "hole" is plugged you'd have to prove in court you were being retaliated against. Vibes are not going to be enough. You'd need a decision maker's e-Mail saying "you know what, fuck Epic cancel their account". Without that smoking gun all Apple needs to do is show all the instances of Epic violating their contract. Same if they canceled your account because of violations.
Here it is easy since Apple admitted to it. Them bringing up all of Epics recent criticism of them here works against them, it is like talking a lot about someone's race when you fire them, that doesn't look good in court even if you also gave another reason. For example firing someone with the reason "He was a lazy black guy" could be read as you firing him for being lazy, but I doubt courts would see it that way.
Holy shit what hyperbole. Apple asked for a realistic assurance Epic wasn't entering into a bad faith agreement. Epic decided they couldn't do that so Apple terminated their account. Pretending Epic is a faultless victim is just ludicrous. Not only have they previously violated the developer agreements they've given every indication they're incapable of entering any good faith agreement with Apple.
They've been throwing tantrums against every company they deal with. They want to charge fees on their store and platforms. They want their IAP. But they act offended when any other company wants to charge them to be on their stores.
You should read the US ruling [1]. This is not about Epic criticising Apple.
This is because Epic did things like pushing a hidden IAP system inside Fortnite to evade review and then at a later point switching it on. This sort of thing has been forbidden since the early days of the App Store. It is a fundamental part of the Apple-Developer contract that you allow reviewers access to all functionality.
You keep repeating this, but I don’t see how it is relevant. Apple’s rules are not relevant anymore under the DMA. Under the DMA, companies are allowed to set up alternative app stores period. It doesn’t matter if they violate Apple’s App Store rules prior. The point of the DMA is exactly that you can make your own App Store that doesn’t have to comply with Apple’s rules.
I can understand that Apple wants to safeguard their platform by requiring notarization, etc. But they are playing with fire here. One outcome of misbehaving could be that the EC will require full sideloading (Android-style), so that Apple cannot sabotage third party stores anymore, like they are doing now.
> 12. The gatekeeper shall apply fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory general conditions of access for business users to its software application stores, online search engines and online social networking services listed in the designation decision pursuant to Article 3(9).
Apple don't get to deny access to their main competitor in this space just as a show of force. That is not fair, reasonable or non-discriminatory.
This will be another issue determined by EU courts, but Apple is not justifying it as a show of force. They're justifying it based on Epic's prior breach of contract and statements they've made. I think based on the record, courts will side with Apple.
Why would a 4 year old breach of contract warrant a ban today instead of 4 years ago? The trigger was that Epic criticized Apple, that doesn't seem like a warranted reason to ban someone even if they did something bad 4 years ago.
Also since the DMA bans arrangement that Epic breached before, there is no reason to suspect that the EU account will breach anything new now, I really doubt EU will let this slide.
The email I've seen from Schiller presents it as a combination -- it says that Epic has previously broken its agreement with Apple because of disagreements about the rules, and that Epic has publicly disagreed loudly with Apple's DMA rules. The disagreement wouldn't be a problem without the history of violations.
No idea where this will actually go with the EU regulator, but US courts said it was okay for Apple to keep Epic's developer account suspended based on this.
>Epic’s egregious breach of its contractual obligations to Apple led courts to determine that Apple has the right to terminate ‘any or all of Epic Games’ wholly owned subsidiaries, affiliates, and/or other entities under Epic Games’ control at any time and at Apple’s sole discretion.’ In light of Epic’s past and ongoing behavior, Apple chose to exercise that right.
presumably apple's ban on epic games is for life, not just for a year or two. and registering a new account doesn't change that - it's just ban evasion.
to wit: you are still banned from reddit or paypal or any other online service, even if you create a new account. if they can link it they'll ban that one too.
and this is a new account that epic games tried to register recently. so it got banned too. Not that complex/hard a concept really, unless you're trying not to understand it.
again, do you think you have a right to create a second reddit account after your first one got banned from the service? how about a bank account, do you get a do-over if you do some fraud and get your first account banned?
> presumably apple's ban on epic games is for life, not just for a year or two. and registering a new account doesn't change that - it's just ban evasion.
They didn't ban every epic account back then, just the violating account. I am pretty sure most of epic games accounts are still there, just the fortnite account got banned.
Apple has nothing on their side aside from a few tweets criticizing them, that just won't cut it as an exemption to the DMA. It's not like Epic released malware or anything.
Remember that the whole goal of the DMA is that actors like Apple and Google can't decide to block competiton on a whim, the exact thing they are doing right now.
In the US and in most countries, sure that'll be enough but in the EU, the DMA superseded their contracts. Apple might have got away with it if they had limited the ban to outside the EU but as I understand, they didn't.
The article is talking about the license for Epic's EU subsidiary, which would have been used to launch an app store only in EU (as the only region where Apple is obligated to make competing app stores possible). When the EC, and possibly later the courts, evaluate whether this is breaking the DMA, a US court ruling permitting the closure of Epic's developer accounts has no bearing.
The EU is a sovereign entity, enforcing its own laws in its own territory. A US court ruling can't compel the EU to allow Apple to violate EU laws when operating in the EU. How would that even work?
> The EU is a sovereign entity, enforcing its own laws in its own territory. A US court ruling can't compel the EU to allow Apple to violate EU laws when operating in the EU. How would that even work?
In a word: treaties. Usual disclaimer that I'm not a lawyer yada yada, but treaties are generally why one country's laws or legal proceedings might affect another country in some way. Think stuff like US copyright law being applied to Europe [1]. I don't actually know how or if anything would even apply in this specific scenario (not a lawyer and I think it's pretty unlikely that the US court ruling would affect the EU DMA here), but treaties are what you'd look at to find out.
[1] Technically those countries passed their own versions of the US law, but it's all hammered out in the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty.
Do EU courts consider sworn foreign testimony entirely inadmissible as evidence? It is a fact that Epic swore before a court of law, a foreign court but still a recognized court of law, that they did all this on purpose. EU law might still not allow for its submission into evidence, I don’t know, but that isn’t nothing either. Unless prohibited by law, a Judge in his professional judgement might still allow it.
Depends on the ruling, judge, and arguments. Law does pay attention to overseas precedence, but it's just another piece of evidence to consider, not final worldwide judgement.
In the case here, Epic doing a behavior to go around a store policy that EU specifically is considering bad may mean they cast aside the US rulings.
I suspect if the disagreement is in Epic refusing to commit to honoring a contract and the CEO referring to it as requiring "sworn fealty", the actual resolution would be for Apple to show the actual harm in a marketplace violating said contract.
From there a lot of things can happen to negotiate a resolution, such as negotiating penalties for not following said contract.
I don't think Epic will be able to convince a court that there is no resolution when Apple has already said before and now what they would require for Epic to resume their business relationship with Apple.
a) It is fair and non-discriminatory. Epic was found by the courts to have violated the terms of the agreement that they signed and Apple had the right to terminate it. They have done this with other developers as well.
Have any other companies announced credible plans for a competing app store? I'm at least not aware of any, which would absolutely make Epic their main competitor.
It is pretty hilarious how people think some US court judgement would have any relevance on EU anti-trust regulation.
Apple doesn't need a court judgement to terminate a contract. They can just do it if they believe terms have been broken. Epic sued them in the US to reverse this decision and the courts found in favour of Apple. The process in the EU starts the same way.
And this is a basic contractual dispute seperate from the DMA which is why the many other parties have not also had their contracts terminated.
Also running an App Store is hard. It's going to take more than a few days to see competitors.
Well, yes, clearly I think you're confused about how this works given you keep thinking that a US court ruling is going to overrule the DMA on EU soil.
The entity that Epic will be complaining to about this will not be a US court. It will be the EC. The EC will look at the text and the intent of the DMA: to permit competing app stores. They'll also note that Apple has (arbitarily and without any technical justification) made a developer account a requirement for launching a competing app store. And finally, they'll note that Apple is terminating the developer accounts of the company most vocal about intending to launch a competing app store.
It doesn't matter what text Apple has in their contract about how they're permitted to close developer accounts for any reason they want to. It doesn't matter that they have a courting ruling from some other country. Apple chose to gatekeep app store competition on membership in the developer program. To prevent this from being used as an end-run on the DMA, the EC just an't allow Apple to terminate the licenses on a flimsy pretext. And "Tim Sweeney tweeted mean things about us" is not going to work.
a) No one has said that a US court ruling has jurisdiction over the EU. Developers have to sign seperate contracts in the countries that their apps are being sold in.
b) Epic's actions e.g. pushing hidden IAP features were a fundamental breach of the contract in all countries where it was signed including EU. It was never about Epic criticising Apple.
c) Apple takes the first move in terminating the contract. Then Epic sues. And then the EU legal system will settle the matter. That is the process.
You keep hammering on point c but nobody in this thread has disagreed about the sequencing.
a -> that is the clear implication of one of the above comments, ie. if it was a legsl use of the contract in the US that somehow will shield them from dma violation, but dma supersedes contracts
You’re missing a key point by calling this a “competing app store”. That’s not what it would be. It would simply be Epic’s app store with Epic’s apps in it, the purpose being to maximize Epic’s revenue on Epic’s games. Apple, in case you haven’t noticed, isn’t a game company — they don’t compete with Epic. Microsoft does. Steam does. Apple doesn’t. In fact, given that Epic games haven’t been on iOS in ages, there’s literally zero competition even there.
It’s kind of silly to think that other companies that actually compete with Epic would choose to publish via the Epic store, since they’d just be giving money to their competitor. Either they’ll build their own stores or they’ll continue business as usual, using the device manufacturer’s stores.
To your other point, while a US court judgement is unlikely to have direct relevance to EU regulation, it does help establish a pattern of behavior on Epic’s part.
It’s also important to note that the provisions for establishing an alternative app store are designed to protect the consumer. Repeated violations of contractual agreements is clear evidence of a company’s untrustworthiness, and it would be irresponsible for Apple to do anything other than exercise the termination clause as a result..
One reason we know this is that Epic Games Store on PC isn't Epic-only.
Another reason we know it is that Apple has (arbitrarily) forbidden app stores that aren't open to third parties. Even if Epic wanted to make it a first-party only store (why?), they couldn't.
You claim that Apple isn't a gaming company. It's true that Apple doesn't really develop or publish games. But the App Store is the world's largest games store, larger than e.g. any of the console games stores or Steam. Every estimate I can find is that significantly more than half the App Store revenue is from games.
Finally, you suggest that nobody would publish games on Epic's store. That might be true on iOS just due to the unreasonable terms Apple set for that (in particular the core platform fee), but it certainly won't be true due to competitors not wanting to give 12% to Epic rather than 30% to Apple. This fear hasn't stopped companies from publishing their games on the PC EGS.
Apple claim that all their requirements are there just to protect the consumers. They might be telling the truth, they might be lying and actually just want to make life as hard as possible for the competing app stores. It's hard for anyone on the outside to be sure which. But terminating the developer account of the most credible competitor on the day DMA enforcement starts is a pretty bad look, and makes it quite hard to believe Apple's story on why the requirements exist.
> Another reason we know it is that Apple has (arbitrarily) forbidden app stores that aren't open to third parties. Even if Epic wanted to make it a first-party only store (why?), they couldn't.
That's a circular argument. Apple is arguing (maybe wrongly) that Epic won't follow the rules. You can't refute that argument by saying "but the rules say they have to follow the rules".
The GP wasn't making an argument about why Epic's account was terminated.
They were making an argument about why Epic wasn't a competitor to Apple. That argument was based on the mistaken belief that Epic was looking to launch a store only for their only games.
In that context it's not a circular argument to point out that a first-party only store cannot be launched on iOS, so obviously that's not what Epic is intending to do.
Epic also intentionally broke agreements with Apple before. Non-discriminatory doesn’t mean they have no grounds to terminate Epic’s developer accounts, and Epic is continuing to make themselves look untrustworthy by trying to publicly and explicitly shank Apple. Spotify is also trying to shank Apple in all the same places Epic is, but they also didn’t go behind Apple’s back to deceive the prior review process in contravention to a signed agreement, file suit and spin-out a pre-prepared publicity stunt-filled PR campaign and then go on to court to testify that all of that was done on purpose. Tim Sweeney and Epic did.
It sucks because I was hoping this fight was basically in the rear-view mirror now, but it’s hard to argue Apple has no grounds for calling Epic untrustworthy and not even maintaining an arms-length business relationship in one jurisdiction with them. Who’s to say Epic wouldn’t try something similar again? Apple can still set terms under the DMA, and Tim has been publicly campaigning that these terms violate the DMA which isn’t actually his call to make.
Also one other point:
> Apple don't get to deny access to their main competitor in this space
As of today, and yesterday, and going back to the dawn of the iPhone: Epic isn’t anything in “this space” let alone Apple’s main competitor. They have stated that they intend to compete, and want to compete with Apple in this space, but Epic’s iPhone app marketplace is vaporware. It hasn’t shipped, it doesn’t look like they’re going to be able to ship now, and in its entire history of being discussed, has earned Epic €0.00 to date.
>Epic also intentionally broke agreements with Apple before.
This is funny to point out since they did it specifically to sue over it (you pretty much can't other wise).
So Apple has their draconian 30% cut or there's literally no other way to have an application run on iOS policy, you can't challenge it without breaking it so you can sue, and because you broke it to sue you are now permanently barred from every making another iOS app.
Yea that seems fine, no monopolistic behavior here, it's only 49% of the phone market so it's fine.
They had the alternative of pulling their software on principle and suing, but they wanted the fight they would have by having Apple suspend and then terminate their developer accounts to bring more public opinion to their side, and they sure got the fight. As a developer enrolled in the program, it would have been hard to argue they didn’t have standing as long as what they were arguing had plausible legal merit (it did, it may not have been the winning argument in the end, but it was at least plausible at the beginning and they won on one count).
The goal wasn’t just to sue Apple, it was to shank Apple with one hand while filing suit with another and they had multiple opportunities to get their account unsuspended at the beginning of the lawsuit even while the case proceeded, before it was eventually terminated.
There is no alternative to mobile computing. Both vendors have draconian rules.
These are devices so essential to modern functioning that the regulators need to come and tell both Apple and Google that unlimited web installs are user rights.
Epic is right. Apple and Google are monopolies over an entire class of computing, and it's a 100% artificial racket.
> These are devices so essential to modern functioning that the regulators need to come and tell both Apple and Google that unlimited web installs are user rights.
This might be what you want but without new legislation, because the DMA ain’t saying what you want, regulators are not within their rights to impose this requirement.
I am sorry to push back on this, but this is just incorrect.
The truth is the vast majority of users do not care about sideloading apks. Apple knows this. Google knows this.
However, it is important that it is allowed without any major hurdle (a warning dialog that you need to click OK on is not a major hurdle for me once you consider that many malicious actors will use this sideloading for nefarious purposes).
Google allows it and you are free to use it without major hurdles. Yes, most users don't care to, and that's fine.
> The truth is the vast majority of users do not care about sideloading apks.
You can't really say that since it isn't a common deployment strategy. If web installs of APKs were normal and had no road blocks, then the practice would be commonplace.
The users care about software. There is only one blessed path to get it.
F-Droid is not a good comparison here because the primary motivator for people to use it is ideological, not because it has a wider selection or cheaper prices. The many different app stores in China is a better example of how a somewhat competitive app store landscape could look to the average user.
> They had the alternative of pulling their software on principle and suing, but they wanted the fight they would have by having Apple suspend and then terminate their developer accounts to bring more public opinion to their side
I think that gave them much stronger standing and claimed damages.
It's a weaker argument if they voluntarily removed themselves from the AppStore.
Apple could have trotted out some 'We typically work well with developers in Epic's situation, but they never approached us so there was nothing we could do' excuse.
By forcing Apple to take an action, it concretely showed that Apple does in fact remove access if companies tried to forward users to alternate payment methods.
Sure, maybe this was the better strategy given either strategy was going to be a long shot, but they high rolled for what was ultimately a contract renegotiation and lost worse than if they had played their cards differently. Higher risk can mean higher rewards, but in this case it just worked out to be a bigger loss. They were never entitled to the outcome they fought for, but it was their right to fight for it and Apple’s right to defend themselves and their policies.
There is no such thing as “stronger” standing. You either have standing or you don’t. It’s the rule almost everywhere that a party to a contract can seek a declaratory judgment regarding the contract without breaching.
This idea that Epic had to breach to sue is part of a well crafted PR campaign by Epic.
I realize the gravity is a lot less here, but consider Civil Rights protests where people intentionally but peacefully broke (bad) laws in protest. I would consider what Epic did in a similar way.
This isn’t Segregation. Epic isn’t Rosa Parks. Apple isn’t a legislature. Epic’s actions until now have been for a B2B contract renegotiation, not a human rights movement.
People who did fight for civil rights were also punished with the force of law for their civil disobedience. The laws were unjust, but they still had consequences for those who lived under them, otherwise they wouldn’t have had to fight. Epic is also facing the consequences of their actions, but it’s only really important to them that they win. Everybody else invested in this fight (within the EU) will probably be able to get anything they want but Fortnite from some other app marketplace.
That's Epic's PR spin, but I ain't buying. This was a chance to reduce the fees they pay to Apple, not subject themselves to the customer relationship rules set by Apple and expand into another line of business. The legal, political and PR campaigns were tools in their arsenal to put pressure on Apple.
They lost, but good news for all the not-Epics out there because there's other companies who stand to benefit from the recent Court and Commission-induced changes Apple made to their policies. It just won't be Epic specifically.
That's why I said I realize the gravity isn't the same. I'm trying to point out it's in a similar category, not the same level of importance. Apple might not be a government, but they have a LOT of power and very little accountability. Epic's rule breaking was done to force Apple to show their ugly side, much like how the protests were designed to show how ugly the law and law enforcement was.
Here's the thing when you have a highly asymmetric power relationship, whether it be with a government or a business or any other large organization. You can point out how bad their policies are, and never break a rule, and people will just sort of sadly nod their head in agreement and go back to doing what they do. Or, you can force them to show just how ugly their rules/laws are on in real life -- not just theoretically. The latter actually gets things done, which is why I made the relation between the two things.
Or put more simply: show, don't tell.
Apple's App Store policies are, in my opinion as both an iPhone user and a developer, bad for everyone but Apple. So no, it's not important just for Epic that they win, it's important for the broader community of developers and users. Apple clearly is punishing Epic for fighting them and securing some victories, and personally I don't think we should tolerate that sort of behavior from Apple.
This notion that 30% is 'draconian' is curious since Steam -- on supposedly open PC -- costs devs more, and even 30% is wrong since it's not 30% below a certain revenue level or in the second year onwards, again in line or less than stores on other platforms.
The PC isn't "supposedly" open, but open. Steam do collect a 30% fee but crucially, they have to work for that fee by competing on core service quality and quality of life features (like cloud saves).
Apple is perfectly entitled to ask for a 30% fee, as long as they allow for competition on equal footing (for clarity, this means they don't try to collect exorbitant rent from their competitors first). Let the free market sort it out.
As a user, I have to pay for iCloud storage for apps that use it. There is a free tier, sure... which most users will fill very quickly just with device backups and photos alone.
I don't recall ever playing for cloud storage on Steam, though.
Steam Cloud is truly a backup service. It's not fast even for tiny amounts of data. They'll even kick you over to an even slower lane if you store anything over 250 MB.
Meanwhile, you can do near real-time app synchronization over iCloud between devices.
But yeah, it'd be great if Apple bumped up the free tier size. That said, I've never actually had any problems storing app data on iCloud. Apple users seem to either pay for more storage or not backup to iCloud, so from a developer perspective, eh.
CloudKit uses the user’s iCloud storage for private containers and bills the developers (although it’s usually free) for "public" CloudKit containers[1].
If you don't like Steam's cut, you can go to Epic or GoG or Origin or Microsoft.
If you don't like Apple's cut, you couldn't (effectively still can't because of the absurd 1 000 000 installs/updates rule) go to any other storefront.
Before you bring up Xbox or Playstation: those devices are not essential computing devices. You can't function in modern society without access to both a computer and a smartphone. That puts a special burden on the companies that effectively own the software stack on those devices.
Not that I see it happen, but lets paint a PC horror scenario:
- Microsoft starts demanding to motherboard and laptop manufacturers to include their Pluton security chip
- Secure Boot can no longer be disabled
- They restructures the Windows kernel in such a way that DirectX is much faster than Vulkan
- They only allow games on the Microsoft Store access to DirectX 12.3 and 13
- Hell, _anything_ not installed from the Microsoft Store has dark-pattern warning pop-ups that make it both too confusing and too scary for the layman to install things from outside the store
- Microsoft also starts to demand a €0.50 fee from any developer that gets more than a million installs - with some updates counting towards installs. _This includes free applications_.
Do you see the problem now? Apple is essentially doing all of these things.
> Before you bring up Xbox or Playstation: those devices are not essential computing devices.
Dude cmon this is not how the legal system works, you can't just pretend that there's such a thing as an "essential computing device" as if iPhones are a human right or some shit
Human right? No. Human necessity in the modern world? Kinda yes. Some businesses are mobile-only now, not just mobile-first. And you need either a computer or a smartphone for many things now. You're really going to be locked out of a big part of normal life without a general computing device.
An Xbox or PS5 is not needed to live a normal life (if you ask my girlfriend it's even the opposite :)
> Dude cmon this is not how the legal system works, you can't just pretend that there's such a thing as an "essential computing device" as if iPhones are a human right or some shit
If I want to file my taxes (in Australia), I need an authentication app that's only available on iOS or Android. I can't use an Xbox or a Playstation. That's the difference.
There are authentication apps on windows, Mac, etc, and you also have the option of using something other than an electronic device.
Before you say desktop OSs are not the same thing, it is to the government. The difference between iOS and macOS is the same as Windows XP and Windows Vista legally, Google only got dinged as a monopoly in the Epic case because of preferential treatment, not because it was "essential" or that the smartphone market is any way distinct or unique enough for that. Microsoft got dinged because it was 95% of the personal computing market in general. Apple is not even close here.
It is fine to suggest abuse and sending warnings, but if you've even remotely looked at any of the legal cases the US government brought against tech companies in the past, you'd know how much of a joke it is when people talk like this.
And given I'm overseas, I also do not have the option of using something other than an electronic device. To be honest, I don't even know if I could if I were living in Australia.
In the real world, Apple/Android devices are in a completely separate category from gaming consoles.
I mean, they’re considered so essential that city / municipal governments will give them to poor people either for free or at extremely subsidized prices. Classes are given to tech illiterate or less able people to learn to access governmental services. That pretty much hits the threshold of a legal definition.
Try it out, for the duration of a month only use your smartphone for texting and calls and do not touch any PC. If you balk at that idea, well, there you go.
Why would I not touch a PC? You're just moving goalposts, Apple is not stopping you from buying a Chromebook. That's what anti-trust legislation is about.
Jitterbug (Lively) is the main contractor for these devices, yes they are getting flip phones. Just spend 30 seconds googling before lying because you just make yourself look like a fool.
More to the point, everything you've said is just a lie. I don't want any luck from you.
Sorry dude, this is how the world is working today. A truckload of my local government apps only function on iOS/Android. They don't even have a web-site. They used to have one on the past, but due to "bad experiences" on mobile devices, they shuttered it.
So, yes a smartphone is now an "essential computing device". This is no longer a matter of opinion. Its now a matter of fact.
So your government physically blocks you from entering the government building to get something done? No? Congratulations, you just have a bad government.
I can only watch cable news on TV, am I going to call that an essential computing device too?
>I can only watch cable news on TV, am I going to call that an essential computing device too?
If that is the only way you can find out about what is happening to the government responsible for your safety and wellbeing or alerts about impending disasters... absolutely!
Phones are literally essential computing devices in modern society as it is the primary source of important information whether it be about family, government, or national emergencies for a large swath of the population.
> Phones are literally essential computing devices in modern society
Cool, it doesn't matter because US courts disagree with you, even if they did agree with you, there's nothing in the constitution that says the welfare of American society is in jeopardy because Apple sets rules on their own devices that you don't have to buy.
Your argument literally only makes sense if you pretend Android doesn't exist. It is not possible to exhibit monopolistic behavior if you are not a monopoly, and Apple is not a monopoly by any stretch of the definition.
Yes except Steam:
* Takes their cut for games purchases on their store
* Doesn't have any rules about in game payments/utxns, if you want to use steam wallet for that they'll take 30%, if you want to process the payment yourself or direct users to a website they don't care at all
The last point is Apple's monopoly, along with no sideloading; because if I don't want to use Steam then I can use whatever else I want to.
But I agree, 30% even just on games purchases is too high, and we should reduce this profiteering across the board, Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. Good thing we can multi task, right?
It doesn’t matter. A company does not have to be a monopoly to be a gatekeeper under the DMA. The DMA defines gatekeeper (among other things) in terms of the number of users in the EU and revenue in the EEA. According to those definitions Apple is a gatekeeper and the DMA applies to them, monopoly or not.
Also not a lawyer, but my understanding is that in order to have standing to sue, you must be able to show that you were damaged by the behavior you are trying to file suit against.
I guess we'll see in the light of the DMA. Apple didn't allow EA to compete before, but who knows now.
But this seems to be missing the point. Epic Games wants to put their store on mobile, they had android on the roadmap for years. They very much want to compete.
First, thank you for posting this because this was my first clue that I mixed up EA’s thing with Epic’s thing. My bad.
Second, wanting to compete and competing aren’t the same activity. They are not presently a competitor to the iPhone’s App Store. They may become a competitor in the future, pending presumably at least some discussions between Apple, the EC and Epic, and possibly a legal fight, but calling them an app marketplace competitor in the present-tense is not accurate nor justifiable.
In the context of standards essential patents, yes. In the case of DMA compliance, it’s a bit more TBD until the EC issues more guidance and actual legal precedent is set, but what we do know is that the DMA still allows Apple to set terms that 3rd parties must both agree with and abide by which means having an active developer account with Apple. If Apple believes Epic will not abide by the terms in good faith, they don’t have any reason to maintain a relationship with Epic, and Epic has given Apple plenty of reasons.
The real and interesting question is whether they can do this before they prove Epic’s non-compliance with the new terms.
I find it hard to see Apple being in the right here. While I'm not so naive as to think one company is "good" and the other "bad", I do think that as developers Epic is fighting for our best interests. Apple's app store monopoly serves only Apple.
Maybe I should rephrase that, they're indirectly fighting for our best interest. Obviously their motives are selfish, but their wins are generally good for the rest of us in this context.
In the right and within their rights are two separate things. I’m not exactly happy with all of Apple’s App Store policies either, but they have their rights.
I also don’t believe Epic is doing this for anything other than Epic’s self-interest. They have no duty to other developers, and this is a potentially new line of business for them, not a liberation of iPhone app developers.
Criticize Apple vigorously and criticize Epic vigorously. Epic's been fined for dark patterns, data collection on minors below 13, and their entire business model relies on getting children to buy worthless cosmetic skins out of peer pressure, while optimizing for engagement and addiction. It's a predatory business model that should be illegal.
One of their main goals in bypassing IAP is to make these microtransactions non-refundable, so parents are screwed. They're the great satan.
Fortnite V-Bucks are nonrefundable (at least they're still marked that way on their site). Their Epic Games Store policy says: "Also, most in-app purchases are non-refundable", so that seems to extend to other games in their store. Epic used to ban Epic accounts after parents used chargebacks (so you lose all your other games, even ones you paid for); it became a big enough controversy (since chargebacks are the only option) that they softened it and now they just ban the credit card. In comparison, every Apple IAP is eligible for refunds and Apple is pretty liberal about granting them.
I assume that one of the reasons Epic isn't as hated as EA is that "the TotalBiscuit audience" is too old to be in the target market for Fortnite.
That’s very much a Pyrrhic victory if Eoic doesn’t have access to the US market. The court ruling in the US said that Apple has the right to terminate their account.
From the linked article
> This judgment stated that “Apple has the contractual right to terminate its DPLA with any or all of Epic Games’ wholly owned subsidiaries, affiliates, and/or other entities under Epic Games’ control at any time and at Apple’s sole discretion.”
Pyrrhic implies that the battle is over. I see it more as a foothold for a much longer battle. I'm sure North America and Asia aren't ignoring this whole ordeal.
It should also be noted that this article specifically talks about Epic's Sweden AB account being banned. It doesn't affect the state of the US account (which may very well be banned anyway).
Other way around, "victory" implies the battle is over, Pyrrhic as a modifier implies a victory that inflicted such a devastating toll that it was tantamount to defeat.
Epic is just Tencent which is an organ of the Chinese state. They might have been able to break open Apple like an egg in Europe but the final boss battle is going to be much harder for them.
> Yeah, its really weird to appeal to the noble intentions of a corporation. They're both just engaged in business.
This is what's wrong with the current overly capitalist system. Companies are totally allowed to have no conscience, and externalise whatever they please to consumers and the environment. And you could even argue they are 'forced' to do so by due diligence legislation.
If we let this continue there will be no world left to fix. We have to change the game. I'm not saying we should go full communism. Capitalism isn't bad but there needs to be a balance between business and society with actual accountability (rather than the current 'green' initiatives basically just being PR without any kind of enforcement). It can't be all about money.
I think for US culture it's hard to imagine doing this but here in Europe society has always had this balance, at least in most countries. Initiatives like RoHS, GDPR, DSA/DMA are often called anticompetitive but we are actually trying to improve things for the benefit of society, not just the shareholders.
Perhaps a better alternative would be to stop anthropomorphising abstractions, and not try to weirdly attribute intentionality, independent agency, or sociopathy to the same thing we're acknowledging is incapable of conscience because it isn't a person.
Corporations are organizational models employed by humans in pursuit of human motivations. They are not entities unto themselves. Everything is humans, all the way down.
Corporate personhood means that legally they are. If we stripped that away and let the board of governors go to jail for doing blatantly illegal stuff, then they might stop being sociopathic.
No, they'd still be sociopathic. They'd do the absolute minimum they have to do under the law, and no more than that - exactly as a sociopath would if watched by someone with the ability to hurt them.
Conscience is fundamentally a trait that requires some kind of physical personhood - an actual self-identity with empathy attached to it. Corporations, being pure legal fiction, have neither.
This is why it is imperative to keep them as small and toothless as we possibly can as a society, even beyond issues with monopolies.
But in the case of the boards being mentioned, the sociopathy is combined with competition between members that doesn't exist right now. If one board member suggests doing something that would be negatively viewed but another doesn't, they are then competing with each other for the direction of the company as opposed to working together to do whatever sociopathic things serves both their best interests.
Sociopathy is all about driving the interests of the individual. Boards not being liable for the actions of companies allows those interests to always be aligned. Taking that away would require them to think about what's good for the business but also what's good for themselves and those things won't always align for all board members the way they do now.
I wasn't referring to board members being sociopathic as people, but to the whole entity being sociopathic as a whole. That is generally the case for any organization in direct proportion to its size, even if none of the constituent members are sociopaths.
The problem is that the more people you have working together on something, the less you can rely on informal human interactions to keep things running, and the more written rules and rigid processes you need. Those written rules and rigid processes increasingly take out human factors (such as empathy) out of the equation, and the result is that the entity as a whole behaves in an increasingly sociopathic manner even when its goals (as set by e.g. the board) are ostensibly beneficial.
> Conscience is fundamentally a trait that requires some kind of physical personhood - an actual self-identity with empathy attached to it. Corporations, being pure legal fiction, have neither.
And, for the same reason, they have no capacity for autonomous thought and action. Corporations are just organizational models for coordinating human activity, but all of the agency still originates with individuals, because there's nothing else that it could originate with.
All malicious acts you are attributing to corporations actually originate from the malicious intent of individuals who are merely using the corporation as an organizational model.
> This is why it is imperative to keep them as small and toothless as we possibly can as a society, even beyond issues with monopolies.
Keeping organized forms of social coordination "small and toothless" is inherently antagonistic to the concept of society itself -- the proper solution is to constrain malicious behavior without interfering with non-malicious behavior, regardless of how that behavior is coordinated or formalized.
There's also a paradox here, in that I have not seen any mechanism proposed for combating the implicit sociopath of one kind of organization that doesn't rely on creating even greater concentrations of monopoly power in the hands of an essentially equivalent form of organization.
Corporate officers who commit criminal violations in the conduct of their job are already legally liable for their behavior. The corporation they work for might also incur liability under the law of agency and vicarious liability.
Corporate personhood applies primarily to private law -- contract liability, civil torts, financial obligations and the like.
It's entirely a matter of incentives. Companies are like machines whose sole purpose is to make a profit. Pretty much everything they do apart from that (make products, employ people, pollute, etc) is, strictly speaking, a side effect.
If they could make just as much money (or more) without doing any of those other things, they absolutely would, and any company that wouldn't do the same would eventually be put out of business via competition, barring some kind of external intervention, say from the state.
If you want companies to grow a conscience, you're first going to have to figure out how to change their incentives, which means changing the environment in which they operate.
> It's entirely a matter of incentives. Companies are like machines whose sole purpose is to make a profit. Pretty much everything they do apart from that (make products, employ people, pollute, etc) is, strictly speaking, a side effect.
What do you base that on? Sure corporations take on a life of their own, but there's much more to most of them than purely making profits. They're made up of humans too, and usually it's some executive making a final call. There are many corporate agendas that have little to do with profit.
The meme that corporations are purely about profit needs to die, because it encourages that exact behavior by giving free reign to morally devoid executives, IMHO. Corporations can and should also be held to account legally and ethically for being good stewards of public interests in addition to profitability. In the end they're just tools for organization, and a rather effective one, but they're still run and accountable to humans and human values.
> What do you base that on? Sure corporations take on a life of their own, but there's much more to most of them than purely making profits.
Do corporations do other things besides make profits? Yes; I previously said as much. The point is about why they do the things they do.
> There are many corporate agendas that have little to do with profit.
Perhaps in the short term, if they can afford to economically, but isn't this kind of like the exception that proves the existence of the rule?
Is Tesla a car company that wants to make great cars and help reduce carbon emissions for the benefit of all? Maybe, but their primary goal must be profits, because they can't do any of the other stuff if they aren't profitable.
> The meme that corporations are purely about profit needs to die, because it encourages that exact behavior by giving free reign to morally devoid executives, IMHO.
I disagree that it encourages that behavior. If you want to change that behavior then an accurate understanding of the current state of affairs is a necessary prerequisite.
Like if you're going to say, "I want <insert company here> to do less of X and more of Y", then surely your first order of business must be to understand why they are doing X in the first place and not so much of Y (hint: it's usually because of profits).
In the case of corporations, because being profitable is necessarily the first priority, it follows that the most effective way to change the behavior of a corporation is pretty much anything that affects their profit, as opposed to appealing to the moral/ethical/whatever values of their leadership. If you want ethical corporate leadership, then you have to make it unprofitable to be unethical.
people don't act out of conscience because there's a particular incentive for them to do so. They act out of conscience, because there's a disincentive, naturally, in doing something wrong as an individual, or as anyone with any amount of accountability at all. But as long as entities shield or provide a mechanism of free absolution to those responsible for harming others and the environment, then there never will be such a disincentive. They can always hide behind the organization, or perhaps the manipulative, false rhetoric that they are simply looking out for shareholder profits.
A false, ill-justified argument can be disassembled from multiple angles. One of the trivial counterarguments to our current wrong state of affairs is that the above mentioned profits are not actually real profits. It's actually people stealing from others. So many people
engage in the same behavior that they can't call out the serious offenders without giving up their own mask.
Humanity en masse actually does not deserve better. That's why we're in this situation. If we did give up our lies, we would demand others do too, as we demand a good world.
None of the DEI initiatives have anything to do with pure profit. If pure profit was the prime driving initiative, Google Gemini would not turn out like it did.
No, DEI is mostly implemented to be political correct, so that they are somewhat protected from being targeted for those kind of controversial topics. In other words, very important commercial incentive.
Besides generating profits for shareholders, let's amend the law to require that business activities also avoid causing harm and benefit society. This means every decision would need to balance the interests of shareholders with those of society at large. Such a requirement could lead to reduced profits for shareholders. Moreover, this change would need to be implemented worldwide, otherwise, capital might simply shift to regions with less stringent regulations.
> Companies are like machines whose sole purpose is to make a profit.
I think I understand that you mean to say "Corporations", whose governing body is made up of board members and executives. In that sense, there certainly seems to be a strong correlation.
In my case, however, I started a game company this year, and my goals are not profit driven. I haven't sat down to write things out but I probably should. Loosely, my company's two main goals:
- To make fun/mindblowing/entertaining pieces of Art. This is done by working on the gaming dreams that myself and my employees have.
- To give my employees a future where they care about the company as much as I do, feel financially well compensated and satisfied in their career, and have support for their aspirations and ideas.
I agree, 'corporations' is definitely a better fit for the argument I'm trying to make.
It's perfectly fine if making a lot of money is not the most important thing to you personally. However, your company will obviously have to at least be at least breaking even in order to continue to exist so that it/you can do the things that you do care about.
From that viewpoint, profitability (defined as 'at least breaking even', as opposed to 'maximizing $$') is still the most important thing because the very existence of the company depends on it.
Companies aren't often started just to make profit. Founders are usually passionate about the product / service they are creating, and want to create it to make a nice contribution to the world, and also make their living from it: best of both worlds.
It starts to change when a company is becoming too big. The original founder(s) usually leave or they themselves become infected by the money. In any case, everything becomes more nasty: people are being treated more like numbers, clients too, less personal contact, more lawsuits, etc.
I think the solution is very simple: just make a size limit to how big companies are allowed to grow. They'll have to split up and compete with each other. Way more healthy economy.
Most senior leaders I've experienced are preserving profits so they can maintain headcount. Is it without conscience to make sure thousands of people retain jobs? Even if it's ego driven it's still mutually beneficial.
"Capitalist" is a nonsense term that no longer carries any meaning.
There is a revolving door between government and corporate leadership.
There is no functional difference between corporate America and public service at this point in time.
One does not rule the other: they are one and the same.
Social media companies have entire teams run by Federal law enforcement.
Federal leadership draws its senior staff from companies like Google.
It is impossible to conduct business without thoroughly invasive involvement of multiple layers of government telling you what you can do, how you must do it, tracking your actions to ensure you comply, and levying obscene punishments if you don't.
For this "service" you are charged a level of tax that would make the Pharaohs green with envy.
If only there were someone, or some institution that could think more long term than mindless consumers. We could call it a Governing board or something!
Capitalism is a system of private property and voluntary exchange. There's tons of accountability - people can stop buying and interacting with these companies.
This isn't always the case. Some of these companies own and run the only methods of doing certain things. There are some places, for example, where you can't use cash to pay for things. That means that, in those places, you cannot stop buying and interacting with Visa and Mastercard, for example.
Honest question, can you provide a single example of a company that came to dominate an industry only to then go out of business purely because people chose to stop buying and interacting with them?
I honestly can't think of a single example of a monopoly, cartel, or industry leading company which has ever crumbled due to everyone collectively deciding not to do business with them. (without some sort of government regulation or technological advancement facilitating the change)
That's just the opposite kind of naive. Companies are still for the most part run by CEOs, and many of those CEOs have tremendous egos and most of them have a tremendous ability to direct the actions of those companies. Look at Tesla and Twitter lawsuits- they're clearly in Musks's interests.
Companies aren't minds of their own directing their own actions. Tim cook or some other high level executive is deciding these actions. Stop abrogating the direction of the literal directors
A board can only really exert soft pressure. Their options are very limited outside trying to fully replace a CEO unless they have something to use as a stick. Apple in particular prints money unlike any other company on earth and its board is not going to stop Tim Cook from doing pretty much whatever he feels like.
Epic isn't squeaky-clean, but Apple is making dangerous and dumb decisions in this whole debate.
Banning third-party payments was one thing, but then Apple banned publishers from TELLING people about the ability to pay through a Web site.
That is not just unnecessary from a business standpoint (since the vast majority of people opt for the most convenient thing); but it's so offensive that it invites crackdowns, implemented by ignorant politicians and legislative bodies... hurting Apple's bottom line.
Apple is tarnishing its image and earning it a place among the true offenders of "big tech," a place it mostly doesn't belong because it's not a gatekeeper to huge swaths of the Internet and commerce the way Google, Amazon, and Meta are.
>but it's so offensive that it invites crackdowns, implemented by ignorant politicians and legislative bodies... hurting Apple's bottom line.
Apple is a billion (nay trillion) dollar company with the best lawyers and accountants in the world. They clearly believe that the added uncertainty and negative perception that could be attached to their brand by allowing systems that can increase fraud and malfeasance is more harmful to their bottom line than maintaining their walled garden with all the accompanying "crackdowns".
I, for one, agree with them. I would much rather keep the existing system for both myself and my extended family members and people who rely on me as their tech person than allow these third-party vultures to further complicate and enshittify the system. In the current case, if my parents bought something on their phone, I know exactly where to go to see the purchase and can easily help them refund it or, if it's a subscription, cancel it. Corporations misleading people into using external payment systems and channels in order to make a quicker buck (and keep more of that buck) is easily a worse experience for everyone involved except the vultures.
It seems pretty clear what should happen here: Apple should be able to require you to accept their payment system, but not to require you to charge uniform pricing across payment systems, and not be able to charge you anything for sales outside of their payment system.
Now you can continue to use Apple's payment system all you like, but if Apple continues to charge 30% when e.g. Stripe charges ~3%, you're going to pay the difference for the privilege.
And with any luck that would encourage Apple to match Stripe's fees, but either way, now the choice is yours instead of the extra fees being hidden and mandatory.
The test of whether they're in compliance should be whether it's feasible to sell an app to an iOS user without paying anything to Apple.
Apple can charge for whatever they want, but they can't put up a troll bridge between other businesses and their customers. Then you can choose whether to use their service or not. If they want to charge for payment processing, you can use Stripe or Paypal. If they want to charge for XCode, you can use VSCode or emacs. If they want to charge for app distribution, you can use the Epic Games Store -- or Google Play -- or host it yourself on AWS or your own servers. Whatever they want to charge for, they have to open up to competition.
If their services are good and well-priced then people will choose them even when they have an alternative. If they're not, they won't.
Apple is asking for a clear commitment to honor its contract this time. I'm pretty sure a court ruling on reinstating the account isn't going to also require a clear commitment to honor the contract.
I think with Samsung, Apple had little choice. If you need to buy over 200 million high res mobile screens per year you have very few choices. Exact numbers on Samsung’s end aren’t readily available, but semiconductor components are by far their biggest segment and Apple is probably their only significant external customer.
I am absolutely sure Apple would love to cut Samsung off at the knees, but not if they do it to themselves at the same time. Samsung poses a much greater threat to Apple than all the third party app stores that could be dreamed up.
It’s a really interesting mutually assured destruction situation.
Epic and Apple, on the other hand, can both be fine without each other, so I wouldn’t expect them to work through the animosity
Epic is sending a strong signal to regulators that they're malicious, and can't be trusted to police themselves. It's a terrible look under the circumstances.
Epic Games was willing to hurt their iOS users by knowingly, wilfully, and strategically breaching Apple's developer agreement in a way they knew would result in Fortnite being removed from the store. Then they manipulated their customers into directing their anger towards Apple even though it was Epic's wilful actions were to blame.
Maybe correct, but the GP's point that Epic instigated this knowing full well it will likely end up in their users being "hurt" is valid. If we're trying to find the point of who decided to do something to hurt users, we look for the first to make that concious decision.
>A kind of repeat of the Apple-Samsung litigation where everyone has a "it's just business" attitude
Very different. Steve was taking Samsung to court partly ( or largely ) taking Android with it. But Tim wasn't a supporter of that, or at least behind the scene he was dealing with Samsung ( or Samsung Display, Samsung Foundry and Samsung Memory divisions directly ). So yes it was all it's just business in large because Tim was there to smooth things out. Or partly because Tim knew they cant do it without Samsung. Zero Chance at the time and they wasn't a trillion dollar company then.
I dont see any similarities here with Apple and Epic.
It is quite unusual to cheer for Goliath putting a David to the knife. Sure, Apple makes great premium hardware but IMO, their monopolistic actions in the digital space is something to be truly wary of.
Epic is learning the lesson that Nvidia had to learn. Apple holds grudges. Honestly, it was idiotic of them to expect anything else. Maybe they thought that they were more Samsung-like and after being a huge pain to apple, life will resume normalcy. Apple needed Samsung. They do not need Epic.
people really think bumpgate was about some issue that also affected AMD too and not closing the door on NVIDIA building a platform inside Apple's platform and shifting the balance of power?
like, we have the benefit of a decade of retrospect and watched nvidia do exactly the thing that apple refuses to let their partners ever do (namely: wear the pants in the relationship), and you're still taking charlie's takes at face value. Do you really think it's the bumps and not Apple taking action to protect themselves and their future products against the threat of competitive lock-in posed by NVIDIA and CUDA?
it is just amazing that people continue to take the guy seriously. How is that "NVIDIA is 4+ years behind AMD in the mid-term, and GV100 and GP100 are bumpgate 2.0" working out for you? Was ~2015-2020 a good period for Radeon Group?
it's amazing that people will sniff out a MLID quote from a thousand paces and yet still uncritically babble Charlie's nonsense like it's the word of god. Dude is a stopped clock who occasionally happens to be correct in his NVIDIA/Intel hatewagon, and that's given him enough reputability that he's apparently beyond reproach with a significant portion of the Gaming Public (tm) who are just looking for reasons to be upset about NVIDIA/Intel.
Grudges are unproductive and bring no benefit to the shareholder - this move is almost certainly going to result in a lawsuit that Epic would be in a good position in (assuming there aren't massive skeletons in the closet). This is an irrational move - especially in an election year when politicians have a lot to gain by demonizing late stage capitalism.
> Apple holds grudges. Honestly, it was idiotic of them to expect anything else.
I'm sure upon first hearing this news Epic's management collectively lay down and curled up into the fetal position, awestruck and weeping in surprise at the sheer, unprecedented nature of this blow.
Even setting aside the dubious morality of Apple's rules on iOS, I feel like I'm going insane watching Apple be maximally aggressive. The EU loves regulating! There's nothing they love more! It seems supremely unwise to give them additional excuses to do something they clearly want to do anyways.
From an observation standpoint seeing how Microsoft behaved in the 90's and onward, they (Apple) are behaving very similarly - almost exactly with what MS did for Windows back then. I have a growing distaste for Apple corporate/mgmt each day even though I am surrounded by their devices.
Apple has been dragged kicking and screaming into more consumer friendly positions since the iPhone was released. It took years for them to simply switch to a more open charging port standard.
Before the iPhone and maybe blackberry the majority of phones used random proprietary charger. The iPhone was the first mass market consumer phone to come with a cable that connected to a standard usb charger.
> The iPhone was the first mass market consumer phone to come with a cable that connected to a standard usb charger.
And had a device end connector that didn’t change every other model. Some phones used standard connectors for that but plenty didn’t, and manufacturers would sometimes change the connector without rhyme or reason.
My Sony Xperia phone had a cable that connected to standard usb charger, this was before the first iPhone. From my memory Moto Razr 2 used micro usb b cable to standard usb. There where plenty of phones before iPhone that had charging cable that connected to standard usb charger.
While I think they should've switched earlier, it's often forgotten how angry people got when Apple switched from the 30 pin connector to Lightning. There were piles and piles of devices that used the 30 pin connector - it had been on every iPod, iPad and iPhone for nearly a decade. Entire hotel chains had iPod Docks in every room. Switching cost isn't limited to just goes in the device. It doesn't surprise me that Apple was hesitant to switch the port again.
Apple wasn't hesitant, they knew it was an inevitable switch so never invested in to Lightening.
They were quite happy knowing once you bought Apple, you kept Apple or you lost all your accessories.
They're still playing the same game now. My Airpods work grate on iPhone, but they only connect to some non-apple devices over bluetooth (not PS5), and when they do connect, if the mic is on the audio is awful.
Microsoft already notified EC that they stop their browser shenanigans and will ship windows without their browser pre-installed to save on endless lawyering game they can’t win.
Sweeney allegedly tweeted that he would breach his contract with Apple. Apple reached out and asked if he was being hysterical for public display. He didn’t clarify. At that point, Epic credibly threatened breach of contract.
This is a commercial dispute between multi-billion dollar companies, both of whom charge outrageous platform fees, both of whom seem to enjoy being dramatic, and both of whom are being maximally aggressive. It’s fair to remain emotionally uninvolved.
> threat of a breach of contract is not a breach of contract
I don’t know EU law. But anticipatory breach is enough to trigger damages under American law, and “is an excuse for non-performance by the non-breaching party” [1].
There's nothing about some random contracts I can see in DMA. DMA however does say that the gatekeeper (Apple) isn't allow to block or retaliate against competitors. Or users for that matter.
Schiller emailed Sweeney asking for assurances and Sweeney responded with:
> Epic and its subsidiaries are acting in good faith and will comply with all terms of current and future agreements with Apple, and we'll be glad to provide Apple with any specific further assurances on the topic that you'd like.
Without reply, Apple summarily terminated their developer account a week later. It seems obvious, in retrospect, that Schiller's email's goal was to establish a fig leaf of Apple having reached out before doing this.
It is indeed true that Sweeney has tweeted many criticisms of Apple's DMA plans but there haven't been any threatening noncompliance.
> there haven't been any threatening noncompliance
Do we have neutral sources for these claims and emails?
Apple said Sweeney threatened to breach contract and didn’t repudiate in private. Epic claims it didn’t threaten and did repudiate. We’re in a he said she said absent independent sourcing.
The source for the tweets (from your original comment: "Sweeney allegedly tweeted that he would breach his contract with Apple") are Sweeney's Twitter feed which you can read as well as I did. Did you find any threatening non-compliance?
Perhaps it's just me, but my gut says that EpicGames dot com might, possibly, just might, not be an entirely neutral source on the topic of "was Epic naughty?"
Even with screenshots, and assuming no false claims (which IIRC are entirely legal so long as you don't swear under oath), there's plenty of ways to mislead by omission while saying only true things.
Epic has a 12% fee, while Apple has a 30% fee - I don't think those are equally outrageous and I would go so far as to say one is extremely reasonable.
Epic’s fee is global. Once you sign with them, you pay that on every install. There is also the 5% royalty, which brings the actual fee to 17% since we’re comparing non-small developer figures.
The 5% royalty is for using the unreal engine - they don't enforce that the engine be used in order to appear in their game store, nor do they enforce that unreal engine games can only be sold on their game store.
Having worked for many bosses, never ever never undersestimate the power of ego of an executive. It's only second to the ego of a lawyer.
Many of them will tank their company and their client if they get their ego bruised and feel publicly humiliated. Those are hyper competitive people which see live as zero sum game and are trained in life to never, ever, lose a challenge or competition for domination. ESPECIALLY in public.
The myth of a rational businessman is just that - a myth.
Being publicly regulated is exactly that scenario for Apple. There's execs in that very company that are frothing at their mouth in irrational anger ready to throw their weight around and WIN. Stomp on the opponent. SPLAT the unimportant fly that DARED challenge them.
(I'm exaggerating... but not by much. This seems more of an emotional than thoughtful response Apple is doing here.)
What if, and hear me out, execs could go to jail instead of just their company paying fines as if they're parking tickets? Would they still be as cocky?
> execs could go to jail instead of just their company paying fines as if they're parking tickets?
You want to send an executive to jail for cancelling a contract?
I’d be curious for a jurisdiction to try this. In my opinion, I wouldn’t want to do business in a place where commercial disputes can be twisted by a political insider into jail time.
This is a bogus modernist interpretation that dilutes the meaning of violence. Fortunately, it’s being rejected after having a moment that peaked during lockdown.
> why does personal responsibility for harm to others bother you?
Personal responsibility is irrelevant. You’re constructing a lower threshold for criminality. I know the first thing I’d be trying to figure out is how to put my competitors in jail.
Let’s take Epic v Apple. Epic went to court. It lost. This entire saga has cost Epic’s shareholders billions. Should Sweeney go to jail? Would the world be better if an Apple-friendly prosecutor could take up that challenge?
If we have a cultural failing in America, it’s having a reflexive urge to turn outrage into jail time.
> Provide an incentive for companies to regulate each other
Do you think there is a reason every modern democracy resists privatising criminal prosecution? (They had it in Rome. We probably need a history of law section in the basic high-school curriculum.)
The justice system in this hypothetical would not be private, it's just that companies would be trying to sue each other for breaking the rules, accidentally advancing the public interest.
Fair enough, no jail time then but how about the personal liability in money. You fuck up, it's your own money you gotta pay with, not the company's bottomless war-chest.
> it's your own money you gotta pay with, not the company's
I agree with this, and it could be constructed out of shareholder rights. Perhaps it could only be applied past a certain threshold of compensation, say, 100x the median wage. ($4.6mm [1].)
I’d argue the threshold should be final, unappealable regulatory penalty or criminal conviction of the corporation.
And that's rather the point. Apple earns a lot of money in the EU and much of that seems to be through abusing their position.
So yes, if you're the executive who signs off on something that is so clearly anticompetative, you should own the penalty. Ignorance of the law is not a defense.
No - you seem to be assuming such a law would only be invoked in cases where the company legitimately did something wrong. But that's not what's at stake here. We're talking about what happens when someone with political clout and a vendetta is able to use that law to wrongfully get a a CEO tossed in prison. Because sometimes laws get twisted for personal gain, and you're raising the stakes pretty high.
I wouldn't want to do business under those conditions, not because I might violate the law, but because it could be used wrongfully against me.
Do you want to send executives to jail when their products kill people? The line has to be drawn somewhere, and if there is no (functioning) regulatory oversight then businesses will absolutely not self-regulate.
PG&E caused the death of hundreds and the loss of hundreds of homes, and they've done it multiple times. Is there regulatory oversight because I'm not seeing it. They will happily cut corners in the name of profit even if it means killing people.
Considering how impactful some executive decisions can be why would this be so inconceivable? A CEO can definitely cause more harm to a community than a shoplifter and we have no qualms about sending them to jail. If there was a clear mens rhea to cause harm or awareness of that harm and a disregard for the consequences to others then why shouldn't we treat it similarly?
> If there was a clear mens rhea to cause harm or awareness of that harm and a disregard for the consequences to others then why shouldn't we treat it similarly?
Yes, and we do. That’s well below the threshold of commercial disputes.
The question you should be asking is: would execs still exist? And we know the answer to this from before the advent of corporations: yes, just as tycoons and barons with barely any checks on their political and financial power instead of as execs.
Personally - never... but illegal adoptions are a very dark side of human trafficking so you may want to be more careful with your example. The truth is that we live in a far better society than fifty or a hundred or a thousand years prior - we have far more access to justice. But if you think that access to justice is universal then there are some hard truths in your future.
When this question is asked, it's always with an implicit bias that executives are all morally bankrupt demons that would be beaten to death by the public if not for police.
My response to that is: we should change the laws.
Nobody ever asks this question thinking about multi-generation family businesses where the executive is the head of household and if everything works out, the business will be passed down to their progeny.
Of course, it also begs the question why do we accept this?
Interestingly countries that jail people for corruption still have corruption. For example in China you can be jailed and even executed for corruption but there is still a lot of corruption there. Here's an example I read about a few days ago where a city government arrested someone who demanded to be payed for their construction contract. (Obviously the real story may be more complicated.)[0] And there are definitely petty execs there as well. I think it may be because you need more power in enforce corruption laws, and power itself multiplies the effect of corruption. That is why I think the civil law vs. criminal law is an important distinction.
Seems current laws look civilized/weak for your taste.
I think you'd rather prefer Sunday gala of past where convict would be covered with oil soaked rags and then set on fire. So while that person ran crying, howling it provided tons of entertainment to hardworking folks gathered there. And in that process of course justice prevailed.
I think it would be wise to reflect on whether the next logical step from "I think fines are not effective enough and decision markers should face jail setences" is "I think we should set people on fire as punishment and public entertainment". Do you genuinely believe that a person arguing for the first, would agree or would be close to agreeing with the second?
I'm willing to believe Apple may be like that behind the scenes, buuuuuut while reading this:
> Many of them will tank their company and their client if they get their ego bruised and feel publicly humiliated. Those are hyper competitive people which see live as zero sum game and are trained in life to never, ever, lose a challenge or competition for domination. ESPECIALLY in public.
… I thought you were going to name Sweeney as the petulant man-child chafing at rules and being told "no".
"We own this platform, we make the rules, and we don't care who you are or how big you are, you mess with us we'll terminate your account and revenue stream."
We own this platform, (we built this platform), we make the rules
I don't see the issue with this... it's not like they're exploiting an inherited platform like Oracle with (everything), IBM with Red Hat or Broadcom with VMware.
Microsoft didn't have competition in the 90s. Apple has plenty of competition, they've just built up a competitive advantage which is their fully-integrated platform. Googles been trying to build one on the Pixel for years and haven't come close to their success.
Apples been doing this "next level of nefarious" since the App Store's introduction in iPhoneOS 3.0, and it's been fine up to this point, otherwise the platform (and consequentially the apps on these platform -- spotify) wouldn't have thrived the way it did.
What competition? Apple has a 87% market share amongst US teenage population[1], Epic's core gamer market. It's basically a monopoly amongst their core demographic which will grow up to be adults with jobs and paycheck and guess what they'll buy? More Apple. With <13% market share Android isn't even in the race.
I find it frustrating when people think something can't be a trust just because one can imagine hoops a consumer could jump through to find an alternative. Switching from iPhone to Android is onerous, and most users are locked into multi-year payments contracts for the device they have.
A healthy competitive environment should have 10+ options. The fact that two massive corporations have the entire space locked up is not sufficiently competitive nor healthy for consumers.
The previously existing competition should have competed rather than completely fucking up. Both Apple and Google started as complete underdogs in the phone market.
Many current Android manufacturers used to built phones running their own platforms or Windows Mobile. Symbian, Windows Mobile, PalmOS, and BlackBerry all died not because Apple or Google somehow hamstrung them but because they sucked compared to what Apple and Google were selling.
I agree that would have been nice. But that is not the consumer's fault; it is however in the consumer's interest to have strong antitrust laws which restore a competitive environment.
What anti-trust laws are going to restore a "competitive" environment? The competitors couldn't compete. They failed. They failed with a huge head start and incumbent advantage! Apple and Google were the underdogs. They made better products people wanted.
Microsoft even tried a second (well, fourth) time and failed again! All these companies failed for their own issues and not any sort of action on Apple's part.
No legislation is going to make a company fundamentally understand the smartphone market, consumer electronics, or help them understand effective operations. No law is going to help them avoid visits from the Good Idea Fairy or executive hubris to avoid stupid business decisions. You're not going to regulate your way into finding investors willing to put up the cash to make a realistic play in the current smartphone market.
I think what Apple is doing is more similar to Nintendo I the 80s with their "seal of quality".
There where a couple of companies that circumvented their security mechanisms and went to court. Was that wrong of Nintendo?
My opinion is that, as long as people keep buying and using it, Apple can do whatever they want in their platforms.
They will change when most app devs coordinately delete their apps from the store, in a mass "strike" or when customers stop paying for their shitty phones.
> They will change when most app devs coordinately delete their apps from the store, in a mass "strike" or when customers stop paying for their shitty phones.
(Android user here.)
Apple doesn't make shitty phones, far from it. Solid build quality, performance and stability across the board... there are very few Android devices that can compete with Apple and almost all come from Samsung.
Since Epic is fighting Apple, let’s overlook the fact it is charged by the FTC for using dark patterns to sell virtual costumes for billions; an interesting choice for a champion of consumer rights.
It's hard to compare anything else to MS in the 90's because Windows (and Excel) had 90%+ marketshare. MS was able to strong arm companies into doing what they wanted by threatening to withhold Windows licenses.
The MS case and recently lost Google case are closer to each other than anything going on with Apple.
> We own this platform, (we built this platform), we make the rules
I own my phone, I make the rules.
If Apple doesn't want Epic on the App Store, fine. But their current level of control over what people can do with the devices they purchased and own is absurd and has nothing to do with market size.
You say that like someone who didn't have to periodically clean/erase/throw away their parents' malware-infested Windows machine (which was already bogged down by anti-virus software) in the early '00s. Not that I agree with every Apple policy, but it's hard to argue that their customers aren't generally more "protected" than they have been on other platforms. The fact that my mom can safely use an iPhone for 4-5 years with little to no support from me is incredible.
>You say that like someone who didn't have to periodically clean/erase/throw away their parents' malware-infested Windows machine (which was already bogged down by anti-virus software) in the early '00s.
Yes I have, you don't know me. And that's not an argument. Apple's MacOS is open unlike iOS and that's not full of malware or users getting scammed daily then what makes you think they'll suddenly start getting scammed on iOS. Explain that please.
Seems more to me like someone built a beautiful walled garden where people are walking nicely, and some rowdy pirates are trying to break it down because they see a lot of money inside.
>someone built a beautiful walled garden where people are walking nicely
Just because you build something nice doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with it. You're still bound by the rules of the state where you operate and earn revenue.
If I build a nice house for me I still have tones of regulation how I can build it and what I can do with it, including activities inside. For example, I can't fire guns(EU) or cook meth in my house, even though it's my property and I pay taxes on it.
Tech companies for some reason think that just because they don't build with brick and mortar but with bytes instead, then somehow the local laws don't apply to them. So just because you built a nice walled garden, the state will want to make sure you don't get to screw over everyone who enters there.
I was going to start an Ask HN post on this very thing just this morning, so instead I’ll just reply here.
The last few weeks, HN seems to be suppressing Apple headlines. They will be on the front page, but then drop off minutes later - despite being fresh, growing in votes and engagement, and being high quality articles.
Meanwhile, positive headlines about OpenAI will be up for hours…
Also, don’t blame the mod tools. This should be fixed, that’s not normal
I didn’t flag this one, but a lot of the debates wind up with pro-Apple/anti-Apple generalities. Which isn’t interesting. Even in this thread, it’s mostly people expressing outrage and disgust or reflexive dismissal; few actual thoughts.
Thank you for not posting an off-topic Ask HN. As the site guidelines ask, you should email hn@ycombinator.com if you want to ask or tell us something (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
There's no special treatment of Apple stories or any other $BigCo stories on HN; the dominant variable is simply random fluctuation. If you're seeing otherwise, it's almost certainly because random fluctuation provides a rich set of datapoints to confirm whatever perception you're inclined towards. Mostly we're all primed to notice, and weight more heavily, the things we dislike. (Endless past explanations about this here, for anyone who cares: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
For example, if you dislike $BigCo then it will seem like negative stories about $BigCo are being suppressed. Indeed there are tons of examples of such stories not staying on the frontpage—but there are also tons of examples of exactly the opposite. How one weights these is a function of one's own perception, which is governed by what one likes and dislikes. People who like $BigCo are just as convinced that HN is biased against $BigCo, and find just as many datapoints to support it, and post just as many complaints about it.
These dynamics are as old as the hills and impossible to stop. All we can do is answer specific questions when we happen to see them. I only saw this one randomly; in the future, please use the reliable mechanism (hn@ycombinator.com) to get your question answered. It's not as if any of this is secret!
That’s not true. A story can disappear from the front page for a variety of reasons, including user flags and manual moderator intervention. There’s no reason to suspect this particular story triggered the flamewar detector.
Normally we'd merge into the earlier thread, but in this case I'm going to merge those comments hither, because the current submission is (presumably) a more neutral article.
Both sides are authoritarian. One is a private company with more money than most countries, one is an economic union nominally representing the people of many countries.
I don't know where I fall on this issue personally, but siding with Apple is probably more authoritarian.
People defend Apple like its the underdog. Apple has been Goliath for almost a decade. Apple under Tim Cook is more about making money than it is about making the best product.
Yep and i think the market is saturated, but they still need the number to go up for the big shareholders. I mean they have a gross profit of 150 billion, it's not like this is helping the workers making apple's products and services.
I'm old enough to remember when they were the underdog.
I still find it weird that people spent the last 5 years complaining about practices that started when they still were an underdog, and which were applauded at the time, and which don't even fully apply now to all developers anyway.
What will happen if they exit the EU? They will loose more revenue and tank their stock and Tim Apple will get the boot ad EU users will move to Samsungs, Pixels and Nokias and life will go on.
You're acting like the EU is some poor country in the outback and not their second biggest market after the US.
Or better yet, we fork Android and have a non-Google EU-only appstore similar to Huawei's Andorid fork OS and appstore but with EU's privacy rules. If so many companies bother to make apps just for Huawei's separate appstore, then they'll definitely do that for the EU as well. Of course, then Google will go bitch about it to "daddy", and the US will probably start a trade war with the EU.
> Or better yet, we fork Android and have a non-Google EU-only appstore similar to Huawei's Andorid fork OS and appstore but with EU's privacy rules.
No one would use it and no developers would publish to them. All brands have their own appstore already, but no one uses them so they also all ship with the Google app store.
> Of course, then Google will go bitch about it to "daddy", and the US will probably start a trade war with the EU.
If Google can do this, certainly Apple can do it too. Biden doesn’t strike me as having much appetite for a trade war with the EU (he famously has a lot of soft diplomacy skills instead), but if Trump were reelected? Maybe that’s something Apple’s holding out for, who knows. Wild speculation on my part.
I think the main danger would be a (new?) competitor trying to become Apple, to fill the niche of premium devices, simple lineup, i.e. whatever image apple currently has. And they could do so in europe in all peace and once they are ready expand to other markets and compete with Apple. To me that seems like one of the biggest dangers of withdrawing from the EU.
My guesses: A big party at Google, a wave of so-so smartphones from companies that will try their luck in the high-end smartphones segment, a grey market of iPhones imported from other countries at high prices without warranty.
The idea of leaving Europe is nonsense. Apple is a publicly owned corporation, and Tim Cook would be immediately dismissed for such financial recklessness.
How much of that revenue is threatened by DMA? If they stand to lose most of their revenue or profits by complying with the laws, why bother?
It seems crazy that Apple is going to die on this hill, but I’m really curious what the accountants are sending the execs. I could see them willing to gamble a chunk of revenue to prevent every other market from trying to write similar laws, especially if they’re losing that revenue regardless.
I think their point of view would be that they’re selling a global product and the value of serving a market needs to exceed the cost of the peculiarities of serving it.
Maybe there’s a complex solution here, but the naive one of global compliance to local demands needs an evaluation of cost vs reward. There’s also the somewhat possible concern that the EU might actually just be hostile to Apple and cutting losses now against possible future losses makes sense. (Again, remember we’re presuming order of magnitude increases in fines).
There's an extremely simple solution here. Just comply with the EU regulation in good faith. Sure, you lose some revenue that you'd otherwise get, but only for extremely popular games/apps like Fortnite etc, but your overall margins remain very thick. The vast majority of users would keep using only the App Store and vast majority of developers would publish there, so what's the big deal?
Instead it seems that what Apple is afraid of, is that this would lead to a chink in their armor, _eventually_ leading to their no-compromise attitude being re-evaluated in other markets as well, both by users (just a couple of TikToks from high-profile influencers would be enough to bring this issue into a more public light) and regulation bodies.
Hahaha, have you seen the firing frenzy the US execs were expected to execute for a SLIGHT DIP in revenue and a few % in cost of a loan? :D
And you expect those same share holders to just support leaving of a massive market? Cook would be taken through NYSE by his nether regions by just thinking that. This whole idea is nonsense.
And even if, by any bizarre chance (it's 2020s after all) it happens, we'll suffer with... *checks list*... Samsung Galaxy Phones? Lenovo, Samsung and ASUS laptops? Sony headphones? Huh. What horrible existence. I'm sure that would be an end of the Union. Imagine using a great Samsung foldable instead of an iPhone.
The lose of revenue would not be the biggest problem, they could afford it. The problem would be the loss of applications, most EU based developers would stop supporting iOS and focus on Android. That would hurt
I so wish they would do that. Apple thinks it's more powerful than government, let's test that theory!
Most people would understand that these huge, aggressive corporates must be brought to heel. The sooner the EU establishes credibility in this respect, the sooner we all win.
> More likely, Apple needs to withdraw entirely from the EU and see what happens.
This uniquely American type of arrogance where TikTok/Huawei is guilty even if it complies will the laws, and American companies are innocent even if they break all our laws.
There are, I am afraid, only two ways to respond - aggressively or subserviently. As US economy loses its position as the centre of the universe, the second option becomes less appealing.
That’s not how cooperation treaties and jurisdictions work. They will totally pay that 2B and also pay for the privilege of running after them and the interest rate too.
It’s not a five year old who can do something mean and then just quickly run home.
Investors will be very angry and the entire C-suites will be at risk of losing their jobs. They're doing this only because it will maximize their revenue/profit through market control.
It’s a FAFO suggestion, nothing more, but I have not seen anyone consider (or care?) whether Apple’s EU customers support the various decisions, which is the point that interests me.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 446 ms ] thread> “Epic’s egregious breach of its contractual obligations to Apple led courts to determine that Apple has the right to terminate ‘any or all of Epic Games’ wholly owned subsidiaries, affiliates, and/or other entities under Epic Games’ control at any time and at Apple’s sole discretion.’ In light of Epic’s past and ongoing behavior, Apple chose to exercise that right.”
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/06/apple-terminates-epic-game...
That's statement is wrong given the quote you posted right after. They clearly state it's due to perceived breaches of contractual obligations.
FWIW, I have no horse in the race, just pointing out what I would assuming is a misapprehension in your statement.
> Schiller suggests that Epic’s “colorful criticism” combined with its past actions “strongly suggests that Epic Sweden does not intend to follow the rules.”
So, the main transgression here was "colorful criticism", that is the ongoing behavior by epic, nothing about safety or contractual breeches. If they believed Epic would break contract they would have banned them 5 years ago when that breech happened, not now, nobody can argue that a 5 year old breech of contract on another account actually warrants a random ban of this account today.
Apple has no principles or ethics or morals to which it is bound; it's governed by an optimization algorithm that pits the profit incentive against the constraints of resources, legislation, and their public image.
Apple's only as effective as the humans who execute their assigned roles within the overall algorithm, so the organization is subject to the usual human weaknesses and foibles.
Pride. Arrogance. Bullheadedness. Complacency.
If these weaknesses infect the culture, spreading across many roles, then many things can degrade and spin out of control. Apple is just as mortal and vulnerable as MySpace, Yahoo, Sears, Blockbuster, or any other big company or institution.
Without the advantages afforded by the unsavory, unethical, and unprincipled aspects of their business, Apple might not be able to maintain their walled garden effectively. Apple's particular variety of golden goose may not continue to be compatible with the markets in which it currently dominates, since much of the regulation, litigation, and legislation will focus on Apple's effects on the world.
Lots of things could happen outside their control that would kill the golden goose. Lots more things could happen if they fall prey to human failure modes.
And the phone market is saturated now. Everyone's got one. They keep getting better and people keep them longer. And Apple already has a 50% share of units sold, and a much higher proportion of total revenue. This market is tapped out. It's not going to grow.
Really the mess happening in Europe (mostly in Europe anyway) is best seen as a desperate struggle to push the growth reckoning far enough out for them to roll out a new successful product. They're rent seeking just to keep the balance sheet clean, but it won't work forever.
Really this happens to all big tech companies. Eventually the original product set starts to commoditize and there's nothing left to fill the void.
The point is that an Apple stock priced at a level commensurate with a static market would be a catastrophic loss of shareholder value.
Today, Apple trades at 6.94 Price/TTM Sales per Share. P&G trades at 4.7.
Apple's TTM Gross Margin and TTM Operating Margins are 45% and 30.7%.
P&G's are 50% and 22%.
Apple's TTM Operating Margin is 1.395x of P&G's, and their P/S is 1.476x of P&G. This is the explanatory variable for the higher P/S – higher operating efficiency. Which makes sense because their blend of revenue includes services and insurance, not just high-margin physical products.
IDK the point you're trying to make, because these companies have essentially the same multiples today. Apple's market cap is higher because their TTM revenue is $386B and P&G's is $84B. But their key ratios are not so far apart.
I wrote all this up to show you the perils of P/E comparisons... before realizing that Apple and P&G actually have essentially identical P/E valuations (~26-27). In this instance, there's not a lot of peril, because they're both in a similar phase of corporate life: operating as late-stage growth companies surfing the wave separating innovation from profit-maximization for as long as they can – where generating income is important (so net income is not hovering around zero) but not the end-all/be-all (there're still expectations of YoY revenue growth).
Besides, Apple's customer and revenue composition is also not at all static, and you'd understand this if you read their earnings reports. They are not a dam that's waiting to burst, in spite of some people willing them to be. On the contrary, they've never been stickier or more mass-market than they are today.
What boat? Not being first to market with a fancy commercial-grade model and charging $20/mo for consumer-style access (a la OpenAI)? Not having a cloud offering (MS, etc)? Not having a fancy in-your-pocket AI (like… no one? Siri is behind the times, and a better Siri would be great, but IMO the issue isn’t so much the quality of the language model but that Siri is oddly limited in what it can interact with).
I agree that Apple hasn’t been amazingly innovative in the last few years, but being off the AI hype boat seems off the mark.
Every single review I’ve seen mentions that Netflix and YouTube aren’t on Vision Pro. One of the biggest applications of VR is gaming and they’re going nuclear with Epic instead of developing a great partnership to bring high value gaming to Vision Pro. Hubris before the fall.
I remember thinking the original iPhone was hugely overpriced, too.
Huge technical leap, but to where? I don’t think Apple has figured that part out.
We’ll see what Gen 2 brings, but if they don’t have a lot more content and apps at launch it’s going to be a hard sell at any price
It's over speced with hardware as it won't be mass sold for a few more years at which point the price for the components will have naturally dropped allowing selling it for a more "reasonable" price. This is apple so it still won't be cheap.
It's made with metal to get the brand of being the "best" build, but watch them drop it on future units (while folks still keep thinking of it as best in build)
Social media eventually took over as the killer apps, but for a while it was Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja on everyone's phone.
... not to mention the countless fart sound players, virtual beer glasses and other such low-quality stuff.
I wouldn't have thought India, a country that is so price sensitive, would be a place you find so many iPhones. But Indians love what America does and follow them blindly.
The iPhone might not be the next big thing, but for most invested in the cloud and app ecosystem, the choice they have to make is whether you upgrade this year or next. It's like Visa or Mastercard. You can cry all you want about high transaction fees. America is still going to keep using it and give them money.
Investors are loving this trend. Starbucks, Visa, Mastercard, Nike, American Express, Bank of America, Coca Cola and what not. Investors love companies that become part of the culture and despite their horrifying practices, people seem to still go back to them.
This is extremely wrong.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/india suggests Android has 95%+ market share in India (and largely unchanged for years).
https://www.statista.com/chart/22702/andoid-ios-market-share... lists India as one of the least iPhone-using countries in the world.
iPhone's are more than 3x more popular across Africa, South America and the rest of Asia than they are in India (https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/africa, https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/south-amer..., https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/asia).
On the other hand, Indian government loves doing what EU does. After USB-C and moving towards AI Safety laws, we expect a DMA-like law soon.
They can also add any number of other policies which you probably run afoul of several times a day. Then terminate you for that. You can still develop your app store, you just can't break all the rules to develop your app store.
If they create a bunch of new rules and only punish those who are developing their own app stores they haven't given themselves a magic get out of jail free card, it'll be very obvious to everyone what is going on.
And then the EU takes them to court and fines them billions of dollars.
The rest of the world doesn't have to stand still. They can just confiscate Apple's money using threat of government force.
But surely the US would not just stand still either while the rest of the world plunders one of its most successful megacorps/source of American influence.
The US government is literally right now trying to sue Apple for similar anti trust crimes.
If anything, what would happen is that the USA would finish its lawsuit and force Apple to end its illegal and anti completive behavior worldwide, instead of just in the EU.
Really? I would 100% expect most any large company selling anything into the computing or computing-adjacent space to have an Apple dev account and a Play Store account.
My supermarket chain has an Apple dev account. Target has an Apple dev account. (Both presumably have Play Store accounts as well.) If those brick-and-mortar companies can manage to reach their customers that way, it was more surprising to me that Epic didn't have one previously than the converse.
> We welcome all developers to the Developer Program so long as they follow the rules. Those rules, including the DPLA and the App Store Review Guidelines, are intended to protect the integrity of the ecosystem, developers large and small, and - most importantly-users. Accordingly, developers who are unable or unwilling to keep their promises can't continue to participate in the Developer Program.
> In the past, Epic has entered into agreements with Apple and then broken them. For example, you testified that Epic Games, Inc. entered into the Developer Program with full understanding of its terms, and then chose to intentionally breach the agreement with Apple. You also testified that Epic deliberately violated Apple's rules, to make a point and for financial gain. More recently, you have described our DMA compliance plan as "hot garbage," a "horror show," and a "devious new instance of Malicious Compliance." And you have complained about what you called "Junk Fees" and "Apple taxes."
> Your colorful criticism of our DMA compliance plan, coupled with Epic's past practice of intentionally violating contractual provisions with which it disagrees, strongly suggest that Epic Sweden does not intend to follow the rules. Another intentional breach could threaten the integrity of the iOS platform, as well as the security and privacy of users.
> You have stated that allowing enrollment of Epic Games Sweden in the Developer Program is "a good faith move by Apple." We invite you to provide us with written assurance that you are also acting in good faith, and that Epic Games Sweden will, despite your public actions and rhetoric, honor all of its commitments. In plain, unqualified terms, please tell us why we should trust Epic this time.
The sooner not needing Apple dev tools or an Apple developer account to make software for an Apple device, the better.
The sooner I can use my Apple Watch with an Android phone, the better.
The sooner Apple stops (basically) requiring me to use icloud instead of literally any other better, cheaper, higher performance cloud service for my photos, videos, settings, and etc without nagging me 24/7 and trying to default to icloud storage, the better.
As a long time user and buyer of Apple products, I'd really rather they have robust security, stable APIs, good UI design standards (once again), and create/support open standards. All of this "ecosystem" "It's secure if you use it our way and only our way" and "it just works (most of the time)" BS is annoying me.
It's annoying, because over the last 20 years I've watched their products become weirder and more gimped and full of dark patterns in an attempt to force you to buy their services and/or lock you into buying nothing but Apple products.
And don't even get me started about the thriving group of Apple-Stans that play the "YOU DON'T LIKE IT?! THEN LEAVE! I LOVE IT! ITS PERFECT AND YOU SHOULD TOO!" game lol. TBH they're even more vicious than tesla/spacex-stans....
But buggy software filled with ads. Yes. That much I agree with!
I have an android phone (galaxy fold 4) that I've been using as a secondary for like 14 months now. When my iPhone XS finally developed a swelling battery, I decided to retire it and switch the GF4 to my primary phone. I've been bouncing between Android and iOS for many years, but this time I felt a little bit heartbroken.....
One of the reasons I like using iPhones is you can send & receive sms/imessage on a Mac. But if you use the google messages app on an android phone, you can use a webapp on any computer (any OS) that IMHO works better (kind of). For one, it works on anything!
For another: MS Windows' link-to-phone thing is pretty sweet.
For another: I like the android/samsung oneUI way of handling phone calls. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it's way less obnoxious. Especially because the speakerphone button ACTUALLY JUST WORKS! At some point iOS decided to make that button pop up a menu. Caller ID also works... and the scam phonecall blacklist thing works WAAAAY better on Android.
I still don't like any other OS as much as I like MacOS, but I miss the days of 10.4/10.5/10.6... it feels like the OS has gotten heavily enshittified since then. Honestly it feels more like Windows XP lol. I blame it all on Notification Center. Notification Center is a badly programmed turd. It steals focus, the hotkeys don't work right and aren't obvious, the notifications are like constant nags and you generally have to opt out of them instead of opting into them.... I just fucking hate it.
Finding this issue so cankerous to post your reply means you should find another port to anchor your ship
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/06/apple-a...
https://mashable.com/article/apple-mac-app-store-scam-forces...
https://tech.hindustantimes.com/tech/news/84-dangerous-scam-...
Guess they will need to fight in the EU to see if they can claw back.
Because in the US/Asia, Epic has no DMA protections.
USAs free speech laws mostly just bans governments from retaliating, but a more encompassing law would also ban corporations from doing so as well, there is no reason you should fear speaking up just because the corporation might retaliate and ruin your life. USA already has such anti retaliation laws for companies in some cases so there is nothing unreasonable about it.
It offers no protection in a case like this between two non-government entities.
In Europe the government does that though, so "even in the US" is a nonsense argument here, the US is horrible at protecting individuals rights against oppressive companies.
I am not certain about such laws that could apply to this case, but there are already plenty of laws around what you are allowed to retaliate for etc. Just like USA makes it illegal to fire based on race or to fire union organizers, it is the same principle.
Then the "freedom of speech" argument is even more irrelevant, in my mind.
So just because US freedom of speech is limited to government doesn't mean that applies everywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_Fundamental_Rights_...
Where do you get this? No third-party developer is under such legal obligation.
I know this is the internet, and no one actually reads the linked articles, but I really wish people would do so before weighing in. You did not need to make up a non-disparagement clause.
the past few years made me really fucking hate that word.
Yeah good luck with that in an EU court.
> Apple said one of the reasons they terminated our developer account only a few weeks after approving it was because we publicly criticized their proposed DMA compliance plan. Apple cited this X post from this thread written by Tim Sweeney. Apple is retaliating against Epic for speaking out against Apple’s unfair and illegal practices, just as they’ve done to other developers time and time again.
It does present an interesting question on whether a Company can be forced to have a bad actor as a Customer, I guess this will be decided in the lawsuits to come.
With Apple though, the bring it on themselves by having a monopolistic marketplace. Since they are the sole gatekeeper to getting apps on the iDevices, there is no alternative like there is in the MS ecosystem. Apple could end all scrutiny tomorrow if they allowed a way to install apps on iDevices that bypassed the app store and Epic would have no case.
8. The gatekeeper shall not require business users or end users to subscribe to, or register with, any further core platform services, as a condition for being able to use, access, sign up for or registering with any of that gatekeeper’s core platform services listed pursuant to that Article.
I have not read the DMA but in the gatekeeper section of the official website the Core platform services listed are AppStore, iOS and Safari. Let's suppose that you single out iOs, why should I sign up something about AppStore to develop apps?
And they have a right to prevent apps that harm the integrity of the overall platform which is what notarisation is designed to prevent.
Also companies have always charged a fee for using their SDKs. Even today Epic does this i.e. 12%.
It's not Apple's devices, though.
(If they were pre-evaluating plans, the optimal play for the gatekeepers would be to propose something totally unreasonable, and then negotiate it to something that's mostly unreasonable but just barely acceptable to the EC. That would be a bad outcome for the EC. So from a game theory perspective, they're better of making the companies guess at what will be acceptable rather than negotiating, since the companies will want to be conservative.)
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/
https://proton.me/blog/apple-dma-compliance-plan-trap
> Introducing the Core Technology Fee (CTF), a junk fee that serves no purpose other than trapping popular apps in Apple’s current shakedown scheme. By charging a €.50 fee for each install after the first 1 million, Apple effectively uses a popular app’s scale against it to prevent it from using an alternative payment system or app store.
> If you decide to use anything other than Apple’s in-app purchase system, you’re forced to display a “scare screen” designed by Apple, which you cannot modify.
> Once you choose which policy you want to implement — the current App Store policy or Apple’s proposed new policy — your decision is permanent. So if you decide to take the risk of trying out alternative payments and it ends up working worse for your business, Apple doesn’t allow you to go back and instead traps you permanently.
Epic opened a developer account under their european subsidiary company, which applied for this, and Apple just banned that account, so Epic can't create a store. Perhaps if someone else (Google, Microsoft, Meta) made a store, Epic might be able to upload apps to that store, but because in the Apple world everything traces back to the developer accounts, I'm pretty sure that would be blocked by Apple as well.
As much as it might seem like Tim Sweeney was exaggerating about Apple's DMA "compliance" changes being hot garbage, a horror show, and malicious compliance -- he really wasn't. Apple are in full on villain mode here.
The part that doesn't make sense, is why Apple are choosing to be such dicks about everything, when the EU is already breathing down their necks. They're inviting more and harsher regulation upon themselves and making the rest of the world hate them in the process.
Most companies won't deal with actors who continually do this.
Whip up a small windows binary and send it to your mom. See if she can run it without any help from you. MS is doing the same thing from a different angle.
Can you do the same on iOS?
I'm not comparing Microsoft to Apple, I'm judging both of them against my intentions. Both companies throw up barriers to interfacing with their systems.
* Unsigned .exe gets a security prompt to Run/Don't Run for the first time.
* MSI has an installation wizard.
* MSIX has a simple Install prompt like PWAs.
Can someone explain it you happen to know?
In the EU/under the DMA, Apple now very likely has a duty to transact even with app developers saying mean things about them. That's certainly a very new situation for Apple, but not an unprecedented one.
I'm not sure if throwing more hissy fits and breaking more of their playmates' toys is a good idea now that adults are in the room.
Whereas one can often experience waiting for a Lyft/Uber where drivers repeatedly decline service after initially accepting.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_medallion
The fact that it happens says nothing about whether it's right or not. In my opinion it's wrong and immoral that taxis can't refuse to service you. But taxis are very regulated in many places. In fact, for example, Uber is illegal in Colombia. And still, despite their legal status, Uber is not only very used in Colombia, but it's also safer than getting a normal taxi.
Depending on your race/ethnicity/disability/socioeconomic status, taxi drivers might refuse service even though it is against the law. It is easier to win against a taxi driver if they're obligated to explain why they didn't help someone in a wheelchair.
Now, I would agree with you if we were talking about individuals. In that case, yeah, I think you should be able to refuse service for any reason or no reason at all to whoever you want. But if you go and get a corporate charter from the government that, for legal and fiscal purposes, creates an entity that is distinct from you-the-actual-person, then I don't see any problem with the same government telling that distinct entity what it can and cannot do. That entity has no natural rights.
Instead, bug reports go into a black hole because Apple doesn't care, and they especially don't care about game developers, unless those game developers are running casino games or gacha games that bring in a billion dollars a year. Then Apple cares a lot - about 30%.
If a billion-dollar company is so thin-skinned that they can't handle having their policies criticized they're run by children.
Epic has historically brought in a lot of money for Apple, both directly - via titles like Infinity Blade and Fortnite - and indirectly - by enabling the developer ecosystem so more people can release titles on Apple platforms. In the past Epic helped promote new Apple product launches. Calling them a bad actor is ridiculous.
Doing so publicly certainly does. I would terminate business with a client if they started airing out their issues about me on Twitter.
That said, I’m not Apple. At a certain size, you lose the right to reject bad actors.
Sweeney and Schiller were emailing. Apple will read a letter you send addressed to their legal team.
This is an absurd take. They very deliberately and publicly breached their agreement with apple, sued them when they got kicked out for it, and lost.
If that isn’t a textbook description of a bad actor then what the hell _would_ count for you?
Isn't the app review system combined with iOS's robust security infrastructure supposed to prevent such an outcome? If a company as big and legally accountable as Epic, with a long track record, is so dangerous - by that standard lots of other developer accounts should be closed down too, just to be safe.
It's perfectly reasonable to go "I don't want to do business with Epic due to how they've treated me" but being your opponent is different from being a bad actor. Using language like this pointlessly inflates the magnitude of what Epic actually did and misrepresents the nature of their conflict with Apple.
Apple forces everyone who wants access to 50% of the mobile computing market into a customer-oriented relationship, and then complains when not everyone Thinks The Same as they do. Its disgusting behavior.
Imagine if everyone wanting to publish a web app would have to be a customer of the respective browser vendors.
Everyone complains about Google and Mozilla and Safari and Edge. Luckily, that doesn’t prevent us from having our web apps running on those browsers.
Emphasis on more-or-less, though. You can use Chrome developer mode (which is NOT a paid option and doesn't require an account) to import extensions from files. You can't do that in iOS. That's Epic's point.
another classic example of android users who don't understand the things they're talking about. go on, tell me more about how "you can't copy and paste between applications in ios" or "there's not even a file browser" please.
(now, still not being able to figure out a calculator app on ipad? that's a fair one lol)
> AltStore then signs the application with your Apple ID so the app can run. You'll need to trust the developer certificate in your device settings, but when you do, any apps that you install through AltStore will work... for seven days. Apple has put several restrictions in place to make the process as difficult as possible, but the developer managed to work around those restrictions. As the clock nears closer to the end of the seven-day period, AltStore will refresh the signing key on the app so that you can get an extra seven days of usage. This can also run in the background.
> AltStore makes use of a feature Apple introduced that lets you install *up to three apps* for free using your Apple ID.
> However, AltStore relies on a computer on the same network running AltServer, so you'll need both iTunes and iCloud installed on that device. [...]
Is this seriously what you're talking about? Because after reading that I still don't believe you can install apps on iOS without Apples splash of iHoly Water TM.
[0] https://www.xda-developers.com/how-to-sideload-apps-iphone-a...
Also: since I don't have a Windows or Mac machine, I literally can't install an app.
All the more reason to legislatively nuke it all as fast and as forcefully as possible before it entrenches.
Don’t like it? Don’t publish to it.
As a consumer I want and like the tight restrictions apple puts on the App Store.
It’s not like users can’t purchase stuff without paying the 30% premium added by developers to offset the apple tax. Just go to the website and buy there. And save the 30%.
My parents who are older use iPhone. They don’t have to wade through trash like android play store. Most apps are good in the iOS store.
If epic wants kids to buy more stuff have their parents pay the 30% premium. If your kid is glued to the phone I’m sure you enabled that and can continue enabling it. Sorry not sorry.
>Don’t like it? Don’t publish to it.
Yeah, why protest at all? Just leave the country. Why fight corruption? Just go somewhere else where there is less of it. Really, why complain at all?
> Don’t like it? Don’t publish to it.
That's not how laws work, Epic have a perfectly valid complaint against Apple because Apple isn't complying with EU law. As far as valid outcomes go, Apple can either comply, face fines, or leave the EU market.
> As a consumer I want and like the tight restrictions apple puts on the App Store.
That's great, but it causes demonstrable harm to the proper functioning of our supposed "free market", so we've outlawed them.
> It’s not like users can’t purchase stuff without paying the 30% premium added by developers to offset the apple tax. Just go to the website and buy there. And save the 30%.
Except they ban you from even mentioning that this alternative exist. More harm to the free market.
> My parents who are older use iPhone. They don’t have to wade through trash like android play store. Most apps are good in the iOS store.
Nobody is forcing them to wade through alternative app stores. If most good apps are indeed on iOS, and Apple's fees are indeed reasonable, then those apps will stay in the iOS App Store. Nothing to worry about!
> If epic wants kids to buy more stuff have their parents pay the 30% premium. If your kid is glued to the phone I’m sure you enabled that and can continue enabling it. Sorry not sorry.
This legislation benefits everyone, not just Epic.
people always obsess over the hardware in these arguments when the value is in the software. You probably can eventually run windows on a PS5, but that's not what people buy a PS5 for. They don't advertise it as being able to install whatever OS you want (they made that mistake on PS3, took it back, and then got fined for taking it back), and the value for most customers is playing PS5 games. The onyl non-gaming thing you can do these days on a PS5 is watch streaming services. So at best it's a media center
Just because you can install doom on a pregnancy test doesn't mean a pregnancy test is a general purpose computer.
A case of this is the Nintendo Switch, which does not even have a Web Browser (possibly due to Nintendo being scared to death of JIT exploits breaking their walled garden). Want to look up a game guide from the Internet, on a device perfectly able of doing so ? Fat chance, need another device for that!
You mentioned consoles supporting some streaming services - why should the manufacturer of the hardware be in business of deciding what streaming services you can use ?
Nothing is stopping you from gutting a switch and putting steam deck components in it to run Windows. You can do all that without bypassing Nintendo OS encryption.
>Want to look up a game guide from the Internet, on a device perfectly able of doing so ? Fat chance, need another device for that!
But that's a software problem, not a hardware one. If you want a browser on the Nintendo OS you either need some exploit on how it renders web pages (legal) or a way to install an app that goes around the Nintendo store (dubious, depending on how you approach it).
>why should the manufacturer of the hardware be in business of deciding what streaming services you can use ?
To be fair, Nintendo does allow streaming services. If your favorite one isn't on Switch, it's a business issue, not a store regulation issue. No different from a game you want not having a switch port.
Netflix wants market capture so it's everywhere. Hulu, not so much. Disney probably would have gotten on it if it didn't launch a few years after the Switch.
They can choose at any point to harm your business e.g. Apple restricting first party cookies.
If an OS vendor would target a specific software that way, however, that also would likely have legal consequences.
Theres plenty of uproar and lawsuits around that one too.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/hp-sued-again-for-bl...
Just because they have general computing hardware doesn't mean they are general purpose computers.
What if they market it one way this month and a different way next month?
I wonder, would a Chromebook be considered a general purpose computer for the purposes of this argument? Should the rules change for the Xbox if Microsoft ever mentions that the Xbox is a great platform for browsing the web on a TV? You can plug a keyboard and mouse into it and Google Docs (among others) works perfectly.
Apple has been heading in this direction with iOS, iPadOs and lately with MacOs too. I think their main reason though is to be able to force users to upgrade/trash otherwise perfectly fine devices using software. Computers are fast enough for most users already but then there is no reason to upgrade.
Definitely not. Hence why I said:
> In reality they're all equally bad.
People who own a computer should have full control over their devices, full stop. I don't care if it's Apple, Google, Nintendo, whomever. They shouldn't have any say in what a computer can and can't do after they sold it.
If you want to make an argument for requiring Apple (et al) to provide straightforward mechanisms for rejecting the supplied software and installing alternative operating systems (e.g. Asahi Linux) then I'll support it to the ends of the earth. I'd be your most vocal supporter. I'd be delighted if this was a legal requirement of all computer hardware, from mainframes to microwaves.
If you want to make an argument for software developers (operating system or otherwise) to be legally required to make their software do anything their customers demands it do (or what another billion dollar corporation like Epic Games demands) then I think that's utterly mad. What would be the self-limiting principle other than to only apply it to exceptionally successful products, with the threshold of success defined by lobbyists of competitors/opponents?
You can't swap the batteries between two iPhones that you purchased directly from Apple. It's probably true of other components too, but I am certain about the batteries.
> If you want to make an argument for software developers (operating system or otherwise) to be legally required to make their software do anything their customers demands it do (or what another billion dollar corporation like Epic Games demands) then I think that's utterly mad.
I think they should be legally required to not impose restrictions on what the user does with the software that is on the hardware that is sold to them. That means: Free Software all the way down. Obviously Apple shouldn't be legally obligated to do what people want them to do with their software. What I am saying is that it should be illegal for Apple to stop others from doing what others want with their software.
You absolutely can. Whether the software likes it is another matter. If you don't want to be under the thumb of an operating system, don't use it.
> What I am saying is that it should be illegal for Apple to stop others from doing what others want with their software.
And that's where I simply disagree. I am an immense fan of the GPL (version 2 especially) and I recognise that the GPL license requires intellectual property rights in order to work. You want copyleft worth a damn? You need copyright. And that means you get copyright. Apple has intellectual property rights over their software and that doesn't give anyone else the right to "do whatever they want" with it.
If you want to cancel all intellectual property rights with respect to software, that's an interesting argument to make. But cancelling it under a few rare circumstances when some software irritates you seems like the height of absurdity.
How do you do that without replacing the hardware?
> You want copyleft worth a damn?
I don't. I want a world without copyright, and I recognize that means taking copyleft with it.
> If you want to cancel all intellectual property rights with respect to software
My desire is more radical: I wish for a world without intellectual propery. Yes, that includes patents, trademarks, and creative copyright. Of course they all have different implications, but I really believe the world with be a better place without all of them. They each mainly serve to better their "owners" (almost exclusively not the creators) rather than better humanity.
As I said earlier—
If you want to make an argument for requiring Apple (et al) to provide straightforward mechanisms for rejecting the supplied software and installing alternative operating systems (e.g. Asahi Linux) then I'll support it to the ends of the earth. I'd be your most vocal supporter. I'd be delighted if this was a legal requirement of all computer hardware, from mainframes to microwaves.
> I wish for a world without intellectual propery.
Cool, but appreciate that this places you in an extreme minority position, and one which destroys your own argument. Without copyright, you don't get to assert any implied rights which normally come from "buying" software. Without copyright, you received nothing of value from Apple except the hardware. If Apple don't own the software that's on YOUR device, they cannot be held responsible for what it does.
They have increasingly become that, and I’m not arguing that the limitations are good, but the limitations of the app store have always been core to the marketing of these devices.
The Mac product lines are the only “general purpose” devices.
iPads are most definitely marketed as devices suitable to take the place of conventional computers.
The underlying implication being: “You don’t need a computer”, and “our ecosystem is so good that the new generation won’t even know what a computer is”.
As a tech and Linux nerd since the early 2000s, I can understand why other tech savvy people could interpret this as “this is no different than a computer”, but I don’t think this is the right framing, and I don’t think we’re the intended audience.
Their claim has always been that this ecosystem makes general purpose computers unnecessary for a wide array of use cases, because “there’s an app for that”.
From the perspective of a layperson, I think the message is: “Computers are for tech people (and/or outdated). This is for the rest of us”.
The term “general purpose” means something very different to the HN crowd than it does for the majority of Apple customers.
I want to reiterate that I’m not endorsing their position, just trying to point out that their marketing has been consistent in trying to differentiate the i*OS products. The difference between “you don’t need a computer” and “this is a general purpose computer” is subtle but important I think.
I also don’t think it’s a good direction for tech in general, even though I value some of the benefits of the locked down ecosystem. I do most of my productive work on a Linux system and think it’s critically important to continue having this option.
I’m just not trying to use an iPad for this purpose.
lmao, in what world? Apple used to bring Epic games on stage during it presentations.
The difference between a gaming console and a phone is that your phone is in your pocket and the console isn't. Both provide libraries and tools for development, both provide support, both provide distribution channel, both provide free marketing, both provide and cultivate user base.
The main difference is: console makers have publishing divisions (that btw put even worse restrictions sometimes) and as of very recently started buying every developer they can afford.
I'm not arguing about that. I'm saying that "carrying about each other" is a stretch.
That seems to be the full extent of their collaboration. No specific deals, no specific adjustments, just having them at PR events and nothing more.
The weirdest thing to me is they couldn't even come up with a deal with Microsoft and the Xbox streaming app when historically MS saved Apple's bacon at the most crucial time.
From the EU point of view it may be simply one of scale. If any of those held the amount of market power Apple does, I suspect the EU would designate them Gatekeepers and we would be off to the races.
From the games publisher point of view, the console manufacturer is actually adding significant value and taking a fair (or not so fair) margin in exchage. Apple detracts value, contributes nothing and then charges a huge margin for it. I can see why Epic views it differently.
I don't get this. What does a game console manufacturer do that Apple does not? Both provide hardware, system-level APIs, dev systems, developer support, customers. In the old days, game manufacturers didn't even provide a sales channel.
And when you say Apple provides nothing, my above list is pretty solid. In the old days, developer margins were way slimmer, with physical stores taking a 50% cut on top of the console licensing fees and physical manufacturing.
Take it to the other extreme: what does a PC manufacturer do that Apple does not? Why not let Windows close down and take 30% on any program installed on Windows? Or go along with its old plans to enforce only signed Windows Store apps to be installed on Windows 12?
It's ultimately just history and culture. We consider general purpose computing to be open and specialized computing to be closed. Apple wants to keep claiming it's just a phone when in reality it's basically a PC. They even unified their hardware so that Mac and IOS run on the same architecture; hardware and software wise there isn't much a mac can do that an iPhone can't do.
I mean, why not? They did so in the past (Windows 10 S).
I think it turned out to be a terrible business move on Microsoft's part that didn't pan out, but why would it be regulated against now?
probably because they don't want to bring up old wounds regarding antitrust. 10 S was trying to go around it by more or less making a mobile device with some desktop functionality. Worked out about as well as Windows 10 mobile.
>but why would it be regulated against now?
well, IOS is being regulated against now, so there's your reason.
So like Apple releasing the iPhone, increasing graphics performance by double-digit percentages consistently year after year?
> They participate in marketing, branding, etc. There's a genuine holistic value exchange that happens.
You would need to give me examples for non-AAA games of console makers providing exceptional value here. My understanding is that this is primarily the role of the publisher, not the console maker.
Apple does showcase _certain_ apps on stage at keynotes, during commercials, with prime placement on the App Store, promoting special events, and so on. This is the level of promotion that I'm used to with game consoles as well.
> Apple's value exchange is almost negative. They invest nothing in gaming as an industry, charge a premium for the hardware and then add burdensome restrictions on how the software is delivered.
What is Playstation's big investment into gaming as an industry, if not for the hardware and the platform creating an ecosystem for games the same way iPhone/iOS have?
Microsoft created DirectX the same way Apple created and promoted Metal. Could you elaborate on the differences?
> And then they try to take the same cut that authentic gaming ecosystem players have as their whole revenue source.
Yes, could you elaborate on what additional work console makers have done here to justify their cut that Apple hasn't?
Other than cultivating a base of iOS users spending 7x more than Android users on apps[1]. That sounds like significant value to me and not dissimilar to what the console manufacturers pitch to developers.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/06/iphone-users-spend-apps/
Those iOS users certainly aren't spending 7x more on AppleTV and iTunes albums. It's because of third-parties that Apple can convince users to spend money in the first place.
> That sounds like significant value to me and not dissimilar to what the console manufacturers pitch to developers.
If console manufacturers had the hardware margins Apple did, they wouldn't be console manufacturers anymore.
The problem is assuming that either party is the one providing all the value. Of course the app developers are providing value, but so is Apple.
> If console manufacturers had the hardware margins Apple did, they wouldn't be console manufacturers anymore.
Margins are irrelevant in this discussion.
> On another note they managed to create a luxurious market although the other platform also allows 3rd party apps.
Many proven monopolies seemingly "improve" their user experience to get users to defend it. Famously, Bell Telephones had imposed a severely-limiting monopoly on phone hardware, but made long-distance calling free as a consolation to users. Bell's new "luxurious market" didn't excuse their prior market abuses, though.
> it’s undeniable that 3rd party devs bring something on the table, but so does Apple
I'm trying to say the opposite. If Apple was providing first-class support to any of their hardware-products, then they wouldn't need to impose anticompetitive limitations on third-parties. What Apple brings to the table is deliberately gimped to manipulate software margins and reduce user choice as a consequence. Third party devs are the only ones bringing things to the table; Apple is charging them for the privilege.
Again - if you want to test this, ask around and see how many people would buy an iPhone with just first-party content. Nobody would, and the clear and eminent reason is that Apple does not provide a superior experience by removing user choice.
That point is quite moot. If there were only first party content on the phone today, there would still be a browser. Also, this content is not specific to the Apple platforms, you can access all of them from Android too, so it’s not the kind of content that would make an iPhone particularly interesting.
> Many proven monopolies seemingly "improve" their user experience to get users to defend it. Famously, Bell Telephones had imposed a severely-limiting monopoly on phone hardware, but made long-distance calling free as a consolation to users. Bell's new "luxurious market" didn't excuse their prior market abuses, though.
I don’t see how Apple is a monopoly with less than 30% of market share in the EU, so this comparison is not apt. Even the DMA talks about gatekeepers not monopolies. I’m of the opinion that kind of dynamics do not apply here - especially because you can switch platforms and go to the other side quite easily nowadays.
> I'm trying to say the opposite. If Apple was providing first-class support to any of their hardware products, then they wouldn't need to impose anticompetitive limitations on third-parties. What Apple brings to the table is deliberately gimped to manipulate software margins and reduce user choice as a consequence. Third party devs are the only ones bringing things to the table; Apple is charging them for the privilege.
It’s the hardware and the conscious decisions that were made along the way by Apple that partly played a role in creating this lucrative market and it doesn’t seem very out of place to me for a business to charge for a market that they partly enabled. I don’t see what’s wrong here. Third parties still come and try to make a buck, so it also seems to be working for them. The third party creates apps to make money, which in turn makes the platform more attractive and hence increases the amount of customers. Apple continues investing in the hardware and software stack that takes advantage of even better technologies and capabilities each year, enabling people to come up with even better apps and experiences. They also consciously make it a closed platform, the opposite of the other platform that has much more market share, to give a choice to customers who prefer this kind of product. Two sides in this relationship feed each other, one wouldn’t be better off without the other.
> Again, if you want to test this, ask around and see how many people would buy an iPhone with just first-party content. Nobody would, and the clear and eminent reason is that Apple does not provide a superior experience by removing user choice.
Again, you’re assuming things are in a vacuum. If only Apple had first party apps and all the other platforms still exist as they are today - sure, there would be much less people buying iPhones, although I believe some still would. But that’s not a fair comparison: if we assumed all other platforms also had only first party apps and nothing else, then I’m sure people would still buy iPhones in droves. But this is still not a very apt comparison, and the reason is the App Store and third party aspect is part of the product, and it has been for a long time. It’s not a separate entity, it’s a core part of the value proposition of an iPhone for the consumer. It’s akin to asking “how many people would buy a car if cars didn’t have engines” so trying to draw conclusions from assuming they didn’t exist shifts the discussion to be something else. The question is how much this relationship between Apple and third parties feed each other - and to me it doesn’t seem like only one side is doing all the work without getting something from the other side in return.
Also, let’s not forget, the sides who are fighting here are both greedy companies and they try to impro...
And nothing to browse on. Not sure anyone would want an iPhone like that.
> I don’t see how Apple is a monopoly with less than 30% of market share in the EU, so this comparison is not apt.
It's been said hundreds of times on this site, but I'll repeat it for posterity. You do not need total control over a market to be charged with monopoly abuse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabash,_St._Louis_%26_Pacific_...
> I don’t see what’s wrong here.
[...]
> They also consciously make it a closed platform
Are you starting to see what's wrong here? Apple is the regulator of their own internal market, and they haven't made their closed platform a competitive ecosystem. They are directly responsible for ensuring that third-parties are offered fair terms to compete on, and they do not: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/image/conten...
> and to me it doesn’t seem like only one side is doing all the work without getting something from the other side in return.
"All the work" in this case, meaning creating an anticompetitive platform where they gimp their competitors? Again, looping back around to Ma Bell - you cannot excuse an exploitative system with it's benefits. Apple must first remediate the issues with their internal market if they intend to keep shipping iPhones in Europe. I don't see what's wrong here.
> the sides who are fighting here are both greedy companies
Which stage of grief is bartering, again?
You don't need to desperately appeal to us by comparing Epic and Apple. We know they're both greedy opportunists, but this time Epic is right. Apple is operating on a double-standard that will tear their company apart if they fight it.
> also it’s not like Apple is obligated to do charity work for free.
Here's an incomplete list of times Apple did charity work to support the whims of another market regulator:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/1/22361762/iphone-russia-sta...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
https://support.apple.com/en-us/111754
https://www.reuters.com/world/india/indias-govt-demanded-app...
https://www.reuters.com/legal/brazil-court-fines-apple-order...
https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-pay-c144-mln-settle...
I smell crocodile tears, Tim Cook.
https://www.apple.com/apple-arcade/
> No marketing, no investment, no PR
How is Apple Arcade not at least marketing and PR for gaming?
Meanwhile, mobile OS's have been around for 15+ years and seem to be there for the long run. Playing the long game makes sense.
----
Emotionally speaking: Tim Sweeny is a game dev at heart and probably respects dedicated console gaming (despite coming to notoriety via PC gaming). They sell consoles at a loss to make gaming more accessible which is many devs' goals at the end of the day. IOS and Android are closer to a PC than a dedicated console, so closing down those environments make no sense. Android inherently isn't closed but Google was strong arming 3rd parties behind the scnes (which Epic won in court over). Apple... well, many people reading this probably know that history.
SOME consoles are sold at close to margins or even a loss at launch, making up for it later.
Other companies like Nintendo have gone many generations selling at a profit at launch.
So should Nintendo not be allowed to make the same revenue cut that other console makers get?
The longest lasting console would in fact be the switch with 8 years behind it. And given how Sony is already making plans for the PS6, I don't think that will change soon. the epic/apple lawsuits took over 4 years, so any resolution would come mid-way into the lifetime of a console. Is 4 years of burning a bridge worth potentially 4 relevant years of having an epic store on the Switch? Probably not.
Mobile app store approval is really a joke by comparison. Its easier to argue that mobile app approval's main purpose is to provide market control.
That said, its just about what is easier to argue in court and where to start. Epic would probably ask opt to put the store on consoles if they were given the chance.
If Apple had run it more like MS or Sony, the only way to get on the platform would be for developers to spend millions of dollars making their case that they deserve to be on the platform. This is obviously very limiting.
I never said how I felt about how the rules should be applied, I was just making a distinction between the two industries.
Stop em all from charging a percentage. All of em. Every industry.
Strictly my opinion, but I also believe that where Sony sends engineers to help developers that struggle (case in point, Helldivers 2 mass influx of gamers after it became a social media darling causing the servers to bog down), Apple would be more likely to use their massive data from iPhones to launch a direct competitor to any app that became a big hit rather than help them out (case in point, Spotify Vs. Apple Music and the other apps Apple tried to buy, and when denied, cloned).
And those browser vendors, like Apple, also provide developer training, developer support services, early access to upcoming product versions, opportunities to provide input into future product designs and features, etc.
In other words, this is not a problem, much less the “core problem”. This is normal industry practice. In fact, on some platforms, there are royalty fees due for the SDK runtime components that are required to run the software a third party developer provides. Just look at mainframes — you might buy XYZ Accounting system from them, and have to pay an additional annual license payment for the cobol runtime it requires.
That fact, by the way, is what the half a Euro per ‘download’ technology fee is about. Part of the DMA requires separation of the “app store fee” from the fee for using iOS services.
It’s also important to note, when people talk about the 30% app store fee as being high — the app store is essentially the same thing as a retail store. Back in the days when you bought software in a physical store, rather than downloading it, the margin at the retail level ranged between 30% and 50%. E.g., we would pay the distributor $25 and sell it for $49.99. The distributor in turn would buy the software in bulk from the manufacturer, for somewhere around $20-$22.
Software developers get a lot bigger share of what the consumer pays in the current model. Some, however, are greedier than others, and leverage governments to their advantage. Epic Games doesn’t want any competition - they want to be the sole retailer of Fortnite on all platforms so that they can raise the price to whatever they want.
I agree. Let's deal with all the other extortion schemes while we're at it and make the free market actually free.
Indeed. It all boils down to: if I buy a product from company A, then want to use that product to do business with company B, why does company A have anything to say about it? Am I not the owner of my device?
the problem with having consumers take action is that they are completely shortsighted and will take the path of least resistence - a path that the companies will have charted out to make this transition as smooth and painless _for the consumer_ as possible while retaining as much monopolistic power as possible.
There needs to be public institutions with the backing of the state to enforce property rights, including purchased devices.
No, average owner has no idea. But they will be relentlessly asking why your application is not supporting iOS
The rest of us are free to choose something else.
Let's say that given 3rd party is making a device, which can be controlled via Bluetooth from Windows, Android, MacOS and iOS. They don't make any money on any applications, but from the device.
The issue is that General Mills doesn't want to be Costco's customer in the first place. They want to sell to Costco shoppers. The fact that this requires them to be a Costco customer is the core problem.
Epic aren't a customer. They're a supplier. They provide Apple with software that Apple's customers buy.
Apple are denying their customers, iPhone users, the option to buy Epic apps through Apple's app store. You should never lose sight of who actually loses here. It's not really Apple or Epic. They're massive corporations that will continue to make billions regardless. The loser is iPhone users who want to use their devices to play a game they enjoy.
A bit of a crude comparison, but I hope it gets the point across that the behavior depends. retaliating against rules that the EU later determines to be bad rules may open a case to allow them, as long as they don't break other rules.
The way I see it Apple is lumping past behavior and current behavior of Epic together to make an exclusion decision. But there was a big change between the past and now so the market situation has changed and access to this changed market should not overly depend on information from a very different world otherwise it can be considered at best arbitrary or an attempt to exclude competitors with irrelevant facts. The latter could get expensive.
(Replace Unity with Windows, Photoshop or whatever software people constantly complain about.)
I'm actually surprised it's not SOP to stop doing business with people who sue you after the lawsuit ends. I mean you took the nuclear option.
You can't deny someone service just because they said mean thing about you.
Companies should be forced to service law abiding customers.
I'm curious why Tim Cook thinks Apple can continue to treat developers they way they do for years on end and it won't slowly but surely come to bite them hard one day.
Unreal Engine is free up to $1 million revenue and 5% after that.
How is that a "greedy troll"?
> In the non-compliance decision, the Commission may impose on a gatekeeper fines not exceeding 10 % of its total worldwide turnover in the preceding financial year where it finds that the gatekeeper, intentionally or negligently, fails to comply with [...]
Because if they don't, the network effects of an entire important continent without Apple's strong presence would be devastating long-term.
[1]:
- "Apple tells suppliers to use 'Taiwan, China' or 'Chinese Taipei' to appease Beijing" https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/05/apple_warns_suppliers...
- "The problem with canceling Jon Stewart: Apple bowed to Chinese government censorship" https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2023/10/26/jon...
- "Apple pulls Taiwanese flag emoji from iPhones in Hong Kong" https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-10-08/apple-taiw...
Lots of brands of Android phones come shipped with alternative app stores, but those places are wastelands.
The main issue is that you can't develop an iOS binary without an Apple developer account.
Instead, they want to have it both ways, "my way or the highway" when it comes to the App Store rules and monetization cut, but on the other hand minimal, extremely cynical "compliance" towards the rules EU has laid out for them.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/382175/quarterly-revenue...
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/01/apple-says-eu-represents-7...
There's plenty of money to be made in Asia/Pacific and the Americas.
Apple's walled-garden approach is innovative especially on the security and stability fronts and anyone who doesn't like that or wants alternative launchers should jailbreak their ios device or just use Android, which does fit better into EU market.
Apple has literally never cared and should never care what outside bodies (including to a large degree -- their own customers) want their products to be. It's what has made them unique in the past.
If Apple backs down on their vision then they are no longer Apple.
This how I feel completely.
I use quite few different devices & operating systems on a daily basis (MacOS, iOS, Android, Linux, Windows, FreeBSD) and they all have their place. I use a Mac for my primary workstation and an iPhone for my primary phone specifically because I want security, stability, and usability on those devices. Also, the Apple ecosystem & iCloud, are very convenient for sharing / collaborating with household family members.
Don't get me wrong - many Linux distros are very stable and secure. But the "year of the Linux Desktop" is still far out. I actually feel it's further out now than it was 5 years ago. Which is too bad, because I am an avid Linux user and have used it since Slackware 3.0 / kernel 1.2.13. Easily 50% time spent on my Mac is just using a terminal logged into Linux or BSD based servers.
If I wanted a single phone, for fun, learning, hacking, etc, it would definitely not be an iPhone. But that's not what I want / need in my phone at this point in my life.
It often seems that the people pushing so hard for Apple to change its ways are not the people that actually use Apple Products, but rather individuals projecting their own beliefs and preferences onto others.
> If Apple backs down on their vision then they are no longer Apple.
They already did it in China.
I would ban other Epic accounts if I was Apple.
If you want to talk about cowardly behavior, we should discuss Apple's anti-steering policy. At the root of this brouhaha is an indefensible double-standard that Apple cannot sustain in a fair market.
I mean, Apple is amazingly good in some areas but in some other areas their products are used only because they don't give a choice and they intent to keep it this way. They also want to control everything and provide all the services.
A bit short sighted and futile IMHO because the competition is catching up with their user experience but Apple doesn't catch up as quickly with the "smart" bits of the modern tech.
I recall a Steve Jobs speech about Apple doing a few things %20 better and other things worse and how he intents to change this by embracing the industry standards because they simply can't do everything by themselves.
I feel like Apple is doing the same mistake again where their products are becoming slightly better at few things and worse in others simply because you can't have the better stuff installed on Apple devices.
The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash.
Every iphone user was reminded daily about how kneecapped it is when they can't pull up the web site for the restaursnt to check hours or call up for a reservation. That kind of life experience was his entire focus and his showpiece product failed utterly at it.
And so he said flash is bad and html5 and pwa is the better way to do what flash does.
Since then they only say anything even slightly similar only as a defense against monopoly charges about native apps "what? you can use pwas" but only on Safari and castrated functionality.
If Steve could have sold a product that didn't even use the same tcp/ip and html as everyone else, he would have. The only time he allowed the tiniest shred of interoperability is when there is no way to sell the product without it.
He absolutely could not stand to share anything. But he could say anything necessary to attain goals.
Just as importantly, Apple and Steve learned not to rely on someone else’s technology. PowerPC and all that (when Motorola stopped keeping up with Intel and Apple suffered)
Look at things through this lens and their behavior over the past decade makes a lot of sense.
but it was replaced with.. nothing. and there is still a gap in that market for novice creators that all the webgl/html5/toolkit-of-the-week has yet to cater towards.
Jobs interest in bad-mouthing it in the early days had more to do with cutting development costs on his side, if flash and adobe is the devil there is no need to spend time and effort developing compatibility layers for it, and it's a chance to wedge the populous towards a solution he can control more closely.
'vulnerabilities' was just the talking point he used to do so.
The reason Flash (and Director before it) was so popular is that it had a very low barrier to entry for creatives.
I still miss Director because of how easy it was to quickly create cross platform apps that could do just about anything.
Flash was the great battery killer. I hated it on laptops. I'd have hated it on phones if it were available. I even hated it on desktops because it made the fans turn up. Sometimes more than a proper 3d native game that used all the hardware you could throw at it.
Of course now we have Javascript and Unity games on the native side so we just changed what screws us up.
Flash was crappy, but so what?
The fact that flash was crappy didn't matter to him. If he wasn't artificially prevented by copyright, he could have and would have just wrote his own implementation that wasn't crappy.
The only problem with flash was that Adobe did to him exactly the same thing he did to everyone else. Flash was a proprietary thing that didn't happen to work the way he'd like, and he wasn't allowed to just make his own better version, and so, "This needs to be an open standard!"
That statement doesn't mean he endorsed or preferred or recognized the value and virtue of open standards. All it means is that he was a huge hypocrite who would say anything at any time, and actually do the opposite the instant he can devise a way to.
He only ever recognized a standard when he is the beneficiary of it and there was no physically possible way to get around it, and only until he manages to devise a way to get around it.
One day he says "bicycle for the mind" and that much is absolutely true.
But the next day tries to sell a bicycle that the user can't repair or add a luggage rack, and conveniently declines to acknowledge that a large part of what makes a human with a bicycle so efficient is that the bicycle is simple and user-serviceable in the field and adaptable. The human is more efficient and powerful because they are literally empowered.
The advantage of the wheels turn completely the other way into the disadvantage of a piece of broken machine you have to carry, after you also paid money to aquire it in the first place, when you can't fix it's bent wheel, or add a headlight or a luggage bag or a lower set of gears or fatter tires etc etc to adapt it to your individual slightly different needs.
He said "bicycle for the mind", but never sold a bicycle for the mind once.
> The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash.
NeXTSTEP, the Steve Jobs thing that got renamed as Mac OS X when Apple bought it, was based on BSD Unix. In the early 2000s, Apple produced and used a lot of open standards. "Darwin" was open source. Bonjour is mDNS. Apple developed CUPS and open sourced it.
Then they got big and greedy and stopped.
Apple hired the maintainer of CUPS and provided the resources necessary to make it good enough for the publishing market, while continuing to publish the source code. They had enough involvement in RFCs 5227, 5387, 6761, 6762 and 6886, among others, for their company name to be listed in the RFC.
It was often used in the early days of OS X before it had native applications because the X11 version was often better than using Classic, especially after the Intel transition basically killed Classic but not X11.
Doing the opposite is generally short-sighted. In the short term you lock customers in and make more money, but then you get everyone else in the industry lined up trying to find a way to cut you out, and eventually one of them succeeds.
They now run linux only because they simply have to. And so they do, in the least compatible way possible.
Almost everyone tries to do this as much as possible, not just Apple.
Initially everyone could make their own stuff 100% unique, hardware and software. Like the early HP machines, a total universe of their own. It's only over time that customers gradually insist on a few standards here and there after they get burned bad enough, and so some things get standard, but even then only incompletely and begrudgingly and always trying to find some way claw back or obsolete get around some other way.
What do you mean? You can install arbitrary third party Linux distributions like Ubuntu on IBM POWER hardware and they work fine.
Meanwhile they've been conceding most of the server market to Intel and AMD for a long time, because the OS is a commodity and then what matters is who makes the best processors, which isn't IBM.
> It's only over time that customers gradually insist on a few standards here and there after they get burned bad enough, and so some things get standard, but even then only incompletely and begrudgingly and always trying to find some way claw back or obsolete get around some other way.
That's what the walking dead platforms try to do when they're set on continuing to die. Milk every last dime out of the companies foolish enough to buy something that wasn't standardized to begin with.
Then their customers flee to open systems as soon as they can get out from under the lock-in and the legacy vendors, having ruined their own reputations, can't replace the customers they're losing and slowly bleed to death until they go bankrupt or get bought out.
Any flexibility left in the final product is not because of Steve, it's in spite of Steve.
It starts with there is already something good and useful and unencumbered that engineers built for themselves.
It's good and useful, so it's saleable, and it's unencumbered, so it's free to be simply harvested like an apple (haha).
But then he takes that starting point and foundation, and tries to do the saleable part as much as possible and the useful part as little as possible.
He does invest a lot of further work, but most of that work other than the ux is not in service to the user.
Adobe claimed that if Apple had let them, they could have gotten Flash running on the first iPhone that had 128Kb of RAM and a 400Mhz processor. Safari could barely run on the phone. If you scrolled fast, you would get a checkerbox while waiting for the page to render.
When Adobe did finally bring Flash to mobile in 2010-2011 on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM and it still ran badly. An iPhone with similar specs didn’t come out until 2011.
The iMac came with only USB in 1997 before most PCs fully adopted it. The original iPod played MP3s and later AAC files and even later standard H.264 and MPegs files.
The original iPhone only supported HTML5.
As did every other phone and tablet ecosystem, even the ones that tried to add flash. Turns out it was bloated, slow, insecure and battery hungry - all the reasons he stated!
A rational position is different from a rationalization, even though they both involve making a rational statement along the way.
> The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash.
This is wildly inaccurate. Flash was never anywhere near that popular and it wasn’t an industry standard. The industry standards were HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and sites that used those were way more common than sites that ran on Flash. We’re not talking a lot more common, we’re talking at least 30–40x as common. Flash-only sites were an annoying but small minority.
The iPhone was the first phone with excellent support for the HTML/CSS/JavaScript industry standards. It literally changed the web development industry it was that good. In 2007, mobile sites tended to sit on m.example.com separate from the main site, and use WAP/WML. The “really good” ones had a severely cut back plain HTML version. None used Flash, that wasn’t even a factor on mobile at all.
Then along comes the iPhone with Mobile Safari. Practically overnight, people were asking for “iPhone-compatible” websites to be built, which were really just normal websites with CSS media queries to offer a mobile-friendly layout. That’s what Steve Jobs was talking about when he was describing a “desktop-class web browser” in his keynote speech.
And because WebKit was open-source, all the other smartphones started using it and got the same capabilities. In the space of a year or two, the mobile web transformed from something virtually nobody wanted to something useful and fun – all using industry standard HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
Ignoring the fact that Flash was terrible quality, which other people have responded to, that whole era of the iPhone is practically defined by Steve Jobs betting hard on industry standards instead of Flash and other proprietary stuff.
Culture is hard. This is why you see corporations and businesses fail constantly despite "obvious" choices being ahead of them.
Apple's goal is to build the best possible vending machine and put it in all our pockets.
Who does Epic exist for?
This "they exist for the shareholders" is an argument that cancels itself out, as it's true of all firms.
So you have to look at who's next on the list. Is the company for people looking to place ads? Is the company for publishers of games? Who is it for?
#2 is senior management and senior employees (so minor shareholders and OG value creators)
#3 is probably a tossup between regular employees and customers, e.g. doing the bare minimum not to alienate either one.
I have a very deep resentment for the App Store, because that was a turning point towards controlling the platform, and start of a feudal relationship with developers.
They’ve went from (half-assed) open source efforts to outright banning GPL completely. They’ve went from trying to use open protocols to putting DRM throughout entire stack on everything they could.
Apple has been high margin company with expensive products, but arguably worth the cost if you appreciated their style and attention to detail. But the OS and services side has shifted to just extracting as much money as they can, because they can. Their 27% cut on purchases made outside of iOS is just pure greed and spite.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32170848
More locked down and more core functionality being put into proprietary apps in the play store in the name of timely updates, they could have achived the same effect with open source apps in the play store but chose not to.
Yes they are now quickly pivoting to allow side-loading to be simplified but if the EU wasn't cracking down on such things I imaging they would have eventually removed side loading in it's entirety.
*Speaking very generally of course, and only from anecdotal experience which is a very small slice of the market that my kids know
Older people tend to care much less about what phone they have, and care much less about upgrading.
They absolutely are, you have just become part of the culture they’re countering. Of course there’s conformity within a group or it wouldn’t really exist, but the main reason young people are so turned off by Android phones is that they are mainly associated with older family members who wanted to save a few bucks and substantially compromised on utility in the process. I’m in my 20s and I know this from experience, my mom gets substantially more utility out of her iPhone than my dad who’s an order of magnitude more technologically literate gets out of his Android phone. It doesn’t matter to teenagers that an Android phone could be as good as their iPhone when the optics are so bad. It doesn’t help that, for them, there isn’t a meaningful difference between the platforms beyond price and maybe piracy either. The actual movement among youth against iPhones is against phones in general, it’s a trend to use “dumbphones” because many feel smartphones are taking too much space in their lives.
The iPhone has legendary levels of crapitude.
Consider every app you use on the iPhone that is authored by Apple. Would you or its stakeholders still use it if you weren't forced to?
Mail? Calendar? Safari? Photos? Music? Fucking Messages? No, no, no, no, no, no.
Don't misunderstand me. I am talking about access to the exact same first party APIs and integrations Apple's software has, and giving it to third party developers. The functionality is so painfully basic, but nonetheless gated, of course a third party would be able to author something better. Like you think Spotify wouldn't give you Siri compatibility? It's just not allowed to.
The App Store is just the crappiest of them all. I don't think people realize how fees and its absolutely horrible discovery is responsible for the shitty state of apps today. I have been in this business a long time, and have met a lot of people, and it is absolutely, 100% Apple's fault that App Store games suck, and Steam's don't. The device is as powerful as a Nintendo Switch nowadays!
I'm generally happy iPhone user. From Apple's offerings, the one I don't like is iCloud because lacks any granularity whatsoever. I want my photos synced but I don't want to waste my space and bandwidth with the videos.
I also would like to have full API access to everything so I can experiment with stuff. Also I want to be able to re-purpose my old iPhone but its too much locked down for the things I would like to do.
However, I'm generally very pleased. I can't stand the Android experience, honestly.
The average Android phone is like $180. You can't stand cheap phones, which is legit, but that's what "Android" is.
I don't know if this is in the zeitgeist yet. People spend more on a pair of airpods as people spend on a whole Android phone. That works because 10% of a $1,400 phone is $140. It doesn't work when 10% of $180 is $18.
Where is there space for a third party ecosystem if there's only $18 on the table? Android users used to be 2.5x less valuable than iOS, and maybe it's closer to 5x-10x now.
This is essentially Apple's value proposition to developers: "We have the rich users." And it's true, that's valuable. But do they deserve 30% of every transaction, to the most disfavorable agents in every software category? The way Apple and Steam conduct themselves is apples to oranges.
> Safari, Photos and Music
The Photos app is profoundly shitty. Lightroom Classic is like 13 years old now. How long did we have to wait for Lightroom Classic's 2009 featureset? The sharing features are abysmal. Why not open the API to the same shared photos backend Photos uses? Apple doesn't charge for access to the API, it charges users for storage - what difference does it make to them? It only matters because they are smart people, they know their software sucks, and if they allowed that level of compatibility, people would immediately abandon Photos, and yes, there would be a cross compatible Photos-like experience with Android and desktops, it would be superior, and it would harm Apple's primary idea of forcing people to use their trash.
> I don't think people realize how fees and its absolutely horrible discovery is responsible for the shitty state of apps today. […] it is absolutely, 100% Apple's fault that App Store games suck, and Steam's don't.
AFAIK Steam fees are 30% as well at least for the average developer + 100$ for publishing a game. So I don’t think the fees are responsible for the shitty state of apps. I think it’s more about customers not wanting to pay for mobile apps in general. Looking at a few successful indie games, they tend to be free (and ad or iAP supported) on the App Store but are sold directly on steam. For example vampire survivors is free (+ Ads) on iOS but costs 5€ on steam. Other games release full price on IOS but the UI is so bad that it’s barely playable.
And the revenue makes the most sense on ios for a large share of developers.
95%+ of developers don't care if Apple doesn't allow Epic on their store. That's just reality.
If my boss tells me "we're launching an ios app" I'm not going to tell him about how I disagree with Apples principles and refuse to build it.
I wish it did but it really doesn't. You can see countless "I lost my google account for a random reason" and yet everyone I know has a google account and probably uses gmail.
Trust me, Apple pissing off developers is absolutely going to have serious implications for them.
I have no effin need for a second store, or a third or a fifth.
What was stopping companies from doing PWAs before? Were they not annoyed at 30% cut? Was the cost of maintaining a separate app for a single platform too small to care about?
Apple was and is stopping companies from doing PWAs.
Smaller devs and midrange gaming companies tremendously helped launch the iPhone, but there's clearly just an afterthought in current Apple's mind.
There's probably risks on both sides here, too: Playing hardball with EU regulators and courts could cost them a lot of money.
If your vision for your company only extends to the next quarterly earnings report, sure, it's "rational."
If you consider the fact that every other participant in the market dislikes this practice, that this dislike has finally risen to the level of government involvement, and that laws are about to be written taking it away from you, then clutching it to your chest is best understood as an emotional position.
It's rooted in a desire to not lose the past while attempting to deny that any other future could possibly exist. It's classic denial, on a trillion dollar corporate level.
Still, about 10% of the pushback they’ve been showing so far would have probably been plenty.
> 6. The gatekeeper shall not directly or indirectly prevent or restrict business users or end users from raising any issue of non-compliance with the relevant Union or national law by the gatekeeper with any relevant public authority, including national courts, related to any practice of the gatekeeper. This is without prejudice to the right of business users and gatekeepers to lay down in their agreements the terms of use of lawful complaints-handling mechanisms.
I am not 100% certain that would apply here, but if the DMA doesn't protect against these things then I am pretty sure that EU will plug that hole to ensure gatekeepers can't retaliate unfairly.
They've been throwing tantrums against every company they deal with. They want to charge fees on their store and platforms. They want their IAP. But they act offended when any other company wants to charge them to be on their stores.
This is because Epic did things like pushing a hidden IAP system inside Fortnite to evade review and then at a later point switching it on. This sort of thing has been forbidden since the early days of the App Store. It is a fundamental part of the Apple-Developer contract that you allow reviewers access to all functionality.
[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/21...
I can understand that Apple wants to safeguard their platform by requiring notarization, etc. But they are playing with fire here. One outcome of misbehaving could be that the EC will require full sideloading (Android-style), so that Apple cannot sabotage third party stores anymore, like they are doing now.
Apple don't get to deny access to their main competitor in this space just as a show of force. That is not fair, reasonable or non-discriminatory.
Also since the DMA bans arrangement that Epic breached before, there is no reason to suspect that the EU account will breach anything new now, I really doubt EU will let this slide.
Epic has been criticising Apple almost every single day.
No idea where this will actually go with the EU regulator, but US courts said it was okay for Apple to keep Epic's developer account suspended based on this.
>Epic’s egregious breach of its contractual obligations to Apple led courts to determine that Apple has the right to terminate ‘any or all of Epic Games’ wholly owned subsidiaries, affiliates, and/or other entities under Epic Games’ control at any time and at Apple’s sole discretion.’ In light of Epic’s past and ongoing behavior, Apple chose to exercise that right.
emphasis mine.
to wit: you are still banned from reddit or paypal or any other online service, even if you create a new account. if they can link it they'll ban that one too.
and this is a new account that epic games tried to register recently. so it got banned too. Not that complex/hard a concept really, unless you're trying not to understand it.
again, do you think you have a right to create a second reddit account after your first one got banned from the service? how about a bank account, do you get a do-over if you do some fraud and get your first account banned?
They didn't ban every epic account back then, just the violating account. I am pretty sure most of epic games accounts are still there, just the fortnite account got banned.
Remember that the whole goal of the DMA is that actors like Apple and Google can't decide to block competiton on a whim, the exact thing they are doing right now.
The EU is a sovereign entity, enforcing its own laws in its own territory. A US court ruling can't compel the EU to allow Apple to violate EU laws when operating in the EU. How would that even work?
In a word: treaties. Usual disclaimer that I'm not a lawyer yada yada, but treaties are generally why one country's laws or legal proceedings might affect another country in some way. Think stuff like US copyright law being applied to Europe [1]. I don't actually know how or if anything would even apply in this specific scenario (not a lawyer and I think it's pretty unlikely that the US court ruling would affect the EU DMA here), but treaties are what you'd look at to find out.
[1] Technically those countries passed their own versions of the US law, but it's all hammered out in the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty.
In the case here, Epic doing a behavior to go around a store policy that EU specifically is considering bad may mean they cast aside the US rulings.
From there a lot of things can happen to negotiate a resolution, such as negotiating penalties for not following said contract.
I don't think Epic will be able to convince a court that there is no resolution when Apple has already said before and now what they would require for Epic to resume their business relationship with Apple.
b) Epic is not their main competitor in anything.
It is pretty hilarious how people think some US court judgement would have any relevance on EU anti-trust regulation.
Apple doesn't need a court judgement to terminate a contract. They can just do it if they believe terms have been broken. Epic sued them in the US to reverse this decision and the courts found in favour of Apple. The process in the EU starts the same way.
And this is a basic contractual dispute seperate from the DMA which is why the many other parties have not also had their contracts terminated.
Also running an App Store is hard. It's going to take more than a few days to see competitors.
The entity that Epic will be complaining to about this will not be a US court. It will be the EC. The EC will look at the text and the intent of the DMA: to permit competing app stores. They'll also note that Apple has (arbitarily and without any technical justification) made a developer account a requirement for launching a competing app store. And finally, they'll note that Apple is terminating the developer accounts of the company most vocal about intending to launch a competing app store.
It doesn't matter what text Apple has in their contract about how they're permitted to close developer accounts for any reason they want to. It doesn't matter that they have a courting ruling from some other country. Apple chose to gatekeep app store competition on membership in the developer program. To prevent this from being used as an end-run on the DMA, the EC just an't allow Apple to terminate the licenses on a flimsy pretext. And "Tim Sweeney tweeted mean things about us" is not going to work.
b) Epic's actions e.g. pushing hidden IAP features were a fundamental breach of the contract in all countries where it was signed including EU. It was never about Epic criticising Apple.
c) Apple takes the first move in terminating the contract. Then Epic sues. And then the EU legal system will settle the matter. That is the process.
a -> that is the clear implication of one of the above comments, ie. if it was a legsl use of the contract in the US that somehow will shield them from dma violation, but dma supersedes contracts
It sounds like you lost the thread, not GP
It’s kind of silly to think that other companies that actually compete with Epic would choose to publish via the Epic store, since they’d just be giving money to their competitor. Either they’ll build their own stores or they’ll continue business as usual, using the device manufacturer’s stores.
To your other point, while a US court judgement is unlikely to have direct relevance to EU regulation, it does help establish a pattern of behavior on Epic’s part.
It’s also important to note that the provisions for establishing an alternative app store are designed to protect the consumer. Repeated violations of contractual agreements is clear evidence of a company’s untrustworthiness, and it would be irresponsible for Apple to do anything other than exercise the termination clause as a result..
On iOS apple has decreed that they deserve 30% of that action. And is now banning the developer of one of the most popular games (on any platform).
And Apple is basically a trillion dollar company. Tens of millions in lost revenue from Epic isn’t going to cause them to lose any sleep at night.
In a sense, yes. The term "sherlocked (by Apple)" exists because Apple routinely releases its own version of various apps
One reason we know this is that Epic Games Store on PC isn't Epic-only.
Another reason we know it is that Apple has (arbitrarily) forbidden app stores that aren't open to third parties. Even if Epic wanted to make it a first-party only store (why?), they couldn't.
You claim that Apple isn't a gaming company. It's true that Apple doesn't really develop or publish games. But the App Store is the world's largest games store, larger than e.g. any of the console games stores or Steam. Every estimate I can find is that significantly more than half the App Store revenue is from games.
Finally, you suggest that nobody would publish games on Epic's store. That might be true on iOS just due to the unreasonable terms Apple set for that (in particular the core platform fee), but it certainly won't be true due to competitors not wanting to give 12% to Epic rather than 30% to Apple. This fear hasn't stopped companies from publishing their games on the PC EGS.
Apple claim that all their requirements are there just to protect the consumers. They might be telling the truth, they might be lying and actually just want to make life as hard as possible for the competing app stores. It's hard for anyone on the outside to be sure which. But terminating the developer account of the most credible competitor on the day DMA enforcement starts is a pretty bad look, and makes it quite hard to believe Apple's story on why the requirements exist.
That's a circular argument. Apple is arguing (maybe wrongly) that Epic won't follow the rules. You can't refute that argument by saying "but the rules say they have to follow the rules".
They were making an argument about why Epic wasn't a competitor to Apple. That argument was based on the mistaken belief that Epic was looking to launch a store only for their only games.
In that context it's not a circular argument to point out that a first-party only store cannot be launched on iOS, so obviously that's not what Epic is intending to do.
It sucks because I was hoping this fight was basically in the rear-view mirror now, but it’s hard to argue Apple has no grounds for calling Epic untrustworthy and not even maintaining an arms-length business relationship in one jurisdiction with them. Who’s to say Epic wouldn’t try something similar again? Apple can still set terms under the DMA, and Tim has been publicly campaigning that these terms violate the DMA which isn’t actually his call to make.
Also one other point:
> Apple don't get to deny access to their main competitor in this space
As of today, and yesterday, and going back to the dawn of the iPhone: Epic isn’t anything in “this space” let alone Apple’s main competitor. They have stated that they intend to compete, and want to compete with Apple in this space, but Epic’s iPhone app marketplace is vaporware. It hasn’t shipped, it doesn’t look like they’re going to be able to ship now, and in its entire history of being discussed, has earned Epic €0.00 to date.
This is funny to point out since they did it specifically to sue over it (you pretty much can't other wise).
So Apple has their draconian 30% cut or there's literally no other way to have an application run on iOS policy, you can't challenge it without breaking it so you can sue, and because you broke it to sue you are now permanently barred from every making another iOS app.
Yea that seems fine, no monopolistic behavior here, it's only 49% of the phone market so it's fine.
The goal wasn’t just to sue Apple, it was to shank Apple with one hand while filing suit with another and they had multiple opportunities to get their account unsuspended at the beginning of the lawsuit even while the case proceeded, before it was eventually terminated.
These are devices so essential to modern functioning that the regulators need to come and tell both Apple and Google that unlimited web installs are user rights.
Epic is right. Apple and Google are monopolies over an entire class of computing, and it's a 100% artificial racket.
This might be what you want but without new legislation, because the DMA ain’t saying what you want, regulators are not within their rights to impose this requirement.
Just because you can ask your users to build a nuclear fission reactor, doesn't mean that they can or will.
F-droid gets ~3M MAU, with a 70% bounce rate. It's pitiful.
This is a pathetic case for mobile rights and freedom. Practically nobody knows how to make use of this model.
Installing software should be first class, not buried in the settings. It shouldn't have scare walls, either.
Google knows exactly what they're doing with the "freedom" they're letting end users have. 0.1% of users even know about or can leverage it.
The truth is the vast majority of users do not care about sideloading apks. Apple knows this. Google knows this.
However, it is important that it is allowed without any major hurdle (a warning dialog that you need to click OK on is not a major hurdle for me once you consider that many malicious actors will use this sideloading for nefarious purposes).
Google allows it and you are free to use it without major hurdles. Yes, most users don't care to, and that's fine.
You can't really say that since it isn't a common deployment strategy. If web installs of APKs were normal and had no road blocks, then the practice would be commonplace.
The users care about software. There is only one blessed path to get it.
I think that gave them much stronger standing and claimed damages.
It's a weaker argument if they voluntarily removed themselves from the AppStore.
Apple could have trotted out some 'We typically work well with developers in Epic's situation, but they never approached us so there was nothing we could do' excuse.
By forcing Apple to take an action, it concretely showed that Apple does in fact remove access if companies tried to forward users to alternate payment methods.
This idea that Epic had to breach to sue is part of a well crafted PR campaign by Epic.
People who did fight for civil rights were also punished with the force of law for their civil disobedience. The laws were unjust, but they still had consequences for those who lived under them, otherwise they wouldn’t have had to fight. Epic is also facing the consequences of their actions, but it’s only really important to them that they win. Everybody else invested in this fight (within the EU) will probably be able to get anything they want but Fortnite from some other app marketplace.
Epic wants better terms for everyone, not just their app.
They lost, but good news for all the not-Epics out there because there's other companies who stand to benefit from the recent Court and Commission-induced changes Apple made to their policies. It just won't be Epic specifically.
Here's the thing when you have a highly asymmetric power relationship, whether it be with a government or a business or any other large organization. You can point out how bad their policies are, and never break a rule, and people will just sort of sadly nod their head in agreement and go back to doing what they do. Or, you can force them to show just how ugly their rules/laws are on in real life -- not just theoretically. The latter actually gets things done, which is why I made the relation between the two things.
Or put more simply: show, don't tell.
Apple's App Store policies are, in my opinion as both an iPhone user and a developer, bad for everyone but Apple. So no, it's not important just for Epic that they win, it's important for the broader community of developers and users. Apple clearly is punishing Epic for fighting them and securing some victories, and personally I don't think we should tolerate that sort of behavior from Apple.
This is simply wrong.
Many have sued Apple over the legalities of the development agreement over the decades. They just always lose.
And Epic could've chosen to follow Spotify and lobby behind the scenes but instead chose the PR move.
iPhone marketshare in the EU is about 22%.
Are you a lawyer? You sound awfully assertive in making this claim, especially with the slight contempt/patronizing tone.
This notion that 30% is 'draconian' is curious since Steam -- on supposedly open PC -- costs devs more, and even 30% is wrong since it's not 30% below a certain revenue level or in the second year onwards, again in line or less than stores on other platforms.
Apple is perfectly entitled to ask for a 30% fee, as long as they allow for competition on equal footing (for clarity, this means they don't try to collect exorbitant rent from their competitors first). Let the free market sort it out.
You mean like CloudKit?
Apple SDKs exist and do things - including everything Steamworks does and quite a bit more.
If Apple decided to only allow apps distributed through them to use their SDKs or services, then would it would be fine because they'd be like Steam?
I don't recall ever playing for cloud storage on Steam, though.
Steam Cloud is truly a backup service. It's not fast even for tiny amounts of data. They'll even kick you over to an even slower lane if you store anything over 250 MB.
Meanwhile, you can do near real-time app synchronization over iCloud between devices.
But yeah, it'd be great if Apple bumped up the free tier size. That said, I've never actually had any problems storing app data on iCloud. Apple users seem to either pay for more storage or not backup to iCloud, so from a developer perspective, eh.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/icloud/cloudkit/
If you don't like Apple's cut, you couldn't (effectively still can't because of the absurd 1 000 000 installs/updates rule) go to any other storefront.
Before you bring up Xbox or Playstation: those devices are not essential computing devices. You can't function in modern society without access to both a computer and a smartphone. That puts a special burden on the companies that effectively own the software stack on those devices.
Not that I see it happen, but lets paint a PC horror scenario:
- Microsoft starts demanding to motherboard and laptop manufacturers to include their Pluton security chip
- Secure Boot can no longer be disabled
- They restructures the Windows kernel in such a way that DirectX is much faster than Vulkan
- They only allow games on the Microsoft Store access to DirectX 12.3 and 13
- Hell, _anything_ not installed from the Microsoft Store has dark-pattern warning pop-ups that make it both too confusing and too scary for the layman to install things from outside the store
- Microsoft also starts to demand a €0.50 fee from any developer that gets more than a million installs - with some updates counting towards installs. _This includes free applications_.
Do you see the problem now? Apple is essentially doing all of these things.
Dude cmon this is not how the legal system works, you can't just pretend that there's such a thing as an "essential computing device" as if iPhones are a human right or some shit
An Xbox or PS5 is not needed to live a normal life (if you ask my girlfriend it's even the opposite :)
If I want to file my taxes (in Australia), I need an authentication app that's only available on iOS or Android. I can't use an Xbox or a Playstation. That's the difference.
Before you say desktop OSs are not the same thing, it is to the government. The difference between iOS and macOS is the same as Windows XP and Windows Vista legally, Google only got dinged as a monopoly in the Epic case because of preferential treatment, not because it was "essential" or that the smartphone market is any way distinct or unique enough for that. Microsoft got dinged because it was 95% of the personal computing market in general. Apple is not even close here.
It is fine to suggest abuse and sending warnings, but if you've even remotely looked at any of the legal cases the US government brought against tech companies in the past, you'd know how much of a joke it is when people talk like this.
"Will there be a desktop version of myGovID?
No, a desktop version or browser-based version of myGovID will not be supported. To use myGovID, you will need your own compatible smart device."
https://www.abr.gov.au/media-centre/featured-news/business-s...
And given I'm overseas, I also do not have the option of using something other than an electronic device. To be honest, I don't even know if I could if I were living in Australia.
In the real world, Apple/Android devices are in a completely separate category from gaming consoles.
Try it out, for the duration of a month only use your smartphone for texting and calls and do not touch any PC. If you balk at that idea, well, there you go.
Why would I not touch a PC? You're just moving goalposts, Apple is not stopping you from buying a Chromebook. That's what anti-trust legislation is about.
No, they give them smartphones. You are so woefully ignorant.
> Why would I not touch a PC? You're just moving goalposts
I am not, you are. We were talking about how essential these devices are to daily life. My post even explicitly talks about locking down PCs.
It doesn't matter anyway, you are just looking to argue. I wish you good luck in life with that attitude.
More to the point, everything you've said is just a lie. I don't want any luck from you.
So, yes a smartphone is now an "essential computing device". This is no longer a matter of opinion. Its now a matter of fact.
I can only watch cable news on TV, am I going to call that an essential computing device too?
If that is the only way you can find out about what is happening to the government responsible for your safety and wellbeing or alerts about impending disasters... absolutely!
Phones are literally essential computing devices in modern society as it is the primary source of important information whether it be about family, government, or national emergencies for a large swath of the population.
Cool, it doesn't matter because US courts disagree with you, even if they did agree with you, there's nothing in the constitution that says the welfare of American society is in jeopardy because Apple sets rules on their own devices that you don't have to buy.
Your argument literally only makes sense if you pretend Android doesn't exist. It is not possible to exhibit monopolistic behavior if you are not a monopoly, and Apple is not a monopoly by any stretch of the definition.
* Doesn't have any rules about in game payments/utxns, if you want to use steam wallet for that they'll take 30%, if you want to process the payment yourself or direct users to a website they don't care at all
The last point is Apple's monopoly, along with no sideloading; because if I don't want to use Steam then I can use whatever else I want to.
But I agree, 30% even just on games purchases is too high, and we should reduce this profiteering across the board, Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. Good thing we can multi task, right?
EDIT: just realized I originally mixed up Origin and the Epic Games Store. My bad.
I guess we'll see in the light of the DMA. Apple didn't allow EA to compete before, but who knows now.
But this seems to be missing the point. Epic Games wants to put their store on mobile, they had android on the roadmap for years. They very much want to compete.
Second, wanting to compete and competing aren’t the same activity. They are not presently a competitor to the iPhone’s App Store. They may become a competitor in the future, pending presumably at least some discussions between Apple, the EC and Epic, and possibly a legal fight, but calling them an app marketplace competitor in the present-tense is not accurate nor justifiable.
The real and interesting question is whether they can do this before they prove Epic’s non-compliance with the new terms.
I also don’t believe Epic is doing this for anything other than Epic’s self-interest. They have no duty to other developers, and this is a potentially new line of business for them, not a liberation of iPhone app developers.
One of their main goals in bypassing IAP is to make these microtransactions non-refundable, so parents are screwed. They're the great satan.
I assume that one of the reasons Epic isn't as hated as EA is that "the TotalBiscuit audience" is too old to be in the target market for Fortnite.
From the linked article
> This judgment stated that “Apple has the contractual right to terminate its DPLA with any or all of Epic Games’ wholly owned subsidiaries, affiliates, and/or other entities under Epic Games’ control at any time and at Apple’s sole discretion.”
It should also be noted that this article specifically talks about Epic's Sweden AB account being banned. It doesn't affect the state of the US account (which may very well be banned anyway).
Other way around, "victory" implies the battle is over, Pyrrhic as a modifier implies a victory that inflicted such a devastating toll that it was tantamount to defeat.
Epic have cracked open the walled garden in one part of the world (EU).
They need to consolidate that win in the EU so it doesn't disappear, then leverage it to break open the walled garden in other places as well.
They're both just engaged in business.
I can believe that Apple is acting incredibly badly in this case without needing to fluff up Epic Games at all.
Apple and Samsung could sue each other and do business with each other because the stakes were lower and they were more codependent.
This is what's wrong with the current overly capitalist system. Companies are totally allowed to have no conscience, and externalise whatever they please to consumers and the environment. And you could even argue they are 'forced' to do so by due diligence legislation.
If we let this continue there will be no world left to fix. We have to change the game. I'm not saying we should go full communism. Capitalism isn't bad but there needs to be a balance between business and society with actual accountability (rather than the current 'green' initiatives basically just being PR without any kind of enforcement). It can't be all about money.
I think for US culture it's hard to imagine doing this but here in Europe society has always had this balance, at least in most countries. Initiatives like RoHS, GDPR, DSA/DMA are often called anticompetitive but we are actually trying to improve things for the benefit of society, not just the shareholders.
I don't think companies are going to form a conscience any time soon.
We need to deal with the fact that they're best viewed as being inherently sociopathic and regulate them effectively.
Corporations are organizational models employed by humans in pursuit of human motivations. They are not entities unto themselves. Everything is humans, all the way down.
I'd also like a pony.
Conscience is fundamentally a trait that requires some kind of physical personhood - an actual self-identity with empathy attached to it. Corporations, being pure legal fiction, have neither.
This is why it is imperative to keep them as small and toothless as we possibly can as a society, even beyond issues with monopolies.
Sociopathy is all about driving the interests of the individual. Boards not being liable for the actions of companies allows those interests to always be aligned. Taking that away would require them to think about what's good for the business but also what's good for themselves and those things won't always align for all board members the way they do now.
The problem is that the more people you have working together on something, the less you can rely on informal human interactions to keep things running, and the more written rules and rigid processes you need. Those written rules and rigid processes increasingly take out human factors (such as empathy) out of the equation, and the result is that the entity as a whole behaves in an increasingly sociopathic manner even when its goals (as set by e.g. the board) are ostensibly beneficial.
And, for the same reason, they have no capacity for autonomous thought and action. Corporations are just organizational models for coordinating human activity, but all of the agency still originates with individuals, because there's nothing else that it could originate with.
All malicious acts you are attributing to corporations actually originate from the malicious intent of individuals who are merely using the corporation as an organizational model.
> This is why it is imperative to keep them as small and toothless as we possibly can as a society, even beyond issues with monopolies.
Keeping organized forms of social coordination "small and toothless" is inherently antagonistic to the concept of society itself -- the proper solution is to constrain malicious behavior without interfering with non-malicious behavior, regardless of how that behavior is coordinated or formalized.
There's also a paradox here, in that I have not seen any mechanism proposed for combating the implicit sociopath of one kind of organization that doesn't rely on creating even greater concentrations of monopoly power in the hands of an essentially equivalent form of organization.
Corporate personhood applies primarily to private law -- contract liability, civil torts, financial obligations and the like.
If they could make just as much money (or more) without doing any of those other things, they absolutely would, and any company that wouldn't do the same would eventually be put out of business via competition, barring some kind of external intervention, say from the state.
If you want companies to grow a conscience, you're first going to have to figure out how to change their incentives, which means changing the environment in which they operate.
This, of course, doesn't work in consolidated markets, and so what is necessary is for consolidated markets to be deconsolidated.
What do you base that on? Sure corporations take on a life of their own, but there's much more to most of them than purely making profits. They're made up of humans too, and usually it's some executive making a final call. There are many corporate agendas that have little to do with profit.
The meme that corporations are purely about profit needs to die, because it encourages that exact behavior by giving free reign to morally devoid executives, IMHO. Corporations can and should also be held to account legally and ethically for being good stewards of public interests in addition to profitability. In the end they're just tools for organization, and a rather effective one, but they're still run and accountable to humans and human values.
Do corporations do other things besides make profits? Yes; I previously said as much. The point is about why they do the things they do.
> There are many corporate agendas that have little to do with profit.
Perhaps in the short term, if they can afford to economically, but isn't this kind of like the exception that proves the existence of the rule?
Is Tesla a car company that wants to make great cars and help reduce carbon emissions for the benefit of all? Maybe, but their primary goal must be profits, because they can't do any of the other stuff if they aren't profitable.
> The meme that corporations are purely about profit needs to die, because it encourages that exact behavior by giving free reign to morally devoid executives, IMHO.
I disagree that it encourages that behavior. If you want to change that behavior then an accurate understanding of the current state of affairs is a necessary prerequisite.
Like if you're going to say, "I want <insert company here> to do less of X and more of Y", then surely your first order of business must be to understand why they are doing X in the first place and not so much of Y (hint: it's usually because of profits).
In the case of corporations, because being profitable is necessarily the first priority, it follows that the most effective way to change the behavior of a corporation is pretty much anything that affects their profit, as opposed to appealing to the moral/ethical/whatever values of their leadership. If you want ethical corporate leadership, then you have to make it unprofitable to be unethical.
A false, ill-justified argument can be disassembled from multiple angles. One of the trivial counterarguments to our current wrong state of affairs is that the above mentioned profits are not actually real profits. It's actually people stealing from others. So many people engage in the same behavior that they can't call out the serious offenders without giving up their own mask.
Humanity en masse actually does not deserve better. That's why we're in this situation. If we did give up our lies, we would demand others do too, as we demand a good world.
I think I understand that you mean to say "Corporations", whose governing body is made up of board members and executives. In that sense, there certainly seems to be a strong correlation.
In my case, however, I started a game company this year, and my goals are not profit driven. I haven't sat down to write things out but I probably should. Loosely, my company's two main goals:
- To make fun/mindblowing/entertaining pieces of Art. This is done by working on the gaming dreams that myself and my employees have.
- To give my employees a future where they care about the company as much as I do, feel financially well compensated and satisfied in their career, and have support for their aspirations and ideas.
That's economics 101, stop idealizing business entities.
It's perfectly fine if making a lot of money is not the most important thing to you personally. However, your company will obviously have to at least be at least breaking even in order to continue to exist so that it/you can do the things that you do care about.
From that viewpoint, profitability (defined as 'at least breaking even', as opposed to 'maximizing $$') is still the most important thing because the very existence of the company depends on it.
It starts to change when a company is becoming too big. The original founder(s) usually leave or they themselves become infected by the money. In any case, everything becomes more nasty: people are being treated more like numbers, clients too, less personal contact, more lawsuits, etc.
I think the solution is very simple: just make a size limit to how big companies are allowed to grow. They'll have to split up and compete with each other. Way more healthy economy.
There is a revolving door between government and corporate leadership.
There is no functional difference between corporate America and public service at this point in time.
One does not rule the other: they are one and the same.
Social media companies have entire teams run by Federal law enforcement.
Federal leadership draws its senior staff from companies like Google.
It is impossible to conduct business without thoroughly invasive involvement of multiple layers of government telling you what you can do, how you must do it, tracking your actions to ensure you comply, and levying obscene punishments if you don't.
For this "service" you are charged a level of tax that would make the Pharaohs green with envy.
I honestly can't think of a single example of a monopoly, cartel, or industry leading company which has ever crumbled due to everyone collectively deciding not to do business with them. (without some sort of government regulation or technological advancement facilitating the change)
Companies aren't minds of their own directing their own actions. Tim cook or some other high level executive is deciding these actions. Stop abrogating the direction of the literal directors
Banning third-party payments was one thing, but then Apple banned publishers from TELLING people about the ability to pay through a Web site.
That is not just unnecessary from a business standpoint (since the vast majority of people opt for the most convenient thing); but it's so offensive that it invites crackdowns, implemented by ignorant politicians and legislative bodies... hurting Apple's bottom line.
Apple is tarnishing its image and earning it a place among the true offenders of "big tech," a place it mostly doesn't belong because it's not a gatekeeper to huge swaths of the Internet and commerce the way Google, Amazon, and Meta are.
Apple is a billion (nay trillion) dollar company with the best lawyers and accountants in the world. They clearly believe that the added uncertainty and negative perception that could be attached to their brand by allowing systems that can increase fraud and malfeasance is more harmful to their bottom line than maintaining their walled garden with all the accompanying "crackdowns".
I, for one, agree with them. I would much rather keep the existing system for both myself and my extended family members and people who rely on me as their tech person than allow these third-party vultures to further complicate and enshittify the system. In the current case, if my parents bought something on their phone, I know exactly where to go to see the purchase and can easily help them refund it or, if it's a subscription, cancel it. Corporations misleading people into using external payment systems and channels in order to make a quicker buck (and keep more of that buck) is easily a worse experience for everyone involved except the vultures.
Now you can continue to use Apple's payment system all you like, but if Apple continues to charge 30% when e.g. Stripe charges ~3%, you're going to pay the difference for the privilege.
And with any luck that would encourage Apple to match Stripe's fees, but either way, now the choice is yours instead of the extra fees being hidden and mandatory.
You're being disingenuous to suggest that the only benefit Apple provides is a payment system.
Apple can charge for whatever they want, but they can't put up a troll bridge between other businesses and their customers. Then you can choose whether to use their service or not. If they want to charge for payment processing, you can use Stripe or Paypal. If they want to charge for XCode, you can use VSCode or emacs. If they want to charge for app distribution, you can use the Epic Games Store -- or Google Play -- or host it yourself on AWS or your own servers. Whatever they want to charge for, they have to open up to competition.
If their services are good and well-priced then people will choose them even when they have an alternative. If they're not, they won't.
I am absolutely sure Apple would love to cut Samsung off at the knees, but not if they do it to themselves at the same time. Samsung poses a much greater threat to Apple than all the third party app stores that could be dreamed up.
It’s a really interesting mutually assured destruction situation.
Epic and Apple, on the other hand, can both be fine without each other, so I wouldn’t expect them to work through the animosity
It's hard to read it as anything but emotional. It's pure display of power, Apple is willing to hurt iOS users to make a point to other developers.
I'd be a little emotional too.
Very different. Steve was taking Samsung to court partly ( or largely ) taking Android with it. But Tim wasn't a supporter of that, or at least behind the scene he was dealing with Samsung ( or Samsung Display, Samsung Foundry and Samsung Memory divisions directly ). So yes it was all it's just business in large because Tim was there to smooth things out. Or partly because Tim knew they cant do it without Samsung. Zero Chance at the time and they wasn't a trillion dollar company then.
I dont see any similarities here with Apple and Epic.
you've been reading way too much semiaccurate lol
https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/10/13/apple-vs-nvidia-w...
like, we have the benefit of a decade of retrospect and watched nvidia do exactly the thing that apple refuses to let their partners ever do (namely: wear the pants in the relationship), and you're still taking charlie's takes at face value. Do you really think it's the bumps and not Apple taking action to protect themselves and their future products against the threat of competitive lock-in posed by NVIDIA and CUDA?
it is just amazing that people continue to take the guy seriously. How is that "NVIDIA is 4+ years behind AMD in the mid-term, and GV100 and GP100 are bumpgate 2.0" working out for you? Was ~2015-2020 a good period for Radeon Group?
https://www.semiaccurate.com/2013/05/20/nvidias-volta-gpu-ra...
https://www.semiaccurate.com/2015/05/19/amd-finally-talks-hb...
https://www.semiaccurate.com/2016/05/03/thing-go-bumpgate-in...
https://www.semiaccurate.com/2016/06/08/nvidia-p100-gpu-upda...
https://www.semiaccurate.com/2016/08/01/nvidia-finally-shows...
https://www.semiaccurate.com/2014/09/15/amds-mantle-api-goin...
it's amazing that people will sniff out a MLID quote from a thousand paces and yet still uncritically babble Charlie's nonsense like it's the word of god. Dude is a stopped clock who occasionally happens to be correct in his NVIDIA/Intel hatewagon, and that's given him enough reputability that he's apparently beyond reproach with a significant portion of the Gaming Public (tm) who are just looking for reasons to be upset about NVIDIA/Intel.
The folks who were using this term are being successfully primaried.
I'm sure upon first hearing this news Epic's management collectively lay down and curled up into the fetal position, awestruck and weeping in surprise at the sheer, unprecedented nature of this blow.
From an observation standpoint seeing how Microsoft behaved in the 90's and onward, they (Apple) are behaving very similarly - almost exactly with what MS did for Windows back then. I have a growing distaste for Apple corporate/mgmt each day even though I am surrounded by their devices.
And had a device end connector that didn’t change every other model. Some phones used standard connectors for that but plenty didn’t, and manufacturers would sometimes change the connector without rhyme or reason.
They were quite happy knowing once you bought Apple, you kept Apple or you lost all your accessories.
They're still playing the same game now. My Airpods work grate on iPhone, but they only connect to some non-apple devices over bluetooth (not PS5), and when they do connect, if the mic is on the audio is awful.
They will get away with this, we let them. They have no incentive to be better.
Sweeney allegedly tweeted that he would breach his contract with Apple. Apple reached out and asked if he was being hysterical for public display. He didn’t clarify. At that point, Epic credibly threatened breach of contract.
This is a commercial dispute between multi-billion dollar companies, both of whom charge outrageous platform fees, both of whom seem to enjoy being dramatic, and both of whom are being maximally aggressive. It’s fair to remain emotionally uninvolved.
A threat of a breach of contract is not a breach of contract, which will be a sticking point if the EU gets involved again.
I don’t know EU law. But anticipatory breach is enough to trigger damages under American law, and “is an excuse for non-performance by the non-breaching party” [1].
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/anticipatory_breach
There are laws other than the DMA?
(Anticipatory breach is incorporated into EU law through the UN CISG [1].)
[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/16247_2020_13
Schiller emailed Sweeney asking for assurances and Sweeney responded with:
> Epic and its subsidiaries are acting in good faith and will comply with all terms of current and future agreements with Apple, and we'll be glad to provide Apple with any specific further assurances on the topic that you'd like.
Without reply, Apple summarily terminated their developer account a week later. It seems obvious, in retrospect, that Schiller's email's goal was to establish a fig leaf of Apple having reached out before doing this.
It is indeed true that Sweeney has tweeted many criticisms of Apple's DMA plans but there haven't been any threatening noncompliance.
Do we have neutral sources for these claims and emails?
Apple said Sweeney threatened to breach contract and didn’t repudiate in private. Epic claims it didn’t threaten and did repudiate. We’re in a he said she said absent independent sourcing.
The source for the tweets (from your original comment: "Sweeney allegedly tweeted that he would breach his contract with Apple") are Sweeney's Twitter feed which you can read as well as I did. Did you find any threatening non-compliance?
Even with screenshots, and assuming no false claims (which IIRC are entirely legal so long as you don't swear under oath), there's plenty of ways to mislead by omission while saying only true things.
Let’s not forget that Epic has previously breached contract with Apple in the past. That’s why Fortnite isn’t in the store today.
Surely this must be the true source of Apples suspicion?
Epic’s fee is global. Once you sign with them, you pay that on every install. There is also the 5% royalty, which brings the actual fee to 17% since we’re comparing non-small developer figures.
[1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1765431238985187525
That increases consumer choice and weakens the market power of both.
Many of them will tank their company and their client if they get their ego bruised and feel publicly humiliated. Those are hyper competitive people which see live as zero sum game and are trained in life to never, ever, lose a challenge or competition for domination. ESPECIALLY in public.
The myth of a rational businessman is just that - a myth.
Being publicly regulated is exactly that scenario for Apple. There's execs in that very company that are frothing at their mouth in irrational anger ready to throw their weight around and WIN. Stomp on the opponent. SPLAT the unimportant fly that DARED challenge them.
(I'm exaggerating... but not by much. This seems more of an emotional than thoughtful response Apple is doing here.)
You want to send an executive to jail for cancelling a contract?
I’d be curious for a jurisdiction to try this. In my opinion, I wouldn’t want to do business in a place where commercial disputes can be twisted by a political insider into jail time.
Why does the concept of personal responsibility for decisions insult you so deeply?
If you believe figurative and actual violence are identical, this analogy makes sense.
This is a bogus modernist interpretation that dilutes the meaning of violence. Fortunately, it’s being rejected after having a moment that peaked during lockdown.
How should this be treated? Fining the company for someone’s actions that caused deaths doesn’t seem enough.
Again, why does personal responsibility for harm to others bother you?
Personal responsibility is irrelevant. You’re constructing a lower threshold for criminality. I know the first thing I’d be trying to figure out is how to put my competitors in jail.
Let’s take Epic v Apple. Epic went to court. It lost. This entire saga has cost Epic’s shareholders billions. Should Sweeney go to jail? Would the world be better if an Apple-friendly prosecutor could take up that challenge?
If we have a cultural failing in America, it’s having a reflexive urge to turn outrage into jail time.
Provide an incentive for companies to regulate each other! Let rational self-interest clean up the market while the state steps back and looks on!
Do you think there is a reason every modern democracy resists privatising criminal prosecution? (They had it in Rome. We probably need a history of law section in the basic high-school curriculum.)
We already have private enforcement of many rules. Environmental ones, for example. We’re specifically discussing criminality, putting people in jail.
I agree with this, and it could be constructed out of shareholder rights. Perhaps it could only be applied past a certain threshold of compensation, say, 100x the median wage. ($4.6mm [1].)
I’d argue the threshold should be final, unappealable regulatory penalty or criminal conviction of the corporation.
[1] https://usafacts.org/data/topics/economy/jobs-and-income/job...
Sort of good and sort of bad - some percentage of the time this would lead to zero money changing hands as the executive is bankrupt or has no assets.
And that's rather the point. Apple earns a lot of money in the EU and much of that seems to be through abusing their position.
So yes, if you're the executive who signs off on something that is so clearly anticompetative, you should own the penalty. Ignorance of the law is not a defense.
That, or leave.
It changes the risk appetite, sure, but that’s the point.
Anything you do —atomically legal or not— becomes illegal if it smothers the chance of competition by using you market dominance.
The thing I'm arguing here is that the person taking those decisions faces consequences.
No - you seem to be assuming such a law would only be invoked in cases where the company legitimately did something wrong. But that's not what's at stake here. We're talking about what happens when someone with political clout and a vendetta is able to use that law to wrongfully get a a CEO tossed in prison. Because sometimes laws get twisted for personal gain, and you're raising the stakes pretty high.
I wouldn't want to do business under those conditions, not because I might violate the law, but because it could be used wrongfully against me.
Yes, and we do. That’s well below the threshold of commercial disputes.
It’s much better for a shareholder too, as I for example don’t want to pay with my money for ceo’s ego trips.
I fail to see the difference?
My response to that is: we should change the laws.
Nobody ever asks this question thinking about multi-generation family businesses where the executive is the head of household and if everything works out, the business will be passed down to their progeny.
Of course, it also begs the question why do we accept this?
[0] https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3253705/c...
I think you'd rather prefer Sunday gala of past where convict would be covered with oil soaked rags and then set on fire. So while that person ran crying, howling it provided tons of entertainment to hardworking folks gathered there. And in that process of course justice prevailed.
This is what one call win-win proposition.
> Many of them will tank their company and their client if they get their ego bruised and feel publicly humiliated. Those are hyper competitive people which see live as zero sum game and are trained in life to never, ever, lose a challenge or competition for domination. ESPECIALLY in public.
… I thought you were going to name Sweeney as the petulant man-child chafing at rules and being told "no".
"We own this platform, we make the rules, and we don't care who you are or how big you are, you mess with us we'll terminate your account and revenue stream."
C'mon EU, do something. <poking EU with a stick>
I don't see the issue with this... it's not like they're exploiting an inherited platform like Oracle with (everything), IBM with Red Hat or Broadcom with VMware.
At least Microsoft had no way of stopping you selling apps for Windows but Apple is a next level of nefarious.
Apples been doing this "next level of nefarious" since the App Store's introduction in iPhoneOS 3.0, and it's been fine up to this point, otherwise the platform (and consequentially the apps on these platform -- spotify) wouldn't have thrived the way it did.
What competition? Apple has a 87% market share amongst US teenage population[1], Epic's core gamer market. It's basically a monopoly amongst their core demographic which will grow up to be adults with jobs and paycheck and guess what they'll buy? More Apple. With <13% market share Android isn't even in the race.
[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/apple-stock-teens-iphone-e5...
Does Apple stop you from downloading Signal and communicating with your Android friends that way?
It's called "competitive advantage" in the US.
A healthy competitive environment should have 10+ options. The fact that two massive corporations have the entire space locked up is not sufficiently competitive nor healthy for consumers.
Many current Android manufacturers used to built phones running their own platforms or Windows Mobile. Symbian, Windows Mobile, PalmOS, and BlackBerry all died not because Apple or Google somehow hamstrung them but because they sucked compared to what Apple and Google were selling.
Microsoft even tried a second (well, fourth) time and failed again! All these companies failed for their own issues and not any sort of action on Apple's part.
No legislation is going to make a company fundamentally understand the smartphone market, consumer electronics, or help them understand effective operations. No law is going to help them avoid visits from the Good Idea Fairy or executive hubris to avoid stupid business decisions. You're not going to regulate your way into finding investors willing to put up the cash to make a realistic play in the current smartphone market.
Yes, through social pressure.
There where a couple of companies that circumvented their security mechanisms and went to court. Was that wrong of Nintendo?
My opinion is that, as long as people keep buying and using it, Apple can do whatever they want in their platforms.
They will change when most app devs coordinately delete their apps from the store, in a mass "strike" or when customers stop paying for their shitty phones.
(Android user here.)
Apple doesn't make shitty phones, far from it. Solid build quality, performance and stability across the board... there are very few Android devices that can compete with Apple and almost all come from Samsung.
what are you talking about? microsoft literally created and sold versions of windows that could only access apps sold through their own app store lmao
microsoft also has the exact same policies as apple does on their own "platform", try selling an xbox app without doing it through microsoft's store
they are possibly the worst example you could have given, and yet here you are doing the victory lap. cringe.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39619432
The MS case and recently lost Google case are closer to each other than anything going on with Apple.
I own my phone, I make the rules.
If Apple doesn't want Epic on the App Store, fine. But their current level of control over what people can do with the devices they purchased and own is absurd and has nothing to do with market size.
"Won't someone please think of the children?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2bOXQibamM
HN is full of temporarily embarassed walled garden magnates.
The say I don't want oligopolies or walled gardens punished because one day I could own a walled garden money making machine!
Yes I have, you don't know me. And that's not an argument. Apple's MacOS is open unlike iOS and that's not full of malware or users getting scammed daily then what makes you think they'll suddenly start getting scammed on iOS. Explain that please.
Just because you build something nice doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with it. You're still bound by the rules of the state where you operate and earn revenue.
If I build a nice house for me I still have tones of regulation how I can build it and what I can do with it, including activities inside. For example, I can't fire guns(EU) or cook meth in my house, even though it's my property and I pay taxes on it.
Tech companies for some reason think that just because they don't build with brick and mortar but with bytes instead, then somehow the local laws don't apply to them. So just because you built a nice walled garden, the state will want to make sure you don't get to screw over everyone who enters there.
The last few weeks, HN seems to be suppressing Apple headlines. They will be on the front page, but then drop off minutes later - despite being fresh, growing in votes and engagement, and being high quality articles.
Meanwhile, positive headlines about OpenAI will be up for hours…
Also, don’t blame the mod tools. This should be fixed, that’s not normal
There's no special treatment of Apple stories or any other $BigCo stories on HN; the dominant variable is simply random fluctuation. If you're seeing otherwise, it's almost certainly because random fluctuation provides a rich set of datapoints to confirm whatever perception you're inclined towards. Mostly we're all primed to notice, and weight more heavily, the things we dislike. (Endless past explanations about this here, for anyone who cares: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
For example, if you dislike $BigCo then it will seem like negative stories about $BigCo are being suppressed. Indeed there are tons of examples of such stories not staying on the frontpage—but there are also tons of examples of exactly the opposite. How one weights these is a function of one's own perception, which is governed by what one likes and dislikes. People who like $BigCo are just as convinced that HN is biased against $BigCo, and find just as many datapoints to support it, and post just as many complaints about it.
These dynamics are as old as the hills and impossible to stop. All we can do is answer specific questions when we happen to see them. I only saw this one randomly; in the future, please use the reliable mechanism (hn@ycombinator.com) to get your question answered. It's not as if any of this is secret!
I don't know where I fall on this issue personally, but siding with Apple is probably more authoritarian.
I still find it weird that people spent the last 5 years complaining about practices that started when they still were an underdog, and which were applauded at the time, and which don't even fully apply now to all developers anyway.
But you're right, they're not underdogs any more.
Apple's choice was apparently to die as a hammer-wielding hero or live long enough to become the patriarch on the telescreen.
You're acting like the EU is some poor country in the outback and not their second biggest market after the US.
Or better yet, we fork Android and have a non-Google EU-only appstore similar to Huawei's Andorid fork OS and appstore but with EU's privacy rules. If so many companies bother to make apps just for Huawei's separate appstore, then they'll definitely do that for the EU as well. Of course, then Google will go bitch about it to "daddy", and the US will probably start a trade war with the EU.
This is the origin
No one would use it and no developers would publish to them. All brands have their own appstore already, but no one uses them so they also all ship with the Google app store.
You're wrong. A lot of Apps are on Huawei's store in EU.
If Google can do this, certainly Apple can do it too. Biden doesn’t strike me as having much appetite for a trade war with the EU (he famously has a lot of soft diplomacy skills instead), but if Trump were reelected? Maybe that’s something Apple’s holding out for, who knows. Wild speculation on my part.
People will get over it switch to alternative services.
The idea of leaving Europe is nonsense. Apple is a publicly owned corporation, and Tim Cook would be immediately dismissed for such financial recklessness.
It seems crazy that Apple is going to die on this hill, but I’m really curious what the accountants are sending the execs. I could see them willing to gamble a chunk of revenue to prevent every other market from trying to write similar laws, especially if they’re losing that revenue regardless.
Maybe there’s a complex solution here, but the naive one of global compliance to local demands needs an evaluation of cost vs reward. There’s also the somewhat possible concern that the EU might actually just be hostile to Apple and cutting losses now against possible future losses makes sense. (Again, remember we’re presuming order of magnitude increases in fines).
There's an extremely simple solution here. Just comply with the EU regulation in good faith. Sure, you lose some revenue that you'd otherwise get, but only for extremely popular games/apps like Fortnite etc, but your overall margins remain very thick. The vast majority of users would keep using only the App Store and vast majority of developers would publish there, so what's the big deal?
Instead it seems that what Apple is afraid of, is that this would lead to a chink in their armor, _eventually_ leading to their no-compromise attitude being re-evaluated in other markets as well, both by users (just a couple of TikToks from high-profile influencers would be enough to bring this issue into a more public light) and regulation bodies.
And you expect those same share holders to just support leaving of a massive market? Cook would be taken through NYSE by his nether regions by just thinking that. This whole idea is nonsense.
And even if, by any bizarre chance (it's 2020s after all) it happens, we'll suffer with... *checks list*... Samsung Galaxy Phones? Lenovo, Samsung and ASUS laptops? Sony headphones? Huh. What horrible existence. I'm sure that would be an end of the Union. Imagine using a great Samsung foldable instead of an iPhone.
Most people would understand that these huge, aggressive corporates must be brought to heel. The sooner the EU establishes credibility in this respect, the sooner we all win.
This uniquely American type of arrogance where TikTok/Huawei is guilty even if it complies will the laws, and American companies are innocent even if they break all our laws.
There are, I am afraid, only two ways to respond - aggressively or subserviently. As US economy loses its position as the centre of the universe, the second option becomes less appealing.
What if Apple complied with the law.
They don't want to lose all those sales anyway.
[Added] ... And continue to support products and services already sold?
It’s not a five year old who can do something mean and then just quickly run home.