> We’re providing more flexibility for developers who distribute apps in the European Union (EU), including introducing a new way to distribute apps directly from a developer’s website.
Important limitation if you click through to the "Getting ready for Web Distribution in the EU" page:
> To be eligible for Web Distribution, you must [...] be a member of good standing in the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more, and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.
This is just more malicious compliance by Apple. Indie developers are completely locked out of web distribution, and it applies only to developers who are already paying the Apple tax.
> To be eligible for Web Distribution, you must:
> Be a member of good standing in the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more, and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.
> Developers will pay a CTF of €0.50 for each first annual install over one million in the past 12 months.
Which part? I don't think the EU can rule that Apple can't charge publishers to be on iOS. This isn't malicious compliance, sans the size requirement it's exactly what they asked for.
This keeps happening where people keep hitching "I don't want to pay Apple" to every wagon except a law that requires Apple to make access to iOS free.
"Allow other payment processors": Okay you still pay 27%
"Allow other stores": Okay you still pay a commission, a different one.
"Allow installing from websites": Okay you still pay a commission, you just have to write us a check.
56: The gatekeepers should, therefore, be required to ensure, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same operating system, hardware or software features that are available or used in the provision of its own complementary and supporting services and hardware
That's not what that means, that's saying Apple can't give themselves special private APIs to do things other apps can't or charge to access them.
Which is funny because you can drive a shipping container through the loophole which is OS components can have special privileges and the boundary between apps and OS for 1st party software is fuzzy.
That's a pretty tortured reading of the DMA. Yes, Apple has to allow more than just the App Store to install iOS applications, but nowhere does it stipulate that Apple can't collect fees from apps installed through alternative stores.
This is the tension, people really really want "ability to install apps" or "ability to install from web" to mean "install without Apple being allowed to collect fees" but that's not what the law says.
I think the original reading is pretty damn correct. It says apps should be able to access the platform "free of charge". Maybe I'm wrong but it seems to me that the reading that limits this to special API access is the tortured reading.
Besides, even Apple's reading is not what Apple is doing either. They're saying that ANY API access that is possible should be done free of charge. Ok. That INCLUDES app installation of course. It does not specify WHO doesn't get charged, which Apple then takes to mean those alternative app stores don't get charged, but the app owners do? Now THAT is tortured reading. Obviously that means NOBODY gets charged. Not the alternative app store, not the application being installed. Apple is not complying with their own reading either.
It seems to me pretty clear. Either interpretation, apps should be able to run on ios free of charge.
Y'all really need to read the whole act. The quote that stated this doesn't even come from (56).
> (56) Gatekeepers can also have a dual role as developers of operating systems and device manufacturers, including any technical functionality that such a device may have. For example, a gatekeeper that is a manufacturer of a device can restrict access to some of the functionalities in that device, such as near-field-communication technology, secure elements and processors, authentication mechanisms and the software used to operate those technologies, which can be required for the effective provision of a service provided together with, or in support of, the core platform service by the gatekeeper as well as by any potential third-party undertaking providing such service.
> (57) If dual roles are used in a manner that prevents alternative service and hardware providers from having access under equal conditions to the same operating system, hardware or software features that are available or used by the gatekeeper in the provision of its own complementary or supporting services or hardware, this could significantly undermine innovation by such alternative providers, as well as choice for end users. The gatekeepers should, therefore, be required to ensure, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same operating system, hardware or software features that are available or used in the provision of its own complementary and supporting services and hardware. Such access can equally be required by software applications related to the relevant services provided together with, or in support of, the core platform service in order to effectively develop and provide functionalities interoperable with those provided by gatekeepers. The aim of the obligations is to allow competing third parties to interconnect through interfaces or similar solutions to the respective features as effectively as the gatekeeper’s own services or hardware.
They are explicitly talking about gatekeepers that are both app maker and OS maker giving their own apps access to parts of the OS that other apps can't access. You as a 3rd party are able to deeply integrate into iOS with your own apps to the same level as 1st party apps. It does not say that anyone must be allowed to access the platform free of charge. Plus this is the preamble to the actual act, you can write whatever you want in there (and legislators frequently do to use it as a pulpit) none of this is the actual law.
I read that as: if Apple wants to allow installation of programs ("apps") on IOS, it must allow, free of charge, others to do the same. Free of charge to everyone. Free of charge to alternative app stores, free of charge to developers, free of charge to apple customers, ... free of charge to anyone. As I said, I'm no lawyer, but that is definitely a valid interpretation to me.
Using 'Tile' trackers, ios pops a messages up every so often saying 'Tile' has been accessing the Location API from IOS.
But Apple introduced a competing product, 'AirTags', and this doesn't have the same (annoying) regular popup.
Does this mean that Apple's Product will no longer be allowed to use a special Location API bypassing the security/barriers their competitors have?
I understand the need for security, but Apple has no incentive to remove friction from the process when it negatively impacts their competitors and doesn't impact them at all.
It's basically saying the same thing. One thing other apps can't do on iOS is... installing packages on the system. This is only a thing that the App Store app can do. So Apple has to open up to third party the possibility to install packages on the device, exactly how on Android any third party can install apps on the device.
By the way, this will impact Android too, since there are permissions that are limited only to Google applications such as the Google Play Services, that (interpreting this rule) now shall be opened to any apps that require them.
Ahh yes, the "all lightbulbs regardless of their manufacture are required to have at least <this> energy efficiency" style regulation where <this> is set "neutrally" at the efficiency of LED bulbs.
Read article 3 paragraphs 1 and 2 and tell me this wasn't written to target like five US tech companies in total.
I have read it. I defines how much money the company needs to be making the EU and how many users they need to have. Sure, it's targeting big companies.
The LED example you gave is actually a great one: I don't think the regulator cares if you're using LED or not. The intention is to reduce the usage of lightbulbs that aren't as energy efficient as modern technology allows them to be. If you can make a incandescent lightbulb that is as efficient, good for you. No one has targeted incandescent light.
Same here. Yes, companies this size are almost only American (and Chinese). That doesn't mean that American companies were the target.
US, with its severe underregulation of oligopolies, allows companies to grow that big. Why do you then complain that they are the ones targeted by laws in countries which are sane enough to understand the need to regulate such things?
Apple is welcome to vacate the EU if it finds it all too onerous.
Petition your representatives to designate those as gatekeepers of a core platform service. But first look up the definitions of those, and the criteria for gatekeeper designation, in the DMA.
Since when do you have to pay to use an ABI or link against system libraries? Shipping your own apps to your own customers doesn't entitle Apple to a payment.
The gatekeepers should, therefore, be required to ensure, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same operating system, hardware or software features that are available or used in the provision of its own complementary and supporting services and hardware
The DMA absolutely allows charging money for access to a regulated platform. The Core Technology Fee is the only thing Apple is charging that can even remotely seem like it may be prohibited. We'll see how that goes:
> Pricing or other general access conditions should be considered unfair if they lead to an imbalance of rights and obligations imposed on business users or confer an advantage on the gatekeeper which is disproportionate to the service provided by the gatekeeper to business users or lead to a disadvantage for business users in providing the same or similar services as the gatekeeper. The following benchmarks can serve as a yardstick to determine the
fairness of general access conditions: prices charged or conditions imposed for the same or similar services by other providers of software application stores; prices charged or conditions imposed by the provider of the software application store for different related or similar services or to different types of end users; prices charged or conditions imposed by the provider of the software application store for the same service in different geographic
regions; prices charged or conditions imposed by the provider of the software application store for the same service the gatekeeper provides to itself.
The CTF is a platform access fee, and not a fee for interoperating with system ABIs/services/APIs. That's the distinction, and why it isn't automatically illegal. It would only be illegal if it gives Apple's App Store an unfair competitive advantage.
And as you can see from the text of the DMA, in order to declare the CTF illegal, the EC has to conduct a fair, impartial, fact-based investigation that considers Apple's viewpoint. Then they produce a preliminary report which Apple is allowed to rebut. After that they can issue a final ruling, and Apple is allowed to appeal that to the court of justice. Even if the CTF is found to be illegal after all of that, Apple gets 6+ months to make changes unless the EC can prove that they were working in bad faith.
> The CTF is a platform access fee, and not a fee for interoperating with system ABIs/services/APIs.
Since Apple already charges $99/yr for a dev account, for which the Xcode price is included, and the CTF applies even when not using the App Store... what are they charging for if not API access in the form of the dev's user's devices? That's the only thing that's left
The CTF applies when not using the App Store, because the equivalent of the CTF is baked into Apple's 30%. People asked for unbundling, and this is what Apple came up with.
Those who are surprised that you have to pay for access to an ABI have obviously never had to pay for their compilers from their software vendors (the price for the HP-UX garbage compiler was eye wateringly high).
GCC works on HP-UX, so I don't know what this is trying to prove. They can charge for Xcode whatever they want, but what does that have to do with installing apps.
Exactly. Not to mention, the HP-UX business model famously flopped in the face of Linux, BSD and Free Software. It's almost the perfect example of how Open software distribution provided a better experience than the alternatives.
The CTF is it's own refutation. A competitive market should not need to kiss anyone's ring in order to function.
Back when I was working with HP-UX, GCC worked if you wanted something completely independent and didn't need to link against system libraries. For the companies I worked for when using AIX, that wasn't an option.
At least on AIX and other UNIXes, the system compiler and GCC worked together. HP-UX was a special kind of hell.
A sibling reply pointed out that developer kits and distribution deals for consoles (which are general purpose computers, regardless of how they are presented, as much as modern smartphones are) are extremely expensive (and there are no alternatives for distribution).
The point that I am making is that the idea that you can develop and distribute for free on any platform is a relatively new one.
It is not new on microcomputers, though, and those have essentially defined the expectations for consumer devices going forward. That is why it was such a big deal back when Apple first introduced the app store with all the restrictions - that was new, even compared to other mobile devices in the market (even feature phones had J2ME by then).
But regardless, it seems like a good idea in general, and proven to work, so why shouldn't we want more of it? I don't see the problem with applying the same logic to game consoles etc - that racket also needs to go down.
> Those who are surprised that you have to pay for access to an ABI have obviously never had to pay for their compilers from their software vendors (the price for the HP-UX garbage compiler was eye wateringly high).
But that doesn't seem to be the case, as Apple hasn't monetized Xcode and the iOS SDK libraries differently since the DMA came up.
Apple can charge for the SDK and all that it entails, but they can't charge for apps getting to run on users' iOS copies, as that's not something IP law contemplates.
What happens when a fully FOSS iOS dev environment comes out, like the way you can compile Windows binaries on Linux right now? What would Apple be charging for then?
The CTF offsets Apple's costs in developing and maintaining the "core technology": the OS and the frameworks that the developer uses in their application.
> The CTF is a platform access fee, and not a fee for interoperating with system ABIs/services/APIs
So the distinction is that they're charging devs to be allowed to run their app on iOS period, rather than charging for access to a particular set of APIs (which would be illegal)?
Because if so, there's a hole in that argument. Right now I can run any web app I want on my iPhone and the developer need pay no platform access fee. However, that app is blocked by Apple from accessing many native APIs, despite it running on my hardware. And to access those APIs it would need to pay Apple a fee...
So in conclusion, Apple should charge every website operator a per-user annual fee for using the Apple's platform.
Why do you say the EC is fine with it? I bet you can't produce any statement from the EC even marginally supporting it. All you know is that Apple proposed something blatantly illegal, and then backed down from that plan.
It's impossible for the EC to have given Apple any kind of guarantees about it being fine to restrict PWAs to just Safari. That's just not how the process works.
Well, is there a legal basis for Apple charging this fee? I'm licensed to use Xcode presently, which means I can legally produce iOS binaries without paying them. I'm legally allowed to distribute those binaries because I own the rights to them, the apps being original works (and not derived works).
What, specifically, is the core technology fee for other than dissuading competition? It's not for using Xcode (I already have that now), and it's not for redistributing Apple software (iOS binaries aren't that). What technology specifically? Is it a software license? Is it for a patent license? Is it payment for a service? What is it?
Have you actually read the licensing terms you agreed to for Xcode and Apple SDKs?
> Except as otherwise expressly set forth in Section 2.2.B., You may not distribute any Applications developed using the Apple SDKs (excluding the macOS SDK) absent entering into a separate written agreement with Apple.
Just the size requirement makes it useless, why would anybody bother with a web distribution if they already have 1 million (!) installs on the appstore where they already have all their customers?
The front runners for doing this would probably be Google and Meta. Large companies that publish several ad-supported apps. Side stepping the App Store would let them revert Apple’s privacy protections for tracking
However, I believe another statute of Apple’s implementation is that developers must pick. App Store or Self Distribution— an app cannot be both
Trivially easy. Create an app that generates a random number and store it in the apps local storage. Send that with any interaction to whatever service you're providing. Hiding this feat in plain sight isn't that hard.
Currently there are two things preventing a developer from doing this:
1. you're supposed to be honest and not do that.
2. you could be caught during review by a bot or a human.
But all that does is let one app track your usage in that app. To do tracking outside of that, you'd need other apps to get access to another apps' local storage. Which you need the OS to give you permission to do.
We have toggles for preventing cell data usage, they could trivially do the same for wifi usage, or accessing other app's local storage.
Sure you can create a sandbox that can cater for some app and keep it completely isolated. And yes, whereas previously any app could basically see and do anything, now there are limits at the OS level.
But an app that shows the latest cat video needs connectivity and the server serving that car video now tracks when you were watching it.
I think computing devices need to have some kind of zero trust sandbox available for installation (kinda like a VM) where any API and system calls that an app use is spoofed. iOS have done this for files and photos (recently), but some is still all or nothing, like contacts. At least camera and microphone access show an indicator when they're in use.
If you really have to pay a fee per install, ad-supported apps are probably the worst candidates to go standalone in my opinion. Those don't get much money per user.
It’s per install including updates. All apps from Meta and Google update almost weekly. That’s 100s of millions of dollars a year in CTF that they won’t have to pay if they stay in the store.
The only Google application (besides Play store and all the stuff that's more or less part of the system) I use is Google maps and it doesn't require being logged.
> I don't think the EU can rule that Apple can't charge publishers to be on iOS
Why not? Maybe they can't rule that Apple must make the App Store free for developers, but they can rule that the App Store can't be the only way to install apps.
> But that isn't the same thing as saying Apple can't take a cut from other App Stores, and surprise, they are.
Yes, it is. For Apple to be able to take a cut from other app stores, they need to have full control over said stores, so effectively it's just their App Store under a different name. Hopefully this won't fly under DMA.
> 4. The gatekeeper shall allow and technically enable the installation and effective use of third-party software applications or software application stores using, or interoperating with, its operating system and allow those software applications or software application stores to be accessed by means other than the relevant core platform services of that gatekeeper.
> 7. The gatekeeper shall allow providers of services and providers of hardware, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same hardware and software features accessed or controlled via the operating system…
Yes, people keep quoting these sections but it doesn't say what folks want it to say.
4. Gatekeeper must allow people to install applications from outside the App Store. That has no relationship at all to whether Apple is allowed to require a contractual relationship with iOS developers that stipulate payment under certain conditions -- installs, IAPs, number of developers, number of users, etc..
7. Gatekeeper can't give themselves special APIs that allow them to do things other apps can't or charge extra for those special privileged APIs. Apple can nonetheless still charge developers to access iOS. But from there Apple can't give themselves an advantage by saying that only Apple apps can access Bluetooth.
Here's something to blow your brain: perhaps the English version is incorrectly translated. With Ireland now the only Anglophone country in the EU, I would trust the French and German versions of the text to have far more clear intent.
I'm not saying they don't have force of law. I'm saying the EU did not write them as strongly as the other versions, making them harder to understand and potentially steering the law in a different direction.
I'm reading the French version, and I find it clear that Apple is not following the DMA with its fee it cannot charge itself.
It’s intentional. Replace EU with Apple and law with AppStore rules and you’ll see the parallels.
> I'm saying the EU did not write them as strongly as the other versions, making them harder to understand and potentially steering the law in a different direction.
Even if they were allowed to ask for a fee, they would not be allowed to set conditions that they can subjectively rule on. Particularly the "in good standing with Apple" is a blatant violation since it effectively lets them block anyone they want for any reason, which is in violation of the very basic "shall allow and technically enable" language of the DMA.
> I don't think the EU can rule that Apple can't charge publishers to be on iOS.
Oh I think the EU can rule whatever they want on their domestic market. Apple can try to find all the holes they want, the Commission is probably just taking notes of those holes to fix them in the DMA 1.1
I really think Apple (and Meta, fwiw) is making a huge mistake if they think they are in position to negociate anything. DMA is here to fix competition issues on the european market and if the goal isnt reached, there will be enough iterations until achievement.
It's not a fight again Apple, it's about preserving the core of what is the EU : the European Single Market. The European Single Market was created after WWII with the goal to enforce peace on the european continent. The Single Market IS the European Union. There is no way they'll let Apple get around this. The only thing Apple don't understand is that the EU is traditionally really slow to act so they had an entire decade (and more) to think that locking access to the market in the EU was fine.
> if the goal isnt reached, there will be enough iterations until achievement.
I wish I was as optimistic as you. GPDR was already supposed to be such an improvement. I have no doubt that current Apple's dance won't work. But I don't think any European company will actually benefit from DMA. (I'd say the ones who will really benefit from it are Epic Games and Google, maybe Mozilla a bit)
That being said, I'm very happy the EU implemented the DMA.
Yeah that's why I'm expecting another change. When they tried banning Epic the EU said no, and Apple was forced to move to this point. I expect/hope that the EU comes back with a further "clarification" on Apple's contention that they can gate this to 1,000,000 downloads.
It is funny to see American companies scream "that's not fair" when faced with a functional government.
This is somewhat a naive interpretation. Yes, the EU can enforce certain regulations, ban Apple, etc, but not without repercussions. We live in a global trade environment. It really comes down to whether the US administration would find the EU's actions unreasonable and whether there would be economic repercussions in turn.
A trade war is the last thing the EU wants, especially when they are completely and utterly dependent on the US for technology and protection, so it's very unlikely that the EU will get all extreme on Apple or other US tech companies.
It will push as hard it can but we will not see a protracted ban. The EU understands that it can only push so hard before it starts a trade war and harms itself out of spite.
They'll not ban anyone, the DMA allow fines up to 20% of the international revenue. I think there is enough room to enforce rules without banning anyone.
Sufficiently high fines are no different from a ban. The DMA will never actually fine at 20% because companies would be forced to leave, triggering the above scenario.
I suppose the next stage of malicious compliance will be to allow absolutely everyone to publish apps everywhere, but with some technical warning that is designed to be ignored.
They're locked down through technological measures such as sandboxing, which is designed to resist against malicious guests regardless of their origin and distribution method.
Well, not really. Usually people have all their personal data on their PC, rather than mobile phone.
Maybe this is changing for young people, but on my parents hard drive (for example) there is 30+ years of all sort of personal data, documents of every kind, emails, documents, etc. Not counting all the password and access saved in the browser itself.
If we talk about businesses, public administrations, hospitals basically everything is inside computers, including very sensitive data.
“I’ve driven many miles and never crashed. Why do I need to pay for seatbelts?”
These are population level decisions which require you to think about mainstream use. For example, you probably have been safe because you know what to look for. This is not true of the general public and there are millions of people who _thought_ they were making a safe choice and only realized later that the polite person in the call center was not actually trying to help them, etc.
> “I’ve driven many miles and never crashed. Why do I need to pay for seatbelts?”
Bad analogy. A better analogy is: I’ve driven many miles and never crashed. Why do I still need Toyota's permission to drive?
I'm absolutely in favor of "seatbelts" for computers, but that means sandboxing, not censorship or rent seeking. It also means you can remove the "seatbelt" when you need to.
I used seatbelts because every car safety measure you can think of has had someone complaining about having to pay a cost for something they’re too good a driver to need. Having apps notarized to enforce some basic legal & safety standards seems similar: it definitely costs more than zero, it definitely is a restriction on absolute freedom, but it helps prevent things which are statistically certain to keep happening otherwise.
Consider how well malware and adware has done where the authors can impersonate legitimate developers (remember when people got faux-Firefox as the first Google hit?) or can run distribution campaigns from shady web hosts for years? Notarization and domain limits mean Apple can block malware almost instantly and the developers have to burn a real company identity on each attack campaign.
That's a very weak argument in favor of apple, and I respectfully disagree. Just another variation of 'think about the children' meme without much substance, repeated in every single apple discussion ad nausea.
Look, you lock your phone as much as you like, your device, your choices (here we are already very far from apple mindset). Why the obsessive need to push this on literally everybody and not even giving the choice? Maybe you have some serious impulse control issues, but most of us don't.
It can even be part of purchase process - choose ultra secure more locked down model, or on-your-risk more free.
But we all know all this is just about 1 singular thing - revenue via customer/market capture. Oracle stuff indeed.
> Look, you lock your phone as much as you like, your device, your choices (here we are already very far from apple mindset)
It keeps software and service vendors from going around security and privacy protections. Folks don’t always have a choice of what they have to install, so “just don’t install their stuff if you don’t like it” isn’t sufficient to achieve the same results, even if we ignore the inherent difference in UX between “100% of the software for this goes through the App Store” and “some software is not on the App Store”.
Doesn’t mean you have to agree that path is better, of course, but it’s also definitely not so easily dismissed as ridiculous.
Software and service vendors can't "go around security and privacy protections", they can do exactly what the operating system and Apple allow them to do (short of actual bugs and vulnerabilities which would exist regardless of distribution method).
Either those protections are technological, baked into the OS, and therefore apply equally to all installation sources, or they don't exist. There's no in between.
There’s in-fact an in between, which is humans enforcing rules. It’s what’s in place now. It does have an actual effect, it’s not like it’s imaginary or doesn’t do anything. Some of the rules aren’t practically enforceable by software alone, at least so far (things like “don’t try to fingerprint the user or device in unauthorized ways”)
Those rules are even less enforceable by human reviewers because they don't employ people to reverse engineer your app, never mind any subsequent updates.
Your contention is that the review process entirely fails at enforcing privacy and security rules that cannot be achieved entirely through automation, or fails at such a high rate that it may as well be entire?
That doesn’t reflect my experience submitting apps, nor as a user of Apple devices. It’s certainly imperfect, but it achieves a lot more than if they simply stopped doing it.
[edit] and in fact, some of the automated checks wouldn’t be practical to run on a user’s device—are those also totally ineffective?
Look at the history on the PC and Mac desktop side. Ever see someone who had Firefox or VLC, only the binary they got was loaded up with things not shipped by the real developer? Notarization prevents that shady phished from talking your dad into installing “a critical security update!!!” from their own server and then either having it immediately get access to his stuff or walking him through logging into his password manager, etc.
I'm not against notarization as long as it's free (akin to Let's Encrypt) and strictly used for combating outright malicious software like you described, and not as a way to keep competitors off the platform, rent seek, or ban apps for "philosophical" reasons (like NSFW content).
They're intentionally conflating these objectives to give themselves an excuse for maintaining their stranglehold on users and developers alike. They need to give up some ground if their security concerns are to be taken seriously.
I'm sure all the smart people in Cupertino (and elsewhere) can figure out some really great solutions for protecting users in an honest manner, if only their leadership didn't instruct them otherwise.
Analogies don’t really work in arguments, it always just devolves into an argument about the analogy. They are useful in other contexts (like teaching, where it might be necessary to simplify something).
Overuse of analogies is one of the worst things the internet has done to discussion in general.
The implication that restricting user freedom to the degree that Apple does is as vital as the seatbelt in your car is hilarious to me. A better analogy would be "how come my Apple car can only drive on Apple-owned toll roads but every other car can drive wherever it wants?"
> Apps offered through Web Distribution must meet Notarization requirements to protect platform integrity, like all iOS apps, and can only be installed from a website domain that the developer has registered in App Store Connect.
If you can’t see a safety benefit, go look at the Windows or Chrome extension malware industry and the billions of dollars it costs people every year. You don’t have to like Apple or agree with everything they’re doing to understand that there is a real problem here.
Right; but the whole point of a browser extension is that it interferes with how other webpages work. But iOS apps can’t do that. They’re more like webpages themselves - sandboxed and run as isolated processes. In the absence of browser bugs, it should be safe to click any web link. Websites can impersonate one another. But my device stays secure.
iOS apps already work like that. Why does Apple have so little trust in their own security model?
The problem exists in the Apple app store. So why behave as if it is an issue unique to windows and android?
The apple situation makes it worse, people now expect the app store to be a safe place to download from and perhaps do less due diligence because they assume apple are doing the heavy lifting, mainly because Apple keep telling us they are doing the heavy lifting to protect us.
I have no emotional attachment to any brand, and I suspect that you are projecting your own attachment by saying so. I simply want tools that take orders rather than give them. I want a system that gives me so much freedom that it will let me sudo rm rf myself. That is important to me on a pragmatic level (not an emotional one) because it is useful enough to me that it is non negotiable.
The usual line after this is "then just don't use Apple," and you'll be happy to learn that I don't and probably never will regardless of what changes they make. I am just baffled by the comments in here defending their behavior. Why subject yourself to this? Of all the brands to get attached to, why the one that makes it so obvious that they're milking you for every dollar they can get? If that answer is that you genuinely can't avoid getting malware unless you are physically prevented from doing so preemptively, then so be it, but I don't get it otherwise.
Some people need to be protected from themselves though. I don't receive support requests anymore from my grandparents since they switched from a Windows-based computer to a ChromeOS system. It suits their needs while being locked down, and it limits the amount of damage that can be done.
Isn't ChromeOS secure because of sandboxing, not because of curation? And isn't the situation similar with iOS? I wouldn't really expect Apple's curators (or automated analysis) to reliably detect malware, but I expect the OS to limit what kind of damage can be done.
It's not frowned upon, it's the normal way of doing anything non-trivial in Windows land. You don't get something from a repo, you go to the Foobinator Tools website to download BarApp Pro
Laptop sales decline every year. People are giving up the idea of keyboards and big screens to avoid Windows laptops. Copying and monetizing the open source repo idea is the smartest thing smartphone manufacturers did.
I would love that. I have recently tried downloading a few apps for different reasons and every single all is locked away, for any useful features, behind in app purchases. I remember the days back when iPhone first came out you could find apps and no such thing as purchasing features. It dawned on me that my iPhone is a pretty shitty platform unlike my Pc where I can download many free open source projects made by passionate people who like to share. I haven’t owned an android in years but I am seriously contemplating getting a google pixel phone as they still have unlocked bootloaders. Our phones are capable of so much more but have been dumbed down so apple can let developers sell us features through apps while taking a 30% fee along the way.
> I have recently tried downloading a few apps for different reasons and every single all is locked away, for any useful features, behind in app purchases.
And you think those developers, once freed from the Apple App Store, will release their apps for free on the web???
Probably not them, but other developers for whom Apple's bullshit (like the 99$/year fee) is too much of a barrier of entry would be happy to share their work for free.
Well if the iPhone was not locked down and one could install open source freeware yes. There are apps for almost anything you can imagine for free on a pc. Look at OpenOffice for example. Free where ms version is quite costly. People are passionate about sharing things. Yes there are paid software that is great and I think they should be allowed as well but they should also have to keep innovating and offer something to entice customers like real human support for example. But open source freeware also has a place but it is being blocked for “security “ which too is alright but at the end of the day we have these phones which are very powerful mini computers and if I want to risk my security I should be allowed to install anything I want. This is why I was into jailbreaking back in the day. I bought an iPhone and the guy at the cell store sold me 1000 video messages with my plan. Be me surprised to learn there was not even a way to take videos on the iPhone back then (people think this is bull shit but it is the truth iPhone only had a camera back then no video). When I searched how to take videos I learned about cycorder available on cydia. Then I learned about jailbreak and took the chance and did it. Then I was able to take videos. Although apple slowly closed the gap a jailbroken phone was far more superior for years. My current iPhone is jailbreakable but I have been out of the scene a long time so not sure I want to mess around I think it might break my banking app not positive but haven’t the time to figure it all out.
This kind of UX is why I ended up installing a bunch of the official geogebra apps on an ipad in the past. Although, almost any calculation you'd want to do on a calculator can be done inside of spotlight search.
Same with PDF reader. A simple one that just let you read and annotate is something I guess no one is asking for. Everything has a premium plan that is a subscription.
Nah, I bet they'll let people install apps from anywhere, but for those apps they'll purposefully crack open the app sandbox to truly allow anything & everything, then when malware/scams hit Apple will be like "see, we told you it was a bad idea "
I'm developing an open source app(flutter) I have already started it in a simulator(kvm). I just don't want to jump through all the hoops and pay to be able to publis the app somewhere for ios users.
If indie developers were to quality, anyone would qualify and security incidents would inevitably increase. That's what Apple is trying to prevent. Keep the attack surface small.
Apple's philosophy is similar to the justice philosophy of nations like Singapore. Freedom in exchange for security. Some people like the trade off and some don't. And if there is anything that we know for sure is that when it comes to tech, freedom is the last of people's priorities.
It doesn't have to be an exclusive choice for Apple: more money and more security for Apple. Many HN folks (many of them using plenty of Apple products) probably won't like it but the reality is that we all vote with our wallet and with our time
We're all free not to buy Apple products if we don't like how they lock them down. There are several alternatives, Android being the most obvious. And yet, iPhones still sell well.
There are also minimum standards of behavior that we require of every participant in society, including regulations on the behavior of products.
The DMA's identification of "gatekeepers" makes a distinction between the requirements on products with smaller vs larger market shares. More successful products are now held to a higher standard, if you like.
This isn't unprecedented: progressive taxation, labor laws, etc -- there are many situations where this happens.
It's not like Apple has a monopoly on phones, but they're significant enough that the EU wants them to behave in a certain (different) way. Both the DMA and Apple's responses to it seem a bit clunky (so far). I expect it'll take some time for an equilibrium to emerge.
I think it's also notable that Apple now has (at least) three major different versions of its software/infrastructure: EU, China, and rest-of-world. I fear that's a trend that will only continue.
something something "those who give up freedom for security deserve neither" something something
The problem with the "freedom-for-security" tradeoff is that there is nothing to keep the security provider - a government or private corporation - from continuing to provide security once you've surrendered freedom. Apple was very good at combating scams and fraud on the App Store when the iPhone was new. The problem is, that's expensive, which is why Apple decided to charge 30% in the first place. Once competitors stopped trying to release mobile operating systems and users had been accustomed to "just download App Store stuff it's safe", Apple moved away from investing in App Store security. We can see this with how many outright scams wind up on the store today.
Singapore is a similar situation. The security a government is supposed to provide is protection against, say, organized criminals, but government and organized crime has the same structure, function, and incentives as one another. A government that takes away your freedom may be able to protect against organized crime, but that also lets them do exactly the same things organized crime might do. The only security this provides is security of Singapore's tax revenue and political control from appropriation by competing violence-users.
Same thing with Apple. They aren't securing you, they're securing themselves in power, with your security trickling down from their handcuffs.
My comment was from the point of view of the security provider. The security provider receives your freedom and gives you security. Of course, from the point of view of the freedom holder, there are no guarantees that the security provider will fulfill the promise in the sense that you expect (i.e. that they won't violate it themselves) but you can generally expect that they will at the very least reduce the number of individuals threatening your security from private individuals plus the state to just the state.
Your full and complete security can't never be guaranteed unless you hand over your full and complete freedom. Sure, today there are many scans in the App Store but today there are also way more mobile users than there were in the early days and phones have gone from digital toys to holders of digital personal life.
If you want to see what a world where you keep most of your freedom looks like, try using the Google App Store with an average phone (see: phone with no security updates since 2021) and see how many scams you get. Guaranteed way more than Apple. Like an order of magnitude more.
Let me give you another analogy. You are a villager in a corrupt country besieged by out of control armed gangs taking control of areas of the country. Areas such as yours. You got a corrupt country making your life hell and gangs making your life hell. Now you have a choice to move to another country where there is corruption but no gangs. That other country is Apple, Singapore and basically any South American country got its gangs under control. There are millions of people that literally want to get an Apple, get into Singapore and get into this kind of SA country. Sure, a world where higher powers don't abuse their power is nice but that world does not exist in our reality. You choose the lesser evil. That's what Apple is doing here.
> and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.
In other words the option is still a joke not worth using. "Yes, you can distribute independently... as long as you've already been popular on the iOS App Store in the past year".
It's a half-assed bribe to try and keep big developers on their side. "Alright, alright, we'll let you keep some money - just stop crying to the regulators already!"
Two big changes here. One is allowing third-party app stores to exclusively offer their own apps (I guess removing the requirement that they accept other apps). And the second is allowing apps that meet certain requirements to be installed directly from the publisher’s website:
> Apple's specific criteria, such as being a member of the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more and having an app with more than one million first installs on iOS in the EU in the prior year, and commit to ongoing requirements, such as publishing transparent data collection policies
But as you can see you won’t be seeing indie apps distributed in this way. Though, to be fair, for most indies the App Store with the old rules is probably the best deal available to them.
> Because it means you need to be making more than $3.3-$1.5 per user per year to break even on this, which is difficult
Perhaps this is the case inside the App Store, but it's not the case outside the App Store, where indie apps tend to be higher priced and upfront paid.
Moreover, keep in mind that the first million first annual installs have no CTF, and most indie devs will never even reach that point.
"Moreover, keep in mind that the first million first annual installs have no CTF, and most indie devs will never even reach that point." Thus the CTF is mostly nonexistent for indie devs.
In any case, though, it's only 5 euros for 10 years of installs, and many indie apps have paid upgrades (which don't exist in the App Store) at least once every 5 years.
As an indie app developer myself, I don't want to have this reoccurring expense hanging over my head. As I incorporate, the 600$ in fixed yearly expenses is stressful enough.
"Good news" then: this is merely a hypothetical conversation, and Apple won't allow you to distribute from your website unless you already have over a million EU users.
But in order to qualify for distributing via your own website, you need to have had a million installs in the prior year. So everyone who could potentially use that distribution method will by definition be subject to the CTF. It seems like an indie dev's only non-Apple option that can avoid the CTF is to distribute through a third-party app marketplace and hope to stay under a million installs.
If your app is ad-supported, you pay 0%. It also makes the freemium model viable. If you have an application that has in-app purchases, then people may download, play the free portion, and never pay you. If you have to pay $0.50 for that, then it may not go well.
The 0.50 is probably much better if you're selling, say, a $10 app.
> The 0.50 is probably much better if you're selling, say, a $10 app.
That's precisely what indie devs outside the Mac App Store are doing. They don't have ad-supported apps. Most of them are upfront paid, perhaps with a time-limited demo. The business models that you're talking about are a product of the App Store race to the bottom.
This framing ignores the very real harm which has come to millions of people. It’s not the 80s any more and there are mature industries built around spying on users or tricking them into decisions with significant financial consequences. Most of the effective defenses require something like notarization to make it hard for attackers to simply disappear without legal consequences, so we need ways to do that at reasonable cost.
€0.50 seems like a reasonable cost for that, similar to how we don’t make circuit breakers or seatbelts optional just because some guy thinks he doesn’t need them and resents paying the extra cost.
I’m not going to hire an IT team to install and maintain MDM to prevent my grandmother from falling for a scam website and installing “free money quick 2024 +++ candy crush ultra”
If you want to block your grandma from being able to install apps from outside the Apple app store, that's fine (as long as she agrees to it). Seems like a useful feature. Maybe file it under "parental controls" or something.
If you want to block me from being able to install apps from outside the Apple app store though, that's none of your business (or Apple's).
It is Apple’s business, actually. Don’t like it? You don’t like anything about the Apple ecosystem. Buy an Android phone from one of the thousands of OEMs.
Apple is not stopping you from buying a phone that isn’t from Apple.
If most people thought like you did, they would just not buy iPhones. The problem is nobody wants what you’re asking for, because you’re buying into the euro-populist cope that it helps consumers, even though this was just a play to allow European companies to even have a small chance at making money in tech because of how over regulated the industry is in Europe.
You’re asking for iOS to be a flavor of Android, and the reality is the Android experience fucking sucks.
How is anyone supposed to take your argument seriously when you use the term "euro-populist cope?"
> even though this was just a play to allow European companies to even have a small chance at making money in tech because of how over regulated the industry is in Europe
Please cite your sources.
> You’re asking for iOS to be a flavor of Android, and the reality is the Android experience fucking sucks.
No. The user is clearly asking to run software on a device that they own. Why is Apple controlling what software people can run on hardware that they don't own? Should Microsoft not allow people to run software on devices that Microsoft does not own?
> worried if they ever allowed unsigned apps to run
I see this stance often - Do you mean worried for the wellbeing of the easily manipulable (e.g. children) on the platform,
Or worried for the quality floor more generally?
The former has an argument, the latter does not in my opinion.
Even then while I welcome a requirement for apple to notarise apps for regular install (particularly as a means to verify the source), I'd also demand the ability to run unsigned apps unrestricted - whether the barrier is self-signing, a settings checkbox, make me stare at a 30s countdown, whatever.
I worry about my family both young and old who all had adware and malware ridden Android phones before I got them iPhones.
The vast majority of people use smartphones against their will and have no desire to learn anything about the magical Facebook machine in their hands.
They press buttons and things happen, who cares what the dialog box says, they press the button that will get them doing what they want to do the fastest, who cares if it said whatever they were doing is dangerous. This is how most people view their phones, and why there are Android botnets and not iOS botnets.
All of your concerns are actually solvable through software … if Apple were willing to work on it. But doing that doesn’t bring a lot of revenue so they keep pushing the narrative how the entire category of applications is malicious or risky.
I think they should allow unsigned apps to run in a similar way to developer mode on the Xbox.
You can enable unsigned apps, but you'll loose Apple services (e.g. iMessage). This should be enough to convince normal users not to do it, but allow those who really want to do it, to do it.
That is one of the reasons why businesses must have security software monitoring your entire system on macOS, but not on iOS.
On Windows, people literally just give everything they install complete root access to their entire system when installing applications, might as well bring that to iOS too, right?
You’re not making the point you think you’re making. There’s a lot more danger using macOS/Windows than iOS, and the people who interact with computers at work aren’t given administrative access for a reason.
I can grant anything access to my iCloud Keychain on macOS, do you honestly think iOS users should be able to press a button to allow this if a random app requested it? Do you even think they will know what that means? Now imagine if unsigned applications could access keychain like on macOS. How well do you think that will go down?
Apple drew the line at consumer safety, and developers hate that they can’t abuse their powers like they do everywhere else.
> That is one of the reasons why businesses must have security software monitoring your entire system on macOS, but not on iOS.
Because it is not even possible on iOS, so false sense of security
> On Windows, people literally just give everything they install complete root access to their entire system when installing applications, might as well bring that to iOS too, right?
You have not used Windows for looooong time, otherwise you would know that this is not the case since Windows 7 and not the case at all on Domain (enterprise) Windows since Windows XP
> I can grant anything access to my iCloud Keychain on macOS, do you honestly think iOS users should be able to press a button to allow this if a random app requested it? Do you even think they will know what that means? Now imagine if unsigned applications could access keychain like on macOS. How well do you think that will go down?
Of course, why not. Are iOS user dumber than MacOS users?
> Apple drew the line at consumer safety, and developers hate that they can’t abuse their powers like they do everywhere else.
This has nothing to do with safety, but with users demanding support for their iOS toys, while refusing to acknowledge, that if Apple bans me from App Store for whatever reason, all the money spent on iOS support are now running down the drain.
It’s clear you have so little knowledge of the area you’re trying to talk about there’s not really a point in continuing.
The real world isn’t a computer, and Apple is held responsible for user mistakes.
Remember the fappening? Apple never let users make security decisions on their iPhone again and forced MFA.
You’re talking about walking back decades of platform security because you want to be special, which by the way, everyone who does this for a living agrees with Apple here, including Google. That’s why they’re making Rooted phones worse experiences, 99% of people cannot be trusted with the sort of access you’re talking about, and Google knows that.
> On Windows, people literally just give everything they install complete root access to their entire system when installing applications, might as well bring that to iOS too, right?
UAC prompts get in the way, and if the user account isn't an admin the app can't do anything.
Yeah, it'd be terrible, awful, horrible if we could run the software we want on the computers we purchase. I've been installing software on WIndows without an infection since 2002, probably before you were born and I've been using third party Android app sources for various projects and products for a full decade without a single unwanted malware like behavior other than obnoxious notification spam. Yeah, tell me how much danger I'm in from my Windows and Android software, child.
> There are plenty of “free Vbucks” and survey sites that show you how to enable sideloading on Android to download said app that is just pure malware.
And yet the world hasn't collapsed due to every Android users' identity and bank accounts being stolen.
Maybe users aren't as dumb as Apple pretends they are.
Altserver+Altstore. Altserver will resign your apps, and altstore can background "refresh" your apps so they _shouldn't_ expire on your.
It refreshes when your on the same wifi network as altserver, for me it works most of the time, but sometimes I need to kick altserver to get the phone to see it.
Doesn't fix the issue, and its a limitation that annoys the hell out of me too, but at least helps mitigate it. (Though it doesn't solve the number of self signed app limit)
The only thing that bothers me about Altstore is that it require you to enter your Apple ID and password. I know the app is open source and only sends the credentials to Apple, but the risk of a supply chain vulnerability is terrifying.
But don't you need a unique phone number for each Apple ID, which makes it kind of difficult to just create a throwaway account? Or is there a way to circumvent that requirement?
AltStore is a bad joke, you can only install 2 apps (three, minus the altstore app), and you have to connect your phone to a MacOS computer and run the app every week.
Just let me click on an IPA to install it, it's really not that deep!
That’s a limitation created by apple, not alt server. Granted you are using one of your three to use alt store, but you can skip using alt store if you don’t want auto refresh by just using the server to install your IPAs.
But Altstore does run on Windows, Mac and Linux (I use a helper script to run it on my home server)
These are all work around to Apple imposed limitations, it’s by no means perfect, but until Apple change their mind (or are forced to change their mind) your alternatives are jailbreaking (which I don’t think there are any public jailbreaks of the latest hardware/OS) or swap to Android (which I’m considering doing) or pay Apple $100 a year for your own dev cert with less restrictions.
That's the thing that would prevent me from buying a Vision Pro down the line. It's going to be an iOS-like walled garden experience. If it could run arbitrary macOS apps on device, it would be infinitely more useful (but probably cannibalize the MacBook market and why would Apple ever roll out a new product line that doesn't force developers to pay them 30%?)
I mean... it hasn't been their model from the start; the Apple II was wildly successful in part because it was so open, and Macs never had a walled garden (though the situation there does seem to have gotten somewhat worse over time).
When the Mac was introduced, there were two loud groups of people:
Those complaining bitterly that Apple had ruined the product by eliminating expansion cards, and holding the case shut with a special screw that needed an "only available from Apple" screwdriver.
And those who gladly bought the first computer that didn't need users to open up the case and mess around with expansion cards and dip switches and so on.
> It's going to be an iOS-like walled garden experience.
It might be even worse. Apparently you can't even add a web app to your home screen on the Vision Pro. Vision Pro users are paying for a native app that loads youtube.com in a webview: https://christianselig.com/2024/02/introducing-juno/
I've wanted to be able to do this on video game consoles for ages. I have a powerful computer with a big screen in my living room but I'm locked out of it.
I hope once the EU starts to look at Sony and Nintendo next.
The Nintendo Switch is a great console for sideloading. There are numerous ports of PC titles like Quake and Half-Life, as well as a library of Homebrew games and modding tools. If you've got an original Nintendo Switch there's practically no excuse not to crack it, unless you intend to play online.
Same goes for the 3DS, too. You can now play Virtual Boy games using the built-in 3D screen, which enables preservation of Nintendo's darkest age (with or without their approval). I have soft-modded versions of both the Switch and 3DS, and recommend it to anyone that wants that "unlocked" experience.
If you want an Xbox or Playstation computer, buy the SOC from AMD. They sell them on Alibaba and get the same support Microsoft and Sony recieve (read: dogshit). Most people would agree that it's wiser to not use console hardware for PC software when you can build a superior machine for a lower price. But hey, if you wanna waste time and money I won't be the one to stop you.
I want access to the developer program like you get with Apple for $100 / year. I want sanctioned and supported third party app stores. Direct download would be cool as well.
There's also the Steam Deck, if you hate getting bent-over by third-party OEMs that don't care about you. But considering your affinity for Apple, maybe the console market is right for you.
So they should be forced to develop the SDK and the dev tools for free and provide that support for free? I mean it would be very nice of them to do so, but legally forcing them to do it? I don't know about that. It is a shortsighted "solution".
The SDK is paid for when purchasing the phone. Same as with Mac OS, OS X, DOS, Windows, Android, Blackberry, ChromeOS and every other OS out there. It's not shortsighted, it's worked well for the past 50 years or so.
and for advanced developer tooling you can charge. This is what MS does. Visual Studio (not Code) is not free for businesses.
One can still do C# development using only Windows SDK and/or dotnet SDK for "free".
You cannot do C/C++ or Rust developement without a license but with MinGW you also can do it without MS SDK. MS doesn't prevent people from using GCC compilers. Their core C++ developers even use it: https://nuwen.net/mingw.html
the point is, MS and others are free to choose how they will offer their services. They can say "hey I'll provide this for free, and I will make you pay for this other thing". As long as they are not a monopoly in computing, they should be free to do whatever they want, no? If they go bonkers with what they ask vs the value they provide, competition will wipe them out - easy peasy.
Apple could have said at the beginning "hey this is iPhone, there are no external apps for it though" - which was actually the case! iPhone did not have 3rd party apps at launch.
Then Apple could have said "good news everyone, you can now develop for the iPhone. Dev kits start at $10000 per unit, apply to partner with us, call us at this number" and that would be the end of it. Lots of gadgets still work like that and nobody bats an eye.
Apple decreased the barrier to entry and provided it as a service, charged for it but created good value in return, and it worked! But now that governments signal that they will punish such success, the next Apple will likely not go the way of low barrier of entry - this will hurt the regular folk, people with not so deep pockets.
What worked well for the past 50 years was freedom. None of those operating systems were forced to provide dev kits at no additional cost. They did it to compete. If Apple's additional costs' value proposition was not there, they would not be successful, they would not be able to attract good developers creating good software. Apple is not a monopoly either, there is competition. So forcing them to provide a service at no additional cost is just theft. And corporations can circumvent the hit they will get from being forced in innumerable ways in a capitalist system, all at the expense of the consumer.
The point is, nobody is disallowed from competing with Apple and its ecosystem on its merits. If Apple didn't provide enough value in return to what they ask, they would fail. Signaling that you will punish success with force means that the next Apple will be a lot more cautious about how they do things. Jacked up prices (as long as value proposition is there, people will pay, they will just pay more), requiring dev kits (can you force a company to change their hardware design so that it can be developed on? where is the limit?) / expensive partnership agreements / increasing the barrier to entry... Unless companies are "state owned" they have infinite ways to keep their profits at the expense of consumers. Apple's existing deal was a good deal - it was working, competition was (and is still) there. Now they will have to do the things that will just inconvenience users as a side effect, which is what they don't want to do, but they will be forced to do regardless.
I believe they would be allowed to charge for the SDK and the dev tools as long as they don’t require developers to use that SDK and the dev tools. I’m sure someone else would provide an alternative SDK and tooling then.
But is it even legally required for them to provide a stable 3rd party software support? That would be ridiculous. So if they put in the effort to provide such a base and open it to public, why can't they choose to be compensated for that work?
My problem can be summarized as (assume the company in question is not a monopoly):
* Is it illegal to sell a device with a microprocessor in it that has no support for 3rd party programmability? -> no, most digital devices are like this in fact.
* Is it illegal to sell a computing device and develop software in house for it? Maybe charge for some of it? Still with no 3rd party support? -> no it is not illegal.
* Is it illegal then, to contract other developers / companies to write that "in house" software for the device you are making? -> no that is not illegal
* Is it illegal to make agreements with other companies to buy software / programming services from them to include in your device? -> no that is not illegal
* Is it illegal to make agreements with other companies so that they can sell licenses to "unlock" their software in your device and get a cut from their sales? -> no it is not illegal
* Is it illegal to sell dev kits to the the above? So the device in question is still not a device you can develop on - but you can create another device where 3rd parties can develop on, and you can sell it to them. You can also pick and choose which companies you will work with. None of this is illegal.
* Is it illegal to automate all of the above? Provide low barrier to entry, no bureaucracy, if you want to develop for the device just do, pay us $100 a year, and give us a cut and you are golden! No need to get into direct contact with us, wait months to get our manual approval - we streamline everything and even the little guy can participate? -> HN thinks that this suddenly must be illegal. If they are providing all this service, they should be legally forced to do all for free.
They can choose to be compensated for their work, but in case of the 30% cut, they seem to want to be compensated for someone else’s work, because how much a successful app makes vs. an unsuccessful app is not a function of the SDK or the platform, which is the same for both. I would have no problem if they asked for a flat fee for providing their service. But they want to profit off the revenue of a whole ecosystem, and that has no quantitative relation to the effort of maintaining the OS and the SDK.
That’s just my personal opinion. The DMA is about anti-trust, that some companies are controlling a too large part of the cake, affecting too many users (end users as well as “business users”, e.g. app developers), which is bad for a competitive market and level playing field.
All of these are wrong. The answer to each of those is "It may or may not be legal depending on various factors including whether it is intentionally creating a monopolistic anti-competitive environment".
Laws are allowed to have very nuanced opinions where it's illegal for microsoft to disallow uninstalling Internet Explorer program (USA vs MS, 2001), but perfectly legal for microsoft do disallow installing the File Explorer program.
I know us programmers want laws to perfectly specified in unambiguous mathematics, but lawyers want laws to be specified in English with nuance and room for interpretation and judgement of intent and spirit.
It makes no sense to you because you are thinking like a programmer. Laws are for empathetic decent humans, not soulless hacker-news-posting programmers.
I'd even be willing to pay the $99 a year, I just want the signature to last longer than a week, ideally forever. For years when I don't feel like updating the app, I won't pay the developer membership fee.
I think the deploy straight from Xcode to your device builds have a pretty short lifetime (I remember it being a month in around 2014 or 2015) not sure now.
If you archive and build using a certificate from developer.apple.com they last a year.
As someone with dozens of side loaded iOS apps, all of my apps are working just fine, well over 6 months later. I always build and deploy without archiving.
It still has the 7 day limit for apps, so if you go on a vacation your apps stop working, or if you stop running the sideloadly software in your home network they also do.
It also doesn't have a linux version, so it's unusable for hacker news users, since all of us only run linux machines in our homes.
Also, closed source, just use altserver which I think is actually open source, and does the same thing but better tested
"The Core Technology Fee (CTF) is an element of the business terms in the EU that reflects the value Apple provides developers through ongoing investments in the tools, technologies, and services that enable them to build and share innovative apps with users around the world."
I feel sick. Yet, I am intrigued by what kind of drugs the PR team at Apple is taking... ;)
In my opinion, Apple's proprietary APIs provide a negative value to developers. Shuffling APIs around for no obvious reason is why none of my old iOS / Mac apps still work. I've been forced to issue refunds to people who upgraded their macOS and then afterwards noticed that my apps don't work anymore. And since Apple owns the customer relationship, we couldn't even send an email to warn them that upgrading will break their setup. (Pro Tools had to do that on basically every OS X upgrade.)
On Windows, things JUST WORK! :) and they've continued working with almost no maintenance for almost 9 years. The Windows version is, thus, highly profitable.
But the Mac version was a financial disaster. And discontinued.
EDIT: Just to clarify, I was super happy with Apple from about 2008 to about 2014 and shipped multiple iOS and Mac apps. But needless to say, my impression of them has soured when they started treating us developers badly. I'm now using Pop! OS as daily driver and it kinda feels as nice as OS X was before the stupidification efforts started.
> provides developers through ongoing investments in the tools, technologies, and services that enable them to build and share innovative apps with users around the world.
That's what the 99$ fee for the developer program is for. The 50ct Core Technology Fee is just Apple showing the middle finger to successful developers. I hope the EU goes after this fee first.
The whole reason for the DMA is that developers do not use Apple's platforms to bring apps to the user's devices.
The user has paid for the device and the operating system, the developer has paid for the developer account, so I am really interested to see how Apple justifies that fee in a court of law.
Maybe Apple's goal is to become irrelevant enough to not be subjected to the DMA. I mean, making developers despise you is a brilliant first step towards such an end!
Why is size a question here? If apple is subject now, but then dropped to 1/10th the number of users, could they suddenly no longer be required to adhere to the DMA? Why is the size of the provider suddenly a test to determine if consumer protections are in order?
The DMA, digital markets act, is about fair competition, not consumer protection. If you got 5 users, you do not have the necessary leverage to matter.
Yeah this is what I really don't understand. They say they have to be compensated for their R&D work and for providing the APIs and cloud services etc. Okay.
They have to be "compensated" in the intellectual property[0] sense of "we reserve the right to invent new reasons why we need to be compensated". Nothing is ever truly "paid for" or "owned" here.
I think you'd be hard pressed to take the $99/yr they make from the dev program fee and use it to cover the salaries for the engineers implementing and maintaining all of iOS' developer-facing APIs.
Isn't having good apps/api a selling point for apple hardware (where they already make massive amount of money), why can't that be a motivation by itself?
Who decided that developers should be the ones paying for the development of those APIs in the first place? Are we just going to ignore Apple's own products and services that their platform allows them to profit off of? And the market share afforded to them by supporting popular third-party apps and services?
There's plenty of precedence for platforms being profitable even with free APIs - including Android, Windows, and even Apple's own MacOS. iOS is not special.
Apple would pay for those APIs whether or not the dev program fees alone were enough to cover the expenses. But they'll also take as much from the devs as they are legally allowed to. And if the fees are enough to keep devs from distributing outside the app store, even better for Apple.
and what about the devices itself? doesn't apple get money from selling iphones and ipads?
The only downside I see on the DMA is that it has come very late, and that it's only an european law. Mobile devices are computers, and once sold you should be able to install whatever you want like on any other computer. The shame on apple is that it is increasingly difficult to install software even on the computers.
I’m not sure what % of their R&D budget comes from the $99 fee vs various other AppStore percentage based fees. But… should it be a flat fee? It seems sort of reasonable to charge more successful apps more, they are apparently benefiting more from the ecosystem, right? Like progressive taxation. (If anything, why not institute increasing developer “apple tax” brackets?)
It looks like, just from some random googling, Apple makes somewhere in the range of $85B per year from their App Store, and there are around 34 Million iOS app developers. Do people really want to pay north of $2000 for their developer licenses?
> The user has paid for the device and the operating system, the developer has paid for the developer account, so I am really interested to see how Apple justifies that fee in a court of law.
pretty much the same way nintendo or sony or microsoft justify it, I'd think.
it's pretty much exactly the same thing as windows S edition, or a console - you paid for the laptop, the developer paid to get notarization to release it. As Android shows, it is also probably legal to refuse to unlock the bootloader... now you own an "appliance".
And again, consoles have been doing this for two full decades now. PS5 isn't sold at a loss (and I don't think it matters if it is - your business model is not my problem) but I can't go mine crypto or emulate games on a PS5 or Xbox even if that's what I want to do with it as a user.
And I know that consoles got a specific carveout in the DMA "for some reason" (more evidence this is really just a bill of attainder in generic dress) but really there is not a moral difference here, and people have (including here, including the apple haters) have generally convinced themselves that it's OK. It's simple, just do the same thing with apple: "my phone is an appliance and I don't need to emulate games to be happy with it". It's a console in my pocket that makes calls.
In the EU, the spirit of the laws is what counts in court, not the letter of the law. That means it's a lot easier to understand things if you start with the intended consequences:
Can you have a normal life without Xbox S or PS5? Yes => no need to regulate here
Can you have a normal life without iOS or Android? No => it's an essential utility => let's regulate this
> Can you have a normal life without Xbox S or PS5? Yes => no need to regulate here
> Can you have a normal life without iOS or Android? No => it's an essential utility => let's regulate this
this is a silly false dilemma/double standard you've set up.
if you want to apply the "do I need this exact device" standard - then no, you do not need a PS5, and you do not need an iphone. Therefore there is no need for regulation.
if you want to apply the "can I live my life without this whole category of Thing" - you probably can't live your life without some form of entertainment, and some form of generalized computing device, right? So no, you can't "do without" something like a PS5 or a phone or a laptop, no.
And the Xbox and PS5 are general purpose computing devices - there is no technical reason you shouldn't be able to check emails or run a word processor on your Xbox, other than that's not the market segmentation MS wants. Again, this is an example of a device so successfully convincing people that it's really an appliance that literally the EU wrote it into a law that there's no need for this appliance to comply.
Again: what's the problem? Just do the same thing with the iphone.
regardless, you are choosing to ignore the whole point about Windows S - you certainly can't life your life without Windows or MacOS, right? And if you want to point to niche solutions... nobody is stopping you from buying a Sailphone, but you would probably agree that's not a sufficient solution for the market as a whole.
Again, the whole thing is very narrowly a bill of attainder, both in its written form and application. If the purpose is "protecting consumers" there is no logical reason to exclude Windows S or PS5 or Xbox or other general-purpose computing devices from being utilized as such by consumers.
The EU has no business to be declaring these classes of devices as having no need to comply with market act requirements, especially when the boundaries are so fuzzy. Apple TV is pushing into mobile gaming. Series S is pushing downwards into mobile gaming. What is the difference between these 2 classes of devices, why should one get a pass? Why should Motorola be allowed to refuse to unlock their bootloaders without voiding a warranty? Etc etc. Literally narrowly targeted at ios and nothing else - even when it would benefit the consumer.
And more generally people are deliberately (and knowingly) missing the point that these types of appliances are common and are widely accepted - literally so widely accepted that the EU wrote special permission for many of them. Phrasing it as if Apple is somehow uniquely denying users access to the capabilities of their hardware is incredibly misleading - literally the EU wrote into the DMA special permission for many vendors to continue denying their users access to the capabilities of their hardware.
But, it's apple, I get it, everyone hates apple. But at a technological level they're not special or different.
Everyone knows the problem has nothing to do with openness or whatever, but that it comes down to the 30% fee and companies not wanting to pay it.
The problem is the law isn’t written to say “30% fees are too damn high” and just mandate that the fees can’t be over X% or are capped at $Y per install/device/whatever.
Game distribution
Steam 30% (25% after $10M, 20% after $50M)
Epic 12%
Humble 25% (15% to Humble, 10% to charity)
GOG 30%
Console
Microsoft 30%
Playstation 30%
Xbox 30%
Nintendo 30%
Mobile
Apple 30%
Google 30%
Physical
Gamestop 30%
Amazon 30%
Best Buy 30%
Walmart 30%
“The spirit of the law thing” is something I’ve seen repeated WRT the EU, but it seems like a really bizarre way to run anything important. The law obviously can’t tell us what its spirit is beyond what the letter is.
We can guess what legislators want… I guess a lawyer must have come up with this idea, because inconsistent guesses are going to give them lots of extra business.
Maybe it would be better to annotate laws with what their spirit is, so we don’t have to guess. In fact, just write that down instead of the apparently non-functional letter of the law.
You as a consumer or business cannot do the interpretation. Courts do. When there is ambiguities in the law (i.e. if the CTF is a valid fee or not), the higher courts (like the CJEU) decide how the law is to be interpreted and their decision sort of amend the word of the law.
Reminds me of this: "The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.
As for cost, we selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta and other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch. Among other things, we're looking at average per-player credit earn rates on a daily basis, and we'll be making constant adjustments to ensure that players have challenges that are compelling, rewarding, and of course attainable via gameplay.
We appreciate the candid feedback, and the passion the community has put forth around the current topics here on Reddit, our forums and across numerous social media outlets.
Our team will continue to make changes and monitor community feedback and update everyone as soon and as often as we can."
Having tracked API changes fairly closely on macOS and iOS for many years now, I can’t think of too many that were just pointless furniture shuffling. Nearly all of them were to enable addition of new features or to improve developer QoL in some way — dropping 32-bit support for example allowed them to make long desired improvements in AppKit that were impractical prior due to quirks in the way Objective-C works.
That said I also don’t think it’s a reasonable expectation for old binaries to continue to work indefinitely. Maintenance is a reality of life of a software developer, and personally speaking if I found myself unable or unwilling to do quick spot checks on each platform my apps run at least once a year, I’d just drop support for those platforms or discontinue the app.
That’s not to say that Apple is blameless here, but I think Microsoft has set an unrealistic standard (while also making some things much more difficult for themselves… Windows on ARM for example will never materialize so long as developers expect to be able to toss a binary over the wall and abandon it for a decade, because no matter how good an x86 compat layer is, it’s still significantly worse than native).
Windows on ARM will never materialize because Qualcomm can't make compelling hardware for it to run on.
Keep in mind that the M1 at launch was as fast as a lot of Intel's lineup running emulated x86 apps. That's what Qualcomm needs to be able to pull off. If the performance is there then people will buy the laptops. That changes the developer story from "please recompile and retest your apps so they'll run on laptops nobody's buying" to "if you recompile your app it'll run 20% faster on this already screaming fast laptop chip".
Proficiency in emulating x86 is just one piece of the puzzle, though. It helped drive M1 adoption to be sure, but users also had a lot of confidence that developers would pull through and provide native binaries in a timely manner, catapulting the capabilities and battery life of their shiny new laptops even further. Apple and third party Mac devs had pulled it off twice already, so there was good reason to believe that they’d do it again.
If the new Qualcomm chips have good performance, it’ll drive sales initially, but enthusiasm will fizzle if 2-3 years down the road developers aren’t making meaningful efforts to port their Windows versions to ARM, because a Windows on ARM device running mostly emulated processes is almost certainly going to fall behind M-series Macs running mostly native in performance and battery life. If Qualcomm can’t keep up substantial performance improvements on a yearly cadence, they also risk getting lapped by traditional x86 machines.
> but users also had a lot of confidence that developers would pull through and provide native binaries in a timely manner, catapulting the capabilities and battery life of their shiny new laptops even further.
Yea. There was a real concerted effort by not Apple employees to get all these *modern* tools working on M1s. I remember at the company I was at, a small handful of engineers working diligently to get our internal dev software and processes working on M1s.
It's important for platforms to support works of art indefinitely. It is not reasonable to expect, say, decade-old games to be updated (something that can involve weeks or months of work because underlying toolkits may need to be updated as well). This was a huge issue when Apple killed 32-bit support.
That's how platforms are killed by neglect. They become locked into their old forms and become replaced wholesale instead of evolving piece by deprecated piece.
> That said I also don’t think it’s a reasonable expectation for old binaries to continue to work indefinitely. Maintenance is a reality of life of a software developer, and personally speaking
There is a fine difference between keeping old binaries running and maintaining your application. I don't expect certain applications to be maintained, but I expect them to run on newer versions of OS for many years. If you think this is impossible, Apple can learn a lot from Microsoft and Linux. And IMHO, Microsoft didn't make unrealistic standards. One of the reasons why Windows has been the most dominant OS for years is exceptional backward compatibility.
16 bit support got dropped from Windows over a decade ago. It's not like macOS drops things at random, Monumental architecture changes are good reasons to break any apps that hadn't been touched in x years.
No, it's still there in the 32-bit version of Windows (10, anyway.) Windows 11 doesn't support 32-bjt, so I suppose you could say it was dropped then, but Windows 10 is still supported.
The amount of backwards compatibility that Windows has built in is frankly insane. I've been going through a catalog of games and making sure they can run on modern Windows. Other than games that were written strictly for 16-bit, I haven't run into a game that can't be made to run. Sure, some require patches in the form of DLL shims, but it's rare that I even have to break out compatibility mode.
> They don't have to believe into what they write.
Imagine the level of sociopathy required for the job. Truly soulless, despicable work, but I almost feel sorry for them. Like, could they even form an authentic human connection anymore, when they have sold out, given up so much humanity to an indifferent market creature? How would you feel about an "I love you" coming from someone payed to lie and manipulate?
I am really impressed how much time and effort Apples legal department spends to find every single loop hole in the wording of the DMA. The 50ct per install for alternate app stores, 50ct per install for non-App Store apps after the millionth install, 1 million dollar in securities for alternate app stores, etc all follow the words of the DMA, but not the spirit. I am really interested to see the European Commissian drag Apple in front of a court and them having to legally defend their actions. I assume that all of those things they are setting up to circumvent people from using their rights will really blow up in their faces.
The EU has always been enthusiastic about the spirit of the law, and Apple is not used to this. You can see their temper tantrum unfold every time they find this out.
There's different ways to interpret laws for courts. One of them is called teleological interpretation where you follow the intent of the law. For this courts also look into the documentation the legislation provided when defining the law. This is usually not done by lower courts, but courts like the CJEU use those when the letter of the law is unclear to define this for the lower courts to follow.
Is it? Developers used to determinism in software frequently don't understand that in all jurisdictions the law is ultimately interpreted by humans. I've been going through some legal processes myself, and my friend who is a lawyer reminded me more times than I care to admit that this is the case.
In the US, SCOTUS's job is literally to interpret the spirit of the law in the event of ambiguity.
Developers are fully used to this ambiguity and "spirit of the law" when interpreting standards. Search for WeirdNIX (popularly known as Windows NT and other names too).
The situation in the US seems to suggest that trying to finely analyze the exact sequence of words in a law or the consitution still leaves a whole lot of room for arbitrary decisions. Abortion was a constitutional right until it wasn't and the constitution was not changed between.
All language carries inherent ambiguity. However, developments in American constitutional law aren’t really about that. The Constitution is very general and it uses terms that lack an objective meaning (for example, “Due Process” - what counts as “process”? What process is “due”?) It can’t really be implemented without bringing in a pile of philosophy and policy making.
At the same time, SCOTUS has been guilty of stretching its terms to include ideas that are clearly out of scope. (For example, the dubious invention of “substantive” due process - which all of the abortion stuff hinges on.)
Of all the examples you could've brought up and you thought a person's right to control their body is a stretch? Try "qualified immunity" if you want an example of justices reasoning with their bare ass showing.
Also, substantive due process was not invented for reproductive rights. It was invented in Dred Scott v. Sandford, to prevent “free” states from depriving slave owners of their “property”.
"The phrase substantive due process was not used until the 20th century, but the concept arguably existed in the 19th century. The idea was a way to import natural law norms into the Constitution; prior to the American Civil War, the state courts were the site of the struggle. Critics of substantive due process claim that the doctrine began, at the federal level, with the infamous 1857 slavery case of Dred Scott v. Sandford.[11] Advocates of substantive due process acknowledge that the doctrine was employed in Dred Scott but claim that it was employed incorrectly. Indeed, abolitionists and others argued that both before and after Dred Scott, the Due Process Clause actually prohibited the federal government from recognizing slavery. Also, the first appearance of substantive due process, as a concept, had appeared in Bloomer v. McQuewan, 55 U.S. 539 (1852)"
While there is a trace of the idea in Bloomer, it is relatively faint. Dred Scott is much more commonly recognized as the origin of substantive due process. For example:
> We should note right at the outset some of the many remarkable facts about the case.
> * Dred Scott was the first Supreme Court case since Marbury v. Madison invalidating a federal law. Since Marbury created judicial review in the context of a denial of jurisdiction, Dred Scott might plausibly be said to be the first real exercise of the power of judicial review.
> * Dred Scott was the first great effort by the Court to take an issue of political morality out of politics. In that sense, it is the great ancestor of many New Deal and Warren Court cases.
> * Dred Scott was the birthplace of the controversial idea of "substantive due process," used in Roe v. Wade, in many important cases endangering the regulatory/welfare state, and in the recent cases involving the "right to die."
> * Dred Scott was one of the first great cases unambiguously using the "intent of the framers" and in that sense it was the great precursor of the method of Justice Scalia and Judge Bork.
I don't think it's controversial at all to say that substantive due process is understood to have its origin in cases like Dred Scott and Lochner, cases where the Supreme Court overrode the results of the democratic process to protect economic interests. Or, for that matter, that the court took significant license in "interpreting" the Fifth Amendment that way.
Also, I think many people are too teleological when they evaluate judicial doctrines and philosophies. "Reproductive rights are good, so let's find a way to justify substantive due process." Jurisprudence is part of a structure and process that is bigger than any specific outcome, and bad jurisprudence shouldn't be excused just because it leads somewhere we might like.
Maybe substantive due process links the two cases in the most nebulous and abstract way, but fundamentally Roe v Wade is about a person's right to control their own body (e.g., nobody can force me to donate a kidney even if I'm a perfect match), whereas Dred Scott was about the exact opposite.
Edit: I also disagree that looking at where judicial philosophies lead is a bad idea. At the end of the day, the judicial system exists for two main purposes: 1) enforce contract law and 2) enforce the moral zeitgeist in the most fair way possible. If an inflexible judicial philosophy is unable to keep up with the morals of the times, we should consider revising the judicial philosophy. I believe this is considered fairly mainstream legal philosophy, and a big reason "originalism" is considered basically a sham by the legal profession.
But that's the thing, when your law is legally binding in 24 different languages it's really impractical if not entirely impossible to have a system based on letter-of-the-law interpretations...
I’m so tired of this, instead of doing the right thing, Apple just keeps trying to brute force the legal framework. You don’t need fancy legal team to know this is not the way.
From a business point, I can totally understand what Apple is doing. Making this as painful and unpredictable (as a developer you never know if your app will be successfull and gain more than 1 million installs) is the way to keep developers using the old contract and keep them on the app store. This makes sense for Apple to find every loophole possible ...
As a consumer, and an Apple users, I want them to be slapped as hard as possible for how they implement this.
Funny how things go. As a consumer especially, but even as a developer I don’t want the DMA to succeed and purposefully want iOS to be a walled garden. It’s literally one of the reasons why I’m on iOS!
That's the nice thing about the DMA ... Nobody forces you to install a 3rd party app store, nobody forces you to install apps from websites, nobody forces you out of the walled garden. For you nothing changes. Those that want to use their 1000€ device differently than you now have the chance to.
As the “tech guy” in the family things might change actually.
(One of) the reasons why I like the walled garden is how it simplifies everything troubleshooting-wise. I have a few quirks to know, the rest is because of hardware failure and that’s it.
My peer not being tech-savvy might install stupid things from stupid places and it might be a problem.
The way it’s done it’s unlikely, but still it just complexify things for next to no reasons in my book. (Yes 30% is a lot; I personally don’t care, though I do recognize I’m a good position and I can afford not to–but then again, the most vocal about the 30% are not the most unwealthy…)
That's also solveable. For android you need to enable deep inside of the settings to allow 3rd party installs. Nobody is preventing Apple to do something like this. Or that you can create a profile that disables that setting that you can install on your familys devices. Nothing in the DMA prevents this.
Just because it makes your life easier as the family tech support is a pretty selfish reason to hope for a very good pro-consumer law to fail.
The way it’s going I’m actually pretty sure if they did that they’d get reprimanded…
Also it makes my life annoying when I open Safari and am presented w/ what can be told as the worst pop-up ever and have to spend literally minutes dismissing it for something I neither wanted nor needed. It’s the cookie banner all over again.
Does not seem like a lot, but as a developer I use devices in a factory configuration a lot, and it’s just as annoying as it’s useless.
Basically it’s the cookie banner again. Served no-one (at least definitely not the consumers), but annoyed a lot.
As for the “those that want to use their 1000€ device differently than you now have the chance to,” well……… nobody forced them to buy a 1000€ device did they?? They knew of the limitations; they had to, or they’re very dumb.
The law is not pro-consumer contrary to people say, it’s anti-garden, which is definitely not the same, and I’ll die on this hill.
> Basically it’s the cookie banner again. Served no-one (at least definitely not the consumers), but annoyed a lot.
Oh no, you have to be given the option to not permit your data to be shared with ~1000 different partners with "legitimate" interests. Honestly, the only thing that is wrong with GDPR is that it came out too late.
Every time you dismiss a "we care for your privacy" banner, you're being made aware that your data is shared with hundreds or thousands of data brokers with "legitimate interest". The fact that vendors prefer to make your experience miserable rather than give up tracking is another example of "malicious compliance".
What happens is that you now have the right to request a copy of the personal information a site has collected and ask them to delete it. You can also sue them if they don't fulfil your request. You're welcome to exercise your rights as an EU citizen at any time.
> Also it makes my life annoying when I open Safari and am presented w/ what can be told as the worst pop-up ever and have to spend literally minutes dismissing it for something I neither wanted nor needed. It’s the cookie banner all over again.
Know what's cool? Firefox on android supports ublock origin. There are some chromium forks too with desktop extension support (on android). Funny what an open(er) market and easy of installing apps does, huh?
Nearly no sites comply with the cookie-banner law, if they did, you wouldn't mind it.
It essentially says "Tell the user you're tracking them, give them a button to click not allow you to do that". If sites actually did that, I honestly couldn't care less about the extra second it would take to click "No, fuck off".
People (myself included) say the same thing about why they buy their tech illiterate relatives macOS computers. And it works. And guess what, it works despite Apple not getting a cut of every everything.
My girlfriend only install the handful of apps she wants both on her Mac and her iPhone and doesn't go back to the app store. She just put things on auto update. Most people don't fiddle with their computing device. And if installation steps are confusing, she just asked me to do it. I guess that's why Microsoft are enabling so many things on Windows as most users won't enable them by themselves.
That's neither here nor there for whether Apple has the right to insert themselves into every transaction on their platform and gets to decide which apps are allowed to exist.
And let's not kid ourself: Microsoft is enabling (and re-enabling and re-enabling and re-enabling) so many things because they are slowly turning their OS into spyware to make more money, not because they care at all about their users.
I'll re-iterate Cory Doctorow's quote: "Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit".
It's perfectly reasonable to create even more walled gardens than the Apple walled garden, once you open up for different markets. That's the beauty of choice.
For years Apple has placed deliberately crafted limitations on 3rd party apps that put theirs at an advantage. They've done anything but treat developers fairly. If they did, maybe this legislation was unneeded, but with the way they've been acting, it feels like a long time coming.
Until some apps are not in the App Store or a website is chromium-compatible only… Or that apps (e.g. youtube) outside the App Store is surprisingly more feature-complete than the equivalent in the App Store…
Don’t worry they’ll find a way to make it socially mandatory (the same way not having a google account nowadays seems impossible (I don’t personally but still do because of work for instance)).
And if you don't trust an app vendor without Apple's underpaid Chinese reviewers playing with it on an iPad for 5 minutes to guarantee your safety, then don't use those apps that pull out of the App Store. If YouTube or FB pull out of Apple's App Store and go to their own, Apple will have to cut it's hosting fees to get them back or lose that business and you'll suffer not because Google and FB pulled out of the App Store but because Apple pushed them out with exorbitant fees. You should want Apple facing that threat because it'll lead to lower App Store prices as developers won't pad a $5 app with $1.50 in extra cost to you to cover the exorbitant Apple fees. But you'd rather blame users who want to run what ever software they want on the computers they purchased than blame Apple's shitty business practices. That's on you, bud.
Once again there are alternatives; nobody forced anybody to buy iPhones.
It’s not like Apple lied at any point saying “buy our phones and do whatever you want on them!” No. It’s clear. You do what they want. In what name should they be forced to “open” it to anybody?
What’s next? Force google to make their map data open? How would that go? It’s mostly the same thing.
I have no idea what your argument is here. That people shouldn't advocate for greater competition in the marketplace just because they already bought a phone?
It's not at all the same thing? Also there's a more apt comparison, which is forcing Google to make Android open and allow alternative app stores (oh wait, they already do).
App stores are a natural monopoly. An app store with more users attracts more developers. An app store with more apps attracts more users. It has a strong network effect and economies of scale. Natural monopolies should be regulated to prevent abuse by the first companies that capture wide market share.
To be blunt, Apple, Google, and other tech megacorps should be glad that we as a society allow them to exist in the first place, even despite growing to the size where they are clearly hindering free market (by actively blocking competition). Never forget that corporations are artificial entities chartered by governments; and nobody has a natural right to a corporate charter, so those can and should come with hefty strings attached.
> And if you don't trust an app vendor without Apple's underpaid Chinese reviewers
This misses the mark so badly that it’s not even worth reading the rest.
App Review is based out of Sunnyvale and has more than 300 people that make on average $85k/y in their first few years, and mostly over $100k/y after three years.
Long tenured people, the ones that last more than 5 years and are advancing towards a decade of doing the work get close to $200k/y with some exceptions over that number.
Many of those 300 people are multilingual, some specialize in a specific language, but to expand and better serve non-English markets, Apple recently opened a branch in Ireland and one in Shanghai.
The latter mainly focusing on the Chinese market and the one in Ireland specializing in European languages and supplementing the English market.
I doubt it. "Walled" and "Safety" are getting confused here.
I think you like the App Store for its safety. You trust it, enough to be happy with it.
What does that have to do with wanting others to be denied alternatives? That deliver however much safety and different benefits that other people want?
If safety is one of Apple store's selling points, then competitive app stores will push Apple to deliver even more safety. Perhaps new forms of safety others pioneer. Apple didn't invent security or sandboxes. While also encouraging it to loosen non-safety driven (and therefore quietly non-customer friendly) restrictions on innovation.
Complying with what you guess at the lawmakers' intentions was/were is a fool's errand. The law is the text, nothing more, nothing less. That's the point of the law. If the law falls short or has loopholes, it's a bad law and it's the legislature's job to fix it, not citizens' to suss it out.
To assume the law means things that aren't written in the law is, quite basically, undemocratic.
Written it in another comment. If there are ambiguities in the written law, for example because the legislature did not specify in the text of the law, that you can't charge for the access to the platforms, high courts like the CJEU will take approaches where they determine the spirit of the law (i.e. by looking at the discussion material the legislature presented for passing the law) to find out what the intent of the legislature was and then defines this law.
This is for example how Germany now has a basic right to data protection. It's not written in the constitution, it was formed by our supereme court by looking at what the intentions of the author's of our constitution were. Same principle applies to EU laws.
I agree that this is not a citizen's job. That's why I wrote that I am very happy to see the EU commission drag Apple in front of the CJEU.
The DMA is perfectly clear regarding its intention and context. Trying to split hairs to find wiggle-room in the text just so a gatekeeper can maintain the status-quo for a while longer is absolutely malicious.
Furthermore, Apple’s behaviour is quite discouraging for us EU based developers who actually understand and aspire to the EU’s values and what we consider “normal” treatment of the people using our apps and services.
Obviously Apple doesn't hold the EU's values in high regard (few people in the Bay or even the US do), so of course they will try to fight it. It's perfectly rational and even expected behavior.
And it's perfectily rational for the EU to take appropriate actions against companies that hold its values in contempt. Apple should expect that and temper their contempt accordingly if they intend on continuing to do business here.
> I am really impressed how much time and effort Apples legal department spends to find every single loop hole in the wording of the DMA.
Maybe this is an American trait, but I would be surprised at any company that wouldn't be doing this. A law has been made that affects our business: How do we comply with the law with as little impact as possible to us?
Some of the comments here seem to expect Apple to simply give up, as though a parent just walked in the room and said "You better do it or else."
If it's really the spirit of the law that counts, then the law should require no specificity. A simple "Treat everyone fairly, installs can come from anywhere" would be sufficient.
Perhaps it seems unusual, as Apple has so much technical control, an unusually extensive legal budget, and doing a very effective job of castrating any "threats" or as the EU might say "significant competition".
And Apple has the cash to play chicken with any potential fines if it comes to it, so its not hedging much if at all.
It is clear that the EU is going to have to get very tough, before Apple is going to proactively take into account any of the "spirit of the law" that the EU would like it to understand.
Being a complacent market leader may come back to bite them in the backside.
The world is getting more technical. People will demand openness. If I buy a product, I should have reasonable flexibility to use it how I want. Even if I break it, repurpose it or improve it, I want the choice to do so, just like I have with pretty much every other thing I own.
People will vote with their wallets if Apple refuses to open things up a bit.
Theres literally billions of dollars of pure profit on the line here. Id be surprised if they dint do absolutely everything they could to keep the app store the way it is.
> such as being a member of the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more and having an app with more than one million first installs on iOS in the EU in the prior year, and commit to ongoing requirements
I didn't expect much but that list is a big joke.
If you were looking for a way to distribute your ios software on the web, well that ain't it.
that makes no sense. google owns android and the default browser on android and so they'd have all the same users using their search and saving some of that cash for any that switched to the Android VM. how is that a bad deal for google?
> In addition, developers will soon be able to distribute apps directly from their websites, providing they meet Apple's specific criteria, such as being a member of the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more and having an app with more than one million first installs on iOS in the EU in the prior year, and commit to ongoing requirements, such as publishing transparent data collection policies. Apps distributed in this way must meet Apple's notarization requirements like all other iOS apps and can only be installed from a web domain registered in App Store Connect.
So, there will still be a centralized chokepoint for censorship of apps the government would prefer you not be able to have on your phone. Cool.
This means no protest apps, no encrypted communications apps unless they have the appropriate government approval/licenses, etc.
This is the same censorship they exert over the app store. It's no benefit to users.
It's the big apps and vendors I want to have protection against. My negotiation position towards Facebook etc. is very weak. This is why I like when Apple is putting certain limits for them.
With smaller apps I don't have this problem. There's typically plenty to choose from. If I don't like the policies of one, then I can go for something else.
Your negotiating power to make any app list in the any app store is approximately zero. If Facebook decides for any reason to leave, neither you nor Apple can stop them so this imagined power you think you get from Apple's App Store policies is just that.
If Apple is forced to allow FB an alternate path and FB takes that path abandoning Apple's App Store, you can blame Apple for the extortion fees in its App Store that are driving FB and others away. Had Apple not been so greedy, there wouldn't have been suits and the EC wouldn't have forced their hand, but Cook's gotta cook for shareholders and leaving even a single penny on the table would be against his commitment to them.
My grocer, who does far more for my well being than Apple, makes 2-3% store-wide markup and he still manages to invest in his store, feed himself and his family, and employ a decent sized staff on that ~2.5% -- and that's the case for most grocery stores, big and small, and we're all real good with that and have been for several decades, these people building actual buildings and gathering up the best foods the world has to offer from hundreds or even thousands of suppliers and paying people to cut open boxes and stock shelves with these amazing foods and mop the floors when we break jars of food that we never pay for he and his crew take sh*t from customers who had a bad day (who might even rob or assault them) and all for 2.5% margin while folks here, on a hacking forum of all places, simp for a walled garden that's extracting 30% from mom and pop hackers for providing what amounts to web hosting.
> First annual install. This is the first time an app is installed by an account in the EU in a 12-month period. After each first annual install, the app may be installed any number of times by the same account for the next 12 months with no additional charge.
Okay...
> A first annual install may result from an app’s first-time install, a reinstall, or an update from any iOS app distribution option — including the App Store, an alternative app marketplace, TestFlight, an App Clip, volume purchases through Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager, and/or a custom app.
Do I understand this correctly that you will have to pay the fee for each user (above the 1 million free) even if they just get an automatic update? Given that updates are automatic by default, you will end up paying even for inactive users (users who installed the app but long forgotten about it and don't use it).
Oh man Apple is finally getting a feature Android had for 10+ years! Maybe in like 20 years iphones will finally have the features a $100 android has and will be up to bare basic standards.
I def look sideways at people who buy a used $300 iphone when you can get a safer, higher quality, more feature phone with more for $150. This is different from someone buying Nike Jordans because they are status insecure, because Nike Jordan's dont affect my life. A critical mass of Apple users caused developers to make Apps for iPhones.
> Alternative app marketplaces. Marketplaces can choose to offer a catalog of apps solely from the developer of the marketplace.
How does that count as a "marketplace"?
> Web Distribution ... will let authorized developers distribute their iOS apps to EU users directly from a website owned by the developer
All of this just makes it crystal clear what Apple's goal is: to prevent competition. It's not about security like they've been lying about; it's all about maintaining their app store monopoly.
Before this, if you had an alternative marketplace, you had to accept submissions from other developers. You are still allowed to accept submissions from other developers, but are no longer required to.
I suppose the point is that, if we're being pedantic (and after all, that is what the internet is _for_), you cannot have a single vendor marketplace based on the commonly understood meaning of the word 'marketplace'.
(But yeah, this is just slightly silly naming from Apple).
Apple is just trying to protect users from scammers! I'm sure all this sensible authorization and notarization business will continue even after the fees are removed from the equation
But does it? I haven't seen any hard evidence, and lots of anecdotal tales of technology illiterate grandparents, fathers and mothers being better off.
Particularly when there are better alternatives. For example, put a physical hardware switch on the inside of the device that disables new stores from being added. Now you can set up your technically disinclined relatives with Apple's store, and a couple of others you trust if it pleases you, then flip the switch and they can't get into trouble because they can't add others.
Move the switch back and the device won't boot without a factory wipe. That's going to deter both anyone who can't successfully disassemble the device to flip the switch (i.e. severely technically illiterate people) and the people who aren't willing to press YES to a prompt that says it's about to erase all their data (i.e. mildly technically illiterate people), while leaving it possible for exactly the people it should be possible for.
What happens when Meta, X, Google et al. move to their own stores where they distribute apps unencumbered by Apple's privacy policies? Your relatives then contact you and insist that you flip the switch for them so they can install Facebook and Instagram from the Meta store so they can continue scrolling cat memes.
I have yet to hear a convincing argument (from multi-store proponents) about how to prevent this. If the big social media companies pull their apps from Apple's official store and move to their own stores (with unfettered access to spy on users) then they will be successful at dragging their users with them. Furthermore, there is no evidence that GDPR has had any success stopping them from siphoning up all the data they want.
You tell them to use the service's web page because their app isn't available from a trustworthy source. And if their web page sucks, you encourage them to use a competing service whenever possible and only use the inconvenient one when strictly necessary. Which, as others do the same, pressures the service to do what you want and put their app in the existing store.
This is the same thing that Apple does if they refuse to follow the process as it is, right? You're being insufficiently stubborn. And excessively dismissive if you think users making choices have no power. There are demonstrably people committed to having it their way:
Unless you think tech companies have gotten too big and people don't have a choice anymore. If you have a monopoly, what you want is not another monopoly to fight them over which gets to fleece you, it's to smash them both by any available means. One of which is resistance through personal choices, one of which is... anti-trust enforcement.
Users don't have much power, individually. They express their power collectively through the political system. I'm just very skeptical of the approach taken by Europe with the DMA. It seems to be less about empowering individual users and more about letting other large players carve up the Apple/Google 2-slice pie into a few more big slices.
> about letting other large players carve up the Apple/Google 2-slice pie into a few more big slices
Do you not believe that increasing competition for app stores will "empower individual users"? If yes, please provide an alternative to DMA that will benefits users more.
Apple markets their offering on its privacy and security. In effect, they act as a bargaining agent on behalf of their users which says no to a lot of the tracking Google, Meta, et al. want to do. Due to Apple's marketshare and the nature of this arrangement (the walled garden), these trackers are forced to bargain with Apple as a unit. The DMA seeks to put an end to this arrangement and allow the trackers to bargain with users individually.
So, to answer your question: no, I do not believe it will empower individual users. If we really want to empower individual users we should be looking to inject more competition into the social media markets as well. More "app stores" that do nothing but offer the same apps while bypassing Apple's protections will not benefit users. And if the 30% Apple tax is the real problem then why not legislate against that directly?
> If we really want to empower individual users we should be looking to inject more competition into the social media markets as well.
Sure, but you can do both.
> More "app stores" that do nothing but offer the same apps while bypassing Apple's protections will not benefit users.
It's not just the same apps though. For example, the license Apple uses for the app store is incompatible with the GPL, so no one can make an iPhone app under the GPL or use existing GPL code in one. That license is one of the things that allows collaborative projects to form and right now that can't happen for iPhones.
Likewise, the $100/year fee deters hobbyists from creating apps.
And Apple prohibits certain types of content in their store, e.g. adult content or P2P apps, which some users would want.
> And if the 30% Apple tax is the real problem then why not legislate against that directly?
Price controls are generally a bad idea. The cost of hosting the app installers is generally negligible, but a few apps could be huge, and then it isn't, so how much should it cost? Can they charge a flat percentage of sales or does it have to be per-GB of transfer? What happens when the market price of storage or bandwidth changes over time? What if it's different in different regions?
Legislating rules to handle all the edge cases is a fool's errand when competition would handle it for you because anyone who charges too much would lose business to someone who charges less.
Users have a lot of power individually. The most obvious example is when there is competition. You could be a single person and your counterparty could be the world's largest corporation, but if you have ten other viable alternatives, they can do no worse to you than the best of your other alternatives or you just choose the other one.
But you can also do it by being stubborn. Some people seem to have completely forgotten how to do this. There is a transaction with a surplus of $100, the counterparty is some egregious monopolist and the deal they offer you is that they get $99 and you get $1. A lot of people take the deal, because $1 is better than nothing, but that's not it. What you do is flip over the table and walk away, because that costs you $1 but it costs them $99 (or $50 or whatever their share would be after offering whatever it would have taken to satisfy your sense of fairness).
People are so lazy now, or they've been conditioned, so now they always just take the $1 even if the alternative is only a minor inconvenience for them. Okay, you have to use Signal instead of WhatsApp, so what? But being willing to walk away from an unfair offer can sometimes be to your advantage even in an individual negotiation, because you both know the other party has more to lose. It's definitely to your advantage when other similarly-situated people do the same thing at scale. See also:
> They express their power collectively through the political system.
They express their power collectively however they want. Organizations (e.g. FSF, EFF) can do things like pool money to create competing systems. Even for-profit corporations can do this -- you don't like the incumbent? Start a competitor, and raise funding from all the other people who don't like the incumbent.
But again this seems like something people have been conditioned to believe doesn't work, even though it obviously does. To take a simple example, the EFF created Let's Encrypt, which cut the legs out from under the certificate mafia and made TLS free for everybody. All it took was an organization to pool enough resources to develop the initial implementation.
> I'm just very skeptical of the approach taken by Europe with the DMA. It seems to be less about empowering individual users and more about letting other large players carve up the Apple/Google 2-slice pie into a few more big slices.
Government regulations often fail as a result of incompetent administration or some corruption. But some forms of anti-trust can only be fixed through the law because the trusts themselves were created that way.
If government enforce contracts in restraint of trade then people will enter into contracts and form a cartel or enforce a monopoly. That is not acceptable, so then governments have to constrain what kinds of contracts they're willing to enforce, and somebody has to write down what "restraint of trade" means to establish how that works. It's not fun and they'll often get it wrong but the only alternatives are to either not have governments enforce contracts or allow cartels to form that become de facto private governments. So we do the best we can.
The EU is not great at this, but the problem they're trying to address is real, so sometimes you just get to sit back and watch two entities you don't really like have a fight with each other.
Except that Signal is free and nothing prevents anyone from having both installed at once, so you being stubborn can get your contacts to install the free app that takes two seconds to install.
Then everyone ends up on Signal because anyone can install Signal but the stubborn people refuse to install WhatsApp, at which point "everyone you actually need to communicate to is on Signal, WhatsApp is pretty much useless."
But in order to get there, you (the collective you, the median pedant) have to be more stubborn than the people who want to use WhatsApp, instead of the other way around.
Most casual contacts aren't going to install Signal just for you, no matter how stubborn you are. They'll just shrug and go their way.
I've been there, actually running Signal as my primary IM for several years. The number of people I "converted" who stuck around was, in the long run, zero.
> Your relatives then contact you and insist that you flip the switch for them so they can install Facebook and Instagram from the Meta store so they can continue scrolling cat memes.
You should not have to police adults on what they're allowed to do with their property. If someone asks me to help them setup their computer, I may gave some advice and warning about things to avoid. If they asked me to do something that may be dangerous, I can refuse to do it, but I will not actively prevent them from doing so. They're not children.
If someone is ok with putting their whole digital life at risk, then let him do so. Just like you can't prevent someone who wants to eat cake all day. It's not your life.
> You should not have to police adults on what they're allowed to do with their property.
The fundamental problem with this "power to the people" mentality is that adults don't actually know how to use technology. The average person is technologically illiterate.
You can go on about giving adults full control over their property, etc. etc. but we both know that this is how you get security disasters: old people getting scammed, people losing their life savings and what not.
Part of being an effective security engineer, is realizing that you need to protect people themselves. 2FA is a prime example of security driven via this mindset: necessary because the technologically illiterate masses reuse passwords. There are other benefits, but that's the main reason.
So you shouldn't have to police people, but practically, in the end you do.
> If someone is ok with putting their whole digital life at risk, then let him do so.
All fun and games until people lose their life savings and get forced into homelessness or whatever.
Then these people start to blame you. Then technologically illiterate senators and regulators will also blame you. Lose-lose scenario.
Crypto is a prime example of what happens when you give people control. "Power to the people!," tons of people get scammed, and this prompts regulatory lockdown.
TL;DR is that the EU regs wouldn't be a problem if Apple could hide the functionality behind developer settings, but they can't. Exciting times, people in the EU are gonna get totally fucked by shady apps. GG.
> You can go on about giving adults full control over their property, etc. etc. but we both know that this is how you get security disasters: old people getting scammed, people losing their life savings and what not.
This happens when senile people are legally authorized to exercise control over their assets. It has nothing to do with technology and has been happening since before computers existed. The general solution is to appoint a conservator who is required to authorize major transactions.
Which hardly justifies using the same measures for someone of sound mind.
> 2FA is a prime example of security driven via this mindset: necessary because the technologically illiterate masses reuse passwords.
And then their phone number changes or they lose access to their email and you've locked them out of their account.
This is particularly egregious when the second factor is required to be a phone number, because people in financial straits will have their service canceled for non-payment and now you've magnified their problems at the worst possible time. But phone numbers serve as a convenient tracking ID since most people only have one of them, which may explain the popularity of requiring them "for your own protection".
> All fun and games until people lose their life savings and get forced into homelessness or whatever.
We build insecure systems and then blame the users for it and offer to lock them in a cell to protect them from our bad choices.
Why is it that anyone can charge a credit card or a bank account who has the account number? Public key cryptography has been a thing for decades. Put a USB-C connector on the credit card itself and require the card to be plugged in to the device the first time each merchant wants to charge the account. 99% of credit card fraud, gone, because you can't breach one merchant and use the card info at a different one without physical access to the card.
Meanwhile anyone could trivially cancel a subscription because the list of authorized merchants would be listed on the bank's account webpage and the user could remove one at any time.
> Crypto is a prime example of what happens when you give people control.
Anybody can go to the bank, right now, and withdraw cash and hand it to a scammer. Sometimes they do. You can also give them your television or company ID badge. Cryptocurrency is no different. Most of the crypto scams are get rich quick schemes, which people have been getting scammed by since the invention of barter.
What made cryptocurrency so susceptible to scams wasn't that people were in control, it was that some people were actually getting rich, which made others credulous, and that attracts con men.
"We have to protect people from themselves" is only true for small children and the mentally ill. Adults get to make their own choices -- because there is no one else to make them. As soon as you appoint someone else to do it, that person has a conflict of interest and the incentive to defect, and the person affected needs the right to choose differently unless you can prove that this specific person is mentally incapable of exercising reason.
"Nobody is ever completely reasonable" doesn't cut it because that applies to the gatekeepers too.
>What happens when Meta, X, Google et al. move to their own stores where they distribute apps unencumbered by Apple's privacy policies?
I guess pigs fly or hell freezes over. Musk and Zuckerburg had years after such changes to make their own store on Android (which put in similar privacy policies at the same time as Apple). It doesn't make any sense for them because being off the main store is worse than gleeming off a bit more data to sell.
>I have yet to hear a convincing argument (from multi-store proponents) about how to prevent this.
How about proving that the subjects in question are on multiple stores to begin with, or otherwise have shown interest?
You're questioning GDPR's validity, but your own premise isn't a thing to begin with.
Why should that be prevented exactly? Why shouldn’t users be able to download apps directly from companies if they want to? Isn’t the whole point of the EU legislation to make all this possible?
> lots of anecdotal tales of technology illiterate grandparents, fathers and mothers being better off
I'll bite. Is there anyone here that thinks overall security for elderly (and lower skilled users) will *not* be hurt by additional app stores? I find it hard to believe. And, I write this post an an uber geek is is neither an Apple fan boi, but is very impressive by their overall security and UX. For the geeks, it would be great to have more stores. For the average users... maybe... For the least tech-savvy users, I cannot believe it will benefit them.
> For the least tech-savvy users, I cannot believe it will benefit them.
My parents are in their 80s and use Android with F-Droid (I set it up for them). No scams. No account or password. No ads. Simple apps. They have definitely benefited from having more choices available to them, specifically a repo of software built with something other than profit motive in mind. Apple's not very good at offering that.
I still feel like that argument is like a "won't somebody please think of the children" one.
If app stores need to be locked down to protect the elderly, then surely the Internet needs to be locked down to protect all children. After all, Safari still navigates little Jimmy to pornhub if he clicks the link.
I feel like the real solution, same as the one most parents should be using instead of forcing it into everyone else is the same it's always been; don't give young Jimmy unfettered access to the Internet (and use a child/safety filter in your own home/on your own devices) and for Apple to provide a setting that enables/disables alternative app stores, so that children of the elderly can choose for them in the same way they'd choose for their children.
In fact, Apple devices already ship with something called "Assistive Access", which is a mode that you can enable that limits what can be done with the phone. In particular, it limits the ability to install apps.
I think you are overall correct that the iOS store does improve the experience of the elder. But I suspect it's more due to the lack of 'side loading' and locked user experience and less so do to do with apple inspection/code review. I have no evidence to support this.
My original question was a request for hard evidence which I think is lacking in arguments of security and safety.
I think I've seen an equal amount of press surrounding fake and useless apps on both android and apple platforms. But this is purely observational.
The vast majority of Android users use the Play Store (or the Amazon thing) exclusively. So Android is not different than iOS in this regard.
The vanishingly few remaining users use F-Droid (sometimes exclusively), which is probably the safest app store on Earth, with GNU/Linux and *BSD distros' base repositories. Open source only, reproducible builds with public recipes written independently, trackers removed (because they usually rely on non-free libs).
I honestly don't see how having only one store makes an OS safer. That store could be an unchecked mess.
We could talk about policies around app inclusion and permission management though.
If the argument is "the number of stores is not a useful metric", I agree.
If the argument is "Apple in particular has a huge vested interest in making sure that their first party App Store doesn't distribute malware", that's somewhat stronger.
I don't know which argument nektro was trying to make, I could read it either way.
Personally, I lean towards the point about vested interests, although it is only "lean towards" not "fully embrace": what they care about isn't strictly security, but their bottom line, and being a US company with US moral norms and US payment providers, this can also be observed in the form of their content rules — they seem to treat sex as a much more important thing to hide than violence[0]. This does not sit well with people like me who think violence is bad and sex is good.
[0] A bit over a decade ago, the app submission process flagged the word "knopf" in German translations, telling me it was a rude word and I might get in trouble if I was using inappropriate language. It's the German word for button… or knob (but in the sense of button, it's never a dick), and so I can only assume someone got a naughty words list in English and translated it literally rather than asking for a local list of naughty words.
> The vast majority of Android users use the Play Store (or the Amazon thing) exclusively
Are you sure? Android phones are pretty big in China, which is by far the world's largest smartphone market, and I guess Play Store & "the Amazon thing" (I don't remember the name either) adoption there is close to 0%. Anecdotally I have noticed a lot of people using phone vendor app stores in India (the second largest market, though half the number of devices as China) and Indonesia (another huge market). Taken together I'm very skeptical that Play Store + Amazon have a majority of Android users.
Google and its services are mostly blocked in China, so using the Play Store would require the use of a VPN or a foreign SIM card. There are a variety of local app stores. I've found that people often just use whatever came on their phone (which is often the phone manufacturer's own app store).
Isn't that kind of the point? The goal was to get out of Apple's clutches when your customers have their devices, so Apple made the thing meant to be independent even more dependent than the original in order to deter adoption.
The parent comment cited Web Distribution as evidence that Apple doesn't actually care about safety and security, when in fact Web Distribution is more secured than Marketplace distribution.
> The goal was to get out of Apple's clutches when your customers have their devices
Whose goal? Read the DMA. It is very explicit that it expects Apple to maintain security of devices and apps.
> The parent comment cited Web Distribution as evidence that Apple doesn't actually care about safety and security, when in fact Web Distribution is more secured than Marketplace distribution.
Which goes to the parent's point that their intent is to prevent competition. Otherwise why would the alternative need more onerous security measures, if not to act as a deterrent through friction?
> Read the DMA. It is very explicit that it expects Apple to maintain security of devices and apps.
It also says that the security measures have to be "strictly necessary" and "there are no less-restrictive means to safeguard the integrity of the hardware or operating system" and "[t]he gatekeeper should be prevented from implementing such measures as a default setting or as pre-installation" etc.
Which implies to me that you not only have to be able to turn them off, they have to be off by default.
The comment literally says "It's not about security like they've been lying about", when the opposite is actually true. They were implying that Web Distribution was a way to get around security of a Marketplace, which is not possible.
Without a kill switch, gatekeepers would lose control over apps, making them "strictly necessary." Most interpretations of the DMA agree.
> The comment literally says "It's not about security like they've been lying about"
The comment literally says: "All of this just makes it crystal clear what Apple's goal is: to prevent competition. It's not about security like they've been lying about; it's all about maintaining their app store monopoly."
There is no reason for the security measures to be more onerous for the competing thing if they were sufficient for Apple's thing, unless the purpose of the security measures is to prevent competition.
> Without a kill switch, gatekeepers would lose control over apps, making them "strictly necessary."
Gatekeepers having control over apps isn't necessary for security. The device's owner having control over apps is. They can opt into a particular gatekeeper's control if they choose to. How is it "strictly necessary" for the gatekeeper to force them to use one provider of vetting services over another? Isn't the point of the act to enable competition?
> There is no reason for the security measures to be more onerous for the competing thing if they were sufficient for Apple's thing, unless the purpose of the security measures is to prevent competition.
Web Distribution means Apple is handing over responsibilities previously handled by the Marketplace directly to the developer. Allowing developers to police themselves is obviously riskier.
> The device's owner having control over apps is.
This is simply not true. Device owners are hopeless at maintaining the security of their devices.
> How is it "strictly necessary" for the gatekeeper to force them to use one provider of vetting services over another?
There are 2 tiers of "vetting services": 1. Marketplaces determine the appropriate content or type of apps allowed in their listings, 2. Apple determines if an app, developer, or marketplace is an outright threat, e.g. if an app turns out to be a scam, or if a bug in an app exposes an exploit, it is "strictly necessary" for Apple to be able to yank the app immediately.
> Web Distribution means Apple is handing over responsibilities previously handled by the Marketplace directly to the developer. Allowing developers to police themselves is obviously riskier.
Doesn't that depend on who the developer is? Certainly it isn't the case that no one exists who the user might trust at least as much as Apple.
> This is simply not true. Device owners are hopeless at maintaining the security of their devices.
"Device owners" includes substantially all people. Many of them are not hopeless and are entitled to make their own decisions. Some of them are even more qualified to do it than the people Apple has reviewing apps.
The hopeless people may be better off sticking to trusted stores, but they can do that without prohibiting others from doing otherwise.
> There are 2 tiers of "vetting services": 1. Marketplaces determine the appropriate content or type of apps allowed in their listings, 2. Apple determines if an app, developer, or marketplace is an outright threat, e.g. if an app turns out to be a scam, or if a bug in an app exposes an exploit, it is "strictly necessary" for Apple to be able to yank the app immediately.
That doesn't change the question. How is it "strictly necessary" for Apple to do that, rather than whoever the owner of the device chooses to do it? It would obviously be possible for a third party like Symantec, Malwarebytes or the makers of uBlock to do the same thing.
Sure, the amount risk probably varies, but you are talking about going from a Marketplace that implements some level of app review to no-review. It's more risk.
> Many of them are not hopeless ...
Exactly, and "many" is not enough. It's not possible to design a special switch only for those qualified "many" - and only them. Platform owners and the EU insist on protecting the unqualified everyone else too.
> How is it "strictly necessary" for Apple to do that, rather than whoever the owner of the device chooses to do it?
It's not in the sense that someone else could do it, but the DMA doesn't require it, so obviously no gatekeeper will. Also, it's a terrible idea because there's no market for it. Everyone already expects it to be free.
> Sure, the amount risk probably varies, but you are talking about going from a Marketplace that implements some level of app review to no-review. It's more risk.
Only if the developer isn't as trustworthy as Apple. In fact, it could be lower risk even if they are less trustworthy than Apple, when it's their own app, because someone who is less competent but not overtly malicious who posts their own app is much less likely to be supplying malware than a general-purpose store that tries to vet everything but accepts submissions from just anyone at all including overtly malicious actors, and could thereby miss something.
And the user, in choosing which alternate stores or developers to trust, can decide that.
> It's not possible to design a special switch only for those qualified "many" - and only them.
Well of course it is. In the worst case scenario you could make the switch irreversible and then once enabled the device could never add another store. But that's really no different than requiring a device wipe to change it back, because a wiped device should be no different than a new device that never had the switch enabled to begin with.
> It's not in the sense that someone else could do it, but the DMA doesn't require it, so obviously no gatekeeper will.
Isn't whether it's "strictly necessary" the condition on which they can demand it?
> Also, it's a terrible idea because there's no market for it. Everyone already expects it to be free.
How is it free? They're charging $100/year and a percentage on top of that.
I love how a never-used-by-courts-before regulation would supposedly already have "most interpretations" with any sort of authoritative value. I can probably walk into a pub tonight and get 27 other "interpretations", they will have the same value of yours. Technically speaking, even the Commissioner's own interpretation might well be flawed - we won't know until a court spends some time on it. I would humbly suggest, though, that when the very same lawmaker who wrote the law is publicly pulling your ears in public on related matters, your interpretations are probably not the right ones.
Apple pay enough real lawyers to defend them, they really don't need pro-bono amateurs.
It's not my interpretation, self-proclaimed humble person. Educated people have been discussing this ad nauseam for months. I would not-humbly suggest you actually read up on topics before breathlessly dismissing them deep down an HN comment thread.
> Apple doesn't actually care about safety and security, when in fact Web Distribution is more secured than Marketplace distribution.
That's a contradiction in logic there. If they cared for security, they would choose the more secured option. But they didn't?
Either they then have provided worse security all along: web distribution could have offered more security than an app store?
Or they could have provided even better security in their app store all along: if they implemented this stricter checking there. Why not?
These arguments are poor and don't stand up to scruteny.
The very simple conclusion is that it's not about security, that it never has been.
No, you're making assumptions about what "secured" means in this context and clearly have no understanding of how any of it actually works. None of what you wrote makes sense.
You could have stopped at "means". No need to be condescending or telling me I don't know how stuff works. I know how stuff works.
My point is, and remains, purely non-technical though. And I also know how language works.
If you say "we don't allow X, only Y, because we prioritize security". Then change that to "we do allow X but will perform extra security scrutiny over what we do at Y" then it does not compute. Again: it proves your first statement was a lie (intentional or not). Because a) it was possible to allow for your level of security and you could've allowed both X and Y all along, or b) you are now lowering your security, proving you don't really prioritize security, or c) you are merely frustrating X in a different way now and security was never the reason not to allow X.
I'm convinced it's both a and c. I surely hope not that it's b.
> it's all about maintaining their app store monopoly.
Does this only makes sense if you assume payments are tied to the App Store? They aren’t.
If you remove payments from your list of motivations, what do you presume Apple’s motivation is to encourage apps to list themselves on the App Store and not a third-party marketplace?
It is much harder to explain to consumers why Apple should get a percentage-based rent (sorry Core Technology Fee that enables Privacy and Security™) if they go to a non-Apple website, download a non-Apple app, to do non-Apple-related things.
Like literally the only participants in that business transaction are the consumer and the company, Apple does not even enter the picture.
It would be like car manufacturers charging you a percentage for going to the grocery store, because they provide a Private and Secure™ transportation platform.
Consumers will soon catch up, and if the EU does not put pressure on Apple about this, they definitely will.
Most platforms would offer the core libraries and services for free as an incentive to attract developers to the platform/make development easier.
This is how it used to be, until Apple got too large and instead of being beholden to developers it flipped the other way around, and now releasing an app for Apple's platform is a supposed privilege.
Take the games industry, where developers and publishers are often given huge incentives by a platform (mostly consoles) to develop for that platform; because games developers are providing value for the platform owner by making the platform more attractive because it has more content options for the consumer.
Why is it so hard for people to wrap their heads around that concept.
> Most platforms would offer the core libraries and services for free as an incentive
Right, as an incentive. That's exactly right. Makers of other platforms chose a particular funding model to suit their commercial strategic environment, not because they were obligated to. Why should Apple be obligated to follow other (or even their own) prior business models?
Sure. Remind me where I can download the free developer kit for the PlayStation 5? Remind me who I need to pay in order to distribute a PlayStation game?
Even back when Visual Studio did cost you an arm and a leg, you didn't need it to build and distribute software for Windows. Free options were always available; you paid for the comfort.
In fact, Windows itself came with everything that you needed to build just about any userspace app in the box since Windows XP SP1 (the first one that included .NET Framework).
It’s more like car manufacturer charging license fees to the dealership for their use of the original manuals and tools to provide services that rely on their diagnostic tools and manuals.
But a car is used for more things than going to the dealership, and the dealership does not sell me groceries. Perhaps I want to race, or carry ikea furniture, or jump start another car - it is a general-purpose transportation device.
Similarly, I dream of going to Epic's website to download some Fortnite, maybe charge a thousand vbucks to mom's credit card if I'm feeling adventurous, and that has nothing to do with Apple or iOS.
This is how every single general-purpose computing platform (including Apple's MacOs) and the open internet has worked for multiple decades.
we don’t care how the car is used. It’s the dealership that pays the fee on service manuals and access to tools, not the customer. The dealership can choose to pass the cost to customer but it doesn’t have to.
Oh but we do care. Not every app developer is a dealership, a car is used in a much broader context.
Some may be like Uber, turning the car into a taxi service, or like Turo, allowing it to be rented. Others may be independent mechanics that can work on the car perfectly fine without access to blessed tools.
There is no cost passed on to the customer because the car manufacturer does not enforce a percentage cut of Uber's or Turo's revenue.
That said, there is likely no perfect analogy in cars. We can instead turn to MacOs / Windows / Linux etc., general purpose computing platforms that do not suffer from a gatekeeper's stranglehold.
An independent dealership can choose to not service particular make of the car, pay for the OEM tools and license for manuals or can choose to obtain those via other means.
You can see where the lack of respect to IP rights leads to when it comes to current espionage claims between some of the world largest economies entangled in a myriad of IP disputes. Ultimately, the question I ask myself is: am I happy with unverified random parts I want to put in my car? Instead of having easy traceability and ability to sue for damages I now have to also vet provenance, authenticity and take on additional risk of an unvetted supplier that I often won’t be even able to sue.
The independent auto shop isn't paying the auto maker a fee every time they change the spark plugs on one of their cars though. They buy a license to the service manual collection and can use that knowledge for however many cars they work on.
This would be the developer buying a license to the SDK and documentation and then that would be it.
Apple fans would always claim that this was a security measure to prevent malware. I have always found the claim dubious.
If you believe in that as a security measure, you could still have a signing requirement and apple could revoke trust on known-bad binaries. Which is probably what they will do.
Mind giving some high level clarification on how Apple would revoke entitlements on applications they’re not allowed to manage? Honestly curious about the infrastructure involved, is it really simple from a technological stand point?
If the developer needs to use Apple resources to track and manage said entitlements, and the consumer expects Apple to police bad actors, then are we asking Apple to do this for free on the bad actor’s behalf (oops, I didn’t mean to use your microphone, GPS, BLE in order to sell the info to an enemy state, law enforcement, angry ex!) or should the cost of said infrastructure be passed to the customer when purchasing hardware? OR does Apple wait until an application is exposed, generally through an echo chamber after the damage is done and is made aware of the issue?
I thought they already do this with notarized binaries on macOS. Conceptually it's no different from certificate revocation. The platform can phone home periodically to discover binaries for which notarization has been revoked.
You may be correct? Then the assumption would be developers need to pay the $99 fee to be part of the Apple dev program (pretty sure that’s the only way to get notarized). Next step in Apple’s playbook might be upping that fee for third party stores?
As an Apple customer in the EU, I'm staying on iOS 17.3 until they rewrite 17.4 4-5 times based on how many times they get fined again for malicious compliance.
"Always wait for a point release". It seems for this we need to wait for the _next_ point release. It should become clearer for EU side of the movement also - it is far from certain that Apple to be the one f*cked.
I don't know about my pet. It would need full storage access, and even I agree that keeping apps separate from each other is a good idea, security wise. I don't see how you can argue against that when you're considering monopoly issues.
On the other hand, Apple not allowing apps not approved by them and not allowing manual single app installs without going through their app store or some other app store does look to me like a monopoly issue.
Are you sure you want iOS? Perhaps you want Android?
Sounds like you just want the iPhone hardware, but not the spirit of the OS that contributed to what it is. Adding manual disk management makes more like running Windows XP than a smooth "mostly just works" phone.
For the same reason I don't switch to Windows: the alternatives are even worse.
Apple isn't the best, no one deserves "best" in desktop and mobile operating systems, but it's the least bad.
In mobiles we basically have a duopoly, and the only ones who are likely to care about the customer's interests are regulators. Neither Apple nor Google have any incentive because there is no 3rd option.
> Apple isn't the best, no one deserves "best" in desktop and mobile operating systems, but it's the least bad.
MacOS and iOS are the most limited in terms of customizability (personalization) and freedom for developing software for them. As much as that might surprise you, many people care about that and can't stand to use Apple operating systems because of it.
What should I do if I have both and want both to operate the way I want because I paid for them? Just like I paid for a Macbook and a Surface and can install anything on both at my will
Or different things should be regulated. You can say the same about drug/alcohol market but somehow these are regulated, why not doing regulations for smartphones/os-es?
Apple keeps a strong control nevertheless, as detailed in the page "Getting ready for Web Distribution in the EU."
> Apps offered through Web Distribution must meet Notarization requirements to protect platform integrity, like all iOS apps, and can only be installed from a website domain that the developer has registered in App Store Connect.
Further, the conditions for eligibility seem to block access to new startups and indie developers.
> To be eligible for Web Distribution, you must: (...) Be a member of good standing in the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more, and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.
An interesting perspective, makes it surprisingly fair play and totally crippling to third parties at the same time.
I guess the outcome will be that outside some completely irrelevant oddballs there will just be one or two entities like Epic serving the intersection of non-casual gamers and people who consider the iPhone a gaming platform and they won't pull much market away from Apple, but serve as a limiter to how much Apple can abuse their platform rule. It will look like a failure, but only because some of the limiting effect on platform abuse will also bleed into makets not directly affected by EU rules.
> One million free first annual installs. Membership in the Apple Developer Program includes one million first annual installs per year for free for apps distributed from the App Store and/or alternative marketplaces.
> Developers of alternative app marketplaces will pay the Core Technology Fee for every first annual install of their app marketplace, including installs that occur before one million.
> Web Distribution, available with a software update later this spring, will let authorized developers distribute their iOS apps to EU users directly from a website owned by the developer.
iPhone users don't really own their own device, do they...
Hence why most European countries just mostly stayed with pre-paid, and operators have been trying to bride us with contracts for iDevices, or if that doesn't get us, contracts in disguise for pre-paid users as post pay.
I will keep using Android devices with physical SIM until it isn't no longer viable.
Due to financing options like Klarna, keeping on monthly prepaid sim-only plans (which are cheap) and using a finance option to purchase the device outright has become much more popular at least in my circle in the UK.
That might be the case, but the phones aren't bound to any specific carrier. A phone bundled with an O2 contract can be used by someone with a Telekom contract.
This really seems like a post from 15 years ago. In my experience prepaid is almost dead. It's the most expensive way to use a mobile phone and you can get a decent sim only subscription for 5 euro per month.
I don't. This is a stark realisation that I have had over the past few years. I would once staunchly recommend iPhones for their strong security, in particular app isolation, on-device AI, and physical device security.
However, over the years there have been more and more instances where Apple decides what I can do with my phone. From restricting APIs to give their first-party apps advantage, to, most recently, not having any (local) method to move voice memos off my Apple Watch.
I've realised they are orchestrating their hardware and software to build a truly solid wall from within which they can extract continuous rent from their captives.
I don't own my device because I cannot freely run the software I create on it (without paying Apple and gaining their approval, which is impossible in some cases).
I'm done with Apple... but there are no acceptable alternatives. Android is bad in other aspects.
This is not a free and fair market; it's a duopoly.
I genuinely pray weekly for a phone like the Framework Laptop, where I can run my own software (Arch Linux) and repair and replace the hardware as needed.
I assume you're aware and have some other reason that disqualifies it (e.g. you're in the US), but Fairphone does exist and comes pretty close (i.e. PostmarketOS is supposed to run, at least): https://www.fairphone.com/
Thank you. I did actually come across this a few weeks ago as I semi-regularly search for new phones in my despair!
It is the closest phone to what I have been after for a while. I particularly like their long software support and their support for right-to-repair. It runs stock Android, however I'm not sure whether that means Google is still fully entrenched into all aspects of the phone by default including through Play Store APIs, notifications, etc.
(If anyone would shed some light on the software side, I would appreciate it because I'm not familiar with modern Android.)
Even if it were suitable I would not be in a position to buy it for a while, hence I am still plodding along with my iPhone but just keeping an eye out for good alternatives.
Edit: I re-noticed you said it runs postmarketOS. That's awesome and I'll need to look into it - I know very little about it. Though it seems many aspects of the hardware are not supported on even the Fairphone 4.
Fairphone runs pretty standard Google Android, basically what you get in the emulator if you ask for the "Google Play" image, sliightly closer to AOSP than the Pixels.
The bootloader can be unlocked trivially (just like on OnePlus/Nexus), but loses SafetyNet when you do.
The company that imports Fairphone 4 to the US (Murena) runs e/OS which is OK. There's a bit of FUD that pops up on HN about e/OS from time to time, but the reality is that it's a mostly de-Google'd but still usable LineageOS clone. Their emphasis is on de-Googling, and usability, not security. It's probably worth a look. I'd say that their privacy/de-Googling is the best of all the LineageOS flavors. You can see comparisons between all the flavors here:
That said, you can flash any Android Os that supports Fairphone, or PostmarketOS to it.
The phone itself is responsive/quite good despite being a bit old at this point. I can do all normal phone tasks (email, web, music, navigation, etc) with no lag or any issues. I have not attempted to game on it. The Fairphone 4 is modular, parts are available for repairs, and it works great in the US with T-Mobile or T-Mobile MVNOs.
Yup, this is the choice: Either a walled garden run by Apple that has a price premium. Or a discounted device by Android that allows Google to snoop on all your data if you want to use a single one of their services (App Store, Gmail, Google Maps) - and correct me if I'm wrong but without play services enabled an Android is not really usable. I rather pay the premium.
GrapheneOS is as close to a private phone as possible nowadays, though it does require paying Google a somewhat hefty premium too (not as expensive as the iPhone, still). You can definitely use Android without Google apps, though GrapheneOS does include options that would let it behave like a normal app without special privileges. You can even isolate it to a work profile so it has no access to your main.
GrapheneOS runs the google play services as a containerized app instead of a system level app, allowing you to disable access as needed. The downside is that it's only available for pixel phones.
I depends what you want from your tool. I get around 4 years of use from the device. I upgrade every 2 years, and my son inherits my old one. I replace the battery if it's below 80%, it's usually once when I hand it over to my son.
That is a reasonable fee every month for the tool I get. I'm not tweaking every little thing and I don't need full access. I don't want it either. So far, Apple has created dependable devices that serves my purposes. I don't see the value in "upgrading" my phone. Maybe the pace will soon be slowed enough that it makes sense, but so far, the leap every 2 years has been enough for me to justify it. I know that is not what everybody want.
I used to do hardcore linux on computers as well, but now that I have other things I want to spend time on, I just need a laptop that is a tool. And maintaining and especially debugging Arch/Debian/Whatever breakage due to an upgrade is not part of the things I want to spend time on.
In principle, I do agree that we should have the ability to gain full access, one way or another. Maybe that means you cannot be part of the walled garden, but that should at least be a choice you can make.
I don't see the value in upgrading parts of my phone apart from a failing battery. And if you read it again, I upgrade because my sons phone is 4 years old, and changing the battery is no longer worth it anymore to me.
But I suppose it's better to just jump on semantics instead of trying to understand the whole of the post.
Admittedly, you plus your son get 4 combined years out of the device. It's an unexpected way to count, but it works. And since you were talking about buying new devices, I took it as a context where that's what the word "upgrading" means too. I wouldn't speak of open-source or third-party mods to the phone as "upgrades", just... "modding". Anyhow. Sorry for skimming.
> Be a member of good standing in the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more, and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year
These are the same as the current requirements to create an alternative App Store. So it sounds like this is a way for developers of a single app to allow users to install just their app. Before this comes into effect, these developers will have to create a custom store to allow users to install a single app.
The terms and conditions for web distribution [0] are concerning to say the least. In short, you have to have at least one million first installs annually on iOS to even qualify, in addition to other terms such as "good standing in the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more". I doubt Epic and the like would be considered in good standing as far as Apple is concerned. Also, quote unquote, developers will pay a core technology fee of €0.50 for each first annual install over one million in the past 12 months.
I don't see this ending well for Apple in any measure. It seems they think the EU lawmakers will just go away if they stick their fingers in their ears hard enough, but that's not how the EU works. The gears of EU turn slowly, but grind finely.
In other words, you're only "eligible" for web distribution if you meet the threshold to pay the Core Technology Fee tax? (on top of the other requirements). Sounds convenient.
That's probably to prevent the most obvious workaround of creating a new shell company for every million users. (Which would be not so ridiculous as it sounds, there is plenty of software you cannot buy directly but only through a reseller. Epic could become a pure b2b shop on paper and sell Fortnite clients to regional distributors, or something like that.)
Some time ago somebody made an alternative App Store for emulators, https://altstore.io . I think it works by having users get a developer's certificate and installing the apps like an in-development app. I think it would be really neat if this model got tested in court and declared completely legal.
> Which would be all around moot because the fee itself is illegal
I haven’t seen any statement in any jurisdiction by lawmakers or judges that supports that claim. It also would, to me, feel inconsistent with the rulings I read about:
- https://developer.apple.com/support/storekit-external-entitl...: “Consistent with the interim relief ruling of the Rotterdam district court, dating apps that are granted an entitlement to link out or use a third-party in-app payment provider will pay Apple a commission on transactions. Apple will reduce its commission by 3% on the price paid by the user, net of value-added taxes. This is a reduced rate that excludes value related to payment processing and related activities”
The Epic ruling is in the US and are irrelevant to EU regulations. Dutch regulators have rejected Apple's response to the dating app ruling, and that matter is currently in the courts[1]. Lastly, these latest changes are in response to a new law, the Digital Markets Act.
This makes no sense. All that Apple would have to do to close this loophole is to count installs per group of associated companies or developer accounts.
It makes no sense for app vendors to behave like crime cartels or sanctioned regimes in order to avoid a 30% fee. The margins are not high enough. It's fraud. Executives could go to jail.
Also, this whole web of companies would have to distribute the same set of apps, which would make it relatively easy for Apple to spot. Contrary to a prosecutor, Apple doesn't have to prove anything. They just close the accounts without recourse if they have any suspicion. End of story.
And the app vendor would have to forego the benefit of accumulating reviews under one name. Or they could have the opposite problem, users gravitating to one of the clones that ranks highest. How would they make sure each clone has no more than 1 million users?
This is no way to run a company. It's totally bonkers.
>I think Siemens Germany is a nice example of just such a cartel.
No, Siemens is not a criminal organisation running a web of hidden shell companies. Siemens is a conglomerate comprising a large number of subsidiaries and associated companies that they publish right on their website [1].
I have no doubt that large companies use complicated structures in order to exploit loopholes. But there are limits to that, especially as Apple doesn't require a complex lawmaking process in order to change their ToS. They can close a loophole at the stroke of a pen. And they can close developer accounts at will if ToS are violated.
The speed at which apple can alter their ToS is indeed a key differentiator.
Any cartel instantly becomes a criminal cartel if governance over laws/EULAs is basically absent and biased against the cartel.
[added]
Not saying Siemens is nefarious, but they do seem to be subverting the spirit of law. The conglomerate sure makes it easy to "reorganize" without due process for firing lots of employees.
> I think Siemens Germany is a nice example of just such a cartel. Nicely distributed in small chunks to abide to the letter of (labour) law.
Siemens is not a good example. If you're looking for better examples, there's Aldi. It intentionally splits its structure to avoid triggering stricter labor and reporting laws.
Yes, plants grows massively faster with higher CO2, plants has been CO2 starved for millions of years now but add it in labs and you can see plants growing more than 100% faster.
Probably the reason we see less mineral density in crops today, CO2 levels has risen so they grow faster but mineral supply is the same. So probably not very beneficial, we aren't lacking in plant calories as is.
Maybe? I wouldn't say there was any straw man argument here honestly. More just that they misunderstand issues regarding climate change. They think that people are saying that climate change is causing deforestation, and arguing against that. That's pretty easy to confuse with what people are actually trying to raise awareness of, which is that deforestation is leading to climate change (those same plants that thrive off the additional CO2 in the atmosphere can't do so if the additional CO2 in the atmosphere is there because they're already dead before they can take it out of the atmosphere).
Note: Deforestation continues at a record pace in tropical areas, which leads to less trees and plants to consume the CO2. The exact parts of the planet that should be thriving is being turned into cattle pastures.
The other big sink for CO2 is the ocean, which does not thrive on CO2. CO2 in water turns the water more acidic, which affects the base of the food chain.
There's no propaganda that suggests that plants don't thrive in CO2.
This isn't "Woke Mind Virus", it's just Corporate Pandering. Apple has a huge PR problem with their factories in China, and they've determined that it's cheaper to "Be Green" than to fix their supply chain or move manufacturing back to the US. Their moves towards being green aren't "Bad", but they wouldn't be doing it if they didn't have to create PR to paper over the things they're doing that are actually Bad.
And this is just the iceberg for the beginning of conversation.
No one cares to watch the experts presented that aren't on the "CO2 is evil" bandwagon, nor then actually spending the time to counter their many arguments of these complex issues.
I don't understand yet why no one has created a "Wikipedia" for various organizations to list and offer their counter-argument for the 1000s of different talking points, so then everyone can view them in a matrix/table format - not only for the climate issue and climate alarmism, but for other complex issues such as the Israel-Palestine "conflict".
P.S. There's no life in the ocean that grows from CO2, and that then fish et al eat?
"Through photosynthesis, phytoplankton consume carbon dioxide on a scale equivalent to forests and other land plants."
"There are a billion billion billion phytoplankton in the world's oceans—more than there are stars in the sky. Phytoplankton are hugely diverse, with likely 100 thousand different species."
I think if you surround yourself with children it becomes difficult to hear the adults. It's too easy to drop a hot take and then dip out of the conversation, retreating back to safety, and never develop the tools needed for critical thinking or self-reflection.
You'll never have a chance to understand how the everyday people who aren't edgy internet pals see you, or why, or what that means for your life.
I mean your statement boils down to "is it possible for evil to do good" and I think the general consensus after a few thousand years of thought is "not really".
Initially I approached this concept as "can good do evil?" but after some reflection I think we have a series of choices and what we do in the moment is the only thing that matters. Good is only good if it does good.
If you want to tie religion into the issue, ask yourself "Is it possible to do evil in the name of good?"
That's a bit of an exaggeration financially. I think Apple is afraid 100% of their market cap depends on the App Store, just not so directly.
Phones are "done". Geese don't live forever.
Switching away is hard. In the not too distant future a $99 no brand phone will be equivalent to the iPhone experience for 80% of use cases, modulo the camera.
If apps are just web apps and run on whatever hardware, Apple will need to come up with something new. Maybe the goose was really named Steve.
That’s why I hope they compete hard in the AI-in-your-pocket space. Seems like they got the hardware talent to make that happen (software-wise I’m not so sure, but at least it sounds like they focus a bit more on that now the car project is dead). I want Apple to win by selling expensive devices, not by collecting 30% fee on minors gambling for loot boxes.
There's a very nice premium in execution. (And vertical integration.) For example their laptops are selling like hot cakes ... because they are seen as better made then the competition by consumers. (Sure, it seems the (premium?) laptop market finally getting some competition thanks to Framework/StarLabs/etc.)
Obviously the same is true of the iPhone. And software is a big part of it. (I don't want to deal with Dell and Windows. And Asahi is getting better day-by-day.) And hardware too. (M1, M2, M3, etc.. and the A series chips allow their devices to really shine with the big battery, etc.)
And ... while I don't like the actual UX of Apple-land, I don't like it either that Google with all their PhDs and big brain still cannot fucking solve the jankyness.
Yes, they will hopefully be forced to give up the free money rent from the walled garden, and hopefully it will encourage them to invest in being a good platform, invest in software, win/keep market share on merits instead of by decree.
> In the not too distant future a $99 no brand phone will be equivalent to the iPhone experience for 80% of use cases, modulo the camera
I'm not so sure, for the same reason people still buy MacBooks when cheap Windows laptops are available, and luxury cars when there is no shortage of lightly used Kias.
Laptops and cars have been around substantially longer than smartphones, but it's still very easy to see the difference between cheap and expensive. While technically yes all of them do "the same thing", people are willing to pay for premium, and I suspect (due to relative affordability if nothing else) that the market of people able and willing to pay for a nicer phone is and will remain quite large.
IPhone is a status symbol. Why people buy designer purses or designer clothes. Someone people will look down on you if you text messages show up green on their phone.
Also IPhone still has more revenue opportunity. AI assistant is the next one. Chat GPT has proven people are willing to spend $20 a month on AI that doesn't even hook up to your email, calendar, or files.
Maybe for some but not for everyone.
In the past you could trust that your phone works 7 years instead of 2 years by having software updates. It also is very stable on software side.
I have saved so much money by buying iPhone and using it for more than 5 years.
> Chat GPT has proven people are willing to spend $20 a month on AI that doesn't even hook up to your email, calendar, or files.
The biggest benefit for paying is the large rate limit and the best accuracy on the market. Copilot is useless with 30 responds per day.
"We urge all EU citizens with Apple devices to have an alternate means of accessing critical internet services like banking, to protect themselves in the event we are forced to block all Apple services EU-wide for legal non-compliance."
... then watch AAPL stock drop below NVDA ...
... and Apple come crawling back, suitably obedient.
It is, but all regulation is market manipulation (like, literally. It forces the market equivalent away from the free market). We have decided it's ok to vest that power in governments.
How's that relevant? It's their second largest market for iPhone sales, representing around 25% of total units sold. If, as the parent comment suggested, the EU intervened and somehow banned Apple's services in the EU until they started complying with the law, new iPhones sales would effectively drop to 0.
If all App Store sells stopped in the EU, it would be 7% of their App Store revenue which is only part of their services revenue which is only 1/5 of their overall revenue.
EU is Apple’s third largest market. The largest market ping pongs between China and the Americans
Why do you keep talking about their app store revenue? IF the EU applied pressure on Apple by blocking their services, both app store and iPhone sales would disappear overnight. Nobody is going to buy an iPhone that doesn't work.
Ironically, the iOS banking apps I use are particularly finicky about only running on customer installs without developer capabilities enabled. I very much doubt that banks would queue up to install from web sites etc.
This can't be repeated often enough. App Store revenue (part of Services segment) is a key growth driver and Apple will drag this out for as long as they can.
I think it's inevitable iPhone 16 prices will increase in EU starting later this year. Arguably similar to Valve's Steam Deck, iPhone prices are subsidized by the apps revenue. Apple is going to try preserve their profit margins one way or another.
Increasing prices in response to this is irrational. Prices are a function of what people are prepared to pay.
If people are prepared to pay more for an iPhone then Apple should have already increased prices, and if they are not then increasing prices will make less money.
It's a function of what people are willing to pay and what suppliers are willing to sell for. So I think the price will go up a little bit, but probably not much.
I mean, "unlocked" iPhones can be worth more money than regular ones, at least in theory. In practice, Apple can probably raise prices by 50% even if they would release the same phone just with an incremented number and people will still buy their stuff.
I’m not sure the DMA works like that. Someone correct me if I’m wrong but as far as I understand the DMA applies to Apple’s operations in the EU, not devices that are sold in the EU. If you buy a “locked” iPhone outside the EU and bring it to the EU and set it up in the EU, I believe that Apple still has to comply with the DMA for that device because all of Apple’s services are still operating in the EU. So Apple wouldn’t be able to charge a premium for “unlocked” devices.
Exactly what Apple now provides. Hand-reviewed apps. Trust, quality, safety, integrated in-app payments, etc.
The problem is that there's no opt-out, no one can (even try to) offer (real) alternatives, and thus it's impossible to judge the App Store's value proposition on its actual merits, and in the end consumers cannot vote with their wallets, there's no realistic way from the status quo (of Apple simply extracting economic rent) to a competitive market of stores.
>You don't give up the golden goose. You defend it.
Meanwhile, Android has dozens of stores and Google Play keeps the lion's share because it's built into almost every phone, has most of the apps anyway, and google's own safety assurances built-in. Google has gotten dinged but for much more insidious stuff behind the scenes, which still amounts to a few large publishers out of hundreds.
It's just paranoia at this point. Most of the market is captured, and any part Apple couldn't capture after 15 years (say, maybe premium games) is one they probably weren't every going to capture anyway. This is being worried about a crack in the brick wall while 99.999% of devs will just keep entering the front door like normal people. And most of the remaining people bypassing apple will just throw a brick at the door instead of meticulously exploit said crack.
Charging per install rather than per subscription is hilarious, almost as if all of this is designed to wind up the EU and cause the largest possible fine.
That really doesn't change their point. It's only slightly less ridiculous, but still completely unworkable and obviously against the spirit of the regulation.
I say spirit of the regulation because I'm not a lawyer and don't want to make absolute claims about the law as written, and I trust the EU to close any loopholes that may arise.
Before the iPhone, because I never liked the Mac UI with the bar at the top and the apps menu over there and I didn't need an iPod.
After the iPhone, a personal boycott because of the walled garden. It was not immediately clear what the endgame would be but it was pretty clear that this level of control by a single corporation on a large part of the world is a bad thing.
speak for yourself I've had two apple products, ever, an Ipod touch 4 (trash) and an ipod nano 7th gen, the nano was good but for music playback, I'd never get an iphone, I'm not down to lock myself down to their terrible ecosystem
When? When Apple products will stop being perceived as something better than competition. They somehow created the image that they are some sort of luxury, but if that was ever an actual case its long gone. Don't take me wrong, its a fine long term marketing performance and I respect them for it, but lets be a bit more technical and less emotional here.
Some phones are way more expensive than A top line, have massive cameras, better screens, batteries (I mean real life, one of failures on A side for first decade), better integration with rest of the electronic world (like streaming fullhd tv from phone to any TV I saw so far, or having mouse&keyboard desktop on big screen via single USB-C cable out of box, or very good pen within the phone - image editing goes to another level). Plus you have much bigger variety, anything from 50$. And they are open, not unimportant aspect not only for many HN users.
That doesn't mean they do bad products, in contrary. But emotions aside, its now just another set of products with personally weird philosophy, even weirder emotional fanbase and just a much more closed ecosystem.
I am not a fanboy, but I do use Apple products. They are pretty excellent, and every feature you stated is available within their ecosystem, and more. Their stuff is expensive but it works pretty well together and I've had nearly no issues. The physical quality is at least worth the price I paid for my Apple stuff. The closed ecosystem is semi-annoying to me as a developer but it really doesn't stop me from doing everything I want to.
tl;dr: Some people are just happy with Apple products; we're not cult members and saying that is insulting, frankly.
Only if you take it that way. But when your smartphone is from Apple, along with you laptop, desktop, monitor, mouse, keyboard, calendar, notes, earpods, with a bevy of charging infrastructure to support that, it's not hard to see that you don't have to squint real hard to see it that way. There were some that went as far as to try and nominate Steve Jobs as president.
What about those who have Google phones, run Chrome on everything, have those Google audio pods, Google branded email, Google TVs, etc?
Some people are fanboys of Linux products, and all their shit runs Linux or some other Unix or BSD (more fanboys than for Apple, probably).
I even know a few people who just LOVE Microsoft and their products.
It's fun to make fun of Apple people, I know because I do that too, but in reality the reason people like me own all that stuff is because it "just works together" and I don't have to fiddle with a bunch of random brand stuff to get it to work together, plus I have had a bad experience with Google so I won't use their products. If I hadn't had a bad experience with Google, I may have everything Google branded right now so it "just works together" too.
The first amendment gives you the right to say what you want free of us government interference but doesn’t say anything about people thinking you’re an asshole because you repeat the oldest joke in technology.
My wife has consistently bad experience with iphone, namely 13 mini. Just a badly designed product from her perspective, doesn't integrate well with anything via open standards that others implement effortlessly. She is not a techie, so theoretically an ideal customer, but no she still hates it with passion and next phone will be something-android. Personal anecdotes are sort of meaningless here, aren't they. But apple fans like you seldom disappoint, you seem to take my post personally, not sure why.
I don't get why you immediately try to move discussion into extremes, maybe your style but not most of folks - either you have everything X, or everything Y. Sort of proving exactly my point. You don't even try to understand my argument - I can integrate anything, from any manufacturer. Plug in DELL monitor via usb-c, just works, immediately. Connect Sennheiser earplugs (since airpods pro sounds quality leaves a lot to be desired), bam and flacs flow via aptx-hd seamlessly. I could go on and on.
Apple has very tiny offer to cater to all our needs and budgets. These days, even if price is not the problem, often they don't offer the best on the market. So smart thing is to have a diverse set, the opposite of locked-down you describe. People are beginning to be fed up with that since apple is showing its true colors, and this topic and discussion is exactly about it.
Some of them do! Go check out a Huawei store, or, to a lesser degree, a Samsung one.
It's true that it might not apply to all their products, because they also cater to people without 6-figure USD equivalent incomes, but you can buy the expensive stuff.
What would happen if big companies simply refuse to pay? Will EU put the European employees in jail? Would they put Americans in their jail? Will they do DNS block? Credit card block? Remove apple products from physical store? Many of the EU countries like Germany are export driven and certainly they don't want to close the market.
Apple has so much stuff and money in the EU, that there will be plenty to take. Only recently have the started to take back some of the funds from Ireland. Apple would be in a pretty bad place if those accounts were all seized, not in the last place because it would block all transactions including customer ones, ones to may for servers, rent etc. Apple might look stupid but they aren't that stupid.
Can't they take all the money out a month before they are planning to refuse to pay fine? I am pretty sure EU could never block Apple's fund unless they want to totally remove all the business from EU.
Did you paste that "burn" or did you actually release all that rage to reply to a one-sentence comment?
The comment above yours touches on something important. The US might not look lightly at foreign powers treating US companies in that way. The world of business and politics is give and take, it's not a video game where things can be done one-sided without consequences.
>The US might not look lightly at foreign powers treating US companies in that way.
There's significant momentum in the US against big tech, I fully expect DMA like legislation on the state level in the near future. This isn't being framed as a national/foreign issue but as a democratic and consumer rights one.
Same for other regions. Japan, South Korea, the UK are likely to adopt similar laws, India already passed a sweeping crackdown on platforms essentially treating them like public utilities earlier last year.
Agreed. Apple's stubbornness and clear attempts to retaliate against everyone for these changes are not going to go well for them, and they need to realise that at some point.
It's genuinely shocking how petty the company is acting with these changes, and how obvious their attempts at only doing the bare minimum to follow the law are.
Remember when Apple taunted bigger companies to sue them, in the name of technological freedom? Pepperidge Farm remembers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosumi
So sad to see them on the other side of the table now, using every trick in the book to screw over the entire sector. Mr. Cook, tear down this wall!
These are some cult-like requirements. The term "good standing" comes not from business, it comes directly from the domain of authoritarian-destructive cults.
I do own an iPhone, but I do like the idea of Apple filling up the EU economy by paying out the fines that the EU lawmakers serve and will serve onto them.
Unfortunately this is backwards for me. My mac usage is direct download (when possible) for small developers, but get the advantages of the mac app store when using an app written from someone big. So if I were inclined to download something from Epic I'd want to use the app store anyway.
For phones though I don't have the tools I do on the mac (ios is too opaque) so if I couldn't get it from the Apple app store I just wouldn't download the app at all.
That's fine. Not every citizen has to actively use every right made available to them by the law. That doesn't diminish its value for the ones who do need it.
Perhaps there are many more, perhaps I'm an outlier, and maybe some HN threads might uncover a which (sometimes happens).
Apple’s requirement that you already have a lot of downloads pretty much defeats the support for small indie developers. But I doubt many people care much about supporting them anyway.
> "So while the U.K. court did not find Samsung guilty of infringement, other courts have recognized that in the course of creating its Galaxy tablet, Samsung willfully copied Apple’s far more popular iPad." - https://filklore.com/wordpress/2012/10/are-apple-in-contempt...
I'm a little bit playing devil's advocate here, but: concerning how?
> you have to have at least one million first installs annually on iOS to even qualify
That's not what the site says at all? "Membership in the Apple Developer Program includes one million first annual installs per year for free for apps distributed from the App Store, alternative marketplaces, and/or Web Distribution." That seems to indicate that there is no minimum, and installs up to 1 million are free. That means that (wild guess) 99.5% of all apps ever released will pay no fee. EDIT TO CORRECT: see below, you have to have an app over 1 million downloads in the previous year to participate, but this description of the fee structure is correct. Which is...weird?
> I doubt Epic and the like would be considered in good standing as far as Apple is concerned.
If Apple plays games like this, they deserve consequences. But does it make sense to take this interpretation rather than just assuming the language means what it means: you haven't been kicked off the platform, and you've been around for two years?
> To be eligible for Web Distribution, you must: ... have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.
Ah, sorry, I missed that part. It's a weird distinction -- you could have one app with a million installs, and a million apps with one install each, and all could be installed from your web page?
So this points to the other thing I said, which is that there are very few developers that will meet this requirement.
It's less "concerning" and more "flagrantly ridiculous".
A company has to pay Apple half a euro for every executable download from the company's own website? If Microsoft tried this shit with Windows people would be apoplectic.
And yet, it's pretty common in commercial software and in other industries.
For instance, my application uses a particular commercially-licensed software library. I have to pay a per-copy-sold royalty to the vendor.
Or I write a video game for a console: I have to pay a percentage of my revenue to the console vendor.
Or I use a particular algorithm (eg. an AV codec) and I have to pay patent royalties.
So if your application uses Apple's provided frameworks, and they choose to charge you a license fee (discounted to zero for your first million sales), you're calling it "flagrantly ridiculous"?
It's not: it's a wide-spread, standard practice. It might suck, sure. But hyperbole helps no-one here.
What the hell is going on at Apple? It's starting to become really funny to see one obviously non-compliant malicious compliance attempt being made after another. Do they really not understand that they're no longer involved in the relationships between users and developers?
Yes, that's called having differing opinions and it's not bad. If enough people in the EU agree with this, go for it. If Apple ends up saying that they're willing to abide by the letter of the law and no more, great.
Apple's not abiding by the letter of the law, though. They're the drug dealer flushing drugs before the cops come in, or in this case Apple is trying to buy time because each month they can delay this they're probably making $1bn more.
> When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), rather than focusing exclusively on the wording of the provisions (linguistic interpretation). This is explained by numerous factors, in particular the open-ended and policy-oriented rules of the EU Treaties, as well as by EU legal multilingualism. Under the latter principle, all EU law is equally authentic in all
language versions. Hence, the Court cannot rely on the wording of a single version, as a national court can, in order to give an interpretation of the legal provision under consideration. Therefore, in order to decode the meaning of a legal rule, the Court analyses it especially in the light of its purpose (teleological interpretation) as well as its context (systemic interpretation).
Facebook, too, tried rules-lawyering EU regulations only to be slapped with a huge fine. This shit doesn't fly here.
It feels bizarre that companies keep making this mistake.
People on HN, sure; we aren't all lawyers. But companies? The EU is the second biggest market on the planet, might pass the USA any year now. They really should be familiar with the basics of EU lawmaking.
It feels bizarre to an American perspective. How is a company supposed to follow rules that are open to interpretation? Or does the EU think it can legislate outcomes (even if they're uneconomic) ?
You have to demonstrate that you're willing to follow the law. It's not like you'll get a gigantic fine as soon as the new law is implemented, assuming you actually make an effort to be compliant.
In this case, Apple is dragging their feet screaming trying to do their best not to comply with the intent.
What's going to happen next, they'll get a notice of nonconformity where they're asked to fix their behaviour.
If they don't show good intent, they'll get hit with a fine.
If they fix it and adhere to the laws here, then we'll all end up better - well, maybe the poor shareholders won't survive this hit...
If you're a company operating in the EU, just a little bit of willingness to adhere to the laws goes a very long way.
Because it's not a market, that's the whole problem, you have to target both platforms no matter what you do otherwise you are losing some marketshare. (Unless you are doing it as a hobby like me of course)
It's not like you can install android apps on iphone or iphone apps on android.
Sure in a market you might tell the consumer "shop somewhere else" but that's not an option here since they can't.
Do you suffer from some kind of God complex? People other than you will make their own decisions on how to conduct their own life and business. Even if you don't agree with those decisions.
Why you don't seem to understand how it works in any other industry?
I'm building a house, I'm going to buy the floor at shop B and the walls at shop A because it's a better value.
I want to buy some groceries, I can buy bread at shop A and eggs at shop B.
When you're on mobile you buy everything either at the play store or the appstore depending on your phone, that's it, zero choice, it's either everything in one or the other.
So first a grand total of two stores for the entire world isn't going cut it regardless and then those stores don't even compete with each other anyways because you are locked in to just one with your phone.
Is that any clearer now why it's not a market or still not?
The cost of switching device ecosystems can be comparable to the cost of renting an apartment in richer countries, and exceeding the monthly income in poorer countries. Yet we clearly recognize that renters need protections and can't reasonably be told to just move apartments over anything. So why shouldn't we hold phone ecosystems to the same standards?
Especially when both do their best to make migration to the other difficult.
I... Don't really see what your numbers could look like, here.
Buying a cheap Android phone is $200-300 and selling an iPhone will more than pay for that. Switching from iCloud to something else for backups will actually save a little bit per month.
Average London rent is equivalent to 40K USD per year, as a random "richer country" example. It's not in the same ballpark, is it?
Not per person, I haven't ever been charged per person except in student accommodation and Japanese hotel rooms, not sure how we'd know what that would be.
> The cost of switching device ecosystems can be comparable to the cost of renting an apartment in richer countries
I'm not sure what you are doing with your phone but you should lower your dependencies on tech gadget if switching from iPhone to Android would cost you so much. The law can't regulate primarily for people making unreasonable decisions.
If I ask you to turn on your head lights at day time, am I ignoring your personal freedom?
You can ask anybody anything and it won't interfere with their freedom I think.
You are free to not even listen to the question...
I might judge you based on your decision and chose to ignore you in future. This again would not violate your personal freedom I think
Isn't it that software developers need hardware, and Apple seek to use their position to prevent developers enabling users on their (the user's) hardware without paying a large fee to Apple. Apple already got paid a large fee as manufacturer though
Put another way: Devs don't need iPhones, they need users to have freedom to install the apps they choose to on the computing devices those users own; regardless of the three manufacturers of those devices.
I wonder how this all works for Nintendo wrt the Switch?
Th DMA was written explicitly to target a small group of mostly American tech companies, while excluding others like Nintendo.
Traditionally, console manufacturers have lost money on hardware, and made it up in license fees for software and accessories. It is a bit more complicated in reality, and I think that situation should change, but the DMA as currently written won't have any impact on it.
Yet they are constantly making the case that third-party developers are value sponges that use “their” platform and access “their” customers for free, and give back nothing in return. They said the same towards Spotify in response to the recent ruling about anti-competitiveness in music apps.
What Apple conveniently fails to acknowledge is that they make an obscene amount of money from selling hardware, and their motivation for investing in the platform and SDKs is that more and better software leads to higher sales of hardware. (I am aware that iPhone sales have effectively peaked, which is likely exactly why they have decided that they are the sole enabler of all digital commerce on the iPhone)
Android is too much tied to Google too. At this point, the best that could happen is for the EU to grow a pair, and ban the US (/Russia/China...) tech companies, especially since there's already a 2015 court decision about that :
Why wouldn't they? There's an EU-ran Apple DMA compliance workshop on the 18th this month[1] which I suggest anyone interested listen to. Stakeholders will be able to voice their concerns and there will no doubt be many, mostly about the Core Technology Fee which is non-compliant per se.
How do I so surely know that? Because Article 6(7), the one that forces free-of-charge OS access for developers, is the only piece of the DMA being proactively challenged in EU court by Apple even before the compliance deadline passed[2].
So, this is a strategy that has actually worked quite well for the likes of Facebook in dealing with the GDPR; they did eventually get some pretty nasty (>1bn) fines, but it took a long, long time.
Early indications are that Europe has learned from the mistakes of the GDPR, and enforcement of the DMA is going to be a lot more proactive. Notably, Facebook seems to be scared of it; the delay to launching Threads in Europe seems to have been for DMA/DSA compliance (in particular, it's not login-walled anymore, at least in Europe). Hard to imagine them delaying a product launch for GDPR compliance...
Don't overcomplicate it. They want to preserve their Services revenue, because Tim Cook is a bean-counter and wants to maintain the profit margin. "After Steve" by Tripp Mickle provides some background.
Many Apple indie devs and fanboys are literally screaming. I bet many people @Apple are too. There are so many things the company could do to regain geek-cred. Package manager and windowing on macOS. Align Mac App Store policies with the more liberal Windows 11 Store policies. Let people run what they want, even outside the EU, including other web engines. Invest in Proton so old Windows games can run on Mac (but then, no App Store tax). Keep OpenGL and Vulkan around for the scientific computation folks (and others). Commit to keeping Rosetta2 around indefinitely, because compatibility is your #1 job as a platform. Open-source more stuff (god forbid, your OSes! why not?).
But they've gotten timid and conservative. Top execs see risk, and VPs seem to think they're making products only for the stereotypical technophobic grandpa, rather than power users.
And before the Apple fanbois come and tell you how Apple is a multi trillion dollar business so they know what they’re doing, a reminder that Apple didn’t want the App Store in the first place, and wanted 3rd party apps to be web apps.
It was the popularity of unofficially created apps running on unlocked original iPhones (which led to many unlocking their iPhone) that convinced Apple to create the App Store.
Apple didn’t really want 3rd party apps to be web apps. The infamous “just build web apps” was a stop-gap measure while they were building the App Store.
> It was the popularity of unofficially created apps running on unlocked original iPhones (which led to many unlocking their iPhone) that convinced Apple to create the App Store.
This just isn't the case. The first iPhone with iOS 1.0 was essentially a very advanced demo that just barely made it out the door. There was no SDK, API documentation, or much of any developer toolchain for early iOS. Ask anyone that fought to build even simple unofficial apps what a nightmare using those early frameworks was like. They were not ready for public consumption.
Web apps were never the long term goal for third parties. Steve Jobs might have said that in public but it was a deflection about native SDK questions. Web apps were a stopgap until the dumpster fire of an internal SDK could be rebuilt.
Apple makes money hand-over-fist already. Their stores are the most profitable retail stores per square foot in the history of retail. There's nobody not buying Apple today that would suddenly begin if they did these things.
Some of these things could happen, but I don’t see Rosetta being kept around indefinitely. Keeping compatibility layers around becomes increasingly expensive with time, encumbering OS development and encouraging devs to never update their apps. It also opens up possibility of multiple compatibility layers being maintained at the same time, which multiplies these issues.
It’s much easier to just make virtualization of old versions of macOS easy to facilitate compatibility with old software, which they’ve done — one can spin up a full featured GPU accelerated macOS VM with just a few lines of Swift, so you don’t even have to use third party software if you don’t want to.
Easier for Apple, but worse for users. Apple's main argument has always been this: "encouraging devs to never update their apps", but I don't buy it. Active developers all update promptly long before any threats of deprecation; they even go out of their way to switch to shiny stuff like SwiftUI. It's the long tail that doesn't get updated, and Apple's deprecation velocity changes nothing. Portal 2 (not Rosetta I know) runs poorly in a VM, but ran well on my 2011 MBP.
I've heard from several former Apple fans who switched, and they all marvel at being able to run old binaries without recompilation. Even though they ship apps with the latest frameworks. It's still "just plain cool".
Mac devs are good about updating their apps, but it’s much more hit or miss in the Windows world. If there’s no impetus to regularly update for security reasons (e.g. browsers) or to keep people subscribed (e.g. Spotify), it’s probably not getting updated too often. There’s a considerable difference in culture between platforms, and I think it largely stems from the expectations set by Apple and Microsoft.
Linux is kind of a mixed bag. Some devs are ultra responsive while others only update when absolutely necessary, but the FOSS nature of most apps there helps since you can always take matters into your own hands and fork a project if it’s accumulated too much rust to be usable.
There's no reason to update a program once it's feature complete if it works offline. Apple is pushing harmful updoot ideology that kills old (but perfectly usable) programs.
This is maybe true for software that can never conceivably interact with the outside world (can’t open files, isn’t scriptable, etc) but at least on Windows and macOS where shipping static binaries or necessary libraries with the software is the norm, vulnerabilities pile up pretty quickly these days making it a bad idea to regularly use or in some cases even have installed software past a certain age. For these programs it’s better to just run them in a VM where compatibility can be perfect by running an old OS and the size of the potential crater resulting from an exploit is minimized.
It’s a bit of a different situation under Linux where the norm is dynamically linked libraries kept up to date with a package manager, but even there static binaries and things like flatpaks and app images can be bad news.
Linux is fragmented. Windows has shockingly few indie devs given its marketshare (compared to Apple: Omni apps, Structured, Day One, Session, Pixelmator, Fantastical...). The Mac has plenty of eager indies that care deeply about UX and design, and many discerning users who care too. Caring about UX/design is their "carrot"; they don't need the "stick" (deprecation).
The stick was mainly necessary for big devs back in the day, who never cared about making Mac-assed Mac apps. Now those have switched to Electron anyway; the stick no longer provides meaningful incentives. It just annoys people who want to play Half-Life for 5 minutes every few years.
I'm sure the people on the Mac team think exactly the way you do though, so I guess I hope they read this, or at least that they make sure their assumptions are still valid.
Mac devs are good at updating their apps because Sparkle exists.
It’s hard to overstate the impact of Sparkle, it made it easy for developers to ship updates while also putting the control of that process in the hands of developers rather than the platform.
Linux went the opposite route with dozens of package managers which makes it harder for updates to reach users.
> VPs seem to think they're making products only for the stereotypical technophobic grandpa, rather than power users.
Hasn't Apple always been "computers for people who don't want to think about computers", while power users finding the tech interesting is just an accident?
That's exactly who they're making products for. Buy it, hand it over, and kids from age 1 to 92 will be just fine. Developer interest in Apple is the product of macOS being incidentally a Real UNIX, the hardware being second to none, and the aforementioned market of kids 1-92 being quite large.
The third-party developers that built the platform are becoming increasingly resentful of Apple and of the platform. It hurts all of us if they switch, even if we just want to "never think about computers".
This isn't 2012 anymore. Developers are into freedom and openness, and either Apple aligns itself, or Mac/iOS will have just as much appeal to cool indie devs as Android/Windows (a fraction of its current appeal). Apple platforms no longer feel exciting to devs.
I think you are right that doing these things would improve Apple's standing with developers but it is important to note that none of the things you listed are in line with Steve Jobs' philosophy which you seem to imply here. Recall for example that the iPhone (aka iPhone 1) did not ship with an App Store. Apple doesn't even let you make iOS apps unless you own a sufficiently up to date MacOS device. So when you say "regain geek-cred," I think it's necessary to point out that this geek-cred never existed with a large (although perhaps not majority) of developers/power users, and when it did exist, it was not because Apple was doing things in line with the steps you have proposed to regain it. It was always about polish and ease of use. So when you say they've gotten timid and conservative I'm not sure in what respect you mean that. Because in terms of openness they have not changed at all and are still completely in line with Steve Jobs' vision in this respect.
True, but the world has changed and so have Apple's biggest fans (the ones that drive purchasing decisions for their social circles) and indie devs. They didn't mind back then, now they do. See the Accidental Tech Podcast guys for example, but there are many others (the infamous DHH and geohot just recently). People's attitudes towards huge corporations have changed. Things formerly rationalized as "for the user experience" are now seen as cash-grabs. Even many pro-Apple people are worried that rent-seeking is leading to product neglect.
> There are so many things the company could do to regain geek-cred.
But why do geeks have to destroy everything for everyone else, just for the benefit of their hobbies? Isn't Linux and Android enough and everything else hardware wise and software wise that isn't Apple? Apple devices work great for people who want to get stuff done in the real world and are willing to pay developers for great software. Why does that annoy geeks? Not everybody is interested in tech, they want something that works and get on with their day.
Just because geeks understand computers doesn't give them the right to dictate how other people should use their devices. Just like car modders shouldn't have a say on how normal people use their cars.
> Just because geeks understand computers doesn't give them the right to dictate how other people should use their devices. Just like car modders shouldn't have a say on how normal people use their cars.
No one is telling normal people how to use their phones/cars. If you want the option of doing something different, however, you may need the government to help you stop companies from being anti-consumer.
Everything on the computer is fake, it's just ones and zeros. It means nothing until it interfaces with the real world. Geeks like to make computers and other devices operate with no real meaning, for their own amusement. But that can and will get in the way for people wanting to use their devices as tools for real world tasks.
You can make the same comparison for any machine. If your hobby is off-roading or dirt biking, you might want to be able to adjust fuel injection exactly as you see fit. But making every car or motorcycle owner have to adjust their gas/air mixture is not what normal people want. They want a safe vehicle that they can rely on for their commute.
There are a gazillion non-iOS devices that work perfectly fine in the real world. I do my banking, bookkeeping, everything with regular end-user software on my non-Apple devices, and so do a lot of people in my extended family and friend groups, believe it or not.
You should seriously reconsider how much you believe Apple has a monopoly on usable personal computing.
That's great. Why can't people be satisfied with those devices and use them then? Why enforce your style of computing onto other people's devices?
Instead of nerfing Apple and ruining a good thing, why can't open source loving hackers try to improve Linux and Android (non-Google) instead, to make people want to use and pay for those systems and devices? It worked with servers for Linux. More competition and more better products is better for everybody, not trying to ruin Apple systems for consumers because of jealousy.
I'm not the European Union. It's not my personal jealousy and distaste for Apple that's the driving force of the EU legislating against Apple's practices.
>There are so many things the company could do to regain geek-cred.
This implies they have lost geek cred. I think that Apple could install razor blades in their keyboards tomorrow and have more than half of HN believe it's a good thing.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 313 ms ] thread> To be eligible for Web Distribution, you must [...] be a member of good standing in the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more, and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.
> To be eligible for Web Distribution, you must:
> Be a member of good standing in the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more, and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.
> Developers will pay a CTF of €0.50 for each first annual install over one million in the past 12 months.
https://developer.apple.com/support/web-distribution-eu/
This keeps happening where people keep hitching "I don't want to pay Apple" to every wagon except a law that requires Apple to make access to iOS free.
"Allow other payment processors": Okay you still pay 27%
"Allow other stores": Okay you still pay a commission, a different one.
"Allow installing from websites": Okay you still pay a commission, you just have to write us a check.
Which is funny because you can drive a shipping container through the loophole which is OS components can have special privileges and the boundary between apps and OS for 1st party software is fuzzy.
This is the tension, people really really want "ability to install apps" or "ability to install from web" to mean "install without Apple being allowed to collect fees" but that's not what the law says.
Besides, even Apple's reading is not what Apple is doing either. They're saying that ANY API access that is possible should be done free of charge. Ok. That INCLUDES app installation of course. It does not specify WHO doesn't get charged, which Apple then takes to mean those alternative app stores don't get charged, but the app owners do? Now THAT is tortured reading. Obviously that means NOBODY gets charged. Not the alternative app store, not the application being installed. Apple is not complying with their own reading either.
It seems to me pretty clear. Either interpretation, apps should be able to run on ios free of charge.
> (56) Gatekeepers can also have a dual role as developers of operating systems and device manufacturers, including any technical functionality that such a device may have. For example, a gatekeeper that is a manufacturer of a device can restrict access to some of the functionalities in that device, such as near-field-communication technology, secure elements and processors, authentication mechanisms and the software used to operate those technologies, which can be required for the effective provision of a service provided together with, or in support of, the core platform service by the gatekeeper as well as by any potential third-party undertaking providing such service.
> (57) If dual roles are used in a manner that prevents alternative service and hardware providers from having access under equal conditions to the same operating system, hardware or software features that are available or used by the gatekeeper in the provision of its own complementary or supporting services or hardware, this could significantly undermine innovation by such alternative providers, as well as choice for end users. The gatekeepers should, therefore, be required to ensure, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same operating system, hardware or software features that are available or used in the provision of its own complementary and supporting services and hardware. Such access can equally be required by software applications related to the relevant services provided together with, or in support of, the core platform service in order to effectively develop and provide functionalities interoperable with those provided by gatekeepers. The aim of the obligations is to allow competing third parties to interconnect through interfaces or similar solutions to the respective features as effectively as the gatekeeper’s own services or hardware.
They are explicitly talking about gatekeepers that are both app maker and OS maker giving their own apps access to parts of the OS that other apps can't access. You as a 3rd party are able to deeply integrate into iOS with your own apps to the same level as 1st party apps. It does not say that anyone must be allowed to access the platform free of charge. Plus this is the preamble to the actual act, you can write whatever you want in there (and legislators frequently do to use it as a pulpit) none of this is the actual law.
For the relevant bit it's article 6 paragraph 7.
What exactly is unreasonable about that reading?
Using 'Tile' trackers, ios pops a messages up every so often saying 'Tile' has been accessing the Location API from IOS.
But Apple introduced a competing product, 'AirTags', and this doesn't have the same (annoying) regular popup.
Does this mean that Apple's Product will no longer be allowed to use a special Location API bypassing the security/barriers their competitors have?
I understand the need for security, but Apple has no incentive to remove friction from the process when it negatively impacts their competitors and doesn't impact them at all.
1. They make AirTags follow the same rules as every other app.
2. They introduce a new toggle that users can grant to Tile that gives them the same abilities as AirTags.
3. They introduce a new entitlement that can be granted to developers who apply for that give them the access that AirTags has.
They've taken #3 for both alternative stores and web downloads so I imagine that would take it here.
By the way, this will impact Android too, since there are permissions that are limited only to Google applications such as the Google Play Services, that (interpreting this rule) now shall be opened to any apps that require them.
What? These European companies are exempt? Crazyyy
Read article 3 paragraphs 1 and 2 and tell me this wasn't written to target like five US tech companies in total.
The LED example you gave is actually a great one: I don't think the regulator cares if you're using LED or not. The intention is to reduce the usage of lightbulbs that aren't as energy efficient as modern technology allows them to be. If you can make a incandescent lightbulb that is as efficient, good for you. No one has targeted incandescent light.
Same here. Yes, companies this size are almost only American (and Chinese). That doesn't mean that American companies were the target.
Apple is welcome to vacate the EU if it finds it all too onerous.
Gee, I wonder why. Maybe you should re-examine this statement:
>This is has nothing to do with the companies being European.
https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust-and-cartel...
The gatekeepers should, therefore, be required to ensure, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same operating system, hardware or software features that are available or used in the provision of its own complementary and supporting services and hardware
> Pricing or other general access conditions should be considered unfair if they lead to an imbalance of rights and obligations imposed on business users or confer an advantage on the gatekeeper which is disproportionate to the service provided by the gatekeeper to business users or lead to a disadvantage for business users in providing the same or similar services as the gatekeeper. The following benchmarks can serve as a yardstick to determine the fairness of general access conditions: prices charged or conditions imposed for the same or similar services by other providers of software application stores; prices charged or conditions imposed by the provider of the software application store for different related or similar services or to different types of end users; prices charged or conditions imposed by the provider of the software application store for the same service in different geographic regions; prices charged or conditions imposed by the provider of the software application store for the same service the gatekeeper provides to itself.
The CTF is the exact topic of discussion in the context I provided the clause
And as you can see from the text of the DMA, in order to declare the CTF illegal, the EC has to conduct a fair, impartial, fact-based investigation that considers Apple's viewpoint. Then they produce a preliminary report which Apple is allowed to rebut. After that they can issue a final ruling, and Apple is allowed to appeal that to the court of justice. Even if the CTF is found to be illegal after all of that, Apple gets 6+ months to make changes unless the EC can prove that they were working in bad faith.
Since Apple already charges $99/yr for a dev account, for which the Xcode price is included, and the CTF applies even when not using the App Store... what are they charging for if not API access in the form of the dev's user's devices? That's the only thing that's left
Those who are surprised that you have to pay for access to an ABI have obviously never had to pay for their compilers from their software vendors (the price for the HP-UX garbage compiler was eye wateringly high).
The CTF is it's own refutation. A competitive market should not need to kiss anyone's ring in order to function.
At least on AIX and other UNIXes, the system compiler and GCC worked together. HP-UX was a special kind of hell.
A sibling reply pointed out that developer kits and distribution deals for consoles (which are general purpose computers, regardless of how they are presented, as much as modern smartphones are) are extremely expensive (and there are no alternatives for distribution).
The point that I am making is that the idea that you can develop and distribute for free on any platform is a relatively new one.
But regardless, it seems like a good idea in general, and proven to work, so why shouldn't we want more of it? I don't see the problem with applying the same logic to game consoles etc - that racket also needs to go down.
But that doesn't seem to be the case, as Apple hasn't monetized Xcode and the iOS SDK libraries differently since the DMA came up.
Apple can charge for the SDK and all that it entails, but they can't charge for apps getting to run on users' iOS copies, as that's not something IP law contemplates.
What happens when a fully FOSS iOS dev environment comes out, like the way you can compile Windows binaries on Linux right now? What would Apple be charging for then?
The CTF offsets Apple's costs in developing and maintaining the "core technology": the OS and the frameworks that the developer uses in their application.
So the distinction is that they're charging devs to be allowed to run their app on iOS period, rather than charging for access to a particular set of APIs (which would be illegal)?
Because if so, there's a hole in that argument. Right now I can run any web app I want on my iPhone and the developer need pay no platform access fee. However, that app is blocked by Apple from accessing many native APIs, despite it running on my hardware. And to access those APIs it would need to pay Apple a fee...
So in conclusion, Apple should charge every website operator a per-user annual fee for using the Apple's platform.
It's impossible for the EC to have given Apple any kind of guarantees about it being fine to restrict PWAs to just Safari. That's just not how the process works.
What, specifically, is the core technology fee for other than dissuading competition? It's not for using Xcode (I already have that now), and it's not for redistributing Apple software (iOS binaries aren't that). What technology specifically? Is it a software license? Is it for a patent license? Is it payment for a service? What is it?
> Except as otherwise expressly set forth in Section 2.2.B., You may not distribute any Applications developed using the Apple SDKs (excluding the macOS SDK) absent entering into a separate written agreement with Apple.
However, I believe another statute of Apple’s implementation is that developers must pick. App Store or Self Distribution— an app cannot be both
Currently there are two things preventing a developer from doing this:
1. you're supposed to be honest and not do that.
2. you could be caught during review by a bot or a human.
Nothing at the OS level to prevent this.
We have toggles for preventing cell data usage, they could trivially do the same for wifi usage, or accessing other app's local storage.
But an app that shows the latest cat video needs connectivity and the server serving that car video now tracks when you were watching it.
Yes, but there’s no way to stop that kind of tracking since those app require you to sign in.
The current App Store already has this kind of tracking.
This is incredibly common practice and AFAIK not even discouraged by Apple.
The app sandbox constrains the local storage data to the app which created the unique identifier. There is no third-party tracking opportunity here.
Why not? Maybe they can't rule that Apple must make the App Store free for developers, but they can rule that the App Store can't be the only way to install apps.
Yes, hence alternative app stores. But that isn't the same thing as saying Apple can't take a cut from other App Stores, and surprise, they are.
Yes, it is. For Apple to be able to take a cut from other app stores, they need to have full control over said stores, so effectively it's just their App Store under a different name. Hopefully this won't fly under DMA.
No, they just need a legally binding agreement.
> 7. The gatekeeper shall allow providers of services and providers of hardware, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same hardware and software features accessed or controlled via the operating system…
More about DMA here: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-dma-malicious-co...
4. Gatekeeper must allow people to install applications from outside the App Store. That has no relationship at all to whether Apple is allowed to require a contractual relationship with iOS developers that stipulate payment under certain conditions -- installs, IAPs, number of developers, number of users, etc..
7. Gatekeeper can't give themselves special APIs that allow them to do things other apps can't or charge extra for those special privileged APIs. Apple can nonetheless still charge developers to access iOS. But from there Apple can't give themselves an advantage by saying that only Apple apps can access Bluetooth.
all officially translated versions of the EUPL are too.
I'm reading the French version, and I find it clear that Apple is not following the DMA with its fee it cannot charge itself.
> I'm saying the EU did not write them as strongly as the other versions, making them harder to understand and potentially steering the law in a different direction.
Oh I think the EU can rule whatever they want on their domestic market. Apple can try to find all the holes they want, the Commission is probably just taking notes of those holes to fix them in the DMA 1.1
I really think Apple (and Meta, fwiw) is making a huge mistake if they think they are in position to negociate anything. DMA is here to fix competition issues on the european market and if the goal isnt reached, there will be enough iterations until achievement.
It's not a fight again Apple, it's about preserving the core of what is the EU : the European Single Market. The European Single Market was created after WWII with the goal to enforce peace on the european continent. The Single Market IS the European Union. There is no way they'll let Apple get around this. The only thing Apple don't understand is that the EU is traditionally really slow to act so they had an entire decade (and more) to think that locking access to the market in the EU was fine.
I wish I was as optimistic as you. GPDR was already supposed to be such an improvement. I have no doubt that current Apple's dance won't work. But I don't think any European company will actually benefit from DMA. (I'd say the ones who will really benefit from it are Epic Games and Google, maybe Mozilla a bit)
That being said, I'm very happy the EU implemented the DMA.
It is funny to see American companies scream "that's not fair" when faced with a functional government.
A trade war is the last thing the EU wants, especially when they are completely and utterly dependent on the US for technology and protection, so it's very unlikely that the EU will get all extreme on Apple or other US tech companies.
It will push as hard it can but we will not see a protracted ban. The EU understands that it can only push so hard before it starts a trade war and harms itself out of spite.
And mobile phones are perfect spying devices too. So the security question is more delicate
Maybe this is changing for young people, but on my parents hard drive (for example) there is 30+ years of all sort of personal data, documents of every kind, emails, documents, etc. Not counting all the password and access saved in the browser itself.
If we talk about businesses, public administrations, hospitals basically everything is inside computers, including very sensitive data.
These are population level decisions which require you to think about mainstream use. For example, you probably have been safe because you know what to look for. This is not true of the general public and there are millions of people who _thought_ they were making a safe choice and only realized later that the polite person in the call center was not actually trying to help them, etc.
Bad analogy. A better analogy is: I’ve driven many miles and never crashed. Why do I still need Toyota's permission to drive?
I'm absolutely in favor of "seatbelts" for computers, but that means sandboxing, not censorship or rent seeking. It also means you can remove the "seatbelt" when you need to.
Which things, exactly?
Not exactly blocking immediately are they.
Look, you lock your phone as much as you like, your device, your choices (here we are already very far from apple mindset). Why the obsessive need to push this on literally everybody and not even giving the choice? Maybe you have some serious impulse control issues, but most of us don't.
It can even be part of purchase process - choose ultra secure more locked down model, or on-your-risk more free.
But we all know all this is just about 1 singular thing - revenue via customer/market capture. Oracle stuff indeed.
It keeps software and service vendors from going around security and privacy protections. Folks don’t always have a choice of what they have to install, so “just don’t install their stuff if you don’t like it” isn’t sufficient to achieve the same results, even if we ignore the inherent difference in UX between “100% of the software for this goes through the App Store” and “some software is not on the App Store”.
Doesn’t mean you have to agree that path is better, of course, but it’s also definitely not so easily dismissed as ridiculous.
Either those protections are technological, baked into the OS, and therefore apply equally to all installation sources, or they don't exist. There's no in between.
That doesn’t reflect my experience submitting apps, nor as a user of Apple devices. It’s certainly imperfect, but it achieves a lot more than if they simply stopped doing it.
[edit] and in fact, some of the automated checks wouldn’t be practical to run on a user’s device—are those also totally ineffective?
They're intentionally conflating these objectives to give themselves an excuse for maintaining their stranglehold on users and developers alike. They need to give up some ground if their security concerns are to be taken seriously.
I'm sure all the smart people in Cupertino (and elsewhere) can figure out some really great solutions for protecting users in an honest manner, if only their leadership didn't instruct them otherwise.
Overuse of analogies is one of the worst things the internet has done to discussion in general.
Read through what’s actually happening:
https://developer.apple.com/support/web-distribution-eu/
> Apps offered through Web Distribution must meet Notarization requirements to protect platform integrity, like all iOS apps, and can only be installed from a website domain that the developer has registered in App Store Connect.
If you can’t see a safety benefit, go look at the Windows or Chrome extension malware industry and the billions of dollars it costs people every year. You don’t have to like Apple or agree with everything they’re doing to understand that there is a real problem here.
iOS apps already work like that. Why does Apple have so little trust in their own security model?
The problem exists in the Apple app store. So why behave as if it is an issue unique to windows and android?
The apple situation makes it worse, people now expect the app store to be a safe place to download from and perhaps do less due diligence because they assume apple are doing the heavy lifting, mainly because Apple keep telling us they are doing the heavy lifting to protect us.
The usual line after this is "then just don't use Apple," and you'll be happy to learn that I don't and probably never will regardless of what changes they make. I am just baffled by the comments in here defending their behavior. Why subject yourself to this? Of all the brands to get attached to, why the one that makes it so obvious that they're milking you for every dollar they can get? If that answer is that you genuinely can't avoid getting malware unless you are physically prevented from doing so preemptively, then so be it, but I don't get it otherwise.
Making a safe choice by downloading an app from the app store where Apple reviews all apps for user safety and security.
And yet the ChromeOS platform still supports putting hardware into developer mode.
Apple's policy is about protecting profits.
Laptop sales decline every year. People are giving up the idea of keyboards and big screens to avoid Windows laptops. Copying and monetizing the open source repo idea is the smartest thing smartphone manufacturers did.
Hmm somehow I can go to any website in a browser and be just fine hmmmm
And you think those developers, once freed from the Apple App Store, will release their apps for free on the web???
First one I tried had ads.
Second one required making an account.
Third one had some features reserved for the paid version (e.g. factorial).
Then more adware and other crap.
After 20 minutes I gave up and used pen and paper.
Predicting it now.
Apple's philosophy is similar to the justice philosophy of nations like Singapore. Freedom in exchange for security. Some people like the trade off and some don't. And if there is anything that we know for sure is that when it comes to tech, freedom is the last of people's priorities.
We're all free not to buy Apple products if we don't like how they lock them down. There are several alternatives, Android being the most obvious. And yet, iPhones still sell well.
There are also minimum standards of behavior that we require of every participant in society, including regulations on the behavior of products.
The DMA's identification of "gatekeepers" makes a distinction between the requirements on products with smaller vs larger market shares. More successful products are now held to a higher standard, if you like.
This isn't unprecedented: progressive taxation, labor laws, etc -- there are many situations where this happens.
It's not like Apple has a monopoly on phones, but they're significant enough that the EU wants them to behave in a certain (different) way. Both the DMA and Apple's responses to it seem a bit clunky (so far). I expect it'll take some time for an equilibrium to emerge.
I think it's also notable that Apple now has (at least) three major different versions of its software/infrastructure: EU, China, and rest-of-world. I fear that's a trend that will only continue.
The problem with the "freedom-for-security" tradeoff is that there is nothing to keep the security provider - a government or private corporation - from continuing to provide security once you've surrendered freedom. Apple was very good at combating scams and fraud on the App Store when the iPhone was new. The problem is, that's expensive, which is why Apple decided to charge 30% in the first place. Once competitors stopped trying to release mobile operating systems and users had been accustomed to "just download App Store stuff it's safe", Apple moved away from investing in App Store security. We can see this with how many outright scams wind up on the store today.
Singapore is a similar situation. The security a government is supposed to provide is protection against, say, organized criminals, but government and organized crime has the same structure, function, and incentives as one another. A government that takes away your freedom may be able to protect against organized crime, but that also lets them do exactly the same things organized crime might do. The only security this provides is security of Singapore's tax revenue and political control from appropriation by competing violence-users.
Same thing with Apple. They aren't securing you, they're securing themselves in power, with your security trickling down from their handcuffs.
Your full and complete security can't never be guaranteed unless you hand over your full and complete freedom. Sure, today there are many scans in the App Store but today there are also way more mobile users than there were in the early days and phones have gone from digital toys to holders of digital personal life.
If you want to see what a world where you keep most of your freedom looks like, try using the Google App Store with an average phone (see: phone with no security updates since 2021) and see how many scams you get. Guaranteed way more than Apple. Like an order of magnitude more.
Let me give you another analogy. You are a villager in a corrupt country besieged by out of control armed gangs taking control of areas of the country. Areas such as yours. You got a corrupt country making your life hell and gangs making your life hell. Now you have a choice to move to another country where there is corruption but no gangs. That other country is Apple, Singapore and basically any South American country got its gangs under control. There are millions of people that literally want to get an Apple, get into Singapore and get into this kind of SA country. Sure, a world where higher powers don't abuse their power is nice but that world does not exist in our reality. You choose the lesser evil. That's what Apple is doing here.
In other words the option is still a joke not worth using. "Yes, you can distribute independently... as long as you've already been popular on the iOS App Store in the past year".
> Apple's specific criteria, such as being a member of the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more and having an app with more than one million first installs on iOS in the EU in the prior year, and commit to ongoing requirements, such as publishing transparent data collection policies
But as you can see you won’t be seeing indie apps distributed in this way. Though, to be fair, for most indies the App Store with the old rules is probably the best deal available to them.
How do you figure? Given the choice, many indie Mac developers continue to distribute their software outside the Mac App Store.
Perhaps this is the case inside the App Store, but it's not the case outside the App Store, where indie apps tend to be higher priced and upfront paid.
Moreover, keep in mind that the first million first annual installs have no CTF, and most indie devs will never even reach that point.
If this is the case, this is an even worse deal, due to the annual install fee. If it was one time, it wouldn't be so bad.
In any case, though, it's only 5 euros for 10 years of installs, and many indie apps have paid upgrades (which don't exist in the App Store) at least once every 5 years.
The 0.50 is probably much better if you're selling, say, a $10 app.
That's precisely what indie devs outside the Mac App Store are doing. They don't have ad-supported apps. Most of them are upfront paid, perhaps with a time-limited demo. The business models that you're talking about are a product of the App Store race to the bottom.
I think for free apps that’s a bit of a big deal?
“Best deal available to them” != “best deal one could hope for”.
There are plenty of “free Vbucks” and survey sites that show you how to enable sideloading on Android to download said app that is just pure malware.
€0.50 seems like a reasonable cost for that, similar to how we don’t make circuit breakers or seatbelts optional just because some guy thinks he doesn’t need them and resents paying the extra cost.
If you want to block me from being able to install apps from outside the Apple app store though, that's none of your business (or Apple's).
Apple is not stopping you from buying a phone that isn’t from Apple.
If most people thought like you did, they would just not buy iPhones. The problem is nobody wants what you’re asking for, because you’re buying into the euro-populist cope that it helps consumers, even though this was just a play to allow European companies to even have a small chance at making money in tech because of how over regulated the industry is in Europe.
You’re asking for iOS to be a flavor of Android, and the reality is the Android experience fucking sucks.
> even though this was just a play to allow European companies to even have a small chance at making money in tech because of how over regulated the industry is in Europe
Please cite your sources.
> You’re asking for iOS to be a flavor of Android, and the reality is the Android experience fucking sucks.
No. The user is clearly asking to run software on a device that they own. Why is Apple controlling what software people can run on hardware that they don't own? Should Microsoft not allow people to run software on devices that Microsoft does not own?
I see this stance often - Do you mean worried for the wellbeing of the easily manipulable (e.g. children) on the platform, Or worried for the quality floor more generally?
The former has an argument, the latter does not in my opinion. Even then while I welcome a requirement for apple to notarise apps for regular install (particularly as a means to verify the source), I'd also demand the ability to run unsigned apps unrestricted - whether the barrier is self-signing, a settings checkbox, make me stare at a 30s countdown, whatever.
The idea that I can't run my own apps because a company is protecting me is laughable.
The vast majority of people use smartphones against their will and have no desire to learn anything about the magical Facebook machine in their hands.
They press buttons and things happen, who cares what the dialog box says, they press the button that will get them doing what they want to do the fastest, who cares if it said whatever they were doing is dangerous. This is how most people view their phones, and why there are Android botnets and not iOS botnets.
In all fairness nothing changes. You are happy with the store? Stay on the store!
But I am an adult, a developer with 25 years of experience and enjoy hacking.
It is my right to pretend from Apple to let me install whatever I want on the device I bought and own 100% and to not be patronizing.
Put the damn setting somewhere hard to activate accidentally and require triple authorisation if it need to be, but stop playing games.
Thanks
You can enable unsigned apps, but you'll loose Apple services (e.g. iMessage). This should be enough to convince normal users not to do it, but allow those who really want to do it, to do it.
On Windows, people literally just give everything they install complete root access to their entire system when installing applications, might as well bring that to iOS too, right?
You’re not making the point you think you’re making. There’s a lot more danger using macOS/Windows than iOS, and the people who interact with computers at work aren’t given administrative access for a reason.
I can grant anything access to my iCloud Keychain on macOS, do you honestly think iOS users should be able to press a button to allow this if a random app requested it? Do you even think they will know what that means? Now imagine if unsigned applications could access keychain like on macOS. How well do you think that will go down?
Apple drew the line at consumer safety, and developers hate that they can’t abuse their powers like they do everywhere else.
Because it is not even possible on iOS, so false sense of security
> On Windows, people literally just give everything they install complete root access to their entire system when installing applications, might as well bring that to iOS too, right?
You have not used Windows for looooong time, otherwise you would know that this is not the case since Windows 7 and not the case at all on Domain (enterprise) Windows since Windows XP
> I can grant anything access to my iCloud Keychain on macOS, do you honestly think iOS users should be able to press a button to allow this if a random app requested it? Do you even think they will know what that means? Now imagine if unsigned applications could access keychain like on macOS. How well do you think that will go down?
Of course, why not. Are iOS user dumber than MacOS users?
> Apple drew the line at consumer safety, and developers hate that they can’t abuse their powers like they do everywhere else.
This has nothing to do with safety, but with users demanding support for their iOS toys, while refusing to acknowledge, that if Apple bans me from App Store for whatever reason, all the money spent on iOS support are now running down the drain.
The real world isn’t a computer, and Apple is held responsible for user mistakes.
Remember the fappening? Apple never let users make security decisions on their iPhone again and forced MFA.
You’re talking about walking back decades of platform security because you want to be special, which by the way, everyone who does this for a living agrees with Apple here, including Google. That’s why they’re making Rooted phones worse experiences, 99% of people cannot be trusted with the sort of access you’re talking about, and Google knows that.
I am developing for Windows, MacOS, Android and iOS. Please continue explaining me how I know nothing about it.
UAC prompts get in the way, and if the user account isn't an admin the app can't do anything.
And yet the world hasn't collapsed due to every Android users' identity and bank accounts being stolen.
Maybe users aren't as dumb as Apple pretends they are.
Sadly, this doesn't seem to allow for that.
It refreshes when your on the same wifi network as altserver, for me it works most of the time, but sometimes I need to kick altserver to get the phone to see it.
Doesn't fix the issue, and its a limitation that annoys the hell out of me too, but at least helps mitigate it. (Though it doesn't solve the number of self signed app limit)
Just let me click on an IPA to install it, it's really not that deep!
But Altstore does run on Windows, Mac and Linux (I use a helper script to run it on my home server)
These are all work around to Apple imposed limitations, it’s by no means perfect, but until Apple change their mind (or are forced to change their mind) your alternatives are jailbreaking (which I don’t think there are any public jailbreaks of the latest hardware/OS) or swap to Android (which I’m considering doing) or pay Apple $100 a year for your own dev cert with less restrictions.
You say "it's going to be" as if this hasn't been the Apple device business model from the start.
Those complaining bitterly that Apple had ruined the product by eliminating expansion cards, and holding the case shut with a special screw that needed an "only available from Apple" screwdriver.
And those who gladly bought the first computer that didn't need users to open up the case and mess around with expansion cards and dip switches and so on.
And so it goes.
It might be even worse. Apparently you can't even add a web app to your home screen on the Vision Pro. Vision Pro users are paying for a native app that loads youtube.com in a webview: https://christianselig.com/2024/02/introducing-juno/
I hope once the EU starts to look at Sony and Nintendo next.
The Nintendo Switch is a great console for sideloading. There are numerous ports of PC titles like Quake and Half-Life, as well as a library of Homebrew games and modding tools. If you've got an original Nintendo Switch there's practically no excuse not to crack it, unless you intend to play online.
Same goes for the 3DS, too. You can now play Virtual Boy games using the built-in 3D screen, which enables preservation of Nintendo's darkest age (with or without their approval). I have soft-modded versions of both the Switch and 3DS, and recommend it to anyone that wants that "unlocked" experience.
If you want an Xbox or Playstation computer, buy the SOC from AMD. They sell them on Alibaba and get the same support Microsoft and Sony recieve (read: dogshit). Most people would agree that it's wiser to not use console hardware for PC software when you can build a superior machine for a lower price. But hey, if you wanna waste time and money I won't be the one to stop you.
There's also the Steam Deck, if you hate getting bent-over by third-party OEMs that don't care about you. But considering your affinity for Apple, maybe the console market is right for you.
One can still do C# development using only Windows SDK and/or dotnet SDK for "free".
You cannot do C/C++ or Rust developement without a license but with MinGW you also can do it without MS SDK. MS doesn't prevent people from using GCC compilers. Their core C++ developers even use it: https://nuwen.net/mingw.html
Apple could have said at the beginning "hey this is iPhone, there are no external apps for it though" - which was actually the case! iPhone did not have 3rd party apps at launch.
Then Apple could have said "good news everyone, you can now develop for the iPhone. Dev kits start at $10000 per unit, apply to partner with us, call us at this number" and that would be the end of it. Lots of gadgets still work like that and nobody bats an eye.
Apple decreased the barrier to entry and provided it as a service, charged for it but created good value in return, and it worked! But now that governments signal that they will punish such success, the next Apple will likely not go the way of low barrier of entry - this will hurt the regular folk, people with not so deep pockets.
The point is, nobody is disallowed from competing with Apple and its ecosystem on its merits. If Apple didn't provide enough value in return to what they ask, they would fail. Signaling that you will punish success with force means that the next Apple will be a lot more cautious about how they do things. Jacked up prices (as long as value proposition is there, people will pay, they will just pay more), requiring dev kits (can you force a company to change their hardware design so that it can be developed on? where is the limit?) / expensive partnership agreements / increasing the barrier to entry... Unless companies are "state owned" they have infinite ways to keep their profits at the expense of consumers. Apple's existing deal was a good deal - it was working, competition was (and is still) there. Now they will have to do the things that will just inconvenience users as a side effect, which is what they don't want to do, but they will be forced to do regardless.
My problem can be summarized as (assume the company in question is not a monopoly):
* Is it illegal to sell a device with a microprocessor in it that has no support for 3rd party programmability? -> no, most digital devices are like this in fact.
* Is it illegal to sell a computing device and develop software in house for it? Maybe charge for some of it? Still with no 3rd party support? -> no it is not illegal.
* Is it illegal then, to contract other developers / companies to write that "in house" software for the device you are making? -> no that is not illegal
* Is it illegal to make agreements with other companies to buy software / programming services from them to include in your device? -> no that is not illegal
* Is it illegal to make agreements with other companies so that they can sell licenses to "unlock" their software in your device and get a cut from their sales? -> no it is not illegal
* Is it illegal to sell dev kits to the the above? So the device in question is still not a device you can develop on - but you can create another device where 3rd parties can develop on, and you can sell it to them. You can also pick and choose which companies you will work with. None of this is illegal.
* Is it illegal to automate all of the above? Provide low barrier to entry, no bureaucracy, if you want to develop for the device just do, pay us $100 a year, and give us a cut and you are golden! No need to get into direct contact with us, wait months to get our manual approval - we streamline everything and even the little guy can participate? -> HN thinks that this suddenly must be illegal. If they are providing all this service, they should be legally forced to do all for free.
I just don't get the logic.
That’s just my personal opinion. The DMA is about anti-trust, that some companies are controlling a too large part of the cake, affecting too many users (end users as well as “business users”, e.g. app developers), which is bad for a competitive market and level playing field.
All of these are wrong. The answer to each of those is "It may or may not be legal depending on various factors including whether it is intentionally creating a monopolistic anti-competitive environment".
Laws are allowed to have very nuanced opinions where it's illegal for microsoft to disallow uninstalling Internet Explorer program (USA vs MS, 2001), but perfectly legal for microsoft do disallow installing the File Explorer program.
I know us programmers want laws to perfectly specified in unambiguous mathematics, but lawyers want laws to be specified in English with nuance and room for interpretation and judgement of intent and spirit.
It makes no sense to you because you are thinking like a programmer. Laws are for empathetic decent humans, not soulless hacker-news-posting programmers.
To my users I'm on the app store for ease of installation, that's all. No one knows how to install a PWA.
When I'm building just for me, it's web every time
An obviously inferior, crude mockery of the real thing.
It also doesn't have a linux version, so it's unusable for hacker news users, since all of us only run linux machines in our homes.
Also, closed source, just use altserver which I think is actually open source, and does the same thing but better tested
I feel sick. Yet, I am intrigued by what kind of drugs the PR team at Apple is taking... ;)
In my opinion, Apple's proprietary APIs provide a negative value to developers. Shuffling APIs around for no obvious reason is why none of my old iOS / Mac apps still work. I've been forced to issue refunds to people who upgraded their macOS and then afterwards noticed that my apps don't work anymore. And since Apple owns the customer relationship, we couldn't even send an email to warn them that upgrading will break their setup. (Pro Tools had to do that on basically every OS X upgrade.)
On Windows, things JUST WORK! :) and they've continued working with almost no maintenance for almost 9 years. The Windows version is, thus, highly profitable.
But the Mac version was a financial disaster. And discontinued.
EDIT: Just to clarify, I was super happy with Apple from about 2008 to about 2014 and shipped multiple iOS and Mac apps. But needless to say, my impression of them has soured when they started treating us developers badly. I'm now using Pop! OS as daily driver and it kinda feels as nice as OS X was before the stupidification efforts started.
That's what the 99$ fee for the developer program is for. The 50ct Core Technology Fee is just Apple showing the middle finger to successful developers. I hope the EU goes after this fee first. The whole reason for the DMA is that developers do not use Apple's platforms to bring apps to the user's devices. The user has paid for the device and the operating system, the developer has paid for the developer account, so I am really interested to see how Apple justifies that fee in a court of law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act
...but the program fee already does that??
[0] "Federal contempt of business model"
There's plenty of precedence for platforms being profitable even with free APIs - including Android, Windows, and even Apple's own MacOS. iOS is not special.
Apple would pay for those APIs whether or not the dev program fees alone were enough to cover the expenses. But they'll also take as much from the devs as they are legally allowed to. And if the fees are enough to keep devs from distributing outside the app store, even better for Apple.
The only downside I see on the DMA is that it has come very late, and that it's only an european law. Mobile devices are computers, and once sold you should be able to install whatever you want like on any other computer. The shame on apple is that it is increasingly difficult to install software even on the computers.
It looks like, just from some random googling, Apple makes somewhere in the range of $85B per year from their App Store, and there are around 34 Million iOS app developers. Do people really want to pay north of $2000 for their developer licenses?
pretty much the same way nintendo or sony or microsoft justify it, I'd think.
it's pretty much exactly the same thing as windows S edition, or a console - you paid for the laptop, the developer paid to get notarization to release it. As Android shows, it is also probably legal to refuse to unlock the bootloader... now you own an "appliance".
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/03/windows-1...
And again, consoles have been doing this for two full decades now. PS5 isn't sold at a loss (and I don't think it matters if it is - your business model is not my problem) but I can't go mine crypto or emulate games on a PS5 or Xbox even if that's what I want to do with it as a user.
And I know that consoles got a specific carveout in the DMA "for some reason" (more evidence this is really just a bill of attainder in generic dress) but really there is not a moral difference here, and people have (including here, including the apple haters) have generally convinced themselves that it's OK. It's simple, just do the same thing with apple: "my phone is an appliance and I don't need to emulate games to be happy with it". It's a console in my pocket that makes calls.
Can you have a normal life without Xbox S or PS5? Yes => no need to regulate here
Can you have a normal life without iOS or Android? No => it's an essential utility => let's regulate this
> Can you have a normal life without iOS or Android? No => it's an essential utility => let's regulate this
this is a silly false dilemma/double standard you've set up.
if you want to apply the "do I need this exact device" standard - then no, you do not need a PS5, and you do not need an iphone. Therefore there is no need for regulation.
if you want to apply the "can I live my life without this whole category of Thing" - you probably can't live your life without some form of entertainment, and some form of generalized computing device, right? So no, you can't "do without" something like a PS5 or a phone or a laptop, no.
And the Xbox and PS5 are general purpose computing devices - there is no technical reason you shouldn't be able to check emails or run a word processor on your Xbox, other than that's not the market segmentation MS wants. Again, this is an example of a device so successfully convincing people that it's really an appliance that literally the EU wrote it into a law that there's no need for this appliance to comply.
Again: what's the problem? Just do the same thing with the iphone.
regardless, you are choosing to ignore the whole point about Windows S - you certainly can't life your life without Windows or MacOS, right? And if you want to point to niche solutions... nobody is stopping you from buying a Sailphone, but you would probably agree that's not a sufficient solution for the market as a whole.
Again, the whole thing is very narrowly a bill of attainder, both in its written form and application. If the purpose is "protecting consumers" there is no logical reason to exclude Windows S or PS5 or Xbox or other general-purpose computing devices from being utilized as such by consumers.
The EU has no business to be declaring these classes of devices as having no need to comply with market act requirements, especially when the boundaries are so fuzzy. Apple TV is pushing into mobile gaming. Series S is pushing downwards into mobile gaming. What is the difference between these 2 classes of devices, why should one get a pass? Why should Motorola be allowed to refuse to unlock their bootloaders without voiding a warranty? Etc etc. Literally narrowly targeted at ios and nothing else - even when it would benefit the consumer.
And more generally people are deliberately (and knowingly) missing the point that these types of appliances are common and are widely accepted - literally so widely accepted that the EU wrote special permission for many of them. Phrasing it as if Apple is somehow uniquely denying users access to the capabilities of their hardware is incredibly misleading - literally the EU wrote into the DMA special permission for many vendors to continue denying their users access to the capabilities of their hardware.
But, it's apple, I get it, everyone hates apple. But at a technological level they're not special or different.
The problem is the law isn’t written to say “30% fees are too damn high” and just mandate that the fees can’t be over X% or are capped at $Y per install/device/whatever.
I'd say that's a misunderstanding of the motivations behind EU law.
If you think this is the result of lobbying work or protectionism, let me ask a simple question: Why does the GDPR exist?
Note that this is from 2019 before Apple and Google changed their rates for small developers in 2020.
Question: will this also prevent GameStop from buying something for $20 from the distributor and marking it up to $26?
We can guess what legislators want… I guess a lawyer must have come up with this idea, because inconsistent guesses are going to give them lots of extra business.
Maybe it would be better to annotate laws with what their spirit is, so we don’t have to guess. In fact, just write that down instead of the apparently non-functional letter of the law.
As for cost, we selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta and other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch. Among other things, we're looking at average per-player credit earn rates on a daily basis, and we'll be making constant adjustments to ensure that players have challenges that are compelling, rewarding, and of course attainable via gameplay.
We appreciate the candid feedback, and the passion the community has put forth around the current topics here on Reddit, our forums and across numerous social media outlets.
Our team will continue to make changes and monitor community feedback and update everyone as soon and as often as we can."
It tends to get brought up whenever dainty corporate language is used to justify a casino for children, or something similarly nefarious.
That said I also don’t think it’s a reasonable expectation for old binaries to continue to work indefinitely. Maintenance is a reality of life of a software developer, and personally speaking if I found myself unable or unwilling to do quick spot checks on each platform my apps run at least once a year, I’d just drop support for those platforms or discontinue the app.
That’s not to say that Apple is blameless here, but I think Microsoft has set an unrealistic standard (while also making some things much more difficult for themselves… Windows on ARM for example will never materialize so long as developers expect to be able to toss a binary over the wall and abandon it for a decade, because no matter how good an x86 compat layer is, it’s still significantly worse than native).
Keep in mind that the M1 at launch was as fast as a lot of Intel's lineup running emulated x86 apps. That's what Qualcomm needs to be able to pull off. If the performance is there then people will buy the laptops. That changes the developer story from "please recompile and retest your apps so they'll run on laptops nobody's buying" to "if you recompile your app it'll run 20% faster on this already screaming fast laptop chip".
If the new Qualcomm chips have good performance, it’ll drive sales initially, but enthusiasm will fizzle if 2-3 years down the road developers aren’t making meaningful efforts to port their Windows versions to ARM, because a Windows on ARM device running mostly emulated processes is almost certainly going to fall behind M-series Macs running mostly native in performance and battery life. If Qualcomm can’t keep up substantial performance improvements on a yearly cadence, they also risk getting lapped by traditional x86 machines.
Yea. There was a real concerted effort by not Apple employees to get all these *modern* tools working on M1s. I remember at the company I was at, a small handful of engineers working diligently to get our internal dev software and processes working on M1s.
Moves like this destroy trust within communities.
There is a fine difference between keeping old binaries running and maintaining your application. I don't expect certain applications to be maintained, but I expect them to run on newer versions of OS for many years. If you think this is impossible, Apple can learn a lot from Microsoft and Linux. And IMHO, Microsoft didn't make unrealistic standards. One of the reasons why Windows has been the most dominant OS for years is exceptional backward compatibility.
No drugs. PR teams write what helps their company to succeed. They don't have to believe into what they write.
Imagine the level of sociopathy required for the job. Truly soulless, despicable work, but I almost feel sorry for them. Like, could they even form an authentic human connection anymore, when they have sold out, given up so much humanity to an indifferent market creature? How would you feel about an "I love you" coming from someone payed to lie and manipulate?
Just like any stupid thing I’m asked to do.
Actually I’d be much happier writing that than dealing with ticket YJ-2934 hanging out in Jira.
I don’t need to be a sick, deprived sociopath.
Then again, I still happily buy and use Apple products. They’ll get over their pointless tempter tantrum at some point. I hope.
In the US, SCOTUS's job is literally to interpret the spirit of the law in the event of ambiguity.
At the same time, SCOTUS has been guilty of stretching its terms to include ideas that are clearly out of scope. (For example, the dubious invention of “substantive” due process - which all of the abortion stuff hinges on.)
Also, substantive due process was not invented for reproductive rights. It was invented in Dred Scott v. Sandford, to prevent “free” states from depriving slave owners of their “property”.
"The phrase substantive due process was not used until the 20th century, but the concept arguably existed in the 19th century. The idea was a way to import natural law norms into the Constitution; prior to the American Civil War, the state courts were the site of the struggle. Critics of substantive due process claim that the doctrine began, at the federal level, with the infamous 1857 slavery case of Dred Scott v. Sandford.[11] Advocates of substantive due process acknowledge that the doctrine was employed in Dred Scott but claim that it was employed incorrectly. Indeed, abolitionists and others argued that both before and after Dred Scott, the Due Process Clause actually prohibited the federal government from recognizing slavery. Also, the first appearance of substantive due process, as a concept, had appeared in Bloomer v. McQuewan, 55 U.S. 539 (1852)"
> We should note right at the outset some of the many remarkable facts about the case.
> * Dred Scott was the first Supreme Court case since Marbury v. Madison invalidating a federal law. Since Marbury created judicial review in the context of a denial of jurisdiction, Dred Scott might plausibly be said to be the first real exercise of the power of judicial review.
> * Dred Scott was the first great effort by the Court to take an issue of political morality out of politics. In that sense, it is the great ancestor of many New Deal and Warren Court cases.
> * Dred Scott was the birthplace of the controversial idea of "substantive due process," used in Roe v. Wade, in many important cases endangering the regulatory/welfare state, and in the recent cases involving the "right to die."
> * Dred Scott was one of the first great cases unambiguously using the "intent of the framers" and in that sense it was the great precursor of the method of Justice Scalia and Judge Bork.
From https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/12942329
--
I don't think it's controversial at all to say that substantive due process is understood to have its origin in cases like Dred Scott and Lochner, cases where the Supreme Court overrode the results of the democratic process to protect economic interests. Or, for that matter, that the court took significant license in "interpreting" the Fifth Amendment that way.
Also, I think many people are too teleological when they evaluate judicial doctrines and philosophies. "Reproductive rights are good, so let's find a way to justify substantive due process." Jurisprudence is part of a structure and process that is bigger than any specific outcome, and bad jurisprudence shouldn't be excused just because it leads somewhere we might like.
Edit: I also disagree that looking at where judicial philosophies lead is a bad idea. At the end of the day, the judicial system exists for two main purposes: 1) enforce contract law and 2) enforce the moral zeitgeist in the most fair way possible. If an inflexible judicial philosophy is unable to keep up with the morals of the times, we should consider revising the judicial philosophy. I believe this is considered fairly mainstream legal philosophy, and a big reason "originalism" is considered basically a sham by the legal profession.
There's a distinction to be made between principles-based and rules-based regulation which I bet you're unfamiliar with.
As a consumer, and an Apple users, I want them to be slapped as hard as possible for how they implement this.
(One of) the reasons why I like the walled garden is how it simplifies everything troubleshooting-wise. I have a few quirks to know, the rest is because of hardware failure and that’s it.
My peer not being tech-savvy might install stupid things from stupid places and it might be a problem.
The way it’s done it’s unlikely, but still it just complexify things for next to no reasons in my book. (Yes 30% is a lot; I personally don’t care, though I do recognize I’m a good position and I can afford not to–but then again, the most vocal about the 30% are not the most unwealthy…)
Just because it makes your life easier as the family tech support is a pretty selfish reason to hope for a very good pro-consumer law to fail.
Also it makes my life annoying when I open Safari and am presented w/ what can be told as the worst pop-up ever and have to spend literally minutes dismissing it for something I neither wanted nor needed. It’s the cookie banner all over again.
Does not seem like a lot, but as a developer I use devices in a factory configuration a lot, and it’s just as annoying as it’s useless.
Basically it’s the cookie banner again. Served no-one (at least definitely not the consumers), but annoyed a lot.
As for the “those that want to use their 1000€ device differently than you now have the chance to,” well……… nobody forced them to buy a 1000€ device did they?? They knew of the limitations; they had to, or they’re very dumb.
The law is not pro-consumer contrary to people say, it’s anti-garden, which is definitely not the same, and I’ll die on this hill.
Oh no, you have to be given the option to not permit your data to be shared with ~1000 different partners with "legitimate" interests. Honestly, the only thing that is wrong with GDPR is that it came out too late.
Ironically Apple did more for privacy than GDPR ever did, and was able to enforce it… by having a walled garden!
Every time you dismiss a "we care for your privacy" banner, you're being made aware that your data is shared with hundreds or thousands of data brokers with "legitimate interest". The fact that vendors prefer to make your experience miserable rather than give up tracking is another example of "malicious compliance".
What happens is that you now have the right to request a copy of the personal information a site has collected and ask them to delete it. You can also sue them if they don't fulfil your request. You're welcome to exercise your rights as an EU citizen at any time.
Not true.
https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-win-first-major-fine-eu-1-million-us...
Know what's cool? Firefox on android supports ublock origin. There are some chromium forks too with desktop extension support (on android). Funny what an open(er) market and easy of installing apps does, huh?
It essentially says "Tell the user you're tracking them, give them a button to click not allow you to do that". If sites actually did that, I honestly couldn't care less about the extra second it would take to click "No, fuck off".
And let's not kid ourself: Microsoft is enabling (and re-enabling and re-enabling and re-enabling) so many things because they are slowly turning their OS into spyware to make more money, not because they care at all about their users.
I'll re-iterate Cory Doctorow's quote: "Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit".
It’s absolutely not the same; they were clear from day 1.
Yes, and they may also respond to phishing emails served up by the Mail app. Do your peers consider you responsible for fixing that too?
Edit: self plug: https://boehs.org/node/private-apis
Don’t worry they’ll find a way to make it socially mandatory (the same way not having a google account nowadays seems impossible (I don’t personally but still do because of work for instance)).
It’s not like Apple lied at any point saying “buy our phones and do whatever you want on them!” No. It’s clear. You do what they want. In what name should they be forced to “open” it to anybody?
What’s next? Force google to make their map data open? How would that go? It’s mostly the same thing.
Spoiler: companies have been forced to do all sorts of things they really didn't want to do, and it often went fairly well for society at large.
Huh, guess it's just Foxconn then.
I have no idea what your argument is here. That people shouldn't advocate for greater competition in the marketplace just because they already bought a phone?
App stores are a natural monopoly. An app store with more users attracts more developers. An app store with more apps attracts more users. It has a strong network effect and economies of scale. Natural monopolies should be regulated to prevent abuse by the first companies that capture wide market share.
This misses the mark so badly that it’s not even worth reading the rest.
App Review is based out of Sunnyvale and has more than 300 people that make on average $85k/y in their first few years, and mostly over $100k/y after three years.
Long tenured people, the ones that last more than 5 years and are advancing towards a decade of doing the work get close to $200k/y with some exceptions over that number.
Many of those 300 people are multilingual, some specialize in a specific language, but to expand and better serve non-English markets, Apple recently opened a branch in Ireland and one in Shanghai.
The latter mainly focusing on the Chinese market and the one in Ireland specializing in European languages and supplementing the English market.
Funny how that works.
I think you like the App Store for its safety. You trust it, enough to be happy with it.
What does that have to do with wanting others to be denied alternatives? That deliver however much safety and different benefits that other people want?
If safety is one of Apple store's selling points, then competitive app stores will push Apple to deliver even more safety. Perhaps new forms of safety others pioneer. Apple didn't invent security or sandboxes. While also encouraging it to loosen non-safety driven (and therefore quietly non-customer friendly) restrictions on innovation.
That can only benefit you.
Article 13 is the fun one for Apple: https://www.eu-digital-markets-act.com/Digital_Markets_Act_A...
To assume the law means things that aren't written in the law is, quite basically, undemocratic.
This is for example how Germany now has a basic right to data protection. It's not written in the constitution, it was formed by our supereme court by looking at what the intentions of the author's of our constitution were. Same principle applies to EU laws.
I agree that this is not a citizen's job. That's why I wrote that I am very happy to see the EU commission drag Apple in front of the CJEU.
Furthermore, Apple’s behaviour is quite discouraging for us EU based developers who actually understand and aspire to the EU’s values and what we consider “normal” treatment of the people using our apps and services.
22,000 of Apple’s employees are EU citizens and residents.
The EU is completely and utterly dependent on US technology and protection, so the measures it take can only go so far.
Maybe this is an American trait, but I would be surprised at any company that wouldn't be doing this. A law has been made that affects our business: How do we comply with the law with as little impact as possible to us?
Some of the comments here seem to expect Apple to simply give up, as though a parent just walked in the room and said "You better do it or else."
If it's really the spirit of the law that counts, then the law should require no specificity. A simple "Treat everyone fairly, installs can come from anywhere" would be sufficient.
And Apple has the cash to play chicken with any potential fines if it comes to it, so its not hedging much if at all.
It is clear that the EU is going to have to get very tough, before Apple is going to proactively take into account any of the "spirit of the law" that the EU would like it to understand.
The world is getting more technical. People will demand openness. If I buy a product, I should have reasonable flexibility to use it how I want. Even if I break it, repurpose it or improve it, I want the choice to do so, just like I have with pretty much every other thing I own.
People will vote with their wallets if Apple refuses to open things up a bit.
I didn't expect much but that list is a big joke.
If you were looking for a way to distribute your ios software on the web, well that ain't it.
I do wonder if that would’ve been enough to have compliance.
I also wonder if apple could argue that web apps are enough.
So, there will still be a centralized chokepoint for censorship of apps the government would prefer you not be able to have on your phone. Cool.
This means no protest apps, no encrypted communications apps unless they have the appropriate government approval/licenses, etc.
This is the same censorship they exert over the app store. It's no benefit to users.
With smaller apps I don't have this problem. There's typically plenty to choose from. If I don't like the policies of one, then I can go for something else.
Android has sideloading yet Facebook still uses the official store.
If Apple is forced to allow FB an alternate path and FB takes that path abandoning Apple's App Store, you can blame Apple for the extortion fees in its App Store that are driving FB and others away. Had Apple not been so greedy, there wouldn't have been suits and the EC wouldn't have forced their hand, but Cook's gotta cook for shareholders and leaving even a single penny on the table would be against his commitment to them.
My grocer, who does far more for my well being than Apple, makes 2-3% store-wide markup and he still manages to invest in his store, feed himself and his family, and employ a decent sized staff on that ~2.5% -- and that's the case for most grocery stores, big and small, and we're all real good with that and have been for several decades, these people building actual buildings and gathering up the best foods the world has to offer from hundreds or even thousands of suppliers and paying people to cut open boxes and stock shelves with these amazing foods and mop the floors when we break jars of food that we never pay for he and his crew take sh*t from customers who had a bad day (who might even rob or assault them) and all for 2.5% margin while folks here, on a hacking forum of all places, simp for a walled garden that's extracting 30% from mom and pop hackers for providing what amounts to web hosting.
C'mon. Get real.
> First annual install. This is the first time an app is installed by an account in the EU in a 12-month period. After each first annual install, the app may be installed any number of times by the same account for the next 12 months with no additional charge.
Okay...
> A first annual install may result from an app’s first-time install, a reinstall, or an update from any iOS app distribution option — including the App Store, an alternative app marketplace, TestFlight, an App Clip, volume purchases through Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager, and/or a custom app.
Do I understand this correctly that you will have to pay the fee for each user (above the 1 million free) even if they just get an automatic update? Given that updates are automatic by default, you will end up paying even for inactive users (users who installed the app but long forgotten about it and don't use it).
Or maybe that's their hail mary for the next round.
I def look sideways at people who buy a used $300 iphone when you can get a safer, higher quality, more feature phone with more for $150. This is different from someone buying Nike Jordans because they are status insecure, because Nike Jordan's dont affect my life. A critical mass of Apple users caused developers to make Apps for iPhones.
Sorry, reality isnt as pretty.
How does that count as a "marketplace"?
> Web Distribution ... will let authorized developers distribute their iOS apps to EU users directly from a website owned by the developer
All of this just makes it crystal clear what Apple's goal is: to prevent competition. It's not about security like they've been lying about; it's all about maintaining their app store monopoly.
(But yeah, this is just slightly silly naming from Apple).
Move the switch back and the device won't boot without a factory wipe. That's going to deter both anyone who can't successfully disassemble the device to flip the switch (i.e. severely technically illiterate people) and the people who aren't willing to press YES to a prompt that says it's about to erase all their data (i.e. mildly technically illiterate people), while leaving it possible for exactly the people it should be possible for.
I have yet to hear a convincing argument (from multi-store proponents) about how to prevent this. If the big social media companies pull their apps from Apple's official store and move to their own stores (with unfettered access to spy on users) then they will be successful at dragging their users with them. Furthermore, there is no evidence that GDPR has had any success stopping them from siphoning up all the data they want.
This is the same thing that Apple does if they refuse to follow the process as it is, right? You're being insufficiently stubborn. And excessively dismissive if you think users making choices have no power. There are demonstrably people committed to having it their way:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39685700
Unless you think tech companies have gotten too big and people don't have a choice anymore. If you have a monopoly, what you want is not another monopoly to fight them over which gets to fleece you, it's to smash them both by any available means. One of which is resistance through personal choices, one of which is... anti-trust enforcement.
> about letting other large players carve up the Apple/Google 2-slice pie into a few more big slices
Do you not believe that increasing competition for app stores will "empower individual users"? If yes, please provide an alternative to DMA that will benefits users more.
So, to answer your question: no, I do not believe it will empower individual users. If we really want to empower individual users we should be looking to inject more competition into the social media markets as well. More "app stores" that do nothing but offer the same apps while bypassing Apple's protections will not benefit users. And if the 30% Apple tax is the real problem then why not legislate against that directly?
Sure, but you can do both.
> More "app stores" that do nothing but offer the same apps while bypassing Apple's protections will not benefit users.
It's not just the same apps though. For example, the license Apple uses for the app store is incompatible with the GPL, so no one can make an iPhone app under the GPL or use existing GPL code in one. That license is one of the things that allows collaborative projects to form and right now that can't happen for iPhones.
Likewise, the $100/year fee deters hobbyists from creating apps.
And Apple prohibits certain types of content in their store, e.g. adult content or P2P apps, which some users would want.
> And if the 30% Apple tax is the real problem then why not legislate against that directly?
Price controls are generally a bad idea. The cost of hosting the app installers is generally negligible, but a few apps could be huge, and then it isn't, so how much should it cost? Can they charge a flat percentage of sales or does it have to be per-GB of transfer? What happens when the market price of storage or bandwidth changes over time? What if it's different in different regions?
Legislating rules to handle all the edge cases is a fool's errand when competition would handle it for you because anyone who charges too much would lose business to someone who charges less.
Users have a lot of power individually. The most obvious example is when there is competition. You could be a single person and your counterparty could be the world's largest corporation, but if you have ten other viable alternatives, they can do no worse to you than the best of your other alternatives or you just choose the other one.
But you can also do it by being stubborn. Some people seem to have completely forgotten how to do this. There is a transaction with a surplus of $100, the counterparty is some egregious monopolist and the deal they offer you is that they get $99 and you get $1. A lot of people take the deal, because $1 is better than nothing, but that's not it. What you do is flip over the table and walk away, because that costs you $1 but it costs them $99 (or $50 or whatever their share would be after offering whatever it would have taken to satisfy your sense of fairness).
People are so lazy now, or they've been conditioned, so now they always just take the $1 even if the alternative is only a minor inconvenience for them. Okay, you have to use Signal instead of WhatsApp, so what? But being willing to walk away from an unfair offer can sometimes be to your advantage even in an individual negotiation, because you both know the other party has more to lose. It's definitely to your advantage when other similarly-situated people do the same thing at scale. See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality
> They express their power collectively through the political system.
They express their power collectively however they want. Organizations (e.g. FSF, EFF) can do things like pool money to create competing systems. Even for-profit corporations can do this -- you don't like the incumbent? Start a competitor, and raise funding from all the other people who don't like the incumbent.
But again this seems like something people have been conditioned to believe doesn't work, even though it obviously does. To take a simple example, the EFF created Let's Encrypt, which cut the legs out from under the certificate mafia and made TLS free for everybody. All it took was an organization to pool enough resources to develop the initial implementation.
> I'm just very skeptical of the approach taken by Europe with the DMA. It seems to be less about empowering individual users and more about letting other large players carve up the Apple/Google 2-slice pie into a few more big slices.
Government regulations often fail as a result of incompetent administration or some corruption. But some forms of anti-trust can only be fixed through the law because the trusts themselves were created that way.
If government enforce contracts in restraint of trade then people will enter into contracts and form a cartel or enforce a monopoly. That is not acceptable, so then governments have to constrain what kinds of contracts they're willing to enforce, and somebody has to write down what "restraint of trade" means to establish how that works. It's not fun and they'll often get it wrong but the only alternatives are to either not have governments enforce contracts or allow cartels to form that become de facto private governments. So we do the best we can.
The EU is not great at this, but the problem they're trying to address is real, so sometimes you just get to sit back and watch two entities you don't really like have a fight with each other.
When everyone you actually need to communicate to is on WhatsApp, Signal is pretty much useless.
Then everyone ends up on Signal because anyone can install Signal but the stubborn people refuse to install WhatsApp, at which point "everyone you actually need to communicate to is on Signal, WhatsApp is pretty much useless."
But in order to get there, you (the collective you, the median pedant) have to be more stubborn than the people who want to use WhatsApp, instead of the other way around.
I've been there, actually running Signal as my primary IM for several years. The number of people I "converted" who stuck around was, in the long run, zero.
You should not have to police adults on what they're allowed to do with their property. If someone asks me to help them setup their computer, I may gave some advice and warning about things to avoid. If they asked me to do something that may be dangerous, I can refuse to do it, but I will not actively prevent them from doing so. They're not children.
If someone is ok with putting their whole digital life at risk, then let him do so. Just like you can't prevent someone who wants to eat cake all day. It's not your life.
The fundamental problem with this "power to the people" mentality is that adults don't actually know how to use technology. The average person is technologically illiterate.
You can go on about giving adults full control over their property, etc. etc. but we both know that this is how you get security disasters: old people getting scammed, people losing their life savings and what not.
Part of being an effective security engineer, is realizing that you need to protect people themselves. 2FA is a prime example of security driven via this mindset: necessary because the technologically illiterate masses reuse passwords. There are other benefits, but that's the main reason.
So you shouldn't have to police people, but practically, in the end you do.
> If someone is ok with putting their whole digital life at risk, then let him do so.
All fun and games until people lose their life savings and get forced into homelessness or whatever.
Then these people start to blame you. Then technologically illiterate senators and regulators will also blame you. Lose-lose scenario.
Crypto is a prime example of what happens when you give people control. "Power to the people!," tons of people get scammed, and this prompts regulatory lockdown.
TL;DR is that the EU regs wouldn't be a problem if Apple could hide the functionality behind developer settings, but they can't. Exciting times, people in the EU are gonna get totally fucked by shady apps. GG.
This happens when senile people are legally authorized to exercise control over their assets. It has nothing to do with technology and has been happening since before computers existed. The general solution is to appoint a conservator who is required to authorize major transactions.
Which hardly justifies using the same measures for someone of sound mind.
> 2FA is a prime example of security driven via this mindset: necessary because the technologically illiterate masses reuse passwords.
And then their phone number changes or they lose access to their email and you've locked them out of their account.
This is particularly egregious when the second factor is required to be a phone number, because people in financial straits will have their service canceled for non-payment and now you've magnified their problems at the worst possible time. But phone numbers serve as a convenient tracking ID since most people only have one of them, which may explain the popularity of requiring them "for your own protection".
> All fun and games until people lose their life savings and get forced into homelessness or whatever.
We build insecure systems and then blame the users for it and offer to lock them in a cell to protect them from our bad choices.
Why is it that anyone can charge a credit card or a bank account who has the account number? Public key cryptography has been a thing for decades. Put a USB-C connector on the credit card itself and require the card to be plugged in to the device the first time each merchant wants to charge the account. 99% of credit card fraud, gone, because you can't breach one merchant and use the card info at a different one without physical access to the card.
Meanwhile anyone could trivially cancel a subscription because the list of authorized merchants would be listed on the bank's account webpage and the user could remove one at any time.
> Crypto is a prime example of what happens when you give people control.
Anybody can go to the bank, right now, and withdraw cash and hand it to a scammer. Sometimes they do. You can also give them your television or company ID badge. Cryptocurrency is no different. Most of the crypto scams are get rich quick schemes, which people have been getting scammed by since the invention of barter.
What made cryptocurrency so susceptible to scams wasn't that people were in control, it was that some people were actually getting rich, which made others credulous, and that attracts con men.
"We have to protect people from themselves" is only true for small children and the mentally ill. Adults get to make their own choices -- because there is no one else to make them. As soon as you appoint someone else to do it, that person has a conflict of interest and the incentive to defect, and the person affected needs the right to choose differently unless you can prove that this specific person is mentally incapable of exercising reason.
"Nobody is ever completely reasonable" doesn't cut it because that applies to the gatekeepers too.
I guess pigs fly or hell freezes over. Musk and Zuckerburg had years after such changes to make their own store on Android (which put in similar privacy policies at the same time as Apple). It doesn't make any sense for them because being off the main store is worse than gleeming off a bit more data to sell.
>I have yet to hear a convincing argument (from multi-store proponents) about how to prevent this.
How about proving that the subjects in question are on multiple stores to begin with, or otherwise have shown interest?
You're questioning GDPR's validity, but your own premise isn't a thing to begin with.
I'll bite. Is there anyone here that thinks overall security for elderly (and lower skilled users) will *not* be hurt by additional app stores? I find it hard to believe. And, I write this post an an uber geek is is neither an Apple fan boi, but is very impressive by their overall security and UX. For the geeks, it would be great to have more stores. For the average users... maybe... For the least tech-savvy users, I cannot believe it will benefit them.
My parents are in their 80s and use Android with F-Droid (I set it up for them). No scams. No account or password. No ads. Simple apps. They have definitely benefited from having more choices available to them, specifically a repo of software built with something other than profit motive in mind. Apple's not very good at offering that.
If app stores need to be locked down to protect the elderly, then surely the Internet needs to be locked down to protect all children. After all, Safari still navigates little Jimmy to pornhub if he clicks the link.
I feel like the real solution, same as the one most parents should be using instead of forcing it into everyone else is the same it's always been; don't give young Jimmy unfettered access to the Internet (and use a child/safety filter in your own home/on your own devices) and for Apple to provide a setting that enables/disables alternative app stores, so that children of the elderly can choose for them in the same way they'd choose for their children.
https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/set-...
My original question was a request for hard evidence which I think is lacking in arguments of security and safety.
I think I've seen an equal amount of press surrounding fake and useless apps on both android and apple platforms. But this is purely observational.
Why would we want freedom to self publish on the web but not in mobile apps?
The vanishingly few remaining users use F-Droid (sometimes exclusively), which is probably the safest app store on Earth, with GNU/Linux and *BSD distros' base repositories. Open source only, reproducible builds with public recipes written independently, trackers removed (because they usually rely on non-free libs).
I honestly don't see how having only one store makes an OS safer. That store could be an unchecked mess.
We could talk about policies around app inclusion and permission management though.
If the argument is "Apple in particular has a huge vested interest in making sure that their first party App Store doesn't distribute malware", that's somewhat stronger.
I don't know which argument nektro was trying to make, I could read it either way.
Personally, I lean towards the point about vested interests, although it is only "lean towards" not "fully embrace": what they care about isn't strictly security, but their bottom line, and being a US company with US moral norms and US payment providers, this can also be observed in the form of their content rules — they seem to treat sex as a much more important thing to hide than violence[0]. This does not sit well with people like me who think violence is bad and sex is good.
[0] A bit over a decade ago, the app submission process flagged the word "knopf" in German translations, telling me it was a rude word and I might get in trouble if I was using inappropriate language. It's the German word for button… or knob (but in the sense of button, it's never a dick), and so I can only assume someone got a naughty words list in English and translated it literally rather than asking for a local list of naughty words.
Are you sure? Android phones are pretty big in China, which is by far the world's largest smartphone market, and I guess Play Store & "the Amazon thing" (I don't remember the name either) adoption there is close to 0%. Anecdotally I have noticed a lot of people using phone vendor app stores in India (the second largest market, though half the number of devices as China) and Indonesia (another huge market). Taken together I'm very skeptical that Play Store + Amazon have a majority of Android users.
No, good point! I hadn't thought about the China market. I don't know how things work there.
Web Distribution requires stricter app and developer review than Marketplace distribution.
> The goal was to get out of Apple's clutches when your customers have their devices
Whose goal? Read the DMA. It is very explicit that it expects Apple to maintain security of devices and apps.
Which goes to the parent's point that their intent is to prevent competition. Otherwise why would the alternative need more onerous security measures, if not to act as a deterrent through friction?
> Read the DMA. It is very explicit that it expects Apple to maintain security of devices and apps.
It also says that the security measures have to be "strictly necessary" and "there are no less-restrictive means to safeguard the integrity of the hardware or operating system" and "[t]he gatekeeper should be prevented from implementing such measures as a default setting or as pre-installation" etc.
Which implies to me that you not only have to be able to turn them off, they have to be off by default.
Without a kill switch, gatekeepers would lose control over apps, making them "strictly necessary." Most interpretations of the DMA agree.
The comment literally says: "All of this just makes it crystal clear what Apple's goal is: to prevent competition. It's not about security like they've been lying about; it's all about maintaining their app store monopoly."
There is no reason for the security measures to be more onerous for the competing thing if they were sufficient for Apple's thing, unless the purpose of the security measures is to prevent competition.
> Without a kill switch, gatekeepers would lose control over apps, making them "strictly necessary."
Gatekeepers having control over apps isn't necessary for security. The device's owner having control over apps is. They can opt into a particular gatekeeper's control if they choose to. How is it "strictly necessary" for the gatekeeper to force them to use one provider of vetting services over another? Isn't the point of the act to enable competition?
Web Distribution means Apple is handing over responsibilities previously handled by the Marketplace directly to the developer. Allowing developers to police themselves is obviously riskier.
> The device's owner having control over apps is.
This is simply not true. Device owners are hopeless at maintaining the security of their devices.
> How is it "strictly necessary" for the gatekeeper to force them to use one provider of vetting services over another?
There are 2 tiers of "vetting services": 1. Marketplaces determine the appropriate content or type of apps allowed in their listings, 2. Apple determines if an app, developer, or marketplace is an outright threat, e.g. if an app turns out to be a scam, or if a bug in an app exposes an exploit, it is "strictly necessary" for Apple to be able to yank the app immediately.
Doesn't that depend on who the developer is? Certainly it isn't the case that no one exists who the user might trust at least as much as Apple.
> This is simply not true. Device owners are hopeless at maintaining the security of their devices.
"Device owners" includes substantially all people. Many of them are not hopeless and are entitled to make their own decisions. Some of them are even more qualified to do it than the people Apple has reviewing apps.
The hopeless people may be better off sticking to trusted stores, but they can do that without prohibiting others from doing otherwise.
> There are 2 tiers of "vetting services": 1. Marketplaces determine the appropriate content or type of apps allowed in their listings, 2. Apple determines if an app, developer, or marketplace is an outright threat, e.g. if an app turns out to be a scam, or if a bug in an app exposes an exploit, it is "strictly necessary" for Apple to be able to yank the app immediately.
That doesn't change the question. How is it "strictly necessary" for Apple to do that, rather than whoever the owner of the device chooses to do it? It would obviously be possible for a third party like Symantec, Malwarebytes or the makers of uBlock to do the same thing.
Sure, the amount risk probably varies, but you are talking about going from a Marketplace that implements some level of app review to no-review. It's more risk.
> Many of them are not hopeless ...
Exactly, and "many" is not enough. It's not possible to design a special switch only for those qualified "many" - and only them. Platform owners and the EU insist on protecting the unqualified everyone else too.
> How is it "strictly necessary" for Apple to do that, rather than whoever the owner of the device chooses to do it?
It's not in the sense that someone else could do it, but the DMA doesn't require it, so obviously no gatekeeper will. Also, it's a terrible idea because there's no market for it. Everyone already expects it to be free.
Only if the developer isn't as trustworthy as Apple. In fact, it could be lower risk even if they are less trustworthy than Apple, when it's their own app, because someone who is less competent but not overtly malicious who posts their own app is much less likely to be supplying malware than a general-purpose store that tries to vet everything but accepts submissions from just anyone at all including overtly malicious actors, and could thereby miss something.
And the user, in choosing which alternate stores or developers to trust, can decide that.
> It's not possible to design a special switch only for those qualified "many" - and only them.
Well of course it is. In the worst case scenario you could make the switch irreversible and then once enabled the device could never add another store. But that's really no different than requiring a device wipe to change it back, because a wiped device should be no different than a new device that never had the switch enabled to begin with.
> It's not in the sense that someone else could do it, but the DMA doesn't require it, so obviously no gatekeeper will.
Isn't whether it's "strictly necessary" the condition on which they can demand it?
> Also, it's a terrible idea because there's no market for it. Everyone already expects it to be free.
How is it free? They're charging $100/year and a percentage on top of that.
Apple pay enough real lawyers to defend them, they really don't need pro-bono amateurs.
That's a contradiction in logic there. If they cared for security, they would choose the more secured option. But they didn't?
Either they then have provided worse security all along: web distribution could have offered more security than an app store? Or they could have provided even better security in their app store all along: if they implemented this stricter checking there. Why not?
These arguments are poor and don't stand up to scruteny.
The very simple conclusion is that it's not about security, that it never has been.
My point is, and remains, purely non-technical though. And I also know how language works.
If you say "we don't allow X, only Y, because we prioritize security". Then change that to "we do allow X but will perform extra security scrutiny over what we do at Y" then it does not compute. Again: it proves your first statement was a lie (intentional or not). Because a) it was possible to allow for your level of security and you could've allowed both X and Y all along, or b) you are now lowering your security, proving you don't really prioritize security, or c) you are merely frustrating X in a different way now and security was never the reason not to allow X.
I'm convinced it's both a and c. I surely hope not that it's b.
I'm assuming that Apple is going to profit from that catalogue.
Does this only makes sense if you assume payments are tied to the App Store? They aren’t.
If you remove payments from your list of motivations, what do you presume Apple’s motivation is to encourage apps to list themselves on the App Store and not a third-party marketplace?
Like literally the only participants in that business transaction are the consumer and the company, Apple does not even enter the picture.
It would be like car manufacturers charging you a percentage for going to the grocery store, because they provide a Private and Secure™ transportation platform.
Consumers will soon catch up, and if the EU does not put pressure on Apple about this, they definitely will.
Not exactly true, there are fragments of Apple intellectual property distributed with compiled binaries.
Which the annual tax (aka developer fee) presumably covers.
This is how it used to be, until Apple got too large and instead of being beholden to developers it flipped the other way around, and now releasing an app for Apple's platform is a supposed privilege.
Take the games industry, where developers and publishers are often given huge incentives by a platform (mostly consoles) to develop for that platform; because games developers are providing value for the platform owner by making the platform more attractive because it has more content options for the consumer.
Why is it so hard for people to wrap their heads around that concept.
Right, as an incentive. That's exactly right. Makers of other platforms chose a particular funding model to suit their commercial strategic environment, not because they were obligated to. Why should Apple be obligated to follow other (or even their own) prior business models?
> This is how it used to be
It really isn't. In fact this expectation of free full-featured developer tools for mainstream platforms is relatively new. https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/microsoft-sets-pricing...
> Take the games industry
Sure. Remind me where I can download the free developer kit for the PlayStation 5? Remind me who I need to pay in order to distribute a PlayStation game?
Also if I bought visual studio, MS couldn't tell me what I could make my program do, or outright refuse to let people use my program.
In fact, Windows itself came with everything that you needed to build just about any userspace app in the box since Windows XP SP1 (the first one that included .NET Framework).
Similarly, I dream of going to Epic's website to download some Fortnite, maybe charge a thousand vbucks to mom's credit card if I'm feeling adventurous, and that has nothing to do with Apple or iOS.
This is how every single general-purpose computing platform (including Apple's MacOs) and the open internet has worked for multiple decades.
Some may be like Uber, turning the car into a taxi service, or like Turo, allowing it to be rented. Others may be independent mechanics that can work on the car perfectly fine without access to blessed tools.
There is no cost passed on to the customer because the car manufacturer does not enforce a percentage cut of Uber's or Turo's revenue.
That said, there is likely no perfect analogy in cars. We can instead turn to MacOs / Windows / Linux etc., general purpose computing platforms that do not suffer from a gatekeeper's stranglehold.
You can see where the lack of respect to IP rights leads to when it comes to current espionage claims between some of the world largest economies entangled in a myriad of IP disputes. Ultimately, the question I ask myself is: am I happy with unverified random parts I want to put in my car? Instead of having easy traceability and ability to sue for damages I now have to also vet provenance, authenticity and take on additional risk of an unvetted supplier that I often won’t be even able to sue.
This would be the developer buying a license to the SDK and documentation and then that would be it.
If you believe in that as a security measure, you could still have a signing requirement and apple could revoke trust on known-bad binaries. Which is probably what they will do.
If the developer needs to use Apple resources to track and manage said entitlements, and the consumer expects Apple to police bad actors, then are we asking Apple to do this for free on the bad actor’s behalf (oops, I didn’t mean to use your microphone, GPS, BLE in order to sell the info to an enemy state, law enforcement, angry ex!) or should the cost of said infrastructure be passed to the customer when purchasing hardware? OR does Apple wait until an application is exposed, generally through an echo chamber after the damage is done and is made aware of the issue?
Namely: unrestricted access for new, small entrants. Less restrictions on utilities. Stuff like that.
My favourite pet example: I want DaisyDisk for iOS. What does Cook need threatening with to allow that?
On the other hand, Apple not allowing apps not approved by them and not allowing manual single app installs without going through their app store or some other app store does look to me like a monopoly issue.
Sounds like you just want the iPhone hardware, but not the spirit of the OS that contributed to what it is. Adding manual disk management makes more like running Windows XP than a smooth "mostly just works" phone.
But... "Other" ?
Apple isn't the best, no one deserves "best" in desktop and mobile operating systems, but it's the least bad.
In mobiles we basically have a duopoly, and the only ones who are likely to care about the customer's interests are regulators. Neither Apple nor Google have any incentive because there is no 3rd option.
Uh. Apple and Google compete with each other. Why would they need a 3rd option for incentive?
If there were 1-2-3 more options, that would give them incentives to be less shit overall.
MacOS and iOS are the most limited in terms of customizability (personalization) and freedom for developing software for them. As much as that might surprise you, many people care about that and can't stand to use Apple operating systems because of it.
Already messed up. Shouldn't buy things you don't approve of.
> Apps offered through Web Distribution must meet Notarization requirements to protect platform integrity, like all iOS apps, and can only be installed from a website domain that the developer has registered in App Store Connect.
Further, the conditions for eligibility seem to block access to new startups and indie developers.
> To be eligible for Web Distribution, you must: (...) Be a member of good standing in the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more, and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.
Can't have this being used by those who might not net Apple any money, they're locked out obviously. Fair and reasonable. /s
I guess the outcome will be that outside some completely irrelevant oddballs there will just be one or two entities like Epic serving the intersection of non-casual gamers and people who consider the iPhone a gaming platform and they won't pull much market away from Apple, but serve as a limiter to how much Apple can abuse their platform rule. It will look like a failure, but only because some of the limiting effect on platform abuse will also bleed into makets not directly affected by EU rules.
And they'll be fairly fined for it
You get 1m free Apple App Store installs/year.
App marketplaces pay 0.50€ per install-year from zero.
App developers (except web distribution, perhaps) get 1M free app installs per year, regardless of marketplace.
> One million free first annual installs. Membership in the Apple Developer Program includes one million first annual installs per year for free for apps distributed from the App Store and/or alternative marketplaces.
> Developers of alternative app marketplaces will pay the Core Technology Fee for every first annual install of their app marketplace, including installs that occur before one million.
https://developer.apple.com/support/core-technology-fee/
iPhone users don't really own their own device, do they...
I will keep using Android devices with physical SIM until it isn't no longer viable.
However, over the years there have been more and more instances where Apple decides what I can do with my phone. From restricting APIs to give their first-party apps advantage, to, most recently, not having any (local) method to move voice memos off my Apple Watch.
I've realised they are orchestrating their hardware and software to build a truly solid wall from within which they can extract continuous rent from their captives.
I don't own my device because I cannot freely run the software I create on it (without paying Apple and gaining their approval, which is impossible in some cases).
I'm done with Apple... but there are no acceptable alternatives. Android is bad in other aspects.
This is not a free and fair market; it's a duopoly.
I genuinely pray weekly for a phone like the Framework Laptop, where I can run my own software (Arch Linux) and repair and replace the hardware as needed.
It is the closest phone to what I have been after for a while. I particularly like their long software support and their support for right-to-repair. It runs stock Android, however I'm not sure whether that means Google is still fully entrenched into all aspects of the phone by default including through Play Store APIs, notifications, etc.
(If anyone would shed some light on the software side, I would appreciate it because I'm not familiar with modern Android.)
Even if it were suitable I would not be in a position to buy it for a while, hence I am still plodding along with my iPhone but just keeping an eye out for good alternatives.
Edit: I re-noticed you said it runs postmarketOS. That's awesome and I'll need to look into it - I know very little about it. Though it seems many aspects of the hardware are not supported on even the Fairphone 4.
The bootloader can be unlocked trivially (just like on OnePlus/Nexus), but loses SafetyNet when you do.
https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm
That said, you can flash any Android Os that supports Fairphone, or PostmarketOS to it.
The phone itself is responsive/quite good despite being a bit old at this point. I can do all normal phone tasks (email, web, music, navigation, etc) with no lag or any issues. I have not attempted to game on it. The Fairphone 4 is modular, parts are available for repairs, and it works great in the US with T-Mobile or T-Mobile MVNOs.
https://murena.com/america/shop/smartphones/brand-new/murena...
That is a reasonable fee every month for the tool I get. I'm not tweaking every little thing and I don't need full access. I don't want it either. So far, Apple has created dependable devices that serves my purposes. I don't see the value in "upgrading" my phone. Maybe the pace will soon be slowed enough that it makes sense, but so far, the leap every 2 years has been enough for me to justify it. I know that is not what everybody want.
I used to do hardcore linux on computers as well, but now that I have other things I want to spend time on, I just need a laptop that is a tool. And maintaining and especially debugging Arch/Debian/Whatever breakage due to an upgrade is not part of the things I want to spend time on.
In principle, I do agree that we should have the ability to gain full access, one way or another. Maybe that means you cannot be part of the walled garden, but that should at least be a choice you can make.
You...think there are many people in 2024 with an even higher upgrade pace?
But I suppose it's better to just jump on semantics instead of trying to understand the whole of the post.
IMHO hackers should focus their efforts on the likes of Pinephone / Librem 5 instead...
(See also : avoiding Chromium.)
For one, batteries certainly are user replaceable, though it does require specialized tools and quite a bit of care.
Would you consider a car to be "rented, not owned" because they are difficult for the average end-user to repair?
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+1st+Generation+Battery+R...
These are the same as the current requirements to create an alternative App Store. So it sounds like this is a way for developers of a single app to allow users to install just their app. Before this comes into effect, these developers will have to create a custom store to allow users to install a single app.
I don't see this ending well for Apple in any measure. It seems they think the EU lawmakers will just go away if they stick their fingers in their ears hard enough, but that's not how the EU works. The gears of EU turn slowly, but grind finely.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/support/web-distribution-eu/
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/05/apple-tweaks-eu-app-sto...
Some time ago somebody made an alternative App Store for emulators, https://altstore.io . I think it works by having users get a developer's certificate and installing the apps like an in-development app. I think it would be really neat if this model got tested in court and declared completely legal.
Which would be all around moot because the fee itself is illegal.
I haven’t seen any statement in any jurisdiction by lawmakers or judges that supports that claim. It also would, to me, feel inconsistent with the rulings I read about:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple#Decision: “Rogers found in favor of Apple on nine of ten counts brought up against them in the case, including Epic's charges related to Apple's 30% revenue cut”
- https://developer.apple.com/support/storekit-external-entitl...: “Consistent with the interim relief ruling of the Rotterdam district court, dating apps that are granted an entitlement to link out or use a third-party in-app payment provider will pay Apple a commission on transactions. Apple will reduce its commission by 3% on the price paid by the user, net of value-added taxes. This is a reduced rate that excludes value related to payment processing and related activities”
What did I miss?
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/01/apple_app_rules_nethe...
Also, this whole web of companies would have to distribute the same set of apps, which would make it relatively easy for Apple to spot. Contrary to a prosecutor, Apple doesn't have to prove anything. They just close the accounts without recourse if they have any suspicion. End of story.
And the app vendor would have to forego the benefit of accumulating reviews under one name. Or they could have the opposite problem, users gravitating to one of the clones that ranks highest. How would they make sure each clone has no more than 1 million users?
This is no way to run a company. It's totally bonkers.
I would not be surprised to find similar structures leveraging Amazon or Google posing as small shops.
Apple choosing to splinter their app store rules, eulas regionally doesn't make it easier (for them) to surveil and control their Apple cosmos either.
No, Siemens is not a criminal organisation running a web of hidden shell companies. Siemens is a conglomerate comprising a large number of subsidiaries and associated companies that they publish right on their website [1].
I have no doubt that large companies use complicated structures in order to exploit loopholes. But there are limits to that, especially as Apple doesn't require a complex lawmaking process in order to change their ToS. They can close a loophole at the stroke of a pen. And they can close developer accounts at will if ToS are violated.
[1] https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:830cf...
Any cartel instantly becomes a criminal cartel if governance over laws/EULAs is basically absent and biased against the cartel.
[added]
Not saying Siemens is nefarious, but they do seem to be subverting the spirit of law. The conglomerate sure makes it easy to "reorganize" without due process for firing lots of employees.
Siemens is not a good example. If you're looking for better examples, there's Aldi. It intentionally splits its structure to avoid triggering stricter labor and reporting laws.
When you look at the multiple on services - the App Store could easily be >40% of Apple's total market cap.
They're going to stick their fingers in their ears as long as they can to defend that.
You don't give up the golden goose. You defend it.
Patè des californiens is going to be delicious.
Probably the reason we see less mineral density in crops today, CO2 levels has risen so they grow faster but mineral supply is the same. So probably not very beneficial, we aren't lacking in plant calories as is.
I thought that's primarily because monocrops are quick to strip minerals from the land, as they leave with the food that's harvested?
I don't know what propaganda you have been consuming, but mine hasn't tried to convince me that I am a plant yet.
The other big sink for CO2 is the ocean, which does not thrive on CO2. CO2 in water turns the water more acidic, which affects the base of the food chain.
There's no propaganda that suggests that plants don't thrive in CO2.
This isn't "Woke Mind Virus", it's just Corporate Pandering. Apple has a huge PR problem with their factories in China, and they've determined that it's cheaper to "Be Green" than to fix their supply chain or move manufacturing back to the US. Their moves towards being green aren't "Bad", but they wouldn't be doing it if they didn't have to create PR to paper over the things they're doing that are actually Bad.
No one cares to watch the experts presented that aren't on the "CO2 is evil" bandwagon, nor then actually spending the time to counter their many arguments of these complex issues.
I don't understand yet why no one has created a "Wikipedia" for various organizations to list and offer their counter-argument for the 1000s of different talking points, so then everyone can view them in a matrix/table format - not only for the climate issue and climate alarmism, but for other complex issues such as the Israel-Palestine "conflict".
P.S. There's no life in the ocean that grows from CO2, and that then fish et al eat?
"Through photosynthesis, phytoplankton consume carbon dioxide on a scale equivalent to forests and other land plants."
"There are a billion billion billion phytoplankton in the world's oceans—more than there are stars in the sky. Phytoplankton are hugely diverse, with likely 100 thousand different species."
Lets not ruin another thread with this nonsense.
I think if you surround yourself with children it becomes difficult to hear the adults. It's too easy to drop a hot take and then dip out of the conversation, retreating back to safety, and never develop the tools needed for critical thinking or self-reflection.
You'll never have a chance to understand how the everyday people who aren't edgy internet pals see you, or why, or what that means for your life.
If you want to tie religion into the issue, ask yourself "Is it possible to do evil in the name of good?"
Have a heart and spare a thought the guy works hard.
Phones are "done". Geese don't live forever.
Switching away is hard. In the not too distant future a $99 no brand phone will be equivalent to the iPhone experience for 80% of use cases, modulo the camera.
If apps are just web apps and run on whatever hardware, Apple will need to come up with something new. Maybe the goose was really named Steve.
Obviously the same is true of the iPhone. And software is a big part of it. (I don't want to deal with Dell and Windows. And Asahi is getting better day-by-day.) And hardware too. (M1, M2, M3, etc.. and the A series chips allow their devices to really shine with the big battery, etc.)
And ... while I don't like the actual UX of Apple-land, I don't like it either that Google with all their PhDs and big brain still cannot fucking solve the jankyness.
Yes, they will hopefully be forced to give up the free money rent from the walled garden, and hopefully it will encourage them to invest in being a good platform, invest in software, win/keep market share on merits instead of by decree.
I'm not so sure, for the same reason people still buy MacBooks when cheap Windows laptops are available, and luxury cars when there is no shortage of lightly used Kias.
Laptops and cars have been around substantially longer than smartphones, but it's still very easy to see the difference between cheap and expensive. While technically yes all of them do "the same thing", people are willing to pay for premium, and I suspect (due to relative affordability if nothing else) that the market of people able and willing to pay for a nicer phone is and will remain quite large.
Also IPhone still has more revenue opportunity. AI assistant is the next one. Chat GPT has proven people are willing to spend $20 a month on AI that doesn't even hook up to your email, calendar, or files.
Maybe for some but not for everyone. In the past you could trust that your phone works 7 years instead of 2 years by having software updates. It also is very stable on software side.
I have saved so much money by buying iPhone and using it for more than 5 years.
> Chat GPT has proven people are willing to spend $20 a month on AI that doesn't even hook up to your email, calendar, or files.
The biggest benefit for paying is the large rate limit and the best accuracy on the market. Copilot is useless with 30 responds per day.
Something along the lines of:
"We urge all EU citizens with Apple devices to have an alternate means of accessing critical internet services like banking, to protect themselves in the event we are forced to block all Apple services EU-wide for legal non-compliance."
... then watch AAPL stock drop below NVDA ...
... and Apple come crawling back, suitably obedient.
This would be:
A) looking out for their citizens
B) making it clear who's boss
EU is Apple’s third largest market. The largest market ping pongs between China and the Americans
https://www.macrumors.com/2023/08/29/china-biggest-iphone-ma...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-11/apple-to-...
I think it's inevitable iPhone 16 prices will increase in EU starting later this year. Arguably similar to Valve's Steam Deck, iPhone prices are subsidized by the apps revenue. Apple is going to try preserve their profit margins one way or another.
If people are prepared to pay more for an iPhone then Apple should have already increased prices, and if they are not then increasing prices will make less money.
The problem is that there's no opt-out, no one can (even try to) offer (real) alternatives, and thus it's impossible to judge the App Store's value proposition on its actual merits, and in the end consumers cannot vote with their wallets, there's no realistic way from the status quo (of Apple simply extracting economic rent) to a competitive market of stores.
Meanwhile, Android has dozens of stores and Google Play keeps the lion's share because it's built into almost every phone, has most of the apps anyway, and google's own safety assurances built-in. Google has gotten dinged but for much more insidious stuff behind the scenes, which still amounts to a few large publishers out of hundreds.
It's just paranoia at this point. Most of the market is captured, and any part Apple couldn't capture after 15 years (say, maybe premium games) is one they probably weren't every going to capture anyway. This is being worried about a crack in the brick wall while 99.999% of devs will just keep entering the front door like normal people. And most of the remaining people bypassing apple will just throw a brick at the door instead of meticulously exploit said crack.
> "Developers will pay a CTF of €0.50 for each first annual install over one million in the past 12 months."
I say spirit of the regulation because I'm not a lawyer and don't want to make absolute claims about the law as written, and I trust the EU to close any loopholes that may arise.
They were screwed by Microsoft in the past. And now they're the ones screwing every single small and mid-sized software shop everywhere.
When will we stop buying their products?
Before the iPhone, because I never liked the Mac UI with the bar at the top and the apps menu over there and I didn't need an iPod.
After the iPhone, a personal boycott because of the walled garden. It was not immediately clear what the endgame would be but it was pretty clear that this level of control by a single corporation on a large part of the world is a bad thing.
People who do write for it live in this electronic ghetto regardless of their size.
The customer isn't king, she is a serf.
Some phones are way more expensive than A top line, have massive cameras, better screens, batteries (I mean real life, one of failures on A side for first decade), better integration with rest of the electronic world (like streaming fullhd tv from phone to any TV I saw so far, or having mouse&keyboard desktop on big screen via single USB-C cable out of box, or very good pen within the phone - image editing goes to another level). Plus you have much bigger variety, anything from 50$. And they are open, not unimportant aspect not only for many HN users.
That doesn't mean they do bad products, in contrary. But emotions aside, its now just another set of products with personally weird philosophy, even weirder emotional fanbase and just a much more closed ecosystem.
tl;dr: Some people are just happy with Apple products; we're not cult members and saying that is insulting, frankly.
Some people are fanboys of Linux products, and all their shit runs Linux or some other Unix or BSD (more fanboys than for Apple, probably).
I even know a few people who just LOVE Microsoft and their products.
It's fun to make fun of Apple people, I know because I do that too, but in reality the reason people like me own all that stuff is because it "just works together" and I don't have to fiddle with a bunch of random brand stuff to get it to work together, plus I have had a bad experience with Google so I won't use their products. If I hadn't had a bad experience with Google, I may have everything Google branded right now so it "just works together" too.
I don't get why you immediately try to move discussion into extremes, maybe your style but not most of folks - either you have everything X, or everything Y. Sort of proving exactly my point. You don't even try to understand my argument - I can integrate anything, from any manufacturer. Plug in DELL monitor via usb-c, just works, immediately. Connect Sennheiser earplugs (since airpods pro sounds quality leaves a lot to be desired), bam and flacs flow via aptx-hd seamlessly. I could go on and on.
Apple has very tiny offer to cater to all our needs and budgets. These days, even if price is not the problem, often they don't offer the best on the market. So smart thing is to have a diverse set, the opposite of locked-down you describe. People are beginning to be fed up with that since apple is showing its true colors, and this topic and discussion is exactly about it.
When their competitors finally bother to pay attention to build quality.
It's true that it might not apply to all their products, because they also cater to people without 6-figure USD equivalent incomes, but you can buy the expensive stuff.
What would happen if big companies simply refuse to pay? Will EU put the European employees in jail? Would they put Americans in their jail? Will they do DNS block? Credit card block? Remove apple products from physical store? Many of the EU countries like Germany are export driven and certainly they don't want to close the market.
The comment above yours touches on something important. The US might not look lightly at foreign powers treating US companies in that way. The world of business and politics is give and take, it's not a video game where things can be done one-sided without consequences.
There's significant momentum in the US against big tech, I fully expect DMA like legislation on the state level in the near future. This isn't being framed as a national/foreign issue but as a democratic and consumer rights one.
Same for other regions. Japan, South Korea, the UK are likely to adopt similar laws, India already passed a sweeping crackdown on platforms essentially treating them like public utilities earlier last year.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's genuinely shocking how petty the company is acting with these changes, and how obvious their attempts at only doing the bare minimum to follow the law are.
So sad to see them on the other side of the table now, using every trick in the book to screw over the entire sector. Mr. Cook, tear down this wall!
https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/customer-in-good-stand...
Source:
"Your PG&E residential account is in good standing at the time of the outage and at the time PG&E issues payment" - https://www.pge.com/en/outages-and-safety/outage-preparednes...
"Must remain on qualifying service in good standing for duration of EIP agreement." - https://www.t-mobile.com/accessories/category/mounts-docks-a...
"Request for Certificate of Good Standing" - https://cand.uscourts.gov/attorneys/request-for-certificate-...
"Tangerine may reject the overpayment and your Account may not be considered to be in Good Standing." - https://www.tangerine.ca/en/legal/credit-card-cardholder-agr...
"Use this form to pay the United States Tax Court to order a Certificate of Good Standing" - https://www.pay.gov/public/form/start/802285219
"Your account must be in good standing to sign up" - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/899060/y...
"To maintain status as a member in good standing, SCCs must notify the SCC program manager of any changes to information collected to administer the program." - https://www.sw.siemens.com/en-US/community-catalyst-program/
It’s possible to criticize Apple without making stuff up. It’s a road traveled by few, but it is there.
For phones though I don't have the tools I do on the mac (ios is too opaque) so if I couldn't get it from the Apple app store I just wouldn't download the app at all.
Perhaps there are many more, perhaps I'm an outlier, and maybe some HN threads might uncover a which (sometimes happens).
Apple’s requirement that you already have a lot of downloads pretty much defeats the support for small indie developers. But I doubt many people care much about supporting them anyway.
His "" must be difficult to type. Ease of use.
On my pixel I can download and install any .apk I want. Easy breezy. Isn't this what the EU intended with the recent veredict?
> "So while the U.K. court did not find Samsung guilty of infringement, other courts have recognized that in the course of creating its Galaxy tablet, Samsung willfully copied Apple’s far more popular iPad." - https://filklore.com/wordpress/2012/10/are-apple-in-contempt...
> you have to have at least one million first installs annually on iOS to even qualify
That's not what the site says at all? "Membership in the Apple Developer Program includes one million first annual installs per year for free for apps distributed from the App Store, alternative marketplaces, and/or Web Distribution." That seems to indicate that there is no minimum, and installs up to 1 million are free. That means that (wild guess) 99.5% of all apps ever released will pay no fee. EDIT TO CORRECT: see below, you have to have an app over 1 million downloads in the previous year to participate, but this description of the fee structure is correct. Which is...weird?
> I doubt Epic and the like would be considered in good standing as far as Apple is concerned.
If Apple plays games like this, they deserve consequences. But does it make sense to take this interpretation rather than just assuming the language means what it means: you haven't been kicked off the platform, and you've been around for two years?
> To be eligible for Web Distribution, you must: ... have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.
So this points to the other thing I said, which is that there are very few developers that will meet this requirement.
A company has to pay Apple half a euro for every executable download from the company's own website? If Microsoft tried this shit with Windows people would be apoplectic.
For instance, my application uses a particular commercially-licensed software library. I have to pay a per-copy-sold royalty to the vendor.
Or I write a video game for a console: I have to pay a percentage of my revenue to the console vendor.
Or I use a particular algorithm (eg. an AV codec) and I have to pay patent royalties.
So if your application uses Apple's provided frameworks, and they choose to charge you a license fee (discounted to zero for your first million sales), you're calling it "flagrantly ridiculous"?
It's not: it's a wide-spread, standard practice. It might suck, sure. But hyperbole helps no-one here.
Is it common in general purpose operating systems? Android? Linux? ChromeOS? Windows? Hell, MacOS?
No? Then why did you bring it up?
Developers need the iPhone and Apple needs developers.
EU: "No."
It's called teleological interpretation, here's an EU document with a bit more background: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2017/5993...
Key quote:
> When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), rather than focusing exclusively on the wording of the provisions (linguistic interpretation). This is explained by numerous factors, in particular the open-ended and policy-oriented rules of the EU Treaties, as well as by EU legal multilingualism. Under the latter principle, all EU law is equally authentic in all language versions. Hence, the Court cannot rely on the wording of a single version, as a national court can, in order to give an interpretation of the legal provision under consideration. Therefore, in order to decode the meaning of a legal rule, the Court analyses it especially in the light of its purpose (teleological interpretation) as well as its context (systemic interpretation).
Facebook, too, tried rules-lawyering EU regulations only to be slapped with a huge fine. This shit doesn't fly here.
People on HN, sure; we aren't all lawyers. But companies? The EU is the second biggest market on the planet, might pass the USA any year now. They really should be familiar with the basics of EU lawmaking.
In this case, Apple is dragging their feet screaming trying to do their best not to comply with the intent.
What's going to happen next, they'll get a notice of nonconformity where they're asked to fix their behaviour. If they don't show good intent, they'll get hit with a fine. If they fix it and adhere to the laws here, then we'll all end up better - well, maybe the poor shareholders won't survive this hit...
If you're a company operating in the EU, just a little bit of willingness to adhere to the laws goes a very long way.
That's easy. Make a good faith interpretation of the intent of the law and follow that.
And don't try to find loop holes that only work in your favor.
Apple just appears to be hard of hearing, perhaps purposely.
That's the law. Not some linguistic technicalities in some document somewhere.
That's what I've done personally but that's not something you can ask most companies.
It's not like you can install android apps on iphone or iphone apps on android.
Sure in a market you might tell the consumer "shop somewhere else" but that's not an option here since they can't.
It's nowhere like shops where you can price compare and pick the shop you want every week.
In an actual market, both marketplace would compete.
What's why I'm saying it's not a market, phone users can't price compare stores.
I'm building a house, I'm going to buy the floor at shop B and the walls at shop A because it's a better value.
I want to buy some groceries, I can buy bread at shop A and eggs at shop B.
When you're on mobile you buy everything either at the play store or the appstore depending on your phone, that's it, zero choice, it's either everything in one or the other.
So first a grand total of two stores for the entire world isn't going cut it regardless and then those stores don't even compete with each other anyways because you are locked in to just one with your phone.
Is that any clearer now why it's not a market or still not?
Especially when both do their best to make migration to the other difficult.
Buying a cheap Android phone is $200-300 and selling an iPhone will more than pay for that. Switching from iCloud to something else for backups will actually save a little bit per month.
Average London rent is equivalent to 40K USD per year, as a random "richer country" example. It's not in the same ballpark, is it?
Average London rent is $3333 per month per person? I’m struggling to believe that.
greater london: ~£2600/mo (~US$3200)
inner london: ~£3100/mo (~US$3900)
outer london: ~£2200/mo (~US$2800)
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/news/rental-price-tracker
Not per person, I haven't ever been charged per person except in student accommodation and Japanese hotel rooms, not sure how we'd know what that would be.
I'm not sure what you are doing with your phone but you should lower your dependencies on tech gadget if switching from iPhone to Android would cost you so much. The law can't regulate primarily for people making unreasonable decisions.
I might judge you based on your decision and chose to ignore you in future. This again would not violate your personal freedom I think
Put another way: Devs don't need iPhones, they need users to have freedom to install the apps they choose to on the computing devices those users own; regardless of the three manufacturers of those devices.
I wonder how this all works for Nintendo wrt the Switch?
Traditionally, console manufacturers have lost money on hardware, and made it up in license fees for software and accessories. It is a bit more complicated in reality, and I think that situation should change, but the DMA as currently written won't have any impact on it.
Smart phones are universal, 90% penetration. Game consoles are at best at 20% or similar.
Yet they are constantly making the case that third-party developers are value sponges that use “their” platform and access “their” customers for free, and give back nothing in return. They said the same towards Spotify in response to the recent ruling about anti-competitiveness in music apps.
What Apple conveniently fails to acknowledge is that they make an obscene amount of money from selling hardware, and their motivation for investing in the platform and SDKs is that more and better software leads to higher sales of hardware. (I am aware that iPhone sales have effectively peaked, which is likely exactly why they have decided that they are the sole enabler of all digital commerce on the iPhone)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_II
How do I so surely know that? Because Article 6(7), the one that forces free-of-charge OS access for developers, is the only piece of the DMA being proactively challenged in EU court by Apple even before the compliance deadline passed[2].
[1] https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/events-poolpage/app...
[2] https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&do...
Corporations are people too, or something :)
Early indications are that Europe has learned from the mistakes of the GDPR, and enforcement of the DMA is going to be a lot more proactive. Notably, Facebook seems to be scared of it; the delay to launching Threads in Europe seems to have been for DMA/DSA compliance (in particular, it's not login-walled anymore, at least in Europe). Hard to imagine them delaying a product launch for GDPR compliance...
Many Apple indie devs and fanboys are literally screaming. I bet many people @Apple are too. There are so many things the company could do to regain geek-cred. Package manager and windowing on macOS. Align Mac App Store policies with the more liberal Windows 11 Store policies. Let people run what they want, even outside the EU, including other web engines. Invest in Proton so old Windows games can run on Mac (but then, no App Store tax). Keep OpenGL and Vulkan around for the scientific computation folks (and others). Commit to keeping Rosetta2 around indefinitely, because compatibility is your #1 job as a platform. Open-source more stuff (god forbid, your OSes! why not?).
But they've gotten timid and conservative. Top execs see risk, and VPs seem to think they're making products only for the stereotypical technophobic grandpa, rather than power users.
It was the popularity of unofficially created apps running on unlocked original iPhones (which led to many unlocking their iPhone) that convinced Apple to create the App Store.
This just isn't the case. The first iPhone with iOS 1.0 was essentially a very advanced demo that just barely made it out the door. There was no SDK, API documentation, or much of any developer toolchain for early iOS. Ask anyone that fought to build even simple unofficial apps what a nightmare using those early frameworks was like. They were not ready for public consumption.
Web apps were never the long term goal for third parties. Steve Jobs might have said that in public but it was a deflection about native SDK questions. Web apps were a stopgap until the dumpster fire of an internal SDK could be rebuilt.
It’s much easier to just make virtualization of old versions of macOS easy to facilitate compatibility with old software, which they’ve done — one can spin up a full featured GPU accelerated macOS VM with just a few lines of Swift, so you don’t even have to use third party software if you don’t want to.
I've heard from several former Apple fans who switched, and they all marvel at being able to run old binaries without recompilation. Even though they ship apps with the latest frameworks. It's still "just plain cool".
Linux is kind of a mixed bag. Some devs are ultra responsive while others only update when absolutely necessary, but the FOSS nature of most apps there helps since you can always take matters into your own hands and fork a project if it’s accumulated too much rust to be usable.
It’s a bit of a different situation under Linux where the norm is dynamically linked libraries kept up to date with a package manager, but even there static binaries and things like flatpaks and app images can be bad news.
The stick was mainly necessary for big devs back in the day, who never cared about making Mac-assed Mac apps. Now those have switched to Electron anyway; the stick no longer provides meaningful incentives. It just annoys people who want to play Half-Life for 5 minutes every few years.
I'm sure the people on the Mac team think exactly the way you do though, so I guess I hope they read this, or at least that they make sure their assumptions are still valid.
It’s hard to overstate the impact of Sparkle, it made it easy for developers to ship updates while also putting the control of that process in the hands of developers rather than the platform.
Linux went the opposite route with dozens of package managers which makes it harder for updates to reach users.
That doesn't right at all.
Apple famously dropped support for 32 bit binaries on iOS/iPadOS a while back (it's why I sold my iPad Pro).
Pretty sure they dropped support for 32 bit binaries on macOS at some point as well.
Hasn't Apple always been "computers for people who don't want to think about computers", while power users finding the tech interesting is just an accident?
This isn't 2012 anymore. Developers are into freedom and openness, and either Apple aligns itself, or Mac/iOS will have just as much appeal to cool indie devs as Android/Windows (a fraction of its current appeal). Apple platforms no longer feel exciting to devs.
But why do geeks have to destroy everything for everyone else, just for the benefit of their hobbies? Isn't Linux and Android enough and everything else hardware wise and software wise that isn't Apple? Apple devices work great for people who want to get stuff done in the real world and are willing to pay developers for great software. Why does that annoy geeks? Not everybody is interested in tech, they want something that works and get on with their day.
Just because geeks understand computers doesn't give them the right to dictate how other people should use their devices. Just like car modders shouldn't have a say on how normal people use their cars.
No one is telling normal people how to use their phones/cars. If you want the option of doing something different, however, you may need the government to help you stop companies from being anti-consumer.
You can make the same comparison for any machine. If your hobby is off-roading or dirt biking, you might want to be able to adjust fuel injection exactly as you see fit. But making every car or motorcycle owner have to adjust their gas/air mixture is not what normal people want. They want a safe vehicle that they can rely on for their commute.
You should seriously reconsider how much you believe Apple has a monopoly on usable personal computing.
Instead of nerfing Apple and ruining a good thing, why can't open source loving hackers try to improve Linux and Android (non-Google) instead, to make people want to use and pay for those systems and devices? It worked with servers for Linux. More competition and more better products is better for everybody, not trying to ruin Apple systems for consumers because of jealousy.
This implies they have lost geek cred. I think that Apple could install razor blades in their keyboards tomorrow and have more than half of HN believe it's a good thing.