Was trying the AltServer (for non-EU) route but the effort ended quickly when it asked me to enter my Apple ID and password with an assurance that it will not be saved and that might as well be true. Just not worth it.
In case it’s helpful- apparently you can just use a secondary Apple ID (even one made just for this use) with AltStore and it works just as well without risking one’s main ID. (Though for 365 day signing, that’d also need to be added to its own, or a non-individual, dev team.)
>That the first "app store" approved is built on predatory free to play gaming money is also a problem.
That's how 70% of apple's revenue is gained. AKA, the biggest players who are capable of advertising their own store without visibility from the default mode of purchase.
I'm sure eventually we'll get FDroid equivalents on IOS, but Apple is still playing coy as of now. So nothing but the deepest pockets will challenge them.
70% of Apples app store revenue comes from game MTX. This is pretty much public record thanks to Apple v. Epic.
I completely get why they are in their death thoes, but as you said: they have other lucrative revenue streams anyway. So I hope the EU keeps slamming down on them.
"Gatekeeper approved by Apple" is not entirely accurate since Apple also gatekeeps what that gatekeeper can actually approve. All apps in third-party app stores must be notarized and Apple has complete control of what apps get notarized. UTM for example is not allowed on iOS even on third-party app stores since Apple has denied them notarization.
It's more of a choice between Apple, or Apple + third-party gatekeeper. Well, at least now – I fully expect this to be investigated by the EU.
They'll fight tooth and nail even with the knowledge they'll eventually loose because they know once they cave in, other countries will want the same pro consumer privacy rules for them and Apple will have already run out of excuses by then.
...is the official App Store not built on predatory free to play gaming money? The top grossing games on iOS are all "free", and they have no rules against the most exploitative types of F2P monetization (gacha/pseudo-gambling). They have even featured gacha games like Genshin Impact during their launch events.
Apple had no qualms about Fortnites monetization model when it was in the App Store either, other than the fact that Epic tried to cut them out of the payment loop.
> Fortnite’s counterintuitive, inconsistent, and confusing button configuration led players to incur unwanted charges based on the press of a single button.
Apple is also taking aim at Epic here for using buttons and labels identical to the ones that they use - I’m curious to actually see these buttons, and I wonder if they are being used intentionally.
Maybe that was once the case (possible), but I played Fornite for a while and I never had to pay for it, nor did I feel confused by whether I’m paying for something or not.
The game is very successful and well-made. It is AAA-quality. An AAA price for that kind of content would be $60 minimum, more likely $80-100. Anything under that price and you’re playing the game at a steep discount, compared to what the games market offers.
As for kids getting confused — yeah. That happens a lot, on the internet and outside the internet. Kids are confused about so many things. In fact, that is why they need to be parented. I feel like some parents should try and do that instead of waving fists at every tech/game company.
This reminds me a bit about the outrage GTA used to cause. Just don’t buy it for your kid if you think it’s too violent for them, you know? It’s not hard. Don’t give your kid access to Fortnite if they will be confused. Or use a bank with spending limits. Or just give your kid gift cards. There are so many options in the world for parents other than child-proofing the world itself.
Very, very many parents get this right. And it only takes 10 minutes to put some restrictions in place — bare minimum for parenting. Some others have the “government should do it for me” complex. Actions beget consequences. Neither Epic Games nor governments can fix bad parenting.
So is paying less for a game than it’s worth really predatory? Alternatively, if kids get confused by something made for a broad audience, is that predatory? I don’t know, it’s grey area at best for me. You could make a claim that marketing in Fortnite is predatory but it’s the same marketing psychology that’s used elsewhere. Is marketing predatory then?
>Tencent didn't get all their investment money from Gacha in the asian market?
Got some, but thinking Tencent got all their money from Gacha is like saying Google got all its money from Search. Tencent's reach is in nearly every industry in China.
>And please don't tell me Tencent is a minority investor or that there are non predatory IAPs
I won't, but do you really believe all add-ons are predatory?
This attitude is exactly why you can't make premium mobile anymore. No one wants to pay, and the minority that do will pay a lot. "Piracy is a service problem" is a very common thing touted in argument against such tactics, but when you can sell your service for "free" to get people in the door, that argument falls apart quickly.
- subscription model. Get basic features and maybe ads, pay some 2-5 dollars a month for premium features. These may or may not have a "lifetime" option which is basically pay once.
- the dying breed of "demo mode". You play X levels and then you pay once for a "full game".
- and then freemium models which is basically a free game with small and large tricks to encourage spending over time.This is probably where you are.
But outside of that, yes. There are still premium games you buy like a console game (they are often ports of console games). But it's a niche because they are competing against a sea of "free" games. And many mobile gamers do just want 10-20 minutes of a quick fix, not even long enough to get past tutorials in larger games.
Non-expansions... (and a bunch of exceptions you list, but are not limited to).
Seems like a pretty blurry line in the sand. Even blurrier when price 100% has an impact on perception. Skins are an exception but if I told you some skins are $60, would that be predatory?
Let me translate “it’s only cosmetic” for you, because it’s probably what you think when you say there are non predatory IAPs. It means “keep the players playing until they get bored and buy some cosmetics”.
They design the game to not only fleece you for money, but to waste your time until you do.
Translate what you like, it doesn't change my point: Free to play is not inherently predatory.
There's a big difference between free to play and using as many dirty tricks as they can to fleece as much info as possible (and/or being pay to win), and a company that genuinely makes a free to play game and makes money off skins, because it made better business sense than charging $50 up front.
> So the free to play model fleeces you for more money. It's not predatory. At all. Honest.
Ah, I see the cause of the misunderstanding. You're assuming the free to play model fleeces people for more money always when that simply isn't true. It's obviously true when companies are playing dirty, but not all companies do. Consider little indie studios, for example.
Quite often, free to play can end up costing people less money. Case in point, I played CSGO for 10+ years and spent less than $5 on it. If I had bought the game when it came out it would have cost $20 or so.
The little indie studios that I buy my games from are all pay once?
> Quite often, free to play can end up costing people less money. Case in point, I played CSGO for 10+ years and spent less than $5 on it. If I had bought the game when it came out it would have cost $20 or so.
Someone else paid $2000 for hats or whatever CSGO sells in the same period to cover the $20 you and other 98 players haven't paid.
And the game design and development effort went towards making those hats so the whales can buy them.
Any free to play game would have been completely different if it were designed as a pay once game.
> The little indie studios that I buy my games from are all pay once?
Why are you going out of your way to disingenuously interpret comments? It's strangely super-defensive, your comment history shows it isn't a rare occurrence.
No, maybe not the little indie studios you specifically buy your games from, but plenty of indie studios offer free to play games.
Go browse Steam or something before commenting more on this subject please.
> Someone else paid $2000 for hats or whatever CSGO sells in the same period to cover the $20 you and other 98 players haven't paid.
Because they probably had disposable income and wanted to. It doesn't mean they are being fleeced, anymore than Balanciaga is 'fleecing' people here.
I take 'fleecing' here to mean conning, and there is no con happening. It's an honest transaction that people can take if they want to.
> Any free to play game would have been completely different if it were designed as a pay once game.
No shit, business models evolve. That doesn't mean all free to play games are inherently predatory. That's honestly a very foolish assertion to try and make.
> Go browse Steam or something before commenting more on this subject please.
I don't look at free games, I'm not that rich.
> No shit, business models evolve. That doesn't mean all free to play games are inherently predatory. That's honestly a very foolish assertion to try and make.
But they are. And not only for the whales that pay 2000 for the hats.
Do you realize that any "free" title is designed to waste your time to keep you playing? Why do you think they are all endless $ACTIVITY or competitive multiplayer? Is your time worth that little?
Jesus christ lol. So, you're just confirming here you had no clue what you were talking about. You get that, right?
You're making very bold claims based on assumptions and misunderstanding, for something you don't even browser or participate in. Your initials aren't DK by any chance, are they?
> And not only for the whales that pay 2000 for the hats.
Sure, anyone that can afford it and wants it will. Most people might just pay for a few $20 hats though, and get more enjoyment out of it than say 3 of their $8 cups of coffee.
> Do you realize that any "free" title is designed to waste your time to keep you playing?
I mean, that'ss true in some cases, and I'd say that's true of the biggest free to play games pushed by the buggest companies with a history of being shady, but again (and this is key): that doesn't describe all free to play games.
You're doing the equivilant of insisting all operating systems must be unstable and crash because Windows used to.
> Why do you think they are all endless $ACTIVITY or competitive multiplayer? Is your time worth that little?
I play free to play games to jump on and have a break. I'v played FPS games since I was a kid and find it a good way to destress. I see no problem in doing something I enjoy and would hardly call that a waste of time.
I’m not disagreeing with you that it’s predatory but I think the point is that by not charging up front, you get more people in the door. And even if each of those people spend less than the upfront would have been, there are so many more of them that you make money. That basic philosophy isn’t bad, it’s what most tech platforms are based on
It's a problem for those who already bought Apple and didn't know any better or didn't care. Also, not everyone likes the only available other alternative, which is Google, as while they allow sideloading, they're still a privacy nightmare ad-ware company.
The mobile space really needs a shake-up from the entrenched duopoly as currently the choice are a rock or a hard place.
>as while they allow sideloading, they're still a privacy nightmare ad-ware company.
You can definitely de-google AOSP (and I believe a few phones sell on that promise if you don't want to ever interface with that stuff). You can't de-apple IOS as of now.
I don't think that problem will be solved anytime soon. Network effects + market capture = no one is going to want to learn a new system. The desktop space has been 3 platforms for decades and the only potential challenger is... Google. Meanwhile, Microsoft, Blackberry, and Palm all dropped out nearly a decade ago and there's nothing new on the horizon.
> It's a problem for those who already bought Apple and didn't know any better or didn't care. Also, not everyone likes the only available other alternative, which is Google, as while they allow sideloading, they're still a privacy nightmare ad-ware company.
If you do care about privacy and having control of your own hardware, Google is the only choice, and that should be very obvious. Not because Android is so much better, but because you have a lot of options, even using a custom rom if you want. No such option with Apple.
> Google is an ad company so it's totally not obvious to me.
Google being an ad company is irrelevant here. I wasn't clear in my wording, I should have said 'Android as a platform' and not Google, is the only choice, and it is.
Sure, there are disadvantages and it's not perfect, but it doesn't matter. If you care about privacy, using something like Graphene or eOS on a Fairphone is your best option.
> Oh, and can I pay with my phone when using those custom roms, for example?
The demand isn't there for that. Help change that and be the change you want to see in the world.
If trying to get enough public support to push for structural change is the idea, then iOS is currently moving toward being less locked down, while Android has been getting more locked down.
Help change that by supporting open platforms over closed platforms. It's that simple. Put your money towards fairphones and pinephones and not iphones.
I will put up with a certain amount of jank to support better platforms, but those two in particular are a mess and the fairphone is still stuck on qualcomm.
Cydia requires a jailbreak to begin with, which won't be available on newer devices. Sandcastle project is just Android for iPhones which wouldn't be an alternative to Android and it looks abandoned, too.
Android is the better choice not due to Android specifically, but rather due to Android as a platform which includes the hardware that the Android OS can run on, and all the forks of Android.
Fundamentally boils down to the question of whether or not your society is equipped with enough education to successfully make rational consumption choices.
one step at a time. Bureaucracies and regulators move slow but it seems pretty evident that the wind is at least blowing into the correct direction this time. Might take another five years or so but in a lot of regions it seems like the control over devices and software is slowly breaking down. India, Japan, SK all have similar regulation passed or on the way.
Excuse them because they want their own rules and regulations on their territory and not the default US rules that ship with Google and Apple devices.
That would be like Budweiser selling their beer in Europe with the condition you have to be 21 to drink it because that's how it is where they're from.
>it would be nice to see but console games get the same treatment.
what's the appeal? consoles at best last 8 years before the new generation. These stores probably take 2-4 years to prepare properly. A dev won't use half their generation to get around a 30% fee.
I think one understated part of the consoles is that that 30% does go into proper support, compared to apple/google that act more as gatekeepers. Larger studios knowing they can get on-site console developers to help debug, optimize, and maybe even fix API issues is well worth such a cut.
> consoles at best last 8 years before the new generation.
Consoles remain alive way longer in poorer regions of the world. The lock-in from console manufacturers is designed to artificially shorten console lifecycles by cutting off supply of newly-manufactured older consoles and new games for those consoles. It's textbook planned obsolescence.
I don't want a single CPU in my home that I don't have the right to reprogram as I see fit. There's no reason for gaming consoles to be an exception.
Sure. I 100% agree. But I wasn't arguing as a customer, I was arguing as a potential studio making a storefront on the console. Would I support that store for 5-10+ years for 3rd world countries? Would it even be profitable given exchange rates?
The 1st world customers wants to keep advancing to the next generation. 3rd parties want to make money and mostly get it from 1st world countries.
>artificially shorten console lifecycles by cutting off supply of newly-manufactured older consoles and new games for those consoles. It's textbook planned obsolescence.
Planned obsolescence isn't to stop producing a product you no longer want to sell. If there's one thing consoles are good at, it's supporting repairs well after the next gen rolls end. Nintendo just stopped supporting the Wii U (their worst selling console) repairs due to a lack of supplies, and that is about 6 years after they EOL'd it in terms of software support. Phone/PC manufacturers should take notes.
Meanwhile, hardcore gamers have been complaining about the switch performance for years. They are disappointed there was no mid gen refresh. Consumer demand very much wants companies to keep making better hardware.
>There's no reason for gaming consoles to be an exception.
Personally, I just don't see gaming consoles as general computing devices. They could be, but they way they are presented/marketed aren't. So I have about as much desire to reprogram on my PS4 as I do my smart fridge (which probably is running some variant of Linux underneath, albeit embedded).
It's Apple blatantly violating the Digital Markets Act, because it thinks it is above the law (and to be fair, in the USA, it is). The EU has acknowledged this and is currently preparing a truly massive punishment for Apple. Apple, being unaccustomed to having rules apply to it, seems to be ignoring this.
I think it's more likely that while the punishment might be significant it will be more profitable to continue as long as possible violating the law or at least pushing the boundaries as much as possible instead of proactively being compliant.
After a court order they will know exactly where the limits are and tiptoe them as much as possible. If they proactively try to be "overcompliant" they might loose more money in the long run.
It's messed up to be honest. I would prefer harsher punishments, but on the other hand if companies are scared all the time it might have a chilling economic effect so there is a balance to strike as well.
> while the punishment might be significant it will be more profitable to continue as long as possible violating the law or at least pushing the boundaries as much as possible instead of proactively being compliant
This is it. The law is ambiguous, and until someone specifies the line it makes no sense for either side to concede. Both Epic and Apple are multi-billion dollar companies taking maximalist positions.
There is also the shadow component of it being an open question—given the present state of European politics—as to which will outlast the other, Cupertino or Brussels.
I mean, if it's too much, they will just pull out of the EU and sell to Europeans via online only. EU citizens will still be Apple customers, just without any EU protections.
To be fair, the EU is being a bit ridiculous sometimes. Apple decided not to compete in the EU because of the restrictions, and the EU seemingly wanted to penalize that decision also.
> Selling your product in the EU means having an EU presence.
Ehhhhhh. Kind of. Maybe. Certainly not always.
I mean, if there is some shitty little porn company in say, California, and they make porn that say, caters to a fetish that is legal in California but illegal in the EU, well, what then?
The porn company isn't doing anything wrong, and EU laws are irrelevant. At this point they can try to firewall off the company, punish ISPs, maybe punish citizens who do business with that company, because it isn't breaking any EU laws, and has no EU presence that can be fined, sieved, etc.
This is very normal, this is the way international laws work barring treaties or other agreements to have a special arrangement outside of that.
So, if Apple pulls out of the EU, maybe they can no longer ship mail to the EU, I'm doubtful of that but let's just say. Well, there are plenty of non EU countries close by, including the UK. Not really a problem for EU citizens to get one at all, so again, the EU can only punish people, not the company.
> Like, I can’t just ship heroin to Europe from abroad and claim I’m immune.
If it was legal to do so in the sending country, sure you could. That isn't true for any country though, so it's not a great analogy.
> So, if Apple pulls out of the EU, maybe they can no longer ship mail to the EU, I'm doubtful of that but let's just say.
Why? Apple has Customs pulling (ironically, actually genuine) Apple parts being shipped.
Customs is built around this whole model, unless what, you propose that Apple starts selling commercial quantities of iPhones by disposable drop shippers?
Excellent point, I clearly wasn't thinking too clearly when I made that point. The main point I was thinking is that trying to stop iPhones coming in to the EU is significantly harder.
Imagine the amount of people wanking through the 'nothing to declare' exit after coming back from pretty much any other country and buying an iphone.
The EU could start blocking payments to that porn studio. Avoiding the block would be money laundering, which is also illegal in California. The EU (or it's constituent countries - not sure) also controls imports, and could seize and destroy illegally purchased iPhones at the border. Every one of my international purchases is already stopped and processed by customs to evaluate import taxes. It would be quite easy for them to simply say "you can't import this."
> The EU could start blocking payments to that porn studio.
Sure, but this is not punishing the company in any way which was the other posters point. If the EU was blocking payments to Apple after Apple withdrew from the EU, they are not punishing Apple or holding them accountable to EU law (specifically in the context of complying with competition guidelines and DMA type stuff).
> Avoiding the block would be money laundering, which is also illegal in California.
Hmmmm. I'm not so sure about that. If the EU barred payments to Apple, that block would be on banks and payment processors, not people. If someone goes to the US and buys an iPhone in this new world, they are not committing a crime unless the EU passes a law prohibiting its citizens to buy iPhones.
> The EU (or it's constituent countries - not sure) also controls imports, and could seize and destroy illegally purchased iPhones at the border. Every one of my international purchases is already stopped and processed by customs to evaluate import taxes. It would be quite easy for them to simply say "you can't import this."
Absolutely, but this has nothing to do with Apple, and it isn't the EU punishing Apple, it's Apple punishing people or organizations.
The other posters point was that if Apple withdraws from the EU, EU law wouldn't apply (in the sense they wouldn't need to allow any 3rd party app store, period), and people could still buy iPhones and Apple products outside of it. It's on the EU to try and deal with that.
So they’d lose 20% of their global revenue just out of spite? Can you name a single rational reason why’d they do that?
> Or bypass
How? They won’t be able to sell directly to EU customers…
> Re-read the comment in context.
It just doesn’t make any sense. Apple wouldn’t be able to sell to clients in the EU on a large scale. It just wouldn’t work due to perfectly obvious reasons.
> So they’d lose 20% of their global revenue just out of spite? Can you name a single rational reason why’d they do that?
If EU fines exceed EU revenue.
> How? They won’t be able to sell directly to EU customers…
The EU would have to police its own citizens from going outsize their walls and buying iPhones from literally any other country.
> It just doesn’t make any sense. Apple wouldn’t be able to sell to clients in the EU on a large scale.
So it made sense, and you understood fine, you just disagreed and decided to be obtuse about it. Sigh.
The point was simply that the EU can't touch a company in another country with no presence in the EU, even if EU citizens are buying from it.
All they can do is try and block payments to it, firewall it off, and similar things.
So sure, the EU could police its citizens buying iPhones online, but that's going to be an awful lot of work considering all the third party sellers, and I don't think it would be terribly successful. Not without enforcement which would be extremely unpopular.
They won’t. Also you’re assuming that Apple’s management is irrational and petulant, because if not it should be “if the cost of compliance with EU regulations exceeds their EU revenue/net income” which isn’t going to be even remotely true.
> obtuse about it
Not at all. It’s just that this seems fairly obvious to me:
A very small fraction of people
buying iPhones in Europe now would buy them if they had to ship them from outside the EU, pay the VAT themselves and have no warranty/support.
So sure it won’t be 100%, just 80-90% which doesn’t change anything
You're awfully cocksure with nothing to back it up.
Apple's global revenue in 2023 was about 120 billion. EU revenue was 24 billion. DMA allows fines up to 10% of global revenue. Two max fines under the DMA is already more than their EU profit.
> Also you’re assuming that Apple’s management is irrational and petulantv
I'm not the one making an assumption here. I'm saying if x then y which is perfectly reasonable. You're saying x would *NEVER* happen, which I would consider foolish.
I think Apple will comply with the EU to a point, I agree they are not trying to leave the EU at all. But ultimately they are still a US company and follow US leadership, who may want to do things or try and circumvent EU policies in a way they think are fine, but the EU doesn't.
I mean, there was already a clash with their first fine, it won't be surprising if more come.
I also really think you are being dismissive and downplaying their decision to not enter the AI market in the EU.
> It’s just that this seems fairly obvious to me:
> A very small fraction of people buying iPhones in Europe now would buy them if they had to ship them from outside the EU, pay the VAT themselves and have no warranty/support.
> So sure it won’t be 100%, just 80-90% which doesn’t change anything
I'm so confused at what point you are making here. You're saying EU citizens, if Apple left the EU, would just, and to quote "ship them from outside the EU, pay the VAT themselves and have no warranty/support."
Is this correct? Because that has been specifically the point I was making. Jesus. My point though, to clarify again, is if they do that, Apple won't be subject to any EU rules. All those iPhones bought outside the EU won't have 3rd party app stores, for example, and the EU would be powerless to enforce that. Seriously. That's the point I made several comments ago that you decided to dispute. Which now you are making yourself?
Sure, like let's not be silly and absurd and refuse to consider the possibility Apple might leave the EU?
> Also it’s the cost of compliance that has to surpass their profit
Right, but the fines the EU issues are from their global revenue. While I think this is reasonable, for the same reasons it's a problem that the rich can speed and not care about a fine, but it could well be enough for Apple to withdraw.
It’s a rough not very educated estimate of what proportion of their global revenue Apple might lose by complying with the regulations ( I’d personally bet it’s significantly less than that). Do you have a better figure?
Once again, you're just making assumptions. So, all this time you've just assuming the max fines won't apply - that's the entire crux of your argument, right?
As where I've been talking about a situation where the max fines are being imposed.
I really don't think you're reading or keeping the context of the discussion in mind when replying. I have no other explanation for you assuming 2% and asking if I have a better figure in spite of me specifically citing the max fine number as a prerequisite for my scenario numerous times.
No, it’s still a problem for apple because they won’t leave. Even in the absurdly inconceivable (to an extent that it’s not even worth discussing) case that they did losing a significant proportion of their revenue would be a much bigger problem for them than the EU.
Less than 20% of Apple’s net income comes from what they call “Europe”, which actually includes Africa and the mid-East.
If Apple pulled out of the EU, which isn’t even all of the European continent much less the “Europe” reporting region, they would probably take less than a 10% hit. Significant, but not a showstopper. I don’t know where everyone gets this idea that pulling out of the EU would kill Apple.
It wouldn’t. It would still be an immensely absurd thing to do. I assume Apple is not run by 12-year olds, why would they lose 15-20% (probably closer to 20%, EMEA seems to be ~27% and besides Britain the EU would be the overwhelming majority of what’s left) of their revenue out of spite when realistically they are only risking 1-2% by staying?
They are just trying to find the “optimal” way of complying with the regulations while maximizing their income.
Apple even continue to follow all Russia demands even though they only sell subscriptions there and accept payments on App Store. E.g few days ago they removed VPN apps from App Store due to demands of Russian government.
The difference is that China’s domestic requirements don’t require Apple to become a non-profit. If the EU’s requirements are actually as many HN’ers would like them to be, Apple will have no reason to sell iPhones in the EU.
Apple still makes significantly more money from selling the actual iPhones than from the App Store.
This such an obvious fact that anyone even mildly interested in the topic (i.e. commenting here and making such strong, yet silly, claims) surely must know..
If that were true, Apple wouldn’t care to poke the bear.
If you were honest, you would read Apple’s SEC filing, which show that (globally) about 43% of Apple’s profits come from Services, while 57% comes from hardware. You could just admit that you don’t understand the difference between revenue and profit. I’m sure you’ll move the goalposts and claim that’s “significantly” more.
The EU wants to zero out Services revenue, while simultaneously removing Apple’s brand value (a curated “walled garden”, where app developers can’t take too much advantage of customers).
The alt stores in the EU will be a race to the bottom of which one allows developers to abuse customers the most. Why would any app stay on Apple’s store when alt stores allow more invasive privacy violations? And then when the app ecosystem on iOS looks like Android, what possible reason could you have to buy an iPhone?
So, yes, the EU very much wants Apple to be a non-profit.
> If that were true, Apple wouldn’t care to poke the bear
They are just searching for the optimal way of complying with the regulations while maximizing their income .
you do have a valid point about services being a larger % of their net income than I implied but that includes Apple Care, iCloud, the estimated $20(?) billion from Google that’s basically pure profit and is massively inflating the services segment’s margins? What proportion is left to the App Store? Who cares let’s just ignore that I guess..
> You could just admit that you don’t understand the difference between revenue and profit
Ok, that’s that, you’re either being obtuse or worse. Either way no point in continuing this silly discussion. But no, most of what you’re saying makes very little sense
So instead of losing 5% or so of their revenue in the EU they’d rather lose > 80-90% seems like a smart business decision…
In any case (not quite the same but gives a glimpse into their mindset) they have zero issues with kowtowing to authoritarian regimes like those in Russia or China
> So instead of losing 5% or so of their revenue in the EU they’d rather lose > 80-90%
They would directly lose ~40% of profit. Additionally, there’s no reason to buy an iPhone if it just works like an Android, so Apple would be competing with Samsung hardware on price instead of on having a superior customer experience. So there go the other ~60% of profits.
So, yes, pulling out of the market completely starts to look like a rational business decision.
How did you come to that conclusion. Doesn’t “services” include the $20 billion get from Google per year which is basically pure profit? Also Apple care, icloud etc etc. how would that be impacted?
> Additionally, there’s no reason to buy an iPhone if it just works like an Android
Why would it work the same as an Android? Most people don’t use third party appstores or side loading anyway…
> So, yes, pulling out of the market completely starts to look like a rational business decision.
> So instead of losing 5% or so of their revenue in the EU they’d rather lose > 80-90% seems like a smart business decision…
Not sure where you're pulling that 5% figure from, but the EU wants to fine companies like Apple a much larger percentage of their global revenue, not just EU revenue.
If the fines the EU wants to impose are greater than Apple's profit in the EU, indeed it would be a smart business decision to pull out.
> In any case (not quite the same but gives a glimpse into their mindset) they have zero issues with kowtowing to authoritarian regimes like those in Russia or China
Well, duh. Apple are not concerned with a government abusing its own people, they are concerned with a government taking 10% of their global revenue.
> Good thing the fines are optional and can be negotiated down
Source? Which of the fines so far have been negotiated down?
> when apple starts complying with the regulations.
Heh. Or, Apple just starts withdrawing from spaces in the EU because they don't like the EU's behavior. For example, they are withdrawing from the AI space citing that exact reason.
If they are already pulling out of cashcows like AI, is it that much a stretch to think they could withdraw entirely?
Not to mention Apple consideres the regulations to be unclear given the the EC seem to want Apple to figure out the 'spirit' of the law and comply with that instead.
> They could do that, that in no way means that they are planning to
They already do that. Look at what the max fines for say DMA or GDPR allow for. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume all your previous replies are because you haven't actually done this yet.
I guess most Iphones are sold in a bundle with a carrier contract. Those bundles would become impossible. Without this scheme, most Iphone users would notice how overpriced their shiny status symbol actually is.
I think that’s pretty rare in the EU these days and seems to be restricted in some countries at least. You might get some nominal discount but you’re still being billed separately for the device/contract each month
I want that too. But you know, there are apps in my country, banking apps, payments apps which are literally essential now as public service. They ask for every permission under the sun and don't function if you don't provide them those permissions which are often contact read, SMS read, and definitely location read - on Android. On Apple? Ah, works just fine without any permission otherwise Apple won't approve those apps. Heck, I have used TrueCaller with zero permission. I don't want to lose this freedom to be honest, as much as I despise Apple's user and other-business hostility.
Notarization as it exists today as well. It's absurd that everyone on the planet needs to ask some corporation for permission to allow users to use their app in a normal way.
> third party app stores are subject to review by apple is a problem in itself
Anybody speaking with certainty on these questions should be distrusted.
We don’t know. We now have a natural experiment between the EU and U.S. My suspicion is we’ll see Orwellian corporate surveillance through mandated alternative marketplaces, e.g. Facebook requiring an Eye of Sauron marketplace to get around Apple’s rules, but that’s just a hunch. We may instead see a Cambrian explosion of creativity in the EU.
The question is how long we wait to measure. I think the answer is about one VC fund cycle, or 3 to 7 years. I don’t know when to start the clock—my hunch is when the first alt app store actually launches.
Don't iPhone users in China already interface with effectively a separate app store? I bet you won't find history edu apps detailing the events of June 4 1989 there.
It's easy for people to read the law — or worse, opinions about the law — and mistake this for knowledge. One of the benefits to me for ChatGPT is that it gives me a stick to measure against: I know it's flawed because of how it writes code, and I know it will be that level of wrong about law too, and I also know that it's wildly better about law than I am. This makes the degree of my own ignorance much more intuitive, and reminds me that I can't just look at the text of the law and go "ah-ha!"
While I suspect you're right that Facebook will attempt this, I suspect they are much like Apple when it comes to not really believing that the EU is serious, and it will explode in their faces — a few years back, Apple put in rules for advertising privacy ID, which (while acknowledging my ignorance above) didn't seem too different from what the law required, yet Facebook was very unhappy about this.
"It's absurd that apps are subject to review by Apple. I know what I'm doing. I've thoroughly inspected the source code of this app that I want to install."
Not even the most brilliant hacker can say so. In other words: I don't agree. Users are dumb, and need to protected from harm. I don't want the Windows virus disaster all over again, especially because this time the stakes are considerably higher.
You can disagree with the fees, but for the rest my opinion is: live with the pain.
I'd be hesitant to treat them this way. One is a trusted and controlled environment, the other is a pocket storefront run by Google/Apple and their partners.
Your Mac doesn’t know where you are at all times, whether you’re walking or running or in a vehicle. I also suspect it doesn’t know your social media habits as well, although everyone’s different in that regard.
This only holds until a major player pulls its apps from the store and requires you to use their portal. It’s not exactly a “welcome” when the price is losing access to a major component of your social network.
Apple's (flawed!) review process still catches a lot of bad actors. Not all, and it has false-positives. That doesn't mean it's useless.
The (legit) question is: is Apple also using security as an excuse to make more money at the expense of customer choice? Because Apple absolutely doesn't need to be the only entity performing this task — I don't trust Epic, I think their business model is predatory on gambling addiction, that doesn't mean they would be incapable of performing the same kinds of security review — and while Apple's smooshing of all the different expenses from API development to review and hosting and processing fees into a fixed sales percentage is convenient, it does make it harder for competitors to emerge for each of those separate tasks.
I think it goes both ways. Perfection is letting me control the hardware I bought and tweak the software to my liking. them throwing their hands up because of their motte argument of "security" doesn't resonate with me. Especially when the bailey argument is simply "we want to control everything you do". Here, it's "don't even try to achieve good, avoid bad at all costs".
In my mind it's like closing a store down due to excessive theft in an area. That doesnt fix theft, it just takes away service from the honest customers.
Some call it "the Apple tax". To that end, I see this as more like the invention of courts and a police force in a world that was previously an anarchy.
Yes, I lose the power to do things; in exchange, I genuinely gain the security of some measure of defence against other people doing things at my expense. I remember when we could actually read all the code on our computers — that time has passed even when the source code is fully published simply because the volume is too great, and we must either trust someone to do it for us (or at least that someone has liability if it goes wrong), or have some manner of insurance because doing so is impractical.
Of course, corporations are not democracies, so the fight between Apple and Epic is to me as the fight between King John and his barons in 1215 A.D. — and my relative power compared to either corporation is as the power of a, I dunno, franklin or free peasants or something, as to the King and his barons.
You're essentially arguing that King John should have exclusive right to publish books, and that he should be able to prevent the barons from publishing unapproved books - the DMA gives anyone the right to publish apps including you and I and Epic.
I might agree that Epic should be prevented from publishing their apps, but by a Democratically elected government, not by a private warlord. If Epic is doing something wrong, that should be a matter of public law, not a matter for a king to decide.
> You're essentially arguing that King John should have exclusive right to publish books, and that he should be able to prevent the barons from publishing unapproved books - the DMA gives anyone the right to publish apps including you and I and Epic.
The thing I'm referencing is Magna Carta, specifically where the conflict was over "can the King force me to use his own courts when I sue him?" — this didn't much affect the normal folk who never had to personally sue the king in his own personal courts.
Similarly, I:
(1) already had the ability to publish an app, and have done so on many occasions
> I might agree that Epic should be prevented from publishing their apps, but by a Democratically elected government, not by a private warlord. If Epic is doing something wrong, that should be a matter of public law, not a matter for a king to decide.
Sure, but this is the kind of thing we could — and others have and will anyway even if we don't — spend lifetimes arguing over every single nuance and subtlely of, including the extent to which a corporation is allowed to have the freedom to decide its own rules for who it does business with e.g. all the things Apple is doing (and all that Apple wants to refuse to do), or if the owner of a cake shop can refuse to do business with customers whose morals it disagrees with, and so on.
The only thing I'm sure of, is that I can't see the consequences of applying my first principles as if they were universal truths.
>I genuinely gain the security of some measure of defence against other people doing things at my expense.
If I need security, I buy anti-virus. But I can't opt out of Apples "security". I don't see that as a good thing. If apple wanted to offer that at checkout, I wouldn't mind at all.
Worst case scenario, I backup all my stuff. My phone exploding should not ruin any more of my livliehood than losing a few days of phone calls would. I can protect myself without some non-consentual agreement from a vendor whose relationship should end after the device ships to my address.
that time has passed even when the source code is fully published simply because the volume is too great, and we must either trust someone to do it for us (or at least that someone has liability if it goes wrong), or have some manner of insurance because doing so is impractical.
>that time has passed even when the source code is fully published simply because the volume is too great, and we must either trust someone to do it for us (or at least that someone has liability if it goes wrong), or have some manner of insurance because doing so is impractical.
I'm not going to pretend I consult the AOSP everytime I hit an odd quirk on my android. But I like the ease of mind knowing I can take my ball and go home if Google goes rogue (and I can argue thst it has already done so, years ago).
I ultimate trust people mush smarter than me for that, but I like having more than one biased source to rely on. And heck, I might help contribute if angry enough. That's the power of open source. The best possible insurance when I go in loops under "official channels".
> If I need security, I buy anti-virus. But I can't opt out of Apples "security". I don't see that as a good thing. If apple wanted to offer that at checkout, I wouldn't mind at all.
I can't opt out of the police.
I can opt out of Apple's security by using literally any other brand of phone.
> Worst case scenario, I backup all my stuff.
No, the worse-case scenario is that malware knows everything you look at and everything you type (like bank details), everything you're listening to in real life, your location, your health data, etc.… and can also be used to spy on you through all the phones of the people around you in much the same way even if you don't download any malware yourself.
(And how many of those things would Facebook like to do in the name of "improved advertisement targeting"? If they had full access to photo libraries rather than just what's uploaded to their servers, I'd expect them to try to analyse all my friend's photos that happen to include me for this exact reason, and I'd expect that data to be mis-used by malicious parties just like other ad data has reportedly been).
There's a lot of reason someone should be enforcing rules on this; not so much that it should be Apple doing it.
> whose relationship should end after the device ships to my address
So, not a fan of security patches? :P
> But I like the ease of mind knowing I can take my ball and go home if Google goes rogue (and I can argue thst it has already done so, years ago).
Given that Google has (arguably) already gone rogue, can you actually take your ball and go home? There's a whole subreddit for that, yet every time I've heard other people try, it turns out much harder than anticipated.
> That's the power of open source. The best possible insurance when I go in loops under "official channels".
I have no more reason to trust open source than closed source: underhanded-C contest; at least one example of a Linux distro doing exactly what I'd expect if they were under a secret government order; Reflections on Trusting Trust; the foot-gun nature of C++ combined with its popularity; the number of times someone else has told me to fix something in a PR or QA report where I never spotted the issue while writing the code myself; and the obvious motivations of intelligence agencies worldwide to insert backdoors.
Given my cultural history, I sure do wish I could.
Regardless, police have people holding them accountable some 20% of the time. No one's holding Apple accountable in the US, apparently.
>No, the worse-case scenario is
Okay... I'm a regular Joe. That sucks but let's not pretend I'm leaking government secrets even if all that happens. I see bad malware on phone (with my data backed up), I reset my phone. It's software, not a serial killer.
You can argue identity theft and all that, but that's not a unique feature to IOS/Android/Windows/Linux. So I don't count that as a bonus/demerit to any given platform.
>I have no more reason to trust open source than closed source
I already gave a reason. The ball is in my court and I can take it home. There are bad actors but also good actors when bad actors arise. Thars a better check and balance than some conglomerate who never had my best interests in mind.
> I'm a regular Joe. That sucks but let's not pretend I'm leaking government secrets even if all that happens. I see bad malware on phone
Back in the desktop days, Regular Joe had malware that they have no idea was on their system.
> (with my data backed up), I reset my phone. It's software, not a serial killer.
What it is, however, is a thief. Lots of people have juicy secrets, that's why privacy is important in the first place.
Malware is very good at keeping hidden these days, running unspotted for a long time.
Someone cleans out your bank account, or gets blackmail material on you, backup won't do jack. This is also why certain apps, including banking, include tests to make sure they're not on a rooted device.
> So I don't count that as a bonus/demerit to any given platform.
Sounds like you only accept silver bullet "solutions".
Scare quotes because nothing ever is.
The questions are "how often" and "where can be done about it", the answers are not "yes" and "turn it off and on again".
> I already gave a reason
And I showed why it wasn't sufficient.
If you think open source will keep you safe, you are treating it as the exact silver bullet you're criticising Apple for not being.
> Thars a better check and balance than some conglomerate who never had my best interests in mind.
There's no real balance, and the checks are insufficient — there are definitely bugs that only get spotted a decade later, there are definitely state-sponsored flaws in OSS code, definitely some cases of normal criminals buying off some projects, and definitely cases where we don't find out about these things until much later.
And of course, quite a lot of OSS projects are in fact directly funded and managed by a corporation — the cathedral and the bazaar have both blended into a metaphorical Amazon marketplace, complete with fake reviews for fake products.
macOS has implemented code signing and only allowing apps from the App Store or trusted developers as default for quite a while now but people still find a way to turn it off or bypass it and then get infected by malware/spyware/adware. Because it's expected that you can run any app on a desktop/laptop platform though, they can't just fully restrict it, and it shows.
If "historical inertia" is the only thing keeping macOS a general purpose computing platform, that is extremely troubling. Because it means Apple will not hesitate to lock it down in the future if it's able (e.g. through subversion of notarization).
To me, this is one of the main reasons to fight for an open iOS: if people get accustomed to corporations revoking access to their software for arbitrary reasons, and if the technology exists allowing them to easily do so, then the gradual introduction of these measures to PC platforms will be met with a collective shrug.
> So suffice to say, their whole security scheme leaves a bit to be desired.
Indeed, but always was it so, and always will it be.
Also, that story is exactly what I mean when I say that what Apple does is, despite the flaws, still better than nothing: you can't pull a fake app hosted on its own website — you might not even be able to go after the host or the domain registry without a court order, and even then the country in which they are based may not be on good terms with your own and may not care about that order.
The analogy here would be using a headline of the police arresting a criminal to say "this shows that the idea of using a police force to prevent crime leaves a bit to be desired". Yes, and?
> you can't pull a fake app hosted on its own website
You can stop signing it, or register the hash of the program as malware. There, that's two easy ways to stop end-users from consuming harmful software.
> The analogy here would be [...]
It's more like if the police was trying to rationalize some ridiculous security system (say, drones) that didn't help catch criminals in the first place.
> You can stop signing it, or register the hash of the program as malware. There, that's two easy ways to stop end-users from consuming harmful software.
The first requires them to be signed in the first place. That violates the prerequisite of your point because your words were "they leave it on, and install malware/spyware/adware anyways" — so that's not a way to actually stop end-users from consuming harmful software, by your own words.
The issues with the App Store are "Apple is a gatekeeper that gets to say no and we don't like the set of reasons they've given themselves to be allowed to do that" and "Apple is a gatekeeper that charges money and we don't like that charge".
The right to stop signing some app, the right to register a hash as malware, both have the exact same capacity for mis-use if you regard Apple themselves (or any other gatekeeper) as being a threat to your freedom. Unless you turn off "run only trusted apps", but again that violates the prerequisite of your point, because then "stop signing it" has no effect.
And come on, hashes? Self-modifying code was a thing when my compiler only output for 68k/System 7.
> It's more like if the police was trying to rationalize some ridiculous security system (say, drones) that didn't help catch criminals in the first place.
It's specifically an example of them catching a bad actor and stopping them. "Pulls" is right in the headline.
Android doesn’t seem to be a complete disaster in this sense?
> and need to protected from harm
Yet Apple has no issue working for authoritarian regimes like Russia and China to protect those regimes and fuck over their users. Is that what you’re talking about? People are to dumb and stupid for democracy and therefore corporations like Apple need to prop up dictators to protect them?
I’m not even being facetious, looking at the actual facts and Apple’s behavior I don’t see how anyone can come to a different conclusion?
> Before Apple's announcement, Epic said the iPhone maker had twice rejected documents the video-game publisher submitted to launch the Epic Games Store because the design of certain buttons and labels was similar to those used by its App Store.
This is illegal and I hope it leads to Apple being disallowed to still insert itself into the distribution process at all, which should’ve been the case from the start.
It’s kinda strange to see so many people taking Epic’s account here at face value given they’ve been fined multiple times in multiple countries over their existing store (Fortnite). For example:
> The FTC says Fortnite's "counterintuitive, inconsistent, and confusing button configuration led players to incur unwanted charges based on the press of a single button."
> Because of those design tricks, the regulator says it found instances where players were charged while attempting to wake the game from sleep mode, while the game was in a loading screen, or by pressing an adjacent button while attempting simply to preview an item.
> "These tactics led to hundreds of millions of dollars in unauthorized charges for consumers," the FTC said.
> Some parents complained that their children had racked up hundreds of dollars in charges before they realized Epic had charged their credit card without their consent. Accounts who disputed unauthorized transactions on their credit cards often had their entire accounts locked, giving customers no access to content that they had willingly paid for.
Epic‘s no saint, but I don’t expect them to outright lie about something they’ll likely present to officials. Especially considering that the alleged behavior is exactly in line with what Apple has been doing for a long time.
I mean, so far what we've got is mostly some statements on Twitter. Given how much of this fight has been waged in the media, I put a lot less faith in that than you do.
If there's some actual filings with the EU about this somewhere I'd definitely be interested to read them. If Apple's actually rejecting this application because "they used standard platform buttons in a standard platform way", then yeah, nail them to the wall.
I'm just not to ready to jump to "nail them to the wall" based on a company with a history of dark patterns in their UI designs claiming on Twitter that Apple took issue with their UI designs.
> If Apple's actually rejecting this application because "they used standard platform buttons in a standard platform way", then yeah, nail them to the wall.
Apple has publicly commented that the buttons are in fact the reason for the rejection.
“Apple has since told AppleInsider on Friday that it has approved Epic's marketplace app. It has also asked Epic to fix the buttons in a future submission of the app for review.”
By your very words and the article, the buttons "are in fact the reason for the rejection", except for now, when they weren't, because it was approved?
When faced with evidence of their dishonesty, to the extent of govt-enforced correction, the typical HN reader: they're no saint, but i certainly don't expect dishonesty.
> Because of those design tricks, the regulator says it found instances where players were charged while [...] pressing an adjacent button while attempting simply to preview an item
This kind of deliberately vague phrasing makes me immediately suspicious. This 'button adjacent to the preview button' - that wouldn't happen to be the buy button, would it?
> Real shame Apple more or less got away with it with its ransom bekng to stay inside the walled garden.
Given with how much Apple got away for years, I am not surprised. Either many people don’t have particularly much insight or a severe case of Stockholm syndrome.
What bothers me the most is apples double dipping. You as the consumer basically pay a fee for apples technology. And then they expect the developers to pay the same fee, which will ultimately be paid by the consumer as well. Also ignoring the fact that Apples platform would be completely worthless if it weren’t for the developers building the apps the users want
That's what infuriates me about this discourse. "Do you want Apple to continue to develop stuff and just provide it to developers for free?".
iPhone sales alone are 3x Apple's entire R&D spend. And developers pay more than fair share of that because they need at least two devices (an iPhone and a Mac) if they want to develop anything, and a yearly fee.
Apple doesn't just double dip. It triple dips, and wants to quadruple and quantuple dip.
Why can’t a business be built solely without giving Apple a dime? The web is free — as in freedom and as in gratis. It has a developer tools system funded by hundreds of companies, developers and community members.
Because Apple limits the viability of non-native apps on its mobile devices? Same reason it refused to allow Flash. It wants you to stay in the walled garden with the expensive fees.
> Android has been the dominant mobile OS for over a decade.
worldwide, and not by a large margin. I believe it's 60/40 last I checked.
Among US and a few other first world countries, it's nearly 50/50, with a very small advantadge to Apple. Slashing your consumer base in the biggest markets isn't an attractive proposition.
>Where is the multitude of amazing native-like web apps that we keep hearing about?
well Apple made PWA's harder to do in the EU, so ask them... They're doing what they did to Flash long ago, with much less justification this time around.
So. Let me get this straight. Android is dominant in the world. In first world countries it's 50/50 (though it's 69% in the EU). There are also desktops where Chrome is dominant.
And yet, somehow, there are still no amazing PWAs[1] that are the future as everyone claims, because somehow Apple prevents you from building them for those dominant platforms.
[1] Don't mention Figma or VSCode before you also mention how much effort went into implementing them.
> And yet, somehow, there are still no amazing PWAs
There are plenty of great PWAs. People bring them up on a regular basis and you piss and moan when we say Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Mastodon, Pinterest, Uber, Trivago, Starbucks, Dominos, Stitchfix, Adam & Eve or Hotels.com are usable online. You specifically complain because none of these apps are killer features to you. I don't know what to say; clearly they exist and you're trying to minimize the number of apps that technically qualify.
People refuse to take you seriously when you repeat this same tautology. Of course PWAs aren't popular on platforms that deliberately go out of their way to make them infeasible alternatives to a first-party service. It's not my fault that your purview of the technology is arbitrarily limited.
> There are plenty of great PWAs. People bring them up on a regular basis and you piss and moan when we say
1. Funny how "on a regular basis" only comes after prodding these people multiple times, pointing out Android and desktop exists, and wading through numerous complaints how no, it's not true, and Apple prevents PWAs from existing.
Even in this discussion instead of naming PWAs right off the bat you first pretended that Android isn't dominant, and completely ignored Chrome dominance
2. It's also funny how "the amazing great PWAs" are inevitably not that great, are they?
Instead of being great and amazing they are just... "usable online". Each of those significantly much better as native apps. Without fail most of them would be much faster, fluid, less janky and resource-hungry if they were just static sites with links instead of ... whatever they are. Oh yes, they are usable.
> clearly they exist and you're trying to minimize the number of apps that technically qualify.
"Technically qualify". That's a great turn of phrase you used there.
So, we went from "boohoo limits the viability of non-native apps on its mobile devices" to "usable online" and "technically qualify".
I, for one, don't want to use apps that "technically qualify". I want actual fast fluid non-janky and non-resource hungry apps that are a joy to use even if they are the most mundane apps out there. That is precisely why I keep asking: given that Android dominates mobile space, and Chrome dominates desktop platforms, how come the best examples you can come up with barely "technically qualify"?
> People refuse to take you seriously when you repeat this same tautology.
People refuse to accept PWA fanatics when they keep saying grand words with very little to back them app. All you can do is complain about Apple.
> Of course PWAs aren't popular on platforms that deliberately go out of their way
You'd think that PWAs would be great and amazing on platforms that don't have any real or perceived limitations. And yet, all you can come up with is "usable online" and "technically qualify". But sure, do keep complaining how it's Apple who's preventing you from building great native-like experiences on the web.
Reading the comments is convincing enough to believe there is no viable business to be built on the mobile web. It's great technology, sure; but not a great business. Mobile web apps won't pay the bills for people who build them. It seems worth everyone's time to have those mobile web devs instead build native apps. Ergo, Apple's "dips" are justified costs of doing business.
> Why doesn’t the web compete away Apple’s “dips”?
Because the web sucks at building apps? Because the web can barely render a few lines of text and several images without lag and jank? Because the web lacks useful and powerful primitives and controls to build anything but the most primitive UIs? Because...
The web is more than good enough. There's just a lot of people drinking the kool-aid and believing big tech's subtle and not so subtle messages about the web being shite. Of course the web is shite on devices from companies that compete with the web. They actively undermine it.
For content delivery, yes. For deeply-interactive apps, not in my experience: every vendor that went web-only that wasn’t just serving up text, in the end, forced me to a competitor.
In my experience, the only people drinking kool-aid are those claiming that the web is good enough, and failing to deliver web apps that can do anything beyond the absolutely primitive stuff.
With very few notable exceptions which are notable precisely because they are so few.
The web is absolutely more than good enough for the vast majority of apps. I was playing Quake Live in the browser on a thermally throttled dual core laptop 15 years ago, but the hive mind here at HN will have you believe that the generic social media apps that dominate the charts all need to be "close to the metal": https://apps.apple.com/us/charts/iphone/top-free-apps/36
Just because you played Quake doesn't mean the web is good for "vast majority of apps".
The web can barely display simple text and images without jank because that is inherent limitation of the DOM that you cannot escape (that, and the absolute dearth of useful controls and utilities in the browser).
You could of course build stuff with canvas/WebGPL/WebGPU, but then you have to reinvent the whole world from scratch because those are low-level (and in case of Canvas quite limited) APIs
> Just because you played Quake doesn't mean the web is good for "vast majority of apps"
It means that at least 15 years ago it was more than powerful enough for all of the 2D Candy Crush style games which make up the overwhelming majority of mobile gaming apps.
> The web can barely display simple text and images without jank because that is inherent limitation of the DOM that you cannot escape
I've seen you repeat this phrase over and over again like a mantra on HN, but without examples I can't really gauge the performance problems you've run in to. The overwhelming majority of jank on the web that I've experienced is due to advertising bloatware (an adblocker is indispensable), and occasionally bad engineering (e.g. someone forgot to make an event listener passive, or isn't debouncing an event) not some inherent limitation of the platform. What are some examples of popular apps that you think require the full brunt of a modern chip? Every M3 iPad review I've watched ends up saying essentially the same thing: "this chip is powerful, but besides Geekbench benchmarks we have nothing to use it for".
One thing I can quantify directly: in Zoom's native Windows app I can reply to a question and share my screen essentially instantly. That is to say I can do like "you can see here" and I've shared my screen before I've finished speaking, in the Google Meet PWA I have to say "here let me show you..." and pause while I wait for the screen share UI to load, I find the button to share the correct screen, and go.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Zoom saves me 5 minutes out of every 30 in meetings, in fact it might be conservative. And this isn't just a question of the chips (though native Zoom does make better use of it) but also display, audio input/output, even global keyboard shortcut handling.
After some of the CVEs linked to the Zoom desktop clients I wouldn't touch them with a ten foot pole [1][2], but I don't want to move the goalposts since we're talking about performance here. It's hard to tell whether or not the disparity is due to a Screen Capture API performance issue, or just bad engineering from the front end team at Google Meet, or even just bad UI design. Hiding features behind buttons and menus will always add a noticeable delay to an action, but that's just bad UI design, not a technical problem.
> but also display, audio input/output, even global keyboard shortcut handling.
I personally have never had a display or audio hiccup that I could attribute to a browser limitation. I don't even own a device with a display powerful enough to max out Youtube.com's 8K video resolution limit. I'm not sure why you've had issues with keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard events are well established and widely supported [3].
All I can tell you is that Google Meet is thoroughly inferior to native Zoom, and the browser-based Zoom is also inferior. If you don't use both apps professionally, you don't have a feel for what it means to rely on such features working for effective communication, you don't have a basis for comparison. It's hard to quantify the cost of security, and it's equally hard to quantify the cost of bad UX.
Definitely during the pandemic - good UX meant I got to feel more present with friends and family and that was well worth any security cost.
I've used Zoom professionally in the browser literally within the past week, and it ran smoothly. We can trade anecdotes here, but it won't be very productive.
What I can tell you is that I felt at ease using Zoom in the browser knowing that I wasn't opening my computer up to a remote code execution vulnerability. Your UX concerns are a bit nebulous, but I'd be willing to bet that the risk assessment departments at most organizations could quantify the cost of a hacker gaining access to one of their employee's computers. I also used Zoom during the pandemic but I wasn't doing a ton of screen sharing (I was more interested in seeing my friends and family members faces rather than their screens).
Another thing is that the native Windows app can support 50 simultaneous video streams, which makes it possible to see more people. I was in dance parties during the pandemic with enough people that it meant that I could see 50 realtime streams of people dancing. It wasn't the same as being in a room with 50 other people dancing in sync, but it was better than only seeing 25 people at once. My problems aren't so much nebulous as too numerous to explain, I could go on for a while.
Of course a lot of this is Zoom vs. Google Meet, I'm sure a lot of the things I like about Zoom work fine in the browser - but not as well as with the simultaneous video streams limitation.
You can cost out security, but a lot of the things that I love about Zoom's native app are truly priceless - it means I can see and hear more of people I care about. Another thing is supporting dual monitors with different screens, it makes it very easy to rearrange and see more than one person I want to see at a glance. You can do it with multiple browsers and so on, but it's more fiddly and you spend more time fussing with the screens, which means less time actually paying attention to the people.
We might simply have different value systems because I could never justify putting myself at risk of a data breach in order to badly simulate the experience of attending an actual social event and dancing with other human beings. That feels very dystopian to me.
We're getting really deep into the intricacies of Zoom and Google Meet here, and I feel like we're losing the larger plot. If you have a battle station set up for Zoom parties with multiple monitors with 50 simultaneous dancers that you need to keep an eye on, and you don't mind the security risks, then maybe you represent a specific edge case, but I think the vast majority of software users have different requirements that web browsers satisfy handily.
You're at risk of a data breach the moment you connect your computer to the Internet. You need to do a complete threat model and explain how Zoom contributes to that risk, and weigh that against the benefits. If you have zero tolerance for a data breach you should delete the data so no one including you may access it. Zoom is reliably effective at transmitting data, you can use less reliable methods but Zoom deliberately often makes the choice that delivering data is preferable to not delivering data. I think this is a valid choice and in security we sometimes have to say "would I prefer to open myself up to attack, or would I prefer not to deliver this message at all?" Both are valid choices in different circumstances. Practically speaking I have conversations in public places all the time and I don't stress about the possibility that someone might be recording me with a parabolic microphone.
> You're at risk of a data breach the moment you connect your computer to the Internet [...] If you have zero tolerance for a data breach you should delete the data so no one including you may access it.
To reason by analogy, this is like me suggesting you wear a seatbelt while driving a car and you responding by saying: "well you're at risk the moment you step outside of your house, so if you really have no tolerance for injury you should simply not leave the house". You're saying instead of opening Zoom in the browser I should delete all personal data from my computer, and for what end? I'm doing this so that I can attend virtual dance parties efficiently? I don't understand how any rational cost benefit analysis could yield such a conclusion.
> "would I prefer to open myself up to attack, or would I prefer not to deliver this message at all?"
This is absolutely a false dichotomy. The choice isn't between sending data and not sending data, the choice is between sending data in the browser vs sending the same data within a desktop application.
> You need to do a complete threat model and explain how Zoom contributes to that risk,
The Zoom desktop clients have had RCE vulnerabilities where hackers were able to remotely execute arbitrary code on victims computers with zero user input required from the victims (they demonstrated this by remotely opening the calculator app). It's very obvious how Zoom contributes to that risk. "A zero-day vulnerability in Zoom which can be used to launch remote code execution (RCE) attacks has been disclosed by researchers. The researchers from Computest demonstrated a three-bug attack chain that caused an RCE on a target machine, and all without any form of user interaction [...] an animation of the attack in action demonstrates how an attacker was able to open the calculator program of a machine running Zoom following its exploit. As noted by Malwarebytes, the attack works on both Windows and Mac versions of Zoom [...] The browser version of the videoconferencing software is not impacted." [1]
> Practically speaking I have conversations in public places all the time and I don't stress about the possibility that someone might be recording me with a parabolic microphone.
Do you yell out your bank account number and routing number in public because you think the user experience of finding a private place to talk is too burdensome? Because that's metaphorically what you're arguing for.
> The Zoom desktop clients have had RCE vulnerabilities where hackers were able to remotely execute arbitrary code on victims computers with zero user input required from the victims
There have been RCE vulnerabilities in browsers too. Do you have an example of a Zoom RCE vulnerability that wasn't fixed? The example you gave was one where Zoom was proactively publicizing their own work to recruit researchers to find vulnerabilities so they could be fixed before they caused actual issues - and Zoom fixed the issue, you're using Zoom's good behavior in security testing their app against them.
> Do you yell out your bank account number and routing number in public because you think the user experience of finding a private place to talk is too burdensome? Because that's metaphorically what you're arguing for.
No it's not, I wouldn't transmit my bank account number and routing number or similarly sensitive information over Zoom.
> This is absolutely a false dichotomy. The choice isn't between sending data and not sending data, the choice is between sending data in the browser vs sending the same data within a desktop application.
The choice is in fact between sending data and not sending data. I've given you one example (the limited number of simultaneous streams) where you're opting not to send data. You're just pretending that use case is invalid. There are other examples I could give, but they require more explanation and you seem determined to dismiss any examples I give.
> There have been RCE vulnerabilities in browsers too.
We're not comparing the security of web browsers as a whole to the security of the Zoom desktop client, we're comparing the security of the Zoom web app to the security of the Zoom desktop app. Can you find a single example of an exploit that allowed a hacker to execute arbitrary code on a user's computer after visiting zoom.com (even one that was eventually fixed)?
And also, almost all computer users are running web browsers (they come preinstalled on most consumer operating systems). So by downloading Zoom you're adding an additional threat vector on top of whatever threat your favorite browser already represents.
> The example you gave was one where Zoom was proactively publicizing their own work to recruit researchers to find vulnerabilities so they could be fixed before they caused actual issues - and Zoom fixed the issue, you're using Zoom's good behavior in security testing their app against them.
Every reputable organization has a bug bounty program (including browser vendors). You don't get a participation trophy for having a bug bounty program. You're missing the entire point which is that Zoom offered $200,000 to security researchers to find a vulnerability in their products and both of their desktop clients produced critical vulnerabilities yet the browser version did not. Which I would infer means that the browser version is more secure. Once again, do you have any examples of Zoom exploits in the browser?
Zoom can't keep producing vulnerabilities and getting a pass because they eventually fix them. This exploit's existence was publicized before Zoom fixed it. What if it was sold on the dark web and exploited in the interim?
> No it's not, I wouldn't transmit my bank account number and routing number or similarly sensitive information over Zoom.
People are absolutely transmitting critical information via Zoom. Courts literally use Zoom to remotely administer proceedings. I've heard of companies that ask employees to hold up sensitive documents in front of the camera to verify their identity. Hiding your head in the sand and saying "just don't send sensitive info via Zoom" is disingenuous at best. And even if you did buy in to the "just don't send sensitive data bro" argument it doesn't matter because an RCE exploit could potentially expose information that you never transmitted via Zoom that just happens to be sitting on your filesystem.
> The choice is in fact between sending data and not sending data. I've given you one example (the limited number of simultaneous streams) where you're opting not to send data.
The overwhelming majority of your examples have been cases where you've begrudgingly admitted that there's a way to accomplish your goal in the browser, albeit less efficiently. You started this conversation by admitting that you can share your screen in the browser, but doing so via the desktop app saved you a few minutes. I haven't found any published documentation from Zoom in regards to the streaming limit and I'm not willing to call up 49 other people to test this for an HN debate, but like I said, the vast majority of users can fulfill their needs in the browser. The average Zoom user is not hosting digital raves. I couldn't even imagine wanting to have 50 videos playing on my screen vying for attention. And again, there's no technical reason for why you couldn't implement 50 streaming videos in the browser. Maybe Zoom should spend that $200,000 improving their browser product.
Efficiency is very important. The whole point of using a video app is to communicate things you can't communicate as quickly without video. It would be much safer just to use text, even voice would be significantly safer.
And again, this is about messages simply being undeliverable without the native app. If the web app takes an extra 5 seconds to join the meeting (I think it can actually be worse than this in a lot of cases - minutes lost) and I've just reached the meeting at 2pm and the meeting starts promptly at 2pm, and the native app causes me to miss 5 minutes of the intro... what is the cost there? I think in a lot of cases it can erase the benefits of video.
Courts are famously overloaded. If a court can get through 10 cases over a 4 hour session, each taking 24 minutes, and if each case loses 5 minutes of time due to using the browser app, then that's two whole cases worth of time they've lost. And it's not just about being able to handle a larger caseload: in a lot of cases inefficient communication results in incorrect communication and incorrect decisions.
Broadly though, you're taking it for granted that it's easier to make a browser app efficient than it is to make a native app secure. I'd actually wager there's a ceiling to how efficient you can make a browser app, and you can make the native app at least as secure as the browser app while also making it more efficient. Zoom has the money, they don't need to cheap out and do the browser app, and they shouldn't because efficient communication is a matter of life and death and their whole reason for being. Yes, it should be secure, but you can't just dismiss efficiency, being inefficient can cause security problems and it is often a matter of life and death.
> And again, there's no technical reason for why you couldn't implement 50 streaming videos in the browser.
Their docs specify that there are minimum system requirements for doing 50 rather than 25. This is an efficiency problem at the end of the day - the browser app is less efficient and can't handle as much info at a time with the same hardware.
> The whole point of using a video app is to communicate things you can't communicate as quickly without video.
The 'whole point' of a visual medium is not just to communicate ideas more quickly. Having eyeballs does not merely grant me a speed boost, it allows me to experience things that are simply ineffable otherwise. People didn't Zoom/Facetime their family members during the pandemic just because it was more efficient than texting them.
> And again, this is about messages simply being undeliverable without the native app. If the web app takes an extra 5 seconds to join the meeting
You're misusing the word undeliverable. Undeliverable means 'can not be delivered', not 'delivered 5 seconds later'.
> Zoom has the money, they don't need to cheap out and do the browser app
They're already doing the browser app. I'm saying they should do it well.
> Their docs specify that there are minimum system requirements for doing 50 rather than 25. This is an efficiency problem at the end of the day - the browser app is less efficient and can't handle as much info at a time with the same hardware.
You originally claimed that there was a hard limit to the number of simultaneous video streams that the browser version could handle, and that this was the difference between sending a message and not sending a message, and now you're walking that point back and saying that the browser version can't do it with the same hardware. So you're tacitly admitting that you were originally presenting a false dichotomy.
> being inefficient can cause security problems
There are multiple confirmed security flaws in the desktop Zoom apps (which you claim are more efficient), and your conclusion is "inefficient = insecure"? If anything, the opposite appears to be true according to your own claims.
> I'd actually wager there's a ceiling to how efficient you can make a browser app, and you can make the native app at least as secure as the browser app
Zoom themselves wagered $200,000, and the result was a critical RCE vulnerability in their desktop clients, and nothing in the browser version. But keep postulating with hypotheticals and ignore objective reality.
> if each case loses 5 minutes of time due to using the browser app [...] because efficient communication is a matter of life and death
First of all you've been throwing around this '5 minute' figure throughout this discussion, but there's simply nothing to substantiate it. Your entire argument hinges on this flimsy point derived from anecdotal evidence. I've never spent 5 minutes trying to set up Zoom in the browser. I predicted several days ago that this discussion would degenerate into anecdote trading, and here we are.
Second of all, if I were dealing with a serious court case then one of my primary concerns would be maintaining confidentiality. You completely ignored the entire point of my court example which was to illustrate the fact that security has serious implications, and you can't simply wave them off by saying "I wouldn't transmit personal information via Zoom". You're trying as hard as you can to avoid the most important aspect of using Zoom in court: security. Instead you wrote a thinkpiece about Zoom hypothetically taking 5 minutes to load. Imagine being a witness in a high profile case, on the brink of going into the witness protection program, with your literal life on the line, only to find out that your private information was leaked because someone didn't like the UX of the Zoom web app. And you have the gall to claim that bad UX is a matter of life and death. Are you being serious here?
You yourself said "I wouldn't transmit my bank account number and routing number or similarly sensitive information over Zoom", and yet you want the Zoom desktop app to be used in courts? That makes absolutely zero sense. Do you not believe courts deal with sensitive information?
> Of course PWAs aren't popular on platforms that deliberately go out of their way
Strange how we went from "The web is absolutely more than good enough for the vast majority of apps" to "majority of mobile gaming apps."
> I've seen you repeat this phrase over and over again like a mantra on HN, but without examples
I mean, almost every single web "app" out there suffers from this. The DOM isn't built for highly dynamic interactive applications. It's a system to deliver static text and images.
> What are some examples of popular apps that you think require the full brunt of a modern chip?
Now you're pretending I said something I didn't.
However, it's funny how the amazing fast web sites that are more than enough for the majority of apps struggle with even the most basic tasks even on maxed out machines. I mean, Slack's app needs up to 20% of CPU even on an M* Mac (last I tried it was M1 Max IIRC) to render a few animated emojis.
It's a single example, but it's quite representative of the state of the Web.
> Of course PWAs aren't popular on platforms that deliberately go out of their way
You've got your signals crossed. That was another commenter who wrote that statement [1].
> Strange how we went from "The web is absolutely more than good enough for the vast majority of apps" to "majority of mobile gaming apps."
We didn't go from one thing to another. I addressed a subset of the app market: gaming apps. Just like your Slack example addressed a subset of the app market: chat apps.
> I mean, almost every single web "app" out there suffers from this. The DOM isn't built for highly dynamic interactive applications. It's a system to deliver static text and images.
This is not a technical argument, it's a philosophical one. The council of browser elders never convened to proclaim that web browsers are only meant to deliver "static text and images", that's just your philosophical viewpoint. In fact, Apple is currently pushing WebXR to support the new Vision Pro, so apparently they didn't get the memo about "static text and images" [2].
> Now you're pretending I said something I didn't.
You said that the web is not performant enough. CPU speed is a pretty big component of performance.
> I mean, Slack's app needs up to 20% of CPU even on an M* Mac (last I tried it was M1 Max IIRC) to render a few animated emojis.
Slack's desktop app or Slack's web app? If you're talking about the Electron app, well then yeah bundling Chrome is never going to win efficiency awards, but now you're pretending I said something that I didn't. I'm not defending Electron apps. Everytime I discuss the web on HN someone does a bait and switch and starts talking about Electron. Don't conflate Electron with the World Wide Web.
If we're talking about chat apps, then I've watched high definition streams on Kick, Twitch, and YouTube where the chat is streaming in over Websockets faster than I can read it. The human brain at that point becomes the actual performance bottleneck. But tell me more about how the web can only handle a few lines of text (by commenting on a website).
Plugins like Flash, Silverlight, and NPAPI were common at the time, but anything running in a web browser is still a web application. It feels like you're making a distinction without a difference [1]. Either way, the web can performantly do what Quake Live did back then without plugins today, and it can certainly handle the Flappy Bird and Angry Birds style apps that people are playing on mobile devices today. Just take a look at some of the Unity WebGL and threejs demos.
the web isn't shit per se. But it's horrible in the one way it matters to business; it is very hard to monetize web content compared to apps. That's a small part of why flash games quickly gave way to mobile.
But it's hard to deny there are quite a few technical shortcomings. Shortcomings only just now starting to dimish as WebASM/WebGPU gain traction.
Unity got raked over the coals for *retroactively* changing the licensing fees for developers in a way that negatively impacted a common existing business model amongst their customers.
It’s fair to not like the Apple fees but the scenario isn’t equivalent.
One was a rug pull. If they did that all along it wouldn’t have been as big an issue.
I'd say it's still equivalent. I just think apple was smart knowing most people are comfy in the walled garden and won't throw up a fuss.
Similar to Unity, these pricing ding the smaller people the most. But unlike Unity, the bigger players aren't joining the protest. I guess I was just foolish thinking businesses would at least think in the middle-term of "what if we want our own storefront one day ". I guess the EU might pick up that ball, but the Apathy from other devs is a bit disenheartening. The same Apathy that let these companies enshittify the net and turn into trillionaires as punishment
> Unity, these pricing ding the smaller people the most
I don’t think that’s true. A very small proportion of smaller developers might have been disproportionately affected but Unity was just complete garbage at communicating the changes (not trying to downplay the retroactive bit, no excuse for that). Most people just didn’t bother reading the fine print or calculating the actual fees themselves and just looked at the published headlines.
>A very small proportion of smaller developers might have been disproportionately affected
I don't think it was a small portion. The main point was that the lowest cost plan was horrible and a ploy to get you to buy Unity Pro. If you weren't a free (as in freedom) app, it as a complete negative to be on the base plan.
IIRC you weren’t affected if your revenue was under $100k and you couldn’t use the free version before the change anyway if it was over that. I might be wrong but I’m almost sure that that proportion was close to zero.
> it as a complete negative to be on the base plan.
With the changes if you didn’t get pro after surpassing the revenue it would have gotten price but that wasn’t even an option previously.
I think it was actually a significant improvement for some people in that position:
- the cap was now per game/project instead of company
- you could still surpass the previous cap a bit and save some money by paying for install instead of immediately being required to get pro.
Everybody just seem to ignore that/ didn’t notice it because Unity did such a garbage job explaining the changes.
(I’m not really defending them, they only had to introduce this few because they almost literally burnt billions between by pointlessly buying random companies and going on some deranged hiring spree for no reason..)
How are they equivalent other than a fee existing at all, and how is that different than a revenue share that Epic do? Apple hasn’t added a new fee to existing devs. The reason you see apathy is that this doesn’t negatively change the status quo.
It provides new options. Granted they might not like the terms of the new options , as you clearly don’t. But nothing has been taken away from them in the process. It is completely unsurprising that there is apathy.
Unity tried to change the terms from under people which changed their livelihood prospective negatively.
If the only equivalence is that there’s a fee, then that applies to a lot more to the point it’s meaningless. Epic do a revenue share. Unity should have done a revenue share but did something more trackable without requiring regular audits.
Ultimately it wasn’t Unity’s actual fee that was the problem, had it been a new tier. But it retroactively changed things for people.
If you had any plans at all to maybe think of an alternative app store, it's equivalent. You have an expectation from a competitor who allows this and IOS instead will charge you despite not using their own store. Pricing that is worse than staying in the walled garden.
If you were apathetic/supportive of Apple and would stay on the App Store anyway, nothing changes. And I suppose a lot of businesses are in this group.
>But nothing has been taken away from them in the process. It is completely unsurprising that there is apathy.
Yes, that's my core problem. But the last two years should have taught me thst companies aren't looking in the long term these days. Epic is, sort of. if only because they have no option given their whole kerfuffle.
It's kind of crazy, because all of the super high numbers and companies that said they'd go bankrupt were looking at the Personal tier, which basically acted as a sales funnel towards the Pro tier, where the prices would not be as outrageous, even in the original version of the Runtime Fee: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/unity-runtime-fee-a-look-at... (under "How bad is it, really?")
Of course, they since revised it so my article isn't relevant anymore, but if you look at the platform fee cost per install, then it becomes quite obvious and the initial pushback didn't seem to take this into account: https://blog.kronis.dev/images/1/6/-/f/e/16-fee-per-install-...
Aside from that, though, I guess companies will always try to take a part of the profits that anything offered through their platforms generates (Apple's App Store, Google's Play Store, Valve's Steam etc.). It's good to see things improving at least somewhat, though, since we can't express a lot of progress overnight.
> For most developers this will be a deal breaker, because it also applies to free software which most of the time is only supported by donations
If the app is taking donations or any sort of payment, then the Core Technology Fee applies after 1 million first installs in a year. If it’s a completely free app, this fee does not apply. This fee also does not apply for educational institutions, nonprofits, and government agencies (with a fee waiver).
Quoting from “ Understanding the Core Technology Fee for iOS apps in the European Union” [1]:
> Developers whose apps do not surpass one million first annual installs per year and nonprofits, educational institutions, and government entities with an Apple Developer Program fee waiver do not pay the CTF. The CTF is also not required for developers with a no revenue business that offer free apps without monetization.
> Apple provides many conditions where developers do not pay the CTF: […] Developers that earn no revenue whatsoever. This includes offering a free app without monetization of any kind (physical, digital, advertising, or otherwise).
Yes, let's nationalize Android as well. Windows too. Azure. AWS. Google. Nationalize everything. Let politicians build our tech products. I hear many congress and senate people write great product specs and are great at UX design.
We're all "yeah, the government's shit at this stay out of tech" but then turn around and "I don't like the way these guys are doing things, the government needs to force them to build and run their platform differently."
Which is it? You want the government telling tech companies how to run things or not?
That argument didn't work for Microsoft in the 90's (just install BSD or buy a mac if you don't like IE), I don't know why it should work for Apple who's gotten much bigger than 90's MS.
Because the situations are different? Apple has at best, 50% of the market. They sell their own hardware, and the OS is only available on that hardware. They don't force other phone manufacturers to buy iOS licenses even though they're shipping phones without iOS. You can't even buy a license for iOS except to buy the actual hardware from Apple. All the same software, with the singular exception of Apple's own first party software and perhaps some small indie softare, is available on the competing platform. The competing platform is sold by multiple vendors, comes in multiple different options and is just as well supported by 3rd party developers and businesses. The terms and conditions of the Apple store, and the associated fees are as bad or better than they have ever been. There has been no bait and switch, no undercutting the market to oust competitors. In fact, iOS devices as a rule are some of the most expensive devices in their respective classes. They offer access to all of your data in industry standard formats if you decide you want to switch, and Google themselves offer an automatic switching application that will transfer that data for you. If Apple dominates, it is because consumers overwhelming choose that. There is nothing that stops people from buying from any number of vendors that sell fully comparable alternatives, and no reason other than preferring the locked down experience that Apple sells to buy an iOS device.
> All the same software, with the singular exception of Apple's own first party software and perhaps some small indie softare, is available on the competing platform.
But what about the other way around; how does Apple ensure that third-parties can compete with their private entitlements?
Is it even realistic for an indie business to compete against any of Apple's provided services if they're forced to serve that business through the App Store? Apple's progressive pricing scheme seems to punish them for posing a threat to any first-party services.
Microsoft was demanding from PC sellers that they do not offer customers other operating systems if they wanted to keep their business with Microsoft. Which is blatantly anti-competitive and an abuse. The equivalent would be Apple demanding that software makers do not offer their apps on Android or PC devices if they want to sell on the App Store.
Any software maker is free to sell on any non-Apple device without Apple saying a word.
It’s not very different on Android, and anyone big enough distorts the market. There is no real competition or choice here for the market to work. That’s why regulation is needed. To be clear I want Google and Microsoft regulated similarly on both mobile devices and regular computers.
"people here" are inflamed pundits from social media that wouldn't know the difference between authoritarianism and common-sense regulation if they were being hunted by Chiquita's 'Death Squad'.
I wouldn't take HN's cognitive dissonance personally. Half this website has to fellate their favorite CEO on a daily basis or they dematerialize into insecurity.
The title alone makes me shiver. Apple "okays" what a government orders them to do. What!??
You and I look right through this power language, but this kind of wording makes people believe Apple is mightier than it is. It's disgusting from Reuters.
They are refusing to leave Russian market and are actively cooperating with Russian government - see blocking VPNs few days ago. Russian market is much poorer and smaller. If they are refusing to leave this market, leaving EU market is ludicrous to even think about.
If you willingly take no profit (Leaving market) over less profit (Losing control over AppStore in the market) then you can be almost sure that shareholders are going to sue you and I would bet shareholders would win such lawsuit. So no Apple doesn't have this choice.
Both are good choices TBH. Maybe Apple is utterly incompatible with the way we Europeans (at least western part for sure) treat freedom and moral behavior and expect companies adhere to those principles. Not empty phrases or half-assed gestures all over the place, but real, concrete, measurable, long term at least good enough behavior.
I'd say fine every transgression progressively so much it hurts their finances so badly they actually make that choice, once and for good (for Apple this would be tens of billions each time depending on the case). But cca 450 million potential customers and rich market ain't something to ignore, shares would take 50% or more cut easily.
Out of curiosity, do you think that Apple's customers in Europe would be appreciative of their entire platform being strongarmed into stopping service?
Just like with russia, they would service current customers just like usually, just not be able to get new ones. Slow, for Apple painful, exit. Of course as mentioned the effect on shares would be catastrophic so they would actually start respecting the law way before that would happen, Cook and shareholders ain't stupid and know very well what games they play.
It would just stop these PR charades where they try to act like they care and have some actual morals, but act differently.
Probably not. Which is why they are begrudgingly applying, slowly. Last thing they want to do is pay their domestic country taxes that goes back (kinda) to the people.
> title alone makes me shiver. Apple "okays" what a government orders them to do. What!??
If I’m fined by my city for a code violation, and then I sign off on a contractor to apply the remedies, I’m okaying work I’ve been ordered to do. Nothing in that framing challenges the city’s authority.
It’s not disgusting from Reuters, it’s disgusting from the EU allowing Apple to still gate keep the distribution process. The hoops you still have to jump through are insane and prohibitive for most people.
I STILL can’t install my smartwatches discontinued app because the notarization will most likely be rejected (as I’m not the creator).
If there's one thing we can all agree on it is that there should be laws to enable Epic to pay lower commissions on Apple's game store than it pays on other game stores.
Whats the difference between mobsters owning a city , demanding money from all shops and Apple? There is none. Leadership at Apple is no different. Criminals who need be charged with jail penalties. Only then things will change. Will that ever happen? No. Governments are more or less controlled by lobbyists representing the same evil companies.
Consumers buy these devices. Apple doesn't give them away for free. A consumer should be able to run whatever they want on the devices they have purchased. We are a long way from achieving this basic goal.
I don’t want to buy a device that can run any code, even if it’s apparently (hacking or force can be a factor) by my own choice. Especially for a device that I also use for contactless payment.
I want full confidence that I can buy a second hand device without any malicious software installed (even if I’m not smart enough to know how to properly and fully reset it). And I want people that buy my second hand phone to have full confidence in that device so I get a good resale value for it. Maintaining this resale value is also important to avoid e-waste, since if people don’t get a good price for their phone it just gets left in a drawer.
Apple provides this product. So I buy it. If you don’t want these guarantees for a device you’re buying, just don’t buy an iPhone.
I think we’re going about lack of choice completely wrong. Yeah, it may be hard to get certain apps that don’t rely on iOS or Google Play Services. So legislation should target that problem instead: government and key public service apps should be published in an open app format that can be run on any device that implements the open standard.
The problem is when there's DRM getting in the way of the natural right to mess with your own belongings. Cars have traditionally not had that, and I think it should not be allowed.
Physically, Apple does not hinder you from doing anything you want with your device. If you take out the chips and put in other components, that's your business, not Apples. If you manage to hack the software on the Apple chip to work exactly as you prefer, Apple cannot do anything.
But what hackers are demanding is that Apple alter their software to work exactly as they want and assist them with this, even though most of them will not ever purchase an Apple device. To the detriment of normal customers who want devices that work well.
Why are these requirements not levied against other product manufacturers? Why don't you try to force Tesla to make their cars run on diesel? Why don't you try to force McDonalds to make you a Whopper?
First off, not putting in DRM is less work. And user control over keys is not hard. They wouldn't need to make anything worse.
But really it's about reasonable fit-for-use regulations. That burger needs to be edible. The restaurant has to follow fire codes, even though that takes extra work. Both of those are orders of magnitude harder, as a percentage of cost, than letting the user control their own device. An even closer comparison is a rule that Tesla has to work with other chargers, which would be a good rule if it doesn't already exist.
DRM is a special new thing that didn't traditionally exist, and we shouldn't let it be used as a way to remove the ability to tinker. It's almost as bad as physically hindering.
Apple and other device manufacturers are following a ton of regulations for how electronic devices have to behave, and interface on the airwaves. You wouldn't demand McDonald's to let you into the kitchen and cook your food exactly to your liking, so why should Apple be forced to do the same?
So your analogy clearly isn't comparing the McDonald's kitchen to an iPhone factory. I'm not asking to alter anything on the production lines, and I'm not asking for any customization before I take the iPhone home.
The analogy is more like comparing the McDonald's kitchen to the iPhone itself? In that case the answer is obvious. I don't own the kitchen, but I do own the iPhone.
But to elaborate on burgers, since you keep making wild extrapolations, all I would demand is that the burgers not have DRM on them (or Food Rights Management?). Thankfully nobody has invented that yet. But imagine if you couldn't combine your own drink with a McDonald's burger, at home. If that kind of anti-consumer practice was possible, I guarantee you'd see it implemented. And we should not treat it as a right of the restaurant as long as they don't "physically" prevent you from doing it. Outlaw it as soon as it seems like it could be possible.
If you demand that McDonalds burgers are not made with McDonalds ingredients, they will not obey. They will likely send you to another burger joint.
Most restaurants of any kind will not let you enter with your own drink or food, so your example can be made both ways.
You're not demanding customization of your iPhone before purchasing it: worse, you're demanding it after your purchase, even though there's no unclarity as to how an iPhone works.
I doubt that the people here have the same entitlement towards other businesses as they have towards Apple. Or at least I hope so.
> You're not demanding customization of your iPhone before purchasing it: worse, you're demanding it after your purchase, even though there's no unclarity as to how an iPhone works.
I'm not demanding they customize it, though. I'm just demanding they don't artificially block customization.
So, like a normal burger. You keep adding weird demands into your analogies, because the straightforward burger analogy is "burger where if I take it home I can customize it at my leisure, no technology applied to make that effectively impossible", and there's no way to twist that desire into sounding unreasonable. The thing I want from Apple is a thing that almost every company already does.
So you also dispute fuel stations selling fuel for all car brands and would prefer fuel stations only supporting one car brand instead of the generic standard? And yes, this is the same. Why should BMW allow Exxon or Shell to fuel the cars when they don't get a sweet 30% tax for every refuel happening?
Considering the same company is often using the idea of free markets, yet does everything to avoid that free market where it can, the irony here is pretty strong.
As I wrote in the comment you responded to, I’m "not trying to defend Apple, just answering the question".
> So you also dispute fuel stations selling fuel for all car brands and would prefer fuel stations only supporting one car brand instead of the generic standard? And yes, this is the same. Why should BMW allow Exxon or Shell to fuel the cars when they don't get a sweet 30% tax for every refuel happening?
This seems a strawman argument to me. The situation is not the same at all: fuelling a BMW or a Mercedes car is exactly the same thing for the gaz station; all gaz stations sell the same oil; the road that brings all these cars to the gaz station does not belong to a car manufacturer; there are countless car manufacturers and not only two giants; etc. Can’t we reason about the situation without having to resort to dubious analogies?
"free to go anywhere else" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in a state/province with 2 "cities". Google isn't being hit as hard by the DMA, but they didn't get off scot-free either.
That still doesn't give you any right to just take what Apple built for free. Maybe there's no right option for you - I know there isn't for me, I'd prefer to have Windows Mobile (not Phone) again.
That's sadly how deeds work, 2008 taught that lesson.
Still, I don't understand people defending a trillion dollar company for doing things much worse than what wad torn apart in us courts 30 years prior. Sad that the EU needs to pick up that torch, but it is what it is.
Indeed, and they saw that software of sufficient quality can't be funded merely by sales of these devices, and decided to create a platform where the software publishers share the cost with the end users.
I yearn for Windows Mobile but it has suffered from this problem greatly. Same with early Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones with smarter features like J2ME.
>and they saw that software of sufficient quality can't be funded merely by sales of these device
I don't think Microsoft of the 90's, pre-"I take 30% as a gatekeeper" crashed and burned because it didn't leech enough funds from developers. Quite the contrary, It encouraged and empowered future entrepreneurs and customers alike, thinikg in the long term. .
>i yearn for Windows Mobile but it has suffered from this problem greatly.
Pricing wasn't the issue. Remember that this was the days where phone carriers subsidized phones with contracts, so no one was paying 600-1000 outright like today. It was a mix of lacking tech and UX needed. And a gargantuan marketing campaign.
Until Android 12 or 13 alternative stores couldn't update apps automatically in the background. And you still need to click "install" for new apps, which isn't the case with Google Play.
Try it without having Google services on that phone. Most apps and especially the essential ones are dependent on unmodified phones with Google services.
> Most apps and especially the essential ones are dependent on unmodified phones with Google services.
There are no "essential" apps that prevent you from running Android without Google services. There are certainly some nice features that require it, but you have been capable of using de-Googled Android for close to a decade at this point.
It is sad state of things. I dislike Apple's inconsistency and hypocrisy. And it was themselves which ultimately lead to the whole regulation.
But I still think regulation or government intervention is bad for everybody. As we now have precedence to decouple a lot of things in the name of Anti-Trust or Monopoly.
> As we now have precedence to decouple a lot of things in the name of Anti-Trust or Monopoly.
The precedence has always existed. It might seem a bit uncharacteristic from the European perspective, but historically the United States hasn't shied away from butchering it's largest cash cows.
