141–150 of 583 posts
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Sounds like a lawsuit in the making if the harm is great enough.
What laws would be broken in this case?
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Which competitors to $car_manufacturer engines are there for $car_manufacturer cars? This is a stupid question. Whether or not there is competition on iOS doesn’t matter as long as there exists viable competition on any viable platform.
...and if all car manufacturers bought engines from the same factory (TSMC), used the same satnav (except one brand, who had a slightly-worse in-house clone), and an accelerator and gearbox from exactly one source (Google search) would you be more concerned about anticompetitive behavior? What if the manufacturers were allowed to produce "accessories" like batteries, tires, and child seats that refused to work in any…
Somehow there are heaps of expensive android phones that sell just fine. The flagship Samsung phones cost more than any iPhone.
> It's absolutely a duopoly, and so minimally competitive
Well no, there are tons of smartphone manufacturers with viable products.
Does this mean if there's a developer I don't like, I can buy their stuff and refund it to arbitrarily cost them money at no cost to myself and there's nothing they can do about it? That seems ... not great, especially these days. What happens when mobs of internet morons decide review bombing isn't sufficient and realize Apple will help them cause direct financial harm instead?
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If you do this often Apple will ban your account. If you don't do this often it's not a problem.
Will they? In some jurisdictions they are required by law to grant refunds. In others, they still have very little incentive to control refund fraud, what with the fact that they're still making money rather than losing it. It would be one thing if they said "We're keeping the credit card processing fees so that we don't lose money," but to keep the whole 30% cut is just petty.
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The fact that that is even a thought screams silly and childish in my mind, but then again life has taught me that 'maturity' really is a social construct and the rule of law and contracts really should be the only baseline expectation of human behavior from strangers. Also - that plotline from SV where he just buys pizza from thd pizza startup that is operating at a loss seems like the same idea as this but just sli…
It's a bit different when a company is completely voluntarily engaging in self-destructive behavior - when it comes to the app store it is voluntary that folks post their apps there but Apple has an absolute monopoly on the market.
Payment processors generally don't refund fees on payments when the payments are refunded, this isn't new. It's remarkable mainly because (a) it's 30%, not 3% and (b) the App store doesn't position itself as a payments processor the way Stripe does, so it sounds really weird that they would act like one. If the app store took a 3% chunk and never refunded it regardless of the ongoing status of the transaction, that w…
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Something about conspiracy to defraud, maybe?
How is that fraud? "Everyone, buy this product and return it to the store for a full refund," doesn't sound like fraud to me. It doesn't result in personal or financial gain to the people perpetrating it, either. edit: so who is in trouble here? The person calling for people to do it with their twitter following or the twitter followers? I'm not saying that buying the app and returning it is not fraud if you entered…
I think the form is definitely fraud but I wouldn't be surprised if Visa went after you for something as well, they need to actually process all those charges and charge backs and it does cost them some amount of money to do so.
Purchase: Customer pays $10. Apple keeps $3. Developer gets $7 Refund should be: Developer has $7 deducted from current owed "royalties" Apple refunds $10 to the customer. Is Apple actually taking $10 from the developer and giving it to the customer? That would be theft. The developer is not obligated to cover refunds beyond the profit/royalty they originally made on it.
That is exactly what is happening.
App stores need heavy regulations. It's not only Apple but Google and even steam to a small extent. Apple is of course the biggest offender as they heavily guard their monopoly with code signing enforcement. This shouldn't have been legal. They are the very definitions of predatory competition squashing monopolies.
I don't see what kind of regulation Steam needs. They are hardly the only storefront on the platforms they support, aren't the default one, have almost no exclusive content, and don't even take a cut if you sell Steam keys on other stores. What is there to regulate? If you don't like their terms you can sell on a different store or distribute yourself, there's nothing stopping you like there is on a typical iPhone or…