What Apple is going is just obnoxious and as clear a case of anti-trust as has ever been.
30% of revenue for no services offered, just because they can, is the definition of extortion. The only thing stopping them from asking 30% off of your Amazon orders placed via Safari is because the consumer has a choice of another browser for free. Otherwise these high priests of design and aesthetics would make the shirt on your back cost 30% more.
Your app can't even tell the consumer that they can pay outside and avoid paying the Apple tax infinitely AFTER paying for their really expensive device. This is keeping the consumer in the dark to exploit them.
This isn't capitalism. This is monopoly abuse.
Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store
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Re: Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store
#612Re: Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store
#613Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN's great flaw is that it has been allowed to be overrun by huge numbers of people from large organizations. There are tens of thousands of people from FAANG/YC acting as self-interested agents of their organizations without any kind of disclosure or counter-measures. These are, in effect, massive voting rings and propaganda efforts which are supposedly not allowed on HN. It's obvious how this results in the total d…
Many have tried. There's a simple reason that you glance at but don't directly confront in your post. The "voting rings" you outline are actually a huge constituency, thanks to the outlandish concentration of wealth and resources in the hands of these few companies (I mean FAANG - YC has a huge and unique network but I don't suspsect it's anywhere close to the same scale in dollars or current employees). No site can…
It is simply not true that many have tried. HN has certainly not tried to solve this problem. They seem to be focused on much smaller problems, like preventing handfuls of friends from upvoting a GitHub project at the same time or Viagra spam.
As an example, HN could start requiring users to link their LinkedIn accounts. Every comment could show the user's current employer (if it's a major one) without revealing the user's real name. HN cold also disregard votes for google.com submissions for Google employees, etc. These steps alone would reduce the problem drastically.
No one would like to link their LinkedIn account, of course, but most people in tech have one and could do so in seconds.
That's an obvious solution but there are many other possibilities as well. And it would still be possible to maintain the ability for anonymous throwaway accounts to be used.
Re: Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store
#614Earlier quoted context omitted.
regulation is not the answer. The market aka the consumer will solve this on its own.
I like to think that this would be resolved by the market, but if that were the case, why hasn’t It happened. Apple has been acting this way for 12 years. They haven’t changed their tune. The singular real market alternative is android, which still suffers from fragmentation issues. Microsoft, one of the most powerful companies in the world, couldn’t make their option work. Amazon, one of the most powerful companies…
IMO, this is all quite true and it signals an in-built ceiling in the mobile phone market, which I believe we're closer to reaching than people realize.
Perhaps the market's innovation that solves this walled garden problem will be towards a very different or very new kind of mobile communications product altogether, rather than a mere iteration on the now rather tired smartphone theme.
Re: Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store
#615You could argue about Apple's rights, or citizens' free speech rights, or consumer rights, under existing law. It would be an interesting discussion because I think it's a lot more complicated an issue that most people appreciate. But really why not talk about how we think things should work on platforms like iOS? What should the law be? What protects essential human rights, encourages creativity, and allows business…
> Personally, I would argue that consumers should have a legal right to install whatever software they wish on a product they have purchased, including onto the bundled operating system. The thing is, people do have this right on Apple phones; the Library of Congress can designate exemptions from the DMCA and they have done so for jailbreaking smart phones. You have the legal right to jailbreak your phone and install…
> You have the legal right to jailbreak your phone and install whatever you want; neither Apple nor the Feds can stop you.
The law isn’t that simple, and even if it was, Apple does stop most people from jailbreaking most Apple devices most of the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_jailbreaking#Digital_Mille...
Re: Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store
#616Earlier quoted context omitted.
They were expecting to get kicked out of the app store so that they could file a lawsuit and challenge the app store monopoly. How is that unclear?
Gonna sue Nintendo if they don't let your game in the eshop?
Much harder, but it wouldn't surprise me if the do later, depending on how this goes.
Re: Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store
#617Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK Apple prevents this by forcing every browser app to use the half broken Safari engine that does not implement many modern web APIs and standards.
I don’t know if that’s true otherwise but webgl is supported by safari on iOS.
Making a first-class gaming experience will require considerably more than this on iOS, and as far as I am aware, Safari's implementation is spotty at best.
My company spent years getting a passable Safari/iOS mobile web 360 video player working, a whole game like Fortnite would be another beast entirely.
Re: Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store
#618So if fortnight was allowed to have their own App Store would it need to be downloaded via the App Store?
I see people on both sides of this issue and I know it’s heated, but I’m honestly a bit confused about how it would work in practical terms.
The iOS platform has been deliberately engineered —- for better or worse —- to have this blurring of the hardware/software divide... how do you overcome that if this challenge went all the way through?
It doesn’t seem like it would be as simple as downloading the storefront from epic.
Re: Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store
#619Apologies for the extreme swearing that ensues. Wow, I would have hoped for better support from the HN community. Instead there are apologists after apologists. So what if Epic is big. Really, seriously shouldn't we have had alternative app stores available form the official ones. Why is this even a point of debate? All the time we hear stories of people one of our own getting fucked by these app stores and their lor…
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Re: Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store
#620This is the number one reason I don't use iPhones. Their privacy policy is very good (compared to Android) but it is a very airtight walled garden. Android has many problems, like no updates after two years and Google's draconian user support. But at least you can use alternative app stores (like F-Droid, Fortnite). At least you can compile and run your own code on your device without asking Google for permission.