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Apple, Epic, and the App Store

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Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#311

Post by izacus »

MR4D wrote: post #309
danShumway wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to heavy push back against both-sides-isms here. > I think Epic's real motivation here is to run their own App Store Yeah, you're right. That is the outcome that we want. We want multiple stores on iOS. I thought advocates for this position had been really clear, but maybe we haven't been clear enough. For the record, we want there to be multiple app stores on iOS. > build a bigger moat and get the profits…

> We want multiple stores on iOS. No no no no no no!!!!!! It's this type of thinking that has caused me to have more freaking messaging and video apps on my phone so I can talk to everyone: Zoom, Skype, Meet, Meetings, Facetime, Messenger, Chime,...etc, etc. etc. NO. I ABSOLUTELY do not want that. Freaking nightmare. When that happens I ditch my iPhone and buy a flip phone. Seriously - stop the insanity. There is no…

Are you also living in a crippling fear because you have the ability to buy things in multiple stores in your city? Is that a nightmare as well?

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#312

Post by SiVal »

vageli wrote: post #74
cschneid wrote: post #27

The Hey saga emphasized that Apple has multiple products interacting in a single app store. * Screened apps - Apple only lets "safe" apps into the store. * Discoverability - Apple in theory lets users find apps that they didn't know about before. Customer Acquisition * Payments - Apple makes it easy to accept payments, for their 30% fee. One or all of those are useful and great. Where I have an issue is when they use…

> That feels like using an existing monopoly (actually a duopoly w/ google's similar practices) to force developers to purchase products they don't want. Hey didn't want to accept payments via apple, but Apple's market power and decisions were focused on forcing them to. In order to sell goods in a place like Walmart, a manufacturer is subject to onerous terms. Why is the app store different than a retailer limiting…

Suppose Apple and Google started making cars and put every other car company out of business. Both made the rule that if you bought their car, every product or service that went into the car also had to be purchased through them. You preferred the Apple car world to the Google car world. (All Google cars streamed your location and live video of you and your facially recognized passengers back to Google for analysis of who you did what with where and when, for your "convenience", and Google was the only alternative to Apple.)

Avoiding Google surveillance meant you could only buy an Apple car. You could then only buy gasoline at Apple gas stations. People in your town who wanted to change your oil had to pay an annual fee to Apple to even be considered, would have to pay 30% of revenue to Apple if approved, and could be put out of business at any moment with no recourse by whatever happened in secret behind the Apple fortress walls.

You as a car owner could not choose to buy tires or get "your" car painted or even get your car washed by anyone without going through Apple. You paid Apple for the car wash, because (no matter what you or the people washing your car would prefer) you were Apple's customer and the car you paid for was Apple's car.

For your "safety", of course.

A phone is as fundamental to the infrastructure of your life today as a car. Any company that could utterly control it would probably become a trillion-dollar company.

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#313

Post by MR4D »

immigrantsheep wrote: post #285
ericmay wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, you're right. That is the outcome that we want. We want multiple stores on iOS. I thought advocates for this position had been really clear, maybe we haven't been clear enough though. Right, and the rest of us don't want that, and I also don't want games or apps that don't adhere to Apple's rules. You want another option of App Stores because you want don't want to pay for the user base that Apple created and…

Instagram and TikTok have been found guilty on collecting an absurd amount of data against user's wishes. How did Apple's policy prevent that? Also I don't see Apple banning TikTok or Instagram.

Let's go with this for a start: https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/07/30/facebook-says-app...

Also, notice that FB has done everything possible to gather information. Frankly, the NSA should just hire FB to do their work - it'b be faster and cheaper.

Locking stuff down is hard. Doing it with multiple app stores will be impossible.

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#314

Post by GeekyBear »

saurik wrote: post #235
GeekyBear wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. It's been perfectly legal since 2010. >The U.S. Librarian of Congress ruled on Monday that consumers who circumvent digital protections on smartphones to install unapproved applications—a practice often colloquially known as “jailbreaking”—for noninfringing reasons should be exempted from prosecution under the anti-circumvention section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). https://www.macworld.com…

If you can figure it out, you can jailbreak it; but there is no reason why jailbreaking a device is inherently possible: jailbreaks for iOS are happening later and later in the boot cycle and so are more and more limited, and we have had a single bootrom exploit in like a decade. If you want to be able to jailbreak a device it must be illegal to lock it down like that, not merely legal for someone to figure out how t…

>If you want to be able to jailbreak a device it must be illegal to lock it down like that

I'm not sure why you're putting this in terms of iOS, since many Android devices also ship with a locked bootloader.

>there is no reason why jailbreaking a device is inherently possible

Any iDevice with an A11 or earlier has an unpatchable bootloader flaw that absolutely makes it inherently jailbreakable. Apple cannot prevent you from jailbreaking those devices, nor can it patch the flaw with a future version of the OS.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/devel...

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#315

Post by izacus »

tc wrote: post #41

Here's the thing. Even if you're OK with Apple (or whoever) controlling what you can run on your computers, this is a centralization of power that will be co-opted. Let's say that Australia wants to ban consumer encryption. This would currently be difficult to enforce for PC software. But on mobile, this is easy. Just make Apple and Google enforce it! Make them ban such apps from their stores. Now you've achieved per…

Apple already actively censors political content in apps and actively works with Chinese government to censor content on Chinese AppStore.

A private company is already put themselves in plate to control software content that reaches millions of people without those people having the ability to choose anything else on their pocket computers.

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#316

Post by sercand »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #35
ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #11

A pretty well-thought out article, given the inflammatory nature of the subject matter. I think Apple is right on the line. But I don't see a good argument as to what their doing is being anti-competitive. ~2 million apps are on the app store. Charging a fee for giving developers a huge market that spends money is not exactly unfair. And the rules of engagement are generally applied equally to everyone - the exceptio…

actual harm => consumers end up paying more for the apps because the app developers have to increase their price to cover Apple's cut (which is more like a shakedown). I don't see any reason why a company needs to pay any percent of their revenue instead of a flat fee. You pay a % of revenue when someone is your partner or an investor in your company. Apple is neither. In fact, they've shown to be the opposite of a t…

> consumers end up paying more for the apps because the app developers have to increase their price to cover Apple's cut.

I don’t think so. When we determined our app’s monthly price we have A/B tested several price like $5/month, $8/month, $15/month. And we have chosen the one that we earned most (It was the expensive one). If the Apple’s cut will become 10%, we won’t change our price because would earn less. Therefore, Apple’s cut won’t change most of the apps’ price.

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#317

Post by kelnos »

tomc1985 wrote: post #297
kartayyar wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the whole objection to mutiple app stores. Instead of clicking icon A, I click icon B and if I get a cheaper game, all power to Epic. I don't spend time in an app store. I spend time playing the game.

So I recently built a living room gaming PC. Installed Steam, Epic Store, GOG, Origin, XBOX, Rockstar Social Club, even Twitch. Pretty much anything where I have a library of games. And let me tell you, what a pain in the ass it is! I keep all the games organized in Playnite. If I try to launch Epic games from Playnite, most of the time nothing happens. So I start the epic client and... oh look, it logged me out agai…

> Multiple launchers is NOT ideal.

Absolutely agreed, but consider what would happen if only one of those game stores you mention were allowed to be installed on your gaming PC. Then you'd have to go through a single gatekeeper, and I bet you a bunch of the games you like just wouldn't be available at all, because they'd either have been capriciously rejected, or because their developers can't make the terms work to their satisfaction. But because this mythical single game store is the only game in town (heh), there's no recourse.

Or maybe most, or even all, of those games you play might be available on this single app store. But expect them to be worse, because their developers have to pay a middleman a larger fee for distribution, which leaves less money to build the game itself. Expect them to be missing features, because this gatekeeper makes it harder to build some features, even if it's through well-meaning policies.

It absolutely floors me that people on a site called Hacker News are praising the role of a gatekeeping corporation that locks down devices they own to the point that they don't even really own them.

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#318

Post by [deleted] »

enragedcacti wrote: post #287
ericmay wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, you're right. That is the outcome that we want. We want multiple stores on iOS. I thought advocates for this position had been really clear, maybe we haven't been clear enough though. Right, and the rest of us don't want that, and I also don't want games or apps that don't adhere to Apple's rules. You want another option of App Stores because you want don't want to pay for the user base that Apple created and…

...just don't use other app stores? Honest question, what do you lose by other people having the option?

[deleted]

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#320

Post by rowanG077 »

ericmay wrote: post #277
rowanG077 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I can choose to make myself a 12 pack of half Pepsi, 1/4th Mountain Dew, and 1/4 Cherry. That's the entire point. There is no artificial restriction that mixing Pepsi with some other soft drink results in a toxic mixture. But that is essentially what's happening on the App store/Phone hardware space. IMessage facebook messenger case is not an artificial lock. They are fundamentally different protocols. It's not l…

> It's not like IMessage supports facebook messenger and Apple just say no you can't use it. There is a real difference here. You can make a protocol then and Facebook won't allow you to use it. They're definitely artificially locking you in. It's no different. > Apple is artificially restricting usage of it's phones for no other reason then greed. Really? That's the only reason? Does it not seem odd to you that iPho…

> You can make a protocol then and Facebook won't allow you to use it. They're definitely artificially locking you in. It's no different.

If the technical requirements are met and Facebook won't allow then it indeed is not an artificial lock in. But I doubt that Facebook messenger can talk to IMessage right now. It's not the responsibility of either Facebook or Apple to make those two apps work together. The only thing they should not do is go out of their way to not allow them to interface. I.e. It should be possible for a user to write a bridge between those two apps.

> Really? That's the only reason? Does it not seem odd to you that iPhones are considered safe devices, and that Apple goes to great lengths to protect them and user data and now companies are complaining about the App Store? Once they can circumvent the App Store, then can put all sorts of garbage tracking and malware into applications. iPhone and the App Store have been around for more than 10 years, and then over the last two years Apple requires no tracking, prompting of data usage, soon a data use "nutrition scorecard" and now just this year all of these companies are complaining about pricing? Give me a break. If you want to call Apple greedy, then it's just a case of pots calling kettles black. Notice how there aren't any customers complaining about this oh so bad and greedy practice? I don't care what developers want here. I want my iPhone the way it is, and changing the App Store is bad in my view. I'll vote with my wallet in this case. If that means fewer applications because they want to circumvent these things that I want Apple to do, then that's fine, good riddance.

I don't consider Apple safe devices because of the App store. Every single protection that is afforded by the app store is actually provided by the OS. With the exception of manual review and that is a subjective process full of holes.

Can you explain to me, since you believe Apple is actually not user hostile, why does it allow obvious malware in the app store such as apps that appear to be free but once you install them you end up in micro-transaction hell? Why do they allow micro-transactions at all? Micro-transactions are very rarely if ever beneficial to the user. What's up with the apps that promise a feature and don't deliver? I'm not joking when I say that the quality of apps I can download for free on my desktop is way higher then most stuff that is in the app store. App stores have brought down the quality of software significantly. It's so bad that my default stance on anything on the app store is that it must be trash because that's what it is usually.

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