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Apple, Epic, and the App Store

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Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#691

Post by anon98356 »

donor20 wrote: post #521
naikrovek wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Epic has a monopoly on selling items inside Fortnite. 3rd party artists can't create anything that can be used inside Fortnite, neither inside the v-bucks store nor outside of it. There's no 3rd party "market" at all. Apple has a market where third parties can market their apps. Apple requires a cut of all purchases made through that store, which alone is not monopolistic. Apple also requires that you sell your iOS…

Xbox has a monpoly on their game store. Sony has a monpoloy on their game store. Come on - is this argument going to be used for all these too? Walmart has a monopoly on what sells in Walmart.

Depends on what you define as their game store. I can purchase a game that is playable on the xbox from anywhere that sells a copy. One of these places is the digital store that comes with the xbox. But I can also go to cd-keys, or amazon and buy a copy there that will still work on an xbox.

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#692

Post by imtringued »

danShumway wrote: post #433
Spivak wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're going to try and argue to me that the games PC market would be better if we had fewer stores. If you hang around gaming forums you'll see this echoed plenty. If I could buy every single game ever through Steam I would without hesitation. I don't want Origin or the Epic store but I don't get the choice. I mean this isn't a super uncommon sentiment. Everyone has a preference but not everyone agrees. But reg…

> If I could buy every single game ever through Steam I would without hesitation. I don't want Origin or the Epic store but I don't get the choice. I know that some gamers feel this way, but I wholeheartedly disagree. Epic's entry into the market has been good for the PC games industry[0]. We have more games now from more developers covering more diverse genres. We've even managed to pull a few exclusives off of cons…

What about people who want to play games on Linux? Since 2018 Steam has made playing Windows games on Linux absolutely painless. How is Epic Games going to afford doing projects like proton with their cutthroat revenue cut? They can't. They charge extra depending on the payment method and from what I have heard they don't even have regional pricing so the vast majority of people can't even afford games on that store anyway.

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#693

Post by arvinsim »

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…

Yep, I am really surprised about people demonising Google but apologising for Apple. They both constitute a duopoly in the mobile space.

But then again, I shouldn't be surprised since there are incentives to act this way.

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#694

Post by imtringued »

kartayyar wrote: post #279
enra wrote: post #236

While I don't like Apple's 30% cut on multiplatform/subscription products, I think Epic's real motivation here is to run their own App Store, build a bigger moat and get the profits themselves (they take 12% cut, 5% if you use Unreal Engine, from developers in their store). They also make exclusive deals, bribing developers with funding/marketing support, so that the games can only bought in their store for 6-12mo. C…

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.

You don't get a cheaper game, especially not if you live in India where Steam will basically give you a 66% discount on every single game automatically. The 18% fee reduction goes straight to the developer. I have spent quite a lot of time chatting with friends on my "App Store".

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#695

Post by the-golden-one »

valuearb wrote: post #641
cromwellian wrote: post #352

"But Apple needs to fund the App Store. XCode, payment processing, reviewers, it all costs money". Yes, very little in comparison. Apple made $50 billion in revenue from the App Store in 2019. $50 BILLION. The data centers costs to serve up this are miniscule in comparison. Apple could build 50 datacenters PER YEAR EVERY YEAR for that revenue. Reviewers? A staff of 10,000 fulltime reviewers paid $200k per year would…

Apple doesn’t make $50B a year from the App Store. That’s roughly it’s entire services revenues. It’s estimated that developers had gross sales of $50B from the AppStore last year, of which $15B is Apples share before expenses. Apples audited financials tell us gross margins on services is 68%, and $9B of those services are from an annual payment from Google for search placement in Safari with a gross margin approach…

On the wild assumption that the plist for macOS Safari at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2813786 is used on iOS and it's derivatives, and that the Default pair implements this on all platforms, given the $9 billion placement payment for Google, would that code section not be a contender for the most expensive lines of code in existence, and at $360 million per letter?

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#696

Post by romanoderoma »

thewebcount wrote: post #497
romanoderoma wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you can buy the same exact item on Zalando and put it on fire if you want to Imagine if you could buy shoes only at Walmart because you bought the shoe rack there.

> Because you can buy the same exact item on Zalando and put it on fire if you want to No you can't. Walmart often requires vendors to make a special Walmart-only version of their product. So there is nothing that's truly comparable.

We are talking about the same exact item with the same exact features, just a different brand

There is no "vendor lock in" for t-shirts

You are not forced to buy walmart special editions using Walmart payment gateway and vendors don't have to pay Walmart a 30% cut, the opposite is true, Walmart HS to buy at least N items and pay in advance to be able to require a special edition, even though they don't know if they are going to sell all of them

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#697

Post by immigrantsheep »

MR4D wrote: post #346
sprafa wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t PRISM basically using FB to do NSA work for them anyhow?

Probably. Which was kinda my point - monitoring these rule breakers is hard.

And yet even after these things surfaced, nothing happened to the apps. Not everyone is equal.

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#698

Post by thewhitetulip »

danity wrote: post #634
thewhitetulip wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a world where walmart is the only store & it bans all other retail stores from existing, Walmart will become monopoly. This is false equivalence

What do you call the Play Store? What do you call Android? Talk about false equivalence, you’ve just demonstrated that.

1.I have installed LineageOS which has 0 apps from Gogle

2. I have installed android apps from F_-droid/Samsung app store or even Vivo app store

3. I have directly installed apks which didn't appear on play store directly from the internet

Where is my false equivalence? Pray tell me?

Google makes it impossible for apps to run without play store but I've used 0 google apps on android for 1yr and lived easily with 0 issues

Remove apple's app store, I dare you and then tell me you can live for one year.

Apple has monopoly on app store.

Walmart can't be compared.

Google has technically enforced monopoly and which I oppose. I never said google play store isn't a monopoly.

Are you sure you know what false equivalence means?

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#699

Post by whywhywhywhy »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #446

>This is not a console you play to entertain yourself, or even a PC for work: it is the foundation of modern life OMFG. Is it just because I'm 56? Is it just because I've spent my entire adult life connected to the internet (barring a few early years where it was just Bitnet)? Is it because I helped start the biggest e-commerce company in the anglo/eurosphere? Is it that I spend all day in front of screens, connected…

Dopamine addiction is a real thing and most people are completely unaware they even have it. That's why they think so highly of phones.

Re: Apple, Epic, and the App Store

#700

Post by ghostwriter »

enragedcacti wrote: post #581
ghostwriter wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so, where's the flaw? The fact that somebody sometime ago named another corporation a monopoly by the same ridiculous criterion as "too big" and discharged it, doesn't make it anyhow right. Was there gatekeeping from the government for new players to enter the same market? Any quotas or tariffs by chance?

> Was there gatekeeping from the government for new players to enter the same market? That isn't what a monopoly is.

Artificial inability to enter the market with a competing product is literally in the definition of a monopoly.
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