51–60 of 121 posts
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They showed that Apple forcing iOS apps to use their Payment Processor is bad for consumers by providing an alternative that is 20% cheaper. Which is what got them banned.
Every payment and subscription going through Apple is one of the best features for me. Especially the subscriptions.
Some choice sections: "...On Thursday, August 13, 2020, Epic Games made the calculated decision to breach its allegedly illegal agreements with Apple by activating allegedly hidden code in Fortnite allowing Epic Games to collect IAPs directly. In response, Apple removed Fortnite from the App Store, where it remains unavailable to the date of this Order. Later that same day, Epic Games filed this action and began a pr…
> Not even Epic Games gives away its products for free... Do... do they not? The point being made in that paragraph seems valid regardless, but that's a strange comparison to end with - is Fortnite not free-to-play on Apple devices? It certainly is on all other platforms I've seen it on.
Free to play, does not mean they give away their products for free
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I'd take that bet. I think Epic (Tim Sweeney, really) was prepared to lose that revenue to win the war. This ruling is what I expected and seems quite reasonable. Epic doesn't get temporary special privileges to break App Store rules (even though they are alleged to be illegal), but also Apple can't retaliate against them in other areas. If Epic does reverse the payment changes in an attempt to return Fortnite to the…
People seem to act like this is the first App Store dispute. There have been many over the last decade and Apple's behaviour has been consistent i.e. they will simply allow Epic to come back onto the store and pretend like nothing ever happened. Exactly like we saw recently with the Hey app. Apple doesn't want to punish developers but they will play hard ball if they don't abide by the rules.
Some choice sections: "...On Thursday, August 13, 2020, Epic Games made the calculated decision to breach its allegedly illegal agreements with Apple by activating allegedly hidden code in Fortnite allowing Epic Games to collect IAPs directly. In response, Apple removed Fortnite from the App Store, where it remains unavailable to the date of this Order. Later that same day, Epic Games filed this action and began a pr…
> Not even Epic Games gives away its products for free... Do... do they not? The point being made in that paragraph seems valid regardless, but that's a strange comparison to end with - is Fortnite not free-to-play on Apple devices? It certainly is on all other platforms I've seen it on.
It's not 30% but the actual amount doesn't matter in the context of that particular part of the order.
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> Not even Epic Games gives away its products for free... Do... do they not? The point being made in that paragraph seems valid regardless, but that's a strange comparison to end with - is Fortnite not free-to-play on Apple devices? It certainly is on all other platforms I've seen it on.
How then exactly did epic make over a billion dollars off of fortnite last year? Free to play, does not mean they give away their products for free
This seems like the predictable outcome. Epic knew Fortnite would get banned when they started this; Apple is innocent until proven guilty, so no court will force Apple to reinstate Fortnite unless Epic wins its antitrust suit. But similarly, Apple's subsequent, second threat to ban Epic from doing other lines of business via macOS tools (e.g. Unreal Engine development) seemed excessive compared to other app bans, an…
Since Epic has 2 different accounts, Apple could have terminated only one of them, leaving Unreal Engine intact. But Schiller’s declaration says that in these cases they have always terminated all accounts that are owned by the same company / conglomerate (I can easily see this is useful in some cases). So again I feel they were in a corner: they had to follow what they have always done, so that other companies couldn’t prove a ad-hoc enforcement of rules (termination rules, in this case).
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Every payment and subscription going through Apple is one of the best features for me. Especially the subscriptions.
And that's your choice, but forcing that onto everyone is anti-competitive.
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Of course a competing App Store can offer lower prices, they don't bear any of the costs for developing and managing the iOS ecosystem Apple spent billions over a decade building (that many other companies lost fortunes failing to compete against). They can just popup a virtual store in someone else's successful established platform and access a market of 1B+ credit cards they had no hand in creating where they can d…
Apple profits handsomely from the iOS ecosystem every time someone buys an iPhone to access it, or buys a Mac because Apple won't allow building iOS apps without one, or pays the annual developer program fee. They don't need to triple or quadruple dip to be the most valuable publicly traded company in the world.
The nominal annual fee is a cost for accessing the dev tools only, it's in no way a royalty-free cost to sell products on one of the most lucrative markets in the world - that's what their standard royalty % (unchanged from the outset) covers.
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The US is disproportionately iOS compared to the entire world, and especially US teens (I've seen estimates of something like 90%). iOS, the US, and US teens are all disproportionately important to digital sales. Although the US is 10% of TikTok's user base, it provides 50% of TikTok's revenue, nd from Charli D'Amelio on down the most-followed TikTok accounts are almost entirely American. That's why everyone expects…
US is the majority of revenue sure, but there is no way that so much comes from iOS the cross platform play numbers don’t back this up you can’t just extrapolate from hypothetical app download figures. The US is about 80% of Fortnite’s but the majority of the players are on consoles not mobile. The 80% figure will change drastically when China grants epic permission to monetize the game as the vast majority of their…
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The walled garden is not what protects your email, 2FA SMSes or bank details. The OS sandboxing and permissions system do that. The two are often conflated, but the two concerns are orthogonal really. Heck, you could easily imagine a system where software distributed outside the app store can only access a subset of perms if security is such a concern, and that'd still be less anti-competitive
Due to the way iOS works (dynamic dispatch) private APIs can only be prevented through an App Store review process. And many of those APIs can be used to extract enough information to fingerprint the device, determine your location or steal your data e.g. accessing the list of WiFi networks or browser history. So no. The two concerns are very much related.
That's complete nonsense.
Dynamic dispatch has nothing to do with the ability or not of a program to access API. Dynamic dispatch is the selection at runtime of the correct version of a polymorphic function. Obviously, you can sandbox programs written in languages using dynamic dispatch.