681–690 of 1001 posts
Not sure why people are surprised or consider it giant news. > The court recommended that Epic follow the App Store’s guidelines and policies while the case is in progress – the rules they followed over the past ten years until they created the current situation themselves. Epic refused. Well duh, this is a show match court fight of Epic Games not liking the rules and not getting the special treatment they want. No m…
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This is like in Amazon sold a fridge and said you can only shop at Whole Foods. Epic wants users to be able to shop at stores other than Whole Foods, not to be carried at that store without a markup
> This is like in Amazon sold a fridge and said you can only shop at Whole Foods. So why would anyone buy such fridge? And if they do, there clearly are other benefits, which you omitted.
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> if Epic wins this battle Apple That's a big IF. You will find it damn-near-impossible to have any legal standing when you willfully violate the terms of service with a provider as openly as Epic did. Apple is fully in the right here, and as a consumer I'm glad Apple isn't messing around with their software security. What Epic did was down right sneaky, and they are (rightfully) being punished for it. Epic started t…
Contracts are not laws, if you breech a contract then one of the possible outcomes is that you will end up in court arguing whether the contract is valid. That is what happened in this case. The law would be especially toothless if you had to obey a contract in order to dispute its validity.
Apple is a monopoly. When Microsoft was investigated and fined for anti-trust behaviors, it hasn't engaged in this level of abuse.
I am not sure why this fallacy continues to be repeated in every Apple thread. Apple currently has 46% US market share [1] and 14% global market share [2]. This is far from monopoly power. By contrast, Microsoft had 95% market share during their antitrust suit. [3] [1] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-sh... [2] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share... [3] https://schola…
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
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If you’re claiming that Spotify would get all the benefit of a break in the fee, you’re implicitly claiming that it bears all the economic burden of the fee (ie. it doesn’t pass on the fee to users). Spotify currently charges $13 to sign up in iOS and $10 to sign up on the web. This is strong evidence that Spotify is currently passing through the fee to users. It seems much more likely that Spotify would give iOS use…
Especially when Apple Music is $10 per month, Spotify needs to more or less match that price. The problem is if Apple takes 30% and Spotify pays out 70% (old info, maybe this has changed) to labels, Spotify is left with $0. It drops to 15% after the first year, but that's still not good compared to the 3% major credit card processors charge.
My feeling is that this whole situation is mostly going as Tim Sweeney intended. He was itching for a fight, wanted to sue Apple. The harsher that Apple retaliates, the better Epic's court case. Apple is playing right into his hands. Did Sweeney anticipate Apple's threat to Unreal Engine? Maybe, maybe not. But the temporary restraining order did block that threat, at least for now. I don't think Epic ever intended to…
I can't see how Epic wins this. If Stripe can claim Wells Fargo doesn't want to process porn payments, and that's legal, how can an American court rule for Epic? Epic are obviously going to lose, and lose hard, or set a precedent that's going to screw every payment provider in America and open a flood gate for fraudulent payments. You can't force someone to sell something they don't want to, especially because Apple…
1. Stripe is a minor player overall. Lots of other credit card processors
2. Stripe is not preventing you from collecting payments from your customers. You can use a different payment processors.
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Might be an unpopular opinion but I don’t think they are acting to the level of MSFT in the 90s. What MSFT did would be equivalent to Apple forcing everyone to use its apps and not allow any competing apps. Also recall that Jobs was pretty adamant about allowing third-party apps in the beginning. Now, do I think 30% is ridiculous in 2020? Yes. But it made sense a decade ago when having a half decent working app almos…
Might be an unpopular opinion but I don’t think they are acting to the level of MSFT in the 90s. It's far worse. Microsoft may have played dirty tricks with bundling, but they never prevented developers from distributing competing software. If Microsoft had the control over Windows that Apple does over iOS, they never would have allowed web browsers (for "security", no doubt) and we might be in a Windows monoculture…
In a way, they did. They made deals with OEMs to only ship PCs with Windows on them, and not, say, BeOS or Linux.
Apple is a monopoly. When Microsoft was investigated and fined for anti-trust behaviors, it hasn't engaged in this level of abuse.
Android is another phone platform with a larger market share. This is hardly a monopoly. Don’t buy an ios device if you want apps from vendors who don’t play by apples rules. I hate the 30% fee as a developer and a user. I was an ios jail breaker before the App Store launched. I used jailbreaking after the App Store launched to have a control panel and fast app switching. All that got baked into ios but I wish new in…
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
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Tim Sweeney may be a wonderful man who loves open platforms, apple pie, and kittens, but: - Android is clearly more open than iOS, but Epic is also suing Google. So is this really about sideloading? From that suit, it sure doesn't sound like it. - When you do sideload Fortnite on your Android device, from what I understand, you can't actually sideload Fortnite directly. Instead you have sideload... the Epic Games Sto…
> - Android is clearly more open than iOS, but Epic is also suing Google. So is this really about sideloading? From that suit, it sure doesn't sound like it. Google is equally as responsible for anticompetitive behavior with their exclusive agreements with OEMs, and the fact that they've limited Android in such a way that third party app stores will never have feature parity with the Play Store. If you distribute an…
My feeling is that this whole situation is mostly going as Tim Sweeney intended. He was itching for a fight, wanted to sue Apple. The harsher that Apple retaliates, the better Epic's court case. Apple is playing right into his hands. Did Sweeney anticipate Apple's threat to Unreal Engine? Maybe, maybe not. But the temporary restraining order did block that threat, at least for now. I don't think Epic ever intended to…