241–250 of 614 posts
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This should alarm any developer. Any iOS developer could be at risk to pay Apple punitive damages whenever they determine their rules have been broken.
Just like game consoles have been doing for the last 40 years.
That being said, this is scary and also shows how comfortable Apple feels in their position. I am hoping that someone as strong as Apple will come with a lawsuit and shake them up a bit so to speak.
I really wish there was a third party - the customer - actually represented in this trial. Apple and Epic arguing over what is best for the customer, while clearly they are having their own interests in mind, screams for the actual customers to be represented. The whole argument about them promoting an app „for free“ is a bit ridiculous. They clearly knew the amount of commission they were going to earn from pushing…
The real problem here is that companies are forced to accept apples terms. Because apple controls every level of the stack, to opt out of the App store ToS you have to opt out of the store, the OS, and the hardware. If there was a way to install apps outside of the store this would not be an issue. Most users and developers would still use the app store since it provides value but devs who feel that they can supply t…
The issue I have with that is that then a ton of companies think it's a good idea to ship a crappy "launcher" that needs to run on startup, taking up resources in the background while providing little to no added functionality. We can see that with PC games; it used to be just Steam, but now there's the Epic Games Launcher, Origin, GoG, and a bunch of more obscure launchers that need to be installed to play particular games.
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Just like game consoles have been doing for the last 40 years.
Right. And some of us are very opposed to that model taking over the majority of computing.
I have no understanding for anyone that buys Apple and then complains.
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But it's no more value than they get from googles platform, or more importantly their own platform. It's "just another platform" to EPIC.
That's laughable. It's been shown over and over that iOS customers spend a lot more money than Android customers.
I'm not comparing iOS to Android - i'm comparing iOS to every platform EPIC makes money on. 20% is a big chunk yes, but 2 billion instead of 2.5 billion is still a ton of money, and they're obviously willing to sacrifice in order to get to their real goal - bringing the EPIC game store to iOS
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In game consoles you can't even start coding for them unless they happen to like you, and on top pay several thousands for a devkit.
This is false. Sony and MS games can be programmed without licenses or devkits (which make it much easier to debug games by providing debug access not available on retail consoles). Moreover, devkits are frequently made available for free by both companies to indie developers and even major partners.
In Microsoft's case, UWP on XBox doesn't count as it is castrated to the actual OS capabilities, and hasn't been updated for a while and most likely it won't.
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In game consoles you can't even start coding for them unless they happen to like you, and on top pay several thousands for a devkit.
This is false. Sony and MS games can be programmed without licenses or devkits (which make it much easier to debug games by providing debug access not available on retail consoles). Moreover, devkits are frequently made available for free by both companies to indie developers and even major partners.
Xbox developer mode [1] appears to require a valid, current Partner Center app developer account [2]. Individual accounts are $19 and "With a developer account, you can submit apps and games to Microsoft marketplaces, including the Microsoft Store."
so you dont need a devkit but would need an Xbox and you do need an account to publish. so yes, while you dont need a xbox dev account to program, you dont need an apple dev account to program either. you just need a dev account on either platform to publish.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/xbox-apps/devki... [2] https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/store/register/
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If is such a killer app, Epic is free to create their own phone OS, it would sell like hot pancakes. You know, actual innovation.
> If is such a killer app, Epic is free to create their own phone OS, it would sell like hot pancakes. Creating a phone OS wouldn't actually let them compete on the same level, because you can't run anything but iOS on Apple hardware. The only companies that actually compete at the same level as Apple and Google and Amazon, since they both create the hardware, run an OS on it, and provide a store on it. Any while it'…
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> How many of those are installed on more than 1% of mobile devices 4/5 in the examples I gave. Google, Apple, Samsung and Amazon all have decent market share.
I am skeptical that Amazon has 1% market share. I found a datum that Samsung has like 25M MAU in the US, but I doubt that they do more than 1% of the total app transactions in the US. Maybe in Korea.
> How many of those are installed on more than 1% of mobile devices (however broadly construed)?
> I doubt that they do more than 1% of the total app transactions
These goal posts keep moving
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Isn't a better analogy that car dealerships deserve revenue for selling Toyota's cars? Running an app store and providing a safe platform for users isn't free right?
Car dealership analogy is flawed. In some states its illegal for the car manufacturer to directly sale to the consumer, they have to go through car dealerships. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_US_dealership_disputes