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Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

appfairness.org

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Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#631

Post by headmelted »

sneak wrote: post #76
candiddevmike wrote: post #62

Device freedom is a must. Any device should be completely controllable by the end user. There's two parts to this to me: app stores and the data collected by the devices. Users should have the freedom to install any software on their devices, period. Users should also have the freedom to stop all data collection by these devices. This applies to all electronics--video game consoles, TVs, printers, who knows what else…

If users didn’t want these things, users wouldn’t buy them. For the vast majority of people, and iPhone is way, way better than a computer that can run any app, precisely because it can’t run any app they click on. I’m a hacker, so I would love to be able to install any software I want on my iPhone, and introspect it in other ways. Most users, however, would have a way worse experience using their phone if they were…

Wrong. Completely.

The vast majority of people you're talking about don't realise they're having their prices jacked up with taxes or their options curtailed by Apple. They just assume the App Store is where you get the apps because it's been programmed into them over the last 12 years.

Allowing third party app stores doesn't change the API or permissions system already baked into the OS. If Epic wants to start an App Store with lax policies then if you and Apple are right about the value of their policies then that'll become apparent quickly enough and will still be a selling point of the App Store.

This is nothing like what happened with desktop computers, where the security model had to be welded on after the horse had already bolted. Windows (just as an example) wouldn't allow blanket admin permissions to software if there was a way to stuff the legacy software genie back in it's bottle. Unfortunately fixing permissions retrospectively would break a multitude of legacy software that hasn't been updated in years, in some cases decades.

Apple is not being punished for success, and you don't understand the problem or the legal case, which is entirely not at all related to Apple protecting or not protecting their users from pop-up ads.

Consumer choice didn't chose anything. Most phone users don't even understand that they are in a walled garden.

tldr; This isn't The Beach, it's The Truman Show.

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#632

Post by zepto »

headmelted wrote: post #615
zepto wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! Which is why I absolutely reject Epic et al’s position. They want to be part of a small exclusive group of store owners who get to share in the benefits of Apple’s investments. Very different from the device freedom you are calling for. It must also be said that device freedom cannot come at the cost of security and trust. I and presumably you, have the capability to make good decisions about what software to t…

"They want to be part of a small exclusive group of store owners who get to share in the benefits of Apple’s investments" False. Epic made very clear, early on, IN THEIR COURT FILING that their case was an attempt to legally force Apple and Google to allow for third party app stores to exist equitably on iOS and Android. Does that benefit Epic substantially? Of course it does. They want a mobile Epic Games Store on b…

Nothing I said is false. Third party stores will not exist equitably on iOS and Android because there don’t exist equitably anywhere else.

I said a small group, not just Epic. That group would be made up of the usual suspects - Epic, Amazon, Google, Facebook, various other TenCent properties etc.

Nothing about it would make it either developer friendly, nor consumer friendly.

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#633

Post by RonanTheGrey »

mercurysmessage wrote: post #605
geodel wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm strongly reminded of the quote "Freedom of speech doesn't protect speech you like; it protects speech you don't like... Modern addendum is "You can have Freedom Of Speech but no guarantee for Freedom After speech." Edit: Just to clarify, It is not my opinion. It is Social media warriors warning people "Free speech is not free of consequences"

"Free speech is not free of consequences" This is absolutely true though? I fail to see your point. You are free to say what you want, and other people are free to criticize you for it. If you don't support the right to criticize, you don't support free speech.

Depends on the consequences. Usually this is invoked to mean "it's fine for me burn down your business or destroy your life because I don't like you because consequences "

In general, the statement CANNOT be true, because the chilling effect explicitly suppresses free speech -- being a result of consequences. Ergo, consequence (of a particular type) is in fact suppression of free speech.

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#634

Post by sweezyjeezy »

pb7 wrote: post #602
yladiz wrote: post #428

Why should I read this website and take it seriously if I can't even read the cookie policy without accepting cookies, and when I actually do attempt to read the policy (thanks Reader Mode) I am told that to opt-out I have to disable cookies in my browser? Looking further and reading their privacy policy in the section titled "Your European Rights", I see this: > You have the right to ask us not to process your Perso…

It's probably because they care very little about consumer rights and are just doing what companies do: attempt to make the most money possible.

Do their motivations invalidate the argument?

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#635

Post by zepto »

bogwog wrote: post #608
judge2020 wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-epic-games/apple-sa...

I don't see how that's relevant. Epic isn't suing Apple so that they can have exclusive rights to open a second app store, they're suing to allow third-party app stores in general. If Epic wins, they aren't going to be part of a small group of store owners; anyone would be able to open their own competing store.

Almost no stores will be able to compete with Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc, who already have giant reach and network effects,

Consumers will have to deal with them all, as will developers.

There will be a small group of store owners.

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#636

Post by manigandham »

spideymans wrote: post #549
manigandham wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What privacy rules would those be? Why would iOS privacy settings be affected by the install method? What would be different from the Facebook SDK that's already installed in millions of apps on the App Store today?

Abusing private APIs would be a major issues. Binaries uploaded to the App Store are inspected to ensure that they aren't abusing any private APIs. Facebook controlling their own store would allow them to circumvent this check. In the past, private APIs have been used to track users, amongst other malicious behaviour.

What kind of inspection? The App Store review is not that in-depth and has frequently let through many apps that were leaking private details.

And again, how does this affect iOS system level privacy settings and protections? App permissions and warnings don't change.

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#637

Post by FreeFull »

zepto wrote: post #611
FreeFull wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Android there is the F-Droid software repository, and there is no issue of competition with the Play Store. Would things be different on Apple phones?

Developers can safely ignore the F-Droid store because it represents no significant market share. This will not be true of the stores that Epic, Facebook, and Google, and Amazon et al would start up on iOS.

F-Droid does not offer any form of payment, anyway. All the apps offered by F-Droid are open source and the majority of them ad-free, and it's honestly a fantastic resource for me. It actually has quite a lot of apps, including games, productivity tools, utilities, and other things. Something like this wouldn't be possible at all on Apple's platform.

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#638

Post by mattnewton »

chefandy wrote: post #482
lotsofpulp wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or bad actors can use analogies to mislead people. Or a neutral actor erroneously uses them and the result is still misinformed people. My opinion is analogies do more harm than good, at best wasting people's time, and at worst, resulting in people coming to the wrong conclusions.

All language constructs can be abused. The problem is lying, not the rhetorical mechanism.

In this case the problem is constructing poor models and using them to understand the world; it doesn't have to be used to intentionally mislead, people often can use analogies to explain things to themselves and get it wrong.

It's not without it's uses as a technique but you have to make sure the model the analogy constructs is, well, actually analogous to the situation you are modeling.

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#639

Post by zepto »

headmelted wrote: post #622
zepto wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason you can’t build a phone. You’ll be competing with multi-billion dollar corporations who have exclusive content and nobody will bother with your store.

But that's not anti-competitive. All manner of well-funded corporations would be able to start app stores on mobile, and several (Epic, Valve/Steam, Microsoft) would start app stores the second they were able to. They'd also be competing for software - as there's a lot of fat that can be trimmed in those 30% margins. The competition, which would be fierce, is more than enough to solve the issue of price fixing.

Any fat trimmed in the margins (which is less than you think) would not accrue to developers because they’d have to deal with multiple stores and multiple rules sets.

They also wouldn’t have to offer the same terms to every developer. All they would need to do would be to lock in some exclusive popular apps. ‘Competing for developers’ doesn’t mean making things better for all developers. It just means securing enough exclusives that people can’t ignore your store.

Re: Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

#640

Post by lotsofpulp »

tomcatfish wrote: post #571
lotsofpulp wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is analogies are erroneously as supporting arguments to jump from premise to conclusion of an unrelated topic. I saw them a lot at my family's various religious/cult gatherings when I was a kid. The preacher would state something and then "prove" it with an analogy. Analogies don't accomplish anything in basically all of the uses I've seen. People want them to serve as proof, but it's a lazy way of gett…

I'd like to try to change your mind on analogies, and even without analogies (although I _will_ use an example)! Analogies are an attempt to generalize an argument. Say we are trying to prove that "It will rain" is a valid conclusion from "If it is cloudy it will rain and it is cloudy". We can generalize this to "A -> B" & "B" -> "B", which you will recognize as an application of modus ponens from formal logic. Analo…

I agree that analogies are useful to illustrate (in some scenarios), but I would not use them to support my argument (outside of a discrete math course).

If I were to argue that Apple's app store policies were harmful, then I would do just that. I would define terms, define the parties involved, show the harm and to which parties, maybe provide some examples, show which laws it violates, and maybe suggest solutions.

But I don't see why involving Cheerios at a brick and mortar retail store would help clear anything up.

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