Despite all this, I currently have more respect for Apple's ethics than most other companies - currently. But if their incentives continue to lead them in this direction, Apple will be the Oracle of 2025. They should actually welcome regulation in this area, because its difficult for a company to change its own incentives.
ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'
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Re: ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'
#182Apple is nothing else but the digital equivalent of a landlord extracting economic rents from everyone in the ecosystem. It's time to put an end to it, and while we're at it the same goes for all the other platform owners. We (in this case the EU) should give it the same treatment we gave credit card companies. Cap their rates at 1% or whatever so they can cover the operational costs of their stores, stop them from b…
What about video game consoles? Early in a generation, they are sold at razor-thin (or negative) margins, with the expectation that the manufacturer will recoup losses from licensing fees over the life of the console and that costs will come down in later revisions.
If manufacturers lose their substantial licensing fees, they would be forced to charge more upfront for the consoles which is objectively worse for consumers.
Re: ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'
#183Well, true that's kinda how Mafia works.
Except the Mafia hasn't built from scratch the neighborhood it asks "protection money" from, it already existed there and they pushed out anyone able to stand up to them and started enforcing their rules over the people already living there. Also comparing an organization that terrorizes, mauls and murders people in real life living in their home neighborhood to a company that imposes strict rules to ensure they get a cut of every sale on their own digital platform seems far fetched.
Re: ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Its for your own safety kiddo. Those stuff are dangerous and will harm your device" When companies use the same logic of spreading fear to manipulate and ultimately control as the war on terror/war on drugs from Bush/Nixon, you know something is really wrong.
To be fair, push notifications from websites can be harmful if the user doesn't understand them. I know of a person who just clicked the "allow notifications" in order to not get bothered by the popup, and then they started getting notifications with sex offers and stuff like that. The website which triggered them was https://open4u.co.uk , which was prominently recommended by Google due to its positioning in the sea…
The user agent gets to choose how the permission requests are shown - that's not part of the spec. For example, they can choose to ignore permission requests until the user has interacted with the site for a significant amount of time. They can make the permission prompt more explicit and "scary". They can choose to only allow notifications after the site has been added to the home screen.
This is not a question of safety at all - Apple has control over how many people get tricked via their control over the permission prompt.
Re: ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'
#185From the article : Apple responded, saying that free companion apps to paid online services are no longer required to have in-app purchases as of September 11, 2020. As long as paid upgrades are not offered through the app and it has no notifications to customers about an external subscription service, everything is fine. So....
From the article, emphasis mine:
> Out of the blue, one day they said you have to add in-app purchase to stay in the App Store. They stumbled upon something in the app that mentioned there were paid plans, they went to the website and saw there was a subscription you could purchase, and then turned around and demanded we add IAP.
It's apparently not just "no notifications". Below is the actual Apple guidelines. Notice that it is not "notifications", but "call to action". In practice, it may be "slightest hint".
> Free apps acting as a stand-alone companion to a paid web based tool (eg. VOIP, Cloud Storage, Email Services, Web Hosting) do not need to use in-app purchase, provided there is no purchasing inside the app, or calls to action for purchase outside of the app
Re: ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'
#186Another thread where people will fly to defend Apple and explain how it's circumstances are similar to PS and Xbox and no one is coming after Sony, yet everyone conveniently decides not to compare Apple to early 2000s Microsoft which is basically a mirror situation. I guess people "expect" stuff like this from Apple which is the reason we are not allowed to criticize them, yet if Microsoft came out and said Steam bre…
I don't need XBOX or PS5 to defend Apple. I will defend the rights of any non-monopoly (Apple doesn't have a monopoly on the phone market) that created their own hardware, software platform and digital market from scratch, to define their own rules governing said digital market whatsoever.
However, do not confuse defending Apple's right to impose their rules with "liking" or "approving" what they do. Just because I believe Apple is in full rights to do all of this I do not like it so as I consumer I vote with my wallet, which is my right to do so just as is their right to impose rules on their platform.
A lot of the people riling up against Apple seem to want to have the cake and eat it too. They want partake in the value of the Apple digital platform (both as consumers and developers) but then they want to force Apple to play by their own rules, not Apple's rules. That doesn't seem right to me plus it's just contradictory as it's very likely that Apple being able to enforce their own rules is what created the value of their platform anyway.
Re: ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'
#187Apple is nothing else but the digital equivalent of a landlord extracting economic rents from everyone in the ecosystem. It's time to put an end to it, and while we're at it the same goes for all the other platform owners. We (in this case the EU) should give it the same treatment we gave credit card companies. Cap their rates at 1% or whatever so they can cover the operational costs of their stores, stop them from b…
When you will build your own piece of land from scratch then you also get to decide what laws govern it. The iPhone, iOS and the Apple Store exist because someone had the idea, will and spent tons of money building it. They aren't natural resources that Apple acquired and imposed on people so now everyone else has no choice but to pay the Apple tax. So I don't see how that analogy applies here.
What about the products of my labor that I create from scratch? Can I decide what laws govern that too? You know, like taxes?
That idea went out the window a long time ago. Now we are all beholden to each-other and society on some level, so best we deal with it and solve these anti-competative issues and predatory platforms, otherwise let's agree that it's completely immoral and stop cherry-picking "moral rules" based on what we find useful at the time.
Re: ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'
#188I'm actually happier to pay a small premium for IAP based subscriptions because of the cancellation options. Having been subjected to asinine "retention" policies that make ending a subscription service an onerous and time consuming process (ex: NYT), and having seen first hand how a company purposefully makes subscription cancellations difficult, being able to open a single interface and click `Cancel` is a massive…
30% is not an amount I would consider a "small" premium.
The premium is actually higher than that. For $100, the developer gets $70. Which means the premium is $30 on a $70 base price, i.e. a ~42% higher price. That's a very steep price for easier payment cancellation.
Re: ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'
#189Apple is nothing else but the digital equivalent of a landlord extracting economic rents from everyone in the ecosystem. It's time to put an end to it, and while we're at it the same goes for all the other platform owners. We (in this case the EU) should give it the same treatment we gave credit card companies. Cap their rates at 1% or whatever so they can cover the operational costs of their stores, stop them from b…
"stop them from banning apps from their stores that aren't breaking any laws" It's unlikely to happen in the US because one primary weapon of Cancel Culture is going for the financial jugular, by getting people they dislike banned from payment processing platforms, who all hide behind "we are a private entity" BS.
How is it BS for a private company to say they don't want to take money from a group like Stormfront?