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Apple blocks game streaming services unless individual games are approved

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Re: Apple blocks game streaming services unless individual games are approved

#321

Post by account42 »

millstone wrote: post #281
whatshisface wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> many successful games come to iOS because it is a controlled environment, with negligible piracy. How does that make sense when all of those games were originally developed for the PC platform, which has rampant piracy, even above that of Android?

Every PC game developer sweats piracy. Windows is targeted first (or only) because it is the vastly dominant gaming platform. But the piracy aspect is real, and important, and it hurts Windows gaming. If you are developing a Nintendo Switch game, you can focus on building a better game, instead of anti-piracy techniques, or futzing with hardware incompatibilities. That's iOS too.

> instead of anti-piracy techniques

Or you could simply focus on the legit PC market instead of worrying about people who will likely never be your customers.

Re: Apple blocks game streaming services unless individual games are approved

#322

Post by soulofmischief »

xnyan wrote: post #310
soulofmischief wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, the individual, cannot decide what content is allowed on my own Apple device which costs more than half a thousand dollars. Yet the collective can decide at my expense: Netflix gets a free pass via the argument that Netflix's movies are somehow more important than the content I wish to experience. It's great to see collective bargaining in action, for sure. I don't blame the people, and I don't blame Netflix. I bl…

I think you’re kind of conflating what I believe is the ideal versus what I perceive to be reality. We are one of billions of people. The fundamental nature of existence is that our sum ability to affect the world around is generally quite small in comparison to the sum of the consequences of others as a whole. More people use Netflix, ergo Netflix has more leverage in negotiations with Apple. I don’t think that’s a…

The controversy is that this is an artificial phenomenon brought upon by Apple's blatant disregard of inalienable digital rights by refusing to allow a user to do as they please with their mobile personal computing platform.

There should be no leverage, and the fact that Netflix uses this privilege without taking a stand for others left behind is also controversial.

Re: Apple blocks game streaming services unless individual games are approved

#323

Post by kelnos »

millstone wrote: post #286
echelon wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your educated choice here, together with the uninformed choices of millions of Americans, support an economic system that disenfranchises device owners, software engineers, and small businesses. It's okay, have your iDevice. But that choice supports a company that makes the world less equitable for others. To deny that is to deny economics and the power of monopoly. We need to educate our lawmakers about this situati…

Well I strongly disagree with all of that. You're talking about "uninformed choices of Americans" that are "unequipped to understand," but I was there in 2007 when the iPhone was introduced, and there's a reason that EVERY phone is essentially an iPhone and not a Blackberry. This did not "disenfranchise" anyone, it radically empowered us all (in the same way that google.com did).

I don't think you're using "disenfranchise" in the same way the parent is. You're being denied the ability to truly own your hardware and run whatever you want on it. You're being hurt in ways you don't even know because by definition you can't, as you don't know what you're missing.

You're ok with this now, and may never change your opinion on that, but you are being harmed by this in the long run, as is the entire market for these sorts of devices. An entire generation is being brought up on devices that they're not allowed to tinker with -- and don't know that anything different is even possible -- and that will have negative long-term ramifications, though we may not be sure exactly what those are yet.

Re: Apple blocks game streaming services unless individual games are approved

#324

Post by aabbcc1241 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #113

Just more evidence that large platform and device owners will try to gate-keep and landgrab as much as they can and try to destroy the open web and force competitors into financial agreements to collect economic rent. There finally needs to be regulation on this. No banning of end user services as long as they're legal, I don't want a phone maker controlling what I do on the internet. It's ridiculous. Microsoft in th…

Yet some people still choose to use iPhone (as if it's their most reasonable choice)

Re: Apple blocks game streaming services unless individual games are approved

#325

Post by kelnos »

enos_feedler wrote: post #248
jtbayly wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True PWA's, for example, including push notifications.

This is false. Google has the ability to create true PWAs on chromebooks with ChromeOS. Why did they include the play store + app model instead of embracing a true PWA experience? Google has enough influence that if they could build a showcase PWA experience on the chromeOS/chromebook platform, they could get web ecosystem adoption. They were able to do this with AMP for instance.

> Why did they include the play store + app model instead of embracing a true PWA experience?

I can think of a few possible reasons:

1. Chrome (as in the browser) came out after the first iPhone was released (2007), and around the same time of Android's first release (2008). Chrome OS didn't come out until 2011. Android's app ecosystem started developing before Google had all that much influence on web standards, and likely before they realized that it would be a good idea to have that influence, or even knew that Chrome (the browser) would become as popular as it ended up being. I'll also note that Chrome OS wasn't anywhere near as successful as Google hoped it would be; while that doesn't invalidate Chrome OS's app model, it doesn't validate it either.

2. Android has done a decent amount of copying of iOS features (I say this without judgment or malice; I've been a generally happy Android user continuously since 2010 and have no axe to grind). Not having native app development on Android could have been seen as a possible market disadvantage when compared against Apple.

3. Google may have actually desired more Apple-like control over what runs on Android, or at least wanted to allow for the possibility that they'd want it in the future. That's harder when you base your app platform on web standards.

Re: Apple blocks game streaming services unless individual games are approved

#326

Post by kelnos »

otterley wrote: post #308
hu3 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebM is widespread, royalty free media format that's hardware accelerated with zero cost license. The reason non-WebM stream services might work on Safari is because said service engineers implemented alternatives to it.

Right. My point is, the WebM solution was not needed to fulfill customer demand (just like Flash turned out not to be needed either). Customer demand isn't "give me WebM" - it's "give me high quality video in my mobile browser that doesn't kill my battery." There is wisdom sometimes in saying "no."

I think you're ignoring other aspects of that kind of decision-making. Yes, the feature here is "power efficient, high quality mobile video streaming", but consider that content producers have to encode, store, and serve multiple different formats (plus more licensing fees for the encoders) in order to serve all their users. That's incredibly wasteful and causes people all sorts of headaches on the backend. Both Apple's stuff and WebM do indeed satisfy the user-facing feature requirements, but Apple could have just used WebM and saved content producers a lot of time and money (which often -- but admittedly not always -- translates into saving end-customers money as well).

There's of course a balance to be maintained; if we single-source our streaming video codecs, that will dampen innovation in that space. But I'd hope there's a less wasteful middle ground than the place we're at now.

Re: Apple blocks game streaming services unless individual games are approved

#327

Post by burnte »

dpkonofa wrote: post #46
burnte wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then it should also ban other browsers, movie streaming apps, music streaming apps, ebook readers, etc. Be consistent.

It is consistent. There are fundamental differences between the apps you've mentioned and these game-streaming apps that clearly delineate why those are approved and why these are not.

I disagree there are fundamental differences. The reason Apple is blocking game streaming apps is because games could contain content that violates the standards of the app store.

An easy violation is nudity, there is an app for Playboy, but there is zero nudity in it. However, I can get the full, uncensored Playboy magazine in the Nook app. I can watch movies with nudity in Netflix or Amazon Video. I can even buy or rent movies FROM APPLE with nudity in the iTunes store, like Eyes Wide Shut, Walk Hard, Boogie Nights (which is about porn!), and Barbarella, all right from my iPad or iPhone.

So why can I see nudity if I buy it directly from Apple in a movie, but not an app?

I can download the Twitch app and watch streams of video games, but I can't download an app to let me PLAY the very same games?

There is no difference, it is simply Apple capriciousness.

Re: Apple blocks game streaming services unless individual games are approved

#328

Post by pmontra »

immigrantsheep wrote: post #312
pmontra wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook or WeChat, Apple can't ban them. Game streaming, they can. Maybe they'll change the rule in 1, 2 or 5 years if game streaming becomes so big to move enough of their customers to Android. Then they'll claim they're introducing an incredible thing. Remember copy and paste on the iPhone 3 GS? https://www.idownloadblog.com/2009/07/17/iphone-3gs-stupid-t...

The can ban them. They don't want to. They could just as easy say "we'll remove the Facebook app until you remove the gaming part". Same for WeChat.

Of course Apple doesn't want to. Both them and Apple know that without WeChat Apple won't sell any iPhone in China and without Facebook no iPhone in the western world.

Re: Apple blocks game streaming services unless individual games are approved

#329

Post by otterley »

kelnos wrote: post #326
otterley wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. My point is, the WebM solution was not needed to fulfill customer demand (just like Flash turned out not to be needed either). Customer demand isn't "give me WebM" - it's "give me high quality video in my mobile browser that doesn't kill my battery." There is wisdom sometimes in saying "no."

I think you're ignoring other aspects of that kind of decision-making. Yes, the feature here is "power efficient, high quality mobile video streaming", but consider that content producers have to encode, store, and serve multiple different formats (plus more licensing fees for the encoders) in order to serve all their users. That's incredibly wasteful and causes people all sorts of headaches on the backend. Both Appl…

HLS and H.264 are by far the most popular streaming technologies according to a 2019 survey. If anything, I’d say Apple made the smart bet, and that WebM is the real distraction for content delivery providers.

Technology license cost is not the only consideration that goes into business decisions. Consider the whole end to end process of making, distributing and consuming video, and all the parties and technology providers involved, not to mention installed bases, cost of switching, etc.

Re: Apple blocks game streaming services unless individual games are approved

#330

Post by kd913 »

Dahoon wrote: post #316
kd913 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make no sense. It's less secure and likely more privacy problems trusting a service with Blokada compared with my own pihole. My own pihole is accessible wherever I want, I know who has the logs for the DNS requests performed by my pihole which is done over DNS over HTTPS. The DNS requests are made securely through wireguard and just those requests. There is no extra hop?

There's no extra hop? Do you carry the pihole around with you? Do you have a firewall running on your phone to block or redirect DNS requests? Since hardcoding and bypassing the one in network settings is extremely easy and done by default by even some Google apps. DNS leaking VPN is trivial. What logs are you talking about? Blokada can use the same upstream DNS as your pihole so the logs are exactly the same if any…

>Do you carry the pihole around with you?

No I leave my pihole at home?

>Do you have a firewall running on your phone to block or redirect DNS requests? Since hardcoding and bypassing the one in network settings is extremely easy and done by default by even some Google apps. DNS leaking VPN is trivial.

I assume wireguard's DNS field sets/redirects all DNS traffic through the VPN. If it ignores that setting, then Android's VPN design itself is broken. Switching to blokada won't fix this problem either.

Either way, Android's Firewall/Network aspects don't give me enough control here. But I can see enough hits on my pihole to have some reasonable confidence.

>What logs are you talking about? Blokada can use the same upstream DNS as your pihole so the logs are exactly the same if any exists.

I don't have to trust the owners of blokada aren't keeping logs? Why would I need to trust them when I can use my pihole which I know doesn't keep logs?

You are offering no advantages here compared to using my setup.

>Without a firewall and a VPN (both on the phone) you are not secure.

Well there is no competent firewall on the phone without root. Yes there is a VPN on both and it seems to work.

>With a VPN and a custom DNS service with blocklists you have an identical setup as one who uses Blokada, but without an external service.

Yes, I have an identical setup that I run myself without trusting some random owner of blokada. It runs externally just fine using my home network.

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