EU says Apple’s App Store breaks competition rules after Spotify complaint

> I contributed to some of the jailbreak app stores

You didn't build or work on an app store. You played with one. Much easier to modify something that already exists than to create something where there once was nothing.

> just look at AWS prices to see how much it costs to store and transfer a file on S3

Look, if it's so cheap and easy to do, why is everyone so hell bent on getting onto Apple's? They should just do it themselves!

The answer is that it's not that simple.

> Please re-read my comment, especially the part about sandboxing and 3rd-party app stores

I reread it. You did not say anything about sandboxing _3rd-party app stores_. Thanks for wasting my time with that! You said "apps are pretty well sandboxed" and we've seen how well that's done to protect users' privacy. App Tracking and Transparency was created for a reason.

You really need to cool it with the condescension ("Haha what are you talking about?", "I actually laughed out loud when I read your comment"); it adds nothing to your arguments, except the veneer of juvenility.

Why would you need to sign your own apps?

I agree that it's like a tax. The fact that, like taxes, there's no way to get around it is IMO the damaging part. You have to use their payment infrastructure: rolling out your own or using a competing one is out of the question.

> You really need to cool it with the condescension

> But I doubt you even know the costs to run the service so my opinion is that you are speaking from a place of ignorance.

> You didn't build or work on an app store. You played with one. Much easier to modify something that already exists than to create something where there once was nothing.

That's some impressive cognitive dissonance ya got there, you might want to try looking in a mirror. You have no idea how much involvement I had. Please stop arguing from a place of complete and total ignorance.

> Look, if it's so cheap and easy to do, why is everyone so hell bent on getting onto Apple's? They should just do it themselves!

Surely you can't be serious... this is literally the topic at hand. Apple won't let anyone do it themselves. That is why they don't do it themselves. People absolutely would do it themselves if Apple wasn't behaving anti-competitively. I'm glad you agree that Apple should open up iOS to 3rd-party app stores so that they can live or die on their own merits, rather than being prevented from existing in the first place, based on dubious claims of protecting users. Though again, it is worth noting that people (yours truly included) actually have done it themselves, through jailbreaking. And that many jailbreak apps have done quite well financially, handling the distribution themselves. This is success in spite of Apple, as requiring users to jailbreak before they use your App Store is in fact a pretty high bar and does in fact make your system less secure.

> You did not say anything about sandboxing _3rd-party app stores_... App Tracking and Transparency was created for a reason.

Um, yes. That is exactly my point – the apps themselves are sandboxed and permissioned, at an OS level, so Apple's oversight (in the App Store) is a lot less useful than it once was (whether it ever was particularly valuable is not a given). If an app wants access to your location, the user has to explicitly allow it to have that permission. It doesn't matter what App Store the app is being distributed on, that sandboxing is there regardless.

Also, isn't it a bit strange that Apple added such a feature in the first place? You'd think, since they were already gatekeeping apps that can be installed on your device, there would be no need, because Apple would catch apps that asked for permissions they didn't need, hmmm... just kidding, obviously this is because different users have different needs and Apple can't prescribe the same thing for everyone. Which is exactly why Apple should open up iOS to other app stores, and in order to keep iOS users secure they should focus on more things like App Tracking and Transparency, not on monopolizing app stores.

> Notably, text editors from 30 years ago still work fantastically. Email clients from 30 years ago still mostly work great (unless using certain popular anti-consumer cloud email providers).

What text editors and mail clients are you using regularly that (a) you paid for and (b) have not been regularly updated for 30 years and (c) still work on modern systems with modern file types and file systems?

To be direct, I highly suspect that any 30 year old applications you're referencing receive regular updates, are tragically underfunded, and the developers would ultimately benefit from upgrade or subscription pricing.

Of course, everyone loves a free lunch, but someone had to pay for the sandwiches.