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Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

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Re: Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

#621

Post by bawolff »

deergomoo wrote: post #56

> Cook used more privacy and safety claims to defend that system, saying it would be both insecure and inconvenient to let apps process payments separately This one is always funny to me, because sellers of physical goods are of course totally exempt from IAP rules, because it would be untenable otherwise. I can type my card number directly into the Amazon app and buy a paperback without any intervention from Apple.…

Given how easy it is to trick users, i feel like that's a decent trade-off. Its untennable for amazon maybe, but every sketchy app in the world processing credit cards as a normal thing would lead to a lot of phising.

Re: Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

#622

Post by Karunamon »

azinman2 wrote: post #524
frosted-flakes wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple could still limit the APIs that are available to developers.

But if there’s no Apple App Store, you not only can’t prevent private APIs from being used (or abused), but you certainly can’t prevent cross—app tracking and a whole host of other issues.

Well.. you could still limit certain APIs to official "app store" signatures, and in fact I guarantee that Apple will take this tactic and it will take further legal wrangling to deal with the overstepping they will no doubt do.

And on a more base level, Apple has overplayed their hand for far too long for me to be very sympathetic to their arguments. The app store is still loaded with scams, they still deny things for arbitrary and inconsistent reasons with little-to-no explanation, and they've had years to clean this up. It's not 2007 anymore.

Apple isn't acting in good faith. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.

Re: Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

#623

Post by eigen »

idle_zealot wrote: post #307
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter to your point, pretend Apple is the FDA and the drugs are apps. Now pretend the government wants to get rid of Apple/FDA.

Right. And to add to the scenario: in this world the FDA is a for-profit corporation that owns the only drug store and uses its regulatory power to prevent any others from existing.

does the FDA not get a fee to review and approve drugs? is it not the exclusive arbiter of approved drugs in the US?

ignoring the for-profit corp vs govt regulatory body statutory difference, there isn't much different in operation.

Re: Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

#624

Post by bawolff »

gbrown wrote: post #582
grey_earthling wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're paying for access to their userbase.

... which is monopolistic rent-seeking, the like of which would have been shut down (and was) in the 90’s

Would it? Its not like iphone's are the only game in town.

Re: Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

#625

Post by ajkjk »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #613

The only aspect of the Apple App Store that strikes me as truly anticompetitive is their prohibition on adjusting prices to include Apple’s fees, or even to tell the user what they are. I can accept that Apple can demand a 30% fee for billing customers on their devices. And I can accept that they would prohibit installation/sales of software any other way. But I should be allowed to mark up the price by 30% and then…

Dystopian is the word for it. It's fucking insane that you can't talk about why it's priced that way.

Of course, if you include the fee explicitly then people will think to look elsewhere and realize they can avoid it. But that's fine, taking a cut is stupid anyway. Really just seems like the app should be paying more to Apple (like a physical store paying rent on real estate) up front and getting the full price of their purchases anyway.

Re: Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

#626

Post by bawolff »

Zak wrote: post #578
crazygringo wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing weird about it. If there were no food regulations, I don't know if I'd be able to pick restaurants and grocery store brands that were safe to eat. But I definitely know I want safe food to eat. Most people want safe food but they want the government to figure out what that means. Same thing here -- most people just want a safe app store. They don't want the work of having to figure out which app store…

There's an important distinction here in that Apple is a for-profit company, not a government. It responds to market forces, not democratic ones. Its motivation is profit and shareholder value, not some semblance of fairness or a good society. > most people just want a safe app store We already have an example of how users behave when there's a platform that has a default app store and the ability to install others:…

> Its motivation is profit and shareholder value, not some semblance of fairness or a good society.

It derrives profit from iphones being relatively secure, which in practise means making it difficult for average users to install stupid things like malware.

Just because corporate overlords have a profit motive, doesn't mean it can't overlap with more alturustic motives. Being an evil villian typically pays well in the short term but not the long term (plenty of exceptions)

Re: Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

#627

Post by stale2002 »

crazygringo wrote: post #366
remolacha wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there were two, or ten, food safety inspection groups, we could figure out which ones had trustworthy ratings. No need for end consumers to inspect every restaurant (every app) individually. That's what Epic is asking for - to have its own app store on iOS.

Which is exactly what everyone wants to avoid. Imagine if there were 10 inspection groups, but sometimes they get bought by corrupt investors who let standards slide while pocketing the extra profit, and consumers constantly have to stay on top of which food inspection groups are the current OK ones and which aren't, and restaurants can't afford to get inspected by all 10 so they only do 2 but then people who only tr…

> Which is exactly what everyone wants to avoid.

Then don't use those other apps stores.

I think that people who care about all this stuff, can very easily just continue to use the Apple app store.

Re: Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

#628

Post by bawolff »

testific8 wrote: post #612
stjohnswarts wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that the US government is also a for-profit government, don't give up your rights so quickly to them. At least with Apple you know what they want: money. With government it could be money, a power play, government official looking to get on the map (ambition), a policy lobbied for by a bought off politician, etc

You can argue that all you like, but it is a ridiculous point. It's not perfect, but most of the time democracy works. This much is self evident. If you are comparing the difference between having a company in charge of public health and a democratic government, you might as well compare the difference between a dictatorship and a democracy. Customers are not stakeholders in the same way that citizens are stakeholder…

> When the public is angry at the government, heads will roll. When the public is angry at corporations, heads will glide down in golden parachutes.

That's hardly true. People are rarely angry enough for heads to roll, and almost never that angry at corporations. But if they are that angry, heads have certainly rolled at corporations. Most of the time, nothing happens when people are angry at govs, and if they are angry enough for heads to roll, its more likely to be the people's heads than the government's.

Re: Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

#629

Post by nwallin »

I will not buy any device that does not give me control of the device. If I can't sideload apps, can't install a 3rd party store, do not have the ability to root my own device, I won't buy it. Apple has decided that's not allowed, fine, I won't buy their product. That's between Apple and their customers.

But it is certifiably insane that Apple thinks they have the right to dictate to Epic what Epic charges for its apps on their store. If Epic thinks Fortnite is worth $30, and Epic charges Android users $30 for the binary to sideload onto their Android devices, and because Apple charges a 30% surcharge, Epic sells the same app on iOS for $42.86, and Apple says, "no, you're not allowed to do that, you have to charge $30 just like you do on Android" -- no. Absolutely not. Apple does not have the moral/ethical right to do that.

Re: Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

#630

Post by abecedarius »

paulmd wrote: post #554
abecedarius wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument presumes apps get capabilities by default. OSes have been invented where apps get nothing implicitly (the object-capability model); it's a design problem to install mass-market apps with usable security in that paradigm, and it might be a difficult one. But there's been a little work on it and it's worth pursuing.

If there is no app-store review process then all apps will demand full permissions, which means apps effectively get everything by default. If it's a choice between permissions and not using the app then users will give them the permissions, and that is the choice app developers will give users, if they are sufficiently large to get away with it (Facebook, Fortnite, etc).

See my other replies. Standard bundles of caps by app type; limited/fake caps in place of system cap; yes it's a problem that needs work to demonstrate success at scale; ultimately it's up to the user who owns the device -- we can only design to support their judgement, not replace it. Replacing individual judgement with one central emperor of all phone software leaves everyone vulnerable to the emperor, as the recent and unsurprising news about iCloud in China should highlight.

It's not that I expect Apple to jump right on redesigning their OS. It's the claim that usable security is incompatible with universal computation, requiring a locked-down app store, that I'm objecting to. We have promising ideas about how to do better. We have actual experience of a handful of mass-market OSes, none using those ideas. If we had a lot of diverse experience of mass-market OSes and none of them worked, that would be a powerful argument from experience. But I think in our reality it's just status-quo bias.

(Fuchsia apparently is capability-based.)

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