351–360 of 958 posts
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Is that actually an issue though, given that Apple has never advertised their hardware as being "free-use"?
It's an issue given that I'd be more interested in using a Mac if I could choose which graphics card I get to use instead of perusing a pre-approved list of B-rate processing units.
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Are you willing to spend 27% more for everything to use Apple payment gateway? Do you love it that much? At the end of the day, services have to provide value. If your customers don't want to pay for your services, they do not value them. That's a dangerous position for any company to try to maintain. The mobile software industry generally has been chaffing at the fees for quite some time now, these are the warning s…
> Are you willing to spend 27% more for everything to use Apple payment gateway? This is the argument Epic's tried to make, and it isn't particularly convincing. The iOS App Store is filled with cheap apps, to the point where many people react to a one-time price of $9.99 as disturbingly expensive. Apps and games that are literally identical on iOS to other platforms are frequently cheaper in their iOS releases becau…
It's not an argument, it's a question. Some people have clearly answered it as yes, yes they would. This shows some distinct value provided to them by Apple. Value that's worth something, though perhaps not 30%.
Apple's next step is to provide a compelling enough offering that developers and consumers alike pick it over the soon-to-be competing offerings. Wouldn't that be awesome if they pull it off?
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Afaik they cannot ignore a ruling. And they don't need 30% fees for maintaining IOS ecosystem - when you buy an apple phone for $1000, you pay Apple enough for it to maintain its AppStore. Also they earn money from AppStore advertising (which apps out of the millions should the small screen show); so maintaining AppStore should not be a problem. I don't know about the bad-actors part though.
> Afaik they cannot ignore a ruling. They can, but it has a high probability of additional adverse consequences.
> “The court cannot ultimately conclude that apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws,” she writes in the ruling. “Nonetheless, the trial did show that apple is engaging in anti-competitive conduct under California’s competition laws.” It's nice to see that you don't have to be a monopolist to be legally barred from anti-competitive behaviour. I hope this puts a permanent stop to all the thr…
I'm sure it won't put a stop to it, I love to read discussions about "Does company X engage in anti-competitive behavior and are they a big enough player that it's a problem". That seems to be a much more useful discussion (i.e. it gets at "do they need to be reigned in by We The People") than "are they a monopoly" which is just bickering over what words mean (with some shades of "if they _were_ a monopoly, then We T…
Even if they aren't a monopoly, they shouldn't be allowed to engage in anti-competitive behavior.
Reading this, I cannot help but imagine someone at Apple thinking to themselves "I wish we had granted Epic an exemption like we did with Netflix". The court proceedings and the documents that they were required to disclose were surely bad for PR and now it looks like they won't even keep the monetary benefits.
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In my opinion we don't need to change the definition of monopoly, we need to integrate "conflict of interest" more into anti-competitive practice discourse. Apple, Google, etc. are having their cake and eating it, too. They have platform which they charge others to use (ok), and then they study usage data (somewhat shady) and then launch direct competitors ( > shady). That's the root of the problem in many cases. Of…
Most of the apps that Apple sells are already in highly competitive markets like music, video streaming, cloud storage, etc. I really don’t feel bad if some developer selling a leveler app for 99¢ goes out of business because Apple pre-installs a free leveling app on the iPhone.
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You would really pay a 30% premium on all your digital purchases just to be warned about a subscription expiring next year? You might be an edge case.
A fair amount of companies makes their subscription cancellation actively hostile in an effort to not get people to do it. To give an example, though you can subscribe online, the NYT requires you to call during only certain hours to a customer service line where you get badgered and questioned like you’re trying to cancel a cable subscription. If the US mandated that you need to provide equivalent means of subscript…
Even if a developer makes subscriptions easy to manage today, without tie-in to Apple's infrastructure, they could change that process on a whim.
To be clear, I'm on the side of Epic here, but in rulings like this where it has been judged that someone did some wrong (just focusing on Epic breaking their contract) and the punishment is getting them to pay exactly as much as had they done the "right" thing, the expected value is always going to favour doing the "wrong" thing, as sometimes you won't get caught. Any fines or decisions like this should include the…
Very good point. I believe that the judge just gave a slap on the wrist to Epic Games with that fine (that's why it was equal to just the "back-pay") for breaking a contract (which is wrong, legally speaking.) I believe the judge did this (just a slap) because Epic was right and Apple was anti-competitive. I could be wrong though. I have very little knowledge of anti-competitive laws.
Think Apple has already seen the writing on the wall - both S. Korea & the US are now probably going to push back against the IAP restrictions, and they can / should do a couple of things, which might actually increase revenue. 1. Cut down the IAP commission to 15% for everyone. 2. Cut down the commission to 5% for those who pay for a Business Account, say at $5,000 a year. The thing is no customer wants to use any c…
> The thing is no customer wants to use any company's half-assed bug-riddled purchase or subscription system. Every iOS and macOS user will prefer to use the Apple system. The first sentence is true but incomplete, making the second wrong. For example, the Amazon app is highly likely to have people using their existing Amazon payment method. Companies like Stripe are going to offer their own SDKs just like they do fo…