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Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

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Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#121

Post by interpol_p »

ecedeno wrote: post #20
thefounder wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I mean Drafts has the ability to download actions (not sure if that is the right term) which are JS that run inside the app. I think this is fine and doesn't skirt any rules, I'm not familiar with that particular app but if that happens it's not fine and it seems to get a pass from Apple. The apps are not allowed to download executable code. You have to bundle it all in the app.

That's not exclusive to that app. Being able to update the app without going through the App Store was one of the big selling points of React Native a few years back. Apps are not allowed to download native code, however.

You cannot download and execute native code on iOS, the sandbox prevents it. Memory protection ensures that pages marked as data cannot be executed

There is a special entitlement to allow some Apple apps and frameworks to do this — Apple’s JavaScriptCore can do JIT, which requires executing data pages. Similarly, Swift Playgrounds can compile to native code and execute that code

So, for example, you could ship a C compiler on iOS and it would compile perfectly valid binaries, but you would never be able to execute those binaries natively without code-signing them and deploying them in an Apple sanctioned way, which you cannot do on-device (except with the above mentioned exceptions)

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#122

Post by nathansherburn »

yding wrote: post #6

Here's a stat I heard a few years back: WeChat has over 50% time share in China. Meaning people in China are on WeChat more than all other apps on their phones combined.

That seems high to me. A lot of people seem to spend most of their time on xiaohongshu (like Pinterest?), douyin (tiktok), bilibili (like YouTube) etc. WeChat is good for its utility functions like ordering a Didi, chatting with friends or ordering from a restaurant but for entertainment (where people spend most of their time) it's pretty basic.

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#123

Post by numpad0 »

meowtimemania wrote: post #39

I don't totally understand the concept of having an everything app. Isn't the OS the "everything app"? Do people like the wechat experience because you have one login and don't have to go through an onboarding process in every mini-app?

It's just that if you had more user distraction on your app in a single-app platform, that'll earn your app some long tail of extra attention and bad user decisions and therefore revenue. Kind of like a chat window in e-commerce websites, or imagine on the bottom right of HN were a miniature minesweeper screen. Add enough of those and someone calls yours a superapp.

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#124

Post by numpad0 »

vanjajaja1 wrote: post #81
em-bee wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the concept is that the primary feature that wechat provides is your identity with your wechat account. you connect to other people and you have verified their identity as well. from there it is most logical that you then want to use that identity to share work, make appointments, pay for things, etc. the miniapp that we used the most was a voting tool. you could see who in the group had voted for what and it was ver…

I'm not even anon on twitter, but bonkers to think that people would want to directly connect their finances to things they say in online in public in this day and age

Maybe there is an expectation from superapp users that their interactions are private by default(and they are unless explicitly warned), like it is on a Discord server.

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#125

Post by aio2 »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #113
Georgelemental wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They hit it in the 90s, except it failed hard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...

... That really wasn't what the Tienanmen Square Protests were about, at all. The protest were a massive mixture of different ideologies, but the dominant ones were democratic politics, and communist economics, opposing the trend towards oligarchic/autocratic rule and liberalized economy.

And now look at what they got.

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#126

Post by bitwize »

Back in the 90s when the PlayStation was released, Sony Computer Entertainment America implemented rules about which sorts of games would and would not be approved: specifically, you needed to be developing 3D polygon games. If you were developing a sprite-based game, you were likely unable to get approval to publish it. We missed out on a lot of great Japanese sprite based games this way, simply because they didn't fit into SCEA's marketing strategy based around the idea that sprites are old hat, and the PlayStation is the sexy new console that leaves all that behind in favor of 3D polygons.

Of course, Sony made exceptions to this policy for major publishers and their big-ticket franchises like Capcom with Street Fighter...

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#127

Post by Barrin92 »

eunos wrote: post #114
game_the0ry wrote: post #25

When the west opened trade to China, policy experts assumed China would become more liberal like the west. Instead, the west is becoming more like China. [1, 2, 3] [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrit... [2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/ready-for-your-e... [3] (countless more examples, especially recently...)

> policy experts assumed China would become more liberal like the west. There are many flavors of liberalism and yes 2023 China is more liberal than 1980 China. If you could explain 2023 China to Deng Xiaoping in 1980 he'd think China would be a degenerate state. The fethism with political liberalism above all needs to stop

Yup, Deng literally invaded Vietnam and rolled tanks over dissidents. In Lee Kuan Yew's Biography he recounts talking to Deng shortly after Tiananmen, and Deng by LKY's account just said straight to his face "if I had to kill a hundred thousand students to restore order, I would have done it".

I genuinely have to laugh when people tend to say things like "I wish China was as liberal as it was back under Deng", people have concocted some serious alt-history if they think China today isn't more liberal than it was decades ago

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#128

Post by ack_complete »

kelnos wrote: post #109
pavlov wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story with Adobe on Mac in the 1990s is that their apps were so important to the platform that they practically had a veto on the API for Apple’s next-gen OS. When Apple acquired NeXT, the original plan was for the NeXT API (now called Cocoa) to become the only way to build apps on the new Mac OS. But Adobe made it clear they were not going to port everything to Objective-C. In response Apple came up with Carbon,…

I think Apple was the one who was unreasonable here, not Adobe. I loathe the idea of giving Microsoft credit for anything, but one thing they got right was their focus on backward compatibility. Certainly that has frayed at times here and there, but MS generally doesn't ask their developers to completely rewrite their applications to use a new application framework.

Except for UWP, where they are doing just that. Some OS features, such as multi-layer swap chains, are exclusive to UWP apps.

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#129

Post by paulmd »

worrycue wrote: post #112
deciplex wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Marxism-Leninism did more good for the Soviet Republics in its first 40 years there (beating back an imperialist invasion, rapidly developing industry, beating the Nazis, putting the first man in space, raising the standard of living nearly to par with the West despite being a feudal backwater in 1917, etc) than capitalism has done for those countries since we finally beat them thirty years ago. And, public opi…

I wonder how much of the USSR’s success (until it wasn't) can be attributed to Marxism-Leninism rather than the fact that the country produced oil. It’s like attributing the success of Saudi Arabia to its theocratical monarchy. Oil is basically a cheat code for countries. If you have oil, you will do OK regardless of political/economical system. Even then, the quality of life in the USSR was pretty poor compared to t…

That’s actually completely not true at all and resource-rich countries actually tend to underperform (by getting trapped in an economy that only does one thing and when that resource disappears it’s gone).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

You can even see shades of this now with Russia… what is going to happen when the gas runs out, or if western countries block international trade of their gas (as they attempted to do recently)? Nothing good.

Re: Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

#130

Post by paulmd »

adra wrote: post #52
goodbyesf wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many people (both poor and rich) are leaving china, places with sharia law, and moving to the west. The countries with the highest per capita immigration are in the middle east, not in 'the west'. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-immigration-by-co... Do you think they are moving to the middle east because of their love of sharia law? Or do you think they are moving they for economic opportunities? People…

Their definition includes "Foreign workers", aka kafala. These people live in the country to work and accrue money for their families back home while they live in compounds and rarely directly interact with the host population. The host countries are largely empty husks which have very unproductive labour. They offset the productivity gap with oil revenues to bring in cheap labour keeping their quality of life higher…

Well, if you are self-selecting your comparison to wealthy immigrants looking for economic freedom to enjoy their wealth you are obviously going to get a very particular outcome as to the countries they choose. The "cuban ex-pat" scenario, so to speak.

Working class immigration is still immigration in general.

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