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Japanese game publisher Digital Will has filed a lawsuit against Apple

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Re: Japanese game publisher Digital Will has filed a lawsuit against Apple

#151

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What you call a "walled garden" someone else would call an openly opinionated, thoughtfully designed, and well managed platform with seamless integration and world-class support. Again, if that's not your thing you're perfectly free to spend your money elsewhere.

> Again, if that's not your thing you're perfectly free to spend your money elsewhere. You are in fact not, it's the whole problem. There's two actors colluding in the market, Apple & Google with very similar practices and rules ... and that's it.

Do you have citations to back up your claim of collusion?

Re: Japanese game publisher Digital Will has filed a lawsuit against Apple

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existence of F-Droid demonstrates the existence both of devs willing to list apps in restrictive "stores" and of users who seek such software. Even assuming commercialized stores, that proposed race to the bottom dynamic doesn't hold up - Walmart is not the only retailer. People are happy to pay for quality and curation.

I use F-Droid (mostly just for Termux) on Android. It's an entirely different thing than GP was proposing. It's a host for FOSS apps that don't expect to be paid for the delivery of their software. Its existence essentially zero effect on the existence of freemium/SaaS apps the play store, which is kind of evidence for my point.

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Re: Japanese game publisher Digital Will has filed a lawsuit against Apple

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really good lawyers still can’t defend textbook cases. In many cases they can, because while the violation is textbook, they find some unrelated technicality to have the case dismissed. The plaintiff is in the wrong jurisdiction, or filed too late, or too early, or agreed to a binding arbitration clause etc. etc. And when they run out of all of that, they open their wallet and pay the plaintiffs to settle so the pr…

So it’s not a textbook case after all?

If you're making the excessively literal claim that they don't put cases dismissed on procedural grounds in the textbook, actually sometimes they do, because the procedural issue gets appealed and the appellate court writes a significant opinion about it.

But that still doesn't affect whether the substantive issue is a textbook case. You could have the facts of the case exactly match an existing Supreme Court precedent, but that doesn't help the plaintiff if the statute of limitations has run.

Re: Japanese game publisher Digital Will has filed a lawsuit against Apple

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason the app store is full of freemium apps stuffed with ads and microtransactions is because that's overwhelmingly the thing that consumers choose But that's the problem with a generalist store. They're leaving too much money on the table to exclude those things, so they include them, and then the store is full of crap and you can't trust anything. If anyone could start a store then you could have a store op…

I feel like you're missing the point that the existence of such a niche store would have no effect on the "money left on the table" of the main app store. To affect the main store, they would have to a) Put their app on the niche store and not on the main store (which would lose them money; fewer people will go to a niche store and buy a paid app than a freemium app. Therefore, developer have no incentive to do this)…

> Put their app on the niche store and not on the main store (which would lose them money; fewer people will go to a niche store and buy a paid app than a freemium app. Therefore, developer have no incentive to do this)

You're assuming that all customers want the same thing.

Right now if you want to make a paid non-freemium game, no one can find it because the freemium games will have more downloads and the main store sorts by popularity. The customers who want such games hate this too, but because the main store has no competitors, they're just as stuck with it. And since customers can't find them, developers don't make them.

If you had a store that has only non-freemium games, the developer who makes one can go there and actually reach their customers, because being at the top of the list on a store with 1% of the market generates more sales than being on page 5000 of the main store's search results where even fewer people will see it. And then more of those games actually get made, which grows the market for the alternate store, which allows more of those games to get made.

Meanwhile that store doesn't take a huge chunk out of the main store's market, but it takes a percent or three. Many other niche stores each take a little share. And then a big store that competes directly with the main store but only charges 3% instead of 30% takes the rest.

Re: Japanese game publisher Digital Will has filed a lawsuit against Apple

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Again, if that's not your thing you're perfectly free to spend your money elsewhere. You are in fact not, it's the whole problem. There's two actors colluding in the market, Apple & Google with very similar practices and rules ... and that's it.

Do you have citations to back up your claim of collusion?

The fact that the only change of pricing ever done was due to an anti trust lawsuit and copied straight over to start with? It's basically admission of guilt.

Re: Japanese game publisher Digital Will has filed a lawsuit against Apple

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ We don't know all the facts yet, but there's one surefire way to get terminated: > If you attempt to cheat the system (for example, by trying to trick the review process, steal user data, copy another developer’s work, manipulate ratings or App Store discovery) your apps will be removed from the store and you will be expelled from the Apple Developer Program.

Considering they engaged legal representation and it sounds like Apple rather than fight it restored their account. So we can probably safely assume it wasn't a glaringly obvious or serious breach of the terms that Apple felt it could defend. I don't imagine Apple would make cost benefit decisions about who can break their terms of service with nothing more than a letter with a legal letterhead. That being said we wi…

I bet what happened is that one of Apples internal qualia changed and caused them to flag this developer, and no human being with any ability to fix things ever actually took a look at what happened until the lawsuit was filed and Apple was at risk of actually losing money because of it.

I hope they get a multiplier on their damages. $725,000 for 4 months of downtime for 7 people doesn't seem like enough.

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