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Judge rules Apple executive lied under oath, makes criminal contempt referral

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Re: Judge rules Apple executive lied under oath, makes criminal contempt referral

#151

Post by trinsic2 »

nostromo wrote: post #40
Workaccount2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't blame them, Americans on the whole fall over themselves to defend Apple. Apple is the magic entity that figured out how to send full videos and pictures in text messages. Something a google android could never figure out. Apple phones didn't come bloated with garbage. You go to the apple store for help rather than the verizon store. You are above others when you have an iPhone. Apple's external veneer is s…

I want Apple to protect me from app developers. For me, it’s a feature not a bug. I want them to prevent social media companies from tracking my device across my other apps. I want them to integrate billing so I can easily cancel subscriptions or get refunds. I want them to require Oauth that allows me to keep my email private from app developers. These features make my customer experience better not worse. I’m sorry…

And they also tie you into systems you don't control. That power can be wielded against you when you least expect it. When you trade security for freedom, you deserve neither.

Re: Judge rules Apple executive lied under oath, makes criminal contempt referral

#152

Post by scruple »

bee_rider wrote: post #117
jofla_net wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally believable. My grandmother lived though the great depression, wherein she was lucky to get an Orange at christmas. The last few decades of her life she basically was a food hoarder, pantries overflowing with canned goods, and a freezer where you never saw the back.

When I was a kid I did odd jobs, and one of the odd jobs was cleaning out a semi-hoarder’s house after he’d passed away (iirc he’d lived through the Great Depression). Not like you see on TV, with the heaps and heaps of garbage. Maybe like your grandmother, tons of… basically well organized supplies and stuff. I dunno. Toilet paper, some canned goods, lighters, I guess that stuff all lasts decades if stored properly.…

Rats nests of USB cables and power cords, etc., probably.

Re: Judge rules Apple executive lied under oath, makes criminal contempt referral

#153

Post by wtallis »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #139
wtallis wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every attempt at providing the general public with an "informed consent" escape hatch to security or privacy features ends degrading to either consent fatigue or "misinformed consent" dark patterns.

What do you suggest, then? As users, does rent-seeking paternalism really serve us better in the long run?

The rent-seeking is fundamentally a separate issue from the paternalism. Lots of the anti-Apple lobbying and PR is drawing attention to the 30% fees, but for many of those companies, they care much more about winning the freedom to spy on their users or engage in other predatory or abusive business practices.

But aside from that, you cannot simply point people at the approach that led to Windows UAC and GDPR cookie consent banners and consider the problem adequately solved.

Re: Judge rules Apple executive lied under oath, makes criminal contempt referral

#154

Post by joe_the_user »

joezydeco wrote: post #93
pjmlp wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple always has been like that, see The Cult of Mac book. However, it appears being at the edge of bankruptcy, and having turned the ship around has made them paranoid of losing a single cent. When Apple Store came out it was great. I was a Nokia employee at the time, and 30% was a dream compared with what you would have to pay to phone operators, app listenings in magazines with SMS download codes, for Blackberry,…

"In 2013 i met a very close friend of Steve Jobs and i remember saying "there's one thing i absolutely have to know, it's really important to me" he responds "okay what is it?" I ask "what was all the money for?!" puzzled "what do you mean?" "Steve Jobs saved up like 200 billion dollars in cash at Apple, but what was it all for? what was the plan? was he going to buy AT&T? was he going to build his own telecom or mak…

The only way that differs "any corp" is that in most publicly corporations, you want to return that money to your shareholders - and they sit on it for the same reason. IE, this just says Jobs ran Apple as his personal fife. But since he made lots of money, no one cared.

Re: Judge rules Apple executive lied under oath, makes criminal contempt referral

#155

Post by davisr »

TheDong wrote: post #110
nostromo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want Apple to protect me from app developers. For me, it’s a feature not a bug. I want them to prevent social media companies from tracking my device across my other apps. I want them to integrate billing so I can easily cancel subscriptions or get refunds. I want them to require Oauth that allows me to keep my email private from app developers. These features make my customer experience better not worse. I’m sorry…

We're on Hacker News, not Granny News. Being a hacker means having curiosity about the things around you, having the desire to be able to change and understand things. On android, I wrote small toy apps for myself, I could build and self-sign an APK, I could poke at how the system worked and read all the source code I wanted. Tragically, due to blue bubbles and group chats within my family, I was forced to switch to…

You weren't forced to do anything. You submitted to peer pressure, and that was a decision that, along with millions of others making that same decision, led to the current state. The very state that you're now complaining about.

Don't like it? Don't use it. (I don't.)

Re: Judge rules Apple executive lied under oath, makes criminal contempt referral

#156

Post by TheDong »

kagakuninja wrote: post #129
mullingitover wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda dishonest to cite that 30% number when most developers don't pay it. The fee has been 15% for years now if your revenues are under $1M.

And it is the same cut that console companies take from developers. And then when we point this out, people respond with some bullshit that consoles are not "general purpose computers"...

Consoles are trivially avoidable. Family group chats that require a blue-bubble-capable phone, grandmothers that only know how to use facetime, those are actually important.

I can't get into my coworking space without a door unlock app on my phone.

On the other hand, exactly 0 times in my life have I ever been told "yeah, you need to own an xbox to go to the dentist's office".

Phones are indeed in a different class from game consoles and should be held to a higher standard.

But yes, also, game consoles should allow you to develop your own programs and side-load them.

Re: Judge rules Apple executive lied under oath, makes criminal contempt referral

#157

Post by chrisjj »

cyral wrote: post #118
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #12

John Gruber has a good summary of the ruling: https://daringfireball.net/2025/04/gonzales_rogers_apple_app... . My favourite part: "Unlike Mr. Maestri and Mr. Roman, Mr. Schiller sat through the entire underlying trial and actually read the entire 180-page decision. That Messrs. Maestri and Roman did neither, does not shield Apple of its knowledge (actual and constructive) of the Court’s findings."

Great summary. I will add to this: > Apple’s response: charge a 27 percent commission (again tied to nothing) on off-app purchases, where it had previously charged nothing, and extend the commission for a period of seven days after the consumer linked-out of the app. Not only have they been asking for this, but the link to your external checkout could only be in once place in your app, and could not be part of the pa…

> And this scary popup before going to the external payment page: https://d7ych6cwyfyiba.archive.is/AZrEz/0c8d40ed4a6886240370...

My. They forgot "Apple cannot guarantee making payment elsewhere won't give you cancer."

Re: Judge rules Apple executive lied under oath, makes criminal contempt referral

#158

Post by jampekka »

vessenes wrote: post #79

In the words of a trial lawyer friend of mine, “Nobody in the history of the world has said, ‘You know what? The judge was right; I was an asshole.’ Definitely some of those vibes there. I’ve generally been on team apple for this case, and as Gruber notes, they largely won the case. Dunking on their power to set other contractual fees seems to have come back to bite them. That said, as a user, I strongly prefer to us…

> That said, as a user, I strongly prefer to use Apple’s in-app payments

I'm sure both the app developer and Apple are happy to let you pay 30% extra for the convenience of Apple Pay vs PayPal.

Re: Judge rules Apple executive lied under oath, makes criminal contempt referral

#159

Post by jasode »

behnamoh wrote: post #76
pjmlp wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple always has been like that, see The Cult of Mac book. However, it appears being at the edge of bankruptcy, and having turned the ship around has made them paranoid of losing a single cent. When Apple Store came out it was great. I was a Nokia employee at the time, and 30% was a dream compared with what you would have to pay to phone operators, app listenings in magazines with SMS download codes, for Blackberry,…

> However, it appears being at the edge of bankruptcy, and having turned the ship around has made them paranoid of losing a single cent. That was more than 20 years ago, under a totally different market condition and Apple leadership. Back then, they needed developers to turn the ship around, now they think devs need them. They's a cash cow and act like assholes.

> Back then, they needed developers to turn the ship around, now they think devs need them.

No, that's the opposite of what actually happened with the iPhone. Back in 2007, Apple actually saw evidence from the customer buying frenzy that Apple didn't need 3rd-party devs to make iPhone a wild success. After the very desirable iPhones got into millions of customers hands, it was the 3rd-party devs that needed Apple more than Apple needed the 3rd-party ecosystem as I've mentioned before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39291668

Maybe an alternate history would have had all the 3rd-party devs deliberately boycott Apple iOS and thus only create apps for Android in 2008. We now know that didn't happen so we'll never know if devs realistically had enough leverage back in 2008 to alter Apple's App Store commission structure and policies.

The iPhone was so desirable as a platform that new popular apps like Instagram and WhatsApp were released for Apple iPhones months before Android.

Re: Judge rules Apple executive lied under oath, makes criminal contempt referral

#160

Post by tech234a »

m463 wrote: post #128
nostromo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want Apple to protect me from app developers. For me, it’s a feature not a bug. I want them to prevent social media companies from tracking my device across my other apps. I want them to integrate billing so I can easily cancel subscriptions or get refunds. I want them to require Oauth that allows me to keep my email private from app developers. These features make my customer experience better not worse. I’m sorry…

I would like to know what is running on my phone, what it is doing and who it is communicating with. I would like to be able to prevent it, like running a firewall or disabling bluetooth for certain processes or more...

I think apps have to request permission to use Bluetooth on iOS with the exception of audio playback
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