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Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US

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Re: Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US

#231
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve Jobs was quite famously against upgradability since the start. That is not something new for Apple. Honestly I love the current macs, but of course I would like to be able to upgrade them as well. But yeah I also have the feeling that Apple is getting less innovative, more sloppy and more greedy, but I'm not sure I think its become a whole other company.

> Steve Jobs was quite famously against upgradability since the start. That is not something new for Apple. And yet during his time we had upgradeable MacBooks and Macs. Heck, even iPhone battery was upgradeable while he was still in charge.

Heck, even iPhone battery was upgradeable while he was still in charge.

Eh, wot? iPhone battery has never been easily replaced. Yeah, you could do it, but it still involved tiny screws and fiddly bits; you’re not popping a new one in while waiting at a stoplight.

But I do miss the days of throwing some cheap RAM at a MacBook.

Re: Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US

#232
post #192

If you haven't watched Tim Sweeney's appearance on Lex Fridman (which went live two days ago ironically), he discusses this battle against Apple, which he's maintained at a furious pace for years. He goes into detail on how the previous guidelines stifle innovation, how app developers are basically forced to implement anti-consumer practices to maintain the ridiculous costs of achieving success on the app store, etc.…

Fortnite - sit in lobby for 80% of the time and buy shit? Tim just wants all of his cut. And wants Apple to pay his app distribution costs... There's no good guys anywhere in this.

Apple extra premium downloads, nobody else can do it.

Re: Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had thought the clear need for anti-trust had tickled down to the plebs on here. Unfortunate to see that people still casually refer to free markets as if it's a meaningful concept. If you really truly think that regulation is dragging down some market, it's easy to talk about in specific terms. It is only possible to employ "free markets" in bad faith.

Endstate of the game theory of free markets is cartel or Monopoly. All it takes is a single competitor to gradually gain more and more strength and competitive advantage via dumping, regulatory capture, or other means (see: organized crime and syndicates) to win the death struggle. What has saved us hasn't been some magical free market, it has been the markets themselves, once they achieve trust status, fundamentally…

I highly recommend reading Schumpeter, both "Business Cycles" and "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy".

He discusses how motivations fundamentally change after profit margins peak and argues that profit after this point necessarily produces less economically efficient processes (in terms of the flow of demanded goods and services, not the shareholder, who does receive further productivity gains). In this context, undesired market advantage (legal or illegal) is just a symptom of profit, but it can be analyzed like any other sort of inefficiency. The core prescription is to nationalize the process or otherwise remove the profit motive around peak profit (which is, to be clear, not always easy or possible to identify... but in the worst case, this would open further opportunity for private capital to invest in the next generation of improvements).

He also discusses how failed investment cycles can resonate into market crashes faster than capital can rationally reallocate. Both of these above observations seem very very relevant to our current situation in the US today, and should cause everyone to look askance at people who aren't concerned about how healthy our political economy actually is.

> fundamentally undermined by science and technology creating a new market that upends the old one.

The kicker here is that there's no reason to expect either to continue yielding the same rewards. Some industries have projectable, plannable, investable growth patterns; others do not. Almost all the industries with predictable growth rely on consumption driven by yields from the lucrative exploitation of frontiers, mostly technological recently as you point out. I suspect that the market is going to get incredibly volatile as capital sees this frontiers dry up and adjusts expectations. ideally by cannibalizing itself and not eating us, but it might need a little help in that regard....

Re: Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No gambling, no randomized loot boxes, etc. > So I give Tim a lot of credit for maintaining such a principled stance. IMO, someone that drives and capitalizes on addictive spending by an underage audience should never be considered principled. While it may not be considered gambling, it’s not much better when it’s often out of control due to feeding on FOMO.

Ah yes, toy makers, the true problem of our world. 30 years ago I'm sure you'd be complaining about "addicted" spending on keeping up with the most popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys. It's not evil to make things kids want and make money off it. If you don't want your kids to buy things, that's on you and its a problem from time immemorial, not a new issue with video games.

Yes it is evil, considering how the advertisements are made in ways that makes it difficult for parents to escape them.

The only way to escape kids TV shows that have advertisements between shows and advertisements within the shows themselves as product placements is to only watch public television (which is generally funded way less and has way fewer programs than commercial television).

Hell, shows like Transfomers have the toys as the stars of the show.

So now all your kids have the peer pressure of all their friends consuming popular media and owning toys and now you have to be the bad guy saying no to literally everything to escape.

You go to any store and the toys and sugary cereals are right here at eye height of your kids with cartoon characters and promises of prizes, toys, and sweepstakes.

So you’re basically between a rock and a hard place, either you are the “weird kid with the weird parents” or you buy into at least some of that consumerism, trying to approach it with some level of moderation.

Re: Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US

#235
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortnite - sit in lobby for 80% of the time and buy shit? Tim just wants all of his cut. And wants Apple to pay his app distribution costs... There's no good guys anywhere in this.

"App distribution costs" is laughable as an incentive. Any business that makes an app where you can and will spend dollars would gladly let you download it directly from their website in exchange for not giving up 30% of the in-app payments. App distribution costs nothing.

390 million users. Say 10% on iOS. 39 million users. 18Gb on iOS last time

Yeah app distribution costs something. Finger in the air 10's of petabytes...

Re: Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US

#236

If you haven't watched Tim Sweeney's appearance on Lex Fridman (which went live two days ago ironically), he discusses this battle against Apple, which he's maintained at a furious pace for years. He goes into detail on how the previous guidelines stifle innovation, how app developers are basically forced to implement anti-consumer practices to maintain the ridiculous costs of achieving success on the app store, etc.…

Tim's a selfish businessman, whose interests just happen to align with the public interest in this instance. He makes excuses about Linux market share when asked why Fortnite isn't on the Steam Deck, then ships a build for Windows ARM. Fortnite Festival, their Rock Band recreation in the Fortnite ecosystem, recently started limiting when you can purchase songs in an effort to get people to impulse buy them when avail…

As far as being an American company they're pretty low on scummy behaviour.

Re: Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US

#237

At the risk of not piling on to the Apple dislike here, if you use a non-Apple payment system, and you have an issue, you now need to go to the specific company and payment system, you can no longer demand your money back by dealing with a single company. I presume even more scam apps will take your money and ignore your complaints; imagine trying to sue a company in some foreign country to try to get your money back…

This is sorta what customers expect. When they want a refund or have a problem, they ask the developer. They don't understand the payments are all going through apple AND that apple is responsible for all billing support. There is no way to even look up a customer or get a list of your customers with IAP, aside from using something like RevenueCat that tries to link your user accounts with the device receipts to figure out who is subscribed. Customers find it ridiculous that you can't help them with any billing questions at all.

Re: Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No gambling, no randomized loot boxes, etc. > So I give Tim a lot of credit for maintaining such a principled stance. IMO, someone that drives and capitalizes on addictive spending by an underage audience should never be considered principled. While it may not be considered gambling, it’s not much better when it’s often out of control due to feeding on FOMO.

Ah yes, toy makers, the true problem of our world. 30 years ago I'm sure you'd be complaining about "addicted" spending on keeping up with the most popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys. It's not evil to make things kids want and make money off it. If you don't want your kids to buy things, that's on you and its a problem from time immemorial, not a new issue with video games.

Well said. Streaming services are finally getting the kinds of commercial content we did in the 80s and 90s. It's refreshing as I feel those years were the golden era of toys. Many toys of the era didn't even have commercials but we still wanted them. X-Men toys for example. If I was a kid, I'd of loved to have seen weekly commercials of the newest line up of X-Men toys.

Re: Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US

#239

Crazy. I thought hackernews didn’t care because this happened yesterday and I never saw anything! We’re updating our app in a couple days this will save a LOT of money. We will kick users out to web and pass a JWT in the url with a short lifespan to log the user in on web and then prompt for Apple Pay or credit card. Then a link back to our app’s deep link

So many questions: - Why not just handle all of this in the app? Do you think Apple won't allow it? - Are you geofencing this functionality? It seems like per other comments this is US only. - How are you handling existing subscribers (not sure if applicable)? Will you "encourage" them to migrate?

Because customers can’t trust payments in the app. Unless I’m being bounced out to somewhere I can see the URL and an SSL certificate I’m not paying.

What you’re suggesting is a dangerous anti-pattern.

Re: Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US

#240
post #40
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically the App Store only exists because of the ridicule Apple received when they announced their new smartphone which then only supported 3rd party applications as web apps. Back then, native apps were considered a “must have” feature for smartphones. How times have changed.

Mobile internet has underwent massive improvements since then. In the U.S. at least, there are places 5G outperforms wired connections. Same goes for mobile compute power (which translates to browser performance)

That’s just the tip of the iceberg too. More and more services have adopted a web-first interface. So the benefits of native applications have dwindled when you’re basically just using web technologies regardless.

And then there is the massive abuse of spyware in mobile apps. For that reason alone, I rarely bother with native apps if I can help it.

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