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Apple: Person-to-person experiences do not have to use in-app purchase

developer.apple.com

201–210 of 492 posts

Re: Apple: Person-to-person experiences do not have to use in-app purchase

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. When rules aren't codified it invites biased interpretation of them. However.... I've worked on an internal communications platform. For some reason people would forget that they were on a corporate site with their corporate email linked to it and spew garbage that any decent person would be embarrassed to say out loud. So we deliberately didn't codify our rules. We chose not to because we were aw…

To begin with, I think they made it to accommodate Tencent, who once threatened to pull Wechat from App Store if they don't let them use their own payments. First, they used them for transfers only, but later came games, and etc.

Because it is not about fairness or rules. It is about extracting as much values as possible from app developers.

That made sense when the Apple store was a small kind of start up enterprise. Nowadays, it should be regulated so all developers can use the platform in a level field where competition is real and it is not just a game for big corporations.

Re: Apple: Person-to-person experiences do not have to use in-app purchase

#202
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if what you're arguing against is judgment calls, or against the fallout of that supreme court ruling, but to address the use of judgment, the nature of curation is that it's not always something that can be put in a set of explicit rules. There's always people that walk right up to and over the line and generally push boundaries and find loopholes, no matter how well written rules are. Human judgment needs…

> Human judgment needs to be a part of the process if a good experience is desired Yeah just to second this I think that a lot of us coming from software backgrounds like to think of laws as being code, fully definable, automatable and capable of covering all edge cases. This isn’t the case. Judgement is required. Not to ruin my own metaphor but I actually think there is a lesson about software as well. Software is n…

One observation I've made about laws vs code is that the former allows for the use of some very... convenient descriptors. The best one is "reasonable". It's used all the time in legal agreements, and it's exactly the type of mushy concept you could never explain to a computer.

And I think that's healthy. Laws are written for people, not computers, and as far as I can (I'm very much not a lawyer), everyone basically agrees on what "reasonable" means. Furthermore, I'm not sure what we'd do without that word, because you can't realistically outline every possible scenario in advance.

Re: Apple: Person-to-person experiences do not have to use in-app purchase

#203
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if what you're arguing against is judgment calls, or against the fallout of that supreme court ruling, but to address the use of judgment, the nature of curation is that it's not always something that can be put in a set of explicit rules. There's always people that walk right up to and over the line and generally push boundaries and find loopholes, no matter how well written rules are. Human judgment needs…

> Human judgment needs to be a part of the process if a good experience is desired Yeah just to second this I think that a lot of us coming from software backgrounds like to think of laws as being code, fully definable, automatable and capable of covering all edge cases. This isn’t the case. Judgement is required. Not to ruin my own metaphor but I actually think there is a lesson about software as well. Software is n…

Agree. Decision environments are high dimensional spaces that human judgment can tap into. Laws and rules are ways to compress that space, but the compression is lossy and can lead to a divergence between the letter of the rule and its intent.

And to add more complexity to the situation, laws and rules are but static snapshots within a dynamic system, and may simply drift away from intent with the progression of time and people's viewpoints. Kind of like a really old keyframe in a compressed video that starts smearing from the accumulation of too many changes.

Re: Apple: Person-to-person experiences do not have to use in-app purchase

#204
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing "secret". Everybody can roll their own payment in the web. They cannot advertise alternative payment methods in the app . See Spotify as an example.

Everybody can't. The Hey.com email guys did the same thing. They allowed only signing into the up. No sign up. Then Apple made up another rule saying ''You download the app and it does not work. Therefore it has to be removed'' . Lets keep adding more rules and exclusions as time passes. That's the Apple way of doing things.

Hey is not a reader app, so the rule for reader apps does not apply.

Re: Apple: Person-to-person experiences do not have to use in-app purchase

#205

> We will reject apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, “I’ll know it when I see it”. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it. This line makes my blood boil. Futhermore, later they define disallowed sexual content as: > 1.1.4 Overtly sexual or pornographic material, defined by Webster’s Dictionary as "explici…

I completely agree. When rules aren't codified it invites biased interpretation of them. However.... I've worked on an internal communications platform. For some reason people would forget that they were on a corporate site with their corporate email linked to it and spew garbage that any decent person would be embarrassed to say out loud. So we deliberately didn't codify our rules. We chose not to because we were aw…

Yeah, the thing is to have codified questions. Seems weird but that's how the law does it. We are always asked to frame things in terms of what a reasonable person would find explicit, threatening, likely, implausible...basically, the law asks you: can you answer this question with a straight face?

Re: Apple: Person-to-person experiences do not have to use in-app purchase

#206

> We will reject apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, “I’ll know it when I see it”. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it. This line makes my blood boil. Futhermore, later they define disallowed sexual content as: > 1.1.4 Overtly sexual or pornographic material, defined by Webster’s Dictionary as "explici…

> “I’ll know it when I see it”. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.

Which means different app reviewers will have different interpretations of it. A problem that exists now.

Re: Apple: Person-to-person experiences do not have to use in-app purchase

#207

Platforms need to be regulated and not with the anti-trust laws created to deal with industries before software even existed. We need a new Sherman or Clayton act specifically for platforms. You can split them out, social media platforms over X users are regulated in this way. Marketplaces over x users are regulated in this way. We cannot rely on platform owners to update policy in response to mounting public pressur…

>Platforms need to be regulated No. God no. Regulation has its place. But regulation is also a slooow bureaucratic process. Regulators have no incentive to change with market conditions and in a fast moving industry will be a hindrance in no time. They also increase the cost of development benefiting the big guys that can afford an army of HR, Regulatory and Legal people to handle compliance.

We do need regulation that will protect developers and consumers from the huge monopolistic power of platform owners like Apple, Facebook, and Google. The regulation would be targeted specifically at those behemoths and not at small fry developers, since those don't have significant market power.

Today you don't need an army of legal people to deal with existing anticompetitive regulations if you're not a behemoth yourself. To argue that regulation designed to protect from monopolists will actually help those monopolists by its mere existence is ridiculous.

Re: Apple: Person-to-person experiences do not have to use in-app purchase

#209
post #133

Man I just want to have control over my phone is that too much to ask?

don't understand why you got downvoted because ultimately it's what it all boils down to..

You never had control with Apple. It didn't seem to matter to many for the longest time.

Re: Apple: Person-to-person experiences do not have to use in-app purchase

#210
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard of this thing called "Android". From what I've heard, and I know that this sounds crazy, but it reportedly has a larger market share than Apple does in the mobile space. So any arguments or comments here mentioning "monopolistic power" are, well, I want to be nice about this, but they are a complete fucking joke.

It appears you didn't hear the biggest shocker of them all; one does not need to have an outright monopoly to be in a dominant position, able to abuse its power in a market. I know, shocker.

As my words make quite clear (despite the downvotes), I'm only talking about the use of the word "monopoly" in a context where it should not be used.

You want to gripe about supposed abuse of market power, even though that's a weak argument that is not supported by the facts? Go right ahead.

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