201–210 of 930 posts
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It might kill off consoles entirely tbh
I sure hope not. As I age, the value prop of consoles is, I don't have to mess with settings or diagnose problems or sacrifice goats to the "did this update break something" gods. It just works. I can just play games.
There's several very good provisions in this legislation (3rd party payment processors, non-preferential treatment for 1st party apps), there are several that have a mix of upsides and downsides (sideloading is one--I personally like knowing that Facebook can't ask people to sideload some privacy destroying crap on iOS). Then there's: - Allow developers to integrate their apps and digital services directly with those…
The near-field communication have a clear reason. Apple was only allowing access to their own banking app as a payment provider in shops. As I understand there was not even a way to get access with any kind of forms or such if you had a competing plastic card firm. That is pretty much the only reason that clause is the legislation.
What does this mean? Apple is not a payment processor. The banks sign deals with Apple put make their cards available through Apple Pay, but the payment still goes through the payment networks (visa, mastercard, amex) and the banks.
This is huge. Forcing Apple to allow app side-loading, third-party payments, etc is going to wrest away control of the iOS ecosystem (and eat pretty heavily into their revenues [1] [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/10/apple-implies-it-generated-r... I hope some of these regulations spill over into the U.S. and the rest of the world.
Apple's greed (in maintaining the egregious 30% commission for so long) is going to undermine their entire ecosystem. If Apple moved voluntarily to 10% or 15% for all, there never would have been the industry pressure for this sort of regulation. The EU would have been better to just mandate a maximum % commission for all digital marketplaces above a certain level of revenue. This new solution will get poked full of…
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I wonder if it would make more financial sense for Apple to withdraw from EU market, rather than complying. The numbers for 2021 are pretty much in line: $89B - Apple sales in Europe (including some non-EU countries, most notably UK) $85B - Apple AppStore revenue worldwide. The question is: which one has more potential for growth.
Doesn't Apple route all of their international sales through Ireland, which is in the EU? They'd need to find another tax haven.
EU regulation just ruins tech in my opinion. GDPR was great in principle but all we ended up with was annoying cookie pop ups. Apple did a much better job with App Tracking Privacy. And not, EU so regulating that to make it worse
Read through this list - there's more than just cookie popups:
Happy that I might be able to install something else than Safari. I want the Gecko engine on iOS. Sad that being in UK probably means we'll ignore it because "Brexit." I got a text the other day telling me that, since we've left the EU, roaming charges are back. Hurray! Without making this about politics, this is a great step forward. Still unsure how Apple & co. will make their proprietary video and messaging platfo…
> Still unsure how Apple & co. will make their proprietary video and messaging platforms "interoperable". I doubt they'll be writing an RFC any time soon. I'd be pretty happy if I could integrate iMessage and Signal together, since I hate the fact that iMessage is the only messaging platform with a native macOS app.
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Never underestimate the creative genius of Apple. They will come up with new solutions to keep their walled garden. "Allow users to install apps from third-party app stores and sideload directly from the internet" I bet this is going to be a horrible user experience. "Are you really sure?", "Apple takes no responsibility not warranty" whatsoever. What sound usually easy on paper...
I don’t think fucking around with EU regulators is something Apple should do here. They’ll probably revenge even with stronger further regulations later.
The only questionable part is end-to-end encryption. I don't see how you can make your messaging apps interoperable and have E2E encryption. Most of the other things: mostly good. Apple and Google need to be taken down a peg or 10.
Apple would just need to publish an API for connecting to iMessage like that, and Signal would potentially need to allow users to add friends via their iMessage ID rather than their phone number.
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> Apple has completely forgotten their privacy bargains in China when their profits were threatened. Couple of things here. First, I live in America so I don't really care and apparently the Chinese people for whatever reason want to live in that privacy hellscape. Second, Apple unfortunately (like many corporations) is not in a position to dictate privacy regulations to the Chinese government. The interactions here,…
>We are not talking about GDPR or "socialism" or whatever. We're talking about regulating Apple so that other mega corporations can create their own app stores on iOS and then do whatever they want. So don't use those. Personally I'll mostly stick to Apple's app store along with some Free Software one where I download Firefox and some other open source apps.
The problem is that it lessens Apple's collective bargaining power. They can't make Facebook (again just as an example) comply with privacy rules on the iOS App Store because Facebook can and will offer its product exclusively on its own store or on a third-party store where they don't have to use these rules.
The feedback loop for privacy rights is such that people will say screw the privacy rights and go download Facebook anyway - so now customers that previously had the best of both worlds (privacy rules and Facebook) will be forced to choose, and they'll definitely choose Facebook.
So what was gained? Well, it's good for mega corporations like Facebook. Bad for single megacorporation Apple, and bad for me as a customer. It's good for payday loan type crypto companies or other scam artists, and bad for my grandma. Etc.
That's the problem here. Saying "don't use those" doesn't make sense. But if you wanted to say that then I just say don't use the iPhone if you want third-party app stores.
I really hope Sony and Nintendo are classified as gatekeepers as well because this > Allow users to install apps from third-party app stores and sideload directly from the internet. would be huge for Playstation and Switch owners.
So far everyone complaining about app lockouts have been laser-focused on phones, because they're general-purpose and thus easier to legally justify sideloading on. Nobody wants to talk about game consoles - to open them up would almost certainly require revisiting DMCA 1201[0] and removing the prohibition on circumvention tools. The US Copyright Office wouldn't entertain extending the current "mobile devices"[1] jai…
That law only forbids bypassing protection measures exclusively related to protecting access to a specific copyrighted work. Getting root on consoles isn't that.