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I don’t care that developers have to pay 30%, it makes no difference to me. If that fee went away… it would just give them 30% more profit.
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> > But people should also be able to get apps from whatever store they want. The web. Without scare walls or hidden "enable downloads" menu settings. And apps should no longer have to use first party payment rails, first party authentication/sign in rails, or be forced to jump through review or upgrade hoops.
> The web. Without scare walls or hidden "enable downloads" menu settings. I'm not too sure about that, for non-technical users the warnings before installing an APK on Android are very likely a good thing. There's a lot of malware out there and, similar to running a downloaded Exe on Windows, you should at least explicitly confirm it's execution.
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We could have had other competitors, but nobody wanted them. Windows phones had a very enthusiastic but too-tiny following. Blackberry lost the plot with terrible hardware and software for the app era (developing an app for the Storm was enough to convince me to never get one of their phones). Symbian's S60 was too little too late in the US. Ubuntu, Mozilla, and others all tried various flavors of Linux and web based…
> We could have had other competitors, but nobody wanted them People didn't even get a choice. Google bullied Windows Phone out of the market. People won't switch to a platform without apps. Microsoft tried to fix that, made an HTML5 youtube app. Google threw a fit and blocked it, twice. MS even followed what Google told them to do, and still blocked the app. Google saw great hardware, and an OS that was gaining medi…
Can we get retroactive regulatory enforcement for that?
Sounds like Google needs to no longer have YouTube. They're wielding it like a blunt instrument to destroy trillions in market value.
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If you think 3% is too much, there are plenty of other payment processors... the thing is, most of that 3% is not set by the processor (or kept by them) but is set by the card networks. It is the card networks that should be targeted by antitrust laws. If there anyone could make an App Store, then we would have a better idea of what the market rate for app stores should be.
> If you think 3% is too much, there are plenty of other payment processors... The things is, there's really not. There's two: Visa and Mastercard. In the US there's also American Express and Discover (afaik), but those aren't accepted everywhere (to the point that it was a joke in Futurama). But We’ve actually seen this happen in the United States before. The Durbin Amendment put a cap on debit card transactions of…
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What a stupid argument. Maybe grandpas and grandmas should get a different phone then, like a Doro, and stop bringing the rest of us down. And it doesn't even hold water as my mother has been scammed by legitimate App Store apps that have charged extra-fees just because they could.
> Maybe grandpas and grandmas should get a different phone then, like a Doro They did, they got an iPhone. > my mother has been scammed by legitimate App Store apps that have charged extra-fees just because they could. Did it empty her bank balance by abusing the private NFC payment APIs that Apple are being ordered to open up? Did it cryptolock all her files? Did it activate the camera and mic to spy on her for blac…
It's just corporate propaganda that all hell would break loose, you could just offer installing baby mode at Apple physical store that can only be removed at said places. Yeah some people would still climb the fence and touch the power lines but look, can we save them all? Should we? In this world of merciless exploitation, wouldnt it be just fair we stopped pretending it never was about anything else but money?
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There are many ways to deal with any scenario like this, all of which don't involve the device manufacturer locking ALL device owners out of ANY control over the hardware they own. For example, you can be the administrator on Grandma's device and block access to third-party app stores which cannot be overridden by anyone (including the device manufacturer) without your credentials. Alternatively, you could delegate t…
> No one is saying you can't keep choosing Apple's walled-garden app store as the only store provider or that you shouldn't be able to block any or even all app stores Err.. Isn’t that exactly what the EU is saying?
Regulators have never ruled that Apple can't have an app store or that the number of enabled App Stores MUST be more than 1 - only that the legal owner of the device have an opportunity to choose. Scenarios like "Oh no, the EU wants to take away Grandma's one safe, simple walled-garden app store so she's left to fend for herself on the dark web" is a disingenuous straw man exaggeration by Apple and their apologists to protect Apple's multi-billion dollar app store monopoly.
Once there's owner choice, even Grandma who chooses Apple as her only app store will pay lower prices and very likely gain other safe options like a full featured Firefox with Ublock Origin ad blocking. Just the existence of competitive choice is beneficial - even to users who choose "no competition". Plus Apple will finally have a real incentive to be more responsive and reasonable with app developers regarding app store prices and policies - which will help solo and small startup app developers.
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It's possible they'll allow this on iOS once finer granularity logging of battery usage is pervasive, how fine is anyone's guess, so as to track down what apps, and of whatever provenance, degrade some kpi like user impression of battery life.
This is about money not battery life. Apple makes billions of dollars in highly profitable revenue by cryptographically blocking users from controlling their own devices.
That said, i was an engineer for several years in Apple and primary internal concerns were battery life and its influence on user experience; the removal of Flash viability, favoring html5, is an example: profiling of Flash apps written in the wild showed code that routinely drained battery with aplomb...inexplicable to end users not also programmers.
But the Injunction requires Apple not to prohibit linking-out period,
full stop. It does not permit Apple to condition the right to
link-out on the payment of a fee.
Similarly, the simplicity of the alternative world of just clicking a button fails to incorporate any additional risks (hence the "scare" screen).
Courts generally permit companies to charge what they want. It may be justifiable to force alternative markets for something close to a monopoly, but it's not clear they can force the alternative to be cheaper.
If you look at the table of authorities, it's basically Epic itself, and some 50+ year-old cases. There's just nothing really in support.
Currently, a tiny, tiny percentage of very large developers make virtually all of the profits from selling Apple apps. Apple's 30% rate has been in place longer than most of them have existed, so there's been no surprise. Price discrimination is legal, and Apple's choice to make larger companies pay more seems supportive of small businesses. So there's not even a compelling argument that Apple's fees are evil; it's just that big, maximalist players see a way to get more profit.
So yes, Apple fees limit profits for Y-combinator startups. The brief would have been more compelling had it listed the startups that were passed on due to the fees (rather than listing the successful ones). That's the only new data point in this argument, and would have been direct evidence of impact to small companies. But because the brief didn't make this argument factually, the court can fairly assume there are no such cases, and the brief may have done more damage than good to its cause.
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What you are proposing is the balkanization of software delivery. I indeed choose not to download software from Facebook and friends, but it’s quite likely others will need to as it will become the only way to get their software. At that point: tracking out the ass.
"Balkanization" is the wrong way to view this. This is waking up the regulatory arm of the government that has been asleep at the wheel. And it should have been done over a decade ago. The better analogy is a forest fire. We're clearing up the overgrowth (ossification, unfair taxation, and unfair control) and creating room for new life to start and flourish. > I indeed choose not to download software from Facebook an…
It's a perfectly valid way to view it. Forest fire might be another valid way to view it, but is different. Both are equally valid, and represent different views of what ideal is.
> Tax and regulate it. It's what Europe does.
I am European. Nice try though.
> We need to stretch those muscles and get back into the habit of doing it.
I don't disagree. Start there then. Make it so that tracking me incurs such a heavy penalty payable to me personally that it is not worthwhile. Then go after the distribution mechanisms that allow someone to live a relatively tracking-free life without having to be an uber-nerd to make it reality.
> Mobile computing belongs to all of us.
There are plenty of platforms. What you are saying is it belongs to the people who want it to be a certain way with particular negative outcomes for many people. I want it to be a different way with negative outcomes that affect me less.
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It's a tradeoff. You may have the knowledge and risk awareness to install anything, circumvent protections like you still can on MacOS, but the vast majority does not and should not have that power; this led to huge botnets during the Windows XP era when many internet connections were first set up. They overcompensated with Vista, asking permissions for everything so people developed a kneejerk "just hit accept". The…
> It's a tradeoff. You may have the knowledge and risk awareness [...] but the vast majority does not and should not have that power But that power is not more dangerous than having guns, right? So.. while I can apply for a gun license, I can't apply for an unrestricted computing license, so something is wrong here, don't you think? Unless you believe guns are less dangerous.
It actually is.
Free computers are intolerably subversive. They can literally wipe out entire sectors of the economy just by copying artificially scarce things. They can defeat police, judges, militaries, governments by democratizing access to strong cryprography.
They want to control our computers at all costs. We must resist. Computers are too important for us to allow them to be controlled and limited.