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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

#241

Post by dangus »

bluSCALE4 wrote: post #238
tracerbulletx wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With the caveat that shows still have a massive amount product placement within them and ad-free streaming services cost more than double the price of ad-supported, meaning that the poor are far more likely to be viewing ads anyway.

I love me some Gabby’s Dollhouse but the show is literally about a toy dollhouse that you can go buy.

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

#242

Post by orasis »

amluto wrote: post #222
post_break wrote: post #146

This is what bad management at Apple looks like. They were now forced to cut off the spice flow that is millions of dollars of IAPs from games in their coveted services pie chart because they got cocky. Roblox alone is going to show up on their balance chart. Epic throwing water on an oil fire with their comments make me grin, they are the reason Apple lowered AppStore pricing, and now they are the reason Apple can n…

Maybe? Apple collected a lot of money in the last year doing this. I wonder if someone will try to force them to refund it all.

There have already been class action lawsuits against both Apple and Google that have paid out to developers so who knows.

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

#243

Post by dboreham »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #138
deeThrow94 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very good points. I've been trying to figure out whose interest is in our "national interests" my entire life. It sure ain't protecting my interests or those of anyone I love that justifies a trillion dollar a year military.

The trillion dollar military is Americas welfare system. You may be chronically confused why no politician dem/republican/liberal/conservative ever wants to cut funding for it, and toss it up as obvious collusion between mega-contractors and politicians. Well it is. And it's willful. That trillion dollars is spent almost entirely on US made things by US workers. Only a small slice (still large in absolute terms) goes…

And it was an explicit pact between US and European countries: you can have socialism and not much military (because who wants a huge German army??), while we will do our socialism via our military, which in turn will protect you.

But now our politicians are so dumb they don't realize that's what was agreed long ago, and think they can have one part of that deal and not the other.

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

#244

Post by dboreham »

alt227 wrote: post #120
deeThrow94 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very good points. I've been trying to figure out whose interest is in our "national interests" my entire life. It sure ain't protecting my interests or those of anyone I love that justifies a trillion dollar a year military.

I am pretty sure if the US decided to get rid of its military entirely, then it wouldnt be long before it was invaded by Russia or China and then the interests of the people you love would be severly impacted. The world stage is no more a safe place than it has been for any other part of history.

Or invaded by liberating Canadians. We can dream...

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

#245

Post by hayst4ck »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #190
jader201 wrote: post #181

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.

These people are implementing Skinner boxes[1] for children.

There are literally "engagement" engineers actively doing A/B tests on children to see what makes them more addicted or gets them to spend more money or time on their platform.

There are humans literally doing experiments on children to figure out what stimulus results in more addicted behavior.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

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

#246

Post by robertlagrant »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #202
StefanBatory wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Fortnite, skins are available to buy only sometimes. At a given time, you can buy like, 6-7 of them. If you want something that is not up, well, tough luck, it may never come back.

I heard they make whole cartoons to feature a specific toy character and put them in kids happy meals and have limited collectors editions. Will the manipulative horrors of marketing to children ever cease or will we all be coerced into a life time sentence at Disney land by a clever cereal tie in.

They do, and that is bad. Growing up surrounded by toy adverts that make kids despondent if they don't have the toys is not good.

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

#247

Post by bugfix »

mschuster91 wrote: post #57
dartharva wrote: post #5

In the same article: 3.1.1 In-App Purchase: If you want to unlock features or functionality within your app, (by way of example: subscriptions, in-game currencies, game levels, access to premium content, or unlocking a full version), you must use in-app purchase. Apps may not use their own mechanisms to unlock content or functionality, such as license keys, augmented reality markers, QR codes, cryptocurrencies and cr…

I get where Apple is coming from, though, and it's not just the revenue stream. They want to make sure that if you spent money on something in the Apple ecosystem, you can enjoy that for as long as you got a working device with that app installed. Allowing third-party services like license keys introduce a dependency on the vendor to keep their servers up and running.

Apple wants to make sure they get a 30% cut if you spend money on anything within their ecosystem — that's all they really care about.

There are several reports of people having their entire accounts banned, effectively losing access to everything they paid for. And it's basically impossible to get your account back.

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

#248

Post by brutal_chaos_ »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #216
brutal_chaos_ wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good enough is how everything went to shit (enshitification). "It's an MVP? Good enough, ship it and bolt on features no one wants." Personally, I am very tired of "good enough." I wish we built great things.

"Enshitification" is probably the most self-sabotaging term we could think of; in terms of how it makes us look like whining teenagers. I will never use it in polite conversation; which would ironically be a tech company's greatest goal for if we had a word. But optics aside, this also ignores the problem that many of these businesses were not sustainable and were never sustainable . They are heading downhill, partia…

You bring up some good points. I guess I was too absolute in my statement as I didn't intend to imply it was the only problem. Given that, Windows gaining ads (nevermind the number of settings panels/windows, etc), games being released broken or loot box driven, google search once being good and now being ad driven, and a myriad of other problems have caused the downfall as well. So the big players are part of the problem too.

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

#249

Post by redbell »

> In the European Union, developers can also distribute notarized iOS and iPadOS apps from alternative app marketplaces and directly from their website.

Well, this was only possible because the EU had pushed hard toward this openness otherwise, we wouldn't expect Apple to do this.

> For everything else there is always the open Internet. If the App Store model and guidelines or alternative app marketplaces and Notarization for iOS and iPadOS apps are not best for your app or business idea that’s okay, we provide Safari for a great web experience too.

IMO, Safari on iOS do not have a great experience for web devs who are willing to distribute their apps as PWAs, especially when there is no alternative browser that provides additional capabilities, they are all skinned Safaris. Take for instance the Vibration API [1], it has been supported since a long time in Chrome mobile but not in Safari. I believe it does an excellent job in giving a PWA some native-feeling when being used. Still though, I still miss that haptic feedback is not yet supported by Chrome. Bluetooth [2] is yet another missing API in Safari.

Of course, for these (and other) web APIs to be abused by developers, I encourage browser vendors to disable them by default when requested from a website and enable them ONLY on user consent. On the other hand, when a user installs the PWA, these privileges should be granted automatically with the ability to disable them by the user.

To finalize, another excellent API that facilitate the installation of PWAs by triggering an install prompt [3] is not supported in iOS Safari, which does really makes me wonder: "How Safari provides a great web experience?"

___________________

1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Vibration_A...

2. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Bluetoo...

3. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...

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

#250

Post by Hikikomori »

ohgr wrote: post #235
cloudfudge wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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...

Why shouldn't Apple compete on pricing against others then? Drop the arbitrary %, charge for actual usage. If they're so good and cheap then everyone will stay with Apple distribution.
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