301–310 of 631 posts
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...wait, there is? It's not in the archive.is link!
WSJ probably updated the article. Here's the newer link: https://archive.is/20250501040217/https://www.wsj.com/tech/a...
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Jesus Christ. How worse can they be? Willfully malicious
Now we will have corporate training programs teaching us to say "inform the user" when we mean "scare the user", and then this wont show up in court. Just like how Microsoft taught us to never say "crush the competition". They will do all the same things though.
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I think you'll find at least 1/4 of HN comments are indicative of stating things from a place of strong instinctive tribalism, but this crowd are just very slightly better at using words to defend our position in a more noble way. That's OK, it shows we're human, it's not all AI slop here (yet?).
I guess being smart sometimes doesn’t lead you to have a more accurate opinion, but to develop more sophisticated rhetorical devices to defend your inaccurate opinion?
Hint: rationalization tends to be after.
Not to say that it can’t be overridden with training and/or self-reflection/self-skepticism, but first reactions tend to allows follow this pattern.
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I guess being smart sometimes doesn’t lead you to have a more accurate opinion, but to develop more sophisticated rhetorical devices to defend your inaccurate opinion?
Oh man, just wait until you see the research on fMRI timing on when decision making vs rationalization parts of the brain engage. Hint: rationalization tends to be after. Not to say that it can’t be overridden with training and/or self-reflection/self-skepticism, but first reactions tend to allows follow this pattern.
Edit: hmm, I suppose voicing your hot take about a news piece is a quick decision though.
The court decision itself is worth reading for a revealing look behind the curtain. [0] >> In Slack communications dated November 16, 2021, the Apple employees crafting the warning screen for Project Michigan discussed how best to frame its language. Mr. Onak suggested the warning screen should include the language: “By continuing on the web, you will leave the app and be taken to an external website” because “‘exter…
Ironically it ends up getting flagged as some deliberate Apple malicious compliance BS which just sours you on the whole iOS experience.
The heart of Apple's hypocrisy is this: they claim their 30% is necessary to support the developer ecosystem and fund its operations. But of course if that were true, they could easily charge a high enough platform membership fee directly to developers. Instead they opt for a structural tax to cover what are mostly completely opaque and secret operational costs. They're opaque and secret for obvious reasons: those ex…
They don’t make that claim. That’s the service they are selling and the margin they choose. The royalty is similar to software retailer margins going back a long time. Steam charges a similar rate. It’s pretty trivial to bypass. Just don’t charge for your software, and use the app to access paid resources purchased outside the platform. My company distributes a few dozen apps to thousands of employees, Apple gets $0,…
Many people blame the EU for targeting US companies when it passes anti-monopoly and pro-consumer laws, or penalizes the companies for breaking them. Now that US courts are doing it more, it seems that corporations abusing their monopoly powers are the problem, not EU laws. But what do I know.
>An EU law stiffles all companies, not just the trillion dollar companies. I've essentially not considered EU audiences because I'm small and focus on the engineering + product directed toward 'everyone except Europe' because it feels like near anarchy.
>This is precision work. These companies get too big and anger the wrong person, so they get knocked. However, we obviously see that when its so big, these violations last significantly longer and often can go unpunished.
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If through Apple it is easy to cancel and all subs are listed in one place. If done through third parties directly the scammers will not make unsubscribing easy and it will not be as easy to find out where you are subscribing. Thus I expect the scamming to increase.
Easy from your point of view... This is the argument I mostly hear from Apple folks, but my experience (especially with less tech savvy folks) is that they have no idea where or how to cancel a subscription on IAP and they think that the multiple "Apple" charges are just some iCloud thing or something along those lines. With Credit Card flows the alarm bells go off waaaay earlier: when a website asks for their CC dat…
The heart of Apple's hypocrisy is this: they claim their 30% is necessary to support the developer ecosystem and fund its operations. But of course if that were true, they could easily charge a high enough platform membership fee directly to developers. Instead they opt for a structural tax to cover what are mostly completely opaque and secret operational costs. They're opaque and secret for obvious reasons: those ex…
They don’t make that claim. That’s the service they are selling and the margin they choose. The royalty is similar to software retailer margins going back a long time. Steam charges a similar rate. It’s pretty trivial to bypass. Just don’t charge for your software, and use the app to access paid resources purchased outside the platform. My company distributes a few dozen apps to thousands of employees, Apple gets $0,…
Additionally Apple remains the arbiter of what kind of content and apps may be listed. Until recently they were blocking all emulators and cloud gaming apps. They used to block all crypto apps. They still selectively block gambling apps. They still block torrenting and adult apps.
Additionally, Apple is famous for arbitrary and selectively enforced rules. Many developers have their updates rejected for any and no reason after an automated system rejects them for specious reasons.
Additionally, developers are blocked from linking out. They can't up-sell, which is a critical component of a SaaS business model. Nothing in the app can tell users where to subscribe or how to upgrade or change their credit card details. This one alone kills most SaaS applications unless they use Apple's IAPs.
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> I can't trust that Apple is honest about their privacy commitments This is a funny comment for me to read. Did anyone honestly think that Apple was touting privacy as anything other than a competitive advantage for revenue maximization? They've had things like iAd, their services revenue has grown massively as hardware sales plateau, and they are nowhere near as "private" in certain countries either.
iAd is stated as being built differently to how other adtech networks work. I personally believe that Apple is able to make different (better), choices in the name of a consumer privacy, than Google will. Android is built from the ground up to provide surveillance data to Google-controlled adtech - that's their revenue model. I don't begrudge them that, people should have choice, etc. but the revenue model is adtech…
I've always read this and it seems well accepted. But I'm curious what exactly does it mean? What's Android sending to Google? Surely it's not logging what I click on apps? It's not logging what I click on my browser since the websites themselves send this info for ad purposes. So what's Android doing that let's say my Linux laptop isn't?
Edit: Answering my own question. There is a cross-app unique identifier (ignoring any privacy sandbox stuff) so developers and ad networks can get a consistent id across apps.