Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

andyibanez.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 357 posts

Re: Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

#341

Post by mcv »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #327
mcv wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banks have already dropped their transaction fees. Simple bank transactions in the EU are free. iDeal payment is either free or costs about 25 cents.

In the EU it’s illegal for a merchant to charge a different price based on payment method (iirc), but merchants are most certainly still charged transaction fees for card payments. SEPA transfers still incur fees too. There is a huge number of service providers involved in every single card payment, and that service infrastructure only exists because people pay to use it. It absolutely wouldn’t be strange for the 2-3…

> "In the EU it’s illegal for a merchant to charge a different price based on payment method"

I really don't think that's true; there are plenty of merchants who do still charge different prices based on payment method. But there are also many who voluntarily don't, because the actual cost is negligible and better than the alternatives. Regular bank transfers of various kinds between consumers, including iDeal internet payments, as far as I can tell, have no fees at all. Cash withdrawals across different currencies may incur fees, but I've never seen fees in regular Euro cash withdrawals.

Nobody here is charging 2-3% except when credit cards are involved.

Re: Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

#342

Post by mcv »

pc86 wrote: post #282
mcv wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you pay the restaurant through direct bank transaction. Credit cards are needlessly expensive, but not all electronic payment systems are.

There is no means to do this in the US, debts cards have the same fees as credit cards (maybe more?).

This is the core of the problem. In the US, credit card companies have an effective monopoly on the payment infrastructure, and there's not cooperation among banks, and not enough political will, to propose a better system.

In the EU, there's been a lot of regulation over the past couple of decades to improve payment infrastructure. Before that, international payment within the EU used to be awful, and even transferring money from one bank to another within a single country could in some circumstances be bafflingly complex.

Re: Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

#343

Post by pixelface »

Ductapemaster wrote: post #325
eitland wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the majority of users, this is irrelevant because linux is unusable for them. I got Ubuntu recommended by an electrician back in 2005 or 2006. (I used to be using Red Hat/Mandrake/Mandriva back then.) Soon after I realized it had come to the point where Ubuntu was not only possible to install and use but simpler to install and use than at least OEM-loaded Windows machines. It seemed to work well for grandmother…

I've thought about this as my grandmother has had a host of computer issues, some of them resulting in fraud scares. The real problem for me is that support is really hard to come by if something goes wrong. Grandma can't access the internet on her Ubuntu system — who can help her? I'm 500 miles away, my parents are equally as far in the other direction. Neither myself or my parents use Linux as a daily driver either…

you've touched on the problem and the solution - number of people using it. for people who were children in the early 2000s it's a distant memory now but adults used to be generally bad with computers and windows was just as much wizardry as anything. be the linux userbase you want to see in the world and help others when they want to join just like the 10 year olds of 2003 handheld parents through computer use. there's never going to be a magic solution, there just needs to be a sufficient number of people using it so that your outlined issue of proximal support gets better.

ubuntu (and i'm sure others) are in a great state for casual users already -- i've handed multiple family members an ubuntu machine with no more instruction than "use it like any other computer, don't be scared by the icons looking a little different" with great success. for the increasing number of people who do almost all of their work in a word processor and a browser exclusively, it's a complete solution with almost zero hassle.

Re: Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

#344

Post by AmericanChopper »

mcv wrote: post #341
AmericanChopper wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the EU it’s illegal for a merchant to charge a different price based on payment method (iirc), but merchants are most certainly still charged transaction fees for card payments. SEPA transfers still incur fees too. There is a huge number of service providers involved in every single card payment, and that service infrastructure only exists because people pay to use it. It absolutely wouldn’t be strange for the 2-3…

> "In the EU it’s illegal for a merchant to charge a different price based on payment method" I really don't think that's true; there are plenty of merchants who do still charge different prices based on payment method. But there are also many who voluntarily don't, because the actual cost is negligible and better than the alternatives. Regular bank transfers of various kinds between consumers, including iDeal intern…

Turns out it is true.

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/pri...

> Traders in the EU are not allowed to charge you extra for using your credit or debit card.

Regarding this:

> Nobody here is charging 2-3% except when credit cards are involved.

The service provider that provides the payment terminals merchants use will be charging the merchants between 1-2%, often with a per transaction fee on top of that. I’m not 100% sure how service providers in the EU bundle things, but intercharge fees are usually charged on top of that again. Even though the EU caps interchange fees, merchants will very easily be incurring above 2% in fees even for non-credit card transactions. The EU’s cap on interchange fees for card not present transactions is barely below standard market rates, so EU merchants will be paying about the same as everybody else for those.

Re: Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

#345

Post by tuwtuwtuwtuw »

gman83 wrote: post #8
traceroute66 wrote: post #4

The problem with all these "Apple is being nasty to me" stories that have been appearing recently is that there appears to be a strong smell of "two sides to every story". I have not read the blog post above fully, but a speed-read suggests that the author was publicly distributing an app through TestFlight rather than App Store. I am not accusing anyone of anything here. But if my speed-read is accurate, then its no…

Yeah he's been distributing the app through TestFlight with the link on his website for three years.

If that was the issue surely Apple would tell him? Why keep such information a secret?

Re: Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

#346

Post by chris_wot »

odshoifsdhfs wrote: post #56
chris_wot wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are speculating though. Do you know for sure that is the fraudulent activity that Apple are referring to?

No, I can't say for sure, but it is A reason to terminate the account, and since this post is called 'Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason' I believe it is the case. We will never know the real reason as Apple probably won't provide it, but there is a violation of their rules, even if the termination was because something else, they are still entitled to close it based on the vi…

I do t see why it is so hard for Apple to explain what in particular he was doing wrong.

Re: Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

#347

Post by Gibbon1 »

syshum wrote: post #326
Aeolun wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still need to have the money to go through the whole thing in the first place. Because when they don’t pay your small claims court case you’re right back at the normal court trying to enforce the payment.

Yes and no Going to a court to enforce a judgment is going to be orders of magnitudes cheaper than a tort litigation, and there are FAR FAR FAR less delay tatics the lawyer could impose So I still do not believe that is a reason not to use the small claims process Seems people just want to have a deafest attitude There is almost no down side from making use of the Small Claims system, could you still end up not being…

Yeah a civil case is an adversarial procedure with the court as a neutral party that makes a decision. And the two parties are expected to square after.

But an enforcement case the court is no longer a neutral party. It's enforcing it's previous decision. An enforcement order has the backing of the state.

Re: Apple is threatening to terminate my developer account with no clear reason

#348

Post by KajMagnus »

realusername wrote: post #332
leadingthenet wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can that possibly be the case if it's becoming more, not less, standards compliant and performant?! Additionally, it even manages to outperform Blink in certain use cases / benchmarks, especially after the last major update or so. It might not be Apple's bread and butter like Blink is for Google, but I see no obvious signs of WebKit dying, though I'm open to proof to the contrary.

PWA, wepb, fullscreen support, intersection observers... the list is very long. And I'm not counting the basic bugs they never solved.

I recently lost 2 days troubleshooting an iOS 13 Safari bug: It just froze, when it got certain html. Wasn't possible to connect a debugger. Never seen that in a browser before.

FF, Chrome: all fine, page rendered correctly.

(I had to bisection-comment out half the html page and so on, until I found out what made Safari freeze. The problem: Radio buttons in separate divs but not wrapped in separate forms, killed Safari.)

Post reply on HN