401–408 of 408 posts
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I'm sure any number of Christian lunatics would love to remake America into Y'all-Qaeda.
You can take your classist “Y’all Qaeda” and shove it. If you want to critique politics that’s fine, but please understand what you’re spewing is dehumanizing propaganda implying more than half of the country are dumb hicks.
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Just because most consumers outside the US use android instead of apple doesn't mean we shouldn't try to help protect hundreds of millions of users. There is a large enough portion of market along with all the businesses built around catering to this market that are unfairly being taken advantage of.
You know one of the techniques to rip off consumers is to hide in their transaction log. Get them to sign up for a subscription and help them forget they’re paying, that way they’re less likely to cancel. Apple handles this quite well, having all your subscriptions in one place easily canceled and non of this shenanigans about losing access if you cancel mid subscription. Have you app store social justice warrior typ…
Hey there friend, I really don't appreciate your assumptions and negative tone. I never once mentioned alternative app stores as they have nothing to do with what I am talking about.
I believe a 30% fee for other developers to innovate on their platform ultimately bad for everyone but Apple. Either the developer eats the cost and thus has less resources to work with or they offload this cost onto their consumers which results in artificially high costs for the consumer, the only one that truly benefits here is Apple.
Here you have a market used by hundreds of millions of people controlled by one company with practically zero government oversight. Even if we take the optimistic view that no one in Apple is currently taking advantage of these people (unlikely as that may be) what protections do we have should Apple ever start taking advantage? (Let a fox into the hey pen as it were) To me it's ridiculous that consumers don't have any meaningful financial protections in this market given the sheer size, scale, and daily activity it sees.
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Isn’t that how competition works? Ideally, no company becomes so large that they don’t feel the pressure to remain competitive. Of course there’s countless examples of big players stagnating and becoming rent collectors with a captive market. But, I see that as all the more reason to have competition. I think it’s rather optimistic to believe the Epic Games Store going to overtake Steam. If that’s the criteria for ra…
> way to sell and players a way to purchase games cheaper. If you believe because the cut is less on epic store (assuming a developer uses all the methods available to a game developer to reduce it) that they then charge less on the epic store you are mistaken. Prices are the same between the two stores.
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I’m guessing you don’t know much about religion? Christianity and islam are quite a bit different, the latter literally convinving people to convert by sword. And here I thought HN got rid of bigoted comments like this.
> the latter literally convinving people to convert by sword Unlike such famously gentle Christian coercions like the Spanish Inquisition or the Crusades. :P
Which is my point, your average non-religious person does not understand the difference between religions. Be it Islam vs Christianity, or Christianity vs Catholicism.
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> way to sell and players a way to purchase games cheaper. If you believe because the cut is less on epic store (assuming a developer uses all the methods available to a game developer to reduce it) that they then charge less on the epic store you are mistaken. Prices are the same between the two stores.
I'm fairly certain I'm not mistaken. The MSRP may be the same, sure. Some games, however, are routinely cheaper on sale on EGS than they are on Steam. "Alan Wake 2" in particular has been cheaper on EGS and came with "Alan Wake Remastered". EGS has been giving away free games since its inception. They have issued coupons with pretty large discounts ($15 or 33% off) that can be used on just about any game, effectively…
We’re in a promotional period for EGS right now. The free games and coupons won’t continue.
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You know one of the techniques to rip off consumers is to hide in their transaction log. Get them to sign up for a subscription and help them forget they’re paying, that way they’re less likely to cancel. Apple handles this quite well, having all your subscriptions in one place easily canceled and non of this shenanigans about losing access if you cancel mid subscription. Have you app store social justice warrior typ…
>Have you app store social justice warrior types thought of this and how to protect consumers against that type of scumbaggery? Or is it more likely you don’t care about the consumer at all and just want alternative app stores for your own desires? Hey there friend, I really don't appreciate your assumptions and negative tone. I never once mentioned alternative app stores as they have nothing to do with what I am tal…
Then how is Apple to continue development of the platform? Is your point that Apple should spend the money developing something hundreds of millions of people use, literally inventing smart phones as we know it, and they shouldn’t be able to make money on it to maintain it?
> what protections do we have should Apple ever start taking advantage?
In general, it’s illegal to punish someone or something for an action they have not taken. You are preemptively attempting to regulate with no damages. If this were a lawsuit, it’d be thrown out and used as the new definition of frivolous.
Now answer my question. Who do you trust more to be pro consumer? The company with the proven track record and a great reputation to lose or “Random Shady Company, LLC, were totes not gonna scam you”?
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>Have you app store social justice warrior types thought of this and how to protect consumers against that type of scumbaggery? Or is it more likely you don’t care about the consumer at all and just want alternative app stores for your own desires? Hey there friend, I really don't appreciate your assumptions and negative tone. I never once mentioned alternative app stores as they have nothing to do with what I am tal…
> I believe a 30% fee for other developers to innovate on their platform ultimately bad for everyone but Apple. Then how is Apple to continue development of the platform? Is your point that Apple should spend the money developing something hundreds of millions of people use, literally inventing smart phones as we know it, and they shouldn’t be able to make money on it to maintain it? > what protections do we have sho…
That is not my point, no. I'm saying that apple should only be allowed to make a healthy profit off of the hundreds of millions of people that use/develop on their platform. Should apple be able to profit off people using their platform absolutely, but they shouldn't be allowed to price gouge their customers and developers.
>In general, it’s illegal to punish someone or something for an action they have not taken. You are preemptively attempting to regulate with no damages. If this were a lawsuit, it’d be thrown out and used as the new definition of frivolous.
I was being generous by taking the position that apple has "never" been taken advantage of, but you're right in that it would be frivolous. So let us both take off our rose-tinted glasses and see if Apple has ever done anything to warrant regulation...
- Walter Peters v. Apple Inc (where they were sued for deceptive advertising about subscription management service you mentioned in your orignal post)
- United States v. Apple Inc. (where Apple was found guilty for price fixing e-books)
- France v. Apple Inc (Where they were found guilty of quietly sending out planned obstinate updates that destroyed older iphone battery life)
- FTC v. Apple (Where Apple was payed out 35 million to refund parents due to all of the in-app purchases apple allowed children to make without notifying the cardholder within a reasonable time frame)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litigation_involving_Apple_Inc
Hopefully these several lawsuits where apple has already been found guilty of taken advantage of their consumers is a convincing argument that apple consumers deserve to be protected from being taken advantage of.
>Who do you trust more to be pro consumer? The company with the proven track record and a great reputation to lose or “Random Shady Company, LLC, were totes not gonna scam you”?
You're begging the question here as I'd like to have both options and be able to make my decision on a case-by-case basis. But if you insist that I answer, I'd personally use whichever one provides the smoothest checkout experience w/ a reasonable cost. (I'm not going to pay $5 more because apple's checkout is easier but I'd probably pay an extra $1 if it meant not having to leave the app.)
But again, what the heck does this have to do with my post. I'm beginning to feel like a broken record, I genuinely do not care if apple forces all payments to go through them or requires all apps to be downloaded from their store nor am I arguing that this shouldn't be the case. 3rd party app stores/payment solutions are not a required belief for me to be concerned with Apple price gouging developers that innovate on their platform. Even if they magically made both these options available right now, the reality is that 99% of users would likely still use their store and thus cause for concern.
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> the latter literally convinving people to convert by sword Unlike such famously gentle Christian coercions like the Spanish Inquisition or the Crusades. :P
That was Catholicism, not Christianity. Which is my point, your average non-religious person does not understand the difference between religions. Be it Islam vs Christianity, or Christianity vs Catholicism.
If you're going to tar all of Islam by their worst members ("the latter literally convinving people to convert by sword"), you can't object if someone applies the same logic to Christianity.
> Christianity vs Catholicism
Catholics aren't Christian? Sounds exactly like some of evangelical nuts I grew up around. Most of the world views Christianity as a big umbrella, with Catholics and Protestants being two of the major flavors. (Somehow I highly doubt you're Eastern Orthodox.)
> your average non-religious person does not understand the difference between religions
And apparently, neither do you, my evangelical wingnut in Christ.