Earlier quoted context omitted.
30% is an insane amount.
How much is a fair amount? Who decides that and how?
The market, through competition.
EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms
431–440 of 930 posts
Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms
#432Does anyone know if Shopify will be considered a gatekeeper? What are the qualifications for being deemed a "gatekeeper"?
Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this pre 30% or after? Also: how much does it cost to run the App Store globally? Do have the numbers?
Ya, maybe they meant this article[0]? If so, then it's 60B going to developers, and some quick math there indicates Apple only made 15B from their cut. > Apple said Monday that it paid developers $60 billion in 2021, a figure that suggests that App Store sales continue to grow at a rapid clip. 0: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/10/apple-implies-it-generated-r...
15ish billion isn’t profit. They still need to pay credit card fees, do customer service on low value transactions, actually review apps, run data centers etc.
Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not the point. "Anti-competitive practices are business or government practices that prevent or reduce competition in a market.". The point of me mentioning that Apple is not the market majority was to emphasize that even with their current positions, Apple isn't capable of effectively reducing competition in the market of electronic devices, as is already proven not by legislative bodies but the market.
Just because there is someone with more market share than you does not mean that your actions can't squeeze smaller players than you (or, more commonly for apple, squeeze players in adjacent markets. See: Spotify vs Apple Music).
True that.
"See: Spotify vs Apple Music". Considering that Google has their own streaming services and takes same 30% cut, i truly wonder why Spotify didn't address their "anticompetitive practices".
Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple's App store revenue is very substantial and likely has very low overall costs and microscopic per-unit costs relative to a hardware business like iPhone or Mac. Apple paid out $45 billion to developers in 2020 with $64 billion gross, which means they had as high as $19 billion in revenue from the app store commission alone.[1] Unfortunately Apple doesn't break out profit per category but we know that their net…
Apple annual gross profit for 2021 was $152 billion. That ~19B in 2020 is before CC fees on 64B or internal expenses. App stores have a lot of customer service and charge backs on relatively tiny purchases. Actually reviewing apps isn’t cheap either, and all the relevant IT adds even more expense. Further they upped the developers cut to between 70% and 85% from the flat 70% in 2020. So sure they might make 3-5 billi…
at 5%, cc fees would result 2.9 billion. So more like 16B in profit
Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't read the DMA/DSA, so if this is actually written out in them then I'll happily be corrected here. The way I see it, the EU probably doesn't really care if Apple keep ALL the restrictions they currently have on their App Store in actuality, as long as options exist on the platform. So the solution to allowing access to NFC hardware will probably just be Apple opening up sideloading. I personally hope that Ap…
I'm worried that apps that does not honor user's privacy would just leave App Store and have users sideload their app. Sometimes users have very little choice about whether or not to use certain phenomenal IM/social apps since everyone is using them and it would be a problem if they can now force user to sideload their unrestricted/unaudited version.
Some might try this move, but my guess is that sideloading will involve enough friction that user retention will drop and developers will be heavily disincentivized from relying on it for distribution. In particular I expect that every update will require user action to re-install the new version of every sideloaded app, which is the reason most developers don't go that route on Android today.
Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
So far everyone complaining about app lockouts have been laser-focused on phones, because they're general-purpose and thus easier to legally justify sideloading on. Nobody wants to talk about game consoles - to open them up would almost certainly require revisiting DMCA 1201[0] and removing the prohibition on circumvention tools. The US Copyright Office wouldn't entertain extending the current "mobile devices"[1] jai…
> Nobody wants to talk about game consoles They're talked about a fair bit tbh. All sorts of proposed legislature often goes to pains to say "except game consoles". The role of game consoles was brought up a fair bit in the Epic v. Apple lawsuit.
> goes to pains to say "except game consoles"
For no good reason. Both are effectively media consoles with the streaming apps available, and the xbox has a browser just the same as Apple[0], you can do your banking from it if you so choose (and some people saw that appeal a while ago[1]). The only difference is the form factor and the price point where the consoles are sold near-cost[2] - apple would throw in $500 worth of rare earth material if it meant they could keep their app store revenue model.
0: https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/hardware-network/console...
1: https://distantarcade.co.uk/online-banking-snes-1998-tran-di...
2: https://www.polygon.com/2021/2/3/22264242/playstation-5-sale...
Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wont comment much on the statement you can't actually code on an iPad, technically you can That's not coding on an iPad, since the code is not being interpreted/compiled on-device. You're right that an iPad can remote into a build server for "development", but so can a $6 Raspberry Pi.
I don't know why I should give a rat's ass what CPU is doing the work as long as the work can be done. Your point seems kind of pedantic in a world where a vast amount of code executes in the cloud or is intricately tied up with networked services so that a freestanding computer is of little value.
Hey, if that's your attitude then who am I to stop you? By your definition, the iPad is also a great device for Windows since it can RDP into Windows machines without problems. Of course, as I outlined above, that's not a very impressive superpower, but who cares! In the future, you'll own nothing and be happy: including your own hardware/software.
For me, though, having an internet connection as a prerequisite for running my software is borderline insanity. My software should compile and run locally, I shouldn't need to trust a random third-party or connect to the internet to check how my HTML renders or test a few changes to my software. But I guess that doesn't make a difference on iPad, because even if you did have a proper text editor/compiler it would phone home with OSCP anyways.
Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, it could be ugly. The GDPR is supposed to be great, but what practical impact did it have on most of us? Cookie consent dialogs everywhere .
The impact is: far fewer data breaches in the EU than before, fewer of them wiped under the carpet, security no longer seen as a cost but as an important element in the IT strategy and with a seat at the table during design, operation and decommission (and in many cases: at the C level). On the whole the change has been remarkable, the last four years have seen a sea change in how corporations look at data, security…
That all sounds pretty rosy, and my BS-meter is pegged. I think it's just as likely that the corporations have figured out how to skirt the law and get everything they wanted anyway.
> If all you associate with the GDPR is cookie consent dialogs then maybe these discussions are not for you?
You realize that you are the unique one? Most people don't care about abstract concepts of digital privacy and just hit whatever button on that dialog that makes it go away. Who knows what they're opting in to, and they don't really care.
These are definitely the sorts of things we should factor into regulation lest we continue to pave that road to hell with shiny good intentions.
Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms
#440I hope Apple turns Xcode features into a tiered pricing model to counter balance and keep developers in check. 1. Want to use the swift compiler? Pay $5000 per year per user (pretty competitively priced if you compare it to the MATLAB Compiler) 2. Want to click any of the “Services” buttons to enable “Siri” etc in your app? $100 per user per year 3. Want to log and instrument your iOS app in production? $1000 per dev…
> Institutionalized 3p developers should be treated like adversaries
The weird part about your statement here, is that you bring up a statement about 3rd party developers doing bad things, and yet the solutions you gave do nothing except for take extra money from those 3rd parties and gives that money to Apple.
If you actually cared about stopping all these bad actions, why didn't you suggest an action that gives Apple zero dollars, and prevents these bad things from happening?
I am all for both helping customers, and preventing monopoly app stores. How about we solve all of this, by making sure app developers do not have to pay Apple anything, while also ensuring that app developers follow basic user privacy requirements?