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Epic says Apple will reinstate developer account

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Re: Epic says Apple will reinstate developer account

#481

Post by freedomben »

mulmen wrote: post #448
freedomben wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it harm trust in Apple's brand? From what I can gather, people who already love and trust Apple want them to do this. They view the status quo as better, and would likely lose trust if Apple didn't fight this as much as possible.

I love my Apple products. I think the walled garden improves my experience on the device. I do want Apple to exert control over the platform. But I also believe they are fallible and the app store is anti-competitive. I think some competition in the browser and app store space on iOS would be good for everyone, including Apple. They need to be humbled occasionally. I definitely think less of Apple based on their acti…

Interesting, thank you. That seems an extremely reasonable position to me

Definitely don't feel obligated to answer, but may I ask what country or region you're from? And if you do any ios or Mac development?

Re: Epic says Apple will reinstate developer account

#482

Post by freedomben »

tpmoney wrote: post #471
freedomben wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really think Apple is just going to abandon everything it believes in and trash their brand in a race to the bottom? If there's one company I don't expect that from, it's Apple. They may have highly dubious ethics but they are damn good at business and marketing, and I would be utterly shocked if they don't position themselves as the safe, privacy-friendly official app store. For people who don't enable side-load…

It's not whether Apple will, it's the other developers that you might not have a choice to interact with. Sure, in the tech space, we're all imagining the great open source on iOS revolution. Gamers are anticipating their Fortnite. And I'm sure Facebook is anticipating not having to ask for permission to hoover up all your personal data. Sure you don't need facebook, but if you want to be using WhatsApp to communicat…

That would certainly be an interesting turn of events if major apps like Facebook or Whatsapp decided to d-list from the app store and require their own store. Given Apple's current heavy fees and disincentives to do that, I'm guessing epic is probably the only company that will. I think a lot of people would refuse to install an alternative app store to get most apps.

But most of all, I look at Android where alternative app stores are possible with essentially no cost, and even with Amazon's enormous resources behind it, they could not get an alternative app store to catch on. I can't think of any reason why it would be different on iOS, so ultimately I suppose I expect this to go nowhere and a few years from now there will be the epic game store and the main app store and everything for nearly everybody will just be on the app store like it is now. The alternative stores will just have the apps that Apple wouldn't approve, like porn apps or privacy invasive, etc

Re: Epic says Apple will reinstate developer account

#483

Post by RetpolineDrama »

mulmen wrote: post #478
summerlight wrote: post #346

It feels like the initial ban decision was driven by some high level exec (probably Phil Schiller)? If it was happened to be reviewed carefully by lawyers and public relations, they cannot really ban Epic so quickly. There are too many uncertainties and if you do something wrong, that puts government relations at huge risk. Typical employees cannot be held accountable for such decisions, not even low tier VP.

If a VP is "low tier" then isn't calling them a VP at all just title inflation? At what point is a person responsible for the consequences of their actions regardless of intent?

A large company has a ton of VPs. They're really not that special at scale, VPs don't fly private etc.

Re: Epic says Apple will reinstate developer account

#484

Post by RetpolineDrama »

freedomben wrote: post #438
mulmen wrote: post #372

Apple believes this is an existential threat and they are fighting against it as hard as they can. But is this a self-fulfilling prophecy? These actions come with a cost. This gives Epic visibility and it harms trust in Apple’s brand. How do they balance these costs against the perceived threat?

Does it harm trust in Apple's brand? From what I can gather, people who already love and trust Apple want them to do this. They view the status quo as better, and would likely lose trust if Apple didn't fight this as much as possible.

>From what I can gather,

You're almost certainly listening to loud voices online, who do not reflect majority opinion

Re: Epic says Apple will reinstate developer account

#485

Post by smoldesu »

dylan604 wrote: post #469
smoldesu wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of Apple's problem is that they're expected to vendor support for third-party stuff. Who accelerates Pytorch or ONNX for Apple silicon, if not Apple? They've done an okay job of that so far, but their flagship library is diverging pretty far from industry demand. At best, CoreML is a slightly funkier Tensorflow - at worst, it's a single-platform model cemetery. No matter what road they take, they have to keep in…

> an unwinnable fight when you're selling to datacenter customers. didn't Apple pretty much throw in the towel in this market simply by choice of form factor for their computers? The sheer desperation of their users wanting a device in this space is shown in the "creative" ways to mount their offerings in a rack. all of the user friendly things they've done by shrinking the footprint, making them silent, etc are all…

I mostly agree, which is why I question their strategy of even "competing" at all. The existence of CoreML feels strictly obligatory, as if the existence of Pytorch and Tensorflow spurned FOMO from the C-suites. It's not terrible, but it's also pretty pointless when the competing libraries do more things, faster.

Users, developers, and probably Apple too would benefit from just using the prior art. I'd go as far as to argue Apple can't thread the AI needle without embracing community contributions. The field simply moves too fast to ship "AI Siri" and call it a day.

> The sheer desperation of their users wanting a device in this space is shown in the "creative" ways to mount their offerings in a rack.

Well you and I both know that nobody is doing that to beat AWS on hosting costs. It's a novelty, and the utility beyond that is restricted to the few processes that require MacOS in some arbitrary way. If we're being honest with ourselves, any muppet with a power drill and enough 1U rails can rackmount a Mac Mini.

Re: Epic says Apple will reinstate developer account

#486

Post by mulmen »

freedomben wrote: post #481
mulmen wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love my Apple products. I think the walled garden improves my experience on the device. I do want Apple to exert control over the platform. But I also believe they are fallible and the app store is anti-competitive. I think some competition in the browser and app store space on iOS would be good for everyone, including Apple. They need to be humbled occasionally. I definitely think less of Apple based on their acti…

Interesting, thank you. That seems an extremely reasonable position to me Definitely don't feel obligated to answer, but may I ask what country or region you're from? And if you do any ios or Mac development?

I live in Seattle, WA. I use a MacBook professionally as a data engineer but I do not develop anything for the Mac or iOS ecosystems.

Re: Epic says Apple will reinstate developer account

#487

Post by fragmede »

amluto wrote: post #389
johnnyanmac wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other titans tried, they all failed to capture. Blackberry lagged for too long and Microsoft simply lacked the network effects since early advertisement was based on how large the app stores were. The only solace is that you can modify Android to the point where there's almost no Google interference whatsoever. But of course some apps choose to rely on that (e.g. Banking).maybe one day Apple will begrudgingly get to…

> Microsoft simply lacked the network effects MS beat Apple to market by a considerable margin. Windows Mobile substantially predates the iPhone, and it was actually usable. (I had one of their flagship devices.) But MS’s OS concept was incoherent, their UI was laggy, their web browser was unbearably slow despite arguably superior hardware, their form factor was not snazzy. And, unlike Apple, they utterly failed at m…

> Also, Apple out their foot down against carrier nonsense

This is the main point, not the "also". Apple's revolution was actually getting it in the hands of real life consumers who paid for cell phone plans. The tech was already there with blackberry, but you had to have business to afford it. Yes, the original iPhone itself was a technical marvel, but it would have been a dead fish if it wasn't for the at& t deal that came out as part of it.

Re: Epic says Apple will reinstate developer account

#488

Post by idle_zealot »

Dalewyn wrote: post #441
overgard wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What then would be sufficient? Or are you saying it's simply OK for Apple to ban a major company from their app store? Before you say that, keep in mind that Apple has over 50% of smartphone market share -- they aren't "just another company", should they really be able to decide for that many people that they're not allowed to use Epic's product? Also I should point out that there's a significant difference between b…

Business is an at-will arrangement, at least in the free parts of the world. If Apple straight up doesn't want to do business with Epic and can even point to prior breaches and violations of terms as justification, more power to them. Remember the classic and often seen disclaimer: "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone." >versus breaking a ToS that's forced upon you. Epic wasn't forced to sign anything.

> If Apple straight up doesn't want to do business with Epic and can even point to prior breaches and violations of terms as justification, more power to them.

This would be true, if Apple hadn't positioned themselves as gatekeeper to running software on a significant portion of the world's personal computers. If Apple wants full say over who they do business with all it has to do is allow its users to install software distributed by parties they do not do business with.

Re: Epic says Apple will reinstate developer account

#489

Post by Aldo_MX »

Aldo_MX wrote: post #212
throwaway14356 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want an iphone but if they want to end the industry i cant buy one

Then buy 51% of shares, do a hostile takeover and stop their anti-competitive madness before it is too late. You don't need to do radical changes, just small actions like do not steal the tips students send to teachers. Going full-goblin mode and demanding 30% of all the money that moves through a phone is what is destroying Apple.

To people confused about "students tipping teachers", this is the context:

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/21/in-a-reversal-apple-is-now...

Re: Epic says Apple will reinstate developer account

#490

Post by idle_zealot »

sangnoir wrote: post #401
bevekspldnw wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely! This all about market competition which may both spur new technologies and lower prices for consumers. The entire point of DMA is to make sure platforms can’t use lock in to prevent others from joining the market for digital goods and services. What terrifies Apple isn’t Fortnite, it’s that Epic will make a *better* AppStore.

I hope the folk at Valve have been busy working on this - Steam for iOS and Vision Pro could be great!

VisionOS is not consider a gatekeeper my the DMA, and despite the platform supporting it Valve has made no effort to expand their game store to Android. It is doubtful that they will work on an iOS game distribution platform.
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