561–570 of 639 posts
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80% of world's customers are on Android. There are countries with 0% market share for iOS.
This lawsuit is taking place in the United States just like most of my business. It doesn’t matter what’s happening in the rest of the world.
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Android is better, but far from acceptable. Alternative app stores cannot install and update apps in the background. Without root that is – which Google also fights against.
To be honest, it seems like a really bad idea to give third-party app installers root access to your phone though...
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To be honest, it seems like a really bad idea to give third-party app installers root access to your phone though...
You do it with Epic Game Store or Steam on Windows... why would it be any different here?
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Internet Explorer was already ubiquitous at that point. The iPhone was not ubiquitous when the App Store was released. The iPhone become so widely used because of the popularity of the App Store. The 30% cut was there from the very start, and people were fine with it. It's only now that people are turning around and complaining that a platform that was never open to begin with, is not open enough.
> The iPhone was not ubiquitous when the App Store was released. But it is ubiquitous now. As of last month, the iphone now has 52.4% of the US market. > The 30% cut was there from the very start, and people were fine with it. Anticompetitive behavior become illegal when a company has enough market power. > It's only now that people are turning around and complaining Well yes, that is how anti-competitive laws work.…
The Microsoft case is completely different, in that it favored IE over other browsers based on the APIs the software was allowed access to. Apple allows all apps to access the iOS APIs and uses those same APIs to develop its own apps. Taking a 30% cut of software that Apple distributes on your behalf might be steep, but is certainly not anti-competitive. If you think it costs too much, don't pay it! Nobody is forcing you to distribute software for the iPhone. If you're lamenting that people are stupid enough to buy hardware they don't have full control over, then that speaks more of human stupidity and the fact that convenience will always win.
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It is sad they don't have rooted developer phones available. I'd switch platforms in a second if they started allowing me root on my own device.
Root access used to be a concern for me, but it became much less useful when Xposed had to enter the cat-and-mouse game against SafetyNet. And now that unlocked bootloaders can't be hidden from SafetyNet, I don't even bother with root. And because of that I've been considering just switching to the next iPhone and going all in on Apple's ecosystem.
Being able to have multiple app stores on android is also pretty good. I have an iPhone for work, and it's fine, but I don't know how people live with one. Everything wants to have ads or wants me to pay for it.
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You do it with Epic Game Store or Steam on Windows... why would it be any different here?
As far as I am aware Steam does not need administrator privileges to install third-party games. I am not sure about Epic Game Store.
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As someone that works at an Unreal Engine shop, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
OK, but please don't post a personal attack with zero information. Instead, post information with zero personal attack. Then the rest of can learn something. The problem with berating someone for being ignorant—even if they are ignorant—is that it poisons the commons. (Edit: besides, of course, it not being nice.) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Epic relies heavily on deploying Fortnite in order to test the Unreal Engine at scale. Fortnite itself is, in some sense, the test bed from which many improvements and fixes are carried back to the mainline engine. Any studio or publisher relying on the Unreal Engine to deploy to iOS or MacOS would be more or less immediately effected, especially given the volatility of Apple's APIs.
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As someone that works at an Unreal Engine shop, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
Can you explain? How was your shop targeted directly by Apple?
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You may see this as a solution, however this (non-)solution creates larger problems by itself as i have repeatedly mentioned in these comments.
I'm not convinced the problems are larger (or, at least, not that they're larger for most people; some people are seriously inconvenience by Apple's policies. I once hit a hard roadblock trying to develop something for the iPhone and had to switch to Android exclusive development; so it goes). And I think having different organizations exploring different tradeoffs in this space is a valuable thing. There are platfor…
And besides, what different organizations exploring what different tradeoffs? Right now the only practical options are Apple and Android, there aren't really that many options as to have a healthy environment and Google isn't immune to making decisions that can have an overall negative impact to the control that people have over the stuff they buy (see their Stadia console as an example and how it completely and absolutely removes any notion of control from people buying games - not even consoles, let alone PCs, feature such loss of control).
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Yeah, the cut is basically irrelevant. It's the power Apple/Google holds that's a problem.
No, it's highly relevant. Consider Spotify vs Apple music. If Spotify has to charge X + 30% to subscriber's on iPhone in order to make X then they absolutely can't compete on price if Apple simply charges X.
If users want they can create an account on Mac (or even on iOS Safari) and set up a subscription with lower fees outside the app and then use it inside the app.
People can easily use the Netflix accounts they created on their Mac on iOS with no extra charge.
What's not allowed is making an iOS app where you are shown a login screen but no way of creating an account from within inside the app, which forces you to use a separate platform to create the account. The idea is that an iPhone or iPad should be a standalone device and not require the help of another platform or device to do basic things like create an account.