Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes

Undismissable full-screen modal that forces me to get all cookies? Not gonna read it mate. You would expect an advocacy group to try and get their message out...

It refutes your claim that developers will end up having to support alternate app stores or risk losing on market share. Despite the potential for greater revenue on the Amazon Appstore, developers don't seem to be flocking to it.

People seem to be buying into Epic's own claims of self-importance. They may be the ones to have finally advanced grievances against the App Store to the lawsuit, but they do not- nor should they- have the ability to frame the entire discussion. Their standards for openness are debatable.

So, let’s apply this same logic to accessibility. Let’s say the government says “devices must have voice over functionality”. Ok, great. Apple puts that as an option, and we’re done.

The same applies for if the government said “you have a right to install apps of your choice”. Apple adds a setting in the settings menu. You still get your locked down device by default, and much like blind people, people who care about controlling their device are given that option, too.

What you’re arguing is akin to saying, “I’m not blind, so Apple shouldn’t ever even have a Voice Over option, because it’s not my preference, even if it’s just in the settings”.

There’s a false dichotomy - Apple can still keep it locked down by default. You still get your device just as safe and sound. And much like accessibility settings, most people wouldn’t bother to find the setting, and if they did, they would have a big warning (and of course Apple could have another big warning on every install, as well as keep all their sand boxing and permissions access rules active).

There’s no loser here. If grandma digs deep into the settings and ignores multiple warnings, it seems she is proficient enough to take on the risk. Forcing blind people to not have any voice over because grandma may accidentally turn it on and have a bad outcome is a weak argument.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I do appreciate that in the Apple ecosystem, "I'm not the product". There is a level of trust with their products and services that I do feel thankful for and will continue to pay for it. I do not want a different app store. I do not want to have apps direct access to the fundamental iOS services. Don't get me wrong, I really like a lot of the companies that have formed this coalition but I don't think their ask is right. I cannot honestly read about the impact to democracy, primarily because we are unable to define and protect what is private data and what is public, and then agree to what is being asked for by this coalition of partners.

However they promise to safeguard the data, I don't think they have a sound business model / sound business principles / a long enough pedigree of protecting user data for me to trust them. I also see what all of this is about - just a redistribution of the pot of money. This is not about anti-competitiveness, this is not about an Apple Tax hurting consumers (https://www.theverge.com/21445923/platform-fees-apps-games-b...)

I honestly hope that if Apple does lose the anti-trust case, that they split the iPhone into one that allows these non-Apple stores and services and another that offers a Apple managed ecosystem.

I for sure will chose the one that is governed by Apple.

>Not having choices is a bad situation. I would be surprised if you thought otherwise.

really? I completely disagree, let me illustrate. I don't have much choice of toilet paper when I go to the bathroom, especially in a public restroom. Theres usually only one dispenser, but somehow nobody cares, no one is asking the government to regulate for every Walmart in the country to offer dispensers for every manufacturer, or to regulate residential construction so that every bathroom has one of those industrial size dispensers (or space to install one!) so homeowners can use the jumbo rolls seen in public restrooms. But let's play pretend and imagine if every time you went to use a public restroom there were 8 different toilet papers in the stall. What benefit would that serve, and how would it be a better situation vs the "bad situation" of no choice in toilet paper? Sure, its a bad situation for Charmin as the only toilet paper offered at thousands of Walmarts in the US is probably some cheap Marathon or Georgia-Pacific product, but is it really a social responsibility to make sure that every public restroom has a selection of toilet papers? I would be surprised if you thought that choice would be good here. Given my assumption, why is it not a social responsibility to demand toilet paper choice, and how is toilet paper choice different than app store choice? Serious question, because they seem about equivalent to me.

Moreover, I detest this type of pointless choice in most areas of my life because it is an absolute waste of my time and mental resources. Choice is good for macro economic reasons, not social reasons, and sometimes its not even good for micro economic reasons[1]. It allows for competition in a marketplace, driving down prices as a typical consequence. However competition is also typically a waste of resources, whether it's the consumer's time or engineering costs for duplicate/redundant products/factories/supply chains, and it can certainly lead to lower consumer satisfaction.

Your links are from a developer's point of view, but like it or not developers are businesses, and Apple and the government don't exist to serve them, they exist to serve everyone(or in Apple's case their shareholders and by extension everyone who can afford an iPhone), developers are a small minority of that everyone. It sucks for those developers, sure, but business is rough as a rule, and I find this whole "but the app developers" like a bad joke. I'd be interested in an example of another cottage industry like app development that got some sort of regulation on stores similar to this. Honestly it seems if we look at precedent in the economy, usually this sort of intervention is anti-consumer; the dealership model for car sales drives car prices up 10% [2], for example.

I think small developers should be fearful of this lobby. App development could be a lot more regulated, considering the amount of personal information on a phone and the importance of them in modern life, it seems crazy that the production of eggs is so much more tightly regulated than the production of phone applications. I could probably bounce back from getting salmonella in a month or less, but if all the information on my iphone got stolen and used maliciously it would take me years to recover my identity, if I ever did. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the next type of thing that this lobby went after. Let's create a government body to do randomized security audits on smart phone applications, with arcane and pointless rules. Seriously, check out the laws in the US on the sale and farming of eggs and then tell me you want to let big business get the government involved in regulating apps.

[1]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1016/j.jcps.2014.... [2]https://www.mercatus.org/publications/regulation/auto-franch...