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Apple terminates Epic Games developer account, calling it a 'threat' to iOS

techcrunch.com

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Re: Apple terminates Epic Games developer account, calling it a 'threat' to iOS

#831

Post by fennecbutt »

dwaite wrote: post #721
zmmmmm wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They create dedicated hardware designed to excel at gaming and then sell it at or near cost. In a very real sense they create the market that games producers sell into, and the business model is explicitly centered around those software sales. They participate in marketing, branding, etc. There's a genuine holistic value exchange that happens. Apple's value exchange is almost negative. They invest nothing in gaming a…

> They create dedicated hardware designed to excel at gaming and then sell it at or near cost. In a very real sense they create the market that games producers sell into, and the business model is explicitly centered around those software sales. So like Apple releasing the iPhone, increasing graphics performance by double-digit percentages consistently year after year? > They participate in marketing, branding, etc.…

Apple make a huge profit on the iPhone, they make back R&D costs and then some, just from hardware sale. The same cannot be said for the game console industry. Don't be disingenuous.

Re: Apple terminates Epic Games developer account, calling it a 'threat' to iOS

#832

Post by raincole »

hizanberg wrote: post #18

If I had a Customer that spent years relentlessly complaining about my Company, I know I wouldn't want to have them as a Customer. It does present an interesting question on whether a Company can be forced to have a bad actor as a Customer, I guess this will be decided in the lawsuits to come.

Are you serious? So you think it's okay for Unity to terminate my dev account because I complain about Unity on hacker news?

(Replace Unity with Windows, Photoshop or whatever software people constantly complain about.)

Re: Apple terminates Epic Games developer account, calling it a 'threat' to iOS

#833

Post by fennecbutt »

password4321 wrote: post #773
zmmmmm wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Epic doesn't want those users. It is not asking for any placement in the app store. It just wants it's own users who have iPhones to be able to access its software which it will funnel to them through their own channel. Apple contributes nothing to cultivate the gaming market overall. No marketing, no investment, no PR, no subsidation of the hardware etc. Apple simply gets in the way, making it harder, adding restric…

> Apple contributes nothing to cultivate the gaming market overall. https://www.apple.com/apple-arcade/

Lmao, that's an Ad for Apple. It has nothing to do with supporting the gaming industry itself.

Re: Apple terminates Epic Games developer account, calling it a 'threat' to iOS

#834

Post by nozzlegear »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #117
ergonaught wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More likely, Apple needs to withdraw entirely from the EU and see what happens.

What will happen if they exit the EU? They will loose more revenue and tank their stock and Tim Apple will get the boot ad EU users will move to Samsungs, Pixels and Nokias and life will go on. You're acting like the EU is some poor country in the outback and not their second biggest market after the US. Or better yet, we fork Android and have a non-Google EU-only appstore similar to Huawei's Andorid fork OS and apps…

> Of course, then Google will go bitch about it to "daddy", and the US will probably start a trade war with the EU.

If Google can do this, certainly Apple can do it too. Biden doesn’t strike me as having much appetite for a trade war with the EU (he famously has a lot of soft diplomacy skills instead), but if Trump were reelected? Maybe that’s something Apple’s holding out for, who knows. Wild speculation on my part.

Re: Apple terminates Epic Games developer account, calling it a 'threat' to iOS

#835

Post by JimDabell »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #69
mrtksn wrote: post #45

I wonder why Apple doesn't open up their platforms to have everything best on their devices instead of fighting and agonising developers and governments. Yes yes, the commission is nice but they might be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. I mean, Apple is amazingly good in some areas but in some other areas their products are used only because they don't give a choice and they intent to keep it this way. Th…

Steve hated industry standards. The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash. Every iphone user was reminded daily about how kneecapped it is when they can't pull up the web site for the restaursnt to check hours or call up for a reservation. That kind of life experience was his entire focus and his showpiece product failed utterly at it. And…

> Steve hated industry standards.

> The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash.

This is wildly inaccurate. Flash was never anywhere near that popular and it wasn’t an industry standard. The industry standards were HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and sites that used those were way more common than sites that ran on Flash. We’re not talking a lot more common, we’re talking at least 30–40x as common. Flash-only sites were an annoying but small minority.

The iPhone was the first phone with excellent support for the HTML/CSS/JavaScript industry standards. It literally changed the web development industry it was that good. In 2007, mobile sites tended to sit on m.example.com separate from the main site, and use WAP/WML. The “really good” ones had a severely cut back plain HTML version. None used Flash, that wasn’t even a factor on mobile at all.

Then along comes the iPhone with Mobile Safari. Practically overnight, people were asking for “iPhone-compatible” websites to be built, which were really just normal websites with CSS media queries to offer a mobile-friendly layout. That’s what Steve Jobs was talking about when he was describing a “desktop-class web browser” in his keynote speech.

And because WebKit was open-source, all the other smartphones started using it and got the same capabilities. In the space of a year or two, the mobile web transformed from something virtually nobody wanted to something useful and fun – all using industry standard HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

Ignoring the fact that Flash was terrible quality, which other people have responded to, that whole era of the iPhone is practically defined by Steve Jobs betting hard on industry standards instead of Flash and other proprietary stuff.

Re: Apple terminates Epic Games developer account, calling it a 'threat' to iOS

#836

Post by nozzlegear »

hu3 wrote: post #506
sidewndr46 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so if I set up my own app store with nothing but apps designed to scam people, Apple has to allow me to do it?

App Store is already rampant with scams so nothing new under the sun. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/06/apple-a... https://mashable.com/article/apple-mac-app-store-scam-forces... https://tech.hindustantimes.com/tech/news/84-dangerous-scam-...

This doesn’t answer the question though.

Re: Apple terminates Epic Games developer account, calling it a 'threat' to iOS

#838

Post by int_19h »

letsdothisagain wrote: post #781
Gormo wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps a better alternative would be to stop anthropomorphising abstractions, and not try to weirdly attribute intentionality, independent agency, or sociopathy to the same thing we're acknowledging is incapable of conscience because it isn't a person. Corporations are organizational models employed by humans in pursuit of human motivations. They are not entities unto themselves. Everything is humans, all the way do…

Corporate personhood means that legally they are. If we stripped that away and let the board of governors go to jail for doing blatantly illegal stuff, then they might stop being sociopathic. I'd also like a pony.

No, they'd still be sociopathic. They'd do the absolute minimum they have to do under the law, and no more than that - exactly as a sociopath would if watched by someone with the ability to hurt them.

Conscience is fundamentally a trait that requires some kind of physical personhood - an actual self-identity with empathy attached to it. Corporations, being pure legal fiction, have neither.

This is why it is imperative to keep them as small and toothless as we possibly can as a society, even beyond issues with monopolies.

Re: Apple terminates Epic Games developer account, calling it a 'threat' to iOS

#839

Post by Spivak »

hizanberg wrote: post #18

If I had a Customer that spent years relentlessly complaining about my Company, I know I wouldn't want to have them as a Customer. It does present an interesting question on whether a Company can be forced to have a bad actor as a Customer, I guess this will be decided in the lawsuits to come.

It's not even that, if I was Apple I wouldn't want to have them as a customer simply to deny them standing for their constant lawsuits. If the two companies have absolutely no business relationship at all, ties completely severed then it's a lot harder to demonstrate harm. All you could really sue about is that they won't do business with you.

I'm actually surprised it's not SOP to stop doing business with people who sue you after the lawsuit ends. I mean you took the nuclear option.

Re: Apple terminates Epic Games developer account, calling it a 'threat' to iOS

#840

Post by scotty79 »

hizanberg wrote: post #18

If I had a Customer that spent years relentlessly complaining about my Company, I know I wouldn't want to have them as a Customer. It does present an interesting question on whether a Company can be forced to have a bad actor as a Customer, I guess this will be decided in the lawsuits to come.

Things look a bit different if you are one of two for example electric utility companies in the country.

You can't deny someone service just because they said mean thing about you.

Companies should be forced to service law abiding customers.

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