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EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

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Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#901

Post by caramelcustard »

justinclift wrote: post #602
caramelcustard wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that the definition of "anti competitive practices" is beyond stretched at this point, it's safe to say that those very practices are one of the reasons iOS is profitable for developers: they don't need to worry about piracy as much as they do on Android, because Apple learned the key lessons of phone manufacturers of the past.

> ... one of the reasons iOS is profitable for developers. Is it profitable for many developers? Was under the impression that making decent money was possible years ago, but in recent years it's not real profitable for the vast majority of devs.

For those who still serve "premium" apps it is (e.g gaming or industry specific applications.).

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#902

Post by caramelcustard »

lenkite wrote: post #764
Bud wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone needs a tutorial on what "monopoly" means. Controlling app distribution solely within your own platform is not a monopoly. You might wish it were. You might not like it; you might want it changed. But that doesn't magically mean you can call it a monopoly. It's not a monopoly.

If you open a market in the city, prevent any others from opening a market in the city, force all sellers to pay 10-30% to you, force all product makers to comply to your dictates about what can be sold or get kicked out then it's an effective and abusive monopoly. Thankfully the EU in their wisdom has decided that Apple has abused their dominant position and we don't need to agree with your definition.

Except iOS devices aren't "markets in the city". It's a good thing that you decided to pick that as an example for this comparison (even though it's a bad example) as you have (on accident, i presume) contradicted yourself in a spectacular way. See, the aformentioned market is in...well, "the city" and chances are that that market is regulated by the city council/county laws/the laws of the country the market is in. The city provides infrastructure for the market as well as customers, perhaps some advertising...you get the idea. Hm, it seems that in that relationship, while AppStore is sure a market, the city that the market belongs to is...Apple? Whoops.

I hope that the wise EU is also going to decide that European car manufacturers and their infotainment systems are "abusing" their dominant position in their respective markets of manufacturer and model specific systems! Or that non-European companies should be able to provide "alternative software" to multi-billion euro manufacturing lines of European mega-manufacturers with the same disregard for any potential consequences, just to avoid any sort of "anti-consumer" behaviour. I sure hope so!!!(couldn't care less)

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#903

Post by makeitdouble »

kmeisthax wrote: post #460
nradov wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Denying warranty claims for that reason would already be illegal under existing laws in most developed countries.

Yes, but there's few entities out there actually enforcing these kinds of laws. For example, if you ever use the manufacturer-sanctioned bootloader unlock on a Samsung phone, that blows a fuse in the phone that says "my warranty is void". Samsung refuses to service phones that have ever had their bootloaders unlocked, regardless of what was actually done to them. As far as I'm aware nobody has bothered to sue Samsung…

This had me thinking. This might be a weird take, but if nobody was bothered enough to file an official complaint against Samsung, and have it reviewed and pushed through the process, is it a significant issue in the first place ?

(Basically, I am making a "if a tree falls in a forest" argument)

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#904

Post by caramelcustard »

account42 wrote: post #822
caramelcustard wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure 30% commission is not an Apple-exclusive thing. Google Play, consoles and Steam have the same rate.

Steam's commision has also been (IMO rightfully) criticised but the situation is hardly the same because Steam doesn't (and can't) prevent other stores or direct app installations on the platforms it runs on so that 30% is much more justifiable as something the "free" market is willing to pay for the services Steam provides. Apple on the other hand doesn't even let anyone compete. (Of course, Steam still greatly bene…

They can't, because the platform it runs on doesn't belong to anyone in particular. It's absolutely not the same situation that Apple/console makers have.

No they shouldn't. Steam wasn't the first in digital distribution of videogames as some consoles offered similar system way before Steam. An argument can be made that "on demand" gaming options of the past can be considered the Steam of the past. And enforcing regulations for no reasons other than regulating on companies that are widely recognized as pioneers of their respective industries is the very definition of "punishing success".

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#905

Post by dijit »

smoldesu wrote: post #438
seti0Cha wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

IDK, the iPad feels to me like it was designed specifically to be a thin client.

Lots of input capabilities and low processing (yes, I know it has the M1 now, but that feels more like a supply chain thing than a product thing).

I wouldn't get mad if the Sun Ray[0] didn't allow me to compile code natively.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#906

Post by emn13 »

samatman wrote: post #656
majewsky wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many people actually register that there are two buttons at the bottom? It's very obvious to power-users like us since we're used to [ Accept ] Cancel at this point, but I can only imagine the borderless design for the secondary button originating from a dark pattern.

The entire iOS operating system works that way now. I dislike it. I think buttons should be buttons. But this isn't a special case, so unless you consider every instance of two buttons looking this way a dark pattern, this one isn't either.

That pattern may be reasonable for "Are you sure" kind of requests for actions that the user explicitly wanted - because then there really is a sane default; we expect the user didn't click on some button by accident. But it's not reasonable to portray questions that are asking the user to agree to something they did not explicitly want; that's just trying to trick the user to make the annoying popup go away by clicking the big button. There's no sane default here, so none should be preselected (and ideally, the layout of confirmation dialogs and agreement dialogs would not be identical in the first place).

It's a dark pattern, and I really doubt it's accidental.

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#907

Post by emn13 »

shuckles wrote: post #711
emn13 wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The linked article lists a bunch of those. Most of that bullet-point list of required or conversely prohibited behaviors apply to Apple. And all of those are justified only by self-interest. Incidentally, that doesn't mean the alternative has to be the wild west - that's a false dichotomy. Controlling access is fine; it's simply not fine that it's the platform that holds exclusive sway, especially if the answer is "o…

This thread is about Apple’s privacy rules for App Store developers, and it’s not plainly obvious which items in the EU proposal enhance those protections at all, but the person I was responding to was insinuating that those protections have self-serving flaws.

Is that distinction really helpful? The App Store has _rules_ some of which relate to user privacy, and some of which are in a grey area, and some of which don't relate to user privacy. Is needing to use Apple's payment provider a privacy protection? If you squint just right it might be.

I'm sure there are some subset of app-store rules that taken by themselves, without the context of the other app-store rules are not self-serving. But that doesn't mean the rules overall are - and that's the reality that competitors need to deal with. Unlike apple, they can't change the restrictions they need to comply with. Both in actually immediate sense, and in a more meta process sense Apple has an unfair advantage they can and do exploit to extract tolls from the interactions between users and third-party providers.

The fact that some of those protections also protect user privacy to the extent the user stays in Apple's walled garden is almost akin to blackmail: rather than trying to protect the user's privacy regardless, they've tied the user's privacy to the Apple ecosystem. It's all or nothing. Would be a shame if anything happened to that privacy of yours - are you sure you want to leave our walled garden? There aren't any other curated gardens (we made sure of that!), and your device unfortunately has no way to safely and conveniently opt in to risks worth taking, so it's our way, or the wild west out there... oh, and if you really want the wild west, we'll take your hardware too, you'll need to use android, and we use obvious UI patents to ensure it's inconvenient to switch a lot.

It doesn't take an evil, machiavellian plan to end up in a situation in which the rules are so slanted in Apple's favor. All it takes are lots of tiny by themselves reasonable features - but steps that are always tested against Apple's interests, since those get a voice in the decision-making process, and rarely tested against third-party interests. It may well be that Apple was well intentioned in its privacy rules, and that those rules truly do protect the user - yet still have those rules stifle competition in a way that also harms the user down the line.

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#908

Post by nottorp »

nottorp wrote: post #834
Karunamon wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to everything the others mentioned already, anything that's not a web browser that might at some point show NSFW content. Applications like Discord and Tumblr been forced to make ux-degrading changes to comply with this Victorian-era prudishness. (and before you mention an application you know of that doesn't have this problem, remember that Apple's enforcement and reading of the rules compares unfavorabl…

Yeah, if as a consequence what you can do iOS/Mac OS stops being censored according to US puritan values, that would be a plus.

Haha speaking of Apple stuff being Disney-ified, my phone stopped charging wirelessly. The solution to that is to restart it, but Apple hid that option under 3 layers of menus and I can never find it, so I asked Siri to "turn off this f--ing phone". She said "That's not nice" and did not turn off the phone.

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#909

Post by utucuro »

walterbell wrote: post #810
account42 wrote: post #790

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that will work in practice but you have no way of knowing if it does. There is nothing really preventing Apple from sneaking tracking data through the notification channel (not to mention that centralized notifications are already a juicy opportunity to profile and track users) or retaining the data and sending it off when you do OS updates. Once a company has shown willingness to go against your interest you c…

All true, but less bad than competitors Google and Microsoft, which do not offer comparable segmentation of notifications and telemetry. Since notifications are user-visible, one can audit for unexpected, non-notification traffic to Apple's advertised notification-only IPs.

Apple colluded with Google when it suited them before, I cannot see a reason to trust them any more than Google.

Re: EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

#910

Post by sburud »

efields wrote: post #243

Let’s start the list of UX that could be built if apple followed these rules starting tomorrow. What will be available to me that I don’t have now, and how will it benefit me, Joe P. Consumer? Keep in mind, I have no idea what a software developer does all day — I just want my email to work and these internet pop ups to be easier to close. What am I missing out on?

A lot of media consumption apps, from Kindle to my local TV provider would offer the option to purchase content!

Copy-paste from where the "Buy now" button in the Kindle app should have been: "This app does not support purchasing of this content. Digital books and comics purchased from Amazon are available to read in the Kindle app."

After Google started following Apple in requiring the 30% cut, several local media companies have sent out emails saying we have to use their website or whatever to purchase content from now on.

This legislation would reverse that, and I'm really looking forward to renting movies in five seconds instead of five minutes again.

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