I wish the United States would follow the EU on this. It's insane that 1 company has near complete control over what software can and cannot be published, and they get to take a tax on all software sold. Absolutely insane. Obviously there's web, Android, Windows, Linux, gaming consoles, and smart tvs, so there are some work-arounds to avoid the evil empire, but most consumers here in the United States use iPhones and probably have no idea that Apple is taxing all of the app developers and exercising complete editorial control over all software published for the iPhone. Do you think consumers know that Apple literally reviews all software companies products and then decide whether they will allow that company or product to exist? Even worse, its not even high level executives making these decisions, it's $20 an hour employees on their App Review Board making these decisions to kill entire companies.
Go back in time 20 years and tell someone that the most popular personal computer taxes every transaction that runs on it for 30% and has absolute control over what software runs on it including banning any programs it doesn't like, and they'd look at you like you were crazy. And then be like, "Fucking Bill Gates! How'd he pull that off?"
>and has absolute control over what software runs on it including banning any programs it doesn't like
Don't forget taking the idea from an app developer, implementing it themselves, and then banning the app from the developer that came up with the idea. Apple has done this so many times, and it's completely abusive.
> The phenomenon of Apple releasing a feature that supplants or obviates third-party software is so well known that being Sherlocked has become an accepted term used within the Mac and iOS developer community.
To be clear I don’t think this is an acceptable practice, but the concept wouldn’t be completely unfamiliar because Nintendo did this with the NES and their lockout chip/seal of quality system
The differences are scale and utility. A company that has control of such a large market gets different rules because of the power they weld. Apple's market is 1-2 billion people and affects 100,000+ companies. Nintendo's market is 2-3 orders of magnitude less and the number of companies affected is similarly much much smaller.
I still think if you own a device you should be able to run whatever software you want on it, even if it's a game console from a somewhat smaller (but still huge) company
>Apple's market is 1-2 billion people and affects 100,000+ companies.
It's a bit disingenuous to use customer base and the number of people who develop for the platform as a excuse to bring legal action against the company. Customers know what they were getting when they bought the phones and companies knew the rules when they chose to develop for the platform.
I don't think users are fully aware of the extent these platforms control the devices. The same thing happened with cigarettes; eventually, the government required a warning. Perhaps a similar approach is necessary here.
I agree. Though to be fair Nintendo's NES is a gaming console (not that they are right, just contrasting the use-cases).
Consider Apple's very own Mac - another general-purpose computing device like the iPhone, only in a different form-factor.
Surely Mac developers must be tripping over themselves to throw 30% of their total revenue at Apple, as reward for their laser focus on privacy and security and for developing a nanny-platform that makes their users feel warm and fuzzy inside?
Surely Mac users must not be allowed to do business with literally any entity in the world without involving Apple as the gatekeeper?
You mean distributing .mob files on xda-developers and needing to speak with carriers to distribute your app?
There’s a reason most developers moved in droves to Apple ecosystem for amazing APIs, software and hardware, abandoned Symbian/blackberry/etc and had no issues with the 30% fee since they instantly got market access to millions of consumers.
30% was never an issue to begin with. People just feel today that everyone should get access to a marketplace with billion users for free, often forgetting what it took to build this market in the first place.
The confiscation of 30% of all revenue earned online has always been an issue for any company and developer here on planet Earth.
There are countless useful apps and companies that will never serve people's needs because it is not financially feasible to run a business where your total revenue is confiscated to the tune of 30%.
It has always been an issue. It's just better than the status quo before the iPhone.
> People just feel today that everyone should get access to a marketplace with billion users for free, often forgetting what it took to build this market in the first place.
1. It's not for free. Users (and developers) pay for it when they buy the iPhone. iPhone revenue is 3x Apple's R&D expenses. That is, iPhone sales alone cover the R&D on every single of Apple's products: from iPhone and iOS to Macs and MacOS, AppleTV, HomePods, Vision Pro, all of Apple's software running on those devices etc.
2. This market was built in no small part by the actual developers you now so snidely dismiss. iPhone is nothing without the app ecosystem.
What Apple does is bad but they don't tax 30% of every transaction. Apple isn't taking a 30% of your Uber or DoorDash, they charge 30% for sales made
on their platform for digital goods and services redeemed on that platform.
I think it's harder to argue that Sony shouldn't be allowed to take a cut of game sales on the PS5 outside of "well we all decided collectively to make that illegal because we don't like it." And honestly that's plenty enough for legislation but it's not going to be without consequences because Apple will extract their pound of flesh somewhere, can't have profits go down.
> The commission says a fee for such matchmaking is justifiable but what Apple charges goes “beyond what is strictly necessary”.
The EU commission is a hair away from just telling Apple what they're allowed to charge which I don't love. Either how Apple extracts fees is legal and how much is up to the market, or it isn't. Saying "it's legal as long as the percent is small enough" is silly.
> What Apple does is bad but they don't tax 30% of every transaction. Apple isn't taking a 30% of your Uber or DoorDash, they charge 30% for sales made on their platform for digital goods and services redeemed on that platform.
You're mischaracterising the situation. Apple taxes 30% of all transactions made on apps other than exempt transactions. The food and tangible services you mentioned are exempt categories. Apple takes a 30% cut of all sales of digital goods and services transacted on apps on their platform, regardless of whether the goods are "redeemed on that platform" (whatever that means). Of course Apple has built a byzantine maze of carve-outs, exemptions and counter-exemptions that muddy the waters and give them great power if you're a small developer without the resources to fight them for your rights.
Subscriptions are 15% after the first year. Apps from small developers also pay 15%. Given the prevalence of subscriptions and the large number of indies on the app store, I really doubt 30% is close to the average. At any rate, 15% is still sizable, but it doesn't help the conversation if we are substantially overstating the fee percentage.
Rather than going in to details why that doesn't matter, with relation to monopolistic power, I'll just let you extrapolate your reasoning to the following:
The EU population is quite literally a minority of the world population.
I think it's funny people argue this when Google already does extract a massive pound of flesh from web purchases and uses Chrome to push "the web" where they control the market.
I have to pay the Apple tax to reach my customers where they are, iOS.
I have to pay the Google tax to reach my customers where they are, the web dominated by Doubleclick and Google search.
Do you care that a tech company is extracting huge sums from digital markets or do you just care how? Does it make a lick of difference that with ad spend it feels like you're buying something or when you put ads on your site you never see the money they took off the top?
> Do you care that a tech company is extracting huge sums from digital markets or do you just care how?
Everyone should care how! The how is the important part.
If there are alternative ways to access something then people are free to compete of product. That's a huge difference because competition is generally consumer friendly.
And the EU should look into Google's unfair practices from its domination of web search and ads. I suspect it will.
If Google starting charging site owners 30% of their revenues to index their website on Google Search, and there was no possible alternative, the EU would probably be looking at them pretty harshly too.
Love that, I fully expect "pound of flesh" to soon have an entry in the dictionary for "an unspecified amount of flesh" to annoy language prescriptivists.
That was the case 5-10 years ago, but many e-commerce businesses are surviving solely on TikTok and Instagram ads. Look at most of the Google Shopping results for small items, all Amazon and Temu who have bigger pockets.
> I think it's harder to argue that Sony shouldn't be allowed to take a cut of game sales on the PS5
I agree, it's hard to argue that. Sony created a narrow-purpose platform (gaming + media) and is taking a cut for offering 3rd party games there.
It's not a general purpose computer designed to be your main communication device and your key to connect you to any type of service or appliance in your world.
Sony didn't sell best-in-class TVs, then used their dominating position to demand revenue-share from broadcasters, then integrated a gaming console for the same price to crush console competitors, then created a custom plug and partnered with building companies that their plug shall be in all living rooms, then launched a watch which would only work if you also have their TVs, then started a bank and mandated that all products promoted on any TV channel must only be payable via their payment service,...
...and then when a commission started setting boundaries on its grip over the market, started complaining how the commission is preventing competition, how only Sony can ensure a secure living room and safe TV-experience, and started weaponizing its customers (with the custom sockets, watches and wallets all on Sony) against their own elected regulatory body...
Apple didn't develop a "general purpose computer" either, they developed a cell phone. They entered into an established product market, with a product that was even more locked down than the current competition (remember, Palm Treos and Blackberrys?). Even "dumb" phones had apps and games (though if you think Apple's fees are ridiculous, you should look up the cost of developing a bejeweled clone for your old sony ericson, "Qalcom BREW" would be a contemporary starting point). Within this market, 3 different competitors (Palm, Microsoft and Google) also threw their hat into the ring, with far more open platforms. Palm and Microsoft eventually gave up, and Google is the majority player with the fully open platform. Yet Apple is somehow so dominant that we're crafting entirely new rules around them doing the same thing they and many other highly integrated hardware/software manufacturer has done for ages. Why?
Because like it or not, it has become a general purpose computer. For millions it’s their primary (for some: only) gateway to banking, payments, education, government services, personal relations, keeping in touch with family, navigation, healthcare and emergency services.
Up next: digital ID and (possibly) online voting.
Those things are all pretty important for a society, right? In a sense, they are society.
Accordingly, a couple powerful entities controlling all those things ought to expect oversight from said society. It’s not hard to understand.
So no, Apple is not doing “the same thing” as other device manufacturers have “done for ages”. Not even close.
They are a victim of their own success in a way, but their shareholders have been rewarded handsomely. They’re hardly a victim like you’re proposing.
It feels to me like the problem here is the government and large institutions only providing access via a single manufacturers single platform, rather than the existence of the platform. That is to say, if education, government services, health care, emergency services, ID and voting are all only accessible via having an iPhone, the solution to that is to mandate that those things be accessible via other options too, not to mandate opening up the iPhone ecosystem. Aside from the fact that the government needs no new laws to actually make its services available on open platforms, there's also the "single point of failure" problem, and the "government services only available to people with $400+ electronic toys with expensive monthly subscription services" problem. Regulating banking vs phone app store markets might be more of a toss up, but it seems like again the "single point of failure" problem should argue much more strongly in favor of forcing banks to not limit access to iPhones, rather than forcing iPhones to change to be something the iPhone consumers don't actually want.
No, the problem is that a critical mass of a market is dependant on a single operator of that market, and that operator is not providing equal access to it but considers itself the owner AND a privileged player there which everyone has to pay to compete with.
The audience of iPhone users are that market.
-
"You have something to sell on my market? Sure, here are the fees, the rules and I take a cut of all your sales"
--> "My data shows that people like what you're selling on my market, so I studied all details, decided to build it myself, provide it for less/free and compete with you. Thanks for doing the risky work of proving that potential."
"Feel free to stay if you like, your continued success will continue to educate/fund my competing product. If you leave, you have to end business with all customers, as I took measures that they are ONLY able to visit MY market"
"Thanks for doing the risky work of proving that potential"
When people realise that Apple hasn't innovated any new technology pretty much ever (certainly for at least the last 30 years).
They always wait until something is proven in the market and then buy their way to it & lock the competition out. "Face ID" = Kinect, "we invented multi-touch" = blatant lie, vision= pre-existing AR/VR...oh sorry "spatial computing" Etc.
>You have something to sell on my market? Sure, here are the fees, the rules and I take a cut of all your sales
>My data shows that people like what you're selling on my market, so I studied all details, decided to build it myself, provide it for less/free and compete with you. Thanks for doing the risky work of proving that potential.
>Feel free to stay if you like, your continued success will continue to educate/fund my competing product. If you leave, you have to end business with all customers, as I took measures that they are ONLY able to visit MY market
None of those things really affect the banking, government services, education, ID, health etc apps that the OP was concerned with. They're not selling their apps or even selling any services via their app (except for services which are incidentally forbidden from using IAP in the first place which means the 30% fees don't apply:
>3.1.3(e) Goods and Services Outside of the App: If your app enables people to purchase physical goods or services that will be consumed outside of the app, you must use purchase methods other than in-app purchase to collect those payments, such as Apple Pay or traditional credit card entry.
Nor are they competing with Apple for their applications. At a stretch, you could argue that the banking apps sort of kind of compete with Apple wallet in the credit card space, but like I said, it's a bit of a stretch.
My comment about government services, banking, education and so on was in response to your general assertion that an iPhone is no different than other electronic devices and therefore shouldn't be treated differently by regulators. For the reasons I listed, that's kind of ridiculous. Smartphones are just as important to modern economies/societies as the automobile, air travel, public libraries or news organizations (at least in my opinion).
Accordingly... unlike an XBox (which only provides entertainment) smartphones need to have well considered legislation that maximizes the overall benefit to society (while still maintaining a financial incentive for innovation). There's a lot at stake.
So, I wasn't trying to cite specific examples where Apple has fallen short in these areas (though I'm aware of a few), I was making a generalization about the relative importance of the smartphone to modern economies and society. It's just not the same thing as other gadgets (even if the technology is similar). Not even close.
> None of those things really affect the banking, government services, education, ID, health etc apps that the OP was concerned with.
Of course they do. All those entities have to follow terms and conditions of Apple to reach THEIR customers/citizens, requiring them to share crucial information to Apple, the sole gatekeeper with a vested interest to maximize user-profit.
> At a stretch, you could argue that the banking apps sort of kind of compete with Apple wallet in the credit card space, but like I said, it's a bit of a stretch.
No stretch at all. The market operator also offers financial services directly, while having privileged access (as preloaded app) and a superior level of information (via user profiling) about the users needs and behavior. Other financial service providers have the choice between paying revenue-share to Apple to be integrated with Apple Pay, or have their services only surface if the customer explicitly searches for their app (all while a competitor may pay the rev-share and have higher integration/visibility from the market provider)
You raise good points about making sure that all those services are always available through multiple means, but the argument I'm making isn't that all those services are limited to a smartphone - they aren't... I think everything I mentioned (except for emergency calls) are available in a web browser.
The argument is simply; the smartphone is the platform we have chosen because it makes our lives so much better. It does its job so well that it has become a critical part of the economic and social fabric of the country. Thus we need to make sure it's regulated (up to a point, obviously) so that the public's needs and that of the larger economy are met, while still maintaining the financial incentive for smartphone platforms to innovate.
Consider; it's possible to walk to work/banks/government offices for the majority of people but vehicles are convenient and time-efficient so that's what people choose. Accordingly, society accommodates and regulates vehicle use. Same thing for radio and television in the past... it was possible to get information and entertainment elsewhere, but people chose those mediums because they were better than the alternatives. It's because of the popularity of cars/radio/television that those things deserved regulation, nothing else.
I guess my question is what part of the various laws being passed is addressing some "public need" that's not currently being met for these apps, or by the entire rest of the market place. I've said it before but every single thing every advocate of regulating Apple's iPhone and App Store is already available on Android. And unlike in the 90's when Windows literally dominated the market, even in the markets where Apple is doing the strongest, at best they have half of the market. Which means every single "necessary" application and resource is equally present on both iOS and Android.
So what is the need here? Who isn't able to access something they need access to and how is forcing Apple to open up their hardware and software platform the correct solution to that problem? And I'm asking honestly here, are there any actual necessary services that are only available on iOS? Not more convenient on iOS, unavailable anywhere else. If we accept the arguments against iOS at face value, it seems impossible for there to even be any necessary services that are more convenient on iOS. The major arguments are Apple is too restrictive, they prevent apps from doing things, they prevent PWAs from working, they disallow integrations that developers want. By all accounts, the iOS experience should be measurably worse for users in every single way for any 3rd party service. If removing Apple's restrictions was important to consumers, if it was actually harming them in ways that they didn't think was worth the benefits those same restrictions provide, Android should be mopping the floor with Apple. But they're not. And none of the arguments I've heard for regulating Apple have been because of failures of iOS users to be able to access critical government and economic resources.
The closest arguments that could be made are about things like blocking access to certain VPNs or other "subversive" applications in places like China and Russia. But of course, the proper way to regulate that would be to mandate wide open consumer access to strong end to end encryption that governments can not control or have access to. But mandating that sort of thing would be admitting that even "western" governments are untrustworthy and might need to be subverted. It would be mandating access to law breaking tools, which the EU and the US are not eager to do even here, let alone eager to step into that political battle on the world stage.
> Apple didn't develop a "general purpose computer" either, they developed a cell phone.
Yeah, like Sony did in the analogy above. They became best-in-class
in TV and then started to dictate the rules for reaching every living room with their TV in, made trillions of dollars and then used that position to take control of other industries.
To my knowledge none of the big three consoles allow you to install anything you want on them. They're "walled gardens" just as badly as Apple's ecosystem.
Game consoles are not general computing devices. Apple has aggressively and repeatedly marketed iOS devices as being for general-purpose computing. (Remember the "what's a computer" ads?)
If Apple wants to claim their devices are computer replacements, they should be regulated like it.
Proceeds to site one ad from 2018. Hyperbole really isn’t necessary here. And marketing determining how a product should be regulated is a sure fire way to encourage companies to get around regulation by changing your their marketing.
Prepare for the PS6 to cost $1200 then. The hardware is sold at a loss, which I think justifies them being able to recoup their costs through selling software.
Honestly I don’t know why people think they should be able to publish their software on anything anyways. I can see the iOS/android argument at least because they’re ubiquitous. But there is nothing wrong with how game consoles currently work. It’s a win for Sony/M$/Nintendo, game developers, and consumers. If it wasn’t, then games would only get released on PC (which already allows for exactly what you seem to be advocating for)
I'm less sure about Microsoft, my understanding is that the Series X is profitable and the Series S is a loss leader. However, both of them can be put into a developer mode and you can run your own (or other people's) code.
I mean, you're basically describing the mini-pc form factor. I'm not sure exactly where the steamdeck lies but the last couple of years these laptop CPU based systems have been pretty amazing for what they pack.
The one big (to me) advantage of the Steam Deck is that it's a static system, this way many games have a preset specifically for the deck, usually automatically applied on boot.
No need to spend hours adjusting settings and scouring the internet for That One Setting that will make it run smoothly.
Even CP2077 runs great out of the box on it - and it's nigh-unplayable on PS4 level hardware.
Sure, go for it. Price points won't change, consumers are only willing to pay so much for game systems, so we'll see just how close to the FUD price the market will get. I doubt prices will change much if at all.
Sure, but that being said the 3DS, Wii, Wii U and Nintendo Switch all have enormous homebrew communities. It's nowhere near Sony's OtherOS levels of support, but the board does have functioning CPU/GPU drivers and can run pretty much "anything" you'd expect from an Aarch64 Linux target.
It's more of a technical nuance in the Switch's case, but homebrew on Nintendo consoles is a time-honored tradition.
While there are more consumer friendly ways to do it sure, I don’t see anything illegal or wrong here. You’re buying their hardware, with the software licensing understanding that comes with it - if you don’t like the terms you don’t buy the hardware.
There isn’t a moral calculus that is or needs to be involved here, it’s a simple flat “don’t buy their product if you don’t like it”. If enough people cared and did so, they’d change very quickly.
Apple isn’t a monopoly, there are plenty of alternatives that might suit your needs better.
This so tiring. The issue is not about whether you as a consumer can buy a different phone. The issues is about whether you, as a company, can do business with half the world with one company gating access to those customers. No company should have that level of power. That's why its called the Digital "Markets" Act. It's not some consumer choice act.
Neither Apple, nor Google, nor anyone else, should be able to control so many businesses. It's the same reason Booking.com is in trouble. they're so big, they affect nearly every hotel in the world. That's too much power over too many business.
Like a lot of anti-monopoly laws, the harmed party is not the consumer but other businesses.
No, you cannot simply refuse to give Apple their 30% (unless you are yourself big enough to negotiate an exemption; including waiving a 30% fee of your own for Apple's apps on your platforms) if you want access to their huge and very lucrative market.
Microsoft lost an anti-monopoly case because they bundled a free browser with Windows. Forcing your competitors to pay 30% and thus have higher costs and prices than your own competing services is a much more straightforward violation.
> It seems parasitic in a kind of way to demand that right.
Third parties bring value to the platform. Try to remove all the third parties from the Apple Store and see how people react.
Apple's sales of iPhones benefit from the third parties, but they use their dominant position to take a huge cut of what the third parties sell.
One could say: either Apple gives access to third parties in a decent way, or they just don't. Apple needs the third parties (otherwise they would not give them access in the first place, obviously), so they should give them decent conditions.
It's parasitic because if you want to participate in the market, you need to use their platform.
Their value is ideally keeping scammers out, but they don't do a great job of that and part of the reason they don't is because they also profit when the scammers do. For example, gambling for kids (loot boxes) is OK. The other part of the value is having a central place to list and promote apps, but also there they're double dipping as you need to pay them to get eyes to your app.
Their value absolutely does not equal 30% of your revenue.
People who are demanding benefits for free (ie selling your products in somebody else's store), are parasites. Those who cooperate, or set up their own shop if they don't want to cooperate, are not.
Let me know when I can start selling stuff on Amazon without giving them a cut. Or put up a stand in the local supermarket where I sell my produce directly to customers.
If App developers made iOS such a profitable market, why haven't they made Android an equally profitable market? There's more users, more liberty, more potential money to be made.
What it comes down to is whether it's better to get a big piece of a small pie or a smaller piece of a big pie. Apple offers a bigger pie of user spending for developers, while cutting out a bigger chunk for themselves from that pie.
> But consumer software spending was something very niche before Apple expanded the market.
LOLNO :-)
The web is and was a major consumer "software" platform. We just don't have raw numbers for it because it's so distributed, my guess is that it's still bigger than these walled gardens combined.
The web would be even bigger if said walled garden makers wouldn't c**block it by not investing in progressive web apps & co (while they are investing like crazy in their walled gardens, of course).
30 years ago was 1994. Most people did not even have a personal computer. Consumer software was a super niche product.
Subscription online software for consumers was not a big market until pretty recently. As a matter of fact, from the top of my head I cannot think of any such software that is very popular for consumers. Or do you refer to subscription entertainment?
Apple does not hinder any developer from selling their software on competing devices or operating systems. I don't see how an honest person could claim that they're doing anything anti-competitive. I see how the EU politicians can claim that, because they are dishonest and expected to support parasitic actions.
"I don't see how an honest person could claim that they're doing anything anti-competitive."
I, on the other side, very much see it, given how huge the market share of Apple is.
I would be with you if Apple had 5 per cent of the smartphone market. Nevertheless, their very size makes any of their actions that restricts freedoms of their customes at least suspicious of being anti-competitive.
> Apple does not hinder any developer from selling their software on competing devices or operating systems
But Apple does hinder every developer from selling their software on Apple devices without using Apple's mandatory software distribution service. Which most of us can agree, is relatively monopolistic in nature and creates a captive market of Apple customers ripe for abuse.
No, I don't think "most of us can agree" that a manufacturer setting the conditions for distributing plugins for the hardware and software system that they produce and sell is "monopolistic" in nature. That's why we're having these discussions in the first place.
Every store, market place and mall has conditions for being able to sell your wares in their space. Every single one of them will prevent you from using their space if you fail to meet those conditions. Malls will kick you out if you close your store during mall hours, denying you the ability to sell to those mall customers. eBay will shut your account if you try to get buyers to pay you outside of eBay, denying you the ability to sell to those eBay customers. Your local grocery store won't be allowing you to set up in the middle of the aisle with a laser light show selling your home made cookies, denying you the ability to sell to the grocery story customers. Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony will all very happily terminate your access to their markets for failure to comply with their development programs, denying you the ability to sell to those console customers.
> Every store, market place and mall has conditions for being able to sell your wares in their space.
But it's not a store. It's software; Apple charges developers to use their developer tools and then additionally requires you to pay the surcharges in their mandatory App Store. It is a racket that specifically relies on Apple's sole presence as a distributor on iOS and iPadOS; otherwise it will fail, as MacOS has shown us.
> Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony will all very happily terminate your access to their markets for failure to comply with their development programs
And every single one of those companies competes under fair pretenses with their publishing partners. Apple doesn't. That's why they're singled-out.
>But it's not a store. It's software; Apple ... requires you to pay the surcharges in their mandatory App Store.
So is it a store or not?
>And every single one of those companies competes under fair pretenses with their publishing partners. Apple doesn't. That's why they're singled-out.
How so? What is Apple doing that those companies (Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony) don't do for their hardware platforms? The certainly "[charge] developers to use their developer tools and then additionally [require developers] to pay the surcharged in their mandatory [store]." So what's different? How are they competing under fair pretenses (a phrase which I admit I'm having trouble parsing the meaning of), but Apple isn't?
Apple have managed to get themselves into a monopolistic position. Actually it's a duopoly. It doesn't matter if there are alternatives to Android and iPhone, those are the majority of devices to something like 99%. If you want to access that marketplace you need to go through one of those 2 gatekeepers and they have similar rules. This is the exact kind of situation that monopoly laws are there to address. Apple have been hugely successful. No-one is proposing to take the success away from them, but they are taking away some of apple and Google's ability to control the market they've captured.
When money enters the conversation, honesty usually goes out. I would say that most people, almost all people, will bend things in a dishonest way when they think they can have the slightest monetary benefit.
Here, the perceived benefit is cheaper apps for their cellphone. So we call Apple a monopoly, though they clearly aren't. And if they are, then why shouldn't McDonalds be forced to let anybody sell fast food inside their locations?
To be clear, I am not an Apple user and do not have a dog in this fight. But it is abundantly clear to me that iPhone users cannot easily swap between competitors the same way that McDonalds customers can eat every meal at a different restaurant if they so wish (in fact, McDonald's is usually right next door to numerous competitors, making this maximally easy).
Apple has an entrenched audience, as is unfortunately inherent with operating system and platforms, and that comes with certain legal responsibilities. If Apple doesn't like those responsibilities, they should get out of the OS/platform space.
But this is the same argument you have no doubt seen many times, which you dismiss as "dishonesty". That is your prerogative, but most onlookers are going to see this as an attempt to get out of having to present a convincing argument, most likely because you can't.
Perhaps you should inform yourself by reading the DMA. You won't find in it anything about Apple or anyone else hindering developers from selling elsewhere.
What the EU is regulating is fair competition for very large platforms, defined as having 45m or more users. These benefit from network effects and may be operated in ways that inhibit competition.
Do you also believe that John D. Rockefeller never did anything anti-competitive? lol
If Apple wants to sell in the EU it will have to abide by EU rules decided by democratically elected politicians. The US has proven incapable and or unwilling to regulate big tech. The EU has been slow and won't always get it right first time but it's trying. This is why EU citizens have e.f., privacy rights Americans don't, why broadband costs way less in the EU than the US etc.
If parasitism is what interests you I suggest directing your attention to rentier capitalism and the never ending upward flow of wealth to the 1% and the extent to which US politicians are owned by billionaires.
I like their product. If I buy it: do I own it or do I rent it from them? Obvious next question: If I own it, do I have right to install whatever I want?
I like a product from Ford, if I own it I have the right to install whatever I want right? Except Ford has no obligation to make their products compatible with other car makers. If I wanted to LS-swap an F150 it would require a lot of technical knowledge, time, and help but it can be done. You can develop your own jailbreaks for iOS it just requires a lot of technical knowledge, time, and help.
1) In fact, there are laws that prevent Ford from taking too much advantage of the situation, such as how they wouldn't be allowed to deny warranty service on a car with third party parts.
2) You make it sound as if it weee merely technically complicated to jailbreak the device, whereas the truth is the only reason it is possible at all is because Apple has thankfully sometimes made mistakes in their security. There is no reason to believe that this should be possible at all.
Then, these companies go further: they attempt to weaponize the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions against users to claim it is actually criminally illegal to take advantage of such implementation mistakes.
The problem here isn't Apple having to go out of their way to do anything... the situation is the exact opposite: Apple has gone super far out of their way to PREVENT people using third-party parts or modified software, and that can be, should be, and in some cases already is illegal.
I think the analogy would be Ford demanding a 30% each time you put oil, gas, or pay a toll road. Their (Apple’s) stance then would be “somebody is making money out of the existence of my creation, hence I am entitled to a share”
On second thoughts, I better delete this soon in case BMW gets some ideas
I think a better analogy would be swapping tires instead of an engine. Engine swaps are rare, most people understand there are physical complications to using an engine from one car in another, even from the same manufacturer. Tire swaps are common, most people expect that if the tire is the right size you can put it on your car, regardless of who made it or where you got it.
The same is true for apps on a computing device. Installing new ones is common, not rare like an engine swap in a car. Most people expect that if the app is compatible with the hardware you can put it on the device, regardless of who made it or where you got it.
Ford did not go out of their way to make LS swaps particularly difficult on the F150. Apple has gone to very great lengths to make something that is VERY simple (installing software in an OS) very difficult.
Very conveniently so, because if anyone ever discovered that so-called "apps" are no different from "software" we would accidentally realize that the iPhone is in fact a computer.
A part of this issue is that said company intentionally cripples their web browser (and all browsers in their platform because they run on the same engine) to prevent progressive web apps from competing with their App Store.
This may not be the biggest issue but really grinds my gears because it holds back a whole ecosystem of possibilities.
>Obviously there's web, Android, Windows, Linux, gaming consoles, and smart tvs, so there are some work-arounds to avoid the evil empire
So obviously, effectively all other forms of computing (including by the way, Apple's own general purpose computers). But this one single OS, distributed by one single company, for two (counting the iPad) hardware platforms, which are also manufactured and distributed exclusively and only by this same single company "has near complete control over what software and and cannot be published, and [gets] to take a tax on all software sold"?
Being kind and not dismissing this as outright hyperbole of the highest order, why is this the case? I'm a fan of open source software and hardware, so the fact that this is the case seems like a MASSIVE failure of the entire computing industry at all levels. How is it a company that was famously described as "beleagured" for decades, that supposedly needed a cash infusion by Microsoft of all companies to even stay alive, that has always and famously been singularly focused on their own vision of computing and never been particularly concerned with compatibility or openness, how have they become the single dominating player in the the computing world? How have they gained "near complete control", when the platform they supposedly wield all this control from didn't even have a software store to begin with, and their conditions are as onerous on developers as they always have been? Why did developers flock to this system? Why did consumers? It's not like this is a bait and switch situation. The iPhone was NEVER an open development platform. The 70/30 split has been there from the day the app store was announced. In app purchases weren't a thing to begin with, and when they were announced they too had that same 70/30 split.
So how in the world has Apple come to dominate and why hasn't the entire rest of the computing industry managed to come up with anything close to an answer? What is it that Apple is selling to consumers and developers that make their clearly marked and publicly restrictive ecosystem to enticing when the open options are sold right next door? And how have they managed this dominance without even being the majority? Android to the best of my knowledge as more installs, so why is Apple the one controlling the market? In what other industry does the #2 player control the field?
I can only point at [1] and say that this has always been the case with domestic computing. The parking lot giving away tanks for free never did as much business as the slick salesman selling the badly-engineered sedans with the easy UI. And that was 1999.
So ultimately, I guess the conclusion is despite the amount of chatter it gets in tech circles and among high profile software developers like facebook and epic, the answer is Apple is in the position its in because it's selling what people actually want and care about.
Which then leads us to ask, why can't the open platforms sell the same thing? Unfortunately, I can only think of 2 answers to that:
1) They are technically unable to. It would appear Apple is right about the security and technical challenges, and making the trade offs they have is the only way to sell what they're selling. And no one can make enough money to fund developing both a fully open OS along with all the other benefits (security, streamlined payment systems, streamlined sync, tight platform integrations, whatever other things you think are part of Apple's "secret sauce"). Fundamentally "open platform" and "everything adheres to a single standard" are incompatible goals that can not be accomplished simultaneously.
2) They are unwilling to. Either none of the developers care, or they don't want to do the hard dirty grunt work, or none of the other players are willing to "share the glory" so to speak with their competition.
I think it's similar to what I describe as my "Kardashian Problem" - that I don't understand why the Kardashians are famous. Not their problem, obviously; they are wildly successful, rich, famous, etc. They clearly understand their market very well and know how to address it. I have no idea why their market likes them, and that means I should never try to build a mass-market product.
Tech geeks (of which I am one) don't understand what's important to non-tech-geeks. And we don't care. We're building Linux for us, and what we care about is choice, transparency, privacy, ease of configuration, etc. Clearly the general public don't give a shit about any of that, and have other priorities (e.g. does it look pretty?). So they look at Linux and see a shitshow of nasty tech, and look at Apple and see a beautiful shiny product. While we look at Linux and see a happy playground, and look at Apple and see a prison.
But how did they get people into the ecosystem to begin with? iOS has ALWAYS been this locked down. Heck it didn't even have an app store to begin with. The apps you got were what Apple decided you could have and that was it. Cell phones before the iPhone (Palm, Blackberry and even dumb phones) had some form of software market capabilities, and certainly phones after and their larger competitor (Windows Mobile, Palm again and Android respectively) have had far more open platforms. So how did Apple manage to get all the developers and users locked in when the better options were – perhaps with the brief exception of June 2007 - Sept 2008 (if you don't count Palm and Blackberry) – always there?
Additionally, how has Apple designed their ecosystem to make it "as painful as possible" to switch to a competitor? It's on the app developers whether they would charge for a replacement copy of their app on Android. Apple does nothing to prevent them from offering a "switcher" discount. All of your first party app data is syncable to your computer, and Google even offers a tool that says it can do contacts, photos, calendars, messages, apps and music. And if that's not enough, Apple will provide you with a copy of all your iCloud stored account data in the original format (for things like photos) and in standard format (for things like calendars and emails) https://support.apple.com/en-us/102208. So other than Apple themselves providing a first party tool to migrate your data directly to your new Android phone, what are they doing or not doing that qualifies as "[making] it as painful as can be to switch"
I just did that switch having been on iphone since the 6s. It is amazing how much choice there is on the Android platform. Having switched to Samsung immediately I get two software stores for a start. I'm not beholden to a single file service; Apps will integrate with multiple different options not just iCloud. I can download multiple browsers, with adblockers. I can download torrent clients without having to jailbreak.
Meanwhile I can't receive text chat integrated video above about 240p from iphone friends because Apple won't integrate with them. They're a shit company and I'll never buy their products again.
it might be easy to blame the US and expect better when they are still struggling with lobbying against tax filing nonsense that impact every working-class person.
at the same time, the EU has been selective with these cases, and has been mostly around big tech from the US. they could do this for much more, like for printers for example. i wonder if they would lobby this hard against the domestic automotive industry, with their DLC heated seats and what not.
Something that tickled me occasionally was much of my extended family assumed Apple was paying me to make the point of sale app, so restauranteurs would buy iPhones/iPads to use at their restaurant.
I have an app on the App Store and honestly the review sometimes helps me catch some pretty big bugs. I consider it free basic QA. Having said that, I don’t like the principle of having a gatekeeper either. I also don’t mind the commission they take from in app purchases as the App Store is the main distribution channel that my customers find the app, and it’s only 15% under $1m annual revenue.
The problem here is that the EU law is "whatever the bureaucrats say it is". The DMA rules are not specific enough for Apple or anyone to know a priori if a feature or product is going to cross the line. Thus Apple is now announcing new features won't immediately be available to EU customers.
We should all want more competition but I'm not convinced "because the unelected technocrat in Brussels said so" is the way to do it.
What do you mean? This is literally how Apple advertises their store: "a big part of those experiences is ensuring that the apps we offer are held to the highest standards for privacy, security, and content". Maybe you want Apple to advertise more effectively?
It depends, it's just different viewpoints, I'm glad Apple reviews all software and decides if it's worth it and a lot of action from the EU tends just to make things worse/annoying for most users, while collecting big fines for themselves.
Neither of these companies should be allowed to control both the hardware and the store. Having a duopoly here ensures that there will be little to no price competition, especially because the stores are full monopolies on their platforms, and developers have no choice but to use both to cover the full market.
I honestly don't think it's insane at all. Middlemen are everywhere, and if a government body wants to complain about taxation, glass houses...
Before iPhone and Android, it was infeasible for small-time devs to sell apps pretty much at all. The two are in hot competition still. Nintendo etc aren't in trouble cause they just stuck to closed systems. If building platforms becomes less profitable, fewer platforms will be built, which so far has been the story in the EU.
Why would the US do that? Europe has no issues when a European corporation has market dominance. It would be dumb for them to do so in a global market. Do you see any push for diversifying the european market by breaking up corporations like SAP or ASML? If anything those two have an even tighter control over their respective markets than apple could ever have over their own.
Yes, but the US or the EU could've pushed for a break up when most of its EUV research was in the US. Market dominance wasn't built overnight.
Yes, it would now be very hard to do. But that goes back to my original point, Europe does not really care about market dominance and fairness as long as European corporations are the ones dominating. As you said, if competition and market health was the objective...what ASML does is very important and shouldn't be left to a single corporation. They have complete market control over a critical part of something that's foundational to our modern economy.
But I've never heard of a single European move to do something about that. SAP also has a de facto monopoly on entire parts of business processes and administration.
Also, apple is in many ways just as important to the US government. So nobody is going to break them up, in the US at least.
I'm not making a judgement here, I'm just saying that it's weird to expect the US to shoot itself in the foot, just like it would be weird to expect Europe to do the same. For the EU, the issue is more that Apple isn't European.
> what ASML does is very important and shouldn't be left to a single corporation.
But that's not what market abuse is about. How is ASML impairing their competitors? What would breaking them up do, besides create a second ASML? You have to explain how separating ASML's IP helps the market or their customers.
> So nobody is going to break them up, in the US at least.
Didn't people say the same thing about Microsoft? "How would they get broken up over something as insignificant as Netscape?"
Microsoft wasn't seen as a strategic asset back then, and the US wasn't in a semi cold war.
In any case, I was talking about the concept of breaking up large national corporations moreso than this specific case, since the comment I was replying to was talking about how the US should start looking into breaking up Apple too.
(Even then, I also gave SAP as an example, which perfectly fits the apple modus operandi of taking advantage of their closed ecosystem to destroy competition. but in a way that even apple couldn't ever dream of. And once you get into said ecosystem, you will start using the gigantic constellation of SAP products and be locked in to the extreme. Impairing competitors would be putting it lightly. Yet, no European probe either.)
Here's some context which a lot of people, including most news media, seem to have missed:
The reason Apple is still playing games with the EC is that they're waiting on an EU Court's ruling[1] on whether Article 6 (7), the provision that mandates free of charge iOS APIs for all developers, is "constitutional" within the EU framework itself.
Most people who call out the Core Technology Fee use that provision as one of their main arguments, and it's one of their strongest, because the "free of charge" language throws away the general idea that the law doesn't want to interfere with Apple's monetization strategies. Since Apple could very well have chosen to monetize certain local API access in the past, the fact that this provision put a stop to that effectively nullifies Apple's argument (to the courts) that the law could never have meant to actually control how they make money.
The problem is that apple is going to continue malicious compliance while the EU is trying to be reasonable: "the EU hopes ongoing dialogue will lead to compliance rather than sanctions."
I think cookie dialogs are the best example of malicious compliance in tech.
Instead of just a "Reject all non-essential cookies" button, corporations went the extra mile to instead have a "Manage preferences" button which opens some slow menu with like 70 separate checkboxes, all of which are ticked by default and so you have to go through all of them manually, which then makes like 90% of the users just cave in to the dark pattern and just click "Accept all".
No law can predict all of the ways someone will try to weasel around it, regardless of whether it's something like the example above, or a company trying to maintain a walled garden.
> As part of the new investigation, the commission is examining 0.50c charge, or “core technology fee”, Apple demands every time a developer’s app is installed on a phone.
That said, while this sounds a bit like the infamous Unity Runtime Fee, if done correctly, personally I wouldn't have as much of an issue with this as others might, if it's done in a way where it never will cause a developer to go in the red: https://developer.apple.com/support/core-technology-fee/
> Instead of just a "Reject all non-essential cookies" button, corporations went the extra mile to instead have a "Manage preferences" button which opens some slow menu with like 70 separate checkboxes, all of which are ticked by default and so you have to go through all of them manually, which then makes like 90% of the users just cave in to the dark pattern and just click "Accept all".
That is not malicious compliance. That's outright non-compliance. Reject All must be as prominent as Accept All.
Guess all of the companies doing that must have missed the memo, though I guess how dire the situation is was more or less known pretty early on: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.02479
> Instead of just a "Reject all non-essential cookies" button, corporations went the extra mile to instead have a "Manage preferences" button which opens some slow menu with like 70 separate checkboxes, all of which are ticked by default and so you have to go through all of them manually, which then makes like 90% of the users just cave in to the dark pattern and just click "Accept all".
That's straight up non-compliance. The law literally says that refusal has to be as easy as accepting.
> If a company is in compliance to the law and you don’t like the outcome the problem isn’t the company it is the law.
The law isn’t the only thing that upholds a cohesive society that is nice to live in. At the very least, culture plays its own part as well. There are probably many more things
If I only cared about being legal, I would behave very differently. Just think about how far a citizen could go if they would live in full malicious compliance. One would be a nightmare to others
And despite this, some people DO insist on living just on the edge of legality. I recently had an interaction with someone declared a "vexatious litigant" in Texas. That's a legal status that requires them to get authorization from a judge before opening a new lawsuit against another party.
I prefer a world where most people don't ride the edge of legality.
An overly complex set of rules often breeds this kind of behavior; Functioning legally in a world with a practically infinite number of rules requires it. Fixing the unwanted behavior often involves making more rules… and thus a cancer is born.
Another common outcome is complete apathy for the rules. ie: nothing seems legal, why bother trying?
Please report to your local Komsomol office to collect 5 credits as a reward for upholding the right attitude against these ruthless reactionaries and hooligans. Remember to bring your credit book for the stamp.
Could anyone help me understand why this was flagged dead? Is it incorrect somehow? This is a discussion around legality, so it makes sense to keep the discussion in that context.
Apple being able to do something undesirable, in the perspective in the intent of the law, is either a "loophole" in the law, or the law doesn't actually accomplish what it was made to. Both are problems with the law. This isn't an Apple thing as much as a "anyone who will benefit in complying minimally will comply minimally". Apple today, whomever else tomorrow.
Because GP's comment mixes the concepts and who thinks what in a very "I'm just asking a question" way, while suggesting that everything not illegal is 100% fine. People don't appreciate that because they see exactly the kind of person who would operate in that malicious compliance mode.
Obviously you can't regulate every bit of behavior and this will always leave room for abusing corner cases. You have quiet hours in your neighborhood? I'll just make the maximum amount of noise every second it's allowed, forever. It's legal, it's not fine. So clearly GP's comment rubs people the wrong way enough to be flagged.
It's pretty clear from the term itself that malicious compliance is compliance or else it would have been called (malicious) noncompliance. This is what people think Apple is doing. What EU authorities believe is that Apple is not compliant with the law, perhaps for different reasons than people see as malicious compliance.
So the EU is bashing Apple for them not being compliant, while regular people are bashing Apple for the malicious compliance. The second one is perfectly fine to do even without a judge's verdict.
> What is malicious compliance? Apple is either in compliance or it isn’t.
Because funnily enough, the comment itself is kind of malicious compliance.
It has the form of polite debate, but it also feigns to not understand the parent (bad faith is a pretty simple/obvious concept and I'm sure the author gets it), which ruins the discussion. So yes, it appears reasonable that it is flagged.
From a point of argument, they're not wrong though, albeit an obvious point they're making that if loopholes exist, companies will definitely find them and take advantage, and still be in compliance because the pitfalls of said regulations weren't accounted for.
This leaves it up for debate in courts to settle those shortcomings, but it wouldn't be surprising if they found they were compliant and that the rules need adjustments.
If Apple stops servicing the EU…
…life will go on. No EU country will be “doomed” let alone “totally doomed”.
I prefer many Apple products over Android-based devices or, god forbid, any S(h)amsung crap, but the EU will continue to prosper without Apple Intelligence, iPhone Sharing or even iPhones and Macs at all. The EU is setting a precedent that every consumer would benefit from, especially if more countries would follow the lead.
Yes, the EC’s approach could be better, they’re stumbling forwards (cookie-dialogs, plastic-bottle tethered-caps,o insane E2E encryption-invalidating proposals etc etc) but I still believe the overall direction will ultimately be beneficial to many.
The purpose of the DMA is to increase competition, not directly benefit the consumer. If there is no Apple product, you don't have that product to support your application and your business.
This is strongly wishful thinking. America isn't even the top trade partner of the EU as far as goods go. Many companies would literally hold a party if Apple, or any other American companies for that matter, left the EU market.
... which makes up a small fraction of Apple's profits. About 7% [1].
Losing 7% would be "A big deal", although they'd also lose a lot of the operational costs so the overall loss may be less than that. There are several costs of doing business in the EU.
I can also see them selling more to the UK and a black-market opening up in the EU for UK phones. Again, not a huge thing but a little +ve offset.
Overall, I could see it happening, maybe, emphasis on the maybe part. I think the EU thinks it's inconceivable for Apple to exit their market. I also think Apple are very hard-headed. Make the cost/benefit balance skew too heavily in the -ve direction, and the potential of future profits stop outweighing the costs.
Personally I really hope they just do as they're told by the EU because I think it'd hit the stock, and I could do with the stock staying reasonably high in the short term, but they'd recover. Hell, they could run on cash/savings with no sales for several years at the current rate...
Of Apple were to give up on the second largest market (GDP) in the world, I think that would make their platforms a lot less attractive as a target for software makers. More of them might decide to target other platforms first.
Is it a joke? Apple is 27% of Apple revenue, profit is irrelevant as this is just finance engineering and you can put the value you want for tax reason.
>It’s unclear whether Maestri was saying that the EU accounts for 7 percent of Apple’s worldwide App Store revenue, or 7 percent of all revenue, but I suspect it doesn’t matter, and that both are around 7 percent
So... what's Apple's argument here? Do they just think the DMA was badly drafted, or do they want to strip competition law out of the EU? Or is this the same "we have a right to monetize our IP[0]" argument they used in the Epic lawsuit?
[0] Intellectual property, in the Doctorowian sense of "thing that lets us tell our competitors what to do"
The DMA was badly drafted, and it's quite protectionist. The EU does not write good tech legislation overall, because it does not understand tech industry at a cultural level, having never built out its own.
Yes obviously it’s protectionist, the whole point of the DMA is to protect the EU internal market from entities that aren’t EU state apparatus from having too much control.
I’m not entirely sure how you say the DMA is badly drafted, what do think its objectives are? It’s not a “tech law” at all, it’s a market competition law that designed to deal with the unique imbalances created by large tech companies that historical competition law hasn't adequately dealt with.
> ...it does not understand tech industry at a cultural level, having never built out its own
Consumer products are only a subset of tech. ASML, Siemens, ABB, Bosch have been tech industry bellwethers for ages. Europe is also no slouch in consumers/web/apps either (Spotify, booking.com)
Man forgets the industrial era was started in Europe. There are plenty of European tech companies behind all of the big American ones, the difference is really just the size of the market.
Face ID tech is old Kinect tech, Apple bought...an Israeli company for it (not EU, I know). But probably the biggest and most obvious example is ARM.
That it's an absolutely insane thing to do to a trading partner and calling prices "artificially low" is just "our glorious government investment their savage government trade war subsidies." Go read the whitehouse announcement, it's blatant. The best part is that is centers around IP literally proving that any country that ignores the insanity of western IP laws will outcompete. Big no no, it's the children that are wrong energy.
Absolutely do not support the US artificially limiting EV adoption by forcing prices higher to prop up a domestic auto industry that got caught with their pants down. If they're gonna sell us EVs below cost we would be stupid not to buy them all up and make them lose money. But there's the rub, they're not actually doing that, they are just able to make them cheaper.
If they're selling below cost, who's the "we" that should buy them all up? Because if it's US consumers, then the domestic auto companies could fail in the while that's happening. If it's the US government - isn't that kind of what the tariff accomplishes, without having to take ownership of a bunch of inventory?
While I think Apple's rules are ridiculous, it is pretty standard in the industry. AirBnB doesn't allow hosts to accept cash or arrange alternative payment. Amazon doesn't allow suppliers to offer direct sales to potential customers. Even Visa and Mastercard officially don't allow merchants to offer discounts for cash transactions (although many do anyway). Etc, etc. I think this should be a more general rule, no "platform" or "aggregator" should be allowed to prevent the free communication of users of their platform from arranging their deal elsewhere. Just because they met on the platform doesn't give the right to the platform to strong-arm their users into using them. The platform must compete with alternative payment methods on its own merits, such as convenience, security, etc., not by forcing people to use them just because they happen to be the matchmaker. Because this policy cements monopolies and rewards the largest incumbents.
Gotta start somewhere, going for the Trillion dollar behemoth is a good first step, in my opinion.
And let's not forget that this standard is a de facto standard, not a regulatory one. Just because things have been done in this way, it doesn't mean they should remain like this forever.
The EU is one of the few parties which can actually bring some change.
Then it should do so broadly and inclusive of actual technical expertise. It’s nitpicking fluff because Epic and Spotify are mad, and not addressing root causes.
It’s easy (and often deserved) to dunk on the trillion-dollar corporation. And regulation is good, actually. But the DMA isn’t good regulation.
I’m not sure how they could have gone broader. The EU is saying that Apple payments offering need to compete on level playing field with other payment options. I don’t really see what being “inclusive of technical expertise” would bring to the table, beyond what’s already there.
What they didn’t allow previously was adding a surcharge to credit transactions. But regulation forced them to allow that as well. So not the best example overall.
The State of MN stopped accepting certain credit cards for many DMV type activities, and now only accept ones that allow an explicit surcharge (Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex).
The difference (or at least what would be argued as a difference) is that you have no other choice with Apple (Amazon maybe in a similar situation).
If I didn't like AirBNB I could use VRBO/whatever else, or I could use both even.
I can understand Apple's cut for app developers who solely create apps and distribute them through Apple.
Where it becomes a problem is a large number of apps are just a way for the iPhone to connect to a larger product (Spotify, Basecamp, most SaaS companies), and I don't know why Apple should feel entitled to own the relationship with a businesses customers because they also use an iPhone when it's an ancillary part of the product.
> The difference (or at least what would be argued as a difference) is that you have no other choice with Apple (Amazon maybe in a similar situation).
> If I didn't like AirBNB I could use VRBO/whatever else, or I could use both even.
Read what you wrote again, and think about it. If you don't like AirBnB you can use one of the competitors, but there are no competitors to Apple? Would you consider that you might have a blind spot to something very obvious?
For AirBnB (temporary lodging), if you don't like it, typically you're only stuck with it for a few days and you can make a different choice afterwards.
Phones, for many people, are something they will use for years so they're essentially locked in a lot of the time. It's more like long term rentals, where the renter usually gets stronger protections too.
I think we're defining markets differently which is where this is debatable.
If you say that the App Store is an extension of the iPhone and you're buying into that when you buy a phone, sure I can see the argument that the App Store by default has no competitors on the iPhone and people are agreeing to that when they buy an iPhone/develop for the iPhone, and so the competition is Google (and by extension the Play store.
I just don't think we should accept the tight coupling of hardware and software distribution by default though.
Even then if you do, the strongest argument for Apple gives us a duopoly that both exhibit strong anti-competitive behaviours.
I do have some sympathy for Apple here though. When Nintendo takes tight control over distribution on the switch is that also a monopoly? When your product essentially becomes a utility though I think some form of regulation ends up being good for society as a whole.
> If you don't like AirBnB you can use one of the competitors, but there are no competitors to Apple?
There isn't enough competition. Apple is in a monopolistic market position. AirBNB isn't, at least not yet. That's a contingent fact about the current state of affairs, but I think it's true - there's a lot of pressure to be on Apple, whereas there's not much pressure to be on AirBNB.
> The effect of AirBnB on everyday life of people and the economy is in my opinion at least a thousand times larger than any effect that Apple has.
How do you figure? I'd say the effect of AirBnB is pretty much zero; they're an interchangeable provider in what's fundamentally a commoditised business. If you can't or don't want to go to an AirBnB then you go to OwnersDirect or Booking or Agoda or worst case someone's individual website, and you have a virtually identical experience. And if you're a property owner you also don't care and probably list your place on a bunch of different sites.
There are thousands of cities and towns all over the world, where short term rentals – accelerated by AirBnB – has made it impossible for young workers to afford to live where they were born. Real estate prices and rent prices are much more important in the everyday life for all of us, than all information technology combined. Unless you are a multimillionaire in tech stocks. But there aren't so many of them around.
A normal worker today in the US or Europe could if they want afford to buy all top Apple devices or equivalent PC devices, as well as every paid app on the App store. That same normal worker in the US or Europe today can never afford to buy a home, unless he/she goes into lifelong debt, or gets help from family that owns real estate.
> There are thousands of cities and towns all over the world, where short term rentals – accelerated by AirBnB – has made it impossible for young workers to afford to live where they were born.
That has very little to do with short term rentals, and even less to do with AirBnB specifically. Much like "foreign investors", it's just a convenient scapegoat when the real problem is basic supply and demand: there simply isn't enough housing to go around.
> A normal worker today in the US or Europe could if they want afford to buy all top Apple devices or equivalent PC devices, as well as every paid app on the App store. That same normal worker in the US or Europe today can never afford to buy a home, unless he/she goes into lifelong debt, or gets help from family that owns real estate.
And yet Apple's annual revenue is about 30x AirBnB's, and the numbers are similar for profit. That should tell you something about how much of the device/app market Apple controls compared to how much of the housing market AirBnB controls.
I think it has a lot to do with short term rentals, and this is how it works: When a homeowner dies, usually the heirs would go live in that home or sell it on the open market. Maybe using that money to pay off another mortgage.
Today, the heirs will instead keep the inherited home, rent it out seasonally on AirBnB to earn a little money, keep any mortgage they have on the place they live, and reap the value increase of their AirBnB unit every year. That value increase can be used as collateral for many things. In the industrialized world, your yearly salary (value increase) is much higher from earning real estate and doing nothing, than it would be from working any skilled job. AirBnB is an important piece of that whole equation, because it makes it much easier for people to hold onto extra property instead of selling it to somebody who needs a place to live. There is no shortage of housing.
> And yet Apple's annual revenue is about 30x AirBnB's
This has nothing to do with it. Real estate prices and values are much more important in the daily life of people than any consumer product such as Apple. AirBnB does not own the properties, but if you add up the value of all properties listed on AirBnB, that amount would dwarf not only Apple, but the entire stock market.
> Today, the heirs will instead keep the inherited home, rent it out seasonally on AirBnB to earn a little money, keep any mortgage they have on the place they live, and reap the value increase of their AirBnB unit every year. That value increase can be used as collateral for many things.
Money is fungible, finance people can do this kind of transformation with anything and do, all the time. Ever heard of a company or rich individual doing a sale-and-leaseback transaction? That's the same thing in reverse.
> In the industrialized world, your yearly salary (value increase) is much higher from earning real estate and doing nothing... There is no shortage of housing.
On the contrary, the shortage of housing is the underlying reality that makes all the flashy transactions on top work. Why does the value of housing keep going up? Because demand is going up and supply is staying approximately constant, or even going down. Everything else is window dressing.
> if you add up the value of all properties listed on AirBnB, that amount would dwarf not only Apple, but the entire stock market.
Maybe, but those properties are listed on a bunch of AirBnB competitors at the same time. AirBnB has very little market power over them; if they try to hike up the rates or anything they'll lose their customers. The real estate market is important. AirBnB isn't.
Difference is that AirBnB hosts can put their properties on multiple short let services, and access broadly the same market.
The same simply doesn’t apply to App on iPhone. AirBnB would only be equivalent if it was impossible for hosts to list their properties in multiple places and AirBnB customers where effective tied into the AirBnB platform where they would have do something ridiculous like change their electricity supplier to use an AirBnB competitor (because for some reason AirBnb have figured how to build a tightly integrated ecosystem of utilities and services that effectively force you to use them all together to get the most benefit).
And I say this as someone who’s fallen a long way down the Apple rabbit hole, and quite likes it down here. If multiple options for app stores and payment mechanisms existed, I would probably stick with Apple and happily pay a premium, because I value the convenience and peace of mind that comes from only having to trust Apple with my data. But that doesn’t mean that I think Apples behaviour is any reasonable or acceptable.
> I don't know why Apple should feel entitled to own the relationship with a businesses customers because they also use an iPhone when it's an ancillary part of the product.
Apple provides a custom operating system (frameworks, drivers, security updates, backwards compatibility, etc) to make that business's app function, and continue to function, at all.
You can write and maintain a website instead of an app to avoid that.
Your electricity company and your internet provider are also making your use of that app possible. In fact, they've invested trillions to accomplish that. Shouldn't they be entitled to extract a percentage from each transaction?
Because if these companies would think there's even a remote chance of this being legal, I'm sure they'd not shy away from investing even more trillions in making some sort of digital enforcement system.
Would be fun. Your power outlet only providing power to certified devices! All in the name of protecting consumers of course.
Landlords provide infrastructure (wall, roofs, electrical systems, plumbing, fire systems) needed for shops to function, or continue to function at all.
Shops could just build their own market stands to avoid their landlords owning the relationship with their customers.
Huh, that argument doesn’t seem as reasonable when applied to landlords and buildings.
And yes, many app developers don’t pay much or anything to Apple, and shops always pay rent. But here’s the thing, as an Apple customer I pay Apple when I buy my phone. Why should Apple be allowed to double dip? It never seems reasonable when ISP want to charge their customers and content providers for bandwidth, so why is it reasonable for Apple to do something similar with Apps?
I tried that route. You need an Apple developer account to get your web features only partially crippled, and the "sell your soul" part of the exchange doesn't happen till _after_ money has left your account (which is on a screen promising that you're done, and the payment is the final hurdle, not that it would make it much better if you _knew_ you were paying for the opportunity to perhaps complete the transaction if Apple deems you worthy and accepts your additional offerings).
Maybe that's fine in your world, but the status quo isn't as simple as "just write a website instead."
You don’t have to pay Apple a penny to run a website. I’m talking plain HTML5 / JavaScript and a URL.
Perhaps you’re assuming I mean a PWA, Apple sign-in, or Apple Pay? I believe those are non-standard integrations with the OS provided by Apple, for the convenience of developers.
It would be great if everything was standardized from the start, but standardization can also hinder technological progress and creativity. It’s a trade-off.
Perhaps I’m in the minority here, but I don’t bemoan paying for development tools. I pay about $60/year for a JetBrains IDE because it makes my life easier and that’s how I make money. Devs pay for APIs and SaaS to make their lives easier too.
Apple locks decade-old web features (say, e.g., web notifications) behind a contract wall and handles that contract wall exceptionally poorly, taking your money in exchange for goods and services only to later add additional terms and requirements and not refund your money without two court orders.
It leaves an especially sour taste in your mouth when you note that users paid a premium for devices which, at a minimum, ought to be able to do decade-old web things. Developers are paying for the privilege of maintaining that facade.
Separately, yu're not paying for development tools; you're signing a highly imbalanced contract (with a well-funded entity with a history of enforcing those imbalanced terms) and paying to give iPhone owners the sort of software they were implicitly promised when buying a top-of-the-line phone. "Apple Pay" is even worse since that same contract forbids you from using other options; it's not for your convenience, it's just obfuscated pricing with some legalese in the mix.
For the record, paying for development tools is fine. JetBrains offers actual benefits instead of abusing the courts for rent-seeking. Plus, their contracts are (comparatively) very reasonable (and also rarely enforced, so terms you don't like are less important). You could probably put together a financial argument against Apple's behavior here, but that's not their worst offense by a long shot.
> I believe those are non-standard integrations with the OS provided by Apple, for the convenience of developers.
Other developers would love to provide these integrations (as they could on any of the more open platforms), but that option has been cut of by Apple as well.
And what does 'non-standard' mean here? We're talking about web standards that are about a decade old at this point.
It's not really standard and I think the comparisons don't quite work. In Airbnb's case, Apple's policy is comparable to forbidding hosts from offering extra services (not related to lodging) to users off-platform once they begin their stay. In Amazon's case, it's like if Amazon banned manufacturers from including coupons for future direct purchases in the product packaging. In Visa and Mastercard's case, it's like banning merchants from mentioning other payment methods at all.
I think it's abuse and I agree it should be forbidden as a class of behaviors. I would love to see Apple fined enough to deter anyone from trying what they did with Epic ever again.
Would you consider an Airbnb property that offered $0.99 per night rates for max 1 night and then asked you arrange alternative payment for additional nights to be in violation of Airbnb policy?
> Would you consider an Airbnb property that offered $0.99 per night rates for max 1 night and then asked you arrange alternative payment for additional nights to be in violation of Airbnb policy?
No, just a sucker. They would get bankrupted so fast Airbnb wouldn't have to do anything.
> AirBnB doesn't allow hosts to accept cash or arrange alternative payment.
Not a computer or operating system I paid for.
> Amazon doesn't allow suppliers to offer direct sales to potential customers.
Not a computer or operating system I paid for.
> Even Visa and Mastercard officially don't allow merchants to offer discounts for cash transactions (although many do anyway). Etc, etc.
Not a computer or operating system I paid for.
In fact in every single case you listed a free platform that makes its money by charging fees per use. This is radically different from Apple's model.
Apple makes computers. Apple iDevices are some of the most expensive computers on the market. Apple cloud services are some of the most expensive cloud services on the market. Apple's operating systems hardcode the software to the hardware, meaning neither phone nor laptop can be upgraded. In every single case these are expensive devices and services that people already own. They should be free to download whatever software they want without a monopolizer telling them what's allowed to run on them.
I mostly agree but I think iOS/Android/Windows (and maybe MacOS) are so important to our economy that they represent a difference in kind and should be regulated more stringently. I don't really care if vacation rentals are more expensive or worse than they should be, I do care if the software that mediates our lives is.
I think it’s just the difference of having something run on your hardware. If Apple allowed you to install a different OS on your iPhone (and there was a viable alternative) it wouldn’t be nearly as bad.
> I do care if the software that mediates our lives is
If you DO care about this, implementing this regulation as is will only make the software worse, not better. Apple did a good job so far keeping developers in check.
"only" is a really strong statement. Off the top of my head, here's a few situations where Apple makes things worse for the end-consumer:
- Any case where Apple builds a competing product and charges a cut to the competitor that makes them structurally unable to compete is blatantly anti-competitive, i.e. Spotify vs Apple Music
- Any case where the margins of the business do not support Apple's 30%, i.e. Kindle (let me buy my damn books in the app)
- Any case where Apple has prohibited something for seemingly no reason, i.e. game emulators till about a month ago under regulatory pressure
- Any case where Apple's unilateral control of pricing meant that certain business models couldn't be tried, i.e. subscriptions for a long part of the App Store's history, upgrade pricing today etc
- Any case where Apple has prohibited anyone from competing with it. iOS Safari is bad and Apple has insulated it from competition by prohibited third-party browser engines. Note this hurts both users who'd rather use Chrome or Firefox and users who use Safari who don't benefit from Apple having to compete.
I don't disagree that there are benefits to Apple's approach. I just think that they should be heavily scrutinized because of iOS's import.
Allowing engines while sounds good, in today's reality will result in absolute Chrome (Google) domination. They will be setting web standards unopposed. And they are an Ad company. So again, this is good for me.
Nope, still consumer. It is simple. Google (Chrome) is an Ad company, Apple (Safari) is not. And any consumer knows that web standards define user's privacy and security.
Honestly, the app store is so full of crud I find it hard to believe they’re really checking. I have zero faith in any app in the app store until I’ve inspected it myself.
Airbnb is one of the many players and they don't have any practical sized lockin over consumer or vendors. While Apple is dominant force with complete lockin over all iPhone users.
Exactly, If I choose to advertise my property on AirBnB, that doesnt mean I cant also let me my mates stay round for free, or rent it out to other people privately if I want to.
And if you sell your software or services on the App Store, that doesn’t mean you can’t give it away for free to your buddies or sell it somewhere else.
How else do you give it away free? The CTF applies to anyone with business revenue who meets the install requirements, even if you're not charging for that specific app. Development apps are time limited by Apple's terms.
Furthermore, all of the limits exist solely at Apple's discretion. Apple is essentially being benevolent, not saying they have no claim to the transactions.
Same way anyone gives software away for free, put the source code up and give instructions for compiling / installing. That Apple imposes time limits on self installed applications is the user's problem, not the developer's. The user chose the platform, the consequences of that are theirs to bear. If they wanted to install arbitrary applications that weren't beholden to Apple's rules the options for that were always there. Apple's restrictions are well known and are as restrictive as they have ever been, there was no bait and switch here.
I'm sure we both understand why "put it on GitHub" is not free in any meaningful sense on a platform that charges people $99/yr to use the compiler. The point here is that Apple is insisting they own every part of the system and neither the user nor the developer can touch any of it without their permission.
I would understand that if that were true, but Apple does not "[charge] people $99/yr to use the compiler." I'd also once again point out that even were that the case, that's still the user's problem, not the developer's. At a certain point a user is responsible for the choices they have made, which includes choosing the second most popular cell phone OS, with well known heavy restrictions on applications as their platform of choice. If I chose to do all of my computing using a nintendo switch, the fact that I need to buy a dev kit to even begin to have a chance of installing something like firefox is my problem as a user, not Mozilla's, nor does it make firefox any less meaningfully free.
I'm apparently a bit out of date. The last time I did any iOS dev was before iOS 9 when free provisioning (running the compiler) became a thing. Guess that's something at least.
That just seems like a ridiculous argument… People choose to enter the Apple ecosystem and pay a premium for what are luxury goods. At the same time they hold their resale value extremely well, most iPhone users could sell their iPhone and probably buy a competing phone with cash left over if they wanted…
There’s really very little holding people captive. The real problem with the EC’s attempts at regulation is that the vast majority of users aren’t worried about it and keep freely buying into the platform despite other viable options being available in a competitive market…
The move is to create a closed-market and then collect rent. If your serfs don't like the terms, well, they can't really leave because of the collective action problem of buyers and sellers not being able to coordinate a move to a new platform.
On the other hand a mechanism of a number of online market place scams is to gain customers trading on the “security” (such as it is) of the market place, and then directing the customer out of the market place. Everyone (should) know that any eBay seller that tries to get you to complete the auction outside of eBay is likely to be a scam. Likewise I would hope anyone would be leery of placing an order on Amazon and having a seller contact you asking you to cancel that order and buy it cheaper on some other website. Reputation matters for consumers, and legitimate sellers rely on the market place’s good reputation to help smooth the sales process. Scammers do too, but their goal is to get you out of the market place ASAP where the rules and regulations are harder to get enforced. Companies like Apple and eBay have a strong incentive to have a trustable pipeline and mandate sellers to use it because even though they’re not the ones perpetuating the scam, being known as a market place where scammers hang out is damaging. Consider this, between the Apple Store, eBay and Craigslist, what order would you place those market places if ranking your level of trust for not getting scammed when providing your payment details for a recurring subscription to a random seller?
Or put another way, even though it’s free and plenty of smaller companies do, Netflix doesn’t make posts of Craigslist advertising their services. There’s obviously many reasons for that, but at least part of it I’m sure is no one should trust a random link in a Craigslist post to a Netflix sign up site.
Apple's app-store policies are anti-competitive. Even though they recently 'allowed' (How kind of them) publishers to create a link to an external form of payment, where the offer may be better, Apple still demands a significant slice of commission.
I think many users would continue to use in-app purchases as it is a convenient way to pay, but the actions from Apple are poor and heavily restrictive. To save yourself some money, if subscribing, always go to the website, you'll get a better offer than within the app and more of your money will go to the publisher.
There are apps on the App Store in which the only way to pay is by entering your credit card info in the app. Others that link out to bank processing sites in a web view to do the same. This has been true for at least ten years, and the number is not getting smaller as far as I can tell.
As a user of some of these apps, I have always wondered whether there is some exception clause for, say, retailers of physical goods, utilities, and anything remotely to do with transportation. My anecdata suggests it’s more common in the EU and Asia, but a year and a half ago I was standing by the curb in Sacramento cursing the parking meter app for not taking Apple Pay.
> 3.1.3(d) Person-to-Person Services: If your app enables the purchase of real-time person-to-person services between two individuals (for example tutoring students, medical consultations, real estate tours, or fitness training), you may use purchase methods other than in-app purchase to collect those payments. One-to-few and one-to-many real-time services must use in-app purchase.
> 3.1.3(e) Goods and Services Outside of the App: If your app enables people to purchase physical goods or services that will be consumed outside of the app, you must use purchase methods other than in-app purchase to collect those payments, such as Apple Pay or traditional credit card entry.
Please don't post irritable overgeneralizations about "this forum". The community has an entire spectrum of responses. Singling out the segment that you most dislike while failing to notice the rest is something that many readers do*, but it leads to low-quality comments and lame discussion.
It's neither correct nor incorrect but rather a category error to say that a forum "comprehends" or "understands" or fails to do so. It's basically noise except as a statement of how the commenter feels, and this could be better expressed more substantively and less trope-ily.
I absolutely do NOT want to download/sideload anything from a third party. You are absolutely correct there. Not even from companies I trust (e.g. I wouldn't want to download the Netflix app from Netflix)
- I DO want apple to spend as much money and effort as they do now on vetting
apps.
- I DO realize that means they must grab some money, somwhere.
- I DO NOT want apple to take a cut out of subscriptions for services.
It's as simple as that. There is zero way in hell that apple should have a cut out of subscription services. I should be able to pay any way I want for e.g. podcasts, and Apple should just suck it up and charge $25 from the distributor, once, for reviewing the podcast app.
Basically: Apple needs to just give up their golden egg, run the app store at minium profit, and I hope the EU breaks their kneecaps if they don't swiftly agree to do so.
If the app you downloaded has an update, does the app not need to be revised again? Why would the revision fee not happen with every update?
Would that not mean developers that update more and get better value for their customers are penalised?
Subscription cuts strikes a happy medium, where apple gets paid when the company gets paid, so if they deliver more features they are not penalised but they are also not allowed to update for free forever (potentially adding malicious code without anyone checking due to only being checked the first time they paid).
> Why would the revision fee not happen with every update?
It would. So charge $25 again. So long as they charge what their actual cost is (with a reasonable margin) that's fine. But that's a universe apart from charging 10% of the profits of some streaming service because you "provide the platform".
That would actually be pretty nice; devs would maybe not update every day but once a month or something, and have actual changelogs, AND the review queue would be way shorter.
From a user's perspective it wouldn't be a phone worth buying if those SDKs weren't provided. Why do we have to accept Apple's framing that SDKs are a gift bestowed upon developers rather than an essential part of the software ecosystem that users are buying into?
Third party apps can't exist without the SDK, but the iPhone wouldn't be viable without third party apps. Who makes money in this arrangement has nothing to do with what's fair and everything to do with who has more power.
Your rant seems misguided, given you're talking about "downloads". The GP wasn't talking about downloading apps from outside the App Store, it was about Apple's anti-steering rules within the App Store
But in either case, if the user sentiment is as strong as you claim, Apple has nothing to lose in following the laws. The users will continue to demand installs and payments go via the App Store, and developers will have to continue providing that option or lose customers. Why do you feel so threatened by these laws? It sounds like you don't really have the confidence in 95% of the users agreeing with you.
If users don't want to go to other websites, then developers should notice they're losing sales and be incentivised to offer a more convenient option!
Maybe over time more integrated options could emergy that's as convenient, offers more features, and could be cheaper. Imagine if there was competition!
Ok, fair. Then allow app developers to explain this in the app and provide a link to the external website and let the user decide what they prefer.
The issue is that you can't publish an app unless you hide this information from the user and as a consequence most users aren't even aware that alternatives exists.
Let the user freely decide and you can't charge how much you want for the convenience of your service, even more than 30%, nobody would care.
> This forum will never understand is that 95% of Apple users DO NOT want to go to a random website and download to save a few bucks
Who said they will download from a random website, or that the only advantage is to save a few bucks?
The advantage might be to get software that is not allowed on the app store, or to use a source that you trust more than Apple, or an otherwise better curated source - I would guess a high proportion of F-Droid users trust the software installed from there or find it easier to get what they want than in the Play Store. Why can someone not similarly improve on Apple's store?
> before Apple everything was download, pay and pray.
Your opinion of what users supposedly want is irrelevant. What matters is that the law mandates these options and Apple refuses to comply.
And no - I prefer iOS, for various reasons (such as smooth integration with macOS, better UI), and wanting to download apps from the Apple app store is not the reason.
If 95% users don't want it, then Apple should be happy to provide it as an option since nobody will use it and it will have no impact on Apple's business, right?
> This forum will never understand is that 95% of Apple users DO NOT want to go to a random website and download to save a few bucks.
Almost everyone uses Google's store on Android. The average person doesn't know what 3rd party stores are, they don't go to websites to make payments. I'm a more advanced user and never had to go to a website and download and app, unless I absolutely wanted to.
Not sure why you think it would be different on iOS.
Please don't generalise. My partner still uses IPhone 7 today, and they are certainly interested in saving a few bucks. There are countries poorer than the US and not every Apple user is rich.
Maybe so, but I bet more than 5% of Apple users would appreciate the economic effects of a world in which people can go to a random website and save a few bucks.
Competition is good for markets even if you continue to buy from the incumbent.
Well that sounds like complete nonsense. As an Apple user id definitely take advantage of cheaper ways to purchase the exact same product.
Furthermore - No one is forcing anyone to click the "get this cheaper here" link ... But I'd bet you'd be surprised how many Apple users would click it if it was there. The user and developer both win in that situation.
Considering the glut of scammy, ad-filled garbage on the official App Store, I'm not convinced we haven't ended up exactly where you claim we haven't. That being said, I do agree with you that the vast majority of users probably don't care about alternative app marketplaces (but for the small majority of us who do, I'll continue to champion the EU's efforts here).
Also, for the love of god open up the Apple Messages API please...
Only power users / devs really understand what Apple does in terms of vetting apps.
Regular people just want to be able to install what they want.
As a dev who has to deal with the Apple App store (and someone who is completely bought into the Apple ecosystem, owning an iPhone, Macbook Pro, Vision Pro, Apple Watch, and iPad...), I'd like to just be able to push out an app or update without involving Apple. They require us to do a lot of work that I don't think is necessary and the app approval process is a significant time waster for us.
You can feel however you want about Apple's rules and EU regulation, but I think it's pretty indispuitable how wrong it is that Apple prevents developers from explaining these rules to their users. Apple prevents developers from saying that Apple takes a % cut of the sale. Apple prevents developers from saying its available cheaper elsewhere. If Apple feels these rules are so just and fair and indispuitably correct, why does it go to such measures to hide them from its consumers?
Consistently these anti-steering rules are what gets Apple in trouble all around the world. It's the one part Apple lost in the US Epic case, and it's the EUs first point on their breach. Apple has done this to themselves by being so stubborn and refusing to budge an inch on how they run their platforms. The tiniest concession years ago could have avoided all this regulation on them.
Have they ever specified any reason why they prevent users from finding this out? I read somewhere (I think Epic v Apple) where the judge surmised that App store model was not just payments but the whole mechanism of tracking subscriptions, cancel and refunds, and standard pricing for purchases. I can understand the viewpoint that Apple customers might expect the same functionality if they purchase directly on site. But then, let the developer explain that too. "You can get this cheaper on website, but will no longer be able to cancel via App Store" is a fair enough line that can be mandated just like they mandated everything else. Think they will have to do away with it eventually, though from the outside it looks like they think if they drag their feet on this, maybe regulators won't come for other things.
They could also provide developers some APIs to register external subscriptions and purchases, and thus make cancellation and refunds available through centralised user interfaces within iOS, but they don't, because their goal isn't actually to create great products for their customers, it's to create value for shareholders, and they can more easily do that by locking users into their model.
As a user I really like the fact that Apple is the only one with my payment informations. I can safely install any app that I want, get subscription, in-apps etc without ever having to wonder where my payment informations are going.
You can't have that level of safety with API. Nothing prevents a dev from building an API that returns always "200 OK" when being called for a "terminate subscription" action, but that does nothing under the hood. If I unsubscribe from an Apple provided UI, I will hold Apple responsible for the execution of the action. Apple works really really hard to make sure that this trust we have in their system is warranted. As we know, trust is hard-earned, easily lost, and difficult to reestablish. So all it takes is a single bad experience to make me doubt everything else.
The current system allows Apple to control 100% of the process and to be fully responsible for everything.
That being said, Apple should allow users to perform all these operations outside of the iOS ecosystem if the developer allows it. I feel there is a clear communication here that "anything done outside of the Apple UI's is not the responsibility of Apple" (including payment / subscription management).
I can dispute a card transaction, cancel a payment, maybe even send a nastygram to a developer. But if I dispute something with a middleman like Apple, Google, Steam, etc. I have to consider the possibility that they'll cancel my whole account if they think I'm abusing their system with any dispute.
My wife received over a thousand dollars in mystery credit card charges from the App Store over a period of about 6 weeks. Apple couldn't explain it or provide any insight whatsoever. Nothing.
Apparently, the charges were on her credit card but associated with another Apple ID.
We did a charge back which was successful. Now, I'm just waiting for the inevitable locking of her Apple ID. Luckily, she has already created a new one, but if the same thing happened to me I'd be in serious trouble. In my case, simply creating a new Apple ID is not an option.
I mean, canceling a check costs money, and a charge-back (or perhaps more accurately rephrased, the request for a charge-back) on a credit card can be declined by the financial institution if they don't believe it's the correct action, and they'll usually ask you to work with the merchant first.
I'm not saying the middlemen you mention there are beyond reproach, merely pointing out the alternative systems that are implied here to be more/perfectly effective aren't exactly that either.
The behaviour of a credit card company would vary enormously around the world though, for example in the UK credit card providers are jointly and severely liable for any action brought against the merchant (ie if they won't do anything you take both them and (eg) Apple to court) so they tend to be far more responsive to consumer complaints.
And if a company keeps charging you unconsented fees on your credit card and you keep complaining to your bank, the CEO goes to jail.
Canceling a check is on you since if you didn't want to spend the money you shouldn't have written the check. CC Chargeback hits the merchant hard if approved, since they fucked up. And your chance of approval is similar as with Apple.
If it's an Apple-approved unconsented fee and you keep complaining to Apple, they remotely brick your phone and your computer along with deleting all your emails, your family photos, and your contact from everyone else's phone.
They are saying the middleman gatekeepers are dangerous becasue if you push them too hard they can take away your access to everything.
Whereas if your agreements are with the individual companies and developers then the worst they can do is take away that one app.
On the other hand, those middlemen gatekeepers also make it a big part of their value addition to me, as a customer, to throw their weight around in my favor against all the other companies I can’t be arsed to argue with. For example, one of the reasons people pay for that AmEx Platinum card or Sapphire Reserve is specifically because you can call in the lender to do chargebacks, and the merchants themselves know that if they get too many complaints filed against them the financial institution will visit consequences on them.
I view Apple in much the same way. I don’t trust most developers, and part of what makes me willing to go out on a limb and throw a bit of money their way is the knowledge that I’m not gonna have to go through a whole path of dark pattern bullshit when I want to modify or cancel my subscription.
Google threatened to end my access to their payments system, which at the time would have caused my Google Fi phone plan to be unpayable, because they refuse to acknowledge a fraudulent charge through some Google Wallet apparently/maybe physical card at Forever 21's Indian affiliate for like $20 or $25. I have never, ever shopped at Forever 21 and didn't ever have a physical Google Wallet card. The charge was obviously fraudulent, but Google refused to help (and I also couldn't get anything particularly useful from Forever 21 other than to confirm that they hadn't integrated Google's payment method directly, so it must have been a physical card).
So I disputed the charge with my real bank, which corrected the problem by refunding me.
Google told me that if I ever did that again, they would lock me out of not just my account, but any future account using Google payment methods that was linked to me. That would make my phone service and the Google Play Store unusable. That was the beginning of the end of my relationship with Google services. So yeah...I do not trust Google or Apple as intermediaries for every payment in my life.
Oh, point taken certainly. But I have a feeling if a credit card issuer believes you are abusing their charge-back system, they might well nuke your account there too.
If a credit card issuer drops your account, you don't lose access to things you paid for with the card.
If a DRM store drops your account, you often do. (I think some of them do have a limited account type, so they will no longet let you transact, but you can still use the content you didn't chargeback)
If the charge back is approved, by definition it's not abuse, and the issuer makes money on successful chargebacks. They also make money on you having an account there. And they have the responsibility to give your money back if they close it. Plus you're ultimately, if indirectly, backed up by the full power of the civil justice system, courts and judges and all that. It may be very flawed but let's buy pretend it's as nearly as bad as the whim of one underpaid Apple intern with no real incentives or accountability.
It's different because you only have to figure out how to deal with Apple rather than discovering a new process for every app you want to install. Far lighter mental load.
Apple doesn't legally deserve a privileged position there, because they are legally equal to any other payment processor that wants to be the "only one". Apple has no more right to be the "only one" than a competitor does.
Their spite fee for alternative payment processors being almost equal to their own payment processor fee, though, kinda shows their goal is just money anyways.
Having said that, I don't think figuring out how to use Apple Pay and Paypal is that hard. My friends use all kinds of payment processors.
My comment isn't addressing whether they deserve anything or whether this arrangement is beneficial overall - I'm only recognizing that it's easier to deal with a single supplier rather than a multitude of them.
I like seatbelts but that doesn’t mean I’ll drive into a truck… I still use critical thinking when I buy stuff. But when I forget to cancel a subscription I can ask for a refund and 99% I get it back from Apple. Like 20-30% when I haven’t used the App Store and went directly to the merchant.
The worry is that after asking apple for a certain amount of refunds they flag you as a troublemaker and block you from using any of their services. This happens all the time.
Going directly to companies and merchants keeps this control in your own hands, nobody can block you from buying other software just because you had issues in the past.
As a user I really hate that I'm forced to give Apple my payment information when I want to do business with a third party on an iPhone, including the possibility that the 30% fee they take gets factored into the price I pay.
I think the EU's solution will make us both happy: you don't have to do business with companies that don't offer Apple pay, and I don't have to do business with companies that do.
> Nothing prevents a dev from building an API that returns always "200 OK" when being called for a "terminate subscription" action, but that does nothing under the hood.
Laws. Existing laws prevent developers from doing that.
> As we know, trust is hard-earned, easily lost, and difficult to reestablish. So all it takes is a single bad experience to make me doubt everything else.
This is true.
> The current system allows Apple to control 100% of the process and to be fully responsible for everything.
However, that same system prevent me from buying Kindle books from the Kindle app on device, for example. Even though I can open the browser on that same device and buy them from Amazon.
> Laws. Existing laws prevent developers from doing that.
Laws mean nothing to scammy developers trying to make a quick buck. Would you hire a lawyer to sue for a $4.99 refund? And even if you’re willing to spend that money, are you sure you can figure out who to sue? The scammy developer is likely using some shell company registered in some dodgy jurisdiction. Sure, what they’re doing is illegal, but the average consumer has no real recourse.
My bank gave me a $10 refund, no questions asked, for a service that wouldn't answer cancellation requests. I don't think they even dinged the service, since they tried to bill me again the next month.
> However, that same system prevent me from buying Kindle books from the Kindle app on device, for example. Even though I can open the browser on that same device and buy them from Amazon.
I’m sure Apple would actually prefer that you buy the Kindle books on the app, even if they didn’t get a cut of the sale. It is actually Amazon choosing not to do it in order to dodge paying the payment processing fees.
Not a single payment processor in the world has a 30% fee while also having a competing product in which they can have the prices arbitrarily low (because they don't care about the 30% fee they pay to themselves).
The egregiously high processing fees from AmEx are at 3.30%.
most of your comment is irrelevant because you assume Apple would be calling a external API, while parent means is external calling Apple API to register subscriptions. Then if you have concerns like yours you can stay within Apple ecosystem.
That only works if the external API is handing off the entire subscription to Apple, up to and including payments. But the entire premise is to move away from being forced to use Apple for these elements, which makes it a non-sensical interpretation. In fact, that particular interpretation is the current status-quo -- apps use APIs to create subscriptions entirely managed by Apple.
If Apple does not control the actual subscription, but is only providing an interface for managing it, then Apple must then alert the actual owner of the subscription upon changes. There's then no guarantee that the code on the other side is properly handling that alert.
How would that be helpful if you want to cancel the subscription using a third party payment processor from the app store/settings(current workflow)? Apple would still have to call a third party API, otherwise it doesn’t seem particularly useful (i.e. you just get to see the status and that’s it?)
The only reason is that they don't want the public to realise how greedy they are. They know the value they add is not worth the price difference to a lot of customers.
As many have said for years. As long as Apple is not able to explain their value to the customer, they have to rely on shady business tactics to maintain the revenue stream they became addicted to.
Having been so close to bankruptcy seemed to have tainted their behaviour, that now anything goes to protect what in the end saved them, moreso than in other companies.
No, not “moreso than in other companies” — maximizing profits is something that effectively all companies do.
The difference is that smaller companies can get away with anticompetitive behaviour but there are regulations for market leaders.
What Apple was allowed to do when they were a disrupter is different from what they are allowed to do with a dominant postion in the ecosystem.
PS Saying all companies are greedy and would abuse a market position is not a moral defense of Apple’s behaviour, it’s a defense of antitrust regulations.
Do you know any other marketplace / reseller who puts a message: "By the way, if you book directly with the provider and cut us out, it will be cheaper"?
I can fully understand Apple's position. They created the system that customers love, developers will have to pay something to get access to those customers.
Apple doesn't have to explain to customers the value. Anybody who is buying or using an iPhone today knows what they're getting.
They want to maximize their revenue, just like any other company and there is absolutely nothing else to it.
> Anybody who is buying or using an iPhone today knows what they're getting.
You don’t get to pick and choose which features do you want and most people don’t really care.
Anybody who is buying or using an iPhone today knows what they're getting.
That’s what allows Apple to abuse their position as a quasi-monopoly (as a platform for app developers adjusted by user spending they are effectively that in multiple markets).
It's repeated again and again among hackers that Apple is a monopoly. While selling less devices than their biggest competitor. While having a much smaller install base for their OS than Android.
> They want to maximize their revenue, just like any other company and there is absolutely nothing else to it.
Oh, I had no idea.
> You don’t get to pick and choose which features do you want and most people don’t really care.
What? Iphones have been around for more than a decade, it's well known among customers how they work and there are plenty of options from other manufacturers.
Any store that can will take a cut from producers, whether that is a physical store like your local supermarket, or a digital store like Apple's.
The question is why Apple users are so much more willing to spend money on software than users of other platforms, and why hackers hate that so much? How much money can an independent or boutique developer earn from Linux or Windows users, compared to Apple users?
> While selling less devices than their biggest competitor
That doesn’t matter that much (when taking about app developers) compared to how much money they are spending. A single iPhone user in the US and other rich countries is worth a dozen of Android users in India/African countries etc.
Also even if not literally a monopoly they can effectively behave like a monopoly and abuse their position because no tech company targeting consumers can afford to not have an iOS app.
> What? Iphones have been around for more than a decade, it's well known among customers how they work and there are plenty of options from other manufacturers.
Not what I meant and not how it works. I’m using an iPhone in-spite of their abusive practices and restrictions because their other features/advantages compared to Android outweigh that in my case. It’s basically a shit sandwich…
> why Apple users are so much more willing to spend money on software than users of other platforms
Because they have more money?
> How much money can an independent or boutique developer earn from Linux or Windows users, compared to Apple users?
Yes, that exactly what I’m saying. Apple won (clearly because of the merits of their products) and now they can squeeze developers and consumers to a very high degree without any negative consequences. That’s how monopolies (of course it’s scale, Apple is not literally a monopoly, for that matter neither was Standard Oil back in 1906, they had a comparable market share to Apple these days) work regardless of how exactly they became one, they get to keep all the market surplus that would go to consumers in a more competitive market.
I think this quote illustrates well your perspective and the general perspective of hackers here. Apple users spend more on software because they're just so dumb and don't know how to compile their apps and set up a self-hosted solution.
I can only speak for myself, but I'm very happy to spend money on quality software that I need to solve real world problems, instead of suffering with low-quality FOSS or ad supported software just to save a few bucks. I prefer saving my headache instead, so that I can tinker because I choose to, not because I have to. I think most non-enterprise software customers think the same way. They want something to solve their needs and are fine to pay a fair price for that. So they buy Apple products and later iOS/MacOS software.
If other tech companies cared at all about their product and their customers, they would do the same as Apple. But it's easier to sell to enterprise clients and spy on free users to sell ads instead.
> I think this quote illustrates
> Apple users spend more on software because they're just so dumb and don't know how to compile their apps and set up a self-hosted solution
Never meant anything even remotely close to that. Apple users tend to have higher incomes and therefore can afford to spend much more than average (globally) Android users. I see absolutely nothing wrong about people spending money on quality software (the opposite really and I entirely agree with your point about ad supported and OS consumer software).
> they would do the same as Apple
Well yeah, arguably that was one of the main reasons behind their success. However I don’t see how do these things contradict each other, Apple can continue producing great products while being less abusive towards developers who have much more limited bargaining power.
My apologies for reading something into your words that wasn't there. It just sounded so dismissive to say that they spend more money because they have more money, which is an attitude I've often heard, and which isn't true.
Most Android/Windows/Linux users in the developed world (and they are billions) spend less on software than iOS/MacOS users, even though they can well afford it. Small time developers on those platforms are left to beg for donations (that never come), or bundle their software with ads and spyware that some big company pays them for. If they want to make a living on their work.
Developers serving Apple platforms are as far as I know better off reimbursement-wise than developers serving other platforms. Apple takes their cut, but until somebody voluntarily offers developers something better I think it's misguided to go against Apple.
People say that Microsoft got hit with these kind of lawsuits in the 90s, but as far as I remember, they were threatening PC hardware vendors if they offered competitor's software – which is clearly an anti-competitive measure. Not a reply to you, just a general comparison.
Nor how dangerous first-party services like iMessage still are, for zero-click exploits like Pegasus. The average iPhone user knows almost nothing about their device outside of what Apple directly markets to them as true.
I would expect someone who wants something from someone else to formulate a polite, specific request, and to then submit the request in a manner somewhere on the spectrum between respectfully and deferentially.
Unless I totally misunderstood, and you don't want anything, and are just expressing that the universe failed to live up to your expectations. In which case: my bad, sorry for the misunderstanding!
If Apple's fees cost 30% of the price, then the actual developers who make the software must raise prices to make up for Apple's fees. How much, though?
One might intuitively guess 30%, bringing $1 to $1.30. But Apple will take a cut of this price increase as well: $1.30 * 70% = $0.91, so still losing money to Apple's fees.
The actual amount they must raise the prices is (1 - (1 / 0.7)) = 0.428, or roughly 43%.
Doing this math backwards to factor out Apple's fees yields a confirmation: $1.43 * 70% ≈ $1
> "You can get this cheaper on website, but will no longer be able to cancel via App Store"
This seems like a reasonable compromise. Allow Apple to tell you what you won't get if you leave their store, but otherwise let consumers choose.
> Have they ever specified any reason why they prevent users from finding this out?
The reason is that every major retailer has anti-steering or most favored nation agreements with their suppliers, and Apple thinks they shouldn't be banned from it when everyone else does it. Applied to physical retail it does seem pretty absurd, e.g. The Cuisinart blender box at Target says it's 10% cheaper at Wal-Mart.
Walmart isn't a gatekeeper because it doesn't make one of the most popular platforms on the planet.
If apple want to give up platform ownership and be a retailer, the EU wont have any complaints about them not allowing steering in their app store. Meanwhile Apple's app store would become one of many options rather than the default and only, so steering is moot.
Obviously that's not going to happen, hence they are going to have to hash it out until it's not longer anti competitive or be broken up forcefully.
My point was that the idea of anti-steering in retail is old and the idea of "gatekeepers" is new. Apple isn't unique. They are behaving exactly how you would expect if a regulator suddenly tries to stop them from doing something that was previously routine.
> The reason is that every major retailer has anti-steering or most favored nation agreements with their suppliers
Well, I don't think that should be allowed either. Especially when the retailer has enough market power that they can bully the supplier into accepting unfavorable terms, like say Amazon or Wal-Mart.
If a retailer takes a bigger cut, it shouldn't forbid you from selling it cheaper elsewhere.
It's close to that, and if Apple was forced to advertise the cheaper price, or the product seller themselves was then it would be.
This is more like Target prohibits sellers from ever notifying you that there's a sales price at Walmart if you're looking for a deal. You're not allowed to push deals for you're own product during Black Friday or similar.
Frankly. I donno where the quote about the "do not tell about sales is at." I tried to read the legalese and got stuck on:
7.3 "You may also distribute Your Applications ... within Your company, ... on a limited number of Registered Devices (as specified in the Program web portal)" Wait. What? My own company has limited internal distribution on my own app?
7.6 "Except for the distribution of ... Licensed Applications through the App Store or Custom App Distribution, the distribution of Applications (using Section 7.3, 7.4, 7.5) ... and/or as otherwise permitted herein, no other distribution of programs or applications developed using the Apple Software is authorized or permitted hereunder. You agree not to distribute Your Application ... via other distribution methods or to enable or permit others to do so." IE, you cannot go out on the street and "share" this app with someone, or give it to them, or similar. And obviously not 3rd party portals.
9.2-9.3: "You agree to protect Apple Confidential Information using at least the same degree of care that You use to protect Your own confidential information of similar importance, but no less than a reasonable degree of care." ... "Apple will be free to use and disclose any Licensee Disclosures on an unrestricted basis without notifying or compensating You." Note: Licensee Disclosures include All Data. You agree to put Apple's data in a vault, Apple agrees to copy your app.
> Have they ever specified any reason why they prevent users from finding this out?
As a user, it’d just be irritating noise to have this start showing up in apps, unless buried in some little out of the way link somewhere like other unimportant things like the supposedly legally binding t&c all these apps pretend we’re reading.
Messages like this (“go subscribe somewhere else to get a lower price”) also confuse the hell out of e.g. my dad and prime them to fall for scam messages.
Could just show "Apple transaction fees" as a separate line item instead of just the total. Everyone should be more accustomed to that than a possibly sketchy looking message.
Yeah making it itemized on the payment screen would be fine. As long as the stated amount and the final total weren’t different, like sales taxes in US stores. No “$10… just kidding now it’s $13”. But listing it on the “bill”, yeah, wouldn’t mind a bit if they were forced to do that.
> they think if they drag their feet on this, maybe regulators won't come for other things.
This. EU politicians and EU voters want the EU to crack down on foreign tech companies who abuse users data rights, use monopolies to push EU companies out of the market, and use accounting tricks to barely pay any taxes.
Therefore, the EU has to be fining Apple and Google for something. If not this, then it'll be something else.
Let's not make it some sort of agenda out the EU: these companies are out just for themselves and however much someone likes their tech/philosophy/ecosystem, their practices are bullshit and unfair.
I know it might be not be an obvious difference for people living in US these days, but there's in fact a massive difference between a megacorporation and elected government.
We vote for the parliament, which was only like a week ago. Each country also votes for their government, at times specified by their constitutions. Those governments then form the Commission and the Council.
One is a for-profit company known for anti-competitive and cut-throat techniques, as well as expert in tax dodging over the world.
The other is a governmental group formed by 27 rather different countries, all having a wide range of philosophies, cultures, corruption and mentalities.
I know which one I am more likely to get some level-headed decision which might help me.
The EU at the cutting edge of competition law, which is to say it is looking actively at the competitive landscape and saying "what are the problems?" then moving doctrine along to solve them. There's a lot to be said for the approach.
If the EU can be said to have an agenda, it is clear from the rules - their agenda is market fairness, and the ability of new entrants to successfully compete. The DMA is a key plank of that, but there will be others.
EU's single biggest win is free and open Single Market and it will fight to keep it so. It doesn't matter where companies come from – if you look at e.g. GDPR enforcement tracker you'll see they're as eager to keep internal EU companies in line.
Initially all companies that were defined as gatekeepers under DMA were foreign, but on 13.5.2024 Booking.com was designated as one as well. They are a Dutch company.
Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
See, the problem is that if I name one as an example, you will just fall back to silly games like "but the EU defined the term 'gatekeeper' in such a way that your example does not count". It does not matter whether the market dynamics are the same as the defined gatekeepers, whether the market shares are similar, or anything like that. Your side will shut down any debate with logic such as that. So why bother engaging?
It's like arguing with a hardcore religious person about god. "Oh, but that's not what I meant by 'god'".
> EU politicians and EU voters want the EU to crack down on foreign tech companies
EU tech companies want the EU to crack down on foreign tech companies. The Digital Markets Act’s standards for considering someone a “gatekeeper” seems like it was specifically tailored to exclude Spotify while binding Apple, Google, and Facebook.
> The Digital Markets Act’s standards for considering someone a “gatekeeper” seems like it was specifically tailored to exclude Spotify while binding Apple, Google, and Facebook.
A glance at that list of 4 companies will quickly lead a person to the intuitive observation that 1 of those companies is not like the other. It's hard to see how one would classify Spotify as a "Gatekeeper" in the sense that the others are, so perhaps your observation is by design: Why would we expect the legal definition of ”Gatekeeper" to include Spotify, if Spotify is not a gatekeeper even on a common-sense level?
It’s one of the few benefits of EU being a complete backwater when it comes to software and consumer tech products.
There will be very little harm to EU’s economy since almost all of the profits are being sent to the US anyway.
Also this/GDPR/etc. is a form of protectionism (not that I see anything wrong with that to a limited extent) which will hopefully give at least some slight competitive advantage to EU tech companies (since they really do need it) and maybe a bit more crumbs to fight over.
> Have they ever specified any reason why they prevent users from finding this out?
They haven't (and obviously won't), but the intent is clearly to eliminate any criticism of Apple from within apps, while also making sure that there aren't any "leaks" in the system from which money could escape that they want their fingers on.
(except for privileged companies like Netflix and Amazon)
> "You can get this cheaper on website, but will no longer be able to cancel via App Store"
For one thing, nobody reads that stuff and secondary, after a few months people forget the details of where and how they subscribed to things.
So it absolutely would lead to an increase in support calls to Apple as people ask why they can’t manage a subscription through the App Store. Even me, who generally does keep track of this sort of thing, completely forgot through what service I first activated an HBO subscription and it was kind of a hassle to cancel it since, it turned out, I had set it up through Roku and I haven’t owned anything Roku in 6 years so didn’t think to look.
A blanket ban is overdoing it though, and is just a lazy (and conveniently profit maximizing) way to stop it. I’ve long felt that what Apple ought to do is maintain a codified standard of bad behaviors that address the specific dark patterns they are worried about and just hold that over developers’ heads to retroactively punish abuse rather than having a default posture of being adversarial.
> what Apple ought to do is maintain a codified standard of bad behaviors that address the specific dark patterns they are worried about and just hold that over developers’ heads
The problem with doing that is that it likely results in a game of Whack-A-Mole with malicious parties. See for instance Google regarding SEO.
They’re already playing that game through App Review anyway though. This just gives them more granular sets of punishments they can dole out beyond just “accepted” or “rejected.” It also discourages seedy developers from just opening up chains of fly-by-night developer accounts to upload scams, since they could gate a lot of these elevated API privileges behind needing to have a good reputation.
> where the judge surmised that App store model was not just payments but the whole mechanism of tracking subscriptions, cancel and refunds, and standard pricing for purchases
Well, yeah. When it's your only goddamn choice it sure as shit becomes that. I can guarantee you it can be done for much, much less than 30%. But apple won't allow it.
But that’s how they decided to fund other areas like having iOS free. I still don’t understand the logic behind the complaint. If the developers don’t want to pay, why not just drop support for iOS? If the answer is because customers are on iOS then… idk respect that this is the decision of the user. Don’t force me to install another App Store or give you my card data so you can charge me the same amount and keep more profit while compromising my privacy and security
> idk respect that this is the decision of the user.
You have it completely opposite.
The argument is that the user should be given full power and permission over their own device that they own, and should be allowed to choose, on their iPhone, to install whatever they want.
If a user doesn't want to install an app, thats fine. But give them the choice to do so.
> Don’t force me to install another App Store
Then don't install another app store! Just don't do it!
> Have they ever specified any reason why they prevent users from finding this out?
Surely because they think, "We're Apple, this is how we do things." But honestly, there's starting to burn through a lot of the consumer good will credit they have built up. They're just another "shareholders first" company now.
actually the rules apply to everyone monopoly or otherwise, anti-competitive rules are not applied/enforced when there is a dominant market position only.
In some cases a monopoly is needed or wanted, like in credit card cases you don't want a million credit card types that all work in different subsections. In such cases regulations are to prevent such companies from having too much influence and bottlenecking everything else with high prices or forcing their own other products. EU already did this with credit cards.
Or you force and open standard and now you have different companies using the same system but with competing pricing.
If something "has to be a monopoly", there is a good case to be made that you are talking about a core public infrastructure piece which shouldn't be under control of a singular private entity.
Credit cards need to have personal connections with businesses since it is about mutual trust. A business doesn't want to deal with a shady credit card and credit card providers doesn't want to deal with shady businesses.
So you are talking about a technical solution to a social issue, that wont solve it.
Online pay providers show that it is very well possible. There are tons of payment providers which are widely supported. The only difference is that some of them have a physical presence while others do not.
With a common standard, the available of card-based payment providers would indeed increase. In europe, you often can't pay with Diner's Club or American Express. If they would not all have proprietary systems and were compatible, then their adoption would in-fact increase.
Naturally, not every grandmother and their dog should be able to use this standard but there must be a well-respected authority behind it. Taken to the extreme and we couldn't trust anybody we couldn't have root certificates.
Mutual trust doesn't scale. You really think that either Visa or Mastercard has a personal connection to every grocery store that accepts credit card payments?
If you're from the USA maybe you're used to effectively a single payment system (or a small number that all use the same card reader)
Many countries have far more payment systems. For example, Japan, 7/11 takes Line Pay, PayPay, Merupay, au Pay, R Pay, d払い, Smart Code, J-Coin, Bank Pay, QOU-Pay, WeChat Pay, Alipay, Nanco, R Edy, iD, QUICPay, 9 different train cards, Mastercard, Visa, American Express, JBC.
Some of them you insert the card, some use NFC, some you scan a QR Code, some you show a QR code.
Some have had big discounts or "points", probably to try to get market share. The discounts can go either way. Some are for the consumer (get 5% cash back for example). Others are for the merchant (zero fees for N months, etc...)
That’s arguably not a great example, since there are both more than one international credit/debit card networks, and even these have been subject to constant regulatory scrutiny.
There was a time when common wisdom was that telephone companies and many other infrastructure businesses needed to “obviously” be monopolies as well (sometimes state-owned, sometimes private, which is arguably the worst of both worlds). I really wouldn’t want to go back to that.
> That’s arguably not a great example, since there are both more than one international credit/debit card networks, and even these have been subject to constant regulatory scrutiny.
The two cards are essentially interchangeable so it is a duopoly. And the fact that they are subject to constant regulatory scrutiny without adding laws to force new entrants is why it is such a good example, it shows how well regulations can work without adding competition. To me in Europe credit cards works really great with low fees and no fuzz, I don't think that anything needs to be done about that more than is already done.
To card issuing banks, absolutely not. Visa and Mastercard compete for their business.
To merchants, yes, since they can't reasonably only accept one but not the other, as that would turn away a large fraction of their customer base. This is why most regulatory action happens here.
> subject to constant regulatory scrutiny without adding laws to force new entrants
There are absolutely measures taken to encourage new market entrants or at least more competition among the existing ones. (Whether they are effective is a different question.)
As one example, in the US, every debit card issuer is obliged to add at least one other brand/network to their cards, so that merchants do in fact have some routing choice. In Europe, some countries also have a domestic competing debit scheme, such as CB in France, Girocard in Germany etc.
> I don't think that anything needs to be done about that more than is already done.
I think you underestimate how unstable the current equilibrium is. The interchange cap regulation is relatively new, and I doubt that the networks will fail to come up with other ways to grow their market share and/or revenue that will, at some point, require further regulatory scrutiny.
Not sure I understand, what has the EU done to encourage a credit card monopoly? That there's basically a world wide Visa/MC duopoly isn't something the EU has actively encouraged as far as I know, only regulated as you mentioned.
For banking transfers there's SEPA so assuming a similar system could be set up for credit cards.
In that case it should be owned/regulated by the govts. In India's UPI has multiple banks talk to multiple consumer and vendor apps in one ecosystem standardized by govt agency. and it is damn good compared to other systems.
The DMA very much does not apply to everybody and was revised and tailored to exclude EU companies, by making sure the definition of “platform” includes the Big Tech firms + TikTok while excluding Spotify and Booking.
The job of the EU is protect and benefit the EU, not American companies. The DMA is not a “general” regulation like the GDPR that applies to all, this is a tailored approach to help EU companies.
Maybe not as much in the EU, but in the US it's completely insane:
"Stay in our ecosystem or else your friends/family will stop including you in group chats, stop sharing pictures with you, stop sharing video moments with you"
Apple leverages your personal social connections against you in the US...and by and large people don't seem to know or really care.
This was similar when the Bell Telephone company was running things, but at some point the regulator said no and other telephone operators were allowed on the same network.
> in open market profits will go to zero as competition increases
As they should. Innovators should be able to collect a profit for their hardwork. A decade later when your company gets captured by MBA grads it's not a great thing for the consumer or the economy as a whole if they just sit there and collect rent while lobbying for regulatory capture to keep any new talent from being able to do better than them.
And who will win? Those "smart people"(I hate this word, being nefarious is not smart, and stop gaslighting us by humanizing an evil multi trillion corporation doing illegal things, as "people") creating their own market monopoly, or the regulatory bodies of large governments that can regulate those monopolies in their regions?
History tells us that the institutions with laws, guns, judges and a monopoly on violence rules over "smart people" who just make phones.
Apple's only retaliation is making life shit for EU users or pulling out of the EU market which they won't because that would leave a China style vacuum that Google or a local EU competitor will take after a period of painfull transition for the EU consumers.
The EU consumers can live without iPhones. Can Apple's shareholders live without Eu's profits?
That's quite a large loss. Esp. given that there's another option - stay on the EU market while conforming to its rules. That will lower the profits, but not by that much.
Losing Europe as a market would have larger consequences, though. Software produced in EU would have worse support on Apple, people even in US having connections with Europeans would start installing alternative messengers etc. Apple's strength is in its network effect, cutting out a major part of it would be disastrous.
Americans already install alternative messengers on Apple and always have. That's not a real risk. I work in Europe and the people I know commonly switch between WhatsApp, iMessage, and Signal. I still use the Apple messenger by default because it is a noticeably superior product to the other two.
Similarly, my experience is that software produced in the EU commonly has worse support on Apple, including at companies I worked for. Again, that's already the reality. This fact was sometimes raised as a reason the apps had difficulty getting traction in iPhone heavy markets like the US.
There are reasons for Apple to stay in Europe but these aren't the reasons. I've commonly observed that the iPhone is more of a status symbol in Europe than in the US (where it is usually just the phone most people buy by default), which creates different market dynamics. In the US good interoperability with other iPhones is more important because that is a primary reason people buy them.
>Americans already install alternative messengers on Apple and always have.
Americans in Europe like you, or Americans in the US? Because for the latter, the statists would disagree, as in most use iPhones and just default to iMessage.
According to Apple's CFO [1] it's more like 7%, at least for the app-store, but it's hard to see how that wouldn't correlate to overall profits just as it does elsewhere. The regions are ... creatively named.
The EU is a subset of “Europe in that report. Pretty sure Gruber also mentioned that the Middle East is also lumped in there as well for some reason.
So yeah, the EU is bound to be a big number but it isn’t 25%. The biggest economies in the EU are Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium? Big countries outside of it but included in Apple’s “Europe” catagory include the nordics, UK, Switzerland, Turkey, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and probably something else.
Even if the EU makes up half of what Apple calls “Europe.” A fine of 10% of worldwide revenues is way beyond what the EU contributes to the bottom line. There’s no way Apple wants to take the nuclear option but if the EU threatens them with big enough fines they might think about it.
Most people in Europe use Whatsapp or FB Messenger, so they don't need Facetime or Apple Messages - major selling points of the Apple ecosystem. Alongside that, only 6% of people in the EU use macs, which further shows how Apple's ecosystem does not have a solid foothold in the EU.
Governments have a shot at this fortunately. But it seems that some US people have such an ingrained anti-government that they reject anything, even if it helps.
This is forum with a lot of top1% earners who can afford to pay Apple premium. And entrepreneurs who only dream to build the next apple and be able to abuse market power the same way.
Government regulation are kind a opposite side of that coin.
The CEO has to answer to shareholders when it comes to keeping his job and to legislators when it comes to abiding the regulations in every market. It's a tough act to follow if you try to maximize shareholder returns while also trying to stay out of prison.
I never said people aren't human, I said apple aren't human they're a corporation.
And people who knowingly leverage their gigantic corporation to make life worse for others in the name of shareholder profit can and should be dehumanized. There nothing humane in hurting others for greed.
Ship of Theseus. If you replace every single human at Apple with someone different, it's still Apple. Apple is, at this point, a separate entity, under control by a given group of humans at a given time, but that can change.
The problem is considering "Apple" itself a person, as corporate personhood does. Thinking of companies, even in limited contexts, as a "person" allows the individuals actually making decisions to be largely immune from liability on a personal level. Maybe that should change.
Technically a person is just a bunch of cells, but those cells are interchangable, replaceable (indeed few last more than a couple of decades), and if you lose an individual cell nothing happens to the person, but the cell can’t function.
we don’t say the cells make decisions, we say people do. With a corporation it’s the corporation that makes the decisions, not the individual cells.
Agreed, there's definitely the emergence principle at work when looking at how groups of people function.
The population of a city or a nation is similarly greater than the sum of its parts, and there is an emergent property in both cases. Same as an ant colony.
2 things though.
The constituant parts of a corporation are human, unlike an ant colony. So in that sense they are human, and ant colonies are ant.
Regarding ourselves, we absolutely are an assembly of cells, it wouldn't be wrong to define us as such, although not terribly convenient. But interchangeable the cells are not, well not like a person to a corporation.
A cell can't move from one person to another, if it somehow disagreed with a decision of the central nervous system.
The human brain is made up of billions of cells, and decisions of the brain are heavily dictated by the digestive system and various hormones.
A corporate board is at the most, what, maybe a few dozen people? There isn't the same level of responsibility of each component.
Finally, if the entire corporation decides as one entity, how to punish for wrongdoing?
Should every component of the corporation be put in jail if the corporation kills people (looking at you Boeing), or just the humans at the top that made those decisions?
Another way of looking at it:
Is the entirety of the Palestinian population responsible for the decisions of the dozens of humans that are the Hamas leadership?
The decision makers still have agency, but structures exist to prevent those who would make un-profitable decisions from reaching the top of the corporation in the first place. Once they’re there, their choices are constrained somewhat and (with nuances) profitable decisions are incentivized over others. The consequence is that, while individuals possess agency, we can also observe that the average individual’s behavior is predictable and in service of the corporate machine in aggregate. You can punish the ghoulish person who decided, along with a few others, to dump toxic waste into the river, while still recognizing that their actions were an inevitable result of the incentives we created for them. The most productive thing, of course, would be to change the incentives, but baby steps.
Looking at a corporation as a single entity from the outside it seems more like some sociopathic, mildly superhuman ai than a group of people. Of course it’s composed of people, but is that really the most useful frame to view it through? It’s nothing like a book club.
Yes - they have more legs. But what they are not is a homogenised mass, all as equally guilty or innocent of issues as the other. If 3 executives do something bad, those 3 executives are to blame. And not some nothing-to-do-with-people corporation.
I don’t see the future, but argument for Apple could go like this:
- it is Apple vs EU
- US gov has guns and influence and various levers
- US gov will definitely protect Apple from guns of EU (so regulator with guns is a bit mute point)
- Apple is important to americans (I think they feel it’s their symbol or something), so officials in US gov might think it’s good opportunity to grab some political points.
- US gov might act to help out Apple in this dispute (Nothing like a war, but some slight nod or handshake; maybe via diplomatic backwater; maybe in exchange for something)
Though most probably apple will give “something” even if minor change in the rules, at least just so EU would not loose face, to keep relationship friendly.
(But it will be move in the right direction)
There is a deep misunderstanding here of US politics and foreign policy.
The US might act in various ways to protect American manufacturers, or oil industry, or other industries that are responsible for a lot of jobs in the US or are a strategic resource in some other way. See the 100% tax import for Chinese EVs. The US government doesn't care about Apple. Apple's economic impact is basically irrelevant for the US, because it doesn't provide a noteworthy number of jobs or any significant supply chain within the US. Apple's use as a strategic resource is completely irrelevant based on their antagonistic behavior towards the US government and they've shown themselves to be as eager to comply with Chinese laws as they are to flout US government policies.
I'd maybe see the US do something to protect Microsoft, with its deep ties to the military industrial complex, or Intel, which has both these ties and is clearly a strategic resource because of the advanced chips it provides, but really only if there were an existential threat that would also prevent Microsoft or Intel from performing their necessary roles in the US economy, the military and in US foreign policy.
But to suggest that US guns are in any way relevant, or that the US would bother trying to protect Apple, is frankly absurd.
The EU has smacked down Meta, Google and Microsoft already for things they felt were anti-competitive. The US didn't give a shit. Why would it be any different here?
The billions in agricultural subsidies, strict regulations, and non-tariff barriers that make it difficult for non-EU companies to compete suggest otherwise to me.
Parent didn’t say when smart people figured it out.
This is also why Nintendo (when they moved into video games) set up their business model as platform-holder, not just game developer. And their own games are primarily there to seed the platform.
Rather, the goal was to lower ("subsidise") the purchase price (initial barrier) of the NES/SNES and then recoup it on licenses for cartridges. It makes each purchase of a console cheaper. It's the rational way to maximize revenue.
I'm not sure how you're framing that as a subsidy. It's a killer app that gets people over the threshold to purchase the platform (console). And then once the install base is established, everyone else wants to make their own games and has to pay you (a lot) for the privilege.
Developing first-party games costs more money, to both Nintendo and consumers, so it's the opposite of a subsidy. But they're compelling enough, they clear the purchase threshold and establish the platform on which the rest of the business is built.
Parent commenter meant subsidizing the actual hardware costs. The same is true of pretty much every other console, they can also sell the hardware cheaper for this reason
Nintendo is a funny example here though, since they are notably the one major player which actually makes a profit on their hardware sales directly. They do also make a cut on the other games still, though.
MacOS is a great example of what happens when that competitive ground does exist. Most Mac apps are distributed outside of the app store, some aren't even notarized.
Android is the more closer to iOS example though. They have alt store and you can also download app through chrome, yet most users only use Google's play store.
* Most users only use Google's play store, except for apps not available there
Certain categories of apps aren't deemed acceptable by Google (e.g. apps with adult content, apps that circumvent copyright, some "hacking" apps, etc). If you want any of those they are easy enough to find and sideload.
There is also a big community pirating legitimate Android apps. According to some for every one purchase ten people use a pirated version.
Also, there are many apps from sanctioned Russian companies that can't be published on Google Play, so they only exist in alternative app stores like RuStore and/or as self-updating apks.
On iOS, they just can't "legally" have an app any more, period. Some made their apps PWAs, some say "just use the website", and some (Tinkoff/T-Bank in particular) keep trying to get into the app store with those double-bottom apps and also distribute them signed with enterprise certificates.
Most of the paid apps I've ever used on MacOS are well-known and cross-platform -- the kind of thing where you'd go to the developers website directly by name. So, of course the developer is going to guide those people down a path where they get all the revenue.
And the users of FOSS apps are overwhelmingly the people who will download a DMG from GitHub releases, and change their security settings to install it -- so why bother?
But for everyone else -- the $4.99 apps that aren't household names -- the App Store is probably where these are most often purchased. Although I doubt this market is very large on the desktop -- most people just use a browser and maybe some well known software that would have come in a box 20 years ago.
US and Japan are the two unusual countries where iOS has more market share than Android. In the rest of the world, iOS is maybe 20%. For computers the situation is exacerbated by the fact that many people own one mostly for gaming, which means it's going to be Windows. Whereas an iPhone is considered a status symbol.
Are you implying that macOS has a smaller market share because of the lack of restrictions? Cause its competition, Windows, is less restricted if anything.
And what difference does that make with regard to software distribution models? It can easily be connected to a cellular network using one of those USB modem sticks btw.
I’m talking about the carrier network requiring protections. The carrier like to verify devices on their network. There was a time when booking up a fax was illegal. Apple is responsible for the activity of the devices they create on the carrier network.
> Apple is responsible for the activity of the devices they create on the carrier network.
Where did you get this idea? You are responsible for what your device does on the network. It's in your contract with your carrier. If you interfere with others' ability to use their phones on the same network, that has a good chance of the communications authority getting involved.
But we're talking about apps. The worst thing an app can do is DDoS something. That would just make you run out of data very quickly. Or auto-dial numbers (Android allows that, with a permission for which the app has to ask you), you'll just rack up an enormous bill and will learn to never make this mistake again. Or spam SMS, same thing.
Eveyone can interpret the various rules and regulations. I think you should do more research and reflection on how easy it is to be in cellular network.
The "being in cellular network" is done by the modem. It's a separate CPU core that doesn't run any user code. If you jailbreak the user OS, you can send AT commands to it, which is still harmless as far as RF interference is concerned.
But I really struggle to understand how any of this relates to the distribution of apps that run in sandboxes.
i dont think apple is too concerned with the end user using a 3rd party store but the large companies having the ability to host their app on a 3rd party store sidestepping apples fee entirely. thats what truely scares them.
People assuming this is a competitive posture exclusively are missing the point.
The app store isn't just about making more money, it's about enforcing privacy and security guidelines for apps through the review process and through checks for unauthorized api usage.
Apple's product is privacy; they view privacy as a premium feature worth paying for, and 3rd party app stores that are the wild west for privacy are antithetical to this.
These "important products" are already getting out of the Apple Store, but instead of moving to the competing App Store alternative (which currently doesn't exist), they are moving to another ecosystem
Apple did what they thought was best. The EU said no and the next step is the court system. When that result is known Apple can decide what markets to operate in.
When Apple Kerberos all their services they essentially made it possible to granularly manage service availability by user, device, and region.
The EU fining schedule is so out of proportion that it creates a real business risk to Apple that may be greater than the EU market size.
I don’t think the EU efforts are as detailed or grounded in reality as the EU considers them.
As a spectator I can’t wait to follow the ups and downs of this.
which is about brand marketing, which is about making more money. without the differentiation of the app store, they are that much closer to being android.
> Apple's product is privacy
that's a large component of their brand, not their product.
for contrast, signal's product is privacy. (note: i'm no fan of signal)
consider that the facebook app is allowed, on the first party app store. i'm failing to see how the app store gates privacy.
Anti-steering rules are completely normal in contracts between cooperating commercial entities. We sell on Amazon and we’re not allowed to steer Amazon’s customers off of Amazon. Amazon disables hyperlinks in the messaging system for communicating with customers. They rejected our PDF spec sheets for having links to our website. They will de-list our products if they’re available for a lower price on another site.
And, honestly, they’re completely justified, IMO. They’ve done all the work of furnishing a customer who is ready to purchase. Why should they then have to allow us to steer that customer off of their site to complete the sale? Of course, we’re still allowed to sell outside of Amazon, but we have to do all the legwork to get customers. And, being in the midst of an effort to do just that, it’s a huge amount of work, so I think they’re justified in not wanting us to poach their customers.
I remember hearing stories of customers flicking through physical books in bookstores and then buying them off Amazon. Can't do anti-steering in that direction.
> They rejected our PDF spec sheets for having links to our website.
I miss the world wide web where you could link to sites.
> They will de-list our products if they’re available for a lower price on another site.
This is straight up cartelization and can no longer be called a "market".
> They’ve done all the work of furnishing a customer who is ready to purchase.
But Apple aren't doing that, really. If I find a link to an App Store app on a website and install it via App Store (as that's the only option), Apple have put no effort into finding a customer. In fact, they've injected themselves into the process by requiring apps come via the App Store.
No they haven't? An app can sell a customer access to their app outside the App Store, give them an account that they can use to access full functionality, direct them to the App Store to download the app, and Apple doesn't take anything. Apple gets a cut when they facilitate the sale, which they absolutely do when a customer is directed to the app in the App Store and then can buy the app with a single tap (knowing it has undergone some degree of vetting and that they can get a refund if they're not happy). If you don't think that is providing immense value, then just consider the difficulty of selling software outside of the App Store. To an approximation, it basically doesn't happen except with B2B SaaS (which notoriously requires a very expensive sales and marketing function).
The developer could probably sell them same app service directly through a webpage and use that in the advertisement link instead of the App Store link.
Not only are they shady, but these most favoured nation deals are incredibly anti competitive. Amazon is using its market position to dictate what price other stores are allowed to sell at.
They're just not. The thing they're trying to avoid is a customer discovering a product on Amazon, then immediately finding it for less on the manufacturer's website. And this happens. We do it! So do plenty of other sellers we're aware of. Of course, we have to hide it behind a login or offer a 10% discount on first order or whatever.
Amazon is giving sellers something of immense value (the opportunity to sell physical goods to a huge pool of customers who are ready to buy). Why should Amazon give that access to sellers who are trying to divert customers off of Amazon? They're not running a charity. It's their business, which they've built over decades of immense investment and effort. And the immense value of what they've built is evident in the difficulty other massive retailers like Walmart, Target, Kroger, etc. are having building similar online retail businesses.
> They're just not. The thing they're trying to avoid is a customer discovering a product on Amazon, then immediately finding it for less on the manufacturer's website.
So they are using most favoured nation deals? Whether you believe they have a good reason for it or not (I don't think they do) doesn't make it any less anti-competitive
> It's their business, which they've built over decades of immense investment and effort.
I don't care how much money and effort it takes. That's their problem, not the customers'.
They have also built it up by exploiting their workers, creating inferior knockoffs and then kicking the original off the platform, taking as much money from suppliers as possible, and introducing paid placements so that vendors need to advertise to show up even when searched for by name.
> And the immense value of what they've built is evident in the difficulty other massive retailers like Walmart, Target, Kroger, etc. are having building similar online retail businesses.
Perhaps that might have something to do with all of Amazon's best efforts to exert ever more control over suppliers. Or leveraging their success in other areas (looking at you AWS) to do things that would not be profitable otherwise in order to eliminate competition (Diapers.com anyone?).
We don’t have a right to sell on their site. If we want access to their customers and exposure for our products, they want to make sure they’re not being undercut on pricing (since they know customers will price shop).
If even after stopping you from linking to your own site Amazon still fears their customers will price shop by their own accord then:
a) Amazon is implicitly admitting that their shopping platform is not so special: if customers could find cheaper suppliers of your product that would be enough for Amazon to be outcompeted.
b) Amazon is indisputably engaging in anticompetitive practices by forbidding you from even selling at a cheaper price with the only justification of "we do not want price competition to even exist"
Sorry, but you just have no idea how valuable Amazon is at enabling customers to discover that your product even exists. 100% of the customers who have ever bought from our website have discovered us on Amazon. We know this because we don't do any advertising outside of Amazon.
I don't know what your product is, but this feels like it tremendously undervalues the hard work you've done to create a good product:
> And, honestly, they’re completely justified, IMO. They’ve done all the work of furnishing a customer who is ready to purchase.
Amazon is just a dumb pipe for your product and for payments. Sure, they have world-class infrastructure, but it's still a replaceable service, other companies do it successfully. Some % of those customers would find you without Amazon, especially if you advertised or put your product on other marketplaces.
This mindset also allows Amazon to exploit you, because you've already decided you'll accept anything they decide to do.
"We can't link to our website" is INSANE. It means any other company can undercut you or impersonate you on Amazon because your customers have no relationship with you as a company! That's terrifying!
> "We can't link to our website" is INSANE. It means any other company can undercut you or impersonate you on Amazon because your customers have no relationship with you as a company!
It's even better when Amazon undercuts you with an Amazon Basics product. As a bonus they'll give the Amazon Basics product a preferential position in search too.
So what? All large retailers do this. They're called house brands. And they're actually beneficial to customers, since there's a well understood quality floor. If your product can't compete with a house brand, then your product isn't bringing any value to the customer or the marketplace.
I say this as an Amazon seller that competes with Amazon Basics.
> Why should they then have to allow us to steer that customer off of their site to complete the sale?
Because we live in a democratic society with laws that are voted on, and voters are perfectly able to decide what rules they want to live by.
If Apple doesn't like it, then they can shut down their entire company or move out of those countries that have the full democratic authority to decide how businesses run in their country.
I wonder if everything would have been simple if the regulation itself was something death-simple like:
If you control the software of the hardware you sell, you must refund with the inflation adjusted sums the users at any time they return their hardware.
This way, companies can choose if they are renting platforms they deliver their services like the TV boxes some cable providers will rent, or of they are selling products and the users can choose to do whatever they like with it.
The makers can still provide and and sell services on devices they built but they will have to be good at it.
That would be very bad for customers and Apple will love it. Instead of buying iPhone you'll subscribe to it and pay $99/m for iphone+one+Apple telecom
Early iPhones were sold only on special "iPhone plans", not because "special unlimited internet" (at least once iPhone 3G landed for sale outside USA and its shitty telecom market), but because there was a percentage paid from the plan to Apple.
How would it play out? A scenario is that I could buy an iPhone for 1000 Euro, use it for one year, return it, get my 1k back and use it to buy a newer model. Basically they would be working for free or they'd have to increase the price of 1k per year, with huge discounts for whoever swaps an Android for an iPhone.
It would be up to them to choose their models. If they want to keep the closed model where you can't use the device you purchase in absence of Apple, they will have to charge accordingly for the device and services and do the refunds if the user no longer want the device. I guess people would like yearly updates, so Apple will have to operate drastically differently to keep the closed platform model.
Alternatively, they can sell the devices as today and provide a method to install any software the user wishes and even to remove iOS from the device. I guess they will be required to produce a basic documentation on all this so others can create the alternative services but wouldn't be required to modify their own software and services.
Maybe, I don't know. Its up to the companies to do the math, who would like to pursue this model. If it's not feasible, the shouldn't be doing it though. AFAIK BoM is usually no that high, so it can be viable.
Anyway, maybe some depreciation calculations might be used to account for wear&tear but the core idea is that if you are selling something that works only on your other services by actively preventing competition you shouldn't be charging for the hardware that delivers that and the money you take upfront is just a fully refundable deposit to cover stuff like the consumer breaking the device or taking it but not using the services.
The EU regulates credit card fees caping them at 0.3% [1]. That is roughly a fifth of the fees charged in the US and roughly two orders of magnitude smaller than Apple app store fees.
I think that’s a different fee. As a merchant accepting credit card or debit card payments is going to cost you the same 2-3%. At least that’s what Stripe or local payment processors charge
Stripe charges 1.5% + €0.25 ($0.27) in the EU to accept EEA cards [1]. Stripe charges 2.9% + $0.30 for processing domestic cards in the US [2].
The reason it charges 1.4% more for accepting US cards is the US card fees (interchange fees). These fees are complicated and roughly five times more than European card fees [3].
> indispuitable how wrong it is that Apple prevents developers from explaining these rules to their users
Absolutely. This is the same as giving Candy to a child and saying "don't tell anyone" or your boss saying you can't tell coworkers how much you're being paid.
The fact they want to keep it a secret shows something fishy is going on, and they know it.
Add to that the fact that the App Store only supports certain kinds of payment and subscription formats. Paid major upgrades, volume discounts for apps with IAPs or subscriptions , etc. - not possible at all.
Apple's restrictions are so deep as to dictate the very way we choose to monetize our apps. And all the fearmongering about choosing to publish to an alternative store. It needs to stop.
No paid upgrades is the huge issue. By fiat they eliminated the mechanism by which small developers survived for decades before the app store. It couldn't be any harder for them to support than the crazy IAP dance they make you do instead or the subscriptions they foist on everything.
2. Not entirely sure why things are done in a certain way, they their changes it and revert to Steve jobs's way, or they refused to change and did not understand why Steve decided on doing certain things in the first place.
3. Not a very coherent company. Still better than most other companies except may be Jensen in Nvidia.
Nobody is asking for the ability to put a label on their App Store listing that shows the price of the same software or subscription on the web. What they're doing is akin to dictating what the creator of a product could put in the manual or paperwork that comes in the box - you know, where you'll often find manufacturer's coupons and adverts for registering your product with their website.
It's the cycle of most companies that are successful.
Start as the rebel/upstart being more bold, fighting the system, disrupting, until they become big enough to become the system.
It's just different games, as a startup you can't behave like a big corporation, so you use that strength to your advantage, as you get huge, you can't act like a more reckless upstart.
Apple is happy to deliberately create social strife among kids by blocking it's most social app from cross-platform use, just to eek out a few more phone sales. That would be bad enough if they weren't the market leader. The fact that they are brings it to the level of grotesque cruelty.
The point being, Apple is clearly willing to use every trick and scheme possible to maintain dominance and should be regulated as such. They are begging for it.
Apple currently has three sets of business terms governing its relationship with app developers, including the App Store's steering rules. The Commission preliminarily finds that:
- None of these business terms allow developers to freely steer their customers. For example, developers cannot provide pricing information within the app or communicate in any other way with their customers to promote offers available on alternative distribution channels.
- Under most of the business terms available to app developers, Apple allows steering only through “link-outs”, i.e., app developers can include a link in their app that redirects the customer to a web page where the customer can conclude a contract. The link-out process is subject to several restrictions imposed by Apple that prevent app developers from communicating, promoting offers and concluding contracts through the distribution channel of their choice.
- Whilst Apple can receive a fee for facilitating via the AppStore the initial acquisition of a new customer by developers, the fees charged by Apple go beyond what is strictly necessary for such remuneration. For example, Apple charges developers a fee for every purchase of digital goods or services a user makes within seven days after a link-out from the app.
[edit] I will add one thing: right now, i'm rich enough that i wouldn't care about paying 30% less if it saves me the hassle of using a new payment processor, and i think this is the case for most people here, or even most people using Apple phones. But 10 years ago when i was scraping by, i had a phone that was given to me (not an iphone, but it could have been), and i would totally do everything i could to save 33% on anything (mostly food tbh). T=Not allowing link out and price discovery is not only anti-market, it's anti-poor.
> T=Not allowing link out and price discovery is not only anti-market, it's anti-poor.
What shops list their own markup? If I go to a supermarket I don't see what the markup is the shop adds. I just see the price here vs the price there. I did that when I didn't have any money as well. It seems to work.
Every shops allow price discovery, and none will charge me if I go in a physical shop to see what a product looks like in real life, then command it on internet. In fact, when I was a student, almost everyone I knew did that, as at that time, internet prices were a lot lower (and we had no money).
At that time I even went in different supermarkets to check foodstuff promos and sometime bought ham in a place, lettuce and mayo in another, and bread at another, on the same day. Not allowing to do that is anti-poor, I'll say it again.
Imagine that some people have only one way to access internet, and it's their phone on public wifi. What Apple is doing should be punished.
the law allows, the implementation that apple took, doesn’t in reality. yes, techinically it is possible, but with the associated cost only some big players can do it. there’s no room for free apps when the store has to pay 50 cents per user after a small threshold.
When was the last time your grocer explicitly listed out the shipping cost of your globalized shopping cart? Did it show shipping of orange concentrate from florida? or grains from Iowa?
I think you are intentionally misinterpreting parent. When you buy something online, shipping is almost always a separate item on the bill (unless it's free). Taxes are also clearly specified on the invoice. Food delivery apps and Airbnb take it to the extreme, by charging a relatively small price and then adding surcharges. Uber breaks down price into the driver price, marketplace fee, taxes, and sometimes congestion fees. So yes, breaking down price is common.
The model breaks down because there is only one supermarket. Well, at least until the EU mandates alternate app stores without Apple handicapping them.
I also do not see where else I can buy it, or prices of other shops for the same product. I also do not see products in shop A tell me I should go to shop B instead.
It's hard to draw analogies to the real world. It's like if you bought a dishwasher and Best Buy forced the manufacturer to force the user to buy detergent from their store, and forbid the manufacturer from telling the user they can get cheaper detergent elsewhere.
Apples AppStore isn't the shop, it's street where all the shops are. They have decided that no consumer walking this street should know which shops exist or what their prices are.
These analogies break down real quick, but the center of the argument is that companies that grow too large can become "the market" and not "one actor on the market".
That's what I don't understand: what price can't I discover? Things like: how much Netflix costs, or how much something on Amazon costs, or how much a NYT subscription costs? I'm struggling to think of an example of what you're saying.
You cannot sign up for Netlifx on an iPhone, because Netflix either must make 30% less giving that cut to Apple, or charge 30% more.
This is even more egregious when it comes to Spotify, which is unable to compete evenly with Apple Music. I wonder if Apple Music has to give away 30% of it's revenue to a payment processor....
Okay, but I can see the price of Netflix and Spotify. Or are the prices different on iPhone? I don't have one, so I'm only going on what you're saying.
No, the impact of Apple's rules is that you cannot see the price of Netflix in the Netflix app, because Netflix doesn't want to use Apple's IAP and give them whatever % cut.
If Netflix did offer in-app subscription (through Apple), and charged it at a higher rate to account for Apple's cut, it would be forbidden from telling it's more expensive because Apple takes a cut, or that it's available for cheaper on their website. Apple even forbids Netflix emailing their customer after signup telling them it's cheaper on their website.
From my understanding (I also don't have an iPhone), you're not sent anywhere, because Netflix were forbidden from telling you to go sign up on their website. There was just no sign up button, and an implicit assumption that you would somehow figure out that you need to open up netflix.com in the browser and subscribe there.
I think that has changed now for Netflix in particular, but not for some other types of apps?
No, that's called steering and it would be perfectly fine. But apple doesn't allow that, and that's what the EU's major complaint is about. So the worst case is that you have no competition, which is the definition of anticompetitive
It's a bit like the electricity or water, at some point tech gets integrated into a functioning society and creates serious social problems when those are not available/working in malicious ways and as a result governments create regulations around it to prevent abuse.
It would suck if your electricity provider one day decides that you will need to change all your electronics because they are switching to another frequency and offering you a package for the switch that costs just below the cost of moving away or building alternative sources. It would also suck if for example your telefon company stops connecting your calls upon the payment of your employer who suspects that you might be looking for another job and taking interviews.
So, no one has to create a telephone company or an electricity company as if they are charity, it's just that if they want to do it, they need to do it within the ruleset of the regulator.
How does this relate to my original comment about apple being anti-poor? My question was: why should apple be pro-poor? There are other manufacturers. I think I see now why I was flagged, people understood me wrong. My point was: apple is higher-tier smartphone tech, so it doesn't have to attend to "poor people" (to be defined). Other manufacturers happily do. So the original argument doesn't make any sense.
My guess is that you framing this as forced charity and dismissing the these devices as a "human right" may have an annoyed people. That would have brought the downvotes , but the flagging is probably because of your tone.
Anyway, These regulations are not about Apple. They are about fixing market dynamics issues to protect customers and other businesses. That’s why they target by market share.
Yeah might be. I was only referring to the comment from the top about apple being "anti-poor" when there are other, more affordable options. But too late to recover from that haha.
I agree about tackling market dynamics though. Anti-competitive behaviour is a shitty thing independent of economic standing.
There is a right to be a fully participating member of society, and right now you pretty much have to own/use some sort of smartphone for that. An old IPhone is not high-class anymore but might still be usable.
I don't understand why so many people think that if Apple didn't take a percentage cut of sales, prices would go down. Products are typically priced at what customers are willing to pay, which likely wouldn't change. The developer would simply earn more. The only real benefit to customers might be the existence of some apps with extremely thin margins that wouldn't be viable otherwise. As a developer, I naturally approve this though.
> I don't understand why so many people think that if Apple didn't take a percentage cut of sales, prices would go down. Products are typically priced at what customers are willing to pay, which likely wouldn't change.
You can trivially find countless counter examples where prices are higher only on the app store like netflix[1], spotify, etc.. subscriptions. They don't make their web & Android users pay more just to cover for iOS users, why would they? That makes no sense. So of course the price would drop if they were allowed to steer as they already sell it at the lower price on the website, they just aren't being allowed to tell iOS users that.
And that is what Apple is getting hit for here. Not the 30% fee, but the rules forbidding developers from telling the user about alternative sign ups or purchasing locations.
1: well before Apple cut a special deal for Netflix anyway
Because there are price sensitive users and many services would prefer to share those 30% with them instead of losing the business. Because even if the developer gets the money, they will invest them in their product instead of them going to Apple. Because even if they don't invest them, more money on the market will incentivize more developers who will create competition. Because even nothing changes, this means more money around the world instead of being concentrated in the Apple shareholders who will use them to create even more locked gardens.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. If a product is already priced optimally, lowering the price to capture price-sensitive users would reduce overall revenue, right? Profitable developers set prices based on what the market will bear, not the cost structure. Also, I'm not sure all developers would reinvest additional earnings into their products rather than just increase profit margins or divert funds elsewhere. I agree on the economic redistribution point though.
> I'm not sure all developers would reinvest additional earnings into their products rather than just increase profit margins or divert funds elsewhere
A mega corporation like Apple is much less likely to do this than a smaller company, though. Apple's quarterly dividend is literally the company communicating that they make so much money they can't think of anything better to do with it than just giving it away to the investors.
The profit maximizing price after a 30% cut `q(price) * (price - 30%price)` is not the same as the profit maximizing price without that cut `q(price) price`.
As long as the demand curve is downward sloping, there will be some pass through of Apple's cut to customers, though the fraction that is passed through will depend on price elasticity.
The current optimal price is set with the extra cost of Apple rentiering included on the production side. Minus that cost, the developer might find another optimum.
Companies would sure not reduce the price by 30%, but perhaps 10%. This would mean their revenue increases, and the price conscious user saves money as well. I doubt any users would opt for not using the apple store if the price wasn't significantly lower.
You pay Apple because they provide infrastructure to which you distribute your apps. Is like taxes so your country provide infrastructure etc, it may not be 100% efficient use but these things aren’t free
Surely, Apple will respond by artificially hampering one or more of their products in the EU and hence take away even the slightest reason to upgrade hardware in the name of Apple Intelligence.
Customers need a company that acts and reasons like an adult.
You’re obviously insinuating that they are delaying features in the EU just to be petty, but the ostensible reason is plenty compelling on its own.
The EU regulations will require them to do insane amounts of custom work building a public API for Apple Intelligence. Imagine how hard it will be to make that interface secure, private, not terrible for users.
The other features like mirroring are much simpler, but still, is it worth making a public interface and taking the security and privacy risks just to offer the feature in the EU?
Every new feature in the EU is now a massive liability, so of course they’re going to be more cautious what they release.
The idea that any third party app could (a) record my screen 24/7 in the background or (b) have full access to all of the data on my phone would be beyond unacceptable.
Everyone rightly criticised Microsoft for providing such a capability and they would do the same with Apple as well.
>The idea that any third party app could (a) record my screen 24/7 in the background or (b) have full access to all of the data on my phone would be beyond unacceptable.
So don't give permission? (or don't install the app in the first place) I thought this was about malicious apps that collected private data behind your back.
This comment would have made sense in the late 90s.
Today we have decades of experience that the majority of users are not capable of making informed decisions when it comes to topics like app permissions. Especially the flow on implications e.g. allow the app to record the screen could mean your bank details are exposed.
> The EU regulations will require them to do insane amounts of custom work building a public API
Apple are the biggest company in the world. If they wanted they could hire 1000 developers to throw at this, and it wouldnt even dent a single percent of their profit.
Apple could very easily do this if they wanted to, heck they could do absolutely anything they want with their money and clout, but they dont.
You can’t do anything you want just by adding developers. If it were that easy, the entire software industry would look completely different. And that’s not even accounting for the inevitable system-wide repercussions of the work.
Im aware of the man month, and Im aware that you cant just throw any deverlopers at any coding problem.
However I believe Apple easily has the money, developers, and ability to do this if they wanted.
Look at all the other amazing things they do, anyone who argues this is hard for them is delusional IMO.
There’s a difference between working to build an amazing product that wows people, and working to fulfill mind numbing regulations created by people who couldn’t run a coffee shop. One is soul enriching, another is soul crushing. If Apple wants to torture its developers into doing soul numbing, slow moving work, I guess they can but the default response would be to not do that and give their developers more meaningful tasks that leaves them and Apple happy.
Sure, but why not just cut out the middlemen? Just install a EU representative in each Apple office, and they can watch over all the developers and dictate features.
The notion that Apple is punishing one of the largest markets on the planet by disincentivizing them from upgrading to the next generation of hardware seems like something you didn't really think through. The AI thing will be the #1 selling point of the 16 and onwards, and you can be assured that Apple wants it in the EU.
Apple, as with most mega-cos, needs to be reigned in and corralled by the governments of the world. But let's be real that the EU in some of their actions has grossly overreached and offered up impractical demands, while strangely targeting only American companies.
Maybe we should just fine any company 100% of revenue if they breach a law, since that's just as arbitrary of a number and makes our region more money.
It's fairly standard corporate behaviour, and ultimately it pays off handsomely for Apple. They slow walked implementing a solution to prior censure, and then provided a solution that is laughable, but it starts the whole process again. Now Apple has a year to get some sort of real solution in. During the intervening periods they will have made billions they wouldn't have if they actually implemented a good faith, good intentions response the first time around.
Many years ago I would have said Apple would never leave the EU, but now I’d say it’s firmly in the “possible” territory.
Maybe it’s a win for both parties of Apple leaves the EU, though I’m skeptical any homegrown EU product would have any traction unless they also force Google to divest Android.
I’d love to know how much work it is for Apple to comply and deal with the EU regulatory environment.
In the short term that would impact their stock price way too much; I don't think they would pull that trigger.
In the long term this stance will become untenable if other regions come to the same conclusions. Anti-competition investigations against Apple are currently running in:
If Apple left EU, in the long run it would be very damaging to their market worldwide because of network effects.
Suddenly other governments (and people) would have a very real exhibit that life just goes on and that one company is not as important as previously thought.
God I'd give anything to see that happen. It would be the happiest day of my life, especially once (not if) other countries start following suit with their own regulations that will target Apple and they pull out of more and more countries until they only sell in Texas, I guess.
Why would apple leave the EU? It's a huge market, and I don't think there is a risk of their profit in the EU going negative because of some relatively small concessions. They can keep existing rules for the rest of the world and change them slightly for the EU. Unless they are afraid that other countries will demand the same if they budge?
That's amazingly low given that Europe has such a large portion of the world's wealthy consumers. Even then, I think it'd be a huge risk to Apple if they created the perfect conditions for the might of the Polish/German/Ukrainian/Dutch developers to create their own Apple competitor.
look at the “by country” table. If sorted by mean, 2 countries in the top 10. If sorted by median, 3.
I agree that 7% of app store revenue seems low. HOWEVER keep in mind that the EU is tiny on a population level. Not a single county cracks the top ten. So maybe not so surprising…
This argument only makes sense if you think of Apple as an entity that has a nationality. It's an internationally traded company that is therefore owned by international money. The stars would have to align in a very special way for 50% of the shareholders to agree that it's to Apple's strategic benefit to leave the EU.
It also underestimates the costs of leaving the EU or any country. In a lot of cases there are laws against leaving a countries market. I doubt the shareholders want Apple to go into such a fight.
Any extra work it requires to comply can be offset by price increases if Apple needs to recoup those losses.
That would be very very stupid. Their marketshare is already going down in China. Soon RoW will bring in similar laws and Apple will sell only in Texas and Florida.
Apple's services in the app store(in app purchase system, refunds, API's, app store distribution infrastructure) is indisputly useful and deserved to be paid, however, it could be time to relax the fee circumventing rules since they are so big and has a target on their backs now.
I'm excited to see where this goes. Whether you agree or disagree with Apple, them losing (or even just lessening) their monopoly status would make room for new and upcoming businesses. New apps, new app stores, etc etc. Disruption may not always turn out better in the end, but if the status quo is not good, it's often worth the risk.
"Move fast and break stuff" is very divisive, because of course 'stuff' could include optimal stuff, people, the environment, etc.
"Move fast and break monopolies" on the other hand, should, as a forum for startup aspirants, be pretty easy to agree on.
What EU is doing is wrong. There are costs in running App Store, and asking for it to be fee free does not make sense. Allowing 3rd party Stores will wide open mass public to scams, data leaks and worse.
Developers are getting a very good deal for their small fee by SW industry metrics. Their apps gets displayed and sold by Apple, all things covered, no chargebacks, no running costs.
I feel threatened as a user by what EU is doing. Next thing to expect - many apps will require(!) always on location...
As a EU-citizen, I'm not happy with this legislation and enforcement. I choose Apple versus Android, because I want the safe and user friendly ecosystem Apple offers. Otherwise, it makes much more sense to go with Android. Those phones are much cheaper and are very much the same quality-wise (performance, screen, form factor...).
The same goes with iOS on iPad. I'm very happy that my parents can use those devices versus a Windows machine (or even a MacBook) and know that they are pretty much safe from malware.
Even now, I noticed that with the mandatory browser selection screen both my parents independently have moved on from built-in Safari to Chrome (independently), since that was the only browser name they know. And now they are in a much worse position privacy-wise than before. Which is certainly not in the spirit of the GDPR and DMA.
You're upset that your parents were free to make some choice that you feel is wrong, and you believe Apple should be allowed to take that choice away from them?
Honestly, I feel that Apple has completely brainwashed some people. Comments like yours abound, complaining about the dangers and disadvantages of freedom and choice. You're only a few words away from "freedom is slavery".
You're assuming the OPs parents made an informed choice. Chrome might be the only name they recognized so they picked it. Is Chrome really the best choice for them? Hard to know. A bunch of choices up front is also generally bad UX. Reasonable defaults that can be changed later are likely better for the average user.
No, I'm not assuming that. The freedom to make a choice is not contingent on your being informed. Imagine being kept in jail with the pretext "you are not yet fully informed of what is out there, so we're not letting you go out for your own good".
Anyway, OP can just inform their parents and fix this thing, if that was really the problem.
> Is Chrome really the best choice for them? Hard to know.
If you imagine this is a good argument for taking choice away from people, you are damaged. There is no freedom if you get to restrict people until they will make the choice you feel is perfect for them. Freedom means freedom to make mistakes. It's not like Chrome is explosive, and if handled incorrectly it may kill its user and some innocent bystanders to boot.
I also said that it should be changeable later - so I'm not taking away anyones choice. Sticking a bunch of questions in front of a user, when all they really want to do is use their new phone almost feels like a dark pattern. They just pick whatever and move on. Is that really any better than default that can be changed later? IDK, other than randomly getting people using something different.
> Imagine being kept in jail with the pretext "you are not yet fully informed of what is out there, so we're not letting you go out for your own good".
Isn't this basically what school is for children?
I don't think it's crazy that people might have a range of preferences for how "locked down" a device or ecosystem is. One end of the spectrum might be Linux phones and the other might be those Jitterbug (?) phones for old people that can only dial a few preset numbers. Android would be more towards Linux and Apple more towards Jitterbug.
But I do think Apple should be more transparent with their users, and has generally been "maliciously complying" with these regulations.
considering all this ai gen improvements, you should talk to them not just about browsers... scams that do imit ppl's voices are on the rise, you should also talk to them about being virgilent about some websites that do try to trick ppl, maybe even give some examples. The web is not safe and soon it'll be even less safe if there are photos of you/videos with your voice registered & available online
I have to explain on average once a month to family why some websites break on "the Apple internet app" (safari) and they should use Firefox or Chrome for critical stuff instead.
Had to explain again yesterday because Safari crashed to a white screen error on my wife's macbook while she was trying to buy plane tickets.
Very much. I am the 'tech person' whithin family and friends. I used to just do everything for them which was a chore. Since then I have discovered if I educate them on what a browser is, the choices they have, and how you can try multiple ones if you are having issues, then they very often start solving problems and looking further into things themselves.
People very often dont have a clue what things like app permissions are and just blindly accept them all. Aftrer educating and showing them, they are much more careful in checking what they are accepting.
Teach a person to fish is my motto, you should try it sometime!
I dont see why that opinion deserves downvotes but there you go.
No, of course, everyone should be free to have the choice to install whichever software they want on devices that they own. E.g. put the phone in developer/hobbyist mode by connecting it with a USB cable to a PC, show some big fat warnings, and then allow all forms of sideloading. But it needs to be like a safety switch.
Then the matter of an informed browser choice. This is simply not a thing most regular people make or care about. Remember the Internet Explorer era? In this case, simply the most recognisable picture gets chosen (e.g. the only company that advertised their browser).
The general argument is that the changes end up being annoying.
Simplest example would be 1st party apps only vs including 3rd party apps. Clearly there are implications around including 3rd party apps that would affect the operating system and thus user experience
iPhones can still come with Safari installed and used by default, no changes to anyones experience at all. But if I want to go to the app store, install a different browser engine, and set it as default, how does that affect any users that are just using the default device as supplied to them?
There is no reason at all to hinder this choice. It does not affect 1st party apps, or how the device works by default. It just allows choice for those who want to explore it.
> iPhones can still come with Safari installed and used by default, no changes to anyones experience at all.
No, this is not allowed and currently also not the case. When you're setting up a new iPhone, one of the questions during setup is which browser do you want to use.
I agree, except Windows had a massive PC monopoly back then. Apple doesnt have nearly that same monopoly today. It shares it with Google and in some markets it lags behind Googles user numbers.
Suppose there were a rule that there could be no defaults ever, and all of the apps are randomly arranged in the App Store for the sake of fairness.
Your argument would be equally true, you could just scroll and scroll until you find the app you’re looking for, but surely you’d agree the experience would be worse?
Because web sites will start using Chrome only features and stick a big box over the page insisting the user switch. Unless, of course, you want to pass complete control over web standards to Google.
See GDPR side effect of annoying banners everywhere even if I don't give a damn about my website visits information being processed, for how unintended consequences played out and made the web worse for everyone.
For DMA specifically, see Apple withholding Screen Mirroring (a feature I would enjoy tremendously) from EU for fear (IMHO quite reasonable) that the vaguely written DMA could be interpreted as requiring them to open mirroring to 3rd parties.
It's been just a few months and already DMA impacted my enjoyment of my devices, no?
the only problem with gdpr is that it didn't push far enough. If your browser provides a header with accept/reject all, a banner should not be shown. Also, GDPR does have many other interesting things, including being able to download/delete your data
Just for your info, the banners are absolutely not required and they are the band aid solution of websites who don't give a crap about their users.
If you also don't care about yourself, it's worse for you but many others now have the chance to deny providers of their scummy way to make money off unwitting users.
Parent is right, banners are not required by GDPR. These websites do not reflect the people in the organisations they represent, they are made by developers like the rest of us who are following the crowd like sheep.
3. Analytics cookies
We use these purely for internal research on how we can improve the service we provide for all our users.
The cookies simply assess how you interact with our website – as an anonymous user (they data gathered does not identify you personally).
Also, this data is not shared with any third parties or used for any other purpose. The anonymised statistics could be shared with contractors working on communication projects under contractual agreement with the European Commission.
However, you are free to refuse these types of cookies – either via the cookie banner you will see on the first page you visit or at Europa Analytics.
That appears to be things covered by the GDPR and that they need some way to inform you that you can reject them ... and that's done with a banner that allows you to reject those cookies.
Given that analytics is used, and that has cookies that track information, they're required to have that notification somehow. That page doesn't appear to be a "developers following the crowd like sheep" but rather "the requirements of the law are followed to the spirit and letter and the easiest and most accessible way to provide that functionality is with a banner."
The banner works for its requirements with GDPR and meets the requirements for accessibility.
Surely, one cannot expect that companies trying to save costs will go through great lengths to implement something that they don't know if it will work or not or if they'll get sued in the EU if they implement a different solution when the EU themselves implement it this way.
If there is a better way of doing it that doesn't lead to lawsuits, the EU's website should be the first ones to implement and demonstrate an easier and more accessible way to comply with the GPDR.
As it is, the websites of europa.eu are setting the standard for companies to follow when they want to make sure that they don't get sued for failure to comply with the GPDR for website notifications and accessibility within the EU.
This is an issue I regulary face, people not being educated on what the damn thing actually is. A general catchall banner on intial website load is the laziest and most intrusive way to get compliance, but its the easiest for developers so they generally take that way out.
As a company, if I were to implement something that is unknown to be in compliance with the spirit or letter of the GDPR, it is possible that the company would get sued within the EU.
The way to ensure that you don't get sued is to copy the structure of the one website that you know is in compliance with the GPDR and follow their lead.
When reading the GPDR text from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/homepage.html I see a cookie banner. If it works there and that is the example of how to be in compliance with the obligations of a website for cookies? Would some other implementation that isn't done that way be risky in that the courts in Europe could decide that it wasn't done correctly?
Until the websites of europa.eu change to show an alternative way to be in compliance with cookie notification for the GDPR, banners remain the least risky (and yes, easiest and laziest) way to try to remain in compliance.
Nothing in the GPDR says "thou shalt have a banner" - but that's not the issue at hand. What is the least risky way for a company to implement the requirements of GDPR given that's the way europa.eu does it?
It's interesting the views in the threads of "screw your parents if they can't figure out how to protect themselves w/o iOS/AppStore" to "we must think of the children and protect them from cookies"
as eu citizen i'm happy with it. I have both a pixel and an iphone and imo you can continue using app store apps if you are afraid of security (let's not dive into this argument, bc the statements about security in some cases are false), while others will use other app stores when/where they want, that's kinda the point, you as a user can decide what to do. If you are afraid about your grandma/kids installing something, I'm fairly sure there's(or will be) an option in settings to limit such actions.
It's true that ppl do need more education related to digital privacy, on the other hand, who knows if chrome is much worse than safari, and if they use chrome on their laptops... chances are the data is already collected, if they use google - data is already collected.
> I choose Apple versus Android, because I want the safe and user friendly ecosystem Apple offers.
Me too.
> The same goes with iOS on iPad. I'm very happy that my parents can use those devices versus a Windows machine (or even a MacBook) and know that they are pretty much safe from malware.
iOS (and Android) are very different position, security-wise, than desktop operating systems (Windows, Linux, macOS) because of the strong application isolation and permissions system. On a desktop OS ~any software you run has access to ~all your files (https://xkcd.com/1200/). Even as a die-hard desktop Linux user, we have to recognize that Apple leads in platform security, both in mobile and on the desktop. Take a look at Hector Martin’s (from Asahi Linux) thoughts on this.
> both my parents independently have moved on from built-in Safari to Chrome (independently), since that was the only browser name they know. And now they are in a much worse position privacy-wise than before. Which is certainly not in the spirit of the GDPR and DMA.
Two thoughts here: 1) the point of the GDPR and DMA is to give people the choice. In my opinion, choice is good. 2) people choosing things that hinder their privacy because they “don’t know better” is, well, an education problem.
Of course the GDPR/ePrivacy directive is notorious for lax enforcement (it’s ramping up, though) of illegal techniques and dark patterns like making it more difficult to reject unnecessary spyware cookies than to accept them. I predict the same will happen with the DMA.
It's not an alternative viewpoint, it's just plain missing the point.
The strength of Apple products and their ecosystem does not require apple forcing a monopoly on payments in their ecosystem.
If they stop abusing their position, their products will be just as good and as secure. I don't see the correlation between the article linked and that comment
a lot of people actually clueless on why apple charge a fee so they are like, why are you charging? the web didn't charge me either. when in fact apple provides all the infrastructure, distribution, security, payment system.
You seem to be saying 'Look at all this infrastructure Apple gives you for free, of course you should pay them their cut'.
You could look at it the other way and say 'They made all this infrastructure in order to lock in vendors and monopolise the app market, thereby forcing you to pay them their cut'.
If posts on HN are anything to go by, it seems this perspective is decided simply by whether you like Apple or not!
Is that sarcastic? If not I feel you have missed the point of this whole thread/argument.
People would rather the freedom to choose what they buy, who they buy it from, and where they buy it. This freedom of choice is much more important to a great many people than being locked in to a service 'because its good'.
The EU is too soft with Apple. Apple has consistently shown harmful intentions towards users, and it needs to change. They have had numerous opportunities to change but have refused to do so. I'm a big fan of Apple products, but I cannot accept the fact that I cannot install apps on my device from any source I want. Even if I develop my own app, I cannot install it on my iPhone. Why is the iPhone different from the Mac? It should be just as easy to install an app on the iPhone, simply download it and you're done, or drag and drop it from the desktop.
I hope the EU sets a precedent once and for all with a maximum fine (10% of global revenue).
To be fair, if you develop the app yourself you can install it on your iPhone without any problem, you connect your phone and install it through Xcode.
True, but you have to rebuild the app every six or seven days, because it stops working. Unless you shell out for the paid developer account I think. Then your apps won't expire.
My guess is that Apple thinks this route could be used to circumvent the App Store.
Xcode only works on a Mac, and to do it you need to be registered in the Apple developer program.
So if you want to develop an app for iPhone you can do it no problem, as long as you buy another apple device to code it on, pay Apple the subscription fee to join the developer program, and then you can install it on your Apple phone.
I hope that Apple pulls out of the EU. They're less than 10% of their global revenue. If the fines are higher than their profits why on earth would they stay?
1. The logic in that is to prevent Apple from trying any shenenigans where "technically" Apple Europe has 10€ revenue and can continue to dodge regulations. It's simply recognizing that megacorps exist and will absolutely try to play the system. Sure, you could be develop a more complex method but why? Fines are meant as a determent and should hurt.
2. The fines would of course be enforced against the European Entity.
3. If they stick to the regulation there is no need to pay any fines. Taxes are not calculated this way.
4. There is an implicit "up to" whenever EU fines are stated.
The logic is obvious, that is what it takes for these kind of companies to feel the fine. 20 million dollars is nothing to them.
This is easy to see if you want to. It's been discussed over and over. "I don't understand this thing that I refuse to understand!" is a really useless comment.
Still makes 0 sense. 20% of global revenue is much much more than 20mils. apple had 380 billion in revenue last year. so you want to fine them 76 billion?
also, "its nothing to them" is not an argument.
They have the opportunity to stop breaking the law. If they don't choose to do that, they face punitive damages. It has never been unusual for punitive damages to exceed the proceeds gained from breaking the law. That's why they're called punitive.
This isn't a situation where they do something unknowingly and then face some major consequences. This is a situation where they break the law, they're told to stop, they don't stop, they're told to stop again, they still don't stop. After that, rinse and repeat a few more times. 20% of global revenue sounds perfectly fair for this kind of stupidity.
Apple's App Store policy is unbelievably ridiculously hubristic. Imagine if Google/Microsoft charged you 30% of your entire business just because you ran it on top of Excel/Sheets and Gmail/Outlook. Or if Adobe took a 30% royalty from all artists creative works. It's madness, plain and simple. Developers already pay an annual fee to publish to the App Store, and consumers pay massive dollar to buy their iDevices. And yet they still have the nerve to demand 30% of entire business revenue, and charge a tax even when conducted outside of the App Store (so-called Core Technology Fee)? Even most governments in the world don't tax out-of-jurisdiction income.
It's never actually been about the 30%, it's just that that's the easiest manifestation. It's Apple's insistance to insert themselves into the relationship between developers and their users.
The fee could be next-to-free and many would still be upset if they're not able to use their own payments infrastructure. Developers are not able to offer customers refunds on IAP or discounts or credits.
Steam demonstrates that it's not about the 30%. It shows how 30% is viable in a competetive market if it's what consumers (and developers) prefer.
In the world of physical products, brick and mortar stores will take 40-50% of the revenue for selling your product. This is the norm. Even worse, production, shipping, and accounting all also cost vastly more.
So while the 30% take of the app store is likely too much, you can't really do an "imagine if" because actually prior to the software industry things were far far far more difficult.
Yeah but physical products are hard work, and cost a lot to store, move and display properly. Yet you can still sell directly to consumer if you wish. Software distribution costs basically nothing on the internet, AND Apple makes it impossible to sell directly to the user.
Sure, putting files on a CDN is very cheap. But, point of sales is a massive pain in the ass. Updates are a massive pain in the ass, notifying users of updates and security patches, not to mention marketing. These things are such a huge pain that I can see why a platform would charge more than pennies for them.
Facing building out exactly this stuff myself using Stripe, a traditional website, building in licensing keys, etc etc. If something like the app store were multi-platform and had a bit more support around offline licensing and things like upgrade pricing, then honestly I would not immediately discount it even at 30% cut. Especially if I got some marketing out of it too.
You can argue wether 30% is the right number, but what the app store provides is definitely not "basically nothing".
Imagine if Steam took 30% of all sales on their platform! Or if Nintendo or Sony or Microsoft charged developers 30% for online app sales! (Spoiler: they all do).
There are lots of things worth criticizing about Apple's model, but I'll never understand the fixation on the 30% rule. They provide a distribution platform that is every bit as robust and has a much larger reach than the video game consoles, and if they want to charge the same prices as the consoles I don't see why that's the hill to die on when there are so many other things that are more obviously rotten.
A) For the video game consoles this isn't true, they have full control just like Apple does.
B) Like I said, there are better hills to die on. App store monopoly is one that makes more sense to me (though I still actually disagree with the mainstream HN consensus on it).
> A) For the video game consoles this isn't true, they have full control just like Apple does.
You can still go to any physical retail store and buy a game developed by a 3rd party. Yes that 3rd Party company had to pay a license fee to release the game on the hardware but you can still choose where you want to buy that game from, including any sales or discounts that retailer might see fit to try to gain your custom.
Which is a right that Apple was willing to concede, but people flipped out when they announced you'd still have to pay the fee.
Consoles get a pass for things that Apple gets raked over the coals for. There's clearly something more going on than just "these specific behaviors are unacceptable always", which is the simplified take that gets popular on HN.
>Which is a right that Apple was willing to concede
Begrudgly and in a way that is very much viewed as malicious compliance, hence them now being investigated for it.
>but people flipped out when they announced you'd still have to pay the fee
I agree with them
When I buy an App from the app store, Apple should take a cut for providing the infrastructure, payment system etc, thats fair.
If I am buying something from a company directly from their website or marketplace, for a service they provide in that app, why should I pay Apple a fee?
> If I am buying something from a company directly from their website or marketplace, for a service they provide in that app, why should I pay Apple a fee?
Ok, but explain to me why it is ok for Sony to charge a license fee to release a game that is only sold in retail stores as physical copies, while it is not ok for Apple to charge a similar fee?
The parent's point is that HN goes all frothy-mouthed about the $0.50/download fee from Apple, and then uses pretzel logic to justify why it is ok for Playstation/Xbox/Nintendo to do the exact same thing.
The main difference is that the agreement between Sony and publisher only covers publishers first sale of the material, and their agreements only cover direct revenue share / static prices per unit from publisher.
It does not limit publisher in any way how they want to sell the physical copies, it does absolutely not apply to non-first-sale (depending on the structure of distribution, the box you see in a retail store might already be beyond first sale).
It also does not setup any limits on publishers activities that do not involve Sony licensed IP.
It's similar to how many vendors had revenue share licensing on their products in the past, which is legally distinct from flat percentage applied to distribution channel and limits on said distribution channel
n.b. Sony has, apparently, since PS4 sometimes been cheaper to develop for, in terms of non-revenue-share pricing, than Apple - often providing no-cost loaners for smaller teams.
I think that the issue here is that every person and their grandma has an iphone, and so they are a bigger target. Pretty much every single person in the western world has a mobile phone, and the majority of those are iPhones.
No matter how hard you try to compare this to the console market, its apples and oranges. The amount of xboxes sold and the market they are sold to just pales in insignificance compared to Apples domination of the world.
Also the gaming world has a much shittier nemesis, gambling. The loot box and microtransaction scandals have overshadowed any issues with store fees. I feel if these things hadnt been so big over the last decade, there would have been much more focus on the payment issues of app stores.
As a kicker, I feel that the courts would probably argue that the console world is very specific to gaming, and therefore is a much more targetted audience. Phones have apps for everrything that run your life, hell you cant even get a bus ticket or do any banking where Im from if you dont have a smart phone. So it is much more of a lifestyle device which is required to live in the modern age, whereas consoles are purely entertainment.
Steam also leans on the same anticompetitive "most-favored nation" agreements as Amazon. Sure, you don't have to list on Steam... but if you do, you better not try to go around their cut and list elsewhere at a lower price, either.
They have very positive mindshare with gamers but at the end of the day gaben's not your buddy either.
Steam lets you sell Steam keys directly or via a third party and they take a 0% cut. That's how places like greenman gaming, humble bundle, etc work. You still get to use all Steam's infrastructure but pay no fee.
that's a mechanism intended to grant keys to reviewers and such, you can't use that as a primary transaction mechanism. steam has an unspecified threshold at which they will kick you off the platform for abusing that, they aren't there to be a free delivery platform for external sales and if it makes up a plurality of your sales they'll pull the plug.
you'll note humble bundle isn't literally the only sales those publishers make on those games, or even a majority of their sales, and it's also something that's specially blessed by valve. if you pull that as a random shit publisher not through humble bundle you'll get kicked off.
It's mostly about intent: just about no one on the planet looks at the marketing for a PlayStation 5 and expects to be able to use it to file their taxes. That device is sold as a multimedia platform; that it happens to be a general purpose computer with software locks is irrelevant to it's stated purpose. The consumer is pretty well aware of what they're getting.
Not so with your average Apple device with access to the App Store, outside of maybe the TVs these days. The iPad ad that made all the headlines recently was clearly trying to bill it as a general purpose everything device with few if any such limitations. In terms of how the devices are marketed to consumers, it's night and day, and that does make a huge difference when trying to determine if consumers have been mislead by shady business practices.
> just about no one on the planet looks at the marketing for a PlayStation 5 and expects to be able to use it to file their taxes
Ah, this old chestnut of circular reasoning. It's not a general purpose computer because people think it isn't, so they don't use it as one because it's not a general purpose computer.
> The consumer is pretty well aware of what they're getting.
Is the consumer not well aware that iOS is a walled garden?
I should clarify that I don't personally hold this particular chestnut. A computer is a computer, and I'll remove the locks and run whatever software I please. I make homebrew games as a hobby, after all.
But regulators don't tend to write laws based on the actual tech, as much as how it gets used. That's the disconnect, but it still helps to try to understand the other point of view.
Primarily. Some can also play Blu-ray disks and all can stream music and movies from a bunch of different sources. The PS5 also has integrations with some social media sites and a built-in web browser. The PS5 Game Base application also lets you call and text other PS5 users.
> You're seriously asking me how is Playstation OS targeted at games?
We know the OS is great for games. What I'm asking is why it's not good for other things (the OS kernel is FreeBSD 11).
The PS2 and 3 had full user Linux support so those were obviously general purpose PCs. They removed Linux support for the PS4 and 5 though and apparently that seems to be enough for many people here to no longer think of them as computers.
If the dividing line between general purpose computer and appliance is in how the manufacturer lets you use it, then what functionality would the iPhone need to lose to in order for you to stop thinking the iPhone is a general purpose computer?
15% can still be too much. Alternative music, book, etc stores often have high IP payments that make the business case impossible because 15% is more than the profit margin. And apple doesn't have that 15% for it's music and book store. It's the definition of monopoly privilege.
AFAIK, steam doesn't prevent developers from also allowing their games to be installed outside of steam (if so, then that's a problem).
It's the fact that there's no alternative to get spotify, etc onto your phone that's the ultimate issue. The security of the app store in an enourmous advantage, but they're using it to extract huge premiums.
Like it or not, our phones have become the primary medium we use for news, entertainment, etc. If it were me, I'd allow side-loading of apps onto the app store, but they'd then have zero access to your contacts, unique phone IDs, and strict privacy rules. Apple could still enforce malware via the apple subscription. Essentially, they can make it like MacOS, but not allow any unsigned apps.
What makes Apple such a unique company beloved by billions of people and such a valuable company for investors is because there’s no other company like Apple. It’s the only company that has managed to be a successful software AND hardware company, it has 3 extremely popular operating systems (iOS, ipadOS, MacOS) and the only company that is vertically integrated from top down. Wait it gets better. There are no laws in the books that says what Apple is doing is illegal. Apple’s culture might be Steve Jobs’ greatest product.
I wouldn't consider iPadOS different from iOS. They realistically share 99% or more of their code with each other and just lock down features because of hardware/form factor differences. You also left out watchOS which is based on iOS.
This is ridiculous. The EU has a complete axe to grind against Apple, for reasons that I believe border on corruption (if not, veer completely into it). Meanwhile, Meta has a near-monopoly on social networking in the Western world and is subject to a slap on the wrist at best.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt, one of the best friends of the current EU Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager, is currently on Meta's payroll. For this reason alone, the current EU Competition Commissioner should recuse herself from being involved in this role. There are other reasons, including direct conversations I have had with co-founders of Meta regarding EU commissioners, that cause me to have very little faith in these people to act fairly, or to do little other than carry out Meta's very long agenda to be able to ride on top of Apple's platform and deliver their own App Store with their own currency (remember Facebook Credits, anyone?) and completely replace iMessage etc for people who live within the mass-scale dystopia that is the Facebook-Instagram-WhatsApp Industrial Complex.
Meta is a total monopoly that causes daily harm to society, and yet this is what the EU finds itself obsessed with. These people should be ashamed of themselves. And, they should release the records of every meeting and every communication they have with Meta and its various lobbyists, and the children/spouses of these people (because they love using the family connection to avoid scrutiny, as evidenced by their hiring of various congresspeople's children in roles that make no sense).
The EU fined Meta for 1.2 billion dollars last year, the largest GDPR fine ever [1]. And last month, the EU announced another investigation into Meta [2].
I wish the United States would follow the EU on this. It's insane that 1 company has near complete control over what software can and cannot be published, and they get to take a tax on all software sold. Absolutely insane. Obviously there's web, Android, Windows, Linux, gaming consoles, and smart tvs, so there are some work-arounds to avoid the evil empire, but most consumers here in the United States use iPhones and probably have no idea that Apple is taxing all of the app developers and exercising complete editorial control over all software published for the iPhone. Do you think consumers know that Apple literally reviews all software companies products and then decide whether they will allow that company or product to exist? Even worse, its not even high level executives making these decisions, it's $20 an hour employees on their App Review Board making these decisions to kill entire companies.
Go back in time 20 years and tell someone that the most popular personal computer taxes every transaction that runs on it for 30% and has absolute control over what software runs on it including banning any programs it doesn't like, and they'd look at you like you were crazy. And then be like, "Fucking Bill Gates! How'd he pull that off?"
>and has absolute control over what software runs on it including banning any programs it doesn't like
Don't forget taking the idea from an app developer, implementing it themselves, and then banning the app from the developer that came up with the idea. Apple has done this so many times, and it's completely abusive.
> Apple has done this so many times, and it's completely abusive.
Interesting
I must be living under a rock....
Have you some examples?
Sherlocking:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#:~:text=So....
> The phenomenon of Apple releasing a feature that supplants or obviates third-party software is so well known that being Sherlocked has become an accepted term used within the Mac and iOS developer community.
Also stealing ideas from the jailbreak community https://ios.gadgethacks.com/how-to/60-ios-features-apple-sto...
Keyboard on Apple Watch
https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/09/14/flicktype-develop...
To be clear I don’t think this is an acceptable practice, but the concept wouldn’t be completely unfamiliar because Nintendo did this with the NES and their lockout chip/seal of quality system
The differences are scale and utility. A company that has control of such a large market gets different rules because of the power they weld. Apple's market is 1-2 billion people and affects 100,000+ companies. Nintendo's market is 2-3 orders of magnitude less and the number of companies affected is similarly much much smaller.
Plus a gaming console is for entertainment only while a smarphone is becoming almost a requirement for participation in modern society.
I still think if you own a device you should be able to run whatever software you want on it, even if it's a game console from a somewhat smaller (but still huge) company
>Apple's market is 1-2 billion people and affects 100,000+ companies.
It's a bit disingenuous to use customer base and the number of people who develop for the platform as a excuse to bring legal action against the company. Customers know what they were getting when they bought the phones and companies knew the rules when they chose to develop for the platform.
I don't think users are fully aware of the extent these platforms control the devices. The same thing happened with cigarettes; eventually, the government required a warning. Perhaps a similar approach is necessary here.
Is it? If there’s an effective duopoly on the entire market is that truly choice?
I agree. Though to be fair Nintendo's NES is a gaming console (not that they are right, just contrasting the use-cases).
Consider Apple's very own Mac - another general-purpose computing device like the iPhone, only in a different form-factor.
Surely Mac developers must be tripping over themselves to throw 30% of their total revenue at Apple, as reward for their laser focus on privacy and security and for developing a nanny-platform that makes their users feel warm and fuzzy inside?
Surely Mac users must not be allowed to do business with literally any entity in the world without involving Apple as the gatekeeper?
Oh wait.
I don't agree with it for games consoles as well, but a NES back then is completely different to a phone these days.
Everybody uses a phone, for everything now.
Gave me a good laugh.
"Micro$oft amiright"
Appl€ as well now.
They’d snap your hands off for distribution and marketing costs as low as 30%.
Retail markups were much higher on physical software.
For retail software yes, but distributing for next to nothing over the internet was also common (depending on the target group) 20 years ago.
You mean distributing .mob files on xda-developers and needing to speak with carriers to distribute your app?
There’s a reason most developers moved in droves to Apple ecosystem for amazing APIs, software and hardware, abandoned Symbian/blackberry/etc and had no issues with the 30% fee since they instantly got market access to millions of consumers.
30% was never an issue to begin with. People just feel today that everyone should get access to a marketplace with billion users for free, often forgetting what it took to build this market in the first place.
> 30% was never an issue to begin with
The confiscation of 30% of all revenue earned online has always been an issue for any company and developer here on planet Earth.
There are countless useful apps and companies that will never serve people's needs because it is not financially feasible to run a business where your total revenue is confiscated to the tune of 30%.
Well there was no real mobile market 20 years ago, but for desktop software there was a huge industry of software you would download from websites.
> People just feel today that everyone should get access to a marketplace with billion users for free
Exactly
> often forgetting what it took to build this market in the first place.
Don’t give a fuck
>30% was never an issue to begin with.
It has always been an issue. It's just better than the status quo before the iPhone.
> People just feel today that everyone should get access to a marketplace with billion users for free, often forgetting what it took to build this market in the first place.
1. It's not for free. Users (and developers) pay for it when they buy the iPhone. iPhone revenue is 3x Apple's R&D expenses. That is, iPhone sales alone cover the R&D on every single of Apple's products: from iPhone and iOS to Macs and MacOS, AppleTV, HomePods, Vision Pro, all of Apple's software running on those devices etc.
2. This market was built in no small part by the actual developers you now so snidely dismiss. iPhone is nothing without the app ecosystem.
What Apple does is bad but they don't tax 30% of every transaction. Apple isn't taking a 30% of your Uber or DoorDash, they charge 30% for sales made on their platform for digital goods and services redeemed on that platform.
I think it's harder to argue that Sony shouldn't be allowed to take a cut of game sales on the PS5 outside of "well we all decided collectively to make that illegal because we don't like it." And honestly that's plenty enough for legislation but it's not going to be without consequences because Apple will extract their pound of flesh somewhere, can't have profits go down.
> The commission says a fee for such matchmaking is justifiable but what Apple charges goes “beyond what is strictly necessary”.
The EU commission is a hair away from just telling Apple what they're allowed to charge which I don't love. Either how Apple extracts fees is legal and how much is up to the market, or it isn't. Saying "it's legal as long as the percent is small enough" is silly.
> Saying "it's legal as long as the percent is small enough" is silly.
Credit card companies have had caps on their fee percentages in the EU for a long time, it's not unusual for the EU to set these limits.
> What Apple does is bad but they don't tax 30% of every transaction. Apple isn't taking a 30% of your Uber or DoorDash, they charge 30% for sales made on their platform for digital goods and services redeemed on that platform.
You're mischaracterising the situation. Apple taxes 30% of all transactions made on apps other than exempt transactions. The food and tangible services you mentioned are exempt categories. Apple takes a 30% cut of all sales of digital goods and services transacted on apps on their platform, regardless of whether the goods are "redeemed on that platform" (whatever that means). Of course Apple has built a byzantine maze of carve-outs, exemptions and counter-exemptions that muddy the waters and give them great power if you're a small developer without the resources to fight them for your rights.
Subscriptions are 15% after the first year. Apps from small developers also pay 15%. Given the prevalence of subscriptions and the large number of indies on the app store, I really doubt 30% is close to the average. At any rate, 15% is still sizable, but it doesn't help the conversation if we are substantially overstating the fee percentage.
> it's not going to be without consequences because Apple will extract their pound of flesh somewhere, can't have profits go down.
You write this as if Apple is the authority figure here.
Profits can very easily go down.
> The EU commission is a hair away from just telling Apple what they're allowed to charge which I don't love
I see your point.
But there are trade-offs. Apple is doing its best to be a monopoly, and so tell them what to charge or break them up.
Or simply allow the monopolist practices to do what they do and eventually one firm will own everything.
> Apple is doing its best to be a monopoly
Apple is quite literally a minority player in the EU.
Rather than going in to details why that doesn't matter, with relation to monopolistic power, I'll just let you extrapolate your reasoning to the following:
The EU population is quite literally a minority of the world population.
Apple has less than 30% market share globally.
Meanwhile the EU—a minority of the world population—levies fines based on global revenue.
Should Google Chrome ask for 30% of web purchases?
I think it's funny people argue this when Google already does extract a massive pound of flesh from web purchases and uses Chrome to push "the web" where they control the market.
I have to pay the Apple tax to reach my customers where they are, iOS.
I have to pay the Google tax to reach my customers where they are, the web dominated by Doubleclick and Google search.
Do you care that a tech company is extracting huge sums from digital markets or do you just care how? Does it make a lick of difference that with ad spend it feels like you're buying something or when you put ads on your site you never see the money they took off the top?
> Do you care that a tech company is extracting huge sums from digital markets or do you just care how?
Everyone should care how! The how is the important part.
If there are alternative ways to access something then people are free to compete of product. That's a huge difference because competition is generally consumer friendly.
And the EU should look into Google's unfair practices from its domination of web search and ads. I suspect it will.
If Google starting charging site owners 30% of their revenues to index their website on Google Search, and there was no possible alternative, the EU would probably be looking at them pretty harshly too.
> massive pound of flesh
Technically, all pounds of flesh are the same mass :)
Love that, I fully expect "pound of flesh" to soon have an entry in the dictionary for "an unspecified amount of flesh" to annoy language prescriptivists.
Not in an interplanetary society. If you're on Europa, your entire body weighs approximately one pound.
In modern times, the pound is defined in terms of kilograms, so it's a unit of mass.
I can send you a link to my website, no Google required.
I can send you my Android app, no Google required.
I can’t send you my iOS app without relying on Apple.
They already do, you can't survive in ecommerce without google ads.
That was the case 5-10 years ago, but many e-commerce businesses are surviving solely on TikTok and Instagram ads. Look at most of the Google Shopping results for small items, all Amazon and Temu who have bigger pockets.
> Either how Apple extracts fees is legal and how much is up to the market, or it isn't.
Whose market? The one that Apple controls?
Arguably PS5/Nintendo stuff is just as obnoxious... just in smaller scale. Do you really own that device you bought?
> I think it's harder to argue that Sony shouldn't be allowed to take a cut of game sales on the PS5
I agree, it's hard to argue that. Sony created a narrow-purpose platform (gaming + media) and is taking a cut for offering 3rd party games there. It's not a general purpose computer designed to be your main communication device and your key to connect you to any type of service or appliance in your world.
Sony didn't sell best-in-class TVs, then used their dominating position to demand revenue-share from broadcasters, then integrated a gaming console for the same price to crush console competitors, then created a custom plug and partnered with building companies that their plug shall be in all living rooms, then launched a watch which would only work if you also have their TVs, then started a bank and mandated that all products promoted on any TV channel must only be payable via their payment service,...
...and then when a commission started setting boundaries on its grip over the market, started complaining how the commission is preventing competition, how only Sony can ensure a secure living room and safe TV-experience, and started weaponizing its customers (with the custom sockets, watches and wallets all on Sony) against their own elected regulatory body...
Apple didn't develop a "general purpose computer" either, they developed a cell phone. They entered into an established product market, with a product that was even more locked down than the current competition (remember, Palm Treos and Blackberrys?). Even "dumb" phones had apps and games (though if you think Apple's fees are ridiculous, you should look up the cost of developing a bejeweled clone for your old sony ericson, "Qalcom BREW" would be a contemporary starting point). Within this market, 3 different competitors (Palm, Microsoft and Google) also threw their hat into the ring, with far more open platforms. Palm and Microsoft eventually gave up, and Google is the majority player with the fully open platform. Yet Apple is somehow so dominant that we're crafting entirely new rules around them doing the same thing they and many other highly integrated hardware/software manufacturer has done for ages. Why?
Because like it or not, it has become a general purpose computer. For millions it’s their primary (for some: only) gateway to banking, payments, education, government services, personal relations, keeping in touch with family, navigation, healthcare and emergency services.
Up next: digital ID and (possibly) online voting.
Those things are all pretty important for a society, right? In a sense, they are society.
Accordingly, a couple powerful entities controlling all those things ought to expect oversight from said society. It’s not hard to understand.
So no, Apple is not doing “the same thing” as other device manufacturers have “done for ages”. Not even close.
They are a victim of their own success in a way, but their shareholders have been rewarded handsomely. They’re hardly a victim like you’re proposing.
It feels to me like the problem here is the government and large institutions only providing access via a single manufacturers single platform, rather than the existence of the platform. That is to say, if education, government services, health care, emergency services, ID and voting are all only accessible via having an iPhone, the solution to that is to mandate that those things be accessible via other options too, not to mandate opening up the iPhone ecosystem. Aside from the fact that the government needs no new laws to actually make its services available on open platforms, there's also the "single point of failure" problem, and the "government services only available to people with $400+ electronic toys with expensive monthly subscription services" problem. Regulating banking vs phone app store markets might be more of a toss up, but it seems like again the "single point of failure" problem should argue much more strongly in favor of forcing banks to not limit access to iPhones, rather than forcing iPhones to change to be something the iPhone consumers don't actually want.
No, the problem is that a critical mass of a market is dependant on a single operator of that market, and that operator is not providing equal access to it but considers itself the owner AND a privileged player there which everyone has to pay to compete with.
The audience of iPhone users are that market.
-
"You have something to sell on my market? Sure, here are the fees, the rules and I take a cut of all your sales"
--> "My data shows that people like what you're selling on my market, so I studied all details, decided to build it myself, provide it for less/free and compete with you. Thanks for doing the risky work of proving that potential."
"Feel free to stay if you like, your continued success will continue to educate/fund my competing product. If you leave, you have to end business with all customers, as I took measures that they are ONLY able to visit MY market"
"Thanks for doing the risky work of proving that potential"
When people realise that Apple hasn't innovated any new technology pretty much ever (certainly for at least the last 30 years).
They always wait until something is proven in the market and then buy their way to it & lock the competition out. "Face ID" = Kinect, "we invented multi-touch" = blatant lie, vision= pre-existing AR/VR...oh sorry "spatial computing" Etc.
>You have something to sell on my market? Sure, here are the fees, the rules and I take a cut of all your sales
>My data shows that people like what you're selling on my market, so I studied all details, decided to build it myself, provide it for less/free and compete with you. Thanks for doing the risky work of proving that potential.
>Feel free to stay if you like, your continued success will continue to educate/fund my competing product. If you leave, you have to end business with all customers, as I took measures that they are ONLY able to visit MY market
None of those things really affect the banking, government services, education, ID, health etc apps that the OP was concerned with. They're not selling their apps or even selling any services via their app (except for services which are incidentally forbidden from using IAP in the first place which means the 30% fees don't apply:
>3.1.3(e) Goods and Services Outside of the App: If your app enables people to purchase physical goods or services that will be consumed outside of the app, you must use purchase methods other than in-app purchase to collect those payments, such as Apple Pay or traditional credit card entry.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#goo...
Nor are they competing with Apple for their applications. At a stretch, you could argue that the banking apps sort of kind of compete with Apple wallet in the credit card space, but like I said, it's a bit of a stretch.
My comment about government services, banking, education and so on was in response to your general assertion that an iPhone is no different than other electronic devices and therefore shouldn't be treated differently by regulators. For the reasons I listed, that's kind of ridiculous. Smartphones are just as important to modern economies/societies as the automobile, air travel, public libraries or news organizations (at least in my opinion).
Accordingly... unlike an XBox (which only provides entertainment) smartphones need to have well considered legislation that maximizes the overall benefit to society (while still maintaining a financial incentive for innovation). There's a lot at stake.
So, I wasn't trying to cite specific examples where Apple has fallen short in these areas (though I'm aware of a few), I was making a generalization about the relative importance of the smartphone to modern economies and society. It's just not the same thing as other gadgets (even if the technology is similar). Not even close.
> None of those things really affect the banking, government services, education, ID, health etc apps that the OP was concerned with.
Of course they do. All those entities have to follow terms and conditions of Apple to reach THEIR customers/citizens, requiring them to share crucial information to Apple, the sole gatekeeper with a vested interest to maximize user-profit.
> At a stretch, you could argue that the banking apps sort of kind of compete with Apple wallet in the credit card space, but like I said, it's a bit of a stretch.
No stretch at all. The market operator also offers financial services directly, while having privileged access (as preloaded app) and a superior level of information (via user profiling) about the users needs and behavior. Other financial service providers have the choice between paying revenue-share to Apple to be integrated with Apple Pay, or have their services only surface if the customer explicitly searches for their app (all while a competitor may pay the rev-share and have higher integration/visibility from the market provider)
You raise good points about making sure that all those services are always available through multiple means, but the argument I'm making isn't that all those services are limited to a smartphone - they aren't... I think everything I mentioned (except for emergency calls) are available in a web browser.
The argument is simply; the smartphone is the platform we have chosen because it makes our lives so much better. It does its job so well that it has become a critical part of the economic and social fabric of the country. Thus we need to make sure it's regulated (up to a point, obviously) so that the public's needs and that of the larger economy are met, while still maintaining the financial incentive for smartphone platforms to innovate.
Consider; it's possible to walk to work/banks/government offices for the majority of people but vehicles are convenient and time-efficient so that's what people choose. Accordingly, society accommodates and regulates vehicle use. Same thing for radio and television in the past... it was possible to get information and entertainment elsewhere, but people chose those mediums because they were better than the alternatives. It's because of the popularity of cars/radio/television that those things deserved regulation, nothing else.
I guess my question is what part of the various laws being passed is addressing some "public need" that's not currently being met for these apps, or by the entire rest of the market place. I've said it before but every single thing every advocate of regulating Apple's iPhone and App Store is already available on Android. And unlike in the 90's when Windows literally dominated the market, even in the markets where Apple is doing the strongest, at best they have half of the market. Which means every single "necessary" application and resource is equally present on both iOS and Android.
So what is the need here? Who isn't able to access something they need access to and how is forcing Apple to open up their hardware and software platform the correct solution to that problem? And I'm asking honestly here, are there any actual necessary services that are only available on iOS? Not more convenient on iOS, unavailable anywhere else. If we accept the arguments against iOS at face value, it seems impossible for there to even be any necessary services that are more convenient on iOS. The major arguments are Apple is too restrictive, they prevent apps from doing things, they prevent PWAs from working, they disallow integrations that developers want. By all accounts, the iOS experience should be measurably worse for users in every single way for any 3rd party service. If removing Apple's restrictions was important to consumers, if it was actually harming them in ways that they didn't think was worth the benefits those same restrictions provide, Android should be mopping the floor with Apple. But they're not. And none of the arguments I've heard for regulating Apple have been because of failures of iOS users to be able to access critical government and economic resources.
The closest arguments that could be made are about things like blocking access to certain VPNs or other "subversive" applications in places like China and Russia. But of course, the proper way to regulate that would be to mandate wide open consumer access to strong end to end encryption that governments can not control or have access to. But mandating that sort of thing would be admitting that even "western" governments are untrustworthy and might need to be subverted. It would be mandating access to law breaking tools, which the EU and the US are not eager to do even here, let alone eager to step into that political battle on the world stage.
> Apple didn't develop a "general purpose computer" either, they developed a cell phone.
Yeah, like Sony did in the analogy above. They became best-in-class in TV and then started to dictate the rules for reaching every living room with their TV in, made trillions of dollars and then used that position to take control of other industries.
> gaming consoles
To my knowledge none of the big three consoles allow you to install anything you want on them. They're "walled gardens" just as badly as Apple's ecosystem.
Banks and train companies don't try to run payment apps on them.
Even if technically they could, the fact that they don't is to me the crucial difference.
Seems like a different problem.
It is, but it's intertwined in the Apple vs other platforms issue.
Regulators make a difference between general purpose platforms and dedicated/single purpose platforms.
Game consoles are not general computing devices. Apple has aggressively and repeatedly marketed iOS devices as being for general-purpose computing. (Remember the "what's a computer" ads?)
If Apple wants to claim their devices are computer replacements, they should be regulated like it.
> aggressively and repeatedly
Proceeds to site one ad from 2018. Hyperbole really isn’t necessary here. And marketing determining how a product should be regulated is a sure fire way to encourage companies to get around regulation by changing your their marketing.
What regulations exist on computer devices that Apple is evading?
According to this article, Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Okay, wasn't sure that was the reference thanks.
> If Apple wants to claim their devices are computer replacements, they should be regulated like it.
Except they only have very limited use. Smartphones are now ubiquitous.
Only because the garden walls are so thick.
There is no reason why I shouldn't be able to install Arch on either the Xbox or PS5, the hardware is 80-90% off the shelf stuff anyway.
Why can't I have a proper web browser on either? There are no technical limitations, only the walls of their garden we wilfully ignore.
Free the consoles, too.
Prepare for the PS6 to cost $1200 then. The hardware is sold at a loss, which I think justifies them being able to recoup their costs through selling software.
Honestly I don’t know why people think they should be able to publish their software on anything anyways. I can see the iOS/android argument at least because they’re ubiquitous. But there is nothing wrong with how game consoles currently work. It’s a win for Sony/M$/Nintendo, game developers, and consumers. If it wasn’t, then games would only get released on PC (which already allows for exactly what you seem to be advocating for)
That's how the market used to work, but hasn't been the case for generations. Nintendo has sold every platform from the Wii on at a profit.
The PS5 was sold at a slight loss at launch, Sony got production costs down enough to be profitable about a year later (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-04/sony-rais...).
I'm less sure about Microsoft, my understanding is that the Series X is profitable and the Series S is a loss leader. However, both of them can be put into a developer mode and you can run your own (or other people's) code.
My steamdeck certanly didn't cost that much. It also runs arch btw and I can install anything I want on it.
The Stem Deck is a perfect device.
I want one with more power in a displayless box I can plug into my TV and make it my only console.
(they tried with the Steambox, but it kinda faltered)
https://www.amazon.ca/Beelink-Computer-Desktop-Display-2-5Gb...
I mean, you're basically describing the mini-pc form factor. I'm not sure exactly where the steamdeck lies but the last couple of years these laptop CPU based systems have been pretty amazing for what they pack.
The one big (to me) advantage of the Steam Deck is that it's a static system, this way many games have a preset specifically for the deck, usually automatically applied on boot.
No need to spend hours adjusting settings and scouring the internet for That One Setting that will make it run smoothly.
Even CP2077 runs great out of the box on it - and it's nigh-unplayable on PS4 level hardware.
Sure, go for it. Price points won't change, consumers are only willing to pay so much for game systems, so we'll see just how close to the FUD price the market will get. I doubt prices will change much if at all.
> none of the big three consoles allow you to install anything you want on them.
The Xbox kinda does: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/xbox-apps/devk...
And while unofficial, the Nintendo Switch has an exploit chain that lets you run native apps or mainline Linux/Android with Nvidia's Tegra drivers: https://github.com/CTCaer/hekate https://github.com/Atmosphere-NX/Atmosphere
So that's two of the big three consoles that technically do let you install anything you want.
Saying Nintendo are tolerant of users doing anything on their hardware the company doesn't approve of is stretching the truth beyond recognition.
Sure, but that being said the 3DS, Wii, Wii U and Nintendo Switch all have enormous homebrew communities. It's nowhere near Sony's OtherOS levels of support, but the board does have functioning CPU/GPU drivers and can run pretty much "anything" you'd expect from an Aarch64 Linux target.
It's more of a technical nuance in the Switch's case, but homebrew on Nintendo consoles is a time-honored tradition.
Last I checked you could only exploit Switches manufactured in the first couple years of its lifespan without going the hardware mod route.
XBox is/was so open it spawned a very popular media platform: XBMC (XBox Media Center)
That required circumventing its protections via a hardware or software mod.
"Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch! I was there when it was written."
I used Xbox Media Player on my modded Xbox, it later turned into XBMC and to Kodi much later.
It was hardly "open". The console had to be modded to enable any of it.
Could you just not buy their products then?
While there are more consumer friendly ways to do it sure, I don’t see anything illegal or wrong here. You’re buying their hardware, with the software licensing understanding that comes with it - if you don’t like the terms you don’t buy the hardware.
There isn’t a moral calculus that is or needs to be involved here, it’s a simple flat “don’t buy their product if you don’t like it”. If enough people cared and did so, they’d change very quickly.
Apple isn’t a monopoly, there are plenty of alternatives that might suit your needs better.
This so tiring. The issue is not about whether you as a consumer can buy a different phone. The issues is about whether you, as a company, can do business with half the world with one company gating access to those customers. No company should have that level of power. That's why its called the Digital "Markets" Act. It's not some consumer choice act.
Neither Apple, nor Google, nor anyone else, should be able to control so many businesses. It's the same reason Booking.com is in trouble. they're so big, they affect nearly every hotel in the world. That's too much power over too many business.
Like a lot of anti-monopoly laws, the harmed party is not the consumer but other businesses.
No, you cannot simply refuse to give Apple their 30% (unless you are yourself big enough to negotiate an exemption; including waiving a 30% fee of your own for Apple's apps on your platforms) if you want access to their huge and very lucrative market.
Microsoft lost an anti-monopoly case because they bundled a free browser with Windows. Forcing your competitors to pay 30% and thus have higher costs and prices than your own competing services is a much more straightforward violation.
> if you want access to their huge and very lucrative market.
But what gives some third party the right to that huge and lucrative market? It seems parasitic in a kind of way to demand that right.
> It seems parasitic in a kind of way to demand that right.
Third parties bring value to the platform. Try to remove all the third parties from the Apple Store and see how people react.
Apple's sales of iPhones benefit from the third parties, but they use their dominant position to take a huge cut of what the third parties sell.
One could say: either Apple gives access to third parties in a decent way, or they just don't. Apple needs the third parties (otherwise they would not give them access in the first place, obviously), so they should give them decent conditions.
Parasitic? My God, the Kool Aid has been depleted.
The reason their "ecosystem" has any value is because of the "parasites". They're a f**ng platform.
Excuse me, but we should know better over here.
It's parasitic because if you want to participate in the market, you need to use their platform.
Their value is ideally keeping scammers out, but they don't do a great job of that and part of the reason they don't is because they also profit when the scammers do. For example, gambling for kids (loot boxes) is OK. The other part of the value is having a central place to list and promote apps, but also there they're double dipping as you need to pay them to get eyes to your app.
Their value absolutely does not equal 30% of your revenue.
You've misread the original comment.
It wasn't calling Apple parasitic, it was calling the app DEVELOPERS parasitic which is crazy talk.
Oh. Wow. Yeah, calling devs parasitic is wild.
People who are demanding benefits for free (ie selling your products in somebody else's store), are parasites. Those who cooperate, or set up their own shop if they don't want to cooperate, are not.
Let me know when I can start selling stuff on Amazon without giving them a cut. Or put up a stand in the local supermarket where I sell my produce directly to customers.
If App developers made iOS such a profitable market, why haven't they made Android an equally profitable market? There's more users, more liberty, more potential money to be made.
What it comes down to is whether it's better to get a big piece of a small pie or a smaller piece of a big pie. Apple offers a bigger pie of user spending for developers, while cutting out a bigger chunk for themselves from that pie.
Windows was the most successful platform in IT history for about 30 years without this BS.
And they still are, when it comes to enterprise. But consumer software spending was something very niche before Apple expanded the market.
> But consumer software spending was something very niche before Apple expanded the market.
LOLNO :-)
The web is and was a major consumer "software" platform. We just don't have raw numbers for it because it's so distributed, my guess is that it's still bigger than these walled gardens combined.
The web would be even bigger if said walled garden makers wouldn't c**block it by not investing in progressive web apps & co (while they are investing like crazy in their walled gardens, of course).
30 years ago was 1994. Most people did not even have a personal computer. Consumer software was a super niche product.
Subscription online software for consumers was not a big market until pretty recently. As a matter of fact, from the top of my head I cannot think of any such software that is very popular for consumers. Or do you refer to subscription entertainment?
Competition laws
Apple does not hinder any developer from selling their software on competing devices or operating systems. I don't see how an honest person could claim that they're doing anything anti-competitive. I see how the EU politicians can claim that, because they are dishonest and expected to support parasitic actions.
"I don't see how an honest person could claim that they're doing anything anti-competitive."
I, on the other side, very much see it, given how huge the market share of Apple is.
I would be with you if Apple had 5 per cent of the smartphone market. Nevertheless, their very size makes any of their actions that restricts freedoms of their customes at least suspicious of being anti-competitive.
> Apple does not hinder any developer from selling their software on competing devices or operating systems
But Apple does hinder every developer from selling their software on Apple devices without using Apple's mandatory software distribution service. Which most of us can agree, is relatively monopolistic in nature and creates a captive market of Apple customers ripe for abuse.
No, I don't think "most of us can agree" that a manufacturer setting the conditions for distributing plugins for the hardware and software system that they produce and sell is "monopolistic" in nature. That's why we're having these discussions in the first place.
Every store, market place and mall has conditions for being able to sell your wares in their space. Every single one of them will prevent you from using their space if you fail to meet those conditions. Malls will kick you out if you close your store during mall hours, denying you the ability to sell to those mall customers. eBay will shut your account if you try to get buyers to pay you outside of eBay, denying you the ability to sell to those eBay customers. Your local grocery store won't be allowing you to set up in the middle of the aisle with a laser light show selling your home made cookies, denying you the ability to sell to the grocery story customers. Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony will all very happily terminate your access to their markets for failure to comply with their development programs, denying you the ability to sell to those console customers.
> Every store, market place and mall has conditions for being able to sell your wares in their space.
But it's not a store. It's software; Apple charges developers to use their developer tools and then additionally requires you to pay the surcharges in their mandatory App Store. It is a racket that specifically relies on Apple's sole presence as a distributor on iOS and iPadOS; otherwise it will fail, as MacOS has shown us.
> Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony will all very happily terminate your access to their markets for failure to comply with their development programs
And every single one of those companies competes under fair pretenses with their publishing partners. Apple doesn't. That's why they're singled-out.
>But it's not a store. It's software; Apple ... requires you to pay the surcharges in their mandatory App Store.
So is it a store or not?
>And every single one of those companies competes under fair pretenses with their publishing partners. Apple doesn't. That's why they're singled-out.
How so? What is Apple doing that those companies (Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony) don't do for their hardware platforms? The certainly "[charge] developers to use their developer tools and then additionally [require developers] to pay the surcharged in their mandatory [store]." So what's different? How are they competing under fair pretenses (a phrase which I admit I'm having trouble parsing the meaning of), but Apple isn't?
Apple have managed to get themselves into a monopolistic position. Actually it's a duopoly. It doesn't matter if there are alternatives to Android and iPhone, those are the majority of devices to something like 99%. If you want to access that marketplace you need to go through one of those 2 gatekeepers and they have similar rules. This is the exact kind of situation that monopoly laws are there to address. Apple have been hugely successful. No-one is proposing to take the success away from them, but they are taking away some of apple and Google's ability to control the market they've captured.
So are you accusing of most of the readers and participants in this comment section of being dishonest?
Do you commonly just assume that people who disagree with you are dishonest?
When money enters the conversation, honesty usually goes out. I would say that most people, almost all people, will bend things in a dishonest way when they think they can have the slightest monetary benefit.
Here, the perceived benefit is cheaper apps for their cellphone. So we call Apple a monopoly, though they clearly aren't. And if they are, then why shouldn't McDonalds be forced to let anybody sell fast food inside their locations?
To be clear, I am not an Apple user and do not have a dog in this fight. But it is abundantly clear to me that iPhone users cannot easily swap between competitors the same way that McDonalds customers can eat every meal at a different restaurant if they so wish (in fact, McDonald's is usually right next door to numerous competitors, making this maximally easy).
Apple has an entrenched audience, as is unfortunately inherent with operating system and platforms, and that comes with certain legal responsibilities. If Apple doesn't like those responsibilities, they should get out of the OS/platform space.
But this is the same argument you have no doubt seen many times, which you dismiss as "dishonesty". That is your prerogative, but most onlookers are going to see this as an attempt to get out of having to present a convincing argument, most likely because you can't.
Perhaps you should inform yourself by reading the DMA. You won't find in it anything about Apple or anyone else hindering developers from selling elsewhere.
What the EU is regulating is fair competition for very large platforms, defined as having 45m or more users. These benefit from network effects and may be operated in ways that inhibit competition.
Do you also believe that John D. Rockefeller never did anything anti-competitive? lol
If Apple wants to sell in the EU it will have to abide by EU rules decided by democratically elected politicians. The US has proven incapable and or unwilling to regulate big tech. The EU has been slow and won't always get it right first time but it's trying. This is why EU citizens have e.f., privacy rights Americans don't, why broadband costs way less in the EU than the US etc.
If parasitism is what interests you I suggest directing your attention to rentier capitalism and the never ending upward flow of wealth to the 1% and the extent to which US politicians are owned by billionaires.
> don’t buy their product if you don’t like it
I like their product. If I buy it: do I own it or do I rent it from them? Obvious next question: If I own it, do I have right to install whatever I want?
I like a product from Ford, if I own it I have the right to install whatever I want right? Except Ford has no obligation to make their products compatible with other car makers. If I wanted to LS-swap an F150 it would require a lot of technical knowledge, time, and help but it can be done. You can develop your own jailbreaks for iOS it just requires a lot of technical knowledge, time, and help.
1) In fact, there are laws that prevent Ford from taking too much advantage of the situation, such as how they wouldn't be allowed to deny warranty service on a car with third party parts.
2) You make it sound as if it weee merely technically complicated to jailbreak the device, whereas the truth is the only reason it is possible at all is because Apple has thankfully sometimes made mistakes in their security. There is no reason to believe that this should be possible at all.
Then, these companies go further: they attempt to weaponize the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions against users to claim it is actually criminally illegal to take advantage of such implementation mistakes.
The problem here isn't Apple having to go out of their way to do anything... the situation is the exact opposite: Apple has gone super far out of their way to PREVENT people using third-party parts or modified software, and that can be, should be, and in some cases already is illegal.
I think the analogy would be Ford demanding a 30% each time you put oil, gas, or pay a toll road. Their (Apple’s) stance then would be “somebody is making money out of the existence of my creation, hence I am entitled to a share”
On second thoughts, I better delete this soon in case BMW gets some ideas
I think a better analogy would be swapping tires instead of an engine. Engine swaps are rare, most people understand there are physical complications to using an engine from one car in another, even from the same manufacturer. Tire swaps are common, most people expect that if the tire is the right size you can put it on your car, regardless of who made it or where you got it.
The same is true for apps on a computing device. Installing new ones is common, not rare like an engine swap in a car. Most people expect that if the app is compatible with the hardware you can put it on the device, regardless of who made it or where you got it.
Ford did not go out of their way to make LS swaps particularly difficult on the F150. Apple has gone to very great lengths to make something that is VERY simple (installing software in an OS) very difficult.
Apple products are general purpose computers while Ford is not.
iphone is absolutely not a general purpose computer, nor has it ever purported to be.
Very conveniently so, because if anyone ever discovered that so-called "apps" are no different from "software" we would accidentally realize that the iPhone is in fact a computer.
Would you mind providing your definition of general purpose computer.
Are you read the software licenses for the whole software ecosystem in an Apple shop at purchase time?
A part of this issue is that said company intentionally cripples their web browser (and all browsers in their platform because they run on the same engine) to prevent progressive web apps from competing with their App Store.
This may not be the biggest issue but really grinds my gears because it holds back a whole ecosystem of possibilities.
> grinds my gears because it holds back a whole ecosystem of possibilities.
One of the possibilities being total Chrome dominance everywhere. "This website only works with Chrome" situation.
Nothing stopping apple from implementing more and better APIs in their browser to match Chrome.
Maybe security/privacy of the APIs?
Not at all, no such issues where these are implemented.
>Obviously there's web, Android, Windows, Linux, gaming consoles, and smart tvs, so there are some work-arounds to avoid the evil empire
So obviously, effectively all other forms of computing (including by the way, Apple's own general purpose computers). But this one single OS, distributed by one single company, for two (counting the iPad) hardware platforms, which are also manufactured and distributed exclusively and only by this same single company "has near complete control over what software and and cannot be published, and [gets] to take a tax on all software sold"?
Being kind and not dismissing this as outright hyperbole of the highest order, why is this the case? I'm a fan of open source software and hardware, so the fact that this is the case seems like a MASSIVE failure of the entire computing industry at all levels. How is it a company that was famously described as "beleagured" for decades, that supposedly needed a cash infusion by Microsoft of all companies to even stay alive, that has always and famously been singularly focused on their own vision of computing and never been particularly concerned with compatibility or openness, how have they become the single dominating player in the the computing world? How have they gained "near complete control", when the platform they supposedly wield all this control from didn't even have a software store to begin with, and their conditions are as onerous on developers as they always have been? Why did developers flock to this system? Why did consumers? It's not like this is a bait and switch situation. The iPhone was NEVER an open development platform. The 70/30 split has been there from the day the app store was announced. In app purchases weren't a thing to begin with, and when they were announced they too had that same 70/30 split.
So how in the world has Apple come to dominate and why hasn't the entire rest of the computing industry managed to come up with anything close to an answer? What is it that Apple is selling to consumers and developers that make their clearly marked and publicly restrictive ecosystem to enticing when the open options are sold right next door? And how have they managed this dominance without even being the majority? Android to the best of my knowledge as more installs, so why is Apple the one controlling the market? In what other industry does the #2 player control the field?
Good questions.
I can only point at [1] and say that this has always been the case with domestic computing. The parking lot giving away tanks for free never did as much business as the slick salesman selling the badly-engineered sedans with the easy UI. And that was 1999.
I guess people really like European luxury cars.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co...
So ultimately, I guess the conclusion is despite the amount of chatter it gets in tech circles and among high profile software developers like facebook and epic, the answer is Apple is in the position its in because it's selling what people actually want and care about.
Which then leads us to ask, why can't the open platforms sell the same thing? Unfortunately, I can only think of 2 answers to that:
1) They are technically unable to. It would appear Apple is right about the security and technical challenges, and making the trade offs they have is the only way to sell what they're selling. And no one can make enough money to fund developing both a fully open OS along with all the other benefits (security, streamlined payment systems, streamlined sync, tight platform integrations, whatever other things you think are part of Apple's "secret sauce"). Fundamentally "open platform" and "everything adheres to a single standard" are incompatible goals that can not be accomplished simultaneously.
2) They are unwilling to. Either none of the developers care, or they don't want to do the hard dirty grunt work, or none of the other players are willing to "share the glory" so to speak with their competition.
I think it's similar to what I describe as my "Kardashian Problem" - that I don't understand why the Kardashians are famous. Not their problem, obviously; they are wildly successful, rich, famous, etc. They clearly understand their market very well and know how to address it. I have no idea why their market likes them, and that means I should never try to build a mass-market product.
Tech geeks (of which I am one) don't understand what's important to non-tech-geeks. And we don't care. We're building Linux for us, and what we care about is choice, transparency, privacy, ease of configuration, etc. Clearly the general public don't give a shit about any of that, and have other priorities (e.g. does it look pretty?). So they look at Linux and see a shitshow of nasty tech, and look at Apple and see a beautiful shiny product. While we look at Linux and see a happy playground, and look at Apple and see a prison.
You point out that there's actually a lot of competition, but that consumers prefer Apple. Isn't this contrary to your greater point?
It's hard not to prefer the ecosystem that is designed to make it as painful as it can be to switch to a competitor.
But how did they get people into the ecosystem to begin with? iOS has ALWAYS been this locked down. Heck it didn't even have an app store to begin with. The apps you got were what Apple decided you could have and that was it. Cell phones before the iPhone (Palm, Blackberry and even dumb phones) had some form of software market capabilities, and certainly phones after and their larger competitor (Windows Mobile, Palm again and Android respectively) have had far more open platforms. So how did Apple manage to get all the developers and users locked in when the better options were – perhaps with the brief exception of June 2007 - Sept 2008 (if you don't count Palm and Blackberry) – always there?
Additionally, how has Apple designed their ecosystem to make it "as painful as possible" to switch to a competitor? It's on the app developers whether they would charge for a replacement copy of their app on Android. Apple does nothing to prevent them from offering a "switcher" discount. All of your first party app data is syncable to your computer, and Google even offers a tool that says it can do contacts, photos, calendars, messages, apps and music. And if that's not enough, Apple will provide you with a copy of all your iCloud stored account data in the original format (for things like photos) and in standard format (for things like calendars and emails) https://support.apple.com/en-us/102208. So other than Apple themselves providing a first party tool to migrate your data directly to your new Android phone, what are they doing or not doing that qualifies as "[making] it as painful as can be to switch"
I found switching off Google to be as hard as I imagine switching off Apple will be.
I just did that switch having been on iphone since the 6s. It is amazing how much choice there is on the Android platform. Having switched to Samsung immediately I get two software stores for a start. I'm not beholden to a single file service; Apps will integrate with multiple different options not just iCloud. I can download multiple browsers, with adblockers. I can download torrent clients without having to jailbreak.
Meanwhile I can't receive text chat integrated video above about 240p from iphone friends because Apple won't integrate with them. They're a shit company and I'll never buy their products again.
everybody has their own battles to pick.
it might be easy to blame the US and expect better when they are still struggling with lobbying against tax filing nonsense that impact every working-class person.
at the same time, the EU has been selective with these cases, and has been mostly around big tech from the US. they could do this for much more, like for printers for example. i wonder if they would lobby this hard against the domestic automotive industry, with their DLC heated seats and what not.
Something that tickled me occasionally was much of my extended family assumed Apple was paying me to make the point of sale app, so restauranteurs would buy iPhones/iPads to use at their restaurant.
I have an app on the App Store and honestly the review sometimes helps me catch some pretty big bugs. I consider it free basic QA. Having said that, I don’t like the principle of having a gatekeeper either. I also don’t mind the commission they take from in app purchases as the App Store is the main distribution channel that my customers find the app, and it’s only 15% under $1m annual revenue.
The problem here is that the EU law is "whatever the bureaucrats say it is". The DMA rules are not specific enough for Apple or anyone to know a priori if a feature or product is going to cross the line. Thus Apple is now announcing new features won't immediately be available to EU customers.
We should all want more competition but I'm not convinced "because the unelected technocrat in Brussels said so" is the way to do it.
We literally had an elction for the technocrats in brussels (and strasbourg) two weeks ago.
What do you mean? This is literally how Apple advertises their store: "a big part of those experiences is ensuring that the apps we offer are held to the highest standards for privacy, security, and content". Maybe you want Apple to advertise more effectively?
https://www.apple.com/app-store/
It depends, it's just different viewpoints, I'm glad Apple reviews all software and decides if it's worth it and a lot of action from the EU tends just to make things worse/annoying for most users, while collecting big fines for themselves.
Google also taxes for transactions on their Play store, but yes, Apple takes it to the extreme. You don't have to buy into the walled garden though.
Neither of these companies should be allowed to control both the hardware and the store. Having a duopoly here ensures that there will be little to no price competition, especially because the stores are full monopolies on their platforms, and developers have no choice but to use both to cover the full market.
I honestly don't think it's insane at all. Middlemen are everywhere, and if a government body wants to complain about taxation, glass houses...
Before iPhone and Android, it was infeasible for small-time devs to sell apps pretty much at all. The two are in hot competition still. Nintendo etc aren't in trouble cause they just stuck to closed systems. If building platforms becomes less profitable, fewer platforms will be built, which so far has been the story in the EU.
Why would the US do that? Europe has no issues when a European corporation has market dominance. It would be dumb for them to do so in a global market. Do you see any push for diversifying the european market by breaking up corporations like SAP or ASML? If anything those two have an even tighter control over their respective markets than apple could ever have over their own.
Nobody is ever going to break up ASML. Apple is, in the grand scheme of things much less important. Much less.
Yes, but the US or the EU could've pushed for a break up when most of its EUV research was in the US. Market dominance wasn't built overnight.
Yes, it would now be very hard to do. But that goes back to my original point, Europe does not really care about market dominance and fairness as long as European corporations are the ones dominating. As you said, if competition and market health was the objective...what ASML does is very important and shouldn't be left to a single corporation. They have complete market control over a critical part of something that's foundational to our modern economy.
But I've never heard of a single European move to do something about that. SAP also has a de facto monopoly on entire parts of business processes and administration.
Also, apple is in many ways just as important to the US government. So nobody is going to break them up, in the US at least.
I'm not making a judgement here, I'm just saying that it's weird to expect the US to shoot itself in the foot, just like it would be weird to expect Europe to do the same. For the EU, the issue is more that Apple isn't European.
> what ASML does is very important and shouldn't be left to a single corporation.
But that's not what market abuse is about. How is ASML impairing their competitors? What would breaking them up do, besides create a second ASML? You have to explain how separating ASML's IP helps the market or their customers.
> So nobody is going to break them up, in the US at least.
Didn't people say the same thing about Microsoft? "How would they get broken up over something as insignificant as Netscape?"
Microsoft wasn't seen as a strategic asset back then, and the US wasn't in a semi cold war.
In any case, I was talking about the concept of breaking up large national corporations moreso than this specific case, since the comment I was replying to was talking about how the US should start looking into breaking up Apple too.
(Even then, I also gave SAP as an example, which perfectly fits the apple modus operandi of taking advantage of their closed ecosystem to destroy competition. but in a way that even apple couldn't ever dream of. And once you get into said ecosystem, you will start using the gigantic constellation of SAP products and be locked in to the extreme. Impairing competitors would be putting it lightly. Yet, no European probe either.)
Here's some context which a lot of people, including most news media, seem to have missed:
The reason Apple is still playing games with the EC is that they're waiting on an EU Court's ruling[1] on whether Article 6 (7), the provision that mandates free of charge iOS APIs for all developers, is "constitutional" within the EU framework itself.
Most people who call out the Core Technology Fee use that provision as one of their main arguments, and it's one of their strongest, because the "free of charge" language throws away the general idea that the law doesn't want to interfere with Apple's monetization strategies. Since Apple could very well have chosen to monetize certain local API access in the past, the fact that this provision put a stop to that effectively nullifies Apple's argument (to the courts) that the law could never have meant to actually control how they make money.
[1] https://curia.europa.eu/juris/fiche.jsf?id=T%3B1080%3B23%3BR...
The problem is that apple is going to continue malicious compliance while the EU is trying to be reasonable: "the EU hopes ongoing dialogue will lead to compliance rather than sanctions."
That’s one whole year of free money from Apple’s perspective.
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> What is malicious compliance?
I think cookie dialogs are the best example of malicious compliance in tech.
Instead of just a "Reject all non-essential cookies" button, corporations went the extra mile to instead have a "Manage preferences" button which opens some slow menu with like 70 separate checkboxes, all of which are ticked by default and so you have to go through all of them manually, which then makes like 90% of the users just cave in to the dark pattern and just click "Accept all".
No law can predict all of the ways someone will try to weasel around it, regardless of whether it's something like the example above, or a company trying to maintain a walled garden.
> As part of the new investigation, the commission is examining 0.50c charge, or “core technology fee”, Apple demands every time a developer’s app is installed on a phone.
That said, while this sounds a bit like the infamous Unity Runtime Fee, if done correctly, personally I wouldn't have as much of an issue with this as others might, if it's done in a way where it never will cause a developer to go in the red: https://developer.apple.com/support/core-technology-fee/
> Instead of just a "Reject all non-essential cookies" button, corporations went the extra mile to instead have a "Manage preferences" button which opens some slow menu with like 70 separate checkboxes, all of which are ticked by default and so you have to go through all of them manually, which then makes like 90% of the users just cave in to the dark pattern and just click "Accept all".
That is not malicious compliance. That's outright non-compliance. Reject All must be as prominent as Accept All.
Guess all of the companies doing that must have missed the memo, though I guess how dire the situation is was more or less known pretty early on: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.02479
There's limited amount of people who can do the litigation, so it's slow going, and the whole point of the mess is to condition people against GDPR
> Instead of just a "Reject all non-essential cookies" button, corporations went the extra mile to instead have a "Manage preferences" button which opens some slow menu with like 70 separate checkboxes, all of which are ticked by default and so you have to go through all of them manually, which then makes like 90% of the users just cave in to the dark pattern and just click "Accept all".
That's straight up non-compliance. The law literally says that refusal has to be as easy as accepting.
> If a company is in compliance to the law and you don’t like the outcome the problem isn’t the company it is the law.
The law isn’t the only thing that upholds a cohesive society that is nice to live in. At the very least, culture plays its own part as well. There are probably many more things
If I only cared about being legal, I would behave very differently. Just think about how far a citizen could go if they would live in full malicious compliance. One would be a nightmare to others
And despite this, some people DO insist on living just on the edge of legality. I recently had an interaction with someone declared a "vexatious litigant" in Texas. That's a legal status that requires them to get authorization from a judge before opening a new lawsuit against another party.
I prefer a world where most people don't ride the edge of legality.
An overly complex set of rules often breeds this kind of behavior; Functioning legally in a world with a practically infinite number of rules requires it. Fixing the unwanted behavior often involves making more rules… and thus a cancer is born.
Another common outcome is complete apathy for the rules. ie: nothing seems legal, why bother trying?
> If I only cared about being legal, I would behave very differently.
While I wouldn't recommend you live that way, I also wouldn't call you a criminal.
Just an a*s.
Someone with a hacker mindset and malicious compliance would be so creative that new laws have to be created just because of what that person did
Please report to your local Komsomol office to collect 5 credits as a reward for upholding the right attitude against these ruthless reactionaries and hooligans. Remember to bring your credit book for the stamp.
Could anyone help me understand why this was flagged dead? Is it incorrect somehow? This is a discussion around legality, so it makes sense to keep the discussion in that context.
Apple being able to do something undesirable, in the perspective in the intent of the law, is either a "loophole" in the law, or the law doesn't actually accomplish what it was made to. Both are problems with the law. This isn't an Apple thing as much as a "anyone who will benefit in complying minimally will comply minimally". Apple today, whomever else tomorrow.
Because GP's comment mixes the concepts and who thinks what in a very "I'm just asking a question" way, while suggesting that everything not illegal is 100% fine. People don't appreciate that because they see exactly the kind of person who would operate in that malicious compliance mode.
Obviously you can't regulate every bit of behavior and this will always leave room for abusing corner cases. You have quiet hours in your neighborhood? I'll just make the maximum amount of noise every second it's allowed, forever. It's legal, it's not fine. So clearly GP's comment rubs people the wrong way enough to be flagged.
It's pretty clear from the term itself that malicious compliance is compliance or else it would have been called (malicious) noncompliance. This is what people think Apple is doing. What EU authorities believe is that Apple is not compliant with the law, perhaps for different reasons than people see as malicious compliance.
So the EU is bashing Apple for them not being compliant, while regular people are bashing Apple for the malicious compliance. The second one is perfectly fine to do even without a judge's verdict.
> What is malicious compliance? Apple is either in compliance or it isn’t.
Because funnily enough, the comment itself is kind of malicious compliance.
It has the form of polite debate, but it also feigns to not understand the parent (bad faith is a pretty simple/obvious concept and I'm sure the author gets it), which ruins the discussion. So yes, it appears reasonable that it is flagged.
From a point of argument, they're not wrong though, albeit an obvious point they're making that if loopholes exist, companies will definitely find them and take advantage, and still be in compliance because the pitfalls of said regulations weren't accounted for.
This leaves it up for debate in courts to settle those shortcomings, but it wouldn't be surprising if they found they were compliant and that the rules need adjustments.
[flagged]
If Apple stops servicing the EU… …life will go on. No EU country will be “doomed” let alone “totally doomed”. I prefer many Apple products over Android-based devices or, god forbid, any S(h)amsung crap, but the EU will continue to prosper without Apple Intelligence, iPhone Sharing or even iPhones and Macs at all. The EU is setting a precedent that every consumer would benefit from, especially if more countries would follow the lead. Yes, the EC’s approach could be better, they’re stumbling forwards (cookie-dialogs, plastic-bottle tethered-caps,o insane E2E encryption-invalidating proposals etc etc) but I still believe the overall direction will ultimately be beneficial to many.
The purpose of the DMA is to increase competition, not directly benefit the consumer. If there is no Apple product, you don't have that product to support your application and your business.
This is strongly wishful thinking. America isn't even the top trade partner of the EU as far as goods go. Many companies would literally hold a party if Apple, or any other American companies for that matter, left the EU market.
It's a 450M people hand, with decent GDP :-)
... which makes up a small fraction of Apple's profits. About 7% [1].
Losing 7% would be "A big deal", although they'd also lose a lot of the operational costs so the overall loss may be less than that. There are several costs of doing business in the EU.
I can also see them selling more to the UK and a black-market opening up in the EU for UK phones. Again, not a huge thing but a little +ve offset.
Overall, I could see it happening, maybe, emphasis on the maybe part. I think the EU thinks it's inconceivable for Apple to exit their market. I also think Apple are very hard-headed. Make the cost/benefit balance skew too heavily in the -ve direction, and the potential of future profits stop outweighing the costs.
Personally I really hope they just do as they're told by the EU because I think it'd hit the stock, and I could do with the stock staying reasonably high in the short term, but they'd recover. Hell, they could run on cash/savings with no sales for several years at the current rate...
[1]: https://daringfireball.net/2024/03/more_on_the_eus_market_mi...
Of Apple were to give up on the second largest market (GDP) in the world, I think that would make their platforms a lot less attractive as a target for software makers. More of them might decide to target other platforms first.
Is it a joke? Apple is 27% of Apple revenue, profit is irrelevant as this is just finance engineering and you can put the value you want for tax reason.
>It’s unclear whether Maestri was saying that the EU accounts for 7 percent of Apple’s worldwide App Store revenue, or 7 percent of all revenue, but I suspect it doesn’t matter, and that both are around 7 percent
Eh.
So... what's Apple's argument here? Do they just think the DMA was badly drafted, or do they want to strip competition law out of the EU? Or is this the same "we have a right to monetize our IP[0]" argument they used in the Epic lawsuit?
[0] Intellectual property, in the Doctorowian sense of "thing that lets us tell our competitors what to do"
The DMA was badly drafted, and it's quite protectionist. The EU does not write good tech legislation overall, because it does not understand tech industry at a cultural level, having never built out its own.
Yes obviously it’s protectionist, the whole point of the DMA is to protect the EU internal market from entities that aren’t EU state apparatus from having too much control.
I’m not entirely sure how you say the DMA is badly drafted, what do think its objectives are? It’s not a “tech law” at all, it’s a market competition law that designed to deal with the unique imbalances created by large tech companies that historical competition law hasn't adequately dealt with.
> ...it does not understand tech industry at a cultural level, having never built out its own
Consumer products are only a subset of tech. ASML, Siemens, ABB, Bosch have been tech industry bellwethers for ages. Europe is also no slouch in consumers/web/apps either (Spotify, booking.com)
Man forgets the industrial era was started in Europe. There are plenty of European tech companies behind all of the big American ones, the difference is really just the size of the market.
Face ID tech is old Kinect tech, Apple bought...an Israeli company for it (not EU, I know). But probably the biggest and most obvious example is ARM.
Generally wondering: how to you look at US imposing 100% tariffs on EVs from China?
That it's an absolutely insane thing to do to a trading partner and calling prices "artificially low" is just "our glorious government investment their savage government trade war subsidies." Go read the whitehouse announcement, it's blatant. The best part is that is centers around IP literally proving that any country that ignores the insanity of western IP laws will outcompete. Big no no, it's the children that are wrong energy.
Absolutely do not support the US artificially limiting EV adoption by forcing prices higher to prop up a domestic auto industry that got caught with their pants down. If they're gonna sell us EVs below cost we would be stupid not to buy them all up and make them lose money. But there's the rub, they're not actually doing that, they are just able to make them cheaper.
If they're selling below cost, who's the "we" that should buy them all up? Because if it's US consumers, then the domestic auto companies could fail in the while that's happening. If it's the US government - isn't that kind of what the tariff accomplishes, without having to take ownership of a bunch of inventory?
While I think Apple's rules are ridiculous, it is pretty standard in the industry. AirBnB doesn't allow hosts to accept cash or arrange alternative payment. Amazon doesn't allow suppliers to offer direct sales to potential customers. Even Visa and Mastercard officially don't allow merchants to offer discounts for cash transactions (although many do anyway). Etc, etc. I think this should be a more general rule, no "platform" or "aggregator" should be allowed to prevent the free communication of users of their platform from arranging their deal elsewhere. Just because they met on the platform doesn't give the right to the platform to strong-arm their users into using them. The platform must compete with alternative payment methods on its own merits, such as convenience, security, etc., not by forcing people to use them just because they happen to be the matchmaker. Because this policy cements monopolies and rewards the largest incumbents.
Gotta start somewhere, going for the Trillion dollar behemoth is a good first step, in my opinion.
And let's not forget that this standard is a de facto standard, not a regulatory one. Just because things have been done in this way, it doesn't mean they should remain like this forever.
The EU is one of the few parties which can actually bring some change.
Then it should do so broadly and inclusive of actual technical expertise. It’s nitpicking fluff because Epic and Spotify are mad, and not addressing root causes.
It’s easy (and often deserved) to dunk on the trillion-dollar corporation. And regulation is good, actually. But the DMA isn’t good regulation.
I’m not sure how they could have gone broader. The EU is saying that Apple payments offering need to compete on level playing field with other payment options. I don’t really see what being “inclusive of technical expertise” would bring to the table, beyond what’s already there.
Visa and Mastercard do very explicitly allow cash discounts.
https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/global/support-legal/d...
What they didn’t allow previously was adding a surcharge to credit transactions. But regulation forced them to allow that as well. So not the best example overall.
The State of MN stopped accepting certain credit cards for many DMV type activities, and now only accept ones that allow an explicit surcharge (Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex).
> Limit surcharging to credit cards only (debit cards and prepaid cards cannot be surcharged)
This is just one of conditions, being "allowed" is very limited.
With the important caveat that the surcharge can't be more than 3% or the fee, whichever is lowest. Is there a similar caveat for cash discounts?
The difference (or at least what would be argued as a difference) is that you have no other choice with Apple (Amazon maybe in a similar situation).
If I didn't like AirBNB I could use VRBO/whatever else, or I could use both even.
I can understand Apple's cut for app developers who solely create apps and distribute them through Apple.
Where it becomes a problem is a large number of apps are just a way for the iPhone to connect to a larger product (Spotify, Basecamp, most SaaS companies), and I don't know why Apple should feel entitled to own the relationship with a businesses customers because they also use an iPhone when it's an ancillary part of the product.
> The difference (or at least what would be argued as a difference) is that you have no other choice with Apple (Amazon maybe in a similar situation).
> If I didn't like AirBNB I could use VRBO/whatever else, or I could use both even.
Read what you wrote again, and think about it. If you don't like AirBnB you can use one of the competitors, but there are no competitors to Apple? Would you consider that you might have a blind spot to something very obvious?
For AirBnB (temporary lodging), if you don't like it, typically you're only stuck with it for a few days and you can make a different choice afterwards.
Phones, for many people, are something they will use for years so they're essentially locked in a lot of the time. It's more like long term rentals, where the renter usually gets stronger protections too.
I think we're defining markets differently which is where this is debatable.
If you say that the App Store is an extension of the iPhone and you're buying into that when you buy a phone, sure I can see the argument that the App Store by default has no competitors on the iPhone and people are agreeing to that when they buy an iPhone/develop for the iPhone, and so the competition is Google (and by extension the Play store.
I just don't think we should accept the tight coupling of hardware and software distribution by default though.
Even then if you do, the strongest argument for Apple gives us a duopoly that both exhibit strong anti-competitive behaviours.
I do have some sympathy for Apple here though. When Nintendo takes tight control over distribution on the switch is that also a monopoly? When your product essentially becomes a utility though I think some form of regulation ends up being good for society as a whole.
> If you don't like AirBnB you can use one of the competitors, but there are no competitors to Apple?
There isn't enough competition. Apple is in a monopolistic market position. AirBNB isn't, at least not yet. That's a contingent fact about the current state of affairs, but I think it's true - there's a lot of pressure to be on Apple, whereas there's not much pressure to be on AirBNB.
Why is Apple in a monopolistic position and why is AirBnB not?
The effect of AirBnB on everyday life of people and the economy is in my opinion at least a thousand times larger than any effect that Apple has.
> The effect of AirBnB on everyday life of people and the economy is in my opinion at least a thousand times larger than any effect that Apple has.
How do you figure? I'd say the effect of AirBnB is pretty much zero; they're an interchangeable provider in what's fundamentally a commoditised business. If you can't or don't want to go to an AirBnB then you go to OwnersDirect or Booking or Agoda or worst case someone's individual website, and you have a virtually identical experience. And if you're a property owner you also don't care and probably list your place on a bunch of different sites.
There are thousands of cities and towns all over the world, where short term rentals – accelerated by AirBnB – has made it impossible for young workers to afford to live where they were born. Real estate prices and rent prices are much more important in the everyday life for all of us, than all information technology combined. Unless you are a multimillionaire in tech stocks. But there aren't so many of them around.
A normal worker today in the US or Europe could if they want afford to buy all top Apple devices or equivalent PC devices, as well as every paid app on the App store. That same normal worker in the US or Europe today can never afford to buy a home, unless he/she goes into lifelong debt, or gets help from family that owns real estate.
> There are thousands of cities and towns all over the world, where short term rentals – accelerated by AirBnB – has made it impossible for young workers to afford to live where they were born.
That has very little to do with short term rentals, and even less to do with AirBnB specifically. Much like "foreign investors", it's just a convenient scapegoat when the real problem is basic supply and demand: there simply isn't enough housing to go around.
> A normal worker today in the US or Europe could if they want afford to buy all top Apple devices or equivalent PC devices, as well as every paid app on the App store. That same normal worker in the US or Europe today can never afford to buy a home, unless he/she goes into lifelong debt, or gets help from family that owns real estate.
And yet Apple's annual revenue is about 30x AirBnB's, and the numbers are similar for profit. That should tell you something about how much of the device/app market Apple controls compared to how much of the housing market AirBnB controls.
I think it has a lot to do with short term rentals, and this is how it works: When a homeowner dies, usually the heirs would go live in that home or sell it on the open market. Maybe using that money to pay off another mortgage.
Today, the heirs will instead keep the inherited home, rent it out seasonally on AirBnB to earn a little money, keep any mortgage they have on the place they live, and reap the value increase of their AirBnB unit every year. That value increase can be used as collateral for many things. In the industrialized world, your yearly salary (value increase) is much higher from earning real estate and doing nothing, than it would be from working any skilled job. AirBnB is an important piece of that whole equation, because it makes it much easier for people to hold onto extra property instead of selling it to somebody who needs a place to live. There is no shortage of housing.
> And yet Apple's annual revenue is about 30x AirBnB's
This has nothing to do with it. Real estate prices and values are much more important in the daily life of people than any consumer product such as Apple. AirBnB does not own the properties, but if you add up the value of all properties listed on AirBnB, that amount would dwarf not only Apple, but the entire stock market.
> Today, the heirs will instead keep the inherited home, rent it out seasonally on AirBnB to earn a little money, keep any mortgage they have on the place they live, and reap the value increase of their AirBnB unit every year. That value increase can be used as collateral for many things.
Money is fungible, finance people can do this kind of transformation with anything and do, all the time. Ever heard of a company or rich individual doing a sale-and-leaseback transaction? That's the same thing in reverse.
> In the industrialized world, your yearly salary (value increase) is much higher from earning real estate and doing nothing... There is no shortage of housing.
On the contrary, the shortage of housing is the underlying reality that makes all the flashy transactions on top work. Why does the value of housing keep going up? Because demand is going up and supply is staying approximately constant, or even going down. Everything else is window dressing.
> if you add up the value of all properties listed on AirBnB, that amount would dwarf not only Apple, but the entire stock market.
Maybe, but those properties are listed on a bunch of AirBnB competitors at the same time. AirBnB has very little market power over them; if they try to hike up the rates or anything they'll lose their customers. The real estate market is important. AirBnB isn't.
How can that be when at least 30% of consumers visiting airbnb.com do so using Apple hardware, OS and browser?
Difference is that AirBnB hosts can put their properties on multiple short let services, and access broadly the same market.
The same simply doesn’t apply to App on iPhone. AirBnB would only be equivalent if it was impossible for hosts to list their properties in multiple places and AirBnB customers where effective tied into the AirBnB platform where they would have do something ridiculous like change their electricity supplier to use an AirBnB competitor (because for some reason AirBnb have figured how to build a tightly integrated ecosystem of utilities and services that effectively force you to use them all together to get the most benefit).
And I say this as someone who’s fallen a long way down the Apple rabbit hole, and quite likes it down here. If multiple options for app stores and payment mechanisms existed, I would probably stick with Apple and happily pay a premium, because I value the convenience and peace of mind that comes from only having to trust Apple with my data. But that doesn’t mean that I think Apples behaviour is any reasonable or acceptable.
> I don't know why Apple should feel entitled to own the relationship with a businesses customers because they also use an iPhone when it's an ancillary part of the product.
Apple provides a custom operating system (frameworks, drivers, security updates, backwards compatibility, etc) to make that business's app function, and continue to function, at all.
You can write and maintain a website instead of an app to avoid that.
Your electricity company and your internet provider are also making your use of that app possible. In fact, they've invested trillions to accomplish that. Shouldn't they be entitled to extract a percentage from each transaction?
Because if these companies would think there's even a remote chance of this being legal, I'm sure they'd not shy away from investing even more trillions in making some sort of digital enforcement system.
Would be fun. Your power outlet only providing power to certified devices! All in the name of protecting consumers of course.
Landlords provide infrastructure (wall, roofs, electrical systems, plumbing, fire systems) needed for shops to function, or continue to function at all.
Shops could just build their own market stands to avoid their landlords owning the relationship with their customers.
Huh, that argument doesn’t seem as reasonable when applied to landlords and buildings.
And yes, many app developers don’t pay much or anything to Apple, and shops always pay rent. But here’s the thing, as an Apple customer I pay Apple when I buy my phone. Why should Apple be allowed to double dip? It never seems reasonable when ISP want to charge their customers and content providers for bandwidth, so why is it reasonable for Apple to do something similar with Apps?
Oh like a PWA? That Apple can cripple and has crippled at a moment's notice?
This would be a better argument if Apple didn't also lock down the capability of web browsers not called Safari.
On the bright side, having only one browser to support makes life a lot easier, too.
> website
I tried that route. You need an Apple developer account to get your web features only partially crippled, and the "sell your soul" part of the exchange doesn't happen till _after_ money has left your account (which is on a screen promising that you're done, and the payment is the final hurdle, not that it would make it much better if you _knew_ you were paying for the opportunity to perhaps complete the transaction if Apple deems you worthy and accepts your additional offerings).
Maybe that's fine in your world, but the status quo isn't as simple as "just write a website instead."
You don’t have to pay Apple a penny to run a website. I’m talking plain HTML5 / JavaScript and a URL.
Perhaps you’re assuming I mean a PWA, Apple sign-in, or Apple Pay? I believe those are non-standard integrations with the OS provided by Apple, for the convenience of developers.
It would be great if everything was standardized from the start, but standardization can also hinder technological progress and creativity. It’s a trade-off.
Perhaps I’m in the minority here, but I don’t bemoan paying for development tools. I pay about $60/year for a JetBrains IDE because it makes my life easier and that’s how I make money. Devs pay for APIs and SaaS to make their lives easier too.
How, exactly, is any of that relevant?
Apple locks decade-old web features (say, e.g., web notifications) behind a contract wall and handles that contract wall exceptionally poorly, taking your money in exchange for goods and services only to later add additional terms and requirements and not refund your money without two court orders.
It leaves an especially sour taste in your mouth when you note that users paid a premium for devices which, at a minimum, ought to be able to do decade-old web things. Developers are paying for the privilege of maintaining that facade.
Separately, yu're not paying for development tools; you're signing a highly imbalanced contract (with a well-funded entity with a history of enforcing those imbalanced terms) and paying to give iPhone owners the sort of software they were implicitly promised when buying a top-of-the-line phone. "Apple Pay" is even worse since that same contract forbids you from using other options; it's not for your convenience, it's just obfuscated pricing with some legalese in the mix.
For the record, paying for development tools is fine. JetBrains offers actual benefits instead of abusing the courts for rent-seeking. Plus, their contracts are (comparatively) very reasonable (and also rarely enforced, so terms you don't like are less important). You could probably put together a financial argument against Apple's behavior here, but that's not their worst offense by a long shot.
> I believe those are non-standard integrations with the OS provided by Apple, for the convenience of developers.
Other developers would love to provide these integrations (as they could on any of the more open platforms), but that option has been cut of by Apple as well.
And what does 'non-standard' mean here? We're talking about web standards that are about a decade old at this point.
It's not really standard and I think the comparisons don't quite work. In Airbnb's case, Apple's policy is comparable to forbidding hosts from offering extra services (not related to lodging) to users off-platform once they begin their stay. In Amazon's case, it's like if Amazon banned manufacturers from including coupons for future direct purchases in the product packaging. In Visa and Mastercard's case, it's like banning merchants from mentioning other payment methods at all.
I think it's abuse and I agree it should be forbidden as a class of behaviors. I would love to see Apple fined enough to deter anyone from trying what they did with Epic ever again.
Would you consider an Airbnb property that offered $0.99 per night rates for max 1 night and then asked you arrange alternative payment for additional nights to be in violation of Airbnb policy?
> Would you consider an Airbnb property that offered $0.99 per night rates for max 1 night and then asked you arrange alternative payment for additional nights to be in violation of Airbnb policy?
No, just a sucker. They would get bankrupted so fast Airbnb wouldn't have to do anything.
> AirBnB doesn't allow hosts to accept cash or arrange alternative payment.
Not a computer or operating system I paid for.
> Amazon doesn't allow suppliers to offer direct sales to potential customers.
Not a computer or operating system I paid for.
> Even Visa and Mastercard officially don't allow merchants to offer discounts for cash transactions (although many do anyway). Etc, etc.
Not a computer or operating system I paid for.
In fact in every single case you listed a free platform that makes its money by charging fees per use. This is radically different from Apple's model.
Apple makes computers. Apple iDevices are some of the most expensive computers on the market. Apple cloud services are some of the most expensive cloud services on the market. Apple's operating systems hardcode the software to the hardware, meaning neither phone nor laptop can be upgraded. In every single case these are expensive devices and services that people already own. They should be free to download whatever software they want without a monopolizer telling them what's allowed to run on them.
I mostly agree but I think iOS/Android/Windows (and maybe MacOS) are so important to our economy that they represent a difference in kind and should be regulated more stringently. I don't really care if vacation rentals are more expensive or worse than they should be, I do care if the software that mediates our lives is.
I think it’s just the difference of having something run on your hardware. If Apple allowed you to install a different OS on your iPhone (and there was a viable alternative) it wouldn’t be nearly as bad.
> I do care if the software that mediates our lives is
If you DO care about this, implementing this regulation as is will only make the software worse, not better. Apple did a good job so far keeping developers in check.
This assumes the only thing that can make software worse for consumers is the developers that Apple "checks".
Is it not? Apple does check for unreasonable entitlements (permission requests) in apps. And for other creepiness too. And I like it very much.
I think Apple users are underrepresented here, more developers here.
"only" is a really strong statement. Off the top of my head, here's a few situations where Apple makes things worse for the end-consumer:
- Any case where Apple builds a competing product and charges a cut to the competitor that makes them structurally unable to compete is blatantly anti-competitive, i.e. Spotify vs Apple Music - Any case where the margins of the business do not support Apple's 30%, i.e. Kindle (let me buy my damn books in the app) - Any case where Apple has prohibited something for seemingly no reason, i.e. game emulators till about a month ago under regulatory pressure - Any case where Apple's unilateral control of pricing meant that certain business models couldn't be tried, i.e. subscriptions for a long part of the App Store's history, upgrade pricing today etc - Any case where Apple has prohibited anyone from competing with it. iOS Safari is bad and Apple has insulated it from competition by prohibited third-party browser engines. Note this hurts both users who'd rather use Chrome or Firefox and users who use Safari who don't benefit from Apple having to compete.
I don't disagree that there are benefits to Apple's approach. I just think that they should be heavily scrutinized because of iOS's import.
> Safari ... from Apple having to compete.
Allowing engines while sounds good, in today's reality will result in absolute Chrome (Google) domination. They will be setting web standards unopposed. And they are an Ad company. So again, this is good for me.
You switched from representing consumers to representing a political stance around web standards real fast.
Nope, still consumer. It is simple. Google (Chrome) is an Ad company, Apple (Safari) is not. And any consumer knows that web standards define user's privacy and security.
Honestly, the app store is so full of crud I find it hard to believe they’re really checking. I have zero faith in any app in the app store until I’ve inspected it myself.
Airbnb is one of the many players and they don't have any practical sized lockin over consumer or vendors. While Apple is dominant force with complete lockin over all iPhone users.
Exactly, If I choose to advertise my property on AirBnB, that doesnt mean I cant also let me my mates stay round for free, or rent it out to other people privately if I want to.
And if you sell your software or services on the App Store, that doesn’t mean you can’t give it away for free to your buddies or sell it somewhere else.
How else do you give it away free? The CTF applies to anyone with business revenue who meets the install requirements, even if you're not charging for that specific app. Development apps are time limited by Apple's terms.
Furthermore, all of the limits exist solely at Apple's discretion. Apple is essentially being benevolent, not saying they have no claim to the transactions.
Same way anyone gives software away for free, put the source code up and give instructions for compiling / installing. That Apple imposes time limits on self installed applications is the user's problem, not the developer's. The user chose the platform, the consequences of that are theirs to bear. If they wanted to install arbitrary applications that weren't beholden to Apple's rules the options for that were always there. Apple's restrictions are well known and are as restrictive as they have ever been, there was no bait and switch here.
I'm sure we both understand why "put it on GitHub" is not free in any meaningful sense on a platform that charges people $99/yr to use the compiler. The point here is that Apple is insisting they own every part of the system and neither the user nor the developer can touch any of it without their permission.
I would understand that if that were true, but Apple does not "[charge] people $99/yr to use the compiler." I'd also once again point out that even were that the case, that's still the user's problem, not the developer's. At a certain point a user is responsible for the choices they have made, which includes choosing the second most popular cell phone OS, with well known heavy restrictions on applications as their platform of choice. If I chose to do all of my computing using a nintendo switch, the fact that I need to buy a dev kit to even begin to have a chance of installing something like firefox is my problem as a user, not Mozilla's, nor does it make firefox any less meaningfully free.
I'm apparently a bit out of date. The last time I did any iOS dev was before iOS 9 when free provisioning (running the compiler) became a thing. Guess that's something at least.
That just seems like a ridiculous argument… People choose to enter the Apple ecosystem and pay a premium for what are luxury goods. At the same time they hold their resale value extremely well, most iPhone users could sell their iPhone and probably buy a competing phone with cash left over if they wanted…
There’s really very little holding people captive. The real problem with the EC’s attempts at regulation is that the vast majority of users aren’t worried about it and keep freely buying into the platform despite other viable options being available in a competitive market…
The move is to create a closed-market and then collect rent. If your serfs don't like the terms, well, they can't really leave because of the collective action problem of buyers and sellers not being able to coordinate a move to a new platform.
On the other hand a mechanism of a number of online market place scams is to gain customers trading on the “security” (such as it is) of the market place, and then directing the customer out of the market place. Everyone (should) know that any eBay seller that tries to get you to complete the auction outside of eBay is likely to be a scam. Likewise I would hope anyone would be leery of placing an order on Amazon and having a seller contact you asking you to cancel that order and buy it cheaper on some other website. Reputation matters for consumers, and legitimate sellers rely on the market place’s good reputation to help smooth the sales process. Scammers do too, but their goal is to get you out of the market place ASAP where the rules and regulations are harder to get enforced. Companies like Apple and eBay have a strong incentive to have a trustable pipeline and mandate sellers to use it because even though they’re not the ones perpetuating the scam, being known as a market place where scammers hang out is damaging. Consider this, between the Apple Store, eBay and Craigslist, what order would you place those market places if ranking your level of trust for not getting scammed when providing your payment details for a recurring subscription to a random seller?
Or put another way, even though it’s free and plenty of smaller companies do, Netflix doesn’t make posts of Craigslist advertising their services. There’s obviously many reasons for that, but at least part of it I’m sure is no one should trust a random link in a Craigslist post to a Netflix sign up site.
Airbnb isn’t a duopoly.
Apple's app-store policies are anti-competitive. Even though they recently 'allowed' (How kind of them) publishers to create a link to an external form of payment, where the offer may be better, Apple still demands a significant slice of commission.
I think many users would continue to use in-app purchases as it is a convenient way to pay, but the actions from Apple are poor and heavily restrictive. To save yourself some money, if subscribing, always go to the website, you'll get a better offer than within the app and more of your money will go to the publisher.
There are apps on the App Store in which the only way to pay is by entering your credit card info in the app. Others that link out to bank processing sites in a web view to do the same. This has been true for at least ten years, and the number is not getting smaller as far as I can tell.
As a user of some of these apps, I have always wondered whether there is some exception clause for, say, retailers of physical goods, utilities, and anything remotely to do with transportation. My anecdata suggests it’s more common in the EU and Asia, but a year and a half ago I was standing by the curb in Sacramento cursing the parking meter app for not taking Apple Pay.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#per...
> 3.1.3(d) Person-to-Person Services: If your app enables the purchase of real-time person-to-person services between two individuals (for example tutoring students, medical consultations, real estate tours, or fitness training), you may use purchase methods other than in-app purchase to collect those payments. One-to-few and one-to-many real-time services must use in-app purchase.
> 3.1.3(e) Goods and Services Outside of the App: If your app enables people to purchase physical goods or services that will be consumed outside of the app, you must use purchase methods other than in-app purchase to collect those payments, such as Apple Pay or traditional credit card entry.
Thanks, that clears it up I think!
[flagged]
Please don't post irritable overgeneralizations about "this forum". The community has an entire spectrum of responses. Singling out the segment that you most dislike while failing to notice the rest is something that many readers do*, but it leads to low-quality comments and lame discussion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The original comment is 100% correct.
It's neither correct nor incorrect but rather a category error to say that a forum "comprehends" or "understands" or fails to do so. It's basically noise except as a statement of how the commenter feels, and this could be better expressed more substantively and less trope-ily.
I absolutely do NOT want to download/sideload anything from a third party. You are absolutely correct there. Not even from companies I trust (e.g. I wouldn't want to download the Netflix app from Netflix)
- I DO want apple to spend as much money and effort as they do now on vetting apps.
- I DO realize that means they must grab some money, somwhere.
- I DO NOT want apple to take a cut out of subscriptions for services.
It's as simple as that. There is zero way in hell that apple should have a cut out of subscription services. I should be able to pay any way I want for e.g. podcasts, and Apple should just suck it up and charge $25 from the distributor, once, for reviewing the podcast app.
Basically: Apple needs to just give up their golden egg, run the app store at minium profit, and I hope the EU breaks their kneecaps if they don't swiftly agree to do so.
If the app you downloaded has an update, does the app not need to be revised again? Why would the revision fee not happen with every update?
Would that not mean developers that update more and get better value for their customers are penalised?
Subscription cuts strikes a happy medium, where apple gets paid when the company gets paid, so if they deliver more features they are not penalised but they are also not allowed to update for free forever (potentially adding malicious code without anyone checking due to only being checked the first time they paid).
> Why would the revision fee not happen with every update?
It would. So charge $25 again. So long as they charge what their actual cost is (with a reasonable margin) that's fine. But that's a universe apart from charging 10% of the profits of some streaming service because you "provide the platform".
That would actually be pretty nice; devs would maybe not update every day but once a month or something, and have actual changelogs, AND the review queue would be way shorter.
Ok, well Apple can keep their model, but they must allow alternate app stores onto iPhones.
If consumers want to pay for Apple's premium services, they can just stick to the default.
If they want stuff cheaper, they can try an app store willing to only make a 10% margin instead of Apple's 40%.
The problem is you have a misunderstanding of what the fee is.
From Apple's perspective it includes the ongoing cost of providing all of the SDKs i.e. CTF.
From a user's perspective it wouldn't be a phone worth buying if those SDKs weren't provided. Why do we have to accept Apple's framing that SDKs are a gift bestowed upon developers rather than an essential part of the software ecosystem that users are buying into?
Third party apps can't exist without the SDK, but the iPhone wouldn't be viable without third party apps. Who makes money in this arrangement has nothing to do with what's fair and everything to do with who has more power.
Then why isn’t there one on macOS?
I get the feeling that the CTF exists more to dissuade developers from building for alt app stores.
Your rant seems misguided, given you're talking about "downloads". The GP wasn't talking about downloading apps from outside the App Store, it was about Apple's anti-steering rules within the App Store
But in either case, if the user sentiment is as strong as you claim, Apple has nothing to lose in following the laws. The users will continue to demand installs and payments go via the App Store, and developers will have to continue providing that option or lose customers. Why do you feel so threatened by these laws? It sounds like you don't really have the confidence in 95% of the users agreeing with you.
That should be an informed decision. If users are happy to pay extra to Apple for convenience of use, then they should be aware of what is happening.
If 95%, like you say, are happy to pay extra, then it should be no problem for Apple to allow developers to communicate the Apple fees.
If users don't want to go to other websites, then developers should notice they're losing sales and be incentivised to offer a more convenient option!
Maybe over time more integrated options could emergy that's as convenient, offers more features, and could be cheaper. Imagine if there was competition!
Ok, fair. Then allow app developers to explain this in the app and provide a link to the external website and let the user decide what they prefer.
The issue is that you can't publish an app unless you hide this information from the user and as a consequence most users aren't even aware that alternatives exists.
Let the user freely decide and you can't charge how much you want for the convenience of your service, even more than 30%, nobody would care.
> This forum will never understand is that 95% of Apple users DO NOT want to go to a random website and download to save a few bucks
Who said they will download from a random website, or that the only advantage is to save a few bucks?
The advantage might be to get software that is not allowed on the app store, or to use a source that you trust more than Apple, or an otherwise better curated source - I would guess a high proportion of F-Droid users trust the software installed from there or find it easier to get what they want than in the Play Store. Why can someone not similarly improve on Apple's store?
> before Apple everything was download, pay and pray.
never had many problems myself.
Your opinion of what users supposedly want is irrelevant. What matters is that the law mandates these options and Apple refuses to comply.
And no - I prefer iOS, for various reasons (such as smooth integration with macOS, better UI), and wanting to download apps from the Apple app store is not the reason.
If 95% users don't want it, then Apple should be happy to provide it as an option since nobody will use it and it will have no impact on Apple's business, right?
> This forum will never understand is that 95% of Apple users DO NOT want to go to a random website and download to save a few bucks.
Almost everyone uses Google's store on Android. The average person doesn't know what 3rd party stores are, they don't go to websites to make payments. I'm a more advanced user and never had to go to a website and download and app, unless I absolutely wanted to.
Not sure why you think it would be different on iOS.
"This forum" constantly has someone posting this exact take on every single thread on this issue
"This forum" has talked about these issues hundreds of times over the decade since the App Store launched.
There is not a single argument or point that hasn't been made many times over.
If they don't want to do that even if the choice was available, then Apple has no reason to mandate these paths be hidden?
Please don't generalise. My partner still uses IPhone 7 today, and they are certainly interested in saving a few bucks. There are countries poorer than the US and not every Apple user is rich.
Maybe so, but I bet more than 5% of Apple users would appreciate the economic effects of a world in which people can go to a random website and save a few bucks.
Competition is good for markets even if you continue to buy from the incumbent.
What does their anti competitive behaviour have to do with you, the consumer?
It's not about you, It's about other companies wanting to distribute their software without giving 30% of their sales to Apple.
Whether you agree that it's unfair or not, the EU decided that it is.
If it is so clear, so put so many roadblocks. Let there be other stores/payment gateways which no one will use.
Well that sounds like complete nonsense. As an Apple user id definitely take advantage of cheaper ways to purchase the exact same product.
Furthermore - No one is forcing anyone to click the "get this cheaper here" link ... But I'd bet you'd be surprised how many Apple users would click it if it was there. The user and developer both win in that situation.
Why can't you sign up for Netflix on an iPhone?
If nobody will use it, then what's the harm in offering it?
Source for the 95% figure?
Considering the glut of scammy, ad-filled garbage on the official App Store, I'm not convinced we haven't ended up exactly where you claim we haven't. That being said, I do agree with you that the vast majority of users probably don't care about alternative app marketplaces (but for the small majority of us who do, I'll continue to champion the EU's efforts here).
Also, for the love of god open up the Apple Messages API please...
Only power users / devs really understand what Apple does in terms of vetting apps.
Regular people just want to be able to install what they want.
As a dev who has to deal with the Apple App store (and someone who is completely bought into the Apple ecosystem, owning an iPhone, Macbook Pro, Vision Pro, Apple Watch, and iPad...), I'd like to just be able to push out an app or update without involving Apple. They require us to do a lot of work that I don't think is necessary and the app approval process is a significant time waster for us.
> because before Apple everything was download, pay and pray.
That's complete nonsense. That's not even true on computers, let alone in an Android/iPhone where applications are de facto sandboxed.
Also, none of these changes impact prevents you and the 95% to keep using the app store exclusively.
It's not about what Apple users want. It's about what the law requires.
Where does this 95% come from?
Derived via the method rectal extrication I suspect.
Yes and I will send you my diagramed study.
You can feel however you want about Apple's rules and EU regulation, but I think it's pretty indispuitable how wrong it is that Apple prevents developers from explaining these rules to their users. Apple prevents developers from saying that Apple takes a % cut of the sale. Apple prevents developers from saying its available cheaper elsewhere. If Apple feels these rules are so just and fair and indispuitably correct, why does it go to such measures to hide them from its consumers?
Consistently these anti-steering rules are what gets Apple in trouble all around the world. It's the one part Apple lost in the US Epic case, and it's the EUs first point on their breach. Apple has done this to themselves by being so stubborn and refusing to budge an inch on how they run their platforms. The tiniest concession years ago could have avoided all this regulation on them.
Have they ever specified any reason why they prevent users from finding this out? I read somewhere (I think Epic v Apple) where the judge surmised that App store model was not just payments but the whole mechanism of tracking subscriptions, cancel and refunds, and standard pricing for purchases. I can understand the viewpoint that Apple customers might expect the same functionality if they purchase directly on site. But then, let the developer explain that too. "You can get this cheaper on website, but will no longer be able to cancel via App Store" is a fair enough line that can be mandated just like they mandated everything else. Think they will have to do away with it eventually, though from the outside it looks like they think if they drag their feet on this, maybe regulators won't come for other things.
They could also provide developers some APIs to register external subscriptions and purchases, and thus make cancellation and refunds available through centralised user interfaces within iOS, but they don't, because their goal isn't actually to create great products for their customers, it's to create value for shareholders, and they can more easily do that by locking users into their model.
As a user I really like the fact that Apple is the only one with my payment informations. I can safely install any app that I want, get subscription, in-apps etc without ever having to wonder where my payment informations are going.
You can't have that level of safety with API. Nothing prevents a dev from building an API that returns always "200 OK" when being called for a "terminate subscription" action, but that does nothing under the hood. If I unsubscribe from an Apple provided UI, I will hold Apple responsible for the execution of the action. Apple works really really hard to make sure that this trust we have in their system is warranted. As we know, trust is hard-earned, easily lost, and difficult to reestablish. So all it takes is a single bad experience to make me doubt everything else.
The current system allows Apple to control 100% of the process and to be fully responsible for everything.
That being said, Apple should allow users to perform all these operations outside of the iOS ecosystem if the developer allows it. I feel there is a clear communication here that "anything done outside of the Apple UI's is not the responsibility of Apple" (including payment / subscription management).
> I will hold Apple responsible for the execution of the action.
How do you think you'll do that? And then, how would it be different than with an app developer?
When this happens for example https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254901336 and you don't have another Apple device available.
I can dispute a card transaction, cancel a payment, maybe even send a nastygram to a developer. But if I dispute something with a middleman like Apple, Google, Steam, etc. I have to consider the possibility that they'll cancel my whole account if they think I'm abusing their system with any dispute.
My wife received over a thousand dollars in mystery credit card charges from the App Store over a period of about 6 weeks. Apple couldn't explain it or provide any insight whatsoever. Nothing.
Apparently, the charges were on her credit card but associated with another Apple ID.
We did a charge back which was successful. Now, I'm just waiting for the inevitable locking of her Apple ID. Luckily, she has already created a new one, but if the same thing happened to me I'd be in serious trouble. In my case, simply creating a new Apple ID is not an option.
It's really scary.
I mean, canceling a check costs money, and a charge-back (or perhaps more accurately rephrased, the request for a charge-back) on a credit card can be declined by the financial institution if they don't believe it's the correct action, and they'll usually ask you to work with the merchant first.
I'm not saying the middlemen you mention there are beyond reproach, merely pointing out the alternative systems that are implied here to be more/perfectly effective aren't exactly that either.
The behaviour of a credit card company would vary enormously around the world though, for example in the UK credit card providers are jointly and severely liable for any action brought against the merchant (ie if they won't do anything you take both them and (eg) Apple to court) so they tend to be far more responsive to consumer complaints.
And if a company keeps charging you unconsented fees on your credit card and you keep complaining to your bank, the CEO goes to jail.
Canceling a check is on you since if you didn't want to spend the money you shouldn't have written the check. CC Chargeback hits the merchant hard if approved, since they fucked up. And your chance of approval is similar as with Apple.
If it's an Apple-approved unconsented fee and you keep complaining to Apple, they remotely brick your phone and your computer along with deleting all your emails, your family photos, and your contact from everyone else's phone.
I think youve missed the parents point.
They are saying the middleman gatekeepers are dangerous becasue if you push them too hard they can take away your access to everything. Whereas if your agreements are with the individual companies and developers then the worst they can do is take away that one app.
On the other hand, those middlemen gatekeepers also make it a big part of their value addition to me, as a customer, to throw their weight around in my favor against all the other companies I can’t be arsed to argue with. For example, one of the reasons people pay for that AmEx Platinum card or Sapphire Reserve is specifically because you can call in the lender to do chargebacks, and the merchants themselves know that if they get too many complaints filed against them the financial institution will visit consequences on them.
I view Apple in much the same way. I don’t trust most developers, and part of what makes me willing to go out on a limb and throw a bit of money their way is the knowledge that I’m not gonna have to go through a whole path of dark pattern bullshit when I want to modify or cancel my subscription.
Google threatened to end my access to their payments system, which at the time would have caused my Google Fi phone plan to be unpayable, because they refuse to acknowledge a fraudulent charge through some Google Wallet apparently/maybe physical card at Forever 21's Indian affiliate for like $20 or $25. I have never, ever shopped at Forever 21 and didn't ever have a physical Google Wallet card. The charge was obviously fraudulent, but Google refused to help (and I also couldn't get anything particularly useful from Forever 21 other than to confirm that they hadn't integrated Google's payment method directly, so it must have been a physical card).
So I disputed the charge with my real bank, which corrected the problem by refunding me.
Google told me that if I ever did that again, they would lock me out of not just my account, but any future account using Google payment methods that was linked to me. That would make my phone service and the Google Play Store unusable. That was the beginning of the end of my relationship with Google services. So yeah...I do not trust Google or Apple as intermediaries for every payment in my life.
This is why I got rid of Google Fi... Google can't be trusted with mission critical systems (I consider my phone mission critical in my life)
Oh, point taken certainly. But I have a feeling if a credit card issuer believes you are abusing their charge-back system, they might well nuke your account there too.
If a credit card issuer drops your account, you don't lose access to things you paid for with the card.
If a DRM store drops your account, you often do. (I think some of them do have a limited account type, so they will no longet let you transact, but you can still use the content you didn't chargeback)
The difference is there are many thousands of credit card companies to go and get another one from.
There are no other companies you can go to to get an app on your iphone.
If the charge back is approved, by definition it's not abuse, and the issuer makes money on successful chargebacks. They also make money on you having an account there. And they have the responsibility to give your money back if they close it. Plus you're ultimately, if indirectly, backed up by the full power of the civil justice system, courts and judges and all that. It may be very flawed but let's buy pretend it's as nearly as bad as the whim of one underpaid Apple intern with no real incentives or accountability.
It's different because you only have to figure out how to deal with Apple rather than discovering a new process for every app you want to install. Far lighter mental load.
Apple doesn't legally deserve a privileged position there, because they are legally equal to any other payment processor that wants to be the "only one". Apple has no more right to be the "only one" than a competitor does.
Their spite fee for alternative payment processors being almost equal to their own payment processor fee, though, kinda shows their goal is just money anyways.
Having said that, I don't think figuring out how to use Apple Pay and Paypal is that hard. My friends use all kinds of payment processors.
My comment isn't addressing whether they deserve anything or whether this arrangement is beneficial overall - I'm only recognizing that it's easier to deal with a single supplier rather than a multitude of them.
> The current system allows Apple to control 100% of the process and to be fully responsible for everything.
Did Apple refund people who were scammed through apps, e.g. in bitcoin trading like [0] (first item google found)?
[0] https://www.imore.com/apple/apple-removes-scam-bitcoin-walle...
> https://www.imore.com/apple/apple-removes-scam-bitcoin-walle...
Wow thats really worrying, and all these people in here saying they love using Apple products becasue it keeps them safe.
I like seatbelts but that doesn’t mean I’ll drive into a truck… I still use critical thinking when I buy stuff. But when I forget to cancel a subscription I can ask for a refund and 99% I get it back from Apple. Like 20-30% when I haven’t used the App Store and went directly to the merchant.
The worry is that after asking apple for a certain amount of refunds they flag you as a troublemaker and block you from using any of their services. This happens all the time.
Going directly to companies and merchants keeps this control in your own hands, nobody can block you from buying other software just because you had issues in the past.
I just wonder why it matters to you.
Why does any of it matter to anyone? We're all just shooting the breeze with opinions on a public forum.
As a user I really hate that I'm forced to give Apple my payment information when I want to do business with a third party on an iPhone, including the possibility that the 30% fee they take gets factored into the price I pay.
I think the EU's solution will make us both happy: you don't have to do business with companies that don't offer Apple pay, and I don't have to do business with companies that do.
This isn’t true. You can do business through Safari all you want and Apple takes nothing. Indeed I have bought Kindle ebooks on my iPhone that way.
Not for music, video streaming, games, etc. There are limits to the kinds of experiences that can be built through a web browser (especially Safari).
Do the business through the browser, view the content in the app. Netflix is happy to sell you a subscription through Safari.
Why do I have to jump through hoops but not you?
> Nothing prevents a dev from building an API that returns always "200 OK" when being called for a "terminate subscription" action, but that does nothing under the hood.
Laws. Existing laws prevent developers from doing that.
> As we know, trust is hard-earned, easily lost, and difficult to reestablish. So all it takes is a single bad experience to make me doubt everything else.
This is true.
> The current system allows Apple to control 100% of the process and to be fully responsible for everything.
However, that same system prevent me from buying Kindle books from the Kindle app on device, for example. Even though I can open the browser on that same device and buy them from Amazon.
> Laws. Existing laws prevent developers from doing that.
Laws mean nothing to scammy developers trying to make a quick buck. Would you hire a lawyer to sue for a $4.99 refund? And even if you’re willing to spend that money, are you sure you can figure out who to sue? The scammy developer is likely using some shell company registered in some dodgy jurisdiction. Sure, what they’re doing is illegal, but the average consumer has no real recourse.
My bank gave me a $10 refund, no questions asked, for a service that wouldn't answer cancellation requests. I don't think they even dinged the service, since they tried to bill me again the next month.
> Laws. Existing laws prevent developers from doing that.
Whose laws? The US's laws? Many app developers aren't in the US.
> However, that same system prevent me from buying Kindle books from the Kindle app on device, for example. Even though I can open the browser on that same device and buy them from Amazon.
I’m sure Apple would actually prefer that you buy the Kindle books on the app, even if they didn’t get a cut of the sale. It is actually Amazon choosing not to do it in order to dodge paying the payment processing fees.
Not a single payment processor in the world has a 30% fee while also having a competing product in which they can have the prices arbitrarily low (because they don't care about the 30% fee they pay to themselves).
The egregiously high processing fees from AmEx are at 3.30%.
> paying the payment processing fees
Was that ever an option? I thought you always had to pay 30% when selling digital goods
Laws? Lol. Like bigger part of the world cares.
most of your comment is irrelevant because you assume Apple would be calling a external API, while parent means is external calling Apple API to register subscriptions. Then if you have concerns like yours you can stay within Apple ecosystem.
That only works if the external API is handing off the entire subscription to Apple, up to and including payments. But the entire premise is to move away from being forced to use Apple for these elements, which makes it a non-sensical interpretation. In fact, that particular interpretation is the current status-quo -- apps use APIs to create subscriptions entirely managed by Apple.
If Apple does not control the actual subscription, but is only providing an interface for managing it, then Apple must then alert the actual owner of the subscription upon changes. There's then no guarantee that the code on the other side is properly handling that alert.
How would that be helpful if you want to cancel the subscription using a third party payment processor from the app store/settings(current workflow)? Apple would still have to call a third party API, otherwise it doesn’t seem particularly useful (i.e. you just get to see the status and that’s it?)
> As a user I really like the fact that Apple is the only one with my payment informations.
Apple pay provides the exactly same functionality without the lock in. Same with Google pay and even Samsung.
Feels like a solution to an American problem, cancelling things isn't much of a problem in EU.
The only reason is that they don't want the public to realise how greedy they are. They know the value they add is not worth the price difference to a lot of customers.
As many have said for years. As long as Apple is not able to explain their value to the customer, they have to rely on shady business tactics to maintain the revenue stream they became addicted to.
Having been so close to bankruptcy seemed to have tainted their behaviour, that now anything goes to protect what in the end saved them, moreso than in other companies.
No, not “moreso than in other companies” — maximizing profits is something that effectively all companies do.
The difference is that smaller companies can get away with anticompetitive behaviour but there are regulations for market leaders.
What Apple was allowed to do when they were a disrupter is different from what they are allowed to do with a dominant postion in the ecosystem.
PS Saying all companies are greedy and would abuse a market position is not a moral defense of Apple’s behaviour, it’s a defense of antitrust regulations.
Do you know any other marketplace / reseller who puts a message: "By the way, if you book directly with the provider and cut us out, it will be cheaper"?
I can fully understand Apple's position. They created the system that customers love, developers will have to pay something to get access to those customers.
Apple doesn't have to explain to customers the value. Anybody who is buying or using an iPhone today knows what they're getting.
> I can fully understand Apple's position
They want to maximize their revenue, just like any other company and there is absolutely nothing else to it.
> Anybody who is buying or using an iPhone today knows what they're getting.
You don’t get to pick and choose which features do you want and most people don’t really care.
Anybody who is buying or using an iPhone today knows what they're getting.
That’s what allows Apple to abuse their position as a quasi-monopoly (as a platform for app developers adjusted by user spending they are effectively that in multiple markets).
It's repeated again and again among hackers that Apple is a monopoly. While selling less devices than their biggest competitor. While having a much smaller install base for their OS than Android.
> They want to maximize their revenue, just like any other company and there is absolutely nothing else to it.
Oh, I had no idea.
> You don’t get to pick and choose which features do you want and most people don’t really care.
What? Iphones have been around for more than a decade, it's well known among customers how they work and there are plenty of options from other manufacturers.
Any store that can will take a cut from producers, whether that is a physical store like your local supermarket, or a digital store like Apple's.
The question is why Apple users are so much more willing to spend money on software than users of other platforms, and why hackers hate that so much? How much money can an independent or boutique developer earn from Linux or Windows users, compared to Apple users?
> While selling less devices than their biggest competitor
That doesn’t matter that much (when taking about app developers) compared to how much money they are spending. A single iPhone user in the US and other rich countries is worth a dozen of Android users in India/African countries etc.
Also even if not literally a monopoly they can effectively behave like a monopoly and abuse their position because no tech company targeting consumers can afford to not have an iOS app.
> What? Iphones have been around for more than a decade, it's well known among customers how they work and there are plenty of options from other manufacturers.
Not what I meant and not how it works. I’m using an iPhone in-spite of their abusive practices and restrictions because their other features/advantages compared to Android outweigh that in my case. It’s basically a shit sandwich…
> why Apple users are so much more willing to spend money on software than users of other platforms
Because they have more money?
> How much money can an independent or boutique developer earn from Linux or Windows users, compared to Apple users?
Yes, that exactly what I’m saying. Apple won (clearly because of the merits of their products) and now they can squeeze developers and consumers to a very high degree without any negative consequences. That’s how monopolies (of course it’s scale, Apple is not literally a monopoly, for that matter neither was Standard Oil back in 1906, they had a comparable market share to Apple these days) work regardless of how exactly they became one, they get to keep all the market surplus that would go to consumers in a more competitive market.
> Because they have more money?
I think this quote illustrates well your perspective and the general perspective of hackers here. Apple users spend more on software because they're just so dumb and don't know how to compile their apps and set up a self-hosted solution.
I can only speak for myself, but I'm very happy to spend money on quality software that I need to solve real world problems, instead of suffering with low-quality FOSS or ad supported software just to save a few bucks. I prefer saving my headache instead, so that I can tinker because I choose to, not because I have to. I think most non-enterprise software customers think the same way. They want something to solve their needs and are fine to pay a fair price for that. So they buy Apple products and later iOS/MacOS software.
If other tech companies cared at all about their product and their customers, they would do the same as Apple. But it's easier to sell to enterprise clients and spy on free users to sell ads instead.
> I think this quote illustrates > Apple users spend more on software because they're just so dumb and don't know how to compile their apps and set up a self-hosted solution
Never meant anything even remotely close to that. Apple users tend to have higher incomes and therefore can afford to spend much more than average (globally) Android users. I see absolutely nothing wrong about people spending money on quality software (the opposite really and I entirely agree with your point about ad supported and OS consumer software).
> they would do the same as Apple
Well yeah, arguably that was one of the main reasons behind their success. However I don’t see how do these things contradict each other, Apple can continue producing great products while being less abusive towards developers who have much more limited bargaining power.
My apologies for reading something into your words that wasn't there. It just sounded so dismissive to say that they spend more money because they have more money, which is an attitude I've often heard, and which isn't true.
Most Android/Windows/Linux users in the developed world (and they are billions) spend less on software than iOS/MacOS users, even though they can well afford it. Small time developers on those platforms are left to beg for donations (that never come), or bundle their software with ads and spyware that some big company pays them for. If they want to make a living on their work.
Developers serving Apple platforms are as far as I know better off reimbursement-wise than developers serving other platforms. Apple takes their cut, but until somebody voluntarily offers developers something better I think it's misguided to go against Apple.
People say that Microsoft got hit with these kind of lawsuits in the 90s, but as far as I remember, they were threatening PC hardware vendors if they offered competitor's software – which is clearly an anti-competitive measure. Not a reply to you, just a general comparison.
No, most people still do not know about how onerous the App Store rules are.
Nor how dangerous first-party services like iMessage still are, for zero-click exploits like Pegasus. The average iPhone user knows almost nothing about their device outside of what Apple directly markets to them as true.
Do you mean they don’t wan the public to know that they take 30% of sales?
Or perhaps that prices are 43% higher as a result of Apple taking their cut.
I would expect such a claim to be backed with facts.
I would expect someone who wants something from someone else to formulate a polite, specific request, and to then submit the request in a manner somewhere on the spectrum between respectfully and deferentially.
Unless I totally misunderstood, and you don't want anything, and are just expressing that the universe failed to live up to your expectations. In which case: my bad, sorry for the misunderstanding!
Where did you get the 43% number is that specific enough?
If Apple's fees cost 30% of the price, then the actual developers who make the software must raise prices to make up for Apple's fees. How much, though?
One might intuitively guess 30%, bringing $1 to $1.30. But Apple will take a cut of this price increase as well: $1.30 * 70% = $0.91, so still losing money to Apple's fees.
The actual amount they must raise the prices is (1 - (1 / 0.7)) = 0.428, or roughly 43%.
Doing this math backwards to factor out Apple's fees yields a confirmation: $1.43 * 70% ≈ $1
> "You can get this cheaper on website, but will no longer be able to cancel via App Store"
This seems like a reasonable compromise. Allow Apple to tell you what you won't get if you leave their store, but otherwise let consumers choose.
> Have they ever specified any reason why they prevent users from finding this out?
The reason is that every major retailer has anti-steering or most favored nation agreements with their suppliers, and Apple thinks they shouldn't be banned from it when everyone else does it. Applied to physical retail it does seem pretty absurd, e.g. The Cuisinart blender box at Target says it's 10% cheaper at Wal-Mart.
Walmart isn't a gatekeeper because it doesn't make one of the most popular platforms on the planet.
If apple want to give up platform ownership and be a retailer, the EU wont have any complaints about them not allowing steering in their app store. Meanwhile Apple's app store would become one of many options rather than the default and only, so steering is moot.
Obviously that's not going to happen, hence they are going to have to hash it out until it's not longer anti competitive or be broken up forcefully.
My point was that the idea of anti-steering in retail is old and the idea of "gatekeepers" is new. Apple isn't unique. They are behaving exactly how you would expect if a regulator suddenly tries to stop them from doing something that was previously routine.
> The reason is that every major retailer has anti-steering or most favored nation agreements with their suppliers
Well, I don't think that should be allowed either. Especially when the retailer has enough market power that they can bully the supplier into accepting unfavorable terms, like say Amazon or Wal-Mart.
If a retailer takes a bigger cut, it shouldn't forbid you from selling it cheaper elsewhere.
It's close to that, and if Apple was forced to advertise the cheaper price, or the product seller themselves was then it would be.
This is more like Target prohibits sellers from ever notifying you that there's a sales price at Walmart if you're looking for a deal. You're not allowed to push deals for you're own product during Black Friday or similar.
Frankly. I donno where the quote about the "do not tell about sales is at." I tried to read the legalese and got stuck on:
7.3 "You may also distribute Your Applications ... within Your company, ... on a limited number of Registered Devices (as specified in the Program web portal)" Wait. What? My own company has limited internal distribution on my own app?
7.6 "Except for the distribution of ... Licensed Applications through the App Store or Custom App Distribution, the distribution of Applications (using Section 7.3, 7.4, 7.5) ... and/or as otherwise permitted herein, no other distribution of programs or applications developed using the Apple Software is authorized or permitted hereunder. You agree not to distribute Your Application ... via other distribution methods or to enable or permit others to do so." IE, you cannot go out on the street and "share" this app with someone, or give it to them, or similar. And obviously not 3rd party portals.
9.2-9.3: "You agree to protect Apple Confidential Information using at least the same degree of care that You use to protect Your own confidential information of similar importance, but no less than a reasonable degree of care." ... "Apple will be free to use and disclose any Licensee Disclosures on an unrestricted basis without notifying or compensating You." Note: Licensee Disclosures include All Data. You agree to put Apple's data in a vault, Apple agrees to copy your app.
AppStore is not Target. At best it's a mall.
> Have they ever specified any reason why they prevent users from finding this out?
As a user, it’d just be irritating noise to have this start showing up in apps, unless buried in some little out of the way link somewhere like other unimportant things like the supposedly legally binding t&c all these apps pretend we’re reading.
Messages like this (“go subscribe somewhere else to get a lower price”) also confuse the hell out of e.g. my dad and prime them to fall for scam messages.
Could just show "Apple transaction fees" as a separate line item instead of just the total. Everyone should be more accustomed to that than a possibly sketchy looking message.
Yeah making it itemized on the payment screen would be fine. As long as the stated amount and the final total weren’t different, like sales taxes in US stores. No “$10… just kidding now it’s $13”. But listing it on the “bill”, yeah, wouldn’t mind a bit if they were forced to do that.
> they think if they drag their feet on this, maybe regulators won't come for other things.
This. EU politicians and EU voters want the EU to crack down on foreign tech companies who abuse users data rights, use monopolies to push EU companies out of the market, and use accounting tricks to barely pay any taxes.
Therefore, the EU has to be fining Apple and Google for something. If not this, then it'll be something else.
Let's not make it some sort of agenda out the EU: these companies are out just for themselves and however much someone likes their tech/philosophy/ecosystem, their practices are bullshit and unfair.
If Apple gets to have an nefarious agenda, then the EU may have one as well.
I know it might be not be an obvious difference for people living in US these days, but there's in fact a massive difference between a megacorporation and elected government.
Who did you vote for in the EU? When were those elections?
Just last week was one of them.
> Who did you vote for in the EU? When were those elections?
2024 European elections: https://elections.europa.eu/en/
Includes topics such as: results, how the elections work, and what comes next.
We vote for the parliament, which was only like a week ago. Each country also votes for their government, at times specified by their constitutions. Those governments then form the Commission and the Council.
The EU parliament has a quite limited role. That's not the center of EU power.
Sure. But every institution is elected one way or another.
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One is a for-profit company known for anti-competitive and cut-throat techniques, as well as expert in tax dodging over the world.
The other is a governmental group formed by 27 rather different countries, all having a wide range of philosophies, cultures, corruption and mentalities.
I know which one I am more likely to get some level-headed decision which might help me.
The EU at the cutting edge of competition law, which is to say it is looking actively at the competitive landscape and saying "what are the problems?" then moving doctrine along to solve them. There's a lot to be said for the approach.
If the EU can be said to have an agenda, it is clear from the rules - their agenda is market fairness, and the ability of new entrants to successfully compete. The DMA is a key plank of that, but there will be others.
EU's single biggest win is free and open Single Market and it will fight to keep it so. It doesn't matter where companies come from – if you look at e.g. GDPR enforcement tracker you'll see they're as eager to keep internal EU companies in line.
Yea, but that's not so true for the DMA. They're only targeting foreign companies using it.
Initially all companies that were defined as gatekeepers under DMA were foreign, but on 13.5.2024 Booking.com was designated as one as well. They are a Dutch company.
Any evidence for this? Which big domestic company is a gatekeeper and not being targeted by the EU?
Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
See, the problem is that if I name one as an example, you will just fall back to silly games like "but the EU defined the term 'gatekeeper' in such a way that your example does not count". It does not matter whether the market dynamics are the same as the defined gatekeepers, whether the market shares are similar, or anything like that. Your side will shut down any debate with logic such as that. So why bother engaging?
It's like arguing with a hardcore religious person about god. "Oh, but that's not what I meant by 'god'".
This just sounds like you don't have any examples.
>It does not matter whether the market dynamics are the same as the defined gatekeepers
Perhaps then find an example where this is the case.
forget not the stick is also levied towards domestic to EU companies. starting with Booking.com
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> EU politicians and EU voters want the EU to crack down on foreign tech companies
EU tech companies want the EU to crack down on foreign tech companies. The Digital Markets Act’s standards for considering someone a “gatekeeper” seems like it was specifically tailored to exclude Spotify while binding Apple, Google, and Facebook.
> The Digital Markets Act’s standards for considering someone a “gatekeeper” seems like it was specifically tailored to exclude Spotify while binding Apple, Google, and Facebook.
A glance at that list of 4 companies will quickly lead a person to the intuitive observation that 1 of those companies is not like the other. It's hard to see how one would classify Spotify as a "Gatekeeper" in the sense that the others are, so perhaps your observation is by design: Why would we expect the legal definition of ”Gatekeeper" to include Spotify, if Spotify is not a gatekeeper even on a common-sense level?
How is Spotify a gatekeeper? There's iTunes, Deezer, YouTube Music, Tidal and many, many, many other music providers.
There is plenty of competition in Spotify's market.Music is a commodity and the market is working Just fine.
Btw Netflix also isn't a gatekeeper and neither are Disney, salesforce or Oracle to name a few.
It’s one of the few benefits of EU being a complete backwater when it comes to software and consumer tech products.
There will be very little harm to EU’s economy since almost all of the profits are being sent to the US anyway.
Also this/GDPR/etc. is a form of protectionism (not that I see anything wrong with that to a limited extent) which will hopefully give at least some slight competitive advantage to EU tech companies (since they really do need it) and maybe a bit more crumbs to fight over.
> Have they ever specified any reason why they prevent users from finding this out?
They haven't (and obviously won't), but the intent is clearly to eliminate any criticism of Apple from within apps, while also making sure that there aren't any "leaks" in the system from which money could escape that they want their fingers on.
(except for privileged companies like Netflix and Amazon)
> "You can get this cheaper on website, but will no longer be able to cancel via App Store"
For one thing, nobody reads that stuff and secondary, after a few months people forget the details of where and how they subscribed to things.
So it absolutely would lead to an increase in support calls to Apple as people ask why they can’t manage a subscription through the App Store. Even me, who generally does keep track of this sort of thing, completely forgot through what service I first activated an HBO subscription and it was kind of a hassle to cancel it since, it turned out, I had set it up through Roku and I haven’t owned anything Roku in 6 years so didn’t think to look.
A blanket ban is overdoing it though, and is just a lazy (and conveniently profit maximizing) way to stop it. I’ve long felt that what Apple ought to do is maintain a codified standard of bad behaviors that address the specific dark patterns they are worried about and just hold that over developers’ heads to retroactively punish abuse rather than having a default posture of being adversarial.
> what Apple ought to do is maintain a codified standard of bad behaviors that address the specific dark patterns they are worried about and just hold that over developers’ heads
The problem with doing that is that it likely results in a game of Whack-A-Mole with malicious parties. See for instance Google regarding SEO.
They’re already playing that game through App Review anyway though. This just gives them more granular sets of punishments they can dole out beyond just “accepted” or “rejected.” It also discourages seedy developers from just opening up chains of fly-by-night developer accounts to upload scams, since they could gate a lot of these elevated API privileges behind needing to have a good reputation.
> But then, let the developer explain that too.
This is a bit like banning free speech because sometimes not the whole story is told.
> where the judge surmised that App store model was not just payments but the whole mechanism of tracking subscriptions, cancel and refunds, and standard pricing for purchases
Well, yeah. When it's your only goddamn choice it sure as shit becomes that. I can guarantee you it can be done for much, much less than 30%. But apple won't allow it.
But that’s how they decided to fund other areas like having iOS free. I still don’t understand the logic behind the complaint. If the developers don’t want to pay, why not just drop support for iOS? If the answer is because customers are on iOS then… idk respect that this is the decision of the user. Don’t force me to install another App Store or give you my card data so you can charge me the same amount and keep more profit while compromising my privacy and security
> that's how they decided to fund other areas like having iOS free
Isn't that funded by iDevice and Mac sales? Because Mac sales sure as hell aren't going to MacOS development...
> idk respect that this is the decision of the user.
You have it completely opposite.
The argument is that the user should be given full power and permission over their own device that they own, and should be allowed to choose, on their iPhone, to install whatever they want.
If a user doesn't want to install an app, thats fine. But give them the choice to do so.
> Don’t force me to install another App Store
Then don't install another app store! Just don't do it!
Apple, being part of a duopoly, should not have that power. That's all. I don't care about protecting their business or whatever the fuck else.
> Have they ever specified any reason why they prevent users from finding this out?
Surely because they think, "We're Apple, this is how we do things." But honestly, there's starting to burn through a lot of the consumer good will credit they have built up. They're just another "shareholders first" company now.
Fair or not, but it is very good business model. Smart people realised, that in open market profits will go to zero as competition increases.
Solution: create your own alternative to open market - be the market (and write rules for it)
Apple will do a lot to keep this cash cow at peak performance.
Yes it's called a monopoly and this is precisely what the EU is trying to avoid.
actually the rules apply to everyone monopoly or otherwise, anti-competitive rules are not applied/enforced when there is a dominant market position only.
Exactly, the rules are meant to prevent monopolies from forming in the first place.
In some cases a monopoly is needed or wanted, like in credit card cases you don't want a million credit card types that all work in different subsections. In such cases regulations are to prevent such companies from having too much influence and bottlenecking everything else with high prices or forcing their own other products. EU already did this with credit cards.
Or you force and open standard and now you have different companies using the same system but with competing pricing.
If something "has to be a monopoly", there is a good case to be made that you are talking about a core public infrastructure piece which shouldn't be under control of a singular private entity.
Credit cards need to have personal connections with businesses since it is about mutual trust. A business doesn't want to deal with a shady credit card and credit card providers doesn't want to deal with shady businesses.
So you are talking about a technical solution to a social issue, that wont solve it.
Online pay providers show that it is very well possible. There are tons of payment providers which are widely supported. The only difference is that some of them have a physical presence while others do not.
With a common standard, the available of card-based payment providers would indeed increase. In europe, you often can't pay with Diner's Club or American Express. If they would not all have proprietary systems and were compatible, then their adoption would in-fact increase.
Naturally, not every grandmother and their dog should be able to use this standard but there must be a well-respected authority behind it. Taken to the extreme and we couldn't trust anybody we couldn't have root certificates.
Mutual trust doesn't scale. You really think that either Visa or Mastercard has a personal connection to every grocery store that accepts credit card payments?
If you're from the USA maybe you're used to effectively a single payment system (or a small number that all use the same card reader)
Many countries have far more payment systems. For example, Japan, 7/11 takes Line Pay, PayPay, Merupay, au Pay, R Pay, d払い, Smart Code, J-Coin, Bank Pay, QOU-Pay, WeChat Pay, Alipay, Nanco, R Edy, iD, QUICPay, 9 different train cards, Mastercard, Visa, American Express, JBC.
Some of them you insert the card, some use NFC, some you scan a QR Code, some you show a QR code.
Some have had big discounts or "points", probably to try to get market share. The discounts can go either way. Some are for the consumer (get 5% cash back for example). Others are for the merchant (zero fees for N months, etc...)
There's tons of competition.
That’s arguably not a great example, since there are both more than one international credit/debit card networks, and even these have been subject to constant regulatory scrutiny.
There was a time when common wisdom was that telephone companies and many other infrastructure businesses needed to “obviously” be monopolies as well (sometimes state-owned, sometimes private, which is arguably the worst of both worlds). I really wouldn’t want to go back to that.
> That’s arguably not a great example, since there are both more than one international credit/debit card networks, and even these have been subject to constant regulatory scrutiny.
The two cards are essentially interchangeable so it is a duopoly. And the fact that they are subject to constant regulatory scrutiny without adding laws to force new entrants is why it is such a good example, it shows how well regulations can work without adding competition. To me in Europe credit cards works really great with low fees and no fuzz, I don't think that anything needs to be done about that more than is already done.
To card issuing banks, absolutely not. Visa and Mastercard compete for their business.
To merchants, yes, since they can't reasonably only accept one but not the other, as that would turn away a large fraction of their customer base. This is why most regulatory action happens here.
> subject to constant regulatory scrutiny without adding laws to force new entrants
There are absolutely measures taken to encourage new market entrants or at least more competition among the existing ones. (Whether they are effective is a different question.)
As one example, in the US, every debit card issuer is obliged to add at least one other brand/network to their cards, so that merchants do in fact have some routing choice. In Europe, some countries also have a domestic competing debit scheme, such as CB in France, Girocard in Germany etc.
> I don't think that anything needs to be done about that more than is already done.
I think you underestimate how unstable the current equilibrium is. The interchange cap regulation is relatively new, and I doubt that the networks will fail to come up with other ways to grow their market share and/or revenue that will, at some point, require further regulatory scrutiny.
Not sure I understand, what has the EU done to encourage a credit card monopoly? That there's basically a world wide Visa/MC duopoly isn't something the EU has actively encouraged as far as I know, only regulated as you mentioned.
For banking transfers there's SEPA so assuming a similar system could be set up for credit cards.
> what has the EU done to encourage a credit card monopoly
I didn't say they encouraged it, just that they didn't end it but instead added laws to cap the fees.
In that case it should be owned/regulated by the govts. In India's UPI has multiple banks talk to multiple consumer and vendor apps in one ecosystem standardized by govt agency. and it is damn good compared to other systems.
What your describing is accomplished by standards, not monopolies. Monopolies can create standards but that's a horrible trade-off for society.
HTML is a standard, not a monopoly
The DMA very much does not apply to everybody and was revised and tailored to exclude EU companies, by making sure the definition of “platform” includes the Big Tech firms + TikTok while excluding Spotify and Booking.
The job of the EU is protect and benefit the EU, not American companies. The DMA is not a “general” regulation like the GDPR that applies to all, this is a tailored approach to help EU companies.
> excluding [...] Booking.
????????????????????????
https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/commission-designat...
Wow, had not seen that development. Would love to know how the Dutch lost that fight. Thanks for the updated info.
It's more than monopoly. It's monopoly combined with strong lock-in.
Maybe not as much in the EU, but in the US it's completely insane:
"Stay in our ecosystem or else your friends/family will stop including you in group chats, stop sharing pictures with you, stop sharing video moments with you"
Apple leverages your personal social connections against you in the US...and by and large people don't seem to know or really care.
This was similar when the Bell Telephone company was running things, but at some point the regulator said no and other telephone operators were allowed on the same network.
That's actually a great comparison.
> Apple will do a lot to keep this cash cow at peak performance.
The problem is if Apple's obstinance leads them to loosing much more of their cash cow than if they had just given up a little.
> in open market profits will go to zero as competition increases
As they should. Innovators should be able to collect a profit for their hardwork. A decade later when your company gets captured by MBA grads it's not a great thing for the consumer or the economy as a whole if they just sit there and collect rent while lobbying for regulatory capture to keep any new talent from being able to do better than them.
Smart people realized that you can operate in antisocial manner and benefit at the cost of others by creating a monopoly?
Do you also think drug peddlers are smart for entering an under supplied market?
And who will win? Those "smart people"(I hate this word, being nefarious is not smart, and stop gaslighting us by humanizing an evil multi trillion corporation doing illegal things, as "people") creating their own market monopoly, or the regulatory bodies of large governments that can regulate those monopolies in their regions?
History tells us that the institutions with laws, guns, judges and a monopoly on violence rules over "smart people" who just make phones.
Apple's only retaliation is making life shit for EU users or pulling out of the EU market which they won't because that would leave a China style vacuum that Google or a local EU competitor will take after a period of painfull transition for the EU consumers.
The EU consumers can live without iPhones. Can Apple's shareholders live without Eu's profits?
Europe represents ~25% of Apple's revenue (https://www.statista.com/statistics/382175/quarterly-revenue...)
That's quite a large loss. Esp. given that there's another option - stay on the EU market while conforming to its rules. That will lower the profits, but not by that much.
Losing Europe as a market would have larger consequences, though. Software produced in EU would have worse support on Apple, people even in US having connections with Europeans would start installing alternative messengers etc. Apple's strength is in its network effect, cutting out a major part of it would be disastrous.
Americans already install alternative messengers on Apple and always have. That's not a real risk. I work in Europe and the people I know commonly switch between WhatsApp, iMessage, and Signal. I still use the Apple messenger by default because it is a noticeably superior product to the other two.
Similarly, my experience is that software produced in the EU commonly has worse support on Apple, including at companies I worked for. Again, that's already the reality. This fact was sometimes raised as a reason the apps had difficulty getting traction in iPhone heavy markets like the US.
There are reasons for Apple to stay in Europe but these aren't the reasons. I've commonly observed that the iPhone is more of a status symbol in Europe than in the US (where it is usually just the phone most people buy by default), which creates different market dynamics. In the US good interoperability with other iPhones is more important because that is a primary reason people buy them.
>Americans already install alternative messengers on Apple and always have.
Americans in Europe like you, or Americans in the US? Because for the latter, the statists would disagree, as in most use iPhones and just default to iMessage.
According to Apple's CFO [1] it's more like 7%, at least for the app-store, but it's hard to see how that wouldn't correlate to overall profits just as it does elsewhere. The regions are ... creatively named.
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2024/03/more_on_the_eus_market_mi...
I'm not sure I'm getting it - what does that figure, which talks about the AppStore revenue, have to do with sales in the EU?
Indubitably it would hurt Apple a lot if they lost a quarter of their revenue, would it not?
The EU is a subset of “Europe in that report. Pretty sure Gruber also mentioned that the Middle East is also lumped in there as well for some reason.
So yeah, the EU is bound to be a big number but it isn’t 25%. The biggest economies in the EU are Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium? Big countries outside of it but included in Apple’s “Europe” catagory include the nordics, UK, Switzerland, Turkey, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and probably something else.
Even if the EU makes up half of what Apple calls “Europe.” A fine of 10% of worldwide revenues is way beyond what the EU contributes to the bottom line. There’s no way Apple wants to take the nuclear option but if the EU threatens them with big enough fines they might think about it.
> the nordics
This one is a big stretch. Sweden, Denmark and Finland are part of the EU, while Norway and Iceland are part of the EEA where the DMA also applies.
Nuclear option? Looks more like a fart to me.
Most people in Europe use Whatsapp or FB Messenger, so they don't need Facetime or Apple Messages - major selling points of the Apple ecosystem. Alongside that, only 6% of people in the EU use macs, which further shows how Apple's ecosystem does not have a solid foothold in the EU.
> History tells us that the institutions with laws, guns, judges and a monopoly on violence rules over "smart people" who just make phones.
The real problem is that some of these mega-corporations can drag things out so long legally that the end result barely matters. :(
Governments have a shot at this fortunately. But it seems that some US people have such an ingrained anti-government that they reject anything, even if it helps.
This is forum with a lot of top1% earners who can afford to pay Apple premium. And entrepreneurs who only dream to build the next apple and be able to abuse market power the same way.
Government regulation are kind a opposite side of that coin.
> I hate this word, let's stop being gaslighted humanizing an evil multi trillion corporation as "people"
It's not gaslighting. People work for the company, and they decided. You're dehumanising them by saying they aren't human.
> People work for the company, and they decided.
I think you have an incorrect model of the incentive structure and actual power dynamics of publicly owned corporations.
Even the CEO has to answer to shareholders in the end.
The CEO has to answer to shareholders when it comes to keeping his job and to legislators when it comes to abiding the regulations in every market. It's a tough act to follow if you try to maximize shareholder returns while also trying to stay out of prison.
I never said people aren't human, I said apple aren't human they're a corporation.
And people who knowingly leverage their gigantic corporation to make life worse for others in the name of shareholder profit can and should be dehumanized. There nothing humane in hurting others for greed.
I get what you're saying, but Apple are a group of people, so they are human.
Like the local book club, or Hamas.
Anyway, you don't have to look very far to see the many horrible things done to humans by other humans.
The word "humane", in my view, defines how we would like to be, not how we really are.
Ship of Theseus. If you replace every single human at Apple with someone different, it's still Apple. Apple is, at this point, a separate entity, under control by a given group of humans at a given time, but that can change.
The problem is considering "Apple" itself a person, as corporate personhood does. Thinking of companies, even in limited contexts, as a "person" allows the individuals actually making decisions to be largely immune from liability on a personal level. Maybe that should change.
Apple is more than the sum of its parts.
Technically a person is just a bunch of cells, but those cells are interchangable, replaceable (indeed few last more than a couple of decades), and if you lose an individual cell nothing happens to the person, but the cell can’t function.
we don’t say the cells make decisions, we say people do. With a corporation it’s the corporation that makes the decisions, not the individual cells.
Agreed, there's definitely the emergence principle at work when looking at how groups of people function.
The population of a city or a nation is similarly greater than the sum of its parts, and there is an emergent property in both cases. Same as an ant colony.
2 things though.
The constituant parts of a corporation are human, unlike an ant colony. So in that sense they are human, and ant colonies are ant.
Regarding ourselves, we absolutely are an assembly of cells, it wouldn't be wrong to define us as such, although not terribly convenient. But interchangeable the cells are not, well not like a person to a corporation.
A cell can't move from one person to another, if it somehow disagreed with a decision of the central nervous system.
The human brain is made up of billions of cells, and decisions of the brain are heavily dictated by the digestive system and various hormones. A corporate board is at the most, what, maybe a few dozen people? There isn't the same level of responsibility of each component.
Finally, if the entire corporation decides as one entity, how to punish for wrongdoing?
Should every component of the corporation be put in jail if the corporation kills people (looking at you Boeing), or just the humans at the top that made those decisions?
Another way of looking at it: Is the entirety of the Palestinian population responsible for the decisions of the dozens of humans that are the Hamas leadership?
The decision makers still have agency, but structures exist to prevent those who would make un-profitable decisions from reaching the top of the corporation in the first place. Once they’re there, their choices are constrained somewhat and (with nuances) profitable decisions are incentivized over others. The consequence is that, while individuals possess agency, we can also observe that the average individual’s behavior is predictable and in service of the corporate machine in aggregate. You can punish the ghoulish person who decided, along with a few others, to dump toxic waste into the river, while still recognizing that their actions were an inevitable result of the incentives we created for them. The most productive thing, of course, would be to change the incentives, but baby steps.
Your way of thinking advocates for no accountability by employees. The company did it?
Looking at a corporation as a single entity from the outside it seems more like some sociopathic, mildly superhuman ai than a group of people. Of course it’s composed of people, but is that really the most useful frame to view it through? It’s nothing like a book club.
Agree entirely on principle, but nobody should be dehumanized, if nothing else because it is a very ineffective way to model your opponent.
And hurting other for greed is surely not humane, but it is very much human. Big difference that e at the end.
Modeling a group of people, answerable to yet another, even larger group of people, as “a person” is what I would call even worse modeling.
It's not that a company is a person. It's that it's multiple people, some of whom make decisions.
Exactly, and groups of people behave differently from a single person in many important ways.
Yes - they have more legs. But what they are not is a homogenised mass, all as equally guilty or innocent of issues as the other. If 3 executives do something bad, those 3 executives are to blame. And not some nothing-to-do-with-people corporation.
I agree! That's why I didn't say "are culpable differently" but "behave differently".
One of HN's biggest intellectual blind spots is mistaking explanation with justification. Looks like your comment was caught up in that.
I don’t see the future, but argument for Apple could go like this:
- it is Apple vs EU
- US gov has guns and influence and various levers
- US gov will definitely protect Apple from guns of EU (so regulator with guns is a bit mute point)
- Apple is important to americans (I think they feel it’s their symbol or something), so officials in US gov might think it’s good opportunity to grab some political points.
- US gov might act to help out Apple in this dispute (Nothing like a war, but some slight nod or handshake; maybe via diplomatic backwater; maybe in exchange for something)
Though most probably apple will give “something” even if minor change in the rules, at least just so EU would not loose face, to keep relationship friendly. (But it will be move in the right direction)
The US has filed an antitrust case against Apple, which pretty much denies this whole argument.
https://www.theverge.com/24107581/doj-v-apple-antitrust-mono...
There is a deep misunderstanding here of US politics and foreign policy.
The US might act in various ways to protect American manufacturers, or oil industry, or other industries that are responsible for a lot of jobs in the US or are a strategic resource in some other way. See the 100% tax import for Chinese EVs. The US government doesn't care about Apple. Apple's economic impact is basically irrelevant for the US, because it doesn't provide a noteworthy number of jobs or any significant supply chain within the US. Apple's use as a strategic resource is completely irrelevant based on their antagonistic behavior towards the US government and they've shown themselves to be as eager to comply with Chinese laws as they are to flout US government policies.
I'd maybe see the US do something to protect Microsoft, with its deep ties to the military industrial complex, or Intel, which has both these ties and is clearly a strategic resource because of the advanced chips it provides, but really only if there were an existential threat that would also prevent Microsoft or Intel from performing their necessary roles in the US economy, the military and in US foreign policy.
But to suggest that US guns are in any way relevant, or that the US would bother trying to protect Apple, is frankly absurd.
The EU has smacked down Meta, Google and Microsoft already for things they felt were anti-competitive. The US didn't give a shit. Why would it be any different here?
Did the US attack China over all the regulations Apple and Google have to fall in line with to be compliant over there?
The US might have less of a leg to stand on vis-a-vis Bytedance absent China's examples of how to do it.
The core raison d'etre for the EU is open markets. They'll do a lot to keep their fundamental core principle.
The billions in agricultural subsidies, strict regulations, and non-tariff barriers that make it difficult for non-EU companies to compete suggest otherwise to me.
Open markets != unregulated markets.
EU is not about “open for all”, but “open among members”.
> Smart people realised that in open market profits will go to zero as competition increases.
This has been observed and written about since at least the 18th century
Parent didn’t say when smart people figured it out.
This is also why Nintendo (when they moved into video games) set up their business model as platform-holder, not just game developer. And their own games are primarily there to seed the platform.
Rather, the goal was to lower ("subsidise") the purchase price (initial barrier) of the NES/SNES and then recoup it on licenses for cartridges. It makes each purchase of a console cheaper. It's the rational way to maximize revenue.
But Apple is not subsidising phones in any way.
I'm not sure how you're framing that as a subsidy. It's a killer app that gets people over the threshold to purchase the platform (console). And then once the install base is established, everyone else wants to make their own games and has to pay you (a lot) for the privilege.
Developing first-party games costs more money, to both Nintendo and consumers, so it's the opposite of a subsidy. But they're compelling enough, they clear the purchase threshold and establish the platform on which the rest of the business is built.
Parent commenter meant subsidizing the actual hardware costs. The same is true of pretty much every other console, they can also sell the hardware cheaper for this reason
Nintendo is a funny example here though, since they are notably the one major player which actually makes a profit on their hardware sales directly. They do also make a cut on the other games still, though.
So, is that good or bad in your opinion?
Whipping homeless people until they do the work you demand of them is also a very good business model. Just not exactly ethical or legal.
Not arguing with general point.
But I strongly doubt that your business model would even approach #1 spot on S&P index.
If you are looking for advice on your business model..
> Whipping homeless people
On avg. homeless people are less competent part of the bell curve. Don’t limit yourself, toss the “homeless” restriction.
You could reduce cost by mostly just threatening to whip, and to actually demonstrate the whipping only on Mondays, just to prove that it happens.
Also, micro-management has serious downsides. It does not build trust, it eats away at initiative and motivation.
Why the homeless qualifier?
If Apple had any competitive ground to stand on, it would not bother banning other app stores.
Customers would love to pay the 30% Apple tax for security and the great selection of apps.
MacOS is a great example of what happens when that competitive ground does exist. Most Mac apps are distributed outside of the app store, some aren't even notarized.
Yes because developers don’t want to pay $100 to then go through a super annoying notarization process to distribute their FOSS app.
Android is the more closer to iOS example though. They have alt store and you can also download app through chrome, yet most users only use Google's play store.
* Most users only use Google's play store, except for apps not available there
Certain categories of apps aren't deemed acceptable by Google (e.g. apps with adult content, apps that circumvent copyright, some "hacking" apps, etc). If you want any of those they are easy enough to find and sideload.
There is also a big community pirating legitimate Android apps. According to some for every one purchase ten people use a pirated version.
Also, Fortnite isn't available on Google's store. Which is what that Epic case was about.
Also, there are many apps from sanctioned Russian companies that can't be published on Google Play, so they only exist in alternative app stores like RuStore and/or as self-updating apks.
On iOS, they just can't "legally" have an app any more, period. Some made their apps PWAs, some say "just use the website", and some (Tinkoff/T-Bank in particular) keep trying to get into the app store with those double-bottom apps and also distribute them signed with enterprise certificates.
The desktop is kind of a different space, though.
Most of the paid apps I've ever used on MacOS are well-known and cross-platform -- the kind of thing where you'd go to the developers website directly by name. So, of course the developer is going to guide those people down a path where they get all the revenue.
And the users of FOSS apps are overwhelmingly the people who will download a DMG from GitHub releases, and change their security settings to install it -- so why bother?
But for everyone else -- the $4.99 apps that aren't household names -- the App Store is probably where these are most often purchased. Although I doubt this market is very large on the desktop -- most people just use a browser and maybe some well known software that would have come in a box 20 years ago.
Yes, it is! Look at how much smaller MacOS market share is compared to iOS in their respective markets. Stated preference vs. revealed preference.
US and Japan are the two unusual countries where iOS has more market share than Android. In the rest of the world, iOS is maybe 20%. For computers the situation is exacerbated by the fact that many people own one mostly for gaming, which means it's going to be Windows. Whereas an iPhone is considered a status symbol.
> In the rest of the world, iOS is maybe 20%
If you count the number of devices. By app store sales, the figure is maybe 50%, probably higher.
Are you implying that macOS has a smaller market share because of the lack of restrictions? Cause its competition, Windows, is less restricted if anything.
MacOS also isn’t connected to a cellular network.
And what difference does that make with regard to software distribution models? It can easily be connected to a cellular network using one of those USB modem sticks btw.
Being connected to a cellular network puts different responsibilities on the platform vendor due to the global reach of a software problem.
What "software problem" are you talking about?
I’m talking about the carrier network requiring protections. The carrier like to verify devices on their network. There was a time when booking up a fax was illegal. Apple is responsible for the activity of the devices they create on the carrier network.
> Apple is responsible for the activity of the devices they create on the carrier network.
Where did you get this idea? You are responsible for what your device does on the network. It's in your contract with your carrier. If you interfere with others' ability to use their phones on the same network, that has a good chance of the communications authority getting involved.
But we're talking about apps. The worst thing an app can do is DDoS something. That would just make you run out of data very quickly. Or auto-dial numbers (Android allows that, with a permission for which the app has to ask you), you'll just rack up an enormous bill and will learn to never make this mistake again. Or spam SMS, same thing.
Eveyone can interpret the various rules and regulations. I think you should do more research and reflection on how easy it is to be in cellular network.
The "being in cellular network" is done by the modem. It's a separate CPU core that doesn't run any user code. If you jailbreak the user OS, you can send AT commands to it, which is still harmless as far as RF interference is concerned.
But I really struggle to understand how any of this relates to the distribution of apps that run in sandboxes.
i dont think apple is too concerned with the end user using a 3rd party store but the large companies having the ability to host their app on a 3rd party store sidestepping apples fee entirely. thats what truely scares them.
People assuming this is a competitive posture exclusively are missing the point.
The app store isn't just about making more money, it's about enforcing privacy and security guidelines for apps through the review process and through checks for unauthorized api usage.
Apple's product is privacy; they view privacy as a premium feature worth paying for, and 3rd party app stores that are the wild west for privacy are antithetical to this.
Said customers who care about privacy would therefore continue to use the App Store.
Except important products will be pulled from the App Store because they will become exclusives in 3rd party stores.
These "important products" are already getting out of the Apple Store, but instead of moving to the competing App Store alternative (which currently doesn't exist), they are moving to another ecosystem
What if Apple presented better deal terms on a level playing field?
Why should Apple divert resources creating a secondary environment?
Because it's the law in a region Apple wants to do business. Simple.
Apple did what they thought was best. The EU said no and the next step is the court system. When that result is known Apple can decide what markets to operate in.
When Apple Kerberos all their services they essentially made it possible to granularly manage service availability by user, device, and region.
The EU fining schedule is so out of proportion that it creates a real business risk to Apple that may be greater than the EU market size.
I don’t think the EU efforts are as detailed or grounded in reality as the EU considers them.
As a spectator I can’t wait to follow the ups and downs of this.
which is about brand marketing, which is about making more money. without the differentiation of the app store, they are that much closer to being android.
> Apple's product is privacy
that's a large component of their brand, not their product.
for contrast, signal's product is privacy. (note: i'm no fan of signal)
consider that the facebook app is allowed, on the first party app store. i'm failing to see how the app store gates privacy.
The App Store rules are mostly about making more money. So what, it's not a charity.
3rd party app stores will still be subject to GDPR, which apply to all European customers, so calling it a wild west is a weird claim.
Anti-steering rules are completely normal in contracts between cooperating commercial entities. We sell on Amazon and we’re not allowed to steer Amazon’s customers off of Amazon. Amazon disables hyperlinks in the messaging system for communicating with customers. They rejected our PDF spec sheets for having links to our website. They will de-list our products if they’re available for a lower price on another site.
And, honestly, they’re completely justified, IMO. They’ve done all the work of furnishing a customer who is ready to purchase. Why should they then have to allow us to steer that customer off of their site to complete the sale? Of course, we’re still allowed to sell outside of Amazon, but we have to do all the legwork to get customers. And, being in the midst of an effort to do just that, it’s a huge amount of work, so I think they’re justified in not wanting us to poach their customers.
I remember hearing stories of customers flicking through physical books in bookstores and then buying them off Amazon. Can't do anti-steering in that direction.
> They rejected our PDF spec sheets for having links to our website.
I miss the world wide web where you could link to sites.
> They will de-list our products if they’re available for a lower price on another site.
This is straight up cartelization and can no longer be called a "market".
It's important to get the analogies close.
The bookstore isn't the same. It would be if the book had a QR code on the back labeled "guaranteed cheaper here" - not just the UPC/ISBN.
The customer is choosing to price compare somewhere else, that's not steering, that's brand loyalty.
Wasn't this literally a feature of the Amazon app? You could scan a book's UPC and have it pull up the Amazon listing.
Sure, but that's _still_ customer brand loyalty. The _book_ isn't advertising "Go to Amazon for the cheapest prices" on the cover.
> They’ve done all the work of furnishing a customer who is ready to purchase.
But Apple aren't doing that, really. If I find a link to an App Store app on a website and install it via App Store (as that's the only option), Apple have put no effort into finding a customer. In fact, they've injected themselves into the process by requiring apps come via the App Store.
No they haven't? An app can sell a customer access to their app outside the App Store, give them an account that they can use to access full functionality, direct them to the App Store to download the app, and Apple doesn't take anything. Apple gets a cut when they facilitate the sale, which they absolutely do when a customer is directed to the app in the App Store and then can buy the app with a single tap (knowing it has undergone some degree of vetting and that they can get a refund if they're not happy). If you don't think that is providing immense value, then just consider the difficulty of selling software outside of the App Store. To an approximation, it basically doesn't happen except with B2B SaaS (which notoriously requires a very expensive sales and marketing function).
The developer could probably sell them same app service directly through a webpage and use that in the advertisement link instead of the App Store link.
I understand why Amazon won't allow you to link to your store directly but
>They will de-list our products if they’re available for a lower price on another site.
This sounds pretty shady
Not only are they shady, but these most favoured nation deals are incredibly anti competitive. Amazon is using its market position to dictate what price other stores are allowed to sell at.
They're just not. The thing they're trying to avoid is a customer discovering a product on Amazon, then immediately finding it for less on the manufacturer's website. And this happens. We do it! So do plenty of other sellers we're aware of. Of course, we have to hide it behind a login or offer a 10% discount on first order or whatever.
Amazon is giving sellers something of immense value (the opportunity to sell physical goods to a huge pool of customers who are ready to buy). Why should Amazon give that access to sellers who are trying to divert customers off of Amazon? They're not running a charity. It's their business, which they've built over decades of immense investment and effort. And the immense value of what they've built is evident in the difficulty other massive retailers like Walmart, Target, Kroger, etc. are having building similar online retail businesses.
> They're just not. The thing they're trying to avoid is a customer discovering a product on Amazon, then immediately finding it for less on the manufacturer's website.
So they are using most favoured nation deals? Whether you believe they have a good reason for it or not (I don't think they do) doesn't make it any less anti-competitive
> It's their business, which they've built over decades of immense investment and effort.
I don't care how much money and effort it takes. That's their problem, not the customers'.
They have also built it up by exploiting their workers, creating inferior knockoffs and then kicking the original off the platform, taking as much money from suppliers as possible, and introducing paid placements so that vendors need to advertise to show up even when searched for by name.
> And the immense value of what they've built is evident in the difficulty other massive retailers like Walmart, Target, Kroger, etc. are having building similar online retail businesses.
Perhaps that might have something to do with all of Amazon's best efforts to exert ever more control over suppliers. Or leveraging their success in other areas (looking at you AWS) to do things that would not be profitable otherwise in order to eliminate competition (Diapers.com anyone?).
Not only they do that but they also give out deals and rebates without asking the merchant.
I would automatically give the clients a rebate equal to the Amazon fees if they purchased through my site.
We don’t have a right to sell on their site. If we want access to their customers and exposure for our products, they want to make sure they’re not being undercut on pricing (since they know customers will price shop).
If even after stopping you from linking to your own site Amazon still fears their customers will price shop by their own accord then:
a) Amazon is implicitly admitting that their shopping platform is not so special: if customers could find cheaper suppliers of your product that would be enough for Amazon to be outcompeted.
b) Amazon is indisputably engaging in anticompetitive practices by forbidding you from even selling at a cheaper price with the only justification of "we do not want price competition to even exist"
Sorry, but you just have no idea how valuable Amazon is at enabling customers to discover that your product even exists. 100% of the customers who have ever bought from our website have discovered us on Amazon. We know this because we don't do any advertising outside of Amazon.
I don't know what your product is, but this feels like it tremendously undervalues the hard work you've done to create a good product:
> And, honestly, they’re completely justified, IMO. They’ve done all the work of furnishing a customer who is ready to purchase.
Amazon is just a dumb pipe for your product and for payments. Sure, they have world-class infrastructure, but it's still a replaceable service, other companies do it successfully. Some % of those customers would find you without Amazon, especially if you advertised or put your product on other marketplaces.
This mindset also allows Amazon to exploit you, because you've already decided you'll accept anything they decide to do.
"We can't link to our website" is INSANE. It means any other company can undercut you or impersonate you on Amazon because your customers have no relationship with you as a company! That's terrifying!
> "We can't link to our website" is INSANE. It means any other company can undercut you or impersonate you on Amazon because your customers have no relationship with you as a company!
It's even better when Amazon undercuts you with an Amazon Basics product. As a bonus they'll give the Amazon Basics product a preferential position in search too.
So what? All large retailers do this. They're called house brands. And they're actually beneficial to customers, since there's a well understood quality floor. If your product can't compete with a house brand, then your product isn't bringing any value to the customer or the marketplace.
I say this as an Amazon seller that competes with Amazon Basics.
> Why should they then have to allow us to steer that customer off of their site to complete the sale?
Because we live in a democratic society with laws that are voted on, and voters are perfectly able to decide what rules they want to live by.
If Apple doesn't like it, then they can shut down their entire company or move out of those countries that have the full democratic authority to decide how businesses run in their country.
I wonder if everything would have been simple if the regulation itself was something death-simple like:
If you control the software of the hardware you sell, you must refund with the inflation adjusted sums the users at any time they return their hardware.
This way, companies can choose if they are renting platforms they deliver their services like the TV boxes some cable providers will rent, or of they are selling products and the users can choose to do whatever they like with it.
The makers can still provide and and sell services on devices they built but they will have to be good at it.
That would be very bad for customers and Apple will love it. Instead of buying iPhone you'll subscribe to it and pay $99/m for iphone+one+Apple telecom
What’s stopping them from doing it now then?
They do (or did for some time).
That's literally the original iPhone sales model.
Early iPhones were sold only on special "iPhone plans", not because "special unlimited internet" (at least once iPhone 3G landed for sale outside USA and its shitty telecom market), but because there was a percentage paid from the plan to Apple.
How would it play out? A scenario is that I could buy an iPhone for 1000 Euro, use it for one year, return it, get my 1k back and use it to buy a newer model. Basically they would be working for free or they'd have to increase the price of 1k per year, with huge discounts for whoever swaps an Android for an iPhone.
It would be up to them to choose their models. If they want to keep the closed model where you can't use the device you purchase in absence of Apple, they will have to charge accordingly for the device and services and do the refunds if the user no longer want the device. I guess people would like yearly updates, so Apple will have to operate drastically differently to keep the closed platform model.
Alternatively, they can sell the devices as today and provide a method to install any software the user wishes and even to remove iOS from the device. I guess they will be required to produce a basic documentation on all this so others can create the alternative services but wouldn't be required to modify their own software and services.
So, the device is sold at a loss at 100 Euro but it doesn't work without mandatory services that cost 500 Euro per year?
Maybe, I don't know. Its up to the companies to do the math, who would like to pursue this model. If it's not feasible, the shouldn't be doing it though. AFAIK BoM is usually no that high, so it can be viable.
Anyway, maybe some depreciation calculations might be used to account for wear&tear but the core idea is that if you are selling something that works only on your other services by actively preventing competition you shouldn't be charging for the hardware that delivers that and the money you take upfront is just a fully refundable deposit to cover stuff like the consumer breaking the device or taking it but not using the services.
> If Apple feels these rules are so just and fair and indispuitably correct, why does it go to such measures to hide them from its consumers?
Because if would harm shareholder value. You don't need a more complicated explanation about the whole situation.
If customers being informed about your business practices will result in harm to shareholder value, you've got a problem.
But they will ride high in a pile of money until the curtain is drawn back. It's worth it to them
I think visa and Mastercard have the same behaviour even supported by the governments. You can’t add the visa fee to the checkout.
The EU regulates credit card fees caping them at 0.3% [1]. That is roughly a fifth of the fees charged in the US and roughly two orders of magnitude smaller than Apple app store fees.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/fees-for-...
I think that’s a different fee. As a merchant accepting credit card or debit card payments is going to cost you the same 2-3%. At least that’s what Stripe or local payment processors charge
Stripe charges 1.5% + €0.25 ($0.27) in the EU to accept EEA cards [1]. Stripe charges 2.9% + $0.30 for processing domestic cards in the US [2].
The reason it charges 1.4% more for accepting US cards is the US card fees (interchange fees). These fees are complicated and roughly five times more than European card fees [3].
[1] https://stripe.com/en-fr/pricing
[2] https://stripe.com/pricing
[3] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/small-business/credit-car...
It varies state-to-state.
https://www.bankrate.com/credit-cards/business/can-a-busines...
The typical way stores get around it in Canada is with a "discount" if you pay cash.
And yet several places do. “Menu reflects cash prices” and “tuition payment via credit card will be subject to a 3.5% fee” are 2 I got this week.
What? Basically every store I go to adds a fee for credit transactions.
> indispuitable how wrong it is that Apple prevents developers from explaining these rules to their users
Absolutely. This is the same as giving Candy to a child and saying "don't tell anyone" or your boss saying you can't tell coworkers how much you're being paid.
The fact they want to keep it a secret shows something fishy is going on, and they know it.
Add to that the fact that the App Store only supports certain kinds of payment and subscription formats. Paid major upgrades, volume discounts for apps with IAPs or subscriptions , etc. - not possible at all.
Apple's restrictions are so deep as to dictate the very way we choose to monetize our apps. And all the fearmongering about choosing to publish to an alternative store. It needs to stop.
No paid upgrades is the huge issue. By fiat they eliminated the mechanism by which small developers survived for decades before the app store. It couldn't be any harder for them to support than the crazy IAP dance they make you do instead or the subscriptions they foist on everything.
They also implicitly prevent businesses where the margins are less than 30% unless it relies on ads.
Apple without Steve Jobs is
1. Not very good at explaining itself.
2. Not entirely sure why things are done in a certain way, they their changes it and revert to Steve jobs's way, or they refused to change and did not understand why Steve decided on doing certain things in the first place.
3. Not a very coherent company. Still better than most other companies except may be Jensen in Nvidia.
Is there any marketplace that allows a seller to advertise a cheaper alternative within their marketplace?
Nobody is asking for the ability to put a label on their App Store listing that shows the price of the same software or subscription on the web. What they're doing is akin to dictating what the creator of a product could put in the manual or paperwork that comes in the box - you know, where you'll often find manufacturer's coupons and adverts for registering your product with their website.
Ok, guess I'm out of the loop then, I thought they already allowed that
You think this is indisputable, but I don't see why there needs to be a law against these anti-steering rules.
> why does it go to such measures to hide them from its consumers?
Because the ripped off customers must keep paying. Why pay 30% more ?
Imagine if Steve Jobs was starting today, that famous super bowl advert from 1984 would allude to Apple, instead of IBM...
It's the cycle of most companies that are successful.
Start as the rebel/upstart being more bold, fighting the system, disrupting, until they become big enough to become the system.
It's just different games, as a startup you can't behave like a big corporation, so you use that strength to your advantage, as you get huge, you can't act like a more reckless upstart.
... Ouch.
Not wrong.
Apple is happy to deliberately create social strife among kids by blocking it's most social app from cross-platform use, just to eek out a few more phone sales. That would be bad enough if they weren't the market leader. The fact that they are brings it to the level of grotesque cruelty.
The point being, Apple is clearly willing to use every trick and scheme possible to maintain dominance and should be regulated as such. They are begging for it.
Here's the actual EC press release: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
It's very readable!
And it's been submitted, making this a dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40773806
Apple currently has three sets of business terms governing its relationship with app developers, including the App Store's steering rules. The Commission preliminarily finds that:
- None of these business terms allow developers to freely steer their customers. For example, developers cannot provide pricing information within the app or communicate in any other way with their customers to promote offers available on alternative distribution channels.
- Under most of the business terms available to app developers, Apple allows steering only through “link-outs”, i.e., app developers can include a link in their app that redirects the customer to a web page where the customer can conclude a contract. The link-out process is subject to several restrictions imposed by Apple that prevent app developers from communicating, promoting offers and concluding contracts through the distribution channel of their choice.
- Whilst Apple can receive a fee for facilitating via the AppStore the initial acquisition of a new customer by developers, the fees charged by Apple go beyond what is strictly necessary for such remuneration. For example, Apple charges developers a fee for every purchase of digital goods or services a user makes within seven days after a link-out from the app.
[edit] I will add one thing: right now, i'm rich enough that i wouldn't care about paying 30% less if it saves me the hassle of using a new payment processor, and i think this is the case for most people here, or even most people using Apple phones. But 10 years ago when i was scraping by, i had a phone that was given to me (not an iphone, but it could have been), and i would totally do everything i could to save 33% on anything (mostly food tbh). T=Not allowing link out and price discovery is not only anti-market, it's anti-poor.
> T=Not allowing link out and price discovery is not only anti-market, it's anti-poor.
What shops list their own markup? If I go to a supermarket I don't see what the markup is the shop adds. I just see the price here vs the price there. I did that when I didn't have any money as well. It seems to work.
Every shops allow price discovery, and none will charge me if I go in a physical shop to see what a product looks like in real life, then command it on internet. In fact, when I was a student, almost everyone I knew did that, as at that time, internet prices were a lot lower (and we had no money).
At that time I even went in different supermarkets to check foodstuff promos and sometime bought ham in a place, lettuce and mayo in another, and bread at another, on the same day. Not allowing to do that is anti-poor, I'll say it again.
Imagine that some people have only one way to access internet, and it's their phone on public wifi. What Apple is doing should be punished.
You can't compare appstore with other shops, though. It's the only shop that can possible exist, so it faces no competition at any rate by design.
I thought EU law is already going to allow for alternative app stores on iOS?
the law allows, the implementation that apple took, doesn’t in reality. yes, techinically it is possible, but with the associated cost only some big players can do it. there’s no room for free apps when the store has to pay 50 cents per user after a small threshold.
When the markup is external, this is quite common: e.g. shipping, taxes, etc.
When was the last time your grocer explicitly listed out the shipping cost of your globalized shopping cart? Did it show shipping of orange concentrate from florida? or grains from Iowa?
I think you are intentionally misinterpreting parent. When you buy something online, shipping is almost always a separate item on the bill (unless it's free). Taxes are also clearly specified on the invoice. Food delivery apps and Airbnb take it to the extreme, by charging a relatively small price and then adding surcharges. Uber breaks down price into the driver price, marketplace fee, taxes, and sometimes congestion fees. So yes, breaking down price is common.
They're only showing you last mile delivery fees. Don't mistake for once that your food is grown in the city you live in.
Go to a mall. You'll see shops happily advertising their stuff, directing people to their websites, asking people to download their apps etc.
The model breaks down because there is only one supermarket. Well, at least until the EU mandates alternate app stores without Apple handicapping them.
I also do not see where else I can buy it, or prices of other shops for the same product. I also do not see products in shop A tell me I should go to shop B instead.
Wasn’t the shop model what they copied?
It's hard to draw analogies to the real world. It's like if you bought a dishwasher and Best Buy forced the manufacturer to force the user to buy detergent from their store, and forbid the manufacturer from telling the user they can get cheaper detergent elsewhere.
Apples AppStore isn't the shop, it's street where all the shops are. They have decided that no consumer walking this street should know which shops exist or what their prices are.
These analogies break down real quick, but the center of the argument is that companies that grow too large can become "the market" and not "one actor on the market".
That's what I don't understand: what price can't I discover? Things like: how much Netflix costs, or how much something on Amazon costs, or how much a NYT subscription costs? I'm struggling to think of an example of what you're saying.
You cannot sign up for Netlifx on an iPhone, because Netflix either must make 30% less giving that cut to Apple, or charge 30% more.
This is even more egregious when it comes to Spotify, which is unable to compete evenly with Apple Music. I wonder if Apple Music has to give away 30% of it's revenue to a payment processor....
Okay, but I can see the price of Netflix and Spotify. Or are the prices different on iPhone? I don't have one, so I'm only going on what you're saying.
No, the impact of Apple's rules is that you cannot see the price of Netflix in the Netflix app, because Netflix doesn't want to use Apple's IAP and give them whatever % cut.
If Netflix did offer in-app subscription (through Apple), and charged it at a higher rate to account for Apple's cut, it would be forbidden from telling it's more expensive because Apple takes a cut, or that it's available for cheaper on their website. Apple even forbids Netflix emailing their customer after signup telling them it's cheaper on their website.
Okay - but I'm genuinely struggling to see an example. Is the worst symptom of this issue that I'm sent to sign up on an open platform like the Web?
From my understanding (I also don't have an iPhone), you're not sent anywhere, because Netflix were forbidden from telling you to go sign up on their website. There was just no sign up button, and an implicit assumption that you would somehow figure out that you need to open up netflix.com in the browser and subscribe there.
I think that has changed now for Netflix in particular, but not for some other types of apps?
No, that's called steering and it would be perfectly fine. But apple doesn't allow that, and that's what the EU's major complaint is about. So the worst case is that you have no competition, which is the definition of anticompetitive
[flagged]
It's a bit like the electricity or water, at some point tech gets integrated into a functioning society and creates serious social problems when those are not available/working in malicious ways and as a result governments create regulations around it to prevent abuse.
It would suck if your electricity provider one day decides that you will need to change all your electronics because they are switching to another frequency and offering you a package for the switch that costs just below the cost of moving away or building alternative sources. It would also suck if for example your telefon company stops connecting your calls upon the payment of your employer who suspects that you might be looking for another job and taking interviews.
So, no one has to create a telephone company or an electricity company as if they are charity, it's just that if they want to do it, they need to do it within the ruleset of the regulator.
Yeah, but why does it have to be apple? Why the best of the best and not a cheap android?
It doesn't have to be Apple, they can choose not to do business in EU
How does this relate to my original comment about apple being anti-poor? My question was: why should apple be pro-poor? There are other manufacturers. I think I see now why I was flagged, people understood me wrong. My point was: apple is higher-tier smartphone tech, so it doesn't have to attend to "poor people" (to be defined). Other manufacturers happily do. So the original argument doesn't make any sense.
My guess is that you framing this as forced charity and dismissing the these devices as a "human right" may have an annoyed people. That would have brought the downvotes , but the flagging is probably because of your tone.
Anyway, These regulations are not about Apple. They are about fixing market dynamics issues to protect customers and other businesses. That’s why they target by market share.
Yeah might be. I was only referring to the comment from the top about apple being "anti-poor" when there are other, more affordable options. But too late to recover from that haha.
I agree about tackling market dynamics though. Anti-competitive behaviour is a shitty thing independent of economic standing.
No one is concerned with Apple charging for its electronics.
There is a right to be a fully participating member of society, and right now you pretty much have to own/use some sort of smartphone for that. An old IPhone is not high-class anymore but might still be usable.
So android is not an option if you're poor? Wtf is this sentiment in this thread
Android is an option, IPhone is an option. Same rules for all market participants.
I don't understand why so many people think that if Apple didn't take a percentage cut of sales, prices would go down. Products are typically priced at what customers are willing to pay, which likely wouldn't change. The developer would simply earn more. The only real benefit to customers might be the existence of some apps with extremely thin margins that wouldn't be viable otherwise. As a developer, I naturally approve this though.
> I don't understand why so many people think that if Apple didn't take a percentage cut of sales, prices would go down. Products are typically priced at what customers are willing to pay, which likely wouldn't change.
You can trivially find countless counter examples where prices are higher only on the app store like netflix[1], spotify, etc.. subscriptions. They don't make their web & Android users pay more just to cover for iOS users, why would they? That makes no sense. So of course the price would drop if they were allowed to steer as they already sell it at the lower price on the website, they just aren't being allowed to tell iOS users that.
And that is what Apple is getting hit for here. Not the 30% fee, but the rules forbidding developers from telling the user about alternative sign ups or purchasing locations.
1: well before Apple cut a special deal for Netflix anyway
Because there are price sensitive users and many services would prefer to share those 30% with them instead of losing the business. Because even if the developer gets the money, they will invest them in their product instead of them going to Apple. Because even if they don't invest them, more money on the market will incentivize more developers who will create competition. Because even nothing changes, this means more money around the world instead of being concentrated in the Apple shareholders who will use them to create even more locked gardens.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. If a product is already priced optimally, lowering the price to capture price-sensitive users would reduce overall revenue, right? Profitable developers set prices based on what the market will bear, not the cost structure. Also, I'm not sure all developers would reinvest additional earnings into their products rather than just increase profit margins or divert funds elsewhere. I agree on the economic redistribution point though.
> I'm not sure all developers would reinvest additional earnings into their products rather than just increase profit margins or divert funds elsewhere
A mega corporation like Apple is much less likely to do this than a smaller company, though. Apple's quarterly dividend is literally the company communicating that they make so much money they can't think of anything better to do with it than just giving it away to the investors.
The profit maximizing price after a 30% cut `q(price) * (price - 30%price)` is not the same as the profit maximizing price without that cut `q(price) price`.
As long as the demand curve is downward sloping, there will be some pass through of Apple's cut to customers, though the fraction that is passed through will depend on price elasticity.
The current optimal price is set with the extra cost of Apple rentiering included on the production side. Minus that cost, the developer might find another optimum.
Companies would sure not reduce the price by 30%, but perhaps 10%. This would mean their revenue increases, and the price conscious user saves money as well. I doubt any users would opt for not using the apple store if the price wasn't significantly lower.
You pay Apple because they provide infrastructure to which you distribute your apps. Is like taxes so your country provide infrastructure etc, it may not be 100% efficient use but these things aren’t free
Competitive pricing doesn't work when you're in a monopoly/monopsony scenario, which is the case with Apple's App Store.
Presumably the quality of the apps would get a bit better as well.
If you've got 10 overworked employees and you suddenly make 10-30% more money, you can hire another one or two people and the business runs better.
> the existence of some apps with extremely thin margins that wouldn't be viable otherwise
Isn't that great for me as a customer, though?
And I wouldn't exactly call 30% + x an extremely thin margin!
Surely, Apple will respond by artificially hampering one or more of their products in the EU and hence take away even the slightest reason to upgrade hardware in the name of Apple Intelligence.
Customers need a company that acts and reasons like an adult.
You’re obviously insinuating that they are delaying features in the EU just to be petty, but the ostensible reason is plenty compelling on its own.
The EU regulations will require them to do insane amounts of custom work building a public API for Apple Intelligence. Imagine how hard it will be to make that interface secure, private, not terrible for users.
The other features like mirroring are much simpler, but still, is it worth making a public interface and taking the security and privacy risks just to offer the feature in the EU?
Every new feature in the EU is now a massive liability, so of course they’re going to be more cautious what they release.
The idea that any third party app could (a) record my screen 24/7 in the background or (b) have full access to all of the data on my phone would be beyond unacceptable.
Everyone rightly criticised Microsoft for providing such a capability and they would do the same with Apple as well.
EU would be insane to push Apple on this.
>The idea that any third party app could (a) record my screen 24/7 in the background or (b) have full access to all of the data on my phone would be beyond unacceptable.
Such an app would be breaking GDPR.
> Such an app would be breaking GDPR.
Obviously not
https://www.rewind.ai/
GDPR has no bearing on what apps can and cant do, as long as they ask you permission for their use of personal data first.
So don't give permission? (or don't install the app in the first place) I thought this was about malicious apps that collected private data behind your back.
This comment would have made sense in the late 90s.
Today we have decades of experience that the majority of users are not capable of making informed decisions when it comes to topics like app permissions. Especially the flow on implications e.g. allow the app to record the screen could mean your bank details are exposed.
> I thought this was about malicious apps that collected private data behind your back
No, where did you get that idea from?
> The EU regulations will require them to do insane amounts of custom work building a public API
Apple are the biggest company in the world. If they wanted they could hire 1000 developers to throw at this, and it wouldnt even dent a single percent of their profit.
Apple could very easily do this if they wanted to, heck they could do absolutely anything they want with their money and clout, but they dont.
You can’t do anything you want just by adding developers. If it were that easy, the entire software industry would look completely different. And that’s not even accounting for the inevitable system-wide repercussions of the work.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
Im aware of the man month, and Im aware that you cant just throw any deverlopers at any coding problem.
However I believe Apple easily has the money, developers, and ability to do this if they wanted. Look at all the other amazing things they do, anyone who argues this is hard for them is delusional IMO.
There’s a difference between working to build an amazing product that wows people, and working to fulfill mind numbing regulations created by people who couldn’t run a coffee shop. One is soul enriching, another is soul crushing. If Apple wants to torture its developers into doing soul numbing, slow moving work, I guess they can but the default response would be to not do that and give their developers more meaningful tasks that leaves them and Apple happy.
Sure, but why not just cut out the middlemen? Just install a EU representative in each Apple office, and they can watch over all the developers and dictate features.
The notion that Apple is punishing one of the largest markets on the planet by disincentivizing them from upgrading to the next generation of hardware seems like something you didn't really think through. The AI thing will be the #1 selling point of the 16 and onwards, and you can be assured that Apple wants it in the EU.
Apple, as with most mega-cos, needs to be reigned in and corralled by the governments of the world. But let's be real that the EU in some of their actions has grossly overreached and offered up impractical demands, while strangely targeting only American companies.
I guess reasonable fine for this breach is 30% of revenue in EU just like in the app store.
Maybe they ought to fine Apple 50 cents per installed app from their App Store, since apparently they consider that perfectly fine and reasonable.
The fine is up to 10% of global revenue, but that's not far from the 30% of revenue from EU.
Maybe we should just fine any company 100% of revenue if they breach a law, since that's just as arbitrary of a number and makes our region more money.
Don't forget the $99 per app.
Even if you don't want an app, you have to pay $99 for the privilege of a "Login with Apple" button on your website.
Or even 'Pay with Apple Pay' on your website.
So?
wrong, its 99 per developer
Apple keeps half assing its compliance in EU, thinking their malicious compliance will fly.
They want to learn it won't work through their wallets.
It's fairly standard corporate behaviour, and ultimately it pays off handsomely for Apple. They slow walked implementing a solution to prior censure, and then provided a solution that is laughable, but it starts the whole process again. Now Apple has a year to get some sort of real solution in. During the intervening periods they will have made billions they wouldn't have if they actually implemented a good faith, good intentions response the first time around.
Assuming EU won't slap a $30B fine. this approach didn't work very well for MS.
Many years ago I would have said Apple would never leave the EU, but now I’d say it’s firmly in the “possible” territory.
Maybe it’s a win for both parties of Apple leaves the EU, though I’m skeptical any homegrown EU product would have any traction unless they also force Google to divest Android.
I’d love to know how much work it is for Apple to comply and deal with the EU regulatory environment.
Interesting times.
In the short term that would impact their stock price way too much; I don't think they would pull that trigger.
In the long term this stance will become untenable if other regions come to the same conclusions. Anti-competition investigations against Apple are currently running in:
- US (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-apple...)
- UK (https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/investigation-into-apple-appsto...)
- Japan (https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2024/06/bc2d7f45d456-japa...)
Australia (https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/new-competition-laws-n...) and India (https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-amazon-apple-lobby...) will follow soon.
If Apple left EU, in the long run it would be very damaging to their market worldwide because of network effects.
Suddenly other governments (and people) would have a very real exhibit that life just goes on and that one company is not as important as previously thought.
God I'd give anything to see that happen. It would be the happiest day of my life, especially once (not if) other countries start following suit with their own regulations that will target Apple and they pull out of more and more countries until they only sell in Texas, I guess.
Shame it's a pipe dream
Why would apple leave the EU? It's a huge market, and I don't think there is a risk of their profit in the EU going negative because of some relatively small concessions. They can keep existing rules for the rest of the world and change them slightly for the EU. Unless they are afraid that other countries will demand the same if they budge?
> It's a huge market
Approximately 7% of Apple's worldwide revenue: https://daringfireball.net/2024/03/eu_share_of_apples_revenu...
That's hardly "huge" especially when weighted against DMA's fines up to 10-20% of worldwide revenue plus the uncertainty risk of interpreting DMA.
I really doubt that blogs numbers, the revenue share in Europe is around 25%, I doubt less than a third of that is in EU:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/382288/geographical-regi....
That's not actually Europe. That's Apple's "Europe" sector which includes 4 billion people across Europe, India, Africa and the Middle East.
7% of App Store revenue. Not all their revenue.
That's amazingly low given that Europe has such a large portion of the world's wealthy consumers. Even then, I think it'd be a huge risk to Apple if they created the perfect conditions for the might of the Polish/German/Ukrainian/Dutch developers to create their own Apple competitor.
Gathering some hard data…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
look at the “by country” table. If sorted by mean, 2 countries in the top 10. If sorted by median, 3.
I agree that 7% of app store revenue seems low. HOWEVER keep in mind that the EU is tiny on a population level. Not a single county cracks the top ten. So maybe not so surprising…
EU is also bigger on population level than USA as a whole market.
That's a bit like saying that USA is tiny on population level because of states like Alaska.
China is a huge market and Google left. Anything is possible.
Apple hasn't left China though, why would they leave Europe that has much less regulatory issues?
I am not saying they will leave, I’m saving it’s for me anyway, no longer inconceivable.
nor have they left Russia despite sanctions (and have not attracted the opprobrium for that that companies like Unilever have)
Google was forced to leave. Partly because their lucrative business of siphoning user data for ads hasn't panned out in China.
Note how Apple doesn't leave China despite significantly stricter regulation than Google faced,
The EU is much closer to the US than China is, however.
This argument only makes sense if you think of Apple as an entity that has a nationality. It's an internationally traded company that is therefore owned by international money. The stars would have to align in a very special way for 50% of the shareholders to agree that it's to Apple's strategic benefit to leave the EU.
It also underestimates the costs of leaving the EU or any country. In a lot of cases there are laws against leaving a countries market. I doubt the shareholders want Apple to go into such a fight.
Any extra work it requires to comply can be offset by price increases if Apple needs to recoup those losses.
That would be very very stupid. Their marketshare is already going down in China. Soon RoW will bring in similar laws and Apple will sell only in Texas and Florida.
Apple has invested more work into malicious non-compliance than it would have taken to simply do it right the first time.
> Many years ago I would have said Apple would never leave the EU, but now I’d say it’s firmly in the “possible” territory.
I don't even think that Steve Jobs would be able to pull that one off.
Sure, and then they can leave Japan and India next, as well.
Might not be homegrown.
Anyone could come in.
Would be a nice enticement too.
Apple's services in the app store(in app purchase system, refunds, API's, app store distribution infrastructure) is indisputly useful and deserved to be paid, however, it could be time to relax the fee circumventing rules since they are so big and has a target on their backs now.
I'm excited to see where this goes. Whether you agree or disagree with Apple, them losing (or even just lessening) their monopoly status would make room for new and upcoming businesses. New apps, new app stores, etc etc. Disruption may not always turn out better in the end, but if the status quo is not good, it's often worth the risk.
"Move fast and break stuff" is very divisive, because of course 'stuff' could include optimal stuff, people, the environment, etc.
"Move fast and break monopolies" on the other hand, should, as a forum for startup aspirants, be pretty easy to agree on.
What EU is doing is wrong. There are costs in running App Store, and asking for it to be fee free does not make sense. Allowing 3rd party Stores will wide open mass public to scams, data leaks and worse.
Developers are getting a very good deal for their small fee by SW industry metrics. Their apps gets displayed and sold by Apple, all things covered, no chargebacks, no running costs.
I feel threatened as a user by what EU is doing. Next thing to expect - many apps will require(!) always on location...
[dupe]
Some more discussion on the official commission release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40773806
As a EU-citizen, I'm not happy with this legislation and enforcement. I choose Apple versus Android, because I want the safe and user friendly ecosystem Apple offers. Otherwise, it makes much more sense to go with Android. Those phones are much cheaper and are very much the same quality-wise (performance, screen, form factor...).
The same goes with iOS on iPad. I'm very happy that my parents can use those devices versus a Windows machine (or even a MacBook) and know that they are pretty much safe from malware.
Even now, I noticed that with the mandatory browser selection screen both my parents independently have moved on from built-in Safari to Chrome (independently), since that was the only browser name they know. And now they are in a much worse position privacy-wise than before. Which is certainly not in the spirit of the GDPR and DMA.
You're upset that your parents were free to make some choice that you feel is wrong, and you believe Apple should be allowed to take that choice away from them?
Honestly, I feel that Apple has completely brainwashed some people. Comments like yours abound, complaining about the dangers and disadvantages of freedom and choice. You're only a few words away from "freedom is slavery".
You're assuming the OPs parents made an informed choice. Chrome might be the only name they recognized so they picked it. Is Chrome really the best choice for them? Hard to know. A bunch of choices up front is also generally bad UX. Reasonable defaults that can be changed later are likely better for the average user.
No, I'm not assuming that. The freedom to make a choice is not contingent on your being informed. Imagine being kept in jail with the pretext "you are not yet fully informed of what is out there, so we're not letting you go out for your own good".
Anyway, OP can just inform their parents and fix this thing, if that was really the problem.
> Is Chrome really the best choice for them? Hard to know.
If you imagine this is a good argument for taking choice away from people, you are damaged. There is no freedom if you get to restrict people until they will make the choice you feel is perfect for them. Freedom means freedom to make mistakes. It's not like Chrome is explosive, and if handled incorrectly it may kill its user and some innocent bystanders to boot.
Really doubling down on the absurd arguments.
I also said that it should be changeable later - so I'm not taking away anyones choice. Sticking a bunch of questions in front of a user, when all they really want to do is use their new phone almost feels like a dark pattern. They just pick whatever and move on. Is that really any better than default that can be changed later? IDK, other than randomly getting people using something different.
> Imagine being kept in jail with the pretext "you are not yet fully informed of what is out there, so we're not letting you go out for your own good".
Isn't this basically what school is for children?
I don't think it's crazy that people might have a range of preferences for how "locked down" a device or ecosystem is. One end of the spectrum might be Linux phones and the other might be those Jitterbug (?) phones for old people that can only dial a few preset numbers. Android would be more towards Linux and Apple more towards Jitterbug.
But I do think Apple should be more transparent with their users, and has generally been "maliciously complying" with these regulations.
> Anyway, OP can just inform their parents and fix this thing, if that was really the problem.
Yes, the little time we have in our lives, I really want to spend talking with my parents about topics like browser choices.
considering all this ai gen improvements, you should talk to them not just about browsers... scams that do imit ppl's voices are on the rise, you should also talk to them about being virgilent about some websites that do try to trick ppl, maybe even give some examples. The web is not safe and soon it'll be even less safe if there are photos of you/videos with your voice registered & available online
You'll have to do it anyway.
I have to explain on average once a month to family why some websites break on "the Apple internet app" (safari) and they should use Firefox or Chrome for critical stuff instead.
Had to explain again yesterday because Safari crashed to a white screen error on my wife's macbook while she was trying to buy plane tickets.
Firefox just worked.
Internet browsers are very present in 2024.
Something like this is really important considering the future of all of our live is digital whether we like it or not.
Have those discussions, educate them on choices, and it will make their lives much safer going forward.
Have you ... ever dealt with people? This doesn't seem to be the typical reality for most.
Very much. I am the 'tech person' whithin family and friends. I used to just do everything for them which was a chore. Since then I have discovered if I educate them on what a browser is, the choices they have, and how you can try multiple ones if you are having issues, then they very often start solving problems and looking further into things themselves.
People very often dont have a clue what things like app permissions are and just blindly accept them all. Aftrer educating and showing them, they are much more careful in checking what they are accepting.
Teach a person to fish is my motto, you should try it sometime! I dont see why that opinion deserves downvotes but there you go.
No, of course, everyone should be free to have the choice to install whichever software they want on devices that they own. E.g. put the phone in developer/hobbyist mode by connecting it with a USB cable to a PC, show some big fat warnings, and then allow all forms of sideloading. But it needs to be like a safety switch.
Then the matter of an informed browser choice. This is simply not a thing most regular people make or care about. Remember the Internet Explorer era? In this case, simply the most recognisable picture gets chosen (e.g. the only company that advertised their browser).
How does other users' ability to install stuff outside of Apple's control impact your enjoyment of your devices?
The general argument is that the changes end up being annoying.
Simplest example would be 1st party apps only vs including 3rd party apps. Clearly there are implications around including 3rd party apps that would affect the operating system and thus user experience
I never understand this argument.
iPhones can still come with Safari installed and used by default, no changes to anyones experience at all. But if I want to go to the app store, install a different browser engine, and set it as default, how does that affect any users that are just using the default device as supplied to them?
There is no reason at all to hinder this choice. It does not affect 1st party apps, or how the device works by default. It just allows choice for those who want to explore it.
> iPhones can still come with Safari installed and used by default, no changes to anyones experience at all.
No, this is not allowed and currently also not the case. When you're setting up a new iPhone, one of the questions during setup is which browser do you want to use.
Then IMO this went too far. All they needed to do was allow people to doanload alternatives if they want them.
EU did this to Microsoft years ago to disrupt the internet explorer monopoly. It wouldn't be fair to not demand Apple and Google to do the same now
I agree, except Windows had a massive PC monopoly back then. Apple doesnt have nearly that same monopoly today. It shares it with Google and in some markets it lags behind Googles user numbers.
The point is to prevent monopoly from happening
Suppose there were a rule that there could be no defaults ever, and all of the apps are randomly arranged in the App Store for the sake of fairness.
Your argument would be equally true, you could just scroll and scroll until you find the app you’re looking for, but surely you’d agree the experience would be worse?
In the EU Safari is no longer used by default. You're forced to choose a browser when setting up the phone.
Because web sites will start using Chrome only features and stick a big box over the page insisting the user switch. Unless, of course, you want to pass complete control over web standards to Google.
That's not very clear to me. How would it affect anything?
If there were no 3rd party apps everything else could be coupled, no App Store, etc.
Depending on particular user design goals, the experience could be far superior at the expense of being limited.
See GDPR side effect of annoying banners everywhere even if I don't give a damn about my website visits information being processed, for how unintended consequences played out and made the web worse for everyone.
For DMA specifically, see Apple withholding Screen Mirroring (a feature I would enjoy tremendously) from EU for fear (IMHO quite reasonable) that the vaguely written DMA could be interpreted as requiring them to open mirroring to 3rd parties.
It's been just a few months and already DMA impacted my enjoyment of my devices, no?
the only problem with gdpr is that it didn't push far enough. If your browser provides a header with accept/reject all, a banner should not be shown. Also, GDPR does have many other interesting things, including being able to download/delete your data
Just for your info, the banners are absolutely not required and they are the band aid solution of websites who don't give a crap about their users.
If you also don't care about yourself, it's worse for you but many others now have the chance to deny providers of their scummy way to make money off unwitting users.
Here is the home page of the European Union https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en
There is a banner.
The European Commission on data protection https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection_e...
There is a banner.
The press release for the current enforcement against Apple https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
There is a banner.
> the banners are absolutely not required and they are the band aid solution of websites who don't give a crap about their users.
If this is true, it says a lot about the organization running those websites.
Parent is right, banners are not required by GDPR. These websites do not reflect the people in the organisations they represent, they are made by developers like the rest of us who are following the crowd like sheep.
From https://european-union.europa.eu/cookies_en
That appears to be things covered by the GDPR and that they need some way to inform you that you can reject them ... and that's done with a banner that allows you to reject those cookies.Given that analytics is used, and that has cookies that track information, they're required to have that notification somehow. That page doesn't appear to be a "developers following the crowd like sheep" but rather "the requirements of the law are followed to the spirit and letter and the easiest and most accessible way to provide that functionality is with a banner."
I agree with your points, but with this...
>the easiest and most accessible way to provide that functionality is with a banner.
I read that as 'the laziest way'.
Well, one option is to automatically trigger "reject all" option if you see "Do Not Track" header or equivalent.
Designing the website in a way that works with browsers that meet the requirements of https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/digital-in... and https://commission.europa.eu/resources-partners/europa-web-g...
The banner works for its requirements with GDPR and meets the requirements for accessibility.
Surely, one cannot expect that companies trying to save costs will go through great lengths to implement something that they don't know if it will work or not or if they'll get sued in the EU if they implement a different solution when the EU themselves implement it this way.
If there is a better way of doing it that doesn't lead to lawsuits, the EU's website should be the first ones to implement and demonstrate an easier and more accessible way to comply with the GPDR.
As it is, the websites of europa.eu are setting the standard for companies to follow when they want to make sure that they don't get sued for failure to comply with the GPDR for website notifications and accessibility within the EU.
Have you read GDPR? I have many times, as I am a data controller for multiple companies.
I urge you to go and read it, and then come back and continue the conversation.
https://gdpr-info.eu/
This is an issue I regulary face, people not being educated on what the damn thing actually is. A general catchall banner on intial website load is the laziest and most intrusive way to get compliance, but its the easiest for developers so they generally take that way out.
As a company, if I were to implement something that is unknown to be in compliance with the spirit or letter of the GDPR, it is possible that the company would get sued within the EU.
The way to ensure that you don't get sued is to copy the structure of the one website that you know is in compliance with the GPDR and follow their lead.
When reading the GPDR text from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/homepage.html I see a cookie banner. If it works there and that is the example of how to be in compliance with the obligations of a website for cookies? Would some other implementation that isn't done that way be risky in that the courts in Europe could decide that it wasn't done correctly?
Until the websites of europa.eu change to show an alternative way to be in compliance with cookie notification for the GDPR, banners remain the least risky (and yes, easiest and laziest) way to try to remain in compliance.
Nothing in the GPDR says "thou shalt have a banner" - but that's not the issue at hand. What is the least risky way for a company to implement the requirements of GDPR given that's the way europa.eu does it?
It's interesting the views in the threads of "screw your parents if they can't figure out how to protect themselves w/o iOS/AppStore" to "we must think of the children and protect them from cookies"
> I choose Apple versus Android, because I want the safe and user friendly ecosystem Apple offers
And nobody wants to destroy the ecosystem. Just make it default, but not mandatory.
as eu citizen i'm happy with it. I have both a pixel and an iphone and imo you can continue using app store apps if you are afraid of security (let's not dive into this argument, bc the statements about security in some cases are false), while others will use other app stores when/where they want, that's kinda the point, you as a user can decide what to do. If you are afraid about your grandma/kids installing something, I'm fairly sure there's(or will be) an option in settings to limit such actions. It's true that ppl do need more education related to digital privacy, on the other hand, who knows if chrome is much worse than safari, and if they use chrome on their laptops... chances are the data is already collected, if they use google - data is already collected.
> I choose Apple versus Android, because I want the safe and user friendly ecosystem Apple offers.
Me too.
> The same goes with iOS on iPad. I'm very happy that my parents can use those devices versus a Windows machine (or even a MacBook) and know that they are pretty much safe from malware.
iOS (and Android) are very different position, security-wise, than desktop operating systems (Windows, Linux, macOS) because of the strong application isolation and permissions system. On a desktop OS ~any software you run has access to ~all your files (https://xkcd.com/1200/). Even as a die-hard desktop Linux user, we have to recognize that Apple leads in platform security, both in mobile and on the desktop. Take a look at Hector Martin’s (from Asahi Linux) thoughts on this.
> both my parents independently have moved on from built-in Safari to Chrome (independently), since that was the only browser name they know. And now they are in a much worse position privacy-wise than before. Which is certainly not in the spirit of the GDPR and DMA.
Two thoughts here: 1) the point of the GDPR and DMA is to give people the choice. In my opinion, choice is good. 2) people choosing things that hinder their privacy because they “don’t know better” is, well, an education problem.
Of course the GDPR/ePrivacy directive is notorious for lax enforcement (it’s ramping up, though) of illegal techniques and dark patterns like making it more difficult to reject unnecessary spyware cookies than to accept them. I predict the same will happen with the DMA.
It’s worth noting that ePrivacy directive is an EU directive, in contrast to GDPR being an EU regulation.
Inconsistent enforcement is a feature of directives. The comment on the GDPR though is full-well valid.
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Downvotes for an alternate viewpoint, what is this, Reddit?
It's not an alternative viewpoint, it's just plain missing the point.
The strength of Apple products and their ecosystem does not require apple forcing a monopoly on payments in their ecosystem.
If they stop abusing their position, their products will be just as good and as secure. I don't see the correlation between the article linked and that comment
Downvotes on HN are (also) for mere disagreement:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
Answers seem to imply the downvotes are for a naïve rather than alternate viewpoint.
This is a big enough forum that you will find anti-Apple posters that will reflexively downvote anything sympathetic to Apple.
a lot of people actually clueless on why apple charge a fee so they are like, why are you charging? the web didn't charge me either. when in fact apple provides all the infrastructure, distribution, security, payment system.
It depends which way you look at it.
You seem to be saying 'Look at all this infrastructure Apple gives you for free, of course you should pay them their cut'.
You could look at it the other way and say 'They made all this infrastructure in order to lock in vendors and monopolise the app market, thereby forcing you to pay them their cut'.
If posts on HN are anything to go by, it seems this perspective is decided simply by whether you like Apple or not!
Providing a good service which “lock you in” is a good thing. What do you rather?
Is that sarcastic? If not I feel you have missed the point of this whole thread/argument.
People would rather the freedom to choose what they buy, who they buy it from, and where they buy it. This freedom of choice is much more important to a great many people than being locked in to a service 'because its good'.
Wow! What if Apple decided to stop operating in EU altogether ?
The EU would rapidly collapse if US big tech pulled out. It actively prevents the development of a flourishing tech industry.
Nah, there would just be more Androids phones sold.
Google's Android?
That was quick.
The EU is too soft with Apple. Apple has consistently shown harmful intentions towards users, and it needs to change. They have had numerous opportunities to change but have refused to do so. I'm a big fan of Apple products, but I cannot accept the fact that I cannot install apps on my device from any source I want. Even if I develop my own app, I cannot install it on my iPhone. Why is the iPhone different from the Mac? It should be just as easy to install an app on the iPhone, simply download it and you're done, or drag and drop it from the desktop.
I hope the EU sets a precedent once and for all with a maximum fine (10% of global revenue).
To be fair, if you develop the app yourself you can install it on your iPhone without any problem, you connect your phone and install it through Xcode.
True, but you have to rebuild the app every six or seven days, because it stops working. Unless you shell out for the paid developer account I think. Then your apps won't expire.
My guess is that Apple thinks this route could be used to circumvent the App Store.
> Then your apps won't expire.
Correction: then your apps will last a year before they expire. You'll still need to reinstall yearly.
Xcode only works on a Mac, and to do it you need to be registered in the Apple developer program.
So if you want to develop an app for iPhone you can do it no problem, as long as you buy another apple device to code it on, pay Apple the subscription fee to join the developer program, and then you can install it on your Apple phone.
That still requires a MacBook. It makes it almost impossible for open source developers to make applications for IOS
Open source != owning a mac
I agree that the hardware requirement is bullshit and mostly unnecessary.
I share the same exact sentiment.
I hope they get hit hard.
I hope that Apple pulls out of the EU. They're less than 10% of their global revenue. If the fines are higher than their profits why on earth would they stay?
Where are you getting 10%. It is close to 25% for fy23.
"10% of global revenue" - What does EU have to do with GLOBAL revenue? Where is the logic in that.
1. The logic in that is to prevent Apple from trying any shenenigans where "technically" Apple Europe has 10€ revenue and can continue to dodge regulations. It's simply recognizing that megacorps exist and will absolutely try to play the system. Sure, you could be develop a more complex method but why? Fines are meant as a determent and should hurt.
2. The fines would of course be enforced against the European Entity.
3. If they stick to the regulation there is no need to pay any fines. Taxes are not calculated this way.
4. There is an implicit "up to" whenever EU fines are stated.
Why does the USA have extrajudicial power, why does China force technological transfers to access its market?
In international laws there is no logic, it’s only about being strong enough to enforce your rules.
The logic is obvious, that is what it takes for these kind of companies to feel the fine. 20 million dollars is nothing to them.
This is easy to see if you want to. It's been discussed over and over. "I don't understand this thing that I refuse to understand!" is a really useless comment.
Still makes 0 sense. 20% of global revenue is much much more than 20mils. apple had 380 billion in revenue last year. so you want to fine them 76 billion? also, "its nothing to them" is not an argument.
They have the opportunity to stop breaking the law. If they don't choose to do that, they face punitive damages. It has never been unusual for punitive damages to exceed the proceeds gained from breaking the law. That's why they're called punitive.
This isn't a situation where they do something unknowingly and then face some major consequences. This is a situation where they break the law, they're told to stop, they don't stop, they're told to stop again, they still don't stop. After that, rinse and repeat a few more times. 20% of global revenue sounds perfectly fair for this kind of stupidity.
> so you want to fine them 76 billion?"
No, what the EU wants is for Apple to comply with the regulations.
Nobody would have to be fined anything if Apple simply stopped playing these silly games, and followed the law.
It is very easy for these companies to shift money around their books to look like none of it came from a certain country.
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Apple's App Store policy is unbelievably ridiculously hubristic. Imagine if Google/Microsoft charged you 30% of your entire business just because you ran it on top of Excel/Sheets and Gmail/Outlook. Or if Adobe took a 30% royalty from all artists creative works. It's madness, plain and simple. Developers already pay an annual fee to publish to the App Store, and consumers pay massive dollar to buy their iDevices. And yet they still have the nerve to demand 30% of entire business revenue, and charge a tax even when conducted outside of the App Store (so-called Core Technology Fee)? Even most governments in the world don't tax out-of-jurisdiction income.
Not only Apple charges their tax but they decide if you can distribute your iOS code to users.
You can work for a year on an app for iPhone or iPad and then not be able to distribute it if Apple doesn't want to. This is not even hypothetical.
Apple owns 30% of your business but has 100% control of it.
> You can work for a year on an app for iPhone or iPad and then not be able to distribute it if Apple doesn't want to.
Happened to my company.
At the time they had no guidelines on sending "tips" digitally, and when we asked for an exception (before building) we were granted it.
Submission day, rejected.
Cue 3 months of back and forth, which ended with "yeah, you gotta use IAP for that, and we're gonna take 30% from the tips."
> Imagine
Google's Play Store and Microsoft's Xbox charge the same as Apple's App Store.
Microsoft's Windows Store charges less, but nobody uses it store anyway.
Because side-loading is a thing that works well on Windows.
Not only works well, but is the default accepted way of installing applications.
That's true, but on the other hand you have Steam, et al. that are popular in spite of that. Or the Mac App Store on macOS.
30% is arguably justified for some tangible goods, depending on the value add of the channel(s) for sales & distribution.
But digital goods? Thievery.
Tell that to Steam, which is generally well liked by developers and users alike.
There's clearly something else going on than just the 30% number, and it's worth investigating what that is rather than fixating on the wrong thing.
It's never actually been about the 30%, it's just that that's the easiest manifestation. It's Apple's insistance to insert themselves into the relationship between developers and their users.
The fee could be next-to-free and many would still be upset if they're not able to use their own payments infrastructure. Developers are not able to offer customers refunds on IAP or discounts or credits.
Steam demonstrates that it's not about the 30%. It shows how 30% is viable in a competetive market if it's what consumers (and developers) prefer.
The difference here is that you don't have to use Steam. For example, Epic Games is doing just fine providing downloads for Fortnite themselves.
Yep, so the problem isn't how much they're charging at all, it's the tight lock down.
I like your sibling comment's summation:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40776710
In the world of physical products, brick and mortar stores will take 40-50% of the revenue for selling your product. This is the norm. Even worse, production, shipping, and accounting all also cost vastly more.
So while the 30% take of the app store is likely too much, you can't really do an "imagine if" because actually prior to the software industry things were far far far more difficult.
Yeah but physical products are hard work, and cost a lot to store, move and display properly. Yet you can still sell directly to consumer if you wish. Software distribution costs basically nothing on the internet, AND Apple makes it impossible to sell directly to the user.
Sure, putting files on a CDN is very cheap. But, point of sales is a massive pain in the ass. Updates are a massive pain in the ass, notifying users of updates and security patches, not to mention marketing. These things are such a huge pain that I can see why a platform would charge more than pennies for them.
Facing building out exactly this stuff myself using Stripe, a traditional website, building in licensing keys, etc etc. If something like the app store were multi-platform and had a bit more support around offline licensing and things like upgrade pricing, then honestly I would not immediately discount it even at 30% cut. Especially if I got some marketing out of it too.
You can argue wether 30% is the right number, but what the app store provides is definitely not "basically nothing".
Imagine if Steam took 30% of all sales on their platform! Or if Nintendo or Sony or Microsoft charged developers 30% for online app sales! (Spoiler: they all do).
There are lots of things worth criticizing about Apple's model, but I'll never understand the fixation on the 30% rule. They provide a distribution platform that is every bit as robust and has a much larger reach than the video game consoles, and if they want to charge the same prices as the consoles I don't see why that's the hill to die on when there are so many other things that are more obviously rotten.
Steam is one of the many app stores I can use.
Not the only one.
Meanwhile Apple forces their app store down their customers throat. And charges for the forced privilege.
Consoles are not general purpose devices. But I wouldn't mind if EU went after them as well
> Steam is one of the many app stores I can use.
> Not the only one.
A) For the video game consoles this isn't true, they have full control just like Apple does.
B) Like I said, there are better hills to die on. App store monopoly is one that makes more sense to me (though I still actually disagree with the mainstream HN consensus on it).
> A) For the video game consoles this isn't true, they have full control just like Apple does.
You can still go to any physical retail store and buy a game developed by a 3rd party. Yes that 3rd Party company had to pay a license fee to release the game on the hardware but you can still choose where you want to buy that game from, including any sales or discounts that retailer might see fit to try to gain your custom.
Which is a right that Apple was willing to concede, but people flipped out when they announced you'd still have to pay the fee.
Consoles get a pass for things that Apple gets raked over the coals for. There's clearly something more going on than just "these specific behaviors are unacceptable always", which is the simplified take that gets popular on HN.
>Which is a right that Apple was willing to concede
Begrudgly and in a way that is very much viewed as malicious compliance, hence them now being investigated for it.
>but people flipped out when they announced you'd still have to pay the fee
I agree with them
When I buy an App from the app store, Apple should take a cut for providing the infrastructure, payment system etc, thats fair.
If I am buying something from a company directly from their website or marketplace, for a service they provide in that app, why should I pay Apple a fee?
> If I am buying something from a company directly from their website or marketplace, for a service they provide in that app, why should I pay Apple a fee?
Ok, but explain to me why it is ok for Sony to charge a license fee to release a game that is only sold in retail stores as physical copies, while it is not ok for Apple to charge a similar fee?
The parent's point is that HN goes all frothy-mouthed about the $0.50/download fee from Apple, and then uses pretzel logic to justify why it is ok for Playstation/Xbox/Nintendo to do the exact same thing.
The main difference is that the agreement between Sony and publisher only covers publishers first sale of the material, and their agreements only cover direct revenue share / static prices per unit from publisher.
It does not limit publisher in any way how they want to sell the physical copies, it does absolutely not apply to non-first-sale (depending on the structure of distribution, the box you see in a retail store might already be beyond first sale).
It also does not setup any limits on publishers activities that do not involve Sony licensed IP.
It's similar to how many vendors had revenue share licensing on their products in the past, which is legally distinct from flat percentage applied to distribution channel and limits on said distribution channel
n.b. Sony has, apparently, since PS4 sometimes been cheaper to develop for, in terms of non-revenue-share pricing, than Apple - often providing no-cost loaners for smaller teams.
source on Sony terms: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1821175/000149315220...
I think that the issue here is that every person and their grandma has an iphone, and so they are a bigger target. Pretty much every single person in the western world has a mobile phone, and the majority of those are iPhones.
No matter how hard you try to compare this to the console market, its apples and oranges. The amount of xboxes sold and the market they are sold to just pales in insignificance compared to Apples domination of the world.
Also the gaming world has a much shittier nemesis, gambling. The loot box and microtransaction scandals have overshadowed any issues with store fees. I feel if these things hadnt been so big over the last decade, there would have been much more focus on the payment issues of app stores.
As a kicker, I feel that the courts would probably argue that the console world is very specific to gaming, and therefore is a much more targetted audience. Phones have apps for everrything that run your life, hell you cant even get a bus ticket or do any banking where Im from if you dont have a smart phone. So it is much more of a lifestyle device which is required to live in the modern age, whereas consoles are purely entertainment.
>App store monopoly is one that makes more sense to me
Am I misreading this, or are you advocating for a monopoly? In what world is a monopoly better for consumers?
Steam also leans on the same anticompetitive "most-favored nation" agreements as Amazon. Sure, you don't have to list on Steam... but if you do, you better not try to go around their cut and list elsewhere at a lower price, either.
They have very positive mindshare with gamers but at the end of the day gaben's not your buddy either.
Steam lets you sell Steam keys directly or via a third party and they take a 0% cut. That's how places like greenman gaming, humble bundle, etc work. You still get to use all Steam's infrastructure but pay no fee.
that's a mechanism intended to grant keys to reviewers and such, you can't use that as a primary transaction mechanism. steam has an unspecified threshold at which they will kick you off the platform for abusing that, they aren't there to be a free delivery platform for external sales and if it makes up a plurality of your sales they'll pull the plug.
you'll note humble bundle isn't literally the only sales those publishers make on those games, or even a majority of their sales, and it's also something that's specially blessed by valve. if you pull that as a random shit publisher not through humble bundle you'll get kicked off.
But you can sell steam keys with Valve taking a 0% cut.
See the 2 sibling comments 10 mins before you
> Consoles are not general purpose devices. But I wouldn't mind if EU went after them as
Silly argument. All of the consoles support apps.
How is a console not a general purpose device? If I gave you a PS5 dev kit, what software would you be unable to port?
It's mostly about intent: just about no one on the planet looks at the marketing for a PlayStation 5 and expects to be able to use it to file their taxes. That device is sold as a multimedia platform; that it happens to be a general purpose computer with software locks is irrelevant to it's stated purpose. The consumer is pretty well aware of what they're getting.
Not so with your average Apple device with access to the App Store, outside of maybe the TVs these days. The iPad ad that made all the headlines recently was clearly trying to bill it as a general purpose everything device with few if any such limitations. In terms of how the devices are marketed to consumers, it's night and day, and that does make a huge difference when trying to determine if consumers have been mislead by shady business practices.
> just about no one on the planet looks at the marketing for a PlayStation 5 and expects to be able to use it to file their taxes
Ah, this old chestnut of circular reasoning. It's not a general purpose computer because people think it isn't, so they don't use it as one because it's not a general purpose computer.
> The consumer is pretty well aware of what they're getting.
Is the consumer not well aware that iOS is a walled garden?
I should clarify that I don't personally hold this particular chestnut. A computer is a computer, and I'll remove the locks and run whatever software I please. I make homebrew games as a hobby, after all.
But regulators don't tend to write laws based on the actual tech, as much as how it gets used. That's the disconnect, but it still helps to try to understand the other point of view.
Sony hasn't marketed the PS5 as a general purpose computer, but they did that with the PS2 and 3.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2
Economical viably? No software.
It's a platform for games.
With input devices targeted for games.
With an operational system target for games.
> It's a platform for games.
Primarily. Some can also play Blu-ray disks and all can stream music and movies from a bunch of different sources. The PS5 also has integrations with some social media sites and a built-in web browser. The PS5 Game Base application also lets you call and text other PS5 users.
> With input devices targeted for games.
But also bluetooth keyboard and mouse support.
> With an operational system target for games.
Did you have something specific in mind for this?
You're seriously asking me how is Playstation OS targeted at games?
Sorry I wont indulge in this level of discussion.
Waste of time for all involved.
> You're seriously asking me how is Playstation OS targeted at games?
We know the OS is great for games. What I'm asking is why it's not good for other things (the OS kernel is FreeBSD 11).
The PS2 and 3 had full user Linux support so those were obviously general purpose PCs. They removed Linux support for the PS4 and 5 though and apparently that seems to be enough for many people here to no longer think of them as computers.
If the dividing line between general purpose computer and appliance is in how the manufacturer lets you use it, then what functionality would the iPhone need to lose to in order for you to stop thinking the iPhone is a general purpose computer?
Everyone also conveniently forgets that in many cases, Apple is only charging 15%, not 30 (small business, long-term subscriptions, etc...)
You are conveniently forgetting that this was a direct response to the Epic Games lawsuit, as to not appear too anti competetive:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-lowers-app-store-tax-...
Apple only makes concessions when it is under legislative pressure.
15% can still be too much. Alternative music, book, etc stores often have high IP payments that make the business case impossible because 15% is more than the profit margin. And apple doesn't have that 15% for it's music and book store. It's the definition of monopoly privilege.
AFAIK, steam doesn't prevent developers from also allowing their games to be installed outside of steam (if so, then that's a problem).
It's the fact that there's no alternative to get spotify, etc onto your phone that's the ultimate issue. The security of the app store in an enourmous advantage, but they're using it to extract huge premiums.
Like it or not, our phones have become the primary medium we use for news, entertainment, etc. If it were me, I'd allow side-loading of apps onto the app store, but they'd then have zero access to your contacts, unique phone IDs, and strict privacy rules. Apple could still enforce malware via the apple subscription. Essentially, they can make it like MacOS, but not allow any unsigned apps.
> AFAIK, steam doesn't prevent developers from also allowing their games to be installed outside of steam (if so, then that's a problem).
Yep, that's something that's better worth focusing on than 30%.
Which is why DMA says nothing about 30%, and this complaint is largely about Apple forbidding steering.
Imagine if Steam were the only way to purchase games on your Windows PC.
What makes Apple such a unique company beloved by billions of people and such a valuable company for investors is because there’s no other company like Apple. It’s the only company that has managed to be a successful software AND hardware company, it has 3 extremely popular operating systems (iOS, ipadOS, MacOS) and the only company that is vertically integrated from top down. Wait it gets better. There are no laws in the books that says what Apple is doing is illegal. Apple’s culture might be Steve Jobs’ greatest product.
I wouldn't consider iPadOS different from iOS. They realistically share 99% or more of their code with each other and just lock down features because of hardware/form factor differences. You also left out watchOS which is based on iOS.
> There are no laws in the books that says what Apple is doing is illegal.
Ummm. The whole discussion is that allegedly Apple is not compliant with DMA.
This is ridiculous. The EU has a complete axe to grind against Apple, for reasons that I believe border on corruption (if not, veer completely into it). Meanwhile, Meta has a near-monopoly on social networking in the Western world and is subject to a slap on the wrist at best.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt, one of the best friends of the current EU Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager, is currently on Meta's payroll. For this reason alone, the current EU Competition Commissioner should recuse herself from being involved in this role. There are other reasons, including direct conversations I have had with co-founders of Meta regarding EU commissioners, that cause me to have very little faith in these people to act fairly, or to do little other than carry out Meta's very long agenda to be able to ride on top of Apple's platform and deliver their own App Store with their own currency (remember Facebook Credits, anyone?) and completely replace iMessage etc for people who live within the mass-scale dystopia that is the Facebook-Instagram-WhatsApp Industrial Complex.
Meta is a total monopoly that causes daily harm to society, and yet this is what the EU finds itself obsessed with. These people should be ashamed of themselves. And, they should release the records of every meeting and every communication they have with Meta and its various lobbyists, and the children/spouses of these people (because they love using the family connection to avoid scrutiny, as evidenced by their hiring of various congresspeople's children in roles that make no sense).
I suggest you read the EU's press release. I don't understand how anyone could side with Apple on this.
Link: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
The EU fined Meta for 1.2 billion dollars last year, the largest GDPR fine ever [1]. And last month, the EU announced another investigation into Meta [2].
[1] https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2023/12-billion-euro-fi...
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
The press release for this also mentions they are investigating Meta.
So when do we address the elephant in the room and designate Apple a Criminal Enterprise™?