nice ty. i always have so much trouble finding these links but i have Apple News+. is there an easy way to do it? i always have to manually go through issues.
sophiebits · 4h ago
In Safari you can hit the Share button at the bottom then pick News.
Mayzie · 3h ago
Odd. That is not there for me and I cannot add it :( I have the same problem as OP. I wish it were simple.
williamscales · 4h ago
Usually if the article is on Apple News+ it will come up if you search the headline on the “following” tab
thaumasiotes · 8h ago
The article is short enough that it makes more sense to quote it in full than to provide an archive link:
> A federal judge hammered Apple for violating a ruling in an antitrust case that required the company to loosen certain restrictions it imposes on software-makers in its App Store.
> Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordered the iPhone-maker to allow developers to steer users to alternative methods of paying for services or subscriptions offered in the App Store. The company also can no longer impose fees in such scenarios or restrict the ability of software-makers to offer links or otherwise communicate alternate payment options with consumers.
> “Apple willfully chose not to comply with this court’s injunction,” she said in the ruling. “It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers.” She referred the case to federal prosecutors to determine whether a criminal contempt investigation is appropriate.
> The order is the latest twist in the long-running legal dispute between Apple and Epic Games, developer of the popular videogame “Fortnite.”
xp84 · 3h ago
There’s more than this, though.
Wowfunhappy · 44m ago
...wait, there is? It's not in the archive.is link!
The court decision itself is worth reading for a revealing look behind the curtain. [0]
>> In Slack communications dated November 16, 2021, the Apple employees crafting the
warning screen for Project Michigan discussed how best to frame its language. Mr. Onak suggested the warning screen should include the language: “By continuing on the web,
you will leave the app and be taken to an external website” because “‘external website’ sounds scary, so execs will love it.” [...] One employee further wrote, “to make your version even worse you could add the developer name rather than the app name.” To that, another responded “ooh - keep going.”
Jesus Christ. How worse can they be? Willfully malicious
xuki · 7h ago
> Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise.
The bean counters won. I guess Tim Cook does care about the bloody ROI after all.
If Tim Cook is willing to lie and cheat for extra revenue, I can't trust that Apple is honest about their privacy commitments. Services revenue line must keep going up, and their ad business is a growth opportunity.
satvikpendem · 2h ago
> I can't trust that Apple is honest about their privacy commitments
This is a funny comment for me to read. Did anyone honestly think that Apple was touting privacy as anything other than a competitive advantage for revenue maximization? They've had things like iAd, their services revenue has grown massively as hardware sales plateau, and they are nowhere near as "private" in certain countries either.
xpe · 2h ago
I agree, but I might phrase it a little bit differently. I recommend thinking about corporate stances as actions and interests, not moral intentions. Don’t expect a corporation to do things for moral reasons. Trust them only to the extent that their actions are in their self interest. To be fair, some organizations do have charters and interests that make them more palatable than others.
One takeaway to startups that hope to stand for something even after tremendous growth and leadership changes: you have to build governance and accountability structures into your organizational DNA if you truly want specific values to persist over the long run.
Tarq0n · 1h ago
Sadly the openAI debacle has undermined faith in those kinds of structures as well.
PaulRobinson · 1h ago
iAd is stated as being built differently to how other adtech networks work.
I personally believe that Apple is able to make different (better), choices in the name of a consumer privacy, than Google will.
Android is built from the ground up to provide surveillance data to Google-controlled adtech - that's their revenue model. I don't begrudge them that, people should have choice, etc. but the revenue model is adtech first and foremost.
Apple want services revenue, they like services revenue, but historically they're a vertically integrated tech platform manufacturer whose revenue model is building better platforms consumers want.
It's true that the services model may start to compromise that - and they've definitely started to make some poor choices they might need to pull back on to protect the core platform model - but I do think we're not comparing like with like when we say that Apple is no different to any other company in this space.
saagarjha · 15m ago
iAd doesn't exist anymore.
20after4 · 2h ago
Similar to how Google merged with DoubleClick and threw out the whole "don't be evil" policy.
My luke-warm take is that the advertising industry is inherently evil.
someNameIG · 1h ago
Their privacy commitments align with their business, not their morals. They don't want an open internet primarily funded by advertising, so they make harder for advertising companies to track their users. What they want is an internet silod into apps you get from their app store, that are funded buy subscriptions and IAPs that they get a 30% cut from.
drooopy · 2h ago
Apple is a for-profit business, and like most such entities, its primary concern is its bottom line. If promoting privacy aligns with that objective, so be it. However, the company does not have an inherent inclination toward acting ethically beyond what serves its business interests.
pi-err · 2h ago
Pretty sure this is not about revenue but profit margins, since the Services line was under heavy surveillance by markets back then.
Though that's the core issue, margins on services are just too addictive for big tech. Not sure Apple can keep its recipe for success with both services and hardware.
JKCalhoun · 3h ago
I’m liking Phil more than I expected to.
sneak · 3h ago
Now Tim Apple has gotta call up Trump and remind him he donated to the inauguration fund and is getting fucked by the tariffs (and furthermore has to spend many billions to hedge against what the USA is going to need to do in Taiwan) and get him to threaten the appellate judge.
naruhodo · 2h ago
It will be interesting to see if Mr Apple has more spine than Mr Amazon, who acceded to Trump's demand not to show customers how much the tariffs were costing them.
My feeling is that these guys who showed up to the inauguration of a self-professed "dictator on day one" might be a little light on backbone, if not moral fortitude.
TheOtherHobbes · 2h ago
"It's our best moral position ever, with 110% more wealth extraction over our previous models. We know you're gonna love it."
xbmcuser · 2h ago
They already are why do you think Zuckerberg etc were sucking up to Trump and complaining about trade restrictions and barriers in Europe.
bze12 · 9h ago
Their entire setup was egregious.
They charge 27% for purchases made using external payment processors. Including Stripe fees that's net-zero (not even accounting for any chargeback risks). They severely limit how you can display the external purchase link too, and display an obnoxious warning screen when you tap it.
I would be surprised if a single developer adopted it.
Wasn’t there a recent EU fine for Apple for preventing developers from promoting alternative distribution channels within their apps, or linking to external subscription websites?
Half of the entire HN was like „EU bad, how dare you regulate them”. What gives?
zamadatix · 2h ago
This is more about Apple lying under oath about both delaying the court and being aware what they were doing was not actually complying with the previous order. Additional factors are it does not list a fine, relies on longstanding general anti-trust legislation rather than new tech specific laws, and there isn't a wide swath of other regulatory rulings against Apple coinciding with the previous one.
Between all of this, it'll be a lot harder to come to the comments to defend Apple for not getting fined twice in a row for the same issue despite lying under oath and intentionally delaying proceedings, even if you vehemently disagree with the original ruling.
Google tends to be the one with more sympathy in the US lately as they've gotten much more of the regulatory stick in court.
openplatypus · 3h ago
HN is mostly US audience.
EU = bad
US = good
kubb · 2h ago
But weren't people here supposed to be intellectually curious, and have the cognitive tools to overcome things like instinctive tribalism?
BLKNSLVR · 6m ago
Intellectually curious doesn't necessarily overrule base human tendencies.
They may be more likely to have the capacity, but no way it's amy kind of guarantee.
PaulRobinson · 1h ago
I think you'll find at least 1/4 of HN comments are indicative of stating things from a place of strong instinctive tribalism, but this crowd are just very slightly better at using words to defend our position in a more noble way.
That's OK, it shows we're human, it's not all AI slop here (yet?).
kubb · 42m ago
I guess being smart sometimes doesn’t lead you to have a more accurate opinion, but to develop more sophisticated rhetorical devices to defend your inaccurate opinion?
CalRobert · 3h ago
Seems to depend on time of day
voidUpdate · 2h ago
timezones probably, EU is more likely to be on HN at different times to US
danieldk · 1h ago
This is certainly the case. I have noticed this in voting patterns as well. I often comment strongly in favor of EU regulations (I believe capitalism is fairer and benefits consumers more with stronger regulations). During times the US is asleep such comments often get a lot of upvotes. During times where EU and the US are up, there seems to be much more contention in the voting, with votes swinging up and down a lot.
By the way, I don't think this is a good way of voting. IMO comments should be upvoted if they provide good insights (even if you disagree with them) and downvoted when they are low-content/trolling/full of fallacies.
Quite the opposite. Every single comment that I have done critisizing any aspect of EU regulation has been heavily downvoted. Never even seen a EU bad comment as top comment in any story.
thealexliang · 9h ago
"Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anti-competitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anti-competitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the cover-up made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple."
I'd recommend skimming through the whole thing because Judge Rogers just eviscerates Apple over and over.
tyre · 5h ago
“For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple.”
I love whichever clerk wrote this and then got it through. The real MVP
It's so good... but also it has taken so, so long to get here. The US should've done something about the app store tax a long time ago. People thought Apple won their case, but it... really just took time to get here. You get to try malicious compliance with judges exactly once, and then you're over.
There's a whole class of sh*t-software that only exists (and is profitable) because users subscribe to them and then forget – primarily because the subscription fee is charged as "Apple" on their Credit Card. I wonder what's gonna happen with this type of scam.
pasc1878 · 1h ago
If through Apple it is easy to cancel and all subs are listed in one place.
If done through third parties directly the scammers will not make unsubscribing easy and it will not be as easy to find out where you are subscribing.
Thus I expect the scamming to increase.
rafaelcosta · 1h ago
Easy from your point of view... This is the argument I mostly hear from Apple folks, but my experience (especially with less tech savvy folks) is that they have no idea where or how to cancel a subscription on IAP and they think that the multiple "Apple" charges are just some iCloud thing or something along those lines. With Credit Card flows the alarm bells go off waaaay earlier: when a website asks for their CC data, they immediately scrutinize more (and thus, conversion rates are lower)
pimterry · 37m ago
> If done through third parties directly the scammers will not make unsubscribing easy and it will not be as easy to find out where you are subscribing.
This is fairly quickly resolved though - if anything close to 1% of customers complain to their banks that they don't want this payment and can't cancel it, triggering a chargeback, the scammers end up entirely blocked from the payment networks entirely in pretty short order. If you end up banned from Visa & Mastercard your whole operation is permanently kaput.
Also, this might be a non-US thing, but over here most modern banks (e.g. Revolut) will let you view & block recurring payment authorizations directly from your banking app anyway.
redleather · 2h ago
Nothing? The ruling is that app developers get to choose how they communicate to users, or how they charge in-app fees. The kind of shady developers you describe would simply continue to use Apple, as it benefits them to do so.
rafaelcosta · 1h ago
Right now, yes, but there's a potential to:
- Most legit services move to a web based Apple Pay (note to the unaware reader: this is NOT In-App Purchases and has never had 30% fees) due to the ease of implementing and lower fee (easier to do cross platform + web)
- Non-legit developers keep the In-App flow
Over time this would skew In-App Purchases to be scammy-only (and therefore, easier to spot). I'm sure people at Apple consider this possibility too – and therefore, now that there's actual competition, IAP flows will probably have to change to prevent this and compete for actual developer preference (and keep it a viable legit-developer choice)
ENGNR · 47m ago
So they should probably just scrap the 30% fee. At the very least scrap it if the user was linked directly to the app. And just make the also huge commission on the payments.
caseyy · 1h ago
Many people blame the EU for targeting US companies when it passes anti-monopoly and pro-consumer laws, or penalizes them for breaking them.
Now that US courts are doing it more, it seems that corporations abusing their monopoly powers are the problem, not EU laws. But what do I know.
plst · 12m ago
Responding to a comment by bn-l, but also to the general sentiment about Apple and untrusted code I often see on hacker news.
> The broader consumer base will install anything a bad actor wants them to and then blame the manufacturer for not stopping them with some draconian rule.
Has this even happened? Has anyone ever sued and won the case with a laptop manufacturer (or Microsoft or Apple), because they downloaded and executed an executable with malware on their computer? Do average people really blame Microsoft for malware?
I would kind of agree that they should, but not because Microsoft allows people to run untrusted code, but because the security model of Windows (and other PC operating systems) is still bad. But not because it allows people to run unsigned code.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think we should return to security model of old operating systems - smartphone OSes definitely got that right, except for the part that forces users to give up control of their devices. It's just that the argument, that allowing people to install software not signed by Apple on their own devices would make iPhones insecure, is totally unsubstantiated to me.
I see some people still arguing that (ex. older) people will do what they are told and will install shady software. If Apple really cares, they could provide a switch that allows users to disable installing "unverified" software. Maybe ask about it during setup. Maybe allow locking it until factory reset, or allow head of icloud family to control it. There are many options to keep some people secure from all unverified apps, while allowing others to run them.
Not to mention that the idea that all apps not signed by Apple are somehow malicious is just bad. You could have other entities than Apple verify code.
Currently, even running apps you yourself wrote, on your own hardware, is hard and limited. For no good reason.
The only reason Apple is blocking other stores, or preventing people from installing homebrew, is to collect more money. It's good that they are investing into security of their software and hardware, but in this particular case, security is used only as a distraction.
snowwrestler · 7h ago
It’s a shame Phil Schiller has gotten sidelined. He always seemed like a good guy and a big part of the “soul” of Apple as it made its resurgence under Jobs after the NeXT merger.
conorwade · 3h ago
Agree with this. He originally was taking the opinion that they should make changes to the App Store rules from a position of strength before being forced into it. Schiller has always felt like the best embodiment of the Steve Era. I think they would have lost Tim Cook if he didn't get the CEO position, but Apple has been a little too focused on extracting as much value as possible during his time. They are still doing great stuff, but feel focused on the wrong things.
clhodapp · 5h ago
Phil Schiller was one of the strongest voices against cross-platform messaging interoperability. He's just as bad as the rest of them.
mil22 · 9h ago
About time. I'm tired of apologizing to customers who purchase subscriptions in my app only to discover they could have purchased the exact the same thing from my website for 15% less. "Why didn't you tell me?"
Excerpt from the filing:
"In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option. To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate."
autobodie · 9h ago
About time for what? Another company to get charged with something that they don't get punished for?
The fines are always less than the companies' net gains from the practice. Gains are often indirect, risk-related, and/or part of a larger strategy, so they cannot be calculated.
Everything short of prison is a waste of time, waste of tax dollars, and spits in the face of decent citizens.
Nevermark · 8h ago
I like the idea of civil judgements that require responsible individuals to remove themselves from the company. And void any forward looking renumeration in their contracts.
Personal fines too, such as returning past remunerations during the problematic time in question. Salaries. Stock grants.
There is no such thing as an incentive, that doesn't incentivize someone. Relatively small fines relative to revenues and profits don't incentivize anything.
Alternatively, if fines really were big enough to turn large companies around (i.e. not just the enforced, but other companies seeing the enforcement), heads would roll, but would they be the right ones given those in charge are unlikely to fire themselves? And shareholders are the ones really paying the fines, are they really the culprits?
The incentives to act in good faith, should be placed very directly on the individuals whose choices dictate the good/bad faith. Starting and staying largely with the CEO, and the direct line of reports from the CEO down to the relevent decisions.
You don't want anyone who mattered to have cover. You want CEO's policing their own, and their reports pushing back upward against poor directives.
The only cover for relevent actors would be a record of pushing back against those who pushed through poor behavior.
TLDR: Limited liability should protect non-managing shareholders, but not bad actors within a company. Decisions makers should always be held directly responsible for their decisions. Any other system is perverse.
tsimionescu · 4h ago
I think both things are needed. Despite what you're saying, shareholders have the ultimate responsibility and control over the company: they own it, they name the executives, and all the profits are ultimately returned to them. So it's absolutely necessary for the shareholders to be penalized, massively, if they profitted massively off of illegal business practices. Even if the executives were hiding this illegality from them, they are still responsible for having set up the company in a way that allowed that.
If you only punish the executives for illegal business practices, but leave the company alone, then you create an incentive to hire patsies as executives, continue letting them do illegal stuff, go to jail, and pay them handsomely after they get out.
Ultimately it has to be the company that's losing money when the company made money from illegal business, otherwise the company can just find other people willing to continue and provide for everyone who gets caught.
Nevermark · 3h ago
> Ultimately it has to be the company that's losing money when the company made money from illegal business, otherwise the company can just find other people willing to continue and provide for everyone who gets caught.
You are so right. The board & shareholders are in the path of responsibility and not recognizing that would be a call for both to use and abuse executives as scapegoats.
So be it!
Terr_ · 7h ago
> I like the idea of civil judgements that require responsible individuals to remove themselves from the company.
> There is no such thing as an incentive, that doesn't incentivize someone.
It's wild how the public discourse on incentives is so split. On one hand, the poor are guilty until proven innocent of six dimensional chess to eek "unearned" pennies from social programs, yet the very idea that mega billionaires might pull easy, obvious levers for unethical mega million payouts is one that must beg and scrape for consideration.
echelon · 9h ago
100%. This doesn't deserve a fine. This deserves Apple to be given an ultimatum about their mob boss behavior with mobile.
Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax. You can't even deploy your own apps at your own cadence, without strict review, using your own technology. You have to jump through unplanned upgrade cycles, you're forced to use their payment rails and signup flows (and don't get to know your customer or get them to use your website). You pay the taxes on everything. And even then, they let your competitors advertise against your name or trademark.
This is rotten to the core.
Neither Google nor Apple should have an app store. Apps should be web installs. The only reason things work the way they do is so that Apple and Google can tax and exert control. A permissions system, signature scans, and heuristics are all that are needed to keep web installs safe - and all of those pieces are already in place. There's no technical or safety limitation, Apple and Google just want to dominate.
These two companies were innovative 20 years ago, but their lead then doesn't entitle them to keep owning the majority of most people's computing surface area for the rest of time. They have to give up the reigns. There are still billions of dollars for them to make on mobile, even if regulators tell them to stop treating developers as serfs and locking them in cages.
No. More. App. Stores.
Regulate big tech's hold over mobile, web, search, and advertising.
snowwrestler · 7h ago
I understand people like this ruling and want Apple and Google to open up. But this is just silly rewriting of history:
> Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax.
Long before Apple and Google made phones, a huge mobile device ecosystem already existed, including app stores, and it was way more locked down and expensive than what we have now.
The iPhone did not even launch with an app store, its launch concept was 100% web apps. They only added the native SDK and app store after developers and customers demanded it.
Again: I know the world is different now. But the idea that this was all some swift inexorable coup by Apple and Google is totally inaccurate. Plenty of other companies had a chance to do things differently, many with huge head starts.
wolpoli · 7h ago
Sure, but parallel to the mobile device (featurephone) ecosystem, there was also the old smartphone ecosystem which grew out of the PDA market where you could install your own program without paying the middleman. I would argue that modern day smartphone is more similar to the old smartphones than the featurephones.
pbh101 · 5h ago
And somehow despite that ecosystem existing before, new entrants Apple and Google emerged victorious. Maybe it had something to do with their different approach.
xp84 · 3h ago
I doubt it was because people wanted The App Store. If the PocketPC/Windows Mobile had an App Store it would not have won.
Featurephones had App Stores like Verizon’s “Get It Now” and it was obvious that they were money grabs like Apple’s.
Apple and Google won the game because the phones were powerful enough to make web browsing feasible, and had great text input.
If nobody had thought of app stores, it would have been trivial to distribute .ipa’s and .apk’s on the Web just like Windows and Mac software still predominantly is.
manmal · 5h ago
> Long before Apple and Google made phones, a huge mobile device ecosystem already existed, including app stores, and it was way more locked down and expensive than what we have now.
That’s a poor comparison IMO, because the scale of this was multiple orders of magnitude less. App stores were a niche occurrence that almost no nontechnical person had heard about. Seldom anyone „needed“ an app for their company to be successful. Now they control billions of eyes.
heisenbit · 2h ago
In addition there are some exceptions when it comes to new stuff which app stores were at the time. When you come up with something new e.g. you can choose who to make business with. Different to what you can do running a dominant platform.
oefrha · 5h ago
> They only added the native SDK and app store after developers and customers demanded it.
People demanded native SDK because web apps were garbage, unlike the native first party apps. Some people wanted an app store. No one ever wanted or demanded an exclusive app store. Putting demand for native SDK and demand for app store in one sentence smells like gaslighting.
notpushkin · 6h ago
Sure, 100% web apps will never work. It should be 95% web apps.
xp84 · 3h ago
These days that’s obviously true. Back then web technologies lacked a lot but today I seriously question why say, a retailer, needs to waste the massive cost of building an app and putting it on both of the App Stores and updating it for every OS change. Especially considering it’s just going to be using React Native and likely isn’t any faster or more responsive than the Web.
And as a user it just feels idiotic to have to download a dedicated program to say, pay for parking or order a sandwich, in a city I’m just visiting for the day. As though taking a credit card on the Web is a foreign concept.
thaumasiotes · 1h ago
It's worth noting that other fields take a radically different perspective on this. You can see Brandon Sanderson talking about how software developers get such great deals from publishers, with Apple, Google, and Steam taking puny 30% commissions, and he wishes authors could get something similar.
ulrikrasmussen · 6h ago
It's also insane how what was considered dystopia for desktop computing silently happened for mobile devices: a corporation controlling the software stack and using cryptography against the users to control precisely what software they are allowed to run on their "own" devices. Yes, in principle Android phones can be rooted, but in practice this breaks Play Integrity and you are now locked out from a huge range of apps.
Google and Apple have silently achieved Microsoft's wet dream from the "trusted platform" era of effectively making it impossible for free and open source operating systems to compete with their own.
plokiju · 3h ago
You don't need to root an android to install apps from outside the play store
ulrikrasmussen · 3h ago
What I meant is if I want to run an open source OS like LineageOS. In principle this is possible, but Play Integrity will refuse to work when you have a custom ROM.
tgsovlerkhgsel · 6h ago
It does deserve a fine and/or criminal forfeiture of the revenue they made from the app store monopoly. If Apple had to repay let's say the difference between what they charged and what a reasonable fee would be (let's say 10%), for the entire time they've been doing it, that would put "a bit" of a dent into their pocketbook and serve as an effective deterrent.
leptons · 6h ago
I'm fine with Google and Apple having App stores, so long as I'm not forced to use them. They should compete like everyone else. The walls of the walled garden have to be torn down. They still get to have a garden, they just can't lock unwitting people inside of it.
gpm · 6h ago
Walls to keep apps out should be fine, but they should have to have gates to let the consumers out - i.e. a method to install other apps (not through the app store) that have every bit the same level of access as the device manufacturer's apps.
There should be two levers used to achieve this. One is anti-trust style legislation. The other is patent misuse legislation. If you try and prevent consumers from running software on hardware they bought from you to make a profit, you shouldn't be allowed to prevent consumers from buying the same hardware from someone else - that's what patents do - they create government enforced monopolies on the hardware. You should be required to invalidate (donate to the public domain) every patent on the hardware if you want to sell hardware where you get to profit off your monopoly on letting developers write software for the hardware.
These Epic rulings are better than nothing, but I can't help but feel that their solution of "make Apple distribute software they don't like in their app store" is the wrong one.
xp84 · 3h ago
Is anyone proposing making Apple distribute software? If so, though, pretty sure just allowing sideloading instead would satisfy all of Apple’s critics including the government. It’s Apple who insists that all roads onto the iPhone must go through them (and give them 30% of your gross revenue)
scripturial · 4h ago
A company can lock the hardware but not the software, or lock the software but not the hardware? I’ve not heard this idea before, it sounds like an extremely logical idea. It would easily be achieved by splitting apple in two. I wonder if there are any downsides to that? The “walled garden” of hardware and software does have some benefits, but the cost to society is too high.
jonny_eh · 6h ago
If it's good enough for Mac, it's good enough for iPhone.
pbh101 · 5h ago
I think the realistic possible end-states are either effectively Facebook controls the app store that matters or Apple/Google do.
Then maybe they shouldn't be making billions of dollars
zelphirkalt · 7h ago
And really we don't need them making billions of dollars. It is not conducive to healthy human society or progress. Such money could be spent way better than lining the pockets of management levels, people, who enable this by not having a conscience, and corrupt politicians.
tsimionescu · 4h ago
If it's possible to prove that they could only make their billions thanks to this illegal practice, that would be awesome - the government could claw back the billions.
musicale · 8h ago
> To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath
Well that sounds rather damning.
stingraycharles · 8h ago
Happens more than you’d think. Happened to me in the past as well in some business conflict. It was baffling how people can just lie in court under oath and get away with it.
somenameforme · 5h ago
The asterisk is that the government has to be able to prove knowledge and intent to lie, and prove that beyond a reasonable doubt. It makes it really hard to successfully charge anybody with perjury.
tebbers · 5h ago
What happened to the people who lied under oath? Were they found out?
stingraycharles · 4h ago
No, it was their CFO who denied knowing about <something> when he absolutely did. We ended up winning the lawsuit on all accounts, but they were never specifically called out about lying about this.
zik · 7h ago
Surely he should receive a prison sentence for that alone?
numbsafari · 6h ago
With the referral to the US attorney’s office, he actually might.
Consider how painful that is going to be for Apple, and Roman, with how the current administration is abusing the DOJ.
The repercussions of this could be huge.
xp84 · 3h ago
Well in this case it wouldn’t be abuse. I hope they do convict him if he’s guilty of perjury. It will set an example for the other weasels. “Percentage of executives of Fortune 500 companies who do time for real crimes they committed” should be a big KPI for the DOJ in my book.
Muromec · 9h ago
Criminal contempt would the charge against the company or the people named above? How does it work in this case?
mil22 · 9h ago
"Accordingly ... the Court refers the issue to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California ... for investigation against Apple and Alex Roman, Apple’s Vice President of Finance specifically."
propagandist · 9h ago
Read Taibbi's book, The Divide. No prison time is the most likely outcome unless the justice system has changed between then and now.
to11mtm · 8h ago
> Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise.
Here's the fun question though. Do Roman, Maestri et al not have any specific damages to this? (I know the answer, but it's a good question to ask....)
zelphirkalt · 7h ago
And what happens now to those who lied under oath? Can we get those people properly punished and send some signals? Or are they above the law somehow?
spencerflem · 6h ago
The USA is an oligarchy
stillatit · 9h ago
So what is the punishment for outright lying under oath?
90s_dev · 9h ago
Generally none, the DA must choose to pursue perjury charges, which basically never happens. In reality, nearly everyone commits perjury. Thomas More would not approve. Both versions (1966 and 1988) of A Man For All Seasons are highly worth watching several times and practically memorizing. "Would you benefit England by populating her with liars?" [edit] in retrospect, there is one inescapable consequence of lying under oath: your word now means nothing to honest people.
ryandrake · 8h ago
I bet if a poor person struggling to hold down three jobs to survive were found to be lying under oath, the DA would throw the book at them.
JumpCrisscross · 7h ago
> if a poor person struggling to hold down three jobs to survive were found to be lying under oath, the DA would throw the book at them
Have you been to a traffic court?
FireBeyond · 6h ago
Yeah. I was pulled over and told I had an "invalid" license. "My license isn't suspended!" "No, it's not, it's just invalid." Not expired. Not counterfeit. Just invalid. "What does that mean?" "You'll have ask the DOL. And here's a ticket. And you can't drive from here."
Go home, go to the DOL's website. Green text, "VALID". Weird. "Pay any monies owing on your license." Let's try that. "There are no monies owed."
Huh.
Print these out, take them to the DOL. It was a technicality where a process had suspended my license over a fine, but then unsuspended it the same day because they'd received a check.
She waives the $25 fee that should have been attached. And stamps the screenshots of this I'd taken, and prints out the status changes on my account.
Take it to court to challenge the ticket. Prosecutor doesn't want to dismiss. "They'd have generated and sent you a letter when they did that, so you had to have known."
Eventually dismissed, but only after three or four back-and-forths.
JumpCrisscross · 4h ago
That’s hilarious. But also irrelevant. The point is people in traffic court are constantly lying. Like, zero-effort four-IQ lies.
Mountain_Skies · 4h ago
Federal prosecutors have insanely high "winning" percentages but the closer you get to the local level, the more that drops. I suspect that local prosecutors, in addition to often having a poor understanding of the law, often try to up their win percentage by pushing cases like yours because they know most people will find it easier to just pay whatever token amount it takes to make it go away.
Jcampuzano2 · 7h ago
To be honest companies practically incentivize having no moral compass and lying to succeed. Every major company's executives incorporate lying judiciously to their employees and their users alike and encourage their reports to lie to theirs and so on. Adhering to complete honesty is a one way ticket to HR.
Sit on any all-hands call for a major company and it is practically guaranteed large chunks of the presentation will be executive gaslighting of its own employees with info that is objectively false or a misrepresentation. You will also never get a real answer to actual hard questions (especially if it is on the topic of something that may negatively affect workers) which is essentially lying by omission.
It doesn't help that we have now proven that you can lie all the way to the seat of being president of the united states.
That said - whether we like it or not, we are now a culture built on lying.
saagarjha · 11m ago
Sure, but doing it in a court of law is illegal.
mil22 · 4h ago
This matches my own personal experience of corporate America, and is one of the primary reasons I left.
And it’s not just the lying that’s the problem - it’s the lack of critical thinking, the gullibility, the willingness to suspend disbelief and give benefit of the doubt and credit where it’s not due, amongst those being lied to, be they employees, or voters.
The way out is to see through it, to question it, and to stop acquiescing to it. If we all do that, the liars will never ascend to the positions of power we have allowed them to have over us today.
dfedbeef · 7h ago
Oh no, my word means nothing to honest people.
Boards private jet to Monaco
jkestner · 6h ago
Yet these superrich people crave respect so much that they endlessly poast on social networks, or buy a social network.
usefulcat · 8h ago
I've not seen the one from 1988; I'll have to check that out. I've long enjoyed the one from '66.
I also heartily recommend both seasons of Wolf Hall. About Cromwell rather than More, but still fascinating.
90s_dev · 7h ago
The 1988 one stars Charlton Heston as Thomas More and was a made for TV movie based on the original 1965 play by Robert Bolt. Very, very good. Different from the 1966 movie. But both good in different ways. Neither is better.
labster · 8h ago
There are so few honest Americans that it hardly matters to serve such a small demographic.
andrewmcwatters · 9h ago
Clearly nothing, since we've decided to be a nation that doesn't enforce laws.
gorbachev · 3h ago
In the inevitable case where this lands Apple serious monetary penalties affecting the quarterly earnings, how many employees will be laid off? Will Alex Roman be one of them?
I'd bet no.
brailsafe · 9h ago
> About time.
Oh c'mon, 16 years into a product line ain't too bad, is it?
If you had a kid when the App Store first came out, that kid would now be nearing high school graduation and you still can't do as you describe. The great recession, the pandemic, the iPad, proliferation of AI, legalization of Gay marriage in the states and weed in some places, annexation of crimea and the war in Ukraine, the foxconn suicide issue, 4G, LTE, 5G, fiber to the home, brexit, Golang, Rust, TypeScript, Swift, APFS, Arm and the downfall of Intel, the rise of NVIDIA, Netflix, TikTok, drones, electric cars, scooters, bikes, end-to-end design and construction of their mothership headquarters, and federal acknowledgement that climate change is an issue, have all basically happened in that time; but nope, it's for security reasons. Hell, even their lead industrial designer retired long before they'd let up.
Edit: Not that any of those have anything to do with the App Store, but still.
retetr · 8h ago
We didn't start the fire, it was always burning since the world's been turning...
mvdtnz · 9h ago
If you're publishing on the app store you are part of the problem. Your customers are right to feel aggrieved.
scarface_74 · 7h ago
Will Walmart let you have a label on your product saying you could get it cheaper from Amazon?
TheDong · 6h ago
Will walmart open your packaging, review all text in the manual, and tell you that you need to reprint your manual because it has a link to your homepage "company.com" and on that page you can find a pricing page with lower prices?
Will walmart prevent you from selling, say, a fishing pole that allows you to buy fishing hooks from another store?
Apple's app-store review would reject any app that linked the company pricing page, and would reject any app that let you use an alternative payment method like paypal or a credit card on a non-apple site.
Also, in your analogy the customer has to be unable to buy your app from anywhere else (since the customer has an iPhone and there are no other stores or operating systems for iPhone)..
It really doesn't work as a good comparison imo.
scarface_74 · 6h ago
The parent poster just said that customers can pay on his website so I’m assuming it’s a service surfaced by his app.
No comments yet
saagarjha · 6m ago
> Thus the Court found:
> In retail brick-and-mortar stores, consumers do not lack knowledge of options. Technology platforms differ.
Yeah, but keep going on about how this is the same as Walmart
mrcwinn · 9h ago
The heart of Apple's hypocrisy is this: they claim their 30% is necessary to support the developer ecosystem and fund its operations. But of course if that were true, they could easily charge a high enough platform membership fee directly to developers. Instead they opt for a structural tax to cover what are mostly completely opaque and secret operational costs. They're opaque and secret for obvious reasons: those expenses come nowhere close to the ~$30 billion in App Store commission Apple generates every year.
elpool2 · 9h ago
As described in the ruling, Apple hired a consulting group to estimate how much value developers get from the iphone platform, which found that
(1) Apple’s platform technology is worth up to 30% of a developer’s revenue.
(2) Apple’s developer tools and services are worth approximately 3%–16%.
(3) Apple’s distribution services are worth approximately 4%–14%.
(4) Apple’s discovery services are worth approximately 5%–14%.
Then Apple claimed this study was how they came up with the 27%, but the Judge basically said nah you guys came up with that number before the study, and you even know it would be a non-starter for almost all developers.
paxys · 9h ago
Hire a consulting firm to tell you exactly what you want to hear, then say "see the experts said it, not us". Classic.
manmal · 5h ago
> Apple’s developer tools and services are worth approximately 3%–16%
That must be a joke. Xcode is so bad, compared to Android Studio, it’s not even funny. As iOS dev I have to constantly apologize to my Android team members, that, no, Xcode can’t do this and that, and, no, we can’t do X in the build pipeline. And I‘m generally 10-20% slower than them because the tooling is just terrible and flaky.
BTW there was a promising IntelliJ option for Apple development, but Apple made life so hard for them that they had to give up. It was called „AppCode“ and some people are still sad that it doesn’t exist anymore.
marcus_holmes · 8h ago
The first thing the consulting group would have asked Apple was "what do you want this number to be?".
That's the point of hiring consulting groups.
jamessinghal · 6h ago
The funny thing is that the companies that stand to benefit the most from this and that move the most money (Netflix, Spotify, Fortnite) need Apple's platform, marketing, and distribution the least.
xp84 · 3h ago
Indeed. I’d add a fourth category: the medium-to-long tail of ad-infested casino games for children. None of those apps are successful because of the App Store. People don’t generally start at the App Store and go looking for games like this. They are all installed from CPI ads in other ad-infested apps or on websites.
Apple is exactly like a mobster demanding a cut for “protection” — except they’ve designed and controlled the system so well that your business just cannot exist in the first place until your automatic extortion payment system is in place.
YetAnotherNick · 2h ago
They don't. Nobody heard about Netflix and Spotify from randomly browsing App Store(Do people even browse app store feeds to see what to download?). Almost every users of them would likely have searched for it.
troupo · 3h ago
what discovery?
For "discovery" people would have to regularly check the App Store app and read the "today" page. Maybe perhaps Spotify or Netflix will appear there once a year among 15000 stories about games.
Or you mean search? If people search for Spotify/Netflix, they already know about it. And right now Apple will helpfully cover half of the screen with an ad for Gmail if you search for Spotify (and will hide all other Spotify apps like Spotify Kids and Spotify for Creators six screens down)
realusername · 8h ago
It made me laugh, if you pretend to be worth 30% of revenue (an insane markup), you better really invest in those developer tools to show it off because the sad state of xcode really isn't showing that.
I don't know where this money is going but certainly not in the developer tooling because it's absolutely terrible
ethbr1 · 8h ago
If Apple were worth 30% of revenue, then they'd have no problem allowing competing app stores on their devices, because they support their rate with their value.
The fact that they're deadset against competition should tell the courts all they need to know about how competitively supportable the 30% is.
wmf · 7h ago
I thought Apple's argument was that the 30% pays for iOS itself, not that the 30% pays for the App Store. Under that theory there's no reason to allow other app stores.
ledauphin · 7h ago
this would be a silly argument - surely the customers buying the devices should be paying directly for the operating system?
mcphage · 6h ago
They used to do that back when the iPhone first came out. I don’t think anybody liked that better, and having people hang around on older iOS versions was (and still is) bad for security.
kmeisthax · 5h ago
iPhones never had paid iOS upgrades. iPod touch did, but that's because Apple was worried free updates would violate an accounting rule. Specifically, the iPhone was considered subscription revenue while the iPod touch was considered purchase revenue. And after an accounting scandal[0] GAAP had been changed so that you couldn't say you sold, say, a bunch of stuff that hadn't actually been finished yet, and then finish it later with, say, a software update.
This is, of course, how basically every tech company works nowadays[1], because Apple lobbied to have that accounting rule removed.
None of this has anything to do with "App Store pays for iOS". That's an excuse Apple came up with after Epic Games sued them, there's no point in time I can point to where iOS is just the bundled OS vs. "paid for with app sales". The reality is, everything pays for everything, because Apple only sells fully bundled experiences. Their opposition to sideloading or third-party iOS app stores is only somewhat related to security[2], and more related to the fact that they don't want anyone dictating to them how the customer experience is, even if those changes improve the experience.
Well, that, and the fact that they make bank off App Store apps.
[0] I'm not sure if it was Enron or Worldcom
[1] Looking at you, Tesla FSD
[2] If it was, they'd be locking down macOS
Scaevolus · 6h ago
Steam takes a 30% cut, but it's actually apparently worth it for discovery and low-friction sales alone, since developers still sell on Steam when the PC is an open platform with competing storefronts with lower cuts.
DaiPlusPlus · 6h ago
> if you pretend to be worth 30% of revenue (an insane markup)
Back in 2008, if you were an indie dev then their 30% ask was more than reasonable because the cost-of-doing-business on other platforms (like Windows Mobile) was much higher due to the lack of any central App Store; for example, you'd often need to partner with a company like Digital River, and pay more for marketing/advertising and overcome the significant friction involved in convincing punters to register/buy from your website, download the app *.cab files to their PC, install the app onto your device, and hope no-one uploads a copy to a filesharing network because this was before the days when an OS itself would employ DRM to enforce a license for third-party software.
...then one day Apple comes along and says: "We can manage all of that for you, for far less than what you'd pay for e-commerce and digital distribution, and our customers have lots of disposable income".
Ostensibly, competition should have come from the Android and (lol) Windows App Stores: "surely if Android's Play Store offers devs better rates then devs will simply not target iOS anymore and Apple will reduce their % to stay competitive" - but Apple's secret-sauce of a markedly more affluent customer base with already saved credit-card details meant that Android apps leant more on ad-supported apps while more iOS apps could charge an up-front amount, not have ads, and result in iOS devs still making far more money on Apple's platform.
--------
There exists an argument that Apple should not be forced to open-up the iOS platform because Apple is selling a closed platform on the merits of it being a closed platform, and Apple's customers want a closed platform (even if they don't realize it) because having a closed platform looks like the only way to enforce a minimum standard of quality and to keep malware out precisely because normal-human-users (i.e. our collective mothers) will install malware because the installation instructions for "Facebook_Gold_App1_100%_Real_honest.app" tell them to disable system protections.
lapcat · 5h ago
> Back in 2008, if you were an indie dev then their 30% ask was more than reasonable because the cost-of-doing-business on other platforms (like Windows Mobile) was much higher due to the lack of any central App Store
The first iPhone indie devs were Mac indie devs who already knew Objective-C and Cocoa and Xcode and paid 0% to Apple on the Mac.
russellbeattie · 6h ago
At the time, the Verizon/Qualcomm BREW platform had absurd levels of revenue sharing: Up to 90% (!!!) went to the carrier unless you were big enough to negotiate a specific deal.
The 30% that Apple announced was a game changer.
bigyabai · 4h ago
2010: "Man, charging people money to install software on a feature-phone they bought is kinda fucked up. Both companies are in the wrong for doing that."
2025: "You don't appreciate how lower publishing fees foster competition, except when there's no fees at all, because that's too competitive for the OEM."
realusername · 4h ago
> because having a closed platform looks like the only way to enforce a minimum standard of quality and to keep malware out precisely because normal-human-users (i.e. our collective mothers) will install malware because the installation instructions
Well no, the most secure platform in 2025 is still the web. You can't get as much data in a web browser as you can in a mobile app and the sandboxing is tighter.
And I may mention that the majority of the appstore revenue comes from casino like games, not really something I would give it to my family.
And sure, I'm opened to the idea that the appstore was innovative in 2008, unfortunately for Apple, we're now in 2025 and it clearly isn't anymore.
bigyabai · 7h ago
You don't pay consulting agencies to put you in legal jeopardy. The judge is right.
to11mtm · 8h ago
This is obscene lmao.
if you take the high end for all of these points, Apple is claiming 74% of the revenue is thanks to them.
Also, there's a certain level of 'hand-waving' here where if you're developing for iOS you're almost forced to have Apple hardware in the first place to run+test (hell, even Android can be dev'd from almost anything...)
m463 · 3h ago
This made sense for an app that was sold on the store.
It didn't make sense to me for media from an external subscription or store account was taxed by apple (like netflix or kindle).
Spooky23 · 9h ago
They don’t make that claim. That’s the service they are selling and the margin they choose. The royalty is similar to software retailer margins going back a long time. Steam charges a similar rate.
It’s pretty trivial to bypass. Just don’t charge for your software, and use the app to access paid resources purchased outside the platform. My company distributes a few dozen apps to thousands of employees, Apple gets $0, because they utilize an existing subscription or license unconnected to Apple.
gausswho · 8h ago
Isn't the point of this case that even free apps can't even advertise their direct payment systems?
SchemaLoad · 3h ago
The problem is less the actual % itself and the fact that it's bundled in with so many things you can't pick or substitute. You can't avoid the app store and you can't avoid the Apple developer tools because they force you to use both of them. So then charging money for something you don't have an alternative to is the issue.
Steam might charge a similar rate but you aren't forced to use them. You can deliver games to PC gamers in a number of ways and many large games opt to not be on Steam.
troupo · 3h ago
> Just don’t charge for your software, and use the app to access paid resources purchased outside the platform.
That introduces insane friction and you lose a ton of customers
ivanmontillam · 9h ago
Were they transparent, what would inhibit developers from bargaining against the costs and benefits shown? Sometimes that also outweighs the benefits of transparency.
You just can't show anything to anyone without kicking a wasp's nest.
I am not defending Apple, if anything, I am pro-Android here, but I understand the pickle they'd be in, were they be transparent with the cost structure.
cyberax · 9h ago
Well, yeah. It would have shown that their commissions are nothing but rent-seeking.
ivanmontillam · 9h ago
Exactly my point!
This would kick the wasp's nest of "they (Apple) don't need this much money to operate, they can do well with 10% profit!"
Which is very hard to admit, that profit margins are arbitrary when you, indeed, dominate the market.
Apple doesn't want (nor need) to give anyone a handle to anyone to make them accountable. It is not a charity.
(Again, I'm not defending Apple, but I do defend corporate liberties, in general.)
to11mtm · 8h ago
When a company builds the moat too high (i.e. restrictions on external sub signups) it becomes monopolistic.
Apple is honestly worse than Microsoft in so many ways as far as restrictions (nowadays, anyway) and yet it's taken this long even to get here.
(To be clear, I am not a fan of Google's actions in the mobile space either...)
girvo · 8h ago
Mobile space
Ad space
Search space
And more!
ysavir · 8h ago
Are you defending their corporate liberty to withhold information or to lie about the information being withheld?
mystified5016 · 9h ago
It isn't about transparency.
It is about illegal anticompetitive behavior.
Apple didn't charge tax on all app store purchases to protect themselves, it was done out of greed and malice.
You're assuming that Apple is acting in good faith. An actual, literal judge has decided the evidence shows that Apple was not acting in good faith, and in fact were behaving illegally. This isn't a "both sides" argument, Apple is definitively in the wrong.
mvdtnz · 9h ago
> what would inhibit developers from bargaining against the costs and benefits shown?
Another word for that is "competing". And yeah, exactly.
m3kw9 · 6h ago
The math of a one time fee is different than a percentage. Not sure what you are getting at by presenting a business model that doesn’t make sense as an argument
sensanaty · 8h ago
Is there any hope of a non-joke fine here? Or are we just looking at another kiss of the wrists as them and Google and all the other big tech cos fuck literally everyone over?
semiquaver · 8h ago
The important penalty isn’t a fine, it’s a forced change of behavior to comply with the injunction. The referral for criminal contempt charges will end up being a slap on the wrist if they are even charged though.
bpodgursky · 8h ago
No this is actually going get Tim Cook's attention. Contempt can mean actual jail time for execs.
iamkonstantin · 2h ago
The precedent is significant too. Remember the EU is currently reviewing Apple’s malicious compliance with the DMA, there are also regulators in other countries moving forward too.
ocdtrekkie · 6h ago
A fine isn't even necessary: Apple's App Store business just ended. Between app sales and IAP it has a 30% tax. If an app developer swaps out for a Stripe portal they're paying 3% and probably at least doubling their own profit margin.
Only an idiot would still be selling apps through Apple's payments next week. The only way Apple will make any money at all on apps is if it drops it's fees to 10% or below.
clhodapp · 5h ago
A fine is still necessary because (as per the original ruling), they should have never foisted their store on people seventeen years ago when they first launched it and certainly should not have done so when the court ordered them to stop four years ago.
If there isn't a fine, the message will be that it's fine to profit off of ignoring court orders until you face thread of contempt charges.
simondotau · 4h ago
When Apple first launched the App Store, developers everywhere were praising Apple for offering such favourable terms.
clhodapp · 4h ago
If the terms were so great and the value to developers so high, it should definitely have been able to succeed in a competitive market, and need not have been forced on people.
troupo · 3h ago
Because it was better than anything existing at the time (fees in the few existing stores were up to 70%).
That was 18 years ago. The times, they are a-changing
bigyabai · 4h ago
I think most of the praise was because before the App Store, you quite literally could not install software on iOS. If the Mac worked the same way, people would absent-mindedly praise Apple for it too.
brudgers · 9h ago
Unless the fine is the better part of a trillion dollars, it won’t make any difference.
Apple has close to 1/2 trillion in revenue a year. A few billion is rounding error.
sureIy · 8h ago
Some country recently fined Apple every day until they resolved the issue. I think such solution would both help push Apple to actually resolve the issue and do so in a timely manner.
As much money as they have, no shareholder wants to see a $1m/day expense on the balance sheet.
zamadatix · 8h ago
$1m/day since they launched the iPhone App Store in 2008 is roughly 2 months worth of 30% App Store commision revenue. I.e. they'd be making more money by keeping such a small fine on the balance sheet than complying.
The same thing at $1b/day or rapidly increasing with time might be effective though, but I'm not sure what's really assignable by the given court or not.
DecentShoes · 7h ago
If they refuse to comply, why don't we just... arrest them?
Like, you know, we do for someone who was poor and starving and stole 10$ of food?
brudgers · 7h ago
You can’t arrest a fictitious person.
dbetteridge · 6h ago
Why not?
If a company is a person, it can go in jail.
Freeze their ability to do anything above basic life support without the permission of the judge or court.
randunel · 4h ago
A fictitious person's executives and directors are typically real. Or, if fictitious as well, go down the rabbit hole of said contractors until you finally find the real ones.
In the country I'm from, each exec gets a partial sentence in accordance with their contribution to the criminal act. And no, the total amount on years in prison needn't match the total, there's a minimum and also percentages always exceed 100%.
Limited liability doesn't and shouldn't protect criminals from imprisonment.
DecentShoes · 2h ago
I assure you apple is run by real humans
layer8 · 5h ago
Tim Cook isn't fictious, even if it sometimes appears that way.
brudgers · 4h ago
Legally, Tim Cook is just another employee.
Apple is a corporation.
Legally, corporations are persons.
Corporations are often referred to as fictitious persons in legal contexts to reduce confusion.
rfrey · 5h ago
Is your comment asserting that there are no people poor enough to steal food? Or are you claiming that poor people do not get arrested and are in fact treated with kindness and compassion by the various police agencies?
Refers to corporate personhood. You can't jail Apple Inc.
Biganon · 3h ago
Piercing the corporate veil is a thing.
cwillu · 8h ago
that's still not even a billion a year though, on a revenue of hundreds of billions.
bobmcnamara · 7h ago
Or toss Tim Apple in the huscow for contempt.
ncallaway · 7h ago
I don’t think that’s likely with the referral to the US attorney.
I think Cook will probably find that there is a dollar value that will get Trump to instruct a us attorney to drop charges
willhslade · 6h ago
Hoosegow?
No comments yet
HDThoreaun · 7h ago
Apple makes tens of billions of dollars a year off App Store royalties. If this ruling is upheld this fine has a net present value of 100 billion - trillion dollars depending on your discount rate. They will lose billions of dollars a year forever.
EcommerceFlow · 9h ago
The timing of this with Tim Sweeney's interview with Lex Friedman is great. Watching a few hours of it, it's no wonder he hasn't slowed down in the slightest in this fight against Apple, he is unrelenting in his focus.
No comments yet
cuuupid · 9h ago
Does this mean Apple will have to give up their % fees or that they have to allow third party app stores in the US? And when does that go into effect?
galleywest200 · 8h ago
> Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordered the iPhone-maker to allow developers to steer users to alternative methods of paying for services or subscriptions offered in the App Store. The company also can no longer impose fees in such scenarios or restrict the ability of software-makers to offer links or otherwise communicate alternate payment options with consumers.
The ruling means this starts immediately it seems, as I cannot see a date listed anywhere.
"In Slack communications dated November 16, 2021, the Apple employees crafting the
warning screen for Project Michigan discussed how best to frame its language. (CX-206.)
Mr. Onak suggested the warning screen should include the language: “By continuing on the web,
you will leave the app and be taken to an external website” because “‘external website’ sounds
scary, so execs will love it.” (Id. at .2.) From Mr. Onak’s perspective, of the “execs” on the
project, Mr. Schiller was at the top. (Feb. 2025 Tr. 1340:4–6 (Onak).) One employee further
wrote, “to make your version even worse you could add the developer name rather than the app name.” (CX-206.4.) To that, another responded “ooh - keep going.” (Id.)
I could never imagine Apple employees doing it like this. I knew they had to have discussions about the scare screen, but come on! This is pure evil.
eviks · 5h ago
> I could never imagine Apple employees doing it like this.
Curious why your imagination is so limited here regarding a pretty standard human behavior pattern. Do you personally know Apple employees or is it more of a general respect for their products or ...?
refulgentis · 4h ago
I pretty much grew up on this site. 19yo-37yo. economics dropout from nowhere => waiter => startup => sold => 7 year tenure at google => back to a new startup), and I honestly was absolutely horribly over-the-top stunned at how people were just...normal? to put it nicely?...at Google.
You're absolutely right that it's an unwarranted assumption, yet simultaneously, I just always assumed higher class == higher morals. If anything it seemed to select for senior year of HS math class score and sociopathy.
Stuff I used to hear as grousing, from tired, defeated, adults, that couldn't hack it now ring as universal truths.
udev4096 · 4h ago
> higher class == higher morals
Are you serious? First off, stop using the term "high class" for immoral people. They are well beneath the whole morale chain and the fact they managed to get to your-definition-of-high-class means that lots of dirty tactics were used which are well beyond what a normal human is capable of
refulgentis · 3h ago
> it's an unwarranted assumption,
I'm not sure why you're reacting indignantly. I'll reconsider being vulnerable and honest next time people ask a question.
EMIRELADERO · 7h ago
Want something even more evil? I got you.
When saurik sued Apple for antitrust reasons over Cydia[1] (which sadly ended up going nowhere), at some point a hearing was held where his lawyer accidentally read out something that was supposed to be protected/sealed. Apple's lawyer quickly interjected, but what saurik's attorney got to read before ended up in the official transcript[2], and it's straight up disgusting. From p.18:
"For example, something where -- they are talking about an iOS update that, quote, broke Cydia Impactor. Where they said, it feels too good to destroy someone's spirit. We did something else today that will kill him again with a little smiley emoticon. That, we can specifically talk about with respect to Cydia."
[1] For those not in the know, Cydia was the de-facto App Store for jailbroken iDevices, the prominent third-party marketplace before AltStore.
FWIW, the lawsuit went pretty far--all the way to an appeals court--but failed on what was ostensibly a statute of limitations issue that made very little sense and feels wrong :/. I still intend to write a giant article about it at some point, and probably do a long interview / lamentation about it on t3dotgg's YouTube channel... it just has felt so difficult to approach as the whole thing was so upsetting :(.
EMIRELADERO · 6h ago
Hey! I should have phrased that differently, sorry! I actually followed the lawsuit as it was progressing, even listening to the oral arguments as soon as they were uploaded to the Ninth Circuit's YT channel. Such a shame...
robocat · 7h ago
How much does Apple select employees for loyalty when hiring? One-eyed competitive fanbois?
Companies do want smart machiavellian people that independently act in the interests of the company (archetypical C-suite executives).
Google has had a number of ethical employees damage Google from the inside.
A company can be damaged by smart motivated machiavellian employees using their skills against their own company.
I've noticed competitive gaming training/selecting people to win-at-all-costs. Presumably the C-suite is benefiting from the influx of people that understand manipulation and complexity.
dagmx · 7h ago
I know several people who work there who are Android and windows users and haven’t switched. Internally it seems they’re not very kool-aid heavy.
bgro · 1h ago
Besides nothing, I wonder what penalty they’ll face.
gamblor956 · 8h ago
"She also referred the case to prosecutors for potential criminal investigation into the company and a top finance executive."
That's big. You really have to piss off a judge for them to refer a case for criminal investigation.
fsckboy · 6h ago
i think all you need to do is commit a crime
medhir · 9h ago
once again will ask why iPhones are treated any differently from other computing devices — we need legislative solutions that allow consumers to load software (or even other operating systems) on any computing device they own.
restricting software distribution on any platform under the guise of needing to be kept “secure” always seemed anticompetitive to me - that should apply regardless of Apple’s particular behavior with the courts in this example.
abtinf · 9h ago
> once again will ask why iPhones are treated any differently from other computing devices
And then you immediately state a way they should be treated differently (worse).
zamadatix · 1h ago
Their stated way applies to all computing devices, not just iPhones.
medhir · 6h ago
can you expand on what you find worse about the concept of having full access to any computer you own?
troupo · 3h ago
Welcome to EU's fight with Apple (and Google)
medhir · 2h ago
I’d really like to bring the fight to the US in a more meaningful way!
2OEH8eoCRo0 · 9h ago
Get ready to answer why an iPhone is different than an xbox
medhir · 9h ago
I’m principled in my stance, I think if you own said Xbox you should be able to load software on that as well.
Laremere · 9h ago
It isn't. Consoles at this stage are general purpose computers with hardware and software explicitly designed to prevent consumers using it as such. If consumer rights had any real teeth, any hardware device would be required to allow their owners to install any piece of software of their choosing, including replacing the operating system.
socalgal2 · 8h ago
One has billions of users, the other has millions. One has 100s of thousands of companies trying to to do business with that platform's users, the other has 100s of companies trying to do business with that platform's users.
scale and usage matters. Apple has > 50% market share in the USA (the place relevant to USA law). So, being a monopoly they get treated differently than a non-monopoly.
Even if they had less than 50%, people bank, invest, shop, talk, communicate, book hotels, flights, and effectively live their lives on smartphones. On XBox they play games and same small percent play music or watch movies there (I suspect most switch over to their Smart TV/Apple TV/.. for that).
ribosometronome · 7h ago
No, it doesn't. They're not enforcing this under anti-trust law.
socalgal2 · 6h ago
they aren't? The title is "Apple Violated Antitrust Ruling, Judge Finds"
the first sentence in the article is:
> A federal judge hammered Apple for violating an antitrust ruling related to App Store restrictions and took the extraordinary step of referring the matter to federal prosecutors for a criminal contempt investigation.
Seems like it's about antitrust law
ribosometronome · 6h ago
Fair enough, I replied poorly, but the judgment doesn't appear to be based on Apple being monopoly or size of the business, as far as I can tell. The issue appears to be of anti-steering, more than the number of customers/its market share. Epic notably failed to prove Sherman act violations, didn't it?
>After a bench trial, this Court entered judgment on September 10, 2021, finding thatcertain of Apple’s anti-steering rules violate the California Unfair Competition Law (“UCL”)under its unfair prong.
...
As to the merits of Apple’s UCL violations, Apple did not directly challenge this Court’s application of the UCL’s tethering and balancing tests, instead arguing that(i) the UCL’s “safe harbor” doctrine insulates its liability because Epic failed to establish Sherman Act liability
...
As to Apple’s “unfair” practices under the UCL, the Court explainedthat Epic could demonstrate unfairness under either a “tethering” test or a “balancing” test. Id. at1053. The “tethering” test required Epic to “show that Apple’s conduct (1) ‘threatens an incipientviolation of an antitrust law,’ (2) ‘violates the policy or spirit of one of those laws because itseffects are comparable to or the same as a violation of the law,’ or (3) ‘otherwise significantlythreatens or harms competition.’” Id. at 1052 (quoting Cel-Tech Commc’ns, Inc. v. Los AngelesCellular Tel. Co., 973 P.2d 527, 544 (Cal. 1999)). While the Court held that Epic’s claims basedon app distribution and in-app payment processing restrictions failed to state a claim of unfairpractices, the Court held that Apple’s anti-steering provisions were severable and constitutedunfair practices under the UCL
I'm not sure that the scale or usage really matters.
fsckboy · 5h ago
the judgment doesn't appear to be based on Apple being monopoly or size of the business
our anti-trust laws are not about being a monopoly or the size of your business: they are about abusing market dominance (where up or downstream has no choice) with unfair business practices.
a monopoly that charges fair prices and does not abuse suppliers and customers will not encounter any legal difficulty
scq · 9h ago
Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch should be forced to open up as well.
Closed ecosystems only benefit the corporations that control them.
udev4096 · 4h ago
At the very least, sony doesn't get offended with new jailbreaks while nintendo will chase you down for even browsing an emulator's website
xxs · 3h ago
Both allow to have software developed for by any 3rd parties - that should include any and the original device seller should not be able to control the distribution.
If you really ask: xbox is pretty much the same as an x86-64 PC, running Windows (and having AMD GPU). It just bit more sealed.
ribosometronome · 7h ago
Basically every reply gets it wrong. The answer is that the Xbox isn't developed in California. This judgment was applied under California's UCL, not any federal anti-trust law, despite being in federal court. Epic wasn't able to prove Apple a monopoly, because it's not. Applying California's UCL to Microsoft, Sony, etc is going to be a harder sell in courts.
bigyabai · 4h ago
> Epic wasn't able to prove Apple a monopoly, because it's not.
Unless your name is T. Cook, you lack the authority to make that statement conclusively. The judge claims that Apple is guilty of perjury, and never corrected the executive that made misleading statements. If that testimony was fabricated, then there is every reason to believe Apple is obstructing information that could benefit the prosecution. There is no other feasible alibi in this scenario besides their lawyers all calling in sick. It's one thing to make a mistake, it's another thing to insist it's truth.
Let's not forget that Apple was headed down this same road with the DOJ, too. They are being investigated for a pattern of behavior that is not new, meaning they very well could be guilty of monopoly abuse right this very second. Saying "because it's not" is like telling Lance Ito to drop the OJ charges. Apple is not guilty until proven innocent; but claiming their innocence in certainty is a base lie. You do not actually know, either.
t_sawyer · 9h ago
Which… while we’re at it. Gaming would be much better if consoles didn’t exist anymore. Games would be more optimized for PC and manufacturers would just be building prebuilt gaming PCs.
We also would have more Switch competition in the ARM gaming space instead of x64 handhelds and Android windows emulation if these walled gardens didn’t exist.
If iPhones were sold at-cost to consumers, then Apple would have been right to ask developers to pay 30% fees.
sureIy · 8h ago
I think this is the real answer, however it would be difficult to use it as an excuse for the model since there are laws also against selling at a loss to undercut competitors.
cyberax · 7h ago
It's a more difficult argument. Consoles are not competing with regular general-purpose computers, and the console manufacturers go out of their way to make it impossible to install unapproved third-party software on them.
And since all the console manufacturers are selling the hardware at loss or with low margins, they can argue that it's just how the market works (free razors but expensive razor blades).
rk06 · 1h ago
If consoles are sold at loss to gain "monopoly power", then that is anti competitive and should not be allowed. This would lead (or maybe already resulted) to pathetic printer and ink cartridge situation
MattRix · 9h ago
One is a general computing device and one is for a specific task (gaming).
nozzlegear · 8h ago
That seems rather arbitrary. I'm not doing any general computing on my iPhone, I'm just browsing Hacker News and watching YouTube. If your contention is that the phone is capable of doing more than those two things, well, isn't the Xbox capable of doing more than just gaming?
socalgal2 · 8h ago
You're not. The majority of phone users replaced their computers with a phone. They are using their phone for everything they used to use their computers for. Almost no one is using an XBox to replace their computer.
Aloisius · 8h ago
> The majority of phone users replaced their computers with a phone
Are you pushing back on the word "majority" or on the concept that many people use their phones for nearly everything they used to use their computers for but that next to no one does the same with an Xbox?
Aloisius · 4h ago
That the majority has replaced their computers with smartphones.
That link though doesn't say that. It simply shows global ownership of smartphones is higher than computers which is rather different altogether.
ribosometronome · 7h ago
That's nothing to do with it. The judgment repeatedly talks about Epic as a competing game store. I'm not sure how else you'd describe the app store of consoles.
cyberax · 9h ago
Finally. The AppStore rules are ridiculous.
Apple has zero moral justification for them. They are quadruple-dipping:
1. Consumers pay premium prices for Apple devices.
2. Developers have to pay $100 a year to be able to publish an app.
3. Developers need to buy expensive Apple hardware to develop for iOS. XCode doesn't work on Linux or Windows.
4. And on top of it, Apple also wants 30% of all the gross app sales.
All while their tools that developers _have_ to use are buggy and often nigh unsusable (Apple Connect....).
But wait, there's more! To keep the stronghold on developers, Apple is not allowing third-party apps to use JITs, resulting in a huge amount of time wasted to work around that.
sepositus · 8h ago
> All while their tools that developers _have_ to use are buggy and often nigh unsusable (Apple Connect....).
I'm moving to a job where I don't have to be the build/devops engineer for a product with an iOS app. To say I'm relieved wouldn't even be the half of it. What made it particularly worse was that our release cycle was every two months which is just enough time for Apple to completely wreck the build.
Absolutely terrible experience.
m463 · 8h ago
also, you can't install software on your own device. Even when you can, you have to ask apple permission.
bn-l · 7h ago
The broader consumer base will install anything a bad actor wants them to and then blame the manufacturer for not stopping them with some draconian rule.
idle_zealot · 5h ago
This expectation exists because Apple/Google/monopolists sell it. But it's not realistic, the app stores are cesspools. We need a culture shift to being more selective about installing software. Clearer permissions, better architecture, and trusted repositories with reputations to maintain. Installing software without any validation of safety should be possible but scary (show a terminal log reporting useful technical information or something).
TheDong · 6h ago
Please, side-loading is usually an annoying involved process targeted at developers which the average consumer cannot accidentally do.
A bad actor would have better luck telling a victim "just ship me your phone and login password for some emergency maintenance" than instructing a user through sideloading an app onto their smart fridge.
I, personally, would be happy if iOS had android-style side-loading where you have to enable developer mode, promise you're not an idiot, and go from there.
m463 · 3h ago
the fact that "side-loading" is even a name is sort of ridiculous.
Even on apple's other operating system it is just downloading and running a program.
I remember when you could just stick a floppy or later cd into a system from anywhere and install and run a program.
it was called "install and run".
smt88 · 6h ago
The Play Store proves you absolutely wrong about this. It was an unfiltered Wild West until very recently.
stahtops · 41m ago
I see you have some really serious and valid complaints here. It is so unfair that Apple forced you to become an iOS developer.
Have you considered developing apps for Android, WindowsPhone, Palm, and Blackberry instead of iOS? As of 2008, there were more than 50,000 third-party applications available for the Palm OS platform, it is really growing in popularity. In a few years it could be a real money maker.
amazingamazing · 8h ago
all these big companies being hypocrites. congress should just pass a law that you can't be big and end the charades.
marcus_holmes · 7h ago
I think that's actually the effect of anti-trust/anti-monopoly laws.
There's a point where companies get "too big to fail"/"too big to jail" and have outsize effect on the country (especially if the country is stupid enough to pass a Citizens United law that explicitly allows them to do this). Anti-trust laws are the main way that the government tries to prevent this, and haven't really been used since Reaganomics decided that big == efficient. Until recently.
Passing a law that companies cannot exceed a certain size (market cap as a percentage of GDP, I guess?) would probably be a simpler way of achieving this. Though, obviously, the accounting profession would roll up its collective sleeves and declare "challenge accepted".
> iPhone users are accustomed to using the App Store to make digital purchases, and changing their behavior could prove difficult
Apple Pay on websites works flawlessly and is great for impulse purchases. Its the same as the inapp experience.
I think this user experience will be fine.
Vt71fcAqt7 · 9h ago
I'm glad this happened, although I would have prefered if the result came from a new law eg. the Open App Markets Act rather than have to rely on what is or is not legally considered a market in terms of the sherman act etc.
hereme888 · 9h ago
The judge should slap them in the wrist! Just like last time. Served them well...
newbie578 · 1h ago
Finally vindicated! For years we were arguing with the Apple fanboys here on HN about what Apple is doing and how it is wrong, immoral and illegal. Glad to see something starting to happen.
I just wonder what are the next excuses going to be?
pcvetkovski · 8h ago
Groundbreaking.
We just released Crosspay, a cross-platform in-app subscriptions SDK for iOS, Android, macOS, Linux, Windows, and Web apps, enabling users to purchase subscriptions once, and use anywhere. As this ruling becomes effective, we will also enable users to choose their payment method on any platform, instead of being tied to Apple App Store.
However, apps that charge $1 or less per transaction will continue to pay over 30% in fees (e.g. Stripe charges 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction)
I vouched this comment because I found it genuinely helpful, I was looking for cross payment service for my apps that work across all platforms (they're in Flutter, do you support that?).
w_for_wumbo · 8h ago
This is huge, because it means that anyone buying an iPhone or apple product going forward is knowingly supporting this behaviour.
I fully expect this to be the ruin of Apple.
brailsafe · 8h ago
This seems like a bit of a reach tbh. It's no doubt hopefully huge, but by buying a product you're not implicitly agreeing with every or any element of internal company politics that occured during its production. I buy Macbooks because I tend to like most aspects of them, but use mostly Pixel phones, does that mean I support literally anything Tim Cook or leadership does to produce anything else? Not really, I just use the tools that work for me.
bzzzt · 2h ago
If that's the bar you're setting nobody would buy Microsoft or Google since they also got convicted of monopolistic practices.
canogat · 8h ago
Apple is still a hardware company. A loss of revenue from software and services sales is far from ruinous for Apple.
eviks · 5h ago
What is the magic information dissemination service that guarantees that every future customer knows?
77pt77 · 7h ago
> I fully expect this to be the ruin of Apple.
Apple products are status products. Especially in the USA.
> A federal judge hammered Apple for violating a ruling in an antitrust case that required the company to loosen certain restrictions it imposes on software-makers in its App Store.
> Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordered the iPhone-maker to allow developers to steer users to alternative methods of paying for services or subscriptions offered in the App Store. The company also can no longer impose fees in such scenarios or restrict the ability of software-makers to offer links or otherwise communicate alternate payment options with consumers.
> “Apple willfully chose not to comply with this court’s injunction,” she said in the ruling. “It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers.” She referred the case to federal prosecutors to determine whether a criminal contempt investigation is appropriate.
> The order is the latest twist in the long-running legal dispute between Apple and Epic Games, developer of the popular videogame “Fortnite.”
>> In Slack communications dated November 16, 2021, the Apple employees crafting the warning screen for Project Michigan discussed how best to frame its language. Mr. Onak suggested the warning screen should include the language: “By continuing on the web, you will leave the app and be taken to an external website” because “‘external website’ sounds scary, so execs will love it.” [...] One employee further wrote, “to make your version even worse you could add the developer name rather than the app name.” To that, another responded “ooh - keep going.”
[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
The bean counters won. I guess Tim Cook does care about the bloody ROI after all.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim...
If Tim Cook is willing to lie and cheat for extra revenue, I can't trust that Apple is honest about their privacy commitments. Services revenue line must keep going up, and their ad business is a growth opportunity.
This is a funny comment for me to read. Did anyone honestly think that Apple was touting privacy as anything other than a competitive advantage for revenue maximization? They've had things like iAd, their services revenue has grown massively as hardware sales plateau, and they are nowhere near as "private" in certain countries either.
One takeaway to startups that hope to stand for something even after tremendous growth and leadership changes: you have to build governance and accountability structures into your organizational DNA if you truly want specific values to persist over the long run.
I personally believe that Apple is able to make different (better), choices in the name of a consumer privacy, than Google will.
Android is built from the ground up to provide surveillance data to Google-controlled adtech - that's their revenue model. I don't begrudge them that, people should have choice, etc. but the revenue model is adtech first and foremost.
Apple want services revenue, they like services revenue, but historically they're a vertically integrated tech platform manufacturer whose revenue model is building better platforms consumers want.
It's true that the services model may start to compromise that - and they've definitely started to make some poor choices they might need to pull back on to protect the core platform model - but I do think we're not comparing like with like when we say that Apple is no different to any other company in this space.
My luke-warm take is that the advertising industry is inherently evil.
Though that's the core issue, margins on services are just too addictive for big tech. Not sure Apple can keep its recipe for success with both services and hardware.
My feeling is that these guys who showed up to the inauguration of a self-professed "dictator on day one" might be a little light on backbone, if not moral fortitude.
They charge 27% for purchases made using external payment processors. Including Stripe fees that's net-zero (not even accounting for any chargeback risks). They severely limit how you can display the external purchase link too, and display an obnoxious warning screen when you tap it.
I would be surprised if a single developer adopted it.
https://developer.apple.com/support/storekit-external-entitl...
[1]: https://www.macstories.net/news/an-app-store-first-delta-add...
Half of the entire HN was like „EU bad, how dare you regulate them”. What gives?
Between all of this, it'll be a lot harder to come to the comments to defend Apple for not getting fined twice in a row for the same issue despite lying under oath and intentionally delaying proceedings, even if you vehemently disagree with the original ruling.
Google tends to be the one with more sympathy in the US lately as they've gotten much more of the regulatory stick in court.
EU = bad
US = good
They may be more likely to have the capacity, but no way it's amy kind of guarantee.
That's OK, it shows we're human, it's not all AI slop here (yet?).
By the way, I don't think this is a good way of voting. IMO comments should be upvoted if they provide good insights (even if you disagree with them) and downvoted when they are low-content/trolling/full of fallacies.
I'd recommend skimming through the whole thing because Judge Rogers just eviscerates Apple over and over.
I love whichever clerk wrote this and then got it through. The real MVP
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2025/04/gonzales_rogers_apple_app...
If done through third parties directly the scammers will not make unsubscribing easy and it will not be as easy to find out where you are subscribing.
Thus I expect the scamming to increase.
This is fairly quickly resolved though - if anything close to 1% of customers complain to their banks that they don't want this payment and can't cancel it, triggering a chargeback, the scammers end up entirely blocked from the payment networks entirely in pretty short order. If you end up banned from Visa & Mastercard your whole operation is permanently kaput.
Also, this might be a non-US thing, but over here most modern banks (e.g. Revolut) will let you view & block recurring payment authorizations directly from your banking app anyway.
- Most legit services move to a web based Apple Pay (note to the unaware reader: this is NOT In-App Purchases and has never had 30% fees) due to the ease of implementing and lower fee (easier to do cross platform + web) - Non-legit developers keep the In-App flow
Over time this would skew In-App Purchases to be scammy-only (and therefore, easier to spot). I'm sure people at Apple consider this possibility too – and therefore, now that there's actual competition, IAP flows will probably have to change to prevent this and compete for actual developer preference (and keep it a viable legit-developer choice)
Now that US courts are doing it more, it seems that corporations abusing their monopoly powers are the problem, not EU laws. But what do I know.
> The broader consumer base will install anything a bad actor wants them to and then blame the manufacturer for not stopping them with some draconian rule.
Has this even happened? Has anyone ever sued and won the case with a laptop manufacturer (or Microsoft or Apple), because they downloaded and executed an executable with malware on their computer? Do average people really blame Microsoft for malware? I would kind of agree that they should, but not because Microsoft allows people to run untrusted code, but because the security model of Windows (and other PC operating systems) is still bad. But not because it allows people to run unsigned code.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think we should return to security model of old operating systems - smartphone OSes definitely got that right, except for the part that forces users to give up control of their devices. It's just that the argument, that allowing people to install software not signed by Apple on their own devices would make iPhones insecure, is totally unsubstantiated to me.
I see some people still arguing that (ex. older) people will do what they are told and will install shady software. If Apple really cares, they could provide a switch that allows users to disable installing "unverified" software. Maybe ask about it during setup. Maybe allow locking it until factory reset, or allow head of icloud family to control it. There are many options to keep some people secure from all unverified apps, while allowing others to run them. Not to mention that the idea that all apps not signed by Apple are somehow malicious is just bad. You could have other entities than Apple verify code. Currently, even running apps you yourself wrote, on your own hardware, is hard and limited. For no good reason.
The only reason Apple is blocking other stores, or preventing people from installing homebrew, is to collect more money. It's good that they are investing into security of their software and hardware, but in this particular case, security is used only as a distraction.
Excerpt from the filing:
"In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option. To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate."
The fines are always less than the companies' net gains from the practice. Gains are often indirect, risk-related, and/or part of a larger strategy, so they cannot be calculated.
Everything short of prison is a waste of time, waste of tax dollars, and spits in the face of decent citizens.
Personal fines too, such as returning past remunerations during the problematic time in question. Salaries. Stock grants.
There is no such thing as an incentive, that doesn't incentivize someone. Relatively small fines relative to revenues and profits don't incentivize anything.
Alternatively, if fines really were big enough to turn large companies around (i.e. not just the enforced, but other companies seeing the enforcement), heads would roll, but would they be the right ones given those in charge are unlikely to fire themselves? And shareholders are the ones really paying the fines, are they really the culprits?
The incentives to act in good faith, should be placed very directly on the individuals whose choices dictate the good/bad faith. Starting and staying largely with the CEO, and the direct line of reports from the CEO down to the relevent decisions.
You don't want anyone who mattered to have cover. You want CEO's policing their own, and their reports pushing back upward against poor directives.
The only cover for relevent actors would be a record of pushing back against those who pushed through poor behavior.
TLDR: Limited liability should protect non-managing shareholders, but not bad actors within a company. Decisions makers should always be held directly responsible for their decisions. Any other system is perverse.
If you only punish the executives for illegal business practices, but leave the company alone, then you create an incentive to hire patsies as executives, continue letting them do illegal stuff, go to jail, and pay them handsomely after they get out.
Ultimately it has to be the company that's losing money when the company made money from illegal business, otherwise the company can just find other people willing to continue and provide for everyone who gets caught.
You are so right. The board & shareholders are in the path of responsibility and not recognizing that would be a call for both to use and abuse executives as scapegoats.
So be it!
As long as their job isn't to P.L.E.A.S.E.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfWVV533RHE&t=85s
It's wild how the public discourse on incentives is so split. On one hand, the poor are guilty until proven innocent of six dimensional chess to eek "unearned" pennies from social programs, yet the very idea that mega billionaires might pull easy, obvious levers for unethical mega million payouts is one that must beg and scrape for consideration.
Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax. You can't even deploy your own apps at your own cadence, without strict review, using your own technology. You have to jump through unplanned upgrade cycles, you're forced to use their payment rails and signup flows (and don't get to know your customer or get them to use your website). You pay the taxes on everything. And even then, they let your competitors advertise against your name or trademark.
This is rotten to the core.
Neither Google nor Apple should have an app store. Apps should be web installs. The only reason things work the way they do is so that Apple and Google can tax and exert control. A permissions system, signature scans, and heuristics are all that are needed to keep web installs safe - and all of those pieces are already in place. There's no technical or safety limitation, Apple and Google just want to dominate.
These two companies were innovative 20 years ago, but their lead then doesn't entitle them to keep owning the majority of most people's computing surface area for the rest of time. They have to give up the reigns. There are still billions of dollars for them to make on mobile, even if regulators tell them to stop treating developers as serfs and locking them in cages.
No. More. App. Stores.
Regulate big tech's hold over mobile, web, search, and advertising.
> Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax.
Long before Apple and Google made phones, a huge mobile device ecosystem already existed, including app stores, and it was way more locked down and expensive than what we have now.
The iPhone did not even launch with an app store, its launch concept was 100% web apps. They only added the native SDK and app store after developers and customers demanded it.
Again: I know the world is different now. But the idea that this was all some swift inexorable coup by Apple and Google is totally inaccurate. Plenty of other companies had a chance to do things differently, many with huge head starts.
Featurephones had App Stores like Verizon’s “Get It Now” and it was obvious that they were money grabs like Apple’s.
Apple and Google won the game because the phones were powerful enough to make web browsing feasible, and had great text input.
If nobody had thought of app stores, it would have been trivial to distribute .ipa’s and .apk’s on the Web just like Windows and Mac software still predominantly is.
That’s a poor comparison IMO, because the scale of this was multiple orders of magnitude less. App stores were a niche occurrence that almost no nontechnical person had heard about. Seldom anyone „needed“ an app for their company to be successful. Now they control billions of eyes.
People demanded native SDK because web apps were garbage, unlike the native first party apps. Some people wanted an app store. No one ever wanted or demanded an exclusive app store. Putting demand for native SDK and demand for app store in one sentence smells like gaslighting.
And as a user it just feels idiotic to have to download a dedicated program to say, pay for parking or order a sandwich, in a city I’m just visiting for the day. As though taking a credit card on the Web is a foreign concept.
Google and Apple have silently achieved Microsoft's wet dream from the "trusted platform" era of effectively making it impossible for free and open source operating systems to compete with their own.
There should be two levers used to achieve this. One is anti-trust style legislation. The other is patent misuse legislation. If you try and prevent consumers from running software on hardware they bought from you to make a profit, you shouldn't be allowed to prevent consumers from buying the same hardware from someone else - that's what patents do - they create government enforced monopolies on the hardware. You should be required to invalidate (donate to the public domain) every patent on the hardware if you want to sell hardware where you get to profit off your monopoly on letting developers write software for the hardware.
These Epic rulings are better than nothing, but I can't help but feel that their solution of "make Apple distribute software they don't like in their app store" is the wrong one.
Well that sounds rather damning.
Consider how painful that is going to be for Apple, and Roman, with how the current administration is abusing the DOJ.
The repercussions of this could be huge.
Here's the fun question though. Do Roman, Maestri et al not have any specific damages to this? (I know the answer, but it's a good question to ask....)
Have you been to a traffic court?
Go home, go to the DOL's website. Green text, "VALID". Weird. "Pay any monies owing on your license." Let's try that. "There are no monies owed."
Huh.
Print these out, take them to the DOL. It was a technicality where a process had suspended my license over a fine, but then unsuspended it the same day because they'd received a check.
She waives the $25 fee that should have been attached. And stamps the screenshots of this I'd taken, and prints out the status changes on my account.
Take it to court to challenge the ticket. Prosecutor doesn't want to dismiss. "They'd have generated and sent you a letter when they did that, so you had to have known."
Eventually dismissed, but only after three or four back-and-forths.
Sit on any all-hands call for a major company and it is practically guaranteed large chunks of the presentation will be executive gaslighting of its own employees with info that is objectively false or a misrepresentation. You will also never get a real answer to actual hard questions (especially if it is on the topic of something that may negatively affect workers) which is essentially lying by omission.
It doesn't help that we have now proven that you can lie all the way to the seat of being president of the united states.
That said - whether we like it or not, we are now a culture built on lying.
And it’s not just the lying that’s the problem - it’s the lack of critical thinking, the gullibility, the willingness to suspend disbelief and give benefit of the doubt and credit where it’s not due, amongst those being lied to, be they employees, or voters.
The way out is to see through it, to question it, and to stop acquiescing to it. If we all do that, the liars will never ascend to the positions of power we have allowed them to have over us today.
Boards private jet to Monaco
I also heartily recommend both seasons of Wolf Hall. About Cromwell rather than More, but still fascinating.
I'd bet no.
Oh c'mon, 16 years into a product line ain't too bad, is it?
If you had a kid when the App Store first came out, that kid would now be nearing high school graduation and you still can't do as you describe. The great recession, the pandemic, the iPad, proliferation of AI, legalization of Gay marriage in the states and weed in some places, annexation of crimea and the war in Ukraine, the foxconn suicide issue, 4G, LTE, 5G, fiber to the home, brexit, Golang, Rust, TypeScript, Swift, APFS, Arm and the downfall of Intel, the rise of NVIDIA, Netflix, TikTok, drones, electric cars, scooters, bikes, end-to-end design and construction of their mothership headquarters, and federal acknowledgement that climate change is an issue, have all basically happened in that time; but nope, it's for security reasons. Hell, even their lead industrial designer retired long before they'd let up.
Edit: Not that any of those have anything to do with the App Store, but still.
Will walmart prevent you from selling, say, a fishing pole that allows you to buy fishing hooks from another store?
Apple's app-store review would reject any app that linked the company pricing page, and would reject any app that let you use an alternative payment method like paypal or a credit card on a non-apple site.
Also, in your analogy the customer has to be unable to buy your app from anywhere else (since the customer has an iPhone and there are no other stores or operating systems for iPhone)..
It really doesn't work as a good comparison imo.
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> In retail brick-and-mortar stores, consumers do not lack knowledge of options. Technology platforms differ.
Yeah, but keep going on about how this is the same as Walmart
(1) Apple’s platform technology is worth up to 30% of a developer’s revenue. (2) Apple’s developer tools and services are worth approximately 3%–16%. (3) Apple’s distribution services are worth approximately 4%–14%. (4) Apple’s discovery services are worth approximately 5%–14%.
Then Apple claimed this study was how they came up with the 27%, but the Judge basically said nah you guys came up with that number before the study, and you even know it would be a non-starter for almost all developers.
That must be a joke. Xcode is so bad, compared to Android Studio, it’s not even funny. As iOS dev I have to constantly apologize to my Android team members, that, no, Xcode can’t do this and that, and, no, we can’t do X in the build pipeline. And I‘m generally 10-20% slower than them because the tooling is just terrible and flaky.
BTW there was a promising IntelliJ option for Apple development, but Apple made life so hard for them that they had to give up. It was called „AppCode“ and some people are still sad that it doesn’t exist anymore.
That's the point of hiring consulting groups.
Apple is exactly like a mobster demanding a cut for “protection” — except they’ve designed and controlled the system so well that your business just cannot exist in the first place until your automatic extortion payment system is in place.
For "discovery" people would have to regularly check the App Store app and read the "today" page. Maybe perhaps Spotify or Netflix will appear there once a year among 15000 stories about games.
Or you mean search? If people search for Spotify/Netflix, they already know about it. And right now Apple will helpfully cover half of the screen with an ad for Gmail if you search for Spotify (and will hide all other Spotify apps like Spotify Kids and Spotify for Creators six screens down)
I don't know where this money is going but certainly not in the developer tooling because it's absolutely terrible
The fact that they're deadset against competition should tell the courts all they need to know about how competitively supportable the 30% is.
This is, of course, how basically every tech company works nowadays[1], because Apple lobbied to have that accounting rule removed.
None of this has anything to do with "App Store pays for iOS". That's an excuse Apple came up with after Epic Games sued them, there's no point in time I can point to where iOS is just the bundled OS vs. "paid for with app sales". The reality is, everything pays for everything, because Apple only sells fully bundled experiences. Their opposition to sideloading or third-party iOS app stores is only somewhat related to security[2], and more related to the fact that they don't want anyone dictating to them how the customer experience is, even if those changes improve the experience.
Well, that, and the fact that they make bank off App Store apps.
[0] I'm not sure if it was Enron or Worldcom
[1] Looking at you, Tesla FSD
[2] If it was, they'd be locking down macOS
Back in 2008, if you were an indie dev then their 30% ask was more than reasonable because the cost-of-doing-business on other platforms (like Windows Mobile) was much higher due to the lack of any central App Store; for example, you'd often need to partner with a company like Digital River, and pay more for marketing/advertising and overcome the significant friction involved in convincing punters to register/buy from your website, download the app *.cab files to their PC, install the app onto your device, and hope no-one uploads a copy to a filesharing network because this was before the days when an OS itself would employ DRM to enforce a license for third-party software.
...then one day Apple comes along and says: "We can manage all of that for you, for far less than what you'd pay for e-commerce and digital distribution, and our customers have lots of disposable income".
Ostensibly, competition should have come from the Android and (lol) Windows App Stores: "surely if Android's Play Store offers devs better rates then devs will simply not target iOS anymore and Apple will reduce their % to stay competitive" - but Apple's secret-sauce of a markedly more affluent customer base with already saved credit-card details meant that Android apps leant more on ad-supported apps while more iOS apps could charge an up-front amount, not have ads, and result in iOS devs still making far more money on Apple's platform.
--------
There exists an argument that Apple should not be forced to open-up the iOS platform because Apple is selling a closed platform on the merits of it being a closed platform, and Apple's customers want a closed platform (even if they don't realize it) because having a closed platform looks like the only way to enforce a minimum standard of quality and to keep malware out precisely because normal-human-users (i.e. our collective mothers) will install malware because the installation instructions for "Facebook_Gold_App1_100%_Real_honest.app" tell them to disable system protections.
The first iPhone indie devs were Mac indie devs who already knew Objective-C and Cocoa and Xcode and paid 0% to Apple on the Mac.
The 30% that Apple announced was a game changer.
2025: "You don't appreciate how lower publishing fees foster competition, except when there's no fees at all, because that's too competitive for the OEM."
Well no, the most secure platform in 2025 is still the web. You can't get as much data in a web browser as you can in a mobile app and the sandboxing is tighter.
And I may mention that the majority of the appstore revenue comes from casino like games, not really something I would give it to my family.
And sure, I'm opened to the idea that the appstore was innovative in 2008, unfortunately for Apple, we're now in 2025 and it clearly isn't anymore.
if you take the high end for all of these points, Apple is claiming 74% of the revenue is thanks to them.
Also, there's a certain level of 'hand-waving' here where if you're developing for iOS you're almost forced to have Apple hardware in the first place to run+test (hell, even Android can be dev'd from almost anything...)
It didn't make sense to me for media from an external subscription or store account was taxed by apple (like netflix or kindle).
It’s pretty trivial to bypass. Just don’t charge for your software, and use the app to access paid resources purchased outside the platform. My company distributes a few dozen apps to thousands of employees, Apple gets $0, because they utilize an existing subscription or license unconnected to Apple.
Steam might charge a similar rate but you aren't forced to use them. You can deliver games to PC gamers in a number of ways and many large games opt to not be on Steam.
That introduces insane friction and you lose a ton of customers
You just can't show anything to anyone without kicking a wasp's nest.
I am not defending Apple, if anything, I am pro-Android here, but I understand the pickle they'd be in, were they be transparent with the cost structure.
This would kick the wasp's nest of "they (Apple) don't need this much money to operate, they can do well with 10% profit!"
Which is very hard to admit, that profit margins are arbitrary when you, indeed, dominate the market.
Apple doesn't want (nor need) to give anyone a handle to anyone to make them accountable. It is not a charity.
(Again, I'm not defending Apple, but I do defend corporate liberties, in general.)
Apple is honestly worse than Microsoft in so many ways as far as restrictions (nowadays, anyway) and yet it's taken this long even to get here.
(To be clear, I am not a fan of Google's actions in the mobile space either...)
Ad space
Search space
And more!
It is about illegal anticompetitive behavior.
Apple didn't charge tax on all app store purchases to protect themselves, it was done out of greed and malice.
You're assuming that Apple is acting in good faith. An actual, literal judge has decided the evidence shows that Apple was not acting in good faith, and in fact were behaving illegally. This isn't a "both sides" argument, Apple is definitively in the wrong.
Another word for that is "competing". And yeah, exactly.
Only an idiot would still be selling apps through Apple's payments next week. The only way Apple will make any money at all on apps is if it drops it's fees to 10% or below.
If there isn't a fine, the message will be that it's fine to profit off of ignoring court orders until you face thread of contempt charges.
That was 18 years ago. The times, they are a-changing
Apple has close to 1/2 trillion in revenue a year. A few billion is rounding error.
As much money as they have, no shareholder wants to see a $1m/day expense on the balance sheet.
The same thing at $1b/day or rapidly increasing with time might be effective though, but I'm not sure what's really assignable by the given court or not.
Like, you know, we do for someone who was poor and starving and stole 10$ of food?
If a company is a person, it can go in jail.
Freeze their ability to do anything above basic life support without the permission of the judge or court.
In the country I'm from, each exec gets a partial sentence in accordance with their contribution to the criminal act. And no, the total amount on years in prison needn't match the total, there's a minimum and also percentages always exceed 100%.
Limited liability doesn't and shouldn't protect criminals from imprisonment.
Apple is a corporation.
Legally, corporations are persons.
Corporations are often referred to as fictitious persons in legal contexts to reduce confusion.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/fictitious-person
Your assumptions are absurd.
I think Cook will probably find that there is a dollar value that will get Trump to instruct a us attorney to drop charges
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The ruling means this starts immediately it seems, as I cannot see a date listed anywhere.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
I could never imagine Apple employees doing it like this. I knew they had to have discussions about the scare screen, but come on! This is pure evil.
Curious why your imagination is so limited here regarding a pretty standard human behavior pattern. Do you personally know Apple employees or is it more of a general respect for their products or ...?
You're absolutely right that it's an unwarranted assumption, yet simultaneously, I just always assumed higher class == higher morals. If anything it seemed to select for senior year of HS math class score and sociopathy.
Stuff I used to hear as grousing, from tired, defeated, adults, that couldn't hack it now ring as universal truths.
Are you serious? First off, stop using the term "high class" for immoral people. They are well beneath the whole morale chain and the fact they managed to get to your-definition-of-high-class means that lots of dirty tactics were used which are well beyond what a normal human is capable of
I'm not sure why you're reacting indignantly. I'll reconsider being vulnerable and honest next time people ask a question.
When saurik sued Apple for antitrust reasons over Cydia[1] (which sadly ended up going nowhere), at some point a hearing was held where his lawyer accidentally read out something that was supposed to be protected/sealed. Apple's lawyer quickly interjected, but what saurik's attorney got to read before ended up in the official transcript[2], and it's straight up disgusting. From p.18:
"For example, something where -- they are talking about an iOS update that, quote, broke Cydia Impactor. Where they said, it feels too good to destroy someone's spirit. We did something else today that will kill him again with a little smiley emoticon. That, we can specifically talk about with respect to Cydia."
[1] For those not in the know, Cydia was the de-facto App Store for jailbroken iDevices, the prominent third-party marketplace before AltStore.
[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18730843/75/saurikit-ll...
Companies do want smart machiavellian people that independently act in the interests of the company (archetypical C-suite executives).
Google has had a number of ethical employees damage Google from the inside.
A company can be damaged by smart motivated machiavellian employees using their skills against their own company.
I've noticed competitive gaming training/selecting people to win-at-all-costs. Presumably the C-suite is benefiting from the influx of people that understand manipulation and complexity.
That's big. You really have to piss off a judge for them to refer a case for criminal investigation.
restricting software distribution on any platform under the guise of needing to be kept “secure” always seemed anticompetitive to me - that should apply regardless of Apple’s particular behavior with the courts in this example.
And then you immediately state a way they should be treated differently (worse).
scale and usage matters. Apple has > 50% market share in the USA (the place relevant to USA law). So, being a monopoly they get treated differently than a non-monopoly.
Even if they had less than 50%, people bank, invest, shop, talk, communicate, book hotels, flights, and effectively live their lives on smartphones. On XBox they play games and same small percent play music or watch movies there (I suspect most switch over to their Smart TV/Apple TV/.. for that).
the first sentence in the article is:
> A federal judge hammered Apple for violating an antitrust ruling related to App Store restrictions and took the extraordinary step of referring the matter to federal prosecutors for a criminal contempt investigation.
Seems like it's about antitrust law
The actual judgment: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25924283-epic-v-appl...
>After a bench trial, this Court entered judgment on September 10, 2021, finding thatcertain of Apple’s anti-steering rules violate the California Unfair Competition Law (“UCL”)under its unfair prong. ... As to the merits of Apple’s UCL violations, Apple did not directly challenge this Court’s application of the UCL’s tethering and balancing tests, instead arguing that(i) the UCL’s “safe harbor” doctrine insulates its liability because Epic failed to establish Sherman Act liability ... As to Apple’s “unfair” practices under the UCL, the Court explainedthat Epic could demonstrate unfairness under either a “tethering” test or a “balancing” test. Id. at1053. The “tethering” test required Epic to “show that Apple’s conduct (1) ‘threatens an incipientviolation of an antitrust law,’ (2) ‘violates the policy or spirit of one of those laws because itseffects are comparable to or the same as a violation of the law,’ or (3) ‘otherwise significantlythreatens or harms competition.’” Id. at 1052 (quoting Cel-Tech Commc’ns, Inc. v. Los AngelesCellular Tel. Co., 973 P.2d 527, 544 (Cal. 1999)). While the Court held that Epic’s claims basedon app distribution and in-app payment processing restrictions failed to state a claim of unfairpractices, the Court held that Apple’s anti-steering provisions were severable and constitutedunfair practices under the UCL
I'm not sure that the scale or usage really matters.
our anti-trust laws are not about being a monopoly or the size of your business: they are about abusing market dominance (where up or downstream has no choice) with unfair business practices.
a monopoly that charges fair prices and does not abuse suppliers and customers will not encounter any legal difficulty
Closed ecosystems only benefit the corporations that control them.
If you really ask: xbox is pretty much the same as an x86-64 PC, running Windows (and having AMD GPU). It just bit more sealed.
Unless your name is T. Cook, you lack the authority to make that statement conclusively. The judge claims that Apple is guilty of perjury, and never corrected the executive that made misleading statements. If that testimony was fabricated, then there is every reason to believe Apple is obstructing information that could benefit the prosecution. There is no other feasible alibi in this scenario besides their lawyers all calling in sick. It's one thing to make a mistake, it's another thing to insist it's truth.
Let's not forget that Apple was headed down this same road with the DOJ, too. They are being investigated for a pattern of behavior that is not new, meaning they very well could be guilty of monopoly abuse right this very second. Saying "because it's not" is like telling Lance Ito to drop the OJ charges. Apple is not guilty until proven innocent; but claiming their innocence in certainty is a base lie. You do not actually know, either.
We also would have more Switch competition in the ARM gaming space instead of x64 handhelds and Android windows emulation if these walled gardens didn’t exist.
iPhones are sold at a _premium_.
If iPhones were sold at-cost to consumers, then Apple would have been right to ask developers to pay 30% fees.
And since all the console manufacturers are selling the hardware at loss or with low margins, they can argue that it's just how the market works (free razors but expensive razor blades).
Source?
I can't find anything that backs that up.
Are you pushing back on the word "majority" or on the concept that many people use their phones for nearly everything they used to use their computers for but that next to no one does the same with an Xbox?
That link though doesn't say that. It simply shows global ownership of smartphones is higher than computers which is rather different altogether.
Apple has zero moral justification for them. They are quadruple-dipping:
1. Consumers pay premium prices for Apple devices.
2. Developers have to pay $100 a year to be able to publish an app.
3. Developers need to buy expensive Apple hardware to develop for iOS. XCode doesn't work on Linux or Windows.
4. And on top of it, Apple also wants 30% of all the gross app sales.
All while their tools that developers _have_ to use are buggy and often nigh unsusable (Apple Connect....).
But wait, there's more! To keep the stronghold on developers, Apple is not allowing third-party apps to use JITs, resulting in a huge amount of time wasted to work around that.
I'm moving to a job where I don't have to be the build/devops engineer for a product with an iOS app. To say I'm relieved wouldn't even be the half of it. What made it particularly worse was that our release cycle was every two months which is just enough time for Apple to completely wreck the build.
Absolutely terrible experience.
A bad actor would have better luck telling a victim "just ship me your phone and login password for some emergency maintenance" than instructing a user through sideloading an app onto their smart fridge.
I, personally, would be happy if iOS had android-style side-loading where you have to enable developer mode, promise you're not an idiot, and go from there.
Even on apple's other operating system it is just downloading and running a program.
I remember when you could just stick a floppy or later cd into a system from anywhere and install and run a program.
it was called "install and run".
Have you considered developing apps for Android, WindowsPhone, Palm, and Blackberry instead of iOS? As of 2008, there were more than 50,000 third-party applications available for the Palm OS platform, it is really growing in popularity. In a few years it could be a real money maker.
There's a point where companies get "too big to fail"/"too big to jail" and have outsize effect on the country (especially if the country is stupid enough to pass a Citizens United law that explicitly allows them to do this). Anti-trust laws are the main way that the government tries to prevent this, and haven't really been used since Reaganomics decided that big == efficient. Until recently.
Passing a law that companies cannot exceed a certain size (market cap as a percentage of GDP, I guess?) would probably be a simpler way of achieving this. Though, obviously, the accounting profession would roll up its collective sleeves and declare "challenge accepted".
Apple Pay on websites works flawlessly and is great for impulse purchases. Its the same as the inapp experience.
I think this user experience will be fine.
I just wonder what are the next excuses going to be?
We just released Crosspay, a cross-platform in-app subscriptions SDK for iOS, Android, macOS, Linux, Windows, and Web apps, enabling users to purchase subscriptions once, and use anywhere. As this ruling becomes effective, we will also enable users to choose their payment method on any platform, instead of being tied to Apple App Store.
However, apps that charge $1 or less per transaction will continue to pay over 30% in fees (e.g. Stripe charges 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction)
See more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43714552
Apple products are status products. Especially in the USA.
No one will care.