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.
thaumasiotes · 3h 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.”
bze12 · 4h 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.
> 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.
"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 · 5m 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
ocdtrekkie · 1h ago
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.
snowwrestler · 2h 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.
clhodapp · 23m 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 · 4h 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 · 4h 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 · 3h 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.
Terr_ · 2h 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 · 4h 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 · 3h 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 · 2h 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 · 46m 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.
manmal · 14m 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.
oefrha · 57m 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 · 1h ago
Sure, 100% web apps will never work. It should be 95% web apps.
ulrikrasmussen · 1h 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.
tgsovlerkhgsel · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
pbh101 · 41m ago
I think the realistic possible end-states are either effectively Facebook controls the app store that matters or Apple/Google do.
jonny_eh · 1h ago
If it's good enough for Mac, it's good enough for iPhone.
Then maybe they shouldn't be making billions of dollars
zelphirkalt · 2h 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.
musicale · 3h ago
> To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath
Well that sounds rather damning.
zik · 2h ago
Surely he should receive a prison sentence for that alone?
numbsafari · 1h 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.
stingraycharles · 3h 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 · 43m 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 · 20m ago
What happened to the people who lied under oath? Were they found out?
zelphirkalt · 2h 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 · 1h ago
The USA is an oligarchy
Muromec · 4h ago
Criminal contempt would the charge against the company or the people named above? How does it work in this case?
mil22 · 4h 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 · 4h 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 · 3h 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....)
stillatit · 4h ago
So what is the punishment for outright lying under oath?
90s_dev · 4h 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 · 3h 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 · 3h 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 · 1h 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.
Jcampuzano2 · 2h 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.
usefulcat · 3h 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 · 2h 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.
dfedbeef · 2h ago
Oh no, my word means nothing to honest people.
Boards private jet to Monaco
jkestner · 1h ago
Yet these superrich people crave respect so much that they endlessly poast on social networks, or buy a social network.
labster · 3h ago
There are so few honest Americans that it hardly matters to serve such a small demographic.
andrewmcwatters · 4h ago
Clearly nothing, since we've decided to be a nation that doesn't enforce laws.
georgemcbay · 4h ago
in 2025? Tim Apple has to call Trump and be very nice to him, maybe cut a check to fund the presidential library.
platevoltage · 4h ago
I mean, that contribution to his inauguration fund is what probably got them that tariff exemption.
brailsafe · 4h 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 · 3h ago
We didn't start the fire, it was always burning since the world's been turning...
mvdtnz · 4h ago
If you're publishing on the app store you are part of the problem. Your customers are right to feel aggrieved.
scarface_74 · 2h ago
Will Walmart let you have a label on your product saying you could get it cheaper from Amazon?
TheDong · 1h 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 · 1h 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
mrcwinn · 4h 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 · 4h 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.
manmal · 7m 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.
paxys · 4h ago
Hire a consulting firm to tell you exactly what you want to hear, then say "see the experts said it, not us". Classic.
marcus_holmes · 3h 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 · 1h 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.
realusername · 3h 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 · 3h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h ago
this would be a silly argument - surely the customers buying the devices should be paying directly for the operating system?
mcphage · 1h 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 · 32m 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 59m 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 · 1h 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 · 2h ago
You don't pay consulting agencies to put you in legal jeopardy. The judge is right.
to11mtm · 3h 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...)
Spooky23 · 4h 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 · 3h ago
Isn't the point of this case that even free apps can't even advertise their direct payment systems?
ivanmontillam · 4h 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 · 4h ago
Well, yeah. It would have shown that their commissions are nothing but rent-seeking.
ivanmontillam · 4h 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 · 3h 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 · 3h ago
Mobile space
Ad space
Search space
And more!
ysavir · 3h ago
Are you defending their corporate liberty to withhold information or to lie about the information being withheld?
mvdtnz · 4h ago
> what would inhibit developers from bargaining against the costs and benefits shown?
Another word for that is "competing". And yeah, exactly.
mystified5016 · 4h 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.
m3kw9 · 1h 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 · 3h 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 · 3h 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 · 3h ago
No this is actually going get Tim Cook's attention. Contempt can mean actual jail time for execs.
ocdtrekkie · 1h 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 · 15m ago
A fine is still necessary because (as per the original ruling), they should have never had 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.
brudgers · 4h 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 · 3h 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 · 3h 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 $1b/day or rapidly increasing with time might be effective though, but I'm not sure what's really assignable by the given court or not.
DecentShoes · 2h ago
If they refuse to comply, why don't we just... arrest them?
Like, you know, we do for someone who was poor and starving and stole 10$ of food?
brudgers · 2h ago
You can’t arrest a fictitious person.
layer8 · 21m ago
Tim Cook isn't fictious, even if it sometimes appears that way.
dbetteridge · 1h 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.
rfrey · 27m 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?
brudgers · 2m ago
[delayed]
cwillu · 3h ago
that's still not even a billion a year though, on a revenue of hundreds of billions.
bobmcnamara · 2h ago
Or toss Tim Apple in the huscow for contempt.
ncallaway · 2h 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 · 1h ago
Hoosegow?
No comments yet
HDThoreaun · 2h 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.
dchest · 3h ago
"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 · 38m ago
> I could never imagine Apple employees doing it like this.
Curious why is your imagination 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 · 1m ago
I pretty much grew up on this site (19yo-37yo today, 1 startup, 7 year tenure at google, back to the wilderness), and I honestly was absolutely horribly over-the-top stunned at how people were just...normal?...there.
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.
EMIRELADERO · 2h 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 · 1h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h 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.
cuuupid · 4h 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 · 4h 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.
pram · 3h ago
Neither!
amazingamazing · 3h 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 · 2h 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".
EcommerceFlow · 4h 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
gamblor956 · 3h 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.
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 · 4h 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).
medhir · 1h ago
can you expand on what you find worse about the concept of having full access to any computer you own?
2OEH8eoCRo0 · 4h ago
Get ready to answer why an iPhone is different than an xbox
medhir · 4h 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 · 4h 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.
ribosometronome · 2h 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.
scq · 4h ago
Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch should be forced to open up as well.
Closed ecosystems only benefit the corporations that control them.
socalgal2 · 3h 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 · 2h ago
No, it doesn't. They're not enforcing this under anti-trust law.
socalgal2 · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 31m 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
t_sawyer · 4h 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 · 3h 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 · 2h 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).
MattRix · 4h ago
One is a general computing device and one is for a specific task (gaming).
nozzlegear · 3h 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 · 3h 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 · 3h 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?
ribosometronome · 2h 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.
yieldcrv · 4h ago
> 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 · 4h 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.
cyberax · 4h 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 · 3h 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 · 4h ago
also, you can't install software on your own device. Even when you can, you have to ask apple permission.
bn-l · 2h 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 · 15m 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 · 1h 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.
smt88 · 2h ago
The Play Store proves you absolutely wrong about this. It was an unfiltered Wild West until very recently.
hereme888 · 4h ago
The judge should slap them in the wrist! Just like last time. Served them well...
w_for_wumbo · 3h 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 · 3h 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.
eviks · 34m ago
What is the magic information dissemination service that guarantees that every future customer knows?
canogat · 3h ago
Apple is still a hardware company. A loss of revenue from software and services sales is far from ruinous for Apple.
77pt77 · 2h 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.”
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...
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I also heartily recommend both seasons of Wolf Hall. About Cromwell rather than More, but still fascinating.
Boards private jet to Monaco
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.
No comments yet
(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.
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.
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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.
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’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.
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!
Another word for that is "competing". And yeah, exactly.
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.
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.
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.
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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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 is your imagination 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.
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.
The ruling means this starts immediately it seems, as I cannot see a date listed anywhere.
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".
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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).
Closed ecosystems only benefit the corporations that control them.
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
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?
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.
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.
Apple products are status products. Especially in the USA.
No one will care.