Apple Disabling 'Sign in with Apple' for Epic Games on September 11
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
Apple can, at will, remove your entire foundation or business, your (their) customers and your existence on iOS is just gone.
Apple is a company that needs to be brought down a peg or two, it's far too 'valuable' in terms of its market worth, and needs a huge kick up the ass as Microsoft once had to show them some respect.
And the EU will levy the world's biggest fine at Apple, I predict north of $5 billion if not $10 billion for abusing their status with this being a notable case.
Certainly, for public opinion, it means you now have to "tow the line", no protesting allowed. If you dare challenge us, we WILL REMOVE YOU.
Horrible company.
Also, businesses generally don't have to do business with other businesses that are suing them.
Isn't that how all private companies work? If you walk into a mom-and-pop corner shop with no "shoes or shirt" you'll be removed as well—whether or not you think it's some kind of righteous protest.
When I worked in retail and scouted prices at the completion they would ask me to leave the store.
I don't really care about Epic's stake in the matter; they are clearly making plenty of money. A smaller company with a different idea that treads the line with their in-app-purchases would be in a tough place.
And it would be a poor business model if it were capable of ending your business, no?
And I didn't think Google was involved here?
Not to mention that if you DO manage to build a successful competitor to GPlay, you’ll have to worry about Google’s “white hat” hit squad at Project Zero.
Epic is suing Google at the same time for the same reason as Apple. Maybe they're not "involved" if you mean that Apple and Google are colluding against Epic, but they're both the subjects of the same discussion.
A console is designed for a specific task (playing games and similar software), the market is somewhat competitive and you are free to buy a PC/Mac/Linux and get 99% of the functionality (minus a few exclusive titles). In fact consoles nowadays are just PCs running a custom build of a general-purpose OS.
The mobile market is different. There are only 2 dominant players (Apple and Google), they both have similar anti-competitive restrictions (side-loading on Android is a non-starter given the various security warnings, and even then the lack of officially-supported root access on Android means there are things official Google software can do that you can't do without resorting to exploits, plus Android requires you to accept Google's terms & privacy policy which does not comply with the GDPR). There are no other players; the open-source alternatives such as Pinephone are not viable alternatives as they cut you off from the vast majority of apps out there. Let's take a period-correct example, are there any Covid contact-tracing clients available for platforms besides iOS and Android?
There's a reason alternatives to iOS and Android haven't picked up, some of those reasons are because for those that care to side load apps they can already do it on Android (or can go further and replace their OS) so not much incentive for a third mobile OS. If there was a strong enough need for an alternative then that would exist already.
Google has hindered Android so that it doesn't allow third party app stores to install apps in the background, upgrade apps or batch install apps like the Play Store can.
Microsoft and Playstation also allow for cross-platform play, and crucially unlike Apple, actually provide a significant amount of services to developers for their cuts, including but not limited to QA services, SDK and hardware support from actual MS/Sony employees, and marketing spend.
Additionally, while MS and Sony require all developers to use their stores or APIs for IAP, they allow developers (at least large ones) to heavily customize those storefronts, and charge significantly less than 30% for the enforced privilege of using their IAP APIs; the exact rates being a matter of negotiation.
> Microsoft and Playstation also allow for cross-platform play
Don't some games allow iOS / PC cross-platform play? Epic's Fortnite did, didn't it?
I don’t understand how this is materially different from apples investments into Xcode, discoverability & promotion in the App Store/“marketing spend”, etc. Apple does tons of stuff with the big players behind closed doors, they highlight it every keynote and that’s just the ones they talk about on the “real human being” front.
But in that scenario, you can always walk out and walk into a competing grocery store and try to find a better price. The fact that you can walk is what makes it a competitive scenario, and not an anti-trust one. The question here is, is being able to walk away and use an Android (or other smartphone) product an equivalent (thus fair competition) - or is software in the iOS ecosystem unique enough that not being allowed to participate unless you follow arcane rules is unfair abuse of a monopoly.
Sony explicitly didn't allow for cross-play until 2 years ago [https://kotaku.com/sony-is-finally-allowing-cross-play-on-th...], even though it was technically possible before then [https://www.engadget.com/2017-06-24-rocket-league-cross-netw...]. In fact, the only reason Sony opened up to cross-play is due to pressure to stay competitive with rival platform Xbox. This was a take-it-or-leave it situation, but Sony was too big to leave. Nothing changed until Sony caved to social pressure.
If the argument is that Apple is a unique kind of device that Apple has a monopoly over, it would hard to argue that Sony and Microsoft don't enjoy the same monopoly powers. On the other hand, if argument is that it's easy enough to switch from Playstation to Xbox, then how is that different from buying a new phone?
In fact, I would bet that Epic sued Apple not because it's more monopolistic, but because they want to set a legal precedent that they can then apply to Playstation, Xbox and Switch, without threatening Epic's core business on consoles.
Rather easily: players can own two consoles with nothing more than the hardware investment, and there's a long social experience of dedicated gamers doing just this. Owning two phones, however, requires two separate cell/data plans and duplication of every other regular-use app (productivity, e-mail, etc.)
The core distinction is that a console is a device, whereas iOS/Android is a platform.
multiple console platforms require multiple accounts with separate friends lists, paid online access, save games, etc. with WiFi calling, separate cell/data plans are not necessary. [1]
> The core distinction is that a console is a device, whereas iOS/Android is a platform.
a console gaming platform certainly seems like a platform. games, friends list with chat, applications such as video streaming, etc.
[1] https://thedroidguy.com/trick-drop-cell-phone-plan-completel...
I can't run my Switch copy of Warframe on my PS4. I have to install Warframe for PS4 on the PS4, and then I'll be playing only with other Warframe-on-PS4 players.
Similarly for every paid title I have on the PS4 if I move to Switch I have to buy those titles again, assuming they're available on the Switch. Many of the titles I have on Switch require a Nintendo Online account which is a paid service.
So I'm not sure what you think you're addressing with that comparison, other than desperately trying to find evidence to support your assertion that iPhone is somehow different to a gaming console in terms of being a platform or device.
Would you be willing to agree that the relative importance of a smartphone in 2020 is far greater than the relative importance of a video game console in virtually everyone’s lives?
Nor does Fortnite.
It seems to run counter to everything I've heard when people compare the iOS ecosystem to consoles. Where can I learn more?
Appendix A1 (page 16) here https://www.analysisgroup.com/globalassets/insights/publishi...
Truth is Xbox does have independent developer programs and you can sideload games.
Truth is, iOS has the same. You have been able to sideload apps on iOS, without paying for a developer account, for years.
It need to at least be persistent or it didn't count.
Except you don’t! I really recommend looking at AltStore before judging the convenience based on how things were years ago when you last had the whim to look.
> AltStore will periodically attempt to refresh your apps in the background, and you can always manually refresh your apps from within AltStore.
It's not solution, it is workaround for the apple's creepy behavior.
Because you don’t want solutions, you just want to complain about Apple not doing exactly what you want when you want. Apple’s not your company if you expect them to cater to your whims, that’s never been their MO (for better or for worse).
> apple's creepy behavior
Really?
UWP runs in a sandbox castrated XBox environment.
> For games development, Xbox One, like other games consoles, is a specialized piece of hardware that requires a specific hardware-based development kit to access its full potential. If you are working on a game that requires access to the maximum potential of the Xbox One hardware, consider registering with the ID@Xbox program to get access to an Xbox One development kit.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/xbox-apps/syste...
How is this true? Consoles predate app stores by many decades.
I'm not convinced that the console ecosystem would be destroyed if you forced them all to open up. Quite the contrary: I'd happily invest in consoles if I could build it myself with open hardware.
If consoles were not price subsidized like now, their prices would go up and sales would be affected. Presumably there'd just be fewer people who could afford to buy the latest one. You might see lower or higher specs in consoles since the market would be a little more niche. Xbox might merge fully into Windows 10 and the line between console and gamer PC may disappear.
At the very least, I think we can all agree that the console ecosystem would change. Maybe "destroy" is too strong, but maybe not.
Did opening up destroy the PC market? No. But opening up another console market probably would destroy it; there's no reason to separate a hypothetical new PC market from the old PC market. So if you have a PC market and a PS4 market, and then you open the PS4, you have a PC market and another PC market, and then you just have the PC market.
And the claim that consoles are just closed down PCs is absurd. Consoles can play AAA games at a fraction of the cost of your average PC. The hardware that goes into building a console is significantly different than a PC.
there was a time when consoles didnt require internet tethering, were media capable, and could be used for common PC tasks.
Still are. I watch nearly all my TV through my PS4.
Eh.. no, I think this is reductive.
In addition to being closed PCs, consoles are also an OS and collection of services that make playing games easier and make the process of configuring the device easy.
They also often come with unique hardware (3DS, Wii U, Switch, Vita) that offer dedicated features that don't make sense on PCs.
Most importantly, consoles are standardized PCs. It's not that they're closed, it's that if a game says it works on the Switch, and you have a Switch, that's it. That's all you need to know. PCs offer a lot more complication because there are multiple hardware variations and because the OS isn't specially designed to provide a lot of dedicated frameworks and interfaces to make running games and taking advantage of the hardware easy.
I don't think any of those benefits would go away if 3rd-parties were allowed to make compatible games without asking permission.
It would be a lot harder to loss-lead the hardware, sure. And it would maybe have some implications for quality-control if anyone could start selling unplayable games at Walmart. I'm sympathetic to those arguments.
But I think it's reductive to say that the only reason anyone would ever buy a console is because it's a closed market.
Yes, I'm familiar with the economic reasons for the existence of consoles. But look at the parent comment:
>>> I'd happily invest in consoles if I could build it myself with open hardware.
And poof, all the benefits of standardization are gone. This is just an ordinary PC. You put in the parts you want. And developers suddenly have to support every part anyone might want.
> I don't think any of those benefits would go away if 3rd-parties were allowed to make compatible games without asking permission.
As I read inetknght, he's talking about making the hardware open, not letting people sell games for it.
My apologies, I misread inetknght's comment.
Agreed, a user-built console without any standardization is just a PC, maybe with a different OS.
I disagree about unique hardware not making sense on PCs. Can you provide examples? 3DS and Vita are about the size of a raspberry pi and with some added sensors and controllers. The Wii's controller is pretty similar to the HTC Vive's wand which connects to a PC just fine.
> consoles are standardized PCs. It's not that they're closed, it's that if a game says it works on the Switch, and you have a Switch, that's it. That's all you need to know.
PC games often provide minimum/recommended requirements. PC games often compiled for the x86 or x86_64 architecture just the same as most modern consoles use. Rendering APIs, hardware controllers, and sensors are all standardized. What more do you need?
> PCs offer a lot more complication because there are multiple hardware variations and because the OS isn't specially designed to provide a lot of dedicated frameworks and interfaces to make running games and taking advantage of the hardware easy.
No; I absolutely and fully disagree. The OS provides an operating system. Consumer operating systems are specifically designed to provide a lot of dedicated frameworks and interfaces to make running any software and take advantage of any hardware.
Xbox uses x86 based hardware. The same goes for PS4. Modern controllers are well known to be just simply USB or bluetooth, both of which have PC interfaces. The only thing that ties games to a console is the proprietary vendor-locked API.
Sure, you could create these things in a PC format, but what I'm getting at is that nobody has. They don't make sense in the current PC market. Selling games that need special non-universal peripherals is really hard. Not impossible (Guitar hero pulled it off), but very difficult.
The HTC Vive is a good example of that. It's about as close to a general peripheral as you can get on the current market (and even it strays irritatingly close to "platform" status). But VR is a wildly niche market. It's nowhere near the market penetration of the 3DS or Wii.
I don't mean that those peripherals can't be built for PC, I mean that we don't have compelling evidence that it makes sense to build them primarily targeting PCs.
> to make running any software and take advantage of any hardware.
You can tune a game way more if you're not targeting 'any' hardware -- it's a lot easier if you're targeting one piece of hardware that works one way.
Take a look at the incredible work that emulators like Citra and Dolphin are doing right now. Reverse engineering the API is only one piece of that puzzle, another big challenge is dealing with the games that are designed to take advantage of hardware quirks and undocumented behaviors.
It's a huge simplification to say that those emulators/games are just based on the API and nothing else. They're often emulating wildly specific behaviors that wouldn't be standardized across multiple implementations of the same API on multiple pieces of hardware. That's why its a such a huge engineering challenge to build an emulator in the first place -- you're constantly balancing accuracy and performance, figuring out when you need to load and emulate specific hardware features.
> Rendering APIs, hardware controllers, and sensors are all standardized. What more do you need?
If you make a game for Switch today, you need to target one aspect ratio at two resolutions, and a very small, finite set of controller layouts. If you tried to release a PC game with those kinds of restrictions, you'd be laughed out of the market.
As someone who's currently working on supporting multiple controllers for a PC game, it's really stinking annoying. Even aftermarket XBox controllers will occasionally just report entirely separate button layouts depending on the OS they're being used with. I can't even just read the hardware codes and base the layout on that, I have controllers that map buttons differently depending on whether I'm in Ubuntu or Manjaro. Libraries like SDL2 help a bit with that, but even then the situation isn't perfect and you often end up making multiple control schemes that degrade gracefully when features are missing.
And from a consumer perspective, minimum requirements for PCs aren't really a scientific thing. People don't know what their GPUs are, they don't have that information in front of them when they go to a store. They buy games as gifts for other people who's PCs they've never seen.
Compare all that to, "does Billy have the Wii U? Cool, then Smash Bros will just work on it."
You could have something like that in the PC space if everybody got together and we had industry-wide standardization on certain requirements or parts for PCs, I can imagine that existing. But it doesn't exist right now, and it's not clear to me that most PC game developers would want that (I wouldn't), and it's not clear to me that current PC-gamers want that (I don't).
It's not a propriety vs Open thing. If someone wants to make a console that has all of its specs completely open and uses off the shelf parts, then fine. Consumers won't care either way. Consumers care about being able to look at exactly one logo on a game disk that indicates the game will play perfectly on every device that shares that logo.
The PC market is not even close to that goal, you're greatly overestimating how standardized even the average Windows install is, and that gets even worse once we start talking about more freedom-friendly OSes like Linux.
https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-go/
The fact is that besides some enthusiasts no one into games for money cares that they exist.
My 3DS supports savestates & backups for games like Animal Crossing that let me maintain multiple towns at the same time, custom emulators that run my old Gameboy cartridge backups that I made, really amazing mods like Project Restoration for Majora's Mask, plus custom themes and easier storage management for things like pictures and songs. By comparison, an unhacked Switch still can't even back up all of its save games to the cloud.
If you don't want us to go after consoles as well, maybe don't tempt us? I'm sympathetic to the argument that being loss leaders makes consoles unique and special and different from a smartphone, but if the general consensus here is that they're exactly the same...
If you're arguing that this case is a slippery slope, try to come up with some consequences farther down the slope that don't sound kind of nice.
I don't think anyone can reasonably argue that Apple would stop producing the iPhone if sideloading was allowed. The smartphone market doesn't operate the same way as the console market.
It's not "their" product. It's mine, I purchased a license to use their software on my hardware. I'm not beholden to continue using their software
The App Store, however, is their store.
The 30% per transaction only really makes sense for apps for which Apple has provided the advertising, distribution and processing -- the App Store.
I'd love to just provide a direct download for my customers who also happen to be Apple (device) customers.
I also think there are more substantial differences. The most major being the difficulty in switching. Switching consoles means losing my data most of the time, but they're just save games, achievements and friends list. If my console melted down tomorrow, it'd be fine. Switching phone OS is a lot harder. Contacts and calendars are relatively easy to switch, but it gets hard after that. How do I get all my data off the old phone? Am I sure I exported my 2FA keys right? If my phone melts down and takes the cloud backups with it, my life is in a world of hurt.
I am also curious how first-party software will be handled. Is it okay to have a closed marketplace on your own software if that marketplace only serves your software? Just as an example, if I get an LG smart fridge that has a marketplace to download new widgets for the display, and LG only allows the sale of LG apps there, is that okay? I'm wondering if app stores won't just shift their model. Instead of "you upload an app, and we'll pay you what users pay us for it minus our cut" it will become "You grant us a perpetual license to distribute your application, and we will pay you 70% royalties on the money we earn". I wonder if that shifts any liability around
And an inability to play every game you've purchased. Even if you didn't buy the games digitally, it'd be amazingly difficult to resell your games to buy the same ones for a different platform. Heck, just look at all the groaning online about Epic store exclusive games because people didn't want to have to deal with Steam AND Epic launchers.
>I am also curious how first-party software will be handled. Is it okay to have a closed marketplace on your own software if that marketplace only serves your software?
Similarly, why should only Epic be able to sell skins for Fortnite?
Emulators exists (unlike Apple which bans any virtualization of MacOS under non-macs).
>it'd be amazingly difficult to resell your games to buy the same ones for a different platform
Selling is easy. 'Buying the same game' is often a nonfactor due to how the games market works (many games become outdated quickly, multiplayer servers go offline, etc.).
>>Is it okay to have a closed marketplace on your own software if that marketplace only serves your software?
>Similarly, why should only Epic be able to sell skins for Fortnite?
There's no duty to have a open marketplace, that is open to 3rd parties. Not having it is no different than offering different paid versions of the main software (imagine Fortnite Premium Edition with X skins, or iPhone only with Apple apps). However, once the marketplace is open to 3rd parties, there's a duty to allow fair competition, and that does limit Apple.
You can sideload apps with a free dev account for several years now. The only condition is that you have to resign the binary every seven days. There are even desktop apps that automate it.
> AltStore will periodically attempt to refresh your apps in the background, and you can always manually refresh your apps from within AltStore.
This is not how XBox games developed with XDK are actually developed and they can see all the hardware, instead of being into a UWP sandbox.
It is more to cater to indie devs as means to get something into the XBox similar to XNA used to allow, it is not meant for proper XBox games as such.
Also it hasn't been updated for a while.
Eventually the console makers will die due to lack of funding, and Epic will release their own console which will be more locked down than an Apple iPhone.
This is whataboutism for sure.
It moves the discussion to a less constructive, more re-hashed place.
Consoles are different because they're not sold as general purpose computing devices and do not have the market penetration size that iOS does.
There is a great argument for allowing all consumers to install whatever software they want on all devices they purchased - including consoles - by law. I'd like to see this - for over a decade, a lot of tech communities have pushed for this - but this isn't the conversation we're having today.
iOS is only 20% of the global smartphone market, PS 4 outperforms it on world market share.
Mobile phones are how many individuals interface with the rest of the world.
Not to mention your case gets worse when there are way less restrictions on releasing games on Xbox/PlayStation/Switch than on iOS.
I don't believe any of those vendors take anything close to 30% of in-game revenue. And the reason is they compete with each other, quite vigorously, for the same set of users looking for the same set of products (consoles and games).
> or classify iOS as somehow different...
Right, because Apple is leveraging their dominance of an external market (high end mobile phones) to control pricing in the game market that "should" be more akin to consoles. But it demonstrably isn't. And that is a problem.
If you want to argue here, the proper argument is that iOS isn't a monopoly (and that Google charges similar fees). But don't argue that it's the same as a console, that just doesn't make sense.
Worked for one of the worlds largest video games publishers for 6+ years. Now I work for the largest games publisher in the world, so, if anyone would get a discount for being big it would be us.
It’s 30% platform fee for sales on the PlayStation or xbox platforms, 70k eur/y developer fee (and you still have to buy hardware which is double sometimes triple price from the consumer stuff).
Valve has the same 30% and the same “non-compete” w.r.t discounts on other platforms.
This is pretty standard, and is one of the reasons why people tend to release on epic or steam and not both.
For publishers/developers getting a special deal, there's just no upside to sharing that information, even internally.
Since I can see total unit sales and total income and it’s broken down on SKU- then it would have been easy for me to see a discrepancy from what I was told our deals were by my masters at HQ but there never was one.
I think you assume too much of executives, they are consumers of our work, they don’t create any reports or such themselves.
The Microsoft store takes a mere 5%.
The Epic Games Store is at... 12% I believe. There's also no exclusivity from either Steam or EGS. The only condition is not using Steam to promote a game that will release first on EGS.
Although, while we had good relationships with Microsoft at Ubisoft on a technical basis- I'm not sure about the business arrangement. If Valve is any indication then it was likely incredibly hostile.
Epic does only take 12%, it's an outlier, and is gaining traction because of it.
Consoles should also be forced to open up though, and there's no reason why that would "destroy the console ecosystem". They might have to raise the prices of the consoles, but everyone has to do it so it won't matter, and the consoles can also either be financed or monthly fees for online play can be increased.
Consoles opening up would be a good thing. I'm not sure why you say it would destroy their ecosystem.
In other words, Xbox is already more open than iOS. I believe they opened it up with the Xbox 360 around 2007. https://www.xbox.com/en-US/developers#developerprograms
It took months of back and forth and the Xbox team had plenty of input from UX, to monetization, particularly when it came to users buying stuff on other platforms and using them on Xbox.
Sure, MS let us do what Sony and Nintendo would not, so I guess they're the most "open", but make no mistake, it's Microsoft's platform.
Console ecosystems are already open-by-law, based on past cases from the 80s and 90s. You can already publish a game to a Switch or PlayStation without ever going through Nintendo or Sony (so long as you don't steal any copywritten assets to do so). You can even publish your own software, that modifies anyone elses software (again, so long as you don't break copyright to do so).
Their eShop/online stores are not yet open, but the devices main software sources are open by law (things like the BluRay drive on a PS4, or the Cartridge slot on a Switch). This is how things like "unauthorized games" were legally published, as well as software editors/debuggers like GameShark, all existed 100% legally as far back as the 90's.
Apple is actually attempting to overturn precedent here, they're trying to claim their TOS is somehow more legally binding than everyone elses is, and trying to reverse battles already fought and lost by Atari / Nintendo / Sega, because companies didn't have easy way to retroactively punish users for fair use back then, like Apple can and does do today.
copyrighted
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that you don't actually need to do that to be legal. You just have to clean room reverse engineer the DRM. After that, anything you have legal access to, you can legally use.
You could just get past the DRM on the BluRay drive or SD card slot or whatever, and then assuming you have legal rights to use it, load up a full set of Unreal/Unity/Renderware/whatever middleware you want and be off to the races.
Again: This caselaw pre-dates always-on-DRM and Apple-angry-tantrum-responses stuff. So this stuff was 100% legal and clear in the PS2 / Xbox / GameCube days, when there was a clear separation between the two. Now that Apple has tried to muddy the water by pretending their DRM is a "platform" that "provides value", I suspect it will be easier to confuse folks
As far as I know, the courts didn't require that Nintendo, Sega or Sony make the consoles open - they just didn't make it illegal to reverse engineer the protections.
I'm curious what cases you think actually established this precedent? Keep in mind that a court saying "reverse engineering is not copyright infringement" is not the same thing as a court saying "a hardware manufacturer is legally obligated to permit the distribution of third-party software on its hardware".
> You can already publish a game to a Switch or PlayStation without ever going through Nintendo or Sony (so long as you don't steal any copywritten assets to do so).
I don't believe this is accurate, at least not in the sense of commercially publishing a game in a physical store or on Nintendo or Sony's digital storefronts. I'm certainly not aware of any games that have been published in physical stores without the publisher having signed a publishing agreement with Nintendo or Sony.
They did put commercial unlicensed software into US retailers, without any agreement from Nintendo or Sony.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade (1992) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nin.... (1992)
(TL/DR: you are allowed to build and publish and sell unlicensed software for a console. You are allowed to break DRM to do this, so long as it's a clean-room reverse engineer (don't pull a TENGEN). You are allowed to do this for your own uses (sell your own games) and are allowed to do this even if that software edits other people's legally-purchased software (cheat engines / debuggers / mods / etc). You can legally do this without any license agreement from Nintendo or Sony)
This is how GameSharks/ActionReplays/etc were legally sold in every Wal*Mart / Target / Meijer / GameStop / etc in the US for a decade or more. Their boot screens all contain boot messages saying "this product is NOT licensed by Nintendo/Sega/Sony/etc" for this reason - https://nerdbacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/GS3.jpg
These are still sold, legally at retail stores like GameStop and WalMart, even today: https://www.codejunkies.com/Products/PowerSaves-Pro__EF00111... (again, still 100% unlicensed from Nintendo)
But it doesn't mean those platforms are "open", otherwise under that definition the iOS platform is "open" too because you can legally jailbreak your phone and distribute jailbroken apps. I don't think that's what people mean when they say a platform is "open".
> This is how GameSharks/ActionReplays/etc were legally sold
I was more curious if any actual games had been sold this way.
Isn't this why people pay the Apple tax? To have them protect you (their users) from 'bad apples'? Everyone liked their over bearing approach to their eco-system until it directly affected them, and now it's too much? Have your cake and eat it too?
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/09/android11-...
isn't the expression toe the line? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line#Misspelling_as_%2...
Like any breach of contract, it should be dealt appropriately.
> The Court finds that with respect to Epic Games’ motion as to its games, including Fortnite, Epic Games has not yet demonstrated irreparable harm. The current predicament appears of its own making. Epic strategically chose to breach its agreements with Apple
How can purposefully violating someone's contract be a prerequisite for bringing a lawsuit against the organization whose contract you're violating? Where is the legal argument backing up "They needed to do it this way"?
The difference is important, the temporary restraining order's effects are only limited to that August-September time window, and the hearing itself had limited argument, and very little preparation time (Epic presumably thinking Apple wouldn't be so aggressive, and would want to drag things out, which they do, but they're also probably hoping to force a settlement as soon as possible). Part of Epic's legal team's arguments was that there is binding legal precedent that "self inflicted harm" was not disqualifying of any of their claims in an anti-trust suit due to the standing hurdle (of note: a similar anti-trust suit filed by an Apple user was thrown out without a trial on grounds that the customer was not able to sufficiently demonstrate Apple's practices harmed them; standing is a very big hurdle), but Epic's lawyers messed up and forgot to file that case brief in the documents they submitted before the restraining order hearing, so the judge made no determination then. They indicated it would be included in the injunction hearing filings. Basically, everything the judge has determined so far could change at the end of the month.
So far it hasn't been. It appears obvious their approach was to first inflict PR damage & garner public support prior to commencing legal action.
Which case is this? Epic’s complaint [1] only mentions the word “standing” once and seeks broad restraints on Apple’s “conduct” that go beyond the enforcement of one TOS clause. I can see why strategically, Epic thought it was best to build the record by breaching its contract with Apple first, but it’s not clear that this was an essential precondition to the lawsuit.
[1] https://cdn2.unrealengine.com/apple-complaint-734589783.pdf
I think you've misunderstood this part of the hearing. The cases they attempted to cite said that the doctrine of "unclean hands" is not a valid defense in an antitrust claim. It's unrelated to standing or whether their injury was self-inflicted for purposes of the TRO and the judge said in her ruling that it wasn't relevant to her analysis. [1]
> a similar anti-trust suit filed by an Apple user was thrown out without a trial on grounds that the customer was not able to sufficiently demonstrate Apple's practices harmed them
If you are referring to Apple v. Pepper note that this ruling was reversed by the Supreme Court and the case is still ongoing. [2]
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.364265... (Footnote on Page 5)
[2] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/17-204_bq7d.pdf
Apple also has noncompetes in its employee contracts, even though such provisions are illegal in CA. Should we prevent Apple employees from moving to Apple competitors in violation of those illegal non-compete provisions?
The entire purpose of government is to serve us, and we should change the rules if we think that a 30% money grab of all developer's income is unethical.
Its the same reason we support Net Neutrality. We instituted (or tried to anyway) controls at the government level to prevent ISPs from abusing their position.
Even if they do get fined this amount, it would have been worth it for them to abuse their position with the developers.
Not soon... Apple is loved by a good majority of EU citizens, and while that's the case, the EU won't fine them. Fines are for 'evil corporations' as deemed by a voter...
Laws in the EU are far less strict and precise to begin with than US laws that you might be used to. The EU competition commission has wideranging powers to fine almost any company as it sees fit for even no reason at all. But to maintain its own existence, the public (voters -> MEPs) need to think it's doing a good job. A good way to do that is to fine companies voters think are evil.
It doesn't really come down to if the law is precise or not, but how it is applied.
For Epic, though, only 12% of their revenue comes from IOS, so they're willing to dump Apple.
edit: Their 2FA can do either SMS or email so that's a yes.
They also offer the software token method, but most kids will not enable it.
Just like they ended the Microsoft OS monopoly abuses. Dream on.
How much of a cut is Steam taking when you sell software on their store?
How much of a cut will Epic be taking when you sell software on their store?
This is completely different to how much Mastercard charges you for selling stuff from your store.
I've owned and used Apple products continuously for over 30 years, and I'm not ashamed to say that I am rooting HARD for Epic on this. Apple doesn't give a shit about innovation when they are making money hand over fist. They are spending all their time nurturing their cash cow. It's time to butcher that motherfucker.
You mean, Apple, like any grown-up company would do in their place, has rightfully shown Epic the door? Google kicked Fortnite from Play Store for the same reason. And had they tried this against consoles (where devs also pay 30%), they'd be kicked out of the respective console forever.
What's a "non-cry-baby" reaction in your opinion?
Epic hoped for preferential treatment just because they are big, and they've enjoyed preferential treatment on consoles. hey've run into Apple applying their TOS equally to everybody and are now somehow pissed.
It's crazy but I didn't even notice this paradigm shift until they announced their credit card. Apple used to be the company to push boundaries and revolutionize computing in some way every few years. The last real "innovation" I feel Apple has come up with was the Retina display, pushing OEMs everywhere towards higher pixel counts and better overall user experiences. Before that we got everything from the iPhone and iPod and even iTunes, to USB and WiFi brought to the mainstream, to crazy, beautiful designs that worked well, like the iMac G4.
Just for instance working off local memory, The iMac hasn't seen a form factor update since what, 2012 when they slimmed down the curve? Which even then was a minor facelift of the 2007 design at best, which itself was an aluminum facelift. Before then we had new iMac designs every few years, between the G3 in '98, the G4 in '02, and the G5 settling on the current form factor in '04.
Not sure what you mean here. USB was used everywhere and around the time iPhone launched, microusb was used by a large portion of new phones. Apple is pretty much the only actively USB-avoiding company left. They still use a proprietary connection for their devices.
They certainly sped up the wifi on mobile trend, but I would argue with bringing it to the mainstream.
Some innovations I can think of are force touch, fingerprint sensor (arguably), Face ID, T2 chip / hardware security, Touch Bar, the heart sensor on Watch, and (possibly) wireless charging. Now, some of those, like the Touch Bar are widely reviled here, but whether or not you find it useful, it is an innovation.
Design-wise there's been incremental innovations, some of which haven't succeed (scissors keyboard). The Jet Black iPhone was a design innovation, or at least a manufacturing innovation, since they had to preprocess the metal surface so that the black dye would soak in beyond the outer layer.
They should have sued and never have done their "pay direct" thing if they wanted to stay operational on Apple platforms during the lawsuit. Apple couldn't retaliate at that point since any termination attempt would be reversed by a court order.
If they did that, any court hearing the lawsuit would throw it out because Epic would not have standing. Epic had to do it this way to have any hope of a court hearing their case.
0: https://cdn2.unrealengine.com/apple-complaint-734589783.pdf
That would have made the chances of the lawsuit being thrown out over BS standing issues much higher
Apple's other actions are just retaliatory: threatening the unreal engine, terminating developer accounts from affiliates, and yanking Apple login. It's those actions that you shouldn't expect.
Epic Games is free to build their own phone and app store platform. There is nothing stopping them. Other than the risk that people don't want to buy into whatever they build. But Apple had the same risks.
If this is truly a good faith negotiation (and not a stunt) on the part of Epic Games, they need to understand they're just losing the negotiation -- that's all. Business is business. Epic Games is just bad at it.
Epic games (AFAIK) started (the public portion of) this conversation by violating terms that Apple set forth in a contract that Epic games agreed to. Apple is defending their contract with their behavior. They have the stronger position unless the law comes to the aid of Epic games (which is what I'm assuming Epic games hopes to induce).
Sidenote: The only law capable of negating a contract is a bankruptcy. Neither party has declared bankruptcy. I have a feeling the law is going to be on Apple's side too.
The precedence Apple wants to set is: break ToS, get kicked off the store. Break ToS and then try to take Apple to court, get kicked off the platform.
It's pretty obvious that Fortnite is just the pawn that Epic used to wage war. This is obvious to Apple too, hence their counterclaim for punitive damages.
This is the same concept as tenant rights. Just because you are renting someone's house doesn't give them complete control over your life. A landlord can't randomly barge into your house (even if technically belongs to them) and sell your stuff.
And before someone comments "But there is no tenancy here", well it's an analogy and it's the same idea. The reason tenant rights exist is because we recognize that having a place to live in is a basic existential need for an individual and therefore we place restrictions on what landlords can get away it, despite the fact that being a landlord is far from a monopoly.
Something similar needs to happen for these bottlenecking platforms that are basically existential requirements for a lot of companies. Also applies to payment processors btw.
Even at much smaller scale, you may need someone more than they need you, and they will negotiate like it - for legal and commercial terms.
Also, terms of service are usually negotiable - presuming you're worth negotiating with. GE has no problem negotiating with Google - you as an individual might have to take what their standard is.
Whats being asked isn't some massive change to their software. Its freedom for the developer and user to have a choice in payment platforms. As much as Apple tries to obfuscate it, the AppStore is not the kernel, its not the graphics layer, its not the file system, its not something that is needed to run software. The other OS components are already being abstracted away to some extent by cross-platform tooling, and the AppStore is way way easier than those.
On one hand, Apple will never take legal responsibility to audit software on their App Store and certify it free from malware, because doing so will be cost prohibitive and/or impossible. But at the same time, they want to claim its this 'utopia' that will get destroyed if users are allowed the freedom to pick a different store. How about you let us decide that?
After Apple kicked Fortnite from the iOS store, there was an outcry of people who had previously spent money on it through Apple's in-app purchases and now wanted a refund.
Some of those users switched to playing Fortnite on a laptop or Android phone instead, but of course they were still using Sign in with Apple if they had originally created their account and paid for items on iOS. Apple is now locking out those users.
So I predict another wave of upset users, this time it'll be the people that purchased through Apple and were then attempting to play elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Epic now has a very good reason to collect a working email address from every past iOS customer, which they can immediately use to offer the customer a 20% rebate on future purchases if they buy directly through Epic and circumvent the Apple tax.
Plus as an added benefit, Japan has now started an antitrust investigation against Apple after various smaller Japanese game studios (most of them Unreal Engine customers) have come out in support of Epic: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-03/apple-app...
And lastly, the combination of pressure on Epic together with the looming iOS14 update have made iOS a lot less attractive for mobile game studios, most of whom traditionally used advertisements to subsidize free players: https://www.consumeracquisition.com/game-over-ios-14-idfa-lo...
I found this quote which I think is quite fitting: "As the folks at Microsoft used to say in the early days of the Xbox, developers are the canaries in the coal mine. When they start dying, the platform is in trouble."
https://venturebeat.com/2020/09/04/the-deanbeat-apple-must-t...
Interesting point about the looming iOS14 update. Makes you wonder whether Apple will ultimately fall at their privacy sword, similar to how Google fell at its own "Don't do evil" motto. E.g. it's meaningless bravado when not applied to universally to all countries, aka China.
AFAIK Epic did their move by pushing "legal" iOS code, then doing an over-the-air update of adding non-Apple payment system.
Mozilla can't just push a rendering & JavaScript engine "over the air".
Just include both native renderer and webkit, and over the air switch which you use.
Plus I doubt Mozilla is in the mode to burn months of programmers time on a stunt right now.
No, the code was hidden in the app itself, just disabled via server-side flag. After the app was approved they then flipped the flag to enable it.
Source: Epic admits this in their legal filings.
As a long time Apple user, and open software advocate I'd literally cry tears of joy. I'd also have to throw Zuck a bone if FB joined.
I really just want Apple to separate their code signing (Developer) service with their advertising and distribution service (App Store).
As a user, it’s appalling to see developers taking the side of user-hostile companies in order to take down a company trying to protect users.
It makes me want to avoid any products from such companies and developers.
It would likely be unusably slow if they did. Apple doesn’t allow apps in the store with the required entitlements to make an optimized JavaScript engine of entirely Mozilla’s design.
Would Epic be willing to lead the fight against consoles as well (they charge 30%, too)? Oh, right...
epic is proposing a 12% rate to all the stores and asked Google for it as well, they have fought playstation policies against crossplay and won in the past.
"All stores" as in "actually all stores" or "Apple Store and Google Play Store only"? Their entire "fight" is very much targeted, and consoles (which are Epic's key partners) are not really targeted. Moreover, Epic goes out of its way to define consoles as something else.
--- start quotes ---
“The 30 per cent store tax is a high cost in a world where game developers’ 70 per cent must cover all the cost of developing, operating, and supporting their games,” he explains.
“There’s a rationale for this on console where there’s enormous investment in hardware, often sold below cost, and marketing campaigns in broad partnership with publishers. But on open platforms, 30 per cent is disproportionate to the cost of the services these stores perform, such as payment processing, download bandwidth, and customer service.” [1]
"Consoles are unique in that the hardware is sold at or below the cost of manufacturing, and is subsidized by software sales, whereas iOS and Android are insanely profitable for Apple and Google from just hardware sales and ads." [2]
--- end quotes ---
Regardless of your opinion on 30% cuts in AppStore and Play Store, these are some really shoddy arguments.
[1] 2018, https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-07-31-30-percent...
[2] 2020, https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/127327654856984166...
Consoles will become more expensive but games will cost $60. Payment processing fees have to be passed onto the customer. Your $0.99 game with 30% cut is now a $1.30 game because of credit card fees. No more Steam cards at retailers.
All these statements require hard proof. Additionally, "you already earn more money than I'd like" is not exactly a valid case to make against a cut.
Apple is by far the most distinct case, so it perfectly reasonable to focus on Apple (Besides, I'm sure that Apple with its trillions can afford a legal defence). If Apple gets off, all other stores get off too since Apple is the most restrictive. If Epic wins, we can then discuss how to apply the legal doctrine to other cases.
The top 100 apps on iOS need to do a 'blackout' and pull their apps from iOS for a week. That will make front page international headlines globally and involve the entire planet. That's the kind of scale necessary.
Legislators from around the world will take notice whereas right now, probably very few know or care.
Don't discount how little the public knows or cares about these kinds of things, most people are busy with their lives they are not paying attention. Few even know or understand the terms of the iOS store let alone what it means.
So a focused PR campaign and 'major action' by a lot of players is what is needed. FB, Wikipedia, Netflix, CNN etc. etc..
I feel like it's a reasonable trade-off. Free apps don't cost you much (yes, $99 for dev tools is not much honestly. It keeps away spurious bots and spammy accounts). Paid apps cost 30% -- if the dev decides to charge outrageous prices then well, Apple will take an outrageous cut).
Most apps cost $1-$5 which is cheap. Of course, at a billion users it's hefty. But if you're grumpy about that then it just means you're grumpy about a shrewd for-profit company.
Combined with the ambiguity, lack of choice, threats to business - absolutely yes, iOS is basically universally reviled by developers.
Nobody on this planet accepts that the 30% is necessary for anything ergo, it's a massive chunk out of profits.
Most companies are not hugely profitable.
In many cases, Apple is making considerable more profit off of apps than developers themselves.
For a $1 spent, about 25 cents to Apple mostly profit, then 70 cents to the dev which will mostly be dev., ad. and op. costs.
It wouldn't surprise met that Apple makes more surplus from Fornite than Fortnite makes off the platform.
Their business model is munted. All because people are sheep. They advertised to moronic uni students who like shiny things, Their parents wanted to seem hip so they got on board.
I mean hell, you cant even use a cable they don't own.
Because I rather like the fact the iOS devices get OS updates for about twice as long as Android devices. Android security was also a pretty bad joke for a very long time—it has started to change, but there's only so much they can fix. Google would release an OS (or even a security) update, then you'd have to wait for both the OEM and the network provider to pass the update on to end users. Google are changing this with security patches, but there's still a lot of Android devices running old versions with no prospect of any new features coming any time soon.
In iOS land, there's no OEM or network intermediaries (something Apple insisted on in all deals with networks from the first iPhone), so generally takeup of a new iOS version happens really promptly - as of June 2020, 81% of iOS users are on iOS 13.* That's good for the health of the platform as app developers can build on top of new OS features knowing a reasonable number of actual users can use those new features.
Also, there are a whole variety of suppliers of Lightning cables. Go to Amazon and search "MFi certified lightning cable".
* https://www.statista.com/statistics/565270/apple-devices-ios...
30% is outrageous and basically no developers want to pay it.
Were it 10%, all those things you mention would remain the same.
Boy will your world be shook when you discover the Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo stores.
Also, OP is stating that the only reason people buy iOS is because they're some kind of idiot fashionista sheeple etc. I was merely pointing out that there are compelling reasons to prefer iOS beyond, I dunno, the magic mind-control powers of the ghost of Steve Jobs.
Except that developers don't need to use the App Store a sales/distribution mechanism.
It's like saying "In one country, there is only one car, and it is $50 000". In another country, the same car exists, and yes, there are other $50 000 cars ... but there are also any number of other choices.
And FYI even Google is engaging in anticompetitive practices.
Both platforms should be required to allow the installation of any app vendor point they want as the default app store.
I almost forgotten that here people want to get paid without paying for their own tools.
It sounds to me like the _only_ reason developers are clamoring against the App Store is because some fraction of developers are unhappy about a high commission. It's on the same lines are some people out there unhappy about Apple's high prices. In both cases, you should vote with your wallets -- do not buy Apple devices or develop for Apple devices.
>Combined with the ambiguity, lack of choice, threats to business Would you say that there was abundant choice for developers before the iPhone? What would you develop for -- Blackberry? Nokia? None of those manufacturers had anything remotely close to the iPhone. Right?
Would you say that a 3rd party developer who writes a "flashlight" app is really a legitimate business? Ok, I'll acknowledge the beef with Spotify and the threat an integrated platform can pose in that regard. So what would you propose Apple do? Pay software engineers on their payroll to help Spotify sell music on the iPod (oops; I mean iPhone)?
>Most companies are not hugely profitable. >In many cases, Apple is making considerable more profit off of apps than developers themselves. >For a $1 spent, about 25 cents to Apple mostly profit, then 70 cents to the dev which will mostly be dev., ad. and op. costs.
All this goes to show is that Apple is hugely expensive platform to develop for. Massively expensive! I am sincerely trying to understand _why_ would any developer _need_ to take this expense if they cannot afford it? Can't you develop a web app instead?
Well, Microsoft did that, they developed the Spotify app for Windows Phone back in the day.
> I am sincerely trying to understand _why_ would any developer _need_ to take this expense if they cannot afford it? Can't you develop a web app instead?
I guess because such a large portion of phone users use iPhone, not developing for iOS means you remove yourself from competing about not only those customers but others as well. Say you develop a chat app (fat chance of that now but anyways), a large portion of Android users will say "It's nice and all but because some of my friends have iPhones I want to be able to chat with them as well."
So quite simply, you need to be where the customers are and customers want native apps not web apps. They don't want to open Safari or Chrome or Firefox, type in a URL and some login credentials. It's too much of a nuisance. So if you don't write a native app some one else will and then they take all your customers...
> Well, Microsoft did that, they developed the Spotify app for Windows Phone back in the day. I was trying to be _too clever_ in my reference. What I was trying to say is that there's no moral highground for the developer community to stand on and demand that Apple reduce their commission or allow sideloading on the iPhone. A similar argument demanding that Apple open up iPods for 3rd party apps would've never sounded reasonable when Apple had the largest revenue share or market share or whatever share of the digital music player market. The exact same situation applies to the iPhone as well.
What Microsoft did was because they had no leverage. Apple beat them to market and successfully attracted enough developers to write apps. Sure Apple's platforms benefit from having 3P developers, but that doesn't mean they should set prices based on what 3P devs feel is "fair". If devs don't like the iPhone they should've developed for Windows Phone.
>I guess because such a large portion of phone users use iPhone, not developing for iOS means you remove yourself from competing about not only those customers but others as well. Say you develop a chat app (fat chance of that now but anyways), a large portion of Android users will say "It's nice and all but because some of my friends have iPhones I want to be able to chat with them as well."
> So quite simply, you need to be where the customers are and customers want native apps not web apps. They don't want to open Safari or Chrome or Firefox, type in a URL and some login credentials. It's too much of a nuisance. So if you don't write a native app some one else will and then they take all your customers...
Yes I completely agree with all these points. That is precisely what costs 30% of your app's revenue. The argument around "fairness" doesn't apply because the value provided by the platform is massive. It's the same reason why any argument comparing the iPhone to a Mac or PC wouldn't apply either. You can always build a web-app that's based on open standards and pay the price of losing to a competitor who will build a richer native app.
I'm a legal expert or something. As a developer myself, I find the arguments presented by the dev community against the App store & it's commission self-serving and hypocritical. That's just the cost of doing business on an iPhone. It's expensive! So the best thing to do is to go out there and build for every other phone maker.
No. No, it is not.
I am a developer, and I support iOS and Apple’s practices.
I know this comment will be buried; It’s ironic how the people supposedly championing freedom tries to bury any dissenting voices.
> In many cases, Apple is making considerable more profit off of apps than developers themselves.
Apple pays out more revenue to developers than the Play Store.
Like Enron or something.
Fortnite sucks the air out of the room, as much as any #1 media property does to its category.
Besides, making an Unreal Engine game for iOS hardly ever makes sense. Those are always crummy ports.
You could argue Fortnite on mobile devices is itself a crummy port.
Do we need more virtual joystick games? Are we deprived of Battle Royales?
Ask film people whether we’d be better off without Disney, for example.
Listen Epic may be right in some ways, but if Apple just arbitrarily periodically removed the #1 apps from the App Store, I’ve got a surprise for you: it would be healthy for the app ecosystem.
It's really quite absurd to wave away every unreal game disappearing from iOS as acceptable because they were all bad games anyway. It's likely the second most popular engine in the industry, there must be thousands of unreal games released on iOS every year.
Good for the ecosystem? How many people could be, through no fault of their own, locked out of an entire platform because of this?
Metal + the Unreal shaders look wonderful almost 100% of the time
I do question the justification of the 30% cut they all seem to take.
From what I see, the resilience of the PC through the years only shows that people want less consoles, not more.
As for PC resilience, there are hardly any desktops left at most consumer stores, just tablets, 2-1 laptop hybrids and laptops that are either Windows or Mac, both of which are a hit-and-miss for anything else other that the OS version that the vendor shipped with the laptop.
Not just epic but any business really that obtains most of their customer base through sign in with apple.
Losing your entire customer base because of making apple mad is a risk that most businesses will now be unwilling to take.
It seems to be hurting them more than Apple: Epic Games Asks Court to Allow Fortnite Back on the App Store: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/09/05/epic-injuction-fortnite...
> Meanwhile, Epic now has a very good reason to collect a working email address from every past iOS customer
One of the biggest reason I love using Sign-In With Apple is so that I don't have to give my email to any one else.
All of the other news, like hampering advertisers, is good for users but bad for companies and developers who like to prey on users.
I could see disabling new signups, but breaking existing users...geeze.
I think it's all a mixed bag, and it might be naive of users to assume Apple is always going to protect them from things that go against their best interests.
Somehow Apple's arduous review process misses privacy exploits like when Facebook or Tiktok or some other random ad company does it. Shoot, they even rolled back some big privacy change in iOS 14 because Facebook complained about it.
I dunno, this will sound stupid, but my primary reason against the "closed ecosystem" is that I can't run a decent Tetris app on my iPhone. It must be the official N3twork licensed Tetris app or noooothing. That sucks.
I must have missed that news — could you share a link?
When you restrict your logins to a single company’s OAuth, you’re giving that company incredible power over you- it’s generally not a good thing, except in, perhaps, corporate scenarios where revoking that power unilaterally is a good thing.
I have an infinite supply of email addresses so I can give a unique one to whoever asks and then kill it if it's abused. This way I don't have to tell Apple whenever I logon to Epic or fear that Apple will revoke my access to Epic because of a random adolescent outburst not really befitting of a company of that size.
Twitter and Facebook entirely eradicated based around their API's.
In Apple's response to Epic, they make the case there is absolutely no way to define them as a monopoly, since even just for Fortnite, there are a half dozen competing platforms of which they note, the App Store isn't even the biggest one.
then a few years later Apple will win the appeal and get every penny of it back due to Commission's overstretch
Yes Epic is. They willingly violated their TOS to the point of even communicating that they were going to violate their TOS. Surprise, surprise if you break the rules don't be shocked when they are enforced. They also are attempting to user their Engine and customer base (against their will) to fight a battle that they don't want to be a part of.
This isn't Apple just erasing a company because they felt like it, and Apple isn't the antagonizing party at all. Don't coflate the necessary need to protest against actual issues like corrupt governments versus not getting your video game the way you like it. It weakens the word and idea of actual protest.
Apple may be allowed to do everything they’re doing by contract and more.
I’m a big Apple fan but they are just... crazy on this. They seem to be going way too far and just being outright spiteful. Far far more than Apple usually does. And they’re scaring a big chunk of their developer base in the process.
I don’t know what they’re thinking, but I think they’re heading towards a Pyrrhic victory at best.
Epic has already shown that they will go to great lengths to get what they want, would you trust them with your customers medical data?
It’s the hazards of building your business on another company’s foundation.
There are millions of companies completely dependent on Apple, Amazon, or another organization. In tech terms, it goes back to affiliate marketing days. In real world terms, it goes back centuries.
No leader should make his company dependent on another company, but it happens all the time.
The only things that are different now is that the company is Apple, and that tech bubble social media outrage is a thing.
Blame the victim.
And that you literally cannot avoid external forces.
This isn't unique to Apple, and it's not arbitrary or capricious on their behalf.
This is one of those mindkill kind of lines someone posts in all such threads.
Yes, everything in the world depends on something else. Do you also say this when companies rely on utility companies for their electricity and water? Or must I buy an island and set things up from scratch before I am allowed to start a lemonade stand? Or maybe move to a different planet entirely just to be sure?
An Apple login is handled by Apple. If they don‘t want to do business with you anymore, you‘re lost. They make the rules themself, there is basically not much you can do to appeal those rules directly. I can‘t do anything (well, court, but until then I‘m bankrupt) about it.
What needs to happen is that Apple and the App Store become separate companies, and other companies are also allowed to sell apps on iOS devices. Restrictive walled gardens like this need to be banned.
If it was a real fine, and not just wild speculation, it would definitely impact on their financials.
No company owning a big general computing ecosystem should have this much disproportionate power.
I am glad that at least on a personal level I decided to diversify on my computing devices and just use their laptops now.
Well, yes. Thing is, Epic essentially started a war. Had they went and sued Apple... that's normal. They could have also tried this in the EU where they would likely garner some governmental help.
But the decided to violate license agreements, created smear PR campaigns and so on. It is unsurprising that Apple is hitting back.
Even if Epic wins, I'm not sure the public is better served by a store from a company that punches so low. Using they customers as fodder is not ok.
I would say that applies to apple lot more than epic , they have hurt their customers .
Apple could also have taken epic to the courts as well and got their way if it was fair. Remember apple did the actual ban and is hurting the users now .
As a user, I desire a curated platform.
As a developer, I want to have access to all the users of that platform by publishing on just one store.
> Apple is a company that needs to be brought down a peg or two
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
> it's far too 'valuable' in terms of its market worth
Because many consumers agree with how Apple does things.
Why is that simple fact so offensive for some of you?
Nobody is being forced to buy Apple products or develop for them, they choose to.
Microsoft and Google, on the other hand, are much much harder to avoid even if I don't choose to directly buy any of their products.
Replace software with retail in your example, it doesn't sound so abnormal
"Walmart can, at will, remove your entire line of potato chips from your (their) customers and your existance in their stores is just gone."
The store analogy also has very limited switching costs, for example if Walmart stops selling brand X of potato chips, it's inconvenient but not impractical to go out of one's way to buy them at Target. It would be different if buying potato chips at Target would involve throwing out everything one has bought at Walmart and buying the same Target-equivalent merchandise (ie. switching from iPhone to Android, one would need to buy equivalent apps).
Epic's problem is that they want a Epic Store on other people's devices.
If you include using 3rd party apps like AltStore, then yes it meets a reasonable definition of convenient, imho.
No! You need to move away from Walmart.
Apple only has ~25% market share in the EU. Their "status" is as the minority player in the market. It's questionable whether this is high enough to violate EU antitrust laws, which have usually required at least 40% to show market dominance.
Dominance on the aftermarket is excluded to the extent that a customer:
1) can make an informed choice including lifecycle pricing, that he 2) is likely to make such an informed choice accordingly, and that 3) in case of an apparent policy of exploitation being pursued in one specific aftermarket, a sufficient number of customers would adapt their purchasing behaviour at the level of the primary market 4) within a reasonable time.
The case that established this precedent found that printer manufacturers did not have dominance in the market of "printer cartridges compatible with their printers" based on the above criteria. Whether or not this would apply to the iOS platform will have to be decided by a court.
[1] https://europeanlawblog.eu/2013/09/26/the-efim-case-no-domin...
What a ridiculous thing to say.
1) You make it seem like Apple are some capricious God like entity that any moment will completely change the underlying terms and conditions you agreed to when running your business in iOS. Its simply not true. If you remove this one situation with Epic its literally never happened.
2) Consumer trust in Apple flows onto any company that is on the iOS platform. You expect Apple to give this away for free? It provides immeasurable benefit to most businesses insofar that a consumer is far more likely to purchase goods or services knowing that Apple have 'vetted' you simply by being on the iOS platform. By Apple being so strict and stringent on App Store requirements you know as a consumer they aren't doing things in the interest of the vendors which in turn benefits legitimate vendors.
3) Epic flagrantly violated the terms they had previously agreed to simply because they don't agree to the 30% cut. That style of negotiation is absolutely atrocious and Epic should be the ones being punished not Apple. If they felt so strongly about Apple's anti-trust liabilities they could have formed an alliance with other businesses and lobbied governments globally without breaking existing T&Cs. They probably would have won too and been able to get the cut Apple take to the same level that it costs Apple to run (say 15%). Instead they are trying to bully Apple into doing something that benefits Epic and Epic alone.
Epic are 100% in the wrong here.
Note I am neither an Epic nor Apple user.
They do it all the time. The terms are vague and they can interpret them, or change their mind at will. This happens daily in small cases, and more so in bigger one's were Apple, out of the blue, demands a 30% cut of some adjacent business.
Apple is in this for profit - if they can adjust the rules within legality for more money - the will.
Epic probably thinks that some conditions are illegal, and therefore void. But that would also mean that Apple broke the contract with Epic when they removed the app from the store.
Apple has removed apps from the App Store and blocked apps from being published or updated MANY times.
Inform yourself.
Every single time Apple removed an App from the App Store is because the new version was somehow in breach of the T&Cs.
You could say that the rules was applied unfairly to Hey but nonetheless the T&Cs were clear as day about off platform signup/payments because it protects consumer from sham companies.
When Catalina was released, they kicked out Luna and Duet after having copied their features in Sidecar.
When they released Screen Time, they kicked out similar apps from the App Store, despite being here for years.
The list is endless.
And they would get quite a few allies then. See an earlier proclamation and fight by Spotify: https://timetoplayfair.com/timeline/
I didn't sign up for coke's anti-union movements in south america because I like fizzy sugar water.
Meanwhile Apple is actually innovating and producing useful things.
Also, there seems to be an odd concentrated anti-Apple effort going on right now. Basecamp was on it recently when they immediately didn’t get what they wanted, and I believe I’ve seen similar messages from other companies in the same vein. I wish I could get a refund my hey.com account, but too late I guess.
Basecamp, incidentally, seems to be another company that did great things in the past, but is now having trouble finding new innovations. Hey.com is a web-only email client that costs 100 bucks per year. This is hardly worth the posturing they’re putting out.
I feel like this was posted to serve the narrative Epic is trying to dispense. I’m on the other side of the fence and I was an Epic fan until they started to pull this crap.
So a couple of things here, if you violate a contract with a company what do you expect the outcome to be? They knew exactly what they were doing, implemented a payment system and got the boot. If they didn’t want to get the boot they could’ve just not.
But if you Apple decide that they don't like you anymore, they'll not only cut you off the App Store, they'll also bury all (or a subset of) your users.
Apple is starting to act more and more like a bully.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#sig...
I'd be more ok with Apple not allowing new accounts, but existing accounts should not be removed from people without them agreeing to a transition process to a non sso, local epic account.
Of course, retaliation is expected, but Apple has been so inconsistent in their application of the rules that every decision they've ever made is going to be called into question.
And you can be sure if there is even a hint at favouritism or revelations they've given certain partners special deals (that perhaps Epic wasn't allowed but Amazon was), then they are well and truly fucked.
The EU is not going to mess around. They are going to question every single decision Apple has made, and will make a substantial report into their conduct especially the effects on EU business and the economy. If the EU announces they are investigating you, you should be very, very afraid, they do NOT mess around and will absolutely be at the least issuing a rather substantial financial penalty and changes you will be forced to make within the business (and the OS).
Just look at what they've done to Google in the past few years, this is going to be no different.
I expect huge changes are coming for Apple in 2021 and I think we'll all be better off for it.
So sure, take the actions/steps you want, but be prepared to really defend them, and hope you actually have a case that is applied equally and fairly to all.
Rumor is, Amazon was cut a deal and others have had a deal so the rules don't seem applied in a fair way. Amazon isn't forced to use Apple Pay for example. (which i think is the part specific with this specific case)
in fact, it's safer than Youtube if safety is a concern...
Amazon didn't cut a deal, you can't subscribe to prime video in the app without using Apple's IAP payment system. You can only subscribe outside the app.
Most developers who use Apple IAPs gave to give Apple a 30% cut. Amazon only gives apple a 15% cut. How is that not a deal?
They will suffer reputation damage anyway, but they at least stand a chance of convincing some of their customers that they have a good reason for taking these actions.
Epic could have brought on this lawsuit while still complying with the App Store rules, in fact the judge suggested they do that so their users aren't impacted. They wouldn't be getting kicked off right now and the Sign-in with Apple button wouldn't be getting disabled. They chose to break the app store rules, which they did agreed to, AND they also decided to sue Apple.
They could revert their app right now and Apple would restore their account and they could still continue their lawsuit. Epic is just weaponizing their user base in their fight against Apple.
You have no way of knowing this and frankly I doubt it. And I'm not sure that it wouldn't weaken their legal position.
"We agree with Judge Gonzalez-Rogers that 'the sensible way to proceed' is for Epic to comply with the App Store guidelines and continue to operate while the case proceeds. If Epic takes the steps the judge has recommended, we will gladly welcome Fortnite back onto iOS. We look forward to making our case to the court in September."
Edit: Oh, and Epic also says Apple privately threatened to ban them for a year, contradicting what they said in court.
Among other things, Apple does not allow developers to mention competing products or that discounts are available for purchasing outside of the Apple store.
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/sep/09/fortnite-could...
In fact, the judge did not suggest they do so because absent economic harm Epic had no standing to sue until Apple retaliated. The judge simply pointed out that they couldn't provide injunctive relief forcing Apple to allow Epic to have its own store before the case was decided on the merits. (Judges rarely grant injunctive relief to change the status quo, especially in commercial cases.)
> In fact, the judge did not suggest they do so because absent economic harm Epic had no standing to sue until Apple retaliated.
Yes, she did. She literally suggested the sensible way to proceed was to comply with the agreement while the lawsuit went on.
Epic Games remains free to maintain its agreements with Apple in breach status as this litigation continues, but as the Seventh Circuit recognized in Second City Music, “[t]he sensible way to proceed is for [Epic to comply with the agreements and guidelines] and continue to operate while it builds a record.” Id. “Any injury that [Epic Games] incurs by following a different course is of its own choosing.” Id.
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.364265... (Page 5)
Epic is alleging that Apple is breaking the law. That's the whole point of the antitrust lawsuit, to decide if they are or are not.
> Epic could have brought on this lawsuit while still complying with the App Store rules
No they could not. They needed standing to sue. "Apple is doing what the contract says and we don't like it" does not establish standing. Epic needed to act as though the contract was illegal, suffer some harm, and then they have standing to sue. That's exactly what happened.
You are correct that they could revert their changes and comply for the time being and Apple seems amenable to that.
What Epic needs to do to survive summary judgement is to present a trialable claim that injury to competition has occurred. The trial itself will then determine whether the claim is accurate not.
I still don't think Fortnite being in or out of the App Store makes a difference to Epic's case. If Epic's theory of Apple's behavior is correct, then they have a winning case regardless of whatever happened to Fortnite specifically.
2. It was already established in Apple v. Pepper that developers had standing to sue Apple over App Store policies. The case then went up to the Supreme Court which ruled that consumers also have standing to sue.
3. Showing consumer harm may help Epic win their suit. But it's not necessary to establish standing to bring the suit in the first place.
In any case it seems like the goalposts have been moved from "Epic needs to establish standing" to "Epic needs a strong case". My point was only to correct the former misconception which for some reason has been incorrectly repeated all over this thread.
Standing needs to be established separately for each claim, yes, but I expect in this case the $300 million in fees takes care of that across the board.
> they likely had to break the illegal rule for standing to sue.
I'm not sure if this was ever true, but it's quite clear at this point that they can make their app comply with App Store policies and and continue their lawsuit at this point.
Sorry I don't know where you got this idea but that's now how the legal system works.
Do feel free to quote a written ruling from the judge if you think I am off base. A binding ruling on standing which Apple has had the chance to appeal to the Supreme Court.
You do know the trial judge isn't even the final judge that would decide on an issue of standing, correct? Not only is your claim implausible, but a lower court judge doesn't have the final say on standing even if your claim was true.
Page 5
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.364265...
If Apple wanted to show some goodwill towards the end users who were caught up in this mess they'd continue to allow them to log in or provide a migration path.
I wonder if this will be used against Apple in the future since it's clearly hurting people of they lose access to their game, progress and purchases.
If Epic succeeds in breaking that, they’ll lose a lot more than 30% of the 20 ish millions a month that Epic is currently losing on this ordeal.
Apple does act like a petty child, and a rather obnoxious one at that. They are the worst kind of company, one that considers it is doing you a favour by allowing you to be their customer.
Sent from my iPhone.
From the original article: Customers will be able to "update to a standard email address and password" and, even after the deadline to do that, "those who did not transition from Sign in with Apple may be able to contact Epic Games to have their accounts recovered manually."
Epic intentionally broke the rules. Maybe Apple's actions are right, maybe wrong. But don't pretend Apple just out-of-the-blue decided to do this to Epic for no reason.
Epic caused their own pain here, sure but What other way can we actually get a semi open platform that we're not being taxed on? Why can't we as users and developers have options on iOS? I think that if an operating system allows third party apps they should be _legally_ required to allow other app stores, sideloading of programs without penalty for doing so, or both. That goes for any platform, developed at any time by anyone.
I have been completely at a loss for anyone defending Apple while hoping that Epic loses their fight. The first makes sense but the second is absolutely baffling.
As an Apple user, the whole point here is that it's not an open system.
I just can't get riled up over a developer not following the rules of a platform. I use Apple because the Apple ecosystem is valuable to me - the store, the SSO, the Apple ID, the UI/UX, the hardware - all of it. I don't care about Epic or any other developer that doesn't want to play nice with that ecosystem. Those kinds of developers don't have any value to me.
> which of course led to hundreds of fake and infected apps on the net, harming users.
> If you just want to play Fortnite on your iPhone and don't care about the App Store then the latter option is a better.
Not unless you get a Fortnite that has an ad at the bottom of the screen and ships as much PII as it can to some third-party company, or offers 2x v-bucks and steals CC info.
The app stores are facilitating that in a way though. They're keeping the users as dumb as possible and not making any effort to differentiate between legitimate or malicious apps that are sideloaded.
If it were a matter of going to epicgames.com, clicking "Install for Android", and confirming a prompt that says "You're about to install an app from epicgames.com", I think it would be a lot easier to train users to understand that.
It's too simplistic and disingenuous to present it that way. Last month there was Fornite in the App Store and no option to sideload.
Right now I count 34 Adobe apps in the Apple's phone App Store. I'm very confident if this precedent is set Adobe will have their own app store and very likely will not have anything but a placeholder in Apple's App Store.
I want an iPhone primarily _because_ the App Store is the only place to get apps.
It's not that simple. Right now when I look at the apps on my phone, I have a very, very high confidence that they are not malware. It's not 100% though - right? Because I have to trust some entity. I choose to trust Apple. If apple opens up side loading of apps, I have _much less_ confidence that when I look at my phone, the apps are not malware.
Unless I'm enrolling in an MDM, I implicitly trust everything on my device.
> This would all go away if Apple simply made it a setting to allow other IPAs
Again I think you're missing the point. Do you know how _awesome_ it is as a user that Apple manages my payment method and paying for random apps, and random subscriptions is managed by my Apple ID? I don't have to hunt down 'unsubscribe' emails, or call any phone numbers, or any of that garbage - I go into the control panel and click a button and now I'm no longer paying for that subscription. Allowing that stuff to happen outside of Apple would be a huge _negative_ for me.
> Keep the garden if you want it. Don't enable outside installs.
The wall around the garden is important. Sure, I could get my leg amputated in the street by a doctor with tools from my garage - but I'd rather have that done in a hospital where ingress and egress are more controlled and contamination is less likely.
> The difference here is Apple doesn't give you a choice.
Maybe the difference here is I made my choice already - I picked Apple. I don't want to have to think about every little feature and whether or not it increase my exposure to risk. If you value all that other stuff, go play in the Android world. I don't, so I don't even think about it until these threads come up.
> Even if the developer does all the legwork to build a payment system (for example, they have a web app as well) and market the app on their own, they have to give Apple their cut. You don't get a choice and neither does the developer.
You're conveniently omitting a huge feature of having Apple manage all of that stuff: _Apple manages all of that stuff_, not Epic or the kid that implements the next subscription-based flappy bird.
Just like you say "we can use Android" why can't we say "you can just stay on the app store"?
The fact that is impossible to side load apps is a feature to me. If Apple enables you and others to side load apps, it removes a feature and something I value.
If it makes you feel any better, I have never, ever, felt "locked down" in the Apple ecosystem. We must live very different lives because I never think about my phone - I think about messaging people, sending emails, looking something up on the web, getting directions, etc. Things I like and enjoy using are there and amazing. I don't have to worry about scummy devs like Epic, or side-loading malware because it's cool, or jailbreaking so I can put drop shadows on random things. If you need those features you should have picked a device that supported those features. I don't, so I don't care about things like that because they bring me no value.
Managing your devices and apps is expensive in terms of time and attention costs. It's not worth it to me.
> Also as a developer deploying anything Apple-related is a pain.
I would challenge this or at least dismiss this as an opinion - I have apps in both the iOS and Android stores and deploying on iOS is a breeze compared to Android.
What makes them scummy? They want to make money without paying Apple's 30% (for what? hosting the app would cost Epic very little, payment processing costs < 3% from anywhere).
> side-loading malware because it's cool, or jailbreaking so I can put drop shadows on random things
The whole point is that you shouldn't need to side-load or jail-break anything. You can put any app you want on your pc or linux machine. And no, we aren't all operating with tons of malware on those machines.
> they bring me no value.
Do you pay for any apps? Wouldn't them costing 20% less bring you value in a very literal, "more money in your bank account" sense?
> I would challenge this or at least dismiss this as an opinion - I have apps in both the iOS and Android stores and deploying on iOS is a breeze compared to Android.
This is simply not true. It's not a matter of opinion, there are fewer steps/fields to fill out and less time involved in deploying an Android app. Android also charges less.
Breaking the TOS
> They want to make money without paying Apple's 30%
Too bad, that's what it costs to play in the Apple ecosystem.
> (for what? hosting the app would cost Epic very little, payment processing costs < 3% from anywhere).
Surely you think there is more to the management and delivery of app bundles to millions of people, right? You're reducing the value provided by the App Store too a ridiculous level.
> The whole point is that you shouldn't need to side-load or jail-break anything.
I agree! I don't need either of those things.
> You can put any app you want on your pc or linux machine. And no, we aren't all operating with tons of malware on those machines.
Great, keep up the good work.
> Do you pay for any apps? Wouldn't them costing 20% less bring you value in a very literal, "more money in your bank account" sense?
Not if the cost is letting more garbage from Epic/EA/Origin/Zynga/whatever into the App Store and on my device.
> This is simply not true. It's not a matter of opinion, there are fewer steps/fields to fill out and less time involved in deploying an Android app.
How is it not a matter of opinion? If I counted the number of clicks/fields/pages/panels/etc for getting an app onto an Android or Apple device, my anecdotal experience tells me that it's about half the effort to distribute an Apple app. But anyway, this metric is silly and ultimately doesn't matter to me so I'm not going to argue with you about it anymore.
> Android also charges less.
Cool; I see about 2-3x more money on iOS apps vs their Android ports. The difference in the $99 vs the $25 is made up in no time and it's a rounding error to any enterprise listing apps.
Do you think that the Apple ecosystem could get better? Surely, there are improvements that would be a net positive for you?
Now, what if what Epic is doing results in an improvement in the Apple ecosystem?
Ultimately, you can only say that this case has no value to you if you can reason that there is no way that it will make things better for you, and that's a very tough thing to prove without a crystal ball :)
Still, you certainly don't have to put all that much thought into this. At the end of the day, there are far more important things in life.
You're inverting the relationship. These things have value because I don't have to care about side loading garbage IPAs or devs injecting malware, etc. etc. I don't care about sone random developer's "improvements". Just give me what I paid for and that's all I care about.
Hint: Part of what I pay for is: "play nice with apple, because that's what I expect."
I am using Android as I've been for the last couple of years for this hackability, but i rely more on F-Droid than Play Store.
I understand both Apples and Epics point of view, standard consumer would probably be hurt by Epic getting their way while HN crowd would benefit (possibly short term only) from Epic getting their way.
One thing to keep in mind is that there's a reason why Apple is doing this, and it rhymes well with what every single person i know says about the iPhone. It's simple, it just works, you know how to use it, It's convenient. All these things sound like things one can only achieve in a walled garden.
Apple does what's best for their shareholders, and what's best for their shareholders is if people stay happy with their iPhones and keep purchasing them. I'll stick to Android and all the associated spyware until there's a proper opensource alternative for day2day use and some decent music streaming service available.
You won't expect the single-parent-of-two type of developer to even hope of touching Apple. That sort of developer has no alternative but to keep paying the Apple 'tax'. It's no different than general purpose extortion.
As much as we deny it, companies only tend to get that big through anti-consumer behaviour, walled gardens, vendor lock-in, etc.
When your life's purpose revolves around the absolute power your dream requires, of course you will defend it. The fact that allowing other companies to behave this way makes it harder for you to do well is irrelevant, because you need that power for when you're in their place.
Of course the truth is that smart contracts are close to useless without human intervention (see: the oracle problem), their inability to be changed is more problematic than useful because humans make mistakes writing them or change their mind later or are forced by law to change it, and Apple's app store system is already riddled with exceptions for entities that even Apple can't deny too many wishes (see: exceptions for Amazon) and weird constructs that draw artificial, blurred and very much human-defined lines in order to fix contradicting or nonsensical rules (see: the so-called "reader" app exceptions). But all of this is easily ignored when necessary to construct a seemingly contradiction-free world view and picking a "side". Also a very human imperfection...
The user experience of installing from their app store and using their sign in method is so much better than the experience of installing from the web and signing in via other methods. It frustrates me that the entire industry failed to create a suitable sign-in option and Apple felt they had to step in to create something with good UX while respecting users' privacy.
I'd love for the iOS ecosystem to open up more, but I also know it would be exploited easily and create an industry-wide race-to-the-bottom for UX and privacy.
Epic tried to get Apple to allow a whole new store on their platform AND allow Epic to do all its own CC processing. Apple said no and Epic flipped a switch to offer CC processing for Fortnite and so Apple removed the app and disabled the account. Part of that account access included the Sign in with Apple and so that is going away as well.
Epic isn't fighting for the little guy, they wanted their own store where they would take their own percentage of sales.
Lastly I'll just say that while 30% might be too high I think a lot of people are overlooking the value that the App Store and the iOS platform as whole provides. I swear all of the comments about "I could host it myself and use stripe and pay way less" just reeks of "...you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem..."
Nobody is fighting for the little guy, but this is still advantageous for the consumer. Apple is even fighting with Facebook, since you are forbidden to disclose the 30% cut with consumers.
Isn't that an argument to get rid of the App store? EVERY game there is exclusive- there's no other way to buy it for iOS. And it's a bit tautological, but games on the App Store will never be able to undercut prices of competing stores on the platform because there aren't any.
*btw I don't totally agree with the implication. Even though many games cost the same as Steam, many of them also don't. Even if only a subset of games is cheaper on Epic, that's a win for consumers.
Who cares if you have to open a different megacorp's launcher?
Also, the comparison between Apple and retail isn't fair. If Walmart doesn't want your product, you can sell to Target. If Apple doesn't want your software product, you have no alternative.
Sure you have an alternative - Android.
Just like back in the day, Nintendo refused to allow certain types of games.
iOS has 52% marketshare in the US. If over half of Americans are locked out of your product, that's not much of an alternative. Continuing your retail analogy, you can drive to Target, Walmart, Best Buy without any hassles, but making your customers switch from iOS to Android has significant friction. And Android lets your sideload even if Google doesn't like your app.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...
Just like every other console maker and retailer has rules.
Epic tried bypassing the Play Store. How did that work out?
Competing stores on a platform means that store vendors have to compete on price and/or service since they can't rely on exclusive access to the platform to force anyone who wants to reach the platform into their store. So, fighting for their own store on the platform (especially since succeeding forces the platform open to other stores, as well) is fighting for the little guy. It may not be the goal, but it's the ultimate effect.
So many people say "oh, Epic is not the underdog. They are a huge corporation themselves. They do not deserve my sympathy." As if they don't support this case, but would have supported it if it was brought by a small independent developer. As if it is morally wrong to support the case because it has been filed by a big company.
But guess what, only a multi-billion dollar corporation who is willing to spend north of a billion dollar on legal costs can even toy with the idea of suing Apple and winning. Anything smaller, they will be out of business and everyone will be polishing their resumes and studying leetcode before the first snowfall. There will never ever be a serious legal battle against Apple by a small independent mom-and-pop owned warm fuzzy feelings business. Because they just go bankrupt. Many have perished under App Store rules (you remember the case of the curated app review app from a couple of weeks ago?) and many more will perish.
But if some company, any company at all, even if it is Blackwater, wins this suit, then there is a precedant. Then there is a path forward. Then, even if it comes to a lawsuit, with the precedent, it may only takes a couple million dollars for the ISV to fight it in court, instead of a couple billion dollars. Then there may be alternative app stores, so instead of just going out of business if an Apple reviewer decides they don't like you app, you can move your app to the alternatives, even if they are run by devil incarnates.
Epic may not care about the little guy, but if they win the fight they are fighting, the little guys will benefit immensely.
A billion dollar company is completely necessary to tackle Apple. This stuff is important, and advocates for user-freedom and device ownership can't afford to put every company that's criticizing Apple through a purity test to make sure that they've never done anything anti-consumer themselves.
Think back to Google vs Oracle. You don't need to like a company overall to agree with them in one specific lawsuit.
Absolutely not.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/22/apple-approves-hey-email-app...
The in court part was implied in the context of the discussion. Yes, Apple may decide to have mercy on your soul and not fight you in court. But if they decide to fight you, they will win. After all, when fighting Apple, single digit billionaires have no effective access to the legal system.
The only benefit that came out of the controversy over Hey was that Epic got another example incident they could trot out in an actual legal case over antitrust that has the potential to impact multiple developers.
Hey cannot be the champion in the fight against Apple, they don't have the popularity or resources to win that fight. There was never any chance during Hey's fight with Apple that it was going to result in ordinary consumers being able to decide what code they want to run on their own devices.
Hey got what they wanted, as did Apple. This is the way.
It's amusing that people think Epic is doing this for the good of anyone other than themselves.
That's correct, they were not big enough to take on Apple and win. They bent to Apple's demands and figured out a solution that Apple wanted. In the process they saved their own company but had zero impact on the overall ecosystem.
I think my original point stands. If user-freedom advocates want a "champion" that can actually change the ecosystem, it's going to need to be someone bigger and more powerful than Hey. It's going to need to be a company that has a lot of lawyers and a lot of money.
> It's amusing that people think Epic is doing this for the good of anyone other than themselves.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24423865
Nobody supporting Epic in this lawsuit cares about Epic's motivations. It's not important whether or not Epic is doing this for their own good or not.
Again, think back to Google vs Oracle. Do we believe that Google wasn't selfishly motivated during that case? Of course not, of course Google is looking to protect its own interests. But the case still mattered for ordinary developers, and we still wanted Google to win.
I didn't need to stop criticizing the Chromium team or stop accusing Google of being anti-privacy to support them in that one lawsuit. "Bad company accidentally does good thing" is a perfectly fine perspective to have when dealing with corporate lawsuits.
I think reasonable people can disagree on the meaning of "win" in this case.
From my POV, Hey won because (1) they were handsomely rewarded with free national news coverage for Raging Against the Fruit at the cost of having to make very minor and unsurprising changes to their app, and (2) they forced Apple to make changes to their app review process.
> Apple: "Additionally, two changes are coming to the app review process and will be implemented this summer. First, developers will not only be able to appeal decisions about whether an app violates a given guideline of the App Store Review Guidelines, but will also have a mechanism to challenge the guideline itself. Second, for apps that are already on the App Store, bug fixes will no longer be delayed over guideline violations except for those related to legal issues. Developers will instead be able to address the issue in their next submission."
WordPress is another example of a small company who "won", receiving an very public apology from Apple.
It's worth keeping Hey's response to those changes in mind[0]:
> "What they've given out is actually so far very little. Apple has said that you can appeal to Apple if you want Apple to investigate Apple. OK, maybe there's something there, but it hinges on what those verdicts are going to be"
> "We did not want a fight with Apple whatsoever," Hanssen said. "We just need to get on the iPhone, it's the dominant platform for these kinds of services."
I guess I agree; different people have different definitions of "win", and I'm not going to fight with you if that fits your definition. I am going to say that even if this is a win, Hey isn't pushing the envelope or moving Apple in any significant direction.
This is not an efficient or reasonable way for us to change how Apple approaches device ownership, and it's not clear to me how a company like Hey can force Apple to make the jump from "we'll be slightly nicer about approving apps" to "consumers will own the devices they buy and have the option to control the code that runs on them."
Call this a victory if you want, but we need bigger victories than this.
> WordPress is another example of a small company who "won"
Sure, they got an apology from Apple while Apple was being sued by a billion dollar company over their app store policies and worried about looking bad for that lawsuit.
But it's kind of the same situation as above. I guess you can call it a win, but forgive me for not being too excited about an outcome where Apple says 'sorry that you misunderstood us' to one company. I don't think that's going to have a significant impact on user's ability to own and control their own devices.
[0]:https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/23/apple-app-store-policy-chang...
Fair enough! And thank you for the thoughtful replies — they definitely have me thinking about my own biases and assumptions.
It's amusing that people defending Apple have trouble understanding the difference between effects and motivations.
The issue of why people who aren't Epic want Epic to succeed has never been about why Epic is pursuing the endeavour.
What I don't like, though, is that Epic are trying to portray themselves as the little guy fighting for the users' rights throughout all this, as seen in the "Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite" ad. They're being dishonest in their self-image, and that taints my perception of them because I wonder what else they're being dishonest about.
Here's a visualization so you can see how much smaller a billion is than a trillion - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoK38U8gDU
I’m a little guy. Am I a bad guy though because I want freedom for me and my own customers to interface digitally with one another without going through Apple? Half of my customers have an iPhone and Apple didn’t bring these customers to me they were mine.
I also think a big PR campaign is just part of the game. I mean look at how successful Apple's been at convincing people their only motive is security and privacy for their users. At least there's some awareness being raised for both developers and users.
The app stores are hugely successful demand aggregation platforms and the result of that is developers becoming a commodity. Apple and Google don't care which million developers are in their stores and beyond the top 100 apps the developers are nothing more than interchangeable cogs.
Epic is not advocating for you. Epic’s strategy is to get you to think they are, but they aren’t.
That's the point. This is also what the little guys want. Epic isn't fighting for the little guy, but they are fighting for terms that are mutually beneficial for both Epic and the little guy.
For the devs who support Epic in the lawsuit, it's never directly been about the 30% cut. It's about this article, right here -- that Apple requires you to support a sign-in system that they can just turn off whenever they want, that if you get into a legal battle with Apple they can just revoke your developer certificates, that you're not allowed to mention even inside your app that alternative payment methods exist. It's about a company that purposefully gimps their browser and disallows competing engines, keeping webapps at a perpetual disadvantage to native apps. It's about the fact that if I buy an iPhone, I don't get to decide what code runs on it.
People are treating this like a popularity contest, bringing up points like, "Epic is selfishly motivated." Well, of course. Both Apple and Epic are selfishly motivated, neither company cares about you. But it just so happens that in this case, the stuff Epic wants is also the stuff I want. I want the ability to run my own code on my own device I bought without asking anyone else's permission to do so. I really don't care about Epic's motivations.
I understand why people disagree with me, I understand why people like Apple's walled garden, and I understand why people think that the average consumer might be too stupid to actually own their own hardware and make their own decisions. I also understand why some people think that antitrust is too heavy of a hammer, and that there are other ways to address the problem of iPhone lock-in for consumers. Heck, I even understand why some people think the monopoly is good, because it forces companies to support iPhone regardless of Apple's terms, which opens some doors to increase user privacy.
I disagree with those people, but I understand them. I don't think that they all just completely irrationally hate Epic.
So is it really impossible for you to understand why someone would want the ability to control what code runs on their own device they bought? Do you genuinely believe that all boils down to anti-Apple sentiment? You can't understand the other viewpoint at all?
> I swear all of the comments about "I could host it myself and use stripe and pay way less" just reeks of "...you can already build such a system yourself [...]"
To flip this around, I feel the same way about comments I read that are saying, "Epic should just make their own smartphone or put together a webapp if they don't want to be on the store. The market will solve this." Building a store and figuring out hosting is pretty objectively easier than building a new smartphone competitor.
Apple isn't my biggest worry when I think about consumer lock-in and anti-competitive practices (hello Amazon Kindle/Audible), but there is some pretty obvious user lock-in for iPhones, and Apple is pretty obviously pushing to create more of them. There's a reason why the Apple credit card only works with iPhone, and there's a reason why Apple wants everyone to sign into 3rd-party services with Apple accounts.
So when someone says, "if it was possible to build a better phone ecosysytem, someone would have done it", I feel like they're drastically oversimplifying the technical, social, and market barriers to actually competing in a smartphone market.
Respectfully, it feels like you don't. For example:
> I understand why people think that the average consumer might be too stupid to actually own their own hardware and make their own decisions.
It's not about stupidity. I like the fact that my 94-year-old grandmother (who isn't stupid, by the way) doesn't have to worry about accidentally downloading malware from the App Store on her iOS devices, and the fact that she can't be phished into side-loading the same. As long as side loading is a thing, malicious actors will trick some users into side loading malware.
My grandmother has never been such an autonomous computer user as the day she got an iOS device. It's absolutely astonishing how much more agency she has as a computer user with iOS, compared to Windows and Android. She manages the device almost entirely by herself (vs. Windows/Android where a family member spent a few hours per month fixing things). Her iOS device is an actual "personal" computer, one on which she, not another family member, gets to make the decisions about which software to run.
So here's the inconvenient fact for your argument: In a very real sense, my grandmother (who, I claim, is much more representative of an average user than you or I, here on Hacker News) is making more of her own decisions with more autonomy than she ever did on Windows or Android. And that new agency is enabled because of Apple's policies.
> So is it really impossible for you to understand why someone would want the ability to control what code runs on their own device they bought? Do you genuinely believe that all boils down to anti-Apple sentiment? You can't understand the other viewpoint at all?
It's not hard to understand why someone wants more control. It is, however, very hard for me to understand why you don't use the mobile operating system that already works the way you claim to want it to.
Genuine question: Apple makes no secret of the fact that they exert a large degree of control over the ecosystem, and they have a generous return policy. If you don't hate Apple, why don't you just buy an Android device and allow those of us who like iOS the way it is to live in peace? Why are you forcing your desires on us?
> the stuff Epic wants is also the stuff I want
> but they are fighting for terms that are mutually beneficial for both Epic and the little guy.
Epic is not fighting for mutually-beneficial terms. You can already side load on Android yet Epic is suing Google right alongside Apple. Epic doesn't want you to side load your own code--they want you to pay for someone else's code through Epic's store without paying a cut to Apple. That's it.
Speaking mutually-beneficial: Sign-in with Apple, a "gimped" browser, developer restrictions, forcing IAP to go through Apple. Yes, those all all very clearly benefit Apple. But they also benefit users.
It would be nice if app developers could offer their own payment platform. But what happens when a user (deservedly) asks for a refund? Apple has to say "sorry bud, we didn't process the payment, you're out of luck for using the 3rd-party IAP". So users stop trusting the platform, which hurts other developers. Remember when you stopped trusting that a product on amazon.com was actually sold by Amazon? Did that make you more or less likely to spend money on amazon.com?
I do use an Android device, and once the Linux community makes a usable option, I'll switch to their phone. There are two sides to this, the developer perspective and the user perspective.
As a user, I already benefit tremendously from the ability to sideload apps on Android, the FDroid store is fantastic and offers much stricter curation than Google Play. My only annoyance is that I feel like I'm captive on Android -- I can't switch away to other ecosystems without giving up my freedom. This means that Android doesn't really have to compete with anyone else to keep me locked into the ecosystem, which is frustrating.
As a developer, I think that Apple engages in anticompetitive behavior that locks users into their ecosystem and that forces developers to agree to arduous terms to publish on their devices.
> and the fact that she can't be phished into side-loading the same.
I apologize, I should have used a word other than 'stupid' when I was describing your position. It was dismissive and rude of me to refer to people who don't have technical training using that kind of language. You're right to call me out on that.
But I do understand the underlying argument -- you think the average consumer (including your grandmother) doesn't have the technical training and inclination to avoid malware or follow security best-practices. I disagree with that argument, but I do understand it.
To address really quickly why I disagree with that:
> As long as side loading is a thing, malicious actors will trick some users into side loading malware.
There's a weird double-standard here where we believe that your grandmother was fully informed enough to opt into a locked-down walled garden of her own volition, but that she isn't fully informed enough to stay in that garden of her own volition.
It is very difficult to protect people against their will. If consumers are informed enough that we assume they know the consequences of tying all of their payment information to Apple, of tying all of their sign-ins to Apple, of opting into this restrictive world, then we should also assume they're informed enough to stay in that world.
I'm not against walled gardens, I'm against walled gardens that lock from the outside. My feeling is that if you're doing a good job of protecting people, and they want you to protect them, then you shouldn't need to force them to accept your protection.
I don't believe it's a difficult challenge to make sideloading obvious and to put obvious warnings in front of it. I've never been worried that one of my parents will accidentally sideload an app on Android. I wouldn't suddenly start worrying about my family members on iPhone just because a new setting appeared somewhere deep in the device. I've already had the conversation with my family members about the dangers of going outside of official software sources.
There are so many strategies we could use to address the problem you have without being anticompetitive. We could set you up as a device administrator and allow you to choose whether or not sideloading is allowed. We could make the UI around sideloading clearer for nontechnical people. We could go the Web route and make sandboxing better. The point is, we have options here. It's not, "everyone downloads malware" or "nobody can install anything that's not Apple-approved." There are ways that we can allow people to own their devices without forcing them to get a security degree to administer them.
> Why are you forcing your desires on us?
I don't think I am. Nobody's talking about forcing anybody to sideload anything. You can choose what store you install software from. To bring up the FDroid example, you could even restrict yourself to a much more heavily curated app store than what Apple is offering. You could have a more limited app store with better security than Apple's official store.
But you don't have to do anything, you could also run stock iOS and never sideload a single app.
I mentioned above that I do understand and sympathize with the people who claim, "that only works because Apple is a monopoly and apps like Facebook have to release on the official store". They're worried that without the monopoly status, Apple won't be able to bully apps like Facebook into being at least mildly private. I disagree with that argument, I don't think it holds up once you dig into it, but it's not an unreasonable point for someone to bring up.
But beyond that, there is no requirement that your grandmother start sideloading apps. I'm not trying to force your grandmother to do anything.
> You can already side load on Android yet Epic is suing Google right alongside Apple.
Eh... I think you're misinformed here. Epic is suing Google for entirely separate reasons -- they're suing Google because Google threatened manufacturers who were going to include an Epic store. Apple/Google are different cases with different grievances, and people shouldn't compare them.
> Remember when you stopped trusting that a product on amazon.com was actually sold by Amazon?
But the web payments API wasn't the reason that happened. The existence of Stripe or Ebay did not make Amazon worse. Amazon's refusal to clearly label products and curate their own store made Amazon worse. In the same way, FDroid isn't the reason why the Google Play store is filled with malware. Google Play moderation has nothing to do with sideloading.
If we want to talk about Amazon in the context of locked-down devices and ecosystems, remember when their restrictions around DRM on their storefronts allowed them to bully the entire publishing industry into submission on prices and neuter both the ebook market and the audiobook market?
> they want you to pay for someone else's code through Epic's store without paying a cut to Apple. That's it.
I don't see a realistic outcome where Epic is allowed to distribute its own store on iOS and nobody else is. I don't think the world you're concerned about there exists. Having multiple storefronts is effectively the same thing as allowing sideloading; other 3rd-party storefronts by companies other than Epic will pop up over time.
> Speaking mutually-beneficial: Sign-in with Apple, a "gimped" browser, developer restrictions, forcing IAP to go through Apple. Yes, those all all very clearly benefit Apple. But they also benefit users.
How does something like devaluing PWAs in the browser benefit me? How is +30% on something as simple as a payment request benefitting me? Consolidating your logins behind Sign-in with Apple has risks too. If you end up being an outlier and getting banned by Apple you're going to have a bad time.
> Genuine question: Apple makes no secret of the fact that they exert a large degree of control over the ecosystem, and they have a generous return policy. If you don't hate Apple, why don't you just buy an Android device and allow those of us who like iOS the way it is to live in peace? Why are you forcing your desires on us?
Because an app that can't get onto or can't be successful on the app store isn't going to get built, so Apples' restrictions bleed over to Android users both as apps that don't get built and as apps that are built to have feature parity between mobile platforms. You'll also have companies targeting average revenue per user, so the +30% charged by closed app stores means I'm subsidizing those users if I sign up via the website.
A little guy would not have the resources to fight off the most valuable corporation in the world. Apple could spend hundreds of millions in legal fees and it would be a rounding error on their financials. Apple could literally hire every lawyer in the US and the EU, pay them their normal rates, and treat the entire expense as an immaterial item on their annual financials.
There are few companies in the world with the resources to fight Apple, and fewer still with the willingness (or reason) to do so.
Given all this, Epic's actions represent at least an attempt to reign is some of Apple's power. I think that's why people are siding with Epic - because there is no one else doing anything about the walled gardens increasingly going up in modern computing.
What's really scary is what might happen if Apple wins these lawsuits. With legal precedent set, unless there's legislative action to pass new law, it's unlikely anyone will want to challenge Apple or Google's App Store terms in the future.
Except for the part where hosting my own website/store and using Fastspring for processing Mac app sales was actually less of a PITA than dealing with the Mac App Store with its signing, certificates, shitty first version of cert management, et. al. And it was far less expense and hassle than 30% of sales. Hosting one's own iOS app web store probably wouldn't be a whole lot more trouble.
So in this comparison, doing it myself is Dropbox. Going the Apple Store route is wiring together FTP with SVN, getting curlftpfs working,...and paying extra for the privilege.
The courts aren't going to decide this case based on who is fighting for "the little guy" but whether the anti-competitive actions taken by Apple constitute a violation of civil or corporate law.
> I'm honestly surprised so many HN readers are siding with Epic
I'm not. If my only use case for an Apple device was to develop commercial software for Apple devices then I'd rather quit my job, go get a law degree and join Epic's legal team for no salary just to stick it to Apple.
But I am a consumer that owns apple devices and I derive value from their model of the universe and don't see how Epic's alternative universe where they charge a lower fee with a different mechanism would improve anything, either as a developer or user.
There are much more concrete things they could argue in court are harmful to consumers, like the fact that supporting MacOS and iOS targets costs enormous amounts of money compared to Windows and Linux due to the lack of (TOS compliant) solutions for targeting and testing for Apple's operating systems. But that wouldn't give Epic a win scenario that would allow them to bypass parental controls for microtransactions in a children's game.
In a market economy, one thing you can generally count on is that nobody is going to do a thing because it is what's best for you. Anything an entity does is generally going to be self-interested. If you're going to dismiss and discount positive actions based on this observation, you're never going to have anything good to say about anything a company does, ever.
A mall owner can't dictate how it's residents receive money.* Nor would it be wise of them to take a share of their commercial resident's sales.*
I'm not arguing on legality. I'm arguing based on social norms (not ethics either).
Apple is extreme social behavior of a corporation. There are multiple situations where Apple copied something another app developer made.
I doubt Epic will win but...it may open up the conversation and maybe finally encourage other developers to push back on Apple, so that a more socially acceptable structure is within the App Store (and it's ecosystem).
If this doesn't cause Apple to reform, the next escalation is clearly inciting a frenzy to push the Govt to execute judgement with the antitrust laws. Even if they're outdated, the case is clear. Apple hasn't just been a bad actor once or twice but numerous instances. If Epic does this with their current case, I'm uncertain that they'll achieve their desired outcome because their limited situation doesn't seem as clear cut.
* - If the contract says this...it's still not socially fair. Land is vast...the phone ecosystem is not. Which means a mall owner will meet a lot of competition to push them to either change or they'll go out of business due to undue hardship put on the commercial tenants.
The value would be obvious if an alternative was available to contrast with.
Curation is just letting someone else be your admin and you only get a normal user account. I don't have a problem with that, but I also don't think it's unreasonable for developers to charge those users +43% to recoup the costs of paying Apple to be their admin.
Shutting down "sign in" options shows that internally, Apple is looking for a way to hurt Epic in a manner that hurts the most but they are coming up short. Although iOS accounts for over one-thirds of Fortnite's 360million users, Epic has already made the brave decision to let that portion of revenue go and nothing Apple does will hurt them into begging Apple to let them back into their walled garden.
I'm not saying Apple's in the right here, but people keep construing it as Apple "looking for way[s] to hurt Epic" and I don't think that's quite what's going on. Epic performed a significant breach of the App Store terms in a way never tried before, and the repercussions (which are detailed in those terms!) are being enforced on a scale never seen before. But it's not like Apple's execs are scouring, looking for minute and petty ways to hurt Epic. They're just going to let the lawsuit run its course, and in the meantime enforce the terms of the agreement (willingly broken by Epic) to the fullest capacity.
Developers using Unreal Engine certainly do not sign their app with Epic's credentials.
Or when I put in the contract tips go straight to the business. You don't put your tips in at the end of the night, Boom! Fired!
You can't expect me to keep you employed if you don't follow the contract.
Hell I've even had some of them come up to me and say those terms are illegal but I put in the contract that you can't complain about the conract, so... Boom! Fired! They knew they would be so why are they even complaining, idiots?
The case would have been dismissed as having no merit if this was not at least in question.
The US and EU are looking into Apple as breaching anti trust rules and you are honestly saying that for you these aren't even close:
Employee ignores contract terms they know to be illegal, gets punished for it because boss doesn't think it's illegal, employee takes boss to court.
and
Epic ignores contract terms they know to be illegal, gets punished for it because Apple doesn't think it's illegal, Epic takes Apple to court.
?
We already had a single Nintendo Switch that they both shared, so we let them spend the money they saved to split the cost & buy a second Switch lite so that they can both still play together. After getting used to haptic joystick controls, they much prefer them to touch controls.
They both now say "I hate Apple". They didn't get that from me: I think both companies are engaged in an arms race of their own self interest, and have explained the issue to my kids as being about both companies wanting to make money. Something like this:
"Apple created a store and wants people who sell items in the store to share money from their sales, which is the way stores generally work. Epic thinks that Apple & Google take way too much of that money and Epic wants to keep more of that money, though they are willing to let users get some saving too."
They both still hate Apple now, and when my daughter did pick up her iPad for the first time in days, she was afraid to spend her money on a different game she wanted because she thought Apple might take it away. (She's 7... she also kicks my --s in Fortnite. I'm smart, and decades of practice mean I pickup videogames fast enough to be above average in any new game. She is better & smarter than me in every way. I work in data science, and I'm half convinced that if I taught her the basics of SQL, python, R and a few presentation-layer reporting technologies, she could do my job in an hour of her free time each day. But, you know, child labor laws.)
This is a curious decision considering that the primary distinction between the part of the temporary restraining order the court granted (against Apple interfering with unreal engine) and the part the court denied (against Apple interfering with fortnite) was that the court thought that Epic had demonstrated irreparable harm with respect to the former and not the latter.
I don't get it.
(Legalities note: A temporary restraining order is basically a "preliminary preliminary injunction", the same idea, but granted earlier and only lasts until the court rules on the actual preliminary injunction)
Apple is moving the situation farther from the status quo... which strikes me as a very bad legal strategy when the ruling for them was based on the idea that maintaining the status quo did not cause irreparable harm.
I expect the judge is going to have some serious questions about whether this action is in response to them violating the terms of service (status quo as I believe the judge is interpreting the phrase), or if it's about retaliating against the lawsuit [1]. Novel punitive actions using services that aren't directly related don't strike me as business as usual.
[1] Unless the court rules in some way that makes the whole question moot. We shouldn't read too much into how the court ruled on the TRO.
It's very similar, seems like a reasonable next move. We can agree that there is a risk of being found retaliatory and it might not be the greatest strategic move as found in court 5 years later, but the risk is worthwhile.
I found it extremely convenient especially from a privacy perspective (your name and email are hidden) but the risk I'll lose access to my accounts is too much.
The risk/reward cuts both ways. If a developer starts putting malware/whatever in their apps and Apple nukes their access to "Sign On With Apple" then it protects me as a user, and I value that.
If Facebook blocks your developer account (Had this happen to my company once) your users can no longer sign in - though are they really your users at that point, or are they (Facebook/Google/Apple/etc...)
First off, Epic's whole lawsuit is that parts of Apple's ToS are illegal, and thus Apple has no grounds to enforce it as they did. Secondly, the kind of retaliation Apple has attempted to do here very much resembles anti-consumer monopolistic behavior. Apple is using their position in one market (common sign in, developer tools, hardware) to enforce their position in another (app store). Classic no-no.
Obviously the final determination on these points will be made by the courts. In the meantime, if Apple isn't an anti-consumer monopoly, they sure are walking, talking and quacking like one.
Apps need social login, disabling it at all is out of the question. Implementing any social login means implement login with Apple ID (and following desing guidelines), or app will not pass review.
By default, login with Apple gives a bogus email not connected to anything, so there's no way to send there a random password "just in case Apple want to kick us out". And app cannot ask for real email just in case, because it will not pass the review.
Check and mate.
If you simply decide to break the terms of your contract with them, yes, they will kick you out. But this is not 'in case Apple wants'. It's because the developer wants to break contract.
Apple and Google have banned applications about COVID since the world was littered with apps and scams trying profit from the COVID pandemic.
The author is making a news app that's promoting COVID articles and content, so it got instant banned on sight. That's super clear cut and straightforward even though he doesn't like that.
You really shouldn't call that censorship. You're making a disservice to countries who experience real censorship, where people risk their life for saying innocent things.
If you abuse a service, and they cut you off, you don't get to cry about them enforcing their rules.
Hurts the consumer too. People will be locked out of their Epic accounts.
Epic's own customers are blaming Epic for this snafu. It's hard to see Apple as the bad guy when Epic is the one who broke the rules first. Almost every gamer isn't going to be sympathetic to a player who broke the rules and got banned.
> They enforce their TOS randomly and this will happen to smaller companies too.
If their ToS is randomly enforced, which other App/Company violated the same terms as Epic which Apple chose to not enforce? I can't imagine there'll ever be a single case where a remote activated violation to sneak pass App Review would ever be allowed to remain on the App Store once identified.
[1] https://www.apple.com/ios/app-store/principles-practices/#:~...
Remote activation is an irrelevant detail. Apps routinely active features remotely. It's the underlying violation that matters, not how it was enabled. That's just PR.
This just shows how Apple has a "deity" like status in the community, fanboys here are willing to die defending Apple and their arbitrary "rules".
Just dare to imagine if tomorrow Microsoft came out and said Steam broke ToS and starting September 11 all accounts signed-up over outlook.com will be disabled.
There would be riots on the streets and buildings burning, Nadella would give a resignation within a week.
Yet for Apple, the rules don't apply (ironically). Tim Cook blatantly commits perjury in front of Congress and no one bats an eye, yet people are still willing to trash Gates how "arrogant" he was to Congress 20 years ago.
The only true hope is for EU step in and completely revamp the App Store
At least Google is not the only Android handset game in town and you can still sideload apps.
The court already validated that Apple disabling Epic account was okay.
Apple also has the option to continue allowing Epic to deliver password reset emails to private relay email addresses, using their pre-11th DKIM/SPF settings, so that users can continue to reset their account passwords by email and login and change their email address.
Cynically, I assume that if Apple does continue relaying password resets, Epic would change their systems in some way that intentionally breaks that somehow, in order to create further public pressure on Apple.
Prediction: future iOS release disables Fortnite app from running.
The Fortnite iOS app is critical even if you don’t play Fortnite on iOS. The app has the team voice feature so you can talk to teammates while playing Fortnite.
Everyone in your party can be playing on different devices (Xbox, PS4, etc.). If you open the iOS app then you can transfer the party voice to an iPhone. The sound is really clear and you can use your headphones or AirPods to talk and listen.
I’m sure some will be pissed if they lost access to that.
If you deleted the app or bought a new iOS device, can you still install Fortnite from previous purchases?
So I'm all pro-Apple for the whole Epic thing, but by this one action, I will refuse to use sign in with Apple for good.
They're basically hijacking users
If the demands are unfair or extortionate I don't blame people for not capitulating to them. This the same idea that forms the basis of civil disobedience.
Epic can continue to serve Fortnite just fine through the app store while the case goes though court. There is nobody being kidnapped and murdered here.
I’m sure there have been some incidents, maybe murder, related to fortnite.
I'd guess that by disabling 'Sign in with apple', those games will now throw errors and stop working. And it'll look like Epics fault.
It's all a big game of optics and PR....
This undermines their entire user-facing SSO strategy with anyone paying attention. (The dev-facing “implement our SSO or you can’t be on the iPhone” isn’t really a “strategy” per se.) Of course apps will have to support it to be in the App Store, but this means that any user paying attention now knows that their accounts/logins for PAID SERVICES are potentially at the mercy of Apple’s control crusade battles.
Dangerous precedent.
This is a really ignorant and pretty crazy comment.
Apple is this year moving to their own silicon and likely next year we will see the fruits of the large number of AR/VR acquisitions.
Seems to me like you would need a lot of specialist talent to do both.
1. Epic had to know Apple would go nuclear. If they didn't, they're completely incompetent. Let's assume that's not the case. So Epic was itching for a fight. Maybe they were delusional about Fortnite's power here?
2. Apple is going nuclear here. The message is that Apple wants to crush this. This is Apple making an example of Epic. It looks like Apple is prepared for this fight and doesn't want it to gain traction;
3. Personally I think for the vast majority of developers the Apple payment ecosystem makes sense. It's just for the likes of Epic, Amazon or Netflix it doesn't as they're large enough to have their own so 30% is a huge fee for those companies and ultimately untenable;
4. Apple's monopoly will end at some point. I have to believe that even Apple knows that. So it's just a question of time and Apple doesn't want it to be now;
5. I don't think the solution is for anyone to be able to have payment infrastructure. That kind of Wild West is no good for anyone. It's just a question of what the compromise looks like;
I really do see this as the dying days of the Apple and Google app ecosystems.
console on contract: https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-all-access sale data: https://hookedontech.com/xbox-one-vs-ps4-vs-switch-console-a...
I think if that were true, Apple wouldn't fight this fight. They would find some way to accommodate the giants and keep taking 30% of small developer's paychecks. I think most smaller developers would like the option to choose a different store. They might not use it, but who wouldn't like the option?
This is nothing but regulatory capture, just happening at a private level.
Meanwhile something like the Hey app has to hope that their complaint gets viral on social media to maybe get a slightly expedited App Review.
Considering that one can get payment processing for a tenth of Apple's fee, I consider Apple's 30% to be outright usurious. I would be a little more forgiving if that same fee bought some discovery in the App Store, but no. Or maybe faster app reviews. Okay, finally; after how many years of multiple week waits?
You have people in this thread that are shocked anyone would side with Epic because they obviously broke the agreement but on the other you have people amazed that you can justify paying hundreds of dollars in markup per device, then be charged 30% for any software, and then developers still have to pay annually for access and pay for visibility. And even attempting to tell users cheaper ways to pay isn't allowed. It's like people desperately want to chuck all their income at Apple like dollars to a stripper.
Can you sign into your account using an id and password?
> Epic broke Apple's ToS
Just because terms have been set, does not mean they are right or that they shouldn't be challenged. Remember, these terms were arbitrary when they were first set, why defend them as if it's written in the constitution?
> But Epic is a big greedy corp that only cares about its own profits
Yeah but Epic's win extends as a win to every small player in the ecosystem. In terms of size, Apple is a trillion-dollar company whereas Epic is multi billion-dollar company. The only people who can challenge Apple are companies like Epic, and not the small players and indie app & game developers.
> Apple's reactionary behaviour is just proving Epic's case
I know right! But that's the whole point that Epic started this saga with. Actually, it started before. Earlier this year HEY/Basecamp guys faced the same issue. Obviously they created a huge uproar, figured a path that works for them, and then shut up completely (instead of continuing the fight, as they promised they would). Epic here is fighting to make a change that will benefit everyone.
> But I'm an Apple user because I like the closed ecosystem
I get it, you want a platform to make decisions for you. In which case, you can continue using the App Store to get your dose of apps and games. But why does your indecision stand in the way of having alternative app stores where people who want to have a choice, get to make that choice.
> But Apple isn't a monopoly
There's 2 major phone OSes in the world. If you're making any kind of mobile game or mobile application, you HAVE to be on either or both mobile OSes. iOS has 60% of US market share, which means it IS a monopoly. Apple exclusively owns iOS. Apple is a monopoly.
Closing thoughts
In the end, I feel that people who don't understand the stand Epic is taking are people who have never done something of their own and failed or faced undue stress on their venture due to a large gatekeeper who stamps on whoever it pleases.
I feel the people defending Apple here NEED to defend Apple to satisfy their internal narrative, which would reflect in their life's pursuit to be a 1 in 10,000 employee of a billion-dollar company.
I'm airing the dirty laundry in the hopes that everyone gains empathy and perspective.
I'm a big fan of FOSS as much as possible.
The ad '1984' by Apple has become the biggest, most hypocritical piece of propaganda every created.
Yeah, so, did you check how much Epic earns with fortnite? I wont call this 'low margin' at all.
So my point is absolutely valid and it is shocking that Apple makes almost 3 times more money from Fortnight than Epic makes.
Imagine spending years building an app and then someone else ends up making 3 times more money from it than you do...
Interesting again to see that "fees" started the core battle fight. Visa and MasterCard, along with other brands, are acutely aware of the coming payments swing and continue on buying sprees to protect their toll road. Whether it be crypto, RTP, FedNow or remains to be credit card is yet to be known however these events and more will continue to push businesses to bring payments in house cutting out more and more middlemen. This is long overdue.
If anyone runs linux/win on mac hardware smoothly I want to know more details.
Namely, self-preference on the platform (Google, Amazon), false information (Facebook, Twitter), transparency of the source of ads, or in Apple's case usurious rates.
I imagine if platforms came with some regulations, all those folks clambering to "be the Uber of X" would sound about as cool as being a wastewater treatment plant, or a fire station.
I know, I'm old.
If a significant % of apps protest, then Apple has to bend down. Apple isn’t with much if they don’t have the developer and customer mindshare.
Microsoft lost the mobile market because they couldn’t make a viable AppStore. Those Nokia phones were fantastic but the apps were very subpar.