Apple will cut off 3rd-party appstore updates if iPhone is not in EU for a month
theverge.com
theverge.com
Are they? I know developers don’t like the rules, but I don’t know a lot of iPhone owners who feel particularly stifled by them. If they did, presumably they’d just buy an Android phone?
The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
The existence of iOS Unix shell emulators (iSH, aShell) suggests otherwise, at least on iPads.
Perhaps that will change with forthcoming iPad Pro + macOS-subset VMs.
I don’t know a lot of iPhone owners who feel particularly stifled by them
Who exactly are these developers? Because I'm a developer and I find the idea of supporting multiple app stores absolutely dreadful.
Consider the impact. If we're lucky there will be only one necessary re-implementation something major. At minimum we can expect to rewrite all code paths involving IAP. This will require a thick layer of abstraction caked on top to maintain feature parity between the separate builds, further slowing down compile times and making debugging more cumbersome. Yes, there will be separate builds because we rely on Apple to manage our DWARF symbols. That will need a homegrown solution, all new tooling, which of course will be crappy and half baked for many years. Best keep the builds separate.
Separate builds will likely mean new build/deploy pipelines to manage, possibly each having their own separate staging environments, which eats away at productive development time. Of course this will be all tied together with additional layers of abstraction. All tooling involving the AppStore API will be re-created.
Oh and I pity the poor souls that use react-native and it's convoluted, fragile, build environment. It's going to really suck for them. Cross your fingers and hope for the best when you npm install react-native-alternative-store and it's 500 dependencies written by CoPilot in Objective-C by one unresponsive developer on a GitHub page whose only activity is an increasing number of unresolved issues.
And that's not all! We use AppStore analytics, financial data management, beta test tooling, and internal device management. What will be fate of these services without the App Store? More crappy work and less time spent actually making the product better.
So no, this developer is just fine paying 15 to 30%. It's really a bargain for smaller dev shops.
The only reason why it's probably not going to be worth supporting the other stores is that the userbase is going to be too small, which makes the potential extra revenue you can get in the other store likely too low to justify the support
But 30% is never going to be a bargain, even if you're a solo developer. It's 30% of the company revenue if they're only on the app store. That's likely more then your wage in it's entirely.
What do they lose by fighting it tooth and nail? They don't want consumers using 3rd party app stores. Apple users have been plenty happy without them for years, too.
As an iPhone owner I have been annoyed at the walled garden for years.
This is Platform Sherlocking 101. Let new crops grow before demanding a cut. Don't scare everyone from farming.
There's a reason that only gaming companies have taken Apple to court.
Why should the economics of low-volume and low-profit medical or security applications be subject to the business mechanics of addictive games, which generate billions of revenue for Apple and gaming app developers?
The us judgements in fact suggested that epic should have focused on that issue as the unfair bit
EDIT: I get what people are saying about the App Store fees but reputational damage does cost money, possibly quite a lot.
The idea being, I could travel to the EU (or just buy an EU iPhone), install a 3rd party App Store + apps, then happily use a non-Appstore iPhone outside the EU.
I don't particularly think this "infection" a big risk, but Apple sure seems to.
Billions and billions of dollars, that's why.
So this is just a PR fiasco and a way for Apple to look like a comic book villain that spites both customers and governments, at no gain to itself. If this thing Apple execs apparently fear more than the Devil himself were to actually happen then OK do the calculus and ban what you think you need to ban. But doing it now is just silly.
Apple used to be a company that was famously good at managing its image, no more it seems. A slow decline into incompetency accompanied by a relentless focus on profit maximization is a classic sign that a company has obtained illegal monopoly rents in one form or another and needs to be brought to justice
Say what you want about Apple’s products, but their support is top tier and a major selling point for many consumers. It’s also very expensive to provide.
Relaxing AppStore restrictions reduces both security and expected behavior the phone. People here will argue otherwise, but it is a fact. Alternative web browsers require the ability to make the most dangerous, security compromising system call that can be done by a normal app. Things will inevitably go wrong in ways that Apple cannot control, and users will seek the support they expect. Unfortunately now Apple is at the mercy of Google or whomever to release their own patches while Apple fronts the support costs for problems they didn’t create.
Losing control of the system and being unable to provide the expected level of customer satisfaction is more damaging to the brand than otherwise. Outside of tech circles, nobody cares about alternative app stores or which JIT compiler is running when they browse the web
[1]: as outlined in, e.g. https://developer.apple.com/security/complying-with-the-dma....
Change the law so that any device sold must comply with the DMA for all EU citizens, regardless of domicile.
Thus, any company that denies a EU citizen under the DMA, even if they live in the US, shall be considered noncomplaint.
Also, to make sure no tricks are used, make sure to specify that it is illegal to require citizenship verification for DMA rights.
They say it's their on-device indicator, but that could mean many things. GPS, external IP, cell phone masts...
Do I really own the device if I can't control what runs on it?
your iPhone has a phone component inside and that phone component knows exactly (well depending on the tower you are connected to) what country are you in.
PS: yes your cellphone network provider knows pretty accurate when you are entering your country and exiting it.
I recently spent a bit of time trying to bypass the location check (out of curiosity) and they have it pretty locked down.
The key is they require WiFi to be on so they can get around GPS spoofing.
I had even attempted re-creating all the SSIDs and other networks nearby my spoofed location but the existing networks near my real location were reducing the confidence and still getting me flagged.
One thing I learned during this was how complicit browser manufactures are in providing this information. There is no way to enable location services but disable WiFi triangulation in any mainstream browser. If you disable location permissions websites can just outright block you.
End solution was just a remote KVM setup but not exactly what I wanted.
An opportunity for alternative browsers?
Some more discussion a few days ago:
In terms of camera quality, battery life, or any single criterion it’s not like apple devices are the best anyway.
As a side note - I really don’t understand the logic that leaves gaming consoles exempt.
As a second side note - how is apple even determining if you are an EU citizen or in an EU country? Presumably GPS, but is the implication that EU users must phone home to apple every 30 days?
That's Apple's argument, but it's bs. It's like Microsoft selling you Windows with ads all over the place and then when you complain they say: "I don't understand why you buy Windows if you don't want to see ads, there are other options w/o ads."
Both cell towers and wifi base stations advertise the country code they're in. Every phone needs to know what jurisdiction it is in order to do things like route emergency services calls or what radio frequency bands to enable.
Great looking products. But behind those products is a predator looking to extract as much money/time from you.
Edit: I suppose technically it could be a client level rejection and the App Store says “idk what went wrong”
Apple beeing evil. I hope they get fined by the EU.