I would not buy a FIDO2 token if it allowed anybody to reprogram it, including me. If you managed to make selling me such a device illegal, then may a pox descend on your house.
If I want to reprogram my own FIDO2 token, I should be allowed to.
If I get your FIDO2 token and reprogram it without somehow also wiping the data on it, your problem is that I got your FIDO2 token, not that I could reprogram it without erasing it (which theoretically could perhaps be true right now)
I'm guessing you don't understand the reason I don't want it to be reprogrammable. Yes, there are some advantages to me being able to reprogram it. But it comes with two big downsides.
The first is if I can reprogram it, then so can anyone else. I don't know what the situation is where you live, but government has passed laws allowing them to compel all manufacturers of reprogrammable devices to all them to reprogram is with their spyware.
The second is places I interact with, like banks, insist on having guarantees on the devices I use to authenticate myself. Devices like a credit card. "I promise to never reprogram this card so it debits someone else's account" simply won't fly with them.
The easy way out of that is to ensure the entity who can reprogram it has a lot of skin in the game and deep pockets. This is why they trust a locked pixel running Google signed android to store your cards. But take the same phone running a near identical OS, but on unlocked hardware so you reprogram it, and they won't let you store cards.
But that's the easy way out. It still let's a government force Google to install spyware, so it's not the most secure way. One way to make it secure is to insist no one can reprogram it. That's what a credit card does.
In any case, if someone successfully got the law changed in the way the OP suggested, so people could not use their devices as a digital passport, it won't only be me wishing a pox on their house.
1. if your government decides google has to put spyware on your phone, you wont be able to remove it, unless your device is reprogramnable.
It's actually the other way around, the only way to garantue that your device is free of spyware is you reprogramming it. You shouldn't have to trust the potentially compromised manufacturer.
True, but it's turtles all the way down. There is lots of non-reprogramable firmware in what you call "hardware". The recent article here pointed out the 8087 (an old floating point co-processor) had so much firmware (for the time) Intel had to use a special type of transistor to make it fit. Modern CPU's have many such tiny CPU's doing little jobs here and there. I'm being you didn't even know they exist. They not only exist, they also have a firmware programmed into ROM's you can never change. The bottom line is you have to trust the manufacturer of the silicon, and that isn't much different to trusting someone else who loaded firmware into the device.
The fact that there is always something you must trust in a device, as opposed to being able to prove it's trustworthy to yourself by just looking at it is so well known it has a name: is called the root of trust.
The interesting thing is it can ensure the root of trust the only thing you need to trust. The ability to do that makes your statement factually wrong. In fact it's drop dead simple. The root of trust only need let you read all firmware you loaded back, so you can verify it is what you would have loaded yourself. TPM's and secure boot are built around doing just that. Secure boot is how the banks and whoever else know you are running a copy of Android produced by Google.
> but government has passed laws allowing them to compel all manufacturers of reprogrammable devices to all them to reprogram is with their spyware.
In this case the government may mandate to have spyware pre-installed in the factory - which is already the case for phones and laptops in some countries.
> I promise to never reprogram this card so it debits someone else's account
When reprogramming, the card should wipe private keys so it becomes just a "blank" without any useful information.
That doesn't work for two reasons. Firstly the law in my country specifically forbids introducing what they call a "systemic weakness". Among other things, that bans them from demanding every device is bugged. Instead they must get an judge to authorise targeting an individual, then get the manufacturers to replace the firmware in that device.
Secondly, they have no control over companies not based where I live. So I could just import it myself, provided you are successful get ever country to pass a law the denies me the right to do this the way I want to do it.
Fair enough. Sort of. You can get the same assurances OTP gives you using secure boot + open source + reproducible builds.
Regardless the rest us who don't want to go through the extra work OTP creates still of use want to put our credit cards, fido2 keys, government licences, concert tickets and whatever else in one general purpose computing device so we don't have to carry lots of little auth devices. To do pull that off securely this device must have firmware I can not change.
The OP wants to make it illegal to sell a device with firmware I can not change.
In asking for that, they've demonstrated they don't have a clue how secure and opening computing works. If they somehow got it implemented it would be a security disaster for them and everybody else.
I agree, with maybe minor exceptions. It's probably reasonable that radio hardware can't trivially be reprogrammed to exceed regulated power limits. Or for stuff that is extremely safety critical like pacemakers (though I think for those things it should be mandatory to share source code).
I don't think this should be a matter of regulation, as you can create a device that broadcasts powerful signals at almost any frequency, with high school physics and garage engineering.
It should very much be enforced though, similar to speed limits on the road. It's much easier to zero in on weird electromagnetic waves than it is to catch people speeding on roads.
By requiring high-school garage engineering to DOS your local RF services you prevent essentially everyone from doing it.
I'm all in to allow free access to reading waves, but broadcasting is regulated for good reason. Today I was in the subway when my Bluetooth headset started lagging, it's happened once before on a highway close to a specific car, this is DOS.
The radio spectrum is limited and it must be regulated and follow regulations, enforcement is really hard, it's a lot easier and reasonable to dump it on the manufacturers by locking the juice behind closed firmware.
2.1033 Application for grant of certification. Paragraph 4(i) which reads:
For devices including modular transmitters which are software defined radios and use software to control the radio or other parameters subject to the Commission’s rules, the description must include details of the equipment’s capabilities for software modification and upgradeability, including all frequency bands, power levels, modulation types, or other modes of operation for which the device is designed to operate, whether or not the device will be initially marketed with all modes enabled. The description must state which parties will be authorized to make software changes (e.g., the grantee, wireless service providers, other authorized parties) and the software controls that are provided to prevent unauthorized parties from enabling different modes of operation. Manufacturers must describe the methods used in the device to secure the software in their application for equipment authorization and must include a high level operational description or flow diagram of the software that controls the radio frequency operating parameters. The applicant must provide an attestation that only permissible modes of operation may be selected by a user.
2.1042 Certified modular transmitters. Paragraph (8)(e) which reads:
Manufacturers of any radio including certified modular transmitters which includes a software defined radio must take steps to ensure that only software that has been approved with a particular radio can be loaded into that radio. The software must not allow the installers or end-user to operate the transmitter with operating frequencies, output power, modulation types or other radio frequency parameters outside those that were approved. Manufacturers may use means including, but not limited to the use of a private network that allows only authenticated users to download software, electronic signatures in software or coding in hardware that is decoded by software to verify that new software can be legally loaded into a device to meet these requirements.
That appears to be a post arguing against adopting a rule that was proposed a decade ago. Was it ever actually enacted? I don't see the text of the proposed rule present in the relevant section here:
I wonder if Aliexpress SDR sellers follow this regulations. And as for transmission power, you can simply connect regulation-complying SDR to regulation-complying amplifier and work around it.
> By requiring high-school garage engineering to DOS your local RF services you prevent essentially everyone from doing it.
Likewise for requiring someone to change out drivers or firmware.
> The radio spectrum is limited and it must be regulated and follow regulations, enforcement is really hard, it's a lot easier and reasonable to dump it on the manufacturers by locking the juice behind closed firmware.
By far the largest problem in this space is users importing devices purchased via travel abroad or drop shipping and then those devices don't follow the rules.
Getting domestic users to follow the rules is not a significant problem because a) most people don't know how to modify firmware anyway, b) the people who do know how to do it are sophisticated users who are more likely to understand that there are significant penalties for violating regulatory limits and know they actually live in the relevant jurisdiction, c) if those users really wanted to do it they're the sort who could figure out how to do it regardless, and d) there is negligible benefit in doing it anyway (increasing power increases interference, including for you, and it works much better to just get a second access point).
I think an 80mph limit would be reasonable (10 over the limit in the UK).
I wouldn't be in favour of a hard 75mph because current speed limits are set by social consensus on the basis that they aren't strictly enforced. The police are extremely unlikely to stop you for doing 76mph in a 70, so I don't think your car should.
We should require that any devices that our lives depends on, especially devices that go inside our bodies, to be open source: not just reprogrammable, but with source code available for inspection and modification.
I've been working in this industry for too long in order to trust a closed source pacemaker to be bug-free.
We can have both freedom and safety by requiring re-certification after modification. Like when you heavily physically modify a car then you can still drive it after the authorities decide it is safe.
No, I think we'll start with Apple and work our way down. Scale is everything when you're concerned about remediating market damages.
John Deere is already subject to extra regulation in Europe; it's only in America that they're allowed to molest consumers in the aftermarket. And Xbox has had sideloading for decades now, in case you were unaware: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...
Technical point here but opinions are not illegal to have.
Besides that your point is missing the fact that you are dealing with outside services that provide a contract for their usage (GPS, GSM). You should be free to program your own devices but if you use an external service, then yes they can specify how you use their service. Those are contractual obligations. Cars on the road have clear safety risks and those are legal obligations. None of those obligations should govern what you do with your device until your device interacts with other people and/or services.
The difference is apple doesn’t let you modify your device to use other services. Their contractual obligation goes beyond the service itself. That’s why EPIC won this case.
GPS doesn't come with a contract. It's a purely receive only system.
It wouldn't be fit for purpose (letting soldiers know precisely where they are on the globe) if it required transmission of any type from the user. That would turn it into a beacon an adversary could leverage.
I don't really understand your point in restating this. Someone who says "X should be true" isn't going to be convinced that X should be false by reminding them that X is in fact false.
>GPS et al would be non-functional if everybody could make a jammer.
Then it should be illegal to make a GPS jammer. Making it illegal to reprogram a GPS receiver in any way is unnecessarily broad.
GPS is a bad example, but there are things that pose a physical threat to others that we maybe shouldn't tinker with. Like I think some modern cars are fly-by-wire, so you could stick the accelerator open and disable the breaks and steering. If it's also push-to-start, that's probably not physically connected to the ignition either.
It would be difficult to catch in an inspection if you could reprogram the OEM parts.
I don't care about closed-course cars, though. Do whatever you want to your track/drag car, but cars on the highway should probably have stock software for functional parts.
> Like I think some modern cars are fly-by-wire, so you could stick the accelerator open and disable the breaks and steering.
Essentially all passenger cars use physical/hydraulic connections for the steering and brakes. The computer can activate the brakes, not disable the pedal from working.
But also, this argument is absurd. What if someone could reprogram your computer to make the brakes not work? They could also cut the brake lines or run you off the road. Which is why attempted murder is illegal and you don't need "programming a computer" to be illegal.
> It would be difficult to catch in an inspection if you could reprogram the OEM parts.
People already do this. There are also schmucks who make things like straight-through "catalytic converters" that internally bypass the catalyst for the main exhaust flow to improve performance while putting a mini-catalyst right in front of the oxygen sensor to fool the computer. You'd basically have to remove the catalytic converter and inspect the inside of it to catch them, or test the car on a dyno using an external exhaust probe, which are the same things that would catch someone reprogramming the computer.
In practice those people often don't get caught and the better solution is to go after the people selling those things rather than the people buying them anyway.
> GPS is a bad example, but there are things that pose a physical threat to others that we maybe shouldn't tinker with. Like I think some modern cars are fly-by-wire, so you could stick the accelerator open and disable the breaks and steering. If it's also push-to-start, that's probably not physically connected to the ignition either.
I'm not seeing an argument here.
Cars have posed a physical threat to humans ever since they were invented, and yet the owners could do whatever the hell they wanted as long as the car still behaved legally when tested[1].
Aftermarket brakes (note spelling!), aftermarket steering wheels, aftermarket accelerator pedals (which can stick!), aftermarket suspensions - all legal. Aftermarket air filters, fuel injectors and pumps, exhausts - all legal. Hell, even additions, like forced induction (super/turbo chargers), cold air intake systems, lights, transmission coolers, etc are perfectly fine.
You just have to pass the tests, that's all.
I want to know why it is suddenly so important to remove the owners right to repair.
After all, it's only been quite recent that replacement aftermarket ECUs for engine control were made illegal under certain circumstances[2], and that's only a a few special jurisdictions.
What you are proposing is the automakers wet dream come true - they can effectively disable the car by bricking it after X years, and will legally prevent you from getting it running again even if you had the technical knowhow to do so!
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[1] Like with emissions. Or brakes (note spelling!)
[2] Reprogramming the existing one is still legal, though, you just have to ensure you pass the emissions test.
>you could stick the accelerator open and disable the breaks and steering
This is silly. Prohibiting modifying car firmware because it would enable some methods of sabotage is like prohibiting making sledgehammers because someone might use one to bludgeon someone, when murder is already a crime to begin with.
How does being able to reprogram a GPS device make it into a jammer any more efficiently than grabbing three pieces of coal and running a few amps thru it? Or hell just buying an SDR on aliexpress!
The only reason it's "illegal" is because they were thinking people would use it to make missiles easily - but that's already the case even with non-reprogrammable gps. And in big 2025 you can also just use drones with bombs attached to it.
To be fair, millions people walking with guns around are much scarier than a guy which can jam GPS with a receiver. We have GPS jammed on a regular basis (including around airports when planes land/take off) and nothing bad happens.
• > "If you want to get along, go along." — Sam Rayburn
• > "Reform? Reform! Aren't things bad enough already?" — Lord Eldon
• > "We've always done it this way." — Grace Hopper (referred to it as a dangerous phrase)
• > "Well, when you put it that way..." — [List of millions redacted to protect the compliant]
Rebuttal:
• > "“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” ― George Bernard Shaw
• > "Yeah, well, ya know, that's just like, uh, your opinion man." — The Dude (In someone's pharmaceutically elevated dream, addressing the Supreme Court.)
IANAL but I don’t think OP is breaking any laws by having an opinion on this subject. [At least in the US] pretty much all opinions are completely legal.
> Speaking to reporters Thursday night, though, Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said he believes those should be “super super minor fees,” on the order of “tens or hundreds of dollars” every time an iOS app update goes through Apple for review. That should be more than enough to compensate the employees reviewing the apps to make sure outside payment links are not scams
I would think making sure outside payment links aren’t scams will be more expensive than that because checking that once isn’t sufficient. Scammers will update the target of such links, so you can’t just check this at app submission time. You also will have to check from around the world, from different IP address ranges, outside California business hours, etc, because scammer are smart enough to use such info to decide whether to show their scammy page.
Also, even if it becomes ‘only’ hundreds of dollars, I guess only large companies will be able to afford providing an option for outside payments.
They ferociously check everything that goes out of an app.
If you have a hint of a payment button 15 clicked after leaving your support page through the site logo link your app would get immediately flagged for removal unless you deal with it within week or two give to you.
> CEO Tim Sweeney said he believes those should be “super super minor fees”
He seems to be ignoring the part of the ruling finding that Apple is entitled to "some compensation" for the use of its intellectual property.
> The appeals court recommends that the district court calculate a commission that is based on the costs that are necessary for its coordination of external links for linked-out purchases, along with "some compensation" for the use of its intellectual property. Costs should not include commission for security and privacy.
I don't think a percentage makes any sense at all. Is it proportionately more expensive to host a $50 game than a $25 game? It's only a percentage Because They Can.
I agree. Charging a blanket percentage of gross revenue is an extremely inexact way to monetize what is a broad basket of services that were previously separate including: electronic software delivery, software security verification, marketplace, transaction processing, DRM, etc. Since 2009, first on Apple's app store and then Google's, these services have all been arbitrarily bundled together despite having vastly different one-time, fixed and variable costs. People are only used to it in this context where every marketplace has been controlled by a monopolist gatekeeper.
Doing it this way makes no economic sense for either the seller or the buyer but it's coincidentally the absolute best way for a middleman to maximize the tax they can extract from a two-sided marketplace they control. In competitive markets, blanket taxing on total gross revenue generally only occurs when there's a single fundamental cost structure tied to that revenue, or the amounts being collected are so small it's de minimis. App stores are highly profitable, multi-billion dollar businesses.
Perhaps the most perverse thing about this is that electronic transactions for purely digital goods which occur entirely on real-time connected digital platforms make it trivial to price each service for maximum efficiency. It's easy for the price a 2GB game with frequent updates pays for electronic delivery to reflect the cost they impose on the infrastructure while a 100k one-time purchase app can pay a vastly smaller amount. And that's exactly the way the competitive marketplaces evolve - from moving shipping containers around the planet to residential propane delivery.
I'm by no means defending the percentage they take, but I would suggest that it's a percentage because it's simple:
Pick 3 imaginary games for sale priced at $1, $10 and $100. Any one of those games could be a million download a month success, and any one of them could be a complete dud.
What flat rate would you suggest to:
* Pay the developer for their work (ongoing per sale)
* Review each game and ensure it meets store guidelines (once per update)
* Host said game regardless of how popular it is (ongoing)
* Process transactions for the game (ongoing)
The alternative would be pricing based on revenue tiers (similar to what Unreal Engine does now), which aren't known in advance and don't take global variance into account (USD$200 in Eastern Europe might be a month's salary).
Percentage is just simpler. It also means that they'd be taking a loss on every free app or in the case of Free-to-Download In-App purchase apps - until users start transacting.
Well it's based on sales, not cost. In theory, a more popular game is a larger stress on servers, so charging them more makes sense.
The scaling also helps so that some (probably most) games aren't losing money to be hosted kn a store. That would be catastrophic as at some point games would need to remove themselves to name financial sense.
Why isn't this applied to income taxes first? Does the government deserve a percentage with no cap of whatever you make? Your government services don't get better for you the more you pay.
That is the hill you want to die on? The fact that at income levels greatly above the median income, taxes aren't capped?
You should look at it the other way, where ANY income or income equivalent, of any kind, should be taxed like income.
So when Bezos spends $5bn per year, that means he made $5bn per year (at least), so his tax statement should show him paying $2bn or whatever the top tax rate would imply.
If Epic deserves a 12% cut of a Windows game sold through their store (despite not having paid the costs associated with developing and maintaining Windows) how large a cut should you get when you did incur the additional costs of creating and maintaining the platform?
Yes, if Epic sold an Epic computer which had > 50% marketshare and and you could only purchase products from their store.
The only other category you can really compare this to is game consoles, but the hardware is sold at a much smaller margin and they still (for now) support physical media.
Thats after you make a million dollars though. It's free until then.
"0% Store Fee For First $1,000,000 in Revenue Per App Per Year
Starting in June 2025, for any Epic Games Store payments we process, developers will pay a 0% revenue share on their first $1,000,000 in revenue per app per year, and then our regular 88%/12% revenue share when they earn more than that.
"
12 sounds fine. I won't object to lower but 3-6 % is what most other modern digital platforms charge. Adding your own 3-6% on top a payment processor as a platform hostong content sounds reasonable.
EU courts did cap payment processor fees, so yeah that is intended. We can't have companies bottleneck and take excessive fees and thus stifle progress, when a company gets too powerful the government has to step in.
I'll never say no to properly auditing our systems. So sure.
But I also recognize that few out there are pressing strong opposition to the idea of paying 3% for someone else to manage their financial transactions, or to host their own business. If I make a million dollars, paying 50k to Patreon or Kickstarter for hosting the service seems to make sense in my mind
Every single PC developer is fully able to release PCs games to customers without paying Epic a dime.
So, to you answer your question, the fee that Epic should take is exactly the same as Apple's. It is exactly Zero dollars for all apps that do not go through their app store. Thats already how it works though.
It, of course, would be absurd if Epic was able to force you to pay them money for apps that don't involve Epic in any way and dont go through their app store!
Doesn’t Epic charge a 5% royalty for any games developed on Unreal Engine regardless of where or how the money is collected or what app store it’s installed from? Why can’t Apple collect fees for any apps that are built on their software AND hardware?
> Doesn’t Epic charge a 5% royalty for any games developed on Unreal Engine regardless of where or how the money is collected or what app store it’s installed from?
"Royalty". It's common to charge a royalty when allowing someone to distribute your copyrighted property.
> Why can’t Apple collect fees for any apps that are built on their software AND hardware?
Because that's not a royalty - you aren't distributing Apple's copyrighted property when you send someone an iPhone application.[1]
When you send someone your game built on Unreal Engine, you are sending them Epic's copyrighted property.[2]
-------------------------
[1] If people could side-load iPhone apps, that is. I don't believe that they can.
[2] If you sell someone code to your game and tell them to to download Unreal Engine, then compile and/or link it against Unreal Engine themselves, then sure, Epic won't get a dime. But your customer might still have to pay for that, depending on whether Epic makes single-user no-sale licenses free (I believe they do).
It's a little more nuanced than simply "some compensation" - and IANAL but it seems like the court is saying this fee should as Sweeney posits be very small:
> Apple should be able to charge a commission on linked-out purchases based on the costs that are genuinely and reasonably necessary for its coordination of external links for linked-out purchases, but no more.
> In making a determination of Apple’s necessary costs, Apple is entitled to some compensation for the use of its intellectual property that is directly used in permitting Epic and others to consummate linked-out purchases.
> In deciding how much that should be, the district court should consider the fact that most of the intellectual property at issue is already used to facilitate IAP, and costs attributed to linked-out purchases should be reduced equitably and proportionately;
> Apple should receive no commission for the security and privacy features it offers to external links, and its calculation of its necessary costs for external links should not include the cost associated with the security and privacy features it offers with its IAP;
0.27% + credit card interchange fees feels more than fair to me. Apple should be thanking their lucky stars that the court isn’t forcing them to spin off the App Store business and pay back every stolen cent from their criminal bundling scheme. This makes IE + Windows look so innocent in comparison. Hardware manufacturers shouldn’t be allowed to mandate a monopoly on software distribution. Full stop.
> I would think making sure outside payment links aren’t scams will be more expensive than that because checking that once isn’t sufficient.
Ignoring the fact Apple isn't doing that anyway right now as others have pointed out:
There are multiple ways to make sure of that without it costing any significant money, eg hashing all scripts that are served on the link and making sure they're the same since review.
Not that they'd ever do the review to begin with, so the hashing won't be done either, but it's something that could be done on iOS/ipados.
And if you consider that infeasible, you might want to check out current CSP best practices, you might be surprised
Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said he believes those should be “super super minor fees,” on the order of “tens or hundreds of dollars” every time an iOS app update goes through Apple for review. That should be more than enough to compensate the employees reviewing the apps to make sure outside payment links are not scams and lead to a system of “normal fees for normal businesses that sell normal things to normal customers,” Sweeney said.
Tens to hundreds every time an app goes through review is "super supor minor"... This is how you know Epic has the backs of all the indie devs who fret about $100/year dev membership.
This isn't about whether Apple allows outside payment links or not. It's about whether Apple takes a percentage cut from outside payments.
Is Apple actually checking outside payments for scams outside of review times? Do they check non-payment links for scams outside of review times? How often?
The point is that they should only be able to charge a fee for work they are truly doing, and it shouldn't be retaliatory.
Maybe it wouldn't hurt to have rarer and more thoughtful releases.
Or we end up with this modern disease where the OS wants to update itself, the browser needs to update itself, Acrobat wants to update itself, etc, etc, all the time.
> I would think making sure outside payment links aren’t scams will be more expensive than that because checking that once isn’t sufficient.
According to the ruling on page 42, "(c) Apple should receive no commission for the security and privacy features it offers to external links, and its calculation of its necessary costs for external links should not include the cost associated with the security and privacy features it offers with its IAP"
> Apple should receive no commission for the security and privacy features it offers to external links
I'm not versed in legalese, so maybe I misunderstand. Isn't it reasonable that Apple receives money for a service they provide, that costs money to run?
The case is really about the opposite: "what payment related services is Apple allowed to force people to use (and therefore pay for)". The court concluded that excludes both the payment service itself as well as the validation of the security of external payment services used in its place.
A service to whom? Protecting users is a service to users, not to developers. This is a selling point of iPhone, and thus Apple receives money from users when they pay for the iPhone.
Think about it this way: totally free apps with no IAP get reviewed by Apple too, and there's no charge to the developer except the $99 Apple Developer Program membership fee, which Epic already pays too.
> Think about it this way: totally free apps with no IAP get reviewed by Apple too, and there's no charge to the developer except the $99 Apple Developer Program membership fee
Yearly fee. And about $500 a year in hardware depreciation, because you can reasonably develop for Apple _only_ on Apple hardware.
This is _way_ more than Microsoft has ever charged, btw.
> I would think making sure outside payment links aren’t scams will be more expensive than that
You really think that the aggregate cost of fraud mitigation in the app store is 30% of revenue? That seems laughable, the credit card industry as a whole does far, far better than that with far less ability to audit and control transaction use.
I don’t feel great about this ruling. Whatever a “reasonable” fee is supposed to mean, Apple will interpret it to some ridiculous amount. Before the ban, they tried to charge 27%
They absolutely will and they will absolutely get away with it. It just won’t be anywhere close to 27%.
There has been craploads of litigation about “Fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory” licensing over the last two decades, and fees that are percentages of revenue with no cap have survived and there is no reason to believe any of these legal standards will change.
In fact, I think it’s likely that Apple and Google will team up to create a standards body that defines the method for distributing/installing smartphone apps (because this is now in their best interest, not that I want them to). These standards are going to end up using a bunch of patents that you will have to license on FRAND terms.
Yes, the cost is going to go down. Yes, Epic is going to benefit a lot more than any indie developer. Such is life
Yep, there's no reason to believe the fees will only be a few hundred dollars as Sweeney is saying, Apple will absolutely try to extract as much as possible without being sued again. The zero commissions for external links was the right approach.
I'm not even sure about that. This very ruling shows that Apple blatantly violated the law (the previous ruling) and tried to collect as much fee as possible while the case goes through the system.
And Apple isn't afraid of being sued. As long as they can earn more money in revenue than paying for lawyers, that's a net profit for them. They can certainly afford all of this.
It should be based on the app size, so maybe developers will stop shipping apps with a single feature and one button that takes 700 MB because of random bloated third-party SDKs that aren't even used.
Money makers on the AppStore are games, and games need assets in high definition. Third party SDKs are probably a drop in the bucket in comparison with visual assets.
I don't feel great either, but that's because prices aren't coming down, instead one billion dollar company just keeps more money than another billion (trillion I guess) dollar company, and we've lost some convenience features that Apple maintained, without any gain.
This is not only affects Epic. Basically any other app, game or SaaS developer can now earn more money because payment processing costing them 1-3% instead of 30%.
And small companies are hit by 30% platform tax the most. More money for small compsnies mean more competition.
For starters, small companies are paying 15%, not 30%.
I'm also not sure where a small company can find a payment processor that will only charge 1%. Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction.
If you have a $4.99 in-app purchase that will cost you 44 cents per transaction to use Stripe vs 75 cents to use Apple's IAP.
But Stripe does not act as a merchant of record so you are responsible for remitting sales tax yourself. Registering for and remitting sales tax in every jurisdiction where you have nexus adds huge administrative overhead to a small company.
If you want to avoid this overhead, Paddle will act as a merchant of record for you, but then you're paying 5% plus 50 cents which adds up to 75 cents on a $4.99 purchase anyway.
Taken all together, depending on their pricing structure, small companies may very well be financially better off sticking with IAP rather than linking to external payments anyway.
When talking in the grand scheme of this case, the 15% arose out of these proceedings. It was 30 back on in 2018.
But yes, overall most people will stick with Apple regardless. I still see it as a win that companies who want to put the work in to go around apple can. That simply seems reasonable in my eyes.
> When talking in the grand scheme of this case, the 15% arose out of these proceedings. It was 30 back on in 2018.
I'm not sure about the timeline, but in general the reduction to 15% for small developers was due to market signals as much as it was anything else. Both Apple and Google need small developers to continue to create new apps and if the 30% is onerous to small developers (which I think it probably is) they'll lower it to attract more products and services.
> But yes, overall most people will stick with Apple regardless. I still see it as a win that companies who want to put the work in to go around apple can. That simply seems reasonable in my eyes
When you think about it, there's maybe half a dozen companies that truly could put in similar work to Apple or Google in creating and maintaining these stores and platforms at the scale and with the features and security that they have built. Most people are going to stick with Apple and Google, except when one of those large competitors like Meta decides to bypass those stores and create its own and continue to nudge folks to their store for various features or downloads or whatever. It introduces friction for no obvious benefit to customers.
You can argue that 3rd party app stores will be more permissive in what they allow, but most of the things that people complain about "scary surveillance" or other onerous regulations for example have to also be followed by any legitimate App Store. So all you've really done is create worse versions of the Apple or Google App Store that siphon away applications. It reduces the profit margins of Apple or Google but it doesn't benefit customers.
I've always wanted to do some small business, maybe an app but to get started feels so daunting. This information you provided is great and makes me feel like there's room to know more.
Are there any good places to grow this kind of knowledge?
How to use payment processors?
How to actually setup a business and get paid yourself?
I don't want to get into the whole founder ethos, I just want to make something and get paid for it.
I don't know a lot about this, but for example an would app side loaded or delivered via F-Droid be subject to this policy?
F-Droid notwithstanding using an alternative app is not a very attractive option right now as there no good alternatives. But if Valve can create an Android app store that competes with the Play store, the in principle situation is very different.
Will this help other services like Netflix, Spotify? Or am I misreading things.
My understanding, at least several years ago, that Netflix was paying as much to Apple in subscription fees, as they did for their AWS hosting.
I also noticed when upgrading my Spotify account, I couldn't do that through the iphone app itself - I assumed this was because it would break TOS, or they didn't want to pay a massive chunck of the monthly subscription cost to Apple.
Will Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Valve and another software store have to allow mini stores on their platforms? That's to say software with its own payment system, inside of a free app?
Q: How much does it cost to develop on Nintendo platforms?
A: Registering for the portal and downloading the tools is completely free.
Also, if you plan to release a digital only title, you can use the IARC system to retrieve the age rating for no fee, which will allow you to publish in all the participating countries.
All that is left is the cost of acquiring development hardware: you will find more information on this inside the portal.
Development hardware isn't cheap, but it's also not out-of-sight expensive either. There's a very good reason why you see so many indie games this past generation on Switch.
Fair. I should have simply said "Nintendo doesn't approve and send out dev kits to anyone that signs up". But even that is perhaps outdated info from the pre-switch days.
Heck, pre-COVID, you needed a business address to even receive a kit. Things changed quickly at the turn of the decade.
The "reasonable" fees are not gonna be only a few hundred bucks, it'll still be a percentage of revenue but smaller than 27%. Apple will try to extract as much as possible and will not tolerate a non-percentage fee.
Yeah, console hardware already run on thin margins and it feels like one of the big manufacturers are already on their way out. I don't think extra regulation benefits anyone. Not the devs, not the consumers.
Meanwhile, Apple and Google sure aren't going to call it quits just because they take 10, 20% less.
You're seriously arguing that Sony and Microsoft need or deserve special treatment? That's patently insane. The Government shouldn't be in the business of assessing the minutia of competing business models. Whatever you think is right for Apple, it's good enough for absolutely everyone.
1. No one cares about making an app store for the Ps5 when in 10 years they'll need to port it to the PS6
2. Consoles are already stagnating and it won't take much to also push Sony out. So basically we'd reduce competition back down to Nintendo to enable a feature no one cares about.
But sure. If you want to look at it in that lens: I want apple and Google to get "special punishments" because they've long proven to be a monopoly and practice anti-competitive behaviors. We can deal with other monopolies as we go along.
The size and impact on society of the Android/iOS platforms are way way way higher than that of Sony's and Nintendo's platforms. Nobody needs a console, but basically everybody needs a phone running Android or iOS.
Yes, basically everybody needs a phone running Android or iOS. But they don’t need Fortnite on their phone.
If the government wanted to proscribe store rates for productivity apps only, I’d be more receptive. But it’s ridiculous for the government to proscribe rates for game sales, especially if they aren’t doing the same for all game stores.
Because they directly negotiate deals with those companies that other smaller players can’t negotiate. The App Store is largely a “these are the rules for everyone” minus a few small exceptions.
Because the three of them are all making their store business decisions outside of CA such that it's far harder to have California law applied to them?
I think the simpler answer is that Epic isn’t upset with the arrangement they have with Microsoft/Nintendo/Sony. They’ve done a better job cultivating a relationship with Epic than Apple has who seems to have only contempt for every other developer.
Well yeah! A Nintendo switch or PlayStation is technically similar to an iPhone. But you can’t make the same monopolistic dealing argument there as you can on phones.
Why? Because a console is bought as a gaming device. And because you can reasonably have multiple consoles and there’s healthy competition between them.
In comparison, people buy a phone to have a phone. Then the App Store lock-in is tacked on the side. iPhone and Android compete on who has the best cameras. But once you’ve bought your phone, you’re trapped in the manufacturer’s App Store, who can charge monopolistic pricing. And normal people don’t buy multiple phones for different app stores.
The App Store monopoly is like if your electricity company somehow made it so you could only buy an Xbox. Games on steam and PlayStation aren’t compatible with the electricity in your house. And your friend down the street could only use a PlayStation. Not for any technical reason, but simply because locking you in to a single console manufacturer means they can make you pay way more for games. And you’ll pay it, because you don’t have a choice and can’t shop around.
The problem comes about because phones and app stores are glued together. They use a captive market created by one part of the business to trap consumers and developers elsewhere. If Google and Apple had to compete on app stores - like how Nintendo, PlayStation and Microsoft have to compete - then there’s no way Apple could get away with charging their extortionate 28% for App Store sales. If chrome charged a 28% commission on all purchases I made through the browser, everyone would switch to Firefox. Apps on my phone should be more like that.
I bought a console as a gaming device, but now my family mostly use it for YouTube and other streaming video. Similarly, relatively little of my phone time is used on phone calls. I think the distinction is mostly just locked in by history.
If you wanted a dedicated streaming device, the competition is much cheaper.
But sure, nothing on a technical lecdl stops you from using a console as a general computer. It's just that that's not what the overwhelming use is as of now. Use cases play a large factor in rulings like this.
Well, its not just "games vs phones". The question is whether or not the company's actions unfairly stifle competition. Nintendo / sony / etc would argue there's lots of competition, because you can just buy their competitor's product if you think they provide a better service. The argument is weaker for apple because its much harder for regular people to "just" swap their phone between ios / android over differences in the app stores.
Consoles compete on games. Phones compete on specs, and then they happen to have an app store on the side. Thats a difference.
Sure; I’d love it if they were. But there’s another, legally much stronger reason to hate on Apple for their locked down App Store that has nothing to do with engineering.
You don't need a phone for most 2-factor methods. Also, you don't need iOS to receive a text message. It's very rare that I have to grab my phone for MFA.
> Consoles run more "commodity hardware" than phones, like CPUs and GPUs and standard ports etc.
Not really. They share CPU/GPU architecture but there are significant differences vs. what you can buy for a PC. For example, the latest PlayStation and Xbox use unified GDDR memory and commodity CPUs all use (LP)DDR.
However, you can buy systems that use the same (or similar) chips as phones these days. Snapdragon, Apple Silicon, SBCs?
My point is the argument against apples monopolistic practices isn’t a technical argument. It’s a legal / social one.
For what it’s worth, I agree with the argument that if I buy a computer it should let me run arbitrary code. But there’s no laws against that. There are laws about monopolies. I see that as a much stronger way to attack Apple over their behaviour here.
It's odd to celebrate having the key sanctions unwound.
Before this ruling:
1. Apple were prohibited from charging any fee for external/referral purchases. Now this is once again allowed and the district court will work with all parties to develop a reasonable commission.
2. External links were permitted to dominate over IAP options. Now they must have equal size, prominence and quantity.
3. Apple were prevented from showing any kind of exit screen, that is now restored (but it can't be a scare screen).
4. Apple were barred from preventing certain developers/app classes from using external links (such as those enrolled in the News or Video Partner Programs) those are now reversed and Apple can once again prevent them.
Epic/Tim Sweeney are trying to spin these recent losses as a win. It's the old marketing playbook of hoping no one reads the fine print.
> ... the appeals court now suggests that Apple should still be able to charge a “reasonable fee” based on its “actual costs to ensure user security and privacy.”
> Speaking to reporters Thursday night, though, Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said he believes those should be “super super minor fees,” on the order of “tens or hundreds of dollars” every time an iOS app update goes through Apple for review.
Wow, one step forward, and one step back. Good job, Epic.
The outcome is obviously going to be that Apple's store will have the most apps, with the most up to date versions, and with the most free apps/games. I'm sure Fortnite will do just fine though.
Unless I'm misunderstanding this, why would the court allow Apple to act as a gatekeeper for their competitors?
> why would the court allow Apple to act as a gatekeeper for their competitors
Yeah, this is the fundamental problem, and not something this court ruling does anything to fix. Apple has full control over what software its competitors are allowed to sell. The court's solution? Tell Apple to be more fair when dictating rules to its competitors. Yeah... I'm sure that'll work great.
Yep, on their platform. Just like Wal-Mart and Kroger have full control over what products their competitors are allowed to sell too (in-store versus name brands). Microsoft only makes and sells their games for example for the Windows platform and doesn't allow portability.
As a pattern there's nothing wrong with it.
The crux of the issue is that creation of a mobile operating system that people actually want, like in some other industries, as resulted in two dominant platforms that don't compete all that much with each other. That's a much more interesting and important "problem" to solve than Apple/Google create competing apps on their software distribution platforms.
My phone that I purchased is not "their" platform. Better analogy would be if Wal-Mart sold me a fridge and then somehow managed to make it so I can only store groceries purchased from Wal-Mart in that fridge. Now if anyone wants to sell me groceries they need to sell them to me through Walmart, otherwise I can't refrigerate them.
As long as you understood the limitations of the fridge you purchased, i.e. you weren't defrauded, what's the problem? Do you really need a nanny state to prevent you from making bad purchases??
There are many other computing devices that can run operating systems other than Android and iOS, including devices that can run completely unlocked versions of Android. You're just lying.
So your argument here is "Apple isn't a monopoly. The Fairphone is always ab option"?
I'll keep pounding it in people's heads that 30 years ago Microsoft was hit over a web browser. It's a shame these days people would instead revert that and say "just download Netscape". If that worked, sure. But we have decades of market lock in showing it doesn't
The flaw in the Microsoft comparison is that the web browser was installed in, what, 95% of actual computing devices? Remember phones and all of this other cool technology we have didn't exist.
Today there are many phones to choose from. You can buy an iPhone, or a Pixel, or a Galaxy. You can even buy a more open-source style phone with open-source style stores just like any other generic product feature. There is a marketplace and there is competition, it's just that, unlike what so many people here seem to desire, locked-down stores are what the market prefers.
>Remember phones and all of this other cool technology we have didn't exist.
I don't think phones and PCs compete against each other, though. A phone can act like a general computer, but a PC can't act like a phone.
>Today there are many phones to choose from.
We had Linux, mac, BSD and a few other OS's back in the day as well. If we're saying Windows is 95% of PCs back then, I don't think it's controversial saying Apple and Android are 95% of phones. Especially in a day and age where phones are now needed to act as verification for work and school and chat communications are expected to be snappy (so it's not like I can just opt out and go back to dumb phones).
>locked-down stores are what the market prefers.
That's why anti-trust isn't left to "what the market prefers".
Yes, society will always waiver towards idyllic destruction if left ubchecked. People generally "like" monopolies. People yearn for that society on WALL-E where they do minimum work and get maximum dopamine. It's a quirk genes that benefitted us 1000 years ago that haven't adjusted to modern realities.
Governments and non-monopoly businesses alike hate it, though. Don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. Don't want to have a single businessman hold the country hostage later and shift to a plutocracy as they abuse your citizens who work.
That's why it's best to stop it much earlier and not when the company becomes a trillionaire. But now is the 2nd best time.
Seems like there are a relatively large number of competitors to Apple and Google. Eg. Samsung, Motorola, Lenovo, OnePlus, LG, HTC etc. Not to mention Asian brands.
Duopoly might apply if those companies were using their combined dominance to collude and push other competitors out but that isn't really happening as evidenced by the amount of competitors that are in the market.
The problem is that it obviously sucks. If you say "no it doesn't" - you're lying, you know it sucks. Obviously me only being able to refrigerate Walmart goods sucks.
> Do you really need a nanny state
This is a false dichotomy. The reason you're doing this is because you know the current situation sucks major donkey dick and nobody, including you, likes it. So to defend it you have to appeal to something even more sucky. It's the death rattle of a poorly constructed argument.
You don't need a nanny state, quite the opposite! You need a freer market.
When Walmart sells the evil fridge, which I can only assume has been hexed by a swamp witch, what they are actually doing is subverting the free market. They're cheating.
Instead of competing by selling the best groceries or the best fridge, they're competing by artificially limiting their competition. They see the market, say "fuck that market, your market is only our stuff", and force your hand. They've created a soft monopoly.
The misconception about free markets is that, if you just let them be, then they're good. Ha. Every free market player is actively devising every single plan imaginable to make the market less free.
If Walmart could run behind you and lock the doors so that you have to buy their groceries, lest you starve to death, they would. Luckily, the "nanny state" stepped in, and we have a freer market because of it.
So the problem with your fridge example is that if the product was as bad as you say, nobody would buy it and thus there is no risk of a monopoly. If the product is so good that everyone wants it, there goes the rest of your pro-consumer argument.
This whole argument is a neat trick, as you smuggle bad outcomes into a situation where there aren't any by pretending that everyone wants to buy the horrible product.
If you want to make a case that monopolies that arise from consumers overwhelmingly choosing a preferential product are bad, go ahead, but don't construct an impossible scenario where everyone loses their minds and buys a product that provides purely negative value to them just cuz.
You've been repeating this flawed comparison for years. It's getting really stale.
The App Store is markedly unlike Wal-Mart or Kroger, in that a user cannot buy one thing from one store and another thing from the other. This would be like buying a Kroger-branded car and then being forbidden from entering the Wal-Mart parking lot. The problem with the App Store is not Apple's control over it and the Apple-branded experience - it is the exclusion of alternative and competing schemes that could naturally drive down their own prices.
If Wal-Mart or Kroger did this, they would be in the same hot water as Apple. Probably quite a bit worse, since people understand the commoditization of groceries better than software.
> That's a much more interesting and important "problem" to solve
No it's not. The industry has no interest in overturning it, if there was commercial demand for an innovative third platform then we'd see one. The crux of this issue is Apple becoming a services company and then denying competing services from competing on equal grounds. It cannot get any clearer than that.
> You've been repeating this flawed comparison for years. It's getting really stale.
Well I've been repeating it because it's still true.
> The App Store is markedly unlike Wal-Mart or Kroger, in that a user cannot buy one thing from one store and another thing from the other.
You're just shifting around a definition of store to fit your argument. If you want to be consistent, it's more like you can't go in to Kroger and demand to buy products sold at Wal-Mart for Wal-Mart prices. You're in a different store.
> No it's not. The industry has no interest in overturning it, if there was commercial demand for an innovative third platform then we'd see one.
So the market is clearly saying "this works and we like it". It's just that the lawyers and accountants want to shift which giant corporation gets to keep more of whatever fee percentage.
> The crux of this issue is Apple becoming a services company and then denying competing services from competing on equal grounds. It cannot get any clearer than that.
Equality will never exist on these platforms, nor is equality necessarily something that's desired. Every company on earth that operates any sort of marketplace or store sets rules and boundaries that restrict competition. You're just mad about Apple/Google doing it because some algorithm decided it was an important issue for you. Do you know why that's true? Because you're sitting here arguing about Apple/Google doing it and not every other company doing it.
Even worse is that these changes that you champion have resulted in no price reductions, no "innovation", and have degraded features that I personally like and enjoy.
> it's more like you can't go in to Kroger and demand to buy products sold at Wal-Mart for Wal-Mart prices.
You don't have to. Kroger and Wal-Mart are completely commoditized options providing the same service. There is fundamentally no difference from buying at one store vs the other; you can do both. If someone goes into Kroger demanding to buy Wal-Mart products at Wal-Mart prices, they're in luck; Wal-Mart exists. There is no lock-in to either store or the options they provide. You're describing a boogeyman that doesn't exist because the greater grocery market is functional and competitive.
The same opportunity does not exist for customers of the App Store. Apps themselves are entirely commoditized; it's only the App Store that is a deliberate monopoly. That has been consistent since the launch of the iPhone and packaging of iOS applications as infinitely reproducible .IPA files.
> So the market is clearly saying "this works and we like it".
That's how most monopolies work, yes. Unfortunately, "the market" won't be asked to testify to whether or not they like or enjoy a monopoly, but whether it causes anti-competitive damages.
> You're just mad about Apple/Google doing it because some algorithm decided it was an important issue for you.
I cannot parse what you're even trying to accuse me of in this sentence. This is the Y Combinator forum. We discuss monopolies like AdSense and the App Store because they harm the economy, not because Instagram Reels showed me a Louis Rossman short.
Because Epic hitched their real desire, we want to do digital distribution independent of Apple, to wanting alternative App Stores and alternative payment methods. And Apple responded with a scheme that does the latter without the former.
Sure you can use your own payment processor, we're still charging 27% though. Sure you can have your own App Store, you still have to go through the same review process though. It seems some of the cracks in this malicious compliance are starting to show.
There’s a Best Buy a few miles from my house. Why aren't I allowed to put my own products on their shelves, or set up a little folding table next to the phone accessories to sell my own cases?
It is not fair to me as a merchant that everyone who wants to buy a phone case goes to Best Buy. That's where all the foot traffic is. It's clearly anti-competitive that they expect me to pay for shelf space I benefit from.
And now they want to charge me to verify that the USB-C cables I'm selling actually work? How is that remotely reasonable? Just because most of my cables are faulty and customers will inevitably go complain to their customer service desk, why should I bear that cost?
Consumers deserve the right to choose accessories from multiple independent merchants inside Best Buy. Suggesting otherwise is anti-consumer, anti-choice, and proof that you hate open and accessible ecosystems.
For this analogy to be comparable, you would first have to consider that Best Buy, together with Walmart, owns 99.9999% of all store real estate in the world. You would also have to consider that the "shelf space" in this case is free and comes at zero cost to Best Buy; in fact, giving you virtual shelf space increases the amount of traffic that comes into their stores, resulting in a benefit to themselves.
Your analogy as presented was so lacking in merit you might as well have been talking about cats and leprechauns for how completely nonsensical it was to bring it up in the context of Apple.
Simon and GGP combined do own an overwhelming percentage of all retail square footage in the US, but lets at least consider the rest of the argument here.
Apple's "shelf space" is not free. There are constant R&D expenses involved in introducing new sensors and screens that make the underlying apps better. They take on the support load of on-boarding users, managing the relationship, and dealing with any problems. Advertising, carrier validation, third party hardware ecosystem, etc.
Epic wants to sidestep all of the costs of building a platform, and offload support costs onto Apple.
> Simon and GGP combined do own an overwhelming percentage of all retail square footage in the US
This is factually incorrect, and not only incorrect, but so wildly far from being correct that one wonders if this statement was made in bad faith. They only have around 300 million sqft out of an estimated 12 billion sqft, around 2.5%. That is not an overwhelming percentage, nor is it "99.9999% of all retail square footage in the world", which was not a hyperbolic statement. Competitors in retail can obtain their own shelf space. You cannot obtain your own shelf space for mobile software. The network effects of hardware+OS centralization are too strong, so there are and never will be any viable competitors to iOS and Android.
> Apple's "shelf space" is not free. There are constant R&D expenses involved in introducing new sensors and screens that make the underlying apps better.
The R&D expenses do not change regardless of whether there are 1 million or 10 million apps available for iOS. Allowing people to distribute their own software comes at no cost to Apple.
> They take on the support load of on-boarding users, managing the relationship, and dealing with any problems.
Apple absolutely does not do any of this as it pertains to individual apps.
> Epic wants to sidestep all of the costs of building a platform, and offload support costs onto Apple
Nobody is asking for Apple's support; really, what the world needs is less of Apple's involvement in the hardware the people own, not more. Epic is clearly willing to spend money on building platforms, since it has a documented $600 million in losses in its effort to build a competitor to Steam. This, however, is not a case where it is possible to build a platform.
You absolutely can sell your product as a merchant! Best buy doesnt force you to pay them a fee, if you are selling electronics. You are perfectly within your right to ship the electronics to the merchant yourself and best buy doesnt take a dime!
The same is not true for Apple. For Apple, a customer can want to make a direct agreement with an app store developer, without the involvement of Apple in any way, on the phone that they completely own, and Apple wasn't allowing this to happen.
It would be like if it was illegal to setup competing stores that are located next to best buy that dont involve best buy in any way. That would be absurd.
Apple pays 100% of the tax on the service road to the stores and pays for the parking lot, though. They deserve some fee and that's what the courts said, right?
You call it a tax, most others would call it the cost of doing business.
But yes, that's built into the product's price. Devs are paying for a license to work with IOS and need to own hardware only Apple sells to work on IOS. So I think those costs are covered.
We'll see what the "reasonable" price is. If nothing else, we know 27% was too much even for appeals.
Not if the only way to get to the store was through that road. In that case, there are public access laws and it is literally illegal for people who "own" a road to charge people money, if there is an easement.
Thats probably a simplification, but they are called "easement by necessity." rights. So even in your example of the roadway, thats also wrong. They get zero dollars.
My point is in the real world sharing an area with it would mean the other store also contributes tax wise. It's not equivalent to bring up real life if the real life paying part isn't also adhered to; the lack of symmetry is notable. I don't think they deserve to set their price, though (30% is way too high).
This case is more of a "lead a horse to water" situation. Even if Apple fully opened up PWAs there'd only be a small trickle of them as people developed to norms.
Its still worth pursuing. Hut the effects may not be what we desire.
> the web proves that security / safety can be done in an open way
A) the web is full of phishing and other scams, as well as tons of low quality garbage
B) the web achieves this security model by limiting applications to a browser sandbox, which imposes restrictions on what the software can do. This is a non starter for many native apps.
insist on Apple IAP links/buttons to be the same as buttons/links to external payments. But they can't ask for the outgoing links/buttons to be less prominent
charge for links/buttons to external payment, but not as they please. One interpretation is that it has to be based on real cost and can't in any way be tied to IAP costs.
I think a 'real store' generally allows you to exchange money for something. If I wanted to sell software to Linux users, Steam is probably the closest thing to an 'app store' you could expect to find. Windows has the Microsoft Store, and Macs have the Apple Store.
Some distros have literal stores. But "Linux" isn't a centralized platform the same way Windows and Mac is.
Also, the stores for desktop apps just don't really seem to be as effective. Companies are used to hosting their desktop apps on web.
Games seems to be more of an exception to the rule, for historical reasons.
Downloading software over dial-up speeds of 14.4 kbps to 28.8 kbps sucked, and most businesses weren't large enterprises so didn't have T1s (which were themselves only 1.5 Mbps) so sending the office manager across town to Circuit City to buy a boxed copy of some piece of software made sense. The app stores of the 90s were "third party" and physical and covered the needs and capabilities of 90s companies. The other "app store" was even more indirect, software makers paying PC sellers to pre-install.
That's how Game consoles operated, so there was definitely precedent.
But it took until 93-94 for Windows to actually become dominant enough to have such leverage, some argue that this only really happened with Windows 95. Since it was an open ecosystem for almost a decade at that point, changing was hard.
The Apple AppStore was different, it was launched after the iPhone shipped 13 million units and "only allowed web apps".
It could be argued that it was part of "embrace, extend, extinguish" to attract developers to the platform by keeping it open. They would just figure out how to capitalize on anything that got big enough, much like Google.
Apple really pioneered the walled garden (which I would assume was previously taken to be shooting yourself in the foot), and it's proven to resonate with the wider less tech-savvy population.
> And you don't need the internet to sell applications.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? I don't know how you'd sell them otherwise. How do you do you process a payment without a network connection? The only thing I can think of is offering a catalog in the OS which users could browse and physically order stuff from, but I wouldn't call that a store.
Even back then, game console manufacturers had licensing agreements with developers, so those developers had to pay royalties, even though distribution was handled by physical stores.
In some cases, some console manufacturers even handled the manufacturing of cartridges/CDs and the distribution side too.
Sorry, I'm a little confused about the relevance here. Could you elaborate a bit on how it ties into what I was saying? How did the users view products, how did they purchase them, and how did they receive them?
You asked how a company could sell (presumably third-party) apps without internet. I gave an example of it happening. Money-wise the model was very similar to Apple's AppStore.
> How did the users view products, how did they purchase them, and how did they receive them?
For the specific case of games, it was mainly via physical stores but I'm sure there were other methods such as catalogs, especially internationally.
EDIT: Remember GP is talking about the 90s and without internet, so it doesn't mean an app store where the app is instantly in your possession after clicking a button.
> Remember GP is talking about the 90s and without internet, so it doesn't mean an app store where the app is instantly in your possession after clicking a button.
Right, but how is that an app store and not just a catalog?
…am I fully misunderstanding and they just meant a physical store?
>Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? I don't know how you'd sell them otherwise. How do you do you process a payment without a network connection? The only thing I can think of is offering a catalog in the OS which users could browse and physically order stuff from, but I wouldn't call that a store.
Not GP but, processing payments absolutely does not require a network connection. Doing so is absolutely not nearly as convenient, but in my adult lifetime it was pretty normal for retailers to pick up a phone, give a customer service rep and/or automated call handler CC info and dollar amounts and get appropriate confirmations.
As for a business without an OS interface not being a "store," that's ridiculous on its face. If that were true, we'd have to call 7/11 or any similar place (like those at most gas stations) convenience "locations with items for sale but not a store, because stores are only places with catalogs in my OS," and "places which sell stuff but aren't stores because rimunroe says they can't be a 'store' without a catalog in their OS."
> Not GP but, processing payments absolutely does not require a network connection. Doing so is absolutely not nearly as convenient, but in my adult lifetime it was pretty normal for retailers to pick up a phone, give a customer service rep and/or automated call handler CC info and dollar amounts and get appropriate confirmations.
I forgot about phone payments, but that doesn't change my argument. If it's a built in listing of products, it presumably needs to be updated occasionally too, which I'm not sure how you'd do without mailing disks if you didn't have a network connection. I also don't know how you'd make room for the bundled software. My memory of my Windows 3.1 machine involves a lot of wishing I had more space on my HDD.
> As for a business without an OS interface not being a "store," that's ridiculous on its face.
That indeed would be absurd. Fortunately, I never argued this. I argued that without taking payments or distributing the software through the "store", I don't think it would qualify as a store but would qualify as a catalog. I think of a store as somewhere you go to exchange money for goods/services. If it's doing neither of those things is it still a store?
> Touch grass, friend.
I don't know why you felt this hostility was warranted. Did I slight you in some way?
There wasn't an argument. The OP was just asking a (presumably honest) and simple question: How do you do you process a payment without a network connection?
I can understand how someone under, say, 30, might not know how commerce happened before the Internet. My 13 year old can't believe there was even once a world without the Internet.
> I can understand how someone under, say, 30, might not know how commerce happened before the Internet.
I remember those days, but I think most people would call something where you viewed a list of products and then called or mailed to order and received the product elsewhere a catalog, not a store. As for over-the-phone payments, I forgot about that method for a moment but don't think it meaningfully affects my argument. It's just as out-of-band as the mail order example I included.
It feels like courts are not doing a good job promoting "competition".
- Apple shouldn't be able to charge for external payments, come on.
- Force prominent disclosure of refund policies. Epic Games doesn't allow them for IAP. Apple does. Epic knows exactly how predatory that is, betting some kids will find ways to spend thousands and the parents will be helpless. Ideally you'd have a law mandating refunds, but without that, there should be mandatory disclosure on the IAP screen, at least for microtransaction games. You can't have fair "competition" when you have an information asymmetry, and if these rulings don't mandate that, you'll open the floodgate for these gaming companies to screw over parents.
Antitrust laws were written in the early 1900s and updated through the 1950s. Credit cards weren't available until 1966 and didn't become widely used until the 1990s. Digital platforms weren't a thing until the late 90s/early 2000s and the Apple app store didn't exist until 2008.
The courts can only enforce the laws on the books. Congress needs to update the laws, but they won't because they are hopelessly corrupt :(
Lina Khan did try and regulate. She had some successes, but the major cases w/r/t concentration of power against Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta and Apple have all moved slowly and (so far) failed to result in break ups.
100% agree Apple should be forced to have a big banner on explicitly stating they have no refund policy and it's all whatever they feel like this week. Which funny enough is also basically their app approval process.
> - Force prominent disclosure of refund policies. Epic Games doesn't allow them for IAP. Apple does.
Apple has no official App Store refund policy, either for IAP or for upfront paid apps. I've already looked for one. There's of course a form to request a refund, but refunds are entirely at Apple's discretion, for any reason or no reason, and Apple often exercises its discretion to refuse refunds.
The App Store was built on iTunes and used the same backend. The refund process hasn’t changed since then. Funny enough before the App Store you could buy Apple curated apps for your iPod.
Have you heard reports of Apple not granting refunds?
Why shouldn't Apple be able to charge whatever the fuck they want on their own platform, while users of their platform can? Now Sweeney can sell vbux to kids and Apple has to just grin and bear it?
Apple needs to be broken up and separated from the App Store. Apple sells devices, and I buy one expecting to own it outright. When you own something, you should be able to install whatever you want without interference from Apple.
How is the iPhone different from the Macs? I can install anything I want from any source on the Mac, but I can't do that on the iPhone. Doesn't make any sense.
Whoever owns the device can do what they want with it, Apple cannot tell you what you're allowed to do with your phone. You're making up a scenario in your head.
This goes both ways - when Apple produces a phone, they own it and they're also free to load whatever software they want onto it. They then enter into voluntary transactions with others, in which the ownership of the phone is transferred along with the right to load whatever software is desired.
If you can't figure out how to load your desired software onto an iPhone, don't buy one. But it's certainly not Apples problem at that point since, as you said, they no longer have a right to any say in how that device is used, and thus also give up any responsibilities you seem to desire.
> “I think this is all pretty simple — iBooks is going to be the only bookstore on iOS devices. We need to hold our heads high. One can read books bought elsewhere, just not buy/rent/subscribe from iOS without paying us, which we acknowledge is prohibitive for many things.”
Microsoft, for all their faults, gave us an actual operating system that people could build and distribute executables on as they saw fit with no restrictions, and they did it despite the fact that they owned almost the entire personal computing space.
Imagine Microsoft had charged everyone who distributed a Windows executable 30%, they'd have made trillions by now. Bill Gates said once that Microsoft has captured maybe 1% of the value that people have created on top of their software because they don't insert themselves between what users do with each other and I do think they actually deserve some props for that
Nah. Fuck Apple but the only reason Microsoft isn't doing the same thing Apple does with iOS is because they don't have a mobile operating system anymore.
Even on Windows, Microsoft has very similar notarization requirements as Apple. Microsoft requires either an ~400-500$/year EV cert (if you don't want to involve Azure), or more recently a $10/month subscription to Azure, which is almost the same as Apple's $99/year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46182546
Tim Cook has been absolutely fantastic for Apple shareholders and absolutely awful for anyone else, particularly the customers.
The walled garden has to end. There is no excuse for making people pay a premium price for an iPad Pro that can't run a third party web browser or do software development in any meaningful way.
Outside of a very narrow use case, the iPad product range is useless, despite the endless rantings of the brainwashed fanboys. Source: used to be one. Left the ecosystem when they started treating the RFCs like toilet paper.
At one point, there was a case for preventing scammy and fraudulent apps. For a long time, the ios App store had a much higher quality than android.
But now? There are tons of scammy and fraudulent apps on the app store. If you try to search for any popular app, you'll be presented with a dozen apps that look similar with similar names and logos.
And there are literally app farms pushing hundreds consealed illegal gambling / casino / betting apps to app store daily. Apple approves every single one.
They are then getting removed in days / weeks, but it just proves their review process is a joke.
Steve wasn't exactly famous for playing nicely with other tech either.
He signed his name to the "fuck Flash" memo, promised to publish interoperable specs for iMessage/FaceTime and never did, presided over the original App Store launch, etc.
A lot of the balls Tim is rolling were first pushed by Steve.
I know! I was just out shopping for a towel and these armed gunmen grabbed me and pulled me into this store and held a gun to my kids head until I bought them a new iPad Pro M5. I am traumatized.
Oh, no, wait, I remember, my kid wanted an iPad Pro for their art and for school. They liked their wacom, but the iPad was more portable, and with the keyboard, it was perfect for taking notes.
> The walled garden has to end. There is no excuse for making people pay a premium price for an iPad Pro that can't run a third party web browser or do software development in any meaningful way.
Why?
There's an alternative: Android. I'm perfectly free to use that instead. I don't.
If I want to "do software development in any meaningful way", I'm not using a tablet. I'm using something with MacOS or GNU/Linux on it.
People willingly pay what Apple's charging for the iPad in the face of competition from a different OS and different classes of device, so I'm not really seeing the problem, especially when I can hand my technologically-handicapped 65-year-old mother an iPad and not have to worry as much about her installing something that will wreck every device on my parents' network or compromise her bank accounts or something.
Besides, the whole "locked-down device" wasn't Tim's idea, it was Steve's. There are plenty of reasons to gripe about Tim Cook, but "the iPad is too locked down" isn't one of them.
> There's an alternative: Android. I'm perfectly free to use that instead. I don't.
I think this is my entire problem with most of these conversations. When they say "The walled garden has to end." ... they mean "YOUR walled garden has to end.".
I also like the Walled Garden. Do I think Apple should be able to charge more than Stripe? No.
I wish they would stop conflating the gate keeping price to enter the walled garden being too high with the wall garden and the gate being a moral wrong.
Apparently, the market can bear Apple charging more than Stripe. Hell, Stripe's business model is just moneychanging at its core; at least Apple can make an argument that they do more than that.
Hard disagree. Tim should focus on fixing their software. It has become extremely buggy and it needs to be fixed. No one buying an iPad cares about running some custom browser and supporting it is pointless and is what makes the software emote complex and worse. He should take better care of his paying customers rather than engaging with opinionated activists.
>For iOS 27 and next year’s other major operating system updates — including macOS 27 — the company is focused on improving the software’s quality and underlying performance.
-via Bloomberg -18d
Edit: almost can’t be true if they’re going to try to push Siri hard :-/
I'm a consumer too and I despise having 20 different logins for each vendor to extract data from and the resulting increased exposure to identity theft. I'm grateful for Steam's dominance in the gaming space, my Playstation Sony account was hacked and was a nightmare cleaning up. It is not my job to care about developer margins, all the apps I care about are able to stay in business regardless of Apple's fees and if they cannot then they should charge more. I also dread the idea of having to spend time cleaning spammy "Patriot.Eagle App Store" from my elderly parent's devices if the walled garden is fully removed in the future, I know that shit is coming.
What gives you the right to tell someone who purchases Apple devices because of the walled garden that they should no longer have that option because YOU don't like it. What an incredibly entitled and selfish position. Have you even stopped to consider for even a second why Apple devices are so popular, especially with normal people who don't spend their time fantasizing about how they want to control other people's purchases with other sweaty nerds on the internet? Have you ever considered that other people may have different preferences and desires from yours? Jfc.
> Outside of a very narrow use case, the iPad product range is useless, despite the endless rantings of the brainwashed fanboys
The use case is rich iPhone users who want an easy experience to watch videos, read, or consume social media on a larger screen than their phones. It’s especially popular for the children or elderly parents of these rich people. You can argue this use case is narrow, but it’s decently profitable.
Just because this use case doesn’t apply to your experience doesn’t mean anyone who disagrees is a brainwashed fanboy.
I will agree that the iPad Pro range seems overly niche to me — but also it could be I just don’t understand the use case. If someone else finds it productive and pleasant to use, what difference does this make to me or you?
Tim Cook, or any CEO, is accountable to the shareholders, so job well done it seems. It's still the user's choice if they want to live in the walled garden or not, and lots of people do, so why would they change it?
I heart that at least in the US losing access to Facetime would be a serious loss in social status. So then this would be a real hurdle WRT user choice.
In my opinion, every manufacturer of a programmable device should not be allowed to prevent the buyer from reprogramming it.
I would not buy a FIDO2 token if it allowed anybody to reprogram it, including me. If you managed to make selling me such a device illegal, then may a pox descend on your house.
If I want to reprogram my own FIDO2 token, I should be allowed to.
If I get your FIDO2 token and reprogram it without somehow also wiping the data on it, your problem is that I got your FIDO2 token, not that I could reprogram it without erasing it (which theoretically could perhaps be true right now)
your problem is that I got your FIDO2 token
For this exact reason, I store my cryptographic keys in a ring which I never remove from my finger.
Reprogramming might imply wiping the read-write partition and removing the attestation key.
You're free to choose not to reprogram it, so the pox is actually upon your house.
Also, you should probably spend more time reading about cryptography and less time reading FIDO Alliance propaganda.
I'm guessing you don't understand the reason I don't want it to be reprogrammable. Yes, there are some advantages to me being able to reprogram it. But it comes with two big downsides.
The first is if I can reprogram it, then so can anyone else. I don't know what the situation is where you live, but government has passed laws allowing them to compel all manufacturers of reprogrammable devices to all them to reprogram is with their spyware.
The second is places I interact with, like banks, insist on having guarantees on the devices I use to authenticate myself. Devices like a credit card. "I promise to never reprogram this card so it debits someone else's account" simply won't fly with them.
The easy way out of that is to ensure the entity who can reprogram it has a lot of skin in the game and deep pockets. This is why they trust a locked pixel running Google signed android to store your cards. But take the same phone running a near identical OS, but on unlocked hardware so you reprogram it, and they won't let you store cards.
But that's the easy way out. It still let's a government force Google to install spyware, so it's not the most secure way. One way to make it secure is to insist no one can reprogram it. That's what a credit card does.
In any case, if someone successfully got the law changed in the way the OP suggested, so people could not use their devices as a digital passport, it won't only be me wishing a pox on their house.
1. if your government decides google has to put spyware on your phone, you wont be able to remove it, unless your device is reprogramnable.
It's actually the other way around, the only way to garantue that your device is free of spyware is you reprogramming it. You shouldn't have to trust the potentially compromised manufacturer.
True, but it's turtles all the way down. There is lots of non-reprogramable firmware in what you call "hardware". The recent article here pointed out the 8087 (an old floating point co-processor) had so much firmware (for the time) Intel had to use a special type of transistor to make it fit. Modern CPU's have many such tiny CPU's doing little jobs here and there. I'm being you didn't even know they exist. They not only exist, they also have a firmware programmed into ROM's you can never change. The bottom line is you have to trust the manufacturer of the silicon, and that isn't much different to trusting someone else who loaded firmware into the device.
The fact that there is always something you must trust in a device, as opposed to being able to prove it's trustworthy to yourself by just looking at it is so well known it has a name: is called the root of trust.
The interesting thing is it can ensure the root of trust the only thing you need to trust. The ability to do that makes your statement factually wrong. In fact it's drop dead simple. The root of trust only need let you read all firmware you loaded back, so you can verify it is what you would have loaded yourself. TPM's and secure boot are built around doing just that. Secure boot is how the banks and whoever else know you are running a copy of Android produced by Google.
> but government has passed laws allowing them to compel all manufacturers of reprogrammable devices to all them to reprogram is with their spyware.
In this case the government may mandate to have spyware pre-installed in the factory - which is already the case for phones and laptops in some countries.
> I promise to never reprogram this card so it debits someone else's account
When reprogramming, the card should wipe private keys so it becomes just a "blank" without any useful information.
That doesn't work for two reasons. Firstly the law in my country specifically forbids introducing what they call a "systemic weakness". Among other things, that bans them from demanding every device is bugged. Instead they must get an judge to authorise targeting an individual, then get the manufacturers to replace the firmware in that device.
Secondly, they have no control over companies not based where I live. So I could just import it myself, provided you are successful get ever country to pass a law the denies me the right to do this the way I want to do it.
for such security devices, there is OTP.
I prefer to have my auth device bricked than compromised.
for anything else, i want to be able to reprogram.
so for vendors, a simple choice :
* be OTP, but no "patching"
* be R/W, but also by its owner
Fair enough. Sort of. You can get the same assurances OTP gives you using secure boot + open source + reproducible builds.
Regardless the rest us who don't want to go through the extra work OTP creates still of use want to put our credit cards, fido2 keys, government licences, concert tickets and whatever else in one general purpose computing device so we don't have to carry lots of little auth devices. To do pull that off securely this device must have firmware I can not change.
The OP wants to make it illegal to sell a device with firmware I can not change.
In asking for that, they've demonstrated they don't have a clue how secure and opening computing works. If they somehow got it implemented it would be a security disaster for them and everybody else.
Agreed, even if solely for sustainability purposes in reducing ewaste
Apple apologists in 1, 2, 3…
I swear not even Micro$oft attained this level of commitment.
I agree, with maybe minor exceptions. It's probably reasonable that radio hardware can't trivially be reprogrammed to exceed regulated power limits. Or for stuff that is extremely safety critical like pacemakers (though I think for those things it should be mandatory to share source code).
I don't think this should be a matter of regulation, as you can create a device that broadcasts powerful signals at almost any frequency, with high school physics and garage engineering.
It should very much be enforced though, similar to speed limits on the road. It's much easier to zero in on weird electromagnetic waves than it is to catch people speeding on roads.
By requiring high-school garage engineering to DOS your local RF services you prevent essentially everyone from doing it.
I'm all in to allow free access to reading waves, but broadcasting is regulated for good reason. Today I was in the subway when my Bluetooth headset started lagging, it's happened once before on a highway close to a specific car, this is DOS.
The radio spectrum is limited and it must be regulated and follow regulations, enforcement is really hard, it's a lot easier and reasonable to dump it on the manufacturers by locking the juice behind closed firmware.
From the post "Yes, the FCC might ban your operating system" - https://prplfoundation.org/yes-the-fcc-might-ban-your-operat...
That appears to be a post arguing against adopting a rule that was proposed a decade ago. Was it ever actually enacted? I don't see the text of the proposed rule present in the relevant section here:
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-A...
I wonder if Aliexpress SDR sellers follow this regulations. And as for transmission power, you can simply connect regulation-complying SDR to regulation-complying amplifier and work around it.
> By requiring high-school garage engineering to DOS your local RF services you prevent essentially everyone from doing it.
Likewise for requiring someone to change out drivers or firmware.
> The radio spectrum is limited and it must be regulated and follow regulations, enforcement is really hard, it's a lot easier and reasonable to dump it on the manufacturers by locking the juice behind closed firmware.
By far the largest problem in this space is users importing devices purchased via travel abroad or drop shipping and then those devices don't follow the rules.
Getting domestic users to follow the rules is not a significant problem because a) most people don't know how to modify firmware anyway, b) the people who do know how to do it are sophisticated users who are more likely to understand that there are significant penalties for violating regulatory limits and know they actually live in the relevant jurisdiction, c) if those users really wanted to do it they're the sort who could figure out how to do it regardless, and d) there is negligible benefit in doing it anyway (increasing power increases interference, including for you, and it works much better to just get a second access point).
It's not a real problem.
I am not opposing regulation of broadcasting.
I am against regulation of broadcasting equipment. There's a difference.
> By requiring high-school garage engineering to DOS your local RF services you prevent essentially everyone from doing it.
At most, it prevents people from accidentally doing it. Anyone who wants to do can figure it out on their own.
> It's probably reasonable that radio hardware can't trivially be reprogrammed to exceed regulated power limits.
No more reasonable than limiting cars to 75mph (which some people, admittedly, are probably in favor of).
I think an 80mph limit would be reasonable (10 over the limit in the UK).
I wouldn't be in favour of a hard 75mph because current speed limits are set by social consensus on the basis that they aren't strictly enforced. The police are extremely unlikely to stop you for doing 76mph in a 70, so I don't think your car should.
> It's probably reasonable that radio hardware can't trivially be reprogrammed to exceed regulated power limits.
https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/blob/develop/src/mesh...
The true limits are imposed by the hardware, not the software, as it should be!
What about a pacemaker? Or a car?
You have a point.
Being able to reprogram a pacemaker isn't enough!
We should require that any devices that our lives depends on, especially devices that go inside our bodies, to be open source: not just reprogrammable, but with source code available for inspection and modification.
I've been working in this industry for too long in order to trust a closed source pacemaker to be bug-free.
We can have both freedom and safety by requiring re-certification after modification. Like when you heavily physically modify a car then you can still drive it after the authorities decide it is safe.
Cars were user-reprogrammable for a long time and the sky never fell.
Requiring that the pacemaker be outside a human body in order to reprogram it seems like a very sensible solution.
Perfect. Go take your enthusiasm to John Deere, and the Xbox division.
No, I think we'll start with Apple and work our way down. Scale is everything when you're concerned about remediating market damages.
John Deere is already subject to extra regulation in Europe; it's only in America that they're allowed to molest consumers in the aftermarket. And Xbox has had sideloading for decades now, in case you were unaware: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...
> John Deere is already subject to extra regulation in Europe; it's only in America that they're allowed to molest consumers
Which clearly shows the problem is not John Deer, Apple, etc.
The problem is weak consumer protections in the US from corrupt US lawmakers who were bought by the companies they are supposed to regulate.
I support apple doing what Xbox does. A separate mode - you can side-load, but you lose all access to appstore and all built-in apps. Enjoy :)
LOL. Developer mode is side loading now.
For those who didn’t click the link, Xbox allows you to either load your own software or load software you buy from the Xbox store. Not both.
Well, your opinion is literally illegal.
You're legally (and technically) prohibited from re-programming GPS modules, GSM modules, and probably many stuff in cars as well.
(Actually, maybe contractually when it comes to GPS modules.)
Technical point here but opinions are not illegal to have.
Besides that your point is missing the fact that you are dealing with outside services that provide a contract for their usage (GPS, GSM). You should be free to program your own devices but if you use an external service, then yes they can specify how you use their service. Those are contractual obligations. Cars on the road have clear safety risks and those are legal obligations. None of those obligations should govern what you do with your device until your device interacts with other people and/or services.
> if you use an external service, then yes they can specify how you use their service. Those are contractual obligations.
Sounds like something Apple would say.
The difference is apple doesn’t let you modify your device to use other services. Their contractual obligation goes beyond the service itself. That’s why EPIC won this case.
GPS doesn't come with a contract. It's a purely receive only system.
It wouldn't be fit for purpose (letting soldiers know precisely where they are on the globe) if it required transmission of any type from the user. That would turn it into a beacon an adversary could leverage.
He is saying that it should not be illegal to do so.
And they are saying that it already is, naming a few examples of things that really need to be illegal to reprogram.
GPS et al would be non-functional if everybody could make a jammer.
(That’s not to say that app stores fall even remotely in that category.)
I don't really understand your point in restating this. Someone who says "X should be true" isn't going to be convinced that X should be false by reminding them that X is in fact false.
>GPS et al would be non-functional if everybody could make a jammer.
Then it should be illegal to make a GPS jammer. Making it illegal to reprogram a GPS receiver in any way is unnecessarily broad.
GPS is a bad example, but there are things that pose a physical threat to others that we maybe shouldn't tinker with. Like I think some modern cars are fly-by-wire, so you could stick the accelerator open and disable the breaks and steering. If it's also push-to-start, that's probably not physically connected to the ignition either.
It would be difficult to catch in an inspection if you could reprogram the OEM parts.
I don't care about closed-course cars, though. Do whatever you want to your track/drag car, but cars on the highway should probably have stock software for functional parts.
> Like I think some modern cars are fly-by-wire, so you could stick the accelerator open and disable the breaks and steering.
Essentially all passenger cars use physical/hydraulic connections for the steering and brakes. The computer can activate the brakes, not disable the pedal from working.
But also, this argument is absurd. What if someone could reprogram your computer to make the brakes not work? They could also cut the brake lines or run you off the road. Which is why attempted murder is illegal and you don't need "programming a computer" to be illegal.
> It would be difficult to catch in an inspection if you could reprogram the OEM parts.
People already do this. There are also schmucks who make things like straight-through "catalytic converters" that internally bypass the catalyst for the main exhaust flow to improve performance while putting a mini-catalyst right in front of the oxygen sensor to fool the computer. You'd basically have to remove the catalytic converter and inspect the inside of it to catch them, or test the car on a dyno using an external exhaust probe, which are the same things that would catch someone reprogramming the computer.
In practice those people often don't get caught and the better solution is to go after the people selling those things rather than the people buying them anyway.
> GPS is a bad example, but there are things that pose a physical threat to others that we maybe shouldn't tinker with. Like I think some modern cars are fly-by-wire, so you could stick the accelerator open and disable the breaks and steering. If it's also push-to-start, that's probably not physically connected to the ignition either.
I'm not seeing an argument here.
Cars have posed a physical threat to humans ever since they were invented, and yet the owners could do whatever the hell they wanted as long as the car still behaved legally when tested[1].
Aftermarket brakes (note spelling!), aftermarket steering wheels, aftermarket accelerator pedals (which can stick!), aftermarket suspensions - all legal. Aftermarket air filters, fuel injectors and pumps, exhausts - all legal. Hell, even additions, like forced induction (super/turbo chargers), cold air intake systems, lights, transmission coolers, etc are perfectly fine.
You just have to pass the tests, that's all.
I want to know why it is suddenly so important to remove the owners right to repair.
After all, it's only been quite recent that replacement aftermarket ECUs for engine control were made illegal under certain circumstances[2], and that's only a a few special jurisdictions.
What you are proposing is the automakers wet dream come true - they can effectively disable the car by bricking it after X years, and will legally prevent you from getting it running again even if you had the technical knowhow to do so!
---------------------------
[1] Like with emissions. Or brakes (note spelling!)
[2] Reprogramming the existing one is still legal, though, you just have to ensure you pass the emissions test.
Why does it matter if it's running stock software or not so long as it's still operational?
Oftentimes even the stock software can cause those problems you've mentioned, and has happened quite a few times in the past
> It would be difficult to catch in an inspection if you could reprogram the OEM parts.
This would be easy to inspect if the device were open.
The simplest solution to prevent tampering is a seal.
>you could stick the accelerator open and disable the breaks and steering
This is silly. Prohibiting modifying car firmware because it would enable some methods of sabotage is like prohibiting making sledgehammers because someone might use one to bludgeon someone, when murder is already a crime to begin with.
How does being able to reprogram a GPS device make it into a jammer any more efficiently than grabbing three pieces of coal and running a few amps thru it? Or hell just buying an SDR on aliexpress!
The only reason it's "illegal" is because they were thinking people would use it to make missiles easily - but that's already the case even with non-reprogrammable gps. And in big 2025 you can also just use drones with bombs attached to it.
How does reprogramming GPS receiver turn it into a jammer? To make a jammer, you better buy a cheap SDR from Aliexpress.
Everyone can make a jammer already. (It's illegal to use one, but you're able to)
Hardware receivers cannot be reprogrammed as transmitters.
We already have well known areas with constant GPS manipulation. https://www.flightradar24.com/data/gps-jamming
In the same way that anybody can use a gun for violence, right?
They're becoming self aware!
To be fair, millions people walking with guns around are much scarier than a guy which can jam GPS with a receiver. We have GPS jammed on a regular basis (including around airports when planes land/take off) and nothing bad happens.
> Well, your opinion is literally illegal.
That's the whole point.. parent is arguing that it should not be illegal.
Is it really illegal to reprogram a GPS unit? Why? Isn't it essentially a radio?
Why is it illegal? Pretty sure it's not.
It is however, illegal to broadcast into spectrums you're not allowed to.
But if I modify the uc in a GPS module to calculate 1+1=3 then AFAIK that's totally allowed.
> Well, your opinion is literally illegal.
In support of this irrefutable statement:
• > "Whatever is, is right." — Alexander Pope
• > "If you want to get along, go along." — Sam Rayburn
• > "Reform? Reform! Aren't things bad enough already?" — Lord Eldon
• > "We've always done it this way." — Grace Hopper (referred to it as a dangerous phrase)
• > "Well, when you put it that way..." — [List of millions redacted to protect the compliant]
Rebuttal:
• > "“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” ― George Bernard Shaw
• > "Yeah, well, ya know, that's just like, uh, your opinion man." — The Dude (In someone's pharmaceutically elevated dream, addressing the Supreme Court.)
IANAL but I don’t think OP is breaking any laws by having an opinion on this subject. [At least in the US] pretty much all opinions are completely legal.
Unless you're stopped at the border and a cop decides to take a stroll through your social media on your phone. Wish THAT was a joke.
So here's my opinion: unless re-programming something is illegal, it should be illegal for the manufacturer to prevent the consumer from doing that.
> Speaking to reporters Thursday night, though, Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said he believes those should be “super super minor fees,” on the order of “tens or hundreds of dollars” every time an iOS app update goes through Apple for review. That should be more than enough to compensate the employees reviewing the apps to make sure outside payment links are not scams
I would think making sure outside payment links aren’t scams will be more expensive than that because checking that once isn’t sufficient. Scammers will update the target of such links, so you can’t just check this at app submission time. You also will have to check from around the world, from different IP address ranges, outside California business hours, etc, because scammer are smart enough to use such info to decide whether to show their scammy page.
Also, even if it becomes ‘only’ hundreds of dollars, I guess only large companies will be able to afford providing an option for outside payments.
I don't believe iOS app reviewers actually do any of that, even if on paper they do.
They don't need to check outside payment links, until recently (I doubt they do though).
They ferociously check everything that goes out of an app.
If you have a hint of a payment button 15 clicked after leaving your support page through the site logo link your app would get immediately flagged for removal unless you deal with it within week or two give to you.
They had to check that app authors hadn't added any.
> CEO Tim Sweeney said he believes those should be “super super minor fees”
He seems to be ignoring the part of the ruling finding that Apple is entitled to "some compensation" for the use of its intellectual property.
> The appeals court recommends that the district court calculate a commission that is based on the costs that are necessary for its coordination of external links for linked-out purchases, along with "some compensation" for the use of its intellectual property. Costs should not include commission for security and privacy.
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/11/apple-app-store-fees-ex...
Apple wanted 27% and Epic thinks it should be 0%. The lower court will have to pick a number in between the two.
Maybe next they can decide what Epic’s 12% fee for their own marketplace should be
I get your point, but looking at it at a glance without any other context, 12% feels like a pretty reasonable amount IMHO.
Like, if all major marketplaces only charge 12% from the get-go, we probably would have had much less fuss and lawsuits over this.
This issue was always the disproportionate size of the fee, not the fact that they charge a fee.
I don't think a percentage makes any sense at all. Is it proportionately more expensive to host a $50 game than a $25 game? It's only a percentage Because They Can.
I agree. Charging a blanket percentage of gross revenue is an extremely inexact way to monetize what is a broad basket of services that were previously separate including: electronic software delivery, software security verification, marketplace, transaction processing, DRM, etc. Since 2009, first on Apple's app store and then Google's, these services have all been arbitrarily bundled together despite having vastly different one-time, fixed and variable costs. People are only used to it in this context where every marketplace has been controlled by a monopolist gatekeeper.
Doing it this way makes no economic sense for either the seller or the buyer but it's coincidentally the absolute best way for a middleman to maximize the tax they can extract from a two-sided marketplace they control. In competitive markets, blanket taxing on total gross revenue generally only occurs when there's a single fundamental cost structure tied to that revenue, or the amounts being collected are so small it's de minimis. App stores are highly profitable, multi-billion dollar businesses.
Perhaps the most perverse thing about this is that electronic transactions for purely digital goods which occur entirely on real-time connected digital platforms make it trivial to price each service for maximum efficiency. It's easy for the price a 2GB game with frequent updates pays for electronic delivery to reflect the cost they impose on the infrastructure while a 100k one-time purchase app can pay a vastly smaller amount. And that's exactly the way the competitive marketplaces evolve - from moving shipping containers around the planet to residential propane delivery.
I'm by no means defending the percentage they take, but I would suggest that it's a percentage because it's simple:
Pick 3 imaginary games for sale priced at $1, $10 and $100. Any one of those games could be a million download a month success, and any one of them could be a complete dud.
What flat rate would you suggest to:
* Pay the developer for their work (ongoing per sale)
* Review each game and ensure it meets store guidelines (once per update)
* Host said game regardless of how popular it is (ongoing)
* Process transactions for the game (ongoing)
The alternative would be pricing based on revenue tiers (similar to what Unreal Engine does now), which aren't known in advance and don't take global variance into account (USD$200 in Eastern Europe might be a month's salary).
Percentage is just simpler. It also means that they'd be taking a loss on every free app or in the case of Free-to-Download In-App purchase apps - until users start transacting.
Well it's based on sales, not cost. In theory, a more popular game is a larger stress on servers, so charging them more makes sense.
The scaling also helps so that some (probably most) games aren't losing money to be hosted kn a store. That would be catastrophic as at some point games would need to remove themselves to name financial sense.
>It's only a percentage Because They Can.
Do you object to other sorts of royalty-based compensation, like for Unity engine or Unreal engine?
Yes. No to rent seeking.
There should be caps overall and under the caps there should be the option to choose between lump sum and royalties.
Nobody should be collecting unlimited revenue for a brilliant idea at the start and benefit from cheap or free scaling.
This entire model is ripping apart the fabric of modern society.
And yes, I known this is blasphemy on this website.
Why isn't this applied to income taxes first? Does the government deserve a percentage with no cap of whatever you make? Your government services don't get better for you the more you pay.
That is the hill you want to die on? The fact that at income levels greatly above the median income, taxes aren't capped?
You should look at it the other way, where ANY income or income equivalent, of any kind, should be taxed like income.
So when Bezos spends $5bn per year, that means he made $5bn per year (at least), so his tax statement should show him paying $2bn or whatever the top tax rate would imply.
On consoles, a review costs several grands. That’s the alternative.
This.
If something gets super popular, it presumable costs Epic more. But does 100 sales cost 100x more than 1 sale? That seems unlikely.
It’s proportionally more expensive to run a credit card charge for twice the amount, yes.
If Epic deserves a 12% cut of a Windows game sold through their store (despite not having paid the costs associated with developing and maintaining Windows) how large a cut should you get when you did incur the additional costs of creating and maintaining the platform?
The cut should definitely not such that your profit margin for the service is a multiple of your costs.
So where does 12% fall when you provide nothing but optional DRM, hosting and payment processing?
Does Microsoft earn their 30% cut on Xbox since they do provide the OS, hardware development and gaming APIs?
How about making it 10%? As a modern-day "tithe".
Yes, if Epic sold an Epic computer which had > 50% marketshare and and you could only purchase products from their store.
The only other category you can really compare this to is game consoles, but the hardware is sold at a much smaller margin and they still (for now) support physical media.
> Maybe next they can decide what Epic’s 12% fee for their own marketplace should be
Aren't Epic's 12% fee less than half of what is usually charged?
Since courts work on what is reasonable, what makes you think that they will reduce it?
Epic's fee for 3rd-party payments is 0%.
12% is if you sell directly through Epic's platform - nobody is claiming Apple shouldn't get a cut of that for their own platform.
Thats after you make a million dollars though. It's free until then.
"0% Store Fee For First $1,000,000 in Revenue Per App Per Year Starting in June 2025, for any Epic Games Store payments we process, developers will pay a 0% revenue share on their first $1,000,000 in revenue per app per year, and then our regular 88%/12% revenue share when they earn more than that. "
12 sounds fine. I won't object to lower but 3-6 % is what most other modern digital platforms charge. Adding your own 3-6% on top a payment processor as a platform hostong content sounds reasonable.
Why are payment processor fees 3-6%? The court should investigate that too, it can't cost more than a few cents to process that charge.
The court is going to be pretty busy with all these investigations going on!
EU courts did cap payment processor fees, so yeah that is intended. We can't have companies bottleneck and take excessive fees and thus stifle progress, when a company gets too powerful the government has to step in.
I'll never say no to properly auditing our systems. So sure.
But I also recognize that few out there are pressing strong opposition to the idea of paying 3% for someone else to manage their financial transactions, or to host their own business. If I make a million dollars, paying 50k to Patreon or Kickstarter for hosting the service seems to make sense in my mind
Every single PC developer is fully able to release PCs games to customers without paying Epic a dime.
So, to you answer your question, the fee that Epic should take is exactly the same as Apple's. It is exactly Zero dollars for all apps that do not go through their app store. Thats already how it works though.
It, of course, would be absurd if Epic was able to force you to pay them money for apps that don't involve Epic in any way and dont go through their app store!
Doesn’t Epic charge a 5% royalty for any games developed on Unreal Engine regardless of where or how the money is collected or what app store it’s installed from? Why can’t Apple collect fees for any apps that are built on their software AND hardware?
> Doesn’t Epic charge a 5% royalty for any games developed on Unreal Engine regardless of where or how the money is collected or what app store it’s installed from?
"Royalty". It's common to charge a royalty when allowing someone to distribute your copyrighted property.
> Why can’t Apple collect fees for any apps that are built on their software AND hardware?
Because that's not a royalty - you aren't distributing Apple's copyrighted property when you send someone an iPhone application.[1]
When you send someone your game built on Unreal Engine, you are sending them Epic's copyrighted property.[2]
-------------------------
[1] If people could side-load iPhone apps, that is. I don't believe that they can.
[2] If you sell someone code to your game and tell them to to download Unreal Engine, then compile and/or link it against Unreal Engine themselves, then sure, Epic won't get a dime. But your customer might still have to pay for that, depending on whether Epic makes single-user no-sale licenses free (I believe they do).
It's a little more nuanced than simply "some compensation" - and IANAL but it seems like the court is saying this fee should as Sweeney posits be very small:
> Apple should be able to charge a commission on linked-out purchases based on the costs that are genuinely and reasonably necessary for its coordination of external links for linked-out purchases, but no more.
> In making a determination of Apple’s necessary costs, Apple is entitled to some compensation for the use of its intellectual property that is directly used in permitting Epic and others to consummate linked-out purchases.
> In deciding how much that should be, the district court should consider the fact that most of the intellectual property at issue is already used to facilitate IAP, and costs attributed to linked-out purchases should be reduced equitably and proportionately;
> Apple should receive no commission for the security and privacy features it offers to external links, and its calculation of its necessary costs for external links should not include the cost associated with the security and privacy features it offers with its IAP;
https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/lgvdqxweopo/...
0.27% + credit card interchange fees feels more than fair to me. Apple should be thanking their lucky stars that the court isn’t forcing them to spin off the App Store business and pay back every stolen cent from their criminal bundling scheme. This makes IE + Windows look so innocent in comparison. Hardware manufacturers shouldn’t be allowed to mandate a monopoly on software distribution. Full stop.
But Apple does not currently constantly check apps for changing links. I see no change here.
Yeah it doesn't make sense. If there's a scam, users will report it. You don't need to check every payment processor with a fine toothed comb.
> I guess only large companies will be able to afford providing an option for outside payments
https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/news/introducing-epic-web-...
> I would think making sure outside payment links aren’t scams will be more expensive than that because checking that once isn’t sufficient. Ignoring the fact Apple isn't doing that anyway right now as others have pointed out: There are multiple ways to make sure of that without it costing any significant money, eg hashing all scripts that are served on the link and making sure they're the same since review.
Not that they'd ever do the review to begin with, so the hashing won't be done either, but it's something that could be done on iOS/ipados.
And if you consider that infeasible, you might want to check out current CSP best practices, you might be surprised
Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said he believes those should be “super super minor fees,” on the order of “tens or hundreds of dollars” every time an iOS app update goes through Apple for review. That should be more than enough to compensate the employees reviewing the apps to make sure outside payment links are not scams and lead to a system of “normal fees for normal businesses that sell normal things to normal customers,” Sweeney said.
Tens to hundreds every time an app goes through review is "super supor minor"... This is how you know Epic has the backs of all the indie devs who fret about $100/year dev membership.
This isn't about whether Apple allows outside payment links or not. It's about whether Apple takes a percentage cut from outside payments.
Is Apple actually checking outside payments for scams outside of review times? Do they check non-payment links for scams outside of review times? How often?
The point is that they should only be able to charge a fee for work they are truly doing, and it shouldn't be retaliatory.
Hundreds of dollars just to push an app update would be devastating for many solo developers.
Maybe it wouldn't hurt to have rarer and more thoughtful releases.
Or we end up with this modern disease where the OS wants to update itself, the browser needs to update itself, Acrobat wants to update itself, etc, etc, all the time.
Apple can just do it like credit card companies: chargebacks. Plus kick offenders out of the store. No need to check anything in advance.
Wouldn't that incentivize smaller developers not to update their apps unless absolutely necessary?
> I would think making sure outside payment links aren’t scams will be more expensive than that because checking that once isn’t sufficient.
According to the ruling on page 42, "(c) Apple should receive no commission for the security and privacy features it offers to external links, and its calculation of its necessary costs for external links should not include the cost associated with the security and privacy features it offers with its IAP"
> Apple should receive no commission for the security and privacy features it offers to external links
I'm not versed in legalese, so maybe I misunderstand. Isn't it reasonable that Apple receives money for a service they provide, that costs money to run?
The case is really about the opposite: "what payment related services is Apple allowed to force people to use (and therefore pay for)". The court concluded that excludes both the payment service itself as well as the validation of the security of external payment services used in its place.
A service to whom? Protecting users is a service to users, not to developers. This is a selling point of iPhone, and thus Apple receives money from users when they pay for the iPhone.
Think about it this way: totally free apps with no IAP get reviewed by Apple too, and there's no charge to the developer except the $99 Apple Developer Program membership fee, which Epic already pays too.
Protecting users is absolutely in the best interest of developers.
Forcing developers to go through Apple's arbitrary, capricious, slow review process is absolutely not in the best interest of developers.
> Think about it this way: totally free apps with no IAP get reviewed by Apple too, and there's no charge to the developer except the $99 Apple Developer Program membership fee
Yearly fee. And about $500 a year in hardware depreciation, because you can reasonably develop for Apple _only_ on Apple hardware.
This is _way_ more than Microsoft has ever charged, btw.
> I would think making sure outside payment links aren’t scams will be more expensive
On average, Apple spends less than a minute on app reviews for new versions.
Spreading FUD as a marketing move will surely come free with this. It works just too well with Apple.
> I would think making sure outside payment links aren’t scams will be more expensive than that
You really think that the aggregate cost of fraud mitigation in the app store is 30% of revenue? That seems laughable, the credit card industry as a whole does far, far better than that with far less ability to audit and control transaction use.
I don’t feel great about this ruling. Whatever a “reasonable” fee is supposed to mean, Apple will interpret it to some ridiculous amount. Before the ban, they tried to charge 27%
I think Apple will have a very hard time arguing that the "reasonable" amount is a percentage of revenue with no cap.
They absolutely will and they will absolutely get away with it. It just won’t be anywhere close to 27%.
There has been craploads of litigation about “Fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory” licensing over the last two decades, and fees that are percentages of revenue with no cap have survived and there is no reason to believe any of these legal standards will change.
In fact, I think it’s likely that Apple and Google will team up to create a standards body that defines the method for distributing/installing smartphone apps (because this is now in their best interest, not that I want them to). These standards are going to end up using a bunch of patents that you will have to license on FRAND terms.
Yes, the cost is going to go down. Yes, Epic is going to benefit a lot more than any indie developer. Such is life
This isn't related to what's fair in licensing, comparing it as such is Apples to oranges.
Just you wait
I'm not disagreeing on the conclusion, this argument of why was just not supportive of it.
Yep, there's no reason to believe the fees will only be a few hundred dollars as Sweeney is saying, Apple will absolutely try to extract as much as possible without being sued again. The zero commissions for external links was the right approach.
> ... without being sued again
I'm not even sure about that. This very ruling shows that Apple blatantly violated the law (the previous ruling) and tried to collect as much fee as possible while the case goes through the system.
And Apple isn't afraid of being sued. As long as they can earn more money in revenue than paying for lawyers, that's a net profit for them. They can certainly afford all of this.
It should be based on the app size, so maybe developers will stop shipping apps with a single feature and one button that takes 700 MB because of random bloated third-party SDKs that aren't even used.
Money makers on the AppStore are games, and games need assets in high definition. Third party SDKs are probably a drop in the bucket in comparison with visual assets.
They need locale-based app bundles to make that realistic then. If I need to support every locale I can, I need to bundle the frameworks necessary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmeCYiD0hnE
I don't feel great either, but that's because prices aren't coming down, instead one billion dollar company just keeps more money than another billion (trillion I guess) dollar company, and we've lost some convenience features that Apple maintained, without any gain.
This is not only affects Epic. Basically any other app, game or SaaS developer can now earn more money because payment processing costing them 1-3% instead of 30%.
And small companies are hit by 30% platform tax the most. More money for small compsnies mean more competition.
Not necessarily.
For starters, small companies are paying 15%, not 30%.
I'm also not sure where a small company can find a payment processor that will only charge 1%. Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction.
If you have a $4.99 in-app purchase that will cost you 44 cents per transaction to use Stripe vs 75 cents to use Apple's IAP.
But Stripe does not act as a merchant of record so you are responsible for remitting sales tax yourself. Registering for and remitting sales tax in every jurisdiction where you have nexus adds huge administrative overhead to a small company.
If you want to avoid this overhead, Paddle will act as a merchant of record for you, but then you're paying 5% plus 50 cents which adds up to 75 cents on a $4.99 purchase anyway.
Linking to external payments also reduces conversion rates (https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/growth/iap-vs-web-purchases-...) compared to using IAP.
Taken all together, depending on their pricing structure, small companies may very well be financially better off sticking with IAP rather than linking to external payments anyway.
>small companies are paying 15%, not 30%.
When talking in the grand scheme of this case, the 15% arose out of these proceedings. It was 30 back on in 2018.
But yes, overall most people will stick with Apple regardless. I still see it as a win that companies who want to put the work in to go around apple can. That simply seems reasonable in my eyes.
> When talking in the grand scheme of this case, the 15% arose out of these proceedings. It was 30 back on in 2018.
I'm not sure about the timeline, but in general the reduction to 15% for small developers was due to market signals as much as it was anything else. Both Apple and Google need small developers to continue to create new apps and if the 30% is onerous to small developers (which I think it probably is) they'll lower it to attract more products and services.
> But yes, overall most people will stick with Apple regardless. I still see it as a win that companies who want to put the work in to go around apple can. That simply seems reasonable in my eyes
When you think about it, there's maybe half a dozen companies that truly could put in similar work to Apple or Google in creating and maintaining these stores and platforms at the scale and with the features and security that they have built. Most people are going to stick with Apple and Google, except when one of those large competitors like Meta decides to bypass those stores and create its own and continue to nudge folks to their store for various features or downloads or whatever. It introduces friction for no obvious benefit to customers.
You can argue that 3rd party app stores will be more permissive in what they allow, but most of the things that people complain about "scary surveillance" or other onerous regulations for example have to also be followed by any legitimate App Store. So all you've really done is create worse versions of the Apple or Google App Store that siphon away applications. It reduces the profit margins of Apple or Google but it doesn't benefit customers.
I've always wanted to do some small business, maybe an app but to get started feels so daunting. This information you provided is great and makes me feel like there's room to know more.
Are there any good places to grow this kind of knowledge? How to use payment processors? How to actually setup a business and get paid yourself?
I don't want to get into the whole founder ethos, I just want to make something and get paid for it.
Shared the same in a comment below, but probably worth adding as a top level comment.
Google are doing exactly the same as Apple previously were doing, mandatory from end of next month - January 28, 2026.
Their new requirements: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
I don't know a lot about this, but for example an would app side loaded or delivered via F-Droid be subject to this policy?
F-Droid notwithstanding using an alternative app is not a very attractive option right now as there no good alternatives. But if Valve can create an Android app store that competes with the Play store, the in principle situation is very different.
The US court order still remains in effect afaik, so not in the US.
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
Will this help other services like Netflix, Spotify? Or am I misreading things.
My understanding, at least several years ago, that Netflix was paying as much to Apple in subscription fees, as they did for their AWS hosting.
I also noticed when upgrading my Spotify account, I couldn't do that through the iphone app itself - I assumed this was because it would break TOS, or they didn't want to pay a massive chunck of the monthly subscription cost to Apple.
Apple relaxed these rules shortly after the initial Epic vs Apple lawsuit: https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/02/tech/apple-app-store-changes-...
Apologies for being unable to find a better source at the moment, but it links to this press release: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/09/japan-fair-trade-comm...
Netflix and Spotify haven't paid Apple a cut for years. Customers pay subscription fees to them directly and Apple doesn't get a dime.
Their problem is that you cannot (could not) sign up for an account from the iPhone app.
“You download the app and it doesn’t work, that’s not what we want on the store” https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/18/interview-apples-schiller-...
Will Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Valve and another software store have to allow mini stores on their platforms? That's to say software with its own payment system, inside of a free app?
Valve doesn't restrict how you use their devices so you can install whatever you want on them already.
It'd be useless because you don't have a Dev kit at home to do this with. You can't just pay $100 and get access to the Nintendo SDK.
And I don't think any of the big players are interested in fracturing consoles. Consoles change every 6-8 years so it's a moot point.
This is factually incorrect.
https://developer.nintendo.com/faq
Development hardware isn't cheap, but it's also not out-of-sight expensive either. There's a very good reason why you see so many indie games this past generation on Switch.Fair. I should have simply said "Nintendo doesn't approve and send out dev kits to anyone that signs up". But even that is perhaps outdated info from the pre-switch days.
Heck, pre-COVID, you needed a business address to even receive a kit. Things changed quickly at the turn of the decade.
One can only hope.
Valve already provides a store inside someone else's platform.
When can I ship my own web browser with my own JIT?
This would be for a clear subset of the web, with strong protections.
Obviously, on this venue the question is rhetorical. But Apple's prohibition on any kind of real web competition is a problem.
> When can I ship my own web browser with my own JIT?
Do you live in Europe or Japan? If so, you can [1][2]. If not, Apple forbids you from doing so.
The US, Department of Justice is suing Apple [3]. Maybe the US will be added to this list.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...
[2] https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/japan-apple-must-lift-eng...
[3] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
Hm, the US court case includes cloud gaming platforms. Is there a way for a startup in that area to get on the bandwagon?
The "reasonable" fees are not gonna be only a few hundred bucks, it'll still be a percentage of revenue but smaller than 27%. Apple will try to extract as much as possible and will not tolerate a non-percentage fee.
I don’t see how they could argue for a percentage of revenue model while mandated to do this based on costs?
It's Apple, see their malicious compliance until nowand is don't expect it'll be any different in the future, they're gonna argue one way or another.
While having Epic Store, Fortnite "mini store", and being perfectly fine with Nintendo, Sony and XBox.
Why do you think Epic is okay with Nintendo, Sony, and XBox?
Because if console makers can not "control" the platform there will probably not be future consoles which are a big part of Epic's sales.
Yeah, console hardware already run on thin margins and it feels like one of the big manufacturers are already on their way out. I don't think extra regulation benefits anyone. Not the devs, not the consumers.
Meanwhile, Apple and Google sure aren't going to call it quits just because they take 10, 20% less.
You're seriously arguing that Sony and Microsoft need or deserve special treatment? That's patently insane. The Government shouldn't be in the business of assessing the minutia of competing business models. Whatever you think is right for Apple, it's good enough for absolutely everyone.
I'm mostly saying
1. No one cares about making an app store for the Ps5 when in 10 years they'll need to port it to the PS6
2. Consoles are already stagnating and it won't take much to also push Sony out. So basically we'd reduce competition back down to Nintendo to enable a feature no one cares about.
But sure. If you want to look at it in that lens: I want apple and Google to get "special punishments" because they've long proven to be a monopoly and practice anti-competitive behaviors. We can deal with other monopolies as we go along.
The size and impact on society of the Android/iOS platforms are way way way higher than that of Sony's and Nintendo's platforms. Nobody needs a console, but basically everybody needs a phone running Android or iOS.
Yes, basically everybody needs a phone running Android or iOS. But they don’t need Fortnite on their phone.
If the government wanted to proscribe store rates for productivity apps only, I’d be more receptive. But it’s ridiculous for the government to proscribe rates for game sales, especially if they aren’t doing the same for all game stores.
Because Epic is doing something much closer to those companies and restraints on what they can do would likely affect Epic as well.
Because they directly negotiate deals with those companies that other smaller players can’t negotiate. The App Store is largely a “these are the rules for everyone” minus a few small exceptions.
Because the three of them are all making their store business decisions outside of CA such that it's far harder to have California law applied to them?
Epic also sued both Google and Apple in Australia, which is notably outside of CA.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/australia-court-rul...
I think the simpler answer is that Epic isn’t upset with the arrangement they have with Microsoft/Nintendo/Sony. They’ve done a better job cultivating a relationship with Epic than Apple has who seems to have only contempt for every other developer.
https://direct.playstation.com/en-gb/buy-consoles/playstatio...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ubcwin-Switch-Fortnite-Wildcat-Bund...
Have they sued Nintendo, Sony or XBox yet?
Epic store has the lowest royalties by a hefty margin
Because they are the underdog on PC stores.
Well yeah! A Nintendo switch or PlayStation is technically similar to an iPhone. But you can’t make the same monopolistic dealing argument there as you can on phones.
Why? Because a console is bought as a gaming device. And because you can reasonably have multiple consoles and there’s healthy competition between them.
In comparison, people buy a phone to have a phone. Then the App Store lock-in is tacked on the side. iPhone and Android compete on who has the best cameras. But once you’ve bought your phone, you’re trapped in the manufacturer’s App Store, who can charge monopolistic pricing. And normal people don’t buy multiple phones for different app stores.
The App Store monopoly is like if your electricity company somehow made it so you could only buy an Xbox. Games on steam and PlayStation aren’t compatible with the electricity in your house. And your friend down the street could only use a PlayStation. Not for any technical reason, but simply because locking you in to a single console manufacturer means they can make you pay way more for games. And you’ll pay it, because you don’t have a choice and can’t shop around.
The problem comes about because phones and app stores are glued together. They use a captive market created by one part of the business to trap consumers and developers elsewhere. If Google and Apple had to compete on app stores - like how Nintendo, PlayStation and Microsoft have to compete - then there’s no way Apple could get away with charging their extortionate 28% for App Store sales. If chrome charged a 28% commission on all purchases I made through the browser, everyone would switch to Firefox. Apps on my phone should be more like that.
I bought a console as a gaming device, but now my family mostly use it for YouTube and other streaming video. Similarly, relatively little of my phone time is used on phone calls. I think the distinction is mostly just locked in by history.
If you wanted a dedicated streaming device, the competition is much cheaper.
But sure, nothing on a technical lecdl stops you from using a console as a general computer. It's just that that's not what the overwhelming use is as of now. Use cases play a large factor in rulings like this.
Well, its not just "games vs phones". The question is whether or not the company's actions unfairly stifle competition. Nintendo / sony / etc would argue there's lots of competition, because you can just buy their competitor's product if you think they provide a better service. The argument is weaker for apple because its much harder for regular people to "just" swap their phone between ios / android over differences in the app stores.
Consoles compete on games. Phones compete on specs, and then they happen to have an app store on the side. Thats a difference.
Ah, so I can buy XBox games from the PlayStation store?
Naturally not, Microsoft has to pay the Sony tax to publish their games into the PlayStation.
There are more mobile devices than people, since not everyone has a phone, naturally there are enough people with multiple phones.
Finally, people do browse the Internet, watch TV, and even have a general app store in XBox's case.
No, the consoles should be open, too.
Sure; I’d love it if they were. But there’s another, legally much stronger reason to hate on Apple for their locked down App Store that has nothing to do with engineering.
You also NEED a modern phone to function in modern society.
Mainly because of 2-factor authentication. If my phone breaks, I can't work.
You don't need a phone for most 2-factor methods. Also, you don't need iOS to receive a text message. It's very rare that I have to grab my phone for MFA.
All these mental gymnastics to wring consoles out of the arguments against phones.. seriously what the fuck
Consoles run more "commodity hardware" than phones, like CPUs and GPUs and standard ports etc.
> Consoles run more "commodity hardware" than phones, like CPUs and GPUs and standard ports etc.
Not really. They share CPU/GPU architecture but there are significant differences vs. what you can buy for a PC. For example, the latest PlayStation and Xbox use unified GDDR memory and commodity CPUs all use (LP)DDR.
However, you can buy systems that use the same (or similar) chips as phones these days. Snapdragon, Apple Silicon, SBCs?
My point is the argument against apples monopolistic practices isn’t a technical argument. It’s a legal / social one.
For what it’s worth, I agree with the argument that if I buy a computer it should let me run arbitrary code. But there’s no laws against that. There are laws about monopolies. I see that as a much stronger way to attack Apple over their behaviour here.
There are 2 major phone ecosystems (Android manufacturers count as Android)
There are 3 console ecosystems.
Such difference. wow
Whoosh. You have completely missed my point.
It's odd to celebrate having the key sanctions unwound.
Before this ruling:
1. Apple were prohibited from charging any fee for external/referral purchases. Now this is once again allowed and the district court will work with all parties to develop a reasonable commission.
2. External links were permitted to dominate over IAP options. Now they must have equal size, prominence and quantity.
3. Apple were prevented from showing any kind of exit screen, that is now restored (but it can't be a scare screen).
4. Apple were barred from preventing certain developers/app classes from using external links (such as those enrolled in the News or Video Partner Programs) those are now reversed and Apple can once again prevent them.
Epic/Tim Sweeney are trying to spin these recent losses as a win. It's the old marketing playbook of hoping no one reads the fine print.
In the context of 2025, the appeals court not just outright throwing out the ruling down below is a win all its own.
The celebration is premature but it's a good step forward legally. I think only #4 is a true loss here
> ... the appeals court now suggests that Apple should still be able to charge a “reasonable fee” based on its “actual costs to ensure user security and privacy.”
> Speaking to reporters Thursday night, though, Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said he believes those should be “super super minor fees,” on the order of “tens or hundreds of dollars” every time an iOS app update goes through Apple for review.
Wow, one step forward, and one step back. Good job, Epic.
The outcome is obviously going to be that Apple's store will have the most apps, with the most up to date versions, and with the most free apps/games. I'm sure Fortnite will do just fine though.
Unless I'm misunderstanding this, why would the court allow Apple to act as a gatekeeper for their competitors?
> why would the court allow Apple to act as a gatekeeper for their competitors
Yeah, this is the fundamental problem, and not something this court ruling does anything to fix. Apple has full control over what software its competitors are allowed to sell. The court's solution? Tell Apple to be more fair when dictating rules to its competitors. Yeah... I'm sure that'll work great.
Yep, on their platform. Just like Wal-Mart and Kroger have full control over what products their competitors are allowed to sell too (in-store versus name brands). Microsoft only makes and sells their games for example for the Windows platform and doesn't allow portability.
As a pattern there's nothing wrong with it.
The crux of the issue is that creation of a mobile operating system that people actually want, like in some other industries, as resulted in two dominant platforms that don't compete all that much with each other. That's a much more interesting and important "problem" to solve than Apple/Google create competing apps on their software distribution platforms.
My phone that I purchased is not "their" platform. Better analogy would be if Wal-Mart sold me a fridge and then somehow managed to make it so I can only store groceries purchased from Wal-Mart in that fridge. Now if anyone wants to sell me groceries they need to sell them to me through Walmart, otherwise I can't refrigerate them.
As long as you understood the limitations of the fridge you purchased, i.e. you weren't defrauded, what's the problem? Do you really need a nanny state to prevent you from making bad purchases??
The problem currently is the duopoly. There are only 2 types of fridges we can buy. And both have the same conditions.
There are many other computing devices that can run operating systems other than Android and iOS, including devices that can run completely unlocked versions of Android. You're just lying.
We're not talking about computing devices in general, we're talking about phones.
So am I?
There's Linux phones and phones that run versions of Android that are completely decoupled from Google.
So your argument here is "Apple isn't a monopoly. The Fairphone is always ab option"?
I'll keep pounding it in people's heads that 30 years ago Microsoft was hit over a web browser. It's a shame these days people would instead revert that and say "just download Netscape". If that worked, sure. But we have decades of market lock in showing it doesn't
The flaw in the Microsoft comparison is that the web browser was installed in, what, 95% of actual computing devices? Remember phones and all of this other cool technology we have didn't exist.
Today there are many phones to choose from. You can buy an iPhone, or a Pixel, or a Galaxy. You can even buy a more open-source style phone with open-source style stores just like any other generic product feature. There is a marketplace and there is competition, it's just that, unlike what so many people here seem to desire, locked-down stores are what the market prefers.
>Remember phones and all of this other cool technology we have didn't exist.
I don't think phones and PCs compete against each other, though. A phone can act like a general computer, but a PC can't act like a phone.
>Today there are many phones to choose from.
We had Linux, mac, BSD and a few other OS's back in the day as well. If we're saying Windows is 95% of PCs back then, I don't think it's controversial saying Apple and Android are 95% of phones. Especially in a day and age where phones are now needed to act as verification for work and school and chat communications are expected to be snappy (so it's not like I can just opt out and go back to dumb phones).
>locked-down stores are what the market prefers.
That's why anti-trust isn't left to "what the market prefers".
Yes, society will always waiver towards idyllic destruction if left ubchecked. People generally "like" monopolies. People yearn for that society on WALL-E where they do minimum work and get maximum dopamine. It's a quirk genes that benefitted us 1000 years ago that haven't adjusted to modern realities.
Governments and non-monopoly businesses alike hate it, though. Don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. Don't want to have a single businessman hold the country hostage later and shift to a plutocracy as they abuse your citizens who work.
That's why it's best to stop it much earlier and not when the company becomes a trillionaire. But now is the 2nd best time.
Well they aren't a monopoly. They have what, ~50% market share?
MS had 97% market share and were abusing their market dominance to push others out. Apple isn't doing this, so there isn't a valid comparison here.
Duopoly isn't a much better comparison here. It's big enough that both apple and Google should be addressed.
Seems like there are a relatively large number of competitors to Apple and Google. Eg. Samsung, Motorola, Lenovo, OnePlus, LG, HTC etc. Not to mention Asian brands.
Duopoly might apply if those companies were using their combined dominance to collude and push other competitors out but that isn't really happening as evidenced by the amount of competitors that are in the market.
I don't think you're on the same frequency as the court proceedings here. Try to read those first to better understand the context here.
You're doing the equivalent of saying "but Dell and HP make PC's". When the case is about Internet explorer.
You brought up the MS antitrust suite and I'm providing context as to why it's not relevant.
The problem is that it obviously sucks. If you say "no it doesn't" - you're lying, you know it sucks. Obviously me only being able to refrigerate Walmart goods sucks.
> Do you really need a nanny state
This is a false dichotomy. The reason you're doing this is because you know the current situation sucks major donkey dick and nobody, including you, likes it. So to defend it you have to appeal to something even more sucky. It's the death rattle of a poorly constructed argument.
You don't need a nanny state, quite the opposite! You need a freer market.
When Walmart sells the evil fridge, which I can only assume has been hexed by a swamp witch, what they are actually doing is subverting the free market. They're cheating.
Instead of competing by selling the best groceries or the best fridge, they're competing by artificially limiting their competition. They see the market, say "fuck that market, your market is only our stuff", and force your hand. They've created a soft monopoly.
The misconception about free markets is that, if you just let them be, then they're good. Ha. Every free market player is actively devising every single plan imaginable to make the market less free.
If Walmart could run behind you and lock the doors so that you have to buy their groceries, lest you starve to death, they would. Luckily, the "nanny state" stepped in, and we have a freer market because of it.
So the problem with your fridge example is that if the product was as bad as you say, nobody would buy it and thus there is no risk of a monopoly. If the product is so good that everyone wants it, there goes the rest of your pro-consumer argument.
This whole argument is a neat trick, as you smuggle bad outcomes into a situation where there aren't any by pretending that everyone wants to buy the horrible product.
If you want to make a case that monopolies that arise from consumers overwhelmingly choosing a preferential product are bad, go ahead, but don't construct an impossible scenario where everyone loses their minds and buys a product that provides purely negative value to them just cuz.
The key is you don't tell consumers.
A pre-requisite for a free market is consumer choice, which deception naturally undermines. And don't even say "well the EULA..." no, doesn't count.
Consumers leave bad reviews and people stop buying the product.
Serious question: how many black turtlenecks do you own?
Black turtlenecks? In this economy?
> Just like Wal-Mart and Kroger
You've been repeating this flawed comparison for years. It's getting really stale.
The App Store is markedly unlike Wal-Mart or Kroger, in that a user cannot buy one thing from one store and another thing from the other. This would be like buying a Kroger-branded car and then being forbidden from entering the Wal-Mart parking lot. The problem with the App Store is not Apple's control over it and the Apple-branded experience - it is the exclusion of alternative and competing schemes that could naturally drive down their own prices.
If Wal-Mart or Kroger did this, they would be in the same hot water as Apple. Probably quite a bit worse, since people understand the commoditization of groceries better than software.
> That's a much more interesting and important "problem" to solve
No it's not. The industry has no interest in overturning it, if there was commercial demand for an innovative third platform then we'd see one. The crux of this issue is Apple becoming a services company and then denying competing services from competing on equal grounds. It cannot get any clearer than that.
> You've been repeating this flawed comparison for years. It's getting really stale.
Well I've been repeating it because it's still true.
> The App Store is markedly unlike Wal-Mart or Kroger, in that a user cannot buy one thing from one store and another thing from the other.
You're just shifting around a definition of store to fit your argument. If you want to be consistent, it's more like you can't go in to Kroger and demand to buy products sold at Wal-Mart for Wal-Mart prices. You're in a different store.
> No it's not. The industry has no interest in overturning it, if there was commercial demand for an innovative third platform then we'd see one.
So the market is clearly saying "this works and we like it". It's just that the lawyers and accountants want to shift which giant corporation gets to keep more of whatever fee percentage.
> The crux of this issue is Apple becoming a services company and then denying competing services from competing on equal grounds. It cannot get any clearer than that.
Equality will never exist on these platforms, nor is equality necessarily something that's desired. Every company on earth that operates any sort of marketplace or store sets rules and boundaries that restrict competition. You're just mad about Apple/Google doing it because some algorithm decided it was an important issue for you. Do you know why that's true? Because you're sitting here arguing about Apple/Google doing it and not every other company doing it.
Even worse is that these changes that you champion have resulted in no price reductions, no "innovation", and have degraded features that I personally like and enjoy.
> it's more like you can't go in to Kroger and demand to buy products sold at Wal-Mart for Wal-Mart prices.
You don't have to. Kroger and Wal-Mart are completely commoditized options providing the same service. There is fundamentally no difference from buying at one store vs the other; you can do both. If someone goes into Kroger demanding to buy Wal-Mart products at Wal-Mart prices, they're in luck; Wal-Mart exists. There is no lock-in to either store or the options they provide. You're describing a boogeyman that doesn't exist because the greater grocery market is functional and competitive.
The same opportunity does not exist for customers of the App Store. Apps themselves are entirely commoditized; it's only the App Store that is a deliberate monopoly. That has been consistent since the launch of the iPhone and packaging of iOS applications as infinitely reproducible .IPA files.
> So the market is clearly saying "this works and we like it".
That's how most monopolies work, yes. Unfortunately, "the market" won't be asked to testify to whether or not they like or enjoy a monopoly, but whether it causes anti-competitive damages.
> You're just mad about Apple/Google doing it because some algorithm decided it was an important issue for you.
I cannot parse what you're even trying to accuse me of in this sentence. This is the Y Combinator forum. We discuss monopolies like AdSense and the App Store because they harm the economy, not because Instagram Reels showed me a Louis Rossman short.
Because Epic hitched their real desire, we want to do digital distribution independent of Apple, to wanting alternative App Stores and alternative payment methods. And Apple responded with a scheme that does the latter without the former.
Sure you can use your own payment processor, we're still charging 27% though. Sure you can have your own App Store, you still have to go through the same review process though. It seems some of the cracks in this malicious compliance are starting to show.
There’s a Best Buy a few miles from my house. Why aren't I allowed to put my own products on their shelves, or set up a little folding table next to the phone accessories to sell my own cases?
It is not fair to me as a merchant that everyone who wants to buy a phone case goes to Best Buy. That's where all the foot traffic is. It's clearly anti-competitive that they expect me to pay for shelf space I benefit from.
And now they want to charge me to verify that the USB-C cables I'm selling actually work? How is that remotely reasonable? Just because most of my cables are faulty and customers will inevitably go complain to their customer service desk, why should I bear that cost?
Consumers deserve the right to choose accessories from multiple independent merchants inside Best Buy. Suggesting otherwise is anti-consumer, anti-choice, and proof that you hate open and accessible ecosystems.
For this analogy to be comparable, you would first have to consider that Best Buy, together with Walmart, owns 99.9999% of all store real estate in the world. You would also have to consider that the "shelf space" in this case is free and comes at zero cost to Best Buy; in fact, giving you virtual shelf space increases the amount of traffic that comes into their stores, resulting in a benefit to themselves.
Your analogy as presented was so lacking in merit you might as well have been talking about cats and leprechauns for how completely nonsensical it was to bring it up in the context of Apple.
Simon and GGP combined do own an overwhelming percentage of all retail square footage in the US, but lets at least consider the rest of the argument here.
Apple's "shelf space" is not free. There are constant R&D expenses involved in introducing new sensors and screens that make the underlying apps better. They take on the support load of on-boarding users, managing the relationship, and dealing with any problems. Advertising, carrier validation, third party hardware ecosystem, etc.
Epic wants to sidestep all of the costs of building a platform, and offload support costs onto Apple.
> Simon and GGP combined do own an overwhelming percentage of all retail square footage in the US
This is factually incorrect, and not only incorrect, but so wildly far from being correct that one wonders if this statement was made in bad faith. They only have around 300 million sqft out of an estimated 12 billion sqft, around 2.5%. That is not an overwhelming percentage, nor is it "99.9999% of all retail square footage in the world", which was not a hyperbolic statement. Competitors in retail can obtain their own shelf space. You cannot obtain your own shelf space for mobile software. The network effects of hardware+OS centralization are too strong, so there are and never will be any viable competitors to iOS and Android.
> Apple's "shelf space" is not free. There are constant R&D expenses involved in introducing new sensors and screens that make the underlying apps better.
The R&D expenses do not change regardless of whether there are 1 million or 10 million apps available for iOS. Allowing people to distribute their own software comes at no cost to Apple.
> They take on the support load of on-boarding users, managing the relationship, and dealing with any problems.
Apple absolutely does not do any of this as it pertains to individual apps.
> Epic wants to sidestep all of the costs of building a platform, and offload support costs onto Apple
Nobody is asking for Apple's support; really, what the world needs is less of Apple's involvement in the hardware the people own, not more. Epic is clearly willing to spend money on building platforms, since it has a documented $600 million in losses in its effort to build a competitor to Steam. This, however, is not a case where it is possible to build a platform.
> It is not fair to me as a merchant
You absolutely can sell your product as a merchant! Best buy doesnt force you to pay them a fee, if you are selling electronics. You are perfectly within your right to ship the electronics to the merchant yourself and best buy doesnt take a dime!
The same is not true for Apple. For Apple, a customer can want to make a direct agreement with an app store developer, without the involvement of Apple in any way, on the phone that they completely own, and Apple wasn't allowing this to happen.
It would be like if it was illegal to setup competing stores that are located next to best buy that dont involve best buy in any way. That would be absurd.
Best buy owns their store. I own my phone. You can open a store next door to best buy, thats what epic wants to be allowed to do on ios.
Apple pays 100% of the tax on the service road to the stores and pays for the parking lot, though. They deserve some fee and that's what the courts said, right?
You call it a tax, most others would call it the cost of doing business.
But yes, that's built into the product's price. Devs are paying for a license to work with IOS and need to own hardware only Apple sells to work on IOS. So I think those costs are covered.
We'll see what the "reasonable" price is. If nothing else, we know 27% was too much even for appeals.
Payment processing is worth 3. I assume the other stuff is somewhere within an order of magnitude of that, so maybe like 9-12% total is fair?
> They deserve some fee
Not if the only way to get to the store was through that road. In that case, there are public access laws and it is literally illegal for people who "own" a road to charge people money, if there is an easement.
Thats probably a simplification, but they are called "easement by necessity." rights. So even in your example of the roadway, thats also wrong. They get zero dollars.
Isn't that only to get somewhere else?
My point is in the real world sharing an area with it would mean the other store also contributes tax wise. It's not equivalent to bring up real life if the real life paying part isn't also adhered to; the lack of symmetry is notable. I don't think they deserve to set their price, though (30% is way too high).
when are we going to finally give up on the concept of the app store?
it is not efficient, it doesn't incentivize high quality products, and the web proves that security / safety can be done in an open way.
Apple killed the idea of PWAs being viable, similar to killing Flash. 20 years of vendor lock on will make mentality hard to change.
.. or enforcing & updating anti-monopoly policies
This case is more of a "lead a horse to water" situation. Even if Apple fully opened up PWAs there'd only be a small trickle of them as people developed to norms.
Its still worth pursuing. Hut the effects may not be what we desire.
> the web proves that security / safety can be done in an open way
A) the web is full of phishing and other scams, as well as tons of low quality garbage
B) the web achieves this security model by limiting applications to a browser sandbox, which imposes restrictions on what the software can do. This is a non starter for many native apps.
Is this going to involve any concrete penalty for Apple? If not, what incentive do they have to not keep doing the same thing over and over?
Are these the same thing? Different framing, confusing details:
Apple wins partial reversal of sanctions in Epic Games antitrust lawsuit
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat... (https://archive.ph/Cbi3f)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46237312
The ruling says Apple can:
insist on Apple IAP links/buttons to be the same as buttons/links to external payments. But they can't ask for the outgoing links/buttons to be less prominent
charge for links/buttons to external payment, but not as they please. One interpretation is that it has to be based on real cost and can't in any way be tied to IAP costs.
can't use scare screens on external purchases
>Are these the same thing?
Both articles appear to point at the same 9th circuit appeals court ruling:
The Ars piece points at:
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/US-Co...
Which appears to be the same ruling as the Reuters piece links to:
https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/lgvdqxweopo/...
As such, I believe that, yes, this is the same ruling reported by both Ars and Reuters.
Well, yeah..
Devil's always in the details. But in this instance, any even partial win is still a win. Something is better than nothing.
We really need a right to repair all software (or at least replace).
Peripheral question: Is there any "real" App Store on Linux except for Steam?
Not sure what you mean. apt-get, yum, and even things like snap act like app stores for free apps, no?
It's only a real "App-Store" if it has arbitrary restrictions and you must pay fees to a company, obviously.
Even with a non-free package, simply add the repository and you're ready to install it.
I think a 'real store' generally allows you to exchange money for something. If I wanted to sell software to Linux users, Steam is probably the closest thing to an 'app store' you could expect to find. Windows has the Microsoft Store, and Macs have the Apple Store.
Some distros have literal stores. But "Linux" isn't a centralized platform the same way Windows and Mac is. Also, the stores for desktop apps just don't really seem to be as effective. Companies are used to hosting their desktop apps on web.
Games seems to be more of an exception to the rule, for historical reasons.
https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
App stores are just worse package managers
Flathub.
Original Title (too long for title box):
Epic celebrates “the end of the Apple Tax” after appeals court win in iOS payments case
Why didn't Microsoft, back in the 90s, have an app store that businesses had to pay for to sell Windows applications in?
I mean, it's certainly not for lack of business insight. And you don't need the internet to sell applications.
Downloading software over dial-up speeds of 14.4 kbps to 28.8 kbps sucked, and most businesses weren't large enterprises so didn't have T1s (which were themselves only 1.5 Mbps) so sending the office manager across town to Circuit City to buy a boxed copy of some piece of software made sense. The app stores of the 90s were "third party" and physical and covered the needs and capabilities of 90s companies. The other "app store" was even more indirect, software makers paying PC sellers to pre-install.
That's how Game consoles operated, so there was definitely precedent.
But it took until 93-94 for Windows to actually become dominant enough to have such leverage, some argue that this only really happened with Windows 95. Since it was an open ecosystem for almost a decade at that point, changing was hard.
The Apple AppStore was different, it was launched after the iPhone shipped 13 million units and "only allowed web apps".
It could be argued that it was part of "embrace, extend, extinguish" to attract developers to the platform by keeping it open. They would just figure out how to capitalize on anything that got big enough, much like Google.
Apple really pioneered the walled garden (which I would assume was previously taken to be shooting yourself in the foot), and it's proven to resonate with the wider less tech-savvy population.
> And you don't need the internet to sell applications.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? I don't know how you'd sell them otherwise. How do you do you process a payment without a network connection? The only thing I can think of is offering a catalog in the OS which users could browse and physically order stuff from, but I wouldn't call that a store.
Even back then, game console manufacturers had licensing agreements with developers, so those developers had to pay royalties, even though distribution was handled by physical stores.
In some cases, some console manufacturers even handled the manufacturing of cartridges/CDs and the distribution side too.
Sorry, I'm a little confused about the relevance here. Could you elaborate a bit on how it ties into what I was saying? How did the users view products, how did they purchase them, and how did they receive them?
You asked how a company could sell (presumably third-party) apps without internet. I gave an example of it happening. Money-wise the model was very similar to Apple's AppStore.
> How did the users view products, how did they purchase them, and how did they receive them?
For the specific case of games, it was mainly via physical stores but I'm sure there were other methods such as catalogs, especially internationally.
EDIT: Remember GP is talking about the 90s and without internet, so it doesn't mean an app store where the app is instantly in your possession after clicking a button.
> Remember GP is talking about the 90s and without internet, so it doesn't mean an app store where the app is instantly in your possession after clicking a button.
Right, but how is that an app store and not just a catalog?
…am I fully misunderstanding and they just meant a physical store?
I just provided some information, use it as you want. I'm not really in this website to have an argument.
>Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? I don't know how you'd sell them otherwise. How do you do you process a payment without a network connection? The only thing I can think of is offering a catalog in the OS which users could browse and physically order stuff from, but I wouldn't call that a store.
Not GP but, processing payments absolutely does not require a network connection. Doing so is absolutely not nearly as convenient, but in my adult lifetime it was pretty normal for retailers to pick up a phone, give a customer service rep and/or automated call handler CC info and dollar amounts and get appropriate confirmations.
As for a business without an OS interface not being a "store," that's ridiculous on its face. If that were true, we'd have to call 7/11 or any similar place (like those at most gas stations) convenience "locations with items for sale but not a store, because stores are only places with catalogs in my OS," and "places which sell stuff but aren't stores because rimunroe says they can't be a 'store' without a catalog in their OS."
Touch grass, friend.
> Not GP but, processing payments absolutely does not require a network connection. Doing so is absolutely not nearly as convenient, but in my adult lifetime it was pretty normal for retailers to pick up a phone, give a customer service rep and/or automated call handler CC info and dollar amounts and get appropriate confirmations.
I forgot about phone payments, but that doesn't change my argument. If it's a built in listing of products, it presumably needs to be updated occasionally too, which I'm not sure how you'd do without mailing disks if you didn't have a network connection. I also don't know how you'd make room for the bundled software. My memory of my Windows 3.1 machine involves a lot of wishing I had more space on my HDD.
> As for a business without an OS interface not being a "store," that's ridiculous on its face.
That indeed would be absurd. Fortunately, I never argued this. I argued that without taking payments or distributing the software through the "store", I don't think it would qualify as a store but would qualify as a catalog. I think of a store as somewhere you go to exchange money for goods/services. If it's doing neither of those things is it still a store?
> Touch grass, friend.
I don't know why you felt this hostility was warranted. Did I slight you in some way?
You can probably bet that the dumbest possible interpretation of someone's argument is not what they had in mind.
There wasn't an argument. The OP was just asking a (presumably honest) and simple question: How do you do you process a payment without a network connection?
I can understand how someone under, say, 30, might not know how commerce happened before the Internet. My 13 year old can't believe there was even once a world without the Internet.
> I can understand how someone under, say, 30, might not know how commerce happened before the Internet.
I remember those days, but I think most people would call something where you viewed a list of products and then called or mailed to order and received the product elsewhere a catalog, not a store. As for over-the-phone payments, I forgot about that method for a moment but don't think it meaningfully affects my argument. It's just as out-of-band as the mail order example I included.
I was referring to ThrowMeAway's response to rimunroe. "That's ridiculous on its face" is a clue that they meant something different.
Moving megabytes and then gigabytes were really expensive and error prone. physical media was faster and practically no error.
It feels like courts are not doing a good job promoting "competition".
- Apple shouldn't be able to charge for external payments, come on.
- Force prominent disclosure of refund policies. Epic Games doesn't allow them for IAP. Apple does. Epic knows exactly how predatory that is, betting some kids will find ways to spend thousands and the parents will be helpless. Ideally you'd have a law mandating refunds, but without that, there should be mandatory disclosure on the IAP screen, at least for microtransaction games. You can't have fair "competition" when you have an information asymmetry, and if these rulings don't mandate that, you'll open the floodgate for these gaming companies to screw over parents.
Antitrust laws were written in the early 1900s and updated through the 1950s. Credit cards weren't available until 1966 and didn't become widely used until the 1990s. Digital platforms weren't a thing until the late 90s/early 2000s and the Apple app store didn't exist until 2008.
The courts can only enforce the laws on the books. Congress needs to update the laws, but they won't because they are hopelessly corrupt :(
A lot of laws don't need updating.
Courts don't allow you to submit false evidence yet somehow they need to update their produces to handle AI generated false submissions?
The issue is enforcement. Plain and simple. The anti-trust on the books are fine; no more amount of written laws will make regulators regulate.
Lina Khan did try and regulate. She had some successes, but the major cases w/r/t concentration of power against Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta and Apple have all moved slowly and (so far) failed to result in break ups.
> Force prominent disclosure of refund policies.
100% agree Apple should be forced to have a big banner on explicitly stating they have no refund policy and it's all whatever they feel like this week. Which funny enough is also basically their app approval process.
> - Force prominent disclosure of refund policies. Epic Games doesn't allow them for IAP. Apple does.
Apple has no official App Store refund policy, either for IAP or for upfront paid apps. I've already looked for one. There's of course a form to request a refund, but refunds are entirely at Apple's discretion, for any reason or no reason, and Apple often exercises its discretion to refuse refunds.
I have never had Apple to refuse a refund and I’ve had an iTunes account since 2003
> I have never had Apple to refuse a refund
Good for you, but you're only one user out of more than a billion.
> I’ve had an iTunes account since 2003
I'm not sure how that's relevant, because the App Store opened in 2008. Also, Apple had a different CEO at the time.
The App Store was built on iTunes and used the same backend. The refund process hasn’t changed since then. Funny enough before the App Store you could buy Apple curated apps for your iPod.
Have you heard reports of Apple not granting refunds?
> The App Store was built on iTunes and used the same backend. The refund process hasn’t changed since then.
I'm not talking about the technical process. Like I already said, "There's of course a form to request a refund".
> Have you heard reports of Apple not granting refunds?
Yes, many. Indeed, I've heard it from my own customers, as I'm an App Store developer myself.
Why shouldn't Apple be able to charge whatever the fuck they want on their own platform, while users of their platform can? Now Sweeney can sell vbux to kids and Apple has to just grin and bear it?
Apple needs to be broken up and separated from the App Store. Apple sells devices, and I buy one expecting to own it outright. When you own something, you should be able to install whatever you want without interference from Apple.
How is the iPhone different from the Macs? I can install anything I want from any source on the Mac, but I can't do that on the iPhone. Doesn't make any sense.
Because they’re forcing people to use their platform
Oh yeah those pesky armed thugs that go around forcing you to buy Apple products sure are annoying...
Nobody is getting forced to use the Apple platform.
I bought a phone. It’s my phone. It’s not Apple’s phone. Apple can fuck off telling me what I’m allowed to do with my phone.
Whoever owns the device can do what they want with it, Apple cannot tell you what you're allowed to do with your phone. You're making up a scenario in your head.
This goes both ways - when Apple produces a phone, they own it and they're also free to load whatever software they want onto it. They then enter into voluntary transactions with others, in which the ownership of the phone is transferred along with the right to load whatever software is desired.
If you can't figure out how to load your desired software onto an iPhone, don't buy one. But it's certainly not Apples problem at that point since, as you said, they no longer have a right to any say in how that device is used, and thus also give up any responsibilities you seem to desire.
Jail breaking the phone is not sufficient for fair play.
Apple is actively preventing competition for app stores on the iPhone. And in other countries they’ve already lost the battle.
> Apple is actively preventing competition for app stores on the iPhone.
Walmart is actively preventing competition for grocery stores inside Walmarts.
Not everything is a monopoly and not everything needs to be totally competitive....
This has never been about protecting users but about mobsters getting a bigger cut of the pie.
Look at the major companies aligned with Epic on this, like Match.com, and what they do.
Now let’s ban all probabilistic digital items like loot boxes.
Are they still much of a thing? I was vaguely aware of epic dropping them years ago for Fortnite.
Different from gacha at least.
David vs Goliath - well done epic
It's more like Goliath vs Bigger Goliath.
Small developers/business won't benefit from this change.
End-users COULD benefit from this change but the skeptic in me knows Epic won't adjust their prices to reflect the smaller cut they have to pay now.
Apple can go to hell, their 30% fee is prohibitive.
If Jobs was still here, he would have fired all the fat management.
shame on you Apple, you are acting like M$!
Why would jobs of all people have an issue with that?
He loved their policy. He wrote it.
> “I think this is all pretty simple — iBooks is going to be the only bookstore on iOS devices. We need to hold our heads high. One can read books bought elsewhere, just not buy/rent/subscribe from iOS without paying us, which we acknowledge is prohibitive for many things.”
https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/30/21348130/apple-documents-...
>shame on you Apple, you are acting like M$!
Microsoft, for all their faults, gave us an actual operating system that people could build and distribute executables on as they saw fit with no restrictions, and they did it despite the fact that they owned almost the entire personal computing space.
Imagine Microsoft had charged everyone who distributed a Windows executable 30%, they'd have made trillions by now. Bill Gates said once that Microsoft has captured maybe 1% of the value that people have created on top of their software because they don't insert themselves between what users do with each other and I do think they actually deserve some props for that
Nah. Fuck Apple but the only reason Microsoft isn't doing the same thing Apple does with iOS is because they don't have a mobile operating system anymore.
Even on Windows, Microsoft has very similar notarization requirements as Apple. Microsoft requires either an ~400-500$/year EV cert (if you don't want to involve Azure), or more recently a $10/month subscription to Azure, which is almost the same as Apple's $99/year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46182546
> their own payment processors
Thats another industry that needs more competition.
Now I wonder what this will do to Google ? IIRC, they have been looking into a similar extortion fee for Android Developers.
I received an e-mail earlier this week saying that their new policies will be mandatory by January 28, 2026.
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
It's incredibly similar to what Apple had before.
Tim Cook has been absolutely fantastic for Apple shareholders and absolutely awful for anyone else, particularly the customers.
The walled garden has to end. There is no excuse for making people pay a premium price for an iPad Pro that can't run a third party web browser or do software development in any meaningful way.
Outside of a very narrow use case, the iPad product range is useless, despite the endless rantings of the brainwashed fanboys. Source: used to be one. Left the ecosystem when they started treating the RFCs like toilet paper.
At one point, there was a case for preventing scammy and fraudulent apps. For a long time, the ios App store had a much higher quality than android.
But now? There are tons of scammy and fraudulent apps on the app store. If you try to search for any popular app, you'll be presented with a dozen apps that look similar with similar names and logos.
Yep. And this has been the case for over a decade.
They might do some sampling, but they're definitely not checking everything.
The first app I published in 2012 had a backend, but the Apple team never logged in with the provided credentials, or even tried anything.
Like when you search for anything "AI" and get bombarded with a wall of minimalist goatse
Apple's "manual review" process stopped meaning anything to me when they verified a trojan horse version of LastPass: https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/warning-fraudulent-app-imper...
I don't even know how this is possible. FOSS repos have more security than that...
Also: gambling apps. Legal, sure, but also incredibly scammy.
And there are literally app farms pushing hundreds consealed illegal gambling / casino / betting apps to app store daily. Apple approves every single one.
They are then getting removed in days / weeks, but it just proves their review process is a joke.
Steve wasn't exactly famous for playing nicely with other tech either.
He signed his name to the "fuck Flash" memo, promised to publish interoperable specs for iMessage/FaceTime and never did, presided over the original App Store launch, etc.
A lot of the balls Tim is rolling were first pushed by Steve.
Did you consider... not buying an Ipad Pro?
>There is no excuse for making people pay
I know! I was just out shopping for a towel and these armed gunmen grabbed me and pulled me into this store and held a gun to my kids head until I bought them a new iPad Pro M5. I am traumatized.
Oh, no, wait, I remember, my kid wanted an iPad Pro for their art and for school. They liked their wacom, but the iPad was more portable, and with the keyboard, it was perfect for taking notes.
> The walled garden has to end. There is no excuse for making people pay a premium price for an iPad Pro that can't run a third party web browser or do software development in any meaningful way.
Why?
There's an alternative: Android. I'm perfectly free to use that instead. I don't.
If I want to "do software development in any meaningful way", I'm not using a tablet. I'm using something with MacOS or GNU/Linux on it.
People willingly pay what Apple's charging for the iPad in the face of competition from a different OS and different classes of device, so I'm not really seeing the problem, especially when I can hand my technologically-handicapped 65-year-old mother an iPad and not have to worry as much about her installing something that will wreck every device on my parents' network or compromise her bank accounts or something.
Besides, the whole "locked-down device" wasn't Tim's idea, it was Steve's. There are plenty of reasons to gripe about Tim Cook, but "the iPad is too locked down" isn't one of them.
> There's an alternative: Android. I'm perfectly free to use that instead. I don't.
I think this is my entire problem with most of these conversations. When they say "The walled garden has to end." ... they mean "YOUR walled garden has to end.".
I also like the Walled Garden. Do I think Apple should be able to charge more than Stripe? No.
I wish they would stop conflating the gate keeping price to enter the walled garden being too high with the wall garden and the gate being a moral wrong.
Apparently, the market can bear Apple charging more than Stripe. Hell, Stripe's business model is just moneychanging at its core; at least Apple can make an argument that they do more than that.
> I can hand my technologically-handicapped 65-year-old mother an iPad and not have to worry
We don't have to lock an entire ecosystem of devices because your mom's technologically-handicapped
As we dive further and further into them being dependent on said devices to be part of modern society... Yes we do.
It's the niche that wants open and flexible devices and the ability to customize everything.
Let's not ruin iOS by trying to make it Android.
I say that both as an iOS developer and Android user.
Find another ecosystem of devices. There are plenty. And it's not just my family, there's at least one person in most families who is like that.
Hard disagree. Tim should focus on fixing their software. It has become extremely buggy and it needs to be fixed. No one buying an iPad cares about running some custom browser and supporting it is pointless and is what makes the software emote complex and worse. He should take better care of his paying customers rather than engaging with opinionated activists.
You hopeful for this? Per Gurman:
>For iOS 27 and next year’s other major operating system updates — including macOS 27 — the company is focused on improving the software’s quality and underlying performance.
-via Bloomberg -18d
Edit: almost can’t be true if they’re going to try to push Siri hard :-/
I'm a consumer too and I despise having 20 different logins for each vendor to extract data from and the resulting increased exposure to identity theft. I'm grateful for Steam's dominance in the gaming space, my Playstation Sony account was hacked and was a nightmare cleaning up. It is not my job to care about developer margins, all the apps I care about are able to stay in business regardless of Apple's fees and if they cannot then they should charge more. I also dread the idea of having to spend time cleaning spammy "Patriot.Eagle App Store" from my elderly parent's devices if the walled garden is fully removed in the future, I know that shit is coming.
What gives you the right to tell someone who purchases Apple devices because of the walled garden that they should no longer have that option because YOU don't like it. What an incredibly entitled and selfish position. Have you even stopped to consider for even a second why Apple devices are so popular, especially with normal people who don't spend their time fantasizing about how they want to control other people's purchases with other sweaty nerds on the internet? Have you ever considered that other people may have different preferences and desires from yours? Jfc.
> Outside of a very narrow use case, the iPad product range is useless, despite the endless rantings of the brainwashed fanboys
The use case is rich iPhone users who want an easy experience to watch videos, read, or consume social media on a larger screen than their phones. It’s especially popular for the children or elderly parents of these rich people. You can argue this use case is narrow, but it’s decently profitable.
Just because this use case doesn’t apply to your experience doesn’t mean anyone who disagrees is a brainwashed fanboy.
I will agree that the iPad Pro range seems overly niche to me — but also it could be I just don’t understand the use case. If someone else finds it productive and pleasant to use, what difference does this make to me or you?
Tim Cook, or any CEO, is accountable to the shareholders, so job well done it seems. It's still the user's choice if they want to live in the walled garden or not, and lots of people do, so why would they change it?
I heart that at least in the US losing access to Facetime would be a serious loss in social status. So then this would be a real hurdle WRT user choice.