Apparently it looked too much like the iPad Settings app.
Insane.
Just find an alternative business strategy that doesn't rely on Apple. You can't rely on them. They don't give a crap about developers and never have. Why do all developers keep enabling them? Seriously, just sacrifice a small % of your income by ignoring Apple and you will help make the world a better place. Developers have to stand up for themselves.
I would suggest requiring cause to be stated for account termination or threatened termination, and a formal right of appeal to request evidence.
Of course this would be onerous for the smallest businesses, so we’d need some threshold for when it kicks in. E.g. 2 years, or $1,000 of transactions.
This wouldn’t make any particular kind of termination illegal. It would simply force transparency, so that then if there really are abuses or patterns of abuse taking place, we can expose them.
It would also apply to all businesses - Google, Banks, Gyms, whatever.
There's not much they can't do, now.
Forget that useless malicious platform already. It's not worth it.
I just googled this, found some references to the anime image boards. Most were Hentai / Porn. If the main purpose of an app is viewing adult content, its main purpose is viewing adult content - even if you have to add the ressources yourself. (I might be wrong, I don't have a clue about the Boorus community).
So prop. Apples "Freedom from Porn"approach?
Google will close gmail accounts, take away adsense revenues, or remove youtube videos on a whim.
Visa blocked users from giving their money to political causes they decided didn't aligned with their view of the world.
For years Microsoft made it super hard to buy hardware without paying the Windows licence. They killed xbox remotely. They have invasive telemetry in Win 10.
Paypal may refuse to pay the money you have on their account at any moment. Your money, no appeal.
Twitter and facebook censorship rules are on a case by case basis. If your famous, you may be able to use hate speech. I you are an anonymous political activist, China may ask for your shut down.
Big companies exist to make money. If they get too much power, they will abuse it. Not because they are evil, but because it's the logical thing to do for them.
This is why I was advocating in another comment that we should not use WhatsApp new payment system:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553455
Thinking about the power we give to big entities is a central mechanism to build the society we live on. That's why we should think about what we buy, the media we consumme, etc.
They are votes, just as much as during an election.
That is why I am absolutely against abolishing paper cash.
Edit: I know there are countries where you have a democratically elected representatives and every part of the government and even companies is held ( more or less ) accountable to the people and does not need to worry ( much ) about big business or government taking over some basic right. Yes cashless in that case is great. Is like utopian.
Unfortunately not everyone has that luxury.
A cashless society would mean a society where some neuro-atypical people might periodically have to worry about starving to death.
Of course this is also an area that requires government regulation in order to prevent banks from taking advantage of their customers. And that requires a government that actually cares about this sort of thing.
Yeah. If we want any semblance of actual freedom left, cash is a part of the future.
Ah, took me a second. You don't mean paper cash in reference to fiat money vs the gold standard. You mean hard cash being replaced by plastic account balances in a sort of cyberpunk vein. Totally agree, great point.
At the moment. All those things can and do change, and then what will you do?
Same goes for Uber eats etc. Call the restaurant directly, don't be a dick.
- protects you from this type of arbitrary abuse of power
- helps in keeping third parties from mining you for all your data
- helps in resisting censorship
- protects you from surprise changes or cancellations of services (Google Reader, Google+, Microsoft PlaysForSure, etc.)
- gives you more control over your data
So get that Raspberry Pi, that old laptop without a screen, that abandoned diskless client or some other low-power (as in power consumption) machine with a few GB of memory and a few GHz of CPU and start tinkering. There are readymade solutions for those who dislike tinkering but this being Hacker News I'd assume most of you do. There are plenty of posts on this board and elsewhere on this subject so I won't repeat the whole list of services and software which can be used except for one: add a git repository (e.g. gitea [1], sourcehut [2], gitlab being too heavy for most SBCs) so you can be master (pun intended) over your own data. Nae lairds, nae kings, we are free.
ISPs can ban users just as capriciously as any other company. And they do.
Decentralized internet alternatives are both harder to use (and "host your own infrastructure" is already impossibly hard for the vast majority of people) and too limited to be useful.
It's time to accept that and emergent behavior of the internet is to become more centralized, not less.
They will then attack your Domain Register, or your DDOS protection (CloudFlare) or ISP (as more residential plan forbid running any server the ISP will ban you not for political or other reasons but for running a server on a residential plan), have your bank account / credit card cancelled (this has happened) etc etc etc
The next day I got an email saying my adsense was closed for 'fake views / clicks', no way to challenge it or anything.
That was like 10 years ago. I still can't use adsense to this day.
I haven't been able to trust gmail with anything important after that.
Visa and their competitors (Mastercard et al) are companies that should almost certainly be investigated over antitrust concerns and regulated like utillities. The fact they have so much control over things like online payments should be absolutely terrifying.
But yeah, this is why we should definitely avoid giving large companies too much power, and arguably avoid relying on them as much as possible in general.
Elsewhere on HN today we have 'On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B (1975) [pdf] (web.mit.edu)' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23549203 in a way, you could say it applies to this whole situation quite well.
Just curious, what were the political causes affected?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-m...
I wonder if it would be better than what we currently have?
I want to go online and fill out a long, myers briggs like personality test that judges my political leanings, and then have that data fed to a script that votes on all the issues for me directly, skipping the middlemen. Collectively those scripts would be a far better representation than any human.
Replace all politicians with tiny shell scripts.
So I'm not sure what 'buying the government' actually would mean or how it would be different...
It's now so bad people are refraining from trying out innovative business model or apps just because they think there could be a chance someone at apple validation wouldn't like it and kill the product at any time.
I wish the Hey story makes people realize it is not reasonable to have one actor control the only software distribution channel to hundred of millions of customers.
I'm fine with apple wanting to provide a highly curated experience to their users by having them download apps from a store they control. But this shouldn't be the only option.
The fact is that those companies are not telling people what they did wrong and even more persuasive these days not explaining why their apparent transgression is leading to a particular punishment. Or how that transgression fits the punishment. I for one will not subject myself to such a form of tyranny.
In this case even if having your app in TestFlight too long, why is now (3 years in) the time to revoke the app? Having 200 test users is too much. Why not tell people beforehand they exceeded a limit if that is your rule?
Lets say you are invited into a country as a citizen, but the conditions are: You can be punished arbitrarily, even banished, without recourse, harassed, given arbitrary commands by minions. You pay a 30% tax on all your proceeds, but your proceeds are your sole responsibility. There is no right to have your grievances addressed by the tyrant, not even by one of the lower minions. Would you go? I will not. Now say you already find yourself in such a country. I'm sorry for you. I think I would organize and try to collectively have those rights improved.
<rant>
Seriously, just how hard is it for these companies to communicate properly? Would it kill them to send something like "We saw X on your account so we are closing your account temporarily. Contact us.". Instead it is just "We closed your account. Get screwed.".
This is why so many developers are going the web app way these days. Dealing with a closed platform who won't even talk to you is just infuriating.
Sorry for the rant.
Because of the nature of a couple of my apps, I’ve had them bounced for “providing commonly available services” (i.e. competing with OS tools). In each instance, I have appealed, citing some unique features, and have prevailed.
I think that reviewers have a number of “1-button” responses, provided by some kind of dashboard, in order to ensure a narrative is maintained. This is actually common for many customer interaction scenarios. I don’t like it, but understand why it happens.
I’ll bet that the more heated an exchange gets, the more “canned” these responses become, because...lawyers. He may, in fact, be communicating with a human, who keeps hitting canned response buttons (not much different from ‘bots).
I’ve wondered whether or not folks might use TestFlight for “shadow release.” I have seen app makers use Enterprise in that fashion. I have no idea (or opinion) on whether or not that was the case, here.
I’m not sure I would want to pursue my case in the court of public opinion. It’s a risky gambit, but this chap may feel he has nothing to lose.
EDIT: One thing that I should mention, is that I never have a release in TestFlight for more than a few days. It has a "time bomb"; I think, maybe 60 or 90 days. That means, in order to maintain an app in TF for three years, he'd need to keep re-releasing every couple of months. That speaks to some kind of intent.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#bet...
I encourage you to read through the entire AppStore guidelines, there might be more sections that apply to Apple's decision to terminate the account
I didn't read through all of your privacy policy on the app's website, but definitely worthwhile to cross check it with the AppStore guidelines as well.
As others have said, GMail was 5 years in beta, it's normal for products to be in beta for years as long as they are not monatized. Maybe he didn't get the updates reviewed according to the guidelines though.
But from the way it sounds the author was not actively developing the application, so I am not sure how many changes went into each 90 day revision, perhaps Apple does not look kindly on resubmitting a build just for the sake of resetting the TestFlight 90 day activity counter. This might be seen as a way to try and avoid deployment and the final app review process.
The 90 day counter is mentioned here https://testflight.apple.com/ Look for it under "Testing"
From the way I have understood the 90 day counter before is that the app should be updated with new functionality/patches to be more beta tested, otherwise your app is obviously not being developed so no need for beta testing anymore
And if not, and a single Apple ID is also used for development, (1) can it remain intentionally unassociated with any payment method in any specific country, and (2) is there a threat of losing it if Developer account is terminated for some unfathomable reason?
If it’s a business ID then I’d still say you have little to lose by using a separate one for the Dev account. You can even switch IDs on iOS for using the App Store if you need to login using the dev account.
If Apple were not years behind PWA integration, switching to a PWA instead of native app might be an option. But this is sadly not in Apple’s interest.
I wonder how many people will choose Android over Apple in the future because of PWAs. I can imagine there will be a flood of useful PWAs, freely to use and only fully working on Android, not Apple.
In this case, it seems we've sleepwalked into a situation where there are conflicts of interest like never really seen before - companies with global scale, able to arbitrarily decide which competition they wish to allow to be present on "their" marketplace, and make them either raise their price by 30%, or be 30% less profitable.
Resolving these conflicts, and recognising these aren't simple "creation of a moat", but rather some actual, tangible, anti-competitive practices would be a good starting point. But what is the outcome? Apple's view is "we're protecting users from bad things on the internet", but perhaps this kind of arbitrary decision-making is not one to be getting made arbitrarily?
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_...
If we enforced the law as written, I think the "cookie law" would be a net positive for everyone.
In terms of who deals with the anti competitive situation, I don't think that matters. But this is textbook market distortion that traditional antitrust laws were made for, and I think it's high time we saw them used to break up anti-competitive market practices.
Speculation but my money would be on some unethical competitor or even just a jerk who doesn't like Andy is spamming negative reviews and reported him to Apple for fraud. Since I've never heard of this happening, I don't know if Apple's fraud department takes a guilty-until-innocent approach or if they agreed fraud occurred. Either way the lack of transparency and communication is not right. I'll echo sentiments that I've spoken to humans about app issues but never about fraud.
Well there you have it. The rest of devs will be happy they're still under Apple's wing, and nothing will change.
I have not read the blog post above fully, but a speed-read suggests that the author was publicly distributing an app through TestFlight rather than App Store.
I am not accusing anyone of anything here. But if my speed-read is accurate, then its not at all surprising Apple have taken issue with him.
TestFlight is a dev tool. Its not for production deployment. Its meant for beta testing.
Is there still no way to release an iPhone app out with the iOS app store?
To enable this countries and regions have drafted laws to govern what business and trade practices are permissible.
Some non-rhetorical questions out of curiosity because I genuinely don't know:
Is it illegal for supermarkets to only partner with certain brands and carry their products over those of their competitors? If there is only 1 Walmart within driving distance of 50,000 people, and that Wal-Mart chooses to throw out all toilet paper brands and sell their store brand, is this allowed under current law? What if they allow the brand to stay if they pay an additional whimsical commission to Wal-Mart? Is that legal?
Is there something that makes the App store different from the physical store equivalent?
Putting aside the letter of the law, does it violate the aforementioned "spirit" of the law? i.e. ought there be laws against this kind of behaviour? I am sure there are good arguments for both sides.
The problem is that the iPhone itself isn't a monopoly. You can buy an Android phone that can access any store and install any app you want, so monopoly law doesn't apply (in the strictest sense). Now, one could say that you shouldn't have to move towns just because your favorite toilet paper isn't sold. But as it stands today, you have to, as I understand it. (With that being said, Apple, start acting right.)
By his own description of what it does, I'd say the app is highly likely to be selling access to content that the author hasn't licensed, and is on sketchy copyright grounds.
Also, the fact that a vote manipulation app...
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122737/iowa-democractic-...
...was distributed via a test platform with the financial backing of former Clinton and Obama / recent Pete Buttigieg staffers...
https://apnews.com/5232ce5601996c1de440806ad30fa4fb
...has likely put Apple in the position of being compelled to more actively police what goes on in test apps. I get the knee-jerk tendency to blame corporate oppression of indie developers since that is usually what we see from the Googles and Microsofts of the world, but Apple has little monetary interest in kicking a successful app developer off of their ecosystem, unless that app developer is blatantly flaunting civil / criminal statutes or trying to scam Apple out of their cut of the profit.
If I had a to guess I'd say this guy is doing both.
So basically he was calling something a 'beta' and distributing it through Testflight for 3 years.
Yep, no clear reason here. Big Apple bad!
Apple has a lot of problems, and I agree, but most of these 'developer stories about mean Apple' always have two sides of the story. I remember the same outrage about Kapeli's Dash situation, and then came out an account in his name was doing fraudulent activities ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12680131 )
Techically this is of course just like web browser, but Apple could see it differently.
[1] Objectionable Content
The fact that a faceless entity can lock you out of developing like this is just wrong. I fear for the future of such closed off ecosystems.
We really shouldn’t have to do that kind of shit.
Paid customer service where the customer pays money (say $100-$1k depending on how serious the issue is) and each company can have a special channel to respond to these paid requests and be compensated (say 80% of the fee the customer pays). That way companies will have the will and ability to attend to serious issues and filter them out from the "useless" customer requests that flood any large size business.
I've recently got the PinePhone in and while actual Linux on smartphones is very early, it's also an opportunity to have some real impact. I'll never go back to a walled garden, no matter how appealing it may seem from the outside.
For the majority of users, this is irrelevant because linux is unusable for them. And they are the customers. To have a sustainable business, we have to target the platforms that paying customers use. That platform is not gnu/linux.
How about Apple telling me they don't like my business bank (a well known UK bank I've been with for 10 years) and simply refusing to set up the account. In a very cold, "go away already", manner. I wasn't going to kill the relationship with my business bank just because Apple told me to, so the app never got onto App Store and I shut down my dev account.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's abhorrent, but it's something you should think about.
I once tried to open a new bank account with my bank of 10y, and set up direct debit to it. The point was that I was going to pay my rent from that new account (both me and a roommate would pay into the account, and a direct-debit would go to the landlord).
I filed the paperwork, in person, and heard nothing, a week passed, I phoned the bank, they said call back tomorrow.
I did, "please call in a week".
Waited a week, "please call back next week"..
So I go in person to the bank, and I refuse to leave until they fix it- I was being pressured by the landlord, I couldn't take the keys of the new property until proof of direct debit was handed over.
I waited for 5hrs in the lobby, basically from a few minutes after the branch opened until the mid-afternoon. Eventually a teller decided to help me because none of the bank managers were going to look at it.
What was the problem? apparently because I had claimed to have an income on one of the forms they wanted proof. I had never been asked to delclare proof before; and bearing in mind that previously I had never declared any income on any account _and_ I had standing orders/direct debits coming from the account; this was also the account that was where my salary landed, the only account I'd had since I was 13.
I tried to give proof, I showed bank statements and payslips... contracts etc; but because the payslips were on my phone they didn't accept them, I asked if I could use a printer and they said no.
So, I walked across the street to Barclays, opened 3 accounts with my passport and a proof-of-address, set up all my direct debits in 1hr, transferred all my money and that was the end of it.
What pissed me off most was the lack of transparency on exactly /why/ they decided not to move forward, expecting me to just sit on my hands forever is not good.
Fuck you HSBC, that was nearly 10 years ago and I still fucking hate you.
er... my point is that corps can be fickle and you shouldn't trust any of them. Especially the ones that implore you to trust them.
The same should happen to Google with search, Chrome, and Android. You can't use dozens of entire markets as your product moat.
But... Why? Are you not an Android user maybe? Because it didn't make sense to me as an Android user. My default browser is set to Firefox with ublock origin installed. Search backend is still set to Google, but it's pretty easy to switch between providers. You're not forced into anything here
The real issue there is the deep coupling between Google services and Android, removing at least 70% of the phones utility if the phone isn't signed into a Google account.
The same applies to apple devices though, with the added issue that everything else is forced as well. While I'd be glad if Google opened up the services api, that's a very different issue to the one the original discussion was about.
I hope it's not going to be a talk about which commission rate is fair, because it completely misses the point. If apple wants to charge 30% commission for being able to distribute on the store, use their development tools, their apis, and have people pay using apple, fine. But just let my customers free to install my software on the hardware they own the way they want to.
Compare that to games on PC: even though competition has fortunately started to pick up recently, it'd still be madness not to publish on Steam.
All platforms seem to naturally tend towards monopoly, with an enormous first mover advantage. I wish I knew of a solution :/
Also, for startups, making sure you have an alternative option to distribute your app in case it gets shut down on apple’s store makes it almost a guarantee that they’ll try to deploy on as many different stores as possible.
I find it amusing that people and businesses are willing to put their future in the hands of a company that has historically destroyed anyone who gets enough users on their platform.
If this is the best option, I think that the best option would be to actively work with a platform competitor. Do developers have a sense of stockholm syndrome ?
Apple's callous "walled garden" practices have always been well known. Honestly, developers who continue to participate in this shitshow had it coming.
Remember:
developers : Apple == taxi drivers : UberMicrosoft and other brands are getting better at making quality hardware faster than Apple is innovating in the space.
Apple still has the lead in their os just feeling so much nicer and solid to use but again it's still stagnant while windows is slowly evolving and when it comes down to it you can't even build a mac with the power you're working with on the Windows side so it stops really being an option if one means your work can be done multiple times faster (GPGPU workloads for example) than on the Mac side.
All these whinging developers seem to have forgotten that they made an agreement with Apple which included:
"10. Term and Termination. Apple may terminate or suspend you ... at any time in Apple’s sole discretion."
Don't like the terms, don't sign the contract. I learned that the hard way at the age of 19, it wasn't in tech, it was a housing contract, but I learned my lesson:
Before you agree to anything with legal standing, read it and reread it. Understand it, and if you don't seek help to get that understanding. Once you understand the terms you have to make a choice to agree or walk away. Then you have to live with the consequences.
This is the basis of legal justice (as it stands) and much of society relies on it.
When your opposition has an absolute chokehold on major markets it's a near unassailable position - throw in that the vast vast majority of users simply don't care whether an app store is open or not or know why they should care - attention is finite and the only way things will improve is if governments lead it and well see my earlier paragraph about who has the money...
While Apple hasn't officially announced yet, they should have reached 1 Billion Active iPhone user in the past few months. They are just waiting for the moment to make the announcement.
The Mission Impossible 5 lines always come up in my head when I read these stories.
The App Store, was a hypothetically brainchild of certain people within Apple. Recruit former developers from other platform, supply them with tools, use them to grow the ecosystem and surgically remove our competitors, both at home and abroad. Its operation was to be hidden within Services in a virtual account that Steve alone would control. It would have made him a Judge, Jury and Executioner with zero accountability.
This is very true. I know of many people who have legitimate App ideas that would flourish today had it not been the extreme restrictions that Apple and Google is putting on mobile devices. Sadly, I can testify, that Apple and Google are actively putting obstacles in the way of innovation because it hurts their business models.
Switch to Android. You just realized the same reason why I switched 8 years ago.
That and consistently raising prices. Apple is doing this to satisfy their never-ending rising stock-price and it will only get worse.
Ps. Android exploits are worth more than iOS once now. How times have changed...
Don't apologize, your rant is valid and unfortunately this issue is not limited to Apple. Google is infamous for closing accounts and sending an automated message along the lines of "You may have violated a rule. We won't tell you which rule, and we won't offer proof, deal with it." They don't just do this to their free users, it's happened to businesses using paid Google services for their core infrastructure. It's maddening that a corporation can get so big that it's effectively a human walking through an ant hill, oblivious to the thousands or even millions of lives it's disrupting in the name of moving forward and making profits.
When you type your password into your computer, if you do it incorrectly, you get a generic error like "That didn't work, try again". If instead the OS gave out more specific hints, like "Your username is good but your password isn't" and "You tried 9 characters, but your password is not 9 characters", it would only make things easier for the attacker.
And, might I add, Safari performs way better for me than Chrome, on macOS.
They fear it would kill their fraud prevention efforts because they'd just be giving evil actors a list of instructions on how to stay as close as possible to their undesirable activities.
> We saw X on your account so we are closing your account temporarily
There will always be some idiot who goes 'oh so you're descriminating against X' or some other bullshit but legally valid reason and sues them. Can't have that.
It wasn’t a fun process but I like having a human contact on the other side of the things.
Sometimes I think, people having issues must be omitting some part of the story because I am not a big-time publisher, I have no privilege but at the same time, I don’t have these problems of ”evil Apple destroying the little guy” sort.
"Apple threatens to close my developer account" is a very different situation from Hey's disagreement with the business practices of Apple.
At the start I also got canned responses, which was a bit frustrating (because I knew that these won’t help me in the slightest) but then I got real help and it also felt like the support actually wanted to help, which is often not the case in such scenarios.
I guess what I wanted to say is that this is what brings value to interacting in any business. You need to be able to listen and talk.
They are. I know a real estate company that distributes its app to its customers that way. I don't know why they do it, but it's annoying not to be able to just download it from the App Store like a normal app.
That's insane. Their brand must be in the toilet. This guy has a "niche" product that is probably only of interest to a few geeks. A real estate company, on the other hand, has a brand that it needs to protect and project.
Also, I'll bet they will get to interact with the account fraud department, sooner or later.
It sounds like OP is dealing with the account fraud department instead
"Note, however, that apps using TestFlight cannot be distributed to testers in exchange for compensation of any kind, including as a reward for crowd-sourced funding."
If you have taken the time to read the information posted you would see that the information is relevant on monetization outside of the app.
I am just giving possible considerations for the author that they haven't consider in the article, we don't know how the app link has been distributed throughout the last 3 years, maybe they posted a donation link somewhere before and Apple considered this as compensation for the beta distribution of the app.
What's completely unacceptable here is that Apple does not specifically say what the author did wrong and this can't be defended by apologists.
What is surprising or not coming from Apple is irrelevant, stop normalizing this abusive behavior from app store gate keepers.
I agree that Apple’s lack of communication with developers is a massive problem, but I also think there are a couple of gaps in his story that need filling in.
TestFlight betas expire after a short amount of time – one or two months, if I remember correctly. He says the application has been available through TestFlight for three years. This means that he will have had to publish a new build well over a dozen times to keep it active for this amount of time. And if it’s already on TestFlight with external testers, it’s really not much effort at all to push it live. The build is already in Apple’s system – you've got to fill out a couple more form fields and click submit.
So looking at it that way… he gets hundreds of users, keeps pushing new builds to those users on a regular basis for three years, but never submits it to go through the public App Store review process. If I were Apple, I’d think he was probably trying to bypass the review process as well. Apps with a public invitation link are common, but this behaviour is not.
But yes, they should talk to him about it and this is a failure on Apple’s part even if he is acting suspiciously. I’ve been saying for a while that Apple need a VP of Developer Relations to take ownership of this type of thing, because it seems clear nobody owns it at the moment.
It's outrageous, but people rag on Apple disproportionately, as though their model (curated App Store vs free-for-all) is the issue. We need sweeping technology reform from the top. Governments need to start understanding the technology that they oversee, not just dealing on a 'business level' with lobbyists and execs who will do anything to maintain their autonomy.
When these companies are service providers to a majority of the population (in aggregate, or individually) they must be treated as infrastructure providers and held to basic standards of accountability, transparency, and governance.
And, as the author extensively explains, the major sin of Apple is not that they removed the app from Testflight, but that threaten to suspend his developer account completely and give no explanation _why_, even after multiple attempts of the author to reach out to Apple to solve this situation.
If that's the case, surely the better action would be for Apple to just remove the app from Testflight (and maybe reset the list so testers have to sign up again)?
As for TestFlight lengths - if you are required to guess what the issue is you have already proven his point.
Also, I'd say referring to that app (however problematic it was, and I agree they did a terrible job building and deploying it) as a "vote manipulation app" is unnecessarily inflammatory.
> distributed via a test platform with the financial backing of former Clinton and Obama / recent Pete Buttigieg staffers This implies that TestFlight has financial backing from those groups. Maybe that's just unclear wording, but interpreted as written the claim is unsupported by the provided source.
Assuming you meant to say the Iowa caucus app was supported by those former staffers, it should be clarified that the company who made the app also provided services to those campaigns. I wouldn't consider Shadow Inc. to be competent as a technology company, but it doesn't surprise me that Democrats would buy political tech from a company founded by people who worked on digital outreach for the most recent Democratic presidential campaign.
1) Desire to cut Apple out of their share by trying to monetize a test app
and/or
2) Desire to escape the review process which might flag and reject an app designed to allow the user to easily fetch data from source that would be in violation of copyright laws.
This is relevant to the political example for a similar reason. Sure, we can say there's nothing wrong with the judge in a politician's criminal trial being seen with the politician in a restaurant after the politician's acquittal.... on the same day (look up Edwin Edwards and you'll see examples of just that), but it certainly does look bad, doesn't it? Similarly we can say that people from the vote counting app and their investors being seen in a bar with the guy responsible for failing to count the votes is not necessarily nefarious, but when the guy who counts the votes fails to count the votes in a way that favors the candidate whose staffers were also at the same get together at the same bar, it sure does look bad, doesn't it?
There's no reason for a guy with a successful app to fail to launch it and monetize it, unless he's trying to skirt Apple's rules in some way. It's just a matter of what way he's trying to game their system, isn't it?
They do, and that's great, but rarely can they afford to not _also_ sell on Steam. Steam will still take their ~30% cut of the vast majority of revenue, still mostly thanks to its first mover advantage, and there's no self-interest-preserving move the developer has against that.
The only exception are exclusives like Epic's, and exclusives aren't exactly great for consumers either.
There are still emerging markets and space for innovation. And next innovation might be based on something open, like Ubuntu Touch.
We see terrible software all the time now because it's rushed to GM because that's what you need to do, apparently.
But we know this isn't going to happen. At least not in the US. We have seen a massive consolidation of power in nearly every sector of the economy. That's not going to change. Nobody in our government seems to think it is a big enough problem to do anything useful to stop it.
I mean, it's finally working with police brutality after a century of protesting it. If enough people care about this, you might actually get it in a century or so.
All of the examples mentioned by BiteCode_dev have at least three things in common.
1. The company in question is in a dominant position as a provider of some product or service.
2. That product or service is important or essential to a lot of people.
3. The company is not significantly regulated by law.
Many of them could be dealt with by regulating all financial services and communications services companies. I think there is a lot of merit in offering a "common carrier" principle in these sectors, where a business provides a service but does so strictly neutrally, with neither any control over how people then use it nor any responsibility for those people's actions.
I also think there is a lot of merit in saying that if a business wants to take a more active role than that, it must also accept a corresponding increase in liability. In particular, it should then be subject to not only legal actions by individuals but also regulatory actions by an independent, government-backed agency with sufficiently strong statutory powers that a business can get stomped if it persistently and knowingly abuses people.
The other thing that IMHO we need but don't currently have in many cases is sufficiently strong consumer protections (and this should extend to small businesses dealing with much larger businesses, or any other situation where one side is effectively in full control of the terms of any deal). The danger is having dominant businesses, whether monopolies or otherwise, providing important or essential services but then having powers to damage others, whether wilfully or simply through negligence, because of the control they retain over those products or services. Under the umbrella of what is important or essential, I do include things like operating systems for PCs and phones, or hosting email, or providing almost any kind of large-scale digital marketplace facility; these are technologies that have become essential to living a "normal life" and participating actively in society. It's not just about the ability to conduct financial transactions or communicate, vital as those also are.
I generally agree with the sentiment as a developer.
As I user I never want to side load an app though. I’m afraid this will e.g. allow my bank to develop a shitty app bypassing the permission model and ask / force me to install it. I prefer to know even “strong” entities need to play by the sandbox rules.
And as an aside: you can sideload apps on Android. Have you seen any banks try to convince users to sideload their app? I sure haven’t.
In a way, having states in the US is that idea. E.g. moving from a deeply racist southern state during the height of equal but separate era to a more progressive state would have given you far better results than voting in terms of how you were treated by the local government.
This opens everyone up to the kind of complexity nobody is ready for.
- Would the groups split under different governments but sharing the same territory? Who has the final word?
- Do they split the territory? Who gets the better one?
- In any group someone will be unhappy with the treatment. How many times do you split and "get your own government"?
- Maybe the competition is between the already established governments of existing countries. What happens when one government (or the people it represents) doesn't what specific people from joining the group?
First Past the Post (what most nations us) is not a way to pick a true representative official, it breads defensive voting, vote spoiling, and all kinds of other problems where you end up in a spiral of worse and worse people, and where everyone says "I do not want either option but...."
iOS users are known to pay for apps they like. Android users less so.
In the end it is a choice of business model. Taking the risk of making money while being dependant on one party (Apple, Youtube) is always a huge risk.
Edit: Just to clarify I'm not bashing PWAs I've developed a lot for both the web and iOS and consider myself fairly mercenary, I will jump ship to other tech if need be. But there is still quite a way to go[0] and it's going to be hard to get these companies to agree on some of these standards. I'm also conscious of the fact that PWAs may just replace one dictator (Apple) with another (Google).
Edit. These are actual questions, the US legal system is very unkind with those without very deep pockets, having the highest litigation costs in the world.
How are you going to force a large company to pay if they are already ignoring you?
If one party has deep pockets and the other does not, the rich guy wins. He can drag things out in court forever making it cost more than the small guy has to keep going. In the end so much is subjective anyway, and the high priced lawyers will get their way.
Beyond that, there are systems we as developers can build to make it easier for users to self-host on small home servers. But if your internet connection is cut off, building an alternative is hardly an option.
Maybe somebody should try to get the word "tax" on a sanction list...
But thanks for correcting me.
You never know when you, personally, become the non-mainstream person.
Mental issues can be pretty much anything you can dream off.
People want a perfect system to replace an imperfect one. When instead they should rationally look at it and ask "is it better than what we have now" instead they pick it apart for any flaws then proclaim that is not workable because it is not 100% perfect every time
Slowly trying to disconnect everything away from google.
Use the domain, or let some one else.
Excellent example of short-term thinking. If everyone followed your advice, Google and Apple would be able to extort any bank in the world, until in addition to their software and ad near-monopolies, they'd also have a banking near-monopoly.
I don't even want to make any money off iOS apps in the short or medium term. I just want to make apps for my friends and family, and have the iPhone users have as good an experience as the Android users. But I'm not going to get into iOS development just for that. Why, why, why can't I just achieve it with a PWA?!
Because Apple will make less money that way, that's why. Again, it makes sense, but I still hate them for it.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hsbc-probe/hsbc-to-pay-1-...
From what I understand, the fine was much less than what they made from that money laundering. People should have gone to prison for it. The fine was only a slap on the wrist.
If they had been up front and said "we need payslips in A4 printed format" I would have provided them..
Ironically HSBC at the time had adverts plastered at airports all over the world bragging at how good they are for international businesses...
With long established institutions (like banks) you still have lots of competitors to choose from, and legal recourse if you are wronged. There is no recourse when PayPals, Amazons and Apples of the world decide to scrub you.
In my case it was Apple refusing to work with a bank because they don't have branches, apparently. It's a well known private bank, with a gazillion businesses banking with them, a subsidiary of a rather large multinational bank. For ten years my company has been paid by, and paid out to, numerous entities in the UK and abroad, with no problems. But now Apple comes around, all arrogant as they are, telling me to switch banks because they have enacted a rule that doesn't exist in any laws, just because they can? I am not willing to go down that route.
Which is the same as my example.
Legal recourse for your bank to lock down your account is actually very limited. But I agree that banks are at least more competitive so they're less likely.
If there were two banks (a duo culture, like google/apple in phones) then you can be very sure it would be the same.
However, this doesn't necessarily mean credit card, usually it means Maestro or EFTPOS or whatever. These tend to have low fees and function roughly like a near-enough-to-immediate direct credit.
In general, places that don't accept cash will also accept credit card for non-locals, but it's not at all uncommon for (usually smaller) places that accept cash to not accept credit card, even if they do accept the local debit card system, due to the extra expense.
I think the benefits are compelling. NYC ruled it was a discriminatory practice though, because not everyone has access to banking/credit.
I am firmly of the view that cash is essential as a safeguard and something people should have the option to use, but as we've seen recently here in the UK, modern alternatives like contactless payments using a bank card or one of the phone-based systems can be quick and convenient, and they do not seem to have resulted in a devastating wave of fraud.
In the EU, there's been a lot of regulation over the past couple of decades to improve payment infrastructure. Before that, international payment within the EU used to be awful, and even transferring money from one bank to another within a single country could in some circumstances be bafflingly complex.
[1] If everybody is out to block you it might also be time to wonder why they're all blocking you...
It is not your right to reach all those people.
> No one benefits from this current situation except Apple.
This isn't true. See top comment, but all the FAANGs and their smaller siblings benefit in the exact same way.
The problem is systemic, and it starts with lobbying and disparity of legal standing between corporations and individuals.
People with more users have more word of mouth network effects.
Thats not much of a choice.
Either participate, or be locked out and lag behind the competitors.
The problem here is that Apple is both the platform and the distribution network, when we know very well, computers work just fine with a distribution of power its pretty silly to argue anything counter to that.
Id love to see mac users round here survive on mac os with nothing but the app store.
Good luck without npm, homebrew, wget, or any other convenient way to install software.
> Id love to see mac users round here survive on mac os with nothing but the app store.
You're moving the goalposts here... Anyone can publish outside the App Store, I thought this was a conversation about publishing ON the Apple Store?
Depends what you call "actively maintained", I would call it on life support personally, it's lacking very far behind the other engines.
Additionally, it even manages to outperform Blink in certain use cases / benchmarks, especially after the last major update or so.
It might not be Apple's bread and butter like Blink is for Google, but I see no obvious signs of WebKit dying, though I'm open to proof to the contrary.
I didn’t squat them. Parking for future use is ok to me. Squatting for profit i don’t agree with.
Not on iOS they can't. Which is the entire point.
> Reaching people is not your right.
No... but a competitive market is in everyone (except the monopolist/oligopolist's) interest. Our entire economic model is based on the premise that markets are competitive. Thus in situation like this where a big player in a significant market is being anti-competitive, it is more than reasonable to complain about it.
FF, Chrome: all fine, page rendered correctly.
(I had to bisection-comment out half the html page and so on, until I found out what made Safari freeze. The problem: Radio buttons in separate divs but not wrapped in separate forms, killed Safari.)
That's exactly right - there was no trial or conviction. Just the word of the administration was enough for Visa and other payment providers.
People should boycott Visa, Mastercard and Paypal over this.
Going to a court to enforce a judgment is going to be orders of magnitudes cheaper than a tort litigation, and there are FAR FAR FAR less delay tatics the lawyer could impose
So I still do not believe that is a reason not to use the small claims process
Seems people just want to have a deafest attitude
There is almost no down side from making use of the Small Claims system, could you still end up not being paid sure... but they have ALOT better change of getting the money with a small claims judgement than with no judgment, and small claims is pretty strait forward and inexpensive
Further once you have the judgement the ability to get consignment legal services goes up substantially as well
But an enforcement case the court is no longer a neutral party. It's enforcing it's previous decision. An enforcement order has the backing of the state.
Almost nobody pays for anything with cash in the UK anymore.
I think this is an illusion.
Sure, if you're going into almost any shop it will accept other payment methods and most people will use them, particularly at the moment. Similarly, ordering anything online isn't likely to be cash-on-delivery.
However, there are still reasons people might need or prefer to pay or be paid in cash, only one of which is "I'm a dodgy tradesman evading tax". For example, we've used a few local services for things like cleaning or gardening. They often like to be paid in cash, at least for the first visit or two, so everyone immediately knows it's all above board. This is common IME even if they might be happy to be paid (or even prefer to be paid) electronically once they get to know you.
Is the use of cash declining here? Certainly. Is it negligible? Not even close. Is it still useful or even essential? Sometimes, yes.
Paying people in cash seems like the exact opposite of an indicator of everything being above board.
My favourite cheese shop used to only accept cash, but the owner retired. Beyond that, the only thing I need cash for is to give to homeless people. I think they're the main group losing out due to the switch to electronic payment; the can't afford the equipment for it.
Granted, I haven't been there in six months because of the virus, but I watch current British television every couple of days, and I still see people using cash.
Payment systems should be nationalised and run by a country's central bank. It's a very boring infrastructure equivalent to roads. There shouldn't be a private company taxing every single transaction someone makes. Do that and the small stores can drop the fees.
“Earlier this year, Deputy Governor Tim Lane spoke about the circumstances when it might make sense for the Bank of Canada to issue our own digital currency. This includes a situation in which most Canadians stopped using bank notes. We don’t believe that a digital currency is required at this time. But we are moving forward with contingency planning so that if we ever judged that we should issue a digital currency, we would be ready.” (https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2020/06/opening-statement-160620...)
This is Finland, YMMV.
This part of the contract is not followed in SEA countries. If you want to pay with something that carries a fee, you are going to pay the fee on top of the price. Logically, most people will choose to pay cash then.
The second reason is taxes. Most small vendors do not bother with taxing their incomes; they are too poor for that anyway, every coin helps. With electronic ledgers documenting all the transactions, that would be much more difficult. The local IRSes do not bother with chasing these people, they know that the price would be higher than revenue; so they check only businesses with significant enough turnover.
I think it's basically the Uber model of spending VC money to subsidize customer purchases to get that market share...
In the US, credit card surcharges have been legal for many years:
Of course that only works if electronic payment is cheap. This is not the case with US credit card companies.
>> Almost nobody pays for anything with cash in the UK anymore
I got Ubuntu recommended by an electrician back in 2005 or 2006. (I used to be using Red Hat/Mandrake/Mandriva back then.)
Soon after I realized it had come to the point where Ubuntu was not only possible to install and use but simpler to install and use than at least OEM-loaded Windows machines.
It seemed to work well for grandmothers, kids and sysadmins.
Notable exceptions:
- certain people refuse to learn (certain Windows sysadmins)
- people who depend on powerhungry software that doesn't exist on Linux (for less power hungry software there is RDP or Citrix and Windows Terminal servers.)
The real problem for me is that support is really hard to come by if something goes wrong. Grandma can't access the internet on her Ubuntu system — who can help her? I'm 500 miles away, my parents are equally as far in the other direction. Neither myself or my parents use Linux as a daily driver either. Her neighbors have Windows or Mac machines. Does she drive to Best Buy with her desktop? Call in external help?
If she uses Mac or Windows machines, help is just a lot closer. My dad can replicate her issues on his machine and walk her through it on the phone, or I can. Her neighbor will at least potentially be familiar with the way the OS looks, so can offer greater help.
I'm not sure how you can close that gap if you're not next door to the individuals who would benefit most from it. While it may be a great individual solution, the support burden just isn't a solved problem in my opinion.
ubuntu (and i'm sure others) are in a great state for casual users already -- i've handed multiple family members an ubuntu machine with no more instruction than "use it like any other computer, don't be scared by the icons looking a little different" with great success. for the increasing number of people who do almost all of their work in a word processor and a browser exclusively, it's a complete solution with almost zero hassle.
There is no such thing as to much RAM
There is no such thing as to much DASD (Disk)
There is no such thing as to much Screen Size
There is unfortunately never enough Budget :-)
Try to tell Red Hat/Canonical/SUSE about it.
The biggest OP mistake is relying on iOS only. Spending 9 years as iOS developer - great, but if you're mobile dev working with two platforms will be a life savior for cases like this one.
> For the majority of users, this is irrelevant because linux is unusable for them.
While I think I get what you're trying to say, I don't think it's necessarily unusable for regular users, more so unreachable in a nice, preinstalled form from a well-known brand & retailer.
Also, there's no ads for GNU/Linux machines on TV or on the Metro, which I think is often underappreciated.
I know because I've personally witnessed friends and family members who swore Linux is unusable give it a serious try only after Windows or macOS crossed them for the nth time and haven't had a single one switch back.
The key is to get hardware that is well-supported and not 2nd tier i.e. not a netbook etc. that I'm just going to throw Linux on and compare the experience to my 10x more expensive MBP.
The experience's not perfect, but that's not the case for macOS either. Is it "unusable"? Far from it.
The key is to get top-class hardware with the express intention of it running Linux, rather than installing it on the laptop Windows will no longer run reasonably on.
It is true however that such as switch is easier for developers like myself who are not dependent on Cocoa/SwiftUI etc. but that's a choice you have to make.
Linux does run better than Windows tends to on old HW, sure, but comparing that experience to macOS on new hardware is less than fair.
There's plenty of new hardware Linux runs great on, I am not sure what you call "experimental" hardware, but I am using a Surface Pro 7 as my main machine with exclusively Linux on it, no problems.
Any recent standard ultrabook should also work fine, heck I even have a random, no-name Chinese UMPC that works well.
Much as I loathe Windows and increasingly dislike MacOS, there is nothing like Adobe CC or any of the major DAWs, video editing tools, or VJ performance suites on Linux. Not even close.
There are toy copy apps run as hobby coding projects. But professionals need the real deal - for file exchange and for other workflow reasons - and Linux simply does not offer that.
If your desktop product is good enough, your users will install Linux. Linux runs on Windows and Mac.
Your mobile app can be a web app.
Not a GUI app per se, but an app used on a desktop.
2) Taking his argument in good faith, he also means "free" apps with microtransactions, because in both cases the same situation exists: The iOS App Store is too big a market to ignore. Which leads to the same problem, regardless of whether your app is paid or "free", that if Apple suddenly decides it doesn't like you, you're screwed.
What I've noticed on macOS however, is that is a lot easier to sell things that should be bundled or FLOSS for relatively serious money. For example there are dozens of rather expensive "Finder replacements" on macOS and you'll have a hard time selling something proprietary like that to Linux users because we do have good file managers that are libre software already.
- sound editing/musical production
- video editing/special effects
- CAD/CAM/EDA
- Mechanical/physics/electrical simulations
- interfacing with custom hardware
Hollywood studios run on Linux (except Pixar, and granted, not with webapps), so it is possible. What's missing is the middle-ground, mass-market solution like Premiere/After Effects or FCP, though DaVinci Resolve is quite nice entry there.
- interfacing with custom hardware
From experience, that's a lot easier on Linux.
As for CAD, video editing and music production - sure you do have a point, except that in those areas the likes of Autodesk and Adobe dominate anyway and the "pro" segment of macOS/Windows users is a tiny fraction of the overall userbase, so I'd be rather surprised if that's the kind of software you can sell in decent numbers to macOS/Windows users as an indie dev.
I'm very lazy and I don't want to tinker with shit to get it running or maintain it. So, I stuck with Windows for the longest time. It was the easy path for a long time because a lot of my work was doing .NET. However, once I switched full-time to doing Node.js Windows got in the way more and more. I spent a lot of time investigating issues. I have a couple of Macs and I tried using macOS as my main, but honestly I can't stand anything about the way Apple does things. I just hate the bad window management, the shitty finder, the stupid global menu bar and the lack of a coherent hotkey system.
I had been trying out Linux desktop distros for honestly decades, out of pure interest. Every single one of my experiments ended in a failure to boot one day after an update. Then one day I read about Manjaro and I decided to give it a shot. 2 years later, I'm still running it as my main work OS on 3 different workstations (home desktop, work desktop and a laptop). Not one of them has ever eaten itself due to a bad update. I've had to fix minor issues after a couple of updates, but that's nothing compared to the shit I've gone through to make Windows or macOS usable.
If you're new to Linux, skip Debian, Ubuntu and all that crap and go straight to Manjaro. Installing software in Manjaro is way, way, way easier than any other distro and the stability for me on 2 desktops and a laptop has been nothing less than stellar.
It's also a traditional sign of honesty, and a convenient way for someone who has provided very good service to be tipped without making a big deal of it ("Keep the change"), and both of those things can be important in these kinds of situations.
Well I accept your experience, but in my experience asking for cash is a traditional sign of dishonesty and tax evasion. Why do you think they always offer a hushed discount for cash?
A professional tradesman invoices after and then accepts a bank transfer. Asking for a wad of banknotes is grubby.
FWIW, I'm not sure I've ever actually encountered that in my entire life. It seems like one of those folk tales governments tell when they want to get more money out of a group who are an easy target. After all, can you prove you only charged that nice couple what you said on your accounts for fitting out their new bathroom, Mr Plumber?
A professional tradesman invoices after and then accepts a bank transfer.
Sure, and when we've had tradesmen in that's almost always what we've done too.
But again, in my entire life, I don't think I've ever received a paper invoice from a cleaner, or a gardener, or a neighbour's teenager who was childminding, or the friendly retiree around the corner who is an ace at fixing bikes. Not unless they were working through an agency and it was the agency handling the billing, anyway. Not everything is big enough and formal enough to need invoicing and professional payment tools. Normal people still pay for plenty of stuff with cash around here. Just not usually in shops (online or bricks 'n' mortar) or for big things.
Sweden has a pilot project for a digtal currency: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/20/906146/sweden-ri... , I wonder how it's going.
I really don't think that's true; there are plenty of merchants who do still charge different prices based on payment method. But there are also many who voluntarily don't, because the actual cost is negligible and better than the alternatives. Regular bank transfers of various kinds between consumers, including iDeal internet payments, as far as I can tell, have no fees at all. Cash withdrawals across different currencies may incur fees, but I've never seen fees in regular Euro cash withdrawals.
Nobody here is charging 2-3% except when credit cards are involved.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/pri...
> Traders in the EU are not allowed to charge you extra for using your credit or debit card.
Regarding this:
> Nobody here is charging 2-3% except when credit cards are involved.
The service provider that provides the payment terminals merchants use will be charging the merchants between 1-2%, often with a per transaction fee on top of that. I’m not 100% sure how service providers in the EU bundle things, but intercharge fees are usually charged on top of that again. Even though the EU caps interchange fees, merchants will very easily be incurring above 2% in fees even for non-credit card transactions. The EU’s cap on interchange fees for card not present transactions is barely below standard market rates, so EU merchants will be paying about the same as everybody else for those.
on the other hand i just updated Windows 10 to v2004 and my microsft xbox controllers no longer work in Windows and they f'd up my resolution/scaling so i think i'm gonna go download Pop