The EU has signed and ratified the WIPO treaty. There’s nothing they can put into the DMA that can cancel out the treaty.

Installing software in iOS uses Apple intellectual property and WIPO guarantees their right to charge a commission.

If you don’t like this, get rid of WIPO!

It's clear that Apple won. They will get their money, one way or another, but mostly the old way, because they managed to make the new way so unattractive. Good job EU!

> a simple 5 percent commission on digital transactions in apps distributed outside the App Store

It's straight up protection money. They're not even pretending anymore.

So how are they trying to circumvent the EU regulations this time?

So, is this an announcement of the changes, or a press release announcing an announcement?

God damn it all to hell when even the comms department issues stupid crap like this.

Why can't we just use our computers the way we want to use our computers? It is so dumb that vendor lock-in even exists, and I'm sick of it.

> For App Store apps that link out of the app to complete purchases, the commission will be 15 percent. Developers in the programs mentioned above will pay a reduced rate of 10 percent.

What the fuck. Does this also include apps that keep purchase management entirely out of the app? And if so, is that even legal?

Hope I'm misreading this...

Edit: to give some context to my "what the fuck is that even legal", consider this. my phone provider has an app that lets me modify my cell contract, and buy additional services (fast 5g, extra sims, whatever). Utility providers, grocery delivery platforms, many such cases. what's next for apple, will they come for their pound of flesh there, too?

I wish Apple would extend these options to me as a US user and developer. I’m jealous to be honest.

Apple should just come out and say they are "doing God’s work"

So Brussels caved as usual.

all my app builds in testsflight became unavailable since yesterday (it looks fine on appstoreconnect, but im unable to update the app if i roll out new build as a tester)

does anyone experience the same?

I predict 2027 will be the year of the PWA ... and desktop Linux.

This is a loss if the EU actually considers this acceptable. I should be able to Just™ install an app from whereever, and Apple shouldn't have a say in that. Notarization isn't needed on PCs or Macs, and yet here we are.

Apple just can't read the room can they? For a while I agreed with their stance to not allow web payments for things like IAP but as time has gone on the stance has become less and less defensible and tipped over in the absurd.

I'll state plainly: Apple should get 0% of the non-Apple-processed payments.

- You link out (or even payments in-app not through Apple): Apple gets 0%

- You aren't in the app store: Apple gets 0%

They should have to actually compete, do things like allow developers to give refunds, allow different monetization strategies (upgrade pricing?), make App Store Connect _not_ a steaming pile of shit.

The rent-seeking has got to stop.

Apple makes money on the hardware, Apple makes money off developers, Apple makes money off ads, Apple makes plenty of money. Taxing every financial activity (expect for the growing list of carve-outs which look sillier and sillier as time goes on) is beyond the pale.

I will say that I think the 30% deal was a good deal when the App Store launched but times have changed, taking payments online has gotten easier, hosting something like the App Store has gotten cheaper, and the App Store does not provide enough value to deserve so rich a cut.

The crap apps that sail by review while legitimately good and well-crafted Apps get held up is but one example. If App Review was faster and/or better we might be having a different conversation but Apple has not upheld its end of the bargain and has the audacity to still think they deserve a huge cut.

There are whole categories of apps I wish I had on my iPhone that will never see the light of day because of Apple's policies and/or they are DOA because Apple wants 30% [0].

If macOS launched today I probably wouldn't touch it with a 10ft pole because of how locked down it would be. Even now we have to fight to run the software we want unless it's signed. How Apple doesn't see that they are killing the golden goose is beyond me. There is plenty of money for them to make and the only way Apple can continue to squeeze is due to anti-competitive practices which harm all consumers.

I still think the DMA was ham-fisted and written by complete morons but it was a step in the right direction. It's too bad our "elected" officials are bought and paid for and too busy engaging in one-upmanship or cheap shots to do anything close to actually governing.

Lastly, I continue to find it disgusting and immoral how much money Apple makes off incredibly unsavory practices like the casinos for children (and adults) they promote and encourage (gems, coins, tokens, loot boxes, and the list goes on). Our corrupt politicians are complicit in abdicating any responsibility for the cesspool which is 99% of IAP.

[0] Yes, I know it's 15% for small business but while they tout that regularly it's not so black and white. There are cliffs, it's not progressive, and you have to apply for it. 1 good year can screw you over and using just revenue as the marker is wrong IMHO.

They’re starting to cave.

Turnis taking the reins perhaps?

This has clearly been tilting at windmills this entire time. They were never going to win. How much time and money could they have saved by giving a reasonable amount instead of sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling “la la la I can’t hear you why do you love criminals”?

"Distributed" ... LOL. That's certainly how they want the media and casual observers to see it. Meanwhile, what's mainly being sold as IAP is "Gems" or "Gold" or "Robux" -- incrementing numbers in a table in a Postgres DB somewhere. Or toggling a plist value in your app, for "unlock pro version" or "remove ads."

yeah, but if only suspend/resume worked near flawlessly... I've had MacOS crash on suspend or resume before, but I'd say it happens less than 1/10th of 1% of the time I sleep or resume my laptop.

Following this to its logical conclusion… “Sorry, you didn’t buy a Development Pro Guitar. Please bring it in to your nearest Apple repair shop to get it retuned or restringed”

See? “Development machine” just means the ability to do what you want with your own machine. No third party interference.

Let Timmy Can’t-Tune bring his guitar to someone who can. Let grandma have her new phone be setup by her grandson appropriately so she can’t install malware.

Freedom. Digital rights.

We aren’t taking about Android developers here.

Sure, great idea.

[Incoming call: National Security Agency] "Don't you dare stop our malware doing all that stuff you just said".

:P

All the other nations' agencies, outisde Five Eyes at least, will probably want to stop the NSA's malware, but may have their own instead.

The "alternative marketplace" should be replaced with "no marketplace." How do people accept this "alternative marketplace" idea? This is obviously a way to increase friction in order to maintain dominance - and the solution is obvious - no marketplace at all.

These aren't problems I face often. I especially don't get random push notifications about Apple (or any other) services, so I'm not sure what's going on for you.

Maybe iOS just isn't for you.

It reflects a change in their internal thinking, perhaps.

There's also a circularity issue. To write iOS apps you need a platform more flexible than iOS.

It doesn't seem like they're going in that direction, or the MacBook Neo would have been an iPad instead of a Mac.

I think the point is that they didn't charge developers anything specifically to be developers or sell apps. They just needed the same hardware and software as everybody else, which, yes, they probably had to buy.

improving the legislative mechanism would require even more time, and it does not appear there is the political will for it at this time

Yeah the app store really has turned into a wasteland of shit.

I don't think a $2000 fee would change that. People scamming with the $79 weekly subscription for junk make a lot more than that in the blink of an eye.

there would be 100x that many spam apps if it wasn't gated by a fee, esp nowadays

You're forgetting some detail in your example, which is that

1. the existing STORES also sell almost all the CARS, and the GPS in these cars is hardcoded to only drive to one of their STORES

2. The government is considering a law that forces everyone to show their ID to open the door and drive their CAR,

3. To enfore #2, the government is considering a law to prevent drivers from manually entering GPS coordinates to any other stores, because the two existing STORES promise to enforce the ID-verification system in their parking lots.

Now you want to sell your HAT, good luck, because anybody trying to open up a Hat-Droid store with your product in it, is soon legally prevented from doing so. For security purposes. Think of the children!

Because it works better. And doing work is the real reason to have a computer.

Yet you all cry for the right to repair. I’m confused. Is this a selective law, or what. And if yes, how is that legal?

Your approach is fine, if that is something important to use then use linux. What I dislike is taking a platform where the sandbox is a feature, and crying you aren't allowed to shit in the sandbox.

Microsoft sell locked down PCs today. Secure Boot cannot be disabled, nor new keys enrolled, on Windows PCs that ship with an ARM processor (yes they exist). It's as if Apple decided to lock down Macbooks when they switched to M-series. The only thing keeping PCs "free" is that ARM processors suck at the high end if you're not Apple, so it's seen as acceptable market segmentation. It's purely arbitrary though, just like it's purely arbitrary that you can put Linux on a Macbook but not an iPad despite having the same SoC.

>open platforms instead of being at the mercy of a private corporations protection racket as if it's the 19th century

But your gripe is not about open platforms. Your gripe is that Apple iOS is not an open platform. Those are two different things, there are open platforms out there.

My complaint is that iOS as a closed platform is a feature, and Apple has been a good steward for that platform that has made it a stable computing platform for the general public. Corporations (cosplaying as "poor indie developers"), are simply frustrated that Apple isn't allowing them to abuse their users for extra dollars.

These same "developers" who pretend to care so deeply about open platforms don't even distribute their software on Linux. The concern trolling about open platforms is a farce. Picking on epic games again - you can't play Fortnite on Linux. It's "open platforms for me, but not for thee"

Forget the advertising angle, lets look at payments. Apple forces you to use their payment processor and they charge a larger fee. What does the consumer get? They get a single control panel for all their subscriptions that they can cancel at any time. "Developers" hate this - not because they want to charge you less, but so that they can make you jump through 50 hoops in order to cancel.

If I have to choose between two evil corporations, Apple and the greater tech industry that shit on the web, I'm picking Apple. If I care about open platforms, I'll move to an open platform, not lobby the government for Apple to open theirs.

We can? Last time I checked everyone and their mother is collecting all kinds of data for nefarious purposes. EU has a snowball's chance in hell keeping up, and when they eventually get around to issuing a fine it's so small and irrelevant compared to money made that it's business as usual.

Are those regulations adequately enforced? Lots of smaller developers out of jurisdication, and lots of bigger ones treat it as a cost of doing business: the data is worth more than the fines.

It's not that I haven't given it a try, my primary desktop machine is debian stable and xfce4 with the libraries installed to also run a bunch of gnome and kde-native applications, but that right now I prefer macos for laptop use... Primarily due to suspend/resume working properly, the touchpad, and certain user interface things in MacOS that make working with a single smaller screen easier for extensive multitasking (expose hot corners of screen to quickly see all windows, switch windows, etc).

>Evil developers forcing poor users to download their applications.

Stupid users who have neglected to attain perfect and absolute information regarding all the things that the applications they install will do.

>Guess we all to suffer with braindead supercomputers in our pockets

Complete non-sequitur. You don't have to suffer, you can just buy a different platform. Android has had alternate stores for decades.

This is concern trolling. If you cared about having an open platform, you could just not buy apple. But that's not what you care about - you want to be able to push your shitty software onto other people's supercomputers without Apple getting in the way.

There’s a whole layer of VPs banging their head against the wall 24/7 on how to make it possible, don’t worry.

Duopoly

One example: Russia Today / RT News. Process: Google made a blog post [1] and cited EU's Council Regulation (EU) 2022/350.

The app is still available in Russia on both App Store and Play Store.

[1] https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-annou...

I guess we can all make up analogies that don’t resonate with other people?

You’re describing racketeering, and in your analogy, you have a store.

But in reality, you don’t have a store, so the hypothetical doesn’t make any sense.

Do you want to try rail lines? You want to ship your HATS on a freight TRAIN, but you don’t have a TRAIN or even a RAIL.

Do you think the rail owner or the freight train will carry your product for free?

Thanks for the summary!

By the way, would you happen to know if it possible to distribute the same app in the AppStore under the 15/26% commission and in alternative stores in the EU with the 10% commission?

Or maybe this somehow constitutes a danger Apple has to protect its users from, and can only be alleviated by me paying Apple the higher rate? The earlier terms certainly did their best to prevent anyone from opting into the alternative distribution terms.

I respect your overall point but I think the picture is more nuanced than that. "Computer" as a term is simply unpopular, in favor of something referencing the intended application, as determined by things like the form factor:

Graphing Calculators are computers in every sense, it's hard to find one you can't at least program in a high level language like Basic or Python, and many accept assembly programs - even Texas Instruments models did, before their signing keys were brute forced.

Games consoles too almost invariably run third party code, although they tend not to be end user programmable - no different than an iPhone in that regard, really.

"Feature phones" - pre-smartphone phones with cameras and internet etc - usually had the ability to run Java Midlets without manufacturer blessing, even though you couldn't touch the OS. You could SSH into servers from those!

I think a big problem is that the distinction between "general purpose computer" and "end user programmable general purpose computer" is functionally meaningless when you can't write programs, which is most people. Instead they understand it in a functional context - what is this device for? How does it compare to how such devices usually work? The general purpose CPU inside is an implementation detail, and just because you think of an iPhone as a computer doesn't mean everyone does. They think of it as a "phone".

Most people consider the iPhone as a "phone", not as a "computer". It's even in the name. So it fits your definition for devices which only run code that the vendor had specially packaged.

Well here's EU regulators working with Apple directly to allow it. I honestly think that's worse, the EU government took the time to allow this directly. It's not just a case of the existing laws not being clear in this instance, it's the EU working with Apple to come up with this 'solution'.

5% tax on all digital transactions (still applies to Kindle ebooks too I'm guessing?) and all applications have to go through an Apple review process. That's ridiculous for a government to explicitly agree to.

Except it won't show for signed+notarized apps. It's just a minor obstacle to deliver malware. Even stuff on App Store has malware in it.

If security was a concern, these hoops would be for all apps, not just unsigned. It just shows the only function it serves is gatekeeping by Apple.

That isn't one by law.

Whatever censorship exists in the EU is really inconsequential. What bothers me is the spying.

You’re making a lot of statements here with no supporting argument.

Plenty of other companies manufacture hardware and run stores. If we’re going to say that isn’t allowed, then at least make the rule across the board.

How many new companies will be popping up to manufacture these types of devices? Not many.

I think the reality is that the EU sees an opportunity to apply some pressure on a few successful foreign companies, as that potentially provides them leverage in other negotiations, or at the very least some revenue from fines.

Sure, but ApolloFortyNine described Apple’s behavior as “slam dunk monopoly abuse”. A monopoly is not a dominant position, it’s an overwhelmingly dominant one.

Geez even the EU's own government websites are polluted with cookie banners. Apparently they can't resist tracking their visitors either.

Apple isn't "dominant" in any geography and in the EU specifically Android has much greater market share.

I'm kinda tempted to do that to classic MacOS. But only kinda, because copyright and trademarks are things, and I don't want to risk incurring the wrath of any legal team, let alone a trillion dollar corporation's legal team.

Maybe ReactOS can be a good base for this actually becoming a reality!

I assume you mean on an open hardware platform, because underneath Apple's SDKs are just more Apple APIs until you get to Apple's IPC interfaces to talk to Apple-designed hardware register interfaces.

Unfortunately when it comes to technology licensing, it is rarely successful to say you should pay less because you purposely made your job harder.

> Nowadays with LLMs people could probably patch up some FOSS SDK that perfectly replicates the original's functionality without infringing Apple's copyrights.

I don't intend to insult you, but as an iOS developer myself I have serious doubts about whether you have any expertise in the subject you're talking about here.

I assume you mean approved by Microsoft.

When they were found in the US to have a monopoly, they had around 95% of personal computer operating system share. Apple isn’t even close.

For desktop and server, sure. MacBook is superior for everything that matters in a laptop. The touchpad alone is a dream. compare that to constant pain for the thousands of hours I will use the device over it's lifetime.

yet https://keepandroidopen.org/

They’ve announced they’re changing the policy to require ‘verification’ in future Android versions.

It will likely be delayed, just like Manifest v3, but eventually it will happen.

yes, though the level of headache is relatively minimal. I meant I'd stop using it if things became completely impossible to run unsigned code (or the hassle went from a couple of extra seconds of work to some convoluted process) . Additionally something like this takes less than a minute to do once.

https://donatstudios.com/mac-terminal-run-unsigned-binaries

Running xattr -d to strip the quarantine flag is just a slight annoyance. I think next big outcry will be the removal of Rosetta 2.

> Flutter which has a very minimal use of their SDK.

> Basically enough to render inputs to a gpu accelerated surface.

I suspect it uses much more so that it can support

- audio

- file I/O

- accessibility

- …

An iPhone is the private property of the user, and if you are skilled enough you can jailbreak it and there is nothing Apple can do about it. If you're not skilled to do it, then that's your own problem. No court of law would go against you if you took a soldering iron and your expertise to change your iPhone in any way you please. Apple shouldn't be obliged to help you in those efforts, though.

> Apple is unfairly forcing themselves into the dev-user relationship here.

Who was forced to buy an iPhone? Who was forced to develop for Apple devices?

The whole EU censorship rhetoric is almost always devoid of facts and examples. I feel like it is mainly sustained because US people like the narrative that theytl are the free(TM).

Try watching Citizen Vigilante in Germany. Or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or I Spit on Your Grave until recently.

And none of these are meaningfully different on high end laptops from other providers.

Apple had a window with M1 devices where I'd probably agree they were just better. Apple also has a history of making devices that are very expensive, and have a corresponding higher quality (ex - in the 2000s when most laptop manufacturers were racing to the bottom, and things like the Eee pc were considered hot - lots of garbage quality windows machines).

But many manufacturers today have entries in the "High quality, high price" category, and they're very similar.

Ex - https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-xps-14-lapt...

The size is almost identical to an M5 laptop, the battery life is almost identical to an M5 laptop, the touchpad is almost identical to an M5 laptop (personally, I actually like the touchpad on the xps slightly more because the cutout on the front of macbooks is sharp, and I find it annoying and painful for long use, but I also have very large hands and I'm left handed).

And also - the price is functionally the same as the new M5 laptops.

All of those land in the +/- 10% range of each other. With just slight differences (ex - I can get a touchscreen on the XPS if I want, but it makes the battery life 15hrs instead of 18hrs on the macbook. The XPS is also fractionally lighter (3lbs vs 3.4lbs). The macbook is ~10% faster on single core benchmarks then the intel series 3, but identical to slightly worse on multicore. etc...)

Basically - unless you're actually using different machines here... stop it, you're talking out your ass (cough - fanboy - cough).

Even the framework... yes - it's clearly not as "good" as the $3600 macbook I have. I don't expect it to be given I paid ~$1500 for it. But it also excels in other areas that make it worth considering - I have 3 young kids, and I've had the screen pulled flat several times, the touchpad got a cup of milk dumped in it, and my oldest shoved a screwdriver into a usb-c port. Turns out new screen hinges were ~$19, the touchpad was ~$21, and the replacement port was $9. All done at home myself with simple tools.

Compared to several trips to a store and weeks without a laptop... that's a type of ergonomics that I prefer right now.

Stop buying Apple products

Glad to see I am not the only one. Many years ago I had a laptop with a pointing stick, aka "the clit", and that was surprisingly easy to use. But touchpads? No matter how fancy and expensive you make them, they will always be a bad interface.

It's not, it just means when they say they "need to", they lie.

Better business for a specific company doesn't mean better markets for consumers and other participants, and we make laws to ensure the latter even if it's at the expense of the former.

It should be against the law to create they kind of business they have, though

As opposed to what? What’s the alternative you propose?

This is not a useful distinction. The API existed and was used by Apple apps and by jailbreak apps. In fact Scott Forstall intentionally prepared iOS to have third-party apps. The API was just not public yet.

If you think the header files are the thing that Apple thinks is worth of a cut of app revenue, I think you're way off base. It's the technology, whether you access it with permission or not.

But I don't want to make replacement API? I'm just expecting these API to be freely available on any OS, you can't seriously say that you will charge for these. It's not an "SDK" but basic OS primitives.

I doubt Apple can even ship a mobile phone without audio or I/O support even without third party apps...

> They have no power to prevent you from doing anything you want to your device. Just like Ford has no power to stop me from modifying my truck in any way I want. Or any other product from any other company.

They have the technical ability to prevent me from running the code I want, and they exercise that ability for that purpose. They're not a passive actor in this situation, they explicitly block me from doing things that they themselves can do, even after the sale.

Again, this should be a concern merely because of the power imbalance.

> That's a choice for them to make. You might then say that Coca-Cola is forcing supermarkets to carry their product because customers want to buy them.

Not the same thing at all. The mobile app market is a top-level one in a way the Coca-Cola one is not. Apple is controlling a huge amount of commerce for products that have nothing to do with them, besides being digital accessories to iDevices.

The better analogy would be: there are only two store companies in the entire US. If you want to sell any product at all, of any category (silverware, food, lawnmowers etc) you must contract with them and there's no other way, and anyone who wants to purchase any product whatsoever only has those two options.

The ONLY interesting market share here isn't how many apps Apple create, or how large share of the smartphones they have. It's how much of the distribution of apps they control on iOS (which easily reaches the bar of being a market in itself).

I.e. the monopoly question is: if apple takes X% for each app in this market, and a competitor can't take less, then it's a monopoly.

> In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises.[3] Although monopolies may be big businesses, size is not a characteristic of a monopoly. A small business may still have the power to raise prices in a small industry (or market).[3]

All countries with a working democracy would class Apple as a monopoly as it has significant market power, enough to distort prices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

Except that it's easier to invalidate an entire signing certificate than to hope your malware definition satisfies all mechanically generated permutations of the malware.

What would be so outlandish about that?

> because they'd try to make it up by charging more for Apple products. > Developers might prefer to shift the burden to consumers's wallets

I vigorously disagree with this. It sounds very confused about economics, specifically prices.

Apple, as every market actor does, charges the absolute maximum price the market will bear for their products and not a penny less. They cannot "make up" any money that comes from unrelated parties (such as their Google payola for search, or their casino games for children IAP revenue) by raising product prices. If they could raise their product prices and have that be profit-positive, they would have done it yesterday.

They could raise prices on phones to make up for a hypothetical "free iCloud+," because the same consumers are the other party in both those transactions so presumably many people would see that the more expensive phone justifies free iCloud services.

Apple doesn't set its prices by saying "OK, we need exactly 83 billion dollars in net income this year, so given that our products cost us 233 billion dollars to make and we have 54 billion dollars in expenses, we need 383 billion in revenue, so now let's set prices of each product to target this."

That $83 billion in net income is just the number they are able to make last year with the prices being what the market would bear. Trying to increase prices to hold it there when a downfall in other revenue happens would depress sales.

> It would actually cost consumers more if Apple couldn't make any money from developers directly because they'd try to make it up by charging more for Apple products.

iPhone sales pay for the entirety of Apple's R&D. 10 times over.

That's just not how that works, how much consumers will pay is a binding constraint. Apple isn't subsiding their phone with developer fees and distributing their below marginal cost. Apple is almost certainly charging well above its marginal costs and is already charging the revenue maximising price, it's not willingly leaving money on the table.

Not entirely how you've made formed this connection but respectively it sounds like you've confused several things here.

It’s a one time delay that occurs when you first enable the ability to install downloaded apks and you never see it again for any device attached to your Google account. That’s why I called it a wildly overblown non-issue

Multiple other competitive laptops have haptic trackpads with the list growing every year.

Lenovo and Framework have great ones, so does Microsoft and other brands I can’t think of right now.

I also find it that “macOS is well-optimized for touchpads” actually means “macOS is hostile to traditional mice and keyboards so that Apple can sell you external mice that cost 3x the price of alternatives even though you’re using your laptop at a stationary desk with external monitor 80% of the time”.

Plug in a traditional mouse to macOS and you’ll see how horrible the OS is with it for no reason. I needed third party mouse software just to play Minecraft without a horrendous scroll wheel experience for the item bar. There’s no built-in OS setting to have separate scroll directions for trackpad versus external mouse even though such a setup is highly logical. You need third party software for that. Meanwhile, on Linux that configuration option is built-in to Gnome and KDE.

Most trackpad gestures in macOS don’t need to be trackpad gestures at all and seem to be aimed at selling expensive peripherals and making Apple’s trackpad advantage larger than it would be if their system used a different OS. There’s no advantage to three finger swiping versus a traditional keyboard shortcut (to be fair, macOS also offers the keyboard shortcuts).

With the exception of flying on an airplane, grabbing a $30 mouse out of your backpack and plopping it on the table is perfectly acceptable and portable solution and often better than any trackpad imaginable for deep productive work.

Anyway, that last bit is a tangent and a rant of mine, but either way, the list of reasons to prefer a Mac is shrinking every day, if you ask me.

For example, MacBook Pros aren’t at the top of the battery life charts anymore, that honor goes to the Framework 13 Pro with the Panther Lake chips.

You are forced to purchase one of them, yes.

> which unfair market conditions made it impossible

Bank applications depending on various os or device level security features? Good luck getting developers to build applications for your platform in general until you have a very large number of users (even Microsoft couldn’t manage it when the oligopoly was way less entrenched)

I mean if you're gonna stop people from owning their device and doing what they want with it just because of the possibility of crime occurring then their are quite a few more things that probably should also no longer exist because of their potential use in crime.

That's a pretty ridiculous argument if you ask me.

If companies had a product people cared enough about, people would stop buying iPhones.

> Apple has conveniently, for them, set themselves up as an unwanted middleman.

I don't see users complaining, it's mostly developers.

The real world is that outside US, Apple hardly has a monopoly in mobile phones.

I asked a question: "How do you not use their SDK?"

Your answer seemed nonsensical to me.

What I meant, though, is that I'm not going to argue about a specific point, the viability of "some FOSS SDK that perfectly replicates the original's functionality." If you don't even have any experience with iOS development, then you have no basis for making any claims about that subject, and thus I'm not going to bother explaining "What would be so outlandish about that?"

In any case, most iOS devs don't want to opt out of using the SDK. That would not be a particularly attractive route for making iOS apps. What I want as an iOS dev is the same freedom of software distribution that we have on macOS.

I’ve already given one reason why the switch is a bad idea. Another reason is that powerful third parties such as Meta and Google could force users to disable their own protections and give those apps full access to all data as a condition of installation.

Ultimately, an option becomes a requirement and then the protection for users is totally gone.

iOS is noticeably better for this though because it's more locked down, there is a real tradeoff there

Couldn't agree more tbh. I have an app each for like 8 restaurants I want to be able to order ahead from. All those apps are 200-600MB each, their performance is dogshit and they're obviously all built with web technologies anyway. Just let me do all the same shit on a website, kill the app, and save the download and the Apple bullshit.

The Play Store on Android.

More specifically your question is like asking what if you have a car that requires diesel, what substitute is available to let you use cheaper gasoline?

The same way you have a Playstation and don't want to pay Sony for the game.

> That's your claim. Neither Apple nor the EU appear to agree. Nor do US courts appear to agree in the Epic v. Apple trial.

This point was never raised in any of those cases. Apple just did aome hand-waving "IP compensation" justification and everyone just went along with it, because the case wasn't about that particular point.

> Apple itself has to pay license fees for some technologies in iPhone

And such costs are more than made up for by hardware sales. The only reason this persists is because of greed, not because it's essential to profitability.

> and those licenses do not automatically extend to third-party developers via the consumer. It's not a license agreement with the consumer.

They don't need to extend them because the consumer is already entitled to use those technologies merely by having purchased the device. That entitlement comes from the fact that they get legal copies of the technologies when they take posession of the hardware. IP rights regulate distribution, not consumption.

As for the rest of your comment, the overall problem is the requiremet to deal with Apple at all, the $99 fee and the 5% commission are just the cherry on top.

> The average Android user is almost worthless economically compared to the average iPhone user.

But how and why is Apple to be blamed for that?

> The victim in this case are the consumers, not banks.

The culprits are the banks, who aren't offering their customers adequate service. The culprit certainly isn't Apple. They aren't a bank.

> Overall the smartphone OS market is a not very competitive oligopoly

Some of the biggest companies in the world are competing against each other on smart phones. And customers have a great variety of devices to choose from. Smart phones is a prime example on where the free market worked: Fierce competition between several very large companies resulted in amazing devices being offered to customers. And since customers are free to choose what they purchase, they will choose the best device they can get at whatever price they deem reasonable and affordable. Companies who cannot offer good enough products fall away from the competition by the nature of the free market: Nokia, Microsoft, BlackBerry, Siemens, and more. All of them were powerful corporations.

Current hacker ideology has mixed the worst parts of capitalism and communism into weird standpoints which make no sense. Am I supposed to feel sorry that developers (they are mostly giant corporations) can't figure out how to make money without depending on Apple? And that therefore the government should intervene to guarantee the profits of these giant corporations?

Enough, already. Apple has no unfair advantage against the competition, except for the incompetence of said competition. Let them have their win, and if they are acting against the interest of their consumers, then they won't have their win for long.

This is the weirdest comment to me.

“I don’t want to be able to do what I want to do.”

“Please stop me. I’m about to install a program by a small independent developer that does something I want. Stop me, and first charge me 15%, and them $100. Oh, and install it in my old phone??? No! Please stop me and force me to upgrade!!”

“Oh my phone is too old!! Please force me to but another one!!”

You would still be free to use the appstore, I'm sure if it's as great as Apple says, it will have no problem

> I was referring to the distribution of the licensed technologies by Apple to the hardware purchasers.

I know. My point was that distribution of the licensed technology by Apple to iPhone purchasers does not thereby allow third-party iPhone app developers to distribute their iPhone app executables to other iPhone purchasers.

> Returning to your own interpretation though, the hypothetical community SDK wouldn't contain proprietary code, so the distribution aspect is solved there. It's the same principle by which homebrew game console scenes work, or how you can build Windows software on Linux without touching any Microsoft code.

You appear to be focused on the building of iPhone apps. I'm focused on the distribution of built iPhone apps. This is why I said, "The developer tools are relatively unimportant, which is why Apple gives them away. Distribution is everything."

In general, consumers are unwilling or unable to build their own apps. They need precompiled executables, distributed by third parties, to easily install on their devices. The hypothetical FOSS SDK is a red herring. I don't see how the consumer's right to use the iPhone automatically grants a legal right for third-party developers to distribute executables using Apple's licensed technology. There are other consumer products that allow personal use but don't allow redistribution.

I’m not Tim Cook. You need to send an email to him, apparently he reads them. Anyway, I still prefer that instead of having a risk accidentally installing some shit scam app from literally anywhere on the internet. Is it so difficult to understand the difference? At least I can hold Apple liable when I buy a scam app on their App Store. What you propose is basically shareware of 1990s. Zero security.

Don’t get me even started on the hypocrisy of the people wanting what you propose. So, the reason you want to build an app for iOS is that there are many of us. There are many of us because of App Store, mainly, as an end user. Pick one. You are proposing breaking the only platform making the iPhone an interesting product for a computer illiterate.

Show me anyone who says there are millions of scam apps on the App Store. We aren’t talking about the Play Store here.

> Suppose that a developer discovers a bug in the Apple Music API that allows songs to be played without paying for the Apple Music subscription. Are you claiming that if a developer writes an app to exploit this bug, they're not doing anything illegal? It's ok to get Apple Music without paying, as long as you're just "calling an API"?

That would be illegal, yes, but for an entirely different reason (DRM bypass to get copyrighted material), not because it's calling an existing API. It's not the case for 99% of apps.

> In any case, you're still ignoring distribution. You start with the assumption that a binary is already on the iPhone. The technology is already inside the iPhone, but the third-party app is not. Distribution is an entirely different legal matter than personal use.

The third-party app does not contain any Apple-owned or licensed technology just because it's programmed to make use of it once inside a phone, and there's no IP right to control distribution of material that uses proprietary technology if that technology is not actually in the distributed material. The only barrier is Apple's own actions in how they programmed iOS to reject unsigned code and their developer program, not a legal one based on IP.

It's such a bad argument, the 'but grandma will install malware' excuse. By that logic we also need to fully lock down the Mac, Windows, and Linux the same way because Granny might get scammed there, too. Apple must approve all software.

Again, Apple already allows grannies to be scammed with apps right on the App Store. Apps which are advertised by web popups that try to stop you from going Back, and throw up "You're INFECTED!" warnings and alerts. Then they route you to the App Store to get the scammy apps, with often weekly subscriptions. Apple routinely lets these listings stay up for a long time. I can see an app right now called "Storage Cleaner_ Phone Cleanup" It charges victims $9.99 a month to pretend to do several things that the OS already includes as features. And another one called "Phone Guard: Secure Cleaner" - same basic deal, $6.99 a week.

The sandboxing should be what keeps us safe from "malware" -- these apps don't have root. They can't access your phone's contacts without explicit permission, nor take control of the radios, nor replace your system apps.

Apple can't or won't keep people safe on the App Store. But they still use this line about the poor confused grannies and toddlers as an excuse of why we have to let them keep 100% control of every iPhone in the world, in a way that just happens to earn them tens of billions of dollars every year.