How is that Apple's fault? Considering the suspension emails and other info are automated, it's likely that he missed them or they went into his spam somehow.
In this case, there may even be a lawsuit involved so it's not as simple as a customer service rep telling them "you've been banned".
My experience with Apple is that they do what they want and getting anything out of them occurs on their timeline. If you don't like it, get stuffed, they won't budge.
Hoping they reinstate the account feels a bit like a pipe dream given his activity on 5to9mac, and I'm sure Apple was entirely in the right to suspend his account, but he should have been able to discover that in days, r even immediately upon trying to log in (it's not hard to say "this account has been locked because:..." instead of just "this account has been locked") rather than "never being told".
'If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps.'
https://web.archive.org/web/20141226094343/https://developer...
Their app store is their monopoly, sure, but if you don't want to use Apple products you are not barred from using other cellphones and app stores.
This is different than, e.g. saying that there is a monopoly with the electricity provider. If you don't want to use company A for that, you have absolutely no access to electricity at all.
The question is instead, I think, if after some size, companies wield so much power that they should be regulated as if they were monopolies, just because of the sheer amount of people that depends on their services.
But that's a whole other can of worms and a different discussion than "Apple is a monopoly"
I.e. the term "monopoly" has a very specific legal definition which is not met by whatever behavior Apple is having.
Does that make it ok? not necessarily and the nuance is debatable. But the fact is that as per the current definition, it's not a monopoly.
That's why I said they should be regulated...because they currently aren't. When anti-trust laws were being written, software walled gardens weren't a thing. They should be updated for modern times, since the App Store is basically its own industry. It brings in tens of billions of dollars in revenue every year, which is more than the GDP of some countries.
iOS isn't great software (ok, "good software" for 13) in a vacuum. It's inherently, inextricably tied in with Apple's world-class hardware; and vice versa as well. To allow unfettered access to both is a risk to users, whose trust in Apple has been built up over more than a decade.
It's not a monopoly. It's an experience.
I think the point is that there are other electricity providers in other areas, so monopoly rules don't apply.
Their electric service is their monopoly, sure, but if you don't want to use company A electricity you are not barred from buying a house somewhere else, with a different electric service.
This is different than, e.g. saying that there is a monopoly with the app store. If you don't want to use Apple for that, you have absolutely no access to iPhone software at all.
However I do understand that for a lot of people, moving from Apple to Android (and vice versa) is not as easy or straightforward to do, and thus why perhaps the discussion should be about regulating those companies that hold so much power, as if they were a monopoly. That doesn't make them a monopoly by current definitions though.
When did being able to access / sell to a private marketplace become an entitlement of public accommodation?
If the Supreme Court rules in favor of this then by all means go ahead and assert this. I personally don't believe the iPhone App Store (or any other app store) yet rises to the level of a forum of open public access and certain pricing in the name of public good.
You are perfectly free to develop apps and sell them elsewhere.
Yeah, you just lose access to a giant chunk of the market and severely limit your growth potential.
The entire industry with its millions of jobs and immeasurable value to society is two stores owned by two companies. That needs to be regulated.
What does that have to do with this? Anti-trust laws are to protect competitive forces in the market, not human rights.
Allowing these companies to have limitless control over millions of jobs with no regulation whatsoever gives us the crappy situation we have today. Someone could have their developer account terminated by accident/laziness, and then that person's entire livelihood is destroyed and they're left with no recourse because Apple/Google can't be bothered to even answer the phone. The Play store is an endless sea of malware, adware, and spyware, and any attempt at making a competitive marketplace is hopeless and instantly attacked by Google (remember Fortnite installer fiasco?). There's so much anti-competitive and clearly harmful (for developers and consumers) bullshit going on in these two stores every day that it's ridiculous that there still is not any strong regulatory action against them.
> I personally exercise a bit more restraint in saying that things call for government intervention.
Good for you. I heard that a lot in college. People who just took an economics class for the first time felt compelled to "pick a side", and everyone always picked that same side as you (me too). Yet that decision is made so so far detached from any real life problems or data that it's effectively arbitrary. If you feel that this characterization doesn't apply to you, then please contribute to the discussion with some actual substantive arguments and not hand-wavy virtue signaling.
This isn't a monopoly. With your logic I could scope down to arbitrary levels and call everything a monopoly.
* Oh, Safari is a monopoly because you can only set the search engines Safari lets you!
* Verizon is a monopoly because they look the bootloader on a phone bought from Verizon!
* Target is a monopoly because you can only buy the products Target sells when you're in Target!
Monopolies are considered in the scheme of the wider industry. And in the wider industry, Apple is far from a monopoly. Both users and businesses can move to other platforms that in fact have more consumers.
Just like you could go to another supermarket down the street, you can switch from iOS to Android.
Nobody ever claims they get more revenue on android than IOS
In the buildup to this rule Apple was wrong, inconsistent and sometimes just ridiculous in their app rejections.
Calling broad attention to their problems, like their keyboard issues, is the only way they choose to listen.
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=funniest%20apple%20app...
How? Apple isn't saying that they're going to take negative action against someone for going to the press and bad-mouthing them and, frankly, there's no evidence that this has ever happened with them. That would be vindictive. What they said, on the other hand, is that it wouldn't be helpful to do so and that is an accurate statement.
Apple doesn't change decisions based on media reporting. They make and change decisions based on the information they have. There has never been a reversal of a decision that came as a result of media intervention. It has always come as a result of the affected party giving Apple some information that they didn't have before.
Apple is taking it from a relationship standpoint. If someone trash talks you in public and your opinion of them has gone down, you have every right to stop interacting with them.
Now saying they have market power and should not being able to do that, well that is the domain of different regulations.
They haven't quashed free speech. They've built a consequence to speech into their developer agreement, as an exercise of their freedom of association.
If you're in a bar and you trashtalk the waitstaff to their faces, it's fully within their rights to eject you. You're free to stand on the sidewalk outside of the bar and continue to exercise your rights. Just as OP is free to speak about their experiences with Apple. But Apple, and the bar, have no obligation to maintain a business relationship with anybody.
https://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-app-rejections-2009-1...
https://www.cnet.com/news/behind-10-eyebrow-raising-app-stor...
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3dwq8/apples-long-histor...
https://www.macworld.com/article/1140476/accessapproved.html
https://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/11/16/2318247/official-g...
https://mashable.com/2017/03/28/apple-app-store-metadata-dro...
Also from the CNET article: a political countdown timer, a podcasting app and South Park streaming episodes app were all never approved.
It's always resolved through either a change by the developer or a change in the review policy at Apple. Again, the statement is about the relationship between the developer and Apple. If anything, Apple will be less likely to cave or change a decision just because of media pressure. Otherwise, the countdown timer, podcast app, and South Park would have just been approved after the media got wind of it. You're literally arguing against yourself with that point.
It's obviously not quite as clear-cut when it comes to relationships between individuals that have rights.
You have not thought this through, at all...
What is Apple defending here? Not their right not to be criticized because that doesn't exist. Their NDAs? That would be legitimate but locking Rambo out of his account won't achieve that aim.
So the only reason to disable his account is to punish him. That's the job of the state, its courts and executive. Not of a for-profit company that does not even allow him to know why he is being punished, let alone a hearing or an appeal court.
I'm fairly leftist, and I support a pretty strong freedom of speech, but I'm also familiar enough with other rights to see how they get balanced against one another, a la "the right to swing your fist ends at my face." I read popehat, because the authors are attorneys specializing in the first amendment. They defend people I find deplorable; they've got politics I disagree with. But I keep reading, because they're experts and it's a good source of fact.
But to answer your question, apple is first and foremost a US company.
Sealand doesn't seem all that socialist to me but I'm not very familiar with it.
> But to answer your question, apple is first and foremost a US company.
Rights != what the law says rights are. Else it wouldn't be possible for the state to violate your rights on a large scale.
Anyway, Apple is subject to the laws of every country it operates in.
I'm not surprised one bit. I generally don't talk about downvoting, but it's pertinent to the topic of free speech and consequences for speaking.
There's a common theme in "free speech" advocacy -- folks assert that free speech must not have any consequences. Addressing that misconception with facts about the US legal system and precedent frequently results in downvotes. Which is rather ironic -- downvoting is a consequence that can result in "censorship." But karma comes and goes with the popularity of my opinions; I'm not bothered.
And spreading pre-release confidential information is different from criticizing the company.
Apple is also free to decide who it wants to welcome into its developer community, and it’s fair that they take the content of your speech into account in that decision.
Presumably in violation of the developer program's NDA.
4. Confidentiality. Except as otherwise set forth herein, you agree that any Apple prerelease software, services, and/or hardware (including related documentation and materials) provided to you as an Apple Developer (“Pre-Release Materials”) and any information disclosed by Apple to you in connection with Apple Events will be considered and referred to as “Apple Confidential Information”.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, Apple Confidential Information will not include: (a) information that is generally and legitimately available to the public through no fault or breach of yours; (b) information that is generally made available to the public by Apple; (c) information that is independently developed by you without the use of any Apple Confidential Information; (d) information that was rightfully obtained from a third party who had the right to transfer or disclose it to you without limitation; or (e) any third party software and/or documentation provided to you by Apple and accompanied by licensing terms that do not impose confidentiality obligations on the use or disclosure of such software and/or documentation. Further, Apple agrees that you will not be bound by the foregoing confidentiality terms with regard to technical information about Apple prerelease software, services and/or hardware disclosed by Apple at WWDC (Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference), except that you may not post screen shots of, write public reviews of, or redistribute any such materials.
https://developer.apple.com/terms/apple-developer-agreement/...
Personally I hate this new move towards Apple/Microsoft/Google being gatekeepers for everything that can run on a machine. It's fucking bullshit.
Apple/Google/Microsoft thinking is easier to understand if the black slab in your hand is considered one thing, not two things. If it is not a general purpose personal computing device (PC), but a branded PDA that makes calls.
For most consumers, that’s right, and for them, the strategy is right. Make the PDA experience seamless and safe.
It's what people want. The population is happily giving these companies all this power, and refuses to abandon them or pressure them in any way when they do this stuff.
And to be fair, I don't see Google acting nearly this badly. If anything, they're the opposite: they don't exercise enough control over their app store, so it has a lot of spyware and malware. As for MS, they seem to be incompetent and powerless: they tried to make an app store for Windows 10 and that was a big flop, and of course they tried to ape Apple/Google with Windows Phone, and that was a big flop too.
Even if that seems likely doing all that without a "real" full locking of the account and an email seems kind of odd.
There will always be false positives because even if reviewed or decided by group or committee, human judgement is always flawed and none of us really know if a ban is appropriate or justified. (And even if it is, there is always a concept of remorse or forgiveness that should be a thing too.)
Just think of your own personal experience. How many times have you been wrong when being judgemental about other people? How many times have they been wrong about you? Most of the time that's just a mild social thing and it has no consequence, but practices like shadow banning make it consequential.
I don’t think this specific one has anything to do with the NDA.
That article clearly indicates he sourced some information from the developer program betas, which would be a violation of the NDA when publicized.
The same way that you can't stop paying rent to your landlord because he hasn't fixed your sink, Apple can't harass someone because they believe he is in violation of a contract.
> Your rights under this license to use and access the Content will terminate automatically without notice from Apple if you fail to comply with any of these provisions.
Given that there is clear public evidence that he is misrepresenting what happened and that he has profited from breaking the NDA, why is any of this work that Apple should do?
> Your rights under this license to use and access the Content will terminate automatically without notice from Apple if you fail to comply with any of these provisions.
A supervisor shouldn't/wouldn't string him along in this situation
Do you think he doesn’t know that 9to5mac published the information he provided to them?
We can see he has very likely violated the NDA.
By not mentioning this, and presenting himself as just another developer trying to make nice apps, we can see that he clearly has the capacity to be disingenuous. Most developers don’t reverse engineer Apple software and supply the results for publication.
We also know that if Apple froze people’s accounts for failing to sign a Brazilian legal form (or similar), it would affect a lot of people and we’d know it was a real possibility. But they don’t.
We don’t know anything with 100% certainty, but we easily have enough certainty to make it obvious that failing to mention his reverse engineering practice is a major red flag for his credibility.
Why is distributing information covered by the NDA ok, but screenshots not?
Define "press".
> Why is distributing information covered by the NDA ok, but screenshots not?
Because that's what the license agreement says. Information about prerelease software is OK to discuss, sharing screenshots is not.
It's the guy who brought us a bunch of early iOS 13 leaks among other things: https://www.hackingwithswift.com/articles/164/interview-guil...