I appreciate apple's attempt in the privacy space as well as loathe their 30% mandatory in app purchase integration which EPIC is fighting against. You need someone who is big like Epic to stand against apple as they the resource to battle it out legally.
One of my clients is a small player and they have stripe integration for their service. The android platform uses the stripe integration where as the apple platform has forced in app purchases down their throat. In app purchases should be an option and it should be upto the customer if they want to use it or not.
The problem is it's really hard to hold these apparently contradictory positions in your head at the same time. We love binary distinctions on single dimension axes because our brains are more efficiently with this paradigm. In truth the world at any degree of scale does not work this way and we've got to do a better job developing more nuanced personal positions.
Fortnite hasn't had loot boxes like this for about 18 months. The contents of the box are visible and change each day.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/fortnite-puts-an-end-...
I already have a cloud footprint as my apps depend on it. The bulk of that 4% is in payment processing. The rest is just background noise on my hosting bills.
Yet you do have a desire for it to run on Apple's hardware, under Apple's OS. And thus you have a desire to do business with them. That you disagree with their rules for doing business by itself doesn't make them the bad guy.
They're offering many of the same terms offered by Microsoft, Google (Android Play store and Stadia), and Sony after all.
But, as I pointed out in a sibling reply, this hardware, firmware, and OS is, practically speaking, not ours. No matter how much as we’d like it to be.
This is a problem that's bigger than Apple, and it's not a problem that will be solved by allowing more stores on the phone - it won't make it somehow "your" hardware.
You can blame Apple for doing this with their phone all you want, but you're fighting against the tide with a shovel. It's an industry standard to lock hardware down to the point where they'd rather the hardware be bricked (the Nintendo Switch and its hardware fuses) than run "libre" software on it.
But my main point was that trying to frame it as heroic Apple against evil Epic, where Apple tries to save their users from gambling by taking a large cut of the loot, isn't entirely truthful.
Ultimately, it's their storefront, so who they do business with - and the terms of that business - is their choice (as is so often argued when free speech and platforms comes up here on HN). Competition exists, in the form of other hardware and other OSes (though, Epic's Fortnight was kicked off Google's store for the same reason as it was kicked off Apple's).
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191008/08591443147/epic-...
Please don't willingly spread misinformation like this.
https://www.sportskeeda.com/esports/news-fortnite-sued-trick...
> U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers announced a ruling yesterday which stated that Fortnite had convinced minors to spend money in game without parental consent. This ruling keeps Epic on the hook for its misleading business practices.
Was this also an ”out of court settlement”
What's your point? The other one was, that's all I was directing my reply to.
Writing these impassioned posts like you’re defending the decisions of your favorite sports team that can do no wrong... oof.
> That’s exactly what Apple is doing — giving users awareness over what is going on, and control over it.
I'm not really here to debate. You can disagree, but considering John's well-discussed pro-Apple bias (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9345312), it seems others agree that his writing often goes out of its way to frame Apple in more of a positive light than Apple likely deserves.
It's fine to praise specific actions, but Gruber's known for praising Apple so much that his Apple critiques tend to make news for how rare they are.
Remember when Microsoft was sued for bundling IE with Windows? Now imagine if they blocked other browsers from existing on Windows back then.
MS was sued for a number of things including forcing OEMs to pay a license fee for each PC sold whether or not it was shipped with Windows and not allowing third parties to ship alternative browsers.
Your specificity of “in the US” suggests you know that’s not how it went down in the rest of the world, and that they did infact have to stop bundling IE (and other components) in other countries / regional blocs.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/technology/11eubrowser.ht...
A single datapoint doesn’t tell the whole story.
haha, remember iAd? That failed quickly.
Perhaps this is my penance for working on FarmVille and Zynga Poker back in the day.
I'm sorry, but that show was really, really dumb and unrealistic and I couldn't sit through it.
3 engineers (notably: cringey white dudes) are never following one single user and controlling his interactions like that and it did more harm than good by pretending it works that way.
This implies someone is directly accountable, showing up to work every day and fucking with people's attention regularly, when in reality, it's soulless machines programmed to do this while the engineers are several degrees away from inflicting harm like this.
That's what makes it so dangerous -- not that tech companies have unlimited money to build situation rooms dedicated to following single users around.
It sometimes isn't, but why did they put 3 white dudes in charge of messing with someone's life when they know that's the prevailing stereotype of SV engineers?
Could it be that they were trying to capitalize on that stereotype for shock value? I'd think so.
Maybe because they earnt their position through merit? Maybe because white males are still a majority of the work force in Google, Facebook, and may more? The probability of picking 3 random senior people who are white are not that slim.
I as an Asian man take issue that just because you see white people in the show and automatically assume what the show has to say is not representative of whats happening in the Ad-industry. You could literally replace any color of race and claim it is not representative and disregard the bigger message here. This is a classic reverse-racism.
They earned the position of representing a wildly exaggerated view of how tech companies influence their users?
Give me a break, this show was just dumb. It added no value to the conversation around tech companies.
Even if the person taking the loss started at 100 and ended up at 80, while the person making the gain started at 20 and ended up at 40.
You’re still going to feel persecuted at 80 because of the relative loss. The human mind is super resilient and adaptable. That can be less helpful when it’s adapting to good things, making it the new baseline normal.
One thing I think most people can agree on: relative to recent history, 2020 has been a pretty bad year.
I agree it was cringy but the shows intent wasn't bad.
The show, up until I stopped watching, felt like slow-rolling click bait.
If they stopped being anti right to repair then maybe i'd be interested.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2019/01/25/facebook-tu...
The FTC alleges Apple allowed the same thing on their platform for three years after they became aware.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/16/technology/government-and...
But what's really amazing is Google, Amazon and Microsoft have all been sued for the same thing too and it still not illegal to have games where kids can spend unlimited amounts and conduct unlimited transactions using obfuscated virtual currencies.
I have three kids and have never had an in-app or other purchase that I didn’t approve.
The loot boxes issue is new to me though. Citation?
I agree that democracy in the US is shaky, but it has more to do with failures of both sides caused by the system. Really worthwhile read.
The right hates Gavin Newsom; They’re on their third recall attempt. But he wasn’t elected for no reason; He was elected because his campaign promises were what the people who put him there wanted.
That’s democracy working as intended as well.
The world is also not as simple as “left” and “right,” and I’ve found that it’s unwise to tell someone else what it’s like from their POV. We should instead speak for ourselves, and be genuinely interested and curious why others think the way they do.
“The right” make up about a third of the state[0] if the 2018 gubernatorial election is anything to go by. I wouldn’t call that “hardly exist[ing].” They may not be powerful enough to vote in who they want, but they’re there.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_California_gubernatorial_...
For all the free market cheerleaders, remember this: we already have laws in place preventing or regulating businesses from engaging in certain activities, like exploitation, gambling, addictive drugs, etc. And these companies fighting Apple want to do exactly that: Epic wants to sell digital gambling (loot) boxes to children. Facebook and Instagram want to track everything you do every second of the day, for the dubious goal of making advertising “more relevant to you” (and just happens to have the small side effect of being a tool currently in use to topple democracies around the world). Social networks are hooking into addiction centers of the brain to keep people hooked on misinformation that is actually killing people.
Is Apple perfect? No. Is this one thing going to stop all that I mentioned? No. But you have to start somewhere.