You install those yourself you know. I'd rather have a choice than not.

I feel your pain in the sense that that I think user UX will take a hit, but I think that's less important than breaking the monopoly of the current app store.

For example, I can't find apps with pornography or other types of things the high overlords at apple or Google have deemed inappropriate for me to have. That's bad. Apparently apps like Matrix fall under that category. It'd be nice if I can choose what I want to see.

The problem is the choice is taken away from you though. Just like he said with the game market. If you want to play Game A, you go and download/install Game A's publishing app store. If you want to then play Game B, rinse and repeat. You will be forced to use so many different app stores and won't have a choice to NOT use their app store "IF" it progresses like it has on the desktop. No proof it will/won't either.

As opposed to Developers not having the choice to distribute their own app stores?

There is no solution to this problem that benefits everyone perfectly. There are only solutions which are better than the solution we have today.

Actually, there is one near-perfect solution; Apple reduces their cut to ~5% and stops enforcing their insane rules. But that's not happening.

You, and many others in this thread, are blaming Epic, Steam, Blizzard, etc. That's fundamentally flawed thinking. All of this is Apple's fault. 100%. If the government forces Apple to destroy the UX of iOS, its because of actions Apple took which forced their hand. There are actions Apple could take which would abate this. They aren't taking them. You should not be mad at developers; you should be mad at Apple.

You can’t have both a secure platform and a platform where anyone can arbitrarily run code without a gatekeeper.

Apple is that gatekeeper because I, the user, want them to be. Apple has shown me, as a user, that the trade off they make between giving developers open access and protecting users from malware to be a sane one.

Does it make it harder to monetize an app? Totally, but for many iPhone users, that’s a feature, not a bug. The developers are not apple’s customer, so they’re not building a product around their needs — which we honestly need more of in tech. If I felt more strongly about Apple being a gatekeeper on its own platform, I might use Android in some flavor. But I just want a phone that works and has the apps I want to use without a bunch of garbage cluttering it up.

As a developer I just don’t like the precedent that if I’m too successful at creating a great product that I therefore lose control over the very qualities of my product that made it successful.

This applies to everything though. If I drill of oil and am 'too successful' and abuse my position the Gov cracks down on me. Same if a telco is 'too successful'

And you are forgetting that 'too successful' in these cases is: literally has billions in profit uses market position in an anti competitive way

In return for the benefits of living in a modern society, you pay many prices; one of them is a cap on how much influence you are permitted to hold over others.

Remember when you had to rent a telephone from Ma Bell in order to use the phone service that you paid for? Yeah neither do I because the government broke that shit up like they were supposed to.

I bought this iPhone and I can't even run my own programs on it without asking for Apple's permission. This needs to be outlawed yesterday.

All of WHAT is Apple’s fault? Providing a service that consumers want to use and preventing other companies from ruining it?

Telling consumers they should be mad at Apple is absurd. I am not mad at Apple, I am mad at Epic for wasting everyone’s time with this case that they know they will lose, purely to shape public opinion. The judge so far seems to be projecting this is what will happen. I also don’t like relying on regulators to force changes in a market they know little about. Interfering with a successful model that consumers LIKE and WANT into something else does not benefit consumers.

Benefiting other developers is completely irrelevant to the point of antitrust. That’s just corporate welfare.

Apple would be best to lower their rate a bit, clarify certain inconsistent rules, and not abuse the review process, but otherwise I do not want multiple App stores and prefer Apple to regulate their store over the government. I guarantee you there are far more consumers that share this opinion than not. We really could care less what developers are whining about Apple’s policies or retail cut. If you can’t build for iOS at a profit, find something else to do.

The government isn’t going to force a change of the iOS UX, that’s a pipe dream localized to Hacker News and Epic’s board room. Apple isn’t a monopoly by any definition of the term. You could declare them a utility, but that won’t have the effect you expect.

To believe that iOS, a platform with 15% market share, somehow represents the end of platform history that needs government intervention, is the height of lazy thinking. Build a better ecosystem. Apple did it barely 14 years ago when they were a fraction of Microsoft’s size, and everyone said it was impossible.

> Actually, there is one near-perfect solution...

So your perfect solution is to recreate the mess that's on the PC???

I don't think you understand - we don't want that. That's why people like me, my wife, my kids, my parents, my relatives, and most of my friends buy an iPhone - so we don't have to go through that hell.

The number of people who buy a iphone for sheer simplicity is enormous. My friend's Android has a better camera, a different friend's Android has some cool games that I can't get. But that's OK, and it's my trade-off to make.

If Blizzard really doesn't like Apple, when why don't they fork Android and make their own phone and have a cool backend like Unreal engine running it? They have the resources and the fans to do it. And frankly, it'd probably be really freakin cool.

You think blizzard has the resources, know-how, marketing, and brand recognition to build and successfully launch a phone that competes with the iPhone? That is just short of delusional. You really have no idea what you're talking about. But I'm glad you like the iPhone.

They don’t have to go it alone. I’m sure they could partner with Samsung or someone else.

And I’m not trying to understate the complexity, just saying they’d have a decent chance of making a great gaming device with phone capabilities.

Buying a phone just for a game is the solution instead of actually being able to install whatever you want. Are you even thinking before hitting "reply"?

A Nintendo Switch is basically that, right?

Apple make their devices for their customers. I don't really give a fuck about what toxic crap developers want to be able to get away with.

The best developers are selfless and put the interests of users first.

Those "insane rules" are an example of that.

Which developers are those, exactly? I'd like examples.

Is Apple one of them? The company which disobeys its own App Store rules in the usage of push messages for marking AppleCare, Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness, and Apple Arcade? The company which goes beyond this and into marketing these services within the literal Settings app of iOS, an avenue that no other developer has access to?

Is Apple putting the interests of their users "first" by restricting the distribution of cloud game streaming applications without being able to review the individual games within the service? How so? It doesn't put my interests first, and I'm an Apple user!

So, oof, ok, they're putting the interests of the nebulous, general, undefinable "prototypical user" first; not me, naturally, not millions of other users, but some unknown user out there. Though, by serving the interests of this unknown prototypical user, they're actively hurting my interests!

Is Apple putting the interests of users "first" by forcing a 30% tax onto any transaction made in the store? I mean, if one analyzes it with all the critical thinking of a seventh grader, sure. They're protecting their users! From the evil, icky "other" credit card processors like, uh, Visa! and Stripe! Those guys will steal your data... or, uh, I guess they wouldn't, actually they're fine, but then apps could use whatever processors they wanted, including ones which steal your data! I mean, lets ignore that Apple could require developers to use one of a set number of approved safe processors, because jeeze, that would destroy the whole argument, wouldn't want that.

Oh, right, I forgot, Apple is being Fair! They don't want to give special treatment to other payment networks, because then they'd have to pick which ones are safe and show favoritism. There we go, an Unassailable stance. Wait, but... Apple only enforces the IAP Framework requirement for Digital purchases... plenty of apps use whatever payment processor they want, including bad ones, as long as its for Physical goods. Weird... and didn't Apple give Amazon special treatment with Prime Video, for Digital goods, allowing them to bypass the IAP Framework? That's right, they did do that...

Jeeze, this is looking pretty bad for Apple. I mean, they're the ones making the rules, and they can't even operate in a position where the Nebulous and Undefinable Interests of Unknown and Uncountable Users is put "first". What hope does anyone else have?

Except, maybe, just maybe, their hope lies in not treating users like babies who need a nanny to make rules in the first place. I know, its crazy, but hear me out: there was that one time I was drinking from my bottle and the nipple fell off and I split milk everywhere, it was such a mess, my mommy was so mad! But, I'm still here. Growing. Learning. Making dumb, shitty comments on the internet. Capable of (most of the time) acting like an adult and making my own decisions. I'm capable of deciding for myself whether something is Safe, whether I want to take the risk, and hedging myself and my interests when those risks turn sour. Every human is. We can't operate in a nursery for our entire lives and expect to grow as people, or even as a species.

There is so much more that iPhones, and mobile computing in general, are capable of; so lets go do it, and lets not pay Apple 30% and deal with their App Review Team in the process. Because I already paid them fair and square for the phone. That should be enough.

You have the choice to not go play a game if it isn't on a platform that you want to install.

This is somewhat similar to "I don't want to buy an XBox just to play this one game". Of course the barrier there is often a monetary cost. The software platforms are free to download so there's no real barrier.

But for instance, I don't particularly like Epic Games attitude around buying exclusives so I don't use their store. I have missed out on some games I might have enjoyed as a result, but I still have lots to play elsewhere.

You have the choice to not use iOS and not use the Apple App Store. You might not like Apple’s attitude around their operation of the App Store so you don’t use their devices. You might have missed some great apps, but there are still many great alternatives on Android.

So it's either a choice between "not running some specific game/app whose publisher made their own app store" and "not running any iOS app because my only option is to not have an iPhone"?

I know which one gives me more choice.

No, your freedom of choice is only one level deep. You can either choose iOS, which includes 'runs only apple-approved software', or choose any other OS which runs other software.

This is basically the right to repair / right to do whatever you want with your device debate. You can't force Apple to program the functionality for running other people's code into iOS, but it's legal if you figure out how. This is exactly what went down in 2010 with Cydia [0] - it's fair use to modify your own device, but that doesn't compel apple to make it easy to do so[1].

0: https://www.wired.com/2010/07/feds-ok-iphone-jailbreaking/

1: https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2010/07/dmcae...

Nitpick: that exemption is from 2010. The DMCA mandates an exemption be granted every three years for something. Meaning: in 2013, that exemption was gone unless it was exempted again. And again in 2016. And again in 2019. And so on. The DMCA does not include an “exempt once, exempt forever” clause, sadly.

Thankfully, we’ve had the EFF to campaign for exemptions, but it’s frustrating having to go through the whole ordeal every three years because Congress can’t be arsed to fix it.

17 U.S. Code §1201(a)(1)(C)[0]:

> (C) During the 2-year period described in subparagraph (A), and during each succeeding 3-year period, the Librarian of Congress, upon the recommendation of the Register of Copyrights, who shall consult with the Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information of the Department of Commerce and report and comment on his or her views in making such recommendation, shall make the determination in a rulemaking proceeding for purposes of subparagraph (B) of whether persons who are users of a copyrighted work are, or are likely to be in the succeeding 3-year period, adversely affected by the prohibition under subparagraph (A) in their ability to make noninfringing uses under this title of a particular class of copyrighted works. In conducting such rulemaking, the Librarian shall examine—

(followed by a list of things the Librarian will consider)

[0]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

Or choose any other OS? Are you living in a fantasy world with more than two OSs? It’s not goddamn hair shampoo..

We have more choice today, because currently Android and iOS have different models. Break up the App Store and your left with a single model.

What nobody is talking about is Epic could completely avoid the premium their complaining about by using a website for all transactions. Just like the Kindle App or Netflix etc. The only thing they get from this lawsuit is in app micro transactions. As such it’s really a question of business models not consumer choice.

Reading Apple's policy makes it seem not so simple. Netflix, for example, avoids the cost because it is a subscription service which is specifically excluded from having a cut taken out. I can't speak for Kindle, but when I very recently read over this it was clear that just routing to a site to handle the purchase would not be sufficient to bypass this

> which is specifically excluded from having a cut taken out.

Netflix is constantly at odds with Apple. You can't subscribe via the iOS app store and they don't even link to the Netflix website due to Apple's rules and how they want their 30% cut for app store-driven traffic.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/31/netflix-stops-paying-the-a...

> constantly at odds

Provides an article from 3 years ago during which time the sign-up flow has not changed and Netflix has exploded in growth.

There doesn't need to be constant news about Netflix changing stuff, they still don't like Apple's rules about it and there are still no links to netflix.com in the app.

> Trying to join Netflix?

>

> You can't sign up for Netflix in the app. We know it's a hassle.

And likely Netflix et al were grandfathered in because Apple _couldn't_ strongarm them. If Netflix was invented post AppStore, I'd wager that Apple would have them paying Apple taxes regardless.

> What nobody is talking about is Epic could completely avoid the premium their complaining about by using a website for all transactions.

Epic would also need all paid transactions to originate entirely from said website - i.e. there would be no ability for their own apps to even send users to that website. There have been multiple horror stories about app developers trying this exact approach and Apple turning around with "nope, pay up your 30% cut".

Yea, you need a login page that’s:

Trying to join _? You can't sign up for _ in the app. We know it's a hassle.

Not:

Trying to join _? click here

But, actually following the acceptable approach and you don’t run into issues.

> We have more choice today, because currently Android and iOS have different models. Break up the App Store and your left with a single model

What a goofy point of view.

If there are two restaurants in town, and only one grocery store, would you conclude that eating out is better than cooking your own meals because you have two restaurant options instead of just the one grocery store?

Why is more choice necessarily good, besides simplified theory about capitalism? Brands have built their entire success off of providing less choice to consumers and they, in general seem to be successful. See Apple and Trader Joe's.

Choice is good when there's direct competition. Companies will compete to have better app stores if I can choose which app store I want to use. I as a consumer will get to choose what games I want to play. It's bad for me as a consumer that I also have to choose which app store I'm using to download that game.

Also both things can be bad, but I personally feel that the model where people like Apple due to the "ecosystem" seems to have worked pretty well for a lot of consumers. I don't think "more choice" is a good metric here at all because it's false. I don't care about having more choice in app stores(and I'm not getting to chose which app store I use under either model anyway), I care about my choice of apps. Which isn't really changing, companies will get their product to consumers.

Imagine the same choice on a PC. Microsoft doesn't allow a ceeatin software just switch to MacOS or Linux. All the software you previously bought is useless and you have to buy it again. So because multiple AppStores is too much of hassle you need to keep multiple smartphones or buy the same software twice.

Considering the tight integration of the OS and the hardware, I would offer the comparison that it's more like a CPU not allowing any code that's not signed by Intel to run. Or, more aptly, only allowing one specific OS to run on their CPU and that OS has a restrictive policy on application usage.

Sure, you could go with AMD but does having other choices excuse a company? It certainly violates the spirit of anti-trust laws. Apple makes and controls 46% of all the mobile devices in the US. The nearest competitor is Samsung, who makes 25%.

If Apple allowed other OS's to operate on their phone, then they could say "If you don't like our integrated app store policies and policy of not allowing other app stores, use a different OS". But until they do that, the OS and the hardware have to be seen as one thing.

Apple makes and controls 46% of all the mobile devices in the US because their methodology for designing, building, distributing and iterating on the product is successful. Consumer satisfaction, retention and growth are bi-products of this success. Apple doesn't play mean tricks to gain market share. They simply build great products, invest more in innovation (CPUs) to continue making great products. The m1 chip shows this. You can't pick apart what Apple does and give it some attribute/feature of an ecosystem model. Right now the market is Apple vs. ecosystem. Consumers have choice to buy from Apple, or buy from an ecosystem. We should focus less on trying to handicap Apple and start figuring out how a leader in the ecosystem can rise above it to compete with Apple head on.

It's not so simple. Because Apple hardware and software are closely interwoven it's hard to change to another brand. Most of the software and accessories only works with Apple hardware and software so if you change you have to make rather large expenses to keep the previous status quo. I.e. even if you are unhappy, for some it is simply too expensive to switch to another brand.

But this is true for the game console market in the comment I originally replied to. When you buy a game you are locked in, you can't put your Halo disk in a playstation or transfer your Nintendo store purchases to Xbox. If you have an Xbox and all your friends load up on Playstation, its going to be a significant cost to get the new console and library you want to play multiplayer with them. For some reason people care more now that its a phone than a game console.

There are alternative stores for the same game on the desktop. A trivial example is that some games can be installed directly by downloading a file from the developer, or via Humble Bundle, GOG or Steam.

So this business model is possible. And it's the friendliest to end users, too.

When things work that way, then great!

But a number of high-profile publishers (Rockstar, Ubisoft, EA) force you to use their app platform even if you purchased the game on Steam. I bought Far Cry 5 on Steam, and running it first launches Ubisoft's launcher, which usually needs to update (why????), then I can launch the game. GTA Online freebie in Epic Store, first has to start Rockstar Social Club (which also usually needs to update), then finally runs the game. FIFA on Steam forces Origin, and so on.

It's a lot easier to deal with if you use a game launcher like Playnite, or should I say a launcher launcher, but with the rigarmarole you have to go through just to start one game suddenly your launcher launcher is now a launcher launcher launcher.

At this point I barely play anymore. Because with all the intermediate updates and transient failures, it takes longer to start the game than the time you would spend casually playing during a week evening.

Agreed. I have definitely been favoring platforms that let me run the binary directly, which is really just GOG, Patreon projects, and open-source.

Exactly why people buy consoles.

For the same experience as you get with an iPhone.

Except when it's not -- I rarely ever fire up my PS4 but when I do I can be guaranteed to have to wait a half hour for updates to install

Same with new games ... pop in the disc, run the install routine, download the day 1 patch...

The problem referenced by the GP is worse on consoles in my experience. Did the system software get updated today? Well, no network features for you until you download it.

What about that video streaming app? Well, there's a new version, so you have to download that right now or you can't watch. Oh, and we logged you out. Get out your phone or computer and type in this link. Then log in there and type this code. Make sure you enable all javascript because otherwise this won't work. Also, there will be an awkward pause after the computer tells you you've activated where the console won't indicate the same and you'll wonder if it even worked.

Granted, some consoles handle this better than others.

The situation degraded so far that it actually gives me a benefit. Ubisoft and EA now offer cheap subscriptions, so I never actually have to buy a game from them again; I just pay a low price once a year for a month or two of access. Why wait for Assassins' Creed: Valhalla at 75% off when I can play it now for less (and it is still cheaper in the rare cases I want to play something a second time). EA even seem to be getting in bed with Microsoft, with the XBox for PC premium subscription thing gaining EA access, so I expect that platform may actually die sooner rather than later and get folded into XBox (which seems to use the built in Windows store distribution). I really can't fathom how the divisions at the big companies running these stores can justify their existence, where trying to maximize their share of the market appears to just be driving it into the ground.

I think its actually driven by marketing wanting to control messaging over their channel. Having little more than tiny little text and picture boxes to try and sell you stuff probably drives them nuts

Many standalone downloads in fact come with the publisher app store. Thay must runs in order to start the game. The end result is the same. And the store will update the game anyways, often re-downloading the equivalent of half the game (we are talking 50GB scale here).

Sometimes you can use another publisher app store. Which will in fact start another app store upon starting the game. In turn starting the game. And the game itself will also ask you for a game studio account. So you need 2 app store and 3 account to play the game. And I am talking about single player game here.

> Sometimes you can use another publisher app store. Which will in fact start another app store upon starting the game.

Not saying this doesn't ever happen, but I've used Steam for more than a decade now and not once have I seen that happen, ever.

Yes, some games have separate launchers, and yes, sometimes these have support for their own separate accounts and mod loaders and such, but not once have they actually been full-blown alternative app stores.

I don't buy very many modern AAA titles, though, so that might be part of it. Still, of the ones I do buy, none of them have installed some alternative store.

Practically every game from EA or Ubisoft on Steam published within the last eight years or so does this.

And they do so because people support it.

Like so much else in PC gaming, they do so because customers don't have a choice. If I want to play The Division with my friends, I have to put up with an extra launcher.

If it bothers you enough, then don't play the division?

I actively avoid and don't buy/play games that require Origin or Uplay. Even when friends tell me about free games in Origin I don't give a fuck. And I'm a very active gamer.

You do have a choice. There are tons of awesome games out there.

Playing devil's advocate: If it bothers you enough, then don't buy an iPhone?

Ubisoft does this for games that are shared with Steam. You launch the game on Uplay which starts Steam which starts the game.

Many games are exclusive to the Epic launcher, or Origins, or Uplay. Many games are multiplayer are require logging into the above launchers even if theoretically you could somehow separate the game itself.

The entity that makes Game A has a choice where the app is sold. So, for Example, EA sells games on Origin but also Steam. There are lots of apps that are in many stores.

On an iOS device, the entity that makes the app has no choice of what store to be in, they must be in Apple's. That is a monopoly.

As many have pointed out, if you only want to get your apps from one store-- like Apple's-- you could chose that. But currently you can't choose to use another app vendor.

Right, it's a monopoly for app developers, much more than for users.

Users have even less choice then developers.

Well, everything is a monopoly if you define the market specifically enough.

You can abuse your market position without being a monopoly.

Of course you can. But the parent comment doesn’t put forward any argument for why they think that’s happening. They’re just saying Apple has a monopoly over Apple customers. Which is more of a truism rather than anything insightful.

I think it is safe to say that if Apple allowed another company to offer an app store, even using all the same screening and security protocols Apple does, they would take a lower cut of app revenue. I believe that is what bothers Epic. If they don't like the cut Valve demands they can make their own store on Windows, and they do.

Argument for why is that happening: So Apple can make more money.

(Disclosure: I am an Apple shareholder.)

Well I don’t think that’s supported by the data, because they can do that on android, and Epic is suing Google too.

You’re also framing the market in an arbitrary way to support your conclusions. Every company could be said to have a monopoly over their own customers. Any argument that Apple monopolizes Apple customer, or that Google monopolizes Play Store customers could also be used to say Valve monopolizes Valve customers, or Sony monopolizes PlayStation customers, or that Samsung monopolizes the market of Samsung smart fridge customers.

You need a lot more than just that to make a compelling argument that the behaviour is illegally anti-competitive.

You can side load an Epic on to a Android app, that is true, but that is not the same as being able to buy it from a store on an Android device.

Amazon and other vendors have forked Android so that they can put there own store on it. Google does not open up its API enough that you can have the same functionality as the Google Play Store. I think you understand what I am saying, but just in case, it's really different than what you can do on Windows, Linux, MacOS.

I agree you can't have a monopoly by "customers". That's why I don't think Valve has a monopoly. PC users can can and do install games other ways. On the other hand, by my logic, Nintendo does have a monopoly on Switch users and PlayStation does have a monopoly on PlayStation owners. I think it matters a lot less in those cases because they aren't as ubiquitous as phones. In the US, Apple is 60% of the market, which is way past what the US used to define as a monopoly.

I am guessing you don't agree and don't think that is a problem. But I think I understand your point and respect the different point of view.

> You can side load an Epic on to a Android app, that is true, but that is not the same as being able to buy it from a store on an Android device.

I think this reframes the issue even further. This changes the claim to being that they're anti-competitive by simply not distributing the competing software themselves. The typical workflow for downloading software on a PC is go to website > download software > install software. The typical workflow for "sideloading" an app is go to website > download software > install software.

I would suggest the reason consumers are inhibited from downloading alternative app stores is because they don't trust apps they've downloaded from alternative locations (you could say the security warnings are anti-competitive, but MacOS and Windows have similar warnings when installing software downloaded from the internet, and they don't seem to generate the same accusations). But in any case, the complaint "consumers trust Google, but they don't trust me, and that's not fair" is not a reasonable basis for a lawsuit.

If EA win their fight, I can't really see them offering their app on the Apple App Store.

So, really what this is about is choice for the big app-manufacturers, including games. It has nothing to do with user choice at all, and the cost is borne by the user (who has a far shittier user-experience than they do now).

If it makes EA more money, they will absolutely sell their games on other app stores, see Origin vs Steam.

But it won't, will it. That's the entire reason they want to do it in the first place - to make more money for themselves.

They want in on the platform, without paying the fees that being on the platform requires.

Sure they will. If apple reduced their fee to something like 5%, I am sure that even most large game developers would use it.

If that choice of app store actually matters to you, then you have the option to choose an Android phone instead of an iPhone. You're not being relegated to some obscure platform with no app support like people who didn't want to use Wintel in the '00s.

Google Play Store's revenue is half of that of the Apple App Store, so choosing only Android instead of both platforms would cut the expected app revenue by about two-thirds. Google also has similar app tax policies to Apple (and there is an ongoing lawsuit by Epic against them), so they really are relegated to the more obscure app stores.

That's because Apple's app store has better quality apps due to curation. The minute iPhones are opened up, the value of the App Store will tank considerably, and many devs on here will be up in arms, complaining about all the flood of free apps that have destroyed their market.

The fact is the App Store helps everyone. It curates apps for most people, it helps developers make more money (as you said, double the revenue, well worth the 1/3 cut, that no longer applies to small apps), and it helps Apple innovate on their hardware product.

> That's because Apple's app store has better quality apps due to curation.

Is that why I found a dozen Chinese knockoff BonziBuddy[1] clones on Apple's App Store?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy

If you want to create anecdotes to prove a point I won't waste my time. The problem is far, far worse on Play and Android.

I do not agree that the revenue is necessarily because of higher-quality apps. Apple iPhones are regarded in many markets as luxury goods bought by people with more disposable income, so the increased revenue could well be attributable to having a wealthier customer base that is willing to spend more on app/in-app purchases. In this case, opening up the market to competition might be beneficial to existing App Store developers.

App Store does help developers make more money than if they were not on it, but being on it is the only practical way for them to gain access to iPhone users (they could ask users to jailbreak their phones instead but that is impractical for most). If the courts order Apple to allow competing app stores, users would still benefit from Apple's curation, and developers would still benefit from the distribution by using Apple App Store, but they would have a viable choice of picking another app store without having to change to another OS (for users) or abandoning the largest market (for developers).

Sure it is - because Apps are curated, you can charge more for them. If there are free alternatives available everywhere, people will be less likely to pay.

> In this case, opening up the market to competition might be beneficial to existing App Store developers.

Only true if the 50% revenue increase disappears (Which is likely with a flood of free apps). Not only that, but more free apps = more privacy violations.

> App Store does help.....

So the App Store is a net benefit - what, exactly, is the problem? There is no demonstrable harm. The small apps got a cut on the fee earlier this year. Now it's just megacorps trying to get as much of the pie as they can, in a way that hurts consumers.

Also allowing 3rd party applications to control critical features is a privacy/security issue I haven't seen addressed.

> Sure it is - because Apps are curated, you can charge more for them.

That is not a sure thing. Having a wealthier customer base could be as much or even bigger a reason for the higher revenue. And curated apps still have to compete with each other.

> If there are free alternatives available everywhere, people will be less likely to pay.

If this were really the case, it would actually be an argument for increased competition because it would be better for the consumers. However, I do not think that it is true because almost 93% of apps in the App Store are already free.[1] So the 100% revenue difference probably would not disappear. And free apps would have to follow Apple's privacy rules, as they do now.

> So the App Store is a net benefit - what, exactly, is the problem?

Of course it is a net benefit. Even if overall fees were 99%, it would still be a net benefit to both consumers and developers because retaining 1% is still better than nothing for developers, and having a software repository is very valuable for users. No-one is suggesting shutting down the App Store. What is being suggested is for Apple to allow other firms to compete against it, because they control almost two-thirds of the market by revenue and can dictate the terms to the participants.

> There is no demonstrable harm.

That is for Epic to prove. They would try to demonstrate that they suffered harm after violating App Store terms by offering a competing payment method, and that it is anti-competitive for Apple to eject Epic's app, given its market position. Regulators would also have their own methods of determining whether harm occurred.

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1020996/distribution-of-...

A fair portion as well is that Apple takes paid/subscription apps on the store more seriously. Apple believes people should be willing to pay money for things (since Apple sells products) and Google believes people want advertising-supported free content (because that is _their_ business model).

> Apple takes paid/subscription apps on the store more seriously

I understand what you wrote about the two companies' motivations but what do you mean when you write that Apple takes paid apps more seriously? What app store policy differences are you thinking of, for example, between Apple and Google, that suggest a more serious attitude?

I think users would stop benefiting as soon as some critical service they use like Gmail or Instagram moves to one of these third party app stores to avoid Apple's increasingly aggressive privacy requirements.

I wasn't talking about developer choice, I was talking about end user choice. Given that statistic, I think it is pretty obvious that we as developers stand to make more money on iOS than Android regardless of Apple's 30% cut.

There are a few reasons for the discrepancy though. Someone else already mentioned the higher average quality of apps on the App Store.

One facet is the difficulty involved in pirating iOS apps compared to Android, likely because Apple makes sideloading so difficult. Pretty much any kid can spend 20 minutes searching around on Google and figure out how to get paid games for free on their phone.

Another variable is average user affluence. Apple is popular in developed countries with sizable middle class populations, and they position themselves as more of a luxury brand. Android devices run the gamut from ultra premium to ultra budget, catering to user in every socioeconomic class. Apple users on average probably have more spare cash to spend on apps.

> You will be forced to use so many different app stores and won't have a choice to NOT use their app store "IF" it progresses like it has on the desktop.

You're only forced to use stuff when you're in the small minority that cares about not using stuff. Moxie Marlinspike explained it perfectly in his DEF CON 18 keynote.

Thing is, I don't think there's any conclusive proof that the majority of customer would be okay with what you're describing.

Most of us on PC are getting along just fine with one or two game launchers. I'm using GOG and Steam. My kid uses Steam and Epic.

When Funcom tried adding their own launcher for Conan Exiles, the vast majority of players berated them so hard on their forums that they removed it.

There are plenty of cross-store games on PC. And even if some games end up being exclusive you might still benefit as a player thanks to the competition. If Epic started offering a very bad user experience game devs would hesitate to publish exclusively through them because they'd fear reduced revenue.

It's also a very good thing for game devs who aren't at the mercy of the whims of a single company. Steam no longer wants to work with you? Go to GOG, Epic or even self-publish.

> Epic started offering a very bad user experience game devs would hesitate to publish exclusively through them because they'd fear reduced revenue.

This is demonstrably not true. Epic's launcher has been a laughing stock since it was announced.

* It only recently got any form of Achievements (that are completely undiscoverable)

* It has no way to join a party with your friends. I think it has Friends support but am not sure because you can't do anything at all with your Friends so I never even look.

* It has no way to get support (their "troubleshoot" guide amounts to 'clear your cache, run as Admin, then try reinstalling: https://www.epicgames.com/help/en-US/epic-games-store-c73/la...)

* Half the time their UI elements don't work (I just went into the "Troubleshoot" section and the back button doesn't work, so I had to close the whole window and start over)

* There are no user reviews of games

* Their store and library sorting is a mess that makes it difficult to find anything

* They launched without even having cloud save support

Epic's game store is underpowered, buggy, and miserable to use - and plenty of companies still do exclusive deals with them because Epic holds a bag of gold in front of their face. They even do it when it breaks their own promises, like when IOI decided to launch Hitman 3 after promising they'd import Hitman 2 purchases - and then apparently totally forgot that Hitman 1 and 2 were on Steam and Hitman 3 was on Epic, so while XBox and Playstation users got their levels migrated on day one PC users are still out of luck a month later.

I heard all about that but I really don't think it matters all that much for the vast majority of players. People who are really active in video game communities are indeed likely to be annoyed at this and loudly complain online, but I'm sure the vast majority of casual players won't care massively about any of this. In particular all the online features. I'm in my 30s, do you realize how hard it is to schedule anything with my friends?

Paying for exclusives is a bit of a bummer but game development is pretty damn competitive as it is, Epic injecting a lot of money to secure exclusives might actually do some good for indie devs.

In my experience most of these exclusivity deals are temporary anyway, so you just have to wait 6 months to a year to get it on your store of choice. That's a fair compromise IMO, especially since nobody bothers to release finished games anymore anyway, so you might as well get the finished version on Steam on sale a year later.

None of those sounds like a very bad user experience. A very bad experience is games disppearing different games appearing after purchasing something else, games not working, memory usage too high..etc

No user reviews, no easy help button for noobs, no cloud save, only recently got achievements, can't crush a friends party. all sound like little nice to haves that don't add much value. Does it allow me to find/play the game? Everything else takes time away from playing.

Then, no offense, but you might not understand the market very well. Achievements and friends are table stakes these days. Games are primarily a multiplayer experience with friends so platforms absolutely need those things before locking games as exclusives.

This would be like shipping an OS without internet access to end-users.

It likely depends on your friends or the games you play. I don't think my friends care to know that I am playing the Witcher, Cyberpunk, Battletech, Mechwarrior, or Jotun. Friends might care to know that I'm online, and be able to message me, but to be honest Discord or other social networks (Steam, Blizzard) already cover that. I've actually been quite happy with GOG's interface, for example.

I actually think it is you who doesn’t understand the market.

Nobody cares about centralised achievements any more, and most people don’t particularly like having different friends lists for each service.

People would rather organise a game through something like Discord that is entirely seperate to the store ecosystem.

Hmm, maybe achievements aren't as popular as I once believed, but I do think there's unnecessary friction to joining a friend's game with Epic's half baked model. It's one of those things that nobody notices until it's missing.

I'm not saying you need a full social network on every platform, either.

> Achievements and friends are table stakes these days.

Nintendo must have missed this.

In fairness, Nintendo consoles were always designed around couch co-op, and that is a big failing of the biggest PC platforms.

Nintendo's online services are, and always have been, a disaster.

An OS doesn't ship with internet access. You may get internet as a separate service later and connect it to your computer which has an OS.

I'm not sure you understand the market. If saving to the cloud is a must have feature your game will provide it. Ditto for multiplayer. No one is refusing to play a game because the platform you purchased the game on doesn't have an easy help button.

Is all of that really a problem when the companies seem to have shown that none of that matters? The increased cut is apparently more valuable to them.

And I also should note, half of those items don't need to implemented in a store. People ask for them because they are implemented as extras in other stores, but strictly speaking the distribution and support are the only things the store needs to have to be called a store. Achievements, friend lists, user reviews, and cloud saves can be provided by separate services and work just as well, and could result in a higher cut for the vendors if the store doesn't have to shelter the cost for that.

That sounds like the same class of argument as "all an operating system needs to provide is process scheduling and hardware access". It doesn't match user expectations and it certainly isn't a good user experience. Having to sign into a different account for every game to get basic functionality is a nightmare. Users want to purchase a game from a store, install it, play it, and have everything work. That's it - no other configuration or connections required.

The answer to that isn't putting all stores but one out of business, it's having a single-sign-on provider.

Also, I doubt you would criticize an embedded OS for only having process scheduling and hardware access, because that's probably all it was designed to do. Similarly, a low-cost store may want to skip on providing all those extra features so they can keep prices down.

Epic DOES offer a terrible experience, especially on Mac. It crashes ALL the time. It's terribly slow. It regularly consumes over 50% of available Ram and CPU. It still has exclusives and it's the only place I can get Unreal Engine if I want it. The PC game market is a prime example of how this common knowledge not being true at all for consumers. A couple of years ago steam was really the App Store for games and the user experience was far better. Now it's the worst it's been ever. Gog, UPlay Connect, Origin, Steam, Epic Game store etc... All with exclusives, all with massive privacy issues, all worse for consumer's.

The only way to truly improve it for consumer is to require that all platform's be open source. That I could get behind but it will never happen.

We used to download almost every program on their own website until just a couple of years ago. It'll be fine.

It'll be fine:

https://patrickspokemonpalace.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/ie...

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/antivirus-software-...

App store monopolies have not meaningfully hindered this.

To your first example: Most malware infections on PCs today are distributed by the Chrome Web Store. (Preventing malicious extensions was Google's excuse for blocking third party install... but since they don't even attempt to control malware they distribute first party, it's hilarious.) If they tell you they have a virus, open their Chrome extensions tab, remove everything, and you're good.

If anything, centralized app stores magnify the problem: By making every single app submitted look like it's coming from a reputable source. If app stores did any realistic good job at policing malware, instead of focusing on policing their revenue tax, they might be a benefit.

But again, malicious apps can have millions of installs and nobody does anything about it. Epic decides to charge 18% less and circumvent Google and Apple's taxation, and they act in less than 12 hours.

App stores do hinder this when they are resonably well moderated. Google makes almost no effort to do this. The extension markets for Firefox and Safari are comparatively malware-free next to the Chrome extension store.

Indeed, the problem is scale. Companies like Google and Apple end up employing cheap, low quality labor to review apps and extensions instead of high quality technical personnel.

Bear in mind, if Google and Apple had to compete in this aspect, it's possible users would actually choose and prefer a third party store with better curation. So they'd have an incentive to improve their review processes.

> Companies like Google and Apple end up employing cheap, low quality labor to review apps and extensions instead of high quality technical personnel.

I will need to see evidence Google employs people to review third-party software.

Apple's own store proves this incorrect. Apple's App Store has VERY few instance's of Malware (at least in the sense of exploiting security issues). The App Store does have an ongoing issue with dark patterns and subscription fraud, no doubt but in general Apple's App Store is the by far the best and safest App Store for consumer. I'm an app developer and the App Store has more than it's share of issues like discovery and subscription fraud but ALL of those issues are worse on other more "open" platforms.

Isn't more a question of sandboxing than the app store itself? Installed apps on iOS just can't do every much.

What is considered Android/iOS malware these days is much more tame than what malware used to be. A cryptolocker on iOS is basically impossible.

There are a lot of non-technical requirements for the Apple App Store, for instance on what an application can do with bluetooth, local networking, contacts, photos, and location data - even after the user gives access approval for them.

Another great example is the target of the Apple/Facebook spat currently - Apple has not just said that the developer needs to go through the OS-dialog approval to use the IDFA (identifier for advertising) to track users, but to do _any_ cross-organizational tracking, including using mechanisms that Apple does not have technical protections for.

Apple developer accounts involve real-world identity verification, so that (hopefully) abuse results in an actual ban of the company and people rather than just of a throwaway account.

> (from parent) need their App Store running in order to play their games

This is the real UX problem.

I have no problem buying from a variety of stores. I do that in real life. Most required (pre-Covid) me to walk in each of their doors.

What's a problem is requiring the installed & running presence of a particular App Store to run an app.

If I legally purchased something, why is a particular App Store even still required? If I want to re-install (new device) then I can download it again?

If we're talking updates... I'm happy to forgo update pushing. And renting software with subscriptions just needs to die.

Microsoft, EA and Ubisoft eventually caved in and offer their games also on Steam.

EGS "exclusives" are usually timed exclusives. You wait half a year or so, and get a more stable, better optimized and usually also cheaper version on Steam too. If you want to play an EGS exclusive game immediately, installing EGS isn't a big deal either.

So far, having multiple competing app stores on PC has been a win both for users and developers. Choice is always a good thing.

Meh - eventually things work out for the best of the consumers most of the time - for eg. epic game store just gave a bunch of titles free no strings attached a while ago, EA store used to have free stuff as well.

End of the day you have to have enough value to get people to inconvenience themselves - I'd rather that this value gets shelled out to users as enticement to install some app store than Apple capturing that money simply because their store is the only one allowed to exist on the platform.

This is short-sighted.

The App Store is good because it is closed and curated. That's a main driver of the product experience. Removing the App Store irrecoverably damages the iPhone - a curated, non-malware infested, high quality phone with a consistent experience.

I have yet to see any argument how the App Store harms consumers. It helps developers make more money (Play Store revenue is half that of the App store's apps), it helps consumers stay protected from malware infested applications and is easy to use.

Where, exactly, is the harm? Now Epic with their gambling games will be able to rip off kids even more in their own store? Fantastic.

Lol the framing is ridiculous - Apple had nothing against ripping off gambling kids as long as they were getting their 30% cut so please cut the fanboy crap.

Apple is using it's market position and it's leading to inefficient pricing. I guarantee you if Apple was forced to allow other payment methods on their store that their % cut would go down because the convenience they offer is not worth 30%.

And App Store can be as curated as they want if they provide the hooks to allow third party stores and app deployments.

I generally agree that you have the device choice - but considering the size of this market and Apple market position this is a right place for regulators to step in and fix the market inefficiency - just like the Windows/IE thing. And while they are at it they should probably look at digital store policies in general to prevent this kind of thing, Google isn't much better than Apple and they keep bundling stuff with the phone as well.

Not an apple fanboy, please argue on merit, else I won't continue.

Apple isn't ripping off anyone. They're taking their cut of sales based off the value of providing access to a high paying market that has a non-negligible cost. The point is - Epic is not doing this "for the market." They're doing it because they want more money for themselves - which is fair, but they are using a service which provides them revenue. That should not be free. For that matter, they have a monopoly over their store as well - should they have to allow third party "VBucks" stores? It's absurd.

> Apple is using it's market position.....

It clearly is worth that, in fact, probably much more - others on this thread that support your POV have said the App Store generates twice the revenue of Android. It's not just the convenience - it simply makes devs more money. Cutting the app store will tank developer value instantly. Developers will lose big time in this event. There will be many on here that will begin to complain as their salary dips. Also apple already cut the fee for smaller apps. So what's the real problem? I have yet to see any tangible evidence of consumer harm.

> And App Store can be as curated.....

That opens the door for malware and a poor customer experience. I can see my mom now being tricked into downloading a privacy invading app. my dad's android is a nightmare. It destroys the product.

> I generally agree that you have the device choice....

There isn't market inefficiency. It's hard to argue monopoly of a company that has 20% of the market. The IE/Windows debate is far different. Both DOMINATED the market. This simply isn't true in this case.

The fact is every time this comes up on HN people just hate Apple, but never look at the actual merit of the arguments. It isn't a monopoly (less than 20% global marketshare), its fees aren't exorbitant based on the value it provides developers, and end consumers get a clean, relatively safe experience. No one is losing, except megacorps like Epic who want to make a little more money.

Um, the harm is 30% more expensive apps. If devs can't avoid the cut, its only going to get passed down to the user.

Except in the real world when we see games offered in multiple places (e.g. Steam and the Epic Game Store) they are usually the same price.

In other words, any savings from the developer cut is simply kept by the developer, not passed onto the consumer.

> Except in the real world when we see games offered in multiple places (e.g. Steam and the Epic Game Store) they are usually the same price.

Is that really true? Legitimate Steam keys are sold by stores other than Valve's Steam store, such as Humble Bundle, Green Man Gaming and Fanatical.

I shop at multiple stores that sell Steam keys, and I would say that I only buy less than 1/3rd of my games from Steam directly, due to heavy discounts via bundling and other sales at various online game stores. I find that the alternate "Steam" stores have sales more often than the official Steam store does.

As someone mentioned in another comment, this is the result of yet another monopolistic practice, this time by Steam who requires your game to be priced the same in all stores else it will be removed from Steam.

https://www.pcgamer.com/lawsuit-claims-valve-is-abusing-its-...

how is it 30% more expensive apps when the play store, ps4 store, xbox store all take the same amount?

Because all of them take a 30% cut (*some exceptions to certain apps apply)

https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/10/07/report-steams-30-cut...

What I mean is, if Apple's cut was lesser / we had different app stores, prices could potentially be up to 30% lesser.

They'd be cutting themselves out of other stores if they did that. Stores like Steam require that your game is sold at the same price across all stores otherwise it will be removed from Steam.

That is also a bad monopolistic practice we should be against. Apple isn't the only culprit.

Ahh so harm now is spending any money. I was harmed by my grocery store for charging me 1.50 for milk!

30% is more than fair. People spend more money on the App Store than competitors. Developers want access to that. it shouldn't be free.

This is dumb. I never said "any" money, you're just trying to justify your own opinion.

Yes people spend more on the App Store and if the dev wants to use it to market their app they should go ahead and pay that 30%.

However if the devs dont want to access that, and/or consumers want to pay lesser, they should have the option to download from elsewhere.

Even assuming the only reason App Store revenue is that high is because of the store itself, we shouldn't treat the policies as one indivisible work set in stone.

You can have a properly curated store with 10% fees, for example. And you can block malware without blocking alternative web browsers or game streaming apps.

The policies are more than fair.

People on HN get mad when others make money, but they never get mad when they want to make money too.

> You can have a properly curated store with 10% fees, for example. And you can block malware without blocking alternative web browsers or game streaming apps.

It becomes much more difficult and time consuming, and why 10%? The service is unbelievable - it provides great access to a platform and its high spending users. That is worth more than 10%.

> The policies are more than fair.

More than fair? Okay then, tell me what percent is fair.

> People on HN get mad when others make money, but they never get mad when they want to make money too.

The problem is not that they make money, it's that they are engineering a lack of competition in order to keep their prices arbitrarily high.

> It becomes much more difficult and time consuming, and why 10%? The service is unbelievable - it provides great access to a platform and its high spending users. That is worth more than 10%.

Charging a significant percentage for "providing access to users" is rent-seeking. That's not a good thing.

There is no choice being taken away - you don't have a choice at this point - you must use "the" App Store whether you like it or not.

Maybe the Apple App Store can get it's shit together and present a less hostile environment so these companies are able/willing to distribute on the Apple App Store again, and then you'll actually have a choice.

You make that choice when you buy the phone.

You are not buying an iPhone and the software separately. It is one product. The App Store is the product.

No, you buy the phone hardware and a license to use iOS. The App Store is a service provided by Apple that you should have a choice to use or not. The Apple Tax is what you're 'buying' from Apple when using the App Store service.

This is not accurate. I never "buy" a license explicitly. I buy the phone explicitly.

I can't "buy" iOS and put it on any phone. The phone and software are inextricably linked. It is one product.

> The App Store is a service provided by Apple that you should have a choice to use or not. The Apple Tax is what you're 'buying' from Apple when using the App Store service.

You can extend this to any level. This is like complaining "I don't want to use Amazon to buy things on Amazon.com"

In both cases, I as the user, have no choice:

1. Apple wins = I have no choice but to use the app store.

2. Epic wins = I have no choice but to install multiple different app stores to run many different apps.

I'd argue you have less choice if Epic wins as you as the user no longer have the choice to choose a walled garden (iOS) vs open platform (Android).

If Epic wins, you can still use the walled garden. I don't see your loss of choice.

My understanding and usage of a "walled garden" is to mean a closed ecosystem. By definition it no longer exists if Epic wins.

Continuing the analogy: Some people want a walled garden to keep their kids safe, but your suggesting to remove the walls and just advice kids to stay on the lawn instead.

By that logic I have no choice but to buy an iPhone to run many different apps because they're not available on Android.

I recognize the fact that the argument is exactly the same as for not opening up the appstore in the first place. But the importance and scope of it is less if the store is open.

Now you can chose to buy en expensive device (or you did in the past and can't de-apple due to lock-in) or not. In the future you could chose not to buy photoshop because of their insistence on their app store dependency.

I think having a more granular choice is good. Like I said, that UX hit, imo, is less important than the monopolistic behavior displayed now:

The apple "tax" (including the rules around links to donation pages and similar nonsense). Curation that cannot be overridden by end-users. Unpredictable policy changes for developers. 1st party appropriation of successful independent applications. Unfair competing (think browser javascript engines).

I think bad UX is less important than those things listed above, that's the argument.

I think EA created a game store because it feels parasitic that Valve could take 30% of your sells, why not make your own store and keep the 30% .

What I would do is force EA to put their games on all stores, then on their own store they can give you a 25% discount because they don't have to pay the tax. Then people could decide if they want store A, B or C version.

If the store tax would be low enough there would not be such a pressure from the giant publishers to avoid the store, as a person that don't like giants I hope that this giants fighting each other will benefit us by breaking the monopolies and ensuring that all stores will play by fair rules and respect all consumer rights.

It's not parasitic of Valve, though. Valve created the storefront and platform that has all of those customers baked into it. EA is not just paying 30% for the privilege of selling their game, they're paying for the customer base that they haven't had to work to establish on that platform.

I will disagree, you can see the entitlement of users that demand the game,movie or payment system must be exactly his preferred one. Though for Valve you can compete with them (but people hate it but I think they don't hate the actual competition but the shitty implementation of the stores and the fact this game launcher most of the time must be run in background ) BUT with Apple you can't compete, they have up to 50% market share in some countries and if you are a business half of your existing customers(that you earned fairly and were not gifted by Apple to you) will ask for an iOS app and now you either give a bad experience to your customer or you pay the tax.

About the argument that Apple,Valve gives you access to many users, sure that should be price correctly, developers could pay for getting promoted on the first page of the store, but Apple,Google should not get a cut for promoting my app if the user installed it starting from my own website.

It isn't entitlement for consumers to look at a company saying "you can buy this game, but only on our own launcher/storefront" and say "okay, then I won't buy it". Users don't like juggling Steam, Origin, Uplay, Epic, and whatever other launchers/storefronts. If publishers feel the additional sales are important, they can make it available through Steam.

I don't think there is any sane user that will say something as stupid like "I wish Cool Game 3 would be only on Origin(or only on Steam). So we should try to get most games on all stores not try to get them only on our facorite store.

The issue with the launchers is indeed a problem, the solution is to have the games run without the shitty launcher. So if you want to buy and play a game you can open your browser, find the best deal, buy the game and if you want do a direct download and play, or use a launcher, install the game then kill the launcher and play the game. This is the GOG model, you don't need the launcher.

So IMO the launcher issue should be addressed by fixing it, not by praying that there will be no competition in future so only my favorite launcher will exist.

I'm not sure what you're arguing because it sounds like you agree with the parent. The games should be available on Origin and Steam and people should be able to choose the one they want. That's the whole issue, though.

Case in point, I bought DooM Eternal's Collector's Edition. I could not use Steam and had to activate the game through the Bethesda launcher. I can add the game to my Steam library as an "external" game but I can't play with my list of Steam friends or use the matchmaking tools built into Steam. I had to use Bethesda's platform and we, essentially, had to re-do all the connections and friends lists to duplicate them in Bethesda. I would have preferred not to do that. You may even be able to do that now but it was not an option at launch.

Sorry If I was not clear, I see some people commenting that they like Steam so Epic, Origin and others are evil and should not exists. My point is that we should wish they exist and compete and that games would be available on all of them so you can chose and would also be great if the launchers would also be optional like GOG.

Also today there are many examples of PC players playing together with console players so there is no technical reason why someone that uses Steam should not be able to play multiplayer game with someone that bought on GOG or PlayStation Store.

>there is no technical reason why someone that uses Steam should not be able to play multiplayer game with someone that bought on GOG or PlayStation Store.

Exactly. Yet these limitations exist. That's why people should vote with their wallets and not support games that artificially limit this and why, if people want phones that don't have walled gardens, they shouldn't buy an Apple product.

But still countries or EU are in their right to demands Apple to do stuff even if free market fanboys don't like it, there are many examples where banks,telecom, fuel or tech giants were forced to do stuff they did not like.

I agree people should vote with their money but also not ignore the actual voting, and demand that we pass laws in favor of the people. Americans could keep their locked iPhones and EU could have a law where a user would have the freedom to get his device rooted.

>BUT with Apple you can't compete, they have up to 50% market share in some countries

That statement isn't true no matter how you slice it. Apple's largest competitor is Google so the idea that you can't compete with Apple is nonsense. And what countries does Apple have a 50% market share in?

US, mobile market , ask Apple fanbous about app sales and they will proudly tell you how Apple stores has more sales. Ask same guys about monopoly and they will then count the entire world, count all computers and dumb-phones and pretend Apple is the little guy.

I fucking can't compete with Apple, say I am a bank/store/club and my customers(not Apple ones) want a mobile app, how can I give the 50% of my customer my app without having to pay Apple , if I try to sell something or put a link to a page of mine for buying subscriptions or stuff Apple will demand a cut(I know they were forced to be less greedy lately).

1. Sales != market share but that's not relevant. Even a >50% share isn't a monopoly if there are multiple other competitors in the remaining 50%. And I don't think anyone is misrepresenting Apple's position. The word "Monopoly" has a meaning. Apple does not fit that meaning.

2. You can't give your customers an app without paying Apple if your customers are demanding it work for Apple products. That doesn't mean you can't compete. You can still only sell to Android users and other phone users but you have to do so with the understanding of what that means. You're still competing. That's like saying you can't compete with Windows when you only release your app for Linux. That's your choice. You're still competing against Windows.

I know Apple is very dear for many people but let's think different , say 49% of the radios in people homes and cars are made by Huawei and if I want my radio station to work on this radios I need to pay Huawei 30% of my profits and I can only have content approved by Huawei just in case is not respecting the correct values. It is ridiculous right to have a radio or TV device put artificial limits,

Your second point is again invalid, say Apple is blocking my website because I said that they are greedy, this is fine in your opinion because I can still show my site to PC and Android users and you can't even see yet the abuse that is happening, Apple should not decide that they don't like the politics on an app or book and not allow the user the freedom to install it, they can block it from the store sure but the user should have the freedom to use his brain and install what he wants, The same for say a group of developers or musicians that want to compete with Apple products , like the Apple Store, or Apple Music or whatever games they have, it is actually ilegal for Apple to abuse their market share in smartphones to give it's own products an advantage. (yeah actually the law does not say you must have 50% +1 market share)

Both of your analogies are flawed.

1. Huawei, in your example, didn't create the radio station platform. We're not talking about publicly accessible platforms, we're talking about a app platform that Apple created, cultivated, and maintains 100%.

2. Again, this analogy has the same issue. Apple doesn't own the entire internet. If Apple started blocking websites, that would be wrong because those websites existed and continue to exist without Apple. The App Store does not have that same providence and was 100% created by Apple.

No one ever said that you have to have 50% + 1 market share so I don't know where you're getting that from. Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Amazon, Google... all these companies own the marketplaces for their devices. This is not illegal and there is precedent protecting it.

No, you are trying to make it appear that it is physically impossible to run an application on Apple devices without using the store, This is FALSE, see the laptops , you can run applications without using the Apple store or their dev tools. So users should be allowed same fucking freedom on the phones as on the laptops, the only excuses I see are "most iOS users are retards and they will get scammed" or "Apple should have the right to be assholes and abuse their customers if the market allows it and don't dare try to question Apple, even when they make mistakes they are perfect"

I literally never said that so you're lying and/or arguing a straw man here.

The difference is that laptops have always been able to run that stuff. iOS was setup from the beginning to only allow apps from the App Store.

If users want the freedom to install whatever they want on their devices, they can go with Android.

>If users want the freedom to install whatever they want on their devices, they can go with Android.

Why should be this true? Why a law that forbids radio and TV makers to lock their device is good for society but a similar law for phones is less good? What is the benefit? The only benefit is more money for Apple so maybe you love Apple more then people but it makes no sense, sorry.

Again, radio and TV are public utilities. The public paid to create that infrastructure and the technology and resources necessary to support it. It should have a law that forbids people from any kind of limitation since citizens paid for all of that.

Apple is a private company whose shareholders decide what's best based on the fact that they created the infrastructure and technology of their platform and they are the ones spending money and resources to ensure its quality and reliability.

If you want to pass laws to solve this problem, create a National App Store platform and then require companies to allow access to it. Forcing Apple to change their own App Store, though, is wrong. How much I love Apple or how much I love people has nothing to do with it.

And not to put to fine a point on it but you can do whatever you want with your iPhone after you've bought it. You can take it apart, swap out components, repair it yourself, jailbreak it, or whatever you want and Apple can't do anything about it (and won't). You're talking about forcing a company to change its own operations for their platform just because you don't like it or agree with the restrictions they've chosen to place on it. I would be really curious to see if you'd be willing to have a private company force you to do something you don't want to do with your own property or self.

> It is ridiculous right to have a radio or TV device put artificial limits,

I take it you then also demand that Sirius and Comcast broadcast anyone who brings them any old content, then? Everything should public access?

For that matter, terrestrial radio stations also must broadcast the End is Nigh clapboard kooks, too, right?

This is frankly a stupid comparison, I did not ask that Apple put my game, music or books in their store and promote it. I ask that the device can be used without limitations. There were laws that forbid radio devices to be "locked" and there were also laws for phones to also not allow locking them to a specific carrier (the exception was that if you were getting the phone with a discount with a 2 year contract after the 2 years you had the right to unlock your phone for free).

I would appreciate if you try a bit more to make the distinction between Apple Store market and just he hardware(the laptop or phone).

You're the one muddying the waters, here. You keep comparing device restrictions between iPhones and radios when they're completely different. One accesses a public good and the other a private platform.

Let me give you a different examples, bank ATM machines, guess what it is a private object, connected to a private bank, on private property and still that laws (in EU) forced this banks to make the ATMs interoperable and to stop the giant extra taxes when you used a card from bank A on an ATM from bank B.

So probably in your view this is evil, the people forced a private entity to not be a jerk and apply a big tax. Evil or not this is possible, a law can be made to limit the Google/Apple tax and the same law can be made to force side loading or block loot-boxes.

A literal monopoly is not required for something to be illegally anti competitive.

All that has to happen is that a company has significant market power.

And courts have held that 50% of a given geographic area can fall under anti trust laws.

That's completely fine. The current situation already has precedent in courts considering that Sony, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, and many others have exclusive control of their App Stores. Claiming Apple is anti-competitive because of its platform would upend all of these platforms.

s/Valve/Apple/g

Well, the difference is that with Steam EA gets the choice whether they like the "extra marketing" for that price or not. If a customer wants to buy something from EA outside of Steam, EA is permitted to sell it to them without ripping up their Steam distribution channel - which is not the case for Epic/Apple.

Yes it is. Epic is allowed to sell to every other person that's not an iOS user without ripping up their iOS distribution channel too. They chose not to do that, though, and then shot themselves in the foot on top of it to try and stick it to Apple.

Epic could sell to accounts in every other channel without having to pay a cut. In-app purchasing is just too convenient - and as a result, too lucrative.

Uhhh... yes. They could but they don't want to. They want to sell to people on iOS. I wonder why that is?

Yes. Exactly.

Valve is not parasitic because its pimint out it's customers? That a stange argument if I ever heard one.

I could accept this if valve store didn't take 20 seconds to load on an 8-core machine.

It is parasitic, but I think in the bigger scheme of things, Valve is a lesser evil than Epic, which is in itself a lesser evil than Apple. Valve is investing in its own capital as well as the infrastructure for the PC gaming industry at large (Vulkan and driver improvements), whereas Epic has no endgame but to gain market share using bottomless VC pockets. Apple, while a company with some merits, utilizes vertical integration that is overall harmful for user freedom, especially when it comes to the right-to-repair, and is only using its revenue to further remove themselves from the large tech ecosystem and build up the walls of its gated community with their own unique hardware/software.

You and I must have different definitions of parasitic. Apple is providing services to developers and, in exchange is receiving payment for that. Developers shouldn't be able to take advantage of the benefits of the platform without paying for it.

Everything else you said is irrelevant.

Apple provides a hardware thing, users pay for the objects, Developers should pay for the IDEs or compilers if they want to use Apple tools and the user should have the freedom to decide what to put on his piece of hardware,

But sure, if I put my app on the store I should pay for hosting it, for the updates and reviews, I should pay if I want it to be promoted on the store but I should not be forced to say pay Apple a tax for shit like soem subscriptions or books I sell from my app, I should pay Apple for the store services they offer.

Also Sony and Microsoft should not be immune either IMO

>I should not be forced to say pay Apple a tax for shit like soem subscriptions or books I sell from my app

If you're selling them from within the app, you're making use of Apple's payment and subscription infrastructure and the customer base of iOS. Those things are not free.

That is the issue, Apple is abusing it's power but not letting you even put a shitty link to your website if on that website you were selling stuff.

I agree if you as a customer pay with Apple payment system Apple should charge you a fee, but you as a user should have the freedom to see a link to a product page.

Check all the rule changes Apple were forced to do, they reducing the tax and reducing the scope when to apply it, the Apple fans were sure that Apple was perfect before this changes and for some reason Apple changed it's perfection now and can it be more perfect??? Was the last change the last one, can't Apple be even more perfect then more perfect and offer the user the freedom that they do not deserve??

The changes in policy show that Apple was not in the right and it is not perfect and there is a large chance that the last changes were not enough and they need to slowly give up their control , but squeze as much money as possible because "this is the way"

>Apple is abusing it's power but not letting you even put a shitty link to your website if on that website you were selling stuff.

That's a load of horseshit. You can't walk in to a Target and post an advertisement saying that the Walmart down the street or "Mom and Pop's General Store" sell the same items for cheaper or that they have x, y, z. Apple owns their App Store. It functions just like a regular store and they're allowed to decide what they want to allow on their store and what they don't.

Your position on this is wrong because it's based on assumptions you're making that are inaccurate. This a private platform. They're not abusing their power simply by operating their store and not allowing others to advertise their own outside goods inside of it.

I am asking for side loading.

There is an infinite difference with a physical Store, Apple and Google combined control the market where your local store might control a small area (in my little village there are at least 3 stores so there is more competition then in mobile market)

Apple does provide services but.yoj cannot opt out. It is by definition rent seeking.

It is not. You can opt out of using the services by not using them.

You can now buy EA games on Steam though.

EA's Origin client also knows which EA games you have that were bought on Steam as well.

I guess here is less about your choice as a consumer, but the choice of the publisher

You have a similar choice like not using apps on App Store 2

You could always just not play Game A?

You never had a choice with Apple. That is their business model. You choose or don't choose to work in that model. Epic Games is pathetic.

>The problem is the choice is taken away from you though

All Apple has to do is compromise on the 30% number. They've taken it to the extreme and demanded 30% of everything, 30% of subscriptions, 30% of every dollar.

It's outrageous and developers who are perfectly capable of either self-hosting or finding a solution for cheaper than 30% OF ALL REVENUE deserve to keep the 25% of that revenue that is pure profit to Apple.

Apple created this situation for themselves and they will have to give up sooner or later.

Steam makes plenty of concessions for the 30% number and now allows basically pass-through games so that a much more wide variety of titles can appear there even if they aren't paying a full tax to the storefront for appearing.

I mean, could you imagine a world where Wal-Mart was the only store your Toyota car was allowed to drive to, and Wal-Mart charged their suppliers 30% of all revenue to appear on the shelves?

What is happening with the App Store monopoly is truly outrageous, it's an unimaginable amount. 30% is why Apple is going to lose here. If they were willing to be reasonable, it wouldn't get to this point.

how is the app store any different them the play/ps4/xbox store which also take 30% cut?

> You install those yourself you know. I'd rather have a choice than not.

yes and No. When some games are "exclusives" to a certain store, if you want to play such games you end up having to install every store in existence which is not very consumer friendly. It would be better for stores to have every game possible, just like at the time of good old physical retail. It's not like there were Wallmart exclusive games, right?

But to be fair, devs are almost as much to blame as store owners for this situation.

> It's not like there were Wallmart exclusive games, right?

Either you’re younger than me or you’ve forgotten about the pre-order content exclusives from different stores.

If physical retailers had the marketshare that online distribution now has I’m sure they would have done exclusive games. If you have smaller game devs and no cost of disc manufacturing (ie download only) its easier to make exclusivity deals.

> Either you’re younger than me or you’ve forgotten about the pre-order content exclusives from different stores.

This has basically no bearing to the actual game access. While now, buying in a certain store means a very limited selection of titles, which is unlike anything ever experienced in physical retail. So, bad analogy.

Yes, makes my blood boil that Stadia is hogging the rights to stream Rockstar games, but you can't import them. So even though I have purchased them, I need to buy them again.

I highly doubt that devs are the ones who make the decision to put everything behind the walled garden of an entirely separate app store. Although I would agree that devs do shoulder some of the blame for relying on electron and other such technologies for building these things.

> who make the decision to put everything behind the walled garden of an entirely separate app store

Devs or Publishers, but devs can also self-publish when they are indies anyway. Epic Store is famously buying timed exclusives - we have seen ShenMue 3 for example exclusive for one year on EGS depiste a kickstarter campaign where they promised a release on Steam on Day 1. Devs/Publishers were clearly to blame there: they decided to ignore their supporters and go for the big bag of Epic money instead.

> It's not like there were Wallmart exclusive games, right?

It doesn't matter too much, but there actually have been... Nintendo's Chibi-Robo Park Patrol was a WalMart exclusive game in the US. (in 2007)

A big problem with the comparison between big box stores and app stores regarding exclusives is: I can go to Walmart, buy my “Walmart Exclusive(tm)”, and then not go back. Chibi-Robo! doesn’t require I play in Walmart, and, in fact, will run just fine on my DS everywhere. OTOH, for an Epic exclusive, I can’t buy (read: license) the game and then never use the Epic launcher. Because every time I want to play “Epic Exclusive(tm) #9001”, I need to have the Epic Store running.

> When some games are "exclusives" to a certain store, if you want to play such games you end up having to install every store in existence

Then don't! You don't need that game. If you and other gamers want to make a stand against the crazy number of stores just refuse to install them. Unless you do that the store owners know your complaints aren't going to amount to a thing.

> Then don't! You don't need that game

I think you fail to understand conflicting interests. Devs and Publishers do everything to hype up game releases, and Store Owners buy exclusivity to bring people to their platforms. Even if I restrict my own choice, my vote ultimately does not matter: these perverse incentives are at play, and make life suck for every end user involved.

I find the hassle of having multiple game launchers installed to be pretty insignificant. In exchange, developers have more freedom regarding where they're willing to publish, and have the opportunity of exclusive deals that bring in more money and could reasonably be put back into the content of a game.

Also, as players we occasionally get games at much lower costs than normal (sometimes even free), which seems to be a benefit we wouldn't get to the same extent if multiple storefronts weren't competing.

Just having that choice though includes a cost. When everyone is forced onto the app store, Apple can censor as you point out, it can demand high percentages on in app transactions, and plenty of other negative things. But it can also demand certain behavior standards, easily deplatform people who abuse (in Apple's eyes) things like tracking (like when they revoked Facebook's cert in 2019), etc.

The minute you open up to multiple stores, much of that control is gone or reduced. Or at least limited. After all Apple also nuked Zoom's webserver off all OS X boxes in 2019 so I'm sure they could kill things via iOS updates.

As a more mundane issue, if now content is segregated across N store fronts, that's now N passwords I need to track, N potential places that my credit card can be stolen from, N stores I need up install, log into, and download apps from when I get a new iOS device, etc. I as a user do lose a lot of quality of life tweaks the moment balkanization of store fronts can occur. I as a consumer do feel I benefit from Apple being able to tell app providers "We have about 40% of the market on our devices and if you want to interact with them, it's our way or the highway. So if you want to sell to them, you will meet or exceed these standards, there are no other options."

Ideally this standard setting would be set by a neutral entity like say a government and applied equally across all personal devices, but US privacy regulations are a joke so basically I'm stuck hoping that Apple continues to see value in branding themselves as the more secure and private phone (I'm suddenly nostalgic for Blackberry).

You always have the recourse of buying an Android and side loading if you want total freedom.

> I'd rather have a choice than not.

You don't have a choice with many of them. Some publishers force you to use a particular store.

It's not only about which app gets installed. It's also who is tracking what you own. If tomorrow EA decides that the store should be gone, what happens to all the money you spent on their store? Of course, a similar argument could be made for Apple's own store, but they have more incentives to keep that up.

If purchased assets would be treated like phone numbers that you can port to another carrier, then that would be great. Steam supports that (obviously just to 'import' games, not to 'export').

You won't have a choice when some critical service you use moves to a third party app store in order to avoid Apple's new privacy policy.

Wouldn’t Apple just ban you from installing the Porn Store? Or do you think Epic will make them allow any and all alternative app stores?

If Apple allows you to install alternative app stores, I assume that means they allow you to "side load" apps. If that's the case, Apple can't really ban you from installing anything.

So they would be unable to ban the Pirate Bay Store, the Scamcoin Drug Store, the Cracked Epic Games Store, the Tiananmen 1989 Store?

They could, of course, ban third-party stores from their own app distribution platforms. Otherwise, I imagine not, in the same way that most other general purpose operating systems cannot "ban" things like that. I suppose they could require all apps to be signed and subject to remote signature verification before the OS lets you install them.

This sort of banning is the very thing Epic appears to be trying to prevent. I would guess their legal endgame is to forbid anyone but government agencies impending a store for any reason. Once this is in place there will be no legal way prevent Apple from securing devices from bad actors in the store space.

Edit: In this scenario I am guessing it will not be Apple, but the government who will need to step in and sell store licenses to prevent illegal content... so yay for bribed big government over authoritarian Apple.

>I'd rather have a choice than not.

Then get an Android if you like that experience?

Have you looked into PWAs? Sounds like they'd fit your use case.

I'd rather Amazon, EA, Blizzard & cie have no choice.

Freedom of choice is an illusion, with the advance of megacorporations, even so. They will choose for you.

> It'd be nice if I can choose what I want to see.

Have I got news for you?! You can choose exactly what you want to see.

There's a very cool "App Store" on your iPhone right now. Somebody in marketing named it "Safari" -- IKR! pfft; -- Safari is one of the best App Stores out there. It has this neat interface called "URLs" where you "search" for Apps and apparently they run on this HTML5 voodoo magic; which is a set of open standards, run by the open committees (W3C); and here's the best part -- JavaScript! Yes! No more pesky Xcode tooling and Objective C and Swift and C++. Bleh!

You can even hit the share button then 'add to home screen' if you want easy access to the site without the URL bar (at least for PWAs; regular sites will just open a safari tab).

I know this is a joke comment, but isn’t JavaScript supposed to be the joke language here on HN, not Objective-C/Swift?

> My gaming computer is already filled with like 8 different app stores each completely different then the other and a variety of privacy/security issues on each.

Do you honestly think this is a worse scenario than having to buy all of your apps/games through Microsoft's app store? Can you imagine using macOS without homebrew because everything has to come from Apple's app store? Can you imagine using Ubuntu without apt because everything has to come from the Canonical's software center? Even Android is made slightly more tolerable by the existence of F-Droid.

Being able to use your preferred software manager/store for everything would be nice, but I don't know of any platform that lets you do that. You either have to deal with multiple software managers and use your preferred one as much as possible, or you're stuck with whatever the platform forces on you. I definitely prefer the former.

Contrarily, MSFT being the one to approve all code would be good in that it would destroy the current Windows code signing racket that only six companies have access to[0].

0: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/da...

(thankfully MSFT is indeed working on their own first-party code signing solution https://youtu.be/Wi-4WdpKm5E)

> Can you imagine using macOS without homebrew because everything has to come from Apple's app store?

No, because I would have never used macOS if there were limitations that prevented me from being able to do my job. And imagining a world where Apple restricted macOS in such a way is a rather unlikely hypothetical.

The big difference is that iOS has _never_ had these capabilities. Many people have opted into the current model of iOS because they don't consider it a general purpose computing device - they consider it a phone, an iPod, an internet browser, or an angry birds player.

> Can you imagine using Ubuntu without apt because everything has to come from the Canonical's software center?

No, for the same reason. Their customer base would refuse to upgrade, servers would be migrated off, etc.

A closer equivalent there to the current game app stores would be always-on licensing servers which used physical dongles - the game stores are running basically as licensing servers. And professionals _hated_ these. Even software-based licensing servers over the LAN is much less common in professional software these days.

> A closer equivalent there to the current game app stores would be always-on licensing servers which used physical dongles - the game stores are running basically as licensing servers. And professionals _hated_ these. Even software-based licensing servers over the LAN is much less common in professional software these days.

While it's true that apps for PC game stores often double as DRM, I don't think that's relevant to a discussion of whether or not Apple should be compelled to allow for third-party app distribution platforms and the "side loading" of apps on iOS.

After all, there is little stopping you from implementing always-on DRM on an iOS app. You'd just have to implement it in the app directly, which is how PC games used to do it before modern platforms became popular. The rise of those platforms (Steam in particular) had a lot to do with the downfall of oft-maligned DRM solutions like SecuROM. Software-embedded DRM tech like Denuvo are still a blight on PC gaming, but they're at least less common than they once were.

> everything has to come from Apple’s app store?

See SetApp for MacOS and for iOS:

- https://setapp.com/

- https://setapp.com/how-it-works

Absolutely yes. As a user, I really wish Microsoft required the use of their store. Having a single place to go is a lot easier

Same here. As a user, I would rather have direct download/installation, aka sideloading. But absent that, I would much prefer to have all my applciations available on one store. Having to download multiple stores in order to get multiple applications is pretty much the worst outcome.

What you are wishing for though is the death of computing.

Maybe you'd be interested in joining the dozens of other Windows 10 S users.

Quibble: I cannot stand the Microsoft store because I cannot simply delete the apps or even understand why they are there even after I told it to uninstall. I also cannot easily move apps between drives or even control which drive something is installed on sometimes. Steam is the best this way, IMO.

That's actually one thing I quite liked about it - there's some option to just switch an app from one drive to another, and it's one of the only things I've found in Windows which actually "just works"

What you want is Windows 10 S mode.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/s-mode

Only works if it's enforced for all users though. Having all the Windows apps in the single official store is really the only possible way for it to function

Obviously never going to happen, but it'd be a much nicer ecosystem if it did work that way

Before Apple blessed us with it's ground breaking technology to restrict the software you are allowed to have on your own device we did just fine getting software on our devices using a file system and the internet.

You may have but the rest of the world did so with a lot of hand-wringing and a boatload of viruses, toolbars, malware, and everything else.

As someone who has worked in IT and in tech support, I get and agree with what Apple has done.

FYI, the iOS sandboxing model is the innovation behind the security of iOS. It is separate from the notion of having an app store. Apps would be just as restricted from accessing your data and modifying the OS as they are through their own store.

So this argument is wrong but will be peddled by Apple for sure. PC operating systems had viruses because of the non-restrictive, unsandboxed access their APIs gave to every app.

1. Sandboxing might help prevent certain types of attacks but the App Store review process goes above and beyond simple API restrictions and imposes rules on how you're allowed to use those APIs to prevent abuse of privacy. For example: just because I grant an app access to my contacts/photos for a legitimate purpose doesn't mean I want that company to exfiltrate that data and sell it to a third party. Sandboxing won't help you there.

2. Sandboxing is no panacea as we've seen from multiple Android malware attacks that abuse system vulnerabilities to break out of the sandbox. You're also underestimating the amount of damage that can be done even within the sandbox:

- The CryCryptor ransomware abuses file access APIs to encrypt photos and videos on external storage and hold them hostage. (https://threatpost.com/emerging-ransomware-photos-videos-and...)

- The DEFENSOR ID banking trojan abuses accessibility APIs to steal login credentials, text messages, and 2FA codes. (https://www.welivesecurity.com/2020/05/22/insidious-android-...)

Objective-C based dynamic dispatch allows you to call private, internal APIs from your code effectively bypassing the iOS sandbox.

App Store review process specifically checks for this.

It is one of the innovations behind the security. A big piece of the security posture is the App Store review process which specifically checks to make sure apps are following the sandbox model. That wouldn't exist outside of that and apps could definitely bypass the sandbox.

Part of the Apple sandboxing model is to run a check on binaries to make sure internal APIs are not being abused, or other shenanigans. I would not trust the Apple sandbox at all, especially with the privacy in place which prevents any sort of auditing of what people are doing to their devices.

App store are good, not argument. The inability of side loading beside the store is what is being critisized.

That's literally a major reason why people buy Apple products, though. If you can't sideload things, there's literally no chance of your phone being compromised by those things.

Is part of your reasoning also the fact that devs can't even mention in their apps that they have a website that users can buy their subscription from?

No but that's a reasonable restriction considering that apps would still benefit from the App Store ecosystem but would be able to circumvent the requirements of it.

Wait, what? You argued that a single app store makes apple devices safer. How does not allowing devs to sell subscriptions on their website help with this arguable safety? Don't bullshit.

> How does not allowing devs to sell subscriptions on their website help with this arguable safety?

By making sure the user has a single channel for dealing with payments and complaints.

Deliveroo did an update their software that wiped out my login settings. They didn't support apple login, so I lost access to my account. They won't recover my email because of a special character in it, and so they continued to charge me for their "plus" service every month, and avoided any emails I tried to send asking to stop (asking me to "log in" to change my payment settings!).

Requiring apps use Apple's channel would have protected me from that experience.

> Don't bullshit.

If you're not trying to be persuaded, why are you arguing?

I'm not bullshitting and I'll use myself as an example. I love the fact that any payments on iOS go through Apple Pay. If anything ever happens to my payment or contact info, I know who to blame. If every developer is able to process transactions and collect my personal info, then every developer is a vector for my payment or account information getting out to the world. I don't know what they do with my info, I don't know who they sell my data to. With Apple, I know the answers to all those questions.

See that's the thing. Apple does NOT prevent developers from taking payment anywhere else, it just prevents developers from advertising it on their Apple app. How is that making the iOS any safer?

You can't make the purchase through the app. Therefore there's no way for fraudulent transactions to be processed through the app. Refunds are done by Apple, subscriptions are done via Apple, and no mention of any external payments are made within the app. That makes iOS safer.

And yet the guy making bogus app clones with subscriptions makes millions from the App Store (and Apple takes its cut).

What does that have to do with anything? That's still not malware.

> That's literally a major reason why people buy Apple products, though. If you can't sideload things, there's literally no chance of your phone being compromised by those things.

False. People who don't want to take risk simply don't sideload, most people don't know how to anyways even on android - having the /option/ to do so is not a negative.

Android allows is and there's nearly no malware https://duo.com/decipher/google-data-shows-tiny-fraction-of-...

It's not false. We already went through this when people first learned you could jailbreak an iPhone. People don't know the risks involved with sideloading. They just see that some jerk has "video wallpaper" and "custom icons" on their iOS and they want that so they find someone to jailbreak and install those apps without ever recognizing that they have compromised their device. That's literally the entire point here.

Also, that's a very naive position if you're just going to go by that article. That only covers "known" malware and only Android phones that they have been able to actually register has having these apps installed. Malware is not going to phone home to Google. It's going to do it's damndest to hide itself.

Side note: wtf kind of word is damndest? I always thought it was damnest.

> If you can't sideload things

Ok, and if you simply had a setting that you could turn on, that make it so your phone couldn't side load, then you still get what you want.

Everyone wins, by simply giving you the option to turn off side loading, but letting others choose to do so if they want to.

No, everyone doesn't win because that exact situation has already been used before by Windows with UAC and Android with developer mode and malware/virus peddlers just started to include instructions on how to bypass those things.

Why are you advocating for the lowest common denominator among humans? Are you sure you really want to be doing that?

If that's the case, take away all the knives, require people to get a license to have kids, don't let them drive cars, take away all of the dangerous things in life so that everybody can be secure. It's just a ridiculous argument to say that we must have only this one particular app store to keep everybody safe. There are a lot of solutions to this. I don't care if I have to sign a written agreement to allow me to sideload things, just give me a way to do it.

People who trade liberty for security are absolutely one of the biggest problems in this world. You should be advocating for people to smarten up instead. Otherwise you're going to wake up one day and you're not going to be able to make a move without asking for big brothers permission.

And, if you say that people have a choice to go on Android well, then they have a choice already don't they? Did the existence of that choice automatically screw the entirety of society? No it did not. So there's no problem with also giving them a choice to sideload.

You're acting like everybody will immediately flip the switch to sideload things. They already made a good choice by going on an iPhone, why are you discounting that people won't also make other good choices? You want people to throw out the baby with the bathwater. If I want to sideload one damn thing that doesn't mean I want to give up the comfort and security of the rest of my iPhone ecosystem.

>Why are you advocating for the lowest common denominator among humans?

That's awfully reductionist of you and absolutely not what I'm doing. I'm simply arguing that people saying "no one wants this" are wrong because I am a person that wants this. I do not want my family or friends, who reach out to me for support with their computers and phones, to be able to install and sideload apps.

I've been through these situations already and, yes, while a lot of people will be fine and can sideload without issues, there are just as many who mess everything up and waste my time when I have to restore everything without losing their data. These are not tech savvy people and they don't understand the risks.

Additionally, yes... people have the choice to go Android where they can sideload. That's the choice. Apple or Android. There is no other choice and I'm fine with that and actively support it.

> That's awfully reductionist of you...

That's rich, considering that you're arguing that offering people an option will somehow ruin the entire ecosystem for you and make your support job more difficult.

> I do not want my family or friends, who reach out to me for support with their computers and phones, to be able to install and sideload apps.

So, tell them not to. Done. If they listen to you - no problem. If they don't and you continue to waste your time helping them, that's completely on you.

If a man fails to learn from you how to fish, it's not very wise to prevent everybody else from fishing.

> That's the choice. Apple or Android. There is no other choice...

There will be, so don't get too comfortable with the status quo. Apple's control is so tight right now that there's only one direction that things can go and I'm looking forward to that as an iPhone user and a developer who would like to simply put some custom programs onto a device that I own without a major hassle.

Currently, my best option is https://altstore.io/ and as you can see from that, people are working on this outside of Apple so even if Apple isn't forced to open up like I am betting, we'll get there eventually.

What are you gonna do if someone in your family installs AltStore? You'll tell them not to or you can't support them - same with sideloading. So, I'm sorry, but your argument really holds no weight with me.

>your argument really holds no weight with me.

It doesn't need to. I'm not trying to change your mind. I'm explaining to you why some people prefer the option to use an ecosystem that has a walled garden vs. one that doesn't. Unfortunately for you, the majority of people must agree and be ok with the walled gardens provided by Apple because they continue to buy the products.

If people wanted the freedom you're describing, they'd buy an Android phone. If they by an Apple phone, it's because they're ok with that not being an option and some, like me, not only don't mind but actively prefer that.

> Unfortunately for you, the majority of people must agree and be ok with the walled gardens

I am sure that many people would be fine with being given the voluntary option of turning the switch on, to side load if they choose to do so though.

And you have no significant evidence that if many people were given the option to buy a perfectly identical Iphone, that simply was easier to jailbreak, that people would automatically choose the locked down version.

You have evidence of people prefering iphones over android. But you have no evidence about if someone was offered two otherwise identical Iphone, that people would always choose to not even have the option of switching the jail break switch if it were easy.

The obvious solution would be to give people the option of getting access to the easy to jailbrake iphones and seeing what they would prefer.

That's irrelevant. Apple doesn't offer that option so discussing something that doesn't exist right now makes no sense.

> Apple doesn't offer that option so discussing something that doesn't exist right now makes no sense

It is relevant because I think that a lot of people would want this option, and this would solve the issue by allowing people to voluntarily choose this.

That's pretty much what the whole thread is discussing?

> I'm not trying to change your mind.

You entered a lot of comments in this thread when one comment could have sufficed to get your message across. So you'll have to excuse me if I remain unconvinced of your motivation.

> Unfortunately for you, the majority of people must agree and be ok with the walled gardens provided by Apple because they continue to buy the products.

That's patently false. As I mentioned earlier, I myself buy iPhones and iPads despite the fact that I'm not okay with the walled garden as the sole method of loading software. I've also seen many, many people in this thread and in threads past express my same views. Heck, you can see it everywhere even among non-programming hangouts like reddit, 9gag, etc. There's a difference between begrudgingly accepting some sad state of affairs and actively pursuing it.

> If people wanted the freedom you're describing, they'd buy an Android phone.

That's better stated as "If the only thing people wanted was freedom of software sources, they'd buy a particular Android model and brand of phone that allows them that freedom." In other words, you're grossly oversimplifying the problem. As with all things, there's usually a multitude of competing desires driving someones choices. For the masses, software freedom doesn't even enter their minds. Instead, they decide based on their susceptibility to marketing, their financial means (price), what their friends are using, what they're used to and so on.

Luckily for me, the masses don't decide on this. Just like in Banking, Finance, Health and other industries that widely affect the common man - the common man doesn't decide the rules for those industries either. The people working in it do - and I'm one of the people working in it. Do you think common people cared that Microsoft was bundling Internet Explorer with Windows? Not really, not outside of Slashdot in that day - Netscape, Oracle and other affected companies got the ball rolling on that one. Even a small group of Linux users were able to push for getting refunds from OEMs on Windows bundled with their PCs.

With iPhones approaching 50% general market share in the US and 80-90% of the youth market in the US gravitating towards iPhones (which will cause the general market share to keep rising) - the writing is on the wall. They're going to be forced to open up somehow. The only question is what form that is going to take and where (EU/US/Asia). Apple will follow the laws of the land and the law is a constantly changing battleground, especially for a new-ish field such as ours.

Not sure why you're downvoted b/c FB was already caught doing something similar with enterprise certs.

https://www.theregister.com/2019/01/30/facebook_apple_enterp...

When the next Matrix or whatever service gets taken off the app store for hate speech on decentralized servers, I'll be grateful for a way to sideload if this goes through.

As it is, I have to trust Apple to "not be evil", something Google certainly failed at.

Imagine how much safer it would be if you got rid of the App Store and weren't allowed to install any third party software.

Thats like claiming Isaak newton was a great scientist because he stayed a virgin.

People buy iPhones and tolerate lack of sideloading.

If you’re going to make that claim, you’ll need to back it up with literally any evidence or even anecdote.

I buy iPhone because it is basically the only reliable computer I own, and a single, reputable source of software is a big part of that. Not being extorted into installing Steam is a huge part of that.

No, I didn’t _really_ have a choice to install Steam and I fucking hate it, thank you very much.

What? That's a terrible analogy. I don't even understand what point you're trying to make. Those 2 things aren't related. A large percentage of iPhone users buy the device because there are less avenues for issues.

I went into your history and ALL of your comments are for defending Apple on Apple related stories or defending Apple on non-apple related stories. You are clearly an Apple shill. How much are you getting paid?

You might like it or not, but his argument here actually stands.

$0. I'm not an Apple employee and all my comments are not defending Apple. Most of them might be because I only go on HN to discuss programming and Apple.

Interesting, though, that instead of actually arguing any of my points, you want to claim, without any proof, that I'm a shill based on what I like to talk about. Instead of attacking me based on my history, how about actually addressing the points I'm making? Clearly you're unable or unwilling to do so.

Come on, we all remember what it was like going to Source Forge and trying to figure out which download button got you the malware you were actually trying to install. Don't pretend like that was a utopia.

honestly the worst moments of SF have nothing to do with app stores.

with today's operating systems 99.99℅ of the malware of the past would be detected before being downloaded.

truth is vulnerabilities are still being discovered and exploited, even with the app stores

https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-fixes-another-three-ios-...

My desktop is a device for making, exploring, working, tinkering, making mistakes, hoarding. My phone is a device that solves problems or unlocks doors (metaphorically) near-instantly.

I’m tolerant to friction (some) on my “exploratory” device. I’m intolerant to friction on my pocket-tool. The latter must always just work or it is pointless. I’m happy to trade freedom for stability for that use case, and deeply frustrated to make that same trade for the other.

Few thing is not a tradeoff, but allowing sideloading is not one. (Or it is, to apple’s profits)

Do you remember the hardware that existed at the time, the GUI, the usability or non usability. There are two systems, IOS or Android. I really respect Apples rules and appreciate them. They stood their ground and prevented Cell Carriers from loading their phone with CRAP ware that is non-removable. Unlike android and any other flavor of phone OS that has existed. IOS when it came out was a true game changer. Its a very dominant player in the cell phone industry because of it.

that has nothing to do with their abusive store policies, and abusive store policies aren't required for the above.

Yeah what the hell is this person talking about? How do they think software was installed prior to Steam?

yeah! don’t they remember the glory days and freedom of choice to wait in a virtual line on GameSpy to download the bandwidth limited patch from version 1.4 to 1.5 only to realize they’re on 1.2 and there is no delta patch from 1.2 to 1.4 so they can either try again with the full upgrade for 1.x to 1.5 which is about 10x the download size or they can get each incremental patch from 1.2 to 1.3 to 1.4 to 1.5?

come on. there’s a distinct value these app stores add and there is a distinct value in having one for the platform.

the ONLY benefit to this future is Epic gets a larger slice. they will not “pass the benefit down” in some trickle down user freedom economy. they will shove more micro transactions and advertisements into every corner of their marketplace.

Softwares can auto update and hide the process to the user without the need for a store.

I would argue that removing the App Store as a single point of failure for free speech [1][2] would be a pretty big benefit.

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/apple-bans-vpns-from-app-store-in-c... [2] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/pakistan-forced...

You have to realize that saying the app store is a single point of failure for free speech is hyperbolic.

How the hell do you get from "App Store" to "Freedom of Speech"?

Going online to a download website and downloading what ever you want.

There has always been "app stores" if it's tucows download or filehippo or gamespy or what not.

Very few people google "simulation games" and scroll through the pages and pages of google results and go directly to a publishers website and download an exe that they run.

There is and always has been a middleman.

> I can hardly wait to use Amazon App Store to install Amazon and then open up the Epic Game Store to install random game and then open up EA Game Store to install random game and then open up Facebook App Store to install Facebook and then open up the Apple App Store to install the Blizzard App Store to install Hearthstone and then go back to the Apple App Store and update the Blizzard App Store so I can get the latest Hearthstone updates.

This is how life is as a PC gamer and it's.... actually good. Who cares if you need to open multiple stores? That is the smallest possible inconvenience, and in exchange we get an insanely competitive marketplace where consumers are regularly given free games and deep, deep discounts to lure them into competing stores.

Would you prefer every city had one car yard? Is it a major hardship for you to have to go to different car yards for Fords and Nissans?

> This is how life is as a PC gamer and it's.... actually good. Who cares if you need to open multiple stores?

I do. I hate it with passion. Launchers have to be updated, games have to be updated; they all have different UX, work better or worse than the other. Let me have just Steam and regulate Valve so that they don't abuse their position, and I'll be fine thank you.

Imagine hating something so trivial that provides real tangible benefits so much.

it's not trivial? its multiple accounts and multiple things to install and juggle - not everyone has the latest and greatest computer. Not to mention are you 100% sure those stores and your purchases will continue to exist longer than steam ect?

regardless, I hate it too but i really don't care, companies like EA and epic can do whatever they want and i just don't install or play games not on steam or the ps4 stores and move on with my life.

> Not to mention are you 100% sure those stores and your purchases will continue to exist longer than steam ect

This is more of people complaining about DRM and acting like giving Steam a monopoly over the market is a solution. If you're worried about a company going under and you losing your purchases, the solution to that problem is to not tie game access to an account.

People are looking at a clearly inferior system and saying, "it's OK, Valve will do such a good job that I won't notice the flaws."

You don't have a problem with too much store diversity, you have a problem with DRM and the constant need for you to have a good-standing Steam account and a computer running their client in order for you to access any of your games. But Steam is only a solution to your problem if the company never goes out of business, never bans you, never starts doing shady stuff, never gets overshadowed by competitor... those are not safe bets for you to make.

well no, because let's say there is no DRM, and the store does go under, and then your computer explodes and you don't have the terrabyte of games you own backed up somewhere, your SOL at that point?

Like while i trust sony to a degree i don't trust nintendo so all my switch games are hardcopy. I trust steam more then i trust EA/epic and thats on top of the not wanting to deal with multiple stores/ect.

Yes, if the store goes under, and you've never thought to buy a $50 terabyte drive to back up hundreds of dollars worth of games, and you never signed up for an online service like Backblaze that just uploads your entire computer including its program files, then you would have a problem. Presumably, at the point when the store went under and told you that it was no longer going to let you download your games, at that point you might have gone and backed up your games because you had advanced notice, but let's pretend you didn't.

Yes, if you ignored all of that you would have a problem, albeit in this case it would be a problem that was mostly your fault and not the fault of archaic US copyright laws. The point is that without DRM you at least have the option to be responsible and prevent this problem. With DRM, you don't have that option.

> I trust steam more then i trust EA/epic

:shrug: People trusted Kodak and Gamestop too. I'm not worried Steam is going to go under tomorrow, but if something happens where you start to get worried about Steam, tough. You can't do anything about that now. I hope you trust Steam because you don't have an option not to -- no matter what happens in the future or who retires or dies or takes over the company or how the market changes. Your game library is reliant on Steam being perpetually trustworthy for the rest of your life.

> and thats on top of the not wanting to deal with multiple stores/ect.

It's also important to note here that you wouldn't have to deal with multiple stores if you didn't have DRM. You could buy a game from Epic and use a separate client that you preferred to download it. The only reason you can't do that today is because the games are DRM-encumbered and Valve can't legally connect to Epic's servers with your credentials on your behalf and download and run those games for you without breaking the law.

This kind of 'adversarial operability' was commonplace in the computing world before it became legally tenuous for companies to offer those services. There is no reason other than copyright law and a misplaced fervor around the CFAA that Valve couldn't manage your Epic library for you.

> so all my switch games are hardcopy

Partially just a PSA here: there are good reasons to buy hardcopy games but if you haven't rooted your Switch and dumped those cartridges, then they're not actually backed up. You can have an extensive collection of 3DS games right now, but Nintendo doesn't sell a 3DS at this point. The Switch is going to be in an even worse position when it gets retired, because it's DRM-encumbered to the point that emulators won't work unless you dump files from your Switch that you own. You can't set up Yuzu (legally) unless you have a working Switch to get those files from, and Nintendo is definitely going to discontinue selling the Switch at some point.

This is one of the problems of DRM, and people's solution to this problem seems to be "well, I'll just pretend that this can never happen." In a DRM-free world, you can at least try to be responsible. You can take initiative to dump your saves so you don't lose hundreds of hours of Animal Crossing progress and Splatoon data when someone steals your Switch. In the current world you have to either root your console or just shrug your shoulders and try to remind yourself that nothing lasts forever.

This is also a problem that giving one console-maker a monopoly over the entire market would not solve.

It's about as trivial as problems get.

The only tangible benefits it provides are to the publishers.

Regulating Valve would stifle competition. This is the current free market, where we have competing launchers and therefore innovation and price wars.

> just Steam and regulate Valve

Welcome to the world where you can only use government approved software!

Worked for the telephone system for 75 years....

Most iPhone users do not want to open multiple stores. We like and want Apple's curation.

This is why Epic's position is a very difficult anti-trust argument: Apple is aligned with what many customers actually want.

The creation of multiple stores doesn't mean you have to use them...

Just vote with your wallet and stick with that store. Android has a half-dozen stores available, but how many people are using stores outside of the official one?

>This is how life is as a PC gamer and it's.... actually good.

Are you kidding? Because it just takes a look at how bad the EA store is to realize it sucks.

Yeah, you don't use it, but you know who does? every single person playing Sims. You'd be amazed how many "Why does the Sims 4 doesn't work anymore on my mac?" calls I've got...

What's a car yard? I assume based on the context a dealer?

And yes I would love to go to a mall with all the different cars available. Would make it easier to see all available options and pick the best one for me (rather then pick the best one from Ford for me).

> This is how life is as a PC gamer and it's.... actually good.

You just reminded me one of the many reasons I stopped PC gaming and either casual game on mobile or use a console.

most of them you can configure to exit after starting a game too

You mentioned it yourself, most third party developers still use the Google Play Store on Android. The same will be true if the App Store continues to provide a better user experience. You might need to pay a little more for a game from the App Store, but I'm willing to bet most people will pay for the peace of mind. Let people decide whether the Apple tax is worth it or not. Either way, you're going to end up with a more efficient system where end users are paying an Apple Tax that is closer to the cost of running the store.

This does mean that Apple will need to start upping their game by either lowering their fee (which means lower costs for you) or supporting other independent games that deserve attention in the App Store.

Furthermore, iOS is a well designed platform with very tight security restrictions. You don't need the App Store to do that, it's build into the platform.

I recently discovered Playnite, an open source PC game library manager. It connects to all the stores and aggregates them in one place. You can also configure your own emulators for older games, etc. I can now view my DOSBox games and Steam/Origin/Epic games in one place.

https://playnite.link/

There's also Launchbox [https://www.launchbox-app.com/]. You can also get Steam's Big Picture to do something similar, although it might take a little bit of work.

huh, this is super interesting. Thanks for that

Say you had the choice between:

1. Buy game X from Apple's app store for $39.00.

2. Buy game X from X's own app store for $30.00.

Would you install X's app store then? Would you at least want the option of choosing that path?

Except we all know the real option will be to buy game X from X's own app store for $39.00, so the only thing the consumer has gained is extra friction in exchange for the developer pocketing a larger share.

> Except we all know the real option will be to buy game X from X's own app store for $39.00

Why? Epic Store is literally giving games and discount vouchers away so you'd get _on_ they're platform. You somehow imply that there wouldn't be competition between competing services?

Seems a little short-sighted. Epic are not a charity. Discounts are clearly a ploy to capture marketshare from Steam et al... Games/products will always be priced the most the market is willing to pay for it. If just before launch costs drop by half do you really think the price drops by half?

PC gaming has been the most competitive and consumer beneficial software platform by an absurd margin for a long time now. I'm sure we can attribute at least some of this to the freedom of the market?

> consumer beneficial software platform

For people like (excuse my bluntness) us hacker news types sure. I can make a case that for a large chunk of the population this is not true - consoles are popular because people don't want to have to deal with the added complexity that came from "freedom".

If Epic wins, any user who wanted a walled garden (e.g. iOS) rather than open (e.g. Android) will be deprived of that choice. Ultimately, having looked into this quite a bit, I think this boils down to a debate whether the walled garden business model should be legal.

But most people won't be bothered to use other stores (just like most Android users don't use other stores).

The real solution there is forcing digital sales to include a perpetual license to the software independent of the platform. The current digital monopoly culture is against the overwhelming majority of citizens.

It won't be an option.

It will be install Epic store if you want Epic games.

Install uPlay if you want Ubisoft games.

And so on. Oh, and none of those will provide information about tracking and privacy breaches, because that's part of the business model.

I think that having to make that choice in the first place is exactly what most iOS users want to avoid.

Apple could allow you to add additional sources inside the existing store interface. We can already do this with apt and yum on Linux for example. They won't do it though because they want to increase friction to maximize their money. They don't actually care about users.

Optimistically, someone will make a metastore that provides search across all the different stores. Sure, you'll have to sign up for each separately, but that should be a one-time deal. I mean, we kind of had that already before "software" became "apps" - the WWW where any publisher could sell their software on their very own website, free of interference.

Then you end up at step 1, lol, same thing with TV.

Channels are bad and too restrictive -> added cable TV "stores" to buy movies/stuff -> Netflix -> Prime/Hulu/Disney Plus/etc -> App to allow you to search through "channels" -> welcome to TV from the 1990's with the added benefit of millions or channels vs 1000's.

Edit for funniness:

It's like the wheel that took a self-help course on how to reinvent oneself.

This exists actually. There's quite a few of them.

ie: Razer Cortex

You could use Apple sign in! Oh the irony.

Yes, freedom is such an encumbrance. Life is so much easier when someone makes all the decisions for me.</sarcasm>

One of the alternatives is better. No app stores! The world simply doesn't need them and we should be pushing for nothing less than their complete demise.

Takes me back to the days of Warcraft 3 and The Sims on Windows XP. Go to the website, or install from a disk. Launch the game with a desktop icon. No app store needed. Updates are installed when the game is launched. No need to announce to all your friends that you bought a game, no need to have an integrated chat client. Just nothing but the actual game.

why would each of these companies bother creating a new store that requires eng resources, server costs, maintenance, etc. if the total cost was less than Apple's unreasonable fee? doesn't it simply mean that these companies perceive the value of Apple's App Store to be less than the cost?

Why does Facebook want to know what you had for breakfast and mad that Apple is wanting to limit their access to data and share that they are collecting that information?

I'm sure every company already has infrastructure for distributing digital resources over the internet, nothing more is needed unless someone builds a toll road into their platform.

Sure, but I the consumer could give a rats ass about how they perceive the value of the app store.

These app store requirements are ridiculous. An app store is something that should be 'up and running' when a user wants to buy an app, not to serve as the continuous anchor point on a users device to fleece them further. This has really gotten out of hand.

This. The reason app stores suck so much isn't their distribution of apps. They do fine at that, and it would be easy to switch binary distributors.

It's the value-added services that are inexplicably linked that bug me. Why can't I allow push notifications without Google's app store? And why can't I use Google's app store without getting bundled into dozens of other services?

Allowing other app stores isn't going to be very compelling so long as Google and Apple can force you to use their app store if you want access to their value add services like push notifications.

This is a false dichotomy. Something could be set up that allows the current convenience of the Apple app store in a more federated way. The hoops are put there purposefully.

"App Stores" are just synonymous with "content filter".

Perhaps we should just name it such.

So "App Store" becomes "Content Filter".

And you can install any app you want from any URL, unless you have some content filters installed, which will limit what you can install.

No more App Stores.

It is annoying how every PC game company tries to be a social network and persistent advertising daemon. But a launcher is not necessary to keep an app updated. Look at Chrome -- you install it, and it stays up to date. Blizzard could do that for their games and Epic could do that for their games, but they want extra money from putting ads in a launcher. (Actually, they seem to always be "house ads", so they aren't really making money, they're saving money. But at a Fortune 500, saving money is basically the same as making money.)

In-game chat could be XMPP or a more modern alternative, too, and then you wouldn't need a separate IM client for each ecosystem.

Finally, I don't think anyone really dislikes the app stores themselves. They are annoyed that they have to pay a 30% tax. If it were 3%, I doubt anyone would be complaining. Apple took a big gamble by being as restrictive as they are -- if they win, they get free money for doing nothing; if they lose, they get $0. I think history will show that they lose; app developers have caught on. But, I could be wrong.

Aside: Epic Games already uses XMPP according to https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/postmortem-of-...

That's a really good postmortem.

There is a very simple solution - no App Store at all! I can download and install anything I want on my computer. I can use Google or bing or DuckDuckGo or whatever to find it. Why do you need App Store in the first place?

I'd have zero care if I have to 'download' stuff from a website and run it. The entire idea of store/aggregator is ok but the lack of choice to do as I please with the thing I own doesn't sit right.

I hate the fact I have to use Apple TV to watch Servant, Disney+ to watch The Mandalorian, Netflix to watch Stranger Things, and Amazon Prime Video to watch The Boys, and HBO to watch Game of Thrones, and so on. I'd much rather all of those other companies gave Apple a 30% cut of their revenue.

While I 100% agree with the sentiment, I’m not fully following these examples. On my Apple TV device, when using the TV app, TV consolidates all those except Netflix into an overall Up Next. I can watch next episodes directly, from Disney+, Prime, Hulu, AMC+, Apple TV+, even AT&T, without leaving the “TV” app.

Additionally, not just up next, but based on my subscription patterns, content from CBS, Showtime, Starz, AMC+, Epix, HBO, Cinemax, Sundance, Acorn, BritBox, IFC Films, and MUBI, as well as Apple’s TV+ channel, are all browsable without leaving the consolidated TV UI, and do not need an app installed at all.

From your list, Hulu, Disney+, Netflix, and Prime all do need apps installed. I do have to go into these to discover their own algorithmically proposed (personalized) thumbnails. But for day to day watching, the only app needed for each brand you happened to mention (except Netflix) is the TV app, and when searching for a show, shows from all of these (except Netflix) are in the search results.

Unfortunately, there are apps that work on Apple TV that do not play nice with the consolidated view and watch-roll. Some that were well integrated, backed off, most likely having to do with the waterline on viewer measurement / analytics data.

Netflix is the prime offender here. It wasn’t integrated, then it was, then it wasn’t again. They seem to have landed on a (for them) happy medium, where if you have Netflix in your home (top) row of icons on Apple TV’s home screen, “mousing over” (aka selecting w/ remote) the Netflix icon does show you your Continue Watching and Trending Now options, so you can go directly to those without opening the Netflix app itself. But they no longer show up in even the search interface, which probably keeps me subscribing to and watching other sources more than I need to.

To help give a signal to media owners, and to Apple, I systematically un-subscribed through individual apps and subscribed through the fully integrated “Channels” as those channels appeared. This individual statement is lost in statistical noise, sure. But what you describe is clearly better for the home user, and if enough folks do it, they’ll catch on.

I'm confused by your statement. Why should those companies give 30% to Apple? Also, many already do.

Maybe they're being sarcastic? I can't tell.

Funnily enough the new Chromecast with Google TV is a better experience for you than Apple TV. All of the services except Apple TV that you mentioned are searchable and playable from the home screen and Google doesn't have to take 30% of their revenue to make it happen.

I am not sure what the GP is referring to, but the Apple TV does exactly this.

On my Apple TV I can search for shows on HBO, Amazon, ESPN, etc. All of my recently watched shows, regardless of streaming service/channel, show up on the main "TV" page. I can use Siri to search across all services, e.g. if I ask Siri to play The Office it will find it on Peacock and play it directly from there.

The large exception here is Netflix, apparently they don't hook in to the Apple TV API like the rest of these apps do (I imagine it's the same on the Google TV).

Just FYI, Netflix works without any issues on the new Chromecast with Google TV.

It'd be nice if these companies could come to an agreement, but 30% seems to be too high a cut.

Do you have any research why 30% is high and 20% is OK?

I was arguing with someone earlier today about the "sweetheart" deal that Amazon supposedly got from Apple and it cracks me up that we have these situations live in the world and the only company working to make this easier for end users is Apple. The fact that Amazon (and other video services!) can rent out movies within their platform as long as they allow for integration with the Apple TV app is a net benefit to consumers, imo.

Where I want to also see this extending is for the platform that Epic Games has created with the Unreal Engine. Should we be able to load in any skins that we could sell on our own store [- the users could decide to not allow/block them], etc? This would help counter Epic's ability to simply make skins that copy higher detail versions or make them look enough like other mainstream-popular characters, e.g. the skin that by users is called the "John Wick" skin - but it's not called that by Epic, so instead that movie franchise could have created and sold the John Wick skin on all game platforms for users to integrate if they allow [e.g. moving towards the Ready Player One movie].

I wonder what we used to do before we had appstores? That must have been a horrible time. And we didn't have amazon either how did we even shop?

Sorry for the sarcasm, but why do we even need appstores, apart from it being a website to download stuff?

Simple answer: People didn't use computers or phones to do most things. They'd pick up the phone and talk to a human, or they'd go to the physical store, and talk to a human.

Nothing wrong with that, but app stores, among other things, made computers far more accessible for non technical people, to do things like shop from their couch without talking to anyone.

We had people install a thing from whichever site they found, often with a toxic payload because third-party sites gamed results to end up above a company, or via sites that started trusted but were taken over by scamware, and then never updated anything, falling prey to whatever virii were doing the rounds.

People really make it as if it’s a better solution. there are multiple reasons why apple still doesn’t like allowing third party to take control. One reason means that trusting the third party applications means trusting privacy on the sub applications and apple have been trying to be more transparent on every app in their store. Another is how the payment system works. Yes, apple takes a big chunk of money and it may be absurd, but I wouldn’t want applications to end up being like google play apps, where i have to trust the company for not stealing my payments info or using their own payment method to track costumers without apple knowledge. not to mention if the company got cyber attacked and they store my payment information. Opening things up for third party may make things better if you read privacy policies and trust companies that you know are trustworthy, but it takes the privacy and security out of apple hands. Add to that how certain companies will definitely exploit that system, Facebook would probably hide their app inside an appstore to avoid privacy policy being transparent. Apple acting as a middleman for every app in the store isn’t that bad if you consider all that, and i am sure we would see many articles blaming apple if things go bad in a third party app.

If only Apple could, say, permit payments outside of the Apple store for apps installed from the store...

This was the real problem. Apple has to get a cut if you run the app on an Apple-made device and either sell the software or charge money for digital goods at all.

There is only upside for Apple with these restrictions, so I see them continuing to fight this fight with the excuse being "Customer experience, security concerns," etc, where the reality is maintaining the wall and gate in their garden.

Suggesting that iOS should not be more like literally the most vibrant, healthy, popular computing platform ever created (Windows) is borderline delusion.

The Mac is great, but the Mac App Store is garbage. And that's the iOS analogue there. That's because Mac has alternatives; centralized, forced big-tech App Stores don't work in the face of alternatives. The only platforms they have worked on (iOS, lesser degree Android) only work because of the Big Tech monopoly.

What sucks more for consumers: Having to install the Epic Games Store to play Fornite, or not being able to play Fortnite? Those are your two options. You want to believe there's a third option where Big Tech Opoly is allowed to run a centralized draconian app store for perfect user UX. This third option does not exist; its availability over the past decade was a blip destined for the footnotes of history.

Hell, go over to Linux and juggle the multiple package managers and package availability between them. That's the natural state of the world; developers hold the cards, and they'll do what is best for their business. The App Store is fighting against nature, and that fight is always a losing one. Always. There is no third option; its just a matter of time.

It sucks way more to have a new app store per company.

as a user, I WANT a single app store, that is heavily curated.

As a surprise, who do NOT want that ? Companies already pushing garbage on my desktop computer so I can play their games.

> The Mac is great, but the Mac App Store is garbage.

The Mac App Store is garbage and so will be the iOS App Store if Apple are forced to allow alternate stores.

I love the Mac... but it really isn't great for regular (non hacker news) people - unlike iOS I've seen plenty of Macs needing a reinstall

> My gaming computer is already filled with like 8 different app stores

I got around this by simply refusing to install any other stores. If its not on Steam, GoG or Playstation store, I'm simply not buying that game. There are so many games I've still not played and my time is limited, I can live without playing a game that forces me to install another "app store".

It's even worse, a lot of the app stores are going to want to leverage violation so privacy, security, auto-billing etc to generate at least short term margin at expense of trust in overall apple ecosystem.

Right now I'm PRETTY sure I can't get screwed by a random subscription. Having played with some of the others, definitely not true elsewhere.

I've been there too, always used Steam to install the majority of the games I played. Then EA decided to only release Battlefield on Origin, then Ubisoft decided you also needed to install their launcher, now we also have the Epic Games launcher and the Blizzard Launcher (warranted they always had this).

Between each of these launchers they have their own chat platforms, I need to duplicate my friends list between them all and they each have their pros and cons.

It's not great and its frustrating. Clearly Steam had a fantastic solution and was ahead of its time in terms of digital distribution of content.

Why can't we move to a solution like brick and mortar stores where every game is made available at every online store? Then I can choose where I want to download the game from.

I like the grocery store analogy. You can get Kellogs Corn Flakes at any grocery store. You can get General Mills Cheerios at any grocery store. You don't have to make separate trips to the Kellogs store and the General Mills store. There are exclusive store-brand items, for which you do need to go to a specific store, but there's minimal additional cost to do so. You don't need to buy a new car to get from Trader Joes to Wegman's, you can use the same car to go to both.

With app stores the situation is reversed. Exclusives are common, and many quite expensive devices only have one store available. And once you've got an expensive product from the Apple App store on your Apple device, you can't (usually) change to a Google device and the Google Play Store and still use the product without re-buying it.

I get that the fracturing of content delivery platforms had to happen for the sake of ~profits~, but I miss the days when having Netflix, Steam, and Spotify completely satisfied consumption needs. At least Spotify still has nearly everything I want, and still provides me with great recommendations.

Was the same with instant messaging software years ago; Aol, MSN, ICQ, Mirc, Gamespy, Paltalk, ...

Choice is better than not having it.

Who's gonna pay for supporting that "choice" and new attack vectors like when we had tons of Fortnite malware after launching Epic Game Store outside Google Play Store?

flipside - I'm very excited for apple to be removed as the gatekeeper to running any software at all on the devices. I'd rather have too many stores than one gatekeeper who controls all ios devices and takes a huge financial cut for the privilege.

It's good that Steam has real competition now. For a long time it was the only game in town.

> All of them need their App Store running in order to play their games, so half the time my computer has 4-5 App Stores running in the background so I can play a single game

You can always close down the app-stores you don't need right now, but it's true they don't tend to give you the option to do this automatically.

> And they are all electron/qt webkit apps cause nobody builds apps anymore so each one consumes about 500mb of ram.

Agree, it would be nice if they were more lean. I'm seeing Origin taking up >200MB just sitting there.

If Apple charged a reasonable commission level - say 5-15% - these problems would not occur.

30% is completely uneconomic and drives all of the profit to the platform owner. That's why were seeing so many acquisitions.

The problem here is with the 30%.

How old are you? Have you ever asked yourself "why developers went to the new and empty Apple App Store in 2008 in mature market with Nokia and others"?

The answer is very simple - commissions before Apple's 30% were 50%-70%. That's why Jobs conducted that presentation with slide regarding with 30% fee - it was unprecedent for those times.

Also there is also another question - how did you calculate that 5-15% is reasonable? You need to have solid arguments to defend your position. But no one provided - even Epic's lawyers such data. Also most of apps in Apple's App Store are free, so Apple is paying for the whole development/maintenance of infrastructure (delta updates etc.)

They went to the platform because the iPhone was rapidly gaining popularity and they gained access to a captive market.

Economies of scale alone indicates that if they could do the store at 30%, they could do it for far less when scaled up.

Finally, they are rather near brick-and-mortar markups for a lot of things despite not having all the extra overhead.

> They went to the platform because the iPhone was rapidly gaining popularity and they gained access to a captive market.

So as Apple stated in court docs - it's symbiosis between company, developers and users. If iPhone were bad people wouldn't buy them and developers wouldn't create apps with bad conditions in economic terms.

> if they could do the store at 30%, they could do it for far less when scaled u

Since they aren't monopoly (court conclusion after TRO hearing and on and after preliminary hearing on September 28th 2020) and we are on free market there is no reason to discuss their fee. Moreover they didn't upped it. And never did from App Store launch in 2008, only lowered for subscriptions after 1 year from 30% to 15%.

Developers can stop learning Objective-C/Swift and switch to Android-whatever on their career start if they feel bad about industry-standard 30% fee. But developers won't because Apple's user base is paying money and not sideloading pirated versions like on Android.

Also business and investors don't care about Android, like Clubhouse - for start-ups only iOS matters on first years.

So what we see? Developers who make tenths of millions (Epic Games with Tencent) want free access for Apple's user (install) base for free. There is a word for this - parasitism.

It's just natural that big game companies want to start their own gamestore, it's easy money without having to come up with original ideas again and again. And you can take a big cut of the profits of the ones that makes the actual work.

But we can vote with our wallet, it's a free market. I only buy things on GOG.

I don't see any reason why App Store the app won't be able to give you a unified interface to several app stores, including search through all of them.

For some reason, apt-get has been able to do that with different package repos for last 25 years or so.

Instead of making the split at the app store level, enabling other payment processors within the iOS app store would solve most of these issues without creating a UX nightmare. That said, I wouldn't mind competition at the app store level too.

As iOS user I completely disagree. I love the Apple platform for the simplicity. Every time there is a payment I choose Apple Pay as it's more secure than giving my card away. It uses biometrics, not some static digits stuck with card if you lose it. It's also more or less valid for Google Pay as well.

Having the option to use PayPal, Stripe, some other payment processor increases the stress on the UX and also the attack surface for fraud.

There's nothing preventing Apple Pay-level security features from being integrated with 3rd party vendors like Stripe, except Apple's desire to keep 30%. It's highway robbery compared to every other payment processor's fees and has nothing to do with security, cost of operation, or doing right by users. Apple has conned users into believing that rhetoric, but it's harming developers, which are also a type of user.

No platform should ever be allowed to be the sole gatekeeper for apps on your device; that it's done for security is dishonest. And it's doubly egregious that they've tied payment processing restrictions onto it too.

I don't make mobile apps so I have no skin directly in this game, but as a user who believes my devices are my own, and as a developer too, I have to stand with my fellow developers in demanding app stores do right by the people producing apps for them.

Apple Pay is separate from In App Purchases and the app store is not needed for its security features you seem to like. Ironically, a payment processor like Stripe is usually the thing facilitating Apple Pay support on the backend.

My bad I didn’t express myself completely. I enjoy the fact that I have one account and I know EXACTLY when I’m making a payment.

When I get presented with the price and checkout in an in-app purchase I’m sure that’s everything I’m paying, there are no hidden fees, it’s secure and there is no way for someone to steal my details. And it’s the same flow to make the payment: double tap the side button and scan my face. This is the parallel with Apple Pay. Plus I think the backend on in-app and in-store payments are the same so it would be ApplePay.

> I can hardly wait to use Amazon App Store to install Amazon ...

This doesn't happen on Android.

> My gaming computer is already filled with like 8 different app stores

This is because game companies want to be middlemen in games distribution. Games have communities, chat, matchmaking, patches, DLC, DRM, sales and pricing engines, analytics, online gaming, and a lot more complexity than your AirBNB or CashApp.

It's also happening with streaming. Once game steaming gains adoption, you'll see it there too.

You're not going to stop this by defending Apple's moat.

Forcing Apple to open up lets small developers get around the Apple tax and draconian and arbitrary review process that hinders their growth. It also lets people control the devices they purchased, and defends software freedoms broadly by discouraging the Apple behavior across the board.

If its not on steam/ps4 i don't play it. if its not on the mac store or in homebrew i am very unlikely to install it and will seek an alternitive.

If it won't be on the ios apple store i won't install it.

If you don't like it then stop using crappy software.

Right now the only choice people have for a phone that doesn't force you to have an apple or google account is a pinephone and this could potentially fix that.

One solution is Apple could add a feature where you voluntarily pay $50 to not be able to use other stores, and you could purchase it.

I would like to see that experiment play out.

Somehow the locked down 'S' version of windows is not very popular.

> Somehow the locked down 'S' version of windows is not very popular.

It doesn't have any benefits.

I don't get how you can be against having more options/freedom with your device

Because I don’t use my iPhone like I use my computer (as in desktop experience). Many people like the simple, wall/garden approach to iOS.

It’s almost like console gaming would be easier, where if you want to buy a digital game, there is only one marketplace to use [1].

Oh wait.

[1] yes, you can also buy physical games for most systems, but that’s in its way out too. If this plays out as expected, this complaint is going to have a lot of collateral damage.

There is a difference between a video game console and a portable multi purpose device with such a reach. Judges should take this into account. With great power comes great responsibility.

Modern game consoles can do a lot... and have their own app stores. Microsoft would love for me to use my Xbox to stream Netflix.

I don’t think they are as far apart as you think. They are both walled gardens that are heavily controlled by their developers.

Not to mention — this all started with a game developer that wasn’t happy with the distribution of their game. Nevermind that they abide by the same rules and fees for Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo.

This isn’t about Apple. It’s about all of them.

No, that is a false analogy. Device capacity does not determine device usage. It's about market power and not about device capacity.

It sounds a little bit like you're arguing that we should get rid of DRM. The interesting thing is that all of those app stores allow you to import other games. You can already manage your entire computer's gaming library on Steam -- or you could, if the games weren't tied by DRM to a specific client. DRM is literally the entire reason why Epic and Origin have a download client in the first place. If it didn't exist, you could use one client to manage your games today.

I don't see people complaining about GoG or Itch.io on this point, because you can download your games for those systems using a web browser and import them into any game manager you want.

It also sounds a bit like you're arguing for federated standards, which is also a thing that we could do. Nobody complains about there being too many repository remotes in Linux, because you wire them up to whatever package manager you're using and that's it. Your setup doesn't become more complicated just because you're using extra software sources. It's still the same commands to search for software and update your system.

This is already how F-Droid works, and it's great. Anyone can set up an alternative repository to F-Droid and I can use them as a software source within F-Droid. It's also the way that your podcast app works. Nobody complains that there are too many platforms for hosting and distributing podcasts, because as long as you avoid bad actors like Stitcher, you just install one app and manage them in one place from every source.

You're looking at games on the desktop through the lens of the model that Valve popularized by being a dominant player that refused to play nicely with anyone else. There are plenty of ways to design an ecosystem for managing stores without turning your computer into a cesspool of DRM. And Apple could do that, it could build a framework that required 3rd-party stores to work like software repositories.

----

Look at all of the fragmented broken systems you're complaining about -- the vast majority of them from video, to music streaming, to game purchases, are fragmented because they are deliberately designed to not work well with each other because the companies want consumer lock-in and DRM. But that's also exactly what is Apple is doing, they're just in a position of power so they're the only people doing it.

People didn't notice that Steam's way of managing games was fundamentally broken until other people copied Steam's strategy and made the downsides obvious. You're noticing the same thing with Apple's app store. You're noticing what goes wrong when app stores are designed using Apple's template -- when they're designed to restrict consumer rights, lock them into platforms, and force competitors out of the market, rather than when they're designed to be standardized clients that serve the user.

> And each App Store also has their own chat system along with the others like discord.

Why does a games distribution platform have a chat system in the first place? Aren't all of those chat systems basically inferior to Discord in almost every way? The Unix way of handling this is that whatever chat system you're using should be able to talk to Steam and get events from that client -- it shouldn't be bundled into Steam itself.

I categorically disagree. It's your choice to use one store on PC. Epic and a lot of people are asking for the choice. You don't have to make that choice since no one will force you.

So you prefer the console situation? A game is PS or Xbox exclusive so instead of just another store you need a completely other hardware for hundreds of dollars.

You can buy pasta at a few different stores, a caulk gun at a few different stores, clothes etc etc. Why would software be different?

Food exclusives aren’t that much a thing. Sure, I can’t buy Good & Gather or Up & Up (Target brands) at Walmart, but Up & Up napkins work just as well as Great Value (Walmart) napkins. An Epic exclusive requires the Epic Store. Maybe for things like flashlight apps or Flappy Bird clones you’d be easily able to find a version on your favorite store, but AAA games are different. For example, if GTA VI (whenever it comes out) is an Epic exclusive, I’m not finding a GTA VI copy of the same caliber on Steam.

While we're at it, why does there need to be 18 brands of deodorant? I think regulations should be in place so there's only one brand!

...or Apple could be a true platform and not compete unfairly?

You know, just a thought.

They want secure app distribution? Great! Build an equitable charge model. Charge for transactions, charge for usage, don’t charge flat rates that don’t scale. Certainly don’t prohibit other payment gateways.

And certain don’t punish your competitors in ways you don’t punish yourself. ( blanket certificate removals for a company and all its subsidiaries)

The ends do not justify the means. Apple can run a profitable and secure app distribution platform. It requires being open and fair. They are not doing that.

The threat model Apple is addressing by not allowing third party payment systems is user privacy, issues many systems having securing that data, and dark patterns vs subscription cancelation or outright scams.

It is not an unreasonable thing to offer a platform with that security built in.

Blanket punishments are about the only thing that works on large corporations. Everything else can be worked around. Facebook would not have budged an inch on their app unless half their company was shut down a day. I have no doubt part of the point of Epic trying to bypass the billing system is to get additional user data they can monetize.

While it is true Apple is neither open or fair, it is reasonable to assume the many of the apps on the store have no intention of being either open or fair either. Apple is trying to stand between the consumer and rampant corporate ethical lapses. That they are also doing so in the name of corporate greed makes them hard to defend, but then I hate how much of my income funds the police.

> My gaming computer is already filled with like 8 different app stores each completely different then the other and a variety of privacy/security issues on each

One could expect that someone on a forum called "hacker news" knows how to close apps after running + also disable their autorun at startup.

Multiple app-stores are not that great, but still better than a monopoly of one company that takes a 30% cut for every product sold and in return provides an app that barely works (lags, constant updates, constant questions about password if you dont use it much).

It's basically the same as having multiple icons provided by multiple games. They also had different installers and privacy policies.

Competition among app stores means lower prices and cheaper service.

This sucks, but who is guilt for this, the giant publishers, why? because AppStores have a big tax , so competition that would lower the tax would solve the problem,

Is same with video streaming, the giants don't want other giants to get a big cut without working hard.

IMO , AppStore competition should be like web hosting, competition is large enough so you have enough choice to buy exactly what you want. Imagine if you want your web page to be visible on Apple stuff you need to pay 30% of your profits to Apple and only if Apple likes your page content.

30% is one of the lowest fees in the market. Amazon's Twitch takes 50% fee. Also Tencent, who is behind Epic Games lawsuit takes 50% fee in China with their Android App Store.

>30% is one of the lowest fees in the market.

What? This is simply not true. If anything, 30% is the standard for app distribution. Steam, GOG, MS Store, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, Apple App Store & Google Play are all at 30%. If it's a lot or not is opinion.

>Amazon's Twitch takes 50% fee

Twitch is not an app store, it makes no difference to this discussion. It just happens to be higher than 30, so you mentioned it. For example patreon takes 8-12%, but that does not matter either.

>Also Tencent, who is behind Epic Games lawsuit

Tencent is not behind the Epic Games lawsuit.

So? on MacBooks you can download and install any applications, including GPL ones for free, no censorship or GPL aversion issues. Because inn your opinion Apple shit stinks less still you should have the freedom to not eat it. so you should have the choice not to use the store

It's not my opinion. It's fact that court doesn't compare open platforms (Windows, Linux Distros, macOS) with closed ones - iOS, Nintendo, Xbox, PlayStation.

Please see preliminary hearing video where judge rejected such arguments like yours. Epic lawyers failed very badly.

It does not matter what a judge said in the past when we want to create some new laws, the new laws will invalidate the old stuff.

You can't invalidate walled gardens because every company uses it. From Tesla to NASA.

Sure we can, if people want it they can. Example with ATM machines in EU, before I had to find an ATM machine from my bank because using other bank one would cost a lot, guess what laws fix that and the people benefited and the big banks suffered a bit, some rich bastards has one less expensive car now... so in a society it is possible to make illegal shitty behavior. (in case you are wondering the banks did not left and no righ dude lost his home because of this)

So if the people would convince the politicians that loot boxes, game exclusives, wall gardens, tracking etc is bad they can force the big giants to stop it and no fanboy or judge in Texas could affect what EU m Australia or other countries would decide.