News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Epic Games steps up Apple fight with EU antitrust complaint by judge2020 on Wednesday February 17, 2021 @11:29AM (#26168213)
Your consumer freedom entitles you to a choice, not to demand companies sink money to accommodate your specific use case. Just like you can't demand for Pepsi to ship Coke product on their trucks, you can't demand Apple spend millions of dollars to port Facetime or iMessage to Android. Apple has a right to decide what sort of features and platforms they support for their apps, so if they decide to not support Android, that's just a reason for you to exercise your consumer freedom of choice and use a different product. Meanwhile, anyone else that you want to Facetime with has chosen a product (Facetime) that only allows calling other users on the same iOS software as them, and that's them exercising their consumer freedom of choice. If they want to call people that are on Android, they can choose other apps which do support calling Android phones.

But that's talking about Facetime as if it's a product. It's not - it's a feature of iOS, iPadOS and MacOS. Effectively, Facetime isn't free - it's a unlimited use service that is paid for with your initial purchase of your Mac or iOS device and includes a perpetual, transferable license.

Re:Epic Games steps up Apple fight with EU antitrust complaint by dleslie on Wednesday February 17, 2021 @12:49PM (#26169221)
Enacting regulation to force open access is well-trod the world over. Apple may not need to port FaceTime, but there is strong cause to demand that all social networks and communication providers either adopt open standards or open their protocols and adhere to them.
Re:Epic Games steps up Apple fight with EU antitrust complaint by zepto on Wednesday February 17, 2021 @05:03PM (#26172417)
adopt open standards or open their protocols and adhere to them

I.e. no further innovation is possible?

Re:Epic Games steps up Apple fight with EU antitrust complaint by dleslie on Wednesday February 17, 2021 @05:38PM (#26172762)
HTML5 is a thing. Innovation of open standards occurs.
Re:Epic Games steps up Apple fight with EU antitrust complaint by zepto on Wednesday February 17, 2021 @08:56PM (#26174537)
Nobody is forced to implement or adhere to HTML5.

It is completely voluntary.

Re:Epic Games steps up Apple fight with EU antitrust complaint by dleslie on Thursday February 18, 2021 @11:05AM (#26181499)
Ok.

You'll find many required open standards in civic engineering and aerospace engineering, and really, any engineering where engineers carry liability. They adapt and change in response to deficiencies discovered.