News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by scarface74 on Saturday May 08, 2021 @02:27PM (#27089569)
Their only end goal was to get a better outcome for themselves. It came out in the trial that if they had gotten the special deal they were seeking, you probably wouldn’t have heard a peep from them.
Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by djmips on Saturday May 08, 2021 @02:34PM (#27089625)
Somehow that seemed obvious to me without the direct evidence. I have no doubt that if the shoe was on the other foot, Epic would be super happy to be the gatekeeper taking in 30%>
Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by MattRix on Saturday May 08, 2021 @03:01PM (#27089815)
No they wouldn’t. They already run their own store where they take 12%. Tim Sweeney has been a vocal supporter of open platforms/markets for many years. This action is costing Epic TONS of money. In no way does it make financial sense whatsoever. If you read the internal Epic documents from this case, it becomes quite clear that this is Tim Sweeney’s personal crusade against Apple.
Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by dtech on Saturday May 08, 2021 @03:45PM (#27090091)
The only reason they do that is because they are trying to break into Steam's near monopoly market position. They are not above anti-consumer practices like exclusives. I have no doubt that if they could, they would take that 30% cut.
Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by MattRix on Saturday May 08, 2021 @06:31PM (#27091391)
Why would they choose 12% and not 25% or 20% then? Either of those would be better than Steam.

Calling exclusives “anti-consumer” is basically nonsense. Exclusives have been a mainstay of the gaming world for ages. The actual harm they cause to the consumer is minimal, no different than first party titles do (like Valve’s own Half-Life, etc).

Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by scarface74 on Monday May 10, 2021 @02:33PM (#27109274)
5% less isn’t enough to get over the inertia of being on steam.
Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by edoceo on Saturday May 08, 2021 @03:09PM (#27089871)
> read the internal Epic documents from this case

how can we do that?

Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by MattRix on Saturday May 08, 2021 @06:26PM (#27091349)
It used to be in a public documents folder on Box. The link doesn’t seem to be working anymore so maybe they took it down for the weekend (or permanently) https://app.box.com/s/6b9wmjvr582c95uzma1136exumk6p989/folde...
Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by MattRix on Monday May 10, 2021 @01:58PM (#27108858)
Just discovered that the Box link I posted in my other comment actually still does work, it just doesn’t work on mobile for some reason.
Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by scarface74 on Saturday May 08, 2021 @03:05PM (#27089840)
Then why did Epic ask for a special deal from Apple?

Can I use in game currency bought from somewhere else in FortNite?

Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by tpxl on Saturday May 08, 2021 @06:23PM (#27091322)
> Tim Sweeney has been a vocal supporter of open platforms/markets for many years.

If he was, he would be against exclusives, but he pays handsomely for those.

Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by echelon on Sunday May 09, 2021 @12:20AM (#27093206)
These aren't even comparable.

- Epic marketplace has a few exclusive video game titles for their marketplace.

- Their games can be installed on multiple platforms.

- Also, there are dozens of competing video game marketplaces, each with their own exclusives. You can't play Zelda on PC.

Vs.

- There are only two brands of smartphones. Everyone is forced into this duopoly.

- iPhone is a device that doesn't let users repair it

- iPhone is a device that doesn't let users install their own software

- iOS forces all commerce through Apple's tax rails

- iOS prevents forming a relationship with customers as it gives businesses a disposable fake contact. These are "Apple's customers", not yours.

Businesses have two choices: fuck off and die of irrelevancy, or put on the Apple gimp suit and get fucked. There's no way this was ever legal. We've all just been gaslighted by Apple's mind-bending PR. They've constructed the biggest monopoly of all time.

Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by scarface74 on Sunday May 09, 2021 @02:49AM (#27093819)
Epic and especially FortNite is it’s own marketplace. You can’t buy in game merchandise without going through Epic’s payment system. T

As far as relationships, I don’t want every business to have relationship with me. For those companies that need one, they can have users register.

How is the App Store any more illegal than the consoles? Yes every physical game you buy for a console still has to be approved by the console makers.

Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by echelon on Sunday May 09, 2021 @01:44PM (#27097953)
Because I'm not trying to run my dating app on the Epic platform. And if gamer dating was my thing, I'd have twenty or so different market places to target.

Apple is the only game in town, and they bully everyone. Their rise to this position and stranglehold over all commerce was an illegal move that will be corrected by the DOJ.

Imagine if AOL controlled the Internet and all websites had to pay 30% to AOL. That's the world we live in with Apple.

Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by scarface74 on Sunday May 09, 2021 @03:55PM (#27099165)
Apple is not the only game in town. It doesn’t even have the majority market share.

Not to mention that there is also the web.

No website has to pay Apple 30%. In fact, no dating app has to pay Apple 30%. They can all force you to pay on the web and Apple won’t get any cut.

Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by echelon on Sunday May 09, 2021 @10:43PM (#27102159)
The web is increasingly not an option and you know it.
Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by scarface74 on Monday May 10, 2021 @12:08PM (#27107591)
So tell me why the web isn’t an option for a dating app?
Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by echelon on Monday May 10, 2021 @12:44PM (#27107976)
Absolutely.

Do you think Tinder would have caught on as a website? Apple trained people to use apps.

Furthermore, what about real time video transcoding? Apple kept their web browser purposely hobbled to force people into their dungeon. You can't use a multitude of modern, advanced capabilities with safari. How can I do advanced workloads in parallel, at high performance, in the background? I can't because Apple.

Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by scarface74 on Monday May 10, 2021 @02:30PM (#27109245)
Tender interactions very much could work on the web.

You can’t do advanced workloads in the background with native apps on iOS. Apple strictly limits what an app can do in the background to conserve battery life. Safari doesn’t stop running in the background.

I don’t know about performance, but if someone could write a performant JS/web assembly transcoder that could run on the web, since iOS devices routinely trounce all Android devices with respect to browser performance, I’m sure it could be done.

Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by johnnyanmac on Thursday May 13, 2021 @05:53PM (#27147970)
>Tender interactions very much could work on the web.

it's not about what "could work", a 15fps game "could work".

it's "what is successful". And for a mobile audience, UI/UX engineers have spend decades determining that after a certain amount of lag, that experience is lost.be it for technical or political reasons, Safari and by extension, much of HTML 5 cannot meet this UX criteria. So an application has an massive advantage.

>but if someone could write a performant JS/web assembly transcoder that could run on the web

Sounds like a Progressive Web App: https://web.dev/what-are-pwas/

They've come far but are far from perfect. It's also moot in this case, since certain optimizations would need to rely on understanding Safari's infrastructure. Which is closed source. They can optimize it for webkit, but any web dev can tell you that interplatform quirks are the 2nd 90% of the battle.

Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by tpxl on Sunday May 09, 2021 @04:59AM (#27094406)
Compare them to Steam and GOG, not apple.

- GoG will give you DRM free downloads

- Steam allows you to give out keys for free then use their infrastructure to download/manage the game (humble bundle steam keys)

- None of them force exclusives as far as I know

> Businesses have two choices: fuck off and die of irrelevancy, or put on the Apple gimp suit and get fucked.

No they don't. There's plenty of businesses that are alive and well and not getting fucked by anyone.

Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by arvinsim on Sunday May 09, 2021 @07:52AM (#27095240)
Can you cite big businesses that are successful that is Android exclusive?
Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by MattRix on Monday May 10, 2021 @09:59AM (#27106032)
There’s nothing wrong with exclusives. They aren’t any more “anti-consumer” than first party titles (like Valve’s own Half-Life, Portal, etc)
Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by stephc_int13 on Saturday May 08, 2021 @02:34PM (#27089626)
You are right about their end goal, and this is expected from a company with shareholders, I think this is part of the job of a CEO.

But you don't know if this is their only end goal.

Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by scarface74 on Saturday May 08, 2021 @02:44PM (#27089699)
If they could get a special deal, do you really think they would take the case to trial, spend the money and have as much of their dirty laundry become part of the record?
Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by stephc_int13 on Saturday May 08, 2021 @02:52PM (#27089745)
I don't read in tea leaves, we can only infer their goals from the PR and what seems to be their best self-interest.

Internally this is probably a high-risk high-reward kind of plan, but this is a wild guess.

Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by dylan604 on Saturday May 08, 2021 @03:51PM (#27090128)
I was actually surprised the went this alone instead of trying to get other devs involved to seek class action status.
Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by lupire on Saturday May 08, 2021 @05:07PM (#27090699)
They want a policy change, not a $40 coupon.
Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by scarface74 on Saturday May 08, 2021 @02:57PM (#27089781)
If they had gotten all of the concessions they wanted, there would have been no reward.

If they could sell digital goods using their own payment system within the app like Amazon can with Amazon Video, what would they gain from this?

The PR doesn’t tell the story like what came out during court procedures.

Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by johnnyanmac on Thursday May 13, 2021 @05:56PM (#27147995)
>If they could sell digital goods using their own payment system within the app like Amazon can with Amazon Video, what would they gain from this?

the ability to potential lauch EGS on IOS. Success or not, they want that opportunity to try.

Re:Apple brass discussed disclosing 128M iPhone hack, then d... by gpm on Saturday May 08, 2021 @06:18PM (#27091289)
If they could get a special deal, they probably wouldn't have standing to take the case to trial, so they literally couldn't take it to trial.

I suspect they would still want to. My personal suspicion about the motivation behind this case is that it's not really about Epic Game's profit, but Tencent's. Tencent owns 40% of Epic Games, and owns a lot of companies who stand to make a lot more money if Apple's forced to open up the app store.