Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

Re:Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly reve... by SheinhardtWigCo on Sunday May 23, 2021 @10:40AM (#27255287)

This is FUD. Where is the evidence that letting developers choose how to process payments leads to rampant fraud? The online payment landscape outside the App Store is actually very safe for users.

Try to cancel an in-app subscription without Googling how to do it. Good luck.

Also, if you try using the store, you’ll see it’s not curated in any meaningful way. It’s full of garbage and fake reviews. Someone properly incentivized to improve it could do a much better job.

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Re:Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly reve... by LexGray on Sunday May 23, 2021 @03:51PM (#27257968)

I have worked a few places where customer credit card information was kept in spreadsheets or other open databases. At the scale of an app developer who has trouble affording a $99 developer account spending money on securing customer information is a virtual non starter. Also third party interfaces you may attempt to use are often purchased and repurposed.

There are huge numbers of dark pattern companies who thrive on the ability to thwart subscription cancellation and the Apple method can at least be googled.

I have not seen any platform which has resolved the fake review problem through incentives and many that are far worse.

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Re:Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly reve... by coldtea on Sunday May 23, 2021 @11:18AM (#27255563)

>This is FUD. Where is the evidence that letting developers choose how to process payments leads to rampant fraud?

Here, for one: https://www.pandasecurity.com/en/mediacenter/mobile-security....

And in the general open web, for another, where online fraud is a multi-billion business...

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Re:Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly reve... by oblio on Sunday May 23, 2021 @11:33AM (#27255711)

Yeah, online fraud is a multi-billion business. But how big is the open web? I'd imagine that it's transactions are on the order of hundreds of billions and most likely trillions, which would make that fraud an unavoidable drop in the bucket.

And with Apple's system, are there any studies that shoes it makes a material difference in this fraud level? Even if it did, I'm not sure it's worth giving up all this freedom when we already have a system that works.

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Re:Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly reve... by SheinhardtWigCo on Sunday May 23, 2021 @11:30AM (#27255676)

Not a single sentence in that article is relevant to this topic.

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Re:Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly reve... by coldtea on Sunday May 23, 2021 @12:49PM (#27256462)

The topic is opening up the app store, allowing developers to implement their own payments, and someone asked: "where is the evidence that letting developers choose how to process payments leads to rampant fraud?"

Well, Android is open to sideloading and less "walled" and ends up with 50 times more malware than IOS. That's what "that article" is about.

If someone connects the dots, they'll see that (a) opening up iOS similarly will lead to similar levels of malware, (b) letting developers have their own payment systems in such an environment would just lead to tons of that malware getting people's credit card details, charging for BS, and so on.

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