It would make sense to provide an alternative if Apple's priority was the privacy of their users. Unfortunately, we have testimony from American congressmembers that suggests they have ulterior priorities: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...

That article is a spun version from what appears to be the source article from reuters[0]. Being that they lifted quotes from there and then added a clickbait title by forgetting to add that Google is also compelled by governments to give them the data.

The only "ulterior priorities" I could pick up on was that Apple was most likely following the Government restrictions in a more discerning way than Google by not breaking out the push notifications in their aggregated data for request disclosures. Once it was made public by a Senator, Apple updated their policy and started to break it out to its own section. How long Google did this before Apple is not stated and the DOJ declined to comment on the push notification surveillance or whether it had prevented Apple or Google from talking about it.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...

I'm not treating this as a relative comparison, it's a criticism specifically of Apple's service architecture. When you prioritize privacy while refusing transparency, you end up in situations like this very often. That would not be the case if Apple held themselves to their advertised standards for the infrastructure they build.

Here are the new tiers: https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/reference...

The document says manual updates are included but not automatic updates (which is just a setting in the App Store that I personally disable).

Whether there will be update notifications is unclear. Is that what you meant by "app notification delivery", or something else?

As an App Store developer myself, I would love to have Tier 1 in the United States, mainly due to no user ratings and reviews. I hate them, and I hate trying to solicit them. As far as I'm concerned, ditching ratings & reviews would be a bonus!

"No user ratings and reviews" - that just means you rank last in app store search, right?

Apple will do whatever they can to ensure that developers that don't pay will suffer the costs.

Ratings and reviews cost money to maintain. Anti-spam, compute, distribution, security concerns, etc. Apple should do whatever they can to ensure that developers who aren't paying don't degrade the service for everyone else.

The App Store is already replete with terrible promoted software. Apple made an entire business around degrading the top search results so competitors can bid on less relevant suggestions: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_search_ads

That would be a great argument if you could actually install apps from outside the Apple App Store.

Tier 1 has only exact match search.

That's fine with me. All of my empirical evidence over the years suggests that my customers are coming mostly from the outside, and Apple is not bringing me many customers from inside the App Store.

With the web becoming more fuzzy it has become acceptable to other products when you're searching for a specific brand.

But when I want to buy Grey Poupon Mustard, I don't want to see Heinz etc. If you don't have Grey Poupon, I don't want to see anything.

That's exactly how it is. Outside of a few viral apps, most of the rest are word of mouth or blog post/reddit/YouTube recommandations. Apple has very little to do with an app success which is why it is egregious they ask so much for the "privilege" of using their App Store (you don't have any other choice anyway).

This sounds kinda like what they did when they were forced to allow outside payments in the US. It could only be one link, with a big scary warning, and a 27% cut. They "comply" with the ruling by making another alternative deal that nobody would ever take. Fortunately this backfired in the US and they were actually forced to get rid of all the restrictions in May.

I swear there must be somebody properly petty in higher management of apple to keep coming with these childish moves that harm image of the company as some sort of serious reliable manufacturer.

I guess to each their own

Yep, I have been a Mac user since 2007 and iPhone user since 2009. But all the malicious compliance and pettiness has me looking at alternatives (at least for iPhone, since it has good alternatives).

I don't recognize the fun, playful Apple of the 00s and early 10s anymore. Its soul has been replaced.

“Cook chose poorly.” https://www.theverge.com/apple/659296/apple-failed-complianc...

I think Cook’s time as CEO will be remembered both by enabling massive scale for the most successful consumer product in history—the iPhone—while sacrificing the company’s soul on the alter of efficiency.

No I meant like APNS, which is what iOS uses to send notifications to iOS devices. It's the only way to get iOS to display a notification currently, and it isn't possible to register your own backend for it, so if you want notifications shipped to your users (as in, alerts that happen while users do not have your app open) then you must (to my knowledge) go through Apple.

In that case, then, I think you're wrong. You were quoting a list of store services. APNS is an iOS feature but not an App Store service. And indeed, APNS is not listed as a Tier 2 service either.

But Tier 2 just says "all of it", which is why I was curious since it wasn't listed under Tier 1, but you're probably right, it would be absolutely insane if Apple were to try and pass off a deal like that as being in any way comparable with what Apple themselves are afforded.

There's is absolutely 0% chance this will fly. Apple is begging for a fine at this point, with their bad-faith malicious interpretations of the law.

I think this is how Android Play store currently works? If you deploy your app via another means, you get to DIY your own push infrastructure. I remember Square had to do this for their POS units that run Android, but weren't managed by the play store.

No, Firebase Cloud Messaging is a separate service from Play Store. As long as the device has Google Mobile Services installed the app can be installed from anywhere and doesn't need to be uploaded to Play Store.

Yeah that’s a big requirement. To get Google mobile services, you’re required to install Google chrome, Google play, and bunch of other bloatware.

You don’t have to load the app via Google play but your device needs to be managed by Google.

Which would be fair game except to my knowledge there’s no API in iOS that enables the use of anything other than APNS for notifications. I could be mistaken though!

Again, I don’t see how that is different from android.

For android, you need to buy into all the ecosystem of Google to access their push notification service.

You can use android without google’s system, but you can’t use google push system.

Because on android you can install another background service that can replace the features of the google service. This is pretty much what the Chinese did when they forked Android. There are alternative app delivery/update mechanisms that make this point entirely moot.

On iOS you just can't unless you are fully blessed by Apple, and this is precisely the issue.

You're certain the EU didn't just approve this plan?

Our leaders are sometimes spineless, so I unfortunately can't be certain.

I am however pretty certain that said spinelessness wouldn't fly with the European public.

Doesn't really matter since the European commission is not voted by us - we have no choice in the matter.

The European commission is nominated by our elected governments.

It is as democratic as the US presidency, which is also nominated by electors.

This is a tired talking point designed to sow doubt in the European project.

Adding layers of indirection makes it less democratic. We should be able to vote for them directly.

Sure it does.

But one layer of indirection is not crazy, that's the way any minister in any country works - or the way the US presidency does.

You can't directly elect every single official - it just doesn't scale. It also doesn't really make sense in the commissioner case as different commissioners have different portfolios and which country gets what is subject to negotiation between member states.

I mean, it's _possible_ that they had some sort of informal pre-approval, but given that Apple's last few 'attempts' to comply with EU law have swiftly been met with a "yeah, no" from the commission, there's not that much reason to think that _this_ one is the pre-cleared one.

They are cartoon level bad. I don't think they realize how much they are destroying their image in the eyes of their best customers. It is an extremely short-term strategy; they are doing irreparable damage in my opinion. I kind of like it because Apple needs to be thrown off their pedestal so that they can start to care at least a bit more.

I don't think it matters. Here is why I would pay 10x more for using Apple devices than other devices:

1. The ecosystem is just much better, ie. the quality of apps is in another league compared to apps on Android or Windows.

2. Many amazing apps that are at the core of my company's workflow simply don't exist on other platforms at all. With no comparable equivalents.

3. We get many apps earlier. Even up to a year earlier. Example: Clubhouse. Running a company, my marketing team can't afford to be late to a new social media platform, risking that it becomes the new status quo. I can name a dozen apps that were 6 to 12 months late to Android vs. IOS :(

If these change I would happily move to Linux, or Windows (once they make the OS usable).

We use Linux servers for running Python/Node Scripts, and APIs.

We use 1 Windows machine to use a very specific data science app that only exists for Windows.

Before anyone says I'm a fanboy. I'm here to generate revenue for my company. I don't give 2 sh*ts about AAPL.

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But this is just me.

Why it won't matter to the public: The kids don't care. The want an iPhone.

Apple's complaint will likely be that it's a "technical limitation" because they run the only iOS notification gateway.

Never mind that Mozilla manages to run one for Firefox completely free to users and devs despite being a comically mismanaged nonprofit and if it were really a problem for them they could allow users to enter the domain name for an alternative one.

This issue right here is actually why there have been so few usable open source federated chat apps on the iPhone: the client maintainers must also maintain infrastructure for notifications and are not allowed to delegate this to people hosting their own infrastructure. This is actually the core complaint many people have with how Apple runs their app store and it's very visibly made the internet less usable for everyone.