The court decision itself is worth reading for a revealing look behind the curtain. [0]
>> In Slack communications dated November 16, 2021, the Apple employees crafting the
warning screen for Project Michigan discussed how best to frame its language. Mr. Onak suggested the warning screen should include the language: “By continuing on the web,
you will leave the app and be taken to an external website” because “‘external website’ sounds scary, so execs will love it.” [...] One employee further wrote, “to make your version even worse you could add the developer name rather than the app name.” To that, another responded “ooh - keep going.”
The most shocking thing to me about that isn't the malicious compliance, but that even after a court injunction, and fully knowing that there could be subsequent discovery, they have people putting something like that in writing.
Seriously, this is one of the top 10 largest companies in the world, and they're playing chicken with the court in order to preserve their ongoing revenue. These weren't random employees, but people part of "Project Michigan", Apple's "activities relating to Injunction compliance".
How doesn't every single person that's a part of that project have an Apple lawyer hovering over them every time they get near any sort of device that can put anything on the record?
"The most shocking thing to me about that isn't the malicious compliance, but that even after a court injunction, and fully knowing that there could be subsequent discovery, they have people putting something like that in writing."
Keep in mind that once you lose, the process is no longer adversarial.
In ~all cases you will be required to provide evidence and status updates and such on implementation of an injunction, among other things.
So you do practically have to keep records of what you are doing to comply. These are the kinds of records you would normally see as a result. The only shocking thing is that they didn't lie :)
They often do try to hide bad stuff through privilege anyway - I believe they tried here and lost but i will go back and look - but that doesn't often work.
The arrogance of power is very difficult (perhaps nearly impossibly difficult) for humans to overcome. Apple is worth more than many countries, so employees are going to feel immune to everything. And for the most part, that is true. Big money buys both laws and courts. Only rarely does this assumption fail.
> Seriously, this is one of the top 10 largest companies in the world, and they're playing chicken with the court in order to preserve their ongoing revenue.
Maybe that is a result of the attitudes that made them one of the largest companies in the world?
People put everything in writing and in videos nowadays and don't even think about it. Often it's "not so smart" criminals but we see again and again that even people are the highest levels do the same...
The phrase "incandescent with rage" comes to mind when reading that order. A couple of choice quotes:
To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied
under oath.
This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully
disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction.
She also referred Alex Roman's actions and everyone else complicit for review of contempt of court, which carries a possible prison sentence. I never thought Apple would outright defy the courts to the degree they'd risk a prison term for the executives.
It's so jarring to get these kinds of message, especially for compliance with EU directives, because it's so obviously designed to look un-Apple-like which triggers some sort of malware or scam heuristic without the typical nice Apple presentation.
Ironically it ends up getting flagged as some deliberate Apple malicious compliance BS which just sours you on the whole iOS experience.
I'm not even sure how "external website" is malicious compliance. Yes, I know the intention is to sound scary. But external website is the correct, neutral term which means... external website.
Now we will have corporate training programs teaching us to say "inform the user" when we mean "scare the user", and then this wont show up in court. Just like how Microsoft taught us to never say "crush the competition". They will do all the same things though.
Honestly, I’ve seen way, waay, waaaaaaaaaaaaaay worse in internal comms in different companies. Not trying to defend Apple, but this just sounds like an average conversation to me.
Lawyer here - that's not how these things work. This is definitely non-compliant.
Injunctions are, intentionally, required only to "describe in reasonable detail the act or acts restrained or required". The key being "reasonable". They are not required to specify every detail, or every wrong or right thing, especially when the party being enjoined knows more of the details of how things work than the court does.
You seem to believe the court must specify language, etc, and they are absolutely not required to do so. It is your job to figure it out, and if you need more information, shockingly, you can ask the judge for the information, or whether your proposed approach would be compliant.
You are also required to make good faith attempts to comply with a court order. The evidence here is overwhelming bad faith - they were not trying to figure out how to actually ensure the court's goals were carried out, they are instead trying to figure out how to thwart them. That is pretty much the definiton of bad faith.
The injunction has reasonable detail.
This is neither good faith, nor did they ask.
You seem to think this is game of try to find legal loopholes.
That is a good way to get thrown in a jail by a judge.
It's not. Once you are found guilty and injunction entered, the adversarial process is done. You lost.
Your job is to do what the court requires of you, in good faith, as best you can.
Even if you appeal it, unless it is stayed, you are still required to do it.
The 180-page injunction outline the reason for it and the goals of the injunction. They knew the court ruled against them for specific reasons but came up with a solution that didn't take into account any of the stated goals into account.
Their solution didn't address any of the goals of the injunction.
"Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anti-competitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anti-competitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the cover-up made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple."
I'd recommend skimming through the whole thing because Judge Rogers just eviscerates Apple over and over.
It's so good... but also it has taken so, so long to get here. The US should've done something about the app store tax a long time ago. People thought Apple won their case, but it... really just took time to get here. You get to try malicious compliance with judges exactly once, and then you're over.
Shoot me down with examples here, but my impression is that the US (historically, not just in the last three months) will never hurry to curtail the ability of a US company to make profit. With the possible exception of when a US company egregiously flouts laws that already exist.
> and then you're over
What does this mean in practice?
Apple is still doing business, has three years of profits from the malicious compliance, and appears to have attracted not much more than a sternly worded letter from a judge, and possible criminal contempt charges for a couple of individuals.
What real world consequences does Apple face for this behavior?
Can someone explain this to me? As far as I understand apple is being ordered to do the thing it was supposed to do already. Are there extra consequences I've not understood related to them disregarding the court ruling?
They are being ordered to pay the court and Epic’s costs and being referred to the Department of Justice for potential criminal prosecution for contempt.
There will be a fine. Nobody will go to jail. Apple will appeal. They will likely prevail on this "steering" complaint on a freedom of speech basis. It is their platform afterall.
My concern is more about having private companies control platforms upon which we depend. I do often wish that I had a crystal ball to peer a decade or several into the future to see what the future holds for humanity in this regard. Our legal system seems ill-equipped to manage this risk.
A federal court has ordered Philip Moris USA & R.J. Reynolds Tobacco to state: Smoking cigarettes causes numerous diseases and on average 1,200 American deaths every day.
Freedom of speech does not prevent courts from ordering defendants to say or not say specific things to make up for their past illegal behavior. In this case, the court initially allowed Apple a little flexibility around steering, which Apple misused to make web purchases sound "scary". The penalty for that is the loss of that flexibility.
> Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise.
The bean counters won. I guess Tim Cook does care about the bloody ROI after all.
If Tim Cook is willing to lie and cheat for extra revenue, I can't trust that Apple is honest about their privacy commitments. Services revenue line must keep going up, and their ad business is a growth opportunity.
> I can't trust that Apple is honest about their privacy commitments
This is a funny comment for me to read. Did anyone honestly think that Apple was touting privacy as anything other than a competitive advantage for revenue maximization? They've had things like iAd, their services revenue has grown massively as hardware sales plateau, and they are nowhere near as "private" in certain countries either.
Their privacy commitments align with their business, not their morals. They don't want an open internet primarily funded by advertising, so they make harder for advertising companies to track their users. What they want is an internet silod into apps you get from their app store, that are funded buy subscriptions and IAPs that they get a 30% cut from.
Apple is a for-profit business, and like most such entities, its primary concern is its bottom line. If promoting privacy aligns with that objective, so be it. However, the company does not have an inherent inclination toward acting ethically beyond what serves its business interests.
Pretty sure this is not about revenue but profit margins, since the Services line was under heavy surveillance by markets back then.
Though that's the core issue, margins on services are just too addictive for big tech. Not sure Apple can keep its recipe for success with both services and hardware.
The "bean counters" always win in the current state of affairs.
The pressure of the financial capitalism on the industrial capitalism is too high. Any company that produces anything is eventually forced into rent-seeking to keep delivering what has come to be expected YoY growth. C-level that won't let that happen will see the way out.
Now Tim Apple has gotta call up Trump and remind him he donated to the inauguration fund and is getting fucked by the tariffs (and furthermore has to spend many billions to hedge against what the USA is going to need to do in Taiwan) and get him to threaten the appellate judge.
It will be interesting to see if Mr Apple has more spine than Mr Amazon, who acceded to Trump's demand not to show customers how much the tariffs were costing them.
My feeling is that these guys who showed up to the inauguration of a self-professed "dictator on day one" might be a little light on backbone, if not moral fortitude.
Whatever your opinion of Steve Jobs, he was a leader and would never have let things get this far. Now leadership is just mediocre and apple products look nice but are shallow nerfed computing experiences.
They charge 27% for purchases made using external payment processors. Including Stripe fees that's net-zero (not even accounting for any chargeback risks). They severely limit how you can display the external purchase link too, and display an obnoxious warning screen when you tap it.
I would be surprised if a single developer adopted it.
From the court document, I don't know how many ended up actually adopting it, but it's about what you'd expect:
> As of the May 2024 hearing, only 34 developers out of the approximately 136,000 total developers on the App Store applied for the program, and seventeen of those developers had not offered in-app purchases in the first place. In May 2024, Apple argued that it would take more time for developers to take advantage of the Link Entitlement and that the adoption rates could not be known. Apple attempted here to mislead.
> Given the revelations of the February 2025 hearing, Apple modeled the lack of adoption. That Apple adduced no testimony or evidence indicating developer adoption of the program is no surprise. As shown above, Apple knew it was choosing a course which would fail to stimulate any meaningful competition to Apple’s IAP and thereby maintain its revenue stream
Apple is not just responsible for making it possible to purchase apps outside the App Store, but to convince developers to use it over the App Store as well?
I suppose it's damning when combined with the internal emails demonstrating they were trying to avoid compliance with the ruling?
Wasn’t there a recent EU fine for Apple for preventing developers from promoting alternative distribution channels within their apps, or linking to external subscription websites?
Half of the entire HN was like „EU bad, how dare you regulate them”. What gives?
This is more about Apple lying under oath about both delaying the court and being aware what they were doing was not actually complying with the previous order. Additional factors are it does not list a fine, relies on longstanding general anti-trust legislation rather than new tech specific laws, and there isn't a wide swath of other regulatory rulings against Apple coinciding with the previous one.
Between all of this, it'll be a lot harder to come to the comments to defend Apple for not getting fined twice in a row for the same issue despite lying under oath and intentionally delaying proceedings, even if you vehemently disagree with the original ruling.
Google tends to be the one with more sympathy in the US lately as they've gotten much more of the regulatory stick in court.
Quite the opposite. Every single comment that I have done critisizing any aspect of EU regulation has been heavily downvoted. Never even seen a EU bad comment as top comment in any story.
I am concerned that the App Store has become the norm. For many young people, iPhones and iPads have been their only computer. Many have never seen a world where app developers can distribute independently. The NYT had an article out about ruling, and the number of people supporting the App Store was astounding.
I think Apple has done a great job marketing the App Store as the reason for the security/UX of their platform, when in reality, it's the OS. It's the OS that requires apps to get permission before accessing my location, it's the OS that isolates apps from each other, it's the OS that provides an easy way to install/uninstall packages.
The confusion between benefits of the OS/benefits of the App Store combined with many peoples' unfamiliarity with third party distribution has made it more difficult to convince people of the merit of these antitrust suits.
My brother in law (25 years old) mostly uses his phone for everything, which is obviously fine, but he needed help with something on his computer recently so he called me.
It was just asking for help getting stuff of a portable hard drive from work, so I tell him to plug it in and open up the file explorer.
He didn't know what the file explorer was, so I say "uh, the thing with the folders and shit in it, the little folder icon on the bottom". He eventually figured it out, and then I tell him to click on the drive on the left, which he figured out, and then I told him to open another file explorer window and drag the files from the first one to the second. The entire ordeal ended up taking him like ten minutes.
My brother in law isn't stupid or anything, he just didn't grow up with the typical desktop computer interface that most people who frequent HN did. He's been able to use a phone or a tablet for pretty much the entire time he's been using "computers", and those abstract away most of the lower level details.
I disagree. Application developers have always been absolutely terrible at packaging. We see this all the time on linux, where publishers just fail to follow the packaging standard of the system, and instead develop an "installer" for their special little snowflake application. The OS cannot save you from that unless you also control distribution and can tell that publisher "you don't get to publish to my very valuable user group if you don't follow my rules".
Publishers have shown time and time again that if given a permission system, they'll just ask for every single permission under the sun, unless somebody stops them from doing that. The user sure isn't. They'll run whatever garbage installer script the publisher gives them because they want the application.
I don't like Apple's monopolistic behavior. I personally believe it would be a great service to the western world to break apart Big Tech, but the incentives that drive application development ARE broken. Apple has good reason to try and fix that with the app store, they just don't get to do it by running a monopoly.
> it's the OS. It's the OS that requires apps to get permission before accessing my location, it's the OS that isolates apps from each other, it's the OS that provides an easy way to install/uninstall packages.
Sorry, you're just wrong. Only by analyzing the apps can Apple enforce several policies that many folks think contribute to users' security.
The prohibition against dynamic code, lying about the reason that an app needs a certain permission, and all the trust and safety policies are all stuff an OS can't do.
> The prohibition against dynamic code, lying about the reason that an app needs a certain permission, and all the trust and safety policies are all stuff an OS can't do.
It _is_ something a community of people empowered to control their devices can organize and achieve, but we were stripped of this capability when a small set of private concerns unilaterally locked us out. They just told us that they were the only ones they trusted to manage security, and everyone apparently believed them. The state of personal privacy has gotten unimaginably worse since. Not even the world's largest organizations can manage to fight, much less anticipate, the world's worth of bad actors.
> Only by analyzing the apps can Apple enforce several policies
Or they could secure the runtime and quit giving developers dangerous entitlements in the first place. Make no mistake, Apple doesn't need the App Store to develop meaningful security for their users. The Mac is living proof.
I like this decision. But I also like that I can cancel all my IAP subs in the settings quickly. Maybe stripe could set up consumer accounts to do the same.
The government should require credit card companies to introduce a system for recurring billing which would let you see all your subscriptions on your credit card web site and cancel them there. For the 3.5% they charge in fees it is the least they can do.
You're right, we can't really know. But on HN, there are always a few comments to that effect whenever there's a larger discussion about EU consumer protections and anti-monopoly laws or penalties.
What % of the public holds these opinions? Who knows? Maybe someone will conduct a study one day, but 99.9% of internet opinions don't get studied, and 99.9% of people don't post mainly responsibly verified information.
There is so much to say about this, when most of our socialization has moved online. So much to be said.
I don't really know this issue, I don't study it. But from afar:
>An EU law stiffles all companies, not just the trillion dollar companies. I've essentially not considered EU audiences because I'm small and focus on the engineering + product directed toward 'everyone except Europe' because it feels like near anarchy.
>This is precision work. These companies get too big and anger the wrong person, so they get knocked. However, we obviously see that when its so big, these violations last significantly longer and often can go unpunished.
> An EU law stiffles all companies
> it feels like near anarchy
These two... really don't work together, unless my idea of what the word 'anarchy' means is different.
Anyway, an EU based company that wants to trade in the US also has its own slew of legality to consider, including dealing with work visas when visiting, state vs federal laws, import taxes, etc. [0] is the tip of the iceberg. A lot of tech companies will just "move" to the US in order to make things easier (just like a lot of US companies move to e.g. Ireland)
>An EU law stiffles all companies, not just the trillion dollar companies. I've essentially not considered EU audiences because I'm small and focus on the engineering + product directed toward 'everyone except Europe' because it feels like near anarchy.
The DMA specifically only applies to platforms with more than 45 million active users.
> An EU law stiffles all companies, not just the trillion dollar companies
The arguments from Americans against the recent EU regulation is usually the opposite - that it is laser targeted at large US companies "because the EU is jealous that they don't have any large tech companies of their own and just want to cash in on fines"
>An EU law stiffles all companies, not just the trillion dollar companies. I
That is true of some EU laws. Many have a disproportionate impact on smaller companies. GDPR for example, and the early versions of VATMOSS in terms of things I have dealt with.
Also, non EU laws such as the UK's Online Safety Act.
Not just in technology. It is also true of UK licensing laws for pubs - an example my attention was drawn to by comments made by the SEO of a big pub company as giving it an advantage.
On the other hand the EU's DMA and a lot of competition regulation gets that right.
Apple has zero moral justification for them. They are quadruple-dipping:
1. Consumers pay premium prices for Apple devices.
2. Developers have to pay $100 a year to be able to publish an app.
3. Developers need to buy expensive Apple hardware to develop for iOS. XCode doesn't work on Linux or Windows.
4. And on top of it, Apple also wants 30% of all the gross app sales.
All while their tools that developers _have_ to use are buggy and often nigh unsusable (Apple Connect....).
But wait, there's more! To keep the stronghold on developers, Apple is not allowing third-party apps to use JITs, resulting in a huge amount of time wasted to work around that.
> All while their tools that developers _have_ to use are buggy and often nigh unsusable (Apple Connect....).
I'm moving to a job where I don't have to be the build/devops engineer for a product with an iOS app. To say I'm relieved wouldn't even be the half of it. What made it particularly worse was that our release cycle was every two months which is just enough time for Apple to completely wreck the build.
The broader consumer base will install anything a bad actor wants them to and then blame the manufacturer for not stopping them with some draconian rule.
Readit News
>> In Slack communications dated November 16, 2021, the Apple employees crafting the warning screen for Project Michigan discussed how best to frame its language. Mr. Onak suggested the warning screen should include the language: “By continuing on the web, you will leave the app and be taken to an external website” because “‘external website’ sounds scary, so execs will love it.” [...] One employee further wrote, “to make your version even worse you could add the developer name rather than the app name.” To that, another responded “ooh - keep going.”
[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
Seriously, this is one of the top 10 largest companies in the world, and they're playing chicken with the court in order to preserve their ongoing revenue. These weren't random employees, but people part of "Project Michigan", Apple's "activities relating to Injunction compliance".
How doesn't every single person that's a part of that project have an Apple lawyer hovering over them every time they get near any sort of device that can put anything on the record?
Keep in mind that once you lose, the process is no longer adversarial. In ~all cases you will be required to provide evidence and status updates and such on implementation of an injunction, among other things.
So you do practically have to keep records of what you are doing to comply. These are the kinds of records you would normally see as a result. The only shocking thing is that they didn't lie :)
They often do try to hide bad stuff through privilege anyway - I believe they tried here and lost but i will go back and look - but that doesn't often work.
Maybe that is a result of the attitudes that made them one of the largest companies in the world?
To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath.
This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction.
Ironically it ends up getting flagged as some deliberate Apple malicious compliance BS which just sours you on the whole iOS experience.
Are they supposed to say "Please use our competitor. You'll find your experience with them far superior to what we provide" or something similar?
Injunctions are, intentionally, required only to "describe in reasonable detail the act or acts restrained or required". The key being "reasonable". They are not required to specify every detail, or every wrong or right thing, especially when the party being enjoined knows more of the details of how things work than the court does.
You seem to believe the court must specify language, etc, and they are absolutely not required to do so. It is your job to figure it out, and if you need more information, shockingly, you can ask the judge for the information, or whether your proposed approach would be compliant.
You are also required to make good faith attempts to comply with a court order. The evidence here is overwhelming bad faith - they were not trying to figure out how to actually ensure the court's goals were carried out, they are instead trying to figure out how to thwart them. That is pretty much the definiton of bad faith.
The injunction has reasonable detail. This is neither good faith, nor did they ask.
You seem to think this is game of try to find legal loopholes. That is a good way to get thrown in a jail by a judge.
It's not. Once you are found guilty and injunction entered, the adversarial process is done. You lost.
Your job is to do what the court requires of you, in good faith, as best you can.
Even if you appeal it, unless it is stayed, you are still required to do it.
Their solution didn't address any of the goals of the injunction.
IANAL.
I'd recommend skimming through the whole thing because Judge Rogers just eviscerates Apple over and over.
I love whichever clerk wrote this and then got it through. The real MVP
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2025/04/gonzales_rogers_apple_app...
Effective regulation isn't a strength of the US.
Apple is still doing business, has three years of profits from the malicious compliance, and appears to have attracted not much more than a sternly worded letter from a judge, and possible criminal contempt charges for a couple of individuals.
What real world consequences does Apple face for this behavior?
Can someone explain this to me? As far as I understand apple is being ordered to do the thing it was supposed to do already. Are there extra consequences I've not understood related to them disregarding the court ruling?
My concern is more about having private companies control platforms upon which we depend. I do often wish that I had a crystal ball to peer a decade or several into the future to see what the future holds for humanity in this regard. Our legal system seems ill-equipped to manage this risk.
Freedom of speech does not prevent courts from ordering defendants to say or not say specific things to make up for their past illegal behavior. In this case, the court initially allowed Apple a little flexibility around steering, which Apple misused to make web purchases sound "scary". The penalty for that is the loss of that flexibility.
The bean counters won. I guess Tim Cook does care about the bloody ROI after all.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim...
If Tim Cook is willing to lie and cheat for extra revenue, I can't trust that Apple is honest about their privacy commitments. Services revenue line must keep going up, and their ad business is a growth opportunity.
This is a funny comment for me to read. Did anyone honestly think that Apple was touting privacy as anything other than a competitive advantage for revenue maximization? They've had things like iAd, their services revenue has grown massively as hardware sales plateau, and they are nowhere near as "private" in certain countries either.
My luke-warm take is that the advertising industry is inherently evil.
Though that's the core issue, margins on services are just too addictive for big tech. Not sure Apple can keep its recipe for success with both services and hardware.
Oh, no! Who would have thought? What could we possibly do other than keep shoving money into their faces?
They were never serious.
The pressure of the financial capitalism on the industrial capitalism is too high. Any company that produces anything is eventually forced into rent-seeking to keep delivering what has come to be expected YoY growth. C-level that won't let that happen will see the way out.
My feeling is that these guys who showed up to the inauguration of a self-professed "dictator on day one" might be a little light on backbone, if not moral fortitude.
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
They charge 27% for purchases made using external payment processors. Including Stripe fees that's net-zero (not even accounting for any chargeback risks). They severely limit how you can display the external purchase link too, and display an obnoxious warning screen when you tap it.
I would be surprised if a single developer adopted it.
https://developer.apple.com/support/storekit-external-entitl...
> As of the May 2024 hearing, only 34 developers out of the approximately 136,000 total developers on the App Store applied for the program, and seventeen of those developers had not offered in-app purchases in the first place. In May 2024, Apple argued that it would take more time for developers to take advantage of the Link Entitlement and that the adoption rates could not be known. Apple attempted here to mislead.
> Given the revelations of the February 2025 hearing, Apple modeled the lack of adoption. That Apple adduced no testimony or evidence indicating developer adoption of the program is no surprise. As shown above, Apple knew it was choosing a course which would fail to stimulate any meaningful competition to Apple’s IAP and thereby maintain its revenue stream
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
Apple is not just responsible for making it possible to purchase apps outside the App Store, but to convince developers to use it over the App Store as well?
I suppose it's damning when combined with the internal emails demonstrating they were trying to avoid compliance with the ruling?
[1]: https://www.macstories.net/news/an-app-store-first-delta-add...
Half of the entire HN was like „EU bad, how dare you regulate them”. What gives?
Between all of this, it'll be a lot harder to come to the comments to defend Apple for not getting fined twice in a row for the same issue despite lying under oath and intentionally delaying proceedings, even if you vehemently disagree with the original ruling.
Google tends to be the one with more sympathy in the US lately as they've gotten much more of the regulatory stick in court.
EU = bad
US = good
I think Apple has done a great job marketing the App Store as the reason for the security/UX of their platform, when in reality, it's the OS. It's the OS that requires apps to get permission before accessing my location, it's the OS that isolates apps from each other, it's the OS that provides an easy way to install/uninstall packages.
The confusion between benefits of the OS/benefits of the App Store combined with many peoples' unfamiliarity with third party distribution has made it more difficult to convince people of the merit of these antitrust suits.
It was just asking for help getting stuff of a portable hard drive from work, so I tell him to plug it in and open up the file explorer.
He didn't know what the file explorer was, so I say "uh, the thing with the folders and shit in it, the little folder icon on the bottom". He eventually figured it out, and then I tell him to click on the drive on the left, which he figured out, and then I told him to open another file explorer window and drag the files from the first one to the second. The entire ordeal ended up taking him like ten minutes.
My brother in law isn't stupid or anything, he just didn't grow up with the typical desktop computer interface that most people who frequent HN did. He's been able to use a phone or a tablet for pretty much the entire time he's been using "computers", and those abstract away most of the lower level details.
I disagree. Application developers have always been absolutely terrible at packaging. We see this all the time on linux, where publishers just fail to follow the packaging standard of the system, and instead develop an "installer" for their special little snowflake application. The OS cannot save you from that unless you also control distribution and can tell that publisher "you don't get to publish to my very valuable user group if you don't follow my rules".
Publishers have shown time and time again that if given a permission system, they'll just ask for every single permission under the sun, unless somebody stops them from doing that. The user sure isn't. They'll run whatever garbage installer script the publisher gives them because they want the application.
I don't like Apple's monopolistic behavior. I personally believe it would be a great service to the western world to break apart Big Tech, but the incentives that drive application development ARE broken. Apple has good reason to try and fix that with the app store, they just don't get to do it by running a monopoly.
OK, sure. Fine. Whatever.
Fuckin learn or get wrecked.
Sorry, you're just wrong. Only by analyzing the apps can Apple enforce several policies that many folks think contribute to users' security.
The prohibition against dynamic code, lying about the reason that an app needs a certain permission, and all the trust and safety policies are all stuff an OS can't do.
It _is_ something a community of people empowered to control their devices can organize and achieve, but we were stripped of this capability when a small set of private concerns unilaterally locked us out. They just told us that they were the only ones they trusted to manage security, and everyone apparently believed them. The state of personal privacy has gotten unimaginably worse since. Not even the world's largest organizations can manage to fight, much less anticipate, the world's worth of bad actors.
I have a mountain I would like to sell ya.
I am not agreeing with the other guy that it's OS.
But App Store is hardly more safe than the usual internet. Stuff...
Or they could secure the runtime and quit giving developers dangerous entitlements in the first place. Make no mistake, Apple doesn't need the App Store to develop meaningful security for their users. The Mac is living proof.
Now that US courts are doing it more, it seems that corporations abusing their monopoly powers are the problem, not EU laws. But what do I know.
I doubt it's very many, they just are very loud because there is a lot of money behind their complaints.
What % of the public holds these opinions? Who knows? Maybe someone will conduct a study one day, but 99.9% of internet opinions don't get studied, and 99.9% of people don't post mainly responsibly verified information.
There is so much to say about this, when most of our socialization has moved online. So much to be said.
Apols for the tangent.
>An EU law stiffles all companies, not just the trillion dollar companies. I've essentially not considered EU audiences because I'm small and focus on the engineering + product directed toward 'everyone except Europe' because it feels like near anarchy.
>This is precision work. These companies get too big and anger the wrong person, so they get knocked. However, we obviously see that when its so big, these violations last significantly longer and often can go unpunished.
These two... really don't work together, unless my idea of what the word 'anarchy' means is different.
Anyway, an EU based company that wants to trade in the US also has its own slew of legality to consider, including dealing with work visas when visiting, state vs federal laws, import taxes, etc. [0] is the tip of the iceberg. A lot of tech companies will just "move" to the US in order to make things easier (just like a lot of US companies move to e.g. Ireland)
[0] https://www.kvk.nl/en/international/doing-business-with-the-...
The DMA specifically only applies to platforms with more than 45 million active users.
The arguments from Americans against the recent EU regulation is usually the opposite - that it is laser targeted at large US companies "because the EU is jealous that they don't have any large tech companies of their own and just want to cash in on fines"
That is true of some EU laws. Many have a disproportionate impact on smaller companies. GDPR for example, and the early versions of VATMOSS in terms of things I have dealt with.
Also, non EU laws such as the UK's Online Safety Act.
Not just in technology. It is also true of UK licensing laws for pubs - an example my attention was drawn to by comments made by the SEO of a big pub company as giving it an advantage.
On the other hand the EU's DMA and a lot of competition regulation gets that right.
Apple has zero moral justification for them. They are quadruple-dipping:
1. Consumers pay premium prices for Apple devices.
2. Developers have to pay $100 a year to be able to publish an app.
3. Developers need to buy expensive Apple hardware to develop for iOS. XCode doesn't work on Linux or Windows.
4. And on top of it, Apple also wants 30% of all the gross app sales.
All while their tools that developers _have_ to use are buggy and often nigh unsusable (Apple Connect....).
But wait, there's more! To keep the stronghold on developers, Apple is not allowing third-party apps to use JITs, resulting in a huge amount of time wasted to work around that.
I'm moving to a job where I don't have to be the build/devops engineer for a product with an iOS app. To say I'm relieved wouldn't even be the half of it. What made it particularly worse was that our release cycle was every two months which is just enough time for Apple to completely wreck the build.
Absolutely terrible experience.
Dead Comment