darklion

The edict was intentionally vague and overbroad.

It’s a law that establishes no measurable compliance guidelines, while providing absolutely no limitations on what the EU can decide counts as a violation retroactively. It’s basically “We’re not going to tell you what we want you to do. You need to guess what we want you to do, and fuck you if you guess wrong.”

I’m struggling to understand why controversial blog entries and erotic fiction need a secure machine.

Meanwhile, my company halved our sick time a couple of years ago, and just last week announced that they were eliminating dedicated sick time entirely starting the first of next year. Want to take a sick day? Spend your “paid time off” (a.k.a., vacation days) to do it.

Insert a, “I’d love to use my sick time, IF I HAD ANY” meme here.

Uh, Hypervisor still exists, and is still supported: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor

I still use Reddit, but I gave up on productively contributing to it.

The only account I use now is purely for NSFW reddits, which Reddit will not display advertising for, and I don’t post questions or write comments. They serve me media they host, incurring the costs of storage and data transfer, and get nothing from me in return.

Where actually they are a full monopoly in the App Store market.

They do, they absolutely do. What’s worse, it turns out they have a full monopoly in MacBooks, computers running macOS, iPads, and iPhones.

In other words, no they don’t. The legal definition of monopoly is not solely, “if there’s only one participant in a market, the participant in that market has a monopoly”. There is necessarily more to it than that, because if that’s all it was, literally every company selling a product would have a monopoly in that product.

No, they want installs on-demand once you select the browser, which ties into a subsequent demand that browsers be able to be downloaded directly from the source or an alternative App Store.

Because the only reason I can think of is whining about not being the default.

That is exactly the reason.

The charitable reason is so that the browser, upon launch, can ask the user if they want to make it the default.

The problem is that the only incentive browser vendors have to not ask repeatedly is the frequency threshold past which the user will not use the browser.

All of these need to get broken up until we have at least a half-dozen competing companies in those spaces.

You seem to be forgetting, we had your “at least a half-dozen competing companies" situation in the past. It was called the late 2000s and the early 2010s. And the reason it disappeared is not the traditional “everybody merges until only two or three are left standing”, it’s because iOS and Android were so much better than the competition that every other phone manufacturer starved to death or switched to Android.

By the time a new generation of smartphones with sufficiently-equivalent OSes had arrived — in the form of webOS and Microsoft Phone — iOS and Android were so established the newcomers couldn’t successfully compete.

Even today, while there are only two major OSes, there are still numerous successfully competing manufacturers: Samsung, Google, Apple, OnePlus, BLU, Lenovo/Motorola, Huwaei, Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo, etc. They all make mobile phones, with varying levels of market share across the world.

Why not just let people do what they do with other files and leave it on their desktop.

Once upon a time, upon seeing a disk image open with an app icon, a certain quantity of people would choose to run the app straight off the disk image, likely not understanding the prompt to copy the app to the Applications folder.

Then, sometime later, the disk image would be unmounted (e.g., system reboot) and suddenly the app they had “installed” disappeared.

Rather than force everyone into mandatorily copying apps to the Applications folder, they added a dialog to suggest to the user where the app should go. I will say, though, I didn’t realize it applied to _everything_ outside of the Applications folder. I thought it was only for apps run off of disk images.

Why stop at protecting kids when you can force your morals on adults at the same time?

Spain knows it’s never going to stop people from looking at porn, but if you can essentially ration it, and then figure out a way to embarrass the adults who want more rations, you can pat yourself on the back for reducing overall porn usage.

What’s less freedom matter if you’re doing God’s work?

It’s being done in response to Elon Musk being caught liking some questionable things.

Now people (e.g., Musk) can like anti-Semitic and pro-white supremacy and pro-Nazi content all they want without fear of being exposed as anti-Semitic or pro-Nazi.

Apple is often “behind” because it believes that generally, technological advancements are subordinate to product function and user benefit. It generally doesn’t do something just because it’s hip, cool, or trendy. it does something because it believes that something benefits the user.

So it’s pragmatic to publicly advocate one position and then privately advocate another?

Isn’t that what Google is doing here, publicly advocating one position (Epic are a bunch of selfish bastards) and privately advocating another (Google is entitled to screw over everybody else)? Why is Google selfish and Epic pragmatic for the exact same actions?

It's not wrong for Epic to support changes that also happen to benefit everyone while also prioritizing their own goals.

No, but it’s wrong for Epic to position those changes as part of a battle to ensure everybody gets their money, and then admit on the stand that they were perfectly happy to let everybody else to continue to get screwed over as long as they (Epic) got their cash.

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https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/30/23962920/epic-just-admit...

"The Coalition for App Fairness is an independent nonprofit organization founded by industry-leading companies to advocate for freedom of choice and fair competition across the app ecosystem."

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https://www.imore.com/epic-games-would-have-accepted-special...

Lawyer: If Apple had told you that it would offer you a deal and no other developers, would you have accepted that?

Sweeney: Yes, I would have.

No it doesn't, but leading up to the trial, Epic generally and Sweeney specifically made a _huge_ PR push that he was waging this battle on Apple (and Google) on behalf of all developers everywhere who are getting screwed over by the 30% commission.

While it’s perfectly fine for him to sue, I think it’s extremely disingenuous for him to make that huge PR push about how he’s standing up for the common developer and then admit on the stand that he’s perfectly happy to let the common developer continue to twist in the wind as long as he gets his pay-off.

In that sense, Google’s post did get one thing right — Epic’s only interested in itself; any impact for anybody else, positive or negative, is just incidental.

Epic is accusing Google (and Apple) of being monopolies since it wants to play in the app store space.

I think that’s a secondary effect. The primary reason is so Epic gets to keep all the money it makes on digital purchases, which is pretty much all margin for them.

And any pretense that Epic is doing this for anyone other than, or in addition to, Epic went out the window during the Apple trial when Sweeney admitted on the stand that had Apple offered Epic, and only Epic, a sweetheart deal, he would’ve gladly taken it in a heartbeat.

Putting aside the bugginess of the existing software, this litany of complaints mostly boils down to, “I wish Apple would make the macOS equivalent to the Microsoft Surface.”

This is a wishlist for a device that lets you do literally everything in every way possible that a Mac lets you do, but is simultaneously perfectly adapted to doing all of those things in a completely touch-only format with no downsides, regressions, or compromises.

Good. The only downside that I can see to this settlement is that it isn’t able to set a legal precedent.

So does that mean that if Firefox or Safari don’t implement something, but it exists in a polyfill, that Firefox or Safari should be treated as if it has been implemented natively?

Otherwise, what I’m reading is, “It’s OK for Chrome to put out whatever it wants because other browsers can rely on polyfills, but then we can turn around and ignore those same polyfills when it comes to evaluating what technologies Chrome supports vs. what technologies the other browsers support.”

In other words, Chrome gets promoted for going it alone, and the other browsers get dinged for waiting to implement something standard.

While Chrome _does_ respect existing standards, sometimes to the point of pedantry, it also happily rolls out designed-for-our-needs web technologies and APIs into its majority-share browser immediately, only starting the standards process once it has the feature implemented. That means for months, or years, Chrome essentially has a proprietary set of extensions and APIs while its competitors are waiting for the standards process to work.

Does “having a proprietary, not-a-standard set of extensions and APIs that work only in that one browser” sound familiar? Chrome may not be dragging its feet on existing standards, but it’s so far out over the skis of where the standards are at.

THAT is what people mean when they say “Chrome is the new IE”.

I wish there were a setting to never use an in app web browser on iOS.

I get that, but by the same token, a thoughtful app maker can provide that option to you today (I have apps on my device that expicitly have that option).

Honestly, if this rule were in place, that App Store rejection would make even /more/ sense — it’s even /more/ cumbersome to stitch together a login flow by redirecting to another entirely separate app (the default browser).

Apple must update SFSafariViewController (Apple’s system provided in-app browser for iOS) to respect the user's choice of default browser.

I don’t understand this ask. If the idea is that in-app browsers are inherently compromised either through security or user preference, then at that point it makes no sense for an in-browser component to exist in the first place; all it’s going to do is invisibly bounce the request from the app to the default browser, at which point the app might as well just invoke the default browser directly and not bother using the in-app version.

Why not post a direct link to the video that the tweet embeds?

There’s no violation here. The injunction said they couldn’t prohibit linking out; it didn’t prohibit Apple from continuing to charge money.

Whether they should is a related, but separate, issue that is not relevant to the words of the injunction. Unlike in the EU, legal documents in the US usually mean what the words say.

WHY does Apple, parading around as a pompous paragon of privacy, even allow this crap?

Good alliteration.

Apple doesn’t enforce what the app does with app data. Apple makes sure that if the app uses a platform API that is sensitive, it gets your opt-in (or prohibits the use of the API altogether). Apple makes sure that the app publishes a privacy nutrition label. But what the app does inside with whatever data you choose to give it, that’s up to the app.

If you voluntarily choose to give data to the app, what the app does with it is your problem. Apple just tries to make sure the app can’t take data that you haven’t chosen to give it.

this is exclusivity on individual customers.

Yes, individual customers who choose to buy an iPhone. It’s not like Apple is the only phone manufacturer in the world, and the iPhone is only barely dominant in the United States. There is plenty of competition for the iPhone. If you don’t like the iPhone and its singular App Store, go buy an Android phone.

What you want is an iPhone on your terms. Sorry, that’s not how the market works.

If you’re suggesting there’s some sort of data- or usage- mining of Spotify’s app and/or app integrations with the OS going on, you’re going to have to provide much more evidence than just the allegation of “Apple can see Spotify’s data”.

The device might be able to see “Spotify’s data”, but the closest thing Apple-the-company has to “Spotify’s data [on iOS/macOS]” is likely to be device/customer profiles on who downloads the app from the App Store.

And I’m sure the amount of data that Apple has on Spotify and their business and marketing strategies from non-device sources is both vastly superior and vastly more than what they would get from device-based information.

What is TAMASHA?

Should a store be forced to stock a product that has “This product is significantly cheaper if you buy it directly from the manufacturer” printed on the front of the package?