skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I really don't agree with the idea that "alternative payment processors" are pro-consumer. This only benefits the developer

I mean, in this case, the consumer is literally saving 20% for the same purchase. Seems good to me.

> There needs to be a reasonable compromise somewhere in the middle.

Why isn't "let other stores sell software for iOS, and the market will set the rent those stores can extract from software developers" the reasonable compromise?

People who want the ease and security of Apple and are willing to pay their extra fees can do so. Those who don't don't have to.
A consumer can jailbreak their iPhone and install apps that way, or buy an Android phone. You have choices.
You can pull another platform's image. If the image is only available for one platform, you can just pull it. If the image is available for multiple platforms, it will pull your platform instead, you need to explicitly specify the digest to get another platform's:

For example:

docker pull python@sha256:2d29705d82489bf999b57f9773282eecbcd54873d308a7e0da3adb8a2a6976af

Pulls the latest Python image for Linux Alpine running on IBM System/z.

Not what you were asking, but if you have qemu-user-static installed, you can even run Docker images for other platforms. For example:

docker run -it python@sha256:2d29705d82489bf999b57f9773282eecbcd54873d308a7e0da3adb8a2a6976af

That's Python for Linux for IBM System/z. Check the CPU architecture:

import os;os.uname().machine

Running other platform's images under QEMU is going to be quite slow on a Raspberry Pi, I imagine (I haven't tried it). But of course for this case you don't have to run the image, you just want to pull it, so that doesn't matter.
Give me PWA notifications and I'd be more apt to agree with you.
They can try, but since it's not really possible to build Fortnite and make it run efficiently on mobile safari, I doubt they'll get very far.

Section III is the missing piece of the legal puzzle for me. I have in the past been convinced that the presence of Android is sufficient to prevent a lawsuit like this from succeeding against Apple. But now I'm not so sure.

III. Competition in the Sale of Mobile Devices Cannot Discipline Apple’s Conduct
in the iOS App Distribution or iOS In-App Payment Processing Markets.
156. Competition in the sale of mobile devices cannot constrain Apple’s
anti-competitive conduct described in Parts I and II.
157. First, Apple’s power in the relevant markets described above is not
disciplined by competition in the sale of mobile devices because Apple mobile device
customers face significant switching costs and customer lock-in to Apple’s iOS
ecosystem.

How many news articles have we seen about the power of iMessage to keep people in the Apple ecosystem? It's gonna be hard for Apple to argue that they don't try to engender consumer lock in given their plain reluctance to interoperate and all the news articles talking about how strong this effect is.

I think Epic has a chance here. Certainly it's a gamble I'd love to see them win. IANAL.
I would prefer to live in a world where customers don't have to be treated like children though. Just handle it the same way Android does it - only allow apps from the app store by default, or you can enable unsafe mode and install whatever you want - the choice should always be yours.
So if I buy a Macbook, we should require Apple to make available all software I had on my Windows PC? That makes no sense.
Microsoft Windows did the same:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20041104-00/?p=37...

In later versions, heap memory handles were even implemented in Intel x86 hardware:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20041105-00/?p=37...
> I didn't do that in my initial comment, the one you originally accused of having ad hominem.

I don't know what comment you think I'm referring to other than the
first, nor why or how you can think that the ad hominem in that comment
isn't in it.

> Saying "actually, I was just being polite, I didn't mean that word you based your argument on" is rude even though it's honest.

First of all, manufacturing quotes is an offense both in life and by
HN's moderation policy.

Secondly, rude-but-honest is a real thing, but this is not an instance
of it. You're confusing someone being wounded with whether it happened because another actor was rude. Rudeness is not a necessary precondition to
emotional wounds.

If I don't like you and decline your offer to have lunch together, and then at the
end of the day you confront me about why it was that we didn't have
lunch, and I succinctly explain it and that I'm unlikely to ever agree
to have lunch, then it's a very realistic possibility that that's
something you feel wounded by. But it's not evidence of me being
rude; it's a consequence of you putting yourself in a position where
the inevitable result is discovering information that leads to you
feeling that way.

The problem with the original commenter's remark goes beyond even that.

The problem was both to question the intent of my wording (which is
sufficient alone to give a direct response—no malice necessary), and
then to tie that in to their argument as well. My options were to
answer the question truthfully, or to let their comments stand, both
sacrificing the truth and ceding to what was an unsound argument. It
might be accurate to call it rude if it were somehow immaterial and
unprovoked (like "pulling the rug out from under" someone), but it
wasn't that; to repeat myself now for something like the third time: my
comment was a direct response to the person calling attention to the
matter. They put themselves in a position to hear the answer they were
seeking, and it doesn't require rudeness to have given the response they got.

> The combination of misleading someone and then harshly pulling the rug out from under them

Harshly pulling the rug out from under someone is being a dick.
Responding directly to someone with an answer that may upset them is not. And there was no misleading, unlike...

> Are personal attacks not a subset of rude? You said it was a personal
attack.

Not interested in the least in litigating this kind of misdirection. In fact, communicating this was the exact intent of the part of my response that you're replying to here: It wouldn't matter if you were being rude or not, nor did I claim it was rude.
I agree that is a sensible compromise, like login. "If you support our competitors, you must support our implementation to benefit from placement in our index."
FYI some dude named Tim owns like 55%
Global market shares are the concern of global governments
The small engine repair/power equipment sales shop a mile from me. They're still using an Okidata dot matrix printer from the '80s for their invoices. They don't have a website either.

There's a lot of companies like this. More than you could imagine. Why? The owners are probably in their 70s, missed the whole "computers are cool/useful" thing, and have been muddling along for decades. But, somehow, they've kept going on reputation, customer laziness, whatever.
“We can solve any problem by introducing an extra level of indirection.”

— “Fundamental theorem of software engineering”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_softwar...
How do you feel about events like the Stonewall Riots[1], where police historically assaulted LGBTQ+ people, and those people fought back? These people should have just accepted being beaten and arrested for being gay? That should have waited until legislation caught up with their rights?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots
The thing is, if Apple alienates developers enough/makes them go bankrupt, the only applications you will be able to use would be the first party Apple ones. That won't be a very enjoyable thing, would be?

That's the entire problem. If a shopping mall was charging every store 30% of their revenue (not profit, revenue!), it would be very quickly going broke and empty. Yet Apple (and to a lesser degree Google, Facebook and a few others) is getting away with this - exactly because unlike the shopping mall, the developers don't have a choice. It is either play by Apple rules - or be excluded from a very sizeable part of the mobile market.

When Microsoft was playing dirty and abusing its market dominance to put a squeeze on companies trying to ship other than Microsoft's software, they got hammered in court pretty bad. The anti-monopoly/abuse of dominant market position laws are there for a reason, even if you, as a consumer, don't see it (yet).
Yes, it was an in-game event via their Party Royale game mode. Should be up on YouTube relatively soon - it was only a minute or so long.
How is the apple app store and development kit etc etc not a toolbox? Granted 30% is a ridiculous cut.
Not paying 30% fees to apple absolutely helps consumers. If you look at the demand elasticity on mobile payments you'll see that fee's are mostly passed on to consumers. Developers will be happy to give a 25% discount to get that extra 2-3% after credit card fees.
True, and I personally think it's a good idea.

The stockholders though would probably say that they can just supply the capital themselves, if the business is in trouble.
If you derailed a train, you'd lose what, tens of millions of dollars worth of locomotives, cars, and maybe a mile of track? When a hypertunnel explosively pressurizes, chances are you'd lose tens of billions of dollars of tube, plus anything that was anywhere in it.
If by great you mean "great for malware makers" I guess so. HN has a big problem of pushing for changes hat benefit highly tech-literate people but in reality the majority of the market needs signed apps so they don't download harmful programs.

I think people need to stop looking at their own immediate interests and start considering long term aspects of things. You can't just throw out technology now without understanding how it empowers bad actors, because it amplifies them too.
Why is market share relevant?

Also, Apple has a much bigger market share in the US simply because most of the world cannot afford an iPhone.
Security. the ability to find non shitty ass clones
Epic Games releases "Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite" ad
SEO itself is a garbage industry full of pseudoscience and snake oil quackery but the fundamental process of optimizing your web presence is something that isn't going away.

Social media is not a replacement for a great web presence.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

-- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/89101-those-who-make-peacef...
> Applications in this store cannot be patched, or pinned. You can’t audit them, hold them, modify them or even point snap to a different store.

This is not entirely correct. Distributions can use a "brand store" to have complete control over which packages their users get.

> You can’t audit them

Many Snaps contain a build manifest in `/snap/snap-name/current/snap/manifest.yaml`. This manifest contains a log of everything that is used to build the package. For snaps built on Launchpad, this is automatically enabled and includes a link to the Launchpad build log for that snap. This is one of the build logs for the Chromium package, for example: https://launchpad.net/~osomon/+snap/chromium-snap-firstrun-n...

Using Launchpad as the source of truth, you can be 100% certain that the snap you're running is built from the source it presents. This is the same infrastructure that builds and provides trust for Ubuntu itself.

The snapcraft build service uses Launchpad in the background, so any snap built using that can be audited just like regular Ubuntu packages. Snaps built on third-party infrastructure can enable this manifest using an environment variable.

I don't know why Linux Mint is spreading such misinformation, but this is harmful.
There’s plenty of businesses that aren’t just motivated by profit. However the businesses that rise to the top are obviously going to be those who are more aggressively profit driven. This is why my previous comment made a distinction about company size rather than making a blanket statement about all companies.
Plenty of people have no idea what they are getting into when they buy Apple devices as a status symbol.
There's a additional point: on 4 cloud instances, a x5 performance improvement means you have only one machine to manage instead of several, and then your ops costs are way smaller.

There's a big number of companies who have between 4 and 20 machines for serving Python, Node or PHP apps and spend a lot of efforts managing them with overkill solutions like kubernetes or whatever when it could be a single machine or two using more frugal languages.
The difference is that Apple’s “store” is the whole device, not just the UI for downloading apps.

Apple owns the building that allows apps to set up shop and sell their services. As part of that deal they get a cut of every sale.
Observation, what happens often is more about what the shysters can get away with than any intrinsic morality.
That sounds like, for performance reasons, you want control over the actual types used. But you could eliminate those changes from affecting the semantic representation of your program. Or at the very least with an easy check that the optimization doesn't affect your semantics.
Maybe their shitty and outdated implementation of standards is what is holding them back. Maybe just use another browser though right...
> Look up how you type: those • characters I used in my post, an m-dash (—), a c-cedilla (ç), a german double-S (ß), basic accented characters for various Western European languages

No thanks! I already new how to type — (Compose - - -), and I was able to guess how to type the others simply by trial and error in less time than it would take to duck/google how to type them:

Compose + . + - → · (close enough for me Edit: Compose + . + = → •) ┃
Compose + c + , → ç ┃
Compose + s + s → ß

Compose + e + ` → è ┃
Compose + e + ' → é ┃
Compose + ` + e → è ┃
Compose + ' + e → é

Bonus:
Compose + - + > → → ┃
Compose + = + / → ≠ ┃
Compose + / + = → ≠ ┃
Compose + : + ) → ┃
Compose + L + L + A + P → (Edit: HN seems to have stripped out the last two, a smiley face emoji and the \\// / Star Trek/Live Long And Prosper hand. So I guess the compose key can type more characters than HN even allows.)

ß°ηυ5 þē 5€¢•ηⅾ:
Pressing the alt key reveals underlines under selectable gui elements. Press any letter that's underlined (while still holding alt) to activate the element (menu item, button, etc.). Try this in every GUI you use regularly and then race a macOS user stuck with reaching for a trackpad or mouse everytime they need to click something. Јоⅰη ⅿе ⅰɳ wօɳԁеrⅰηg Һօw ɳօ‐օɳе аt Аррⅼе tҺօυgҺt tо аⅾԁ tҺіѕ, wҺⅰϲҺ іѕ ɳօt ѕоⅿе rесеɳtⅼу‐аԁԁеԁ fеаtυrе ⅰɳ ԌΝU⁄Ⅼіɳυⅹ, Ьυt ⅰѕ рrасtіϲаⅼⅼУ аɳсіеηt ⅰη ϲоⅿρυtⅰɳg tеrⅿѕ (¡ΝаѕtУ Wⅰηԁоwѕ, рrеҺⅰѕtоrіс Wіηԁօwѕ 95, Һаⅾ tҺеѕе υηⅾеrⅼіɳеѕ аⅼwаУѕ ⌵іѕⅰЬⅼе!).
The Republican party wants to be a dictatorship. They are putting party over country. They don't want to lose and win at all costs. I wish Obama had done something like this to make sure Trump didn't get elected (this statement is intended to trigger Republicans and force them to defend Trump's actions)
Not all that objectionable IMHO, even if you think Apple should allow other app sources. Of course an app store having clear policies and a good reputation is an important factor for users installing apps from there - and thus for vendors picking one to sell in. You see that in action on Android to some degree.

EDIT: In some ways the best option IMHO would be a package-manager like design, where the system is responsible for fetching and updating packages, verifying signatures, security prompts, ... and "app stores" just feed information into that, but I doubt we'll see that anywhere.
LOLz. Being able to distribute free versions of apps is a huge developer benefit. There is an entire top Free Apps list front and center on the store for customers to see.

They are hiding away Fortnight, because it’s demanding a free ride on a pay product.
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
I'm reading this and thinking, is just the fact that an iphone do not allow you to install another OS is considered as an infringement of the anti trust law?
Or, you know, go to Android with 70%+ global market share.[1]

If you really want to make a radio for Lamborghini's, but they say no, then you go to a different manufacturer. "oh but Lambo owners have so much spend/revenue per owner" doesn't really hold water.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide
Not everyone can afford getting half naked under the sun on a daily basis.
It's easier to be deficient than you think. Do a blood test. You may get an unpleasant surprise.
I think about half of the population is either insufficient or deficient without supplementation.
Ballot box stuffing has occurred numerous times in American History. Even ids are not a panacea.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/fake-id-seizures-on-the-rise-m...

Plato's critique of a Democracy is it's the son of Oligarchy & degenerates into Tyranny...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_five_regimes
> Snap is auto-updating and you can't stop it

Kill the daemon and make it non-executable. Only restore it when you want to manually do an install.
Does Microsoft take a cut when someone purchases on Xbox? Sony on the PlayStation? How is this different?
"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win."
a) Phone is not considered by most people to be a computer.

b) I can't install anything I want on my PS4, Switch, Tesla, Shopify store etc.

So actually Apple isn't the outlier at all.
That's the position of one of the two parties in the case. The other party says they are.
That's because you have a disingenuous definition of "average PC user", a strawman, so that your argument works.

What you call the "average PC user" is really the average smartphone user these days. PC users are doing office work, running a business, development, gaming, content creation in more ways than I can enumerate, etc.

People who have a bulky desktop computer in their home just to browse the internet are vanishingly few.
so are you intentionally ignoring every possible alternative or are you just that dense

don't worry the state will handle it
But what if that is what I as an Apple customer actually pays for - a walled garden where everything is controlled?
As a consumer it doesn't hurt me at all. All apps on the app store adhere to a certain set of rules and if they don't they are removed. It also means that payment is controlled by Apple, which is fine by me. I trust Apple more than I trust Epic or any other potential company that wishes to bypass App store rules wrt payments..

And i buy many Apps priced way above 99 cents.
Apple is gatekeeping a market of their own design. I am going to try to construct (probably a poor) analogy.

It is as if Apple started a town and a bunch of people moved in establishing a new market. The only way to deliver goods to this market is via the railway Apple established. The catch, you pay Apple 30% of the revenue generated for access to this market via the railway. If you try to establish a highway system, build an airport, perform airdrops, or some other means of delivering goods and services to this market, you are no longer allowed to use the train. IMO, Apple should be able to refuse transport of anything they wish for any reason they wish.

If this was a real scenario, what was allowed in this market would be controlled by the people who make up that market. There would be some governance and laws established for fair trade practices. I would think it is up to the people to establish these alternate delivery methods, in this case, jailbreaking their iphones and installing whatever they wanted.
> Their ability to spread to adults is their biggest risk factor

Others have mentioned this, but just for emphasis: you do not know that. Nor does anyone else. Repeating it is irresponsible, and you should stop doing that.

There have been a lot of lessons the epidemic can teach us. But one big one is that magical thinking is still accepted as a substitute for reason by a frightening number of people, and that's before you get to the outright grifters.
You can't build a messenger in Safari that pings when someone is sending you a message. Actually, you wouldn't be able to do that even with app side loading, because Apple does not allow apps to work in background and must rely on push notifications to wake up from sleep.

If Apple is forced to allow third-party stores, it should also be forced to allow third-party push notifications.
Do you mean that pandemics don’t really end, but only get reclassified?

Or do you mean they end when we cure ourselves through vaccines, herd immunity etc.?
I think this model looks at apps as widgets too much. People don't price compare IAPs. Nobody's like "well fortnite charges X for Y, but Minecraft charges A for B." App store revenues are probably largely games or similar things that don't really have a competitor you can easily price compare against.

App developers set their prices at whatever maximizes revenue (which is often determined by testing) and the payment processing fee has no effect. It's more like Coke pricing at an airport than Coke pricing at a gas station with another gas station next door.

I expect they'd offer whatever discount maximized revenue, so the real question is how much of a discount do they need to offer to get you to switch from app store payments to some other method? Other methods are largely pretty seamless these days too, so the answer is probably not much. I expect consumers would barely benefit.

(Source: been doing games with IAPs for 13 years).
I wish I could give comments gold on HN.

My phone is the center of my life, and I genuinely appreciate that Apple does the work of vetting applications so I don't have to.
You aren’t using the store correctly if you believe that. Marketing isn’t just “ads”. Look it up.
You could say that the disruption is being disrupted.

Regulators are slowly getting sick of the tech industry's behavior of overthrowing markets by VC-ing out competitors to establish their own monopoly all while dodging taxes through global schemes.
Kimberly Jones, "How Can We Win".

Excellent.
Container Linux on the Desktop (2017)
> 1. It's clearly not a monopoly by any accepted definition.

Apple's market power seems to fit this legal definition quite well: https://definitions.uslegal.com/m/monopoly/

Monopoly is a control or advantage obtained by one entity over the commercial market in a specific area. Monopolization is an offense under federal anti trust law. The two elements of monopolization are (1) the power to fix prices and exclude competitors within the relevant market. (2) the willful acquisition or maintenance of that power as distinguished from growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen or historical accident.
Google doesn't penalize for too many outbound links, but SEO is a zero sum game. Being conservative or even stingy with links is higher reward strategy than being generous.
Excellent insight, thank you.
Yes, it's a rambling rant "man yells at the cloud", and it's since been recanted by its own author. What did you learn from that article exactly?