skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple has huge economies of scale and its public services margins imply costs are roughly 10%. That’s why you won’t see app stores offering similar functionality charging less than 20% ever.
Can someone explain to me why Apple's 30% tax is so different from every B&M retailer providing shelf space? I can't sell stuff in walmart without paying Walmart

"But you can't sell apps on iOS outside the app store"

I can't sell stuff on ANY platform/device without the permission of the platform/device maker. I also can't create my own platform within another platform, without permission of that platform. I can't open an Amazon store and ask Amazon to list or fulfill my goods but not charge me a fee.

Monopoly argument? with like 20-30% global user share? C'mon now
https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-expected-to-ex...
They make up most store revenue. Android might have more installs, but Apple makes way more from their store. They are effectively a monopoly, if not a duopoly. But Android allows secondary stores...Apple doesn't.
And if you've bought apps? The same is true the other way around of course, i.e. if you've bought apps on android
You perhaps were being sarcastic, but there is truth in the statement. And while it is unpleasant, I think it is an aspect of this pandemic that is worth considering - not necessarily in an of itself, but perhaps as a way to begin discussing our culture's unhealthy view of prolonging life at all costs. I don't want to spend my last days/weeks/months slowly rotting in a hospital bed.
You seem to be missing what differential privacy is. It's not about collection of data, it's about the _use_ of that data. It's no secret that Google has an incredible amount of logging data, but the ways we can use it are very limited. Folks seem to be under the impression that we can wily-nily just go ahead and build products that harvest everything about you and link up the dots across organizations. That's so funny, because it'd make things so much easier sometimes. :P

Instead, we have very strict privacy rules and experts to review the designs for the use of this data. If I even want to train a ML model over real data I have to have an approved privacy review that shows how you maintain privacy.

Where I use differential privacy algorithms in my line of work is to do ad-hoc analysis over suggestions placed in front of users. I have dimensions to aggregate across, but I want to ensure that no one bucket can deanonymize a user. k-anonymity used to be the thing (e.g. if a bucket has <50 people in it, that's too few), but even a large bucket can deanonymize users which is where k-anonymity comes in. I sincerely don't care who the users are, I just want to know how our features get used to try and save them more time.

Do I have access to the underlying logs? Yes. Can I use that to make decisions? No. I can however use the anonymized data to make decisions, and even store that longer than the underlying data exists (most logs exist for <14d).

Differential privacy also makes it possible to train models like SmartCompose by ensuring that the tokens it trains over are diffuse enough to not point back to any one person.

> I'd personally bet that differential privacy techniques that actually give users notable information-theoretic anonymity are very rarely used by Google in general.

For existing things, sure. They did their best, but this is new, reified research. As they're replaced they're being replaced by features which use differential privacy techniques.
I think this is textbook confirmation bias. When you have two seemingly equivalent theories (the threat of C-19 is serious vs overblown), you select the one that is more convenient for your worldview.

Mr. and Mrs. Applecart both have full-time jobs and four children; they don't have time to home-school and wouldn't know how if they did. Their lives would be more functional if the threat is overblown, so they believe the threat is overblown.

Mrs. and Mr. Bandersnatch work in the mining industry. If scientists are correct, the fossil fuel industry is going to lead to climate collapse within about twenty years. Their livelihoods depend on oil extraction. They have a vested interest in being skeptical of scientific authority.

As someone else here pointed out, the study doesn't seem to factor economic security. I bet you would find a very strong correlation between economic security and willingness to keep children at home that would cross political lines.

(yes, I know, confirmation bias cuts both ways)
My point is definitely not that Apple should be forced to give up control of their work, since I'm not sure which work you're referring to.

As far as I know, you can't use Apple's store without Apple's hardware. So my point is that Apple is getting paid.
Not for developers or customers.
Predecessor of the business card: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visiting_card (and in some languages business cards don't have a different name - e.g. German also calls them "Visitenkarte")
> Plus we know nothing about the long term health consequences.

I'm not anti-vax, but anti-vaxers use this same tactic; they use ambiguity to breed fear against vaccines.

I get that some unknowns are dangerous, but there has to be a limit, right? We can't be afraid of everything we don't know.
> Monopoly is the wrong word but Apple's practices are at least bordering on anti-consumer.

As always, monopoly depends on how you define your market. If the market as iOS apps then Apple is clearly a monopoly.
I think I have a better analogy: Apple operates a market with a significant portion of economic activity in several industries / verticals, yet it sets its own rules and even is party to transactions. That's basically the definition of a black market.

Black markets are useful in some circumstances, but when they grow too big they have to be regulated and taxed. A lot.

Good for Epic.
I use C++ to write business servers that along with managing data do some heavy calculations and reporting. I see no problems at all using C++ (in combination with some libraries) for this purpose. They're blindingly fast and memory efficient. Using modern C++ they're not any more difficult to develop then using "traditional" means.
If you are a user of an iPhone you cannot get an app from elsewhere. If I develop an app and sell if for $4.99 on the app store (price based on projections of downloads, how much apple takes, etc needed to make my money back). However I could offer the same app for $3.99 on an appstore that took a more reasonable percentage cut and get more downloads since lots of users are price sensitive. From this perspective, it looks like a textbook case where prices are higher for consumers due to the lack of competition.

Even if one builds for the web, apple only allows a single browser engine which is their own. They unilaterally can decide what to implement and what features to add or remove.
Xfinity (in my neighborhood) is a monopoly. I literally cannot get any other fast internet service at my apartment.

I can, however, chose to buy a different phone.
why do we need appstore’s at all? on my computer i can just download an executable from any website i please. i don’t need an app store intermediary
AWESOME. Fortnite not following rules = good riddance. I don't want 528925 apps with different payment platforms and rules.
you also have far more influence on your financial problems then a disease.

Financial problems are, aslong as the basic needs are met (food, water, housing etc) purely a societal problem.

A disease with a deadly track record and no cure is far worse and is something you or anybody else in society has little to no control over.
Not really. If it’s my damn fridge, and it comes with an OS, I’d like to install whatever software I want on it, not just buy overpriced crap through the manufacturers insolence-store.
Brendan Eich was a decent CTO, as far as I could tell from the outside; while I disagreed with him on some technical details (e.g. single threaded everything didn't seem that great), at least he seemed to be able to justify his decisions. As a CEO of a very public company, though, I feel like he wasn't quite up for the job — mostly in that he couldn't respond to public criticism fast enough and let it build up instead.

I think things would worked out better for everybody if he had stayed as the CTO, but that's the power of hindsight. That and it was under his watch that they didn't invest into mobile early enough (I'm thinking of Minimo here, which would have been for Windows CE — not helpful in itself, but it would have helped slim down Gecko, probably).
Yes, electric and hybrids use the breaks so little that rust on the discs is a problem many places
I believe Amazon’s cut is 15% and eBay’s is 10%.
Don't lump Google in with Apple here. Android lets you sideload apps.
On what evidence to you base your belief that Apple is guaranteed to win this case? Yes, they have more financial resources, and they have a lot more to lose if they lose so they definitely fight as hard as they can. That doesn't mean they aren't breaking the law and that Epic can't prove it. It'll just be very expensive to do so.
Trump blocks postal funds to prevent expanded mail-in voting
Context is that Apple has two things:

A) Devices, with a large market share, restricted to a particular app store, where Apple takes a pay cut of 30%.

B) Strong restrictions on what is allowed inside this app store and no hesitation to ban anyone from that app store for sometimes the weirdest reason.

Naturally no one likes to pay apple the 30% cut and even more so no one likes to be forced to play by Apple's rules to distribute software to iPhones etc.

Now Epic Games actually tries to fight back. Study law and read the documents if you need more details ;).

My take on this: Apple is obviously acting in a manner that prevents fair competition. They have a point to be paid and they have a point to enact certain policies. But taken together with the outright ban of competing stores, this is obviously a market dominating position. I guess they can have two of the three and they should go for policies, single app store and a self-cost price. But they probably will settle for single app store and high price.
Also, a lot of countries have far more centralized authority to figure things out.
s/abhorrent/malicious/

I subscribe to Hanlon's Razor, but at this point we're well past any benefit of the doubt.
Nobody is forcing you to side load apps. Just because someone say has the option to install an application that Apple censored it it does not mean you are also forced to install that application.
No, uber shouldn't have done and should not do any of those. Anyone with common sense understands its not a normal job.

Liberals have a tendency to pass bad policies that cause job losses and big increases in costs to an already broke population, yet they claim to be for the poor. Just that alone shows they have zero common sense.
Imagine if Microsoft did this on PCs. a) prohibiting the installation of non-windows store software (sideloading) and b) insisting that all purchases done via apps give them a 30% cut. I think this is a ridiculous practice on the behalf of Apple.
The Unreal Engine license is like Epic giving you a toolbox for no upfront cost, but charging you 5% of whatever revenue you generate selling goods made using the toolbox.

The App store comission is like Apple charging you 30% anytime you sell one of those goods to someone who lives in an Apple branded house. (To complete the analogy, maybe you're a door to door salesman and Apple charges you a "sidewalk usage fee" or something)

One (Unreal Engine) is a licensing agreement for a tool with no upfront cost; the other is a tax on any sale made to an end user.
I believe the correct term is Cartel and is just as illegal as monopoly just harder to prove.
FWIW, I find "in year XXXX" arguments equally frustrating. It is an entitled, condescending perspective that automatically dismisses the counter-point as a "thing of the past" and "regressive" without adding any substance.

Which also happens to be factually misleading. Views on sexuality normativity does not have a linear progression over time, nor through societies [1].

Name dropping the current year not only doesn't add anything to the argument, it is also fallacious for any domain that doesn't progress strictly monotonically.

[1] For example in contrast to attitudes towards homosexuality in certain Middle Eastern countries today, little would consider that heteronormativity might have increased as more of a result of 19th century colonial European influence on those cultures. See this r/AskHistorians post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4r17fc/what_...
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Netscape sued Microsoft and got its way. Size doesn't often matter, just visibility. Apple was already under the microscope.
Apple only really had two actions, both bad for Epic. They probably prepared responses and PR campaigns against both.
They aren’t breaking the law in any way.
It's a sad affair. The measures wouldn't have to be so severe if there wasn't so much noise about it.
A bit of cool headed thought, compliance, and leaders we could trust might have saved our grandparents while ensuring a pretty good upbringing for our children.

Alas, that's not the world we live in. We don't trust anything, the media is busy being sensational, big money only cares about making more money in way possible, our leaders continuely lie to us and foster partisanship and miscommunication.
The fear is not death.

How about the fact that long term effects are unknown. Or what sort of ongoing medical issues will people have for the rest of their lives?

There is people who believe that once you're done with this virus, it is gone from your system and you're back to normal. Certainly that is the case for many, but there are still many more that will continue to suffer from what they are calling now 'long haulers'.

Spend some time in a large (91k people and growing) Survivors group [0] to get a feeling of what people are facing.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/groups/COVID19survivorcorps/
That's not even an issue. There are two parties who are having a dispute; one of the two parties has appropriated something from the other. You don't need to know who gave more blows to understand who's in the wrong here. However, it happens in this case that the thief is also the person who inflicted more injuries on the other.
I don't see how the Google Play Store is a good comparison, as you can trivially install a 3rd-party app store on an unrooted, stock Android device, and you can install things without even going through an app store.

But I agree that this suit probably isn't going anywhere, at least not to the extent that some commenters here are hoping. This will likely end with a slap on the wrist and/or some very small concessions to Epic.
The Commodore Amiga in Pixels_
So, one presumes, they are betting that against the possibility of tens of millions of dollars in upside somehow.
The Ever-Accelerating Automation of Fast Food
It’s impossible to force a parent into the choice between working a life-threatening job interacting with the public or eviction

It's a failing of the government that so many Americans have to face this choice.
Epic has a good argument that Apple is engaging in illegal "tying" - requiring that to buy B, you must also buy A, where A and B are not inherently tied tightly together

AT&T lost that one decades ago. At one time phone users could only use a rented AT&T phone. (Or modem, and AT&Ts modems were huge, expensive, and included a dial and handset.) See "Carterphone decision".
As must be repeated in every thread on antitrust:

Antitrust law is about much more than just monopoly. Apple doesn't have one, nor do they need one to be prosecuted for anticompetitive behavior and abuse of market position. If you're not familiar with the difference between the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act, this is a good primer: https://www.britannica.com/event/Clayton-Antitrust-Act

Apple is about to get bitten hard, not for being a monopoly, but for anticompetitive business practices.
I guess the question is does McDonalds price it as a luxury good in India?
Apple yes. Google no. You can install 3rd party stores and freely sideload apps.
Pro-tip for engineers on spreadsheets: Org-mode & emacs is a great tool for the random spreadsheet you might want to scratch out to compare something or get some running totals or do cost-benefit analysis or whatever. Check out https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-spreadsheet-lisp-... and https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/org.html...

I recently used it to find out how much a certain company owes me based on a monthly guarantee obligation they have continuously fallen short of . I've also used it to do comparisons and find out the maximum I can save on a refinance from different lenders etc, whether I should lease or purchase a car etc.. Very useful!
If you own the hardware, you can use any software you want on it. Period. End of discussion. If the government needs to step in to make it so, then so be it. The Apple bootlickers and capitalist drones in this thread need to get with the program. The time for tolerating opposition to Right to Repair and consumer ownership over the products they buy has long past.
Indeed - a co-worker long ago introduced me to the power of references and if you deal with contracts or legal documents that reference other parts of a document nothing else comes close!
Epic doesn't need to pursue Apple iPhone customers they same way Epic doesn't need to pursue Sony Bravia customers.

This is the same as Bungee not needing to pursue Playstation customers to make Halo what it is.
When Trump Was My Guest
I really don't agree with the idea that "alternative payment processors" are pro-consumer. This only benefits the developer, and I have huge privacy concerns with trusting third-party devs to handle my payment information. There's a 100% certainty that such payment information would be used for advertising purposes in the best-case, and rampant identity theft or mass payment security breaches in the worst-case. I'm certain Apple would also get a share of the blame for these third-party issues, which further tarnishes their platform and user experience.

For all Apple's faults, they've actually put a huge amount of effort to making payment processing seamless for the user, while also making it extremely transparent. I get regular notifications if I have a subscription trial about to expire, and it's super easy to manage ALL subscriptions through a single UI, and cancel them with a single click. This would not be possible through third-party systems, which I can guarantee would put huge effort into tricking users rather than making it easier for them. And yet again, Apple would receive the blame for allowing these Apps.

All that said I also don't agree with Apple taking a huge 30% cut, especially for subscription services that directly complete with them such as Netflix. Though obviously there are costs to run this ecosystem, so Apple also can't just charge nothing. I see both sides of this argument, and I don't see a middle ground that can please all sides. There needs to be a reasonable compromise somewhere in the middle.
About popcorn... On a smaller scale, I can't wait to read the scathing, cynical take n-gate.com will no doubt have on these HN threads
Using GPT-3 to enrich NPC interactions in MUDs
> Why would anyone want to risk being deplatformed?

App stores give you incredible access to new users. You literally don’t have a way to get unto iOS devices w/o the App Store.
Or people are assuming that the long term effects of COVID on children are similar to that of the flu on children, given similar death rates. (Which seems plausible, if you count '10x higher' as 'similar'. Overall, the flu is about 1/30th the IFR of COVID-19, but apparently most of the difference is at older ages)

EDIT: And, in fact, the CDC says that the Flu is more dangerous to healthy children than COVID-19: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/symptoms/flu-vs-covid19.htm and search for 'children'. Though the CDC may not be a trusted source for many...
Actually, that’s not correct about gas stations.

Having worked at one, we would check the prices of the two others on the same road once every hour. These numbers were reported into HQ, and a price adjustment would be made to be lower.

It’s very competitive and people are willing to drive or wait until a different time of day to get a lower price.

EDIT: Maybe I should have said: that’s at least not the case everywhere.
>Not for developers or customers.

I am both of the above and F-Droid works just fine for me. Feel free to let me know how it doesn't in your opinion work for me if you really want to talk for others.
That would be a disaster for developers. Right now the App Store will distribute as many terabytes of your apps as you want, for free, and only charges a fee when customers actually buy. It’s the greatest software marketing machine ever and access is only $99 a year.
Saw on reddit and agree 100%

> I will say it's a VERY smart move by Epic to position Apple against customers by no longer making it "Apple is taking 30% from epic" to "Apple is taking 20% from you"
Agree. Other comments raise the point of “what if Windows decided to do this... is it okay because Linux exists?” and the answer is clearly no. I bought an iPhone with the expectation that I would be in a closed ecosystem; if win10 updated to mirror win8 RT where you could only use the windows store, that would obviously be a problem because win10 users purchased a license with the expectation that they could install whatever they wanted on it.

> I don’t want to have to think about my phone that much, but I want to be able to rely on it.

I’m in the exact same boat; I have no interest in sideloading every app that decides to get into a pissing match with Apple (and as Spotify’s hinted at it before, they will certainly be losing my subscription if I need to sideload their app). For every app that has a legitimate reason to sideload (i.e. payments), there will be another app that sideloads to bypass the user-beneficial aspects of the App Store (i.e. Onavo from Facebook).
I can install anything I want from any platform/device maker on my Windows computer, my Android phone, my Macbook, and my Linux laptop. Apple phones are the outlier here.
It’s amazing that one company could control the hardware and universal functions like texting in such a restrictive hyper-capitalistic way.

“You can write apps for our hardware but all your purchases we take 30%...” imagine Microsoft trying this tactic in the 1990s.
> This is why antitrust laws exist

Anti trust laws (or competition laws) tend to apply to players with an clear control over the market, monopolies that stifle competition. Apple has ~14% of the mobile market, compared to Android's ~86%. I'm curious about how this will play out as it might have an impact in other sectors where smaller players by market share exercise a bit too tight control.
For what Epic is doing, it should be zero. Let's say you buy Fortnite at Walmart. Walmart gets its share from the sale. Walmart doesn't get a share for every in-app-purchase made thereafter.

You might say, if Fortnite were given away, Walmart wouldn't stock it, because it would just take shelf space. Perhaps that's true, but who says that Apple needs to give (virtual) shelf space to free apps?

They could hide away apps that don't bring them money. In fact, that's effectively what they're doing anyway: Unless you have tons of downloads or you get featured, you are invisible on the App Store.
I'm not sure how it could be worse. The app store is filled with mountains and mountains of malware as it is.
Okay sovereign citizen. Have fun living in your fantasy world
The problem are not the rules on the App Store (that Epic actually breached), but the App Store having a monopoly as you can't easily install external apps or stores like you can on Android.