The article is short enough that it makes more sense to quote it in full than to provide an archive link:
> A federal judge hammered Apple for violating a ruling in an antitrust case that required the company to loosen certain restrictions it imposes on software-makers in its App Store.
> Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordered the iPhone-maker to allow developers to steer users to alternative methods of paying for services or subscriptions offered in the App Store. The company also can no longer impose fees in such scenarios or restrict the ability of software-makers to offer links or otherwise communicate alternate payment options with consumers.
> “Apple willfully chose not to comply with this court’s injunction,” she said in the ruling. “It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers.” She referred the case to federal prosecutors to determine whether a criminal contempt investigation is appropriate.
> The order is the latest twist in the long-running legal dispute between Apple and Epic Games, developer of the popular videogame “Fortnite.”
Makes sense. The original link says “updates to follow as news develop” at the bottom. And I guess they really meant that – that they were planning on expanding on it already when they first published the initial, short version of it.
nice ty. i always have so much trouble finding these links but i have Apple News+. is there an easy way to do it? i always have to manually go through issues.
It’s a bit amusing to me that this sounds like another, different anti-trust issue. Apple’s browser having this feature, which other browser vendors (presumably) can’t add, to open another app would also look bad to an EU judge.
I believe this is a way to use their own apple news subscription to access the article instead of using the archive version: It only redirects if you're not logged in to apple news.
So it's spam in the eyes of everyone who doesn't happen to subscribe to their service of choice? If they want to read an article through their news app they are of course free to do so, but why spam that link?
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.
> 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 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.
Hmm. I'm already considering switching our app to stripe only to ease billing reconciliation. Managing users who made in app purchases who want regular web access as well has been a pain.
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.
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.
> you do practically have to keep records of what you are doing to comply
I would argue that the text the parent comment has pulled out is not part of the record keeping you need to do to comply. Lawyers will tell you to have certain conversations in person, and it is surprising that some of these conversations happened in text instead of in person.
>they did try to hide some of this stuff, by abusing attorney client privilege
I don't know a thing about the legal system: if someone gets caught doing that sort of thing, does that incur additional punishments?
I mean, if you do something illegal, and when the police arrest you they prove that you were trying to hide it from them, that's another charge. How does that work if the court catches you doing it?
> THE COURT FURTHER FINDS that Apple’s abuse of attorney-client privilege designations to delay proceedings and obscure its decision-making process warrants sanction to deter future misconduct. Apple is SANCTIONED in the amount of the full cost of the special masters’ review and Epic’s attorneys’ fees on this issue alone through approximately May 15, 2025, the anticipated date of completion.
So pretty mild thus far. As far as I remember from reading other court decisions, court-imposed sanctions against individual lawyers are also a thing. As far as the clients are considered, given production of documents is mandated by a court order, presumably this counts as defying a court order and so any punishments would fall under criminal contempt?
(Not a lawyer, in case this wasn’t clear from the above already.)
> 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...
It is not always a question of smart of vs not smart. At times, you will see people say something in an email or chat for no other reason than 'now it is part of the record'.
CYA, always be building a paper trail in systems of record. "Will this be committed to something with a retention schedule and that is subject to a potential legal hold?" hits return
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.
Is it surprising? If the revenue realized by the ongoing defiance of the courts exceeds the cost of replacing the executive (including any risk premium caused by the risk of jail time in that job) then it seems rational for Apple as an entity to continue to defy the law.
Even if these executive positions carried a guarantee of a several year term in minimum or medium security prison, for the salaries involved they should be able to find someone who is reasonably competent and willing to do the job.
It's not like the corporate entity itself can be threatened with state violence, and it's owners (probably half the US!) are insulated from any real consequences. An entity like Apple really has diffused responsibility to the point that it transcends the law at this point, and it becomes perfectly rational for it to defy the courts.
> I never thought Apple would outright defy the courts to the degree they'd risk a prison term for the executives.
He probably got offered a couple mil for a slap on the wrist, he likely won't even be jailed for a day. Why wouldn't they lie? They have the money to get away with it.
Give the current situation with people ignoring the court (cough into the presidency) with no consequences, what do you expect them to do? Take the courts seriously?
Now, practically speaking, that exposes them to the Court taking all their frustration out on the execs. Oops.
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.
To you and me, sure. On the other hand, I wonder if is intended to scare people who like and want the safety of the apple ecosystem and perceive everything as outside of it as dark web. Come to think of it, that is kinda how I see dark web.. is there a scarier place on line than that?
I think it would be easy to argue that the term "external website" is neutral rather than scary sounding, if not for actual chat logs in evidence saying "let's use this term because it's scary sounding".
It kind of surprises me that people working in that environment haven't been better trained about what not to write. I have zero legal background, but even twenty years ago at my very first corporate job I received a training module about legal discovery and the consequences of poorly worded emails -- and that was at a company that I genuinely believe was trying to follow the law in good faith, and was simply worried about liability due to misperception of careless language.
For a team specifically working on a legal compliance project, I am with the poster above that mentioned legal teams providing oversite. If nothing else, every one of these chats should have had a lawyer logged in to provide a mental reminder to participants that the conversation really isn't private.
Hm. Maybe I did not phrase it correctly. I was presenting two perspectives: one of a user, who thinks net outside walled garden is dangerous and user who regularly traverses non-walled garden that the first user perceives as dark net. That was followed by: is there a place darker than dark net:D
Apologies, there are times I do not express myself as clearly as I would want to.
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.
Let's cut to the fundamental argument here. Government should NEVER be allowed to dictate your state of mind and should NEVER be allowed to dictate based on feelings instead of facts.
If the judge wanted "reasonable" in that sense, then they should have defined the limits of reasonable. The assumption that "reasonable is what I the judge consider reasonable" is bad in every conceivable way. You can't read the judge's mind. If they didn't say exactly what they meant, then it is the judge that is at fault.
Next, the judge is an expert in law -- NOT an expert in humane interface, UI, or UX. They are in NO position to exert their amateur, ignorant opinion as fact and no effort was made by the judge to consult experts in the field about what would generally be considered "reasonable".
Finally, reasonable is subject to the facts and how those facts are subjectively viewed. Most Apple employees likely view this ruling as bad for their consumers and feel an obligation to protect their 1.4B iPhone users. From this perspective, discussing how to dissuade people from making decisions that could harm them would be very reasonable even if that discussion had a light-hearted tone or some joking along the way.
As an aside, I actively dislike what mostly amounts to forcing Apple to implement California state law outside of the state of California. I get no vote in California and should not be expected to abide by their laws in which I have no say. This whole thing should have been dealt with a the Federal level as it is obviously about interstate commerce and should have been legislated by congress rather than a politically-appointed judge that nobody voted for.
The law isn't some objective truth. Reckless endangerment, harassment, etc. don't have every form of those outlined. But if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's a duck.
If the people involved don't have the brain cells to figure this out, maybe Apple should employ smarter people, because it's about to cost them a lot. And I don't even necessarily mean the UI people - anything would go through legal. I have contracted for companies that have had legal judgements similar to, but not exactly, like this, and they erred on the side of caution. Everything went through legal. And yes, that can mean not doing stuff your competitor does because you stepped too far over the line. Oh well, you fucked up big time and now you have a magnifying glass on you.
But Apple is too stupid or too bold to have an ounce of sense here.
The idea that people can follow laws based upon 'feelings' but billion dollar corporations can't is ridiculous. Fuck them, they 100% knew what they were doing.
Something like reckless endangerment is criminal rather than civil. It will involve subject matter experts (SMEs) presenting both sides. It will involve a jury of peers with various perspectives rather than just the Judge's perspective making it less subject to individual bias. It will involve one person (the accused) or multiple people only if it can be clearly proven that they worked in direct concert with each other. The bar for conviction is much higher and you wouldn't find yourself deciding the Mens Rea of person A based on messages person B sent to person C (text messages lack enough context that all but the most flagrant statements won't constitute "beyond reasonable doubt"). Once the sentence is handed down, the penalties will be clear and with essentially zero room for "good faith" or "reasonableness" in its execution. SMEs will almost certainly be completely unrelated to the final ruling.
Basically none of that applies here. This is a civil case. It did not involve a jury.
The group tasked with carrying out the ruling were not involved with the trial either directly or indirectly. The ruling was vague because the judge as I understand it wasn't a SME and wasn't qualified to write what she wrote. Rather than consult SMEs to reach a reasonable conclusion, she proceeded (unreasonably I might add as it is unreasonable for someone to pretend to be an expert in something they know little about) to pretend she was an expert anyway.
After her vague guidelines didn't get the results she thought it should, it seems that rather than discuss, she doubled down on SMEs needing to read her mind to decide what she considered reasonable rather than what other SMEs might consider reasonable then leveraged her position as judge to punish their lack of understanding (which seems very close to acting in bad faith to me) instead of reflecting on what could have been done differently and changing accordingly.
Regardless of how you feel about this particular case (personally, I'm in favor of opening up iOS to other stores rather than this third-party website bandaid), the court's actions and expectations are flawed in this case.
Would this still be clear bad faith had these chat logs not been created?
In other words, could Apple have done these exact same actions and successfully argued that the language ("external website") was in fact neutral, if not for the direct written record that established their intent to do otherwise?
Everything you just said makes sense, but the details of how the courts manage to enforce orders like this are interesting, and it seems like enforcing notions of good faith must be extremely difficult.
Thanks for writing this though, this is a window into a space I have never played in. The legal system is very mysterious to me.
"Would this still be clear bad faith had these chat logs not been created?"
Yes, almost certainly. The party claiming non-compliance has to prove your non-compliance, but they do not have to prove your bad faith.
Instead, the burden falls to the enjoined party to prove good faith.
Affirmative good faith usually comes up more in trying to dissolve injunctions, etc (where the enjoined party has to prove good faith) than civil contempt of an order.
This is because in the case of civil contempt, Judges still have discretion to find you in contempt even if you acted in good faith. IE bad faith will definitely get you contempt, but good faith alone will not save you from it. You can act in good faith, not do enough, and still be found in contempt for not doing enough. This helps dissuade malicious compliance as well.
"The absence of willfulness does not relieve from civil contempt. Civil as distinguished from criminal contempt is a sanction to enforce compliance with an order of the court or to compensate for losses or damages sustained by reason of noncompliance . . . . Since the purpose is remedial, it matters not with what intent the defendant did the prohibited act . . . . An act does not cease to be a violation of a law and of a decree merely because it may have been done innocently. The force and vitality of judicial decrees derive from more robust sanctions. And the grant or withholding of remedial relief is not wholly discretionary with the judge. . . . The private or public rights that the decree sought to protect are an important measure of the remedy."
>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.
What I don't get is that sometimes it seems that is the game, sometimes the legal loopholes are accepted and other times they are not. It feels one of the big benefits of hiring a good lawyer is that they know which loopholes are accepted and which are seen as spiting the authority of the courts.
Same (perceived) reason my bank and brokerages (and I think even my kid's school website does this) pop up a warning every time I click on a link that will take them outside their website.
I think there's a valid reason to think "if it's OK and common for banks and brokers to do it, it's OK for me to do it" and also to think "this will help protect users from being scammed by other apps who might pop open random links without any notices".
There is probably nothing whatsoever the judge could have done about this action by itself. The issue is the conversations around it, which established intent. The chat logs provide hard evidence that it was done in bad faith and with criminal intent.
Now that I think about it, I wonder how much of the current backlash against remote work is to avoid this exact situation. Face to face conversations don't end up in evidence. Written conversations do, and video chats are increasingly being summarized and recorded by AI.
From a positive point of view: so that app makers can't open up malicious payment screens. Of course, I don't think there's anything stopping them now.
From a more negative point of view, so Apple knows how much it happens and gets to have some influence over it.
I have my parents use iOS because they couldn’t help themselves from downloading malware on Android. It wasn’t from Google, but it didn’t matter, because the whole Android system’s reputation was reduced because of it.
Non-lawyer here. This information is surprising to me (to be clear, I believe you, I just would have guessed otherwise).
Is some degree of malicious compliance not extremely common when companies deal with the courts? From the outside it seems like the incentive would be to comply with a court order to the minimum degree required to avoid further legal consequences, but no more. Is compliance more enthusiastic that that in practice? Again, I have zero experience, but the idea of a company losing a lawsuit and then actually acting in good faith is a strange one to me.
An individual might be intimidated to act in actual good faith to avoid serious consequences, but Apple as an entity can't be tossed in jail for contempt of court, right? So it would seem that it is incentivized to push it's employees to take risks like this, with the understand that they can be replaced by employees who will if they refuse.
Again, once you lose, the adversarial part is over.
Malicious compliance is exactly why good faith is a requirement but not a defense.
Bad faith will get you contempt, good faith will not save you from contempt if you didn't do enough.
Do companies try to skirt this anyway - sure. But they run the risk of a judge finding they didn't do enough, and sanctioning them anyway, even if they didn't have obvious bad faith, or heck, even if they have objectively good faith.
There are plenty of cases where judges sanctioned good faith actors who didn't do enough.
I know the current interpretation, but I also know that it's not logically sustainable.
The key here is "reasonableness", but you can't read a judge's mind, so reasonable only means what a reasonable person would infer. That is completely subjective based on an individual's implicit biases and knowledge of all surrounding circumstances.
For example, the dev team tasked with implementing this may not be familiar with the entire case, so what they consider reasonable will be different based on that. They also know much more about technology and likely have strong feelings about what is acceptable, but the judge is NOT a subject matter expert (SME) in that area. Likewise, the judge is NOT a SME on UI/UX, so the judge's interpretation of "reasonable" may well be at odds. There is also an argument that directing to these third-party sites opens 1.4B people to exploitation, so it would be reasonable to allow them access, but also to protect those users (who also aren't SMEs and often have essentially zero understanding) from potential issues by framing things appropriately. I could go on with many other qualifiers about what would be reasonable.
The judge is qualified to make rulings based on the law, but utterly unqualified to decide what the details of a reasonable implementation would be. If she were a qualified SME, she could and should have written her reasoned decision and removed the need for interpretation. If the ruling were itself reasonable and clear, there wouldn't be meaningful room for debate about reasonableness which would in turn effectively render reasonableness a mute point. As such, you can see that "reasonableness" in these kinds of cases is a crutch to protect unqualified judges making rulings they should not be making which is ironically a very unreasonable approach.
As to "good faith", who is she to dictate that you must do what she says and be happily compliant or else? After all, unhappiness will almost certainly taint all actions to a greater or lesser degree, so anything less than perfect contentment would be "bad faith" to a greater or lesser degree.
Who is the judge to single-handedly decide these people's state of mind? Has all her study of law made her an expert on what happens in other people's minds and privy to their thoughts and experiences while ridding herself of her own biases? Such a task is impossibly hard for a jury even in broad terms with lots of facts and even less possible for a single person judging the actions of many people based only on a few chat messages.
How does she ensure that every single one of those hundreds to thousands of people involved is "acting in good faith" is an impossible task and you can be assured that at least one of them at any given time isn't acting in good faith about ANYTHING. This would imply that you must ALWAYS assume that bad faith was involved.
How do you determine how much bad faith is too much? Based on outcome is the only logical answer, but in that case, you could have been explicit about the outcome in the first place and skipped all the trouble and possible excuses of misunderstanding once again rendering "bad faith" as a crutch to protect the judge from their incompetence.
She passed judgement based on the law. As long as that judgement is fulfilled to the degree specified, the state of mind of the hundreds to thousands of people involved in carrying out that judgement should not matter.
"Good faith" and "reasonableness" is a faulty and fickle metric at its best when applied to a single person by a group of peers. It is a broken and unusable metric when applied to a group or corporate entity by a single judge not an expert in the matters at hand.
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.
Then that training will get called into evidence (like Google’s prior training re: anti competitive training) to prove they were being intentionally anti-competitive, and rinse repeat.
I received training like this over 20 years ago as a brand new engineer at my first job. The training was literally about how to avoid writing emails that could create legal liability due to careless language. Emails that came out during the Ford Pinto lawsuits were used as examples. It was all carefully worded to be about not being misperceived in court.
That job was at an avionics company working on safety critical systems. They paid tons of lip service to always placing safety first -- and from what I personally witnessed, at least at that time, the concern was genuine. There was a culture of taking the responsibility seriously, at least at the engineering level I interacted with.
Even acting in good faith though, things happen. Planes crash (usually due to pilot error), and when they do everyone gets sued, and when that happens careless language represents a risk for a company, even if they did everything right.
Having moved on to consumer tech, I haven't seen similar cultures of doing the "right thing". That could be the modern world, my own cynicism, or just the differences inherent to industries where lives aren't explicitly on the line. Regardless, it's not at all hard to imagine that employees can be taught to self censor in ways that won't themselves create more liability.
I’ve worked for one BigTech company in my career and there were a list of banned words we couldn’t say in writing. The one word I remember we couldn’t say was “moat”.
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.
> 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.
I agree, but I might phrase it a little bit differently. I recommend thinking about corporate stances as actions and interests, not moral intentions. Don’t expect a corporation to do things for moral reasons. Trust them only to the extent that their actions are in their self interest. To be fair, some organizations do have charters and interests that make them more palatable than others.
One takeaway to startups that hope to stand for something even after tremendous growth and leadership changes: you have to build governance and accountability structures into your organizational DNA if you truly want specific values to persist over the long run.
This is probably a good thing -- faith in such structures was never justified.
Any relationship with a corporate entity is transactional in nature. A great deal of effort is often expended to manipulate us into feeling otherwise, but that is all it is.
Companies don't have feelings. They aren't conscious entities with a capacity for guilt or morality. They are, in essence, software applications designed to execute on systems composed of human employees. In a sense they are the original AI agents.
I don't think there are any companies that care one way or the other about taking away your freedom.
Companies are revenue maximizers, period. The ones that aren't quickly get displaced by ones that are.
The simpler test is to stay away from any company that has anything to gain by taking away your freedom. THAT unfortunately is most of them.
The depressing reality in consumer tech is that anything with a CPU doesn't belong to you, doesn't work for you, and will never do more than pretend to act in your best interest.
>Did anyone honestly think that Apple was touting privacy as anything other than a competitive advantage for revenue maximization?
I think they're more willing to build out privacy enhancing features than other companies that don't rely on surveillance capitalism to make their money. "Small" things like Filevault add up.
I have no trouble believing a gay boomer from the South instinctively cares about personal privacy; he will have spent much of his early life needing to be very protective of his.
I would agree that most people with that exact background would have learned the hard way to care about privacy.
The single example that ascended to be the CEO of Apple though? That selection process would seem more relevant than any personal background.
My base assumption is that any impressions we have about Tim Cook (or any other executive of a company that size) are a carefully crafted artifact of marketing and PR. He may be a real person behind the scenes, but his (and everyone's) media persona is a fictional character he is portraying.
It feels like if you'd expect someone to be something based on their background, _and_ they profess to be that thing, then the onus is on the person disputing it to come up with the evidence contra?
> any impressions we have about Tim Cook ... is a fictional character he is portraying
The relevant ones here are that he's gay, of a certain age, and from the South, and that he heads up a company who appear to invest heavily, over a long period of time, in privacy protections -- these all feel like they'd be easy to falsify if there existed evidence to the contrary.
iAd is stated as being built differently to how other adtech networks work.
I personally believe that Apple is able to make different (better), choices in the name of a consumer privacy, than Google will.
Android is built from the ground up to provide surveillance data to Google-controlled adtech - that's their revenue model. I don't begrudge them that, people should have choice, etc. but the revenue model is adtech first and foremost.
Apple want services revenue, they like services revenue, but historically they're a vertically integrated tech platform manufacturer whose revenue model is building better platforms consumers want.
It's true that the services model may start to compromise that - and they've definitely started to make some poor choices they might need to pull back on to protect the core platform model - but I do think we're not comparing like with like when we say that Apple is no different to any other company in this space.
> Android is built from the ground up to provide surveillance data to Google-controlled adtech
I've always read this and it seems well accepted. But I'm curious what exactly does it mean? What's Android sending to Google? Surely it's not logging what I click on apps? It's not logging what I click on my browser since the websites themselves send this info for ad purposes. So what's Android doing that let's say my Linux laptop isn't?
Edit: Answering my own question. There is a cross-app unique identifier (ignoring any privacy sandbox stuff) so developers and ad networks can get a consistent id across apps.
I'm guessing the poster is referring to AOSP and custom ROMs. If so, yes, it is entirely possible, but not something I'd expect any normal human being to do.
Not all phones allow custom ROMs and most that do completely void your warranty. Doing it yourself is a complete non-starter for at least 95% of the population.
In practical terms, you can simply not log into a Google account on any Android device, including those made by Google, and Google will get less data about you than Apple does on iOS.
The key difference is user choice. An iOS user has no choice but to send their location data and app usage data to Apple. No such required privacy violations on Android.
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.
We can have both, because they cannot kill the web. We can enjoy better privacy in the OS, the open Web, and better controls for the applications that should not be a website (which is still quite a lot of them).
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.
> “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind,” he said, “I don't consider the bloody ROI.” He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader.
> As evidenced by the use of “bloody” in his response—the closest thing to public profanity I've ever seen from Mr. Cook–it was clear that he was quite angry. His body language changed, his face contracted, and he spoke in rapid fire sentences compared to the usual metered and controlled way he speaks.
More broadly, I know that for-profit businesses are concerned with their bottom line, and I know businesses regularly throw other values under the bus in pursuit of profit. But I'm not sure it's possible to build a successful business (in terms of maintaining consumer trust, attracting and motivating decent employees, etc.) without some values beyond what's immediately quantifiable on the bottom line.
Belief within limits, yes. At least, I can only think of a couple of possible explanations for the event:
1. Cook only cares about pursuing profits, but at a shareholder meeting where shareholders were pressuring him to pursue profits, he lied to them (and had the presence of mind and acting chops to pretend to be uncharacteristically angry about it), because he believed that the story would get reported on and Apple fans would want to hear it, and he made the calculation that that would be more beneficial to his bottom line than being honest (or at least more politically neutral) with his shareholders.
2. Cook really does believe about accessibility, environmental issues, and worker safety, and he tries (or at least likes to think that he tries) to take steps toward those causes at the expense of profits, but he's also a complex and flawed mixture of motivations and is capable of compromising his values (and/or of letting those under him compromise their values) to varying degrees in the face of financial rewards or the pressures of the capitalist system.
#2 seems more likely and is more consistent with my view of humanity in general.
#2 seems more probable to me for any given human being selected at random.
#1 seems more probable given a human being that has been selected to head one of the most valuable companies on the planet. That's his entire job -- to play a carefully crafted role for the public, the share holders and the media. He isn't paid to stand up at a shareholder meeting and let any sort of genuine feelings slip through, unless those feelings happen to be the right ones for that role at that moment.
It's also worth noting that the meeting in question was in 2104. That's over a decade ago now.
It's entirely possible that Cook was fully sincere then, but that over the subsequent 11 years, marinating in the toxic stew that is the upper echelons of American industry has eroded his principles and he is now more willing to listen to the voices pushing for money over all else (whether those voices are outside or inside his own head).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
This tends to be a property of regulations in general. It costs money to comply. At a minimum you often need to hire an expert that actually understands the regulation and can explain how to comply with it.
In general that cost doesn't scale linearly with size, so bigger companies are proportionally less impacted.
Sometimes an attempt is made to compensate for this by exempting organizations under a certain size criteria.
Yes, it is a problem, but efforts should be made to limit it.
It is a factor that should be considered when designing regulations. The comment with regard to the pubs was that the regulatory paperwork was a major cause for businesses being put up for sale.
There are many regulations that should exempt businesses under a certain size or with other criteria. For example small businesses that do not trade data should be largely exempt from GDPR. Small not for profits even more so.
Similarly, with VATMOSS the initial sales limit for registration was set ludicrously low.
Underlying this is a political failure to understand or even consider impacts on small businesses. When politicians talk to business they inevitably talk to big businesses.
>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.
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.
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.
I think you'll find at least 1/4 of HN comments are indicative of stating things from a place of strong instinctive tribalism, but this crowd are just very slightly better at using words to defend our position in a more noble way.
That's OK, it shows we're human, it's not all AI slop here (yet?).
I guess being smart sometimes doesn’t lead you to have a more accurate opinion, but to develop more sophisticated rhetorical devices to defend your inaccurate opinion?
Yeah. I’ve been steadily figuring out why the ‘strong, silent type’ used to be 1) so much more common, and 2) hated by a certain type of personality, and 3) might be a better approach than anyone wants to think about.
In my subjective opinion, when it comes to Apple specifically, all kinds of unpaid labor will emerge from the ether to defend them on anonymous or pseudonymous message boards.
This is certainly the case. I have noticed this in voting patterns as well. I often comment strongly in favor of EU regulations (I believe capitalism is fairer and benefits consumers more with stronger regulations). During times the US is asleep such comments often get a lot of upvotes. During times where EU and the US are up, there seems to be much more contention in the voting, with votes swinging up and down a lot.
By the way, I don't think this is a good way of voting. IMO comments should be upvoted if they provide good insights (even if you disagree with them) and downvoted when they are low-content/trolling/full of fallacies.
I regularly have posts that go from say +10 in the evening to -5 in the morning (I post from the EU). I mostly agree with your observations. That said,
> IMO comments should be upvoted if they provide good insights (even if you disagree with them) and downvoted when they are low-content/trolling/full of fallacies.
Votes are not a popularity contest. Only you see your score, and it does not matter one bit whether you have 2 or 20 upvotes on a post. Even moderate negative scores don’t matter. The grey threshold is more important, and you have to post something quite bad to end up there. I think I read a good post that was dead once.
The system is working and the end result is what you want. Sure, it could be better, but we are never going to get a perfect implementation because humans are social animals, and not always very rational.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
The US has no problem with regulating its industries. It just doesn't do it pre-emptively out of fear the way the EU does. It actually lets business develop before assessing any damages.
So you're arguing that it's s still to early to assess Google, Meta, Amazon and other big tech? Somehow I don't think that's right and EU realized the need of regulation much earlier.
Not arguing that it's still too soon. The anti-trust litagations are obviously underway. But the EU themselves only started cracking down within the last decade, which is still relatively recent.
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.
There's a whole class of sh*t-software that only exists (and is profitable) because users subscribe to them and then forget – primarily because the subscription fee is charged as "Apple" on their Credit Card. I wonder what's gonna happen with this type of scam.
Easy from your point of view... This is the argument I mostly hear from Apple folks, but my experience (especially with less tech savvy folks) is that they have no idea where or how to cancel a subscription on IAP and they think that the multiple "Apple" charges are just some iCloud thing or something along those lines. With Credit Card flows the alarm bells go off waaaay earlier: when a website asks for their CC data, they immediately scrutinize more (and thus, conversion rates are lower)
There’s a single page in the settings with all the subscriptions, and you can cancel any of them by tapping a button and confirming. You get emails regularly with a link to a page with the subscription information when it is renewed. It really is easy and much, much better than all the alternatives I tried.
I wanted to cancel an Apple subscription recently. I didn't know where to do it. I knew it was coming up because I got an email from Apple to say it was shortly due for renewal.
It took me about 5 seconds to google "cancel subscription apple" and find about a zillion articles on how to do it. Basically open up the App Store, go to your account, click on subscriptions, click on the one in the list you want to cancel. Done.
On the other hand, I also wanted to cancel a pet-locator subscription that was coming up for renewal (we're leaving the country, they don't have coverage outside the US) and I had to go through about 30 layers of "are you sure", "are you really sure", "you know this will stop your service, right?", "we'd sure hate to lose you", "Is there anything we can offer to change your mind", etc. etc.
> If done through third parties directly the scammers will not make unsubscribing easy and it will not be as easy to find out where you are subscribing.
This is fairly quickly resolved though - if anything close to 1% of customers complain to their banks that they don't want this payment and can't cancel it, triggering a chargeback, the scammers end up entirely blocked from the payment networks entirely in pretty short order. If you end up banned from Visa & Mastercard your whole operation is permanently kaput.
Also, this might be a non-US thing, but over here most modern banks (e.g. Revolut) will let you view & block recurring payment authorizations directly from your banking app anyway.
For me to get to it from App Store, I have to click a tiny profile pic (smallest allowed button on iOS?)
The next screen displays Purchase History and other items. However, no way to cancel from this page (insane?)
To get to subscriptions, I have to click my name at the top of that page (which doesn’t even look like a button) which loads for 3 seconds then pops up.
On this hidden account page, it shows Purchase History along with subscriptions list to cancel.
If any other site hid subscription cancelling behind a flat contact header secret account page, it’d be an issue, so yeah it’s an issue for Apple too.
What version are you using?
Click 'Settings' -> 'Profile' (huge button on top) -> 'Subscriptions'. I don't know how it could be easier than that. Ah wait, pull down on the home screen for search, type 'subscriptions' and tap on the result for direct access to the setting.
From there you can see and cancel any subscription made in the App Store.
Nothing? The ruling is that app developers get to choose how they communicate to users, or how they charge in-app fees. The kind of shady developers you describe would simply continue to use Apple, as it benefits them to do so.
- Most legit services move to a web based Apple Pay (note to the unaware reader: this is NOT In-App Purchases and has never had 30% fees) due to the ease of implementing and lower fee (easier to do cross platform + web)
- Non-legit developers keep the In-App flow
Over time this would skew In-App Purchases to be scammy-only (and therefore, easier to spot). I'm sure people at Apple consider this possibility too – and therefore, now that there's actual competition, IAP flows will probably have to change to prevent this and compete for actual developer preference (and keep it a viable legit-developer choice)
So they should probably just scrap the 30% fee. At the very least scrap it if the user was linked directly to the app. And just make the also huge commission on the payments.
Apple sends a specific, detailed receipt on the billing of every such item. Apple has some of the most user-friendly subscription management options of anyone. Apple lets you cancel a subscription immediately without cancelling the service immediately, and so on.
There is a lot to criticize Apple for -- the 30% fee is disgusting, and the subject of this order where they bar external payments without fees is criminal -- but the subscription complaint has always been weak.
It’s a shame Phil Schiller has gotten sidelined. He always seemed like a good guy and a big part of the “soul” of Apple as it made its resurgence under Jobs after the NeXT merger.
Agree with this. He originally was taking the opinion that they should make changes to the App Store rules from a position of strength before being forced into it. Schiller has always felt like the best embodiment of the Steve Era. I think they would have lost Tim Cook if he didn't get the CEO position, but Apple has been a little too focused on extracting as much value as possible during his time. They are still doing great stuff, but feel focused on the wrong things.
But isn’t that orthogonal to this topic? Being strong on not allowing or losing to competition from a business standpoint vs. advocating that it’s a good idea to follow the judicial directives without playing around?
Sure you can. The services just need to agree protocols. The tech & cryptography part is not difficult these days. We've had guaranteed E2E for email since PGP in 1991, though not many people cared enough to use it.
None of the services you listed do it, but that's because they don't want to, not because it can't be done. It's a business decision problem, not a technical problem.
About time. I'm tired of apologizing to customers who purchase subscriptions in my app only to discover they could have purchased the exact the same thing from my website for 15% less. "Why didn't you tell me?"
Excerpt from the filing:
"In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option. To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. 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. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate."
About time for what? Another company to get charged with something that they don't get punished for?
The fines are always less than the companies' net gains from the practice. Gains are often indirect, risk-related, and/or part of a larger strategy, so they cannot be calculated.
Everything short of prison is a waste of time, waste of tax dollars, and spits in the face of decent citizens.
The judge referred the case for review of contempt of court, which makes individuals responsible for their criminal actions, and carries possible prison sentences. The judge has clear evidence of lying under oath and withholding evidence, and people have gone to prison for less. Alex Roman appears primarily culpable, but given the evidence reported, Tim Cook may also be complicit, and others. There is a real chance they are arrested at some point.
For me (IANAL), reading the judgment was initially shocking primarily for its facts and tone, rather than having any understanding of the legal consequences. I initially skipped over the phrase 'contempt of court' because the phrase seems so familiar from TV. But on reflection, it's the most consequential part of the document because, as you say, it has actual consequences for the people involved.
Lying under oath would catch a perjury charge as well.
In the United States, the general perjury statute under federal law classifies perjury as a felony and provides for a prison sentence of up to five years.
I like the idea of civil judgements that require responsible individuals to remove themselves from the company. And void any forward looking renumeration in their contracts.
Personal fines too, such as returning past remunerations during the problematic time in question. Salaries. Stock grants.
There is no such thing as an incentive, that doesn't incentivize someone. Relatively small fines relative to revenues and profits don't incentivize anything.
Alternatively, if fines really were big enough to turn large companies around (i.e. not just the enforced, but other companies seeing the enforcement), heads would roll, but would they be the right ones given those in charge are unlikely to fire themselves? And shareholders are the ones really paying the fines, are they really the culprits?
The incentives to act in good faith, should be placed very directly on the individuals whose choices dictate the good/bad faith. Starting and staying largely with the CEO, and the direct line of reports from the CEO down to the relevent decisions.
You don't want anyone who mattered to have cover. You want CEO's policing their own, and their reports pushing back upward against poor directives.
The only cover for relevent actors would be a record of pushing back against those who pushed through poor behavior.
TLDR: Limited liability should protect non-managing shareholders, but not bad actors within a company. Decisions makers should always be held directly responsible for their decisions. Any other system is perverse.
I think both things are needed. Despite what you're saying, shareholders have the ultimate responsibility and control over the company: they own it, they name the executives, and all the profits are ultimately returned to them. So it's absolutely necessary for the shareholders to be penalized, massively, if they profitted massively off of illegal business practices. Even if the executives were hiding this illegality from them, they are still responsible for having set up the company in a way that allowed that.
If you only punish the executives for illegal business practices, but leave the company alone, then you create an incentive to hire patsies as executives, continue letting them do illegal stuff, go to jail, and pay them handsomely after they get out.
Ultimately it has to be the company that's losing money when the company made money from illegal business, otherwise the company can just find other people willing to continue and provide for everyone who gets caught.
> Ultimately it has to be the company that's losing money when the company made money from illegal business, otherwise the company can just find other people willing to continue and provide for everyone who gets caught.
You are so right. The board & shareholders are in the path of responsibility and not recognizing that would be a call for both to use and abuse executives as scapegoats.
> There is no such thing as an incentive, that doesn't incentivize someone.
It's wild how the public discourse on incentives is so split. On one hand, the poor are guilty until proven innocent of six dimensional chess to eek "unearned" pennies from social programs, yet the very idea that mega billionaires might pull easy, obvious levers for unethical mega million payouts is one that must beg and scrape for consideration.
100%. This doesn't deserve a fine. This deserves Apple to be given an ultimatum about their mob boss behavior with mobile.
Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax. You can't even deploy your own apps at your own cadence, without strict review, using your own technology. You have to jump through unplanned upgrade cycles, you're forced to use their payment rails and signup flows (and don't get to know your customer or get them to use your website). You pay the taxes on everything. And even then, they let your competitors advertise against your name or trademark.
This is rotten to the core.
Neither Google nor Apple should have an app store. Apps should be web installs. The only reason things work the way they do is so that Apple and Google can tax and exert control. A permissions system, signature scans, and heuristics are all that are needed to keep web installs safe - and all of those pieces are already in place. There's no technical or safety limitation, Apple and Google just want to dominate.
These two companies were innovative 20 years ago, but their lead then doesn't entitle them to keep owning the majority of most people's computing surface area for the rest of time. They have to give up the reigns. There are still billions of dollars for them to make on mobile, even if regulators tell them to stop treating developers as serfs and locking them in cages.
No. More. App. Stores.
Regulate big tech's hold over mobile, web, search, and advertising.
I understand people like this ruling and want Apple and Google to open up. But this is just silly rewriting of history:
> Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax.
Long before Apple and Google made phones, a huge mobile device ecosystem already existed, including app stores, and it was way more locked down and expensive than what we have now.
The iPhone did not even launch with an app store, its launch concept was 100% web apps. They only added the native SDK and app store after developers and customers demanded it.
Again: I know the world is different now. But the idea that this was all some swift inexorable coup by Apple and Google is totally inaccurate. Plenty of other companies had a chance to do things differently, many with huge head starts.
Sure, but parallel to the mobile device (featurephone) ecosystem, there was also the old smartphone ecosystem which grew out of the PDA market where you could install your own program without paying the middleman. I would argue that modern day smartphone is more similar to the old smartphones than the featurephones.
And somehow despite that ecosystem existing before, new entrants Apple and Google emerged victorious. Maybe it had something to do with their different approach.
I doubt it was because people wanted The App Store. If the PocketPC/Windows Mobile had an App Store it would not have won.
Featurephones had App Stores like Verizon’s “Get It Now” and it was obvious that they were money grabs like Apple’s.
Apple and Google won the game because the phones were powerful enough to make web browsing feasible, and had great text input.
If nobody had thought of app stores, it would have been trivial to distribute .ipa’s and .apk’s on the Web just like Windows and Mac software still predominantly is.
The iPhone did not even launch with an app store, its launch concept was 100% web apps.
In 2007 web apps were severely limited in performance and functionality, so this wasn't remotely feasible for most apps. I still believe Apple's original plan was a console model where hand-picked partners would get the secret native API. Then they realized the demand for native apps was much greater than they had anticipated, and decided to take a 30% cut from millions of developers rather than large licensing fees from a few.
> Long before Apple and Google made phones, a huge mobile device ecosystem already existed, including app stores, and it was way more locked down and expensive than what we have now.
That’s a poor comparison IMO, because the scale of this was multiple orders of magnitude less. App stores were a niche occurrence that almost no nontechnical person had heard about. Seldom anyone „needed“ an app for their company to be successful. Now they control billions of eyes.
In addition there are some exceptions when it comes to new stuff which app stores were at the time. When you come up with something new e.g. you can choose who to make business with. Different to what you can do running a dominant platform.
> They only added the native SDK and app store after developers and customers demanded it.
People demanded native SDK because web apps were garbage, unlike the native first party apps. Some people wanted an app store. No one ever wanted or demanded an exclusive app store. Putting demand for native SDK and demand for app store in one sentence smells like gaslighting.
These days that’s obviously true. Back then web technologies lacked a lot but today I seriously question why say, a retailer, needs to waste the massive cost of building an app and putting it on both of the App Stores and updating it for every OS change. Especially considering it’s just going to be using React Native and likely isn’t any faster or more responsive than the Web.
And as a user it just feels idiotic to have to download a dedicated program to say, pay for parking or order a sandwich, in a city I’m just visiting for the day. As though taking a credit card on the Web is a foreign concept.
It's worth noting that other fields take a radically different perspective on this. You can see Brandon Sanderson talking about how software developers get such great deals from publishers, with Apple, Google, and Steam taking puny 30% commissions, and he wishes authors could get something similar.
The 30% number was taken very positively when the Apple app store launched. It was much lower than what software companies typically budgeted at that time for marketing and distributing a new product.
Of course it didn’t take long before the App Store was so full that anyone who wanted scale had to do additional paid marketing anyway.
It's also insane how what was considered dystopia for desktop computing silently happened for mobile devices: a corporation controlling the software stack and using cryptography against the users to control precisely what software they are allowed to run on their "own" devices. Yes, in principle Android phones can be rooted, but in practice this breaks Play Integrity and you are now locked out from a huge range of apps.
Google and Apple have silently achieved Microsoft's wet dream from the "trusted platform" era of effectively making it impossible for free and open source operating systems to compete with their own.
What I meant is if I want to run an open source OS like LineageOS. In principle this is possible, but Play Integrity will refuse to work when you have a custom ROM.
It does deserve a fine and/or criminal forfeiture of the revenue they made from the app store monopoly. If Apple had to repay let's say the difference between what they charged and what a reasonable fee would be (let's say 10%), for the entire time they've been doing it, that would put "a bit" of a dent into their pocketbook and serve as an effective deterrent.
I'm fine with Google and Apple having App stores, so long as I'm not forced to use them. They should compete like everyone else. The walls of the walled garden have to be torn down. They still get to have a garden, they just can't lock unwitting people inside of it.
Walls to keep apps out should be fine, but they should have to have gates to let the consumers out - i.e. a method to install other apps (not through the app store) that have every bit the same level of access as the device manufacturer's apps.
There should be two levers used to achieve this. One is anti-trust style legislation. The other is patent misuse legislation. If you try and prevent consumers from running software on hardware they bought from you to make a profit, you shouldn't be allowed to prevent consumers from buying the same hardware from someone else - that's what patents do - they create government enforced monopolies on the hardware. You should be required to invalidate (donate to the public domain) every patent on the hardware if you want to sell hardware where you get to profit off your monopoly on letting developers write software for the hardware.
These Epic rulings are better than nothing, but I can't help but feel that their solution of "make Apple distribute software they don't like in their app store" is the wrong one.
A company can lock the hardware but not the software, or lock the software but not the hardware? I’ve not heard this idea before, it sounds like an extremely logical idea. It would easily be achieved by splitting apple in two. I wonder if there are any downsides to that? The “walled garden” of hardware and software does have some benefits, but the cost to society is too high.
Is anyone proposing making Apple distribute software? If so, though, pretty sure just allowing sideloading instead would satisfy all of Apple’s critics including the government. It’s Apple who insists that all roads onto the iPhone must go through them (and give them 30% of your gross revenue)
> Is anyone proposing making Apple distribute software?
That's what the plain language of this injunction does.
Admittedly if Apple had come to the court (or even potentially came to the court now) and agreed to the alternate solution of allowing sideloading the court might have issued a different injunction (or modify this injunction).
And really we don't need them making billions of dollars. It is not conducive to healthy human society or progress. Such money could be spent way better than lining the pockets of management levels, people, who enable this by not having a conscience, and corrupt politicians.
If it's possible to prove that they could only make their billions thanks to this illegal practice, that would be awesome - the government could claw back the billions.
Happens more than you’d think. Happened to me in the past as well in some business conflict. It was baffling how people can just lie in court under oath and get away with it.
The asterisk is that the government has to be able to prove knowledge and intent to lie, and prove that beyond a reasonable doubt. It makes it really hard to successfully charge anybody with perjury.
No, it was their CFO who denied knowing about <something> when he absolutely did. We ended up winning the lawsuit on all accounts, but they were never specifically called out about lying about this.
Well in this case it wouldn’t be abuse. I hope they do convict him if he’s guilty of perjury. It will set an example for the other weasels. “Percentage of executives of Fortune 500 companies who do time for real crimes they committed” should be a big KPI for the DOJ in my book.
I really hope you're right, but I think we're more likely to see the case swept under the rug in exchange for totally voluntary donations from Apple to various organisations with 'Trump' in their name.
"Accordingly ... the Court refers the issue to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California ... for investigation against Apple and Alex Roman, Apple’s Vice President of Finance specifically."
> 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.
Here's the fun question though. Do Roman, Maestri et al not have any specific damages to this? (I know the answer, but it's a good question to ask....)
Generally none, the DA must choose to pursue perjury charges, which basically never happens. In reality, nearly everyone commits perjury. Thomas More would not approve. Both versions (1966 and 1988) of A Man For All Seasons are highly worth watching several times and practically memorizing. "Would you benefit England by populating her with liars?" [edit] in retrospect, there is one inescapable consequence of lying under oath: your word now means nothing to honest people.
Yeah. I was pulled over and told I had an "invalid" license. "My license isn't suspended!" "No, it's not, it's just invalid." Not expired. Not counterfeit. Just invalid. "What does that mean?" "You'll have ask the DOL. And here's a ticket. And you can't drive from here."
Go home, go to the DOL's website. Green text, "VALID". Weird. "Pay any monies owing on your license." Let's try that. "There are no monies owed."
Huh.
Print these out, take them to the DOL. It was a technicality where a process had suspended my license over a fine, but then unsuspended it the same day because they'd received a check.
She waives the $25 fee that should have been attached. And stamps the screenshots of this I'd taken, and prints out the status changes on my account.
Take it to court to challenge the ticket. Prosecutor doesn't want to dismiss. "They'd have generated and sent you a letter when they did that, so you had to have known."
Eventually dismissed, but only after three or four back-and-forths.
Federal prosecutors have insanely high "winning" percentages but the closer you get to the local level, the more that drops. I suspect that local prosecutors, in addition to often having a poor understanding of the law, often try to up their win percentage by pushing cases like yours because they know most people will find it easier to just pay whatever token amount it takes to make it go away.
To be honest companies practically incentivize having no moral compass and lying to succeed. Every major company's executives incorporate lying judiciously to their employees and their users alike and encourage their reports to lie to theirs and so on. Adhering to complete honesty is a one way ticket to HR.
Sit on any all-hands call for a major company and it is practically guaranteed large chunks of the presentation will be executive gaslighting of its own employees with info that is objectively false or a misrepresentation. You will also never get a real answer to actual hard questions (especially if it is on the topic of something that may negatively affect workers) which is essentially lying by omission.
It doesn't help that we have now proven that you can lie all the way to the seat of being president of the united states.
That said - whether we like it or not, we are now a culture built on lying.
This matches my own personal experience of corporate America, and is one of the primary reasons I left.
And it’s not just the lying that’s the problem - it’s the lack of critical thinking, the gullibility, the willingness to suspend disbelief and give benefit of the doubt and credit where it’s not due, amongst those being lied to, be they employees, or voters.
The way out is to see through it, to question it, and to stop acquiescing to it. If we all do that, the liars will never ascend to the positions of power we have allowed them to have over us today.
Are now? I mentioned Thomas More to show that this exact same thing happened 500 years ago. The whole point of the movie A Man For All Seasons is to show that this is always how it has been throughout human history, and that only a few people stand out as putting the truth higher than their own interests, such as Thomas More and Joan of Arc, which deeply impress even non-religious people like Robert Bolt and Mark Twain.
The 1988 one stars Charlton Heston as Thomas More and was a made for TV movie based on the original 1965 play by Robert Bolt. Very, very good. Different from the 1966 movie. But both good in different ways. Neither is better.
Don't we all? This is one of the very basic human needs. Since they don't need to worry about food and shelter, they focus on social status and entertainment.
Oh c'mon, 16 years into a product line ain't too bad, is it?
If you had a kid when the App Store first came out, that kid would now be nearing high school graduation and you still can't do as you describe. The great recession, the pandemic, the iPad, proliferation of AI, legalization of Gay marriage in the states and weed in some places, annexation of crimea and the war in Ukraine, the foxconn suicide issue, 4G, LTE, 5G, fiber to the home, brexit, Golang, Rust, TypeScript, Swift, APFS, Arm and the downfall of Intel, the rise of NVIDIA, Netflix, TikTok, drones, electric cars, scooters, bikes, end-to-end design and construction of their mothership headquarters, and federal acknowledgement that climate change is an issue, have all basically happened in that time; but nope, it's for security reasons. Hell, even their lead industrial designer retired long before they'd let up.
Edit: Not that any of those have anything to do with the App Store, but still.
In the inevitable case where this lands Apple serious monetary penalties affecting the quarterly earnings, how many employees will be laid off? Will Alex Roman be one of them?
Will walmart open your packaging, review all text in the manual, and tell you that you need to reprint your manual because it has a link to your homepage "company.com" and on that page you can find a pricing page with lower prices?
Will walmart prevent you from selling, say, a fishing pole that allows you to buy fishing hooks from another store?
Apple's app-store review would reject any app that linked the company pricing page, and would reject any app that let you use an alternative payment method like paypal or a credit card on a non-apple site.
Also, in your analogy the customer has to be unable to buy your app from anywhere else (since the customer has an iPhone and there are no other stores or operating systems for iPhone)..
Yet everyday, people seem to know that to use Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, etc on their phone, they have to sign up on the website since you can’t pay for either via in app purchases.
The heart of Apple's hypocrisy is this: they claim their 30% is necessary to support the developer ecosystem and fund its operations. But of course if that were true, they could easily charge a high enough platform membership fee directly to developers. Instead they opt for a structural tax to cover what are mostly completely opaque and secret operational costs. They're opaque and secret for obvious reasons: those expenses come nowhere close to the ~$30 billion in App Store commission Apple generates every year.
As described in the ruling, Apple hired a consulting group to estimate how much value developers get from the iphone platform, which found that
(1) Apple’s platform technology is worth up to 30% of a developer’s revenue.
(2) Apple’s developer tools and services are worth approximately 3%–16%.
(3) Apple’s distribution services are worth approximately 4%–14%.
(4) Apple’s discovery services are worth approximately 5%–14%.
Then Apple claimed this study was how they came up with the 27%, but the Judge basically said nah you guys came up with that number before the study, and you even know it would be a non-starter for almost all developers.
> Apple’s developer tools and services are worth approximately 3%–16%
That must be a joke. Xcode is so bad, compared to Android Studio, it’s not even funny. As iOS dev I have to constantly apologize to my Android team members, that, no, Xcode can’t do this and that, and, no, we can’t do X in the build pipeline. And I‘m generally 10-20% slower than them because the tooling is just terrible and flaky.
BTW there was a promising IntelliJ option for Apple development, but Apple made life so hard for them that they had to give up. It was called „AppCode“ and some people are still sad that it doesn’t exist anymore.
The funny thing is that the companies that stand to benefit the most from this and that move the most money (Netflix, Spotify, Fortnite) need Apple's platform, marketing, and distribution the least.
Indeed. I’d add a fourth category: the medium-to-long tail of ad-infested casino games for children. None of those apps are successful because of the App Store. People don’t generally start at the App Store and go looking for games like this. They are all installed from CPI ads in other ad-infested apps or on websites.
Apple is exactly like a mobster demanding a cut for “protection” — except they’ve designed and controlled the system so well that your business just cannot exist in the first place until your automatic extortion payment system is in place.
They don't. Nobody heard about Netflix and Spotify from randomly browsing App Store(Do people even browse app store feeds to see what to download?). Almost every users of them would likely have searched for it.
Maybe I should have said "_don't_ need Apple's platform, marketing, and distribution" rather than "need Apple's platform, marketing, and distribution the _least_", but I think we agree.
For "discovery" people would have to regularly check the App Store app and read the "today" page. Maybe perhaps Spotify or Netflix will appear there once a year among 15000 stories about games.
Or you mean search? If people search for Spotify/Netflix, they already know about it. And right now Apple will helpfully cover half of the screen with an ad for Gmail if you search for Spotify (and will hide all other Spotify apps like Spotify Kids and Spotify for Creators six screens down)
It made me laugh, if you pretend to be worth 30% of revenue (an insane markup), you better really invest in those developer tools to show it off because the sad state of xcode really isn't showing that.
I don't know where this money is going but certainly not in the developer tooling because it's absolutely terrible
If Apple were worth 30% of revenue, then they'd have no problem allowing competing app stores on their devices, because they support their rate with their value.
The fact that they're deadset against competition should tell the courts all they need to know about how competitively supportable the 30% is.
I thought Apple's argument was that the 30% pays for iOS itself, not that the 30% pays for the App Store. Under that theory there's no reason to allow other app stores.
They used to do that back when the iPhone first came out. I don’t think anybody liked that better, and having people hang around on older iOS versions was (and still is) bad for security.
iPhones never had paid iOS upgrades. iPod touch did, but that's because Apple was worried free updates would violate an accounting rule. Specifically, the iPhone was considered subscription revenue while the iPod touch was considered purchase revenue. And after an accounting scandal[0] GAAP had been changed so that you couldn't say you sold, say, a bunch of stuff that hadn't actually been finished yet, and then finish it later with, say, a software update.
This is, of course, how basically every tech company works nowadays[1], because Apple lobbied to have that accounting rule removed.
None of this has anything to do with "App Store pays for iOS". That's an excuse Apple came up with after Epic Games sued them, there's no point in time I can point to where iOS is just the bundled OS vs. "paid for with app sales". The reality is, everything pays for everything, because Apple only sells fully bundled experiences. Their opposition to sideloading or third-party iOS app stores is only somewhat related to security[2], and more related to the fact that they don't want anyone dictating to them how the customer experience is, even if those changes improve the experience.
Well, that, and the fact that they make bank off App Store apps.
Steam takes a 30% cut, but it's actually apparently worth it for discovery and low-friction sales alone, since developers still sell on Steam when the PC is an open platform with competing storefronts with lower cuts.
Steam also reduces their cut down to 25/20% at $10m/$50m in sales, whereas Apple reduces it to 15% only for devs under $1m/yr. A small number of games/apps make the vast majority of revenue so Steam's average cut is likely considerably lower in practice.
> if you pretend to be worth 30% of revenue (an insane markup)
Back in 2008, if you were an indie dev then their 30% ask was more than reasonable because the cost-of-doing-business on other platforms (like Windows Mobile) was much higher due to the lack of any central App Store; for example, you'd often need to partner with a company like Digital River, and pay more for marketing/advertising and overcome the significant friction involved in convincing punters to register/buy from your website, download the app *.cab files to their PC, install the app onto your device, and hope no-one uploads a copy to a filesharing network because this was before the days when an OS itself would employ DRM to enforce a license for third-party software.
...then one day Apple comes along and says: "We can manage all of that for you, for far less than what you'd pay for e-commerce and digital distribution, and our customers have lots of disposable income".
Ostensibly, competition should have come from the Android and (lol) Windows App Stores: "surely if Android's Play Store offers devs better rates then devs will simply not target iOS anymore and Apple will reduce their % to stay competitive" - but Apple's secret-sauce of a markedly more affluent customer base with already saved credit-card details meant that Android apps leant more on ad-supported apps while more iOS apps could charge an up-front amount, not have ads, and result in iOS devs still making far more money on Apple's platform.
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There exists an argument that Apple should not be forced to open-up the iOS platform because Apple is selling a closed platform on the merits of it being a closed platform, and Apple's customers want a closed platform (even if they don't realize it) because having a closed platform looks like the only way to enforce a minimum standard of quality and to keep malware out precisely because normal-human-users (i.e. our collective mothers) will install malware because the installation instructions for "Facebook_Gold_App1_100%_Real_honest.app" tell them to disable system protections.
> Back in 2008, if you were an indie dev then their 30% ask was more than reasonable because the cost-of-doing-business on other platforms (like Windows Mobile) was much higher due to the lack of any central App Store
The first iPhone indie devs were Mac indie devs who already knew Objective-C and Cocoa and Xcode and paid 0% to Apple on the Mac.
> because having a closed platform looks like the only way to enforce a minimum standard of quality and to keep malware out precisely because normal-human-users (i.e. our collective mothers) will install malware because the installation instructions
Well no, the most secure platform in 2025 is still the web. You can't get as much data in a web browser as you can in a mobile app and the sandboxing is tighter.
And I may mention that the majority of the appstore revenue comes from casino like games, not really something I would give it to my family.
And sure, I'm opened to the idea that the appstore was innovative in 2008, unfortunately for Apple, we're now in 2025 and it clearly isn't anymore.
At the time, the Verizon/Qualcomm BREW platform had absurd levels of revenue sharing: Up to 90% (!!!) went to the carrier unless you were big enough to negotiate a specific deal.
2010: "Man, charging people money to install software on a feature-phone they bought is kinda fucked up. Both companies are in the wrong for doing that."
2025: "You don't appreciate how lower publishing fees foster competition, except when there's no fees at all, because that's too competitive for the OEM."
if you take the high end for all of these points, Apple is claiming 74% of the revenue is thanks to them.
Also, there's a certain level of 'hand-waving' here where if you're developing for iOS you're almost forced to have Apple hardware in the first place to run+test (hell, even Android can be dev'd from almost anything...)
They don’t make that claim. That’s the service they are selling and the margin they choose. The royalty is similar to software retailer margins going back a long time. Steam charges a similar rate.
It’s pretty trivial to bypass. Just don’t charge for your software, and use the app to access paid resources purchased outside the platform. My company distributes a few dozen apps to thousands of employees, Apple gets $0, because they utilize an existing subscription or license unconnected to Apple.
There are many caveats on this. For example, Apple's terms clearly state that developers must use Apple’s in-app purchase (IAP) system for digital goods or services. So you're restricted to only subscription based pricing. No upgrade pricing. No microtransactions.
Additionally Apple remains the arbiter of what kind of content and apps may be listed. Until recently they were blocking all emulators and cloud gaming apps. They used to block all crypto apps. They still selectively block gambling apps. They still block torrenting and adult apps.
Additionally, Apple is famous for arbitrary and selectively enforced rules. Many developers have their updates rejected for any and no reason after an automated system rejects them for specious reasons.
Additionally, developers are blocked from linking out. They can't up-sell, which is a critical component of a SaaS business model. Nothing in the app can tell users where to subscribe or how to upgrade or change their credit card details. This one alone kills most SaaS applications unless they use Apple's IAPs.
The problem is less the actual % itself and the fact that it's bundled in with so many things you can't pick or substitute. You can't avoid the app store and you can't avoid the Apple developer tools because they force you to use both of them. So then charging money for something you don't have an alternative to is the issue.
Steam might charge a similar rate but you aren't forced to use them. You can deliver games to PC gamers in a number of ways and many large games opt to not be on Steam.
But game developers can sell steam keys directly or cia other resellers and avoid the steam commision entirely. So Valve is goving them a fee service and only chargeing a commision when valve themselves generate the sell.
Were they transparent, what would inhibit developers from bargaining against the costs and benefits shown? Sometimes that also outweighs the benefits of transparency.
You just can't show anything to anyone without kicking a wasp's nest.
I am not defending Apple, if anything, I am pro-Android here, but I understand the pickle they'd be in, were they be transparent with the cost structure.
Apple didn't charge tax on all app store purchases to protect themselves, it was done out of greed and malice.
You're assuming that Apple is acting in good faith. An actual, literal judge has decided the evidence shows that Apple was not acting in good faith, and in fact were behaving illegally. This isn't a "both sides" argument, Apple is definitively in the wrong.
The math of a one time fee is different than a percentage. Not sure what you are getting at by presenting a business model that doesn’t make sense as an argument
Apple should abandon the console model for iPhones (and iPads, etc.). It's corrosive. By my back-of-the napkin math (subtracting an estimate of Google's quarterly search payments from Apple's stated "services" revenue and comparing to iPhone revenue), Apple would make the same amount of money by just charging me an extra 25% when I bought a phone. I would gladly pay that up-front instead of indirectly when I buy apps.
Its not a dollar value. It’s an ongoing percentage based tax on your business relationships and consumption with other providers.
For instance, say Netflix has an iOS app with 10M installs. Apple wants 30% of the subscription revenue even though their costs are static. The only variable cost is payment infrastructure which to some degree is proportional to amounts (fraud etc). But what is the market value of that? A couple percent at most? Are apple even taking any risk?
And honestly, Apple could easily take 5-10% and I’m sure lots of vendors would still use them due to user preference - it’s trustworthy, provided an overview of ongoing subscriptions, and importantly you can cancel without being on a 30min retention call with absolute garbage companies.
But that needs to be played out by the markets. Competition will make Apples option cheaper and most likely competitors will step up to match the UX at lower prices. Free markets, like democracy, have this paradox of tolerance, ie bad faith players can abuse the very system to destroy it in self-interest.
Is there any hope of a non-joke fine here? Or are we just looking at another kiss of the wrists as them and Google and all the other big tech cos fuck literally everyone over?
The important penalty isn’t a fine, it’s a forced change of behavior to comply with the injunction. The referral for criminal contempt charges will end up being a slap on the wrist if they are even charged though.
The precedent is significant too. Remember the EU is currently reviewing Apple’s malicious compliance with the DMA, there are also regulators in other countries moving forward too.
A fine isn't even necessary: Apple's App Store business just ended. Between app sales and IAP it has a 30% tax. If an app developer swaps out for a Stripe portal they're paying 3% and probably at least doubling their own profit margin.
Only an idiot would still be selling apps through Apple's payments next week. The only way Apple will make any money at all on apps is if it drops it's fees to 10% or below.
A fine is still necessary because (as per the original ruling), they should have never foisted their store on people seventeen years ago when they first launched it and certainly should not have done so when the court ordered them to stop four years ago.
If there isn't a fine, the message will be that it's fine to profit off of ignoring court orders until you face thread of contempt charges.
If the terms were so great and the value to developers so high, it should definitely have been able to succeed in a competitive market, and need not have been forced on people.
I think most of the praise was because before the App Store, you quite literally could not install software on iOS. If the Mac worked the same way, people would absent-mindedly praise Apple for it too.
Responding to a comment by bn-l, but also to the general sentiment about Apple and untrusted code I often see on hacker news.
> 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.
Has this even happened? Has anyone ever sued and won the case with a laptop manufacturer (or Microsoft or Apple), because they downloaded and executed an executable with malware on their computer? Do average people really blame Microsoft for malware?
I would kind of agree that they should, but not because Microsoft allows people to run untrusted code, but because the security model of Windows (and other PC operating systems) is still bad. But not because it allows people to run unsigned code.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think we should return to security model of old operating systems - smartphone OSes definitely got that right, except for the part that forces users to give up control of their devices. It's just that the argument, that allowing people to install software not signed by Apple on their own devices would make iPhones insecure, is totally unsubstantiated to me.
I see some people still arguing that (ex. older) people will do what they are told and will install shady software. If Apple really cares, they could provide a switch that allows users to disable installing "unverified" software. Maybe ask about it during setup. Maybe allow locking it until factory reset, or allow head of icloud family to control it. There are many options to keep some people secure from all unverified apps, while allowing others to run them.
Not to mention that the idea that all apps not signed by Apple are somehow malicious is just bad. You could have other entities than Apple verify code.
Currently, even running apps you yourself wrote, on your own hardware, is hard and limited. For no good reason.
The only reason Apple is blocking other stores, or preventing people from installing homebrew, is to collect more money. It's good that they are investing into security of their software and hardware, but in this particular case, security is used only as a distraction.
Some country recently fined Apple every day until they resolved the issue. I think such solution would both help push Apple to actually resolve the issue and do so in a timely manner.
As much money as they have, no shareholder wants to see a $1m/day expense on the balance sheet.
$1m/day since they launched the iPhone App Store in 2008 is roughly 2 months worth of 30% App Store commision revenue. I.e. they'd be making more money by keeping such a small fine on the balance sheet than complying.
The same thing at $1b/day or rapidly increasing with time might be effective though, but I'm not sure what's really assignable by the given court or not.
That is exactly what the judge has triggered. She has referred Alex Roman and anyone else complicit in Apple for review of contempt of course. This carries actual prison time.
Freeze their ability to do anything period. Physically lock the incorporation documents in a prison cell. They won't need to do "basic life support", the documents will be provided with trays of food, water, and adequate opportunities for exercise by the prison facility. If they need more than that, they can petition their former customers to send money to their prison commissary account for the purchase of snacks, toiletries and such.
A fictitious person's executives and directors are typically real. Or, if fictitious as well, go down the rabbit hole of said contractors until you finally find the real ones.
In the country I'm from, each exec gets a partial sentence in accordance with their contribution to the criminal act. And no, the total amount on years in prison needn't match the total, there's a minimum and also percentages always exceed 100%.
Limited liability doesn't and shouldn't protect criminals from imprisonment.
Careful. The real humans at the bottom of that rabbit hole are the individual shareholders. That is the real root of this problem -- the people that ultimately profit from this behavior (a group that, ironically, almost certainly includes the judge in this case, and most of the people in this thread) have no responsibility whatsoever.
Because they're not responsible? We (shareholders) pay executives to manage the companies. This means doing what is best for the company, not committing crimes.
Is your comment asserting that there are no people poor enough to steal food? Or are you claiming that poor people do not get arrested and are in fact treated with kindness and compassion by the various police agencies?
The court is pushing for criminal censure of some of the involved participants. If that happens -- and it absolutely should -- it will have a tremendous impact on the hubris seen in Apple, and in the industry in general. Hopefully bribes don't get them out of this, and some Apple execs really do end up with prison sentences.
Apple makes tens of billions of dollars a year off App Store royalties. If this ruling is upheld this fine has a net present value of 100 billion - trillion dollars depending on your discount rate. They will lose billions of dollars a year forever.
The timing of this with Tim Sweeney's interview with Lex Friedman is great. Watching a few hours of it, it's no wonder he hasn't slowed down in the slightest in this fight against Apple, he is unrelenting in his focus.
I’ve always been critical of headlines that frame the company as the culprit—especially when the company can’t be sent to prison or face personal consequences. No, it wasn’t "Apple" that violated antitrust laws—Tim Cook approved the actions. Apple doesn't make decisions on its own; it operates under the direction and vision of the people in charge.
It's far too convenient for C-level executives to reap the rewards when their leadership drives profits, only to shift blame to "the company" when things go wrong. Accountability should work both ways.
I agree with the core of your sentiment, but I don't think moving the framing from the company to the person is the answer. It makes it too easy for a company to put the blame on an individual that has conveniently been fired (either for the relevant reason or any other) and then act like the problem is solved. The individuals most responsible should face personal consequences. The company should also face consequences. As they say: One bad apple spoils the bunch. (no pun intended)
No one ever suggests that we hold the owners of companies liable for what their companies do.
I know that this is the entire point of limited liability corporations -- to divorce ownership from responsibility -- but maybe that wasn't such a good idea.
Other than the possible contempt for the guy who lied under oath (and some bad press), doesn't this injunction just mean that apple has to do... what it was already previously ordered to do?
Are there no fines or consequences for them doing this? Am I missing something else here?
Previously they were ordered to allow outside payments. Apple “complied” by requiring a 27% cut on all outside payments (slight discount to cover the cost of Stripe or whatever), a massive scary popup saying that outside sites can’t be trusted, and the link wasn’t allowed to be in the “payment flow” (where else would it be?), and the right to audit your finances. There were some other things but that’s what I remember as being the most egregious.
Since this basically defies what the court would require, they are now explicitly telling Apple that none of that is allowed, and that there cannot be any restrictions on placement or styling of links to outside payments. As the judge said, no reasonable person would believe that their actions are complying with that they were instructed to do.
> Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court's Injunction. It did so with the express
intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the coverup made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple.
"In Slack communications dated November 16, 2021, the Apple employees crafting the
warning screen for Project Michigan discussed how best to frame its language. (CX-206.)
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.” (Id. at .2.) From Mr. Onak’s perspective, of the “execs” on the
project, Mr. Schiller was at the top. (Feb. 2025 Tr. 1340:4–6 (Onak).) One employee further
wrote, “to make your version even worse you could add the developer name rather than the app name.” (CX-206.4.) To that, another responded “ooh - keep going.” (Id.)
I could never imagine Apple employees doing it like this. I knew they had to have discussions about the scare screen, but come on! This is pure evil.
> I could never imagine Apple employees doing it like this.
Curious why your imagination is so limited here regarding a pretty standard human behavior pattern. Do you personally know Apple employees or is it more of a general respect for their products or ...?
I pretty much grew up on this site. 19yo-37yo. economics dropout from nowhere => waiter => startup => sold => 7 year tenure at google => back to a new startup), and I honestly was absolutely horribly over-the-top stunned at how people were just...normal? to put it nicely?...at Google.
You're absolutely right that it's an unwarranted assumption, yet simultaneously, I just always assumed higher class == higher morals. If anything it seemed to select for senior year of HS math class score and sociopathy.
Stuff I used to hear as grousing, from tired, defeated, adults, that couldn't hack it now ring as universal truths.
Are you serious? First off, stop using the term "high class" for immoral people. They are well beneath the whole morale chain and the fact they managed to get to your-definition-of-high-class means that lots of dirty tactics were used which are well beyond what a normal human is capable of
He was virtue signaling. It's sadly all too common these days. As if he or any human isn't capable of horrible atrocities given the right circumstances. Don't let him or anyone stifle your speech. Say what you need to say regardless of the sniping. You can't turn in your karma points for anything anyway, not even a little eraser.
When saurik sued Apple for antitrust reasons over Cydia[1] (which sadly ended up going nowhere), at some point a hearing was held where his lawyer accidentally read out something that was supposed to be protected/sealed. Apple's lawyer quickly interjected, but what saurik's attorney got to read before ended up in the official transcript[2], and it's straight up disgusting. From p.18:
"For example, something where -- they are talking about an iOS update that, quote, broke Cydia Impactor. Where they said, it feels too good to destroy someone's spirit. We did something else today that will kill him again with a little smiley emoticon. That, we can specifically talk about with respect to Cydia."
[1] For those not in the know, Cydia was the de-facto App Store for jailbroken iDevices, the prominent third-party marketplace before AltStore.
FWIW, the lawsuit went pretty far--all the way to an appeals court--but failed on what was ostensibly a statute of limitations issue that made very little sense and feels wrong :/. I still intend to write a giant article about it at some point, and probably do a long interview / lamentation about it on t3dotgg's YouTube channel... it just has felt so difficult to approach as the whole thing was so upsetting :(.
Hey! I should have phrased that differently, sorry! I actually followed the lawsuit as it was progressing, even listening to the oral arguments as soon as they were uploaded to the Ninth Circuit's YT channel. Such a shame...
This wasn't just a random employee either, it was “Rafael Onak, User Experience Writing Manager at Apple”.
If you think this is the only time they pull this kind of crap and then hide behind some privacy/design/UX bullshit argument, then I've got news for you...
How much does Apple select employees for loyalty when hiring? One-eyed competitive fanbois?
Companies do want smart machiavellian people that independently act in the interests of the company (archetypical C-suite executives).
Google has had a number of ethical employees damage Google from the inside.
A company can be damaged by smart motivated machiavellian employees using their skills against their own company.
I've noticed competitive gaming training/selecting people to win-at-all-costs. Presumably the C-suite is benefiting from the influx of people that understand manipulation and complexity.
> Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordered the iPhone-maker to allow developers to steer users to alternative methods of paying for services or subscriptions offered in the App Store. The company also can no longer impose fees in such scenarios or restrict the ability of software-makers to offer links or otherwise communicate alternate payment options with consumers.
The ruling means this starts immediately it seems, as I cannot see a date listed anywhere.
So : make a free app. Ask people to buy the non-free version on a website. Apple gets 0. No revenue at all for providing stable apis and sdks? How’s that sustainable?
The app store itself would be a gigantic loss leader that has to be paid for by iphone sales.
If console makers have to do the same, consoles triple in price
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.
This expectation exists because Apple/Google/monopolists sell it. But it's not realistic, the app stores are cesspools. We need a culture shift to being more selective about installing software. Clearer permissions, better architecture, and trusted repositories with reputations to maintain. Installing software without any validation of safety should be possible but scary (show a terminal log reporting useful technical information or something).
Permissioning is a mess – among other things of course. I feel that permissions to access any resource(image, location, files etc) could be given without necessarily giving access to the PII value that resource holds, e.g. running a no side effects function on it on-device or on a trusted service that is readonly to me and write-only to 3rd parties.
Please, side-loading is usually an annoying involved process targeted at developers which the average consumer cannot accidentally do.
A bad actor would have better luck telling a victim "just ship me your phone and login password for some emergency maintenance" than instructing a user through sideloading an app onto their smart fridge.
I, personally, would be happy if iOS had android-style side-loading where you have to enable developer mode, promise you're not an idiot, and go from there.
once again will ask why iPhones are treated any differently from other computing devices — we need legislative solutions that allow consumers to load software (or even other operating systems) on any computing device they own.
restricting software distribution on any platform under the guise of needing to be kept “secure” always seemed anticompetitive to me - that should apply regardless of Apple’s particular behavior with the courts in this example.
It isn't. Consoles at this stage are general purpose computers with hardware and software explicitly designed to prevent consumers using it as such. If consumer rights had any real teeth, any hardware device would be required to allow their owners to install any piece of software of their choosing, including replacing the operating system.
One has billions of users, the other has millions. One has 100s of thousands of companies trying to to do business with that platform's users, the other has 100s of companies trying to do business with that platform's users.
scale and usage matters. Apple has > 50% market share in the USA (the place relevant to USA law). So, being a monopoly they get treated differently than a non-monopoly.
Even if they had less than 50%, people bank, invest, shop, talk, communicate, book hotels, flights, and effectively live their lives on smartphones. On XBox they play games and same small percent play music or watch movies there (I suspect most switch over to their Smart TV/Apple TV/.. for that).
they aren't? The title is "Apple Violated Antitrust Ruling, Judge Finds"
the first sentence in the article is:
> A federal judge hammered Apple for violating an antitrust ruling related to App Store restrictions and took the extraordinary step of referring the matter to federal prosecutors for a criminal contempt investigation.
Fair enough, I replied poorly, but the judgment doesn't appear to be based on Apple being monopoly or size of the business, as far as I can tell. The issue appears to be of anti-steering, more than the number of customers/its market share. Epic notably failed to prove Sherman act violations, didn't it?
>After a bench trial, this Court entered judgment on September 10, 2021, finding thatcertain of Apple’s anti-steering rules violate the California Unfair Competition Law (“UCL”)under its unfair prong.
...
As to the merits of Apple’s UCL violations, Apple did not directly challenge this Court’s application of the UCL’s tethering and balancing tests, instead arguing that(i) the UCL’s “safe harbor” doctrine insulates its liability because Epic failed to establish Sherman Act liability
...
As to Apple’s “unfair” practices under the UCL, the Court explainedthat Epic could demonstrate unfairness under either a “tethering” test or a “balancing” test. Id. at1053. The “tethering” test required Epic to “show that Apple’s conduct (1) ‘threatens an incipientviolation of an antitrust law,’ (2) ‘violates the policy or spirit of one of those laws because itseffects are comparable to or the same as a violation of the law,’ or (3) ‘otherwise significantlythreatens or harms competition.’” Id. at 1052 (quoting Cel-Tech Commc’ns, Inc. v. Los AngelesCellular Tel. Co., 973 P.2d 527, 544 (Cal. 1999)). While the Court held that Epic’s claims basedon app distribution and in-app payment processing restrictions failed to state a claim of unfairpractices, the Court held that Apple’s anti-steering provisions were severable and constitutedunfair practices under the UCL
I'm not sure that the scale or usage really matters.
the judgment doesn't appear to be based on Apple being monopoly or size of the business
our anti-trust laws are not about being a monopoly or the size of your business: they are about abusing market dominance (where up or downstream has no choice) with unfair business practices.
a monopoly that charges fair prices and does not abuse suppliers and customers will not encounter any legal difficulty
Basically every reply gets it wrong. The answer is that the Xbox isn't developed in California. This judgment was applied under California's UCL, not any federal anti-trust law, despite being in federal court. Epic wasn't able to prove Apple a monopoly, because it's not. Applying California's UCL to Microsoft, Sony, etc is going to be a harder sell in courts.
> Epic wasn't able to prove Apple a monopoly, because it's not.
Unless your name is T. Cook, you lack the authority to make that statement conclusively. The judge claims that Apple is guilty of perjury, and never corrected the executive that made misleading statements. If that testimony was fabricated, then there is every reason to believe Apple is obstructing information that could benefit the prosecution. There is no other feasible alibi in this scenario besides their lawyers all calling in sick. It's one thing to make a mistake, it's another thing to insist it's truth.
Let's not forget that Apple was headed down this same road with the DOJ, too. They are being investigated for a pattern of behavior that is not new, meaning they very well could be guilty of monopoly abuse right this very second. Saying "because it's not" is like telling Lance Ito to drop the OJ charges. Apple is not guilty until proven innocent; but claiming their innocence in certainty is a base lie. You do not actually know, either.
Both allow to have software developed for by any 3rd parties - that should include any and the original device seller should not be able to control the distribution.
If you really ask: xbox is pretty much the same as an x86-64 PC, running Windows (and having AMD GPU). It just bit more sealed.
Which… while we’re at it. Gaming would be much better if consoles didn’t exist anymore. Games would be more optimized for PC and manufacturers would just be building prebuilt gaming PCs.
We also would have more Switch competition in the ARM gaming space instead of x64 handhelds and Android windows emulation if these walled gardens didn’t exist.
I think this is the real answer, however it would be difficult to use it as an excuse for the model since there are laws also against selling at a loss to undercut competitors.
It's a more difficult argument. Consoles are not competing with regular general-purpose computers, and the console manufacturers go out of their way to make it impossible to install unapproved third-party software on them.
And since all the console manufacturers are selling the hardware at loss or with low margins, they can argue that it's just how the market works (free razors but expensive razor blades).
If consoles are sold at loss to gain "monopoly power", then that is anti competitive and should not be allowed. This would lead (or maybe already resulted) to pathetic printer and ink cartridge situation
That seems rather arbitrary. I'm not doing any general computing on my iPhone, I'm just browsing Hacker News and watching YouTube. If your contention is that the phone is capable of doing more than those two things, well, isn't the Xbox capable of doing more than just gaming?
You're not. The majority of phone users replaced their computers with a phone. They are using their phone for everything they used to use their computers for. Almost no one is using an XBox to replace their computer.
Are you pushing back on the word "majority" or on the concept that many people use their phones for nearly everything they used to use their computers for but that next to no one does the same with an Xbox?
That's nothing to do with it. The judgment repeatedly talks about Epic as a competing game store. I'm not sure how else you'd describe the app store of consoles.
It's not very clear in OP, but is reported better in other places.
> Apple employees attempted to mislead the Court by testifying that the decision to impose a commission was grounded in AG’s report. The testimony of Mr. Roman, Vice President of Finance, was replete with misdirection and outright lies. He even went so far as to testify that Apple did not look at comparables to estimate the costs of alternative payment solutions that developers would need to procure to facilitate linked-out purchases.
> The Court finds that Apple did consider the external costs developers faced when utilizing alternative payment solutions for linked out transactions, which conveniently exceeded the 3% discount Apple ultimately decided to provide by a safe margin. Apple did not rely on a substantiated bottoms-up analysis during its months-long assessment of whether to impose a commission, seemingly justifying its decision after the fact with the AG’s report.
> Mr. Roman did not stop there, however. He also testified that up until January 16, 2024, Apple had no idea what fee it would impose on linked-out purchases […] Another lie under oath: contemporaneous business documents reveal that on the contrary, the main components of Apple’s plan, including the 27% commission, were determined in July 2023.
> Neither Apple, nor its counsel, corrected the, now obvious, lies. They did not seek to withdraw the testimony or to have it stricken (although Apple did request that the Court strike other testimony). Thus, Apple will be held to have adopted the lies and misrepresentations to this Court.
I think that's actually the effect of anti-trust/anti-monopoly laws.
There's a point where companies get "too big to fail"/"too big to jail" and have outsize effect on the country (especially if the country is stupid enough to pass a Citizens United law that explicitly allows them to do this). Anti-trust laws are the main way that the government tries to prevent this, and haven't really been used since Reaganomics decided that big == efficient. Until recently.
Passing a law that companies cannot exceed a certain size (market cap as a percentage of GDP, I guess?) would probably be a simpler way of achieving this. Though, obviously, the accounting profession would roll up its collective sleeves and declare "challenge accepted".
With only a passing knowledge of the field, I'm aware that the standard of monopolistic effect varies between the EU and US (neither specifically uses financial size as the standard). In the EU it's about whether there is sufficient competition in the market, whereas in the US it's about whether the price is sufficiently competitive.
I'm glad this happened, although I would have prefered if the result came from a new law eg. the Open App Markets Act rather than have to rely on what is or is not legally considered a market in terms of the sherman act etc.
Finally vindicated! For years we were arguing with the Apple fanboys here on HN about what Apple is doing and how it is wrong, immoral and illegal. Glad to see something starting to happen.
I just wonder what are the next excuses going to be?
We just released Crosspay, a cross-platform in-app subscriptions SDK for iOS, Android, macOS, Linux, Windows, and Web apps, enabling users to purchase subscriptions once, and use anywhere. As this ruling becomes effective, we will also enable users to choose their payment method on any platform, instead of being tied to Apple App Store.
However, apps that charge $1 or less per transaction will continue to pay over 30% in fees (e.g. Stripe charges 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction)
I vouched this comment because I found it genuinely helpful, I was looking for cross payment service for my apps that work across all platforms (they're in Flutter, do you support that?).
This is huge, because it means that anyone buying an iPhone or apple product going forward is knowingly supporting this behaviour.
I fully expect this to be the ruin of Apple.
This seems like a bit of a reach tbh. It's no doubt hopefully huge, but by buying a product you're not implicitly agreeing with every or any element of internal company politics that occured during its production. I buy Macbooks because I tend to like most aspects of them, but use mostly Pixel phones, does that mean I support literally anything Tim Cook or leadership does to produce anything else? Not really, I just use the tools that work for me.
> A federal judge hammered Apple for violating a ruling in an antitrust case that required the company to loosen certain restrictions it imposes on software-makers in its App Store.
> Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordered the iPhone-maker to allow developers to steer users to alternative methods of paying for services or subscriptions offered in the App Store. The company also can no longer impose fees in such scenarios or restrict the ability of software-makers to offer links or otherwise communicate alternate payment options with consumers.
> “Apple willfully chose not to comply with this court’s injunction,” she said in the ruling. “It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers.” She referred the case to federal prosecutors to determine whether a criminal contempt investigation is appropriate.
> The order is the latest twist in the long-running legal dispute between Apple and Epic Games, developer of the popular videogame “Fortnite.”
Full article, works where archive.ph is blocked, no Javascript required, no tracking^1:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1DXcJN
1. Archive.{is,md,ph,etc.} puts the reader's IP address in a "spy pixel" URL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_pixel
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23316085
If you view it on an Apple device, it takes you to the Apple News app and opens it there, rather than redirecting.
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.
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 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.
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.
>> 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.
I would argue that the text the parent comment has pulled out is not part of the record keeping you need to do to comply. Lawyers will tell you to have certain conversations in person, and it is surprising that some of these conversations happened in text instead of in person.
I don't know a thing about the legal system: if someone gets caught doing that sort of thing, does that incur additional punishments?
I mean, if you do something illegal, and when the police arrest you they prove that you were trying to hide it from them, that's another charge. How does that work if the court catches you doing it?
So pretty mild thus far. As far as I remember from reading other court decisions, court-imposed sanctions against individual lawyers are also a thing. As far as the clients are considered, given production of documents is mandated by a court order, presumably this counts as defying a court order and so any punishments would fall under criminal contempt?
(Not a lawyer, in case this wasn’t clear from the above already.)
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.
Even if these executive positions carried a guarantee of a several year term in minimum or medium security prison, for the salaries involved they should be able to find someone who is reasonably competent and willing to do the job.
It's not like the corporate entity itself can be threatened with state violence, and it's owners (probably half the US!) are insulated from any real consequences. An entity like Apple really has diffused responsibility to the point that it transcends the law at this point, and it becomes perfectly rational for it to defy the courts.
He probably got offered a couple mil for a slap on the wrist, he likely won't even be jailed for a day. Why wouldn't they lie? They have the money to get away with it.
Do they defy the courts in China or just in the US?
Now, practically speaking, that exposes them to the Court taking all their frustration out on the execs. Oops.
Ironically it ends up getting flagged as some deliberate Apple malicious compliance BS which just sours you on the whole iOS experience.
It kind of surprises me that people working in that environment haven't been better trained about what not to write. I have zero legal background, but even twenty years ago at my very first corporate job I received a training module about legal discovery and the consequences of poorly worded emails -- and that was at a company that I genuinely believe was trying to follow the law in good faith, and was simply worried about liability due to misperception of careless language.
For a team specifically working on a legal compliance project, I am with the poster above that mentioned legal teams providing oversite. If nothing else, every one of these chats should have had a lawyer logged in to provide a mental reminder to participants that the conversation really isn't private.
Apologies, there are times I do not express myself as clearly as I would want to.
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.
If the judge wanted "reasonable" in that sense, then they should have defined the limits of reasonable. The assumption that "reasonable is what I the judge consider reasonable" is bad in every conceivable way. You can't read the judge's mind. If they didn't say exactly what they meant, then it is the judge that is at fault.
Next, the judge is an expert in law -- NOT an expert in humane interface, UI, or UX. They are in NO position to exert their amateur, ignorant opinion as fact and no effort was made by the judge to consult experts in the field about what would generally be considered "reasonable".
Finally, reasonable is subject to the facts and how those facts are subjectively viewed. Most Apple employees likely view this ruling as bad for their consumers and feel an obligation to protect their 1.4B iPhone users. From this perspective, discussing how to dissuade people from making decisions that could harm them would be very reasonable even if that discussion had a light-hearted tone or some joking along the way.
As an aside, I actively dislike what mostly amounts to forcing Apple to implement California state law outside of the state of California. I get no vote in California and should not be expected to abide by their laws in which I have no say. This whole thing should have been dealt with a the Federal level as it is obviously about interstate commerce and should have been legislated by congress rather than a politically-appointed judge that nobody voted for.
If the people involved don't have the brain cells to figure this out, maybe Apple should employ smarter people, because it's about to cost them a lot. And I don't even necessarily mean the UI people - anything would go through legal. I have contracted for companies that have had legal judgements similar to, but not exactly, like this, and they erred on the side of caution. Everything went through legal. And yes, that can mean not doing stuff your competitor does because you stepped too far over the line. Oh well, you fucked up big time and now you have a magnifying glass on you.
But Apple is too stupid or too bold to have an ounce of sense here.
The idea that people can follow laws based upon 'feelings' but billion dollar corporations can't is ridiculous. Fuck them, they 100% knew what they were doing.
Basically none of that applies here. This is a civil case. It did not involve a jury. The group tasked with carrying out the ruling were not involved with the trial either directly or indirectly. The ruling was vague because the judge as I understand it wasn't a SME and wasn't qualified to write what she wrote. Rather than consult SMEs to reach a reasonable conclusion, she proceeded (unreasonably I might add as it is unreasonable for someone to pretend to be an expert in something they know little about) to pretend she was an expert anyway.
After her vague guidelines didn't get the results she thought it should, it seems that rather than discuss, she doubled down on SMEs needing to read her mind to decide what she considered reasonable rather than what other SMEs might consider reasonable then leveraged her position as judge to punish their lack of understanding (which seems very close to acting in bad faith to me) instead of reflecting on what could have been done differently and changing accordingly.
Regardless of how you feel about this particular case (personally, I'm in favor of opening up iOS to other stores rather than this third-party website bandaid), the court's actions and expectations are flawed in this case.
In other words, could Apple have done these exact same actions and successfully argued that the language ("external website") was in fact neutral, if not for the direct written record that established their intent to do otherwise?
Everything you just said makes sense, but the details of how the courts manage to enforce orders like this are interesting, and it seems like enforcing notions of good faith must be extremely difficult.
Thanks for writing this though, this is a window into a space I have never played in. The legal system is very mysterious to me.
Yes, almost certainly. The party claiming non-compliance has to prove your non-compliance, but they do not have to prove your bad faith.
Instead, the burden falls to the enjoined party to prove good faith.
Affirmative good faith usually comes up more in trying to dissolve injunctions, etc (where the enjoined party has to prove good faith) than civil contempt of an order.
This is because in the case of civil contempt, Judges still have discretion to find you in contempt even if you acted in good faith. IE bad faith will definitely get you contempt, but good faith alone will not save you from it. You can act in good faith, not do enough, and still be found in contempt for not doing enough. This helps dissuade malicious compliance as well.
See, generally, mccomb and friends:
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/336/187/
"The absence of willfulness does not relieve from civil contempt. Civil as distinguished from criminal contempt is a sanction to enforce compliance with an order of the court or to compensate for losses or damages sustained by reason of noncompliance . . . . Since the purpose is remedial, it matters not with what intent the defendant did the prohibited act . . . . An act does not cease to be a violation of a law and of a decree merely because it may have been done innocently. The force and vitality of judicial decrees derive from more robust sanctions. And the grant or withholding of remedial relief is not wholly discretionary with the judge. . . . The private or public rights that the decree sought to protect are an important measure of the remedy."
What I don't get is that sometimes it seems that is the game, sometimes the legal loopholes are accepted and other times they are not. It feels one of the big benefits of hiring a good lawyer is that they know which loopholes are accepted and which are seen as spiting the authority of the courts.
I think there's a valid reason to think "if it's OK and common for banks and brokers to do it, it's OK for me to do it" and also to think "this will help protect users from being scammed by other apps who might pop open random links without any notices".
Now that I think about it, I wonder how much of the current backlash against remote work is to avoid this exact situation. Face to face conversations don't end up in evidence. Written conversations do, and video chats are increasingly being summarized and recorded by AI.
From a more negative point of view, so Apple knows how much it happens and gets to have some influence over it.
There are a lot of websites that give you a warning when you click on a link outside of their control.
Good faith is a requirement. Act in bad faith, and you can still be sanctioned.
Do you have any background in this, or are you just asserting what you want reality to be?
Because you are just spouting wrong information that, even for a non-lawyer, would take you 10 minutes to go find and read right information.
Is some degree of malicious compliance not extremely common when companies deal with the courts? From the outside it seems like the incentive would be to comply with a court order to the minimum degree required to avoid further legal consequences, but no more. Is compliance more enthusiastic that that in practice? Again, I have zero experience, but the idea of a company losing a lawsuit and then actually acting in good faith is a strange one to me.
An individual might be intimidated to act in actual good faith to avoid serious consequences, but Apple as an entity can't be tossed in jail for contempt of court, right? So it would seem that it is incentivized to push it's employees to take risks like this, with the understand that they can be replaced by employees who will if they refuse.
Malicious compliance is exactly why good faith is a requirement but not a defense.
Bad faith will get you contempt, good faith will not save you from contempt if you didn't do enough.
Do companies try to skirt this anyway - sure. But they run the risk of a judge finding they didn't do enough, and sanctioning them anyway, even if they didn't have obvious bad faith, or heck, even if they have objectively good faith.
There are plenty of cases where judges sanctioned good faith actors who didn't do enough.
I quoted McComb in another comment (so don't want to paste it again here), but see https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/336/187/ and friends.
In the end, once you lose, if you play stupid games, you will usually win stupid prizes.
That doesn't mean people don't play, but it's almost always against their lawyers strong advice.
As for jail - you have to distinguish civil and criminal contempt. Criminal contempt can get you thrown in jail, and has different requirements.
The key here is "reasonableness", but you can't read a judge's mind, so reasonable only means what a reasonable person would infer. That is completely subjective based on an individual's implicit biases and knowledge of all surrounding circumstances.
For example, the dev team tasked with implementing this may not be familiar with the entire case, so what they consider reasonable will be different based on that. They also know much more about technology and likely have strong feelings about what is acceptable, but the judge is NOT a subject matter expert (SME) in that area. Likewise, the judge is NOT a SME on UI/UX, so the judge's interpretation of "reasonable" may well be at odds. There is also an argument that directing to these third-party sites opens 1.4B people to exploitation, so it would be reasonable to allow them access, but also to protect those users (who also aren't SMEs and often have essentially zero understanding) from potential issues by framing things appropriately. I could go on with many other qualifiers about what would be reasonable.
The judge is qualified to make rulings based on the law, but utterly unqualified to decide what the details of a reasonable implementation would be. If she were a qualified SME, she could and should have written her reasoned decision and removed the need for interpretation. If the ruling were itself reasonable and clear, there wouldn't be meaningful room for debate about reasonableness which would in turn effectively render reasonableness a mute point. As such, you can see that "reasonableness" in these kinds of cases is a crutch to protect unqualified judges making rulings they should not be making which is ironically a very unreasonable approach.
As to "good faith", who is she to dictate that you must do what she says and be happily compliant or else? After all, unhappiness will almost certainly taint all actions to a greater or lesser degree, so anything less than perfect contentment would be "bad faith" to a greater or lesser degree.
Who is the judge to single-handedly decide these people's state of mind? Has all her study of law made her an expert on what happens in other people's minds and privy to their thoughts and experiences while ridding herself of her own biases? Such a task is impossibly hard for a jury even in broad terms with lots of facts and even less possible for a single person judging the actions of many people based only on a few chat messages.
How does she ensure that every single one of those hundreds to thousands of people involved is "acting in good faith" is an impossible task and you can be assured that at least one of them at any given time isn't acting in good faith about ANYTHING. This would imply that you must ALWAYS assume that bad faith was involved.
How do you determine how much bad faith is too much? Based on outcome is the only logical answer, but in that case, you could have been explicit about the outcome in the first place and skipped all the trouble and possible excuses of misunderstanding once again rendering "bad faith" as a crutch to protect the judge from their incompetence.
She passed judgement based on the law. As long as that judgement is fulfilled to the degree specified, the state of mind of the hundreds to thousands of people involved in carrying out that judgement should not matter.
"Good faith" and "reasonableness" is a faulty and fickle metric at its best when applied to a single person by a group of peers. It is a broken and unusable metric when applied to a group or corporate entity by a single judge not an expert in the matters at hand.
That job was at an avionics company working on safety critical systems. They paid tons of lip service to always placing safety first -- and from what I personally witnessed, at least at that time, the concern was genuine. There was a culture of taking the responsibility seriously, at least at the engineering level I interacted with.
Even acting in good faith though, things happen. Planes crash (usually due to pilot error), and when they do everyone gets sued, and when that happens careless language represents a risk for a company, even if they did everything right.
Having moved on to consumer tech, I haven't seen similar cultures of doing the "right thing". That could be the modern world, my own cynicism, or just the differences inherent to industries where lives aren't explicitly on the line. Regardless, it's not at all hard to imagine that employees can be taught to self censor in ways that won't themselves create more liability.
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.
One takeaway to startups that hope to stand for something even after tremendous growth and leadership changes: you have to build governance and accountability structures into your organizational DNA if you truly want specific values to persist over the long run.
Any relationship with a corporate entity is transactional in nature. A great deal of effort is often expended to manipulate us into feeling otherwise, but that is all it is.
Companies don't have feelings. They aren't conscious entities with a capacity for guilt or morality. They are, in essence, software applications designed to execute on systems composed of human employees. In a sense they are the original AI agents.
Companies are revenue maximizers, period. The ones that aren't quickly get displaced by ones that are.
The simpler test is to stay away from any company that has anything to gain by taking away your freedom. THAT unfortunately is most of them.
The depressing reality in consumer tech is that anything with a CPU doesn't belong to you, doesn't work for you, and will never do more than pretend to act in your best interest.
I think they're more willing to build out privacy enhancing features than other companies that don't rely on surveillance capitalism to make their money. "Small" things like Filevault add up.
The single example that ascended to be the CEO of Apple though? That selection process would seem more relevant than any personal background.
My base assumption is that any impressions we have about Tim Cook (or any other executive of a company that size) are a carefully crafted artifact of marketing and PR. He may be a real person behind the scenes, but his (and everyone's) media persona is a fictional character he is portraying.
> any impressions we have about Tim Cook ... is a fictional character he is portraying
The relevant ones here are that he's gay, of a certain age, and from the South, and that he heads up a company who appear to invest heavily, over a long period of time, in privacy protections -- these all feel like they'd be easy to falsify if there existed evidence to the contrary.
I personally believe that Apple is able to make different (better), choices in the name of a consumer privacy, than Google will.
Android is built from the ground up to provide surveillance data to Google-controlled adtech - that's their revenue model. I don't begrudge them that, people should have choice, etc. but the revenue model is adtech first and foremost.
Apple want services revenue, they like services revenue, but historically they're a vertically integrated tech platform manufacturer whose revenue model is building better platforms consumers want.
It's true that the services model may start to compromise that - and they've definitely started to make some poor choices they might need to pull back on to protect the core platform model - but I do think we're not comparing like with like when we say that Apple is no different to any other company in this space.
I've always read this and it seems well accepted. But I'm curious what exactly does it mean? What's Android sending to Google? Surely it's not logging what I click on apps? It's not logging what I click on my browser since the websites themselves send this info for ad purposes. So what's Android doing that let's say my Linux laptop isn't?
Edit: Answering my own question. There is a cross-app unique identifier (ignoring any privacy sandbox stuff) so developers and ad networks can get a consistent id across apps.
The key difference is user choice. An iOS user has no choice but to send their location data and app usage data to Apple. No such required privacy violations on Android.
“They don’t want <bad thing> so they choose <equally bad thing good for their revenue>”
My luke-warm take is that the advertising industry is inherently evil.
Why? I like using ad-supported services, and have found some life-changing products/services via targeted ads.
> “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind,” he said, “I don't consider the bloody ROI.” He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader.
> As evidenced by the use of “bloody” in his response—the closest thing to public profanity I've ever seen from Mr. Cook–it was clear that he was quite angry. His body language changed, his face contracted, and he spoke in rapid fire sentences compared to the usual metered and controlled way he speaks.
More broadly, I know that for-profit businesses are concerned with their bottom line, and I know businesses regularly throw other values under the bus in pursuit of profit. But I'm not sure it's possible to build a successful business (in terms of maintaining consumer trust, attracting and motivating decent employees, etc.) without some values beyond what's immediately quantifiable on the bottom line.
...and you believed him? I'm sorry, I'm trying to be less cynical in life, but he said exactly what people - apple fans - want to hear.
Is he above lying? We were just discussing how one of the apple executives straight up lied in court.
1. Cook only cares about pursuing profits, but at a shareholder meeting where shareholders were pressuring him to pursue profits, he lied to them (and had the presence of mind and acting chops to pretend to be uncharacteristically angry about it), because he believed that the story would get reported on and Apple fans would want to hear it, and he made the calculation that that would be more beneficial to his bottom line than being honest (or at least more politically neutral) with his shareholders.
2. Cook really does believe about accessibility, environmental issues, and worker safety, and he tries (or at least likes to think that he tries) to take steps toward those causes at the expense of profits, but he's also a complex and flawed mixture of motivations and is capable of compromising his values (and/or of letting those under him compromise their values) to varying degrees in the face of financial rewards or the pressures of the capitalist system.
#2 seems more likely and is more consistent with my view of humanity in general.
#1 seems more probable given a human being that has been selected to head one of the most valuable companies on the planet. That's his entire job -- to play a carefully crafted role for the public, the share holders and the media. He isn't paid to stand up at a shareholder meeting and let any sort of genuine feelings slip through, unless those feelings happen to be the right ones for that role at that moment.
It's entirely possible that Cook was fully sincere then, but that over the subsequent 11 years, marinating in the toxic stew that is the upper echelons of American industry has eroded his principles and he is now more willing to listen to the voices pushing for money over all else (whether those voices are outside or inside his own head).
Oh, no! Who would have thought? What could we possibly do other than keep shoving money into their faces?
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.
They were never serious.
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.
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.
>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-...
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.
In general that cost doesn't scale linearly with size, so bigger companies are proportionally less impacted.
Sometimes an attempt is made to compensate for this by exempting organizations under a certain size criteria.
It is a factor that should be considered when designing regulations. The comment with regard to the pubs was that the regulatory paperwork was a major cause for businesses being put up for sale.
There are many regulations that should exempt businesses under a certain size or with other criteria. For example small businesses that do not trade data should be largely exempt from GDPR. Small not for profits even more so.
Similarly, with VATMOSS the initial sales limit for registration was set ludicrously low.
Underlying this is a political failure to understand or even consider impacts on small businesses. When politicians talk to business they inevitably talk to big businesses.
The DMA specifically only applies to platforms with more than 45 million active users.
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...
[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
They may be more likely to have the capacity, but no way it's amy kind of guarantee.
That's OK, it shows we're human, it's not all AI slop here (yet?).
Hint: rationalization tends to be after.
Not to say that it can’t be overridden with training and/or self-reflection/self-skepticism, but first reactions tend to allows follow this pattern.
Edit: hmm, I suppose voicing your hot take about a news piece is a quick decision though.
By the way, I don't think this is a good way of voting. IMO comments should be upvoted if they provide good insights (even if you disagree with them) and downvoted when they are low-content/trolling/full of fallacies.
> IMO comments should be upvoted if they provide good insights (even if you disagree with them) and downvoted when they are low-content/trolling/full of fallacies.
Votes are not a popularity contest. Only you see your score, and it does not matter one bit whether you have 2 or 20 upvotes on a post. Even moderate negative scores don’t matter. The grey threshold is more important, and you have to post something quite bad to end up there. I think I read a good post that was dead once.
The system is working and the end result is what you want. Sure, it could be better, but we are never going to get a perfect implementation because humans are social animals, and not always very rational.
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...
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?
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?
Effective regulation isn't a strength of the US.
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.
If done through third parties directly the scammers will not make unsubscribing easy and it will not be as easy to find out where you are subscribing.
Thus I expect the scamming to increase.
It took me about 5 seconds to google "cancel subscription apple" and find about a zillion articles on how to do it. Basically open up the App Store, go to your account, click on subscriptions, click on the one in the list you want to cancel. Done.
On the other hand, I also wanted to cancel a pet-locator subscription that was coming up for renewal (we're leaving the country, they don't have coverage outside the US) and I had to go through about 30 layers of "are you sure", "are you really sure", "you know this will stop your service, right?", "we'd sure hate to lose you", "Is there anything we can offer to change your mind", etc. etc.
There was a link in that email to a page to manage and cancel that subscription, although it might not be obvious.
I doubt a scammer will do that.
This is fairly quickly resolved though - if anything close to 1% of customers complain to their banks that they don't want this payment and can't cancel it, triggering a chargeback, the scammers end up entirely blocked from the payment networks entirely in pretty short order. If you end up banned from Visa & Mastercard your whole operation is permanently kaput.
Also, this might be a non-US thing, but over here most modern banks (e.g. Revolut) will let you view & block recurring payment authorizations directly from your banking app anyway.
For me to get to it from App Store, I have to click a tiny profile pic (smallest allowed button on iOS?)
The next screen displays Purchase History and other items. However, no way to cancel from this page (insane?)
To get to subscriptions, I have to click my name at the top of that page (which doesn’t even look like a button) which loads for 3 seconds then pops up.
On this hidden account page, it shows Purchase History along with subscriptions list to cancel.
If any other site hid subscription cancelling behind a flat contact header secret account page, it’d be an issue, so yeah it’s an issue for Apple too.
And if that’s too tricky, you can just type “Subscriptions” (shows up after just typing “sub” for me) into Spotlight Search, and it’s the top option.
- Most legit services move to a web based Apple Pay (note to the unaware reader: this is NOT In-App Purchases and has never had 30% fees) due to the ease of implementing and lower fee (easier to do cross platform + web) - Non-legit developers keep the In-App flow
Over time this would skew In-App Purchases to be scammy-only (and therefore, easier to spot). I'm sure people at Apple consider this possibility too – and therefore, now that there's actual competition, IAP flows will probably have to change to prevent this and compete for actual developer preference (and keep it a viable legit-developer choice)
There is a lot to criticize Apple for -- the 30% fee is disgusting, and the subject of this order where they bar external payments without fees is criminal -- but the subscription complaint has always been weak.
None of the services you listed do it, but that's because they don't want to, not because it can't be done. It's a business decision problem, not a technical problem.
https://9to5google.com/2025/03/14/rcs-end-to-end-encryption-...
Excerpt from the filing:
"In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option. To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. 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. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate."
The fines are always less than the companies' net gains from the practice. Gains are often indirect, risk-related, and/or part of a larger strategy, so they cannot be calculated.
Everything short of prison is a waste of time, waste of tax dollars, and spits in the face of decent citizens.
Let's put money on it. I'll put $10k on it.
In the United States, the general perjury statute under federal law classifies perjury as a felony and provides for a prison sentence of up to five years.
Personal fines too, such as returning past remunerations during the problematic time in question. Salaries. Stock grants.
There is no such thing as an incentive, that doesn't incentivize someone. Relatively small fines relative to revenues and profits don't incentivize anything.
Alternatively, if fines really were big enough to turn large companies around (i.e. not just the enforced, but other companies seeing the enforcement), heads would roll, but would they be the right ones given those in charge are unlikely to fire themselves? And shareholders are the ones really paying the fines, are they really the culprits?
The incentives to act in good faith, should be placed very directly on the individuals whose choices dictate the good/bad faith. Starting and staying largely with the CEO, and the direct line of reports from the CEO down to the relevent decisions.
You don't want anyone who mattered to have cover. You want CEO's policing their own, and their reports pushing back upward against poor directives.
The only cover for relevent actors would be a record of pushing back against those who pushed through poor behavior.
TLDR: Limited liability should protect non-managing shareholders, but not bad actors within a company. Decisions makers should always be held directly responsible for their decisions. Any other system is perverse.
If you only punish the executives for illegal business practices, but leave the company alone, then you create an incentive to hire patsies as executives, continue letting them do illegal stuff, go to jail, and pay them handsomely after they get out.
Ultimately it has to be the company that's losing money when the company made money from illegal business, otherwise the company can just find other people willing to continue and provide for everyone who gets caught.
You are so right. The board & shareholders are in the path of responsibility and not recognizing that would be a call for both to use and abuse executives as scapegoats.
So be it!
As long as their job isn't to P.L.E.A.S.E.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfWVV533RHE&t=85s
It's wild how the public discourse on incentives is so split. On one hand, the poor are guilty until proven innocent of six dimensional chess to eek "unearned" pennies from social programs, yet the very idea that mega billionaires might pull easy, obvious levers for unethical mega million payouts is one that must beg and scrape for consideration.
Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax. You can't even deploy your own apps at your own cadence, without strict review, using your own technology. You have to jump through unplanned upgrade cycles, you're forced to use their payment rails and signup flows (and don't get to know your customer or get them to use your website). You pay the taxes on everything. And even then, they let your competitors advertise against your name or trademark.
This is rotten to the core.
Neither Google nor Apple should have an app store. Apps should be web installs. The only reason things work the way they do is so that Apple and Google can tax and exert control. A permissions system, signature scans, and heuristics are all that are needed to keep web installs safe - and all of those pieces are already in place. There's no technical or safety limitation, Apple and Google just want to dominate.
These two companies were innovative 20 years ago, but their lead then doesn't entitle them to keep owning the majority of most people's computing surface area for the rest of time. They have to give up the reigns. There are still billions of dollars for them to make on mobile, even if regulators tell them to stop treating developers as serfs and locking them in cages.
No. More. App. Stores.
Regulate big tech's hold over mobile, web, search, and advertising.
> Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax.
Long before Apple and Google made phones, a huge mobile device ecosystem already existed, including app stores, and it was way more locked down and expensive than what we have now.
The iPhone did not even launch with an app store, its launch concept was 100% web apps. They only added the native SDK and app store after developers and customers demanded it.
Again: I know the world is different now. But the idea that this was all some swift inexorable coup by Apple and Google is totally inaccurate. Plenty of other companies had a chance to do things differently, many with huge head starts.
Featurephones had App Stores like Verizon’s “Get It Now” and it was obvious that they were money grabs like Apple’s.
Apple and Google won the game because the phones were powerful enough to make web browsing feasible, and had great text input.
If nobody had thought of app stores, it would have been trivial to distribute .ipa’s and .apk’s on the Web just like Windows and Mac software still predominantly is.
In 2007 web apps were severely limited in performance and functionality, so this wasn't remotely feasible for most apps. I still believe Apple's original plan was a console model where hand-picked partners would get the secret native API. Then they realized the demand for native apps was much greater than they had anticipated, and decided to take a 30% cut from millions of developers rather than large licensing fees from a few.
That’s a poor comparison IMO, because the scale of this was multiple orders of magnitude less. App stores were a niche occurrence that almost no nontechnical person had heard about. Seldom anyone „needed“ an app for their company to be successful. Now they control billions of eyes.
People demanded native SDK because web apps were garbage, unlike the native first party apps. Some people wanted an app store. No one ever wanted or demanded an exclusive app store. Putting demand for native SDK and demand for app store in one sentence smells like gaslighting.
And as a user it just feels idiotic to have to download a dedicated program to say, pay for parking or order a sandwich, in a city I’m just visiting for the day. As though taking a credit card on the Web is a foreign concept.
Of course it didn’t take long before the App Store was so full that anyone who wanted scale had to do additional paid marketing anyway.
Google and Apple have silently achieved Microsoft's wet dream from the "trusted platform" era of effectively making it impossible for free and open source operating systems to compete with their own.
There should be two levers used to achieve this. One is anti-trust style legislation. The other is patent misuse legislation. If you try and prevent consumers from running software on hardware they bought from you to make a profit, you shouldn't be allowed to prevent consumers from buying the same hardware from someone else - that's what patents do - they create government enforced monopolies on the hardware. You should be required to invalidate (donate to the public domain) every patent on the hardware if you want to sell hardware where you get to profit off your monopoly on letting developers write software for the hardware.
These Epic rulings are better than nothing, but I can't help but feel that their solution of "make Apple distribute software they don't like in their app store" is the wrong one.
That's what the plain language of this injunction does.
Admittedly if Apple had come to the court (or even potentially came to the court now) and agreed to the alternate solution of allowing sideloading the court might have issued a different injunction (or modify this injunction).
Well that sounds rather damning.
Consider how painful that is going to be for Apple, and Roman, with how the current administration is abusing the DOJ.
The repercussions of this could be huge.
Here's the fun question though. Do Roman, Maestri et al not have any specific damages to this? (I know the answer, but it's a good question to ask....)
Have you been to a traffic court?
Go home, go to the DOL's website. Green text, "VALID". Weird. "Pay any monies owing on your license." Let's try that. "There are no monies owed."
Huh.
Print these out, take them to the DOL. It was a technicality where a process had suspended my license over a fine, but then unsuspended it the same day because they'd received a check.
She waives the $25 fee that should have been attached. And stamps the screenshots of this I'd taken, and prints out the status changes on my account.
Take it to court to challenge the ticket. Prosecutor doesn't want to dismiss. "They'd have generated and sent you a letter when they did that, so you had to have known."
Eventually dismissed, but only after three or four back-and-forths.
Sit on any all-hands call for a major company and it is practically guaranteed large chunks of the presentation will be executive gaslighting of its own employees with info that is objectively false or a misrepresentation. You will also never get a real answer to actual hard questions (especially if it is on the topic of something that may negatively affect workers) which is essentially lying by omission.
It doesn't help that we have now proven that you can lie all the way to the seat of being president of the united states.
That said - whether we like it or not, we are now a culture built on lying.
And it’s not just the lying that’s the problem - it’s the lack of critical thinking, the gullibility, the willingness to suspend disbelief and give benefit of the doubt and credit where it’s not due, amongst those being lied to, be they employees, or voters.
The way out is to see through it, to question it, and to stop acquiescing to it. If we all do that, the liars will never ascend to the positions of power we have allowed them to have over us today.
Are now? I mentioned Thomas More to show that this exact same thing happened 500 years ago. The whole point of the movie A Man For All Seasons is to show that this is always how it has been throughout human history, and that only a few people stand out as putting the truth higher than their own interests, such as Thomas More and Joan of Arc, which deeply impress even non-religious people like Robert Bolt and Mark Twain.
Truth for thee but not for me are the rich and powerful's greatest desire.
I also heartily recommend both seasons of Wolf Hall. About Cromwell rather than More, but still fascinating.
IE this person is now useless as a witness pretty much forever.
Boards private jet to Monaco
Don't we all? This is one of the very basic human needs. Since they don't need to worry about food and shelter, they focus on social status and entertainment.
Oh c'mon, 16 years into a product line ain't too bad, is it?
If you had a kid when the App Store first came out, that kid would now be nearing high school graduation and you still can't do as you describe. The great recession, the pandemic, the iPad, proliferation of AI, legalization of Gay marriage in the states and weed in some places, annexation of crimea and the war in Ukraine, the foxconn suicide issue, 4G, LTE, 5G, fiber to the home, brexit, Golang, Rust, TypeScript, Swift, APFS, Arm and the downfall of Intel, the rise of NVIDIA, Netflix, TikTok, drones, electric cars, scooters, bikes, end-to-end design and construction of their mothership headquarters, and federal acknowledgement that climate change is an issue, have all basically happened in that time; but nope, it's for security reasons. Hell, even their lead industrial designer retired long before they'd let up.
Edit: Not that any of those have anything to do with the App Store, but still.
I'd bet no.
Will walmart prevent you from selling, say, a fishing pole that allows you to buy fishing hooks from another store?
Apple's app-store review would reject any app that linked the company pricing page, and would reject any app that let you use an alternative payment method like paypal or a credit card on a non-apple site.
Also, in your analogy the customer has to be unable to buy your app from anywhere else (since the customer has an iPhone and there are no other stores or operating systems for iPhone)..
It really doesn't work as a good comparison imo.
> In retail brick-and-mortar stores, consumers do not lack knowledge of options. Technology platforms differ.
Yeah, but keep going on about how this is the same as Walmart
(1) Apple’s platform technology is worth up to 30% of a developer’s revenue. (2) Apple’s developer tools and services are worth approximately 3%–16%. (3) Apple’s distribution services are worth approximately 4%–14%. (4) Apple’s discovery services are worth approximately 5%–14%.
Then Apple claimed this study was how they came up with the 27%, but the Judge basically said nah you guys came up with that number before the study, and you even know it would be a non-starter for almost all developers.
That must be a joke. Xcode is so bad, compared to Android Studio, it’s not even funny. As iOS dev I have to constantly apologize to my Android team members, that, no, Xcode can’t do this and that, and, no, we can’t do X in the build pipeline. And I‘m generally 10-20% slower than them because the tooling is just terrible and flaky.
BTW there was a promising IntelliJ option for Apple development, but Apple made life so hard for them that they had to give up. It was called „AppCode“ and some people are still sad that it doesn’t exist anymore.
That's the point of hiring consulting groups.
Apple is exactly like a mobster demanding a cut for “protection” — except they’ve designed and controlled the system so well that your business just cannot exist in the first place until your automatic extortion payment system is in place.
For "discovery" people would have to regularly check the App Store app and read the "today" page. Maybe perhaps Spotify or Netflix will appear there once a year among 15000 stories about games.
Or you mean search? If people search for Spotify/Netflix, they already know about it. And right now Apple will helpfully cover half of the screen with an ad for Gmail if you search for Spotify (and will hide all other Spotify apps like Spotify Kids and Spotify for Creators six screens down)
I don't know where this money is going but certainly not in the developer tooling because it's absolutely terrible
The fact that they're deadset against competition should tell the courts all they need to know about how competitively supportable the 30% is.
This is, of course, how basically every tech company works nowadays[1], because Apple lobbied to have that accounting rule removed.
None of this has anything to do with "App Store pays for iOS". That's an excuse Apple came up with after Epic Games sued them, there's no point in time I can point to where iOS is just the bundled OS vs. "paid for with app sales". The reality is, everything pays for everything, because Apple only sells fully bundled experiences. Their opposition to sideloading or third-party iOS app stores is only somewhat related to security[2], and more related to the fact that they don't want anyone dictating to them how the customer experience is, even if those changes improve the experience.
Well, that, and the fact that they make bank off App Store apps.
[0] I'm not sure if it was Enron or Worldcom
[1] Looking at you, Tesla FSD
[2] If it was, they'd be locking down macOS
Back in 2008, if you were an indie dev then their 30% ask was more than reasonable because the cost-of-doing-business on other platforms (like Windows Mobile) was much higher due to the lack of any central App Store; for example, you'd often need to partner with a company like Digital River, and pay more for marketing/advertising and overcome the significant friction involved in convincing punters to register/buy from your website, download the app *.cab files to their PC, install the app onto your device, and hope no-one uploads a copy to a filesharing network because this was before the days when an OS itself would employ DRM to enforce a license for third-party software.
...then one day Apple comes along and says: "We can manage all of that for you, for far less than what you'd pay for e-commerce and digital distribution, and our customers have lots of disposable income".
Ostensibly, competition should have come from the Android and (lol) Windows App Stores: "surely if Android's Play Store offers devs better rates then devs will simply not target iOS anymore and Apple will reduce their % to stay competitive" - but Apple's secret-sauce of a markedly more affluent customer base with already saved credit-card details meant that Android apps leant more on ad-supported apps while more iOS apps could charge an up-front amount, not have ads, and result in iOS devs still making far more money on Apple's platform.
--------
There exists an argument that Apple should not be forced to open-up the iOS platform because Apple is selling a closed platform on the merits of it being a closed platform, and Apple's customers want a closed platform (even if they don't realize it) because having a closed platform looks like the only way to enforce a minimum standard of quality and to keep malware out precisely because normal-human-users (i.e. our collective mothers) will install malware because the installation instructions for "Facebook_Gold_App1_100%_Real_honest.app" tell them to disable system protections.
The first iPhone indie devs were Mac indie devs who already knew Objective-C and Cocoa and Xcode and paid 0% to Apple on the Mac.
Well no, the most secure platform in 2025 is still the web. You can't get as much data in a web browser as you can in a mobile app and the sandboxing is tighter.
And I may mention that the majority of the appstore revenue comes from casino like games, not really something I would give it to my family.
And sure, I'm opened to the idea that the appstore was innovative in 2008, unfortunately for Apple, we're now in 2025 and it clearly isn't anymore.
The 30% that Apple announced was a game changer.
2025: "You don't appreciate how lower publishing fees foster competition, except when there's no fees at all, because that's too competitive for the OEM."
if you take the high end for all of these points, Apple is claiming 74% of the revenue is thanks to them.
Also, there's a certain level of 'hand-waving' here where if you're developing for iOS you're almost forced to have Apple hardware in the first place to run+test (hell, even Android can be dev'd from almost anything...)
It didn't make sense to me for media from an external subscription or store account was taxed by apple (like netflix or kindle).
It’s pretty trivial to bypass. Just don’t charge for your software, and use the app to access paid resources purchased outside the platform. My company distributes a few dozen apps to thousands of employees, Apple gets $0, because they utilize an existing subscription or license unconnected to Apple.
Additionally Apple remains the arbiter of what kind of content and apps may be listed. Until recently they were blocking all emulators and cloud gaming apps. They used to block all crypto apps. They still selectively block gambling apps. They still block torrenting and adult apps.
Additionally, Apple is famous for arbitrary and selectively enforced rules. Many developers have their updates rejected for any and no reason after an automated system rejects them for specious reasons.
Additionally, developers are blocked from linking out. They can't up-sell, which is a critical component of a SaaS business model. Nothing in the app can tell users where to subscribe or how to upgrade or change their credit card details. This one alone kills most SaaS applications unless they use Apple's IAPs.
Steam might charge a similar rate but you aren't forced to use them. You can deliver games to PC gamers in a number of ways and many large games opt to not be on Steam.
That introduces insane friction and you lose a ton of customers
You just can't show anything to anyone without kicking a wasp's nest.
I am not defending Apple, if anything, I am pro-Android here, but I understand the pickle they'd be in, were they be transparent with the cost structure.
This would kick the wasp's nest of "they (Apple) don't need this much money to operate, they can do well with 10% profit!"
Which is very hard to admit, that profit margins are arbitrary when you, indeed, dominate the market.
Apple doesn't want (nor need) to give anyone a handle to anyone to make them accountable. It is not a charity.
(Again, I'm not defending Apple, but I do defend corporate liberties, in general.)
Apple is honestly worse than Microsoft in so many ways as far as restrictions (nowadays, anyway) and yet it's taken this long even to get here.
(To be clear, I am not a fan of Google's actions in the mobile space either...)
Ad space
Search space
And more!
It is about illegal anticompetitive behavior.
Apple didn't charge tax on all app store purchases to protect themselves, it was done out of greed and malice.
You're assuming that Apple is acting in good faith. An actual, literal judge has decided the evidence shows that Apple was not acting in good faith, and in fact were behaving illegally. This isn't a "both sides" argument, Apple is definitively in the wrong.
Another word for that is "competing". And yeah, exactly.
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1DXcJN
Read the opinion:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
For instance, say Netflix has an iOS app with 10M installs. Apple wants 30% of the subscription revenue even though their costs are static. The only variable cost is payment infrastructure which to some degree is proportional to amounts (fraud etc). But what is the market value of that? A couple percent at most? Are apple even taking any risk?
And honestly, Apple could easily take 5-10% and I’m sure lots of vendors would still use them due to user preference - it’s trustworthy, provided an overview of ongoing subscriptions, and importantly you can cancel without being on a 30min retention call with absolute garbage companies.
But that needs to be played out by the markets. Competition will make Apples option cheaper and most likely competitors will step up to match the UX at lower prices. Free markets, like democracy, have this paradox of tolerance, ie bad faith players can abuse the very system to destroy it in self-interest.
Only an idiot would still be selling apps through Apple's payments next week. The only way Apple will make any money at all on apps is if it drops it's fees to 10% or below.
If there isn't a fine, the message will be that it's fine to profit off of ignoring court orders until you face thread of contempt charges.
That was 18 years ago. The times, they are a-changing
> 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.
Has this even happened? Has anyone ever sued and won the case with a laptop manufacturer (or Microsoft or Apple), because they downloaded and executed an executable with malware on their computer? Do average people really blame Microsoft for malware? I would kind of agree that they should, but not because Microsoft allows people to run untrusted code, but because the security model of Windows (and other PC operating systems) is still bad. But not because it allows people to run unsigned code.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think we should return to security model of old operating systems - smartphone OSes definitely got that right, except for the part that forces users to give up control of their devices. It's just that the argument, that allowing people to install software not signed by Apple on their own devices would make iPhones insecure, is totally unsubstantiated to me.
I see some people still arguing that (ex. older) people will do what they are told and will install shady software. If Apple really cares, they could provide a switch that allows users to disable installing "unverified" software. Maybe ask about it during setup. Maybe allow locking it until factory reset, or allow head of icloud family to control it. There are many options to keep some people secure from all unverified apps, while allowing others to run them. Not to mention that the idea that all apps not signed by Apple are somehow malicious is just bad. You could have other entities than Apple verify code. Currently, even running apps you yourself wrote, on your own hardware, is hard and limited. For no good reason.
The only reason Apple is blocking other stores, or preventing people from installing homebrew, is to collect more money. It's good that they are investing into security of their software and hardware, but in this particular case, security is used only as a distraction.
Apple has close to 1/2 trillion in revenue a year. A few billion is rounding error.
As much money as they have, no shareholder wants to see a $1m/day expense on the balance sheet.
The same thing at $1b/day or rapidly increasing with time might be effective though, but I'm not sure what's really assignable by the given court or not.
Like, you know, we do for someone who was poor and starving and stole 10$ of food?
If a company is a person, it can go in jail.
Freeze their ability to do anything above basic life support without the permission of the judge or court.
In the country I'm from, each exec gets a partial sentence in accordance with their contribution to the criminal act. And no, the total amount on years in prison needn't match the total, there's a minimum and also percentages always exceed 100%.
Limited liability doesn't and shouldn't protect criminals from imprisonment.
Apple is a corporation.
Legally, corporations are persons.
Corporations are often referred to as fictitious persons in legal contexts to reduce confusion.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/fictitious-person
Your assumptions are absurd.
I think Cook will probably find that there is a dollar value that will get Trump to instruct a us attorney to drop charges
It's far too convenient for C-level executives to reap the rewards when their leadership drives profits, only to shift blame to "the company" when things go wrong. Accountability should work both ways.
I know that this is the entire point of limited liability corporations -- to divorce ownership from responsibility -- but maybe that wasn't such a good idea.
Other than the possible contempt for the guy who lied under oath (and some bad press), doesn't this injunction just mean that apple has to do... what it was already previously ordered to do?
Are there no fines or consequences for them doing this? Am I missing something else here?
Since this basically defies what the court would require, they are now explicitly telling Apple that none of that is allowed, and that there cannot be any restrictions on placement or styling of links to outside payments. As the judge said, no reasonable person would believe that their actions are complying with that they were instructed to do.
> Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court's Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the coverup made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple.
I could never imagine Apple employees doing it like this. I knew they had to have discussions about the scare screen, but come on! This is pure evil.
Curious why your imagination is so limited here regarding a pretty standard human behavior pattern. Do you personally know Apple employees or is it more of a general respect for their products or ...?
You're absolutely right that it's an unwarranted assumption, yet simultaneously, I just always assumed higher class == higher morals. If anything it seemed to select for senior year of HS math class score and sociopathy.
Stuff I used to hear as grousing, from tired, defeated, adults, that couldn't hack it now ring as universal truths.
Are you serious? First off, stop using the term "high class" for immoral people. They are well beneath the whole morale chain and the fact they managed to get to your-definition-of-high-class means that lots of dirty tactics were used which are well beyond what a normal human is capable of
I'm not sure why you're reacting indignantly. I'll reconsider being vulnerable and honest next time people ask a question.
When saurik sued Apple for antitrust reasons over Cydia[1] (which sadly ended up going nowhere), at some point a hearing was held where his lawyer accidentally read out something that was supposed to be protected/sealed. Apple's lawyer quickly interjected, but what saurik's attorney got to read before ended up in the official transcript[2], and it's straight up disgusting. From p.18:
"For example, something where -- they are talking about an iOS update that, quote, broke Cydia Impactor. Where they said, it feels too good to destroy someone's spirit. We did something else today that will kill him again with a little smiley emoticon. That, we can specifically talk about with respect to Cydia."
[1] For those not in the know, Cydia was the de-facto App Store for jailbroken iDevices, the prominent third-party marketplace before AltStore.
[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18730843/75/saurikit-ll...
If you think this is the only time they pull this kind of crap and then hide behind some privacy/design/UX bullshit argument, then I've got news for you...
Companies do want smart machiavellian people that independently act in the interests of the company (archetypical C-suite executives).
Google has had a number of ethical employees damage Google from the inside.
A company can be damaged by smart motivated machiavellian employees using their skills against their own company.
I've noticed competitive gaming training/selecting people to win-at-all-costs. Presumably the C-suite is benefiting from the influx of people that understand manipulation and complexity.
The ruling means this starts immediately it seems, as I cannot see a date listed anywhere.
If console makers have to do the same, consoles triple in price
They should go down the hall and ask the MacOS developers how they do it.
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.
A bad actor would have better luck telling a victim "just ship me your phone and login password for some emergency maintenance" than instructing a user through sideloading an app onto their smart fridge.
I, personally, would be happy if iOS had android-style side-loading where you have to enable developer mode, promise you're not an idiot, and go from there.
Even on apple's other operating system it is just downloading and running a program.
I remember when you could just stick a floppy or later cd into a system from anywhere and install and run a program.
it was called "install and run".
Companies can't ignore Apple if they want to sell in the US so they're forced into their ecosystem. It's not a preference like you imply.
I'll never understand how people defend blatantly anti-competitive behavior even when it hurts themselves.
https://mobilegamer.biz/apples-phil-schiller-refuses-to-fix-...
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
restricting software distribution on any platform under the guise of needing to be kept “secure” always seemed anticompetitive to me - that should apply regardless of Apple’s particular behavior with the courts in this example.
Closed ecosystems only benefit the corporations that control them.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...
scale and usage matters. Apple has > 50% market share in the USA (the place relevant to USA law). So, being a monopoly they get treated differently than a non-monopoly.
Even if they had less than 50%, people bank, invest, shop, talk, communicate, book hotels, flights, and effectively live their lives on smartphones. On XBox they play games and same small percent play music or watch movies there (I suspect most switch over to their Smart TV/Apple TV/.. for that).
the first sentence in the article is:
> A federal judge hammered Apple for violating an antitrust ruling related to App Store restrictions and took the extraordinary step of referring the matter to federal prosecutors for a criminal contempt investigation.
Seems like it's about antitrust law
The actual judgment: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25924283-epic-v-appl...
>After a bench trial, this Court entered judgment on September 10, 2021, finding thatcertain of Apple’s anti-steering rules violate the California Unfair Competition Law (“UCL”)under its unfair prong. ... As to the merits of Apple’s UCL violations, Apple did not directly challenge this Court’s application of the UCL’s tethering and balancing tests, instead arguing that(i) the UCL’s “safe harbor” doctrine insulates its liability because Epic failed to establish Sherman Act liability ... As to Apple’s “unfair” practices under the UCL, the Court explainedthat Epic could demonstrate unfairness under either a “tethering” test or a “balancing” test. Id. at1053. The “tethering” test required Epic to “show that Apple’s conduct (1) ‘threatens an incipientviolation of an antitrust law,’ (2) ‘violates the policy or spirit of one of those laws because itseffects are comparable to or the same as a violation of the law,’ or (3) ‘otherwise significantlythreatens or harms competition.’” Id. at 1052 (quoting Cel-Tech Commc’ns, Inc. v. Los AngelesCellular Tel. Co., 973 P.2d 527, 544 (Cal. 1999)). While the Court held that Epic’s claims basedon app distribution and in-app payment processing restrictions failed to state a claim of unfairpractices, the Court held that Apple’s anti-steering provisions were severable and constitutedunfair practices under the UCL
I'm not sure that the scale or usage really matters.
our anti-trust laws are not about being a monopoly or the size of your business: they are about abusing market dominance (where up or downstream has no choice) with unfair business practices.
a monopoly that charges fair prices and does not abuse suppliers and customers will not encounter any legal difficulty
Unless your name is T. Cook, you lack the authority to make that statement conclusively. The judge claims that Apple is guilty of perjury, and never corrected the executive that made misleading statements. If that testimony was fabricated, then there is every reason to believe Apple is obstructing information that could benefit the prosecution. There is no other feasible alibi in this scenario besides their lawyers all calling in sick. It's one thing to make a mistake, it's another thing to insist it's truth.
Let's not forget that Apple was headed down this same road with the DOJ, too. They are being investigated for a pattern of behavior that is not new, meaning they very well could be guilty of monopoly abuse right this very second. Saying "because it's not" is like telling Lance Ito to drop the OJ charges. Apple is not guilty until proven innocent; but claiming their innocence in certainty is a base lie. You do not actually know, either.
If you really ask: xbox is pretty much the same as an x86-64 PC, running Windows (and having AMD GPU). It just bit more sealed.
We also would have more Switch competition in the ARM gaming space instead of x64 handhelds and Android windows emulation if these walled gardens didn’t exist.
iPhones are sold at a _premium_.
If iPhones were sold at-cost to consumers, then Apple would have been right to ask developers to pay 30% fees.
And since all the console manufacturers are selling the hardware at loss or with low margins, they can argue that it's just how the market works (free razors but expensive razor blades).
Source?
I can't find anything that backs that up.
Are you pushing back on the word "majority" or on the concept that many people use their phones for nearly everything they used to use their computers for but that next to no one does the same with an Xbox?
That link though doesn't say that. It simply shows global ownership of smartphones is higher than computers which is rather different altogether.
And then you immediately state a way they should be treated differently (worse).
> Apple employees attempted to mislead the Court by testifying that the decision to impose a commission was grounded in AG’s report. The testimony of Mr. Roman, Vice President of Finance, was replete with misdirection and outright lies. He even went so far as to testify that Apple did not look at comparables to estimate the costs of alternative payment solutions that developers would need to procure to facilitate linked-out purchases.
> The Court finds that Apple did consider the external costs developers faced when utilizing alternative payment solutions for linked out transactions, which conveniently exceeded the 3% discount Apple ultimately decided to provide by a safe margin. Apple did not rely on a substantiated bottoms-up analysis during its months-long assessment of whether to impose a commission, seemingly justifying its decision after the fact with the AG’s report.
> Mr. Roman did not stop there, however. He also testified that up until January 16, 2024, Apple had no idea what fee it would impose on linked-out purchases […] Another lie under oath: contemporaneous business documents reveal that on the contrary, the main components of Apple’s plan, including the 27% commission, were determined in July 2023.
> Neither Apple, nor its counsel, corrected the, now obvious, lies. They did not seek to withdraw the testimony or to have it stricken (although Apple did request that the Court strike other testimony). Thus, Apple will be held to have adopted the lies and misrepresentations to this Court.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/05/01/a-senior-apple-exec-could-be-...
That's big. You really have to piss off a judge for them to refer a case for criminal investigation.
Apple Pay on websites works flawlessly and is great for impulse purchases. Its the same as the inapp experience.
I think this user experience will be fine.
There's a point where companies get "too big to fail"/"too big to jail" and have outsize effect on the country (especially if the country is stupid enough to pass a Citizens United law that explicitly allows them to do this). Anti-trust laws are the main way that the government tries to prevent this, and haven't really been used since Reaganomics decided that big == efficient. Until recently.
Passing a law that companies cannot exceed a certain size (market cap as a percentage of GDP, I guess?) would probably be a simpler way of achieving this. Though, obviously, the accounting profession would roll up its collective sleeves and declare "challenge accepted".
I just wonder what are the next excuses going to be?
We just released Crosspay, a cross-platform in-app subscriptions SDK for iOS, Android, macOS, Linux, Windows, and Web apps, enabling users to purchase subscriptions once, and use anywhere. As this ruling becomes effective, we will also enable users to choose their payment method on any platform, instead of being tied to Apple App Store.
However, apps that charge $1 or less per transaction will continue to pay over 30% in fees (e.g. Stripe charges 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction)
See more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43714552
Apple products are status products. Especially in the USA.
No one will care.