The apparent information gathering and brutal review process is unbelievable here. If I'm understanding this correctly, the requirement is that eg Epic Game Store must register and upload every single APK for every app they offer, and cannot offer it in their store until Google approves it, which may take a week or more - including every time the app updates.
Meanwhile they get full competitive insight into which apps are being added to Epics store, their download rates apparently, and they even get the APKs to boot, potentially making it easier for those app devs to onboard if they like, and can pressure them to do so by dragging their feet on that review process.
> Provide direct, publicly accessible customer support to end users through readily accessible communication channels.
This is an interesting requirement. I want to see someone provide the same level of support that Google does to see if it draws a ban.
their Play store review practices are such a joke. Apps review is a completely obscure process, no clear way to see that the app is in review state, if they reject - amount of information why it was rejected is minimal and you have to second-guess; appealing is not trivial; most of the reviews are done by AI which gets triggered in totally random places from time to time (e.g., in my case, some pictures which looked fine for kids for years and went through many previous reviewed, suddenly seem too violent).
I have healthcare apps. The review process for me consists of some reviewer deciding what set of healthcare features I should have picked from their list and rejecting on that basis. But subsequent reviewers have different opinions. In one app version release I got rejected 5 times for picking the wrong set of healthcare features as either the reviewer changed their mind or I got different reviewers. The app has been on Google play for 13 years.
I'm not subscribed to too many Youtubers. But it's insane that I still need 2 digits to count how many of those creators tried to work for over a week to address some urgent issue brought upon by one of Google's automation tools. Then simply resorted to Twitter to get their fanbase to rile up YouTube for them.
absolutely, i get this. i assume it's going to be a relatively small subset that go open in order to jump to an open platform. i'm not super familiar with the f-droid publishing ecosystem (or mobile publishing at all, admittedly).
i do wonder if there's regardless going to be some kind of (perhaps overwhelming) inundation.
The fact that this is being introduced after the whole Epic/Apple thing clearly shows that the penalties in that case were not nearly severe enough and the standards set were not nearly stringent enough. The mere attempt to engage in policies like this should result in fines in the hundreds of billions.
The cheaper and more effective way is tk tbeeaten to jail any key decision nakers. Remove the freedoms they enjoy and abise and suddenly they start falling in line quickly.
It should be partial government ownership. That way the true 'company' the owners feel the penalty in the form of stock dilution. Plus no one wants the government on the inside and the pains that will come with that. And repeat offenders end up owned by the government.
I’d also point out in the same observation that they knew better than to try this in Europe and that their strategy of trying to hold large tech companies accountable seems to be working (with the minor caveat that it’s now official US defence policy to try and break up the European Union and US trade policy is extremely focused on the idea that nobody is ever allowed to fine a US company for breaking the law)
I am morbidly curious about how far the attempt to destroy the USA will be allowed to proceed before even the Republican party has decided that it is probably enough. So far they have exceeded my wildest (and worst) expectations.
Unfortunately I can't get myself and those I care about off this planet (no, thank you, Elon) and we all will most likely lose a lot, possibly life and limb on account of this.
I don't know what the 'plan' is anymore other than that it seems to entail destabilization and destruction of the most powerful nation on the earth into a bit player making this every two bit dictator's wet dream.
There is no way this ends well if it is not arrested.
Yes, but then we have the blanket tarriffs. Which it seems even the most diehard are coming around to say was really, really stupid. Who's genuinely making a profit off this decision?
That definitely tells me there's ego at play here more than anything else. Even money.
That's the unheard of part of this year. Even the most blatantly corrupt politicians know not to actively throw money into a furnace.
No, project 2025 is very much about centralizing federal power, securing and further entrenching Republican partisan power, and dismantling and/or restructuring federal institutions that are perceived as being particularly useful in implementing priorities the Right does not share so thar even should the attempt to enteench Republican institutional advantage not secure a permanent majority, the federal government will have been selectively institutionally crippled so that gearing up to do things Republicans would prefer not be done will take longer than it takes to bring Republicans back into power to stop it.
Its very much about centralizing power while very carefully restructuring capacities, not decentralizing power.
Are you sure about that? I feel like they want more feudalism with a king. Aka states more independent, with a king in Washington. They even say that they want to get more rules be decided by the state...
Maybe the other party should do the other thing then? Actually decentralize things and reduce federal power in ways that stick between administrations. Then the next Trump wouldn't have the power to do things like this, and meanwhile California and other states could be setting their own emissions standards or imposing network neutrality or antitrust rules etc. without federal interference.
No, I think the better idea is, if the Democrats get power, pack the union, remove the pardon power, and basically send everyone associated with either Trump administration to jail for life (including all House/Senate members who voted against impeachment). It might be necessary to execute some for treason. I don't see any way back to sanity without a Nuremberg-style process in which "conservatism" as we know it is gouged out of the political arena.
This is the exact attitude that got Trump back in office. Keep everything hyper-partisan and every election is flipping a coin to see who got 1% more votes this time, with everyone feeling like if they lose the other side is going to damage them on purpose because that's literally what they're saying they want to do.
Instead you need to get some adults back in the room and start doing things like prosecuting government officials for corruption regardless of which party they're in, passing the laws that lower the cost of living even over the opposition of the people getting paid the higher costs, and actually enforcing antitrust laws instead of both parties using them as a cudgel to get tech and media corporations to bend the knee politically in exchange for not enforcing them.
It would be great to do that, but we can't do that while the government has a gun pointed at its head. There's no room for doing anything substantive when someone else can just get in and destroy everything. Thinking that this is just "hyper-partisan" is the kind of both-sides-ism that's a big contributor to the mess we're in.
> There's no room for doing anything substantive when someone else can just get in and destroy everything.
So then:
> Maybe the other party should do the other thing then? Actually decentralize things and reduce federal power in ways that stick between administrations. Then the next Trump wouldn't have the power to do things like this, and meanwhile California and other states could be setting their own emissions standards or imposing network neutrality or antitrust rules etc. without federal interference.
No, because we do need the federal government to do stuff. We just need it to mostly do the opposite of everything that it's doing. We don't need to reduce federal power, we just need to reduce the overall power to do bad things, by bringing a sledgehammer down on the factions that want to do those things.
> We don't need to reduce federal power, we just need to reduce the overall power to do bad things
If you define the bad things they're not allowed to do narrowly then they'll trivially avoid the restrictions while still doing bad things. What works better is to define the good things they are allowed to do. But then the good things have to be defined narrowly, because a broad definition makes it easy to get bad things into the tent.
So a proposal can either be to prohibit some bad things on paper while not really doing it in practice, or it can be to permit them to do only the things that have to be done federally for some specific reason and define them narrowly enough that it doesn't just let them do whatever they want. Those are the only real options.
>Keep everything hyper-partisan and every election is flipping a coin to see who got 1% more votes this time
No, we simply realize that 20 years of compromise for a party blatantly breaking the rules is not working. You can call it "flipping the coin" if you want, but in my eyes we've been trying to continue a game of chess after dozens of illegal moves.
Maybe continuing to play the game as if nothing happened isn't the solution this time.
That's the thing Republicans say to justify what they're currently doing.
Here's the second clause of the 18th amendment (prohibition of alcohol), ratified in 1919 and repealed by the 21st:
> The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
In other words, in 1919 it was generally understood that the federal government didn't have the power to so much as prohibit alcohol, and they needed a constitutional amendment to grant that power (without withdrawing it from the states through preemption).
Most of what the federal government currently does was intended to be unconstitutional, until FDR threatened to pack the Supreme Court if they didn't knuckle under and approve his unconstitutional acts, and then they did. Likewise Roe v. Wade, initiated by the Court itself in a year the left held the majority and then kept that way for half a century even though its logic was muddled and inconsistent with those same opinions they themselves wanted that said the government does have the power to regulate healthcare providers. Likewise gun control, which the constitution not only didn't give the federal government the power to do, it explicitly constrained them from it.
You can think that any of these things would be good policy, but without breaking the rules to enact them you'd need to amend the constitution. So never mind 20 years, this has been going on for a lot longer than that.
But if you abandon the rules because it's expedient, and then they abandon the rules because you did, and then you abandon even more of the rules because they did, we all end up in a place nobody likes.
All such arguments about the constitution and federal power are just a waste of time. The constitution is so riddled with flaws that there's little point in attempting to save the good parts. We absolutely should throw out a large proportion of the "rules" in the constitution. The idea that some policies are okay for state governments to do but not okay for the federal government to do also makes no real sense. It's just an arbitrary jurisdictional distraction from the substantive content of policies. Talking about "breaking the rules" in this context is like there's a basketball game where fans, coaches, and players are all kicking each other in the nuts and you're worried about calling double dribble.
> The idea that some policies are okay for state governments to do but not okay for the federal government to do also makes no real sense.
There are many issues on which not everyone agrees what should be done. If the federal government does them, the same solution is forced on everyone even if a large plurality of people would prefer something else and those people constitute the majority of various states, so it makes more sense to let each state decide for themselves. There is nothing stopping them from all doing the same thing if there was consensus.
And when there isn't consensus, you get to see how each of the alternatives turn out when different states do different things:
But if the federal government is even allowed to do them then whichever faction has the federal majority imposes their will on everyone else and prevents that from happening.
> Talking about "breaking the rules" in this context
The post I responded to was the one that brought up "breaking the rules". My point is that you should follow the rules if you want to complain about others breaking them.
> My point is that you should follow the rules if you want to complain about others breaking them.
I would say the problem is people doing bad things, and the rules are disconnected from any substantive connection to what is good or bad, and from any essential connection to the idea that the people (not any apparatus of government) is the final arbiter of what should be done.
The problem with appealing to "the people" is that they don't all agree what's good or bad, and indeed will give different answers to what is substantively the same question depending on how it's framed or what mechanism is being used to measure their preferences.
You also need some rules to temper tyrannical majorities unless "51% of the vote means you get to oppress the minority" is your idea of a good time.
And a lot of these are in the nature of a Ulysses pact. When nobody wants anybody to censor them, and everybody knows that they won't always be in the majority, we can form a general consensus that we all agree not to censor the opposition when we're in the majority and in exchange they can't censor anyone when they're in the majority. For that to work you need an effective mechanism to constrain the majority or some fool is going to steer the ship into the rocks as soon as they hear the Siren song.
Then the broad consensus gets written into the constitution which in turn requires broad consensus to change. If nobody's playing dirty.
Whereas if everybody's playing dirty then pretty clearly the checks and balances aren't working and we need some better ones.
This is the exact attitude that got us into this mess. Republicans can talk crazy and act crazy, knowing that the other side will be forced to be the adults in the room, clean up the mess, and get rejected by the voters soon after because no one likes the strict parent.
People would like them if they did the things people actually want. People want to be able to own a home and afford healthcare.
But to do that you have to step on the toes of the banks and the National Association of Realtors and the trades unions on housing costs and the healthcare companies and the AMA on healthcare costs. Which the rest of the public wants you to do, but that's not how you get paid off, so it's not what they do.
Instead they talk a big game but when it comes time to do it, they offer up economic sophism like rent control or medical price controls that not only don't solve the problems but generally make them worse. And then people don't like them because they suck.
Based on my read of "Amusing Ourselves to Death", length and complexity of political speeches by presidents over time, and the current administration: What makes you think American voters want to put adults back in the room?
I mean I'm sympathetic; I fully support having adults back in the White House, even from above the 49th parallel. It does not, however, seem realistic.
> What makes you think American voters want to put adults back in the room?
People seem to make this mistake a lot.
People want adults back in the room because that's how they get the results they want. Now, are they currently doing the things that will cause that to happen? Obviously not. But "they" is us. There is no external "them" to delegate this to and then blame when it goes wrong. Things get done when someone does them. If you want it done then the someone is you.
That doesn't mean you can solve the entire problem yourself, but it also doesn't mean you can't make a contribution. The absence of trying is the presence of failure.
Now let's consider how we've gotten screwed in the past. The primary recent mechanism is that nobody likes how things are going, but half the country is convinced that the problem is the other half and vice versa. And then they direct their efforts into having their party "win" even though their party sucks because both parties suck. Which absorbs all the inclination people have to try to fix things and throws it into a black hole as everyone's efforts do nothing more than cancel out the efforts of their countrymen on the other team.
If you're being divided into teams then you're playing someone else's game. That makes people think the goal should be to win the game. But the goal should be to change the rules so that people with common interests aren't stuck on opposing teams.
I think the theory is something like 'ok, the bucket will be smaller but we're the same so effectively we will grow' where 'we' is the wealthy assholes that power this movement.
The fact that a couple of million (billion?) people could die as a result of their landgrab is none of their concern. The billionaire class appears to be divorced from reality to a very dangerous degree, and there are enough useful idiots willing to hand them their support to make this a very dangerous time. I don't think we've ever been closer to potentially losing it all than we are right now.
You're looking at 'divide and conquer' on a scale that we have never seen before and there are enough dominoes falling already that I don't even know if it still can be arrested.
A disregard for other people seems to be a prerequisite to becoming that wealthy for me. Hope i'm wrong, guess the good ones don't make the news. Surely they must exist
I think if you cared even a little bit about other people, you'd realize that after say, ten million, your life is gonna be pretty damn sweet already and you'd try to help other people with your money instead of buying yachts.
To become a billionaire requires sociopathic disregard for the suffering of others and a pathological need for more.
If you don't realize it by two you never will. Really, this is completely out of proportion by now, Marie Antoinette was a pauper by the standards these people live by.
With single family homes in some part of the world costing two by themselves, I think we can give it a little bit more leeway, especially if you're planning to retire and support your kids through college.
Sure, but you could still realize it, even if you are still amassing more money. Nothing stops people from doing so at lower points than 10 million and my point was that if you don't realize it by the time 2 million rolls around you probably never will.
> I think if you cared even a little bit about other people, you'd realize that after say, ten million, your life is gonna be pretty damn sweet already and you'd try to help other people with your money instead of buying yachts.
In general their money isn't money, it's stock. The thing it buys them is being the CEO of their company instead of letting Wall St pick someone even worse.
The real problem is that companies are now so large that you'd have to be a multi-billionaire to have a controlling interest.
Even muli-billionaires often don't have a direct controlling interest. Sometimes have special shares that give them 10x votes like Larry and Sergey. Bezos, Zuck, and Musk have significant direct amounts of their companies.
The list almost always reads the same on every major corporation. Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street, ect... Numbers may be slightly out of date in some cases. If the Institutionals all vote together or collectively, almost none of the wealthy have "controlling amounts". (wikipedia listings)
- NVIDIA: The Vanguard Group(8.280%), BlackRock(5.623%), Fidelity Investments(5.161%), State Street Corporation(3.711%), *Jensen Huang(3.507%)*, Geode Capital Management(2.024%), T. Rowe Price(2.013%), JPMorgan Chase(1.417%)
- Apple: Vanguard Group Inc(9.47%), Blackrock Inc.(7.76%), State Street Corporation(4.04%), JPMORGAN CHASE & CO(3.20%), Geode Capital Management, LLC(2.41%), FMR, LLC(2.05%)
- Microsoft: The Vanguard Group(8.9%), BlackRock(5.6%), State Street Corporation(4.0%), *Steve Ballmer(4.0%),* Fidelity Investments(2.9%), Geode Capital Management(2.1%), T. Rowe Price International(1.9%) (Ballmer is a notable exception)
- Alphabet: The Vanguard Group(7.25%), BlackRock(6.27%), State Street Corporation(3.36%), *Sergey Brin(3.0%)*, *Larry Page(3.0%)*, Fidelity Investments(2.07%), Geode Capital Management(1.76%), T. Rowe Price(1.73%) (Sergey and Larry each get 10x votes)
- Amazon: (Notable exception to this trend) *Jeff Bezos(9.04%)*, The Vanguard Group(7.96%), BlackRock(4.93%), State Street Corporation(3.5%), Fidelity Investments(3.22%), Geode Capital Management(2.03%), JP Morgan Investment Management(1.81%), Eaton Vance(1.5%), T. Rowe Price(1.48%)
- Meta: (Another exception) *Mark Zuckerberg (13.5%)*, The Vanguard Group (8.8%), BlackRock (7.66%), Fidelity Investments (6.28%), State Street Corporation (3.97%), JPMorgan Chase (2.38%), Geode Capital Management (2.27%), T. Rowe Price (1.95%)
- Broadcom: The Vanguard Group(10.03%), BlackRock(7.63%), Capital World Investors(4.53%), Capital International Investors(4.04%), State Street Corporation(3.95%), Geode Capital Management(2.12%), Insiders[Various](2.04%)
- Tesla: *Elon Musk(12.9%)*, The Vanguard Group(7.2%), BlackRock(4.5%), State Street Corporation(3.4%), Geode Capital Management(1.7%), Capital Research & Management(1.3%)
Basically, it usually reads like "if Vanguard, Blackrock, and State Street agree on anything, you lose the vote." Alphabet being somewhat exception because of the 10x special votes. Everything listed has more than $1,400,000,000,000 share cost outstanding. Even $100,000,000,000 won't buy enough.
Notably, in-practice they probably usually just vote whatever one of the main founders, CEO's, ect... recommends unless there's some actual major issue. Although that's so far above my pay grade, no idea what actually goes on.
Funnily, the next one on the list is JPMorgan and they're controlled by ... Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street... Who in turn control major portions of NVIDIA, Apple, Amazon, Meta... It's all rather incestuous and circular.
And funnier, they all own each other.
Vanguard itself is weird, like a mutual fund, and owned by its funds, then in turned owned by shareholders. However, *those* owners, are almost entire large institutional also. Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, UBS Group, JPMorgan Chase, LPL Financial, Envestnet Asset Management, Ameriprise Financial, TIAA Trust, Dimensional Fund Advisors, Beacon Capital Management, Betterment, Wealthfront Advisers, and Cove Street Capital
Blackrock is pretty the same circular ownership: The Vanguard Group(9.08%), BlackRock Inc(7.02%), State Street Corporation(4.95%), Temasek Holdings Ltd(4.28%), Bank of America Corp(4.28%), Capital Research Global Investors(3.78%), Morgan Stanley(3.62%), Charles Schwab Corporation(3.14%), Capital World Investors(2.68%), Geode Capital Management(2.32%)
State Street is ... of course, the same ownership: Vanguard Group Inc(13.23%), Blackrock Inc(8.71%), JPMorgan Chase(6.06%), State Street Corporation(4.83%), FMR, LLC(4.05%), Invesco Ltd(3.00%), Harris Associates L.P(2.73%), Geode Capital Management, LLC(2.66%), Dodge & Cox Inc(2.43%), Morgan Stanley(1.71%)
> Funnily, the next one on the list is JPMorgan and they're controlled by ... Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street... Who in turn control major portions of NVIDIA, Apple, Amazon, Meta... It's all rather incestuous and circular.
It's almost like there could be a book about this from a hundred years ago:
Precisely. These cats fancy themselves the kings of the new world order, and if nobody stops them they'll pull it off too.
But their plan appears to be quite messy and harder to execute on than they thought so all we have so far is a lot of destruction with not much to show for it. Even the White House looks like a demolition site and not a peep about it.
I believe that if any past president had so much as suggested this rather than executed on it they'd have been impeached instantly.
Another reason they could be attacking NATO allies on this front is that the UK has been acting against Bully XL dogs. They’re scared that these dog regulations will spread and so Trump must be surely considering exiting NATO over this.
The US’ current desire to break up the EU is not because of EU regulations, it’s because the US president is a convicted felon who has been a Russian mob asset promoting Putin’s talking points for decades.
He's also a by-the-dictionary-definition fascist authoritarian including the part where corporations are untouchable and above the law, so long as they pay to play with his new mafia government modeled directly on Russia.
> The following fees apply when a user completes [...] any app installs within 24 hours of following an external content link
So does this mean a malicious competitor or motivated disgruntled user could fraudulently cause millions of app installs? With the scale smartphone activity fraud farms are at these days, paying a few thousand dollars on such a service to cause a developer to spend a few million dollars on worthless installs (or a lot of resources arguing with Google) seems like a worthwhile endeavour for the motivated.
If linking to external content is not viable, developers will not continue linking to external content. If developers stop linking to external content Google stops making money. It's not an infinite money glitch if Google didn't go after fraud, it hurts the profit they can make from it.
I got my AdSense account disabled because "fraudulent click activity" or how they worded it (someone clicked my ads frequently, I assume?). Google then kept all the my hard earned 16++ EUR or so.
I’m very curious how Tim Sweeney will react to this. This is very much not the victory lap he was hoping to take (nor are the Apple rulings)
1. I think uptake of third party stores is quite low and there’s a strong incentive to stay available on the primary store
2. The App Store model has very much been that the paid apps are subsidizing the free ones. So it’s somewhat fair to charge for using the infrastructure, if you’re not contributing into the pot (and are siphoning away from it)
3. Those per install costs are brutal. I was thinking they’d do a dollar , but at almost $4, they’re outside what most people would spend. This is a strong way to keep F2P games from instituting external payment processing.
Developers pay Google to access its services. Infrastructure costs account for less than 1% of the profit margin and are practically negligible. Google acts like a pimp, obsessed with squeezing profit above all else.
If Google allowed other App stores on Android then maybe Amazon could make one. Or maybe they could add a setting to allow users to install their own APKs somehow.
It also involves around three or four "I know this could be dangerous" click-throughs. That is harder to get an audience of everyday, than settling for paying someone you are probably already paying.
The average person will not click through a security warning. And if they do, they don't know what they're expected to do on that settings page. They are trained _not_ to bypass security.
> I’m very curious how Tim Sweeney will react to this.
“Epic has indicated that it opposes the service fees that Google announced it may implement in the future and that Epic will challenge these fees if they come into effect.”
I’m sure they’ll oppose it but I’m not sure what footing they’d have if this doesn’t fall under googles collusion case, seeing as it’s for everyone in the same boat.
The term "paying users" referring to users that are paying the app developer as opposed to those who play for free. And with the money they earn from those users they are able to subsidize the cost of acquiring more users which hopefully acquires another paying user to continue the cycle.
People keep making the comparison between the Apple App Store or the Google Play store and the XBox store or the Fortnite store.
But these are likely irrelevant comparisons.
For one thing, the degree of monopolization simply doesn’t exist. Gaming is a market. There are many gaming platforms that are extremely popular. Xbox, PS, Nintendo, Steam, and then just open distribution on PCs which essentially means there is no lock in in this industry. And unlike the “web app” comparison folks try to make, open distribution can easily leverage the same capabilities as the store distributed games can (and in fact, they are more capable than games from some stores, like the Windows store).
But more importantly, gaming isn’t an essential part of life, which is basically what smartphones, dominated entirely by iOS/Android, have become at this point.
People depend on these platforms. There are businesses you cannot interact with if not through your phone. There are public transportation systems that are almost unusable.
And finally, maybe this is just me, but I think the idea that general purpose computing is the same as playing video games just strikes me as wrong. General purpose computing, which is what phones are, are basic infrastructure for modern life. They should be treated differently and we shoudoht allow 2 companies to monopolize and/or embargo them like Apple/Google are trying.
It's really too bad that essential public services can't be hosted on the web so that you could use them on any platform - smartphone, laptop, tablet, whatever - and would have an alternative to Apple and Google's game stores. Basic apps don't need fancy 3D graphics (and even if they did we have webGL etc.)
There is no single organisation that has done more to push the mobile web forward than Apple. Seriously, name one.
Nobody gave a shit about the mobile web until Apple launched the iPhone, where one of its main selling points was a “desktop-class web browser”, where Steve Jobs told announced that if they wanted to run apps on the iPhone, they should be web apps.
Then suddenly everybody started demanding “iPhone-compatible websites” overnight. Nobody was asking for “mobile websites”, which until that point were shitty WAP/WML things, or – in the best case – cut back m.example.com microsites. People wanted “iPhone-compatible websites”.
And then all the other phone vendors used Apple’s open-source WebKit code (open-source thanks to KDE, useful on mobile thanks to Apple) to release their own browsers, and the mobile web took off like a rocket because suddenly it was useful because people could use real websites.
And let’s not forget Steve Jobs telling people to avoid Flash and use open web standards instead.
There is a very clear before/after with the mobile web, and it’s the launch of the iPhone and all the work Apple put into making WebKit work well on mobile that provided that watershed moment.
Apple were championing the web in the time period you claim they were “intentionally undermining and artificially crippling it”.
Now, you may be underwhelmed by their performance in more recent years, but it’s simply factually untrue that they have had a 20 year campaign to undermine the web.
It seems like the better way to dispose of these comparisons is to just to treat them the same and require Xbox etc. to allow alternative stores too. Would thousands be killed if that were required? Simply don't allow devices to exclude competing distribution systems, whatsoever.
I'm a bit surprised that the DMA etc. didn't end up applying to Xbox, and how Microsoft has tried to make implausible arguments about how iPhone should be open but Xbox should be closed.
The killer app for jailbreaking game systems is and has always been running unlicensed games, a scenario which Apple, Xbox, and Nintendo vigorously object to. It's also why Sony killed Linux on PS3. On the other hand, you can run unlicensed games on Android and it hasn't killed Google Play.
> For one thing, the degree of monopolization simply doesn’t exist. Gaming is a market. There are many gaming platforms that are extremely popular. Xbox, PS, Nintendo, Steam, and then just open
Except there isn’t multiple stores on Xbox or PlayStation or Switch. Which is directly comparable to the iOS lock ins that Epic was fighting against.
> But more importantly, gaming isn’t an essential part of life, which is basically what smartphones, dominated entirely by iOS/Android, have become at this point.
True but also irrelevant. Monopoly laws don’t make those distinctions.
> And finally, maybe this is just me, but I think the idea that general purpose computing is the same as playing video games just strikes me as wrong.
Again, monopoly laws don’t make any distinction here. However to answer your direct point, some consoles are marketed as more general purpose devices for taxation reasons. All consoles support YouTube, most have other streaming services from Netflix to Spotify. They all come with a fully capable web browser. Even their hardware has been generic for the last few generations of consoles. So they are general purpose devices in all metrics aside from the variety of apps available. And you could argue the reason for this is literally because of their “App Store” lock ins. So your argument here is evidence against the point you’re trying to make.
> General purpose computing, which is what phones are, are basic infrastructure for modern life.
That’s not the definition of a “general purpose computing device” and I reject the idea that iOS and Android are equivalent to water, roads and electricity.
I do agree that smartphones are a MASSIVELY useful asset, but you don’t actually need a smartphone for modern life. Plenty of older people still manage just fine without iOS nor Android. They’ll use a laptop or PC to access the same services via a web browser.
Furthermore, the companies who are fighting iOS lock ins are not critical services. Epic, for example, is a gaming company. They don’t provide health or banking services. You can’t do your taxes in Fortnight. You don’t book your car in for a service via an app built in Unreal Engine. Epic build games not essential infrastructure.
This analysis is correct. Epic's business incentive has always been lowering platform fees paid to Apple and Google for Fortnite compared to what they are paying Nintendo and Sony for Fortnite.
There's nothing criminal or arguably even morally wrong about that. Nintendo and Sony do not make 10% of the hardware margins that Apple does. They are not analogous businesses.
> There's nothing criminal or arguably even morally wrong about that.
Morality is irrelevant and criminality is for the legal system to decide, not you.
> Nintendo and Sony do not make 10% of the hardware margins that Apple does.
Which, again, is completely irrelevant.
> They are not analogous businesses.
Only because you’ve decided they’re not. And your arguments have zero citations to any legal precedence. Yet we do have legal precedence of lock ins on other platforms and their related app stores.
So the problem we have is the legal precedence actually works against Nintendo et al and now it’s up to the courts to decide if those prior judgements are relevant to Nintendo and its ilk too.
Thus far all you and your likeminded peers have proven is that you have a personal opinion. But you’ve provided precisely zero legal evidence to back up your opinions. So why should we trust your opinion any more than the highly public legal precedence that was reached between Epic and Apple?
“but they’re different” isn’t a compelling legal argument for why they’re different. Regardless of how much you might wish it were.
I assume by hardware margins you are thinking of component and manufacturing cost. However, the largest cost that has to be amortized over the life of a hardware product is R&D cost, which is huge.
Even by the component and manufacturing cost metric, the Switch has always been profitable, though DRAM and flash storage costs are putting pressure on hardware margins at the moment. Still R&D is the largest cost that each company faces.
And the business you need to interact with through your phone and government services are not going through in app payments and giving Apple a cut. At most they are accepting Apple Pay and being charged standard credit card fees
Cry me a river for the Epics of the world selling loot boxes and other pay to win crap. It came out in the trial that 90% of App Store revenue is coming from games.
Neither Epic, Google or Apple are on the side of the angels
This comparison doesn't work at all. An APK for app A is compatible with Android devices of version X, regardless of the store it is sold on. A cosmetic for game B is not compatible with all games running on the same engine Y, for obvious reasons.
Asking Fortnite to accept other stores selling Fortnite-compatible cosmetics doesn't work either because Fortnite has not monopolized a trillion-dollar industry, meanwhile spending billions on lobbying to make daily life for the average citizen impossible without them, which the Google-Apple cartel has. Fortnite has also never gained market share by pursuing claims about being an open source platform or not being evil, again unlike Google. These differences.. make all the difference. Call me when my kids are forced to agree to Fortnite EULAs to participate in schooling all around the world.
> Unless all around the world is the usual "world === USA".
Not at all. US isn't even the leader on this. For example in many countries it's already much harder to do any kind of digital banking without a Google/Apple-approved phone than in the US.
In Europe as well, more and more places where it's completely the norm for schools and teachers to do all their communication through Facebook or Whatsapp. Sure those have web, but are arguably the worst of the three. Portugal nor most European countries are above this at all. If only they were. Look at all the national IDs rolled out, those too more and more mandatory Apple/Android 2FA.
Will Portuguese teachers never downgrade any students who do all their homework on e.g. OpenOffice and it doesn't look nice on the teacher's MS Office? Doubt it.
Most students in Portugal still deliver their work assigments in paper, and if they want a computer, parents buy one to have at home, usually shared by all that are going to school.
We have had national IDs since forever, with fingerprints, we don't go crazy about it like in some other countries, even though we suffered a dictorship with lots of human losses, colonial wars, and even though PIDE/DGS wasn't KGB or Stasi level, it also managed to impact our society.
I should know, I am part of the first generation to grow up in freedom, while hearing the grown up stories of how everything came to be.
So which non-Meta platforms do schools and teachers primarily use to communicate with parents and students? How well is the Apple/Google-less digital banking in Portugal holding up? I'm sure like you're saying things in Portugal are better than average for Europe, but it's not representative.
You're moving goalposts - my bigger point was about daily life becoming impossible without Google/Apple, and digital banking is one of the prime examples of this. On top of that Meta is the natural 3rd party in that group.
Considering Google Classrooms is used by a significant percentage of public schools, I have no idea why you think Portugal is special here.
Also, given the frequency of families having issues with the Cuco MDM used to lock out the Windows computers they handed to kids during COVID, and what kids do which such computers, I'm doubly unsure it was a smart idea to offer shitty Windows laptops vs. shitty Chromebooks.
Schools around the world give kids Chromebooks (or iPads) because they're harder to fuck and easier to unfuck. Windows still sucks at this, and no one came up with a coherent — locked down — Linux platform to achieve the same.
I am Portuguese, have family ties with teachers still into the active, I guess.
That kind of stuff is mostly US school system, schools in countries that go with USA into G7 meetings, or wealthy enough for that kind of stuff maybe.
Not every country has the pleasure to enjoy a school system swimming in money to offer computers to kids, in every single school.
Not even during COVID was every Portuguese family granted the pleasure to have a device offered to them, some lucky ones did, a large majority only saw them on the news, and as usual the burden was on the family to come up with a solution to all their kids attending the various school levels.
And lets not even go to such great stuff like Magalhães, e-escola, and who got to profit from it.
I'm writing from personal experience in a middle of the table public school, with a single IT guy helping out around 1000 pupils, who regularly get their computers locked with said MDM.
It's possible other school districts with a less diligent, but similarly overworked, IT guy just give up and don't even hand out the computers anymore, especially if they don't have enough of them, after being on their second or third kid.
Those are certainly above 6 grade, because I am aware of few schools, whose desktop computers, with luck get to a have a visit from some local computer store, on demand after lots back and forth with the regional ministerium office regarding how it gets paid.
None of them has hardly an IT guy, or girl on site, and as usual "em casa de ferreiro espeto de pau", acquaitances have been invited to have a look at their computers.
The IT guy is the TIC professor, who does it in excess of work. The guy is the son of the former TIC professor. And of course, I was roped in to help for my kids’ classes.
And yes, it includes kids from at least 2nd grade. My COVID kids got their laptop on 1st grade, but that's no longer the case.
>the degree of monopolization simply doesn’t exist
Yes, it does. Your only options are like Fornite, Roblox, or Minecraft.
Saying make your own game, is like saying make your own phone. There is tremendous value in the gigantic userbases these platforms have. This value is why platform holders can charge for access to them.
Wow. I guess Steam must be bankrupt and surviving off just four games. And I guess Epic and Steam just don't compete. And itch and GoG are just irrelevant with no market impact.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but gaming is not "choose between these two" level of monopilisation. And indies just won game of the year awards! Things are just not monopolised.
Nothing locks you into a specific phone. I have both a primary Android and iOS phone that I use.
>are so many other games out there to choose from.
But how many can you make a business on top of that can pay competitively? It's like how there are a ton of operating systems to choose from, yet only a few that are viable to build upon.
Games are there to be played. Not being able to build a business on top of a game does not make it irrelevant.
f you want to start a business making games then you really should consider using a game engine rather than something like Roblox because Roblox takes a massive cut (way more than 30%) when looking at what users pay vs. what you cash out. I don't
This whole conversation is about how there is very few options for games where it is financially viable to build content for them as a third party. I am not claiming that other games are not fun, you just can't make a successful business on top of them.
Yes, it's possible to make your own game, but it's also possible to make your own app store. There is value in being able to build on top of successful platforms. These existing app stores can demand a bigger cut than doing things yourself because they bring a lot of value and paying customers to the table.
> This whole conversation is about how there is very few options for games where it is financially viable to build content for them as a third party.
Because games are not platforms. Roblox is a platform - games ("experiences") are all UGC. Fortnite is a game that Epic is turning into a platform. Not sure what Minecraft is doing but it doesn't seem anywhere near as financially viable for creators pas Roblox.
It's an interesting thing to think about because Roblox does not exactly follow the App Store review guidelines. Code and assets are downloaded onto your device to run the games. If you could add them to your home screen then it wouldn't be so far off from a game-specific app store.
Stardew Valley. Runs on everything, not just "viable" OSs, made by a single person, and easily competes with an entire genre of gaming to pay the author.
The upper bound of building a business on top of Stardew Valley appears to be https://www.patreon.com/pathoschild which makes under $400 per month after Patreon's cut. That's not enough to work as a single person full time let alone hiring a team.
A $400/mo Patreon does not exactly outweigh somewhere between 18-35 million sales on a single one of the platforms it supports. I would not call that the "upper bound".
That 18-35 million goes to the game's developer and probably not even a single penny goes to those building a business off of designing content on top of the game. That figure is irrelevant.
Taking Fortnite as an example the relevant figure would be that creators on Fortnite can make over $10 million per year. Bringing up that Epic made a few billion dollars is irrelevant to what this conversation is about, which is games where it is financially viable to build content for them.
> which is games where it is financially viable to build content for them.
If that was your interpretation, then it would have been better to have mentioned it anywhere upthread. What we have, so far, is people talking about the gaming industry, and you calling it a monopoly. Nowhere before do we have a mention of third-party developers.
I got tripped up because the parent comment used the term "Fortnite store" when I think they meant "Epic Games Store", so I didn't mention the monopolization that I was talking about was in game monetization upon an existing game.
I feel like many commenters are misunderstanding what this is about. This is about apps that are distributed via Google Play. It's an exception to the long-standing rules that a) all monetary transactions for non-physical items must use IAPs, and b) a Google Play distributed app can't install or ask the user to install something from outside of Google Play.
As far as I can tell, none of this applies to apps installed from elsewhere, be that F-Droid, other stores like RuStore, or just a downloaded apk. As long as the alternative store itself wasn't installed from Google Play that is, but none of them work like that anyway.
I'm not defending Google of course. Their entitlement is still insane.
Since Google is making sure to use all its monopolistic power for keeping Google Play the "default" app store for 99% of users, I fail to see this distinction as particularly relevant. From an anticompetitiveness perspective, that is.
A common pattern in social networks with a political identity, is that bait news stories are less scrutinized for truthfulness and more baited into raging. E.g:
Political group:Right
Social media: twitter
Headline: "the police detained a 15 yo for posting on tiktok"
Reality: "15yo called for violence on a specific event and group of people"
Pol group: left
Social media: bluesky
Headline: "young mother of 2 gets detained by ICE for speaking in spanish"
Reality: "DUI, didn't speak english, translator was used, prior records"
Reminds me of how phishing attempts play to our political identities as well, recently there was a phishing attempt were the platform said that during pride month all uploaded content would have the pride flag added or something like that.
The common pattern is that some things are ridiculous, but people want to believe that "the enemy" is as ridiculous, it's an opportunity to be enraged and vindicated that the injustice is too obvious to hold on its own. That it will all come crumbling down, or at least that any insecurities in our political positioning are reduced, and our position becomes clearer and our certainty increased.
In our case, it seems to be something very specific about external links from the play store. I can't be sure but it seems as if this rule relates to apps distributed through the google play store that in turn can download other apps. This provides an alternative agreement to the rev share model, where app stores can pay per install rather than on all future revenue.
Let's try to understand news and be on the same page before analyzing implications.
Hopefully this gets slapped down hard just like Apple recently did. Both Apple and Google want to continue business as usual despite the court rulings.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to here. Google are the file distributor for content from their store.
These rules aren’t for linking out from the store to a third party site, but rather for installing an app from the store and then linking out to a third party payment.
Choosing a price based off the cost is just one pricing strategy. Another is to do it based off the value it offers a customer along with the price competitors are charging.
I honestly don't understand the court rulings regarding all of this. Like, "you need to allow someone to install your software for free" is easy to understand. And "you can ban software that doesn't pay you your chosen cut" is also straightforward (even though I'm a dirty OS Commie that wants that shit for free). Both of those follow clear-cut legal principles based in antitrust and intellectual property law (respectively).
But it seems to me that the court is trying to enforce some kind of middle ground, which doesn't make sense. There's no legal principle one can use to curtail the power of an IP holder aside from mandating it be given away for free. Indeed, the whole idea of IP law is that the true value of the underlying property can only be realized if the property owner has the power of the state to force others to negotiate for it. Apple was told "you can charge for your IP" and said "well all our fee is actually licensing, except for the 3% we pay per transaction". The courts rejected this, so... I mean, what does Apple do now? Keep whittling down the fee until the court finds it reasonable? That can't possibly be good faith compliance (as if Apple has ever complied in good faith lol).
> the whole idea of IP law is that the true value of the underlying property can only be realized if the property owner has the power of the state to force others to negotiate for it
You're describing property in general. Not just IP.
> Apple was told "you can charge for your IP"
It's a bit misleading to use quotes in this case, given you aren't quoting the court.
From just this page it's rather unclear what triggers this... if an fdroid app that does not use any Play libraries has a purchaseable thing on another site, is that in scope? Do they need to add Play libraries to track it, or be smacked? If yes, it'd certainly explain their "developer verification" effort, as it's a way to enforce rent extraction.
I’d also assume with many ad-supported apps they’re also leading source of ads (also on iOS)
Another point to consider,
Is they DO take fee from each device developer that includes Google App Services. So basically ALL devices with official Play Store sold by the manufacturer already pays a fee to include their store (but also that’s the only way to have official Gmail and other services users would expect when buying an android device)
> App download event: A fixed fee (subject to periodic adjustments) per install based on the app category of the linked external app being installed. The linked app category must be declared as part of transaction reporting.
> Games: $3.65
> Apps: $2.85
Isn't this dangerously similar to what Unity did with their Runtime Fee? You know, the thing that soured public opinion of them so bad that a lot of devs quit using it altogether? Or is this more of a Google holding everyone hostage situation?
Wasn't Apple just slapped down for exactly this in court, for the second time? They're really both going to fight this to the bitter end kicking and screaming like toddlers, aren't they.
They have a duopoly, so all app developers are extorted to use this if they want to make a living. (Or they use the duopoly-sanctioned payment methods and pay the extortion money there)
It's a partnership and there are more ways to make a living in this world than making apps for the Play Store and App Store. Extortion would be if people were forced to make Play Store apps. But if you don't like the terms you can find some other platform to work with or build your own to fill a gap in the market.
You aren't forced to add links to external content in your app. It was already prohibited, so it's not like you have to do extra work in removing them.
Making the process exhorbitantly difficult and expensive is obviously intended to make sure people choose Google's preferred path. It's a bog standard monopoly play.
Spotify hasn’t allowed in ap purchases since 2013, Netflix hasn’t either for years. Amazon cut some type of deal with Apple where Amazon Prime Movies can be purchased in app via your Amazon account.
Correct, but that means higher friction to pay/subscribe, which means lost conversions (customers) and higher cost of acquisition (of new customers). So they care intensely about bringing it down to 0% or allowing free linking out to the web.
That's clearly what's happening at the moment, the middle class gets squeezed more and more since covid and the B2C business became a hard game of low margins with very high numbers which you can only achieve with a very large company.
Google attempting to claim any percentage of revenue from an external transaction will never happen. I believe the current situation with the App Store is that Apple has been barred by US courts from attempting to charge a fee similar to this; though they still do in the EU. USG antitrust, especially in the current admin, hates Google, far more than Apple; this structure will never survive being challenged.
Charging a reasonable fee for the installation of an app can be, IMO, a fair and reasonably cost-correlative way for app store providers to be compensated for what few services they do provide application developers. That's within an order of magnitude of how much bandwidth would cost, if they were paying market cloud rates, and certainly there are other services rendered, like search indexing.
I would emphasize to the people at Google, however, that your customers bought the phone, which came with the operating system, and thus ethically the core technology your application developers depend on has already been paid for. In Google's case, this happens through Samsung/etc's Android licensing; a relationship which landed them on the wrong side of antitrust lawsuits in the US quicker than Apple's racket did. They dip further by charging developers a direct fee to publish on their stores ($100/year for Apple, $25/one time for Google). Attempting to triple-dip by "reflecting the value provided by Android and Play and support our continued investments across Android and Play" convinces exactly no one of your benign intent; not your investors, nor the US Government, nor consumers, nor developers. The only person who may be convinced that any of this makes any sense is some nameless VP somewhere in some nameless org at your mothership, who can pat themselves on the back and say "at least its legal's problem now". Its possible no one at all in this business unit remembers what the words "produce value" even mean, let alone have the remote understanding of what it takes to do so. Exactly everyone who has ever interacted with it know this; your CEO certainly knows this, given how much investment he's made into AI and not into the Play Store. Continuing to cause so many global legal problems, for such an unpromising, growth-stunted business unit, is not generally a good recipe for keeping your job or saving your people from layoffs.
Well in hindsight, that „Don’t be evil“ turned out to be such a blatant in-your-face lie shouldn’t come as a surprise when dealing with Epstein vicinity enjoyers.
Meanwhile they get full competitive insight into which apps are being added to Epics store, their download rates apparently, and they even get the APKs to boot, potentially making it easier for those app devs to onboard if they like, and can pressure them to do so by dragging their feet on that review process.
> Provide direct, publicly accessible customer support to end users through readily accessible communication channels.
This is an interesting requirement. I want to see someone provide the same level of support that Google does to see if it draws a ban.
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