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Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store

(www.theverge.com)
1704 points ardit33 | 6 comments | 13 Aug 20 19:03 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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lordleft ◴[13 Aug 20 20:04 UTC] No.24147974[source]▶
Imagine if Microsoft did this on PCs. a) prohibiting the installation of non-windows store software (sideloading) and b) insisting that all purchases done via apps give them a 30% cut. I think this is a ridiculous practice on the behalf of Apple.
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rvz ◴[13 Aug 20 20:13 UTC] No.24148127[source]▶
Even worse. Imagine if the World Wide Web was not open and you had to go through a closed WWW like AOL and websites were "under review" by the providers and would take a 30% cut of your revenues or clicks on your web app or subscription service and websites require going only through that provider.

Thank goodness that wasn't the case.

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1. paulnechifor ◴[13 Aug 20 22:08 UTC] No.24150108[source]▶
Even worse. Imagine millions of people knowing this and still buying these inferior phones.
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2. nicebill8 ◴[13 Aug 20 22:23 UTC] No.24150309[source]▶
A more stable, frequently updated platform with decent hardware offerings and the fastest chips on the market does not amount to inferior phones.
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3. scarface74 ◴[13 Aug 20 22:43 UTC] No.24150532[source]▶
Well, could it possibly be that people really don’t care about side loading apps?
4. paulnechifor ◴[13 Aug 20 22:45 UTC] No.24150555[source]▶
I'm not sure about any of that. Android phones are ridiculously diverse, from overpowered "gaming" behemoths to tiny ones like Unihertz Jelly.

But in the end I guess what matters more is whether you want a single person to control what you view or not, like when they banned James Joyce because of an illustration of a man skinny dipping.

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5. dividedbyzero ◴[13 Aug 20 23:03 UTC] No.24150754[source]▶
Android phones don't suffer from this as much, though weird rejections from the Play Store do happen not infrequently, if HN front page can be trusted, and getting non-technical people to be comfortable with sideloading must be a huge security liability. Getting updates for the lifetime of my device and especially security patches, finding a phone with a decent user experience not marred by badly implemented manufacturer shells, that's still really hard though. Those have been significant problems for me with my Android phones, much more significant than not being able to sideload. I'd say it's not so black and white, both platforms have grave problems, with no immediate fix in sight.
6. squeaky-clean ◴[13 Aug 20 23:18 UTC] No.24150943{3}[source]▶
Your comment doesn't really disagree with theirs. One major reason Android feels so fragmented is all the different devices. My last Android phone was an LG G3 (yeah I know I'm out of date nowadays). It had a really good camera (for the time) with a fast laser autofocus. Turns out no app used the proper APIs to take advantage of laser autofocus. If I wanted to take a picture with an app, I would have to take a picture with the camera app, and then upload it. Except certain apps like Instagram didn't allow you to upload photos from your camera roll, so any instagram photo I took was not in focus.

In my opinion iOS was far better when there were fewer different devices released every year, but it's still better today than Android.