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Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store

(www.theverge.com)
1704 points ardit33 | 4 comments | 13 Aug 20 19:03 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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throwaway140820 ◴[14 Aug 20 04:16 UTC] No.24153297[source]▶
Apologies for the extreme swearing that ensues.

Wow, I would have hoped for better support from the HN community. Instead there are apologists after apologists. So what if Epic is big. Really, seriously shouldn't we have had alternative app stores available form the official ones. Why is this even a point of debate? All the time we hear stories of people one of our own getting fucked by these app stores and their lordship and now that we have an opportunity to make some noise, this is the response? Fuck that. Maybe we deserve these lords.

Fuck your security and fuck your walled gardens. Fucking no alternative browser allowed. Fuck that, fuck you apple and fuck you google. Fuck your monopoly and chokehold on the devs.

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spanhandler ◴[14 Aug 20 05:16 UTC] No.24153888[source]▶
> Fuck your security and fuck your walled gardens.

Sigh. I guess we're going to remove a product category (the relatively safe, very consistent, managed platform you can use when you just want to use a computer and not also manage a computer) and call that consumer choice, then? I'd prefer instead that more companies make something similarly-nice and compete with Apple. I have lots and lots of options I can use if I want to have to worry about a bunch of silly stuff like "will this .exe or 3rd-party repo pwn me?" or "is this payment prompt fake?" when I'm just trying to play the piano, make art, track recipes, balance my books, or whatever. I use them all the time, in fact. When I don't want to worry about that crap I use iOS. It's nice having any option in that category. I do not want to go back to having zero of them. I don't care that 3rd party browsers on it have to render with the WebKit engine. Not even a little.

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Silhouette ◴[14 Aug 20 05:33 UTC] No.24154057[source]▶
I guess we're going to remove a product category (the relatively safe, very consistent, managed platform you can use when you just want to use a computer and not also manage a computer) and call that consumer choice, then?

Isn't the point here that Apple could still provide good security features in iOS and still provide their app store with whatever security or other vetting measures they consider appropriate and allow users to install software from other sources if they so wish?

Users who want Apple's version of safety and security can stick with the default configuration on their devices and install apps only from Apple's store, just like today. However, both they and Apple would pay a price if the Apple app store was then too restrictive in its policies and/or tried to charge excessively: developers who weren't prepared to provide their apps on those terms could sell them through other stores.

Then for those apps, Apple wouldn't get their cut, while users who insisted on sticking with only Apple's store wouldn't have the same range of apps available to them. However, no other users or developers would have their hands tied by Apple's policies. I fail to see how this would restrict consumer choice more than the status quo.

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spanhandler ◴[14 Aug 20 05:54 UTC] No.24154188[source]▶
> Users who want Apple's version of safety and security can stick with the default configuration on their devices and install apps only from Apple's store, just like today.

> while users who insisted on sticking with only Apple's store wouldn't have the same range of apps available to them.

Exactly. From my perspective my i-devices get worse if that happens, for exactly that reason. I'm stuck choosing between availability of software and safety & consistency. Again. Like everywhere else.

> I fail to see how this would restrict consumer choice more than the status quo.

Clearly, the choice of being able to buy a phone or tablet where 100% of the apps available on it, and 100% of payments for digital services in apps, go through one app store and one payment system, would be gone. My choice to buy a device that works that way would be gone, and i-devices would join literally all the other choices I have which do not work that way.

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Silhouette ◴[14 Aug 20 06:02 UTC] No.24154236[source]▶
I understand your point, but I think your argument is based on an implicit assumption that may not be valid: that the items you like, the apps in this case, will still be available at all if the restrictions continue. For example, apparently even if you were able to buy the Apple device you want with the restrictions you want, you still can't get Fortnite on it now. The difference between your position and mine is that in mine, you don't get to choose whether everyone else is limited in the same way, and neither does Apple.
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1. spanhandler ◴[14 Aug 20 14:27 UTC] No.24158365{3}[source]▶
Deliberately getting Fortnite kicked off is political. Either Epic will win and this will all be moot or they'll lose and, because they don't hate giant piles of money, go back to providing an app-store-compliant game. Barring a major shift in the landscape (granted, always possible) major vendors who ignore iOS are just saying "nah, I'd rather have less money". I expect vendors overwhelmingly to continue not doing that if Epic loses, and to continue providing software that abides by Apple's terms even if they'd rather not. Since, overall, I like Apple's terms they impose on developers more than I dislike them—do I want that everywhere? No. Do I want that on iOS? Yes, their stewardship of the iOS app ecosystem is surely among the top-3 reasons I prefer it to Android—that is the outcome I would prefer.

There's a chance Epic loses but Fortnite is so big, and no clone takes its place on iOS and ends up pwning it out of existence (a risk Epic is taking), that they decide to deny themselves piles of cash to keep sticking it to Apple, and that Fortnite's absence ends up eroding Apple's marketshare and so the App Store model becomes untenable that way. Or that that happens the next time a company does this. Of course that might happen. One app doing it does not yet have me worried I won't still have an excellent selection of software, all with spying and other anti-user capabilities significantly dampened versus other platforms, in two years.

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2. Silhouette ◴[14 Aug 20 17:13 UTC] No.24160493[source]▶
Deliberately getting Fortnite kicked off is political.

Well, yes. I'm fairly sure they're trying to prompt that "major shift in the landscape" you mentioned. And I suspect that if a few of the other big players who have been unhappy with Apple's policies join them, they might even succeed, regardless of the outcome of the current legal action. Apple can almost certainly stand to lose one big name game from its ecosystem. But a "high end" phone that can't access the major streaming services or play several of the most popular games starts to look more like a phone that "just doesn't work", particularly with the sub-par web browser it also imposes.

One app doing it does not yet have me worried I won't still have an excellent selection of software, all with spying and other anti-user capabilities significantly dampened versus other platforms, in two years.

As I and others have pointed out many times, if you're relying on an app store for your platform's security and privacy restrictions, your model is already broken. The OS shouldn't be permitting inappropriate behaviour by apps, regardless of where they came from. Trying to thoroughly vet every new version of every app to ensure it will never do anything inappropriate that it otherwise could is a losing battle.

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3. spanhandler ◴[15 Aug 20 00:44 UTC] No.24164927[source]▶
> The OS shouldn't be permitting inappropriate behaviour by apps, regardless of where they came from.

Sure, but they all do.

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4. Silhouette ◴[15 Aug 20 04:34 UTC] No.24165966{3}[source]▶
If the organisation you're trusting can't secure a single OS reliably, why on earth would you have confidence that it could vet every single app on its store and detect all possible abuses reliably? The latter is likely to be a much harder problem.