Naiyas

rotateleftbyte said:

I see this as the carriers snooping on your internet activity is threatened by this. As they sell that data, they see a loss of revenue and want it banned. If that fails, they'll try increasing prices or throttling or something else.

I would tend to agree with this comment. I am based in the UK currently and my ISP is currently Vodafone. They require a user identifiable log in to access their broadband and it’s become abundantly clear over the last 6 months that they really do not like me running VPNs at all.

My employers laptop VPNs to the office - speed of the connection is capped (but not by my office or my router; I run a VPN network and I also have a few devices that will “relay” too, and I also select my own DNS servers at the connection level. All of these so called “enterprise level features” (as Vodafone support call them) result in speed / connectivity issues even on a “business line”. But use a device without any VPN / relay and the full bandwidth is available. So I’m 100% sure it’s Vodafone’s network and they will throttle any traffic that they cannot analyse and then sell the profile of to a third party.

Once my contract is up I’m moving to an ISP that doesn’t associate my connection with a username and password for access.

As a developer of a subscription based app I’m actually concerned by type resultant actions that will be taken after this ruling. Why? Well let’s go through them:

1. At the moment I pay $99 per year for access to the development tools, APIs and ability to distribute through the Apple App Store regardless of how many apps I ultimately build and publish.
2. I list an app for free and I can monetise through advertising or just have it as a loss leader for exposure if I want. A cost to Apple for hosting it but not to me.
3. I sell a subscription to my app and I receive 70% in the first year and 85% in the second year, BUT if I did have subscriptions sold outside the App Store via online or someone that was on Android that subscribed and switched then Apple gets nothing.
4. I don’t have to deal with payments, marketing, distribution, publishing, etc. most of the effort sits with Apple and that’s fine by me.

Now what could happen to the above is huge:

1. That annual access fee could stick around, but what if that now gets restricted to no listed apps and you now need to pay for listing each app?
2. What if you now have to pay for access to each API Apple currently offers as included?
3. What if you now have to pay for each download of your app regardless of if it’s free or paid or continued to be in use (or some combination of the two)?
4. What if the listing fee is simply to put it on the store, but to have it able to found in search you now need to pay for that ability?
5. They may not care about me having a subscription anymore, but I now need to pay a whole series of charges whether someone subscribes or not.
6. Now I have to deal with payments and all of the regulations and data protection rules that entails - a huge burden for a small developer, especially when you are subject to GDPR.
7. My accounting system now has to be far more complicated because of all the above potential fees, whereas before it was dead easy… 30% year one, 15% year two.

The changes to the charging structure are not out of the question, and there appears to be nothing in the order that would prevent these changes from being imposed. My point is that what looks like a win could easily change to a disaster that benefits big name developers only.

elijahg said:

Whilst this is true, there have been plenty of times whereby that extra margin as a percentage is in the high teens. That and as Lkrupp rightly (???) said, "What goes up never comes down". As far as I'm aware, Apple has rarely (if ever?) corrected the foreign prices downwards in response to exchange rate fluctuations, only ever up.

The margin will clearly go up and down as the exchange rate fluctuates, just like all prices have the appearance of doing so when you are trying to compare across currencies. This is nothing new and is the normal course of things, hence why there are currency traders, currency hedges, etc. I recall, pre-Euro, going to Spain for holidays, we'd buy our pesetas in the winter as we'd get 250 to the pound vs in the summer where we would get 150 to the pound (costing us 40% less for the same amount of pesetas).

Whilst I also don't recall a time that Apple prices have dropped in the last 15 years related to this, it is also true that the pound to dollar exchange rate has also fallen over that time so there is unlikely to have been a time that a price correction would have gone the other way in this period.

fred1 said:

Thank you. It’s always the same discussion. Prices seem much higher outside the US for this reason.
I, for example, can buy Apple products for a bit less here than in the US because I can claim them as a business expense and be reimbursed for the VAT (it’s actually credited against the VAT that people pay me for my work).  

I'm also in this position as I run my own business which partially zero rated for supply so full VAT recovery. We're still stuck with ~10% import duty and currency fluctuation, but it's not as bad as it seems at first glance for this reason. I have, previously, been a little naughty in that I've taken advantage of the fluctuation and high value purchase to use it as a way to justify a flight to the US for a holiday - the savings on buying in the US vs the UK effectively covers the price of the flight and hotel for a week or two - selling my old computer while there and coming back with a new one - been over 10 years since that kind of difference was workable though, but with the recent price rises it may be possible again soon.

Not against this at all really. Can imagine the backlash against Apple if one of their phones blows up in someone’s face while charging and the reason was due to a defective cable that “lied” about its abilities to carry current?

I had a fairly general charger that when used with an iPhone with Touch ID it would disable the Touch ID sensor. Little did I know at the time but the charger was providing power across pins that it was not supposed to be doing for an iPhone and the Touch ID sensor was being “shorted” to save the phone.

I’ve been MFi ever since and have had no issues at all.

I never got the chance to play Myst back in the day as I moved straight to The Settlers which has been one of my favourite games for a long long time. I’d be extremely happy to pay for Myst on iPad/iPhone at the price mentioned - or even a bit more - as I’m more of a pay once game player. What I can’t stand is the continuous obsession with in-app purchases to progress games. I just don’t play them and so it’s a revenue loss to the studios that promote these type of games.

Give me a good game I can pay once for and I’m in most times… old fashioned, perhaps, but it makes far more sense to me and Myst looks to be one that I will splash out for… finally.

chris_kalan said:

On device VPN apps may not circumvent this, but a router-based VPN should, as the traffic being sent to and from the iPhone will masked at the router level, so the iPhone shouldn't be any the wiser.

iPhones have GPS assist so whilst a proxy location is initially determined by things like WiFi, Cellular network, IP address, etc. After a short time the full GPS satellite driven location is determined. So no, a router based VPN will not help much as location is not IP driven.

I would also guess that the eligibility tag is time stamped, so even if location services were disabled after location eligibility was confirmed, there would be an ongoing requirement to refresh the tag after the “grace period” expired.

I have this problem and it is a big issue so far as I’m concerned. I’ve reported it every single time a new update is pushed out and it’s been going on for years now.