22july2013

aderutter said:

For this to be successful I reckon it needs to be $20/£20 per month for everything including family sharing.
In my opinion each service is worth no more than $5/£5.
Currently, Music and News are way, way over priced.

"This remains a bad experience for customers. Gamers want to jump directly into a game from their curated catalog within one app just like they do with movies or songs, and not be forced to download over 100 apps to play individual games from the cloud

See? They claim it's about a user's "experience." Not money. Even if Apple paid MS to put stuff on iOS, MS would still be complaining. How would Microsoft know what iOS users "want"? Microsoft, you already have a gaming platform, and I doubt you have let Apple take control of any part of it. Living in Seattle has turned the brains of Microsoft's management into snowflakes.

In short, Epic wants phones to function like computers. As Tim Sweeney tweeted, the founding principles of general purpose computers were to give full control of the computer to the user, not to the hardware manufacturer or operating system manufacturer. Nobody at either IBM, or Microsoft, or Apple (all of which wrote operating systems for PCs) ever tried to stop anyone from running anything on their own PC hardware. There was nothing to jailbreak because all computers were delivered, essentially, jailbroken. As time progressed the dangers of malicious software increased but the defenses available to users increased in parallel. These days there are numerous different mechanisms to keep computers safe, including (a) anti-virus software; (b) firewalls; (c) file permissions; (d) digital signatures; (e) online license validation; (f) SSL-protected websites; and (g) curated app stores. Each of these defense mechanisms is mature and effective. All of these defense mechanisms put security in the hands of the user except for the last one, "(g) curated app stores." It's this one, and only this one, that introduces a sinister danger into society, not unlike the dangers in Orwell's book "1984." Because this is the only mechanism that puts your security and privacy in the hands of another person. Who is this person, and how does this person decide what you may do and what you may not do? And to whom is this person accountable, if anyone? There are several countries in the world where the government curates everything that users see and touch. We won't mention which countries here but that should be obvious to the courts. In these countries the curation has gone amok. Users are under constant scrutiny; users try to access remote data but are blocked by Great Firewalls; users do not know what the criteria of their own government's monitoring are. This curation of software in some countries has led, and is still leading, to brutal dictatorial rule. Do we want or need this sort of UNCHECKED control of our online freedoms, and all that in the hands of unaccountable private citizens? Although censorship by private companies is legal in America, it goes against the guiding principles of the Constitution. This is not just a censorship of a company's employees, which Epic would not object to, but it's a censorship of all people who use a phone. Traditional phone companies, which are private companies like Apple (and also publicly traded), have never been allowed to censor or monitor individual phone calls in America. Voice and data are just two forms of the same thing: data. "Smart phones" are the new telephones. Telephone companies may not legally monitor or curate anyone's telephone calls, and for the same reasons as that, Epic asks the court to place an injunction on Apple from being able to block or monitor any data or speech that occurs on their phones too.