beeble42

Apple should charge $1000 per developer per year for XCode and $10000 per title per year to license the SDK. That is fairly reasonable considering what you get for the money and much cheaper than similar ecosystems before Apple built the App store. Codewarrior cost me $1500 back in the day and it was no where near as good as XCode. Adjust for inflation and you've got yourself a bargain.

And charge fees of $0.10 per download (including all updates) to help run the store, don't allow free apps and charge take 30% of the initial purchase price.

Developers aren't getting charged 30% for simply having their app on the app store. They're getting that for the entire ecosystem Apple built for them, tools, support systems, online store as a service and so on.

The reason Apple doesn't want to do that is because it kills innovation. It kills the small guys by putting a high bar in place to cover Apple's costs. Look at the before and after landscape. How many stories were there of high schoolers making a million dollars from their bedroom back when they had to pay vast sums for development tools, negotiate with publishers (who were taking more than 30%) and fight for shelf space at retailers (who were taking more than 30%)? In round numbers, 0.

Epic can die in a fire for all I care. All the developers who work there have profited immensely from what Apple has done for the software industry and now they want to either force Apple to give everything away or recoup their costs in the only other way and kill opportunity for those who come behind them? Disgraceful.

Lion was far, far worse. Mountain Lion was the literal fix for many issues that persisted throughout the cycle with Lion and Mavericks was the literal fix for the issues that remained at the end of Mountain Lion's run. Mavericks was the first useable (but far from perfect) OS after Snow Leopard. Lion truly was Apple's Vista. Catalina by comparison is almost problem free, such were the level of issues with Lion. I skipped Lion on my personal Macs because all my clients were having problems regularly. I delayed purchasing a new Mac until I couldn't delay any longer (just before Mavericks was released). I'm skipping Catalina on some of my personal Macs because of the 64-bit stuff that breaks some older software. There's still one or two where I'm waiting on an update or replacement (replacement is more likely at this point). But they'll get Catalina or Big Sur eventually. On my work laptop, Catalina has been fine.

So no app for Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland?

TouchID isn't looking so bad now.

Don't beat up on Apple for doing what the law requires of them. Beat up on yourselves for electing representatives that enact laws that require Apple to do this. You the People! If you don't like it, do something about it. Apple didn't elect them, you did!