uroshnor

macgui said:

TheObannonFile said:

When I see articles like this, I realize how many assumptions I make. I assumed this was already happening at large. Adoption of things like CarPlay and USB-C at large has been painfully slow.

I can't fathom any reason why someone would reasonably assume police were using CarPlay to provide information regarding calls for service, not only at large, but at all.

It's innovative on the part of the WAP, and maybe other law enforcement agencies have done this, but at large? Hardly. I suspect an analysis of law enforcement world wide would find very few agencies with CarPlay in their enforcement vehicles. Every year more vehicles include CarPlay in their package options, some may even make it standard equipment. But most police agencies don't have the budget for that.

Police cars typically get a fit-out that raises the cost of the car to 3-5x from the "base" base for the chassis from the car manufacturer. The previous "gold standard" in policing is to mount a Panasonic Toughbook in the passenger compartment as a "Mobile Data Terminal", at the cost of over AUD $5,000 per vehicle, but thats not the only cost. Because that laptop and its keyboard are an obstruction in the safety zone for airbags and the passenger in the event of a crash, under the Australian Design Rules for cars, the fitted car needs to be destructively crash tested (usually 5 vehicles). So bringing a new type of police car into service, can cost an Australian police force several hundred thousand dollars just in crash testing, before the cost of fitting a fleet comes into it.What WA Police are doing, removes the obstruction in the passenger compartment, and means the car can keep its standard model safety certification without additional testing. So from a few different angles, its actually saving them money.

command_f said:

Security of information tends to be a drag on such systems. Commercial comms, like iPhones, are often unacceptable because their security, though likely very good, cannot be validated by the appropriate regulators. Given privacy laws and respect for individuals' data, this is understandable.

If you want an example of how use of commercial comms can go wrong, look at the Russian army in Ukraine.

iOS has been validated by Australian Signals Directorate for the security classifications used by police in Australia for over a decade, and most Australian (& NZ) police forces use Apple devices at fairly large scales - thousands to tens of thousands of iPhones or iPad Minis mainly in multiple forces.

Stabitha_Christie said:

red oak said:

This screams anti-trust if they have any intention of making Call of Duty exclusive to Xbox and PC.    Half of company’s revenue is generated on PlayStation and mobile.I don’t see the point in Microsoft buying it.

Microsoft has a horrible M&A record.  It is where company’s go to die 

If they are the third largest game company after this then it’s somewhat hard to see where the anti-trust complaint would be. They aren’t a gaming monopoly so it would need to be some other provision of the Sherman Act. Not really a cartel since it is all one company. Perhaps product bundling depending on what they do in the future. Simply nixing COD for PlayStation wouldn’t quality. Game exclusives exist already and there is nothing inherently illegal about that. 

If you are the 3rd largest OS vendor (Windows installed base being smaller than Android and iOS), and the 3rd largest game console vendor, and they you buy in via acquisitions to become the 3rd larges game vendor ... all you have to do for it to become an anti-trust issue, is redirect the games you acquired (which are honestly one of the more cross platform vendors), to on future versions and releases, to only run on the platforms and services you already had. They've done this many, many times before, and its not unreasonable to expect Blizzard to go the way of Bungie as an example (for those of you not old enough to remember, Bungie were Mac exclusive with a couple of contracted ports, until bought out by Microsoft who then removed Mac as a client OS from Bungie products). Its a real testament to the skill of Microsoft's government relations teams that they've avoided anti-trust action in the last 5-10 years.

You don't have to be the largest player in a market to for anti-trust issues to surface, you just have to be "big enough" and to leverage power in a one market to improve your sales & revenue in another.

mjtomlin said:

tylersdad said:

I guess calling it "Anti-App Store" is one way of spinning it. "Pro-consumer" is an equally correct way of spinning it. There's no reason why I should have to ask for Apple's permissions to install an app on a device I paid for with my own money. It would be no different than Subaru telling me I can only install kayak racks I bought from a Subaru dealer on my car. 

Yeah, not so much. As a consumer you are free to buy any device that's available. You are not free to buy a device and demand that manufacturer make it work in a way that was not guaranteed or intended. You buy it as is, if you don't like it, you return it. If Apple wants to limit how software is installed on their devices, they are free to do so. Anyone who does not like that limitation can choose to use another device. That's how the free market works. This is how Apple's iOS devices have ALWAYS worked (except when first released and you couldn't install ANY apps).

There is no argument or example that can demonstrate that Apple's decision to run their platform this way is restricting consumers (or developers outside their platform). The proof is in the fact that consumers choose Android over iOS by a wide margin. If there comes a time in that market where Apple's devices are nearly ubiquitous and consumers have very few alternative, non-Apple, devices to choose from, then there might be a problem about limiting software installation.

In most rich western countries, consumer's do often choose iOS use by a wide margin. Its consistently about half new device sales and often 66-80% of devices in active use (iOS devices keep being used for longer by more people).  The global figures skew heavily to Android because of the large populations in Africa, India and China, mainly using low cost Android devices (eg China and India are overwhelmingly Android and between them more than 1/3 of the global handset market). So whilst its true that Android is ~80% of global handset sales, the by country figures vary wildly from that, and the devices currently in use figures by country do as well. With a few exceptions, iOS share correlates strongly with the disposable income.

For software vendors, its devices currently in use that matters, not annual handset sales. And most aren't going to care about the software market revenue potential of people in developing countries, they are going to focus on rich western markets.

For some carriers, 80-90% of their handset sales are iOS. They view this as a business risk, being too dependent on a single vendor and actively work to sell Android (eg I know of more than one carrier with this mix who pays their staff 2x-3x the commission to sell Android than iOS)

There's real competition, but Apple is getting into very high share percentages in some countries. 

mrconfuse said:

It's not that hard to understand the issue. The problem is that developers has no other avenue to sell their apps to IOS users. You have to use the app store if you want to sell anything that can be installed on an IPhone or Ipad. It doesn't even matter if the developer has the money or expertise to host, manage and advertise their app on their own system. You could be a multi billionaire, you could own your own hosting facility, your own advertising team and at the end of the day the only way you can get your app to any IOS users is through the app store. I'm sorry but that does sound a bit like a monopoly. And before anyone says "oh you can sell to android users, it's not a monopoly". No, this is about selling to IOS users and there is only one way. 

developers who produce Mac OS applications can sell it anywhere and macbook users can buy it, download it and install it without having to go to the app store on the mac. Yet on IOS, developers are told that they can only reach IOS users if they use the official app store. 

1. If you narrow the scope, you can define anything as a monopoly. 2. Monopolies are not intrinsically illegal. 3. You don't need to use to use the App Store to sell software that works on iOS.

The game platforms market includes iOS, Google Play, Mac, Windows, Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo, Steam, Epic, Facebook, Amazon and many more. 

There are heaps of companies that a) never publish anything on any Apple platform b) are doing do just great financially, and c) are publishing on other platforms that are as closed or even more so than Apple.

Publishing on iOS isn't necessary for the success of a software vendor - its a business decision and a trade-off.

I have friends who have worked in the games industry for 20 years, have successful careers, and will probably never be involved with anything that runs on Apple's hardware.

Apple has programs for enterprises to deploy software outside of the App store, and plenty of software vendors ONLY write stuff for organisations to deploy via that mechanism. You can publish source code on getup and users can compile and install it on their own devices. You can stream games via a web browser (Microsoft is in beta for doing exactly this with Xbox games).

The App Store is only a monopoly if you ignore every other platform, AND want to sell something that is a pre-compiled App, AND you want to sell it to consumers, AND you don't want to deliver it via a browser. Apple didn't make that monopoly, a software vendor chose to work within that set of constraints.

A given software business model doesn't automatically have the right to go everywhere in the market or every platform.

Epic's complaint is effectively, "we don't like having to play by a one size fits all set of platform rules, and if a platform vendor won't negotiate exceptions individually to us, want the right to dismantle other people's monopolies, so we can set up our own".