uroshnor

tommikele said:

qwerty52 said:

jungmark said:

Epic waste of time. 

...... and money!
Sweeney is lucky that he is the CEO of Epic, otherwise he has been fired a long time ago. He is destroying Epic, just because of 

his personal ego ambitions.

Epic has lost much more money to pay lawyers, from missed revenue from AppStore sales and from the loss of customers, than if Epic has kept paying the AppStore commission, like it did it over the last ten years.

Are you their accountant? Unless you are their accountant  or the CEO or a board member you have no idea what the numbers are or how they calculated how much they are willing to invest in following this path. They have obviously calculated the investment to pursue this path is worth the financial risk and if they are successful they see the payoff as huge. If they lose, the cost will be written off against their profits which on an estimated $1 billion of revenue with gross margins over  50% is huge. They can afford to lose. I doubt you have much knowledge about who controls Epic and has the biggest chunk of ownership. Simply put, you have no idea whatsoever what the numbers and returns are either way it comes out.

No company goes into an action like this blind or without the support of its board.

Epic is a privately held company and is not traded on the stock market. Tim Sweeney owns more than 50% of the shares in Epic, and despite being a billionaire, apparently lives a pretty frugal lifestyle, with none or few of the usual trappings of extreme wealth, and no kids/partner/family. He seems to be highly invested in this dispute, and has the resources to (pardon the pun) be epically petty and vindictive in the tactics used. I don't think he's right (either legally or , and I think Epic will ultimately lose in court in the vast majority of jurisdictions, but Epic can be a vexatious litigious pain in the butt Apple for as long as he remains motivated about this, and I think they will pursue this well past the point that a more conventional corporate leadership team would have pragmatically moved on. Tim doesn't have a lot of the normal constraints imposed on him by a more typical corporate governance structure.

Not much of this has been tested in court yet, and my best guess the reaction to losing in court will be to double down. 

Paying lobbyists to write legislation in many countries & jurisdictions, and push it up in legislatures, is just a tactic to push up the costs to Apple, in a hope that they'll give up because its all too hard/expensive to fight against. Many smaller jurisdiction like states in the US, are actually quite vulnerable to this kind of tactic of having lobbyists writing legislation and effectively influencing or buying votes to pass it.

Epic's worth about US $20 billion, and Tencent owns about 40% of that - even if Apple bought Tencent out, Tim Sweeney would still be able to outvote them on the board (and there would be legitimate arguments about Apple owning Unreal from an anti-trust perspective).

He's in a really strong position to just keep at this, for as long as he wants. 

Epic isn't a pure as the driven snow white night here, they have been doing a bunch of anti-competitive things themselves like paying developers (effectively from Unreal licensing revenue) to not publish games on other platforms, and use the Epic Store instead (examples including iOS, Mac, Google, Microsoft and Steam)

DAalseth said:

I've never agreed with Apple claiming a portion of all sales from an app even if those sales don't go through the AppStore.
Yet Apple is demanding a slice of everything bought on Amazon Prime, and Kindle, and all in game purchases, and more, even if those transactions have nothing to do 

But neither of those things is what Apple or Google have set up in their rules.

They only take a percentage if:

1. Its an App Store App.
2. the financial transaction is for digital goods, and was done in-App.

Transactions outside the App Store don't. Real world good don't. You can buy books on the Amazon web site, and they appear on your Kindle App on iOS. Apple gets nothing. You can order a pizza, Apple gets nothing.

Google has a little more flexibility, but has similar rules for Google Play.

Epic (and a number of others) are taking the position that the App Stores owners are basic middlemen, and do little more than credit card processing. That is at best disingenuous, and at worst delusional. Historically, the personal computer revolution it the 80's and 90's is an abberation, and there are aspects of it that are not normal at all - we'll probably never see a new area of technology emerge like the personal computing again. Tim Sweeney grew up in that, and probably thinks thats how things should be - you can build something commercial, that leverages somebody else's work without cost.

Would Epic be better off if they got charged only a credit processing fee, or even better, could side step the App Store completely. Totally - they would be. 

However, what is good for Epic, isn't necessarily what is good for their users. 

Does Apple's App review guidelines & processes need to be more refinement, and be consistent and transparent ? Could they communicate better ? Does it have ugly knobs on it ? Is there a power imbalance ? Definitely. They could learn a lot from outside Silicon Valley as to what procedural fairness actually is. Most of that isn't to do with what Epic is claiming.

You can argue if 30% or 25% or 20% or 15% or 10%or 7.5% is the "right" % for Apple to charge. You can argue they need a sliding % scale so more successful titles scale to lower percentages as they pass certain tiers. 

However, they are also delivering the most frictionless, safest (for consumers), software store ever. Its been hugely advantageous for small/indy developers, and levelling the playing field inherently weakens the position of large players.

Apple build the development environment used by most developers on the store. They developed and maintain the languages used by most developers on the store. They develop the operating systems used by all of the devices that use the store. They design all the devices. All of that adds up to having some value to access. You can argue what it is, if it should be a flat fee or a % or some combination of both, but its above the transaction percentage on a credit card.

As a percentage, what Apple charges was lower than any other preceding attempt at a digital or physical software store previously. It hasn't changed much in over a decade. Do you know what it cost to become a developer for Nokia's Symbian OS ? 4 million USD per year. What was the % to be in EB games or a supermarket shelf ? 50+%

Are their business models that are so low margin, that they don't make sense using Apple's 30% fee ? Yes. There are business models that don't make sense at 1.5% credit card fee rates.

Thats not inherently anti-competitive. No-one's business model is owed anything. Companies die because they can't adapt to new environments and markets. The people go on to get new jobs elsewhere.

Some of the commentary by Epic, Spotify and others justifying their positions is just bare faced lying - other parts are valid points. My bet is they will lose the case with costs.

If society wants to make laws to mandate consumer grade side-loading, they can. But don't for an instant claim it will make end users safer in terms of consumer protections, or privacy or cyber security.

 

M68000 said:

No thanks.  Having a central point of failure (everything on one device) is not cool.  No fun if device goes missing.  What if it gets hacked too?  As somebody else said,  don’t like idea of handing over phone ... it getting dropped.  I would rather drop it.    On a side note,  I tried to post on the website for this forum and it does not render correctly or work.  Does anybody know how to get rid of dark mode on the full website version too?

This very likely does not involve unlocking the phone or handing it over - the interaction experience will probably be very similar to Apple Pay - just tap a reader, and it’s sorted.

The Digital Transformation Agency isn't a company. Its part of the government - specifically the Department of Finance, and has overall responsibility for the Commonwealth government's strategic procurement and use of technology, including things like government-to-citizen Apps and services.

They subcontracted a local developer to build at least one of the Apps for DTA (and the figure quoted is way too high for just the DTA's Coronavirus App, which would have been 1-2 people over a weekend at best). The COVIDSafe app is more complex than that, but 1.85 M seems way too high for just front end development of 2 simple apps, so there must be more to it than that.

https://www.crn.com.au/news/canberras-delv-awarded-185-million-for-developing-covid-19-app-546593

Delv are a small-ish solution integrator who do things like manage MDMs and do development work for agencies. They aren't exclusively Apple, but have been doing stuff pretty well on Apple platforms for a long time.

I'd also note the holding of contact data was covered in detail here:

https://www.health.gov.au/resources/publications/covidsafe-application-privacy-impact-assessment

And there's fairly harsh legislation about discrimination associated with and unauthorised use of the App's data that has been put before parliament. 

I'm not exactly a superfan of the current government, but given how governments work, they've done a pretty good job here under time pressure, and the efforts to do the right kind of things really appear to be there (they are just in tension with the "be seen to be doing something" and "hey we are government so we'll just do things the hard way" factors)

This is only true for some kinds of VPN configuration (and its been around forever). If you set up with per-app VPN or the whole device always on VPN, this doesn't apply - in both of those cases if the VPN isn't up, the device thinks there's no network. Its only manual/on-demand configurations where its an issue.