I feel like this sounds worse than it is because you also don't create a Threads account, per se, in the first place. You use your Instagram account. If you want to use Threads, you activate your Threads profile; if you want to stop using Threads, you deactivate your Threads profile. Your Instagram account is still your Instagram account and exists independent of Threads. If you want a totally separate account for Threads, you need to create a second Instagram account for it.
If the EU didn't want to allow this then they should have written the law differently, but poorly-written regulations are their specialty. Apple's plan complies with the letter of the law. Developers are free to use a direct sales channel and can offer any price they want, along with various conditions that aren't an option in the App Store. They just have to pay a commission for access to the lucrative market Apple built. The specific percentage of the commission is such that it's not actually a desirable option for developers, but the law didn't say that Apple had to make it desirable to avoid the App Store's existing sales system.
The first movie available to buy on iTunes was High School Musical in March 2006. Apple then launched the iTunes Movie Store in September and by the next year (sometime around when this was probably written) was bragging about having sold a couple million movies.
Anyway, I think they're likely talking about downloading proper rather than streaming.
I'm surprised he found a firm willing to take this case. I wonder how ironclad their engagement letter is? Even if they demand payment upfront, what protection do they have against him suing them? His current M.O. is not paying his bills, and now he's going retroactive. There are better clients out there.
Even in 2007 it was laughable that you couldn’t connect to WiFi with a purported smart device.
Yes, that would be laughable, except that's not true. The original iPhone absolutely supported Wi-Fi. You're criticizing a product you never used based on mis-remembered details. You're also completely missing the point. The iPhone didn't change the market because it checked every feature box from the first day but because it was a radical leap in the total platform. It had a sophisticated operating system with a brand new developer framework and major advances in UI and UX design. It wasn't rushed and there were no true competitors because nobody was working on anything remotely as advanced. The first iPhone was major inflection point and every single mobile device platform that came out after it was, at the very least, heavily inspired by it.
I asked if people chose iPhone for the blue bubbles elsewhere a couple days ago, and while there was some good discourse on that post, the blue bubbles definitely also came up as a reason....
Apple refuses to implement RCS on their devices in a way that is compatible with non-Apple devices.
I think it's important to note that "RCS" in this context actually refers to a proprietary messaging platform by Google, running on Google's servers. There is no industry-standard RCS in use in America; it's just Google's forked version, which in practice is exactly as proprietary as iMessage. Nobody should expect Apple to implement someone else's proprietary messaging platform on their devices, especially one run by Google, which has the worst history of managing messaging platforms of any company on the planet.
This suit is going to crash and burn. The US's entire antitrust efforts of late have been poorly directed and many of the allegations are ridiculous or outdated.
Disrupting “super apps” that encompass many different programs and could degrade “iOS stickiness” by making it easier for iPhone users to switch to competing devices
"Super apps" are a China thing. Apple could actively encourage them and they still wouldn't be a thing in America.
Blocking cloud-streaming apps for things like video games that would lower the need for more expensive hardware
They're already allowed.
Suppressing the quality of messaging between the iPhone and competing platforms like Android
Did they fall for Google's cringey and misleading push for Apple to support Google's proprietary extension of RCS? At any rate, Apple has already publicly committed to supporting the open version of RCS, but they want to make it not suck first (and RCS does suck).
Limiting the functionality of third-party smartwatches with its iPhones and making it harder for Apple Watch users to switch from the iPhone due to compatibility issues
Nothing Apple does or doesn't do to iOS is going to make non-Apple smartwatches remotely competitive. They're fully compatible with Android phones and are still universally awful. The simple truth is that Apple has an absolutely enormous technological advantage in the Apple Watch itself. It really is, itself, that much better. And why on earth should Apple be compelled to make Android software for managing an Apple Watch?
Blocking third-party developers from creating competing digital wallets with tap-to-pay functionality for the iPhone
As a consumer I absolutely do not want this. Banks suck at software. Apple Pay enhances competition between banks precisely by allowing no competition on how the consumer uses the NFC to pay. Every single card from every single bank gets treated the same way, used the same way, in the same interface, in a single unified Wallet, exactly like in real life. This means banks must compete for each transaction on the merits of what they offer as a bank. Cards from the biggest banks and the smallest credit unions all get the same best-in-class user experience. What big banks would like is for their own payment app to be your default for NFC and to make it harder to choose competing cards from another bank at the time of payment.
I’m upset when the government wastes resources on a big lawsuit that it’s absolutely going to lose, because it’s weak on the law and inept on the not-that-complicated technological issues. I also question the leadership of an organization that, in the name of consumer protection, decides to target a product with ludicrously high customer satisfaction ratings. Consumers love their iPhones, perhaps more so than literally any other product they own. What a monumentally stupid target.
The main cause of the losses is said to be from loan-loss provisions (when a bank sets aside money as an expense for future loans it expects won’t be repaid).
They have actually lost a billion dollars on the deal, but are just accounting for loans they don’t expect to be repaid. They will also profit from interest earned on repaid loans, but those aren’t part of this provision. In other words, these numbers are just the losses without the gains. New credit cards are always net-negative at first.
No, we are discussing services not sold through their store and not using their payment provider. That is literally the topic of the post.
This is about purchases of virtual goods made by users of the app either directly in the app (30% combined commission and payment processing fees), or who click a link in the app to make the purchase using an external payment provider (27% commission). In all cases, these are sales originating from within the app.
Third party console games don't literally pay money to not use services.
I’m not sure if there have been any changes in the last few years (I doubt it), but developers paid Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony a 15% “licensing” fee for physical media games sold for their consoles. That has been the basic business model for all consoles for decades.
I'm not sure if you're aware, but games consoles are a completely different market with completely different laws and standards governing them. Game consoles are not general purpose devices. They are closed platforms where you gotta sign lengthy NDAs and pay thousands just to get yourself a fucking dev kit.
iPhones are a closed platform. Ditto for iPad and Apple Vision Pro. They are essentially an app console. They have never been sold to consumers or presented to developers as anything else. For what it’s worth, almost all of the in-app revenue at the center of this discussion is gaming revenue. Everything else is a rounding error.
I'm going to go ahead and just call this a nothingburger. The context is that you're already a registered user signed into the Facebook, etc. app. You've already volunteered the valuable profile data and the analytics data from actually using the app. If you're already OK with all of that, there's effectively no additional concern with the relatively minor data that can be collected or inferred from the notifications. The very idea that someone should or would turn notifications off on, for example, Instagram because they're concerned about privacy is ridiculous. It's like telling someone not to crack the windows on their car because it might rain, but they're in a convertible with the top down.
But in case that wasn’t enough of an iPhone vibe for you, the other big update that comes with this public beta is that you can now put widgets on your desktop. Widgets! ... Now, this is neat. It also strikes me as one of those iOS carryovers that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense on a computer.
Is the writer even aware that Apple first introduced widgets in 1984 as "Desk Accessories"? This isn't an iOS thing that carried over to the Mac; it's a Mac thing that went through a lot of iterations over the years, migrated to iOS, and then came back to the Mac in a form that's almost exactly the same as when they were originally introduced decades ago.
PSA: You Can't Delete Your Threads Account Without Also Deleting Instagram (www.makeuseof.com)
Meta's Threads app has a major flaw: you can't delete your Threads account without deleting your Instagram account.
Apple plans to charge fees for sideloading (9to5mac.com)
Who would’ve thought? This isn’t going to fly with the EU....
Maximum PC Article from 2008 (media.tech.lgbt)
Nintendo Wii: Sold like gangbusters....
Musk sues law firm because he’s mad that Twitter paid $90 million bill (arstechnica.com)
Musk tries to claw back $90M from firm that forced him to complete Twitter deal.
On this day in 2007 the iPhone was released. (beehaw.org)
For better or worse the iPhone hit the market today 16 years ago changing the world forever.
Is having an Android really a deal-breaker for some people?
I asked if people chose iPhone for the blue bubbles elsewhere a couple days ago, and while there was some good discourse on that post, the blue bubbles definitely also came up as a reason....
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United States v. Apple is pure nerd rage (www.theverge.com)
Vinyl records outsell CDs for the second year running (www.theverge.com)
WSJ: Goldman Sachs wants to bail on Apple Card partnership after $1B loss, in talks with Amex (9to5mac.com)
How have they lost so much??
Apple’s biggest critics are big mad about the new 27 percent App Store tax (www.theverge.com)
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The Mac sure is starting to look like the iPhone (www.theverge.com)
macOS Sonoma’s public beta is live and continues the ‘continuity’ trend Apple has been pushing for the past few years.