Said while ignoring all of the other changes Apple will be required to implement resources into changing. Not to mention Apple's administrative costs of ensuring regulatory compliance in order to avoid fines.
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Apple-Commissioned Study Highlights Success of Third-Party Apps
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Then they are unpalatable to Apple. And instead of Apple losing a little app store revenue voluntarily, they can face the prospect of losing a lot of app store revenue forcibly. C'est la vie.
It’s funny that you’ve posted an article about Apple making changes, then berate them for not making any changes.Yet often major policies coincidentally change at roughly the same time.
Apple announces reduction to a 15% cut on the first $1 million of dev sales.
Announcing the App Store Small Business Program - Latest News - Apple Developer
We believe that small businesses are the backbone of our global economy and the beating heart of innovation and opportunity in communities around the world. Launching January 1, 2021, the industry-leading new App Store Small Business Program is designed to accelerate innovation and help propel...developer.apple.com
Google does the same thing less than 4 months later.
Boosting developer success on Google Play
News and insights on the Android platform, developer tools, and events.android-developers.googleblog.com
Too bad big tech didn't have the foresight to implement some changes before regulations came down on them. You'd think they'd have been sophisticated enough to have seen regulation as being the alternative to inaction, like many of the forum members here.
But this is entirely my point. The only change you say is acceptable for Apple to make is the change that they’d have to make if these regulations pass.
Therefore Apple has nothing to lose by not voluntarily making that change. In fact, I’d argue they’d have had more to lose if they made these changes voluntarily as they then wouldn’t be able to challenge the proposed legislation in court. Right now Apple are very vocally against the proposed legislation and will assuredly challenge the legality of the new regulations in court. If they just rolled over voluntarily they wouldn’t have a chance of preventing them from becoming law.
The same resources needed to make the changes you were proposing they do voluntarily! And the lost revenue in the meantime!
Nevermind the fact that there isn’t an alternative universe where this regulation doesn’t exist so Apple will have to spend those resources regardless!
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They’d lose just as much App Store revenue from both the proposed voluntary and enforced regulatory action. Why do you think a voluntary 3rd party App Store would generate more revenue for Apple than an enforced 3rd party App Store?
Yup.
A New Jersey Law That's Kept Smart Guns Off Shelves Nationwide
The law says that once "personalized" guns are available in the U.S., all handguns sold in New Jersey must be smart guns. So, to avoid triggering the law, vendors aren't selling them — anywhere.
www.npr.org
Possibly, sure. Except that the allowance for third-party stores isn't the only thing being enforced by the regulation, is it?
It’s the only allowance that’ll cost Apple money (nevermind the cost to reengineer the OS to work with 3rd party app stores). All purchases otherwise going through the App Store will be subject to Apples commission.
That change falls under the token changes category. Apple loses very little money through that change and nothing changes structurally. Everybody knows the money comes from the game developers who make far more than $1 million. Notice how Apple's services revenue has only continued to trend upward since that change. Clearly it had minimal impact on them.
We've been over this. These regulations means Apple has to make many changes, not just the one that I propsed. Also, I don't exactly see EU courts being favorable to Apple, should they fight it. It will make a bunch of lawyers money and that's about it.
No because they could've implemented a smaller set of changes. And there wouldn't have been the ongoing costs of the regulatory compliance. Regulatory compliance isn't a one and done. Yes, a lot of work might be frontloaded when new regs comes out, but it doesn't stop there.
The more regulations you have to follow, the more people you need to pay to read them and interpret them for the rest of your employees. I work in the chemical industry, if more regulations are enacted tomorrow, we not only continue to have to the same workload of ensuring compliance with the old regs, but now have to implement the workload of following the new ones as well. This likely means hiring more people to do that work. Likely expensive lawyers.
Which all boils back down to what I originally said in the first place.
There is no action that Apple could have taken alone that would have prevented any of this. There’s no point in pretending that if only Apple had allowed 3rd party app stores in the first place then none of this regulation would exist. Apple will get dragged through this regardless of what changes they made.
Apple’s only mistake is being too successful and therefore falling within the scope of this regulation.
You may not realize this, but that's almost never how laws end up being created. An issue becomes prevalent and government steps in to fix it with laws and/or regulations. I'm not sure what this has to do with the subject at hand however.Yup.
A New Jersey Law That's Kept Smart Guns Off Shelves Nationwide
The law says that once "personalized" guns are available in the U.S., all handguns sold in New Jersey must be smart guns. So, to avoid triggering the law, vendors aren't selling them — anywhere.
Again, we don't disagree on the Apple-alone aspect so I'm not sure why you keep trying to pretend it's a point of contention. Apple failed. Google failed. Facebook failed. Others failed.
Your very initial claim was:
“If Apple had changed their behavior, they wouldn’t be under such scrutiny. Same with some of the other tech companies.”
You did not say ’If Apple and other big tech companies collectively changed their behaviour…’. You specifically implied that Apple could change its behaviour in isolation to avoid regulation. I pulled you up on that and challenged you on that assertion, and you now agree with me.
You think Apple software engineers are so incompetent that they would completely abandon something as basic as modularization in the OS of their flagship product?
I think a fundamental change to how apps and the App Store work will cost Apple a lot of time and money to implement. I very much appreciate how something that looks like a simple change to a lay person can very often be quite complex under the hood.
I presume since you didn’t quote the rest of my post that you are now in agreement with my other points.
Do you typically lay out the entirety of your position from head to toe in one comment? Or do you make further points and expand on your thoughts over the course of a conversation? It's quite absurd to expect the former. There's a lot of stuff I didn't say in my first comment, but that doesn't mean the first comment was the whole of my thoughts or logic on the topic at hand. You yourself have expanded on your own thoughts over the course of many comments in this thread. Not to mention I made my position clear on this specific point by comment number three to you. Attack my actual argument, rather than setting up strawmen for yourself to beat up. Though I realize the appeal of the latter since it's the easy, though fallacious way to debate.
Ahh. The "layperson" dig. Gotta love the veiled self-importance of rabid fanboys.
You make it sound like Apple would have to completely re-engineer the operating system just so that some third party application can do the same thing that their own built-in application can do. It may just be the "layperson" in me, but I kind of have to express a bit of doubt here. Because in order for that to be true, Apple would have had to spend a metric f-ton of software engineering man-hours intentionally doing the opposite of what is considered general best practices in software design, just to do something that simple software interlocks would accomplish with less expense and fewer avenues of failure.
Apps themselves are pretty much self-contained once they have been installed. The only real change that would need to be made is some mechanism for iOS or the Apple App store to identify when an app is being maintained by a third party store and to politely leave it alone come update time.
Either way, I honestly couldn't give a rat's ass how much Apple has to spend to fix what they intentionally broke.
Sure, go ahead and presume that.
Whether "I" realize it or not, I provided a real life example. This falls under the heading that government can create any law it wants, and of course in the US a law (once passed) has to stand up to a Supreme Court challenge.
What do you imagine your real life example proves? That there are exceptions to the rule? And how does it relate to the topic at hand? Also I’m not even taking about the U.S, but the EU.
All it does is prove your assertion incorrect. Never say never. It relates to the topic at hand because my assertion is government can create any law it wants. In the US and the EU.
Wrong comparison. Walmart dosn't make the PS5. A better comparison would be if Sony prevented you from putting whatever software on it that you wanted to, which IIRC they do as you are limited to licensed software.
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Apple is not Microsoft and history has shown that with a few exception Apple's own programs come off inferior to their alternatives and in some cases disappear entirely (MacWrite and MacPaint for example). You would have to prove that iOS is somehow different.
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As was pointed out before this whole mess started (back in 7 Oct 2019) 30% was the industry standard: Report: Steam's 30% Cut Is Actually the Industry Standard. The Apple bashers can hem and haw all they want but that doesn't change that one fact.
There is something like this already - look up how much a local monopoly the cable and ISP companies have.