Imagine you're a government lawyer working on the US case and you show up to a deposition and pull your iPhone out set it on the table.
What are the chances that your Apple ID and iCloud are mysteriously banned for violations of the terms of service for which Apple can't share the specific reason because of "policy related security reasons" before the week is out?
That’s called “ retaliation” and Apple would have to be pretty fucking stupid to do that to the prosecutors at any point, let alone in the middle of a dep.
NAL, but it would likely be enough for a felony obstruction of justice charge. Add to that, depending on specifics of Apple's legal response (and whether they throw the employee under the bus,) a CPAA charge for exceeding authorized access in a computer system.
So? That doesn't change how stupid it was to publicly retaliate against them, and explicitly write out that you were punishing them for their criticism. The point is that Apple execs are as dumb as your average person, just greedier.
So this wasn't exactly retaliation. The first approval epic got this year was from an automated system. Once they got the approval they assumed (very understandably) that apple was okay with them establishing their store within the new guidelines, so they announced their plans publicly. They also continued to diss apple on Twitter of course. Hearing the announcement, Apple execs decided to ban them again because they didn't adhere to the rules last time.
This however completely looked like retaliation from apple's side, so the DMA lawyers started an investigation and Apple had to re-allow epic again.
Wether it's apple's fault for having the shitty automated system or not, doesn't really matter though. I just hope we get proper sideloading by the end of the process.
No, this was exactly retaliation. Phil Schiller explicitly said in emails that they were removing Epic's Switzerland's account because they couldn't trust them because of how critical their recent comments about the DMA plan were.
Since someone else brought up superapps, do they seem like an initial attempt to get around the manufacturer's app store lock-in?
Super apps allow adding mini apps. Seems like an app store.
The goog/apple app stores are already saturated by malware, I can't imagine some mini app store would do better. Even if the big two did do a better job, how would they go about vetting all the code these super apps might have access to?
I guess I'm too jaded, but it seems like just another malware loader you intentionally install.
Am I being too hard on the concept? Are there any really good ones you've used?
Why rely on them doing the detective work and just not give 1 more second to think through before hitting that install button? This is basic digital hygiene.
I had hoped that as most younger adults now were kids who grew up with computers, the average person would have a pretty good understanding of how they work. I never expected everyone to be a programmer or sysadmin of course, but to have a general sense of things like whether data is stored on their device or remotely, how to find out if an app install is risky, and whether a prompt requesting permissions, a password, etc... is reasonable.
For the most part, I don't think that has happened. The average person doesn't know how to use a computer and isn't going to learn.
I work at a major university. Everything became a black box and now if there is no output, students born circa 2002-2006, who are otherwise very bright, don't know how to navigate it.
I'm afraid peak computer literacy and hygiene is past us now. Younger folks are so used to everything just working, that the vast majority don't care or are willing to find out how things work. (Don't get me wrong, the vast majority of boomers, gen-x and millennials aren't much better, but tend to have more of a healthy suspicion because of their analog youths.)
All that happened by design. The trend for decades has been to remove the user from the internal workings of the computer. This paved the way for expensive support packages, geek squads, and genius bars.
If we look at cars as an example, the future of computing looks grim. Who’s to say that there won’t be leased laptops with built in features behind paywalls in the next 10 years?
I don't think we need a sinister plan to explain how we got where we are.
Most people are interested in some outcome, and want the easiest process to achieve it, not to learn about the process. They want to play a computer game, not learn about graphics drivers. They want to take a picture and send it to their friends, not learn about communications protocols or camera settings.
It's not just tech. They want to cut their food, not learn to sharpen knives. They want to drive to their destinations, not maintain their cars. Maintenance-free tends to outsell serviceable in most product categories.
Geek Squad didn't come about because people didn't have the ability to access the inner workings of their computers, but because they didn't want to put in the effort to learn. Getting the defaults right so most people don't have to change settings before your product is useful is good design even when your product offers lots of access to the inner workings.
I do, however see the trend of software requiring remote attestation about the OS it's running on as sinister. Google even recently tried to bring that to the web.
Is it possible this is because of Apple though? Feels like a whole generation is coming of age that we're told they were too dumb to figure out settings and to just let papa Apple take care of all that nerd shit.
Honestly, I would be happy if Apple addressed all of these things as long as doing so has absolutely zero chance of degrading my experience as their customer.
My original comment:
Apple already announced that it'll be supporting RCS sometime this year. Cloud streaming games have been available on iOS for years now, but prior they had to be a Web App and as of earlier this year that is no longer the case. Now they can be a regular app in the app store.
Superapps are hot garbage and should be banned. But WeChat exists on iPhone so I am honestly confused about this one. What features is it not allowed to have?
The NFC and wallet issue is a thing still.
The watch thing is a head scratcher. What API does Apple Watch currently use which 3rd party watches don't have access to? Because it seems like Apple is being blamed for other companies not making better products.
Let me put it this way, superapps rely on harvesting and exploiting massive amounts of user data for profit, which is much worse than anything that Apple does. That aspect should be banned.
The quality of the service or content they provide is not my preference, but that's not what I was referring to as hot garbage in this case.
What are you talking about? They very clearly presented a concrete solution of banning problematic behaviour rather than arbitrary categories of applications.
But in this case I pointed out some things that are wrong with the DOJ's complaints, one thing that is valid, and asked questions about two that nobody, and my searches, have answered. They seem to also be completely wrong on the DOJ side.
I doubt you use their products or will be affected by them being altered in any way, but I do and will, so this case interests me as do the details.
Fortunately for you, this lawsuit doesn't involve the Mac.
Fortunately for the rest of us, Apple doesn't have anywhere near a monopoly in any industry, which is honestly where this case should be dismissed.
If you have to take a specific month out of the year, limit the region, and define a category as "performance" to get your numbers fudged and you still only get to 70% you're not exactly making a strong case for a monopoly.
I don't think you can reply to a text message using a third party watch on iOS but you can with your Apple watch. I've seen that cited as an exclusive API.
To be fair, it’s the most interesting story the verge has covered in about, well, as long as the verge has existed.
This is a big deal - it’s going to shape the entire tech industry for the foreseeable future. And it’s going to drag on in court and probably also congress for years and years.
Apple is the target of the lawsuit but the DoJ is also telling every other tech company what rules they need to operate under. The last decade of “just do whatever you want” is over.
I expect them to cover this in as much detail as possible. They are probably the last big tech / business news website standing. I know Gizmodo, Engadget, Tech Crunch etc exist but nobody seems to have resources and connections The Verge does.
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.
You do realize that you can like iPhones and Apple products while recognizing that a lot of Apple's business practices seriously hurt consumers, right?
I also don't think they'll lose. They have a ton of evidence of intentionally anti-competitive behavior from Apple.
United States v. Apple is a lawsuit written for the general public, an 88-page press release designed to be read aloud on cable news shows.
That’s not against the rules — note that United States v. Google (filed 2023) has a single, terse intro paragraph outside the numbered section — but US v. Apple powers up for two whole pages before getting into allegations.
There are even a beguiling few paragraphs in which the DOJ compares the need to regularly update AAA video game titles to the onerous process of App Store review and then concludes that “Apple’s conduct made cloud streaming apps so unattractive to users that no developer designed one for the iPhone.” At no point does the DOJ allege that Apple is why I can’t play AAA games on my iPhone….
(At the Thursday press conference, Attorney General Merrick Garland made no mention of how Sarah Jeong would like to see the SE return to its 2016 size.)
It’s fun to engage with the legal distillation of nerd rage at the line level, but there’s also an overarching narrative here that the DOJ is trying to push, one with potentially enormous ramifications.
Meanwhile, the opening volley in its battle against one of America’s favorite companies is a killer start, not least in part because of an unusual degree of lawyerly insight into the human psyche.
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