kirklennon

I won’t shed any tears for Amazon etc having to give Apple a huge chunk of cash

Amazon doesn't have to give Apple a huge chunk of cash though. Apps don't pay anything to Apple for real-world stuff being sold. Amazon pays nothing for the tens of billions of dollars purchased every year from iPhones. The only thing they pay Apple for is if someone uses the Prime Video app to buy or rent something or subscribe to Prime Video, but who does not already have an Amazon account (with saved card) that they're signed into. We're probably talking a number measured in the thousands of dollars. Uber, for example, pays Apple nothing other than their annual developer account fee (or fees, assuming they have multiple accounts).

this sounds like a way to frustrate small developers who don’t have a whole team to devote to their finances.

Nobody is going to actually use this program so there's no real world extra accounting cost. Previously Apple charged 30% for a combined payment handling and commission. A court determined they had to let developers handle their own payments so Apple complied and said the commission is 27%. It's invariably cheaper to just stick with Apple's 30%.

Everyone always wants more money. Developers would love to pay less; Apple would love to make more. The 30% max fee (in practice less for many developers) has been pretty successful for everyone involved. I think people can quibble over the "right" number, but I don't think it's wrong that there's a sales commission for access to a profitable platform.

If you are a developer, what right does Apple have to seeing your finances for all purchases made in the app that they sold on their store?

It's a commission for sales that came from the app, meaning from Apple's platform, where they have roughly one billion above-average income users with a reputation for buying apps and subscriptions.

It's also worth keeping in mind that there are different ways of monetizing platforms, none of which are necessarily morally better or worse than the other. Microsoft's IDE, Visual Studio, is $45 or $250 per user per month (so $4500 annually for a team of ten). Xcode, Apple's IDE, is free. A business can offer its apps on the App Store, which also serves the files, for a grand total of $99/year.

So, instead of providing all our comments for free to LLMs, how about adding a copyright notice to everything we write?

Legally everything you write is already copyrighted, and no notice is required. Creative Commons licenses are a way to reduce the restrictions on what people can do with your content. They don't impose any extra obligations beyond what would exist without any copyright notice at all.

The developer of the app sends the push notification through Apple's service. Developers have always been able to encrypt it, at which point it can be decrypted only by their app, but not all developers do this. There's also still limited metadata about the fact that a notification was sent, even if the contents are encrypted.

It’s not like these companies are just refusing to pay their fines, as this article falsely implies. There are ongoing legal disputes. Most of Meta’s “unpaid” fines, for example, are from just six months ago and there are legitimate disagreements on them that are subject to appeal.

I hate writing defenses of big tech companies but I also late lazy journalism that treats them as an easy punching bag. Anyway, here goes:

The thing about governments is that they’re supposed to last basically forever, and their budgets are enormous, so if they have to wait a while to get some money, is it really that big of a problem? There’s a power imbalance between the parties so it makes sense that the company should be able to avail itself of the full rights of the legal system. In many of the cases cited in the article the money has already been placed in escrow or is subject to interest payments so if the government ultimately prevails, it’s not really out anything and there’s no risk it won’t get the money. Would we prefer governments to just seize assets immediately when, under their own laws, there are legal disputes remaining?

To pick an example from the article: "Apple has fought for years against a French antitrust fine of 1.1 billion euros and an order to pay 13 billion euros of tax to Ireland.” Apple has actually already mostly won that fight against the antitrust fine. The legal system agreed that it was excessive and reduced it to roughly one-third the original. Apple still disputes the remaining third. I honestly have no idea if they’re right or wrong on that, but the fact that they were fairly quickly able to get several hundred million dollars of fines erase by the court indicates to me that we shouldn’t just automatically accept that all of these fines are legitimate; some may indeed be regulatory overreach. The tax bill to Ireland is an interesting matter. The government of Ireland is steadfastly opposed to it. They intentionally created a low-tax system to court foreign investment. Apple took advantage of the program and has employed thousands of Irish people for decades. The EU says Apple owes the tax to Ireland; Apple and Ireland say Apple doesn’t. Again, clearly a legitimate, ongoing legal dispute and not simply a case of someone not paying a fine, as the headline makes it sound.

Most of Meta’s fine (€1.2 billion) is from just this May and (we’ve got a theme here) the government of Ireland didn’t think that Meta’s violation warranted a fine at all, but they were overruled by some other members of the European Data Protection Board. If Ireland’s own Data Protection Commission didn’t think Meta should pay them a fine, surely Meta should be able to avail itself of the legal system to dispute the ruling?

Anyway, it comes down to this: I believe that we should be a society governed by laws, and those laws include the right to appeal or otherwise contest an initial ruling. Given the fact that there’s no real downside for the governments to wait, I believe it’s reasonable that companies want to wait to pay until after exhausting their legal rights to appeal.

That’s like saying they made the lightning port as a protest to USB standards, nah they just want their proprietary shit.

They wanted a new, compact, durable, reversible plug for their mobile devices. There was no industry-standard option that met their requirements, so they made their own. If USB-C had existed at the time, they would have used it (though as a physical connector, Lightning is still just plain better).

There’s a merit to say that technology is connected to all sort of fields and purposes today, but that doesn’t make it less of technology, or the companies behind them less technology-focused.

My contention is that the use of technology is so universal that it's not meaningful to call a company a technology company just because they use a lot of technology, even if they have to create a lot of it themselves. Pretty much every big company has on-staff software engineers making and implementing custom technology. It takes a lot of technology to make a law firm work but that doesn't make a law firm a technology company. If we use too-expansive of a definition for what's a technology company, then it applies to almost every company, making it a useless term.

I do not think social media companies are technology focused. They just use technology to achieve their social media (/advertising) business goals, the same as every bank, every hospital, every trucking company, etc.

Technology is a means to an end so I like to make the distinction of what the company actually does or make. Apple's primary business is selling computer hardware (an actual technology product) so it's a technology company. Microsoft sells software and cloud services (tech tools) so it's a technology company. Netflix sells access to video, so it's a media company. Are algorithms involved? Sure, but they're child's play compared to the algorithms used by high frequency traders, yet those people still unambiguously work for finance/banking companies. Every large retailer employs data scientists and teams of data analysts, but they're still retailers rather than tech companies. Amazon is the trickiest to categorize. Amazon.com is a straight up retailer but AWS is clearly a tech "company." Best to think of that one like a conglomerate.

Can you not use Wi-Fi Calling?

Or a 11% increase in price overall. Meanwhile inflation is at 6-7%?

Over what time period, though? We'd need to know when the 255g for $10 price was introduced. If the price and weight have been unchanged for a few years, this could even be below the rate of inflation.

Uber was unsustainably underpriced in order to gain market share. Pricing is temporary; the core benefit as a consumer was always the ability to request one from anywhere using an app (where you also paid) and have them come directly to you instead of needing to hail one. Taxi companies added that ability and now everything is better. There's no reason why the approximate cost should vary much, outside of limited promotions. An Uber, a Lyft, and a taxi should cost roughly the same. Why wouldn't they? Perpetual VC-funded pricing wasn't what we were promised; the promise was convenient ordering and stress-free payments.